All the next day Grover Cleveland hunted for his boots. “I sot ’em right here,” he said, “and I ain’t touched ’em since.” In the house he had turned every thing over and over again, had gone through the barn and out-houses in the same way and at sundown was searching the woods when Arsula a-mule-back rode up to the house. Colonel Ledbetter was chopping wood but he put down his axe and went to her.
“I’ve come from Carliny’s,” she said, “and here’s them blue-top boots. Carliny found ’em outside her door this morning and she’d no more notion than the dead whose they was or how they got there, till I told her ’bout last night.”
The old man turned them in his hands confusedly. “If Grover Cleveland took these boots up thar last night,” he said, “his sleepin’ opinion is a heap different from his wakin’ opinion. When he’s awake he ’grees with me; he thinks if she was so set on goin’ her own gait, now she’d ought to keep on goin it.”
Arsula rode off and he went into the house and tucked the boots out of sight.
By the by his grandson came in dispirited and weary, ate a little supper, and crept away under his side of the Valley of the Mississippi.
“He ain’t eatin’ as much as he’d ought to,” mused his grandfather as he scraped the remnant of their meal upon the hearth for Dixie. “If Missouri was alive she’d make somethin’ to tempt his appetite, but I ’low I ain’t got the sleight o’ cookin’.” He went to the bed and tucked the quilt closely about the child’s shoulders.
“He’ll lay quiet enough to-night; I never knowed him to get up two nights runnin’. Seem like he gets scairt and keeps still a spell. I’m mighty nigh beat out myself, bein’ up so late yesterday evenin’; I reckon I can sleep without any rockin’,” and he went to bed.
He awoke after a three-hours’ nap. The room was cold and his first thought was to see if the Valley of the Mississippi was doing its duty by his grandson. It was not; and when he attempted to pull it into place he found there was no grandson there; neither did there appear to be a complement of the Valley of the Mississippi.
“Grover Cleveland! Grover Cleveland!” he shouted and the only answer was a stampede of rats from the hearth. He got up, lighted his candle, and held it low over the bed. The boy was surely gone. He pulled the quilt toward him and as he did so the big old shears that served them in their various household operations fell to the floor. The quilt had been cut through from end to end; the side containing the striped pieces had been left in its place but the blue had disappeared!
He got into his clothes and hurrying out among the shadows of the moonlight night took his direction with the certainty of prescience. When he set foot upon the highroad, he began to follow by sight, for, excepting where the shadows were heaviest, he could discern the little trudging figure of Grover Cleveland, its outline marred by something slung in man-like fashion across his shoulder and by the dog following closely.