AT SUNRISE the following morning, a man riding a lean bay horse came down the mountain road toward the mill. His left hand was deformed, as though from infancy. The fingers doubled in against the wrist. He held the bridle rein, tied in a knot, over the crook of his arm. He was a big man and he sat in the saddle as though more accustomed to that seat than to any other. The horse traveled in a running walk. He turned into the little valley and approached the mill. The miller was feeding her chickens in the road before the door, throwing out handfuls of yellow corn. The man called to her before the horse stopped.
“Have you got enough of that corn for a horse-feed, Sally?”
The woman turned, scattering the chickens.
“Bless my life,” she said, “it's the doctor. Where you been?”
“Up there,” he replied, jerking his deformed arm toward the summit of the mountain where lay the bit of farm, marked by the gigantic trees.
“Is ole Nicholas sick?” said the woman. “He ain't sick now,” replied the doctor. “You cured h'm, did you?”
“No, I didn't cure him,” said the doctor, getting down from his horse; “they were dyin' in Hickory Mountain before I come into it, an' they'll keep on a-dyin' after I've gone out.”
He lifted his leather saddlebags down from the horse and carried it across to the mill porch.
The woman remained standing in the road, her closed hand full of corn, the yellow grains showing between her fingers.
“You arn't tellin' me ole Nicholas is dead!”
“Yes, he's dead,” said the doctor. “New get me a gallon of corn; that horse ain't had a bite to eat since yesterday evening.”
He went across the road, picked up a box, knocked the dust out of it and brought it over by the mill porch. Then he took the bit out of the horse's mouth, and put the bridle rein over the saddle, under the stirrup leather.
“Ole Nicholas dead!” the woman repeated. “Well! Upon my word!”
“Why shouldn't he be dead?” said the doctor. “Every damn thing's got to die.”
“What killed him?” inquired the woman.
“I don't know what killed him,” replied the doctor. “He was stretched out on the floor when I got there.”
“Did he die just like anybody else?” said the woman.
“No,” answered the doctor, “he didn't die like anybody that I ever saw. Will you get me that corn?”
The woman went into the mill and presently came out with the toll measure full of corn. She poured it into the box. Then she sat down on the porch beside the doctor, and began to roll the end of her apron between her fat fingers.
“When did ole Nicholas take down?” she began.
“I don't know that,” said the doctor. “Jonas Black was crossing the mountain about noon, an' old Nicholas called to him and told him to tell me to come and see him. I went up last night.”
“It's a wonder you went,” said the miller. “Ole Nicholas wouldn't pay you, would he?”
“If he didn't pay me, I wouldn't go,” replied the doctor, “you can depend on that. I've quit bringin' 'em in or seein' 'em out unless I get the cash in my hand.”
“I didn't think he had any money. He was always buyin' wild lands of the State.”
“I don't know how much money he had,” replied the doctor, “but I do know that it was always there on the table for me when I went. If it hadn't a-been, I wouldn't have darkened his door.”
“Did he die hard?” said the woman. “Everybody dies hard,” replied the doctor.
“Did he want to go?”
“None of us want to go.”
“How long did he live after you got there?”
“He lived until daylight.”
“You must have had a bad night of it.”
“It was awful!”
“It must a-been terrible if you thought so. You are used to seein' people die.”
“I'm not used to seein' them die like old Nicholas died,” replied the doctor. “He must a-been in powerful pain.”
“It wasn't so much pain. I could stop the pain.”
“Was he out of his head then?”
“I don't know.”
“Couldn't you tell by the way he talked?”
“He didn't talk.”
“Did he see things?”
“I don't know what he saw.”
“What was it that made his dyin' so awful?”
“It wasfear,” replied the doctor,
“That he'd be lost?”
“No,” said the doctor, “that he'd die before he could tell me something that he was tryin' to tell me.”
“Goodness! Was he tryin' to tell you somethin' all night?”
“All night,” said the doctor.
The woman sat for a moment in silence, her fat hands clasped together in her lap, the muscles of her face tense, her eyes fixed on the mountain, then she spoke. “Did he ever tell you?”
“Yes.”
“Was it somethin' he'd done?”
“N,” replied the doctor, “it was not anything he'd done.”
“What was it?”
“I did not understand it,” replied the doctor.
The woman rose.
“Good Lord!” she said, “a man on his deathbed a-trying all night to tell you somethin' an' then you didn't understand it!”
