The women were rather stampeded by this onslaught of the irregular troops—especially Mrs. Bronson. She was placed in the position of a woman taking a man's wisdom from her ne'er-do-well son for the first time in her life. Like any other mother in this position, she felt a flutter of pride—but it was strongly mingled with a motherly desire to spank him. The deputation rose, with a unanimous feeling that they had been scored upon.

"Cows!" scoffed Mrs. Peterson. "If we leave you in this yob, Mr. Irwin, our children will know nothing but cows and hens and soils and grains—and where will the culture come in? How will our boys and girls appear when we get fixed so we can move to town? We won't have no culture at all, Yim!"

"Culture!" exclaimed Jim. "Why—why, after ten years of the sort of school I would give you if I were a better teacher, and could have my way, the people of the cities would be begging to have their children admitted so that they might obtain real culture—culture fitting them for life in the twentieth century—"

"Don't bother to get ready for the city children, Jim," said Mrs. Bonner sneeringly, "you won't be teaching the Woodruff school that long."

All this time, the dark-faced Cracker had been glooming from a corner, earnestly seeking to fathom the wrongness he sensed in the gathering. Now he came forward.

"I reckon I may be making a mistake to say anything," said he, "f'r we-all is strangers hyeh, an' we're pore; but I must speak out for Mr. Jim—I must! Don't turn him out, folks, f'r he's done mo' f'r us than eveh any one done in the world!"

"What do you mean?" asked Mrs. Peterson.

"I mean," said Raymond, "that when Mr. Jim began talking school to us, we was a pore no-'count lot without any learnin', with nothin' to talk about except our wrongs, an' our enemies, and the meanness of the Iowa folks. You see we didn't understand you-all. An' now, we have hope. We done got hope from this school. We're goin' to make good in the world. We're getting education. We're all learnin' to use books. My little sister will be as good as anybody, if you'll just let Mr. Jim alone in this school—as good as any one. An' I'll he'p pap get a farm, and we'll work and think at the same time, an' be happy!"



CHAPTER IX

JENNIE ARRANGES A CHRISTMAS PARTY

The great party magnates who made up the tickets from governor down to the lowest county office, doubtless regarded the little political plum shaken off into the apron of Miss Jennie Woodruff of the Woodruff District, as the very smallest and least bloomy of all the plums on the tree; but there is something which tends to puff one up in the mere fact of having received the votes of the people for any office, especially in a region of high average civilization, covering six hundred or seven hundred square miles of good American domain. Jennie was a sensible country girl. Being sensible, she tried to avoid uppishness. But she did feel some little sense of increased importance as she drove her father's little one-cylinder runabout over the smooth earth roads, in the crisp December weather, just before Christmas.

The weather itself was stimulating, and she was making rapid progress in the management of the little car which her father had offered to lend her for use in visiting the one hundred or more rural schools soon to come under her supervision. She rather fancied the picture of herself, clothed in more or less authority and queening it over her little army of teachers.

Mr. Haakon Peterson was phlegmatically conscious that she made rather an agreeable picture, as she stopped her car alongside his top buggy to talk with him. She had bright blue eyes, fluffy brown hair, a complexion whipped pink by the breeze, and she smiled at him ingratiatingly.

"Don't you think father is lovely?" said she. "He is going to let me use the runabout when I visit the schools."

"That will be good," said Haakon. "It will save you lots of time. I hope you make the county pay for the gasoline."

"I haven't thought about that," said Jennie. "Everybody's been so nice to me—I want to give as well as receive."

"Why," said Haakon, "you will yust begin to receive when your salary begins in Yanuary."

"Oh, no!" said Jennie. "I've received much more than that now! You don't know how proud I feel. So many nice men I never knew before, and all my old friends like you working for me in the convention and at the polls, just as if I amounted to something."

"And you don't know how proud I feel," said Haakon, "to have in county office a little girl I used to hold on my lap."

In early times, when Haakon was a flat-capped immigrant boy, he had earned the initial payment on his first eighty acres of prairie land as a hired man on Colonel Woodruff's farm. Now he was a rather richer man than the colonel, and not a little proud of his ascent to affluence. He was a mild-spoken, soft-voiced Scandinavian, quite completely Americanized, and possessed of that aptitude for local politics which makes so good a citizen of the Norwegian and Swede. His influence was always worth fifty to sixty Scandinavian votes in any county election. He was a good party man and conscious of being entitled to his voice in party matters. This seemed to him an opportunity for exerting a bit of political influence.

"Yennie," said he, "this man Yim Irwin needs to be lined up."

"Lined up! What do you mean?"

"The way he is doing in the school," said Haakon, "is all wrong. If you can't line him up, he will make you trouble. We must look ahead. Everybody has his friends, and Yim Irwin has his friends. If you have trouble with him, his friends will be against you when we want to nominate you for a second term. The county is getting close. If we go to conwention without your home delegation it would weaken you, and if we nominate you, every piece of trouble like this cuts down your wote. You ought to line him up and have him do right."

"But he is so funny," said Jennie.

"He likes you," said Haakon. "You can line him up."

Jennie blushed, and to conceal her slight embarrassment, got out for the purpose of cranking her machine.

"But if I can not line him up?" said she.

"I tank," said Haakon, "if you can't line him up, you will have a chance to rewoke his certificate when you take office."

So Jim Irwin was to be crushed like an insect. The little local gearing of the big party machine was to crush him. Jennie dimly sensed the tragedy of it, but very dimly. Mainly she thought of Mr. Peterson's suggestion as to "lining up" Jim Irwin as so thoroughly sensible that she gave it a good deal of thought that day. She could not help feeling a little resentment at Jim for following his own fads and fancies so far. We always resent the necessity of crushing any weak creature which must needs be wiped out. The idea that there could be anything fundamentally sane in his overturning of the old and tried school methods under which both he and she had been educated, was absurd to Jennie. To be sure, everybody had always favored "more practical education," and Jim's farm arithmetic, farm physiology, farm reading and writing, cow-testing exercises, seed analysis, corn clubs and the tomato, poultry and pig clubs he proposed to have in operation the next summer, seemed highly practical; but to Jennie's mind, the fact that they introduced dissension in the neighborhood and promised to make her official life vexatious, seemed ample proof that Jim's work was visionary and impractical. Poor Jennie was not aware of the fact that new truth always comes bringing, not peace to mankind, but a sword.

"Father," said she that night, "let's have a little Christmas party."

"All right," said the colonel. "Whom shall we invite?"

"Don't laugh," said she. "I want to invite Jim Irwin and his mother, and nobody else."

"All right," reiterated the colonel. "But why?"

"Oh," said Jennie, "I want to see whether I can talk Jim out of some of his foolishness."

"You want to line him up, do you?" said the colonel. "Well, that's good politics, and incidentally, you may get some good ideas out of Jim."

"Rather unlikely," said Jennie.

"I don't know about that," said the colonel, smiling. "I begin to think that Jim's a Brown Mouse. I've told you about the Brown Mouse, haven't I?"

"Yes," said Jennie. "You've told me. But Professor Darbishire's brown mice were simply wild and incorrigible creatures. Just because it happens to emerge suddenly from the forests of heredity, it doesn't prove that the Brown Mouse is any good."

"Justin Morgan was a Brown Mouse," said the colonel. "And he founded the greatest breed of horses in the world."

"You say that," said Jennie, "because you're a lover of the Morgan horse."

"Napoleon Bonaparte was a Brown Mouse," said the colonel. "So was George Washington, and so was Peter the Great. Whenever a Brown Mouse appears he changes things in a little way or a big way."

"For the better, always?" asked Jennie.

"No," said the colonel. "The Brown Mouse may throw back to slant-headed savagery. But Jim ... sometimes I think Jim is the kind of Mendelian segregation out of which we get Franklins and Edisons and their sort. You may get some good ideas out of Jim. Let us have them here for Christmas, by all means."

In due time Jennie's invitation reached Jim and his mother, like an explosive shell fired from a distance into their humble dwelling—quite upsetting things. Twenty-five years constitute rather a long wait for social recognition, and Mrs. Irwin had long since regarded herself as quite outside society. To be sure, for something like half of this period, she had been of society if not in it. She had done the family washings, scrubbings and cleanings, had made the family clothes and been a woman of all work, passing from household to household, in an orbit determined by the exigencies of threshing, harvesting, illness and child-bearing. At such times she sat at the family table and participated in the neighborhood gossip, in quite the manner of a visiting aunt or other female relative; but in spite of the democracy of rural life, there is and always has been a social difference between a hired woman and an invited guest. And when Jim, having absorbed everything which the Woodruff school could give him in the way of education, found his first job at "making a hand," Mrs. Irwin, at her son's urgent request, ceased going out to work for a while, until she could get back her strength. This she had never succeeded in doing, and for a dozen years or more had never entered a single one of the houses in which she had formerly served.

"I can't go, James," said she; "I can't possibly go."

"Oh, yes, you can! Why not?" said Jim. "Why not?"

"You know I don't go anywhere," urged Mrs. Irwin.

"That's no reason," said her son.

"I haven't a thing to wear," said Mrs. Irwin.

"Nothing to wear!"

