Grandma Padgett puckered the brows above her glasses. She did not want to pay unnecessary bounty to the toll-gate keepers.
“Well, that's a good plan, Zene, if you're sure we won't lose the way, or fall into any dif-fick-ulty.”
“I've asked nigh a dozen men, and they all tell the same tale,” said Zene.
“People ought to know the lay of the land in their own neighborhood,” admitted Grandma Padgett. “Well, we'll try what virtue there is in the dirt road.”
So she clucked to the carriage horses and Zene went back to his charge.
The last toll-gate they would see for thirty miles drew its pole down before them. Zene paid according to the usual arrangement, and the toll-man only stood in the door to see the carriage pass.
“I wouldn't like to live in a little bit of a house sticking out on the 'pike like that,” said aunt Corinne to her nephew. “Folks could run against it on dark nights. Does he stay there by himself? And if robbers or old beggars came by they could nab him the minute he opened his door.”
“But if he has any boys,” suggested Robert looking back, “they can see everybody pass, and it'd be just as good as going some place all the time. And who's afraid of robbers!”
Zene beckoned to the carriage as he turned off the 'pike. For a distance the wagon moved ahead of them, between tall stake fences which were overrun with vines or had their corners crowded with bushes. Wheat and cornfields and sweet-smelling buckwheat spread out on each side until the woods met them, and not a bit of the afternoon heat touched the carriage after that. Aunt Corinne clasped a leather-covered upright which hurt her hand before, and leaned toward the trees on her side. Every new piece of woodland is an unexplored country containing moss-lined stumps, dimples of hollows full of mint, queer-shaped trees, and hickory saplings just the right saddle-curve for bending down as “teeters,” such as are never reproduced in any other piece of woodland. Nature does not make two trees alike, and her cool breathing-halls under the woods' canopies are as diverse as the faces of children wandering there. Moss or lichens grow thicker in one spot; another particular enclosure you call the lily or the bloodroot woods, and yet another the wild-grape woods. This is distinguished for blackberries away up in the clearings, and that is a fishing woods, where the limbs stretch down to clear holes, and you sit in a root seat and hear springs trickling down the banks while you fish. Though Corinne could possess these reaches of trees only with a brief survey, she enjoyed them as a novelty.
“I would like to get lost in the woods,” she observed, “and have everybody out hunting me while I had to eat berries and roots. I don't believe I'd like roots, though: they look so big and tough. And I wouldn't touch a persimmon! Nor Injun turnip. You's a bad boy that time you give me Injun turnip to eat, Bobaday Padgett!”