Title: The Mountain School-Teacher
Author: Post, Melville Davisson
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Mountain School-Teacher" ***


THE MOUNTAIN SCHOOL-TEACHER

By Melville Davisson Post

D. Appleton and Company

New York, London

1922

[Illustration: 0001]

[Illustration: 0002]

[Illustration: 0003]

[Illustration: 0007]



THE MOUNTAIN SCHOOL-TEACHER



CHAPTER I

|THERE had once been a path along the backbone of the mountain, but the
wilderness had undertaken to remove it, and had almost succeeded. The
wind had gathered bits of moss, twigs and dead stuff into the slight
depression. The great hickories had covered it with leaves. The rain
had packed it. There was no longer a path, only an open way between the
trees running down the gentle slope of the ridge to the mountain road.
The ridge was heavily wooded. The primeval forest was there. Great
hickories shot up sixty feet without a limb, and so close that a man
putting out his hand could reach from one tree to another. A gigantic
poplar now and then arose, a sugar maple, an oak--huge at the butt, deep
rooted in the good soil.

The afternoon sun, excluded of the forest, seemed to pack itself into
this abandoned path.

The leaves fallen from the hickories, under the touch of waning summer,
took on now, by the magic of this sun, golden tones of red and yellow.
Woodpeckers hammered on the great trees along this path. Insects moved
between the branches, the wild bee, the hornet, the yellow butterfly, as
though the aerial life of the woods had been drawn here to the sun.

A man was coming through the forest along this abandoned path. He walked
slowly, his hands behind him, his head bare. He was a very young man--at
that period of life when, within a day, as by the crossing of some
unmarked line, the boy becomes a man. There was about him the vigor, the
freshness, the joy of youth, under a certain maturity. He was not above
middle height, his face was oval, his eyes gray-blue, his hair of that
soft rich brown which a touch of the sun burnishes into a living yellow;
the mouth was sensitive and mobile.

There was a marked contrast between the man and the wild, rugged,
primitive country in which he appeared. His hands were firm and white,
and his skin was not in the least discolored by sun or weather.

Now and then the man stopped and looked up at the dappled woodpeckers,
and the swarms of yellow butterflies, gathered here along this sunlit
path as though to welcome his arrival, and his mouth relaxed into an
eager, luminous smile, as though, despite his maturity, he retained a
child’s sense of some universal kinship with all living things. He came
down the long ridge toward the place where the mountain road crossed the
low gap.

Half a mile below him a patriarchal ox was plodding slowly up the
mountain road. The ox was old. His red hair was worn away in a variety
of places, by long labors at the sled and the plow. His ancient horns
were capped with brass knobs. Astride the ox sat a small boy on a sack
of corn, perhaps a bushel and a half shelled from the cob. Under the
sack was a strip of homemade carpet dyed yellow with copperas. The
little boy guided the ox with a piece of old rope tied to the left
horn below the brass knob, precisely as the driver of a four-horse team
directs it with a single line. When he wished the ox to go to the right,
he jerked the rope and shouted, “Gee, Berry,” when to the left, he
pulled on the rope and shouted, “Haw, Berry.”

But the ox no longer required these elaborate directions.

“Gee,”

“Haw,” accompanied by a kicking of the rider’s naked heels, were enough
for the patriarch, or the soft heels alone on the broad iron ribs.

The boy could not have been above six years old. He wore two garments, a
little blue shirt of the material called “hickory,” and short trousers,
with tiny hand-knitted woolen “galluses.”

He was now engaged with an extreme difficulty.

For more than a mile, under the ox’s rolling gait, the corn had been
moving over to one end of the sack. To keep the bag from falling, the
boy had added his weight to the decreasing end. As the corn moved, he
shifted his seat a little farther out on the sack. He sat now, well
over the ox’s side on the very end of the sack. His little mouth was
contracted.

It had been a long, painful struggle--this fight against the corn. Every
inch, every fraction of an inch, contested.

The grains had crept slowly over, and the child had considered and
estimated the change, and moved with it. He had attributed to the corn
a certain malicious intent, a certain insidious hostility, and he had
resisted with dogged courage. It was all in the set of his little mouth,
in the clutch of his tiny brown hand.

For the sack to fall was a calamity which the child well understood.

He could not lift the sack. He could not leave the ox and go for aid,
because Berry, although a member of the family, was an eyeservant and
not above making his dinner on the corn when the master’s back was
turned.

Neither could he leave the corn lying in the road and return with
the ox. Some one might carry it away and, besides, it was his bale of
stuffs, the cargo with which he had been intrusted, and he could not
leave it.

The mountain road was deserted and the evening sun was beginning to
descend.

The child’s whole energies were centered on his desperate struggle with
the corn, and the ox traveled on leisurely as he liked. Presently, as
he neared the top, the ox stepped on the root of a tree remaining in
the road, and his shoulder went down. The sack slipped forward and fell,
carrying with it the boy and the piece of carpet.

The ox instantly stopped, the boy rose and sat down on the sack, resting
his elbows on his knees and his chin in the hollow of his tiny brown
hands. His features retained their set, dogged expression, but presently
big tears began to trickle slowly down over his determined little face.
He sat with his back toward the mountain gap, locking out over the vast
wilderness of tree tops below him. The ox stood before him in the road,
a figure of unending patience.

The day waned, long shadows crossed the road, the sun withdrew to the
high places. Far away through the deep wooded gorges night began to
enter the mountains.



CHAPTER II


|WHEN the man came out into the mountain road, he saw the little boy
sitting on the sack of corn beside the red ox, and he smiled as he had
smiled at the hammering birds, at the yellow butterflies. He turned down
toward the tragic picture, lengthening his steps. The sun, by some trick
of the moving world, seemed to follow him out of the abandoned path.

The little boy did not see the man approaching, but he observed that the
ox, apparently resigned to passing the night on the mountain, was making
ready to lie down, knees first, after the manner of cattle. And the
comfortable assurance of Berry in this, the hour of their misfortune,
was more than he could bear. He arose and began to beat the ox with his
little fists.

“Git up, Berry!” he cried. “You ole dog! You ole scalawag! Git up!”

The ox slowly arose, and the child turned to find the man beside him.

“Poor Berry!” said the man, smiling. “Is he a very bad ox?”

“He’s a lazy ole pup,” replied the little hoy, his wet eyes catching
and reflecting the stranger’s smile. “He’s spilt!” Then he crowded his
little fists into his eyes to remove the traces of weakness with which
he had been taken unawares.

“Do you reckon,” he said, “that both of us could put the corn on him if
we lifted together?”

“I think so,” replied the man; “at least we will try.”

He took up the piece of yellow carpet and laid it over the ox’s back.
Then he stooped down, put his arms around the sack, linking his fingers
together under it. The little hoy took hold of the corner. The man
raised the sack with scarcely an effort, the child contributing his tiny
might. Then, as though the child’s help were essential to the task, he
nodded.

“Now,” he said, and with a swing lifted the sack onto the ox’s back.

The hoy straightened up, and put both little hands on his hips. His face
was now radiant.

“We got it up all right, didn’t we?” he said, “both a-liftin’; an’ now,”
 he paused and regarded the ox with some concern, “I’ve got to git on
somehow-er-nuther.” The ordinary man would then have lifted the child
and set him on the ox, but this man did not. He seemed to know and
regard that self-reliance which was so dear a thing to this child. He
stood back and looked over the patriarch.

“Berry is a big ox,” he said. “We will lead him up to the bank.”

The little boy walked across the road, with a bit of a swagger.

“Yes,” he said, “Berry’s a big ox.”

He liked this strange man who understood and considered him.

The man led the ox to the roadside, and standing by the beast’s
shoulder, set his knee against the bank. The little boy put his foot on
the man’s knee, caught hold of the ox’s shoulder, and climbed up onto
the sack of corn. He panted with the effort.

“Berry’s everlastin’ big,” he observed in comment. Then he set himself
squarely on the sack.

“We’re goin’ to mill,” he said. “Where are you goin’?”

“If you don’t mind,” replied the man, “I shall go along with you and
Berry.”

The tiny chest expanded.

“I don’t mind,” he said, “ner Berry don’t neither.”

Then, as a sort of condescension, as a sort of return for the man’s
kindness, he gravely handed down the bit of ancient rope.

“An’ you k’n lead Berry if you want to.”

They crossed the low gap and began to descend the mountain on the other
side. The man walked in front with the rope in his hand, the ox followed
with a slow, roiling gait, his head lowered, the child sitting astride
the sack of corn. The sun seemed to linger on the crest of the mountain
as though loath, now, to withdraw wholly from the world, a vagrant
breeze began to move idly in the tree tops, a faint haze to gather over
the forests, below the sun, as though it were some visible odor arising
from the earth.

The road was steep and rough, low stumps and the roots of trees remained
in it, and it was washed out in great ruts. The winter rain had carried
the loose earth out of it and left the stones and the tree roots
uncovered. A modern vehicle could hardly have kept together on such a
road, although it bore the marks of wheels where the mountaineer had
gone over with his wagon.

The little boy sat regarding the man who walked before him in the road.
He seemed not to have felt with this man that fear of the stranger which
is so strong an instinct with a child. From the first moment he had been
wholly at his ease. He spoke without restraint.

“Where’s your hat?” he said.

The man paused, and put up his hand as though he had not until this
moment realized that he was bareheaded.

A note of distress came into the child’s voice.

“You’ve lost your hat. Are you goin’ back to look for it? ‘Cause me an’
Berry can go on to the mill by ourselves.”

“No,” said the man, “I shall go on with you and Berry.”

“But you ain’t got no hat,” the child continued.

“Perhaps I shall find one somewhere,” replied the man.

“No,” said the child, “you won’t never find one, ‘cause nobody don’t
lose their hats up here. You’ll have to buy one at the store.”

Then he went on to tell of all the wonderful things that the store
contained: Striped candy in sticks in a big glass jar, and fishhooks,
and sea grass fishin’ lines, and guns, and pistols, and knives. But
principally knives. Upon this particular topic he spoke with deep
personal interest. In that place of wonders were knives with six blades,
with “peraly” handles, with gimlets and tweezers in them, little knives
that one could hide between one’s fingers and big ones with a ring in
the handle so one could tie them to his “galluses.” And Barlows with IXL
on the blade.

He paused and thrust his hand into his pocket. He had one that his
grandfather had given him at Christmas, and he held it up--a Barlow with
a bone handle and a single blade.

The man stopped and came back to the ox’s shoulder. He took the knife
and examined it carefully, opened it and tried the edge on his thumb.
The blade was round and blunt at the end. The child explained this with
an air of apology.

“Gran’-pap was afraid I’d run it in my eye, so he grinded it off. Have
you got a knife?”

The man felt in his pockets.

“No,” he replied, “I don’t seem to have a knife.”

“Well,” said the little boy, “you can git one when you go to git your
hat.”

The man walked on by the ox’s shoulder, and the child continued to talk.
There were difficulties to be met. The store was very far away, and one
required money to obtain its treasures. The getting of money was a very
troublesome affair. But he knew a way or two by which the thing could
be accomplished. One could gather hickory nuts or one could dig ginseng.
The latter method was to be advised--a pound brought a dollar and
seventeen cents. But it must be dried. One strung it on a string and
hung it over the fireplace. The storekeeper would not take it green.

He spoke a word of comment concerning the storekeeper.

He was hard to fool. He always broke the ginseng roots to see if there
was a nail concealed inside. The child knew a man who had outwitted the
storekeeper once by putting shot in the ends of the root, leaving the
middle unmolested; but, he added, that was “no way to do.”

The road on this side of the mountain was steep. The turns short. The
little party soon reached the foot, and came out into a valley, cleared
and sowed in timothy grass. Through this valley, between sodded banks,
ran a dark-colored, swiftly flowing stream.

The road followed the stream through the meadow until it approached the
mill. There the stream descended swiftly over ridges of sandstone into a
dam of ancient logs. The mill sat beside the road, its roof projecting,
its porch raised above the ground, its door and its gable open, its
entrance coated with white dust.

The machinery was of the simplest, two stone burrs turned by a paddle
wheel; the water carried down from the dam in a boxed sluice, covered
with green moss.

The mill evidently served two uses.

There was a second door to one-half of it, also opening on the porch,
and through the open door one could see a stove, a bed, a well-scrubbed
table.

As the man leading the red ox approached, a woman appeared in the mill
door. She was a sturdy woman of middle life, her calico dress pulled
up in front and girded around her ample waist with an apron string. Her
sleeves were rolled to the elbows, and her fat, powerful hands rested on
her hips. Her mouth was compressed, the muscles of her jaws protruded,
her bright gray eyes rested on the strange man with a profound, unmoved
scrutiny. When the ox stood beside the porch, the man spoke.

“Good evening,” he said.

The woman did not reply, she jerked her head; then she came slowly out,
still looking at the man.

“Jump off, David,” she said to the boy; then she took up the sack with
ease, swung it into the hollow of her arm, and went with it into the
mill, But over her shoulder she continued to regard the man standing in
the road.

She threw the sack down by the hopper, and came again into the mill
door. Her fat hands returned to her hips and her eyes went again to the
man. But she spoke to the boy.

“You’ll be late gittin’ home.”

“I ain’t goin’ home,” replied the child. “I’m goin’ to Uncle Jimmie’s,”
 and he pointed his linger up the valley.

“You can make that by dark.” said the woman, “but you better be movin’
along.”

She came out and spread the piece of carpet on the ox. The small boy
stepped off the mill porch and went out into the road behind the man,
where a flat rock lay in the dust.

He remained a moment squatted down on his bare legs. Then he returned,
climbed onto the ox, and set out up the valley, kicking his heels
against the patriarch’s ancient ribs.

At the bend of the road, the boy stopped and shouted. The man turned
about where he was standing. The boy pointed his finger.

“There’s somethin’ under that rock,” he called.

Then he swung around on his piece of carpet, spoke to the ox, and was
swallowed up in the shadows of the valley.

The man stooped down and turned the fiat stone over. There lay the
Barlow knife.

The woman, watching the man, suddenly brought her bent palm to her
forehead and looked up at the mountain, to see if some stray bit of the
setting sun had entered the valley. But there was nothing.

Night had descended.



CHAPTER III

|THE man stood out in the road looking toward the south. The country
under his eye was primitive. The mountains rose in benches, heavily
wooded. On one of these benches stood a log house to be seen among the
trees, faintly, where the mountain road passed. Behind it, far away, a
strip of green lay like a cloth across the very top of the mountain--a
bit of farm in which two immense hickory trees stood like pillars. These
trees must have been gigantic, since at the great distance they were to
the eye huge. The man standing in the road seemed to be considering this
country. His face was lifted and, in repose, melancholy.

The woman continued to regard the men standing in the road. Finally she
spoke, swinging her body a moment on her sturdy legs.

“You’re the new School-teacher, I reckon.”

The man replied, without moving.

“Yes,” he said.

“You’re a little behindhand.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve come a good piece to-day, I reckon.”

“A long way.”

The woman took her fat right hand from her hips, and began to brush the
skirt of her calico dress, although there was nothing on it to remove.

