Courts can not enforce laws upon which public opinion sets its embargo.
The men of the mountains have lived isolated lives for a hundred years.
They inhabit an island of medievalism entirely surrounded by
civilization, but the civilization is no more a part of them than the
water that surrounds an island is part of the island. "Leave us alone"
has been the word of the hills to the gift-bearing Greeks of innovation.
The right of men to settle their own quarrels after the method of the
Scottish clans from whom they sprang, has been a thing which local
courts have made only perfunctory efforts to deny--and which juries of
the vicinage stubbornly refused to deny. Among their crude cabins one
still hears phrases bequeathed by word of mouth from the England of
Elizabeth and the Scotland of Mary Stuart. Immured behind their walls of
sandstone, they have lived ignorantly--and fiercely.
Their peaks are heaped against the skies, and their fields are tilled
with the hoe when mules and plows might fall down to destruction. With
nature itself they pursue a constant and desperate quarrel for
subsistence, and through generations of battle they have grown morose
and sullen and vengeful and have lost all sense of life's humor.
But slowly the tide of outside influence is creeping in upon them and at
the contact-points strangely anomalous conditions arise: the clash of
incongruous centuries; the war between a stubborn old order and an
inevitable new. In such a life there are here and there far-sighted men
who, standing like great trees among stunted brethren, look out across a
wider perspective with a surer vision.
The house of McAllister Falkins stands twenty miles from a railroad and
is, for this crude environment, a mansion. It was built in the days when
the first tide of pioneer life swept out of Virginia, and because it
was, in that remote day, nearer kin to the culture of the Old Dominion
than to the wilderness, it bore a strange blending of compromises
between luxury and the exigency of the frontier.
The head of the house of Falkins, generation after generation, had clung
to the old standards and old ideals. The children of this household had
been reared like their cousins of Virginia and the bluegrass. Other
branches of the family bearing the surname had gone to seed and lapsed
into illiteracy. There were cousins who had to sign their names with
cross-marks and who had been embroiled in savage animosities until the
"Spooner-Falkins War" had become one of the sanguinary chapters of
feudal history, but the head of the house had always stood apart and
denounced the godless code of the vendetta.
And now the time was come when old McAllister Falkins could look ahead
and begin to see the pale glow of a coming dawn. The railroads, whose
surveyors and chain-bearers his neighbors had fought, were piercing and
developing the hills. Here and there rose a circuit judge or a
prosecuting attorney who dared to talk from an unterrified soul to grand
and petit juries, and occasionally a panel harkened. District schools
began to pass into the hands of teachers who could teach. In this place
and that rose small colleges and the flickering blaze of enlightenment
was struggling into a semblance of steadiness. McAllister Falkins had
sent his son Henry away to school and college, and had had the
satisfaction of seeing him return unspoiled.
The life of young Henry Falkins, therefore, had been cast both in and
out of the Cumberlands, and he had reached the age of twenty-five with a
minimum of enemies and a maximum of friends. His was the breadth of the
lowlands and the unflinching strength of the hills. Then the lurking and
inevitable shadow of that life had impalpably and suddenly fallen upon
him.
When Bud Mortimer, a "marked man," riding home from Jackson, had slid
from his horse and died in a creek-bed with a rifle-hole drilled through
his chest, Falkins had been unlucky enough to have been
squirrel-shooting near by and to have recognized one of three figures
that left the open road and took cover in the laurel. By one of the
strange chances of fate, Falkins, who was tramping the woods with no
idea of concealment, had been unobserved, while the three assassins,
crouching along with all their covert art of hiding out, had not quite
escaped his eye. He had not heard the volley because the murder had
taken place at a distance. He would not have suspected the men who
passed casually below him with their rifles cradled in their elbows, had
not a word or two, in the staccato voice of a youth who walked third in
the single file, come to his ears. These words were profanely triumphant
and boastful of marksmanship. The other two men, the squirrel-hunter did
not recognize. Still, Henry Falkins might not have known that the
bull's-eye alluded to had been a human breast, and he did not know it
till later.
When the dead man's friends had carried the matter to the courts, with
no better evidence perhaps than the bad blood which they knew existed,
and when young Newt Spooner, aged eighteen, but precocious in crime,
stood at the bar, charged with murder, Henry Falkins told the prosecutor
what he had seen. The prosecutor instructed him to keep his secret until
he was called as a witness. He knew the conditions and recognized that,
should this evidence come prematurely to the ears of the Spooners, he
should probably not only lose valuable evidence, but also be saddled
with another prosecution for murder--and just now his homicide docket
was burdensomely heavy.
