"My husband's gone to Baltimore," she vouchsafed at her easy leisure.
"Let's have a look in the cellar," said Merryfield, and dropped down the cellar stairs with Hallisey at his heels. Together they ransacked the little cave to a conclusion. During the process, Merryfield conceived an idea.
"Hallisey," he murmured, "what would you think of my staying down here, while you and Smith go off talking as though we were all together? She might say something to the children, when she believes we're gone, and I could hear every word through that thin floor."
"We'll do it!" Hallisey answered, beneath his voice. Then, shouting:—
"Come on, Smith! Let's get away from this; no use wasting time here!"
And in another moment Smith and Hallisey were crashing up the mountain-side, calling out: "Hi, there! Merryfield—Oh! Merryfield, wait for us!"—as if their comrade had outstripped them on the trail.
Merryfield had made use of the noise of their departure to establish himself in a tenable position under the widest crack in the floor. Now he held himself motionless, subduing even his breath.
One—two—three minutes of dead silence. Then came the timorous half-whisper of a frightened child:
"Will them men kill father if they find him?"
"S-sh!"
"Mother!" faintly ventured another little voice, "will them men kill father if they find him?"
"S-sh! S-sh! I tell ye!"
"Ma-ma! Will they kill my father?" This was the wail, insistent, uncontrolled, of the smallest child of all.
The crackling tramp of the officers, mounting the trail, had wholly died away. The woman evidently believed all immediate danger past.
"No!" she exclaimed vehemently, "they ain't goin' to lay eyes on yo' father, hair nor hide of him. Quit yer frettin'!"
In a moment she spoke again: "You keep still, now, like good children, while I go out and empty these peach-stones. I'll be back in a minute. See you keep still just where you are!"
Stealing noiselessly to the cellar door as the woman left the house, Merryfield saw her making for the woods, a basket on her arm. He watched her till the shadows engulfed her. Then he drew back to his own place and resumed his silent vigil.
Moments passed, without a sound from the room above. Then came soft little thuds on the floor, a whimper or two, small sighs, and a slither of bare legs on bare boards.
"Poor little kiddies!" thought Merryfield, "they're coiling down to sleep!"
Back in the days when the Force was started, the Major had said to each recruit of them all:—
"I expect you to treat women and children at all times with every consideration."
From that hour forth the principle has been grafted into the lives of the men. It is instinct now—self-acting, deep, and unconscious. No tried Trooper deliberately remembers it. It is an integral part of him, like the drawing of his breath.
"I wish I could manage to spare those babies and their mother in what's to come!" Merryfield pondered as he lurked in the mould-scented dark.
A quarter of an hour went by. Five minutes more. Footsteps nearing the cabin from the direction of the woods. Low voices—very low. Indistinguishable words. Then the back door opened. Two persons entered, and all that they now uttered was clear.
"It was them that the dog heard," said a man's voice. "Get me my rifle and all my ammunition. I'll go to Maryland. I'll get a job on that stone quarry near Westminster. I'll send some money as soon as I'm paid."
"But you won't startto-night!" exclaimed the wife.
"Yes, to-night—this minute. Quick! I wouldn't budge an inch for the County folks. But with the State Troopers after me, that's another thing. If I stay around here now they'll get me dead sure—and send me up too. My gun, I say!"
"Oh, daddy, daddy, don't go away!" "Don'tgo away off and leave me, daddy!" "Don't go, don't go!" came the children's plaintive wails, hoarse with fatigue and fright.
Merryfield stealthily crept from the cellar's outside door, hugging the wall of the cabin, moving toward the rear. As he reached the corner, and was about to make the turn toward the back, he drew his six-shooter and laid his carbine down in the grass. For the next step, he knew, would bringhim into plain sight. If Drake offered any resistance, the ensuing action would be at short range or hand to hand.
He rounded the corner. Drake was standing just outside the door, a rifle in his left hand, his right hand hidden in the pocket of his overcoat. In the doorway stood the wife, with the three little children crowding before her. It was the last moment. They were saying good-bye.
Merryfield covered the bandit with his revolver.
"Put up your hands! You are under arrest," he commanded.
