"You mean you don't like Susan. She _is_ a little sharp with her tongue.

But you wouldn't fight with a baby--it isn't like you."

"No, sir-ee," said Pewee.

"You'd rather take a big boy than a little one. Now, you ought to make Riley let Lummy alone."

"I'll do that," said Pewee. "Riley's about a million times bigger than Lum."

"I went to the school-house this morning," continued Jack, "and I found Riley choking and beating him. And I thought I'd just speak to you, and see if you can't make him stop it."

"I'll do that," said Pewee, walking along with great dignity.

When Ben Berry and Riley saw Pewee coming in company with Jack, they were amazed and hung their heads, afraid to say anything even to each other. Jack and Pewee walked straight up to the fence-corner in which they stood.

"I thought I'd see what King Pewee would say about your fighting with babies, Riley," said Jack.

"I want you fellows to understand," said Pewee, "that I'm not going to have that little Lum Risdale hurt. If you want to fight, why don't you fight somebody your own size? I don't fight babies myself," and here Pewee drew his head up, "and I don't stand by any boy that does."

Poor Riley felt the last support drop from under him. Pewee had deserted him, and he was now an orphan, unprotected in an unfriendly world!

Jack knew that the truce with so vain a fellow as Pewee could not last long, but it served its purpose for the time. And when, after school, Susan Lanham took pains to go and thank Pewee for standing up for Columbus, Pewee felt himself every inch a king, and for the time he was--if not a "reformed prize-fighter," such as one hears of sometimes, at least an improved boy. The trouble with vain people like Pewee is, that they have no stability. They bend the way the wind blows, and for the most part the wind blows from the wrong quarter.

CHAPTER IX

PIGEON POT-PIE

Happy boys and girls that go to school nowadays! You have to study harder than the generations before you, it is true; you miss the jolly spelling-schools, and the good old games that were not half so scientific as base-ball, lawn tennis, or lacrosse, but that had ten times more fun and frolic in them; but all this is made up to you by the fact that you escape the tyrannical old master. Whatever the faults the teachers of this day may have, they do not generally lacerate the backs of their pupils, as did some of their fore-runners.

At the time of which I write, thirty years ago, a better race of school-masters was crowding out the old, but many of the latter cla.s.s, with their terrible switches and cruel beatings, kept their ground until they died off one by one, and relieved the world of their odious ways.

Mr. Ball wouldn't die to please anybody. He was a bachelor, and had no liking for children, but taught school five or six months in winter to avoid having to work on a farm in the summer. He had taught in Greenbank every winter for a quarter of a century, and having never learned to win anybody's affection, had been obliged to teach those who disliked him.

This atmosphere of mutual dislike will sour the sweetest temper, and Mr.

Ball's temper had not been strained honey to begin with. Year by year he grew more and more severe--he whipped for poor lessons, he whipped for speaking in school, he took down his switch for not speaking loud enough in cla.s.s, he whipped for coming late to school, he whipped because a scholar made a noise with his feet, and he whipped because he himself had eaten something unwholesome for his breakfast. The brutality of a master produces like qualities in scholars. The boys drew caricatures on the blackboard, put living cats or dead ones into Mr. Ball's desk, and tried to drive him wild by their many devices.

He would walk up and down the school-room seeking a victim, and he had as much pleasure in beating a girl or a little boy as in punishing an overgrown fellow.

And yet I cannot say that Mr. Ball was impartial. There were some pupils that escaped. Susan Lanham was not punished, because her father, Dr.

Lanham, was a very influential man in the town; and the faults of Henry Weathervane and his sister were always overlooked after their father became a school trustee.

Many efforts had been made to put a new master into the school. But Mr.

Ball's brother-in-law was one of the princ.i.p.al merchants in the place, and the old man had had the school so long that it seemed like robbery to deprive him of it. It had come, in some sort, to belong to him.

People hated to see him moved. He would die some day, they said, and n.o.body could deny that, though it often seemed to the boys and girls that he would never die; he was more likely to dry up and blow away. And it was a long time to wait for that.

And yet I think Greenbank might have had to wait for something like that if there hadn't come a great flight of pigeons just at this time. For whenever Susan Lanham suggested to her father that he should try to get Mr. Ball removed and a new teacher appointed, Dr. Lanham smiled and said "he hated to move against the old man; he's been there so long, you know, and he probably wouldn't live long, anyhow. Something ought to be done, perhaps, but he couldn't meddle with him." For older people forgot the beatings they had endured, and remembered the old man only as one of the venerable landmarks of their childhood.

And so, by favor of Henry Weathervane's father, whose children he did not punish, and by favor of other people's neglect and forgetfulness, the Greenbank children might have had to face and fear the old ogre down to this day, or until he dried up and blew away, if it hadn't been, as I said, that there came a great flight of pigeons.

