It was a mistake from the first. The post was not at all for a woman, but Miss Terrill was unaware of that. She had just come to Bacolod _via_ San Francisco, Manila, and Ilo-Ilo, by means, successively, of a big white army transport full of other ingenuous pedagogues; a wheezy but impudent little Spanish steamer, which aggressively shoved its nose under every ripple of the inter-island seas; a languid-sailed lorcha, loaded with pigs, dogs, and brownies, and finally a dizzy banca, which, perched upon the tip-foam of a curling comber, outriggers spread out like wings, landed her high up on a golden beach--fresh, dainty, and composed like a coloured album picture. So, when out of the hat in which the Division Superintendent was thoughtfully shuffling little slips of paper representing the towns of his terra incognita, she drew the name of Barang, she took it as much of a lark. Immediately she ran to a map, found the little black dot down in the southern part of Negros, and pronounced it "cute." She seemed prone, it must be said, to take things that way. She was a very young girl, so young that the officers of the Post raised their eyebrows and muttered under their breaths when they learned where she was going. A certain second lieutenant, Saunders by name, and very fresh from West Point, went so far in fact as to offer to arrange it so that she should stay in Bacolod, at least as long as he were there, and afterwards--any place where he might be. But she laughed sweetly at this proffer, and put it from her promptly and decisively, though her blue eyes, at the young fellow's sudden show of despair, shone a moment with a tenderness--maternal he called it afterward--that somehow left him without bitterness and full of reverence. Here it must be explained for future understanding that Rumour, a most vigorous Dame in the Philippines, forthwith pounced upon this little incident and made off with it north and south. North the development of the tale was rapid indeed; by the time it reached Escalante it dealt with the marriage of Miss Terrill to the fat old colonel of the Post. South, progress was more modest; at Himamaylan and Cantalacan, towns nearest to Barang, it gave merely the news of the formal engagement of Miss Terrill to Lieutenant Saunders. Which freak of Dame Rumour was precious indeed, in that it led to the complications that make this story.