l speed.

After the sixth performance of this kind, one being at a street
crossing where some raw cocoa beans were drying on a _petate_ in the
sun, and the three others at the different outposts, we decided among
ourselves that we had best dismiss our _cochero_ and return to the
ship, since it had taken us more than two hours to drive where we
might have walked in thirty minutes.

It was here a most embarrassing situation arose, for just as we were
debating what to pay our Jehu, something in my boot heels suggested
that perhaps the native was not a coachman at all, but a Filipino
gentleman taking us to drive at the request of the presidente. There
was the sign manual of Misamis's four hundred about him. He wore
shoes. Moreover, he sported a very large and very yellow twenty dollar
gold piece on his watch-chain. But stronger even than these evidences
of native gentility was the freedom from restraint in the very frequent
remarks he had tentatively thrown over his shoulder during the drive,
and the fact that he had not weakened when, on first coming ashore,
we had tried to browbeat him out of driving the horse.

"But if he _is_ a _cochero_, and we don't pay him, he'll think we're
cheating him," wailed one of us.

"And if he isn't a _cochero_, and we do pay him, he'll be indignant,"
affirmed another.

My boot heels gave me another suggestion. Being a woman, I suppose
I have intuitions, but I trust my boot heels every time. They are
more reliable. "How would it do," I suggested, with a consciousness
of superiority which I trust did not sound in my voice, "How would
it do to stop a sentinel and ask whether our friend is a coachman or
the mayor of the town?" and even as I spoke a sentinel hove in sight
and was promptly interrogated by the men.

"Him?" returned the soldier in answer to our questions, "Him? Why, he's
the richest man in these parts, I reckon, and holds some big job under
the government. I forget what just now, but provost marshal, chief
of police, or somethin' like that." We gasped at our narrow escape,
and after getting that villainous automobile horse in motion again,
pressed some cigars upon our distinguished host, and on reaching the
dock thanked him heartily for our charming morning, impressing upon
him that the _Burnside_ was at his disposition at any and all times,
an invitation of which he later availed himself.

On the afternoon of January 9th the fault which we had been seeking
so long in the