Chapter I

THE story I am about to tell I have never told before. The events in it took place when I was a child of fifteen, an oldish child of fifteen. I had a taste for books and dreams, and a kind of adoring love of older people; a predilection, too, for romance and wonderment. There were many things I meant to do some day.

Among my lesser resolves was one that I had held for a good many years: I mean the resolve some day to be a passenger in the absurd old-fashioned 'bus that had made its daily journey, ever since I could remember, from my home town to a small town quite off the railroad, and some twelve miles away, the county-seat of that county in which my home was situated.

The 'bus was an extraordinary-looking vehicle. It had the air of a huge beetle. It creaked and rattled when it was in action. It had enormous dipping springs. It lunged and rolled a bit from side to side as it went. Its top bulged and had ribs across it and a low iron railing around it, convenient for the lashing of ropes to hold the packages of all kinds and sizes with which it usually went laden. There was a door at the back and there were two steps by which to enter. It had the air of being a distinguished character, even among the antiquated and entirely individual types of vehicle still common then in the little old-fashioned town.

This air was, no doubt, due chiefly to the large oval pictures painted, not without some skill, on its sides. One of these depicted the rescue of Daniel Boone by Kenton, who with the butt of a large musket was perpetually about to brain a murderous Indian; the other dealt with Smith’s unchanging obligation to Pocahontas.

I hardly think Keats had more lasting enjoyment of his Grecian urn with 'brede of marble men and maidens overwrought' than I of those pictures, where, not less than in the more classic example, I saw perpetually preserved what I took to be the most thrilling and desirable of moments, death forever arrested by unending loyalty and undying affection.

But, interesting as all this was, it was by no means the heart of that strange fascination with which, for so many years, I contemplated the old beetling vehicle. Its fascination lay for me in its daily journey to parts beyond the bounds of my narrow horizon. It plied faithfully every week-day of the year, an envoy extraordinary, ambassador plenipotentiary, between another world and mine. Some day I should see that world and know it.

It must not be supposed, however, that I had in mind only the town to which the 'bus journeyed, the mere inconsiderable county seat. Children’s imaginations, especially when the child is just emerging into all the glorious possibilities of womanhood, deal, not in towns, but in worlds. The world outside my own narrow bounds of life--that was what I meant to see and experience.

I can think of only one thing, besides the old 'bus, which roused my fancy to an equal degree, namely, the herds of dumb cattle which were driven past my home always once, and sometimes twice a week, to the stockyards which lay somewhere on the outskirts of my home town. If I close my eyes, I can still hear on hot afternoons the dark herds trampling past, a mass of broad backs and spreading horns and wide foreheads,--and dull or occasionally frightened eyes,--and the hurrying hoofs, scuffling the dust.

I had never seen the stockyards. I was never informed very particularly about them, and by some instinct, I suppose, I never inquired too carefully. But I knew this for another world also, and dread as it was, it fascinated me. I believe the hurrying herds stood to me for a kind of world of fearful reality that I meant some day to look into, and the old picture-painted 'bus for a world of romance, yonder, yonder over the dip of the horizon, which not less, some day, I was determined to know.

Just how I came to take my resolve, and the events which precipitated it--all this has no bearing on the story. The story begins just where I stood that hot day in June waiting for the 'bus by the dusty mullens beside the pike. I had walked a good mile outside the town so that none of the townspeople would see the beginning of my adventure.

The 'bus was late, I think, even allowing for my anxiety. It came in sight at last, at a slow beetling pace. I held up a slim finger. But not until he was alongside did the driver begin to draw in the long reins. I ran after the 'bus a few paces, opened the door, climbed the high steps with a beating heart, and got in.

The driver peeked through the little peek-hole in the roof to make sure I was safe; then he called to his horses, and the vehicle lunged ahead.

The only other passengers were an old man, unknown to me, who carried a basket of eggs, and an old woman who lived somewhere outside the town and whom I recognized as one we called the 'horse-radish woman.' She stood always on a Saturday at one corner of our town market, grinding and selling horse-radish roots, blinking with red eyes, and always wiping the tears from them before she could make you your change. I recognized her of course at once, but whether she knew me, I do not know. If she did, she gave not the least evidence of it, but looked out absently with squinted red-lidded eyes at the country as we jogged along.

The lovely rolling Kentucky land began to spread out on all sides. Long white curves of the pike flowed slowly behind us and were seen in glimpses through the open front windows ahead of us. Dust rose and settled over us.

A little while before we got to Latonia, the old horse-radish woman, with a tin cup she carried, knocked on the ceiling of the 'bus near the driver’s peep-hole, to warn him that she wished to get out. When we arrived at Latonia and the horses were having water at the big trough, the old man with the basket of eggs also left.

