"Oh, Todd. We knowed it later when he went about with his left hand tied up,—Blant fired as the bullet hit Rich, at the hand that held the gun. We Marrses don't do no low-down fighting,—we allus fight in the open. And the Cheevers used to; but Todd is a snake in the grass, and don't stop at nothing."
Thursday.
While at the big house talking with the head-workers yesterday, they showed me some albums of photographs made in the beginnings of their work here, before the school was even thought of, and when they came up from the Blue Grass only in the summers, and lived in tents, having classes in cooking, sewing, singing, nursing and the like. I turned the pages with eagerness, hearing enthralling tales as I went, and stopped at last before a small picture of strange beauty. In a blaze of firelight, against a dusky log-cabin interior, sat a young mother with a child clasped in her arms. The serene, Madonna-like tenderness of face and attitude made the photograph memorable and surprising.
"Many persons have admired that picture," said one of the heads; "we took it years ago, over on Rakeshin Creek, late one afternoon when, weary from a long tramp, we walked in upon a young mother and her child in the firelight. We spent the night there afterward."
"On Rakeshin!" I exclaimed. "How long ago was it?"
"Eight years, I should say."
"Do you suppose—could it have been, the wife and child of Mr. Atkins?"
"That's exactly who it was," she replied,—"one of his wives, I hardly remember which."
"I know," I said; "it was Iry's mother. And that wonderful child remembers the very hour! Only Sunday he was telling of the long look he and his mother were taking at each other when some strange women came in and interrupted them."
The heads exclaimed with me in wonder and loving interest.