So when he turned into the first street of the little city and a man stepped out from a tienda and asked: "You go away, Señor Magheenis?" McGennis, jogging along with a smile on his face, was ready for him. "Sure," he said carelessly.
But he was not ready for what followed. For the man put a hand to his mouth and called shrilly: "It is true," and from every _tienda_ down the length of that long street, men and women came out and stood looking up at him, silently, sorrowfully, questioningly, as if there were something they wanted to understand, and couldn't. Before McGennis was half-way to the _plaza_, his smile was a savage grin, and he had kicked the big horse into a thundering gallop. And so he rode down between the rows of silent people, looking straight ahead.
He had reached the _plaza_, and was swinging his horse for the corner where his house was, when the sight of the schoolhouse on the farther side checked him. This hour, just before sunset, had come to be the one playtime hour of his busy days, and he spent it at the school. Not as a teacher, nor among the boys who were his unofficial pupils. At the other end of the school from the boys' room was another equally big room crowded full of girls, and it was there, oddly enough, that McGennis spent the one happy hour when he did not have to be a Deputy Supervisor.
Oddly, for, as McGennis put it, he "had no use for skirts." In his short, tempestuous life he had seen many good men wasted for love of women, and far from being curious at their fate and the causes of it, he had drawn back into himself till he regarded the softer half of humankind with a suspicion which bordered on hatred.
But there were women of another sort. Tiny things whose little clinging fingers could hardly circle one of his stubby ones. Wee things of such primal innocence that, as they stood unclad at the village wells, with their plump little brown bodies shining in the sun, and their wisps of black hair hanging all draggled about their faces, while their mothers poured water over them, they looked up unabashed if he came riding by, and smiled up friendlily, and lisped "Good-a-mornin'."
Of such women McGennis had no fear, and so it had come about, very gradually, that after all the others were gone, these little ones waited in the big room till McGennis came with a wonderfully colored book, and then, with shining eyes and tiny gurgles of excited laughter, they closed about him and wormed their warm little selves inside his arms and balanced precariously on his shoulders, steadying themselves by his hair, and lay piled, a heap of eager heads and forgotten arms and legs, on the big table where the book was, while the Deputy Supervisor revealed to them the thrilling difference between a peach and an apple, and the astonishing unlikeness of either to a violet. And any one who had come unseen on McGennis then, would hardly have known him for a Deputy Supervisor.