It was nearly sundown when she started home. Jim came up to roll the empty barrel on to the sled, to place her chair against it, and help little William hitch up the oxen; but when she looked around to thank the little clown, he had disappeared. No one could tell where he had gone.
Never in her girlhood, rolling home in the stately family coach from some gay social conquest, had she felt so victorious. She jingled the silk reticule at her side with childish pleasure. She could hardly wait for the slow oxen to plod the two long miles toward home, and when they stopped in front of the little cabin she was trembling with eagerness. Hurrying up the path through the gathering dusk, she poured her treasure out on her husband's bed.
"Look!" she cried, laying her face on the pillow and slipping an arm around his neck. "We are going back to Maryland, dear heart!" She nestled her faded cheek against his with a happy little sob. "Oh, William, we need not be a burden any longer, for we're going home to-morrow!"
Later, the full August moon swung up over the edge of the forest. It flooded the little clearing with its white light, and turned the dusty road in front of the cabin to a broad band of silver. A slow, steady tramp of many feet marching across a wooden bridge in the distance fell on the intense stillness of the summer night.
"It's the circus," said Boone, raising his head to listen. "I reckon they're travellin' by night on account of the heat, and they'll be pushin' on down to the river."
His wife limped to the door and sat down on the step to watch for its coming, but his mother hurried out to the fence and leaned across the bars, waiting.
A strange procession of unwieldy monsters, never before seen in this peaceful woodland, loomed up in the distance, huge and black, while a stranger procession of fantastic shadows stalked grimly by its side. The sleepy keepers dozed in their saddles, filing by in ghostly silence, save for the clanking of trace-chains and the creaking of the heavy lion cages.
At the extreme end of the long line came the tired little clown on the trick mule. A sorrier-looking object could not be imagined, as he sat with his knees drawn up and his head bent dejectedly down. He did not notice the figure leaning eagerly over the bars, until she called him. Then he looked up with a start. The next instant he had dismounted and was standing bare-headed in the road before her. The moonlight made a halo of her white hair, and lighted up her gentle, aristocratic face with something of its old high-born beauty.
"I wanted to thank you," she said, holding out her slender hand to the painted little jester with the gracious dignity that had always been her charm. "You disappeared this afternoon before I could tell you how much your courtesy has done for me and mine."