In the pearl dawn of a lovely July morning Augusta lay in her hammock, happily lazy and wide awake looking up at the line of the hills, watching the rosy light from the sun as it flushed color up into the pale eastern sky. Were these the hills of desire, she wondered, thinking vaguely of the words that had come to her while she studied the cards at the gypsy girl's bidding. The long, sun-drenched, dusty days upon the road, the sudden violent storms, the meetings with people who thought her so queer a gypsy, all had swept into a distant past the impression of that evening a month ago. A happy, busy month it had been, full of new things to be learned, of old, half forgotten things to be remembered, of careful explanations to people who did not listen; and three black, fearful days when Jimmie had been so bad that they could not move, days and especially nights when she had sat crouching beside him and had felt her faith and her dear high hope slipping from her and had frankly feared that he was dying.
Those nights of sinking fear seemed very far off this morning as she lay and looked at Jimmie stretched out along the length of the wagon on the other side, sleeping as smoothly and easily as a child. She could see that the skin still stretched drum tight over his temple hollows and she knew that there were still hollows under his big bony shoulders into which her two hands would fit. But she no longer feared these things, for she could see the vital tan of sun and wind creeping up across his face and driving away the hated pallor and she knew that this was the sign of life for him.
She smiled as she thought of the efforts she had wasted in trying to tell people the truth of why they were on the road in this way. She loved the freedom of the road, but she did not want to be taken too literally for a gypsy. So she was careful to explain to the farmer's wives to whom she went to buy eggs and milk and in the little village stores where she stopped for meat and bread that she had nothing to trade in the gypsy way, that she was just like anybody's wife travelling in this way for her husband's health. They believed her—everybody always believed Augusta on sight. But on returning to the wagon it was often to find Jimmie eloquently discoursing from the step of the wagon to a moderate sized crowd of people—Where did they come from? She would wonder horrified—upon the universal merits of a certain gypsy remedy which had come down to him through a wonderful and ever varying procession of lineal antecedents, and which he was presently going to bestow, at a nominal price, upon this distinguished and intelligent audience.
Humiliated and angry, afraid that she would laugh and yet wanting to cry, Augusta would jump up into her seat and drive brusquely off, Jimmie swaying on the step and waving apologies for his untimely departure. To her shame, he actually did sell three bottles of cod liver oil, which he had himself refused to take. When, however, she caught him dressing up as hair restorer the bottle of harness oil which Mary Donahue's care had provided, Augusta asserted genuine authority and this outlet of his genius was stopped.
But in the matter of horse trading she found that she had no influence whatever. With a cheery hail and a wave of the arm he would stop anybody who drove a horse and proceed to ask pertinent and leading questions about the horse which the other person drove. And if he could but awaken in his listener's eye the faintest gleam of our American rural passion he would be down on the ground instantly, walking around the stranger's horse, squinting severely at him, cataloguing his points in technical terms wonderfully misplaced, with a dispassionate, steady flow of bewildering language, until his listener in sheer self defense turned the inquiry upon Donahue.
Jimmie would then throw up his head, one ear cocked in the air in that way he had, as though some new and interesting fact had been brought to his attention. Then he would talk of Donahue.
On ordinary days, when Jimmie was in no more than his usual good strain of talk, Donahue was only a pure blooded Arabian bay from a race of desert horses, whose breed and pedigree had been guarded jealously through a thousand years by Jimmie's own forbears. But when Jimmie was having a good day Donahue was apotheosized. He, Donahue, was in fact a lineal descendant of the fay white horses that used to run wild under the lakes in Ireland in the days of the giants. Jimmie reminded his listener truculently that Colonel Roosevelt had written all about these things in his studies of the Irish Sagas, and he dared him to admit that he had not read anything of it. Our rural people do not like to admit complete ignorance of any given thing. They generally agreed that they "had heard something about it."
That was enough for Jimmie's case. Donahue's rusty color proved the matter—Those horses would certainly have turned rusty after all that water.
It was in vain that Augusta explained to Jimmie that these people really thought him crazy, and that they only listened to him and humored him because they were afraid that he would turn violent. Not argument, nor ridicule, nor even tears could break him from his mania of proposing to trade Donahue to every person who drove a horse and who could be persuaded to stop and listen to him. And Augusta could only sit in her place, smothering her laughter and her anger until he was willing to break off his farce and drive on.
She remembered one awful day in the Mohawk Valley between Little Falls and Herkimer when he had stopped in succession, and labored with, a candidate for Congress, who foolishly tried to sow the good political seed which was quickly blown away in the breeze of Jimmie's zeal, with a butcher, with a jolly old farmer who declared that if he had Jimmie's tongue he would go on the road himself, with a capable spinster who drove a smart horse and plainly showed that she would have liked to crack her whip at Jimmie's ear, with a veterinary surgeon—with whom he nearly came to blows, and with a minister of the Gospel.