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 know what it is."
The Maestro dashed to a solution. "All right," he said cheerily. "I caught him; guess I can give him a name. Call him—Isidro de los Maestros."
And thus it was that the urchin went down on the school records, and on the records of life afterward.
Now, well pleased with himself, the Maestro, as is the wont of men in such state, sought for further enjoyment.
"Ask him," he said teasingly, pointing with his chin at the newly-baptized but still unregenerate little savage, "why he came out of the ditch."