CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

AN EVENTFUL SPRING

Spring came, and every mountain cañon held a rushing torrent. The sky was gloriously blue after the long months that it had been leaden-gray, and flowers began to appear in the crevices soon after the snow was gone.

Joy in the heart of the young school-teacher sang with the returning birds. Even the small Martin children seemed to be eagerly expectant.

“I feel as though something ever so nice is going to happen, Miss Bayley, don’t you?” Dixie looked up glowingly from the slate on which she was trying to solve a difficult sum.

Her beloved friend and teacher stood at her side. These two had remained after school, that the older Martin girl might catch up with Ken in mathematics.

“I’d heaps rather write rhymes or sing songs or play on my violin,” Dixie confided when at last the slate had been washed clean and replaced in the desk.

“I’m glad,” Miss Bayley said as she pinned on her hat, preparing to depart. “You will derive much more joy from the poetry and the music, but arithmetic, too, must be mastered, if you are to go to college.”

The girl looked brightly up at her teacher. “I’d have to be living in a fairy-tale to have that happen,” she declared. Then laughingly she confessed, “There are only six pennies in the sock under my mattress, and you can’t think how hard I have tried to save all winter. However, I might call them a nest-egg toward the future education of the four Martins.”

The gold-brown eyes of the girl glowed from beneath the wide brim of her rather shabby hat, but the young teacher saw not the hat but only the radiant young face.

“Dixie,” she exclaimed suddenly, “this is the hour that the stage arrives. Let’s walk down the cañon road a little way and see if it is coming. Shall we?”

“I’d love to!” was the glad reply. “And maybe we’ll find some wild flowers.” Then, when they had started swinging along together, the younger girl asked, looking up at her taller companion, “Miss Bayley, are you expecting some one in particular to come to-day?”

The rosy flush in the teacher’s face puzzled Dixie. She had not thought that a romance might exist between Ken’s old friend and the young woman whom she so loved.

“No, dear, no one in particular,” was the quiet reply, and it was true, for although Miss Bayley had received a letter stating that Frederick Edrington would soon be through with his work of inspection, he had not said when he would revisit the cañon.

They had reached a high point, and Dixie had clambered up on a peak of rocks, that she might have a wider vision. Shading her eyes from the glare of the sun, she looked down into the valley.

“Surely there is something coming,” she called gleefully to the waiting teacher. “I can see it moving among the pine trees.” Then, clapping her hands, she added joyfully: “It _is_ the stage! It’s out in the clearing, and now it’s beginning to climb. I do believe it will pass here in half an hour or so.”

Miss Bayley pressed her hand on her heart to try to still its rapid beating. “I can’t understand it at all,” she thought, “but I seem to feel sure that some one _is_ coming on the stage, some one whom I shall be glad to see.” Never before had a half hour seemed so long to the two who spent the time searching for flowers among the rocks. Only a few, blue as the sky, had been found, when Dixie stood suddenly alert, listening. “Hear that rumble?” she sang out. “It’s the stage just around Old Indian Rock.” She pointed to an outjutting boulder below them at the turn in the cañon road. Breathlessly they waited. There were four passengers in the coach, and one was an elderly woman, who, handsomely dressed, sat very erect, and the expression on her proud, aristocratic face assured the two by the roadside that, whoever she might be, the errand that had brought her to the mountains was most displeasing to her.

The elderly stage-driver waved the hand that held the whip, and beamed down good-naturedly. The young teacher and Dixie smiled and nodded, but although the occupants of the coach must have seen them, they were not at all interested.

The girl heard Miss Bayley sigh. “Dear teacher,” she said softly, “won’t you come on down to our cabin for supper? There is to be cottage cheese that you like so much, with nice yellow cream on it.”

Dixie was convinced that her companion had been expecting some one who had not come.

Josephine Bayley laughed merrily. “You dear little tempter,” she said, “of course I’ll go.” And so hand in hand they descended the trail that led under the great old pines and down to the picturesque log cabin.

