In the late afternoon they came dropping down from a ridge into Smedley village. Augusta read the name on a white sign over the post office door. It seemed to be the end of the highway, for the road which they had been following appeared just to stumble on weakly, between the six houses on the one side and the four houses and little white school on the other, out into a rising field and to lose itself there.
Augusta went into the post office to buy bread, bacon, matches and soap. While the postmaster filled her order she inquired:
"Where does the road go from here?"
The stout old man beamed benignly on Augusta's happy, browned, open-eyed face. Then he squinted cautiously out through the door at the wagon which was unmistakably gypsy. He could not place her.
"Where was you calc'latin' to go, missy?" he evaded with the usual rural unwillingness to give any information until he had first received some.
"Oh, nowhere," Augusta confessed. "My husband—"
"Then you're right there. You don't need to go another step. This is nowhere. The last place you stopped at was next to nowhere, and Smedley, here, is it itself," he grumbled, without any ill humor. "I been waitin' here forty year for that road to go somewhere. But it aint gone and it aint goin', not so it appears. There aint no place for it to go to. That bacon's been around here a good while, too," he interpolated thoughtfully. "But the soap's prime—staple as old cheese. No sir, there aint no other place beyond this. This is nowhere. When you get here you have to stay or go back."
"But people do stay here," said Augusta a little thoughtfully, "and live and keep well," she added, eyeing the ruddy, well nourished, well preserved face of the old man.
"Of course they do," he admitted. "What else is there for 'em to do. There's no doctors here, so they can't get sick. And there's no preachers to make 'em think about dyin'. So they just hang 'round."
"But it seems a nice place to stay around in," said Augusta as she stood on the little porch of the post office and looked around at the comfort and security of the solid little houses with the strength of the hills behind them.