A flight of pigeons is not uncommon in the Ohio River country. Audubon, the great naturalist, saw them in his day, and in old colonial times such flights took place in the settlements on the sea-board, and sometimes the starving colonists were able to knock down pigeons with sticks. The mathematician is not yet born who can count the number of pigeons in one of these sky-darkening flocks, which are often many miles in length, and which follow one another for a whole day. The birds, for the most part, fly at a considerable height from the earth, but when they are crossing a wide valley, like that of the Ohio River, they drop down to a lower level, and so reach the hills quite close to the ground, and within easy gunshot.

When the pigeon flight comes on Sat.u.r.day, it is very convenient for those boys that have guns. If these pigeons had only come on Sat.u.r.day instead of on Monday, Mr. Ball might have taught the Greenbank school until to-day,--that is to say, if he hadn't died or quite dried up and blown off meanwhile.

For when Riley and Ben Berry saw this flight of pigeons begin on Monday morning, they remembered that the geography lesson was a hard one, and so they played "hooky," and, taking their guns with them, hid in the bushes at the top of the hill. Then, as the birds struck the hill, and beat their way up over the brow of it, the boys, lying in ambush, had only to fire into the flock without taking aim, and the birds would drop all around them. The discharge of the guns made Bob Holliday so hungry for pigeon pot-pie, that he, too, ran away from school, at recess, and took his place among the pigeon-slayers in the paw-paw patch on the hill top.

Tuesday morning, Mr. Ball came in with darkened brows, and three extra switches. Riley, Berry, and Holliday were called up as soon as school began. They had pigeon pot-pie for dinner, but they also had sore backs for three days, and Bob laughingly said that he knew just how a pigeon felt when it was basted.

The day after the whipping and the pigeon pot-pie, when the sun shone warm at noon, the fire was allowed to go down in the stove. All were at play in the sunshine, excepting Columbus Risdale, who sat solitary, like a disconsolate screech-owl, in one corner of the room. Riley and Ben Berry, still smarting from yesterday, entered, and without observing Lummy's presence, proceeded to put some gunpowder in the stove, taking pains to surround it with cool ashes, so that it should not explode until the stirring of the fire, as the chill of the afternoon should come on. When they had finished this dangerous transaction, they discovered the presence of Columbus in his corner, looking at them with large-eyed wonder and alarm.

"If you ever tell a living soul about that, we'll kill you," said Ben Berry.

Riley also threatened the scared little rabbit, and both felt safe from detection.

An hour after school had resumed its session. Columbus, who had sat shivering with terror all the time, wrote on his slate:

"Will Riley and Ben B. put something in the stove. Said they would kill me if I told on them."

This he pa.s.sed to Jack, who sat next to him. Jack rubbed it out as soon as he had read it, and wrote:

"Don't tell anybody."

Jack could not guess what they had put in. It might be coffee-nuts, which would explode harmlessly; it might be something that would give a bad smell in burning, such as chicken-feathers. If he had thought that it was gunpowder, he would have plucked up courage enough to give the master some warning, though he might have got only a whipping for his pains. While Jack was debating what he should do, the master called the Fourth-Reader cla.s.s. At the close of the lesson he noticed that Columbus was shivering, though indeed it was more from terror than from cold.

"Go to the stove and stir up the fire, and get warm," he said, sternly.

"I'd--I'd rather not," said Lum, shaking with fright at the idea.

"Umph!" said Mr. Ball, looking hard at the lad, with half a mind to make him go. Then he changed his purpose and went to the stove himself, raked forward the coals, and made up the fire. Just as he was shutting the stove-door, the explosion came--the ashes flew out all over the master, the stove was thrown down from the bricks on which its four legs rested, the long pipe fell in many pieces on the floor, and the children set up a general howl in all parts of the room.

As soon as Mr. Ball had shaken off the ashes from his coat, he said: "Be quiet--there's no more danger. Columbus Risdale, come here."

"He did not do it," spoke up Susan Lanham.

"Be quiet, Susan. You know all about this," continued the master to poor little Columbus, who was so frightened as hardly to be able to stand.

After looking at Columbus a moment, the master took down a great beech switch. "Now, I shall whip you until you tell me who did it. You were afraid to go to the stove. You knew there was powder there. Who put it there? That's the question. Answer, quick, or I shall make you."

The little skin-and-bones trembled between two terrors, and Jack, seeing his perplexity, got up and stood by him.

"He didn't do it, Mr. Ball. I know who did it. If Columbus should tell you, he would be beaten for telling. The boy who did it is just mean enough to let Lummy get the whipping. Please let him off."

"_You_ know, do you? I shall whip you both. You knew there was gunpowder in the fire, and you gave no warning. I shall whip you both--the severest whipping you ever had, too."

And the master put up the switch he had taken down, as not effective enough, and proceeded to take another.

"If we had known it was gunpowder," said Jack, beginning to tremble, "you would have been warned. But we didn't. We only knew that something had been put in."

"If you'll tell all about it, I'll let you off easier; if you don't, I shall give you all the whipping I know how to give." And by way of giving impressiveness to his threat he took a turn about the room, while there was an awful stillness among the terrified scholars.