“He fairly dragged her from under the flapping sail.”
“No. The holes wouldn’t stay open long, as cold as it is out here. It’s about twenty below zero right now, my lady, and I’m keeping a sharp eye on your nose.”
“Oh! Oh!” gasped Agnes, putting her mittened hand tentatively to her nose. “Is that why you told me to keep my collar up over my mouth and nose?”
“It is!” declared the boy, rubbing his own face vigorously. “If you see any white spot on anybody’s face up here in this weather, grab a handful of snow and begin rubbing the spot.”
“Mercy!” Agnes murmured, with a gay little laugh. “Lucky Trix Severn doesn’t come up here. She uses rice powder dreadfully, and folks would think she was being frost-bitten.”
“Uh-huh!” agreed Neale.
“But you haven’t told me how they fish,” said the girl, as they approached nearer to the huts and she was able to walk better.
“Through the ice of course,” he laughed. “Only you don’t see the holes. They are inside the huts.”
“You don’t mean it, Neale?”
“To be sure I mean it! Some of those big shanties house whole families. You see there are children and dogs. They have pot stoves which warm the huts to a certain degree, and on which they cook. And they have bunks built against the walls, with plenty of bedding.”
“Why, I should think they would get their death of cold!” gasped the girl.
“That’s just what they don’t get,” Neale rejoined. “You can bet there are no ‘white plague’ patients here. This atmosphere will kill tubercular germs like a hammer kills a flea.”
“Goodness, Neale!” giggled Agnes. “Did you ever kill a flea with a hammer?”
“Yep. Sand-flea,” he assured her, grinning. “Oh! I’m one quick lad, Aggie.”
She really thought he was joking, however, until she had looked into two or three of the huts. People really did live in them, as she saw. In the middle of the plank floors was a well, with open water kept clear of frost. The set-lines were fastened to pegs in the planks and the “flags” announced when a fish was on the hook.
A smiling woman, done up like an Eskimo, invited them into one shack. She had evidently not seen the scooter arrive from down the lake and thought the boy and girl had walked out from Coxford.
“Hello!” she said. “Goin’ to try your hands at fishin’? You’re town folks, ain’t you?”
“Yes,” said Agnes, politely. “We come from Milton.”
“Lawsy! That’s a fur ways,” said the woman. She was peeling potatoes, and a kettle was boiling on the stove at one side. The visitors knew by the odor that there was corned beef in the pot. “You goin’ to try your hands?” the woman repeated.
“No,” said Neale. “We are with a party that is going up to Red Deer Lodge.”
“Oh! That’s the Birdsall place. You can’t git up there tonight. It’s too fur.”
“I guess we shall stay in Coxford,” admitted Neale.
“Didn’t know but you an’ your sister wanted to fish. Old Manny Cox got ketched with rheumatics so that he had to give up fishin’ this season. I can hire you his shanty.”
“No, thank you!” murmured Agnes, her eyes round with interest.
“I let it for a week or more to two gals,” said the woman complacently. “Got five dollars out of ’em for Manny. He’ll be needin’ the money. Better stay awhile and try the fishin’.”
“Goodness! Two girls alone?” asked Agnes.
“Yes. Younger’n you are, too. But they knowed their way around, I guess,” said the woman. “Good lookin’ gals. Nice clo’es. Town folks, I guess. Mebbe they wasn’t older’n my Bob, and he’s just turned twelve.”
“Twelve years old! And two girls alone?” murmured Agnes.
“Oh, there ain’t nobody to hurt you here. We don’t never need no constable out here on the ice. There’s plenty of women folks—Miz’ Ashtable, and Hank Crummet’s wife, and Mary Boley and her boys. Oh, lots o’ women here. We can help make money in the winter.
“There! See that set-line bob?”
She dropped the potato she was paring and crossed to the well. One of the flags had dipped. With a strong hand she reeled in the wet line. At its end was a big pickerel—the biggest pickerel the visitors had ever seen.
“There!” exclaimed the woman. “Sorry I didn’t git that before Joe Jagson went with his load of fish. That’s four pound if it weighs an ounce.”
She shook the flopping fish off the hook into a basket and then hung the basket outside the door. In the frosty air the fish did not need to be packed in ice. It would literally be ice within a very few minutes.
“Got to hang ’em up to keep the dogs from gettin’ them,” said the woman, rebaiting the hook and then returning to her potato paring. “Can’t leave ’em in a creel in the water, neither; pike would come along an’ eat ’em clean to the bone.”
“Oh!” gasped Agnes.
“Yes. Regular cannibals, them pike,” said the woman. “But all big fish will eat little ones.”
“What kind of fish do you catch?” Neale asked.
“Pickerel and pike, whitebait (we calls ’em that), perch, some lake bass and once in a while a lake trout. Trout’s out o’ season. We don’t durst sell ’em. But we eat ’em. They ain’t no ‘season,’ I tell ’em, for a boy’s appetite; and I got three boys and my man to feed.”
At that moment there was a great shouting and barking of dogs outside, and Neale and Agnes went out of the hut to learn what it meant. The Corner House girl whispered to the boy:
“What do you think about those two twelve year old girls coming here to stay and fish through the ice?”
“Great little sports,” commented Neale.
“Well,” exclaimed Agnes, “that’s being too much of a sport, if you ask me!”
The barking of the dogs was in answer to the booming note that Tom Jonah sent echoing across the ice. Agnes and Neale found that the two big ice-boats were near at hand.
As one of the crew of Mr. Howbridge’s boat owned the scooter that Neale and Agnes had come up the lake on, that owner wished to recover his abandoned ice-boat. Besides, it was not more than two miles over the ice to Coxford, and the wind was going down with the sun. The big boats would have made slow work of it beating in to the slab-town on the western shore of the lake.
Neale and Agnes ran out across the ice to meet their friends. Most of the party were glad indeed to get on their feet, for the ride up the lake had been a cold one.
In fact, Tess could scarcely walk when she got out of her seat, and Dot tumbled right down on the ice, almost weeping.
“I—I guess I haven’t got any feet,” the smallest Corner House girl half sobbed. “I can’t feel ’em.”
“Course you’ve got feet, Dot,” said Sammy, staggering a good deal himself when he walked toward her. “Just you jump up and down like this,” and he proceeded to follow his own advice.
“But won’t we break through the ice?” murmured the smallest Corner House girl.
“Why, Dot! do you s’pose,” demanded Tess, “that you can jump hard enough to break through two feet of ice?”
“Well, I never tried it before, did I?” demanded Dot. “How should I know what might happen to the old ice?”
Agnes hurried the little ones over to the shanty of the friendly fisher-woman, where they could get warm and be sheltered from the raw wind that still puffed down in gusts from the hills.
Tom Jonah had jumped out of the cockpit of the ice-boat and found himself immediately in the middle of what Luke Shepard called “a fine ruction.”
“Canines to right of him, canines to left of him, volleyed and thundered!” laughed the college youth. “Hey! call off your fish-hounds, or Tom Jonah will eat them up.”
