he gathering darkness Jim again took Jennie's hand, but this time she
deprived him of it.

He was trembling like a leaf. Let it be remembered in his favor that this
was the only girl's hand he had ever held.

"You can't find any more scars on it," she said soberly.

"Let me see how much it has changed since I stuck the knife in it," begged
Jim.

Jennie held it up for inspection.

"It's longer, and slenderer, and whiter, and even more beautiful," said
he, "than the little hand I cut; but it was then the most beautiful hand
in the world to me--and still is."

"I must light the lamps," said the county superintendent-elect, rather
flustered, it must be confessed. "Mama! Where are all the matches?"

Mrs. Woodruff and Mrs. Irwin came in, and the lamplight reminded Jim's
mother that the cow was still to milk, and that the chickens might need
attention. The Woodruff sleigh came to the door to carry them home; but
Jim desired to breast the storm. He felt that he needed the conflict. Mrs.
Irwin scolded him for his foolishness, but he strode off into the whirling
drift, throwing back a good-by for general consumption, and a pathetic
smile to Jennie.

"He's as odd as Dick's hatband," said Mrs. Woodruff, "tramping off in a
storm like this."

"Did you line him up?" asked the colonel of Jennie.

The young lady started and blushed. She had forgotten all about the
politics of the situation.

"I--I'm afraid I didn't, papa," she confessed.

"Those brown mice of Professor Darbishire's," said the colonel, "were the
devil and all to control."

Jennie was thinking of this as she dropped asleep.

"Hard to control!" she thought. "I wonder. I wonder, after all, if Jim is
not capable of being easily lined up--when he sees how foolish I think he
is!"

And Jim? He found himself hard to control that night. So much so that it
was after midnight before he had finished work on a plan for a cooperative
creamery.

"The boys can be given work in helping to operate it," he wrote on a
tablet, "which, in connection with the labor performed by the teacher,
will greatly reduce the expense of operation. A skilled butter-maker, with
slender white hands"--but he erased this last clause and retired.

CHAPTER XII

FACING TRIAL

A distinct sensation ran through the Woodruff school, but the schoolmaster
and a group of five big boys and three girls engaged in a very unclasslike
conference in the back of the room were all unconscious of