“It would be a bad night for a man with a bad conscience,” he said aloud. “He would think there were avenging spirits on his track, sure enough. Come to think of it, I’ve plenty of things to have a bad conscience about myself. I’d better be watching out or the goblins will get me. And whatever would wife Barbara and baby Jonathan do then, poor things!”
The place where he had lighted his camp fire was in a little hollow and the mist gathered very thickly there, so he concluded that it would be better to go on farther up the mountain. It was possible that he might find an airier place where the draft would keep the heavier clouds away. So once more he put his horse to the path and went on silently, rather weary, and heartily wishing that the night were fair.
He was very far from the beaten road, in a place so solitary that he could not hope to meet anyone, so it was with no little surprise that he found himself, suddenly, almost upon a group of human beings. They were sitting, three of them, around a fire, well wrapped from the chill. There was a sort of rude hut beside them, fashioned of saplings and thatched with pine boughs. Here, apparently, they slept. They were not then like himself, wanderers, but campers. Well, it was a quiet place for a camp, and no doubt a sightly one—
His thoughts broke off like a thread that is snapped. He recognized the persons at whom he was looking. They were the Disbrows! They were the fugitives. At first he thought of going right up to them, but something withheld him. He could hear Mrs. Disbrow’s voice, and he slid from his horse and having tied him, crept nearer with as much stealth and skill in silence as an Indian, that he might listen. There were things he felt that he must know, and that as Sam’s friend he had a right to know.
“I don’t mean to go on, pa,” Mrs. Disbrow was saying. “What’s the use of going on? Whatever would it mean for me but another house to look after, and me lacking the strength to do it? Hannah would drudge and drudge, and that’s all there’d be to it. Living like this there aren’t any pantry shelves to clean or doorsteps to scrub. That’s a great point to a woman with no elbow grease. You understand, pa, it’s been pretty dull for me these last few years back. You can’t tell what it is to lie awake all night wondering if the morning will ever come, and when the morning comes, hating it because the light tears your eyes out and the noise splits your ears.”
“But you seem to stand the light and the noise here well enough, ma.”
“So I do. That’s why I want to stay. The only noise is what the crickets and birds make, with now and then a bee humming or an owl screeching. And the light is green, coming through the trees. Why, it’s as if a thousand years had rolled off my back. There’s no one around wondering about me, and trying this trick and that to get a sight of me.”
“No one ever did that, ma,” cried out the shrill voice of Hannah. “That was just your imagination. It was your being sick made you think that way.”
“Well, however that may be, out here we’re free. Now I propose, since you’ve got some money, pa, that we move around here and there, like a nice family of bears—the father, and the mother and the baby bear.”
She gave a curious, unaccustomed laugh. Then suddenly she turned toward her husband, and Mr. Summers could see her wild eyes gleaming in the firelight.