One cur was already running away yelping and limping; the others took notice that the old dog had powerful jaws. But Ruth insisted that Tom Jonah be put on a leash, and Luke meekly obeyed. Indeed, he was likely to do almost anything that the oldest Corner House girl told him to do, “right up to jumping through the ring of a doughnut!” his sister whispered to Mrs. MacCall in great glee.
“Well, my lassie,” was the housekeeper’s comment, “he might be mindin’ a much worse mistress than our Ruthie.”
Nothing that Ruth could or did do in most matters was wrong in Mrs. MacCall’s opinion, even if she did criticize the Kenways’ charity. If Luke Shepard some day expected to get Ruth for his wife, the housekeeper considered that it was only right he should first learn to obey Ruth’s behests in all things.
Ruth had a word to say to Neale and Agnes at this time. She pointed out to those two restless and reckless younger ones that there must be no such venturesome escapades during the remainder of this winter vacation as that connected with the ice-scooter.
“If you have no respect for your own bones, think of our feelings,” she concluded. “Why! I almost had heart disease when I saw that horrid scooter fly past with Agnes up in the air as though she were on a flying trapeze.”
“Shucks, Ruth!” said Neale, “you know I wouldn’t let any harm come to Aggie.”
“Now, Neale,” returned the older girl, “how would you keep her from getting hurt if that ice-boat broke in two, for instance?”
“Oh, well—”
“That’s what I thought!” snapped Ruth. “You had not thought of that.”
“Don’t scold him! Don’t scold Neale!” begged Agnes. “He’s all right.”
“Oh, no, he isn’t,” said Ruth grimly. “One side of him is left! And you will promise to be good or I’ll make Mr. Howbridge send Neale home, right from here.”
“Oh!” cried her sister. “You would not be so mean, Ruthie Kenway.”
“I don’t know but I would,” Ruth rejoined. “I don’t think so much of boys, anyway—”
“Not until they get to be collegians,” whispered Neale shrilly from behind his hand.
Ruth’s eyes snapped at that, and she marched away without another word. Mr. Howbridge refrained from commenting upon the incident, for he saw that Ruth had said quite all that was necessary.
Neale and Agnes were much abashed. They followed the others slowly toward the village on the ice. Neale said:
“Well, if she says I can’t go any farther I’ll stay right here and fish until you come back, Aggie.”
“Oh, Neale! You wouldn’t!”
“Why not? Maybe I’d make a little money. If two twelve year old girls could stand it for a week here, I don’t see why I couldn’t stand it for three weeks.”
“I’ve been thinking about those two girls that woman told us about,” said Agnes with sudden eagerness.
“What about ’em?”
“Do you s’pose they were girls, Neale O’Neil?”
“Why! what do you mean? How do I know? The woman said they were.”
“But two girls—and only twelve! It doesn’t seem probable. I should think the police—”
“Didn’t you hear that woman say there were no constables out here on the ice?” said Neale.
“I don’t care! I’m suspicious,” declared Agnes.
“Not of that fisher-woman?” asked the boy, puzzled indeed.
“No, no! But no two girls in this world would ever have considered coming out here on the ice to fish. How ridiculous!”
“Say! what are you trying to get at, Agnes Kenway?” demanded her friend. “You do have the craziest ideas!”
“Do I, Mr. Smartie?” she returned. “At least they are ideas. You never seem to suspect a living thing, Neale O’Neil.”
“Oh! I give it up,” he groaned. “You are too much for me. I’m lashed to the post and you have left me behind.”
“Oh, do come on!” exclaimed Agnes, hastily dragging at his jacket sleeve. “If you don’t know what I’m about, just keep still and listen.”
“Oh, I’ll do that little thing for you,” returned Neale. “I can be as dumb as a mute quahog with the lockjaw—just watch me!”
He tagged on behind Agnes with much interest. The girl hurried to the shack into which the little folks had been taken for warmth. Mrs. MacCall was there with them, talking with the genial fisher-woman.
“Hech!” exclaimed the housekeeper, warming her blue hands, “but this is a strange way to live. ’Tis worse than sheep herding in the Highlands. ’Tis so!”
“’Tain’t so bad,” said the woman. “And there’s good money in the fish. We are mostly all Coxford people here—or folks from back in the hills. Few stragglers come here to bother us.”
“But you said two strangers had been here this winter,” Agnes interposed, eagerly.
“I said so,” the woman agreed. “Two stragglers. Two girls,” and she laughed. “But they didn’t stay long. They kept to themselves like, and never did us any harm.”
“Say, Maw!” The voice came out of a shadowy corner. It was gloomy in the shack, for the sun had now dipped below the hills and twilight had come.
“That’s my Bob,” said the woman. “He’s about the age of them two gals.”
“They wasn’t two gals, Maw,” said Bob from the darkness.
“What d’you mean?”
“One was a boy. Yes, she was—a boy! We kids found it out, and that’s why them two lit out over night.”
“Good gracious, Bob! What are you sayin’?”
“That’s right,” said the voice from the dark corner, stubbornly. “They was brother and sister. They owned up. Run away from somewhere, I guess. And then they run away from here.”
Agnes pinched Neale’s arm. “What did I tell you?” she whispered.
“Ouch! I don’t know. You’ve told me so many things, Aggie,” he complained.
“Don’t you remember what Mr. Howbridge told us about the Birdsall twins and the picture he sent out to the police? He showed us that, too.”
“Jumping Jupiter!” gasped the amazed Neale. “Why—why, she,” pointing to the fisher-woman, “didn’t say anything about the twins.”
“Listen!” exclaimed Agnes again; and as Mrs. MacCall had taken the three younger children out of the shack, Agnes began to interrogate the woman as to the appearance of the strange girls who had remained for a week at the village on the ice.
Yes, they were both slim, and dark, and looked boyish enough—both of them. They seemed well behaved. She didn’t believe Bob—
“I tell you I know,” put in Bob from his corner. “One was a boy. He called the other by a girl name all right. Rowly—or Rowny—or sumpin’—”
“Rowena!” cried Agnes.
“Mebbe,” admitted Bob.
“For the land of liberty’s sake!” exclaimed his mother suddenly, “I’d like to know how you are so sure ’bout one bein’ a boy?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” grumbled Bob. “’Cause he licked me! Yes, he did. Licked me good and proper. No girl could ha’ done that, you bet!” said the disgruntled Bob.
“Now, Bob! I am ashamed of you!” said his mother.
“You needn’t be. He could fight, that fellow!”
“But did you think they were both girls till you got into this fight?” Neale asked, now becoming interested.
“Bet you. We thought we could get some of their lines. They had more’n enough. We went over there to Manny Cox’s shack, and she that was a girl was alone. So we took the lines.”
“Now, Bob!” murmured his mother.
“Guess a constable here wouldn’t be a bad thing after all,” chuckled Neale.
“Go on,” ordered Agnes.
