The Brown Mouse Part 2

CHAPTER II

REVERSED UNANIMITY

The great blade of the grading machine, running diagonally across the road and pulling the earth toward its median line, had made several trips, and much persiflage about Jim Irwin's forthcoming appearance before the board had been addressed to Jim and exchanged by others for his benefit.

To Newton Bronson was given the task of leveling and distributing the earth rolled into the road by the grader--a labor which in the interests of fitting a muzzle on his big mongrel dog he deserted whenever the machine moved away from him. No dog would have seemed less deserving of a muzzle, for he was a friendly animal, always wagging his tail, pressing his nose into people's palms, licking their clothing and otherwise making a nuisance of himself. That there was some mystery about the muzzle was evident from Newton's pains to make a secret of it. Its wires were curled into a ring directly over the dog's nose, and into this ring Newton had fitted a cork, through which he had thrust a large needle which protruded, an inch-long bayonet, in front of Ponto's nose. As the grader swept back, horses straining, harness creaking and a billow of dark earth rolling before the knife, Ponto, fully equipped with this stinger, raced madly alongside, a friend to every man, but not unlike some people, one whose friends.h.i.+p was of all things to be most dreaded.

As the grader moved along one side of the highway, a high-powered automobile approached on the other. It was attempting to rush the swale for the hill opposite, and making rather bad weather of the newly repaired road. A pile of loose soil that Newton had allowed to lie just across the path made a certain maintenance of speed desirable. The knavish Newton planted himself in the path of the laboring car, and waved its driver a command to halt. The car came to a standstill with its front wheels in the edge of the loose earth, and the chauffeur fuming at the possibility of stalling--a contingency upon which Newton had confidently reckoned.

"What d'ye want?" he demanded. "What d'ye mean by stopping me in this kind of place?"

"I want to ask you," said Newton with mock politeness, "if you have the correct time."

The chauffeur sought words appropriate to his feelings. Ponto and his muzzle saved him the trouble. A pretty pointer leaped from the car, and attracted by the evident friendliness of Ponto's greeting, p.r.i.c.ked up its ears, and sought, in a spirit of canine brotherhood, to touch noses with him. The needle in Ponto's muzzle did its work to the agony and horror of the pointer, which leaped back with a yelp, and turned tail. Ponto, in an effort to apologize, followed, and finding itself bayonetted at every contact with this demon dog, the pointer definitely took flight, howling, leaving Ponto in a state of wonder and humiliation at the sudden end of what had promised to be a very friendly acquaintance. I have known instances not entirely dissimilar among human beings. The pointer's master watched its strange flight, and swore. His eye turned to the boy who had caused all this, and he alighted pale with anger.

"I've got time," said he, remembering Newton's impudent question, "to give you what you deserve."

Newton grinned and dodged, but the bank of loose earth was his undoing, and while he stumbled, the chauffeur caught and held him by the collar.

And as he held the boy, the operation of flogging him in the presence of the grading gang grew less to his taste. Again Ponto intervened, for as the chauffeur stood holding Newton, the dog, evidently regarding the stranger as his master's friend, thrust his nose into the chauffeur's palm--the needle necessarily preceding the nose. The chauffeur behaved much as his pointer had done, saving and excepting that the pointer did not swear.

It was funny--even the pain involved could not make it otherwise than funny. The grading gang laughed to a man. Newton grinned even while in the fell clutch of circ.u.mstance. Ponto tried to smell the chauffeur's trousers, and what had been a laugh became a roar, quite general save for the fact that the chauffeur did not join in it.

Caution and mercy departed from the chauffeur's mood; and he drew back his fist to strike the boy--and found it caught by the hard hand of Jim Irwin.

"You're too angry to punish this boy," said Jim gently,--"even if you had the right to punish him at all!"

"Oh, cut it out," said a fat man in the rear of the car, who had hitherto manifested no interest in anything save Ponto. "Get in, and let's be on our way!"

