CHAPTER XXVIITHE ECHO AGAIN
Thefirst flakes of snow, riding on the strong westerly gale, met them as the Kremlin struck into the Upper Road coming from Middletown once more. Before Janice dropped the Elder—and his money—at his door, the snow was making a good showing in the frozen ruts and the fence corners.
When Marty helped her run the car into the garage, he said, with a grin:
“You can kiss your ortermobile good-bye for the winter now, Janice. We’re a-goin’ to git it for fair, so the paper says. We’ll have a white Christmas all right, all right.”
“And we’ll have an extra nice Christmas, I hope,” rejoined his cousin. “Guess what you’re going to get, Marty?”
“No, I won’t!” declared the boy. “I don’t want to even think of it. I know what I want, and if I sh’d guess right it’d just spoil Christmas for me. Ain’t I the big kid?”
She laughed at him, happily. “That’s all the fun of Christmas morning, I guess—not knowing what you’re going to get till the time comes. Little Lottieis going to get a Christmas present that she’s been longing for—Miss ’Rill. Won’t they all be happy in the Drugg house?”
“Huh!” snorted Marty. “I dunno as I’d call gettin’ a step-mother much of a Christmas present.”
“Well, I guess,” said Janice, indignantly, “if you were a little girl like Lottie and couldn’t remember any mother at all, that you’d be just as glad as she is to get one like Miss ’Rill.”
“All right—all right,” grumbled her cousin. “You needn’t get red-headed about it.”
As rapidly as the snow was gathering they did not realize that this was more than an ordinary storm. Uncle Jason was away on a job and Marty soon went whistling down the hill with his jacket collar turned up to keep the snow from sifting into his neck. He was bound for the Reading Room for a book with which to while away the long evening.
Sunset was not yet, however, although the chickens were going to roost. Janice ran in to Aunt ’Mira, glowing in both heart and healthy body. She did not mean to say anything to anybody about the wild ride to save Elder Concannon’s money; but it was something to remember with satisfaction.
Aunt ’Mira was deep, it seemed, in the rites and mysteries of some form of heathen worship. That is what it looked like at the girl’s first amazed glance into the sitting-room. The fleshy lady had a sheet draped around her and she was bowing and posturingand turning her head first over one shoulder and then the other—trying, it would seem, to look down her own spinal column.
“Dear me, Auntie! what is the matter now?” gasped Janice. “Aren’t you afraid you will hurt yourself doing that?”
“I know I’m hurting myself,” responded Aunt ’Mira, grimly, “but it’s the way to keep supple, they say. And I declare for’t! I don’t know nobody that needs sech trainin’ more’n I do.”
Janice had descried the propped-open physical culture magazine now, and understood—in part, at least.
“But why the sheet, Auntie?” she asked, as the good lady went on with her self-inflicted punishment.
“Wal,” panted Aunt ’Mira, at length obliged to sit down for breath, “I jest wanted to see how I’d look in one o’ them Grecian costumes they picter there. I’ve looked at hundreds an’ hundreds of picters of Greeks in their draperies, and I’ve failed yet to see afatone. Janice, don’t you s’pose there never was any fat people in them ancient times?”
“I suppose there must have been—some,” admitted Janice, much amused. “But they don’t put them in pictures. Besides,” she added thoughtfully, “the way the Greeks lived and exercised, and all, would naturally tend to make perfect bodies andalmost eliminate the liability of one’s having too much flesh.”
Aunt ’Mira snorted her disgust. “I declare to man!” she cried. “If a body’s going to be fat, they’ll be fat. That’s all there is to it, I reckon. I’ve tried my best; and though I’m some more limber than I was, you know yourself, Janice, I’m jest as fat as ever.
“No, Ma’am! Ye can’t tell me! They never put the fat Greeks in picters—jest kep’ ’em in the background, same’s they try to do with fat people nowadays. And if it’s your fate to be fat, why, ye will be, and that’s all there is about it.
