"To be outnumbered, always;
to be outfought, never."

IT was the afternoon of January 6, 1905.

A coast guard cutter, with three officers and 145 men of the Manila Company, Philippine Constabulary, was edging slowly along the jungled fringe of a reef-protected island. It was the northeast coast of Samar, that island of ugly memory that was a graveyard of men.

Captain Cary Crockett was in command of this party; his orders, to establish a post at the town of San Ramon, and from that station to protect the peaceably inclined people of the coast and conduct expeditions into the interior. The boat came to a stop inside a circular bay, and through the green foliage the men could see only the blackened ashes of what had been the town of San Ramon. It had been burned by the pulajans and its inhabitants slaughtered or scattered to the hills.

Crockett took three squads and went ashore. There was no sound from the fringe of bush as the force landed and moved away through the high grass. Crockett divided the party into three small patrols; one he sent to the right, another to the left. The center squad he led himself. He was moving through the bush when the silence was broken by rifle fire. Then the distant hills came to life as the pulajan boudjons, the great war horns, sounded a summons. There was more rifle fire and a threshing in the bushes and the sound of men in combat. The big red-billed kalaos--the horn-bills--took alarm and flapped away with that raucous cry that can be heard for a mile.

The bush opened again after a while, and Crockett came back to the beach. His men were carrying trophies of the chase now; great crescent-shaped blades that were heavily weighted toward the point. The knives were without guards, and the handles were of carabao horn and heavily mounted with silver. The edges were as keen as razors. There were the talibongs of the hillmen--the great fighting bolos of the fanatical mountaineers. Another soldier carried red tunics, bloodstained now.

They had surprised an outpost of pulajans in the high grass.

Crockett had much to consider as he returned to the coast guard cutter at dusk. He had found the town of San Ramon burned to the ground, the civilian population chopped to pieces, and the stores and plantation houses looted. There was no food; nor was there any other mark to indicate that man had inhabited the place, save those few blackened timbers. From papers found on the dead pulajans of the force he had routed, he knew that the region was held by one Cinicio Lasara, who was one of the premier fighting chiefs of the famous "Papa" Pablo.

The presence of this strong fighting force in the region had not been anticipated; Crockett's heart leaped as he considered one possible reason for the concentration of this pulajan force about desolated San Ramon. It could mean that Pablo's fortress of Maslog was behind San Ramon in the mountains!

For months, the combined forces of Scouts and Constabulary had searched this unexplored island for the stronghold of the "Pope" who was the spirit of the resistance in Samar. Maslog had been freely discussed by the fighting men. Of it they had said, "It's the place everybody looks for and hopes to God he won't find." The officer who found Maslog might go against thousands of pulajans.

Meanwhile, Crockett had his orders to consider: "Occupy San Ramon." He had ten days' rations and a fair amount of ammunition. Other than a few cooking pots, blankets for the men, and a medicine kit, that was all he had. Over the horizon was no possibility of relief, reinforcement, or renewal of supplies for an indefinite period, should he elect to remain. And this was Samar, in 1905; a raw and cruel island that swarmed with 7,000 fighting natives.

General Allen had not known, of course, that San Ramon would be found burned and deserted. He had not known that he was sending his Captain into the wild island without hope of replenishing his supplies. Crockett thought of these things. And then he thought of the pulajan concentration he had found at San Ramon. This was the place for a detail, he decided; he would stand on his orders and occupy the place where San Ramon had been.

He disembarked his men and that evening the Coast Guard cutter sailed away, carrying Crockett's requisition for more ammunition and supplies and a report of the situation.

There was work to be done. With the severing of this last tie with civilization, Crockett began to prepare for the safety of his men. Three squads were posted on sentry duty at the jungle edge and two additional squads were held in support of the sentries. The remainder of the men began the building of an outpost.

