individual taste. A great man was Chino Charlie, though of small build, and as wise as they make them in Amoy.
But
after all the man who ran the beer saloon made the real big money. Good
luck to you, Don Pedro! You gave me a room and a slice of porch above
your saloon for 250 pesos a month, and the right to sit at your mess. I
liked your gar-banzos well enough till the Encyclopedia Britannica told
me they were but a kind of dry pea. But it shocked me to find you were
a man of so little gastronomical taste as to serve them up with carabao
tail. But good taste or no, Don Pedro, I have not forgotten you, or
your many sneak-thief kindly deeds to me and others.
Two
days after I'd settled down in my room above the saloon it was Army
pay-day. I had set me down after supper on the porch to rest in a Kudat
chair and dream of home. From below came the beery song from a
half-boozed pair, the sound of many men talking, the clink of glasses,
the scraping of chairs and the constant ring of the cash register.
But
suddenly louder words followed, followed by curses and shouts, and the
report of a gun. The sound made me jump from my chair, and there, only
a foot from me, lay the bullet.
In
my funk I did not hear the second shot, but a minute later, leaning
over my porch rail, I saw the stretcher below in the street, a pallid
face in the moonlight and (in my mind's eye) a weeping American mother.
"Does this sort of thing go on all the time?" I inquired of Don Pedro.
"Oh,
bless you, Senor, it only lasts while the men have any money—three or
four more days at most, for by then their wads will be in my iron
chest."
Three
or four days might be too much for me, I thought, and was ready to
seize the opportunity of getting away from Jolo for a week, when the
skipper of the Government launch invited me to take a trip with him to
Zamboanga in Mindanao.
"Just get on board quietly to-morrow night at eight," he
