The Call of the Cumberlands

Sally was not in the procession, and the teacher, riding on, found her

lying face down among the briars of the desolate meeting-house yard,

her small body convulsively heaving with her weeping, and her slim

fingers grasping the thorny briar shoots as though she would still hold

to the earth that lay in freshly broken clods over her mother's grave.

Miss Grover lifted her gently, and at first the girl only stared at

her out of wide, unseeing eyes.

"You've nothing to keep you here now," said the older woman, gently.

"You can come to us, and live at the college." She had learned from

Sally's lips that she lived alone with her mother and younger brother.

"You can't go on living there now."

But the girl drew away, and shook her head with a wild torrent of

childish dissent.

"No, I kain't, neither!" she declared, violently. "I kain't!"

"Why, dear?" The teacher took the palpitating little figure in her

arms and kissed the wet face. She had learned something of this sweet

wood-thrush girl, and had seen both sides of life's coin enough to be

able to close her eyes and ears, and visualize the woman that this

might be.

"'Cause I kain't!" was the obstinate reply.

Being wise, Miss Grover desisted from urging, and went with Sally to

the desolated cabin, which she straightway began to overhaul and put to

rights. The widow had been dying for a week. It was when she lifted

Samson's gun with the purpose of sweeping the corner that the girl

swooped down on her, and rescued the weapon from her grasp.

"Nobody but me mustn't tech thet rifle-gun," she exclaimed, and then,

little by little, it came out that the reason Sally could not leave

this cabin, was because some time there might be a whippoorwill call

out by the stile, and, when it came, she must be there to answer. And,

when at the next vacation Miss Grover rode over, and announced that she

meant to visit Sally for a month or two, and when under her deft hands

the cabin began to transform itself, and the girl to transform herself,

she discovered that Sally found in the graveyard another magnet. There,

she seemed to share something with Samson where their dead lay buried.

While the "fotched-on" lady taught the girl, the girl taught the

"fotched-on" lady, for the birds were her brothers, and the flowers her

cousins, and in the poetry that existed before forms of meter came into

being she was deeply versed.