The schoolmaster at Hemlock Hill was troubled that morning.Three of his boys were missing.This was not only a notable deficit in a roll-call of twenty, but the absentees were his three most original and distinctive scholars.He had received no preliminary warning or excuse.Nor could he attribute their absence to any common local detention or difficulty of travel.They lived widely apart and in different directions.Neither were they generally known as "chums," or comrades, who might have entered into an unhallowed combination to "play hookey."He looked at the vacant places before him with a concern which his other scholars little shared, having, after their first lively curiosity, not unmixed with some envy of the derelicts, apparently forgotten them.He missed the cropped head and inquisitive glances of Jackson Tribbs on the third bench, the red hair and brown eyes of Providence Smith in the corner, and there was a blank space in the first bench where Julian Fleming, a lanky giant of seventeen, had sat.Still, it would not do to show his concern openly, and, as became a man who was at least three years the senior of the eldest, Julian Fleming, he reflected that they were "only boys,"and that their friends were probably ignorant of the good he was doing them, and so dismissed the subject.Nevertheless, it struck him as wonderful how the little world beneath him got on without them.Hanky Rogers, bully, who had been kept in wholesome check by Julian Fleming, was lively and exuberant, and his conduct was quietly accepted by the whole school; Johnny Stebbins, Tribbs's bosom friend, consorted openly with Tribbs's particular enemy; some of the girls were singularly gay and conceited.It was evident that some superior masculine oppression had been removed.
He was particularly struck by this last fact, when, the next morning, no news coming of the absentees, he was impelled to question his flock somewhat precisely concerning them.There was the usual shy silence which follows a general inquiry from the teacher's desk; the children looked at one another, giggled nervously, and said nothing.