Rick's hair lifted. "Put that thing down!" he gulped.
"Officer," Tony said crisply, "these are the two boys from my party. They were chasing the burglar." He added, "Apparently they succeeded only in catching each other. What in the name of an Igorot icebox were you two trying to do?"
The boys looked embarrassed. "We had the sniper," Rick explained. "But we must have got tangled up. I thought the man with the rifle was the burglar, but it was Scotty."
"He threw the rifle at me," Scotty said. "I reached for him, swung on him and connected, then the rifle knocked me down."
The policeman's running mate came back from a search of the darkness. He spoke to his companion in Tagalog.
"No use," the first policeman said. "He is gone. We would need help to find him, since the walled city is big and has many hiding places. Can you give a description? By the time help came he could be miles from here. Perhaps we can get him later."
"Unless the boys got a better look," Tony Briotti said, "the only thing I can say is that he was either an Igorot or an Ifugao. Short and muscular. I saw his haircut--couldn't very well miss it. But not his face."
Rick and Scotty hadn't even seen that much. An Igorot or Ifugao? Probably the latter, since their expedition was connected with the Ifugaos and not the Igorots. Rick remembered the incident on the freighter. There was a pattern to this....
"I will be the one to take the rifle," the policeman said.
Rick wondered at the strange flavor of the phrase. But he was to hear it many times while in the Philippines. "I will be the one...." It was a literal translation from the Spanish.
"I will be the one to take the names," the second policeman said, opening his notebook. "You will have to make charges."
"No use," Tony replied. "Let's forget the whole thing. We'll never catch up with the man, whoever he was."
Nevertheless, the police insisted on names and histories, and it was ten minutes before the Spindrifters made their way back to the hotel. In the main dining room they talked over cups of hot chocolate, ignoring the curious stares of late supper guests who obviously wondered about Rick and Scotty's disheveled condition.
Since the boys had not wanted to discuss their personal business in front of Lazada's chauffeur there had been no chance to tell Tony about Chahda. Now they did so, and Rick ticked off points on his fingers.