"Lord," said McGennis to himself, looking at his victim contritely, "I ought not to have tossed it out at him that way."
It was a relief that just at that moment a white-clad native teacher should come to the door of the schoolhouse on the far side of the plaza and ring a bell with nervous, insistent strokes. McGennis jerked out his watch, and realized that for the first time in Sicaba he was late in beginning his day. "Stay as long as you want to, Secretario," he called back, rushing for the stairs. The Secretary sat motionless, and McGennis, plunging out into the sunshine, felt a second pang of contrition for having tossed it out so suddenly.
But his regret was only momentary. Somehow the morning sparkled as never morning had outside God's own country, and the Deputy Supervisor, pushing across the plaza with long, boyish strides, responded to it. "Going away, going away," was the refrain his feet patted out. Away from Sicaba, away from isolation and obscurity, out to the big, big chance which waited him. And the chief had been watching him, canny old Stewart who said so little and saw so much with those narrowed gray eyes of his; hard-mouthed Stewart, who handled his forces for the overthrow of Botany and Geology, down there in Bacolot, as a general handles his troops. And Stewart, whose approval was a grunt, had said in so many words that he, McGennis, had made good. Truly, it paid to cut your notches and let the Stewarts look out for the meaning of them.
His eager, keen face was so bright, as he cut across the angle where church and convent wall a corner of the plaza, that the men who had been puttering there with stones and cement dropped their work to sing out cheery "Maayong agas" a dozen of them in a volley.
"Maayong aga, amigos," returned McGennis, and hesitated. He was already late for school, but then school is not one of the duties of an engineer in charge of half a province. One of the few duties that isn't his, McGennis had thought sometimes. Still, this school of Sicaba, in a way—
Somehow McGennis's mind was working in quick flashes, and even as he hung there on his heel he saw again just how that school had become one of his duties, and laughed grimly to think of it.
There had been a Maestro in Sicaba once, a bespectacled American from an East effete beyond words, but chronic indigestion—coupled with a coldness in the feet equally chronic, thought McGennis, with light scorn—had caused his early departure. And then the school, in the hands of four warring native teachers, male and female, had been going to the dogs, until McGennis, with his inherent dislike for seeing anything go to the dogs uncombatted, had, with a deft jerk of the wrist, straightened those four warring pedagogues into their collars and kept them there, till a Deputy Superintendent of Schools had come riding up from Bacolot to see what was to be done about it. McGennis still remembered that trim, slim, innocent-eyed Deputy with regretful admiration.
"I reckon," McGennis had remarked, with the impersonal contempt of an Engineer speaking to a Teacher, "you'll be sending up another glass-eyed Dictionary to snarl 'em all up—"
"I don't know," the Deputy Superintendent had said thoughtfully. "You've done surprisingly well with them yourself."
"That," McGennis retorted, with huge sarcasm, "is because I've got nothing else to do."