e what we can do. I'll get some kind of a
meeting together, and what I want you to do is to use this offer as a club
over this helpless school district. What we need is to be held up. Do the
Jesse James act, Jim!"

"I can't, Colonel!"

"Yes, you can, too. Will you try it?"

"I want to treat everybody fairly," said Jim, "including Mr. Hofmyer. I
don't know what to do, hardly."

"Well, I'll get the meeting together," said the colonel, "and in the
meantime, think of what I've said."

Another thing to think of! Jim rushed into the house and surprised his
mother, who had expected him to arrive after a slow walk from town through
the snow. Jim caught her in his arms, from which she was released a moment
later, quite flustered and blushing.

"Why, James," said she, "you seem excited. What's happened?"

"Nothing, mother," he replied, "except that I believe there's just a
possibility of my being a success in the world!"

"My boy, my boy!" said she, laying her hand on his arm, "if you were to
die to-night, you'd die the greatest success any boy ever was--if your
mother is any judge."

Jim kissed her, and went up to his attic to change his clothes. Inside the
waistcoat was a worn envelope, which he carefully opened, and took from it
a letter much creased from many foldings. It was the old letter from
Jennie, written when the comical mistake had been made of making him the
teacher of the Woodruff school. It still contained her rather fussy
cautions about being "too original," and the sage statement that "the
wheel runs easiest in the beaten track." It was written before the
vexation and trouble he had caused her; but he did not read the advice,
nor think of the coolness which had come between them--he read only the
sentence in which Jennie had told of her father's interest in Jim's
success, ending with the underscored words, "_I'm for you, too._"

"I wonder," said Jim, as he went out to do the evening's tasks, "I wonder
if she _is_ for me!"

CHAPTER XXI

A SCHOOL DISTRICT HELD UP

Young McGeehee Simms was loitering along the snowy way to the schoolhouse
bearing a brightly scoured tin pail two-thirds full of water. He had been
allowed to act as Water Superintendent of the Woodruff School as a reward
of merit--said merit being an essay on which he received credit in both
language and geography on "Harvesting Wheat in the Tennessee Mountains."
This had been of vast interest to the school in view of the fact tha