did not make a very good job of
it. To hold the glass in place, he used shingle nails, which he had to
hunt for on the ground where they had dropped from the roof during
shingling, and when they had been driven into the frame--with the
handle of the screwdriver--they showed very plainly from the inside.
Then the putty did not seem to want to stick anywhere, but kept
crumbling off in little lumps. So Lance threw the putty at a gopher
that was standing up nibbling one of Riley's sandwiches, and went
after the desks.

These took some time to unwrap and carry into place. There were only
twelve, but Lance would have sworn before a jury that he carried at
least fifty single desks into the schoolhouse that afternoon, and
screwed them to the floor, and unscrewed them because the darned
things did not line up straight when viewed from the teacher's desk,
and he had a vivid impression that blue, blue eyes can be very
critical over such things as a crooked line of desks!

Perhaps it was because his head ached splittingly and his injured hand
throbbed until it was practically useless; at any rate the cleaning of
the schoolhouse, especially the placing of the desks, became fixed
afterward in his memory as the biggest, the most disagreeable incident
in his whole vacation.

At four-thirty however the task was accomplished. At the spring, Lance
scrubbed the water bucket clean, washed the dipper, placed them behind
the door. He got wearily into the borrowed fur coat, took a last
comprehensive survey of the room from the doorway, went back to erase
certain sentences scrawled on the blackboard by some would-be
humorist, took another look at the work of his aching hands, and went
away with the coffeepot in his hand and the screwdriver showing its
battered wooden handle from the top of his pocket. He was too tired to
feel any glow of accomplishment, any great joy in the thought of Mary
Hope's pleasure. He was not even sure that she would feel any
pleasure.

His chief emotion was a gloomy satisfaction in knowing that the place
was once more presentable, that it was ready for Mary Hope to hang up
her hat and ring her little bell and start right in teaching. That
what the Lorrigans had set out to do, the Lorrigans had done.

At the ranch he found Riley at the bunk house wrangling with the boys
over his lost wardrobe. In Riley's opinion it was a darned poor idea
of a darned poor joke, and it took a darned poor man to perpetrate it.
Lance