CHAPTER IIIWHAT IS A BROWN MOUSE
Immediately upon the accidental election of Jim Irwin to the position of teacher of the Woodruff school, he developed habits somewhat like a ghost’s or a bandit’s. That is, he walked of nights and on rainy days.
On fine days, he worked in Colonel Woodruff’s fields as of yore. Had he been appointed to a position attached to a salary of fifty thousand dollars a year, he might have spent six months on a preliminary vacation in learning something about his new duties. But Jim’s salary was to be three hundred and sixty dollars for nine months’ work in the Woodruff school, and he was to find himself—and his mother. Therefore, he had to indulge in his loose habits of night walking and roaming about after hours only, or on holidays and in foul weather.
The Simms family, being from the mountings of Tennessee, were rather startled one night, when Jim Irwin, homely, stooped and errandless, silently appeared in their family circle about the front door. They had lived where it was the custom to give a whoop from the big road before one passed through the palin’s and up to the house. Otherwise, how was one to know whether the visitor was friend or foe?
From force of habit, Old Man Simms started for his gun-rack at Jim’s appearance, but the Lincolnian smile and the low slow speech, so much like his own in some respects, ended that part of the matter. Besides, Old Man Simms remembered that none of the Hobdays, whose hostilities somewhat stood in the way of the return of the Simmses to their native hills, could possibly be expected to appear thus in Iowa.
“Stranger,” said Mr. Simms, after greetings had been exchanged, “you’re right welcome, but in my kentry you’d find it dangersome to walk in thisaway.”
“How so?” queried Jim Irwin.
“You’d more’n likely git shot up some,” repliedMr. Simms, “onless you whooped from the big road.”
“I didn’t know that,” replied Jim. “I’m ignorant of the customs of other countries. Would you rather I’d whoop from the big road—nobody else will.”
“I reckon,” replied Mr. Simms, “that we-all will have to accommodate ourse’ves to the ways hyeh.”
Evidently Jim was the Simms’ first caller since they had settled on the little brushy tract whose hills and trees reminded them of their mountains. Low hills, to be sure, with only a footing of rocks where the creek had cut through, and not many trees, but down in the creek bed, with the oaks, elms and box-elders arching overhead, the Simmses could imagine themselves beside some run falling into the French Broad, or the Holston. The creek bed was a withdrawing room in which to retire from the eternal black soil and level corn-fields of Iowa. What if the soil was so poor, in comparison with those black uplands, that the owner of the old wood-lot could find no renter? It was better than the soil in themountains, and suited the lonesome Simmses much more than a better farm would have done. They were not of the Iowa people anyhow, not understood, not their equals—they were pore, and expected to stay pore—while the Iowa people all seemed to be either well-to-do, or expecting to become so. It was much more agreeable to the Simmses to retire to the back wood-lot farm with the creek bed running through it.
Jim Irwin asked Old Man Simms about the fishing in the creek, and whether there was any duck shooting spring and fall.
“We git right smart of these little panfish,” said Mr. Simms, “an’ Calista done shot two butterball ducks about ‘tater-plantin’ time.”
Calista blushed—but this stranger, so much like themselves, could not see the rosy suffusion. The allusion gave him a chance to look about him at the family. There was a boy of sixteen, a girl—the duck-shooting Calista—younger than Raymond—a girl of eleven, named Virginia, but called Jinnie—and a smaller lad who rejoiced in the name of McGeehee, but was mercifully called Buddy.
Calista squirmed for something to say. “Raymond runs a line o’ traps when the fur’s prime,” she volunteered.
Then came a long talk on traps and trapping, shooting, hunting and the joys of the mountings—during which Jim noted the ignorance and poverty of the Simmses. The clothing of the girls was not decent according to local standards; for while Calista wore a skirt hurriedly slipped on, Jim was quite sure—and not without evidence to support his views—that she had been wearing when he arrived the same regimentals now displayed by Jinnie—a pair of ragged blue overalls. Evidently the Simmses were wearing what they had and not what they desired. The father was faded, patched, gray and earthy, and the boys looked better than the rest solely because we expect boys to be torn and patched. Mrs. Simms was invisible except as a gray blur beyond the rain-barrel, in the midst of which her pipe glowed with a regular ebb and flow of embers.
On the next rainy day Jim called again and secured the services of Raymond to help him select seed corn. He was going to teach theschool next winter, and he wanted to have a seed-corn frolic the first day, instead of waiting until the last—and you had to get seed corn while it was on the stalk, if you got the best. No Simms could refuse a favor to the fellow who was so much like themselves, and who was so greatly interested in trapping, hunting and the Tennessee mountains—so Raymond went with Jim, and with Newt Bronson and five more they selected Colonel Woodruff’s seed corn for the next year, under the colonel’s personal superintendence.
In the evening they looked the grain over on the Woodruff lawn, and the colonel talked about corn and corn selection. They had supper at half past six, and Jennie waited on them—having assisted her mother in the cooking. It was quite a festival. Jim Irwin was the least conspicuous person in the gathering, but the colonel, who was a seasoned politician, observed that the farm-hand had become a fisher of men, and was angling for the souls of these boys, and their interest in the school. Jim was careful not to flush the covey, but every boy received from the next winter’s teacher someconfidential hint as to plans, and some suggestion that Jim was relying on the aid and comfort of that particular boy. Newt Bronson, especially, was leaned on as a strong staff and a very present help in time of trouble. As for Raymond Simms, it was clearly best to leave him alone. All this talk of corn selection and related things was new to him, and he drank it in thirstily. He had an inestimable advantage over Newt in that he was starved, while Newt was surfeited with “advantages” for which he had no use.
