BOOK THREE

December 5, 1896

17. Lovely Dark and Deep

“There’s weather coming,” came Capital Gaines’s high-pitched voice when he lit down from his sleigh. It was the very first thing he said, before “Hello,” or “How do you do,” or “It’s me.” “I went down to the telegraph office to see what was the latest, and there’s a blizzard been crossing the White Mountains since last night, and it’s just touching Portland, even as we speak. How do you do, I’m Capital Gaines.” He offered his hand to Frederick Covington.

After Mister Walton had happily introduced the older man to Isabelle and Moxie, Capital looked up at the sky and repeated his assertions regarding the weather. They considered the atmosphere, which was clear for the most part and gave no sign of things to come. truly delayed and our mysterious opponents have time to catch up with “It’s all the more reason to go today,” said Frederick, “before we’re us.” It was the first time that Mister Walton and Sundry had seen Covington without his clerical collar, and standing outside the Wesserunsett Inn, the minister looked like a rough-and-ready sportsman, with his boots laced to the knees, and his faded trousers and his old winter coat. He had a brown tweed cap and a pack at his feet like a guide.

Isabelle was decked out in slightly newer, slightly more fashionable, but no less practical clothes. Her wool skirt was layered like a quilt with petticoats, and though her boots must remain a mystery above the ankles, they looked very much like her husband’s. She had a coat with a beaver collar and a fur hat that might have been amusing if she hadn’t been so fetching looking out from under it. Capital said later that it was the hat that convinced him she knew what she was doing.

“You sure you are going, Mrs. Covington?” he asked only once, and she took no offense.

“I am, Mr. Gaines,” she said with the sort of quickness that indicated she knew the question was coming.

“Capital,” he said.

“If you wish, thank you. I am Isabelle.” Her determination was somewhat contradicted, however, by an uneasiness that she could not entirely conceal. Her presence, in fact, and her lack of ease had been under some discussion between Mister Walton and Sundry, and they rightly considered that though she would rather none of them had ventured on this mission, she was unwilling to allow her husband to venture without her.

“Courage can only visit the fearful,” Mister Walton had quoted.

“I see the widow allowed you the use of her sleigh,” said Mister Walton with almost a wink.

“She did,” said Capital, and standing before the sleigh, he quickly altered the subject by telling them his plan, which he had devised in the dark hours of the morning with Mr. Noel and Mr. Noggin. He’d been almost too excited about the whole business to sleep; he looked game, however, and none the worse for a restless night.

“I’m sorry Mr. Noel and Mr. Noggin aren’t coming with us,” said Sundry. “You might see them before the day is out,” said Capital. He absently stroked Moxie’s head as he told them the roundabout method by which he hoped to confound their opponents, giving the affair the shine of a real adventure. “Well, sir,” said the old major to no one in particular, “let’s burn to it.”

The entire state had been snowed upon several times since Thanksgiving, but the white drifts were deeper this far inland than they were in Portland. Roads were not generally plowed in those days (only the railroads had the power and mechanics to push snow from their course), and when the roads were groomed at all, they were rolled so that the snow was compacted into a hard surface. Sleighs were the mode of travel, and horses were bred with their ability to winter in mind.

The road from Skowhegan to Canaan therefore was not a straightforward means of travel but was filled with the hazards and difficulties consequent to the season’s already heavy weather. Capital had a good horse for this sort of thing, however, and once they had their gear packed in the back of the sleigh, they were soon skimming over the snow like a coaster.

They were not long getting out of the general settlement and were heading south toward the Kennebec when Capital Gaines asked, “What do you think these runes say, Mr. Covington?”

“That’s just it. They seem to be runes-their shapes match actual figures in Norse writing-but they don’t seem to say anything. In one or two places there will be a short recognizable word, but you could lay down letters at random and do that much.”

“I took note last night of a strange shape down by the bottom right,” said the old man. “What could that be, do you suppose?”

“You can’t see it very well in the photographs,” said Frederick. “The sun was low, it seems, and in order to expose the other marks properly, he had to underexpose that one figure. It looks almost like the pictograph of an ox. Our own letter a developed from something like it, the two rays of an angle and an intersecting line about halfway along the rays. The head of an ox.”

“What would that mean?”

“I couldn’t say. I’m not familiar with pictographs in rune making. Do you have a theory, Mr. Gaines? I would be greatly appreciative of one.”

Capital Gaines laughed.

“A directional marker?” wondered Mister Walton, who sat back to this conversation.

“The thought had crossed my mind,” said Frederick.

“Are the runes abbreviated directions then?” asked Capital.

“I’m not sure they are runes.”

“Ah, well,” said Capital, “it’s pretty out in the forest this time of year.”

Twice when they reached the height of a steep slope, their driver and guide stood on his seat and surveyed the road before and behind them. For a while they followed the flow of the Kennebec. Below them the dark waters and snow-covered islands seemed void of color and motion.

It had been a long time since Mister Walton and Sundry had seen so much forest, and the dark ranks of trees that closed on their left, then on either side as they left the river heightened the mysterious nature of their mission as much as would the Gothic ramparts of a castle. Sundry thought he caught sight of a small, doglike creature skirting the edge of the trees; then the swift shape disappeared amid a stand of alders. He ruffled Moxie’s downy ears and wondered what her nose was telling her.

They traveled for more than an hour, west and southwest of some prominent wooded hills. Then in a shadowy hollow, while the sky had begun to show signs of coming weather and the wind had risen, Capital drew the mare up and let out a “Hallo!”

Moxie let out a surprised bark, and the others in the sleigh were similarly startled.

