“Where were you going?” said the School-teacher. “We were a-goin' to the doctor,” replied the woman. “We thought we'd make as far as the mill, an' he could wait there, an' I could git Sally to keep the baby while I went after the doctor.” “How far is it to the doctor?” “It's a-goin' on fourteen mile from the mill, an' that ain't the worst of it. He won't come unless he gits the money, an' we ain't got no money to throw away on a doctor.” She opened her hand and disclosed a crumpled, greasy note. “That there five-dollar bill is the very last cent that we've got. An' when it's gone I don't know where we'll git any more, with him hurt, an' me with a little sucklin' baby.” The woman began to sob. “I'm jist ready to give up.” The School-teacher's big gray-blue eyes filled with a kindly light. “Don't cry,” he said, “perhaps I can do something for your husband's shoulder.” He went over to the man. What the School-teacher did, precisely, these persons were never afterward able to describe. The event in their minds seemed clouded in mystery. A wonder had been accomplished in the road, in the sun, in the light before them, but they could not lay hold upon the sequence of the detail. The voice of the School-teacher presently reached them as from a distance. “It's all right now,” he said. The man doubled the arm and extended it. The woman came running up. “Kin you use it, Sol?” The man continued to move the arm. “It 'pears like I kin,” he said; “it 'pears like it's well.” “Kin you use it good?” “It 'pears like I kin use it good as I ever could.” “Well, sir!” ejaculated the woman, “if I hadn't a seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't never a-believed it.” The School-teacher remained standing for a moment in the road after the mountaineers had gone. Then he went back to the children, waiting in the schoolhouse. He called them out into the grove before the door, and took his place in the game, bending over to hold the hands of the tiniest child. The circle began once more to move. The song to rise. “An' catch the one that you love best.” CHAPTER VIII |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. “Do you claim old Nicholas Parks' estate?” The School-teacher regarded him with his deep, tranquil, gray-blue eyes.