This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler

                          [Picture: Book cover]




OTHER BOOKS IN
THE BLUE RIDGE SERIES
By Elia W. Peattie


AZALEA.  Clean and wholesome, but lacking nothing in liveliness.  Azalea
is a winsome mountain lassie who has made many friends among girl
readers.

ANNIE LAURIE AND AZALEA.  Continuing Mrs. Peattie’s success in “Azalea,”
hailed by reviewers and readers as a “first-class piece of fiction any
boy or girl between nine and ninety will enjoy.”

Each story complete and individual, but each dealing with the people and
the locality Mrs. Peattie’s charming stories have endeared to young
readers.

  [Picture: “So I lost David,” whispered Mary Cecily; “I lost my little
                                brother.”]





                                AZALEA AT
                                SUNSET GAP


                                    BY
                             ELIA W. PEATTIE
             Author of Azalea; Annie Laurie and Azalea; etc.

                            _Illustrations by_
                         _Joseph Pierre Nuyttens_

                       [Picture: Publisher’s logo]

                         The Reilly & Britton Co.
                                 Chicago

                                * * * * *

                             Copyright, 1914
                                    by
                         The Reilly & Britton Co.

                                * * * * *

                          _Azalea at Sunset Gap_

                                * * * * *




CONTENTS

CHAPTER                                    PAGE
          I  THE PERFECT CHAPERON             9
         II  PASSENGERS FOR BEE TREE         29
        III  SUNSET GAP                      47
         IV  “SAY! TEACHER!”                 67
          V  ROWANTREE HALL                  87
         VI  LITTLE BROTHER                 103
        VII  “DOING GOOD”                   118
       VIII  THE WAR                        138
         IX  THE RESCUE                     156
          X  THE RESCUE, CONTINUED          172
         XI  KEEFE                          192
        XII  THE BLAB BOY                   207
       XIII  THE HERMIT THRUSH              225
        XIV  THE REBEL                      242
         XV  NEW HOPES                      261

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“So I lost David,” whispered Mary Cecily; “I lost       _Frontispiece_
my little brother.”
“I an artist?  Mercy, no,” said Azalea.  “I’m                       64
nothing—just a girl.”
There was Paralee, dragging a gaunt woman to the                   166
door.  “Tell ’em to ’light, ma, and come in,” she
begged
Keefe lifted a languid hand.  “I’ve been wanting to                230
tell you for a long time,” he said

CHAPTER I
THE PERFECT CHAPERON


Three girls, Azalea McBirney, Annie Laurie Pace and Carin Carson rode
slowly along the red clay road that led no-where-in-particular.  In fact,
these friends were bound for No-Where-In-Particular, and the way there
was lined on both sides with blossoming dogwood, as white as snow.  There
were snow-white clouds in the sky, too, against a background of glorious
blue.  But the balm in the air suggested anything rather than snow.  It
blew back and forth, carrying with it delicious perfumes of the
blossoming shrubs that grew by the roadside and within the wood, and
touching the cheek like a caress.

The horses seemed to be enjoying themselves almost as much as the girls.
They stepped daintily, throwing back their heads as if they would be
pleased if their mistresses would give them leave to be off and away down
the road, and expanding their nostrils to catch the scents of the
spring-awakened earth.  But their mistresses were too deeply engaged in
conversation just then to grant them their desire.

“You see,” the fairest of them was saying—the one the others called
Carin—“I don’t really _want_ to go to Europe with father and mother this
time.  It isn’t as if they were going to stay in one place.  They’ll be
traveling the whole time, because, you see, father is going on business,
and mother is going along to keep him company.  It wouldn’t be very
pleasant, would it, to hear mother saying: ‘And now what in the world
will we do with Carin to-day?’  Really, you know, I wouldn’t at all enjoy
having my name changed to ‘Little-Carin-in-the-Way.’”

The tallest girl, Annie Laurie Pace, laughed rather enviously.

“Think of giving up a European trip for that!” she cried.

“Oh, indeed, I’ll be only too thankful to go on some other occasion,
Annie Laurie, when there’s time to see things or to study.  Remember,
I’ve gone twice already; once over the same ground that father and mother
are going over this time.  The next time, I hope to stay and study, but
this summer I want to follow the plan we made last summer and go up into
the mountains and teach school.”

“Oh, do you really, Carin?” cried Azalea, the third girl.  “I’ve wondered
and wondered if you’d remember about that!  Would your father and mother
let you?”

“That remains to be seen.  One can always ask.  Do you think Ma McBirney
would give you permission, Azalea?”

“Oh, I think she would.  The trouble with Ma McBirney is that she’s
likely to say ‘yes’ whether my going makes it hard for her or not.”

“But didn’t she plan,” broke in Annie Laurie, “to visit her cousin down
Calhoun way?  Pa McBirney will be going too, won’t he?”

“I don’t think he could leave the stock and the farm.  But you see, I
thought maybe Mother McBirney would want to take me along to—”

“To show off her new daughter,” laughed Carin.  “I don’t blame her.”

“I never meant anything of the sort,” protested Azalea, coloring.  “But
of course, having picked me up by the roadside the way she did—like a
poor stray kitten, you may say—perhaps she would like her relatives to
see that I wasn’t—”  Azalea hesitated again, with the mocking eyes of her
friends on her.

“That you weren’t _what_?” demanded Carin teasingly.

But Annie Laurie interrupted with one of the practical remarks for which
she was celebrated.

“It’s all very well for you girls to talk of going off to the mountains
to teach school,” she said, “but have you any idea of where you’ll go and
whom you’ll teach?”

“We have a very clear idea,” answered Carin.  “We’ll go back to Sunset
Gap, where we were last summer, and where they need help about as badly
as they can.  I was talking with Azalea’s minister, Mr. Summers, and he
says he doesn’t know of any place where the people are in greater need of
schooling than they are there.  You remember the place, Annie Laurie,
don’t you?  We stopped there overnight when we were on our camping trip.
It took us a long time to get there by wagon, but this time we’ll take
the train as far as Bee Tree and drive only the last fifteen miles.  Mr.
Summers says he knows a man who will meet us at the station.”

“You’ve quite made up your mind to go, haven’t you?” asked Annie Laurie.
“What a girl you are, to be laying out all these plans without telling
anyone.”

“Oh, I haven’t done much,” protested Carin, “only, when I happened to
meet Mr. Summers, I talked it over with him.  You see, there are men and
women up there on Dundee mountain who don’t even know their letters, and
teaching the children will be like carrying civilization to them,” said
Carin earnestly, meaning very much more than she said but trusting her
sympathetic friends to understand.

“It’s the very kind of work that I want to do above everything else,”
declared Azalea with an earnestness no less than that of her friend.
“Oh, Annie Laurie, if we go, do come with us!  You’d make the best
teacher of us all.  You’re so firm, and you always think out beforehand
what you’re going to do.”

“The best way for me to live up to that fine reputation,” retorted Annie
Laurie, “is by staying at home.  This is my last chance for learning to
manage my dairy, for Sam Disbrow, who has been taking almost all of the
responsibility, is leaving me next October for his two years at
Rutherford Academy.  I’m so happy to think he’s going, after all the
disappointments and troubles he’s had.”

“But couldn’t your Aunt Adnah look after the dairy for a couple of
months?  I thought she was a fine business woman,” Carin persisted.

“Oh, Carin, father’s death was a much greater shock to her than to any of
the rest of us.  She oughtn’t to have much care.  Anyway, the dairy is my
business now that father is gone, and I’m anxious to learn every detail
of it.  I understand now about keeping the books, but I am making a study
of raising fodder and preserving it, and of feeding the cattle and
marketing the milk.  Oh, it’s a huge undertaking.”

Annie Laurie drew a deep breath.

“Yes, I suppose it is,” sighed Carin sympathetically.  “Isn’t it queer,
when you come to think of it, that work had to be brought into the world?
Why weren’t we made like the birds, so that we could hop around awhile,
and sing awhile, and go to sleep under a nice dry leaf?”

“Well, life isn’t that way,” said Annie Laurie in the solemn tones the
Paces sometimes used.  “We have to work for what we get, and I’m glad we
do.  Life is more interesting just the way it is.”

“I like to keep busy myself,” admitted Carin, “but if anyone came up to
me and told me that what I was doing was _work_, I believe I’d fall in my
tracks.”  She gave a silvery laugh.

“After you’ve taught school a week, you’ll not need anyone to point out
that what you are doing is work,” Annie Laurie returned.  “Azalea, have
you spoken yet to Pa and Ma McBirney about going?”

Azalea gave a little chuckle, half of amusement, half of affection, as
her friend spoke the names of the good mountain people who had taken
Azalea into their home when she was orphaned.

“Naturally, I haven’t,” she said, “because until this hour I didn’t know
Carin was really planning for it.  And now I’ll have to approach the
subject cautiously.  You know how it is with my dear pretend-parents;
they’re mountain people and don’t like to be frightened out of their wits
by having a question hurled at them.  You have to lead them up to it,
like you would a nervous horse.”

“Don’t say ‘like you would,’ Azalea,” pleaded Carin.  “You know Miss
Parkhurst never lets you.  Say ‘as you would,’ Zalie.”

“As you would,” breathed Azalea meekly.

“Well,” said Annie Laurie, “it’s a grand plan and I hope it will come
true, though I’m not perfectly in love with the idea of having you girls
go off for the summer and leave me.  But never mind that.  Let’s have a
gallop!”

She flicked the reins on the neck of her pretty mare, and the animal,
delighted at the signal, bounded away as playfully as a kitten.  Like
kittens, too, the ponies on which the other girls were mounted followed
after.  As they rode, the blooms of the dogwood rained about them and the
laughter of the girls mingled with the nickering of the horses.

At the ford, two miles down the valley, they drew rein.

“It’s time I was getting home,” said Annie Laurie.  “How about you,
Azalea?  Do you go up the mountain to-night?”

“No, I’m staying with Carin.  That’s getting to be my habit on Friday
nights.  Mother McBirney comes down Saturday for her trading, and I meet
her at the village and then we go home together.”

And now while they canter back down the lovely Valley of Lee in the bland
light of the closing day, let us tell something of their history to such
readers as have not met them before.

Azalea McBirney did not bear the name to which she was born.  She was
Azalea Knox, the daughter of a ne’er-do-well son of a fine family, and of
a loving-hearted mother who had left her home and friends for the sake of
the man she married.  The young mother had fallen upon such evil days
that at last, to provide her little girl with the necessaries of life,
she had traveled with a band of sorry actors who journeyed from town to
town in squalid, covered wagons.  Sick in body and shamed in spirit, she
died on the road in front of the mountain cabin where Thomas and Mary
McBirney lived.  They had taken Azalea into their home, where she shared
their care and affection with Jim McBirney, their only living child.

Carin Carson was the daughter of Charles and Lucy Carson, Northerners of
wealth, who, having lost their three sons in a tragic manner, had come to
the beautiful little mountain town of Lee, to forget, if possible, amid
its beautiful surroundings and peaceful life, the pain which had made
their old home impossible to them.  They had interested themselves
greatly in Azalea, had offered to make her their adopted daughter, and
upon her decision to stay with her devoted foster mother, had given her
the privilege of sharing with Carin the excellent instruction received
from Miss Parkhurst, Carin’s governess.

A warm friendship had developed between the girls, and it was a sharp
disappointment to them when Mrs. Carson, who thought they were growing
too self-centered and indifferent to other young folk, brought into their
classroom Annie Laurie Pace, the daughter of the dairy-man at Lee.  It
was only after Annie Laurie’s revolt from their selfishness that they
realized the need they had of her as well as the privilege that it was to
her—a girl too advanced for the district school—to share their
opportunities with them.  Troubles came to Annie Laurie.  She lost her
father and her fortune; but these misfortunes only bound the three girls
closer in “the triple alliance” which they had formed.  When, finally
Annie Laurie’s fortune was recovered by a singular chance, they settled
down into happy enjoyment of their school days.

The previous summer had found them together with their elders upon a
camping trip which was to remain in the minds of all of them as one of
the most delightful experiences of their lives.  On this excursion they
had seen something of the lives of the mountaineers of the Blue Ridge far
back from the railroads and the main routes of travel, and had resolved
that at the first opportunity they would return to pass on to these
untaught, friendly, wistful folk some of the knowledge which had been
bountifully given them.  But this thought had slipped out of sight during
the winter, for each girl had been much occupied after her own fashion.
Now, with the return of summer, their thoughts turned naturally to the
mountains.  Back of their desire to be useful to their less fortunate
neighbors, was the hunger for life in the open.  They dreamed of the
low-lying valleys bathed in purple mist, of the flaming azalea burning on
the higher slopes, of the innumerable flowers springing to life along the
adventurous pathways, of the wild beauty of the storms, and the ever-new
miracle of sunrise and sunset.

Annie Laurie said good-bye, and Carin and Azalea turned in at the great
gate of the Shoals, the beautiful home built by Colonel Atherton, the
grandfather of Azalea.  But Azalea entered it now, a poor girl, the
foster daughter of simple mountain folk, and it was Carin’s parents who
owned the fine old place and who lived there in a very different sort of
state from that which had obtained in Colonel Atherton’s day.  His
thought had been all of his own indulgence and glory.  Charles Carson and
his wife had their greatest happiness in sharing their prosperity with
others.  They had built up a trade for the handicraft of the mountain
people, had lent a hand to several of the enterprises in the town of Lee,
and were the chief supporters of a school for the mountain children.

When Mustard and Paprika, the ponies, had been led away by the stable
boy, the girls ran up the wide sweeping stairs to Carin’s room to dress
for dinner, and as they brushed their hair and changed their frocks, they
talked of how they could best approach their parents with their rather
madcap plan of going up into the mountains.  In the midst of their talk
Mrs. Carson came into the room.  She kissed them in her gentle way and
then held Azalea off with one white jewelled hand, eyeing her with
quizzical affection.  Azalea returned her look adoringly, for Carin’s
mother was the girl’s ideal of what a “beautiful lady” should be.  The
faint breath of violet perfume which floated from her gowns, the satin
sheen of her waving hair, her indescribably soft and musical voice, her
gestures, her laugh, all served Azalea as the standard by which she
measured charm in women.

“You two have been plotting something,” declared the lady.  “I can read
conspiracy in your faces—such a pair of telltale faces as you have!
Come!  What is it?”

She drew Azalea closer to her, and the girl nestled her face for a moment
against Mrs. Carson’s soft cheek.

“It’s the mountains, mamma Carson,” she replied.  “Carin and I want to go
up there and teach school the way we planned last summer.  You remember,
don’t you?”

“So that’s it!  Well, that’s not a very dark conspiracy.  There wouldn’t
be any objection if we weren’t going abroad.”

“But it’s because you are going abroad, mamma,” cried Carin, “and because
I don’t really want to go, that this plan seems so—so timely.”

Well, that was where the argument began.  It was continued at the dinner
table; it was taken up the next day with the McBirneys as soon as ever
they showed their faces in the village, so that they were not, after all,
allowed to approach the subject in that gradual and cautious manner
advised by Azalea; it was carried to the Reverend Absalom Summers and his
wife Barbara.  Even Jonathan Summers, aged three, took a hand in it by
pulling Azalea’s skirt and saying: “Don’t go!  Don’t go.”

Mr. Carson explained the situation to Mr. Summers after this fashion:
“It’s not that I am really so keen about taking Carin on this trip; and I
certainly have no objection to her making herself useful, but going to
live upon a wild mountain among wilder people doesn’t appeal to me as the
best thing for young girls to do.  I doubt if it would be safe.”

“Safe?” roared the Reverend Absalom, who had been a mountain man himself
and to whom the honor of the mountaineers was dear.  “Safe, Mr. Carson!
Do you mean to insinuate that those girls wouldn’t be as safe on Dundee
Mountain as here in the town of Lee?  Are you not aware that women are
honored and protected in the remotest regions of our mountains?”

Mr. Carson enjoyed the outbreaks of his friend and was not at all put out
at having provoked one.  His smile led Mr. Summers to suppose that his
eloquence had not been vigorous enough, so he resumed in a louder tone of
voice:

“We may do a good many things up on the mountain that aren’t generally
approved of by people living in the valleys; we may quarrel among
ourselves, and we may forget to pay the government the tax on our
whiskey; we may be lazy—we _are_ lazy, if you like; we may have different
ideas of enjoyment from those you have, but if you think there is any
human panther among us who—”

Mr. Carson roared with laughter.

“No, Summers,” he cried, waving his hands to stop the stream of protest,
“I don’t think so—I don’t think anything.  But you know yourself that if
the girls go up to Sunset Gap, they’ve got to have a reliable, sensible,
agreeable woman along with them.  Now where shall we find anyone like
that?  She must like roughing it, yet she’ll have to be a refined,
companionable woman.  She must know how to keep the pantry stocked, do
the cooking, and yet be a restraint to our impulsive young people.  Such
a person is hard to find.”

Mr. Summers had to admit that it was.  His little wife, Barbara, who
wanted terribly to go with the girls but who was unwilling to leave her
preacher-man, had to admit it also, though she usually was the first to
think of the answer to any puzzle.  Finally, Mr. Carson put it this way:

“McBirney and his wife are willing Azalea should go, providing the proper
protectress is found.  Mrs. Carson and I feel the same way.  Now,
Summers, I ask you, isn’t it up to the girls to find the right chaperon?
Why not leave it in their hands?  Let them produce a woman of good sense,
refinement, courage, love of adventure mixed with judgment,
well-educated, accustomed to killing snakes, friendly to the mountain
people, with a religious nature and a perfect disposition—no objection to
a little knowledge of medicine thrown in—and they can go.”

The Rev. Absalom threw back his head and laughed, and his laugh was
entirely out of proportion to the size of the little house in which he
and his wife and his yellow-headed son lived and had their being, and in
which they were now entertaining their friends the Carsons and the
McBirneys.

But Carin and Azalea arose to the situation.

“It’s an hour before father and mother are to start up the mountain for
home,” said Azalea, taking the dare gayly; “so we’ve time to go out and
look around.”

“Why not?” demanded Carin.  “I’m great at finding four-leaf clovers.  Why
shouldn’t I find the perfect chaperon?”  Half in expectation, half in
despair, the two of them ran off down the sunny street, followed by the
applause of Barbara Summers’ small brown hands.

“First,” said Carin, when they were beyond the hearing of their elders,
“let’s go tell Annie Laurie.”

“Of course,” agreed Azalea.  “Even if she doesn’t know of the right
person, she must be told what we’re doing.”

It was not far from the Summers’ home to the rather gaunt house which
Annie Laurie Pace had inherited.  The girls made their way between the
well-kept fields in which the fodder was raised for Annie Laurie’s fine
herd of cattle—the celebrated Pace herd, which provided milk for half the
county—and so came by carefully tended roads to their friend’s home.

Annie Laurie had been training vines to grow over the austere house, and
had made flower gardens in the yard which until recently had worn a
forbidding and business-like appearance.  There was even an arbor about
which clematis and wisteria were beginning to climb, and here, sparsely
sheltered by shade, sat Miss Zillah Pace, the younger and gentler of
Annie Laurie’s two aunts.  There was a wistful look on her face and her
hands lay idly in her lap, but when she saw the two girls she got to her
feet and came swiftly forward to meet them.

“Oh,” she cried, “how very nice to see you on such a beautiful day!
Everyone ought to be young to-day, oughtn’t they?  I declare, I don’t see
how I’m ever going to give up and be middle-aged if it means sitting
around here at home season in and season out.”

“Were you such a very giddy girl, Miss Zillah?” asked Carin in amusement,
casting an eye at Miss Zillah’s staid frock and prim little curls, and
thinking how amusing it was that such a settled little person should be
able to think of herself as adventurous.

“Not on the outside,” returned Miss Zillah.  “When I was young I had a
very great sense of duty, and there were many opportunities for me to
exercise it.  But do you know, I’m kind of worn out doing my duty, and
I’d give anything if I were going away on some such jaunt as we went on
last year.”  She looked at the girls appealingly, and then concluded with
a shy little smile, “I suppose you think I’m a dreadfully silly old
woman.”

But Carin had clasped Azalea’s arm in a fierce grasp.

“The perfect chaperon,” she whispered, “made to order!”

“Found in fifteen minutes,” whispered back Azalea.

Miss Zillah, who caught their rapid exchange of confidence, looked
perplexed.

“Oh, don’t think us rude, Miss Zillah,” pleaded Carin.  “We’re not; we’re
merely excited.  You see, we’ve just made a discovery.”

“Have you, my dears?” asked Miss Zillah.  “Come sit down in the arbor and
tell me about it.”

“I’m afraid we’re almost too elated to sit down,” laughed Azalea.  “You
see, what we have discovered, Miss Zillah, is you.”

“But it’s a long time since you landed on my continent,” said Miss
Zillah.

“Yes, but when we first saw you we made the same mistake that Columbus
did.  We thought you were some one else.”

“Who did you think I was?  Who am I?” laughed the nice old lady, glad of
an excuse to be talking happy nonsense.

“Why, we thought you were just Annie Laurie’s aunt,” explained Azalea,
“but now we’re wondering if you’re not our chaperon.  We’re going up to
Sunset Gap again; this time to teach school.  And we _must_ have a
perfect chaperon, else we’ll not be allowed to go.”

“And you’re she!” cried Carin, flinging her arms impulsively about Miss
Zillah’s soft neck.  “You know you are!  Say you’ll come, Miss Zillah,
and then we can run back and tell our people that everything is all
right.”




CHAPTER II
PASSENGERS FOR BEE TREE


Three weeks later there was a notable gathering at the railroad station
at Lee.  The Carsons were there, the Paces, the McBirneys, including Jim,
in a new straw hat, Dick Heller, just up from the Rutherford Academy, Sam
Disbrow, happy now and full of wholesome activity, Hi Kitchell and his
sister, and ever so many others, some black and some white.  The baggage
man was oppressed with a sense of the importance of the luggage he was to
put on the train, for it included, as he realized full well, the summer
outfit of Miss Zillah Pace and her charges.  That is, if Azalea and
Carin, so important and full of business, so suddenly grown up as it
seemed, and their own mistresses, could possibly be looked upon as
“charges.”

“Wire Mr. Summers if anything goes wrong, Carin,” Mr. Carson was
commanding.

“Mind you write me everything—simply everything,” warned Annie Laurie.

“You will find it very profitable to keep a diary, Sister Zillah,” Miss
Adnah Pace commented.

“It’s a burning shame we’re not all going,” little Mrs. Summers sighed.
“I’m sure the mountain air is just what Jonathan needs.”

Jonathan, who was toddling from friend to friend, sociably offering the
words: “Don’t go” as an example of his conversational powers, really did
not seem to need much of anything.

“If you all went,” broke in the Reverend Absalom Summers, “we’d have just
as much of a town up at the Gap as we have down here in the valley, and
then that would spoil it all, and we’d have to light out again.  Queer,
isn’t it, how we all swarm to a town and then hike out to the solitude,
and fret wherever we are?”

“Oh, there’s the train,” cried Azalea.  “Oh, mother McBirney, dear, I’ve
got to go.  You’re sure you won’t mind?”

“It’s pretty late in the day to be thinking about that,” said Ma McBirney
with laughing tremulousness.  “You take care yo’self, Zalie, and look
after Miss Zillah and Miss Carson, and yo’r pa and me’ll be all right.
Do yo’r level best to pass on the l’arnin’ to them pore untaught folks,
Zalie.  We’ll be honin’ for you, but we’re mighty proud that yo’re able
to be a help to others.”

Azalea blushed violently.

“Oh, mother,” she whispered, “the people will hear you and they’ll think
I’m a regular missionary!”

“Shake hands, girl,” cried Pa McBirney.  “Here’s the train.”

So they were off.  Miss Zillah had a seat to herself and her bags and
boxes.  Carin and Azalea sat together, and for a time said very little.
Both were a bit tearful—Carin particularly, at the thought that her
parents were going over-seas.  But after a while they grew interested in
the flowering mountain side and the little cabins tucked away on the
shelves of the mountains.  Azalea even caught a glimpse of the McBirney
cabin lying so confidently on its high ledge—the cabin through whose
hospitable door she had entered to find the only home she knew.

To keep the tears from getting out beyond her lids, where they were
swimming at rising flood, she turned her attention to the people with her
in the car.  Opposite was an old woman in a sun bonnet, chewing her snuff
stick and staring straight before her, without, apparently, the slightest
curiosity about anyone.  In front of her sat a little girl of seven, who
evidently was traveling quite alone.  She was just the sort of a child
Azalea liked—though, come to think of it, Azalea had never seen any sort
of a child she did not like.  This one, however, was especially
attractive, no doubt about that.  She had purplish-blue eyes, like
pansies, and dark hair and lashes so long they swept her cheeks.  She
looked both shy and innocently bold, both plain and pretty, both graceful
and awkward, both wistful and mischievous.  Azalea decided that when she
grew up she probably would be lovely.

She kept glancing at the girls as if she would like to be acquainted with
them, and finally Azalea motioned for her to come over to their seat.
The little girl got up at the first crook of Azalea’s finger and crossed
the aisle, smiling and coloring as she came.

“You don’t like sitting all alone very well, do you?” Azalea asked.  “I
think it’s horrid traveling in the cars with no one to talk to.  Don’t
you think I’m lucky to have my friend with me?”

“Yes’m,” said the little girl in a very sweet voice.  Then after a pause:
“I couldn’t bring any of my friends with me.”

She seemed to think she would have been the one to do the “bringing.”  It
evidently did not occur to her that she would have been “brought.”

“I’ll turn over this seat if you like,” said Azalea, “and then you may
sit with us.  Mayn’t she, Carin?”

“Why, of course,” said Carin.  She got up to turn over the seat, but it
stuck and rocked and acted in a singularly perverse way, as car seats
sometimes will, and at that a lad who had been sitting with his nose
buried in a book, arose and came quickly to her assistance.

He was so slender and graceful, his dark eyes were so friendly and quick
to make responses, that the girls and Miss Zillah could not help staring
at him for a few seconds with surprise and admiration in their eyes.  In
America lads and young men often have a way of looking like grown men
before their time.  They are too business-like, too responsible, too
seasoned.  But this boy was as eager, as gentle as the girls themselves.
He not only had not grown up—though he was as tall as the majority of
men—but he looked as if he had no intention of doing so for some time to
come.  He held his cap in his hand, and showed a beautifully shaped head
overgrown by a short crop of dark curls which he had, apparently, tried
in vain to straighten.

“That seat,” he said with a sudden smile, showing two rows of teeth that
could be described in no other way save as “gleaming,” “has a bad
disposition.”

“Yes, hasn’t it?” said Carin.  “But I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

“It’s no trouble,” he said, “for me to shake the cussedness out of
anything that acts like that.  It’s a pleasure.”

He gave the seat such a shake as irritable parents give to naughty
children, and got it over in place somehow, and he settled the little
girl in it.

“Have you anything that you’d like to have brought over here, Miss
Rowantree?” he asked.

“Please,” said the little girl, “my dolly and my package.”

She spoke with a fine distinctness and with a charming accent.

“She’s English, I’m sure,” whispered Carin to Azalea.

The doll, a battered but evidently well-loved affair, was brought, and a
box held in a shawl strap, which no doubt contained the small person’s
wearing apparel.

“But how did you know her name was Miss Rowantree?” Azalea asked, or
started to ask.  Before she had finished her question she saw on the
child’s dark blue reefer a piece of cloth, neatly sewn in place, and with
these words on it in indelible ink:

“Constance Rowantree.  Please see that she leaves the train at Rowantree
Road.”

“You’re terrible young to be traveling alone, child,” said Aunt Zillah
seriously.  “How ever could they let you do it?”

“I got so homesick they had to,” explained the child with equal gravity.
“Nobody could come with me, so I had to come alone.  I don’t mind,” she
added valiantly.

“I hope you reach your home before dark,” went on Aunt Zillah, quite at
ease now that she had somebody to worry about.

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” the child answered, “I’ll get home a long time before
sundown, and my father will meet me.”  She spoke in such a slow and
particular fashion that she made them all smile.

“That’s all right then,” said Azalea cheerfully, who was afraid the
little girl was having some fears manufactured for her.  “Now, please
tell me the name of your doll.”

“It’s Mary Cecily Rowantree, after my mamma,” said the little girl.
“Isn’t that a pretty name?”

“Pretty as a song,” said the youth, who was still standing by them.

“I wish it was my name,” the little girl added.  “I’m only named
Constance.”

“But that’s a lovely name,” Carin told her.  “It means that you will
always have to be true to those you love.”

“I love ever so many people,” said the child.  “And I’m going to keep
right on loving them as long as I live.”

They chatted on for a while, as congenial folk will on the train.  No
doubt if Azalea had been left to herself she would frankly have told her
new acquaintances just where she and her friends were going and what they
intended to do, but the more reserved Carin and the cautious Miss Zillah
forbade, by their eyes, any such confidences.  So, after Constance had
finished telling how a lady named Miss Todd has come to live with them
for a while, and how she had taken her—Constance—home with her, and how
Constance had stayed till the “spell” of homesickness conquered her, no
more confidences were made save by the young man.

“This country’s new to me,” he told them.  “But I’ve heard a lot about
it, so I came up to see what it was like.  You see, I’m a painter.  At
least if I keep on working for the next twenty years maybe I’ll become
one.  I’ve been sketching on the islands off the Carolina coast, and now
I’m going to see what I can do with the mountains.  I painted some
pictures of the sea that were so bad the tide didn’t come in for three
days and maybe I can make the mountains so enraged that they’ll skip like
lambs.  Anyway, it will be fun.”

“Where do you get off?” asked Azalea cheerfully.

“Hanged if I know,” the youth replied, turning on them again the radiance
of his beautiful smile.  “Any place that looks wild enough will get me.”

“It’s wild at Rowantree Road,” said the little Constance gravely, looking
up from under her long lashes with almost the expression of some woods
creature.  “We never see anybody hardly.  You can’t think how wild it
is!”

Time went on and in spite of Miss Zillah’s reserved manner, all of the
young people were beginning to enjoy themselves and each other when the
train came to a sudden stop.  It was so sudden that it threw Constance
forward on Carin’s lap and hurled the contents of the overhead carry-alls
down on the heads of the travelers.

“Oh!” cried Constance, righting herself, “I hope Mary Cecily isn’t
broken!”

“What is it?” asked Miss Zillah anxiously, addressing herself to the only
man in the party.

But the young man was already out of the car, making investigations, and
he was followed by four traveling men who plunged out of the smoking
room.

“Oh, let’s go see—” began Azalea.  But Miss Zillah’s hand was on her arm.

“Sit still, my dear.  The gentlemen will look to the matter,” she said
with the confidence of the old-time woman.

“Of course they will,” protested Azalea, half-vexed and half-laughing.
“They’ll have all the fun of seeing to it.  I want some of the fun
myself.”

“No doubt the engine has broken down,” said Carin calmly, “and you
couldn’t do anything about that, could you, Azalea?”

Constance wriggled out of her seat and started for the door, but Miss
Zillah caught and held her gently.

“You are much better in here, my dear,” she said.

The child, rebuked, turned her attention to picking up the articles that
had fallen from their racks.  There were, in the seat where their new
acquaintance had been sitting, a knapsack and an artist’s kit, marked K.
O’C. in large black letters on the canvas.

“K stands for Kitty,” said Miss Constance.  “O stands for Oliver.  C
stands for Constance.”

The young man came rushing back into the car, and he overheard.

“K stands for Keefe,” he declared, “and O’C for O’Connor.  That’s myself,
such as I am.  The engine has broken down—”

“Just as I thought,” murmured Carin.

“And we’re likely to be tied up here for hours.”

“It is a single track, I think,” said Miss Zillah with forced calm.  “Are
we not in danger of a collision?  Would you advise me, sir, to take the
young ladies out into the open air?”

“Why not?” asked Keefe O’Connor, packing articles back in the racks and
generally settling the car.  “We may as well break up the time a little.”
He happened to look at Constance and caught a look of dismay on the face
that until now had been so cheerful.

“Well, Miss Rowantree, what is it?” he asked.

“If we stay here for hours,” said the wise little girl, “it will be jet
dark when I get to my place.”  Her lips quivered a little.

“Come dark, come light,” said the young man, “you’ll be all right,
Constance Rowantree.  Just you trust to me.  Anyway, worry never yet
mended anything.”

But plenty of worrying was done on that train first and last that
afternoon.  The engineer worried and the conductor worried, the brake-men
had their own troubles, and the passengers fretted as hard as they could.
Carin and Azalea walked up and down the track with Miss Zillah and
Constance, and tried to think they liked the adventure.

“Mr. Summers said that Mr. McEvoy would meet us no matter what happened,”
said Miss Zillah, “and I take it that what Mr. Summers says is so.”

“Of course it’s so,” Azalea assured her.  “We’ll certainly be met, Miss
Zillah.  But even if we shouldn’t be, there’d be some place for us to
stay.  There are houses at Bee Tree, aren’t there?  Or do you think there
is only a tree?”

“Oh, there are houses,” put in Constance.  “Daddy goes there to get his
letters and the groceries.”