When their cub was indicted, the Spooner pack laughed. When he was haled
into court, despite his callow years, he came with insolent confidence,
as one above the law. He might have escaped and hidden out, since the
court had allowed him bond, but that would have hampered his future
freedom of action, so he preferred to go through the farce of a trial,
and afterward be free.
He testified, and his alibi corps testified as one man, that he had been
at Hazard, forty miles away, when Mortimer fell. The defense closed in
sanguine trustfulness. Then, in rebuttal, the prosecution sprung a
surprise--a sensation--a bomb. The surprise was Henry Falkins, and when
he took the stand, the hand-made alibi collapsed. Even then Newt Spooner
had not been able to realize that the convincing story of one witness
could destroy his carefully fabricated tissue of lies. But sundry
unexpected things were happening in this dingy court-room. A new spirit
reigned there. Vaguely the sullen lad, crouching back in the prisoner's
chair, was aware of a hardening and petrifying resolve on the rugged
faces in the jury-box. Heretofore the average venireman had thought
there was no health in incurring the wrath of a family of terrorists
like the Spooners. Heretofore Spooners had always "come cl'ar."
Heretofore prosecutors had made only perfunctory attempts to convict
them. Not so with the Honorable Cale Floyd. From opening statement to
closing argument he leaped savagely at the throat of the defense. His
cross-examination was a merciless hail of verbal rifle-fire. As he
defied all the vicious animosities of the Spooner tribe, the court-room
held its breath, and young Newt waited vainly for his kinsmen to rise
_en masse_ and silence his anathemas with a volley. Each night in his
cell, young Newt Spooner wondered why he did not hear a sound outside
the brick "jail-house," and see the doors go down before the wrath of
his rescuers. It was incredible that the clan should stand by and permit
him to be "penitentiaried." Yet it finally dawned upon him that
precisely this thing was happening. The realization had dazed and
embittered him. He knew that even among his own he was not accounted as
of great importance, but he bore the name of Spooner, and in the old
days that would have been enough. He was the first sacrifice to the
changing order. He felt no resentment against the prosecutor in spite of
his philippics. The prosecutor was paid to do it. He even rather admired
the courage which gave strength to the attack, when every precedent told
the lawyer that he was inviting death for his pains. But for the man who
had volunteered to testify; who belonged to the family which his family
had hated and fought; who had come back to the mountains with
"fotched-on" ideas and attacked him with the despised weapon of the law;
for that man he felt such hatred as can only come of festering and
venomous brooding, which lasts while life lasts.
These thoughts Newt Spooner carried as companions as he tramped the
first leg of his homeward journey. Until he had come to Frankfort,
hand-cuffed to a deputy sheriff, he had never seen this land of "down
below." Its softly billowing landscape was to him unfamiliar and
unpleasing. The great columned mansions of time-stained brick set deep
in park-like woodlands; the smoothness of velvet lawns; rippling acres
of grain ripening into gold under the June sun; all these things wore on
his nerves. He was accustomed to a country shut in and sequestered
between eternal hills; of roads where footfalls were silenced; of ragged
patches of cultivation pocketed in surrounding forests. In such places a
man could step aside and be hidden. Here he felt exposed; his very
thoughts seemed naked. That men should live in such great houses and
drive such smooth roads seemed monstrous and incredible. He hated the
"highfalutin" bearing of these "furriners," who carried their chins
aloft like masters of creation. He hated the sight of the "niggers" who
served them. He hated all the orderly smoothness and opulence of this
level land where no ridges broke the sky. So he stalked along, his face
set toward the far horizon, beyond which lay his mountains and his
purpose.
It was a slow journey, for he was weak, but as he breathed the June air
into his cramped lungs, his shoulders began to lose their slouch and his
gait began to discard its prison shuffle for the long space-eating
stride of the mountaineer.
At twilight, he came to a small house by the roadside. He had made a
poor day's journey and, since night was falling, he turned in at the
gate, as though it had been that of his own cabin. The place was shabby
and its residents would have been characterized by the negroes as "po'
white trash," but of social values the late Number 813 was ignorant. He
saw only a roof and to the hills-man a roof is a shelter for whosoever
may need it. Over the whitewashed fence clambering roses hung in profuse
invitation, spicing the air with their fragrance.