“Jennie,” said Colonel Woodruff, after the party had broken up, “I’m losing the best hand I ever had, and I’ve been sorry.”
“I’m glad he’s leaving you,” said Jennie. “He ought to do something except work in the field for wages.”
“I’ve had no idea he could make good as a teacher—and what is there in it if he does?”
“What has he lost if he doesn’t?” rejoined Jennie. “And why can’t he make good?”
“The school board’s against him, for one thing,” replied the colonel. “They’ll fire him if they get a chance. They’re the laughing-stockof the country for hiring him by mistake, and they’re irritated. But after seeing him perform to-night, I wonder if he can’t make good.”
“If he couldfeellike anything but an underling he’d succeed,” said Jennie.
“That’s his heredity,” stated the colonel, whose live-stock operations were based on heredity. “Jim’s a scrub, I suppose; but he acts as if he might turn out to be a Brown Mouse.”
“What do you mean, pa,” scoffed Jennie—“a Brown Mouse!”
“A fellow in Edinburgh,” said the colonel, “crossed the Japanese waltzing mouse with the common white mouse. Jim’s pedling father was a waltzing mouse, no good except to jump from one spot to another for no good reason. Jim’s mother is an albino of a woman, with all the color washed out in one way or another. Jim ought to be a mongrel, and I’ve always considered him one. But the Edinburgh fellow every once in a while got out of his variously-colored, waltzing and albino hybrids, a brown mouse. It wasn’t a common house mouse, either, but a wild mouse unlike any he hadever seen. It ran away, and bit and gnawed, and raised hob. It was what we breeders call a Mendelian segregation of genetic factors that had been in the waltzers and albinos all the time—their original wild ancestor of the woods and fields. If Jim turns out to be a Brown Mouse, he may be a bigger man than any of us. Anyhow, I’m for him.”
“He’ll have to be a big man to make anything out of the job of a country school-teacher,” said Jennie.
“Any job’s as big as the man who holds it down,” said her father.
Next day, Jim received a letter from Jennie.
“Dear Jim,” it ran. “Father says you are sure to have a hard time—the school board’s against you, and all that. But he added, ‘I’m for Jim, anyhow!’ I thought you’d like to know this. Also he said, ‘Any job’s as big as the man who holds it down,’ And I believe this also,and I’m for you, too!You are doing wonders even before the school starts in getting the pupils interested in a lot of things, which, while they don’t belong to school work, will make them friends of yours. I don’t see how this will help you much, but it’s a fine thing, and shows your interest in them. Don’t be too original. The wheel runs easiest in the beaten track. Yours. Jennie.”
Jennie’s caution made no impression on Jim—but he put the letter away, and every evening took it out and read the italicized words,“I’m for you, too!”The colonel’s dictum, “Any job’s as big as the man who holds it down,” was an Emersonian truism to Jim. It reduced all jobs to an equality, and it meant equality in intellectual and spiritual development. It didn’t mean, for instance, that any job was as good as another in making it possible for a man to marry—and Jennie Woodruff’s “Humph!” returned to kill and drag off her “I’m for you, too!”
CHAPTER IVTHE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL
I suppose every reader will say that genius consists very largely in seeing Opportunity in the set of circumstances or thoughts or impressions that constitute Opportunity, and making the best of them.
Jim Irwin would have said so, anyhow. He was full of his Emerson’sRepresentative Men, and his Carlyle’sFrench Revolution, and the other old-fashioned, excellent good literature which did not cost over twenty-five cents a volume; and he had pored long and with many thrills over the pages of Matthews’Getting on in the World—which is the best book of purely conventional helpfulness in the language. And his view of efficiency was that it is the capacity to see opportunity where others overlook it, and make the most of it.
All through his life he had had his own plansfor becoming great. He was to be a general, hurling back the foes of his country; he was to be the nation’s master in literature; a successful drawing on his slate had filled him with ambition, confidently entertained, of becoming a Rubens—and the story of Benjamin West in his school reader fanned this spark to a flame; science, too, had at times been his chosen field; and when he had built a mousetrap which actually caught mice, he saw himself a millionaire inventor. As for being president, that was a commonplace in his dreams. And all the time, he was barefooted, ill-clad and dreamed his dreams to the accompaniment of the growl of the plow cutting the roots under the brown furrow-slice, or the wooshing of the milk in the pail. At twenty-eight, he considered these dreams over.
As for this new employment, he saw no great opportunity in it. Of any spark of genius he was to show in it, of anything he was to suffer in it, of those pains and penalties wherewith the world pays its geniuses, Jim Irwin anticipated nothing. He went into the small, mean, ill-paid task as a part of the day’s work, withno knowledge of the stirring of the nation for a different sort of rural school, and no suspicion that there lay in it any highway to success in life. He was not a college man or even a high-school man. All his other dreams had found rude awakening in the fact that he had not been able to secure the schooling which geniuses need in these days. He was unfitted for the work geniuses do. All he was to be was a rural teacher, accidentally elected by a stupid school board, and with a hard tussle before him to stay on the job for the term of his contract. He could have accepted positions quite as good years ago, save for the fact that they would have taken him away from his mother, their cheap little home, their garden and their fowls. He rather wondered why he had allowed Jennie’s sneer to sting him into the course of action which put him in this new relation to his neighbors.
