“Nils Hansen’s girl?” asked Pete.
“Toppy little filly,” said the lineman, “with silver mane—looks like she’d pull a good load and step some.”
“M’h’m,” grunted Pete. “Bettina Hansen. Looks well enough. What about her?”
Again the county superintendent, seated on the bench, pricked up her ears that she might learn, mayhap, something of educational interest.
“I never wanted to be a school-teacher as bad,” continued the shooter of trouble, “as I did when this farmer got to the low place in the road with the fair Bettina this afternoon when they was comin’ home from school. The water was all over the road——”
“Then I win a smoke from the roadmaster,” said Pete. “I bet him it would overflow.”
“Well, if I was in the professor’s place, I’d be glad to pay the bet,” said the worldly lineman. “And I’ll say this for him, he rose equal to the emergency and caved the emergency’s head in. He carried her across the pond, and her a-clingin’ to his neck in a way to make your mouth water. She wasn’t a bit mad about it, either.”
“I’d rather have a good cigar any ol’ time,” said Pete. “Nothin’ but a yaller-haired kid—an’ a Dane at that. I had a dame once up at Spirit Lake——”
“Well, I must be drivin’ on,” said the lineman. “Got to get up a lecture for Professor Irwin to-morrow—and maybe I’ll be able to meet that yaller-haired kid. So long!”
The county superintendent recognized at once the educational importance of the matter, when one of her country teachers adopted the policy of calling in everybody available who could teach the pupils anything special, and converting the school into a local Chautauqua served by local lecturers. She made a run of ten miles to hear the trouble shooter’s lecture. She saw the boys and some of the girls give an explanation of the telephone and the use of it. She heard the teacher give as a language exercise the next day an essay on the ethics and proprieties of eavesdropping on party lines; and she saw the beginning of an arrangement under which the boys of the Woodruff school took the contract to look after easily-remedied line troubles in the neighborhood on the basis which paid for a telephone for the school, and swelled slightly the fund which Jim was accumulating for general purposes. Incidentally, she saw how really educational was the work of the day, and that to which it led.