Produced by David Clarke, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) Caybigan BY JAMES HOPPER NEW YORK MCCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. MCMVI _Copyright, 1906 by_ McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. Published, September, 1906 Copyright, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, by The S. S. McClure Company [Illustration: "_The subsequent walk across the plaza with the hard-won bundle, beneath the appreciative eyes of the whole town, had been humiliating_"] CONTENTS I. THE JUDGMENT OF MAN 3 II. THE MAESTRO OF BALANGILANG 27 III. HER READING 52 IV. THE STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPH OF ISIDRO DE LOS MAESTROS 74 V. THE FAILURE 98 VI. SOME BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION 124 VII. A JEST OF THE GODS 153 VIII. THE COMING OF THE MAESTRA 178 IX. CAYBIGAN 202 X. THE CAPTURE OF PAPA GATO 226 XI. THE MAÑANGETE 257 XII. THE PAST 267 XIII. THE PREROGATIVE 277 XIV. THE CONFLUENCE 289 XV. THE CALL 331 CAYBIGAN I THE JUDGMENT OF MAN We were sitting around the big centre table in the sala of the "House of Guests" in Ilo-Ilo. We were teachers from Occidental Negros. It was near Christmas; we had left our stations for the holidays--the cholera had just swept them and the aftermath was not pleasant to contemplate--and so we were leaning over the polished narra table, sipping a sweet, false Spanish wine from which we drew, not a convivial spirit, but rather a quiet, reflective gloom. All the shell shutters were drawn back; we could see the tin-roofed city gleam and crackle with the heat, and beyond the lithe line of coconuts, the iridescent sea, tugging the heart with offer of coolness. But, all of us, we knew the promise to be Fake, monumental Fake, knew the alluring depths to be hot as corruption, and full of sharks. Somebody in a monotonous voice was cataloguing the dead, enumerating those of us who had been conquered by the climate, by the work, or through their own inward flaws. He mentioned Miller with some sort of disparaging gesture, and then Carter of Balangilang, who had been very silent, suddenly burst into speech with singular fury. "Who are you, to judge him?" he shouted. "Who are you, eh? Who are we, anyway, to judge him?"