But, true to his belief in honest thorough work, like a general preparing for battle, he examined his field of operations. His manner of doing this seemed to prove to Colonel Woodruff, who watched it with keen interest as somethingnew in the world, that Jim Irwin was possibly a Brown Mouse. But the colonel knew only a part of Jim’s performances. He saw Jim clothed in slickers, walking through rainstorms to the houses in the Woodruff District, as greedy for every moment of rain as a haymaker for shine; and he knew that Jim made a great many evening calls.
But he did not know that Jim was making what our sociologists call a survey. For that matter, neither did Jim; for books on sociology cost more than twenty-five cents a volume, and Jim had never seen one. However, it was a survey. To be sure, he had long known everybody in the district, save the Simmses—and he was now a friend of all that exotic race; but there is knowing and knowing. He now had note-books full of facts about people and their farms. He knew how many acres each family possessed, and what sort of farming each husband was doing—live stock, grain or mixed. He knew about the mortgages, and the debts. He knew whether the family atmosphere was happy and contented, or the reverse. He knew which boys and girls were wayward and insubordinate.He made a record of the advancement in their studies of all the children, and what they liked to read. He knew their favorite amusements. He talked with their mothers and sisters—not about the school, to any extent, but on the weather, the horses, the automobiles, the silo-filling machinery and the profits of farming.
I suppose that no person who has undertaken the management of the young people of any school in all the history of education, ever did so much work of this sort before his school opened. Really, though Jennie Woodruff did not see how such doings related to school work, Jim Irwin’s school was running full blast in the homes of the district and the minds of many pupils, weeks and weeks before that day when he called them to order on the Monday specified in his contract as the first day of school.
Con Bonner, who came to see the opening, voiced the sentiments of the older people when he condemned the school as disorderly. To be sure, there were more pupils enrolled than had ever entered on a first day in the wholehistory of the school, and it was hard to accommodate them all. But the director’s criticism was leveled against the free-and-easy air of the children. Most of them had brought seed corn and a good-sized corn show was on view. There was much argument as to the merits of the various entries. Instead of a language lesson from the text-book, Jim had given them an exercise based on an examination of the ears of corn.
The number exercises of the little chaps had been worked out with ears and kernels of corn. One class in arithmetic calculated the percentage of inferior kernels at tip and butt to the full-sized grains in the middle of the ear.
All the time, Jim Irwin, awkward and uncouth, clad in his none-too-good Sunday suit and trying to hide behind his Lincolnian smile the fact that he was pretty badly frightened and much embarrassed, passed among them, getting them enrolled, setting them to work, wasting much time and laboring like a heavy-laden barge in a seaway.
“That feller’ll never do,” said Bonner toBronson next day. “Looks like a tramp in the schoolroom.”
“Wearin’ his best, I guess,” said Bronson.
“Half the kids call him ‘Jim,’” said Bonner.
“That’s all right with me,” replied Bronson.
“The room was as noisy as a caucus,” was Bonner’s next indictment, “and the flure was all over corn like a hog-pin.”
“Oh! I don’t suppose he can get away with it,” assented Bronson disgustedly, “but that boy of mine is as tickled as a colt with the whole thing. Says he’s goin’ reg’lar this winter.”
“That’s because Jim don’t keep no order,” said Bonner. “He lets Newt do as he dam pleases.”
“First time he’s ever pleased to do anything but deviltry,” protested Bronson. “Oh, I suppose Jim’ll fall down, and we’ll have to fire him—but I wish we could git agoodteacher that would git hold of Newt the way he seems to!”
CHAPTER VTHE PROMOTION OF JENNIE
If Jennie Woodruff was the cause of Jim Irwin’s sudden irruption into the educational field by her scoffing “Humph!” at the idea of a farm-hand’s ever being able to marry, she also gave him the opportunity to knock down the driver of the big motor-car, and perceptibly elevate himself in the opinion of the neighborhood, while filling his own heart with something like shame.
The fat man who had said “Cut it out” to his driver, was Mr. Charles Dilly, a business man in the village at the extreme opposite corner of the county. His choice of the Woodruff District as a place for motoring had a secret explanation. I am under no obligation to preserve the secret. He came to see Colonel Woodruff and Jennie. Mr. Dilly was a candidate for county treasurer, and wished to be nominatedat the approaching county convention. In his part of the county lived the county superintendent—a candidate for renomination. He was just a plain garden or field county superintendent of schools, no better and no worse than the general political run of them, but he had local pride enlisted in his cause, and was a good politician.
Mr. Dilly was in the Woodruff District to build a backfire against this conflagration of the county superintendent. He expected to use Jennie Woodruff to light it withal. That is, while denying that he wished to make any deal or trade—every candidate in every convention always says that—he wished to say to Miss Woodruff and her father, that if Miss Woodruff would permit her name to be used for the office of county superintendent of schools, a goodly group of delegates could be selected in the other corner of the county who would be glad to reciprocate any favors Mr. Charles J. Dilly might receive in the way of votes for county treasurer with ballots for Miss Jennie Woodruff for superintendent of schools.
