Old Caravan Days | Page 7

glass and earthen dishes. One end of the table
was an exact counterpart of the other, even to the stacks of mighty
bread-slices. Boiled cabbage and onions and thick corn-pone with fried
ham were there to afford a strong support through the night's fast.
Nothing was served in order: you helped yourself from the dishes or let
them alone at your pleasure. The landlord appeared just as jolly as his
wife was dismal. He sat at the other end of the table and urged
everybody with jokes to eat heartily; yet all this profusion was not half
so appetizing as some of Grandma Padgett's fried chicken and toast
would have been.
After supper Bobaday went out to the barn and saw a whole street of
horse-stalls, the farthest horse switching his tail in dim distance; and
such a mow of hay as impressed him with the advantages of travel. A

hostler was forking down hay for the evening's feeding, and Robert
climbed to his side, upon which the hostler good-naturedly took him by
the shoulders and let him slide down and alight upon the spongy pile
below. This would have been a delightful sensation had Bobaday not
bitten his tongue in the descent. But he liked it better than the house
where his aunt Corinne wandered uneasily up stairs which were
hollowed in the middle of each step, and along narrow passages where
bits of plaster had fallen off.
There was a dulcimer in the room aunt Corinne occupied with her
mother. She took the hammer and beat on its rusty wires some time
before going to bed. It tinkled a plea to her to let it alone, but what little
girl could look at the queer instrument and keep her hands off it? The
landlady said it was left there by a travelling showman who could not
pay his board. He hired the bar-room to give a concert in, and pasted up
written advertisements of his performance in various parts of the town.
He sent free tickets to the preacher and schoolmaster, and the landlord's
family went in for nothing. Nobody else came, though he played on the
flute and harmonium, besides the dulcimer, and sang Lilly Dale, and
_Roll on, Silver Moon_, so touchingly that the landlady wiped her eyes
at their mere memory. As he had no money to pay stage-fare further,
and the flute and harmonium--a small bellows organ without legs--were
easier to carry than the dulcimer, he left it and trudged eastward. And
no one at that tavern could tell whether he and his instruments had
perished piecemeal along the way, or whether he had found crowded
houses and forgotten the old dulcimer in the tide of prosperity.
Grandma Padgett's party ate breakfast before day, by the light of a
candle covering its candlestick with a tallow glacier. It made only a
hole of shine in the general duskiness of the big dining-room. The
landlady bade them a pathetic good-by. She was sure there were
dangers ahead of them. The night stage had got in three hours late,
owing to a breakdown, and one calamity she said, is only the
forerunner of another.
Zene had driven ahead with the load. It was a foggy morning, and drops
of moisture hung to the carriage curtains. There was the morning star

yet trembling over the town. Aunt Corinne hugged her wrap, and
Bobaday stuck his hands deep in his pockets. But Grandma sat erect
and drove away undaunted and undamped. She merely searched the
inside of the carriage with her glasses, inquiring as a last precaution:
"Have we left anything behind?"
"I got all my things," said Robert. "And my gold dollar's in my pocket."
At this aunt Corinne arose and plunged into the carriage pocket on her
side.

CHAPTER IV.
THE SUSAN HOUSE.
The contents of that pocket she piled upon her seat; she raked the
interior with her nails, then she looked at Robert Day with dilating
eyes.
"My gold dollar's gone!" said aunt Corinne. "That little old man with a
bag on his back--I just know he got into the barn and took it last night."
"You put it in and took it out so many times yesterday," said Bobaday,
"maybe it fell on the carriage floor." So they unavailingly searched the
carriage floor.
The little old man with a bag on his back was now fixed in Corinne's
imagination as the evil genius of the journey. If he spirited out her gold
dollar, what harm could he not do them! He might throw stones at them
from sheltered places, and even shoot them with guns. He could jump
out of any culvert and scare them almost to death! This destroyed half
her pleasure as the day advanced, in watching boys fish with horse-hair
snares