"I-loof-dde-name-off-Wash-ing-ton,I-loof-my-coontrrree-tow,I-loof-dde-fleg-dde-dear-owl-fleg,Off-rrid-on-whit-on-bloo-oo-oo!"
"I-loof-dde-name-off-Wash-ing-ton,I-loof-my-coontrrree-tow,I-loof-dde-fleg-dde-dear-owl-fleg,Off-rrid-on-whit-on-bloo-oo-oo!"
By this time the Maestro was ready to go to bed, and long in the torpor of the tropic night there came to him, above the hum of the mosquitoes fighting at the net, the soft, wailing croon of Isidro, back at his "Goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies."
These were days of ease and beauty to the Maestro, and he enjoyed them the more when a new problem came to give action to his resourceful brain.
The thing was: For three days there had not been one funeral in Balangilang.
In other climes, in other towns, this might have been a source of congratulation, perhaps, but not in Balangilang. There were rumours of cholera in the towns to the north, and the Maestro, as President ofthe Board of Health, was on the watch for it. Five deaths a day, experience had taught him, was the healthy average for the town; and this sudden cessation of public burials—he could not believe that dying had stopped—was something to make him suspicious.
It was over this puzzling situation that he was pondering at the morning recess, when his attention was taken from it by a singular scene.
The "batas" of the school were flocking and pushing and jolting at the door of the basement, which served as stable for the municipal carabao. Elbowing his way to the spot, the Maestro found Isidro at the entrance, gravely taking up an admission of five shells from those who would enter. Business seemed to be brisk; Isidro had already a big bandana handkerchief bulging with the receipts, which were now overflowing into a great tao hat, obligingly loaned him by one of his admirers, as one by one those lucky enough to have the price filed in, feverish curiosity upon their faces.
The Maestro thought it might be well to go in also, which he did without paying admission. The disappointed gatekeeper followed him. The Maestro found himself before a little pink-and-blue tissue-paper box, frilled with rosettes.
"What have you in there?" asked the Maestro.
"My brother," answered Isidro, sweetly.
He cast his eyes to the ground and watched his big toe drawing vague figures in the earth, then, appealing to the First Assistant, who was present by this time, he added, in the tone of virtue whichwillbe modest:
"Maestro Pablo does not like it when I do not come to school on account of a funeral, so I brought him [pointing to the little box] with me."
"Well, I'll be——," was the only comment the Maestro found adequate at the moment.
"It is my little pickaninny brother," went on Isidro, becoming alive to the fact that he was a centre of interest; "and he died last night of the great sickness."
"The great what?" ejaculated the Maestro, who had caught a few words.
"The great sickness," explained the Assistant. "That is the name by which these ignorant people call the cholera."
For the next two hours the Maestro was very busy.
Firstly he gathered the "batas" who had been rich enough to attend Isidro's little show and locked them up—with the impresario himself—in the little town jail close by. Then, after a vivid exhortation upon the beauties of boiling water and reporting disease, he dismissed the school for an indefinite period.After which, impressing the two town prisoners, now temporarily out of home, he shouldered Isidro's pretty box, tramped to the cemetery, and directed the digging of a grave six feet deep. When the earth had been scraped back upon the lonely little object, he returned to town and transferred the awe-stricken playgoers to his own house, where a strenuous performance took place.
Tolio, his boy, built a most tremendous fire outside and set upon it all the pots and pans and cauldrons and cans of his kitchen arsenal, filled with water. When these began to gurgle and steam, the Maestro set himself to stripping the horrified bunch in his room; one by one he threw the garments out of the window to Tolio, who, catching them, stuffed them into the receptacles, poking down their bulging protest with a big stick. Then the Maestro mixed an awful brew in an old oilcan, and, taking the brush which was commonly used to sleek up his little pony, he dipped it generously into the pungent stuff and began an energetic scrubbing of his now absolutely panic-stricken wards. When he had done this to his satisfaction and thoroughly to their discontent, he let them put on their still steaming garments, and they slid out of the house, aseptic as hospitals.
Isidro he kept longer. He lingered over him with loving and strenuous care, and after he had himexternally clean proceeded to dose him internally from a little red bottle. Isidro took everything—the terrific scrubbing, the exaggerated dosing, the ruinous treatment of his pantaloons—with wonder-eyed serenity.
When all this was finished, the Maestro took the urchin into the dining-room and, seating him on his best bamboo chair, he courteously offered him a fine, dark perfecto.
The next instant he was suffused with the light of a new revelation. For, stretching out his hard little claw to receive the gift, the boy had shot at him a glance so mild, so wistful, so brown-eyed, filled with such mixed admiration, trust, and appeal, that a a queer softness had risen in the Maestro from somewhere down in the regions of his heel, up and up, quietly, like the mercury in the thermometer, till it had flowed through his whole body and stood still, its high-water mark a little lump in his throat.
"Why, Lord bless us-ones, Isidro," said the Maestro, quietly. "We're only a child, after all, a mere baby, my man. And don't we like to go to school?"
"Señor Pablo," asked the boy, looking up softly into the Maestro's still perspiring visage, "Señor Pablo, is it true that there will be no school because of the great sickness?"
"Yes, it is true," answered the Maestro. "No school for a long, long time."
Then Isidro's mouth began to twitch queerly, and, suddenly throwing himself full length upon the floor, he hurled out from somewhere within him a long, tremulous wail.
Out of the deadly stupor that encased him as a leaden coffin, Burke started with a gurgling cry. He thought that somebody was driving a red-hot poker into his eyeballs. He found only that the flaming globe of the rising sun had just emerged over the lorcha's bow bulwarks and was burrowing his face with its feverish rays. He rolled clumsily down the sloping deck to a spot where a flap of dirty sail gave shade and there he lay weakly on his back, motionless.
The change gave him little comfort. His eyes throbbed hotly, his throat was as if scraped raw, and his mouth was fevered. A circle of iron seemed riveted around his head and his whole body vibrated to a mad dance of all his nerves. At last he could stand it no longer. He sat up and looked about him desperately, then crawled to the scuppers and picked up a flask lying there. He held it up against the sun. It was empty. With a curse he hurled it into diamond-dust against the bulwarks.
He sat there a moment, glassy-eyed, then rose witha trembling effort and groped aft to the cabin. He had to kick a mangy dog out of the way and to step over a squalid baby, but finally he fell on his knees in a corner and eagerly searched beneath the bamboo bench that followed the wall on three sides. He rolled a dirty bundle out of the way and pulled a demijohn toward him. He lowered the mouth tentatively till a few drops of the fiery white beno wet the palm of his hand, then, with a cry between a sob and a snarl, like that of a starving dog closing in on a bone, he raised the jug to his lips and drained the dregs in four big gulps. His trembling fingers opened and the demijohn fell to the floor with a crash.
