"This ain't no country to hunt in," said he. "Did either of you fellows ever have any real duck-shooting?"

"The mountings," said Raymond, "air poor places for ducks."

"Not big enough water," suggested Pete. "Some wood-ducks, I suppose?"

"Along the creeks and rivers, yes seh," said Raymond, "and sometimes a flock of wild geese would get lost, and some bewildered, and a man would shoot one or two—from the tops of the ridges—but nothing to depend on."

"I've never been nowhere," said Newton, "except once to Minnesota—and—and that wasn't in the shooting season."

A year ago Newton would have boasted of having "bummed" his way to Faribault. His hesitant speech was a proof of the embarrassment his new respectability sometimes inflicted upon him.

"I used to shoot ducks for the market at Spirit Lake," said Pete. "I know Fred Gilbert just as well as I know you. If I'd 'a' kep' on shooting I could have made my millions as champion wing shot as easy as he has. He didn't have nothing on me when we was both shooting for a livin'. But that's all over, now. You've got to go so fur now to get decent shooting where the farmers won't drive you off, that it costs nine dollars to send a postcard home."

"I think we'll have fine shooting on the slew in a few days," said Newton.

"Humph!" scoffed Pete. "I give you my word, if I hadn't promised the colonel I'd stay with him another year, I'd take a side-door Pullman for the Sand Hills of Nebraska or the Devil's Lake country to-morrow—if I had a gun."

"If it wasn't for a passel of things that keep me hyeh," said Raymond, "I'd like to go too."

"The colonel," said Pete, "needs me. He needs me in the election to-morrow. What's the matter of your ol' man, Newt? What for does he vote for that Bonner, and throw down an old neighbor?"

"I can't do anything with him!" exclaimed Newton irritably. "He's all tangled up with Peterson and Bonner."

"Well," said Pete, "if he'd just stay at home, it would help some. If he votes for Bonner, it'll be just about a stand-off."

"He never misses a vote!" said Newton despairingly.

"Can't you cripple him someway?" asked Pete jocularly. "Darned funny when a boy o' your age can't control his father's vote! So long!"

"I wish I could vote!" grumbled Newton. "I wish I could! We know a lot more about the school, and Jim Irwin bein' a good teacher than dad does—and we can't vote. Why can't folks vote when they are interested in an election, and know about the issues. It's tyranny that you and I can't vote."

"I reckon," said Raymond, the conservative, "that the old-time people that fixed it thataway knowed best."

"Rats!" sneered Newton, the iconoclast. "Why, Calista knows more about the election of school director than dad knows."

"That don't seem reasonable," protested Raymond. "She's prejudyced, I reckon, in favor of Mr. Jim Irwin."

"Well, dad's prejudiced against him,—er, no, he hain't either. He likes Jim. He's just prejudiced against giving up his old notions. No, he hain't neither—I guess he's only prejudiced against seeming to give up some old notions he seemed to have once! And the kids in school would be prejudiced right, anyhow!"

"Paw says he'll be on hand prompt," said Raymond. "But he had to be p'swaded right much. Paw's proud—and he cain't read."

"Sometimes I think the more people read the less sense they've got," said Newton. "I wish I could tie dad up! I wish I could get snakebit, and make him go for the doctor!"

The boys crossed the ridge to the wooded valley in which nestled the Simms cabin. They found Mrs. Simms greatly exercised in her mind because young McGeehee had been found playing with some blue vitriol used by Raymond in his school work on the treatment of seed potatoes for scab.

"His hands was all blue with it," said she. "Do you reckon, Mr. Newton, that it'll pizen him?"

"Did he swallow any of it?" asked Newton.

"Nah!" said McGeehee scornfully.

Newton reassured Mrs. Simms, and went away pensive. He was in rebellion against the strange ways grown men have of discharging their duties as citizens—a rather remarkable thing, and perhaps a proof that Jim Irwin's methods had already accomplished much in preparing Newton and Raymond for citizenship. He had shown them the fact that voting really has some relation to life. At present, however, the new wine in the old bottles was causing Newton to forget his filial duty, and his respect for his father. He wished he could lock him up in the barn so he couldn't go to the school election. He wished he could become ill—or poisoned with blue vitriol or something—so his father would be obliged to go for a doctor. He wished——well, why couldn't he get sick. Mrs. Simms had been about to send for the doctor for Buddy when he had explained away the apparent necessity. People got dreadfully scared about poison—— Newton mended his pace, and looked happier. He looked very much as he had done on the day he adjusted the needle-pointed muzzle to his dog's nose. He looked, in fact, more like a person filled with deviltry, than one yearning for the right to vote.

"I'll fix him!" said he to himself.

"What time's the election, Ez?" asked Mrs. Bronson at breakfast.

"I'm goin' at four o'clock," said Ezra. "And I don't want to hear any more from any one"—looking at Newton—"about the election. It's none of the business of the women an' boys."

Newton took this reproof in an unexpectedly submissive spirit. In fact, he exhibited his very best side to the family that morning, like one going on a long journey, or about to be married off, or engaged in some deep dark plot.

"I s'pose you're off trampin' the slews at the sight of a flock of ducks four miles off as usual?" stated Mr. Bronson challengingly.

"I thought," said Newton, "that I'd get a lot of raisin bait ready for the pocket-gophers in the lower meadow. They'll be throwing up their mounds by the first of April."

"Not them," said Mr. Bronson, somewhat mollified, "not before May. Where'd you get the raisin idee?"

"We learned it in school," answered Newton. "Jim had me study a bulletin on the control and eradication of pocket-gophers. You use raisins with strychnine in 'em—and it tells how."

"Some fool notion, I s'pose," said Mr. Bronson, rising. "But go ahead if you're careful about handlin' the strychnine."

Newton spent the time from twelve-thirty to half after two in watching the clock; and twenty minutes to three found him seated in the woodshed with a pen-knife in his hand, a small vial of strychnine crystals on a stand before him, a saucer of raisins at his right hand, and one exactly like it, partially filled with gopher bait—by which is meant raisins under the skin of each of which a minute crystal of strychnine had been inserted on the point of the knife. Newton was apparently happy and was whistling The Glow-Worm. It was a lovely scene if one can forget the gopher's point of view.

At three-thirty, Newton went into the house and lay down on the horsehair sofa, saying to his mother that he felt kind o' funny and thought he'd lie down a while. At three-forty he heard his father's voice in the kitchen and knew that his sire was preparing to start for the scene of battle between Colonel Woodruff and Con Bonner, on the result of which hinged the future of Jim Irwin and the Woodruff school.

A groan issued from Newton's lips—a gruesome groan as of the painful death of a person very sensitive to physical suffering. But his father's voice from the kitchen door betrayed no agitation. He was scolding the horses as they stood tied to the hitching-post, in tones that showed no knowledge of his son's distressed moans.

"What's the matter?"

It was Newton's little sister who asked the question, her facial expression evincing appreciation of Newton's efforts in the line of groans, somewhat touched with awe. Even though regarded as a pure matter of make-believe, such sounds were terrible.

"Oh, sister, sister!" howled Newton, "run and tell 'em that brother's dying!"

Fanny disappeared in a manner which expressed her balanced feelings—she felt that her brother was making believe, but she believed for all that, that something awful was the matter. So she went rather slowly to the kitchen door, and casually remarked that Newton was dying on the sofa in the sitting-room.

"You little fraud!" said her father.

"Why, Fanny!" said her mother—and ran into the sitting-room—whence in a moment, with a cry that was almost a scream, she summoned her husband, who responded at the top of his speed.

Newton was groaning and in convulsions. Horrible grimaces contorted his face, his jaws were set, his arms and legs drawn up, and his muscles tense.

"What's the matter?" His father's voice was stern as well as full of anxiety. "What's the matter, boy?"

"Oh!" cried Newton. "Oh! Oh! Oh!"

"Newtie, Newtie!" cried his mother, "where are you in pain? Tell mother, Newtie!"

"Oh," groaned Newtie, relaxing, "I feel awful!"

"What you been eating?" interrogated his father.

"Nothing," replied Newton.

"I saw you eatin' dinner," said his father.

Again Newton was convulsed by strong spasms, and again his groans filled the hearts of his parents with terror.

"That's all I've eaten," said he, when his spasms had passed, "except a few raisins. I was putting strychnine in 'em——"

"Oh, heavens!" cried his mother. "He's poisoned! Drive for the doctor, Ezra! Drive!"

Mr. Bronson forgot all about the election—forgot everything save antidotes and speed. He leaped toward the door. As he passed out, he shouted "Give him an emetic!" He tore the hitching straps from the posts, jumped into the buggy and headed for the road. Skilfully avoiding an overturn as he rounded into the highway, he gave the spirited horses their heads, and fled toward town, carefully computing the speed the horses could make and still be able to return. Mile after mile he covered, passing teams, keeping ahead of automobiles and advertising panic. Just at the town limits, he met the doctor in Sheriff Dilly's automobile, the sheriff himself at the steering wheel. Mr. Bronson signaled them to stop, ignoring the fact that they were making similar signs to him.

"We're just starting for your place," said the doctor. "Your wife got me on the phone."

"Thank God!" replied Bronson. "Don't fool any time away on me. Drive!"

"Get in here, Ez," said the sheriff. "Doc knows how to drive, and I'll come on with your team. They need a slow drive to cool 'em off."

"Why didn't you phone me?" asked the doctor.

"Never thought of it," replied Bronson. "I hain't had the phone only a few years. Drive faster!"

"I want to get there, or I would," answered the doctor. "Don't worry. From what your wife told me over the phone I don't believe the boy's eaten any more strychnine than I have—and probably not so much."

"He was alive, then?"

"Alive and making an argument against taking the emetic," replied the doctor. "But I guess she got it down him."

"I'd hate to lose that boy, Doc!"

"I don't believe there's any danger. It doesn't sound like a genuine poisoning case to me."

Thus reassured, Mr. Bronson was calm, even if somewhat tragic in calmness, when he entered the death chamber with the doctor. Newton was sitting up, his eyes wet, and his face pale. His mother had won the argument, and Newton had lost his dinner. Haakon Peterson occupied an armchair.

"What's all this?" asked the doctor. "How you feeling, Newt? Any pain?"

"I'm all right," said Newton. "Don't give me any more o' that nasty stuff!"

"No," said the doctor, "but if you don't tell me just what you've been eating, and doing, and pulling off on us, I'll use this"—and the doctor exhibited a huge stomach pump.