Mr. Dilly never inquired as to Miss Woodruff’sabilities as an educator. That would have been eccentric. Miss Woodruff never asked herself if she knew anything about rural education which especially fitted her for the task; for was she not a popular and successful teacher—and was not that enough? Mr. Dilly merely asked himself if Miss Woodruff’s name could command strength enough to eliminate the embarrassing candidate in his part of the county and leave the field to himself. Miss Woodruff asked herself whether the work would not give her a pleasanter life than did teaching, a better salary, and more chances to settle herself in life. So are the officials chosen who supervise and control the education of the farm children of America.
This secret mission to effect a political trade accounted for Mr. Dilly’s desire that his driver should “cut out” the controversy with Newton Bronson, and the personal encounter with Jim Irwin—and it may account for Jim’s easy victory in his first and only physical encounter. An office seeker could scarcely afford to let his friend or employee lick a member of a farmers’ road gang. It certainly explains the fact thatwhen Jim Irwin started home from putting out his team the day after his first call on the Simms family, Jennie was waiting at the gate to be congratulated on her nomination.
“I congratulate you,” said Jim.
“Thanks,” said Jennie, extending her hand.
“I hope you’re elected,” Jim went on, holding the hand; “but there’s no doubt of that.”
“They say not,” replied Jennie; “but father says I must go about and let the people see me. He believes in working just as if we didn’t have a big majority for the ticket.”
“A woman has an advantage of a man in such a contest,” said Jim; “she can work just as hard as he can, and at the same time profit by the fact that it’s supposed she can’t.”
“I need all the advantage I possess,” said Jennie, “and all the votes. Say a word for me when on your pastoral rounds.”
“All right,” said Jim, “what shall I say you’ll do for the schools?”
“Why,” said Jennie, rather perplexed, “I’ll be fair in my examinations of teachers, try to keep the unfit teachers out of the schools, visitschools as often as I can, and—why, what does any good superintendent do?”
“I never heard of a good county superintendent,” said Jim.
“Never heard of one—why, Jim Irwin!”
“I don’t believe there is any such thing,” persisted Jim, “and if you do no more than you say, you’ll be off the same piece as the rest. Your system won’t give us any better schools than we have—of the old sort—and we need a new kind.”
“Oh, Jim, Jim! Dreaming as of yore! Why can’t you be practical! What do you mean by a new kind of rural school?”
“A truly-rural rural school,” said Jim.
“I can’t pronounce it,” smiled Jennie, “to say nothing of understanding it. What would your tralalooral rural school do?”
“It would be correlated with rural life,” said Jim.
“How?”
“It would get education out of the things the farmers and farmers’ wives are interested in as a part of their lives.”
“What, for instance?”
“Dairying, for instance, in this district; and soil management; and corn-growing; and farm manual training for boys; and sewing, cooking and housekeeping for the girls—and caring for babies!”
Jennie looked serious, after smothering a laugh.
“Jim,” said she, “you’re going to have a hard enough time to succeed in the Woodruff school, if you confine yourself to methods that have been tested, and found good.”
“But the old methods,” urged Jim, “have been tested and found bad. Shall I keep to them?”
“They have made the American people what they are,” said Jennie. “Don’t be unpatriotic, Jim.”
“They have educated our farm children for the cities,” said Jim. “This county is losing population—and it’s the best county in the world.”
“Pessimism never wins,” said Jennie.
“Neither does blindness,” answered Jim. “Itis losing the farms their dwellers, and swelling the cities with a proletariat.”
For some time, now, Jim had ceased to hold Jennie’s hand; and their sweetheart days had never seemed farther away.
“Jim,” said Jennie, “I may be elected to a position in which I shall be obliged to pass on your acts as teacher—in an official way, I mean. I hope they will be justifiable.”
Jim smiled his slowest and saddest smile.
“If they’re not, I’ll not ask you to condone them,” said he. “But first, they must be justifiable to me, Jennie.”
“Good night,” said Jennie curtly, and left him.
Jennie, I am obliged to admit, gave scant attention to the new career upon which her old sweetheart seemed to be entering. She was in politics, and was playing the game as became the daughter of a local politician. The reader must not by this term get the impression that Colonel Woodruff was a man of the grafting tricky sort of which we are prone to think when the term is used. The West has been ruled by just such men as he, and the Westhas done rather well, all things considered. Colonel Albert Woodruff went south with the army as a corporal in 1861, and came back a lieutenant. His title of colonel was conferred by appointment as a member of the staff of the governor, long years ago, when he was county auditor. He was not a rich man, as I may have suggested, but a well-to-do farmer, whose wife did her own work much of the time, not because the colonel could not afford to hire “help,” but for the reason that “hired girls” were hard to get.
The colonel, having seen the glory of the coming of the Lord in the triumph of his side in the great war, was inclined to think that all reform had ceased, and was a political stand-patter—a very honest and sincere one. Moreover, he was influential enough so that when Mr. Cummins or Mr. Dolliver came into the county on political errands, Colonel Woodruff had always been called into conference. He was of the old New England type, believed very much in heredity, very much in the theory that whatever is is right, in so far as it has secured money or power.