A faint colour came to his cheeks and his body straightened. He searched his pockets with feverish fingers and drew out a soiled cigarette paper and a pinch of tobacco. He rolled a cigarette, lit it, and went out on the deck. A breath of wind, sweet with the fruity smell of crude sugar, struck him in the face, and he noticed for the first time what had been true since his awakening—that the lorcha had come to a standstill and that the white roofs of Manila were glistening before him.
The sight did not seem to quicken him into action. He strolled down the deck and sat on the bulwarks, his legs dangling above the quay. He inhaled the smoke deeply two or three times, then his backhumped and his eyes narrowed like those of a purring cat.
This lethargy of bliss did not last long. Slowly something forced itself into it with the insistence of a question mark. On the quay almost beneath his feet, there were four long, black boxes, ranged symmetrically in a row, each with its long, black cover by its side. At first they said nothing to his half-stupid contemplation, but gradually they took on something mysterious and awesome. They were so regular, so oblong, so respectable; they stood so gapingly, so alertly open, that suddenly a little shudder thrilled up along his spine. Ten feet away, rigid and alert, a big Met. policeman stood, looking along the quay with patiently expectant eyes. Burke was on the point of calling out a question when his attention was drawn by another scene.
A little rosy pig trotted squealing down the deck with a fierce little boy after it. It bumped the bulwark beneath Burke, and the vibration caused him to look down. The boy had the pig by the tail. The boy was pulling one way and the pig the other; they were of equal strength, so that for a second they were fixed in a plastic group. Struggling impotently, the boy turned his big black eyes up to the man in mute appeal, and the big black eyes suddenly recalled to Burke two other such eyes in just such a little brownface, and these big black eyes became a measure of the road that Burke had travelled the last three years, a road he liked not to contemplate. So he was turning from the unpleasant scene when the boy let go the tail and fell back, rigid.
Burke looked down upon the stark little form with a frown of perplexity and distrust. He slid himself along the bulwark till a few feet away, then ran his eyes up along the mainmast.
At the peak, a yellow flag was smacking in the wind.
His eyes dropped to the boxes on the quay. They were coffins.
He understood. The cholera had crept upon the lorcha before it had left Vigan, and all the way down the coast it had been doing its dread work about him, plunged in the oblivion of his solitary orgy.
There had been seventy people on the lorcha when it had left Vigan; and there were still a half-hundred. They were huddled forward, a squalid, rancid, and coloured group, their eyes wistfully set upon a black pot vibrating upon a fire of small sticks. They were from the famine district of Vigan and had not eaten for a long time, but their attention was not solely upon the vessel holding their handful of rice. At times they threw black looks toward the quay. Fearwas upon them; fear, not of the impalpable Death hovering about them, but fear of the White Man's Quarantine as represented by the big, passive policeman standing there like a menace; the White Man's Quarantine, ready to clutch them at the first sign of disease and tear them off to its den, to a fearful and ever-mysterious fate.
Burke looked at them, then pointed at the boy at his feet, but they seemed to see nothing. He sprang to the deck and he shouted. They turned their heads, scowled indifferently at the little stretched body, then their eyes returned to the black kettle quivering on the fire.
"Here, here, that won't do," cried Burke, all the maudlin softness out of his face, as he marched upon the group. "Get up, you hound!" he thundered, kicking the nearest man. "Get up, there! And you, too," he added, cuffing another. "Get up and take care of the kid!"
He laid about him furiously for a moment, then his rage oozed out of him and he stood silent and at loss. For the resistance offered him was unlike any he had ever met. The men did not budge; they took the blows like blocks of wood, remaining as they were, without a tremor, their eyes glowing sullenly at the deck between their knees; and the passiveness of that resistance was so monstrously powerful that Burkefelt his throat tighten in a rageful, childish impulse to break out weeping.
On a box, a little apart from the crowd, there sat a fat, sleek, pale-yellow personage. He observed the scene through his narrow eyes with the arrogantly skeptical air of the Chino mestizo. His falsetto voice now broke the silence.
"Porque no Usted?" he said, suavely, while his eyes narrowed to a line with a gleam in it. "Why not you?"
Burke opened his mouth, left it open for a good second, then shut it again with a grinding of teeth.
"By God, I'll do it," he muttered, as he turned away.
He went to the boy, made a movement as if to pick him up, hesitated, stood irresolute for a moment, then, with a blinding flash of resolution, such as in the past had carried him off into postures of which others said resounding things and of which he himself was vaguely ashamed, he stooped quickly and whisked up the little body into his arms. He crossed the deck, and as he passed his old army blanket, lying still open on the floor, he picked it up and wrapped it about the boy; then he laid the whole burden down in a sheltered spot against the cabin. A sudden, springy alertness had seized his body, and beneath the pussy alcoholic flesh of his face had sprung tightropy lines not yet corroded. He tore off the light camisa and pantaloons and began rubbing the stiffened limbs. He rubbed with an energy almost savage, and he felt under his fingers the stark flesh loosen and warm up and live again. The glazed eyes softened, the lids closed slowly, and they reopened with the light of life beneath them.
And then it was worse. Burke sprang to his feet. His bloated face took on the colour of his khaki jacket and beads of perspiration welled up about his lips. Then his eyebrows snapped down in one black line, and his lower jaw advanced till it almost crushed out the double chin. For the next hour he worked with concentrated rage.
A thunder of wheels over the cobbles of the quay froze him into a listening attitude. The noise stopped in a creaking of brakes, and Burke rose slowly, stretching his body to full length. He walked to the bulwarks and looked out. A big, black wagon was standing by. From it two men alighted, putting on great rubber gloves. Burke came down the gang-plank, bearing the boy in his arms. "Hurry up, he may pull through," he said. They placed the little form in the wagon and rumbled off to the heavy trot of the weary horses. The Met. carelessly took a position between Burke and the street, but this was not necessary. Burke looked down at the coffins, raisedhis head, took a big gulp of fresh air, and walked back up the plank.
Ten minutes later a light buggy drove up. An officer with a brass cross on the collar of his khaki jacket sprang out and walked aboard.
Burke went to his feet and his hand rose to his hat in military salute. "Good-morning, sir," he said.
The officer's eyes wandered over the boat, taking in all the details swiftly, then came back to the man standing there at attention. He looked at the bloated face, with its ruins of strength beneath; at the blood-shot eyes, with their remnant of calm, blue light; at the great, corroded body, with its something yet elastic.
"Jerry Burke!" he said.
"Glad you remember me," said the man, with a slight sarcasm in his voice.
The officer looked at him again, with a long, sweeping glance that took in the bloated face, the blood-shot eyes, the twisted mouth, the dirty, ragged collar, the greasy jacket, the trembling, clutching hands, the corkscrewed trousers, the heelless shoes—the whole abject picture of human degradation there before him.
"And that's what you have become," he said, at length.
Jerry did not answer.
"Why the devil didn't you go home with the Volunteers?" asked the officer, angrily.
Jerry's lips trembled.
"It had got too bad by that time," he answered, at length.