“Why, that girl just cried and scolded. But the other one came back before me and Hank and Buddie got away.”
“The one you think was a boy?” asked Agnes.
“One I know was a boy—since he fought me. He didn’t do no cryin’. He squared right off, skirts an’ all, and jest lambasted me. And when Hank tried to put in an oar, he lambasted him. Buddie run, or he’d ’ve been licked, too, I guess.”
“Well!” exclaimed Bob’s mother. “I never did! And you never said a word about it!”
“What was the use?” asked her son. “We was licked. And the next morning that boy-girl and his sister was gone. We didn’t see ’em no more.”
“That is right,” said the woman thoughtfully. “They got away jest like that. I never did know what become of ’em or what they went for.”
Agnes dragged Neale out of the shack. She was excited.
“Let’s find Mr. Howbridge!” she cried. “He ought to know about this. I just feel sure those twins have been here in this fisher-town.”
But the lawyer and guardian of the runaway Birdsall twins was not so easily convinced that Agnes had found the trail of the lost Ralph and Rowena. It seemed preposterous that the twins should have joined these rough fisherfolk and lived with them in the ice-village.
The party from Milton waited at the village for an hour while the lawyer cross-questioned the inhabitants. It was not that any of these people wished to hobble Mr. Howbridge’s curiosity regarding the “stragglers,” as they called the strangers who sometimes joined the community; but nobody had considered it his or her business to question or examine in any way the two unknown girls (if they were girls) who had occupied Manny Cox’s shack for a week.
After all, the boy, Bob, and his mates, gave the most convincing testimony regarding the strangers. He was positive that one of the stragglers had been a boy—a very sturdy and pugilistic one for a twelve-year-old lad.
“And that might fit young Ralph Birdsall’s reputation, as I got it from Rodgers, the butler,” said Mr. Howbridge. “Ralph has to be stirred by Rowena to fight; but, once stirred, Rodgers says he can fight like a wildcat.”
“Why, what a horrid boy!” murmured Tess, who heard this. “I guess I’m glad those twins didn’t come with us after all.”
“But, Mr. Howbridge,” asked Ruth, “does it seem possible that they could get away up here alone?”
“That is difficult to say. Nobody knows how much money they had when they left Arlington. They might have come as far as this. If they had wished to, I mean.”
It was getting quite dark, now, and the children were tired and hungry. The party could spend no more time at the fishing village. They set out across the ice for Coxford.
Neale took Dot pick-a-pack and Luke shouldered Tess, although the latter felt much embarrassed by this proceeding. Ruth had to urge her to remain upon the collegian’s shoulder.
“Really, I’m quite too big to play this way,” she objected.
But she was tired—she had to admit that. Sammy made no complaint; but his short legs were weary enough before they reached the shore.
Oil lamps on posts lit the few streets of Coxford. Most of the slab houses looked as though the wind, with a good puff, could blow them down. The forest came down to the edge of the village. If there should be a forest fire on this side of the mountain range, the slab-town would surely be destroyed.
Hedden, Mr. Howbridge’s man, had prepared things here for the party, as well as at Culberton. On the main street of the little town was what passed for a hotel. At this time of year it was but little patronized.
Therefore the lawyer’s man had chartered the house, as well as the family that owned it, to make the holiday vacation party comfortable over one night.
Roaring fires, hot supper, feather beds, and plenty of woolen blankets awaited the crowd from Milton at this backwoods hostelry. Mr. Dan Durkin, who was the proprietor of the Coxford Hotel, and his hospitable wife and daughters, could not do too much for the comfort of Mr. Howbridge and his friends.
“We don’t have enough strangers here in winter time to keep us in mind of what city folks are like,” the hotel-keeper declared. “When Miz’ Birdsall was alive, she and her man and the kids used to come through here three-four times ’twixt the first snow flurries an’ the spring break-up. They liked to see their camp up there in the hills durin’ the winter. But after Miz’ Birdsall died, he never came.”
“And the children?” asked Mr. Howbridge, thoughtfully.
“They did come in summer,” said Durkin; “but not in the winter.”
“You haven’t seen them of late, have you?” questioned the lawyer.
“Them twins? No. Nary hide nor hair of ’em. I tell you, ain’t nobody—scurcely—gets up here this time’ o’ year. ’Ceptin’ a few stragglers for the fishin’, perhaps. But we don’t see them here at the hotel. We don’t take in stragglers.”
But he and his family, as has been said, did their very best for the party from Milton. The young folks slept soundly, and warmly, as well, and were really sorry to crawl out of the feather beds at seven o’clock the next morning when they were called to get ready for breakfast.
The cold and the long ride of the day before seemed to have done nobody any harm. The balsam-laden air, when they went to the hotel porch for a breath of it before breakfast, seemed to search right down to the bottom of their lungs and invigorate them all. Surely, as Neale had told Agnes, no tubercular germ could live in such an atmosphere.
“Just the same,” said Ruth, wisely, when Agnes mentioned this scientific statement fathered by the ex-circus boy, “you children keep well wrapped up. What is one man’s medicine is another man’s poison, Mrs. Mac often says. And it is so with germs, I guess. What will kill one germ, another germ thrives on. A bad cold up here will be almost sure to turn into pneumonia. So beware!”
“Don’t keep talking about being sick,” cried Cecile. “You are almost as bad as Neighbor.” “Neighbor” Henry Northrup lived next door to the Shepards and their Aunt Lorena, and was Luke’s very good friend. “Neighbor is forever talking about symptoms and diseases. After a half hour visit with him I always go home feeling as though I needed to call the doctor for some complaint.”
They made a hearty and hilarious breakfast of country fare—fried pork and johnnycakes, with eggs and baked beans for “fillers.” Mrs. MacCall should not have tried to eat the crisply fried “crackling” as the farmers call the pork-rind; but she did. And one of the teeth on her upper plate snapped right off!
“Oh, dear me, Mrs. Mac!” gasped Agnes. “And not a dentist for miles and miles, I suppose!”
“Oh, well, I can get along without that one tooth.”
“My pop’s got a new set of false teeth,” Sammy said soberly. “He’s just got ’em—all new and shiny.”
“What did he do with the old ones he had?” asked Tess, interested.
“Huh! I dunno. Throwed ’em away, I hope. Anyway,” said Sammy, who had had much experience in wearing made over clothing, “mom can’t cut them down and make me wear ’em!”
The jangling of sleighbells hurried the party through breakfast. The little folks were first out upon the porch to look at the two pungs, filled with straw, and each drawn by a pair of heavy horses. The latter did not promise from their appearance a swift trip to Red Deer Lodge; but they were undoubtedly able to draw a heavy load through the deepest drifts in the forest.
They set out very gayly from the little lakeside town. It was not a brilliantly sunshiny day, for a haze wrapped the mountain tops about and was creeping down toward the ice-covered lake.
“There’s a storm gathering,” declared one of the men engaged to drive the Milton party into the woods. “I reckon you folks will git about all the snow you want for Christmas.”