He had hated General Weaver and his forces; and had sometimes wondered how a man of Horace Boies’ opinions had succeeded in being so good a governor. He broke with Governor Larrabee when that excellent man had turned against the great men who had developed Iowa by building the railroads. He was always in the county convention, and preferred to serve on the committee on credentials, and leave to others the more showy work of membership in the committee on resolutions. He believed in education, provided it did not unsettle things. He had a good deal of Latin and some Greek, and lived on a farm rather than in a fine house in the county seat because of his lack of financial ability. As a matter of fact, he had been too strictly scrupulous to do the things—such as dealing in lands belonging to eastern speculators who were not advised as to their values, speculating in county warrants, buying up tax titles with county money, and the like—by which his fellow-politicians who held office in the early years of the county had founded their fortunes. A very respectable, honest, American tory was the colonel, fond ofhis political sway, and rather soured by the fact that it was passing from him. He had now broken with Cummins and Dolliver as he had done years ago with Weaver and later with Larrabee—and this breach was very important to him, whether they were greatly concerned about it or not.
Such being her family history, Jennie was something of a politician herself. She was in no way surprised when approached by party managers on the subject of accepting the nomination for county superintendent of schools. Colonel Woodruff could deliver some delegates to his daughter, though he rather shied at the proposal at first, but on thinking it over, warmed somewhat to the notion of having a Woodruff on the county pay-roll once more.
CHAPTER VIJIM TALKS THE WEATHER COLD
“Going to the rally, James?”
Jim had finished his supper, and yearned for a long evening in his attic den with his cheap literature. But as the district schoolmaster he was to some extent responsible for the protection of the school property, and felt some sense of duty as to exhibiting an interest in public affairs.
“I guess I’ll have to go, mother,” he replied regretfully. “I want to see Mr. Woodruff about borrowing his Babcock milk tester, and I’ll go that way. I guess I’ll go on to the meeting.”
He kissed his mother when he went—a habit from which he never deviated, and another of those personal peculiarities which had marked him as different from the other boys of the neighborhood. His mother urged his overcoat upon him in vain—for Jim’s overcoat was distinctlya bad one, while his best suit, now worn every day as a concession to his scholastic position, still looked passably well after several weeks of schoolroom duty. She pressed him to wear a muffler about his neck, but he declined that also. He didn’t need it, he said; but he was thinking of the incongruity of a muffler with no overcoat. It seemed more logical to assume that the weather was milder than it really was, on that sharp October evening, and appear at his best, albeit rather aware of the cold. Jennie was at home, and he was likely to see and be seen of her.
“You can borrow that tester,” said the colonel, “and the cows that go with it, if you can use ’em. They ain’t earning their keep here. But how does the milk tester fit into the curriculum of the school? A decoration?”
“We want to make a few tests of the cows in the neighborhood,” answered Jim. “Just another of my fool notions.”
“All right,” said the colonel. “Take it along. Going to the speakin’?”
“Certainly, he’s going,” said Jennie, entering. “This is my meeting, Jim.”
“Surely, I’m going,” assented Jim. “And I think I’ll run along.”
“I wish we had room for you in the car,” said the colonel. “But I’m going around by Bronson’s to pick up the speaker, and I’ll have a chuck-up load.”
“Not so much of a load as you think,” said Jennie. “I’m going with Jim. The walk will do me good.”
Any candidate warms to her voting population just before election; but Jennie had a special kindness for Jim. He was no longer a farm-hand. The fact that he was coming to be a center of disturbance in the district, and that she quite failed to understand how his eccentric behavior could be harmonized with those principles of teaching which she had imbibed at the state normal school in itself lifted him nearer to equality with her. A public nuisance is really more respectable than a nonentity.
She gave Jim a thrill as she passed through the gate that he opened for her. White moonlight on her white furs suggested purity, exaltation, the essence of womanhood—things farfiner in the woman of twenty-seven than the glamour thrown over him by the schoolgirl of sixteen.
Jim gave her no thrill; for he looked gaunt and angular in his skimpy, ready-made suit, too short in legs and sleeves, and too thin for the season. Yet, as they walked along, Jim grew upon her. He strode on with immense strides, made slow to accommodate her shorter steps, and embarrassing her by his entire absence of effort to keep step. For all that, he lifted his face to the stars, and he kept silence, save for certain fragments of his thoughts, in dropping which he assumed that she, like himself, was filled with the grandeur of the sparkling sky, its vast moon, plowing like an astronomical liner through the cloudlets of a wool-pack. He pointed out the great open spaces in the Milky Way, wondering at their emptiness, and at the fact that no telescope can find stars in them.
They stopped and looked. Jim laid his hard hands on the shoulders of her white fur collarette.
“What’s the use of political meetings,” said Jim, “when you and I can stand here and thinkour way out, even beyond the limits of our Universe?”
“A wonderful journey,” said she, not quite understanding his mood, but very respectful to it.
“And together,” said Jim. “I’d like to go on a long, long journey with you to-night, Jennie, to make up for the years since we went anywhere together.”
“And we shouldn’t have come together to-night,” said Jennie, getting back to earth, “if I hadn’t exercised my leap-year privilege.”
She slipped her arm in his, and they went on in a rather intimate way.
“I’m not to blame, Jennie,” said he. “You know that at any time I’d have given anything—anything—”
“And even now,” said Jennie, taking advantage of his depleted stock of words, “while we roam beyond the Milky Way, we aren’t getting any votes for me for county superintendent.”
Jim said nothing. He was quite, quite reestablished on the earth.
“Don’t you want me to be elected, Jim?”
Jim seemed to ponder this for some time—a period of taking the matter under advisement which caused Jennie to drop his arm and busy herself with her skirts.
