Old Caravan Days | Page 9

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 grass and briers. And there was a school-house in an open space, 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 passing 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 pass 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 butter 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," assured 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