Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp Part 14

"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, d.i.c.kory, 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, d.i.c.k'ry, dock The mouse ran up the clock, The clock struck one, An' down he come Hick'ry, d.i.c.k'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 s.h.i.+ngle 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 pa.s.sions. 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 p.r.o.nounced 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?"