“Yes,” said Jim, at last; “of course I do.”
Nothing more was said until they reached the schoolhouse door.
“Well,” said Jennie rather indignantly, “I’m glad there are plenty of voters who are more enthusiastic about me than you seem to be!”
More interesting to a keen observer than the speeches, were the unusual things in the room itself. To be sure, there were on the blackboards exercises and outlines, of lessons in language, history, mathematics, geography and the like. But these were not the usual things taken from text-books. The problems in arithmetic were calculations as to the feeding value of various rations for live stock, records of laying hens and computation as to the excess of value in eggs produced over the cost of feed. Pinned to the wall were market reports on all sorts of farm products, and especially numerous were the statistics on the prices of cream and butter. There were files of farm papers piledabout, and racks of agricultural bulletins. In one corner of the room was a typewriting machine, and in another a sewing machine. Parts of an old telephone were scattered about on the teacher’s desk. A model of a piggery stood on a shelf, done in cardboard. Instead of the usual collection of text-books in the desk, there were hectograph copies of exercises, reading lessons, arithmetical tables and essays on various matters relating to agriculture, all of which were accounted for by two or three hand-made hectographs—a very fair sort of printing plant—lying on a table. The members of the school board were there, looking on these evidences of innovation with wonder and more or less disfavor. Things were disorderly. The text-books recently adopted by the board against some popular protest had evidently been pitched, neck and crop, out of the school by the man whom Bonner had termed a dub. It was a sort of contempt for the powers that be.
Colonel Woodruff was in the chair. After the speechifying was over, and the stereotyped,though rather illogical, appeal had been made for voters of the one party to cast the straight ticket, and for those of the other faction to scratch, the colonel rose to adjourn the meeting.
Newton Bronson, safely concealed behind taller people, called out, “Jim Irwin! speech!”
There was a giggle, a slight sensation, and many voices joined in the call for the new schoolmaster.
Colonel Woodruff felt the unwisdom of ignoring the demand. Probably he relied upon Jim’s discretion and expected a declination.
Jim arose, seedy and lank, and the voices ceased, save for another suppressed titter.
“I don’t know,” said Jim, “whether this call upon me is a joke or not. If it is, it isn’t a practical one, for I can’t talk. I don’t care much about parties or politics. I don’t know whether I’m a Democrat, a Republican or a Populist.”
This caused a real sensation. The nerve of the fellow! Really, it must in justice be said, Jim was losing himself in a desire to tell his true feelings. He forgot all about Jennie andher candidacy—about everything except his real, true feelings. This proves that he was no politician.
“I don’t see much in this county campaign that interests me,” he went on—and Jennie Woodruff reddened, while her seasoned father covered his mouth with his hand to conceal a smile. “The politicians come out into the farming districts every campaign and get us hayseeds for anything they want. They always have got us. They’ve got us again! They give us clodhoppers the glad hand, a cheap cigar, and a cheaper smile after election;—and that’s all. I know it, you all know it, they know it. I don’t blame them so very much. The trouble is we don’t ask them to do anything better. I want a new kind of rural school; but I don’t see any prospect, no matter how this election goes, for any change in them. We in the Woodruff District will have to work out our own salvation. Our political ring never’ll do anything but the old things. They don’t want to, and they haven’t sense enough to do it if they did. That’s all—and I don’t suppose I should have said as much as I have!”
There was stark silence for a moment when he sat down, and then as many cheers for Jim as for the principal speaker of the evening, cheers mingled with titters and catcalls. Jim felt a good deal as he had done when he knocked down Mr. Billy’s chauffeur—rather degraded and humiliated, as if he had made an ass of himself. And as he walked out of the door, the future county superintendent passed by him in high displeasure, and walked home with some one else.
Jim found the weather much colder than it had been while coming. He really needed an Eskimo’s fur suit.
CHAPTER VIITHE NEW WINE
In the little strip of forest which divided the sown from the Iowa sown wandered two boys in earnest converse. They seemed to be Boy Trappers, and from their backloads of steel-traps one of them might have been Frank Merriwell, and the other Dead-Shot Dick. However, though it was only mid-December, and the fur of all wild varmints was at its primest, they were bringing their traps into the settlements, instead of taking them afield. “The settlements” were represented by the ruinous dwelling of the Simmses, and the boy who resembled Frank Merriwell was Raymond Simms. The other, who was much more barbarously accoutered, whose overalls were fringed, who wore a cartridge belt about his person, and carried hatchet, revolver, and a long knife with a deerfoot handle, and who sostudiously looked like Dead-Shot Dick, was our old friend of the road gang, Newton Bronson. On the right, on the left, a few rods would have brought the boys out upon the levels of rich corn-fields, and in sight of the long rows of cottonwoods, willows, box-elders and soft maples along the straight roads, and of the huge red barns, each of which possessed a numerous progeny of outbuildings, among which the dwelling held a dubious headship. But here, they could be the Boy Trappers—a thin fringe of bushes and trees made of the little valley a forest to the imagination of the boys. Newton put down his load, and sat upon a stump to rest.
