There was a Filipino village which lay off to the left in a mountain gorge, and, scouting carefully around the side of the mountain, we approached it over the last one-hundred yards, crawling through the grass and under mango and cocoanut trees up to within fifty yards. It lay before us, a dozen shacks on bamboo cane shocked with the coarse straw of the rice stalk. The usual squalor and emptiness was around, but there was not a sound, not a living thing. Moriarty nudged me. "There’s hell in there somewhere, Cap’n," he whispered, "it looks too peaceful loike." It was a Filipino cur that gave us the first clue. They are a half wild breed but little beyond the wild things from which they came. As we lay in the grass listening, this dog which had come back for some morsel he knew of, smelt us, and, barking, bolted down a wooded path to the right. We saw him clearly as he ran up a hillside and over into a gorge beyond. "There’s where we’ll find the family," said Moriarty. "We’ll cut around and go into the rear." It took us a good hour to do it, crawling through bamboo and cane, under mango and desert palm, through the tall grasses, and over _crevasses_. Often we lay quiet in them, resting. It was a weird and unexpected sight that we saw. Before us lay a little cup in the mountain gorge, a natural amphitheater, framed by a small grove of palms and cocoanuts. Savage figures were going through queer rites. We stopped, puzzled. "That isn’t the village people," whispered Davis. "There are no women or children there, they are headmen and warriors, and that is some ceremony they are performing." We crawled up within fifty yards, and then I wished I had not come, for Moriarty gripped me quickly, and pointing to two naked men bound and laid out on the ground, whispered, "Ross and Billings!" "We’re too late, Captain, they’ve been killed and now they are fixing to mutilate them, cut off their heads and cut out their hearts and fill their stomachs with stones." I nodded. It was the savage’s way of mutilating all our dead. We recognized the fighting men easily. There were dozens of them, squatted in a circle, armed with _bolos_, _borangs_, and _spears_. But in the center stood a strange figure in a long black robe, his parted hair hanging down his back. Around him stood six men, fierce savages, with shaved heads, and half naked bodies. "_Juramentado!_" I whispered. "That’s a Mohammedan priest in the center and he is making _Juramentado_ of the six—look!" I heard both Davis and Moriarty slip the bolts of their Krags. To say _Juramentado_ to any soldier was like crying wolf to a shepherd and his flock. We lay still, seeing the mystic savage rite no white man ever saw before. We could hear the words of the priest which, spoken in a mixed Moro-Spanish, we easily interpreted. The six we soon learned were Moros from Mindanao and had sailed over to sacrifice themselves to our army.