"No; I'm goin' to walk."
"But, father—"
"I don't mean to breakup your stayin' here, nor your mother's. You tell her how 'twas. I'm goin' to walk."
Hattie turned and whispered to her husband for a moment. Then she took her father's hand.
"I'll slip into the tent and put you up somethin' for your breakfast and luncheon," she said. "Sereno's gone to harness; for, pa, you must take one horse, and you can send Luke back with it Friday, so's we can get the things home. What do we want of two horses down here, at two and ninepence a day? I guess I know!"
So Eli yielded; but before his wife appeared, he had turned his back on the sea, where the rose of dawn was fast unfolding. As he jogged homeward, the dusty roadsides bloomed with flowers of paradise, and the insects' dry chirp thrilled like the song of angels. He drove into the yard just at the turning of the day, when the fragrant smoke of many a crackling fire curls cheerily upward, in promise of the evening meal.
"What's busted?" asked Luke, swinging himself down from his load of fodder-corn, and beginning to unharness Doll.
"Oh, nothin'," said Eli, leaping, from the wagon as if twenty years had been taken from his bones. "I guess I'm too old for such jaunts. I hope you didn't forgit them cats."