The Executive Mansion,
Darlington.

It was the Governor of the State!

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I couldn’t help chuckling, as Parnassus came over the brow of the hill, and I saw the river in the distance once more.  How different all this was from my girlhood visions of romance.  That has been characteristic of my life all along—­it has been full of homely, workaday happenings, and often rather comic in spite of my best resolves to be highbrow and serious.  All the same I was something near to tears as I thought of the tragic wreck at Willdon and the grief-laden hearts that must be mourning.  I wondered whether the Governor was now returning from Willdon after ordering an inquiry.

On his card he had written:  “Please release R. Mifflin at once and show this lady all courtesies.”  So I didn’t anticipate any particular trouble.  This made me all the more anxious to push on, and after crossing the ferry we halted in Woodbridge only long enough for supper.  I drove past the bank where I had waited in the anteroom, and would have been glad of a chance to horsewhip that sneaking little cashier.  I wondered how they had transported the Professor to Port Vigor, and thought ironically that it was only that Saturday morning when he had suggested taking the hoboes to the same jail.  Still I do not doubt that his philosophic spirit had made the best of it all.

Woodbridge was as dead as any country town is on Sunday night.  At the little hotel where I had supper there was no topic of conversation except the wreck.  But the proprietor, when I paid my bill, happened to notice Parnassus in the yard.

“That’s the bus that pedlar sold you, ain’t it?” he asked with a leer.

“Yes,” I said, shortly.

“Goin’ back to prosecute him, I guess?” he suggested.  “Say, that feller’s a devil, believe me.  When the sheriff tried to put the cuffs on him he gave him a black eye and pretty near broke his jaw.  Some scrapper fer a midget!”

My own brave little fighter, I thought, and flushed with pride.

The road back to Port Vigor seemed endless.  I was a little nervous, remembering the tramps in Pratt’s quarry, but with Bock sitting beside me on the seat I thought it craven to be alarmed.  We rumbled gently through the darkness, between aisles of inky pines where the strip of starlight ran like a ribbon overhead, then on the rolling dunes that overlook the water.  There was a moon, too, but I was mortally tired and lonely and longed only to see my little Redbeard.  Peg was weary, too, and plodded slowly.  It must have been midnight before we saw the red and green lights of the railway signals and I knew that Port Vigor was at hand.

I decided to camp where I was.  I guided Peg into a field beside the road, hitched her to a fence, and took the dog into the van with me.  I was too tired to undress.  I fell into the bunk and drew the blankets over me.  As I did so, something dropped down behind the bunk with a sharp rap.  It was a forgotten corncob pipe of the Professor’s, blackened and sooty.  I put it under my pillow, and fell asleep.