“Hallo!” came an answering call from the woods.

“Get your gear,” said Capital, and he nickered the horses a little closer to a stream that crossed the road just ahead of them. The water disappeared through a screen of evergreen and brush, beyond which they could barely see a little glen, as dark and tidy as a gnome hole, with glaciated boulders and ancient deadfalls surrounding it like purposeful boundary keeping. Capital rubbed his horses’ noses and simply said, “Stand,” to them.

A man was picking his way down the stream by way of a series of stones, and he cried out a “Hallo!” again as he peered up from the confines of the glen to see whom he was greeting. “Capital?” he called.

“It’s me!” called the man, and with his own gear slung over his back, he half slid, half leaped down the snowy bank to the stream. Moxie capered alongside him, and neither of them looked more than a young man or a pup.

“Capital!” said the man, with more emphasis than volume, and they gripped hands. “What are you up to, you old scalawag?”

“Paul!” said Capital.

Sundry, who had taken his own things and Mister Walton’s, was quickly down the slope and pulling up beside the two men. Paul was of an age with Capital, a tall, wiry man, his curly hair and heavy beard a mix of coal black and gray; his face was weathered, and he had bushy eyebrows that overhung a handsome, if rugged, face.

“We’re off to search for buried treasure,” said Capital lightly.

“You’ve picked a good time of year for it,” said Paul, whose voice carried with it the rhythm and inflection of Acadian French.

“We thought the deeper it was buried, the more we’d find,” suggested Capital.

“Then wait a day or so, and it will be buried deeper.” Paul was watching as Frederick and Isabelle preceded Mister Walton down the short slope to the stream. Clearly his interest was up. “Shall I do for our tracks before I take your sleigh?”

“That would be fine. My friends, this is Paul Duvaudreuil, who has been my friend for longer than either of us would care to admit.”

Mr. Duvaudreuil was pleased to meet them all, and he laughed when Moxie offered her paw. For the dog he could speak his native French, and Moxie was as pleased to hear endearments voiced in this language as in English.

“You’ll have to trust me to explain another time, Paul,” said Capital. “But the quicker you have my sleigh on its way to Pittsfield, the better.”

“I am on my way,” said Mr. Duvaudreuil. He had a short knife out of the sheath at his belt and was cutting pine boughs.

“And we must be gone ourselves,” said Capital, and without further. adieu, he led his small party over the same stones that Paul Duvaudreuil had traversed. In two minutes they had passed through the cathedral like stillness of the glen (the stream rippling was itself like an aspect of silence) to a border of juniper thicket. “I hope you won’t find this difficult traveling in your skirt, Isabelle,” said the old man, but he did not hesitate before leading the way over the junipers, using them much like the steppingstones in the stream.

Sundry had heard of this way of hiding one’s tracks; the junipers were thick and heavy enough to keep a normal person from making much of a track beneath it, and if one was able to step in their very center, he hardly left a trace of his passing. The native Indians could fairly dance over a stretch of juniper.

“Our tracks from the road,” said Frederick, a little out of breath keeping up with their guide.

“Paul will have covered those and his own already,” said Capital. “It’s not as easy as it sounds, but he learned the trick from an old Indian when we were boys, simply as a means to have fun with me one winter. He’s done the same with his own tracks coming in from another path.”

They broke through a stand of fir then, and Capital watched as Isabelle joined them. She seemed as ready as ever, and he simply nodded his approval. They were in a small clearing, and there was another sleigh above them on a little rise. Two light Percherons stood in harness, looking sturdy and willing. The woods all about were muffled with snow, and Mister Walton marveled that it was only December.

“I’ve seen it like this, back in ‘72, in October,” said Capital. “A little north of here,” he amended, “but we had snow in Augusta.”

Sundry and Frederick were loading the sleigh with their gear, and the clergyman lifted his wife into a seat. Mister Walton and the husband climbed after, and Sundry clambered up alongside Capital. a crow called from a nearby tree, and the older man chuckled softly. The black bird lit on a dancing pine bough and cocked an eye down at them.

“That’s as good as a telegram for declaring where we are,” said Capital. He put a hand to his mouth and gave out a croak that would have sounded rude in a parlor back home.

The crow turned its head and applied its other eye. Capital called again. For some distance the bird said nothing, but curious, it passed from tree to tree, following them. Moxie barked at the creature once, and Frederick hushed her and ordered her to settle between them.

The horses were like dancers in the snow, their handsome legs flashing through the drifts and their broad chests pressing forward with the illusion of small labor. They followed the western shore of the stream for perhaps three-quarters of a mile before they crossed a brook and came within sight of Oaks Pond.

“The ice is probably strong enough, cold as it’s been,” said Capital, “but tracks on the pond can be seen from any high bank. Better to keep ourselves a little concealed among the trees. There are some trails near the water, however, and the way will be easy till we come to the brook that leads to Lake George, where we will have to make some decisions.”

Along trails that deer had broken, the horses only gained speed; they seemed born for the task, and the lake to their right flashed in and out of the trees. The broad expanse of sky above the plain of ice gave greater evidence of the coming storm-a palette of gray had conquered the atmosphere—and when this was remarked, Capital assured them that he knew of more than one hunting camp where they could see a blizzard through. “It may seem the middle of nowhere,” he said, “but we’re not so far out.”

The accompanying crow had chased after some breeze above the lake, racing ahead of them by half a mile, but they could hear it calling, and several others of its kin answered from other corners of the otherwise silent woods.

18. John 19:27

He never discovered where the old woman was going, and he wished afterward that he had inquired. He never knew her name.

Snow was drifting from the clouded atmosphere.

