E. Hoffmann Price's War and Western Action Page 19

  Just for luck, he cut a heap of thorny creepers with which to make a barrier about his shelter. Then he opened a can of salmon from his pack, and cooked a pannikin of coffee. Within an hour after making camp, Riley was asleep; fatigue overcame his impatience, and the thumping of Andug’s gongs did their part.

  Around ten o’clock that night the mountain chill awakened him. He was shivering when he pushed the thorn barrier aside and crept from his shelter.

  Stalking deer was simple enough, though as a sport it was more like assassination. With shotgun and jacklight, Riley picked his way back toward a burned-off area which, freed of the tall cogan grass, invited deer. They liked the new crop, which was tender and juicy.

  He stepped slowly over the black clearing, swinging his jacklight beam from side to side. Presently, two luminous eyes gleamed ahead of him. He advanced, deliberately. Curiosity kept the animal fixed in place, fascinated if not actually blinded and bewildered.

  Riley raised his gun and cut loose with the charge of buckshot.

  Simple butchery. Simple as the way the Moros cut down a sentry, or a coconut planter, or a Christian native.

  So, an hour after leaving camp, Riley was back again. With a flexible strand of bajuco he hoisted the little buck to the limb of a tree, out of reach of the ants. Left anywhere near the ground, the carcass would have been cleaned to the bones, and long before dawn.

  In the morning, Riley shouldered the sixty-pound deer, and worked his way back to the main trail. At the fork, he followed the course taken by the visiting Moros he had met perhaps twenty-four hours earlier. Hampered by gun and venison, Riley began to appreciate Crazy Tom’s industry in keeping four wives.

  When he finally came near enough to Andug’s cotta to smell the rotting offal, and the lines where the fighting stallions were kept, he saw Tsang Wu’s tienda, which stood in a level clearing. Aside from being cogon thatched, it was similar to the one where he had left Crazy Tom, in Bacolod.

  Nearby was a lean-to, where the Chino’s Moro wife squatted beside the cooking fire. Though Tsang Wu was an infidel, and as much the enemy of Allah as any white man, the Chino’s native wife won him tolerance.

  For all the ventilation, the place had the high odor of dried fish, guinamos, and, worst of all, durian. Riley stood there, staring stupidly, which was easy, since his eyes could not at once accustom themselves to the shade of the tienda.

  Tsang leaped from his seat behind the littered counter, and snatched up a “working” bolo; though designed for household service, such as cutting bamboo and beheading chickens, it was versatile enough. “Whatchee want?”

  Riley grunted. “Sell meat.”

  The Chino looked puzzled, then lowered his bolo, and grinned broadly. This last was easy, for his face was round, gleaming, and there was lots of it.

  “Oh—Tom—you fool me, come back too quick.”

  In his haste, Riley had not learned all about Crazy Tom’s routine. Apparently the sunshiner, after selling Tsang a buck, moved on to the next hunting ground, on the Malabang trail, instead of making a follow-up sale.

  The Chino, still chuckling, went on, “Wassa malla, mebbeso flaid see Ca’mencita, likkee Conchita mo’ bettah?”

  This was dangerous ground. He wasn’t even sure where Conchita lived, and what was more, he didn’t want to stumble anywhere into the vicinity of the lady’s shack, somewhere on the plateau. Each wife had a battle-axe of a duena, nominally a companion, but actually, a guardian. Conchita might overlook a bit of mistaken identity but the duena would not. Old and ugly, she would be resentful enough of a shapely young trick to watch every move.

  Riley answered, “Nuh-uh. Datu Andug—lots of company—need plenty meat, huh? You can sell, huh?”

  “My savvee plenty.” Tsang laughed until his belly shook his blue shirt, which hung outside his green silk pants. “Velly flighten, you come back too quick.”

  The Chino meant that he had for a moment feared that some other white hunter, wearing a mask, had come up for a bit of robbery. Yet that made no sense, for with a village of warlike Moros less than half a mile away, Crazy Tom was the only white man who would dare come so near. But then, Tsang’s dress and his fat face showed that he was prosperous enough to be wary of the most improbable threat to his hoard.

  Ten to one, the hill tribes had been bringing him bits of gold dust, or perhaps some pearls, from the coast.

