Then the girl added with a happy laugh: “The truth is, I didn’t know what I was supposed to be afraid of, and so, of course, I couldn’t be afraid of it.”
This remark sounded a little unbalanced to the wife of the innkeeper. She had never heard that one had to know what to be afraid of before he could be afraid. She drew herself up very straight as she enumerated: “Well, there’s plenty that usually scares tenderfoot school-teachers. There’s the coyotes howlin’ at night, though they mostly never touches human bein’s; an’ now and then there’s a bear, but worst, I guess, is the parcel of Indians over Tahoe way. They don’t do much but thievin’. I guess that’s all, unless ’tis now and then a bandit passin’ this way to hold up a train over beyond Reno.”
Scandalized, indeed, was the wife of the innkeeper when she heard the new school-teacher laugh. “Oh, Mrs. Twiggly,” the girl exclaimed merrily, “I do hope some one of those skeery things will happen soon. I’m just longing for adventure.”
This time the sniff of her listener was entirely audible. “Well, I reckon you’ll get all the adventure you’re wantin’ before the term’s up, Miss Bayley, if you’re kept, and I sort o’ feel it my duty to tell you that the board of eddication hereabouts is particular and persnifity.”
“Which means?” was what Miss Bayley thought. But aloud she demurely asked, “Mrs. Twiggly, just what are the requirements that I shall have to meet?”
The wife of the innkeeper bristled, as she always did when this subject was discussed. “If you mean what you ought to do to please the board, I must say it seems like there’s nothin’ needed but just to flatter and pamper the board’s only child, that forward little Jessica Archer.”
Miss Bayley’s dark eyes were wide. “Is there only one man on the local board of education?” she inquired.
Mrs. Twiggly nodded. “Ye-ah, and, for that matter, there’s only one important man in these here parts, and that’s Mr. Sethibald Archer. He owns all the sheep-grazin’ country round about, and if he don’t own it honest, he’s got it somehow.”
“Sethibald?” Miss Bayley repeated. “I never heard such a Christian name as that before.”
Mrs. Twiggly was scornful.