“I don't know,” I said. Wondering if I would get the chance.

     “Remember, I could just as well be dead. It might be more convenient to think of me as dead.”

     He was laughing when he said it.

     The guards brought us over to where eight more riflemen were standing, waiting, beneath the guard tower. With five of them in front of us and five behind, we walked out of the camp, through the cogon and down the widening valley.

     The air was torpid. The moon was fat, fuzzy behind clouds. In low spots the mud sucked at my shoes. On the steep slopes I grabbed brush and trees to keep from slipping, but fell anyway, and before we had gone far my clothes were soaked and smeared.

     After about an hour the clouds slid free. We were going in the same direction we had come the night before; not the same trail, but from the top of a ridge I could recognize a valley below, and another ridge embracing it on that side. I could see trees and a few huts and the silver rectangles of the paddies. We dropped down through the forest, down two hillsides into rolling cane. Through fields, through fields, the cane leaves making ticks and swishes until we briefly broke out into the clear. That's when I heard the low coursing sound of the generator at the hacienda bungalow.

     It was Saturday night. I knew where we were going.

     Another wide field. The cane here was nearly as tall as a house. The generator's drumming seemed to center itself directly in front of us, when gunfire grumbled distantly to our left.

     “Curba,” one of the riflemen said behind us.

     “Curba, that's a sitio,” Lito said. “Like Lanao, but smaller, couple of miles away.”

     “Part of the hacienda?”

     “It sure is.”

     The grumbling stopped. Almost at once a couple of