“Well,” she said, “you better come in and git your supper.”

The man turned and faced the woman.

His features appeared by a powerful effort to exclude something which
he wished not to show and had been until this moment not wholly able to
conceal.

“You are very kind,” he said. “I am hungry.”

“Just set down on the porch.” said the woman. “We’ve had our supper, but
I’ll git you a bite.”

The man came over and sat down, his hands idly on his knees, his face
looking out toward the mountains. The woman began her preparations for
the stranger’s meal. She entered the room where the wooden table stood,
crossed to a cupboard, opened it and took out some dishes. These she
began to put on the table. Then she stopped and stood with her hands
resting on her hips. A moment later she removed the dishes, went over
to a chest, standing in the corner, lifted the lid, took out a clean
homespun linen cloth, and spread it over the table.

As she moved about she talked.

“When are you goin’ to begin school?”

“Monday morning,” replied the man. “Word ought to be sent ‘round.”

“I think the children will come.”

“They’ll come when they know it, an’ they’ll know it purty soon; news
travels powerful fast. We looked for you yesterday.”

“Yes.”

“Somethin’ kept you back, I s’pose.”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s allers somethin’ to happen. You won’t have much of a
school, I expect. The big boys have all gone off to the sawmills, an’
the big girls are helpin’ with the work. It’s a mighty busy time.”

“I would rather have the little children.”

“They’re a heap of bother.”

“I don’t think I shall mind the bother.”

“Don’t you? Most people do. They’re harder to teach than the big ones,
ain’t they?”

“I think they are easier to teach.”

“Do you? What makes you think they’re easier to teach?”

“They understand me better,” replied the man.

The woman had taken down an old glass bowl with a notched glass cover
from the top shelf of the cupboard, rinsed it with water, wiped it
carefully and set it on the table. In this she had placed a comb of red,
mountain honey. She continued to talk.

“I want Martha to go to school. She’s a-goin’ on nine. I can’t spare her
very well, but I don’t want to keep her back. She saves me a good many
steps. She’s gone after the cow. She ought to be comin’.”

The woman was busy at the stove.

“I don’t see why a cow can’t learn somethin’, can’t learn to come home
at night, anyway. Everything else learns to come home at night. Ketch a
dog forgittin’ it. I ‘spose old Bloss has gone as fur as she could git,
an’ you can’t allears hear the bell. But Martha’ll find her.”

The woman came from the stove to the table.

“Martha can read, an’ she can spell out of the spellin’ book. She’s real
smart.”

A stone jar sat on a bench in the corner of the room, beside it was a
yellow gourd with a long handle, the bowl of the gourd cut out to form
a dipper. The woman got a plate out of the cupboard. A very old plate,
somewhat chipped, with quaint little flowers painted on it in bright
colors. The plate had not been used for a long time. It was covered with
white dust. She carried the plate over to the jar, dipped up some water
with the gourd, and holding the plate over a bucket, poured on the
water, then she polished the plate carefully with a cloth and set it on
the table. Her conversation continued.

“The schoolhouse is old, but it’s got a good roof on it. It’ll turn the
weather. Ole man Dix put that roof on three years ago. The clapboards
are all smoothed with a drawin’ knife. He was so slow that it made you
tired jest to see him workin’, but he done a good job. He used to have a
savin’ that he got out of the Bible--when you made fun of him for bein’
so slow. He must have heard it in meetin’. He couldn’t read. But I’ve
heard him say it over an’ over a thousand times, I reckon--‘He that
believeth shall not make haste.’ I don’t know what he believed. I know
he was never paid nothin’ for puttin’ on the roof.”

“How do you know that he was not paid?” said the man.

“I know it very well,” said the woman. “He was dyin’ of the janders all
the time. He sawed the comb of the roof the very day before he went.”

The iron skillet on which the woman was baking cakes, overheated, at
this moment caught fire. She lifted it from the stove, blew out the
flame, and turned the cake with a deft twist of her hand.

Engaged with the pancakes for the man’s supper, her conversation became
a monologue.

She reviewed the families living in the mountains, enumerated the
children, named them, classed them as good or bad with a few clear
strokes and attached the history of their ancestors, running on, as she
moved about. Then, when she had finished, she got a little yellow bowl
from the cupboard and came with it in her hand to the door.

“I wonder what’s keepin’ Martha,” she murmured.

At the door she came near to dropping the bowl out of her hand in her
astonishment. A little figure in a red calico sun-bonnet sat beside the
man on the mill porch; close beside him in the gloom of the descending
night.

“Goodness!” said the woman. “How you skeered me. When did you git back?”

The child arose, laughing. In the darkness only the bonnet, the short
dress, the little white legs were visible.

“While you were talkin’, Mother,” she replied.

“Bless my life!” said the woman. “I didn’t hear you.” She handed the
child the bowl. “Run along to the spring house and git some butter.”

The woman went back into the room, got a tallow candle, squeezed it
into an old brass candlestick, and set it on the table. In a moment
the little girl returned with the butter. She regarded the table for a
moment, then she removed the old blue plate, drew out from under the
bed a store box with a lid fastened with leather hinges--evidently her
private chest--took out a plate, washed it with boiling water from the
teakettle, and set it on the table. It was a little, cheap, porcelain
plate with the letters of the alphabet raised around the rim. The woman
watched the child with a certain smiling condescension. Then she went to
the door, wiped her hands on her apron, stood back by the doorpost, and
spoke to the man.

“Now,” she said, “if you’ll come in to supper.”

The man got up, came into the room, and sat down at the table. Before
him on the clean linen cloth were honey, brown corncakes, and a goblet
of milk. The light of the candle seemed to gather and illumine his face;
and curiously to bring out in his brown hair those touches of living
yellow which the sun had so strikingly indicated on this afternoon.
And more curiously, too, there was no stain of travel, no evidence of
fatigue on the man. Instead of it, there was an abiding glow of fresh,
vital, alluring youth.

The woman moved about, setting the room in order, the little girl stood
by the man’s chair.

Presently the woman finished and came over to the table, bringing with
her a heavy, hickory, split-bottom chair. She stopped, snuffed the
candle, and then sat down opposite the man. Her hands, as though
accustomed to constant occupation, wandered to the table, smoothed
the cloth by stretching the two corners, flicked away invisible dust.
Finally she spoke.

“You’re goin’ to board around, I ‘spose.”

“No,” replied the man, “I’m going to stay at Nicholas Parks’ house.”

The woman dropped her hands into her lap. Her mouth opened with
astonishment.

“Not with ole Nicholas!” she said. “Why, the devil couldn’t live with
ole Nicholas! He’s the meanest man that ever drawed the breath of life!
He wouldn’t give you a meal’s vittels if it was to save you from dying!”

She arose to her feet.

“Dear me!” she said, “that won’t do at all.” She walked about the room
moving articles of furniture, and crumpling her apron in her fat hands.
Finally she came back to the table.

“It ain’t cold,” she said, “an’ if you could sleep in the mill loft, you
could stay right here with us.”

She hastened to explain.

“You could help me grind on Saturdays--that’s the busiest day, an’
maybe, if you’re handy with tools, you could patch up the mill some. The
wheel needs a new paddle, an’ you could board up the loft, an’ you could
put in some steps.”

The man listened.

“Yes,” he said, “I can work with tools; I will do these things for you.”

“Then you’ll stay,” said the woman.

“I am sorry,” replied the man, “but I cannot stay.”

The woman sat down in her chair.

“How you’ll git on with ole Nicholas, I don’t see,” she said.

“He will not be there,” said the man.

“Not be there!” the woman repeated.

“No,” replied the man, “he is going away.”

The woman’s face became, on the instant, incredulous.

The little girl, standing beside the man, saw it and shook her head. The
woman, her mouth open, her chin lifted, marked the signal and respected
it. She dropped her hands into her lap.

“Well!” she said, and after a moment, to establish her composure, “you
can’t go on to ole Nicholas’ to-night,--it’s dark now.”

“I am going to the schoolhouse tonight,” replied the man.

“You’re more’n welcome to stay with us,” said the woman, “if you’ll
stay.”

The man had now finished his supper, and he rose.

“I know that,” he said, “you are very kind to me.”

The woman got up and went to the door.

“Dear me,” she said, “I hate to see you goin’ out in the night.”

The man stopped to kiss the little girl.

“I don’t mind the night,” he said. “I have some things to do.”

“The schoolhouse will need cleanin’ up,” said the woman, “an’
to-morrow’s Sunday. I ought to a-helped you clean it.”

“You have already helped me more than you realize,” replied the man. “If
I need further help, another will help me.”

Then he went down into the road. There was no moon, but under the
brilliant stars, the road became a vague white way, leading the stranger
up into the deeps of the forest.

The woman remained standing in the door. Presently the little girl
spoke.

“Mother,” she said, “the Teacher has no clothes, he didn’t even have a
little bundle.”

The woman came back to the table. She stood a moment with her hand
resting on her hip.

“That’s so,” she said. “I reckon he didn’t bring any. Carryin’ things
gits powerful tiresome, when you come a long ways.”

Then the dominant quality in the woman--the instinct to find a resource
for every condition that arose, moved her. She went over to the
fireplace, above which, on the high mantel shelf sat an ancient clock.
She stood on her tiptoes, opened the clock door, and took out a little
brass key, then she crossed to the foot of the bed, stooped and dragged
a little old horsehide trunk out into the floor. She fitted the key into
the lock, but it was rusted and would not turn. The trunk had not been
opened for many years. She came back to the table and rubbed the key
with melted tallow from the candle.

“There are some fine shirts in that trunk that we could give him,” she
said. “Your grandma give them to your pap at our infair. She made them
herself. But he never wore them. He said, they was too fine to skuff
out. An’ they’ve laid there for ten years. They’re a heap too big for
the Teacher. Your pap was twice as big as he is. But I can cut off the
sleeves and take up the neckband, so he can wear them. They’re good
linen. Your grandma was mighty handy.”

The little girl had removed the dishes from the table, while the woman
was opening the trunk. She now came and held the horsehide lid, while
her mother searched for the articles. Finally the woman found the
shirts. She found also, at the bottom of the trunk, a folded piece of
linen, as though that one making the shirts had used only a portion of
her material.

“Well, upon my word,” she said, “if here ain’t a big piece that your
grandma didn’t make up.”

She brought the shirts over to the table where the candle stood. She
regarded them with surprise and admiration.

“Bless my life, they’re nice,” she said, “not a yaller spot on them.”

A moment she stood in rapt appreciation of the beautiful, snowy linen.
Then she caught up one of the shirts and spread the neckband with her
fingers.

“Well! Upon my soul!” she said. “Upon my soul!”

She held the shirt up and measured it from shoulder to shoulder, and
from the neckband to the wrist.

“Why, they’ll fit him! They’ll fit him just as good as if they’d been
made for him. If that don’t beat all! Your pap was over six feet, and
long armed. Now, how in the name of common sense did your grandma ever
make such a mistake? It ain’t like your grandma--she always sewed by
pinnin’ and measurin’.”

The little girl was not listening. She had gone out onto the mill porch.
She now spoke, but not in reply to these exclamations.

“There are lights up at the schoolhouse, Mother.”

The woman, still under her surprise, replied without looking up.

“I reckon the Teacher’s cleanin’ the schoolhouse.”

“But the lights look like they went up an’ down through the tree tops.”

“I suppose he’s carryin’ water down from the spring on the mountain,”
 replied the woman, still bending over the shirts that lay spread out on
the table.



CHAPTER IV


|AT SUNRISE the following morning, a man riding a lean bay horse came
down the mountain road toward the mill. His left hand was deformed, as
though from infancy. The fingers doubled in against the wrist. He held
the bridle rein, tied in a knot, over the crook of his arm. He was a big
man and he sat in the saddle as though more accustomed to that seat than
to any other. The horse traveled in a running walk. He turned into
the little valley and approached the mill. The miller was feeding her
chickens in the road before the door, throwing out handfuls of yellow
corn. The man called to her before the horse stopped.

“Have you got enough of that corn for a horse-feed, Sally?”

The woman turned, scattering the chickens.

“Bless my life,” she said, “it’s the doctor. Where you been?”

“Up there,” he replied, jerking his deformed arm toward the summit of
the mountain where lay the bit of farm, marked by the gigantic trees.

“Is ole Nicholas sick?” said the woman. “He ain’t sick now,” replied the
doctor. “You cured h’m, did you?”

“No, I didn’t cure him,” said the doctor, getting down from his horse;
“they were dyin’ in Hickory Mountain before I come into it, an’ they’ll
keep on a-dyin’ after I’ve gone out.”

He lifted his leather saddlebags down from the horse and carried it
across to the mill porch.

The woman remained standing in the road, her closed hand full of corn,
the yellow grains showing between her fingers.

“You arn’t tellin’ me ole Nicholas is dead!”

“Yes, he’s dead,” said the doctor. “New get me a gallon of corn; that
horse ain’t had a bite to eat since yesterday evening.”

He went across the road, picked up a box, knocked the dust out of it
and brought it over by the mill porch. Then he took the bit out of
the horse’s mouth, and put the bridle rein over the saddle, under the
stirrup leather.

“Ole Nicholas dead!” the woman repeated. “Well! Upon my word!”

“Why shouldn’t he be dead?” said the doctor. “Every damn thing’s got to
die.”

“What killed him?” inquired the woman.

“I don’t know what killed him,” replied the doctor. “He was stretched
out on the floor when I got there.”

“Did he die just like anybody else?” said the woman.

“No,” answered the doctor, “he didn’t die like anybody that I ever saw.
Will you get me that corn?”

The woman went into the mill and presently came out with the toll
measure full of corn. She poured it into the box. Then she sat down
on the porch beside the doctor, and began to roll the end of her apron
between her fat fingers.

“When did ole Nicholas take down?” she began.

“I don’t know that,” said the doctor. “Jonas Black was crossing the
mountain about noon, an’ old Nicholas called to him and told him to tell
me to come and see him. I went up last night.”

“It’s a wonder you went,” said the miller. “Ole Nicholas wouldn’t pay
you, would he?”

“If he didn’t pay me, I wouldn’t go,” replied the doctor, “you can
depend on that. I’ve quit bringin’ ‘em in or seein’ ‘em out unless I get
the cash in my hand.”

“I didn’t think he had any money. He was always buyin’ wild lands of the
State.”

“I don’t know how much money he had,” replied the doctor, “but I do know
that it was always there on the table for me when I went. If it hadn’t
a-been, I wouldn’t have darkened his door.”

“Did he die hard?” said the woman. “Everybody dies hard,” replied the
doctor.

“Did he want to go?”

“None of us want to go.”

“How long did he live after you got there?”

“He lived until daylight.”

“You must have had a bad night of it.”

“It was awful!”

“It must a-been terrible if you thought so. You are used to seein’
people die.”

“I’m not used to seein’ them die like old Nicholas died,” replied the
doctor. “He must a-been in powerful pain.”

“It wasn’t so much pain. I could stop the pain.”

“Was he out of his head then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Couldn’t you tell by the way he talked?”

“He didn’t talk.”

“Did he see things?”

“I don’t know what he saw.”

