The Brown Mouse Read online

  CHAPTER II

  REVERSED UNANIMITY

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

  To Newton Bronson was given the task of leveling and distributing theearth rolled into the road by the grader--a labor which in the interestsof fitting a muzzle on his big mongrel dog he deserted whenever themachine moved away from him. No dog would have seemed less deserving of amuzzle, for he was a friendly animal, always wagging his tail, pressinghis nose into people's palms, licking their clothing and otherwise makinga nuisance of himself. That there was some mystery about the muzzle wasevident from Newton's pains to make a secret of it. Its wires were curledinto a ring directly over the dog's nose, and into this ring Newton hadfitted 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 rollingbefore the knife, Ponto, fully equipped with this stinger, raced madlyalongside, a friend to every man, but not unlike some people, one whosefriendship was of all things to be most dreaded.

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

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

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

  The chauffeur sought words appropriate to his feelings. Ponto and hismuzzle saved him the trouble. A pretty pointer leaped from the car, andattracted by the evident friendliness of Ponto's greeting, pricked up itsears, and sought, in a spirit of canine brotherhood, to touch noses withhim. The needle in Ponto's muzzle did its work to the agony and horror ofthe pointer, which leaped back with a yelp, and turned tail. Ponto, in aneffort to apologize, followed, and finding itself bayonetted at everycontact with this demon dog, the pointer definitely took flight, howling,leaving Ponto in a state of wonder and humiliation at the sudden end ofwhat had promised to be a very friendly acquaintance. I have knowninstances not entirely dissimilar among human beings. The pointer's masterwatched its strange flight, and swore. His eye turned to the boy who hadcaused all this, and he alighted pale with anger.

  "I've got time," said he, remembering Newton's impudent question, "to giveyou 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 ofthe grading gang grew less to his taste. Again Ponto intervened, for asthe chauffeur stood holding Newton, the dog, evidently regarding thestranger as his master's friend, thrust his nose into the chauffeur'spalm--the needle necessarily preceding the nose. The chauffeur behavedmuch as his pointer had done, saving and excepting that the pointer didnot swear.

  It was funny--even the pain involved could not make it otherwise thanfunny. The grading gang laughed to a man. Newton grinned even while in thefell clutch of circumstance. Ponto tried to smell the chauffeur'strousers, and what had been a laugh became a roar, quite general save forthe fact that the chauffeur did not join in it.

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

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

  "Oh, cut it out," said a fat man in the rear of the car, who had hithertomanifested no interest in anything save Ponto. "Get in, and let's be onour 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 hisembarrassment. Unhesitatingly, he released Newton, and blindly, furiouslyand futilely, he delivered a blow meant for Jim's jaw, but which reallymiscarried by a foot. In reply, Jim countered with an awkward swinginguppercut, which was superior to the chauffeur's blow in one respectonly--it landed fairly on the point of the jaw. The chauffeur staggeredand slowly toppled over into the soft earth which had caused so much ofthe rumpus. Newton Bronson slipped behind a hedge, and took his infernallyequipped dog with him. The grader gang formed a ring about the combatantsand waited. Colonel Woodruff, driving toward home in his runabout, held upby the traffic blockade, asked what was going on here, and the chauffeur,rising groggily, picked up his goggles, climbed into the car; and themeeting dissolved, leaving Jim Irwin greatly embarrassed by the fact thatfor 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 someinstructions for the next day and drove on. The road gang dispersed forthe afternoon. Newton Bronson carefully secreted the magic muzzle, andchuckled at what had been perhaps the most picturesquely successful bit ofdeviltry in his varied record. Jim Irwin put out his team, got his supperand went to the meeting of the school board.

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

  "Mr. Prisidint," said he, "we have wid us t'night, a young man who nadesno introduction to an audience in this place, Mr. Jim Irwin. He thinkswe're bullheaded mules, and that all the schools are bad. At the propertime I shall move that we hire him f'r teacher; and pinding that motion, Imove that he be given the floor. Ye've all heared of Mr. Irwin's abilityas 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 lookedupon it as ridicule of himself, while Con Bonner regarded it as a tributeto his successful speech.

