that.'
"And that's why I say," concluded Ben Granger, "that you can't tell

where ambition begins any more than you can where it is going to wind
up."

THE HEAD-HUNTER
When the war between Spain and George Dewey was over, I went to the

Philippine Islands. There I remained as bushwhacker correspondent for
my paper until its managing editor notified me that an eight-hundred-

word cablegram describing the grief of a pet carabao over the death of
an infant Moro was not considered by the office to be war news. So I

resigned, and came home.
On board the trading-vessel that brought me back I pondered much upon

the strange things I had sensed in the weird archipelago of the
yellow-brown people. The manoeuvres and skirmishings of the petty war

interested me not: I was spellbound by the outlandish and unreadable
countenance of that race that had turned its expressionless gaze upon

us out of an unguessable past.
Particularly during my stay in Mindanao had I been fascinated and

attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as the
head-hunters. Those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never seen,

but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their
concealed presence, paralleling the trail of their prey through

unmapped forests, across perilous mountain-tops, adown bottomless
chasms, into uninhabitable jungles, always near with the invisible

hand of death uplifted, betraying their pursuit only by such signs as
a beast or a bird or a gliding serpent might make-a twig crackling in

the awful, sweat-soaked night, a drench of dew showering from the
screening foliage of a giant tree, a whisper at even from the rushes

of a water-level-a hint of death for every mile and every hour-they
amused me greatly, those little fellows of one idea.

When you think of it, their method is beautifully and almost
hilariously effective and simple.

You have your hut in which you live and carry out the destiny that was
decreed for you. Spiked to the jamb of your bamboodoorway is a

basket made of green withes, plaited. From time to time, as vanity or
ennui or love or jealousy or ambition may move you, you creep forth

with your snickersnee and take up the silent trail. Back from it you
come, triumphant, bearing the severed, gory head of your victim, which

you deposit with pardonable pride in the basket at the side of your
door. It may be the head of your enemy, your friend, or a stranger,

according as competition, jealousy, or simple sportiveness has been
your incentive to labor.

In any case, your reward is certain. The village men, in passing,
stop to congratulate you, as your neighbor on weaker planes of life

stops to admire and praise the begonias in your front yard. Your
particular brown maid lingers, with fluttering bosom, casting soft

tiger's eyes at the evidence of your love for her. You chew betel-nut
and listen, content, to the intermittent soft drip from the ends of

the severed neck arteries. And you show your teeth and grunt like a
water-buffalo--which is as near as you can come to laughing-at the

thought that the cold, acephalous body of your door ornament is being
spotted by wheeling vultures in the Mindanaoan wilds.

Truly, the life of the merry head-hunter captivated me. He had
reduced art and philosophy to a simple code. To take your adversary's

head, to basket it at the portal of your castle, to see it lying
there, a dead thing, with its cunning and stratagems and power gone--

Is there a better way to foil his plots, to refute his arguments, to
establish your superiority over his skill and wisdom?

The ship that brought me home was captained by an erratic Swede, who
changed his course and deposited me, with genuinecompassion, in a

small town on the Pacific coast of one of the Central American
republics, a few hundred miles south of the port to which he had

engaged to convey me. But I was wearied of movement and exotic
fancies; so I leaped contentedly upon the firm sands of the village of

Mojada, telling myself I should be sure to find there the rest that I
craved. After all, far better to linger there (I thought), lulled by

the sedative plash of the waves and the rustling of palm-fronds, than
to sit upon the horsehair sofa of my parental home in the East, and

there, cast down by currant wine and cake, and scourged by fatuous
relatives, drivel into the ears of gaping neighbors sad stories of the

death of colonial governors.
When I first saw Chloe Greene she was standing, all in white, in the

doorway of her father's tile-roofed 'dobe house. She was polishing a
silver cup with a cloth, and she looked like a pearl laid against

black velvet. She turned on me a flatteringly protracted but a
wiltingly disapproving gaze, and then went inside, humming a light

song to indicate the value she placed upon my existence.
Small wonder: for Dr. Stamford (the most disreputable professional

man between Juneau and Valparaiso) and I were zigzagging along the
turfy street, tunelessly singing the words of Auld Lang Syne to the

air of Muzzer's Little Coal-Black Coon. We had come from the ice
factory, which was Mojada's palace of wickedness, where we had been

playing billiards and opening black bottles, white with frost, that we
dragged with strings out of old Sandoval's ice-cold vats.

I turned in sudden rage to Dr. Stamford, as sober as the verger of a
cathedral. In a moment I had become aware that we were swine cast

before a pearl.
"You beast," I said, "this is half your doing. And the other half is

the fault of this cursed country. I'd better have gone back to
Sleepy-town and died in a wild orgy of currant wine and buns than to

have had this happen."
Stamford filled the empty street with his roaring laughter.

"You too!" he cried. "And all as quick as the popping of a cork.
Well, she does seem to strike agreeably upon the retina. But don't

burn your fingers. All Mojada will tell you that Louis Devoe is the
man.

"We will see about that," said I. "And, perhaps, whether he is a man
as well as the man."

I lost no time in meeting Louis Devoe. That was easily accomplished,
for the foreign colony in Mojada numbered scarce a dozen; and they

gathered daily at a half-decent hotel kept by a Turk, where they
managed to patch together the fluttering rags of country and

civilization that were left them. I sought Devoe before I did my
pearl of the doorway, because I had learned a little of the game of

war, and knew better than to strike for a prize before testing the
strength of the enemy.

A sort of cold dismay-something akin to fear-filled me when I had
estimated him. I found a man so perfectly poised, so charming, so

deeply learned in the world's rituals, so full of tact, courtesy, and
hospitality, so endowed with grace and ease and a kind of careless,

haughty power that I almost overstepped the bounds in probing him, in
turning him on the spit to find the weak point that I so craved for

him to have. But I left him whole-I had to make bitter acknowledgment
to myself that Louis Devoe was a gentleman worthy of my best blows;

and I swore to give him them. He was a great merchant of the country,
a wealthy importer and exporter. All day he sat in a fastidiously

appointed office, surrounded by works of art and evidences of his high
culture, directing through glass doors and windows the affairs of his

house.
In person he was slender and hardly tall. His small, well-shaped head

was covered with thick, brown hair, trimmed short, and he wore a
thick, brown beard also cut close and to a fine point. His manners

were a pattern.
Before long I had become a regular and a welcomevisitor at the Greene

home. I shook my wild habits from me like a worn-out cloak. I
trained for the conflict with the care of a prize-fighter and the

self-denial of a Brahmin.
As for Chloe Greene, I shall weary you with no sonnets to her eyebrow.

She was a splendidlyfeminine girl, as wholesome as a November pippin,
and no more mysterious than a windowpane. She had whimsical little

theories that she had deduced from life, and that fitted the maxims of
Epictetus like princess gowns. I wonder, after all, if that old