CHAPTER XII
GREENBANK WAKES UP
If the pigeons had not crossed the valley on Monday, nobody would have played truant, and if nobody had played truant on Monday, there would not have been occasion to whip three boys on Tuesday morning, and if Ben Berry and Riley had escaped a beating on Tuesday morning, they would not have thought of putting gunpowder into the stove on Wednesday at noon, and if they had omitted that bad joke, Columbus would not have got into trouble and run away from school, and if he had escaped the fright and the flight, he might not have had the fever, and the town would not have been waked up, and other things would not have happened.
So then, you see, this world of ours is just like the House that Jack Built: one thing is tied to another and another to that, and that to this, and this to something, and something to something else, and so on to the very end of all things.
So it was that the village was thrown into a great excitement as the result of a flock of innocent pigeons going over the heads of some lazy boys. In the first place, Susan Lanham talked about things. She talked to her aunts, and she talked to her uncles, and, above all, she talked to her father. Now Susan was the brightest girl in the town, and she had a tongue, as all the world knew, and when she set out to tell people what a brute the old master was, how he had beaten two innocent boys, how bravely Jack had carried himself, how frightened little Columbus was, and how sick it had made him, and how mean the boys were to put the powder there, and then to let the others take the whipping,—I say, when Susan set out to tell all these things, in her eloquent way, to everybody she knew, you might expect a waking up in the sleepy old town. Some of the people took Susan’s side and removed their children from the school, lest they, too, should get a whipping and run home and have brain fever. But many stood up for the old master, mostly because they were people of the sort that never can bear to see anything changed. “The boys ought to have told who put the powder in the stove,” they said. “It served them right.”
“How could the master know that Jack and Columbus did not do it themselves?” said others. “Maybe they did!”
“Don’t tell me!” cried old Mrs. Horne. “Don’t tell me! Boys can’t be managed without whipping, and plenty of it. ‘Bring up a child and away he goes,’ as the Bible says. When you hire a master, you want a master, says I.”
“What a tongue that Sue Lanham has got!” said Mr. Higbie, Mr. Ball’s brother-in-law.