I went, but I was so dazed at her thinking I wanted her to love me, that I hardly heard May and Leon calling; when I did I went to the cemetery fence and there they lay in the long grass waiting. "If you cried, we were coming back and pitch into her," said Leon. There was a pointer. Next time, first cut she gave me, I decided to scream bloody murder. But that would be no Crusader way. There was one thing though. No Crusader ever sat and heard a perfectly lovely fight going on, and never even wondered which whipped. May and Leon stepped one on each side, took a hand, and we ran like Indians, and slid down the hill between the bushes, climbed the fence, crossed the pasture back of the church, and went to the creek. There we sat on a log, I told them, and we just laughed. I didn't know what I could do to pay them, for they saved me sure as fate that time. I wished we lived in the woods the way it was when father and mother were married and moved to Ohio. The nearest neighbours were nine miles, and there wasn't a dollar for school funds, so of course the children didn't have to go, and what their fathers and mothers taught them was all they knew. That would not have helped me much though, for we never had one single teacher who knew anything to compare with what father and mother did, and we never had one who was forever reading books, papers, and learning more things that help, to teach other people. I wished father had time to take our school. It would have been some fun to go to him, because I just knew he would use the woods for the room, and teach us things it would do some good to know about. I began debating whether it was a big enough thing to bother the Lord with: this being penned up in the schoolhouse droning over spelling and numbers, when you could smell tree bloom, flower bloom, dozens of birds were nesting, and everything was beginning to hum with life. I couldn't think for that piece about "Spring" going over in my head: "I am coming, I am coming: Hark! the little bee is humming: See! the lark is soaring high, In the bright and sunny sky; All the birds are on the wing: Little maiden, now is spring."