occurred, the boys, by agreement, stopped work two hours earlier than
usual, for the stage usually reached Bottle Flat about two hours before
sundown, and the one of that day was to bring the hated teacher. The
boys had wellnigh given up the idea of further resistance, yet curiosity
has a small place even in manly bosoms, and they could at least _look_
hatred at the detested pedagogue. So about four o'clock they gathered at
The Nugget so suddenly, that several fathers; who were calmly drinking
inside, had barely time to escape through the back windows.

The boys drank several times before composing themselves into their
accustomed seats and leaning-places; but it was afterward asserted and
Southpaw--the one-armed bar-keeper--cited as evidence, that none of them
took sugar in their liquor. They subjected their sorrow to homeopathic
treatment by drinking only the most raw and rasping fluids that the bar
afforded.

The preliminary drinking over, they moodily whittled, chewed, and
expectorated; a stranger would have imagined them a batch of miserable
criminals awaiting transportation.

The silence was finally broken by a decided-looking red-haired man, who
had been neatly beveling the door-post with his knife, and who spoke as
if his words only by great difficulty escaped being bitten in two.

"We ken burn down the schoolhouse right before his face and eyes, and
then mebbe the State Board'll git our idees about eddycation."

"Twon't be no use, Mose," said Judge Barber, whose legal title was
honorary, and conferred because he had spent some time in a penitentiary
in the East. "Them State Board fellers is wrong, but they've got grit,