E. Hoffmann Price's War and Western Action Read online

  In one big hand, he gripped a single-barreled shotgun. This weapon, loaded with buckshot, kept the market hunter in money for gin, and for gewgaws that fascinated his four wives. The ladies made quite a fuss over him; all, that is, except his first wife, Catalina, who bitterly resented the three younger ones.

  So Tom had to beat her thoroughly, whenever he was in town.

  But in his rough way, Crazy Tom was kind to Catalina. He gave her as much red calico, and as many bits of tinned jewelry as he gave to Conception, Carmen, and Conchita. These last ones were Moro girls with outlandish Malay names, and from some queer quirk, he had given them Spanish names all starting with “C.”

  While Riley had always been sorry for that caricature of a white man, he now found Tom’s psychology intensely interesting. Sergeant Piomonte, though a Christion Visayan, was ill at ease from seeing his teniente stare so earnestly at the accursed one. He and his fellows feared Tom almost as much as the Moslem mountaineers did; but aside from their squeamishness in the presence of the uncanny, the little scouts feared nothing on earth, least of all the Moros and their long kampilans, and leaf shaped barongs, and the deadly sundangs. These were fighting men, and led by a fighting captain, they were hundred and thirty pound packets of hell.

  “Señor, ees not good to watch heem too much.”

  “Carries a deer like it was a rabbit—hmmm—I can do that.” But Riley was troubled by the thought of what would happen if one of the wives thought they saw Tom approaching, up some narrow trail, and ran to meet him. “Oh, well, it’s a good gamble.”

  Women, who had no souls, were exempt from any of the harm an accursed one’s proximity could cause a man. Neither did women have brains, hence, nothing would be addled. But a Moro warrior would as soon eat pork as come within arm’s reach of Crazy Tom.

  “Maybe the old man’s right, maybe I’m nuts too,” Riley pondered.

  However, the Moros had not officially classed Riley as a madman, and not a man of the hill tribes but would love to dissect the solid Irishman, for fun, for glory, and for his pistol and cartridges.

  A bugler sounded first call. Piomonte had to leave. Riley bolted into his room, kicked out of his slacks, and put on a civilian suit. Out on the parade, commands rumbled, and there was the smart slap of leather slings against Scout palms; the thump of pieces coming to the order. When any more snap is possible, the Scouts will display it.

  The retreat gun boomed; it echoed from the adjoining headland, and from the wooded hills. “Pre-z-e-n-n-n-nt—ARMS!” That was when Riley bolted. Aside from himself and the cooks, every man on the reservation was at attention, eyes front, waiting for the colors to be lowered. The bugler sounded, “To the colors.” Riley’s instinct almost made him halt. Then he stretched his legs, having found a precedent: “Hell, I’m under arrest, I am not entitled to salute!”

  The sentries were at present arms, facing the direction of the field music. So Riley cleared the limits of the post before the captains commanded, “Order, arms!”

  But even in his bolting, Riley had noticed one significant thing: Crazy Tom, who had stopped to rest along the trail, had risen, had raised his hand to the brim of his sloppy old hat when the bugle screamed. Way back in that gin cooked brain, there was perhaps ten cents worth of soldier.

  “Which makes me and him about neck and neck,” Riley said, once he ploughed through the high cogon grass and readied the rocky trail to Bacolod. “But Crann, he’s nuts, claiming I can’t command men in battle.”

  Major Crann, for all his worship of the I.D.R., was a field soldier, and a good one. He did his best to conceal his mistrust of Scout officers, who in the main were ex-enlisted men of various grades, commissioned temporarily in time of emergency. Though he did not question their valor and experience, he simply could not quite accept them as real officers. And Riley, the horrible example of a self-styled “field soldier” who had won a commission, was breaking arrest.

  For all Crann’s insistence that finding the source of Andug’s guns would not and could not get the charges withdrawn, Riley still gambled, and so he followed Crazy Tom, mimicking his gait, trying even to think like a madman, a sunshiner, a market hunter who kept four native wives, and yet was not a Moslem.