“Ye don’t suppose, Niece Janice, that I let this fat come upon me without a struggle, do ye? I—should—say—not!” cried Aunt ’Mira, with energy. “Why, I fought it tooth and toe-nail!”
“When me an’ Jason was keepin’ comp’ny I was afraid he’d be scare’t at sech a mountain of flesh as I was then, and I dunno how many strings I broke tryin’ to pull in my stays. I wonder I didn’t squeeze all my internal consarns inter mush, I declare!
“But the more I ever done to try to take off flesh, the more I put it on. Why, Janice, I was a fat baby, and a fat young’un. I was jest about square—like a brick. You could ha’ set me any side up—I’d stood jest as well one way as t’other. Therewarn’t no more escape for me from flesh than there is from death when my time comes.
“You’d oughter seen me when I was a little toddler, goin’ to old Marcy Coe’s to school. In them days there warn’t much of a public school here in Polktown—it only kep’ three months in the year, anyway. Miss Marcy Coe kep’ a sort of private school for the little tads, right in her own settin’-room. When they got too big for her to punish, they graduated to the reg’lar school.
“And believe me!” Aunt ’Mira exclaimed, with energy, “Miss Marcy Coe sartainly was ingenious in her punishments. I’ll never forgit one thing she useter make me do when I was bad. She was most always sewing while she sat and listened to us readin’ out of our little lesson-books, and her thimble was a very handy weapon.
“She sat with one leg crossed over the other,” went on the reminiscent lady, “a-swinging of her foot for hours at a time. If I was naughty I had to come up to her and squat a-straddle of that foot. If I rested any weight on her foot, Marcy would rap me on the head with her thimble.”
“Oh! how cruel!” burst out Janice.
“Mebbe it was good for the back and limbs,” sighed Aunt ’Mira; “but it was awful tryin’. We’d hafter stay in that stoopin’ position until sometimes we’d fall right over on the floor. And my poor head! It was sore all over from Marcy Coe’s thimble,until I fairly squalled at night when my mother combed my hair. She thought ’twas snarls, poor dear.”
Aunt ’Mira chanced to look up and see the snow beating against the windows. It drew a perfect curtain between the warm sitting-room and the general outlook. The wind had risen, too, and was grumbling in the deep-throated chimney and rattling the outside blinds.
“My goodness, Janice!” her aunt exclaimed, “this is a hard storm. Where can your Uncle Jason and Marty be? They’d ought to be home early to do the chores. If this keeps up they won’t git to the critters at all to-night.”
“I can run out and feed the live stock and shut the hen-house door, Aunt ’Mira,” offered the girl, getting up briskly. “All they will have to do when they come home, then, will be to milk.”
“Wal, if you will,” agreed her aunt. “And I’ll be gettin’ a hot supper. They’ll want it—’specially Jason—after trampin’ through this snow.”
Janice put on a short coat, her leggings and mittens, and ventured out. The back porch was half full of snow, heaped to her waist.
“I never did see it snow so hard and so fast before,” thought the girl, facing the storm.
As she went past the tool shed she bethought her and secured a shovel. And it was well she did so, for when she reached the small stable door, thesnow was heaped so high against it that she had difficulty in digging her way in.
When she finally was in the stable, the wind banged the door shut. There was light enough for her to see, however. The ponies whinnied, while the cows lowed gratefully at her appearance. Janice scattered corn and oats through the feed-window into the hen-house, and heard some of the hungry biddies scramble down from the roosts to get the grain.
She knew just what grain to give the horses, and she mixed the mash for each cow separately. Uncle Jason had put a pump into the barn the year before, and it was so protected that it could not freeze. She climbed into the mow and threw down fodder and hay for the night. All that the men would have to do would be to milk and water the stock.
It was comfortably warm in the stable. The heat of the animals’ bodies made it so. She went the round of the stalls and patted the nose of each beast kindly. The horses raised their heads and looked at her; but the cows kept on guzzling their food, their broad, rough tongues scraping around and around in the wooden pails.
