"Whut"s that?" said June quickly.
"That"s poetry."
"Whut"s po-e-try?" Hale threw up both hands.
"I don"t know, but I"ll read you some--some day."
By that time she was gurgling with delight over a bunch of spring beauties that came up, root, stalk and all, when she reached for them.
"Well, ain"t they purty?" While they lay in her hand and she looked, the rose-veined petals began to close, the leaves to droop and the stem got limp.
"Ah-h!" crooned June. "I won"t pull up no more o" THEM."
""These little dream-flowers found in the spring." More poetry, June."
A little later he heard her repeating that line to herself. It was an easy step to poetry from flowers, and evidently June was groping for it.
A few days later the service-berry swung out white stars on the low hill-sides, but Hale could tell her nothing that she did not know about the "sarvice-berry." Soon, the dogwood swept in snowy gusts along the mountains, and from a bank of it one morning a red-bird flamed and sang: "What cheer! What cheer! What cheer!" And like its scarlet coat the red-bud had burst into bloom. June knew the red-bud, but she had never heard it called the Judas tree.
"You see, the red-bud was supposed to be poisonous. It shakes in the wind and says to the bees, "Come on, little fellows--here"s your nice fresh honey, and when they come, it betrays and poisons them."
"Well, what do you think o" that!" said June indignantly, and Hale had to hedge a bit.
"Well, I don"t know whether it REALLY does, but that"s what they SAY."
A little farther on the white stars of the trillium gleamed at them from the border of the woods and near by June stooped over some lovely sky-blue blossoms with yellow eyes.
"Forget-me-nots," said Hale. June stooped to gather them with a radiant face.
"Oh," she said, "is that what you call "em?"
"They aren"t the real ones--they"re false forget-me-nots."
"Then I don"t want "em," said June. But they were beautiful and fragrant and she added gently:
""Tain"t their fault. I"m agoin" to call "em jus" forget-me-nots, an"
I"m givin" "em to you," she said--"so that you won"t."
"Thank you," said Hale gravely. "I won"t."
They found larkspur, too--
""Blue as the heaven it gazes at,"" quoted Hale.
"Whut"s "gazes"?"
"Looks." June looked up at the sky and down at the flower.
"Tain"t," she said, "hit"s bluer."
When they discovered something Hale did not know he would say that it was one of those--
""Wan flowers without a name.""
"My!" said June at last, "seems like them wan flowers is a mighty big fambly."
"They are," laughed Hale, "for a bachelor like me."
"Huh!" said June.
Later, they ran upon yellow adder"s tongues in a hollow, each blossom guarded by a pair of ear-like leaves, Dutchman"s breeches and wild bleeding hearts--a name that appealed greatly to the fancy of the romantic little lady, and thus together they followed the footsteps of that spring. And while she studied the flowers Hale was studying the loveliest flower of them all--little June. About ferns, plants and trees as well, he told her all he knew, and there seemed nothing in the skies, the green world of the leaves or the under world at her feet to which she was not magically responsive. Indeed, Hale had never seen a man, woman or child so eager to learn, and one day, when she had apparently reached the limit of inquiry, she grew very thoughtful and he watched her in silence a long while.
"What"s the matter, June?" he asked finally.
"I"m just wonderin" why I"m always axin" why," said little June.
She was learning in school, too, and she was happier there now, for there had been no more open teasing of the new pupil. Bob"s championship saved her from that, and, thereafter, school changed straightway for June. Before that day she had kept apart from her school-fellows at recess-times as well as in the school-room. Two or three of the girls had made friendly advances to her, but she had shyly repelled them--why she hardly knew--and it was her lonely custom at recess-times to build a play-house at the foot of a great beech with moss, broken bits of bottles and stones. Once she found it torn to pieces and from the look on the face of the tall mountain boy, Cal Heaton, who had grinned at her when she went up for her first lesson, and who was now Bob"s arch-enemy, she knew that he was the guilty one. Again a day or two later it was destroyed, and when she came down from the woods almost in tears, Bob happened to meet her in the road and made her tell the trouble she was in. Straightway he charged the trespa.s.ser with the deed and was lied to for his pains. So after school that day he slipped up on the hill with the little girl and helped her rebuild again.
"Now I"ll lay for him," said Bob, "and catch him at it."
"All right," said June, and she looked both her worry and her grat.i.tude so that Bob understood both; and he answered both with a nonchalant wave of one hand.
