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+Project Gutenberg's Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp, by Annie Roe Carr
+Project Gutenberg's The Old Lumberman's Secret, by Annie Roe Carr
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+Title:  Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp
+Title:  The Old Lumberman's Secret
+
+Author:  Annie Roe Carr
+
+July, 2001  [Etext #2691]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+
+Project Gutenberg's Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp, by Annie Roe Carr
+Project Gutenberg's The Old Lumberman's Secret, by Annie Roe Carr
+******This file should be named nsapc10.txt or nsapc10.zip******
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+
+Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp
+
+or The Old Lumberman's Secret
+
+
+by Annie Roe Carr
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+THE YELLOW POSTER
+
+"Oh, look there, Nan!" cried Bess Harley suddenly, as they turned
+into High Street from the avenue on which Tillbury's high school
+was situated.
+
+"Look where?" queried Nan Sherwood promptly.  "Up in the air,
+down on the ground or all around?" and she carried out her
+speech in action, finally spinning about on one foot in a manner
+to shock the more staid Elizabeth.
+
+"Oh, Nan!"
+
+"Oh, Bess!" mocked her friend.
+
+She was a rosy-cheeked, brown-eyed girl, with fly-away hair, a
+blue tam-o'-shanter set jauntily upon it, and a strong, plump
+body that she had great difficulty in keeping still enough in
+school to satisfy her teachers.
+
+"Do behave, Nan," begged Bess.  "We're on the public street."
+
+"How awful!" proclaimed Nan Sherwood, making big eyes at her
+chum.  "Why folks know we're only high-school girls.  so, of
+course, we're crazy!  Otherwise we wouldn't BE high-school
+girls."
+
+"Nonsense!" cried Bess, interrupting.  Do be reasonable, Nan.
+And look yonder!  What do you suppose that crowd is at the big
+gate of the Atwater Mills?"
+
+Nan Sherwood's merry face instantly clouded.  She was not at all
+a thoughtless girl, although she was of a sanguine, cheerful
+temperament.
+
+The startled change in her face amazed Bess.
+
+"Oh dear!" the latter cried.  "What is it? Surely, there's nobody
+hurt in the mills?  Your father-----"
+
+"I'm afraid, Bess dear, that it means there are a great many hurt
+in the mills."
+
+"Oh, Nan! How horridly you talk," cried Bess.  "That is
+impossible."
+
+"Not hurt in the machinery, not mangled by the looms," Nan went
+on to say, gravely. "But dreadfully hurt nevertheless, Bess.
+Father has been expecting it, I believe.  Let's go and read the
+poster."
+
+"Why it is a poster, isn't it?" cried Bess.  "What does it say?"
+
+The two school girls, both neatly dressed and carrying their
+bags of text books, pushed into the group before the yellow
+quarter-sheet poster pasted on the fence.
+
+The appearance of Nan and Bess was distinctly to their advantage
+when compared with that of the women and girls who made up the
+most of the crowd interested in the black print upon the poster.
+
+The majority of these whispering, staring people were foreigners.
+All bore marks of hard work and poverty.  The hands of even the
+girls in the group were red and cracked.  It was sharp winter
+weather, but none wore gloves.
+
+If they wore a head-covering at all, it was a shawl gathered at
+the throat by the clutch of frost-bitten fingers.  There was snow
+on the ground; but few wore overshoes.
+
+They crowded away from the two well-dressed high-school girls,
+looking at them askance.  Bess Harley scarcely noticed the mill-
+hands' wives and daughters.  She came of a family who considered
+these poor people little better than cattle.  Nan Sherwood was so
+much interested in the poster that she saw nothing else.  It
+read:
+
+NOTICE: Two weeks from date all departments of these mills will
+be closed until further notice.  Final payment of wages due will
+be made on January 15th.  Over-supply of our market and the
+prohibitive price of cotton make this action a necessity.
+ATWATER MILLS COMPANY.  December 28th.
+
+"Why, dear me!" murmured Bess.  "I thought it might really be
+something terrible.  Come on, Nan.  It's only a notice of a
+vacation.  I guess most of them will be glad to rest awhile."
+
+"And who is going to pay for their bread and butter while the
+poor creatures are resting?" asked Nan seriously, as the two
+girls moved away from the group before the yellow poster.
+
+"Dear me, Nan!" her chum cried.  "You do always think of the most
+dreadful things.  It troubles me to know anything about poverty
+and poor people.  I can't help them, and I don't want to know
+anything about them."
+
+"If I didn't know that you are better than your talk, Bess," said
+Nan, still gravely, "I'd think you a most callous person.  You
+just don't understand.  These poor people have been fearing this
+shut-down for months.  And all the time they have been expecting
+it they have been helpless to avert it and unable to prepare for
+it."
+
+"They might have saved some of their wages, I suppose," said
+Bess.  "I heard father say the other night how much money the
+mills paid out in a year to the hands, some perfectly enORmous
+sum."
+
+"But just think how many people that has to be divided among,"
+urged Nan.  "Lots of the men earn only eight or nine dollars a
+week, and have families to support."
+
+"Well, of course, they don't have to be supported as we are,"
+objected the easy-minded Bess.  "Anyway my father says frugality
+should be taught to the poor just the same as reading and
+writing.
+They ought to learn how to save."
+
+"When you earn only just enough to supply your needs, and no
+more, how can you divide your income so as to hoard up any part
+of it?"
+
+"Dear me!  Don't ask questions in political economy out of
+school, Nan!" cried Bess, forgetting that she had started the
+discussion herself.  "I just HATE that study, and wish we didn't
+have to take it!  I can't answer that question, anyway."
+
+"I'll answer it then," declared Nan.  "If you are a mill-hand
+your stomach won't let you save money.  There probably won't be a
+dozen families affected by this shut-down who have more than ten
+dollars saved."
+
+"Goodness!  You don't mean that that's true?  Why, dad gives me
+that much to spend on myself each month," Bess cried.  "The poor
+things!  Even if they are frowsy and low, I am sorry for them.
+But, of course, the shut-down doesn't trouble you, Nan.  Not
+personally, I mean.  Your father has had a good position for so
+many years-----"
+
+"I'm not at all sure that it won't trouble us," Nan interposed
+gravely.  "But of course we are not in danger of starvation."
+
+She felt some delicacy about entirely confiding in Bess on the
+subject.  Nan had heard the pros and cons of the expected closing
+of the mills discussed at home almost every day for weeks past;
+but family secrets should never be mentioned outside the family
+circle, as Nan very well knew.
+
+"Well," signed Bess, whose whole universe revolved around a
+central sun called Self, as is the case with many girls brought
+up by indulgent parents.  "I hope, dear, that this trouble won't
+keep you from entering Lakeview with me next fall."
+
+Nan laughed.  "There never was a chance of my going with you,
+Bess, and I've told you so often enough-----"
+
+"Now, don't you say that, Nan Sherwood!" cried her chum.  "I've
+just made up my mind that you shall go, and that's all there is
+to it!  You've just got to go!"
+
+"You mean to kidnap me and bear me off to that ogre's castle,
+whether or not?"
+
+"It's the very nicest school that ever was," cried Bess.  "And
+such a romantic place."
+
+"Romantic?" repeated Nan curiously.
+
+"Yes, indeed!  A great big stone castle overlooking Lake
+Michigan, a regular fortress, they say.  It was built years ago
+by Colonel Gilpatrick French, when he came over from Europe with
+some adventurous Irishmen who thought all they had to do was to
+sail over to Canada and the whole country would be theirs for the
+taking."
+
+"Goodness me!  I've read something about that," said Nan,
+interested.
+
+"Well, Lakeview Hall, as the school is called, was built by that
+rich Colonel French.  And they say there are dungeons under it  "
+
+"Where they keep their jams and preserves, now, I suppose?"
+laughed Nan.
+
+"And secret passages down to the shore of the lake.  And the
+great hall where the brave Irishmen used to drill is now the
+assembly hall of the school."
+
+"Sounds awfully interesting," admitted Nan.
+
+"And Dr. Beulah Prescott, who governs the hall, the preceptress,
+you know, is really a very lovely lady, my mother says," went on
+the enthusiastic Bess.  "MY mother went to school to her at
+Ferncliffe."
+
+"Oh, Bess," Nan said warmly, "It must be a perfectly lovely
+place!  But I know I can never go there."
+
+"Don't you say that!  Don't you say that!" cried the other girl.
+"I won't listen to you!  You've just got to go!"
+
+"I'm afraid you'll have to kidnap me, then," repeated Nan, with a
+rueful smile.  "I'm very sure that my father won't be able to
+afford it, especially now that the mills will close."
+
+"Oh, Nan!  I think you're too mean," wailed her friend.  "It's my
+pet project.  You know, I've always said we should go to
+preparatory school together, and then to college."
+
+Nan's eyes sparkled; but she shook her head.
+
+"We sat together in primary school, and we've always been in the
+same grade through grammar and into high," went on Bess, who was
+really very faithful in her friendships.  "It would just break my
+heart, Nan, if we were to be separated now."
+
+Nan put her arm about her.  They had reached the corner by Bess's
+big house where they usually separated after school.
+
+"Don't you cry, honey!" Nan begged her chum.  "You'll find lots
+of nice girls at that Lakeview school, I am sure.  I'd dearly
+love to go with you, but you might as well understand right now,
+dear, that my folks are poor."
+
+"Poor!" gasped Bess.
+
+"Too poor to send me to Lakeview," Nan went on steadily.  "And
+with the mills closing as they are, we shall be poorer still.  I
+may have to get a certificate as Bertha Pike did, and go to work.
+So you mustn't think any more about my going to that beautiful
+school with you."
+
+"Stop!  I won't listen to you another moment, Nan Sherwood!"
+cried Bess, and sticking her fingers in her ears, she ran angrily
+away and up the walk to the front door.
+
+Nan walked briskly away toward Amity Street.  She did not turn
+back to wave her hand as usual at the top of the hill.
+
+Chapter II
+THE COTTAGE ON AMITY STREET
+
+The little shingled cottage stood back from the street, in a
+deeper yard than most of its neighbors.  It was built the year
+Nan was born, so the roses, the honeysuckle, and the clematis had
+become of stalwart growth and quite shaded the front and side
+porches.
+
+The front steps had begun to sag a little; but Mr. Sherwood had
+blocked them up.  The front fence had got out of alignment, and
+the same able mechanic had righted it and set the necessary new
+posts.
+
+The trim of the little cottage on Amity Street had been painted
+twice within Nan's remembrance; each time her father had done the
+work in his spare time.
+
+Now, with snow on the ground and frozen turf peeping out from
+under the half-melted and yellowed drifts, the Sherwood cottage
+was not so attractive as in summer.  Yet it was a cozy looking
+house with the early lamplight shining through the kitchen window
+and across the porch as Nan approached, swinging her schoolbooks.
+
+Papa Sherwood called it, with that funny little quirk in the
+corner of his mouth, "a dwelling in amity, more precious than
+jewels or fine gold."
+
+And it was just that.  Nan had had experience enough in the
+houses of her school friends to know that none of them were homes
+like her own.
+
+All was amity, all was harmony, in the little shingled cottage on
+this short by-street of Tillbury.
+
+It was no grave and solemn place where the natural outburst of
+childish spirits was frowned upon, or one had to sit "stiff and
+starched" upon stools of penitence.
+
+No, indeed!  Nan had romped and played in and about the cottage
+all her life.  She had been, in fact, of rather a boisterous
+temperament until lately.
+
+Her mother's influence was always quieting, and not only with her
+little daughter.  Mrs. Sherwood's voice was low, and with a dear
+drawl in it, so Nan declared.
+
+She had come from the South to Northern Illinois, from
+Tennessee, to be exact, where Mr. Sherwood had met and married
+her.  She had grace and gentleness without the languor that often
+accompanies those qualities.
+
+Her influence upon both her daughter and her husband was marked.
+They deferred to her, made much of her, shielded her in every way
+possible from all that was rude or unpleasant.
+
+Yet Mrs. Sherwood was a perfectly capable and practical
+housekeeper, and when her health would allow it she did all the
+work of the little family herself.  Just now she was having what
+she smilingly called "one of her lazy spells," and old Mrs. Joyce
+came in to do the washing and cleaning each week.
+
+It was one of Mrs. Sherwood's many virtues that she bore with a
+smile recurrent bodily ills that had made her a semi-invalid
+since Nan was a very little girl.  But in seeking medical aid for
+these ills, much of the earnings of the head of the household had
+been spent.
+
+The teakettle was singing when Nan entered the "dwelling in
+amity", and her mother's low rocker was drawn close to the side-
+table on which the lamp stood beside the basket of mending.
+
+Although Mrs. Sherwood could not at present do her own laundry-
+work, she insisted upon darning and patching and mending as only
+she could darn and patch and mend.
+
+Mr. Sherwood insisted that a sock always felt more comfortable on
+his foot after "Momsey" had darned it than when it was new.  And
+surely she was a very excellent needlewoman.
+
+This evening, however, her work had fallen into her lap with an
+idle needle sticking in it.  She had been resting her head upon
+her hand and her elbow on the table when Nan came in.  But she
+spoke in her usual bright way to the girl as the latter first of
+all kissed her and then put away her books and outer clothing.
+
+"What is the good word from out of doors, honey?" she asked.
+
+Nan's face was rather serious and she could not coax her usual
+smile into being.  Her last words with Bess Harley had savored of
+a misunderstanding, and Nan was not of a quarrelsome disposition.
+
+"I'm afraid there isn't any real good word to be brought from
+outside tonight, Momsey," she confessed, coming back to stand by
+her mother's chair.
+
+"Can that be possible, Daughter!" said Mrs. Sherwood, with her
+low, caressing laugh.  "Has the whole world gone wrong?"
+
+"Well, I missed in two recitations and have extras to make up, in
+the first place," rejoined Nan ruefully.
+
+"And what else?"
+
+"Well, Bess and I didn't have exactly a falling out; but I
+couldn't help offending her in one thing.  That's the second
+trouble."
+
+"And is there a 'thirdly,' my dear?" queried little Mrs. Sherwood
+tranquilly.
+
+"Oh, dear, yes!  The worst of all!" cried Nan.  "The yellow
+poster is up at the mills."
+
+"The yellow poster?" repeated her mother doubtfully, not at first
+understanding the significance of her daughter's statement.
+
+"Yes.  You know.  When there's anything bad to announce to the
+hands the Atwater Company uses yellow posters, like a small-pox,
+or typhoid warning.  The horrid thing!  The mills shut down in
+two weeks, Momsey, and no knowing when they will open again."
+
+"Oh, my dear!" was the little woman's involuntary tribute to the
+seriousness of the announcement.
+
+In a moment she was again her usual bright self.  She drew Nan
+closer to her and her own brown eyes, the full counterpart of
+her daughter's, winkled merrily.
+
+"I tell you what let's do, Nan," she said.
+
+"What shall we do, Momsey?" repeated the girl, rather
+lugubriously.
+
+"Why, let's not let Papa Sherwood know about it, it will make
+him feel so bad."
+
+Nan began to giggle at that.  She knew what her mother meant.  Of
+course, Mr. Sherwood, being at the head of one of the mill
+departments, would know all about the announcement of the shut-
+down; but they would keep up the fiction that they did not know
+it by being particularly cheerful when he came home from work.
+
+So Nan giggled and swallowed back her sobs.  Surely, if Momsey
+could present a cheerful face to this family calamity, she could!
+
+The girl ran her slim fingers into the thick mane of her mother's
+coiled hair, glossy brown hair through which only a few threads
+of white were speckled.
+
+"Your head feels hot, Momsey," she said anxiously.  "Does it
+ache?"
+
+"A wee bit, honey," confessed Mrs. Sherwood.
+
+"Let me take the pins out and rub your poor head, dear," said
+Nan.  "You know, I'm a famous 'massagist.'  Come   do, dear."
+
+"If you like, honey."
+
+Thus it was that, a little later, when Mr. Sherwood came home
+with feet that dragged more than usual on this evening, he opened
+the door upon a very beautiful picture indeed.
+
+His wife's hair was "a glory of womanhood," for it made a tent
+all about her, falling quite to the floor as she sat in her low
+chair.  Out of this canopy she looked up at the brawny, serious
+man, roguishly.
+
+"Am I not a lazy, luxurious person, Papa Sherwood?" she demanded.
+"Nan is becoming a practical maid, and I presume I put upon the
+child dreadfully, she is good-natured, like you, Robert."
+
+"Aye, I know our Nan gets all her good qualities from me,
+Jessie," said her husband.  "If she favored you she would, of
+course, be a very hateful child."
+
+He kissed his wife tenderly.  As Nan said, he always "cleaned up"
+at the mills and "came home kissable."
+
+"I ought to be just next door to an angel, if I absorbed the
+virtues of both my parents," declared Nan briskly, beginning to
+braid the wonderful hair which she had already brushed.  "I often
+think of that."
+
+Her father poked her tentatively under the shoulder blades with a
+blunt forefinger, making her squirm.
+
+"I don't feel the wings sprouting yet, Nancy," he said, in his
+dry way.
+
+"I hope not, yet!" exclaimed the girl.  "I'd have to have a new
+winter coat if you did, and I know we can't afford that just
+now."
+
+"You never said a truer word, Nan," replied Mr. Sherwood, his
+voice dropping to a less cheerful level, as he went away to
+change his coat and light the hanging lamp in the dining room
+where the supper table was already set.
+
+Mother and daughter looked at each other rather ruefully.
+
+"Oh, dear me!" whispered Nan.  "I never do open my mouth but I
+put my foot in it!"
+
+"Goodness!" returned her mother, much amused.  "That is an
+acrobatic feat that I never believed you capable of, honey."
+
+"We-ell!  I reminded Papa Sherwood of our hard luck instead of
+being bright and cheerful like you."
+
+"We will give him a nice supper, honey, and make him forget his
+troubles.  Time enough to call to order the ways and means
+committee afterward."  Her husband came back into the kitchen as
+Nan finished arranging the hair.  "Come, Papa Sherwood!" cried
+the little lady.  "Hot biscuit; the last of the honey; sweet
+pickles; sliced cold ham; and a beautiful big plum cake that our
+Nan made this morning before school time, her own self.  You MUST
+smile at all those dainties."
+
+And the husband and father smiled.  They all made an effort to
+help each other.  But they knew that with the loss of his work
+would doubtless come the loss of the home.  During the years that
+had elapsed, Mr. Sherwood had paid in part for the cottage; but
+now the property was deteriorating instead of advancing in value.
+He could not increase the mortgage upon it.  Prompt payment of
+interest half-yearly was demanded.  And how could he meet these
+payments, not counting living expenses, when his income was
+entirely cut off?
+
+Mr. Sherwood was forty-five years old, an age at which it is
+difficult for a man to take up a new trade, or to obtain new
+employment at his old one.
+
+Chapter III
+"FISHING"
+
+Nan told of Bess Harley's desire to have her chum accompany her
+to Lakeview Hall the following autumn, as a good joke.
+
+"I hope I'll be in some good situation by that time," she said to
+her mother, confidentially, "helping, at least, to support myself
+instead of being a burden upon father and you."
+
+"It's very unselfish of you to propose that, honey," replied her
+mother.  "But, perhaps, such a sacrifice as the curtailment of
+your education will not be required of you."
+
+"But, my DEAR!" gasped Nan.  "I couldn't go to Lakeview Hall.  It
+would cost, why!  a pile!"
+
+"I don't know how much a pile is, translated into coin of the
+realm, honey," responded Mrs. Sherwood with her low, sweet laugh.
+"But the only thing we can give our dear daughter, your father
+and I, is an education.  That you MUST have to enable you to
+support yourself properly when your father can do no more for
+you."
+
+"But I s'pose I've already had as much education as most girls in
+Tillbury get.  So many of them go into the mills and factories at
+my age.  If they can get along, I suppose I can."
+
+"Hush!" begged her mother quickly.  "Don't speak of such a thing.
+I couldn't bear to have you obliged to undertake your own support
+in any such way.
+
+"Both your father and I, honey, had the benefit of more than the
+ordinary common-school education.  I went three years to the
+Tennessee Training College; I was prepared to teach when your
+father and I met and married.  He obtained an excellent training
+for his business in a technical college.  We hoped to give our
+children, if we were blessed with them, an even better start in
+life than we had.
+
+"Had your little brother lived, honey," added Mrs. Sherwood
+tenderly, "we should have tried to put him through college, and
+you, as well.  It would have been something worthwhile for your
+father to work for.  But I am afraid all these years that his
+money has been wasted in attempts to benefit my health."
+
+"Oh, Momsey!  Don't say it, that way," urged Nan.  "What would we
+ever do without you?  But I sometimes think how nice it would be
+had I been a boy, my own brother, for instance.  A boy can be so
+much more help than a girl."
+
+"For shame!" cried her mother, laughing.  "Do you dare admit a
+boy is smarter than a girl, Nan?"
+
+"Not smarter.  Only better able to do any kind of work, I guess.
+They wouldn't let me work in the file shop, or drive a grocery
+wagon."
+
+"Goodness!  Listen to the child!" gasped Mrs. Sherwood.  "I
+should hope not!  Why, honey, is your mind running continually on
+such dreadful things?  I am afraid your father and I allow you to
+hear us talk too frequently about family matters.  You must not
+assume the family's burdens at your age."
+
+There was that trend to Nan Sherwood's character, however.  With
+all her blithesomeness and high spirits she was inclined to be
+serious in thought.
+
+This conversation occurred several days after the evening when,
+on their way home from school, Nan and her school chum, Bess
+Harley, had read the yellow poster at the gate of the Atwater
+Mills.
+
+The district surrounding the mills, in which most of the hands
+lived, had put on an aspect of mourning.  Some of the workmen and
+their families had already packed up and gone.  Most of the
+houses occupied by the hands were owned by the Atwater Company,
+and if the poor people remained till January 15th, the wages due
+them then would be eaten up by the rent of the tenements.
+
+So they were wise to leave when they could.  Many who remained
+would be a burden upon the taxpayers of Tillbury before the
+winter was over.
+
+Nan and her folks were not in such a sad situation as the
+laborers, of course.  Mr. Sherwood had a small sum in bank.  He
+had, too, a certain standing in the community and a line of
+credit at the stores that he might have used.
+
+Debt, however, save that upon their house, he had fought to keep
+out of all his married life.  That his equity in the Amity Street
+cottage was so small was not his fault; but he owed not any man.
+
+"Now we must go fishing," Mrs. Sherwood said, in her sprightly
+way, when the little family really discussed the unfortunate
+situation after the announcement of the shut-down of the mills
+was made public.
+
+"Goodness, Momsey!  What a reckless creature you are," laughed
+Mr. Sherwood.  "Waste our precious time in such employment, and
+in the dead of winter, too?"
+
+"Now, Papa Sherwood, I don't mean that kind of fishing at all!"
+cried the little woman gaily.  "We are going to fish for
+employment for you, perhaps for a new home."
+
+"Oh!" gasped Nan.  The thought of deserting the little cottage on
+Amity Street was a dreadful shock.
+
+"We must face that possibility," said her mother firmly.  "It may
+be.  Tillbury will see very hard times now that the mills are
+closed.  Other mills and shops will follow suit."
+
+"Quite true, Momsey," agreed the husband and father.
+
+"I am a very logical person, am I not?" said the smiling little
+lady.
+
+"But the fishing?" cried Nan curiously.
+
+"Ah, yes.  I am coming to that," said her mother.  "The fishing,
+to be sure! Why, we are going to write letters to just everybody
+we know, and some we only know by hearsay, and find out if there
+isn't a niche for Papa Sherwood somewhere outside Tillbury."
+
+"So we can!" cried Nan, clapping her hands.
+
+"I am afraid there is general depression in my line of business
+everywhere," suggested Mr. Sherwood.  "For some years the
+manufacturers have been forcing cotton goods upon a false market.
+And the recent attempt to help the cotton growers by boosting the
+price of raw cotton will come near to ruining the mills and mill
+workers.  It is always so.  In an attempt to benefit one class of
+the people another class is injured."
+
+"Now, never mind politics, sir!" cried his little wife.  "We
+poor, weak women aren't supposed to understand such things.  Only
+when Nan and I get the vote, and all the other millions of women
+and girls, we will have no class legislation.  'The greatest good
+for the greatest number' will be our motto."
+
+Mr. Sherwood only smiled.  He might have pointed out that in that
+very statement was the root of all class legislation.  He knew
+his wife's particular ideas were good, however, her general
+political panacea was rather doubtful.  He listened thoughtfully
+as she went on:
+
+"Yes, we must fish for a new position for papa.  We may have to
+go away from here.  Perhaps rent the house.  You know, we have
+had good offers for it."
+
+"True," admitted Mr. Sherwood.
+
+"Oh, dear!" sighed Nan, but below her breath so that Momsey and
+Papa Sherwood did not hear the sigh.
+
+"I am going to write to Cousin Adair MacKenzie, in Memphis.  He
+is quite prominent in business there," pursued Mrs. Sherwood.
+"We might find a footing in Memphis."
+
+Mr. Sherwood looked grave, but said nothing.  He knew that the
+enervating climate of the Southern river city would never do for
+his wife.  Change of climate might benefit her greatly; the
+doctors had all said so of late; but not that change.
+
+"Then," continued Nan's mother, "there is your brother, Henry, up
+in Michigan."
+
+"Oh! I remember Uncle Henry," cried Nan.  "Such a big, big man!"
+
+"With a heart quite in keeping with the size of his body, honey,"
+her mother quickly added.  "And your Aunt Kate is a very nice
+woman.  Your uncle has lumber interests.  He might find something
+for your father there."
+
+"I'll write to Hen, Jessie," Mr. Sherwood said decisively.  "But
+a
+lumber camp is no place for you.  Let's see, his mail address is
+Hobart Forks, isn't it?  Right in the heart of the woods.  If you
+weren't eaten up by black gnats, you would be by ennui," and he
+chuckled.
+
+"Goodness!" cried Mrs. Sherwood, making big eyes at him.  "Are
+those a new kind of mosquito?  Ennui, indeed!  Am I a baby?  Is
+Nan another?"
+
+"But think of Nan's education, my dear," suggested Mr. Sherwood.
+
+"I ought to work and help the family instead of going to school
+any longer," Nan declared.
+
+"Not yet, Daughter, not yet," her father said quickly.  "However,
+I will write to Hen.  He may be able to suggest something."
+
+"It might be fun living in the woods," Nan said.  "I'm not afraid
+of gnats, or mosquitoes, or, or on-wees!"
+
+She chanced to overhear her father and Dr. Christian talking the
+next day on the porch, and heard the wise old physician say:
+
+"I'm not sure I could countenance that, Robert.  What Jessie
+needs is an invigorating, bracing atmosphere.  A sea voyage would
+do her the greatest possible good."
+
+"Perhaps a trip to Buffalo, down the lakes?"
+
+"No, no!  That's merely an old woman's home-made plaster on the
+wound.  Something more drastic.  Salt air.  A long, slow voyage,
+overseas.  It often wracks the system, but it brings the patient
+to better and more stable health.  Jessie may yet be a strong,
+well woman if we take the right course with her."
+
+Nevertheless, Mr. Sherwood wrote to his brother.  He had to do
+so, it seemed.  There was no other course open to him.
+
+And while he fished in that direction, Momsey threw out her line
+toward Memphis and Adair MacKenzie.  Mr. Sherwood pulled in his
+line first, without much of a nibble, it must be confessed.
+
+"Dear Bob," the elder Sherwood wrote: "Things are flatter than a
+stepped-on pancake with me.  I've got a bunch of trouble with old
+Ged Raffer and may have to go into court with him.  Am not
+cutting a stick of timber.  But you and Jessie and the little
+nipper  "("Consider!" interjected Nan, "calling me 'a little
+nipper'!  What does he consider a big 'nipper'?") "come up to
+Pine Camp.  Kate and I will be mighty glad to have you here.  Tom
+and Rafe are working for a luckier lumberman than I, and there's
+plenty of room here for all hands, and a hearty welcome for you
+and yours as long as there's a shot in the locker."
+
+"That's just like Hen," Nan's father said.  "He'd divide his last
+crust with me.  But I don't want to go where work is scarce.  I
+must go where it is plentiful, where a man of even my age will be
+welcome."
+
+"Your age, Papa Sherwood!  How you talk," drawled Nan's mother in
+her pretty way.  "You are as young as the best of 'em yet."
+
+"Employers don't look at me through your pretty eyes, Momsey," he
+returned, laughing.
+
+"Well," said his wife, still cheerfully, "my fishing seems to be
+resultless yet.  Perhaps the bait's gone off the hook.  Had I
+better haul in the line and bait again?  I was always doing that
+when I went fishing with Adair and his brothers, years ago, when
+I was a little girl."
+
+Her husband shook his head.  "Have patience, Jessie," he said.
+
+He had few expectations from the Memphis letter; yet there was a
+most surprising result from it on the way, something which by no
+possibility could the little family in the Amity Street cottage
+have suspected.
+
+Chapter IV
+SWEEPING CLEAN
+
+"My goodness me!" ejaculated Bess Harley.  "Talk about the
+'leaden wings of Time.'  Why!  Time sweeps by us on electrically-
+driven, ball-bearing pinions.  Here's another week gone, Nan, and
+tomorrow's Saturday."
+
+"Yes," Nan agreed.  "Time flies all too quickly, for me, anyway.
+The mills have been closed a week now."
+
+"Oh, dear!  That's all I hear," complained Bess.  "Those tiresome
+old mills.  Our Maggie's sister was crying in the kitchen last
+night because her Mike couldn't get a job now the mills were
+closed, and was drinking up all the money they had saved.  That's
+what the mill-hands do; their money goes to the saloon-keepers!"
+
+"The proportion of their income spent by the laboring class for
+alcoholic beverages is smaller by considerable than that spent by
+the well-to-do for similar poison!" quoted Nan decisively.  "Mike
+is desperate, I suppose, poor fellow!"
+
+"My goodness me!" cried Bess again.  "You are most exasperating,
+Nan Sherwood.  Mike's case has nothing to do with political
+Economy, and I do wish you'd drop that study out of school----"
+
+"I have!" gasped Nan, for just then her books slipped from her
+strap; "and history, rhetoric, and philosophical readings along
+with it," and she proceeded cheerfully to pick up the several
+books mentioned.
+
+"You can't mean," Bess said, still severely, "that you won't go
+to Lakeview with me, Nan?"
+
+"I wish you wouldn't keep saying that, Bess," Nan Sherwood cried.
+"Is it my fault?  Don't you suppose I'd love to, if I could?  We
+have no money.  Father is out of work.  There is no prospect of
+other work for him in Tillbury, he says, and," Nan continued
+desperately, "how do you suppose I can go to a fancy boarding
+school under these circumstances?"
+
+"Why-----"
+
+For once Elizabeth was momentarily silenced.  Suddenly her face
+brightened.  "I tell you!" she exclaimed.  "I'll speak to my
+father about it.  He can fix it so that you will be able to go to
+the Hall with me, I know."
+
+"I'd like to see myself an object of charity!" Nan cried, with
+heat.  "I, guess, not!  What I can't earn, or my father can't
+give me, I'll go without, Bess.  That's all there is to that!"
+
+Bess stared at her with quivering lips.  "You can't be so mean,
+Nan," she faltered.
+
+"I'm not mean!" denied the other.
+
+"I'd like to know what you call it?  Why, father'd never miss
+your tuition money in the world.  And I know he'd pay your way if
+I asked him and told him how bad I felt about your not going."
+
+"You're a dear, Bess!" declared Nan, impulsively hugging her
+friend again. "But you mustn't ask him, honey.  It wouldn't be
+right, and I couldn't accept.
+
+"Don't you understand, honey, that I have some pride in the
+matter?  So have Papa Sherwood and Momsey.  What they can't do
+for me their own selves I wouldn't want anybody to do."
+
+"Why, that sounds awfully silly to me, Nan!" said Bess.  "Why not
+take all you can get in this world?  I'm sure I should."
+
+"You don't know what you are saying," Nan returned seriously.
+"And, then, you are not poor, so you can afford to say it, and
+even do it."
+
+"Poor!  I'm getting to hate that word," cried Bess stormily.  "It
+never bothered me before, much.  We're not poor and none of our
+friends were poor.  Not until those old mills closed.  And now it
+seems all I hear is about folks being POOR.  I hate it!"
+
+"I guess," said Nan ruefully, "you don't hate it half as much as
+those of us who have to suffer it."
+
+"I'm just going to find some way of getting you to Lakeview Hall,
+my dear," Bess rejoined gloomily.  "Why!  I won't want to go
+myself if you don't go, Nan."
+
+Her friend thought she would better not tell Bess just then that
+the prospect was that she, with her father and mother, would have
+to leave Tillbury long before the autumn.  Mr. Sherwood was
+trying to obtain a situation in Chicago, in a machine shop.  He
+had no hope of getting another foreman's position.
+
+Nothing had been heard from Mr. Adair MacKenzie, of Memphis.
+Mrs. Sherwood wanted to write again; but her husband begged her
+not to.  He had a proper pride.  It looked to him as though his
+wife's cousin did not care to be troubled by the necessities of
+his relations.
+
+"We'll get along!" was Mr. Sherwood's repeated and cheerful
+statement.  "Never say die!  Hope is our anchor!  Fate shall not
+balk us!  And all the other copy-book maxims."
+
+But it was Mrs. Sherwood and Nan who managed to save and scrimp
+and be frugal in many infinitesimal ways, thus making their
+savings last marvelously.
+
+Nan gave up her entire Saturdays to household tasks.  She
+insisted on that, and urged the curtailment of the weekly expense
+by having Mrs. Joyce come in to help but one day.
+
+"I can iron, Momsey, and if I can't do it very well at first, I
+can learn," declared the plucky girl.  "And, of course, I can
+sweep.  That's good for me.  Our physical instructor says so.
+Instead of going to the gym on Saturday, I'll put in calisthenics
+and acrobatic stunts with a broom and duster.
+
+She was thorough, too.  She could not have been her father's
+daughter without having that virtue.  There was no "lick and a
+promise" in Nan Sherwood's housekeeping.  She did not sweep the
+dust under the bureau, or behind the door, or forget to wipe the
+rounds of the chairs and the baseboard all around the rooms.
+
+Papa Sherwood, coughing in the lower hall as the dust descended
+from above, declared she went through the cottage like a
+whirlwind.  It was not as bad as that, but her vigorous young
+arms wielded the broom with considerable skill.
