Old Caravan Days | Page 9

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 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.