This was all that any boy could ask. Robert uttered a derisive “Ho!” but he sat and meditated with pleasure on the pile of bones. It cast a lime-white glitter on the man and woman who but for that might have been harmless.
“I didn't git much rest,” concluded Zene. “I could drop off sound now if I'd let myself.”
“I'll drive,” proposed Bobaday.
Zene reluctantly considered this offer. The road ahead looked smooth enough. “I guess there's no danger unless you run into a fence corner,” he remarked.
“I can drive as well as Grandma Padgett can,” said Robert indignantly.
Zene wagged his head as if unconvinced. He never intended to let Robert Day be a big boy while he stayed with the family.
“Your gran'marm knows how to handle a horse. Now if I's to crawl back and take a nap, and you's to run the team into any accident, I'd have to bear all the blame.”
Robert protested: and when Zene had shifted his responsibility to his satisfaction, he crept back and leaned against the goods, falling into a sound sleep.
The boy drove slowly forward. It seemed that old gray and old white also felt last night's vigils. They drowsed along with their heads down through a landscape that shimmered sleepily.
Robert thought of gathering apples in the home orchard: of the big red ones that used to fall and split asunder with their own weight, waking him sometimes from a dream, with their thump against the sod. What boy hereafter would gather the sheep-noses, and watch the early June's every day until their green turned suddenly into gold, and one bite was enough to make you sit down under the tree and ask for nothing better in life! He used to keep the chest in his room floored with apples. They lay under his best clothes and perfumed them. His nose knew the breath of a russet, and in a dark cellar he could smell out the bell-flower bin. The real poor people of the earth must be those who had no orchards; who could not clap a particular comrade of a tree on the bark and look up to see it smiling back red and yellow smiles; who could not walk down the slope and see apples lying in ridges, or pairs, or dotting the grass everywhere. Robert was half-asleep, dreaming of apples. He felt thirsty, and heard a humming like the buzz of bees around the cider-press. He and aunt Corinne used to sit down by the first tub of sweet cider, each with two straws apiece, and watch their faces in the rosy juice while they drank Cider from the barrels when snow was on the ground, poured out of a pitcher into a glass, had not the ecstatic tang of cider through a straw. The Bees came to the very edge of the tub, as if to dispute such hiving of diluted honey; and more of them came, from hanging with bent bodies, around the dripping press.