It was early March, a snowy, blustery March, and the Applebys were plodding through West Virginia. No longer were they the mysterious “Smiths.” Father was rather proud, now, of being Appleby, the pedestrian. Mother looked stolidly content as she trudged at his side, ruddy and placid and accustomed to being wept over by every farm-wife.
At an early dusk, with a storm menacing, with the air uneasy and a wind melancholy in the trees, they struck off by a forest road which would, they hoped, prove a short cut to the town of Weatherford. They came to cross-paths, and took the more trodden way, which betrayed them and soon dwindled to a narrow rut which they could scarcely follow in the twilight. Father was frightened. They would have to camp in the woods—and a blizzard was coming.
He saw a light ahead, a shifting, evasive light.
“There’s a farm-house or something,” he declared, cheerily. “We’ll just nach’ly make ’em give us shelter. Going to storm too bad to do much work for ’em, and I bet it’s some cranky old shellback farmer, living ’way out here like this. Well, we’ll teach the old codger to like music, and this time I will play my mouth-organ. Ain’t you glad we’re young folks that like music and dancing—”
“How you run on!” Mother said, trustingly.
From the bleakness ahead came a cracked but lusty voice singing “Hello, ’Frisco!”
“Man singing! Jolly! That’s a good omen,” chuckled Father. “All the folks that are peculiar—like we are—love to sing.”
“Yes, and talk!” However much she enjoyed Father’s chatter, Mother felt that she owed it to her conscience—which she kept as neat and well dusted, now that they were vagrants, as she had in a New York flat—to reprove him occasionally, for his own good.
“Say, this is exciting. That’s a bonfire ahead,” Father whispered.