Raymond Simms was dimly conscious of a change in Newton since the day when they met and helped select Colonel Woodruff’s next year’s seed corn. Newton’s mother had a mother’s confidence that Newton was now a good boy, who had been led astray by other boys, but had reformed. Jim Irwin had a distinct feeling of optimism. Newton had quit tobacco and beer, casually stating to Jim that he was “in training.” Since Jim had shownhis ability to administer a knockout to that angry chauffeur, he seemed to this hobbledehoy peculiarly a proper person for athletic confidences. Newton’s mind seemed gradually filling up with interests that displaced the psychological complex out of which oozed the bad stories and filthy allusion. Jim attributed much of this to the clear mountain atmosphere which surrounded Raymond Simms, the ignorant barbarian driven out of his native hills by a feud. Raymond was of the open spaces, and refused to hear fetid things that seemed out of place in them. There was a dignity which impressed Newton, in the blank gaze with which Raymond greeted Newton’s sallies that were wont to set the village pool room in a roar; but how could you have a fuss with a feller who knew all about trapping, who had seen a man shot, who had shot a bear, who had killed wild turkeys, who had trapped a hundred dollars’ worth of furs in one winter, who knew the proper “sets” for all fur-bearing animals, and whom you liked, and who liked you?
As the reason for Newton’s improvement inmanner of living, Raymond, out of his own experience, would have had no hesitation in naming the school and the schoolmaster.
“I wouldn’t go back on a friend,” said Newton, seated on the stump with his traps on the ground at his feet, “the way you’re going back on me.”
“You got no call to talk thataway,” replied the mountain boy. “How’m I goin’ back on you?”
“We was goin’ to trap all winter,” asseverated Newton, “and next winter we were goin’ up in the north woods together.”
“You know,” said Raymond somberly, “that we cain’t run any trap line and do whut we got to do to he’p Mr. Jim.”
Newton sat mute as one having no rejoinder.
“Mr. Jim,” went on Raymond, “needs all the he’p every kid in this settlement kin give him. He’s the best friend I ever had. I’m a pore ignerant boy, an’ he teaches me how to do things that will make me something.”
“Darn it all!” said Newton.
“You know,” said Raymond, “that you’dthink mahgty small of me, if I’d desert Mr. Jim Irwin.”
“Well, then,” replied Newton, seizing his traps and throwing them across his shoulder, “come on with the traps, and shut up! What’ll we do when the school board gets Jennie Woodruff to revoke his certificate and make him quit teachin’, hey?”
“Nobody’ll eveh do that,” said Raymond. “I’d set in the schoolhouse do’ with my rifle and shoot anybody that’d come to th’ow Mr. Jim outen the school.”
“Not in this country,” said Newton. “This ain’t a gun country.”
“But it orto be either a justice kentry, or a gun kentry,” replied the mountain boy. “It stands to reason it must be one ’r the otheh, Newton.”
“No, it don’t, neither,” said Newton dogmatically.
“Why should they th’ow Mr. Jim outen the school?” inquired Raymond. “Ain’t he teachin’ us right?”
Newton explained for the tenth time that hisfather, Mr. Con Bonner and Mr. Haakon Peterson had not meant to hire Jim Irwin at all, but each had voted for him so that he might have one vote. They were all against him from the first, but they had not known how to get rid of him. Now, however, Jim had done so many things that no teacher was supposed to do, and had left undone so many things that teachers were bound by custom to perform, that Newton’s father and Mr. Bonner and Mr. Peterson had made up up their minds that they would call upon him to resign, and if he wouldn’t, they would “turn him out” in some way. And the best way if they could do it, would be to induce County Superintendent Woodruff, who didn’t like Jim since the speech he made at the political meeting, to revoke his certificate.
“What wrong’s he done committed?” asked Raymond. “I don’t know what teachers air supposed to do in this kentry, but Mr. Jim seems to be the only shore-enough teacher I ever see!”
“He don’t teach out of the books the school board adopted,” replied Newton.
“But he makes up better lessons,” urged Raymond. “An’ all the things we do in school, he’ps us make a livin’.”
“He begins at eight in the mornin’,” said Newton, “an’ he has some of us there till half past five, and comes back in the evening. And every Saturday, some of the kids are doin’ something at the schoolhouse.”
“They don’t pay him for overtime, do they?” queried Raymond. “Well, then, they orto, instid of turnin’ him out!”
“Well, they’ll turn him out!” prophesied Newton. “I’m havin’ more fun in school than I ever—an’ that’s why I’m with you on this quittin’ trapping—but they’ll get Jim, all right!”
“I’m having something betteh’n fun,” replied Raymond. “My pap has never understood this kentry, an’ we-all has had bad times hyeh; but Mr. Jim an’ I have studied out how I can make a betteh livin’ next year—and pap says we kin go on the way Mr. Jim says. I’ll work for Colonel Woodruff a part of the time, an’ pap kin make corn in the biggest field. It seems we didn’t do our work right last year—an’ ina couple of years, with the increase of the hawgs, an’ the land we kin get under plow....”
Raymond was off on his pet dream of becoming something better than the oldest of the Simms tribe of outcasts, and Newton was subconsciously impressed by the fact that never for a moment did Raymond’s plans fail to include the elevation with him of Calista and Jinnie and Buddy and Pap and Mam. It was taken for granted that the Simmses sank or swam together, whether their antagonists were poverty and ignorance, or their ancient foes, the Hobdays. Newton drew closer to Raymond’s side.
