“Darn you, Buster—this is the best shirt I got,” with the husky threat, added, “I’ll wear you to a frazzle—when I get my breath.”
Burch and Miss Valeria were the only ones who seemed to be out of it all. The little lady looked up mildly once or twice at the extra amount of noise and bustle going on about her, then relaxed into her book or the endless piece of Battenburg which never seemed to get itself finished under her slim, aristocratic white hands. Burch was a silent boy, who cared enough about his books to have made a very good student and whose deportment would always have been rated one hundred if he hadn’t had such a queer way of taking an idea into his head, saying nothing about it, and putting it into execution—whatever it was—without any one’s permission.
There was the time when the school clock got out of order, and Burch took it out of its case to oil it. Miss Belle caught him with it just when he dipped it in a bath of kerosene. He wouldn’t say he was sorry. It went on all morning till the young teacher said she was going to whip him—and expel him from school. Even that didn’t move Burch to say anything but:
“I wish you’d let me oil the clock now and put it back in the case and put the hands on. It’ll run all right now.”
But Miss Belle wouldn’t even do that, and Hilda, crazy with anxiety, had ridden after Uncle Hank, begging him to come quick and not to let Aunt Val know. She’d been locked out of the school room. She thought Miss Belle was in there whipping Burchie. Miss Belle wouldn’t listen to her when she told her he was always learning about machinery; and maybe he really could fix the clock.
She and Uncle Hank had come into the school room to find a boy that had been whipped, a clock that was ticking away in good order—and a teacher who was hysterical.
“He ought to have told me that the watchmaker there in Fort Worth had showed him what to do—let him help him at such things,” she said.
Uncle Hank agreed to that, but when they were climbing on their ponies to leave, Burch said:
“Aw—people talk too much. Anyhow, she didn’t ask me if any one had taught me how to fix a clock. I told her I could do it. After she whipped me, she cried and let me show her. She doesn’t hit very hard. It didn’t hurt very much.”
“And you see, Burch,” Uncle Hank put in, “you shouldn’t never have touched the clock without permission. Long as you done that, I’m glad to see you are willing to take a licking for it.”