“No, I didn't understand it,” said the doctor. “He kept whisperin'—'He's comin,' he's comin'. He's to have my things,' an' I kept askin' him if he meant some of his kin folks, but he always shook his head. I never saw a man in such mortal agony to speak. Finally just before he died, he got it out. He said, 'The Teacher.' Now, what did he mean?”
“I know who he meant,” replied the woman, “he meant the School-teacher.”
“What School-teacher?”
“Why, the new School-teacher, the one that come last night. He was goin' to stay with Nicholas.”
The horse had now finished with his breakfast, the doctor got up.
“I didn't know you had a Schoolteacher,” he said.
He went over to the horse, put the bit into its mouth, took up his leather saddle-hags and thrust his foot into the stirrup.
“See here, Sally,” he said, “old Nicholas wanted me to get up at his funeral and say that he had left everything to the 'Teacher.' I suppose he meant this new School-teacher. I told him I'd see to it. Now, I don't want to come back here; couldn't you do it? The country will likely gather up and bury him this afternoon.”
He swung up into the saddle and hooked the bridle rein over his crooked arm.
“Yes, I'll do that,” said the woman. The doctor clucked to his horse, and disappeared down the little valley; his arm rising and falling with the regular motion of the swinging walk.
The woman remained standing in the road, her hands spread out on her hips. She had suddenly remembered that the guest of last night had said that Nicholas Parks was going away!
At noon the miller and her little girl set out up the mountain.
They did not go by the road that wound tortuously through the forest to the summit. They followed a path that ascended more directly, crossing the road now and then, and climbing up steep ascents to the top, where it ended in the road running along the high ridge, through the little mountain farm.
The farm was inclosed on either side by a rail fence. Below it was a cornfield of several acres, above a bit of fertile meadow, in which, on the very ridge, stood two gigantic trees lifting their branches eighty feet into the sky.
A dozen paces of beautiful green turf lying between the great shellbarks.
Farther out stood a log house with a clapboard roof and a chimney built halfway up with stone and finished with crossed sticks, daubed with yellow clay. Behind it was a garden inclosed with palings split out of long cuts of hickory timber. Midway between the garden and the house, opposite the door, was a whitewashed well curb. From a long pole, suspended in a forked tree on a round locust pin, hung a sapling fastened to a bucket. Everything about the little farm was well kept. The chimney and the palings were whitewashed, the fence was well laid up, the bit of land was clean. Midway in the meadow, a path entered through wooden bars and ran along inside the rail fence to the house.
There was a little crowd of some half dozen men standing about these bars, when the woman and child came up.
The woman stopped in the road.
“What are you all standin' around for?” she said.
The men did not immediately reply. Finally one of them answered.
“We're waitin' for the preacher to come.”
The woman looked at the apparently vacant house. The door open. The sun lying on the threshold.
“There's a-plenty to do, till he gits here,” she said. “Somebody's got to dig a grave, an' somebody's got to make a coffin.”
The man leaning against the bar post, who had spoken for the others, now jerked his head toward the meadow'.
“It's dug,” he said.
The woman looked in the direction he indicated; a pile of fresh earth lay heaped up in the meadow', not between the two trees, but below' them, some paces from the summit.
“Well,” said the woman, “you didn't pick out the place I'd a picked; I'd a put it on the ridge between them two trees, that's the natural place for it, there couldn't be no grander place. Who did you think you was savin' that place for? It looks like you was puttin' ole Nicholas so he'd be at the foot of somebody else that you was a-goin' to bury.”
“We didn't pick the place,” said the man.
“Who done it?”
“We don't know who done it, the grave was dug when we got here.”
The conversation was interrupted by the little girl.
“There comes the preacher,” she said.
The woman turned and looked down the road in the direction from which she had just come.
AMAN driving a country buggy was approaching. He was a tall, spare man, in a suit of black ready-made clothes that seemed not to fit him in any place, and to be a cheap imitation of a clergyman's frock suit. He wore cotton gloves. At his feet was a shiny handbag made of some inexpensive material to imitate alligator skin. His hair and his heavy, drooping mustache were black. His face was narrow, the cheek bones high, the mouth straight. One of the man's eyes was partly grown over with a cataract, and his effort to see equally with that eye gave him a curious, squinting expression. He pulled up on the roadside, got out, tied his horse to a fence rail with one of the lines, took out his handbag, and came over to the little group waiting by the bars.
