Those who have read the first part of this story will perhaps remember the woodcutter Tandang Selo; he still lives, white-haired, making brooms while his son Tales, with two carabaos and a little capital, clears thick woods on the town border that the family thinks no one owns. Malaria kills Tales' wife and Lucia in the breaking of that soil; they blame a woodland spirit and harvest anyway. A religious corporation plants boundary marks and, for humanity's sake, leaves them usufruct at twenty or thirty pesos a year. Tales hates lawsuits, knows no Spanish, and will not smash a clay palyok against the friars' iron kawali, so he pays while Selo tells him to pretend a cayman swallowed the coins.
A good crop buys the wooden house in Sagpang and feeds a dream that Juli may study in Manila like Basilio, the medical student who shares their low origins. Prosperity brings its own levy: the town appoints Tales cabeza de barangay, so he buys sack coat and felt hat and covers tax shortages from his own pocket, while Selo smiles that the cayman's relatives have joined the feast. Each harvest the rent climbs, fifty pesos, then two hundred. When the friar sends a servant to seize land Tales turned from forest to furrows, Tales sees the red mist again, his wife and Lucia dying in the fever while the administrator rides in a carriage and a hireling waits to inherit sweat he never spent. He refuses a single cuarto and answers Selo's plea for patience with the line that they were born without shirts and will all return to clay.
He demands title deeds the friars cannot show and trusts the King to give justice to a man who serves with money and labour. Savings drain to lawyers and clerks, and the village learns that lawsuits are not won by justice. Judges who understand his case still rule for the corporation because one dismissal taught them that families at home outweigh an Indian's furrows; the Governor travels to frighten him, and Tales answers that only blood drawn from the taker's own veins could buy his land. He patrols the cane with a shotgun until the friar's agent dares not enter without civil guards, then conscription takes Tano because Tales will pay attorneys rather than a substitute. Rumour dresses the boy in Civil Guard uniform or bound for the Carolines. Whispers that Tales would bury the administrator in his furrows bring an order to collect firearms, then the long bolo, until only Selo's axe remains while Juli at her loom prays each time her father leaves.
Tulisanes capture him and demand five hundred pesos in two days, while civil-guard pursuit means any fight may kill the captive first. Juli sells combs and her rosary but keeps Basilio's locket, the jewel that passed from Capitan Tiago's daughter through a leper to the boy in Manila. Sister Bali escorts her through rich houses that refuse to help an enemy of the friars, until a pious woman lends the balance if Juli serves her from Christmas Eve. Selo weeps that the girl he kept from the sun must kneel to a mistress on the day Basilio usually arrives with presents. Juli imagines carrying a cuspidor behind her mistress while Basilio marries some wealthy girl in church, then clings to one comfort: he will know she pawned herself before she pawned his gift. She falls asleep dreaming of coloured fish and Tano's face under water while friar claim, court appeal, ransom clock, and Christmas run together. If the law ever names Tales the winner, what will still be standing in Sagpang to receive the verdict?