“At any rate, it won’t be a green Christmas up here,” Agnes said to Neale, who sat beside her in the second sled. “I don’t think it is nice at all not to have plenty of snow over Christmas and New Year’s.”
“I’m with you there,” agreed the boy. “But I’m glad I haven’t got to shovel paths through these drifts,” he added, with a quick grin.
They found the tote-road, as the path was called, quite filled with snow in some places. There were only the marks of the sleds that had gone up two days before with the servants and baggage and returned—these same two pungs in which the party now rode.
The drifts were packed so hard that the horses drew the sleds right over the drifts, without breaking through more than an inch or two with their big hoofs. In some places they could trot heavily, jerking the sleds along at rather a good pace; but for most of the way the road was uphill, and the horses plodded slowly.
The boys got out now and then to stretch their legs. Agnes, too, demanded this privilege, and tramped along beside Neale after the sleds on the uphill grades. Mainly the party was warm and comfortable, and cheerful voices, laughter, and song rang through the spruce woods as they traversed the forest-clad hills.
Red Deer Lodge, it proved, was a long day’s journey from the lakeside into the wilderness. Never before had the Corner House girls and their friends visited so wild a place. But they foresaw no trouble in store for them—not even from the gathering storm.
“Of course,” Agnes said, when she was tramping on one occasion with the boys behind the second sled, “there must be bears, and wolves, and catamounts, and all those, in these woods in summer. But they are all hidden away for the winter now, aren’t they, Neale?”
“The bears are holed up,” he granted. “But the other varmints—”
“What are those?”
“That is what Uncle Bill Sorber calls most carnivorous animals,” laughed Neale. “Creatures that prey—”
“Je-ru-sa-lem!” ejaculated the wide-eared Sammy. “You don’t mean to say wild animals pray, do you? I never knew they were that religious!”
“Good-night!” laughed Neale. “I mean those that prey on other animals—live on ’em, you know. Prey on ’em.”
“Je-ru-sa-lem!” murmured Sammy. “Just like the fleas on my bulldog, Buster?”
“That’s enough! That’s enough!” groaned Neale. “No use trying to teach this boy anything.”
“Huh!” grumbled Sammy Pinkney. “They make me learn enough in school. Don’t you begin to pick on me out here in the woods, Neale O’Neil.”
Just then Tom Jonah, who, his tongue hanging out, had been padding on ahead, suddenly uttered a loud bark and leaped out of the path. He went tearing away across the tops of the drifts and through the open wood through which the tote-road then passed.
Out of a close-branched spruce just ahead of the big dog shot a tawny-gray body, and a fearsome yowl drowned the barking of the dog. But the creature that had created Tom Jonah’s excitement was running away.
“Call off that dog!” shouted the head driver. “Want him all chawed up?”
Tess stood up and began to scream for Tom Jonah to return. The old dog would obey her voice if no other.
“Oh! What is that?” cried Ruth.
“Link,” said the driver, succinctly, as the beast uttered another angry howl which made the returning Tom Jonah turn to snarl in the stranger’s direction.
“Oh!”
“He means lynx,” said Mr. Howbridge.
“Don’t, nuther,” snorted the driver. “There’s only one of him, so he’s a link. If they was two or more they’d be links.”
“Oh! Ah!” chuckled Luke Shepard. “And that one is now the ‘missing link.’ He was making tracks for the port of ‘missing links’ when he disappeared.”
“He’s goin’ some. That dog give him a scare,” admitted the driver, as a third and more distant yowl floated back to them from the depths of the forest.
The whole party, however, was impressed by the incident. More than Dot were disturbed by the thought of danger.
“Just the same,” the smallest Corner House girl murmured in Tess’ ear. “I’m not going to throw my Alice-doll overboard, either for wolfs or linkses—so there!”
Mr. Durkin of the Coxford Hotel had furnished the party with a hearty lunch to eat while they were en route to Red Deer Lodge, and Ruth had brought two big thermos bottles of hot tea, likewise prepared at the hotel. The drivers had their own lunches, and at noon the party halted in the shelter of a windbreak to breathe the horses and allow them to eat their oats.
Mrs. MacCall and the older girls complained of stiffness from sitting so long in the sledges. Riding so far in the cold was not altogether pleasant; there was no sunshine at all now. The gathering storm had overcast the entire sky, and as they went on after lunch a rising wind began moaning through the forest.
“I don’t see why the trees have to make such a meachin’ noise,” sighed Dot, as they climbed a steep hill so slowly that the rueful sound of the rising gale was quite audible.
“Where did you get such a word, Dot?” demanded Ruth, smiling at her.
“It is a good word. Uncle Rufus uses it,” declared the smallest Corner House girl. “And Uncle Rufus never uses bad words.”
“Granted,” Ruth said. “But what does ‘meachin’ mean?”
“Why, just as though the wind felt bad and was whimpering about it,” said Dot, with assurance. “It makes you all shivery to listen to it. And after we heard that link, and know that there are bears and wolfs about—O-o-oh! what’s that, Ruthie?”
Something white had flashed right up in front of the noses of the first team of horses, and with great leaps broke away from the road. Tom Jonah was at the rear of the procession and did not at first see this bounding shape.
Neale stood up in the second sleigh and clapped his hands sharply together. The white ball stopped—halting right in a snow-patch; being so much like the snow itself in color that those in the sledges could scarcely see it. The sharp crack of Neale’s ungloved palms seemed to make the creature cower in the snow. It halted for a moment only, however.
“Oh! The bunny!” gasped Tess, standing up to see.
“A big white hare,” Mr. Howbridge said. “I had no idea there were such big ones around here.”
The hare burst into high speed again and disappeared, almost before Tom Jonah set out for him.
“Come back, Tom Jonah!” shouted Tess. “Why, you couldn’t catch that bunny if you had started ahead of him.”
“Wow! that’s a good one,” said Neale O’Neil. “Tell you what, Aggie, those small sisters of yours are right full of new ideas.”
“That is what teacher says is the matter with Robbie Foote,” remarked Sammy, thoughtfully.
“How is that?” asked Agnes, expecting some illuminating information from the standpoint of a lower grade pupil.
“Why,” Sammy explained, “teacher asked Rob what was the plural of man. Rob told her ‘men.’ Then, of course, she had to keep right on at it. If you do answer her right she goes right at you again,” scoffed Sammy. “That’s why I don’t often answer her right if I can help it. It only makes you trouble.”
“Oh! Oh!” chuckled Neale. “A Daniel come to judgment.”
“Wait. Let’s hear the rest of Sam’s story,” begged Agnes. “What was Robbie Foote’s idea?”
“That’s what teacher said—he was full of ideas, only they were silly,” went on Sammy. “When he’d told her ‘men’ was the plural of ‘man,’ she said: ‘What is the plural of child?’ He told her ‘twins.’ What d’you know about that? She said his ideas were silly.”
“I’m not so sure he was silly,” laughed Neale.
