Old Caravan Days Part 2

Robert shared his lunch with these youths, and parted from them reluctantly when the horses were put in. But aunt Corinne who stood by in a critical att.i.tude, said she couldn't see any use in catching such little fish. You never fried minnies. You used 'em for bait in deep water, though, the split-sleeved boy condescended to inform her, and you _could_ put 'em into a gla.s.s jar, and they'd grow like everything. Aunt Corinne was just becoming fired with anxiety to own such a jarful herself, when the carriage turned toward the road and her mother obliged her to climb in.

About the middle of the afternoon Zene halted and waited for the carriage to come up. He left his seat and came to the rear of Old Hickory, the off carriage horse, slapping a fly flat on Old Hickory's flank as he paused.

"What's the matter, Zene?" inquired Grandma Padgett. "Has anything happened?"

"No, marm," replied Zene. He was a quiet, singular fellow, halting in his walk on account of the unevenness of his legs; but faithful to the family as either Boswell or Johnson. Grandma Padgett having brought him up from a lone and forsaken child, relied upon all the good qualities she discovered from time to time, and she saw nothing ludicrous in Zene. But aunt Corinne and Bobaday never ceased to t.i.tter at Zene's "marm."

"I've been inquirin' along, and we can turn off of the 'pike up here at the first by-road, and then take the first cross-road west, and save thirty mile o' toll gates. The road goes the same direction.

It's a good dirt road."

Grandma Padgett puckered the brows above her gla.s.ses. She did not want to pay unnecessary bounty to the toll-gate keepers.

"Well, that's a good plan, Zene, if you're sure we won't lose the way, or fall into any dif-fick-ulty."

"I've asked nigh a dozen men, and they all tell the same tale," said Zene.

"People ought to know the lay of the land in their own neighborhood,"

admitted Grandma Padgett. "Well, we'll try what virtue there is in the dirt road."

So she clucked to the carriage horses and Zene went back to his charge.

The last toll-gate they would see for thirty miles drew its pole down before them. Zene paid according to the usual arrangement, and the toll-man only stood in the door to see the carriage pa.s.s.

"I wouldn't like to live in a little bit of a house sticking out on the 'pike like that," said aunt Corinne to her nephew. "Folks could run against it on dark nights. Does he stay there by himself? And if robbers or old beggars came by they could nab him the minute he opened his door."

"But if he has any boys," suggested Robert looking back, "they can see everybody pa.s.s, and it'd be just as good as going some place all the time. And who's afraid of robbers!"

Zene beckoned to the carriage as he turned off the 'pike. For a distance the wagon moved ahead of them, between tall stake fences which were overrun with vines or had their corners crowded with bushes.

Wheat and cornfields and sweet-smelling buckwheat spread out on each side until the woods met them, and not a bit of the afternoon heat touched the carriage after that. Aunt Corinne clasped a leather-covered upright which hurt her hand before, and leaned toward the trees on her side. Every new piece of woodland is an unexplored country containing moss-lined stumps, dimples of hollows full of mint, queer-shaped trees, and hickory saplings just the right saddle-curve for bending down as "teeters," such as are never reproduced in any other piece of woodland.

Nature does not make two trees alike, and her cool breathing-halls under the woods' canopies are as diverse as the faces of children wandering there. Moss or lichens grow thicker in one spot; another particular enclosure you call the lily or the bloodroot woods, and yet another the wild-grape woods. This is distinguished for blackberries away up in the clearings, and that is a fishing woods, where the limbs stretch down to clear holes, and you sit in a root seat and hear springs trickling down the banks while you fish. Though Corinne could possess these reaches of trees only with a brief survey, she enjoyed them as a novelty.

"I would like to get lost in the woods," she observed, "and have everybody out hunting me while I had to eat berries and roots. I don't believe I'd like roots, though: they look so big and tough. And I wouldn't touch a persimmon! Nor Injun turnip. You's a bad boy that time you give me Injun turnip to eat, Bobaday Padgett!"

She turned upon her nephew, fierce with the recollection, and he laughed, saying he wished he'd some to fool somebody with now.

"It bit my mouth so a whole crock of milk wouldn't help it, and if brother Tip'd been home, Ma Padgett wouldn't let you off so easy."

"You wanted to taste it," said Robert. "And you'd eat the green persimmons if they'd puckered your mouth clear shut."

"I wanted to see what the things that the little pig that lived in the stone house filled his churn with, tasted like," admitted aunt Corinne lucidly; so she subsided.