It was still an hour before nine—when the rural school traditionally “takes up”—when the boys had stored their traps in a shed at the Bronson home, and walked on to the schoolhouse. That rather scabby and weathered edifice was already humming with industry of a sort. In spite of the hostility of the school board, and the aloofness of the patrons of the school, the pupils were clearly interested in Jim Irwin’s system of rural education. Neverhad the attendance been so large or regular; and one of the reasons for sessions before nine and after four was the inability of the teacher to attend to the needs of his charges in the five and a half hours called “school hours.”
This, however, was not the sole reason. It was the new sort of work which commanded the attention of Raymond and Newton as they entered. This morning, Jim had arranged in various sorts of dishes specimens of grain and grass seeds. By each was a card bearing the name of the farm from which one of the older boys or girls had brought it. “Wheat, Scotch Fife, from the farm of Columbus Smith.” “Timothy, or Herd’s Grass, from the farm of A. B. Talcott.” “Alsike Clover, from the farm of B. B. Hamm.” Each lot was in a small cloth bag which had been made by one of the little girls as a sewing exercise; and each card had been written as a lesson in penmanship by one of the younger pupils, and contained, in addition to the data above mentioned, heads under which to enter the number of grains of the seed examined, the number which grew, the percentage of viability, the number of alienseeds of weeds and other sorts, the names of these adulterants, the weight of true and vitalized, and of foul and alien and dead seeds, the value per bushel in the local market of the seeds under test, and the real market values of the samples, after dead seeds and alien matter had been subtracted.
“Now get busy, here,” cried Jim Irwin. “We’re late! Raymond, you’ve a quick eye—you count seeds—and you, Calista, and Mary Smith—and mind, next year’s crop may depend on making no mistakes!”
“Mistakes!” scoffed Mary Smith, a dumpy girl of fourteen. “We don’t make mistakes any more, teacher.”
It was a frolic, rather than a task. All had come with a perfect understanding that this early attendance was quite illegal, and not to be required of them—but they came.
“Newt,” suggested Jim, “get busy on the percentage problems for that second class in arithmetic.”
“Sure,” said Newt. “Let’s see.... Good seed is the base, and bad seed and dead seed the percentage—find the rate....”
“Oh, you know!” said Jim. “Make them easy and plain and as many as you can get out—and be sure that you name the farm every pop!”
“Got you!” answered Newton, and in a fine frenzy went at the job of creating a text-book in arithmetic.
“Buddy,” said Jim, patting the youngest Simms on the head, “you and Virginia can print the reading lessons this morning, can’t you?”
“Yes, Mr. Jim,” answered both McGeehee Simms and his sister cheerily. “Where’s the copy?”
“Here,” answered the teacher, handing each a typewritten sheet for use as the original from which the young mountaineers were to make hectograph copies, “and mind you make good copies! Bettina Hansen pretty nearly cried last night because she had to write them over so many times on the typewriter before she got them all right.”
The reading lesson was an article on corn condensed from a farm paper, and a selection fromHiawatha—the Indian-corn myth.
“We’ll be careful, Mr. Jim,” said Buddy.
Half past eight, and only half an hour until school would officially be “called.”
Newton Bronson was writing in aniline ink for the hectographs, such problems as these:
“If Mr. Ezra Bronson’s seed wheat carries in each 250 grains, ten cockle grains, fifteen rye grains, twenty fox-tail seeds, three iron-weed seeds, two wild oats grains, twenty-seven wild buckwheat seeds, one wild morning-glory seed, and eighteen lamb’s quarter seeds, what percentage of the seeds sown is wheat, and what foul seed?”
“If in each 250 grains of wheat in Mr. Bronson’s bins, 30 are cracked, dead or otherwise not capable of sprouting, what per cent, of the seed sown will grow?”
“If the foul seed and dead wheat amount to one-eighth by weight of the mass, what did Mr. Bronson pay per bushel for the good wheat, if it cost him $1.10 in the bin, and what per cent, did he lose by the adulterations and the poor wheat?”
Jim ran over these rapidly. “Your mathematics is good, Newton,” said the schoolmaster,“but if you expect to pass in penmanship, you’ll have to take more pains.”
“How about the grammar?” asked Newton. “The writing is pretty bad, I’ll own up.”
“The grammar is good this morning. You’re gradually mastering the art of stating a problem in arithmetic in English—and that’s improvement.”
The hands of Jim Irwin’s dollar watch gradually approached the position indicating nine o’clock—at which time the schoolmaster rapped on his desk and the school came to order. Then, for a while, it became like other schools. A glance over the room enabled him to enter the names of the absentees, and those tardy. There was a song by the school, the recitation in concert ofLittle Brown Hands, some general remarks and directions by the teacher, and the primary pupils came forward for their reading exercises. A few classes began poring over their text-books, but most of the pupils had their work passed out to them in the form of hectograph copies of exercises prepared in the school itself.
As the little ones finished their recitations,they passed to the dishes of wheat, and began aiding Raymond’s squad in the counting and classifying of the various seeds. They counted to five, and they counted the fives. They laughed in a subdued way, and whispered constantly, but nobody seemed disturbed.
“Do they help much, Calista?” asked the teacher, as the oldest Simms girl came to his desk for more wheat.
“No, seh, not much,” replied Calista, beaming, “but they don’t hold us back any—and maybe they do he’p a little.”
“That’s good,” said Jim, “and they enjoy it, don’t they?”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Jim,” assented Calista, “and the way Buddy is learnin’ to count is fine! They-all will soon know all the addition they is, and a lot of multiplication. Angie Talcott knows the kinds of seeds better’n what I do!”