But I was going all the way to the county seat and I considered these passengers much below my own level as travelers. They were merely making a convenience of the 'bus, you see, which just happened to go past their homes; whereas I was off for adventure, my home quite in the other direction, and the world spread wide before me.

It was with a tourist’s pleasure, then, that I looked at that little grouping of houses and the elm-and poplar-shaded pike, which in those days was called, and I believe is still called, Latonia; and at the old Latonia Springs Hotel. It was a typical relic of Southern before-the-war hotel architecture, with its white pillars, its long verandas, its wide doorway, its large lawn sombred by very old shade trees.

I had known something of travel. I had lived in France for two years, at school; but there I had always had some one to go about with me. Here, on the contrary, I was alone. I liked the flavor of the adventure; it was novel, and very stimulating. This journey, however poor a thing it might seem to others, had Audrey’s superlative virtue: it was mine own. The old hotel, then, already romantic enough, took on an additional romance in my eyes.

The driver came around now from sponging his horses' heads and noses at the trough.

'Going all the way, are you?'

I nodded.

'Well, you can get out and stretch your legs if you like, for we’ll be here ten minutes.'

But I did not 'like.' In the 'bus I felt safe enough; but if I got out--adventurous spirit though I was--I knew with unconquerable shyness that everybody would be staring at me.

I contented myself with watching the lazy coming and going of a few people; a dog snapping at flies; some chickens taking dust-baths in the road.

What a still, lazy place it was! Some one asked the time. The driver’s watch had stopped. Nobody knew; it appeared not to matter. This seemed no place for clocks. A stout lame man, having the look of a Southern war veteran, stopped on his cane in the middle of the road, looked around carefully at the outlying country and the shadows, then took a calculating glance at the heavens.

'Well, I should reckon, colonel,' he said, addressing the stage-driver, 'it mout be about twenty-two minutes past two. You gen’lly get here about two, but you was a bit late to-day, a leetle bit late, I should say maybe to the amount of about twelve minutes.'

He leaned on his cane again and began dotting his way slowly and heavily through the dust toward the hotel.

I could not have told whether he was in jest or earnest. But as I look back on it now, it seems to me curiously fitting that the little town should have had so scant dependence on timepieces, for it lay away from all the world, and there was so little to occupy the attention, that the houses, the dusty pike, with its slowly lengthening and slowly shortening shadows, the fields beyond, with their great sycamores and maples, and the sky so little interrupted from edge to edge, must each, indeed, have been to those who had so long observed them, a sundial to make clocks seem mere bustling contrivances.

A big fly sailed in one of the 'bus windows, round and round, droning, and then out; it went with every effect of careful choice and deliberation, to settle on the nose of the old dog that lay, alternately napping and snapping, four feet in the sun.

I can give you no idea of the keen enjoyment with which I noted all these details. I take pleasure now in remembering that, despite the fact that I had lived in Paris, among its thrilling boulevards and monuments, and had seen some stagey Swiss villages and dramatic little French towns, this little cluster of houses known as Latonia, on a dusty pike in Kentucky, only a few miles from my own home,--this village which never a tourist would have gone to see,--was to me in that droning, incredibly quiet afternoon a very piece of romance; the air itself,--I beg you to have patience with me, for really, I tell you only the truth,--the very air itself being 'ambient' for me; the green fields 'amburbial'; the white clouds, so nearly at rest in the blue sky, 'huge symbols of a high romance'; the silver poplars and elms not less than 'immemorial'; and the old hotel a thing made of dreams, haunted with green and shaded memories of before-the-war days, across whose veranda might have stepped at any moment, before my unastonished eyes, the actors in some noble human drama.

I remember, too, that my eye found some dusty marigolds, their blooms leaning through a low paling fence of one of the houses. My eye must have passed over many a marigold before that; I probably never saw one until then. I remember noting their singularity and softness of color, so individual and particular compared with the more customary reds and yellows of commoner flowers, so far more memorable and desirable and foreign; a part they seemed, too, of the quietness and strangeness and romance in the midst of which I found myself.

The 'bus driver was making ready to leave.

The lame war veteran,--for I still take him to have been such,--having got as far as the gate of the Latonia Hotel, was met by a long, lazy-legged darkey coming down the walk, carrying two traveling satchels. Noticeably new-looking they were, and handsome, for that part of the world. He had one under his arm, the other dangling from the same hand, which left his other hand free to manipulate a long piece of ribbon-grass which he was chewing lazily. The veteran held the gate open, the weight of his body leaning against it.

'Going away, are they?'

'Yassuh.'

There emerged from the hotel at this moment a man and a woman.

The darkey crossed the road and put the two satchels in the 'bus--and stood with his hand on the handle of the door, holding it wide open, waiting.