When Ralph Hartsook, with the quiet, dogged tread that he was cultivating, walked into the school-room, he took great care not to seem to see the trap set for him; but he carelessly stepped over the board that had been so nicely adjusted.  The boys who were Hank’s confidants in the plot were very busy over their slates, and took pains not to show their disappointment.

The morning session wore on without incident.  Ralph several times caught two people looking at him.  One was Mirandy.  Her weak and watery eyes stole loving glances over the top of her spelling-book, which she would not study.  Her looks made Ralph’s spirits sink to forty below zero, and congeal.

But on one of the backless little benches that sat in the middle of the school-room was little Shocky, who also cast many love glances at the young master; glances as grateful to his heart as Mirandy’s ogling—­he was tempted to call it ogring—­was hateful.

“Look at Shocky,” giggled Betsey Short, behind her slate.  “He looks as if he was a-goin’ to eat the master up, body and soul.”

And so the forenoon wore on as usual, and those who laid the trap had forgotten it, themselves.  The morning session was drawing to a close.  The fire in the great old fire-place had burnt low.  The flames, which seemed to Shocky to be angels, had disappeared, and now the bright coals, which had played the part of men and women and houses in Shocky’s fancy, had taken on a white and downy covering of ashes, and the great half-burnt back-log lay there smouldering like a giant asleep in a snow-drift.  Shocky longed to wake him up.

As for Henry Banta, he was too much bothered to get the answer to a “sum” he was doing, to remember anything about his trap.  In fact, he had quite forgotten that half an hour ago in the all-absorbing employment of drawing ugly pictures on his slate and coaxing Betsey Short to giggle by showing them slyly across the school-room.  Once or twice Ralph had been attracted to Betsey’s extraordinary fits of giggling, and had come so near to catching Hank that the boy thought it best not to run any further risk of the beech switches, four or five feet long, laid up behind the master in sight of the school as a prophylactic.  Hence his application just now to his “sum” in long division, and hence his puzzled look, for, idler that he was, his “sums” did not solve themselves easily.  As usual in such cases, he came up in front of the master’s desk to have the difficulty explained.  He had to wait a minute until Ralph got through with showing Betsey Short, who had been seized with a studying fit, and who could hardly give any attention to the teacher’s explanations, she did want to giggle so much!  Not at anything in particular, but just at things in general.

While Ralph was “doing” Betsey’s “sum” for her, he was solving a much more difficult question.  A plan had flashed upon him, but the punishment seemed a severe one.  He gave it up once or twice, but he remembered how turbulent the Flat Creek elements were; and had he not inly resolved to be as unrelenting as a bulldog?  He fortified himself by recalling again the oft-remembered remark of Bud, “Ef Bull wunst takes a holt, heaven and yarth can’t make him let go.”  And so he resolved to give Hank and the whole school one good lesson.