Mr. Sethibald Archer. He owns all the sheep-grazin’ country round about, and if he don’t own it honest, he’s got it somehow.”

“Sethibald?” Miss Bayley repeated. “I never heard such a Christian name as that before.”

Mrs. Twiggly was scornful.

“Well, ’twa’n’t that in the beginnin’,” she said. “It was jest plain Seth, but when they got so rich, his wife, who’d allus been Maria, went to visit folks in the city, and when she came back she had her name printed on bits of pasteboard, visitin’-cards, she called ’em, though land knows who she’s goin’ to visit in these parts, and she said Mrs. Seth didn’t look stylish enough, so she tacked on the endin’. Mrs. Sethibald Archer, that’s what’s on the card.”

Again the new teacher had an almost uncontrollable desire to laugh, but, instead, she seated herself at the table and ate the really good breakfast, and found that she was unusually hungry. The mountain-air surely was a tonic.

As her guest seemed in no hurry to depart, Miss Bayley said, “Won’t you be seated, Mrs. Twiggly, and tell me some more about my duties as school-teacher?”

“Well, I dunno but I can set a spell,” was the reply of the garrulous woman, who had “talked herself thin,” as Mrs. Sethibald Archer had been known to declare, and which may have been true.

“Please tell me about my other pupils,” Miss Bayley continued.

There was a visible stiffening of the form of Mrs. Twiggly. “I’ll tell you first about the four children who live down in Woodford’s Cañon, them as had a shiftless, do-nothin’-useful actress for a mother.”

And so it was that Miss Josephine Bayley first heard of brave little Dixie Martin and her three young charges.

“’Twas the year of the big blizzard,” Mrs. Twiggly began, sitting so stiff and straight that her listener found herself wondering if she had a poker for a backbone. “I declare to it, there never had been such a winter. Too, that was the year they struck silver over beyond the cañon. It got out that the mountains hereabouts were all chock-full of payin’ ore, and over-night, it seemed like, a minin’-camp sprung up and grew in a fortnight to be a reg’lar town with houses and stores and even a the-a-ter built. You can see the ruins of it now when you’re over that way, and, havin’ a the-a-ter brought play-actin’ folks to Silver City, and mighty big money they took in.

“It came easy, and was spent easy, but all of a sudden there was no more silver; the veins had petered out, and the gay life of that town blew out like the flame on a candle, and then it was that some little one-horse show, havin’ heard how rich other actors had struck it there, came trailin’ along, but they was too late.

“They gave their show,—‘Shakespeare,’ they called it,—but they gave it to empty benches. They’d come over from Reno on the stage all dressed up in their hifalutin’ costumes, so’s not to have to fetch over their trunks, but they didn’t have any money to pay their way back, and so they started to walk.

“Well, one of ’em was a pretty, frail-lookin’ young girl, with big round eyes and soft curly hair. She wore a long, trailin’ white dress. Ophelia, they called her, but she wa’n’t strong, and them paper shoes she had on got cut to pieces as soon as she began to walk along the mountain roads. When they got to Woodford’s Cañon the man dressed up as king saw as she couldn’t walk any farther, so he said she’d have to stop at some ranch-house and rest till the stage-coach came along.

“The only house anywhere near belonged to Pine Tree Martin. Folks hereabouts called him that because he was always sayin’, ‘Neighbors, don’t cut down the pine trees.’ Queer, how that man did love pine trees. He had two of the finest ones you ever saw growin’ in front of his log cabin, and they’re still there. Well, Pine Tree Martin was nigh forty years old, and he’d been livin’ alone since his ol’ mother died. The king and another fellow they called Hamlet went to the cabin and knocked on the door. Nobody was at home, so they pushed open the door and found a fire burning in the stove and supper set for one on the table. They carried Ophelia, who had fainted by that time, into the cabin and put her on the bed, then the rest of them made tracks for Reno.”

The sniff was very audible now.

Then she went on: “That shows how much morals play-actin’ folks have, but I can tell you Pine Tree Martin wa’n’t made of no such ne’er-do-well stuff. When he found that done-up girl with her big round eyes and soft curly hair in his house, and heerd how she didn’t have a home that she could go to, he up and loved her, as only the Pine Tree Martin kind of people can love.

“He married her and took the tenderest sort o’ care of her as long as she lived. Nothin’ he could get was too good for her, and she as useless as a—well, a butterfly, I guess. An’ what’s more, she was allus talkin’ about what blue-blooded folks her relations was. It seems their name was Haddington-Allen, and they was rich and proud. They had disowned her because she wanted to go on the stage and be a star. When Dixie was born, she wrote letters to the aunt that had fetched her up in the South, but they allus came back, and on ’em was written, ‘Unopened by Mrs. Haddington-Allen.’

“This Mrs. Pine Tree Martin never took to Western ways. Her heart was allus in the South, an’ as her children were born she named them Dixie, Carolina, and Kentucky, till the baby came, and she named him after the uncle that had fetched her up, James Haddington-Allen Martin.

“In one way it turned out good for Dixie to have such a shiftless mother, for as soon as that girl could hold a saucepan she began to cook for the family. The only thing the mother would do was sew, and she made fancy dresses for herself and for the other girl, Carolina, to wear. She never took much pride in the two older children. The boy, Ken, was the livin’ image of his homely, raw-boned pa, and Dixie was a great disappointment, for she was a Martin clear through, but Carolina was the picture of her ma, and still is, and just like her.

“Well, when James Haddington-Allen Martin was three months old, the mother died, and the father was left with four children, which was bad enough, but two years later Pine Tree Martin was killed in a raid, and since then Dixie, who’s just come twelve, has kept house and been mother to the other three,” Mrs. Twiggly concluded.

Then, before Josephine Bayley could comment on the sad story that she had just heard, Mrs. Twiggly arose. “I declare to it,” she exclaimed, “if ’tisn’t eight o’clock and you’ll want to be startin’ to school early. Follow the road right down toward the cañon, then turn toward the mountains a bit, and there you are. You’d better not step off the road to-day. There’s adders and rattlers hereabouts. You’ll get so you can tell a coiled snake from a stone arter you’ve been here a spell, but just at first you’d better be keerful.”

Then when she reached the door with the tray she turned to say condescendingly: “I’m real glad you’ve come, Miss Bayley. It’s mighty nice to have folks as interesting as you are to talk to, an’ I do hope the board will like you.”

She was out of the door when she stepped back to add: “Miss Bayley, if it don’t come too hard, I’d sort of let it seem like you think Jessica Archer is prettier than Carolina Martin and smarter than Dixie. It’ll be stretchin’ the