Again, it was a swift twilight among the gorges between Silang and Indang.  It was after the suicide of the farrier, and there were sores and galls under the packs.  If one cannot quickly start the healing by first intention, a sore back, in this climate, will ruin a mule.  In a day or two, one is all but felled by the stench and corruption of the worm-filled wound—­when the aparejo is lifted....  Just before the halt this night, an old gray mule, one of the tortured, had strayed from the bell; sick, indeed, when that jangle failed to hold her to the work.  Something very strange and sorrowful about these mighty creatures.  If they can but muzzle the flanks of the bell-mare once in twenty-four hours, often stopping a jolt from the heels of this temperamental monster—­the mules appear morally refreshed for any fate.

Miraculous toilers, sexless hybrids—­successful ventures into Nature’s arcanum of cross-fertilization—­steady, humorous, wise, enduring, and homely unto pain!  The bond of their whole organization is the bell.  It is the source inseparable in their intelligence from all that is lovely and of good report—­not the sound, but what the sound represents.  And this is the mystery:  mare or gelding doesn’t seem to matter, nor age, color, temper; just something set up and smelling like a horse.  Thirteen’s crest-jewel was an old roan Jezebel that smothered with hatred at the approach of the least or greatest of her slaves.  She had a knock-out in four feet—­but Beatrice, she was, to those mules.

When Healy found the old gray missing, he remembered she was badly off under the packs.  It was an ordeal to halt and search, for Silang meant supper and pickets.  But the boss led the way back—­and his eye was first to find her....  There she was, silhouetted against the sunset as poor Benton had been—­seventy or eighty feet above the trail.  Her head was down, her tongue fallen.  The old burden-bearer seemed to have clambered up the rocks—­through some desperate impulse for a breeze—­or to die!  She lifted her head as the hoofs rang below—­but still looked away toward some Mecca for good mules.  You must needs have been there to get it all—­the old gray against the red sky—­and know first-hand the torture of the trails, the valor of labor, the awfulness of Luzon.  To Cairns and Bedient there was something deep and heady to the picture, as they followed the eyes of Healy—­and then his yell that filled the gorges for miles: 

“Come down here—­you scenery-lovin’ son of——­”

That was just the vorspiel.  Mother Nature must have fed color to Healy.  He did not paint, play nor write, but the rest of that curse dropped with raw pigment, like a painting of Sorolla.  Prisms of English flashed with terrible attraction.  It was a Homeric curse of all nations.  Parts of it were dainty, too, as a butterfly dip.  Cairns was hot and courageous under the spell.  The whole train of mules huddled and fell to trembling.  A three-legged pariah-dog sniffed, took on a sudden obsession, and went howling heinously dawn the gorge.  Healy rolled a cigarette with his free hand, and the old gray let herself down, half-falling....