“Yes, Miss Adams,” came the wondering reply.
“Well,” I continued, “the left half of the line will take the road around Spencer way, and the right half will take the road around the other way, and the half that gets there last will have to give a show to amuse the winners. We’re going to have a hike, and a picnic. You all have your lunch baskets, haven’t you?”
For a minute they stood dazed, looking at me as if they thought I had lost my senses. Clarissa stopped short in the middle of a sob to gape open-mouthed. Come to think of it, I don’t believe she ever did finish that sob. I repeated my directions, and taking the youngest girl by the hand I started one half of the line down the road, calling over my shoulder to the other line that they might as well make up their stunts on the way, because they were going to get beaten. But after all it was our side that got there last, because we were mostly girls and I had to carry the littlest ones over some of the rough places.
I sent the boys to gather wood and built up a big fire, and then I proceeded to initiate the crowd into some of the mysteries of camp cookery. I daubed a chicken with clay and baked it with the feathers on, like we used to do last summer on Ellen’s Isle, and it would have been splendid if it hadn’t been for one small oversight. I forgot to split the chicken open and take the insides out before I put the clay on.
After dinner it was up to me to produce a show in obedience to my own mandate. None of the rest on my side could help me out, because not one of the blessed chicks had ever done a “stunt” in their lives. The only “prop” I had was a bright red tie, so I proceeded to do the stunt about the goat that ate the two red shirts right off the line—you remember the way Sahwah used to bring the house down with it? Well, I had just got to the part where “he heard the whistle; was in great pain——” and, accompanying the action to the music, was down on all fours giving a lifelike imitation of a goat tied to a railroad track, while the delighted boys and girls were doubled up in all stages of mirth, when I heard a sound that resembled the last gasp of a dying elephant. I jumped to my feet and whirled around, and there in the offing were anchored—anchored is the only expression that fits because they were literally rooted to the spot—the entire school board of Spencer township, plus two strange men plus Justice Sherman. The board members and the strangers stood with their jaws dropped down on their chests and their eyes popping out of their heads; Justice had his handkerchief over his mouth and was shaking from head to foot like a sapling in a high wind. I gave a gasp of dismay which resulted in further developments, for I had the whole red tie stuffed into my mouth with which to flag the train when the time came, and the minute I opened my mouth it billowed out in the breeze. That was the finishing touch. I might have explained away the quadruped attitude as a gymnastic pose, but it takes considerable of an artist to explain away a mouthful of red tie in a schoolmarm. Besides that, I was mud from head to foot, having slid about ten feet for the home plate in a baseball game we had before dinner, so that I presented a front elevation in natural clay effect, broken here and there with elderberries in bas-relief, which had adhered when the can was accidentally spilled over me.
Being acutely conscious of all these facts in every corner of my anatomy did not add to my ease of manner, but I said as nonchalantly as I could, “How do you do, Mr. Butts? How do you do, gentlemen?” Then I added rather lamely, “Pleasant day, is it not?”
Mr. Butts exploded into the same sort of snort as had interrupted me in time to prevent the goat from flagging the train.
“Miss Adams,” he said severely, when he had recovered his breath sufficiently to speak, “what does this mean? Why ain’t you teaching school to-day? Here comes these here two fellers——” and he jerked his thumb in the direction of the two strangers—“from the new school board over to Sabot Junction, to visit our school, and I takes them over to the schoolhouse and finds it empty and no sign of you or the class. Fine doin’s, them! These fellers had their trip for nothin’ and they were pretty mad about it I can tell you, and so I thinks I’ll drive them over to Kenridge to the schoolhouse there and here on the way I runs into you in the woods, acting like a lunytic. I always said Bill Adams’s daughter was plumb crazy and now I’m sure of it.”
I stood aghast. How was I to explain to an irate school board that neither I nor the children had felt like going to school to-day and had decided to have a picnic instead, and that the “lunytic actin’s” was Sahwah’s famous stunt, enacted to add to the hilarity of the occasion? I threw an appealing glance at Justice Sherman, and he sobered up enough to speak.
“You don’t understand, Mr. Butts,” he said hastily. “Miss Adams is teaching school to-day. She is teaching the children botany and it is sometimes necessary to go out into the woods and study right from Nature. I heard her say that she was going to take the children out the first fine day.”