thousand times, no! First let the fields sink into the depths of the
earth and bury them all! Who was this intruder that he should have
any right to his land? Had he brought from his own country a single
handful of that soil? Had he crooked a single one of his fingers to
pull up the roots that ran through it?

Exasperated by the threats of the friar, who tried to uphold his
authority at any cost in the presence of the other tenants, Cabesang
Tales rebelled and refused to pay a single cuarto, having ever before
himself that red mist, saying that he would give up his fields to the
first man who could irrigate it with blood drawn from his own veins.

Old Selo, on looking at his son's face, did not dare to mention the
cayman, but tried to calm him by talking of clay jars, reminding him
that the winner in a lawsuit was left without a shirt to his back.

"We shall all be turned to clay, father, and without shirts we were
born," was the reply.

So he resolutely refused to pay or to give up a single span of his
land unless the friars should first prove the legality of their claim
by exhibiting a title-deed of some kind. As they had none, a lawsuit
followed, and Cabesang Tales entered into it, confiding that some at
least, if not all, were lovers of justice and respecters of the law.

"I serve and have been serving the King with my money and my services,"
he said to those who remonstrated with him. "I'm asking for justice
and he is obliged to give it to me."

Drawn on by fatality, and as if he had put into play in the lawsuit