But as, the whole earth lurching beneath him, he plunged into the Infinite abyss, he took with him a wild, tumultuous, and exquisite joy. For at his last words of defiance, upon the face of his golden-haired caybigan he had seen--fluttering uncertain at first like the heralding colours of the dawn, then glowing clear, certain, resplendent--the expression he had caught at the lone cuartel in the bosque, the look of esteem, of admiration, full, unreserved, complete, for which he had thirsted so agonizingly, and which now at last had come to him, his beyond the power of Man to take away, at the paltry price of treachery and torture and death. X THE CAPTURE OF PAPA GATO This is to explain how young Theodore Pinney, after his meteoric début in the P. I. constabulary--consisting in nothing less than the capture of Papa Gato, fierce _bandelero_, who for years had terrorised the region of the Taal--squatted into a fat civilian job and forsook all dreams of glory. And it's not at all about young Pinney, but mostly about his mother, the widow. "The widow;"--by that short, somewhat ominous and not too respectful cognomen she was known by all the bureau--the educational, of course--from superintendent to lowest clerk; and throughout the archipelago by men departmental and non-departmental. This name, based on fact, like most things based on fact, was a lying thing. Close your eyes and say "widow"; the vision is of something subtle, arch and tantalising--lustrous eyes, comely form (somewhat pudgy), kittenish ways. But she was long and lean and angular; her bosom was arid and her tongue triple-forked. "Old-maid" would have expressed her infinitely better; but there was the fact, the stubborn fact, which manifested itself with slight provocation by a grim tightening of the thin lips, and the phrase--proverbial now throughout the P. I.'s--"Mr. Pinney, well, the less said about him the better. He was a _handsome_ man, but he was a _wicked_ man"--the "handsome" being pronounced with a rising inflection, and the antithetic adjective with a drop into tenebrous basso-profundo. Of Pinney _père_ this is all we ever knew, although in departmental circles he was a subject fertile of delicious speculation. That to be wicked he had had ample temptation, knowing the widow, we cheerfully granted; but what chance he ever had had to succumb, knowing the widow, we could not imagine. Of Pinney _fils_ we knew still less, nothing at all, in fact, what little there was being the property of the postal authorities and consisting of records of money orders sent monthly by the widow to a well known western college town. But of the widow herself, good Lord, we knew only too much.