an
evening pass without a long fight with a leaping pampano or a sea
bass: with thirty or forty pounds of desperate muscle at the other end
of a hundred-yard line, the song of reel was sweet. One night he
brought in an eighty-pound barracuda but usually the larger fish cost
him line, leader or spoon.

At times the surface of the Gulf was alive with schools of leaping
fish: one evening he saw a great fish, a tanguingi, rise into the air
with nose pointed upward, till, at a height of twenty-five feet, it
reversed for a downward rush to plunge in the exact center of the
ripples its great leap had created. Once, far out on the Gulf with
Matak, he came upon a forty-foot whale asleep on the surface, rolling
dreamily from side to side: the Moro, unafraid of man or devil, turned
Malay-green with terror as Terry prodded the huge black surface with
his paddle. Awakened, it upended in a sluggish dive, the heavy flirt
of its great glistening tail smashing the left outrigger and drenching
them to the skin.

Terry had attended strictly to the affairs which properly came under
his control and in doing this and doing it well, had won the respect
of natives and whites, a respect which had warmed into admiration
among those who knew him better, into affection with those who knew
him best. The loyal Macabebes would have followed him against any foe,
and, better than that, they drilled hard and worked faithfully that
they might be a credit to their leader.

The natives knew him as "_El Solitario_," "The Solitary," partly
because he played his game alone in a quiet competent way, to all
appearances equally friendly to all, regardless of color or condition,
partly because he seemed unconscious of the lures of all those brown
maidens known to be as shady of character as of color.

He had often stopped to spend an hour or two with Ledesma on his
prospering plantation. He liked Ledesma's sincere, old-school
courtesy, and he liked him because Ledesma was known as an
Americanista, looked upon the Americans as God-sent to guide his
people out of their sloth and abysmal ignorance. But he gave up these
visits following a day when he found the dark-eyed, ripe-bosomed
daughter alone in the house and learned, in her flaming passion for
him, that she had misunderstood the reason for his calls.

The frequency of his trips to the outlying plantations had increased
as the weeks went by, especially to the pitiful holdings of some of
the poor natives.