  Crazy Tom entered the tangle of nipa-thatched shacks that sprawled along the waterfront, alternating with tin-roofed tiendas and copra storehouses. Mud splashed under the sunshiner’s heavy tread. Dogs yapped; mangy, starved creatures drawn by the smell of blood from the freshly killed game. Flies buzzed about Crazy Tom and the deer, but he ignored them and the dogs as well.

  The garbage and offal under each shack had a stench that drowned the reek of the waterfront, and the odor of copra, and of rotting pearl shell in the vintas that were moored along the quay. Their masts and raking yards were black against the red sky, and their brown crews strutted about town. Women and naked children milled about, going from one open front market to the other.

  Riley edged away from a tub of guinamos. In spite of all the spices and bay leaves, that mess of pickled fish had the foulest odor in the Islands. The natives loved the tang, and once Riley had eaten a portion, rather than offend a local datu. No one had ever decorated him for that feat.

  Crazy Tom, now surrounded by the women of the “coast” Moros, and the wives of the local sunshiners, was hanging the deer to the bamboo roof support of the open front stall which he shared with Lin Fu, the Chinese butcher, as part-time tenant.

  The squaws chattered, pointing. Tom grunted, the big sundang rose and fell, and the customers caught the chunks he lopped off. In a few minutes, nothing remained but a gory tangle of guts and other odds and ends, evenly divided between the dirty table and the crowd of growling dogs. It reminded Riley pretty much of the battle of Mount Bagsak, after the jackass batteries had shelled the Moro outlaws, who, refusing to surrender, fought it out to a finish in the extinct crater. And now Datu Andug, patiently collecting guns from smugglers who must come from the Borneo Coast, seemed to be preparing to duplicate Datu Ali’s bloody revolt.

  When Tom had thrust the last peseta into the side pocket of his ragged pants, Riley stepped from the corner post of the shop and gestured toward Wing Lee’s tienda.

  “Come on, I’m buying a drink.”

  Tom stared, dull-eyed, and backed away. Years of drunkenness, of jungle solitude, of ostracism by his own kind, had made him wary of white people. He muttered behind his dirty red mask, and pulled it up a little higher, concealing the barely visible end of the ugly purple scar that reached slantwise to the hair just above his ear. Riley had never gotten a fair look at the man’s right cheek and jaw, but a glimpse had been enough, people would stare.

  “How about a drink, Tom?” he repeated, with all his Irish persuasion.

  Tom grunted, nodded. “Aw right, teniente.” And now there was half-brightness in his eyes, for he began to remember the only white man who had drunk with him since he had become a sunshiner.

  The walk down the main street was ticklish work, and Riley’s recklessness was not equal to keeping him from uncomfortable tension.

  One provost guard would upset everything. Once, a native policeman in khaki stared for a moment, then hastily turned away and darted down a side street. He must have recognized Riley, but it was none of his business, a white officer breaking arrest. Yet he might make a report to Headquarters, just to forestall a future disturbance.

  Wing Lee’s place was perhaps thirty feet long, and little over twenty wide; its bamboo framework, sides and roof, were thatched with nipa palm, and the floor was of hard packed earth. One door opened to the street, the other to the beach. For the rest, there was a zinc-topped bar, four or five yards long, and half a dozen small, greasy tables.

  Wing clasped his two hands and bowed double. “Velly glad see you, teniente. Lo, Tom. Catchee dlink? Velly nice fire, velly nice, burn up Ah Chin’s place.” He cackled, and pointed to his own lamps. “Too h
igh up, teniente, no throw-ee lamp!”

  “Make it whiskey, Wing. Old Crow, understand?”

  “Ol’ Clow, hab got, catchee, chop-chop.”

  He was proud of his English, and would not dream of using Spanish or Moro. As he trotted to the bar, Riley went to the table in the furthest corner. Like the others, it had a top that was solidly carved with dates, initials, Gibson girls, and Indian chiefs; all the work of soldiers, sunshiners, copra traders, and pearlers; and by the time Wing touched light to the two hanging lamps, the customers began drifting in.

  Riley kept his back to them, and they ignored Crazy Tom. After the first round, which was on the house, for Wing insisted on being grateful for a bit of accidental arson, the lieutenant called for a bottle.

  As he refilled the glasses, he asked, “You sell any deer up in the hills?”

