Dixie Martin, The Girl of Woodford's Cañon

by Grace May North

"Carolina Martin, you get up this instant. Do you hear me? I've called you sixteen times already, if 'tisn't twenty, and this the morning the new teacher starts at the old log schoolhouse over at Woodford's. You don't want us all to be late, do you, and have her think we're shiftless, like the poor white folks our mother used to tell about, in the mountains down in Tennessee. We, with the bluest blood in our veins that flows in the whole South! Carolina, are you up?" This conversation was carried on in a high-pitched voice by a thin, homely, freckled-faced little girl whose straight brick-red hair had not a wave in it, and whose long, skinny legs, showing beneath the gingham dress two years too short for her, made her appear as ungainly as a colt. There was no one else present in the big living-room of the log cabin, but the voice carried well, and was heard in the loft above, where, in a large four-posted bed, another small girl sleepily replied, "Oh, Dixie, I wish folks never did have to get up, nor go to school, nor-" The voice trailed off drowsily, and Carolina had just turned over for another little nap when she heard her sister climbing the ladder which led from the room below to the loft where the two girls slept.

140 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1924

About the author

Grace May North-Monfort was born in Utica, New York, and between 1919 and 1931 wrote a number of books under her own name as well as her personal pseudonym, "Carol Norton." In addition to writing three volumes in the X Bar X Boys series for the Stratemeyer Syndicate, she also wrote a short series of western stories for young children, called the "Southwest Stories for Children," unpublished at the time of her death in San Luis Obispo, California.