Chapter 22

AN EMBASSY FROM DIXIE

Superintendent Jennie sat at her desk in no very satisfactory frame of mind. In the first place court was to convene on the following Monday, and both grand jury and petit juries would be in session, so that her one-room office was not to be hers for a few days. Her desk was even now ready to be moved into the hall by the janitor. To Wilbur Smythe, who did her the honor of calling occasionally as the exigencies of his law practise took him past the office of the pretty country girl on whose shapely shoulders rested the burden of the welfare of the schools, she remarked that if they didn't soon build the new court-house so as to give her such accommodations as her office really needed, "they might take their old office--so there!"

"Fair woman," said Wilbur, as he creased his Prince Albert in a parting bow, "should adorn the home!"

"Bosh!" sneered Jennie, rather pleased, all the same, "suppose she isn't fair, and hasn't any home!"

This question of adorning a home was no nearer settlement with Jennie than it had ever been, though increasingly a matter of speculation.

There were two or three men--rather good catches, too--who, if they were encouraged--but what was there to any of them? Take Wilbur Smythe, now; he would by sheer force of persistent assurance and fair abilities eventually get a good practise for a country lawyer--three or four thousand a year--serve in the legislature or the state senate, and finally become a bank director with a goodly standing as a safe business man; but what was there to him? This is what Jennie asked her paper-weight as she placed it on a pile of unfinished examination papers. And the paper-weight echoed, "Not a thing out of the ordinary!" And then, said Jennie, "Well, you little simpleton, who and what are _you_ so out of the ordinary that you should sneer at Wilbur Smythe and Beckman Fifield and such men?" And echo answered, "What?"--and then the mail-carrier came in.

Down near the bottom of the pile she found this letter, signed by a southern state superintendent of schools, but dated at Kirksville, Missouri:

"I am a member of a party of southern educators--state superintendents in the main," the letter ran, "_en tour_ of the country to see what we can find of an instructive nature in rural school work. I assure you that we are being richly repaid for the time and expense. There are things going on in the schools here in northeastern Missouri, for instance, which merit much study. We have met Professor Withers, of Ames, who suggests that we visit your schools, and especially the rural school taught by a young man named Irwin, and I wonder if you will be free on next Monday morning, if we come to your office, to direct us to the place? If you could accompany us on the trip, and perhaps show us some of your other excellent schools, we should be honored and pleased. The South is recreating her rural schools, and we are coming to believe that we shall be better workmen if we create a new kind rather than an improvement of the old kind."

There was more of this courteous and deferential letter, all giving Jennie a sense of being saluted by a fine gentleman in satin and ruffles, and with a plume on his hat. And then came the shock--a party of state officials were coming into the county to study Jim Irwin's school! They would never come to study Wilbur Smythe's law practise--never in the world--or her work as county superintendent--never!--and Jim was getting seventy-five dollars a month, and had a mother to support. Moreover, he was getting more than he had asked when the colonel had told him to "hold the district up!" But there could be no doubt that there was something _to_ Jim--the man was out of the ordinary. And wasn't that just what she had been looking for in her mind?

Jennie wired to her southerner for the number of his party, and secured automobiles for the trip. She sent a note to Jim Irwin telling of the prospective visitation. She would show all concerned that she could do some things, anyhow, and she would send these people on with a good impression of her county.

She was glad of the automobiles the next Monday morning, when at nine-thirty the train discharged upon her a dozen very alert, very up-to-date, very inquisitive southerners, male and female, most of whom seemed to have left their "r's" in the gulf region. It was eleven when the party parked their machines before the schoolhouse door.

"There are visitors here before us," said Jennie.

"Seems rather like an educational shrine," said Doctor Brathwayt, of Mississippi. "How does he accommodate so many visitors in that small edifice?"

"I am not aware," said Jennie, "that he has been in the habit of receiving so very many from outside the district. Well, shall we go in?"

Once inside, Jennie felt a queer return of her old aversion to Jim's methods--the aversion which had caused her to criticize him so sharply on the occasion of her first visit. The reason for the return of the feeling lay in the fact that the work going on was of the same sort, but of a more intense character. It was so utterly unlike a school as Jennie understood the word, that she glanced back at the group of educators with a little blush. The school was in a sort of uproar. Not that uproar of boredom and mischief of which most of us have familiar memories, but a sort of eager uproar, in which every child was intensely interested in the same thing; and did little rustling things because of this interest; something like the hum at a football game or a dog-fight.

On one side of the desk stood Jim Irwin, and facing him was a smooth stranger of the old-fashioned lightning-rod-agent type--the shallower and laxer sort of salesman of the kind whose sole business is to get signatures on the dotted line, and let some one else do the rest. In short, he was a "closer."

