The Brown Mouse

“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, pricked 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 circumstance. 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 embarrassment. 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 embarrassed 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. The 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 spaches of the Boy Orator of the Platte. Makin’ a good spache 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 passed 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 document, 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 spache 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

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,” replied Mr. 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 the mountains, 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.”