"And now?"
"You can see."
The officer paced the deck.
"Who took care of that boy?" he asked, suddenly, turning upon Jerry with a snarl.
"I did," answered the latter, surprised into acknowledgment.
The officer went back to his pacing. At the tenth turn he stopped short, pivoted on his heel, and faced Burke.
"You were a man once, weren't you?" he asked.
"I suppose so," answered Jerry, hanging his head. "At least, you ought to know," he added, a little bitterly.
"Well, do you want to be a man again?"
Jerry was looking at the deck. He raised his eyes slowly till they plunged into the surgeon's.
"Can you do it?" he asked, steadily. "I can't!"
The officer's manner softened.
"Well, here's the matter. I'm short of Health men. I need somebody on this derelict. You are the man; you're in quarantine, anyway."
Jerry waited for more.
"This afternoon the lorcha will be towed behind the breakwater. She'll be in strict quarantine. You'll be in charge. I'll give you disinfectants and medicines. You'll keep the boat clean, and you'll attend the sick. Whenever somebody tumbles over, run up the yellow flag and we'll come after him as soon as we can. Every morning I'll come around and see how you are getting along."
"How long will it last?" asked Jerry.
"Don't know. Till they're all gone, perhaps. There must be five days' quarantine after each case. If they die close together, it will be short. If they go five days apart, it may last six months. Six months to make a man of you, Jerry; will you do it?"
"It will be hell," said Jerry, with a tense smile.
"It will be hell," acquiesced the surgeon. "You must work, Jerry."
"I'll do it," said Jerry.
That afternoon the lorcha was towed behind the breakwater, and at sunset a woman who was lighting the fire for the evening meal whirled on her heels and slapped the deck with the whole length of her body. Jerry ran up the yellow flag, but the night had dropped like a thunderbolt, and it was not seen from shore; so he cared for her till morning. She was oldand knotted and decrepit; her teeth were gone, and she was loathesomely unclean, but he worked over her with rigid patience, not ceasing for a moment, for the Demon was already clutching at him. At dawn a boat pulled up and the woman was lowered into it, still alive.
Then the sun rose, blinding hot, and Jerry paced the deck furiously. The groups of sleepers on deck were disentangling beneath the stinging announcement of the new day, and they scattered in awe before the strange Americano, tugging among them with great steps that were almost leaps. At last a little steamer appeared at the mouth of the river; it slid along on the other side of the breakwater, turned at the end, and chugged alongside the lorcha. It was the doctor's launch.
Burke stepped to the bulwarks and looked down at the boat wallowing in the cross-seas. Huntington was standing on the rail, his right hand against the side of the lorcha, his body giving easily to every shock; and Burke gazed hungry-eyed at his cool, alert demeanour.
"Well, how goes it?" asked the surgeon.
"One case," said Burke, calmly.
"That means five days more. What is it?"
"A woman; she's at the hospital now," he answered, in the same rigid, subdued tone.
"And you?" asked the surgeon.
"For God's sake," cried Burke, his voice breaking into frenzy, "give me something to do, something to do!"
"All right, old man," answered Huntington, showing no surprise. "Throw us a rope."
Burke threw a rope. A case was tied to it and hauled on deck.
"Chlorodyne," announced the surgeon.
The rope was thrown back. A demijohn was hauled up, then another, and another.
"Carbolic," shouted Huntington. "Disinfect the boat."
"All right; good-by," said Burke.
The doctor waved his hand, and the launch churned away.
The day was heavy with heat. The wind had died, the sea was glazed, and the tin roofs of Manila glistened white. A torpor fell from the brazen heavens, and all day Burke struggled beneath it in a frenzy of toil. When he had cleaned the boat thoroughly, he arranged the little cabin into a hospital. Almost immediately it had its occupant. A boy was down. Jerry laid him on his cot, pried his teeth open with his knife, and poured some chlorodyne between them; then walked to the mainmast, and soon to the watchers on shore the leprous banner rose against the goryhues of the setting sun. The boat came and took the child away.
When the launch came, in the morning, Burke was standing at the head of the ladder. All the traces of a fearful night were in his face, and yet Huntington's scrutiny found something satisfactory in the man. The old khaki suit had been washed, and hung, still damp, upon his frame.
More medicines and disinfectants, a supply of food and distilled water, several objects, very vulgar and very grim, were passed up, and then the doctor asked:
"Anything you need, old man?"
Burke shook his head in indecisive negative.
"I have you on the pay-roll," added the officer, casually; "assistant inspector; three-and-a-half a day."
Burke dropped his eyes to the deck. Then he blurted out:
"Yes, two khakis."
"All right," said Huntington, rapidly measuring with his eye the frame before him. "Anything else?"
Again an embarrassed silence, then another burst:
"A razor."
"I'll send the things this afternoon," said Huntington, gladder than his voice implied.
Burke went back to his work. After disinfecting his little hospital he executed, with the aid of Tionko,the Chino mestizo, whose oily good will and linguistic ability were fast becoming indispensable, a plot hatched during the sleeplessness of the night. First the men, then the women, were filed into a bath house made of sails and forced to bathe in warm, carbolised water, while their clothes boiled in cauldrons outside. By sunset the passenger list of theBonitawas clean, at least externally.
Then the usual commotion forward told Burke that his work had begun again. This time it was a child-mother, a pitiful, little black-eyed thing, with a squalling whitish baby at her breast. It was too late for the shore boat, so he cared for them. At midnight the baby died and, two hours later, the mother; they lay side by side and, of the two, it was the mother's face that looked the child's, and the baby's the withered old. At daybreak the boat took them away.
Weeks followed, filled with the same stagnancy of horror. The work had settled down to flat routine and life became a fearful monotony as day after day poured its brazen heat upon the empested boat. The only element of excitement lay in the ebb and flow of disease. On some days two or three, once even five, fell, and Burke's hospital over-filled and poured out its burden upon the deck; at other times there wouldbe periods of three or four days without a case, and once the expiration of the mystical five days which was to free the lorcha from its imprisonment was almost reached when two men were suddenly felled as if by the same thunderbolt. Burke's worst periods were when the hospital was empty. On such days the routine of his duties took him only a little past noon, and then would come the full bitterness of the struggle. He found something to do and worked with teeth set, but his hands trembled, his nerves were tortured, and his eyes felt as if being pulled out of their sockets.
Then in the maddening monotony of this life there crept another element.
Before lying down to his snatch of horror-broken sleep, Jerry was accustomed to take a plunge over the side, although the waters of the bay were full of sharks. One night, as he was preparing to climb back upon the lorcha, he reached in vain for the rope that he had left dangling for the purpose. It had been pulled up just out of his grasp. Treading water by the black hull, Burke shouted repeatedly, but a sleep deep as the night that wrapped the vessel seemed to have its inhabitants, and his cries got no response.