"What'll you do with that?" asked Newton faintly.

"I'll put this down into your hold, and unload you, that's what I'll do."

"Is the election over, Mr. Peterson?" asked Newton.

"Yes," answered Mr. Peterson, "and the votes counted."

"Who's elected?" asked Newton.

"Colonel Woodruff," answered Mr. Peterson. "The vote was twelve to eleven."

"Well, dad," said Newton, "I s'pose you'll be sore, but the only way I could see to get in half a vote for Colonel Woodruff was to get poisoned and send you after the doctor. If you'd gone, it would 'a' been a tie, anyhow, and probably you'd 'a' persuaded somebody to change to Bonner. That's what's the matter with me. I killed your vote. Now, you can do whatever you like to me—but I'm sorry I scared mother."

Ezra Bronson seized Newton by the throat, but his fingers failed to close. "Don't pinch, dad," said Newton. "I've been using that neck an' it's tired." Mr. Bronson dropped his hands to his sides, glared at his son for a moment and breathed a sigh of relief.

"Why, you darned infernal little fool," said he. "I've a notion to take a hamestrap to you! If I'd been there the vote would have been eleven to thirteen!"

"There was plenty wotes there for the colonel, if he needed 'em," said Haakon, whose politician's mind was already fully adjusted to the changed conditions. "Ay tank the Woodruff District will have a junanimous school board from dis time on once more. Colonel Woodruff is yust the man we have needed."

"I'm with you there," said Bronson. "And as for you, young man, if one or both of them horses is hurt by the run I give them, I'll lick you within an inch of your life—— Here comes Dilly driving 'em in now—— I guess they're all right. I wouldn't want to drive a good team to death for any young hoodlum like him—— All right, how much do I owe you. Doc?"



CHAPTER XVI

THE GLORIOUS FOURTH

A good deal of water ran under the Woodruff District bridges in the weeks between the school election and the Fourth of July picnic at Eight-Mile Grove. They were very important weeks to Jim Irwin, though outwardly uneventful. Great events are often mere imperceptible developments of the spirit.

Spring, for instance, brought a sort of spiritual crisis to Jim; for he had to face the accusing glance of the fields as they were plowed and sown while he lived indoors. As he labored at the tasks of the Woodruff school he was conscious of a feeling not very easily distinguished from a sense of guilt. It seemed that there must be something almost wicked in his failure to be afield with his team in the early spring mornings when the woolly anemones appeared in their fur coats, the heralds of the later comers—violets, sweet-williams, puccoons, and the scarlet prairie lilies.

A moral crisis accompanies the passing of a man from the struggle with the soil to any occupation, the productiveness of which is not quite so clear. It requires a keenly sensitive nature to feel conscious of it, but Jim Irwin possessed such a temperament; and from the beginning of the daily race with the seasons, which makes the life of a northern farmer an eight months' Marathon in which to fall behind for a week is to lose much of the year's reward, the gawky schoolmaster slept uneasily, and heard the earliest cock-crow as a soldier hears a call to arms to which he has made up his mind he will not respond.

I think there is a real moral principle involved. I believe that this deep instinct for labor in and about the soil is a valid one, and that the gathering together of people in cities has been at the cost of an obscure but actual moral shock.

I doubt if the people of the cities can ever be at rest in a future full of moral searchings of conscience until every man has traced definitely the connection of the work he is doing with the maintenance of his country's population. Sometimes those vocations whose connection can not be so traced will be recognized as wicked ones, and people engaged in them will feel as did Jim—until he worked out the facts in the relation of school-teaching to the feeding, clothing and sheltering of the world. Most school-teaching he believed—correctly or incorrectly—has very little to do with the primary task of the human race; but as far as his teaching was concerned, even he believed in it. If by teaching school he could not make a greater contribution to the productiveness of the Woodruff District than by working in the fields, he would go back to the fields. Whether he could make his teaching thus productive or not was the very fact in issue between him and the local body politic.

These are some of the waters that ran under the bridges before the Fourth of July picnic at Eight-Mile Grove. Few surface indications there were of any change in the little community in this annual gathering of friends and neighbors. Wilbur Smythe made the annual address, and was in rather finer fettle than usual as he paid his fervid tribute to the starry flag, and to this very place as the most favored spot in the best country of the greatest state in the most powerful, intellectual, freest and most progressive nation in the best possible of worlds. Wilbur was going strong. Jim Irwin read the Declaration rather well, Jennie Woodruff thought, as she sat on the platform between Deacon Avery, the oldest settler in the district, and Mrs. Columbus Brown, the sole local representative of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Colonel Woodruff presided in his Grand Army of the Republic uniform.

The fresh northwest breeze made free with the oaks, elms, hickories and box-elders of Eight-Mile Grove, and the waters of Pickerel Creek glimmered a hundred yards away, beyond the flitting figures of the boys who preferred to shoot off their own fire-crackers and torpedoes and nigger-chasers, rather than to listen to those of Wilbur Smythe. Still farther off could be heard the voice of a lone lemonade vender as he advertised ice-cold lemonade, made in the shade, with a brand-new spade, by an old maid, as a guaranty that it was the blamedest, coldest lemonade ever sold. And under the shadiest trees a few incorrigible Marthas were spreading the snowy tablecloths on which would soon be placed the bountiful repasts stored in ponderous wicker baskets and hampers. It was a lovely day, in a lovely spot—a good example of the miniature forests which grew naturally from time immemorial in favored locations on the Iowa prairies—half a square mile of woodland, all about which the green corn-rows stood aslant in the cool breeze, "waist-high and laid by."

They were passing down the rough board steps from the platform after the exercises had terminated in a rousing rendition of America, when Jennie Woodruff, having slipped by everybody else to reach him, tapped Jim Irwin on the arm. He looked back at her over his shoulder with his slow gentle smile.

"Isn't your mother here, Jim?" she asked. "I've been looking all over the crowd and can't see her."

"She isn't here," answered Jim. "I was in hopes that when she broke loose and went to your Christmas dinner she would stay loose—but she went home and settled back into her rut."

"Too bad," said Jennie. "She'd have had a nice time if she had come."

"Yes," said Jim, "I believe she would."

"I want help," said Jennie. "Our hamper is terribly heavy. Please!"

It was rather obvious to Mrs. Bonner that Jennie was throwing herself at Jim's head; but that was an article of the Bonner family creed since the decision which closed the hearing at the court-house. It must be admitted that the young county superintendent found tasks which kept the schoolmaster very close to her side. He carried the hamper, helped Jennie to spread the cloth on the grass, went with her to the well for water and cracked ice wherewith to cool it. In fact, he quite cut Wilbur Smythe out when that gentleman made ponderous efforts to obtain a share of the favor implied in these permissions.

"Sit down, Jim," said Mrs. Woodruff, "you've earned a bite of what we've got. It's good enough, what there is of it, and there's enough of it, such as it is!"

"I'm sorry," said Jim, "but I've a prior engagement."

"Why, Jim!" protested Jennie. "I've been counting on you. Don't desert me!"

"I'm awfully sorry," said Jim, "but I promised. I'll see you later."

One might have thought, judging by the colonel's quizzical smile, that he was pleased at Jennie's loss of her former swain.

"We'll have to invite Jim longer ahead of time," said he. "He's getting to be in demand."

He seemed to be in demand—a fact that Jennie confirmed by observation as she chatted with Deacon Avery, Mrs. Columbus Brown and her husband, and the Orator of the Day, at the table set apart for the guests and notables. Jim received a dozen invitations as he passed the groups seated on the grass—one of them from Mrs. Cornelius Bonner, who saw no particular point in advertising disgruntlement. The children ran to him and clung to his hands; young girls gave him sisterly smiles and such trifles as chicken drumsticks, pieces of cake and like tidbits. His passage to the numerous groups at a square table under a big burr-oak was quite an ovation—an ovation of the significance of which he was himself quite unaware. The people were just friendly, that was all—to his mind.

But Jennie—the daughter of a politician and a promising one herself—Jennie sensed the fact that Jim Irwin had won something from the people of the Woodruff District in the way of deference. Still he was the gangling, Lincolnian, ill-dressed, poverty-stricken Jim Irwin of old, but Jennie had no longer the feeling that one's standing was somewhat compromised by association with him. He had begun to put on something more significant than clothes, something which he had possessed all the time, but which became valid only as it was publicly apprehended. There was a slight air of command in his down-sitting and up-rising at the picnic. He was clearly the central figure of his group, in which she recognized the Bronsons, those queer children from Tennessee, the Simmses, the Talcotts, the Hansens, the Hamms and Colonel Woodruff's hired man, Pete, whose other name is not recorded.

Jim sat down between Bettina Hansen, a flaxen-haired young Brunhilde of seventeen, and Calista Simms—Jennie saw him do it, while listening to Wilbur Smythe's account of the exacting nature of the big law practise he was building up,—and would have been glad to exchange places with Calista or Bettina.

The repast drew to a close; and over by the burr-oak the crowd had grown to a circle surrounding Jim Irwin.

"He seems to be making an address," said Wilbur Smythe.

"Well, Wilbur," replied the colonel, "you had the first shot at us. Suppose we move over and see what's under discussion."

As they approached the group, they heard Jim Irwin answering something which Ezra Bronson had said.

"You think so, Ezra," said he, "and it seems reasonable that big creameries like those at Omaha, Sioux City, Des Moines and the other centralizer points can make butter cheaper than we would do here—but we've the figures that show that they aren't economical."

"They can't make good butter, for one thing," said Newton Bronson cockily.

"Why can't they?" asked Olaf Hansen, the father of Bettina.

"Well," said Newton, "they have to have so much cream that they've got to ship it so far that it gets rotten on the way, and they have to renovate it with lime and other ingredients before they can churn it."

"Well," said Raymond Simms, "I reckon they sell their butter fo' all it's wuth; an' they cain't get within from foah to seven cents a pound as much fo' it as the farmers' creameries in Wisconsin and Minnesota get fo' theirs."

"That's a fact, Olaf," said Jim.

"How do you kids know so darned much about it?" queried Pete.

"Huh!" sniffed Bettina. "We've been reading about it, and writing letters about it, and figuring percentages on it in school all winter. We've done arithmetic and geography and grammar and I don't know what else on it."

"Well, I'm agin' any schoolin'," said Pete, "that makes kids smarter in farmin' than their parents and their parents' hired men. Gi' me another swig o' that lemonade, Jim!"