“What was it that made his dyin’ so awful?”

“It was _fear_,” replied the doctor,

“That he’d be lost?”

“No,” said the doctor, “that he’d die before he could tell me something
that he was tryin’ to tell me.”

“Goodness! Was he tryin’ to tell you somethin’ all night?”

“All night,” said the doctor.

The woman sat for a moment in silence, her fat hands clasped together in
her lap, the muscles of her face tense, her eyes fixed on the mountain,
then she spoke. “Did he ever tell you?”

“Yes.”

“Was it somethin’ he’d done?”

“N,” replied the doctor, “it was not anything he’d done.”

“What was it?”

“I did not understand it,” replied the doctor.

The woman rose.

“Good Lord!” she said, “a man on his deathbed a-trying all night to tell
you somethin’ an’ then you didn’t understand it!”

“No, I didn’t understand it,” said the doctor. “He kept
whisperin’--‘He’s comin,’ he’s comin’. He’s to have my things,’ an’ I
kept askin’ him if he meant some of his kin folks, but he always shook
his head. I never saw a man in such mortal agony to speak. Finally just
before he died, he got it out. He said, ‘The Teacher.’ Now, what did he
mean?”

“I know who he meant,” replied the woman, “he meant the School-teacher.”

“What School-teacher?”

“Why, the new School-teacher, the one that come last night. He was goin’
to stay with Nicholas.”

The horse had now finished with his breakfast, the doctor got up.

“I didn’t know you had a Schoolteacher,” he said.

He went over to the horse, put the bit into its mouth, took up his
leather saddle-hags and thrust his foot into the stirrup.

“See here, Sally,” he said, “old Nicholas wanted me to get up at his
funeral and say that he had left everything to the ‘Teacher.’ I suppose
he meant this new School-teacher. I told him I’d see to it. Now, I don’t
want to come back here; couldn’t you do it? The country will likely
gather up and bury him this afternoon.”

He swung up into the saddle and hooked the bridle rein over his crooked
arm.

“Yes, I’ll do that,” said the woman. The doctor clucked to his horse,
and disappeared down the little valley; his arm rising and falling with
the regular motion of the swinging walk.

The woman remained standing in the road, her hands spread out on her
hips. She had suddenly remembered that the guest of last night had said
that Nicholas Parks was going away!

At noon the miller and her little girl set out up the mountain.

They did not go by the road that wound tortuously through the forest to
the summit. They followed a path that ascended more directly, crossing
the road now and then, and climbing up steep ascents to the top, where
it ended in the road running along the high ridge, through the little
mountain farm.

The farm was inclosed on either side by a rail fence. Below it was a
cornfield of several acres, above a bit of fertile meadow, in which, on
the very ridge, stood two gigantic trees lifting their branches eighty
feet into the sky.

A dozen paces of beautiful green turf lying between the great
shellbarks.

Farther out stood a log house with a clapboard roof and a chimney built
halfway up with stone and finished with crossed sticks, daubed with
yellow clay. Behind it was a garden inclosed with palings split out of
long cuts of hickory timber. Midway between the garden and the house,
opposite the door, was a whitewashed well curb. From a long pole,
suspended in a forked tree on a round locust pin, hung a sapling
fastened to a bucket. Everything about the little farm was well kept.
The chimney and the palings were whitewashed, the fence was well laid
up, the bit of land was clean. Midway in the meadow, a path entered
through wooden bars and ran along inside the rail fence to the house.

There was a little crowd of some half dozen men standing about these
bars, when the woman and child came up.

The woman stopped in the road.

“What are you all standin’ around for?” she said.

The men did not immediately reply. Finally one of them answered.

“We’re waitin’ for the preacher to come.”

The woman looked at the apparently vacant house. The door open. The sun
lying on the threshold.

“There’s a-plenty to do, till he gits here,” she said. “Somebody’s got
to dig a grave, an’ somebody’s got to make a coffin.”

The man leaning against the bar post, who had spoken for the others, now
jerked his head toward the meadow’.

“It’s dug,” he said.

The woman looked in the direction he indicated; a pile of fresh earth
lay heaped up in the meadow’, not between the two trees, but below’
them, some paces from the summit.

“Well,” said the woman, “you didn’t pick out the place I’d a picked; I’d
a put it on the ridge between them two trees, that’s the natural place
for it, there couldn’t be no grander place. Who did you think you was
savin’ that place for? It looks like you was puttin’ ole Nicholas so
he’d be at the foot of somebody else that you was a-goin’ to bury.”

“We didn’t pick the place,” said the man.

“Who done it?”

“We don’t know who done it, the grave was dug when we got here.”

The conversation was interrupted by the little girl.

“There comes the preacher,” she said.

The woman turned and looked down the road in the direction from which
she had just come.



CHAPTER V

|A MAN driving a country buggy was approaching. He was a tall, spare
man, in a suit of black ready-made clothes that seemed not to fit him in
any place, and to be a cheap imitation of a clergyman’s frock suit.
He wore cotton gloves. At his feet was a shiny handbag made of some
inexpensive material to imitate alligator skin. His hair and his heavy,
drooping mustache were black. His face was narrow, the cheek bones high,
the mouth straight. One of the man’s eyes was partly grown over with
a cataract, and his effort to see equally with that eye gave him a
curious, squinting expression. He pulled up on the roadside, got out,
tied his horse to a fence rail with one of the lines, took out his
handbag, and came over to the little group waiting by the bars.

“Good evening, brethren,” he said. “The doctor told me that Nicholas
Parks had been called to his account, so I came up to give him Christian
burial.”

“He died sudden, I guess,” replied one of the men.

“It’s God’s way,” said the preacher. “The sinner is taken in the
twinkling of an eye.”

He drew off his cotton gloves and put them into his pocket.

“Have any preparations been made for the burial?” he inquired.

“The grave’s dug,” said one of the men.

“How about the coffin?”

“We don’t know about the coffin, we haven’t been to the house.”

“Is any one up at the house?”

“We think the new School-teacher’s up there. Little David went up to
see, but he ain’t come back.”

“I didn’t know the new School-teacher had come.”

“He got here last night,” said the miller.

“What kind of a man is he?”

“He’s a man that the children will like,” replied the woman.

“Children,” said the preacher, “are not competent judges of men. Let us
go up to the house. Is he elderly?”

“I thought he was mighty young,” said the woman.

“The young,” replied the preacher, “are rarely impressed with the awful
solemnity of God’s commandments.”

“I think he’s a good man,” said the woman. “Martha loved him right away,
an’ I’d trust him with anything I’ve got.”

“Our Mother Eve trusted the serpent,” replied the preacher.

And he extended his right arm, the fingers stiffly together, the thumb
up.

“The youth of the community ought to be brought up in the fear of God.”

During the conversation, the miller’s little daughter had gone on to the
house.

Something vague, intangible, undefined had stopped the men in the road
below the house, and made them await the arrival of the preacher. But
that thing had not affected the children. The little boy David and this
child had gone on without the least hesitation.

The preacher threw down one of the pole bars and went through into the
meadow. The others followed him along the path to the house. As they
drew near they heard the voices of the children. At the threshold the
preacher stopped, and those behind him crowded up to look into the
house.

The door was open. The sun entering, filled the room with light.

On chairs in the middle of this room stood a coffin made of the odds
and ends of rough hoards, but marvelously joined. Beside it stood the
School-teacher, and at either end was one of the children; the three of
them were fitting a board on the coffin for a and, and they were talking
together.

When the minister entered, the Schoolteacher removed the board and laid
it down on the floor, and the two children, as by some instinct, drew
near to the man, on either side, and took hold of his hands.

They became instantly silent.

The minister went up to the chair, looked a moment into the coffin and
took his place at the head of it. The others followed.

The dead man lay in the rough box like one asleep. There was in his face
a peace so profound that the hard, mean, ugly features of this old man
seemed to have been remodeled under some marvelous fingers.

The minister, with his bad eye, seemed not to observe this
transfiguration, but the others marked it and crowded around the coffin.

The minister took out his watch, looked at it, and snapped the case.

“If you will find seats, we’ll begin the service,” he said. “The
stranger here seems to have made all necessary preparations for the
burial.”

The crowd drew back from the coffin, the School-teacher went and sat
in the doorway in the sun; the little boy standing up by his knees, the
little girl beside him on the doorstep.

The minister began a discourse on the horrors of an eternal hell.

But the attention of the audience moved past him to the man seated in
the door. The harmony, grouping the man and these two children, seemed
to enter and fill the room. A certain common sympathy uniting them, as
though it were the purity of childhood.

The man sitting in the door did not move.

He looked out toward the south over a sea of sun washing a shore of tree
tops. A vagrant breath of the afternoon moved his brown hair. He seemed
not to hear the minister, not to regard the service, but to wait like
one infinitely patient with the order of events.

When the preacher had finished, the miller, sitting in a chair by the
window, rose.

“Just before ole Nicholas died,” she said, “he made the doctor promise
to git up here at his funeral an’ tell everybody that he left all his
things to the Schoolteacher. The doctor couldn’t come back, so he asked
me to git up an’ tell it for him.”

The minister turned toward the woman.

“Left his property to this stranger?”

“Yes,” said the woman, “he tried all night to tell the doctor, an’ he
was mortally afeard that he would die before he could tell it.”

The School-teacher was now standing in the door. Beside him, and framing
in his body, dust danced in the sun, making a haze of gold.

The minister addressed him.

“Why did Nicholas Parks leave his possessions to you?”

The School-teacher did not reply.

He went over to the coffin, lifted the lid and began to fit it on the
box. The men standing around the room came forward and took the coffin
up. They carried it out of the house, their hands under the bottom of
it. The preacher picked up his satchel and followed. Outside he stopped,
pointed to the grave in the meadow, and spoke to the School-teacher.

“You didn’t put that grave where old Nicholas wanted it. He wanted to be
buried on the top of the ridge between those two trees. It was a place
he had picked out. He told me so at the last quarterly meeting.”

The School-teacher lifted his face and looked at the two great hickories
marking the spot on the summit of the little meadow. His eyes filled
with melancholy shadows, the smile deepened and saddened about his
mouth. But he did not reply.

Then he walked away to where the two children stood, some distance from
the path.

The minister followed the coffin to the grave, but the School-teacher
went with the two children through the meadow to the spot of green
between the two hickories. He sat down there in the deep clover, the
children beside him. Below came the sound of the earth on the coffin,
and the high-pitched nervous voice of the minister. The School-teacher
talked with the children.

After a while a shadow fell across the grass.

The minister was standing beside them. He had come up from the filled
grave and the carpet of the meadow had hidden the sound of his approach.
He spoke to the School-teacher.

“Do you think that you are old enough to teach the children the fear of
God?”

“I shall not teach them the fear of God.”

“Then I don’t see how you are going to give them any Christian
instruction.”

The man sitting among the deep clover blossoms, looked up at the
minister’s face.

“Isn’t there something growing over your eye?” he said.



CHAPTER VI

|THE School-teacher came out of the door of Nicholas Parks’ house.
It was early in the morning. Frost glistened on the rails of the worm
fence. The air was crisp and sweet.

There was a smell of faint wood smoke.

The door of the house was fastened with a wooden latch on the inside
from which a black leather string, tied in a knot, issuing from a worn
hole, hung on the outside of the door. The man drew the door close
and, pulling the string, dropped the latch into place. Then he left the
house, walking slowly.

In the direction that he moved there was no path. He crossed the little
meadow, south of the house, climbed the rail fence and entered the
forest. There was still no path, although the man moved like one who
followed land marks that he knew.

He descended through the forest for perhaps half a mile in the deep
leaves.

Then he came abruptly on a path that entered a little cove and continued
around a shoulder of the mountain. A spring of water issuing here from a
limestone strata trickled into a keg buried in the earth. On the broken
branch of a dogwood sapling, beside the spring, hung a mottled gourd.

The School-teacher stopped, dipped the gourd into the crystal water, and
drank.

At this moment three figures came into view along the path from
the opposite direction: a child about two years old, a woman, and a
rough-haired yellow dog.

The child came first. He walked with the uncertain tottering gait of
very little children. He wore a clean, white, muslin dress, a tiny apron
and cheap baby shoes, such as one sees hanging on a string over the
counter of mountain stores. He was a sturdy little boy, with soft yellow
hair, burnished at the tips like that of the School-teacher, and big
gray-blue eyes. He was laughing, stopping now and then to look back at
the dog following, and his mother; and then running along ahead.

The woman was young and slender. Her face, tanned by the weather, was
a deep olive. Her hair was black, lustrous and heavy, and hung down her
back in a thick plait. Her eyes were dark and big. The whole aspect of
the woman was that of one untimely matured, and permanently saddened.
Her blue dress was of a cheaper material than that of the child’s.

She carried a tin bucket with a wooden handle.

The woman and the dog stopped when they saw the School-teacher standing
by the spring. But the child greeted the stranger in his baby dialect.

“How-da-do man,” he said. He went on, the little feet tottering over the
uneven path. When he reached the Schoolteacher, he spoke again.

“Up-a-go,” he said.

The man stooped and lifted the child into his arms. The sunny smile that
lighted the baby face seemed to enter and illumine his own. Something
of it, too, moved into the face of the woman, but the cast there of
perpetual melancholy seemed loath to depart, as though the muscles were
unaccustomed to a change.

The child turned about in the man’s arms, and pointed his finger toward
two catbirds that were fluttering in a neighboring bush.

“Giggles,” he said.

The manner in which the woman’s big melancholy eyes followed every
motion of the little boy indicated how her heart enveloped him. He was
evidently her one treasure. The smile, struggling to possess the woman’s
face, seemed to descend and sweeten her mouth.

“He means them birds,” she said. “He’s got a kind a talk of his own.”

“I understand him perfectly,” said the man.

“Do you?” said the woman, the smile gaining in her face. “I thought
nobody could understand him but me. You must take to little children.”

“I love little children,” replied the School-teacher.

The child put his hand into the pocket of his apron and drew out a
battered toy--a cheap, little, painted, wooden toy, so broken and worn
that no one could tell what animal it was originally intended to
represent. He held it up for the Schoolteacher’s admiration.

“Gup,” he said.

“He means a horse,” the woman explained. “He’s heard folks down to the
mill say ‘git up’ to horses they was ridin’, an’ he thinks that’s the
name of it, but he’s got names of his own. Now he calls a bird an’ a
fish an’ a mouse a ‘giggle.’ I don’t know why. Because a bird ain’t like
a fish, an’ neither one of them ain’t like a mouse.”

“I believe I understand why he gives them all the same name,” replied
the School-teacher.

The woman came closer to the man and the child. Her eyes took on an
expression of deep inquiry.

“What do you reckon is the reason? I’ve thought about it often.”

“I think it’s because a bird, a fish and a mouse all appear to him to
have the same motion, to wiggle.”

The woman’s face cleared. “I never thought of that. I reckon that is it.
But now, he’s got names that ain’t like the things at all. Because he
calls milk ‘bugala’ and there ain’t no such word as ‘bugala.’ An’ if
it’s sour or anything he calls it ‘nim bugala.’”

