Old Caravan Days Part 10

"I'm too old for such undertakings," said Grandma Padgett, pa.s.sing over the mover's exuberance with a smile.

"Why, we have a granny over ninety with us!" he declared. "Now's the time to start if you want to see the great western country."

Zene drove off the 'pike on the temporary track made by so many vehicles, and Grandma Padgett followed, the Virginian showing them a good spot near the liveliest part of the camp, upon which they might pitch.

The family sat in the-carriage while Zene took out the horses, sheltered the wagon under thick foliage where rain scarcely penetrated, and stretched the canvas for a tent. Then Grandma Padgett put on her rubber overshoes, pinned a shawl about her and descended; and their fire was soon burning, their kettle was soon boiling, in defiance of water streams which frequently trickled from the leaves and fell on the coals with a hiss. The firelight shone through slices of clear pink ham put down to broil. Aunt Corinne laid the cloth on a box which Zene took out of the wagon for her, and set the cups and saucers, the sugar and preserves, and little seed cakes which grew tenderer the longer you kept them, all in tempting order. They had baker's bread and gingercakes in the carriage. Since her adventure at the Susan house, Grandma Padgett had taken care to put provisions in the carriage pockets. Then aunt Corinne, a.s.sisted by her nephew, got potatoes from the sack, wrapped them in wet wads of paper, and roasted them in the ashes. A potato so roasted may be served up with a scorched and hardened sh.e.l.l, but its heart is perfumed by all the odors of the woods. It tastes better than any other potato, and while the b.u.t.ter melts through it you wonder that people do not fire whole fields and bake the crop in hot earth before digging it, to store for winter.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BOBADAY'S CANOPIED THRONE.]

Zene had frequently a.s.sured Robert Day that an egg served this way was better still. He said he used to roast eggs in the ashes when burning stumps, and you only needed a little salt with them, to make them fit for a king. But Robert Day scorned the egg and remained true to the potato.

While they were at supper the Virginian's wife came to see them, carrying in her hand an offering of bird-pie. Grandma Padgett responded with a dish of preserves. And they then talked about the old State, trying to discover mutual interests there.

The Virginian's wife was a strong, handsome, cordial woman. Her family came from the Pan Handle, but from the neighborhood of Wheeling, They were not mountaineers. She had six children. They were going to California because her husband had the mining fever. He wanted to go years before, but she held out against it until she saw he would do no good unless he went. So they sold their land, and started with a colony of neighbors.

The names of all her relatives were sifted, and Grandma Padgett made a like search among her own kindred, and they discovered that an uncle of one, and a grandfather of the other, had been acquainted, and served together in the War of '12. This established a bond.

Grandma Padgett was gently excited, and told Bobaday and Corinne after the Virginia woman's departure to her own wagons, that she should feel safe on account of being an old neighbor in the camp.

CHAPTER X. THE CRY OF A CHILD IN THE NIGHT.

But the camp was too exciting to let the children fall asleep early.

Fires were kept briskly burning, and some of the wagoners feeling in a musical humor, shouted songs or hummed melancholy tunes which sounded like a droning accompaniment to the rain. The rain fell with a continuous murmur, and evidently in slender threads, for it scarcely pattered on the tent. It was no beating, boisterous, drenching tempest, but a lullaby rain, bringing out the smell of barks, of pennyroyal and May-apple and wild sweet-williams from the deep woods.

Robert Day crept out of the carriage, having with him the oil-cloth ap.r.o.n and a plan. Four long sticks were not hard to find, or to sharpen with his pocket knife, and a few knocks drove them into the soft earth, two on each side of a log near the fire. He then stretched the oil-cloth over the sticks, tying the corners, and had a canopied throne in the midst of this lively camp. A chunk served for a footstool. Bobaday sat upon his log, hearing the rain slide down, and feeling exceedingly snug. His delight came from that wild instinct with which we all turn to arbors and caves, and to unexpected grapevine bowers deep in the woods; the instinct which makes us love to stand upright inside of hollow sycamore-trees, and pretend that a green tunnel among the hazel or elderberry bushes is the entrance hall of a n.o.ble castle.

Bobaday was very still, lest his grandmother in the tent, or Zene in the remoter wagon, should insist on his retiring to his uneasy bed again. He got enough of the carriage in daytime, having counted all its b.u.t.tons up and down and crosswise. The smell of the leather and lining cloth was mixed with every odor of the journey. One can have too much of a very easy, well-made carriage.