Eagleton had just spoken to his landlord the front door of the house on Chestnut Street when he first heard the altercation; he was raising his hat back to his head as he closed the door and stepped onto the stoop to follow his bags to the awaiting cab.

A second cab stood at the curb, and the driver was down from his seat and berating an elderly woman in thunderous tones and blasphemous verbiage. He had a worn hat tilted to one side, a cigar in the hatband; he was unshaven and red-nosed. The man’s eyes bulged with anger, and he did everything but shake his fist at the woman.

She was a small person whose command of English, slight from the start, had evaporated with anxiety. She wore dark clothes and a broad scarf over her head and was from her accent a person of Acadian extraction. She was attempting to explain something to the driver but was thwarted by her own tears and his unwillingness to listen.

Eagleton would have been the first to admit that displays of anger and the use of profanity were, by practice, reasons to move swiftly in another direction, but the discrepancy between the cabdriver and the elderly woman was so great that he swallowed his uncertainty and, stepping past his own cab, approached the scene.

“I was never meaning to pick up one of you people!” the man was saying even as he laid a hand upon the woman’s collar. “What’s this here then? That trinket will cover the cost and my aggravation, you can bet on it!”

“No, no!” the woman was shouting. “Monfils, mon fils.”

“Good heavens!” was all that Eagleton could find to say.

“Lay off!” said the man before Eagleton could get within a pace of him. “She takes my cab, then pretends amazement when she doesn’t have a purse or a penny to her name!”

“I have my purse lost!” the woman pleaded.

“Is it inside?” wondered Eagleton.

“It’s not inside,” said the rough man, grinning most disagreeably. “She’s an Egyptian.” He still had her collar in one hand and with the other attempted to lift something from her neck.

“If she were Egyptian, it would not matter a whit!” Eagleton declared, and he was about to suggest that the woman was speaking French when the situation became intolerable and he did the unthinkable, which was to lay a hand upon the man’s arm and shout, “Sir!” horrible sneer still occupying the lower half of his face. “You had better The driver swung his gaze like a ship’s boom into Eagleton’s face, that have good reason to be laying hold of me, mister!” he spit. “‘Cause I don’t care how fine your hat is, but what I’d be glad to knock it off—and your head with it!”

Eagleton’s driver had joined the scene by this time, and it was not apparent whether he was prepared to come down on one side or another or whether he was simply wanting a ringside seat.

“Sir!” said Eagleton again, followed by “If you will be so kind, I will happily defray the cost of this lady’s travel.”

“You’ll pay her fare?” said the man.

“I will indeed!” said Eagleton, who was growing uncommonly warm.

“And if you will not cease your belligerent manner, not to say your cowardly language, I will be forced to express my displeasure to the authorities!” He had by this time produced his own wallet and put in the man’s hand a sum that would have made the driver happy had he given the old woman three tours of the city.

“He never earned that!” said Eagleton’s own driver; he snatched the money from the first cabbie’s hand and returned it to Eagleton. “Give him a couple of coins, and if he doesn’t take it, I’ll knock the hat from his head!”

In his highly emotional state Eagleton thought that the transaction had grown complicated, but he did as his driver told him, and the unpleasant cabbie climbed back onto his seat, shouting, “She can’t even speak English!”

“She seems to be speaking English and French,” countered Eagleton’s driver, “and that’s two more languages than you command.”

The unpleasant man spat on the sidewalk at Eagleton’s feet and drove away with several sinister deprecations.

Eagleton and his driver both apologized to the elderly woman, the two of them as men and the driver as a member of his profession. Eagleton was averse to being late for his meeting with his friends and Mr. Burnbrake, but he doffed his hat and said in careful syllables, “Is there anything else I can do for you, ma’am, or any place my driver and I can take you?”

The woman took Eagleton’s face in both her hands, and he thought that she was going to kiss him. “You with the beautiful hair!” she said, her English returned to her now that the moment of crisis had passed, and indeed, Eagleton’s blond locks seemed like a source of light on this overcast day. “How like a good son to come to an old woman’s rescue!”

“Oh, well,” said a reddening Eagleton. “I am sure one of my friends would have done more.”

Then the woman reached for the back of her neck and unclasped the delicate chain hanging there. “My heart, it would be broken if that man took this, but to you I give it.”

“My word!” said Eagleton, with a hand raised to indicate the absolute necessity of his refusal.

But the woman took hold of the hand with a surprisingly determined grip and laid in it the chain, from which hung a tiny silver cross. “You cannot deny me,” she insisted. “My son is dead-almost forty years at Bull Run-and to me this was his last gift!”

“But, ma’am!” cried an astonished Eagleton.

“You will give it to your mother,” she said firmly, and when he seemed frozen in place, she took the cross and chain from him again and deftly fixed them about his neck. “I had a dream last night,” she said, “and my son told me he would send another son to help me from trouble, and here you are.” Her sweet wrinkled face smiled up at him. She had tears in her eyes, and the condition seemed contagious. Both Eagleton and the driver were clearing their throats and hemming and hawing and blinking as she moved away from them down the sidewalk.

“What should I do?” wondered Eagleton aloud.

“I should count it a worthy charm,” said the driver.

The chain had slipped beneath Eagleton’s collar, and he could feel the tiny silver cross (it was plated silver, to be sure, though the old woman had never suspected) just above his breastbone. The cross was strange, even problematic to him; Eagleton was a “good Methodist,” which persuasion did not hold with wearing such symbols. But if it seemed awkward as a religious emblem, it rather warmed him as a gift from the old woman’s heart and indirectly the same from her long-dead and well-remembered son.

