But Grandma Padgett did not enjoy the tavern bed or the tavern breakfast. She passed the evening until midnight searching the streets of Richmond, accompanied by Zene and his limp. Some of the tavern people had seen her children in front of the house, but the longest search failed to bring to light any trace of them in or about that building. The tavern-keeper interested himself; the chamber maids were sympathetic. Two hostlers and a bartender went different ways through the town making inquiries. The landlady thought the children might have wandered off to the movers' encampment, where there were other children to play with. Grandma Padgett bade Zene put himself on one of the carriage horses and post to camp. When he came back he reported that Thrusty Ellen and Jonathan were asleep in the tents, and nobody had seen Robert and Corinne.
While searching the streets earlier in the evening, Grandma Padgett observed the pig-headed man's pavilion, and this she also explored with Zene. A crowd was making the canvas stifling, and the pig-headed man's performances were being varied by an untidy woman who screamed and played on a portable bellows which had ivory keys, after explaining that Fairy Carrie, the Wonderful Musical Child, had been taken suddenly ill and could appear no more that night.
Grandma Padgett remained only long enough to scan twice over every face in the tent. She went out, telling Zene she was at her wits' end.
“Oh, they ain't gone far, marm,” reassured Zene. “You'll find out they'll come back to the tavern all right; mebby before we get there.”
But every such hopeful return to base disheartened the searchers more. At last the grandmother was obliged to lie down.
Early in the morning the Virginian came, full of concern. His party was breaking camp, but he would stay behind and help search for the children.
“That I won't allow,” said Grandma Padgett. “You're on a long road, and you don't want to risk separating from the colony. Besides no one can do more than we can—unless it was Son Tip. As I laid awake, I wished in my heart Son Tip was here.”
“Can't you send him a lightnin' message?” said the Virginian. “By the telegraphic wire,” he explained, quoting a line of a popular song.
“I wish I could,” said Grandma Padgett, “but there's no telegraph office in miles of where he's located. I thought of it last night. There's no way to reach him that I can see, but by letter, and sometimes they lay over on the road. And I don't allow to stop at this place. I'm goin' to set out and hunt in all directions till I find the children.”
The Virginian agreed that her plan was best. He also made arrangements to ride back and tell her if the caravan overtook them on the 'pike during that day's journey. Then he and Grandma Padgett shook hands with each other and reluctantly separated.
She made inquiries about all the other roads leading out of Richmond. Zene drove the carriage out of the barnyard, and Grandma Padgett, having closed her account with the tavern, took the lines, an object of interest and solicitude to all who saw her depart, and turned Old Hickory and Old Henry on a southward track. Zene followed with the wagon; he was on no account to loiter out of speaking distance. The usual order of the march being thus reversed, both vehicles moved along lonesomely. Even Boswell and Johnson scented misfortune in the air. Johnson ran in an undeviating line under the carriage, as if he wished his mistress to know he was right there where she could depend on him. His countenance expressed not only gravity, but real concern. Boswell, on the other hand, was in a state of nerves. If he saw a bank at the roadside he ran ahead and mounted it, looking back into the carriage, demanding to know, with a yelping howl, where Bobaday and Corinne were. When his feelings became too strong for him he jumped at the step, and Grandma Padgett shook her head at him.
“Use your nose, you silly little fice, and track them, why don't you?”
As soon as Boswell understood this reproach he jumped a fence and smelt every stump or tuft of grass, every bush and hummock, until the carriage dwindled in the distance. Then he made the dust smoke under his feet as a sudden June shower will do for a few seconds, and usually overtook the carriage with all of his tongue unfurled and his lungs working like a furnace. Johnson reproved him with a glance, and he at once dropped his tail and trotted beside Johnson, as if throwing himself on that superior dog for support in the hour of affliction.
At noon no trace of Robert and Corinne had been seen. Grandma Padgett halted, and when Zene came up she said:
“We'll eat a cold bite right here by the road, and then go on until sunset. If we don't find them, we'll turn back to town and take another direction.”
They ate a cold bite, brought ready packed from the Richmond tavern. The horses were given scant time for feeding, and drank wherever they could find water along the road.
Cloudless as the day was, Grandma Padgett's spectacles had never made any landscape look as blue as this one which she followed until sunset. Sometimes it was blurred by a mist, but she wiped it off the glasses.
