“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.