"Drake, do you surrender?" asked Hallisey.
"Oh, I'll give up. You've got me!" groaned the outlaw. Then he turned on
his wife with bitter anger. "Didn't I tell ye?" he snarled. "Didn't I
tell ye they'd get me if you kept me hangin' around here? These ain't no
damn deputies. _These is the State Police!_"
"An' yet, if I'd known that gun was loaded," said she, "there'd been
some less of 'em to-night!"
They dressed Israel's arm in first-aid fashion. Then they started with
their prisoner down the mountain-trail, at last resuming connection with
their farmer friend. Not without misgivings, the latter consented to
hitch up his "double team" and hurry the party to the nearest town where
a doctor could be found.
As the doctor dressed the bandit's arm, Private Merryfield, whose broken
right hand yet awaited care, observed to the groaning patient:--
"Do you know, you can be thankful to your little children that you have
your life left."
"To hell with you and the children and my life. I'd a hundred times
rather you'd killed me than take what's comin' now."
Then the three Troopers philosophically hunted up a night restaurant and
gave their captive a bite of lunch.
"Now," said Hallisey, as he paid the score, "where's the lock-up?"
The three officers, with Drake in tow, proceeded silently through the
sleeping streets. Not a ripple did their passing occasion. Not even a
dog aroused to take note of them.
Duly they stood at the door of the custodian of the lock-up, ringing the
bell--again and again ringing it. Eventually some one upstairs raised a
window, looked out for an appreciable moment, quickly lowered the window
and locked it. Nothing further occurred. Waiting for a reasonable
interval the officers rang once more. No answer. Silence complete.
Then they pounded on the door till the entire block heard.
Here, there, up street and down, bedroom windows gently opened, then
closed with finality more gentle yet. Silence. Not a voice. Not a foot
on a stair.
The officers looked at each other perplexed. Then, by chance, they
looked at Drake. Drake, so lately black with suicidal gloom, was
grinning! Grinning as a man does when the citadel of his heart is
comforted.
"You don't understand, do ye!" chuckled he. "Well, I'll tell ye: What do
them folks see when they open their windows and look down here in the
road? They see three hard-lookin' fellers with guns in their hands, here
in this bright moonlight. And they see somethin' scarier to them than a
hundred strangers with guns--they see _ME_! There ain't a mother's son
of 'em that'll budge downstairs while I'm here, not if you pound on
their doors till the cows come home." And he slapped his knee with his
good hand and laughed in pure ecstasy--a laugh that caught all the
little group and rocked it as with one mind.
"We don't begrudge you that, do we boys?" Hallisey conceded. "Smith,
you're as respectable-looking as any of us. Hunt around and see if you
can find a Constable that isn't onto this thing. We'll wait here for
you."
Moving out of the zone of the late demonstration, Private Smith learned
the whereabouts of the home of a Constable.
"What's wanted?" asked the Constable, responding like a normal burgher
to Smith's knock at his door.
"Officer of State Police," answered Smith. "I have a man under arrest
and want to put him in the lock-up. Will you get me the keys?"
"Sure. I'll come right down and go along with you myself. Just give me a
jiffy to get on my trousers and boots," cried the Constable, clearly
glad of a share in the adventure.
In a moment the borough official was at the Trooper's side, talking
eagerly as they moved toward the place where the party waited.
"So, he's a highwayman, is he? Good! and a burglar, too, and a
cattle-thief! Good work! And you've got him right up the street, ready
to jail! Well, I'll be switched. Now, what might his name be? Israel
Drake? _Not Israel Drake!_ Oh, my God!"
The Constable had stopped in his tracks like a man struck paralytic.
"No, stranger," he quavered. "I reckon I--I--I won't go no further with
you just now. Here, I'll give you the keys. You can use 'em yourself:
These here's for the doors. This bunch is for the cells. _Good_-night to
you. I'll be getting back home!"
By the first train next morning the Troopers, conveying their prisoner,
left the village for the County Town. As they deposited Drake in the
safe-keeping of the County Jail and were about to depart, he seemed
burdened with an impulse to speak, yet said nothing. Then, as the three
officers were leaving the room, he leaned over and touched Merryfield on
the shoulder.
