Caybigan Part 2

"Fours right--March! Column left!"

"Hep, hep, hep," came the column straight for the schoolmaster. The Lieutenant was muttering something in his mustache that sounded like a benediction. For a long six months, since the organisation of the company, a prudent government had denied his pleadings for permission to give his men target practice. The Scouts were an experiment, and there was a vague feeling that they should not be taught too much.

"Why is that, Roberts?" persisted the Maestro, calmly dodging the advancing phalanx and dropping into the confidential manner. "Why don't you let them shoot? Are you afraid that they might begin on your broad back? Are you----"

A sudden start of pain closed his mouth. The Lieutenant had quietly planted his heel, in pa.s.sing, upon the Educational toe, crus.h.i.+ng down upon it with all the enthusiasm of two hundred pounds a-thrill with long-suppressed rage.

The Maestro's eyes followed the officer, marching at the side of his company. His mouth opened in a broad grin that displayed a startling vacuum where once had been two good teeth, now lying peacefully on the sod of the old Berkeley gridiron.

"Guess it's school-time," he said.

He sprinted fifty yards, leaped an eighteen-foot ditch, hurdled a little goat, bucked a carabao around till its tail was where its head had been, and bounded into the schoolroom.

Two hundred brown ninos sprang to their feet.

"Guda morrneen," they howled, in unison.

"Good-morning," answered the Maestro, briskly. "Come, let's get at this.

No s.h.i.+rking, quick! Arm exercise! One, two; one, two."

He led them through a furious set of exercises in which he himself took part enthusiastically, the perspiration cascading down his nose.

"You poor, scrawny weaklings," he said, at last, beaming upon the breathless little a.s.semblage. "Never you mind; I'll make men of you."

Then he started to go. "Give them reading," he shouted to his native a.s.sistant from the door, "and breathing exercises every half hour."

But he came back, on an after-thought, and placed under the nose of his faithful colleague the piece of sodden paper he had picked up on the plaza.

The man's skin went yellow beneath the brown. "Papa Isio," he whispered.

"Just, what I thought," said the Maestro, nodding to himself. "And he says he is coming here, doesn't he?"

"Yes, sir. He will come and burn the pueblo. That is the way he burned Cabayan last year."

"Gol darn it, don't I know it?" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the pedagogue, fiercely. "And didn't I lose my brand-new seven-dollar Spalding punching-bag? Well, we'll set him on his head this time."

"Yes, sir," meekly answered the a.s.sistant, who had not caught the full import of the explosive questions.

But the maestro did not hear him. He was out already and making his way to the cuartel. Roberts was dismissing the company when he arrived.

"h.e.l.lo, you take them now," said the officer, as he saw the Maestro--Professor of Military Gymnastics also, by common consent--near him. "And, by the way," he added, with suppressed glee, "how's the toe?"

The Maestro did not answer. He was working at the inside of his khaki jacket. With some trouble he drew out a flat, oblong box. From this he took a piece of yellow leather and a s.h.i.+ning object that looked like a bicycle pump. He inserted the mouth of the pump into a hole in the leather and worked the handle up and down in rapid movement. The thing began to swell and take shape. Finally it looked like a great leather egg. He threw it on the ground, toward one of the loafing soldiers, and the latter, as an automaton worked by some powerful spring, hurled himself headfirst at it, grasped it inside of both arms, and lay on it, while the rest of the company poured upon him in an avalanche.

"How's that, eh?" asked the schoolmaster, turning upon the Lieutenant an eye that winked.

He did not wait for an answer. At a signal the company had formed into a long, crouching line. He placed himself behind it, took a quick step, and booted the pigskin a resounding whack. At the sound the whole line galloped off in ferocious pursuit, and when, after describing a beautiful parabola, the ball b.u.mped along the ground, it was smothered at the second bounce beneath the gross weight of the company.

"And how's that?" asked the Maestro, in tone still more compelling.

He turned to his men. "The 'Varsity," he called, a trifle pompously.

Eleven men stood out from the rest and lined up in a team.

"Six, eight, fifteen!" he shouted.

The team went through the pantomime of a fierce ma.s.s on centre.

"Four, fifteen, twenty-two."

The team swirled around in an end-run.

Then he hurled signals at them, and, in quick succession, with a tangle here and there, it is true, they went through an entire repertory--cross tackle bucks, straight openings, tandems, kangaroos, revolving ma.s.ses, double and delayed pa.s.ses, fake kicks. They ma.s.sed and bucked the air about as if it offered no resistance. It was beautiful to see.

"And now, behold!" said the engineer of this fine performance, pausing solemnly.

He drew a line in the earth with his heel and placed the ball upon it.

The quarterback took his position near the ball and the rest of the team gathered some twenty yards away.

"Five, twenty-four, six X!" barked the Maestro.

There was a rapid movement among the men, and then they shot out in a long V. On the walk at first, then on the trot, then at full gallop the V swept down toward the line. The quarterback stooped, picked up the ball, and dexterously pa.s.sed it as the formation thundered down upon him. The ball disappeared, swallowed up within the V, which, pa.s.sing the line with tremendous impetus, rumbled on like a battering-ram to a glorious touch-down.

"The flying wedge," announced the Maestro, in the tone of the knickerbockered flunkey ushering his Grace, the Lord Hunter of the Billion Mark, into the Reception Hall. "Barred out in the States, but, lordy, we're so far way, and it's such a good one, that I thought I'd give it to them anyhow. Well, what do you think of _my_ team-work, eh?"

The Lieutenant pondered a moment in silent malevolence.

"Yes," he said, "pretty fair for signal-practice. But what about the _real_ thing, eh? Why don't they _get_ at each other? I don't see them _scrimmage_, do you?"

A cloud obscured the radiance of the Maestro's visage.

"Well," he said, ruefully, "we're in the Philippines. My team can run signals, but you can't expect them to play. And," he added, in sudden consolation, "your Scouts can drill, but they won't fight."

The situation had become tense beyond words, and the Maestro gracefully evoluted.

"Papa Isio is coming," he said. "I picked up his announcement this morning in the middle of the plaza."

"Papa Isio is a common carabao thief," said the Lieutenant. "Besides, our troops have killed him already five distinct times and he doesn't exist. And it's not up to me, anyhow. Go see Hafner."

So the Maestro went off to see Hafner. Leopold Joseph Hafner, First Lieutenant of Scouts, U. S. A., Commandant of the Post of Balangilang, was reclining in an easy-chair on his veranda, a bottle of gin under his nose. He greeted his visitor with a blank stare. The Commandant disapproved of pedagogues, and, in fact, of civilians in general.

"h.e.l.lo, Lieut," shouted the Maestro, with an irreverence that would have sent a shudder along the spine of a neutral witness. "Here's a piece of paper for you."

The Commandant examined the paper.

"Well?" he said, at length, with an indifference calculated to crush.

"Oh, nothing. Only that Papa Isio is coming. That's the way he announced his visit when I was at Cabayan last spring, and he burned the town down and my punching bag, and made hash of the----"