Still, as crossing the Sciota at Columbus, had been entering a land of adventure, crossing the White River at Indianapolis, seemed at first entering a land of commonplace.
The children were very tired of the wagon. Even aunt Corinne got permission to ride stretches of the road with Robert Day and Zene in the wagon. It gave out a different creak and jolted her until she was grateful for springs and cushions when obliged to go back to them. The landscape was still hazy, the woods grew more beautiful. But neither of the children cared for the little towns along the route: Bellville, Stilesville, Meridian, Manhattan, Pleasant Garden. Hills appeared and ledges of rock cropped out in them. Yet even hills may be observed with indifference by eyes weary of an endless panorama.
They drove more rapidly now to make up for lost time. Both children dived into the carriage pockets for amusement, and aunt Corinne dressed her rag doll a number of times each day. They talked of Rose Tracy, still calling her Fairy Carrie. Of the wonderful clothes her mother laid out to put upon her the night of her departure, in place of aunt Corinne's over-grown things, and the show woman's tawdry additions. They wondered about her home and the colored people who waited on her, and if she would be quite well and cured of her stupor by the time she reached Baltimore. Grandma Padgett told them Baltimore was an old city down in Maryland, and the National 'Pike started in its main street. From Baltimore over the mountains to Wheeling, in the Pan Handle of Virginia, was a grand route. There used to be a great deal of wagoning and stage-coaching, and driving droves of horses and cattle by that road. Perhaps, suggested aunt Corinne, Fairy Carrie would watch the 'pike for the Padgett family, but Bobaday ridiculed the idea. When he grew up a man he meant to go to Baltimore but the railroad would be his choice of routes.
Both Robert and his aunt were glad the day they stopped for dinner near a toll-house, and the woman came and invited them to dine with her.
The house stood on the edge of the 'pike, with its gate-pole ready to be lowered by a rope, looking like any other toll place. But the woman was very brisk and Yankee-like, and different from the many slatternly persons who had before taken toll. She said her people came from “down East,” but she herself was born in Ohio. She thought the old lady would like a cup of strong tea, and her dinner was just ready, and it did get lonesome eating by a body's self day after day.
The Padgetts added their store to the square table set in a back room, and the toll-woman poured her steaming tea into cups covered with flower sprigs. Everything about her was neat and compact as a ship's cabin. Her bed stood in one corner, curtained with white dimity. There were two rooms to the toll-house, the front one being a kind of shop containing a counter, candy jars set in the windows, shoestrings and boxes of thread on shelves, and a codfish or two sprawled upon nails and covered with netting. From the back door you could descend into a garden, and at the end of the garden was a pig-sty, occupied by a white pig almost as tidy and precise as his owner. In the toll-woman's living room there was a cupboard fringed with tissue paper, a rocking-chair cushioned in red calico, curtains to match, a cooking-stove so small it seemed made for a play-thing, and yellow chairs having gold-leaf ornaments on their backs. She herself was a straight, flat woman, looking much broader in a front or back view than when she stood sidewise toward you. Her face was very good-natured. Altogether she seemed just the ready and capable wife for whom the man went to London after the rats and the mice led him such a life. Though in her case it is probable the wheelbarrow would not have broken, nor would any other mishap have marred the journey.
“You don't live here by yourself, do you?” inquired Grandma Padgett as the tea and the meal in common warmed an acquaintance which the fact of their being from one State had readily begun.
“Since father died I have,” replied the toll-woman. “Father moved in here when about everything else failed him, and he'd lost ambition, and laws! now I am used to it. I might gone back to Ohio, but when you fit me into a place I never want to pull up out of it.”
“And don't you ever get afraid, nights or any time, without men folks about?”
“Before I got used to being alone, I did. And there's reason yet every little while. But I only got one bad scare.”
A wagon paused at the front door, so near the horses might have put their heads in and sniffed up the merchandise, and the woman went to take toll, before telling about her bad scare.
“How do you manage in the nights?” inquired her guest.
“That's bad about fair-times, when the wild young men get to racin' late along. The pole's been cut when I tied it down, and sometimes they've tried to jump it. But generally the travellers are peaceable enough. I've got a box in the front door like a letter-box, with a slit outside for them to drop change into, and the pole rope pulls down through the window-frame. There ain't so much travel by night as there used to be, and a body learns to be wakeful anyhow if they've ever had the care of sick old people.”
“You didn't say how you got scared,” remarked aunt Corinne, sitting straight in one of the yellow chairs to impress upon her mind the image of this heroine of the road.
“Well, it was robbers,” confessed the toll-woman, “breakin' into the house, that scared me.”