Newt made his way to the door where a slatternly woman confronted him.
She stared with disapproving eyes as she wiped her hands on her apron.
"Well, what do you want?" she challenged.
"I 'lowed ye'd let me stay all night--I'm a travelin'," replied the boy
from Troublesome. He spoke simply and without cumbersome explanation. At
home it would have been enough. But this woman only stared at him
disapprovingly and as she took in his sullen visage and dusty suit of
black, she recognized in him the erstwhile convict. With a suppressed
scream she disappeared indoors.
Newt stood gazing without comprehension. That he might be turned away
had not at first occurred to him. He had not yet grasped the essential
differences between highland and lowland etiquette. He accordingly
mounted the steps, crossed the porch and entered the door without
knocking. In the mountains no one knocks on a door.
But at the threshold he met a tall man, who thrust him violently
backward and squared himself across the opening. As Newt staggered
backward and brought himself up against one of the porch supports, the
householder surveyed him from crown to toe, and then, waving a hand
outward, ordered briefly:
"Get the hell out of here, you damned jail-bird!"
For an instant the pardoned prisoner stood rigidly at gaze, while his
eyes gathered wrath and his ugly snarl became wolf-like. Never had he
been so greeted when claiming the traveler's prerogative of shelter from
the night. But he was unarmed; moreover, he had a mission. He was going
to kill one man. Killing men was expensive. It cost liberty and
sometimes more. He could not waste animosity. So he veiled his anger and
turned away. "I didn't 'low hit war a-goin' ter make ye mad," he mumbled
as he went out again to the road. But he had learned his lesson. The
mountaineer is as proud as he is ignorant, and, rather than risk another
rebuff, he spent the night in a haystack, and the first rosy kindling of
dawn found him again on his way; hungry, but setting his face stonily
against the temptation to ask food.
* * * * *
The town of Winchester, like all the county seats of central Kentucky,
breaks from its drowsy somnolence into a brief activity on court-day. On
one Monday in each month the roads fill with an unaccustomed caravan of
trade. Then under the hammer of the street auctioneer farm gear and live
stock change hands; saloons and eating-houses do a banner business;
politicians often harangue in the court-house square; friends renew old
acquaintanceships and sometimes enemies renew old quarrels. But
Winchester differs in one respect from its sister towns. The savor of a
soil rich in chivalric traditions hangs here as it does over neighboring
counties, and yet there is a difference. For Winchester is the nearest
town of consequence to that foothilled borderland where the opulent
bluegrass ends and the illiterate Cumberlands pile their grim ramparts.
Here come the farther-wandering traders from the mountains; gaunt men
with steady-gazing eyes and lean sinews and noiseless tread, to mingle
with the louder-spoken and fuller-nourished brothers of the lowlands. It
is on court-day that they come in greatest numbers. Here, too, live some
of their own kin whom the menace of feudal reprisal has driven from
their native slopes and "coves." With the mountaineer's strong yearning
to remain as near as possible to his birthplace, these refugees have
made new homes and new lives at the edge of the bluegrass where on
occasion they can again see familiar faces. From Frankfort to Winchester
is a matter of almost fifty miles, and Newt Spooner, who had taken up
his homeward journey on a Saturday morning, saw its court-house cupola
and church spires pierce the screen of foliage on the forenoon of
Monday, which chanced to be the Monday allotted to Clark County for its
court.
Newt was very tired and very hungry. His rebuff at the farmhouse had
festered and rankled in his mind, and he had refused to ask hospitality
again or to speak to any man, save for the curt asking of necessary
directions. In Lexington he had bought himself a "snack," but because he
was penuriously hoarding his small capital, he spent with a stinting
hand and pushed onward unsatisfied.
Now, as he trudged wearily, he saw a figure by the roadside at his
front. The figure was that of a negro, who sat on a rock pile in the
sun, hammering limestone chunks into road metal. As the boy came nearer,
he saw another detail. The black man, though unguarded, was a prisoner
and he sat safe against the chance of escape by reason of the huge iron
ball fastened to one ankle by a padlocked chain. The white man, himself
so lately released from the penitentiary, halted. He had the
mountaineer's chronic aversion to "niggers," but here was someone whom
he could question and who was in no position to insult him.
"How fur mout hit be ter Winchester?" he demanded.