Eagleton was a little nonplussed as well because he could not follow her directive; his own dear mother had died some years past.

“That was a good piece of work, mister,” said Eagleton’s driver. “You’re going to the Grand Trunk then?”

“I am, thank you.” Eagleton thought to express something further to the old woman, but she was gone from the sidewalk when he looked for her. “Yes,” he said to the driver. “I am. Storm increasing by the hour,” he informed the man. “Expected to taper off after midnight. Winds twenty to thirty knots, in the northwest.”

“Consider the fare paid,” said the driver as he opened the carriage door.

19. The Undisclosed Motives of Roger Noble

Charlotte Burnbrake brought her uncle’s bags into their apartment’s little parlor while her uncle roasted his old bones by the fire, in anticipation of the cold and the snow that he would encounter between the hotel and the train at the Grand Trunk Station.

“Is Pacif a coming soon?” asked Ezra Burnbrake.

“In an hour or so,” answered his niece. She sat beside him and took his hand.

“I hate to leave you alone.” He spoke quietly. Without wife or children, the old man had an appreciation for the vast power of loneliness and hardly understood that Charlotte might relish time by herself. “What will you do?” he asked.

“In the hour before she arrives or when she’s here?” asked Charlotte with sympathetic amusement.

“Whenever,” he said, sensing, though not hurt by, the small bit of teasing in her voice; he was simply interested in everything she did, he loved her so. His brother could have done nothing more for him than provide this niece, who had been light and song in his elder years. “I am glad you will have time with Pacifa,” he said. “I like her very much.”

Charlotte, to be truthful, would be a little glad to have her uncle gone for a few days and felt guilty for it-contradictory impulses. “We shall take a walk in the snow,” she said, and the thought of strolling the streets of Portland with Pacif a made her happy.

Uncle Ezra began a litany of dangers to avoid upon the street but cut himself short with a laugh and finished with “I warrant you’ll be safe with Pacifa.” Pacif a Means, contrary to her name, could be a turbulent creature and a force to reckon with.

“I warrant you will be safe with the Moosepath League,” she returned with a smile. She had been touched and amused by the club members, but she wondered if they would really show; their visit the day before seemed so strange now. “Give them my best,” she added as a mark of faith.

The hotel manager himself came to announce that Mr. Noble had arrived, and there was a hint in his bearing that Mr. Noble had not been pleased to wait downstairs. Uncle Ezra rose from his chair, embraced his niece, and allowed the manager to escort him down the hall. a porter came soon after and retrieved his bags.

Charlotte waited at the window, where she could watch, through a crack in the curtains, the bent shape of her uncle and the straight, arrogant figure of her cousin Roger Noble entering a cab at the sidewalk. Noble paused before he disappeared into the carriage and looked up at the very window. She knew he couldn’t see her, but she flinched. She held the curtain steady, however, and gave him no token of her observance. The snow had begun, just barely, to drift from the clouded sky.

Charlotte lost herself in the contemplation of these first flakes and was finally roused by the sound of Pacifa’s energetic knock upon the door.

Since the first light of morning the skies over Portland Harbor had been that unvariegated gray that drains color from the water and the snow and the rock, mutes the shadows of day, and appears to draw so close that mariner and landsman alike might wonder if a ceiling had been constructed while they were sleeping. Before the first train was pulled alongside the platform of the Grand Trunk Station, lazy spirals of snow had already drifted out of that gray field, only visible as they crossed the dark shapes of buildings or perhaps not till they had lighted upon a shoulder or a glove.

“What’s the wire saying?” wondered the conductor when he came into the station from his routine inspection of the train.

“They’ve hardly seen daylight west of York County,” informed the stationmaster, in what may have been an exaggeration.

The conductor nodded. He was philosophical. Some would get where they were going, and others would not. Anywhere on the rail was his place; the train itself was as much home as his little rooms on Warren Street. out of the roundhouse, though the snow had hardly started and there was From the side windows he could see that the yardmen had dollied a plow only a freckling of white over the tracks. The flakes were fat but sparse, falling like spring fluff. The engine blew a preliminary gout of steam and the damp cloud burst from the stack into a roiling confluence of scattered snow.

“What’s the wire say?” said the engineer, when he stepped into the station.

Together the stationmaster, the ticket man, and the conductor painted a picture that was as bleak or cheery as their distinctive personalities.

“I suppose that it will snow whether we keep school or not,” said the engineer, who was himself philosophical. He and the conductor were more interested in the weather than they let on, however; the running of their train and the safety of their passengers were points of honor with them, though they faced these issues with bland expressions. They had returned to their train before the Grand Trunk Station’s customers and other people began to arrive.

The first of these came under the heading “other people,” it seemed, for they got off the first trolley of the day and wandered into the station with none of the purpose that radiates from the ready traveler. The three of them looked about the waiting room as if it were oddly familiar.

“I think I could sit down,” said Humphrey Brink.

“Remember not to lie down, or they will exact a toll,” said Aldicott Durwood.

“Do not ask for whom the bench tolls,” intoned Brink, “it tolls for me,” and he answered his own poetic call.

“Does anyone see Mister Walton anyplace?” wondered Roderick Waverley.

“Would it be a terrible encumbrance,” wondered the ticket man, “if I were to ask why you gentlemen seem to have no homes?”

“Don’t believe everything that seems,” suggested Brink.

“It’s an illusion,” said Waverley.

“It’s the result of a poorly conceived wager,” explained Durwood. “Our acquaintance here,” he continued, indicating Waverley, “was exhorting certain ruffians with news of our youth, wherein he described an entire week in which purportedly we never made use of our own beds. For a week.”