Robbers! Aunt Corinne's nephew mentally saw a cavern in one of the neighboring hills, and men in scarlet cloaks and feathers lurking among the bushes. If there is any word sweeter to the young male ear than Indian or Tagger, it is robbers.
“Are there many robbers around here?” he inquired, fixing intent eyes on the toll-woman.
“There used to be plenty of horse-thieves, and is, yet,” she replied. “They've come huntin' them from away over in Illinois. I remember that year the milk-sick was so bad there was more horse-thieves than we've ever heard of since.”
“But they ain't true robbers, are they?” said aunt Corinne's nephew in some disgust, his scarlet bandits paling.
“Not the kind that come tryin' the house when I got scared,” admitted the toll-woman.
“And did they get in?” exclaimed Robert Day's aunt.
“I don't like to think about it yet,” remarked the toll-woman, cooling her tea and intent on enjoying her own story. “'Twasn't so very long ago, either. First comes word from this direction that a toll-gate keeper and his wife was tied and robbed at the dead o' night. And then comes word from the other direction of an old man bein' knocked on the head when he opened his door. It wouldn't seem to you there'd be enough money at a toll-gate to make it an object,” said the woman, looking at Zene's cross eyes with unconcealed disfavor. “But folks of that kind don't want much of an object.”
“They love to rob,” suggested Bobaday, enjoying himself.
“They're a desp'rate, evil set,” said the toll-woman sternly. “Why, I could tell things that would make your hair all stand on end, about robberies I've known.”
Aunt Corinne felt a warning stir in her scalp-lock. But her nephew began to desire permanent encampment in the neighborhood of this toll-gate. Robber-stories which his grandmother not only allowed recited, but drank in with her tea, were luxuries of the road not to be left behind.
“Tell some of them,” he urged.
“I'll tell you about their comin' here,” said the toll-woman. “'Twas soon after father's death. They must known there was a lone woman here, and calculated on findin' it an easy job. He'd kept me awake a good deal, for father suffered constant in his last sickness, and though I was done out, I still had the habit of wakin' regular at his medicine-hours. The time was along in the fall, and there was a high wind that night. Fair time, too, so there was more travel on the 'pike of people comin' and goin' to the Fair and from it, in one day, than in a whole week ordinary times.”
{Illustration: THE TOLL-WOMAN.}
“I opened my eyes just as the clock struck two and seemed like I heard something at the front door. I listened and listened. It wasn't the wind singin' along the telegraph wires as it does when there's a strong draught east and west. And it wasn't anybody tryin' to wake me up. Some of our farmers that buys stock and has to be out early and late in a droviete way, often tells me beforehand what time o' night they'll be likely to come by, and I set the pole so it'll be easy for them that knows how to tip up. Then they put their money in the box, and tip the pole back after they drive through, to save wakin' me, for the neighbors are real accommodating and they knew father took a heap of care. But the noise I heard wasn't anybody droppin' coppers in the box, nor raisin' or lowerin' the pole. The rope rasps against the hole when the gate goes up or down. It was just like a lock was bein' picked, or a rattly old window bein' slid up by inches.
“I mistrusted right away. It wouldn't do any good for me to holler. The nearest neighbor was two miles off. I hadn't any gun, and never shot off a gun in my life. I would hate to hurt a human bein' that way. Still, I was excited and afraid of gettin' killed myself; so if I'd had a gun I might have shot it off, for by the time I got my dress and stockin's on, that window was up, and somethin' was in that front room. I could hear him step, still as a cat.
“I thought about the toll-money. Everybody knew the box's inside the door, so I was far from leavin' it there till the collector came. I always took the money out and tied it in a canvas sack and hid it. A body would never think of lookin' where I hid that money.”
“Where did you hide it?” inquired aunt Corinne.
The toll-woman rose up and went to collect from a carriage at the door. The merry face of a girl in the carriage peeped through the house, and some pleasant jokes were exchanged.
“That's the daughter of the biggest stock man around here,” said the toll-woman, returning, and passing over aunt Corinne's question. “She goes to college, but it don't make a simpleton of her. She always has a smile and a pleasant word. Her folks are real good friends of mine. They knew our folks in Ohio.”
“And did he come right in and grab you?” urged Bobaday, keeping to the main narrative.
“I was that scared for a minute,” resumed the toll-woman, “that I hadn't any strength. The middle door never is locked. I leave it on the latch like, so I can hear wheels better. What to do I didn't know, but a body thinks fast at such times. First thing I knew I was on the back doorstep, hookin' the door on the outside. Then a gust of wind like, came around the corner of the house, and voices came with it, and I felt sure there were more men waitin' there to ketch me, if I tried to run.”
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