The chauffeur, however, recognized in a man of mature years and full size, and a creature with no mysterious needle in his nose, a relief from his embarra.s.sment. Unhesitatingly, he released Newton, and blindly, furiously and futilely, he delivered a blow meant for Jim's jaw, but which really miscarried by a foot. In reply, Jim countered with an awkward swinging uppercut, which was superior to the chauffeur's blow in one respect only--it landed fairly on the point of the jaw. The chauffeur staggered and slowly toppled over into the soft earth which had caused so much of the rumpus. Newton Bronson slipped behind a hedge, and took his infernally equipped dog with him. The grader gang formed a ring about the combatants and waited. Colonel Woodruff, driving toward home in his runabout, held up by the traffic blockade, asked what was going on here, and the chauffeur, rising groggily, picked up his goggles, climbed into the car; and the meeting dissolved, leaving Jim Irwin greatly embarra.s.sed by the fact that for the first time in his life, he had struck a man in combat.

"Good work, Jim," said Cornelius Bonner. "I didn't think 'twas in ye!"

"It's beastly," said Jim, reddening. "I didn't know, either."

Colonel Woodruff looked at his hired man sharply, gave him some instructions for the next day and drove on. The road gang dispersed for the afternoon. Newton Bronson carefully secreted the magic muzzle, and chuckled at what had been perhaps the most picturesquely successful bit of deviltry in his varied record. Jim Irwin put out his team, got his supper and went to the meeting of the school board.

The deadlocked members of the board had been so long at loggerheads that their relations had swayed back to something like amity. Jim had scarcely entered when Con Bonner addressed the chair.

"Mr. Prisidint," said he, "we have wid us t'night, a young man who nades no introduction to an audience in this place, Mr. Jim Irwin. He thinks we're bullheaded mules, and that all the schools are bad. At the proper time I shall move that we hire him f'r teacher; and pinding that motion, I move that he be given the floor. Ye've all heared of Mr. Irwin's ability as a white hope, and I know he'll be listened to wid respect!"

Much laughter from the board and the spectators, as Jim arose. He looked upon it as ridicule of himself, while Con Bonner regarded it as a tribute to his successful speech.

"Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Board," said Jim, "I'm not going to tell you anything that you don't know about yourselves. You are simply making a farce of the matter of hiring a teacher for this school. It is not as if any of you had a theory that the teaching methods of one of these teachers would be any better than or much different from those of the others. You know, and I know, that whichever is finally engaged, or even if your silly deadlock is broken by employing a new candidate, the school will be the same old story. It will still be the school it was when I came into it a little ragged boy"--here Jim's voice grew a little husky--"and when I left it, a bigger boy, but still as ragged as ever."

There was a slight sensation in the audience, as if, as Con Bonner said about the knockdown, they hadn't thought Jim Irwin could do it.

"Well," said Con, "you've done well to hold your own."

"In all the years I attended this school," Jim went on, "I never did a bit of work in school which was economically useful. It was all dry stuff copied from the city schools. No other pupil ever did any real work of the sort farmers' boys and girls should do. We copied city schools--and the schools we copied are poor schools. We made bad copies of them, too. If any of you three men were making a fight for what Roosevelt's Country Life Commission called a 'new kind of rural school,' I'd say fight. But you aren't. You're just making individual fights for your favorite teachers."

Jim Irwin made a somewhat lengthy speech after the awkwardness wore off, so long that his audience was nodding and yawning by the time he reached his peroration, in which he abjured Bronson, Bonner and Peterson to study his plan of a new kind of rural school,--in which the work of the school should be correlated with the life of the home and the farm--a school which would be in the highest degree cultural by being consciously useful and obviously practical. There sharp spats of applause from the useless hands of Newton Bronson gave the final touch of absurdity to a situation which Jim had felt to be ridiculous all through. Had it not been for Jennie Woodruff's "Humph!" stinging him to do something outside the round of duties into which he had fallen, had it not been for the absurd notion that perhaps, after they had heard his speech, they would place him in charge of the school, and that he might be able to do something really important in it, he would not have been there. As he sat down, he felt himself a silly clodhopper, filled with the east wind of his own conceit, out of touch with the real world of men. He knew himself a dreamer. The nodding board of directors, the secretary, actually snoring, and the bored audience restored the field-hand to a sense of his proper place.