I wonder if any ordinary person can understand the shock with which Jim Irwin heard those words from his mother's lips. He was approaching thirty, and the association of the ideas of Mother and Costume was foreign to his mind. Other women had surfaces different from hers, to be sure—but his mother was not as other women. She was just Mother, always at work in the house or in the garden, always doing for him those inevitable things which made up her part in life, always clothed in the browns, grays, gray-blues, neutral stripes and checks which were cheap and common and easily made. Clothes! They were in the Irwin family no more than things by which the rules of decency were complied with, and the cold of winter turned back—but as for their appearance! Jim had never given the thing a thought further than to wear out his Sunday best in the schoolroom, to wonder where the next suit of Sunday best was to come from, and to buy for his mother the cheap and common fabrics which she fashioned into the garments in which alone, it seemed to him, she would seem like Mother. A boy who lives until he is nearly thirty in intimate companionship with Carlyle, Thoreau, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Emerson, Professor Henry, Liberty H. Bailey, Cyril Hopkins, Dean Davenport and the great obscurities of the experiment stations, may be excused if his views regarding clothes are derived in a transcendental manner from Sartor Resartus and the agricultural college tests as to the relation between Shelter and Feeding.

"Why, mother," said he, "I think it would be pretty hard to explain to the Woodruffs that you stayed away because of clothes. They have seen you in the clothes you wear pretty often for the last thirty years!"

* * * * *

Was a woman ever quite without a costume?

Mrs. Irwin gazed at vacancy for a while, and went to the old bureau. From the bottom drawer she took an old, old black alpaca dress—a dress which Jim had never seen. She spread it out on her bed in the alcove off the combined kitchen, parlor and dining-room in which they lived, and smoothed out the wrinkles. It was almost whole, save for the places where her body, once so much fuller than now, had drawn the threads apart—under the arms, and at some of the seams—and she handled it as one deals with something very precious.

"I never thought I'd wear it again," said she, "but once. I've been saving it for my last dress. But I guess it won't hurt to wear it once for the benefit of the living."

Jim kissed his mother—a rare thing, save as the caress was called for by the established custom between them.

"Don't think of that, mother," said he, "for years and years yet!"



CHAPTER X

HOW JIM WAS LINED UP

There is no doubt that Jennie Woodruff was justified in thinking that they were a queer couple. They weren't like the Woodruffs, at all. They were of a different pattern. To be sure, Jim's clothes were not especially noteworthy, being just shiny, and frayed at cuff and instep, and short of sleeve and leg, and ill-fitting and cheap. They betrayed poverty, and the inability of a New York sweatshop to anticipate the prodigality of Nature in the matter of length of leg and arm, and wealth of bones and joints which she had lavished upon Jim Irwin. But the Woodruff table had often enjoyed Jim's presence, and the standards prevailing there as to clothes were only those of plain people who eat with their hired men, buy their clothes at a county seat town, and live simply and sensibly on the fat of the land. Jim's queerness lay not so much in his clothes as in his personality.

On the other hand, Jennie could not help thinking that Mrs. Irwin's queerness was to be found almost solely in her clothes. The black alpaca looked undeniably respectable, especially when it was helped out by a curious old brooch of goldstone, bordered with flowers in blue and white and red and green—tiny blossoms of little stones which looked like the flowers which grow at the snow line on Pike's Peak. Jennie felt that it must be a cheap affair, but it was decorative, and she wondered where Mrs. Irwin got it. She guessed it must have a story—a story in which the stooped, rusty, somber old lady looked like a character drawn to harmonize with the period just after the war. For the black alpaca dress looked more like a costume for a masquerade than a present-day garment, and Mrs. Irwin was so oppressed with doubt as to whether she was presentable, with knowledge that her dress didn't fit, and with the difficulty of behaving naturally—like a convict just discharged from prison after a ten years' term—that she took on a stiffness of deportment quite in keeping with the idea that she was a female Rip Van Winkle not yet quite awake. But Jennie had the keenness to see that if Mrs. Irwin could have had an up-to-date costume she would have become a rather ordinary and not bad-looking old lady. What Jennie failed to divine was that if Jim could have invested a hundred dollars in the services of tailors, haberdashers, barbers and other specialists in personal appearance, and could for this hour or so have blotted out his record as her father's field-hand, he would have seemed to her a distinguished-looking young man. Not handsome, of course, but the sort people look after—and follow.

"Come to dinner," said Mrs. Woodruff, who at this juncture had a hired girl, but was yoked to the oar nevertheless when it came to turkey and the other fixings of a Christmas dinner. "It's good enough, what there is of it, and there's enough of it such as it is—but the dressing in the turkey would be better for a little more sage!"

The bountiful meal piled mountain high for guest and hired help and family melted away in a manner to delight the hearts of Mrs. Woodruff and Jennie. The colonel, in stiff starched shirt, black tie and frock coat, carved with much empressement, and Jim felt almost for the first time a sense of the value of manner.

"I had bigger turkeys," said Mrs. Woodruff to Mrs. Irwin, "but I thought it would be better to cook two turkey-hens instead of one great big gobbler with meat as tough as tripe and stuffed full of fat."

"One of the hens would 'a' been plenty," replied Mrs. Irwin. "How much did they weigh?"

"About fifteen pounds apiece," was the answer. "The gobbler would 'a' weighed thirty, I guess. He's pure Mammoth Bronze."

"I wish," said Jim, "that we could get a few breeding birds of the wild bronze turkeys from Mexico."

"Why?" asked the colonel.

"They're the original blood of the domestic bronze turkeys," said Jim, "and they're bigger and handsomer than the pure-bred bronzes, even. They're a better stock than the northern wild turkeys from which our common birds originated."

"Where do you learn all these things, Jim?" asked Mrs. Woodruff. "I declare, I often tell Woodruff that it's as good as a lecture to have Jim Irwin at table. My intelligence has fallen since you quit working here, Jim."

There came into Jim's eyes the gleam of the man devoted to a Cause—and the dinner tended to develop into a lecture. Jennie saw a little more plainly wherein his queerness lay.

"There's an education in any meal, if we would just use the things on the table as materials for study, and follow their trails back to their starting-points. This turkey takes us back to the chaparral of Mexico——"

"What's chaparral?" asked Jennie, as a diversion. "It's one of the words I have seen so often and know perfectly to speak it and read it—but after all it's just a word, and nothing more."

"Ain't that the trouble with our education, Jim?" queried the colonel, cleverly steering Jim back into the track of his discourse.

"They are not even living words," answered Jim, "unless we have clothed them in flesh and blood through some sort of concrete notion. 'Chaparral' to Jennie is just the ghost of a word. Our civilization is full of inefficiency because we are satisfied to give our children these ghosts and shucks and husks of words, instead of the things themselves, that can be seen and hefted and handled and tested and heard."

Jennie looked Jim over carefully. His queerness was taking on a new phase—and she felt a sense of surprise such as one experiences when the conjurer causes a rose to grow into a tree before your very eyes. Jim's development was not so rapid, but Jennie's perception of it was. She began to feel proud of the fact that a man who could make his impractical notions seem so plausible—and who was clearly fired with some sort of evangelistic fervor—had kissed her, once or twice, on bringing her home from the spelling school.

"I think we lose so much time in school," Jim went on, "while the children are eating their dinners."

"Well, Jim," said Mrs. Woodruff, "every one but you is down on the human level. The poor kids have to eat!"

"But think how much good education there is wrapped up in the school dinner—if we could only get it out."

Jennie grew grave. Here was this Brown Mouse actually introducing the subject of the school—and he ought to suspect that she was planning to line him up on this very thing—if he wasn't a perfect donkey as well as a dreamer. And he was calmly wading into the subject as if she were the ex-farm-hand country teacher, and he was the county superintendent-elect!

"Eating a dinner like this, mother," said the colonel gallantly, "is an education in itself—and eating some others requires one; but just how 'larnin' is wrapped up in the school lunch is a new one on me, Jim."

"Well," said Jim, "in the first place the children ought to cook their meals as a part of the school work. Prior to that they ought to buy the materials. And prior to that they ought to keep the accounts of the school kitchen. They'd like to do these things, and it would help prepare them for life on an intelligent plane, while they prepared the meals."

"Isn't that looking rather far ahead?" asked the county superintendent-elect.

"It's like a lot of other things we think far ahead," urged Jim. "The only reason why they're far off is because we think them so. It's a thought—and a thought is as near the moment we think it as it will ever be."

"I guess that's so—to a wild-eyed reformer," said the colonel. "But go on. Develop your thought a little. Have some more dressing."

"Thanks, I believe I will," said Jim. "And a little more of the cranberry sauce. No more turkey, please."

"I'd like to see the school class that could prepare this dinner," said Mrs. Woodruff.

"Why," said Jim, "you'd be there showing them how! They'd get credits in their domestic-economy course for getting the school dinner—and they'd bring their mothers into it to help them stand at the head of their classes. And one detail of girls would cook one week, and another serve. The setting of the table would come in as a study—flowers, linen and all that. And when we get a civilized teacher, table manners!"

"I'd take on that class," said the hired man, winking at Selma Carlson, the maid, from somewhere below the salt. "The way I make my knife feed my face would be a great help to the children."

"And when the food came on the table," Jim went on, with a smile at his former fellow-laborer, who had heard most of this before as a part of the field conversation, "just think of the things we could study while eating it. The literary term for eating a meal is discussing it—well, the discussion of a meal under proper guidance is much more educative than a lecture. This breast-bone, now," said he, referring to the remains on his plate. "That's physiology. The cranberry-sauce—that's botany, and commerce, and soil management—do you know, Colonel, that the cranberry must have an acid soil—which would kill alfalfa or clover?"