The negro, welcoming interruption and conversation, turned with his
granite-headed hammer poised over a piece of limestone.
"It's a right-smart piece, if a man's leg-weary. It's about a mile,
boss," he said.
A mile to the hills-man is nothing; a mere "whoop and a holler," yet now
it seemed to the ex-convict as his informant said, "a right-smart
piece." The glow which spotted his pallid face at the cheekbones told of
a temperature. Through his limbs went a dull ache. From time to time he
coughed. Finally the negro laid aside his rock-hammer, and gazed long
and inquiringly at his silent visitor. He, too, recognized the
state-bestowed clothing and its meaning.
"'Scuse me, boss," he suggested, "but yer done come from Frankfort,
ain't yer?"
Newt Spooner nodded, but his eyes narrowed, discouraging interrogation.
"Was yer--was yer in de pen'tenshery, boss?"
The man chained to his rock pile doubted the wisdom of his question, but
African inquisitiveness had mastered his better judgment.
Instantly he recognized his mistake. The boy from Troublesome was at
once on his feet and his sallow face was distorted with anger. From his
lips came profane volleys of abuse. Transported by rage, he took a step
forward with clenched fists. The negro clambered to his feet, and, since
he was anchored against flight, backed away defensively, waving his rock
hammer.
Newt Spooner selected a huge fragment of the scaly limestone, and
withdrew just beyond the range of hammer and chain; but as the negro, in
a paroxysm of terror, fell pleadingly to his knees, he dropped the
missile at his side.
"I hain't a-goin' ter bust in yore damned black head," he said in slow
wrath, "because I got another job ter do. Thet's ther only reason why I
hain't a-goin' ter kill ye." Then he turned into the road and took up
his journey again.
* * * * *
Back there in the fastnesses of the hills, toward which he was making
his way, the leaven of change was beginning to work, yeast-like. When he
reached his destination he was to learn with surprise that he could not
take up without interruption the story of his life: the story out of
which pages standing for two years had been torn. Births and deaths and
the giving in marriage were not the only things that had happened.
Quietly a new agent had entered in; the agent of a patient spirit of
education. This spirit came burning in the hearts of men and women from
below, who realized that they must breast stubborn opposition and that
they must adapt their methods to the life they sought to change. They
must plant and nourish the new idea in the younger minds and they must
not seek to alter in a twinkling a regime that had long been immutable.
But buried deep in the forestry of the tangled hills, far back from a
railroad stood a group of buildings that seemed miracle-reared. They
were stanch buildings of square-hewn logs, which in contrast to the
ramshackle huts about them appeared to have been lifted from another
world and transported on the winds of some benevolent cyclone. It was
difficult to think of these houses as having been raised from solid
foundation to level ridgepole so far from the facilities of
transportation. Yet here in the wilderness stood the "college."
It was no vaunting boastfulness that had inspired the almost fanatical
men and women who stood as sponsors for the enterprise to give so
high-sounding a name to the institution which taught kindergarten and
primary classes. Some day, they hoped, it might grow up to its title,
and meanwhile there were gray-beards and wrinkled women who sought to
study primer and multiplication-table, but whose pride would bar them
from advantages undignified by the name of college.
On the spring morning when Newt Spooner was trudging homeward, Doctor
Murray, who had slowly and courageously turned his dream into a reality,
sat in the study of the college. There was a smile on his lips, and the
square-jawed face, which escaped all trace of the pedagogic, was
contented. The sun streamed in through his windows and lighted a room
finished in wainscoting of oak and maple--sawed at the mill, which was
part of the institution and which he could see from his window, when he
looked down.
Above, when he cast his eyes in that direction through another window,
nestled the small hospital, where barbaric methods of local surgery were
being altered. But, best of all, there came to his ears laughter and
shouts from the trim campus where boys and girls were at play: boys and
girls who until they had come here, had known little about laughter and
much about drudgery. And every peal of mirth was a challenge to the old
order of hatred and the ancient thraldom of sullenness.
A girl came into the room and laid some papers on his desk, and the
doctor nodded at her with a smile.
"Minerva," he said, "I'm afraid you are working too hard. One doesn't
have to learn everything at once, you know."
