At last the two men clambered out of the high vehicle, and after tugging for some minutes at the rope bridle, succeeded in starting the stubborn animal along, but at so furious a gait that they had all they could do to get up over the wheels and into their seat again. All went well for about a quarter of a mile, when to our surprise the driver started to turn around. "Here, _hombre_," called one of the men, in what he was pleased to consider Spanish, "we don't want to go home yet. We want to go to the outposts--way out, sabe?" Yes, he "sabed," grinning broadly the while, but this, señor, was the outpost.
We were dumbfounded, and stared stupidly at the white tent among the trees. "Why don't they call 'em _in_posts?" growled one of the men, and then to the driver, "Very well, _hombre_, take us to the other three. We want to see 'em all." But this was easier said than done. Again our wise-looking piebald balked, and balked most awfully. Again the two men, at imminent danger to life and limb, jerked at the rope bridle, and again barely escaped with their lives as they performed the perilous acrobatic feat of falling headlong into the carriage while it was going at full speed.
After the sixth performance of this kind, one being at a street crossing where some raw cocoa beans were drying on a _petate_ in the sun, and the three others at the different outposts, we decided among ourselves that we had best dismiss our _cochero_ and return to the ship, since it had taken us more than two hours to drive where we might have walked in thirty minutes.
It was here a most embarrassing situation arose, for just as we were debating what to pay our Jehu, something in my boot heels suggested that perhaps the native was not a coachman at all, but a Filipino gentleman taking us to drive at the request of the presidente. There was the sign manual of Misamis's four hundred about him. He wore shoes. Moreover, he sported a very large and very yellow twenty dollar gold piece on his watch-chain. But stronger even than these evidences of native gentility was the freedom from restraint in the very frequent remarks he had tentatively thrown over his shoulder during the drive, and the fact that he had not weakened when, on first coming ashore, we had tried to browbeat him out of driving the horse.