“I declare!” thought Janice. “It isn’t such a bad lot, after all, to live in a stable. But I guess I’d better get back to the house, or the drifts will be so deep I’ll be lost in them.”
She again buttoned her coat, turned up her collar,and drew on her mittens. It was growing very dark in the barn, and she heard something stirring behind the feed-box—whether a cat or a rat she did not know. Anyway, she did not stop to investigate, for it might be a rat, and Janice was desperately afraid of those vermin.
Coming to the door, she unlatched it and pushed. The door stuck. She tried it again and then, with some fear, threw herself against it. It did not yield an inch and she knew instantly what the matter was. The snow had heaped against it—packed solid by the wind—higher than when she entered.
Again and again Janice Day pushed against the narrow door, exerting her strength to the utmost, while her fear grew. She was not naturally a nervous girl, nor easily disturbed by trifles. But there was something so terrifying in this sudden and complete mastery by the storm of affairs that she was shaken to the soul.
Besides, there was that rustling, scraping noise in the corner beyond the meal chest. It was the unknown that troubled her.
Of course, Uncle Jason or Marty would soon come to her rescue. She had not been more than half an hour in the barn. Unless this snowstorm was much heavier than any of which Janice had ever heard, the men would surely find their way up the hillside, and Aunt ’Mira would send them in search of her. Mrs. Day herself, however, wouldbe sadly alarmed if Janice did not soon return to the house.
It was useless for the girl to push against the door by which she had entered. She was soon assured of this fact. And she did not wish to stay alone in the stable with that rat—or what she thought was a rat. The noise it made could be easily heard above the sounds made by the cattle eating their supper.
“It must be a big one,” breathed Janice. “I just can’t stay here with it!”
She rushed to the big wing doors and tried to open them. But it was foolish to attempt that, for they were barred on the outside. There was no way out of the barn, save through the door by which she had entered, for the cattle entrances were all barred without.
There was the feed door into the hen-house. The thought of it instantly came to her mind. But to get to it she must pass by the feed chest.
It seemed to Janice Day as though she could not do that. The thought of the rat’s sharp teeth, its flaming eyes in the dark, its sleek body and hard, wire-like tail, gave her the shivers.
“I’m a coward! I’m a coward!” she told herself, again and again. “Perhaps it isn’t a rat at all. Maybe it’s only a cunning little mouse—or really nothing at all. Oh, if I only had a light.”
She searched her pockets for matches. Of courseshe had none. The lantern hung on a peg just inside the door which she had endeavored unsuccessfully to open. But an unlighted lantern was of very little use to her. And deeper and deeper grew the shadows on the barn floor.
She feared her aunt would be frightened; and neither her uncle nor Marty came. It seemed to Janice as though much more time had elapsed since she entered the barn than really had passed. She felt sure that by taking off her jacket she could creep through into the hen-house; and the hen-house door was in a corner sheltered from the wind. She could surely get out through that.
“Janice Day!” she muttered, “you’ve justgotto stop being so foolish! You must pass that meal chest and get out! Come now!”
Thus urging herself on—spurring her courage, as it were—the girl advanced a few steps along the barn floor. Suddenly she stopped. There were two bright specks shining in the dark. The noise of the rat’s gnawing had ceased. It must be watching her as she advanced.
Marty always said they were afraid and ran from you; but this particular rodent seemed to have no intention of running.
“Shoo!” gasped Janice—it must be confessed in a very weak voice.
The eyes never even winked. Morally courageous as the girl was, every atom of physical braveryseemed to have oozed out of her now. Her knees trembled under her; she could hardly stand.
And then, unexpectedly, there was a scrambling noise in the dark beyond the chest, and a sleepy voice emitted a plaintive “ba-a-a! ba-a-a!” A lamb! A cosset that had been brought in from the sheepfold the week before and which Janice had forgotten all about, although she had been making a pet of it every time she had occasion to enter the stable.