“Good evening, brethren,” he said. “The doctor told me that Nicholas Parks had been called to his account, so I came up to give him Christian burial.”
“He died sudden, I guess,” replied one of the men.
“It's God's way,” said the preacher. “The sinner is taken in the twinkling of an eye.”
He drew off his cotton gloves and put them into his pocket.
“Have any preparations been made for the burial?” he inquired.
“The grave's dug,” said one of the men.
“How about the coffin?”
“We don't know about the coffin, we haven't been to the house.”
“Is any one up at the house?”
“We think the new School-teacher's up there. Little David went up to see, but he ain't come back.”
“I didn't know the new School-teacher had come.”
“He got here last night,” said the miller.
“What kind of a man is he?”
“He's a man that the children will like,” replied the woman.
“Children,” said the preacher, “are not competent judges of men. Let us go up to the house. Is he elderly?”
“I thought he was mighty young,” said the woman.
“The young,” replied the preacher, “are rarely impressed with the awful solemnity of God's commandments.”
“I think he's a good man,” said the woman. “Martha loved him right away, an' I'd trust him with anything I've got.”
“Our Mother Eve trusted the serpent,” replied the preacher.
And he extended his right arm, the fingers stiffly together, the thumb up.
“The youth of the community ought to be brought up in the fear of God.”
During the conversation, the miller's little daughter had gone on to the house.
Something vague, intangible, undefined had stopped the men in the road below the house, and made them await the arrival of the preacher. But that thing had not affected the children. The little boy David and this child had gone on without the least hesitation.
The preacher threw down one of the pole bars and went through into the meadow. The others followed him along the path to the house. As they drew near they heard the voices of the children. At the threshold the preacher stopped, and those behind him crowded up to look into the house.
The door was open. The sun entering, filled the room with light.
On chairs in the middle of this room stood a coffin made of the odds and ends of rough hoards, but marvelously joined. Beside it stood the School-teacher, and at either end was one of the children; the three of them were fitting a board on the coffin for a and, and they were talking together.
When the minister entered, the Schoolteacher removed the board and laid it down on the floor, and the two children, as by some instinct, drew near to the man, on either side, and took hold of his hands.
They became instantly silent.
The minister went up to the chair, looked a moment into the coffin and took his place at the head of it. The others followed.
The dead man lay in the rough box like one asleep. There was in his face a peace so profound that the hard, mean, ugly features of this old man seemed to have been remodeled under some marvelous fingers.
The minister, with his bad eye, seemed not to observe this transfiguration, but the others marked it and crowded around the coffin.
The minister took out his watch, looked at it, and snapped the case.
“If you will find seats, we'll begin the service,” he said. “The stranger here seems to have made all necessary preparations for the burial.”
The crowd drew back from the coffin, the School-teacher went and sat in the doorway in the sun; the little boy standing up by his knees, the little girl beside him on the doorstep.
The minister began a discourse on the horrors of an eternal hell.
But the attention of the audience moved past him to the man seated in the door. The harmony, grouping the man and these two children, seemed to enter and fill the room. A certain common sympathy uniting them, as though it were the purity of childhood.
The man sitting in the door did not move.
He looked out toward the south over a sea of sun washing a shore of tree tops. A vagrant breath of the afternoon moved his brown hair. He seemed not to hear the minister, not to regard the service, but to wait like one infinitely patient with the order of events.
When the preacher had finished, the miller, sitting in a chair by the window, rose.
“Just before ole Nicholas died,” she said, “he made the doctor promise to git up here at his funeral an' tell everybody that he left all his things to the Schoolteacher. The doctor couldn't come back, so he asked me to git up an' tell it for him.”
The minister turned toward the woman.
“Left his property to this stranger?”
“Yes,” said the woman, “he tried all night to tell the doctor, an' he was mortally afeard that he would die before he could tell it.”
The School-teacher was now standing in the door. Beside him, and framing in his body, dust danced in the sun, making a haze of gold.
The minister addressed him.
“Why did Nicholas Parks leave his possessions to you?”
The School-teacher did not reply.
He went over to the coffin, lifted the lid and began to fit it on the box. The men standing around the room came forward and took the coffin up. They carried it out of the house, their hands under the bottom of it. The preacher picked up his satchel and followed. Outside he stopped, pointed to the grave in the meadow, and spoke to the School-teacher.