"You see," said Jim to his audience, meanwhile pouring the lemonade, "the centralizer creamery is uneconomic in several ways. It has to pay excessive transportation charges. It has to pay excessive commissions to its cream buyers. It has to accept cream without proper inspection, and mixes the good with the bad. It makes such long shipments that the cream spoils in transit and lowers the quality of the butter. It can't make the best use of the buttermilk. All these losses and leaks the farmers have to stand. I can prove—and so can the six or eight pupils in the Woodruff school who have been working on the cream question this winter—that we could make at least six cents a pound on our butter if we had a cooperative creamery and all sent our cream to it."

"Well," said Ezra Bronson, "let's start one."

"I'll go in," said Olaf Hansen.

"Me, too," said Con Bonner.

There was a general chorus of assent. Jim had convinced his audience.

"He's got the jury," said Wilbur Smythe to Colonel Woodruff.

"Yes," said the colonel, "and right here is where he runs into danger. Can he handle the crowd when it's with him?"

"Well," said Jim, "I think we ought to organize one, but I've another proposition first. Let's get together and pool our cream. By that, I mean that we'll all sell to the same creamery, and get the best we can out of the centralizers by the cooperative method. We can save two cents a pound in that way, and we'll learn to cooperate. When we have found just how well we can hang together, we'll be able to take up the cooperative creamery, with less danger of falling apart and failing."

"Who'll handle the pool?" inquired Mr. Hansen.

"We'll handle it in the school," answered Jim.

"School's about done," objected Mr. Bronson.

"Won't the cream pool pretty near pay the expenses of running the school all summer?" asked Bonner.

"We ought to run the school plant all the time," said Jim. "It's the only way to get full value out of the investment. And we've corn-club work, pig-club work, poultry work and canning-club work which make it very desirable to keep in session with only a week's vacation. If you'll add the cream pool, it will make the school the hardest working crowd in the district and doing actual farm work, too. I like Mr. Bonner's suggestion."

"Well," said Haakon Peterson, who had joined the group, "Ay tank we better have a meeting of the board and discuss it."

"Well, darn it," said Columbus Brown, "I want in on this cream pool—and I live outside the district!"

"We'll let you in, Clumb," said the colonel.

"Sure!" said Pete. "We hain't no more sense than to let any one in, Clumb. Come in, the water's fine. We ain't proud!"

"Well," said Clumb, "if this feller is goin' to do school work of this kind, I want in the district, too."

"We'll come to that one of these days," said Jim. "The district is too small."

Wilbur Smythe's car stopped at the distant gate and honked for him—a signal which broke up the party. Haakon Peterson passed the word to the colonel and Mr. Bronson for a board meeting the next evening. The picnic broke up in a dispersion of staid married couples to their homes, and young folks in top buggies to dances and displays of fireworks in the surrounding villages. Jim walked across the fields to his home—neither old nor young, having neither sweetheart with whom to dance nor farm to demand labor in its inexorable chores. He turned after crawling through a wire fence and looked longingly at Jennie as she was suavely assisted into the car by the frock-coated lawyer.

"You saw what he did?" said the colonel interrogatively, as he and his daughter sat on the Woodruff veranda that evening. "Who taught him the supreme wisdom of holding back his troops when they grew too wild for attack?"

"He may lose them," said Jennie.

"Not so," said the colonel. "Individuals of the Brown Mouse type always succeed when they find their environment. And I believe Jim has found his."

"Well," said Jennie, "I wish his environment would find him some clothes. It's a shame the way he has to go looking. He'd be nice-appearing if he was dressed anyway."

"Would he?" queried the colonel. "I wonder, now! Well, Jennie, as his oldest friend having any knowledge of clothes, I think it's up to you to act as a committee of one on Jim's apparel."



CHAPTER XVII

A TROUBLE SHOOTER

A sudden July storm had drenched the fields and filled the swales with water. The cultivators left the corn-fields until the next day's sun and a night of seepage might once more fit the black soil for tillage. The little boys rolled up their trousers and tramped home from school with the rich mud squeezing up between their toes, thrilling with the electricity of clean-washed nature, and the little girls rather wished they could go barefooted, too, as, indeed, some of the more sensible did.

A lithe young man with climbers on his legs walked up a telephone pole by the roadside to make some repairs to the wires, which had been whipped into a "cross" by the wind of the storm and the lashing of the limbs of the roadside trees. He had tied his horse to a post up the road, and was running out the trouble on the line, which was plentifully in evidence just then. Wind and lightning had played hob with the system, and the line repairer was cheerfully profane, in the manner of his sort, glad by reason of the fire of summer in his veins, and incensed at the forces of nature which had brought him out through the mud to the Woodruff District to do these piffling jobs that any of the subscribers ought to have known how to do themselves, and none of which took more than a few minutes of his time when he reached the seat of the difficulty.

Jim Irwin, his school out for the day, came along the muddy road with two of his pupils, a bare-legged little boy and a tall girl with flaxen hair—Bettina Hansen and her small brother Hans, who refused to answer to any name other than Hans Nilsen. His father's name was Nils Hansen, and Hans, a born conservative, being the son of Nils, regarded himself as rightfully a Nilsen, and disliked the "Hans Hansen" on the school register. Thus do European customs sometimes survive among us.

Hans strode through the pool of water which the shower had spread completely over the low turnpike a few rods from the pole on which the trouble shooter was at work, and the electrician ceased his labors and rested himself on a cross-arm while he waited to see what the flaxen-haired girl would do when she came to it.

Jim and Bettina stopped at the water's edge. "Oh!" cried she, "I can't get through!" The trouble shooter felt the impulse to offer his aid, but thought it best on the whole, to leave the matter in the hands of the lank schoolmaster.

"I'll carry you across," said Jim.

"I'm too heavy," answered Bettina.

"Nonsense!" said Jim.

"She's awful heavy," piped Hans. "Better take off your shoes, anyhow!"

Jim thought of the welfare of his only good trousers, and saw that Hans' suggestion was good; but a mental picture of himself with shoes in hand and bare legs restrained him. He took Bettina in his arms and went slowly across, walking rather farther with his blushing burden than was strictly necessary. Bettina was undoubtedly heavy; but she was also wonderfully pleasant to feel in arms which had never borne such a burden before; and her arms about his neck as he slopped through the pond were curiously thrilling. Her cheek brushed his as he set her upon her feet and felt, rather than thought, that if there had only been a good reason for it, Bettina would have willingly been carried much farther.

"How strong you are!" she panted. "I'm awful heavy, ain't I?"

"Not very," said Jim, with scholastic accuracy. "You're just right. I—I mean, you're simply well-nourished and wholesomely plump!"

Bettina blushed still more rosily.

"You've ruined your clothes," said she. "Now you'll have to come home with me and let me—see who's there!"

Jim looked up at the trouble shooter, and went over to the foot of the pole. The man walked down, striking his spurs deep into the wood for safety.

"Hello!" said he. "School out?"

"For the day," said Jim. "Any important work on the telephone line now?"

"Just trouble-shooting," was the answer. "I have to spend three hours hunting these troubles, to one in fixing 'em up."

"Do they take much technical skill?" asked Jim.

"Mostly shakin' out crosses, and puttin' in new carbons in the arresters," replied the trouble man. "Any one ought to do any of 'em with five minutes' instruction. But these farmers—they'd rather have me drive ten miles to take a hair-pin from across the binding-posts than to do it themselves. That's the way they are!"

"Will you be out here to-morrow?" queried the teacher.

"Sure!"

"I'd like to have you show my class in manual training something about the telephone," said Jim. "The reason we can't fix our own troubles, if they are as simple as you say, is because we don't know how simple they are."

"I'll tell you what I'll do, Professor," said the trouble man. "I'll bring a phone with me and give 'em a lecture. I don't see how I can employ the company's time any better than in beating a little telephone sense into the heads of the community. Set the time, and I'll be there with bells."

Bettina and her teacher walked on up the shady lane, feeling that they had a secret. They were very nearly on a parity as to the innocence of soul with which they held this secret, except that Bettina was much more single-minded toward it than Jim. To her he had been gradually attaining the status of a hero whose clasp of her in that iron-armed way was mysteriously blissful—and beyond that her mind had not gone. To Jim, Bettina represented in a very sweet way the disturbing influences which had recently risen to the threshold of consciousness in his being, and which were concretely but not very hopefully embodied in Jennie Woodruff.

Thus interested in each other, they turned the corner which took them out of sight of the lineman, and stopped at the shady avenue leading up to Nils Hansen's farmstead. Little Hans Nilsen had disappeared by the simple method of cutting across lots. Bettina's girlish instinct called for something more than the casual good-by which would have sufficed yesterday. She lingered, standing close by Jim Irwin.

"Won't you come in and let me clean the mud off you," she asked, "and give you some dry socks?"

"Oh, no!" replied Jim. "It's almost as far to your house as it is home. Thank you, no."

"There's a splash of mud on your face," said Bettina. "Let me—" And with her little handkerchief she began wiping off the mud. Jim stooped to permit the attention, but not much, for Bettina was of the mold of women of whom warriors are born—their faces approached, and Jim recognized a crisis in the fact that Bettina's mouth was presented for a kiss. Jim met the occasion like the gentleman he was. He did not leave her stung by rejection; neither did he obey the impulse to respond to the invitation according to his man's instinct; he took the rosy face between his palms and kissed her forehead—and left her in possession of her self-respect. After that Bettina Hansen felt, somehow, that the world could not possibly contain another man like Jim Irwin—a conviction which she still cherishes when that respectful caress has been swept into the cloudy distance of a woman's memories.

Pete, Colonel Woodruff's hired man, was watering the horses at the trough when the trouble shooter reached the Woodruff telephone. County Superintendent Jennie had run for her father's home in her little motor-car in the face of the shower, and was now on the bench where once she had said "Humph!" to Jim Irwin—and thereby started in motion the factors in this story.

"Anything wrong with your phone?" asked the trouble man of Pete.

"Nah," replied Pete. "It was on the blink till you done something down the road."

"Crossed up," said the lineman. "These trees along here are something fierce."

"I'd cut 'em all if they was mine," said Pete, "but the colonel set 'em out, along about sixty-six, and I reckon they'll have to go on a-growin'."

"Who's your school-teacher?" asked the telephone man.

The county superintendent pricked up her ears—being quite properly interested in matters educational.

"Feller name of Irwin," said Pete.

"Not much of a looker," said the trouble shooter.

