"Peanut": The Story of a Boy

by Albert Bigelow Paine

As to Peanut’s ability to make the long journey, she did not question it—not yet. She knew, of course, that the way was long, and would be hard in places. How long or how hard, neither she nor any one could know. She realized much more fully Peanut’s subtle knowledge of outdoor life, his persistence, and the endurance of his wiry little frame. She forgot that a winter of comparative inaction and close mental application might have told on his physical powers. It would be a weary journey, but with the long days of summer-time at hand he would not fail, and September would bring him back to her.

She would begin preparing for him at once. She would make up one of the new dresses, and leave off her second toddy to-morrow. Then there was another purpose, which must be accomplished now, sooner than she had expected. Her boy was coming back to her—not as she had once dreamed, in a buggy, and wearing a tall silk hat—but, better still, the boy who had gone away. He would find her ready to receive him.

But one thing troubled the Rose—the amount of Peanut’s resources. With the aid of her fragmentary arithmetic she verified his calculation that if a little boy traveled fifteen miles a day, and traveled a hundred days, he would travel fifteen hundred miles; also, if the same little boy had ten dollars, and spent ten cents of it every day, he would have enough to last him through the journey. Only, she wished that he might have more than ten cents a day. It seemed to her so little—she wondered what he would buy with it. Crackers, mostly, she thought, and cheese. The Rose thought of the eatables kept at the camp store, and sighed as she remembered how little of them could be had for ten cents. If she only knew where to send him more money. But she remembered hearing that things were cheaper beyond the mountains, and this thought consoled her.

As the days passed, her confidence in Peanut’s ability to make the long trip began to wane. Chicago lay far to the eastward, across rivers and beyond mountains. She reasoned that there must be a road and bridges between, but in her imagination she began to see the dusty little figure toiling along in the sun, overcome by thirst and heat, where the prairies were wide, and the houses far apart. At times she pictured him as being run down by those terrible railroad trains, as waylaid and robbed of his little store of money and left by the roadside to die. Almost clairvoyantly, at night, she saw him asleep in fence-corners, in haystacks, under bushes and ledges of rock—anywhere that afforded shelter to the friendless little wayfarer toiling back to his beloved hills. When the storm raged down the mountains she would open the door and, looking out into the mystery of blackness, fancy she heard his thin voice calling to her above the roar of the torrent and the wail of the tree-tops. However busy her days, they no longer seemed brief, her nights were no longer untroubled. She knew that he was still far away beyond the mountains, yet twenty times a day she hastened to the door to look and listen, while at night wild dreams brought her bolt upright to answer to his call.

When two weeks had passed the stage one day brought her two letters. One of them from Miss Schofield—written from a sense of duty, we may believe—told, briefly and guardedly, of the strange disappearance of Peanut. The writer assured the Rose that there was no cause for uneasiness, that every effort was being made to find the missing boy and that he was certain to be discovered in a brief time. The Rose smiled grimly as she read this epistle, for the other one had been from Peanut—just a line on a bit of wrapping-paper, to tell her that in seven days he had reached Iowa, which was farther than he had expected to be at that time. People had asked him to ride, sometimes, on their wagons. There were nearly always good places to sleep—mostly in the woods, where he had the birds and squirrels for company. He was well, and happier than he had been for a year.

The Rose did not know where Iowa was. When she asked the postmaster he showed it to her on the map. Then she did not know any better, but she was comforted. Peanut wrote again when he reached Nebraska, but that was nearly three weeks later, and the Rose had become almost desperate. Now she was made briefly happy by the statement that he was still well, and had money, and that he had found there were only two more states to cross, Nebraska and Wyoming, and then a little more and he would be home.

To the Rose a state was a state. That the distance yet to be traveled was double that already covered, and many times more difficult, did not occur to her. But when two weeks more had passed, and yet two more, and brought no further word from the little wayfarer, her heart grew very heavy again, and she haunted the camp post-office with each arrival of the stage.

And still another two weeks went by, and yet he did not come, and the days brought her no word. She did not know that the number of crackers obtained by Peanut for five cents had been reduced in his westward march from ten to eight, from eight to six, and that the bit of cheese received in exchange for the other five cents had grown so small that the little boy, alarmed, had feared to spend even the money necessary for another letter. The Rose did not know these things, and even had she known, it would hardly have lessened her anxiety.

She spent most of her time now in watching for him. The hundred days had by no means expired, but his letters had led her to hope that he had gained time and would be there sooner than he had calculated. According to her count, if a little boy could cross two states in four weeks, he could cross four states and something over in about nine weeks, and now twelve weeks had gone by and he had not come. The fact that he no longer wrote encouraged her to believe that at any moment he might walk in upon her.

But now came an added anxiety. A letter, indeed, not from Peanut, but a broken-hearted confession from Cynthia Schofield, who, good woman that she was, acknowledged everything, begging the Rose to forgive her, and to write if she knew aught of their little lad.