“But, Granny, my mother keeps such careful accounts, every penny. Don’t they know how much money they spend?”
“Of course they don’t. They don’t have pennies to spend, honey. And the store won’t give them no account.”
“Then no matter how hard Scip works he won’t get any money?”
“Not a cent, sugar.”
“Then if I were he I wouldn’t work at all!”
“Reckon you’d be turned out then pretty quick without a roof over your head. That happened once before Scip were big. The others they ain’t much account for work. They was born tired. But Scip he’s strong and steady-like.”
“Perhaps he’ll run away and get rich.”
“Perhaps he will,” said Granny, “and perhaps he’ll stay by his mother.”
The teaching progressed, for Hazel was unusually apt for a child at her profession; and if Scip failed at times as a pupil it was not for lack of application on his part. At least four afternoons in the week he found it possible to slip away from the fields or the dirty cabin to the house, as Hazel liked to call it, among the pines. She had made it look like a dwelling-place, bringing two boxes for seats and a third for a table. One day Scipio brought her some early violets and she flew down to Granny’s for a tin can which she filled with water. In this she placed the flowers, setting the can in a corner against the pines. After that the tin vase was often filled. When her pupil could not come she tidied her pine-needle carpet, or, armed with the two-pronged stick Scip had given her, walked bravely among the cows and the grunting pigs. Some days teacher and scholar found it too cold to sit still long and raced one another through the trees, or teased the turkeys whose “gobble, gobble” always amused Hazel. But usually they worked hard at the task of learning to read. Hazel wisely gave up for the present the effort to teach the boy’s clumsy fingers to guide the pencil to write.
One afternoon he was late and seemed unusually slow in responding to his teacher’s questionings.