"Who the hell are you!" Drake flung back. As he spoke he thrust his rifle into the grasp of the woman and snatched his right hand from its concealment. In its grip glistened the barrel of a nickel-plated revolver.
Merryfield could have easily shot him then and there—would have been amply warranted in doing so. But he had heard the children's voices. Now he saw their innocent, terrified eyes.
"Poor—little—kiddies!" he thought again.
Drake stood six feet two inches high, and weighed some two hundred pounds, all brawn. Furthermore, he was desperate. Merryfield is merely of medium build.
"Nevertheless, I'll take a chance," he said to himself, returning his six-shooter to its holster. And just as the outlaw threw up his own weapon to fire, the Trooper, in a running jump, plunged into him with all fours, exactly as, when a boy, he had plunged off a springboard into the old mill-dam of a hot July afternoon.
Too amazed even to pull his trigger, Drake gave backward a step into the doorway. Merryfield's clutch toward his right hand missed the gun, fastening instead on the sleeve of his heavy coat. Swearing wildly while the woman and children screamed behind him, the bandit struggled to break the Trooper's hold—tore and pulled until the sleeve, where Merryfield held it, worked down over the gun in his own grip. SoMerryfield, twisting the sleeve, caught a lock-hold on hand and gun together.
Drake, standing on the doorsill, had now some eight inches advantage of height. The door opened inward, from right to left. With a tremendous effort Drake forced his assailant to his knees, stepped back into the room, seized the door with his left hand and with the whole weight on his shoulder slammed it to, on the Trooper's wrist.
The pain was excruciating—but it did not break that lock-hold on the outlaw's hand and gun. Shooting from his knees like a projectile, Merryfield flung his whole weight at the door. Big as Drake was, he could not hold it. It gave, and once more the two men hung at grips, this time within the room.
Drake's one purpose was to turn the muzzle of his imprisoned revolver upon Merryfield. Merryfield, with his left still clinching that deadly hand caught in its sleeve, now grabbed the revolver in his own right hand, with a twist dragged it free, and flung it out of the door.
But, as he dropped his right defense, taking both hands to the gun, the outlaw's powerful left grip closed on Merryfield's throat with a strangle-hold.
With that great thumb closing his windpipe, with the world turning red and black, "Guess I can't put it over, after all!" the Trooper said to himself.
Reaching for his own revolver, he shoved the muzzle against the bandit's breast.
"Damn you,shoot!" cried the other, believing his end was come.
But in that same instant Merryfield once more caught a glimpse of the fear-stricken faces of the babies, huddled together beyond.
"Hallisey and Smith must be here soon," he thought. "I won't shoot yet."
Again he dropped his revolver back into the holster, seizing the wrist of the outlaw to release that terrible clamp onhis throat. As he did so, Drake with a lightning twist, reached around to the Trooper's belt and possessed himself of the gun. As he fired Merryfield had barely time and space to throw back his head. The flash blinded him—scorched his face hairless. The bullet grooved his body under the upflung arm still wrenching at the clutch that was shutting off his breath.
Perhaps, with the shot, the outlaw insensibly somewhat relaxed that choking arm. Merryfield tore loose. Half-blinded and gasping though he was, he flung himself again at his adversary and landed a blow in his face. Drake, giving backward, kicked over a row of peach jars, slipped on the slimy stream that poured over the bare floor, and dropped the gun.
Pursuing his advantage, Merryfield delivered blow after blow on the outlaw's face and body, backing him around the room, while both men slipped and slid, fell and recovered, on the jam-coated floor. The table crashed over, carrying with it the solitary lamp, whose flame died harmlessly, smothered in tepid mush. Now only the moonlight illuminated the scene.
Drake was manœuvring always to recover the gun. His hand touched the back of a chair. He picked the chair up, swung it high, and was about to smash it down on his adversary's head when Merryfield seized it in the air.
At this moment the woman, who had been crouching against the wall nursing the rifle that her husband had put into her charge, rushed forward clutching the barrel of the gun, swung it at full arm's length as she would have swung an axe, and brought the stock down on the Trooper's right hand.
That vital hand dropped—fractured, done. But in the same second Drake gave a shriek of pain as a shot rang out and his own right arm fell powerless.
