Miss Morgan read well. Even the tougher boys were won over until they never played hooky 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 liked fairy tales, liked to think of whole populations who believed in fairies and consequently saw them. Within the same 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 half a mile to the farm where she boarded. She liked to walk the way alone, cutting off 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 pawsteps on dry leaves, of strange melancholy bird whistles and the gay smells that came 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.”
Tularecito 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—”
Miss Morgan laughed with relief until she felt that her hair was coming loose on the back of her head. “You mean—you mean—gnomes?”
Tularecito nodded.
“What do you want to know about them?”
“I never saw any,” said Tularecito. His voice neither rose nor fell, but continued on one low note.
“Why, few people do see them, I think.”
“But I knew about them.”
Miss Morgan’s eyes squinted with interest. “You did? Who told you about them?”
“Nobody.”
“You never saw them, and no one told you? How could you know about them then?”
“I just knew. Heard them, maybe. I knew them in the book all right.”
Miss Morgan thought: “Why should I deny gnomes to this queer, unfinished child? Wouldn’t his life be richer and happier if he did believe in them? And what harm could it possibly do?”
“Have you ever looked for them?” she asked.
“No, I never looked. I just knew. But I will look now.”
Miss Morgan found herself charmed with the situation. Here was paper on which to write, here was a cliff on which to carve. She could carve a lovely story that would be far more real than a book story ever could. “Where will you look?” she asked.
“I’ll dig in holes,” said Tularecito soberly.
“But the gnomes only come out at night, Tularecito. ~You must watch for them in the night. And you must come and tell me if you find any. Will you do that?”
“I’ll come,” he agreed.
She left him staring after her. All the way home she pictured him searching in the night. The picture pleased her. He might even find the gnomes, might live with them and talk to them. With a few suggestive words she had been able to make his life unreal and very wonderful, and separated from the stupid lives about him. She deeply envied him his searching.
In the evening Tularecito put on his coat and took up a shovel. Old Pancho came upon him as he was leaving the tool shed. “Where goest thou, Little Frog?” he asked.
Tularecito shifted his feet restlessly at the delay. “I go out into dark. Is that a new thing?”
“But why takest thou the shovel? Is there gold, perhaps?”
The boy’s face grew hard with the seriousness of his purpose. “I go to dig for the little people who live in the earth.”
Now Pancho was filled with horrified excitement. “Do not go, Little Frog! Listen to your old friend, your father in God, and do not go! Out in the sage I found thee and saved thee from the devils, thy relatives. Thou art a little brother of Jesus now. Go not back to thine own people! Listen to an old man, Little Frog!”
Tularecito stared hard at the ground and drilled his old thoughts with this new information. “Thou hast said they are my people,” he exclaimed. “I am not like the others at the school or here. I know that. I have loneliness for my own people who live deep in the cool earth.
When I pass a squirrel hole, I wish to crawl into it and hide myself. My own people are like me, and they have called me. I must go home to them, Pancho.”
Pancho stepped back and held up crossed fingers. “Go back to the devil, thy father, then. I am not good enough to fight this evil. It would take a saint. But see! At last I make the sign against thee and against all thy race.” He drew the cross of protection in the air in front of him.
Tularecito smiled sadly, and turning, trudged off into the hills.
The heart of Tularecito gushed with joy at his homecoming. All his life he had been an alien, a lonely outcast, and now he was going home. As always, he heard the voices of the earth—the far off clang of cow bells, the muttering of disturbed quail, the little whine of a coyote who would not sing this night, the nocturnes of a million insects. But Tularecito was listening for another sound, the movement of two-footed creatures, and the hushed voices of the hidden people.
Once he stopped and called, “My father, I have come home,” and he heard no answer. Into squirrel holes he whispered, “Where are you, my people? It is only Tularecito come home.” But there was no reply. Worse, he had no feeling that the gnomes were near. He knew that a doe and fawn were feeding near him; he knew a wildcat was stalking a rabbit behind a bush, although he could not see them, but from the gnomes he had no message.
A sugar-moon arose out of the hills.
“Now the animals will come out to feed,” Tularecito said in the papery whisper of the half witless. “Now the people will come out, too.”
The brush stopped at the edge of a little valley and an orchard took its place. The trees were thick with leaves, and the land finely cultivated. It was Bert Munroe’s orchard. Often, when the land was deserted and ghost-ridden, Tularecito had come here in the night to lie on the ground under the trees and pick the stars with gentle fingers.