“If we are to believe our acquaintance,” said Brink, “then we made the streets and the docks and such places as this our domicile.”

“For a week,” said Durwood again. “When we were younger. Home wasn’t safe at the time. Our fathers wanted us to work.”

“I don’t remember it,” said Brink.

“That’s no proof against,” said Waverley.

“No doubt it was summer,” said Durwood. “And we were young.”

“Waverley made a wager…” said Brink. He spoke with his eyes closed. Perhaps they had forgotten the ticket man entirely; they might almost have been talking among themselves or even to themselves. “… that it could be done again.”

“Though it is winter,” said Durwood.

“I hope it was a sizable bet,” said the ticket man. From his expression one could not tell if he were amused.

“Moreover,” said Waverley, “it is an affair of honor.” Durwood and Brink nearly came to their feet at this communication, and he assured them, “But it was a sizable bet.”

Brink’s attention was taken up by something new at this juncture. Through the glass doors of the station entrance he could see two men one elderly, another of similar age to his friends and himself-mounting the steps slowly. The younger man was haranguing his companion in tones that could be heard well ahead of them. a door was opened, and the volume of this tirade grew respectively.

“I tell you, you have no right to keep me from speaking to her!” the man was saying, and some quality of his own voice in that place (perhaps the echo, as if some sentient creature were repeating his words) brought him up short.

Durwood, Waverley, and Brink made no pretense of uninterest but blinked at the man. “It’s the amiable Roger Noble,” said Brink. His voice carried through the station in the sudden quiet.

“You won’t be able to rest here for long,” explained the man in the ticket booth to Brink, “bet or no bet. There’ll be a lot of folk through here this morning, hoping to beat the storm.”

Roger Noble shot darts around the room, to Brink and his associates, then back to the elderly man, his uncle, Ezra Burnbrake. To look at, Noble, tall and blond, was all that one would ask for in a man of that name; his were straight good looks and a clear eye. He kept his chin high, but his mouth had taken a twist, brought on no doubt by a growing propensity to frown or even to sneer. He had struggled against his boyish features and had won out only too well.

“Roger,” said Durwood as the nephew and uncle advanced to the ticket booth.

“These aren’t the fellows you were talking about?” wondered Noble.

“These men?” said the elderly man. He peered at Durwood, Waverley, and Brink, adjusting his spectacles as he took each of them into account. “No, these aren’t them. Do you know them?” He was out of breath, but Noble did not offer to lead him to a seat, nor did he answer the question.

“I thought,” said Noble accusingly, “anything like the Moosepath League sounded too suspicious to be right!” Clearly he had not listened to his uncle or had simply discounted what the man had said.

“The Moosepath League!” said Brink; Durwood and Waverley echoed him. “You couldn’t have a thing to do with Mister Walton!” added Brink.

“That was the name of their chairman,” said Mr. Burnbrake.

“Don’t feel you have to come along,” said Noble darkly.

“We won’t,” said Brink, who had no idea what the man was referring to.

“We simply haven’t bought our tickets yet,” said Waverley.

“We haven’t?” said Durwood.

“We aren’t part of the Moosepath League, are we?” wondered Brink of his companions.

“I don’t think so,” said Waverley.

“I thought perhaps Mister Walton had inducted us without our knowing.”

“Then we wouldn’t know, would we?” said Waverley.

“That is very true. I hadn’t thought.”

The doors to the station opened just then, and three men hurried inside. They were very different from one another, except that each carried a newspaper under one arm and took his hat in the opposite hand upon entering.

“I have a feeling about these gentlemen, gentlemen,” said Durwood.

“Could it be?” wondered Waverley.

“Mr. Burnbrake!” called the first of these newcomers. “How good to see you again, sir.”

“Ah!” said the old man. “These are the fellows!”

Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump strode up to the small assemblage, even while-from other doors, and behind them-the station began to fill with travelers and baggage. Several porters and a driver stumbled in with a great load of bags and followed the Moosepathians.

The members of the club had discussed among themselves the best way to greet Charlotte Burnbrake’s “troublesome cousin,” and their decision was to face such a personality with a manner that was cordial yet guarded.

“Matthew Ephram,” said that worthy, and he held out his hand.

Noble took it, but sparingly, as if he had only so much greeting allotted to him, and it was Ephram’s motivation that pumped their hands.

Eagleton and Thump introduced themselves, and since the first three men seemed to be of the party, they were drawn into the circle of introductions and handshakes. When Durwood, Waverley, and Brink offered their cognomens, however, Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump were astonished.

“Good heavens!” said Eagleton. “The Dash-It-All Boys!”

Brink’s head shot up.

“We are the Moosepath League!” declared Ephram, as if he were announcing himself to a long lost relative.

“It is like dire fate!” said Waverley.

“The Moosepath League!” said Durwood. “Mister Walton!”

Thump, who was then shaking Durwood’s hand, beamed to hear his chairman’s name spoken in exclamatory tones. Durwood peered into the great density of Thump’s beard in hopes of ascertaining what the bared teeth meant.

Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump were very eager to be shaking hands; they made the rounds of their new acquaintances more than once (and in fact found themselves shaking with one another). Durwood, Waverley, and Brink peered at their own hands, as if expecting these appendages to be somehow altered by all this agitation. Mr. Burnbrake was also greeted affably, and Eagleton insisted that the elderly fellow take a bench.

“It was very good of you to come to the aid of our chairman,” Ephram said to Brink.

“Was it?” Brink couldn’t recall doing any such thing and was a little shocked by the suggestion.

