werful corporation before which Justice bowed her head, while the
judges let fall the scales and surrendered the sword. He fought as
tenaciously as the ant which bites when it knows that it is going
to be crushed, as does the fly which looks into space only through
a pane of glass. Yet the clay jar defying the iron pot and smashing
itself into a thousand pieces bad in it something impressive--it had
the sublimeness of desperation!

On the days when his journeys left him free he patrolled his fields
armed with a shotgun, saying that the tulisanes were hovering around
and he had need of defending himself in order not to fall into their
hands and thus lose his lawsuit. As if to improve his marksmanship,
he shot at birds and fruits, even the butterflies, with such accurate
aim that the friar-administrator did not dare to go to Sagpang without
an escort of civil-guards, while the friar's hireling, who gazed from
afar at the threatening figure of Tales wandering over the fields
like a sentinel upon the walls, was terror stricken and refused to
take the property away from him.

But the local judges and those at the capital, warned by the experience
of one of their number who had been summarily dismissed, dared not
give him the decision, fearing their own dismissal. Yet they were not
really bad men, those judges, they were upright and conscientious,
good citizens, excellent fathers, dutiful sons--and they were
able to appreciate poor Tales' situation better than Tales himself
could. Many of them were versed in the scientific and historical
basis of property, they knew that the friars by their own statutes
could not own property, but they also knew that to come from far
across the sea with an appointment secured with great difficulty,
to undertake the duties of the position with the best intentions,
and now to lose it because an Indian fancied that justice had to
be done on earth as in heaven--that surely was an idea! They had
their families and greater needs surely than that Indian: one had
a mother to provide for, and what duty is more sacred than that of
caring for a mother? Another had sisters, all of marriageable age;
that other there had many little children who expected their daily
bread and who, like fledglings in a nest, would surely die of hunger
the day he was out of a job; even the very least of them had there,
far away, a wife who would be in distress if the monthly remittance
failed. All these moral and conscient