"Nater of the sile," said Pete. "He an' I both worked in it together till it roughened up our complexions."

"Farmer, eh?" said the lineman interrogatively. "Well, he's the first farmer I ever saw in my life that recognized there's education in the telephone business. I'm goin' to teach a class in telephony at the schoolhouse to-morrow."

"Don't get swelled up," said Pete. "He has everybody tell them young ones about everything—blacksmith, cabinet-maker, pie-founder, cookie-cooper, dressmaker—even down to telephones. He'll have them scholars figurin' on telephones, and writin' compositions on 'em, and learnin' 'lectricity from 'em an' things like that"

"He must be some feller," said the lineman. "And who's his star pupil?"

"Didn't know he had one," said Pete. "Why?"

"Girl," said the trouble-shooter. "Goes to school from the farm where the Western Union brace is used at the road."

"Nils Hansen's girl?" asked Pete.

"Toppy little filly," said the lineman, "with silver mane—looks like she'd pull a good load and step some."

"M'h'm," grunted Pete. "Bettina Hansen. Looks well enough. What about her?"

Again the county superintendent, seated on the bench, pricked up her ears that she might learn, mayhap, something of educational interest.

"I never wanted to be a school-teacher as bad," continued the shooter of trouble, "as I did when this farmer got to the low place in the road with the fair Bettina this afternoon when they was comin' home from school. The water was all over the road——"

"Then I win a smoke from the roadmaster," said Pete. "I bet him it would overflow."

"Well, if I was in the professor's place, I'd be glad to pay the bet," said the worldly lineman. "And I'll say this for him, he rose equal to the emergency and caved the emergency's head in. He carried her across the pond, and her a-clingin' to his neck in a way to make your mouth water. She wasn't a bit mad about it, either."

"I'd rather have a good cigar any ol' time," said Pete. "Nothin' but a yaller-haired kid—an' a Dane at that. I had a dame once up at Spirit Lake——"

"Well, I must be drivin' on," said the lineman. "Got to get up a lecture for Professor Irwin to-morrow—and maybe I'll be able to meet that yaller-haired kid. So long!"

The county superintendent recognized at once the educational importance of the matter, when one of her country teachers adopted the policy of calling in everybody available who could teach the pupils anything special, and converting the school into a local Chautauqua served by local lecturers. She made a run of ten miles to hear the trouble shooter's lecture. She saw the boys and some of the girls give an explanation of the telephone and the use of it. She heard the teacher give as a language exercise the next day an essay on the ethics and proprieties of eavesdropping on party lines; and she saw the beginning of an arrangement under which the boys of the Woodruff school took the contract to look after easily-remedied line troubles in the neighborhood on the basis which paid for a telephone for the school, and swelled slightly the fund which Jim was accumulating for general purposes. Incidentally, she saw how really educational was the work of the day, and that to which it led.

She had no curiosity to which she would have confessed, about the relations between Jim Irwin and his "star pupil," that young Brunhilde—Bettina Hansen; but her official duty required her to observe the attitude of pupils to teachers—Bettina among them. Clearly, Jim was looked upon by the girls, large and small, as a possession of theirs. They competed for the task of keeping his desk in order, and of dusting and tidying up the schoolroom. There was something of exaltation of sentiment in this. Bettina's eyes followed him about the room in a devotional sort of way; but so, too, did those of the ten-year-olds. He was loved, that was clear, by Bettina, Calista Simms and all the rest—an excellent thing in a school.

All the same, Jennie met Jim rather oftener after the curious conversation between those rather low fellows, Pete and the trouble shooter. As autumn approached, and the time came for Jim to begin to think of his trip to Ames, Colonel Woodruff's hint that she should assume charge of the problem of Jim's clothes for the occasion, came more and more often to her mind. Would Jim be able to buy suitable clothes? Would he understand that he ought not to appear in the costume which was tolerable in the Woodruff District only because the people there were accustomed to seeing him dressed like a tramp? Could she approach the subject with any degree of safety? Really these were delicate questions; and considering the fact that Jennie had quite dismissed her old sweetheart from the list of eligibles—had never actually admitted him to it, in fact—they assumed great importance to her mind. Once, only a little more than a year ago, she had scoffed at Jim's mention of the fact that he might think of marrying; and now she could not think of saying to him kindly, "Jim, you really must have some better clothes to wear when you go to Ames!" It would have been far easier last summer.

Somehow, Jim had been acquiring dignity and unapproachability. She must sidle up to the subject. She did. She took him into her runabout one day as he was striding toward town in that plowed-ground manner of his, and gave him a spin over to the fair grounds and two or three times around the half-mile track.

"I'm going to Ames to hear your speech," said she.

"I'm glad of that," said Jim. "More of the farmers are going from this neighborhood than ever before. I'll feel at home, if they all sit together where I can talk at them."

"Who's going?" asked Jennie.

"The Bronsons, Con Bonner and Nils Hansen and Bettina," replied Jim. "That's all from our district—and Columbus Brown and probably others from near-by localities."

"I shall have to have some clothes," said Jennie.

Jim failed to respond to this, as clearly out of his field. They were passing the county fair buildings, and he began expatiating on the kind of county fair he would have—a great county exposition with the schools as its central thought—a clearing house for the rural activities of all the country schools.

"And pa's going to have a suit before we go, too," said Jennie. "Here are some samples I got of Atkins, the tailor. Which would be the most becoming do you think?"

Jim looked the samples over carefully, but had little to say as to their adaptation to Colonel Woodruff's sartorial needs. Jennie laid great stress on the excellent quality of one or two samples, and carefully specified the prices of them. Jim exhibited no more than a languid and polite interest, and gave not the slightest symptom of ever having considered even remotely the contingency of having a tailor-made suit. Jennie sidled closer to the subject.

"I should think it would be awfully hard for you to get fitted in the stores," said she, "you are so very tall."

"It would be," said Jim, "if I had ever considered the matter of looks very much. I guess I'm not constructed on any plan the clothing manufacturers have regarded as even remotely possible. How about this county fair idea? Couldn't we do this next fall? You organize the teachers——"

Jennie advanced the spark, cut out the muffler and drowned the rest of Jim's remarks in wind and dust.

"I give it up, dad," said she to her father that evening.

"What?" queried the colonel.

"Jim Irwin's clothes," she replied. "I think he'll go to Ames in a disgraceful plight, but I can't get any closer to the subject than I have done."

"Oh, then you haven't heard the news," said the colonel. "Jim's going to have his first made-to-measure suit for Ames. It's all fixed."

"Who's making it?" asked Jennie.

"Gustaf Paulsen, the Dane that's just opened a shop in town." "A Dane?" queried Jennie. "Isn't he related to some of the neighbors?"

"A brother to Mrs. Hansen," answered the colonel.

"Bettina's uncle!"

"Ratherly," said the colonel jocularly, "seeing as how Bettina's Mrs. Hansen's daughter."

Clothes are rather important, but the difference between a suit made by Atkins the tailor, and one built by Gustaf Paulsen, the new Danish craftsman, could not be supposed to be crucially important, even when designed for a very dear friend. And Jim was scarcely that—of course not! Why, then, did the county superintendent hastily run to her room, and cry? Why did she say to herself that the Hansens were very good people, and well-to-do, and it would be a fine thing for Jim and his mother,—and then cry some more? Colonel failed to notice Jennie's unceremonious retirement from circulation that evening, and had he known all about what took place, he would have been as mystified as you or I.



CHAPTER XVIII

JIM GOES TO AMES

The boat tipped over, and Jim Irwin was left struggling in the water. It was in the rapids just above the cataract—and poor Jim could not swim a stroke. Helpless, terrified, gasping, he floated to destruction, and Jennie Woodruff was not able to lift a hand to help him. To see any human being swept to such an end is dreadful, but for a county superintendent to witness the drowning of one of her best—though sometimes it must be confessed most insubordinate—teachers, under such circumstances, is unspeakable; and when that teacher is a young man who was once that county superintendent's sweetheart, and falls in, clothed in a new made-to-order suit in which he looks almost handsome despite his manifest discomfort in his new cravat and starched collar, the experience is something almost impossible to endure. That is why Jennie gripped her seat until she must have scratched the varnish. That is why she felt she must go to him—and do something. She could not endure it a moment longer, she felt; and there he floated away, his poor pale face dipping below the waves, his sad, long, homely countenance sadder than ever, his lovely—yes, she must confess it now, his eyes were lovely!—his lovely blue eyes, so honest and true, wide with terror; and she unable to give him so much as a cry of encouragement!

And then Jim began to swim. He cast aside the roll of manuscript which he had held in his hand when the waters began to rise about him, and struck out for the shore with strong strokes—wild and agitated at first, but gradually becoming controlled and coordinated, and Jennie drew a long breath as he finally came to shore, breasting the waves like Triton, and master of the element in which he moved. There was a burst of applause, and people went forward to congratulate the greenhorn who had really made good.

Jennie felt like throwing her arms about his neck and weeping out her joy at his escape, and his restoration to her. Her eyes told him something of this; for there was a look in them which reminded him of fifteen years ago. Bettina Hansen was proud of him, and Con Bonner shook his hand and said that he agreed with him. Neither Bettina nor Con had noticed the capsizing of the boat or saw the form of Jim as it went drifting toward the cataract. But Jim knew how near he had been to disaster, and knew that Jennie knew. For she had seen him turn pale when he came on the platform to make his address at the farmers' meeting at Ames, had seen him begin the speech he had committed to memory, had observed how unable he was to remember it, had noted his confusion as he tried to find his manuscript, and then his place of beginning in it—and when his confusion had seemingly quite overcome him, had seen him begin talking to his audience just as he had talked to the political meeting that time when he had so deeply offended her, and had observed how he won first their respect, then their attention, then apparently their convictions.

To Jennie's agitated mind Jim had barely escaped being drowned in the ocean of his own unreadiness and confusion under trying conditions. And she was right. Jim had never felt more the upstart uneducated farm-hand than when he was introduced to that audience by Professor Withers, nor more completely disgraced than when he concluded his remarks. Even the applause was to him a kindly effort on the part of the audience to comfort him in his failure. His only solace was the look in Jennie's eyes.

"Young man," said an old farmer who wore thick glasses and looked like a Dutch burgomaster, "I want to have a little talk with you."

"This is Mr. Hofmyer of Pottawatomie County," said the dean of the college.

"I'm glad to meet you," said Jim. "I can talk to you now."

