“Why, James,” said she, “you seem excited. What’s happened?”
“Nothing, mother,” he replied, “except that I believe there’s just a possibility of my being a success in the world!”
“My boy, my boy!” said she, laying her hand on his arm, “if you were to die to-night, you’d die the greatest success any boy ever was—if your mother is any judge.”
Jim kissed her, and went up to his attic to change his clothes. Inside the waistcoat was a worn envelope, which he carefully opened, and took from it a letter much creased from many foldings. It was the old letter from Jennie, written when the comical mistake had been made of making him the teacher of the Woodruff school. It still contained her rather fussy cautions about being “too original,” and the sage statement that “the wheel runs easiest in the beaten track.” It was written before the vexation and trouble he had caused her; but he did not read the advice, nor think of the coolness which had come between them—he read only the sentence in which Jennie had told of her father’s interest in Jim’s success, ending with the underscored words, “I’m for you, too.”
“I wonder,” said Jim, as he went out to do the evening’s tasks, “I wonder if she is for me!”
CHAPTER XXI
A SCHOOL DISTRICT HELD UP
Young McGeehee Simms was loitering along the snowy way to the schoolhouse bearing a brightly scoured tin pail two-thirds full of water. He had been allowed to act as Water Superintendent of the Woodruff School as a reward of merit—said merit being an essay on which he received credit in both language and geography on “Harvesting Wheat in the Tennessee Mountains.” This had been of vast interest to the school in view of the fact that the Simmses were the only pupils in the school who had ever seen in use that supposedly-obsolete harvesting implement, the cradle. Buddy’s essay had been passed over to the class in United States history as the evidence of an eye-witness concerning farming conditions in our grandfathers’ times.