In the door stood Hallisey, smoking revolver in hand, smiling grimly in the moonlight at the neatness of his own aim. What is the use of killing a man, when you can wing him as trigly as that?
Private Smith, who had entered by the other door, was taking the rifle out of the woman's grasp—partly because she had prodded him viciously with the muzzle. He examined the chambers.
"Do you know this thing is loaded?" he asked her in a mild, detached voice.
She returned his gaze with frank despair in her black eyes.
"Drake, do you surrender?" asked Hallisey.
"Oh, I'll give up. You've got me!" groaned the outlaw. Then he turned on his wife with bitter anger. "Didn't I tell ye?" he snarled. "Didn't I tell ye they'd get me if you kept me hangin' around here? These ain't no damn deputies.These is the State Police!"
"An' yet, if I'd known that gun was loaded," said she, "there'd been some less of 'em to-night!"
They dressed Israel's arm in first-aid fashion. Then they started with their prisoner down the mountain-trail, at last resuming connection with their farmer friend. Not without misgivings, the latter consented to hitch up his "double team" and hurry the party to the nearest town where a doctor could be found.
As the doctor dressed the bandit's arm, Private Merryfield, whose broken right hand yet awaited care, observed to the groaning patient:—
"Do you know, you can be thankful to your little children that you have your life left."
"To hell with you and the children and my life. I'd a hundred times rather you'd killed me than take what's comin' now."
Then the three Troopers philosophically hunted up a night restaurant and gave their captive a bite of lunch.
"Now," said Hallisey, as he paid the score, "where's the lock-up?"
The three officers, with Drake in tow, proceeded silentlythrough the sleeping streets. Not a ripple did their passing occasion. Not even a dog aroused to take note of them.
Duly they stood at the door of the custodian of the lock-up, ringing the bell—again and again ringing it. Eventually some one upstairs raised a window, looked out for an appreciable moment, quickly lowered the window and locked it. Nothing further occurred. Waiting for a reasonable interval the officers rang once more. No answer. Silence complete.
Then they pounded on the door till the entire block heard.
Here, there, up street and down, bedroom windows gently opened, then closed with finality more gentle yet. Silence. Not a voice. Not a foot on a stair.
The officers looked at each other perplexed. Then, by chance, they looked at Drake. Drake, so lately black with suicidal gloom, was grinning! Grinning as a man does when the citadel of his heart is comforted.
"You don't understand, do ye!" chuckled he. "Well, I'll tell ye: What do them folks see when they open their windows and look down here in the road? They see three hard-lookin' fellers with guns in their hands, here in this bright moonlight. And they see somethin' scarier to them than a hundred strangers with guns—they seeME! There ain't a mother's son of 'em that'll budge downstairs while I'm here, not if you pound on their doors till the cows come home." And he slapped his knee with his good hand and laughed in pure ecstasy—a laugh that caught all the little group and rocked it as with one mind.
"We don't begrudge you that, do we boys?" Hallisey conceded. "Smith, you're as respectable-looking as any of us. Hunt around and see if you can find a Constable that isn't onto this thing. We'll wait here for you."
Moving out of the zone of the late demonstration, Private Smith learned the whereabouts of the home of a Constable.
"What's wanted?" asked the Constable, responding like a normal burgher to Smith's knock at his door.
"Officer of State Police," answered Smith. "I have a man under arrest and want to put him in the lock-up. Will you get me the keys?"
"Sure. I'll come right down and go along with you myself. Just give me a jiffy to get on my trousers and boots," cried the Constable, clearly glad of a share in the adventure.
In a moment the borough official was at the Trooper's side, talking eagerly as they moved toward the place where the party waited.
"So, he's a highwayman, is he? Good! and a burglar, too, and a cattle-thief! Good work! And you've got him right up the street, ready to jail! Well, I'll be switched. Now, what might his name be? Israel Drake?Not Israel Drake!Oh, my God!"
The Constable had stopped in his tracks like a man struck paralytic.
"No, stranger," he quavered. "I reckon I—I—I won't go no further with you just now. Here, I'll give you the keys. You can use 'em yourself: These here's for the doors. This bunch is for the cells.Good-night to you. I'll be getting back home!"
