A Womans Journey through the Philippines | Page 6

of its being Christmas, the Signal Corps officers, men, and natives were hard at work establishing an office in the town, digging a trench for the shore end of the cable, and setting up the cable hut, packed in sections for convenience in transportation. Thirty Dumaguete natives were employed at twenty-five cents a day to help dig the trench and put up the hut, and they seemed very willing in their work and thought the remuneration princely.
So heavy was the surf in the early morning that the officers and soldiers going ashore had to be carried from the rowboats to the beach on the backs of natives, but it fortunately calmed down enough before we women went over in the afternoon to allow of our entering Dumaguete in a more conventional manner.
Being a fiesta, the town was full of natives from the provinces, all smartly dressed and all beaming with good-natured curiosity at the advent of two and a half American women,--the only Americanas most of them had ever seen,--and quite an escort gathered around us as, accompanied by the officers of the post and those from the ship not otherwise engaged, we walked down the dusty streets toward the cockpits, where in honour of the day there was to be a contest of unusual interest. At every corner came new recruits to swell the ranks of our followers. "Merry Christmas," cried everyone in Spanish or Visayan, and "Merry Christmas" we responded, though June skies bending down toward tropical palms and soft winds just rustling the tops of tall bamboos, so that they cast flickering fern-like shadows over thatched nipa roofs, but ill suggested Christmas to an American mind.
The cockpit reached, we found it to be a rudely built circular shack of nipa, fairly crowded with natives in gala attire, and a sprinkling of khaki-clad soldiers from the post. Native policemen, in uniforms that strongly reminded one of the insurrecto insignia, showed us to our seats, and a few moments after our arrival two fine cocks, matched as nearly as possible in strength and weight, were brought into the ring by their respective owners, while the onlookers discussed the birds' relative points. The two cocks, still held by their masters, were then allowed to peck at each other's combs until fully angered, when they were put into the ring a short distance apart, and while each owner held the tail feathers of his bird, the cocks made futile efforts to reach each other, giving vent the while to derisive crowing.
The audience, after watching this performance a moment or two, began making their bets, both individually and through the agency of the "farmer," who, standing in the centre of the ring, cried out chaffingly in Visayan to faint-hearted gamesters. Then circles were drawn on the earthen floor of the pit, and the money put up on each cock deposited in one or the other of these rings. At the end of the fight some one appointed cried out the name of the victorious bird, and the winners swarmed down into the pit where they collected their money and the original stakes. There is never any cheating at such affairs, a sort of bolo morality existing among the natives, and all is as methodical and well-behaved as the proverbial Sabbath school.
It was the first cock-fight most of us cable-ship people had ever seen, and it was hard to understand the wild enthusiasm of the natives when, after unsheathing the steel gaffs on the roosters' legs, the birds were allowed to make their preliminary dash at one another. For a moment they walked around the ring with an excessively polite air, each keeping a wary lookout on his antagonist, but frigidly impersonal and courteous. One might almost fancy them shaking hands before the combat should begin, so ceremonious was their attitude. Then there would come a simultaneous onslaught of feathered fury. Again and again they flew at one another, while the volatile audience called out excitedly in Spanish, "The black wins--No, the speckled one's ahead. Holy Virgin, give strength to the black!" In a very few moments one cock is either dead, or perhaps turned coward before the cruel gaff of his opponent, and victor and vanquished leave the arena to new combatants, while the clink of coin changing hands is heard throughout the cockpit.
The first few fights we thought rather tame, and I, personally, had to assure myself over and over as the bloody contestants were removed from the scene of action, that such a death was no more painful and certainly far less ignominious than when chicken stewed or à la Maryland was to be the ultimate result of the fowl's demise.
There was one little game-cock, however, who enthused even the most dispassionate among us. He was small and wiry, and