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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 shown his 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 in manner 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’d think 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 his father, 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’ in a 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. Never had 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 alien seeds 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 from Hiawatha– 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 of Little 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!”
CHAPTER VIII
AND THE OLD BOTTLES
The day passed. Four o’clock came. In order that all might reach home for supper, there was no staying, except that Newt Bronson and Raymond Simms remained to sweep and dust the schoolroom, and prepare kindling for the next morning’s fire – a work they had taken upon themselves, so as to enable the teacher to put on the blackboards such outlines for the morrow’s class work as might be required. Jim was writing on the board a list of words constituting a spelling exercise. They were not from the text-book, but grew naturally out of the study of the seed wheat – “cockle,” “morning-glory,” “convolvulus,” “viable,” “viability,” “sprouting,” “iron-weed” and the like. A tap was heard at the door, and Raymond Simms opened it.
In filed three women – and Jim Irwin knew as he looked at them that he was greeting a deputation, and felt that it meant a struggle. For they were the wives of the members of the school board. He placed for them the three available chairs, and in the absence of any for himself remained standing before them, a gaunt shabby-looking revolutionist at the bar of settled usage and fixed public opinion.
Mrs. Haakon Peterson was a tall blonde woman who, when she spoke betrayed her Scandinavian origin by the northern burr to her “r’s,” and a slight difficulty with her “j’s,” her “y’s” and long “a’s.” She was slow-spoken and dignified, and Jim felt an instinctive respect for her personality. Mrs. Bronson was a good motherly woman, noted for her housekeeping, and for her church activities. She looked oftener at her son, and his friend Raymond than at the schoolmaster. Mrs. Bonner was the most voluble of the three, and was the only one who shook hands with Jim; but in spite of her rather offhand manner, Jim sensed in the little, black-eyed Irishwoman the real commander of the expedition against him – for such he knew it to be.
“You may think it strange of us coming after hours,” said she, “but we wanted to speak to you, teacher, without the children here.”
“I wish more of the parents would call,” said Jim. “At any hour of the day.”
“Or night either, I dare say,” suggested Mrs. Bonner. “I hear you’ve the scholars here at all hours, Jim.”
Jim smiled his slow patient smile.
“We do break the union rules, I guess, Mrs. Bonner,” said he; “there seems to be more to do than we can get done during school hours.”
“What right have ye,” struck in Mrs. Bonner, “to be burning the district’s fuel, and wearing out the school’s property out of hours like that – not that it’s anny of my business,” she interposed, hastily, as if she had been diverted from her chosen point of attack. “I just thought of it, that’s all. What we came for, Mr. Irwin, is to object to the way the teachin’s being done – corn and wheat, and hogs and the like, instead of the learnin’ schools was made to teach.”
“Schools were made to prepare children for life, weren’t they, Mrs. Bonner?”
“To be sure,” went on Mrs. Bonner, “I can see an’ the whole district can see that it’s easier for a man that’s been a farm-hand to teach farm-hand knowledge, than the learnin’ schools was set up to teach; but if so be he hasn’t the book education to do the right thing, we think he should get out and give a real teacher a chance.”
“What am I neglecting?” asked Jim mildly.
Mrs. Bonner seemed unprepared for the question, and sat for an instant mute. Mrs. Peterson interposed her attack while Mrs. Bonner might be recovering her wind.
“We people that have had a hard time,” she said in a precise way which seemed to show that she knew exactly what she wanted, “want to give our boys and girls a chance to live easier lives than we lived. We don’t want our children taught about nothing but work. We want higher things.”
“Mrs. Peterson,” said Jim earnestly, “we must have first things first. Making a living is the first thing – and the highest.”
“Haakon and I will look after making a living for our family,” said she. “We want our children to learn nice things, and go to high school, and after a while to the Juniwersity.”
“And I,” declared Jim, “will send out from this school, if you will let me, pupils better prepared for higher schools than have ever gone from it – because they will be trained to think in terms of action. They will go knowing that thoughts must always be linked with things. Aren’t your children happy in school, Mrs. Peterson?”
“I don’t send them to school to be happy, Yim,” replied Mrs. Peterson, calling him by the name most familiarly known to all of them; “I send them to learn to be higher people than their father and mother. That’s what America means!”
“They’ll be higher people – higher than their parents – higher than their teacher – they’ll be efficient farmers, and efficient farmers’ wives. They’ll be happy, because they will know how to use more brains in farming than any lawyer or doctor or merchant can possibly use in his business. I’m educating them to find an outlet for genius in farming!”
“It’s a fine thing,” said Mrs. Bonner, coming to the aid of her fellow soldiers, “to work hard for a lifetime, an’ raise nothing but a family of farmers! A fine thing!”
“They will be farmers anyhow,” cried Jim, “in spite of your efforts – ninety out of every hundred of them! And of the other ten, nine will be wage-earners in the cities, and wish to God they were back on the farm; and the hundredth one will succeed in the city. Shall we educate the ninety-and-nine to fail, that the hundredth, instead of enriching the rural life with his talents, may steal them away to make the city stronger? It is already too strong for us farmers. Shall we drive our best away to make it stronger?”
The guns of Mrs. Bonner and Mrs. Peterson were silenced for a moment, and Mrs. Bronson, after gazing about at the typewriter, the hectograph, the exhibits of weed seeds, the Babcock milk tester, and the other unscholastic equipment, pointed to the list of words, and the arithmetic problems on the board.
“Do you get them words from the speller?” she asked.
“No,” said he, “we got them from a lesson on seed wheat.”
“Did them examples come out of an arithmetic book?” cross-examined she.