"We have had the privilege of list'nin'," said Con Bonner, rising, "to a great speech, Mr. Prisidint. We should be proud to have a borned orator like this in the agricultural pop'lation of the district. A reg'lar William Jennin's Bryan. I don't understand what he was trying to tell us, but sometimes I've had the same difficulty with the s.p.a.ches of the Boy Orator of the Platte. Makin' a good s.p.a.che is one thing, and teaching a good school is another, but in order to bring this matter before the board, I nominate Mr. James E. Irwin, the Boy Orator of the Woodruff District, and the new white hope, f'r the job of teacher of this school, and I move that when he shall have received a majority of the votes of this board, the secretary and prisidint be insthructed to enter into a contract with him f'r the comin' year."

The seconding of motions on a board of three has its objectionable features, since it seems to commit a majority of the body to the motion in advance. The president, therefore, followed usage, when he said--"If there's no objection, it will be so ordered. The chair hears no objection--and it is so ordered. Prepare the ballots for a vote on the election of teacher, Mr. Secretary. Each votes his preference for teacher.

A majority elects."

For months, the ballots had come out of the box--an empty crayon-box--Herman Paulson, one; Prudence Foster, one; Margaret Gilmartin, one; and every one present expected the same result now.

There was no surprise, however, in view of the nomination of Jim Irwin by the blarneying Bonner when the secretary smoothed out the first ballot, and read: "James E. Irwin, one." Clearly this was the Bonner vote; but when the next slip came forth, "James E. Irwin, two," the Board of Directors of the Woodruff Independent District were stunned at the slowly dawning knowledge that they had made an election! Before they had rallied, the secretary drew from the box the third and last ballot, and read, "James E. Irwin, three."

President Bronson choked as he announced the result--choked and stammered, and made very hard weather of it, but he went through with the motion, as we all run in our grooves.

"The ballot having shown the unanimous election of James E. Irwin, I declare him elected."

He dropped into his chair, while the secretary, a very methodical man, drew from his portfolio a contract duly drawn up save for the signatures of the officers of the district, and the name and signature of the teacher-elect. This he calmly filled out, and pa.s.sed over to the president, pointing to the dotted line. Mr. Bronson would have signed his own death-warrant at that moment, not to mention a perfectly legal doc.u.ment, and signed with Peterson and Bonner looking on stonily. The secretary signed and shoved the contract over to Jim Irwin.

"Sign there," he said.

Jim looked it over, saw the other signatures, and felt an impulse to dodge the whole thing. He could not feel that the action of the board was serious. He thought of the platform he had laid down for himself, and was daunted. He thought of the days in the open field, and of the untroubled evenings with his books, and he shrank from the work. Then he thought of Jennie Woodruff's "Humph!"--and he signed!

"Move we adjourn," said Peterson.

"No 'bjection 't's so ordered!" said Mr. Bronson.

The secretary and Jim went out, while the directors waited.

"What the Billy--" began Bonner, and finished lamely! "What for did you vote for the dub, Ez?"

"I voted for him," replied Bronson, "because he fought for my boy this afternoon. I didn't want it stuck into him too hard. I wanted him to have _one_ vote."

"An' I wanted him to have wan vote, too," said Bonner. "I thought mesilf the only dang fool on the board--an' he made a s.p.a.che that airned wan vote--but f'r the love of hivin, that dub f'r a teacher! What come over you, Haakon--you voted f'r him, too!"

"Ay vanted him to have one wote, too," said Peterson.

And in this wise, Jim became the teacher in the Woodruff District--all on account of Jennie Woodruff's "Humph!"

CHAPTER III

WHAT IS A BROWN MOUSE