“It was a voice in the jungle that had startled Tarrant. I tell you the whole story, Miss Noreen, because of _that_ voice in the jungle. The natives were led by a white man, who wore the khaki of an American soldier. It was this white leadership which had herded Tarrant’s column for slaughter in that hot sink of the jungle. The cry of ‘Rawder! Rawder!’ went up from the American command. Something in the voice troubled me--just for a second--with the fear that Rawder _might_ have run mad at the last.... Listen, I think there is no hate in the world so baleful and destructive as that aroused by a deserter who leads the enemy against his own people. And this man led a black force of Malays!... The natives retired finally, and the white man with them. An Indiana soldier was dying in the sun when all was still. I heard him say wearily, ‘Gawd, if I could only have killed Rawder, hell would have been a cinch for me!’ “That’s how they hated him that day. The story of Rawder, the deserter, went around the world. It had the eternal grip of interest of a scapegoat who turns into a fire-brand. Manila sent column after column of infantry into the Indang country and down below to the Camarines, but the renegade was not to be captured just yet. “I continued to ride with Tarrant for awhile after that. He found action when there was any; moreover, I felt that the real story of Rawder had not been written. He was big to me, and I could not believe the voice from the jungle was his. Tarrant was ordered with his troop and two others, dismounted, to Minday, a little island south of Luzon, which Nature has punished in various ways. I remember the empty, sun-blinded inlet, as our little transport stirred the sand. Not a _banco_ or _casco_ came out to meet us. We were in the midst of a people who put up no front for peace. There is a Spanish tradition that each male native of Minday is possessed of seven devils and the leaders ten. “‘Best fighting men on the islands--these Mindayans,’ Tarrant told me. ‘The price of life here is to kill first, to kill all the time, snakes and men.’ That night I wandered about the deserted port in the Crusoe silence. At the edge of the town, I was ‘put out’ by the route of flashing stars--a blow on the head from behind. “Oddly enough, Miss Noreen, the natives let me live. In the morning I awoke in a bungalow and discovered Rawder sitting in the doorway. “His queerly-cut eyelids were drawn together by the intensity of light. Outside, the sunlight waved in pure white flame. It was the vividest time of the day, of the hottest time of the year, in the fieriest island of the globe. Minday is insidious. You can breathe and walk outside, but if you don’t get under cover when your scalp warns you with its prickling, you will likely be buried at eventide by the wild dogs of Minday. Or, possibly, if your vitality is immense, the sun will spare your life, but fry the contents of your brain-pan, which is rather worse than losing an arm.