“No,” said Jim, “we used problems we made ourselves. We were figuring profits and losses on your cows, Mrs. Bronson!”
“Ezra Bronson,” said Mrs. Bronson loftily, “don’t need any help in telling what’s a good cow. He was farming before you was born!”
“Like fun, he don’t need help! He’s going to dry old Cherry off and fatten her for beef; and he can make more money on the cream by beefing about three more of ’em. The Babcock test shows they’re just boarding on us without paying their board!”
The delegation of matrons ruffled like a group of startled hens at this interposition, which was Newton Bronson’s effective seizing of the opportunity to issue a progress bulletin in the research work on the Bronson dairy herd.
“Newton!” said his mother, “don’t interrupt me when I’m talking to the teacher!”
“Well, then,” said Newton, “don’t tell the teacher that pa knew which cows were good and which were poor. If any one in this district wants to know about their cows they’ll have to come to this shop. And I can tell you that it’ll pay ’em to come too, if they’re going to make anything selling cream. Wait until we get out our reports on the herds, ma!”
The women were rather stampeded by this onslaught of the irregular troops – especially Mrs. Bronson. She was placed in the position of a woman taking a man’s wisdom from her ne’er-do-well son for the first time in her life. Like any other mother in this position, she felt a flutter of pride – but it was strongly mingled with a motherly desire to spank him. The deputation rose, with a unanimous feeling that they had been scored upon.
“Cows!” scoffed Mrs. Peterson. “If we leave you in this yob, Mr. Irwin, our children will know nothing but cows and hens and soils and grains – and where will the culture come in? How will our boys and girls appear when we get fixed so we can move to town? We won’t have no culture at all, Yim!”
“Culture!” exclaimed Jim. “Why – why, after ten years of the sort of school I would give you if I were a better teacher, and could have my way, the people of the cities would be begging to have their children admitted so that they might obtain real culture – culture fitting them for life in the twentieth century – ”
“Don’t bother to get ready for the city children, Jim,” said Mrs. Bonner sneeringly, “you won’t be teaching the Woodruff school that long.”
All this time, the dark-faced Cracker had been glooming from a corner, earnestly seeking to fathom the wrongness he sensed in the gathering. Now he came forward.
“I reckon I may be making a mistake to say anything,” said he, “f’r we-all is strangers hyeh, an’ we’re pore; but I must speak out for Mr. Jim – I must! Don’t turn him out, folks, f’r he’s done mo’ f’r us than eveh any one done in the world!”
“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Peterson.
“I mean,” said Raymond, “that when Mr. Jim began talking school to us, we was a pore no-’count lot without any learnin’, with nothin’ to talk about except our wrongs, an’ our enemies, and the meanness of the Iowa folks. You see we didn’t understand you-all. An’ now, we have hope. We done got hope from this school. We’re goin’ to make good in the world. We’re getting education. We’re all learnin’ to use books. My little sister will be as good as anybody, if you’ll just let Mr. Jim alone in this school – as good as any one. An’ I’ll he’p pap get a farm, and we’ll work and think at the same time, an’ be happy!”
CHAPTER IX
JENNIE ARRANGES A CHRISTMAS PARTY
The great party magnates who made up the tickets from governor down to the lowest county office, doubtless regarded the little political plum shaken off into the apron of Miss Jennie Woodruff of the Woodruff District, as the very smallest and least bloomy of all the plums on the tree; but there is something which tends to puff one up in the mere fact of having received the votes of the people for any office, especially in a region of high average civilization, covering six hundred or seven hundred square miles of good American domain. Jennie was a sensible country girl. Being sensible, she tried to avoid uppishness. But she did feel some little sense of increased importance as she drove her father’s little one-cylinder runabout over the smooth earth roads, in the crisp December weather, just before Christmas.
The weather itself was stimulating, and she was making rapid progress in the management of the little car which her father had offered to lend her for use in visiting the one hundred or more rural schools soon to come under her supervision. She rather fancied the picture of herself, clothed in more or less authority and queening it over her little army of teachers.
Mr. Haakon Peterson was phlegmatically conscious that she made rather an agreeable picture, as she stopped her car alongside his top buggy to talk with him. She had bright blue eyes, fluffy brown hair, a complexion whipped pink by the breeze, and she smiled at him ingratiatingly.
“Don’t you think father is lovely?” said she. “He is going to let me use the runabout when I visit the schools.”
“That will be good,” said Haakon. “It will save you lots of time. I hope you make the county pay for the gasoline.”
“I haven’t thought about that,” said Jennie. “Everybody’s been so nice to me – I want to give as well as receive.”
“Why,” said Haakon, “you will yust begin to receive when your salary begins in Yanuary.”
“Oh, no!” said Jennie. “I’ve received much more than that now! You don’t know how proud I feel. So many nice men I never knew before, and all my old friends like you working for me in the convention and at the polls, just as if I amounted to something.”
“And you don’t know how proud I feel,” said Haakon, “to have in county office a little girl I used to hold on my lap.”
In early times, when Haakon was a flat-capped immigrant boy, he had earned the initial payment on his first eighty acres of prairie land as a hired man on Colonel Woodruff’s farm. Now he was a rather richer man than the colonel, and not a little proud of his ascent to affluence. He was a mild-spoken, soft-voiced Scandinavian, quite completely Americanized, and possessed of that aptitude for local politics which makes so good a citizen of the Norwegian and Swede. His influence was always worth fifty to sixty Scandinavian votes in any county election. He was a good party man and conscious of being entitled to his voice in party matters. This seemed to him an opportunity for exerting a bit of political influence.