+
+One Saturday, with every other room swept but the front hall, she
+closed the doors into that, and set wide open the outer door.
+There was more snow on the ground now; but the porch was cleaned
+and the path to the front gate neatly dug and swept.  The tinkle
+of sleigh bells and the laughter of a crowd of her school friends
+swept by the corner of Amity Street.  Nan ran out upon the porch
+and waved her duster at them.
+
+There she stood, smiling out upon her little world for a minute.
+She might not see Amity Street, and the old neighbors, many weeks
+longer.  A half-promise of work from the Chicago machine shop
+boss had reached Mr. Sherwood that morning by post.  It seemed
+the only opening, and it meant that they would have to give up
+the "dwelling in amity" and go to crowded Chicago to live.  For
+Momsey was determined that Papa Sherwood should not go without
+her.
+
+Nan came back into the hall and began to wield the broom again.
+She could not leave the door open too long, for it was cold
+outside and the winter chill would get into the house.  They had
+to keep all the rooms at an even temperature on account of
+Momsey's health.
+
+But she swept vigorously, moving each piece of furniture, and
+throwing the rugs out upon the porch for a special sweeping
+there.  The rough mat at the door was a heavy one.  As Nan
+stooped to pick it up and toss it after the other small rugs, she
+saw the corner of a yellow envelope sticking from under the edge
+of the hall carpet.
+
+"Wonder what that is?" murmured Nan.  "Somebody has thrust a
+circular, or advertisement, under our door, and it's gone under
+the carpet.  Yes!  There's a tack out there."
+
+She seized the corner of the envelope with thumb and finger.  She
+drew it out.  Its length surprised her.  It was a long, official
+looking envelope, not bulky but most important looking.  In the
+upper left-hand corner was printed:
+
+ADAIR MACKENZIE & CO.
+STOCKS AND BONDS
+MEMPHIS
+
+It was properly stamped and addressed to her mother.  By the
+postmark on it Nan knew it must have been tucked under the door
+by the postman more than a week before.  Somehow he had failed to
+ring their bell when he left the letter.  The missing tack in the
+edge of the hall carpet had allowed the document to slide out of
+sight, and it might have been hidden for weeks longer had chance
+not shown the small corner of straw-colored paper to Nan.
+
+She felt breathless.  Her knees trembled.  Somehow, Nan just KNEW
+that the letter from her mother's cousin must be of enormous
+importance.  She set her broom in the corner and closed the door.
+It was fated that she should do no more sweeping that day.
+
+Chapter V
+GREAT EXPECTATIONS
+
+Mr. Sherwood, in overalls and an old cap, had been sifting
+cinders out behind the shed.  They had to be careful of fuel as
+well as of most other things.  Momsey would not open the long
+envelope until he had been called and had come in.  Nan still
+wore the bright colored bandana wound about her head, turban-
+wise, for a dust cap.  Papa Sherwood beat the ashes from his
+hands as he stood before the glowing kitchen range.
+
+"What is it?" he asked calmly.  "A notice of a new tax
+assessment?  Or a cure-all advertisement of Somebody's Pills?"
+
+"It's from Cousin Adair," said Momsey, a little breathlessly.
+"And it's been lying at our door all the time."
+
+"All what time?" asked Mr. Sherwood curiously.
+
+"All the time we have been so disappointed in our inquiries
+elsewhere," said Momsey soberly.
+
+"Oh!" responded her husband doubtfully, and said no more.
+
+"It makes my knees shake," confessed Nan.  "Do open it, Momsey!"
+
+"I, I feel that it is important, too," the little lady said.
+
+"Well, my dear," her husband finally advised, having waited in
+patience, "unless it is opened we shall never know whether your
+feeling is prophetic or not.  'By the itching of my thumb,' and
+so forth!"
+
+Without making any rejoinder to this, and perhaps without hearing
+his gentle raillery, Mrs. Sherwood reached up to the coils of her
+thick hair to secure woman's never-failing implement, a hairpin.
+
+There were two enclosures.  Both she shook into her lap.  The
+sealed, foreign-looking letter she picked up first.  It was
+addressed in a clerkly hand to,
+
+"MISTRESS JESSIE ADAIR BLAKE,
+"KINDNESS OF MESSRS. ADAIR MACKENZIE & CO.
+"MEMPHIS, TENN., U.S.A."
+
+"From England.  No!  From Scotland," murmured Nan, looking over
+her mother's shoulder in her eagerness.  She read the neatly
+printed card in the corner of the foreign envelope:
+
+KELLAM & BLAKE
+HADBORNE CHAMBERS
+EDINBURGH
+
+Mrs. Sherwood was whispering her maiden name over to herself.
+She looked up suddenly at her husband with roguish eyes.
+
+"I'd almost forgotten there ever was such a girl as Jessie Adair
+Blake," she said.
+
+"Oh, Momsey!" squealed Nan, with clasped hands and immense
+impatience.  "Don't, DON'T be so slow!  Open it!"
+
+"No-o," her mother said, with pursed lips.  "No, honey.  The
+other comes first, I reckon."
+
+It was a letter typewritten upon her cousin's letter-head; but it
+was not dictated by Mr. Adair MacKenzie.  Instead, it was from
+Mr. MacKenzie's secretary, who stated that her employer had gone
+to Mexico on business that might detain him for several weeks.
+
+"A letter addressed by you to Mr. MacKenzie arrived after his
+departure and is being held for him with other personal
+communications until his return; but being assured that you are
+the Jessie Adair Blake, now Sherwood -- to whom the enclosed
+letter from Scotland is addressed, I take the liberty of
+forwarding the same.  The Scotch letter reached us after Mr.
+MacKenzie's departure, likewise.  Will you please acknowledge the
+receipt of the enclosure and oblige?"
+
+This much of the contents of the secretary's letter was of
+particular interest to the Sherwoods.  Momsey's voice shook a
+little as she finished reading it.  Plainly she was disappointed.
+
+"Cousin Adair, I am sure, would have suggested something helpful
+had he been at home," she said sadly.  "It, it is a great
+disappointment, Robert."
+
+"Well, well!" replied Mr. Sherwood, perhaps not without some
+secret relief.  "It will all come out right.  At least, your
+cousin hasn't refused his assistance.  We shall be established
+somewhere before he returns from his Mexican trip."
+
+"I, I did depend so much upon Adair's good will and advice,"
+signed Momsey.
+
+"But, dear me suz!" gasped Nan impatiently.  "What are you folks
+bothering over that for?  It isn't Cousin Adair that I want to
+know about.  It's this letter, Momsey," and she seized the thin
+yet important envelope from Scotland and shook it before her
+mother's eyes.
+
+"Better look into it, Momsey," advised Mr. Sherwood easily,
+preparing to return to the cinder sifting.  "Maybe it's from some
+of your relatives in the Old Country.  I see 'Blake' printed in
+the corner.  Didn't your father have an uncle or somebody, who
+was steward on the estate of a Scotch Laird of some renown?"
+
+"Heck, mon!" cried Momsey, with her usual gaiety, and throwing
+off the cloud of gloom that had momentarily subdued her spirit.
+"Ye air a wise cheil.  Ma faither talked muckle o' Uncle Hughie
+Blake, remimberin' him fra' a wee laddie when his ain faither
+took him tae Scotland, and tae Castle Emberon, on a veesit."
+
+Nan and Papa Sherwood laughed at her when she assumed the Scotch
+burr of her forebears.  With precision she cut the flap of this
+smaller envelope.  She felt no excitement now.  She had regained
+control of herself after the keen disappointment arising from the
+first letter.
+
+She calmly opened the crackly sheet of legal looking paper in her
+lap.  It was not a long letter, and it was written in a stiff,
+legal hand, instead of being typewritten, each character as
+precise as the legal mind that dictated it:
+
+"Mistress Jessie Adair Blake, (Known to be a married woman, but
+wedded name unknown to writer.)
+
+"Dear Madam: It is my duty to inform you that your father (the
+late Randolph Hugh Blake) was made sole beneficiary of his late
+uncle, Mr. Hugh Blake, the Laird of Emberon's steward, by a
+certain testament, or will, made many years ago.  Mr. Hugh Blake
+has recently died a bachelor, and before his demise he added a
+codicil to the above testament, or will, naming you, his great
+niece, his sole heir and beneficiary.
+
+"There are other relatives who may make some attempt to oppose
+your claim; but none of near blood.  Your title to the said
+estate is clear; but it is quite necessary that you should appear
+before our Courts with proofs of identity, and so forth.  On
+receipt from you of acknowledgment of this letter, with copies of
+identification papers (your grandfather's naturalization papers,
+your father's discharge from army, your own birth certificate and
+marriage lines, and so forth) I will give myself the pleasure of
+forwarding any further particulars you may wish, and likewise
+place at your command my own services in obtaining possession for
+you of your great uncle's estate.
+
+"The said estate of Mr. Hugh Blake, deceased, amounts, in real
+and personal property, including moneys in the bank, to about the
+sum, roughly estimated, of 10,000 pounds.
+
+"Respectfully, your servant,
+"Andrew Blake, Solicitor and Att'y."
+
+Nan had leaned over her mother's shoulder, big-eyed, scarce
+believing the plainly written words she read.  It was
+preposterous, ridiculous, fanciful, a dream from which she
+must awake in a moment to the full realization of their dreadful
+need of just such a godsend as this.
+
+It was her father's voice that roused the girl.  He had not seen
+the letter and Momsey had read it silently to herself.
+
+"Look out, Nancy!  What is the matter with your mother?"
+
+With a cry the girl caught the frail little lady in her arms as
+the letter slipped unheeded from her lap to the floor.  Mrs.
+Sherwood's eyes were closed.  She had fainted.
+
+Chapter VI
+A SPRAT FOR A HERRING
+
+"I don't need the doctor this time, honey; joy never killed yet."
+
+So said Mrs. Sherwood, opening her eyes to see the scared face of
+Nan close above her.  Then she saw her husband at her feet,
+quietly chafing her hands in his own hard, warm palms.  She
+pulled hers gently from his clasp and rested them upon his head.
+Mr. Sherwood's hair was iron-gray, thick, and inclined to curl.
+She ran her little fingers into it and clung tightly.
+
+"Let, let me get my breath!" she gasped.  Then, after a moment
+she smiled brilliantly into the wind-bitten face of the kneeling
+man.  "It's all over, Robert," she said.
+
+"My dear!" he cried thickly; while Nan could not wholly stifle
+the cry of fear that rose to her lips.
+
+"It's all over," repeated the little woman.  "All the worry, all
+the poverty, all the uncertainty, all the hard times."
+
+Mr. Sherwood looked startled indeed.  He had no idea what the
+letter from Scotland contained, and he feared that his wife, who
+had already suffered so much, was for the moment quite out of her
+head.
+
+"My poor Jessie," he began, but her low, sweet laugh stopped him.
+
+"Not poor!  Never poor again, Robert!" she cried.  "God is very
+good to us.  At the very darkest hour He has shown us the dawn.
+Robert, we are rich!"
+
+"Great goodness, Jessie!  What do you mean? Exclaimed Mr.
+Sherwood, stumbling to his feet at last.
+
+"It's true!  It's true, Papa Sherwood!" Nan cried, clapping her
+hands.  "Don't you call ten thousand dollars riches?"
+
+"Ten, thousand, dollars?" murmured her father.  He put his hand
+to his head and looked confusedly about for a seat, into which he
+weakly dropped.  Nan had picked up the letter and now she
+dramatically thrust it into his hand.
+
+"Read that, Papa Sherwood!" she said commandingly.
+
+He read the communication from the Scotch attorney, first with
+immense surprise, then with profound doubt.  Who but a young
+imaginative girl, like Nan, or a woman with unbounded faith in
+the miracles of God, like her mother, could accept such a
+perfectly wonderful thing as being real?
+
+"A hoax," thought the man who had worked so hard all his life
+without the least expectation of ever seeing a penny that he did
+not earn himself.  "Can it be that any of those heedless
+relatives of my wife's in Memphis have attempted a practical joke
+at this time?"
+
+He motioned for Nan to bring him the envelope, too.  This he
+examined closely, and then read the communication again.  It
+looked all regular.  The stationery, the postmark, the date
+upon it, all seemed perfectly in accord.
+
+Mrs. Sherwood's gay little laugh shattered the train of her
+husband's thought.  "I know what the matter is with you, Papa
+Sherwood," she said. "You think it must be a practical joke."
+
+"Oh!" gasped Nan, feeling a positive pain at her heart.  This
+awful possibility had never entered her mind before.
+
+"But it isn't," went on her mother blithely.  "It is real.  Mr.
+Hugh Blake, of Emberon, must have been very old; and he was
+probably as saving and canny as any Scotchman who ever wore
+kilts.  It is not surprising that he should have left an estate
+of considerable size-----"
+
+"Ten thousand dollars!" breathed Nan again.  She loved to repeat
+it.  There was white magic in the very sound of such a sum of
+money.  But her father threw a conversational bomb into their
+midst the next instant.
+
+"Ten thousand dollars, you goosey!" he said vigorously.  "That's
+the main doubt in the whole business.  It isn't ten thousand
+dollars.  It's fifty thousand dollars!  A pound, either English
+or Scotch, is almost five of our dollars.  Ten thousand dollars
+would certainly be a fortune for us; fifty thousand is beyond the
+dreams of avarice."
+
+"Oh, dear me!" said Nan weakly.
+
+But Mrs. Sherwood merely laughed again.  "The more the better,"
+she said.  "Why shouldn't we be able to put fifty thousand
+dollars to good use?"
+
+"Oh, we can, Momsey," said Nan eagerly.  "But, will we be let?"
+
+Mr. Sherwood laughed grimly at that; but his wife continued
+confidently:
+
+"I am sure nobody needs it more than we do."
+
+"Why!" her daughter said, just as excitedly, "we'll be as rich as
+Bess Harley's folks.  Oh, Momsey!  Oh, Papa Sherwood!  Can I go
+to Lakewood Hall?"
+
+The earnestness of her cry showed the depths to which that desire
+had plumbed during these last weeks of privation and uncertainty.
+It was Nan's first practical thought in relation to the
+possibility of their changed circumstances.
+
+The father and mother looked at each other with shocked
+understanding.  The surprise attending the letter had caused both
+parents to forget, for the moment, the effect of this wonderful
+promise of fortune, whether true or false, on imaginative,
+high-spirited Nan.
+
+"Let us be happy at first, Nan, just in the knowledge that some
+money is coming to us," Mrs. Sherwood said more quietly.  "Never
+mind how much, or how little.  Time will tell all that."
+
+"Now you talk like father," cried Nan, pouting.
+
+"And let father talk a little, too," Mr. Sherwood said, smiling,
+"and to you both."  His right forefinger struck the letter
+emphatically in his other hand.  "This is a very wonderful, a
+blessed, thing, if true.  But it has to be proven.  We must
+build our hopes on no false foundation."
+
+"Oh, Papa Sherwood!  How can we, when the man says there-----"
+
+"Hush!" whispered Momsey, squeezing her excited little daughter's
+hand.
+
+"In the first place," continued Mr. Sherwood quietly and gravely,
+"there may be some mistake in the identification of your mother,
+child, as the niece mentioned in this old man's will."
+
+"Oh!"  Nan could not help that gasp.
+
+"Again, there may be stronger opposition to her claim than this
+lawyer at present sees.  Fifty thousand dollars is a whole lot of
+money, and other people by the name of Blake will be tempted by
+it."
+
+"How mean of them!" whispered Nan.
+
+"And, above all," pursued Mr. Sherwood, "this may be merely a
+scheme by unprincipled people to filch small sums of money from
+gullible people.  The 'foreign legacy swindle' is worked in many
+different ways.  There may be calls for money, by this man who
+names himself Andrew Blake, for preliminary work on the case.  We
+haven't much; but if he is baiting for hundreds of Blakes in
+America he may secure, in the aggregate, a very tidy sum indeed."
+
+"Oh, Father!" cried Nan.  "That's perfectly horrid!"
+
+"But perfectly possible.  Let us not swallow this bait, hook,
+line and sinker.  You see, he sends no copy of the will in
+question, or that codicil relating to your mother's legacy; nor
+does he offer identification or surety as to his own standing.
+Don't let the possibilities of this wonderful thing carry you off
+your feet, my dear."
+
+Nan's lip was quivering and she could scarcely crowd back the
+tears.  To have one's hopes rise so high only to be dashed-----.
+
+"Don't completely crush us, Papa Sherwood, with your perfectly
+unanswerable logic," said his wife lightly.  "We'll remember all
+these strictures, and more.  We can at least put the matter to
+the test."
+
+"Quite so," agreed her husband.  " We will prepare the papers
+requested by this Scotch attorney.  I will even inquire of a good
+lawyer here something regarding the Scotch laws in such a matter
+as this, if it will be necessary to make a personal appearance
+before the local courts over there.  And perhaps we can find out
+the true standing of Mr. Andrew Blake, of Kellam & Blake,
+Edinburgh.  It will cost us a little money, and we can ill spare
+it now; but to satisfy ourselves-----"
+
+"We will throw a sprat to catch a herring," quoted Momsey
+cheerfully.
+
+"Quite so," repeated Mr. Sherwood.
+
+"But, dear, DEAR!" moaned Nan.  "Is that all it is going to
+amount to?  Don't you really believe it's all true, Papa
+Sherwood?"
+
+"I can't say that I do, my dear," returned her father gravely.
+"Such romantic things as this do not often happen outside of
+story books."
+
+"Then, I declare!" cried Nan desperately, "I wish we lived in a
+story book!"
+
+"Your father will make inquiries at once, honey," said Momsey
+easily, seemingly very little disturbed herself by her husband's
+doubts and fears.  To her mind this wonderful turn of fortune's
+wheel was in direct answer to prayer.  Nothing could shake her
+faith in the final result of her husband's inquiries.  Yet, she
+was proud of his caution and good sense.
+
+"I do think it is dreadful," murmured Nan, "to believe one's self
+rich for only a minute!"
+
+"Have patience, honey," said her mother.
+
+"Meanwhile," added Mr. Sherwood, rising, "I will go back to
+sifting cinders."
+
+But Nan did no more sweeping that day.
+
+Chapter VII
+A VISTA OF NEW FORTUNES
+
+Nan said nothing to Bess Harley, her particular chum and
+confidant, about the wonderful letter that had come from
+Scotland.  Although Momsey and Nan talked the legacy over
+intimately that Saturday afternoon, and planned what they would
+really do with some of the money "when their ship came in," the
+young girl knew that the matter was not to be discussed outside
+of the family circle.
+
+Not even the hope Nan now cherished of accompanying her chum to
+Lakeview Hall when the next school year opened was divulged when
+the two girls were together on Sunday, or on the days that
+immediately followed.
+
+Nan Sherwood went about her household and school tasks in a sort
+of waking dream.  Imagination was continually weaving pictures in
+her mind of what might happen if the vista of new fortunes that
+had opened before the little family in the Amity Street cottage
+really came true.
+
+Papa Sherwood's first reports on the matter of the Scotch legacy
+were not inspiring.
+
+"Mr. Bludsoe says we'd better go slow," he said seriously.  Mr.
+Bludsoe was a lawyer of high repute in Tillbury. "This letter may
+be written by an attorney in Edinburgh; but there are rascally
+lawyers there as well as elsewhere.  Bludsoe had correspondents
+in London.  They may be able to inform him regarding the firm of
+solicitors, Kellam & Blake, if the firm really is entered at the
+Scotch bar."
+
+"Oh!  But won't that mean delay?" murmured Nan.
+
+"Meanwhile," said her father, smiling at her impatience, "we will
+prepare the papers identifying your dear mother so that, if this
+wonderful new fortune should be a reality, we can put in a proper
+claim for it.  Just the same," he added to his wife, when Nan had
+left the room, "I have written to that machine shop boss in
+Chicago that I am ready to come to work any day he may send for
+me."
+
+"Oh, Robert!" gasped the little lady.  "Won't you believe?"
+
+"Like the darkey who was asked if he believed the world was
+round, and said, 'Ah believes it, but Ah ain't dead sho' of it.'
+I presume this great fortune is possible, Jessie, but I haven't
+perfect and abiding faith in its existence, FOR us," said her
+husband.
+
+But Momsey had just that quality of faith.  She went singing
+about her household tasks and her usual smile beamed quite
+beatific.  So said Dr. Christian, who stepped in to see her, as
+was his custom every few days.
+
+"What's this?  What's this?" the old medical practitioner
+demanded of Mr. Sherwood, on the porch, where he usually made his
+report, and to which Nan often stole to listen openly to them
+discuss her mother's case.  "I find her in a state of happy
+excitement, and that is quite right, Robert, quite right, if the
+hopes that are the wellspring of it are not quenched.  What does
+it mean?  Have you arranged the sea voyage I advised?"
+
+Papa Sherwood's face changed suddenly.  He looked oddly, Nan
+thought, at the doctor. "I don't know but that is it, Doc," he
+said.  "That sea voyage may be in the offing."
+
+"Best thing that could happen to her, best thing that could
+happen to her!" declared the old physician with emphasis, as he
+stumped away.
+
+Nan wondered what that could mean.  A sea voyage for Momsey?  Of
+course, for all of them.  She could not imagine Momsey going
+anywhere without her and Papa Sherwood.
+
+She knew she was not to say anything about what she heard pass
+between her father and the doctor on the porch.  Indeed, Nan was
+no bearer of tales in any event.  But she was very curious.  The
+steam from the cauldron of Mystery seldom arose in the little
+"dwelling in amity" save about Christmas time or just previous to
+Nan's birthday.  But Papa Sherwood certainly was enigmatical and
+Momsey was mysteriously happy, as Dr. Christian had said.
+
+"And we'll put steam heat in the little house.  You know, Robert,
+we've always wanted to," Nan's mother suddenly said one evening
+as they all sat around the reading lamp, and quite apropos of
+nothing at all.  Then she laughed, flushing prettily.  "There!
+You see what my mind runs on.  I really can't help it."
+
+It was only a day or two later that the second letter came from
+Memphis.  Mr. Adair MacKenzie had returned from Mexico and
+evidently one of the first duties he performed was to write his
+Cousin Jessie his congratulations.
+
+"A letter on quite another matter," this epistle read, "from our
+distant kinsman, Andrew Blake, of Kellam & Blake, apprised me
+that the ancient Hugh Blake, steward to the Lairds of Emberon for
+so many years, was dead and that his property was willed to your
+father, whose appearance as a lad at Emberon pleased the old man
+greatly.
+
+"You are to be congratulated.  The estate is considerable, I
+understand.  Your husband's troubles which are mentioned in your
+letter that I found awaiting my return will now be over.  For,
+although Andrew Blake intimates that there may be considerable
+opposition in the courts there, over the money going to an
+American heir, you will be able in the end to establish your
+rights.
+
+"Believe me, my dear Jessie, I know of nobody in our family to
+whom I would rather see fortune come than to yourself and your
+dear ones.  If I can be of any assistance, financially, or
+otherwise, in helping you obtain your rights in this event,
+believe me, I stand ready to give such aid.  Do not hesitate to
+call upon me.  My regards to your husband and little girl whom I
+have never seen; Alice and John join me in expressing our good
+wishes for your happy future.  I remain, with the old love I
+always had for you, Your cousin, Adair MacKenzie."
+
+"Now, Robert, what have you to say?" cried Momsey triumphantly,
+while Nan danced a fandango about the room.
+
+"This much," replied her husband, smiling. "Our minds are
+relieved on one point, at least.  Kellam & Blake are respectable
+attorneys.  We will send our communication to Mr. Blake at once,
+without waiting for Mr. Bludsoe's enquiries to bear fruit.  Your
+Cousin Adair knows the Scotch firm, and of course vouches for
+their trustworthiness."
+
+"Dear me, Papa Sherwood, you are so practical!" sighed Nan.  She
+meant "vexing;" they were interchangeable terms to her mind at
+this exciting point.  "Can't you work up any enthusiasm over
+Momsey's wonderful fortune?"
+
+"Its existence is established, it would seem, beyond
+peradventure," said Mr. Sherwood drily.  "But our attempt to
+obtain the fortune is not yet begun."
+
+"Why, ee!" squealed Nan.  "You don't really suppose anybody will
+try to keep Momsey from getting it?"
+
+"Exactly that," said her father.  "The Blakes are a widely
+scattered clan.  There are probably a number of people as close
+in blood-tie to the old man who has just died as your mother, my
+dear.  These people may all bob up, one after another, to dispute
+Momsey's claim."
+
+"But, dear me!" gasped Nan.  "The money was willed to Momsey."
+
+"Nevertheless, these other relatives, if there be such--can
+keep Momsey out of the enjoyment of her rights for a long time.
+Court processes are slow, and especially so, I should judge,
+among the canny and careful Scotch.  I think we would better
+leave it to the lawyers to settle.  We cannot hasten the courts
+by worrying over the fortune.
+
+"I think," pursued Papa Sherwood judiciously, "that instead of
+spending our time discussing and dreaming of the fortune in
+Scotland, we would better go right on with our tasks here as
+though there were really no fortune at all."
+
+"Oh, my!" whispered Nan, her eyes clouding.  "That's because of
+my last fortnightly report.  I know I fell behind in history and
+rhetoric."
+
+"Don't be too hard on us, Papa Sherwood," said Momsey brightly.
+"Anticipation is more than half of every pleasure.  I lie awake
+every night and spend this great fortune of ours to the very last
+penny.”
+
+"Of course," the little lady added, with more gravity, "I
+wouldn't really spend fifty thousand dollars so recklessly as I
+do in my mind.  But I can found schools, and hospitals, and
+educate Nan, and give you, Papa Sherwood, a great big business,
+and buy two automobiles, and-----"
+
+"Enough!  Enough!" cried Mr. Sherwood, in mock seriousness.  "You
+are a born spendthrift, Momsey.  That you have had no chance to
+really be one thus far will only make your case more serious when
+you have this legacy in your possession.  Two automobiles, no
+less!”
+
+"But I want you both, my dears, to bear one very important fact
+in mind.  Roughly estimated the fortune is ten thousand pounds.
+To be exact, it may be a good deal less at the start.  Then,
+after the lawyers and the courts get through with the will and
+all, the remainder that dribbles into your pocket, Momsey, may be
+a very small part of ten thousand pounds."
+
+"Oh, how horrid, Papa Sherwood!" cried Nan.  "We won't listen to
+him, will we, Momsey?"
+
+"Oh, yes we will," her mother said quietly, but smiling.  "But we
+will still believe that the world is good and that God has given
+us great good fortune.  Papa talks very sensibly; but I know that
+there is nothing to fear.  We are going to be very well off for
+the rest of our lives, and I cannot be thankful enough for it."
+
+At that Mr. Sherwood literally threw up his hands.
+"Nevertheless," he said, "I expect to go to Chicago next Monday,
+to begin work in the machine shop.  The boss writes me that I can
+come at that time."
+
+"I will get your clothes ready for you, Robert," said Momsey
+calmly.  "Perhaps you will feel better in your mind if you keep
+busy during this time of waiting."
+
+Chapter VIII
+TWO IMPORTANT HAPPENINGS
+
+It happened, however, that Mr. Sherwood did not go to Chicago to
+work in the machine shop.  Something happened before the week was
+out, that quite put his intention aside.
+
+Indeed, Nan declared that two important happenings just then
+changed the current of affairs at the little cottage on Amity
+Street and that she had a principal part in the action of the
+first of these unexpected happenings.
+
+It was lovely skating on Norway Pond, and both Nan and her chum,
+Bess Harley, were devoted to the sport.  Nan had been unable to
+be on the ice Saturdays, because of her home tasks; but when her
+lessons were learned, she was allowed to go after supper.
+
+It happened to be just at the dark of the moon this week; that
+kept many off the ice, although the weather was settled and the
+ice was perfectly safe.  Sometimes the boys built a bonfire on
+Woody Point, with refuse from the planing mill, and that lit up a
+good bit of the ice.
+
+But once out on the pond, away from the shadows cast by the high
+banks, the girls could see well enough.  They were both good
+skaters, and with arms crossed and hands clasped, they swung up
+the middle of the pond in fine style.
+
+"I just love to skate with you, Nan," sighed Bess ecstatically.
+"You move just like my other self.  We're Siamese twins.  We
+strike out together perfectly.  Oh, my dear!  I don't see
+whatever I am to do if you refuse to go to Lakeview with me."
+
+Nan could scarcely keep from telling Bess of the wonderful new
+fortune that seemed about to come to her; but she was faithful to
+her home training, and only said:
+
+"Don't fret about it, honey.  Maybe something will turn up to let
+me go."
+
+"If you'd let my father pay your way-----?" insinuated Bess.
+
+"Don't talk of that.  It's impossible," said Nan decisively.
+"It's a long time yet to fall.  Maybe conditions will be
+different at home.  A dozen things may happen before school opens
+in September."
+
+"Yes!  But they may not be the right things," sighed Bess.
+
+She could not be too melancholy on such a night as this, however.
+It was perfectly quiet, and the arch of the sky was like black
+velvet pricked out with gold and silver stars.  Their soft
+radiance shed some light upon the pond, enough, at least, to
+show the girl chums the way before them as they skimmed on toward
+Powerton Landing.
+
+They had left a noisy crowd of boys behind them, near the stamp
+Factory, mostly mill boys, and the like.  Bess had been taught
+at home to shrink from association with the mill people and that
+is why she had urged Nan to take this long skate up the pond.
+Around the Tillbury end of it they were always falling in with
+little groups of mill boys and girls whom Bess did not care to
+meet.
+
+There was another reason this evening for keeping away from the
+stamp factory, too.  The manager of that big shop had hired a
+gang of ice cutters a few days before, and had filled his own
+private icehouse.  The men had cut out a roughly outlined square
+of the thick ice, sawed it into cakes, and poled it to shore and
+so to the sleds and the manager's icehouse.
+
+It was not a large opening in the ice; but even if the frost
+continued, it would be several days before the new ice would form
+thickly enough to bear again over that spot.
+
+Elsewhere, however, the ice was strong, for all the cutting for
+the big icehouses had been done long before near the Landing.
+The lights of Powerton Landing were twinkling ahead of them as
+the two friends swept on up the long lake.  The wind was in their
+faces, such wind as there was, and the air was keen and nippy.
+
+The action of skating, however, kept Nan and Bess warm.  Bess in
+her furs and Nan in her warm tam-o'-shanter and the muffler
+Momsey had knitted with her own hands, did not mind the cold.
+
+The evening train shrieked out of the gap and across the long
+trestle just beyond the landing, where it halted for a few
+seconds for passengers to embark or to leave the cars.  This
+train was from Chicago, and on Monday Papa Sherwood expected to
+go to that big city to work.
+
+The thought gave Nan a feeling of depression.  The little family
+in the Amity street cottage had never been separated for more
+than a day since she could remember.  It was going to be hard on
+Momsey, with Papa Sherwood away and Nan in school all day.  How
+were they going to get along without Papa Sherwood coming home to
+supper, and doing the hard chores?
+
+Bess awoke her chum from these dreams.  "Dear me, Nan!  Have you
+lost your tongue all of a sudden?  Do say something, or do
+something."
+
+"Let's race the train down the pond to Tillbury," proposed Nan
+instantly.
+
+The lights of the long coaches were just moving out of the
+station at the Landing.  The two girls came about in a graceful
+curve and struck out for home at a pace that even the train could
+not equal.  The rails followed the shore of the pond on the
+narrow strip of lowland at the foot of the bluffs.  They could
+see the lights shining through the car windows all the way.
+
+The fireman threw open the door of his firebox to feed the
+furnace and a great glare of light, and a shower of sparks,
+spouted from the smokestack.  The rumble of the wheels from
+across the ice seemed louder than usual.
+
+"Come on, Bess!" gasped Nan, quite excited.  "We can do better
+than this!  Why, that old train will beat us!"
+
+For they were falling behind.  The train hooted its defiance as
+it swept down toward Woody Point.  The girls shot in toward the
+shore, where the shadow of the high bluff lay heavily upon the
+ice.
+
+They heard the boys' voices somewhere below them, but Bess and
+Nan could not see them yet.  They knew that the boys had divided
+into sides and were playing old-fashioned hockey, "shinny-on-
+your-own-side" as it was locally called.  Above the rumbling of
+the train they heard the crack of the shinny-stick against the
+wooden block, and the "z-z-z-zip!" of the missile as it scaled
+over the ice.
+
+"Those boys will get into the ice-hole if they don't look out,"
+Nan had just said to her chum, when suddenly a wild yell arose
+from the hockey players.
+
+The train was slowing down at the signal tower, and finally
+stopped there.  A freight had got in on the main track which had
+to be cleared before the passenger train could go into Tillbury
+station.  The coaches stood right along the edge of the frozen
+pond.
+
+But it was nothing in connection with the evening train that
+caused such a commotion among the skaters near the stamp factory.
+There was a crash of breaking ice and a scrambling of skaters
+away from the spot.  The boys' yells communicated panic to other
+people ashore.
+
+"He's in!  He's in!" Nan and Bess heard the boys yelling.  Then a
+man's voice took up the cry: "He'll be drowned!  Help!  Help!"
+
+"That's old Peter Newkirk," gasped Nan, squeezing Bess' gloved
+hands tightly.  "He's night watchman at the stamp works, and he
+has only one arm.  He can't help that boy."
+
+The youngsters who had been playing hockey so recklessly near the
+thin ice, were not as old as Nan and Bess, and the accident had
+thrown them into utter confusion.  Some skated for the shore,
+screaming for ropes and fence-rails; others only tried to get
+away from the danger spot themselves.  None did the first thing
+to help their comrade who had broken through the ice.
+
+"Where are you going, Nan?" gasped Bess, pulling back.  "You'll
+have us both in the water, too."
+
+"We can save him! Quick!" returned her chum eagerly.
+
+She let go of Bess and unwound the long muffler from about her
+own neck.  "If we could only see him!" the girl said, over and
+over.
+
+And then a brilliant idea struck Nan Sherwood, and she turned to
+shout to old Peter Newkirk on the shore.  "Peter!  Peter! Turn on
+the electric light sign!  Turn it on so we can see where he's
+gone in!"
+
+The watchman had all his wits about him.  There was a huge
+electric sign on the stamp works roof, advertising the company's
+output.  The glare of it could be seen for miles, and it lit up
+brilliantly the surroundings of the mill.