“He never found his hat,” said Durwood.

“He didn’t, thank you,” said Eagleton.

“Oh, don’t thank me.”

“And are you coming with us?” asked Thump.

“For a bit,” replied Brink. “Waverley, you were going to get our tickets.”

“Was I?”

“Come,” said Thump, “let us go together!” He half accompanied, half led Waverley to the ticket booth, where the seller was watching with interest. Thump thought it terrifically congenial (and even jolly) to be performing such a function with his Dashian counterpart.

Ephram and Eagleton meanwhile were astonished to hear that the Dash-It-All Boys had seen their chairman only the day before as he and Sundry left with the Covingtons. The news precipitated another round of handshakes that Thump was loath to miss, and though he had not been informed of this new turn of events, he took Waverley’s hand at the ticket booth and shook it heartily.

Roger Noble stared at all this bonhomie with something like disgust.

Ezra Burnbrake looked up from his bench with a quiet smile, considered his nephew and thought it good for him.

It is curious how goodwill is irksome to some people, how sincerity of spirit and honesty of heart can rile particular tempers to the boiling point, as if every pleasing word and unmitigated smile were the bite of a gnat or the buzz of a mosquito.

Misery loves company, it is said, and so perhaps does choler. Roger Noble, who arrived at the Grand Trunk Station in an absolute fury because he had been denied an audience with his cousin Charlotte, found his indignation further prodded by the unaffected pleasantness of the Moosepathians, as well as by the somewhat wryer amiability of the Dashians.

The storm’s advance guard had pushed past the environs of Portland, and the first serious regiments of snow fell upon the city even as the train pulled out from the eastern end of Commercial Street and began its peripheral march below the promenade. Back Cove disappeared behind the snow distance on the one side of the trestle that led toward Falmouth, and the great harbor paled on the other. Noble stared at his half reflection without perceiving the storm, and the Dash-It-All Boys were involved in earnest conversation with the Moosepath League; Ezra Burnbrake felt he was able to sleep in such agreeable company, and he closed his eyes.

At first the Dash-It-All Boys were up to this new diversion, and their conversation was mightily perplexing to the members of the Moosepath League, no more so than when Eagleton announced his great desire to see the Smoking Pine of Hallowell.

“Has it been smoking long?” wondered Brink.

“Oh, yes!” said Eagleton. “For years!”

“It must be very charred by now,” suggested Durwood.

“It is a wonder there’s anything left to see,” added Waverley.

“It isn’t on fire,” explained Ephram. “But there is an odd sort of effluence that hovers above it sometimes, so that it appears to be smoking.”

“It is part of a grove of pines,” continued Eagleton, “thought to be the reincarnated spirits of the last Wawenocks.”

“How long did the Wawenocks last?” asked Durwood.

“I beg your pardon?” said Eagleton.

“I believe I would rather return as a hackmatack,” observed Waverley.

“And why is that?” wondered Brink.

“I don’t know, but I like saying hackmatack.”

“Durwood saw a smoking oak once, didn’t you, Durwood,” remembered Brink.

“Did I?”

“You should know if anyone does.”

“There does seem to be a fleeting recollection.”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Brink. Then to Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump he added, “Nearly burnt his aunt’s house to the ground.”

“Not to the ground, I don’t think,” said Durwood in his own defense. “The third floor was a little poorly.”

“Good heavens!” said Eagleton. “What started it?”

“Some of her parlor furniture, I think,” said Durwood blandly.

The Moosepathians were flabbergasted.

“Three sheets to the wind,” said Brink.

“I beg your pardon,” chorused the Moosepathians.

“Durwood,” said Brink. “Drunk as a lord, he was!”

Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump were stunned by this indictment. None of them but Mr. Burnbrake could have been alive before the Dow Law, unlawful behavior as well as intoxication. The two trios of men gaped at which prohibited liquor in the state of Maine, and so Brink was suggesting one another for some moments, and even Roger Noble turned from his contemplation of the whitened atmosphere to see what the silence meant.

Then a strange noise emanated from Thump; he appeared to be laughing, though it was hard to be sure since his facial growth so concealed his expression. Thump’s friends knew him well, however, and they too began to chortle. “Good heavens!” said Eagleton again. “Good heavens!”

Ephram put his head back and laughed as he had seldom done before.

“You quite had me believing you,” said Thump to Brink.

“Did I?” said Brink.

Eagleton was slapping his thigh. “Drunk as a lord!” he declared. “I must write that down. Oh, good heavens!” He found his notebook and was jotting this exchange into it when it occurred to him that he had something to tell his friends. “It occurs to me,” he said, “that I had something to tell you.”

“Oh?” said Ephram. Thump too leaned forward.

Eagleton was fingering something beneath his shirt, and they watched him do this with interest and curiosity. “I can’t recall,” he said.

“How unfortunate,” said Durwood, and his fellow Dashians appeared disappointed as well.

“It will come to me,” assured Eagleton. Ephram patted Eagleton’s shoulder.

There was yet another thread of conversation among these fellows that would prove consequential to the Moosepathians in a later season (not to mention extraordinary interest, even debate, among historians of the society): While describing certain adventures they had experienced since forming their club, Eagleton happened to mention the remarkable Mrs. Roberto. It was on the previous Fourth of July that this lovely woman, in the performance of her celebrated parachute drop from an ascended balloon, accidentally landed upon Thump, who was attempting to regulate a boxing match between two politicians!

The tale, when it was told, fascinated the Dash-It-All Boys on several levels. “It is a new electoral process then?” wondered Brink.

