“Mighty good thing you’re here, sir,” they heard the conductor say. “I certainly would have been put out if I’d had to leave the little one in the dark by herself.”
“Oh, my daddy is somewhere,” Constance reassured him in her high ringing tones; and as they pulled out they heard her voice calling “Daddy! Daddy!”
“There’s a light!” cried Aunt Zillah excitedly. “See, it’s just up the track a way. Her father must be there after all. Really, it’s the greatest relief to me.”
The traveling men seemed to be relieved, too. So was the conductor; so, no doubt, were the brakemen. No one knows what the engineer felt. He probably was praying that his repairs would hold out. The mountain woman took out her snuff stick again. Just then the conductor called:
“All out for Bee Tree.”
Azalea caught at her parcels; Carin gathered up hers more deliberately; Aunt Zillah arose in a flutter, dropping things here and there which the conductor and the youngest of the traveling men picked up, and presently they were off in the mellow gloom. But it was a gloom with a lantern-light to mitigate it.
“Be you the ladies Mr. Summers writ about?” a cordial voice inquired. “I’m McEvoy. Step along this way, please.”
CHAPTER III
SUNSET GAP
The night was as bland as it was dark. Neither stars nor moon lighted the way of the travelers, but Miles McEvoy’s horses had no need of these celestial bodies to help them keep the road. They knew it, though it swept around Simms’ barn and took the cut-off by Decker’s hill, and plunged straight through Ravenel’s woods. They did not tremble as, climbing and still climbing, it carried them along the edge of a gorge; nor did they quake when their hoofs beat on a resounding bridge, though there were but planks between them and an abyss.
Dew-wet branches touched the faces of those who sat in the sagging old wagon, and low-flying bats brushed their hair. Owls hooted, hounds barked, and all the unnamed sad night noises of the mountain reached their ears. Azalea had known such journeys many and many a time in the old days when she had traveled in the caravan with Sisson’s actors, but to Carin and Miss Zillah this plunging ahead up a strange road in the pitch blackness was a new and not altogether pleasant experience. Mr. McEvoy may have guessed at their feelings, for he said after a long silence: