Scroggie chuckled. "Dad ain't got any use for anybody, much," he answered. "I never heard him say anythin' about any of the people of the Settlement but once, and that was just t'other night. He come home lookin' as if somebody had pushed his head into a crate of eggs. I was too scared to ask him how it happened and Lou wouldn't. Dad said the people 'round here are a bad lot and it wouldn't surprise him if they tried to kill him.",
Maurice Keeler, wan, hollow-eyed, and miserable, was seated on a stool just outside the door in the early morning sunlight. Near him sat his mother, peeling potatoes, her portly form obscured by a trailing wistaria vine. What Maurice had endured during his two weeks with the measles nobody knew but himself. His days had been lonely, filled with remorse that he had ever been born to give people trouble and care; his nights longer even than the days. Hideous nightmares had robbed him of slumber. Old Scroggie's ghost had visited him almost nightly. The Twin Oaks robbers, ugly, hairy giants armed with red-hot pitch-forks, had bound him to a tree and applied fire to his feet. What use to struggle or cry aloud for help? Even Billy, his dearest chum, had sat and laughed with all the mouths of his eight heads at his pain. Of course he had awakened to learn these were but dreams; but to a boy dreams are closely akin to reality.,
"Yes, he's gone an' I s'pose you're satisfied, you and your outlaw companions in crime. Cobin Keeler stopped by this mornin' and he told us the teacher left his writ' resign in his hands. He declares he won't risk his life among a lot of young savages.".
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