She was out of the door when she stepped back to add: “Miss Bayley, if it don’t come too hard, I’d sort of let it seem like you think Jessica Archer is prettier than Carolina Martin and smarter than Dixie. It’ll be stretchin’ the truth mighty hard, but it’s policy. Good mornin’, Miss Bayley.”
The new teacher, at last alone, put her hands to her head as though she felt dizzy. How rasping was Mrs. Twiggly’s voice! But a moment later she was thinking of the poor little children of that stranded Ophelia, and looked eagerly forward to her first meeting with them.
CHAPTER FOUR
GETTING ACQUAINTED
It was a perfect autumn day, and he who has not been in the Sierra Nevada mountains on a golden October morning has not as yet known the full joy of living.
Josephine Bayley had been advised to lock her door in order to keep out “snoopin’ Indians.” She had been shown through a field-glass a group of most dilapidated dwellings about a mile to the south and down in the creek-bottom. These dwellings could not be called wigwams; indeed, they were too nondescript really to be called anything. Some had a rough framework of saplings, with pine branches for a roof and walls; others were made of stones held together with mud, while still others were but shiftlessly erected tents, even discarded clothing having been used, and all were surrounded by rubbish and squalor. Thus the one-time picturesqueness of the Washoe Indian has degenerated.
“They’re curious and snoopin’, those Indians are, but harmless,” Mrs. Enterprise Twiggly had said, when advising Miss Bayley to keep her door locked while she was away.
The new teacher, lithe, dark, athletic, stepped springily down the mountain road, feeling as though she must sing with a lark that was somewhere over in a clump of murmuring pines. But the first note of the song died on her lips as she suddenly stopped and gazed ahead of her.
Had that stone in the road moved, or was it her imagination? She gazed fascinated. Was it about to uncoil and raise a protesting head? Gracious! What was it she had heard about rattlers? When they coiled, they could spring—how far—was it twice the length of their own bodies? Did one have to measure them to know how far away one could stand in safety? If they were straight out, one always had time to escape, for they had to coil to strike. But the large round stone that did look strangely like a coiled snake did not stir, not even when a smaller rock was thrown at it.
Miss Bayley, laughing at her own fears, looked down the cañon road ahead of her, where she beheld a little procession approaching. A light of recognition brightened her dark eyes. “Oh, I am so glad!” she thought. “Here come the children of Ophelia.”
A queer-looking group they made. There was a soft mouse-colored burro, and on it sat a truly beautiful little girl of eight years, holding in front of her a chubby four-year-old boy, who was beaming with delight. A tall, lank lad, with a staff in one hand, was guiding the beast of burden, while on the other side, with pride shining in her eyes, that were a warm golden-brown, walked the little mother of them all, Dixie Martin. She was carrying a basket that held their lunch and leading a very small, long-legged goat that had a red ribbon tied about its neck.