+
+Peter Newkirk bounded away to the main door of the works.  The
+switch that controlled the huge sign was just inside that door.
+Before Nan and Bess had reached the edge of the broken ice, the
+electricity was suddenly shot into the sign and the whole
+neighborhood was alight.
+
+"I see him! There he is!" gasped Nan to her chum.  "Hold me tight
+by the skirt, Bess!  We'll get him!"
+
+She flung herself to her knees and stopped sliding just at the
+edge of the old, thick ice.  With a sweep of her strong young arm
+she shot the end of the long muffler right into the clutching
+hands of the drowning boy.
+
+Involuntarily he seized it.  He had been down once, and
+submersion in the ice water had nearly deprived him of both
+consciousness and power to help save himself.  But Nan drew him
+quickly through the shattered ice-cakes to the edge of the firm
+crystal where she knelt.
+
+"We have him!  We have him!" she cried, in triumph.  "Give me
+your hand, boy!  I won't let you go down again."
+
+But to lift him entirely out of the water would have been too
+much for her strength.  However, several men came running now
+from the stalled passenger train.  The lighting of the electric
+sign had revealed to them what was going on upon the pond.
+
+The man who lifted the half-drowned boy out of the water was not
+one of the train crew, but a passenger.  He was a huge man in a
+bearskin coat and felt boots.  He was wrapped up so heavily, and
+his fur cap was pulled down so far over his ears and face, that
+Nan could not see what he really looked like.  In a great, gruff
+voice he said:
+
+"Well, now!  Give me a girl like you ev'ry time!  I never saw the
+beat of it.  Here, mister!" as he put the rescued boy into the
+arms of a man who had just run from a nearby house.  "Get him
+between blankets and he'll be all right.  But he's got this smart
+little girl to thank that he's alive at all."
+
+He swung around to look at Nan again.  Bess was crying frankly,
+with her gloved hands before her face.  "Oh, Nan!  Nan!" she
+sobbed.  "I didn't do a thing, not a thing.  I didn't even hang
+to the tail of your skirt as you told me.  I, I'm an awful
+coward."
+
+The big man patted Nan's shoulder lightly.  "There's a little
+girl that I'm going to see here in Tillbury," he said gruffly.
+"I hope she turns out to be half as smart as you are, sissy."
+Then he tramped back to the train that was just then starting.
+
+Nan began to laugh.  "Did you hear that funny man?" she asked
+Bess.  "Do stop your crying, Bess!  You have no reason to cry.
+You are not hurt."
+
+"But, but you might have been, been drowned, too," sobbed her
+chum.  "I didn't help you a mite."
+
+"Bother!" exclaimed Nan Sherwood.  "Don't let's talk about it.
+We'll go home.  I guess we've both had enough skating for
+tonight."
+
+Bess wiped away her tears and clung to Nan's hand all the way to
+their usual corner for separating.  Nan ran home from there
+quickly and burst into the kitchen to find Momsey and Papa
+Sherwood in the midst of a very serious conference.
+
+"What is the matter?" cried Nan, startled by the gravity of her
+father and the exaltation upon her mother's face.  "What's
+happened?"
+
+"A very great thing, Nan, honey," said Momsey, drawing her
+daughter to her side.  "Tell her, Papa Sherwood."
+
+He sighed deeply and put away the letter they had been reading.
+"It's from Mr. Blake, of Edinburgh," he said.  "I can no longer
+doubt the existence of the fortune, my dears.  But I fear we
+shall have to strive for it in the Scotch courts."
+
+"Oh!" cried Nan, under her breath.
+
+"Mr. Blake tells us here that it is absolutely necessary for us
+to come to Scotland, and for your mother to appear in person
+before the court there.  The sum of money and other property
+willed to Momsey by her great uncle is so large that the greatest
+care will be exercised by the Scotch judges to see that it goes
+to the right person.”
+
+"As your mother once said, we must throw a sprat to catch a
+herring.  In this case we shall be throwing a sprat to catch a
+whale!  For the amount of money we may have to spend to secure
+the fifty thousand dollars left by Mr. Hugh Blake, of Emberon, is
+small, in comparison to the fortune itself.
+
+"We must go to Scotland," finished Mr. Sherwood firmly.  "And we
+must start as soon as possible."
+
+Chapter IX
+ON THE WAY TO THE WILDERNESS
+
+It seemed to Nan Sherwood that night as though she never could
+get to sleep.  Her mind and imagination worked furiously.
+
+Momsey and Papa Sherwood had sent her to bed early.  There had
+been no time to tell them about the accident on the ice and her
+part in it.  Her parents had much to discuss, much to decide
+upon.  The Scotch lawyer urged their presence before the court
+having jurisdiction in the matter of the late Mr. Hugh Blake's
+will, and that as soon as they could cross the ocean.
+
+Transportation from the little Illinois town, across the
+intervening states to the seaport, and thence, over the winter
+ocean to Glasgow, and so on by rail to Edinburgh, was a journey
+the contemplation of which, to such a quiet family as the
+Sherwoods, was nothing less than appalling.
+
+And there were many things to take into consideration that Nan
+did not wholly understand.  Mrs. Sherwood would require her
+husband's undivided attention while she made the long and arduous
+journey.  The sea voyage was right in line with the physician's
+opinion of what was needed to restore her health; but it was a
+venture at best.
+
+Had the family possessed plenty of money it is doubtful if Mr.
+Sherwood would have risked more than a coasting voyage.
+Conditions rising out of the legacy from the great uncle in
+Scotland spelled necessity in this case.  Of the little sum left
+in bank, most of it would be required to pay the fares of Mr. and
+Mrs. Sherwood to Edinburgh, and their modest living there for a
+few weeks.  There was not enough money in hand to pay a third
+passage and the expenses of a third person in Scotland, until the
+court business should be settled.
+
+Mr. Sherwood had already taken Mr. Bludsoe, the lawyer, into his
+confidence.  He could make arrangements through him to mortgage
+the cottage if it became absolutely necessary.  He shrank from
+accepting financial help from Mrs. Sherwood's relatives in
+Memphis.
+
+Besides, decision must be made immediately.  Plans must be made
+almost overnight.  They must start within forty-eight hours to
+catch a certain steamer bound for the Scotch port of Glasgow, as
+Mr. Sherwood had already found out.  And all their questions
+resolved finally into this very important one:
+
+"WHAT SHALL WE DO ABOUT NAN?"
+
+Nan, in her little white bed, had no idea that she was the
+greatest difficulty her parents found in this present event.  It
+never entered her busy mind that Papa Sherwood and Momsey would
+dream of going to Scotland without her.
+
+"What shall we do with Nan?" Momsey said over and over again.
+She realized as well as did Mr. Sherwood that to take the child
+was an utter impossibility.  Their financial circumstances, as
+well as other considerations would not allow it.
+
+Yet, what should they do with her, with whom to trust her during
+their uncertain absence on the other side?  No answer that came
+to their minds seemed the right one.  They rose that wintry
+morning without having this most important of all questions
+decided.
+
+This was Sunday and Mrs. Joyce always came over for breakfast;
+for she lived alone and never had any too much to eat, Nan was
+sure.  As for the old woman's eating with the family, that was a
+fiction she kept up for appearance's sake, perhaps, or to salve
+her own claims to former gentility.  She always set a place for
+herself at the family table in the dining room and then was too
+busy to eat with them, taking her own meal in the kitchen.
+
+Therefore it was she only who heard the commanding rap at the
+kitchen door in the midst of the leisurely meal, and answered it.
+
+Just then Nan had dropped her knife and fork and was staring from
+Momsey's pitying face to Papa Sherwood's grave one, as she cried,
+in a whisper:
+
+"Not me?  Oh, my dears!  You're never going without me, all that
+long journey?  What, whatever shall I do without you both?"
+
+"Don't, honey!  Don't say it that way!" begged Momsey, putting
+her handkerchief to her eyes.
+
+"If it was not quite impossible, do you think for a moment,
+daughter, that we would contemplate leaving you at home?" queried
+Mr. Sherwood, his own voice trembling.
+
+"It, it seems impossible!" gasped Nan, "just as though it
+couldn't be.  I won't know what to do without you, my dears.  And
+what will you do without me?"
+
+That seemed to be unanswerable, and it quite broke Momsey down.
+She sobbed openly into her handkerchief.
+
+"Who's going to be her little maid?" demanded Nan, of her father.
+"Who's going to 'do' her beautiful hair?  Who's going to wait on
+her when she has her dreadful headaches?  And who's going to play
+'massagist' like me?  I want to know who can do all those things
+for Momsey if you take her away from me, Papa Sherwood?" and she
+ended quite stormily.
+
+"My dear child!" Mr. Sherwood said urgently.  "I want you to
+listen to me.  Our situation is such that we cannot possibly take
+you with us.  That is final.  It is useless for us to discuss the
+point, for there is nothing to be gained by discussing it from
+now till Doomsday."
+
+Nan gulped down a sob and looked at him with dry eyes.  Papa
+Sherwood had never seemed so stern before, and yet his own eyes
+were moist.  She began to see that this decision was very hard
+upon her parents, too.
+
+"Now do you understand," he asked gently, "that we cannot take
+our little daughter with us, but that we are much worried by the
+fact, and we do not know what to do with her while we are gone?"
+
+"You, you might as well put me in an orphan asylum," choked Nan.
+"I'll be an orphan till you get back."
+
+"Oh, honey!" cried her mother.
+
+"There now!" said Nan, jumping up quickly and going around the
+table to her mother's side.  "You poor dear!  I won't say
+anything more to hurt and trouble you.  I'm a selfish thing,
+that's what I am."
+
+Momsey wound her arms about her.  Papa Sherwood still looked
+grave.  " We get no nearer to the proper solution of the
+difficulty," he said.  "Of course, Nancy, the orphan asylum is
+out of the question."
+
+"I'll stay here, of course," Nan said, with some difficulty
+keeping her voice from quavering.
+
+"Not alone in the house, honey," Momsey said quickly.
+
+"With Mrs. Joyce?" suggested Nan tentatively.
+
+"No," Mr. Sherwood said.  "She is not the person to be trusted
+with you."
+
+"There's Mrs. Grimes' boarding house around the corner?"
+suggested Nan.
+
+Momsey shuddered.  "Never!  Never!  My little girl in a boarding
+house.  Oh, Papa Sherwood!  We must find somebody to care for her
+while we are away, who loves Nan."
+
+And it was just here that a surprisingly gruff voice took up the
+matter and decided it in a moment.
+
+"That's me," said the voice, with conviction.  "She's just the
+sort of little girl I cotton to, sister Jessie.  And Kate'll be
+fairly crazy about her.  If you're going anywhere for a long
+spell, just let me take her up to Pine Camp.  We have no little
+girls up there, never had any.  But I bet we know how to treat
+'em."
+
+"Hen!" shouted Mr. Sherwood, stumbling up from the table, and
+putting out both hands to the big man whom Mrs. Joyce had ushered
+in from the kitchen so unexpectedly.
+
+"Henry Sherwood!" gasped Momsey, half rising herself in her
+surprise and delight.
+
+"Why!" cried Nan, "it's the bear-man!" for Mr. Henry Sherwood
+wore the great fur coat and cap that he had worn the evening
+before when he had come to Nan's aid in rescuing the boy from
+Norway Pond.
+
+Afterward Nan confessed, naively, that she ought to have known he
+was her Uncle Henry.  Nobody, she was quite sure, could be so big
+and brawny as the lumberman from Michigan.
+
+"She's the girl for me," proclaimed Uncle Henry admiringly.
+"Smart as a whip and as bold as a catamount.  Hasn't she told you
+what she did last night?  Sho!  Of course not.  She don't go
+'round blowing about her deeds of valor, I bet!" and the big man
+went off into a gale of laughter that seemed to shake the little
+cottage.
+
+Papa Sherwood and Momsey had to learn all the particulars then,
+and both glowed with pride over their little daughter's action.
+Gradually, after numerous personal questions were asked and
+answered on both sides, the conversation came around to the
+difficulty the little family was in, and the cause of it.
+
+Henry Sherwood listened to the story of the Scotch legacy with
+wide-open eyes, marveling greatly.  The possibility of his
+brother's wife becoming wealthy amazed and delighted his simple
+mind.  The fact that they had to take the long journey to
+Scotland to obtain the money troubled him but little.  Although
+he had never traveled far himself, save to Chicago from the
+Michigan woods, Mr. Henry Sherwood had lived in the open so much
+that distances did not appall him.
+
+"Sure you'll go," he proclaimed, reaching down into a very deep
+pocket and dragging to light a long leather pouch, with a draw-
+string of home-cured deer skin.  "And if you are short, Bob,
+we'll go down into this poke and see what there is left.
+
+"I came down to Chicago to see about a piece of timber that's
+owned by some sharps on Jackson Street.  I didn't know but I
+might get to cut that timber.  I've run it careless-like, and I
+know pretty near what there is in it.  So I said to Kate:
+
+"'I'll see Bob and his wife, and the little nipper-----"
+
+"Goodness!" ejaculated Nan, under her breath.
+
+Uncle Henry's eyes twinkled and the many wrinkles about them
+screwed up into hard knots.  "Beg pardon!" he exclaimed, for his
+ears were very sharp.  "This young lady, I should have said.
+Anyhow, I told Kate I'd see you all and find out what you were
+doing.
+
+"Depending on mills and such for employment isn't any very safe
+way to live, I think.  Out in the woods you are as free as air,
+and there aren't so many bosses, and you don't have to think much
+about 'the market' and 'supply and demand,' and all that."
+
+"Just the same," said Mr. Robert Sherwood, his own eyes
+twinkling, "you are in some trouble right now, I believe, Hen?"
+
+"Sho!  You've got me there," boomed his brother with a great
+laugh.  "But there aren't many reptiles like old Ged Raffer.  And
+we can thank a merciful Creator for that.  I expect there are
+just a few miserly old hunks like Ged as horrible examples to the
+rest of us."
+
+"What is the nature of your trouble with this old fellow?" asked
+Mr. Robert Sherwood.
+
+"We've got hold on adjoining options.  I had my lines run by one
+of the best surveyors in the Peninsula of Michigan.  But he up
+and died.  Ged claims I ran over on his tract about a mile.  He
+got to court first, got an injunction, and tied me all up in a
+hard legal knot until the state surveyors can go over both pieces
+of timber.  The land knows when that'll be!  Those state
+surveyors take a week of frog Sundays to do a job.
+
+"I can't cut a stick on my whole piece 'cause Ged claims he'll
+have a right to replevin an equal number of sticks cut, if the
+surveyors back up his contention.  Nasty mess.  The original line
+was run years and years ago, and they're not many alive today in
+the Big woods that know the rights of it.
+
+"I expect," added Uncle Henry, shaking his bushy head, "that old
+Toby Vanderwiller knows the rights of that line business; but he
+won't tell.
+
+Gedney Raffer's got a strangle hold on Toby and his little swamp
+farm, and Toby doesn't dare say his soul's his own.
+
+"Well!" continued the lumberman, with another of his big laughs.
+"This has nothing to do with your stew, Bob.  I didn't want to
+come to the house last night and surprise you; so I stayed at the
+hotel.  And all the time I was thinking of this little nip, Beg
+pardon!  This young lady, and how smart and plucky she was.
+
+"And lo and behold," pursued Uncle Henry, "she turns out to be my
+own niece.  I'm going to take her back with me to Pine Camp.
+Kate's got to see and know her.  The boys will be tickled out of
+their boots to have a girl like her around.  That's our one lack
+at Pine Camp.  There never was a girl in the family.
+
+"Seems that this was just foreordained.  You and Jessie have got
+to go 'way off, over the water; can't leave this plucky girl
+alone.  Her old uncle and aunt are the proper folks to take care
+of her.  What do you say yourself, young lady?"
+
+Nan had liked the big man from the very beginning.  She was a
+sensible child, too.  She saw that she must settle this matter
+herself, for it was too hard a question for either Momsey or Papa
+Sherwood to decide.  She gained control of herself now; but
+nobody will ever know how much courage it took for her to say,
+promptly:
+
+"Of course I will go home with you, Uncle Henry.  It will be fun,
+I think, to go into the woods in the winter.  And, and I can
+come right back as soon as Momsey and Papa Sherwood return from
+Scotland."
+
+So it was settled, just like that.  The rush in which both
+parties got under way on Monday made Nan's head whirl.  Momsey
+was to buy a few necessary things in New York before she boarded
+the steamer.  Nan had a plentiful supply of warm winter clothing,
+and she took a trunkful.
+
+Mrs. Joyce was left to take a peep at the little, locked cottage
+on Amity Street, now and then.  Nan could say "Goodbye" only very
+hastily to Bess Harley and her other school friends.  Her school
+had to be broken off at a bad time in the year, but there was the
+prospect of a change in Nan's method of education the next fall.
+
+Momsey and Papa Sherwood took the train east an hour before Nan
+and Uncle Henry boarded that for Chicago.  All went with a rush
+and clatter, and Nan found herself at last rumbling out of
+Tillbury, on her way to the northern wilderness, while a thin
+drive of fine snowflakes tapped on the car windows.
+
+Chapter X
+GEDNEY RAFFER
+
+It was fortunate for Nan Sherwood that on the day of parting with
+her parents she had so much to do, and that there was so much to
+see, and so many new things of which to think.
+
+She had never traveled to Chicago before, nor far from Tillbury
+at all.  Even the chair car was new to the girl's experience and
+she found it vastly entertaining to sit at a broad window with
+her uncle in the opposite chair, gazing out upon the snowy
+landscape as the train hurried over the prairie.
+
+She had a certain feeling that her Uncle Henry was an anomaly in
+the chair car.  His huge bearskin coat and the rough clothing
+under it; his felt boots, with rubber soles and feet; the fact
+that he wore no linen and only a string tie under the collar of
+his flannel shirt; his great bronzed hands and blunted fingers
+with their broken nails, all these things set him apart from the
+other men who rode in the car.
+
+Papa Sherwood paid much attention to the niceties of dress,
+despite the fact that his work at the Atwater Mills had called
+for overalls and, frequently, oily hands.  Uncle Henry evidently
+knew little about stiff collars and laundered cuffs, or cravats,
+smart boots, bosomed shirts, or other dainty wear for men.  He
+was quite innocent of giving any offence to the eye, however.
+Lying back in the comfortable chair with his coat off and his
+great lumberman's boots crossed, he laughed at anything Nan said
+that chanced to be the least bit amusing, until the gas-globes
+rang again.
+
+It seemed to Nan as though there never was such a huge man
+before.  She doubted if Goliath could have looked so big to young
+David, when the shepherd boy went out with his sling to meet the
+giant.  Uncle Henry was six feet, four inches in height and broad
+in proportion.  The chair creaked under his weight when he moved.
+Other people in the car gazed on the quite unconscious giant as
+wonderingly as did Nan herself.
+
+"Uncle Henry," she asked him once, "are all the men in the Big
+Woods as tall as you are?"
+
+"Goodness me! No, child," he chuckled.  "But the woods don't
+breed many runts, that's a fact.  There's some bigger than I.
+Long Sam Dorgan is near seven feet   he isn't quite sure, for
+he's so ticklish that you can't ever measure him," and Uncle
+Henry's chuckle burst into a full-fledged laugh.  "He's just as
+graceful as a length of shingle lathing, too.  And freckles and
+liver spots on his hands and face, well, he certain sure is a
+handsome creature.
+
+"He went to town once and stayed over night.  Wasn't any bed long
+enough at the hotel, and Sam had got considerably under the
+weather, anyhow, from fooling with hard cider.  So he wasn't
+particular about where he bedded down, and they put him to sleep
+in the horse trough."
+
+"The horse trough!" gasped Nan.
+
+"Yes.  It was pretty dry when Sam went to bed; but right early in
+the morning a sleepy hostler stumbled out to the trough and began
+to pump water into it for the cattle.  Maybe Long Sam needed a
+bath, but not just that way.  He rose up with a yell like a
+Choctaw Indian.  Said he was just dreaming of going through the
+Sault Ste. Marie in a barrel, and he reckoned the barrel burst
+open."
+
+Nan was much amused by this story, as she was by others that the
+old lumberman related.  He was full of dry sayings and his speech
+had many queer twists to it.  His bluff, honest way delighted the
+girl, although he was so different from Papa Sherwood.  As Momsey
+had said, Uncle Henry's body had to be big to contain his heart.
+One can excuse much that is rough in a character so lovable as
+that of Uncle Henry's.
+
+The snow increased as the train sped on and the darkness
+gradually thickened.  Uncle Henry took his niece into the dining
+car where they had supper, with a black man with shiny eyes and
+very white teeth, who seemed always on the broad grin, to wait
+upon them.  Nan made a mental note to write Bess Harley all about
+the meal and the service, for Bess was always interested in
+anything that seemed "aristocratic," and to the unsophisticated
+girl from Tillbury the style of the dining car seemed really
+luxurious.
+
+When the train rolled into the Chicago station it was not yet
+late; but it seemed to Nan as though they had ridden miles and
+miles, through lighted streets hedged on either side with brick
+houses.  The snow was still falling, but it looked sooty and gray
+here in the city.  Nan began to feel some depression, and to
+remember more keenly that Momsey and Papa Sherwood were flying
+easterly just as fast as an express train could take them.
+
+It was cold, too.  A keen, penetrating wind seemed to search
+through the streets.  Uncle Henry said it came from the lake.  He
+beckoned to a taxicab driver, and Nan's trunk was found and
+strapped upon the roof.  Then off they went to the hotel where
+Uncle Henry always stopped when he came to Chicago, and where his
+own bag was checked.
+
+Looking through the cab windows, the girl began to take an
+immediate interest in life again.  So many people, despite the
+storm! So many vehicles tangled up at the corners and waiting for
+the big policemen to let them by in front of the clanging cars!
+Bustle, hurry, noise, confusion!
+
+"Some different from your Tillbury," drawled Uncle Henry.  "And
+just as different from Pine Camp as chalk is from cheese."
+
+"But so interesting!" breathed Nan, with a sigh.  "Doesn't it
+ever get to be bedtime for children in the city?"
+
+"Not for those kids," grumbled Uncle Henry.  "Poor creatures.
+They sell papers, or flowers, or matches, or what-not, all
+evening long.  And stores keep open, and hotel bars, and drug
+shops, besides theatres and the like.  There's a big motion
+picture place!  I went there once.  It beats any show that ever
+came to Hobart Forks, now I tell you."
+
+"Oh, we have motion picture shows at Tillbury.  We have had them
+in the school hall, too," said Nan complacently.  "But, of
+course, I'd like to see all the people and the lights, and so
+forth.  It looks very interesting in the city.  But the snow is
+dirty, Uncle Henry."
+
+"Yes.  And most everything else is dirty when you get into these
+brick and mortar tunnels.  That's what I call the streets.  The
+air even isn't clean," went on the lumberman.  "Give me the
+woods, with a fresh wind blowing, and the world looks good to
+me," then his voice and face fell, as he added, "excepting that
+snake-in-the-grass, Ged Raffer."
+
+"That man must make you a lot of trouble, Uncle Henry," said Nan
+sympathetically.
+
+"He does," growled the lumberman.  "He's a miserable, fox-faced
+scoundrel, and I've no more use for him than I have for an egg-
+sucking dog.  That's the way I feel about it."
+
+They reached the hotel just then, and Uncle Henry's flare of
+passion was quenched.  The hostelry he patronized was not a new
+hotel; but it was a very good one, and Nan's heart beat high as
+she followed the porter inside, with Uncle Henry directing the
+taxicab driver and a second porter how to dispose of the trunk
+for the night.
+
+Nan had her bag in which were her night clothes, toilet articles,
+and other necessities.  The porter carried this for her and
+seated her on a comfortable lounge at one side while Uncle Henry
+arranged about the rooms.
+
+To do honor to his pretty niece the lumberman engaged much better
+quarters than he would have chosen for himself.  When they went
+up to the rooms Nan found a pretty little bath opening out of
+hers, and the maid came and asked her if she could be of any
+help.  The girl began to feel quite "grown up."  It was all very
+wonderful, and she loved Uncle Henry for making things so
+pleasant for her.
+
+She had to run to his door and tell him this before she
+undressed.  He had pulled off his boots and was tramping up and
+down the carpeted floor in his thick woolen socks, humming to
+himself.
+
+"Taking a constitutional, Nan," he declared.  "Haven't had any
+exercise for this big body of mine all day.  Sitting in that car
+has made me as cramped as a bear just crawling out of his den in
+the spring."
+
+He did not tell her that had he been alone he would have gone out
+and tramped the snowy streets for half the night.  But he would
+not leave her alone in the hotel.  "No, sir," said Uncle Henry.
+"Robert would never forgive me if anything happened to his honey-
+bird.  And fire, or something, might break out here while I was
+gone."
+
+He said nothing like this to Nan, however, but kissed her good
+night and told her she should always bid him good night in just
+that way as long as she was at Pine Camp.
+
+"For Kate and I have never had a little girl," said the big
+lumberman, "and boys get over the kissing stage mighty early, I
+find.  Kate and I always did hanker for a girl."
+
+"If you owned a really, truly daughter of your own, Uncle Henry,
+I believe you'd spoil her to death!" cried Nan, the next morning,
+when she came out of the fur shop to which he had taken her.
+
+He had insisted that she was not dressed warmly enough for the
+woods.  We see forty and forty-five below up there, sometimes,"
+he said.  "You think this raw wind is cold; it is nothing to a
+black frost in the Big Woods.  Trees burst as if there were
+dynamite in 'em.  You've never seen the like.
+
+"Of course the back of winter's about broken now.  But we may
+have some cold snaps yet.  Anyhow, you look warmer than you did."
+
+And that was true, for Nan was dressed like a little Esquimau.
+Her coat had a pointed hood to it; she wore high fur boots, the
+fur outside.  Her mittens of seal were buttoned to the sleeves of
+her coat, and she could thrust her hands, with ordinary gloves on
+them, right into these warm receptacles.
+
+Nan thought they were wonderfully served at the hotel where they
+stopped, and she liked the maid on her corridor very much, and
+the boy who brought the icewater, too.  There really was so much
+to tell Bess that she began to keep a diary in a little blank-
+book she bought for that purpose.
+
+Then the most wonderful thing of all was the message from Papa
+Sherwood which arrived just before she and Uncle Henry left the
+hotel for the train.  It was a "night letter" sent from Buffalo
+and told her that Momsey was all right and that they both sent
+love and would telegraph once more before their steamship left
+the dock at New York.
+
+Nan and Uncle Henry drove through the snowy streets to another
+station and took the evening train north.  They traveled at first
+by the Milwaukee Division of the Chicago and Northwestern
+Railroad; and now another new experience came Nan's way.  Uncle
+Henry had secured a section in the sleeping car and each had a
+berth.
+
+It was just like being put to sleep on a shelf, Nan declared,
+when the porter made up the beds at nine o'clock.  She climbed
+into the upper berth a little later, sure that she would not
+sleep, and intending to look out of the narrow window to watch
+the snowy landscape fly by all night.
+
+And much to her surprise (only the surprise came in the morning)
+she fell fast asleep almost immediately, lulled by the rocking of
+the huge car on its springs, and did not arouse until seven
+o'clock and the car stood on the siding in the big Wisconsin
+city.
+
+They hurried to get a northern bound train and were soon off on
+what Uncle Henry called the "longest lap" of their journey.  The
+train swept them up the line of Lake Michigan, sometimes within
+sight of the shore, often along the edge of estuaries,
+particularly following the contour of Green By, and then into the
+Wilderness of upper Wisconsin and the Michigan Peninsula.
+
+On the Peninsula Division of the C. & N. W. they did not travel
+as fast as they had been running, and before Hobart Forks was
+announced on the last local train they traveled in, Nan Sherwood
+certainly was tired of riding by rail.  The station was in
+Marquette County, near the Schoolcraft line.  Pine Camp was
+twenty miles deeper in the Wilderness.  It seemed to Nan that she
+had been traveling through forests, or the barren stumpage where
+forests had been, for weeks.
+
+"Here's where we get off, little girl," Uncle Henry said, as he
+seized his big bag and her little one and made for the door of
+the car.  Nan ran after him in her fur clothing.  She had found
+before this that he was right about the cold.  It was an entirely
+different atmosphere up here in the Big Woods from Tillbury, or
+even Chicago.
+
+The train creaked to a stop.  They leaped down upon the snowy
+platform.  Only a plain station, big freight house, and a company
+of roughly dressed men to meet them.  Behind the station a number
+of sleighs and sledges stood, their impatient horses shaking the
+innumerable bells they wore.
+
+Nan, stumbling off the car step behind her uncle, came near to
+colliding with a small man in patched coat and cowhide boots, and
+with a rope tied about his waist as some teamsters affect.  He
+mumbled something in anger and Nan turned to look at him.
+
+He wore sparse, sandy whiskers, now fast turning gray.  The
+outthrust of the lower part of his face was as sharp as that of a
+fox, and he really looked like a fox.  She was sure of his
+identity before uncle Henry wheeled and, seeing the man, said:
+
+"What's that you are saying, Ged Raffer?  This is my niece, and
+if you lay your tongue to her name, I'll give you something to go
+to law about in a hurry.  Come, Nan.  Don't let that man touch so
+much as your coat sleeve.  He's like pitch.  You can't be near
+him without some of his meanness sticking to you."
+
+Chapter XI
+PINE CAMP AT LAST
+
+It was the first shade upon Uncle Henry's character that
+displeased Nan.  He was evidently a passionate man, prone to give
+way to elemental feelings, literally, "a man of wrath."
+
+Gedney Raffer, weazened, snakelike, sly, and treacherous, had
+doubtless wronged Uncle Henry deeply., But this fact could not
+excuse the huge lumberman's language on the platform of the
+Hobart Forks station.
+
+Nan wanted to stop her ears with her fingers and run from the
+spot.  The tough fellows standing around enjoyed the war of words
+hugely.  Mr. Sherwood was too big to strike Gedney Raffer, and of
+course the latter dared not use his puny fists on the giant.
+
+The blunt club of the lumberman's speech was scarcely a match for
+the sharp rapier of Raffer's tongue.  As the crowd laughed it was
+evident that the fox-faced man was getting the verbal best of the
+controversy.
+
+Nan's ears burned and tears stood in her eyes.  Uncle Henry
+descended to personal threats and the smaller man called out:
+
+"You jest put your hand on me, you big, overgrown sawney!  That's
+all I'm a-waitin' for.  You 'tack me and I'll have you in the
+caboose, sure's my name's Gedney Raffer.  Try it!"
+
+The quarrel was most distressing.  Nan pulled at her uncle's coat
+sleeve.  The rough men eyed her curiously.  She had never felt so
+ashamed in her life.
+
+"Do come, Uncle Henry," she whispered.  "I'm cold."
+
+That statement started the fuming giant at once.  Nan's
+sensitiveness to a rude quarrel did not impress the man; but her
+sensitiveness to the weather shocked him immediately.
+
+"My goodness, girl! We'll go right up to the hotel," he said,
+kindly.  "Any of you fellows seen Rafe or Tom in town this
+morning with the sled and roans?"
+
+"Hey, Hen!" cried the station master, waving a yellow paper.
+"Here's a telegraph despatch for you."
+
+It was really for Nan, and from Papa Sherwood filed just before
+the Afton Castle sailed from New York:
+
+"Momsey and papa send love and kisses.  Be cheerful and good.
+Write often.  We think of you always.  Kind wishes for Henry,
+Kate and boys.  We look forward to fair voyage and safe landing.
+Will cable from other side.  Expect happy meeting in spring.  R.
+and J. Sherwood."
+
+"They got a good start," commented Uncle Henry, putting all
+thought of his quarrel with Ged Raffer behind him at once.
+"We'll hope they have a safe voyage.  Now!  Where are those boys
+of mine?"
+
+The town of Hobart Forks was by no means a lumber town.  Millions
+of feet of timber was boomed on the river within the limits of
+the town every season, and there were great mills along the banks
+of the stream, too.  But there were other industries, as well as
+churches, amusement places and many pleasant dwellings.  It was
+no settlement of "slab shanties" with a few saloons and a general
+store.  Nan had yet to see this latter kind of settlement.
+
+But what she saw about the central market place of Hobart Forks
+opened her eyes considerably to an appreciation of the rough
+country she had come to, and the rough people to be met therein.
+
+The storekeepers she saw through the frosted windows were dressed
+like storekeepers in Tillbury; and there were well dressed women
+on the streets, a few, at least.
+
+But most of the men striding through the snow were as roughly
+dressed as her uncle, and not many were as good looking as Mr.
+Sherwood.  Some who came out of the swinging doors of saloons
+staggered, and were very noisy in their speech and rude in their
+actions.  Of course nobody spoke to Nan, or troubled her; Henry
+Sherwood was undoubtedly a man of standing in the settlement and
+highly respected.
+
+Not far from the market place they came upon a sprawling old
+tavern, with a fenced yard at one side.  As they approached, a
+sled drawn by a wild looking pair of rough, red-roan ponies,
+dashed out of the yard and stopped at the broad front portico of
+the hotel.
+
+"Hey, Tom!  What's the matter with you?" called Uncle Henry.
+"Here we are!"
+
+The driver turned a broad, good-humored face to look over his
+burly shoulder.  Nan saw that Tom Sherwood strongly resembled his
+father.
+
+"That you, Dad?" he drawled. "I'd about given you up.  I didn't
+want to drive down to the depot with these crazy creatures.  And
+if I'd left 'em standing they'd have kicked Phil's shed to
+pieces, I do believe.  The train's been in half an hour and
+more."
+
+"I know," said his father. "I had a mess of words with Ged
+Raffer.  That delayed me."
+
+"You ought to give him the back of your hand, and say no more
+about it," declared Tom, in a tone that showed he warmed in his
+bosom the family grudge against the fox-faced man.
+
+"Here's your Cousin Nan, Tom," said his father, without making
+rejoinder to the young man's observation.  "She must go into
+Phil's and get warm and have a cup of hot coffee.  I'll take some
+in a new-fangled bottle I bought down in Chicago, so we can all
+have a hot drink on the way home."
+
+"'Twon't keep warm twenty miles," said Tom.
+
+"Yes 'twill.  It'll keep HOT for twenty miles and more.  They
+call it a thermos bottle.  It'll keep coffee hot, or cold, for a
+day, just as you please."