"Listen," finally said Burke, talking calmly in the silence. "Listen. You know how I can swim. If that rope does not come down in ten seconds, I'll swim to the big army boat to the right there. I'llcome back with fifty soldiers, and we'll hang you all to the mast. Remember, the sharks do not touch me."
As mysteriously as it had been raised, the rope dropped softly till its end touched the water. When Burke, dripping, sprang on deck, a heavy silence was upon the boat, broken only by the hoarse breathing of the sleepers, spread about in limp attitudes like the dead upon the battlefield.
A few days later, as he took up the demijohn in which he kept his drinking water, brought distilled from shore, he found the cork askew. He was always careful to shut the vessel hermetically, and a sudden suspicion made him turn the demijohn over and pour its contents out upon the deck. The water gurgled out, and when the vessel was empty Jerry found a little piece of cloth sticking to the inside of the gullet. He drew it out, and an icy shiver ran up his spine. He held in his hand a little square of red and yellow calico. The last cholera victim of theBonita, a woman, had worn a sarong of red and yellow calico.
He threw the demijohn overboard, and when he had obtained a new one from shore he slept against it at night.
Burke began to observe his crew, and this gave him little satisfaction. Beneath the oriental passiveness, malevolence was boiling. His orders, it is true, were obeyed; but it was with heaviness of movementand dulness of eye; and in the periods of rest, sullen, squatting groups formed, that broke out in whisperings and oblique looks, to be scattered usually by the bowing, smirking, oily Chino, Tionko. And of all the ominous signs, there was none that displeased Burke more than the behaviour of the Chino—this evident eagerness to save the face of things, to glaze over the dark working beneath with a serene surface.
They were on one of these periods of immunity from disease which drew all nerves tense. Three days had passed, then four; they entered upon the fifth. Twenty-four hours more would set theBonitafree from the iron clutches of the quarantine. That day was a bad one. The solidarity in misfortune that had bound the unfortunates of the lorcha broke into a ferocious individualism. All work ceased that morning. The population of theBonitadivided into groups; these segregated more and more as the day advanced, till finally each man was squatting alone, with glaring threat in his eyeballs. God help the one who should come down; the execration of the whole boat was already focussed upon him.
At last the brazen day melted into the purple evening and night came, with a trembling crescent of moon in the sky and a horizon vibrating in sheet lightning. Burke prepared himself for what waslikely to be his last night of vigil. He lit a lantern and began pacing to and fro to keep awake, usually an easy thing for him to do. Toward midnight, he stopped and leaned against the mainmast, gazing at the weird flashing of light at the horizon. Insensibly he went asleep. His head fell on his breast, his legs sagged beneath him, and he slid softly down till he sat upon the deck, his back against the mast.
Suddenly he found himself sitting bolt upright, all his faculties stiffened in alarm. The turbulent fancies of his slumber had merged into something tense and sharp as reality, and his ears still rang with low moans, a scurry of feet, and a strangled cry. Now that he was fully awake, however, the night was heavy with silence, only the tide bubbling and tinkling and crooning along the flanks of the boat. He lay back a moment, but his senses had been too acutely wrung, and, picking up the lantern, he walked forward.
Everything was quiet. Indistinct forms were stretched about the deck, and the breathing of the sleepers rhythmed the silence. Near the anchor, Burke recognised Tionko. The Chino's chest was rising and falling in deep, regular movement; he moaned inarticulately as Burke bent over him with his lantern.
Burke was turning away when, in the movement, the light of the lantern fell upon the rope up whichhe had clambered on the night of the first mysterious attack against him. Although not used any more, it had been left hanging over the side, and now, as Burke's eyes fell upon it, in the glare of the light, it was all a-tremble and a-thrill, like a live thing. Mumbling sleepily about the strength of the tide, Burke gave it a pull. A resistance met him, as that of a line with a fish hooked at the end. Puzzled, he went over the side, holding to the bulwark and bending down as far as he could, and then, as he gave another tug, two thin arms clutching the rope, and then a livid face, bobbed up slowly into the pale moonlight.
Burke let himself down, his feet against the side, his left hand grasping the rope. He bent down, his right hand caught a handful of hair, and he drew up on it. Taking the loose end of the rope, he passed it beneath both limp arms, then, holding it between his teeth, he clambered back to the deck and pulled the whole body up. He sent the rays of his lantern into the face, and recognised it as that of a young boy of the lorcha.
He was still alive, but cholera had him. Burke understood, but it was no time for punishment. He carried the stiffened form to the hospital and for an hour fought with Death; but the shock had been too much for the disease-racked body. When there was nothing left to do, Burke turned back the blanketover the rigid face, then stood still, his eyes cast down at the deck.
"Tionko," he finally said, as if giving the answer to some problem.
He picked up an iron belaying-pin, bared his arms, and started toward the bow. As he reached the foremast, however, three shadows sprang at him from the darkness ahead. With a sidewise leap he evaded them, then waited, crouched low, with one hand upon the deck. The men scattered in a circle surrounding him, but before they could close in he sprang at one, felled him with the shock of his body, and darted behind the mast, where he stood, waiting.
There was a moment of hesitation among the bravos, and they retreated toward the bow. Burke left the mast to peer into the darkness; a knife whizzed by his head, and he sprang back to his shelter.
They came forward again, and they were four this time. Burke saw that the defensive would be useless. With one leap he was among them, whacking to right and left with his belaying-pin. A hatchet was raised above his head, but the belaying-pin cracked the wrist that held it and it clattered to the deck. A streak of fire scorched his shoulder, but the badly-aimed dagger dropped as the belaying-pin came down upon its owner's cranium.
And all this time, while he laid about him with instinctive parry and thrust, his eyes were riveted on an indistinct form in the shadow behind, a form from which came a running sound of encouragement, suggestion, command. Suddenly he sprang back, then to one side, then forward—and he had passed the four struggling men. He took two running steps forward, then his body left the deck and shot through the air. With a thud it struck the man in the shadow and crushed him down. Like a cat, Burke was on his feet again. He picked up the body by the waist, held it off at arm's length, brought it back close to him long enough to see Tionko's face in a grin of horror, then his arms distended like great springs and Tionko shot over the bulwarks.
He turned to the others, but they had slunk away in the darkness, and he knew that, the Chino gone, there was no more to fear.
He peered out into the water, and the phosphorescence showed him an indistinct form swimming slowly away. Then it turned back, splashing painfully, and a cracked falsetto voice whined in beggar-like modulations.
"Señor, for the love of Christ, let me on!"
Burke hesitated, and suddenly the thing was settled for him. From the right a phosphorescent flash cut the water in a streak. Swift and luminous as arocket it came, straight toward the splashing form; it struck it, and then the spot burst out in a great bubble of light, in which Burke caught a flash of the Chino, his arms raised to heaven, his mouth distended in abominable fear. There was a hoarse croak, a gurgle, and then the phosphorescence sank slowly and went out in the depths below. A gentle ripple undulated over the darkened surface of the water and broke softly against the flanks of the lorcha.