"Shake!" he growled, offering his unwounded hand.
Merryfield "shook" cheerfully, with his own remaining sound member.
"I'm plumb sorry to see ye go, and that's a fact," growled the outlaw.
"Because--well, because you're the only _man_ that ever tried to arrest
me."
KATHERINE MAYO
Miss Katherine Mayo comes of Mayflower stock, but her birthplace was
Ridgway, Pennsylvania. She was educated in private schools at Boston and
Cambridge, Mass. Her earliest literary work to appear in print was a
series of articles describing travels in Norway, followed by another
series on Colonial American topics, written for the New York _Evening
Post_. Later, during a residence in Dutch Guiana, South America, she
wrote for the _Atlantic Monthly_ some interesting sketches of the
natives of Surinam. After this came three years wholly devoted to
historic research. The work, however, that first attracted wide
attention was a history of the Pennsylvania State Police, published in
1917, under the title of _Justice To All_.
This history gives the complete story of the famous Mounted Police of
Pennsylvania, illustrated with a mass of accurate narrative and
re-enforced with statistics. The occasion of its writing was a personal
experience--the cold-blooded murder of Sam Howell, a fine young American
workingman, a carpenter by trade, near Miss Mayo's country home in New
York. The circumstances of this murder could not have been more
skilfully arranged had they been specially designed to illustrate the
weakness and folly of the ancient, out-grown engine to which most states
in the Union, even yet, look for the enforcement of their laws in rural
parts. Sam Howell, carrying the pay roll on pay-day morning, gave his
life for his honor as gallantly as any soldier in any war. He was shot
down, at arm's length range, by four highway men, to whom, though
himself unarmed, he would not surrender his trust. Sheriff, deputy
sheriffs, constables, and some seventy-five fellow laborers available as
sheriff's posse spent hours within a few hundred feet of the little
wood in which the four murderers were known to be hiding, but no arrest
was made and the murderers are to-day still at large.
"You will have forgotten all this in a month's time," said Howell's
fellow-workmen an hour after the tragedy, to Miss Mayo and her friend
Miss Newell, owner of the estate, on the scene. "Sam was only a laboring
man, like ourselves. We, none of us, have any protection when we work in
country parts."
The remark sounded bitter indeed. But investigation proved it, in
principle, only too true. Sam Howell had not been the first, by many
hundreds, to give his life because the State had no real means to make
her law revered. And punishment for such crimes had been rare. Sam
Howell, however, was not to be forgotten, neither was his sacrifice to
be vain. From his blood, shed unseen, in the obscurity of a quiet
country lane, was to spring a great movement, taking effect first in the
state in which he died, and spreading through the Union.
At that time Pennsylvania was the only state of all the forty-seven that
had met its just obligations to protect all its people under its laws.
Pennsylvania's State Police had been for ten years a body of defenders
of justice, "without fear and without reproach". The honest people of
the State had recorded its deeds in a long memory of noble service. But,
never stooping to advertise itself, never hesitating to incur the enmity
of evildoers, it had had many traducers and no historian. There was
nothing in print to which the people of other states might turn for
knowledge of the accomplishment of the sister commonwealth.
So, in order that the facts might be conveniently available for every
American citizen to study from "A" to "Z" and thus to decide
intelligently for himself where he wanted his own state to stand, in the
matter of fair and full protection to all people, Miss Mayo went to
Pennsylvania and embarked on an exhaustive analysis of the workings of
the Pennsylvania State Police Force, viewed from the standpoint of all
parts of the community. Ex-President Roosevelt wrote the preface for
_Justice To All_, the book in which the fruits of this study were
finally embodied, and, in the meantime, Miss Newell devoted all her
energies to the development of an active and aggressive state-wide
movement for a State Police. _Justice To All_, in this campaign was
widely used as a source of authority on which to base the arguments for
the case. And in 1917 came Sam Howell's triumph, the passage of the Act
creating the Department of New York State Police, now popularly called
"the State Troopers".
