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.”

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.”