Burke, dizzied, walked forward. The limp, scattered sleepers were still there as before, but in one corner a man was choking in his breathing, and near the anchor another was vibrating in his sleep in one long, continuous shudder.
There came another period of suspense. One day passed, two days passed, with no cases. The third day came, and Burke's Demon was clutching him.
He had found in the hold some rude native varnish, redolent of crude alcohol, and had brought it up to polish the crude furniture of his hospital; and now he dared not come near it. The bucket stood by the hatch, and Burke was pacing to and fro along the deck like a wild beast. Each time he passed the bucket the pungent odour stung his face, filling his mind with the memory of one of his worst periods ofdegradation and his whole physical being with a madness to wallow back into it.
He fought hard. He knew that he must throw that bucket overboard, so he forced his thoughts upon the act.
"I'll walk twenty times the length of the deck with my mind on that," he muttered to himself.
So, concentrating his brain upon the necessary deed, he began pacing up and down. At the twentieth turn he walked toward the bucket and stopped suddenly, livid as death, his eyes fixed stupidly upon his hands.
In his right hand he held a stick, a little, pliable bamboo stick.
He tried to remember picking it up; he could not. The act had been not of the will, of the will that was fighting for mastery; it had been forced by that other Power, that Power which possessed his nerves, his bones, his flesh, the Power he was seeking to kill.
"I will begin again," he muttered.
At the tenth turn he stopped short, and a cold sweat welled up upon his body. He had another stick in his hand.
And then, slowly, haltingly, but irresistibly, he approached the bucket. With somnambulant rigidity he placed the stick in the viscous stuff and slowly rotated it once, as if tentatively; then once more,determinedly; then again, with a sort of rage. The heavy fluid followed the stick, turned on itself faster and faster. A little whirlpool formed in the center. Burke's eyes fixed themselves upon it, and silently the little whirlpool sucked down all that was strong in him.
The stick scraped along the sides of the bucket; the liquid circled swiftly. In a minute, in the depression at the center, a black spot formed. The stick turned faster. The black spot grew; finally it was a little round ball that sank to the bottom. The stick whirled around madly. The little ball enlarged. From all sides the like molecules rushed to it, rounding it out as a snowball that is rolled downhill. At last it was like a small cannon-ball. Burke bared his arms, plunged them into the bucket, drew out the black, pitchy solid and threw it overboard.
He rushed back, and his hollowed hand scooped up a few drops of the now-white liquid and slapped it to his lips. The taste drove him mad, and, dropping down on hands and knees like a dog, he put his lips to the side of the bucket and drew in long gulpfuls.
A little later the natives were all gathered at the stern, looking with wonder upon the strange actions of the Americano.
He was squatting on deck, the bucket between his knees. At close intervals he raised it to his lips andpoured the awful contents down his throat. Then he hugged the bucket, sobbing softly like a child being consoled after suffering, and between his laughs and his tears he gurgled to himself an endless story, full of tearful self-compassion and sobbing, endearing terms, long and soft and meaningless as the croon of a lonely babe.
Toward night he fell into a heavy stupor and lay there on his back, his face to the moonlight, and the tears drying on his cheeks.
In the morning, when the doctor's launch churned out of the river, it had in tow the boat of theBonitafilled with the people of the lorcha. They had been caught by a patrol boat at midnight just as they were on the point of landing on the Luneta.
The launch pulled up against the lorcha, and Huntington sprang aboard. Burke rose from the deck and waited for him. He was hollow and drooping, as if the bony frame had been removed from his body, and his eyes were dead.
A look told the doctor what had happened.
"Yes," said Burke, corroborating the surgeon's unexpressed thought.
Huntington paced the deck.
"Well," he said, finally, "you did well to stand it that long. Next time it will be longer."
Burke did not answer.
"We have to begin again."
"Begin again," echoed Burke, mechanically.
"You'll do it, old man," said Huntington, confidently.
"My God, Huntington," said Burke, in a whisper; "my God, Huntington, I killed Tionko; I threw him to the sharks, and now, look at me!"
When the launch had left, Burke crouched down in a corner against the bulwarks, and there he sat the morning long, his eyes glued stupidly to the deck.
At noon he suddenly got up, walked firmly to the mainmast, and ran up the yellow flag.
When the boat came he went down the ladder and sat himself in the sternsheets. The man in charge looked at him inquiringly.
"Pull away," he said, shortly; "I've got it."
That by teaching the Filipinos the American branch of the English language it was expected to transfuse into them the customs, ideas, and ideals of the speakers of that tongue, the Maestro vaguely knew. But that this method would meet with the vigorous and somewhat eccentric success that it did in Señorita Constancia de la Rama, the Visayan young lady whom he had trained to take charge of his girls' school, he had not dreamed. So, taken unaware by the news, he flopped down on a chair with a low whistle that finished off into something like a groan as the situation presented itself to him in its full beauty. And then, taken by that perverse desire which, in time of catastrophe, impels us to rehearse all of the elements that go to make our woe particularly unbearable, he began to question the urchin who had brought the note from Mauro Ledesma, one of the native assistant teachers of the boys' school.
"Señor Ledesma gave you that note, Isidro?"
"Yes, Señor Pablo, the little Filipino maestro gave it to me," answered Isidro, careful in his discrimination of masters.
"Where was he; in the house?"
"Oh, yes, Señor Pablo, he was in the house—he was altogether inside of the house!"
The Maestro eyed the boy with sudden suspicion. He thought that he had detected a joyous note in the statement of the native teacher's whereabouts. But Isidro's return glance was liquid with innocence.
"And he called you?" went on the Maestro.
"Oh, no, Señor Pablo, he did not call me! Ambrosio, his muchacho, called me! Señor Ledesma, he stayed inside!"
Again the Maestro started, for Isidro's sentence formation seemed suspiciously appreciative. But the little face he searched was wooden.
"He called you from the door?"
"From the window, Señor Pablo. The door, it was locked. He called this way—" (here Isidro described with his right arm a furious moulinet). "He said, 'sh-sh-sh-sh-sh,' and then he moved his arm this way—" (again the moulinet), "and then he stopped his arm and moved his finger this way—" (here Isidro held up his hand before his face and moved the index finger several times toward his nose in a gesture full of mysterious significance).
"And then you went in?"
"Yes, Señor Pablo. They opened the door, oh, just a little, like that—" (Isidro placed his hands palm to palm with an interstice between them justwide enough to allow the wiggling through of a very lean serpent), "and I went in and they shut the door again and put the bed up against it."
"Well, well; and Maestro Ledesma, he was inside?"
"Oh, yes, Señor Pablo, he was inside. He was writing this letter. And I think Señor Ledesma is very sick, Señor Pablo, because when he was writing he was all the time saying, 'Madre de Dios' and 'Jesus-Maria-Joseph!' and making noises like this."
And Isidro convulsed himself in an effort that resulted in a vague imitation of the wail of a carabao calf.