+
+"Jehosaphat, Dad!  What kind of a swindle's that?  How does the
+bottle know whether you want your drink hot or cold?  Huh!  Those
+city folks couldn't make me believe any such thing," objected the
+son.
+
+Nan had to giggle at that, and Uncle Henry demanded: "Did you
+ever see such a gump?  Go on down to the station and tell Abe to
+fling that trunk and the bags into the back of the sled.  We'll
+have our coffee, and get the thermos bottle filled, too, by the
+time you come back."
+
+Nan liked tom Sherwood.  He was about nineteen and almost as big
+as his father.  He was gentle with her, and showed himself to be
+an expert driver of the roan colts.  Otherwise Nan might have
+been much afraid during the first mile of the journey to Pine
+Camp, for certainly she had never seen horses behave so before.
+
+"Haven't been out of the stable for a week," explained Tom cooly
+as the roans plunged and danced, and "cut up didos" generally, as
+Uncle Henry remarked.
+
+"We had a big fall of snow," Tom went on to say.  "Bunged us all
+up in the woods; so Rafe and I came in.  Marm's all right.  So's
+everybody else around the Camp, except Old Man Llewellen.  He's
+down with rheumatism, or tic-douloureux, or something.  He's
+always complaining."
+
+"I know," said Uncle Henry, and then went on to relate for his
+son's benefit the wonderful thing that had happened to his
+brother and his brother's wife, and why Nan had come up into
+Michigan without her parents.
+
+"We'll be mighty proud to have her," said Tom simply.  He was
+only a great boy, after all, and he blushed every time he caught
+Nan looking at him.  The girl began to feel very much grown up.
+
+They were glad of the hot coffee, and Tom was shown how and why
+the mysterious bottle kept the drink hot.  They only made that
+single halt (and only for a few minutes for the horses to drink)
+before reaching Pine Camp.  They traveled through the snow-
+covered woods most of the way.  There were few farms and no
+settlements at all until they reached Pine Camp.
+
+The road was not well beaten and they could not have got through
+some of the drifts with less spirited ponies than the roans.
+When they crossed the long bridge over the river and swept into
+the village street, Nan was amazed.
+
+Likewise, her heart sank a little.  There was not a building in
+the place more than a story and a half in height.  Most of them
+were slab cottages.  Few yards were fenced.  There were two
+stores, facing each other on the single street of the town, with
+false-fronts running up as tall as the second story would have
+been had there been a second story.
+
+The roans dashed through the better beaten path of the street,
+with everybody along the way hailing Henry Sherwood vociferously.
+The giant waved his hand and shouted in reply.  Nan cowered
+between him and Tom, on the seat, shielding her face from the
+flying snow from the ponies' hoofs, though the tears in her eyes
+were not brought there only by the sting of the pelting she
+received.
+
+Chapter XII
+"HOME WAS NEVER LIKE THIS"
+
+The roan ponies dashed through the slab settlement, past the
+blacksmith and wheelwright shop and the ugly red building Tom
+told Nan was the school, and reached a large, sprawling,
+unpainted dwelling on the outskirts of the village.
+
+There were barns back of the Sherwood house; there was no fence
+between the yard and the road, the windows of the house stared
+out upon the passerby, blindless, and many of them without
+shades.  There was such a painful newness about the building that
+it seemed to Nan the carpenters must have just packed their tools
+and gone, while the painters had not yet arrived.
+
+"Well!  Here we are," announced Mr. Henry Sherwood, as Tom held
+in the still eager ponies.  He stepped out and offered Nan his
+hand.  "Home again, little girl.  I reckon Kate will be mighty
+glad to see you, that she will."
+
+Nan leaped out and began to stamp her feet on the hard snow,
+while Uncle Henry lifted out the trunk and bags.  Just as the
+ponies sprang away again, a door in the ugly house opened and a
+tall, angular woman looked forth.
+
+"Bring her in, Hen!" she cried, in a high-pitched voice.  "I want
+to see her."
+
+Nan went rather timidly up the path.  Her aunt was almost as tall
+as her husband.  She was very bony and was flat-chested and
+unlovely in every way.  That is, so it seemed, when the homesick
+girl raised her eyes to Aunt Kate's face.
+
+That face was as brown as sole-leather, and the texture of the
+skin seemed leathery as well.  There was a hawklike nose
+dominating the unfeminine face.  The shallows below the
+cheekbones were deep, as though she had suffered the loss of her
+back molars.  The eyebrows were straggly; the eyes themselves of
+a pale, watery blue; the mouth a thin line when her colorless
+lips were closed; and her chin was as square and determined as
+Uncle Henry's own.
+
+As Nan approached she saw something else about this unlovely
+woman.  On her neck was a great, livid scar, of a hand's breadth,
+and which looked like a scald, or burn.  No attempt was made to
+conceal this unsightly blemish.
+
+Indeed, there was nothing about Aunt Kate Sherwood suggesting a
+softening of her hard lines.  Her plain, ugly print dress was cut
+low at the throat, and had no collar or ruff to hide the scar.
+Nan's gaze was fastened on that blemish before she was half way
+to the door, and she could see nothing else at first.
+
+The girl fought down a physical shudder when Aunt Kate's clawlike
+hands seized her by both shoulders, and she stooped to kiss the
+visitor.
+
+"Welcome, dear Nannie," her sharp voice said, and Nan thought
+that, with ease, one might have heard her in the middle of the
+village.
+
+But when Aunt Kate's lips touched the girl's forehead they were
+Warm, and soft as velvet.  Her breath was sweet.  There was a
+wholesome cleanliness about her person that pleased Nan.  The
+ugly dress was spotless and beautifully laundered.  She had a
+glimpse of the unplastered kitchen and saw a row of copper pots
+on the shelf over the dresser that were scoured to dazzling
+brightness.  The boards of the floor were white as milk,.  The
+big, patent range glistened with polish, and its nickel-work was
+rubbed till it reflected like a mirror.
+
+"Welcome, my dear!" said Aunt Kate again.  "I hope you will be
+happy while you stay with us."
+
+Happy! With Momsey and Papa Sherwood on the ocean, and the
+"little dwelling in amity" closed and deserted?  Nan feared she
+would break down and cry.
+
+Her Aunt Kate left her to herself a minute just then that she
+might overcome this weakness.  Uncle Henry came up the path with
+the bags, smiling broadly.
+
+"Well, old woman!" he said heartily.
+
+"Well, old man!" she returned.
+
+And then suddenly, Nan Sherwood had a new vision.  She was used
+to seeing her pretty mother and her handsome father display their
+mutual affection; it had not seemed possible that rough, burly
+Uncle Henry and ugly Aunt Kate could feel the same degree of
+affection for each other.
+
+Uncle Henry dropped the bags.  Aunt Kate seemed to be drawn
+toward him when he put out his hands.  Nan saw their lips meet,
+and then the giant gently, almost reverently, kissed the horrid
+scar on Aunt Kate's neck.
+
+"Here's Nan!" cried the big lumberman jovially.  "The pluckiest
+and smartest little girl in seven states!  Take her in out of the
+cold, Kate.  She's not used to our kind of weather, and I have
+been watching for the frost flowers to bloom on her pretty face
+all the way from the forks."
+
+The woman drew Nan into the warm kitchen.  Uncle Henry followed
+in a minute with the trunk.
+
+"Where'll I put this box, Kate?" he asked.  "I reckon you've
+fixed up some cozy place for her?"
+
+"The east room, Hen," Aunt Kate replied.  "The sun lies in there
+mornings.  I took the new spring rocker out of the parlor, and
+with the white enameled bedstead you bought in Chicago, and the
+maple bureau we got of that furniture pedlar, and the best
+drugget to lay over the carpet I reckon Nannie has a pretty
+bedroom."
+
+Meanwhile Nan stared openly around the strange kitchen.  The
+joists and rafters were uncovered by laths or plaster.  Muslin,
+that had once been white, was tacked to the beams overhead for a
+ceiling.  The smoke from the cookstove had stained it to a deep
+brown color above the stove and to a lighter, meerschaum shade in
+the corners.
+
+The furniture was of the rudest plainest kind   much of it
+evidently home-made.  Uncle Henry was not unhandy with tools.
+She learned, later, that he and the boys had practically built
+the house by themselves.  They were finishing it inside, as they
+had time.  In some of the rooms the inside window and door frames
+were not yet in place.
+
+There was an appetizing smell from the pots upon the stove, and
+the long table was set for dinner.  They would not let Nan change
+from her traveling dress before sitting down to the table.  Tom
+and Rafe came in and all three men washed at the long, wooden
+sink.
+
+Rafe was of slighter build than his brother, and a year or more
+younger.  He was not so shy as Tom, either; and his eyes sparkled
+with mischief.  Nan found that she could not act "grown up" with
+her Cousin Rafe.
+
+The principal dish for dinner was venison stew, served with
+vegetables and salt-rising bread.  There was cake, too, very
+heavy and indigestible, and speckled with huckleberries that had
+been dried the fall previous.  Aunt Kate was no fancy cook; but
+appetite is the best sauce, after all, and Nan had her share of
+that condiment.
+
+During the meal there was not much conversation save about the
+wonderful fortune that had fallen to Nan's mother and the voyage
+she and her husband were taking to Scotland to secure it.  Nan
+learned, too, that Uncle Henry had telegraphed from Tillbury of
+Nan's coming to Pine Camp, and consequently Aunt Kate was able to
+prepare for her.
+
+And that the good woman had done her best to make a nest for her
+little niece in the ugly house, Nan was assured.  After dinner
+she insisted upon the girl's going to the east room to change her
+dress and lie down.  The comparison between this great chamber
+and Nan's pretty room at home was appalling.
+
+The room had been plastered, but the plaster was of a gray color
+and unfinished.  The woodwork was painted a dusty, brick red with
+mineral paint.  The odd and ugly pieces of furniture horrified
+Nan.  The drugget on the floor only served to hide a part of the
+still more atrociously patterned carpet.  The rocking chair
+complained if one touched it.  The top of the huge maple dresser
+was as bald as one's palm.
+
+Nan sat down on the unopened trunk when her aunt had left her.
+She dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief.  Home certainly was
+never like this!  She did not see how she was ever going to be
+able to stand it.
+
+Chapter XIII
+MARGARET LLEWELLEN
+
+"If Momsey or Papa Sherwood knew about this they'd be awfully
+sorry for me," thought Nan, still sitting on the trunk.  "Such a
+looking place!  Nothing to see but snow and trees," for the
+village of Pine Camp was quite surrounded by the forest and all
+the visitor could see from the windows of her first-floor bedroom
+were stumps and trees, with deep snow everywhere.
+
+There was a glowing wood stove in the room and a big, chintz-
+covered box beside it, full of "chunks."  It was warm in the
+room, the atmosphere being permeated with the sweet tang of wood
+smoke.
+
+Nan dried her eyes.  There really was not any use in crying.
+Momsey and Papa Sherwood could not know how bad she felt, and
+she really was not selfish enough to wish them to know.
+
+"Now, Nanny Sherwood!" she scolded herself, "there's not a
+particle of use of your sniveling.  It won't 'get you anywhere,'
+as Mrs. Joyce says.  You'll only make your eyes red, and the
+folks will see that you're not happy here, and they will be hurt.
+
+"Mustn't make other folks feel bad just because I feel bad
+myself," Nan decided.  "Come on!  Pluck up your courage!
+
+"I know what I'll do," she added, literally shaking herself as
+she jumped off the trunk.  "I'll unpack.  I'll cover up
+everything ugly that I can with something pretty from Tillbury."
+
+Hurried as she had been her departure from the cottage on Amity
+Street, Nan had packed in her trunk many of those little
+possessions, dear to her childish heart, that had graced her
+bedroom.  These appeared from the trunk even before she hung away
+her clothes in the unplastered closet where the cold wind
+searched through the cracks from out-of-doors.  Into that closet,
+away back in the corner, went a long pasteboard box, tied
+carefully with strong cord.  Nan patted it gently with her hand
+before she left the box, whispering:
+
+"You dear!  I wouldn't have left you behind for anything!  I
+won't let them know you are here; but sometimes, when I'm sure
+nobody will interrupt, you shall come out."
+
+She spread a fringed towel over the barren top of the dresser.
+It would not cover it all, of course; but it made an island in a
+sea of emptiness.
+
+And on the island she quickly set forth the plain little toilet-
+set her mother had given her on her last birthday, the manicure
+set that was a present from Papa Sherwood, and the several other
+knickknacks that would help to make the big dresser look as
+though "there was somebody at home," as she whispered to herself.
+
+She draped a scarf here, hung up a pretty silk bag there, placed
+Momsey's and Papa Sherwood's portraits in their little silver
+filigree easels on the mantelpiece, flanking the clock that would
+not run and which was held by the ugly china shepherdess with
+only one foot and a broken crook, the latter ornament evidently
+having been at one time prized by the babies of her aunt's
+family, for the ring at the top was dented by little teeth.
+
+Nothing, however, could take the curse of ugliness off the
+staring gray walls of the room, or from the horrible turkey-red
+and white canton-flannel quilt that bedecked the bed.  Nan longed
+to spill the contents of her ink bottle over that hideous
+coverlet, but did not dare.
+
+The effort to make the big east room look less like a barn made
+Nan feel better in her mind.  It was still dreary, it must be
+confessed.  There were a dozen things she wished she could do to
+improve it.  There were nothing but paper shades at the windows.
+Even a simple scrim curtain-----
+
+And, in thinking of this, Nan raised her eyes to one window to
+see a face pressed close against the glass, and two rolling,
+crablike eyes glaring in at her.
+
+"Mercy!" ejaculated Nan Sherwood.  "What is the matter with that
+child's eyes?  They'll drop out of her head!"
+
+She ran to the window, evidently startling the peeper quite as
+much as she had been startled herself.  The girl, who was about
+Nan's own age, fell back from the pane, stumbled in the big,
+men's boots she wore, and ungracefully sprawled in the snow upon
+her back.  She could not get away before Nan had the window open.
+
+The sash was held up by a notched stick.  Nan put her head and
+shoulders out into the frosty air and stared down at the
+prostrate girl, who stared up at her in return.
+
+"What do you want?" Nan asked.
+
+"Nothin'," replied the stranger.
+
+"What were you peeping in for?"
+
+"To see you," was the more frank reply.
+
+"What for?" asked Nan.
+
+"Ain't you the new gal?"
+
+"I've newly come here, yes," admitted Nan.
+
+"Well!"
+
+"But I'm not such a sight, am I?" laughed the girl from Tillbury.
+"But you are, lying there in the snow.  You'll get your death of
+cold.  Get up"
+
+The other did so.  Beside the men's boots, which were patched and
+old, she wore a woollen skirt, a blouse, and a shawl over her
+head and shoulders.  She shook the snow from her garments much as
+a dog frees himself from water after coming out of a pond.
+
+"It's too cold to talk with this window open.  You're a neighbor,
+aren't you?"
+
+The girl nodded.
+
+"Then come in," urged Nan.  "I'm sure my aunt will let you."
+
+The girl shook her head in a decided negative to this proposal.
+"Don't want Marm Sherwood to see me," she said.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"She told me not to come over after you come 'ithout I put on my
+new dress and washed my hands and face."
+
+"Well!" exclaimed Nan, looking at her more closely.  "You seem to
+have a clean face, at least."
+
+"Yes.  But that dress she 'gin me, my brother Bob took and put on
+Old Beagle for to dress him up funny.  And Beagle heard a noise
+he thought was a fox barking and he started for the tamarack
+swamp, lickety-split.  I expect there ain't enough of that
+gingham left to tie around a sore thumb."
+
+Nan listened to this in both amusement and surprise.  The girl
+was a new specimen to her.
+
+"Come in, anyway," she urged.  "I can't keep the window open."
+
+"I'll climb in, then," declared the other suddenly, and, suiting
+the action to the word, she swarmed over the sill; but she left
+one huge boot in the snow, and Nan, laughing delightedly, ran for
+the poker to fish for it, and drew it in and shut down the
+window.
+
+The strange girl was warming her hands at the fire.  Nan pushed a
+chair toward her and took one herself, but not the complaining
+spring rocking chair.
+
+"Now tell me all about yourself," the girl demanded.
+
+"I'm Nan Sherwood, and I've come here to Pine Camp to stay while
+my father and mother have gone to Scotland."
+
+"I've heard about Scotland," declared the girl with the very
+prominent eyes.
+
+"Have you?"
+
+"Yes.  Gran'ther Llewellen sings that song.  You know:
+
+"'Scotland's burning!  Scotland's burning!
+Where, where?  Where, where?
+Fire!  Fire!  Fire!  Fire!
+Pour on water!  Pour on water!
+Fire's out!  Fire's out!'"
+
+Nan laughed.  "I've heard that, too," she said.  "But it was
+another Scotland."  Then: "So your name is Llewellen?"
+
+"Marg'ret Llewellen."
+
+"I've heard your grandfather is sick," said Nan, remembering
+Tom's report of the health of the community when he had met her
+and her uncle at Hobart Forks.
+
+"Yes.  He's got the tic-del-rew," declared Margaret, rather
+unfeelingly.  "Aunt Matildy says he's allus creakin' round like a
+rusty gate-hinge."
+
+"Why!  That doesn't sound very nice," objected Nan.  Don't you
+love your grandfather?"
+
+"Not much," said this perfectly frank young savage.  "He's so
+awfully wizzled."
+
+"'Wizzled'?" repeated Nan, puzzled.
+
+"Yes.  His face is all wizzled up like a dried apple."
+
+"But you love your aunt Matilda?" gasped Nan.
+
+"Well, she's wizzled some," confessed Margaret.  Then she said:
+"I don't like faces like hern and Marm Sherwood's.  I like your
+face.  It's smooth."
+
+Nan had noticed that this half-wild girl was of beautifully fair
+complexion herself, and aside from her pop eyes was quite petty.
+But she was a queer little thing.
+
+"You've been to Chicago, ain't you?" asked Margaret suddenly.
+
+"We came through Chicago on our way up here from my home.  We
+stayed one night there," Nan replied.
+
+"It's bigger'n Pine Camp, ain't it?"
+
+"My goodness, yes!"
+
+"Bigger'n the Forks?" queried Margaret doubtfully.
+
+"Why, it is much, much bigger," said Nan, hopeless of making one
+so densely ignorant understand anything of the proportions of the
+metropolis of the lakes.
+
+That's what I told Bob," Margaret said.  "He don't believe it.
+Bob's my brother, but there never was such a dunce since Adam."
+
+Nan had to laugh.  The strange girl amused her.  But Margaret
+said something, too, that deeply interested the visitor at Pine
+Camp before she ended her call, making her exit as she had her
+entrance, by the window.
+
+"I reckon you never seen this house of your uncle's before, did
+you?" queried Margaret at one point in the conversation.
+
+"Oh, no.  I never visited them before."
+
+"Didn't you uster visit 'em when they lived at Pale Lick?"
+
+"No.  I don't remember that they ever lived anywhere else beside
+here."
+
+"Yes, they did.  I heard Gran'ther tell about it.  But mebbe
+'twas before you an' me was born.  It was Pale Lick., I'm sure.
+That's where they lost their two other boys."
+
+"What two other boys?" asked Nan, amazed.
+
+"Didn't you ever hear tell you had two other cousins?"
+
+"No," said Nan.
+
+"Well, you did," said Margaret importantly.  "And when Pale Lick
+burned up, them boys was burned up, too."
+
+"Oh!" gasped Nan, horrified.
+
+"Lots of folks was burned.  Injun Pete come near being burned up.
+He ain't been right, I reckon, since.  And I reckon that's where
+Marm Sherwood got that scar on the side of her neck."
+
+Nan wondered.
+
+Chapter XIV
+AT THE LUMBER CAMP
+
+Nan said nothing just then about her queer little visitor.  Aunt
+Kate asked her when she came out of the east room and crossed the
+chill desert of the parlor to the general sitting room:
+
+"Did you have a nice sleep, Nannie?"
+
+"Goodness, Auntie!" laughed Nan.  "I got over taking a nap in the
+daytime a good while ago, I guess.  But you come and see what I
+have done.  I haven't been idle."
+
+Aunt Kate went and peeped into the east chamber.  "Good mercy,
+child!  It doesn't look like the same room, with all the pretty
+didos," she said.  "And that's your pretty mamma in the picture
+on the mantel?  My!  Your papa looks peaked, doesn't he?  Maybe
+that sea voyage they are taking will do 'em both good."
+
+Nan had to admit that beside her uncle and cousins her father did
+look "peaked."  Robust health and brawn seemed to be the two
+essentials in the opinion of the people of Pine Camp.  Nan was
+plump and rosy herself and so escaped criticism.
+
+Her uncle and aunt, and the two big boys as well, were as kind to
+her as they knew how to be.  Nan could not escape some of the
+depression of homesickness during the first day or two of her
+visit to the woods settlement; but the family did everything
+possible to help her occupy her mind.
+
+The long evenings were rather amusing, although the family knew
+little about any game save checkers, "fox and geese," and
+"hickory, dickory, dock."  Nan played draughts with her uncle and
+fox and geese and the other kindergarten game with her big
+cousins.  To see Tom, with his eyes screwed up tight and the
+pencil poised in his blunt, frost-cracked fingers over the slate,
+while he recited in a base sing-song:
+
+"Hick'ry, dick'ry, dock
+The mouse ran up the clock,
+The clock struck one,
+An' down he come
+Hick'ry, dick'ry, dock,"
+
+was side-splitting.  Nan laughed till she cried.  Poor, simple
+Tom did know just what amused his little cousin so.
+
+Rafe was by no means so slow, or so simple.  Nan caught him
+cheating more than once at fox and geese.  Rafe was a little sly,
+and he was continually making fun of his slow brother, and
+baiting him.  Uncle Henry warned him:
+
+"Now, Rafe, you're too big for your Marm or me to shingle your
+pants; but Tom's likely to lick you some day for your cutting up
+  and I sha'n't blame him.  Just because he's slow to wrath,
+don't you get it in your head that he's afraid, or that he can't
+settle your hash in five minutes."
+
+Nan was greatly disturbed to hear so many references to fistic
+encounters and fighting of all sorts.  These men of the woods
+seemed to be possessed of wild and unruly passions.  What she
+heard the boys say caused her to believe that most of the spare
+time of the men in the lumber camps was spent in personal
+encounters.
+
+"No, no, deary.  They aren't so bad as they sound," Aunt Kate
+told her, comfortably.  "Lots of nice men work in the camps all
+their lives and never fight.  Look at your Uncle Henry."
+
+But Nan remembered the "mess of words" (as he called it) that
+Uncle Henry had had with Gedney Raffer on the railroad station
+platform at the Forks, and she was afraid that even her aunt did
+not look with the same horror on a quarrel that Nan herself did.
+
+The girl from Tillbury had a chance to see just what a lumber
+camp was like, and what the crew were like, on the fourth day
+after her arrival at her Uncle Henry's house.  The weather was
+then pronounced settled, and word came for the two young men, Tom
+and Rafe, to report at Blackton's camp the next morning, prepared
+to go to work.  Tom drove a team which was then at the lumber
+camp, being cared for by the cook and foreman; Rafe was a
+chopper, for he had that sleight with an ax which, more than mere
+muscle, makes the mighty woodsman.
+
+"Their dad'll drive 'em over to Blackton's early, and you can go,
+too," said Aunt Kate.  "That is, if you don't mind getting up
+right promptly in the morning?"
+
+"Oh, I don't mind that," Nan declared.  "I'm used to getting up
+early."
+
+But she thought differently when Uncle Henry's heavy hand rapped
+on the door of the east chamber so early the next morning that it
+seemed to Nan Sherwood that she had only been in bed long enough
+to close her eyes.
+
+"Goodness, Uncle!" she muttered, when she found out what it
+meant.  "What time is it?"
+
+"Three o'clock.  Time enough for you to dress and eat a snack
+before we start," replied her uncle.
+
+"Well!" said Nan to herself.  "I thought the house was afire."
+
+Uncle Henry heard her through the door and whispered, shrilly:
+"Sh!  Don't let your aunt hear you say anything like that,
+child."
+
+"Like what?" queried Nan, in wonder.
+
+"About fire. Remember!" added Uncle Henry, rather sternly, Nan
+thought, as he went back to the kitchen.
+
+Then Nan remembered what the strange little girl, Margaret
+Llewellen, had said about the fire at Pale Lick that had burned
+her uncle's former home.  Nan had not felt like asking her uncle
+or aunt, or the boys, either, about it.  The latter had probably
+been too young to remember much about the tragedy.
+
+Although Nan had seen Margaret on several fleeting occasions
+since her first interview with the woods girl, there had been no
+opportunity of talking privately with her.  And Margaret would
+only come to the window.  She was afraid to tell "Marm Sherwood"
+how she had lost the new dress that had been given to her.
+
+It was now as black outside Nan's window as it could be.  She lit
+her oil lamp and dressed swiftly, running at last through the
+cold parlor and sitting room into the kitchen, where the fire in
+the range was burning briskly and the coffee pot was on.  Tom and
+Rafe were there comfortably getting into thick woolen socks and
+big lumbermen's boots.
+
+There was a heaping pan of Aunt Kate's doughnuts on the table,
+flanked with the thick china coffee cups and deep saucers.  Her
+uncle and the boys always poured their coffee into the saucers
+and blew on it to take the first heat off, then gulped it in
+great draughts.
+
+Nan followed suit this morning, as far as cooling the coffee in
+the saucer went.  There was haste.  Uncle Henry had been up some
+time, and now he came stamping into the house, saying that the
+ponies were hitched in and were standing in readiness upon the
+barn floor, attached to the pung.
+
+"We've twenty-five miles to ride, you see, Nannie," he said.
+"The boys have to be at Blackton's so's to get to work at seven."
+
+They filled the thermos bottle that had so puzzled Tom, and then
+sallied forth.  The ponies were just as eager as they had been
+the day Nan had come over from the Forks.  She was really half
+afraid of them.
+
+It was so dark that she could scarcely see the half-cleared road
+before them as the ponies dashed away from Pine Camp.  The sky
+was completely overcast, but Uncle Henry declared it would break
+at sunrise.
+
+Where the track had been well packed by former sleighs, the
+ponies' hoofs rang as though on iron.  The bits of snow that were
+flung off by their hoofs were like pieces of ice.  The bells on
+the harness jingled a very pretty tune, Nan thought.  She did not
+mind the biting cold, indeed, only her face was exposed.  Uncle
+Henry had suggested a veil; but she wanted to see what she could.
+
+For the first few miles it remained very dark, however.  Had it
+not been for the snow they could not have seen objects beside the
+road at all.  There was a lantern in the back of the pung and
+that flung a stream of yellow light behind them; but Uncle Henry
+would not have the radiance of it shot forward.
+
+"A light just blinds you," he said.  "I'd rather trust to the
+roans' sense."
+
+The ponies galloped for a long way, it seemed to Nan; then they
+came to a hill so steep that they were glad to drop to a walk.
+Their bodies steamed in a great cloud as they tugged the sleigh
+up the slope.  Dark woods shut the road in on either hand.  Nan's
+eyes had got used to the faint light so that she could see this
+at least.
+
+Suddenly she heard a mournful, long-drawn howl, seemingly at a
+great distance.
+
+"Must be a farm somewhere near," she said to Rafe, who sat beside
+her on the back seat.
+
+"Nope.  No farms around here, Nan," he returned.
+
+"But I hear a dog howl," she told him.
+
+Rafe listened, too.  Then he turned to her with a grin on his
+sharp face that she did not see.  "Oh, no, you don't," he
+chuckled.  "That's no dog."
+
+Again the howl was repeated, and it sounded much nearer.  Nan
+realized, too, that it was a more savage sound than she had ever
+heard emitted by a dog.
+
+"What is it?" she asked, speaking in a low voice to Rafe.
+
+"Wolves!" responded her cousin maliciously.  "But you mustn't
+mind a little thing like that.  You don't have wolves down round
+where you live, I s'pose?"
+
+Nan knew that he was attempting to plague her, so she said: "Not
+for pets, at least, Rafe.  These sound awfully savage."
+
+"They are," returned her cousin calmly.
+
+The wolf cry came nearer and nearer.  The ponies had started on a
+trot again at the top of the hill, and her uncle and Tom did not
+seem to notice the ugly cry.  Nan looked back, and was sure that
+some great animal scrambled out of the woods and gave chase to
+them.
+
+"Isn't there some danger?" she asked Rafe again.
+
+"Not for us," he said.  "Of course, if the whole pack gathers and
+catches us, then we have to do something."
+
+"What do you do?" demanded Nan quickly.
+
+"Why, the last time we were chased by wolves, we happened to have
+a ham and a side of bacon along.  So we chucked out first the
+one, and then the other, and so pacified the brutes till we got
+near town."
+
+"Oh!" cried Nan, half believing, half in doubt.
+
+She looked back again.  There, into the flickering light of the
+lantern, a gaunt, huge creature leaped.  Nan could see his head
+and shoulders now and then as he plunged on after the sleigh,
+and a wickeder looking beast, she hoped never to see.
+
+"Oh!" she gasped again, and grabbed at Rafe's arm.
+
+"Don't you be afraid," drawled that young rascal.  "I reckon he
+hasn't many of his jolly companions with him.  If he had, of
+course, we'd have to throw you out to pacify him.  That's the
+rule
+  youngest and prettiest goes first-----"
+
+"Like the ham, I s'pose?" sniffed Nan, in some anger, and just
+then Tom reached over the back of the front seat and seized his
+brother by the shoulder with a grip that made Rafe shriek with
+pain.
+
+Nan was almost as startled as was Rafe.  In the half-darkness
+Tom's dull face blazed with anger, and he held his writhing
+brother as though he were a child.
+
+"You ornery scamp!" he said, almost under his breath.  "You try
+to scare that little girl, and I'll break you in two!"
+
+Nan was horrified.  She begged Tom to let his brother alone.  "I
+was only fooling her," snarled Rafe, rubbing his injured
+shoulder, for Tom had the grip of a pipe wrench.
+
+Uncle Henry never turned around at all; but he said: "If I had a
+gun I'd be tempted to shoot that old wolf hound of Toby
+Vanderwiller's.  He's always running after sleds and yelling his
+head off."
+
+Nan was glad the creature following them was not really a wolf;
+but she knew she should be just as much afraid of him if she met
+him alone, as though he really were a wolf.  However, mostly, she
+was troubled by the passionate nature of her two cousins.  She
+had never seen Tom show any anger before; but it was evident that
+he had plenty of spirit if it were called up.  And she was,
+secretly, proud that the slow-witted young giant should have
+displayed his interest in her welfare so plainly.  Rafe sat and
+nursed his shoulder in silence for several miles.
+
+The cold was intense.  As the sky lightened along the eastern
+horizon it seemed to Nan as though the frost increased each
+moment.  The bricks at their feet were getting cool; and they had
+already had recourse to the thermos bottle, which was now empty
+of the gratefully hot drink it had contained.
+
+As the light gradually increased Nan saw Rafe watching her with
+sudden attention.  After his recent trick she was a little afraid
+of Rafe.  Still it did not seem possible that the reckless fellow
+would attempt any second piece of fooling so soon after his
+brother's threat.
+
+But suddenly Rafe yelled to his father to pull down the roans,
+and as the ponies stopped, he reached from the sled into a drift
+and secured a big handful of snow.  Seizing Nan quickly around
+the shoulders he began to rub her cheek vigorously with the snow.
+Nan gasped and almost lost her breath; but she realized
+immediately what Rafe was about.
+
+The frost had nipped her cheek, and her cousin had seen the white
+spot appear.  "The rubbing stung awfully, and the girl could not
+keep back the tears; but she managed to repress the sobs.
+
+"There!" exclaimed Rafe.  "You are a plucky girl.  I'm sorry I
+got some of that snow down your neck, Nan.  Couldn't help it.
+But it's the only thing to do when the thermometer is thirty-two
+degrees below zero.  Why!  A fellow went outside with his ears
+uncovered at Droomacher's camp one day last winter and after
+awhile he began to rub his ears and one of 'em dropped off just
+like a cake of ice."
+
+"Stop your lying, boy!" commanded his father.  "It isn't as bad
+as that, Nan.  But you want to watch out for frost bite here in
+the woods, just the same as we had to watch out for the
+automobiles in crossing those main streets in Chicago."
+
+With a red sun rising over the low ridge of wooded ground to the
+east, the camp in the hollow was revealed, the smoke rising in a
+pillar of blue from the sheet-iron chimney of the cookhouse;
+smoke rising, too, from a dozen big horses being curried before
+the stables.
+
+Most of the men had arrived the night before.  They were tumbling
+out of the long, low bunkhouse now and making good use of the
+bright tin washbasins on the long bench on the covered porch.
+Ice had been broken to get the water that was poured into the
+basins, but the men laved their faces and their hairy arms and
+chests in it as though it were summer weather.
+
+They quickly ran in for their outer shirts and coats, however,
+and then trooped in to the end of the cook shed where the meals
+were served.  Tom turned away to look over his horses and see
+that they were all ready for the day's work.  Rafe put up the
+roan ponies in a couple of empty stalls and gave them a feed of
+oats.
+
+Uncle Henry took Nan by the hand, and, really she felt as though
+she needed some support, she was so stiff from the cold, and led
+her into the warm room where the men were gathering for the
+hearty meal the cook and his helper had prepared.
+
+The men were boisterous in their greeting of Uncle Henry, until
+they saw Nan.  Than, some bashfully, some because of natural
+refinement, lowered their voices and were more careful how they
+spoke before the girl.
+
+But she heard something that troubled her greatly.  An old,
+grizzled man in a corner of the fireplace where the brisk flames
+leaped high among the logs, and who seemed to have already eaten
+his breakfast and was busily stoning an axe blade, looked up as
+Nan and her uncle approached, saying:
+
+"Seen Ged Raffer lately, Hen?"
+
+"I saw him at the Forks the other day, Toby," Mr. Sherwood
+replied.
+
+"Yaas.  I heard about that," said the old man drawlingly.  "But
+since then?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Wal, he was tellin' me that he'd got you on the hip this time,
+Hen.  If you as much as put your hoof over on that track he's
+fighting you about, he'll plop you in jail, that's what he'll
+do!  He's got a warrant all made out by Jedge Perkins.  I seen
+it."
+
+Uncle Henry walked closer to the old man and looked down at him
+from his great height.  "Tobe," he said, "you know the rights of
+that business well enough.  You know whether I'm right in the
+contention, or whether Ged's right.  You know where the old line
+runs.  Why don't you tell?"
