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
friendship 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, 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!"