As the long, dry summer withered to its roots, the school term of Red Gulch—­to use a local euphuism—­“dried up” also.  In another day Miss Mary would be free, and for a season, at least, Red Gulch would know her no more.  She was seated alone in the school-house, her cheek resting on her hand, her eyes half closed in one of those day-dreams in which Miss Mary, I fear, to the danger of school discipline, was lately in the habit of indulging.  Her lap was full of mosses, ferns, and other woodland memories.  She was so preoccupied with these and her own thoughts that a gentle tapping at the door passed unheard, or translated itself into the remembrance of far-off woodpeckers.  When at last it asserted itself more distinctly, she started up with a flushed cheek and opened the door.  On the threshold stood a woman, the self-assertion and audacity of whose dress were in singular contrast to her timid, irresolute bearing.

Miss Mary recognized at a glance the dubious mother of her anonymous pupil.  Perhaps she was disappointed, perhaps she was only fastidious; but as she coldly invited her to enter, she half unconsciously settled her white cuffs and collar, and gathered closer her own chaste skirts.  It was, perhaps, for this reason that the embarrassed stranger, after a moment’s hesitation, left her gorgeous parasol open and sticking in the dust beside the door, and then sat down at the further end of a long bench.  Her voice was husky as she began: 

“I heerd tell that you were goin’ down to the Bay to-morrow, and I couldn’t let you go until I came to thank you for your kindness to my Tommy.”

Tommy, Miss Mary said, was a good boy, and deserved more than the poor attention she could give him.

“Thank you, miss; thank ye!” cried the stranger, brightening even through the color which Red Gulch knew facetiously as her “war paint,” and striving, in her embarrassment, to drag the long bench nearer the schoolmistress.  “I thank you, miss, for that; and if I am his mother, there ain’t a sweeter, dearer, better boy lives than him.  And if I ain’t much as says it, thar ain’t a sweeter, dearer, angeler teacher lives than he’s got.”

Miss Mary, sitting primly behind her desk, with a ruler over her shoulder, opened her gray eyes widely at this, but said nothing.

“It ain’t for you to be complimented by the like of me, I know,” she went on hurriedly.  “It ain’t for me to be comin’ here, in broad day, to do it, either; but I come to ask a favor—­not for me, miss—­not for me, but for the darling boy.”

Encouraged by a look in the young schoolmistress’s eye, and putting her lilac-gloved hands together, the ringers downward, between her knees, she went on, in a low voice: 

“You see, miss, there’s no one the boy has any claim on but me, and I ain’t the proper person to bring him up.  I thought some, last year, of sending him away to Frisco to school, but when they talked of bringing a schoolma’am here, I waited till I saw you, and then I knew it was all right, and I could keep my boy a little longer.  And, oh! miss, he loves you so much; and if you could hear him talk about you in his pretty way, and if he could ask you what I ask you now, you couldn’t refuse him.