“I wonder what has become of those Birdsall twins,” Agnes said thoughtfully. “Up here in this wild country—”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Neale. “You don’t know anything of the kind. Those two girls that fisher-woman spoke about—”
“One of them was a boy.”
“Well, that doesn’t prove anything. We don’t even know that the two at the fisher-village were twins.”
“But they were brother and sister roaming about—runaways and alone.”
“Oh, Aggie!” he cried, “don’t make up your mind a thing is so without getting some real evidence first. Mr. Howbridge asked, and he is not at all sure those stragglers were the twins.”
“Somehow I just feel that they were,” sighed the second Corner House girl, with a confidence that Neale saw it was useless to try to shake.
When Agnes Kenway made up her mind to a thing Neale wagged his head and gave it up.
The party was quite too jolly, however, to bother much about the lost Birdsall twins just then. Even Mr. Howbridge had said nothing about them since his cross-examination of the hotel-keeper back at Coxford.
If the twins had come this way, for instance, attempting to reach Red Deer Lodge, surely some of the people of Coxford or the woodsmen going back and forth on the tote-road would have met and recognized them. And if Ralph was dressed in some of his sister’s clothing, they would have been the more surely marked.
Two girls of twelve or so traveling into the woods? It seemed quite ridiculous.
For this was indeed a wild country through which the tote-road ran. The fact of its being a wilderness was marked even to the eyes of those so unfamiliar with such scenes.
Now and then a fox barked from the brakes in the lowland. Jays in droves winged across the clearings with raucous cries. More than one trampled place beside the thickets of edible brush showed where the deer herd had browsed within stone’s throw of the tote-road.
And then, as the party came closer to the ridge on which Red Deer Lodge was built, and the twilight began to gather, the big white owls of these northern forests went flapping through the tree-lanes, skimming the snowcrust for the rabbits and other small animals that might be afoot even this early in the evening.
The spread of the wings of the first of these monster owls that they saw was quite six feet from tip to tip, and it almost scared Dot Kenway. With an eerie “Hoo! Hoo! Hoo-oo!” and a swish of wings it crossed the road just ahead of the horses, and made even those plodding beasts toss their heads and prick up their ears.
“Oh, look at that ’normous great white chicken!” shouted Dot. “Did you ever?”
“It is an owl, child,” said Tess.
“An owl as big as that?” gasped the smaller girl. “Why—why—it could carry you right off like the eagle that Mr. Lycurgus Billet set his Sue for bait! Don’t you ’member?”
“I guess I do remember!” Tess declared. “But an owl isn’t like an eagle. It isn’t so savage.”
The party had come a long way, and the steaming horses were now weary. As evening approached the cold increased in intensity, while the mournfully sounding wind promised stern weather. The members of the party from Milton began to congratulate each other that they were arriving at the Lodge before a big storm should sweep over this northern country.
“And suppose we get snowed in and aren’t able to get out of the woods till spring?” suggested Cecile, not without some small fear that such might be a possibility.
“There goes little Miss Fidget!” cried her brother. “Always worrying over the worst that may happen.”
“But I suppose we could be snowbound up here?” suggested Ruth, although scarcely with anxiety.
“Yes!” agreed Luke, laughing. “And pigs might fly. But they tell me they are awful uncertain birds.”
“Don’t listen to him, Ruthie,” said Cecile. “We may have to stay here all winter long.”
“Then I only hope Mr. Howbridge sent up grub enough to see us through till spring,” put in the collegian gayly. “For I can foresee right now that this keen air is going to give me the appetite of an Eskimo.”
It was a long climb to the top of the ridge on which the Birdsalls had built their rustic home. When the party came in sight of it the lamps were already lighted and these beckoned cheerfully to the arrivals while they were still a long way off.
The private road which had branched off from the regular tote-road at the foot of the ridge was easy to ascend beside some of the hills they had climbed. The teams, however, were not to be urged out of a walk.
There was a sudden flare of sulphurous light over the wooded caps of the mountains to the west of the ridge; but this lasted only a few minutes. The sun was then smothered in the mists as it sank to rest. Dusk almost at once filled the aisles of the forest.
On the summit of the ridge about the big, sprawling, rustic house only shade trees had been allowed to stand. The land was cleared and tilled to some extent. At least, there was plenty of open space around the Lodge and the log barns and the outbuildings.
Somebody was on watch, for the big entrance door opened before the sleds reached the steps, and yellow lamplight shone out across the porch. Hedden stood in the doorway, while another man ran down to assist with the bags and bundles.
“Oh, what a homelike looking place!” Ruth cried, quite as amazed as the other visitors by the appearance of the Lodge.
Aside from the fact that the house was built of round logs with the bark peeled off, it did not seem to be at all rough or of crude construction. There were two floors and a garret. The entrance hall seemed as big as a barn.
It was cozy and warm, however, despite its size. There was a gallery all around this hall at the level of the second floor, and a stairway went up on either side. At the rear was a huge fireplace, and this was heaped with logs which gave off both light and heat. There was a chandelier dropped from the ceiling, however, and acetylene gas flared from the burners of this fixture.
The whole party crowded to the hearth where benches and chairs were drawn up in a wide circle before the flames. The maids relieved Mrs. MacCall and the girls of their outer wraps and overshoes. The boys had been shown where they were to leave their caps and coats.
Such a hilarious crowd as they were! Jokes and cheerful gossip were the order of this hour of rest. With all but one member of the party! There was one very serious face, and this was the countenance of the youngest of the four Kenway sisters.
“Dorothy Kenway! what is the matter with you?” demanded Tess, at last seeing the expression on the face of her little sister.
Dot had been gazing all about the room with amazed eyes until this question came. Then with gravity she asked:
“Tessie! didn’t Mr. Howbridge say this was a lodge?”
“Why, yes; this is Red Deer Lodge, child,” rejoined Tess.
“But—but, Tess! you know it isn’t a lodge, nor a room where they have lodges! Now, is it?!”
“Why—why—”
“It can’t be!” went on the smaller girl with great insistence. “You know that was a lodge where we went night before last to have our Christmas tree on Meadow Street.”
“A lodge?” gasped Tess.
“Yes. You know it was. And there was a pulpit and chairs on a platform at both ends of the lodge. And lodges are held there. I know, ’cause Becky Goronofsky’s father belongs to one that meets there. She said so. And he wears a little white apron with a blue border and a sash over his shoulder.
“Now,” said the earnest Dot, “there’s nothing like that here, so it’s not a lodge at all. I don’t see why they call it a red lodge for deers.”
Tess would have been tempted to call on Mr. Howbridge himself for an explanation of this seeming mystery had the lawyer not been just then in conference with Hedden in a corner of the room. The butler had beckoned his employer away from the others.
“What is it, Hedden?” asked the lawyer. “Has something gone wrong?”
“Not with the arrangements for the comfort of your party, Mr. Howbridge,” the man assured him. “But when we came in here yesterday (and I unlocked the door myself with the key you gave me) I found that somebody had recently occupied the Lodge.”
