She opened her hand and disclosed a crumpled, greasy note.
“That there five-dollar bill is the very last cent that we've got. An' when it's gone I don't know where we'll git any more, with him hurt, an' me with a little sucklin' baby.”
The School-teacher's big gray-blue eyes filled with a kindly light.
“Don't cry,” he said, “perhaps I can do something for your husband's shoulder.”
He went over to the man. What the School-teacher did, precisely, these persons were never afterward able to describe. The event in their minds seemed clouded in mystery. A wonder had been accomplished in the road, in the sun, in the light before them, but they could not lay hold upon the sequence of the detail. The voice of the School-teacher presently reached them as from a distance.
The man doubled the arm and extended it. The woman came running up.
The man continued to move the arm. “It 'pears like I kin,” he said; “it 'pears like it's well.”
“It 'pears like I kin use it good as I ever could.”
“Well, sir!” ejaculated the woman, “if I hadn't a seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't never a-believed it.”
The School-teacher remained standing for a moment in the road after the mountaineers had gone.
Then he went back to the children, waiting in the schoolhouse. He called them out into the grove before the door, and took his place in the game, bending over to hold the hands of the tiniest child. The circle began once more to move. The song to rise.
|IT WAS not the only adventure that the School-teacher was destined to meet with on this day. As he was returning along the mountain road, with the little boy on his shoulder, at the first ascent, beyond the river crossing, he met two men in a buckboard. The horses were gaunt as from hard usage. The man who drove them was known to the School-teacher. The other was a big man with a heavy black beard. He sat leaning over in the buckboard. His head down. His shoulders rising in a hump. He had gone stooped for so long that the hump on his shoulders was now a sort of permanent deformity.
They drew up by the roadside as the School-teacher approached. The big, hump-shouldered man spoke, without taking the trouble to preface his remarks with any form of salutation.