"Not just a barnyard duck and not just a wild duck," Harky explained patiently. "It was some big old duck, maybe older'n Old Joe himself, that's been setting back in the woods just hoping Sue would come along."
Miss Cathby's eyes glowed with a true crusader's zeal. In all the time Harky had spent in school and all the time he would spend there, she could not hope to impart more than the rudiments of an education. But here was a heaven-sent opportunity to strike at the very roots of the ignorance and superstition that barred his march toward a more enlightened life. Miss Cathby saw past the boy to the father who would be. Strike Harky's chains and he would voluntarily free his children.
"That's impossible, Harold," she began.
Warming to her subject, she sketched the Garden of Eden, traced the history of mankind, disposed of witches and witch hunters in a few hundred well-chosen words, explained the laws of genetics, and finished with conclusive proof that a coon hound cannot mate with a duck.
Harky listened, not without interest. When it came to telling stories, he conceded, Miss Cathby was even better than Mun and almost as good as Mellie Garson. Nor was she shooting wholly in the dark; Harky himself did not believe that Duckfoot had been sired by a duck. But there was something wanting.
For a moment he could not define the lack. Then, happily, he thought of another of Pine Heglin's ideas. If apples were stored so they could not roll, Pine decided, there would be fewer bruised apples. Forthwith he constructed some latticeworks of willow withes, arranged them as shelves, and stored his apples on them. But Pine had forgotten that some apples are big and some small. The small ones fell through the lattices and the big ones became jammed in them. All were bruised, and rotted quickly, with the result that Pine had no apples at all.
Miss Cathby's lecture was like that, Harky decided. She would find an exact niche for Old Joe, Duckfoot, Mun, everything in the world, and she'd never stop to think that few things really belonged in exact niches. Her ideas just didn't have room to grow in. Mun's did.
"Can you prove to me, Harold, that there is any such creature as this witch duck?" Miss Cathby finished.
"No ma'am," said Harky, and he forebore to mention that neither could she prove there wasn't.
By some miracle, the endless day ended. The new books that Miss Cathby gave him strapped in the bridle rein and slung over his shoulder, Harky walked straight up the road. He had a feeling that was justified when he saw Dib Heglin waiting.