All day they worked, from sunup the next morning until night fell. An area was cleared of grass and brush to permit an open firing zone; a semicircle of rough dwellings was built with a lookout post in a tree in the center. The circle was enclosed with a fence of rough stakes, bound with bejuco vines and anchored. It would delay a pulajan rush for a few moments.

At the edge of the jungle, tin cans were strung on bejuco strings to warn of night attack. The first night in camp the force was not bothered, but they were aware that eyes were watching from the jungle.

The next morning Crockett renewed his preparations for occupation and defense. For several days, the men worked feverishly in the construction of a fort. A bullet-proof, rectangular structure was raised, covered with a steep nipa roof. As the roof was highly inflammable, it was lashed in a manner that permitted it to be cut free instantly, should it take fire under attack. Entrance to the fort was made by a single barred gate. A shallow well was drilled and a quantity of brackish water provided.

Then Crockett raised a slender sapling and flew the Stars and Stripes, and at the base of the staff he made a pile of the skulls of the innocent villagers who had died in the pulajan raid in San Ramon. His Macabebes muttered as they passed that gruesome reminder of the foemen they were to face.

They were ready now for reconnaisance of the country or for pulajan attack. As long as they remained in camp, the jungle was silent, but with every venture of a large foraging party into the jungle, the boudjons would boom to indicate that they were under close surveillance.

The days lengthened into weeks in that jungle stockade, and no boat arrived with supplies. The Constabulary were in a desperate position. The food supply failed; they turned to the jungle for supplies. Fish traps were built; the octopi they ate, but not even the hungry soldiers could relish the jellyfish that made up the balance of the catch. One day they caught an eight-foot shark. They feasted then. In the bush were a few coconut trees, and to these expert jungle men the forest yielded bamboo shoots, palm cabbage, gabi roots, from which poi is made in Hawaii, and a huge root called palawan which Hazzard said tasted like "army issue soap."

They ran out of tobacco, using papaya leaves, ground and dried, as a miserable substitute. Salt they evaporated from the sea water, and they found wild honey in the hollow trees of the forest. As the food supply grew scantier, Crockett and his Lieutenants, Hazzard and Mann, adopted the dangerous expedient of stealing from the camp at night to sit in trees in the dark, in an attempt to shoot wild boar. Occasionally they were successful, wondering each time if the flash of their rifles would bring a horde of pulajans upon them in the dark.

With 147 men to feed, the search for food became feverish. One day Crockett crossed through the swamps to the higher ground in the foothills and came upon a troop of monkeys. He shot as many as he could, and they were a welcome change of diet.

Again, they ate kalao, the huge horn-bills that are remarkably good eating--when they can be killed. During these starvation days, Crockett had occasion to marvel at the fortitude and stoicism of his little Macabebe soldiers. He writes, "I never ceased to wonder at the constant cheerfulness under conditions of service severe enough to sap the spirits of any body of men. The men were on continual campaign, with death in many painful forms ever lurking in the background. Discipline was strict, if not harsh, the pay was small, the clothing and equipment inferior, and the food poor even under ordinary circumstances; and yet, they not only reenlisted, but there was a waiting list of friends and relatives to fill vacancies caused by death and disease. They were ever ready to follow, or to precede white officers into any danger, blindly and without question, so long as they realized that their officer was there to guide them and direct them. In their devotion and eagerness to please, they resembled a well-trained pack of hunting dogs."

We see his Macabebes there, at lonely Fort Defiance, with their orchestra of many pieces playing banjos and native wind instruments in the very face of starvation and death.

One day Hazzard went fishing. He returned with a boatload of immense fruit bats, repulsive creatures with thick, brown fur. "What did you use for bait?" Crockett said. Hazzard grinned, and the natives went about with the preparation of the ghastly creatures. They were strong of flavor and rank of odor, but officers and men ate them, with enthusiasm, if not with relish.

Hazzard was a forager of renown. Another day he came back with two twenty-four-foot pythons. "Forty-eight feet of snake," he said, "and every foot good meat except the heads." The company fed royally upon one of the snakes. The other they cut into strips and dried in the sun for emergency rations.