"No," said Jennie. "I know Mr. Hofmyer will excuse you until after dinner. We have a little party for Mr. Irwin, and we shall be late if we don't hurry."

"Where can I see you after supper?" asked Mr. Hofmyer.

Easy it was to satisfy Mr. Hofmyer; and Jim was carried off to a dinner given by County Superintendent Jennie to Jim, the dean, Professor Withers, and one or two others—and a wonderfully select and distinguished company it seemed to Jim. Jennie seized a moment's opportunity to say, "You did beautifully, Jim; everybody says so."

"I failed!" said. Jim. "You know I failed. I couldn't remember my speech. I can't stay here feasting. I want to get out in the snow."

"You made the best address of the meeting; and you did it because you forgot your speech," insisted Jennie.

"Does anybody else think so?"

"Why, Jim! You must learn to believe in what you have done. Even Con Bonner says it was the best. He says he didn't think you had it in ye!"

This advice from her to "believe in what you have done,"—wasn't there something new in Jennie's attitude here? Wasn't his belief in what he was doing precisely the thing which had made him such a nuisance to the county superintendent? However, Jim couldn't stop to answer the question which popped up in his mind.

"What does Professor Withers say?" he asked.

"He's delighted—silly!"

"Silly!" How wonderful it was to be called "silly"—in that tone.

"I shouldn't have forgotten the speech if it hadn't been for this darned boiled shirt and collar, and for wearing a cravat," urged Jim in extenuation.

"You ought to 've worn them around the house for a week before coming," said Jennie. "Why didn't you ask my advice?"

"I will, next time, Jennie," said Jim. "I didn't suppose I needed a bitting-rig—but I guess I did!"

Jennie ran away then to ask Nils Hansen and Bettina to join their dinner party. She had a sudden access of friendliness for the Hansens. Nils refused because he was going out to see the college herds fed; but at Jennie's urgent request, reinforced by pats and hugs, Bettina consented. Jennie was very happy, and proved herself a beaming hostess. The dean devoted himself to Bettina—and Jim found out afterward that this inquiring gentleman was getting at the mental processes of a specimen pupil in one of the new kind of rural schools, in which he was only half inclined to believe. He thanked Jim for his speech, and said it was "most suggestive and thought-provoking," and as the party broke up slipped into Jim's hand a check for the honorarium. It was not until then that Jim felt quite sure that he was actually to be paid for his speech; and he felt a good deal like returning the check to the conscience fund of the State of Iowa, if it by any chance possessed such a fund. But the breach made in his financial entrenchments by the expenses of the trip and the respectable and well-fitting suit of clothes overcame his feeling of getting something for nothing. If he hadn't given the state anything, he had at least expended something—a good deal in fact—on the state's account.



CHAPTER XIX

JIM'S WORLD WIDENS

Mr. Hofmyer was waiting to give Jim the final convincing proof that he had produced an effect with his speech.

"Do you teach the kind of school you lay out in your talk?" he asked.

"I try to," said Jim, "and I believe I do."

"Well," said Mr. Hofmyer, "that's the kind of education I b'lieve in. I kep' school back in Pennsylvany fifty years ago, and I made the scholars measure things, and weigh things, and apply their studies as fur as I could."

"All good teachers have always done that," said Jim. "Froebel, Pestalozzi, Colonel Parker—they all had the idea which is at the bottom of my work; 'learn to do by doing,' and connecting up the school with life."

"M'h'm," grunted Mr. Hofmyer, "I hain't been able to see how Latin connects up with a high-school kid's life—unless he can find a Latin settlement som'eres and git a job clerkin' in a store."

"But it used to relate to life," said Jim, "the life of the people who made Greek and Latin a part of everybody else's education as well as their own. Latin and Greek were the only languages in which anything worth much was written, you know. But now"—Jim spread out his arms as if to take in the whole world—"science, the marvelous literature of our tongue in the last three centuries! And to make a child learn Latin with all that, a thousand times richer than all the literature of Latin, lying unused before him!"

"Know any Latin?" asked Mr. Hofmyer.

Jim blushed, as one caught in condemning what he knows nothing about.

"I—I have studied the grammar, and read Caesar," he faltered, "but that isn't much. I had no teacher, and I had to work pretty hard, and it didn't go very well."

"I've had all the Latin they gave in the colleges of my time," said Mr. Hofmyer, "if I do talk dialect; and I'll agree with you so far as to say that it would have been a crime for me to neglect the chemistry, bacteriology, physics, engineering and other sciences that pertain to farmin'—if there'd been any such sciences when I was gettin' my schoolin'."

"And yet," said Jim, "some people want us to guide ourselves by the courses of study made before these sciences existed."

"I don't, by hokey!" said Mr. Hofmyer. "I'll be dag-goned if you ain't right. I wouldn't 'a' said so before I heard that speech—but I say so now."

Jim's face lighted up at this, the first convincing evidence that he had scored.

"I b'lieve, too," went on Mr. Hofmyer, "that your idee would please our folks. I've been the stand-patter in our parts—mostly on English and—say German. What d'ye say to comin' down and teachin' our school? We've got a two-room affair, and I was made a committee of one to find a teacher."

"I—I don't see how—" Jim stammered, all taken aback by this new breeze of recognition.

"We can't pay much," said Mr. Hofmyer. "You have charge of the dis-cip-line in the whole school, and teach in Number Two room. Seventy-five dollars a month. Does it appeal to ye?"

Appeal to him! Why, eighteen months ago it would have been worth crawling across the state after, and now to have it offered to him—it was stupendous. And yet, how about the Simmses, Colonel Woodruff, the Hansens and Newton Bronson, now just getting a firm start on the upward path to usefulness and real happiness? How could he leave the little, crude, puny structure on which he had been working—on which he had been merely practising—for a year, and remove to the new field? Jim was in exactly the same situation in which every able young minister of the gospel finds himself sooner or later. The Lord was calling to a broader field—but how could he be sure it was the Lord?

"I'm afraid I can't," said Jim Irwin, "but——"

"If you're only 'fraid you can't," said Mr. Hofmyer, "think it over. I've got your post-office address on this program, and we'll write you a formal offer. We may spring them figures a little. Think it over."

"You mustn't think," said Jim, "that we've done all the things I mentioned in my talk, or that I haven't made any mistakes or failures."

"Your county superintendent didn't mention any failures," said Mr. Hofmyer.

"Did you talk with her about my work?" inquired Jim, suddenly very curious.

"M'h'm."

"Then I don't see why you want me," Jim went on.

"Why?" asked Mr. Hofmyer.

"I had not supposed," said Jim, "that she had a very high opinion of my work."

"I didn't ask her about that," said Mr. Hofmyer, "though I guess she thinks well of it. I asked her what you are tryin' to do, and what sort of a fellow you are. I was favorably impressed; but she didn't mention any failures."

"We haven't succeeded in adopting a successful system of selling our cream," said Jim. "I believe we can do it, but we haven't."

"Wal," said Mr. Hofmyer, "I d'know as I'd call that a failure. The fact that you're tryin' of it shows you've got the right idees. We'll write ye, and mebbe pay your way down to look us over. We're a pretty good crowd, the neighbors think."



CHAPTER XX

THINK OF IT

Ames was an inspiration. Jim Irwin received from the great agricultural college more real education in this one trip than many students get from a four years' course in its halls; for he had spent ten years in getting ready for the experience. The great farm of hundreds of acres, all under the management of experts, the beautiful campus, the commodious classrooms and laboratories, and especially the barns, the greenhouses, gardens, herds and flocks filled him with a sort of apostolic joy.

"Every school," said he to Professor Withers, "ought to be doing a good deal of the work you have to do here."

"I'll admit," said the professor, "that much of our work in agriculture is pretty elementary."

"It's intermediate school work," said Jim. "It's a wrong to force boys and girls to leave their homes and live in a college to get so much of what they should have before they're ten years old."

"There's something in what you say," said the professor, "but some experiment station men seem to think that agriculture in the common schools will take from the young men and women the felt need, and therefore the desire to come to the college."

"If you can't give them anything better than high-school work," said Jim, "that will be so; but if the science and art of agriculture is what I think it is, it would make them hungry for the advanced work that really can't be done at home. To make the children wait until they're twenty is to deny them more than half what the college ought to give them—and make them pay for what they don't get."

"I think you're right," said the professor.

"Give us the kind of schools I ask for," cried Jim, "and I'll fill a college like this in every congressional district in Iowa, or I'll force you to tear this down and build larger."

The professor laughed at his enthusiasm.

More nearly happy, and rather shorter of money than he had recently been, Jim journeyed home among the companions from his own neighborhood, in a frenzy of plans for the future. Mr. Hofmyer had dropped from his mind, until Con Bonner, his old enemy, drew him aside in the vestibule of the train and spoke to him in the mysterious manner peculiar to politicians.

"What kind of a proposition did that man Hofmeister make you?" he inquired. "He asked me about you, and I told him you're a crackerjack."

"I'm much obliged," replied Jim.

"No use in back-cappin' a fellow that's tryin' to make somethin' of himself," said Bonner. "That ain't good politics, nor good sense. Anything to him?"

"He offered me a salary of seventy-five dollars a month to take charge of his school," said Jim.

"Well," said Con, "we'll be sorry to lose yeh, but you can't turn down anything like that."

"I don't know," said Jim. "I haven't decided."

Bonner scrutinized his face sharply, as if to find out what sort of game he was playing.

"Well," said he, at last, "I hope you can stay with us, o' course. I'm licked, and I never squeal. If the rist of the district can stand your kind of thricks, I can. And say, Jim"—here he grew still more mysterious—"if you do stay, some of us would like to have you be enough of a Dimmycrat to go into the next con'vintion f'r county superintendent."

"Why," replied Jim, "I never thought of such a thing!"

"Well, think of it," said Con. "The county's close, and wid a pop'lar young educator—an' a farmer, too, it might be done. Think of it."

It must be confessed that Jim was almost dazed at the number of "propositions" of which he was now required to "think"—and that Bonner's did not at first impress him as having anything back of it but blarney. He was to find out later, however, that the wily Con had made up his mind that the ambition of Jim to serve the rural schools in a larger sphere might be used for the purpose of bringing to earth what he regarded as the soaring political ambitions of the Woodruff family.

