Finally, “It’s too cold to play up here,” she said, coming to herself with a long breath. “You’d better bring Deborah and the trunk down into the south room.” She carried the doll, and Betsy and Ellen each took an end of the old trunk, no larger than a modern suitcase. They settled themselves on the big couch, back of the table with the lamp. Old Shep was on it, but Betsy coaxed him off by putting down some bones Cousin Ann had been saving for him. When he finished those and came back for the rest of his snooze, he found his place occupied by the little girls, sitting cross-legged, examining the contents of the trunk, all spread out around them. Shep sighed deeply and sat down with his nose resting on the couch near Betsy’s knee, following all their movements with his kind, dark eyes. Once in a while Betsy stopped hugging Deborah or exclaiming over a new dress long enough to pat Shep’s head and fondle his ears. This was what he was waiting for, and every time she did it he wagged his tail thumpingly against the floor.
After that Deborah and her trunk were kept downstairs where Betsy could play with her. And often she was taken to school. You never heard of such a thing as taking a doll to school, did you? Well, I told you this was a queer, old-fashioned school that any modern School Superintendent would sniff at. As a matter of fact, it was not only Betsy who took her doll to school; all the little girls did, whenever they felt like it. Miss Benton, the teacher, had a shelf for them in the entryway where the wraps were hung, and the dolls sat on it and waited patiently all through lessons. At recess time or nooning each little mother snatched her own child and began to play. As soon as it grew warm enough to play outdoors without just racing around every minute to keep from freezing to death, the dolls and their mothers went out to a great pile of rocks at one end of the bare, stony field which was the playground.
There they sat and played in the spring sunshine, warmer from day to day. There were a great many holes and shelves and pockets and little caves in the rocks which made lovely places for playing keep-house. Each little girl had her own particular cubbyholes and “rooms,” and they “visited” their dolls back and forth all around the pile. And as they played they talked very fast about all sorts of things, being little girls and not boys who just yelled and howled inarticulately as they played ball or duck-on-a-rock or prisoner’s goal, racing and running and wrestling noisily all around the rocks.
There was one child who neither played with the girls nor ran and whooped with the boys. This was little six-year-old ’Lias, one of the two boys in Molly’s first grade. At recess time he generally hung about the school door by himself, looking moodily down and knocking the toe of his ragged, muddy shoe against a stone. The little girls were talking about him one day as they played. “My! Isn’t that ’Lias Brewster the horridest-looking child!” said Eliza, who had the second grade all to herself, although Molly now read out of the second reader with her.
“Mercy, yes! So ragged!” said Anastasia Monahan, called Stashie for short. She was a big girl, fourteen years old, who was in the seventh grade.
“He doesn’t look as if he ever combed his hair!” said Betsy. “It looks just like a wisp of old hay.”
“And sometimes,” little Molly proudly added her bit to the talk of the older girls, “he forgets to put on any stockings and just has his dreadful old shoes on over his dirty, bare feet.”
“I guess he hasn’t got any stockings half the time,” said big Stashie scornfully. “I guess his stepfather drinks ’em up.”
“How can he drink up stockings!” asked Molly, opening her round eyes very wide.
“Sh! You mustn’t ask. Little girls shouldn’t know about such things, should they, Betsy?”
“No indeed,” said Betsy, looking mysterious. As a matter of fact, she herself had no idea what Stashie meant, but she looked wise and said nothing.
Some of the boys had squatted down near the rocks for a game of marbles now.
“Well, anyhow,” said Molly resentfully, “I don’t care what his stepfather does to his stockings. I wish ’Lias would wear ’em to school. And lots of times he hasn’t anything on under those horrid old overalls either! I can see his bare skin through the torn places.”
“I wish he didn’t have to sit so near me,” said Betsy complainingly. “He’s so dirty.”
“Well, I don’t want him near me, either!” cried all the other little girls at once. Ralph glanced up at them frowning, from where he knelt with his middle finger crooked behind a marble ready for a shot. He looked as he always did, very rough and half-threatening. “Oh, you girls make me sick!” he said. He sent his marble straight to the mark, pocketed his opponent’s, and stood up, scowling at the little mothers. “I guess if you had to live the way he does you’d be dirty! Half the time he don’t get anything to eat before he comes to school, and if my mother didn’t put up some extra for him in my box he wouldn’t get any lunch either. And then you go and jump on him!”
“Why doesn’t his own mother put up his lunch?” Betsy challenged their critic.
“He hasn’t got any mother. She’s dead,” said Ralph, turning away with his hands in his