“Why don’t you get off at Bee Tree with us?” asked Azalea.  “Then we can
look after you.”

“Oh, no,” said the child.  “Daddy wrote that I was to get off at
Rowantree Road.  It’s ever so much nearer our house.  I must do just what
papa said.  If he was there waiting for me and I stayed on the train,
he’d feel dread-ful-ly.”

She made a very long word of “dreadfully,” separating the syllables in
her queer way.

The conductor of the train overheard what was being said.

“I tell you what it is, Miss Constance,” he said: “I’ll have to see your
father standing right there before me ready to take you in charge before
I’ll let you off in those woods alone.  It will be plumb night before we
get to your place.”

“Now, see here, conductor,” said one of the traveling men, “let one of us
boys get off with the little girl.  It won’t do at all for her to be
dropped in the woods.”

“Draw lots to see who does it,” proposed another of the traveling men,
and began tearing up pieces of paper.  “Here, you fellows!”

But Keefe O’Connor objected.

“Not a bit of it,” he cried.  “You men are on business, and it throws you
out of your whole week’s schedule if you miss a town.  I’m out gunning
for scenery.  Want to paint it, you understand.  I have no
destination—only a mileage ticket.  Let me get off with the little girl.
If her father is on hand, I can swing back on the train again.  If he
isn’t, she can guide me to her house.”

“It’s a terribly long way,” said Constance dolefully.  “It’s right
through the woods.  You haven’t a lantern with you, have you?”

“No,” admitted Keefe, “I’ve no lantern, but I’m sure we’d make our way.
Didn’t you promise me you wouldn’t worry?”

“No, sir,” said the child seriously, “I don’t think I promised.”

There really was only one person on the train who could be said to
refrain, and that was the mountain woman with the snuff stick.

“I’ve been a-studying nigh on three months about going to see my son
Jake,” she said, “and now it don’t seem to matter much when I do git
thar.  I’ve got shet of the work to home for a spell, anyhow.  I’ve kep’
at it twelve year without a let-up, and setting by a while won’t trouble
me none.”

No one had anything to eat, for all had counted on reaching their
destination by supper time, so that sundown saw a group of hungry people
with only Miss Zillah Pace’s generous supply of cookies to comfort them.
But at last the engine was repaired in such a way that the engineer
“reckoned it would hold,” and the train moved cautiously on through the
darkness, delayed here and there at sidings, and throwing trains all
along the line out of their time schedule.

There was silence in the car.  The traveling men no longer told their
stories; Aunt Zillah nodded but dared not doze for fear of missing her
station; the mountain woman brooded patiently, caring little, it seemed,
as to what fate might have in store for her; and little Constance slept
in Azalea’s arms.  Carin was supremely patient and quiet; and the bright
eyes of Keefe O’Connor gleamed now and then from under the rim of his
cap, which was pulled low over his face, and behind which he was occupied
in thinking his own thoughts.

But he was alert enough when the conductor came to warn him that they
were approaching Rowantree Road.  He and Azalea between them got the
little girl awake, and with his packages and hers, the friends saw him
swing off the train in the black murk.  The conductor’s lantern threw a
little glow around him where he stood holding the hand of Constance fast
in his own.

“Mighty good thing you’re here, sir,” they heard the conductor say.  “I
certainly would have been put out if I’d had to leave the little one in
the dark by herself.”

“Oh, my daddy is somewhere,” Constance reassured him in her high ringing
tones; and as they pulled out they heard her voice calling “Daddy!
Daddy!”

“There’s a light!” cried Aunt Zillah excitedly.  “See, it’s just up the
track a way.  Her father must be there after all.  Really, it’s the
greatest relief to me.”

The traveling men seemed to be relieved, too.  So was the conductor; so,
no doubt, were the brakemen.  No one knows what the engineer felt.  He
probably was praying that his repairs would hold out.  The mountain woman
took out her snuff stick again.  Just then the conductor called:

“All out for Bee Tree.”

Azalea caught at her parcels; Carin gathered up hers more deliberately;
Aunt Zillah arose in a flutter, dropping things here and there which the
conductor and the youngest of the traveling men picked up, and presently
they were off in the mellow gloom.  But it was a gloom with a
lantern-light to mitigate it.

“Be you the ladies Mr. Summers writ about?” a cordial voice inquired.
“I’m McEvoy.  Step along this way, please.”




CHAPTER III
SUNSET GAP


The night was as bland as it was dark.  Neither stars nor moon lighted
the way of the travelers, but Miles McEvoy’s horses had no need of these
celestial bodies to help them keep the road.  They knew it, though it
swept around Simms’ barn and took the cut-off by Decker’s hill, and
plunged straight through Ravenel’s woods.  They did not tremble as,
climbing and still climbing, it carried them along the edge of a gorge;
nor did they quake when their hoofs beat on a resounding bridge, though
there were but planks between them and an abyss.

Dew-wet branches touched the faces of those who sat in the sagging old
wagon, and low-flying bats brushed their hair.  Owls hooted, hounds
barked, and all the unnamed sad night noises of the mountain reached
their ears.  Azalea had known such journeys many and many a time in the
old days when she had traveled in the caravan with Sisson’s actors, but
to Carin and Miss Zillah this plunging ahead up a strange road in the
pitch blackness was a new and not altogether pleasant experience.  Mr.
McEvoy may have guessed at their feelings, for he said after a long
silence:

“Mr. Summers was for you-all stopping down at Bee Tree for the night.
You could ‘a’ put up at Mis’ Casey’s by turning her step-ma out’n her
bed.  But even then it would have took some studying, for the three of
you would have had to bunk together, and that looked to me a leetle like
crowding the mourners.  So I said to Mis’ McEvoy I’d better haul you
right up home and settle you in our spare room.”

“That was very good of you,” said Miss Zillah heartily.  “It’s a shame
that you had to wait so long for the train.  I’m afraid Mrs. McEvoy will
have cooked supper for us hours ago, and that she’ll be quite discouraged
by this time.”

“No’m, she won’t,” said McEvoy placidly.  “She’s been laying in stores
for you-all these two or three days past.  All I’m to do is to whoop when
we hit Rattlesnake Turn, and she’ll put the kettle to b’iling.”

“What,” asked Carin from somewhere down in her throat, “is Rattlesnake
Turn, Mr. McEvoy, please?”

“’Tain’t nothin’ but a crook in the road, miss.  A few rattlers has been
kilt there on and off, and the folks like to keep the name.  It makes it
sound kind of exciting like, and there ain’t so many things to cause
excitement hereabouts.  We have to make the most of them we’ve got.”  He
gave a little chuckle, and Carin drew a sigh of relief.

“I know,” she said under her breath to Miss Zillah, “that I wouldn’t be
afraid of lions.  At least, not terribly afraid.  I’d be willing to go
hunting wild beasts if I had a good rifle, but I certainly do hate
snakes.”

“Snakes?” murmured Mr. McEvoy pensively.  “Snakes don’t like to be rubbed
the wrong way.  Nuther do folks.  Take things easy, I say—snakes
included.  Go your way and let them go their’n.  Of course if they show
fight, why, scotch ’em.  I seem to understand snakes.”

His musical drawling voice died away languidly, and no one made any
reply.  But Azalea, who knew the mountain people, smiled a little in the
darkness, thinking to herself that Mr. McEvoy’s kind treated their
neighbors much as he did his snakes.

All things come to an end, and the mountain ride was no exception to the
rule.  Tired, rather stiff and very hungry, Miss Zillah and the two girls
were helped out on a horse block made of the huge bole of a chestnut
tree, and were ushered by “Mis’ Cassie McEvoy,” into the brightness of
her mountain cabin.  (She was given the benefit of her full name by the
neighbors to distinguish her from her sister-in-law who lived “over
beyant.”)

Mrs. McEvoy had the table set, the fire blazing on the open hearth, and
the kettle simply leaping among the coals.

She was quiet and shy, but she wanted her visitors to feel at home and
she told them so in a voice even softer and slower than her husband’s.
She led them into the second room in the cabin—there were only two—and
here, sure enough, was the “company room,” with its two beds heaped high
with feather ticks and covered with hand-woven counterpanes.  The walls
were decorated with large framed patent medicine advertisements, very
strong in color, and quite entertaining in subject.  One showed St.
George slaying the dragon, the legend below advertising some oil that was
warranted to cure man of almost all his pains and aches.  Another
pictured a knight in coat of mail, mounted on a charger, rushing at the
fell castle of Disease, his lance in rest.  There were many others, and
in a moment or two Azalea discovered that these went with the rows of
bottles—three deep—upon the mantel shelf.  Tall and dark, squat and
ruddy, all much labeled and sampled, they stood there to bear witness to
the chief interest of Mis’ Cassie McEvoy’s life.

“She didn’t look sickly to me,” said Miss Zillah anxiously.  “At least no
more so than the mountain women usually do.”

But Mis’ McEvoy did not long leave Miss Zillah in ignorance of her
complaint.

“Anybody’d think,” she said while she busied herself setting her supper
before them, “that I was trying to p’isen ’em, to look at them medicine
bottles in thar.  I said to Miles it was a pity I didn’t have no other
place to put ’em—”

“And I told her,” broke in her husband, “that a chimney shelf was whar
folks set out the most costly stuff they had, and by that I reckoned them
medicine bottles was whar they belonged.”

“I’ve been ailing,” said Mis’ McEvoy, looking straight past her husband
at Miss Pace, “for nigh on fifteen years.  Nobody,” she said proudly,
“can make out what it is that _does_ ail me.  Some says it’s this and
some says it’s that.  Some says take this and some says take that.”

“And she heeds ’em,” said McEvoy, with a sound in his throat between a
laugh and a groan.  “So if you’ve got anything that’s good for what ails
her, Miss Pace, ma’am, if you’d be so kind as to mention the name of it I
would get it the next time I’m down to the town.”

“Them pictures you see on the wall in the company room,” went on Mis’
McEvoy, “come with the medicine.”

“They do so,” said her husband, passing the chicken to Carin.

Carin and Azalea were just tired enough to feel silly.  Each girl knew if
she but caught the eye of the other, she would be off in a fit of
laughter, and this was no time for them to disgrace themselves when they
had come up as bearers of learning and manners, so to speak.  So they
looked anywhere except at each other, and only Miss Zillah noticed that
they were choking over their food as they strangled their giggles.

As soon as politeness permitted, they excused themselves, and it was a
happy moment for them when they tumbled onto the high feather bed and lay
there in delicious drowsiness listening to the call of the whippoorwills.
They could hear Miss Zillah softly moving around, and now and then
through half-closed lids they saw her conscientiously brushing her
hair—counting the strokes as she did so—reading her Bible and saying her
prayers.  But at last preparations for the night were finished and all
sank to sleep.

“Why call this Sunset Gap?” asked Carin the next morning.  “Wouldn’t
Sunrise Gap do as well?”

The sun was streaming gorgeously through the open casement full upon the
bed where the girls lay.  Azalea sat up with a start, wondering for a
moment where she was, and how it came that Carin’s voice was in her ears.
Then she saw Miss Zillah’s curls upon the pillow of the adjoining bed,
recognized the triple row of bottles on the mantel shelf, and remembered
that she was now a responsible person.  She was a teacher, a kind of
missionary, a somebody with a purpose!  It was both amusing and alarming.

“Oh, Carin,” she said with a little nervous laugh, “why ever did we come?
Do you suppose we can do anything worth doing?  I’m frightened, honestly
I am.”

Carin sat up in bed too, and Azalea watched her hair turn into shining
gold where the sun played upon it.

“Honey-bird, what’s the matter with you?” Carin demanded.  “I thought
people were always brave in the morning and downhearted at night.  You
were braver than I was last night coming up that dreadful road in the
dark, and now here you are, getting fussy in broad daylight.”

“Well,” said Azalea, a little ashamed, “we’ve simply got to make a
success, haven’t we?  I don’t know as I ever before simply _had_ to make
a success.”

“Take it easy, the way Mr. McEvoy does the snakes,” laughed Carin.  “If
you get to feeling so dreadfully wise and responsible you won’t be able
to do a thing.”

“That’s right,” said Miss Zillah from her bed.  “I myself have always
been too anxious.  It runs in the Pace blood to be serious and
care-taking.  But now that I’m middle-aged and have taken time for
thought I see that owls have never been as much liked as larks.  So you
be a lark, Azalea.  That’s what you naturally are, anyway.”

Azalea gave a little chuckle.  She liked Miss Zillah’s way of putting
things; moreover, these particular words stuck in her memory.  She
contrived to “be a lark” at breakfast, and she insisted on helping Mis’
Cassie McEvoy with the dishes and on entering with vivacity into the
discussion of whether medicine that was good for rheumatism would cure
heartburn.  Two bottles of patent medicine which were enjoying the most
favor just at that time, stood on a tiny shelf above the kitchen table.
One was very fat and contained a dark liquid, and this Azalea secretly
named “Bluebeard.”  The other was slender, tall and filled with a pinkish
stuff, and this she called “The Princess Madeline.”  She told Carin, and
they amused themselves by watching to see which was most in favor.  As
nearly as they could make out, Mis’ Cassie favored Bluebeard of mornings
and so probably turned to Princess Madeline along toward night.

Mr. McEvoy had gone down to Bee Tree to get the three horses which Mr.
Carson was having sent up.  Mustard and Paprika were coming, with a
gentle old nag which had been one of Miss Zillah’s best friends for many
years and which bore the name of Minerva.  So, the house being tidied,
the four women folk started out—Mis’ Cassie acting as guide—and went to
look at the schoolhouse and the little cabin where Miss Zillah was to set
up housekeeping with the girls.

The log schoolhouse, which had been unused for four years, lay
four-square to the compass, facing the purple south.  Not that the south
had any advantage over the other points of the compass in regard to its
color.  All the world, except, of course, the immediate foreground, was
purple up at Sunset Gap.  The mountains threw up peak after peak through
the purple dimness, and the sky itself lost something of its blue
brightness because of the purple veils which drifted between it and the
sweet-smelling earth.

“Time was,” explained Mis’ Cassie, “when this here school was kep’ up
fine.  That was when the Ravenels lived over to the Hall.  Mr. Theodore
Ravenel was pore in his health and he come up this-away to git well.  He
and his wife and his children lived to the Hall—”

“What is the Hall?  Where is it, please?” asked Azalea.

“It’s over beyant,” replied Mis’ Cassie, waving her hand vaguely toward
the slope before them.  “But he died, and Mis’ Ravenel took the childer’
and left.  I reckon she would have given something toward keeping up the
school if she could have spared the money, but she had four young ones to
rear, and couldn’t see her way to it.  The school and the teacher’s house
is just as she left it.  My old man’s kept an eye on things.  He vowed he
wouldn’t see the place tore to pieces.  Thar was plenty hereabouts who
would ‘a’ helped theirselves to the furniture and fixings if he’d let
’em, but he said, no, anybody who had the gift of peering into the future
could see that sometime that school would be set up here ag’in.  And what
he said has come true.”

“Yes, it has, hasn’t it?” cried Azalea, delighted as she always was at
any sign of friendliness and hopefulness in the world.  “Do hurry, Mrs.
McEvoy, please; I’m just wild to see how the schoolhouse looks.”

Mis’ Cassie slipped the huge key in the door and the four entered the
musty schoolroom.  It was, as mountain schools go, a well-equipped room.
There was a fireplace on one side for comfort in mildly chill weather,
and a large sheet iron stove on the other for use on colder days.  The
teacher’s platform was backed by a blackboard; there were good desks for
both pupils and teacher, and comfortable seats with backs to them.  The
room was well lighted, and no dirtier than might be expected.  It is
needless to say, however, that Miss Zillah’s first thought was of the
cleaning it must undergo.

“Where can I find some one to do the cleaning for us, Mrs. McEvoy?” she
asked.  “We must have everything scrubbed and the walls whitewashed.”

“Well,” said Mis’ Cassie, “I’d take pride in cleaning out, and Miles, he
could whitewash.”

“But are you strong enough?” asked Miss Zillah kindly.  “Taking medicine
all the time as you do, I’m afraid you oughtn’t to do such hard work.”

Mis’ Cassie smiled so that she showed the vacant places between her long
pointed teeth.

“It’s taking all that thar medicine that’s pearted me up so I _can_ do
it,” she said triumphantly.  Miss Zillah said no more in the way of
warning, but straightway came to terms with Mis’ Cassie.  Azalea and
Carin, looking from the windows, did not really think this the best site
in the world for a schoolhouse.

“I don’t know how it will be with the pupils,” Azalea said, “but I’m
afraid the teachers won’t do a thing but look out of the window.
Honestly, I’ve never seen such views, and you know, Carin, that first and
last I’ve seen something of the mountains.”

“Oh, how I can paint,” Carin sighed happily.  “I shall get up early
mornings and work before school.  Oh, Azalea, anyone could learn to paint
up here—a person couldn’t keep from painting.”

“I could,” Azalea had to admit.  “You know, Carin, if you were a wicked
queen and threatened to cut my head off if I didn’t give you the picture
of a cow, I’d send for my friends and relatives and bid them a tearful
good-bye, for I’d know my last day had come.”

“Now we’ll go to the house, my dears,” said Miss Zillah.  “If that only
proves to be anything like as comfortable as the schoolhouse, we shall be
fortunate indeed.”

They passed through a grove of maples, and followed a trail once well
worn, that led them by way of a little bridge over a cheerfully noisy
mountain stream to a little headland from which the mountain shelved
abruptly.  Here, among towering white pines, and seeming to be almost a
part of the earth itself, stood a little cabin of logs.  They were square
hewn, but so weathered that their color was like that of the tree trunks,
and the slope of the roof was as graceful as the sweeping branches of the
great pines.  The windows were closed with board shutters, and the
door—well-made and paneled—was double-locked.  Mis’ Cassie, however, was
soon able to admit her guests, and they stood for the first time within
the little room which was to live, forever after, in the minds of all of
them, as a place of peace.

It was a room of good size, divided after a fashion by a huge “rock”
chimney with a fireplace on each side of it—an interesting fact which it
did not take the delighted girls long to discover.  A few simple pieces
of furniture stood about the room—some easy chairs, a settee, a table and
a clock.  Behind the chimney was the bedroom.  Here stood two beds, a
chest of drawers, some straight-backed chairs, and a wide bench with
pail, pitcher, and washbasin.  There was nothing more.  Nothing more was
needed.

“But the kitchen,” said Miss Zillah, turning her gaze reproachfully upon
Mis’ Cassie.

“Oh, yes,” said Mis’ Cassie, “sure enough—the kitchen.”  She led the way
through a door they had not noticed, and there in a lean-to, with a
spring bubbling in a “rock house” fairly by the door, was the little work
room, with its small cooking stove and its shelves of dishes.

“Are the dishes horrid?” demanded Carin, fearing the worst in the matter
of china.

“No!” cried Azalea in the tone of one who makes a discovery.  “They’ve
pink towers on them and pictures of trees.  Oh, Carin, see, they’re like
that plate your mother has!  Aren’t they the dears?”

“Mis’ Ravenel left them plates and cups,” volunteered Mis’ Cassie.  “She
said when she put ’em on the shelves that she did hope they’d fall into
the hands of some one who would set store by them.  They was what she
used and she was mighty particular about them, but it was such a chore
toting things down the mountains and she’d had such a lot o’ trouble that
she just left things behind her.”

“Well, about all we brought was clothes and bedding,” said Miss Zillah.
“Sister Adnah wanted me to bring along dishes and pictures and curtains
and all manner of things, but I said ‘No, wait.  We won’t be needing
pictures or curtains, where there’s a picture out of every window and no
one to be looking in at night, and if we’ve no other dishes we can eat
out of gourds.’”

Miss Zillah gave one of her odd little laughs—one of the gypsy laughs in
which she sometimes indulged.

“It’s a fit home for anybody,” she decided.  “I can’t hardly wait to get
my hands on it and clean it up.”

“Well, let’s don’t wait,” cried Azalea.  “Mr. McEvoy can bring our things
right here when he comes, can’t he, Mrs. McEvoy.  Oh, yes, and is there a
place for the ponies?”

“No,” Mis’ Cassie told them.  “The ponies is to be kept at our place.
Miles will fetch ’em when you want them.”

“Some one is coming,” said Azalea under her breath.  “I saw some one
walking along the road.”

“Why, Azalea, anybody would think you were Robinson Crusoe.  Why should
you be so surprised to see anybody coming down the road?” asked Carin.

Azalea did not answer for a moment.  She moved nearer to the door and
looked out; then drew back suddenly.

“Oh,” she said under her breath, “it’s that boy we saw on the cars—that
young man, I mean.  You know—Keefe O’Connor.”

“Oh, is that so?” said Carin in the most matter-of-fact way.  “How jolly!
Call him in, Azalea.”

But Azalea, the friendly one, Azalea who always liked to talk to people,
and who, up at the McBirney cabin could hardly let anyone pass the door
without saying “come in,” held back unaccountably.  Miss Zillah and Mis’
Cassie were still in the kitchen, so they could not be appealed to, and
finally it was Carin who ran out of the door and called.  But it really
was not necessary to call, for Keefe O’Connor had already discovered the
little house dropped among the pines as naturally as a ground-bird’s
nest, and he had turned aside to investigate it.  When he saw the open
door and the girls, he took off his hat and swung it.

“Isn’t this great!” he cried, not trying to hide his delight.  “Do you
live here?”

“We’ve been here only half an hour,” said Carin.  “But in half an hour
more I think we may truthfully say that we are living here.”

Keefe took it for granted that he was expected to enter.  He looked about
the house with admiring eyes.

“It’s a perfect place,” he said, “for a painter.”

“Oh, Carin’s a painter,” Azalea said quickly.  How wonderful, she
thought, that both Keefe and Carin should be artists.  It ought to make
them good friends.

“And are you an artist too?” asked Keefe, turning his dark eyes on Azalea
with laughing and admiring inquiry.

“Mercy, no,” said Azalea.  “I’m nothing—just a girl.”

  [Picture: “I an artist?  Mercy, no,” said Azalea.  “I’m nothing—just a
                                  girl”]

“Oh, I see,” he said, smiling radiantly.

Carin broke in cheerfully with:

“And are you really staying around here?”

“Yes,” he said; “I’m at the Hall.  You remember little Miss Rowantree?
Her father and mother have consented to let me use one of their rooms.
They have a great many, you know.”

“Ravenel Hall?” asked Carin.  “Is that the same as Ravenel Hall?  We have
just been hearing something of the Ravenels.”

“It’s called Rowantree Hall now,” smiled Keefe.  “You see, Rowantree
himself lives there.  He’s lord of the manor.”

“Is he so magnificent?” asked Carin, her eyes widening.  “I thought no
one lived about here except the mountain folk.  Mr. Summers never told me
anything about Mr. Rowantree.”

“Then,” said Keefe O’Connor, “Mr. Summers, whoever he may be, couldn’t
have known very much about the country.  To be sure, I haven’t been here
long myself, but from what I’ve seen I should say that Mr. Rowantree was
a very important character.”

“Oh, tell us—” began Carin.  But just then Miss Zillah entered.

“My dears,” she said, “Mrs. McEvoy has kindly started the fire.  Let us
wash the dust off the dishes without delay.  Mrs. McEvoy offers to
provide us with vegetables, and our supplies will soon be here, so
presently we shall have dinner.”

Keefe came forward from the shadow of the huge chimney.

“May I help with the dishes, please?” he asked.  If he saw in Miss
Zillah’s eyes a gleam of annoyance that she should have a third person
foisted upon her care he paid no attention to it.  She was too
hospitable, moreover, to refuse.

“Yes,” she said, “if you do it well.  Then, having paid for your dinner
beforehand, you shall eat it with us.”

Azalea, who was already in the kitchen, heard the answer—and dropped the
dipper.




CHAPTER IV
“SAY! TEACHER!”


The schoolhouse was ready.  The books and tablets, pencils and
stereopticon pictures ordered by Mr. Carson, all had come.  The little
house of the schoolteachers was ready, too.  All that was wanting was the
pupils.

But there was little doubt about them—they would soon be coming, for
posted at corners of the main traveled roads, nailed on trees and tacked
on station and post office walls were placards bearing the information
that the Ravenel School was open and that all who wished to study would
be welcomed.  To make plain the nature of the invitation even to those
who could not read, Carin painted on each placard a picture of the
schoolhouse, and put beyond it a beckoning hand, which, as she explained,
was her idea of sign writing.

“Why, even the groundhogs and chipmunks ought to be able to understand
that,” said Azalea.

Then the services of the carrier of the rural mail and of the doctor and
the preacher were asked.  Miles McEvoy made it his business to send on
the good word by everyone he saw going mountainward.  The grocer promised
to let no mountaineer leave his place without telling him of the news and
asking the person to whom he told it, to spread it far and wide.

So it came to pass that Azalea, sitting on the doorstep one morning after
her early breakfast, saw three heads appearing above the slope.

“Carin,” she called.  “They’ve come!”

“Who?  The gypsies?”

“No.  The pupils.  Oh, where is the key to the schoolhouse?  Oh, Aunt
Zillah, do I look in the least like a teacher?  Come, Carin, we must go
meet them.”

But Carin held back a little because she had a curiosity to see how
Azalea would meet these first seekers after knowledge.  They were three
slender young creatures, two boys and a girl, the eldest twelve, the girl
not much younger, and the second boy a mere wisp of a child who looked as
if he had been dragged along for safe-keeping.

Azalea had rushed forth from her door impetuously, the key to the
schoolhouse in her hand, but Carin saw her check herself and walk toward
the children rather slowly.  Anyone looking at her would have said she
was shy.  But she was not half so shy as the children.  They had a
certain dignity about them, it is true, and looked as if they were there
to face whatever might come, but they, too, came forward slowly, looking
from the corners of their eyes, and with their heads drooping.  When
Azalea got near them they stopped, and she stopped too.

“Howdy,” said Azalea in the mountain fashion.

“Howdy,” said they.

A little silence fell.

“Have you come up here to get learning?” asked Azalea quaintly.

“Yes’m,” said they.  The girl added, “Please ma’am.”

“It certainly does amaze me,” said Miss Zillah under her breath to Carin,
“the good manners all the mountain children have.  It doesn’t matter from
what way-back cove they come, they seem to understand politeness.”

“Isn’t Azalea clever?” murmured Carin.  “Now I would probably have
frightened them so that they’d have scampered away like rabbits.”

“The schoolhouse is over yon,” said Azalea.  The three pupils nodded and
when she set out they followed.  Carin joined them, walking a little
behind the others.

“What are your names?” she heard Azalea ask quietly—almost lazily.

“Coulter,” said the elder boy.  “I’m Bud Coulter; my sister, she’s called
Mandy Coulter.  And this here is Babe.”

Carin ran forward and held out her hand to the little one.

“Take my hand, Babe,” she said.  The child drew back for a moment,
looking up in Carin’s face with something like fear; but when he saw
those beautiful blue eyes which Azalea loved so well, and the shining
mass of golden hair, his mouth opened slowly like one who sees a vision,
and when Carin had grasped his thin little hand in her own, he walked
beside her quietly, though his heart beat so that it made his homespun
blouse rise and fall.

“Thar’s a boy living over beyant us that aims to come to school if we
like it,” Mandy Coulter told Azalea.

“Hush up,” her brother whispered, poking her reprovingly in the ribs.
“Don’t be a tell-all.”

“Oh, you’ll like it, I reckon,” said Azalea.  “Anyway, it’s worth while
to learn to read and write, isn’t it?  People who get on in the world all
know how to read and write.”

“Sam Simms can’t read nor write none,” said Bud, “and he’s got six mules
and ten head of cattle and his own house and fields.”

Azalea flushed a little.  It came back to her memory that it was a part
of the delight of mountain people to catch each other tripping.  They
liked a tussle of wits; it was an intellectual game with them.

“Oh, well,” she said, “there’s more than one way of getting on, of
course.  But Mr. Simms must have been a smart man to get all those things
without having reading and writing to help him.  I don’t suppose there’s
another man in the country who could have done that and been so
ignorant.”

“Ignorant?” retorted Bud Coulter.  “He ain’t ignorant.  He knows just
what to do for sick horses and how to gather in swarming bees and lots of
other things.”

“How clever of him,” said Azalea.  “I’d like to know him.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” declared Bud emphatically.  “He’s about the meanest
man around.  He can shoot like—”

Azalea stopped him on that last word.  She knew quite certainly what it
was going to be.

“He wouldn’t want to shoot me, would he?” she asked smilingly.  “I only
wanted to meet him because he could do so many things, although he could
not do the best ones—he couldn’t read in books what other men thought,
and he couldn’t write down any of his own thoughts.  That leaves him in a
bad way, doesn’t it?  Many men not nearly so clever could get ahead of
him.”  Azalea paused a moment.  Then she cried: “Why, come in, quick, and
I can show you how to get ahead of him yourself.”

Bud’s calm was broken.  He looked at Azalea for the first time as
“teacher.”

“Can you, now?” he asked.

She threw open the schoolroom door, showed the children where to put
their hats and ran to the blackboard.

“You must tell me your real name,” she said.  “Surely it isn’t Bud?”

“No’m.  It’s Laurence Babbitt Coulter.”

“Laurence Babbitt Coulter,” she wrote on the blackboard in very plain
letters.  “Can you write that, Bud?”

“No’m.”

“Do you know your letters?”

“When I don’t forget.”

“By the end of the week,” said Azalea with decision, “you will know your
letters and you will be able to write your own name.  Then you can do
something that Mr. Simms can’t do.”

The boy grinned.

“I can come it over him,” he said.  He was again enjoying the encounter
of wits.  This made Azalea say hastily:

“But of course, since he’s so much older than you, Bud, you mustn’t let
him know that you can come it over him.”

“Sure, I must,” cried the boy.  “He’s been mean to my pa.  He’s the
meanest man in these parts, and he’s got a son—at least it ain’t really
his son—it’s his brother’s son—who’s so meachin’ that he don’t even know
enough to be mean, and if that white-livered boob tries to come up here
to this here school—”

“Why, we’ll teach him how to write his name, too,” said Azalea
valorously.

“I won’t stay in no school that Skully Simms comes to,” declared Bud.

Azalea threw a glance at Carin, who was sitting in one of the school
seats beside Babe, and whose face had turned rather white.  Carin had
been prepared for gratitude from the pupils; it had never occurred to her
that they would come to school in a warring attitude.  Moreover, for the
first time she realized what a young girl Azalea still was.  As her Zalie
stood there on the platform, her hair rumpled by the wind, her face
flushed with perplexity, her frock coming just below her shoe tops, she
looked very tender and youthful indeed.  But she had what Sam Disbrow
would have called “the fighting stuff” in her.

“This school is for learning,” she said, “and learning has nothing to do
with friend or foe.  It is for all alike.  Chinamen with cues down their
backs, Arabs riding on camels over the desert, East Indians, all dressed
in white with turbans on their heads, may be learned.  They live on the
other side of the world—quite on the other side of this great ball we
call the earth—but they have just as much right to get learning as we
have.”

Carin had an idea.  She jumped from her seat and ran to the blackboard.

“Did you ever see a picture of a camel?” she asked.

Before the children could answer she had begun sketching one.  She had
colored chalks, and in a moment or two her brown camel was surrounded by
a stretch of desert sand.  Far off, a fronded palm indicated an oasis.
Then she began telling them what the picture meant; she told them of the
desert and the life on it, and of the old, old learning of the Arabs.
The children sat spellbound.

When she had finished, Azalea took up a piece of chalk.

“Now,” she said quietly but in a tone from which there was no demurring,
“we will learn our letters.”

Bud gave her one last defiant glance; then his eyes fell.

“Yes’m,” he said.

Half an hour later two more pupils came, one a red-headed boy named
Dibblee Sikes, the other a girl called Paralee Panther, with
astonishingly heavy eyebrows, a sullen look and only one arm.  She was
the only one of the pupils who really knew how to read.  Moreover, she
was, under all her sullenness, wild to learn more.  With her heavy eyes
she watched every move that Carin or Azalea made; she listened eagerly
and yet as if only half understanding, to all they said.

After school was over, Azalea, more tired mentally than she ever
remembered to have been in her life, walked beside this girl for a way.

“How is it that you have been taught?” asked Azalea.

The girl did not seem to understand.  At least, she failed to reply.

“Who taught you your letters?” Azalea asked again.

“A woman.  She’s dead.”

“Did she live around here?  Was it Mrs. Ravenel’s teacher?”

“No.  We don’t belong hereabouts.  We’ve just come.”

“Oh, is that so?” said Azalea with interest.  “And do you live near?”

“Six miles from here.”

“No—not really!  Oh, that’s too far for you to walk every day.  Can’t you
live somewhere nearer while school lasts?”

“I’m content where I be.”

“But the walk—”

“I can walk it,” said the girl.  Compared with her heavy sulkiness, Bud
Coulter’s habit of arguing was blitheness itself.  However, as Azalea
turned at the house door to look after her strange group of pupils,
Dibblee, the red-headed boy, waved his hand, and little Babe Coulter
called: “Say, teacher, I’m coming nex’-day.”

She slipped in the house with Carin beside her, to find Miss Zillah and
Mrs. McEvoy waiting anxiously to get a report of the first day’s work.

