“Here are your boys,” she said, piloting me to a bunch of greasy looking little devils. “Boys, this is Mr. Henderson. You must be real good to him,” and she gave us all a sweet smile and faded away.
A pale young man with a Sunny Jim face was standing by the bunch. He told me he was the assistant superintendent and had to keep order. He said he always gave a little extra attention to these boys.
“I guess you’d better take them into the class room early,” he said. “They seem to be a bit uneasy today.”
He opened a little door in the wall and the kids fell over themselves into the next room. Then the door was shut, but I couldn’t have heard what was doing in the next room, anyway, for the way those little dagos were howling would have made a room full of maniacs seem like a summer breeze. Just to remind them that I was there I picked up two of them and cracked their heads together. That seemed to interest them a little, and the other boys stopped to take rubbers at the fun. I couldn’t see as I was hurting them any, so I went on batting them. The rest of the crowd evidently got a hunch as to what might be coming to them, for they all filed over to a row of chairs and sat down. It was so still all of a sudden that I could hear their heads crack as I brought them together.
“Now, see here,” said I, letting go of the two interesting little dears I was operating on, “I’m willing to do the fair thing if you give me the chance. If you can sit still without talking or moving I’ll give you each a quarter when they let us out of here.”
“Dat’s Isidore Simon. He’ll get de quarter,” one of the kids said. But the rest of them were too anxious for the money to talk.
“Remember,” I said, fearing I hadn’t made it strong enough, “I’ll pound daylight out of the first one of you little devils that opens his mouth.”
It was enough. I sat there for thirty-five minutes by my watch with that row of brats sitting there as still as if they were dead. The bell rang and I let them file out into the other room, and they did it in great style. Then I had to chase out and get the change to pay them off. As soon as the meeting let out the two young ladies and the assistant superintendent piked up to me and began to all talk at once.
“Oh, Mr. Henderson,” the girls said together, “we must congratulate you on your success. You are perfectly wonderful with children! No one ever handled those boys so well before! Couldn’t you take the class permanently?”
Say, Billy, I thought I’d made a hit. I thought that everything was coming my way, from the way they crowded each other to flash a happy look at me. It must have made me kind of dizzy to get it all in a bunch like that, for before I could think what to say in such a nice crowd as that, Ed’s sister-in-law had got her jacket on and was walking off with Sunny Jim.