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
apron 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 noble 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 buttons 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 shiver 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 passed 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.
“'Cause Boswell'd been at his heels, and the whole camp'd been in a
fight,” replied Bobaday. “Old Johnson was under our wagon; I don't
know where Bos was. I was careful not to wake him.”
Through gaps in foliage and undergrowth they saw many an individual
part of the general camp; the wagon-cover in some cases being as dun
as the hide of an elephant. When a curtain was dropped over the front
opening of the wagon, Bobaday and Corinne knew that women and
children were sleeping within on their chattels. Here a tent was made
of sheets and stretched down with the branch of an overhanging tree
for a ridge-pole; and there horse-blankets were made into a canopy
and supported by upright poles. Within such covers men were asleep,
having sacks or comforters for bedding.
On a few wagon tongues, or stretched easily before fires, men
lingered, talking in steady, monotonous voices as if telling stories,
or in indifferent tones as if tempting each other to trades.
The rain had entirely ceased, though the spongy wet wood sod was not
pleasant to walk upon. “I guess,” said-aunt Corinne, “we'd better go
back.”
“Well, we've seen consider'ble,” assented her nephew. “I guess we'd
better.”
So he faced about. But quite near them arose the piercing scream of
a child in mortal fear.