“Them Coulters,” said Mrs. McEvoy when she heard the name of the first
pupils mentioned, “are the ones that have a war with the Simmses.
They’ve kept it up for twenty years and more.  Seems like they’re set on
seeing which can kill the others off.”

“Oh,” cried Azalea, “is it really one of those dreadful mountain
quarrels?  Mrs. McEvoy, do you suppose we could do anything to break it
up?”

Mis’ Cassie threw an amused and commiserating look at Azalea, who was
looking, for her, white-faced and nervous—not that Azalea’s cheeks could
really fade out completely.

“I don’t think I’d aim to do that,” she said dryly.  “You ’tend to your
teaching, Miss Azalea, and perhaps the light of learning may show them
the folly of walking in dark ways.”

Carin was telling about Paralee Panther.

“Oh, one of them Panthers,” said Mrs. McEvoy.  “They’re strangers.
Nobody takes to them much—can’t get it out of them where they come from
nor what they aim to do.  They’ve all got heavy looks, but that girl’s
the worst of the lot.”

“She’s quite a contrast to Dibblee Sikes,” mused Carin.

“Now, there’s a right peart boy!” exclaimed Mrs. McEvoy with unusual
enthusiasm.  “He’s a blessing to his mother, and a fine friendly lad
altogether.”

It was time to get supper and Carin and Azalea insisted on helping Miss
Zillah, though they would have been particularly glad to have snuggled
down on the settee and forgotten the world.  They had promised Annie
Laurie that Aunt Zillah should not be allowed to get weary and they were
determined to keep their word.  But after supper Miss Zillah insisted on
stacking the dishes away until morning.  She said she wanted to sew and
talk, and that doing the dishes the next day would help her to pass the
time.  So while she put some tiny tucks in a summer frock for Annie
Laurie, the girls told her of everything that had happened during the
day.  Miss Zillah was rather dismayed.

“I don’t understand about those children,” she said.  “Their spirits
don’t seem to be right.”

However, by the end of the week, there was much more encouraging news to
give her.  The children who joined the school along toward the last of
the week were milder and better mannered than those who had come at
first.  It seemed as if the more obstinate and ill-tempered had come
first to try out the young teachers.  Poor Skully Simms, the nephew of
the man who had a “war” with the Coulters, dared not show his face.  Mrs.
McEvoy heard that he was “wishful” to come, but was afraid of Bud
Coulter.  One day Azalea caught a glimpse of a face at the window, and
after school Dibblee Sikes told her that it was Skully Simms.

“He’s jest pestered to know what we-all are doing,” he said.  “But he’s
skeered of Bud.”

“I might ride down and see him,” said Azalea.  “Perhaps I could coax him
to come.”

“Then if he got in bad with Bud and there was blood-shedding,” said
Dibblee wisely, “you’d be taking blame to yourself.  It might break up
the school, ma’am.  That would do harm to the whole lot of us.  Folks
around here don’t believe in stirring up the Coulters and Simms.”

“‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’” quoted Azalea.  “Perhaps you’re right.  You
know the neighbors and I don’t.”

She was glad when Keefe O’Connor volunteered to come in every afternoon
and teach the upper class boys geography and what he called “current
history.”  He had a notion that what they needed more than anything else
was to have some notion of what was going on in the outside world.  He
said he always managed to be followed by a New York newspaper no matter
how far in the backwoods he went.  He had left Rowantree Hall, partly
because he had no wish to put the family to further trouble, but chiefly
because he wanted to be nearer the school, where he meant to lend a hand
now and then.  A tent appeared miraculously on the mountainside, to which
Keefe proudly gave the name of “home.”  He arose early and painted during
the morning hours; then, after his dinner, cooked in the open, he helped
at school.  After that, as the shadows deepened and lay across the
slopes, he went back to his canvas and brushes.  Carin was wild to join
him, but the truth was that those first few days of teaching drained
every drop of strength in her, and Azalea and Aunt Zillah hurried her
into her bed immediately after supper.

“It wouldn’t be so bad,” she complained to Aunt Zillah, half laughing and
half in earnest, “if it wasn’t for that dreadful Paralee Panther.  She
seems like a bad dream; the only trouble is I can’t wake up.  I’d like to
think I had imagined her.  But she is real and needs us more, I suspect,
than anybody else in the school.”

“She’s always frowning and watching,” Azalea added.  “It makes me want to
scream.  Carin, did you ever see anybody with such heavy eyelids?  And
Aunt Zillah, she watches at us from the corners of her eyes.  Don’t you
just hate a trick like that?”

“How ever could she have lost her arm?” wondered Carin.  “A boy might
have shot his off, but it’s strange for a girl to have lost an arm.”

“Oh, well,” said Aunt Zillah philosophically, “we came up here to find
some queer people, and we’re not disappointed.  Queerness often means
unhappiness, that’s what I’ve discovered.  If you girls succeed in doing
what you came up to do and help these poor people out of some of their
troubles and drawbacks, perhaps they won’t be so queer.”

The evenings at home—they called the cottage “home” now and had named it
the “Oriole’s Nest”—were very restful and delightful.  If Carin went to
bed, she did so on the couch in the sitting room, so that she might be
with the others.  Sometimes Aunt Zillah sewed—always for Annie Laurie—and
sometimes she read aloud.  Azalea had some crocheting with which she
busied herself.  Mrs. Carson had taught her to make some beautiful
things, and Azalea had developed a sort of passion for them.  She wanted
to make something lovely for everyone she loved; and Mrs. Carson’s last
gift to her had been a great quantity of beautiful wools of many delicate
shades.

Keefe O’Connor dropped in the little house evenings, too, and added to
the gayety by “picking” on the guitar which he had borrowed from the
McEvoys.  Sitting on the doorstep, his handsome head thrown back against
the casing, his dark eyes fixed with something like yearning affection on
the group in the room, he crept, brotherly fashion, into the heart of
each of them.  He did not explain himself—said nothing of his parents, of
his past, of his means of living—yet he seemed to have for his own
Bohemian purposes, all that he needed, and to be happy in spite of that
curious wistfulness which everyone felt who came near him.

“It does seem as if he was honing for something,” Mrs. McEvoy said one
day when he was under discussion.  “It may only be liver trouble, of
course.  If so, I could help him out there.  I’ve got three bottles of
liver special that I ain’t never took.  Or if it’s indigestion or
rheumatism, there again I could be of aid to him.  I was saying to Miles
the other night, seems as if, since you folks came, I didn’t pay half the
attention to my medicine that I used to.  Aside from them two bottles in
the kitchen, I don’t call on none of them.”

“And if those two bottles weren’t sitting where you could see them,” said
Miss Zillah with unusual boldness, “probably you wouldn’t be taking the
medicine from them.  I do say, Mrs. McEvoy, and I’ll abide by it, that
health is nine-tenths a matter of good food, good air and a happy heart.”

“Oh, la,” said Mrs. McEvoy with more temper than any of them had yet seen
in her, “it’s easy for you to say that, Miss Pace, when you’ve got your
health.  But if you’d been through what I have—”

She could not bring herself to finish, but suddenly remembering that she
had some baking to do, left hastily and walked with unusual swingings of
her body down the path that led to her home.

The path was getting pretty well worn now, and the dwellers in the
Oriole’s Nest were well pleased that it was so.  They were attached to
Mis’ Cassie McEvoy, and were a good deal worried that she seemed
displeased with them.

“I’d like to knock Bluebeard and the Princess Madeline off the shelf and
break them to flinders,” said Carin.  They all called Mrs. McEvoy’s
favorite bottles by the names Azalea had given them.  “It could be done
so accidentally that she’d think it was the cat.”

“No, she wouldn’t,” said Miss Zillah firmly.  “Don’t you try anything
like that, Carin.  Folks have to work out their own liberty.  It can’t be
done for them by anybody else, though a little help may be given now and
then.  I think I’ll bake some of those cookies that Mis’ Cassie likes,
and I can send some over to her when Mr. McEvoy comes with the milk.  I
wouldn’t have her offended with me for anything.”

Miss Zillah always contrived to be busy, it seemed, and she could keep
those around her busy, too.  She was quite determined that there should
be nothing slipshod about the Oriole’s Nest, and had laid out a fine set
of rules for work which had to be followed.  Even Keefe—who had soon
fallen into the way of having his dinner with them—had his duties.  At
night, when Miss Zillah supervised the last offices of the day, it was he
who brought in the pails of fresh water from the spring, and who filled
the wood box.  When he had said good night—lingering a little—Miss Zillah
locked the doors and drew the curtains.  Then she waited till the girls
were snug in bed, and kissing them with gentle seriousness, turned out
the light.

It made it a touch less lonely for them all to hear Keefe whistling on
his way to his tent-home.  He had made it quite “shipshape” and he took a
genuine pride in it.  But he did not sleep in it; instead, he slung his
hammock from the trees and rested there in moonshine or star-light.  Even
a light rain could not drive him in.  Then, in the morning early, having
cooked his breakfast, he was off with his painter’s kit.  But his duties
seemed always to take him past the door of the Oriole’s Nest, and as he
passed he called out mockingly:

“Say, teacher.”

It won him a blithe signal from some one—possibly from all three of the
cottage dwellers.




CHAPTER V
ROWANTREE HALL


The third Sunday of their sojourn on the mountain, they accepted an
invitation to Rowantree Hall.  Keefe O’Connor had been the messenger,
bringing the invitation by word of mouth, and though Miss Zillah was not
quite sure about the propriety of accepting, the girls overbore all
objections.  So it was agreed that Keefe was to be their guide there and
back—to which end he borrowed one of Miles McEvoy’s horses—and they set
forth in the middle of a shimmering July forenoon.  Keefe and Miss Zillah
rode ahead; Azalea and Carin followed on their ponies, each of the
feminine members of the party carrying in a neat saddlebag a clean summer
frock to be donned upon arriving.

They followed the main traveled road but a short way, turning off
presently on what looked like an old wood road.  It was almost overgrown
with huckleberries and little pines, and the farther they went, the
prettier and wilder it grew.  At length they entered a magnificent piece
of woodland where the chestnut and the maple, the tulip and the gum, the
chestnut oak and the red oak and many other beautiful trees grew
together.  Then behold, in the midst of this they came upon a gateway
made of great logs, with an iron lantern hanging from each end of the
crosspiece, and above it in rustic letters the words “Rowantree Hall.”

“I feel,” said Carin, “as if I might come upon the Sleeping Princess at
any moment.”

“And I feel,” Azalea answered, “as if we might all be turned into
sleeping princesses.  Oh, Keefe, are you sure this is not an enchanted
wood?”

Keefe looked back over his shoulder gayly.

“I’m not at all sure,” he said.  “If you know of any way of keeping off
enchantments—”

“I don’t want to keep them off,” Carin called.  “Oh, how wonderful it all
is!  Aunt Zillah, we are going to have an adventure.”

“No doubt,” said Aunt Zillah, quite as light-hearted and care-free as any
of the young people.  “It is impossible to avoid adventures.  Life itself
is an adventure.”

They had to ride a mile after they entered the gate before they came to
the house, and the only indications that they were near the habitation of
man were the paths which ran here and there among laurel or rhododendron,
and the rustic seats which were placed at intervals along the way.  But
at last the house arose before them.  It had started out to be what Mr.
Carson would have called a Southern mansion.  The double gallery should
have been supported by fluted pillars, but instead of these classic
shafts, the boles of eight great chestnut trees served the purpose.  The
house had never been properly painted, only “primed” with ochre which had
faded until it was almost the color of the ground around it, but over
this had grown a multitude of vines.  English ivy, Virginia creeper,
trumpet flower, honeysuckle, purple and white clematis, the Dorothy
Perkins rose and the matrimony vine climbed, ramped, and enwrapped
according to their dispositions, till the ragged looking house was as gay
as a castle with banners.

On the lower gallery, in white linen, very stately and hospitable in
appearance, sat Rowantree himself.

“What a pleasure to have guests,” he said with an English accent, coming
forward to assist Miss Zillah from her horse.  “We have been looking
forward to this honor with the greatest appreciation.”

Miss Zillah could be stately herself when occasion demanded, and she was
quite as polite as Mr. Rowantree when she thanked him.  If Mr. Rowantree
could have had his way, he would have beaten his hands together and
summoned his slaves to lead the horses to the stables.  But the truth—the
bare and undecorated truth—was that there were neither slaves nor
stables, the first never having come into Mr. Rowantree’s life, and the
second having been burned to the ground a few years back.  But the
horses, which Mr. Rowantree and Keefe cared for, were no doubt much
happier let loose in a field near at hand.  The ponies in particular were
enthusiastic, and their cheerful neighings could be heard at intervals
the rest of the day.

Aunt Zillah, followed by her two girls, entered what the Rowantrees were
pleased to call their “drawing-room.”  It was large enough to deserve the
name, no question about that.  And the outlook from its great windows was
so beautiful—the house being on a rise and overlooking the forest about
it and glimpsing the mountains beyond—that curtains would have been a
mere drawback.  Nor could any wall covering have been softer in color
than the gray building paper which had been tacked on the joists of the
house, since the builders never had got as far as lath and plaster.
There was no chimney shelf, but there was a large fireplace, heaped for
the occasion with oleander leaves.  A few pieces of fine mahogany
furniture were surrounded by the rudest mountain chairs, and the wall
decorations consisted of a beautiful clock which kept the time of sunrise
and moonrise as well as the hours of the day; in addition there were two
fine, mellow portraits in oil, a fowling piece, two broken tennis rackets
and some mountain baskets.

Miss Zillah was too delicate-minded to take stock of anybody’s
possessions, but the eager girls, set on their own sort of an adventure,
noticed these odds and ends with one sweep of their eyes.  Then, the next
moment, the mistress of the house entered, and all was forgotten in
looking at her.

She was taller than Barbara Summers, whom they both used as a standard
for sweet women, but still she was small.  Her face was unmistakably
Irish; her eyes gray-misted blue, her hair as black as Keefe O’Connor’s.
Her mouth was sad and glad at once, and there was a strange, appealing
look in her face as of wanting something.  She seemed homesick for
something—perhaps for something she never had had.  The girls felt that
if she had a happy time she wouldn’t, in the midst of it, be able to
forget sorrow; and that if she were very sorrowful, she would still
manage to hold on to joy.  Carin said afterward that her face made her
think of Ellen Terry’s.  Azalea had not, of course, seen this great
actress, but she, too, thought somehow of acting.  As soon as Mrs.
Rowantree began to talk, Azalea felt as if she were in a story book or on
the stage.  Like Rowantree himself, his wife was dressed in white, but it
was, as Azalea could not help noticing, a very old frock with various
rents in it, just as Mr. Rowantree’s linen was frayed and ragged.  But
these things seemed, somehow, to make the “adventure” all the more
interesting.  Mrs. Rowantree had quick, gay motions, and she walked down
the length of the long curious room as if she were tripping on her toes.

“Miss Pace, it’s a great pleasure to be meeting you,” she said, not
waiting for an introduction, but grasping Miss Zillah’s hand.  To Carin
and Azalea she said: “Young faces are flowers at the feast!”  Her way was
so quaintly old-fashioned, so charming, so dramatic, that Azalea again
thought of play-acting; yet Mrs. Rowantree was nothing, it seemed, if not
sincere.  So perhaps it was best, Azalea decided, to think of this as the
most charming “really truly” thing that had come her way.

Miss Zillah made it known that they were not content to remain in their
riding clothes, and Mrs. Rowantree offered their apologies to her husband
with pretty ceremony.

“The ladies wish to be excused, my dear,” she said.  “They have to make
themselves more acceptable to the gentlemen.”  She contrived to include
Keefe in the little bow she swept them.  So the four ladies were off up a
stairway designed for a magnificent hand rail, but having nothing better
in the way of a balustrade than a stout rope strung through posts.

Upstairs the appearance of things was even more bare and unsettled than
below.  The room to which they were taken was that occupied, apparently,
by Mr. and Mrs. Rowantree, and here was almost nothing in the way of
furniture beyond the beds and a most elaborate dressing case belonging to
Rowantree himself, spread out on a table before a triplicate mirror.
Opposite it stood another table above which hung a very small mirror,
where, it was evident by the meager little feminine articles, Mary Cecily
Rowantree made her toilet.  The celluloid brushes were in great contrast
to the gold-stoppered, tortoise shell contrivances in Mr. Rowantree’s
case.

While the white frocks were being put on, Mrs. Rowantree lent a hand with
deftness and gayety.  She delighted in Carin’s golden hair and in Aunt
Zillah’s beautiful silver curls.  She said Azalea was like a rose, and
that Constance had done nothing but talk of her since the day on the
train.

“The children,” said Mrs. Rowantree, “are in the nursery waiting
impatiently to see you.”  It appeared that every bare room in the great
unfinished house had its name.

When they all rustled down in their white gowns, Mr. Rowantree greeted
them magnificently at the foot of the stairs.

“Have the children brought, my dear,” he said to his wife.  “They
naturally are eager to be released.”

From his tone one would have expected the children to enter accompanied
by at least a governess and a nurse, but it was the little proud mother
herself who brought in Gerald—“my eldest son, Miss Pace,”—and Moira and
Michael—“my darling twins, young ladies,”—and led by the hand that wise
young person, Constance, who flew like a bird to Azalea’s arms.

“She’s like myself,” said Mrs. Rowantree, “fierce in her affections.”

Azalea laughed.  “Oh, so am I,” she said.  “Mr. McBirney, my adopted
father, always tells me that.  He wants me to be calm, but I can’t stay
calm.”

Mary Cecily Rowantree gave a rippling laugh.

“Why be calm,” she asked, “when you can be having a fine excitement about
something or other?”

“It’s the Irish blood in her,” explained Mr. Rowantree benevolently,
“that makes my wife like that.  I am not so easily amused myself.  A
quiet life, that’s what suits me best.  I ask nothing better than to sit
on my gallery and look at my peaceful trees.  My dear, dinner will be
served ere long, I take it?”  Again it seemed as if there must be a cook
and cook’s assistants, scullions and servitors not far off.  But again it
was little Mrs. Rowantree who dashed to fill orders.  Miss Zillah was
persuaded to join Mr. Rowantree on the gallery, but Carin and Azalea
insisted on going into the kitchen to help, for by this time they were
quite aware of the condition of things.  It was quite evident that Mr.
Rowantree had an imagination, and not only saw some things which did not
exist, but contrived not to see the unpleasant ones that did.

However, as the four handsome children persisted in tagging their mother
into the kitchen, Mrs. Rowantree said to Carin:

“If you’re really wanting to help—and I can see your heart’s in it—would
you mind telling a story to the young ones off somewhere?  They’re always
under my feet, and while goodness knows I love to have them hanging about
me, they are a hindrance to the getting of the dinner.”

“Story?” cried Carin.  “I know twenty.  Come, children!”  And she
vanished, followed not only by the four young Rowantrees, but by Keefe
O’Connor as well.

So it was Azalea who had the next hour with the hostess.

“I thought we’d eat on the gallery,” said Mrs. Rowantree.  “It gives us a
fine outlook over the estate.”

There was no table on the gallery, but boards laid on sawhorses served
every purpose, and the linen which Mrs. Rowantree gave Azalea to spread
over this rude table was of the finest, most beautiful damask.  The
dishes, on the other hand, were of the commonest and had evidently been
purchased at Bee Tree or some similar mart.  But as for the food, Mrs.
Rowantree knew how to manage that.  She evidently made a fine art of
seasoning, and while, as she said, they “had not the advantage of
markets” at Rowantree Hall, they contrived, apparently, to get plenty to
eat.

It was quite a formal moment when Rowantree himself waved them all to
their seats.  He placed Miss Zillah’s chair for her magnificently, while
Keefe placed Mrs. Rowantree’s.  Miss Zillah was made to feel the
distinction conferred upon her by being placed at the right hand of her
host, who proceeded to carve his barnyard fowl with as many gestures as a
trencher man of the Middle Ages might have used in carving the wild boar.

The Rowantree children apparently forgot nothing in the way of manners—at
least so far as outward appearances went.  It is true that Carin received
a bad kick in the shins which was not intended for her; and that Azalea
had to hold Moira’s hand to keep her from pinching her twin, but nothing
could be sweeter than the way they thanked their father when he served
them with food, or the smiling manner in which they answered questions.

While they sat there, it began to rain softly, gray, bead-like drops
falling from the gallery’s edge to the ground, and hanging a soft shining
curtain between them and the outer world.  Azalea never forgot the beauty
of it all.  There was no wind, and they were quite as comfortable behind
their silver curtain as they would have been in the house—more so,
indeed, for the day had been a hot one.  Delicious odors came up from the
ground; the birds gave forth contented, throaty sounds, and all the regal
midsummer mountain world seemed well content.

They were very happy together, with a freedom from care that does not
often come in this rather grim world.  Only in the eyes of Mary Cecily
Rowantree there remained that strange look of longing, of forever
searching for something which she could not find.  Keefe O’Connor caught
it, and sympathized.  Azalea saw it, and because she too had a hurt—as
orphans must needs have—she too understood.  Those who have a sorrow
belong to a great brotherhood and know each other by secret signs.

But it was a happy dinner for all of that.  Between courses Rowantree
himself offered to sing them an old ballad, and in a rich bass voice
which set the echoes of the wood at work, he thundered the lines of “The
Maid of Bohea.”  There was great applause, and he sang again.  It was to
his singing of “Bold Robin Hood,” that Azalea and his wife brought in the
custard pie and the homemade cheese, and to the sad strains of “A Sailor
There Was” that they finally cleared the table.  After dinner everyone
turned in to help, save the master of the house, who still felt the need
of quiet and of looking down what he called “the approach,” by which he
meant the winding road that led from the house to the gate.

If Mr. Rowantree could sing old English ballads, Mrs. Rowantree could
sing, most bewitchingly, old Irish lyrics.  Carin and Azalea could sing,
too, though not like their friend Annie Laurie.  Keefe had plenty of good
will even if he had not much of a voice, and Miss Zillah had a sweet
little silver thread of song which she was not ashamed to display.  So
among them they had a musical afternoon, accompanied by one and another
on the old square piano with its rattling keys.  The gentle shower that
had fallen during dinner had passed as quietly as it came, and the sun
shone softly through the wet shining leaves of the trees into the room.

However, it was just before going home that Azalea had her real
“adventure.”  Mrs. Rowantree had drawn her arm through her own, and the
two of them had strolled together down one of the laurel-edged paths of
the place.

“Keefe O’Connor has been telling me your story,” Mary Cecily said gently,
“and I want to say that it’s myself who knows how to sympathize with
you.”

“Oh,” Azalea replied with a sharp little catch of the breath, “I didn’t
know anyone had told Keefe about me.”

“Never fear but the story will follow you,” returned Mrs. Rowantree with
an accent of wisdom.  “Stories good and bad have a way of following one.
But this I will say, Miss Azalea: I honor you for what you’ve done and
the way you’ve clung to those who took you in when you were homeless.
It’s very like my own story—very like, indeed.”

“Is it?” asked Azalea, forgetting herself at once and warming to her
companion.  “Have you been alone in the world, Mrs. Rowantree?”

“Alone in a way you never were, Miss Azalea, for I lost through my own
heedlessness the one living creature that should have been my care, and
the knowledge of it is always eating at my heart in spite of my good
husband and my blessed babes.”

“Oh, Mrs. Rowantree,” cried the girl, distressed, “aren’t you blaming
yourself for something that wasn’t really your fault?”

Mary Cecily turned her misty eyes toward Azalea, tragedy brooding in
them.

“If you wish to hear my story,” she said, “sit here and I will tell it to
you.  My good husband doesn’t like me to talk of it, but my sorrow gets
pent in me and tears me, which is what he doesn’t understand.  I’ll be
better for telling you the strange tale.”

There was a rude bench beneath a fine sour-wood tree, and Azalea, sitting
Turk-wise at one end so that she might face her companion, prepared to
give her attention to the “strange tale”—and she thrilled as she did so,
for she loved strange tales with a great love.




CHAPTER VI
LITTLE BROTHER


“My father,” said Mrs. Rowantree with her delicate Irish accent, “was a
gentleman—a scholar and a gentleman.”  She paused a moment in that little
dramatic way of hers and then went on.  “But my mother was a cottager’s
daughter, very sweet and lovely to see, but lacking the fine ways of
himself.  He gave up his friends for her sake, and they left the village
where they were known and went to live in Dublin where my father made a
living by writing for the newspapers and reviews.  I was born the second
year of their marriage, and seven years later my little brother David
came into the world.”  She paused again, but this time because there was
a tightening in her throat which would not let her go on.

“David,” she said, “was the finest baby I ever laid my eyes on, and I’ve
had some fine ones of my own.  He was a treasure from the first, but the
older he grew the nicer he became, till, when he was three years of age,
he was the pride of the neighborhood.  People stopped my mother on the
street for the privilege of looking at him.  He had laughing black eyes
and curly black hair, and the oddest little turns to his baby talk that
ever were heard.  Oh, we were so happy with him—so wrapped up in him.
Indeed, you’d have looked well through Dublin before finding a home equal
to our own for contentment.  My father was getting some little fame for
his writing, and my mother no longer had to slave for us the way she did
at first.

“Then, just as we were at our happiest, father came home with a chill.  I
well remember it.  We were watching for him at the window, David and
mother and I, and we had a meat pie because of his liking for it, and we
had taught David to say ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds.’  Oh, we were
counting on such a happy evening!  But when dad came in, he did not speak
to us for the anguish that was on him, and mother got him in his bed, and
he never got out of it again.”

“Oh, me!” said Azalea softly.

A little silence fell in which Mary Cecily Rowantree locked and unlocked
her thin, nervous fingers in a way of her own.

“And after he was gone,” she resumed, “we had nothing.  Never had he
earned enough for my mother to put by any savings.  So we took to selling
off what was in the house, and she to doing sewing and embroidering, but
in a little while she saw it was no use—there’d be nothing for us but
starvation unless some great piece of fortune befell us.  My mother was a
devout woman and she prayed morning and night and often through the day
for help for her children, and her prayers, she thought, were answered
when word came from my father’s brother who was in America, that if she’d
bring the children to him, he’d care for them with his own, and she could
be about some kind of work.  In America, he said, there were chances.  He
sent us money for the journey, but not very much—all he could afford, of
course.  So mother, who was not afraid to do anything for her children’s
sake, took passage with other poor people in the steerage of a great ship
sailing from Queenstown.”

“Poor little dear,” said Azalea.

“Poor little dear!” echoed Mary Cecily.  “There were swarms of us on that
boat.  We were all huddled and mixed; a torment to each other, with the
number of us.  And the sea was very rough.  Day after day it stormed, and
my little mother, worn with work and worry, was ill unto death.  Others
were ill, but not so cold, so weak, so weary as she.  But few could give
her attention.  They said: ‘She’ll be well in a while.’  But she woke me
one night and told me she would never be well; that she could feel her
heart giving way.  She gave me the address of my uncle, and told me not
to lose it whatever I did, and she had me pin the money that was left, on
my little shirt and told me God would raise up friends for me, who would
give me directions to my uncle’s door, and that once there I was safe.  I
listened till she had finished and then I ran for help.  At first the
ship’s doctor did not want to come out of his warm berth, but I got on my
knees to him and he came.  He thought ’twas only a case of seasickness,
and maybe he was right.  But my little lion-hearted one died that night.
So David and I were alone in the world.”

The memory of the old anguish was upon her, and she stared before her at
the great trees of her “estate,” all of her life dropping back to that
bleak hour when she was left an orphan among those many poor in the great
ship’s heart.

“Oh,” cried Azalea, “I hope you won’t think about it, Mrs. Rowantree.
That’s how I manage to get along.  I say to myself: ‘My sorrow is sacred.
I will not take it out and look at it often.  I will leave it in a holy
place.  It will be safe there.  I will go my way, doing happy, common
things.’  Can’t you look at your trouble that way, Mrs. Rowantree?”

Mary Cecily turned her misty blue eyes on Azalea.

“My girl,” she said solemnly, “I have not yet told you of my real
trouble.”

Azalea caught her breath.

“Well?” she breathed.

“Well, they dropped my little mother in the sea, a good priest saying the
words of the church over her.  Some were kind to us, but after all it was
not many who were knowing us.  The wild weather kept up, and hundreds
there were on the ship who did not leave their beds at all.  David and I
had no heart for talking, and we kept much to ourselves as we had seen
our mother do.  There were rough people all about us, and our ways were
gentle, so oftentimes we did not feel at home with them.  I kept up my
heart by thinking of David and what I must do for him; and now that
mother was gone, he clung to me all of the time.  He could hardly breathe
without me it seemed, and though I was only ten years old, I had the
mother-feeling in me, and I prized myself for the sake of my little
child.”

“I can understand that,” Azalea murmured from her heart.

“Well, we got to the landing place at last, and I was near suffocated
with the beating of my heart.  I was as afraid of the city as if it had
been a dragon.  The fear of cities always was in me, but no city—not
Calcutta, not Hong Kong, nor any foreign place—could have seemed more
terrible to me than New York.  ‘For David’s sake I must be brave,’ I kept
saying to myself.  ‘For David’s sake.’  Well, the first and second-class
passengers were let off, and then came our turn.  I never did know how
many hundreds there were of us.  We seemed like a city-full in ourselves.
And if you’ll believe me, at the same time, on the other side of the
dock, another great steamer was unloading.  So that presently we were all
mixed—all mixed and scattered.”

“Yes,” said Azalea, guessing now what was coming.

“So I lost David,” whispered Mary Cecily; “I lost my little brother.  His
hand slipped from mine and I could not find him.  I looked for him all
that day; I asked everybody, and no one could tell me anything about him.
At night a policeman took me away and put me in the house of a woman and
told me to sleep and he would look.  So I stayed in the house that night,
and the next day I began searching again; and the policeman had others
looking.  But we never found him, any of us.”

“You never found him at all?”

“Never at all.  My uncle came on, after I had written him, and he
searched.  But it was no use.  David was never found; and they concluded
at last that he had been pushed from the wharf into the water and
drowned.  But I said no.  I could hear him calling for me in the night
the way the dead never call.  I could feel him somewhere, drawing me,
drawing me, but I could not tell which way to go, or I would have run to
him across the world.”

“Of course you would—of course.”  Azalea drew nearer till she could rest
her hand on Mary Cecily’s knee.

“But we never found him,” she repeated.  “So after a while we left the
city, my uncle and I, and went to the little farm he had in Maryland.  He
was something of a writer too, like my father; and he published a little
weekly paper.  So you see it was an interesting home he had brought me
to.  His wife was one of those women who are well pleased to have a
motherless child to add to her own.  She was kind to me but she didn’t
spoil me because I was bounden to her.  She set me my tasks and saw to it
that I did them, and when I was a grown girl and showed a little talent
for writing I was sent to my uncle’s office to help with the making of
his paper and setting of it up.  He drilled me in writing and he taught
me type-setting, and I was content there.  I never wanted to take up any
life of my own.  I wanted to be left to myself to mourn for David—”

“Oh, but there was nothing in that,” broke in Azalea.

“Don’t I know it?  But sorrow is like sickness and it can cloud the
spirits as sickness weakens the body.  But for being kept so busy by my
wise relatives, I should have lost my mind altogether, I make no doubt.
But they were a large family, and there was teasing and laughing and
tricks going on as well as work, and that was my medicine.  But even with
all that, I was forever looking down the road, thinking one of those New
York detectives would be bringing my little brother back to me.  Whenever
the letters came I sat frozen with hope that wouldn’t be hope, till they
were given out.  I kept thinking that one would be handed to me that
would tell me David was found.  But none ever was.”

“But you grew happier after a time,” protested Azalea, who could not long
endure the thought of sorrow.  “You must have!  See how happy everything
is with you now.”

“Yes,” admitted Mary Cecily, “I did grow happier after a time, though as
I say, I didn’t really want to.  But I got to be a young woman, and Bryan
Rowantree came along.  He was the younger son of a fine English
family—Irish on his mother’s side, however—and he came over to America to
better himself.  He heard of my uncle’s little paper and looked him up,
thinking he might be wanted to lend a hand, but my uncle liked to run
things his own way, quietly and casually, as he used to put it.  So he
didn’t take the young man into partnership—but I did.”

She smiled down at Azalea happily, and the girl could see that whatever
others might think, Rowantree’s wife could see nothing but the advantages
of the marriage.

“I say he was young,” she went on.  “He was, however, twelve years older
than myself.  But I have always been a poor thing and thankful to have
some one to lean on.”

“Mercy me,” thought Azalea, “can it be she thinks she’s leaning on that
man?  I thought it was just the other way.”  She kept her eyes fixed on
the ground carefully, afraid that if she lifted them her thoughts would
be read in her face.

“We had a sweet little wedding,” said Mary Cecily dreamily, “and then we
came away together.  We had no particular place to go to, but Bryan said
he thought he would like to wander for a time.  That suited me, too.  But
after a little we got tired of that.  Besides, we saw that our money
would soon give out.  So, when we heard of this woodland up here for sale
for almost nothing, we bought it.  The Rowantrees were once great landed
proprietors, but in recent years they had been obliged to live in cities,
and it had not suited them.  At least, it did not suit my husband.  So
here we are.  We lead a very peaceful, retired life.  Mr. Rowantree loves
quiet, as he said to you.  And I’ve the children if ever I feel the
loneliness stealing on me.”

