MISS CATHBY
His books strapped together with a discarded bridle rein, and dangling over his shoulder, Harky Mundee placed one reluctant foot after the other as he strode down the dirt road.
The events that culminated in this dreadful situation—returning to Miss Cathby's school at the Crossroads—had for the past three days been building up like a thunderstorm, and on the whole, it would have been easier to halt the storm. Every autumn, just after the harvest, Mun acquired firm ideas concerning the value of higher education for Harky. But never before had Mun resorted to such foul tricks or taken such unfair advantage.
Coming to where Tumbling Run foamed beneath a wooden bridge and hurled itself toward Willow Brook, Harky halted and rested both elbows on the bridge railing. He looked glumly into the icy water, along which coons of high and low degree prowled every night, and he wished mightily that he were a coon.
Though even coons had their troubles, Harky had never known of a single one that had been forced to hoe corn, milk cows, feed pigs, pitch hay, dig potatoes, or do any of the other unspeakable tasks that were forever falling to the lot of human beings. But even farm chores were not entirely unbearable. In a final agony of desperation, his cause already lost, Harky had even pointed out to Mun that the fence needed mending and hadn't he better cut the posts?
"Blast it!" Mun roared. "Stop this minute tryin' to make a fool of me, Harky! You know's well as I do that the cows ain't goin' to be out to pasture more'n 'nother three weeks! You need some book lore!"
Harky rubbed the heel of his right shoe against the shin of his left leg and wished again that he were a coon, even a treed coon. Being hound-cornered was surely preferable to becoming the hapless victim of Miss Ophelia Cathby.
Grasping the very end of the bridle rein, Harky whirled the books around his head. But exactly on the point of releasing the strap and reveling in the satisfying distance the books would fly, Harky brought them to a stop and slung them back over his shoulder.