"In dis vain worl' you mean," Luke said.
"That's all. Come, don't waste time. You'd better walk on for a short way in the pike before taking to the woods. Now go all night for all you're worth. Good-by." I turned abruptly. But my led horse was averse to abruptness, and all the family except the torpid Robelia poured up their blessings and rained kisses on my very feet.
In my half-intelligent plan I intended first to stop at the house we had gone by, and had reached the gate of its front lane when I met one of its household, a lad of sixteen, on the pike.
"Yes, he had just seen the disabled coach."
I said that by business appointment with the lady who had just left the coach I had gone to the next railway station northward in order to meet her. That I had come down the turnpike on a hired horse and met her and her servants pushing forward to our appointment as best they could. Now, I said, our business, a law matter, was accomplished and she was gone on on my hired horse. This span I was taking back to the stable whence I had hired them for her in the morning.
The boy's graciousness shamed me through and through. "Why, certainly! He would have the coach drawn up to the house before sunrise and would keep it as long as I liked." He asked me in, but I went on to the little railway town, repeated my tarradiddle at its "hotel," and soon was asleep.
["'Tarradi'l','" said Mme. Castanado, "tha'z may be a species of paternoster, I suppose, eh?"
"No," said Scipion, "I think tha'z juz' a fashion of speech that he took a drink. I do that myself, going to bed."
Chester explained, but said that to admit one's untruthfulness by even a nickname implied some compunction. Whereat two or three put in:
"Ah! if he acknowledge' his compunction he's all right! But we are stopping the story."