pine 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