In the course of collecting the material for this book, Miss Mayo
gathered a mass of facts much greater than one volume could properly
contain. From this she later took fifteen adventurous stories of actual
service in the Pennsylvania Force, of which some, including "Israel
Drake" appeared in the _Saturday Evening Post_, while others came out
simultaneously in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and in the _Outlook_. All were
later collected in a volume called _The Standard Bearers_, which met
with a very cordial reception by readers and critics.
During the latter part of the World War, Miss Mayo was in France
investigating the war-work of the Y. M. C. A. Her experiences there
furnished material for a book from which advance pages appeared in the
_Outlook_ in the form of separate stories, "Billy's Hut," "The Colonel's
Lady" and others. The purpose of this book was to determine, as closely
as possible, the real values, whatever those might be, of the work
actually accomplished by the Overseas Y, and to lay the plain truth
without bias or color, before the American people.
IN THE PHILIPPINES
_When the Philippine Islands passed from the possession of Spain to
that of the United States, there was a change in more than the flag.
Spain had sent soldiers and tax-gatherers to the islands; Uncle Sam sent
road-builders and school teachers. One of these school teachers was also
a newspaper man; and in a book called_ CAYBIGAN _he gave a series of
vivid pictures of how the coming generation of Filipinos are taking the
first step towards Americanization._
THE STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPH OF ISIDRO DE LOS MAESTROS
BY
JAMES HOPPER
_I--Face to Face with the Foe_
Returning to his own town after a morning spent in "working up" the
attendance of one of his far and recalcitrant barrio-schools, the
Maestro of Balangilang was swaying with relaxed muscle and half-closed
eyes to the allegretto trot of his little native pony, when he pulled up
with a start, wide awake and all his senses on the alert. Through his
somnolence, at first in a low hum, but fast rising in a fiendish
crescendo, there had come a buzzing sound, much like that of one of the
saw-mills of his California forests, and now, as he sat in the saddle,
erect and tense, the thing ripped the air in ragged tear, shrieked
vibrating into his ear, and finished its course along his spine in
delicious irritation.
"Oh, where am I?" murmured the Maestro, blinking; but between blinks he
caught the flashing green of the palay fields and knew that he was far
from the saw-mills of the Golden State. So he raised his nose to heaven
and there, afloat above him in the serene blue, was the explanation. It
was a kite, a great locust-shaped kite, darting and swooping in the hot
monsoon, and from it, dropping plumb, came the abominable clamor.
"Aha!" exclaimed the Maestro, pointing accusingly at the thin line
vaguely visible against the sky-line in a diagonal running from the kite
above him ahead to a point in the road. "Aha! there's something at the
end of that; there's Attendance at the end of that!"
With which significant remark he leaned forward in the saddle, bringing
his switch down with a whizz behind him. The pony gave three rabbit
leaps and then settled down to his drumming little trot. As they
advanced the line overhead dropped gradually. Finally the Maestro had to
swerve the horse aside to save his helmet. He pulled up to a walk, and a
few yards further came to the spot where string met earth in the
expected Attendance.
The Attendance was sitting on the ground, his legs spread before him in
an angle of forty-five degrees, each foot arched in a secure grip of a
bunch of cogon grass. These legs were bare as far up as they went, and,
in fact, no trace of clothing was reached until the eye met the lower
fringe of an indescribable undershirt modestly veiling the upper half of
a rotund little paunch; an indescribable undershirt, truly, for
observation could not reach the thing itself, but only the dirt
incrusting it so that it hung together, rigid as a knight's iron
corslet, in spite of monstrous tears and rents. Between the teeth of the
Attendance was a long, thick cheroot, wound about with hemp fiber, at
which he pulled with rounded mouth. Hitched around his right wrist was
the kite string, and between his legs a stick spindled with an extra
hundred yards. At intervals he hauled hand-over-hand upon the taut line,
and then the landscape vibrated to the buzz-saw song which had so
compellingly recalled the Maestro to his eternal pursuit.
As the shadow of the horse fell upon him, the Attendance brought his
eyes down from their heavenly contemplation, and fixed them upon the
rider. A tremor of dismay, mastered as soon as born, flitted over him;
then, silently, with careful suppression of all signs of haste, he
reached for a big stone with his little yellow paw, then for a stick
lying farther off. Using the stone as a hammer, he drove the stick into
the ground with deliberate stroke, wound the string around it with
tender solicitude, and then, everything being secure, just as the
Maestro was beginning his usual embarrassing question:
"Why are you not at school, eh?"