  "Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Board," said Jim, "I'm not going totell you anything that you don't know about yourselves. You are simplymaking a farce of the matter of hiring a teacher for this school. It isnot as if any of you had a theory that the teaching methods of one ofthese teachers would be any better than or much different from those ofthe others. You know, and I know, that whichever is finally engaged, oreven if your silly deadlock is broken by employing a new candidate, theschool will be the same old story. It will still be the school it was whenI came into it a little ragged boy"--here Jim's voice grew a littlehusky--"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 saidabout 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 bitof work in school which was economically useful. It was all dry stuffcopied from the city schools. No other pupil ever did any real work of thesort farmers' boys and girls should do. We copied city schools--and theschools we copied are poor schools. We made bad copies of them, too. Ifany of you three men were making a fight for what Roosevelt's Country LifeCommission called a 'new kind of rural school,' I'd say fight. But youaren'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 reachedhis peroration, in whic
h he abjured Bronson, Bonner and Peterson to studyhis plan of a new kind of rural school,--in which the work of the schoolshould be correlated with the life of the home and the farm--a schoolwhich would be in the highest degree cultural by being consciously usefuland obviously practical. The sharp spats of applause from the uselesshands of Newton Bronson gave the final touch of absurdity to a situationwhich Jim had felt to be ridiculous all through. Had it not been forJennie Woodruff's "Humph!" stinging him to do something outside the roundof duties into which he had fallen, had it not been for the absurd notionthat perhaps, after they had heard his speech, they would place him incharge of the school, and that he might be able to do something reallyimportant in it, he would not have been there. As he sat down, he felthimself 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. Thenodding board of directors, the secretary, actually snoring, and the boredaudience restored the field-hand to a sense of his proper place.

  "We have had the privilege of list'nin'," said Con Bonner, rising, "to agreat speech, Mr. Prisidint. We should be proud to have a borned oratorlike this in the agricultural pop'lation of the district. A reg'larWilliam Jennin's Bryan. I don't understand what he was trying to tell us,but sometimes I've had the same difficulty with the spaches of the BoyOrator of the Platte. Makin' a good spache is one thing, and teaching agood school is another, but in order to bring this matter before theboard, I nominate Mr. James E. Irwin, the Boy Orator of the WoodruffDistrict, 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 ofthis board, the secretary and prisidint be insthructed to enter into acontract with him f'r the comin' year."

  The seconding of motions on a board of three has its objectionablefeatures, since it seems to commit a majority of the body to the motion inadvance. The president, therefore, followed usage, when he said--"Ifthere's no objection, it will be so ordered. The chair hears noobjection--and it is so ordered. Prepare the ballots for a vote on theelection of teacher, Mr. Secretary. Each votes his preference for teacher.A majority elects."

  For months, the ballots had come out of the box--an emptycrayon-box--Herman Paulson, one; Prudence Foster, one; MargaretGilmartin, one; and every one present expected the same result now.There was no surprise, however, in view of the nomination of Jim Irwin bythe blarneying Bonner when the secretary smoothed out the firstballot, and read: "James E. Irwin, one." Clearly this was the Bonnervote; but when the next slip came forth, "James E. Irwin, two," the Boardof Directors of the Woodruff Independent District were stunned at theslowly dawning knowledge that they had made an election! Before they hadrallied, 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, aswe all run in our grooves.

  "The ballot having shown the unanimous election of James E. Irwin, Ideclare 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 signaturesof the officers of the district, and the name and signature of theteacher-elect. This he calmly filled out, and passed over to thepresident, pointing to the dotted line. Mr. Bronson would have signed hisown death-warrant at that moment, not to mention a perfectly legaldocument, and signed with Peterson and Bonner looking on stonily. Thesecretary 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 dodgethe whole thing. He could not feel that the action of the board wasserious. He thought of the platform he had laid down for himself, and wasdaunted. He thought of the days in the open field, and of the untroubledevenings with his books, and he shrank from the work. Then he thought ofJennie 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 youvote for the dub, Ez?"

  "I voted for him," replied Bronson, "because he fought for my boy thisafternoon. 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 mesilfthe only dang fool on the board--an' he made a spache that airned wanvote--but f'r the love of hivin, that dub f'r a teacher! What come overyou, 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 onaccount of Jennie Woodruff's "Humph!"