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.
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