Paul started for him, met that sneer, and hesitated. He looked wildly about him. In the farther corner he saw Charlie Brett drop his head and turn crimson, and he knew that Charlie was blushing with hot shame to think that one who had lived under the same roof with him should be such a helpless coward. But most of all, Paul saw Nancy, whose eyes were averted toward the window and whose face was pale, also.
And then a sudden thought came to him with a blessed relief. After all, he could not do more than die, and death itself would be the open door through which he would escape from this flamboyant mockery, this scorn, this contemptuous world in which all his days were so wretched.
He went straight up to big Jack. “Can you write?” he asked.
“Young feller,” said Jack, bending dark brows, “are you sassin’ me, maybe?”
The room hushed to delicious expectancy.
“If you can write,” said Paul, “why haven’t you put down your name?”
The big fellow grinned. He searched inward for insulting phrases, but all he could find to say was: “Maybe I’m gonna write it and maybe I ain’t. Maybe I ain’t ready to write it. And you . . . what you gonna do about it? Do I get a licking?”
He leered at Paul out of the greatness of his strength. Death, certainly, was coming upon the teacher. So, at least, he felt. Those mighty hands could break him like a reed; those balled fists, like ragged lumps of iron, could smash straight through his body.
And across the mind of Paul came an echo from an old romance that he had read in one of his times of illness. In that book, ringed with enemies, the hero had bidden the most formidable of them all to come from the house with him and settle their differences in solitude.
Now he quoted from it, word for word: “Will you leave the room with me, sir?”
That “sir” might have caused more comment, but the excitement was so tense that it was passed over.
“And why in earth should I leave the room with you?” asked big Jack.
Almost in those words the brute of the novel had spoken, and the hero had answered as Paul answered now: “There are women here. Do you wish them to see blood?”
Big Jack lurched to his feet. He was half of a mind to knock down the little schoolteacher then and there, but Paul already was moving uncertainly toward the door. He found it through a mist, and stepped out into the cold, clear morning.
Jack strode behind him. Like a giant he seemed as he stood with feet braced at the bottom of the steps.
“Now what do you want?” he asked savagely.
“I want you,” said the young teacher, “to go home to your father and tell him that you have refused to do what I asked you to do. Or else go back into the school and begin to work.”
There was a gasp from the massed faces at the door.
The handsome face of Jack grew scarlet with anger. “And if I don’t do either, then what?”
“Then,” said Paul, “I’ll have to try to make you.”
“Well,” snarled Jack, “I ain’t gonna do neither. And you try to make me, kid. I ask you that.”
“Very well,” said Paul. He looked at those balled fists with a sigh. The stronger and harder they were, the better. Death would be utterly painless. “Very well,” said Paul, and, stepping a little closer, he flicked big Jack lightly across the face with his open hand.
The answer was all that Paul could have prayed for. It was totally painless. It seemed that a heavy blow fell on the base of his brain, and he dropped into a thousand leagues of darkness.
When he recovered, the sun was spinning across the face of the sky in vast circles. The schoolhouse fairly dissolved in the speed with which it whirled. The trees nearby blurred together.
“He’s alive!” cried a deep, heavy voice.
“Lift him up and carry him in from this frosty ground,” said the voice of a girl.
Paul closed his eyes again, and the darkness shot over his brain once more in a long, slow wave, beginning at his feet.
He wakened near the heat of the stove. A cold cloth was across his forehead. He raised his hand to a bulging, painful lump on the side of his jaw. That was where the blow had fallen. How strange that it had not broken the bone, snapped his neck, smashed all before it.
He could not see clearly, but, when that same heavy man’s voice spoke again, he recognized the tones of big Jack.
“How’s the back of your head, Paul? Will you feel it there . . . where it whacked the ground?”
Paul obediently fumbled at the spot. It was a little sore, but there seemed nothing wrong.
“It ain’t fractured?” gasped Jack.
“No. I’m all right. I . . .”
“Lie still, will you? Lie still and . . . Nancy, what’d we better do with him? I’ll get my wagon and haul him home.”
Paul sat up.
A silent, pale circle stood about them. On their knees beside him were Nancy and Jack.
“I’m all right,” said Paul.
He climbed to his feet. With his great hands, Jack followed the movement, ready to support him if he should fall again. But he would not fall again. He was stronger at that moment than ever he had been in the world. For he had come through the valley of death, and here was the face of lovely Nancy, pale, but lighted with eyes that were on fire with admiration.
IV
There are various thresholds which we must cross, between that of life and that of death, and when young Paul Torridon had risen to his feet and stood safely on them, although his head still rang and his very soul was bruised by his great fall, yet he knew that he had crossed the greatest threshold of all and found himself.
He could look around upon that room without trembling. He went back to his desk, the huge Jack attending him. There, safely seated, he said in a rather faint voice: “Now we’ll begin again . . . your names, please, on the slates.”
Instantly the vast shoulders of Jack Brett bowed over the slate. He labored, and, having finished, he turned slowly around and stared grimly about the schoolroom. There were a full half of the pupils who still had not entirely understood what change had occurred in the school, but the dreadful glare of Jack quickly convinced them that something had changed. They hastened to snatch at their pencils. There was no sight except that of bowed, earnest workers.
Then a little girl of eight began to cry.
“What’s the matter?” asked the teacher.
“I dunno how to write!” wailed the child. “My mummy never taught me!”
The head of Paul Torridon was quite clear now. “Then I’ll teach you,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.” He began to make a tour of the room and studied the sprawling and labored writings until he came to the slate of Nancy. There he paused a moment.
“I think you had better be a teacher, too,” said Torridon.
She looked quickly up to him, surprised, and then she flushed a little with pleasure. “I will, if I can,” she said.
He moved on and came to Jack Brett.
A certain rigidity about the back of the giant took his attention. The neck was as rigid as a pillar of red-hot steel. The head was poised to withstand shocks. And when he looked over the shoulder of the big fellow he saw upon the slate—a meaningless scrawl.
He looked down into the eyes of Jack. They stared straight ahead. One who is about to enter the fire without protest would look forward in that manner.
Torridon picked up that slate and carried it to his desk, where he turned about and faced the class. Dreadful misery was in the face of big Jack now, and, by the peculiar prescience of the sensitive soul, Paul understood what his late enemy expected—that the shapeless scratchings on his slate would be exposed to all eyes.