Billy was giving no attention to the teacher. He was edging towards Lou Scroggie, who stood looking at him from dumb, pleading eyes.
"Go outside," he whispered. "Please do; I kin stand anythin', but I don't want you to see it."
She turned slowly away, then came back and put her hands on his shoulders. She did not speak but the look she gave him was enough. His heart laughed. He turned toward the teacher with so glad a light in his grey eyes that the schooled moulder of young souls gazed back at him in bewilderment.
Was this the brand of boy this Shagland Settlement bred, he wondered. If so, God help him and his precepts.
From the bottom of his heart he wished that he had never seen the place, never encountered the spirit of its woods-born. He knew his capabilities and for once in his life, he confessed to himself, he had over-estimated them. He wanted to give this boy now standing so fearlessly before him a whipping such as he would remember to his dying day, but to save his life he couldn't enter into the task with his old-time zest—not with those clear eyes looking so contemptuously into his very soul.
The room had grown still—a graveyard hush, broken only by a sob from the tenderest-hearted of the girls, who knew that Billy had lied to save one of their sex.
Johnston had turned to his desk and secured a shorter, stronger pointer. The veins between his shaggy eyebrows stood out clearly defined as he motioned Billy up on the platform.
It was just at this juncture that Fatty Watland arrived; smiling and panting, with the pail, borrowed from his mother, full of drinking water. It took him but a moment to learn from one of the boys what had transpired. It took him still less time to reach the platform. There, with much humiliation of spirit and many "sirs," he explained to the greatly surprised, and it must be confessed, secretly relieved Mr. Johnston, the true state of affairs.
There was no doubt in the world that Fatty regretted the part he had so unwittingly played in the day's disaster. He was sufficiently apologetic and low spirited to satisfy even the new teacher, who was content to let him off with a lecture.
Mr. Johnston then briefly stated to his pupils that a mistake had been made. He did not say that he was sorry. That would have been an untruth. He did say that Billy deserved another whipping for lying, but under the circumstances he would excuse him, as he had already received unmerited punishment.