well about among his fellow people, any one of whom would
have cut his throat in a minute if they could have done it without
fear of detection by the tax collector.

I noticed, though, that the servant was particularly careful to sleep
in the same house with his master, and did not go home at night,
as Filipe did. The government representative had a house of his own,
which was occupied only when he was on the island. It was somewhat
larger than the other houses of the place, but like them was built
on posts well up from the ground, and reached by a ladder which could
be taken up at will, as, I noticed, it always was at night.

When the collector had been in Siargao less than a week, I was
surprised to have him come to my place one day and ask me abruptly
if I had ever seen any big apes in my excursions over the island.

I am obliged to confess that I lied to him very promptly and directly,
for I told him at once that I never had. You see there had come into
my mind at once what the lonely old man on the mountain had said
about men who came and killed the animals he loved, and I could see
as plainly as when I left them there, the two big apes sitting on the
verandah of his home, watching us as we came down the mountain path,
and waiting to welcome him when he came home.

The "wise man," sitting on top of the tallest piece of furniture
in the room, to which he had promptly mounted when my caller came
in, said nothing, but his solemn eyes looked at me in a way which
makes me half willing to swear that he had understood every word,
and countenanced my untruthfulness.

The tax collector looked up at the monkey suspiciously, as if he
sometime might have heard how the animal came into my possession,
as, in fact, I had reason afterwards to think he had.

"Caramba," he grunted. "I have reason to think there are big apes
here. Juan," his black-leg--in every sense of the word--servant,
"has told me there is an old man here who has tamed them. He says he
knows where the man lives, back in the mountains.

"If I can find a big ape while I am here, this time," he went on,
"I mean to have him or his hide. There was an agent for a museum of
some kind in England, in Manila when I came away, and he told me he
would give me fifty dollars for the skin of such a beast."

He went on talking in this way for quite a while, but I did not
more than half hear what he was saying, for I was trying to think
of some way in which I could send