They spent their usual quiet evening under the dining-room lamp, Pen with her mending, Pendleton with his newspaper. An instinct of caution warned him not to read aloud any of the comment on the Counsell case. The news of the grand dénouement had not reached Baltimore in time for that morning's paper. They retired early, Pen offering her cheek for the usual good-night kiss.
As soon as the sounds of Pendleton's snores began to issue through the transom over his door, Pen came out of her room again. She was dressed in hat and suit, and carried a small valise. She also had a note addressed to Aunt Maria, giving certain directions for breakfast. As Aunt Maria could not read, Pen knew that it would be brought to Pendleton's attention early.
She slipped out of the house by the back door. Doug in his kennel whined with pleasure. She unfastened him with an admonition to silence. Doug was too experienced a dog to waste much energy in unnecessary noise. Pen walked swiftly back through the paddock, and through the stable yard gate to the road. Doug ran ahead with his tail high. It was a fair night with a pale sky, and dim stars.
She was too early. She loafed along the road. At the gate to the distant field where the sheep were pastured, she leaned her elbows on the bars waiting for the moon, while Doug pursued his canine investigations far and near. He had all the lost time of his imprisonment to make up. Finally when the silver rim appeared, Pen let down the bars and whistled for him.
"Fetch them out, sir!" she said. Doug knew his business thoroughly.
Half an hour later the huddled little flock was striking into the woods, with Pen at its heels and Doug, all intent now upon his charges. Pen paused to let them drink their fill in the little stream that flowed across the road. They plodded on through clogging sand and around mudholes that never dried up from one year's end to another. There was no regular beat to the thudding little hoofs, for those in the van were always hanging back, and those in the rear running to catch up. They passed along in little gusts of sound, like nervous fingers drumming on a window pane. Pen was choked with dust. "What will I look like in the morning?" she thought.
Little owls mourned far off, this way and that, and occasionally the bark of a fox brought Doug to a stand with raised ruff and murmured growl. Through openings in the branches, stray shafts of moonlight fell on the backs of the sheep making them look like little gray ghosts creeping along with bowed shoulders. There was a place miles deep in the woods where they passed a squatter's shack close beside the road. The nervous patter of hoofs brought a figure to the open door. In a curiously tense pose he watched them pass; transfixed; without a sound.
It was ten miles through the woods to the fork in the road where you took the right-hand-turn down to the wharf at Hungerford's Run, three miles further. Endless it seemed to Pen, the way the road twisted aimlessly first off in one direction, then back in the other. It was level for the most part except for once or twice when it precipitated them into a gully with a branch over which Pen had to jump. In spite of scurrying hoofs their net progress was slow. Dawn had broken before they came out on the open road. Pen dreading curious eyes urged them on as fast as she could.
She had one encounter. A farmer early at the plow, turned his team at the end of his furrow, just as Pen with her convoy passed in the road below. His jaw dropped; he all but rubbed his eyes at the strange spectacle of a modishly-dressed (to him) young lady covered with dust, driving a flock of sheep miles from anywhere. Pen did not know him, but he, by a process of elimination guessed who she must be. His face expressed a sort of agony of curiosity until the obvious explanation occurred to him, when it cleared.
"Driving your sheep to the steamboat?" he said.