tired." Mr. Bronson dropped his hands to his sides, glared at his son for
a moment and breathed a sigh of relief.

"Why, you darned infernal little fool," said he. "I've a notion to take a
hamestrap to you! If I'd been there the vote would have been eleven to
thirteen!"

"There was plenty wotes there for the colonel, if he needed 'em," said
Haakon, whose politician's mind was already fully adjusted to the changed
conditions. "Ay tank the Woodruff District will have a junanimous school
board from dis time on once more. Colonel Woodruff is yust the man we have
needed."

"I'm with you there," said Bronson. "And as for you, young man, if one or
both of them horses is hurt by the run I give them, I'll lick you within
an inch of your life---- Here comes Dilly driving 'em in now---- I guess
they're all right. I wouldn't want to drive a good team to death for any
young hoodlum like him---- All right, how much do I owe you. Doc?"

CHAPTER XVI

THE GLORIOUS FOURTH

A good deal of water ran under the Woodruff District bridges in the weeks
between the school election and the Fourth of July picnic at Eight-Mile
Grove. They were very important weeks to Jim Irwin, though outwardly
uneventful. Great events are often mere imperceptible developments of the
spirit.

Spring, for instance, brought a sort of spiritual crisis to Jim; for he
had to face the accusing glance of the fields as they were plowed and sown
while he lived indoors. As he labored at the tasks of the Woodruff school
he was conscious of a feeling not very easily distinguished from a sense
of guilt. It seemed that there must be something almost wicked in his
failure to be afield with his team in the early spring mornings when the
woolly anemones appeared in their fur coats, the heralds of the later
comers--violets, sweet-williams, puccoons, and the scarlet prairie
lilies.

A moral crisis accompanies the passing of a man from the struggle with the
soil to any occupation, the productiveness of which is not quite so clear.
It requires a keenly sensitive nature to feel conscious of it, but Jim
Irwin possessed such a temperament; and from the beginning of the daily
race with the seasons, which makes the life of a northern farmer an eight
months' Marathon in which to fall behind for a week is to lose much of the
year's reward, the gawky schoolmaster slept uneasily, and heard the
earliest cock-crow as a soldier hears a call to arms to which he has made
up his m