land. When he did speak it was in Spanish, which he
had learned that I understood. We were halted on the very edge of
the precipice. Far down below the little fleet of war-proas floated
lightly on the water, the black and yellow signal still fluttering
from the flag ship. I could see now that the men that had come up the
path behind me had brought a quantity of ropes. Perhaps there were
thirty men in all. I wondered what they were going to do with me,
but had decided that any fate was better than to be a Moro slave.

"Men of Mindanao," said the chief, "you know our errand. You know how
often men of our band have been captured by the white men of the north
to lie in prisons there, where death comes so slowly that a 'barong'
blow would be paradise. The few that have crept back to us, weak,
hollow-eyed and trembling, have only come to show us what it meant
to starve, and then have died. The sky is just, and gives us once
and again a white man to whom we may show that the prophet's words
'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' are just. Give the white
dog his due."

Two men grasped me and wound a stout rope, coil after coil, about me
from my neck to my feet, until I was as helpless as a swathed Egyptian
mummy. One end of another rope was fastened in a slip-noose about my
body, and a dozen of the men, sitting well back from the edge of the
cliff and bracing themselves one against another, paid out the rope.

The chief himself, touching me with his foot as he would have touched
some unclean thing, rolled me over the brink of the precipice. The
sharp rocks cut my face until the blood came, but that meant little
to a man who expected to be dropped upon rocks just as sharp three
hundred feet beneath him.

Slowly I was lowered down the face of the cliff until, perhaps twenty
feet down, I found to my surprise that my descent had ceased, and that
I was dangling before the mouth of a cave of considerable size. While
I swung there, wondering what would happen next, the end of a rope
ladder flung down from above dropped across the opening in the side of
the cliff, and a moment later two agile Moros climbed down the ladder
and from it entered the cave. From where they stood it was easy for
them to reach out and haul me in after them, as a bale of merchandise
swinging from a hoisting pulley is hauled in through a window.

Loosening the slip-knot they fastened into it the rope which had been
coiled about my body, and giving it