However, by the end of the week, there was much more encouraging news to give her. The children who joined the school along toward the last of the week were milder and better mannered than those who had come at first. It seemed as if the more obstinate and ill-tempered had come first to try out the young teachers. Poor Skully Simms, the nephew of the man who had a “war” with the Coulters, dared not show his face. Mrs. McEvoy heard that he was “wishful” to come, but was afraid of Bud Coulter. One day Azalea caught a glimpse of a face at the window, and after school Dibblee Sikes told her that it was Skully Simms.
“He’s jest pestered to know what we-all are doing,” he said. “But he’s skeered of Bud.”
“I might ride down and see him,” said Azalea. “Perhaps I could coax him to come.”
“Then if he got in bad with Bud and there was blood-shedding,” said Dibblee wisely, “you’d be taking blame to yourself. It might break up the school, ma’am. That would do harm to the whole lot of us. Folks around here don’t believe in stirring up the Coulters and Simms.”
“‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’” quoted Azalea. “Perhaps you’re right. You know the neighbors and I don’t.”
She was glad when Keefe O’Connor volunteered to come in every afternoon and teach the upper class boys geography and what he called “current history.” He had a notion that what they needed more than anything else was to have some notion of what was going on in the outside world. He said he always managed to be followed by a New York newspaper no matter how far in the backwoods he went. He had left Rowantree Hall, partly because he had no wish to put the family to further trouble, but chiefly because he wanted to be nearer the school, where he meant to lend a hand now and then. A tent appeared miraculously on the mountainside, to which Keefe proudly gave the name of “home.” He arose early and painted during the morning hours; then, after his dinner, cooked in the open, he helped at school. After that, as the shadows deepened and lay across the slopes, he went back to his canvas and brushes. Carin was wild to join him, but the truth was that those first few days of teaching drained every drop of strength in her, and Azalea and Aunt Zillah hurried her into her bed immediately after supper.
“It wouldn’t be so bad,” she complained to Aunt Zillah, half laughing and half in earnest, “if it wasn’t for that dreadful Paralee Panther. She seems like a bad dream; the only trouble is I can’t wake up. I’d like to think I had imagined her. But she is real and needs us more, I suspect, than anybody else in the school.”
“She’s always frowning and watching,” Azalea added. “It makes me want to scream. Carin, did you ever see anybody with such heavy eyelids? And Aunt Zillah, she watches at us from the corners of her eyes. Don’t you just hate a trick like that?”
“How ever could she have lost her arm?” wondered Carin. “A boy might have shot his off, but it’s strange for a girl to have lost an arm.”
“Oh, well,” said Aunt Zillah philosophically, “we came up here to find some queer people, and we’re not disappointed. Queerness often means unhappiness, that’s what I’ve discovered. If you girls succeed in doing what you came up to do and help these poor people out of some of their troubles and drawbacks, perhaps they won’t be so queer.”