After the Albay insurrection of 1903 had been cleaned up, I took charge of the Twelfth Judicial District, having been appointed thereto by Governor Taft just before he left the islands to become Secretary of War. In those trying pioneer days they always seemed to give me the insurrections to sift out, but it was purely fortuitous. Whenever you ceased to be busy, prompt arrangements were made for you to get busy again. Judge Ide, the Minister of Justice, wasted no government money. The Twelfth District consisted of the two island provinces of Samar and Leyte, two of the six Visayan Islands heretofore noticed as the only ones worth considering in a general view of the archipelago such as the student of world politics wants or needs. Leyte had a population of 388,922, [429] and an area of 3008 square miles. [430] Samar's population was 266,237, and its area, 5276 square miles, makes it the third largest island of the Philippine Archipelago. So that as Judge of the Twelfth District, consisting of two provinces, the Governor of each of which was ex-officio sheriff of the court for his province, I was, in a sense, a sort of shepherd of a political flock of some 650,000 people, whom I always thought of as a whole as "my" people. Samar and Leyte are separated, where nearest together, by a most picturesque winding strait bordered with densely wooded hills. San Juanico Strait is much narrower than the inland sea of Japan at its narrowest point, and almost as beautiful. In fact, at its narrowest point it seems little more than a stone's throw in width. It is as pretty as the prettiest part of the Golden Horn. Leyte had been put under the Civil Government in 1901, and this premature interference with the military authorities in the midst of their efforts to pacify the island had had the usual result of postponing pacification, by filling local politicians, wholly unable to comprehend a government which entreated or reasoned with people to do things, with the notion that we were resorting to diplomacy in lieu of force because of fear of them. Leyte and Samar were strategically one for the insurgents, just as the provinces of the Lake district of Luzon, described in an earlier chapter, were, because they could flee by night from one province to another in small boats without detection, when hard pressed by the Americano. The main insurgent general in Samar, Lucban, had surrendered to General Grant in 1902, but the cheaper fellows stayed out much longer, preying upon those who preferred daily toil to cattle-stealing and throat-cutting as a means of livelihood, and continuing the political unrest intermittently in gradually diminishing degree, through 1903. By the spring of 1904, however, there still remained in Samar riffraff enough, the jetsam and flotsam of the insurrection--professional outlaws--to get up some trouble, so that, as brigand chiefs, they might resume the roles of Robin Hood, Jesse James, et al. During the first half of that year the