A call sounded through the woods.

“They think we’re lost,” smiled Mrs. Rowantree.  “And we must be getting
back to the house, but before we go I want you to promise me that you
will not speak of my sorrow.  It’s a queer way I have with me, not liking
to see sympathy save in the eyes of my own chosen friends.  Come now, and
I hope and pray Miss Pace will not accuse me of rudeness!”

“Aunt Zillah?  Never!” said Azalea.  “It’s a wonderful story you’ve told
me, Mrs. Rowantree—so sad I can hardly believe it—much sadder than mine,
and that is sad enough.  Not that I feel sad,” she added hastily.  “Since
I became a McBirney I’m a very happy girl.”

“But you’re not really a McBirney, are you?  Those good mountain people
haven’t really adopted you?”

“Not by law, ma’am,” smiled Azalea.  “But what does that matter if we
love each other?”

“And you have Miss Carin and her parents for your friends.  That must be
a great comfort to you.”

“Oh, indeed, they’re like flowers in the garden of the world,” cried
Azalea with one of her pretty extravagant speeches.

“Indeed, I believe it, my dear.  Yes, we are coming,” she called.  “Did
you think I had locked this dryad up in an oak tree?” she asked
playfully, her arm about Azalea, as they came up to the gallery.  Her
husband threw a quick glance at her.  He knew how to read the changes on
her emotional face.

“Tut,” he said under his breath to her.  “David again!  You shouldn’t,
mavourneen.”

“She’s a treasure, Bryan,” his wife whispered, indicating Azalea with a
little nod of the head.  “It never could do any harm to ease my heart to
her.”

“Miss Pace thinks they must all be on their way, Mary Cecily,” he said
aloud.  “I must have the horses brought ’round.”

“Oh, have a taste of tea before you start,” pleaded Mrs. Rowantree.  But
Aunt Zillah as politely declined.  So, presently, Zillah Pace and her
three young people rode quietly beneath the lengthening shadows through
the sweet smelling woodland to their home.  This time, Aunt Zillah and
Carin rode together, and Azalea’s pony tried in vain to keep pace with
Keefe’s raw-boned horse.  Keefe had much to say of the day.

“I was very happy the little time I stayed there at Rowantree Hall,” he
said.  “I understood their ways—understood the things they do and the
things they don’t do—and what’s more I perfectly understand why they
don’t do them.  Rowantree himself amuses me, yet I’m fond of him.  Mrs.
Rowantree—well, she’s a little miracle.”

“Oh, she is,” cried Azalea.  “How she works—and doesn’t mind.  What ducks
the children are!  And how contented they all seem in that solitude!”

“Might be Highland chieftains,” laughed Keefe.  “And how do you suppose
they live?”

“I can’t imagine,” Azalea admitted.  “Does he farm?”

“A little—a very little.  It’s she who thinks out the things that keep
the wolf from the door.  To be sure he has a little money coming from
England now and then; but it’s Mrs. Rowantree with her little movable
sawmill, which she pays men to run, who really keeps the flour in the
barrel.  Then she raises chickens, has a cow or two, a vegetable patch
and all that.  But best of all, she knows how to do without and yet be
happy, and she’s bringing up the children in the same way.  You noticed,
they never apologized for a thing.”

“Not a thing!  I liked that, Keefe.  She knew we wouldn’t care how things
were.  All we wanted was themselves.”

“Quite right.  All we wanted was themselves.”  He sighed sharply.  “She
makes one feel at home, doesn’t she, that little Mary Cecily Rowantree?
I’ve been a lonely cub, Miss Azalea—a queer lonely cub—thrown out of the
lair by an accident, and not knowing much about home.  But she does
something to me—makes me feel as if I’d got back—”

He hesitated for a long time.  At last Azalea prodded him with a “Got
back?”

But he did not answer.  They rode on then in the noisy silence of the
woods, rode to the sound of falling water, the call of sleepy birds, the
almost inaudible rustle of the trees and the little sharp cries of
insects.  Keefe saw the ladies to their door but he would not come in
with them.  He left them, to go to his tent and to boil his own tea in
the little iron kettle, which, swung from his tripod, had served him on
many expeditions.  He had placed his tent not far from the rim of a
precipice, though back among trees where it would be protected from
storms.  But to-night he abandoned their shelter, and sat quite on the
rim itself, letting the rolling earth fill him with wonder.  The stars
swept by, a young sickle moon arose, the world faded from rosy gray to
purple, from purple to the soft starlit gloom of a summer night.  And
still he sat there, dreaming, wondering, planning, longing.

Most of all he wondered why it was that there were so few thoughts really
worth thinking which one could put into words.




CHAPTER VII
“DOING GOOD”


The little silvery shower which had helped to make Sunday charming, sent
along a number of less agreeable members of its family the following day.
Azalea and Carin opened their eyes upon a rain-smitten landscape, and
down the chimney blew a damp wind.  It made a failure of breakfast, for
the kitchen stove absolutely refused to draw, and it sent the girls out
finally in a pelting shower.

“You are foolish to go,” Miss Zillah told them, really quite out of
patience with them for the first time.  “There will be no pupils at the
school to-day.  You might much better stay at home and keep dry.  I can’t
think that your parents would approve of your going out in such a storm.”

But what was the use of having rubber boots and raincoats and rubber caps
and umbrellas, if they were not to be used?  So the girls argued till
they finally won Miss Zillah’s consent.

It really was rather a lark to be out in a buffeting storm like that.
They could hardly see for the downpour, but they ran on, heads lowered,
skirts gathered close, and were presently in the little schoolhouse.

“We’ll have to light the lamps,” said Azalea.  “Not a soul could see to
study in this place to-day.”

“You remind me of Ma McBirney,” said Carin, wiping the rain from her
face.  “Your first thought is always to make the room bright.  Now me, I
think of myself first.”

Azalea took off her dripping coat, removed the rubber boots from her
slippered feet, released her head from its cap and looked about her,
shivering a little.

“Do you know why?” she asked.  “In the old days when my own mamma and I
were wanderers, going from place to place with that terrible show, we
were often so cold and wretched that no words could describe it.  Yet
mamma always tried to make some sort of a little cosy spot for me—some
sort of a nest that I could get into.  It might only be a ragged
comfortable in a corner of the wagon; or it might be a place under a tree
near the camp fire.  She didn’t seem to care how she got along, if only
she could make me happy.  I realize now how often she went without food
to feed me well, and how she gave me the best of everything.  I was told
about that by poor old Betty Bowen that time Sisson kidnapped me.”

“Oh, don’t talk about that, Azalea,” cried her friend, throwing her arms
about her and kissing her on the cheek with a sort of desperate
tenderness.  “I can’t bear it.  Oh, those nights that we didn’t know
where you were!”

“I only speak of it,” said Azalea, holding her friend close to her,
“because that explains why I want to make every place cheerful.  I can’t
stand gloom and chill and hunger—can’t stand them for myself or anyone
else.  And then—don’t laugh at me, Carin, please—there’s another reason.
I want to pass on to others all the goodness that has been done to me
these last lovely months.  Oh, Carin, I want to do good the way your
father and mother do.  I’d like to give up my whole life to it.  You see,
I’ve really no family.  I’m very queerly placed in life.  There’s gentle
blood in me, and restless blood.  I’m different from Ma and Pa McBirney
and dear Jim.  I can’t get around that, can I?  No matter how much I love
them, no matter how long we live together, I’ll always be different.
Yet, on the other hand, I’ll not know the sort of people that Colonel
Atherton’s granddaughter would be expected to know.  They’ll not come
into my life.  I—I can’t expect to marry—when I grow up—the sort of—”

“Nonsense,” cried Carin impetuously.  “You’ll marry whoever you wish.
And you’ll meet all sorts of people at my house—people who will
appreciate you.”

But Azalea shook her head.

“No,” she said; “my lot has been cast in with that of simple folk.  I’m
glad of it, mind you, and proud to be loved by Mother McBirney.  It’s the
sweetest thing that ever happened to me.  But all the same, I think I
shall have to choose some sort of a career.”

As she talked, she tidied the schoolroom, lighted the lamps, and ventured
on a little blaze in the fireplace to send away the chill.  Carin, less
used to such services, sat fascinatedly watching her friend.

“A career!” she sighed.  “Oh, Azalea, what do you mean by that?  Of
course I believe girls should have careers,” she added hastily.  “I want
to be an artist myself, and if that old dairy doesn’t use up every ounce
of Annie Laurie’s energy, I suppose she’ll be a singer.  Anyway, she
could be, if she chose.  But what would you do, Zalie?”

“Just do good,” said Azalea simply.

“But that wouldn’t earn a living for you.  Weren’t you thinking of
earning a living?”

“It might,” said Azalea.  “It would be a great living to have people
coming to you for help and to know you could drive the misery out of
them—and the devils out of them, too.”

“But the money—” continued Carin.

“There would be enough, probably,” said Azalea, still not willing to give
attention to that part of the subject.  “I feel, Carin, that somehow
there would be money enough.”

Just then the schoolhouse door blew open with a sweep of rain-laden wind
and it took the combined strength of the two girls to close it again.

“Aunt Zillah was quite right,” said Carin breathlessly after this was
accomplished.  “We ought never to have come, Azalea.”

“Oh,” cried Azalea, “there’s some one trying to get in, Carin.  Did you
bolt the door?”

“Yes—it wouldn’t stay shut otherwise.  Help me open it, Azalea.  The bolt
sticks.”

It came back so suddenly at last that Azalea almost lost her footing, and
the next moment, half-blinded by the storm, her poor garments soaked and
dripping, her blouse held together by her single hand, Paralee Panther
stood in the room.  If she had been sullen on other days, she was tragic
now.  So storm-beaten in body and in spirit was she, that she looked as
if all the world was her foe.  Indeed, she always seemed to be thinking
that, and now as she stood there, frowning from under her dripping hair,
the gentle girls at whom she glowered fairly shrank from her.

Then Azalea remembered, as by a swift light of the spirit, how misfortune
could make one misrepresent one’s self.  She thought of herself as she
had been in the old days, when, dust-stained, weary, hungry, shy and
often resentful, she had slunk along beside the wagons of Sisson’s All
Star Show, and of how in reality she had been the same as she was now,
friendly and good, loving cleanliness and beauty and all seemliness.

She went forward to the girl and seized her hand.

“Oh, Paralee,” she said, “I’m so glad now that we came.  Miss Pace
thought no one would be here; but you started, I suppose, before the
storm began.  Come to the fire, do.  We can take off your dress and hang
it on the chair backs—”

But she had made a mistake.  The girl drew back, her eyes full of that
hurt, animal-like anger which was almost always there.

“I won’t take off my dress,” she said.  Azalea guessed why—that she would
not have them see her makeshifts for underclothing.

“Perhaps it would be better not,” Azalea said, as if having thought the
matter over, she reached the same conclusion.  “Come to the fire, then.
You will soon dry.”

She turned away to give the girl a chance to make herself comfortable in
her own manner, and lighted the alcohol stove beneath the shining brass
teakettle.  She and Carin kept a little store of supplies at
school—dainties designed to help out their light luncheons—and now she
made a selection from these, and spreading a tray daintily, put it before
Paralee.  There was the steaming tea, crackers, cookies, cheese, and
candied ginger.

“Such a queer little meal,” she laughed apologetically, “but it will help
to get the damp out of you.  You must feel quite like a sponge, Paralee.”

The girl looked up from under her heavy brows.

“What is a sponge?” she demanded.

Carin heard Azalea stammeringly trying to make clear to her pupil the
nature of a sponge, and discreetly withdrew to the most distant part of
the schoolroom and began busying herself by making a sketch of the
storm-tossed trees in the wild purple light.  She heard Azalea’s voice
going on and on, kindly, gently, insistently; heard Paralee’s gruff
answers; but the rain and the wind drowned the words.  It was only when
Azalea called to her that she learned of the nature of the conversation.
Paralee was standing with half dried garments before the fire.  She had
eaten her little repast, and with her one poor hand was brushing back the
hair that straggled about her face.

“Paralee,” said Azalea, “wants to be a teacher, Carin.  She has to make
her own living, and that is the way she means to do it.”

Not a gleam of Azalea’s eye, not the barest flicker of the voice, told
that she thought such an ambition outrageous.  The heavy-faced,
half-clothed child, so dark and hateful, so ugly and suspicious, might
have been the embodiment of light for all that Azalea’s manner betrayed.
Once more Carin’s affectionate appreciation of her friend went out in
swift response.

“Does she?” asked Carin in the same friendly tone.  “Well, we’ll teach
her what we know, and then she can go to some one better fitted to make a
teacher of her.”

They could see the girl peering up furtively from under her hair,
wondering if it could be possible that they believed in her.  No one ever
had.  But obstinately, passionately, in the face of all things, she
believed in herself.

“I can’t do nothing else,” she said in her deep voice.  “I hain’t got but
one hand.”

“She lost the other,” said Azalea in her even, pleasant voice, “when she
was trying to shoot rabbits for the family to eat.  She and her
grandmother have come down with her brother while he works at the sawmill
Mrs. Rowantree has set up on the Ravenel Branch.”

“He wouldn’t come ’less I did, too,” explained Paralee.  “He didn’t like
to leave home.”

What could the home be that the brother of this girl would hate to leave,
Carin wondered.  It seemed as if Paralee must have come out of a cave
rather than a house.

“We Panthers has always lived by ourselves,” the girl said in half angry
explanation.  “Jake hain’t used to talking to strange folks.  And he
didn’t have no proper clothes for leaving home.”

“Panther is a strange name, isn’t it?” asked Carin.  “Are there many
families of your name in these mountains, Paralee?”

“It hain’t our name,” returned the girl.  “Our name’s Marr.  My granddad
was a fighter, he was.  He kilt six men.  It was a war.  They called him
the Panther of Soco River.  Then they called us all Panthers.  We don’t
care!” she added defiantly.  “One name suits us as well as t’other.”

“Her father,” explained Azalea, “is paralyzed from a tree having fallen
on him.  His home is away out on the tongue of the Soco mountain—so far
away it can only be reached by ‘nag travel.’  Paralee says no doctor ever
goes to see him.”

“Once,” said Paralee, “for two years nobody come up the road, and we
didn’t go nowhere.  For two whole years!”

The girls let the words rest on the air for a moment, taking in their
meaning.

“How in heaven’s name do you live?” asked Carin.

“We live ’cause we don’t die.  We git up and go to bed,” said the girl.
“It gits so still up there we stop talking.  Why, we ’most forget the way
to say words.”

“I should think you would,” said Azalea.  “But what do you have to eat?
How do you make money?”

“We don’t need no money.  Not much, anyhow.  We raise some corn and two
or three hogs; and we have some chickens and a garden patch.  Ma does
some weaving.  Pa used to hunt.  Then, when he got hurt, I tried
hunting.”  She looked down at her maimed arm.  “That’s all,” she said
bitterly.  “The Panthers is well named.  They just live up a tree.”  She
gave a short, sharp laugh.

“How ever did your brother and you come to leave home?” demanded Azalea.
“Didn’t they need you there?”

“Needed us terrible.  But I couldn’t do work to ’mount to nothing, and
Jake was just hanging ’round doing chores Pete could do as well.  I
goaded Jake on to coming down to the sawmill.  I thought he might get
some comforts for pa.  And grandma, she’d got so mean and worried ma so,
I got her to come along.”  She paused for a moment, and then gave way to
an outbreak of rage and misery.  “We was getting to be like stumps,” she
cried.  “That’s what we was getting like—just like the stumps out in the
clearing.  You couldn’t tell we was humans.  I—I couldn’t stand it no
longer.”  As she stood facing them in her ugliness and wretchedness, with
her great mass of hair hanging about her half-bare shoulders, she seemed
to be mysteriously redeemed from mere brutishness by this rebellion.  Out
of that sodden silence and poverty, that shame of inaction, her protest
and purpose had sprung into life.  For a moment the girls were silent
with sympathy.  Then Azalea said:

“We’ll teach you, Paralee, early and late.  We’ll help you in every way
we can.”

“Oh, we will,” agreed Carin.  “And we can do so much more than you think,
Paralee.  Paralee?” she repeated.  “Such an unusual name.  Is it a—a
family name?”

Paralee Panther gave a curious shrug.

“No!” she said with an accent of disgust.  “That ain’t a name any more
than Panther.  They didn’t name me at all—called me Babe.  When I was
six, I got tired of it.  I wanted a name—cried for a name—but they didn’t
seem to think of none.  I invented that name—Paralee.  I thought it awful
pretty then.  I don’t think so now,” she added bluntly.  “I think it’s a
fool name.  I wish my name was anything else—anything!”

“I have a middle name that I don’t need,” said Carin with a laugh.  “It’s
Louisa.  Now, what if I should give that to you?  ‘Louisa Marr!’  How
would that sound?”

“Mr. Summers is coming up to see us by and by,” said Azalea, taking hold
of Paralee’s arm with a girlish squeeze, “and he can name you properly.
He’s a Methodist preacher.”  Paralee nodded.

“I know,” she said.  “Once he came to see my pa.  He said if pa could be
got to an X-ray, or an X-ray could be got to him, maybe he’d be cured.
But it was just talk.  He didn’t do nothing,” she added with a return to
her old bitterness.

“Probably he couldn’t do anything,” said Azalea, swift to defend the
husband of her own “pretend cousin,” Barbara Summers, whom she had picked
out of all the world to be her “kin” since she had none of her own.  “Mr.
Summers is poor, too, and there are many people that he must do things
for.”

“Well, he didn’t do nothing for us,” said the girl.  Then she brooded for
a moment in her heavy way.  “And we didn’t do nothing for ourselves,” she
broke out.  “That was what made me mad—we didn’t do nothing for
ourselves!”

“Your folks didn’t know how,” said Azalea.  “That was it—they didn’t know
how.  They couldn’t help themselves any more than if they had been
children.”

“That’s what they are,” the girl cried.  “They’re children—they don’t
know nothing.  They won’t _do_ nothing.  Oh, it’s so awful—not to have
things to eat; to be like this.”  She held out her stump of a hand.  “To
be like dad—not able to move!  Ain’t it a curse?”

“It must be changed,” said Carin decidedly.  “It can be and it shall.”

“You don’t know,” replied the mountain girl with a return of despair.
“There’s so much to change.”

“Braid your hair, Paralee,” commanded Azalea.  “Then we’ll have a lesson.
I’ll teach you more this morning than you ever learned in any one lesson
in your life.  I noticed last week that you knew how to study better than
anyone in the school.  You could keep your mind on a thing, and that’s
much more than half the battle.  Oh, we’ll make a teacher of you, never
fear.”

So all that long day of wild wind and rain, Azalea labored with her
pupil.  Hitherto, teaching had been a pleasant if tiring experience.
Azalea had felt a cheerful zest in passing on her ideas and her good
practical knowledge.  But this morning a holy passion for teaching came
to her.  She poured facts into Paralee’s starved mind with the same deep
satisfaction that she would have given her water had she been perishing
of thirst.  No other pupils came.  Carin, sitting apart, silent and
content with her own occupations, did not interrupt them, and the
mountain girl listened to her ardent young teacher, conned her lessons
untiringly, and throughout the long hours of the school day refused to
rest.  It was as if she had come into the house of her own mind; as if
she had opened up the weed-choked door and crossed the threshold,
discovering within fair rooms undreamed of; as if she had put the
shutters back from long-closed windows and let the light stream in.

By four o’clock the rain seemed to have beaten itself out, and the wind
died, too.

“Study is over!” cried Azalea at length.  “Come, Paralee, get your
things.  Such a day!  I tell you, anyone who can study as you do will
make a success.  Isn’t it so, Carin?”

Carin got up from her letter writing.

“Of course it is,” she said.  “And I have been writing some letters that
ought to help on.  You must go away to school, Paralee.  There are
boarding schools—”

“What good would they do me?” demanded the girl.  “How could I pay?”

“I have money to be used for such things as that,” Carin said gently.
“My father gave it to me.  I would love to use it for you.”

“What could I give you back, then?  When us Panthers has presents give to
us, we pay back.”

“I have not thought yet,” said Carin seriously, “but I will think.  I
will let you pay me back.  Please, please, don’t think about that now.
Only study—study—study.”

“I wish you didn’t have to go home to-night,” said Azalea.  “Couldn’t you
stay with us?  A six mile walk over gullies like those out there in the
yard doesn’t seem a pleasant prospect.”

The mountain girl looked at her almost with pity—as if for once she
understood something which her instructress did not.

“Do you think I’ll mind gullies?” she asked.

“No,” confessed Azalea; “no, I don’t.”

Paralee Panther had worn neither jacket nor hat, and in her thin blouse
and short skirt, bare-footed, her great braids, half undone, straggling
down her back, she swung off down her mountain trail.  Her heavy, awkward
body gave the impression of great strength and for all of her
awkwardness, whoever looked at her felt that she would be brave.

“That’s the best day’s work we’ve done yet,” said Azalea at last, turning
rather wearily to find her things.  But Carin had them ready for her, and
when the schoolhouse was locked, the two friends made their way single
file beneath the dripping branches and across the noisy brook, thankful
for their good rubber boots and coats.

“I can’t think where Keefe has been to-day,” said Carin.  “It is just the
sort of a day you’d have expected him to come.  We might have needed him,
if the storm had grown worse.  Weren’t you surprised that he didn’t look
in on us?”

“Yes, I was,” confessed Azalea.  “It wasn’t like him to stay away on a
stormy day.”

Carin laughed—and her laugh had a touch of vexation.

“How do you know it wasn’t like him?” she demanded.  “You know very
little about him, really.  You mustn’t go on your impressions too much,
my dear.”

“I know,” confessed Azalea.  “Everyone tells me that.  Pa McBirney is
forever saying it.  Just the same I know it wasn’t like Keefe to stay
away on a stormy day like this and I’d feel better if I knew where he was
this minute.”

They should have been in sight of the Oriole’s Nest by this time, but the
clouds, which had lifted for a time, were settling down again in white
drifting masses.  They had not, of course, been able to see the mountain
peaks all day; but now the trees began to disappear as if willed out of
existence by some wonderful necromancer; then their very pathway before
them seemed swallowed up; and finally each looked to the other like a
ghost.

“Goodness, but it is uncanny!” said Carin.  “I’m glad we haven’t far to
go.  We could get lost in our own doorway.”

It was then that they heard the cheering whistle of Keefe O’Connor.  It
came, apparently, from the cottage.

“He’s been with Aunt Zillah,” said Azalea with a little sigh of relief.
“That was nice of him, wasn’t it?  A day like this she’s sure to be
lonely.”

She gave a blithe answer to the whistle, and seizing Carin’s hand, ran on
swift feet to the cottage, laughing as the billowing mist parted and then
closed like water behind her.  The little cabin could not be discerned
till she and Carin were fairly upon it.  Then they saw the dull glow of a
light in the window, and groping for the door, found the handle just at
the moment Keefe opened it.

“Here they are, Miss Pace,” he called, “quite safe and sound.  I’ve
looked in at you several times to-day, if you want to know, but I thought
my room was better than my company.”

“Oh, my, but I’m glad you’re home,” cried Aunt Zillah, helping them off
with their things.  “I declare, it’s getting darker every minute.  Why,
the mist isn’t white any more—it’s black!”

“We’re in the heart of a black cloud, that’s why,” said Keefe cheerily.
“Well, we’ve wood and oil and food inside, so what do we care?”

“He’s been working around the place all day,” said Aunt Zillah.  “And I
must say I was glad to have him take a hand.  Mr. McEvoy is an excellent
man, but he certainly does carry his ‘take-it-easy’ philosophy to
extremes.  But even he is a comfort.  In my opinion, every house needs a
man around it to make it look right.”




CHAPTER VIII
THE WAR


Well, but it was a snug little cabin!  The mist-wraiths might drift by
the window, might even pause to thrust their spectral faces against the
pane, but it mattered nothing to those who were safe and snug within.
Aunt Zillah cooked her special stew for supper, and served it with
potatoes baked in the coals, raised biscuit, and honey and dainties for
dessert.  Keefe had brought out his borrowed guitar and kept the room
ringing with his melodies.  The girls saw that the occasion was to be a
festive one, and put on the brightest frocks they could find in their
trunks.

Then, with the fire leaping and the candles and lamps lighted and supper
laid out with the pink dishes and the white doilies, the place was
charming indeed.  To Miss Zillah, for the first time in her life removed
from oversight of her elder sister, and playing at being the mother of a
family, it was an experience that made her shy, middle-aged heart leap
within her.  To Carin, used to luxury and beauty and her parent’s
unceasing care, it was an adventure in independence; to Azalea,
accustomed to changes, to people of many sorts, to both rough and smooth
living, it was one more chapter in a book destined to be filled with
curious incidents.  To Keefe—but let him speak for himself.

“This place,” he said, “looks to me singularly like Paradise.  My own
particular habitation is as damp and cold as the Mammoth Cave.  My bed is
done up in oilskins, and my easel is under the bed.  Every stick of wood
I have is drenched, and the field mice have got at my food.”

“Poor orphan,” laughed Carin, and then stopped on the word, wondering if
she had not spoken the truth concerning him.  He had told nothing of
himself, save that he hoped to be an artist, and that he already had
studied at the New York Academy of Design.

“Well,” he retorted, giving no heed to her embarrassment, “I
congratulated myself when I borrowed that tent from Mr. Rowantree.  I saw
it wouldn’t keep water out.  I said to myself, ‘The first time we have a
downpour I’ll have to take refuge with the nearest neighbor.’  I saw to
it that you were that neighbor.  To-night, of course, I shall put in an
application for the guest chamber at Mis’ Cassie McEvoy’s, and I’ll sleep
in the room with the medicine-bottle decoration, but until the clock
tells me it is really night, here I stay.  Don’t I, Miss Pace?”

“Indeed you do,” she returned.  “The laborer is worthy of his hire.”

She had got over the slight prejudice she felt against him at first
meeting.  He was too obliging, too amiable, too wistful, for her to keep
him at a distance.  Miss Zillah’s heart was a particularly soft one,
though for conscience sake she could be stern.

“I hear you had only one pupil to-day,” she said to the girls when they
were seated at the table.

“And she underwent a curious transformation,” said Carin.  “She came to
us Paralee Panther.  She went away Louisa Marr.  Of course we can’t call
her that just yet, as people wouldn’t know whom we were talking about.
But when she goes away to school, as I mean she shall, she’ll bear a
proper Christian name.”

Between Azalea and Carin the grim story of the Panther’s life was told.

“And now,” concluded Azalea, “my heart is set on rescuing that poor Mr.
Panther.  Why, it will be like bringing a man from a mine—or taking him
from the Bastille.  Oh, we mustn’t wait.  We must set about the rescue at
once!”

“It won’t be so easy as you imagine,” said Miss Zillah, with a sigh.
“When people get away down like that, they don’t seem to want to be
disturbed.  They enjoy their misery.  You needn’t be surprised if after
you get to the poor man, you find him quite unwilling to let you do
anything for him.”

“Oh, we won’t even think of such a thing as that,” cried Azalea, with her
usual impatience at the mention of obstacles.  “When can we go to him,
Keefe?”

“Not before Saturday, of course.  We ought to take a physician with us,
oughtn’t we?”

“Of course we ought,” said Azalea.  “Carin, couldn’t we telegraph back
home and get Doctor Stevenson to come up?”

So they wrote out a telegram which was sent to Bee Tree the following day
and from there telephoned to the nearest telegraph station.  But to their
disappointment they received the reply from Dr. Stevenson that he had a
very critical case in hand which he could not leave.  Carin wired
elsewhere, but without success, and they were on the point of postponing
the visit when, on Friday, there dawned upon their view the familiar
figure of Haystack Thompson, their old friend with the fiddle.  With his
“haystack” mop of hair in wilder confusion than ever—for it had grown
grayer and more wiry every month—with his kind, keen, rolling eyes
looking extraordinarily large, and his spare frame thinned, as it seemed,
to the very bone, he appeared at the schoolhouse just before closing, and
the moment Azalea’s eyes fell on him, she felt that he was the person to
help them out.  Just how he would do it she did not stop to think, but
ever since she had known him she had counted on his power to help.

He was lending his aid to some one at that moment evidently, for by the
hand he led a small boy whom neither Carin nor Azalea had seen before,
but the moment that Azalea noticed Bud Coulter starting from his seat,
she knew the newcomer for Skully Simms, the nephew of the Coulters’
hereditary enemy, and the boy who had on several occasions peeped in at
the windows of the schoolroom which he dared not enter.

All week things had gone moderately well.  The school now had twenty-four
pupils, one of them a girl older than her teachers, another a married
woman, Mrs. McIntosh, who, having brought her painfully shy little
daughter to school had been obliged to stay with her.  Mrs. McIntosh had
at first meant only to look on, but the example set by the children had
been too much for her, and she was now conning her first reader beside an
eight year old girl.  Azalea and Carin had almost ceased looking for
trouble, and it was with a sharp shock of alarm that they saw Bud Coulter
spring to his feet and shake a hard young fist in the direction of the
quivering Skully.

“No Simms can’t come to this here school while I’m here!” he shouted.
“You git out o’ here, Skully Simms, you hear?”

Simms cast one glance behind him as if for flight, but the firm hand of
his friend Haystack Thompson upon his shoulder held him; then the second
glance made him aware of all the children rising from their seats, of the
flaming eyes and distorted mouth of Bud Coulter, and the next moment all
of his fears vanished in a flare of the old inherited hate.  He drew in
his breath sharply through his teeth, leaped forward, all bunched up like
an animal, and the next thing that anybody knew, the two boys were
struggling together in the center of the schoolroom.

The fiddler might have managed these two boys, but he saw in a moment
that he would have trouble coping with what was likely to follow.  For
generations the neighbors who bore the names of the children within that
school had taken sides in the long and dark struggle between the Simms
and the Coulters, and now, in a flash, all their old loyalty to the “mean
fighters” of their mountain was upon them.  They leaped to their feet,
got from the floor on to the seats, shrieking and stamping to cheer on
their favorites.  It was not a “scrap.”  It was a war—an old war—in which
men of both names had fallen, and for which they all thought it honorable
to fight to the finish.

Azalea, sitting stark still at her desk, saw, with wide-stretched eyes,
her peaceful schoolroom turned into something resembling a cave of angry
wildcats.  Moreover, she knew enough about such quarrels to imagine what
the outcome might be.

“Carin,” she shrilled to her friend who had turned from the blackboard
and stood paralyzed at what she beheld, “we must think—we must _think_!”

But there was little time for thinking.  They could see that in a few
moments more every boy in the room would be at the throat of some other
boy, all for the glory of the old war cries: “Coulter!”  “Simms!”

Just then, as Azalea was discovering how unlikely her “thinking” was to
be of any use, an extraordinary sound smote her ears.  It rolled out like
thunder, it came in volleys like pistol shots, it was so strange, so
loud, so mocking, that all save the fight-crazed boys at grips on the
floor turned to see what it was.

And what they saw was Haystack Thompson laughing!

He was leaning against the door post and he was laughing as if he were
Jove and could find nothing half so amusing as the capers of earth-men.
He laughed on and on, more and more mockingly, more and more terribly.
His mirth was an insult to those who were engaged in that senseless
combat.  It held them in contempt; it made nothing of them.  The
children, amazed, fixed their eyes on him.  They did not like that
laughter.  It raged and roared at their ancient mountain quarrel; it put
them among the fools of the world.  Their anger turned from each other to
the man.  They forgot the writhing boys upon the floor, and drew towards
Haystack Thompson, resentment in their faces.

Just then, they were given another surprise.  Azalea had at last thought
to some purpose.  No one saw her save Carin, as she took the full water
pail from the bench and advanced with it toward these last silly clansmen
of the Simms and Coulters; but Carin, quick to catch the idea, seized a
second pail, and a moment later a deluge of water descended upon the
fighters, and two gasping, strangling boys, their grip relaxed, lay upon
the floor.

Haystack Thompson was a quick-witted ally.  He bounded forward and
grasping Coulter by the shirt collar—a stout shirt it was, made of
home-spun—plumped him down in a seat, then seeing him still in the throes
of strangulation, proceeded to pound him lustily on the back.  Azalea,
meantime, had pulled the smaller boy to his feet.  He was bleeding at the
nose; one eye was closed and he was blubbering and choking.  She wiped
his face with a firm and determined hand, and led him to the front of the
room.

“Go for more water,” she commanded, finding that the blood still spurted
from the poor injured nose.  The children held back sullenly, but Paralee
Panther picked up a pail and went to do her bidding.  The fiddler’s
fearful laughter having ceased, a strange, shamed quiet hung over the
room, broken only by the angry snortings and sobbing of the two fighters.
And then the fiddler began to laugh again, but not in the old way.  This
time he laughed as if at the funniest joke that man ever heard.  He began
gently, like one amused, he went on to heights of wild and reckless mirth
which reduced the children, and Azalea and Carin with them, to helpless,
suffering spasms of laughter.  There was no resisting such mirth.  It
spread like fire, and once alight, it seemed as if nothing could ever
extinguish it.

