He seemed superior to the neighbor boys, and felt so; but this feeling was curiously mingled with a sense of degradation. By every test of common life, he was a failure. His family history was a badge of failure. People despised a man who was so incontestably smarter than they, and yet could do no better with himself than to work in the fields alongside the tramps and transients and hoboes who drifted back and forth as the casual market for labor and the lure of the cities swept them. Save for his mother and their cow and garden and flock of fowls and their wretched little rented house, he was a tramp himself.

His father had been no better. He had come into the neighborhood from nobody knows where, selling fruit trees, with a wife and baby in his old buggy – and had died suddenly, leaving the baby and widow, and nothing else save the horse and buggy. That horse and buggy were still on the Irwin books represented by Spot the cow – so persistent are the assets of cautious poverty. Mrs. Irwin had labored in kitchen and sewing room until Jim had been able to assume the breadwinner’s burden – which he did about the time he finished the curriculum of the Woodruff District school. He was an off ox and odd as Dick’s hatband, largely because his duties to his mother and his love of reading kept him from joining the gangs whereof I have spoken. His duties, his mother, and his father’s status as an outcast were to him the equivalent of the Byronic club foot, because they took away his citizenship in Boyville, and drove him in upon himself, and, at first, upon his school books which he mastered so easily and quickly as to become the star pupil of the Woodruff District school, and later upon Emerson, Thoreau, Ruskin and the poets, and the agricultural reports and bulletins.

All this degraded – or exalted – him to the position of an intellectual farm-hand, with a sense of superiority and a feeling of degradation. It made Jennie Woodruff’s “Humph!” potent to keep him awake that night, and send him to the road work with Colonel Woodruff’s team next morning with hot eyes and a hotter heart.

What was he anyhow? And what could he ever be? What was the use of his studies in farming practise, if he was always to be an underling whose sole duty was to carry out the crude ideas of his employers? And what chance was there for a farm-hand to become a farm owner, or even a farm renter, especially if he had a mother to support out of the twenty-five or thirty dollars of his monthly wages? None.

A man might rise in the spirit, but how about rising in the world?

Colonel Woodruff’s gray percherons seemed to feel the unrest of their driver, for they fretted and actually executed a clumsy prance as Jim Irwin pulled them up at the end of the turnpike across Bronson’s Slew – the said slew being a peat-marsh which annually offered the men of the Woodruff District the opportunity to hold the male equivalent of a sewing circle while working out their road taxes, with much conversational gain, and no great damage to the road.

In fact, Columbus Brown, the pathmaster, prided himself on the Bronson Slew Turnpike as his greatest triumph in road engineering. The work consisted in hauling, dragging and carrying gravel out on the low fill which carried the road across the marsh, and then watching it slowly settle until the next summer.

“Haul gravel from the east gravel bed, Jim,” called Columbus Brown from the lowest spot in the middle of the turnpike. “Take Newt here to help load.”

Jim smiled his habitual slow, gentle smile at Newton Bronson, his helper. Newton was seventeen, undersized, tobacco-stained, profane and proud of the fact that he had once beaten his way from Des Moines to Faribault on freight trains. A source of anxiety to his father, and the subject of many predictions that he would come to no good end, Newton was out on the road work because he was likely to be of little use on the farm. Clearly, Newton was on the downward road in a double sense – and yet, Jim Irwin rather liked him.

“The fellers have put up a job on you, Jim,” volunteered Newton, as they began filling the wagon with gravel.

“What sort of job?” asked Jim.

“They’re nominating you for teacher,” replied Newton.

“Since when has the position of teacher been an elective office?” asked Jim.

“Sure, it ain’t elective,” answered Newton. “But they say that with as many brains as you’ve got sloshing around loose in the neighborhood, you’re a candidate that can break the deadlock in the school board.”

Jim shoveled on silently for a while, and by example urged Newton to earn the money credited to his father’s assessment for the day’s work.

“Aw, what’s the use of diggin’ into it like this?” protested Newton, who was developing an unwonted perspiration. “None of the others are heatin’ themselves up.”

“Don’t you get any fun out of doing a good day’s work?” asked Jim.

“Fun!” exclaimed Newton. “You’re crazy!”

A slide of earth from the top of the pit threatened to bury Newton in gravel, sand and good top soil. A sweet-clover plant growing rankly beside the pit, and thinking itself perfectly safe, came down with it, its dark green foliage anchored by the long roots which penetrated to a depth below the gravel pit’s bottom. Jim Irwin pulled it loose from its anchorage, and after looking attentively at the roots, laid the whole plant on the bank for safety.

“What do you want of that weed?” asked Newton.

Jim picked it up and showed him the nodules on its roots – little white knobs, smaller than pinheads.

“Know what they are, Newt?”

