From e8b22536c95b96181c581fb6b48cf955cba8b20e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Alex Cabal Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2025 10:50:43 -0600 Subject: [PATCH] [Editorial] mountain-top -> mountaintop --- src/epub/text/a-matter-of-mean-elevation.xhtml | 2 +- src/epub/text/the-headhunter.xhtml | 2 +- 2 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/src/epub/text/a-matter-of-mean-elevation.xhtml b/src/epub/text/a-matter-of-mean-elevation.xhtml index 2c56780..be5e019 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/a-matter-of-mean-elevation.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/a-matter-of-mean-elevation.xhtml @@ -46,7 +46,7 @@

“Oh! look, Mr. Armstrong, there is the sea! Isn’t it lovely? I’m so tired of mountains.” She heaved a pretty shoulder in a gesture of repugnance. “Those horrid Indians! Just think of what I suffered! Although I suppose I attained my ambition of becoming a stellar attraction, I wouldn’t care to repeat the engagement. It was very nice of you to bring me away. Tell me, Mr. Armstrong⁠—honestly, now⁠—do I look such an awful, awful fright? I haven’t looked into a mirror, you know, for months.”

Armstrong made answer according to his changed moods. Also he laid his hand upon hers as it rested upon the horn of her saddle. Luis was at the head of the pack train and could not see. She allowed it to remain there, and her eyes smiled frankly into his.

Then at sundown they dropped upon the coast level under the palms and lemons among the vivid greens and scarlets and ochres of the tierra caliente. They rode into Macuto, and saw the line of volatile bathers frolicking in the surf. The mountains were very far away.

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Mlle. Giraud’s eyes were shining with a joy that could not have existed under the chaperonage of the mountain-tops. There were other spirits calling to her⁠—nymphs of the orange groves, pixies from the chattering surf, imps, born of the music, the perfumes, colours and the insinuating presence of humanity. She laughed aloud, musically, at a sudden thought.

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Mlle. Giraud’s eyes were shining with a joy that could not have existed under the chaperonage of the mountaintops. There were other spirits calling to her⁠—nymphs of the orange groves, pixies from the chattering surf, imps, born of the music, the perfumes, colours and the insinuating presence of humanity. She laughed aloud, musically, at a sudden thought.

“Won’t there be a sensation?” she called to Armstrong. “Don’t I wish I had an engagement just now, though! What a picnic the press agent would have! ‘Held a prisoner by a band of savage Indians subdued by the spell of her wonderful voice’⁠—wouldn’t that make great stuff? But I guess I quit the game winner, anyhow⁠—there ought to be a couple of thousand dollars in that sack of gold dust I collected as encores, don’t you think?”

He left her at the door of the little Hotel de Buen Descansar, where she had stopped before. Two hours later he returned to the hotel. He glanced in at the open door of the little combined reception room and café.

diff --git a/src/epub/text/the-headhunter.xhtml b/src/epub/text/the-headhunter.xhtml index 0814a34..fe99f9f 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/the-headhunter.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/the-headhunter.xhtml @@ -10,7 +10,7 @@

The Headhunter

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.

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Particularly during my stay in Mindanao had I been fascinated and attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as the headhunters. 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.

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Particularly during my stay in Mindanao had I been fascinated and attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as the headhunters. 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 mountaintops, 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 bamboo doorway 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.