Dirty Faces - Book 2

Chapter 30: Seventeen Miles

Chapter 30: Seventeen Miles

Next morning, Ginny woke up well before dawn and quickly, but silently, got dressed. It wouldn't be long before Aunt Betty came to get breakfast ready and Kody got up for work, and she wanted to be gone before she had to answer any questions.

She tiptoed out of the bedroom and across the hall, and put her ear to the door. Ralph was snoring, but when she listened carefully, she could hear Mama's rattling breaths. At least she wasn't coughing. She lingered there a moment before moving quietly into the front room, passing Adam, who lay in a hard, soundless sleep on the couch. Lately, he'd been sleeping wherever he landed, wherever he could be still long enough to doze off. She scooped up her hand-me-down boots from their spot by the door and tiptoed into the kitchen.

Ginny pulled out a chair and sat down, put on her boots, and tied the laces with more care than usual. She had so much on her mind she wasn't really able to complete a thought or pin down a single feeling. It probably would have been wise to eat something, but she wasn't hungry and her stomach felt funny anyway.

On the counter, covered with one of Mama's dish towels, sat a plate of biscuits Ginny had made the previous morning. Leslie and Aunt Betty had helped her to master the preparation of several foods, but the art of biscuits was still beyond her. They hadn't risen like they were supposed to and they certainly shouldn't have turned out crispy. Not surprisingly, they had been left untouched by the rest of her family. She turned the plate over and wrapped her latest failure in the dish towel, figuring that if she, Tommy, and Rowdy got lost out there on the mountain, they'd be more than happy to feast on crunchy, day-old biscuits.

She didn't suppose Ralph would be needing his thermos, so she swiped it from the cabinet. The pack of stale biscuits in one hand, Ralph's thermos in the other, Ginny went to the back door, waiting for a moment with ears pealed. When she was satisfied that she'd detected no sound of any movement within the house, she slipped out the door. After filling the thermos with water from the pump out back, she set off for town.

Tommy and Rowdy were waiting on the front porch when she got to the boarding house. They had a knapsack packed and Ginny gave her bundle and thermos to Rowdy to add to it. "Ooo! Cookies!" he said, unwrapping the dish towel.

Ginny frowned. "They're biscuits."

"Oh. Right. Well, good thinking." He dropped Ginny's additions in the knapsack, then pulled the drawstring tight, fastened the buckle, and threw the pack on his back.

Tommy stood from his seat in the rocking chair and pushed open the screen door. "Well," he said, "Best get a move on. Don't wanna waste any daylight."

The sun was just peeking over the mountain tops but already the town was alive. It was shift change at the mine. Masses of washed men headed toward it as the night crew, a river of black, flooded past them on their way out. Ginny thought she and her friends did a fine job of being invisible among them all.

When they got just outside town, Ginny asked Tommy how long he thought it would take them. He shrugged. "I only know how to get there from our old home place, and that's fifteen or so miles by road from here. Then another mile or two out farther once we get there."

"What about through the woods?" Rowdy asked.

"Probably a lot shorter, but I don't know how to get there that way."

Seventeen miles, one way, on foot. They had anticipated a long trip, got an early start, packed food, water, and supplies accordingly, but now, here at the foot of the mountain, with a numerical distance voiced, it sounded like too much, too far. The shred of hope the expedition had given Ginny began to dissipate with the realization that Rowdy's scheme was not just unlikely, but impossible. It would take a small miracle to get them to Aunt Virgie's by dark, and it was a miracle they were, in essence, seeking in the first place.