“You don’t mean it! Somebody broken in! Some thief?”
“No, sir. I went around to all the windows and doors. Nobody had broken in. Whoever it was must have had a key, too.”
“But who was it? What did the intruder do?”
“I find nothing disturbed, sir. Nothing of importance. But one room, at least, had been used recently. It is a sitting-room upstairs—right near this main hall. There had been a fire in the grate up there. When we came in yesterday the embers were still glowing. But I could find no intruder anywhere about the Lodge, sir.”
Mr. Howbridge was evidently somewhat impressed by Hedden’s report. He stared gravely for a minute at his grizzled butler. Then he nodded.
“Take me upstairs and show me which room you mean, Hedden,” he said.
“Yes, sir. This way, sir.”
He led the lawyer toward the nearest stairway. They mounted to the gallery. Then the man led his employer down a passage and turned short into a doorway. The room they entered was really on the other side of the chimney from the big entrance hall.
It was a small, cozy den. Mr. Howbridge looked the place over keenly, scrutinizing the furnishings before he glanced at the open coal grate to which Hedden sought to draw his attention first of all.
“Ah. Yes,” said the lawyer, thoughtfully. “A work-basket. Low rocker. A dressing table. Couch. This, Hedden, was Mrs. Birdsall’s private sitting-room when she was alive. I never saw the house before, but I have heard Birdsall describe it.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Mrs. Birdsall spent a good deal of her time indoors in this room, and the children with her. So he said. And you found live embers in the grate there?”
“Yes, sir,” said the butler, his own eyes big with wonder.
“No other signs of anybody having been here?”
“Not that I could see,” said Hedden.
“Strange—if anybody had been in here who had a key. Have you seen Ike M’Graw?”
“No, sir. The men who brought us up here said the man had gone away—had been away for a week, sir—but would return tonight.”
“Then he was not the person who built the fire the embers of which you found. The coals would not have burned for a week. He is the person who has a key to the Lodge, and nobody else.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Whoever got in here, of course, either departed when you came, Hedden, or before. Did you notice any tracks about the house?”
“Plenty, sir. But only of beasts and birds.”
“Ah-ha! Are the animals as tame as that up here?”
“There were footprints that the men from town assured me were those of a big cat of some kind, and there were dog footprints; only the men said they were those of wolves. They say the beasts are getting hungry early in the season, because of the deep and early snow, sir.”
“Humph! Better say nothing to the children about that,” said Mr. Howbridge. “Of course, this party’s being here will keep any marauding animals at a distance. We won’t care for that sort of visitor.”
“I think there is no danger, sir. I will tell the chef to throw out no table-scraps, and to feed that big dog we have brought in the back kitchen. Then there will be nothing to attract the wild creatures to the door.”
“Good idea,” Mr. Howbridge said. “And I will warn them all tomorrow not to leave the vicinity of the Lodge alone. When Ike M’Graw arrives we shall be all right. This vicinity is his natural habitat, and he will know all that’s right to do, and what not to do.”
Mr. Howbridge still looked about the room. The thing that interested him most was the mystery of the intruder who had built the fire in the grate. Mrs. Birdsall’s sitting-room! And the lawyer knew from hearing the story repeated again and again by the sorrowing widower, that the woman had been brought in here after her fall from the horse and had died upon the couch in the corner of the room.
He wondered.
Meanwhile the crowd of young people below were comforted with tea and crackers before they went to their bedrooms to change their clothes for dinner. Mr. Howbridge had brought the customs of his own formal household to Red Deer Lodge, and, knowing how particular the lawyer was, Ruth Kenway had warned the others to come prepared to dress for dinner.
Mrs. MacCall, after drinking her third cup of tea, went off with the chief maid to view the house and learn something about it. The Scotch woman was very capable and had governed Mr. Howbridge’s own home before she went to the old Corner House to keep straight the household lines there for the Kenways.
Her situation here at the Lodge was one between the serving people and the family; but the latter, especially the smaller girls, would have been woeful indeed had Mrs. MacCall not sat at the table with them and been one of the family as she was at home in Milton.
The girls were shown to their two big rooms on the second floor, and found them warm and cozy. They were heated by wood fires in drum-stoves. Ike M’Graw, general caretaker of the Lodge, had long since piled each wood box in the house full with billets of hard wood.
Neale and Luke and Sammy were given another room off the gallery above the main hall. There they washed, and freshened up their apparel, and otherwise made themselves more presentable. Even Sammy looked a little less grubby than usual when they came down to the big fire again.
It was black dark outside by this time. The wind was still moaning in the forest, and when they went to the door the fugitive snowflakes drifted against one’s cheek.
“Going to be a bad night, I guess,” Neale said, coming back from an observation, just as the girls came down the stairway. “Oh, look! see ’em all fussed up!”
The girls had shaken out their furbelows, and now came down smiling and preening not a little. Mr. Howbridge appeared in a Tuxedo coat.
“Wish I’d brought my ‘soup to nuts,’” admitted Luke Shepard. “This is going to be a dress-up affair. I thought we were coming into the wilderness to rough it.”
“All the roughing it will be done outside the house, young man,” said Cecile to her brother. “You must be on your very best behavior inside.”
Hedden’s assistant announced dinner, and Mr. Howbridge offered his arm to Mrs. MacCall, who had just descended the stairway in old-fashioned rustling black silk.
Immediately Luke joined the procession with Ruth on his arm, and Neale followed with Agnes, giggling of course. Cecile made Sammy walk beside her, and he was really proud to do this, only he would not admit it. At the end of the procession came the two little girls.
They had not seen the dining-room before. It was big enough for a banquet hall, and the table without being extended would have seated a dozen. There was an open fireplace on either side of this room. The acetylene lamps gave plenty of light. There were favors at each plate. There were even flowers on the table. Aside from the unplastered walls and raftered ceiling, one might have thought this dinner served in Mr. Howbridge’s own home.
They all (the older ones at least) began to realize how great a cross it would have been for the lawyer to take into his home in Milton two harum-scarum children like the Birdsall twins. If all tales about them were true, they were what Neale O’Neil called “terrors.”
Such children would surely break every rule of the lawyer’s well-ordered existence. And bachelors of Mr. Howbridge’s age do not take kindly to changes.
“Think of bringing the refinements of his own establishment away up here into the woods for a three weeks’ vacation!” gasped Cecile afterwards to Ruth.
To-night at dinner every rule of a well-furnished and well-governed household was followed. Hedden and his assistant served. The food was deliciously cooked and the sauce of a good appetite aided all to enjoy the meal.
And the fun and laughter! Mr. Howbridge and Mrs. MacCall enjoyed the jokes and chatter as much as the younger people themselves. Dot’s discovery that this was not at all like the lodge room on Meadow Street delighted everybody.
“If you think that red deer ever held lodge meetings in this house, you are much mistaken, honey,” Agnes told the smallest Corner House girl.