Then they found a reef with fine taraquito and the big saw-toothed barracuda. These they caught and cured. Every day a boatload of men patiently fished the reef with varying success.

The failure of the pulajans to attack became a source of worry to Crockett. As the weeks lengthened, he decided to take a force into the bush to seek the pulajans who would not come to him. Eighty of the men in the best condition were detailed to accompany him; the remainder were left to garrison Fort Defiance under Hazzard. Lieutenant Hazzard received his orders: he was to hold Fort Defiance against all attack and never for a moment relax his vigilance. If Crockett failed to return from the jungle, he was to continue to hold the place until relief arrived from Manila.

At two o'clock in the morning of the scheduled departure, Sergeants Bustos and Alalay were sent out to reconnoiter the trails and to attempt the capture of a guide. The main body left the fort at half-past four and met their scouts a short distance from the post. The Sergeants had no guides, each claiming that the man they had stalked had refused to surrender and was therefore killed. They had crept upon a pulajan outpost and used their long knives silently.

Crockett pushed on through the bush. He sent two squads ahead to develop any enemy patrols. The advance was through great canyons of granite, across mountain streams, over giant boulders, and around sheer mountain spires. The crest of a watershed was scaled in a chill rain that obscured the view. They crossed swamps and waded formidable mountain rivers which threw spray high on the sides of the rocky cliffs. After a march of fourteen hours, they made camp on the crest of a rounded knoll. There was no attack.

The next morning they resumed the march, over another mountain range and through the thick black muck of the lowlands. They came at last to a burned hut and a fork in a native trail. They turned along the most used trail and began to pass cleared areas and patches of camote beds. Towards evening, the company descended into a wide, open valley, where cogon grass grew ten feet in height on either side of the trail. Here the trails were mere tunnels through the grass. Crockett went ahead, crawling on hands and knees through the high grass. He emerged upon a hard, packed trail that was almost a road.

He took this trail, and at a bend came face to face with three pulajans. Each was in uniform and had two bolos and a dagger strapped to his waist. Crockett spoke to them, order ing them to lay down their arms. The man in front made a motion to comply; then, with a swift movement, he slashed at the American officer. The second pulajan tried to stab Crockett in the side as the third rushed with a bolo.

Sergeant Alalay saved Crockett's life. He killed first the leader and then the second man, with charges of buckshot. Crockett dropped the third, in mid-air, with his revolver.

The presence of this broad trail indicated to Crockett that a considerable pulajan settlement was somewhere ahead in the mountains. It also indicated the inadvisability of dividing his force at this time. No further pulajan activity was developed, and in the middle of the night Crockett turned back in the direction of Fort Defiance. He had the information he needed for concerted attack. The next night, after a terrible forced march across the mountains, he was back in the stockade. He sought his blankets and had hardly more than fallen asleep when he was awakened by the heavy roar of rifle fire.

The pulajan attack on Fort Defiance came in two great waves. In the first advance were sixty natives, carrying long poles lashed with burning torches. They were supported by heavy rifle fire from the jungle edge. Their object was to fire the grass roof of the fort and to force the occupants into the open to be chopped down by bolomen. The leading wave dashed in and leaned their torches against the walls. The roof went up like tinder and the scene became as light as day. Then the fanatics swarmed against the stockade walls, each with two bolos lashed to wrists. Up they mounted, lined in the bright glare of the burning roof.

As Crockett cut the lashings supporting the burning roof, the heaviest wave of attackers struck the stockade walls. The roof collapsed upon them and for a moment the rush was halted as men burned to death at the foot of the walls.

Then the main wave of the pulajans came, bounding across the open space, shouting the battle chant of "Tad-Tad." Their red uniforms glinted in the light and the long white capes fluttered in the breeze as they came. Barearmed and barelegged, they rushed to the attack, each man swinging his bolos in circles about his head.