To defeat the colonel in the defeat of his daughter when running for her traditionally-granted second term; to get Jim Irwin out of the Woodruff District by kicking him up-stairs into a county office; to split the forces which had defeated Mr. Bonner in his own school district; and to do these things with the very instrument used by the colonel on that sad but glorious day of the last school election—these, to Mr. Bonner, would be diabolically fine things to do—things worthy of those Tammany politicians who from afar off had won his admiration.

Jim had scarcely taken his seat in the car, facing Jennie Woodruff and Bettina Hansen in the Pullman, when Columbus Brown, pathmaster of the road district and only across the way from residence in the school district, came down the aisle and called Jim to the smoking-room.

"Did an old fellow named Hoffman from Pottawatomie County ask you to leave us and take his school?" he asked.

"Mr. Hofmyer," said Jim, "—yes, he did."

"Well," said Columbus, "I don't want to ask you to stand in your own light, but I hope you won't let him toll you off there among strangers. We're proud of you, Jim, and we don't want to lose you."

Proud of him! Sweet music to the underling's ears! Jim blushed and stammered.

"The fact is," said Columbus, "I know that Woodruff District job hain't big enough for you any more; but we can make it bigger. If you'll stay, I believe we can pull off a deal to consolidate some of them districts, and make you boss of the whole shooting match."

"I appreciate this, Clumb," said Jim, "but I don't believe you can do it."

"Well, think of it," said Columbus. "And don't do anything till you talk with me and a few of the rest of the boys."

"Think of it" again!

A fine home-coming it was for Jim, with the colonel waiting at the station with a double sleigh, and the chance to ride into the snowy country in the same seat with Jennie—a chance which was blighted by the colonel's placing of Jennie, Bettina and Nils Hansen in the broad rear seat, and Jim in front with himself. A fine ride, just the same, over fine roads, and past fine farmsteads snuggled into their rectangular wrappages of trees set out in the old pioneer days. The colonel would not allow him to get out and walk when he could really have reached home more quickly by doing so; no, he set the Hansens down at their door, took Jennie home, and then drove the lightened sleigh merrily to the humble cabin of the rather excited young schoolmaster.

"Did you make any deal with those people down in the western part of the state?" asked the colonel. "Jennie wrote me that you've got an offer."

"No," said Jim, and he told the colonel about the proposal of Mr. Hofmyer.

"Well," said the colonel, "in my capacity of wild-eyed reformer, I've made up my mind that the first four miles in the trip is to make the rural teacher's job a bigger job. It's got to be a man's size, woman's size job, or we can't get real men and real women to stay in the work."

"I think that's a statesmanlike formulation of it," said Jim.

"Well," said the colonel, "don't turn down the Pottawatomie County job until we have a chance to see what we can do. I'll get some kind of a meeting together, and what I want you to do is to use this offer as a club over this helpless school district. What we need is to be held up. Do the Jesse James act, Jim!"

"I can't, Colonel!"

"Yes, you can, too. Will you try it?"

"I want to treat everybody fairly," said Jim, "including Mr. Hofmyer. I don't know what to do, hardly."

"Well, I'll get the meeting together," said the colonel, "and in the meantime, think of what I've said."

Another thing to think of! Jim rushed into the house and surprised his mother, who had expected him to arrive after a slow walk from town through the snow. Jim caught her in his arms, from which she was released a moment later, quite flustered and blushing.

"Why, James," said she, "you seem excited. What's happened?"

"Nothing, mother," he replied, "except that I believe there's just a possibility of my being a success in the world!"

"My boy, my boy!" said she, laying her hand on his arm, "if you were to die to-night, you'd die the greatest success any boy ever was—if your mother is any judge."

Jim kissed her, and went up to his attic to change his clothes. Inside the waistcoat was a worn envelope, which he carefully opened, and took from it a letter much creased from many foldings. It was the old letter from Jennie, written when the comical mistake had been made of making him the teacher of the Woodruff school. It still contained her rather fussy cautions about being "too original," and the sage statement that "the wheel runs easiest in the beaten track." It was written before the vexation and trouble he had caused her; but he did not read the advice, nor think of the coolness which had come between them—he read only the sentence in which Jennie had told of her father's interest in Jim's success, ending with the underscored words, "I'm for you, too."

"I wonder," said Jim, as he went out to do the evening's tasks, "I wonder if she is for me!"



CHAPTER XXI

A SCHOOL DISTRICT HELD UP

Young McGeehee Simms was loitering along the snowy way to the schoolhouse bearing a brightly scoured tin pail two-thirds full of water. He had been allowed to act as Water Superintendent of the Woodruff School as a reward of merit—said merit being an essay on which he received credit in both language and geography on "Harvesting Wheat in the Tennessee Mountains." This had been of vast interest to the school in view of the fact that the Simmses were the only pupils in the school who had ever seen in use that supposedly-obsolete harvesting implement, the cradle. Buddy's essay had been passed over to the class in United States history as the evidence of an eye-witness concerning farming conditions in our grandfathers' times.

The surnameless Pete, Colonel Woodruff's hired man, halted Buddy at the door.

"Mr. Simms, I believe?" he said.

"I reckon you must be lookin' for my brother, Raymond, suh," said Buddy.

"I am a-lookin'," said Pete impressively, "for Mr. McGeehee Simms."

"That's me," said Buddy; "but I hain't been doin' nothin' wrong, suh!"

"I have a message here," said Pete, "for Professor James E. Irwin. He's what-ho within, there, ain't he?"

"He's inside, I reckon," said Buddy.

"Then will you be so kind and condescendin' as to stoop so low as to jump so high as to give him this letter?" asked Pete.

Buddy took the letter and was considering of his reply to this remarkable speech, when Pete, gravely saluting, passed on, rather congratulating himself on having staged a very good burlesque of the dignified manners of those queer mountaineers, the Simmses.

"Please come to the meeting to-night," ran the colonel's note to Jim; "and when you come, come prepared to hold the district up. If we can't meet the Pottawatomie County standard of wages, we ought to lose you. Everybody in the district will be there. Come late, so you won't hear yourself talked about—I should recommend nine-thirty and war-paint."

It was a crisis, no doubt of that; and the responsibility of the situation rather sickened Jim of the task of teaching. How could he impose conditions on the whole school district? How could the colonel expect such a thing of him? And how could any one look for anything but scorn for the upstart field-hand from these men who had for so many years made him the butt of their good-natured but none the less contemptuous ridicule? Who was he, anyway, to lay down rules for these substantial and successful men—he who had been for all the years of his life at their command, subservient to their demands for labor—their underling? Only one thing kept him from dodging the whole issue and remaining at home—the colonel's matter-of-fact assumption that Jim had become master of the situation. How could he flee, when this old soldier was fighting so valiantly for him in the trenches? So Jim went to the meeting.

The season was nearing spring, and it was a mild thawy night. The windows of the schoolhouse were filled with heads, evidencing the presence of a crowd of almost unprecedented size, and the sashes had been thrown up for ventilation and coolness. As Jim climbed the back fence of the school-yard, he heard a burst of applause, from which he judged that some speaker had just finished his remarks. There was silence when he came alongside the window at the right of the chairman's desk, a silence broken by the voice of Old Man Simms, saying "Mistah Chairman!"

"The chair," said the voice of Ezra Bronson, "recognizes Mr. Simms."

Jim halted in indecision. He was not expected while the debate was in progress, and therefore regarded himself at this time as somewhat de trop. There is no rule of manners or morals, however, forbidding eavesdropping during the proceedings of a public meeting—and anyhow, he felt rather shiveringly curious about these deliberations. Therefore he listened to the first and last public speech of Old Man Simms.

"Ah ain't no speaker," said Old Man Simms, "but Ah cain't set here and be quiet an' go home an' face my ole woman an' my boys an' gyuhls withouten sayin' a word fo' the best friend any family evah had, Mr. Jim Irwin." (Applause.) "Ah owe it to him that Ah've got the right to speak in this meetin' at all. Gentlemen, we-all owe everything to Mr. Jim Irwin! Maybe Ah'll be thought forrard to speak hyah, bein' as Ah ain't no learnin' an' some may think Ah don't pay no taxes; but it will be overlooked, I reckon, seein' as how we've took the Blanchard farm, a hundred an' sixty acres, for five yeahs, an' move in a week from Sat'day. We pay taxes in our rent, Ah reckon, an' howsomever that may be, Ah've come to feel that you-all won't think hard of me if Ah speak what we-uns feel so strong about Mr. Jim Irwin?"

Old Man Simms finished this exordium with the rising inflection, which denoted a direct question as to his status in the meeting. "Go on!" "You've got as good a right as any one!" "You're all right, old man!" Such exclamations as these came to Jim's ears with scarcely less gratefulness than to those of Old Man Simms—who stammered and went on.

"Ah thank you-all kindly. Gentlemen an' ladies, when Mr. Jim Irwin found us, we was scandalous pore, an' we was wuss'n pore—we was low-down." (Cries of "No—No!") "Yes, we was, becuz what's respectable in the mountings is one thing, whar all the folks is pore, but when a man gets in a new place, he's got to lift himse'f up to what folks does where he's come to, or he'll fall to the bottom of what there is in that there community—an' maybe he'll make a place fer himse'f lower'n anybody else. In the mountings we was good people, becuz we done the best we could an' the best any one done; but hyah, we was low-down people becuz we hated the people that had mo' learnin', mo' land, mo' money, an' mo' friends than what we had. My little gyuhls wasn't respectable in their clothes. My childern was igernant, an' triflin', but I was the most triflin' of all. Ah'll leave it to Colonel Woodruff if I was good fer a plug of terbacker, or a bakin' of flour at any sto' in the county. Was I, Colonel? Wasn't I perfectly wuthless an' triflin'?"

There was a ripple of laughter, in the midst of which the colonel's voice was heard saying, "I guess you were, Mr. Simms, I guess you were, but——"

"Thankee," said Old Man Simms, as if the colonel had given a really valuable testimonial to his character. "I sho' was! Thankee kindly! An'now, what am I good fer? Cain't I get anything I want at the stores? Cain't I git a little money at the bank, if I got to have it?"

"You're just as good as any man in the district," said the colonel. "You don't ask for more than you can pay, and you can get all you ask."

