"No seat," she faltered, lowering her voice.
He looked up and down the girls' row; there were only four seats in it, and they were full. The boys' benches were not; but, loath to lessen the terrors of a favorite punishment, he hesitated to put her there. "Come up to the rostrum, then," he said.
The little girl walked slowly forward, and a flush stole up her throat and mounted to her temples. But when she was once seated, her sailor-hat on one side and her Second Reader on the other, she felt less demeaned; for the rostrum commanded a view of the whole room, and from it she could see Luffree, fast asleep under the youngest brother's bench.
The teacher went back to the roll-call, and the pupils droned the time away till recess. Then the boys rummaged through their willow baskets for something to eat and went out to play "prisoner's base." But the girls—the neighbor woman's daughter, and the seven belonging to the Dutchman who lived at the Vermillion's forks—stayed in, gathered in a silent circle about the rostrum, fingered the big gold brooch that the little girl's mother had let her wear as a reward for attending, and looked her up and down, from the scarlet bow on her hair to her fringed leggings. And she, never having seen the Dutchman's children before, forgot to be polite, and stared back at their denim dresses, pigtails, and wooden shoes.
When school took up again, the Swede boy was told to put his sums on a bit of tar-papered wall near him, and a mixed class in reading lined up in front of the teacher's table. Soon, however, the room was again quiet. The Swede boy and the class sat down, and the whole school, made sleepy by the warmth from the stove, lounged on their benches and drowsed on their books, and even the little girl, sitting idly on the rostrum, nodded wearily. But right in the midst of the silence, and just before the pupils were dismissed for noon, something so startling happened that the little girl's curls fairly stiffened in alarm.
The teacher clapped his hands, the children followed with a hurried banging of their books and slates, and, instantly, before the little girl had time to think what it all meant, the scholars, with one accord, began to roar at the top of their lungs.
"Scotland's burning! Scotland's burning!"
they cried, rapping their knuckles upon their desks in the rhythm of galloping horses,—
"More water! More water!
Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!
More water! More water!"
The little girl straightened herself and a gray light crept up to where the flush had been, so that every freckle of the hateful thirteen stood out clearly. Near her, the teacher was standing, with his feet planted wide apart and his eyes raised to the ceiling. And before him, shouting and pounding and staring with crimson faces into his, were the pupils.