“I’ll bet you a young shote that I ken!” cried the man.
“I’ll bet you a brace of my ducks that you can’t,” retorted Mr. Rowantree.
“Done!” said Mr. McIntosh. “Give me a book. Set down and tell me about this here l’arning.”
Mr. Rowantree turned to the school.
“A brace of ducks against a young shote that Mr. McIntosh cannot learn to read,” he said gravely. “You are the witnesses. Coulter, kindly bring me a primer from that closet. You will all observe that I play fair. I shall do my best to teach him, but I frankly confess I have my doubts. He has looked down on book-learning and that is against him.”
Mr. McIntosh made no reply. He had hung his hat on a nail and now he drew his one “gallus” a little tighter as if to prepare for a struggle. At the opposite corner of the room from his wife, he bent over his book. Mr. Rowantree drew a chair up beside him.
“We will give our attention, if you please,” he said in his mellow voice, and in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, “to the first letter of the alphabet.”
Young Mrs. McIntosh bent very low over her page and only the children sitting next saw her shoulders shaking with laughter. The children themselves, determined not to spoil sport, kept their mirth till they should be upon the mountain paths. Then they would have their chuckle there over the way McIntosh “was tricked into l’arnin’.” Now they devoted themselves to their own lessons, and away in the backs of their minds a new idea was growing. Why shouldn’t their own fathers and mothers come to school? Why shouldn’t they all know how to read? It was just as Mr. Rowantree said; they couldn’t “match up” with the men and women beyond the mountains. They were different—terribly different. Oh, yes, proud as they were, these children of the mountain clans, they knew that. Their sisters weren’t like Miss Azalea and Miss Carin—not at all like them. Their fathers weren’t like Mr. Rowantree; and though in some ways Mr. Rowantree was not liked by them, and his disinclination to work was noted even by these folk of easy-going ways, still, he was different. He knew about the great world beyond; about what people were doing in the cities; he was acquainted with what other men thought and wrote, and he could talk in a wonderful way. Just see how he had come it over McIntosh, and taken the “meanness” out of him!
It was the red-headed boy, Dibblee Sikes, the most sociable child in the school, who put into words the thing that had been stirring in the children’s minds. He came up to Mr. Rowantree at the nooning.
“Please, sir,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about something.”