Then, suddenly, the wizard released them from the spell.  He stopped and
looked about him at his helpless victims.  He shook his head at them
sadly as if he regretted their folly, and drawing faithful “Betsy,” his
fiddle, the one close friend of his lonely life, from its case, began to
play.  It was quiet music, almost like a hymn, and kind music, like
friendship which endures.  Paying no attention to the gasps and gurgles
of those he had led into folly, he went on steadily with his playing.
Deep, full and rich were the chords he played; clear and high and serene
was the melody, and the troubled laughter died before such sounds.
Little Simms with his aching face and humiliated spirit, was struggling
to get the better of his sobs.  Coulter, the conqueror, had folded his
arms across his unbuttoned shirt and sat there waiting for what might
happen next.

What happened next was that Haystack Thompson began to talk.  He did not
cease playing, but the music that came from his instrument was as soft as
the summer wind in the trees.

“There’s something on my mind,” he said in his deep, kind voice, “that I
want to pass on to you-all.  You’re young and I’m old, and it’s fitting
that what I’ve learned by living a long time should be handed on to you,
who ain’t lived long and consequently hain’t had the chance to make the
mistakes I have.

“The constitution of the United States says that all men are born free
and equal.  Now, in a way that there saying is true, and in another way
it ain’t.  There’s differences in men and in the chances that come to
them, that can’t be gainsaid nor got around.  But it is true that all men
have an equal right to certain things.  They’ve an equal right to be
free, and an equal right to the good things God made—to sun and air and
water and food.  They’ve a right to feel happy and a right to be good.
What’s more, they’ve got a right to learning—got a right to know what’s
hid in books and in Nature.  Anybody who tries to take away these rights
from another is a mean cuss.  He’s unfitten for other men to deal with.
He’s got the soul of a wolf, and it seems like he should be hunted out of
the ha’nts of men.  Only that wouldn’t do, for then we’d be taking away
the greatest right of all from him—the right to be good.  You can’t make
an outlaw of a man and expect him to be good.  No, you’ve got to forgive
him and help him—you’ve got to show him what his rights are, what the
rights of his neighbors are.

“I’m a mountain man and my forbears were mountain men.  I know the
feelings of folks raised in the mountains.  I know they’re brave, and
kind to friends and mean to foes.  I know they’ve got sense and patience,
and that they’ve got folly and madness in them too.  These here quarrels,
like the one that broke out a few minutes ago between these two young
bantams—friends of mine, both of them, and good bantams—are a wicked
waste.  That’s what they are.  They waste human lives and human
happiness.  They make enemies out of folks that had ought to be friends,
and they leave little children orphans and make our people the laughing
stock of the world.

“For my part, I don’t wonder that the world laughs at them.  I laugh at
them too.  They’re so behind the times—they’re so foolish—so like the
wild animals out there in the mountain.  They don’t seem to realize what
it is to be men and to stand up fair and square, taking life and
rejoicing, and letting other men take it and rejoice.  They don’t seem to
understand that hate is like a disease and that it causes rot at the
heart and makes a man as disgusting as rotten fruit or a sick animal.
They don’t understand it, because they’ve grown up in the blindness and
sin of it.  Why, I used to feel like that myself.  I didn’t come of a
quarreling family, and us Thompsons had no war of our own, but we took
sides with them that had wars, and I’d have been as silly as the rest of
you if I hadn’t been taught better by—” he hesitated and looked about him
with a half-shy smile, drew his bow with thrilling resonance thrice
across the deepest strings of his fiddle, and went on—“by my old fiddle
here.  Maybe you’ll understand and maybe you won’t.  Music has laws.
They are laws that run through everything that’s good and true—they run
through the things you’re studying there in your books and they run
through Nature too.  They come from God and if we study them right they
help us to know that we’re God’s children.

“I’ve had to study it all out for myself, but I know what I know.  And
the grandest thing I know is that every man has an equal right to his
life, to his liberty and to his learning.  You may be friends and you may
be foes, but life and liberty and learning are things that friend and foe
have equal rights to—equal rights!  Think of it awhile.  Think of it as
you walk up and down this here mountain side.  Think of it when you go to
bed at night.  I’m an old man—an old mountain man—and you’re just as good
as my kin, you-all are.  And I tell you, it will be a shame to you what
folks will spread over the whole countryside if you drive these two young
ladies away when they’ve given up their ease and their friends for the
whole summer long to come up here to learn you.”

He ceased speaking, but his bow continued its magic movement back and
forth across the strings.  For a moment or two he played a curious melody
with sharp, bright notes, like the sparks from a blazing pine.  Then he
spoke again.

“Skully Simms ain’t got no pa; he ain’t got no ma.  He lives with his
uncle and makes out the best he can.  He’s pretty much alone, and it
ain’t natural for children to be alone.  All the rest of you can go to
homes where there is folks waiting for you.  But this boy has just his
uncle.  That ain’t much like having your ma and your brothers and sisters
and your pa watching out to see you coming home and speeding you on your
way.  He’s been wanting to come up here to school ever since it opened.
He _has_ come up here and peered in the windows, and honed to come in.
But he didn’t durst.  Why?  Because some of his folks, that perhaps he
never so much as laid eyes on, took a dislike to some of Coulter’s folks,
that Coulter never knew.  Do you wonder it made me laugh and mock?”

He played on, happily.  The tune took dancing feet to itself and set the
hearts if not the feet of the children, to a gay rhythm.  Once he lifted
the bow.

“Do you wonder?” he thundered at them in the pause.  Then he went on with
the merry tune.  And now, indeed, the feet of the children began to keep
time.

“Say, Coulter,” he cried as if he were calling out the numbers of a
dance, “will you cut it out?”

Coulter, never a hangdog, sat with his arms still folded.  His blue eyes
met the old fiddler’s steadily.

“Coulter, you’ve got brains.  You’re not a dolt.  You see the point of
what I told you.  Cut it out, Coulter, will you, for the sake of these
here young ladies, and for my sake, and for the sake of learning,
Coulter!”

How happy the music was—how far away from hate and meanness and grudging!
Coulter looked squarely across at poor little Simms, who seemed very
small and thin.  His spare arms showed through his torn shirt; his wisp
of a face was marred and blackened by Coulter’s fist.  Suddenly, Bud
Coulter saw the point.  Yes, “l’arnin’” was a thing that had neither to
do with friend or foe.

“Cut it out, Coulter?” questioned Haystack, vociferously.

“Yessir,” called back Coulter.  “If he wants to come to school, I’ll keep
my hands off him.”

“Honor bright?”

“Yessir.  When I give my word, I keep it.”

“Glory be!” shouted Haystack.  And “Glory be!” shouted “Betsy,” the
violin.

“School over?” queried Haystack.

Azalea nodded.

“School’s over,” announced the fiddler.  “And this is where we march.”

He started down the aisle, his huge head with its wild hair bent above
the violin, and from the little great instrument came the sounds of
marching feet.  They were victorious feet; feet marching in brotherhood;
faithful, determined feet.  Falteringly, shyly, the children fell in with
him.  It was not, indeed, in human power to resist that march.  Carin,
joining with light step, Azalea, marching more seriously, courage and
determination in her face, removed the last hesitation of the laggards.
Skully Simms’ tears dried on his swollen face.  He got up, half
shame-facedly and fell into the march, and so marching forgot his shame
and his resentment.  And Bud Coulter, springing at last to his feet,
tramped with the others.  He was, after all, a “good sport.”  He had
spoken out his feelings, and now, head up—just a touch defiantly—he fell
in line.  They all went out of the schoolhouse so, and on to where the
various paths diverged, running this way and that over the mountainside,
to end in the little cabins where the children lived.

Haystack sped them on their way.  Then he dropped his instrument and
turned to Azalea who stood beside him.

“Well, honey-bird,” he said with fatherly tenderness, “how does the world
treat you?”




CHAPTER IX
THE RESCUE


“There ain’t many men as inquisitive as I be,” remarked Haystack Thompson
as he sat at Aunt Zillah’s supper table that evening.  “’Tain’t the kind
of inquisitiveness that takes men to big towns, nor the kind that takes
men to sea.  It’s jest the kind that has to know what’s going on in the
neighborhood.”

“But you must admit,” said Carin teasingly, “that your neighborhood is
rather a large one.”

“So it is, so it is,” confessed Mr. Thompson.  “It includes these yere
mountains in all their outcroppings in the two Carolinas.  I make it my
business to know what’s going on in them whenever possible.  Earthquakes,
funerals, singings, weddings, corn huskings—anything out of the
usual—demand my attention.”

“Well, I’m glad _we_ received it, at any rate,” said Azalea.  “Did you
think we were getting into mischief?  The truth is, all had been
perfectly quiet till you arrived on the scene.”

“But it was a dishonorable peace,” roared Mr. Thompson.  “The enemy had
you.  You were in league with the powers of darkness.  Now, freedom and
honor sit upon your banners.”

“So they do,” said Miss Zillah.  “I declare, whenever I thought of that
poor little boy who honed to come to school and wasn’t allowed, it seemed
to me I couldn’t stand it.  I wanted to go out and do something about it,
but I didn’t know how.”

“I picked him up down the road a piece,” explained Mr. Thompson.  “He was
playing with a little snake—both of ’em having a nice pleasant time—and I
up and said: ‘Why are you playing with snakes instead of studying up at
Ravenel School with the young misses?’  And what do you think the little
cuss said?  ‘It ain’t as dangerous,’ said he.  ‘Not as dangerous?’ said
I.  ‘How is that?’  So he up and told me the whole story.”

“There’s a story whichever way you turn here,” said Azalea.  “Just
listen, Mr. Thompson, while I tell you the story of Paralee Panther.”

So she told the tale of Paralee, of how her name was no name, of her
father, paralyzed, in need of every comfort, and far from all physicians’
aid and all neighborly service.  Mr. Thompson listened with deep
interest.

“Troubles,” he said, “is divided into two kinds.  There’s the kind you
can’t help and that you’d best forget; and there’s the kind you can help
and that you want to get after.  It looks to me as if this is something
to get after.”

“We all think so,” said Azalea.  “And we propose going to-morrow to see.
There’s a nice boy up here named Keefe O’Connor, an artist—he helps us in
our school, too, almost every day—and he’s going with us.”

“You-all don’t have no call to go,” said Mr. Thompson.  “Not now, at any
rate.  Here I be, a lazy old coot, with nothing else to do.  Just let me
go and investigate these here Panthers.”

But Azalea shook a finger at him.

“Mr. Thompson, Mr. Thompson,” she said.  “Do you think we’re the kind
that can come up into the mountains and just sit and look off at the
view?  You know we aren’t.  We mean to go to that poor man.  That’s our
adventure, don’t you see?  Rescuing the helpless is the greatest fun
there is.  Why, the knights of old found that out.  After you’ve tried
all sorts of things, being rich and gay and all that, you come back to
that old idea.  So we’re setting out to rescue somebody, and we simply
can’t be interfered with.  But you may come along if you like.  It will
make it twice as interesting.”

“About this ‘nice boy,’” said Haystack, ever the watchful protector of
Azalea.  “Who is he?  Where does he come from?  Who are his folks?  What
kind of a job does he look to have—or is he a shiftless good-for-nothing
like me?”

Carin, who felt the inquiries to be justified, flushed slightly and
Azalea distinctly frowned.  It was Azalea who spoke.

“We don’t know a thing about him, and that’s a fact,” she confessed.  “We
thought that perhaps some day he’d be telling us about himself, but he
never says a word.  I think there’s something he doesn’t want to tell.”

“Like as not,” said Haystack, dryly.

“Oh, not anything that he’s ashamed of,” put in Azalea quickly, “but
something that it would make him sad to tell.  You know, Mr. Thompson,
dear, that it’s just that way with me.  There are things in my life I
don’t want to speak of, ever, but nothing that I’m ashamed of.  If it’s
that way with me, why shouldn’t it be the same with others?”

“Why not, indeed, honey-bird?” said Mr. Thompson contritely.  “Well,
we’ll see this ‘nice boy,’ and pass judgment on him.  Though, honor
bright, Zalie, I think your judgment ain’t the worst in the state.  For a
young-un you’ve had a good deal of experience in life and I reckon you
have your own way of sizing up folks.”

As a result of all this, the next morning, early, in the best of moods
and with a spirit for kindly adventure burning within them, a party of
five started for Soco Mountain.

The “sun ball,” as the mountain folk call it, was just showing a burning
rim above the purple horizon when they set out, with food in their saddle
bags, matches in their pockets and canteens of pure spring water on their
backs.  Food for the horses and raincoats were buckled to the saddles.

“Short of breaking a nag’s leg,” said Haystack Thompson, complacently,
“we’re safe.”

The first business of the day was to go for Paralee, who was of course to
be their guide.  Living as she did a mile or two back of Rowantree Hall,
Azalea begged that they might pass through the Rowantree estate, giving
her a chance to speak a word with Mary Cecily, whose haunting story
stayed with her almost constantly—all the more, perhaps, because she had
been forbidden to speak of it to anyone.  The detour made for the purpose
was not great, and presently they were pounding up the “approach” which
Mr. Rowantree so prized.  But on this occasion the master of the house
was not sitting upon his gallery.  Instead, they found him in the
“drawing-room,” clad in a snuff-covered silk dressing gown, reading from
an old red-bound copy of “The Lady of the Lake” to the twins, Moira and
Michael, while little Mrs. Rowantree got the breakfast.

“The vocation I should have chosen,” he said to his guests after they
were seated, “is teaching the young mind to expand.  It is, I may say,
one of the few things which really interest me.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Mrs. Rowantree, bustling about to serve her guests
with hot coffee, “I can’t tell you what a help it is to me, having Mr.
Rowantree amuse the children the way he does.”

“Wouldn’t ‘instruct’ be a better word than ‘amuse,’ my dear?” asked her
husband.

“Oh, indeed, you do instruct as well as amuse them,” she cried loyally.
“You instruct us all.”

“He didn’t amuse nor instruct me none,” said Haystack Thompson when they
were on their way again.  “A great hulk of a man a-setting around while
his little wife lugs in the firewood!”

“It would be horrible, the way she works and the way he loafs,” said
Keefe, “if it weren’t that she is happy.  She likes to be doing things
for him and the children.”

“He sure is a loafer,” mused Haystack.  “I know, because I’m a loafer
myself and I can recognize one when I see him.  But he puts on airs with
his loafing, and I swan, I don’t like that.  But say, he’s got cute
children, ain’t he?  That there little Constance said if I’d stay she’d
call me ‘uncle.’”  He laughed in a flattered way at the remembrance of
it.

They were soon at the little cabin where Paralee lived with her
grandmother and her brother.  The brother they learned, was already off
at the sawmill, but the grandmother, bent double with age, with two sharp
teeth protruding from otherwise toothless jaws, and with her face brown
and furrowed, came out to see her granddaughter’s guests.  Her gimlet
eyes seemed to bore through them.  She looked as if she knew many things
which she would not tell, and which, indeed, she ought not to tell.
Carin had brought her sketch book, and was eager to make a drawing of old
granny Panther, but she was given no time, for Paralee was awaiting them,
ready and impatient to lead them on.  She had no horse, but she said she
wanted none.

“I can keep up with your horses,” she told Azalea.

Keefe wanted to lend her his mount, but at his offer she frowned with
vexation.

“I don’t want to be plagued,” she said sullenly, and set off down the
road.  Her strong, short body moved over the ground with astonishing
swiftness; and as she took advantage of every cut-off, leaving the riders
to go around by the road, she soon proved that they would not be obliged
to waste time by waiting for her.  The Gap was quickly crossed and she
turned up a shoulder of Dundee Mountain, where for an hour the blowing
horses had a hard climb.  Then came a canter along the almost level
table-top of the mountain, till, having reached the end of the plateau,
the road began to descend.  The great mountain reached out many arms,
each of which bore a name; and it was along one of these wooded reaches
that Paralee led them.  By noon, a narrow valley was reached; and here,
beside a pleasant stream, the green solitude all about them, they
dismounted for their luncheon and to rest themselves and their horses.

Paralee would not eat with them, though she accepted the luncheon Azalea
offered her.  She walked away to a shady spot, turned her back upon her
companions and munched her food alone.

“Why does she do it?” Carin asked.  It was Haystack who knew the answer.

“She does it because she’s as proud as Lucifer,” he said sympathetically.

“She does it,” echoed Azalea, “because she’s afraid her manners won’t be
like ours.”

“She does it because she is unhappy,” said Keefe.  “I have been unhappy,
and I know.”

It was the first time he had made a reference to his past life.

But now there was another mountain to climb.  It was low, long, and
dull-looking, and so heavily wooded that there was little outlook.
Azalea said she believed that it was the only mountain she ever had seen
which she did not care for.  The road was so bad that it was impossible
for a wagon to pass over it; and even the horses had trouble making their
way.  Only Paralee, grown up in that tangle, knew how to thread it with
ease.  It was one of the few things which she did know well, and as she
went on, showing no sign of weariness, her awkwardness and shyness began
to drop from her.  She was on her own ground—the ground where she and her
people had fought their lonely fight for life; and she was carrying help
to those whose sorrows had been a savage grief to her.

Presently they reached a ragged clearing, stumbled past it to an ill-kept
garden, passed a number of pig pens and a large chicken yard, and came
upon the place that Paralee Panther called home.  It had been rather a
pleasant cabin, once, perhaps, in the old days when Thomas Panther had
brought his bride there and had “aimed” to be a farmer and woodsman.  But
the roof now hardly gave shelter from the storms, the shutters sagged
from the unglassed windows, the steps had rotted away, and one mounted to
the floor by means of ill-chosen stones which had been placed before the
door, and which rocked when they were stepped upon.

Paralee plunged ahead to carry word to that desolated house that visitors
were at hand.

Visitors!

The word means little enough to most people, thought Azalea, but to these
strange, stricken people, these people who, as Paralee said, had “almost
forgot how to talk,” it must be as the sight of a sail to one upon a
desert island.  Perhaps they would fear as much as they would welcome it;
yet there was Paralee, dragging a gaunt woman to the door.

“Tell ’em to ’light, ma, and come in,” begged the girl, using the
mountaineers’ old phrase of hospitality.

 [Picture: There was Paralee, dragging a gaunt woman to the door.  “Tell
               ’em to ’light, ma, and come in,” she begged]

“We will, ma’am,” cried Haystack Thompson, just as if Mrs. Panther
herself has spoken.  “We’ll be glad to.”

He left Keefe to help the ladies from their mounts, and himself went
forward to shake this ghostlike woman by the hand.  She was tall and
sunburned, thin past belief, and so smitten by the silence and deadness
of the days that she looked like a person who had lost some of her
faculties.  Yet now, with a visible effort, she summoned back her
knowledge of what should be done when guests came.

The first glance in the cabin was enough.  Its two beds, its rickety
chairs and uncovered table, were the whole of the tale so far as
furniture went, and a pathetic tale it was.  But the tragedy began with
the man who lay in one of the beds.  His wandering, wild glance fell upon
the visitors with something like terror.  His yellow skin clung to his
bones, and only one side of his body was alive.  The other was immovable
in the curious half-death of paralysis.

It was Keefe who first went to him, for Mr. Thompson had paused a moment,
aghast at the sight.

“You must pardon us for coming to your home, sir,” he said in such a
gentle and winning way that no one could have resisted his plea.  “It is
taking a liberty, we know, but we heard how ill you were and how no
doctor could get to you.  We are not doctors, but we mean to get you to
one if it will do any good.”

Panther, it appeared, could talk but little.  He shook his head
despairingly at Keefe’s speech, and made a strange, inarticulate sound in
his throat.

“Nothing won’t help him,” said his wife.  “A tree fell on him and he’s
got the paraletics.  He ain’t going to git well.”  She made the statement
calmly.  She was used to the idea; it was her house-companion and always
with her.

“Where’s Pete?” asked Paralee.  “Ain’t he ’round?”

“He’s done lit out,” said Mrs. Panther, still in that dead voice.

“Lit out?” cried Paralee.  “You don’t mean he’s gone and run away?”

Mrs. Panther nodded again; and again the eyes of her husband rolled
wildly.

“Did he leave you all alone, ma?” persisted Paralee.  “’Th’out anybody to
do for you?”

“My childer has all done that,” said the woman.  “Thar ain’t nary one
left.”

“Oh, but Paralee didn’t mean to desert you, ma’am,” cried Azalea, unable
to endure the spiritual bleakness of that home another minute.  “It was
only that she might find some way to help you that she left.  She’s going
to be a teacher; she—”

Mrs. Panther lifted her sun-faded eyes and looked at Azalea with
unspeakable scorn.

“Her!  A teacher!” she said.

Azalea saw Paralee cower at this speech, and she knew then why the girl
was so sullen, so heavily sad.  She had been “put down” all her life, and
she had grown to be like a hateful, chained beast under it.

Then Miss Zillah spoke.  She was occupying one of the three chairs in the
room, and in that bare and bitter place, she looked—with her kind face
and seemly garments—like a being from another world than that in which
poor Mrs. Panther lived and had her aimless being.

“She has the wish to be a teacher, Mrs. Panther,” she said in her soft
tones, “and she has the brains for it as well, so these young ladies tell
me.  In fact, I hear that she understands book-studying better than most.
We all hope to help her, ma’am, and to see you and your husband in a
different home from this.  Wouldn’t you like to have neighbors and to be
where a doctor could visit your husband?”

But Mrs. Panther could not face Miss Pace as she replied.  There was too
much she could not tell.  How could she leave the only spot on earth that
belonged to her?  How could they make any sort of a living elsewhere?
Dare she, who had no more clothes than the poorest beggar, go out into
the world?

Miss Zillah looked at her with her soft yet penetrating gaze.

“I know all you’re thinking, Mrs. Panther,” she said in tones that
carried conviction to the heart, “but I’ll just ask you to trust in us
and we’ll see you through.”

For a moment or two no one spoke.  Mr. Thompson was leaving matters for
the present in Miss Zillah’s hands.  Keefe and the girls were silent with
pity.  Never had they imagined anything so hopeless as the look on the
faces of that man and woman.

“You’ll think of a dozen reasons why you can’t do this or that,” went on
Miss Zillah, “but I feel that every one of them can be overcome.”

Paralee had drawn nearer to her mother, and her dark eyes shone like
points of fire there in the gloom of the cabin.

“Say yes, ma,” she whispered.  “Say yes!  We’ll all die here like snakes
in our holes, if you don’t.”

Mrs. Panther turned on her.

“What you talking to me for?” she demanded.  “Didn’t you turn your back
on me?  Didn’t you make Jake leave?  Didn’t you take Granny?  Much you
care!”

Then Haystack Thompson arose.  He towered till he almost touched the roof
of the cabin.

“Mrs. Panther, ma’am,” he said, “you ain’t seeing things right, but I
don’t blame you none.  I’m a mountain man and I know how you feel.
You’re proud.  But this ain’t a question of pride.  This is a question of
saving lives.  Now, ma’am, does it hurt your husband to move him?”

“Oh, awful,” she said.  “One side don’t feel, but to touch him hurts the
other side awful.”

“Does it, now?” said the fiddler, his voice quivering with sympathy.  “I
wonder why?  Ladies, if you’ll be so good as to step outside, I’ll see if
I can find out.  I’m something of a bone-setter in my way.  O’Connor,
will you lend a hand?”

Half an hour later Mr. Thompson came to consult with the ladies.

“I believe,” he said earnestly, “that the man can be cured.  There’s a
broken collar bone—broken in two places as I make out, and never set—and
it’s pressing on nerves and muscles in such a way as to make him
helpless.  That’s the way it looks to me.  Now, Miss Carin told me coming
over, that she’d pay for his keep in a hospital at Asheville if only we
could get him there.  It would be the death of him to take him in a
wagon; and he couldn’t sit on a nag.  So O’Connor and I have fixed it up
that we’ll carry him out.”

“But you can’t do that, Mr. Thompson,” objected Miss Zillah.  “You’re not
so vigorous as you used to be, sir—”

“Never tell me that, Miss Pace!  Never tell me that!  Old Haystack’s got
muscle and he’s got grit.  You’ll see.  You’ve set me on doing it more
than ever, Miss Pace.”

“It might be all very well to carry him for a mile,” said the practical
Azalea, “but just think of doing it for miles and miles—for twenty
miles.”

“We won’t have to carry him that far.  Say we rig up a hammock and carry
him ten miles.  Then we’ll reach a wagon road.  Meantime, you-all ride
ahead, and have a wagon waiting for us.  Put a mattress on it with plenty
of pillows and comfortables.”

“And we’ll bring along something to sustain him,” added Aunt Zillah,
forgetting all about her objections, “and some refreshments for you and
Keefe—”

“And the first thing you know we’ll have him at Bee Tree.”

“Then,” put in Carin, “we could get the drawing room on a Pullman for
him, and you and Keefe could go with him to Asheville.”

“Sure,” said Mr. Thompson.  “Sure we can do it!”

“And is Mrs. Panther willing?” asked Miss Zillah.

“You can’t tell whether she is or whether she ain’t,” said Mr. Thompson.
“She’s fierce as a tiger.  But then she’s lived like a tiger—only the
hunting ain’t been good.  Say, ladies, are you with us?”

“Oh, we are,” said Miss Zillah fervently.  “It will be like taking a man
from a living tomb.  Of course I can see there are many difficulties, but
probably it is best not to think too much about them.”

“That’s the idee exackly,” agreed Mr. Thompson.  “If you want to do
anything, don’t waste your time thinking about the difficulties.”

“For example,” went on Miss Zillah, “you’ll never reach the main road
before sundown.”

“We’ve thought of that,” said Mr. Thompson, “and what we propose is that
we shall stay right here to-night.”

“Oh, I couldn’t sleep in that house,” whispered Carin.  “Honestly, I
couldn’t.”

“No call to,” said Mr. Thompson, flushing a little, however, in spite of
himself, out of loyalty to his fellow mountain folk.  “You-all will sleep
out in the open.  You can have the stars for your candles and the
sun-ball for your alarm clock.  O’Connor and I will scrape up pine leaves
for your beds.  You can put your raincoats around you, and maybe I can
find an extra blanket to help you out.  We’ll build a fire and you can
sleep with your feet to it.  Now, what’s the matter with that?”

“Nothing, nothing,” cried Azalea.  “Oh, Mr. Thompson, how sweet of you to
think of it.”

Haystack Thompson grinned mockingly at his young friend.

“Me, ‘sweet’?” he asked derisively.  “Jest about as sweet as a green
persimmon.”




CHAPTER X
THE RESCUE, CONTINUED


Breaking up a home is not an easy matter, even when the home has little
in it; nor is it a happy thing—no, not even when the home has been a sad
one.  Moreover, it cannot be done in an hour, even under the easiest
conditions.

“We’ll come back some day, I reckon,” said Mrs. Panther to Miss Pace,
looking about her at the bare room with its broken fireplace and dingy
walls.  “Seems like I wouldn’t know how to live nowhere else.”

“If Mr. Panther gets well, maybe you’ll be glad to come back,” faltered
Aunt Zillah, trying to say the kind thing, but thinking in her wise heart
that these people were perishing, soul and body, for lack of mixing with
their kind.  But there was really too much to do to spend time sighing
over the breaking up.  Even the one remaining hog and the thirty odd
chickens had to be planned for.  It was decided finally that Paralee was
to drive the hog, and that such of the chickens as were not eaten that
night for supper, were to be put in panniers fastened to the saddles and
carried to the McEvoys for safe keeping.

Miss Zillah wanted to help Mrs. Panther pack her clothes, but she was not
quite sure that there was anything to pack; and indeed there was no more
than could be put in a couple of old melon-shaped baskets.

“Clothes ain’t come into my reckoning,” said Mrs. Panther quaintly,
growing more sociable as she felt the influence of Miss Zillah’s genial
atmosphere.  “And, anyway, there wa’n’t nobody to see what we had on.”

Meantime, Mr. Thompson and Keefe had, with the aid of Paralee, been
giving their attention to the hammock in which the sick man was to be
carried.  The house contained one good blanket of wool homespun, strong
yet flexible.  This, doubled, was stretched upon poles, and since no
stout rope could be found about the place, heavy braided warp was
fastened to these poles.  This improvised rope was to be slung over the
shoulders of the carriers.  Azalea and Carin braided the rope and found
it a pleasant task.  Indeed, they both were very happy.

“It warms me all up,” said Azalea, “to think of getting this poor man out
of here and giving him a chance, and I’m just as glad for his wife as I
am for him.  Talk of paralysis; Mrs. Panther has paralysis of the soul,
don’t you think?”

“Isn’t Paralee changed?” Carin cried, not bothering to answer Azalea’s
question.  “She’s actually tidying up things.  I saw her straightening
out the mess under the house with her one poor hand.  She wants the
Panther house to fall to ruins decently.  That’s going a good way—for
Paralee.”

“Oh, you never can tell a thing about these mountain people,” said
Azalea.  “Very likely, a few generations back these silly Panthers, who
ought to have called themselves Marr, had no end of self-respect.  Many,
many generations back, they may have been fine people.  Marr certainly is
the name of one of the greatest of families.”

“Perhaps it meant the same as Panther in the beginning,” surmised Carin.
“Mars is the god of war, and maybe the Marrs and the Panthers all got
their names because they were such good fighters.”

The sick man had been carried out of doors by Mr. Thompson and Keefe, and
placed where he could watch the preparations that were being made for his
journey.  And while he looked, not more than half-understanding, his
great wild eyes rolling in their sockets, his wife mixed hoe-cake, using
the last meal she possessed, and cooked it on the coals.  Chickens had
been prepared with dispatch, and were boiling in the pot, and Aunt
Zillah, having given all necessary attention to affairs within the house,
was now gathering dewberries and getting a fine bowl of them.

Presently the hammock was completed and supper was served.  Miss Zillah
had persuaded Mrs. Panther to let them eat it in the open, and they sat
together, that strangely mingled company, in the clear light of the
long-lingering day, enjoying their homely repast.  The lovely evening,
the wild spot, her friends—so various, but so dear—the awakening light in
Paralee’s eyes, the sense of being, somehow, on the right road of the
world, brought to Azalea’s heart a sense of dancing delight.  She
insisted on serving the chicken, the hoecake and the hot decoction which
Mrs. Panther was pleased to call tea, making the others sit still while
she waited on them.  She could only be contented when she was doing
something, it seemed.

It was well on into the evening before the company was ready for rest;
for the last preparations for moving had to be made that night if the
company was to have an early morning start.  The horses had to be cared
for, Mr. Panther made as fit for civilization as possible, some sort of
garments contrived for Mrs. Panther, and the house and yard “put
straight.”  Everyone, save, of course, the helpless, silent man upon his
couch, turned in to help, Carin with the rest.  Once Azalea whispered to
her friend:

“Did you hear that noise?  It’s Paralee laughing!”

“Do you think so?” asked Carin skeptically.  “It sounded to me rather
like a frog.”

“It was Paralee,” declared Azalea seriously.  “It did sound a little like
a frog, didn’t it, but just you wait a month or two, Carin Carson, and
then hear how it sounds!”

Carin gave a tired little laugh.

“I can’t take another step, Zalie,” she declared.  “No matter what the
rest of you do, I’ve got to go to bed.”

Going to bed on this night meant rolling one’s self in a raincoat,
covering one’s self with some coarse handmade sheeting, and lying
straight upon a bed of pine needles with one’s face to the stars.

“You don’t seem nearly so tired and sleepy as I am, Zalie dear.  Sit by
me and hold my hand,” pleaded Carin.  “You’ll lie next me, won’t
you—quite close?  The mountain seems huge, doesn’t it?  Like a kind
beast.  Isn’t it breathing?  I feel as if it were breathing.  Deep
breaths.  Where do you suppose my own, own father and mother are
to-night?  It was queer that I didn’t want to go with them, wasn’t it?  I
wonder if it was because I didn’t wish to leave you, ‘honey-bird’—as Mr.
Thompson calls you.  Why didn’t he bring his fiddle?  He doesn’t look
right to me without his fiddle.  Oh—h, how tired I am.  Sing, Azalea:
‘Now the day is over.’”

Carin hummed the first line; Azalea took it up at the second, and the
soft silence of the night was broken by the harmony of their voices.
Azalea remembered the evening, long ago, when she had heard Carin and her
father and mother singing that far down the trail.  That was the night
they had come to ask her to be Carin’s adopted sister—the night she had
weighed her love for Ma McBirney in the balance with riches and
opportunity, and had decided in favor of the mountain cabin and Ma
McBirney’s love.

Carin slept quickly, but she was over-tired; her slender shoulders
twitched spasmodically, and the hand Azalea held would clutch and then as
suddenly relax.

“Oh, me,” thought Azalea, suddenly anxious, “are we forgetting how
delicate and tender she is?  What if she should be ill, with her mother
so far away!  We aren’t looking after her the way we ought.  She can’t
stand the things the rest of us can.  I must have a talk with Aunt Zillah
at once.”