All the time the attackers were covered by a tremendous, if ineffective, fire from the bush. The pulajans had hundreds of rifles in this engagement. On the stockade walls, the Macabebes gathered in compact, supporting groups as the fighting became hand to hand. The pulajans who survived the Constabulary fire scaled the fifteen-foot walls as easily as monkeys. A wave of dead men piled up against the foot of the walls. At close quarters, the revolver and rifle fire of the Constabulary was deadly. But the pulajans came by the hundred, careless of death, eager to gain those walls to the interior of the fort. The Macabebes were demons on defense. In the press of battle, two of them watched a pulajan scaling the wall in front of their position. "You hold him," one suggested, "and I'll stab him." Which they did.

The smoke of black powder eddied about the fort as the fight roared through the night. The dawn came suddenly, to show the pulajans gathered at the jungle edge, chanting their prayers. They made a last, frantic rush, which was stopped by a volley. Whatever their distorted convictions, the pulajans were brave men.

This action was one of the greatest disasters to the pulajan cause in the history of the fighting in Samar. The pulajans learned that day that they could not attack Constabulary in barracks. When the police emerged from Fort Defiance, they found the bodies of a hundred pulajans on the field. There were bloody trails in the forest where others had crawled away to die. The less seriously wounded had been carried away. Seven hundred pulajans made the attack, and the band of Anugar, the terrible, was disorganized and broken.

The dead were buried in the soft sand of the square, two deep in a long trench. Practically all of the Constabulary were wounded but the casualties in killed were few. The pulajans had not been able to get within reaching distance with their talibongs. Their attack had been a useless, futile gesture. The Constabulary had killed them to live.

This action was on February 23, 1905.

Among the prisoners captured in the attack on Fort Defiance had been a small boy named Feliciano, who had marched bravely to the assault with the men. He attempted to stab Crockett when picked up on the field. However, kind treatment and gifts changed his allegiance, and he became an adoring worshiper of the Constabulary Captain.

From this small pulajan Crockett was able to gauge very accurately the extent of the religious movement. Feliciano had been with Anugar's band, and he was able to recount the attacks on Catubig and to tell of the massacre of Lieutenant Hayt and his company at Oras. It became apparent to Crockett, as he listened to the small boy, that his troop was one of the few left on Samar. He was still faced with the prospect of virtual starvation, and his supplies of ammunition were scanty. He had received no word from Manila, either in orders or supplies.

Making the best of a very bad situation, Crockett decided to leave all of the men but sixty at Fort Defiance, under the command of a capable Sergeant. He would take the sixty men, with Lieutenant Hazzard, in an effort to break through to the south to some occupied village, and there secure supplies for his men. He intended to return to the fort with supplies via the sea. He was convinced that the severe defeat the pulajans had suffered would discourage further attack on the fort during his absence.

The officers and men who began that march to the south were little more than skeletons. Hazzard became delirious and had to be carried. The strongest of the men walked supporting the weak. Crockett kept his feet, moving from one end of the column to the other, driving his men through a wilderness that threatened to engulf them.

Through that somber forest the little force staggered day after day. They ate roots. They killed the snakes in their path and ate them. They were truly men against the jungle. Every night, they built their small fortified camp, even as they drooped with hunger and fatigue. They plumbed depths of weariness that are revealed to few men. They reached deeper and deeper for that hidden store of endurance that was seemingly inexhaustible. They kept to their feet--long after they should have stretched in the swamp mud to die. They proved to themselves how really tough and fibrous the human organism can be.

After days of bitter marching, they came to the edge of a broad stream that flowed away through the jungle to the sea. Their uniforms were ripped and tattered; their flesh was torn by thorns and their hair was long and matted. They were almost naked and they were starving. They had reached almost that last limit of their endurance.