Tom Jonah was allowed to come in and “sit up” at table. The old dog was so well trained that his table manners (and this was Ruth’s declaration) were far superior to those of Sammy Pinkney. But Sammy was on his best behavior this evening. The grandeur of the table service quite overpowered him.
When they all filed back into the hall, which was really the living-room and reception hall combined, Tom Jonah went with them and curled down on a warm spot on the hearth. One of the men staggered in with a great armful of chunks for the evening fire. Hedden found a popper and popcorn. There was a basket of shiny apples, and even a jug of sweet cider appeared, to be set down near the fire to take the chill off it.
“Now, this,” said Mr. Howbridge, sitting in a great chair with his slippered feet outstretched toward the fire, “is what I call country comfort.”
“Whist, man!” exclaimed Mrs. MacCall. “’Tis plain to be seen you ken little about country comforts, or discomforts either. You were born in the city, Mr. Howbridge, and you have lived in the city most of your days. ’Tis little you know what it means to live away from towns and from luxuries.”
“Why,” laughed the lawyer, “I always go away for a vacation in the summer, and I usually choose some rustic neighborhood.”
“Aye. Where they have piped water in the house, and electricity, an’ hair mattresses. Aye. I know your kind of ‘country,’ too, Mr. Howbridge. But when I was a child at home we lived in the real country—only two farms in the vale and the shepherds’ cots. My feyther was a shepherd, you know.”
“You must be some relation of ours, then, Mrs. MacCall,” Luke said, smiling.
“Oh, aye. By Adam,” said the housekeeper coolly. “I’ve nae doot we sprang from the same stock the Bible speaks of.”
“Now will you be good?” cried Cecile, shaking a finger at her brother. “Go on, Mrs. MacCall. Tell us about your Highland home.”
“Hech! There’s very little to tell,” said the housekeeper, shaking her head, “save that ’twas a very lonely vale we lived in, and forbye in winter. Then we’d not see a strange body from end to end of the snows. And the snow came early and went late.
“If we had not a grand oat bin and a cow in the stable we bairns would oft go hungry. Why, our mother would sometimes keep us abed in stormy weather to save turf. A fire like yon,” she added, nodding toward the blazing pile in the chimney, “would have been counted a sin even in a laird’s house.”
“Ah, Mrs. MacCall,” said the lawyer, “we’re all lairds over here.”
“Aye, that can pay the price can have the luxuries. ’Tis so. But luxuries we knew naught about where I was born and bred.”
“I suppose the people right around us here—the residents of this neighborhood—have few luxuries,” Ruth said thoughtfully.
“There aren’t many neighbors, I guess,” said Neale, laughing.
“But those people living in that fishing village—and even at Coxford—never saw a tenth of the things which we consider necessary at home,” Ruth pursued.
“Suppose!” exclaimed Cecile eagerly. “Just suppose we were snowed in up here and could not get out for weeks, and nobody could get to us. I guess we would have to learn to go without luxuries! Maybe without food.”
“Oh, don’t suggest such a thing,” begged Agnes. “And this cold air gives one such an appetite!”
“Don’t mention a shortage of food,” put in Neale, chuckling, “or Aggie will be getting up in the night and coming down to rob the pantry.”
There might have been a squabble right then and there had not Hedden appeared, and, in his grave way, announced:
“Mr. M’Graw has arrived, sir. Shall I bring him in here?”
“Ah!” exclaimed the lawyer, waking up from a brown study. “Ike M’Graw? I understood from Birdsall that he is a character. Has he had supper, Hedden?”
“Yes, sir. I knew that you would wish him served. He has been eating in the servants’ dining-room, sir.”
“Send him in,” the lawyer said. “Now, young folks, here is the man who can tell us more about Red Deer Lodge and the country hereabout, and all that goes on in it, than anybody else. Here—”
The door opened again. Hedden announced gravely:
“Mr. Ike M’Graw, sir.”
There strode over the threshold one of the tallest men the young people, at least, had ever seen. And he was so lean that his height seemed more than it really was.
“Why,” gasped Neale to Agnes, “he’s so thin he doesn’t cast a shadow, I bet!”
“Sh!” advised the girl warningly.
They were all vastly interested in the appearance of Mr. Ike M’Graw.
Mr. Howbridge got up from his chair and advanced to meet the backwoodsman with hospitable hand. The roughly dressed, bewhiskered forester did not impress the young folks at first as being different from the men who had driven the sledges to the camp or those who had brought the party up Long Lake in the ice-boats.
Ike M’Graw had an enormous moustache (“like that of a walrus,” Cecile whispered), but his iron-gray beard was cropped close. His face was long and solemn of expression, but his gray eyes, surrounded by innumerable wrinkles, had a humorous cast, and were as bright as the eyes of a much younger person.
He seized Mr. Howbridge’s hand and pumped it warmly. His grip was strong, and Mr. Howbridge winced, but he continued to smile upon the old man.
“Mr. Birdsall told me that if I wanted to know anything up here, or wanted anything done, to look to you, Mr. M’Graw,” said the lawyer, as their hands fell apart.
“I bet he didn’t say it jest that way, Mr. Howbridge,” chuckled the man. “No. I reckon he jest called me ‘Ike.’ Now, didn’t he? And ‘Old Ike,’ at that!”
Mr. Howbridge laughed. “Well, he did speak of you in that way, yes,” he admitted.
“I reckoned so,” M’Graw said. “Yep, I’m ‘Old Ike’ to my friends, and what my enemies call me don’t matter at all—not at all.”
“I fancy you don’t make many enemies up here in the woods, M’Graw,” said Mr. Howbridge, waving the visitor to a comfortable seat before the fire.
“Nor friends, nuther,” chuckled the man. “No, sir, there ain’t sech a slather of folks up here to mix in with, by any count.”
Before the woodsman took his seat the lawyer introduced him to Mrs. MacCall and to Ruth, individually, and to the rest of the group in general.
“Hi gorry!” exclaimed Ike M’Graw, “you’ve got a right big fam’ly, haven’t you? You won’t be lonesome up here—no, you won’t be lonesome.”
“And that is what I should think you would be,” Mr. Howbridge said. “Lonesome. If you get snowed in you don’t see anybody for weeks, I suppose?”
“Better say ‘months,’ Mister,” declared M’Graw. “I’ve been snowed into my cabin back yonder in the valley from the day before Christmas till come St. Patrick’s Day. That’s right.”
“I understood you lived near the Lodge, here, Ike?” said the lawyer.
“Oh, I do in winter, since Mr. Birdsall asked me to,” the man said. “But sometimes—’specially when there was visitors up here—the population of this here ridge got too thick for Old Ike. Then I’d hike out for my old cabin in the valley.”
Quickly Mr. Howbridge put in a query that had formed in his mind early in the evening:
“Have you been troubled with visitors up here this winter?”
“No, sir! It’s been right quiet here, you might say.”
“Nobody here at all until my party came yesterday?”
“Well, not many. Some timbermen went through for Neven. His company’s got a camp over beyond the Birdsall line. Yes, sir.”
