On the nearby Island of Mindanao live the savage fanatics, the Moros. These people have been a terror to the Spaniards and are the nightmare of our own men. They are Mohammedans, and the fiercest, most treacherous fighters of all the Philippine Islands. They cannot be civilized, they cannot be conquered, they can only be killed. There is a bloody tradition about them and the Spaniards; how, hemmed up for slaughter, when their warriors have all fallen, the women have been known to rush on the Spanish lines with their babes in their arms, and, as the Spaniards would meet them with their bayonets, hurl their babes onto the steel, blocking both it and the fire behind it, and cut down the soldiers with the deadly _borangs_ of their dead husbands. Then there with their babes on the bayonets they would die. Of these Moros, there is one the soldier dreads more than the firing line of death, more than the panther that springs at night, or the rattlesnake that strikes in the grass. It is the _Juramentado_. When one of the Moros is adjudged guilty of thieving, impurity or half a hundred other crimes and sentenced to death he becomes a _Juramentado_. Strange, mystic ceremonies are performed over him by the priest in the black wood of the black night. Cruel tortures are inflicted; his head, face, eyebrows, and mustache are shaved clean, his face painted, his body left half naked. There is but one atonement for him. He must kill as many Christians as he can before dying himself. Dying in the act he is transplanted to Paradise. They are great sailors and are liable to run amuck and then float out to distant places, to any place where they can find a Christian. Stealthily they creep into a camp, or town, or church, or wherever there is a gathering. Their keen _borang_ is sheathed between two bamboo reeds; its blade is a razor, its weight that of lead. With a blow they have cut heads clean from shoulders, or split a soldier from neck to hip. At a word they will turn in a crowd and kill all those around them. The Spaniards tell how five of these fanatics slipped up to a company of their men peacefully, and then in sudden frenzy killed nineteen soldiers before they could shoot them down. Our orders are strict concerning them: a soldier must never be out of lines without his side arms. And so nameless a danger is in their very name that it is the unwritten law of the camp to courtmartial any soldier who cries out for a joke, _Juramentado_!