“School over?” queried Haystack.
Azalea nodded.
“School’s over,” announced the fiddler. “And this is where we march.”
He started down the aisle, his huge head with its wild hair bent above the violin, and from the little great instrument came the sounds of marching feet. They were victorious feet; feet marching in brotherhood; faithful, determined feet. Falteringly, shyly, the children fell in with him. It was not, indeed, in human power to resist that march. Carin, joining with light step, Azalea, marching more seriously, courage and determination in her face, removed the last hesitation of the laggards. Skully Simms’ tears dried on his swollen face. He got up, half shame-facedly and fell into the march, and so marching forgot his shame and his resentment. And Bud Coulter, springing at last to his feet, tramped with the others. He was, after all, a “good sport.” He had spoken out his feelings, and now, head up—just a touch defiantly—he fell in line. They all went out of the schoolhouse so, and on to where the various paths diverged, running this way and that over the mountainside, to end in the little cabins where the children lived.
Haystack sped them on their way. Then he dropped his instrument and turned to Azalea who stood beside him.
“Well, honey-bird,” he said with fatherly tenderness, “how does the world treat you?”
CHAPTER IX
THE RESCUE
“There ain’t many men as inquisitive as I be,” remarked Haystack Thompson as he sat at Aunt Zillah’s supper table that evening. “’Tain’t the kind of inquisitiveness that takes men to big towns, nor the kind that takes men to sea. It’s jest the kind that has to know what’s going on in the neighborhood.”
“But you must admit,” said Carin teasingly, “that your neighborhood is rather a large one.”
“So it is, so it is,” confessed Mr. Thompson. “It includes these yere mountains in all their outcroppings in the two Carolinas. I make it my business to know what’s going on in them whenever possible. Earthquakes, funerals, singings, weddings, corn huskings—anything out of the usual—demand my attention.”