+
+"Oh, mercy me!" croaked the old man, and in much haste.  "I ain't
+goin' to git into no land squabble, no, sir!  You kin count me
+out right now!" And he picked up his axe, restored the whetstone
+to its sheath on the wall, and at once went out of the shack.
+
+Chapter XV
+A CAT AND HER KITTENS
+
+That was a breakfast long to be remembered by Nan Sherwood, not
+particularly because of its quality, but for the quantity served.
+She had never seen men like these lumbermen eat before, save for
+the few days she had been at Uncle Henry's house.
+
+Great platters of baked beans were placed on the table, flanked
+by the lumps of pork that had seasoned them.  Fried pork, too,
+was a "main-stay" on the bill-of-fare.  The deal table was graced
+by no cloth or napery of any kind.  There were heaps of potatoes
+and onions fried together, and golden cornbread with bowls of
+white gravy to ladle over it.
+
+After riding twenty-five miles through such a frosty air, Nan
+would have had to possess a delicate appetite indeed not to enjoy
+these viands.  She felt bashful because of the presence of so
+many rough men; but they left her alone for the most part, and
+she could listen and watch.
+
+"Old Toby Vanderwiller tell you what Ged's been blowin' about,
+Henry?" asked one of the men at the table, busy ladling beans
+into his mouth with a knife, a feat that Nan thought must be
+rather precarious, to say the least.
+
+"Says he's going to jail me if I go on to the Perkins Tract,"
+growled Uncle Henry, with whom the matter was doubtless a sore
+subject.
+
+"Yaas.  But he says more'n that," said this tale bearer.
+
+"Oh, Ged says a whole lot besides his prayers," responded Uncle
+Henry, good-naturedly.  Perhaps he saw they were trying to bait
+him.
+
+"Wal, 'tain't nothin' prayerful he's sayin'," drawled the first
+speaker, after a gulp of coffee from his thick china cup.  "Some
+of the boys at Beckett's, you know, they're a tough crowd, was
+riggin' him about what you said to him down to the Forks, and Ged
+spit out that he'd give a lump of money to see you on your back."
+
+"Huh!" grunted Uncle Henry.
+
+"And some of 'em took him up, got the old man right down to
+cases."
+
+"That so?" asked Mr. Sherwood curiously.  "What's Ged going to
+do?  Challenge me to a game of cat's cradle?  Or does he want to
+settle the business at draughts, three best out o' five?"
+
+"Now you know dern well, Hen," said the other, as some of the
+listeners laughed loudly at Mr. Sherwood's sally, "that old Ged
+Raffer will never lock horns with you 'ceptin' it's in court,
+where he'll have the full pertection of the law, and a grain the
+best of it into the bargain."
+
+"Well, I s'pose that's so," admitted Nan's uncle, rather
+gloomily, she thought.
+
+"So, if Beckett's crowd are int'rested in bumping you a whole
+lot, you may be sure Ged's promised 'em real money for it."
+
+"Pshaw!" exclaimed Uncle Henry.  "You're fooling now.  He hasn't
+hired any half-baked chip-eaters and Canucks to try and beat me
+up?"
+
+"I ain't foolin'."
+
+"Pshaw!"
+
+"You kin 'pshaw' till the cows come home," cried the other
+heatedly.  "I got it straight."
+
+"Who from?"
+
+"Sim Barkis, him what's cookin' for Beckett's crew."
+
+"Good man, Sim.  Never caught him in a lie yet.  You are
+beginning to sound reasonable, Josh," and Mr. Sherwood put down
+his knife and fork and looked shrewdly at his informant.  "Now
+tell me," he said, "how much is Sim going to get for helping to
+pay Ged Raffer's debts?"
+
+"Har!" ejaculated the other man.  "You know Sim ain't that kind."
+
+"All right, then.  How much does he say the gang's going to split
+between 'em after they've done me up brown according to
+contract?" scoffed Uncle Henry, and Nan realized that her giant
+relative had not the least fear of not being able to meet any
+number of enemies in the open.
+
+"Sim come away before they got that far.  Of course Ged didn't
+say right out in open meetin' that he'd give so many dollars for
+your scalp.  But he got 'em all int'rested, and it wouldn't
+surprise him, so Sim said, if on the quiet some of those plug-
+uglies had agreed to do the job."
+
+Nan shuddered, and had long since stopped eating.  But nobody
+paid any attention to her at the moment.
+
+Uncle Henry drawled: "They're going to do the hardest day's job
+for the smallest pay that they ever did on this Michigan
+Peninsula.  I'm much obliged to you, Josh, for telling me.  I
+never go after trouble, as you fellows all know; but I sha'n't
+try to dodge it, either."
+
+He picked up his knife and fork and went quietly on with his
+breakfast.  But Nan could not eat any more at all.
+
+It seemed to the gently nurtured girl from Tillbury as though she
+had fallen in with people from another globe.  Even the mill-
+hands, whom Bess Harley so scorned, were not like these great,
+rough fellows whose minds seemed continually to be fixed upon
+battle.  At least, she had never seen or heard such talk as had
+just now come to her ears.
+
+The men began, one by one, to push back the benches and go out.
+There was a great bustle of getting under way as the teams
+started for the woods, and the choppers, too, went away.  Tom
+hurried to start his big pair of dapple grays, and Nan was glad
+to bundle up again and run out to watch the exodus.
+
+They were a mighty crew.  As Uncle Henry had said, the Big Woods
+did not breed runts.
+
+Remembering the stunted, quick-moving, chattering French
+Canadians, and the scattering of American-born employees among
+them, who worked in the Tillbury mills, Nan was the more amazed
+by the average size of these workmen.  The woodsmen were a race
+of giants beside the narrow-shouldered, flat-chested pygmies who
+toiled in the mills.
+
+Tom strode by with his timber sled.  Rafe leaped on to ride and
+Tom playfully snapped his whiplash at him.  Nan was glad to see
+that the two brothers smiled again at each other.  Their recent
+tiff seemed to be forgotten.
+
+Some of the choppers had already gone on ahead to the part of the
+tract where the marked trees were being felled.  Now the pluck,
+pluck, pluck of the axe blows laid against the forest monarchs,
+reached the girl's ears.  She thought the flat stuttering sound
+of the axes said "pluck" very plainly, and that that was just the
+word they should say.
+
+"For it does take lots of pluck to do work of this kind," Nan
+confided to her uncle, who walked up and down on the porch
+smoking an after-breakfast pipe.
+
+"Yes.  No softies allowed on the job," said he, cheerfully.
+"Some of the boys may be rough and hard nuts to crack; but it is
+necessary to have just such boys or we couldn't get out the
+timber."
+
+"But they want to fight so much!" gasped Nan.
+
+"Sho!" said her uncle, slowly.  "It's mostly talk.  They feel the
+itch for hard work and hard play, that's all.  You take lively,
+full-muscled animals, and they are always bucking and quarreling
+  trying to see which one is the best.  Take two young, fat
+steers   they'll lock horns at the drop of a hat.  It's animal
+spirits, Nan.  They feel that they've got to let off steam.
+Where muscle and pluck count for what they do in the lumber
+camps, there's bound to be more or less ructions."
+
+Perhaps this might be; but Nan was dreadfully sorry,
+nevertheless, that Uncle Henry had this trouble with Mr. Gedney
+Raffer.  The girl feared that there had been something besides
+"letting off steam" in the challenge her uncle had thrown down to
+his enemy, or to the men that enemy could hire to attack him.
+
+The timber sledges soon began to drift back, for some of the logs
+had been cut before the big storm, and had only to be broken out
+of the drifts and rolled upon the sleds with the aid of the men's
+canthooks.  It was a mystery at first to Nan how they could get
+three huge logs, some of them three feet in diameter at the butt,
+on to the sled; two at the bottom and one rolled upon them, all
+being fastened securely with the timber-chain and hook.
+
+How the horses strained in their collars to start the mighty
+load!  But once started, the runners slipped along easily enough,
+even through the deep snow, packing the compressible stuff in one
+passage as hard as ice.  Nan followed in this narrow track to the
+very bank of the river where the logs were heaped in long
+windrows, ready to be launched into the stream when the waters
+should rise at the time of the spring freshet.
+
+Tom managed his team alone, and unloaded alone, too.  It was
+marvelous (so Nan thought) that her cousin could start the top
+log with the great canthook, and guide it as it rolled off the
+sled so that it should lie true with timbers that had been piled
+before.  The strain of his work made him perspire as though it
+were midsummer.  He thrust the calks on his bootsoles into the
+log and the shreds of bark and small chips flew as he stamped to
+get a secure footing for his work.  Then he heaved like a giant,
+his shoulders humping under the blue jersey he wore, and finally
+the log turned.  Once started, it was soon rolled into place.
+
+Nan ran into the cook shed often to get warm.  Her uncle was busy
+with the boss of the camp, so she had nobody but the cook and his
+helper to speak to for a time.  Therefore it was loneliness that
+made her start over the half-beaten trail for the spot where the
+men were at work, without saying a word to anybody.
+
+None of the teams had come by for some time; but she could hear
+faintly the sound of the axes and the calling of the workmen to
+each other and their sharp commands to the horses.
+
+She went away from the camp a few hundred yards and then found
+that the trail forked.  One path went down a little hill, and as
+that seemed easy to descend, Nan followed it into a little
+hollow.  It seemed only one sled had come this way and none of
+the men were here.  The voices and axes sounded from higher up
+the ridge.
+
+Suddenly she heard something entirely different from the noise of
+the woodsmen.  It was the snarling voice of a huge cat   and
+almost instantly Nan sighted the creature which stood upon a
+snow-covered rock beside the path.  It had tasseled ears, a wide,
+wicked "smile," bristling whiskers, and fangs that really made
+Nan tremble, although she was some yards from the bobcat.
+
+As she believed, from what her cousins had told her, bobcats are
+not usually dangerous.  They never seek trouble with man, save
+under certain conditions; and that is when a mother cat has
+kittens to defend.
+
+This was a big female cat, and, although the season was early,
+she had littered and her kittens, three of them, were bedded in a
+heap of leaves blown by the wind into a hollow tree trunk.
+
+The timberman driving through the hollow had not seen the bobcat
+and her three blind babies; but he had roused the mother cat and
+she was now all ready to spring at intruders.
+
+That Nan was not the person guilty of disturbing her repose made
+no difference to the big cat.  She saw the girl standing,
+affrighted and trembling, in the path and with a ferocious yowl
+and leap she crossed the intervening space and landed in the snow
+within almost arm's reach of the fear-paralyzed girl.
+
+Chapter XVI
+"INJUN PETE"
+
+Nan Sherwood could not cry out, though she tried.  She opened her
+lips only to find her throat so constricted by fear that she
+could not utter a sound.  Perhaps her sudden and utter paralysis
+was of benefit at the moment, after all; for she could not
+possibly have escaped the infuriated lynx by running.
+
+The creature's own movements were hampered by the deep drift in
+which she had landed.  The soft snow impeded the cat and,
+snarling still, she whirled around and around like a pinwheel to
+beat a firmer foundation from which to make her final spring at
+her victim.
+
+Nan, crouching, put her mittened hands before her face.  She saw
+no chance for escape and could not bear to see the vicious beast
+leap at her again.  "Momsey!  Papa Sherwood!" she thought, rather
+than breathed aloud.
+
+Then, down the hill toward her, plunged a swift body.  She rather
+felt the new presence than saw it.  The cat yowled again, and
+spit.  There was the impact of a clubbed gun upon the creature's
+head.
+
+"Sacre bleu!  Take zat!  And zat!" cried a sharp voice, between
+the blows that fell so swiftly.  The animal's cries changed
+instantly from rage to pain.  Nan opened her eyes in time to see
+the maddened cat flee swiftly.  She bounded to the big tree and
+scrambled up the trunk and out upon the first limb.  There she
+crouched, over the place where her kittens were hidden, yowling
+and licking her wounds.  There was blood upon her head and she
+licked again and again a broken forefoot between her yowls of
+rage and pain.
+
+But Nan was more interested just then in the person who had flown
+to her rescue so opportunely.  He was not one of the men from the
+camp, or anybody whom she had ever seen before.
+
+He was not a big man, but was evidently very strong and active.
+His dress was of the most nondescript character, consisting
+mainly of a tattered fur cap, with a woolen muffler tied over his
+ears; a patched and parti-colored coat belted at the waist with a
+frayed rope.  His legs disappeared into the wide tops of a pair
+of boots evidently too big for him, with the feet bundled in
+bagging so that he could walk on top of the snow, this in lieu
+of regular snowshoes.
+
+His back was toward Nan and he did not turn to face her as he
+said:
+
+"Be not afeared, leetle Man'zelle.  Le bad chat is gone.  We
+shall now do famous-lee, eh?  No be afeared more."
+
+"No, no, sir," gasped Nan, trying to be brave.  "Won't, won't
+it come back?"
+
+"Nev-air!" cried the man, with a flourish of the gun   which was
+a rusty-barreled old weapon, perhaps more dangerous at the butt
+end than at its muzzle.  "Ze chat only fear for her babies.  She
+have zem in dat tree.  We will go past   leeving zem streectly
+alone, eh?"
+
+"No!" cried Nan hastily.  "I'm going back to the camp.  I didn't
+know there were such dangerous things as that in these woods."
+
+"Ah!  You are de strange leetle Mam'zelle den?" responded the
+man.  "You do not know ze Beeg Woods?"
+
+"I guess I don't know anything about this wilderness," confessed
+Nan.  "My uncle brought me to the camp up yonder this morning,
+and I hope he'll go right home again.  It's awful!"
+
+"Eet seem terrifying to ze leetle Mam'zelle because she is unused
+  eh?  Me!  I be terrified at ze beeg city where she come from,
+p'r'aps.  Zey tell Pete 'bout waggings run wizout horses, like
+stea'mill.  Ugh!  No wanter see dem.  Debbil in 'em," and he
+laughed, not unpleasantly, making a small joke of the suggestion.
+
+Indeed his voice, now that the sharpness of excitement had gone
+out of it, was a very pleasant voice.  The broken words he used
+assured Nan that his mother tongue must be French.  He was
+probably one of the "Canucks" she had heard her cousins speak of.
+French Canadians were not at all strange to Nan Sherwood, for in
+Tillbury many of the mill hands were of that race.
+
+But she thought it odd that this man kept his face studiously
+turned from her.  Was he watching the bobcat all the time?  Was
+the danger much more serious than he would own?
+
+"Why don't you look at me?" cried the girl, at length.  "I'm
+awfully much obliged to you for coming to help me as you did.
+And my uncle will want to thank you I am sure.  Won't you tell me
+your name?"
+
+The man was silent for a moment.  Then, when he spoke, his voice
+was lower and there was an indescribably sad note in it.
+
+"Call me 'Injun Pete', zat me.  Everybody in de beeg Woods know
+Injun Pete.  No odder name now.  Once ze good Brodders at Aramac
+goin' make scholar of Pete, make heem priest, too, p'r'aps.  He
+go teach among he's mudder's people.  Mudder Micmac, fadder wild
+Frinchman come to dees lakeshore.  But nev-air can Pete be
+Teacher, be priest.  Non, non!  Jes' Injun Pete."
+
+Nan suddenly remembered what little Margaret Llewellen had said
+about the fire at Pale Lick, and "Injun Pete."  The fact that
+this man kept his face turned from her all this time aroused her
+suspicion.  She was deeply, deeply grateful to him for what he
+had just done for her, and, naturally, she enlarged in her mind
+the peril in which she had been placed.
+
+Margaret had suggested this unfortunate half-breed was "not right
+in his head" because of the fire which had disfigured him.  But
+he spoke very sensibly now, it seemed to Nan; very pitifully,
+too, about his blasted hopes of a clerical career.  She said,
+quietly:
+
+"I expect you know my uncle and his family, Pete.  He is Mr.
+Sherwood of Pine Camp."
+
+"Ah!  Mis-tair Hen Sherwood!  I know heem well," admitted the
+man.  "He nice-a man   ver' kind to Injun Pete."
+
+"I'd like to have you look at me, please," said Nan, still
+softly.  "You see, I want to know you again if we meet.  I am
+very grateful."
+
+Pete waved her thanks aside with a royal gesture.  "Me!  I be
+glad to be of use, oh, oui!  Leetle Man'zelle mus' not make
+mooch of nottin', eh?"
+
+He laughed again, but he did not turn to look at her.  Nan
+reached out a tentative hand and touched his sleeve.  "Please,
+Mr. Pete," she said.  "I, I want to see you.  I, I have heard
+something about your having been hurt in a fire.  I am sure you
+must think yourself a more hateful sight than you really are."
+
+A sob seemed to rise in the man's throat, and his shoulders
+shook.  He turned slowly and looked at her for a moment over his
+shoulder.  Then he went swiftly away across the snow (for the
+bobcat had disappeared into her lair) and Nan stumbled back up
+the trail toward the camp, the tears blinding her own eyes.
+
+The disfigured face of the half-breed HAD been a shock to her.
+She could never speak of it afterward.  Indeed, she could not
+tell Uncle Henry about her meeting with the lynx, and her rescue
+  she shrank so from recalling Injun Pete's disfigured face.
+
+Chapter XVII
+SPRING IN THE BIG WOODS
+
+That visit to the lumber camp was memorable for Nan Sherwood in
+more ways than one.  Her adventure with the lynx she kept secret
+from her relatives, because of the reason given in the previous
+chapter.  But there was another incident that marked the occasion
+to the girl's mind, and that was the threat of Gedney Raffer,
+reported to her Uncle Henry.
+
+Nan thought that such a bad man as Raffer appeared to be would
+undoubtedly carry out his threat.  He had offered money to have
+Mr. Sherwood beaten up, and the ruffians he had bribed would
+doubtless be only too eager to earn the reward.
+
+To tell the truth, for weeks thereafter, Nan never saw a rough-
+looking man approach the house on the outskirts of Pine Camp,
+without fearing that here was coming a ruffian bent on her
+uncle's injury.
+
+That Uncle Henry seemed quite to have forgotten the threat only
+made Nan more keenly alive to his danger.  She dared not discuss
+the matter with Aunt Kate, for Nan feared to worry that good
+woman unnecessarily.  Besides, having been used to hiding from
+her own mother all unpleasant things, the girl naturally
+displayed the same thoughtfulness for Aunt Kate.
+
+For, despite Mrs. Henry Sherwood's bruskness and masculine
+appearance, Nan learned that there were certain matters over
+which her aunt showed extreme nervousness.
+
+For instance, she was very careful of the lamps used in the house
+  she insisted upon cleaning and caring for them herself; she
+would not allow a candle to be used, because it might be
+overturned; and she saw to it herself that every fire, even the
+one in Nan's bedroom, was properly banked before the family
+retired at night.
+
+Nan had always in mind what Uncle Henry said about mentioning
+fire to Aunt Kate; so the curious young girl kept her lips closed
+upon the subject.  But she certainly was desirous of knowing
+about that fire, so long ago, at Pale Lick, how it came about;
+if Aunt Kate had really got her great scar there; and if it was
+really true that two members of her uncle's family had met their
+death in the conflagration.
+
+She tried not to think at all of Injun Pete.  That was too
+terrible!
+
+With all her heart, Nan wished she might do something that would
+really help Uncle Henry solve his problem regarding the timber
+rights on the Perkins Tract.  The very judge who had granted the
+injunction forbidding Mr. Sherwood to cut timber on the tract was
+related to the present owners of the piece of timberland; and the
+tract had been the basis of a feud in the Perkins family for two
+generations.
+
+Many people were more or less interested in the case and they
+came to the Sherwood home and talked excitedly about it in the
+big kitchen.  Some advised an utter disregard of the law.  Others
+were evidently minded to increase the trouble between Raffer and
+Uncle Henry by malicious tale-bearing.
+
+Often Nan thought of what Uncle Henry had said to old Toby
+Vanderwiller.  She learned that Toby was one of the oldest
+settlers in this part of the Michigan Peninsula, and in his youth
+had been a timber runner, that is, a man who by following the
+surveyors' lines on a piece of timber, and weaving back and forth
+across it, can judge its market value so nearly right that his
+employer, the prospective timber merchant, is able to bid
+intelligently for the so-called "stumpage" on the tract.
+
+Toby was still a vigorous man save when that bane of the
+woodsman, rheumatism, laid him by the heels.  He had a bit of a
+farm in the tamarack swamp.  Once, being laid up by his arch
+enemy, with his joints stiffened and muscles throbbing with pain,
+Toby had seen the gaunt wolf of starvation, more terrible than
+any timber wolf, waiting at his doorstone.  His old wife and a
+crippled grandson were dependent on Toby, too.
+
+Thus in desperate straits Toby Vanderwiller had accepted help
+from Gedney Raffer.  It was a pitifully small sum Raffer would
+advance upon the little farm; but it was sufficient to put Toby
+in the usurer's power.  This was the story Nan learned regarding
+Toby.  And Uncle Henry believed that Toby, with his old-time
+knowledge of land-boundaries, could tell, if he would, which was
+right in the present contention between Mr. Sherwood and Gedney
+Raffer.
+
+These, and many other subjects of thought, kept the mind of Nan
+Sherwood occupied during the first few weeks of her sojourn at
+Pine Camp.  She had, too, to keep up her diary that she had begun
+for Bess Harley's particular benefit.  Every week she sent off to
+Tillbury a bulky section of this report of her life in the Big
+woods.  It was quite wonderful how much there proved to be to
+write about.  Bess wrote back, enviously, that never did anything
+interesting, by any possibility, happen, now that Nan was away
+from Tillbury.  The town was "as dull as ditch water."  She,
+Bess, lived only in hopes of meeting her chum at Lakeview Hall
+the next September.
+
+This hope Nan shared.  But it all lay with the result of Momsey's
+and Papa Sherwood's visit to Scotland and Emberon Castle.  And,
+Nan thought, it seemed as though her parents never would even
+reach that far distant goal.
+
+They had taken a slow ship for Momsey's benefit and the expected
+re-telegraphed cablegram was looked for at the Forks for a week
+before it possibly could come.
+
+It was a gala day marked on Nan's calendar when Uncle Henry,
+coming home from the railroad station behind the roan ponies,
+called to her to come out and get the message.  Momsey and Papa
+Sherwood had sent it from Glasgow, and were on their way to
+Edinburgh before Nan received the word.  Momsey had been very ill
+a part of the way across the ocean, but went ashore in improved
+health.
+
+Nan was indeed happy at this juncture.  Her parents were safely
+over their voyage on the wintry ocean, so a part of her worry of
+mind was lifted.
+
+Meanwhile spring was stealing upon Pine Camp without Nan's being
+really aware of the fact.  Uncle Henry had said, back in Chicago,
+that "the back of winter was broken"; but the extreme cold
+weather and the deep snow she had found in the Big Woods made Nan
+forget that March was passing and timid April was treading on his
+heels.
+
+A rain lasting two days and a night washed the roads of snow and
+turned the fast disappearing drifts to a dirty yellow hue.  In
+sheltered fence corners and nooks in the wood, the grass lifted
+new, green blades, and queer little Margaret Llewellen showed Nan
+where the first anemones and violets hid under last year's
+drifted leaves.
+
+The river ice went out with a rush after it had rained a few
+hours; after that the "drives" of logs were soon started.  Nan
+went down to the long, high bridge which spanned the river and
+watched the flood carry the logs through.
+
+At first they came scatteringly, riding the foaming waves end-on,
+and sometimes colliding with the stone piers of the bridge with
+sufficient force to split the unhewn timbers from end to end,
+some being laid open as neatly as though done with axe and wedge.
+
+When the main body of the drive arrived, however, the logs were
+like herded cattle, milling in the eddies, stampeded by a cross-
+current, bunching under the bridge arches like frightened steers
+in a chute.  And the drivers herded the logs with all the skill
+of cowboys on the range.
+
+Each drive was attended by its own crew, who guarded the logs on
+either bank, launching those that shoaled on the numerous
+sandbars or in the shallows, keeping them from piling up in coves
+and in the mouths of estuaries, or creeks, some going ahead at
+the bends to fend off and break up any formation of the drifting
+timbers that promised to become a jam.
+
+Behind the drive floated the square bowed and square sterned
+chuck-boat, which carried cook and provisions for the men.  A
+"boom", logs chained together, end to end, was thrown out from
+one shore of the wide stream at night, and anchored at its outer
+end.  Behind this the logs were gathered in an orderly, compact
+mass and the men could generally get their sleep, save for the
+watchman; unless there came a sudden rise of water in the night.
+
+It was a sight long to be remembered, Nan thought, when the boom
+was broken in the morning.  Sometimes an increasing current piled
+the logs up a good bit.  It was a fear-compelling view the girl
+had of the river on one day when she went with Uncle Henry to see
+the first drive from Blackton's camp.  Tom was coming home with
+his team and was not engaged in the drive.  But reckless Rafe was
+considered, for his age, a very smart hand on a log drive.
+
+The river had risen two feet at the Pine Camp bridge overnight.
+It was a boiling brown flood, covered with drifting foam and
+debris.  The roar of the freshet awoke Nan in her bed before
+daybreak.  So she was not surprised to see the river in such a
+turmoil when, afer a hasty breakfast, she and Uncle Henry walked
+beside the flood.
+
+"They started their drive last night," Uncle Henry said, "and
+boomed her just below the campsite.  We'll go up to Dead Man's
+Bend and watch her come down.  There is no other drive betwixt us
+and Blackton's."
+
+"Why is it called by such a horrid name, Uncle?" asked Nan.
+
+"What, honey?" he responded.
+
+"That bend in the river."
+
+"Why, I don't know rightly, honey-bird.  She's just called that.
+Many a man's lost his life there since I came into this part of
+the country, that's a fact.  It's a dangerous place," and Nan
+knew by the look on her uncle's face that he was worried.
+
+Chapter XVIII
+AT DEAD MAN'S BEND
+
+Nan and her uncle came out on the bluff that overlooked the sharp
+bend which hid the upper reaches of the river from Pine Camp.
+Across the stream, almost from bank to bank, a string of gravel
+flats made a barrier that all the rivermen feared.
+
+Blackton was no careless manager, and he had a good foreman in
+Tim Turner.  The big boss had ridden down to the bend in a mud-
+splashed buggy, and was even prepared to take a personal hand in
+the work, if need be.  The foreman was coming down the river bank
+on the Pine Camp side of the stream, watching the leading logs of
+the drive, and directing the foreguard.  Among the latter Nan
+spied Rafe.
+
+"There he is, Uncle!" she cried.  "Oh!  He's jumped out on that
+log, see?"
+
+"He's all right, girl, he's all right," said Uncle Henry
+comfortingly.  "Rafe's got good calks on his boots."
+
+The boy sprang from log to log, the calks making the chips fly,
+and with a canthook pushed off a log that had caught and swung
+upon a small bank.  He did it very cleverly, and was back again,
+across the bucking logs, in half a minute.
+
+Below, the foreman himself was making for a grounded log, one of
+the first of the drive.  It had caught upon some snag, and was
+swinging broadside out, into the stream.  Let two or three more
+timbers catch with it and there would be the nucleus of a jam
+that might result in much trouble for everybody.
+
+Tim Turner leaped spaces of eight and ten feet between the logs,
+landing secure and safe upon the stranded log at last.  With the
+heavy canthook he tried to start it.
+
+"That's a good man, Tim Turner," said Mr. "Sherwood, heartily.
+"He's worked for me, isn't afraid of anything, Ha!  But that's
+wrong!" he suddenly exclaimed.
+
+Turner had failed to start the stranded log.  Other logs were
+hurtling down the foam-streaked river, aimed directly for the
+stranded one.  They would begin to pile up in a heap in a minute.
+The foreman leaped to another log, turning as he did so to face
+the shore.  That was when Uncle Henry declared him wrong.
+
+Turner was swinging his free arm, and above the roar of the river
+and the thunder of the grinding and smashing logs they could hear
+him shouting for somebody to bring him an axe.  One of his men
+leaped to obey.  Nan and Mr. Sherwood did not notice just then
+who this second man was who put himself in jeopardy, for both had
+their gaze on the foreman and that which menaced him.
+
+Shooting across on a slant was a huge log, all of three feet
+through at the butt, and it was aimed for the timber on which
+Turner stood.  He did not see it.  Smaller logs were already
+piling against the timber he had left, and had he leaped back to
+the stranded one he would have been comparatively safe.
+
+Mr. Sherwood was quick to act in such an emergency as this; but
+he was too far from the spot to give practical aid in saving
+Turner from the result of his own heedlessness.  He made a horn
+of his two hands and shouted to the foreguard at the foot of the
+bluff:
+
+"He's going into the water!  Launch Fred Durgin's boat below the
+bend!  Get her! Quick, there!"
+
+Old riverman that he was, Uncle Henry was pretty sure of what was
+about to happen.  The huge log came tearing on, butt first, a
+wave of troubled water split by its on-rush.  Turner was watching
+the person bringing him the axe, and never once threw a glance
+over his shoulder.
+
+Suddenly Nan cried out and seized Uncle Henry's arm.  "Look!  Oh,
+Uncle!  It's Rafe!" she gasped, pointing.
+
+"Aye, I know it," said her uncle, wonderfully cool, Nan thought,
+and casting a single glance at the figure flying over the bucking
+logs toward the endangered foreman.  "He'll do what he can."
+
+Nan could not take her eyes from her cousin after that.  It
+seemed to be a race between Rafe and the charging log, to see
+which should first reach the foreman.  Rafe, reckless and
+harebrained as he was, flew over the logs as sure-footed as a
+goat.  Nan felt faint.  Her cousin's peril seemed far greater to
+her than that of the foreman.
+
+A step might plunge Rafe into the foaming stream!  When a log
+rolled under him she cried out under her breath and clamped her
+teeth down on to her lower lip until the blood almost came.
+
+"He'll be killed!  He'll be killed!" she kept repeating in her
+own mind.  But Uncle Henry stood like a rock and seemingly gave
+no more attention to his son than he did to Turner, or to the men
+running down the bank to seize upon and launch the heavy boat.
+
+Rafe was suddenly balked and had to stop.  Too great a stretch of
+water separated him from the next floating log.  Turner beckoned
+him on.  It was difficult to make the foreman hear above the
+noise of the water and the continual grinding of the logs, but
+Rafe yelled some warning and pointed toward the timber now almost
+upon Turner's foothold.
+
+The man shot a glance behind him.  The butt of the driving log
+rose suddenly into the air as though it would crush him.
+
+Turner leaped to the far end of the log on which he stood.  But
+too great a distance separated him from the log on which Rafe had
+secured a foothold.
+
+Crash!
+
+Nan heard, on top of the bluff, the impact of the great timber as
+it was flung by the current across the smaller log.  Turner shot
+into the air as though he were flung from a catapult.  But he was
+not flung in Rafe's direction, and the boy could not help him.
+
+He plunged into the racing stream and disappeared.  The huge
+timber rode over the smaller log and buried it from sight.  But
+its tail swung around and the great log was headed straight down
+the river again.
+
+As its smaller end swung near, Rafe leaped for it and secured a
+footing on the rolling, plunging log.  How he kept his feet under
+him Nan could not imagine.  A bareback rider in a circus never
+had such work as this.  Rafe rode his wooden horse in masterly
+style.
+
+There, ahead of him in the boiling flood, an arm and head
+appeared.  Turner came to the surface with his senses unimpaired
+and he strove to clutch the nearest log.  But the stick slipped
+away from him.
+
+Rafe ran forward on the plunging timber he now rode   the huge
+stick that had made all the trouble, and tried to reach the man
+in the water.  No use!
+
+Of course, there was no way for Rafe to guide his log toward the
+drowning man.  Nor did he have anything to reach out for Turner
+to grasp.  The axe handle was not long enough, and the foreman's
+canthook had disappeared.
+
+Below, the men were struggling to get the big boat out from under
+the bank into the stream.  Two of them stood up with their
+canthooks to fend off the drifting logs; the others plied the
+heavy oars.
+
+But the boat was too far from the man in the river.  He was
+menaced on all sides by plunging logs.  He barely escaped one to
+be grazed on the shoulder by another.  A third pressed him under
+the surface again; but as he went down this second time, Rafe
+Sherwood threw away his axe and leaped into the flood!
+
+Chapter XIX
+OLD TOBY VANDERWILLER
+
+Nan was sure her Cousin Rafe would be drowned, as well as his
+foreman.  She covered her eyes for a moment, and could not look.
+
+Then a great cheer arose from the men in the boat and those still
+remaining on the bank of the river.  Her uncle, beside her,
+muttered:
+
+"Plucky boy!  Plucky boy!"
+
+Her eyes flew open and she looked again.  In the midst of the
+scattering foam she saw a small log over which her cousin had
+flung his left arm; his other arm was around the foreman, and
+Rafe was bearing his head above water.  Turner had been struck
+and rendered senseless by the blow.
+
+The small log slipped through a race between two shallows, ahead
+of the greater timber.  The latter indeed grounded for a moment
+and that gave the victim of the accident and his rescuer a chance
+for life.
+
+They shot ahead with the log to which Rafe clung.  The men in the
+boat shouted encouragement, and rowed harder.  In a minute the
+boat came alongside the log and two of the rivermen grabbed the
+boy and the unconscious foreman.  They had them safely in the
+boat, and the boat was at the shore again in three minutes.
+
+By that time the big boss himself, Mr. Blackton, was tearing out
+over the logs from the other shore, axe in hand, to cut the key
+log of the jam, the formation of which Turner had tried to
+prevent.  A hundred logs had piled up against the stoppage by
+this time and there promised to be a bad time at the bend if
+every one did not work quickly.
+
+Before Nan and her uncle could reach the foot of the bluff,
+Turner had regained consciousness and was sitting on a stranded
+log, holding his head.  Rafe, just as he had come out of the
+river, was out on the logs again lending a hand at the work so
+necessary to the success of the drive.
+
+"Oh, dear me!" cried Nan, referring to her cousin, "he ought to
+go home and change his clothes.  He'll get his death of cold."
+
+"He'll work hard enough for the next hour to overcome the shock
+of the cold water.  It's lucky if he isn't in again before they
+get that trouble over," responded Uncle Henry.  Then he added,
+proudly: "That's the kind of boys we raise in the Big Woods,
+Nannie.  Maybe they are rough-spoken and aren't really parlor-
+broke, but you can depend on 'em to do something when there's
+anything to do!"
