Page:James Hopper--Caybigan.djvu/76

60 thing, that one time he talked, his lips unsealed in a burst of hysteria.

"He awoke, that night, smothered beneath the black weight of some indefinite discomfort. Instinctively his right hand slipped beneath his pillow and closed upon the Mauser pistol; but when he had lived thus a full minute, his fingers clutched about the stock, his breath convulsive in his throat, he slowly released the weapon with a sigh that was not relief. For it was not from the Katipunan warning that came this vague oppression that through his sleep had wrapped him as in a shroud; it was something deeper, more subtle and more intimate; it was interfibred with his innermost being, and it was torture.

"He fought the haunting thing. It was a terrible night. The heat lay upon him like a catafalque. The enfevering rumour of moat-born gnats clung to the netting surrounding him; from the patio-hall there came the weary cough of a muchacho, stretched in his toil-damp clothes upon the polished floor. Outside, between the conch-shell shutters of the veranda the horizon was luminous with the moon; a beam stole into the steaming darkness of the room. It flashed up the mosquito bar into shimmering vapour; blandly it began a pointing-out of details, the inexorable details of his life's vulgarity. A nausea shook his being; he slipped to the floor and out to the balcony.