The pupil flushed and stood for a moment silent. She was straight and
lithe, and under the blue calico dress that was turned down at her
neck, her throat was brown with a tan through which a petal-like color
glowed. Her brown hair glistened with the glint of polished mahogany,
and her eyes struck the doctor as eyes meant for mirth, though they had
hardly learned to laugh. The deadly seriousness of the hills and the
Calvinistic seriousness that makes martyrs, seemed to hold in bondage a
spirit that nature had intended to radiate gaiety. Her fingers drew
themselves together into fists, and after a moment she spoke slowly, and
her speech was a strange blending of the illiterate argot of the hills
and a conscious effort to speak in the phrases dictated by the education
which she coveted.
"I reckon ye don't hardly know how much I've got to learn," she said. "I
reckon ye don't realize how plumb ign'rant I am."
Suddenly her voice became passionate.
"Maybe ye don't know how I hate it all--how I want to get away from
ign'rance an' dirt an' wickedness. I've been wonderin' if I didn't err
in comin' here. It's just makin' me hate that cabin over yon--I mean
over there--on Troublesome. Sometimes I think it can't hardly do
nothin'--do anything--but make me dissatisfied."
The head of the school looked up, and his face grew grave.
"There are times," he said, "when that thought comes to me, too. I don't
mean as to you, Minerva, alone, but as to all those we take here and
teach. At first it was all a dream of bringing a light to a place that
was dark. That was the only phase I saw. But later I saw more. One can't
make a dream a reality without struggle. Dissatisfaction is the price we
must pay for regeneration--and people like you and myself must be among
the first to pay it."
"Over there," she went on, as though talking to herself, "they only
hates me for it. They says I'm stuck on myself an' that what's been good
enough for my folks for all time ain't good enough for me no more--I
mean any more."
"It takes time," the man reassured her. "In the place of ignorance, we
offer education. In the place of lawlessness, we offer law. In the place
of squalor, we offer thrift. Are those things not worth what they cost?"
The girl stood silent for a moment, then nodded her head.
"I reckon so," she answered simply, and turned to leave the library.
After she had gone, the teacher sat for a time with his book open before
him, but his eyes were contemplative, and it was from memory and not
from the printed page that he was reading.
He was thinking back and seeing over again a day shortly after his
school had opened. In those times there had been fewer buildings, and of
the many pupils who came, hungry to learn, only a few could be taken in.
Among the first had been Minerva.
She had come exhausted and tired because she had come on foot, and her
mean calico dress had been briar-torn, and her feet, which were bare,
had been bruised. But in her eyes was gleaming a passion of hunger and
resolve for the food which the school offered the mind. She had
presented herself, a ragged little mendicant asking the alms of
education, carrying what belongings she had in such a bundle as tramps
carry.
Back in her unlighted and windowless cabin, she had heard of this
"new-fangled" institution where was to be dispensed the pabulum of
"larnin'"--and she had made her pilgrimage. Now Doctor Murray was
recalling that day. He had been down by the stile which gave entrance
from the creek-bed road, when he had seen the slight figure trudging
along, and the girl had stopped and eyed him shyly.
"Air ye the feller frum down below what aims ter give folks larnin'?"
she had demanded, as her large eyes held his with a tense directness,
untinged by any humor.
"To give folks learning is a large contract," he had answered with a
quizzical smile; "but we hope to give to as many as we can, at least its
rudiments."
"What's them?"
"The start. Have you ever been to school at all?"
"I've done been ter the blab-school. I kin read an' write an' figger."
Dr. Murray had stood there looking at her, and it had come to him that
she made a very pathetic picture, with the yearning in her eyes and the
dust of travel on her calico, so he denied her with a heavy heart.
"Just now," he said regretfully, "we can only take in a few pupils and
we are already over-crowded. I'm afraid we can't make room for you."
Suddenly he added, "How far have you come?"
"The rise of twenty mile, sence sun-up," she informed him simply, then
tears welled rebelliously into her eyes. Her voice broke from her lips
with a fierce passionateness.
"Ye've got ter take me," she cried out. "Ye've jest simply got ter take
me. I've done been prayin' ter God Almighty ter give me a chanst. I've
done heerd that ye war a preacher of ther Gospel, an' I reckon God
hain't a-goin' ter suffer ye ter turn me away."
Doctor Murray had then been new to the hills. The storm-like intensity
of the mountain character was bringing him its revelations. He stood
there by the road, watching the ox-teams that were bringing logs in to
his saw-mill and made rapid calculations and as he did so he heard the
new candidate for matriculation rushing on:
"Ther Scripters says thet God's servant won't turn away sich as comes to
him seeking light--an' I've done come."
