spinsters whose faces seemed to reflect consistently tired feet. Miss Morgan enjoyed teaching and made school an
exciting place where unusual things happened.
From the first Miss Morgan was vastly impressed with Tularecito. She knew all about him, had read books and
taken courses about him. Having heard about the fight, she laid off a border around the top of the blackboards for him to
fill with animals, and, when he had completed his parade, she bough with her own money a huge drawing pad and a soft
pencil. After that, he did not bother with spelling. Every day he labored over his drawing board, and every afternoon
presented the teacher with a marvelously wrought animal. She pinned his drawings to the schoolroom wall above the
blackboards.
The pupils received Miss Morgan’s innovations with enthusiasm. Classes became exciting, and even the boys
who had made enviable reputations through teacher-baiting, grew less interested in the possible burning of the
schoolhouse.
Miss Morgan introduced a practice that made the pupils adore her. Every afternoon she read to them for half an
hour. She read by installments, Ivanhoe and The Talisman; fishing stories by Zane Grey, hunting stories of James Oliver
Curwood; The Sea Wolf, The Call of the Wild – not baby stories about the little red hen and the fox and the geese, but
exciting grown-up stories.
Miss Morgan read well. Even the tougher boys were won over until they never played hookey for fear of missing
an installment, until they leaned forward gasping with interest.
But Tularecito continued his careful drawing, only pausing now and then to blink at the teacher and to try to
understand how these distant accounts of the actions of strangers could be of interest to anyone. To him, they were
chronicles of actual events – else why were they written down. The stories were like the lessons. Tularecito did not listen
to them.
After a time, Miss Morgan felt that she had been humoring the older children too much. She herself like fairy
stories, liked to think of whole populations who believed in fairies and consequently saw them. Within the safe circle of
her tried and erudite acquaintance, she often said that “part of America’s cultural starvation was due to its boorish and
superstitious denial of the existence of fairies.” For a time, she devoted the afternoon half hour to fairy tales.
Now a change came over Tularecito. Gradually, as Miss Morgan read about elves and brownies, fairies, pixies,
and changelings, his interest centered and his busy pencil lay idly in his hand. Then she read about gnomes, and their
lives and habits, and he dropped his pencil altogether and leaned toward the teacher to intercept her words.
After school, Miss Morgan walked a half mile to the farm where she boarded. She liked to walk the way alone,
cutting thistle heads with a switch, or throwing stones into the brush to make the quail roar up. She thought she should get
a bounding, inquisitive dog that could share her excitements, could understand the glamour of holes in the ground, and
scattering paw steps on dry leaves, of strange melancholy bird whistles and the gay smells that cam secretly out of the
earth.
One afternoon, Miss Morgan scrambled high up the side of a chalk cliff to carve her initials on the white plane.
On the way up, she tore her finger on a thorn, and, instead of initials, she scratched, “Here I have been and left this part of
me,” and pressed her bloody finger against the absorbent chalk rock.
That night, in a letter, she wrote, “After the bare requisites to living and reproducing, man wants most to leave
some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed. He leaves his proof on wood, on stone, or on the lives
of other people. This deep desire exists in everyone, from the boy who writes dirty words in a public toilet to the Buddha
who etches his image in the race mind. Life is so unreal. I think that we seriously doubt that we exist and go about trying
to prove that we do. She kept a copy of the letter.
On the afternoon when she had read about the gnomes, as she walked home, the grasses beside the road threshed
about for a moment and the ugly head of Tularecito appeared.
“Oh! You frightened me,” Miss Morgan cried. “You shouldn’t pop up like that.”
Tualrecito stood up and smiled bashfully while he whipped his hat against his thigh. Suddenly Miss Morgan felt
fear rising in her. The road was deserted – she had read stories of half-wits. With difficulty, she mastered her trembling
voice.
“What – what is it you want?”
Tularecito smiled more broadly and whipped harder with his hat.
“Were you just lying there, or do you want something?”
The boy struggled to speak, and then relapsed into his protective smile.
“Well, if you don’t want anything, I’ll go on.” She was really prepared for flight.
Tularecito struggled again. “About those people – ”
“What people?” she demanded shrilly. “What about people?”
“About those people in the book –”