eeds for anything they
want. They always have got us. They've got us again! They give us
clodhoppers the glad hand, a cheap cigar, and a cheaper smile after
election;--and that's all. I know it, you all know it, they know it. I
don't blame them so very much. The trouble is we don't ask them to do
anything better. I want a new kind of rural school; but I don't see any
prospect, no matter how this election goes, for any change in them. We in
the Woodruff District will have to work out our own salvation. Our
political ring never'll do anything but the old things. They don't want
to, and they haven't sense enough to do it if they did. That's all--and I
don't suppose I should have said as much as I have!"

There was stark silence for a moment when he sat down, and then as many
cheers for Jim as for the principal speaker of the evening, cheers mingled
with titters and catcalls. Jim felt a good deal as he had done when he
knocked down Mr. Billy's chauffeur--rather degraded and humiliated, as if
he had made an ass of himself. And as he walked out of the door, the
future county superintendent passed by him in high displeasure, and walked
home with some one else.

Jim found the weather much colder than it had been while coming. He really
needed an Eskimo's fur suit.

CHAPTER VII

THE NEW WINE

In the little strip of forest which divided the sown from the Iowa sown
wandered two boys in earnest converse. They seemed to be Boy Trappers, and
from their backloads of steel-traps one of them might have been Frank
Merriwell, and the other Dead-Shot Dick. However, though it was only
mid-December, and the fur of all wild varmints was at its primest, they
were bringing their traps into the settlements, instead of taking them
afield. "The settlements" were represented by the ruinous dwelling of the
Simmses, and the boy who resembled Frank Merriwell was Raymond Simms. The
other, who was much more barbarously accoutered, whose overalls were
fringed, who wore a cartridge belt about his person, and carried hatchet,
revolver, and a long knife with a deerfoot handle, and who so studiously
looked like Dead-Shot Dick, was our old friend of the road gang, Newton
Bronson. On the right, on the left, a few rods would have brought the boys
out upon the levels of rich corn-fields, and in sight of the long rows of
cottonwoods, willows, box-elders and soft maples along the straight roads,
and of the huge red barns, each of which possessed a num