“I’ll work your examples for you to-night, if you do.”
“Oh, all right. There’ll be a lot of ‘em.”
“I don’t mind, I can work ‘em fast. How about yours, Axel?”
Axel was a fat little boy of seven, with pretty, lazy blue eyes. “I
don’t care,” he murmured, buttering his last buckwheat cake without
ambition; “too much trouble to copy ‘em down. Jenny Smiley’ll let me
have hers.”
The boys were to pull Thea to school on their sled, as the snow was
deep. The three set off together. Anna was now in the high school, and
she no longer went with the family party, but walked to school with some
of the older girls who were her friends, and wore a hat, not a hood like
Thea.
IV
“And it was Summer, beautiful Summer!” Those were the closing words of
Thea’s favorite fairy tale, and she thought of them as she ran out into
the world one Saturday morning in May, her music book under her arm. She
was going to the Kohlers’ to take her lesson, but she was in no hurry.
It was in the summer that one really lived. Then all the little
overcrowded houses were opened wide, and the wind blew through them with
sweet, earthy smells of garden-planting. The town looked as if it had
just been washed. People were out painting their fences. The cottonwood
trees were a-flicker with sticky, yellow little leaves, and the feathery
tamarisks were in pink bud. With the warm weather came freedom for
everybody. People were dug up, as it were. The very old people, whom one
had not seen all winter, came out and sunned themselves in the yard. The
double windows were taken off the houses, the tormenting flannels in
which children had been encased all winter were put away in boxes, and
the youngsters felt a pleasure in the cool cotton things next their
skin.
Thea had to walk more than a mile to reach the Kohlers’ house, a very
pleasant mile out of town toward the glittering sand hills,—yellow this
morning, with lines of deep violet where the clefts and valleys were.
She followed the sidewalk to the depot at the south end of the town;
then took the road east to the little group of adobe houses where the
Mexicans lived, then dropped into a deep ravine; a dry sand creek,
across which the railroad track ran on a trestle. Beyond that gulch, on
a little rise of ground that faced the open sandy plain, was the
Kohlers’ house, where Professor Wunsch lived. Fritz Kohler was the town
tailor, one of the first settlers. He had moved there, built a little
house and made a garden, when Moonstone was first marked down on the
map. He had three sons, but they now worked on the railroad and were
stationed in distant cities. One of them had gone to work for the Santa
Fe, and lived in New Mexico.
Mrs. Kohler seldom crossed the ravine and went into the town except at
Christmas-time, when she had to buy presents and Christmas cards to send
to her old friends in Freeport, Illinois. As she did not go to church,
she did not possess such a thing as a hat. Year after year she wore the
same red hood in winter and a black sunbonnet in summer. She made her
own dresses; the skirts came barely to her shoe-tops, and were gathered
as full as they could possibly be to the waistband. She preferred men’s