By the first train next morning the Troopers, conveying their prisoner, left the village for the County Town. As they deposited Drake in the safe-keeping of the County Jail and were about to depart, he seemed burdened with an impulse to speak, yet said nothing. Then, as the three officers were leaving the room, he leaned over and touched Merryfield on the shoulder.
"Shake!" he growled, offering his unwounded hand.
Merryfield "shook" cheerfully, with his own remaining sound member.
"I'm plumb sorry to see ye go, and that's a fact," growled the outlaw. "Because—well, because you're the onlymanthat ever tried to arrest me."
Miss Katherine Mayo comes of Mayflower stock, but her birthplace was Ridgway, Pennsylvania. She was educated in private schools at Boston and Cambridge, Mass. Her earliest literary work to appear in print was a series of articles describing travels in Norway, followed by another series on Colonial American topics, written for the New YorkEvening Post. Later, during a residence in Dutch Guiana, South America, she wrote for theAtlantic Monthlysome interesting sketches of the natives of Surinam. After this came three years wholly devoted to historic research. The work, however, that first attracted wide attention was a history of the Pennsylvania State Police, published in 1917, under the title ofJustice To All.
This history gives the complete story of the famous Mounted Police of Pennsylvania, illustrated with a mass of accurate narrative and re-enforced with statistics. The occasion of its writing was a personal experience—the cold-blooded murder of Sam Howell, a fine young American workingman, a carpenter by trade, near Miss Mayo's country home in New York. The circumstances of this murder could not have been more skilfully arranged had they been specially designed to illustrate the weakness and folly of the ancient, out-grown engine to which most states in the Union, even yet, look for the enforcement of their laws in rural parts. Sam Howell, carrying the pay roll on pay-day morning, gave his life for his honor as gallantly as any soldier in any war. He was shot down, at arm's length range, by four highway men, to whom, though himself unarmed, he would not surrender his trust. Sheriff, deputy sheriffs, constables, and some seventy-five fellow laborers available as sheriff's posse spent hours within a fewhundred feet of the little wood in which the four murderers were known to be hiding, but no arrest was made and the murderers are to-day still at large.
"You will have forgotten all this in a month's time," said Howell's fellow-workmen an hour after the tragedy, to Miss Mayo and her friend Miss Newell, owner of the estate, on the scene. "Sam was only a laboring man, like ourselves. We, none of us, have any protection when we work in country parts."
The remark sounded bitter indeed. But investigation proved it, in principle, only too true. Sam Howell had not been the first, by many hundreds, to give his life because the State had no real means to make her law revered. And punishment for such crimes had been rare. Sam Howell, however, was not to be forgotten, neither was his sacrifice to be vain. From his blood, shed unseen, in the obscurity of a quiet country lane, was to spring a great movement, taking effect first in the state in which he died, and spreading through the Union.
At that time Pennsylvania was the only state of all the forty-seven that had met its just obligations to protect all its people under its laws. Pennsylvania's State Police had been for ten years a body of defenders of justice, "without fear and without reproach". The honest people of the State had recorded its deeds in a long memory of noble service. But, never stooping to advertise itself, never hesitating to incur the enmity of evildoers, it had had many traducers and no historian. There was nothing in print to which the people of other states might turn for knowledge of the accomplishment of the sister commonwealth.
So, in order that the facts might be conveniently available for every American citizen to study from "A" to "Z" and thus to decide intelligently for himself where he wanted his own state to stand, in the matter of fair and full protection to all people, Miss Mayo went to Pennsylvania and embarked on an exhaustive analysis of the workings of the Pennsylvania StatePolice Force, viewed from the standpoint of all parts of the community. Ex-President Roosevelt wrote the preface forJustice To All, the book in which the fruits of this study were finally embodied, and, in the meantime, Miss Newell devoted all her energies to the development of an active and aggressive state-wide movement for a State Police.Justice To All, in this campaign was widely used as a source of authority on which to base the arguments for the case. And in 1917 came Sam Howell's triumph, the passage of the Act creating the Department of New York State Police, now popularly called "the State Troopers".