The firelight revealed him in his thoughtful mood: a very white boy with glistening hair and expanding large eyes of a gray and velvet texture. Some light eyes have a thin and sleepy surface like inferior qualities of lining silk; and you cannot tell whether the expression or the humors of the eye are at fault. But Nature, or his own meditations on what he read and saw in this delicious world, had given to Bobaday's irises a softness like the pile of gray velvet, varied sometimes by cinnamon-colored shades.

His eyes reflected the branches, the other campfires, and many wagons. It gave him the sensation of again reading for the first time one of grandfather's Peter Parley books about the Indians, or Mr.

Irving's story of Dolph Heyleger, where Dolph approaches Antony Vander Heyden's camp. He saw the side of one wagon-cover dragged at and a little night-capped head stuck out.

"Bobaday!" whispered aunt Corinne, creeping on tiptoe toward him, and anxious to keep him from exclaiming when he saw her.

"What did you get up for?" he whispered back.

"What did _you_ get up for?" retaliated aunt Corinne.

Robert Day made room for her on the log under the canopy, and she leaned down and laced her shoes after being seated. "Ma Padgett's just as tight asleep! What'd she say if she knew we wasn't in bed!"

It was so exciting and so nearly wicked to be out of bed and prowling when their elders were asleep, they could not possibly enjoy the sin in silence.

"Ain't it nice?" whispered aunt Corinne. "I saw you fixin' this little tent, and then I sl-ip-ped up and hooked some of my clothes on, and didn't dast to breathe 'fear Ma Padgett'd hear me. There must be lots of children in the camp."

"Yes; I've heard the babies cryin'."

"Do you s'pose there's any gipsy folks along?"

"Do 'now," whispered Bobaday, his tone inclining to an admission that gipsy folks might be along.

"The kind that would steal us," explained aunt Corinne.

This mere suggestion was an added pleasure; it made them s.h.i.+ver and look back in the bushes.

"There might be--away back yonder," whispered Robert Day, emboldened by remembering that his capable grandmother was just within the tent, and Zene at easy waking distance.

"But all the people will hitch up and drive away in the morning," he added, "and we won't know anything about 'em."

To aunt Corinne this seemed a great pity. "I'd like to see how everybody looks," she meditated.

"So'd I," whispered her nephew.

"It's hardly rainin' a drizzle now," whispered aunt Corinne.

"I get so tired ridin' all day long," whispered Robert, "that I wish I was a scout or something, like that old Indian that was named Trackless in the book--that went through the woods and through the woods, and didn't leave any mark and never seemed to wear out. You remember I read you a piece of it?"

Aunt Corinne fidgeted on the log.

"Wouldn't you like," suggested her nephew, whose fancy the nighttime stimulated, "to get on a flying carpet and fly from one place to another?"

Aunt Corinne cast a glance back over her shoulder.

"We could go a little piece from our camp-fire and not get lost,"

she suggested.

"Well," whispered Robert boldly, "le's do it. Le's take a walk. It won't do any harm. 'Tisn't late."

"The's chickens crowin' away over there."

"Chickens crow all times of the night. Don't you remember how our old roosters used to act on Christmas night? I got out of bed four times once, because I thought it was daylight, they would crow so!"

"Which way'll we take?" whispered aunt Corinne.

Robert slid cautiously from the log and mapped out the expedition.

"Off behind the wagon so's Zene won't see us. And then we'll slip along towards that furthest fire. We can see the others as we go by.

Follow me."

It was easy to slip behind the wagon and lose themselves in the brush. But there they stumbled on unseen snags and were caught or scratched by twigs, and descended suddenly to a pig-wallow or other ugly spot, where Corinne fell down. Bobaday then thought it expedient for his aunt to take hold of his jacket behind and walk in his tracks, according to their life-long custom when going down cellar for apples after dark. Grandma Padgett was not a woman to pamper the fear of darkness in her family. She had been known to take a child who recoiled from shapeless visions, and lead him into the unlighted room where he fancied he saw them.

So after proceeding out of sight of their own wagon, aunt Corinne and her nephew, toughened by this training, would not have owned to each other a wish to go back and sit in safety and peace of nerve again upon the log. Robert plodded carefully ahead, parting the bushes, and she pa.s.sed through the gaps with his own figure, clinching his jacket with fingers that tightened or relaxed with her tremors.

They had not counted on being smelled out by dogs at the various watch-fires. One lolling yellow beast sprang up and chased them. Aunt Corinne would have flown with screams, but her nephew hushed her up and put her valiantly on a very high stump behind himself. The dog took no trouble to trace them. He was too comfortable before the brands, too mud-splashed and stiff from a long day's journey, to care about chasing any mystery of the wood to its hole. But this warned them not to venture too near other fires where other possible dogs lay sentry.

"Why didn't we fetch old Johnson?" whispered aunt Corinne, after they slid down the tree stump.