CHAPTER XXIIIMRS. WICKS
Pollywas the first to wake in the morning. She opened one eye sleepily, saw her dress hanging over a chair back, caught a glimpse of unfamiliar wall paper on the side of the room, and sat up with a jerk.
“What’s the matter?” asked Jess, drowsily.
“Oh!” said Polly. “I remember now. We’re here. Say, Jess, it must be late; the sun is shining.”
“Then it’s stopped snowing,” said Jess. “We can go home. Let’s get dressed in a jiffy.”
Margy woke up, and it did not take the three girls long to dress, for they had slept in their underclothes, having removed only their dresses and stockings.
Polly peeped out into the kitchen and saw Fred pumping water at the sink.
“Want to wash your face?” he whispered. “Here’s a towel. It’s stopped snowing, but you ought to see the snow!”
Polly stood on tiptoe to glance out of the window over the sink. The sun was dazzling, and trees and fences and outbuildings were plastered with drifts of snow, flung against them by the wind.
“Isn’t it pretty!” cried Polly, in delight.
“It won’t be so pretty to walk home,” said Ward, who joined them.
“Are you children up?” called Mrs. Wicks. “I wish one of you girls would help me get dressed. My knee isn’t any worse, but then it isn’t any better.”
“I’ll help her,” offered Margy, hastily. “You build the fire, Fred, because it’s freezing cold in this kitchen.”
Fred and Artie went out to get more wood, for Fred suggested that they leave the woodbox untouched, and Margy went to help the old woman get dressed.
By the time she was ready, the kitchen was warm and Polly and Jess set the breakfast table, while Mrs. Wicks stirred up griddle cakes and showed them how to make oatmeal.
“The man on the next farm always brings me milk,” the old lady explained, “and it shows how deep the snow must be, if he can’t get here. It’s lucky I have some milk left from yesterday.”
They had a cheerful breakfast, and when itwas over Polly asked if there wasn’t something they could do to help.
“We can’t walk home through the snow while it is as deep as this,” she said sensibly, “and perhaps we can help you, if you’ll tell us how. What would you do if you weren’t lame this morning?”
“I’d feed my chickens and shovel some paths around the house and down to the mail-box,” said Mrs. Wicks, promptly. “Then I’d sit down and sew.”
Fred and Artie and Ward said they could do the outdoor work, and they went at it with a will. Though before that they found that their shoes were so stiff it wasn’t easy to get them on. But Mrs. Wicks brought out some grease and showed them how to rub it in, and that made the leather pliable again. Fred did the girls’ shoes for them, and Margy was especially grateful, for she loved to be comfortable and she had been dreading to put on her stiffened shoes.
The three girls washed and dried the dishes, swept and straightened up the kitchen, made the beds and watered the geranium that Mrs. Wicks said couldn’t be killed, for no matter how cold the kitchen was, it lived, winter after winter, if protected by a paper at night.
“I wish you’d come and live with me all winter,”the old lady said, when Ward brought in six eggs he had found in the henhouse and Fred and Artie reported that a path had been swept out to the mail-box. “I like company. One of my nieces comes to stay with me part of the time, and she’s coming the day after New Year’s. But she isn’t young like you.”
Fred asked about the barn in which they had stayed, and Mrs. Wicks told them that the place had once been a prosperous farm.
“The house burned down one summer, and the people farmed it for a time, living in the barn and using it as a house,” she said. “Then they sold the place and moved away, and the new owner never did anything with it. One by one the outbuildings fell to pieces, and they say one good wind will blow the barn over, if it gets it in the right corner.”
“There’s rats in it!” shuddered Margy. “I was sitting on the floor last night, waiting for Fred to come back, and a horrid rat ran right across my lap!”
“She let out a yell that could be heard in River Bend,” said Ward, grinning. “And then she rushed outdoors and wouldn’t come back. Fred found her standing in the snow, crying.”
“Well, I’d cry, too, if a rat ran over me,” said Jess, stoutly. “Ugly, horrid things!”
Mrs. Wicks got out her box of patchwork and showed the gay-colored patches to her visitors. Like many lonely old ladies, she was fond of telling stories about her girlhood, and with a brand new audience the temptation was too great to be resisted.
“You girls don’t sew patchwork nowadays, do you?” she asked, smiling.
“We can knit,” offered Polly, apologetically. “But none of us ever made a quilt. My grandmother did, when she was a little girl, though.”
“Ward speaking of the rat that frightened Margy, reminded me of a scare I had when I was a little girl,” said Mrs. Wicks.
“I had gone to visit my Aunt Deborah, of whom I was very fond. Aunt had a son, about sixteen—I was then eleven—and, dear me, what a tease Coburn was! He called me ‘Miss Prim’ and pulled my hair whenever he had a chance. I was supposed to sew on my patchwork every afternoon, even when visiting, and Coburn thought that a girl cousin who spent hours sewing wasn’t much fun to have around. He would have liked me to be a boy cousin and climb trees with him.”
