Shaw was glad when word came that Ian had whooping cough. If Ian had taken it perhaps other children would take it! Perhaps so many would take it that the school would be closed and he would not be far behind the others after all!
All this happened. The school was opened barely in time for the examinations shortly before Christmas.
Shaw was so happy that he scarcely knew what to do with himself on the morning when he first went to school. The sun was dazzling on the snow. The air was so deliciously, so cruelly sharp that it stung his nostrils, tender from coughing and hot indoor air. The lane was an arch of glory, with the snow-laden boughs meeting above and the untrodden whiteness below. His were the first steps to ruffle the lane’s purity and he ran along it leaping and bounding in his joy, watching the snow dust drift on the golden-blue air.
By the time he reached the gate he had a stitch in his side, his legs trembled from running. He wondered what had made him so weak. The two miles to the school along the snowy road seemed very far in prospect. He wished he might get a lift. He looked back along the road and saw approaching a team belonging to the neighboring farmer whose daughter had run away with the hired man, Jack Searle.
The team, red-roan in color, looked wild, dashing through the snow with their blond manes flying and steam curling from their nostrils. The farmer sat, whip in mittened hand, his ruddy face looking out between the lugs of his fur cap, a buffalo skin across his knees. The sleigh bells rang out joyously.
Shaw advanced to the side of the road and looked ingratiatingly into the farmer’s face. The man seemed not to see him, but the hand holding the whip was raised, the lash cracked lightly near the team’s flanks, and they broke into a gallop.
Shaw scowled. “He thinks he’ll keep me from hooking on behind!” he thought. “Guess he’s mistaken—mean old farmer!”
Timing the moment, he sprang on to the back of the sleigh, at first precariously, then edging his body on firmly, placing his schoolbag and his packet of lunch in safety, uttering a grunt of satisfaction.
He saw then that he was not the only one who had “hooked on.” Louie Adams was clinging desperately to the sleigh, her thin legs, terminating in overshoes much too large for her, dangling helplessly, a crocheted red woolen hood accentuating her mauvish pallor. Her round eyes rolled toward him appealingly.
“I’m falling off,” she whined. “I can’t get a good hold. My sakes, Shaw Manifold, give me a boost!”
He put out his hand and grasped her between the skinny shoulder blades. “Pull me on!” she whined. “Quick!”
He had a vibrant sense of power. He could pull her on or let her go, just as he chose. He pictured what she would look like sprawling in the snow with her schoolbag and the packet of bread and molasses which was invariably her lunch lying beside her.
But he was too happy this morning to be unkind to anyone, even Louie. He gave her a heave and she scrambled up beside him. They grinned into each other’s face.
“Did you have the whooping cough?” he asked.
“Did I? I nearly coughed my head off!”
“I nearly coughed myself into little bits. I had it first. I gave it to the whole school.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Off my little cousin. She nearly coughed herself to bits too. We had a special very bad sort of whooping cough.”
“If you were so sick I don’t s’pose you did any homework.”
“Homework, Louie! I did tons and oceans of homework! I’m going to pass into your class. I’m going to pass the entrance ahead of you next summer, see if I don’t!”
The grin faded from her face and again her eyes were hard with hate. The sleigh bells shattered the crisp air with their crisper jangling. One of the horses blew out his breath with a great b-r-r-r and the spray from his lips rose freezing. Coming from behind they saw the Blairs’ wine-colored sleigh and long-legged bay mare. A deep-toned bell rang from her breast. Little bells jingled all round her.
“That horse’s name is Lady Belle,” said Shaw. “That’s her name—Lady Belle.”
“She shall have music wherever she goes,” said Louie, out of her tight little mouth.
“You talk like a baby,” said Shaw.
Instead of being still more annoyed Louie looked pleased. The Blair children shouted and waved as their sleigh sped past. Ian made a grimace of horror at Shaw’s propinquity to Louie. Shaw smiled sheepishly and wished he had let her fall off the sleigh.
As they neared the schoolhouse the farmer looked over his shoulder at Louie and Shaw. Two icicles hanging from his big moustache looked like the teeth of a walrus. There was a malicious twinkle in his eyes. He flicked his long whip across the backs of the team and they sped swiftly forward past the gate of the school.
“Oo!” cried Louie. “He’s taking us way past! Oo—I daren’t jump!”
“You’ve got to!” shouted Shaw. He snatched up his school-bag and leaped to the road.
Desperately Louie jumped after him. She rolled over and over in the snow, clutching her packet of lunch and her bag of books. She gathered herself up and came stumbling toward Shaw over the gleaming prints of the sleigh runners. Together they turned and shouted after the farmer:—
“Did you ever get left? Did you ever get left?”
Then they trudged back to the school.
“That man’s daughter,” said Shaw, “ran away from him. She ran away with the hired man.”
“My father’s a hired man,” said Louie aggressively.
“Well, that’s all right. But a girl wouldn’t want to run away with one. A farmer’s daughter wouldn’t.”
“What are you going to be? I mean when you grow up.”
“Oh, I don’t know yet. Perhaps a doctor. But anyhow something a long way from here. I’m going to do something out in the world.”
“So am I.”
“You couldn’t. You’re only a girl.”
She hung her head.
The Blairs were waiting for them. At noon Ian wrote on the wall of the shed—“Shaw Manifold loves Louie Adams.” The words were chanted up and down the yard, producing a peculiar satisfaction in Louie and nothing but hilarity in Shaw. He was so happy to be at school again that nothing could trouble him.
He was beside himself with impatience for the examinations. He compared notes with Ian and found that he had never opened a book during his isolation. But Ian was already in the entrance class; it was a foregone conclusion that he would pass into the high school at midsummer.
Miss McKay smiled proudly at Shaw when she announced that he had passed both the examinations. He now felt himself the equal of any in the school, the equal of the big boys of fifteen who were head and shoulders taller. He was growing, too. Before the winter was over the trousers and coat of the new suit were not so ridiculously long on him. But he was pale. Many of the children were pale after the long bout of coughing. Many of them had colds as they plodded long miles to school through snowdrifts and piercing winds. The windows of the school were white with frost. Outside the windows hung long icicles as thick as a boy’s wrists. The stove at the end of the room was almost red-hot and the woolen scarves and hoods of the girls, the mittens and the knitted caps with pompoms on the tops, of the boys, hung round it to dry, gave off a strange oily odor.
Miss McKay announced that at Easter she would give a prize for the best map drawn by any pupil in the school. It was the first time a prize had been offered and it was felt by children and parents that a new element of worldliness had entered into their lives. Shaw knew that he would take the prize with the beautiful map of Asia he had colored from Elspeth’s paints. He had