We started from Dagupan mounted on horses kindly furnished us by the army, and escorted by four mounted infantrymen.  None of us had ridden for years, and army officers were offering wagers that we would not get as far as Baguio.  At Mangaldan a cavalry outfit replaced our mounted infantrymen, and while the members of our new escort were resting under the shade of a tree in the cemetery, I heard them voicing joyful anticipations of the easy time they were to have travelling with tenderfeet.  I made up ray mind to give them some healthful exercise on the trip.

Having first visited the work at the lower end of the Benguet Road and then travelled across country in a driving storm over wretched trails, we reached Bauang, our point of departure for the interior.  Here I called the sergeant in charge and asked him where were the extra shoes for our horses.  In some confusion he confessed that he had brought none, whereupon I read him a homily on the duties of a cavalryman, and sent the whole outfit to San Fernando to get the horses reshod and provided with extra shoes for the trip.

We arrived at Baguio in a howling typhoon.  When we emerged from the hills into the open, and our horses got the full sweep of the storm, they at first refused to face it.  We forced them into it, however, and a few moments later had found refuge in the house of Mr. Otto Scheerer, a hospitable German.  The cavalrymen and the horses got in under the building.  It gave me great joy to hear through the floor the voice of the sergeant remarking, with much emphasis of the sort best represented in print by dashes, that if he had known the sort of a trip he was starting on he would have been on sick report the morning of his departure.

We waited in vain three days for the storm to end and then rode on.  Mr. Scheerer, who accompanied us, had sent ahead to arrange for lunch at the house of a rich Igorot named Acop, but when we arrived at this man’s place, soaked, cold, and hungry, we found it shut up.  He had not received the message and was away from home.  Investigation showed that our only resource in the commissary line were some wads of sticky, unsalted, boiled rice which our Igorot carriers had inside their hats, in contact with their frowsy hair.  We bolted as much of this as the Igorots could spare, killing its rather high flavour with cayenne peppers picked beside the trail, and continued our journey.  In descending a steep hill my horse stumbled and while attempting to recover himself drove a sharp stone into his hoof and turned a complete somersault, throwing me over his head on to the rocks.  When I got him up he was dead lame, and I walked the rest of the way to Ambuklao, where we arrived just at sunset.