  Riley set his shotgun against a bamboo upright, and dropped the carcass of the deer. The bargaining, however, had no chance to start. A long shadow reached in through the door. Riley turned, and saw a man whose height, unusual for a Moro, identified him. He was close to six feet, and his curved nose proudly advertised Arab blood, which the Malay race especially reveres. His sarong and turban were of silk, fine and heavy, colored red and black.

  This was Datu Andug, who stood there with one hand on the silver hilt of his kris. Riley grinned foolishly behind his mask, and pointed at the butchered buck. The Moro’s nostrils flared like a stallion’s, and he backed away, to avoid contamination from a madman’s nearness. There was more than revulsion in his expression; and since a chief is a degree nearer to Allah than ordinary men, he might go for that kris.

  With war brewing, Andug would be suspicious even of madmen.

  “You like?” Riley asked in the Maguindanao dialect, and pointed.

  It was very plain that there was something which Andug violently disliked. And Riley knew that he could never reach his shotgun before the kris got into action.

  Andug spat within an inch of Riley’s toe, and stepped to the counter. He spoke to Tsang in a bastard Chinese patois that the disguised officer could not understand. Tsang handed him a packet of cigarettes, and made a gesture toward Riley. Then he said in English, “You no ’flaid, I tell Andug you velly nice man, you no likee soldier, you no talkee.”

  Riley mumbled, “That’s good. I just hunt for a living.”

  The datu, apparently mollified by Tsang’s interposition, tore open the pack of Hebras. “Smoke,” he invited, in Maguindanao.

  Riley readied for the pack, and had almost brushed a corner of his mask aside when he remembered that Crazy Tom did not smoke. His eagerness to make the most out of Andug’s amiability had recoiled. Worse than that, he had fumbled for a pack of matches.

  When he realized his error, he grunted, fumbled in his other pocket. He put the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and with both hands digging, he located his jackknife.

  Then he split the smoke, and grinned. “I don’t smoke, I chew,” he said, and thrust the tobacco under his tongue.

  Andug eyed him intently, then stalked out, where his parasol bearer and a groom waited with the stallion which the datu rode on ceremonial occasions. Riley hoped that his error might be attributed to the confusion that is bound to muddle any ordinary man when a chieftain personally offers a smoke, but he lost no time in pocketing Tsang’s cash, and heading out to hunt again.

  CHAPTER IV

  Riley had ceased to love his work; all day he admitted that, and before mid-afternoon, he also realized that he was thoroughly frightened. It was not that choked and sick feeling a John-recruit gets the first time some Mausers pop from ambush, and a buddy topples over, right beside you. It was not that instant of paralysis you get the first time—or the tenth time!—the cogon grass rustles, and a swarm of Moros rush a column, with kris swishing and every man yelling, “O-o-o-ah buguy!”

  What had Riley by the throat that long day was uncertainty, a strange and new feeling. Andug might want to gain “face” by killing a madman, and again, he might fear to kill one, lest his followers become uneasy. Andug might be having a conflict of qualms, just from wondering whether Crazy Tom would let slip some fatal trifle, in the market at Bacolod, about having seen Lanao Moros so close to the coast; wondering whether the danger of letting him live was greater than that of finishing him.

  When
a Moro becomes introspective, he has to do something about it, and the only thing that comes to his mind is to draw a kris and start slashing, which is what makes him one of the world’s best fighting men.

  To keep from thinking too much, Riley built a super-fancy shelter for the coming night. After cutting a supply of bamboo and cogon grass, he sliced off a length of wiry bajuco, and split off some strips with which to lash the grass thatch, and secure the skeleton. Then he took the feathery branches from the crest of each bamboo stalk, lopped off the leaves, and staked the thorny pieces down in a tight hedge about the lean-to. Raiding Moros couldn’t get through such a barrier without awakening him.

  This was sheer panic, and he knew it. There was some sense in a company hedging itself in, but if a handful of Andug’s men came to get him, they would get him, regardless of his being warned of their approach. Riley would be afraid until they arrived. After that, for a little while, he would be a fighting man again.