The unwinking eyes did not move; but the relieved girl knew what they were now. Two shiny buttons on an old jumper of Marty’s which had been flung down beside the meal chest and in front of the pen where the lamb was kept.
“Ba-a-a!” again bleated the lamb, the innocent cause of all Janice Day’s disturbance and fear.
“Ba-a-a yourself!” she cried, laughing hysterically. “What a dunce I have been. If Marty knew it, I’d never hear the last of it. And how foolish—and really wicked, too!” she continued thoughtfully. “I guess that’s like half the troubles I have in this world. I see them coming and make more of them than they really are when they arrive.
“I expect I even have no business to worry as I have about dear Father. It seems as though I fail to trust in Providence when I am forever disturbed and troubled about things. Everything will come out all right of course! Father will be safe;Nelson will not disappoint me. ‘All things work together for good’——”
She had removed her jacket while she so thought, and now crept through the small, square window into the hen-house. There was a rustling on the perches and the old rooster uttered a sleepy “cut, cut, ca-da-cut!”
“You be still!” giggled Janice. “I am no chicken thief, so don’t alarm your harem. My! that was a tight squeeze! Now I’m going out—Good-night all!” and she pushed open the outside door of the hen-pen and came out into the blowy, snowy world again.
The storm seemed fiercer than ever; but the lights in the kitchen window led Janice to refuge. Marty was hooting for her from the back porch.
“Crackey!” he called, as she stumbled toward him. “You done all the chores, Janice?”
“All but the milking,” she assured him.
“You’re some girl, you are,” declared the boy, with satisfaction. “Most any other girl would have been afraid to go out in the storm. Don’t take much to scare some of ’em into a conniption fit—and then they step in it!” grunted Marty, in vast disgust, being at just that age when the opposite sex seems to be a useless creation of Nature.
Janice refrained from telling him about the rat!
When the girl entered the house a surprise awaited her. Uncle Jason had brought a letter forher—one all the way from Mexico and in her father’s handwriting. Anxiously she tore it open and scanned its contents. Did it contain more bad news?
“Oh, isn’t this lovely!” she cried, her face showing her pleasure. “Daddy writes that matters at the mine have taken a turn for the better. The government has acknowledged their rights and will leave them alone in the future. Oh, isn’t it just grand!”
“I knew it would come out all right in the end, Janice,” returned Aunt ’Mira. “Wasn’t no call for to worry like ye done.”
“But I couldn’t help it,” answered Janice. “Oh, I must tell Uncle Jason and Marty”; and she ran off to do so. It seemed as if one of the great weights on her heart had been lifted away.
The wind blew and the snow was swept furiously across the lake and through the streets of Polktown all that night. When morning came the entire mountain was a mass of white, with the smoking chimneys and the Union Church spire standing like sentinels above the white-mantled trees.
Snow shovels were at a premium. Plows were got out and everybody was busy making the highways, as well as the paths about the dwellings, passable. Business was almost at a standstill that day, and it was not until the next morning that Janice could get to her friend, Miss ’Rill, to tell her of thegood news from Mexico. Of course, she found the pretty little maiden lady around at the grocery on the side street, doing some kindly task for Hopewell Drugg’s little one.
As Janice had said, little Lottie was perfectly delighted at the prospect of having “Mamma ’Rill,” as she was determined to call her father’s new wife, “for her very own.” For although she was by no means as lonely, now that she could see and hear and speak almost as well as other little girls of her age, the Drugg household suffered for the presence of capable feminine hands and a loving heart.
Lottie had been used to run to her father for everything; but she was getting to that age now where it was a woman’s help she often needed.
Father and daughter still spent many an hour together, she with her cheek against his shoulder, while he sawed away at his old violin. The talent of his music-teacher father had been inherited to a degree by Hopewell; only he had always been too busy making a living to have the talent developed.