“Just white specks on the roots,” replied Newton.

“The most wonderful specks in the world,” said Jim. “Ever hear of the use of nitrates to enrich the soil?”

“Ain’t that the stuff the old man used on the lawn last spring?”

“Yes,” said Jim, “your father used some on his lawn. We don’t put it on our fields in Iowa – not yet; but if it weren’t for those white specks on the clover-roots, we should be obliged to do so – as they do back east.”

“How do them white specks keep us from needin’ nitrates?”

“It’s a long story,” said Jim. “You see, before there were any plants big enough to be visible – if there had been any one to see them – the world was full of little plants so small that there may be billions of them in one of these little white specks. They knew how to take the nitrates from the air – ”

“Air!” ejaculated Newton. “Nitrates in the air! You’re crazy!”

“No,” said Jim. “There are tons of nitrogen in the air that press down on your head – but the big plants can’t get it through their leaves, or their roots. They never had to learn, because when the little plants – bacteria – found that the big plants had roots with sap in them, they located on those roots and tapped them for the sap they needed. They began to get their board and lodgings off the big plants. And in payment for their hotel bills, the little plants took nitrogen out of the air for both themselves and their hosts.”

“What d’ye mean by ‘hosts’?”

“Their hotel-keepers – the big plants. And now the plants that have the hotel roots for the bacteria furnish nitrogen not only for themselves but for the crops that follow. Corn can’t get nitrogen out of the air; but clover can – and that’s why we ought to plow down clover before a crop of corn.”

“Gee!” said Newt. “If you could get to teach our school, I’d go again.”

“It would interfere with your pool playing.”

“What business is that o’ yours?” interrogated Newt defiantly.

“Well, get busy with that shovel,” suggested Jim, who had been working steadily, driving out upon the fill occasionally to unload. On his return from dumping the next load, Newton seemed, in a superior way, quite amiably disposed toward his workfellow – rather the habitual thing in the neighborhood.

“I’ll work my old man to vote for you for the job,” said he.

“What job?” asked Jim.

“Teacher for our school,” answered Newt.

“Those school directors,” replied Jim, “have become so bullheaded that they’ll never vote for any one except the applicants they’ve been voting for.”

“The old man says he will have Prue Foster again, or he’ll give the school a darned long vacation, unless Peterson and Bonner join on some one else. That would beat Prue, of course.”

“And Con Bonner won’t vote for any one but Maggie Gilmartin,” added Jim.

“And,” supplied Newton, “Haakon Peterson says he’ll stick to Herman Paulson until the Hot Springs freeze over.”

“And there you are,” said Jim. “You tell your father for me that I think he’s a mere mule – and that the whole district thinks the same.”

“All right,” said Newt. “I’ll tell him that while I’m working him to vote for you.”

Jim smiled grimly. Such a position might have been his years ago, if he could have left his mother or earned enough in it to keep both alive. He had remained a peasant because the American rural teacher is placed economically lower than the peasant. He gave Newton’s chatter no consideration. But when, in the afternoon, he hitched his team with others to the big road grader, and the gang became concentrated within talking distance, he found that the project of heckling and chaffing him about his eminent fitness for a scholastic position was to be the real entertainment of the occasion.

“Jim’s the candidate to bust the deadlock,” said Columbus Brown, with a wink. “Just like Garfield in that Republican convention he was nominated in – eh, Con?”

“Con” was Cornelius Bonner, an Irishman, one of the deadlocked school board, and the captain of the road grader. He winked back at the pathmaster.

“Jim’s the gray-eyed man o’ destiny,” he replied, “if he can get two votes in that board.”

“You’d vote for me, wouldn’t you, Con?” asked Jim.

“I’ll try annything wance,” replied Bonner.

“Try voting with Ezra Bronson once, for Prue Foster,” suggested Jim. “She’s done good work here.”

“Opinions differ,” said Bonner, “an’ when you try annything just for wance, it shouldn’t be an irrevocable shtip, me bye.”

“You’re a reasonable board of public servants,” said Jim ironically. “I’d like to tell the whole board what I think of them.”

“Come down to-night,” said Bonner jeeringly. “We’re going to have a board meeting at the schoolhouse and ballot a few more times. Come down, and be the Garfield of the convintion. We’ve lacked brains on the board, that’s clear. They ain’t a man on the board that iver studied algebra, ’r that knows more about farmin’ than their impl’yers. Come down to the schoolhouse, and we’ll have a field-hand addriss the school board – and begosh, I’ll move yer illiction mesilf! Come, now, Jimmy, me bye, be game. It’ll vary the program, anny-how.”

The entire gang grinned. Jim flushed, and then reconquered his calmness of spirit.

“All right, Con,” said he. “I’ll come and tell you a few things – and you can do as you like about making the motion.”