The mountains are not like our Vermont hills: more rugged, wilder, more--what shall I say!--unsolved.... Thinking of the home hills I can almost conceive the vast significance of the word "eternity": but thoughts of these primeval hills sweeps my mind backward, to the infinity of creation. Untamed, untraveled, mysterious by day as by night, they threaten as they beckon. Nearly every evening, near sundown, I see a pair of wild pigeons homing toward the crest of Apo. "Limocons," the Bogobos call them--"leem-o-sahns": the word falls limpid from their lips, unaccented. They say the limocon never was heard to sing in the lowlands, and tell a strange legend that it is an oracle of the Hill People, its song a harbinger of good or evil tidings. An old Bogobo woman told me of this one night, in a little foothill village, when the spell of dusk had unlocked her lips: and she told, whisperingly, of twice having heard the Giant Agong of the Hill dwellers, once when she was a child, again when she was grandmother to nineteen. I wish you could have been there to watch and to listen: sitting near the fire in front of her hut, surrounded by a circle of almost naked wildmen who moved, uneasy, she told quaveringly of how the booming tones had rumbled down the forested slopes, and of how ill had befallen her people both times; when she ceased, they stood breathless, their whole beings strained to catch the dread sound none but she had ever heard. Yes, she moved me, queerly ... I scarce know why. I am lonely--a little--at times. But who is not? Yet I have my work to keep me busy, usually happy. Just now I am facing less pleasant duty--but it is, I fear, a work that must be done. It is good to know that one is needed, as I am here,--just now. But never a day is born or dies but that I miss you all, as I love you all ... Susan and Ellis, Father Jennings, the foreigners ... all of you. DICK. CHAPTER VIII THE STRICKEN VILLAGE A week later, Terry stood at the window looking down over the blistering plaza. Davao was torpid under the noonday heat. Three carabaos grazed undisturbed on the forbidden square: another of the awkward powerful brutes dawdled up the dusty road, hauling a decrepit two-wheeled cart on which a naked-backed, red-pantalooned native dozed: Padre Velasco, the aged Spanish priest, waved a weary hand at Terry from his window in the old adobe convento. As he watched he saw the soldierly figure of Sergeant Mercado emerge from the _cuartel_ and hurry toward him. Entering the room the soldier saluted stiffly and reported that a patrol had just come in from the foothills with the information that a mysterious fever had attacked the Bogobos in the barrio of Dalag, that a score were stricken and four already dead.