  He wanted a smoke, but he did not dare risk it, so he chewed sweat soaked “Five Brothers,” and waited for darkness. The increasing noise of the Moro cotta told him that Andug’s men were whooping it up, while the elders and junior datus squatted in the big house and chewed betel and spat as they planned.

  He shot his deer.

  He did very little sleeping. And when he roasted the buck’s liver, he knew why it was so hard to swallow. He was too worried.

  And when the sun rose, Riley shouldered the carcass and headed for Andug’s cotta. Being worked over with a kris was better than trying to decide what a datu and a Chino were thinking.

  But Riley’s wire-edged nerves did finally help him. He was perhaps halfway to his destination, when he saw the mass of julat anay that blocked his path. Thorn brush was just routine on the infrequently used trails. He paused, looking around for footprints, and though he found none, he still did not like that obstacle.

  Riley dropped his burden, and cut a length of cana bojo about the thickness of his forefinger. That done, he used a strip of rattan to tie his sundang to the light piece of cane. Standing well to one side, he slashed at the thorny entanglement. There was a sound like the twang of a bowstring. A hunting spear shot across the trail, waist high; the wrought iron head buried half its length in the tough trunk of a kemagon tree.

  If he had tried to kick the julat anay out of his way, as he had often enough done before, the spear would have impaled him. Was this a general precaution, or did it have a personal touch? It is hard luck, it is hoodoo for a Moro to kill a man whose wits are with Allah, but if a madman just blunders into a spear trap, where will the curse land?

  Maybe on the spear. Maybe on the warrior who, obeying the datu’s order, had had no idea as to why his chief had wanted traps set out. There was no telling just what fine turns Moro logic might take.

  Then Riley straightened up, and grinned. “Why, the stupid bugao! That’s a dead giveaway, he still thinks I’m Crazy Tom, or he’d’ve sent the boys to kris me!”

  Riley was a fighting man again. He spent some minutes working the spear head from the tough kemagon trunk. If there was a curse on the weapon that had tried for a madman’s life, he wanted it, just for fun. He began humming an old ballad that dated back to “Bridge of Spain” days, before his time: and he fitted the datu’s name into it.

  “Here’s to Audug, the son of a—

  May he have lice and fever and the dobie itch—”

  With the sixty-pound buck, and Crazy Tom’s shotgun, Riley already had a handful, but it took him only a moment to find a way of taking the spear along. He lashed the animal’s legs together in pairs and swung the carcass across his back, so that the legs reached forward, on each side. With his burden so balanced, he worked the spear through the lashings; thus, one hand on the shaft that passed across his chest did double duty, leaving the other free for the shotgun.

  He did not pause at Tsang’s tienda. Now that the build-up was completed, Riley meant business. And when he reached the clearing in which the fortified village stood, he saw that he had rightly interpreted the sounds and signs. Datu Andug had a swarm of visitors, and he had made lordly preparations for their entertainment.

  The cotta was surrounded by a moat, and a fourfold palisade made of bamboo stalks better than six inches in diameter and lashed together with rattan. Behind this barrier of sharpened stakes was a wall of earth, pierced at intervals by bamboo tubes: these were the ports through which flintlock and matchlock muskets were pointed, as well as the muzzle loading brass lantakas. But these were the routine details of a cotta, and Riley was more interested in a bowl-shaped depression which was perhaps a hundred yards from the fort.

  The ground had been cleared of its natural tangle of vines to make room for pony races, stallion fights, and carabao fights. And all around this natural oval, women and boys and slaves were at work, building shacks and lean-tos. The entire clearing swarmed with visitors.

  Dogs yapped at the heels of the horse ridden by a newly arrived dignitary, and naked brats milled about. The harem, as usual, went ahead, and on foot. And in the excitement of greeting a newcomer, no one paid any attention to the man they assumed was Crazy Tom, bending under a load of venison.

  The visiting datu reined in his under-sized stallion, and the fifty odd fighting men who followed him halted, not far from the bamboo bridge which spanned the dry moat. Women and children crowded the parapet, leaning over the sharpened bamboo stakes to look at the imposing stranger. The gate was blocked by Andug’s men, all wearing their newest turbans and sarongs, and loaded down with krisses and daggers.