The woman recalled with the word, the morning when, to wean him, she had
blackened her breast with charcoal, and the child had pushed away the
blackened breast with his little hand and said, “nim bugala.”

“And he calls everything else to eat ‘A B.’ Now why would he call milk
‘bugala’ an’ bread an’ butter ‘A B’?”

The School-teacher saw that this mystery attaching to the child was dear
to the woman, and he could not disturb it.

“Little children are very wonderful,” he said.

“They are wonderful,” the woman continued. “Just think of the things
they learn when they are real little.”

She jerked her head toward the dog remaining behind her in the road.

“Why, he learned Jim’s name when he was awful little. He called him
‘Nim’ an’ that’s purty near right.”

Her face again became deeply thoughtful.

“I’d like to know if his word ‘nim,’ like he says ‘nun bugala,’ has
anything to do with Jim’s name. It sounds like it, but I don’t see how
it could be, because ‘nim’ means something that he don’t like, an’ he
does like Jim. He’s powerful fond of Jim.”

The School-teacher thoughtfully considered the problem.

“It might be that he has watched you give Jim the things that you did
not want to eat yourself, and so he came to the conclusion that all such
food belonged to Jim. It would not mean that he did not like Jim. It
would only mean that the things that did not taste right to him ought to
be given to Jim. They were not good things, they were ‘nim’ things.”

The woman’s mouth opened.

“Dear me,” she said, “just think of him putting things together like
that, an’ him so little?”

Then she looked up at the man with a sort of wonder.

“Why, you understand him better than I do, an’ I’m his mother. Maybe
you’re married an’ got a little boy of your own.”

“I was never married,” replied the man.

“Then maybe you’ve got a little baby brother.”

“No.”

“Was there never any little children at your house?”

“My father’s house,” replied the School-teacher, “is full of little
children.”

“Just little children that he takes care of?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ve been with ‘em a lot.”

“I am always with them,” replied the School-teacher.

“I could a-told that,” said the woman, “by the way Sonny takes to you.
I could a-told that you was used to little children, an’ that you liked
them.” She indicated the tiny boy with a bob of the head. “He knows it
right away; babies and dogs allers knows it right away.”

She regarded the man for some minutes in silence. Then she spoke like
one come after thought to a conclusion.

“I ‘spose you’re the new School-teacher?”

“Yes.”

“An’ you’re goin’ down to the school-house now.”

“Yes.”

“Then if you’ll wait till I git a bucket of water, I’ll show you the way
down. The path goes out by our house.”

She went over to the spring and dipped the bucket into the keg. The dog
that had been lying down ‘n the path, his head lowered between his paws,
now craw led up to the man and began to lick his feet.

The little boy looked down and shook his tiny fist at the dog.

“Ge-out, Nim!” he said.

The woman rose with the bucket of water.

“You don’t have to carry him,” she said, “he can walk real well.”

“I would rather carry him,” replied the School-teacher.

And he followed the woman along the path, the dog at his heels.

They turned the shoulder of the ridge and came out on a flat bench of
the mountain. Here stood a little cabin, built of logs and daubed with
clay. It was roofed with rough clapboards. Before it was a porch roofed
like the cabin. The door, swinging on wooden hinges, stood open. On
the puncheon floor was a piece of handmade carpet--a circular mat,
hand-plaited out of rags, a primitive cradle with wooden rockers, a bed
covered with a pieced quilt, a rough stone fireplace, an iron pot with
a lid and a black iron kettle. On the porch stood a split-basket full
of beans in the hull, and beside the basket two chairs, the seats of
plaited hickory bark. One of them was very small, a chair in miniature,
made for the little boy. Near the path was an ax, a hacked log and some
lighter limbs of trees, such as a woman might carry in from the forest.
Beside the chimney was a primitive hopper made of clapboards, holding
wood-ashes, and under this was a broken iron pot in which lye, obtained
from the ashes by pouring water on it, dripped.

Beyond the cabin was a bit of garden and a little cornfield, where the
ripened corn stood in yellow shocks bound with grapevines. The shocks
were small, such as a woman could reach around. About, on the bench,
were a grove of sugar trees, scarred with the marks of an auger, and
among them, here and there, a great hickory. Beyond the grove one heard
the faint tinkling of a bell where a cow moved in the forest.

The woman set the bucket of water on the porch and turned to take the
child.

“Come, sonny.”

The little boy drew back in the man’s arms.

“No,” he said.

“But, sonny,” the woman continued, “the Teacher’s goin’ away down the
road.”

“Baby go wif him down woad.”

The woman coaxed, “Won’t sonny stay with Jim and mother?”

“Nim an’ muvver go woad.”

“No,” said the woman, “Jim an’ mother ain’t goin’ down the road. Will
sonny go an’ leave Jim an’ mother?”

The little boy looked over the man’s shoulder at the rough-haired yellow
dog. Jim was his housemate and his brother. A decision was a sore trial,
but he finally made it. He turned about in the man’s arms.

“Baby go woad,” he said.

The man now entered the conversation. “Let him go with me.”

“But he’s too little to go to school.”

“He is not too little to go with me.”

“But he’ll bother you, won’t he?”

“No, he will not bother me. He will help me.”

“He can’t help you.”

“Yes, he can help me.”

“I don’t see how he can help you.”

“He will remind me of the little children in my father’s house.”

“Keep you from gettin’ homesick?”

“Yes,” replied the School-teacher, “that is it. He will keep me from
getting homesick.”

“Well,” said the woman, “if I let him go, you’ll take care of him, won’t
you?”

“I will surely take care of him.”

“An’ you’ll bring him back before sundown.”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’ll be powerful lonesome, but I reckon I can finish gatherin’
the beans. I will fix him somethin’ to eat. You can put it in your
pocket.”

The woman went into the house, got a flat bottle, such as a cheap sort
of liniment is sold in at the mountain stores, scalded it out with water
and filled it with fresh milk. Then she cut some thin slices of a white
bread called “salt rising” and spread it with butter. She stopped with
the knife in her hand, considered a moment, and then cut two larger
pieces of bread, buttered them, and wrapped them all in a piece of
homespun linen towel. She went out to the man with the folded towel and
the bottle in her hand.

“Here’s his milk an’ here’s his bread. I put in two pieces for you.”

The man put the bottle and the bread into his pocket. The light of his
great gray-blue eyes deepened.

“You also thought of me,” he said.

“I didn’t see you carryin’ any dinner.” replied the woman, “an’ the
bread’s nice. I had powerful good luck yesterday. I don’t allers have
such luck, but everything turned out right with the bakin’ somehow.”

The men went on with the little boy in his arms, but the dog remained.
He sat miserably in the path, his tail moving in the leaves, his
eyes fixed on the woman’s face. For a time the woman, watching the
disappearing figures, did not notice the dog. Then she saw him, knew his
distress and spoke.

“You can go along, Jim,” she said.

The dog ran barking after the man and little boy. He overtook them and
went on ahead. At the point where the path entered the forest, the man
turned and looked back at the woman. She did not move, but the smile,
struggling all the morning to conquer her face, finally possessed it.

The School-teacher, the little boy and the dog continued to descend the
mountain. The child addressed every object with which he was familiar.
When they passed the brindle cow, cropping broom sedge beside the path,
he hailed it with a salutation..

“How-da-do, boo,” he sard.

Leaves, burning red with autumn color, he explained, were “dowers.”

Finally they came to the river, running shallow between the foot of
the mountain and the farther bench on which the school-house stood.
The child had not crossed this water, and he was afraid for the man to
attempt it. He put his little hand firmly on the man’s arm to stop him.

The School-teacher stopped, and the child considered this new and
unaccustomed peril. He sat studying the water, his restraining hand on
the man’s arm. Finally, the dog, growing impatient at the delay, entered
the river and began to wade across. The child removed his hand. His
fears were ended. The crossing was safe. He directed the man’s attention
to the proof of it.

“Nim walk in wat,” he said.



CHAPTER VII

|IN THE grove before the log schoolhouse, the Teacher was playing a game
with the children. It was a game in which every child to the tiniest
one could join. Two, standing opposite, with raised arms and the fingers
linked, formed a sore of arch, through which the others passed in a
circle, holding one another’s hands. They all sang as they marched some
verses of a mountain song, ending with the line, “An’ catch the one that
you love best.”

When the song came to this line, those forming the arch brought their
arms down over the head of the child passing at that moment, and he left
the circle and took the place of one of those forming the arch. As each
child wished to catch the School-teacher, the man remained standing
while the children changed.

The little boy David had just been caught. The child, standing with the
School-teacher, had taken his place. The circle had begun once more to
move, the song to rise, when the miller’s daughter, Martha, stopped,
disengaged her hand from the child before her and pointed to the road.

“There comes Sol an’ Suse. I wonder what’s the matter, for Sol’s got his
arm tied up.”

The School-teacher stood up and looked over the heads of the children.
A man was approaching. The sleeves of a red wammus were tied around his
neck, forming a sort of rude sling in which his right arm rested, held
horizontally across his breast. A woman, carrying a baby, was walking
beside him.

The School-teacher spoke to the little girl.

“Martha,” he said, “you and David take the children into the
schoolhouse, I am going out to meet these people.”

When the children had gone in, and the door was closed, the man went
down into the road. He waited there until the two persons approached.
He saw that both the woman and the man were young, the baby but a
few months old--a little family beginning to found a home in the
inhospitable mountain.

The man was evidently injured. The woman was in distress. Her eyes were
red. The muscles of her mouth trembled. The baby, in her arms, wrapped
in an old faded shawl, wailed.

The School-teacher spoke to the woman.

“What has happened?” he said.

“My man’s got hurt.”

“How was he hurt?”

“He was choppin’ in his clearin’, an’ his ax ketched in a grapevine,
an’ throwed him. I reckon his shoulder’s all broke. He can’t use his arm
none.”

The School-teacher addressed the man. “How does your arm feel?”

“I suppose the jint’s smashed.”

The tears began to run down over the woman’s face.

“I don’t see why we have such luck,” she said, “an’ just when we was
a-gittin’ sich a nice start. Now, he can’t work in his clearin’, an’ if
he don’t git his clearin’ done this winter, we won’t have no crop, an’ I
don’t know what’ll become of us.”

The man began to chew his lip.

“Don’ cry, Susie,” he said.

“Yes, I’ll cry,” replied the woman, “for here’s me an’ the baby with
nothin’, and you laid up.”

“Maybe I ain’t hurt so bad,” the man suggested.

The woman continued to cry.

“I know better’n that, you’re hurt bad.”

“Where were you going?” said the School-teacher.

“We were a-goin’ to the doctor,” replied the woman. “We thought we’d
make as far as the mill, an’ he could wait there, an’ I could git Sally
to keep the baby while I went after the doctor.”

“How far is it to the doctor?”

“It’s a-goin’ on fourteen mile from the mill, an’ that ain’t the worst
of it. He won’t come unless he gits the money, an’ we ain’t got no money
to throw away on a doctor.”

She opened her hand and disclosed a crumpled, greasy note.

“That there five-dollar bill is the very last cent that we’ve got. An’
when it’s gone I don’t know where we’ll git any more, with him hurt, an’
me with a little sucklin’ baby.”

The woman began to sob.

“I’m jist ready to give up.”

The School-teacher’s big gray-blue eyes filled with a kindly light.

“Don’t cry,” he said, “perhaps I can do something for your husband’s
shoulder.”

He went over to the man. What the School-teacher did, precisely, these
persons were never afterward able to describe. The event in their minds
seemed clouded in mystery. A wonder had been accomplished in the road,
in the sun, in the light before them, but they could not lay hold upon
the sequence of the detail. The voice of the School-teacher presently
reached them as from a distance.

“It’s all right now,” he said.

The man doubled the arm and extended it. The woman came running up.

“Kin you use it, Sol?”

The man continued to move the arm. “It ‘pears like I kin,” he said; “it
‘pears like it’s well.”

“Kin you use it good?”

“It ‘pears like I kin use it good as I ever could.”

“Well, sir!” ejaculated the woman, “if I hadn’t a seen it with my own
eyes, I wouldn’t never a-believed it.”

The School-teacher remained standing for a moment in the road after the
mountaineers had gone.

Then he went back to the children, waiting in the schoolhouse. He called
them out into the grove before the door, and took his place in the game,
bending over to hold the hands of the tiniest child. The circle began
once more to move. The song to rise.

“An’ catch the one that you love best.”



CHAPTER VIII

|IT WAS not the only adventure that the School-teacher was destined to
meet with on this day. As he was returning along the mountain road, with
the little boy on his shoulder, at the first ascent, beyond the river
crossing, he met two men in a buckboard. The horses were gaunt as from
hard usage. The man who drove them was known to the School-teacher. The
other was a big man with a heavy black beard. He sat leaning over in the
buckboard. His head down. His shoulders rising in a hump. He had gone
stooped for so long that the hump on his shoulders was now a sort of
permanent deformity.

They drew up by the roadside as the School-teacher approached. The big,
hump-shouldered man spoke, without taking the trouble to preface his
remarks with any form of salutation.

“Do you claim old Nicholas Parks’ estate?”

The School-teacher regarded him with his deep, tranquil, gray-blue eyes.

“It belongs to my father,” he said.

“Is your father related to old Nicholas?”

“No.”

“Has he got a deed from old Nicholas?”

“No.”

“Then how does he claim under him?”

“He does not claim under him. Nicholas Parks had his possession from my
father.”

“You mean that your father owned it first?”

“Yes.”

“Did he sell to Nicholas?”

“No.”

“Then how did old Nicholas come to own it?”

“He never owned it; my father permitted him to use it.”

“Then your claim is that old Nicholas was just a tenant for life.”

“Yes,” replied the School-teacher, “that was it, a tenant for life.”

“Did your father give Nicholas any writing?”

“No.”

“Did Nicholas pay anything for the use of the land?”

“No.”

“Did he ever recognize your father’s title while he was living?”

“No.”

“Then he never knew that your father owned these lands?”

“Yes,” replied the School-teacher, “in the end he knew it.”

“How did he know it, if he did not find it out while he was living?”

“He found it out while he was dying,” replied the School-teacher.

The big humpback looked out sidewise at the man standing in the road,
with the child on his shoulder, its little arm around his neck, its
little fingers on his face.

“Didn’t you come into these mountains about the time that old Nicholas
died?”

“On the very day that he died,” replied the School-teacher.

“I see,” said the humpback, “then he found it out through you.”

“No, man,” replied the School-teacher, “ever finds out anything about
the affairs of my father except he find it out through me.”

“Then you’re here to look after your father’s business?”

“Yes,” replied the School-teacher, “that is it, I am here to look after
my father’s business.”

“An’ so you moved in when old Nicholas died?”

“Yes.”

“I see,” said the humpback, “now I want to ask you another question.
These lands belonged to the state. Old Nicholas bought from the state,
and the state made him a deed. Do you contend that your father’s title
is older than that of the state?”

“Yes.”

The humpback compressed the muscles of his mouth and nodded his head
slowly.

