And Louis Gist had told Jimmy that Marion would not let him go. Jimmy knew why. They were gradually coming to distrust him. He and Kenton and MacAfee were one party in the Fish Creek school; Moses and Lewis and Louis Gist another.
He wanted to go to New Orleans. He was entitled to. All winter long he had planned it. Marion Royce would not dare refuse. But Louis’ unconsidered speech rankled in his bitter heart. He would have been glad to escape into the woods, but he sat sullenly plucking his turkey for the barbecue, entrenched behind his knowledge that he had as much right in the schoolhouse as any of the others who chattered around him.
Free public schools had not yet been established in Ohio, but the pioneer families maintained a “subscription school” for their children in primitive schoolhouses of logs afterwards widely known as “Brush College.” Here masters of greater or less merit taught school six days in a week, with no holidays. Not a few, indeed, of the early schoolmasters of this new region were men whom certain weaknesses of character or appetite had exiled from the older walks of civilization. Except for such infirmities many of them were instructors of remarkable ability.
Master Hempstead’s foible was the all too common one of a fond and apparently ungovernable liking for beverages which inebriate. On a number of occasions he had dismissed school in the middle of the forenoon, and after touching homilies to his pupils, had walked out and not been seen again for several days. He had then reappeared, visibly the “worse for wear.”
Marietta, then a vigorous young colony of farmers and shipwrights from New England, was the Mecca to which Master Hempstead’s erratic pilgrimages were directed; and it was from one of these, after an absence of four days, that he was returning, in no very pleasant humor, on the morning of our story.
In the meantime his little kingdom had run riot and tasted the sweets of self-government. An exuberant hilarity indeed was in the air during these first years of the century just past. Moreover, Ohio had become a state that month, and daring schemes for capturing New Orleans from the Spanish were on foot.
On every day of Master Hempstead’s absence his pupils, numbering nineteen, of various ages, had assembled, in expectation of his reappearance. They played “gool,” “I spy” and “hide-and-seek” in the underbrush about the stumpy clearing. Of more interest still was a trap for wild turkeys which the boys had constructed at a distance in the woods.
This trap was a covered pen of stakes and brush, into which a “tunnel” led from the outside. This subway, as well as the pen, was baited with corn, and wild turkeys, which abounded in the forest, were thus allured to enter. The two turkeys which the boys were plucking this morning had been caught in this way.
It was the custom at these early subscription schools of Ohio for the master to “stand a treat” on New Year’s Day, and provide, at his own expense, a bushel of hickory nuts and ten pounds of candy. This coveted festival Master Hempstead had ignored, much to the dissatisfaction of his pupils; and now they determined to bring him to terms.
To guard against a surprise they had closed the door and barricaded it with their benches, which consisted merely of rough “puncheons,” each having four wooden pins for legs; and Moses Ayer, Lewis Hoyt and Molly Royce had prepared a species of “round robin,” containing the demands of the school, written laboriously on a large, smooth chip.