“I will attend to you later, young man,” he said with cold calmness, and passed through the door by which Lester Cole had entered the hall.
As the door closed behind him a low buzzing arose in the classroom. But it ceased abruptly as the scholars saw Joshua Cole trotting toward that door, his small fists doubled. And as he passed the big stove, which had not yet been taken down because of an occasional cold spring morning, he grasped up the iron poker that leaned so invitingly in a corner of the coal-box.
CHAPTER II
SPAWN OF THE DEVIL
SILVANUS MADMALLET had long considered Joshua Cole a child of the evil one. While the boy seemed intelligent enough, he was in the main behind in his school work. His brother, aged eleven, was in the same class, with Joshua fourteen. He was all sufficient as to “readin’ and writin’,” but when it came to the third grim specter in that detestable trio, “’rithmetic,” Joshua simply was the dumbest of the dumb. Geography and history seemed to hold his attention to a mild degree, but he detested grammar and all its works. Madmallet’s futile endeavor to pound arithmetic into young Joshua’s head was perhaps the opening gun in the feud that existed between them. Why, what could anybody ever expect to amount to if he did not have a sound understanding of arithmetic? Once a week the class had composition; and, though Joshua’s efforts were always above the average and showed good sentence construction and thought, they brought no praise from Madmallet. What matter if the boy wrote well if he could not parse and diagram a sentence, and knew no rules of grammar?
One day Madmallet had unraveled a part of the mystery that shrouded the boy’s shortcomings. Slipping up behind young Joshua, he had surprised him in holding behind his large geography a smaller book, upon which his attention was riveted. Madmallet had snatched away the forbidden fruit, and his craggy brows had come down as he glared at the unfamiliar title. Joshua had been reading Proctor’s Other Worlds Than Ours!
Madmallet had no sympathy for Science. He was a firm believer that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and he carried his convictions to extremes. He sent the book home to Joshua’s father, who cared for neither Science nor its enemies, but believed that a pupil should not antagonize his teachers, and promptly punished Joshua by holding him with his head submerged in a tub of water until the boy was all but drowned.
One thing had led to another until Madmallet nursed a personal antipathy for young Joshua. Many times he had punished him, but the boy had proved so obstinate that never a cry could his persecutor wring from his twitching lips. Then Madmallet had learned of Joshua’s rare brotherly love for Lester, who was himself a prodigious sinner and committed more crimes against the canons of the school than did Joshua. So, unable to bend the older brother to his will, he tortured Lester, well knowing in his cunning and cruel old heart that he thus punished Joshua more thoroughly than he could with cane or strap.
And so had the feud progressed until that morning when Joshua turned upon his tormentor and followed him into the hall, the blacksmith-made poker gripped in his trembling hands.
“Take off your coat,” Madmallet was saying, when the door opened softly behind him and Joshua came through.
“Keep yer coat on, Les,” ordered Joshua in shaky tones. Then he turned his grave gray-blue eyes on the teacher, and laid the poker over his right shoulder. “Du-don’t you hit my brother with that strap,” he said; and, though his tones showed nervousness, even fear, they contained a quality that gave Madmallet pause.