“I see,” he said, “your father claims the lands of Nicholas Parks under
some old patent that gives him a color of title and he has sent you
here to get into possession. A color of title is not good at law without
possession. Well, I can tell you, the state’s not going to lie by and
allow you to acquire adverse possession. Old Nicholas Parks died without
heirs, and, by the law, his property escheats to the state. So you can
make up your mind to get off.”

He reached over, caught the whip out of its socket, and struck the
horses. They jumped and the buckboard went clattering down the mountain,
the wheels bouncing on the stones.

The little boy raised his hand and pointed his tiny finger at the
departing horses.

“Man hurt gups,” he said.

The School-teacher stood in the road watching the humpback lash the
half-starved team. His face was full of misery.



CHAPTER IX

|THE School-teacher had been helping the miller.

He had taken the shirts which she had offered to him, but he had refused
to put upon her the labor of making up the big piece of linen that
remained.

“Keep it,” he said, “until I need it.” All of Saturday he had been at
work mending the wooden water wheel. In the evening he set out to return
to Nicholas Parks’ house. He took the short way up the mountain. When
he came out on the great hickory ridge, the sun was not yet down. He
stopped where the path entered the two roads, one turning along the
ridge to his house, the other winding down the mountain, eastward,
toward the far-off lumber mills, sometimes faintly to be indicated by a
tiny wisp of smoke on the horizon.

There had been a gentle rain, and now under the soft evening sun the
earth seemed to recover something of the virility of springtime, as
though the impulse of life waning in the autumn were about to reconquer
its dominion. Here and there, in the moist earth, a little flower crept
out, as though tricked into the belief that it was springtime--a white
strawberry, a tiny violet.

The sap seemed about to move under the bark of the beech trees, the buds
to issue from the twigs.

In the forest the wren and the catbirds fluttered as under a nesting
instinct, the gray squirrels fled around the rough shellbark trees and
from one tree top to another, far off a pheasant drummed, and farther
off a mountain bull lowed as he wandered through the forest.

The road descending the mountain was decked out in color, banked along
its border with the poison ivy and the Virginia creeper, now a mass of
scarlet. Above the beech and hickory leaves were yellow, the clay of the
road below was yellow, and the soft sunlight entered and fused the edges
of these colors. The forest for this hour took on the ripe expectancy of
springtime.

The School-teacher stood where the path emerged from the forest

Presently from below him, beyond the turn of the road, a voice arose,
a voice full, rich and sensuous--a woman’s voice singing a song. It
carried through the forest, swaggering, defiant melody. The words could
not be determined. Indeed, there seemed to be no words. The song was a
thing of sounds--of tropical, sensuous sounds. As though all the love
calls of the creatures of the forest had been fused into one great,
barbaric symphony.

A moment later the singer came into view.

She was a young, buxom woman, and she walked, singing, in the middle
of the road, with a defiant swagger. Her hair was heavy and yellow like
wheat straw. Her lips, colored purple from the wild grapes which she had
been eating, were full, the under one drooping a little at the middle.
Her face was whitened with a cheap powder to be had at the village
store. Her bodice and her petticoat were of bright vivid colors. There
was a crimson handkerchief tied around her neck, a cheap glittering
bangle on her wrist, heavy, gilded earrings hanging in the lobes of
her ears, and at her throat a breastpin of jet set in a lattice work of
brass.

The School-teacher remained motionless. He watched the woman approaching
in the middle of the road, her body swinging loose in her swaggering
stride, and the full volume of her voice abandoned to her song.

She was halfway up the bend of the road before she realized that another
was within sound of her voice. Then she saw the School-teacher and
stopped.

The song ceased.

Her head went up and her eyes opened wide. She remained as though the
power to move had been on the instant stricken out of her. Her foot
advanced, her heel lifted, her mouth shaped to sing. Then, slowly, her
face changed to an expression of profound astonishment.

The School-teacher did not speak. He did not move. The sun descending
behind him slowly crept up the road to his feet, as though, bidden to
withdraw from the world, it were loath to leave him.

The woman’s face again changed. It became troubled. She moved now a few
steps closer, softly, on tiptoe. Then, suddenly, with a swift gesture,
she covered her face with her hands and burst into tears. Her body shook
as with a convulsion. The tears streamed through her fingers.

Until now the School-teacher had not moved. Now he came slowly along the
road to where she stood. As he approached, the woman sank down huddled
together, her face covered, her bosom heaving, her hands wet. He stood
before her in the road looking down at the bowed head.

“Poor child!” he said.

The woman continued to sob. The eyes of the School-teacher deepened with
a profound sorrow. He stooped over to put his hand on the coarse yellow
hair, redolent with a cheap perfume. But before the descending fingers
touched her, the woman sprang up and flew like a wild thing into the
forest.

The sun was now gone.

The tropical colors of the leaves, the vines, the yellow earth, departed
with it. The gray twilight began to descend. The School-teacher walked
slowly to the top of the ridge, and returned along the little meadow to
Nicholas Parks’ house. As he approached he saw a figure moving off down
the mountain along the rail fence.

When he came to the house he stopped.

There was a paper tacked on the door. He looked at it for a moment, but
he did not touch it. The four corners of the paper were doubled under
and a tack at each end held it. He pulled the worn leather string,
lifted the wooden latch and went in, leaving the paper fastened to the
door.

The night had descended.

The house was dark. But when he entered it, on the instant, as though
the opening of the door had made a draft through the fireplace, a log
smoldering shot up a red flame that illumined the house.

The School-teacher went over to a table that stood by the wall.

On this table were a homemade cheese and the half of a loaf of bread.
Beside them was a knife with a wooden handle and a thick china plate
chipped at the rim. Before this table was a hickory chair, the seat of
roughly plaited bark. The School-teacher sat down and ate his supper.

Everything in this house remained as Nicholas Parks had left it.

This chair, this table, a larger hickory chair with arms and a ragged
cushion by the fireplace, a fourpost bed in the corner covered with a
patchwork quilt. When Nicholas Parks died there had been, as now, a log
on the fire, a cheese and a loaf of bread on the table.

There were, however, now on this table, before the School-teacher, some
objects that had not been there. There was a little worn, broken toy
that had once been a wooden horse; there was a top whittled out of a
spool with a hickory pin through it. There was a Barlow knife with an
iron handle, the blade broken at the point; there was a brass ring tied
to a cotton rib-hon; and there were little bunches of wild flowers, the
stems of which were primly wrapped with black thread. These were laid
out on the table beyond the cheese and the loaf. And before he sat down
to eat, the School-teacher touched them.

When he had finished his supper, the

School-teacher went over to the fireplace and sat down in the armchair.
He sat beside the hearth where he could see the doer. He remained for a
long time without moving, except now and then he looked toward the
door, and when there came to him any sound from the night outside, he
listened.

The night advanced. He remained in in the chair before the fire. The
log continued to burn among the ashes in the fireplace. But it no longer
flamed. It burned with a deep crimson glow that flooded the hair, the
face, the hands of the School-teacher. The glow thus reflected seemed to
take on a deeper crimson.

It became like the crimson of blood.

The School-teacher hardly ever moved except to raise his head to listen,
but he was not asleep; there was no sleep in him. The glow of the
smoldering log, changing on his face, gave it an expression of agony.

The night continued to advance; the hours passed. The vagrant sounds of
the world outside ceased. The profound silence of midnight arrived and
passed. The temperature changed.

But the School-teacher did not go to bed.

He sat in the fantastic glow of the fire, with its agony on him. Now
and then, when the playing of the light seemed to convulse his
features--seemed to distort them with a deeper agony, he turned his face
toward the table standing along the wall, near the door, and his eyes
rested on the broken toy horse, the top, the Barlow knife, the ring and
little hunches of flowers; and turned thus out of the glow of the fire,
his features no longer presented the aspect of agony. Moreover, when
his head was turned like that, the glow of the fire, that had been thus
distorting his face, passed by him and streamed over the objects on the
table, bringing them into vivid contrast with every other object in the
room.

The body of the night passed.

The morning began to arrive. And still the School-teacher waited. No
one came. The room was profoundly silent. The breath of the morning
entering, distilled a faint perfume out of the little bunches of wild
flowers, a vague odor that arose and sweetened the room. The night was
dead. The day was beginning to be born. Then it was that the one for
whom the School-teacher waited finally came.

There was a faint sound outside, as though one approached walking softly
on the grass, as though a hand passed gently along the door.

The School-teacher rose.

The latch of the door moved, the door turned noiselessly on its hinges,
and the woman who had fled from the Schoolteacher into the forest
entered.

The whole aspect of the woman was changed.

The purple stains on her mouth, the powder on her face, were gone.
Her hair, too, had been cleansed of its cheap scent. It clung in damp
strands about her face. The swagger, the defiance, the loud notes and
color had gone out of her. And that which remained after these things
were gone, now alone existed--as though the whole fabric of the woman
had been washed with water. The woman put her hand swiftly to her face,
to her hair; she caught her breath.

“Oh!” she said, “I thought you were asleep.”

The School-teacher’s voice was incomparably gentle.

“No,” he said, “I have been waiting for you.”

“Then you thought I would come?”

“I knew that you would come.”

“I had to come,” she said. “I could not go back to--to--the other!”

“No,” he said, “you never could go back to that.”

“An’--an’--I had nowhere else to go.”

“I know that,” replied the Schoolteacher, “there is no place that you
could go, except to me.”



CHAPTER X

|THE children had bought the School-teacher a hat. It had been a large
undertaking, and the cause of innumerable secret conferences in the
grove behind the schoolhouse. The purchase of so costly a thing as a
hat required a certain sum of money. To raise this sum of money, the
children had been put to the most desperate straits. Every tiny store
that any child possessed had been brought forward and contributed to the
common fund. The difficulty did not lie in the drawing on this store.
Although every contribution meant a sacrifice to the donor, no child had
hesitated. There had been no question about what each should give, and
no inquiry as to a holding back of resources. Every child had simply
given all he had.

Ancient two-cent pieces with holes in them, worn nickles, one or
two long-treasured ten-cent pieces, and one-cent pieces thumbed with
counting, were withdrawn from snuffboxes, essence of coffee boxes, pill
boxes, holes in the wall, from under the loose stones of the hearth and
other safety deposit places--wherever the child had deemed it expedient
to keep his treasures. Sometimes, however, this treasure was in
the custody of older persons, and the obtaining of it had presented
difficulties.

The whole school had often gone into counsel on these cases, ways and
means devised, a proper motive constructed, and the child strengthened
and drilled. When the device succeeded, the whole school for that
day rejoiced, when it failed, the school was depressed, but it was not
defeated, and some other plan was brought forward. Some of the plans
were exceedingly ingenious, and, as a rule, the school prevailed.

However, when the whole store was finally collected, or as much as could
be had, the children were confronted with a staggering disappointment;
the entire fund, for all the counting and recounting of it, could not be
made to exceed sixty-four cents. A wholesale borrowing, right and left,
had added only eleven cents. Now, ‘t was well-known that a hat could not
be purchased for less than a dollar, and when it became evident that the
fund must fail by a fourth of that sum the children were in despair.

For a day or two almost the whole school was in tears.

Then, individually, it resorted to desperate devices. One whose
grandfather had been accustomed to present him with ten cents on
Christmas day endeavored to secure an advancement. A small child had
hailed the doctor as he passed along the road, and had offered to work
for him all the remainder of his life for ten cents paid down in cash.
Another had approached the minister, after the Sunday collection, and
endeavored to borrow a twenty-five-cent piece out of the hat.

These ventures had failed, and the latter with the perilous result that
the minister had all but extracted the secret for the money, and his
withering commentaries on a teacher who inculcated the spirit of avarice
into little children had so stricken the child with terror that it had
been afraid to tell the school what it had done.

This brief lapse into madness, the practical leadership of Martha, the
miller’s little girl, and the small hoy, David, was presently able to
cheek. They pointed out what it was useless to do. But for the present
they were not able to bring forward any plan that it seemed worth while
to undertake. At this season the only natural product of the mountain
that could be exchanged for money was hickory nuts, and the value of
this product was in doubt. Sometimes, early in certain seasons, the
storekeeper had been known to give twenty-five cents for a bushel of
choice hickory nuts, not the gross shellbark nut, but the small, round,
sweet-kerneled nut of the smooth-bark hickory.

The school had considered this, but had come always against two serious
difficulties. To secure a bushel of these small nuts would require a
considerable searching of the mountains, and, despite the fact that the
children were very small, each had duties at home that occupied
Saturdays, and the evening fragments of the day. On Sundays, an austere
theology imposed by the minister compelled them to attend the Sunday
sermon and to practice the most rigorous inactivity under pain of
hideous consequences. The insurmountable difficulty, however, lay in
the fact that they could not get a bushel of hickory nuts over the long
distance to the country store.

An unexpected event suddenly removed this difficulty. Coming
breathlessly to the school on a Friday morning, little David announced
that his father was going to the country store on Tuesday with the wagon
to bring home a barrel of salt, and that he had obtained permission to
accompany him. At once the school took up the possibility of securing
the bushel of hickory nuts. It was immediately evident that within so
brief a time the thing could not be done unless the whole of Sunday were
devoted to the labor of it. The school promptly decided.

This expedition did not arise from any failure to appreciate the perils
of the decision. Corporal chastisement under the home roof was certain
to follow; and the hideous tortures vividly presented by the minister,
awaiting at the threshold of his future life, that one who broke the
Sabbath day, was scarcely less certain. Nevertheless, not a child of the
whole school hesitated.

The complete success of the venture strengthened the school to bear the
immediate consequences.

Corporal chastisement in the mountains was not apt to be a thing lightly
administered. But it was a hardship which even the smallest children had
come to regard as one of the inevitable conditions of life. As to
that other penalty, which awaited them at the hands of an outraged and
vindictive deity, they were somehow of the opinion that this malignant
god could not inflict his punishments except through some overt act of
the minister who was his executive agent. Thus, if they could outwit
this dangerous penal vicegerent, the thing could be turned aside. In
travail of this problem, they hit upon the plan of going over the head
of the minister and claiming a direct authorization for their act. When
approached for an explanation of their conduct they solemnly announced
that an angel had come down through the roof of the schoolhouse and
directed them not to attend the religious services on this Sunday.

Transported by the success of their undertaking; by the exquisite
pleasure of making this presentation to the Schoolteacher; by the joy
which his evident happiness in it carried to every heart; they had
neglected to perfect the details of this story. Fortunately they agreed
upon the personal aspect of the angel, since every child, when driven
to describe this divine messenger, simply followed the guidance of
his affections, and presented the School-teacher. But upon a close and
searching examination there had been a divergence. How had the angel been
clothed? Some of the children, put upon inquisition, had replied that
he had nothing at all on; and others, feeling the need for appropriate
vestments, had declared that the angel wore a red coat and blue
breeches.

Seizing upon this point, as a protruding limb, the minister had finally
drawn up the whole hidden body of the incident. And he was now on
his way to confront the School-teacher with this piece of outrageous
conduct. It was evening when he arrived. The school was coming through
the little grove down into the road. The School-teacher walked among
them. The grove was full of voices--the laughter of children. The
School-teacher wore his new hat, and every now and then he took it off
and held it in his hand that he might the better admire it. From the day
that he had received it, he had never ceased to express his appreciation
of it. He continued always to regard it, as if in it were merged, as
in a symbol, all the little sacrifices of every child, and all the love
that had strengthened each one to bear what the thing had cost him.