“You didn't put that grave where old Nicholas wanted it. He wanted to be buried on the top of the ridge between those two trees. It was a place he had picked out. He told me so at the last quarterly meeting.”
The School-teacher lifted his face and looked at the two great hickories marking the spot on the summit of the little meadow. His eyes filled with melancholy shadows, the smile deepened and saddened about his mouth. But he did not reply.
Then he walked away to where the two children stood, some distance from the path.
The minister followed the coffin to the grave, but the School-teacher went with the two children through the meadow to the spot of green between the two hickories. He sat down there in the deep clover, the children beside him. Below came the sound of the earth on the coffin, and the high-pitched nervous voice of the minister. The School-teacher talked with the children.
After a while a shadow fell across the grass.
The minister was standing beside them. He had come up from the filled grave and the carpet of the meadow had hidden the sound of his approach. He spoke to the School-teacher.
“Do you think that you are old enough to teach the children the fear of God?”
“I shall not teach them the fear of God.”
“Then I don't see how you are going to give them any Christian instruction.”
The man sitting among the deep clover blossoms, looked up at the minister's face.
“Isn't there something growing over your eye?” he said.
THE School-teacher came out of the door of Nicholas Parks' house. It was early in the morning. Frost glistened on the rails of the worm fence. The air was crisp and sweet.
There was a smell of faint wood smoke.
The door of the house was fastened with a wooden latch on the inside from which a black leather string, tied in a knot, issuing from a worn hole, hung on the outside of the door. The man drew the door close and, pulling the string, dropped the latch into place. Then he left the house, walking slowly.
In the direction that he moved there was no path. He crossed the little meadow, south of the house, climbed the rail fence and entered the forest. There was still no path, although the man moved like one who followed land marks that he knew.
He descended through the forest for perhaps half a mile in the deep leaves.
Then he came abruptly on a path that entered a little cove and continued around a shoulder of the mountain. A spring of water issuing here from a limestone strata trickled into a keg buried in the earth. On the broken branch of a dogwood sapling, beside the spring, hung a mottled gourd.
The School-teacher stopped, dipped the gourd into the crystal water, and drank.
At this moment three figures came into view along the path from the opposite direction: a child about two years old, a woman, and a rough-haired yellow dog.
The child came first. He walked with the uncertain tottering gait of very little children. He wore a clean, white, muslin dress, a tiny apron and cheap baby shoes, such as one sees hanging on a string over the counter of mountain stores. He was a sturdy little boy, with soft yellow hair, burnished at the tips like that of the School-teacher, and big gray-blue eyes. He was laughing, stopping now and then to look back at the dog following, and his mother; and then running along ahead.
The woman was young and slender. Her face, tanned by the weather, was a deep olive. Her hair was black, lustrous and heavy, and hung down her back in a thick plait. Her eyes were dark and big. The whole aspect of the woman was that of one untimely matured, and permanently saddened. Her blue dress was of a cheaper material than that of the child's.
She carried a tin bucket with a wooden handle.
The woman and the dog stopped when they saw the School-teacher standing by the spring. But the child greeted the stranger in his baby dialect.
“How-da-do man,” he said. He went on, the little feet tottering over the uneven path. When he reached the Schoolteacher, he spoke again.
“Up-a-go,” he said.
The man stooped and lifted the child into his arms. The sunny smile that lighted the baby face seemed to enter and illumine his own. Something of it, too, moved into the face of the woman, but the cast there of perpetual melancholy seemed loath to depart, as though the muscles were unaccustomed to a change.
The child turned about in the man's arms, and pointed his finger toward two catbirds that were fluttering in a neighboring bush.
“Giggles,” he said.
The manner in which the woman's big melancholy eyes followed every motion of the little boy indicated how her heart enveloped him. He was evidently her one treasure. The smile, struggling to possess the woman's face, seemed to descend and sweeten her mouth.
“He means them birds,” she said. “He's got a kind a talk of his own.”
“I understand him perfectly,” said the man.
“Do you?” said the woman, the smile gaining in her face. “I thought nobody could understand him but me. You must take to little children.”
“I love little children,” replied the School-teacher.