Standing back of him in evident distress was Mr. Cornelius Bonner, and grouped about were Columbus Brown, B. B. Hamm, Ezra Bronson, A. B. Talcott and two or three others from outside the Woodruff District. With envelopes in their hands and the light of battle in their eyes stood Newton Bronson, Raymond Simms, Bettina Hansen, Mary Smith and Angie Talcott, the boys filled with delight, the girls rather frightened at being engaged in something like a debate with the salesman.

As the latest-coming visitors moved forward, they heard the schoolmaster finishing his passage at arms with the salesman.

"You should not feel exasperated at us, Mr. Carmichael," said he in tones of the most complete respect, "for what our figures show. You are unfortunate in the business proposition you offer this community. That is all. Even these children have the facts to prove that the creamery outfit you offer is not worth within two thousand dollars of what you ask for it, and that it is very doubtful if it is the sort of outfit we should need."

"I'll bet you a thousand dollars--" began Carmichael hotly, when Jim waved him down.

"Not with me," said Jim. "Your friend, Mr. Bonner, there, knows what chance there is for you to bet even a thousand cents with me. Besides, we know our facts, in this school. We've been working on them for a long time."

"Bet your life we have!" interpolated Newton Bronson.

"Before we finish," said Jim, "I want to thank you gentlemen for bringing in Mr. Carmichael. We have been reading up on the literature of the creamery promoter, and it is a very fine thing to have one in the flesh with whom to--to--demonstrate, if Mr. Carmichael will allow me to say so."

Carmichael looked at Bonner, made an expressive motion with his head toward the door, and turned as if to leave.

"Well," said he, "I can do plenty of business with _men_. If you _men_ want to make the deal I offer you, and I can show you from the statistics I've got at the hotel that it's a special deal just to get started in this part of the state, and carries a thousand dollars of cut in price to you. Let's leave these children and this he school-ma'am and get something done."

"I can't allow you to depart," said Jim more gently than before, "without thanking you for the very excellent talk you gave us on the advantage of the cooperative creamery over the centralizer. We in this school believe in the cooperative creamery, and if we can get rid of you, Mr. Carmichael, without buying your equipment, I think your work here may be productive of good."

"He's off three or four points on the average overrun in the Wisconsin co-ops," said Newton.

"And we thought," said Mary Smith, "that we'd need more cows than he said to keep up a creamery of our own."

"Oh," replied Jim, "but we mustn't expect Mr. Carmichael to know the subject as well as we do, children. He makes a practise of talking mostly to people who know nothing about it--and he talks very well. All in favor of thanking Mr. Carmichael please say 'Aye.'"

There was a rousing chorus of "Aye!" in which Mr. Carmichael, followed closely by Mr. Bonner, made his exit. B. B. Hamm went forward and shook Jim's hand slowly and contemplatively, as if trying to remember just what he should say.

"James E. Irwin," said he, "you've saved us from being skinned by the smoothest grafter that I ever seen."

"Not I," said Jim; "the kind of school I stand for, Mr. Hamm, will save you more than that--and give you the broadest culture any school ever gave. A culture based on life. We've been studying life, in this school--the life we all live here in this district."

"He had a smooth partner, too," said Columbus Brown. Jim looked at Bonner's little boy in one of the front seats and shook his head at Columbus warningly.

"If I hadn't herded 'em in here to ask you a few questions about cooperative creameries," said Mr. Talcott, "we'd have been stuck--they pretty near had our names. And then the whole neighborhood would have been sucked in for about fifty dollars a name."

"I'd have gone in for two hundred," said B. B. Hamm.

"May I call a little meeting here for a minute, Jim?" asked Ezra Bronson. "Why, where's he gone?"

"They's some other visitors come in," said a little girl, pulling her apron in embarrassment at the teacher's absence.

Jim had, after what seemed to Jennie an interminable while, seen the county superintendent and her distinguished party, and was now engaged in welcoming them and endeavoring to find them seats,--quite an impossible thing at that particular moment, by the way.

"Don't mind us, Mr. Irwin," said Doctor Brathwayt. "This is the best thing we've seen on our journeyings. Please go on with the proceedin's. That gentleman seems to have in mind the perfectin' of some so't of organization. I'm intensely interested."

"I'd like to call a little meetin' here," said Ezra to the teacher. "Seein' we've busted up your program so far, may we take a little while longer?"

"Certainly," said Jim. "The school will please come to order."

The pupils took their seats, straightened their books and papers, and were at attention. Doctor Brathwayt nodded approvingly as if at the answer to some question in his mind.

"Children," said Mr. Irwin, "you may or may not be interested in what these gentlemen are about to do--but I hope you are. Those who wish may be members of Mr. Bronson's meeting. Those who do not prefer to do so may take up their regular work."

"Gentlemen," said Mr. Bronson to the remains of Mr. Carmichael's creamery party, "we've been cutting bait in this neighborhood about long enough. I'm in favor of fishing, now. It would have been the biggest disgrace ever put on this district to have been swindled by that sharper, when the man that could have set us right on the subject was right here working for us, and we never let him have a chance. And yet that's what we pretty near