The boy grinned.
“I can come it over him,” he said. He was again enjoying the encounter of wits. This made Azalea say hastily:
“But of course, since he’s so much older than you, Bud, you mustn’t let him know that you can come it over him.”
“Sure, I must,” cried the boy. “He’s been mean to my pa. He’s the meanest man in these parts, and he’s got a son—at least it ain’t really his son—it’s his brother’s son—who’s so meachin’ that he don’t even know enough to be mean, and if that white-livered boob tries to come up here to this here school—”
“Why, we’ll teach him how to write his name, too,” said Azalea valorously.
“I won’t stay in no school that Skully Simms comes to,” declared Bud.
Azalea threw a glance at Carin, who was sitting in one of the school seats beside Babe, and whose face had turned rather white. Carin had been prepared for gratitude from the pupils; it had never occurred to her that they would come to school in a warring attitude. Moreover, for the first time she realized what a young girl Azalea still was. As her Zalie stood there on the platform, her hair rumpled by the wind, her face flushed with perplexity, her frock coming just below her shoe tops, she looked very tender and youthful indeed. But she had what Sam Disbrow would have called “the fighting stuff” in her.
“This school is for learning,” she said, “and learning has nothing to do with friend or foe. It is for all alike. Chinamen with cues down their backs, Arabs riding on camels over the desert, East Indians, all dressed in white with turbans on their heads, may be learned. They live on the other side of the world—quite on the other side of this great ball we call the earth—but they have just as much right to get learning as we have.”
Carin had an idea. She jumped from her seat and ran to the blackboard.
“Did you ever see a picture of a camel?” she asked.