se 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.

Truly, the life of the merry head-hunter captivated me. He had
reduced art and philosophy to a simple code. To take your adversary's
head, to basket it at the portal of your castle, to see it lying
there, a dead thing, with its cunning and stratagems and power gone--
Is there a better way to foil his plots, to refute his arguments, to
estab