“You know,” said Raymond, “that you’d think mahgty small of me, if I’d desert Mr. Jim Irwin.”
“Well, then,” replied Newton, seizing his traps and throwing them across his shoulder, “come on with the traps, and shut up! What’ll we do when the school board gets Jennie Woodruff to revoke his certificate and make him quit teachin’, hey?”
“Nobody’ll eveh do that,” said Raymond. “I’d set in the schoolhouse do’ with my rifle and shoot anybody that’d come to th’ow Mr. Jim outen the school.”
“Not in this country,” said Newton. “This ain’t a gun country.”
“But it orto be either a justice kentry, or a gun kentry,” replied the mountain boy. “It stands to reason it must be one ’r the otheh, Newton.”
“No, it don’t, neither,” said Newton dogmatically.
“Why should they th’ow Mr. Jim outen the school?” inquired Raymond. “Ain’t he teachin’ us right?”
Newton explained for the tenth time that his father, Mr. Con Bonner and Mr. Haakon Peterson had not meant to hire Jim Irwin at all, but each had voted for him so that he might have one vote. They were all against him from the first, but they had not known how to get rid of him. Now, however, Jim had done so many things that no teacher was supposed to do, and had left undone so many things that teachers were bound by custom to perform, that Newton’s father and Mr. Bonner and Mr. Peterson had made up up their minds that they would call upon him to resign, and if he wouldn’t, they would “turn him out” in some way. And the best way if they could do it, would be to induce County Superintendent Woodruff, who didn’t like Jim since the speech he made at the political meeting, to revoke his certificate.
“What wrong’s he done committed?” asked Raymond. “I don’t know what teachers air supposed to do in this kentry, but Mr. Jim seems to be the only shore-enough teacher I ever see!”
“He don’t teach out of the books the school board adopted,” replied Newton.