The Captain's Toll-Gate

by Frank R. Stockton

The Captain and Dick Lancaster desert the Toll-Gate.

When Captain Asher, in an angry mood, left his young friend and guest and went out into his barnyard and his fields in order to quiet his soul by the consideration of agricultural subjects, he met with but little success. He looked at his pigs, but he did not notice their plump condition; he glanced at his two cows, cropping the grass in the little meadow, but it did not impress him that they also were in fine condition; nor did he care whether the pasture were good or not. He looked at this; and he looked at that; and then he folded his arms and looked at the distant mountains. Suddenly he turned on his heel, walked straight to the stable, harnessed his mare to the buggy, and, without saying a word to anybody, drove out of the gate, and on to Glenford.

Dick Lancaster, who was in the arbor, looked in amazement after the captain's departing buggy, and old Jane, with tears in her eyes, came out and spoke to him.

"Isn't this dreadful" she said to him. "Supper with that woman and there all night, and back again as soon as he can get off this mornin'!"

"Perhaps he is not going to her house," Dick suggested. "He may have business in town which he forgot yesterday."

"If he'd had it he'd forgot it," replied the old woman. "But he hadn't none. He's gone to Maria Port's, and he may bring her back with him, married tight and fast, for all you or me knows. It would be just like his sailor fashion. When the captain's got anything to do he just does it sharp and quick."

"I don't believe that," said Dick. "If he had had any such intention as that he certainly would have mentioned it to you or to me."

The good woman shook her head. "When an old man marries a girl," she said, "she just leads him wherever she wants him to go, and he gives up everything to her, and when an old man marries a tough and seasoned and smoked old maid like Maria Port, she just drives him wherever she wants him to go, and he hasn't nothin' to say about it. It looks as if she told him to come in this mornin', and he's gone. It may be for a weddin', or it may be for somethin' else, but whatever it is, it'll be her way and not his straight on to the end of the chapter."

Dick had nothing to answer. He was very much afraid that old Jane knew what she was talking about, and his mind was occupied with trying to decide what he, individually, ought to do about it. Old Jane was now obliged to go to the toll-gate to attend to a traveler, but when she came back she took occasion to say a few more words.

"It's hard on me, sir," she said, "at my age to make a change. I've lived at this house, and I've took toll at that gate ever since I was a girl, long before the captain came here, and I've been with him a long time. My people used to own this house, but they all died, and when the place was sold and the captain bought it, he heard about me, and he said I should always have charge of the old toll-gate when he wasn't attendin' to it himself, just the same as when my father was alive and was toll-gate keeper, and I was helpin' him. But I've got to go now, and where I'm goin' to is more'n I know. But I'd rather go to the county poorhouse than stay here, or anywhere else, with Maria Port. She's a regular boa-constrictor, that woman is! She's twisted herself around people before this and squeezed the senses out of them; and that's exactly what she's doin' with the captain. If she could come here to live and bring her old father, and get him to sell the house in town and put the money in bank, and then if she could worry her husband and her father both to death, and work things so she'd be a widow with plenty of money and a good house and as much farm land as she wanted, and a toll-gate where she could set all day and take toll and give back lies and false witness as change, she'd be the happiest woman on earth."