Americans All Part 39

But his enthusiasm was of short duration. To the commanding tongue-click the caribao had stopped dead-still, and a silence heavy with defiance met the too-soon exultant cries. An insect in the foliage began a creaking call, and then all the creatures of humidity hidden there among this fermenting vegetation joined in mocking chorus.

The Maestro felt a vague blush welling up from the innermost recesses of his being.

"I'm going to get that kid," he muttered darkly, "if I have to wait till--the coming of Common Sense to the Manila office! By gum, he's the Struggle for Attendance personified!"

He sat down on the bank and waited. This did not prove interesting. The animals of the ditch creaked on; the caribao bubbled up the water with his deep content; above, the abandoned kite went through strange acrobatics and wailed as if in pain. The Maestro dipped his hand into the water; it was lukewarm. "No hope of a freeze-out," he murmured pensively.

Behind, the pony began to pull at the reins.

"Yes, little horse, I'm tired, too. Well," he said apologetically, "I hate to get energetic, but there are circ.u.mstances which----"

The end of his sentence was lost, for he had whisked out the big Colt's dissuader of ladrones, that hung on his belt, and was firing. The six shots went off like a bunch of fire-crackers, but far from at random, for a regular circle boiled up around the dozing caribao. The disturbed animal snorted, and again a discreet "cluck-cluck" rose in the sudden, astounded silence.

"This," said the Maestro, as he calmly introduced fresh cartridges into the chambers of his smoking weapon, "is what might be called an application of western solutions to eastern difficulties."

Again he brought his revolver down, but he raised it without shooting and replaced it in its holster. From beneath the caribao's rotund belly, below the surface, an indistinct form shot out; cleaving the water like a polliwog it glided for the bank, and then a black, round head emerged at the feet of the Maestro.

"All right, bub; we'll go to school now," said the latter, nodding to the dripping figure as it rose before him.

He lifted the sullen brownie and straddled him forward of the saddle, then proceeded to mount himself, when the Capture began to display marked agitation. He squirmed and twisted, turned his head back and up, and finally a grunt escaped him.

"El volador."

"The kite, to be sure; we mustn't forget the kite," acquiesced the Maestro graciously. He pulled up the anchoring stick and laboriously, beneath the hostilely critical eye of the Capture, he hauled in the line till the screeching, resisting flying-machine was brought to earth. Then he vaulted into the saddle.

The double weight was a little too much for the pony; so it was at a dignified walk that the Maestro, his naked, dripping, muddy and still defiant prisoner a-straddle in front of him, the captured kite pa.s.sed over his left arm like a knightly s.h.i.+eld, made his triumphant entry into the pueblo.

_II--Heroism and Reverses_

When Maestro Pablo rode down Rizal-y-Was.h.i.+ngton Street to the schoolhouse with his oozing, dripping prize between his arms, the kite, like a knightly escutcheon against his left side, he found that in spite of his efforts at preserving a modest, self-deprecatory bearing, his spine would stiffen and his nose point upward in the unconscious manifestations of an internal feeling that there was in his att.i.tude something picturesquely heroic. Not since walking down the California campus one morning after the big game won three minutes before blowing of the final whistle, by his fifty-yard run-in of a punt, had he been in that posture--at once pleasant and difficult--in which one's vital concern is to wear an humility sufficiently convincing to obtain from friends forgiveness for the crime of being great.

A series of incidents immediately following, however, made the thing quite easy.

Upon bringing the new recruit into the schoolhouse, to the perfidiously expressed delight of the already incorporated, the Maestro called his native a.s.sistant to obtain the information necessary to a full matriculation. At the first question the inquisition came to a dead-lock. The boy did not know his name.

"In Spanish times," the a.s.sistant suggested modestly, "we called them "de los Reyes" when the father was of the army, and "de la Cruz" when the father was of the church; but now, we can never know _what_ it is."

The Maestro dashed to a solution. "All right," he said cheerily. "I caught him; guess I can give him a name. Call him--Isidro de los Maestros."

And thus it was that the urchin went down on the school records, and on the records of life afterward.

Now, well pleased with himself, the Maestro, as is the wont of men in such state, sought for further enjoyment.

"Ask him," he said teasingly, pointing with his chin at the newly-baptized but still unregenerate little savage, "why he came out of the ditch."

"He says he was afraid that you would steal the kite," answered the a.s.sistant, after some linguistic sparring.

"Eh?" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the surprised Maestro.

And in his mind there framed a picture of himself riding along the road with a string between his fingers; and, following in the upper layers of air, a buzzing kite; and, down in the dust of the highway, an urchin trudging wistfully after the kite, drawn on irresistibly, in spite of his better judgment, on and on, horrified but fascinated, up to the yawning school-door.

It would have been the better way. "I ought to go and soak my head,"

murmured the Maestro pensively.

