There was school the next morning, and nine children came out of fourteen. The Ferris twins did not come, nor the Bishop boys, nor little Anna Okerlund, whose mother sent word it was a cough, which perhaps it was. Hannah Garrity walked up the wash alone with her lunch pail and her bonnet down her back, and before she sat she put a folded page from her copybook on Cora's desk. On it, in her round spelling-bee hand, was a sum.
99 links = 1 chain? NO. 100 links = 1 chain. Somebody has to count.
At a quarter past eight Amos Red Willow rode up the knoll with his son in front of him, lifted the boy down, and gave him a flour sack with bread and dried meat and a small apple in it. Eli stood at the door and looked in. Nine children looked back.
Then Gus Lindahl slid down his bench, all the way to the end.
"That's not the back bench," Gus told the room. "It's the third one. I'm just saying."
Eli looked at his father. Amos did not nod or wave. He waited. After a moment the boy went in and sat where Gus had made room, put his sack under the bench as the others had, and folded his hands on the desk because Hannah's were folded. Amos turned the horse and rode down the knoll without looking back. Cora did not know what he thought of her, and she did not suppose she would know for a long time, if ever. She thought that was probably right.
She wiped the old sums off the board until the slate was clean and gray, and wrote: A surveyor's chain is 66 feet long. It has 100 links.
"This morning we start our arithmetic over," she said. "We are going to measure the school lot again, and this time we will not start from the map. We will start from the stone. Mrs. Red Willow has said she will come Thursday and show us where it is. Listen to her carefully. She has been counting longer than any of us."
"Miss Lindqvist," said Gus, "if it comes out different, does that mean the school isn't ours?"
The room went still. Through the big unglassed window the light came in off the dry fork and the pale grass and the brown hills going west. It fell across the initials in the frame, and across her desk, where the deed lay folded on the blotter with a dark iron link on top of it. She had not decided what to do with either. She thought she might leave them there all winter, where the children could see.
"It means we'll know whose it is," she said. "And then we'll know who to thank, and what we owe, and what we can't pay back. That's what measuring is for." She held out the chalk. "Hannah. Come show us how many feet are in four chains and eighty-one links. Show all your work. Somebody has to count."
Hannah Garrity got up from her bench, and took the chalk, and began.