He drew up his feet beneath him, straightened up like a jack-in-a-box,
took a hop-skip-jump, and with a flourish of golden heels, flopped
head-first into the roadside ditch's rank luxuriance.
"The little devil!" exclaimed the disconcerted Maestro. He dismounted
and, leading his horse, walked up to the side of the ditch. It was full
of the water of the last baguio. From the edge of the cane-field on the
other side there cascaded down the bank a mad vegetation; it carpeted
the sides, arched itself above in a vault, and inside this recess the
water was rotting, green-scummed; and a powerful fermentation filled the
nostrils with hot fever-smells. In the center of the ditch the broad,
flat head of a caribao emerged slightly above the water; the floating
lilies made an incongruous wreath about the great horns and the
beatifically-shut eyes, and the thick, humid nose exhaled ecstasy in
shuddering ripplets over the calm surface.
Filled with a vague sense of the ridiculous, the Maestro peered into the
darkness. "The little devil!" he murmured. "He's somewhere in here; but
how am I to get him, I'd like to know. Do you see him, eh, Mathusalem?"
he asked of the stolid beast soaking there in bliss.
Whether in answer to this challenge or to some other irritant, the
animal slowly opened one eye and ponderously let it fall shut again in
what, to the heated imagination of the Maestro, seemed a patronizing
wink. Its head slid quietly along the water; puffs of ooze rose from
below and spread on the surface. Then, in the silence there rose a
significant sound--a soft, repeated snapping of the tongue:
"Cluck, cluck."
"Aha!" shouted the Maestro triumphantly to his invisible audience. "I
know where you are, you scamp; right behind the caribao; come out of
there, _pronto, dale-dale_!"
But his enthusiasm was of short duration. To the commanding
tongue-click the caribao had stopped dead-still, and a silence heavy
with defiance met the too-soon exultant cries. An insect in the foliage
began a creaking call, and then all the creatures of humidity hidden
there among this fermenting vegetation joined in mocking chorus.
The Maestro felt a vague blush welling up from the innermost recesses of
his being.
"I'm going to get that kid," he muttered darkly, "if I have to wait
till--the coming of Common Sense to the Manila office! By gum, he's the
Struggle for Attendance personified!"
He sat down on the bank and waited. This did not prove interesting. The
animals of the ditch creaked on; the caribao bubbled up the water with
his deep content; above, the abandoned kite went through strange
acrobatics and wailed as if in pain. The Maestro dipped his hand into
the water; it was lukewarm. "No hope of a freeze-out," he murmured
pensively.
Behind, the pony began to pull at the reins.
"Yes, little horse, I'm tired, too. Well," he said apologetically, "I
hate to get energetic, but there are circumstances which----"
The end of his sentence was lost, for he had whisked out the big Colt's
dissuader of ladrones, that hung on his belt, and was firing. The six
shots went off like a bunch of fire-crackers, but far from at random,
for a regular circle boiled up around the dozing caribao. The disturbed
animal snorted, and again a discreet "cluck-cluck" rose in the sudden,
astounded silence.
"This," said the Maestro, as he calmly introduced fresh cartridges into
the chambers of his smoking weapon, "is what might be called an
application of western solutions to eastern difficulties."
Again he brought his revolver down, but he raised it without shooting
and replaced it in its holster. From beneath the caribao's rotund belly,
below the surface, an indistinct form shot out; cleaving the water like
a polliwog it glided for the bank, and then a black, round head emerged
at the feet of the Maestro.
"All right, bub; we'll go to school now," said the latter, nodding to
the dripping figure as it rose before him.
He lifted the sullen brownie and straddled him forward of the saddle,
then proceeded to mount himself, when the Capture began to display
marked agitation. He squirmed and twisted, turned his head back and up,
and finally a grunt escaped him.
"El volador."
"The kite, to be sure; we mustn't forget the kite," acquiesced the
Maestro graciously. He pulled up the anchoring stick and laboriously,
beneath the hostilely critical eye of the Capture, he hauled in the line
till the screeching, resisting flying-machine was brought to earth. Then
he vaulted into the saddle.
The double weight was a little too much for the pony; so it was at a
dignified walk that the Maestro, his naked, dripping, muddy and still
defiant prisoner a-straddle in front of him, the captured kite passed
over his left arm like a knightly shield, made his triumphant entry into
the pueblo.
_II--Heroism and Reverses_
When Maestro Pablo rode down Rizal-y-Washington Street to the
schoolhouse with his oozing, dripping prize between his arms, the kite,
like a knightly escutcheon against his left side, he found that in spite
of his efforts at preserving a modest, self-deprecatory bearing, his
spine would stiffen and his nose point upward in the unconscious
manifestations of an internal feeling that there was in his attitude
something picturesquely heroic. Not since walking down the California
campus one morning after the big game won three minutes before blowing
of the final whistle, by his fifty-yard run-in of a punt, had he been
in that posture--at once pleasant and difficult--in which one's vital
concern is to wear an humility sufficiently convincing to obtain from
friends forgiveness for the crime of being great.
A series of incidents immediately following, however, made the thing
quite easy.
Upon bringing the new recruit into the schoolhouse, to the perfidiously
expressed delight of the already incorporated, the Maestro called his
native assistant to obtain the information necessary to a full
matriculation. At the first question the inquisition came to a
dead-lock. The boy did not know his name.
"In Spanish times," the Assistant suggested modestly, "we called them
"de los Reyes" when the father was of the army, and "de la Cruz" when
the father was of the church; but now, we can never know _what_ it is."
The Maestro dashed to a solution. "All right," he said cheerily. "I
caught him; guess I can give him a name. Call him--Isidro de los
Maestros."
And thus it was that the urchin went down on the school records, and on
the records of life afterward.
Now, well pleased with himself, the Maestro, as is the wont of men in
such state, sought for further enjoyment.
"Ask him," he said teasingly, pointing with his chin at the
newly-baptized but still unregenerate little savage, "why he came out of
the ditch."
"He says he was afraid that you would steal the kite," answered the
Assistant, after some linguistic sparring.
"Eh?" ejaculated the surprised Maestro.
And in his mind there framed a picture of himself riding along the road
with a string between his fingers; and, following in the upper layers of
air, a buzzing kite; and, down in the dust of the highway, an urchin
trudging wistfully after the kite, drawn on irresistibly, in spite of
his better judgment, on and on, horrified but fascinated, up to the
yawning school-door.
It would have been the better way. "I ought to go and soak my head,"
murmured the Maestro pensively.
This was check number one, but others came in quick succession.
For the morning after this incident the Maestro did not find Isidro
among the weird, wild crowd gathered into the annex (a transformed sugar
storehouse) by the last raid of the Municipal Police.
Neither was Isidro there the next day, nor the next. And it was not till
a week had passed that the Maestro discovered, with an inward blush of
shame, that his much-longed-for pupil was living in the little hut
behind his own house. There would have been nothing shameful in the
overlooking--there were seventeen other persons sharing the same
abode--were it not that the nipa front of this human hive had been blown
away by the last baguio, leaving an unobstructed view of the interior,
if it might be called such. As it was, the Municipal Police was
mobilized at the urgent behest of the Maestro. Its "cabo," flanked by
two privates armed with old German needle-guns, besieged the home, and
after an interesting game of hide-and-go-seek, Isidro was finally caught
by one arm and one ear, and ceremoniously marched to school. And there
the Maestro asked him why he had not been attending.
"No hay pantalones"--there are no pants--Isidro answered, dropping his
eyes modestly to the ground.
This was check number two, and unmistakably so, for was it not a fact
that a civil commission, overzealous in its civilizing ardor, had passed
a law commanding that every one should wear, when in public, "at least
one garment, preferably trousers?"
Following this, and an unsuccessful plea upon the town tailor who was on
a three weeks' vacation on account of the death of a fourth cousin, the
Maestro shut himself up a whole day with Isidro in his little nipa
house; and behind the closely-shut shutters engaged in some mysterious
toil. When they emerged again the next morning, Isidro wended his way to
the school at the end of the Maestro's arm, trousered!