The child put his hand into the pocket of his apron and drew out a battered toy—a cheap, little, painted, wooden toy, so broken and worn that no one could tell what animal it was originally intended to represent. He held it up for the Schoolteacher's admiration.
“Gup,” he said.
“He means a horse,” the woman explained. “He's heard folks down to the mill say 'git up' to horses they was ridin', an' he thinks that's the name of it, but he's got names of his own. Now he calls a bird an' a fish an' a mouse a 'giggle.' I don't know why. Because a bird ain't like a fish, an' neither one of them ain't like a mouse.”
“I believe I understand why he gives them all the same name,” replied the School-teacher.
The woman came closer to the man and the child. Her eyes took on an expression of deep inquiry.
“What do you reckon is the reason? I've thought about it often.”
“I think it's because a bird, a fish and a mouse all appear to him to have the same motion, to wiggle.”
The woman's face cleared. “I never thought of that. I reckon that is it. But now, he's got names that ain't like the things at all. Because he calls milk 'bugala' and there ain't no such word as 'bugala.' An' if it's sour or anything he calls it 'nim bugala.'”
The woman recalled with the word, the morning when, to wean him, she had blackened her breast with charcoal, and the child had pushed away the blackened breast with his little hand and said, “nim bugala.”
“And he calls everything else to eat 'A B.' Now why would he call milk 'bugala' an' bread an' butter 'A B'?”
The School-teacher saw that this mystery attaching to the child was dear to the woman, and he could not disturb it.
“Little children are very wonderful,” he said.
“They are wonderful,” the woman continued. “Just think of the things they learn when they are real little.”
She jerked her head toward the dog remaining behind her in the road.
“Why, he learned Jim's name when he was awful little. He called him 'Nim' an' that's purty near right.”
Her face again became deeply thoughtful.
“I'd like to know if his word 'nim,' like he says 'nun bugala,' has anything to do with Jim's name. It sounds like it, but I don't see how it could be, because 'nim' means something that he don't like, an' he does like Jim. He's powerful fond of Jim.”
The School-teacher thoughtfully considered the problem.
“It might be that he has watched you give Jim the things that you did not want to eat yourself, and so he came to the conclusion that all such food belonged to Jim. It would not mean that he did not like Jim. It would only mean that the things that did not taste right to him ought to be given to Jim. They were not good things, they were 'nim' things.”
The woman's mouth opened.
“Dear me,” she said, “just think of him putting things together like that, an' him so little?”
Then she looked up at the man with a sort of wonder.
“Why, you understand him better than I do, an' I'm his mother. Maybe you're married an' got a little boy of your own.”
“I was never married,” replied the man.
“Then maybe you've got a little baby brother.”
“No.”
“Was there never any little children at your house?”
“My father's house,” replied the School-teacher, “is full of little children.”
“Just little children that he takes care of?”
“Yes.”
“Then you've been with 'em a lot.”
“I am always with them,” replied the School-teacher.
“I could a-told that,” said the woman, “by the way Sonny takes to you. I could a-told that you was used to little children, an' that you liked them.” She indicated the tiny boy with a bob of the head. “He knows it right away; babies and dogs allers knows it right away.”
She regarded the man for some minutes in silence. Then she spoke like one come after thought to a conclusion.
“I 'spose you're the new School-teacher?”
“Yes.”
“An' you're goin' down to the school-house now.”
“Yes.”
“Then if you'll wait till I git a bucket of water, I'll show you the way down. The path goes out by our house.”
She went over to the spring and dipped the bucket into the keg. The dog that had been lying down 'n the path, his head lowered between his paws, now craw led up to the man and began to lick his feet.
The little boy looked down and shook his tiny fist at the dog.
“Ge-out, Nim!” he said.
The woman rose with the bucket of water.
“You don't have to carry him,” she said, “he can walk real well.”
“I would rather carry him,” replied the School-teacher.
And he followed the woman along the path, the dog at his heels.
They turned the shoulder of the ridge and came out on a flat bench of the mountain. Here stood a little cabin, built of logs and daubed with clay. It was roofed with rough clapboards. Before it was a porch roofed like the cabin. The door, swinging on wooden hinges, stood open. On the puncheon floor was a piece of handmade carpet—a circular mat, hand-plaited out of rags, a primitive cradle with wooden rockers, a bed covered with a pieced quilt, a rough stone fireplace, an iron pot with a lid and a black iron kettle. On the porch stood a split-basket full of beans in the hull, and beside the basket two chairs, the seats of plaited hickory bark. One of them was very small, a chair in miniature, made for the little boy. Near the path was an ax, a hacked log and some lighter limbs of trees, such as a woman might carry in from the forest. Beside the chimney was a primitive hopper made of clapboards, holding wood-ashes, and under this was a broken iron pot in which lye, obtained from the ashes by pouring water on it, dripped.
