usual, and she went out and told them to go home.
Plain as anything I heard May say It: "She's been awful sick, you
know, and mother wouldn't allow it." And then Leon piped up: "You DID
watch the roosters, all the time they fought, and of course all of us
wanted to see just as badly as you did."

She told them if they didn't go right home she'd bring them back and
whip them too; so they had to start, and leave me to my sad fate. I
was afraid they had made it sadder, instead of helping me; she was so
provoked when she came in she was crying, and over nothing but the
plain truth too; if we had storied on her, she'd have had some cause to
beller. She arranged her table, cleaned the board, emptied the water
bucket, and closed the windows. Then she told me I was a rude,
untrained child. I was rude, I suppose, but goodness knows, I wasn't
untrained; that was hard on father and mother; I had a big notion to
tell them; and then, she never whipped me at all. She said if I wanted
her to love me, I mustn't be a saucy, impudent girl, and I should go
straight home and think it over.

I went, but I was so dazed at her thinking I wanted her to love me,
that I hardly heard May and Leon calling; when I did I went to the
cemetery fence and there they lay in the long grass waiting.

"If you cried, we were coming back and pitch into her," said Leon.

There was a pointer. Next time, first cut she gave me, I decided to
scream bloody murder. But that would be no Crusader way. There was
one thing though. No Crusader ever sat and heard a perfectly lovely
fight going on, and never even wondered which whipped.

May and Leon stepped one on each side, took a hand, and we ran like
Indians, and slid down the hill between the bushes, climbed the fence,
crossed the pasture back of the church, and went to the creek. There
we sat on a log, I told them, and we just laughed. I didn't know what
I could do to pay them, for they saved me sure as fate that time.

I wished we lived in the woods the way it was when father and mother
were married and moved to Ohio. The nearest neighbours were nine
miles, and there wasn't a dollar for school funds, so of course the
children didn't have to go, and what their fathers and mothers taught
them was all they knew. That would not have helped me much though, for
we never had one single teacher who knew anything to compare with what
father and mother did, and we never had one who was forever reading
b