One evening, after a week of attendance, he was missing. The next morning he came to Jack's house with his face scratched and his eye bruised. "What's the matter?" asked Jack. "Well, you see, yesterday I was at the school-house at noon, and Pewee, egged on by Riley, said something he oughtn't to, about Susan, and I couldn't stand there and hear that girl made fun of, and so I up and downed him, and made him take it back. I can't go till my face looks better, you know, for I wouldn't want her to know anything about it." But the professor heard all about it from Joanna, who had it from one of the school-boys. Susan sent Columbus to tell Bob that she knew all about it, and that he must come back to school. "So you've been fighting, have you?" she said, severely, when Bob appeared. The poor fellow was glad she took that tone--if she had thanked him he wouldn't have been able to reply. "Yes." "Well, don't you do it any more. It's very wrong to fight. It makes boys brutal. A girl with ability enough to teach the Greenbank Academy can take care of herself, and she doesn't want her scholars to fight." "All right," said Bob. "But," he muttered, "I'll thrash him all the same, and more than ever, if he ever says anything like that again." CHAPTER XIV CROWING AFTER VICTORY Greenbank was awake, and the old master had to go. Mr. Weathervane stood up for him as long as he thought that the excitement was temporary. But when he found that Greenbank really was awake, and not just talking in its sleep, as it did for the most part, he changed sides,--not all at once, but by degrees. At first he softened down a little, "hemmed and hawed," as folks say. He said he did not know but that Mr. Ball had been hasty, but he meant well. The next day he took another step, and said that the old master meant well, but he was _often_ too hasty in his temper. The next week he let himself down another peg in saying that "maybe" the old man meant well, but he was altogether too hot in his temper for a school-master. A little while later, he found out that Mr. Ball's way of teaching was quite out of date. Before a month had elapsed, he was sure that the old curmudgeon ought to be put out, and thus at last Mr. Weathervane found himself where he liked to be, in the popular party. And so the old master came to his last day in the brick school-house. Whatever feelings he may have had in leaving behind him the scenes of his twenty-five years of labor, he said nothing. He only compressed his lips a little more tightly, scowled as severely as ever, removed his books and pens from his desk, gave a last look at his long beech switches on the wall, turned the key in the door of the school-house, carried it to Mr. Weathervane, received his pay, and walked slowly home to the house of his brother-in-law, Mr. Higbie.