Although it was but five o’clock, the little mother at once began to prepare the evening meal. Ken and Jimmy-Boy were out milking the goat, and Carol was over at the Valley Ranch.

“May I set the table?” the teacher inquired.

Dixie nodded. “Let’s use the kept-for-company dishes to-night,” she suggested.

“But you promised long ago that you wouldn’t call me company,” Miss Bayley protested.

“I know I did,” Dixie smiled over the big yellow bowl which held the foamy cheese, and into which she was pouring rich cream. “I don’t understand the least bit why, but somehow I feel as if to-day were an extra occasion, sort of a party.”

“Perhaps because it’s the first real spring day that we’ve had,” Miss Bayley announced, as she opened the old walnut sideboard and brought forth the best china. “Your mother liked beautiful things, didn’t she, Dixie? This pattern is lovely.”

The girl looked up brightly. “I like it,” she replied; then added simply, “I suppose it was hard for Mother to live in a cabin, for all her life had been spent in an old colonial mansion in the South. Our great-aunt, Mrs. James Haddington-Allen, lives there, or, at least, I guess she does. She’s never answered any of our letters, but she always writes something on the envelopes before she returns them, so of course she does receive them.”

“Have you written to her lately?” Miss Bayley was setting the table as she asked the question. She was surprised at the decided tone in which the small girl replied: “No, I haven’t. I never wrote her but once, and that was after we children were left all alone. Our mother had often written, but her letters were always returned unopened.”

“Mrs. James Haddington-Allen must be a hard-hearted old dragoness,” the girl-teacher thought; but aloud she commented, “If your great-aunt could but see you four children, I am sure she would love you all.”

“She might love Carol because she is beautiful, like our mother, and she’d like Jimmy-Boy too, but Ken and I are regular Martins, so probably our great-aunt wouldn’t like us much.” To the surprise of the listener, there was a sob in the girl’s voice as she continued, “I’d heaps rather our great-aunt would never come, for probably she’d want to take Carol and Jimmy-Boy to her fine Southern home, but she wouldn’t want Ken or me. I—I just couldn’t live without Carol and Jimmy-Boy. I couldn’t. I couldn’t!”

Miss Bayley went toward the girl and took her in her arms. “My dear child,” she said tenderly, “before I’d let that happen, I would open up my old home in New York on the Hudson and adopt all four of you.”

Dixie smiled through her tears. “Goodness!” she said, springing away and wiping her eyes on the towel by the kitchen pump, “the cheese is salty enough as ’tis. I mustn’t spill any tears in it.”

Dixie had not grasped the meaning of the words she had heard. To her, Miss Bayley was just a poor young woman who had to teach school for a living, and a home in New York on the Hudson presented no picture to the girl who had always lived in the mountains, and who had never been farther away than Genoa. But to Miss Bayley those words had meant much. Why had she never thought of it before, she wondered. If Frederick Edrington never came back to her, if he had found, while away from her, that he had been mistaken, that he did not really care, still her life need not be empty.

She would go back to New York and take these four children with her. The great old salon that had been in darkness since the death of her parents would ring once again with laughter and song. Then when her brother Tim came back from his three years at sea, there would be a happy home waiting for him. The picture delighted the girl-teacher, and she began to sing as she placed the supper dishes on the best table-cloth.

Carol came in, bringing a bunch of early flowers from a sunny, sheltered garden on the Valley Ranch.

“Oh, how pretty!” Miss Bayley exclaimed. “They are just what we need for the middle of the table.”

The younger girl looked mystified. “Is there going to be a party? Is somebody extra coming?”

“No, dear, just we five,” Miss Bayley began, but the small girl interrupted with, “But, teacher, you’ve put out six plates and everything.”

“So I have!” The girl-teacher actually blushed. But before she could explain, even to herself, why she had done this, Dixie called excitedly, “Carol, skip to the door and see who’s coming. Ken’s waving his cap and shouting to some one coming down the cañon trail.”