Beyond the cabin was a bit of garden and a little cornfield, where the ripened corn stood in yellow shocks bound with grapevines. The shocks were small, such as a woman could reach around. About, on the bench, were a grove of sugar trees, scarred with the marks of an auger, and among them, here and there, a great hickory. Beyond the grove one heard the faint tinkling of a bell where a cow moved in the forest.
The woman set the bucket of water on the porch and turned to take the child.
“Come, sonny.”
The little boy drew back in the man's arms.
“No,” he said.
“But, sonny,” the woman continued, “the Teacher's goin' away down the road.”
“Baby go wif him down woad.”
The woman coaxed, “Won't sonny stay with Jim and mother?”
“Nim an' muvver go woad.”
“No,” said the woman, “Jim an' mother ain't goin' down the road. Will sonny go an' leave Jim an' mother?”
The little boy looked over the man's shoulder at the rough-haired yellow dog. Jim was his housemate and his brother. A decision was a sore trial, but he finally made it. He turned about in the man's arms.
“Baby go woad,” he said.
The man now entered the conversation. “Let him go with me.”
“But he's too little to go to school.”
“He is not too little to go with me.”
“But he'll bother you, won't he?”
“No, he will not bother me. He will help me.”
“He can't help you.”
“Yes, he can help me.”
“I don't see how he can help you.”
“He will remind me of the little children in my father's house.”
“Keep you from gettin' homesick?”
“Yes,” replied the School-teacher, “that is it. He will keep me from getting homesick.”
“Well,” said the woman, “if I let him go, you'll take care of him, won't you?”
“I will surely take care of him.”
“An' you'll bring him back before sundown.”
“Yes.”
“Well, it'll be powerful lonesome, but I reckon I can finish gatherin' the beans. I will fix him somethin' to eat. You can put it in your pocket.”
The woman went into the house, got a flat bottle, such as a cheap sort of liniment is sold in at the mountain stores, scalded it out with water and filled it with fresh milk. Then she cut some thin slices of a white bread called “salt rising” and spread it with butter. She stopped with the knife in her hand, considered a moment, and then cut two larger pieces of bread, buttered them, and wrapped them all in a piece of homespun linen towel. She went out to the man with the folded towel and the bottle in her hand.
“Here's his milk an' here's his bread. I put in two pieces for you.”
The man put the bottle and the bread into his pocket. The light of his great gray-blue eyes deepened.
“You also thought of me,” he said.
“I didn't see you carryin' any dinner.” replied the woman, “an' the bread's nice. I had powerful good luck yesterday. I don't allers have such luck, but everything turned out right with the bakin' somehow.”
The men went on with the little boy in his arms, but the dog remained. He sat miserably in the path, his tail moving in the leaves, his eyes fixed on the woman's face. For a time the woman, watching the disappearing figures, did not notice the dog. Then she saw him, knew his distress and spoke.
“You can go along, Jim,” she said.
The dog ran barking after the man and little boy. He overtook them and went on ahead. At the point where the path entered the forest, the man turned and looked back at the woman. She did not move, but the smile, struggling all the morning to conquer her face, finally possessed it.
The School-teacher, the little boy and the dog continued to descend the mountain. The child addressed every object with which he was familiar. When they passed the brindle cow, cropping broom sedge beside the path, he hailed it with a salutation..
“How-da-do, boo,” he sard.
Leaves, burning red with autumn color, he explained, were “dowers.”
Finally they came to the river, running shallow between the foot of the mountain and the farther bench on which the school-house stood. The child had not crossed this water, and he was afraid for the man to attempt it. He put his little hand firmly on the man's arm to stop him.
The School-teacher stopped, and the child considered this new and unaccustomed peril. He sat studying the water, his restraining hand on the man's arm. Finally, the dog, growing impatient at the delay, entered the river and began to wade across. The child removed his hand. His fears were ended. The crossing was safe. He directed the man's attention to the proof of it.
“Nim walk in wat,” he said.