"And he gave you the letter when he had finished?"
"Yes, Señor Pablo, that is the letter," said Isidro, pointing to the note on the table which had been the Maestro's before-breakfast thunderbolt. "He said, 'run and give this letter to Maestro Pablo'; and so I went, but I did not go out by the door."
"You didn't?"
"No, Señor Pablo. Maestro Ledesma, he said I must not go out by the door. So they tied a rope around me, and I went out by the window, in back, and I ran here, and I did not stop to play cibay on the way, Señor Pablo."
But Isidro's virtue was destined to go unrewarded. The Maestro was deep in a re-reading of the disastrous missive:
Much Señor Mine and Revered Teacher and Adviser in my Times of CalamityI beseech you, my venerated Teacher and in many ways Ancestor to come to my succor in this my most deplorable state, and pull away from me the blackness of Despair that is at the all-around of me.I am a prisoner in my own house. In fear and trembling I dare not sleep, I dare not eat, and I cannot leave my habitation to go to the school and perform my sacred duties of teaching the ignorant and unhappy youth of my sore-tried country the blessings and deliverance of the great country under the rustling shadows of the stars and spangles which you have come so many miles across the wetness of the sea to pull the black veil of ignorance from our eyes.Your Maestra, the Señorita Constancia de la Rama y Lacson, is camped in my sugar fields, in front of my house, and she will not decamp.With loud threats of vengeance and audacious accusation she declares that she will marry me.But I do not want to marry her, most excellent sir, I do not want to marry your Maestra, the Señorita Constancia de la Rama y Lacson!O sir, my revered Master, I am all alone, my ancestral father and mother being for a few weeks at our other hacienda, and I implore you to save me from this my desperate state. Come to me, oh please, and drive the she-wolf from my door, and you shall ever receive a gentle rain of unspeakable gratitude fromThe Sore Heart ofYour humble PupilAnd BeseecherMauro Ledesma y Goles.P.S. Viva America in Philippines! Viva Philippines in America!M. L. y G.
Much Señor Mine and Revered Teacher and Adviser in my Times of Calamity
I beseech you, my venerated Teacher and in many ways Ancestor to come to my succor in this my most deplorable state, and pull away from me the blackness of Despair that is at the all-around of me.
I am a prisoner in my own house. In fear and trembling I dare not sleep, I dare not eat, and I cannot leave my habitation to go to the school and perform my sacred duties of teaching the ignorant and unhappy youth of my sore-tried country the blessings and deliverance of the great country under the rustling shadows of the stars and spangles which you have come so many miles across the wetness of the sea to pull the black veil of ignorance from our eyes.
Your Maestra, the Señorita Constancia de la Rama y Lacson, is camped in my sugar fields, in front of my house, and she will not decamp.
With loud threats of vengeance and audacious accusation she declares that she will marry me.
But I do not want to marry her, most excellent sir, I do not want to marry your Maestra, the Señorita Constancia de la Rama y Lacson!
O sir, my revered Master, I am all alone, my ancestral father and mother being for a few weeks at our other hacienda, and I implore you to save me from this my desperate state. Come to me, oh please, and drive the she-wolf from my door, and you shall ever receive a gentle rain of unspeakable gratitude from
The Sore Heart ofYour humble PupilAnd BeseecherMauro Ledesma y Goles.
The Sore Heart ofYour humble PupilAnd BeseecherMauro Ledesma y Goles.
P.S. Viva America in Philippines! Viva Philippines in America!M. L. y G.
"Go to school, Isidro," said the Maestro, when he was through, in a voice so weak that the boy looked up quickly, wondering whether everyone was ill that fine, fragrant morning. "Tell Señor Abada to take charge till I come."
The Maestro felt the necessity of some deep, careful thinking. For certainly, of all the difficulties which, in his two years' career, he had alertly fought and conquered, none had ever confronted him of nature so delicate.
It's always when you think that you have at last mastered the problem of this life and evolved a system that promises smooth going the rest of the way that the skies tumble down upon you.
Thus it was with the Maestro. Just when he had brought the school system of his pueblo to the point where, he fondly dreamed, he could sit back and watch it run along the nickel-plated tracks that he had so carefully laid, there came the washout and the promise of wreck.
The blow was a hard one, and for a while, very much in contradiction to his custom, the Maestro buried himself in thought of past achievements and his heart softened toward himself in a great burst of self-compassion.
He thought of the fight, the long, bitter, patient fight, he had had to find a Maestra and get his girls' school started. The hunt for a Maestra, what an Iliad, and what an Odyssey! First the careful canvas of the pueblo, the horror of the chosen at the thought of degrading themselves to the point of teaching in a public school, the rebuffs of parents, the tearful indignation of mothers; then, the pueblo proving impossible, the long rides into the surrounding country, to far haciendas, in search of the longed-for Being! Once he had crossed the swollen Ilog, and had been nearly drowned with his horse, to find the fair one of whom he had heard glowing reports—she was very well educated, si Señor, had been to collegio in Manila for four years, yes, four years; and she could play the piano, ah, divinely, and she could sew and weave jusi, just like the mother of God—to find this marvel deaf, deaf as a post!
And then, suddenly, he had met Her!
His being still thrilled at the memory. He had met her, Constancia de la Rama, at a baile. She was dancing the escupiton, and right away he saw that she was not as the others. The grace of her balancing waist, of the airy arm-gestures was not rounded and timid as that of her sisters—her grace was angular. Her black eyes did not fix a hypothetical point between her shilena-shod little feet; they looked boldly atthose who addressed her. She did not squirm and giggle at compliments, but accepted them freely and boisterously. And the Maestro had the irritating sense of having met her somewhere, sometime, before.
He danced with her. In honour of the Americano, rigidon, escupiton, dreamy waltz had been abolished in favour of a Sousa march played in rag-time. They had danced the two-step together, and with stupor he had found himself led. It was she who determined the length of the glide, the way they should turn, how the cape of chairs should be doubled. And so they had slid along the whole floor in three steps, had whirled like tops, and his final desperate attempt to take command had resulted in a woeful lurch and tangle.
And as she stalked in her long, loose stride toward the dressing-room to readjust her saya, somewhat in distress from the Maestro's last effort, it had suddenly flashed upon him where he had seen her before. He had seen her, not in the Philippines, but in the United States, not as an individual, but as a type. He had seen her type in the co-educational colleges of his own country. She was a co-ed, that's what she was!
When she came out again, he asked her to be his Maestra.
"Forty pesos a month," she said, dreamily. "And you would teach me American?"
"You would have to study English and teach it at the school."
"I will begin Monday," she said.
She had not even asked the consent of her parents. At the time, how pleased he had been at this refreshing independence, and yet, in the light of later events, how ominous it really was!
It was a time of joy. She had attacked her new task with alert energy. From the first the Girl's School had become the envy of the maestros of the whole province. He could see her yet, leading her stolid little brownies in song.