  Tom lifted the lower corner of his mask, and downed the drink with not enough exposure of his mouth to give more than a hint of the scar. “Uh, plenty. To Tsang Wu. Got a good tienda.”

  Riley knew the place, having marched through with a detachment, months before Andug had seriously considered revolt. Throughout the jungle of the interior, there were Chinese traders; it was important to know which one Tom favored.

  “Smoke?” Riley produced a pack of Sweet Caporals.

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “Rather have dobes? Or a cigar?”

  “Nuh-uh. Don’t smoke.” He spat out a well worn cud which, kept far back in his cheek, did not interfere with drinking. “Chew,” he said, and fumbled for a package of Five Brothers.

  That was another thing to remember. Tom stumbled to his feet. “Catalina raises hell when I get in too late.” He giggled. “Chased me all the way to the bundoks with a bolo, one time. So I beat hell out of her. Uh-huh. Got to beat squaws. White women too, I guess.”

  “Come on, come on now, sit down, it’s whiskey you’re drinking, Tom.”

  Riley held the bottle as if it were the crown of England; the stuff cost ten times what native gin did. The sunshiner shrugged, slumped back in his chair. “Lieutenant,” he stuttered. “Lieutenant—”

  “Cut out the frills, hell, didn’t I tell you I used to be a buck private in the old Seventh? I’m liable to be something like that again, looks like they’re fixing to bob-tail me for starting that fire and socking Balabac Charley. For a plugged peso, I’d go over the hill, and to hell with ’em!”

  Tom was goggle-eyed. “Go over the hill,” he mumbled, “and show ’em. I did, only they sent a patrol after me.”

  “How do you manage to get along with the Moros?”

  “Aw—anybody can—it’s easy—huh—just don’t pay any attention to ’em. Leave their women alone—buy one for yourself—for some calico—and canned salmon—hell, I get along, don’t I?”

  So Riley listened to the details of how to go native and without being sliced in half, or tied to the horns of a fighting buffalo. Tom’s answers were perfectly logical, except that they omitted the basic principle: a man first had to be established as thoroughly crazy.

  Riley thought. “Poor devil doesn’t realize he hasn’t got regulation equipment above the ears.”

  Then Crazy Tom made gurgling sounds, and fell face forward across the table. Riley beckoned to Wing, and said, “Keep him dead drunk, I’ll pay.” He handed him a thick roll of twenty peso bills. “And there’s more when I come back. Tie him up, don’t let him get away till I come back”

  “Me sawee plenty.”

  “That’s not all. Help me carry him to your shack. I want to swap clothes with him, I want his shotgun, too. Understand? Don’t let him get away! Or I’ll take you to pieces.”

  Wing didn’t understand anything except money, but he said, “Me sawee plenty, you catchee Clazy Tom’s woman?”

  “No, I am not interested in his girls! Now get busy, and shut up.”

  “Me sawee plenty.”

  An hour later, Riley was heading for the jungle. His life depended on a madman and a Chinaman. As long as there were not two Crazy Toms in the hills at once, there was a chance of spying out the country, learning the location of that one among the hundreds of coves where gun runners could land on the jagged Mindanao coast.

  CHAPTER III

  The first mile up the trail that wound into the Ambol country was easy enough, and leaving by night was quite in accord with the character Riley had assumed. He had Crazy Tom’s jack-light on his hat, ready for deer hunting; he carried the sunshiner’s old shotgun across the crook of his arm.

  With each uphill step, the air became hotter and more humid. The jungle’s silence was pointed by furtive stirrings, chirps and twitters. Monkeys, always wary, shifted their perches, and chattered warnings to sleepier companions. Once, the sharp bladed cogon brass rustled, and Riley caught the phosphorescence of a deer’s eyes.

  The long thorns of julat anay—the “wait a bit” creeper—raked his legs. Bejuco vines set traps for his feet, and Crazy Tom’s rope-soled alpargatas were another handicap, though their silence would later be a help. It was a stiff climb, a slow, all-night ascent, unbroken except for Riley’s halts to rest. Swarming mosquitoes kept him from napping more than a few minutes in any place. And when the sun finally rose from behind the peaks about Lake Lanao, he had covered only a short distance in an airline.

