Jennie wired to her southerner for the number of his party, and secured automobiles for the trip. She sent a note to Jim Irwin telling of the prospective visitation. She would show all concerned that she could do some things, anyhow, and she would send these people on with a good impression of her county.
She was glad of the automobiles the next Monday morning, when at nine-thirty the train discharged upon her a dozen very alert, very up-to-date, very inquisitive southerners, male and female, most of whom seemed to have left their “r’s” in the gulf region. It was eleven when the party parked their machines before the schoolhouse door.
“There are visitors here before us,” said Jennie.
“Seems rather like an educational shrine,” said Doctor Brathwayt, of Mississippi. “How does he accommodate so many visitors in that small edifice?”
“I am not aware,” said Jennie, “that he has been in the habit of receiving so very many from outside the district. Well, shall we go in?”
Once inside, Jennie felt a queer return of her old aversion to Jim’s methods—the aversion which had caused her to criticize him so sharply on the occasion of her first visit. The reason for the return of the feeling lay in the fact that the work going on was of the same sort, but of a more intense character. It was so utterly unlike a school as Jennie understood the word, that she glanced back at the group of educators with a little blush. The school was in a sort of uproar. Not that uproar of boredom and mischief of which most of us have familiar memories, but a sort of eager uproar, in which every child was intensely interested in the same thing; and did little rustling things because of this interest; something like the hum at a football game or a dog-fight.
On one side of the desk stood Jim Irwin, and facing him was a smooth stranger of the old-fashioned lightning-rod-agent type—the shallower and laxer sort of salesman of the kind whose sole business is to get signatures on the dotted line, and let some one else do the rest. In short, he was a “closer.”
Standing back of him in evident distress was Mr. Cornelius Bonner, and grouped about were Columbus Brown, B. B. Hamm, Ezra Bronson, A. B. Talcott and two or three others from outside the Woodruff District. With envelopes in their hands and the light of battle in their eyes stood Newton Bronson, Raymond Simms, Bettina Hansen, Mary Smith and Angie Talcott, the boys filled with delight, the girls rather frightened at being engaged in something like a debate with the salesman.
As the latest-coming visitors moved forward, they heard the schoolmaster finishing his passage at arms with the salesman.
“You should not feel exasperated at us, Mr. Carmichael,” said he in tones of the most complete respect, “for what our figures show. You are unfortunate in the business proposition you offer this community. That is all. Even these children have the facts to prove that the creamery outfit you offer is not worth within two thousand dollars of what you ask for it, and that it is very doubtful if it is the sort of outfit we should need.”