"He's as odd as d.i.c.k's hatband," said Mrs. Woodruff, "tramping off in a storm like this."

"Did you line him up?" asked the colonel of Jennie.

The young lady started and blushed. She had forgotten all about the politics of the situation.

"I--I'm afraid I didn't, papa," she confessed.

"Those brown mice of Professor Darbishire's," said the colonel, "were the devil and all to control."

Jennie was thinking of this as she dropped asleep.

"Hard to control!" she thought. "I wonder. I wonder, after all, if Jim is not capable of being easily lined up--when he sees how foolish I think he is!"

And Jim? He found himself hard to control that night. So much so that it was after midnight before he had finished work on a plan for a cooperative creamery.

"The boys can be given work in helping to operate it," he wrote on a tablet, "which, in connection with the labor performed by the teacher, will greatly reduce the expense of operation. A skilled b.u.t.ter-maker, with slender white hands"--but he erased this last clause and retired.

CHAPTER XII

FACING TRIAL

A distinct sensation ran through the Woodruff school, but the schoolmaster and a group of five big boys and three girls engaged in a very uncla.s.slike conference in the back of the room were all unconscious of it. The geography cla.s.ses had recited, and the language work was on. Those too small for these studies were playing a game under the leadership of Jinnie Simms, who had been promoted to the position of weed-seed monitor.

The game was forfeits. Each child had been encouraged to bring some sort of weed from the winter fields--preferably one the seed of which still clung to the dried receptacles--but anyhow, a weed. Some pupils had brought merely empty ta.s.sels, some bare stalks, and some seeds which they had winnowed from the grain in their father's bins; and with them they played forfeits. They counted out by the "arey, Ira, ickery an'" method, and somebody was "It." Then, in order, they presented to him a seed, stalk or head of a weed, and if the one who was It could tell the name of the weed, the child who brought the specimen became It, and the name was written on slates or tablets, and the new It told where the weed or seed was collected. If any pupil brought in a specimen the name of which he himself could not correctly give, he paid a forfeit. If a specimen was brought in not found in the school cabinet--which was coming to contain a considerable collection--it was placed there, and the task allotted to the best penman in the school to write its proper label. All this caused excitement, and not a little buzz--but it ceased when the county superintendent entered the room.

For it was after the first of January, and Jennie was visiting the Woodruff school.

The group in the back of the room went on with its conference, oblivious of the entrance of Superintendent Jennie. Their work was rather absorbing, being no more nor less than the compilation of the figures of a cow census of the district.

"Altogether," said Mary Talcott, "we have in the district one hundred and fifty-three cows."

"I don't make it that," said Raymond Simms. "I don't get but a hundred and thirty-eight."

"The trouble is," said Newton Bronson, "that Mary's counting in the Bailey herd of Shorthorns."

"Well, they're cows, ain't they?" interrogated Mary.

"Not for this census," said Raymond.

"Why not?" asked Mary. "They're the prettiest cows in the neighborhood."

"Scotch Shorthorns," said Newton, "and run with their calves."

"Leave them out," said Jim, "and to-morrow, I want each one to tell in the language cla.s.s, in three hundred words or less, whether there are enough cows in the district to justify a cooperative creamery, and give the reason. You'll find articles in the farm papers if you look through the card index. Now, how about the census in the adjoining districts?"

"There are more than two hundred within four miles on the roads leading west," said a boy.

"My father and I counted up about a hundred beyond us," said Mary. "But I couldn't get the exact number."

"Why," said Raymond, "we could find six hundred dairy cows in this neighborhood, within an hour's drive."

"Six hundred!" scoffed Newton. "You're crazy! In an hour's drive?"

"I mean an hour's drive each way," said Raymond.

"I believe we could," said Jim. "And after we find how far we will have to go to get enough cows, if half of them patronized the creamery, we'll work over the savings the business would make, if we could get the prices for b.u.t.ter paid the Wisconsin cooperative creameries, as compared with what the centralizers pay us, on a basis of the last six months. Who's in possession of that correspondence with the Wisconsin creameries?"

"I have it," said Raymond. "I'm hectographing a lot of arithmetic problems from it."

"How do you do, Mr. Irwin!" It was the superintendent who spoke.

Jim's brain whirled little prismatic clouds before his vision, as he rose and shook Jennie's extended hand.

"Let me give you a chair," said he.

"Oh, no, thank you!" she returned. "I'll just make myself at home. I know my way about in this schoolhouse, you know!"

She smiled at the children, and went about looking at their work--which was not noticeably disturbed, by reason of the fact that visitors were much more frequent now than ever before, and were no rarity. Certainly, Jennie Woodruff was no novelty, since they had known her all their lives.

Most of the embarra.s.sment was Jim's. He rose to the occasion, however, went through the routine of the closing day, and dismissed the flock, not omitting making an engagement with a group of boys for that evening to come back and work on the formalin treatment for s.m.u.t in seed grains, and the blue-vitriol treatment for seed potatoes.

"We hadn't time for these things," said he to the county superintendent, "in the regular cla.s.s work--and it's getting time to take them up if we are to clean out the s.m.u.t in next year's crop."

They repeated Whittier's _Corn Song_ in concert, and school was out.

Alone with her in the old schoolhouse, Jim confronted Jennie in the flesh.

She felt a sense of his agitation, but if she had known the power of it, she would have been astonished. Since that Christmas afternoon when she had undertaken to follow Mr. Peterson's advice and line Yim Irwin up, Jim had gone through an inward transformation. He had pa.s.sed from a late, cold, backward s.e.xual spring, into a warm June of the spirit, in which he had walked amid roses and lilies with Jennie. He was in love with her. He knew how insane it was, how much less than nothing had taken place in his circ.u.mstances to justify the hope that he could ever emerge from the state in which she would not say "Humph!" at the thought that he could marry her or any one else. Yet, he had made up his mind that he would marry Jennie Woodruff .... She ought never have tried to line him up. She knew not what she did.

He saw her through clouds of rose and pink; but she looked at him as at a foolish man who was making trouble for her, chasing rainbows at her expense, and deeply vexing her. She was in a cold official frame of mind.

"Jim," said she, "do you know that you are facing trouble?"

"Trouble," said Jim, "is the natural condition of a man in my state of mind. But it is going to be a delicious sort of tribulation."

"I don't know what you mean," she replied in perfect honesty.

"Then I don't know what you mean," replied Jim.

"Jim," she said pleadingly, "I want you to give up this sort of teaching.

Can't you see it's all wrong?"

"No," answered Jim, in much the manner of a man who has been stabbed by his sweetheart. "I can't see that it's wrong. It's the only sort I can do.

What do you see wrong in it?"

"Oh, I can see some very wonderful things in it," said Jennie, "but it can't be done in the Woodruff District. It may be correct in theory, but it won't work in practise."