In the course of collecting the material for this book, Miss Mayo gathered a mass of facts much greater than one volume could properly contain. From this she later took fifteen adventurous stories of actual service in the Pennsylvania Force, of which some, including "Israel Drake" appeared in theSaturday Evening Post, while others came out simultaneously in theAtlantic Monthlyand in theOutlook. All were later collected in a volume calledThe Standard Bearers, which met with a very cordial reception by readers and critics.
During the latter part of the World War, Miss Mayo was in France investigating the war-work of the Y. M. C. A. Her experiences there furnished material for a book from which advance pages appeared in theOutlookin the form of separate stories, "Billy's Hut," "The Colonel's Lady" and others. The purpose of this book was to determine, as closely as possible, the real values, whatever those might be, of the work actually accomplished by the Overseas Y, and to lay the plain truth without bias or color, before the American people.
When the Philippine Islands passed from the possession of Spain to that of the United States, there was a change in more than the flag. Spain had sent soldiers and tax-gatherers to the islands; Uncle Sam sent road-builders and school teachers. One of these school teachers was also a newspaper man; and in a book calledCaybiganhe gave a series of vivid pictures of how the coming generation of Filipinos are taking the first step towards Americanization.
I—Face to Face with the Foe
Returning to his own town after a morning spent in "working up" the attendance of one of his far and recalcitrant barrio-schools, the Maestro of Balangilang was swaying with relaxed muscle and half-closed eyes to the allegretto trot of his little native pony, when he pulled up with a start, wide awake and all his senses on the alert. Through his somnolence, at first in a low hum, but fast rising in a fiendish crescendo, there had come a buzzing sound, much like that of one of the saw-mills of his California forests, and now, as he sat in the saddle, erect and tense, the thing ripped the air in ragged tear, shrieked vibrating into his ear, and finished its course along his spine in delicious irritation.
"Oh, where am I?" murmured the Maestro, blinking; but between blinks he caught the flashing green of the palay fields and knew that he was far from the saw-mills of the Golden State. So he raised his nose to heaven and there, afloat above him in the serene blue, was the explanation. It was a kite, a great locust-shaped kite, darting and swooping in the hot monsoon, and from it, dropping plumb, came the abominable clamor.
"Aha!" exclaimed the Maestro, pointing accusingly at the thin line vaguely visible against the sky-line in a diagonal running from the kite above him ahead to a point in the road. "Aha! there's something at the end of that; there's Attendance at the end of that!"
With which significant remark he leaned forward in the saddle, bringing his switch down with a whizz behind him. The pony gave three rabbit leaps and then settled down to his drumming little trot. As they advanced the line overhead dropped gradually. Finally the Maestro had to swerve the horse aside to save his helmet. He pulled up to a walk, and a few yards further came to the spot where string met earth in the expected Attendance.
The Attendance was sitting on the ground, his legs spread before him in an angle of forty-five degrees, each foot arched in a secure grip of a bunch of cogon grass. These legs were bare as far up as they went, and, in fact, no trace of clothing was reached until the eye met the lower fringe of an indescribable undershirt modestly veiling the upper half of a rotund little paunch; an indescribable undershirt, truly, for observation could not reach the thing itself, but only the dirt incrusting it so that it hung together, rigid as a knight's iron corslet, in spite of monstrous tears and rents. Between the teeth of the Attendance was a long, thick cheroot, wound about with hemp fiber, at which he pulled with rounded mouth. Hitched around his right wrist was the kite string, and between his legs a stick spindled with an extra hundred yards. At intervals he hauled hand-over-hand upon the taut line, and then the landscape vibrated to the buzz-saw song which had so compellingly recalled the Maestro to his eternal pursuit.
As the shadow of the horse fell upon him, the Attendance brought his eyes down from their heavenly contemplation, and fixed them upon the rider. A tremor of dismay, mastered as soon as born, flitted over him; then, silently, with careful suppression of all signs of haste, he reached for a big stone with his little yellow paw, then for a stick lying farther off. Using the stone as a hammer, he drove the stick into the ground with deliberate stroke, wound the string around it with tender solicitude, and then, everything being secure, just as the Maestro was beginning his usual embarrassing question:
"Why are you not at school, eh?"
