home of giant
crocodiles which not infrequently attacked and capsized the frail
native _vintas_, killing their occupants as they struggled in the
water.

Warner, who had spent four years among the Visayans before going to
Siassi, and who was, therefore, eminently qualified to compare the
northern islanders with the Moros, told me that the latter possess a
much higher type of intelligence than the Filipinos and assimilate new
ideas far more quickly. He added that they have a highly developed
sense of humor; that they are quick to appreciate subtle stories, which
the Tagalogs and Visayans are not; and that they are much more ready to
accept advice on agricultural and economic matters than the Christian
Filipinos, who have a life-sized opinion of their own ability. When the
day's work was over, he said, he would seat himself in the doorway of
his hut, surrounded by a group of Moros, and discuss crops and weather
prospects, swap jokes and tell stories, just as he might have done with
lighter skinned sons of toil around the cracker-barrel of a cross-roads
store in New England. He added that he was sadly in need of some new
stories to tell his Moro proteges, as, after six years on the island,
his own fund was about exhausted. But he was growing weary of life on
Siassi, he told me; he wanted action and excitement; so he was
preparing to move, with his Airedale, to Bohol, in the Visayas, where,
he had heard it rumored, there was another white man.

Still another of the picturesque characters with whom I foregathered
nightly on the after-deck of the _Negros_ during our stay at Jolo was a
former soldier, John Jennings by name. He was an operative of the
Philippine Secret Service, being engaged at the time in breaking up the
running of opium from Borneo across the Sulu Sea to the Moro islands.
Jennings is a short, thickset, powerfully-built man, all nerve and no
nerves. Adventure is his middle name. He has lived more stories than I
could invent. Shortly before our arrival at Jolo Jennings had learned
from a native in his pay that a son of the Flowery Kingdom, the
proprietor of a notorious gambling resort situated on the
quarter-mile-long ramshackle wharf known as the Chinese pier, was
driving a roaring trade in the forbidden drug. So one afternoon
Jennings, his hands in his pockets and in each pocket a service
automatic, sauntered carelessly along the pier and upon reaching the
reputed opium den, knocked briskly on the door. The