in' back inter school agin, and rigged out
like ez if she'd been to a fire in a milliner's shop."

"You shouldn't allow your personal dislikes, Rupert, to provoke you to
speak of a fellow-scholar in that way--and a young lady, too," corrected
the master dryly.

"The woods is full o' sich feller-scholars and sich young ladies, if
yer keer to go a gunning for 'em," said Rupert with dark and slangy
significance. "Ef I'd known she was comin' back I'd"--he stopped and
brought his sunburnt fist against the seam of his trousers with a boyish
gesture, "I'd hev jist"--

"What?" said the master sharply.

"I'd hev played hookey till she left school agin! It moutn't hev bin so
long, neither," he added with a mysterious chuckle.

"That will do," said the master peremptorily. "For the present you'll
attend to your duty and try to make Uncle Ben see you're something more
than a foolish, prejudiced school-boy, or," he added significantly, "he
and I may both repent our agreement. Let me have a good account of you
both when I return."

He took his hat from its peg on the wall, and in obedience to a suddenly
formed resolution left the school-room to call upon the parents of
Cressy McKinstry. He was not quite certain what he should say, but,
after his habit, would trust to the inspiration of the moment. At the
worst he could resign a situation that now appeared to require more
tact and delicacy than seemed consistent with his position, and he was
obliged to confess to himself that he had lately suspected that his
present occupation--the temporary expedient of a poor but clever young
man of twenty--was scarcely bringing him nearer a realization of his
daily dreams. For Mr. Jack Ford was a youthful pilgrim who had sought
his fortune in California so lightly equipped that even in the matter of
kin and advisers he was deficient. That prospective fortune had already
eluded him in San Francisco, had apparently not waited for him in
Sacramento, and now seemed never to have been at Indian Spring.
Nevertheless, when he was once out of sight of the school-house he lit a
cigar, put his hands in his pockets, and strode on with the cheerfulness
of that youth to which all things are possible.

The children had already dispersed as mysteriously and completely as
they had arrived. Between him and the straggling hamlet of Indian Spring
the landscape seemed to be without sound or motion. The wooded upland or
ridge on which the schoolhouse stood, hal