"Read something of it," said the colonel, "but it didn't interest me much."

"And the difference between the types of fowl on the table—that's breeding. And the nutmeg, pepper and cocoanut—that's geography. And everything on the table runs back to geography, and comes to us linked to our lives by dollars and cents—and they're mathematics."

"We must have something more than dollars and cents in life," said Jennie. "We must have culture."

"Culture," cried Jim, "is the ability to think in terms of life—isn't it?"

"Like Jesse James," suggested the hired man, who was a careful student of the life of that eminent bandit.

There was a storm of laughter at this sally amidst which Jennie wished she had thought of something like that. Jim joined in the laughter at his own expense, but was clearly suffering from argumentative shock.

"That's the best answer I've had on that point, Pete," he said, after the disturbance had subsided. "But if the James boys and the Youngers had had the sort of culture I'm for, they would have been successful stock men and farmers, instead of train-robbers. Take Raymond Simms, for instance. He had all the qualifications of a member of the James gang when he came here. All he needed was a few exasperated associates of his own sort, and a convenient railway with undefended trains running over it. But after a few weeks of real 'culture' under a mighty poor teacher, he's developing into the most enthusiastic farmer I know. That's real culture."

"It's snowing like everything," said Jennie, who faced the window.

"Don't cut your dinner short," said the colonel to Pete, "but I think you'll find the cattle ready to come in out of the storm when you get good and through."

"I think I'll let 'em in now," said Pete, by way of excusing himself. "I expect to put in most of the day from now on getting ready to quit eating. Save some of everything for me, Selma,—I'll be right back!"

"All right, Pete," said Selma.



CHAPTER XI

THE MOUSE ESCAPES

Jennie played the piano and sang. They all joined in some simple Christmas songs. Mrs. Woodruff and Jim's mother went into other parts of the house on research work connected with their converse on domestic economy. The colonel withdrew for an inspection of the live stock on the eve of the threatened blizzard. And Jim was left alone with Jennie in the front parlor. After the buzz of conversation, they seemed to have nothing to say. Jennie played softly, and looked at nothing, but scrutinized Jim by means of the eyes which women have concealed in their back hair. There was something new in the man—she sensed that. He was more confident, more persuasive, more dynamic. She was used to him only as a static force.

And Jim felt something new, too. He had felt it growing in him ever since he began his school work, and knew not the cause of it. The cause, however, would not have been a mystery to a wise old yogi who might discover the same sort of change in one of his young novices. Jim Irwin had been a sort of ascetic since his boyhood. He had mortified the flesh by hard labor in the fields, and by flagellations of the brain to drive off sleep while he pored over his books in the attic—which was often so hot after a day of summer's sun on its low thin roof, that he was forced to do his reading in the midmost night. He had looked long on such women as Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Isabel, Cressida, Volumnia, Virginia, Evangeline, Agnes Wickfleld and Fair Rosamond; but on women in the flesh he had gazed as upon trees walking. The aforesaid spiritual director, had this young ascetic been under one, would have foreseen the effects on the psychology of a stout fellow of twenty-eight of freedom from the toil of the fields, and association with a group of young human beings of both sexes. To the novice struggling for emancipation from earthly thoughts, he would have recommended fasting and prayer, and perhaps, a hair shirt. Just what his prescription would have been for a man in Jim's position is, of course, a question. He would, no doubt, have considered carefully his patient's symptoms. These were very largely the mental experiences which most boys pass through in their early twenties, save, perhaps that, as in a belated season, the transition from winter to spring was more sudden, and the contrast more violent. Jim was now thrown every day into contact with his fellows. He was no longer a lay monk, but an active member of a very human group. He was becoming more of a boy, with the boys, and still more was he developing into a man with the women. The budding womanhood of Calista Simms and the other girls of his school thrilled him as Helen of Troy or Juliet had never done. This will not seem very strange to the experienced reader, but it astonished the unsophisticated young schoolmaster. The floating hair, the heaving bosom, the rosebud mouth, the starry eye, the fragrant breath, the magnetic hand—all these disturbed the hitherto sedate mind, and filled the brief hours he was accustomed to spend in sleep with strange dreams. And now, as he gazed at Jennie, he was suddenly aware of the fact that, after all, whenever these thoughts and dreams took on individuality, they were only persistent and intensified continuations of his old dreams of her. They had always been dormant in him, since the days they both studied from the same book. He was quite sure, now, that he had never forgotten for a moment, that Jennie was the only girl in the world for him. And possibly he was right about this. It is perfectly certain, however, that for years he had not consciously been in love with her.

Now, however, he arose as from some inner compulsion, and went to her side. He wished that he knew enough of music to turn her sheets for her, but, alas! the notes were meaningless to him. Still scanning him by means of her back hair, Jennie knew that in another moment Jim would lay his hand on her shoulder, or otherwise advance to personal nearness, as he had done the night of his ill-starred speech at the schoolhouse—and she rose in self-defense. Self-defense, however, did not seem to require that he be kept at too great a distance; so she maneuvered him to the sofa, and seated him beside her. Now was the time to line him up.

"It seems good to have you with us to-day," said she. "We're such old, old friends."

"Yes," repeated Jim, "old friends .... We are, aren't we, Jennie?"

"And I feel sure," Jennie went on, "that this marks a new era in our friendship."

"Why?" asked Jim, after considering the matter.

"Oh! everything is different, now—and getting more different all the time. My new work, and your new work, you know."

"I should like to think," said Jim, "that we are beginning over again."

"Oh, we are, we are, indeed! I am quite sure of it."

"And yet," said Jim, "there is no such thing as a new beginning. Everything joins itself to something which went before. There isn't any seam."

"No?" said Jennie interrogatively.

"Our regard for each other," Jennie noted most pointedly his word "regard"—"must be the continuation of the old regard."

"I hardly know what you mean," said Jennie.

Jim reached over and possessed himself of her hand. She pulled it from him gently, but he paid no attention to the little muscular protest, and examined the hand critically. On the back of the middle finger he pointed out a scar—a very tiny scar.

"Do you remember how you got that?" he asked.

Because Jim clung to the hand, their heads were very close together as she joined in the examination.

"Why, I don't believe I do," said she.

"I do," he replied. "We—you and I and Mary Forsythe were playing mumble-peg, and you put your hand on the grass just as I threw the knife—it cut you, and left that scar."

"I remember, now!" said she. "How such things come back over the memory. And did it leave a scar when I pushed you toward the red-hot stove in the schoolhouse one blizzardy day, like this, and you peeled the skin off your wrist where it struck the stove?"

"Look at it," said he, baring his long and bony wrist. "Right there!"

And they were off on the trail that leads back to childhood. They had talked long, and intimately, when the shadows of the early evening crept into the corners of the room. He had carried her across the flooded slew again after the big rain. They had relived a dozen moving incidents by flood and field. Jennie recalled the time when the tornado narrowly missed the schoolhouse, and frightened everybody in school nearly to death.

"Everybody but you, Jim," Jennie remembered. "You looked out of the window and told the teacher that the twister was going north of us, and would kill somebody else."

"Did I?" asked Jim.

"Yes," said Jennie, "and when the teacher asked us to kneel and thank God, you said, 'Why should we thank God that somebody else is blowed away?' She was greatly shocked."

"I don't see to this day," Jim asserted, "what answer there was to my question."

In the gathering darkness Jim again took Jennie's hand, but this time she deprived him of it.

He was trembling like a leaf. Let it be remembered in his favor that this was the only girl's hand he had ever held.

"You can't find any more scars on it," she said soberly.

"Let me see how much it has changed since I stuck the knife in it," begged Jim.

Jennie held it up for inspection.

"It's longer, and slenderer, and whiter, and even more beautiful," said he, "than the little hand I cut; but it was then the most beautiful hand in the world to me—and still is."

"I must light the lamps," said the county superintendent-elect, rather flustered, it must be confessed. "Mama! Where are all the matches?"

Mrs. Woodruff and Mrs. Irwin came in, and the lamplight reminded Jim's mother that the cow was still to milk, and that the chickens might need attention. The Woodruff sleigh came to the door to carry them home; but Jim desired to breast the storm. He felt that he needed the conflict. Mrs. Irwin scolded him for his foolishness, but he strode off into the whirling drift, throwing back a good-by for general consumption, and a pathetic smile to Jennie.

"He's as odd as Dick's hatband," said Mrs. Woodruff, "tramping off in a storm like this."

"Did you line him up?" asked the colonel of Jennie.

The young lady started and blushed. She had forgotten all about the politics of the situation.

"I—I'm afraid I didn't, papa," she confessed.

"Those brown mice of Professor Darbishire's," said the colonel, "were the devil and all to control."

Jennie was thinking of this as she dropped asleep.

"Hard to control!" she thought. "I wonder. I wonder, after all, if Jim is not capable of being easily lined up—when he sees how foolish I think he is!"

And Jim? He found himself hard to control that night. So much so that it was after midnight before he had finished work on a plan for a cooperative creamery.

