The Code of the Mountains. Charles Neville Buck
that had inspired the almost fanatical men and women who stood as sponsors for the enterprise to give so high-sounding a name to the institution which taught kindergarten and primary classes. Some day, they hoped, it might grow up to its title, and meanwhile there were gray-beards and wrinkled women who sought to study primer and multiplication-table, but whose pride would bar them from advantages undignified by the name of college.
On the spring morning when Newt Spooner was trudging homeward, Doctor Murray, who had slowly and courageously turned his dream into a reality, sat in the study of the college. There was a smile on his lips, and the square-jawed face, which escaped all trace of the pedagogic, was contented. The sun streamed in through his windows and lighted a room finished in wainscoting of oak and maple—sawed at the mill, which was part of the institution and which he could see from his window, when he looked down.
Above, when he cast his eyes in that direction through another window, nestled the small hospital, where barbaric methods of local surgery were being altered. But, best of all, there came to his ears laughter and shouts from the trim campus where boys and girls were at play: boys and girls who until they had come here, had known little about laughter and much about drudgery. And every peal of mirth was a challenge to the old order of hatred and the ancient thraldom of sullenness.
A girl came into the room and laid some papers on his desk, and the doctor nodded at her with a smile.
"Minerva," he said, "I'm afraid you are working too hard. One doesn't have to learn everything at once, you know."
The pupil flushed and stood for a moment silent. She was straight and lithe, and under the blue calico dress that was turned down at her neck, her throat was brown with a tan through which a petal-like color glowed. Her brown hair glistened with the glint of polished mahogany, and her eyes struck the doctor as eyes meant for mirth, though they had hardly learned to laugh. The deadly seriousness of the hills and the Calvinistic seriousness that makes martyrs, seemed to hold in bondage a spirit that nature had intended to radiate gaiety. Her fingers drew themselves together into fists, and after a moment she spoke slowly, and her speech was a strange blending of the illiterate argot of the hills and a conscious effort to speak in the phrases dictated by the education which she coveted.
"I reckon ye don't hardly know how much I've got to learn," she said. "I reckon ye don't realize how plumb ign'rant I am."
Suddenly her voice became passionate.
"Maybe ye don't know how I hate it all—how I want to get away from ign'rance an' dirt an' wickedness. I've been wonderin' if I didn't err in comin' here. It's just makin' me hate that cabin over yon—I mean over there—on Troublesome. Sometimes I think it can't hardly do nothin'—do anything—but make me dissatisfied."
The head of the school looked up, and his face grew grave.
"There are times," he said, "when that thought comes to me, too. I don't mean as to you, Minerva, alone, but as to all those we take here and teach. At first it was all a dream of bringing a light to a place that was dark. That was the only phase I saw. But later I saw more. One can't make a dream a reality without struggle. Dissatisfaction is the price we must pay for regeneration—and people like you and myself must be among the first to pay it."
"Over there," she went on, as though talking to herself, "they only hates me for it. They says I'm stuck on myself an' that what's been good enough for my folks for all time ain't good enough for me no more—I mean any more."
"It takes time," the man reassured her. "In the place of ignorance, we offer education. In the place of lawlessness, we offer law. In the place of squalor, we offer thrift. Are those things not worth what they cost?"
The girl stood silent for a moment, then nodded her head.
"I reckon so," she answered simply, and turned to leave the library. After she had gone, the teacher sat for a time with his book open before him, but his eyes were contemplative, and it was from memory and not from the printed page that he was reading.
He was thinking back and seeing over again a day shortly after his school had opened. In those times there had been fewer buildings, and of the many pupils who came, hungry to learn, only a few could be taken in. Among the first had been Minerva.
She had come exhausted and tired because she had come on foot, and her mean calico dress had been briar-torn, and her feet, which were bare, had been bruised. But in her eyes was gleaming a passion of hunger and resolve for the food which the school offered the mind. She had presented herself, a ragged little mendicant asking the alms of education, carrying what belongings she had in such a bundle as tramps carry.
Back in her unlighted and windowless cabin, she had heard of this "new-fangled" institution where was to be dispensed the pabulum of "larnin'"—and she had made her pilgrimage. Now Doctor Murray was recalling that day. He had been down by the stile which gave entrance from the creek-bed road, when he had seen the slight figure trudging along, and the girl had stopped and eyed him shyly.
"Air ye the feller frum down below what aims ter give folks larnin'?" she had demanded, as her large eyes held his with a tense directness, untinged by any humor.
"To give folks learning is a large contract," he had answered with a quizzical smile; "but we hope to give to as many as we can, at least its rudiments."
"What's them?"
"The start. Have you ever been to school at all?"
"I've done been ter the blab-school. I kin read an' write an' figger."
Dr. Murray had stood there looking at her, and it had come to him that she made a very pathetic picture, with the yearning in her eyes and the dust of travel on her calico, so he denied her with a heavy heart.
"Just now," he said regretfully, "we can only take in a few pupils and we are already over-crowded. I'm afraid we can't make room for you." Suddenly he added, "How far have you come?"
"The rise of twenty mile, sence sun-up," she informed him simply, then tears welled rebelliously into her eyes. Her voice broke from her lips with a fierce passionateness.
"Ye've got ter take me," she cried out. "Ye've jest simply got ter take me. I've done been prayin' ter God Almighty ter give me a chanst. I've done heerd that ye war a preacher of ther Gospel, an' I reckon God hain't a-goin' ter suffer ye ter turn me away."
Doctor Murray had then been new to the hills. The storm-like intensity of the mountain character was bringing him its revelations. He stood there by the road, watching the ox-teams that were bringing logs in to his saw-mill and made rapid calculations and as he did so he heard the new candidate for matriculation rushing on:
"Ther Scripters says thet God's servant won't turn away sich as comes to him seeking light—an' I've done come."
"At all events," he answered gently, "come up and have something to eat, and I'll talk it over with my wife."
Mrs. Murray had spent a half-hour with the girl, and then had come back to her husband.
"She is as wild as a squirrel," was her announcement, "but I have never seen such a starving heart or brain. I don't know what we shall do with her, but we must let her stay." And so Minerva had stayed.
Now she went out of the library, and made her way to a favorite spot up on the hillside. It was a study hour, and she carried a book with her. The time she had spent here had wrought a transformation. The brain had unfolded and the heart had become unplaced. The terms of this school adapted themselves to the needs of the environment. They did not conflict with the nearer demands of farm work, but accommodated themselves to necessity. When the frequent vacations came, Minerva went back to the cabin which she called her home. Each of these visits she dreaded.
Mountain reserve is hard to break. Even in her tempestuous appeal to the head of the school, she had not told her full story. Now she was thinking of it.
Mountain women grow old while they are yet young, but her mother had seemed to her different. Mountain women are grave with a gravity which is more than half sullen, but she remembered a mother who had laughed and