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Updated: June 13, 2025
"Why, Bobaday Padgett," exclaimed aunt Corinne, "if there isn't our wagon and Ma Padgett." Both children came running to the carriage steps, and their guardian got down, trembling. She put her arms around them, and after a silent hug, shook one in each hand. The fire illuminated wagon and carriage, J. D. Matthew's cart, and the logs and bushes surrounding them.
There were the homemade carpet, the centre-table with daguerreotypes standing open and glaring such light as they had yet to reflect, samplers and colored prints upon the walls, but there was also a strange man busy with some papers at the table. His hat stood beside him on the floor, and he dropped the sorted papers into it. He was, as Grandma Padgett supposed, one of the lawyers on the circuit.
It was a small square cellar, having earthen sides, but piles of pine boxes made ambushes everywhere. "Come out!" Grandma Padgett spoke again. "We won't have any tricks played. But if you're hurt, we can help you." It was like addressing solid darkness, for the chip was languishing upon its coals, and cast but a dim red glare around the shovel.
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.
"And a safe time the poor simple soul will have," said Grandma Padgett, making her spectacles glitter at the landlord, "gettin' through the creek that nigh drowned us. I suppose, you have a ford that you don't keep for movers." "Oh, yah!" said the landlord. "Te fort ist goot." "How dared you send a woman and two children to such an empty, miserable shell as this?"
"It's really your child?" said Grandma Padgett, sitting down beside the mother with a satisfied and benevolent expression. "Oh, indeed, yes! Don't you know mamma, darling?" For reply, the little girl was clinging mutely to her mother's neck. Her curls were damp and her eyes very dark-ringed.
J. D. Matthews having finished his dishwashing, sat down in the shadow some distance from the outspoken woman in spectacles, and her family. "Now come up here," urged aunt Corinne, "and sing it all over what you was singing before Ma Padgett came." J. D. ducked his head and chuckled, but remained in his shadow.
After turning off on the by-road, Grandma Padgett heard Zene leisurely jogging in the wake of the carriage, and remembered for a moment, with dismay, the number of breakable things in his load.
They pulled the carriage curtains down, and Grandma Padgett had the oilcloth apron drawn up to her chin, while she continued to drive the horses through a slit. The rear of the wagon made a blur ahead of them.
"I would like to get lost in the woods," she observed, "and have everybody out hunting me while I had to eat berries and roots. I don't believe I'd like roots, though: they look so big and tough. And I wouldn't touch a persimmon! Nor Injun turnip. You's a bad boy that time you give me Injun turnip to eat, Bobaday Padgett!"
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