“Won’t you please give me a lift an’ a chance to earn my vittles for a day or two?”
Hills now met her already weary feet; they seemed never ending, for as the crown of one was reached, another met her eyes. The roadway also became badly gullied, always stony, with grass growing in the hollows.
By now she was faint and dizzy from two days’ fasting, and so footsore that she could scarce limp along. So far her defiant pride had kept her from begging food, but now that was weakening, and at the next house she would have asked a morsel. But no next house came. Only the same scrub growth along the wayside with now and then a patch of forest, with never a fence, even, to indicate human ownership.
The sun had now vanished. Already the stretches of forest were shadowy, and as Chip reached the apex of another long hill, beyond and far below she could see another darkened valley. Night seemed creeping up from it to meet her. Not a house, not even a fence or recent clearing–only the unending tangle of green growth and this dark vale beyond.
“I guess I’ll starve ’fore I find another house,” poor Chip muttered, and then as the utter desolation of her situation and surroundings were realized for a moment, her defiant courage gave way.
For two days and half a night she had plodded on without food and with scarce a moment’s rest. Her feet were blistered, her eyes smarted from sun and dust, her head swam. She was miles away from any human habitation, footsore, weary, and despondent, with night enclosing her–a homeless waif, still clinging to the small bundle that contained her all.
But now as she crouched by the roadside, too exhausted to move on, the memory of those three days and nights of horror, one year ago, came to her. Her plight was bad enough now, but nothing to compare with what it was then, and as all the terror and desperation of that mad flight now returned, it renewed her courage.
“I ain’t so bad off as I was then,” she said. “I’m sure of finding a house to-morrow.”
And now, as if this moment marked the turning-point of her fortunes, from far down the hill she had climbed, came the faint creak, creak, and jolting sound of an ascending wagon. Slowly it neared, until just at the hilltop where Chip sat, the tired horse halted, and its driver saw her rise almost beside the wagon.