“The lady actually settled upon you?” said Waverley. Thump, who had taken very little part in the telling of it, looked red beneath his beard; he had never gotten over his brief encounter with Mrs. Roberto (he had actually danced with her the following evening at the Freeport Fourth of July Ball), and he was quick to come to her defense if anyone was rash enough to disparage her parachuting abilities.

“I met the lady once,” said Durwood.

“Did you?” said his friends, as well as Ephram and Eagleton. Thump’s eyes widened with sudden interest.

Durwood was perhaps remembering the famous shape of that woman, which was not small but was entirely proportionate; he had, by the mild look upon his countenance, admired her.

“I know the woman,” said Roger Noble, and as this was the first instance of his joining their conversation since the train pulled from the Portland station, all eyes turned to him.

“Do you?” said Thump.

Noble smiled unpleasantly. “She is a woman of many talents,” he said, with an insinuation that touched the Dashians, if not the Moosepathians. “She used to live down by the waterfront in Portland.”

“I think you mean a different person,” suggested Durwood.

“I don’t think I do,” said Noble.

“The waterfront?” said Thump. He didn’t know that there were any very nice places in that section of the city.

“I think Mr. Noble is referring to a different person,” said Durwood.

Noble seemed to think better of pursuing this line of thought and ted with a sneer to the window.

But Thump fell into a deep study after this portion of their discourse, which musings did not go unnoticed by the Dash-It-All Boys, who nonetheless succumbed to several nights of carousing and, one by one, put up a remarkable chorus of snores. The members of the Moosepath League continued to think upon the lovely Mrs. Roberto, but soon they too were lulled by the cadence of the rails and the continuous veil of snow outside their windows.

It was not till they changed trains in Brunswick and both clubs roused themselves (and Mr. Burnbrake) that they realized Roger Noble was gone.

Ezra Burnbrake, chiding himself for his carelessness, sent a telegram of warning to his niece, which she received too late.

20. Frantic Whispers and Pointed Dispatch

Roger Noble left the train at Yarmouth; it was a simple thing, a sudden inspiration touched with alarm. He waited more than an hour for a Portland-bound train, and all the while his heart thumped to think that he had defied his uncle (for whom he still held an unaccountable fear) but, more important, that he would soon be face-to-face with his cousin Charlotte Bum brake.

He had not seen Charlotte for three years now, and three years ago, when he did see her, it was considered (by Charlotte and Uncle Ezra) an accident. He had not been allowed to speak with her alone. Before that he had spoken to her alone many times and-since they were very young always to the same frustrating, maddening end.

It was worse than thirst to Noble; enough money and enough industry can find a bottle anywhere, but there was only the single face with which he was obsessed, and that was denied him.

Once they had been companions, and he had held Charlotte’s hand and even kissed her; they had walked in his parents’ garden on summer nights. She was older than he by three years, and he had watched with admiration and growing passion as she trembled from child to womanlike adolescent to woman. Since that final transformation, his life had tumbled by in an agony of waiting, which was relieved only by an absolute torment of disappointment whenever he chanced to see her again.

I his waiting and in his obsession, he managed to make good every prediction of his prodigality and profligacy. He had burned through his legacy within a year of his father’s death and been forced to beg of his uncle an annual stipend, which passed through his hands like water. He was continually in debt, fearful of meeting his creditors, and more often than not behaved as if he were owed money. a is so common with those who lack true self-possession, he carried with him a monumental conceit for his own worth and abilities, an egotism all the more dangerous for being fragile.

His hands shook as he bought a ticket in the Yarmouth station for the trip back to Portland, and he felt a weight in his chest that labored his heart and hindered his breathing.

Believing her cousin to be out of town, Charlotte Bumbrake thought that Portland in the snow was something like paradise. Though the weather already blinded the harbor, accumulating quickly upon the sidewalks, the populace was not to be daunted; the streets were swift with carriages, and the stores lively with business. Charlotte and Pacif a Means delighted to see boxes and packages done up in Christmas wrap, and they stood to listen as a man sang carols at a street corner.

Pacif a was a small woman with a large, sometimes comical manner; her eyes were almost black and flashed alike with amusement or temper; her eyebrows were perfect arches, deft at communicating her frame of mind. Beneath her hood she wore her dark hair in a pile upon her head, lending her small features a patrician quality that she used to benign, if sly, advantage. She and Charlotte walked arm in arm, bundled to the chin in fur collars, their hands muffed, the hems of their long coats dressed with snow.

At a shop window they stopped to look at great ranks of toys, and a man standing beside them asked their opinion regarding the probable Christmas wish of an eight-year-old girl. Pacif a pointed out the doll with eyes that closed when it was laid down. Charlotte favored the miniature tea set. They left the fellow peering from one to the other of these items, and he was such a picture of indecision that Pacif a made Charlotte stop some distance down the walk to watch him.

“Just see if he doesn’t scratch his head,” said Pacifa, and when the man took off his hat to do so, she made Charlotte laugh, she was so gleeful.

“Pacifa!” said Charlotte, fearing they were drawing attention to themselves. “You always make me unruly!” she said, laughing. Pacif a thought the idea of an unruly Charlotte Bumbrake was itself very funny and was therefore subject to further imprecations from her friend.

Charlotte’s and Pacifa’s fathers had been business associates, as well as owning large shares in the same two brigs, the Hallowel and the Estimate. Charlotte, her brothers, and her sister had been raised in nearby Westbrook, but the friendship with Pacifa’s family occasioned many a fondly remembered outing to Portland, and the concerns in the two brigs drew them to the excitement of the waterfront whenever one or the other arrived at her home port.