As the gaunt, battered men rested there by the river bank they heard an incredible sound--the sputter of the engines of a boat and the swirl of propellers. Even as they rose to their feet an army launch came around the bend, filled with blue-shirted regulars. Crockett hastened to the bank and waved his hat as the men cheered. The soldiers on the launch snapped to action. The launch sheered away and a stream of bullets from a Gatling gun spouted the mud where Crockett stood.

Crockett's battered force had been mistaken for pulajans!

In the face of this great disappointment, there was one ray of hope. The presence of the army launch meant that down the river was a garrison of regular troops.

The men set about the building of a raft. After hours of work, they felled a great hardwood tree with their bolos. Laboriously, they hauled it to the river edge. In the water at last, it sank like a stone!

They turned then to the porous stalks of Manila hemp plants. They were nothing more than a vegetable pulp, but this was within the limits of their strength. A float 100 feet in length was constructed and launched. The river was tidal, and they were forced to crouch in the rain for six hours, until the current flowed seaward again. At midnight this change occurred, and they boarded their strange craft and set off down the stream.

The river was alive with enormous crocodiles which followed the raft hungrily. At six-hour intervals, the party sought the land and waited for the changes in tide. There the sick were kept alive with a handful of rice soaked in water and eaten raw. All attempts to build fires with powder from a shell or with flint were unproductive of result. The woods were sodden with rain.

After two days' journey in this manner, the river banks changed in character, to develop into high rocky canyons. The sides of the canyon, where the current ran swiftest, had eroded into shadowy caverns, and the water-logged craft was drawn into these as it was swept by the current. The raft began to break up as it collided with sharp outcroppings of rock. The presence of giant crocodiles added to the danger. Many years later, Crockett stated that of all his Philippine experiences, the night in these caverns was most harrowing. The splash of the crocodiles about them; the rank, musty odor of the brutes, and the added possibility of death by drowning combined to make a night of terror.

At daybreak of the third day, the pulpy mass of vegetation began to disintegrate and Crockett landed his men on the shore. Lieutenant Hazzard and ten of the men had reached their final limit. They were unable to walk.

Crockett selected twenty of the strongest of the men and set out to find the post. Before he departed, he cautioned the men to remain together and be prepared to resist attack. He found a trail, overgrown with vegetation and swarming with leeches to make marching a horror. Every valley was a slough of mud, through which the men pulled themselves with difficulty. After ten hours, they came to a rice field, and in the distance they could see the walls of the ruined town and the sea.

It was Oras, scene of the Scout massacres of Lieutenant Hayt and his company. The town at one time had had a population of 10,000, but on that day not a building had escaped the pulajan vandalism. It was a mass of burned timbers. But the stone walls of the church were standing, and above those walls Crockett saw a sight to gladden his heart. It was the flag of the United States.

The accumulated miseries of two months were forgotten as Crockett led his ragged force into the town. The soldiers on sentry duty saw him and ran to the cuartel with a cry: "Pulajans." The bugles blew "Call to Arms"; riflemen hastened to combat stations and the snout of a Gatling gun pushed through a crevice in the walls.

Crockett halted his men at the edge of a barbed-wire entanglement and made himself known. He expected a bullet at any moment. An officer and twenty men came from the church to inspect the Constabulary detail, and in a few moments Crockett was in the presence of the commander of the regulars.

There he was refused the loan of the government launch to pick up his men on the river bank in the interior. A junior officer of the regulars who had volunteered to go for the party was refused permission to do so by this crotchety commander of the regulars. Today, the actions of this officer surpasses our understanding; his own officers were disgusted with him. He was not a representative specimen of the regular officer in the Philippines.

When the tide changed Crockett secured native canoes, and at noon of the next day Lieutenant Hazzard and the remainder of the Constabulary were safe at Oras.

As Crockett came back with his men, a government steamer came into Oras and General Allen disembarked to take command of Constabulary operations in that vicinity.

The meeting between General Allen and Captain Crockett was perfectly timed and intensely dramatic. Crockett was miles from the station to which he had been assigned. Allen was certain to ask questions.