+
+"Oh, Uncle!" cried the girl.  "I think Rafe is just the bravest
+boy I ever saw.  But I should think Aunt Kate would be scared
+every hour he is away from home, he is so reckless."
+
+She was very proud herself of Rafe and wrote Bess a lot about
+him.  Slow Tom did not figure much in Nan Sherwood's letters, or
+in her thoughts, about this time.  Thoughts and letters were
+filled with handsome Rafe.
+
+It was while the Blackton drive was near Pine Camp that Nan
+became personally acquainted with old Toby Vanderwiller.  It was
+after dinner that day that she met Margaret and Bob Llewellen and
+the three went down to the river bank, below the bridge, to watch
+the last of the Blackton drive.
+
+The chuck-boat had pushed off into the rough current and was
+bobbing about in the wake of the logs; but all the men had not
+departed.
+
+"That's old Toby," said Bob, a black-haired boy, full of
+mischief.  "He don't see us.  Le's creep up and scare him."
+
+"No," said Nan, decidedly; "don't you dare!"
+
+"Aw, shucks!  Girls ain't no fun," the boy growled.  "Mag's bad
+enough, but you air wuss'n she, Nan Sherwood.  What's old Toby to
+you?  He's allus as cross as two sticks, anyway."
+
+"We won't make him any crosser," said Nan, laughing.  "What's the
+good?"
+
+Nan saw that the old man had his coat off, and had slipped down
+the right sleeve of his woolen shirt to bare his shoulder and
+upper right arm.  He was clumsily trying to bandage the arm.
+
+"He's got hurt," Nan cried to Margaret.  "I wonder how?"
+
+"Dunno," returned the smaller girl, carelessly.  Although she was
+not mischievous like her brother, Margaret seldom showed traits
+of tenderness or affection.  Nan was in some doubt as to whether
+the strange girl liked her.  Margaret often patted Nan's cheeks
+and admired her smooth skin; but she never expressed any real
+affection.  She was positively the oddest little piece of
+humanity Nan had ever met.
+
+Once Nan asked her if she had a doll.  "Doll?" snarled Margaret
+with surprising energy.  "A'nt Matildy give me one once't an' I
+throwed it as far as I could inter the river, so I did!  Nasty
+thing!  Its face was all painted and rough."
+
+Nan could only gasp.  Drown a doll-baby!  Big girl as she
+considered herself, she had a very tender spot in her heart for
+doll-babies.
+
+Margaret Llewellen only liked people with fair faces and smooth
+complexions; she could not possibly be interested in old Toby
+Vanderwiller, who seemed always to need a shave, and whose face,
+like that of Margaret's grandfather, was "wizzled."
+
+Nan ran down to him and asked:  "Can't I help you, Mr.
+Vanderwiller?  Did you get badly hurt?"
+
+"Hullo!" grunted Toby.  "Ain't you Hen Sherwood's gal?"
+
+"I'm his niece," she told him.  "Can I help?"
+
+"Well, I dunno.  "I got a wallop from one o' them logs when we
+was breakin' that jam, and it's scraped the skin off me arm----"
+
+"Let me see," cried Nan, earnestly.  "Oh!  Mr. Vanderwiller!
+That must be painful.  Haven't you anything to put on it?"
+
+"Nothin' but this rag," grunted Toby, drily.  "An' ye needn't
+call me 'Mister,' Sissy.  I ain't useter bein' addressed that
+way."
+
+Nan laughed; but she quickly washed the scraped patch on the old
+man's arm with clean water and then bound her own handkerchief
+over the abrasion under the rather doubtful rag that Toby himself
+supplied.
+
+"You're sure handy, Sissy," he said, rising and allowing her to
+help him into the shirt again and on with his coat.  "Now I'll
+hafter toddle along or Tim will give me a call-down.  Much
+obleeged.  If ye get inter the tam'rack swamp, come dry-foot
+weather, stop and see me an' my old woman."
+
+"Oh!  I'd love to, Mr. Vanderwiller," Nan cried.  "The swamp must
+be full of just lovely flowers now."
+
+The old man's face wrinkled into a smile, the first she had seen
+upon it.  Really!  He was not a bad looking man, after all.
+
+"You fond of posies, sissy?" he asked.
+
+"Indeed I am!" she cried.
+
+"There's a-plenty in the swamp," he told her.  "And no end of
+ferns and sich.  You come see us and my old woman'll show ye.
+She's a master hand at huntin' up all kind o' weeds  I tell her."
+
+"I'll surely come, when the weather gets warmer," Nan called
+after Toby as the old man dogtrotted down the bank of the river.
+But he did not answer and was quickly out of sight.
+
+Chapter XX
+NAN'S SECRET
+
+But Margaret Llewellen declared she would not go with her!
+
+"It's nasty in the Tam'rack swamp; and there's frogs and, and
+snakes.  Ketch me!  And as fur goin' ter see Tobe and his old
+woman, huh!  They're both as ugly as sin."
+
+"Why, Margaret!" exclaimed Nan, in horror.  "How you talk!"
+
+"Wal, it's so.  I don't like old, wizzled-up folks, I don't, now
+I tell ye!"
+
+"That sounds awfully cruel," said Nan, soberly.
+
+"Huh!" snorted Margaret, no other word would just express her
+manner of showing disgust.  "There ain't no reason why I should
+go 'round makin' believe likin' them as I don't like.  Dad useter
+take the hide off'n me and Bob for lyin'; an' then he'd stand an'
+palaver folks that he jest couldn't scurce abide, fur I heard
+him say so.  That's lyin', too   ain't it?"
+
+"I, I don't believe it is right to criticize our parents,"
+returned Nan, dodging the sharp girl's question.
+
+"Mebbe yourn don't need criticizin', responded Margaret, bluntly.
+"My dad ain't no angel, you kin bet."
+
+And it was a fact that the Llewellen family was a peculiar one,
+from "Gran'ther" down to Baby Bill, whom Margaret did not mind
+taking care of when he was not "all broke out with the rash on
+his face."  The girl's dislike for any countenance that was not
+of the smoothest, or skin of the softest texture, seemed strange
+indeed.
+
+Margaret's mother was dead.  She had five brothers and sisters of
+assorted ages, up to 'Lonzo, who was sixteen and worked in the
+woods like Nan's cousins.
+
+Aunt Matilda kept house for the motherless brood, and for
+Gran'ther and Mr. Fen Llewellen.  They lived in a most haphazard
+fashion, for, although they were not really poor, the children
+never seemed to have any decent clothing to wear; and if, by
+chance, they got a new garment, something always happened to it
+as, for instance, the taking of Margaret's new gingham by Bob as
+a dress for old Beagle.
+
+As the Llewellens were close neighbors of the Sherwoods, Nan saw
+much of Margaret.  The local school closed soon after the visitor
+had come to Pine Camp, and Nan had little opportunity of getting
+acquainted with other girls, save at the church service, which
+was held in the schoolhouse only every other Sunday.  There was
+no Sunday School at Pine Camp, even for the very youngest of the
+children.
+
+Nan talked to Aunt Kate about that.  Aunt Kate was the very
+kindest-hearted woman that ever lived; but she had little
+initiative herself about anything outside her own house.
+"Goodness knows, I'd like to see the kiddies gathered together on
+Sunday afternoon and taught good things," she signed; "but lawsy,
+Nan!  I'm not the one to do it.  I'm not good enough myself."
+
+"Didn't you teach Tom and Rafe, and   and  " Nan stopped.  She
+had almost mentioned the two older boys of her aunt's, whom she
+had heard were destroyed in the Pale Lick fire.  Aunt Kate did
+not notice, for she went on to say:
+
+"Why -  yes; I taught Tom and Rafe to say their prayers, and I
+hope they say 'em now, big as they are.  And we often read the
+Bible.  It's a great comfort, the main part of it.  I never did
+take to the 'begats,' though."
+
+"But couldn't we," suggested Nan, "interest other people and
+gather the children together on Sundays?  Perhaps the old
+gentleman who comes here to preach every fortnight might help."
+
+"Elder Posey's not here but three hours or so, any time.  Just
+long enough to give us the word and grab a bite at somebody's
+house.  Poor old man!  He attends three meetings each Sunday,
+all different, and lives on a farm at Wingate weekdays where he
+has to work and support his family.
+
+"He doesn't get but fifty dollars a year from each church, it's
+not making him a millionaire very fast," pursued Aunt Kate, with
+a soft little laugh.  "Poor old man!  I wish we could pay him
+more; but Pine Camp's not rich."
+
+"You all seem to have enough and to spare, Auntie," said Nan, who
+was an observant girl for her age.  "Nobody here is really poor."
+
+"Not unless he's right down lazy," said her aunt, vigorously.
+
+"Then I should think they'd build a proper church and give a
+minister some more money, so that he could afford to have a
+Sunday School as well."
+
+"Lawsy me, Nan!" exclaimed her aunt.  "The men here in Pine Camp
+haven't been woke up to such things.  They hate to spend that
+fifty dollars for Elder Posey, they'd get a cheaper man if there
+were such.  There's never been much out of the common happen here
+at Pine Camp.  It takes trouble and destruction to wake folks up
+to their Christian duty in these woods.  Now, at Pale Lick
+they've got a church-----"
+
+She stopped suddenly, and her face paled, while the ugly scar on
+her neck seemed to glow; but that may have been only in contrast.
+Aunt Kate turned away her head, and finally arose and went into
+her own room and closed the door.  Nan dared not continue the
+subject when the good woman came out again, and the talk of a
+Sunday School for Pine Camp, for the time being, was ended.
+
+There were hours when the girl from Tillbury was very lonely
+indeed.  Writing to Bess and other girl friends in her old home
+town and penning long letters on thin paper to Momsey and Papa
+Sherwood in Scotland, did not fill all of these hours when Nan
+shut herself into that east room.
+
+Sometimes she pulled down the paper shades and opened the clothes
+closet door, bringing out the long box she had hidden away there
+on the first day she had come to Pine Camp.  In that box, wrapped
+in soft tissue paper, and dressed in the loveliest gown made by
+Momsey's own skillful fingers, was the great doll that had been
+given to Nan on her tenth birthday.
+
+When girls went to high school, of course they were supposed to
+put away dolls, together with other childish things.  But Nan
+Sherwood never could neglect her doll-babies and had often spent
+whole rainy days playing with them in secret in the attic of the
+little house on Amity Street.
+
+Her other dolls had been left, carefully wrapped and shielded
+from the mice, at Tillbury; but Nan had been unable to leave
+Beautiful Beulah behind.  She packed her in the bottom of her
+trunk, unknown even to Momsey in the hurry of departure.  She had
+not told a soul here at Pine Camp that she possessed a doll; she
+knew the boys would make fun of her for sure.
+
+But she often sat behind the drawn shades nursing the big doll
+and crooning softly to it as she swung back and forth in the
+spring rocking-chair.  Tom had oiled the springs for her so that
+it no longer creaked.
+
+She did not confide even in Aunt Kate about the big doll.  They
+were all very kind to her; but Nan had a feeling that she ought
+to be grown up here among her backwoods relatives.  How could she
+ever face roguish Rafe if he knew she liked to "play dolls?"
+
+Fearing that even Margaret would tell, Nan had never shown the
+woods girl Beautiful Beulah.  Once she was afraid Margaret had
+come to the window to peep in when Nan had the doll out of her
+hiding place; but she was not sure, and Nan hoped her secret was
+still inviolate.  At least, Margaret never said a word about it.
+
+Margaret's sisters had dolls made of corncobs, and rag babies
+with painted faces like the one Margaret had thrown into the
+river and drowned; but Margaret turned up her nose at them all.
+She never seemed to want to "play house" as do most girls of her
+age.  She preferred to run wild, like a colt, with Bob in the
+woods and swamp.
+
+Margaret did not wish to go into the swamp with Nan, however, on
+her first visit to Toby Vanderwiller's little farm.  This was
+some weeks after the log drives, and lumbering was over for the
+season.  Uncle Henry and the boys, rather than be idle, were
+working every acre they owned, and Nan was more alone than she
+had ever been since coming to Pine Camp.
+
+She had learned the way to Toby's place, the main trail through
+the swamp going right by the hummock on which the old man's farm
+was situated.  She knew there was a corduroy road most of the way
+  that is, a road built of logs laid side by side directly over
+the miry ground.  Save in very wet weather this road was passable
+for most vehicles.
+
+The distance was but three miles, however, and Nan liked walking.
+Besides, nobody who has not seen a tamarack swamp in late spring
+or early summer, can ever imagine how beautiful it is.  Nan never
+missed human companionship when she was on the long walks she so
+often took in the woods.
+
+She had learned now that, despite her adventure with the lynx in
+the snow-drifted hollow, there was scarcely any animal to fear
+about Pine Camp.  Bears had not been seen for years; bobcats were
+very infrequently met with and usually ran like scared rabbits;
+foxes were of course shy, and the nearest approach to a wolf in
+all that section was Toby Vanderwiller's wolfhound that had once
+frightened Nan so greatly.
+
+Hares, rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, and many, many birds,
+peopled the forest and swamp.  In sunken places where the green
+water stood and steamed in the sun, turtles and frogs were
+plentiful; and occasionally a snake, as harmless as it was
+wicked looking, slid off a water-soaked log at Nan's approach
+and slipped under the oily surface of the pool.
+
+On the day Nan walked to Toby's place the first time, she saw
+many wonders of plant life along the way, exotics clinging to
+rotten logs and stumps; fronds of delicate vines that she had
+never before heard of; ferns of exquisite beauty.  And flashing
+over them, and sucking honey from every cuplike flower, were
+shimmering humming-birds and marvelously marked butterflies.
+
+The birds screamed or sang or chattered over the girl's head as
+she tripped along.  Squirrels peeped at her, barked, and then
+whisked their tails in rapid flight.  Through the cool, dark
+depths where the forest monarchs had been untouched by the
+woodsmen, great moths winged their lazy flight.  Nan knew not
+half of the creatures or the wonderful plants she saw.
+
+There were sounds in the deeps of the swamplands that she did not
+recognize, either.  Some she supposed must be the voices of huge
+frogs; other notes were bird-calls that she had never heard
+before.  But suddenly, as she approached a turn in the corduroy
+road, her ear was smitten by a sound that she knew very well
+indeed.
+
+It was a man's voice, and it was not a pleasant one.  It caused
+Nan to halt and look about for some place to hide until the owner
+of the voice went by.  She feared him because of his harsh tones,
+though she did not, at the moment, suspect who it was.
+
+Then suddenly she heard plainly a single phrase: "I'd give money,
+I tell ye, to see Hen Sherwood git his!"
+
+Chapter XXI
+IN THE TAMARACK SWAMP
+
+The harsh tone of the unseen man terrified Nan Sherwood; but the
+words he spoke about her Uncle Henry inspired her to creep nearer
+that she might see who it was, and hear more.  The fact that she
+was eavesdropping did not deter the girl.
+
+She believed her uncle's life to be in peril!
+
+The dampness between the logs of the roadway oozed up in little
+pools and steamed in the hot blaze of the afternoon sun.  Insects
+buzzed and hummed, so innumerable that the chorus of their voices
+was like the rumble of a great church-organ.
+
+Nan stepped from the road and pushed aside the thick underbrush
+to find a dry spot to place her foot.  The gnats danced before
+her and buzzed in her ears.  She brushed them aside and so pushed
+on until she could see the road again.  A lean, yellow horse,
+tackled to the shafts of a broken top-buggy with bits of rope as
+well as worn straps, stood in the roadway.  The man on the seat,
+talking to another on the ground, was Mr. Gedney Raffer, the
+timberman who was contending at law with Uncle Henry.
+
+It was he who had said: "I'd give money, I tell ye, to see Hen
+Sherwood git his."
+
+There had fallen a silence, but just as Nan recognized the mean
+looking old man on the carriage seat, she heard the second man
+speak from the other side of the buggy.
+
+"I tell you like I done Hen himself, Ged; I don't wanter be mixed
+up in no land squabble.  I ain't for neither side."
+
+It was Toby.  Nan knew his voice, and she remembered how he had
+answered Uncle Henry at the lumber camp, the first day she had
+seen the old lumberman.  Nan could not doubt that the two men
+were discussing the argument over the boundary of the Perkins
+Tract.
+
+Gedney Raffer snarled out an imprecation when old Toby had
+replied as above.  "Ef you know which side of your bread the
+butter's on, you'll side with me," he said.
+
+"We don't often have butter on our bread, an' I ain't goin' ter
+side with nobody," grumbled Toby Vanderwiller.
+
+"S-s!" hissed Raffer.  "Come here!"
+
+Toby stepped closer to the rattletrap carriage.  "You see your
+way to goin' inter court an' talkin' right, and you won't lose
+nothin' by it, Tobe."
+
+"Huh?  Only my self-respect, I s'pose," grunted the old
+lumberman, and Nan approved very much of him just then.
+
+"Bah!" exclaimed Raffer.
+
+"Bah, yourself!" Toby Vanderwiller returned with some heat.  "I
+got some decency left, I hope.  I ain't goin' to lie for you, nor
+no other man, Ged Raffer!"
+
+"Say!  Would it be lyin' ef you witnessed on my side?" demanded
+the eager Raffer.
+
+"That's my secret," snapped the old lumberman.  "If I don't
+witness for you, be glad I don't harm you."
+
+"You dare!" cried Raffer, shaking his fist at the other as he
+leaned from the buggy seat.
+
+"You hearn me say I wouldn't go inter court one way or 'tother,"
+repeated Toby, gloomily.
+
+"Wal," snarled Raffer, "see't ye don't   see't ye don't.
+'Specially for any man but me.  Ye 'member what I told ye, Tobe.
+Money's tight and I oughter call in that loan."
+
+Toby was silent for half a minute.  Then Nan heard him sigh.
+
+"Well, Ged," he observed, "it's up to you.  If you take the place
+it'll be the poorhouse for that unforchunit boy of mine and mebbe
+for the ol' woman, 'specially if I can't strike a job for next
+winter.  These here lumber bosses begin to think I'm too stiff in
+the j'ints."
+
+"Wal, wal!" snarled Raffer. "I can't help it.  How d'ye expec' I
+kin help you ef you won't help me?"
+
+He clucked to the old horse, which awoke out of its drowse with a
+start, and moved on sluggishly.  Toby stood in the road and
+watched him depart.  Nan thought the old lumberman's to be the
+most sorrowful figure she had ever seen.
+
+Her young heart beat hotly against the meanness and injustice of
+Gedney Raffer.  He had practically threatened Toby with
+foreclosure on his little farm if the old lumberman would not
+help him in his contention with Mr. Sherwood.  On the other hand,
+Uncle Henry desired his help; but Uncle Henry, Nan knew, would
+not try to bribe the old lumberman.  Under these distressing
+circumstances, which antagonist's interests was Toby Vanderwiller
+likely to serve?
+
+This query vastly disturbed Nan Sherwood.  All along she had
+desired much to help Uncle Henry solve his big problem.  The
+courts would not allow him to cut a stick of timber on the
+Perkins Tract until a resurvey of the line was made by
+government-appointed surveyors, and that would be, when?
+
+Uncle Henry's money was tied up in the stumpage lease, or first
+payment to the owners of the land.  It was a big contract and he
+had expected to pay his help and further royalties on the lease,
+from the sale of the timber he cut on the tract.  Besides, many
+valuable trees had been felled before the injunction was served,
+and lay rotting on the ground.  Every month they lay there
+decreased their value.
+
+And now, it appeared, Gedney Raffer was doing all in his power to
+influence old Toby to serve as a witness in his, Raffer's,
+interests.
+
+Had toby been willing to go into court and swear that the line of
+the Perkins Tract was as Mr. Sherwood claimed, the court would
+have to vacate the injunction and Uncle Henry could risk going
+ahead and cutting and hauling timber from the tract.  Uncle Henry
+believed Toby knew exactly where the line lay, for he had been a
+landloper, or timber-runner in this vicinity when the original
+survey was made, forty-odd years before.
+
+It was plain to Nan, hiding in the bushes and watching the old
+man's face, that he was dreadfully tempted.  Working as hard as
+he might, summer and winter alike, Toby Vanderwiller had scarcely
+been able to support his wife and grandson.  His occasional
+attacks of rheumatism so frequently put him back.  If Raffer took
+away the farm and the shelter they had, what would become of
+them?
+
+Uncle Henry was so short of ready money himself that he could not
+assume the mortgage if Raffer undertook to foreclose.
+
+"Oh, dear me!  If Momsey would only write to me that she is
+really rich," thought Nan, "I'd beg her for the money.  I'll tell
+her all about poor Toby in my very next letter and maybe, if she
+gets all that money from the courts in Scotland, she will let me
+give Toby enough to pay off the mortgage."
+
+She never for a moment doubted that Uncle Henry's contention
+about the timber tract line was right.  He must be correct, and
+old Toby must know it!  That is the way Nan Sherwood looked at
+the matter.
+
+But now, seeing Toby turning back along the corduroy road, and
+slowly shuffling toward home, she stepped out of the hovering
+bushes and walked hastily after him.  She overtook him not many
+yards beyond the spot where he had stood talking with Raffer.  He
+looked startled when she spoke his name.
+
+"Well!  You air a sight for sore eyes, Sissy," he said; but
+added, nervously, "How in Joe Tunket did you git in the swamp?
+Along the road?"
+
+"Yes, sir," said Nan.
+
+"Come right erlong this way?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Did ye meet anybody?" demanded old Toby, eyeing her sharply.
+
+"Mr. Raffer, driving his old buckskin horse.  That's all."
+
+"Didn't say nothin' to ye, did he?" asked Toby, curiously.
+
+"Not a word," replied Nan, honestly.  "I'm afraid of him and I
+hid in the bushes till he had gone by."
+
+"Huh!" sighed Toby, as though relieved.  "Jest as well.  Though
+Ged wouldn't ha' dared touch ye, Sissy."
+
+"Never mind.  I'm here now," said Nan, brightly.  "And I want you
+to show me your house and introduce me to Mrs. Vanderwiller."
+
+"Sure.  My ol' woman will be glad to see ye," said the man,
+briskly.  "'Tain't more'n a mile furder on."
+
+But first they came to a deserted place, a strip more than half
+a mile wide, where the trees had been cut in a broad belt
+through the swamp.  All Nan could see was sawdust and the stumps
+of felled trees sticking out of it.  The sawdust, Toby said, was
+anywhere from two to twenty feet deep, and there were acres of
+it.
+
+"They had their mill here, ye kin see the brick work yonder.
+They hauled out the lumber by teams past my place.  The stea'mill
+was here more'n two years.  They hauled the sawdust out of the
+way and dumped it in ev'ry holler, jest as it come handy."
+
+"What a lot there is of it!" murmured Nan, sniffing doubtfully at
+the rather unpleasant odor of the sawdust.
+
+"I wish't 'twas somewhere else," grunted Toby.
+
+"Why-so?"
+
+"Fire git in it and it'd burn till doomsday.  Fire in sawdust is
+a mighty bad thing.  Ye see, even the road here is made of
+sawdust, four foot or more deep and packed as solid as a brick
+walk.  That's the way Pale Lick went, sawdust afire.  Ha'f the
+town was built on sawdust foundation an' she smouldered for weeks
+before they knowed of it.  Then come erlong a big wind and
+started the blaze to the surface."
+
+"Oh!" murmured Nan, much interested.  "Didn't my Uncle Henry live
+there then?"
+
+"I sh'd say he did," returned Toby, emphatically.  "Didn't he
+never tell ye about it?"
+
+"No, sir.  They never speak of Pale Lick."
+
+"Well, I won't, nuther," grunted old Toby.  "'Taint pretty for a
+young gal like you to hear about.  Whush!  Thar goes a loon!"
+
+A big bird had suddenly come into sight, evidently from some
+nearby water-hole.  It did not fly high and seemed very clumsy,
+like a duck or goose.
+
+"Oh!  Are they good to eat, Mr. Vanderwiller?" cried Nan. "Rafe
+brought in a brace of summer ducks the other day, and they were
+awfully good, the way Aunt Kate cooked them."
+
+"Well!" drawled Toby, slyly, "I've hearn tell ye c'd eat a loon,
+ef 'twas cooked right.  But I never tried it."
+
+"How do you cook a loon, Mr. Vanderwiller?" asked Nan, interested
+in all culinary pursuits.
+
+"Well, they tell me thet it's some slow process," said the old
+man, his eyes twinkling.  "Ye git yer loon, pluck an' draw it,
+let it soak overnight in vinegar an' water, vitriol vinegar they
+say is the best.  Then ye put it in the pot an' let it simmer all
+day."
+
+"Yes?" queried the perfectly innocent Nan.
+
+"Then ye throw off that water," Toby said, soberly, "and ye put
+on fresh water an' let it cook all the next day."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"An' then ye throw in a piece of grin'stone with the loon, and
+set it to bilin' again.  When ye kin stick a fork in the
+grin'stone, the loon's done!"
+
+Nan joined in Toby's loud laugh at this old joke, and pretty soon
+thereafter they came to the hummock on which the Vanderwillers
+lived.
+
+Chapter XXII
+ON THE ISLAND
+
+In the winter it was probably dreary enough; but now the beauty
+of the swelling knoll where the little whitewashed house stood,
+with the tiny fields that surrounded it, actually made Nan's
+heart swell and the tears come into her eyes.
+
+It seemed to her as though she had never seen the grass so green
+as here, and the thick wood that encircled the little farm was
+just a hedge of blossoming shrubs with the tall trees shooting
+skyward in unbroken ranks.  A silver spring broke ground at the
+corner of the paddock fence.  A pool had been scooped out for the
+cattle to drink at; but it was not muddied, and the stream
+tinkled down over the polished pebbles to the wider, more
+sluggish stream that meandered away from the farm into the depths
+of the swamp.
+
+Toby told her, before they reached the hummock, that this stream
+rose in the winter and flooded all about the farm, so that the
+latter really was an island.  Unless the ice remained firm they
+sometimes could not drive out with either wagon or sled for days
+at a time.
+
+"Then you live on an island," cried Nan.
+
+"Huh!  Ye might say so," complained Toby.  "And sometimes we feel
+like as though we was cast away on one, too."
+
+But the girl thought it must really be great fun to live on an
+island.
+
+They went up to the house along the bank of the clear stream.  On
+the side porch, vine-covered to the eaves, sat an old woman
+rocking in a low chair and another figure in what seemed at a
+distance, to be a child's wagon of wickerwork, but with no tongue
+and a high back to it.
+
+"Here's Gran'pop!" cried a shrill voice and the little wagon
+moved swiftly to the edge of the steps.  Nan almost screamed in
+fear as it pitched downward.  But the wheels did not bump over
+the four steps leading to the ground, for a wide plank had been
+laid slantingly at that side, and over this the wheels ran
+smoothly, if rapidly.
+
+"You have a care there, Corson!" shrilled the old lady after the
+cripple.  "Some day you'll break your blessed neck."
+
+Nan thought he was a little boy, until they met.  Then she was
+surprised to see a young man's head set upon a shriveled child's
+body!  Corson Vanderwiller had a broad brow, a head of beautiful,
+brown, wavy hair, and a fine mustache.  He was probably all of
+twenty-five years old.
+
+But Nan soon learned that the poor cripple was not grown in mind,
+more than in body, to that age.  His voice was childish, and his
+speech and manner, too.  He was bashful with Nan at first; then
+chattered like a six-year-old child to her when she had once
+gained his confidence.
+
+He wheeled himself about in the little express wagon very well
+indeed, old Toby having rigged brakes with which he moved the
+wagon and steered it.  His arms and hands were quite strong, and
+when he wished to get back on to the piazza, he seized a rope his
+grandfather had hung there, and dragged himself, wagon and all,
+up the inclined plane, or gangplank, as it might be called.
+
+He showed Nan all his treasures, and they included some very
+childish toys, a number of them showing the mechanical skill of
+his grandfather's blunt fingers.  But among them, too, were
+treasures from the swamp and woods that were both very wonderful
+and very beautiful.
+
+Old Toby had made Corson a neatly fitted cabinet in which were
+specimens of preserved butterflies and moths, most of them of
+the gay and common varieties; but some, Nan was almost sure, were
+rare and valuable.  There was one moth in particular, with spread
+wings, on the upper side of the thorax of which was traced in
+white the semblance of a human skull.  Nan was almost sure that
+this must be the famous death's-head moth she had read about in
+school; but she was not confident enough to say anything to old
+Toby Vanderwiller.  A few specimens of this rare insect have been
+found in the swamps of America, although it was originally
+supposed to be an Old World moth.
+
+Nan did say, however, to Toby that perhaps some of these
+specimens might be bought by collectors.  The pressed flowers
+were pretty but not particularly valuable.  In the museum at the
+Tillbury High School there was a much finer collection from the
+Indiana swamps.
+
+"Sho!" said Toby, slowly; "I wouldn't wanter sell the boy's
+pretties.  I brung most on 'em home to him; but he mounted 'em
+himself."
+
+Nan suspected that old Mrs. Vanderwiller had much to do with the
+neat appearance of the cabinet.  She was a quiet, almost a
+speechless, old lady.  But she was very kind and she set out her
+best for Nan's luncheon before the girl from Tillbury returned
+home.
+
+"We ain't got much here on the island," the old lady said; "but
+we do love to have visitors.  Don't we, Corson?"
+
+"Nice ones," admitted the cripple, munching cake.
+
+He had heard something of what Nan suggested to Toby about the
+moths and other specimens.  So when the old lady was absent from
+the porch he whispered:
+
+"Say, girl!"
+
+"Well?" she asked, smiling at him.
+
+"Is what's in that cabinet wuth as much as a dollar?"
+
+"Oh!  I expect so," said Nan.  "More."
+
+"Will you give me a dollar for 'em?" he asked, eagerly.
+
+"Oh, I couldn't!  But perhaps I can write to somebody who would
+be interested in buying some of your things, and for much more
+than a dollar."
+
+Corson looked disappointed.  Nan asked, curiously: "Why do you
+want the dollar?"
+
+"To git Gran'mom a silk dress," he said promptly.  "She's admired
+to have one all her life, and ain't never got to git it yet."
+
+"I'm sure that's nice of you," declared Nan, warmly.  "I'll try
+to sell some of your collection."
+
+"Well!" he jerked out.  "It's got to be pretty soon, or she won't
+git to wear it much.  I heard her tell Gran'pop so."
+
+This impressed Nan Sherwood as being very pitiful, for she was of
+a sympathetic nature.  And it showed that Corson Vanderwiller,
+even if he was simple-minded, possessed one of the great human
+virtues, gratitude.
+
+Chapter XXIII
+A MYSTERY
+
+On this, her first visit to the island in the swamp, Nan said
+nothing to old Toby Vanderwiller about the line dispute between
+her uncle and Gedney Raffer, which the old lumberman was supposed
+to be able to settle if he would.
+
+Mrs. Vanderwiller insisted upon Toby's hitching up an old,
+broken-kneed pony he owned, and taking her over the corduroy road
+to Pine Camp, where she arrived before dark.  To tell the truth,
+little Margaret Llewellen was not the only person who thought it
+odd that Nan should want to go to see the Vanderwillers in the
+heart of the tamarack swamp.  Nan's uncle and aunt and cousins
+considered their guest a little odd; but they made no open
+comment when the girl arrived at home after her visit.
+
+Nan was full of the wonders she had seen, commonplace enough to
+her relatives who had lived all their lives in touch with the
+beautiful and queer things of Nature as displayed in the Michigan
+Peninsula.  Perhaps none but Tom appreciated her ecstasy over
+crippled Corson Vanderwiller's collection.
+
+Rafe was inclined to poke good-natured fun at his young cousin
+for her enthusiasm; but Tom showed an understanding that quite
+surprised Nan.  Despite his simplicity regarding some of the
+commonest things of the great outside world, he showed that he
+was very observant of the things about him.
+
+"Oh, Tom was always like that," scoffed Rafe, with ready laughter
+at his slow brother.  "He'd rather pick up a bug any day and put
+it through a cross-examination, than smash it under the sole of
+his boot."
+
+"I don't think bugs were made to smash," Tom said stoutly.
+
+"Whew!  What in thunder were they made for?" demanded the mocking
+Rafe.
+
+"I don't think God Almighty made things alive just for us to make
+'em dead," said Tom, clumsily, and blushing a deep red.
+
+Rafe laughed again.  Rafe had read much more in a desultory
+fashion than Tom.
+
+"Tom ought to be one of those Brahmas," he said, chuckling.
+"They carry a whisk broom to brush off any seat they may sit on
+before they sit down, so's they sha'n't crush an ant, or any
+other crawling thing.  They're vegetarians, too, and won't take
+life in any form."
+
+"Now, Rafe!" exclaimed his mother, who was never quite sure when
+her younger son was playing the fool.  "You know that Brahmas are
+hens.  I've got some in my flock   those big white and black,
+lazy fowls, with feathers on their legs."
+
+Nan had to laugh at that as well as Rafe.  "Brahma fowl, I guess,
+came from Brahma, or maybe Brahmaputra, all right.  But Rafe
+means Brahmans.  They're a religious people of India," the girl
+from Tillbury said.
+
+"And maybe they've got it right," Tom said stubbornly.  "Why
+should we kill unnecessarily?"
+
+Nan could have hugged him.  At any rate, a new feeling for him
+was born at that moment, and she applauded.  Aunt Kate said:
+
+"Tom always was soft-hearted," and her big son became silent.
+She might as well have called him "soft-headed"; but Nan began
+better to appreciate Tom's worth from that time on.
+
+Rafe remained in her eyes still the reckless, heroic figure he
+had seemed when running over the logs the day of the timber
+drive.  But she began to confide in Tom after this evening of her
+return from the tamarack swamp.
+
+However, this is somewhat in advance of the story.  The pleasant
+evening passed as usual until bedtime came for Nan.  She retired
+to her east chamber, for the windows of which Tom had made
+screens to keep out the night-flying insects.  No matter how
+tired she was at night there was one thing Nan Sherwood seldom
+forgot.
+
+Possibly it was silly in a girl who was almost through her
+freshman year at high school, but Nan brought out Beautiful
+Beulah and rocked her, and hugged her, and crooned over her
+before she went to bed.  She was such a comfort!
+
+So Nan, on this evening, went first of all to the closet and
+reached down to draw out the box in which she had kept the doll
+hidden ever since coming to Pine Camp.
+
+It was not there!
