“Tare ist grass and water,” said the landlord as she turned from his door. “And more as feefty famblies hast put up tere. I don't keep moofers mit te tafern.”
Robert and Corinne felt very homeless as she drove at a rattling pace down the valley. They were hungry, and upon an unknown road; and that inhospitable tavern had turned them away like vagrants.
“We'll drive all night before we'll stop in his movers' pen,” said Grandma Padgett with her well-known decision. “I suppose he calls every vagabond that comes along a mover, and his own house is too clean for such gentry. I've heard about the Swopes and the Dutch being stupid, but a body has to travel before they know.”
But well did the Dutch landlord know the persuasion of his house on the hill after luckless travellers had passed through a stream which drained the valley. This was narrow enough, but the very banks had a caving, treacherous look. Grandma Padgett drove in, and the carriage came down with a plunge on the flanks of Old Hickory and Old Henry, and they disappeared to their nostrils and the harness strips along the centre of their backs.
{Illustration: “HASN'T THE CREEK ANY BOTTOM?” CRIED GRANDMA PADGETT.}
“Hasn't the creek any bottom?” cried Grandma Padgett, while Corinne and Robert clung to the settling carriage. The water poured across their feet and rose up to their knees. Hickory and Henry were urged with whip and cry.
“Hold fast, children! Don't get swept out!” Grandma Padgett exhorted. “There's no danger if the horses can climb the bank.”
They were turned out of their course by the current, and Hickory and Henry got their fore feet out, crumbling a steep place. Below the bank grew steeper. If they did not get out here, all must go whirling and sinking down stream. The landing was made, both horses leaping up as if from an abyss. The carriage cracked, and when its wheels once more ground the dry sand, Grandma Padgett trembled awhile, and moved her lips before replying to the children's exclamations.
“We've been delivered from a great danger,” she said. “And that miserable man let us drive into it without warning!”
“If I's big enough,” said Robert Day, “I'd go back and thrash him.”