one blessed hilarious moment the school-master had stood helpless and enraged, blinded and speechless, choking and gasping and dripping sour cream from every point of his hair, nose, collar, chin, and the tips of his very fingers; and the wild mob of hysterical pupils stood on the desks and viewed him, bending double with their mirth, or jumping up and down in their ecstasy. The next moment Allan Whitney had taken command, and with one raised hand had silenced the hilarity, with a second motion had cleared the room, and a low word to one of his devoted slaves brought a pail of water to his side. Then in the seclusion of the empty school-room he applied himself to the rescue of Mr. Applethorn.
Miranda, in the shelter of the cloak-room door, secure for the moment from the cream-filled eyes of the teacher, watched her hero in awe as he mopped away at his enemy, as tenderly and kindly as if he had been a little child in trouble. She was too filled with mixed emotions to care to play the guileless, saucy part she had prepared for herself in this comedy. She was filled with dread lest after all Allan did not approve of what she had done, and did not like it. That he would be in the least deceived by her sunbonnet trick she never for a moment expected. That he would be angry because she had stopped the fight had not crossed her mind before. Now she stood in an agony of fear, forgetting the comical sight of the school-master done in sour cream, and trembled lest she had hopelessly offended her hero. Perhaps after all it wasn't fair to interfere with the game. Perhaps she had transgressed the rules of the code and lost her high place in his estimation. If she had, no punishment would be too great, no penance suffice to cover her transgression. The sun would be blotted out of her little world, and her heart broken forever.
At that instant of dejection Allan turned from wiping out the victim's left eye and gave the cringing Miranda a large, kind, appreciative wink. Suddenly her sun rose high once more, and her heart sprang lightly up again. She responded with her tongue in her cheek, and a knowing grimace, departing, warmed and satisfied, taking the precaution to make her exit through the window of the cloak-room. Down behind the alders by the creek, however, her natural man asserted itself, and she sat down to laugh till she cried over the spectacle of her teacher in a tin pail enveloped in sour cream. Next morning she found a large piece of spruce gum in her desk with a bit of paper wrapped around it on which was written in Allan's familiar scrawl:
"You are a little brick."
The strange thing about it all was that Allan and Mr. Applethorn became excellent friends after that; but the selectmen, though they offered every inducement in their power, could not prevail upon the teacher to remain longer than the end of the month. Poor little Mr. Applethorn could not get over his humiliation before his scholars, and he never quite understood how that sour cream got located over his head, though Allan gave a very plausible explanation and kept him in some mysterious way from making too close an investigation.
After that Allan Whitney always had a glance and a wink, and on rare occasions, a smile, for Miranda, but the boy did not come back to school again after Mr. Applethorn left, and the little girl seldom saw him except on the street. However, her worship of him relaxed no whit and her young heart resented the things that were said about him. Always she was on the watch to do him a good turn, but not for a long time did it come and then it came with a vengeance, a short, sharp trial of her loyalty.
Chapter V
It was a bitter cold night in November and Miranda had crept up close to the fireplace with her spelling-book—not that she cared in the least for her spelling lesson, though there was to be a spelling-down contest the next day in school, but her spelling-book was always a good excuse to Grandma Heath for not knitting or spinning of an evening.
Grandpa Heath came in presently, stamping away the snow, and shutting the outside door noisily. One could see he was excited. He strode across the room and hung up the big key that locked the old smoke-house door. Mr. Heath was constable and the old smoke-house was being used for a lock-up. It was plain that something had happened.
Miranda looked up alertly, but cast down her eyes at once to her book and was apparently a diligent scholar, even conning her words half aloud. She knew by experience that if she appeared to be listening, all the news would be saved till she was sent off to bed, and then she would have to lie on the floor in the cold with her ear to the pipe-hole that was supposed to warm her room in order to get necessary information. If she kept still and was absorbed in her work the chances were her grandfather would forget she was there.
He hung up his coat, muffler and cap, and sat down heavily in his chair across the table from his wife, who was diligently knitting a long gray stocking. The light of the one candle that was frugally burning high on the shelf over the fireplace, flickered fitfully over the whole room and made the old man's face look ashen gray with shadows as he began to talk, nervously fingering his scraggly gray beard:
"Well, I guess we've had a murder!" he spoke shakily, as if he could not himself quite comprehend the fact he was imparting.
"You guess!" said his wife sharply, "Don't you know? There ain't any half-way about a murder usually."
"Well, he ain't dead yet, but there ain't much chance fer his life. I guess he'll pass away 'fore the mornin'."
"Who? Why don't you ever tell the whole story?" snapped Grandmother Heath excitedly.
"Why, it's old Enoch Taylor. Didn't I say in the first place?"
"No, you didn't. Who done it?”
“Allan Whitney, leastways he was comin' away with a gun when we found him, an' we've got him arrested. He's down in the smoke-house now."
"H'm!" commented his wife. "Just what I expected he'd come to. Well, the town'll be well rid of him. Ain't he kinda young though to be hung?"
“Well, I guess he's about seventeen, but he's large fer his age. I don't know whether they ken hang him er not. He ain't ben tried yet of course, but it'll go against him, no question o' that. He's ben a pest to the neighborhood fer a long time—”
At this point Miranda's spelling-book fell clattering to the hearth, where it knocked off the cover from the bowl of yeast set to rise by the warmth, but when her startled grandparents turned to look at her she was apparently sound asleep, sitting on her little cushion on the hearth with her head against the fire jamb.
Her grandmother arose and gave her a vigorous shaking.
“M’randy, git right up off'n that hearth and go to bed. It beats all how a great girl like you can't keep awake to get her lessons. You might a fell in the fire. Wake up, I tell you, an' go to bed this minute!”
Miranda awoke with studied leisure, yawning and dazed, and admirably unconscious of her surroundings. Slowly she picked up her book, rubbing her drowsy eyes, lighted her candle and dragged herself yawning up the stairs to her room, but when she arrived there she did not prepare for bed. Instead she wrapped herself in a quilt and lay down with her ear to the stove-pipe hole, her whole body tense and quivering with agony.
The old couple waited until the stair door was latched and the girl's footsteps unmistakably toward the top of the stair, then the Grandmother spoke:
"I'm real glad he's got caught now 'fore he growed up any bigger. I always was afraid M'randy'd take a notion to him an' run off like her mother did. He's good lookin', the kind like her father was, and such things run in the blood. She was real fond of him a couple of years back—used to fly up like a scratch-cat every time any body mentioned his cuttin's up, but she ain't mentioned him lately."
"Aw—you didn't need to worry 'bout that I guess," said her husband meditatively, he wouldn't ever have took to her. Red hair and a little turned up nose like hers don't go down with these young fellers. Besides, she ain't nothin' but a child, an' he's most a grown man."
"She ain't so bad looking," bristled her grandmother with asperity, and it is a pity that poor, plain Miranda, who fancied herself a blot on the face of the earth for homeliness, could not have overheard her, for it would have