CHAPTER XII.

All through the next day Waddy was very calm; it was repenting recent rash actions and calculating laboriously.  At the Drovers’ Arms that evening several members of the School Committee compared conclusions and resolved that something must be done.  It was evident that the youth of the township, under the leadership of ‘the boy Haddon,’ had dragged Waddy into a nasty squabble, some of the results of which were unpleasantly conspicuous on the faces and heads of prominent committeemen.  Then the ravaged gardens had to be taken into consideration.  Calmer judgment had convinced the residents that the destruction wrought was not all due to goats, and there was a general desire to visit the responsibility on the true culprits, whose identity was shrewdly suspected.

Friday was rather an eventful day at the school.  The boys had heard of the meeting and expected serious developments.  Mrs. Ben Steven called in the morning.  She was a tall heavily-framed woman, short-tempered, and astonishingly voluble in her wrath.  She had selected Richard Haddon as the vandal who had despoiled her cabbage-patch, and was seeking a just revenge.  Already she had called upon Mrs. Haddon and delivered a long, loud, and fierce public lecture to the startled little widow on the moral responsibilities of parents, and the need they have of faithfully and regularly thrashing their sons as a duty they owe to their neighbors.  Now it was her intention to incite Joel Ham to administer an adequate caning to the boy, or to do herself the bare justice of soundly spanking the culprit.  She bounced into the school, angry, bare-armed, and eager for the fray, and all the children sat up and wondered.

‘I’ve come about that boy Haddon,’ said Mrs. Ben.

Joel Ham blinked his pale lashes and regarded her thoughtfully, in peaceful and good-humoured contrast with her own haste and heat.

‘Have you, indeed, ma’am?’ he said softly.

’Have I, indeed! ’cried the woman, bridling again at a hint of sarcasm; ‘can’t you see I have?’

‘Madam, you are very obvious.’

’Am I, then!  Well, look here, you; you’ve got to cane the hide off that boy.’

‘You surprise me, Mrs. Steven.  For what?’

‘For breakin’ into my garden an’ robbin’ me.  Nice way you’re teachin’ these boys, ain’t you?  Makin’ thieves an’ stealers of ’em.  Now, tell me, do you mean to thrash him?’

Joel considered the matter calmly, pinching his under lip and blinking at Mrs. Ben in a pensive, studious way.

‘No, ma’am, I do not.’

‘For why?’ cried the woman.

‘I am not the public hangman, Mrs. Steven.’

Mrs. Steven could not see the relevance of the excuse, and her anger rose again.

‘Then, sir, I’ll thrash him myself, now an’ here.’

The master sighed heavily and clambered on to his high stool, took his black bottle from his desk, and deliberately refreshed himself, oblivious apparently to the lady’s threat and forgetting her presence.