Part 40 (2/2)

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 this: 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 rumors of cholera in the towns to the north, and the Maestro, as president of the 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 pus.h.i.+ng and jolting at the door of the bas.e.m.e.nt which served as stable for the munic.i.p.al caribao.

Elbowing his way to the spot, the Maestro found Isidro at the entrance, gravely taking up an admission of five sh.e.l.ls 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 that it might be well to go in also, which he did without paying admission. The disappointed gate-keeper followed him. The Maestro found himself before a little pink-and-blue tissue-paper box, frilled with paper 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 a.s.sistant who was present by this time, he added in the tone of virtue which _will_ be 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 center of interest, ”and he died last night of the great sickness.”

”The great what?” e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the Maestro who had caught a few words.

”The great sickness,” explained the a.s.sistant. ”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 sc.r.a.ped 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 caldrons and cans of his kitchen a.r.s.enal, 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 oil-can, 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 him externally 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 little man had shot at him a glance so mild, so wistful, so brown-eyed, filled with such mixed admiration, trust, and appeal, that 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; mere baby, my man. And don't we like to go to school?”

”Senor Pablo,” asked the boy, looking up softly into the Maestro's still perspiring visage, ”Senor Pablo, is it true that there will be no school because of the great sickness?”

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