"Damn!" said the Maestro, as his foot struck the sand. "Damn! a deuce of a bridegroom I make, I do!"
But Tolio, his muchacho, who had stayed behind in guard of the house, was running down the beach toward him, waving a dirty piece of paper. It was a telegram, transmitted by carrier from Bacolod, which was in cable communication with Ilo-Ilo. The Maestro read it quickly; then he re-read it aloud, pausing upon each word as if to sink its dread significance deep into his dazed brain.
"Have missed you in Ilo-Ilo. Am coming on tomorrow's steamer. Girlie."
Behind the Maestro a cast-up log was bleaching in the sun, and he sat down upon it very suddenly and limply, as if his bony carcass had turned to water. "Lordie," he murmured, "and the sky-pilot gone south!"
And truly the situation was a delicate one. For "Girlie" of the telegram was none other than Miss Florence Yeats, come ten thousand miles over the sea to wed him. He should have met her in Ilo-Ilo, where the whole American population had made gleeful preparations for the event; but his uncalculating impatience and the immoral conduct of the winds had foiled him in his attempted crossing of the straits from his own town in Negros; and now she was coming by the day's steamer--with the sky-pilot, otherwise Rev. David Houston, head of the United Protestant Missions of Negroes, who might have afforded a much-needed alternative, far, far away on an inspection tour to the southern stations of the island, and not likely to be back for a month.
So the Maestro remained on his log, inwardly tossed by a cyclone of contradictory feelings. He could but admire the splendid confidence of the girl, coming straight to him without a question after he had failed her, failed her in an appointment to be classed among those, well, of higher importance. At the same time it did seem to him that some kind person in Ilo-Ilo might have warned her of the fact that he was absolutely the only white man in his town, and at that neither a clergyman nor justice of the peace. He did not rise and go home, where he could have spent a very profitable hour changing his bedraggled garments and washing his salt-grimed face. The crisis was too near for that. The little wheezy teapot of a steamer, with its precious and disturbing freight, was due in anywhere from one to four hours; and he would not have missed the sight of its first smoky signal at the horizon for luxuries much more dazzling. So, joyful and unhappy, expectant and horrified, he sat there, while Jack, his little fox terrier, who had come down with Tolio, romped unappreciated between his legs. Out a few hundred yards from shore, planted upon a submerged sand bar, a long bamboo fish-corral screened the horizon; and the Maestro recited metally to himself the approach of the little steamer. The smoke would first appear at the lower end, then slowly would crawl along behind the high paling, slowly, very slowly, till finally the ship itself would burst into view past the upper end, and stand for shore. And then----