"Chi-rrrries rrri-pa! Chi-rrries rrri-pa! Woo weel buy my chi-rrries rrri-pa!" she tremoloed, in piercing falsetto, beating up a small typhoon with her baton of sugar-cane; "chee-rrries rrri-pa—go on! sing! all too-gidderrr! louderr! sing, I say you!—chee-rrries rrri-pa, chee-rrries rri-pa——!"
And then, charging a little girl, her right arm and index finger stiffened out like a lance:
"Hao menny ligs has ddee cao?" she screeched.
"Dee cao has too-a, too-a legs," stammered the little brown maiden, annihilated by the sudden attack.
"Ah, 'sus! Hao menny ligs?" she screeched higher, presenting her lance farther down the line.
"Ddee cao hestrrreelegs!"
"Hao menny ligs? Hao menny ligs? Dee cao hes trree ligs? Count! Count! Wan, too-a, trrrree, four! Dee cao hesfourligs. Wow! 'Sus-Maria-Joseph!"
From the first she had taken an ardent liking for all American institutions. The liberty of women especially, as she gleaned it from her readings and from sundry discreet questions put to the Maestro, enchanted her.
"Señor Maestro, in America, the young ladies, they go out in the street, all alone?"
"Well, yes; it is considered all right for them to do so, in the West, at least."
"And they go out all alone?" she repeated, pensively, in the awed tone that we are taught to use in a cathedral or pantheon.
And, a few days later:
"Señor Maestro, in America, the young girls, they go out with young men, all alone?"
"Well, yes; that is—yes; it's considered all right for young people to walk together."
"And they go out, in the evening, when the moon is shining, and walk together?"
"Well, yes, some do. You see, it's very different in America from the Philippines. You see, in America, the young men and women are more like brothers and sisters."
"Oh, they do not marry, then?"
So that the Maestro's feelings, while watching this Americanisation, were somewhat mixed; especially so when the town council came to him in horror-stricken deputation and advised him of the fact that his Maestra was scandalising the pueblo by walking along the river banks with a young man in the evenings. The Maestra was no dreamy theorist. After that the Maestro was more careful in his inoculation of American virus.
"No, sir," said the Maestro, to himself, rising from his chair and stretching, his self-examination finished; "no, sir; since that night the shocked council called on me I've been good. I've been almighty careful not to put new ideas into her blooming young head. I've been the acme of prudence. I've——"
And suddenly he tumbled back into his chair, and his heart sank slowly down into his heels. For, he remembered, only a few days ago, in the Teachers' class, the subject of leap-year had come up, and his exposition had been—not exclusively astronomical. No, he must admit it, with that deplorable desire to astonish that possesses most of us, he had—well, his account of certain custom had been somewhat coloured, and more emphatic than the custom itself——
"Thunder!" ejaculated the Maestro, a new coldwave showering him. He rushed to the calendar tacked to the wall and turned the pages swiftly.
He stood before the date, petrified.
It was the twenty-ninth of February.
The Maestro seized a cap upon the table, plumped it upon his head, and hop-skipped-jumped down the stairs. "Action, action," his whole being cried. He glanced into the girls' schoolhouse as he passed. The Second Maestra was sitting apathetically in a chair, her baby at her breast, and the little girls, tight up against each other on their high benches, their hands folded upon their bright patadyons, looked like some little strawberry-hued birds that he had seen once in the window of an animal store, a thousand on one perch. The silence, the inaction of the place hurt him to the core, and the remark that suddenly ripped the somnolent atmosphere was so electric that the Maestra sprang to her feet.
"Do you see dde hhett?" she said, lamely, pointing to a pear tree on the chart.
But she might have saved herself the trouble. The head from which had come the remark had disappeared from the door. The Maestro was already fifty yards away, eating up the distance with long, nervous strides. He enfiladed a lane, between fields of highsugar cane, and finally came to the little plaza where throned the Ledesma nipa-mansion. The doors, the shutters were closed tight, as if to shut out the pestilence, and there was no sound, no movement, no sign of life. The Maestro looked about him carefully, then began to walk along the edge of the open space, peering along the vistas between the rows of cane. Soon he came upon the Maestra.
The first glance told him the magnitude of the task ahead; for the little recess in the canes had all the signs of cool and determined occupation. A red-and-white patate was spread upon the ground. On one of the corners were carefully heaped a few of the Señorita's worldly goods—a camphor-wood chest, the size of a doll's trunk; a piña camisa, tied up in a bandana handkerchief; and another handkerchief bulging and running out with a few handfuls of palay. Off the mat, on a little fire of twigs, the breakfast rice was bubbling in a big black pot.
The Maestra was seated in the centre of the mat, her limbs drawn up beneath her bright patadyon in a certain kittenish grace. She was in morning négligé and her loose hair fell down over her shoulders in a glistening black cascade. As the Maestro approached her from behind, he heard a rustling of paper, and, looking down over her head, he saw that she was reading. The Maestro blushed, not at his indiscretion,but at sight of big black lines announcing the name of the publication. The Maestra was reading theHearth Companion. With remorse, the Maestro remembered how once, in the heat of his proselytism, he had recommended to all his Filipino teachers to subscribe to American periodicals. It was a bitter backward path that his mind was treading as he went further into this affair, tracing back to his well-meant efforts so many unexpected results.
"Good-morning, Miss de la Rama," he said, gravely.
But she read on for several lines, then, seemingly having come to a satisfactory ending of an exciting crisis, she laid the paper down carefully and, looking up with a sweet smile, "Gooda morrneen, Señor Pablo," she answered.
And in her tone, her smile, there was no fear of disapproval, but rather that bubbling satisfaction which hardly can wait to be congratulated.
"Why are you not at school?" asked the Maestro, severely.
"Ah, de school, de school, yes, de school was very nice," she sighed, with the tenderness one uses to speak of the sweet, gone past. But her interest, plainly, was elsewhere.
"To-day is leapa-year day," she went on, her voice now vibrant with decision; "and I am going to getmarried, Señor Maestro; I am to get married like an American girl; just like an American girl!" she repeated, in glowing exultation.
"Oh!" said the Maestro, with lying fervour, "somebody has asked your hand, Señorita? Let me congratulate you. And who is the lucky fellow?"
"Asked my hand?" cried the Maestra, wonderingly. "No. I said like an American girl. Nobody has asked me the hand. I will marry like an American girl. This is leapa-year day. Just like an American girl!"
"But, gadzooks!" exclaimed the Maestro, at once frightened and horrified by this strange insistence, "American girls don't marry like that. Leap-year, that's just fiction, a legend, a joke. I told you about leap-year the other day; it's just a little joke—yes, that's it, a little joke!"
But the Maestra was proof against American bluff.
"American girls, they all, all marry on leapa-year," she said, severely. "You say so the other day, and all the American books say so. Here is a paper," she said, patting theHearth Companion. "There are in it ten stories about American girls, and they all marry on leapa-year day; all,todasask a gentleman to marry on leapa-year day. It is not a joke."