"Do you see the wagon, children?" inquired Grandma Padgett, who felt the necessity of following Zene's lead closely. She stopped Old Hickory and Old Henry at cross-roads.

"No; but he said turn west on the first road we came to," counseled Bobaday.

"And this is the first, I counted," said aunt Corinne.

"I wish we could see the cover ahead of us. We don't want to resk gettin' separated," said Grandma Padgett.

Yet she turned the horses westward with a degree of confidence, and drove up into a hilly country which soon hid the sun. The long shades crept past and behind them. There was a country church, with a graveyard full of white stones nearly smothered in gra.s.s and briers.

And there was a school-house in an open s.p.a.ce, with a playground beaten bare and white in the midst of a yellow mustard jungle. They saw some loiterers creeping home, carrying dinner-pail and basket, and taking a languid last tag of each other. The little girls looked up at the pa.s.sing carriage from their sunbonnet depths, but the boys had taken off their hats to slap each other with: they looked at the strangers, round-eyed and ready to smile, and Robert and Corinne nodded. Grandma Padgett bethought herself to ask if any of them had seen a moving wagon pa.s.s that way. The girls stared bashfully at each other and said "No, ma'am," but the boys affirmed strongly that they had seen two moving wagons go by, one just as school was out, and the boldest boy of all made an effort to remember the white and gray horses.

The top of a hill soon stood between these children, and the travellers, but in all the vista beyond there was no glimpse of Zene.

Grandma Padgett felt anxious, and her anxiety increased as the dusk thickened.

"There don't seem to be any taverns along this road," she said; "and I hate to ask at any farmer's for accommodations over night. We don't know the neighborhood, and a body hates to be a bother."

"Let's camp out," volunteered Bobaday.

"We'd need the cover off of the wagon to do that, and kittles," said Grandma Padgett, "and dried meat and b.u.t.ter and cake and things _out_ of the wagon."

"Maybe Zene's back in the woods campin' somewhere," exclaimed aunt Corinne. "And he has his gun, and can shoot birds too."

"No, he's goin' along the right road and expectin' us to follow. And as like as not has found a place to put up,--while we're off on the wrong road."

"How'll we ever get to brother Tip's, then?" propounded aunt Corinne. "Maybe we're in Missouri, or Iowa, and won't never get to the Illinois line!"

"Humph!" remarked Robert her nephew; "do you s'pose folks could go to Iowa or Missouri as quick as this! Cars'd have to put on steam to do it."

"And I forgot about the State lines," murmured his aunt. "The'

hasn't been any ropes stretched along't _I_ saw."

"They don't bound States with ropes," said Robert Day.

"Well, it's lines," insisted aunt Corinne.

"Do you make out a house off there?" questioned Grandma Padgett, shortening the discussion.

"Yes, ma'am, and it's a tavern," a.s.sured her grandson, kneeling upon the cushion beside her to stretch his neck forward.

It was a tavern in a sandy valley. It was lighting a cautious candle or two as they approached. A farmer was watering his team at the trough under the pump spout. All the premises had a look of Holland, which Grandma Padgett did not recognize: she only thought them very clean. There was a side door cut across the centre like the doors of mills, so that the upper part swung open while the lower part remained shut. A fat white woman leaned her elbows upon this, scarcely observing the travellers.

Grandma Padgett paused at the front of the house and waited for somebody to come out. The last primrose color died slowly out of the sky. If the tavern had any proprietor, he combined farming with tavern keeping. His hay and wheat fields came close to the garden, and his corn stood rank on rank up the hills.

"They must be all asleep in there," fretted Grandma Padgett. The woman with her arms over the half door had not stirred.

"Shall I run in?" said Bobaday.

"Yes, and ask if Zene stopped here. I don't see a sign of the wagon."

Her grandson opened the carriage door and ran down the steps. The white-scrubbed hall detained him several minutes before he returned with a large man who smoked a crooked-stemmed pipe during the conference. The man held the bowl of the pipe in his hand which was fat and red. So was his face. He had a mighty tuft of hair on his upper lip. His shirt sleeves shone like new snow through the dark.

"Goot efenins," he said very kindly.

"I want to stop here over night," said Grandma Padgett. "We're moving, and our wagon is somewhere on this road. Have you seen anything of a wagon--and a white and a gray horse?"

"Oh, yes," said the tavern keeper, nodding his head. "Dere is lots of wakkons on de road aheadt."