aged by blows: read what Padre Gaspar
de San Agustin says! [134]

"A woman thus condemned will curse the day on which her child is born,
and this, besides prolonging her torture, violates every maternal
sentiment. Unfortunately, she brought forth a healthy child. Two months
afterwards, the sentence was executed to the great satisfaction of
the men who thought that thus they were performing their duty. Not
being at peace in these mountains, she then fled with her two sons
to a neighboring province, where they lived like wild beasts, hating
and hated. The elder of the two boys still remembered, even amid so
much misery, the happiness of his infancy, so he became a tulisan as
soon as he found himself strong enough. Before long the bloody name
of Balat spread from province to province, a terror to the people,
because in his revenge he did everything with blood and fire. The
younger, who was by nature kind-hearted, resigned himself to his
shameful fate along with his mother, and they lived on what the woods
afforded, clothing themselves in the cast-off rags of travelers. She
had lost her name, being known only as _the convict, the prostitute,
the scourged_. He was known as the son of his mother only, because
the gentleness of his disposition led every one to believe that he
was not the son of the incendiary and because any doubt as to the
morality of the Indians can be held reasonable.

"At last, one day the notorious Balat fell into the clutches of the
authorities, who exacted of him a strict accounting for his crimes,
and of his mother for having done nothing to rear him properly. One
morning the younger brother went to look for his mother, who had
gone into the woods to gather mushrooms and had not returned. He
found her stretched out on the ground under a cotton-tree beside the
highway, her face turned toward the sky, her eyes fixed and staring,
her clenched hands buried in the blood-stained earth. Some impulse
moved him to look up in the direction toward which the eyes of the
dead woman were staring, and he saw hanging from a branch a basket
and in the basket the gory head of his brother!"

"My God!" ejaculated Ibarra.

"That might have been the exclamation of my father," continued Elias
coldly. "The body of the brigand had been cut up and the trunk buried,
but his limbs were distributed and hung up in different towns. If
ever you go from Kalamba to Santo Tomas you will still see a withered
lomboy-tree where one of