There were stacks of eatables, including mango stuffed with cabbage and eggs pickled red in beet vinegar. All sorts of fruit butters and preserves stood about in glass and earthen dishes. One end of the table was an exact counterpart of the other, even to the stacks of mighty bread-slices. Boiled cabbage and onions and thick corn-pone with fried ham were there to afford a strong support through the night's fast. Nothing was served in order: you helped yourself from the dishes or let them alone at your pleasure. The landlord appeared just as jolly as his wife was dismal. He sat at the other end of the table and urged everybody with jokes to eat heartily; yet all this profusion was not half so appetizing as some of Grandma Padgett's fried chicken and toast would have been.
After supper Bobaday went out to the barn and saw a whole street of horse-stalls, the farthest horse switching his tail in dim distance; and such a mow of hay as impressed him with the advantages of travel. A hostler was forking down hay for the evening's feeding, and Robert climbed to his side, upon which the hostler good-naturedly took him by the shoulders and let him slide down and alight upon the spongy pile below. This would have been a delightful sensation had Bobaday not bitten his tongue in the descent. But he liked it better than the house where his aunt Corinne wandered uneasily up stairs which were hollowed in the middle of each step, and along narrow passages where bits of plaster had fallen off.
There was a dulcimer in the room aunt Corinne occupied with her mother. She took the hammer and beat on its rusty wires some time before going to bed. It tinkled a plea to her to let it alone, but what little girl could look at the queer instrument and keep her hands off it? The landlady said it was left there by a travelling showman who could not pay his board. He hired the bar-room to give a concert in, and pasted up written advertisements of his performance in various parts of the town. He sent free tickets to the preacher and schoolmaster, and the landlord's family went in for nothing. Nobody else came, though he played on the flute and harmonium, besides the dulcimer, and sang Lilly Dale, and Roll on, Silver Moon, so touchingly that the landlady wiped her eyes at their mere memory. As he had no money to pay stage-fare further, and the flute and harmonium—a small bellows organ without legs—were easier to carry than the dulcimer, he left it and trudged eastward. And no one at that tavern could tell whether he and his instruments had perished piecemeal along the way, or whether he had found crowded houses and forgotten the old dulcimer in the tide of prosperity.
Grandma Padgett's party ate breakfast before day, by the light of a candle covering its candlestick with a tallow glacier. It made only a hole of shine in the general duskiness of the big dining-room. The landlady bade them a pathetic good-by. She was sure there were dangers ahead of them. The night stage had got in three hours late, owing to a breakdown, and one calamity she said, is only the forerunner of another.
Zene had driven ahead with the load. It was a foggy morning, and drops of moisture hung to the carriage curtains. There was the morning star yet trembling over the town. Aunt Corinne hugged her wrap, and Bobaday stuck his hands deep in his pockets. But Grandma sat erect and drove away undaunted and undamped. She merely searched the inside of the carriage with her glasses, inquiring as a last precaution:
“Have we left anything behind?”
“I got all my things,” said Robert. “And my gold dollar's in my pocket.”
At this aunt Corinne arose and plunged into the carriage pocket on her side.