Page:James Hopper--Caybigan.djvu/245

Rh One day, though, she decided to settle down.

She caught the superintendent at his desk and asked him for a provincial post. The superintendent saw his main chance staring him in the face. He was an intelligent and discreet man, so he did not decide hastily. For a whole afternoon he pored diligently over a map of the archipelago. Finally he settled on Taal, in the volcanic region of Luzon. It was just at the end of the dry season; he calculated that she could just get there. Then the rains would begin—and the roads were without bottom. Besides, there was Papa Gato ambuscaded somewhere upon the flanks of the great volcano surmounting the pueblo. Many things can happen in six months. The superintendent was not an imaginative man; but that day he certainly smiled to visions.

So, with a last array of reclamas—transportation, carts, provisions, military escorts—the widow, her worldly goods upon a carabao-drawn carro, herself in a shaky quilesa, set out toward her Palestine. And the rains began and shut her off behind their impenetrable curtain.

From her isolation, after a while, news began to filter, vague, insufficient, broken, like the irritating snatches of a telegraph line out of order; first the regular official reports, secondly popular rumour. She had evidently taken hold. The monthly reports