IN THE grove before the log schoolhouse, the Teacher was playing a game with the children. It was a game in which every child to the tiniest one could join. Two, standing opposite, with raised arms and the fingers linked, formed a sore of arch, through which the others passed in a circle, holding one another's hands. They all sang as they marched some verses of a mountain song, ending with the line, “An' catch the one that you love best.”
When the song came to this line, those forming the arch brought their arms down over the head of the child passing at that moment, and he left the circle and took the place of one of those forming the arch. As each child wished to catch the School-teacher, the man remained standing while the children changed.
The little boy David had just been caught. The child, standing with the School-teacher, had taken his place. The circle had begun once more to move, the song to rise, when the miller's daughter, Martha, stopped, disengaged her hand from the child before her and pointed to the road.
“There comes Sol an' Suse. I wonder what's the matter, for Sol's got his arm tied up.”
The School-teacher stood up and looked over the heads of the children. A man was approaching. The sleeves of a red wammus were tied around his neck, forming a sort of rude sling in which his right arm rested, held horizontally across his breast. A woman, carrying a baby, was walking beside him.
The School-teacher spoke to the little girl.
“Martha,” he said, “you and David take the children into the schoolhouse, I am going out to meet these people.”
When the children had gone in, and the door was closed, the man went down into the road. He waited there until the two persons approached. He saw that both the woman and the man were young, the baby but a few months old—a little family beginning to found a home in the inhospitable mountain.
The man was evidently injured. The woman was in distress. Her eyes were red. The muscles of her mouth trembled. The baby, in her arms, wrapped in an old faded shawl, wailed.
The School-teacher spoke to the woman.
“What has happened?” he said.
“My man's got hurt.”
“How was he hurt?”
“He was choppin' in his clearin', an' his ax ketched in a grapevine, an' throwed him. I reckon his shoulder's all broke. He can't use his arm none.”
The School-teacher addressed the man. “How does your arm feel?”
“I suppose the jint's smashed.”
The tears began to run down over the woman's face.
“I don't see why we have such luck,” she said, “an' just when we was a-gittin' sich a nice start. Now, he can't work in his clearin', an' if he don't git his clearin' done this winter, we won't have no crop, an' I don't know what'll become of us.”
The man began to chew his lip.
“Don' cry, Susie,” he said.
“Yes, I'll cry,” replied the woman, “for here's me an' the baby with nothin', and you laid up.”
“Maybe I ain't hurt so bad,” the man suggested.
The woman continued to cry.
“I know better'n that, you're hurt bad.”
“Where were you going?” said the School-teacher.
“We were a-goin' to the doctor,” replied the woman. “We thought we'd make as far as the mill, an' he could wait there, an' I could git Sally to keep the baby while I went after the doctor.”
“How far is it to the doctor?”
“It's a-goin' on fourteen mile from the mill, an' that ain't the worst of it. He won't come unless he gits the money, an' we ain't got no money to throw away on a doctor.”
She opened her hand and disclosed a crumpled, greasy note.
“That there five-dollar bill is the very last cent that we've got. An' when it's gone I don't know where we'll git any more, with him hurt, an' me with a little sucklin' baby.”
The woman began to sob.
“I'm jist ready to give up.”
The School-teacher's big gray-blue eyes filled with a kindly light.
“Don't cry,” he said, “perhaps I can do something for your husband's shoulder.”
He went over to the man. What the School-teacher did, precisely, these persons were never afterward able to describe. The event in their minds seemed clouded in mystery. A wonder had been accomplished in the road, in the sun, in the light before them, but they could not lay hold upon the sequence of the detail. The voice of the School-teacher presently reached them as from a distance.
“It's all right now,” he said.
The man doubled the arm and extended it. The woman came running up.
“Kin you use it, Sol?”
The man continued to move the arm. “It 'pears like I kin,” he said; “it 'pears like it's well.”
“Kin you use it good?”
“It 'pears like I kin use it good as I ever could.”
“Well, sir!” ejaculated the woman, “if I hadn't a seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't never a-believed it.”
The School-teacher remained standing for a moment in the road after the mountaineers had gone.
Then he went back to the children, waiting in the schoolhouse. He called them out into the grove before the door, and took his place in the game, bending over to hold the hands of the tiniest child. The circle began once more to move. The song to rise.
“An' catch the one that you love best.”