far as he
could and thought upon his sins, the worst of the trio with the least
compunction, because he was not conscious of any immorality in robbing
Spaniards. As he tramped back and forth, the devil now and then looked
up into the branches, as if guessing the height of the trees. Presently
he stopped before the tallest, levelled his finger at it, and cried
with a stentorian voice a command in words that belong to none of the
forty or fifty languages and dialects of the islands. Then the souls of
the spectators fell, like chilling currents, and their hearts swelled
like balloons and arose into their throats, and there was no joy in
them; for the great tree bent slowly down and swung itself entirely
across the chasm. Its reach was great, and Satan skipped along the
trunk as spryly as a cat on a fence, his arms and tail held out for
balance and twitching nervously. Half-way over he spied the three
spectators and stopped. Their circulation stopped also. He grinned
from ear to ear, showing two rows of tusk-like teeth, shook his fist
playfully, and shouted a laugh so loud, so awful, that they believed
their last moment had come. But it had not. Their hair turned white,
to be sure, and they took on fifty years' growth of wrinkles; but the
Devil was after bigger game. He scampered over the arching trunk,
disappeared on the farther side, and hurried off at a run toward
Manila, where a certain rich lawyer was rumored to be dying. From
later whisperings it appears that His Majesty was not late.

The strange part of the incident is that, although the tree was thus
ill-used to serve the Devil's convenience, and is marked along its
bark by his cloven feet, it was not blasted, but to this hour is
green and flourishing. The Devil's Bridge, as everybody calls it,
is an arboreal wonder, curving lightly and gracefully over the chasm,
its branches resting on the bank opposite to its root, some of them
growing upside down, but all as green and healthy as those of any
tree that the Devil spared when he was looking for a way to cross
the ravine. Had he waded the stream he not only would have wet his
feet, which would have been unpleasant, but would have touched water
that had once been blessed, and that would have been torture. The bad
farmer did not survive this spectacle by many years, though it is not
related that he reformed. The fair-to-middling one lasted for a while
longer. The good one may yet be in the land of the living, unless h