She drew her hand softly from Carin’s grasp and looked about her for Aunt
Zillah.  Someone paced slowly up and down beneath the trees at no great
distance, and Azalea ran to see who it was.

“It’s only Keefe,” said a voice in answer to her low inquiry.  “Not the
person you’re looking for, I’m sure.”

“I happened to be looking for Aunt Zillah,” said Azalea; “but why
shouldn’t I be looking for you, Keefe O’Connor?”

“Because you never do—you never have—never will.  Nobody looks for me.
Nobody worries about me.  I come and go as I please—and don’t like it.  I
had some hope at the beginning of the season that Mrs. Rowantree would
worry about me—she seemed so nice.  But she hasn’t a speck of worry to
spare from Himself and the children.  Then I thought maybe Miss Pace
would devote at least ten minutes a day to worrying about me, but _she_
hasn’t shown a sign of it.  She never asks me where I come from or who I
am, or why I am, or—”

“Why, Keefe O’Connor, you’re as unjust as you can be.  She hasn’t asked
you—none of us has asked you—because we thought that for some reason you
didn’t want to tell.”

Keefe stopped short in his pacing, and standing twenty feet from the
girl, let one cold word drop between them.

“Oh!”

“What a horrid way of saying ‘Oh!’” cried Azalea.  “I meant just what I
said and not anything more.  You know very well that we’ve liked you from
the first, Keefe, and that it never would occur to us to think anything
about you that—that wasn’t nice.  What’s the matter with you to-night,
anyway?  I feel as if, whatever I said, you’d put some meaning into it
that I didn’t want put there.”

“What’s the matter with me?” he asked.  “Why, I’m homesick—for a home I
never had.  I want to see the kin I haven’t got.  I want to know my own
name.  I want to understand—” he broke off and let the words rest
quivering upon the air.  Azalea drew a little nearer in the gloom.

“Don’t you know any of those things, Keefe?”  Her voice sounded awed.

“No, Azalea, I don’t.  I have, I believe, the strangest story in the
world.  I’ve wanted and wanted to tell it to you, but I’ve been afraid
that you—well, that you wouldn’t believe it, or perhaps that you wouldn’t
like me so well after you knew it.”

“Oh, Keefe, tell me now!  I should love to hear a strange story to-night.
I love to live under the sky, don’t you?  When I was a little girl I
often slept out like this with my poor mamma.  Oh, Keefe, how I wish you
had known my poor little mother!  Where shall we sit while you tell me
the story?  Or would you rather we walked back and forth?”

But before Keefe could reply, Miss Zillah, with Paralee and her mother,
came from the house and joined them.

“Paralee wishes to sleep out here with us, Azalea,” said Miss Pace.
“That will be very nice, won’t it?  Mrs. Panther has come to say good
night, my dear.  I tell her she must get to bed.  To-morrow will be a
trying day, though, I hope, a happy one, too.”

Keefe and Azalea stood silent for a moment.  Their little moment of
enchantment was shattered and it was hard for them to hide their
disappointment.  Then Azalea tried to say what was expected of her, but
Mrs. Panther broke in:

“I’ve got it on my mind,” she said slowly, “to say how I feel about
you-all coming away out here to help me and my man.  It’s hard for me to
say, for I ain’t used to strangers.  What’s more, it’s a good while since
I had call to thank anyone.  Things has been against me and folks has
been against me.  My own children has been against me.”

“No, they hain’t, ma.  No, they hain’t,” cried Paralee excitedly.
“You’ll see it hain’t so—”

“What I can’t get clear in my mind,” went on the woman, paying no heed to
Paralee’s wistful tug at her sleeve, “is why you-all should trouble
yourselves to come up here on something that ain’t no concern of yourn—”

“You would have done just the same, wouldn’t you, Mrs. Panther,” said
Azalea in her light, almost gay little way, “if you had heard we were in
trouble and had known you could help us out?”

“Who, me?” gasped Mrs. Panther.  “I never helped nobody.  Never had the
chanct.”  Again the bitterness came into her voice.

“I’m going to give you the chance sometime, Mrs. Panther,” said Azalea,
laughing softly.  “Then you’ll help me the very best you know how; won’t
she, Aunt Zillah?”

On that they parted.  Keefe and Mr. Thompson slept at some distance,
guarding the path—though indeed there was no one to guard it against.
Aunt Zillah and her girls lay beneath a hemlock tree.  Beside them,
Paralee watched the slow roll of the stars till far into the night,
unable to sleep for the thoughts that beset her.

“I couldn’t stay in the house,” she whispered to Azalea.  “It made me
think of the dark days.”

“The dark days?”

“Before I went away—when I thought we was forgot by all on the world.”

The night was good to them; the wind was low and kind; the dew softer
than fairy fingers; the stars softly bright.  Even the dawn did not come
blazing upon them.  In pink and gray, delicately it smiled from the
farther hills.  True, all night long the whippoorwill teased the air with
his foolish song, but all there were too used to the notes of his voice
to heed.

An hour after sunup, the procession was on its way.  Mrs. Panther and
Paralee rode the horses which had carried Keefe and Haystack Thompson the
day before.  In the panniers by their side cackled the excited and
displeased chickens, and following them came the equally surprised and
disgusted pig, for whom Keefe had constructed a harness by means of which
Paralee led him.  Last of all came Keefe and Haystack, carrying the
paralyzed man in his hammock.

The little house looked wretchedly deserted when Paralee had closed its
shutters and Keefe nailed up its door.  He noticed that Mrs. Panther kept
her head turned away from it and he wondered if she had, after all, some
strange, irrational love for this grim place, where she had suffered so
much, and known such bitter solitude.

Well, he reflected, the wrench would soon be over.  Ten minutes took them
out of sight of the house.  They presently were out of the clearing and
picking their way along the most terrible road in a country of bad roads.
The drag of the sick man’s weight, half-skeleton though he was, was more
of a burden than Keefe thought it would be.  At the end of the first mile
it seemed to him that he could not go on; but oddly enough, the second
mile found him getting accustomed to the task.  With Haystack Thompson,
however, the carrying of this dead weight seemed to be but a small
hardship.  Though making the best baskets in the country and playing the
violin with the touch of wild genius were not occupations to strengthen
muscles, still Thompson was capable of great exertion.  Keefe, who walked
behind him, looked at his great shoulders with envy.

Miss Pace, with Azalea and Carin, had ridden on ahead as fast as they
could push their horses, in order to send the McEvoy wagon to the point
where the rough trail met the wagon road.  They had no fear of losing
their way, for the marks their horses had made the previous day were
their sure guide.  So if they were anxious, it was not for themselves.
Their fear was for the two burden-bearers.  Azalea had seen from the
first that Keefe was finding the task a very difficult one.  He was not
strong in the way her good Haystack was, and he never would be.  She
thought of his delicate, long, “clever” hands, that could handle the
sketching pencil or the painter’s brush so deftly, of all his quick,
kind, charming ways, and wondered again what the story could be that he
wanted to tell her, and how it was that he seemed so alone in the world.

The day was proving itself a surprisingly hot one for that altitude.
Azalea was glad to remember the canteens of cold water that the men
carried with them, and hoped Haystack would tell Keefe to put green
leaves in his hat to keep his head cool.  She wondered if there was
danger of sunstroke away up on the mountains and wanted to ask Miss Pace,
but for some reason didn’t quite like to.  Too much anxiety about Keefe
might bring out Carin’s little teasing smile.  Anyway, it was no time for
asking questions.  She urged Paprika ahead of the others, and rode him
over the stubble, through the bushes, across the fords, until at last she
reached the well-traveled road.  Here she watered him lightly, and
breathed him for a few minutes.  Then she flicked the reins on his neck.

“Go home, pony,” she called sharply.  Paprika gave a little sniff as much
as to say that he had supposed that was what he _was_ doing, and reaching
out with his tough little legs, he fairly flew over the ground.  Carin
set her pretty Mustard at the same pace.  The ponies had been bred
together and were equally matched, yet to-day Mustard did not seem quite
the equal of Paprika, and Mustard’s mistress wondered why.  But Aunt
Zillah knew.  The difference lay, not in the ponies, but in the riders.
It was Azalea whose aching sympathy with those she had left behind her,
diffused itself through the heart and lungs and legs of her staunch
little mount, giving him a speed he seldom had known before.

Indeed, it was an all but fainting pony that was drawn up at last by the
McEvoy steps.  Azalea had slipped from her saddle as the little creature
swayed, and guessing at his trouble, had snatched up a pail of water
which stood upon the house steps and dashed it over his face.  Miles
McEvoy, placidly smoking his pipe in the shade of a sweet gum tree, came
to her aid, but she waved him away.

“Hitch the horses to the wagon,” she said, “and please ask Mrs. McEvoy to
come here.”

McEvoy, the leisurely, stared for one second.  Then, putting a question
or two, and receiving Azalea’s clear answers, he strode away to do her
bidding.  Azalea got the saddle off her weary little mount and ran to get
the necessaries for the relief wagon, explaining as she worked.  A few
moments later, Miss Zillah and Carin arrived, Carin too jaded to be of
much service just then, but Aunt Zillah full of expedients.

So in less than an hour, McEvoy, with his wife beside him, was on his
way, and the three who were left behind were making free in the bedroom
of the many bottles, getting all in readiness for Mr. Panther.

At midnight they laid the sick man on Mrs. McEvoy’s best feather bed.
Very deep and soft and sweet it was, and very kindly and safe looked the
homely room.  Miss Zillah’s soup was hot and savory, and her tea had
comfort in it for the weary.  Azalea and Carin, swift-footed and eager,
rendered all the service in their power, and at length, when every task
was performed, with their lanterns in their hands, they, with Miss
Zillah, started for their home.

Keefe O’Connor was sitting without the door waiting for them.

“I want to see you safe, please,” he said in rather a curious voice.
Azalea looked at him to see what was the matter, but the lantern revealed
nothing more than a white and strained face.  She noticed that he was
unusually silent as they made their way over the path of pine needles to
the Oriole’s Nest, but for the matter of that, none of them felt
talkative.  She certainly was not prepared to see him, when he had
unlocked the cabin door for them, reel suddenly and fall unconscious
across the threshold.




CHAPTER XI
KEEFE


Miss Zillah laid a hand on Azalea’s arm.

“Don’t be so frightened,” she said.  “He’s overstrained his heart, no
doubt.  Find a match.  Light the lamps.  Carin, help me lift him—well,
drag him then.  We’ll get him to the lounge.  No hurry.”

Azalea, fumbling for the matches and missing them, wondered why Miss
Zillah had spoken to her.  How had she known that her heart stopped
beating at the sight of Keefe prone across the doorstep?  And if she was
more frightened than the others, how had she shown it—and why, indeed,
_should_ she care more than they?

Then she knew.  She was only a young girl, but she knew.  Somehow,
mysteriously and beautifully in this lonely old world, we are able to
pick out our own.  We know, as we eye them, those who will make us feel
befriended and comfortable and safe.  At least, we think we know, and
even when we find we have been mistaken, we have had the sweetness of the
hour of apparent discovery.  Yes, it was true; Azalea admitted it as with
trembling hands she lighted the lamps, shuddering at the sound of that
body being dragged across the floor.  Keefe O’Connor, who had said that
he did not know his own right name, who admitted that his life had been
strange and sad and unsettled, had seemed to her, from the first, like
some one she always had known—some one it would be a wicked folly to lose
out of her life.

Pa McBirney had warned her that she was too impulsive.  He had told her
that she must watch out for this very thing, and she had promised him
that she would try to put a guard upon herself.  Yet by a swift
understanding which she could not explain, she had felt from the first
that she could trust this lad; could forgive him when he needed
forgiveness, and take life as it came, with poverty or plenty, with good
or ill luck, if he were near to praise her for the long day’s work, or to
laugh with her when play-time came.  And now perhaps he was dying!

There, the lamps were lighted at last!  She had touched a match to the
kindling in the fireplace; she had tossed on a log.  She was willing to
do anything rather than turn her face and look upon that white one on the
couch where Aunt Zillah and Carin, breathing hard, had managed to lift
the inert body of her friend.

“Make some black coffee, quick, Azalea,” she heard Aunt Zillah saying.
“Make it very strong.  Carin, come hold the light while I look in my
medicine case.”

Black coffee, very strong!  How did one make that?  Azalea could not
think.  “Quick, quick,” Aunt Zillah had said.  Azalea gave up thinking,
because her hands were doing the work.  She found that she could trust
them, that some faithful servant in her confused house of thought was
doing the work for her.  The coffee was ground, the fire was lighted, the
pot set on—all as it should be—and still it was not of coffee that she
was thinking, but of that white face which she would not look at; that
fluttering breath that seemed to cease.

She could hear Miss Zillah slapping the cold hands of the boy there on
the couch; could hear her speaking to him and getting no answer.  She
wondered why Carin didn’t come to her to say something—to tell her how he
was faring.  Did they expect her to think of nothing but coffee, coffee,
coffee—particularly when it seemed never to boil, never to get where it
would be of any use?

When she carried the coffee into the living room, he was breathing
heavily.  His eyes were partly opened, and Miss Zillah had loosened his
shirt at the neck, and had poured water over his face and hair.  It made
him look so strange—so different from the way he usually looked.  And
yet, though he looked so different, he seemed familiar, too, in a new
way.

“It’s not of himself that he reminds me,” thought Azalea, “but of some
one else.”  The resemblance was pleasant to her, as if the person he made
her think of was some one she liked, though she could not think who it
was.

Miss Zillah lifted him up and held him steady while Azalea fed him from
the spoon with the strong black coffee.

“Don’t let your hand tremble,” said Miss Zillah rather sharply.  “Don’t
think about your fears, Azalea.  He’s got to have the coffee.  His heart
needs stimulating.  Give it to him and stop trembling.”

Azalea wouldn’t have supposed it possible that by the mere exercise of
will she could stop the shaking of her hand, but when Miss Zillah spoke
to her that way, she steadied herself.

Did the moments go fast or slow?  She could not tell.  She gave him the
full cup of coffee and went for more.  Carin had heated some hot water
and had put it in rubber bags at his hands and feet.  He had been wrapped
warm, and now, little by little, the horrid purple of his lips began to
turn into something more like their usual color.  His lids opened with a
flutter and he saw those about him.  He smiled piteously, like a little
boy, and closed his eyes again.

“Perfect rest is what he needs now,” said Miss Zillah.  “He may have to
be quiet for days.  It takes much longer to rest a heart than it does to
tire it.  Go to bed now, girls.  What a day you’ve had!  Mercy, what
would your people think, Carin, if they knew all you have been through?
Don’t think of getting up in the morning, or of going to school.  The
very thought of your falling ill distresses me.”

It seemed outrageous to leave the gentle Miss Zillah there, her face all
drawn with anxiety, alone with that almost unconscious boy, but she
insisted upon having her way.

“I’ll call you,” she assured the girls, “if there’s anything you can do.”

“Any least thing—” begged Azalea.

Miss Zillah nodded.  So the two crept away to their bed behind the great
chimney and the screens, but they did not undress; only lay down in their
wrappers and with the light burning beside them.  Carin dropped into a
heavy sleep and lay there so sunken in the bed that Azalea had her to
worry about too.  Being of knightly spirit and rescuing folk in distress
was rather an expensive business, it appeared.  If anything happened to
Carin or to Keefe, would the rescue of the Panthers have been worth it?
It was not a pleasant question to dwell upon, and Azalea tried not to
think of the answer.

She was not sure whether she slept or not.  The wall between sleeping and
waking was transparent, like glass, and she could see through it.  So it
was a relief when morning came and she could get out of bed.  She was
stiff and half sick, but when she had taken her cold bath in the little
dressing room they had contrived in the shed, and had got into her clean
clothes, she began to feel better.  Carin tried in vain to shake her
sleepiness off, but she was so wan and worn-looking that Azalea sternly
commanded her to keep her bed.  In the front room Miss Zillah slept
wearily in the arm chair, and Keefe, his eyes wide open, lay watching
her.  He held up his finger for silence as Azalea drew near, and she
slipped out again, comforted at his appearance, to get the breakfast.

In the midst of it, she saw some one coming down the path.  It was
Paralee, swinging along with her great stride.  She still wore her
hideous, outgrown, ragged dress, but for all that she looked changed from
what she had been.  Her hair was smoothly combed, her face properly
washed, and there was hope in her eye and decision in her step.

Azalea slipped out of the door to speak to her.

“How be you all?” she asked.

Azalea told her, hastily.

“Ain’t that a pity, now?” sighed Paralee.  “I knew that boy wasn’t peart
enough for such a long tug.  I wanted him to let me carry pa part of the
way, but he wouldn’t hear to it.  He’s jest beat out; that’s what ails
him.  Lying quiet is the best thing he can do, I reckon.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Azalea anxiously.  “And, oh, Paralee, how ever
am I to get over to school to-day?  I’m so stiff I can hardly move; and
there’s so much to be done here at the house that I don’t believe I ought
to leave.”

“Ain’t it a pity,” said Paralee, kicking viciously at a stone, “that I
ain’t got my eddication yet!  I would jest love to do that thar teaching
for you-all.”

“I wish to goodness you could,” sighed Azalea fervently.  “But you seem
to be the only person around here who even wants to do such a thing—”

She broke off her sentence suddenly, remembering that she had heard Mr.
Rowantree say that teaching was the one thing in the way of work that he
actually enjoyed.  She told Paralee.

“He’d do it,” she cried, “if only I had some way of getting word to him.
It seems such a pity to break up school just when we’re getting it so
nicely started, doesn’t it?  And this is little Skully Simms’ first day,
too!  I couldn’t really answer for what might happen if he got there and
met the Coulters and their friends face to face.”

“Oh, that thar Bud Coulter’ll keep his word about not tetching the little
cuss,” said Paralee placidly.  (She was a Coulter in her sympathies.)
“But I’ll tell you what, Miss Azalea, you jest say the word and I’ll run
shortcuts over to the Rowantrees and tell them what’s doing.”

“Oh, will you, Paralee?  Dare you?  Oughtn’t you to be with your father
and mother?”

“Nope.  They’re all right, I reckon.  Mr. Thompson, he’s to take ’em down
to the afternoon train.  Pa ain’t looking very peart, but it warn’t to be
expected that he would.  Ma acts like she was scared to death, but Mis’
McEvoy’s fixing her out in proper clothes.  Mr. McEvoy, he’s gone down to
Bee Tree to do some telegraphing about the hospital pa’s to go in.  My,
ain’t they rich!”

“Rich!” cried Azalea aghast.  “Who?”

“Oh, the McEvoys and Mr. Thompson.”

“Rich!” repeated Azalea.  But the words died on her lips.  So Paralee
thought the McEvoys in their two-roomed cabin, and good old Haystack with
his fiddle, rich!  She only said:

“Have you had breakfast, Paralee?”

The girl shook her head.

“Come in then.  Things are cooked now, and you can eat and then run to
Rowantree’s.  But you _are_ obliging, Paralee!”

Paralee looked at her with something akin to impatience.

“Say,” she said deep in her throat, “don’t you thank me for nothing, you
hear?  If I was to crawl on my hands and knees around this here mountain,
it wouldn’t even up with what you’re doing for me.  Why, Miss Azalea, I
thought I’d go crazy thinking about my pa and ma in that thar place—plumb
crazy, that’s what I thought I’d go.  Ma laid it up against Pete for
running away.  I tell you, he had to.  It got so awful he just had to.”

“I suppose he did,” said Azalea sympathetically.  She knew very well—for
she was still a child—that there are troubles so dark and hopeless that
children cannot endure them.

A few moments later, standing by the door, she saw Paralee striding along
the old, overgrown road that ran toward Rowantree Hall.

She had confidence, somehow, that Mr. Rowantree would not fail her.
Indolent he might be, odd and proud and vexatious he undeniably was, yet
he had a reverence for the seeking mind, and she felt he would not let
these mountain children ask in vain.

She was quite right.  An hour before school time she saw him mounted on a
sorry nag, which he rode magnificently and as if it were the most dashing
of horse flesh, coming toward her door.  He dismounted with a splendid
gesture, and riding crop in hand, came forward toward the Oriole’s Nest.
By this time Aunt Zillah was sleeping properly in her bed, and Keefe,
wide-eyed and restless, lay on the sofa with instructions neither to move
nor talk.  So Azalea met Mr. Rowantree outside the door and hurriedly
told him all the story of the past two days.  As he stood there on the
little porch, he, being tall, could look well over her head at the figure
of Keefe lying stretched upon the sofa.  It was a sight to make him
sorry, but not one, it would seem, to hold him fascinated.  Yet he gazed
and gazed; then, trying to look away, looked in again.

“Who is it that boy looks like, Miss Azalea?” he asked.  “Somebody—”

“I know,” replied Azalea under her breath.  “Somebody—but who?”

They could not decide, and let it pass.  Azalea went over to the
schoolhouse with Mr. Rowantree and introduced the pupils to him, and gave
him an idea of what was to be studied for the day.  Mr. Rowantree looked
somewhat out of place in the little schoolhouse, to tell the truth; he
was so tall, so fine, so altogether magnificent with his reddish brown
hair and whiskers and his snowy suit of frayed linen.  The children
seemed rather awed by him, but Azalea noticed that little Skully Simms
kept close to him, preferring him, with all his strangeness, to the
Coulters, although the warlike Bud had given bond for good behavior.

When she got back home, the house was very still.  Carin was lying in the
hammock asleep.  There were circles under her eyes, and the lovely wild
rose bloom was gone from her cheek.

“I must take better care of her,” thought Azalea for the twentieth time,
stealing past her into the house.  Aunt Zillah was giving Keefe some
milk, and treating him as gently as if he were glass and might break.

“Remember,” she said as she left the room, “he’s not to talk.  Two or
three days of perfect rest will, in my opinion, make him all right.  It
isn’t anything unusual for a young man to overstrain his heart.  He might
have done it in school athletics and then he wouldn’t have been a hero at
all.  Mr. Thompson was looking for you, Zalie.  He starts in a short time
for Bee Tree, so that Mr. Panther may have a little rest between his
wagon ride and his train journey.  Mr. Thompson is going with him
straight to the hospital.  Carin gave him the money—except for a little—a
very little—addition which I made.  So now, all is well again, or on the
way to be well, and you must go and lie down.  Take a glass of milk first
and sleep as long as you can.  I’m going out to see to the chickens.
They’ve been sadly neglected, poor things.”

Azalea stood in the cool, tidy little room vaguely regarding the lad on
the sofa.  He looked amazingly long as he lay stretched out, all relaxed
and pallid like that.  The “sad-glad” look which Azalea so often had
noticed on his face, was there now.  He held out his hand for her to come
nearer and when she was close enough he whispered:

“I oughtn’t to be staying here, Miss Azalea.  It’s making trouble I am
for Miss Pace and the rest of you.  Anyway, it’s not fitting for me to be
here.  Isn’t this a sort of nunnery?”  He smiled in his sidelong,
whimsical fashion.  “If my tent was to be fixed up right I could wait on
myself well enough, and Mr. McEvoy could be bringing me over a drop of
soup now and then or a pail of milk.”

Azalea made no protest, for she knew how he felt.  She would have felt
the same way in his place.

“We love to have you here,” she said softly.  “We truly love it.  And it
wouldn’t be safe yet for you to go to your tent.  But I was thinking—”

“Yes?”

“How would it be if you went to Rowantree Hall, and got some one—Bud
Coulter, or some one like that—to wait on you?”

To Azalea’s surprise he looked up with eagerness in the eyes that a
moment before had been so lackluster.

“Oh, I wonder if it _could_ be arranged,” he said.  “I should like that.
I can’t tell why, but I should like it more than anything.  Miss Azalea,
will you see if it can be done?  I’m terribly tired.  I—I should like
beyond words to go there.”

A sharp little grip of jealousy that he should prefer Rowantree Hall to
the Oriole’s Nest had Azalea by the throat and kept her from answering.
But she was ashamed of that pang even while she suffered from it, and
nodding reassuringly, she went into the kitchen to attend to the
neglected duties there.




CHAPTER XII
THE BLAB BOY


Meantime, Mr. Rowantree (who loved teaching) was having his experiences.
He had been in the habit of instructing his own children, who, from early
infancy had been taught to listen and to learn.  Indeed, there was
nothing they would rather do.  They knew almost all of the great stories
for children that have been written by the different peoples of the
world, and they were so used to having their father speak partly in
English, partly in Latin and partly in French, that they did not mind
that at all.  Very likely he may have ventured to throw in a little
German or Italian now and then—he certainly could have done so if he
wished.  Then, too, he had taught them their notes in the music book; and
he had made figures seem like a game to them.  Really, he had done little
else since they were born but train them and teach them, and their minds
answered to his as the strings of a harp respond to a piano.

Imagine then, his feelings, when he was left alone to deal with the
twenty-one pupils—including Mrs. McIntosh—of the Ravenel school.  He
tried his best to realize how little they knew, but he really could not
do it.  He had begun with Skully Simms because Azalea had particularly
begged him to look after the boy, owing to the peculiar circumstances
under which he had come to school, and he set him a little reading lesson
to con.  Then he turned to Mrs. McIntosh, whose eagerness to learn, grown
woman as she was, seemed to him very touching.  But he was interrupted by
Skully, who in a high-pitched voice and a wild singsong something like
that used by the traveling preachers at a camp meeting, was going on:

“T-h-e, the, c-a-t, cat, s-a-w, saw, a r-a-t, rat—”

“What do you mean by that noise, sir?” thundered Mr. Rowantree.  “Can’t
you study to yourself?”

Skully looked terribly embarrassed and buried his scarlet face down
behind his book.  Mr. Rowantree regarded him something as a king looks at
a cat—a stray, wayside cat—and resumed his instruction, only to hear a
moment later the wild, high notes of Skully breaking out again.

He turned on the little boy in his most majestic manner.

“Will you have the goodness to tell me—” he began.  But he was
interrupted by a chorus of explanatory voices.

“He’s been to a blab school, sir,” the other children declared.  “He
don’t know how to study no other way.  Once you’ve got the blab way o’
l’arning, you can’t do no other way.”

Mr. Rowantree grasped the meaning of the statement.  He had heard of the
“blab schools” where each pupil studied his lesson aloud, often at the
top of his lungs.  He looked about him expecting to see the Coulter crowd
doubled up with scornful mirth.  But he saw nothing of the sort.  The
children there understood the difficulties of Skully.  Nay, they firmly
believed that when once the blab habit was settled on a person it could
not be got rid of.  They expected to see the schoolmaster fall into a
terrible rage and they naturally looked forward to it with a not
altogether innocent glee.  But Mr. Rowantree, it seemed, could be a
surprising person.

“I beg your pardon,” he said to Skully politely.  “I didn’t understand.
It will be rather bothersome for you to break off the habit of studying
aloud, but of course you must, for it puts other people out very much,
don’t you see?  This morning I will allow you to move your lips as you
study, but you must not speak aloud.  By to-morrow I shall hope that you
can study without even moving your lips.”

“Yessir,” said poor Skully, and he tried as hard as ever he could with
his untutored, eager little mind, to do as he should in the school which
he so very much wished to attend.  But it was hard work, and from time to
time his high-pitched singsong voice would break from the whisper to
which it was held in leash and would cause Mr. Rowantree to hold up a
warning finger.  Then, Skully, scarlet-faced and wretched, would try
again.

This, however, was not the only excitement of the day.  Just before noon
the instructor was surprised to see a very long, very thin, very
dust-colored man appear in the doorway.  It was not only his homespun
clothes which appeared dust-colored.  His hair and skin, even his eyes,
had a faded yellowish hue.

He leaned forward, peering in the room curiously, his high, arched nose
seeming to smell out what his eyes did not at first discover.  Then he
shot out his long arm and pointed at little Mrs. McIntosh, where she sat,
her worn yet girlish face white with nervousness, and said:

“I want you-all to git out of this.”

For a moment no one spoke.  The woman had not arisen.  A little look of
trembling bravery shone in her eyes.  She seemed to be seeking for some
words in which to express her thoughts and not finding them.

“You hear?” cried the man.  “You-all git out of that thar seat and come
to home whar you belong.  Thissen ain’t no place for a married woman.
You hear?”

Mr. Rowantree had been stroking his long ruddy mustache with his white
hand, waiting, it seemed, for developments.  But now he came forward,
bearing upon his handsome face a look not unlike that he had turned upon
Skully a while before.

“Mrs. McIntosh is your wife, I suppose,” he said in his easy, pleasant
way.

“You jest bet she is,” said the man defiantly, “and I want her to home.
She’s making me the laughing stock of the hull place.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Rowantree, quite politely.  “What are they laughing at?
Excuse me if I don’t quite understand.”

“They’re laughing because a married woman leaves her home and sets in
school with childer, l’arning like she was five years old.”

“They probably are not aware that men and women of the most learned sort
go to universities until they are much older than Mrs. McIntosh.
Naturally, they wouldn’t know that, would they?  It’s not the kind of
thing that folk here on the mountain would be liable to hear about.”

“We know ’nough,” said the man sullenly.  “We ken git along without
nobody’s help.”

“Now, really,” said Mr. Rowantree in a pleasant tone, “you _don’t_ get on
very well, you know.  You couldn’t get on with men beyond the
mountains—wouldn’t measure up with them in any way, except perhaps, in
the use of a gun.  And that’s because you don’t know the things your
excellent wife is trying to learn.  She already knows her letters, writes
her name, and is beginning to read books.  Of course that puts her quite
a way ahead of you, Mr. McIntosh.”

Mr. Rowantree still stroked his mustache with a white hand and smiled.

“I don’t allow no woman belonging to me to know more than I know,” said
Mr. McIntosh in what was meant to be a very manly manner.  “What knowing
thar is around our house is for me.”

“Too late, too late,” cried Mr. Rowantree, waving his hand magnificently
in the air.  “You see, she knows more than you this very minute.  She’s
got the key to the puzzle.  You can’t stop her now.  She’s got something
you haven’t—something that puts her in line with the world beyond these
mountains—something that will comfort and amuse her as long as she lives.
That’s the wonder about learning; once you get it in your head, nobody
can take it away from you.”

Mr. Rowantree regarded the mountaineer with an unflinching eye.

“I reckon I ken take it out o’ her,” said the man, his eyes flashing.

“No, you can’t,” retorted Mr. Rowantree.  “You may think you can, but you
can’t.  She’s got hold of a secret that makes her more powerful than you,
though of course your muscles are much stronger than hers.  Mark this,
Mr. McIntosh: No matter how things go with her, she’ll always have a kind
of happiness that no one can take away.”

There was a little pause and then Mr. Rowantree went on.

“What’s more, she’s getting something that she’ll not want to keep to
herself.  That’s the way with folk who learn.  They want to pass their
knowledge on.  She’ll be passing it to her children and they’ll come up
in the world.  You can’t tell anything about _how_ far they’ll come up.
They may get to be the best known and most useful men and women in the
state.  They say children take from their mother, and your children have
a good mother, Mr. McIntosh.  She’s a woman with a clear, sensible mind,
who wants to lift herself up out of poverty and ignorance.  That’s the
sort of a wife you have, sir, and I congratulate you.”

The preposterously pleasant Mr. Rowantree advanced upon the glowering
McIntosh and held out his hand.  In bewilderment the mountaineer took it
and received a grip that surprised him.

“Aren’t you proud of her?” demanded Mr. Rowantree.  “I know what it is to
be proud of a wife, sir.  I have one that’s much too good for me, and I
realize it.  Yes, it’s a great thing for a man to have a wife he can be
proud of; one that can do something he can’t.”

“I ken do what she’s doing,” said Mr. McIntosh defiantly.  “Thar ain’t no
reason that I ken see, why I can’t do it as well as her.”

“I doubt it,” said Mr. Rowantree, shaking his head, “you might—but I
doubt it, Mr. McIntosh.”

“I’ll bet you a young shote that I ken!” cried the man.

“I’ll bet you a brace of my ducks that you can’t,” retorted Mr.
Rowantree.

“Done!” said Mr. McIntosh.  “Give me a book.  Set down and tell me about
this here l’arning.”

Mr. Rowantree turned to the school.

“A brace of ducks against a young shote that Mr. McIntosh cannot learn to
read,” he said gravely.  “You are the witnesses.  Coulter, kindly bring
me a primer from that closet.  You will all observe that I play fair.  I
shall do my best to teach him, but I frankly confess I have my doubts.
He has looked down on book-learning and that is against him.”

Mr. McIntosh made no reply.  He had hung his hat on a nail and now he
drew his one “gallus” a little tighter as if to prepare for a struggle.
At the opposite corner of the room from his wife, he bent over his book.
Mr. Rowantree drew a chair up beside him.

“We will give our attention, if you please,” he said in his mellow voice,
and in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, “to the first letter of the
alphabet.”