  Those at work building shelters dropped their tools and gathered about the retinue. Riley had already recognized the flopping turbans; this datu had come from beyond Lanao, forty miles away. The fifty men behind him were only a fraction of his force; these were just his personal guard, his “household troops,” so to speak. And already, Riley knew why Sahipa waited at the gate of the cotta.

  He was too important to go in to greet Andug. He sat his runty stallion, and pretended to ignore the excitement. He kept his wrinkled face blank, and held his head high; his white hair was bound in a knot that peeped through his turban, and his cheeks and throat and arms were corded with old scars, white against his brown skin. Sahipa, the old man of the mountains, was almost a sultan; the big yellow parasol which an attendant carried had a gilt fringe, and the staff was overlaid with gold leaf.

  Riley was thinking, “Sahipa’s here because Andug has or can get so many guns that there’ll be enough for all.”

  The sensible thing to do was to leave while there was a chance, but while returning and reading the social register of Inner Mindanao, as represented at Andug’s cotta, would warn Crann, Riley was not certain whether that would dispose of the court-martial.

  Then the crowd at the gate parted, and Andug came out, followed by his parasol bearer, servants, and his retinue of datus. He would have been imposing had his horse not been too small for him. The shaggy little brute snorted, tossed his head, shook the red tassels of the bridle; the reins tinkled from their silver decorations. For all his runtiness, he kept his tall rider from seeming ridiculous.

  Riley was impressed when Andug reined in, at the outer end of the bridge, and raised one hand. “Tabay, sultan!” he said. “Greeting, Sultan Sahipa!”

  Then Riley’s glance shifted to the saddle. It was made like a sawbuck, with very little padding, top or bottom. It was bad for the rider, and worse for the mount. Instead of stirrup leathers, there were lengths of braided bajuco, knotted at the lower end. Andug gripped the cord, just above the knot, between his large toe and the next one. Like all Moros, he rode only for short distances, and then only on occasions of ceremony.

  Riley, ex-trooper of the Seventh Cavalry, ceased to be impressed with either datu or sultan. “Depress your heels, you bastards!” he said to himself, thinking of the instruction he had given many a John-recruit. “Get your legs ba
ck!”

  And the spear in his hand gave him confidence. These mountaineers were superstitious and they couldn’t ride for sour apples. If a trumpeter sounded “Charge,” they’d be clawing dirt the first jump. That settled it. He wasn’t going back until he knew where the guns were.

  Then Andug put on the final touch of ceremony. One of his men had a battered bugle, picked up after some skirmish with white troops or brown, and now he was giving it hell. Whatever he was trying to play, made no difference, but the intent was plain—this was American style field music to salute a sultan who would soon be using American style ammunition to clean up the infidels on the coast.

  Both dignitaries were heartily sick of their murderous saddles, and at the bugle tooting, Sahipa dismounted. This last frill touched him, and so he unbent enough to be the first to get on foot.

  Andug practically slid his stallion from under him. Two grooms fought the shaggy devil to keep him from bolting, and while everyone was dodging, Riley ploughed through the crowd, straight for the two chieftains. He dumped the deer on the ground, pointed with the spear. “Present for Andug.”

  There was a snarl, and the whisper of a kris slipping out of a wooden scabbard. A man yelled at Sahipa, “No, he’s crazy!” Andug eyed the spear in Riley’s hand. He eyed the butchered buck. He said, “Thank you, but get away from me.” Then the datu gestured to Sahipa and toward the bridge. As host, Andug had to go first. The warriors followed. Riley, staring dumbly about him, tagged after, with the women and the dogs.

  Now that Sahipa had arrived, the council would get to business, and with luck, Riley would learn about the landing of the ammunition, and where the cargadores would pick it up. He needed luck, needed it as he never had before; but he was too close to victory to hesitate.

  CHAPTER V

  Riley moped around, feigning the dull, shifting attention of the man he impersonated. His interest seemed most centered on the red earthenware pots which steamed over crackling fires of bamboo joints, but as the day wore on, he went to watch the carabao fights. These combats between 1,200 pound buffalos were sluggish affairs, a head to head butting, a pushing back and forth as the heavy, downward drooping horns clashed and locked. Broad beamed, short legged, short necked, these brutes depended on weight; there was a lot of grunting, a ploughing up of dirt as one forced the other back.