balloon.
He himself was to go up in it and give the Manila folk the novel treat
of witnessing a parachute descent. He went up in the balloon all right,
although he had never been in the air before, but there was a hitch in
the second part of the proceedings. The parachute obstinately refused
to open out, and Dick came down in a hurry, hurtling through the air
like a meteor. The gaping, gasping Chino-Filipino crowd fell over
itself to avoid the hero of that stunt. When Dicky Gibbs stood on his
feet again, his hair was white as snow. And that, he said, was how he
started in business.
Why
and how he had drifted southwards to the Moro Isles no one knew. But it
is certain that he came and that he remained for four and twenty
years. Pershing was then a young captain chasing the Moros in the open
and fighting them in their cottas in Mindanao and Sulu. Dicky saw most
of the fighting during those years, more or less in the capacity of
spectator. He was engaged in the pack-train, a crowd of the toughest
hombres you could imagine. The pack-train was not of the Army, but the
Army was helpless without the pack-train, on which it depended for its
supplies. It could neither shoot nor eat save by leave of the
pack-train, and the pack-train men on their mules saw and heard all
that was going on; but they only practiced shooting from the hip to
qualify for Hollywood. A fine life! The chow was fine, the pay good,
blowing up Moros with dynamite the finest sport in the world.
The
worst of it, for the regulars, though, was that this was not an
official war. Nor was the killing official—there was no honor in it.
One day everything would apparently be calm and peaceful, the next each
mountain valley would be buzzing like an angry hive. The Moro never
looked far for a quarrel. He would fight for anything—or nothing.
Sometimes he thought the half-moon was a better design than the stars
and stripes, sometimes he thought that his bolos and krisses were going
rusty for want of blood; sometimes he took personal offense that the
Americanos' favorite dish was pork and beans. Sometimes it was merely
freedom he wanted—freedom to do unto others as he saw fit.
