Part 1 (2/2)

”Help me carry this man into the house,” he said shortly.

”But Father,” I said, ”you surely aren't going to carry that man into the house? All dirty like that!”

Father gave me one look and I said no more. Together father and Jim Wiggin lifted the stranger from the floor and started toward the house with him, while I capered around in my excitement and finally ran on ahead to tell mother. They carried him into the kitchen and laid him down on the old lounge and tried to bring him around with smelling salts and things. But he just kept on talking and muttering to himself, and never opened his eyes.

And that's what he's still doing, while I'm off in my room writing this.

It was five o'clock when we brought him in, and now it's after ten and he hasn't come to his senses yet. There isn't a thing in his pockets to show who he is or where he came from.

I feel so strange since I found that man there. I'm not a bit low in my mind any more, like I was this afternoon. I have a curious feeling as if I had pa.s.sed a turn in the road and come upon something new and wonderful.

Forget the lengthy moan I indulged in at the beginning of this letter, will you, and think of me as gay and chipper as ever.

Yours in Wohelo, Katherine.

KATHERINE TO THE WINNEBAGOS

Oct. 15, 19--.

Darling Winnies:

And to think, after all that fuss I made about not getting a letter from you that day, I didn't have time to open it for three whole days after it finally arrived! You remember where I left off the last time, with the strange man I had found in Sandhelo's stable out of his head on the kitchen lounge? Well, he kept on like that, lying with his eyes shut and occasionally saying a word or two that didn't make sense, all that night and all the next day. Then on Sunday he developed a high fever and began to rave. He shouted at the top of his voice until he was hoa.r.s.e; always about somebody pursuing him and whom he was trying to run away from. Then he began to jump up and try to run outdoors, until we had to bar the door. It took all father and Jim Wiggin and I could do to keep him on the lounge. We had a pretty exciting time of it, I can tell you. Of course, all the uproar upset mother and she had another spell with her heart and took to her bed, and by Tuesday night things got so strenuous that I had to dismiss school for the rest of the week and keep all my ten fingers in the domestic pie.

I don't know who rejoiced more over the unexpected lapse from lessons, the scholars or myself. I never saw a group of children who were so const.i.tutionally opposed to learning as the twenty-two stony-faced specimens of ”hoomanity” that I had to deal with in that little shanty of a school. They'd rather be ignorant than educated any day. I just can't make them do the homework I give them. Every day it's the same story.

They haven't done their examples and they haven't learned their spelling; they haven't studied their geography. The only way I can get them to study their lessons is to keep them in after school and stand over them while they do it. Their only motto seems to be, ”Pa and ma didn't have no education and they got along, so why should we bother?”

The families from which these children come are what is known in this section as ”Hard-uppers,” people who are and have always been ”hard up.”

Nearly everybody around here is a Hard-upper. If they weren't they wouldn't be here. The land is so poor that n.o.body will pay any price for it, so it has drifted into the hands of s.h.i.+ftless people who couldn't get along anywhere, and they work it in a backward, inefficient sort of way and make such a bare living that you couldn't call it a living at all.

They live in little houses that aren't much more than cabins--some of them have only one or two rooms in them--and haven't one of the comforts that you girls think you absolutely couldn't live without. They have no books, no pictures, no magazines. It's no wonder the children are stony-faced when I try to shower blessings upon them in the form of spelling and grammar; they know they won't have a mite of use for them if they do learn them, so why take the trouble?

”What a dreadful set of people!” I can hear you say disdainfully. ”How can you stand it among such poor trash?”

O my Beloveds, I have a sad admission to make. I am a Hard-upper myself! My father, while he is the dearest daddy in the world, never had a sc.r.a.p of business ability; that's how he came to live in this made-out-of-the-sc.r.a.ps-after-every-thing-else-was-made corner of Arkansas. He never had any education either, though it wasn't because he didn't want it. He doesn't care a rap for reading; all he cares for is horses. We live in a shack, too, though it has four rooms and is much better than most around here. We never had any books or magazines, either, except the ones for which I sacrificed everything else I wanted to buy. But I wanted to learn,--oh, how I wanted to learn!--and that's where I differed altogether from the rest of the Hard-uppers. They're still wagging their heads about the way I used to walk along the road reading. The very first week I taught school this year I was taking Absalom b.u.t.ts (mentioned in my former epistle) to task for speaking saucily to me, and thinking to impress him with the dignity of my position I said, ”Do you know whom you're talking to?”

And he answered back impudently, ”Yer Bill Adamses good-for-nothing daughter, that's who you are!”

You see what I'm up against? Those children hear their parents make such remarks about me and they haven't the slightest respect for me. Did you know that I only got this job of teaching because n.o.body else would take it? Absalom b.u.t.ts' father, who is about the only man around here who isn't a Hard-upper, and is the most influential man in the community because he can talk the loudest, held out against me to the very end, declaring I hadn't enough sense to come in out of the rain. As he is president of the school board in this towns.h.i.+p--the whole thing is a farce, but the members are tremendously impressed with their own dignity--it pretty nearly ended up in your little Katherine not getting any school to teach this winter, but when one applicant after another came and saw and turned up her nose, it became a question of me or no schoolmarm, so they gave me the place, but with much misgiving. I had become very much discouraged over the whole business, for I really needed the money, and began to consider myself a regular idiot, but father said I needn't worry very much about being considered a good-for-nothing by Elijah b.u.t.ts; his whole grudge against me rose from the fact that he had wanted to marry my mother when she was young and had never forgiven father for beating him to it. That cheered me up considerably, and I determined to swallow no slights from the family of b.u.t.ts.

Since then it's been nip and tuck between us. Young Absalom is a big, overgrown gawk of fourteen with no brain for anything but mischief. His chief aim in life just now is to think up something to annoy me. I ignore him as much as possible so as not to give him the satisfaction of knowing he can annoy me, but about every three days we have a regular pitched battle, and it keeps me worn out. His sister Clarissa hasn't enough brain for mischief, but her constant flow of tears is nearly as bad as his impudence.

Taken all in all, you can guess that I didn't shed any tears about having to close the school that Tuesday to help take care of the sick man.

Anything, even sitting on a delirious stranger, was a relief from the constant warfare of teaching school. It was in the midst of this mess that your letter came, and lay three whole days before I had time to open it.

On Sat.u.r.day the sick man stopped raving and struggling and lay perfectly motionless. Jim Wiggin looked at his white, sunken face, and remarked oracularly, ”He's a goner.”

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