Young Mrs. McIntosh bent very low over her page and only the children
sitting next saw her shoulders shaking with laughter.  The children
themselves, determined not to spoil sport, kept their mirth till they
should be upon the mountain paths.  Then they would have their chuckle
there over the way McIntosh “was tricked into l’arnin’.”  Now they
devoted themselves to their own lessons, and away in the backs of their
minds a new idea was growing.  Why shouldn’t their own fathers and
mothers come to school?  Why shouldn’t they all know how to read?  It was
just as Mr. Rowantree said; they couldn’t “match up” with the men and
women beyond the mountains.  They were different—terribly different.  Oh,
yes, proud as they were, these children of the mountain clans, they knew
that.  Their sisters weren’t like Miss Azalea and Miss Carin—not at all
like them.  Their fathers weren’t like Mr. Rowantree; and though in some
ways Mr. Rowantree was not liked by them, and his disinclination to work
was noted even by these folk of easy-going ways, still, he was different.
He knew about the great world beyond; about what people were doing in the
cities; he was acquainted with what other men thought and wrote, and he
could talk in a wonderful way.  Just see how he had come it over
McIntosh, and taken the “meanness” out of him!

It was the red-headed boy, Dibblee Sikes, the most sociable child in the
school, who put into words the thing that had been stirring in the
children’s minds.  He came up to Mr. Rowantree at the nooning.

“Please, sir,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about something.”

“You look as if you had,” said Mr. Rowantree cordially.  “Well, I always
count it a pleasant day when I have a new idea.  What have you thought
of, Sikes?”

“Why, seeing Mrs. McIntosh take up with books, sir, and Mr. McIntosh set
down to beat her out in learning, made me think of having a school for
the grown folks.  They need it just as much as us young-uns.”

“They certainly do, Sikes, and do you know, the same notion has been in
my head ever since McIntosh joined us?  Just look at him, will you?  He’s
sitting over there on the ground, studying like a good fellow.  Can’t
even stop to eat.”

“Maybe he ain’t got nothing _to_ eat, seeing he didn’t count on staying
when he come.”  Sikes grinned at his instructor, and Mr. Rowantree
returned the smile, accompanying it with a gentle wink of the left eye.

“Yes, his wife offered him half of her luncheon, though she didn’t have
much.”

“Then I reckon he’s eating with one hand and studying with the other,”
said Dibblee blithely.  “But how about that school, Mr. Rowantree?”

“Well, I suppose it would be impossible for most of them to come in the
daytime.  They have to attend to their work, don’t they?”  Mr. Rowantree
asked the question rather vaguely.  It was a subject about which he was
not very well informed.

Dibblee nodded.  “Sure they do,” he said in the language he had picked up
from some “tourist” boys at Bee Tree.

“What we need here, then, is a night school.  Everything could be made
safe in the homes, the big children could be set to look after the little
ones, and then the fathers and mothers could come here.  What do you
think of that, Sikes?”

“It would be a mighty good thing, Mr. Rowantree, but there’s one thing
stands in the way.”  Dibblee wore a “studyin’” look which sat oddly on
his round, smiling face.

“And what is that, pray?”

“Well, you see, half the time it’s darker than a hat on the roads, with
the trees growing over them and all.  Some folks around here ain’t even
got lanterns, and anyway, if they had, they wouldn’t want to go out such
pitch black nights.”

“Then they could come on moonlight nights,” cried Mr. Rowantree
triumphantly.  “We’ll have a moonlight school, Sikes.  Moonlight will be
a sign and token that school has taken up.  What do you say to that?”

“I say it’s just the very thing,” cried Dibblee Sikes.  “Then my ma can
come, can’t she?  Why, she’s jest as knowing as she can be—keeps me
laughing at her purty near all the time I’m home.  She’s got more rules
for cooking than anybody hereabouts, and she can remember the greatest
songs—about fifty verses long, some of them be—about things that has
happened in this here country.  But she carries it all in her head.  She
can’t read, jest because she ain’t been taught.  If she could read she’d
be the smartest woman anywhere, almost.”

Mr. Rowantree was a man with his own faults, but for every fault he had a
virtue, and now his eyes were alight like the boy’s.

“Right you are, Sikes,” he said.  “And we’ll teach her.  A moonlight
school we shall have, and with the permission of Miss Carson and her
friend, I will teach it.  I’ve been a happy man, Sikes, but I haven’t
been a particularly useful one.  So now I’ll surprise myself by turning
over a new leaf.  I’m going to be useful, if teaching my neighbors what I
know is—”

“Oh, Mr. Rowantree,” interrupted the boy, “I wisht school was over so I
could run home and tell my ma.  I know she’ll want to come, and she’ll
make other folks want to come, too.  You’d be real surprised the way my
ma can get folks to do things.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” said Mr. Rowantree; “not if she’s like you, Sikes.  You
can get folk to do things, too.  You’ve got me to take a job, and by
Jove, I didn’t know it was in me to do such a thing.”

The laziest man in the community smiled at the red-headed boy, and the
boy grinned back, and in doing so revealed three vacancies in the two
rows of teeth.  It was “tooth-dropping” time with him, and he was not
beautiful.

The afternoon, it must be confessed, seemed rather tedious to Mr.
Rowantree.  He wondered where Azalea and Carin had found their patience.
Nay, it took something more than patience to sow the seeds of knowledge
in these uncultivated minds.  Yet he had to admit, that though
uncultivated, they were not rocky and sterile soil.  On the contrary,
beneath all their shyness, the children were wild to learn.  Paralee was,
of course, not present that day, so he missed the pleasure of instructing
the one pupil who treated books as if they were food and she a
starveling.

One last odd incident closed the day of strange experiences for this new
teacher.  In spite of his utmost efforts, poor Skully had broken out
every once in a while with his “blabbing.”  The children, rather strained
and excited by the presence of their very learned instructor, finally
“got the giggles” after the fashion of tired and nervous school children
the world over.  Even the gentle Mrs. McIntosh could not keep from a
foolish “snicker” now and then as the wild cadences of Skully’s voice
broke on the air and were choked back by a grimy hand clapped across his
mouth.  The poor little “blab” boy was covered with confusion, and
finally, in despair, dropped his towseled head upon his arm and softly
wept.

The children, ashamed and sorry, did the very thing they did not want to
do, and giggled all the more.  And at that, up rose Bud Coulter, the
hereditary enemy of little Skully.

“Look a-here, you-all,” he said defiantly.  “I said that there kid should
come to school and no harm should be done him.  What I say I mean.
Nobody but a Coulter ken take the stuffing out of a Simms, and this here
Coulter is going to see that this here Simms is give a chanct.”

“Go home, Skully, my lad,” said Mr. Rowantree kindly.  “It’s been a hard
day for you, but you’ve done wonders.  Practice studying to yourself
awhile this evening, and be here to-morrow morning with the rest.  You’ll
come out ahead.  Miss Azalea was very happy that you were to be in her
school.  You see, she and Miss Carin have given up a good deal to come up
here to help you young folk along, and they want everybody in the country
round about to get some good out of the school.  They want you to make
their sacrifice and hard work worth while.  So you’ll come to-morrow,
won’t you, son?”

Skully lifted a tear-stained face and looked at the teacher with weary
eyes.

“You bet, sir,” he said sadly.

“And please be so good as to run over to Miss Azalea’s house to see how
they are getting on there, and bring me back word.”

Skully cast a look of gratitude at the man who was making his escape
easy, and finding his battered corn husk hat, fled from the school.

Incredibly soon he was back again.

“Miss Zalie says for you to come over to the house soon as ever school
closes, sir,” Skully reported.  “She says to tell you Mis’ Rowantree is
there and Mr. Keefe is mighty poorly, and Mis’ Rowantree wants to take
him home with her.”

An hour later when school closed, the teacher found Skully sitting on a
log, book in hand, studying with one finger acting as monitor to his
lips.

The children pretended not to notice and slipped away after their fashion
down the mountain paths.  Mrs. McIntosh walked with her little daughter,
but while Mr. Rowantree watched, he saw McIntosh stride forward, throw
his little girl pick-a-back over his shoulder, and lope down the trail
behind his wife.




CHAPTER XIII
THE HERMIT THRUSH


Keefe O’Connor had slept for hours, heavily, and Miss Zillah, stealing in
every few minutes to look at him, was not well satisfied.

“I’d give anything if we had a good doctor at hand,” she said to the
girls.  “Rest is a fine thing, of course, but it isn’t always enough.
Keefe seems badly in need of stimulation.  I don’t believe his heart
would have been strained like that, great as the exertion of carrying
poor Mr. Panther was, if he hadn’t been run down.  Probably he hasn’t
been having half enough to eat, for one thing.  Cooking for himself the
way he has is a bad thing.  We ought to have had him in here with us
oftener.  I blame myself very much.  But I hesitated to act, knowing so
little of him and being responsible for you two girls.”

In course of time Mrs. McEvoy came over, and she, too, tiptoed into the
room to look at the sleeping youth.

“I’ve got medicine for almost everything that can ail a body,” she said
when she had joined the others on the porch, “but the trouble is, I don’t
know what _is_ the matter with him.  He seems clean beat out.  Now, if
only Mrs. Rowantree was here she might be able to give us some notion of
what to do.  She reads doctor books so that she can care for her
children.”

Azalea snatched at the idea.

“Let’s do have Mrs. Rowantree come,” she said.  “Now that Mrs. McEvoy
speaks of it, I realize that I’ve been wanting Mary Cecily Rowantree all
day.”

“What a queer girl you are, Azalea,” smiled Carin.  “Every little while
you put on a mysterious look and say something eerie, as if you had been
talking with spooks.”

“I’m not one bit spooky, Carin, and you know it,” said Azalea rather
indignantly, “but now and then I do have feelings—” she did not try to
finish her sentence, but stared before her.

“That’s what I meant,” retorted Carin.  “You have feelings!  And you look
as if you did.”

“We are all mysteriously moved to do certain things,” said the gentle
Miss Zillah, who did not like her girls even to make a pretense of
teasing each other.  “I myself would like to have Mrs. Rowantree here.
She knew Keefe before we did, and she is of the same nationality, and so
possibly might have some peculiar sympathy with him.  I also think we
should send for a physician.”

“There doesn’t seem to be any use in sending for physicians to come up
here,” Carin put in.  “Just think how hard I tried to get one for Mr.
Panther.  Let’s have Mrs. Rowantree over by all means.”

So Miles McEvoy, a much busier man these days than he had been for years
before, undertook to go for Mrs. Rowantree, though he was only just back
from carrying Haystack Thompson and Mr. and Mrs. Panther to the station.

Carin decided to walk down the road a way to meet the wagon bringing Mary
Cecily Rowantree; and Miss Zillah, seeing the prospect of another guest,
went into the kitchen to stir up a cake and compound a custard.  But
Azalea did not move.  She sat near the door and from time to time looked
in at the delicate face of the sleeping youth.  It appeared almost
transparent as he lay there, his eyes closed and yet not quite closed,
his lips trembling a little from the fluttering of his over-taxed heart.

“Oh, I don’t want anything to happen to him,” her heart cried within her.
“How sunny and brave he is—and yet how sad, in that strange quiet way.
We know him, and yet we don’t know him.  If he should die, we wouldn’t be
able to send word to any of his friends, for we haven’t an idea who they
are.  But of course he mustn’t die.  There’s no reason why he should when
he’s so young and all.  And yet—”

The boy opened his eyes drowsily and looked about him.  At first he
failed to remember where he was, and half-raised himself on his elbow.
Then he sank back, white and trembling.  Azalea poured a glass of water
from the jar they kept on the window sill, and hastening to him, lifted
his head and gave him the cool drink.

Keefe smiled gratefully.

“You’re good,” he said simply.  Then, after a pause: “Sit down, please.”

Azalea took a low mountain chair and brought it near, so that she could
face him.  That mysterious feeling which had been hanging over her all
day, whispering to her that something strange was about to happen,
deepened curiously.  Little chills ran lightly over her frame and she had
to close her hands to keep her fingers from twitching.

“It must seem particularly silly to you that a fellow can’t do a little
job like the one I did yesterday without going to pieces over it,” Keefe
began.  “But I don’t believe I’ve ever been very strong.  I have color in
my face, and that rather fools people.  It fools me too, and makes me
think I’m of more account than I am.”

“It was a terribly hard piece of work you did yesterday,” replied Azalea
softly.  “But perfect rest will make you all right, Aunt Zillah thinks.
If I were you, I wouldn’t talk, boy.  Aunt Zillah says you’re not to move
a finger, and I’m sure that means you’re not to move your tongue either.”

Keefe shook his head.

“Never mind what anybody wants, Azalea.  I’ve something to tell you and
I’m going to do it now.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t, Keefe, really—”

Keefe lifted a languid hand, but it had authority in it.

“I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time,” he said.  “You know,
Zalie, if I wait—it may possibly be too late.”

  [Picture: Keefe lifted a languid hand.  “I’ve been wanting to tell you
                        for a long time,” he said]

“No, no, Keefe, I won’t have you—”

“Keep still, please.  I’m going to tell you now, quickly, before anybody
comes.”

“Go on then.  Speak quietly.  I’ll listen.”

She realized suddenly that it was kinder and wiser to let him have his
way.  So she folded her hands in her lap, and sat as still as a stone—no,
as still as a rosebush, for the wind rustled her pale green frock, and
lifted the tendrils of her brown hair.

“Zalie,” he began, his voice at once uncertain yet determined, “I told
you, didn’t I, that I knew neither my name nor my kin?  I am a waif, but
not because I was not loved.  That is what is queer and sad about it all.
That is what keeps me always looking and hoping that some day—” he broke
off and rested for a minute.  “I must begin at the beginning,” he
recommenced.  “I must tell you what I remember.  There was a pleasant
home, somewhere, with a low window from which I could look down the
street if I stood on my toes.  There was a father, a mother, and a sister
who played with me, and whom I adored.  Matey was what I called her.
That little name is all I have to remember her by.  I cannot even tell
you my own last name.  I was ‘Little Brother.’  When any of the three
said it, I was happy.  ‘Little Brother!’  It is the thing I have loved
best in all the memories—the way they said that.  But father went away.
There were darkened windows, a long black box, and all the house was
changed.  It was as terrible as if the sun had gone out of heaven.  I was
so lonely and sad it seemed as if I would die, and I remember always
clinging to black skirts—sometimes my mother’s, sometimes my Matey’s.”

He paused for a moment longer, his dark eyes darkening yet more, and
throwing into relief the pallor of his face.  Azalea was still immovable,
but the look of her face changed.  A warm, wild surmise banished
something of the anxiety in it and flushed it with excitement.

“Then next, I remember the ship.  Mother and Matey and I were on it with
hundreds and hundreds of others, all crowded together sickeningly.
Mother was always in her bed, and Matey and I sat together, creeping out
of people’s way, wrapped in an old plaid shawl.  I would go to sleep
beneath the shawl; and under the shelter of it she told me stories, while
the wind flapped it against us.  Then there came a day when—when my
mother would not answer either Matey or myself.  I heard Matey screaming
and I screamed with her, and some women were good to us.  One kept
kissing me, though I didn’t want to be kissed.  After that, I saw no more
of mother.  I know now they must have dropped her in the sea, but of
course they told me nothing of that.  There were only Matey and me
crouching out of the wind beneath that old shawl, Matey crying in my hair
and on my face, and trying to laugh and play with me.”

He saw the changed look on Azalea’s face and could not quite make it out.

“So then, the landing day came, and sister and I were pushed down the
gangplank with the others.  I remember falling and losing hold of her
hand, and getting up and catching at her skirt again.  At least I thought
it was her skirt.  I ran down the wharf as fast as I could, holding on to
that dress.  Then I remember some one shrieking: ‘It ain’t Jimmy at all!
It’s another boy altogether!’  And with that a woman seized me by the arm
and shook me till I screamed.  ‘Who air you that’s takin’ the place of me
Jimmy?’ she asked.

“I have forgotten all the other words of that day, but I remember those.
The people kept pouring and pouring along, and I think the woman left me
to look for her Jimmy.  So after a while I found myself in the street
with the people and the carts and carriages dashing every way about me.
I ran about like a crazy boy, too frightened to ask questions.  Finally a
man who was going along with a tin pail on his arm, stopped and picked me
up.  He tried to talk to me, but I was too frantic to listen, and anyway,
I was only a baby.  He took me to a poor home, a dark place with two
rooms or maybe three, and there was a woman there who was good to me.  I
used to hear the two of them talking and saying that whoever I belonged
to couldn’t have cared much for me or they’d have been looking for me.
But afterward, I came to believe that they were not very anxious to have
my people find me.  They were homesick folk with no little ones, and they
thought I was one of a great brood and would not be missed.  So I lived
with them, Azalea, till I was seven years of age.”

“Till you were seven!” breathed Azalea, leaning forward a little now.
“And then, Keefe?”

“And then good Bridget O’Connor, who had, in her way, been a mother to
me, died.  Mike O’Connor was fond of me, too, but how could he be looking
after me, and himself away every day working on the street?  Besides,
said he to me: ‘You be different from us O’Connors, boy.  It would be a
shame to tie you down all your life to a man like me.  Bridget knew it,
God save her, but she wanted the sound of your voice in the house.  I’ll
put you with the good Sisters, and they’ll find a new fayther and mother
for ye.’  So he did.  He put me in an orphan asylum, and there I lived
for three months, and at the end of that time I was taken by another
lonely woman who wanted a child in her house.”

“Oh,” breathed Azalea, “was she good to you, Keefe?  You were so
little—so dreadfully little!  Was she good to you?”

A slight color had come back to Keefe’s face.  His lips were no longer so
blue and unnatural as they had been.  He put out his hand and caught a
little fold of Azalea’s frock between his fingers and held on to it as
children hold on to the dresses of the women they depend upon.

“She was good to me,” he said simply, “with a wise goodness which did not
let me be spoiled.  She was not a married woman.  Her name was Harriet
Foster, and the name tells what she was like, simple and straightforward
and practical.  She had lost all of her family and was tired of living
alone.  She had been looking for some time for a child to help fill her
life, and when she saw me, she seemed satisfied.  I was satisfied, too,
and not at all afraid of her even at first.”

“Won’t you rest awhile now, Keefe?” broke in Azalea, trying desperately
to do her duty.  Keefe looked at the parted lips and shining eyes which
betrayed her breathless inquisitiveness, and shook his head.

“Miss Foster did not make me her son by legal adoption,” he went on.
“She left my name as it was.  Bridget had named me Keefe, which was her
name before she was married, and dear old Mike had lent me the honorable
name of O’Connor.  So Keefe O’Connor I remained.  But instead of the foul
basement home I had known, here was a quiet, staid, respectable home; a
three-storied red brick structure, cared for by self-respecting servants,
furnished with pleasing old furniture, and presided over by Harriet
Foster.  She had a group of quiet, gracious friends like herself, whom
she entertained at tea once a week, bringing me in to be shown off.  I
passed their teacups and sang little songs for them sometimes, and after
I had begun to draw, was told to show them my drawings.”

“Did you love her?” broke in Azalea.  “Did she seem like a mother to
you?”

“Love her?  I felt contented with her; but she seldom kissed me even when
I was a little fellow.  She taught me to be very self-reliant and
thorough, and gave me a fine discipline.  We liked to be together.  It
was always a great day when we went out to the sea, or to the picture
galleries.  We could laugh together and be patient together over
troubles.  If that is loving, then we loved each other.  But no, she
didn’t seem like a mother to me.  She seemed like Miss Foster, and that
is what I called her.”

“Oh, poor little boy!”

“Not so poor, Azalea, not so poor.  Children aren’t poor when they’re
given a chance to be themselves and aren’t driven from pillar to post by
some tyrant.  Miss Foster let me grow up to be myself.  She fed me,
clothed me, housed me, and taught me her ideas of honor and kindness and
right living.  When she found that I wanted to be an artist, she put me
in the way of becoming one.  I lived with her till I was seventeen years
of age.  Then she, too, like my poor little mother and dear blowsy
Bridget O’Connor, left me, and since then, I have been alone.”

“Alone!” repeated Azalea beneath her breath.  “And never a word of your
sister all these years, Keefe?”

She smiled at him so beautifully, bending forward, questioning him as it
seemed, so almost gayly, that he looked at her in amazement.

“Not a word, Azalea, in all these years—not one word.  I used to hope and
pray to meet her, but after a time I tried to put it out of my mind.  I
didn’t want it to undermine me.  We Irish are queer folk, Azalea.  We can
wear ourselves out with longing.  I didn’t want to do that.  Miss Foster
had left me a little fortune; enough to let me keep on with my art
studies and to give me a little start in life.  I had to leave the
comfortable old house where I had spent such contented years, because
that went to make a home for old ladies.  But I lived on well enough in
my attic—Oh, don’t be frightened at the word.  I lived in an attic by
choice.  Then perhaps I overworked.  At any rate, the doctor said I must
get out of the city and live in these mountains for two or three years.
So here I am, piling up canvases in Miles McEvoy’s barn and as happy as
anyone need be, especially since I met you—you people, Zalie.  It may
seem odd to you, but these few weeks here with the Rowantrees and
‘you-all’ at Oriole’s Nest, have been the happiest of my life.”

“I don’t think it odd at all,” cried Azalea.  “Oh, Keefe, I think it the
most natural thing in the world.”

“Why?” he asked, astonished at her tone.  But she remembered that dragged
and wearied heart of his and putting her lips tight together, would say
nothing.  He had to take her smiling silences for his answer.

Then, before he could urge her, some one stood on the doorstep without
the room.  Azalea, seeing the shadow fall across the floor guessed who it
was.

“Oh, you!” she cried happily, “you, of all people!  Come in, Mrs.
Rowantree.  Keefe’s fallen ill and Aunt Zillah said that you’d be just
the person to know what to do for him.”

“I hope I’ll know,” said Mary Cecily in her sweet Irish voice, “but how
can we be sure of that at all?  Still, it’s myself that must confess to
some experience, what with the rearing of the four children and the being
so far from a medical man.  What’s ailing you, Mr. Keefe, dear?” she
asked with beautiful gentleness, stooping over him, sister-fashion, and
taking his hand in hers.

And then Azalea knew beyond all doubt!  She wondered that she had not
always known.  Each had reminded her of the other, and yet with a strange
stupidity she had not realized it, no doubt because it had seemed so
certain that they must be strangers whose paths never had crossed.

She tried to be calm, to take the scene as a matter of course, but those
two who had so longed for each other being there, so near, so unlike in
some ways, yet so like with their sad-glad faces, made her put her hands
to her eyes to hide the sight of them.  She almost forgot that they did
not yet know.  She all but forgot Keefe’s heart and his need for quiet.

“I didn’t know they’d sent for you, Mrs. Rowantree, and I’m sorry you’ve
been put to the trouble,” Keefe was saying.

“I met Miss Carin down the road and I know what a hero you’ve been, lad,”
she said under her breath.  “It was beautiful—helping a man out of his
‘prison house of pain’ like that.  Maybe you’ll have to pay by being laid
up for a time, but I know you’re thinking to yourself that it’s worth
it.”

Keefe nodded.  “If poor Panther gets well—”

“Ah, I hope for that—I pray for that—the poor man!”

Keefe said nothing more.  He seemed very weary.  Mary Cecily sat beside
him, looking down at him, and he, half-closing his eyes, watched her
changeful face.  Azalea had sunk on the doorstep and sat there, her heart
beating so she thought the others must hear it.  All her thoughts and
wishes were pouring out toward them, willing them to speak.

Somewhere in the woodland a hermit thrush sent out its liquid, lovely
note.  It seemed above all sounds in the world, the one that suited the
moment.

“Why don’t they speak?  Why don’t they speak?” Azalea asked the question
over and over to herself.  “They _must_ speak.  They will be so happy
when they know!  Oh, how lonely they’ve been.  Oh, poor dears!  But _why_
don’t they speak?”

It seemed as if the very air palpitated with her passionate desire.

Then: “I wish you were my sister, Mrs. Rowantree,” said the boy’s wistful
voice.  “I’ve just been telling Miss Azalea how I once had a sister.
Matey, she was called.  Isn’t it a sweet little name?  We were on a ship
crossing the sea, my sister and my little mother and myself.  It’s just a
little bit of a boy I was—”

Azalea heard a low cry of utter happiness, of amazed, yet undoubting
faith.  She slipped from the room and ran down the path.  Her tears fell
as she fled, but her heart was singing.

The hermit thrush kept up its deep and tender song, but Azalea was
certain that the words being spoken in that room were more beautiful and
wonderful by far.




CHAPTER XIV
THE REBEL


Azalea never forgot how quietly and sweetly that night came down.  The
mountain, so old—older than the peaks of the Rockies or the Sierras—lay
beneath the stars with an air of placidity as comforting to the spirit as
great music or great words.

Within the room where Keefe rested, the shadows deepened till Azalea and
the others could no longer see his long form on the sofa, nor the little
dark head of Mary Cecily bent to touch his.

“To think of finding some one on the earth who really, really belongs to
you,” said Azalea.  “Oh, Carin, how happy they are!”

“Aren’t they!” sighed Carin sympathetically.  “Oh, dear, Azalea, it makes
me homesick for papa and mamma.  Yet here we are, only half through the
term of school we promised to teach.”

“You can’t say that it’s been dull,” replied Azalea with a fluttering
little laugh.  “Just think of all that has happened these short three
weeks.”

“I ought,” murmured Mr. Rowantree, who had supped with them, and who sat
with them now on the porch, “to be riding home to Constance and the other
children.  Paralee kindly promised that she would look in on them and
help them get a bit of something to eat, but now I really must be getting
along.  They’ve never been alone before after nightfall.”

“You’re going to leave Mrs. Rowantree here then?” asked Aunt Zillah.
“Oh, that’s good of you.  I don’t believe those two could bear to be
separated.  I know I couldn’t bear to have them.”

“Of course they must stay together,” answered Mr. Rowantree.  “Ah, what a
brave, bright little creature my Mary Cecily is, Miss Pace!  Folks think
I don’t appreciate her because I’m a lazy, dreamy fool who hasn’t found
out how to take hold of life over here, but perhaps some day I’ll be able
to show them that I’m not quite such a useless creature as they think me.
I know my faults better than anyone else knows them; and the worst fault
of them all is not being properly ashamed of myself.  I always was too
indifferent to what others thought; but since you came, Miss Pace, with
these fine unselfish girls, I—well, I’ve seen myself pretty much as
others must see me and I confess I don’t like the picture.”

“Oh, Mr. Rowantree,” cried Aunt Zillah, distressed, “I’m sure—”

“Don’t trouble yourself to say a single polite thing, ma’am.  Leave me
the virtue of my repentance.  Now, about my little wife’s brother in
there; he must come to Rowantree Hall to-morrow morning.  Miles McEvoy
can drive him over the way he took Panther to the station, lying out on
the straw in the wagon box.  Keefe’s a fine fellow, no manner of doubt
about that.  I took to him from the first.”

“Have you seen the pictures Keefe has up in Mr. McEvoy’s barn?” asked
Aunt Zillah.  “It’s a great pleasure and profit to look at them.  I’m
sure when Mr. and Mrs. Carson see them they’ll be all for having an
exhibit of them down at Lee.  Many artists come there, as you know, and
it’s the habit of the tourists to attend their exhibits.  Sometimes they
purchase very freely.”

“It would be a fine thing for him if something of the sort could be
done,” said Mr. Rowantree.  “My only fear is that Mary Cecily may have
another philandering male for her to care for.  That really would be one
too many.  I declare,” he added humorously, “if it came to that, I think
it might drive me to work!”

Azalea could not repress a little laugh, but Carin maintained
disapproving silence.  She liked Mr. Rowantree—nobody could help liking
him—but she certainly did not approve of him, and it was not in her to
ease off the situation as Azalea could.  Azalea had grown up among
vagabonds, and if she recognized in the magnificent Rowantree a new
variety of the tribe, it only made her tolerant of him.

“But you _do_ like to teach, don’t you, Mr. Rowantree?” she said
encouragingly.  “Paralee met me and told me what a wonderful day it had
been for them all, and how you came it over that poor silly Mr. McIntosh.
If only you had been given a chance to teach, maybe—” she hesitated, not
quite seeing where her speech would lead her.

“Maybe I would have stirred my old stumps, eh, Miss Azalea, and not sat
around on my gallery giving a bad imitation of a Southern planter, while
my lion-hearted little wife used her wit and her strength to provide for
the lot of us?  Well, now, maybe you’re right.  And that reminds me of a
plan we evolved among us to-day.  That nice red-headed boy—whatever his
name is—helped shape the notion.”

He told them the idea of the moonlight school and instantly Azalea was on
fire with enthusiasm.

“Oh, Mr. Rowantree,” she cried, “what a splendid thought—what a shining,
glittering thought!  It looks just like a king, dressed in white and
jewels and with a crown on its head.  Let’s make it come true.  Carin,
you’re the wonderful one for doing things.  All I can do is to exclaim,
but you go off and do them.  Make this come true, Carin!  I couldn’t bear
to have it stay merely a dream.”

“It is a glorious idea,” said Carin.  “I suppose men and women were quite
happy in the old days, Mr. Rowantree, in ignorance.  My father says some
of the old, unlettered peasants were very wise, and that they had
valuable knowledge they passed on from father to son.  But in these days
it certainly does seem terrible for a man or woman not to know how to
read or write, particularly here in our country where everyone should
have a chance.”

“That’s it,” cried Aunt Zillah, who was a great patriot; “in this
glorious country where everyone ought to be given a chance!  That’s the
promise we’ve held out to those who come to our shores, and it’s that
which helps me to overlook so many things that seem wrong in our dear
land.  Greedy we may be, and disgraced by the scheming and grafting of
our politicians, but after all, it is here that the ignorant are educated
and the lowly learn to lift up their heads.  Oh, I’m proud to be an
American, and if I had my life to live over again I would devote it to
some cause that would help on the real Americanism.  Now, here’s Azalea,
God bless her.  She’s going to work among the mountaineers.  What could
be more fitting?  The child has just the nature for the task, and her
experiences have helped her to understand many things that a more
carefully sheltered girl could not have understood.”

“I hope she’ll marry happily and keep in her own home,” said Mr.
Rowantree shortly, while Azalea colored scarlet and was grateful for the
gloom that hid her face.  “I’m an old-fashioned man and I like to see a
woman in her home.  As one of the chief of Miss Azalea’s friends I do not
desire a public career for her.”

Even in the dusk Miss Zillah’s head could be seen shaking emphatically.

“Well,” she said, “if you’re an old-fashioned man, Mr. Rowantree, I
suppose I’m what could be called an old-fashioned woman.  But this I will
say: I believe in women using their powers, and I think a woman of
intelligence and health has the ability to look after her home and do
something else besides.  Azalea may marry or she may not, but in any
event I hope she’ll use her influence and some of her best thought in
behalf of these poor people ’round about us.  I’m not a great one for
foreign missions—although I’ve no objection to them—but I do say that
life is twice as wonderful and beautiful when one helps on her fellow
beings.  There never was a place in the world where missionary work was
needed more than it is right here in our own beloved state of North
Carolina.  It’s a kind and gracious old state, and as beautiful as
anything that lies beneath the sky, but it’s got some poor, neglected
members of the human family in it, and I’m all for helping them on.  I
love Azalea, and have great confidence in her, and that’s why I want to
see her give herself to a useful and important work.  If she wasn’t of
much account, I shouldn’t think that it mattered what she did; but she’s
of much account, and so, if she were mine I would give her to this
service of her kind as I would give a son, if I had one, to fight and die
for his country.”

Miss Zillah’s gentle voice had gathered to itself unusual power, and its
tones, charged with feeling, penetrated to the shadowy room where Keefe
and Mary Cecily were.  Mary Cecily laughed softly as she arose from the
low chair where she had been sitting, and Keefe echoed her.  Perhaps it
struck them as amusing that anybody should find it necessary to worry
about anything now, when suddenly, to them, the world seemed so
completely right.

“How are you in there?” queried Rowantree.  “I’m thinking of driving home
the night, Mary Cecily, and leaving you here with Keefe.”

“Oh, would Mary Cecily be happy away from the little ones?” asked Keefe.
“Really, I’m much better—fifty percent better, I assure you.  It’s not
necessary for—for my sister to stay with me.”  His voice caught on the
words.  “My sister” was not easily uttered.

“Indeed, I’ve no thought of leaving you, brother dear—no thought at all.
It’s as my husband says.  He can ride home to the children; and very good
and dear it is of him to think of it.  The two of us will be along in the
morning, as you were planning a while back.  Be off, Bryan dear.  There’s
only Paralee with the children, and she’s strange to them.  Tell them all
that’s happened to me to-day, and let Constance know that I’m bringing
home an own uncle—the very one she’d have chosen, I’m sure.”

Azalea drew back into the shadow of the house.  So in the morning they
would be off—Keefe and his bright little sister—carrying their rich
romance with them, and the Oriole’s Nest would be the poorer for their
going!  They would be gloriously happy together, telling each other all
that had happened in the years they had been apart.  They would go
farther, those two, with their eager, answering minds, and would talk not
only of what they had done, but of what they had thought and felt.  Each
would be turning out the riches of his mind for the other to see—holding
up their fancies as if they were embroidered clothes, and each marveling
at what the other had to show.  They would be telling to each other the
poetry they knew; and Keefe would be making pictures while Mary Cecily
watched.  And how the two of them would love the children and admire
their graceful ways!  Azalea could see how they would look, all the
family of them, sitting about the blazing fire in that queer
“drawing-room.”  Keefe’s pictures would be put up on the wall—the whole
place would be plastered with them—and they would be talking about this
one and that, and where it was painted.  Then they would be singing
together, and whistling and dancing—heaven only knew what they would or
wouldn’t do.