"The boys can be given work in helping to operate it," he wrote on a tablet, "which, in connection with the labor performed by the teacher, will greatly reduce the expense of operation. A skilled butter-maker, with slender white hands"—but he erased this last clause and retired.



CHAPTER XII

FACING TRIAL

A distinct sensation ran through the Woodruff school, but the schoolmaster and a group of five big boys and three girls engaged in a very unclasslike conference in the back of the room were all unconscious of it. The geography classes had recited, and the language work was on. Those too small for these studies were playing a game under the leadership of Jinnie Simms, who had been promoted to the position of weed-seed monitor.

The game was forfeits. Each child had been encouraged to bring some sort of weed from the winter fields—preferably one the seed of which still clung to the dried receptacles—but anyhow, a weed. Some pupils had brought merely empty tassels, some bare stalks, and some seeds which they had winnowed from the grain in their father's bins; and with them they played forfeits. They counted out by the "arey, Ira, ickery an'" method, and somebody was "It." Then, in order, they presented to him a seed, stalk or head of a weed, and if the one who was It could tell the name of the weed, the child who brought the specimen became It, and the name was written on slates or tablets, and the new It told where the weed or seed was collected. If any pupil brought in a specimen the name of which he himself could not correctly give, he paid a forfeit. If a specimen was brought in not found in the school cabinet—which was coming to contain a considerable collection—it was placed there, and the task allotted to the best penman in the school to write its proper label. All this caused excitement, and not a little buzz—but it ceased when the county superintendent entered the room.

For it was after the first of January, and Jennie was visiting the Woodruff school.

The group in the back of the room went on with its conference, oblivious of the entrance of Superintendent Jennie. Their work was rather absorbing, being no more nor less than the compilation of the figures of a cow census of the district.

"Altogether," said Mary Talcott, "we have in the district one hundred and fifty-three cows."

"I don't make it that," said Raymond Simms. "I don't get but a hundred and thirty-eight."

"The trouble is," said Newton Bronson, "that Mary's counting in the Bailey herd of Shorthorns."

"Well, they're cows, ain't they?" interrogated Mary.

"Not for this census," said Raymond.

"Why not?" asked Mary. "They're the prettiest cows in the neighborhood."

"Scotch Shorthorns," said Newton, "and run with their calves."

"Leave them out," said Jim, "and to-morrow, I want each one to tell in the language class, in three hundred words or less, whether there are enough cows in the district to justify a cooperative creamery, and give the reason. You'll find articles in the farm papers if you look through the card index. Now, how about the census in the adjoining districts?"

"There are more than two hundred within four miles on the roads leading west," said a boy.

"My father and I counted up about a hundred beyond us," said Mary. "But I couldn't get the exact number."

"Why," said Raymond, "we could find six hundred dairy cows in this neighborhood, within an hour's drive."

"Six hundred!" scoffed Newton. "You're crazy! In an hour's drive?"

"I mean an hour's drive each way," said Raymond.

"I believe we could," said Jim. "And after we find how far we will have to go to get enough cows, if half of them patronized the creamery, we'll work over the savings the business would make, if we could get the prices for butter paid the Wisconsin cooperative creameries, as compared with what the centralizers pay us, on a basis of the last six months. Who's in possession of that correspondence with the Wisconsin creameries?"

"I have it," said Raymond. "I'm hectographing a lot of arithmetic problems from it."

"How do you do, Mr. Irwin!" It was the superintendent who spoke.

Jim's brain whirled little prismatic clouds before his vision, as he rose and shook Jennie's extended hand.

"Let me give you a chair," said he.

"Oh, no, thank you!" she returned. "I'll just make myself at home. I know my way about in this schoolhouse, you know!"

She smiled at the children, and went about looking at their work—which was not noticeably disturbed, by reason of the fact that visitors were much more frequent now than ever before, and were no rarity. Certainly, Jennie Woodruff was no novelty, since they had known her all their lives. Most of the embarrassment was Jim's. He rose to the occasion, however, went through the routine of the closing day, and dismissed the flock, not omitting making an engagement with a group of boys for that evening to come back and work on the formalin treatment for smut in seed grains, and the blue-vitriol treatment for seed potatoes.

"We hadn't time for these things," said he to the county superintendent, "in the regular class work—and it's getting time to take them up if we are to clean out the smut in next year's crop."

They repeated Whittier's Corn Song in concert, and school was out.

Alone with her in the old schoolhouse, Jim confronted Jennie in the flesh. She felt a sense of his agitation, but if she had known the power of it, she would have been astonished. Since that Christmas afternoon when she had undertaken to follow Mr. Peterson's advice and line Yim Irwin up, Jim had gone through an inward transformation. He had passed from a late, cold, backward sexual spring, into a warm June of the spirit, in which he had walked amid roses and lilies with Jennie. He was in love with her. He knew how insane it was, how much less than nothing had taken place in his circumstances to justify the hope that he could ever emerge from the state in which she would not say "Humph!" at the thought that he could marry her or any one else. Yet, he had made up his mind that he would marry Jennie Woodruff .... She ought never have tried to line him up. She knew not what she did.

He saw her through clouds of rose and pink; but she looked at him as at a foolish man who was making trouble for her, chasing rainbows at her expense, and deeply vexing her. She was in a cold official frame of mind.

"Jim," said she, "do you know that you are facing trouble?"

"Trouble," said Jim, "is the natural condition of a man in my state of mind. But it is going to be a delicious sort of tribulation."

"I don't know what you mean," she replied in perfect honesty.

"Then I don't know what you mean," replied Jim.

"Jim," she said pleadingly, "I want you to give up this sort of teaching. Can't you see it's all wrong?"

"No," answered Jim, in much the manner of a man who has been stabbed by his sweetheart. "I can't see that it's wrong. It's the only sort I can do. What do you see wrong in it?"

"Oh, I can see some very wonderful things in it," said Jennie, "but it can't be done in the Woodruff District. It may be correct in theory, but it won't work in practise."

"Jennie," said he, "when a thing won't work, it isn't correct in theory."

"Well, then, Jim," said she, "why do you keep on with it?"

"It works," said Jim. "Anything that's correct in theory will work. If the theory seems correct, and yet won't work, it's because something is wrong in an unsuspected way with the theory. But my theory is correct, and it works."

"But the district is against it."

"Who are the district?"

"The school board are against it."

"The school board elected me after listening to an explanation of my theories as to the new sort of rural school in which I believe. I assume that they commissioned me to carry out my ideas."

"Oh, Jim!" cried Jennie. "That's sophistry! They all voted for you so you wouldn't be without support. Each wanted you to have just one vote. Nobody wanted you elected. They were all surprised. You know that!"

"They stood by and saw the contract signed," said Jim, "and—yes, Jennie, I am dealing in sophistry! I got the school by a sort of shell-game, which the board worked on themselves. But that doesn't prove that the district is against me. I believe the people are for me, now, Jennie. I really do!"

Jennie rose and walked to the rear of the room and back, twice. When she spoke, there was decision in her tone—and Jim felt that it was hostile decision.

"As an officer," she said rather grandly, "my relations with the district are with the school board on the one hand, and with your competency as a teacher on the other."

"Has it come to that?" asked Jim. "Well, I have rather expected it."

His tone was weary. The Lincolnian droop in his great, sad, mournful mouth accentuated the resemblance to the martyr president. Possibly his feelings were not entirely different from those experienced by Lincoln at some crises of doubt, misunderstanding and depression.

"If you can't change your methods," said Jennie, "I suggest that you resign."

"Do you think," said Jim, "that changing my methods would appease the men who feel that they are made laughing-stocks by having elected me?"

Jennie was silent; for she knew that the school board meant to pursue their policy of getting rid of the accidental incumbent regardless of his methods.

"They would never call off their dogs," said Jim.

"But your methods would make a great difference with my decision," said Jennie.

"Are you to be called upon to decide?" asked Jim.

"A formal complaint against you for incompetency," she replied, "has been lodged in my office, signed by the three directors. I shall be obliged to take notice of it."

"And do you think," queried Jim, "that my abandonment of the things in which I believe in the face of this attack would prove to your mind that I am competent? Or would it show me incompetent?"

Again Jennie was silent.

"I guess," said Jim, "that we'll have to stand or fall on things as they are."

"Do you refuse to resign?" asked Jennie.

"Sometimes I think it's not worth while to try any longer," said Jim. "And yet, I believe that in my way I'm working on the question which must be solved if this nation is to stand—the question of making the farm and farm life what they should be and may well be. At this moment, I feel like surrendering—for your sake more than mine; but I'll have to think about it. Suppose I refuse to resign?"

Jennie had drawn on her gloves, and stood ready for departure.

"Unless you resign before the twenty-fifth," said she, "I shall hear the petition for your removal on that date. You will be allowed to be present and answer the charges against you. The charges are incompetency. I bid you good evening!"

"Incompetency!" The disgraceful word, representing everything he had always despised, rang through Jim's mind as he walked home. He could think of nothing else as he sat at the simple supper which he could scarcely taste. Incompetent! Well, had he not always been incompetent, except in the use of his muscles? Had he not always been a dreamer? Were not all his dreams as foreign to life and common sense as the Milky Way from the earth? What reason was there for thinking that this crusade of his for better schools had any sounder foundation than hia dream of being president, or a great painter, or a poet or novelist or philosopher? He was just a hayseed, a rube, a misfit, as odd as Dick's hatband, an off ox. He was incompetent. He picked up a pen, and began writing. He wrote, "To the Honorable the Board of Education of the Independent District of ——" And he heard a tap at the door. His mother admitted Colonel Woodruff.

