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Updated: July 18, 2025
In the year eighteen hundred and fifty-seven, on the fifth day of June, the Padgett carriage-horses faced the west, and their mistress gathered the lines into her mitted hands. The moving-wagon was ready in front of the carriage. It was to be driven by Zene, the lame hired man.
Zene limped up to his seat in front of the wagon, and they moved forward along the 'pike. "Good!" breathed aunt Corinne, settling back. "'Tisn't good a bit!" said Bobaday. And whom should they meet in a few miles but cousin Padgett himself, riding horseback and leading a cream-colored horse which he had been into the country to purchase. This was almost as trying as taking dinner at his house.
This bitter skirmishing might have become an open engagement at the next exchange of fires, for the landlord's son stood up in rage while his chums giggled, and Robert felt terribly equal to the occasion. He told Zene next day he had his fist already doubled, and he didn't care if the landlord put them all in jail.
When he discovered they were not in his train, he was in a narrow road and could not turn; so he tied the horses and walked back a piece. He got on a corn-field fence and shouted to them; but by that time there was no carriage anywhere in the landscape. "Such things won't do," said Grandma Padgett with some severity. "No, marm," responded Zene humbly.
The afternoon sun sagged so low it stared into grandma's blue. spectacles and made even Corinne shelter her eyes. Zene drove far ahead with his load to secure lodgings for the night. Having left behind the last acquaintance and entered upon the realities of the journey, grandma considered it time to take off her Leghorn bonnet and replace it with the brown barege one drawn over wire.
Zene concluded he would black his boots and look into the fair awhile also, and as he could keep a protecting eye on her young family, and had authority to send them up-stairs in one hour and a half by the bar-room time, Grandma Padgett went to bed. She was glad the journey was so nearly over, for every night found her quite tired out.
"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.
"Why, we have a granny over ninety with us!" he declared. "Now's the time to start if you want to see the great western country." Zene drove off the 'pike on the temporary track made by so many vehicles, and Grandma Padgett followed, the Virginian showing them a good spot near the liveliest part of the camp, upon which they might pitch.
He told the children she acted like she never see a thing before her, and would go dead asleep if they didn't stick pins in her like they did in a woman he seen walkin' for money once. Robert was fain to wander aside on the subject of this walking woman, but aunt Corinne kept to Fairy Carrie, and made Zene tell every scrap of information he had about her.
The man said his meaning was, she might be slipped off by her keeper. "Where have you got them?" inquired Grandma Padgett. "He saw 'em goin' into Sunday-school, marm," explained Zene. "There's a meetin'-house over yonder three or four mile," pointing with his whip. "It's the unlikeliest place that ever was," said the messenger, polishing his horse's wet neck.
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