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- Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
It was pleasant to look at Eric Murray himself, a tall, broad-shouldered young guy that he had stable grayish-blue eyes and thick wavy brown hair. He was the most popular member of his graduation class and the most enviable because his father was a millionaire and Eric was his only son. Mr. Murray was a kind-hearted, old gentleman who loved his boy. This is a good story with its own morality.
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Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter I
An hour after his pupils had gone home Eric Murray came out of the old stone schoolhouse at Stillwater and locked the door. He had lingered behind to solve some problems for his advanced students and now the sunlight was slanting in warm yellow lines through the thick maple grove to the west of the building. A couple of sheep were nibbling the lush grass in a far corner of the playground; the bell one of them wore tinkled faintly and musically on the still, mellow May air. The scene was very peaceful and pastoral–almost too much so, the young man thought with a slight shrug as he stood on the worn steps and gazed about him. How was he going to put in a whole month here, he wondered, with a little smile at his own expense.
“Father would chuckle if he knew I were sick of it already,” he thought as he walked across the playground to the road. “Well, the week is ended at any rate. I’ve earned my own living for five whole days and that is something I could never say before in all my twenty-five years of existence. It’s an exhilarating thought. But teaching a district school is distinctly not exhilarating, at least, in such a well-behaved school as this where the pupils are so painfully good that I haven’t even the traditional excitement of thrashing obstreperous big boys. Everything seems to go by clockwork. Larry must have been a model driller. I feel as if I were only the big cog in an orderly machine. Well, I can surely stand it for a month. Then I’ll tell the pater he can have his own way with me and that he was right and I was wrong.”
He swung into the road with a whistle and walked with a free, easy stride, that was somehow suggestive of reserve strength and power, down the long slope of the hill. The maples crowded thickly to the roadside on either hand and beneath them were beds of tender green, curly young ferns. Here and there a wild plum hung out its feathery bloom like a banner of springtime. The air was fragrant and balmy with wandering breezes. Now and then Eric met some callow lad on horseback or a shrewd-faced farmer in a cart, who nodded and called out cheerily, “Howdy, Master?” He knew most of them already but at the foot of the hill he met two people he did not know. They sat in an old-fashioned, shabby wagon and were watering their horse at the brook.
Eric surveyed them somewhat curiously. They did not look in the least like the ordinary run of Stillwater people. The boy had a distinctly foreign look in spite of the blue-checked shirt and homespun trousers which seemed to be the regulation workaday outfit for the Stillwater farmer lads. He was lithe and long-limbed, with a head of thick, silky, black curls and long, slender hands. His face was delicately featured and olive-tinted, save for the cheeks which had a dusky, crimson bloom that would not have shamed a girl’s. His mouth was red and full and his eyes large and black. He was a handsome fellow but the expression of his face was slightly sullen.
The other occupant of the wagon was a man of about sixty, with iron-gray hair, a harsh-featured face, and deep-set eyes. His mouth was close lipped and relentless and did not look as if it had ever smiled. Indeed, the idea of smiles could not be connected with this man, it was incongruous. Yet there was nothing repellent about the face and there was something in it that attracted Eric’s attention, for he rather prided himself on being a student of physiognomy, and he felt sure that this man was no ordinary Stillwater farmer of the genial, garrulous type with which he had become familiar. Long after the old wagon, with its oddly assorted pair, had gone lumbering up the hill Eric found himself thinking of the stern, heavy-browed man and the black-eyed, red-lipped boy.
Eric Murray himself was good to look upon, tall, broad-shouldered young fellow that he was, with steady, grayish-blue eyes and thick, wavy chestnut hair. He had been the most popular member of his graduating class that spring and the most envied, for his father was a millionaire and Eric was his only son.
Mr. Murray, senior, was a good-hearted, choleric old gentleman who loved this boy of his with the dead mother’s eyes better than anything else on earth and his business next. It had always been an understood thing that Eric was to go into the firm when he was through college and fit himself to carry on its many enterprises. Eric had assented to this without any particular thought, regarding it as a matter of course. But during the preceding winter he had taken a sudden notion that he would like to go in for law. Full of this idea he had gone home to his father and abruptly told him so. If Mr. Murray had kept his temper and discussed the affair reasonably he would probably have soon induced Eric to drop what was after all only a young man’s passing whim. Instead, Mr. Murray grew unwisely angry, thumped and denounced, and finally issued an ultimatum to the effect that Eric might go and study tomfoolery if he liked but that he need not expect any assistance in so doing.
“I will earn my own way through, then,” Eric had retorted hotly.
He flung himself out of his father’s presence in a rather petulant state of mind. He felt that he had been unjustly treated and it angered him. It was time, he said to himself, that his father ceased treating him like a boy who must always be told what was good for him. He would show him that he was able to stand on his own feet.
The next day he received a letter from Lawrence West, a former Academy classmate who was teaching in an up country district. West wrote that his health would not permit him to return to his school duties after the spring vacation in May and he had been unable to find a substitute. He asked Eric to take his place.
