Gordon Keith. Thomas Nelson Page
rose, put on his hat slowly, and, addressing the other boys, announced that he didn't know what they were going to do, but he was "a-gwine home and git ready to go and see the dance up at Gates's."
He swaggered toward the door, the others following in his wake.
Keith rose from his seat.
"Go back to your places." He spoke so quietly that his voice could scarcely be heard.
"Go nowhere! You go to h--l!" sneered the big leader, contemptuously. "'Tain't no use for you to try to stop me--I kin git away with two like you."
Perhaps, he could have done so, but Keith was too quick for him. He seized the split-bottomed chair from which he had risen, and whirling it high above his head, brought it crashing down on his assailant, laying him flat on the floor. Then, without a second's hesitation, he sprang toward the others.
"Into your seats instantly!" he shouted, as he raised once more the damaged, but still formidable, weapon. By an instinct the mutineers fell into the nearest seats, and Keith turned back to his first opponent, who was just rising from the floor with a dazed look on his face. A few drops of blood were trickling down his forehead.
"If you don't go to your seat instantly, I'll dash your brains out," said Keith, looking him full in the eye. He still grasped the chair, and as he tightened his grip on it, the crestfallen bully sank down on the bench and broke into a whimper about a grown man hitting a boy with a chair.
Suddenly Keith, in the moment of victory, found himself attacked in the rear. One of the smaller boys, who had gone out with the rest, hearing the fight, had rushed back, and, just as Keith drove Jake Dennison to his seat, sprang on him like a little wild-cat. Turning, Keith seized and held him.
"What are you doing, Dave Dennison, confound you?" he demanded angrily.
"I'm one of 'em," blubbered the boy, trying to reach him with both fist and foot. "I don't let nobody hit my brother."
Keith found that he had more trouble in quelling Dave, the smallest member of the Dennison tribe, than in conquering the bigger brothers.
"Sit down and behave yourself," he said, shoving him into a seat and holding him there. "I'm not going to hit him again if he behaves himself."
Keith, having quieted Dave, looked to see that Jake was not much hurt. He took out his handkerchief.
"Take that and wipe your face with it," he said quietly, and taking from his desk his inkstand and some writing-paper, he seated himself on a bench near the door and began to write letters. It grew late, but the young teacher did not move. He wrote letter after letter. It began to grow dark; he simply lit the little lamp on his desk, and taking up a book, settled down to read; and when at last he rose and announced that the culprits might go home, the wheezy strains of the three instruments that composed the band at Gates's had long since died out, and Gordon Keith was undisputed master of Ridge College.
His letter to the trustees was delivered that morning, saying that if they would sustain his action he would do his best to make the school the best in that section; but if not, his resignation was in their hands.
"I guess he is the sort of medicine those youngsters need," said Dr. Balsam. "We'd better let it work."
"I reckon he can ride 'em," said Squire Rawson.
It was voted to sustain him.
The fact that a smooth-faced boy, not as heavy as Jake Dennison by twenty pounds, had "faced down" and quelled the Dennisons all three together, and kept Jake Dennison from going where he wanted to go, struck the humor of the trustees, and they stood by their teacher almost unanimously, and even voted to pay for a new door, which he had offered to pay for himself, as he said he might have to chop it down again. Not that there was not some hostility to him among those to whom his methods were too novel; but when he began to teach his pupils boxing, and showed that with his fists he was more than a match for Jake Dennison, the chief opposition to him died out; and before the year ended, Jake Dennison, putting into practice the art he had learned from his teacher, had thrashed Mr. William Bluffy, the cock of another walk high up across the Ridge, for ridiculing the "newfangled foolishness" of Ridge College, and speaking of its teacher as a "dom-fool furriner." Little Dave Dennison, of all those opposed to him, alone held out. He appeared to be proof against Keith's utmost efforts to be friends.
One day, however, Dave Dennison did not come to school. Keith learned that he had fallen from a tree and broken his leg--"gettin' hawks' eggs for Phrony," Keith's informant reported. Phrony was quite scornful about it, but a little perky as well.
"If a boy was such a fool as to go up a tree when he had been told it wouldn't hold him, she could not help it. She did not want the eggs, anyhow," she said disdainfully. This was all the reward that little Dave got for his devotion and courage.
That afternoon Keith went over the Ridge to see Dave.
The Dennison home was a small farm-house back of the Ridge, in what was known as a "cove," an opening in the angle between the mountains, where was a piece of level or partly level ground on the banks of one of the little mountain creeks. When Keith arrived he found Mrs. Dennison, a small, angular woman with sharp eyes, a thin nose, and thin lips, very stiff and suspicious. She had never forgiven Keith for his victory over her boys, and she looked now as if she would gladly have set the dogs on him instead of calling them off as she did when he strode up the path and the yelping pack dashed out at him.
She "didn' know how Dave was," she said glumly. "The Doctor said he was better. She couldn' see no change. Yes, he could go in, she s'posed, if he wanted to," she said ungraciously.
Keith entered. The boy was lying on a big bed, his head resting against the frame of the little opening which went for a window, through which he was peeping wistfully out at the outside world from which he was to be shut off for so many weary weeks. He returned Keith's greeting in the half-surly way in which he had always received his advances since the day of the row; but when Keith sat down on the bed and began to talk to him cheerily of his daring in climbing where no one else had ventured to go, he thawed out, and presently, when Keith drifted on to other stories of daring, he began to be interested, and after a time grew almost friendly.
He was afraid they might have to cut his leg off. His mother, who always took a gloomy view of things, had scared him by telling him she thought it might have to be done; but Keith was able to reassure him. The Doctor had told him that, while the fracture was very bad, the leg would be saved.
"If he had not been as hard as a lightwood knot, that fall would have mashed him up," said the Doctor. This compliment Keith repeated, and it evidently pleased Dave. The pale face relaxed into a smile. Keith told him stories of other boys who had had similar accidents and had turned them to good account--of Arkwright and Sir William Jones and Commodore Maury, all of whom had laid the foundation for their future fame when they were in bed with broken legs.
When Keith came away he left the boy comforted and cheered, and even the dismal woman at the door gave him a more civil parting than her greeting had been.
Many an afternoon during the boy's convalescence Keith went over the Ridge to see him, taking him story-books, and reading to him until he was strong enough to read himself. And when, weeks later, the lame boy was able to return to school, Keith had no firmer friend in all the Ridge region than Dave Dennison, and Dave had made a mental progress which, perhaps, he would not have made in as many months at school, for he had received an impulse to know and to be something more than he was. He would show Phrony who he was.
It was fine to Gordon to feel that he was earning his own living. He was already making his way in the world, and often from this first rung of the ladder the young teacher looked far up the shining steep to where Fame and Glory beckoned with their radiant hands. He would be known. He would build bridges that should eclipse Stevenson's.