He drew up his feet beneath him, straightened up like a jack-in-a-box, took a hop-skip-jump, and with a flourish of golden heels, flopped head-first into the roadside ditch's rank luxuriance.
"The little devil!" exclaimed the disconcerted Maestro. He dismounted and, leading his horse, walked up to the side of the ditch. It was full of the water of the last baguio. From the edge of the cane-field on the other side there cascaded down the bank a mad vegetation; it carpeted the sides, arched itself above in a vault, and inside this recess the water was rotting, green-scummed; and a powerful fermentation filled the nostrils with hot fever-smells. In the center of the ditch the broad, flat head of a caribao emerged slightly above the water; the floating lilies made an incongruous wreath about the great horns and the beatifically-shut eyes, and the thick, humid nose exhaled ecstasy in shuddering ripplets over the calm surface.
Filled with a vague sense of the ridiculous, the Maestro peered into the darkness. "The little devil!" he murmured. "He's somewhere in here; but how am I to get him, I'd like to know. Do you see him, eh, Mathusalem?" he asked of the stolid beast soaking there in bliss.
Whether in answer to this challenge or to some other irritant, the animal slowly opened one eye and ponderously let it fall shut again in what, to the heated imagination of the Maestro, seemed a patronizing wink. Its head slid quietly along the water; puffs of ooze rose from below and spread on the surface. Then, in the silence there rose a significant sound—a soft, repeated snapping of the tongue:
"Cluck, cluck."
"Aha!" shouted the Maestro triumphantly to his invisible audience. "I know where you are, you scamp; right behind the caribao; come out of there,pronto, dale-dale!"
But his enthusiasm was of short duration. To thecommanding 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 circumstances 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 formshot 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 passed over his left arm like a knightly shield, made his triumphant entry into the pueblo.
II—Heroism and Reverses
When Maestro Pablo rode down Rizal-y-Washington 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 attitude 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 assistant 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 Assistant 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 knowwhatit 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 Assistant, after some linguistic sparring.
"Eh?" ejaculated 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 Municipal Police.
Neither was Isidro there the next day, nor the next. And it was not till a week had passed 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 unobstructed view of the interior, if it might be called such. As it was, the Municipal 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 passed 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 thedeath 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-balls. 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 class. 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 Assistant 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 Assistant 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 amoment 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 Assistant, 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 splashing 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 circumambient 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 passiveness would be broken by strange sounds from the dilapidated hut at the back of his house. A voice, imitative of that of the Third Assistant who taught the annex, hurledforth questions, which were immediately answered by another voice, curiously like that of Isidro.
Fiercely: "Du yu ssee dde hhett?"
Breathlessly: "Yiss I ssee dde hhett."
Ferociously: "Show me dde hhett."
Eagerly: "Here are dde hhett."
Thunderously: "Gif me dde hhett."
Exultantly: "I gif yu dde hhett."
Then the Maestro would step to the window and look into the hut from which came this Socratic dialogue. And on this wall-less platform which looked much like a primitive stage, a singular action was unrolling itself in the smoky glimmer of a two-cent lamp. The Third Assistant was not there at all; but Isidro was the Third Assistant. And the pupil was not Isidro, but the witless old man who was one of the many sharers of the abode. In the voice of the Third Assistant, Isidro was hurling out the tremendous questions; and, as the old gentleman, who represented Isidro, opened his mouth only to drule betel-juice, it was Isidro who, in Isidro's voice, answered the questions. In his rôle as Third Assistant he stood with legs akimbo before the pupil, a bamboo twig in his hand; as Isidro the pupil, he plumped down quickly upon the bench before responding. The sole function of the senile old man seemed that of representing the pupil while the question was being asked, and receiving, in that capacity, a sharp cut across the nose from Isidro-the-Third-Assistant's switch, at which he chuckled to himself in silent glee and druled ad libitum.
For several nights this performance went on with gradual increase of vocabulary in teacher and pupil. But when it had reached the "Do you see the apple-tree?" stage, it ceased to advance, marked time for a while, and then slowly but steadily began sliding back into primitive beginnings. This engendered in the Maestro a suspicion which became certainty when Isidro entered the schoolhouse one morning just before recess, betweentwo policemen at port arms. A rapid scrutiny of the roll-book showed that he had been absent a whole week.