This was check number one, but others came in quick succession.

For the morning after this incident the Maestro did not find Isidro among the weird, wild crowd gathered into the annex (a transformed sugar storehouse) by the last raid of the Munic.i.p.al Police.

Neither was Isidro there the next day, nor the next. And it was not till a week had pa.s.sed that the Maestro discovered, with an inward blush of shame, that his much-longed-for pupil was living in the little hut behind his own house. There would have been nothing shameful in the overlooking--there were seventeen other persons sharing the same abode--were it not that the nipa front of this human hive had been blown away by the last baguio, leaving an un.o.bstructed view of the interior, if it might be called such. As it was, the Munic.i.p.al Police was mobilized at the urgent behest of the Maestro. Its "cabo," flanked by two privates armed with old German needle-guns, besieged the home, and after an interesting game of hide-and-go-seek, Isidro was finally caught by one arm and one ear, and ceremoniously marched to school. And there the Maestro asked him why he had not been attending.

"No hay pantalones"--there are no pants--Isidro answered, dropping his eyes modestly to the ground.

This was check number two, and unmistakably so, for was it not a fact that a civil commission, overzealous in its civilizing ardor, had pa.s.sed a law commanding that every one should wear, when in public, "at least one garment, preferably trousers?"

Following this, and an unsuccessful plea upon the town tailor who was on a three weeks' vacation on account of the death of a fourth cousin, the Maestro shut himself up a whole day with Isidro in his little nipa house; and behind the closely-shut shutters engaged in some mysterious toil. When they emerged again the next morning, Isidro wended his way to the school at the end of the Maestro's arm, trousered!

The trousers, it must be said, had a certain cachet of distinction. They were made of calico-print, with a design of little black skulls sprinkled over a yellow background. Some parts hung flat and limp as if upon a scarecrow; others pulsed, like a fire-hose in action, with the pressure of flesh compressed beneath, while at other points they bulged pneumatically in little foot-b.a.l.l.s. The right leg dropped to the ankle; the left stopped discouraged, a few inches below the knee. The seams looked like the putty mountain chains of the geography cla.s.s. As the Maestro strode along he threw rapid glances at his handiwork, and it was plain that the emotions that moved him were somewhat mixed in character.

His face showed traces of a puzzled diffidence, as that of a man who has come in sack-coat to a full-dress function; but after all it was satisfaction that predominated, for after this heroic effort he had decided that Victory had at last perched upon his banners.

And it really looked so for a time. Isidro stayed at school at least during that first day of his trousered life. For when the Maestro, later in the forenoon paid a visit to the annex, he found the a.s.sistant in charge standing disconcerted before the urchin who, with eyes indignant and hair perpendicular upon the top of his head, was evidently holding to his side of the argument with his customary energy.

Isidro was trouserless. Sitting rigid upon his bench, holding on with both hands as if in fear of being removed, he dangled naked legs to the sight of who might look.

"Que barbaridad!" murmured the a.s.sistant in limp dejection.

But Isidro threw at him a look of black hatred. This became a tense, silent plea for justice as it moved up for a moment to the Maestro's face, and then it settled back upon its first object in frigid accusation.

"Where are your trousers, Isidro?" asked the Maestro.

Isidro relaxed his convulsive grasp of the bench with one hand, canted himself slightly to one side just long enough to give an instantaneous view of the trousers, neatly folded and spread between what he was sitting with and what he was sitting on, then swung back with the suddenness of a kodak-shutter, seized his seat with new determination, and looked eloquent justification at the Maestro.

"Why will you not wear them?" asked the latter.

"He says he will not get them dirty," said the a.s.sistant, interpreting the answer.

"Tell him when they are dirty he can go down to the river and wash them," said the Maestro.

Isidro pondered over the suggestion for two silent minutes. The prospect of a day spent splas.h.i.+ng in the lukewarm waters of the Ilog he finally put down as not at all detestable, and getting up to his feet:

"I will put them on," he said gravely.

Which he did on the moment, with an absence of hesitation as to which was front and which was back, very flattering to the Maestro.

That Isidro persevered during the next week, the Maestro also came to know. For now regularly every evening as he smoked and lounged upon his long, cane chair, trying to persuade his tired body against all laws of physics to give up a little of its heat to a circ.u.mambient atmosphere of temperature equally enthusiastic; as he watched among the rafters of the roof the snakes swallowing the rats, the rats devouring the lizards, the lizards snapping up the spiders, the spiders snaring the flies in eloquent representation of the life struggle, his studied pa.s.siveness would be broken by strange sounds from the dilapidated hut at the back of his house. A voice, imitative of that of the Third a.s.sistant who taught the annex, hurled forth questions, which were immediately answered by another voice, curiously like that of Isidro.

Fiercely: "Du yu ssee dde hhett?"