the whole future of himself and his children, he went on spending his
savings to pay lawyers, notaries, and solicitors, not to mention the
officials and clerks who exploited his ignorance and his needs. He
moved to and fro between the village and the capital, passed his
days without eating and his nights without sleeping, while his talk
was always about briefs, exhibits, and appeals. There was then seen
a struggle such as was never before carried on under the skies of the
Philippines: that of a poor Indian, ignorant and friendless, confiding
in the justness and righteousness of his cause, fighting against a
powerful corporation before which Justice bowed her head, while the
judges let fall the scales and surrendered the sword. He fought as
tenaciously as the ant which bites when it knows that it is going
to be crushed, as does the fly which looks into space only through
a pane of glass. Yet the clay jar defying the iron pot and smashing
itself into a thousand pieces bad in it something impressive--it had
the sublimeness of desperation!

On the days when his journeys left him free he patrolled his fields
armed with a shotgun, saying that the tulisanes were hovering around
and he had need of defending himself in order not to fall into their
hands and thus lose his lawsuit. As if to improve his marksmanship,
he shot at birds and fruits, even the butterflies, with such accurate
aim that the friar-administrator did not dare to go to Sagpang without
an escort of civil-guards, while the friar's hireling, who gazed from
afar at the threatening figure of Tales wandering over the fields
like a sentinel upon the walls, was terror stricken and refused to
take the property away from him.

But the local judges and those at the capital, warned by the experience
of one of their number who had been summarily dismissed, dared not