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Page 62
"And, somehow, when he said that, I remembered, all of a sudden, the
night of that dance and Willie brushing his hair before the looking-
glass, and Myra sticking her head in the door to guy him.
"When we got back to Sam Houston Avenue, Willie says:
"'Well, so long, Ben. I'm going down home and get off my shoes and
take a rest.'
"'You?' says I. 'What's the matter with you? Ain't the court-house
jammed with everybody in town waiting to honor the hero? And two
brass-bands, and recitations and flags and jags and grub to follow
waiting for you?'
"Willie sighs.
"'All right, Ben,' says he. 'Darned if I didn't forget all about
that.'
"And that's why I say," concluded Ben Granger, "that you can't tell
where ambition begins any more than you can where it is going to wind
up."
THE HEAD-HUNTER
When the war between Spain and George Dewey was over, I went to the
Philippine Islands. There I remained as bushwhacker correspondent for
my paper until its managing editor notified me that an eight-hundred-
word cablegram describing the grief of a pet carabao over the death of
an infant Moro was not considered by the office to be war news. So I
resigned, and came home.
On board the trading-vessel that brought me back I pondered much upon
the strange things I had sensed in the weird archipelago of the
yellow-brown people. The manoeuvres and skirmishings of the petty war
interested me not: I was spellbound by the outlandish and unreadable
countenance of that race that had turned its expressionless gaze upon
us out of an unguessable past.
Particularly during my stay in Mindanao had I been fascinated and
attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as the
head-hunters. Those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never seen,
but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their
concealed presence, paralleling the trail of their prey through
unmapped forests, across perilous mountain-tops, adown bottomless
chasms, into uninhabitable jungles, always near with the invisible
hand of death uplifted, betraying their pursuit only by such signs as
a beast or a bird or a gliding serpent might make-a twig crackling in
the awful, sweat-soaked night, a drench of dew showering from the
screening foliage of a giant tree, a whisper at even from the rushes
of a water-level-a hint of death for every mile and every hour-they
amused me greatly, those little fellows of one idea.
When you think of it, their method is beautifully and almost
hilariously effective and simple.
You have your hut in which you live and carry out the destiny that was
decreed for you. Spiked to the jamb of your bamboo doorway is a
basket made of green withes, plaited. From time to time, as vanity or
ennui or love or jealousy or ambition may move you, you creep forth
with your snickersnee and take up the silent trail. Back from it you
come, triumphant, bearing the severed, gory head of your victim, which
you deposit with pardonable pride in the basket at the side of your
door. It may be the head of your enemy, your friend, or a stranger,
according as competition, jealousy, or simple sportiveness has been
your incentive to labor.
In any case, your reward is certain. The village men, in passing,
stop to congratulate you, as your neighbor on weaker planes of life
stops to admire and praise the begonias in your front yard. Your
particular brown maid lingers, with fluttering bosom, casting soft
tiger's eyes at the evidence of your love for her. You chew betel-nut
and listen, content, to the intermittent soft drip from the ends of
the severed neck arteries. And you show your teeth and grunt like a
water-buffalo--which is as near as you can come to laughing-at the
thought that the cold, acephalous body of your door ornament is being
spotted by wheeling vultures in the Mindanaoan wilds.
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