+
+At first Nan Sherwood could not believe this possible.  She
+dropped on her knees and scrambled over the floor of her closet,
+reaching under the hanging skirts and frocks, her fear rising,
+second by second.
+
+The box was not in its place.  She arose and looked about her
+room wildly.  Of course, she had not left it anywhere else, that
+was out of the question.
+
+She could scarcely believe that any member of the family had been
+in her room, much less would disturb anything that was hers.
+Not even Aunt Kate came to the east chamber often.  Nan had
+insisted upon taking care of the room, and she swept and dusted
+and cleaned like the smart little housewife she was.  Aunt Kate
+had been content to let her have her way in this.
+
+Of course Nan never locked her door.  But who would touch a thing
+belonging to her?  And her doll!  Why, she was sure the family
+did not even know she had such a possession.
+
+Almost wildly the girl ran out of her chamber and into the
+sitting room, where the family was still gathered around the
+evening lamp, Rafe cleaning his shot-gun, Tom reading slowly the
+local paper, published at the Forks, Aunt Kate mending, and Uncle
+Henry sitting at the open window with his pipe.
+
+"Oh, it's gone!" gasped Nan, as she burst into the room.
+
+"What's gone?" asked Aunt Kate, and Uncle Henry added: "What's
+happened to you, honey-bird?"
+
+"My Beulah!" cried Nan, almost sobbing.  "My Beulah, she's been
+taken!"
+
+"My mercy, child!" cried Aunt Kate, jumping up.  "Are you crazy?"
+
+"Who's Beulah?" demanded Rafe, looking up from his gun and, Nan
+thought, showing less surprise than the others.
+
+"My Beulah doll," said Nan, too troubled now to care whether the
+family laughed at her or not.  "My Beautiful Beulah.  Somebody's
+played a trick  "
+
+"A doll!" shouted Rafe, and burst into a chatter of laughter.
+
+"Mercy me, child!" repeated Aunt Kate.  "I didn't know you had a
+doll."
+
+"Got a baby rattle, too, Sissy?" chuckled Rafe.  "And a ring to
+cut your teeth on?  My, my!"
+
+"Stop that, Rafe!"commanded his father, sternly, while Tom
+flushed and glared angrily at his brother.
+
+"I didn't know you had a doll, Nannie," said Mrs. Sherwood,
+rather weakly.  "Where'd you have it?"
+
+"In my closet," choked Nan.  "She's a great, big, beautiful
+thing!  I know somebody must be playing a joke on me  "
+
+"Nobody here, Nannie," said Uncle Henry, with decision.  "You may
+be sure of that."  But he looked at Rafe sternly.  That young man
+thought it the better part of wisdom to say no more.
+
+In broken sentences the girl told her innocent secret, and why
+she had kept the doll hidden.  Aunt Kate, after, all, seemed to
+understand.
+
+"My poor dear!" she crooned, patting Nan's hand between her hard
+palms.  "We'll all look for the dolly.  Surely it can't have been
+taken out of the house."
+
+"And who'd even take it out of her closet?" demanded Tom, almost
+as stern as his father.
+
+"It surely didn't walk away of itself," said Aunt Kate.
+
+She took a small hand lamp and went with Nan to the east chamber.
+They searched diligently, but to no good end, save to assure Nan
+that Beulah had utterly disappeared.
+
+As far as could be seen the screens at the windows of the bedroom
+had not been disturbed.  But who would come in from outside to
+steal Nan's doll?  Indeed, who would take it out of the closet,
+anyway?  The girl was almost sure that nobody had known she had
+it.  It was strange, very strange indeed.
+
+Big girl that she was, Nan cried herself to sleep that night over
+the mystery.  The loss of Beulah seemed to snap the last bond
+that held her to the little cottage in Amity street, where she
+had spent all her happy childhood.
+
+Chapter XXIV
+THE SMOKING TREE
+
+Nan awoke to a new day with the feeling that the loss of her
+treasured doll must have been a bad dream.  But it was not.
+Another search of her room and the closet assured her that it was
+a horrid reality.
+
+She might have lost many of her personal possessions without a
+pang; but not Beautiful Beulah.  Nan could not tell her aunt or
+the rest of the family just how she felt about it.  She was sure
+they would not understand.
+
+The doll had reminded her continually of her home life.  Although
+the stay of her parents in Scotland was much more extended than
+they or Nan had expected, the doll was a link binding the girl to
+her old home life which she missed so much.
+
+Her uncle and aunt had tried to make her happy here at Pine Camp.
+As far as they could do so they had supplied the love and care of
+Momsey and Papa Sherwood.  But Nan was actually ill for her old
+home and her old home associations.
+
+On this morning, by herself in her bedroom, she cried bitterly
+before she appeared before the family.
+
+"I have no right to make them feel miserable just because my,
+heart, is, breaking," she sobbed aloud.  "I won't let them see
+how bad I feel.  But if I don't find Beulah, I just know I shall
+die!"
+
+Could she have run to Momsey for comfort it would have helped,
+Oh, how much!
+
+"I am a silly," Nan told herself at last, warmly.  "But I cannot
+help it.  Oh, dear!  Where can Beulah have gone?"
+
+She bathed her eyes well in the cold spring water brought by Tom
+that she always found in the jug outside her door in the morning,
+and removed such traces of tears as she could; and nobody noticed
+when she went out to breakfast that her eyelids were puffy and
+her nose a bit red.
+
+The moment Rafe caught sight of her he began to squall,
+supposedly like an infant, crying:
+
+"Ma-ma!  Ma-ma!  Tum an' take Too-tums.  Waw!  Waw!  Waw!"
+
+After all her hurt pride and sorrow, Nan would have called up a
+laugh at this.  But Tom, who was drinking at the water bucket,
+wheeled with the full dipper and threw the contents into Rafe's
+face.  That broke off the teasing cousin's voice for a moment;
+but Rafe came up, sputtering and mad.
+
+"Say!  You big oaf!" he shouted.  "What you trying to do?"
+
+"Trying to be funny," said Tom, sharply.  "And you set me the
+example."
+
+"Now, boys!" begged Aunt Kate.  "Don't quarrel."
+
+"And, dear me, boys," gasped Nan, "please don't squabble about
+me."
+
+"That big lummox!" continued Rafe, still angry.  "Because dad
+backs him up and says he ought to lick me, he does this.  I'm
+going to defend myself.  If he does a thing like that again, I'll
+fix him."
+
+Tom laughed in his slow way and lumbered out.  Uncle Henry did
+not hear this, and Nan was worried.  She thought Aunt Kate was
+inclined to side with her youngest boy.  Rafe would always be
+"the baby" to Aunt Kate.
+
+At any rate Nan was very sorry the quarrel had arisen over her.
+And she was careful to say nothing to fan further the flame of
+anger between her cousins.  Nor did she say anything more about
+the lost doll.  So the family had no idea how heartsore and
+troubled the girl really was over the mystery.
+
+It hurt her the more because she could talk to nobody about
+Beulah.  There was not a soul in whom she could confide.  Had
+Bess Harley been here at Pine Camp Nan felt that she could not
+really expect sympathy from her chum at this time; for Bess
+considered herself quite grown up and her own dolls were
+relegated to the younger members of her family.
+
+Nan could write to her chum, however, and did.  She could write
+to Momsey, and did that, too; not forgetting to tell her absent
+parents about old Toby Vanderwiller, and his wife and his
+grandson, and of their dilemma.  If only Momsey's great fortune
+came true, Nan was sure that Gedney Raffer would be paid off and
+Toby would no longer have the threat of dispossession held over
+him.
+
+Nan Sherwood wrote, too, to Mr. Mangel, the principal of the
+Tillbury High School, and told him about the collection the
+crippled grandson of the old lumberman had made, mentioning those
+specimens which had impressed her most.  She had some hope that
+the strange moth might be very valuable.
+
+Nan was so busy writing letters, and helping Aunt Kate preserve
+some early summer fruit, that she did not go far from the house
+during the next few days, and so did not see even Margaret
+Llewellen.  The other girl friends she had made at Pine Camp
+lived too far away for her to visit them often or have them come
+to call on her.
+
+A long letter from Papa Sherwood about this time served to take
+Nan's mind off the mystery, in part, at least.  It was a nice
+letter and most joyfully received by the girl; but to her despair
+it gave promise of no very quick return of her parents from
+Scotland:
+
+"Those relatives of your mother's whom we have met here, Mr.
+Andrew Blake's family, for instance, have treated us most
+kindly.  They are, themselves, all well-to-do, and gentlefolk as
+well.  The disposal by Old Hughie Blake, as he was known
+hereabout, of his estate makes no difference to the other Blakes
+living near Emberon," wrote Mr. Sherwood.
+
+"It is some kin at a distance, children of a half sister of Old
+Hughie, who have made a claim against the estate.  Mr. Andrew
+Blake, who is well versed in the Scotch law, assures us these
+distant relatives have not the shadow of a chance of winning
+their suit.  He is so sure of this that he has kindly offered to
+advance certain sums to your mother to tide us over until the
+case is settled.
+
+"I am sending some money to your Uncle Henry for your use, if any
+emergency should arise.  You must not look for our return, my
+dear Nancy, too soon.  Momsey's health is so much improved by the
+sea voyage and the wonderfully invigorating air here, that I
+should be loath to bring her home at once, even if the matter of
+the legacy were settled.  By the way, the sum she will finally
+receive from Mr. Hugh Blake's estate will be quite as much as the
+first letter from the lawyer led us to expect.  Some of your
+dearest wishes, my dear, may be realized in time."
+
+"Oh!  I can go to Lakeview Hall with Bess, after all!" cried Nan,
+aloud, at this point.
+
+Indeed, that possibility quite filled the girl's mind for a
+while.  Nothing else in Papa Sherwood's letter, aside from the
+good news of Momsey's improved health, so pleased her as this
+thought. She hastened to write a long letter to Bess Harley, with
+Lakeview Hall as the text.
+
+Summer seemed to stride out of the forest now, full panoplied.
+After the frost and snow of her early days at Pine Camp, Nan had
+not expected such heat.  The pools beside the road steamed.  The
+forest was atune from daybreak to midnight with winged denizens,
+for insect and bird life seemed unquenchable in the Big Woods.
+
+Especially was this true of the tamarack swamp.  It was
+dreadfully hot at noontide on the corduroy road which passed Toby
+Vanderwiller's little farm; but often Nan Sherwood went that way
+in the afternoon.  Mr. Mangel, the school principal, had written
+Nan and encouraged her to send a full description of some of
+Corson Vanderwiller's collection, especially of the wonderful
+death's-head moth, to a wealthy collector in Chicago.  Nan did
+this at once.
+
+So, one day, a letter came from the man and in it was a check for
+twenty-five dollars.
+
+"This is a retainer," the gentleman wrote.  "I am much interested
+in your account of the lame boy's specimens.  I want the
+strangely marked moth in any case, and the check pays for an
+option on it until I can come and see his specimens personally."
+
+Nan went that very afternoon to the tamarack swamp to tell the
+Vanderwillers this news and give Toby the check.  She knew poor
+Corson would be delighted, for now he could purchase the longed-
+for silk dress for his grandmother.
+
+The day was so hot and the way so long that Nan was glad to sit
+down when she reached the edge of the sawdust strip, to rest and
+cool off before attempting this unshaded desert.  A cardinal bird
+  one of the sauciest and most brilliant of his saucy and
+brilliant race, flitted about her as she sat upon a log.
+
+"You pretty thing!" crooned Nan.  "If it were not wicked I'd wish
+to have you at home in a cage.  I wish"
+
+She stopped, for in following the flight of the cardinal her gaze
+fastened upon a most surprising thing off at some distance from
+the sawdust road.  A single dead tree, some forty feet in height
+and almost limbless, stood in solemn grandeur in the midst of the
+sawdust waste.  It had been of no use to the woodcutters and they
+had allowed the shell of the old forest monarch to stand.  Now,
+from its broken top, Nan espied a thin, faint column of blue haze
+rising.
+
+It was the queerest thing!  It was not mist, of course and she
+did not see how it could be smoke.  There was no fire at the foot
+of the tree, for she could see the base of the bole plainly.  She
+even got up and ran a little way out into the open in order to
+see the other side of the dead tree.
+
+The sky was very blue, and the air was perfectly still.  Almost
+Nan was tempted to believe that her eyes played her false.  The
+column was almost the color of the sky itself, and it was thin as
+a veil.
+
+How could there be a fire in the top of that tall tree?
+
+"There just isn't!  I don't believe I see straight!" declared Nan
+to herself, moving on along the roadway.  "But I'll speak to Toby
+about it."
+
+Chapter XXV
+THE TEMPEST
+
+Nan, however, did not mention to Toby the haze rising from the
+dead tree.  In the first place, when she reached the little farm
+on the island in the tamarack swamp, old Toby Vanderwiller was
+not at home.  His wife greeted the girl warmly, and Corson was
+glad to see her.  When Nan spread the check before him and told
+him what it was for, and what he could do with so much money, the
+crippled boy was delighted.
+
+It was a secret between them that the grandmother was to have the
+black silk dress that she had longed for all her married life;
+only Nan and Corson knew that Nan was commissioned to get the
+check cashed and buy the dress pattern at the Forks; or send to a
+catalogue house for it if she could not find a suitable piece of
+goods at any of the local stores.
+
+Nan lingered, hoping that Toby would come home.  It finally grew
+so late that she dared not wait longer.  She had been warned by
+Aunt Kate not to remain after dusk in the swamp, nor had she any
+desire to do so.
+
+Moreover there was a black cloud rolling up from the west.  That
+was enough to make the girl hurry, for when it rained in the
+swamp, sometimes the corduroy road was knee deep in water.
+
+The cloud had increased to such proportions when Nan was half way
+across the sawdust desert that she began to run.  She had
+forgotten all about the smoking tree.
+
+Not a breath of air was stirring as yet; but there was the
+promise of wind in that cloud.  The still leaves on the bushes,
+the absence of bird life overhead, the lazy drone of insects,
+portended a swift change soon.  Nan was weather-wise enough to
+know that.
+
+She panted on, stumbling through the loose sawdust, but stumbling
+equally in the ruts; for the way was very rough.  This road was
+lonely enough at best; but it seemed more deserted than ever now.
+
+A red fox, his tail depressed, shot past her, and not many yards
+away.  It startled Nan, for it seemed as though something
+dreadful was about to happen and the fox knew it and was running
+away from it.
+
+She could not run as fast as the fox; but Nan wished that she
+could.  And she likewise wished with all her heart that she would
+meet somebody.
+
+That somebody she hoped would be Tom.  Tom was drawing logs from
+some point near, she knew.  A man down the river had bought some
+timber and they had been cut a few weeks before.  Tom was drawing
+them out of the swamp for the man; and he had mentioned only that
+morning at breakfast that he was working within sight of the
+sawdust tract and the corduroy road.
+
+Nan felt that she would be safe with big, slow Tom.  Even the
+thought of thunder and lightning would lose some of its terrors
+if she could only get to Tom.
+
+Suddenly she heard a voice shouting, then the rattle of chain
+harness.  The voice boomed out a stave of an old hymn:
+
+"On Jordan's stormy bank I stand,
+And cast a wishful eye."
+
+"It's Tom!" gasped Nan, and ran harder.
+
+She was almost across the open space now.  The cooler depths of
+the forest were just ahead.  Beyond, a road crossed the mainly-
+traveled swamp track at right angles to it, and this was the path
+Tom followed.
+
+He was now coming from the river, going deeper into the swamp for
+another log.  Nan continued to run, calling to him at the top of
+her voice.
+
+She came in sight of the young timberman and his outfit.  His
+wagon rattled so that he could not easily hear his cousin calling
+to him.  He sat on the tongue of the wagon, and his big, slow-
+moving horses jogged along, rattling their chains in a jingle
+more noisy than harmonious.
+
+The timber cart was a huge, lumbering affair with ordinary
+cartwheels in front but a huge pair behind with an extended reach
+between them; and to the axle of the rear pair of wheels the
+timber to be transported was swung off the ground and fastened
+with chains.  Nan ran after the rumbling cart and finally Tom saw
+her.
+
+"My mercy me!" gasped the boy, using one of his mother's favorite
+expressions.  "What you doing here, Nan?"
+
+"Chasing you, Tom," laughed the girl.  "Is it going to rain?"
+
+"I reckon.  You'll get wet if it does."
+
+"I don't care so much for that," confessed Nan.  "But I am so
+afraid of thunder!  Oh, there it comes."
+
+The tempest muttered in the distance.  Tom, who had pulled in his
+horses and stopped, looked worried.  "I wish you weren't here,
+Nan," he said.
+
+"How gallant you are, I declare, Tommy Sherwood," cried Nan,
+laughing again, and then shuddering as the growl of the thunder
+was repeated.
+
+"Swamp's no place for a girl in a storm," muttered the boy.
+
+"Well, I am here, Tommy; what are you going to do with me?" she
+asked him, saucily.
+
+"If you're so scared by thunder you'd better begin by stopping
+your ears," he drawled.
+
+Nan laughed.  Slow Tom was not often good at repartee.  "I'm
+going to stick by you till it's over, Tom," she said, hopping up
+behind him on the wagon-tongue.
+
+"Cracky, Nan!  You'll get soaked.  It's going to just smoke in a
+few minutes," declared the anxious young fellow.
+
+And that reminded Nan again of the smoking tree.
+
+"Oh, Tom!  Do you know I believe there is a tree afire over
+yonder," she cried, pointing.
+
+"A tree afire?"
+
+"Yes.  I saw it smoking."
+
+"My mercy me!" exclaimed Tom again.  "What do you mean?"
+
+Nan told him about the mystery.  The fact that a column of smoke
+arose out of the top of the dead tree seemed to worry Tom.  Nan
+became alarmed.
+
+"Oh, dear, Tom!  Do you really think it was afire?"
+
+"I, don't know.  If it was afire, it is afire now," he said.
+"Show me, Nan."
+
+He turned the horses out of the beaten track through the brush
+and brambles, to the edge of the open place which had been heaped
+with sawdust from the steam-mill.
+
+Just as they broke cover a vivid flash of lightning cleaved the
+black cloud that had almost reached the zenith by now, and the
+deep rumble of thunder changed to a sharp chatter; then followed
+a second flash and a deafening crash.
+
+"Oh, Tom!" gasped Nan, as she clung to him.
+
+"The flash you see'll never hit you, Nan," drawled Tom, trying to
+be comforting.  "Remember that."
+
+"It isn't so much the lightning I fear as it is the thunder,"
+murmured Nan, in the intermission.  "It just so-o-ounds as though
+the whole house was coming down."
+
+"Ho!" cried Tom.  "No house here, Nan."
+
+"But-----"
+
+The thunder roared again.  A light patter on the leaves and
+ground announced the first drops of the storm.
+
+"Which tree was it you saw smoking?" asked the young fellow.
+
+Nan looked around to find the tall, broken-topped tree.  A murmur
+that had been rising in the distance suddenly grew to a sweeping
+roar.  The trees bent before the blast.  Particles of sawdust
+stung their faces.  The horses snorted and sprang ahead.  Tom had
+difficulty in quieting them.
+
+Then the tempest swooped upon them in earnest.
+
+Chapter XXVI
+BUFFETED BY THE ELEMENTS
+
+Nan knew she had never seen it rain so hard before. The falling
+water was like a drop-curtain, swept across the stage of the open
+tract of sawdust.  In a few minutes they were saturated to the
+skin.  Nan could not have been any wetter if she had gone in
+swimming.
+
+"Oh!" she gasped into Tom's ear.  "It is the deluge!"
+
+"Never was, but one rain  't didn't clear up yet," he returned,
+with difficulty, for his big body was sheltering Nan in part, and
+he was facing the blast.
+
+"I know.  That's this one," she agreed.  "But, it's awful."
+
+"Say!  Can you point out that tree that smoked?" asked Tom.
+
+"Goodness!  It can't be smoking now," gasped Nan, stifled with
+rain and laughter.  "This storm would put out Vesuvius."
+
+"Don't know him," retorted her cousin.  "But it'd put most
+anybody out, I allow.  Still, fire isn't so easy to quench.
+Where's the tree?"
+
+"I can't see it, Tom," declared Nan, with her eyes tightly
+closed.  She really thought he was too stubborn.  Of course, if
+there had been any fire in that tree-top, this rain would put it
+out in about ten seconds.  So Nan believed.
+
+"Look again, Nan," urged her cousin.  "This is no funning.  If
+there's fire in this swamp  "
+
+"Goodness, gracious!" snapped Nan.  "What a fuss-budget you are
+to be sure, Tom.  If there was a fire, this rain would smother
+it.  Oh!  Did it ever pelt one so before?"
+
+Fortunately the rain was warm, and she was not much discomforted
+by being wet.  Tom still clung to the idea that she had started
+in his slow mind.
+
+"Fire's no funning, I tell you," he growled.  "Sometimes it
+smoulders for days and days, and weeks and weeks; then it bursts
+out like a hurricane."
+
+"But the rain"
+
+This sawdust is mighty hard-packed, and feet deep," interrupted
+Tom.  "The fire might be deep down  "
+
+"Why, Tom!  How ridiculously you talk!" cried the girl.  "Didn't
+I tell you I saw the smoke coming out of the top of a tree?  Fire
+couldn't be deep down in the sawdust and the smoke come out of
+the tree top."
+
+"Couldn't, heh?" returned Tom.  "Dead tree, wasn't it?"
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+"Hollow, too, of course?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Might be hollow clear through its length," Tom explained
+seriously.  "The butt might be all rotted out.  Just a tough
+shell of a tree standing there, and 'twould be a fine chimney if
+the fire was smouldering down at its old roots."
+
+"Oh, Tom! I never thought of such a thing," gasped Nan.
+
+"And you don't see the tree now?"
+
+"Let me look!  Let me look!" cried Nan, conscience-stricken.
+
+In spite of the beating rain and wind she got to her knees, still
+clinging to her big cousin, and then stood upon the broad tongue
+of the wagon.  The horses stood still with their heads down,
+bearing the buffeting of the storm with the usual patience of
+dumb beasts.
+
+A sheer wall of water seemed to separate them from every object
+out upon the open land.  Behind them the bulk of the forest
+loomed as another barrier.  Nan had really never believed that
+rain could fall so hard.  It almost took her breath.
+
+Moreover, what Tom said about the smoking tree began to trouble
+the girl.  She thought of the fire at Pale Lick, of which she had
+received hints from several people.  That awful conflagration, in
+which she believed two children belonging to her uncle and aunt
+had lost their lives, had started in the sawdust.
+
+Suddenly she cried aloud and seized Tom more tightly.
+
+"Cracky!  Don't choke a fellow!" he coughed.
+
+"Oh, Tom!"
+
+"Well"
+
+"I think I see it."
+
+"The tree that smoked?" asked her cousin.
+
+"Yes.  There!"
+
+For the moment it seemed as though the downpour lightened.
+Veiled by the still falling water a straight stick rose high in
+the air ahead of them.  Tom chirruped to the horses and made
+them, though unwilling, go forward.
+
+They dragged the heavy cart unevenly.  Through the heavy downpour
+the trail was hard to follow, and once in a while a rear wheel
+bumped over a stump, and Nan was glad to drop down upon the
+tongue again, and cling more tightly than ever to her cousin's
+collar.
+
+"Sure that's it?" queried Tom, craning his neck to look up into
+the tall, straight tree.
+
+"I, I'm almost sure," stammered Nan.
+
+"I, don't, see, any, smoke," drawled Tom, with his head still
+raised.
+
+The rain had almost ceased, an intermission which would not be
+of long duration.  Nan saw that her cousin's prophecy had been
+true; the ground actually smoked after the downpour.  The sun-
+heated sawdust steamed furiously.  They seemed to be crossing a
+heated cauldron.  Clouds of steam rose all about the timber cart.
+
+"Why, Tommy!" Nan choked.  "It does seem as though there must be
+fire under this sawdust now."
+
+Tom brought his own gaze down from the empty tree-top with a
+jerk.  "Hoo!" he shouted, and leaned forward suddenly to flick
+his off horse with the whiplash.  Just then the rear wheel on
+that side slumped down into what seemed a veritable volcano.
+
+Flame and smoke spurted out around the broad wheel.  Nan
+screamed.  The wind suddenly swooped down upon them, and a ball
+of fire, flaming sawdust was shot into the air and was
+tossed twenty feet by a puff of wind.
+
+"We're over an oven!" gasped Tom, and laid the whip solidly
+across the backs of the frightened horses.
+
+They plunged.  Another geyser of fire and smoke spurted from the
+hole into which the rear wheel had slumped.  Again and again the
+big horses flung themselves into the collars in an endeavor to
+get the wheel out.
+
+"Oh, Tommy!" cried Nan.  "We'll be burned up!"
+
+"No you won't," declared her cousin, leaping down.  "Get off and
+run, Nan."
+
+"But you,"
+
+"Do as I say!" commanded Tom.  "Run!"
+
+"Where, where'll I run to?" gasped the girl, leaping off the
+tongue, too, and away from the horses' heels.
+
+"To the road.  Get toward home!" cried Tom, running around to the
+rear of the timber cart.
+
+"And leave you here?" cried Nan.  "I guess not, Mr. Tom!" she
+murmured.
+
+But he did not hear that.  He had seized his axe and was striding
+toward the edge of the forest.  For a moment Nan feared that Tom
+was running away as he advised her to do.  But that would not be
+like Tom Sherwood!
+
+At the edge of the forest he laid the axe to the root of a
+sapling about four inches through at the butt.  Three strokes,
+and the tree was down.  In a minute he had lopped off the
+branches for twenty feet, then removed the top with a single
+blow.
+
+As he turned, dragging the pole with him, up sprang the fire
+again from the hollow into which the wheel of the wagon had sunk.
+It was a smoking furnace down there, and soon the felloe and
+spokes would be injured by the flames and heat.  Sparks flew on
+the wings of the wind from out of the mouth of the hole.  Some of
+them scattered about the horses and they plunged again,
+squealing.
+
+It seemed to Nan impossible after the recent cloudburst that the
+fire could find anything to feed upon.  But underneath the packed
+surface of the sawdust, the heat of summer had been drying out
+the moisture for weeks.  And the fire had been smouldering for a
+long time.  Perhaps for yards and yards around, the interior of
+the sawdust heap was a glowing furnace.
+
+Nan would not run away and Tom did not see her.  As he came
+plunging back to the stalled wagon, suddenly his foot slumped
+into the yielding sawdust and he fell upon his face.  He cried
+out with surprise or pain.  Nan, horrified, saw the flames and
+smoke shooting out of the hole into which her cousin had stepped.
+For the moment the girl felt as if her heart had stopped beating.
+
+"Oh, Tom!  Oh, Tom!" she shrieked, and sprang toward him.
+
+Tom was struggling to get up.  His right leg had gone into the
+yielding mass up to his hip, and despite his struggles he could
+not get it out.  A long yellow flame shot out of the hole and
+almost licked his face.  It, indeed, scorched his hair on one
+side of his head.
+
+But Nan did not scream again.  She needed her breath, all that
+she could get, for a more practical purpose.  Her cousin waved
+her back feebly, and tried to tell her to avoid the fire.
+
+Nan rushed in, got behind him, and seized her cousin under the
+arms.  To lift him seemed a giant's task; but nevertheless she
+tried.
+
+Chapter XXVII
+OLD TOBY IN TROUBLE
+
+The squealing and plunging of the horses, the rattling of their
+chains, the shrieking of the wind, the reverberating cracks of
+thunder made a deafening chorus in Nan's ears.  She could
+scarcely hear what the imperiled Tom shouted to her.  Finally she
+got it:
+
+"Not that way!  Pull sideways!"
+
+He beat his hands impotently upon the crust of sawdust to the
+left.  Nan tugged that way.  Tom pulled, too, heaving his great
+body upward, and scratching and scrambling along the sawdust with
+fingers spread like claws.  His right leg came out of the hole,
+and just then the rain descended torrentially again.
+
+The flames from this opening in the roof of the furnace were
+beaten down.  Tom got to his feet, shaking and panting.  He
+hobbled painfully when he walked.
+
+But in a moment he seized upon the pole he had dropped and made
+for the smoking timber cart.  The terrified horses tried again
+and again to break away; but the chain harnesses were too strong;
+nor did the mired wheel budge.
+
+"Oh, Tom!  Oh, Tom!" begged Nan.  "Let us make the poor horses
+free, and run ourselves."
+
+"And lose my wagon?" returned her cousin, grimly.  "Not much!"
+
+The rain, which continued to descend with tropical violence,
+almost beat Nan to the ground; but Tom Sherwood worked furiously.
+
+He placed the butt of the lever he had cut under the hub of the
+great wheel.  There was a sound stump at hand to use as a
+fulcrum.  Tom threw himself upon the end of the lever.  Nan ran
+to add her small weight to the endeavor.  The wheel creaked and
+began to rise slowly.
+
+The sawdust was not clinging, it was not like real mire.  There
+was no suction to hold the wheel down.  Merely the crust had
+broken in and the wheel had encountered an impediment of a sound
+tree root in front of it so that, when the horses tugged, the
+tire had come against the root and dragged back the team.
+
+Out poured the flames and smoke again, the flames hissing as they
+were quenched by the falling water.  Higher, higher rose the cart
+wheel.  Nan, who was behind her cousin, saw his neck and ears
+turn almost purple from the strain he put in the effort to
+dislodge the wheel.  Up, up it came, and then-----
+
+"Gid-ap!  'Ap, boys!  Yah! Gid-ap!"
+
+The horses strained.  The yoke chains rattled.  Tom gasped to
+Nan:
+
+"Take my whip!  Quick!  Let 'em have it!"
+
+The girl had always thought the drover's whip Tom used a very
+cruel implement, and she wished he did not use it.  But she knew
+now that it was necessary.  She leaped for the whip which Tom had
+thrown down and showed that she knew its use.
+
+The lash hissed and cracked over the horses' backs.  Tom voiced
+one last, ringing shout.  The cart wheel rose up, the horses
+leaped forward, and the big timber cart was out of its plight.
+
+Flames and smoke poured out of the hole again.  The rain dashing
+upon and into the aperture could not entirely quell the stronger
+element.  But the wagon was safe, and so, too, were the two
+cousins.
+
+Tom was rather painfully burned and Nan began to cry about it.
+"Oh!  Oh! You poor, poor dear!" she sobbed.  "It must smart you
+dreadfully, Tommy."
+
+"Don't worry about me," he answered.  "Get aboard.  Let's get out
+of this."
+
+"Are you going home?"
+
+"Bet you!" declared Tom.  "Why, after this rain stops, this whole
+blamed place may be in flames.  Must warn folks and get out the
+fire guard."
+
+"But the rain will put out the fire, Tom," said Nan, who could
+not understand even now the fierce power of a conflagration of
+this kind.
+
+"Look there!" yelled Tom, suddenly glancing back over her head as
+she sat behind him on the wagon tongue.
+
+With a roar like an exploding boiler, the flames leaped up the
+heart of the hollow tree.  The bursted crust of the sawdust heap
+had given free ingress to the wind, and a draught being started,
+it sucked the flames directly up the tall chimney the tree made.
+
+The fire burst from the broken top.  The flames met the falling
+rain as though they were unquenchable.  Indeed the clouds were
+scattering, and second by second the downfall was decreasing.
+The tempest of rain was almost over; but the wind remained to fan
+the flames that had now broken cover in several spots, as well as
+through the tall and hollow tree.
+
+Tom hastened his team toward the main road that passed through
+the tamarack swamp.  At one end of it was Pine Camp; in the other
+direction, after passing the knoll on which the Vanderwillers
+lived, the roadway came out upon a more traveled road to the
+forks and the railroad.
+
+Pine Camp was the nearest place where help could be secured to
+beat down the fire, if, indeed, this were at all possible.
+There was a telephone line there which, in a roundabout way,
+could be made to carry the news of the forest fire to all the
+settlements in the Big Woods and along the railroad line.
+
+But Nan seized Tom's arm and shook it to call his attention as
+the horses neared the road.
+
+"Tom!  For goodness' sake!" she gasped.
+
+"What's the matter now?" her cousin demanded, rather sharply, for
+his burns were painful.
+
+"Toby, the Vanderwillers!  What will become of them?"
+
+"What d'you mean?" asked Tom, aghast.
+
+"That poor cripple!  They can't get away, he and his
+grandmother.  Perhaps Toby hasn't come home yet  "
+
+"And the wind's that way," Tom interrupted.
+
+It was indeed.  The storm had come up from the west and the wind
+was still blowing almost directly into the east.  A sheet of
+flame flew from the top of the old dead tree even as the boy
+spoke, and was carried toward the thick forest.  It did not reach
+it, and as the blazing brand fell it was quenched on the wet
+surface of the sawdust.
+
+Nevertheless, the fire was spreading under the crust and soon the
+few other dead trees left standing on the tract would burst into
+flame.  As they looked, the fire burst out at the foot of the
+tree and began to send long tongues of flame licking up the
+shredded bark.
+
+The effect of the drenching rain would soon be gone and the fire
+would secure great headway.
+
+"Those poor folks are right in the track of the fire, I allow,"
+admitted Tom.  "I wonder if he's got a good wide fire strip
+ploughed?"
+
+"Oh!  I know what you mean," Nan cried.  "You mean all around the
+edge of his farm where it meets the woods?"
+
+"Yes.  A ploughed strip may save his buildings.  Fire can't
+easily cross ploughed ground.  Only, if these woods get really
+ablaze, the fire will jump half a mile!"
+
+"Oh no, Tom!  You don't mean that?"
+
+"Yes, I do," said her cousin, gloomily.  "Tobe's in a bad place.
+You don't know what a forest fire means, nor the damage it does,
+Nannie.  I'm right troubled by old Tobe's case."
+
+"But there's no danger for Pine Camp, is there?" asked the girl,
+eagerly.
+
+"Plenty of folks there to make a fire-guard.  Besides, the wind's
+not that way, exactly opposite.  And she's not likely to switch
+around so soon, neither.  I, don't, know"
+
+"The folks at home ought to know about it," Nan interrupted.
+
+"They'll know it, come dark," Tom said briefly.  "They'll be
+looking for you and they'll see the blaze.  Why!  After dark that
+old dead tree will look like a lighthouse for miles 'n' miles!"
+
+"I suppose it will," agreed Nan.  "But I do want to get home,
+Tom."
