The next morning a party of Signal Corps men, accompanied by a guard of fifteen soldiers from the fort, sailed at peep o' day in the ship's launches, the two in tandem towing a native _banca_ loaded with cable, which was to be laid in the Lintogup River and upper Panguil Bay, a stretch of water too shallow for the _Burnside_ herself to attempt its navigation. This cable was in turn to be connected at Lintogup with Tukuran, on the southern coast of Mindanao, by a land line across a mountainous country.
When the party started there were guns and ammunition enough on the two launches to have quelled a good sized insurrection, but as little was really known of the upper bay and river, and as many rumours were rife among the natives of Misamis as to warlike Moros and Monteses living on these shores, and more disquieting rumours still among the officers that it was a camping place for _insurrectos_, it was thought best to amply provide against any emergency.
Unfortunately, no information could be obtained as to the rise and fall of the tides or the strength of the current, a fact that delayed the expedition many days and necessitated the return of one or other of the launches for a renewal of rations, fresh water, and coal, not once but thrice. The first, second, and third relief expeditions, we called them, and teased the officer in charge unmercifully over his hard luck.
But at last, despite adverse winds and tides; despite the fact that one of the Filipino guides ran the launch aground, with malice aforethought, no doubt, as on his return to Misamis he was arrested on indubitable evidence as a spy; despite the fact that the sailing _banca_, ran on the bar, and while trying to pull her off she and her five miles of cable were swamped; despite the fact that the ship's launch _Grace_, or the _Disgrace_, as she was afterward called, distinguished herself by blowing up twice and almost scalding everyone on board; despite the fact that all the odds were against the expedition's success, and that it took six days and nights to accomplish what might have been done in a third of the time--despite all this, I say, the cable was at last laid and the luckless workers returned.
But, oh, the bitterness of life in general and that of a cable man in particular! For after all those heroic struggles the first test showed a fault, and, cruel fate, at the far end of Panguil Bay at that! The silence which greeted the reception of this terrible news was as profane as words, and the Powers-that-Be decided on the spot that enough work had been spent on that calamitous cable for the time being, and decided to proceed with the laying of the main lines, leaving the Lintogup stretch until a subsequent visit to Misamis.