“Well,” said Jennie, “I wish his environment would find him some clothes. It’s a shame the way he has to go looking. He’d be nice-appearing if he was dressed anyway.”
“Would he?” queried the colonel. “I wonder, now! Well, Jennie, as his oldest friend having any knowledge of clothes, I think it’s up to you to act as a committee of one on Jim’s apparel.”
CHAPTER XVII
A TROUBLE SHOOTER
A sudden July storm had drenched the fields and filled the swales with water. The cultivators left the corn-fields until the next day’s sun and a night of seepage might once more fit the black soil for tillage. The little boys rolled up their trousers and tramped home from school with the rich mud squeezing up between their toes, thrilling with the electricity of clean-washed nature, and the little girls rather wished they could go barefooted, too, as, indeed, some of the more sensible did.
A lithe young man with climbers on his legs walked up a telephone pole by the roadside to make some repairs to the wires, which had been whipped into a “cross” by the wind of the storm and the lashing of the limbs of the roadside trees. He had tied his horse to a post up the road, and was running out the trouble on the line, which was plentifully in evidence just then. Wind and lightning had played hob with the system, and the line repairer was cheerfully profane, in the manner of his sort, glad by reason of the fire of summer in his veins, and incensed at the forces of nature which had brought him out through the mud to the Woodruff District to do these piffling jobs that any of the subscribers ought to have known how to do themselves, and none of which took more than a few minutes of his time when he reached the seat of the difficulty.
Jim Irwin, his school out for the day, came along the muddy road with two of his pupils, a bare-legged little boy and a tall girl with flaxen hair—Bettina Hansen and her small brother Hans, who refused to answer to any name other than Hans Nilsen. His father’s name was Nils Hansen, and Hans, a born conservative, being the son of Nils, regarded himself as rightfully a Nilsen, and disliked the “Hans Hansen” on the school register. Thus do European customs sometimes survive among us.
Hans strode through the pool of water which the shower had spread completely over the low turnpike a few rods from the pole on which the trouble shooter was at work, and the electrician ceased his labors and rested himself on a cross-arm while he waited to see what the flaxen-haired girl would do when she came to it.