.)

"Magandang umaga," (Good morning, in Tagalo), muttered the old man.

After a brief conversation during which Marie told him that she had
been captured by the Americans, had been terribly misused and he had a
miraculous escape, he invited her into his cabin where his aged wife
gave her something to eat. This breakfast consisted of boiled rice,
some fish which the old man had just brought from his set lines in
the San Mateo river, and some bacon which he had found along the
trail made by the American's pack train the day before.

While the old couple were outside of their home--he breaking up
some bamboo with which to re-kindle the fire, and she, cleaning the
fish--Marie ransacked the house. She stole a large diamond ring which
the old man had taken from the finger of a Spanish officer during
the previous insurrection. She opened an old mahogany chest and took
from it a rosary valued at several hundred dollars; also a gold lined
cup which the old man, himself, had stolen from a Spanish priest,
and some Spanish coins.

After a hearty lunch, she started on.

Crossing the river at the rapids, on the boulders which projected
above the water, she quickened her steps and hurried along. Changing
her course to the southward, she started for the northern end of Lake
Laguna de Bay to see her mother.

She had not gone far through a small clump of timber when she came
upon the corpse of a Filipino soldier who had been shot in the previous
day's engagement,--perhaps by a stray ball. Hastily stealing the cross
which hung from a small cord about his neck, and a valueless ring from
one of his fingers, she seized his Mauser rifle and his cartridge belt
which was partly filled with ammunition, and then resumed her journey.

A short distance ahead was a large opening--an old rice field
well cleared. She had scarcely begun to cross it when she heard a
noise. She turned and saw the bow-legged old man whom she had robbed,
with a machete in his hand, coming after her as fast as he could. He
had discovered that the rosary was missing, and upon looking around,
that several other things were gone; therefore he at once started
in pursuit of the fiend who had just enjoyed his hospitality. Marie
was not disturbed. Raising to her shoulder the rifle which she had
just found, she took deliberate aim and at the first shot laid him
low in death.

She reached the small native village of Angono, where her mother was
stopping, about four o'cloc