As the girls passed through group after group, they felt that the very atmosphere about them had changed. It was as if a threatening storm hung over the mountain top. Everyone smiled and spoke, but there was a difference. One could scarcely tell what it was; perhaps an inflection of the voice, perhaps the tightening of the muscles about the mouth. Whatever it was, Marion, who was a keen student of human nature, felt that she could say almost to certainty: “That one is for us; this one against us.”
There were few doubtful ones. Mountain folks are quick to make decisions and slow to change them.
A little lump came to Marion’s throat as she realized that the people they passed were about evenly divided.
“And to think,” she whispered with a little choke down deep in her throat, “only yesterday they were all so cordial. They praised us for the education we were giving their children. They’ve all asked us out to dinner many times. ‘Come and stay a week’—that’s what they said.”
“Yes,” Florence smiled without bitterness, “but this summer we have been teaching their children for nothing. We are about to ask them to let their State pay us the money coming to them for teaching their winter school. Black Blevens has always controlled that. He’s unprincipled, but he’s rich and powerful as mountain folks go. He’s given work to many of these people when they needed it badly. Many of them are kin to him—belong to his clan. As they would say, they are ‘beholden’ to him. Whatever his battle is, they must fight it. They’re living back in the feudal days. And that,” said this big strong girl, swinging her arms on high, “is what makes me love it. I’d like to have been born a knight in those good old days.
“‘Scotts wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,
Scotts wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to victory!’”
She threw back her head and laughed. “I’m going to get out my ‘Lady of the Lake’ and my ‘Lays of the Last Minstrels’ to-night. And in the fight that lies before us I’m going to live over those days of old.”