There was a rousing chorus of “Aye!” in which Mr. Carmichael, followed closely by Mr. Bonner, made his exit. B. B. Hamm went forward and shook Jim’s hand slowly and contemplatively, as if trying to remember just what he should say.
“James E. Irwin,” said he, “you’ve saved us from being skinned by the smoothest grafter that I ever seen.”
“Not I,” said Jim; “the kind of school I stand for, Mr. Hamm, will save you more than that—and give you the broadest culture any school ever gave. A culture based on life. We’ve been studying life, in this school—the life we all live here in this district.”
“He had a smooth partner, too,” said Columbus Brown. Jim looked at Bonner’s little boy in one of the front seats and shook his head at Columbus warningly.
“If I hadn’t herded ’em in here to ask you a few questions about cooperative creameries,” said Mr. Talcott, “we’d have been stuck—they pretty near had our names. And then the whole neighborhood would have been sucked in for about fifty dollars a name.”
“I’d have gone in for two hundred,” said B. B. Hamm.
“May I call a little meeting here for a minute, Jim?” asked Ezra Bronson. “Why, where’s he gone?”
“They’s some other visitors come in,” said a little girl, pulling her apron in embarrassment at the teacher’s absence.
Jim had, after what seemed to Jennie an interminable while, seen the county superintendent and her distinguished party, and was now engaged in welcoming them and endeavoring to find them seats,—quite an impossible thing at that particular moment, by the way.
“Don’t mind us, Mr. Irwin,” said Doctor Brathwayt. “This is the best thing we’ve seen on our journeyings. Please go on with the proceedin’s. That gentleman seems to have in mind the perfectin’ of some so’t of organization. I’m intensely interested.”