CHAPTER III.
Kitty Hood and Her School-house—Dick Compton going Soldiering—A Lovers' Quarrel, a bit of Jealousy, and a Threat—How Dick Compton met his supposed Rival—An Encounter, Sudden Death, and Kitty Hood's terrible Discovery.
"I do not care, Dick Compton! You are a mean, good-for-nothing fellow, and the sooner you go away and get killed, the better. I hope I may never set eyes on you again, as long as I live."
A pleasant style of address, especially from a pretty woman; and yet one to which a good many persons have submitted, first and last, from little people whom they could physically have slain with a single stroke and mentally discomfited with very little more trouble!
The time of this objurgation was the same morning on which the events took place which have already been recorded as occurring at the residence of Margaret Hayley, and at a very little earlier hour than that which witnessed the departure of Carlton Brand from the place of his signal discomfiture. The place was in front of a little country-school-house standing half a mile from the Darby road, north-westward, and perhaps two miles westward from the Hayleys. The interlocutors were Richard Compton (already introduced as "Dick" by the flippant tongue of his companion), a young and well-to-do farmer of the neighborhood, about a quarter of a century old, perhaps some five feet nine in height, thickset, strong-limbed, with a round, good-humored face guiltless of beard but browned a good deal by exposure in the field, generally smiling and content, but with a spice of the bull-dog in his nature which made him sullen occasionally and led him always to be very fond of his own peculiar way;—and Kitty Hood, teacher of the district school of that particular section of the Keystone State, a short, round, rosy little lass, with merry brown eyes that only occasionally had a sterner kind of mischief in them, dark brown waved hair, and just the last general appearance in the world that a phrenologist would have selected for the necessarily calm and dignified life of an instructress of callow youth.
The old weather-beaten school-house, erected perhaps fifty years before but not yet swept away in the prevailing rage for staring new white baby-houses for the instruction of children in the country, stood at the base of a slight wooded hill, facing southward; a fine old sycamore near the door holding the whole house and all its contents in flecked light and shade; a group of locusts not far away to the left showing a motley jumble of benches beneath, that were evidently the favorite lounging-place of the children during play-hours; and a little pond of a hundred or two feet in diameter, with one edge half covered with the leaves of the intrusive pond-lilies, and the other bordered by a juvenile wharf of stones, old boards and bark, supplying the youngsters with a place in which to paddle, sail boats and get very wet without any danger of being drowned, in summer, and with a reliable though limited skating-ground in winter. Its convenience for winter sports could only be imagined, at that season of the year when the wild-roses were clambering up the dingy boards of the inclosure, to the windows of the school-room; but its inevitable use as a part of the great "highway of nations" was too plainly shown by a circumstance which, alas!—at the same moment illustrated the vicissitudes of commerce and the necessity for the existence of insurance companies. A stately vessel of the mercantile guild, twelve inches in length but with the dignity of three masts and each holding spitted on it as a sail nearly an entire half-sheet of foolscap paper, had evidently left the little wharf during the morning play-hour, freighted for the Spice Islands lying up among the pond-lilies, but suffered the fate of many sea-going ships, fallen under the power of foul winds or adverse currents, and stranded on a reef of mud some paces from the shore, from which the ingenuity of her factors had not yet been able to release her, and where she lay "keeled over" in a manner equally contaminating to her white paper sails and unpleasant to her possible passengers. No doubt anxious eyes were meanwhile glancing out of the windows, between two leaves of the geography which detailed the perils of navigation in the East Indian archipelago, to see whether piratical canoes or pirogues did not put off to burn that noble vessel and massacre her crew, before noon should give time for any further efforts towards her release. Here the course of this narration painfully but necessarily loses sight of the good three-master "Snorter, of Philadelphia," as many another of the fairy barks launched by inexperienced youth disappears from view and is known no more forever; but let us hope that this particular venture was floated off at some early "spring tide" of play-spell, and that she "came safely to her desired haven!"
Within the little one-story school-house, with its unpainted desks and benches of pine, dark with age and scarred by notch and inscription from the penknives of half a century of school-boys,—there was going on, at that moment, precisely what may be seen in any school from Windsor to Washoe, when the ruling power is temporarily absent. Wilkie painted not only from life, but from the inevitable in life, when he drew the "Village School in an Uproar;" for mobs have been put down by the military power and even savage communities have been made quiet by the exercise of powder-and-ball; but no force has yet been discovered that could check (and who would wish it to be entirely checked, after all?) the riotous mischief of the school-room when the terrible eye is removed! Five minutes before, Mistress Hood in the chair of authority, fifty heads of all hues and all textures had been more or less closely bent down over book and slate, and a low monotonous hum, something like the sleepy drone from a score of bee-hives, had been heard floating out on the summer air. Now, Mistress Kitty Hood had been just two minutes absent from the school-room, and a nice little Pandemonium was already established, that it would need some birchings and many strong words to annihilate. Half a dozen of the big boys had gathered into a knot, not far from the door, and were snickering aloud and pointing knowingly towards the point of interest without, with running comments on "Miss Hood's beau!" Three little girls, forgetting their sex, were playing at leap-frog between and over two of the benches, to the disarrangement of their short skirts and the eventual tumbling over of one of the benches with a loud clatter. Two or three of the larger girls were in close conversation, about what there is no means of knowing except that one of them remarked that "it was real indecent and she meant to tell her ma!" One boy, who was the possessor of a magnificently national handkerchief, had stuck it on the end of the long ruler from the mistress' desk, and was going through a dress parade of one, with a feeble whistle as music. A young brute was taking the opportunity of pinching the ear of a smaller boy, and making him whimper, as a punishment for some previous alleged injury. Another had made a pair of spectacles out of blue paper, and stuck them on the nose of a little girl on one of the near benches, who blushed so rosily that her white dress, blue spectacles and red face quite supplied the national colors. And still another, with cheeks marvellously distended, was trying whether he could, in the short space of time during which the mistress might be absent, manage to choke down three early harvest-apples without dying by strangulation or requiring any assistance from his companions.
Such were the surroundings of the country school-house, and such was the aspect of Kitty Hood's little school-room during her temporary absence. And now what was the necessity which had for the moment withdrawn her from her charge, and what was the provocation under which the words were uttered, given at the commencement of this chapter?