“But we girls climb trees!” put in Jess. But Mrs. Wicks paid no attention to the remark, and went on with her story.
“Well, I was sitting quietly with my little sewing basket one afternoon, in the parlor window. Aunt Deborah kept the parlor tightly closed most of the time, and there must have been some special reason why I was allowed to sit there and sew, but I don’t recall it. Perhaps because I was company. The parlor window overlooked the road, and, girl-like, I was interested in the various teams that drove past. I liked to see what people were doing as much as any one. Coburn wasn’t anywhere around, and Aunt Deborah was still upstairs finishing her nap.
“A spic and span, shiny new buggy went past with a girl dressed in white driving, and I leaned forward to look, at the same time putting out my hand to take a spool of thread from the basket. I felt something move under my hand, but I thought it was the spool of thread rolling from my fingers. Unconsciously I took a firmer clutch, and something squeaked. I had picked up a little white mouse!”
“Ugh! How awful! Didn’t you scream?” asked Margy.
“Scream! I should think I did!” returned Mrs. Wicks, smiling at the recollection. “To my startled eyes that basket seemed alive with white mice, and I threw it across the room in one directionand my patchwork and thimble in another. Then I fled, still screaming.
“Aunt Deborah came downstairs on the run, and Coburn mysteriously appeared from some secret place. He caught me as I came rushing out of the door and, with some difficulty, calmed me. I think he was a little frightened, for I couldn’t stop crying at first and nothing would induce me to go into the parlor or touch my work basket again. Aunt Deborah made Coburn pick up the scattered spools and put the basket in order. As for his three pet mice, no one ever knew what became of them—they may have run off to live with their relations. Anyway, they never came back and Aunt Deborah declared it served Coburn right for playing such a trick.”
Margy said that she thought mice were the worst animals that ever lived, except rats, while Fred contended that mice were all right when you knew them. This started an argument that lasted till Mrs. Wicks suggested they go down to the mail-box and see if the postman had got through the drifts.
“If we’d only brought our sleds, instead of the skates, we could get home,” said Ward.
“But it wasn’t snowing when we left,” saidPolly. “Oh, dear, I do hope the folks aren’t worrying about us.”
“If we had some snowshoes, we could walk home, on top of the snow,” said Artie. “Why couldn’t we make some?”
“Out of what?” asked Fred, promptly.
“Barrel staves,” replied Artie.
“I think stilts would be better,” declared Ward. “Stilts would hold us up, out of the drifts.”
“Snowshoes are what we need,” decreed Fred. “Perhaps we could make them out of barrels. Let’s see if Mrs. Wicks has any barrels she doesn’t want.”
“Barrels?” said Mrs. Wicks, when they asked her. “Oh, my, yes! plenty of barrels out in the woodshed. Do anything you like with them.”
With the three girls as interested, if not hopeful, spectators (Polly was sure she couldn’t walk on snowshoes after they were made and Margy said frankly she didn’t think they would ever be made) the boys ripped two barrels apart and sandpapered the staves. The sandpaper was worn pretty smooth—it was all Mrs. Wicks had—and the staves were remarkably rough, but they did the best they could.
“You try them first, Fred,” suggested Artie. “How are you going to keep these snowshoes on?”
“Skate straps,” said Fred, briefly.
He managed to strap a stave to each of his feet, using his skate straps, and then, slowly and gingerly, stepped out of the woodshed.
“The way to walk on snowshoes,” he announced, “is not to lift your feet and put ’em down again. You glide along.”
“All right, let’s see you glide,” said Artie, eagerly.
Fred struck out with what he fondly believed to be a gliding motion. He sunk one foot deeply into the snow, balanced there a precarious moment with his other foot waving wildly in the air and then crashed over into a handy drift.
“Of course there’s a knack in getting used to them,” he gasped, as the others pulled him out. “I’ll get it after a while.”
“Well, if I have to walk on those things to get home, I’m going to stay here,” said Jess.
“There’s the postman!” cried Margy. “Look, he’s putting something in the box!”
They ran down the path they had shoveled, Fred discarding his “snowshoes” as hindrances, and found the postman to be a jolly person wrapped in many mufflers and driving a large white horse harnessed to an old-fashioned sleigh.
“Say, there’s some one looking for you kids,” he said, as soon as he saw the children. “I meta team about a mile back, two men in a sleigh. They asked me if I’d seen anything of three boys and three girls. And then I hadn’t, and told them so.”
“Daddy!” cried Polly. “It must be Daddy and Mr. Larue. Whereabouts did you see them?”
“They were following this road,” said the postman. “Looks like them coming now. I’ve had to make so many stops I guess they’ve caught up with me. Yes, they’re waving to you. See ’em?”