"Hello, Jim," said he.

"Good evening, Colonel," said Jim. "Take a chair, won't you?"

"No," replied the colonel. "I thought I'd see if you and the boys at the schoolhouse can't tell me something about the smut in my wheat. I heard you were going to work on that to-night."

"I had forgotten!" said Jim.

"I wondered if you hadn't," said the colonel, "and so I came by for you. I was waiting up the road. Come on, and ride up with me."

The colonel had always been friendly, but there was a new note in his manner to-night. He was almost deferential. If he had been talking to Senator Cummins or the president of the state university, his tone could not have been more courteous, more careful to preserve the amenities due from man to man. He worked with the class on the problem of smut. He offered to aid the boys in every possible way in their campaign against scab in potatoes. He suggested some tests which would show the real value of the treatment. The boys were in a glow of pride at this cooperation with Colonel Woodruff. This was real work! Jim and the colonel went away together. It had been a great evening.

"Jim," said the colonel, "can these kids spell?"

"You mean these boys?"

"I mean the school."

"I think," said Jim, "that they can outspell any school about here."

"Good," said the colonel. "How are they about reading aloud?"

"Better than they were when I took hold."

"How about arithmetic and the other branches? Have you sort of kept them up to the course of study?"

"I have carried them in a course parallel to the text-books," said Jim, "and covering the same ground. But it has been vocational work, you know—related to life."

"Well," said the colonel, "if I were you, I'd put them over a rapid review of the text-books for a few days—say between now and the twenty-fifth."

"What for?"

"Oh, nothing—just to please me .... And say, Jim, I glanced over a communication you have started to the more or less Honorable Board of Education."

"Yes?"

"Well, don't finish it .... And say, Jim, I think I'll give myself the luxury of being a wild-eyed reformer for once."

"Yes," said Jim, dazed.

"And if you think, Jim, that you've got no friends, just remember that I'm for you."

"Thank you, Colonel."

"And we'll show them they're in a horse race."

"I don't see ..." said Jim.

"You're not supposed to see," said the colonel, "but you can bet that we'll be with them at the finish; and, by thunder! while they're getting a full meal, we'll get at least a lunch. See?"

"But Jennie says," began Jim.

"Don't tell me what she says," said the colonel. "She's acting according to her judgment, and her lights and other organs of perception, and I don't think it fittin' that her father should try to influence her official conduct. But you go on and review them common branches, and keep your nerve. I haven't felt so much like a scrap since the day we stormed Lookout Mountain. I kinder like being a wild-eyed reformer, Jim."



CHAPTER XIII

FAME OR NOTORIETY

The office of county superintendent was, as a matter of course, the least desirable room of the court-house. I say "room" advisedly, because it consisted of a single chamber of moderate size, provided with office furniture of the minimum quantity and maximum age. It opened off the central hall at the upper end of the stairway which led to the court room, and when court was in session, served the extraordinary needs of justice as a jury room. At such times the county superintendent's desk was removed to the hall, where it stood in a noisy and confusing but very democratic publicity. Superintendent Jennie might have anticipated the time when, during the March term, offenders passing from the county jail in the basement to arraignment at the bar of justice might be able to peek over her shoulders and criticize her method of treating examination papers. On the twenty-fifth of February, however, this experience lurked unsuspected in her official future.

Poor Jennie! She anticipated nothing more than the appearance of Messrs. Bronson, Peterson and Bonner in her office to confront Jim Irwin on certain questions of fact relating to Jim's competency to hold a teacher's certificate. The time appointed was ten o'clock. At nine forty-five Cornelius Bonner and his wife entered the office, and took twenty-five per cent. of the chairs therein. At nine fifty Jim Irwin came in, haggard, weather-beaten and seedy as ever, and looked as if he had neither eaten nor slept since his sweetheart stabbed him. At nine fifty-five Haakon Peterson and Ezra Bronson came in, accompanied by Wilbur Smythe, attorney-at-law, who carried under his arm a code of Iowa, a compilation of the school laws of the state, and Throop on Public Officers. At nine fifty-six, therefore, the crowd in Jennie's office exceeded its seating capacity, and Jennie was in a flutter as the realization dawned upon her that this promised to be a bigger and more public affair than she had anticipated. At nine fifty-nine Raymond Simms opened the office door and there filed in enough children, large and small, some of them accompanied by their parents, and all belonging to the Woodruff school, to fill completely the interstices of the corners and angles of the room and between the legs of the grownups. In addition there remained an overflow meeting in the hall, under the command of that distinguished military gentleman, Colonel Albert Woodruff.

"Say, Bill, come here!" said the colonel, crooking his finger at the deputy sheriff.

"What you got here, Al!" said Bill, coming up the stairs, puffing. "Ain't it a little early for Sunday-school picnics?"

"This is a school fight in our district," said the colonel. "It's Jennie's baptism of fire, I reckon ... and say, you're not using the court room, are you?"

"Nope," said Bill.

"Well, why not just slip around, then," said the colonel, "and tell Jennie she'd better adjourn to the big room."

Which suggestion was acted upon instanter by Deputy Bill.

"But I can't, I can't," said Jennie to the courteous deputy sheriff. "I don't want all this publicity, and I don't want to go into the court room."

"I hardly see," said Deputy Bill, "how you can avoid it. These people seem to have business with you, and they can't get into your office."

"But they have no business with me," said Jennie. "It's mere curiosity."

Whereupon Wilbur Smythe, who could see no particular point in restricted publicity, said, "Madame County Superintendent, this hearing certainly is public or quasi-public. Your office is a public one, and while the right to attend this hearing may not possibly be a universal one, it surely is one belonging to every citizen and taxpayer of the county, and if the taxpayer, qua taxpayer, then certainly a fortiori to the members of the Woodruff school and residents of that district."

Jennie quailed. "All right, all right!" said she. "But, shall I have to sit on the bench!"

"You will find it by far the most convenient place," said Deputy Bill.

Was this the life to which public office had brought her? Was it for this that she had bartered her independence—for this and the musty office, the stupid examination papers, and the interminable visiting of schools, knowing that such supervision as she could give was practically worthless? Jim had said to her that he had never heard of such a thing as a good county superintendent of schools, and she had thought him queer. And now, here was she, called upon to pass on the competency of the man who had always been her superior in everything that constitutes mental ability; and to make the thing more a matter for the laughter of the gods, she was perched on the judicial bench, which Deputy Bill had dusted off for her, tipping a wink to the assemblage while doing it. He expected to be a candidate for sheriff, one of these days, and was pleasing the crowd. And that crowd! To Jennie it was appalling. The school board under the lead of Wilbur Smythe took seats inside the railing which on court days divided the audience from the lawyers and litigants. Jim Irwin, who had never been in a court room before, herded with the crowd, obeying the attraction of sympathy, but to Jennie, seated on the bench, he, like other persons in the auditorium, was a mere blurry outline with a knob of a head on its top.

She couldn't call the gathering to order. She had no idea as to the proper procedure. She sat there while the people gathered, stood about whispering and talking under their breaths, and finally became silent, all their eyes fixed on her, as she wished that the office of county superintendent had been abolished in the days of her parents' infancy.

"May it please the court," said Wilbur Smythe, standing before the bar. "Or, Madame County Superintendent, I should say ..."

A titter ran through the room, and a flush of temper tinted Jennie's face. They were laughing at her! She wouldn't be a spectacle any longer! So she rose, and handed down her first and last decision from the bench—a rather good one, I think.

"Mr. Smythe," said she, "I feel very ill at ease up here, and I'm going to get down among the people. It's the only way I have of getting the truth."

She descended from the bench, shook hands with everybody near her, and sat down by the attorney's table.

"Now," said she, "this is no formal proceeding and we will dispense with red tape. If we don't, I shall get all tangled up in it. Where's Mr. Irwin? Please come in here, Jim. Now, I know there's some feeling in these things—there always seems to be; but I have none. So I'll just hear why Mr. Bronson, Mr. Peterson and Mr. Bonner think that Mr. James E. Irwin isn't competent to hold a certificate."

Jennie was able to smile at them now, and everybody felt more at ease, save Jim Irwin, the members of the board and Wilbur Smythe. That individual arose, and talked down at Jennie.

"I appear for the proponents here," said he, "and I desire to suggest certain principles of procedure which I take it belong indisputably to the conduct of this hearing."

"Have you a lawyer?" asked the county superintendent of the respondent.

"A what?" exclaimed Jim. "Nobody here has a lawyer!"

"Well, what do you call Wilbur Smythe?" queried Newton Bronson from the midst of the crowd.

"He ain't lawyer enough to hurt!" said the thing which the dramatists call A Voice.

There was a little tempest of laughter at Wilbur Smythe's expense, which was quelled by Jennie's rapping on the table. She was beginning to feel the mouth of the situation.

"I have no way of retaining a lawyer," said Jim, on whom the truth had gradually dawned. "If a lawyer is necessary, I am without protection—but it never occurred to me ..."

"There is nothing in the school laws, as I remember them," said Jennie, "giving the parties any right to be represented by counsel. If there is, Mr. Smythe will please set me right."