+
+"Maybe the storm's not over," said her cousin, cocking an eye
+towards the clouded heavens.  "If it sets in for a long rain (and
+one's due about this time according to the Farmer's Almanac) it
+would keep the fire down, put it out entirely, maybe.  But we
+can't tell."
+
+Nan sighed and patted his shoulder.  "I know it's our duty to go
+to the island, Tommy.  You're a conscientious old thing.  Drive
+on."
+
+Tom clucked to the horses.  He steered them into the roadway, but
+headed away from home.  Another boy with the pain he was bearing
+would not have thought of the old lumberman and his family.  They
+were the only people likely to be in immediate danger from the
+fire if it spread.  The cousins might easily reach the
+Vanderwiller's island, warn them of the fire, and return to town
+before it got very late, or before the fire crossed the wood-
+road.
+
+They rumbled along, soon striking the corduroy road, having the
+thick forest on either hand again.  The ditches were running bank
+full.  Over a quagmire the logs, held down by cross timbers
+spiked to the sleepers, shook under the wheels, and the water
+spurted up through the interstices as the horses put down their
+heavy feet.
+
+"An awful lot of water fell," Tom said soberly.
+
+"Goodness!  The swamp is full," agreed Nan.
+
+"We may have some trouble in reaching Toby's place," the boy
+added.  "But maybe,"
+
+He halted in his speech, and the next instant pulled the horses
+down to a willing stop.  "Hark-a-that!" whispered Tom.
+
+"Can it be anybody crying?  Maybe it's a wildcat," said Nan, with
+a vivid remembrance of her adventure in the snow that she had
+never yet told to any member of the family.
+
+"It's somebody shouting, all right," observed Tom.  "Up ahead a
+way.  Gid-ap!"
+
+He hurried the horses on, and they slopped through the water
+which, in places, flowed over the road, while in others it
+actually lifted the logs from their foundation and threatened to
+spoil the roadway entirely.
+
+Again and again they heard the faint cry, a man's voice.  Tom
+stood up and sent a loud cry across the swamp in answer:
+
+"We're coming!  Hold on!
+
+"Don't know what's the matter with him," he remarked, dropping
+down beside Nan again, and stirring the horses to a faster pace.
+"S'pose he's got into a mud-hold, team and all, maybe."
+
+"Oh, Tom!  Maybe he'll be sucked right down into this awful mud."
+
+"Not likely.  There aren't many quicksands, or the like,
+hereabout.  Never heard tell of 'em, if there are.  Old Tobe lost
+a cow once in some slough  "
+
+They came to a small opening in the forest just then.  Here a
+great tree had been uprooted by the wind and leaned precariously
+over a quagmire beside the roadway.  Fortunately only some of the
+lower branches touched the road line and Tom could get his team
+around them.
+
+Then the person in trouble came into sight.  Nan and her cousin
+saw him immediately.  He was in the middle of the shaking morass
+waist deep in the mire, and clinging to one of the small hanging
+limbs of the uprooted tree.
+
+"Hickory splits!" ejaculated Tom, stopping the team.  "It's old
+Tobe himself!  Did you ever see the like!"
+
+Chapter XXVIII
+THE GIRL IN THE HOLLOW TREE
+
+Just why old Toby Vanderwiller was clinging to that branch and
+did not try to wade ashore, neither Nan nor Tom could understand.
+But one thing was plain: the old lumberman thought himself in
+danger, and every once in a while he gave out a shout for help.
+But his voice was growing weak.
+
+"Hey, Tobe!" yelled Tom.  "Why don't you wade ashore?"
+
+"There ye be, at last, hey?" snarled the old man, who was
+evidently just as angry as he could be.  "Thought  ye'd never
+come. Hearn them horses rattling their chains, must ha' been for
+an hour."
+
+"That's stretching it some," laughed Tom.  "That tree hasn't been
+toppled over an hour."
+
+"Huh!  Ye can't tell me nothin' 'beout that!" declared Toby.  "I
+was right here when it happened."
+
+"Goodness1" gasped Nan.
+
+"Yep.  And lemme tell ye, I only jest 'scaped being knocked down
+when she fell."
+
+"My!" murmured Nan again.
+
+"That's how I got inter this muck hole," growled the old
+lumberman.  "I jumped ter dodge the tree, and landed here."
+
+"Why don't you wade ashore?" demanded Tom again, preparing in a
+leisurely manner to cast the old man the end of a line he had
+coiled on the timber cart.
+
+"Yah!" snarled Toby.  "Why don't Miz' Smith keep pigs?  Don't ax
+fool questions, Tommy, but gimme holt on that rope.  I'm afraid
+ter let go the branch, for I'll sink, and if I try ter pull
+myself up by it, the whole blamed tree'll come down onter me.  Ye
+see how it's toppling?"
+
+It was true that the fallen tree was in a very precarious
+position.  When Toby stirred at all, the small weight he rested
+on the branch made the head of the tree dip perilously.  And if
+it did fall the old man would be thrust into the quagmire by the
+weight of the branches which overhung his body.
+
+"Let go of it, Toby!" called Tom, accelerating his motions.
+"Catch this!"
+
+He flung the coil with skill and Toby seized it.  The rocking
+tree groaned and slipped forward a little.  Toby gave a yell that
+could have been heard much farther than his previous cries.
+
+But Tom sank back on the taut rope and fairly jerked the old man
+out of the miry hole.  Scrambling on hands and knees, Toby
+reached firmer ground, and then the road itself.
+
+Nan uttered a startled exclamation and cowered behind the cart.
+The huge tree, groaning and its roots splintering, sagged down
+and, in an instant, the spot there the old lumberman had been,
+was completely covered by the interlacing branches of the
+uprooted tree.
+
+"Close squeal, that," remarked Tom, helping the old man to his
+feet.
+
+Toby stared at them both, wiping the mire from his face as he did
+so.  He was certainly a scarecrow figure after his submersion in
+the mud; gut Nan did not feel like laughing at him.  The escape
+had been too narrow.
+
+"Guess the Almighty sent you just in time, Tom, my boy," said
+Toby Vanderwiller.  "He must have suthin' more for the old man to
+do yet, before he cashes in.  And little Sissy, too.  Har!  Henry
+Sherwood's son and Henry Sherwood's niece. Reckon I owe him a
+good turn," he muttered.
+
+Nan heard this, though Tom did not, and her heart leaped.  She
+hoped that Toby would feel sufficient gratitude to help Uncle
+Henry win his case against Gedney Raffer.  But, of course, this
+was not the time to speak of it.
+
+When the old lumberman heard about the fire in the sawdust he was
+quite as excited as the young folk had been.  It was fast growing
+dark now, but it was impossible from the narrow road to see even
+the glow of the fire against the clouded sky.
+
+"I believe it's goin' to open up and rain ag'in," Toby said.
+"But if you want to go on and plow me a fire-strip, Tommy, I'll
+be a thousand times obleeged to you."
+
+"That's what I came this way for," said the young fellow briefly.
+"Hop on and we'll go to the island as quickly as possible."
+
+They found Mrs. Vanderwiller and the crippled boy anxiously
+watching the flames in the tree top from the porch of the little
+house on the island.  Nan ran to them to relate their adventures,
+while Toby got out the plow and Tom hitched his big horses to it.
+
+The farm was not fenced, for the road and forest bounded it
+completely.  Tom put the plow in at the edge of the wood and
+turned his furrows toward it, urging the horses into a trot.  It
+was not that the fire was near; but the hour was growing late and
+Tom knew that his mother and father would be vastly anxious about
+Nan.
+
+The young fellow made twelve laps, turning twelve broad furrows
+that surely would guard the farm against any ordinary fire.  But
+by the time he was done it did not look as though the fire in the
+sawdust would spread far.  The clouds were closing up once more
+and it was again raining, gently but with an insistence that
+promised a night of downpour, at least.
+
+Old Mrs. Vanderwiller had made supper, and insisted upon their
+eating before starting for Pine Camp.  And Tom, at least, did his
+share with knife and fork, while his horses ate their measure of
+corn in the paddock.  It was dark as pitch when they started for
+home, but Tom was cheerful and sure of his way, so Nan was
+ashamed to admit that she was frightened.
+
+"Tell yer dad I'll be over ter Pine Camp ter see him 'fore many
+days," Old Toby jerked out, as they were starting.  "I got
+suthin' to say to him, I have!"
+
+Tom did not pay much attention to this; but Nan did.  Her heart
+leaped for joy.  She believed that Toby Vanderwiller's words
+promised help for Uncle Henry.
+
+But she said nothing to Tom about it.  She only clung to his
+shoulder as the heavy timber cart rattled away from the island.
+
+A misty glow hung over the sawdust strip as they advanced; but
+now that the wind had died down the fire could not spread.
+Beside the road the glow worms did their feeble best to light the
+way; and now and then an old stump in the swamp displayed a
+ghostly gleam of phosphorus.
+
+Nan had never been in the swamp before at night.  The rain had
+driven most of the frogs and other croaking creatures to cover.
+But now and then a sudden rumble  "Better-go-roun'!" or "Knee-
+deep!  Knee-deep!"   proclaimed the presence of the green-
+jacketed gentlemen with the yellow vests.
+
+"Goodness me!  I'd be scared to death to travel this road by
+myself," Nan said, as they rode on.  "The frogs make such awful
+noises."
+
+"But frogs won't hurt you," drawled Tom.
+
+"I know all that," sighed Nan.  "But they sound as if they would.
+There!  That one says, just as plain as plain can be, 'Throw 'im
+in!  Throw 'im in!"
+
+"Good!" chuckled Tom.  "And there's a drunken old rascal calling:
+'Jug-er-rum!  Jug-er-rum!'!"
+
+A nighthawk, wheeling overhead through the rain, sent down her
+discordant cry.  Deep in a thicket a whip-poor-will complained.
+It was indeed a ghostly chorus that attended their slow progress
+through the swamp at Pine Camp.
+
+When they crossed the sawdust tract there was little sign of the
+fire.  The dead tree had fallen and was just a glowing pile of
+coals, fast being quenched by the gently falling rain.  For the
+time, at least, the danger of a great conflagration was past.
+
+"Oh!  I am so glad," announced Nan, impetuously.  "I was afraid
+it was going to be like that Pale Lick fire."
+
+"What Pale Lick fire?" demanded Tom, quickly.  "What do you know
+about that?"
+
+"Not much, I guess," admitted his cousin, slowly. "But you used
+to live there, didn't you?"
+
+"Rafe and I don't remember anything about it," said Tom, in his
+quiet way.  "Rafe was a baby and I wasn't much better.  Marm
+saved us both, so we've been told.  She and dad never speak
+about it."
+
+"Oh! And Indian Pete?" whispered Nan.
+
+"He saved the whole of us -  dad and all.  He knew a way out
+through a slough and across a lake.  He had a dug-out.  He got
+badly burned dragging dad to the boat when he was almost
+suffocated with smoke," Tom said soberly.
+
+"'Tisn't anything we talk about much, Nan.  "Who told you?"
+
+"Oh, it's been hinted to me by various people," said Nan, slowly.
+"But I saw Injun Pete, Tom."
+
+"When?  He hasn't been to Pine Camp since you came."
+
+Nan told her cousin of her adventure in the hollow near
+Blackton's lumber camp.  Tom was much excited by that.
+
+"Gracious me, Nan!  But you are a plucky girl.  Wait till Rafe
+hears about it.  And marm and dad will praise you for being so
+level-headed today.  Aren't many girls like you, Nan, I bet!"
+
+"Nor boys like you, Tom," returned the girl, shyly.  "How brave
+you were, staying to pull that old wagon-wheel out of the fire."
+
+"Ugh1" growled Tom.  "A fat time I'd have had there if it hadn't
+been for you helping me out of the oven.  Cracky!  I thought I
+was going to have my leg burned to a cinder.
+
+"That would have been terrible!" shuddered Nan.  "What would poor
+Aunt Kate have said?"
+
+"We can't tell her anything about it," Tom hastened to say.  "You
+see, my two older brothers, Jimmy and Alfred, were asleep in the
+garret of our house at Pale Lick, and marm thought they'd got
+out.  It wasn't until afterward that she learned they'd been
+burned up with the house.  She's never got over it."
+
+"I shouldn't think she would," sighed Nan.
+
+"And you see she's awfully afraid of fire, even now," said Tom.
+
+They rattled on over the logs of the road; here and there they
+came to bad places, where the water had not gone down; and the
+horses were very careful in putting their hoofs down upon the
+shaking logs.  However, it was not much over an hour after
+leaving the island that they spied the lights of Pine Camp from
+the top of the easy rise leading out of the tamarack swamp.
+
+They met Rafe with a lantern half way down the hill.  Uncle Henry
+was away and Aunt Kate had sent Rafe out to look for Nan,
+although she supposed that the girl had remained at the
+Vanderwillers' until the rain was over, and that Toby would bring
+her home.
+
+There was but one other incident of note before the three of them
+reached the rambling house Uncle Henry had built on the outskirts
+of Pine Camp.  As they turned off the swamp road through the lane
+that ran past the Llewellen cottage, Rafe suddenly threw the ray
+of his lantern into a hollow tree beside the roadway.  A small
+figure was there, and it darted back out of sight.
+
+"There!" shouted Rafe.  "I knew you were there, you little
+nuisance.  What did you run out of the house and follow me for,
+Mar'gret Llewellen?"
+
+He jumped in and seized the child, dragging her forth from the
+hollow of the big tree.  He held her, while she squirmed and
+screamed.
+
+"You lemme alone, Rafe Sherwood!  Lemme alone!" she commanded.
+"I ain't doin' nothin' to you."
+
+"Well, I bet you are up to some monkey-shines, out this time of
+night," said Rafe, giving her a little shake.  "You come on back
+home, Mag."
+
+"I won't!" declared the girl.
+
+"Yes, do, Margaret," begged Nan.  "It's going to rain harder.
+Don't hurt her, Rafe."
+
+"Yah!  You couldn't hurt her," said Rafe.  "She's as tough as a
+little pine-knot, and don't you forget it!  Aren't you, Mag?"
+
+"Lemme go!" repeated Margaret, angrily.
+
+"What did you chase down here after me for?" asked Rafe, the
+curious.
+
+"I, I thought mebbe you was comin' to hunt for something,"
+stammered the girl.
+
+"So I was.  For Nancy here," laughed Rafe.
+
+"Thought 'twas somethin' of mine," said the girl.  "Lemme go
+now!"
+
+She jerked away her hand and scuttled into the house that they
+were then just passing.
+
+"Wonder what the little imp came out to watch me for?" queried
+Rafe.
+
+After they had arrived at home and the excitement o the return
+was over; after she and Tom had told as much of their adventures
+as they thought wise, and Nan had retired to the east chamber,
+she thought again about Margaret and her queer actions by the
+roadside.
+
+"Why, that tree is where Margaret hides her most precious
+possessions," said Nan, suddenly, sitting up in bed.  "Why, what
+could it be she was afraid Rafe would find there?  Why   can that
+child have hidden something there that she doesn't want any of us
+to see?"
+
+Late as it was, and dark as it was, and stormy as the night was,
+she felt that she must know immediately what Margaret Llewellen
+had hidden in the hollow tree.
+
+Chapter XXIX
+GREAT NEWS FROM SCOTLAND
+
+Nan put two and two together, and the answer came right.
+
+She got out of bed, lit her lamp again and began to dress.  She
+turned her light down to a dim glimmer, however, for she did not
+want her aunt to look out of the window of her bedroom on the
+other side of the parlor and catch a glimpse of her light.
+
+In the half darkness Nan made a quick toilet; and then, with her
+raincoat on and hood over her head, she hesitated with her hand
+upon the knob of the door.
+
+"If I go through the parlor and out the side door, Aunt Kate will
+hear me," thought Nan.  "That won't do at all."
+
+She looked at the further window.  Outside the rain was pattering
+and there was absolutely no light.  In the pocket of her raincoat
+Nan had slipped the electric torch she had brought from home,
+something of which Aunt Kate cordially approved, and was always
+begging Uncle Henry to buy one like it.
+
+The pocket lamp showed her the fastenings of the screen.  Tom had
+made it to slide up out of the way when she wanted to open or
+close the sash.  And, as far as she could see, any one could open
+it from the outside as easily as from the room itself.
+
+"And that's just what she did," decided Nan.  "How foolish of me
+not to think of it before."
+
+With this enigmatical observation Nan prepared to leave the room
+by this very means.  She was agile, and the sill of the window
+was only three feet from the ground.  It was through this opening
+that she had helped Margaret Llewellen into her room on the first
+occasion that odd child had visited her.
+
+Nan jumped out, let the screen down softly, and hurried across
+the unfenced yard to the road.  She knew well enough when she
+reached the public track, despite the darkness for the mirey clay
+stuck to her shoes and made the walking difficult.
+
+She flashed her lamp once, to get her bearings, and then set off
+down the lane toward the swamp road.  There was not a light in
+any house she passed, not even in Mr. Fen Llewellen's cottage.
+"I guess Margaret's fast asleep," murmured Nan, as she passed
+swiftly on.
+
+The rain beat down upon the girl steadily, and Nan found it
+shivery out here in the dark and storm.  However, her reason for
+coming, Nan conceived, was a very serious one.  This was no
+foolish escapade.
+
+By showing her light now and then she managed to follow the dark
+lane without stepping off into any of the deep puddles which lay
+beside the path.  She came, finally, to the spot where Rafe had
+met her and Tom with his lantern that evening.  Here stood the
+great tree with a big hollow in it, Margaret Llewellen's
+favorite playhouse.
+
+For a moment Nan hesitated.  The place looked so dark   and there
+might be something alive in the hollow.
+
+But she plucked up courage and flashed her lamp into it.  The
+white ray played about the floor of the hollow.  The other
+Llewellen children dared not come here, for Margaret punished
+them if they disturbed anything belonging to her.
+
+What Nan was looking for was not in sight.  She stepped inside,
+and raised the torch.  The rotting wood had been neatly scooped
+out, and where the aperture grew smaller at the top a wide shelf
+had been made by the ingenious Margaret.  Nan had never been in
+this hide-out before.
+
+"It must be here!  It must be here!" she kept telling herself,
+and stood on her tiptoes to feel along the shelf, which was above
+her head.
+
+Nan discovered nothing at first.  She felt along the entire
+length of the shelf again.  Nothing!
+
+"I know better!" she almost sobbed.  "My dear, beautiful  "
+
+She jumped up, feeling back on the shelf with her right hand.
+Her fingers touched something, and it was not the rotting wood
+of the tree!
+
+"It's there!" breathed the excited girl.  She flashed her lamp
+around, searching for something to stand upon.  There in the
+corner was a roughly made footstool.
+
+In a moment Nan had the footstool set in position, and had
+stepped upon it.  Her hand darted to the back of the shelf.
+There was a long box, a pasteboard box.
+
+Nan dropped her lamp with a little scream of ecstasy, and of
+course the light went out.  But she had the long box clasped in
+her arms.  She could not wait to get home with it, but tumbled
+off the stool and sat down upon it, picked up the torch, held it
+so the round spot-light gave her illumination, and untied the
+string.
+
+Off came the cover.  She peeped within.  The pink and white
+loveliness of Beulah's wax features peered up at her.
+
+In fifteen minutes Nan was back in her room, without being
+discovered by anybody, and with the doll safely clasped in her
+arms.  Indeed, she went to bed a second time that night with her
+beloved playmate lying on the pillow beside her, just as she had
+done when a little girl.
+
+"I suppose I'm foolish," she confessed to Aunt Kate the next
+morning when she told her about it.  "But I loved Beulah so much
+when I was little that I can't forget her now.  If I go to
+Lakeview Hall I'm going to take her with me.  I don't care what
+the other girls say!"
+
+"You are faithful in your likes, child," said Aunt Kate nodding.
+"'Tis a good trait.  But I'd like to lay that Marg'ret Llewellen
+across my knee, for her capers."
+
+"And I didn't think she cared for dolls," murmured Nan.
+
+But it was young Bob who betrayed the mysterious reason for his
+sister's act.
+
+"Huh!" he said, with a boy's disgust for such things.  "Mag's
+crazy about pretty faces, if they're smooth, an' pink.  She
+peeked into that Sherwood gal's room and seed her playin' doll;
+then she had ter have it for herself 'cause it was so pretty and
+had a smooth face, not like the kids' dolls that Aunt Matildy
+buyed."
+
+Poor little Margaret was greatly chagrined at the discovery of
+her secret.  She ran away into the woods whenever she saw Nan
+coming, for a long time thereafter.  It took weeks for the girl
+from Tillbury to regain the half-wild girl's confidence again.
+
+Nan was just as busy and happy as she could be, considering the
+uncertain news from Scotland and Uncle Henry's unfortunate affair
+with Gedney Raffer.  She helped Aunt Kate with the housework
+early every morning so that they might both hurry into the woods
+to pick berries.
+
+Pine Camp was in the midst of a vast huckleberry country, and at
+the Forks a cannery had been established.  Beside, the Forks was
+a big shipping centre for the fresh berries.
+
+Uncle Henry bought crates and berry "cups," and sometimes the
+whole family picked all day long in the berry pasture, taking
+with them a cold luncheon, and eating it picnic fashion.
+
+It was great fun, Nan thought, despite the fact that she often
+came home so wearied that her only desire was to drop into bed.
+But the best part of it, the saving grace of all this toil, was
+the fact that she was earning money for herself!  Account was
+faithfully kept of every cup of berries she picked, and, when
+Uncle Henry received his check from the produce merchant to whom
+he shipped the berries, Nan was paid her share.
+
+These welcome earnings she saved for a particular purpose, and
+for no selfish one, you may be sure.  Little Margaret Llewellen
+still ran from her and Nan wished to win the child back; so she
+schemed to do this.
+
+After all, there was something rather pitiful in the nature of
+the child who so disliked any face that was "wizzled," but loved
+those faces that were fair and smooth.
+
+Margaret only possessed a feeling that is quite common to
+humanity; she being such a little savage, she openly expressed an
+emotion that many of us have, but try to hide.
+
+The Llewellen children picked berries, of course, as did most of
+the other neighbors.  Pine Camp was almost a "deserted village"
+during the season when the sweet, blue fruit hung heavy on the
+bushes.
+
+Sometimes the Sherwood party, and the Llewellens, would cross
+each others' paths in the woods, or pastures; but little Margaret
+always shrank into the background.  If Nan tried to surprise her,
+the half wild little thing would slip away into the deeper woods
+like one of its own denizens.
+
+Near the river one day Margaret had an experience that should
+have taught her a lesson, however, regarding wandering alone in
+the forest.  And the adventure should, too, have taught the child
+not to shrink so from an ugly face.
+
+Nan had something very important to tell Margaret.  Her savings
+had amounted to quite a goodly sum and in the catalog of a mail-
+order house she had found something of which she wished to secure
+Margaret's opinion.  The child, as usual, ran away when they met,
+and even Bob could not bring her back.
+
+"She's as obstinate as dad's old mu-el," grunted the disgusted
+boy.  "Can't do a thing with her, Nan Sherwood."
+
+"I'll just get her myself!" declared Nan, laughing, and she
+started into the thicker woods to circumvent Margaret.  She did
+not follow the river as the smaller girl had, but struck into the
+bush, intending to circle around and head Margaret off.
+
+She had not pushed her way through the clinging vines and brush
+for ten minutes before she heard somebody else in the jungle.
+She thought it was the little girl, at first; then she caught
+sight of a man's hat and knew that Margaret did not wear a hat at
+all.
+
+"Goodness!  Who can that be?" thought Nan.  She was a little
+nervous about approaching strange people in the wood; although at
+this season there was nothing to apprehend from stragglers, there
+were so many berry pickers within call.
+
+Nan did not seek to overtake the man, however, and would have
+kept on in her original direction, had she not heard a cry and a
+splitting crash toward the river bank.  Some accident had
+happened, and when Nan heard the scream repeated, she was sure
+that the voice was that of Margaret.
+
+So she set off directly, on a run, tearing her dress and
+scratching her hands and face, but paying no attention to either
+misfortune.  She only wanted to get to the scene of the accident
+and lend her aid, if it was needed.
+
+And it would have been needed if it had not been for the man
+whose hat she had seen a few moments before.  He made his passage
+through the bush much quicker than could Nan, and when the latter
+reached an opening where she could see the river, the stranger
+was just leaping into the deep pool under the high bank.
+
+It was plain to be seen what had happened.  A sycamore overhung
+the river and somebody had climbed out upon a small branch to
+reach a few half-ripened grapes growing on a vine that ran up the
+tree.
+
+The branch had split, drooping downward, and the adventurous
+grape-gatherer had been cast into the water.
+
+"Oh, Margaret!" screamed Nan, confident that it was the reckless
+child that was in peril.
+
+She hurried to the brink of the low bluff, from which the rescuer
+had plunged.  He had already seized the child (there was an eddy
+here under the bank) and was striking out for the shore.  Nan saw
+his wet face, with the bedraggled hair clinging about it.
+
+It was the awfully scarred face of Injun Pete; but to the excited
+Nan, at that moment, it seemed one of the most beautiful faces
+she had ever seen!
+
+The Indian reached the bank, clung to a tough root, and lifted up
+the gasping Margaret for Nan to reach.  The girl took the child
+and scrambled up the bank again; by the time she was at the top,
+Injun Pete was beside her.
+
+"She not hurt, Little missy," said the man, in his soft voice,
+and turning his face so that Nan should not see it.  "She just
+scared."
+
+Margaret would not even cry.  She was too plucky for that.  When
+she got her breath she croaked:
+
+"Put me down, Nan Sherwood.  I ain't no baby."
+
+"But you're a very wet child," said Nan, laughing, yet on the
+verge of tears herself.  "You might have been drowned, you WOULD
+have been had it not been for Mr. Indian Pete."
+
+"Ugh!" whispered Margaret.  "I seen him when I come up out o'
+that nasty water.  I wanted to go down again."
+
+"Hush, Margaret!" cried Nan, sternly.  "You must thank him."
+
+The man was just then moving away.  He shook himself like a dog
+coming out of the stream, and paid no further attention to his
+own wet condition.
+
+"Wait, please!" Nan called after him.
+
+"She all right now," said the Indian.
+
+"But Margaret wants to thank you, don't you, Margaret?"
+
+"Much obleeged," said the little girl, bashfully.  "You air all
+right, you air."
+
+"That all right, that all right," said the man, hurriedly.  "No
+need to thank me."
+
+"Yes, there is," said Nan, insistently.  "Come here, please.
+Margaret wants to kiss you for saving her life."
+
+"Oh!"  The word came out of Margaret's lips like an explosion.
+Nan stared very sternly at her.  "If you don't," she said in a
+low tone, "I'll tell your father all about how you came to fall
+into the river."
+
+Under this threat Margaret became amenable.  She puckered up her
+lips and stretched her arms out toward Indian Pete.  The man
+stumbled back and fell on his knees beside the two girls.  Nan
+heard the hoarse sob in his throat as he took little Margaret in
+his arms.
+
+"Bless you!  Bless you!" he murmured, receiving the kiss right
+upon his scarred cheek.  But Nan saw that Margaret's eyes were
+tightly closed as she delivered the caress, per order!
+
+The next moment the man with the scarred face had slipped away
+and disappeared in the forest.  They saw him no more.
+
+However, just as soon as the catalog house could send it,
+Margaret received a beautiful, pink-cheeked, and flaxen-haired
+Doll, not as fine as Beulah, but beautiful enough to delight any
+reasonable child.
+
+Nan had won back Margaret's confidence and affection.
+
+Meanwhile the hot summer was fast passing.  Nan heard from her
+chum, Bess Harley, with commendable regularity; and no time did
+Bess write without many references to Lakeview Hall.
+
+Nan, advised by her former teacher in Tillbury, had brought her
+books to Pine Camp, and had studied faithfully along the lines of
+the high school work.  She was sure she could pass quite as good
+an entrance examination for Lakeview Hall as Bess could.
+
+And at last good news came from Scotland:
+
+"I am not quite ready to bring Momsey home," Papa Sherwood wrote.
+"But the matter of her fortune is at least partially settled.
+The claims of the other relatives have been disallowed.  Mr.
+Andrew Blake is prepared to turn over to your Momsey a part of
+her wonderful fortune.  The rest will come later.  She will tell
+you all about it herself.
+
+"What I wish to say to you particularly in this letter," pursued
+Mr. Sherwood, "is, that arrangements have been made for you to
+attend Lakeview Hall this coming semester.  You will meet your
+friend, Elizabeth Harley, in Chicago, and will go with her to the
+school.  I am writing by this mail to the principal of the Hall.
+Mr. Harley has made all other necessary arrangements for you."
+
+"Oh!" cried Nan, clasping her hands.  "It"s too good to be true!
+It can't be possible!  I just know I'll wake up in a minute and
+find all this an exciting dream, and that's all!"
+
+But Nan was wrong on that point, as the reader will see if her
+further adventures are followed in the next volume of the series,
+entitled, "Nan Sherwood at Lakeview Hall, or, The Mystery of the
+Haunted Boathouse."
+
+While Nan was still intensely excited over this letter from
+Scotland, Toby Vanderwiller drove up to the Sherwood house behind
+his broken-kneed pony.  This was the first time any of the
+Sherwoods had seen him since the day of the big storm and the
+fire in the sawdust.
+
+Chapter XXX
+OFF FOR LAKEVIEW HALL
+
+Nan ran out immediately to speak to the old lumberman; but Toby
+was calling for Uncle Henry:
+
+"Hey, Hen!  Hen Sherwood!  Come out yere," he cried.
+
+Uncle Henry halloaed from the stables, and came striding at the
+call.  Nan reached the old rattletrap wagon first.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Vanderwiller!" she said.  "I am glad to see you!  And
+how is your wife and Corson?"
+
+He looked down at her reflectively, and for a moment did not say
+a word.  Then he swallowed something and said, jerkily:
+
+"An' you're the one that done it all, Sissy!  The ol' woman an'
+the boy air as chipper as bluejays.  An' they air a honin' for a
+sight on you."
+
+"Yes.  I haven't been over lately.  But that man from Chicago
+came, didn't he?"
+
+"I sh'd say 'yes'!  He come," said Toby, in awe.  "An' what d'ye
+s'pose?  He done buyed a heap of Corson's spec'mens an' paid him
+more'n a hundred dollars for 'em.  And that ain't countin' that
+there dead-head butterfly ye made sech a time about.
+
+"I reckoned," pursued Toby, "that you was right crazy about that
+there bug.  One bug's as bad as another to my way of thinkin'.
+But it seems that Chicago feller thinked dif'rent."
+
+"It really was one of the very rare death's-head moths?" cried
+Nan, delighted.
+
+"So he said.  And he was willin' ter back up his belief with cold
+cash," declared Toby, smiting his leg for emphasis.  "He paid us
+harnsome for it; and he said he'd take a lot more spec'mens if
+
+"Har!  Here ye be, Hen," he added, breaking off to greet Nan's
+uncle.  "I got suthin' to say to you.  I kin say it now, for I
+ain't beholden ter nobody.  With what me and the ol' woman had
+scrimped and saved, an' what this feller from Chicago give
+Corson, I done paid off my debt to ol' Ged Raffer, an' the little
+farm's free and clear."
+
+"I'm glad to hear it, Tobe," Uncle Henry declared, shaking hands
+with the old lumberman again.  "I certain sure am glad to hear
+it!  I'm pleased that you shouldn't have that worry on your mind
+any longer."
+
+"And it has been a worry," said Old Toby, shaking his head.
+"More'n you think for.  Ye see, it snarled me all up so's I
+warn't my own master."
+
+"I see."
+
+"Ye see, Ged was allus after me to go inter court an' back up his
+claim ag'in you on that Perkins Tract."
+
+"I see," said Henry Sherwood again, nodding.
+
+"On the other hand, you wanted me, if I knowed which was right,
+to witness, too.  If I'd witnessed for Ged, ev'rybody wuld ha'
+thought I done it because he had a mortgage on the farm."
+
+"I s'pose so," admitted Uncle Henry.
+
+"Or, if I helped you, they'd ha' thought you'd bribed me  - mebbe
+helped me git square with Ged."
+
+"I couldn't.  Too poor just now," said Uncle Henry, grimly.  "But
+I'd the mind for it, Toby."
+
+"Well, there ye be.  Whichever way the cat jumped, I'd lost the
+respect of the community," said the old lumberman.  "But now I am
+independent, I don't give a dern!"
+
+Mr. Sherwood looked at him expectantly.  Toby's "wizzled" face
+shone.
+
+"I got a debt owin' to that leetle gal you got here, and
+somethin' to pay off to Tommy, too.  But money won't do it, ef I
+had money.  I am goin' to tell what I know about that boundary,
+though, Hen, and it will do YOU good!  I can find another old
+feller, livin' down Pale Lick way, that can corroborate my
+evidence.
+
+"You can git that injunction vacated at once, Hen, if you want,
+and put your axe-men right back into the Perkins Tract to work.
+That's what I come 'round to tell ye."
+
+Aunt Kate was moved to tears, an unusual expression of emotion
+on her part.  Being of pioneer stock, and having suffered much in
+the past, Nan's aunt was not easily moved.  Uncle Henry was
+delighted.  It was a great day for the Sherwoods.
+
+It was another great day when, a week later, the roan ponies were
+brought to the door and Nan's trunk was strapped upon the back of
+the buckboard.  Uncle Henry was to drive her to the train; but
+she would travel alone to Chicago to meet her chum, Bess Harley.
+
+"And go to Lakeview Hall!  I never did really expect I'd get
+there," Nan sighed, as she clung to Aunt Kate's neck.  "It almost
+makes me forget that Momsey and Papa Sherwood are not at home
+yet.
+
+"But, my dear!" she added, "if such a thing could be, you and
+Uncle Henry have taken the place of my own dear parents all these
+months I have been at Pine Camp.  I've had a dee-lightful time.
+I'll never forget you all.  I love you, love you, love you."
+
+The roan ponies started on the jump.  The boys cheered her from
+the corner of the house, having bashfully remained in the
+background.  Even Margaret Llewellen and her impish brother, Bob,
+appeared and shrilly bade her goodbye.
+
+Nan was off for school, and wonderful adventures lay before her!
+
+
+
+
+
+The End of
+Project Gutenberg's Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp, by Annie Roe Carr
+Project Gutenberg's The Old Lumberman's Secret, by Annie Roe Carr
+
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