This never-ceasing appreciation of the School-teacher for his present
had transported the school with pleasure. This acute happiness the
children were not always able to control. Sometimes pride overcame one,
and he would tell how much he had contributed.

And always the smaller children wished to hold the hat in their hands,
so that it quickly gathered a border of little fingerprints.

Even the tiny boy, who had been too little to help in the purchase
of the present, but who somehow dimly understood that all had given
something toward this article, had brought forward a rooster feather,
which he had found, and insisted that it be added to the hat. And the
School-teacher had very carefully pinned this crimson feather to the
band.

Moreover, the habit which the Schoolteacher had acquired of taking off
his hat in order to admire it before the children, seemed to adhere to
him when he was by himself: Of late, those who had watched him as he
passed along the mountain roads, had observed him at this habit and
had marked how his face, profoundly sad when he was alone, always
immediately brightened.

The school trooping about the Schoolteacher was emerging from the grove
when the minister got out of his buggy.

He tied the horse to a sapling with one of the lines. Then he drew his
cotton gloves a little closer over his hands, buttoned his long black
coat down to its last button, and stood out in the road to await the
coming of the School-teacher. The children and the School-teacher
stopped when they saw him. The pleasant laughing voices ceased. The
children gathered around the School-teacher. The smallest ones came
close up and took hold of his hands.

The minister addressed the Schoolteacher. His voice was high and sharp.

“Do you know what the school children have done?”

The School-teacher regarded the minister with his deep, calm, gray-blue
eyes.

“Yes,” he said.

“Did you know that they were going to do it?”

“Yes.”

“Did you try to prevent it?”

“No.”

The lines in the minister’s face hardened.

“That’s all I wanted to know,” he said. “It is now perfectly evident
that you are no fit person to have charge of school children. The
community must get rid of you.”

He turned about in the road, untied his horse, got into his buggy and
took up the lines. He raised one of the lines in his cotton-gloved
hand to bring it down on the horse’s back, but he paused with his arm
extended, and turned about toward the School-teacher. He thrust his head
to one side. His defective eye straining to see.

“Do you have any fear of God at all?” he said.

The School-teacher’s calm, gentle voice did not change, it did not
hesitate. “No,” he said, “none at all.”



CHAPTER XI

|ON SATURDAY morning the miller hailed the doctor as he was passing the
mill.

“Are you goin’ over to Black’s?” she called.

The doctor stopped his horse.

“Yes,” he said, “they sent me word to come.”

“By Jonas the first of the week?”

“Yes.”

“For to see old Jerry’s eye?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it ain’t no use for you to go.”

“Did his eye get well of itself?” inquired the doctor.

“No, it didn’t git well of itself,” replied the woman. “It never would
have got well of itself. Ole Jerry’s been set-tin’ around with that eye
tied up ever since the day that he thrashed out his wheat. He’d a-been
blind in it all the rest of his life if it hadn’t a-been for the
School-teacher.”

The doctor turned around in his saddle.

“What did the School-teacher do to him?” he said.

“He cured him,” replied the miller.

The doctor had ridden past the mill before he stopped. Now he rode hack.
The miller stood on the porch before the door. The doctor sat on his
horse in the road, the loose bridle rein over his crooked arm, his good
hand resting heavily on the pommel of the saddle.

“How did he cure him?” inquired the doctor.

“I don’t know how he cured him,” replied the miller.

“Didn’t you hear?” said the doctor.

“Yes, I heard,” replied the miller.

“Well,” said the doctor, “what did you hear?”

“I heard that he took ole Jerry to one side an’ he asked him if he could
see anything with that eye. An’ ole Jerry said that he couldn’t tell a
man from a tree with it. Then the School-teacher put his hands on his
eye, an’ he made him look up an’ and when the School-teacher got through
ole Jerry could see. But he complained that his eye felt hot an’ the
School-teacher told him to hold a piece of wet clay against it--you
know’ that’s awful good to draw out soreness--an’ the next morning ole
Jerry’s eye was well. Now, how do you suppose he done it?”

“I don’t suppose how he done ‘t,” replied the doctor. “I know how he
done it. Ole Jerry got a wheat husk in that eye when he was thrashing,
and it stuck against the lid back of the ball. The fools that looked
into his eye by pushing the lid up couldn’t see it. But when anybody
come along with sense enough to turn the lid back he got the husk out
and the eye got well.”

The miller crumpled the corner of her apron in her hand.

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “D’d you hear how the
School-teacher cured Sol Shreave’s shoulder that he smashed in his
clearing?”

“Yes, I heard it,” replied the doctor. “I was pretty apt to hear it.”

“Well, what did you think about that?” said the miller.

“I thought it was a piece of meddling with my practice,” replied the
doctor. “It kept me out of a five-dollar fee.”

“But it was wonderful,” said the miller.

“No, it wasn’t wonderful,” replied the doctor.

The miller spoke slowly. She nodded her head between each word.

“To cure a man’s shoulder that was smashed, just by takin’ hold of his
arm, wouldn’t that be a wonder?”

“Yes,” said the doctor, “that would be a hell of a wonder,”

“Well,” said the woman, “didn’t the School-teacher do it?”

“No, he didn’t do it,” replied the doctor. “Then you don’t think ‘t’s
so, about the School-teacher fixin’ Sol’s shoulder?”

“Yes, I know it’s so,” replied the doctor.

“Then what makes you say it ain’t a wonder?”

“Because it’s a thing; anybody could do,” replied the doctor.

“Charm a smashed shoulder well?”

“No,” replied the doctor, “rotate a dislocated joint into place. When
Sol Shreave caught his ax in the grapevine he twisted the ball on the
big hone of his arm out of the socket of the shoulder, and when the
School-teacher took hold of his arm and rotated it around in the right
way it went back into place.”

The miller crossed her hands over her apron. She took hold of the palm
of her left with the fingers of her right. She gave her head a little
jerk. Her eyebrows contracted.

“I don’t know about that,” she said.

She remained for a moment looking down at the mill porch, then she
looked up.

“Doctor,” she said, “did you ever hear of anybody that was dead bein’
brought back to life?”

“Yes,” said the doctor, “I have heard of it ever since I could
remember.”

“Then it has happened?”

“_No_,” said the doctor. “It never has happened. When you’re dead,
you’re dead.”

The doctor took a watch out of his pocket. It was a heavy, old, silver
watch, tied to his waistcoat buttonhole with a buckskin string. He
opened it, examined it for a moment, then snapped the lid and thrust it
back into his pocket. When he looked around the miller was standing in
the roadside beside the horse.

“Doctor,” she said, “I’m a-goin’ to tell you somethin’ that I never told
anybody.”

“What about?” said the doctor.

“About what I’ve just said,” replied the woman.

The doctor reflected for an instant, then he remembered. He shifted his
position in the saddle. His voice showed annoyance.

“What cock-an’-bull story have you got a-hold of now?” he said.

“It’s no cock-an’-bull story,” replied the miller. “It’s the God’s
truth.”

The doctor made a deprecating gesture with his crooked arm.

“Now, look here, Sal,” lie said, “I haven’t time to listen to all the
tales you’ve heard.”

“It ain’t anything I’ve heard,” replied the miller.

“What is it, then?”

“It’s something I saw.”

“Did you see it yourself?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Now, Sal,” said the doctor, “don’t begin to tell me something you
thought you saw.”

“I’m not a-goin’ to tell you somethin’ that I thought I saw. I’m a-goin’
to tell you something that I did see.”

“All right,” said the doctor, “go on and tell it. What did you see?”

The woman drew a little closer.

“Well,” she said, “one Saturday the School-teacher come down here to
help me, an’ he brought Mary Jane’s little hoy with him. He’s awful
little. He ain’t two yet. The School-teacher left him with me while he
went down under the mill to fix one of the wheel paddles. Well, Martha
was gone an’ there was nobody here but me to ‘tend things. An’ I got
to movin’ around and forgot the little boy. An’ when I went to look for
him--I hope I may die!--if he wasn’t a-layin’ drown-ded at the bottom
of the millrace. Lord-amighty! I was crazy. I jumped in an’ got him out,
an’ begun to holler for the School-teacher to come. But he was dead. I
knowed he was dead. His little lips was blue, an’ his poor little hands
was cold.”

The tears came into the woman’s eyes at the memory.

“Lordy, Lordy!” she said, “I knowed he was all that Mary Jane had in the
world. I knowed her soul was wrapped up in him. I knowed it would kill
her.”

The woman stopped and wiped her eyes with her apron.

“Well, the School-teacher come a-run-nin’ an’ took him out of my arms,
an’ carried him into the house. An’ I just stood there in the road like
I was dazed. But after a while I sort a come to myself, an’ I tiptoed up
on the porch, an’ I looked in the door. An’ the little boy was layin’ on
the bed, an’ the School-teacher was a-bendin’ over him. Then I thought
of Mary Jane again. An’ Lord-a’-mighty! I thought I’d die. I went down
off the porch. An’ I reckon I was crazy, because I started out, an’ I
run just as hard as I could right up the road. I reckon I run for half
a mile. Then I thought I heard the School-teacher callin’ me. An’ I come
hack with my apron over my head a-cryin’. An’ when I got right here in
the road, I did hear him, an’ he said, ‘Don’t be distressed, for the
child’s all right.’ An’ I took my apron off my head, an’ I looked in the
door, an’ there set the School-teacher by the stove with the little boy
wrapped in a blanket--an’ he was _alive_.”

The woman stopped, lifted her shoulders, and took in a deep breath, like
one who has concluded a violent exertion. She wiped her face with her
apron.

“Well, he told me to make haste, an’ dry out the little boy’s
clothes--he had nice, little, white clothes, Mary Jane’s awful
particular about him--an’ I did, an’ I ironed them so they’d be just
like they was before he fell in. Then we put the clothes back on him.
An’ the Schoolteacher took him home. An’ he was just as well as he
was before he was drownded. An’ the School-teacher told me not to tell
anybody. I suppose he didn’t want Mary Jane to find it out. It would
only distress her for nothing.”

The woman folded her arms across her bosom, and looked up at the doctor.

“Now, then?” she said.

The doctor sat back in his saddle. He dropped his crooked arm by his
side. He addressed the woman, speaking with a perceptible pause between
each word.

“So you thought he raised the dead, did you?”

“Didn’t I see him do it?” replied the woman.

“Well,” said the doctor, “if you’re that big a fool, there’s no use to
talk to you.”

He turned around in the saddle, gath-tred up the reins, and kicked the
horse with his heel. He passed out of sight in the direction of Jerry
Black’s house. The miller remained standing in the road.



CHAPTER XII

|JERRY BLACK’S house was beyond Hickory Mountain, in the direction of
the far-off lumber mills.

It was afternoon before the doctor returned. He rode hard in anger. He
had gone on to Black’s house, determined to make the old man pay him
for his visit. But the mountaineer, now that his eye was healed, had
refused. The doctor stormed and threatened, but the mountaineer was
obdurate. The School-teacher had cured him. He owed nothing. He would
pay nothing.

The doctor was compelled to return empty-handed, and he rode hard.

A deep resentment against the man who thus interfered with his practice
moved within him. When he came to Hickory Mountain, instead of following
the road around by the mill, he took the one leading across through the
lands of Nicholas Parks. It was mid-afternoon when he stopped in the
road before the Schoolteacher’s house. He called. A woman came to
the door, her heavy hair the color of wheat straw. The doctor made an
exclamation of profound astonishment.

“Yaller Mag!” he said. “Now what’s that hussy doin’ here?”

When the woman saw that the person in the road was the doctor, she went
hack into the house and presently came out with a brown earthen crock.
She walked down the path from the door bearing the crock in her hand.
When she came out into the road, she held the crock up to the doctor.

“The School-teacher told me to give you this money when you come,” she
said.

There was a handful of silver coins in the crock.

Again the doctor was astonished.

“When I come!” he echoed. “How did he know that I was coming?”

“I don’t know how he knew it,” replied the woman.

“What did he tell you to give it to me for?”

“He didn’t tell me.”

The doctor looked at the pieces of silver.

“I suppose this is money that the people have paid him. How much did old
Black pay him?”

“He never paid him anything,” replied the woman. “Nobody ever paid him
anything.”

“Who give him this money then?”

“Nobody give it to him,” said the woman. “It was in that crock on the
shelf when old Nicholas Parks died. It ain’t been touched.”

The doctor looked at the dust-covered handful of silver.

“If nobody pays him, an’ he hasn’t used any of this, where does he get
money to buy things with?”

“He don’t buy anything.”

“What does he live on, then?”

“Well,” said the woman, “when Nicholas Parks died, there was flour in
the barrel. It ain’t run out. It looks like it never would run out. Now,
will you take the money, so I can get some feed for the horse?”

Again the doctor was astonished.

“How do you know that the horse hasn’t been fed?”

“I don’t know it,” replied the woman.

“Then what do you want to feed him for?”

“I want to feed him,” replied the woman, “because the School-teacher
told me to.”

“Told you to feed my horse?”

“Yes, he told me to give you this money and to feed your horse. Are you
goin’ to take the money?”

“No,” said the doctor. “I’m not goin’ to take it. I want to see the
Schoolteacher himself. Where is he?”

“He’s down at Mary Jane’s house.”

“Is she the one that’s got the woods-colt?”

“She’s the one that’s got the little boy,” replied the woman.

“Huh!” said the doctor. “What’s he doin’ there?”

“He’s huskin’ her corn.”

“So he spends his time helpin’ the women who have no men folks about,
too, does he?”

The woman looked up at the doctor. Her face undisturbed by the taunt.

“Yes,” she said. “He spends his time helpin’ those who have nobody else
to help them.”

The doctor did not reply. He gathered his bridle up in his hand. The
woman moved around in front of the doctor.

“Ain’t you goin’ to let me feed the horse?”

“The horse can stand it just as well as I can,” said the doctor.

“But you can help it,” replied the woman, “an’ the horse can’t help it.”

“It won’t hurt him to wait till I eat.”

“Would it hurt you to wait till he eats?”

“It wouldn’t do me much good, if anybody was to sec me waitin’ here,”
 said the doctor.

A flush of color sprang into the woman’s face.

“I only wanted to feed him,” she said, “because the School-teacher told
me to.”

“Get out of my way,” said the doctor. “This School-teacher has
interfered with my business just about as much as I’m going to put up
with.”

He clucked to his horse, and rode around the woman. When he had gone
forward a few paces, he made a gesture with his crooked arm.

“Is there a path over the mountain this way?” he called without turning
in his saddle.

“Yes,” replied the woman, “it runs down past the house.”

She remained standing by the gate with the crock in her hand.

The doctor entered the forest.

The colors lying far down the mountain in the sun were like those of an
oriental carpet. Soft shades of green, of yellow, of crimson, kneaded
into a harmony of low, unobtrusive tones that the sun warmed and
illumined. Near at hand, along the path, where the doctor rode, the
sumacs stood a dull red, the chestnut bushes yellow, the wild cherry
leaves turning on their edges, the oaks crimson like a flame, the water
beeches green, the hickory leaves curling on their twigs like shavings
of gold.