She paused for Mr. Smythe's reply.

"There is nothing which expressly gives that privilege," said Mr. Smythe, "but the right to the benefit of skilled advisers is a universal one. It can not be questioned. And in opening this case for my clients, I desire to call your honor's attention—"

"You may advise your clients all you please," said Jennie, "but I'm not going to waste time in listening to speeches, or having a lot of lawyers examine witnesses."

"I protest," said Mr. Smythe.

"Well, you may file your protest in writing," said Jennie. "I'm going to talk this matter over with these old friends and neighbors of mine. I don't want you dipping into it, I say!"

Jennie's voice was rising toward the scream-line, and Mr. Smythe recognized the hand of fate. One may argue with a cantankerous judge, but the woman, who like necessity, knows no law, and who is smothering in a flood of perplexities, is beyond reason. Moreover, Jennie dimly saw that what she was doing had the approval of the crowd, and it solved the problem of procedure.

There was a little wrangling, and a little protest from Con Bonner, but Jennie ruled with a rod of iron, and adhered to her ruling. When the hearing was resumed after the noon recess, the crowd was larger than ever, but the proceedings consisted mainly in a conference of the principals grouped about Jennie at the big lawyers' table. They were talking about the methods adopted by Jim in his conduct of the Woodruff school—just talking. The only new thing was the presence of a couple of newspaper men, who had queried Chicago papers on the story, and been given orders for a certain number of words on the case of the farm-hand schoolmaster on trial before his old sweetheart for certain weird things he had done in the home school in which they had once been classmates. The fact that the old school-sweetheart had kicked a lawyer out of the case was not overlooked by the gentlemen of the fourth estate. It helped to make it a "good story."

By the time at which gathering darkness made it necessary for the bailiff to light the lamps, the parties had agreed on the facts. Jim admitted most of the allegations. He had practically ignored the text-books. He had burned the district fuel and worn out the district furniture early and late, and on Saturdays. He had introduced domestic economy and manual training, to some extent, by sending the boys to the workshops and the girls to the kitchens and sewing-rooms of the farmers who allowed those privileges. He had used up a great deal of time in studying farm conditions. He had induced the boys to test the cows of the district for butter-fat yield. He was studying the matter of a cooperative creamery. He hoped to have a blacksmith shop on the schoolhouse grounds sometime, where the boys could learn metal working by repairing the farm machinery, and shoeing the farm horses. He hoped to install a cooperative laundry in connection with the creamery. He hoped to see a building sometime, with an auditorium where the people would meet often for moving picture shows, lectures and the like, and he expected that most of the descriptions of foreign lands, industrial operations, wild animals—in short, everything that people should learn about by seeing, rather than reading—would be taught the children by moving pictures accompanied by lectures. He hoped to open to the boys and girls the wonders of the universe which are touched by the work on the farm. He hoped to make good and contented farmers of them, able to get the most out of the soil, to sell what they produced to the best advantage, and at the same time to keep up the fertility of the soil itself. And he hoped to teach the girls in such a way that they would be good and contented farmers' wives. He even had in mind as a part of the schoolhouse the Woodruff District would one day build, an apartment in which the mothers of the neighborhood would leave their babies when they went to town, so that the girls could learn the care of infants.

"An' I say," interposed Con Bonner, "that we can rest our case right here. If that ain't the limit, I don't know what is!"

"Well," said Jennie, "do you desire to rest your case right here?"

Mr. Bonner made no reply to this, and Jennie turned to Jim.

"Now, Mr. Irwin," said she, "while you have been following out these very interesting and original methods, what have you done in the way of teaching the things called for by the course of study?"

"What is the course of study?" queried Jim. "Is it anything more than an outline of the mental march the pupils are ordered to make? Take reading: why does it give the children any greater mastery of the printed page to read about Casabianca on the burning deck, than about the cause of the firing of corn by hot weather? And how can they be given better command of language than by writing about things they have found out in relation to some of the sciences which are laid under contribution by farming? Everything they do runs into numbers, and we do more arithmetic than the course requires. There isn't any branch of study—not even poetry and art and music—that isn't touched by life. If there is we haven't time for it in the common schools. We work out from life to everything in the course of study."

"Do you mean to assert," queried Jennie, "that while you have been doing all this work which was never contemplated by those who have made up the course of study, that you haven't neglected anything?"

"I mean," said Jim, "that I'm willing to stand or fall on an examination of these children in the very text-books we are accused of neglecting."

Jennie looked steadily at Jim for a full minute, and at the clock. It was nearly time for adjournment.

"How many pupils of the Woodruff school are here?" she asked. "All rise, please!"

A mass of the audience, in the midst of which sat Jennie's father, rose at the request.

"Why," said Jennie, "I should say we had a quorum, anyhow! How many will come back to-morrow morning at nine o'clock, and bring your school-books? Please lift hands."

Nearly every hand went up.

"And, Mr. Irwin," she went on, "will you have the school records, so we may be able to ascertain the proper standing of these pupils?"

"I will," said Jim.

"Then," said Jennie, "we'll adjourn until nine o'clock. I hope to see every one here. We'll have school here to-morrow. And, Mr. Irwin, please remember that you state that you'll stand or fall on the mastery by these pupils of the text-books they are supposed to have neglected."

"Not the mastery of the text," said Jim. "But their ability to do the work the text is supposed to fit them for."

"Well," said Jennie, "I don't know but that's fair."

"But," said Mrs. Haakon Peterson, "we don't want our children brought up to be yust farmers. Suppose we move to town—where does the culture come in?"

* * * * *

The Chicago papers had a news item which covered the result of the examinations; but the great sensation of the Woodruff District lay in the Sunday feature carried by one of them.

It had a picture of Jim Irwin, and one of Jennie Woodruff—the latter authentic, and the former gleaned from the morgue, and apparently the portrait of a lumber-jack. There was also a very free treatment by the cartoonist of Mr. Simms carrying a rifle with the intention of shooting up the school board in case the decision went against the schoolmaster.

* * * * *

"When it became known," said the news story, "that the schoolmaster had bet his job on the proficiency of his school in studies supposed and alleged to have been studiously neglected, the excitement rose to fever heat. Local sports bet freely on the result, the odds being eight to five on General Proficiency against the field. The field was Jim Irwin and his school. And the way those rural kids rose in their might and ate up the text-books was simply scandalous. There was a good deal of nervousness on the part of some of the small starters, and some bursts of tears at excusable failures. But when the fight was over, and the dead and wounded cared for, the school board and the county superintendent were forced to admit that they wished the average school could do as well under a similar test.

"The local Mr. Dooley is Cornelius Bonner, a member of the 'board.' When asked for a statement of his views after the county superintendent had decided that her old sweetheart was to be allowed the priceless boon of earning forty dollars a month during the remainder of his contract, Mr. Bonner said, 'Aside from being licked, we're all right. But we'll get this guy yet, don't fall down and fergit that!'

"'The examinations tind to show,' said Mr. Bonner, when asked for his opinion on the result, 'that in or-r-rder to larn anything you shud shtudy somethin' ilse. But we'll git this guy yit!'"

* * * * *

"Jim," said Colonel Woodruff, as they rode home together, "the next heat is the school election. We've got to control that board next year—and we've got to do it by electing one out of three."

"Is that a possibility?" asked Jim. "Aren't we sure to be defeated at last? Shouldn't I quit at the end of my contract? All I ever hoped for was to be allowed to fulfill that. And is it worth the fight?"

"It's not only possible," replied the colonel, "but probable. As for being worth while—why, this thing is too big to drop. I'm just beginning to understand what you're driving at. And I like being a wild-eyed reformer more and more."



CHAPTER XIV

THE COLONEL TAKES THE FIELD

Every Iowa county has its Farmers' Institute. Usually it is held in the county seat, and is a gathering of farmers for the ostensible purpose of listening to improving discussions and addresses both instructive and entertaining. Really, in most cases, the farmers' institutes have been occasions for the cultivation of relations between a few of the exceptional farmers and their city friends and with one another. Seldom is anything done which leads to any better selling methods for the farmers, any organization looking to cooperative effort, or anything else that an agricultural economist from Ireland, Germany or Denmark would suggest as the sort of action which the American farmer must take if he is to make the most of his life and labor.

The Woodruff District was interested in the institute however, because of the fact that a rural-school exhibit was one of its features that year, and that Colonel Woodruff had secured an urgent invitation to the school to take part in it.

"We've got something new out in our district school," said he to the president of the institute.

"So I hear," said the president—"mostly a fight, isn't it?"

"Something more," said the colonel. "If you'll persuade our school to make an exhibit of real rural work in a real rural school, I'll promise you something worth seeing and discussing."

Such exhibits are now so common that it is not worth while for us to describe it; but then, the sight of a class of children testing and weighing milk, examining grains for viability and foul seeds, planning crop rotations, judging grains and live stock was so new in that county as to be the real sensation of the institute.

Two persons were a good deal embarrassed by the success of the exhibit. One was the county superintendent, who was constantly in receipt of undeserved compliments upon her wisdom in fostering really "practical work in the schools." The other was Jim Irwin, who was becoming famous, and who felt he had done nothing to deserve fame. Professor Withers, an extension lecturer from Ames, took Jim to dinner at the best hotel in the town, for the purpose of talking over with him the needs of the rural schools. Jim was in agony. The colored waiter fussed about trying to keep Jim in the beaten track of hotel manners, restored to him the napkin which Jim failed to use, and juggled back into place the silverware which Jim misappropriated to alien and unusual uses. But, when the meal had progressed to the stage of conversation, the waiter noticed that gradually the uncouth farmer became master of the situation, and the well-groomed college professor the interested listener.