"Never you mind--and don"t you tell Mr. Hale," and June in dumb acquiescence crossed heart and body. But the mountain boy was wary, and for two or three days the play-house was undisturbed and so Bob himself laid a trap. He mounted his horse immediately after school, rode past the mountain lad, who was on his way home, crossed the river, made a wide detour at a gallop and, hitching his horse in the woods, came to the play-house from the other side of the hill. And half an hour later, when the pale little teacher came out of the school-house, he heard grunts and blows and scuffling up in the woods, and when he ran toward the sounds, the bodies of two of his pupils rolled into sight clenched fiercely, with torn clothes and bleeding faces--Bob on top with the mountain boy"s thumb in his mouth and his own fingers gripped about his antagonist"s throat. Neither paid any attention to the school-master, who pulled at Bob"s coat unavailingly and with horror at his ferocity.
Bob turned his head, shook it as well as the thumb in his mouth would let him, and went on gripping the throat under him and pushing the head that belonged to it into the ground. The mountain boy"s tongue showed and his eyes bulged.
""Nough!" he yelled. Bob rose then and told his story and the school-master from New England gave them a short lecture on gentleness and Christian charity and fixed on each the awful penalty of "staying in" after school for an hour every day for a week. Bob grinned:
"All right, professor--it was worth it," he said, but the mountain lad shuffled silently away.
An hour later Hale saw the boy with a swollen lip, one eye black and the other as merry as ever--but after that there was no more trouble for June. Bob had made his promise good and gradually she came into the games with her fellows there-after, while Bob stood or sat aside, encouraging but taking no part--for was he not a member of the Police Force? Indeed he was already known far and wide as the Infant of the Guard, and always he carried a whistle and usually, outside the school-house, a pistol b.u.mped his hip, while a Winchester stood in one corner of his room and a billy dangled by his mantel-piece.
The games were new to June, and often Hale would stroll up to the school-house to watch them--Prisoner"s Base, Skipping the Rope, Antny Over, Cracking the Whip and Lifting the Gate; and it pleased him to see how lithe and active his little protege was and more than a match in strength even for the boys who were near her size. June had to take the penalty of her greenness, too, when she was "introduced to the King and Queen" and b.u.mped the ground between the make-believe sovereigns, or got a cup of water in her face when she was trying to see stars through a pipe. And the boys pinned her dress to the bench through a crack and once she walked into school with a placard on her back which read:
"June-Bug." But she was so good-natured that she fast became a favourite. Indeed it was noticeable to Hale as well as Bob that Cal Heaton, the mountain boy, seemed always to get next to June in the Tugs of War, and one morning June found an apple on her desk. She swept the room with a glance and met Cal"s guilty flush, and though she ate the apple, she gave him no thanks--in word, look or manner. It was curious to Hale, moreover, to observe how June"s instinct deftly led her to avoid the mistakes in dress that characterized the gropings of other girls who, like her, were in a stage of transition. They wore gaudy combs and green skirts with red waists, their clothes bunched at the hips, and to their shoes and hands they paid no attention at all. None of these things for June--and Hale did not know that the little girl had leaped her fellows with one bound, had taken Miss Anne Saunders as her model and was climbing upon the pedestal where that lady justly stood.
The two had not become friends as Hale hoped. June was always silent and reserved when the older girl was around, but there was never a move of the latter"s hand or foot or lip or eye that the new pupil failed to see. Miss Anne rallied Hale no little about her, but he laughed good-naturedly, and asked why SHE could not make friends with June.
"She"s jealous," said Miss Saunders, and Hale ridiculed the idea, for not one sign since she came to the Gap had she shown him. It was the jealousy of a child she had once betrayed and that she had outgrown, he thought; but he never knew how June stood behind the curtains of her window, with a hungry suffering in her face and eyes, to watch Hale and Miss Anne ride by and he never guessed that concealment was but a sign of the dawn of womanhood that was breaking within her. And she gave no hint of that breaking dawn until one day early in May, when she heard a woodthrush for the first time with Hale: for it was the bird she loved best, and always its silver fluting would stop her in her tracks and send her into dreamland. Hale had just broken a crimson flower from its stem and held it out to her.
"Here"s another of the "wan ones," June. Do you know what that is?"
"Hit"s"--she paused for correction with her lips drawn severely in for precision--"IT"S a mountain poppy. Pap says it kills goslings"--her eyes danced, for she was in a merry mood that day, and she put both hands behind her--"if you air any kin to a goose, you better drap it."
"That"s a good one," laughed Hale, "but it"s so lovely I"ll take the risk. I won"t drop it."
"Drop it," caught June with a quick upward look, and then to fix the word in her memory she repeated--"drop it, drop it, DROP it!"
"Got it now, June?"
"Uh-huh."