But buried deep in the forestry of the tangled hills, far back from a railroad stood a group of buildings that seemed miracle-reared. They were stanch buildings of square-hewn logs, which in contrast to the ramshackle huts about them appeared to have been lifted from another world and transported on the winds of some benevolent cyclone. It was difficult to think of these houses as having been raised from solid foundation to level ridgepole so far from the facilities of transportation. Yet here in the wilderness stood the "college."
It was no vaunting boastfulness that had inspired the almost fanatical men and women who stood as sponsors for the enterprise to give so high-sounding a name to the institution which taught kindergarten and primary classes. Some day, they hoped, it might grow up to its title, and meanwhile there were gray-beards and wrinkled women who sought to study primer and multiplication-table, but whose pride would bar them from advantages undignified by the name of college.
On the spring morning when Newt Spooner was trudging homeward, Doctor Murray, who had slowly and courageously turned his dream into a reality, sat in the study of the college. There was a smile on his lips, and the square-jawed face, which escaped all trace of the pedagogic, was contented. The sun streamed in through his windows and lighted a room finished in wainscoting of oak and maple—sawed at the mill, which was part of the institution and which he could see from his window, when he looked down.
Above, when he cast his eyes in that direction through another window, nestled the small hospital, where barbaric methods of local surgery were being altered. But, best of all, there came to his ears laughter and shouts from the trim campus where boys and girls were at play: boys and girls who until they had come here, had known little about laughter and much about drudgery. And every peal of mirth was a challenge to the old order of hatred and the ancient thraldom of sullenness.
A girl came into the room and laid some papers on his desk, and the doctor nodded at her with a smile.
"Minerva," he said, "I'm afraid you are working too hard. One doesn't have to learn everything at once, you know."
The pupil flushed and stood for a moment silent. She was straight and lithe, and under the blue calico dress that was turned down at her neck, her throat was brown with a tan through which a petal-like color glowed. Her brown hair glistened with the glint of polished mahogany, and her eyes struck the doctor as eyes meant for mirth, though they had hardly learned to laugh. The deadly seriousness of the hills and the Calvinistic seriousness that makes martyrs, seemed to hold in bondage a spirit that nature had intended to radiate gaiety. Her fingers drew themselves together into fists, and after a moment she spoke slowly, and her speech was a strange blending of the illiterate argot of the hills and a conscious effort to speak in the phrases dictated by the education which she coveted.
"I reckon ye don't hardly know how much I've got to learn," she said. "I reckon ye don't realize how plumb ign'rant I am."
Suddenly her voice became passionate.
"Maybe ye don't know how I hate it all—how I want to get away from ign'rance an' dirt an' wickedness. I've been wonderin' if I didn't err in comin' here. It's just makin' me hate that cabin over yon—I mean over there—on Troublesome. Sometimes I think it can't hardly do nothin'—do anything—but make me dissatisfied."