"But," hinted the Maestro, "maybe Señor Ledesma does not want to marry."
"That does not matter at all," said the Maestra, crisply. "If we will be Americans, we must adopt the American costumbres. There is a story in this paper—it does not matter at all; Señor Ledesma is very bashful, but this is leapa-year day."
Just then the rice rose in a foaming surge and began to trickle down the black rotundity of the pot. The Maestra sprang up with agile grace, and with a few dexterous sweeps of her little feet scattered the fire of twigs. "Will you have some breakfast?" she asked the Maestro, sweetly.
But during this movement the Maestro's brain had been working swiftly, and he had decided upon a change of base.
"Your assistant, Felicia, is becoming a very able teacher," he remarked, nonchalantly.
"Yes, she is a very good teacher," agreed the Maestra; but there was no emphasis on her adjective.
"This morning," went on the Maestro, "she was teaching the children. She said, 'Do you see the hat?' and she pointed to the pear tree."
"'Sus-Maria-Joseph!" exclaimed the Maestra; "she said that? But it is barbarous! The children, they will unlearn all that I learned them! It is—what you call?—it is impossible!"
"Yes," went on the Maestro, seeing that he was on the right track, and using his imagination a bit; "and she told them, 'I has two hats.'"
"'I has? I has?' she said 'I has'? Que barbaridad! Señor Pablo, I will——"
And, dropping her bowl of rice, she started running toward the school, while behind her back the Maestro executed a little jig. His undignified joy, however, lasted but a few seconds. The Maestra came to an abrupt stop, looked down at her garments, and came back slowly.
"I cannot go to school in these clothes," she said, sorrowfully.
"No," admitted the Maestro; "but can you not put on your others?"
The Maestra looked embarrassed.
"Señor Maestro," she confided, "you know my mother; she is very aged, you know, and she does not know American like me, and she dislikes very much American customs——" She hesitated.
"Well?" said the Maestro, not understanding.
"She hates very much American customs, and so she hates the leapa-year custom; and this morning, this morning she told me not to come back to her house, and all my clothes are in the house."
There was a long silence. "Gosh all hemlock,"said the Maestro, at length, and then there was another silence.
The Maestra broke it. "Señor Maestro," she said, softly, "do you think, maybe, perhaps, you could go and ask my mother for the clothes?"
"Good golly!" remarked the Maestro. "Good golly!" he repeated, wiping his brow with his handkerchief. But he started off.
He returned a half hour later, wilted and perspiring. The old Señora de la Rama had some tenacious Chinese blood in her veins, and the struggle had been an unpleasant one. But the Maestro had won. Across his right arm, held gingerly away from him, there shimmered jusis and piñas. He passed the objects to the Maestra with averted eyes and left her in her glade.
Some ten minutes later, as the Maestro was leading his boys in their daily calisthenics, a sudden weird note came floating mournfully through the water-logged atmosphere. The Maestro stood still, with attentive ear, and the cry cut itself into unmistakable syllables: "Chee-rrries rrri-pa; chee-rrries rrri-pa!" It came from the girls' schoolhouse.
"One-two; one-two!" said the Maestro, and the next exercise was so vigorous that before it was finished the urchins were breathless and drooping.
Crushed into a limp, discouraged mass in the depths of his cane chair, the Maestro grasped his head with both hands and thought. Thought with the Maestro was the sign of deep distress. Usually, he just acted.
In truth, the situation was not a rosy one. The Maestra was still unshaken in her marital determination; and in symbol of that state of mind she was having built a little palm hut on the spot where she had camped in Ledesma's cane fields. Three taos, impressed by her from her father's dependents, were working night and day; the four corner posts, the bamboo-strip floor, the nipa roof, were already up, and only the thatch walls remained to be put on. From behind the closed shutters of his father's mansion, Ledesma saw the fort arise above his sugar-canes, and he cowered in dark corners, studying a Civil Service pamphlet with vague projects of escaping to Manila to study typewriting and enter a government office. Also, he had sent an urgent note to his father, off in one of their other haciendas, bidding him to come back quick to protect him. The absence of Ledesma from the boys' school was bad enough, but much worse was the realisation that the truce arranged with the Maestra was fast becoming impossible. When the Maestro had bearded SeñoritaConstancia's mother and had returned triumphant with the objects that were to enable the young lady to make decent appearance at school, he had forgotten that, in the Philippines, clothes are of the kind that must be washed often; so that, when two days later he had to repeat the performance, and saw before him a future filled with the same monotonous prospect, his ardour had undergone several degrees' cooling. This very morning the struggle to obtain a few shreds of presentable clothing from the irate mother had been so violent, and the subsequent walk across the plaza with the hard-won bundle, beneath the appreciative eyes of the whole town, had been so self-conscious that the Maestro had sworn that it was the end ofthat. A better solution, a final solution, must be quickly found.
Out of his bitter reflections the Maestro was suddenly startled by a drumming of hoofs and a shout outside. He went to the window, and a white man in khaki, cork-helmeted, was pulling up his horse before the steps.
"Huston!" shouted the Maestro, in delighted tones. He hop-skipped across the room, dashed down the stairs, and whacked the newcomer, just dismounting, a tremendous slap on the back. "You old son-of-a-gun," he drawled, tenderly, seizing his hand and moving it up and down like a pump-handle.
The man's eyes gleamed, and a flush of pleasurecame to his tanned cheeks. "Here, here, old man," he said, deprecatingly, "you don't seem alive to the—er—dignity of my profession."
"Sky-pilot, eh?" shouted the Maestro. "Gospel-sharp; stuck up about it, eh? Darn-if-I-care; you're still a good fellow. Golly, but I'm glad to see you," he cried, nearly knocking him down with a dig in the short ribs. "Gee, but I'm glad to see you——" and he shook him till his teeth rattled. "How long're you going to stay?"
"Three days," answered Huston; "want to start a mission here."
Tolio, the Maestro's muchacho, was unsaddling the pony. The two friends climbed the steps into the house. Unbuckling his belt, the missionary threw his long Colt's upon the table and dropped into a chair, and then they began to talk. It was a strange performance. The words swept out of their mouths in an uninterrupted, turgid, furious stream; they shouted, stammered, giggled; they laughed like artillery thunder, gesticulated like windmills, a hectic flush upon their cheeks, their brains awhirl, mad with the madness that seizes the man of lone stations when at last he can communicate his thoughts, pour out what has been dammed in so long, free himself of the stagnant burden of never-expressed feeling, emotion, inspiration, theories.
But after a half-hour of this, the Maestro beganto subside. Huston still talked, told of the cholera in Manapla, the mud between Bago and Jinagaran, the palay famine in Oriental Negros, the anti-fraile mob in Silay, the embezzlement of the Provincial Treasurer. But the Maestro was silent, his eyes upon his feet.