"You've got to come down to our farmers' week next year, and tell us about these things," said he to Jim. "Can't you?"

Jim's brain reeled. He go to a gathering of real educators and tell his crude notions! How could he get the money for his expenses? But he had that gameness which goes with supreme confidence in the thing dealt with.

"I'll come," said he.

"Thank you," said the Ames man, "There's a small honorarium attached, you know."

Jim was staggered. What was an honorarium? He tried to remember what an honorarium is, and could get no further than the thought that it is in some way connected with the Latin root of "honor." Was he obliged to pay an honorarium for the chance to speak before the college gathering? Well, he'd save money and pay it. The professor must be able to understand that it couldn't be expected that a country school-teacher would be able to pay much.

"I—I'll try to take care of the honorarium," said he. "I'll come."

The professor laughed. It was the first joke the gangling innovator had perpetrated.

"It won't bother you to take care of it," said he, "but if you're not too extravagant it will pay you your expenses and give you a few dollars over."

Jim breathed more freely. An honorarium was paid to the person receiving the honor, then. What a relief!

"All right," he exclaimed. "I'll be glad to come!"

"Let's consider that settled," said the professor. "And now I must be going back to the opera-house. My talk on soil sickness comes next. I tell you, the winter wheat crop has been—"

But Jim was not able to think much of the winter wheat problem as they went back to the auditorium. He was worth putting on the program at a state meeting! He was worth the appreciation of a college professor, trained to think on the very matters Jim had been so long mulling over in isolation and blindness! He was actually worth paying for his thoughts.

Calista Simms thought she saw something shining and saint-like about the homely face of her teacher as he came to her at her post in the room in which the school exhibit was held. Calista was in charge of the little children whose work was to be demonstrated that day, and was in a state of exaltation to which her starved being had hitherto been a stranger. Perhaps there was something similar in her condition of fervent happiness to that of Jim. She, too, was doing something outside the sordid life of the Simms cabin. She yearned over the children in her care, and would have been glad to die for them—and besides was not Newton Bronson in charge of the corn exhibit, and a member of the corn-judging team? To the eyes of the town girls who passed about among the exhibits, she was poorly dressed; but if they could have seen the clothes she had worn on that evening when Jim Irwin first called at their cabin and failed to give a whoop from the big road, they could perhaps have understood the sense of wellbeing and happiness in Calista's soul at the feeling of her whole clean underclothes, her neat, if cheap, dress, and the "boughten" cloak she wore—and any of them, even without knowledge of this, might have understood Calista's joy at the knowledge that Newton Bronson's eyes were on her from his station by the big pillar, no matter how many town girls filed by. For therein they would have been in a realm of the passions quite universal in its appeal to the feminine soul.

"Hello, Calista!" said Jim. "How are you enjoying it?"

"Oh!" said Calista, and drew a long, long breath. "Ah'm enjoying myse'f right much, Mr. Jim."

"Any of the home folks coming in to see?"

"Yes, seh," answered Calista. "All the school board have stopped by this morning."

Jim looked about him. He wished he could see and shake hands with his enemies, Bronson, Peterson and Bonner: and if he could tell them of his success with Professor Withers of the State Agricultural College, perhaps they would feel differently toward him. There they were now, over in a corner, with their heads together. Perhaps they were agreeing among themselves that he was right in his school methods, and they wrong. He went toward them, his face still beaming with that radiance which had shone so plainly to the eyes of Calista Simms, but they saw in it only a grin of exultation over his defeat of them at the hearing before Jennie Woodruff. When Sim had drawn so close as almost to call for the extended hand, he felt the repulsion of their attitudes and sheered off on some pretended errand to a dark corner across the room.

They resumed their talk.

"I'm a Dimocrat," said Con Bonner, "and you fellers is Republicans, and we've fought each other about who we was to hire for teacher; but when it comes to electing my successor, I think we shouldn't divide on party lines."

"The fight about the teacher," said Haakon Peterson, "is a t'ing of the past. All our candidates got odder yobs now."

"Yes," said Ezra Bronson. "Prue Foster wouldn't take our school now if she could get it"

"And as I was sayin'," went on Bonner, "I want to get this guy, Jim Irwin. An' bein' the cause of his gittin' the school, I'd like to be on the board to kick him off; but if you fellers would like to have some one else, I won't run, and if the right feller is named, I'll line up what friends I got for him." "You got no friend can git as many wotes as you can," said Peterson. "I tank you better run."

"What say, Ez?" asked Bonner.

"Suits me all right," said Bronson. "I guess we three have had our fight out and understand each other."

"All right," returned Bonner, "I'll take the office again. Let's not start too soon, but say we begin about a week from Sunday to line up our friends, to go to the school election and vote kind of unanimous-like?"

"Suits me," said Bronson.

"Wery well," said Peterson.

"I don't like the way Colonel Woodruff acts," said Bonner. "He rounded up that gang of kids that shot us all to pieces at that hearing, didn't he?"

"I tank not," replied Peterson. "I tank he was yust interested in how Yennie managed it."

"Looked mighty like he was managin' the demonstration," said Bonner. "What d'ye think, Ez?"

"Too small a matter for the colonel to monkey with," said Bronson. "I reckon he was just interested in Jennie's dilemmer. It ain't reasonable that Colonel Woodruff after the p'litical career he's had would mix up in school district politics."

"Well," said Bonner, "he seems to take a lot of interest in this exhibition here. I think we'd better watch the colonel. That decision of Jennie's might have been because she's stuck on Jim Irwin, or because she takes a lot of notice of what her father says."

"Or she might have thought the decision was right," said Bronson. "Some people do, you know."

"Right!" scoffed Bonner. "In a pig's wrist! I tell you that decision was crooked."

"Vell," said Haakon Peterson, "talk of crookedness wit' Yennie Woodruff don't get wery fur wit' me."

"Oh, I don't mean anything bad, Haakon," replied Bonner, "but it wasn't an all-right decision. I think she's stuck on the guy."

The caucus broke up after making sure that the three members of the school board would be as one man in maintaining a hostile front to Jim Irwin and his tenure of office. It looked rather like a foregone conclusion, in a little district wherein there were scarcely twenty-five votes. The three members of the board with their immediate friends and dependents could muster two or three ballots each—and who was there to oppose them? Who wanted to be school director? It was a post of no profit, little honor and much vexation. And yet, there are always men to be found who covet such places. Curiously there are always those who covet them for no ascertainable reason, for often they are men who have no theory of education to further, and no fondness for affairs of the intellect. In the Woodruff District, however, the incumbents saw no candidate in view who could be expected to stand up against the rather redoubtable Con Bonner. Jim's hold upon his work seemed fairly secure for the term of his contract, since Jennie had decided that he was competent; and after that he himself had no plans. He could not expect to be retained by the men who had so bitterly attacked him. Perhaps the publicity of his Ames address would get him another place with a sufficient stipend so that he could support his mother without the aid of the little garden, the cows and the fowls—and perhaps he would ask Colonel Woodruff to take him back as a farm-hand. These thoughts thronged his mind as he stood apart and alone after his rebuff by the caucusing members of the school board.

"I don't see," said a voice over against the cooking exhibit, "what there is in this to set people talking? Buttonholes! Cookies! Humph!"

It was Mrs. Bonner who had clearly come to scoff. With her was Mrs. Bronson, whose attitude was that of a person torn between conflicting influences. Her husband had indicated to the crafty Bonner and the subtle Peterson that while he was still loyal to the school board, and hence perforce opposed to Jim Irwin, and resentful to the decision of the county superintendent, his adhesion to the institutions of the Woodruff District as handed down by the fathers was not quite of the thick-and-thin type. For he had suggested that Jennie might have been sincere in rendering her decision, and that some people agreed with her: so Mrs. Bronson, while consorting with the censorious Mrs. Bonner evinced restiveness when the school and its work was condemned. Was not her Newton in charge of a part of this show! Had he not taken great interest in the project? Was he not an open and defiant champion of Jim Irwin, and a constant and enthusiastic attendant upon, not only his classes, but a variety of evening and Saturday affairs at which the children studied arithmetic, grammar, geography, writing and spelling, by working on cows, pigs, chickens, grains, grasses, soils and weeds? And had not Newton become a better boy—a wonderfully better boy? Mrs. Bronson's heart was filled with resentment that she also could not be enrolled among Jim Irwin's supporters. And when Mrs. Bonner sneered at the buttonholes and cookies, Mrs. Bronson, knowing how the little fingers had puzzled themselves over the one, and young faces had become floury and red over the other, flared up a little.

"And I don't see," said she, "anything to laugh at when the young girls do the best they can to make themselves capable housekeepers. I'd like to help them." She turned to Mrs. Bonner as if to add "If this be treason, make the most of it!" but that lady was far too good a diplomat to be cornered in the same enclosure with a rupture of relations.

"And quite right, too," said she, "in the proper place, and at the proper time. The little things ought to be helped by every real woman—of course!"