Azalea felt the hot tears of shameless envy crowding out from under her
lids, and hated herself for them.  She to help on her fellow-men?  She to
work to add to the goodness and happiness of the world, when she grudged
these two their simple happiness, after so many years of tears and
longing and heartache?  Could a more miserable, absurd, abject girl than
herself be found anywhere, she wondered.  She thanked heaven that the
friends there beside her did not dream how ignoble she was.

Rowantree meantime had said good night and had mounted and ridden away.
They watched the light of his lantern flitting like a firefly among the
trees and at last disappearing entirely in the night.

The McEvoys came with the milk, and lingered to learn the news.  As they
walked away Miss Zillah and her girls could hear their soft singsong
voices in kindly unison.

“They’re right sweet folks,” Miss Zillah declared, sighing unaccountably.
“At first they did seem queer to me, but now I’ve grown to be as fond of
them as if they were old neighbors.  They’re a good example of a happy
married pair, too.  I don’t know as I ever heard them really disagree
about a thing; and though those medicine bottles must be a terrible trial
to Mr. McEvoy, he never says a word about them, except, of course, to
tease Mis’ Cassie a little now and then.”

“There haven’t been any new bottles bought since we came up here, I
notice,” said Carin.  “I suppose we’ve kept Mis’ Cassie so busy that she
hasn’t had time to take thought about them.”

“I’ve a fine little plan that I’d like to carry into execution,” said
Miss Zillah.  “Down home I have quite a number of pretty mantel ornaments
I bought long ago when—when I thought I was going to have a little home
of my own.  I—I never told you about that, my dears, but it seems a good
time to do it now, this being such a wonderful day for us all.  You see,
I had my wedding clothes made, and I was to marry one of the kindest,
fairest-minded men that ever lived in the world.  And he—he was killed,
dears—thrown from his horse and killed.”

Azalea had still kept in the background, those hurt and lonely tears hot
beneath her lids; and now, at the story of another’s sorrow, she frankly
let them fall.  Curiously, though, they were not so hot and bitter as she
had thought they would be.

“Why, Aunt Zillah,” she murmured, “we never guessed!  Yet we might have
known.  There always was something about you so gentle and sweet—we might
have known that you’d had sorrow.”

“Few live to my age without having sorrow, Zalie, but my sorrow came in
my youth, and it took the zest out of life for a time.  However, it was a
sweet sorrow.  I’ve always been able to keep my lover young and kind in
my memory.  But what I started to say was, that I put away and never have
used the things I got for that little home I meant to have.  Now, I’m
going to write sister Adnah and ask her to send me my mantel ornaments.
They’re very pretty and chaste,” went on Miss Zillah quaintly.  “Little
shepherds and shepherdesses, piping to each other, and all dressed in the
softest pink and blue, and a clock to match.  I even have an embroidered
cover for the mantel, done in cross stitch and in pastel colors to go
with the ornaments.  If I give these to Mis’ Cassie and induce her to put
them in the spare room she’ll stick the medicine bottles away out of
sight.”

“They’ll go in that mess under the house,” agreed Carin.  “And it will be
a grand day for the McEvoys when they do.  Oh, Aunt Zillah, how tired and
sleepy I am—almost too tired and sleepy to go to bed.”

“I feel just the same way,” said Azalea.  “Yet I hate to leave the night
to itself, it’s so lovely.  Sometimes I think I’ll sleep days and keep
awake nights, I love the night so much.”

“Come,” said Miss Zillah with the voice of authority, “don’t be talking
nonsense.  We will get to our beds.”

So they slipped in softly behind the great chimney and the pretty screens
to their own quaint makeshift of bedroom, leaving Mary Cecily on a cot
near her brother.  The windows and doors all stood open to the night, and
the girls could hear the soft rustlings of the wood and the tinkle of the
brook.  The whippoorwills were very distant and their insistent cry
sounded sweet and mournful, though it could be hectoring enough when it
was near at hand.  But nothing was hectoring this night, except that
foolish, wistful longing in Azalea’s restless young heart, because Keefe
and Mary Cecily were so happy in themselves, and because it was taken for
granted that she, Azalea, was always to be so brave and so eager for
service, and was to be a missionary to the mountain folk and was never to
have any joy of her own—no real, selfish, glorious joy!  Yet only the
other day she had told Carin how clearly the finger of fate pointed to
her as one set apart to “do good.”  She would never marry, she had
said—never, never—because she could not marry a “gentleman” and because
she would marry no one who could not lay claim to that name.  And they
had taken her at her word—or at least, they had almost done so.  She was
to be Azalea McBirney, the adopted daughter of the mountain folk, the
little sister to all the unfortunates, and was to live apart and be good!

Azalea lay quite on the edge of her bed, very straight and rigid, and
looked up at the stars through her open window.  They were cold,
unsympathetic looking stars!  Azalea had not previously noticed how very
haughty and remote they could appear, or how indifferent they could be to
the woes and doubts, the frets and flurries of one self-centered young
person called Azalea McBirney—one reneging, horrid young person, who was
secretly going back on all her declarations of faith and service, and
wanting nothing in the world so much as merely to be happy!

Life, decided Azalea, was a puzzle.  Once it had seemed simple.  Some
things had plainly been right to do; others, as plainly wrong.  In those
days she had believed she had only, at any time, to listen to her
conscience to find out precisely what she ought to do, and therefore what
she wanted to do.  Because, of course, she wanted to do what was right.

Now she was finding out that there were all sorts of matters which were
neither right nor wrong, about which she had to decide.  At present she
was tormented with a longing to share in the joy and in the lives of
Keefe and Mary Cecily.  Something in them called to her.  Their quick
gayety, their sudden sadnesses, their caring about pictures and poetry
more than they did about food or work, or sleep, or any usual, dutiful
thing, made them seem the very kin of her soul.  She couldn’t account for
it.  It was merely a fact.  She began to understand that there might have
been something of the sort in her own poor little mother.  When she took
to wandering the roads with a cheap “show” perhaps it was not merely
necessity, but some half-formed dream of wildness and gayety and art that
had led her on.  She too had loved the night and laughter and dancing,
singing and pictures.  Not anything evil—Oh, no, on the contrary, only
happily, brightly good things, things that lightened the heart and set
the brain moving so that glittering little thoughts shone in it like
stars in the night.

The Carsons, gentle and kind, formal and polite, were Azalea’s tried and
trusted friends; the McBirneys, generous and loving, lived in the inner
chamber of her heart; Annie Laurie was a gallant girl and her own true
friend; but the soft gay laughter of Keefe and Mary Cecily was as fairy
bells in her ears, and that night she could hear nothing else, it
seemed—not even the voices of the dear old friends—for the tinkling of
them.

So, very stiff, very straight, very miserable, she lay upon her edge of
the bed and counted the hours.  Carin, soft as a kitten, curled down well
in the center of the mattress and slept as babies sleep.

“What’s come over me?” demanded Azalea of herself.  “Haven’t I any heart?
Haven’t I any sense?  Can’t I see anybody else happy without being
jealous of them?  Am I an Everlasting Pig?”

Haughty and remote stars do not answer questions like that.  Along in the
latter part of the night Azalea fell asleep with the question hanging in
the fast-chilling air.  When she awoke, the day was already bright, and
outside the door sounded the voice of Miles McEvoy making arrangements to
carry Mary Cecily and Keefe to Rowantree Hall.

Azalea sprang out of bed with decision.  Her lips were set in a hard
little line.

“Come, Carin,” she said, “we mustn’t be late to school.  Let’s settle
down now for a long hard pull.  We’ll teach school as we never did
before.  There’s only three weeks more ahead of us and we mustn’t waste a
minute.”

“My goodness,” yawned Carin, prettily, “you sound like a call to arms.
All right, comrade, I’m with you.  Shall we wear our pink ginghams?”

“What does it matter what we wear?” demanded Azalea sternly.  “We’re here
to _teach school_.  Nobody cares how we look.”

At that Carin sat up in bed bristling with protest.

“What’s come over you, Zalie?” she demanded.  “Of course the children
care how we look.  Looking as well as we can is part of our work.  You
know you’ve often said so yourself.  But, dear me, why should I worry
about you, you old Zalie thing?  You always look lovely.”

Her friends thought so that morning, certainly.  Her eyes were a touch
too bright, perhaps, her cheeks a shade too red, and there was something
a little too vivid and throbbing about her.  Try as hard as she could to
keep in the background, she could not succeed.

“You’re a flaming Azalea this morning, my dear,” whispered Mary Cecily
just before she took her seat beside her brother in McEvoy’s wagon for
the rough journey to Rowantree Hall.  Keefe was white and spent-looking,
but a glorious happiness shone in his eyes.

“No one is to worry about me,” were his words at parting with his friends
at the Oriole’s Nest.  “If it’s sick I am, it must be with gratitude and
bliss.  Never will I forget your goodness to me at this house; and now
here I am, going—home!”  He turned swimming eyes on his sister.

As they drove off he raised himself on one elbow—he was reclining on the
clean straw in the wagon box—to catch one last glimpse of “the flaming
Azalea.”  But she was out of sight—absurdly and irritatingly out of
sight.  There were only Miss Zillah and the golden-headed Carin to wave
good-bye.




CHAPTER XV
NEW HOPES


“Only two more little days,” said Azalea, “and then we are through.”

“Little days, little days,” sang Carin in a tune of her own.  “Only two
more little days.”

“You use strange expressions,” remarked Miss Zillah to her girls.  “Why
do you say ‘little days’?  Why not ‘short days’?”

“When I love anything,” explained Azalea, “I call it little.”

“Then you do love these days?  I’m glad.  I was afraid—”

“Aunt Zillah, dear—afraid?”

“Afraid you were tired, my girl.  You’re tanned, of course, and so not
pale, but you do seem rather weary.”

“Oh, I’m tired, but school teachers have a perfect right to be tired.
Six weeks of teaching children who haven’t been in the habit of learning
_is_ rather an order, now, isn’t it, Aunt Zillah?  But they’ve _learned_!
All this last week they’ve studied like mad trying to get as much as they
could before school closed.  Even that queer, cross Mr. McIntosh has
worked as if his life depended on it.”

“His young shote depended on it, you remember,” laughed Carin.  “Mr.
Rowantree has lost his wager with him and will have to hand over the
brace of ducks.”

“So much the worse for Mary Cecily and the babies,” sighed Azalea.
“Well, they’ll have plenty this year, anyway.  The farm is really doing
well, and it will do better next year now that Jake Panther is to take it
over to work it on shares.  He has _much_ more in him than I thought at
first.  Now that he sees there’s some hope ahead for the Panthers, he’s a
changed fellow.  He’s roofed the cabin he and his grandmother live in,
and set up a doorstep, and put out a rain barrel and made all sorts of
improvements.  Even Grandma Panther herself doesn’t look quite such a
witch as she did.”

“Oh, but Paralee is the prize,” said Carin.  “Since the great news came
from Asheville that her father would soon be as strong and active as ever
he was, and since dear Aunt Zillah fitted her out in decent clothes, and
Jake got his regular job, she walks and looks like one who has just
discovered what it is to be alive.”

“I hope it will all come right about her going to the Industrial School
at Hardinge.  You wrote to your father and mother about it, Carin, didn’t
you?”

“Of course I did, Zalie.  That’s the third time you’ve asked me that
question.  I’m just as sure father will send her away to school as I am
that he’ll open up the moonlight school and put Mr. Rowantree at the head
of it.  Oh, I do wish those dear people of mine would come!  There’s so
much I want to show them and tell them about.  We must take them over to
Rowantree Hall the very first thing.”

“There’s a large package waiting for me at Bee Tree,” said Miss Zillah.
“Little Dibblee Sikes stopped in to tell me.  It must be my mantel
ornaments.  I want to see them on Mis’ Cassie’s spare room shelf before
we go.”

“Come, Carin we must be off,” cried Azalea, snatching her parasol from
its hook.  “Good-bye, Aunt Zillah.  Only two more little days—little
days—little days.”

“Silly one!” cried Carin, gathering up her parasol also and trailing
after her.  “Why is your heart so thistledownish?”

“How do I know?  How do I know?” answered Azalea, still lilting.  “Except
because I like my little days.”

It had come to that, simply.  She liked her little days of hard work.
She had broken the back of rebellion that memorable day when Keefe rode
away to his great happiness with his sister, and she had been left,
bereft of these two “charmers of the world” as she called them, to do her
hard stint of work.  In a way, Carin followed where she led.  If Azalea’s
enthusiasm for the teaching had faltered, Carin’s would have faltered
too.  But Azalea’s devotion to her work had steadily increased since she
had fought her fight with envy and selfishness.  She had been able to
summon to her aid the hidden powers of her will, and these had sustained
her even through these last hot, nerve-wearying days of her teaching.
Now she felt herself to be the victor over that indolent, brooding,
indulgent self which had more than once in her life tried to get the
upper hand.

Not a pupil in the school but had made headway.  Some of them had done
extraordinarily well.  Dibblee Sikes had cried whenever the last day of
school was mentioned; but he cheered up when Azalea assured him that
there should be a “moonlight school” for his mother.

“Maybe,” said Azalea, “it can be arranged so that there will be a day
school all winter long for you youngsters.”

“But you’ll not be here, ma’am,” said Dibblee.  “No one can learn us like
you and Miss Carin.  There’s been teachers here that just yelled at us
and we got so skeered we couldn’t learn nothin’.  All the fun we had was
running away from school.”

“You shan’t have that kind of a teacher, I promise,” Azalea assured him.
“Oh, Dibblee, if only I knew enough I’d stay right here and teach you all
the time; but, you see, I have to go to school myself for a long time
yet.  As I am now, I should soon run out of learning and you would get
ahead of me.”  She laughed gayly and Dibblee laughed with her.  There was
much laughter about the schoolhouse these days, and it was no longer
because some one had blundered or met with an accident.  They laughed now
because they were happy, because their shyness had ceased to be a torment
to them, and because they felt that they were more like other
children—not strange, not some one who needed a “missionary” to help them
on.  Of all the services that Azalea and Carin had been able to perform
for them, the bestowing upon them of self-esteem was the greatest.  Just
how this result had been attained it would be hard to say.  Perhaps it
was the gentleness, the unfailing politeness of their young teachers and
their way of seeming as “kin” to these shy, wild, suspicious young
creatures, that had done it.

“It’s like teaching squirrels to eat from the hand,” Azalea had said more
than once to Carin.

Little had been seen of the Rowantrees and nothing of Keefe since the day
Keefe went to his sister’s home, but they were all, even the children,
coming to school for the “last day.”  The parents of the pupils were
coming too, not only that they might, like parents the world over, swell
with pride over the accomplishments of their offspring, but also because
word had been sent broadcast that the moonlight school would be under
discussion.

There were few flowers left on the mountain side by this time, but the
prettiest imaginable decorations had been contrived with spurge and
galax, rhododendron leaves and vines.  The place was really a bower, and
the children were clean and fresh for the occasion.  Indeed, it may well
be doubted if certain of them had ever been so freshened and decorated as
on this day.  Their young teachers had led them to believe that they were
to expect high festival, and they themselves were in the most charming of
their white frocks, with the little strings of gold beads which Mrs.
Carson had given them at Christmas.

The event held one throbbing secret.  It was a cold secret, although it
arose from a warm impulse.  By the greatest perseverance, Aunt Zillah had
managed to get a wagonload of ice and a number of ice cream freezers up
from Lee, and now, with the eager aid of the McEvoys, delicious ice
cream, made after Miss Zillah’s own receipt, smooth as satin and tempting
as nectar, filled the great freezers which bulked mysteriously beneath
their gunny sack wrappings in the shade of the schoolhouse.  Moreover, in
the little cupboard where Azalea and Carin kept their stores, were six of
the most noble, decorative and triumphant cakes which Miss Zillah ever
had concocted.

“I don’t know much about educating the young,” she told the girls and
Mis’ Cassie, “but when it comes to feeding them, I understand the matter
perfectly.  Anyone who has reared a girl like Annie Laurie is bound to
know something about that.”  She sighed a little, for the day held one
drawback.  She did long to have her niece share in the pleasures of this
closing time and to have her see what had been accomplished, and she had
written begging Annie Laurie to come, but the girl had replied vaguely.
Business at the dairy was very brisk.  She was working early and late to
get her hand in completely before her valuable assistant, Sam Disbrow,
left for Rutherford Academy.

“It will be a month yet before he goes,” Aunt Zillah had said almost
petulantly.  “I should have thought Annie Laurie might have spared us one
day.”

Mr. and Mrs. Carson were already at Lee, having run down to open up the
house.

“There seems to be no end of things to do,” Mr. Carson wrote his
daughter.  “Do you really think you need us up there, kitten?  What
difference will a few hours make?  Have McEvoy pack up your possessions,
and hasten to us.”

“He doesn’t mean a word of it,” Carin declared.  “He and mother are
simply dying to get up here and see what we’ve done.  Whenever papa
sounds dull and prosy like that I know he’s planning something
delightful.  It isn’t normal for him to be stupid.  He’s up to something,
you’ll see.”

But as the “last day,” hot, with gay clouds, came, and the pupils
appeared an hour too early, and the Rowantree’s old surrey swung from the
thick shade of the old wood road, all indicating that the hour was at
hand, Carin began to have her doubts.  For once in the history of the
world, her parents were going to be stupid and sensible and economical!
They were going to act like other people!  She was horribly disappointed
in them, and kept very busy so as not to be alone with Azalea and let her
see how disappointed she was.

There really was a great deal to do, for the parents of the pupils
required much polite consideration.  School did not call that morning
until half after ten o’clock.  The time preceding that was spent in
talking about the moonlight school.  There seemed to be a general desire
for it, although some of the neighbors were exceedingly shy about
expressing their desires.

“I’m ready to teach it,” Mr. Rowantree declared.  “And I’ll do it for the
smallest sum possible.”

The mountain folk may or may not have approved of Mr. Rowantree, but
there was none who doubted his ability to teach them anything they might
wish to know.  Indeed, they always had held a great opinion of his
bookishness; and now they seemed to find him more likable than they had
imagined possible.  His fine and gracious manners never relaxed, no
matter with whom he talked, and where they had once been offended and
annoyed by this display of elegance, it now seemed different to them,
since the young teachers, who evidently approved of him, had themselves
such pretty, fine ways, and yet were so simple and friendly.

The truth was, the folk of Sunset Gap were beginning to take a new view
of various matters.  For almost the first time in their existence they
had been brought into close contact with people from the outer world, and
their fears and prejudices had, in the light of their summer’s
experience, been dying a rapid and painless death.

The morning hours were given up to a hasty review of the work done, that
the parents might see something of what their children had been learning.
The young teachers secretly hoped that their audience would be so pleased
that they would take measures to establish a school of their own
volition.

Now Azalea and now Carin, flushed, eager and slightly tremulous, led on
their classes through the review of reading, spelling, geography, history
and arithmetic, while crowded about the windows and the platform sat the
parents, their tanned faces smiling and interested.  Miss Zillah in her
lavender lawn, her curls fresh as flowers, beamed upon them from the
platform.  Little Mary Cecily Rowantree and her brood was at the rear,
where her young ones could ease their feelings by turning somersaults in
the school doorway or by chasing an alarmed bunny.

Mr. Rowantree moved about from place to place, lending an academic aspect
to the scene.  Seated on the low, broad window sill, gay and lithe as a
faun, was Keefe, with whom Azalea and Carin had been able to exchange
little more than a nod.  He still showed the effects of his illness, his
eyes looked unnaturally large and his mouth was strangely sensitive; but
he was more charming than ever.  He had a sketching pad and pencil with
him, and in the most engaging manner he sketched the heads of those in
the room.  He seemed very far away to Azalea—very much a creature of some
brighter, lighter world than that in which she dwelt.  She felt in her
heart that he was going on to things of which she would know nothing—to a
successful life in some great city.  He would know artists and the most
interesting sort of folks.  He would live in strange, delightful places;
he would travel.  She and Sunset Gap would be only a fading, picturesque
thought in his memory.

But all that foolish fretting and fuming, she told herself severely, was
over and done with.  She was Azalea McBirney, with her chosen work to do.
Things were as they were; not dreams, not charming visions, but just
plain facts, plain needs, plain work.  Moreover, life was all the better
for being as it was.  If the body needed simple bread more than candies,
so the spirit needed the plain bread of life more than delicacies.

So she bent brain, spirit, eyes, hands, lips to the labor of the day.
She determined to draw from each of her pupils a quick and eager
response.  She threw herself into the hour’s performance, and had the
profound satisfaction of feeling those minds which a few weeks before had
been so aloof, so chilled, so closed, open to her influence as flowers
open to the sun.

From time to time more neighbors came and clustered about the windows
without, leaning on the sills and listening to the program.  Neither
Azalea nor Carin paid much attention to these soft comings and goings,
these quiet unobtrusive movements of the people without there in the heat
of the changing day.  There was some fear of rain; Azalea heard the
people whispering about it; she herself noted how the light in the room
changed from bright sunlight to soft shadow.  She hoped, of course, that
the rain would hold off; and yet she couldn’t help thinking how charming
Keefe would look there on the window ledge, with the silver rain falling
between him and the trees; and she remembered that first wonderful day at
the Rowantrees, when they all had eaten on the gallery with the rain
making a silver curtain between them and the rest of the world.

It was time for the nooning—the famous nooning that was to hold Aunt
Zillah’s surprise—and Azalea was just bringing the exercises to an end,
when she saw an extraordinary sight.  Carin, the proper, the correct, the
ladylike, who had been seated on the platform near an open window, was
suddenly seen to plunge through the window like the most madcap child in
the whole school.  Not a sound came from her, but with her bright hair
tumbling about her from the violence of her leap to the ground, she was
speeding down the path.  What was worse and more astonishing, Aunt
Zillah, the very mirror of what was decorous, had looked, and was now
speeding after her, only she was swung down from the window by the
sympathetic Keefe, who apparently had the key to her extraordinary
conduct.  In spite of the titter of delight that shook the school, Azalea
preserved her dignity, but out of the corner of her eye she saw Mr. and
Mrs. Carson, and Carin homing to them like a swift dove; and Annie Laurie
running with outstretched arms to meet her Aunt Zillah.

Azalea didn’t say even in her inmost heart: “And there’s nobody for me.”
She was through with that sort of “grumping” and did not mean ever to
give way to it again.  Besides, in a day or two she would be driving up
the dear familiar road with Pa McBirney, and coming upon the well-loved
clearing with the little house that was her home, and listening to Jim’s
questions, and feeling Ma McBirney’s kind eyes on her, and then she would
go creeping up to her own sweet, odd room in the loft that looked up the
mountain side, and she would be happy.  Yes, of course she would be
happy.  That was her life.  Every one had his own life.  Mary Cecily had
hers and Keefe had his, and Carin had hers—

All of this time she was talking, was neatly and cheerfully bringing the
exercises to a close, and her well-trained pupils were doing their best
to give her their attention and not to let their eyes wander down the
road to view the interesting scenes taking place there.

“Miss Pace,” said Azalea clearly, “has a luncheon prepared for you which
you are all asked to help prepare in the grove.  Everyone is
invited—everyone.  No one is to go away.”

No one had the slightest intention of going away.  What was the use of
doing that when already Paralee and Mis’ Cassie and Mis’ Sikes and others
of the neighbors who had been pressed into service, were bringing forth
platters of sandwiches and cold meat loaf and pickles and salad; and
Miles McEvoy was starting a fire among the well-blackened stones of a
rude fireplace in the schoolyard, and Mrs. McIntosh was mixing coffee in
the huge pot.

“And now,” said Azalea to herself, “it is the moment for me to go and
meet my friends.”

She walked out of the schoolroom door quite properly, meaning to remember
every step of the way that she was only the schoolteacher, and not Carin
with loving parents, nor Aunt Zillah with a devoted niece—but just at her
most dignified and self-conscious moment she was caught about the waist
by Annie Laurie’s strong arms and lifted entirely off her feet.  Yes,
right there before her pupils and all the people she had been hoping to
impress with her discretion, was swung quite clear of the ground and
hugged till she literally heard a little crack in her ribs!

“I suppose you thought I wasn’t coming up here to see how things were
going on, didn’t you, you funny little old schoolma’am?” demanded Annie
Laurie’s strong bright tones.  “Me—as inquisitive as a house cat—not to
come nosing!  That’s too ridiculous.  Well, here I am, anyway!”

Here she very much was, tall and glowing and quite grown up in her pretty
blue linen, with her wide hat with the cornflowers.  And here were Mr.
and Mrs. Carson, ready to greet Azalea as if she were almost their own.
Oh, it was good to have Mrs. Carson’s arm about her waist—good to be in
the encircling gentleness and protection of her calm love!

But there really wasn’t a moment to waste in talk.  Azalea told them
that.  Her mind swung back to its duties.

“After luncheon,” she said, “we’ll visit.”

Carin remembered her responsibilities, too; and Aunt Zillah was suddenly
in a hospitable flurry.  But there really was no call for haste.  Sunset
Gap was not used to it.  There always had been, in the experience of its
inhabitants, plenty of time for everything.  There was time to eat,
certainly.  People sat about in little groups and partook of Aunt
Zillah’s delicious repast, and they waited on each other graciously,
forgetting, it seemed, all about their shyness and their terrific pride
and their old quarrels.

But the great moment came when the generous freezers yielded up their
strange confection, and for the first time in their lives the folk at
Sunset Gap knew the taste of that odd little miracle among foods, ice
cream in August weather.  Some tasted it suspiciously; some ate it
injudiciously; some knew it for a good thing from the first second; some
doubted till they had sampled the second saucer; but all realized that
this would be an occasion to tell of; and that if the truth of the
statements were doubted, they had witnesses to prove that they had eaten
frozen food the hottest day of the year.

That afternoon came the “exercises” and like last day exercises in
schools the world over, what they involved of anguish, triumph, amusement
and disaster it would take long to relate, and the record would be of no
interest save to those who had suffered and rejoiced with the day’s
events.

They were shortened—fortunately, no doubt—by the approach of the storm
which had threatened all day.  The watchers without grew restless; the
horses stamped and tugged at their hitching, and Azalea, bringing the
session quickly and happily to an end, begged for one second’s hearing
for Mr. Carson.

“He has something very important to say to you,” she cried, her voice
reaching out above the heads of her restive audience.  “You must listen,
because it is something that may make all your future lives happier.”
She smiled at them beautifully, and they paused, half risen from their
seats to listen.

Charles Carson had but a brief word.

“The moonlight school of which you have been talking, friends, will be
opened here next month.  It will hold every night that the moon shines
the year round for the next twelve months.  Each person who enters has
the privilege of paying what he can for his instruction.  If he cannot
pay, he shall have the instruction nevertheless.  Mr. Rowantree, your
neighbor, a scholarly man and one whom many a university would be proud
to have on its list of teachers, will be your leader.  May it be for your
great good and joy!  I believe it will be, for no joy in this world is
greater than the joy of knowledge.”

“Three cheers for Mr. Carson,” cried Keefe.  “Come now!
_Whoop—whoop—hurrah_!”

The neighbors and the children gave the cheer heartily if somewhat
awkwardly, and when Keefe called “Three cheers for your teachers, Miss
Carson and Miss McBirney,” they became rather lustier; and when he came
to, “Three cheers for Miss Pace,” remembering the dainties she had
provided, they were aroused to a hoarse enthusiasm.  They wanted to be
polite; to shake hands; to say thank you; but the storm was muttering.
Azalea waved them all away laughingly.

“Why say good-bye?” she cried.  “We’ll never forget you and you’ll never
forget us, but we mustn’t stop to talk about it.  The storm’s coming.
Run—or stay.”

The thunder drowned her voice.

“Come, Azalea,” cried Keefe; “don’t stop to lock up.  Some of the people
will be wanting to stay in the schoolhouse, probably.  Here, put on my
coat and run.”

“But you mustn’t run, Keefe,” warned Azalea.  “Your heart—mustn’t you be
careful of that?”

The boy laughed lightly and held out his hand, and Azalea, taking it,
felt herself flying along through the darkening paths of the woods.

Safe in the Oriole’s Nest, the Carsons, the Rowantrees, the Paces and
Keefe and Azalea, made many plans that evening of wild summer rain.  It
had been arranged that they were all to be accommodated for the night
between the McEvoys’ and the cottage, so since none was leaving, there
was no need for haste.  Not a person there was of the sort who feels that
nightfall bids him to bed.  They did as they pleased with their day and
their night, and this night they wished to talk.  The little Rowantrees,
Gerald and the weary Constance, Moira and Michael, the twins, were nested
in the hammocks and on the couches, and in the lightning-pierced gloom,
with the storm crashing and thundering about them, the others sat long,
talking over each other’s affairs with a frankness which might not have
been easy under other circumstances.

Keefe made it known that he was going to New York, taking his summer’s
product of pictures with him, to “try himself out.”  He had something to
work for now; there was some zest to life; he wanted to make a success of
himself for the sake of Mary Cecily and the children.  Annie Laurie was
to attend to her dairy, and being now ready to take up advanced studies,
was to study the University Extension Course by herself.

“Miss Parkhurst, your governess,” said Mrs. Carson to Carin, “is not
coming back, my dear.  She is to live nearer her mother and sister and
teach school.  That means that our plans for you must be changed.  We
shall send you to the Roanoke Academy for Young Ladies.  After you have
had two years there you may take up your study of painting, if you wish
to do so, in some art school.  In the meantime, you will have art
instruction at the school.”

“But, mamma,” cried Carin, “that means—why, that means that Azalea and
Annie Laurie and I will not study together any more.  Why, it means
breaking up the Triple Alliance!”

“Never worry about changes,” said Mrs. Carson in her silvery voice.  “It
is the changes that make life interesting.  Good has always come to you,
Carin, and good will continue to come.  Annie Laurie has already chosen
what she wishes to do.  We have decided what we think best for you.
There remains only Azalea to care for.  How is it with you, Azalea?  What
do you wish to do?”

“I mean,” said Azalea, her heart trembling a little in spite of her
efforts to be calm and philosophic, “to prepare myself to take charge of
the mountain industries at Lee.  Just how I can best fit myself for this
work I do not know.  I mustn’t desert Mother McBirney, must I?  I can’t
put any expense on my dear family, but I can stay at home and learn
weaving of Mother McBirney and basket-making of dear old Haystack
Thompson, and go to Jug Town and find out how to make pottery.  I can
pick up my education, don’t you see?”

She sat tall, slight and very girlish-looking, by the table on which
rested the reading lamp.  Her vivid face, thrown into relief by the soft
glow, had, to all those present, a sweet and gracious familiarity.  They
loved her, wanted her with them, wanted her to help them make up the sum
of good things that is called “home.”  There was not one person there who
wanted to spare her, yet here she was with her little declaration of
independence.

“Come up to New York,” whispered Keefe, fascinated, “and study at the
School of Design.”

Azalea shook her head.

“I’d like to make my own way,” she said valiantly.  “It—it would make me
happier than anything else.  I’d rather not be sent anywhere.  I’d rather
cut my own path.”

“So proud,” smiled Mr. Carson whimsically.  “Would it hurt you to accept
help from those who love you, Azalea?”

“Is it pride?” asked Azalea with a bright thoughtfulness.  “I’m sure I
don’t think it is.  I want to use my own will, Mr. Carson, to see what I
can spin out of myself.  If it should happen to be a wonderful silver web
how pleased I would be!”

“Oh, you’re so young, Azalea, dear,” mourned Miss Zillah.  “Don’t go to
taking too much risk.  Don’t be too independent.”

“No, don’t, Azalea,” pleaded Carin.  “Let papa and mamma make some plan
for you.”

“They understand me better than you do, Carin love,” said her friend.
“They know what a joy it is to make one’s own plans and carry them out.
Annie Laurie knows, too, don’t you, dear?”

Annie Laurie nodded her fine ruddy head.  She knew.  Keefe knew too, for
he was like an eagle in his love of freedom.  They all gave way before
Azalea finally.  She was no longer a little girl to be petted and given
presents to, and to be consoled for her orphanage by the hospitality they
could offer.  She was a young woman, poor, united to humble people,
gifted with a strange, fine talent—a talent for living and for making
things seem rich and wonderful—and it was their business to let her have
her way.  She had grown up during the summer.  She realized it herself,
and knew as the rest of them could not, what the influences had been
which had brought that transformation to pass.  Henceforth, she would
have her own way to make, her own sorrows to endure, her own peculiar
joys to seek.  Until now one hand after another had guided her; she had
clung to skirts, so to speak.  But she had grown past that; she must walk
alone.

She looked about her at the rude but charming room, and at the faces of
her kind and dear friends.  She seemed to see herself, too, as she sat
there, a girl with a curious past and a strange present.  As for her
future!  She shrugged her shoulders gayly—as her poor little dead mother
sometimes had done—and spread out her hands with a wide gesture.

“It’s to be Azalea for herself,” she said with a brave little laugh.
“Wish her luck!”