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Pilling, whose bashfulness was manifest only in the presence of women, had the utmost calmness before his pupils. He walked quietly to the door and locked it. McStenger, furious without, heard the sound of the bolt being thrust into place, whereupon he began to kick at the door. Pilling turned the chair facing his class and told the girl with the braided hair to continue.
He had shown himself less prudish than he had been thought. Occasionally he drank whiskey or beer, which was looked upon as a good sign in a man of his kind. Tobit McStenger did not know this. He invariably evaded mention of Pilling. People wondered what would happen when the two should meet. For Tobit was known to be revengeful, and he was now, more than ever, in speech and look, a bad man.
But now our soil either will not, or at the leastwise may not, bear either woad or madder. I say not that the ground is not able so to do, but that we are negligent, afraid of the pilling of our grounds, and careless of our own profits, as men rather willing to buy the same of others than take any pain to plant them here at home.
He made no attempt to spoil the peace of Aubrey Pilling, and he only laughed when he heard of the disappearance of Little Tobe. Pilling, by his success in conducting the primary school, had won the esteem of Brickville's citizens. His timidity had diminished, or, rather, it had been discovered to be merely quietness, self-communion, instead of timidity.
You've heard the fellows talk about him who were out East.... Yes, that's the chap.... Come right along." "You don't propose to lionise me, I hope, Gray?" said Seton, as Gray returned to his seat. The other laughed. "I forgot you could hear me," he admitted. "It's my cousin, Margaret Halley. You'll like her. She's a tip-top girl, but eccentric. Goes in for pilling."
Observations which, though they lie beyond us, and seem impertinent to the text, yet are they not much extravagant, for they must lead us and show us how the after- passages were brought about, with the dependences on the line of a collateral workmanship; and surely it may amaze a well-settled judgment to look back into these times and to consider how the duke could attain to such a pitch of greatness, his father dying in ignominy, and at the gallows, his estate confiscated for pilling and polling the people.
The teacher took breath and McStenger reached for a whiskey decanter. The others in the saloon looked on with eager interest, fearing to come between such formidable combatants. Tony Couch ran out in search of the town's only policeman. McStenger advanced toward the teacher. Pilling was farm bred. He had chopped down trees with his right arm alone in his time.
Pilling, the teacher, sat near the stove in the little square school-room, listening to the irrepressible hum of his restless pupils and the predominating monotonous sound of a small girl's voice reciting multiplication tables. "Three times three are nine," she whined, drawlingly; "three times four are twelve, three times " The little girl with the braided hair stopped short.
Pilling thrust forth his arm with unexpected suddenness. Upon the floor, six feet behind his antagonist, was a cuspidor with jagged edges. And Tobit McStenger slept with his fathers. The jury acquitted the teacher on the plea of self-defense. The loungers in Couch's saloon judiciously said that it was a very bad break for Tobit McStenger to have made.
But McStenger went on, more loudly than before: "By fellows, as I said, who came from orphans' homes, and never knew who their parents was, and whose mothers may have been God knows what " Pilling, without turning, had lifted his glass. With an easy motion he had tossed its remaining contents of beer into the face of Tobit McStenger. The latter drew back from the splash of the liquid as if stung.
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