Constabulary captains do not talk of their hardships or question decisions when reporting to the commander after an absence of two months in the bush. Nor did Crockett; he launched instead into a report of the building of San Ramon fort and of his first trek into the hills in search of Maslog.

General Allen, the courtly, became Allen the military personage on the instant. If Maslog had been discovered, why had not Crockett attacked after defeating Anugar--that was what Allen wanted to know.

Another sudden thought crossed Allen's mind as he gazed at his young Captain. "Aren't you a long distance from your assigned station, Captain?" he said.

Crockett was forced, then, to tell Allen the story of that miserable two months of starvation at San Ramon, where he had apparently been forgotten by a commanding officer. The General unbent as he listened to that story of jungle outpost duty, and then, for the first time, Crockett learned the reason for his seeming abandonment at San Ramon.

It had been the "Megaphone Major," previously mentioned, who had been responsible for those terrible privations at San Ramon. He had ignored direct orders from Manila to come around to the east coast of Samar with supplies and take the field in co-operation with Crockett's company. As an excuse, he had stated that the monsoons were so bad that boats could not navigate.

After Crockett had completed his report to General Allen, the immediate organization of a concerted attack on Maslog was undertaken. Captain Todd, with a column of the troops from Oras, proceeded up the river to the head of navigation and established a post at the burned village of Concepcion. Ballard's company of Scouts took station there with the mission of clearing the country of pulajans and protecting the returning villagers from future raids.

The Scout companies who had arrived from Manila with General Allen, commanded by Captains Nickersen and Cook, were to collaborate with Crockett's detachment in an expedition against Maslog.

This force was embarked on the Coast Guard cutter and removed to San Ramon, where Allen made plans to lead the assault in person. It was a great relief to Crockett when the ship rounded the point and he saw his ragged soldiers lining the parapet to welcome his return.

The old Macabebe Sergeant was a soldier to the end. When he saw the Brigadier-General's flag on the cutter he formed his company under arms. When the General landed at the little post the garrison paraded, rifles were snapped to the "present," and there was the prescribed flourish of the homemade musical instruments as the General drew near.

And then Allen stepped out in front of that hungry lot and thanked them for the soldierly qualities that they had displayed and told them that he was proud to be their commander.

The first thing that Allen did, when the men had been fed, was to call the little pulajan boy Feliciano for interrogation. The little boy told the General that he could lead the force to Maslog and he gave the first complete description of the pulajan rites.

He told of the torture and the killing of prisoners by boys of his own age. He told of having officiated at a verdugo himself upon several occasions. The pulajan prisoners were tied to stakes and the little boys were shown where to strike. Once it had been hard, Feliciano said, when the victim had been a woman, whose cries and struggles had made him think of his mother, who had been killed also by the pulajans when Feliciano had been adopted into the tribe.

The pulajans included as a ritual this compelling of children to act as executioners; it was believed to make them bloodthirsty and fearless in battle.

The little boy had never seen "Papa" Pablo; not even Anugar, the war chief, was allowed admittance to the presence of the "Pope." He was an awful figure who was shrouded in mystery and was the possessor of supernatural powers.

After listening to Feliciano, Allen decided to move with 200 Scouts and Crockett's company, with the exception of seventy men who were to be left at San Ramon under Lieutenant Hazzard. The original destination was to be Cagamotan, on the north coast; from there, they would march on Maslog.

Every Macabebe in Crockett's company clamored for the opportunity to join the attack on Maslog. The men who had remained at the fort maintained it to be their turn, while those who had accompanied Crockett insisted that the assault should be their payment for the miserable trek through the jungle. Crockett picked the men by lot, eliminating only the obviously unfit.

At daybreak the next morning the troops disembarked from the cutter at Cagamotan. As they landed, a boudjon boomed in the distance and the sound was taken up and repeated until it had died away in the far hills. The column was formed and began to move up a well-beaten trail that led away into the interior.