  He heard the animated chatter of the monkeys and knew that they were as glad as he was at having lived through another jungle night. Fresh water was not far ahead; he could make camp, cook some coffee, and rest a while.

  Then, as he rounded the turn, he saw a file of Moros: at least forty of them, and strangers to the district. They wore the peculiar, floppy turbans of the tribesmen from beyond Lake Lanao. They were not Datu Andug’s men, who had long accepted Crazy Tom as one under Allah’s protection.

  Their unexpected presence indicated that Andug’s deviltry had gone much further than anyone at Headquarters had suspected; the trouble-maker was calling for allies, and the presumption was that only an offer of guns and cartridges would have induced those Lanao men to team up with the forces of a rival chieftain. But Riley’s first thought was, “How the hell do I convince these fellows that I’m loco?”

  The strangers had come for a prolonged visit. Their women led the way, carrying pots and baskets on their heads. Their black hair and their brown bodies gleamed from palm oil. The reek of this cosmetic blended with the smoky tang exhaled by their close-fitting red sarongs: they had only a little while previous been sleeping beside smudge fires, as partial protection against mosquitoes.

  The procession was heading for a fork that led northeast, toward Datu Andug’s cotta. Already, the women were chattering, and the men were running forward, drawing krisses. It was not cowardice that made these fellows put their wives in the advance guard; it was plain logic, for, since women have neither souls nor sense, no one kills them, and thus they can give the warriors warning of ambush.

  Riley had one move: to convince them he was crazy, and before they sliced him in half. While he could make himself understood in the Lanao dialect, this was not an occasion for logic and argument. So he advanced, very straight instead of slouching. He held the old shotgun as if it were a drum major’s baton. And while a comb and some tissue paper would have helped him imitate field music, he did very well behind his dirty red mask. He shouted a command, gave the gun a spin, and went on with his vocal imitation of a military band, with oomp-pabs worked into his droning of the melody.

  A one man band in the hill country was unique, to say the least; yet every Moro, trying to bushwhack a sentry and steal a rifle, had spied enough near military posts to understand Riley’s pantomime.

  The men with the drawn krisses lowered their weapons. The women began edging back, and into the tigbau grass; they spoke to the waiting warriors. Riley could now see the wrinkle of scowling faces, the fire of narrowed eyes, the play of sunlight on oiled skin. Only a few
more yards to go.

  He made a brave flourish with his baton, and halted, smartly, one-two. Then a command, and a hand salute, which he held as he whistled “To the Colors.” For good measure, he made the four burrrnps of drums rolled in honor of a visiting general.

  Compliments rendered to a visiting dignitary, he made a grandiloquent gesture, said in Lanao, “Welcome to my capital!” Without waiting for any return salute, he marched on, carrying his gun once more as a hunter.

  They did not cut him down. The fighting men scrambled to avoid even the touch of his elbow. But getting that file of forty-odd Moros at his back took longer than Riley’s first three enlistments in the ranks. When he reached a high spot from which he could watch the visitors swinging into the trail toward Andug’s cotta, he slumped down under a tree, and sat there for some minutes before he noticed the biting of ants.

  He felt sick, and he looked it. He said, unsteadily, “If I’d only had a bugle, I could have made the set look and sound like something.”

  While he had sold hostile strangers the idea that he was crazy, he could not shake off the fear that these strangers might, with their animal intuition, begin to wonder if they had not been taken in: simply because, unlike Andug’s people, they had not learned to take Crazy Tom for granted. He had to get away from the main trail, lest he meet other delegations to Andug’s fortified village; a one man band might fail to convince the next party.

  Soon he was following a branch which wound through dense jungle. The trees were overgrown with purple cattalyas and white butterfly orchids; the lovely parasites nodded in the humid breeze, like well groomed women confident of their charm. Monkeys made faces at him, and shook their fists at the scolding parrots, far overhead. And then he heard the booming of kettle-shaped Moro gongs. Andug was welcoming his visitors.

  Riley halted near a small stream, and with his heavy sundang he cut bamboo and cogon grass for a lean-to. He would spend the day sleeping, for the all-night climb had thoroughly tired him. Regardless of the importance of his mission, he had first to kill a deer, and carry on with Crazy Tom’s routine. To go near the Moro cotta without game would be fatally out of character.