So he only knew the old pieces that he had learned when he was a boy and had first found the ancient violin hidden away by his mother in the attic. She had considered it almost a sin to play the instrument. Her husband, she thought, had been a failure because of his devotion to this very violin. She had looked back upon the days when they were first married, and he had spent hours pouring out his soulto her through the strings of the instrument, as wickedness for which she must ever do penance in this life.
As Hopewell Drugg remembered her, his mother had been a very austere woman and had striven to repress every tendency in him toward life or enjoyment. But once having found his father’s old violin, and learning that he could draw a certain kind of harmony from its strings, he refused to give it up. It was the one conflict of their existence together; his mother had gone to her grave without forgiving him for his devotion to music.
His marriage to Lottie’s mother had been a strange one, and his happiness, if there had been happiness at all, was brief. “’Cinda Stone,” as the neighbors had always called Lottie’s mother, was sickly and her married life had been a short one. Since then, until recently, Hopewell’s affections had seemed to be centered entirely in little Lottie. It was to her he played “Silver Threads Among the Gold.” And he still played it to her when the snow kept the child indoors.
Storm after storm charged upon Polktown from over the mountain-peaks or from across the lake. The streets had to be dug out after each snowfall by strings of slow-moving oxen dragging the heavy snowplows. The country roads were almost impassable. Once Janice had to remain with Mrs. MacKay over Sunday. Archie was still engaged inthe bank, although it was closed while the finances of the institution were being adjusted.
Janice’s absence from town increased Lottie’s loneliness. Often the older girl had stopped on her return from school, to visit with the storekeeper’s daughter. Lottie did not go to school herself, but had lessons for two hours each forenoon under Miss ’Rill’s oversight.
After that the hours hung heavily on her hands. She could slide down hill, past Mr. Cross Moore’s; but the other children were in school and it wasn’t much fun to play alone. So, one afternoon, she left her sled at the bottom of the hill and tramped over the hard snow to the frozen cove, where the half-wrecked dock thrust its ice-covered timbers out from the shore. The line of dark spruce on the farther shore—the wall against which her voice was thrown back when she called—was snow-covered, too. And here were more flakes falling.
But little Lottie knew no danger. She was almost in sight of home. Or she would have been had not the snowflakes been coming down so fast and thick between her and the hill on which she lived.
Lottie had an idea in her mind. She had had it for a long time, and now that the cove was solidly frozen over, she could put it into execution. Her pretty fancy of the echo living in the spruce wood over yonder had never been explained away. Shefirmly believed in the existence of some sprite who shouted to her in gentle mockery when she called to him from this side of the cove.
“He-a! he-a! he-a!” she shrilled, standing in the softly falling snow, and facing the wooded point which was now but a hazy outline.
“’Y-a! ’y-a! ’y-a!” The echo came flatly across the cove. It did not sound as it usually did. “I declare! do you suppose something is the matter with my echo?” queried Lottie, aloud.
She shouted again. The reply was quite as slow in returning, and the sound quite as flat.
“I’m going to see what the matter is with my echo,” murmured the child, and she set forth from the shore on the snow-covered ice. The storm was coming from behind her, and she had no idea how swiftly the snow was gathering, or how hard the wind blew until she was in the middle of the cove.
Even then Lottie was not greatly disturbed. A snowstorm was fun. And she was going to find her echo, and they would play together!
So she went on, the storm beating upon her back. Unfortunately, the direction of the wind was not toward the wooded point for which she had started. She drifted before it, and it drove her steadily and surely out upon the open lake.
The cove was solidly frozen over; but the lake ice had been broken by the weight of former snows, andthere were open spots in it, perilous indeed for the unguided feet of the little girl.
Up on the heights the strength of the coming blizzard had been marked earlier in the afternoon. Nelson Haley had sent the smaller children home at two o’clock. By three, when the others were released, it was already growing dark and the poultry had sought their roosts.
The snow was falling heavily as he made his way toward Mrs. Beasely’s cottage. He saw Miss ’Rill’s anxious face at the store door.