“Strangers have not been here, then?”
“Why, no. Not to my knowledge,” said M’Graw, with a keener look at the lawyer. “You wasn’t meanin’ nothin’ special, was you? I’ve been away over to Ebettsville for a week. Nothin’ stirring here before I went.”
The conversation had become general again among the main party. Mr. Howbridge drew his chair nearer to the old man’s ear.
“Listen,” he said. “When my men came up yesterday and opened the house with the key I had given them, they found somebody had been in here not many hours before they arrived.”
“How’d they know?”
“The fire had scarcely died out in one of the grates upstairs.”
“Hum! Fire, eh? And I hadn’t been inside this Lodge since b’fore Thanksgiving. Kinder funny, heh?”
“Yes.”
“Anything stole?”
“Not a thing touched as far as we know. No other traces but the embers in that grate—”
“Hold on, Mister!” exclaimed M’Graw, but in a low voice. “What grate are you referrin’ to? Which room was this fire in?”
Mr. Howbridge told him. The old man’s face was curious to look upon. His brows drew down into a frown. His sharp eyes lost their humorous cast. Of a sudden he was very serious indeed.
“That thar room,” he said slowly, and at length, “was Miz’ Birdsall’s.”
“So I believed from the way it was furnished and from what Frank had told me of the house.”
“Yes, Mister. That was her room. She thought a heap of sittin’ in that room; ’specially in stormy weather. And the little shavers used to play there with her, too.”
“Yes?”
“Them little shavers thought a sight of their mom,” pursued M’Graw.
“I gathered as much from what Frank told me,” Mr. Howbridge said seriously.
“By the way, Mr. Howbridge,” said M’Graw in a different tone, “where are the little shavers?”
“You mean the twins, of course? Ralph and Rowena?”
“Yes, sir.”
The guardian of the Birdsall twins rather hesitatingly told the old man just why he had not brought Ralph and Rowena to Red Deer Lodge at this time.
“Ran away? Now listen to that!” murmured the old man. “That don’t sound right. Wasn’t they with folks able to take keer of ’em?”
“I thought they were,” said Mr. Howbridge. “Rodgers, the butler, and his wife.”
“Whoof!” exclaimed the backwoodsman, expelling his breath in a great snort of disgust. “That butler! Wal, what for a man wants to buttle for, I don’t know. I never could make it out that it was a real man’s job, anyway. And that Rodgers was one useless critter. I don’t blame them little shavers for runnin’ away from Rodgers an’ that sour-apple wife of his. I know ’em both.”
“If that is the case,” said the lawyer sadly, “I wish I had known them as well as you appear to. Then I should have made other provision for the twins right at the start.”
“But shucks!” said M’Graw, suddenly grinning. “Them two little shavers will turn up all right. Ralph and Roweny are right smart kids.”
“That may be. But we don’t know where they have gone to. Of course, Ike, they couldn’t have got up here to Red Deer Lodge, could they?”
“I don’t know ’bout that,” said the old man. “I reckon they could have got here if they’d wanted to. But I know well ’nough they didn’t—not before I went away to Ebettsville a week ago.”
“Of course not! Somebody would have seen them at Coxford. And then, if they had come here, where are they now?”
“That’s right, Mister,” agreed Ike M’Graw. “But—but who started that fire in the grate?”
“If it had been the children wouldn’t they have been found here?”
“Mebbe. Tell you the truth”—and the old man’s weather-beaten face reddened a little. “Well, to tell you the truth, when you spoke of the fire in the grate, I was some took aback. Miz’ Birdsall bein’ killed here. And she likin’ that room so. And she finally dyin’ in it—well, I don’t know—”
“Ike! you are superstitious, I do believe,” said the lawyer.
“Mebbe. But that never killed nobody,” said the man. “And funny things do happen. Howsomever—Say!” he exclaimed suddenly, “how’d these folks that made the fire get into the house and out again?”
“Hedden, my man, says he found nothing broken or burst open. It must have been by the use of a key. And the only key I knew of up here was yours, Ike.”
“That’s right,” said the backwoodsman, nodding. “Mine’s the only key up here.”
“But the intruders couldn’t have used that.”
“Yes, they could, too! I didn’t take it with me when I went away from here.”
“Who would know where it was?”
“Anybody might have seen it that looked into my shack,” admitted the old man. “I ain’t in the habit of hidin’ things. We don’t have burglars up here, Mister. That key, and others, hung right on a nail beside my chimley-place. Yes, sir!”
“Then any person passing by could have found the key and entered the Lodge?” asked Mr. Howbridge.
“Only we don’t have many folks passin’ by,” returned Ike thoughtfully.
“I can’t understand it.”
“It is a puzzle,” admitted M’Graw. “Hi gorry! I ain’t been to my shack yet since comin’ back from Ebettsville. Mebbe the key ain’t thar no more.”
“To what door was it?” asked the lawyer.
“This here,” replied M’Graw, jerking a thumb toward the main entrance. “Padlock on the outside of the door. All the other doors was barred on the inside. Oh, she was locked up hard and fast!”
“I don’t understand it,” said the lawyer. “You look when you go home and see if the key is hanging where you left it.”
“Hi gorry! I will,” promised the backwoodsman. “I’d better bring the key over here tomorrow, anyway. And I reckon you want them figgers on the timber Neven wants to cut?”
“Yes. Of course, Ike, you have made no mistake in cruising the timberland?”
“I never make mistakes, Mister,” said the old man. “That wouldn’t do in the woods. The man that’s brought up, as I was, with wildcats an’ bears an’ sech, can’t afford to make mistakes. This was a lots wilder country when I was a boy from what ’tis now.”
“I find that Neven’s figures are very different from yours.”
“Likely. And I reckon they’re in his favor, ain’t they?” and M’Graw chuckled. “Ye-as? I thought so. Well, you take it from me, Mister: I’m working for Birdsall’s youngsters, not for Neven.”
“I believe that to be a fact,” the lawyer agreed warmly. “I have already told Neven that there are other companies that will make a contract with us if he doesn’t care to accept your report.”
“I b’lieve I know this Birdsall strip a leetle better’n any other feller in these parts. I’ve lived on it twenty year, and knowed it well before that time. I’ve seen some o’ this timber grow. Reckon I ain’t fooled myself none.”
After that Mr. Howbridge drew the old into the general conversation. Ike approved vastly of the young people, it was evident. Agnes and the smaller children were popping corn. There were apples roasting on the hearth. The cider was handed about in glasses which one of the servants brought.
“We shall look to you for help in amusing these young people, Ike,” Mr. Howbridge said. “Is it going to snow enough tonight to keep them indoors tomorrow?”
“No, no,” the old woodsman assured them. “It’s snowing some, but not much yet awhile. This here storm that’s comin’ has got to gather fust. We’ll get a heavy fall, I don’t doubt, in the end; but not yet. Like enough, ’twill be purty fair tomorrow.”