The scene lay out below the doctor in the sun, incomparably painted, but
he did not see it. He rode looking down at the pommel of his saddle. Now
and then, when the horse stumbled, he brought it up with a wrench of the
bit. The horse was tired. It went forward with its head down. Dust
lay around its eye-pits. There were gray bands of dried sweat running
parallel with the leather of the headstall, and beyond the borders of
the saddle blanket.

At a turn of the path a dog appeared, his yellow hair rising on his
back. As the doctor came on, the dog slowly retreated, growling,
holding his place in the road until the horse was almost upon him, then
springing hack, his teeth flashing, his eyes on the doctor. The dog did
not bark, he made no considerable sound, he refused to attack the horse,
but he continued always to menace the approach of the doctor.

They passed the spring and came out before the house and the little
cornfield. Then the dog began, to bark, and a tiny voice arose.

“Ge-out, Nim!” it said.

This patch of clearing, lying within the many-colored garden of the
forest, seemed illumined with a warmer sunlight. The effect doubtless
arose from the carpet of coarse brown fox-grass grown up over the
cornfield, into which the sun seemed to enter and remain. Two or three
small maple trees, abundantly leaved, stood about, flaming scarlet.

Under one of these trees the Schoolteacher was at work.

A corn shock, unbound, lying on the ground before him. He was on his
knees, bareheaded, without a coat, ripping the husk from the ear with a
wooden “peg” bound to his middle finger, snapping it at the socket and
tossing it out on a heap before him.

The ears coming from the Schoolteacher’s hands were long, full-grained
and of a deep yellow.

The two children, Martha and David, were gathering this corn into a
split basket and carrying it to a crib made of rails and roofed with
clapboards. Near the School-teacher, sitting on his coat spread out on
the ground, was the tiny boy who had called to the dog. He was shelling
a red ear of corn into the School-teacher’s hat.

A brush fence inclosed the cornfield.

The doctor pulled up in the path beside the fence. The School-teacher
arose. He stood bareheaded in the sun under the canopy of darning
leaves. He looked past the doctor to the horse, standing with its legs
out, its head down.

“I understand you’re practicin’ medicine,” said the doctor.

“Your horse is tired,” replied the School-teacher.

“There’s a law against practicin’ medicine without a license,” said the
doctor.

“Your horse is hungry,” continued the School-teacher.

The doctor, riding on, replied with an oath.

“You’re going to get into trouble,” he said.



CHAPTER XIII

|EARLY on Monday morning an old man driving a gray mare in a two-wheeled
cart came slowly up the road to the schoolhouse. A lank colt followed
the mare. The cart was very old, no vestige of paint remained on it,
one of the shafts was wrapped with wire, the bottom of the cart, made of
small slats, was loose. The man was heavy and the cart creaked. He drove
slowly, his big body filling the seat on which for comfort he had placed
a folded bedquilt.

He stopped in the road below the schoolhouse and got slowly out of the
creaking cart.

One of his legs was swollen with scrofula, and stiff to the knee. He
moved it with difficulty. He left the mare standing in the road, the
colt beside her, and came through the grove to the school-house door.
The stiff leg gave his heavy body an awkward swing. He supported himself
with a stout stick.

When he came finally to the school-house, he sat down on the step before
the door. He had evidently moved faster than he was accustomed to do,
and he remained for a moment breathing heavily, his big bulk covering
the step. Then he got a memorandum hook and a pencil out of his pocket.
The memorandum book was one of those cheap advertisements of patent
medicine which are given away at the country store. It contained a few
pages blank on one side and printed with virtues of the medicine on the
other. The pencil was a little more pretentious than the ordinary one.
It consisted of a tin case containing a long, thin core of purple lead,
the end of which could be made to protrude for writing by pressing the
thumb on the opposite end of the case.

The old man turned the leaves of the memorandum book, wetting his
forefinger in his mouth, until he found a blank page. Then he laid the
book on his knee, pressed the case of the pencil, touched the tip of the
lead to his tongue, and laboriously wrote.

“This schoolhouse is closed, by order of P. Hamrick, Trustee.”

He tore the leaf out, rose and pinned it to the door.

It was some distance through the grove of ancient trees to the road,
and he started to return. In spite of his bulk and his stiff leg he
endeavored to hurry. He thrust his stout stick out before him on the
path, and swung forward, his weight forcing the point of the stick into
the earth. In order that he might not fall, and to find each time a safe
place for the stick, he moved with his eyes on the ground.

Presently the end of the stick slipped on a pebble, and he lurched
forward. He saved himself from falling by grasping the crook, of the
stick with both hands, tottered a moment, then he regained his balance
and looked up.

The School-teacher stood before him.

The old man remained holding to the stick, breathing with difficulty.
The School-teacher was some distance away, motionless in the path. He
had evidently seen the man coming from the schoolhouse door, and had
stopped there in the path to observe him.

The School-teacher spoke.

“Have you been to the schoolhouse?” he said.

“Yes,” replied the man, “I’ve--I’ve been out to the schoolhouse.”

“To see me?” said the School-teacher. “Well, no,” replied the man, “not
exactly to see you.”

“To see the school?”

“Well, no, not exactly to see the school.” Then he added, “I’m the
trustee. I’ve been looking over the schoolhouse. I think I’ll be goin’
on.”

“Why do you hurry?” said the Schoolteacher.

“I must be gettin’ home,” said the old man.

He reached forward with his stick, but again the point of it slipped and
he nearly fell.

The School-teacher looked past the man toward the schoolhouse.

“What is that on the door?” he said. The old man turned around. The leaf
from the memorandum book, fastened with the pin, fluttered on the door,
as though ‘t were a living thing struggling to free itself.

“That’s a piece of paper,” said the old man.

“Who put it there?”

“I did.”

“What for?”

“It’s a kind of notice.”

“A notice to me?”

“A notice about the schoolhouse.”

“Is there anything wrong with the schoolhouse?”

“Well,” said the old man, “I don’t think it’s just exactly safe.”

“Not safe for the children?”

“Well, no, it mightn’t he safe for the children.”

“What is wrong with the schoolhouse?” said the School-teacher.

The old man began to talk. “Well,” he said, “it’s got a good roof.
Old Dix put that roof on. Every one of the clapboards is planed with
a drawin’ knife. An’ the weatherboardin’ is good. It was seasoned
weatherboardin’. But the floor might be bad.”

“I have mended the floor,” replied the School-teacher.

“It ain’t so much the floor,” continued the old man. “It’s the sills.
The sills might be rotten.”

“I have examined the sills,” replied the School-teacher. “The sills are
sound.”

“Well,” said the old man, “failin’ weather’s comin’ on. I think the
school had better stop anyway.”

He turned a little and put his stick out on the path into the leaves as
though he would go down the hill a shorter way to the road.

The School-teacher read his intent in the moving of the cane.

“You would better stay in the path,” he said. “If you get out of the
path you will fall.”

The old man turned back into the path before the School-teacher.

There was come now a certain dogged expression into his face.

“If you want to know,” he said, “there’s been some complaint about you.”

“Who has complained of me?” said the School-teacher.

“Good men have complained.”

“What good men?”

“Why, men as good as the minister. Why, men as good as the doctor.”

Then he looked out sharp at the Schoolteacher.

“Ain’t that hussy, Yaller Mag, up there with you at Nicholas Parks’
house?” The School-teacher regarded the old man standing before him.

“Do you think this woman ought to be sent away?”

“Yes, I do,” replied the old man.

“Then some one ought to tell her to go.”

“Yes, they ought.”

“It’s a difficult thing to do,” said the School-teacher.

“To find some one to tell her?”

“Yes,” said the School-teacher, “that is it, to find some one to tell
her.”

“If that’s all,” said the old man, “I’m goin’ home by Nicholas Park’s
house, that’s my shortest way. I’ll stop an’ tell her myself.”

“But have you thought how difficult it will be to tell her?” inquired
the Schoolteacher.

“What’s the trouble about tellin’ her?”

“Well,” replied the School-teacher, his eyes resting on the old man’s
swollen scrofuletic leg, “the trouble is that the one who goes to tell
her ought to be better than she is. He ought, himself, to have lived a
clean life.... Perhaps you have, perhaps you can tell her.”

The old man thought that the Schoolteacher saw something lying on the
ground, for he stooped over and his finger moved in the dust of the
path. And while he remained thus, the old man hurried along to the road.
The mare stood facing in the direction of the way over the mountain by
Nicholas Parks’ house.

The old man took her by the bridle and turned her around in the road.

Then he climbed slowly into the creaking cart. He looked back when he
had got his big bulk on the folded bedquilt. The School-teacher was
standing upright where he had passed him in the path. The old man put
his hand on the corner of the seat and turned heavily about.

“There’s another thing,” he said. “I’d like to know why you’re always
carryin’ that bastard brat around with you.”

Then he drove away, but not on the road that crossed the mountain by
Nicholas Park’s house.



CHAPTER XIV

|ALL day long the little boy was with the School-teacher. The child and
the dog watched for the man to come out of the forest in the morning.
When the dog barked, the little boy would say:

“Nim, see Teacher.”

The woman standing before the door watched for the three of them to come
out of the forest in the evening. She listened for the laughter, the
voices, the barking of the dog. The sense of perfect understanding among
the three of them was to her a perpetual wonder. The child had only a
few words, the dog had none. How could the man know so well, what they
meant? It was a wonder that she turned about, and at last, out of the
deeps of her own feelings, she got an answer that she held to.

“If you love a thing enough, it’s goin’ to understand you.”

The relation of the School-teacher to this tiniest child was also that
of his relation to every other one. The sense of it spread throughout
the school. This school became a family. What the cheerless home
withheld, it gave. No child could have told one what that was.

The teacher understood him, would have been the answer.

The School-teacher required no built-up explanations, he required no
justification of one’s act by the unfamiliar standards of another, he
required no trick, no artifice, no pretending, to get on with.

To the question, “What is he like?” a little boy had answered, “Why,
just like me.”

For some time there had been a secret in the school.

The School-teacher had talked with every child apart. The talk had been
confidential. The School-teacher had spoken with each one, even the
tiniest, as with an equal. He had spoken with him from day to day as
the occasion arose. It was the way of this secret to make the child with
whom he talked for a time unhappy. But as the School-teacher continued
each day to strengthen him, to show him how much he depended on him,
and to blow on the embers of his courage, he came at length to carry the
secret with equanimity.

On Thursday evening this secret became the common property of all. The
School-teacher was going away! There would be no more school!

On this afternoon the School-teacher had again talked with each child
apart, told him that the time of which he had spoken had now come, and
called upon him for the evidence of his courage. But, in spite of all,
when the hour arrived, the school broke down. It left the little benches
and gathered around the Schoolteacher. For a moment the Schoolteacher
hesitated, before the group of wet faces, then, one by one, he took each
child up in his arms, carried him to the window and told him something.
Something which he had not told him before. No one, outside of the
school, knew exactly what it was. But each child coming from the
School-teacher’s arms was strengthened, and set out for his home, the
tears drying on his sturdy little face. An idea of what this something
was, afterwards arose. A little boy had said, “Everybody’s a-goin’ to
live at the School-teacher’s house.” But he was in the extremity of
illness when he said it, and they thought he spoke in delirium.

It, was mid-afternoon when the Schoolteacher left the schoolhouse. He
was accompanied by the two children, Martha and David. The dog Jim went
before him and he carried the tiny boy on his shoulder. They went along
the road to the river, crossed on the stones and ascended the mountain.
The little boy fell asleep, his arms around the Schoolteacher’s neck.

The two children walked beside the man.

For the most part they were silent. Finally they came to the little
clearing. The children stopped in the road, and the man went up onto the
cabin porch, the little sleeping boy in his arms. The woman at work in
the kitchen, hearing the footsteps, came out to the door. When she saw
who it was, she was surprised.

“School’s out early to-day,” she said. “Yes,” replied the
School-teacher. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s the last day of the school.”

“Won’t there be any more school?”

“No.”

The woman’s lips trembled. “Then, then...” she said, and she began to
cry.

“Mary,” said the School-teacher, “have you forgotten what I told you?”

The woman sobbed,

“But it’s come so soon.”

Then she looked at the little boy sleeping in the School-teacher’s arms
and the tears streamed down her face.

“Now, what’ll I do?” she said. “Now, what’ll I do? He’ll set there
by the door, him an’ Jim, an’ he’ll look for you every morning, an’
whenever Jim barks he’ll say ‘Nim see Teacher,’ but he won’t never see
you.”

“Yes,” replied the School-teacher, “he will see me again.”

“Then you won’t be so awful far away?”

“I shall never be very far away from him.”

Then he put the sleeping child into the woman’s arms.

“Don’t wake him,” he said, “and don’t cry. Remember, Mary, that if he
should go with me, then he could not stay with you.”

He went down the road, and with the two children beside him, passed on
along the path. They went by the spring, with its keg sunk in the earth,
and up the mountain to Nicholas Parks’ house. There, in the road, they
found the woman with the yellow hair, feeding the chickens, a measure of
corn in her apron.

“You’re back early,” she said.

“It’s the last day of the school,” replied the School-teacher.

The woman’s whole body was convulsed. The corn spilled out of her apron.
Then she fled along the road, and up the path to the house. At the door
she stopped, turned about, and then huddled down by the steps, her apron
over her head.

The School-teacher bade the children await him, then he went up the
path. He passed by the woman and entered the house. Within the house, he
went over to the table by the wall, on which lay a little, worn, broken
toy, that had once been a wooden horse, a top whittled out of a spool, a
brass ring with its cotton ribbon, a Harlow knife, and little bunches
of wild flowers. These he took up, one by one, and put into the bosom of
his coat. Then he came out and closed the door. As he passed, the woman
put out her hand and touched him. And he stopped. For a moment he stood
looking down at the woman sobbing at his feet, the apron over her heed.
Then he spoke.

“Margaret,” he said, “is this how you will keep your promise to me?”

Then he went down the path, and, accompanied by the two children,
followed the road along the ridge to the little path descending the
mountain toward the mill. As the School-teacher walked he endeavored to
strengthen and encourage the two children. He bade them remember what he
had said, and not to cry. They managed not to cry when he left them at
the point where the path entered the road below. But when he was gone
out of their sight and hearing, in the direction of the schoolhouse,
they held to each other and wept.

They stood for a long time, there, in tears, holding to one another.
Then they heard sounds approaching and hid themselves. Two men rode past
in the direction of the schoolhouse. One of them carried a rifle across
the saddle before him.

A great fear fell on the two children and they followed at a distance.
They saw the two men dismount before the school-house, knock on the door
and enter. After a while they came out with the Schoolteacher.

They got on their horses and, with the School-teacher walking between
them, set out along the road in the direction of the town.



CHAPTER XV

THE several influences moving against the School-teacher, having formed
a conjunction, at last determined to act.

