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