"Thankee," said Mr. Simms gravely. "What Ah tell you-all is right, ladies and gentlemen. An' what has made the change in we-uns, ladies and gentlemen? It's the wuk of Mr. Jim Irwin with my boy Raymond, the best boy any man evah hed, and my gyuhl, Calista, an' Buddy, an' Jinnie, an' with me an' my ole woman. He showed us how to get a toe-holt into this new kentry. He teached the children what orto be did by a rentin' farmer in Ioway. He done lifted us up, an' made people of us. He done showed us that you-all is good people, an' not what we thought you was. Outen what he learned in school, my boy Raymond an' me made as good crops as we could last summer, an' done right much wuk outside. We got the name of bein' good farmers an' good wukkers, an' when Mr. Blanchard moved to town, he said he was glad to give us his fine farm for five years. Now, see what Mr. Jim Irwin has done for a pack o' outlaws and outcasts. Instid o' hidin' out from the Hobdays that was lay-wayin' us in the mountings, we'll be livin' in a house with two chimleys an' a swimmin' tub made outen crock'ryware. We'll be in debt a whole lot—an' we owe it to Mr. Jim Irwin that we got the credit to git in debt with, an' the courage to go on and git out agin!" (Applause.) "Ah could affo'd to pay Mr. Jim Irwin's salary mysr'f, if Ah could. An' there's enough men hyah to-night that say they've been money-he'ped by his teachin' the school to make up mo' than his wages. Let's not let Mr. Jim Irwin go, neighbors! Let's not let him go!"

Jim's heart sank. Surely the case was desperate which could call forth such a forlorn-hope charge as that of Old Man Simms—a performance on Mr. Simms' part which warmed Jim's soul. "There isn't a man in that meeting," said he to himself, as he walked to the schoolhouse door, "possessed of the greatness of spirit of Old Man Simms. If he's a fair sample of the people of the mountains, they are of the stuff of which great nations are made—if they only are given a chance!"

Colonel Woodruff was on his feet as Jim made his way through the crowd about the door.

"Mr. Irwin is here, ladies and gentlemen," said he, "and I move that we hear from him as to what we can do to meet the offer of our friends in Pottawatomie County, who have heard of his good work, and want him to work for them; but before I yield the floor, I want to say that this meeting has been worth while just to have been the occasion of our all becoming better acquainted with our friend and neighbor, Mr. Simms. Whatever may have been the lack of understanding, on our part, of his qualities, they were all cleared up by that speech of his—the best I have ever heard in this neighborhood."

More applause, in the midst of which Old Man Simms slunk away down in his seat to escape observation. Then the chairman said that if there was no objection they would hear from their well-known citizen, whose growing fame was more remarkable for the fact that it had been gained as a country schoolmaster—he need not add that he referred to Mr. James E. Irwin. More and louder applause.

"Friends and neighbors," said Jim, "you ask me to say to you what I want you to do. I want you to do what you want to do—nothing more nor less. Last year I was glad to be tolerated here; and the only change in the situation lies in the fact that I have another place offered me—unless there has been a change in your feelings toward me and my work. I hope there has been; for I know my work is good now, whereas I only believed it then."

"Sure it is!" shouted Con Bonner from a front seat, thus signalizing that astute wire-puller's definite choice of a place in the bandwagon. "Tell us what you want, Jim!"

"What do I want?" asked Jim. "More than anything else, I want such meetings as this—often—and a place to hold them. If I stay in the Woodruff District, I want this meeting to effect a permanent organization to work with me. I can't teach this district anything. Nobody can teach any one anything. All any teacher can do is to direct people's activities in teaching themselves. You are gathered here to decide what you'll do about the small matter of keeping me at work as your hired man. You can't make any legal decision here, but whatever this meeting decides will be law, just the same, because a majority of the people of the district are here. Such a meeting as this can decide almost anything. If I'm to be your hired man, I want a boss in the shape of a civic organization which will take in every man and woman in the district. Here's the place and now's the time to make that organization—an organization the object of which shall be to put the whole district at school, and to boss me in my work for the whole district."

"Dat sounds good," cried Haakon Peterson. "Ve'll do dat!"

"Then I want you to work out a building scheme for the school," Jim went on. "We want a place where the girls can learn to cook, keep house, take care of babies, sew and learn to be wives and mothers. We want a place in which Mrs. Hansen can come to show them how to cure meat—she's the best hand at that in the county—where Mrs. Bonner can teach them to make bread and pastry—she ought to be given a doctor's degree for that—where Mrs. Woodruff can teach them the cooking of turkeys, Mrs. Peterson the way to give the family a balanced ration, and Mrs. Simms induct them into the mysteries of weaving rag rugs and making jellies and preserves—you can all learn these things from her. There's somebody right in this neighborhood able to teach anything the young people want to learn.

"And I want a physician here once in a while to examine the children as to their health, and a dentist to look after their teeth and teach them how to care for them. Also an oculist to examine their eyes. And when Bettina Hansen comes home from the hospital a trained nurse, I want her to have a job as visiting nurse right here in the Woodruff District.

"I want a counting-room for the keeping of the farm accounts and the record of our observation in farming. I want cooperation in letting us have these accounts.

"I want some manual training equipment for wood-working and metal working, and a blacksmith and wagon shop, in which the boys may learn to shoe horses, repair tools, design buildings, and practise the best agricultural engineering. So I want a blacksmith and handyman with tools regularly on the job—and he'll more than pay his way. I want some land for actual farming. I want to do work in poultry according to the most modern breeding discoveries, and I want your cooperation in that, and a poultry plant somewhere in the district.

"I want a laboratory in which we can work on seeds, pests, soils, feeds and the like. For the education of your children must come out of these things.

"I want these things because they are necessary if we are to get the culture out of life we should get—and nobody gets culture out of any sort of school—they get it out of life, or they don't get it at all.

"So I want you to build as freely for your school as for your cattle and horses and hogs.

"The school I ask for will make each of you more money than the taxes it will require would make if invested in your farm equipment. If you are not convinced of this, don't bother with me any longer. But the money the school will make for you—this new kind of rural school—will be as nothing to the social life which will grow up—a social life which will make necessary an assembly-room, which will be the social center, because it will be the educational center, and the business center of the countryside.

"I want all these things, and more. But I don't expect them all at once. I know that this district is too small to do all of them, and therefore, I am going to tell you of another want which will tempt you to think that I am crazy. I want a bigger district—one that will give us the financial strength to carry out the program I have sketched. This may be a presumptuous thing for me to propose; but the whole situation here to-night is presumptuous on my part, I fear. If you think so, let me go; but if you don't, please keep this meeting together in a permanent organization of grown-up members of the Woodruff school, and by pulling together, you can do these things—all of them—and many more—and you'll make the Woodruff District a good place to live in and die in—and I shall be proud to live and die in it at your service, as the neighborhood's hired man!"

As Jim sat down there was a hush in the crowded room, as if the people were dazed at his assurance. There was no applause, until Jennie Woodruff, now seen by Jim for the first time over next the blackboard, clapped her gloved hands together and started it; then it swept out through the windows in a storm. The dust rose from stamping feet until the kerosene lamps were dimmed by it. And as the noise subsided, Jim saw standing out in front the stooped form of B. B. Hamm, one of the most prosperous men in the district.

"Mr. Chairman—Ezra Bronson," he roared, "this feller's crazy, an' from the sound of things, you're all as crazy as he is. If this fool scheme of his goes through, my farm's for sale! I'll quit before I'm sold out for taxes!"

"Just a minute, B. B.!" interposed Colonel Woodruff. "This ain't as dangerous as you think. You don't want us to do all this in fifteen minutes, do you, Jim?"

"Oh, as to that," replied Jim, "I just wanted you to have in your minds what I have in my mind—and unless we can agree to work toward these things there's no use in my staying. But time—that's another matter. Believe with me, and I'll work with you."

"Get out of here!" said the colonel to Jim in an undertone, "and leave the rest to your friends."

Jim walked out of the room and took the way toward his home. A horse tied to the hitching-pole had his blanket under foot, and Jim replaced it on his back, patting him kindly and talking horse language to him. Then he went up and down the line of teams, readjusting blankets, tying loosened knots, and assuring himself that his neighbors' horses were securely tied and comfortable. He knew horses better than he knew people, he thought. If he could manage people as he could manage horses—but that would be wrong. The horse did his work as a servant, submissive to the wills of others; the community could never develop anything worth while in its common life, until it worked the system out for itself. Horse management was despotism; man-government must be like the government of a society of wild horses, the result of the common work of the members of the herd.

Two figures emerged from the schoolhouse door, and as he turned toward his home after his pastoral calls on the horses, they overtook him. They were the figures of Newton Bronson and the county superintendent of schools.

"We were coming after you," said Jennie.

"Dad wants you back there again," said Newton.

"What for?" inquired Jim.

"You silly boy," said Jennie, "you talked about the good of the schools all of the time, and never said a word about your own salary! What do you want? They want to know?"

"Oh!" exclaimed Jim in the manner of one who suddenly remembers that he has forgotten his umbrella or his pocket-knife. "I forgot all about it. I haven't thought about that at all, Jennie!"

"Jim," said she, "you need a guardian!"

"I know it, Jennie," said he, "and I know who I want. I want——"

"Please come back," said Jennie, "and tell papa how much you're going to hold the district up for."

"You run back," said Jim to Newton, "and tell your father that whatever is right in the way of salary will be satisfactory to me. I leave that to the people."

Newton darted off, leaving the schoolmaster standing in the road with the county superintendent.

"I can't go back there!" said Jim.

"I'm proud of you, Jim," said Jennie. "This community has found its master. They can't do all you ask now, nor very soon; but finally they'll do just as you want them to do. And, Jim, I want to say that I've been the biggest little fool in the county!"



CHAPTER XXII

AN EMBASSY FROM DIXIE

Superintendent Jennie sat at her desk in no very satisfactory frame of mind. In the first place court was to convene on the following Monday, and both grand jury and petit juries would be in session, so that her one-room office was not to be hers for a few days. Her desk was even now ready to be moved into the hall by the janitor. To Wilbur Smythe, who did her the honor of calling occasionally as the exigencies of his law practise took him past the office of the pretty country girl on whose shapely shoulders rested the burden of the welfare of the schools, she remarked that if they didn't soon build the new court-house so as to give her such accommodations as her office really needed, "they might take their old office—so there!"

"Fair woman," said Wilbur, as he creased his Prince Albert in a parting bow, "should adorn the home!"

"Bosh!" sneered Jennie, rather pleased, all the same, "suppose she isn't fair, and hasn't any home!"

This question of adorning a home was no nearer settlement with Jennie than it had ever been, though increasingly a matter of speculation.

