Grandma Padgett and her party stopped at a tavern on Illinois street. Late in the night they were to separate, Mrs. Tracy taking the first train for Baltimore. So aunt Corinne and Robert, before going to bed, bade good-by to the child who had scarcely been a playmate to them, but more like a delicate plaything in whose helplessness they had felt such interest.
Rose, obeying her mamma, put her arms around their necks and kissed them, telling them to come and see her at home. She looked brighter than hitherto, and remembered a dollhouse and her birds at mamma's house; yet, her long course of opiates left her little recognition of the boy and girl she had so dimly seen.
Her mamma hugged them warmly, and Bobaday endured his share of the hugging with a very good grace, though he was so old. Then it seemed but a breath until morning, and but another breath until they were under way, the wagon creaking along the dewy 'pike ahead of them, an opal clearness growing through the morning twilight, and no Fairy Carrie asleep, like some tiny enchanted princess, on the back seat.
“The rest of the way,” observed Robert Day to his aunt, “there won't be anything happening—you see if there will. Zene says we're half across the State now. And I know we'll never see J. D. Matthews again. And nobody will be lost and have to be found, and there's no tellin' where that great big crowd Jonathan and his folks moved with, are.”
“I feel lonesome,” observed aunt Corinne somewhat pensively. “When Mrs. Tracy was sending back word to the Quaker tavern man, I wished we's going back to stay awhile longer. Some places are so nice!”
“Now it's a pretty thing for you to begin at your time of life,” said Grandma Padgett, “to set your faces backward and wish for what's behind. That's a silly notion. Folks that encourage themselves in doin' it don't show sound sense. The One that made us knew better than to let us stand still in our experience, and I've always found them that go forward cheerfully will pretty generally keep the land of Beulah right around them. Git up, Hickory!”
Thus admonished, the children entered the lone bridge over White River, or that branch of White River on which Indianapolis is situated. The stream, seen between chinks in the floor, appeared deep, but not particularly limpid. How the horses' feet thundered on the boards, and how long they trod before the little star at the other end grew to an opening quite large enough to let any vehicle out of the bridge!
CHAPTER XXIV. THE TOLL-WOMAN.
Still, as crossing the Sciota at Columbus, had been entering a land of adventure, crossing the White River at Indianapolis, seemed at first entering a land of commonplace.