His eager, keen face was so bright, as he cut across the angle where church and convent wall a corner of the _plaza_, that the men who had been puttering there with stones and cement dropped their work to sing out cheery "_Maayong agas_" a dozen of them in a volley.
"_Maayong aga, amigos_," returned McGennis, and hesitated. He was already late for school, but then school is not one of the duties of an engineer in charge of half a province. One of the few duties that isn't his, McGennis had thought sometimes. Still, this school of Sicaba, in a way--
Somehow McGennis's mind was working in quick flashes, and even as he hung there on his heel he saw again just how that school had become one of his duties, and laughed grimly to think of it.
There had been a Maestro in Sicaba once, a bespectacled American from an East effete beyond words, but chronic indigestion--coupled with a coldness in the feet equally chronic, thought McGennis, with light scorn--had caused his early departure. And then the school, in the hands of four warring native teachers, male and female, had been going to the dogs, until McGennis, with his inherent dislike for seeing anything go to the dogs uncombatted, had, with a deft jerk of the wrist, straightened those four warring pedagogues into their collars and kept them there, till a Deputy Superintendent of Schools had come riding up from Bacolot to see what was to be done about it. McGennis still remembered that trim, slim, innocent-eyed Deputy with regretful admiration.
"I reckon," McGennis had remarked, with the impersonal contempt of an Engineer speaking to a Teacher, "you'll be sending up another glass-eyed Dictionary to snarl 'em all up--"
"I don't know," the Deputy Superintendent had said thoughtfully. "You've done surprisingly well with them yourself."
"That," McGennis retorted, with huge sarcasm, "is because I've got nothing else to do."
"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.