“Well, ’twa’n’t that in the beginnin’,” she said. “It was jest plain Seth, but when they got so rich, his wife, who’d allus been Maria, went to visit folks in the city, and when she came back she had her name printed on bits of pasteboard, visitin’-cards, she called ’em, though land knows who she’s goin’ to visit in these parts, and she said Mrs. Seth didn’t look stylish enough, so she tacked on the endin’. Mrs. Sethibald Archer, that’s what’s on the card.”
Again the new teacher had an almost uncontrollable desire to laugh, but, instead, she seated herself at the table and ate the really good breakfast, and found that she was unusually hungry. The mountain-air surely was a tonic.
As her guest seemed in no hurry to depart, Miss Bayley said, “Won’t you be seated, Mrs. Twiggly, and tell me some more about my duties as school-teacher?”
“Well, I dunno but I can set a spell,” was the reply of the garrulous woman, who had “talked herself thin,” as Mrs. Sethibald Archer had been known to declare, and which may have been true.
“Please tell me about my other pupils,” Miss Bayley continued.
There was a visible stiffening of the form of Mrs. Twiggly. “I’ll tell you first about the four children who live down in Woodford’s Cañon, them as had a shiftless, do-nothin’-useful actress for a mother.”
And so it was that Miss Josephine Bayley first heard of brave little Dixie Martin and her three young charges.
“’Twas the year of the big blizzard,” Mrs. Twiggly began, sitting so stiff and straight that her listener found herself wondering if she had a poker for a backbone. “I declare to it, there never had been such a winter. Too, that was the year they struck silver over beyond the cañon. It got out that the mountains hereabouts were all chock-full of payin’ ore, and over-night, it seemed like, a minin’-camp sprung up and grew in a fortnight to be a reg’lar town with houses and stores and even a the-a-ter built. You can see the ruins of it now when you’re over that way, and, havin’ a the-a-ter brought play-actin’ folks to Silver City, and mighty big money they took in.
“It came easy, and was spent easy, but all of a sudden there was no more silver; the veins had petered out, and the gay life of that town blew out like the flame on a candle, and then it was that some little one-horse show, havin’ heard how rich other actors had struck it there, came trailin’ along, but they was too late.
“They gave their show,—‘Shakespeare,’ they called it,—but they gave it to empty benches. They’d come over from Reno on the stage all dressed up in their hifalutin’ costumes, so’s not to have to fetch over their trunks, but they didn’t have any money to pay their way back, and so they started to walk.