“What can she want here?” thought the master.  Everybody knew “Mliss,” as she was called, throughout the length and height of Red Mountain.  Everybody knew her as an incorrigible girl.  Her fierce, ungovernable disposition, her mad freaks and lawless character, were in their way as proverbial as the story of her father’s weaknesses, and as philosophically accepted by the townsfolk.  She wrangled with and fought the schoolboys with keener invective and quite as powerful arm.  She followed the trails with a woodman’s craft, and the master had met her before, miles away, shoeless, stockingless, and bareheaded on the mountain road.  The miners’ camps along the stream supplied her with subsistence during these voluntary pilgrimages, in freely offered alms.  Not but that a larger protection had been previously extended to Mliss.  The Rev. Joshua McSnagley, “stated” preacher, had placed her in the hotel as servant, by way of preliminary refinement, and had introduced her to his scholars at Sunday school.  But she threw plates occasionally at the landlord, and quickly retorted to the cheap witticisms of the guests, and created in the Sabbath school a sensation that was so inimical to the orthodox dullness and placidity of that institution that, with a decent regard for the starched frocks and unblemished morals of the two pink-and-white-faced children of the first families, the reverend gentleman had her ignominiously expelled.  Such were the antecedents, and such the character of Mliss as she stood before the master.  It was shown in the ragged dress, the unkempt hair, and bleeding feet, and asked his pity.  It flashed from her black, fearless eyes, and commanded his respect.

“I come here tonight,” she said rapidly and boldly, keeping her hard glance on his, “because I knew you was alone.  I wouldn’t come here when them gals was here.  I hate ’em and they hates me.  That’s why.  You keep school, don’t you?  I want to be teached!”

If to the shabbiness of her apparel and uncomeliness of her tangled hair and dirty face she had added the humility of tears, the master would have extended to her the usual moiety of pity, and nothing more.  But with the natural, though illogical, instincts of his species, her boldness awakened in him something of that respect which all original natures pay unconsciously to one another in any grade.  And he gazed at her the more fixedly as she went on still rapidly, her hand on that door latch and her eyes on his: 

“My name’s Mliss—­Mliss Smith!  You can bet your life on that.  My father’s Old Smith—­Old Bummer Smith—­that’s what’s the matter with him.  Mliss Smith—­and I’m coming to school!”

“Well?” said the master.