"I was at the river cleaning my trousers," answered Isidro when put face to face with this curious fact.
The Maestro suggested that the precious pantaloons which, by the way, had been mysteriously embellished by a red stripe down the right leg and a green stripe down the left leg, could be cleaned in less than a week, and that Saturday and Sunday were days specially set aside in the Catechismo of the Americanos for such little family duties.
Isidro understood, and the nightly rehearsals soon reached the stage of:
"How menny hhetts hev yu?"
"I hevtenhhetts."
Then came another arrest of development and another decline, at the end of which Isidro again making his appearance flanked by two German needle-guns, caused a blush of remorse to suffuse the Maestro by explaining with frigid gravity that his mother had given birth to a little pickaninny-brother and that, of course, he had had to help.
But significant events in the family did not stop there. After birth, death stepped in for its due. Isidro's relatives began to drop off in rapid sequence—each demise demanding three days of meditation in retirement—till at last the Maestro, who had had the excellent idea of keeping upon paper a record of these unfortunate occurrences, was looking with stupor upon a list showing that Isidro had lost, within three weeks, two aunts, three grandfathers, and five grandmothers—which, considering that an actual count proved the house of bereavement still able to boast of seventeen occupants, was plainly an exaggeration.
Following a long sermon from the Maestro in which he sought to explain to Isidro that he must always tell the truth for sundry philosophical reasons—a statement which the First Assistant tactfully smoothed to something within range ofcredulity by translating it that one must not lie toAmericanos, becauseAmericanosdo not like it—there came a period of serenity.
III—The Triumph
There came to the Maestro days of peace and joy. Isidro was coming to school; Isidro was learning English. Isidro was steady, Isidro was docile, Isidro was positively so angelic that there was something uncanny about the situation. And with Isidro, other little savages were being pruned into the school-going stage of civilization. Helped by the police, they were pouring in from barrio and hacienda; the attendance was going up by leaps and bounds, till at last a circulative report showed that Balangilang had passed the odious Cabancalan with its less strenuous school-man, and left it in the ruck by a full hundred. The Maestro was triumphant; his chest had gained two inches in expansion. When he met Isidro at recess, playing cibay, he murmured softly: "You little devil; you were Attendance personified, and I've got you now." At which Isidro, pausing in the act of throwing a shell with the top of his head at another shell on the ground, looked up beneath long lashes in a smile absolutely seraphic.
In the evening, the Maestro, his heart sweet with content, stood at the window. These were moonlight nights; in the grassy lanes the young girls played graceful Spanish games, winding like garlands to a gentle song; from the shadows of the huts came the tinkle-tinkle of serenading guitars and yearning notes of violins wailing despairing love. And Isidro, seated on the bamboo ladder of his house, went through an independent performance. He sang "Good-night, Ladies," the last song given to the school, sang it in soft falsetto, with languorous drawls, and never-ending organ points, over and over again, till it changed character gradually, dropping into a wailing minor, an endless croon full of obscure melancholy of a race that dies.
"Goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies; goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies; goo-oo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies-ies," he repeated and repeated, over and over again, till the Maestro's soul tumbled down and down abysses of maudlin tenderness, and Isidro's chin fell upon his chest in a last drawling, sleepy note. At which he shook himself together and began the next exercise, a recitation, all of one piece from first to last syllable, in one high, monotonous note, like a mechanical doll saying "papa-mama."
"Oh-look-et-de-moon-she-ees-shinin-up-theyre-oh-mudder-shelook-like-a-lom-in-de-ayre-lost-night-she-was-smalleyre-on-jooslike-a-bow-boot-now-she-ees-biggerr-on-rrraon-like-an-O."
"Oh-look-et-de-moon-she-ees-shinin-up-theyre-oh-mudder-shelook-like-a-lom-in-de-ayre-lost-night-she-was-smalleyre-on-jooslike-a-bow-boot-now-she-ees-biggerr-on-rrraon-like-an-O."
Then a big gulp of air and again:
"Oh-look-et-de-moon-she-ees-shinin-up-theyre,——" etc.
An hour of this, and he skipped from the lyric to the patriotic, and then it was: