Americans All Part 38

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 G.o.d!"

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, Ma.s.s. 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 t.i.tle of _Justice To All_.

This history gives the complete story of the famous Mounted Police of Pennsylvania, ill.u.s.trated with a ma.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances of this murder could not have been more skilfully arranged had they been specially designed to ill.u.s.trate 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 n.o.ble 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 pa.s.sage 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 ma.s.s 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 _Sat.u.r.day 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 pa.s.sed 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 gra.s.s. 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 unders.h.i.+rt modestly veiling the upper half of a rotund little paunch; an indescribable unders.h.i.+rt, 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 embarra.s.sing 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-sc.u.mmed; 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, _p.r.o.nto, dale-dale_!"