es" had their
camp. Sometimes one of the brigands led the way, with the prisoner
between them, sometimes both drove him before them, secure in the
knowledge that in his helpless condition he could not escape. The
captain's message, in its rubber case, still lay undisturbed and dry
within the messenger's jacket. For that he was glad, although his heart
sank as every step carried him farther away from the destination of
the dispatch, and from the chance of its being delivered in season.

The means which providence uses to accomplish the ends which it desires
are marvellous, and those of us who do not believe in providence say,
"a strange coincidence."

The day before, back among the mountains of Panay, a little old Montese
woman, who had never heard of God, or of America, and whose only dress
had been thirty yards of fine bamboo plaiting coiled round and round
her body, had died.

When the dead body had been set properly upright beneath the tiny hut
which had been the woman's home, and food and drink placed beside
it for the long journey which the spirit was to take, the hut was
abandoned, as is the custom of the tribe, and the men of the family,
the woman's sons and nephews, started out with freshly sharpened
lances and "mechetes."

For this is the only religion of the Monteses; that no one must be left
to go alone upon the long journey. And so, when one of a family dies,
the men relatives do not stay their hands until some one,--the first
person met,--is slain by them to go on the journey as an escort. Only
if they seek three days through the wood, and find no human being,
then, after the third day, a beast may be slain, and the law of blood
still be satisfied.

The sons and nephews of the Montese woman had marched for thirty-six
hours, and the steel of their weapons had not been dimmed by any
moisture other than the dew, when, suddenly rounding a turn in the
mountain path, they met three men.

The first of the three at that moment was the "tulisane" leader,
and him, in thirty seconds, they had driven six lances through. His
partner, with a scream of terror, dashed into the trackless forest and
disappeared. He need not. The demand for a sacrifice was appeased,
and the men who had killed the "tulisane" cared as little for his
companion as they did for the white man who had been his prisoner. All
they wanted, now, was to get back to the Montese country, and to
the new huts which their women would have been buildin