“Some snow!” the school teacher called, cheerily. “Guess the young ones will have their vacation a day earlier than we intended.”
“Oh, Mr. Haley!” she cried, without replying to his observation. “See if Lottie is with Mrs. Beasely, will you?”
“Sure,” replied Nelson quickly.
He was back in a minute, not having removed his cap and coat. “Hasn’t been with her this afternoon, Miss ’Rill,” said Haley. “What’s the matter? Doesn’t Hopewell know where she is?”
“He said she had gone out with her sled. I’ve been down the hill, but it’s snowing so fast the tracks of the sled are covered.”
“Where’s Hopewell gone?” demanded Haley.
“Down to the dock. He had to go to see about some freight that was left there the last time theConstance Colfaxmade a trip. He and Walky Dexterwill bring it up on Walky’s pung. It’s Christmas goods and—and other things,” and Miss ’Rill blushed, for among the “other things” were the last purchases for her wedding outfit.
“She can’t be over to your mother’s, can she?” asked the young man, quite serious now.
“No,” said Miss ’Rill, shaking her head. “She is not there. Maybe at Cross Moore’s——”
“I’ll go and see,” said the teacher. “You go back into the shop and keep out of this wind. I tell you it’s sharp!”
He plodded down the hill without an idea that he shouldn’t find the little girl in Mr. Cross Moore’s kitchen. The selectman was fond of little Lottie, and often brought her into the house to see his wife, who was an invalid.
When Nelson Haley knocked at the kitchen door, the slipshod girl who waited on Mrs. Moore answered his summons. Mr. Cross Moore was not at home. No; the little girl hadn’t been there that day.
“But I seed her slidin’ on her sled this arternoon,” drawled the girl, who was an output of an orphan asylum—the sort of person, because of mental and physical deficiencies, that few people would take into their homes.
“Where did she go, my good girl?” asked Haley, with anxiety.
“It was beginning to snow and she went right down yonder on the pond.”
“To the cove, you mean?”
“Yep. And out on the ice. Mebbe she’s fell through a hole.”
“You didn’t see her come back?”
“Nop. It begun to snow right hard then, anyway.”
“How long ago was this?”
That question was a puzzling one for the deficient intellect of Sissy. She shook her head. “’Twas afore I rubbed Miz’ Moore’s feet the last time,” she ventured.
Haley, exasperated, but troubled still, pursued his questioning: “Did that take long?”
“Nop. Not long.”
“Have you done anything else since?”
“Yep. I’m allus doin’ things. I washed her tea set. That was after I made her tea and a slice of toast, and she’d eat it.”
“Goodness!” ejaculated Haley, figuring rapidly the possible time which had elapsed since little Lottie had been seen going down to the lake. “What else have you done since then?”
“Shook down the sittin’ room stove an’ put coal on. Miz’ Moore is bound ter have a coal fire, so’s it kin be kep’ all night. And then you come.”
“Maybe Lottie went along an hour ago, then?” queried Haley.
“Wal, if yeou know, Mister,” drawled the girl.
He thought he had some sort of an idea as to Lottie’s whereabouts. If she had gone down to the cove an hour before she might be in the shelter of the old dock, for the snow had come on swiftly. When he reached the shore, however, no Lottie was there.
What was she likely to do? Indeed, why had she come down here? These questions were easily answered by the young man. Lottie’s fondness for the echo was notorious in the neighborhood. She must have come here to shout across the cove and listen to the answer.
“And then what?” thought Haley.
She had not returned up the hill. Even in this smother of snow she could not have missed her way coming in that direction. She was still here in the waste of snow, over which the storm was now shrieking.
The young man made a horn of his two gloved hands and shouted Lottie’s name, again and again. Now the echo was completely smothered and no sound at all came back to him.
A real blizzard had swept down upon the lake. If the child had wandered out upon the ice, what chance would there be of her ever reaching the shore again, let alone any human habitation? And, Nelson asked himself, how should he set about finding her in the drifting snow!