IN THE grove before the log schoolhouse, the Teacher was playing a game with the children. It was a game in which every child to the tiniest one could join. Two, standing opposite, with raised arms and the fingers linked, formed a sore of arch, through which the others passed in a circle, holding one another's hands. They all sang as they marched some verses of a mountain song, ending with the line, “An' catch the one that you love best.”

When the song came to this line, those forming the arch brought their arms down over the head of the child passing at that moment, and he left the circle and took the place of one of those forming the arch. As each child wished to catch the School-teacher, the man remained standing while the children changed.

The little boy David had just been caught. The child, standing with the School-teacher, had taken his place. The circle had begun once more to move, the song to rise, when the miller's daughter, Martha, stopped, disengaged her hand from the child before her and pointed to the road.

“There comes Sol an' Suse. I wonder what's the matter, for Sol's got his arm tied up.”

The School-teacher stood up and looked over the heads of the children. A man was approaching. The sleeves of a red wammus were tied around his neck, forming a sort of rude sling in which his right arm rested, held horizontally across his breast. A woman, carrying a baby, was walking beside him.

The School-teacher spoke to the little girl.

“Martha,” he said, “you and David take the children into the schoolhouse, I am going out to meet these people.”

When the children had gone in, and the door was closed, the man went down into the road. He waited there until the two persons approached. He saw that both the woman and the man were young, the baby but a few months old—a little family beginning to found a home in the inhospitable mountain.

The man was evidently injured. The woman was in distress. Her eyes were red. The muscles of her mouth trembled. The baby, in her arms, wrapped in an old faded shawl, wailed.

The School-teacher spoke to the woman.

“What has happened?” he said.

“My man's got hurt.”

“How was he hurt?”

“He was choppin' in his clearin', an' his ax ketched in a grapevine, an' throwed him. I reckon his shoulder's all broke. He can't use his arm none.”

The School-teacher addressed the man. “How does your arm feel?”

“I suppose the jint's smashed.”

The tears began to run down over the woman's face.

“I don't see why we have such luck,” she said, “an' just when we was a-gittin' sich a nice start. Now, he can't work in his clearin', an' if he don't git his clearin' done this winter, we won't have no crop, an' I don't know what'll become of us.”

The man began to chew his lip.

“Don' cry, Susie,” he said.

“Yes, I'll cry,” replied the woman, “for here's me an' the baby with nothin', and you laid up.”

“Maybe I ain't hurt so bad,” the man suggested.

The woman continued to cry.

“I know better'n that, you're hurt bad.”

“Where were you going?” said the School-teacher.

“We were a-goin' to the doctor,” replied the woman. “We thought we'd make as far as the mill, an' he could wait there, an' I could git Sally to keep the baby while I went after the doctor.”

“How far is it to the doctor?”

“It's a-goin' on fourteen mile from the mill, an' that ain't the worst of it. He won't come unless he gits the money, an' we ain't got no money to throw away on a doctor.”

She opened her hand and disclosed a crumpled, greasy note.

“That there five-dollar bill is the very last cent that we've got. An' when it's gone I don't know where we'll git any more, with him hurt, an' me with a little sucklin' baby.”

The woman began to sob.

“I'm jist ready to give up.”

The School-teacher's big gray-blue eyes filled with a kindly light.

“Don't cry,” he said, “perhaps I can do something for your husband's shoulder.”

He went over to the man. What the School-teacher did, precisely, these persons were never afterward able to describe. The event in their minds seemed clouded in mystery. A wonder had been accomplished in the road, in the sun, in the light before them, but they could not lay hold upon the sequence of the detail. The voice of the School-teacher presently reached them as from a distance.

“It's all right now,” he said.

The man doubled the arm and extended it. The woman came running up.

“Kin you use it, Sol?”

The man continued to move the arm. “It 'pears like I kin,” he said; “it 'pears like it's well.”

“Kin you use it good?”

“It 'pears like I kin use it good as I ever could.”

“Well, sir!” ejaculated the woman, “if I hadn't a seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't never a-believed it.”

The School-teacher remained standing for a moment in the road after the mountaineers had gone.

Then he went back to the children, waiting in the schoolhouse. He called them out into the grove before the door, and took his place in the game, bending over to hold the hands of the tiniest child. The circle began once more to move. The song to rise.

“An' catch the one that you love best.”