On Wednesday night, in the church at the county seat, two persons
attended the minister’s mid-weekly meeting, who were not members of the
congregation. These two persons, the sheriff and the doctor, sat on
the last bench nearest the door. When the service was concluded and the
congregation withdrew, these two persons remained with the minister. The
three of them moved up to the table before the altar, where there was a
small oil lamp.

They remained for a long time in conference around this table.

It seemed that the minister’s efforts to get rid of the School-teacher
by prevailing on the trustee to close the schoolhouse, had not
succeeded.

The school went on in spite of the notice.

And now some more effective measures must be found. The sheriff, when
the minister informed him of the occupancy of Nicholas Parks’ estate by
this stranger, had caused a proceeding to be instituted in the circuit
court, and had obtained an order restraining any one from entering on
the lands of Nicholas Parks until the right of the state thereto could
be determined. This order had been posted on the door of Nicholas Parks’
house. But this order, like the one on the door of the schoolhouse, the
stranger had not regarded.

It was evident that a firmer step must be taken.

Two plans were available. As the School-teacher had continued to remain
on Nicholas Parks’ lands after the restraining order had been posted on
the door, the sheriff could apply to the circuit judge for a _rule_ and
cause him to be brought before the court and imprisoned for contempt.
The second plan was for the doctor to go before a justice of the peace
and take out a warrant against the School-teacher charging him with
practicing medicine without a license.

These two plans were now under discussion in the empty, dimly lighted
church.

The little hand oil lamps had been put out except one on a wooden
bracket by the door, and the one smoking on the table before the altar.
The silence, the empty church, or something in the atmosphere of the
place, caused the men to draw together and to discuss the matter in
undertones.

The minister sat with his back to the altar.

On the bench beside him was his hat containing the money which he had
collected from the congregation at the close of the service. On
either side were the doctor and the sheriff. The latter’s big hump now
prominent as he leaned over the table. The minister led the discussion,
and they remained for some time thus, in conference. The minister’s
defective eye batting, the doctor’s crooked arm on the table, and the
sheriff’s back throwing its humped shadow against the wall.

Finally it was determined that the sheriff should go before the court
on Thursday and obtain the _rule_ upon which the School-teacher could
be arrested and brought down out of the mountain. At the same time the
doctor should take out his warrant before the justice of the peace, so
it might be available in case the circuit judge should not commit the
Schoolteacher upon the proceeding for contempt.

This plan having been settled upon, it became necessary to consider how
the arrest should be made.

The sheriff could send his deputy, who served legal papers in the
county, but the deputy had never seen the School-teacher and did not
know him. And, besides this, if the School-teacher resisted, and those
about him should come to his support, there might be considerable
trouble to take him. One man conducting a prisoner through the mountains
in the night might easily be compelled to release him. Moreover,
the deputy, knowing the danger of making an arrest in the mountain
districts, could not be got to go up alone.

A discussion of who should be found to assist the deputy then arose. No
one could be thought of except Jonas Black, a worthless hanger-on
about the village. This man was the son of Jerry Black, whose eye the
School-teacher had cured.

He had been the sheriff’s driver on the occasion of that official’s
interview with the School-teacher. He was familiar with the mountains,
and it was thought less likely to be resisted, since he was one of the
mountain people. He knew the School-teacher. It was said that for a time
he had hung about him, hoping to be employed to go from house to house
and collect the School-teacher’s salary, until he discovered to his
astonishment, that this stranger was charging nothing for his service.

The sheriff rose and went out into the village to seek this man, while
the others awaited his return. The sheriff was not gone very long. He
presently entered the church with another. This man had a curious deep
red birthmark covering the entire side of his face. He came up the
church aisle behind the sheriff, stepping softly and glancing furtively
about him. He slipped into a seat before the table facing the altar, and
remained there shifting his hat in his lingers.

The sheriff took his place at the table.

“I found Jonas,” he said.

The minister looked across the table at the man.

“Will you go?” he inquired.

“Yes, I’ll go,” replied the man, “if I git paid enough for it.”

“How much do you want?” said the minister.

“Well,” replied the man, “it ought to be worth about five dollars.”

The three men at the table protested.

The sum was excessive. The sheriff would provide a horse. The journey
would not take longer than one night. Besides, there was no way by which
the fees of a deputy, for such service, could be made to aggregate that
sum. The man persisted, and, while the sheriff considered how the sum
allowed under the law could be augmented, the minister bargained. The
man finally reduced his demand to three dollars. And the sheriff, seeing
now a plan by which an additional charge could be officially added,
said:

“There are a couple of bad characters in the jail, held to the grand
jury for breaking into a store. They may try to give me some trouble.
Now, if you would watch the jail for a few nights, I might manage to get
that fee for you.”

“Well,” replied the man, “I’d sorter keep an eye on the jail for a night
or two. I wouldn’t mind doin’ that. But I won’t wait for my money. I
won’t take it in costs.”

“How soon will you want it?” inquired the sheriff.

“Right now,” said the man.

“I couldn’t give it to you to-night,” replied the sheriff.

The man got up.

“Then I won’t go,” he said.

An idea occurred to the minister. He turned around, picked up his
hat, containing the recent collection, and placed it on the table. He
whispered a moment to the others, then he spoke to the man.

“I’ll pay you the money,” he said.

He began to count it out on the table. The money from the collection
was in small silver coins and he selected the largest of them. He leaned
over the table, his fingers in the hat, his defective eye close to the
lamp.

And the man standing before the altar, one half of his face in the
shadow, one half discolored by the crimson birthmark dimly in the light,
received the money. Two dollars and sixty cents in ten-cent pieces,
three five-cent pieces, and one twenty-five cent piece.



CHAPTER XVI

|THEY took the School-teacher into the courthouse early in the morning.

The county seat of this mountain county was nothing more than a village,
lying in the foothills. The courthouse stood in a grove of oak trees, in
the middle of the village. It was a two-story structure. On the ground
floor was the jail in the custody of the sheriff.

The second floor was the courthouse.

This second story was entered exclusively from without. Broad stone
steps led up to a portico, on which stood round, plaster-covered pillars
supporting the projecting roof. On either side, entering between these
pillars, were the offices of the county and circuit clerks. Beyond
was the court room filled with benches. A portion of this room at the
farther end was separated from the benches by a railing. Within it were
chairs and two tables for attorneys, a desk for the clerk, and a raised
platform, ascended by steps on either side, for the judge.

It was the custom of the judges traveling on these mountain circuits to
open court as early as eight o’clock in the morning, and before that, if
they were come into the court room, to hear informally motions and the
like.

When they brought the School-teacher into the courthouse, the sheriff,
the doctor, the minister, the old trustee who had ridden down out of the
mountains in his cart, were already there.

The deputy and Jonas led the Schoolteacher inside the railing. Then they
sat down. The School-teacher remained standing.

The hearing before the circuit judge followed the informal custom of
these mountain circuits.

The School-teacher made no defense.

He stood before the bench. The early sunlight of the morning, entering
through the high windows, fell on his face, on his soft brown hair, on
his deep gray-blue eyes, on his clothing covered with the dust of the
road.

The judge heard the oral evidence in open court, He inquired into
the service of the restraining order, and the prisoner’s subsequent
disregard of it. But he was not convinced. The prisoner’s conduct seemed
inconsistent with an intent to resist the State’s title to these lands.
Moreover, the silence, the calm demeanor, the strange personality of the
prisoner, profoundly impressed him. He felt that some ulterior motive
lay behind the cover of this accusation.

At this moment a woman appeared at the door of the courthouse and
sent in a note to the judge. This note was sealed in an envelope and
addressed in a fine hand. The judge opened it at once. When he had
read it, he sat for some time looking down at the prisoner. He did not
believe in dreams; but the insistence of his wife impressed him.

He turned to the sheriff, and inquired if there was a man in the
courtroom who knew anything about the prisoner.

The sheriff indicated the others near him.

“Yes, Your Honor,” he replied, “the minister, the school trustee of that
district, and the doctor here, all know about him. He seems to have made
himself generally troublesome to the community. I believe the justice
of the peace had issued a warrant against him for practicing medicine
without a license.”

When the circuit judge heard of this action of the justice, he ordered
the School-teacher to be taken before that official. He said that if
the justice of the peace has issued a warrant antedating the _rule_, he
would yield to him the custody of the prisoner.

They took the School-teacher out of the courthouse and across the
village street to the office of the justice of the peace.

The justice was greatly pleased when the deputy and Jonas came in with
the prisoner. A good many stories had drifted down from the mountains to
him concerning the miraculous cures which this man had effected, and he
was anxious to see him. He removed his spectacles, put them carefully
into a tin case, set his feet on the rounds of a chair and, after
having thus made himself comfortable, he requested the School-teacher to
explain to him in detail, exactly how he had accomplished the marvels of
which he had heard.

The School-teacher did not reply.

He remained standing as he had stood before the circuit judge. His
head lifted. The features of his face unmoving. His deep gray-blue eyes
tilled with a tranquil, melancholy light.

When the justice of the peace saw that his curiosity was not likely to
be gratified, he, at once, sent the prisoner back to the circuit judge.
He took this act of the judge to be a delicate courtesy, a tender regard
for the jurisdictional rights of an inferior tribunal, and he was not
to be outdone. In several instances the circuit judge had recently
curtailed his jurisdiction, and he had been smarting under it. This act
was a friendly overture, and he hastened to evidence his appreciation of
it.

He returned the prisoner, saying that as his warrant had not been
served, his jurisdiction had not attached, and the prisoner was
exclusively in the custody of the circuit court. Moreover, that he would
hold his warrant in abeyance until the circuit court had disposed of the
case.

When the School-teacher came again before the circuit judge, that
official no longer hesitated to indicate his opinion. He said that the
prisoner did not seem disposed to contest the state’s title to these
lands, that he appeared to have taken up his residence in Nicholas
Parks’ house anterior to the date of the order, and upon some verbal
direction of the decedent; that while there was here perhaps a technical
contempt, he was not certain that it was intended, and consequently that
he was disposed to dismiss the prisoner.

The minister, the sheriff, the doctor, the old school trustee, under
this informal procedure, came forward with a protest. They said that the
School-teacher was a person dangerous to the community; that he had set
himself against the authority of the state in disregarding the order of
the court; that he had set himself against the authority of the county
by disregarding the notice placed on the schoolhouse door; that he had
openly violated the law in practicing medicine without a license; that
he harbored immoral persons, and encouraged the children in acts of
irreverence.

The judge endeavored to compromise with this opposition. He said that
he would reprimand the prisoner, suspend sentence and release him on his
own recognizance.

The general protest now took on a definite form. The minister spoke for
the others. He was little accustomed to the diplomacy of the advocate
and he thinly disguised the threat that was the tenor of this speech.
He said that one in the position of a circuit judge ought to sustain
the better elements of the community in their efforts to get rid of an
undesirable person; that the will of the people was not lightly to be
disregarded; that the object of making offices elective was that one
who refused to consider what the people desired might be replaced by
another; and the like.

The judge came up presently for reelection. It was notice to him that
the powerful elements which these protesting persons represented would
hold him to account. The strength of his political party lay in these
mountain counties. He required the support of these elements. And he
especially feared a sectarian sentiment against him. He knew the danger
of such a sentiment; and how little, once on its way, explanations would
avail. This covert threat angered the judge, but he feared to resist
it. He dipped his pen into the inkpot before him, and wrote an order
committing the prisoner to the county jail. Then he handed it down to
the sheriff.

The persons standing about the sheriff drew near to him and read the
order. The minister and the school trustee objected to something in the
body of the writing, and the sheriff went with them to the judge.

They pointed out that the order directed the commitment of the
“Schoolteacher of Hickory Mountain District,” that this term was
incorrect, that the prisoner had not been employed by the trustees, that
he was not the School-teacher of Hickory Mountain District, and that the
order ought not so to designate him.

But the judge, smarting under the lash that had been laid on him, was in
no mood to receive a further dictation.

He refused to change what he had written.



CHAPTER XVII

|THE several persons who had forced the judge to commit the
School-teacher to the county jail, having gone down from the courthouse,
remained throughout the day in conference. It was evident that the
circuit judge had acted against his own inclination, and that he could
not be depended upon to hold the prisoner in custody. Some other method
for ridding the community of this undesirable person must be found.
Finally, after long reflection, they hit upon a plan.

Night descended.

In the village saloon, beyond the grove of oak trees behind the
courthouse, the man who had received the money from the minister sat
playing at cards. A rifle stood in the corner behind him. From time to
time he arose, took up the rifle and went to the door. Keeping thus, in
his fashion, an agreement which the sheriff had forgotten.

The night advanced.

At twelve o’clock the sheriff went down into the jail. He carefully
unfastened the door opening into the grove of oak trees. Then he came
along the corridor to the one iron cage that the jail contained. The
door to this cage he likewise carefully unlocked. On a bedtick filled
with straw, two men, convicted of larceny, were apparently asleep
beside this door. On a bench against the wall behind them sat the
School-teacher. His hat with its little crimson feather lay beside him.
He sat unmoving, looking at something in his hand. When he observed the
sheriff, he put the thing which he held in his hand back into the bosom
of his coat. It was the broken toy horse which the little boy had given
him. The sheriff beckoned with his finger.

The School-teacher lifted his head and looked at the man, but he did not
move from his place against the wall.

The sheriff stepped delicately past the men, whom he believed to be
asleep, and approached the School-teacher.

“The door’s open,” he said, “you can get out of the county before ‘t’s
daylight.”

The School-teacher did not reply, and the sheriff went noiselessly out.
Presently the two men got up from their pretended sleep and slipped out
of the cage. The School-teacher rose and spoke to them. But they crept
down the corridor. He followed. He came upon them as they opened the
door leading out of the jail into the grove, stepped between them in the
door and thrust them back. The act saved the men’s lives, but it cost
the School-teacher his own.

There was the flash of a rifle from the saloon beyond the oak trees, and
the School-teacher fell forward, his arms outstretched.

In the evening some women and children from the mountains came to the
circuit judge and asked him for the body of the School-teacher. He gave
it to them, and at night they took it away.

An ox, led by a little boy, bore the body, and women walking beside it
supported it with their hands.

They traveled back into the mountains.

And at daybreak they laid the body in a grave which they had made
between the two great hickories on the ridge beyond Nicholas Parks’
house. They lined the grave with bright-colored leaves, and wrapped the
body in that piece of linen which the School-teacher had bade the miller
keep for him until he should need it. The hands of women and children
filled the grave with earth. Then they went away down the mountain,
toward the mill, leaving a woman crouched beside the grave. Her apron
covering her yellow hail. Her body rocking.

It was morning.

They went down the mountain, the boy and the ox, the little girl, the
two remaining women--one of them carrying a tiny sleeping hoy wrapped in
a shawl, a dog beside her.

On a bench of the mountain below, where a tree, uprooted by the wind,
lay with its broken trunk pointing toward the ridge, they stopped and
looked back. As they looked, the sun arose, a disc of gold between the
two great hickories.

With a wild harking, the dog leaped onto the fallen trunk, ran out to
the projecting end of it, and stood there looking toward the sun.

The tiny boy moved ‘n his mother’s arms.

“Nim see Teacher,” he said.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Mountain School-Teacher" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.