There were two or three men—rather good catches, too—who, if they were encouraged—but what was there to any of them? Take Wilbur Smythe, now; he would by sheer force of persistent assurance and fair abilities eventually get a good practise for a country lawyer—three or four thousand a year—serve in the legislature or the state senate, and finally become a bank director with a goodly standing as a safe business man; but what was there to him? This is what Jennie asked her paper-weight as she placed it on a pile of unfinished examination papers. And the paper-weight echoed, "Not a thing out of the ordinary!" And then, said Jennie, "Well, you little simpleton, who and what are you so out of the ordinary that you should sneer at Wilbur Smythe and Beckman Fifield and such men?" And echo answered, "What?"—and then the mail-carrier came in.

Down near the bottom of the pile she found this letter, signed by a southern state superintendent of schools, but dated at Kirksville, Missouri:

"I am a member of a party of southern educators—state superintendents in the main," the letter ran, "en tour of the country to see what we can find of an instructive nature in rural school work. I assure you that we are being richly repaid for the time and expense. There are things going on in the schools here in northeastern Missouri, for instance, which merit much study. We have met Professor Withers, of Ames, who suggests that we visit your schools, and especially the rural school taught by a young man named Irwin, and I wonder if you will be free on next Monday morning, if we come to your office, to direct us to the place? If you could accompany us on the trip, and perhaps show us some of your other excellent schools, we should be honored and pleased. The South is recreating her rural schools, and we are coming to believe that we shall be better workmen if we create a new kind rather than an improvement of the old kind."

There was more of this courteous and deferential letter, all giving Jennie a sense of being saluted by a fine gentleman in satin and ruffles, and with a plume on his hat. And then came the shock—a party of state officials were coming into the county to study Jim Irwin's school! They would never come to study Wilbur Smythe's law practise—never in the world—or her work as county superintendent—never!—and Jim was getting seventy-five dollars a month, and had a mother to support. Moreover, he was getting more than he had asked when the colonel had told him to "hold the district up!" But there could be no doubt that there was something to Jim—the man was out of the ordinary. And wasn't that just what she had been looking for in her mind?

Jennie wired to her southerner for the number of his party, and secured automobiles for the trip. She sent a note to Jim Irwin telling of the prospective visitation. She would show all concerned that she could do some things, anyhow, and she would send these people on with a good impression of her county.

She was glad of the automobiles the next Monday morning, when at nine-thirty the train discharged upon her a dozen very alert, very up-to-date, very inquisitive southerners, male and female, most of whom seemed to have left their "r's" in the gulf region. It was eleven when the party parked their machines before the schoolhouse door.

"There are visitors here before us," said Jennie.

"Seems rather like an educational shrine," said Doctor Brathwayt, of Mississippi. "How does he accommodate so many visitors in that small edifice?"

"I am not aware," said Jennie, "that he has been in the habit of receiving so very many from outside the district. Well, shall we go in?"

Once inside, Jennie felt a queer return of her old aversion to Jim's methods—the aversion which had caused her to criticize him so sharply on the occasion of her first visit. The reason for the return of the feeling lay in the fact that the work going on was of the same sort, but of a more intense character. It was so utterly unlike a school as Jennie understood the word, that she glanced back at the group of educators with a little blush. The school was in a sort of uproar. Not that uproar of boredom and mischief of which most of us have familiar memories, but a sort of eager uproar, in which every child was intensely interested in the same thing; and did little rustling things because of this interest; something like the hum at a football game or a dog-fight.

On one side of the desk stood Jim Irwin, and facing him was a smooth stranger of the old-fashioned lightning-rod-agent type—the shallower and laxer sort of salesman of the kind whose sole business is to get signatures on the dotted line, and let some one else do the rest. In short, he was a "closer."

Standing back of him in evident distress was Mr. Cornelius Bonner, and grouped about were Columbus Brown, B. B. Hamm, Ezra Bronson, A. B. Talcott and two or three others from outside the Woodruff District. With envelopes in their hands and the light of battle in their eyes stood Newton Bronson, Raymond Simms, Bettina Hansen, Mary Smith and Angie Talcott, the boys filled with delight, the girls rather frightened at being engaged in something like a debate with the salesman.

As the latest-coming visitors moved forward, they heard the schoolmaster finishing his passage at arms with the salesman.

"You should not feel exasperated at us, Mr. Carmichael," said he in tones of the most complete respect, "for what our figures show. You are unfortunate in the business proposition you offer this community. That is all. Even these children have the facts to prove that the creamery outfit you offer is not worth within two thousand dollars of what you ask for it, and that it is very doubtful if it is the sort of outfit we should need."

"I'll bet you a thousand dollars—" began Carmichael hotly, when Jim waved him down.

"Not with me," said Jim. "Your friend, Mr. Bonner, there, knows what chance there is for you to bet even a thousand cents with me. Besides, we know our facts, in this school. We've been working on them for a long time."

"Bet your life we have!" interpolated Newton Bronson.

"Before we finish," said Jim, "I want to thank you gentlemen for bringing in Mr. Carmichael. We have been reading up on the literature of the creamery promoter, and it is a very fine thing to have one in the flesh with whom to—to—demonstrate, if Mr. Carmichael will allow me to say so."

Carmichael looked at Bonner, made an expressive motion with his head toward the door, and turned as if to leave.

"Well," said he, "I can do plenty of business with men. If you men want to make the deal I offer you, and I can show you from the statistics I've got at the hotel that it's a special deal just to get started in this part of the state, and carries a thousand dollars of cut in price to you. Let's leave these children and this he school-ma'am and get something done."

"I can't allow you to depart," said Jim more gently than before, "without thanking you for the very excellent talk you gave us on the advantage of the cooperative creamery over the centralizer. We in this school believe in the cooperative creamery, and if we can get rid of you, Mr. Carmichael, without buying your equipment, I think your work here may be productive of good."

"He's off three or four points on the average overrun in the Wisconsin co-ops," said Newton.

"And we thought," said Mary Smith, "that we'd need more cows than he said to keep up a creamery of our own."

"Oh," replied Jim, "but we mustn't expect Mr. Carmichael to know the subject as well as we do, children. He makes a practise of talking mostly to people who know nothing about it—and he talks very well. All in favor of thanking Mr. Carmichael please say 'Aye.'"

There was a rousing chorus of "Aye!" in which Mr. Carmichael, followed closely by Mr. Bonner, made his exit. B. B. Hamm went forward and shook Jim's hand slowly and contemplatively, as if trying to remember just what he should say.

"James E. Irwin," said he, "you've saved us from being skinned by the smoothest grafter that I ever seen."

"Not I," said Jim; "the kind of school I stand for, Mr. Hamm, will save you more than that—and give you the broadest culture any school ever gave. A culture based on life. We've been studying life, in this school—the life we all live here in this district."

"He had a smooth partner, too," said Columbus Brown. Jim looked at Bonner's little boy in one of the front seats and shook his head at Columbus warningly.

"If I hadn't herded 'em in here to ask you a few questions about cooperative creameries," said Mr. Talcott, "we'd have been stuck—they pretty near had our names. And then the whole neighborhood would have been sucked in for about fifty dollars a name."

"I'd have gone in for two hundred," said B. B. Hamm.

"May I call a little meeting here for a minute, Jim?" asked Ezra Bronson. "Why, where's he gone?"

"They's some other visitors come in," said a little girl, pulling her apron in embarrassment at the teacher's absence.

Jim had, after what seemed to Jennie an interminable while, seen the county superintendent and her distinguished party, and was now engaged in welcoming them and endeavoring to find them seats,—quite an impossible thing at that particular moment, by the way.

"Don't mind us, Mr. Irwin," said Doctor Brathwayt. "This is the best thing we've seen on our journeyings. Please go on with the proceedin's. That gentleman seems to have in mind the perfectin' of some so't of organization. I'm intensely interested."

"I'd like to call a little meetin' here," said Ezra to the teacher. "Seein' we've busted up your program so far, may we take a little while longer?"

"Certainly," said Jim. "The school will please come to order."

The pupils took their seats, straightened their books and papers, and were at attention. Doctor Brathwayt nodded approvingly as if at the answer to some question in his mind.

"Children," said Mr. Irwin, "you may or may not be interested in what these gentlemen are about to do—but I hope you are. Those who wish may be members of Mr. Bronson's meeting. Those who do not prefer to do so may take up their regular work."

"Gentlemen," said Mr. Bronson to the remains of Mr. Carmichael's creamery party, "we've been cutting bait in this neighborhood about long enough. I'm in favor of fishing, now. It would have been the biggest disgrace ever put on this district to have been swindled by that sharper, when the man that could have set us right on the subject was right here working for us, and we never let him have a chance. And yet that's what we pretty near did. How many here favor building a cooperative creamery if we can get the farmers in with cows enough to make it profitable, and the equipment at the right price?"

Each man held up a hand.

"Here's one of our best farmers not voting," said Mr. Bronson, indicating Raymond Simms. "How about you, Raymond?"

"Ah reckon paw'll come in," said Raymond blushingly.

"He will if you say so," said Mr. Bronson.

Raymond's hand went up amid a ripple of applause from the pupils, who seemed glad to have a voter in their ranks.

"Unanimous!" said Mr. Bronson. "It is a vote! Now I'd like to hear a motion to perfect a permanent organization to build a creamery."

"I think we ought to have a secretary first," said Mr. Talcott, "and I nominate Mr. James E. Irwin for the post."

"Quite correct," said Mr. Bronson, "thankee, A. B. I was about to forgit the secretary. Any other nominations? No 'bjections, Mr. Irwin will be declared unanimously elected. Mr. Irwin's elected. Mr. Irwin, will you please assume the duties?"

Jim sat down at the desk and began making notes.

"I think we ought to call this the Anti-Carmichael Protective Association," said Columbus Brown, but Mr. Bronson interrupted him, rather frowningly.

"All in good time, Clumb," said he, "but this is serious work." So admonished, the meeting appointed committees, fixed upon a time for a future meeting, threw a collection of half-dollars on the desk to start a petty cash fund, made the usual joke about putting the secretary under bond, adjourned and dispersed.

"It's a go this time!" said Newton to Jim.

"I think so," said Jim, "with those men interested. Well, our study of creameries has given a great deal of language work, a good deal of arithmetic, some geography, and finally saved the people from a swindle. Rather good work, Raymond!"

"My mother has a delayed luncheon ready for the party," said Jennie to Jim. "Please come with us—please!"

But Jim demurred. Getting off at this time of day was really out of the question if he was to be ready to show the real work of the school in the afternoon session.