"In that case," the Deputy had said, looking at him with smiling innocence, "I'll let you keep the school, just to fill up the time." And then, unexpectedly, he had swung to his saddle and flicked a spurred heel, and gone galloping away, his big Colt's swinging at his trim waist, and left McGennis wrathful yet admiring.
"I say, Mr. McGennis," had been his parting shot, "try to keep their accent and vocabulary back as close to the Mississippi as you can, won't you?"
Rather than quit, McGennis had taken the school and kept the restive teachers in line by counsel and admonition, and had even, when he was in town, taught for an hour each morning himself, smiling with lofty contempt for his womanish occupation as he revealed to his pupils an accent and vocabulary which had never been east of the Missouri. In a way it was his school, but the work those men were doing at the angle of the plaza was infinitely more his work, and, late or not, he swung on his heel for a look at it.
Of all his schemes for the redemption of Sicaba, that culvert and its tributary ditches was his pet. It had been a nice problem in drainage in a town whose highest ridge rose only a meter above high water, and which yet seemed to have an inexhaustible capacity for getting wet and staying wetter. The water had lain two feet deep all over the plaza, the last rains, and a score of men, fathers of families, had wrapped their faces in their clammy cotton blankets and died stolidly of fever, to say nothing of the women and the babies. The babies had been the worst of it. It made him growl out ugly curses to see the tiny coffins borne out of the church, two and three and four a day, with their tawdry draperies of pink calico draggled and beaten by wind and rain. He had made up his mind that it must stop. And it was stopped now, if Yankee ingenuity counted for anything, McGennis thought, as he looked down at the clean green mortar of his culvert.
"Is it good?" the foreman of the masons asked anxiously.
The Deputy Supervisor surveyed the work with puckered brows. "Fine, Miguel," he said genially. "Couldn't be better," and the workmen smiled at each other like pleased children.
"Two, three, four days, it will be done," Miguel said proudly.
"Great!" cried his ruler. "You're a hustler. You and I've got a little Irish in us, I reckon, hey?" And then, chuckling over the bewilderment his speech had caused, he resumed his light-hearted way to school.
The big, sunny boys' room, where blackboards were fastened incongruously and perilously to nipa walls and bright-eyed, white-frocked Oriental youngsters sat at American desks when they must, and drew their legs up to squat comfortably at other times, was very cheerful ordinarily, far and away the homiest place in Sicaba. But as McGennis entered, he met a chilly air. For eleven months he had been impressing the beauty of punctuality on his charges, and now he had his reward. The children stared with round-eyed disapproval. The teachers greeted him with frosty courtesy.
With twinkling eyes, McGennis marched to the desk. "I am late," he reported meekly, "and—I will let Alejandro Angel name my punishment."