"At all events," he answered gently, "come up and have something to eat,
and I'll talk it over with my wife."
Mrs. Murray had spent a half-hour with the girl, and then had come back
to her husband.
"She is as wild as a squirrel," was her announcement, "but I have never
seen such a starving heart or brain. I don't know what we shall do with
her, but we must let her stay." And so Minerva had stayed.
Now she went out of the library, and made her way to a favorite spot up
on the hillside. It was a study hour, and she carried a book with her.
The time she had spent here had wrought a transformation. The brain had
unfolded and the heart had become unplaced. The terms of this school
adapted themselves to the needs of the environment. They did not
conflict with the nearer demands of farm work, but accommodated
themselves to necessity. When the frequent vacations came, Minerva went
back to the cabin which she called her home. Each of these visits she
dreaded.
Mountain reserve is hard to break. Even in her tempestuous appeal to the
head of the school, she had not told her full story. Now she was
thinking of it.
Mountain women grow old while they are yet young, but her mother had
seemed to her different. Mountain women are grave with a gravity which
is more than half sullen, but she remembered a mother who had laughed
and whose voice had been often raised in song. Then when she was still
very small, she remembered one of those rude mountain funerals where
those who come raise their voices in a weird incantation of "mourning,"
which they leave off for gossip as soon as the period set aside for the
clamor comes to its end. After that she had been motherless and had kept
house for a shiftless and surly father. That house-keeping had been
simple enough in the shack of one room, but it had been unrelieved
drudgery, and because she was one of those human beings who are less
near of kinship to the members of the family with whom they live than
with some far-off ancestor whose nature is strangely duplicated, Minerva
had always had longings for things which were to her undefined dreams.
Her nature had always been in insurrection against the squalid facts of
her life. Her inclinations and thoughts struck back, by one of Nature's
practical jokes, to some woman who had been a lady in the courtly life
of Virginia a century, or maybe two centuries, ago, before her ancestors
became stranded pioneers and lapsed into illiteracy, degeneracy and
venal sloth here in the hard hills. What this all meant she had not
known, but she knew that one memory alone was sweet to her thoughts, and
that that was the memory of her mother. She knew, too, that even before
they had taught her at the college how perverted it all was, this whole
scheme of mountain feudalism and black ignorance and bitterness had
seemed to her wrong and repugnant. Something had told her that somewhere
there must be something different and that somehow she must find it and
weave it into the pattern of her life. Of these things she had thought
as she sat in the summer evenings on the slab bench before the cabin
door. In summer there was a great pine, which, just after twilight had
faded into velvet blackness in the sky, pointed an index upward beyond
the valley; and over it, before the other stars came out there always
appeared a tiny point of light, which she chose to call her star.
Somehow, it seemed that in some vague future day that star would lead
her.
She was often alone, for her father would leave her there and go his own
ways, but a day came when he returned and began throwing his few
possessions into a bundle.
"M'nervy," he said with a sullen sort of embarrassment, "I reckon thar's
times when ye gits right-smart lonesome way up hyar, hain't thar?"
A catch had come into her voice as she said:
"Right often, Pappy."
He nodded, then added abruptly:
"Waal, we're ergwine ter nail up thet door ternight an' quit this-hyar
place."
"Whar air we a-goin' ter?"
"I done got myarried terday," he announced. "I reckon we'll go down an'
dwell with my wife's folks."
The sun was nearing the western peaks and the afternoon was well spent.
The girl had had no intimation in advance of this contemplated change of
order. She stood there stunned. Life had been empty enough, but here at
least she had been in a fashion mistress of the wretched house, and here
she had had her pine tree and her star, which were the emblems of her
dreams.
A long, low moan escaped her, and her father's face reddened in anger.
He turned away and left her, going into the house, and she fled
precipitately to the heights above and sobbed out her misery at the
roots of the pine to which she was bidding farewell.
Then they had moved, and life had meant fitting herself into a new
family, no member of which liked her, and submitting to the shrewish
heckling of a step-mother, who seemed to her a hideous libel upon the
memory of the woman who had been lucky enough to die young.
Now, as she sat with her book in her lap, because in a few days she must
go back to that cabin, the past was parading in review before her eyes,
and though she was very hungry for "larnin'" she was neglecting her
books.