Stepping to the edge of the porch, she stood there, bathed in moonlight. The night was glorious. Big Black Mountain, laying away in the distance, seemed the dark tower of some clan of the giants. Below, and nearer, she caught the reflection of the moon in a placid pool on Laurel Branch, while close at hand the rhododendrons wove a fancy border of shadows along the trail that led away to the bottom lands.
As the girl stood drinking in the splendor of it all, she gave a sudden start, then shrank back into the shadows. Had she caught the sound of shuffled footsteps, of a pebble rolling down the steep trail? She thought so. With a shudder she stepped through the door, closed it quickly, and let the heavy bar fall silently into place. Then, without a word, she crept beneath the covers. As an involuntary shudder seized her she felt her companion’s strong arms about her. So, soothed and reassured, she rested there for a moment. She and Florence had been pals for many long months. Strange and thrilling were the mysteries they had solved, the adventures they had experienced. What would the morrow bring? More mystery, greater adventures? At any rate, they would face them together, and with these thoughts her eyes closed in dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER VI
CONFEDERATE GOLD
“So you’re thinking of going into politics?”
Ralph Cawood, a frank-faced college boy of the mountains, who had become a friend of the two girls, brushed the tangled locks from his eyes and laughed a merry laugh as he repeated, “Going into politics! You two girls!”
“I didn’t say that,” said Marion with a frown and an involuntary stamp of her foot. “Teaching school isn’t going into politics, is it?”
“You just better believe it is! Anyway, it is if you’re to teach here in the mountains and draw your pay from the State. You’ll have to elect you a trustee, that’s what you’ll have to do. It’s always done. And believe me, that calls for a right smart of a scrap!”
“But Ralph!” Marion exclaimed. “Don’t you know we’ve nearly finished college, that we are better qualified than most of the teachers in the Mountain Academy at Middlesburg, and that the teachers they’ve had before scarcely knew how to read and write?”
“Yes,” said Ralph, his face suddenly growing sober, “they know all that, and more. But think of the money! This school at the mouth of Laurel Branch pays over seven hundred dollars. Last year Al Finley was head teacher. He paid his assistant twenty dollars a month. School lasts six months. That left him nearly six hundred for six months work, and he didn’t work half the time at that. If he’d worked at freighting, logging or getting out barrel staves, he couldn’t have earned that much in two years.”
“But the children!”