“Well,” said Haakon Peterson, who had joined the group, “Ay tank we better have a meeting of the board and discuss it.”
“Well, darn it,” said Columbus Brown, “I want in on this cream pool—and I live outside the district!”
“We’ll let you in, Clumb,” said the colonel.
“Sure!” said Pete. “We hain’t no more sense than to let any one in, Clumb. Come in, the water’s fine. We ain’t proud!”
“Well,” said Clumb, “if this feller is goin’ to do school work of this kind, I want in the district, too.”
“We’ll come to that one of these days,” said Jim. “The district is too small.”
Wilbur Smythe’s car stopped at the distant gate and honked for him—a signal which broke up the party. Haakon Peterson passed the word to the colonel and Mr. Bronson for a board meeting the next evening. The picnic broke up in a dispersion of staid married couples to their homes, and young folks in top buggies to dances and displays of fireworks in the surrounding villages. Jim walked across the fields to his home—neither old nor young, having neither sweetheart with whom to dance nor farm to demand labor in its inexorable chores. He turned after crawling through a wire fence and looked longingly at Jennie as she was suavely assisted into the car by the frock-coated lawyer.
“You saw what he did?” said the colonel interrogatively, as he and his daughter sat on the Woodruff veranda that evening. “Who taught him the supreme wisdom of holding back his troops when they grew too wild for attack?”
“He may lose them,” said Jennie.
“Not so,” said the colonel. “Individuals of the Brown Mouse type always succeed when they find their environment. And I believe Jim has found his.”