"Well, then, you study it out," he said. "It's too much for me."
That morning Virginia quietly slipped over to Ann Boyd's and confided the new phase of the situation to her sympathetic friend, but Ann could not account for Jane's strange conduct, and Virginia returned home no wiser than she had left. However, at the fence she met Sam. His face was aglow with excitement.
"What you reckon?" he said. "The bird has flown."
"Mother, you mean?"
"Yes, she's skipped clean out. It was this way: Pete Denslow drove past about twenty minutes ago in his empty two-horse wagon, and I hollered out to him and asked him where-away. He pulled up at the gate and said he was going over the mountain to Gilmer after a load of ginseng to fetch back to Darley. Well, sir, no sooner had he said that than your mammy piped up from her dungeon, where she stood listening at a crack, and said, said she, sorter sheepish-like: 'Sam, ask him if he will let me go with him; I promised to go see Sally Maud Pincher over there the first time any wagon was passing, and I want to go.' Well, I told Pete, and he looked at the sun and wanted to know how long it would take her to get ready. She heard him, and yelled out from the door that she'd be out in five minutes, and, bless you, she was on the seat beside him in less time in her best clothes and carpet-bag in hand. She was as white in the face as a convict out taking a sunning, and her gingham looked like it was hanging from a hook on her neck, she was that thin. She never said a word to me as she went by. At first I thought she was plumb crazy, but she had the clearest eye in her head I ever saw, and she was chattering away to Pete about the weather as if he was an unmarried man and she was on the carpet."
"Oh, uncle, what do you think it means?" Virginia sighed, deeply worried.
"Why, I think it's a fine sign, myself," said Sam. "I'm not as good a judge of women as I am of mules—though a body ought to know as much of one as the other—but I think she's perhaps been wanting to get a breath of fresh air for some time and didn't like to acknowledge she was tired of cave-life. Over there at Pincher's, you see, she can slide back into her old ways without attracting attention by it."
"And she didn't leave a word of directions to me?" the girl said, sadly.
"Not a word," was the droll reply. "I didn't say good-bye to her myself. To tell the truth, I had noticed that she'd forgot to put up a snack for her and Pete to eat on the way, and I was afraid she might remember it at the last minute and take what little there was left for you and me."
But Jane evidently had something to attend to before paying her promised visit to Sally Maud Pincher, for on their arrival at the village of Ellijay, the seat of the adjoining county, she asked her obliging conveyer to put her down at the hotel, where she intended to spend the night. It was then about five o'clock in the afternoon, and she went into the little office, which looked like a parlor in a farm-house, and registered her name and was given a room with a sky-blue door and ceiling and whitewashed walls, at the head of the stairs. She sat after that at the window, looking out upon the dreary street and the lonely, red-clay road leading up the mountain, till it grew dark. She went down to the dining-room when the great brass bell was rung by a negro boy who shook it vigorously as he walked through the hall and around the house, but she had no appetite—the long, jolting journey over the rough road had weakened rather than stimulated her faint physical needs, and so she took only a glass of milk, into which she had dropped a few morsels of bread, eating the mixture with a spoon like a child.