At sunset they had not seen a track which might be taken for Robert or Corinne's. The grasshoppers were lonesome. There was a great void in the air, and the most tuneful birds complained from the fence-rails. Grandma Padgett constantly polished her glasses on the backward road.
Nothing was said about making a halt for supper or any kind of cold bite. The carriage was silently turned as one half the sun stood above the tree-tops, I and it passed the wagon without other sign. The wagon turned as silently. The shrill meadow insects became more and more audible. Some young calves in a field, remembering that it was milking time, began to call their mothers, and to remonstrate at the bars in voices full of sad cadences. The very farmhouse dogs, full-fed, and almost too lazy to come out of the gates to interview Boswell and Johnson, barked as if there was sickness in their respective families and it was all they could do to keep up their spirits and refrain from howling.
The carriage and wagon jogged along until the horizon rim was all of that indescribable tint that evening mixes with saffron, purple and pink. Grandma Padgett became anxious to reach Richmond again. The Virginian might have returned over the road with news of her children. Or the children themselves might be at the tavern waiting for her. Zene drove close behind her, and when they were about to recross a shallow creek, scooped between two easy swells and floating a good deal of wild grapevine and darkly reflecting many sycamores, he came forward and loosened the check-reins of Hickory and Henry to let them drink. Grandma Padgett felt impatient at any delay.
“I don't think they want water, Zene,” said she.
“They'd better cool their mouths, marm.” he said. But still he fingered the check reins, uncertain how to state what had sent him forward.
“Seems like I heard somebody laugh, marm,” said Zene.
“Well, suppose you did,” said Grandma Padgett. “The whole world won't mourn just because we're in trouble.”
“But it sounded like Corinne,” said Zene uncertainly.
Grandma Padgett's glasses glared upon him.
“You'd' be more apt to hear her crying,” she exclaimed. “When did you hear it?”
“Just now. I jumped right off the load.”
Hickory and Henry, anxious to taste the creek, would have moved forward, but were checked by both pairs of hands.
“What direction?”
“I don't feel certain, marm,” said Zene, “but it come like it was from that way through the woods.”
Grandma Padgett stretched her neck out of the carriage toward the right.
“Is that a sled track?” she inquired. “It's gittin' so dim I can't see.”.
Zene said there was a sled track, pointing out what looked like a double footpath with a growth of grass and shrubs along the centre.
“We'll drive in that way,” she at once decided, “and if we get wedged among the trees, we'll have to get out the best way we can.”
Zene turned the gray and white, and led on this new march. Hickory and Henry, backed from the creek without being allowed to dip their mouths, reluctantly thumped the sled track with their shoes, and pretended to distrust every tall stump and every glaring sycamore limb which rose before their sight. Scrubby bushes scraped the bottom of the carriage bed. Now one front wheel rose high over a chunk, and the vehicle rolled and creaked. Zene's wagon cover, like a big white blur, moved steadily in front, and presently Hickory and Henry ran their noses against it, and seemed to relish the knock which the carriage-pole gave the feed-box. Zene had halted to listen.
It was dark in the woods. A rustle could be heard now and then as of some tiny four-footed creature moving the stiff grass; or a twig cracked. The frogs in the creek were tuning their bass-viols. A tree-toad rattled on some unseen trunk, and the whole woods heaved its great lungs in the steady breathing which it never leaves off, but which becomes a roar and a wheeze in stormy or winter weather.
“There isn't anything”—began Grandma Padgett, but between thing and “here” came the distinct laugh of a child.
{Illustration: “WHERE'S BOBADAY?"}
Zene cracked his whip over the gray and the white, and the wagon rumbled ahead rapidly, jarring against roots, and ends of decayed logs, turning short in one direction, and dipping through a long sheltered mud-hole to the very wheel-hubs, brushing against trees and under low branches until guttural remonstrances were scraped out of the cover, and finally descending into an abrupt hollow, with the carriage rattling at its hind wheels.
Grandma Padgett had been through many experiences, but she felt she could truly say to her descendants that she never gave up so entirely for pure joy in her life as when she saw Robert and Corinne sitting in front of a fire built against a great stump, and talking with a fat, silly-looking man who leaned against a cart-wheel.
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg