She "kept up" wonderfully well, and they made good time, reaching by dusk, as they had hoped to do, a farmer's house on the downward dip of the mountain to the east. Here, their story being told, they were hospitably received, and Ann Mary was clapped into the airless inner room and fed with gruel and dipped toast. But she had had fresh air and exercise all day, and a hearty meal of cold venison and corn bread at their noonday rest, so she slept soundly.
The next day they went across a wide, hilly valley, up another range of low mountains, and down on the other side. The country was quite strange to them, and somehow, before they knew it, they were not on the road recommended to them by their hosts of the night before. Night overtook them when they were still, as the phrase has come down in our family, "in a miserable, dismal place of wood."
Hannah's teeth chattered for very terror as she saw their plight; but she spoke cheerfully to Ann Mary and the boy, who looked to her for courage, and told them that they were to have the fun of sleeping under the stars.
Boys were the same then as now, and Remember Williams was partly shivering with dread of bears and Indians and things, and partly glowing with anticipatory glory of telling the Hillsboro boys all about the adventure. Hannah soothed the first and inflamed the second emotion until she had Remember strutting about gathering firewood, as brave as a lion.
Very probably Ann Mary would have been frightened to death, if she had not been so sleepy from her long day out of doors that she could not keep her eyes open. And then, of course, everything must be all right, because there was Hannah!
This forlorn terrified little captain wrapped the invalid in all the extra clothing, managed to get a fire started, and cooked a supper of hot cornmeal mush in her big iron "kittle." Ann Mary ate a great deal of this, sweetened as it was with maple sugar crumbled from the big lump Hannah Had brought along and immediately afterward she fell sound asleep.
Soon the soft night air of June was too strong a soporific for Remember's desire to keep awake and hear the catamounts scream, as he had heard they did in those woods. Hannah was left quite alone to keep watch and to tend the fire, her heart in her mouth, jumping and starting at every shadow cast by the flames.
She knew that wild beasts would not come near them if a big fire burned briskly; and all that night she piled on the wood, scraped away the ashes, and watched Ann Mary to see that she did not grow chilly. Hannah does not seem to have been much inclined to talk about her own feelings, and there is no record of what she suffered that night; but I think we may be sure that it seemed a long time to her before the sky began to whiten in the east.
As soon as she could see plainly, she cooked a hearty breakfast of broiled bacon and fried mush, and wakened her two charges to eat it. They made a very early start, and there is nothing more to tell about their journey except that at about seven o'clock that evening the two tired horses crept into the main street of Heath Falls, and a very much excited girl asked the first passer-by where the Indian herb-doctor lived.
They found him in a little old house of logs—the only one that looked natural to them in the prosperous settlement. When Hannah knocked at the door, he opened it himself. He was a small, very old, dark-brown, and prodigiously wrinkled individual, who held up a candle and looked at Hannah with the most impassive eyes she had ever seen—like little pools of black water unstirred by any wind.