"Of course," repeated Mrs. Bronson.

"At home, now, and by their mothers," added Mrs. Bonner.

"Well," said Mrs. Bronson, "take them Simms girls, now. They have to have help outside their home if they are ever going to be like other folks."

"Yes," agreed Mrs. Bonner, "and a lot more help than a farm-hand can give 'em in school. Pretty poor trash, they, and I shouldn't wonder if there was a lot we don't know about why they come north."

"As for that," replied Mrs. Bronson, "I don't know as it's any of my business so long as they behave themselves."

Again Mrs. Bonner felt the situation getting out of hand, and again she returned to the task of keeping Mrs. Bronson in alignment with the forces of accepted Woodruff District conditions.

"Ain't it some of our business?" she queried. "I wonder now! By the way Newtie keeps his eye on that Simms girl, I shouldn't wonder if it might turn out your business."

"Pshaw!" scoffed Mrs. Bronson. "Puppy love!"

"You can't tell how far it'll go," persisted Mrs. Bonner. "I tell you these schools are getting to be nothing more than sparkin' bees, from the county superintendent down."

"Well, maybe," said Mrs. Bronson, "but I don't see sparkin' in everything boys and girls do as quick as some."

"I wonder," said Mrs. Bonner, "if Colonel Woodruff would be as friendly to Jim Irwin if he knew that everybody says Jennie decided he was to keep his certif'kit because she wants him to get along in the world, so he can marry her?"

"I don't know as she is so very friendly to him," replied Mrs. Bronson; "and Jim and Jennie are both of age, you know."

"Yes, but how about our schools bein' ruined by a love affair?" interrogated Mrs. Bonner, as they moved away. "Ain't that your business and mine?"

Instead of desiring further knowledge of what they were discussing, Jim felt a dreadful disgust at the whole thing. Disgust at being the subject of gossip, at the horrible falsity of the picture he had been able to paint to the people of his objects and his ambitions, and especially at the desecration of Jennie by such misconstruction of her attitude toward him officially and personally. Jennie was vexed at him, and wanted him to resign from his position. He firmly believed that she was surprised at finding herself convinced that he was entitled to a decision in the matter of his competency as a teacher. She was against him, he believed, and as for her being in love with him—to hear these women discuss it was intolerable.

He felt his face redden as at the hearing of some horrible indecency. He felt himself stripped naked, and he was hotly ashamed that Jennie should be associated with him in the exposure. And while he was raging inwardly, paying the penalty of his new-found place in the public eye—a publicity to which he was not yet hardened—he heard other voices. Professor Withers, County Superintendent Jennie and Colonel Woodruff were making an inspection of the rural-school exhibit.

"I hear he has been having some trouble with his school board," the professor was saying.

"Yes," said Jennie, "he has."

"Wasn't there an effort made to remove him from his position?" asked the professor.

"Proceedings before me to revoke his certificate," replied Jennie.

"On what grounds?"

"Incompetency," answered Jennie. "I found that his pupils were really doing very well in the regular course of study—which he seems to be neglecting."

"I'm glad you supported him," said the professor. "I'm glad to find you helping him." "Really," protested Jennie, "I don't think myself—"

"What do you think of his notions?" asked the colonel.

"Very advanced," replied Professor Withers. "Where did he imbibe them all?"

"He's a Brown Mouse," said the colonel.

"I beg your pardon," said the puzzled professor. "I didn't quite understand. A—a—what?"

"One of papa's breeding jokes," said Jennie. "He means a phenomenon in heredity—perhaps a genius, you know."

"Ah, I see," replied the professor, "a Mendelian segregation, you mean?"

"Certainly," said the colonel. "The sort of mind that imbibes things from itself."

"Well, he's rather wonderful," declared the professor. "I had him to lunch to-day. He surprised me. I have invited him to make an address at Ames next winter during farmers' week."

"He?"

Jennie's tone showed her astonishment. Jim the underling. Jim the off ox. Jim the thorn in the county superintendent's side. Jim the country teacher! It was stupefying.

"Oh, you musn't judge him by his looks," said the professor. "I really do hope he'll take some advice on the matter of clothes—put on a cravat and a different shirt and collar when he comes to Ames—but I have no doubt he will."

"He hasn't any other," said the colonel.

"Well, it won't signify, if he has the truth to tell us," said the professor.

"Has he?" asked Jennie.

"Miss Woodruff," replied the professor earnestly, "he has something that looks toward truth, and something that we need. Just how far he will go, just what he will amount to, it is impossible to say. But something must be done for the rural schools—something along the lines he is trying to follow. He is a struggling soul, and he is worth helping. You won't make any mistake if you make the most of Mr. Irwin."

Jim slipped out of a side door and fled. As in the case of the conversation between Mrs. Bronson and Mrs. Bonner, he was unable to discern the favorable auspices in the showing of adverse things. He had not sensed Mrs. Bronson's half-concealed friendliness for him, though it was disagreeably plain to Mrs. Bonner. And now he neglected the colonel's evident support of him, and Professor Withers' praise, in Jennie's manifest surprise that old Jim had been accorded the recognition of a place on a college program, and the professor's criticism of his dress and general appearance.

It was unjust! What chance had he been given to discover what it was fashionable to wear, even if he had had the money to buy such clothes as other young men possessed? He would never go near Ames! He would stay in the Woodruff District where the people knew him, and some of them liked him. He would finish his school year, and go back to work on the farm. He would abandon the struggle.

He started home, on foot as he had come, A mile or so out he was overtaken by the colonel, driving briskly along with room in his buggy for Jim.

"Climb in, Jim!" said he. "Dan and Dolly didn't like to see you walk."

"They're looking fine," said Jim.

There is a good deal to say whenever two horse lovers get together. Hoofs and coats and frogs and eyes and teeth and the queer sympathies between horse and man may sometimes quite take the place of the weather for an hour or so. But when Jim had alighted at his own door, the colonel spoke of what had been in his mind all the time.

"I saw Bonner and Haakon and Ez doing some caucusing to-day," said he. "They expect to elect Bonner to the board again."

"Oh, I suppose so," replied Jim.

"Well, what shall we do about it?" asked the colonel.

"If the people want him—" began Jim.

"The people," said the colonel, "must have a choice offered to 'em, or how can you or any man tell what they want? How can they tell themselves?"

Jim was silent. Here was a matter on which he really had no ideas except the broad and general one that truth is mighty and shall prevail—but that the speed of its forward march is problematical.

"I think," said the colonel, "that it's up to us to see that the people have a chance to decide. It's really Bonner against Jim Irwin."

"That's rather startling," said Jim, "but I suppose it's true. And much chance Jim Irwin has!"

"I calculate," rejoined the colonel, "that what you need is a champion."

"To do what?"

"To take that office away from Bonner."

"Who can do that?"

"Well, I'm free to say I don't know that any one can, but I'm willing to try. I think that in about a week I shall pass the word around that I'd like to serve my country on the school board."

Jim's face lighted up—and then darkened.

"Even then they'd be two to one, Colonel."

"Maybe," replied the colonel, "and maybe not. That would have to be figured on. A cracked log splits easy."

"Anyhow," Jim went on, "what's the use? I shan't be disturbed this year—and after that—what's the use?"

"Why, Jim," said the colonel, "you aren't getting short of breath are you? Do I see frost on your boots? I thought you good for the mile, and you aren't turning out a quarter horse, are you? I don't know what all it is you want to do, but I don't, believe you can do it in nine months, can you?"

"Not in nine years!" replied Jim.

"Well, then, let's plan for ten years," said the colonel. "I ain't going to become a reformer at my time of life as a temporary job. Will you stick if we can swing the thing for you?"

"I will," said Jim, in the manner of a person taking the vows in some solemn initiation.

"All right," said the colonel. "We'll keep quiet and see how many votes we can muster up at the election. How many oan you speak for?"

Jim gave himself for a few minutes to thought. It was a new thing to him, this matter of mustering votes—and a thing which he had always looked upon as rather reprehensible. The citizen should go forth with no coercion, no persuasion, no suggestion, and vote his sentiments.

"How many can you round up?" persisted the colonel.

"I think," said Jim, "that I can speak for myself and Old Man Simms!"

The colonel laughed.

"Fine politician!" he repeated. "Fine politician! Well, Jim, we may get beaten in this, but if we are, let's not have them going away picking their noses and saying they've had no fight. You round up yourself and Old Man Simms and I'll see what I can do—I'll see what I can do!"



CHAPTER XV

A MINOR CASTS HALF A VOTE

March came in like neither a lion nor a lamb, but was scarcely a week old before the wild ducks had begun to score the sky above Bronson's Slew looking for open water and badly-harvested corn-fields. Wild geese, too, honked from on high as if in wonder that these great prairies on which their forefathers had been wont fearlessly to alight had been changed into a disgusting expanse of farms. If geese are favored with the long lives in which fable bids us believe, some of these venerable honkers must have seen every vernal and autumnal phase of the transformation from boundless prairie to boundless corn-land. I sometimes seem to hear in the bewildering trumpetings of wild geese a cry of surprise and protest at the ruin of their former paradise. Colonel Woodruff's hired man, Pete, had no such foolish notions, however. He stopped Newton Bronson and Raymond Simms as they tramped across the colonel's pasture, gun in hand, trying to make themselves believe that the shooting was good.