Crockett led the advance into the bush; behind him, eight Constabulary armed with repeating shotguns. Then came General Allen, followed by the balance of the Constabulary. The two Scout companies formed the rear guard.

Allen was in the full dress uniform of a brigadier-general; Crockett was gaudy in Captain's bars and glaring red epaulets. At Allen's insistence, they were going into action attired as officers and gentlemen. The General had refused to take a less exposed position in the center of the column; this splendid Kentuckian was too dignified to be afraid.

Orders were passed along the line that when the ambuscade came, the men were to rally in platoons and fire at will. They were to ignore the rifle fire of the pulajans and concentrate the fire upon the bolomen.

The trail traversed a gentle slope, covered with patches of cogon and jungle. They moved ahead slowly. The blare of the boudjons had ceased; it was steaming quiet in the jungle. No enemy was seen or heard, and the mental strain became greater as they climbed in the foothills.

For two hours they mounted steadily into the hills. Then the head of the column came to a level place in the path where the grass grew high and thick on either side of the trail.

A shrill whistle blast sounded almost in Crockett's ear and he spun in his tracks to fire at a red-garbed figure that rose beside him. From either side of the trail a blast of rifle fire was loosed at the Constabulary. As the flame from the rifles spouted in the very faces of the advance detail, Crockett felt a sledgehammer blow and the shotgun dropped from his hands. His left forearm had been shattered by a heavy caliber soft-nosed bullet.

The cry of "Tad-Tad" went up, and swarms of red-coated bolomen rose from the grass on either side of the trail to rush the Constabulary. Crockett was attacked by four natives, each eager to kill the white officer and gain possession of those red epaulets. Half of the men in the two leading squads were down; the remainder were hand to hand with the pulajans.

Twenty feet in the rear General Allen was maintaining his reputation as a wing-shot. He dropped three pulajans with as many shots; in a moment, he too was hand to hand with the mountaineers. Crockett had stopped three of his charging adversaries with his revolver. As it clicked on an empty chamber, Sergeant Alalay, the faithful, turned from his own troubles and dropped the fourth with his shotgun. Crockett was unable to reload his weapons; with his left arm spurting blood, he seized a bolo and defended himself against the rushes of the pulajans.

The men were spread out in single file along the trail and the entire column was under simultaneous attack. First Sergeant Bustos, a very gallant and brainy fighter, saved the situation and the lives of General Allen and Captain Crockett. He closed his men up and faced them alternately, right and left, delivering rapid-fire volleys until the waves of pulajans fell back with the ground littered with their dead. Bustos then rallied his platoon in a half circle and advanced through the grass, killing the pulajan riflemen almost to a man.

Crockett fainted from loss of blood as the attack ended. He was revived and prepared for return to the coast guard cutter. He objected so strongly that the General permitted him to remain with the party.

The advance moved on, Crockett still in the lead. His wrist and hand were without feeling. Sergeant Alalay remained at his side, steering him around the pitfalls in the trail and the spear traps that grew more frequent as the stronghold was approached.

They came out on the top of the mountains at Maslog, the mysterious. It was to be the lot of no white man to see this pulajan fortress that had been the subject of so many uneasy rumors. The defeated pulajans had retired swiftly and burned their fortress to the ground.

With the picture of Cary Crockett still leading that column as they retraced their way along the trail to the seacoast, we usher this valiant character from the pages of this chronicle.

He fought pulajans for one more year, following his discharge from the hospital. In his jungle service, he acquired three grievous wounds. In 1906 and 1908 he was in Cuba, with the American provisional government; and on January 23, 1908, he resigned as Captain of the Philippine Constabulary to accept a commission as Second Lieutenant in the regular army. Today, he is still on active service, with the rank of Colonel.

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Original publication © 1938 E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.

Filipiniana Reprint Series © 1985 Cacho Hermanos, Inc.

This publication (HTML format & original artwork) © 2001 Bakbakan International.

Transcription courtesy of Ashley Bass.