"No," said Jim. "There are tons of nitrogen in the air that press down on your head--but the big plants can't get it through their leaves, or their roots. They never had to learn, because when the little plants--bacteria--found that the big plants had roots with sap in them, they located on those roots and tapped them for the sap they needed. They began to get their board and lodgings off the big plants. And in payment for their hotel bills, the little plants took nitrogen out of the air for both themselves and their hosts." "What d'ye mean by 'hosts'?" "Their hotel-keepers--the big plants. And now the plants that have the hotel roots for the bacteria furnish nitrogen not only for themselves but for the crops that follow. Corn can't get nitrogen out of the air; but clover can--and that's why we ought to plow down clover before a crop of corn." "Gee!" said Newt. "If you could get to teach our school, I'd go again." "It would interfere with your pool playing." "What business is that o' yours?" interrogated Newt defiantly. "Well, get busy with that shovel," suggested Jim, who had been working steadily, driving out upon the fill occasionally to unload. On his return from dumping the next load, Newton seemed, in a superior way, quite amiably disposed toward his workfellow--rather the habitual thing in the neighborhood. "I'll work my old man to vote for you for the job," said he. "What job?" asked Jim. "Teacher for our school," answered Newt. "Those school directors," replied Jim, "have become so bullheaded that they'll never vote for any one except the applicants they've been voting for." "The old man says he will have Prue Foster again, or he'll give the school a darned long vacation, unless Peterson and Bonner join on some one else. That would beat Prue, of course." "And Con Bonner won't vote for any one but Maggie Gilmartin," added Jim. "And," supplied Newton, "Haakon Peterson says he'll stick to Herman Paulson until the Hot Springs freeze over." "And there you are," said Jim. "You tell your father for me that I think he's a mere mule--and that the whole district thinks the same." "All right," said Newt. "I'll tell him that while I'm working him to vote for you." Jim smiled grimly. Such a position might have been his years ago, if he could have left his mother or earned enough in it to keep both alive. He had remained a peasant because the American rural teacher is placed economically lower than the peasant. He gave Newton's chatter no consideration. But when, in the afternoon, he hitched his team with others to the big road grader, and the gang became concentrated within talking distance, he found that the project of heckling and chaffing him about his eminent fitness for a scholastic position was to be the real entertainment of the occasion. "Jim's the candidate to bust the deadlock," said Columbus Brown, with a wink. "Just like Garfield in that Republican convention he was nominated in--eh, Con?"