This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler

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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.

AZALEA AT
SUNSET GAP

BY
ELIA W. PEATTIE
Author of Azalea; Annie Laurie and Azalea; etc.

Illustrations by
Joseph Pierre Nuyttens

The Reilly & Britton Co.
Chicago

Copyright, 1914
by
The Reilly & Britton Co.

Azalea at Sunset Gap

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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.”

CHAPTER III
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.”

“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.