It was during these years that Charlotte came to know her cousin Roger Noble and in those days to welcome his company. When Charlotte was nineteen, her parents and her sister died during a snowless winter of deadly influenza, and with her brothers at sea or out west, she was sent to Cambridge and Uncle Ezra, with whom she had lived ever since. Ezra doted upon his niece, but now, in his aged years, the relationship between them had reversed somewhat.

While Charlotte was in Cambridge, Pacif a had been married for several years, but her husband died under circumstances that were not talked about. The two friends never had so much as a cross word between them. Neither of their lives was filled with incidents now, but they found much to say as they strolled the business district and shopped from the uncostly side of the store windows, all the while reveling in the snowy crowds.

Along the streets the eye might comprehend each individual flake as it tumbled between the dark buildings; as the eye gazed over the harbor, through a vast field of snowfall against the overcast sea, all the senses were hushed by that silent and endless multitude. Ship’s spars, themselves repeated into the waterfront distance, had collected a mantle of white. More than one crew had, for St. Nicholas’s Day (which was tomorrow), tied boughs and mistletoe onto the highest cross member of their vessel’s mainmast, unintentionally adorning the Christian symbol with the pagan but lending a Yuletide charm to even this rugged neighborhood.

The women were well exercised when they returned to the City Hotel, their cheeks red with exertion and the weather, and they brushed themselves and each other off as best they could before entering the foyer. There they found a young man who promised to have lunch sent to their rooms.

“And coffee please,” said Pacif a with a shiver.

“I sent one of the boys up with a telegram about half an hour ago,” said the manager, who stepped from his office.

“Oh?” Charlotte thought that her uncle might have wired her of his safe arrival at Hallowell.

“He slipped it beneath your door, ma’am.”

It seems early, she thought when she passed the tall clock in the lobby.

They hurried up the stairs, hoping the fire in the apartments was not out.

They were hungry from their exercises and they strode the upstairs hall with as brisk a pace as might be considered ladylike.

The first surprise, and the first inkling that all was not as it should be, came when the door to Charlotte’s apartments opened before she turned the key. a terrible suspicion seemed to emanate from the knob in her hand, till it touched her heart with apprehension and near panic.

The parlor was small but elaborate in its furnishings. Three large chairs cornered the room; ornate electric lamps hung from the ceiling and stood against the walls. The fire in the grate burned merrily. Charlotte had the door more than half opened before a tall man was revealed in the near right corner of the room, and she wondered if he were hiding from all but the last possible moment of discovery.

It’s just Roger she said to herself, and then, It is never just Roger She stepped on something and without thinking bent down to pick the telegram from the floor.

Roger Noble was smiling, not simply to indicate the pleasure of seeing her but to suggest that their meeting was mutually happy. Then that smile evaporated into something almost childlike in its need. She saw that he had been reading the letter from Adam Tempest, and he laid it down upon the table where he found it. He was the first to speak, pronouncing her name as if he had just come up for air.

“Roger,” she said, unable to wash affection entirely from the address.

“Mr. Noble,” said Pacif a as she appeared at her friend’s shoulder.

Irritation flashed in Noble’s eyes. “Mrs. Means,” he said, attempting to recover his passive veneer.

“I am surprised to see you, Roger,” said Charlotte quietly.

He looked like a boy expecting reprimand, and this suggestion of his youth, this flash of the child in the man, made the moments that followed the more painful for Charlotte. She realized that she was standing in the door, blocking Pacifa’s entrance and dripping with melted snow. The women brought their coats to the opposite corner, so that Noble was left standing like the member of a separate party on the other side of the small room.

“You are supposed to be with Uncle,” she said as both reason and anger returned to her.

“He has escort enough, it seems,” said Roger. There was impatience in his eyes, and every fear that Charlotte had concerning him was very simply resubstantiated.

“And yet no family while we speak,” she said.

Pacif a took a poker and made a great deal of noise shaking up the coals in the grate. Roger watched her as she made herself conspicuous; under other circumstances, it might have been comic, how severely she peered at the painting above the fireplace.

“I am like no family at all to that old man,” he said, turning back to Charlotte.

“And if that were so, who is at fault, pray tell?”

“Charlotte, I must talk with you!”

“Nothing has changed, Roger.”

He sent Pacif a another uncertain look, then pleaded with Charlotte. “You can’t know that,” he said, though he might have been saying, How far must I humiliate myself Standing alone, he looked dangerously impotent. He had aged since she saw him last; his clothes and his hair were in the fashion of youth-too youthful really-but the pockets beneath his eyes, the pallor of his cheek declared his unhealthy existence.

There was an impasse; Charlotte was herself mortified by this scene and could say no more, and there was yet enough social restraint in Roger Noble that he would say no more in anything but the most private surroundings.

Pacifa’s restraint at present was a manifestation of her love for Charlotte, and nothing more. She stood with her back to the fire, her exquisite eyebrows raised and her chin in the air.

But Roger Noble had not braved the wrath of his uncle, returned to Portland, and stolen into Charlotte’s room by way of his talent for jimmying locks, only to turn away at the first rebuff, and Charlotte could see this. In his petulant expression there was again the young man she had known and cared for, and not for the first time did she wonder how something so short as childhood could command such respect and duty over the remainder of a person’s life. There were tears in her eyes: tears of apprehension, tears from the shock of seeing him (and seeing him look so old), and tears for the beautiful little boy still discernible in his face. “Let us go into the next room,” she said, and touching Pacifa’s hand to stem any dispute from that quarter, she led the way to the little alcove that gave access to the bed chambers.

Charlotte nodded when Noble reached for the door. He closed it softly behind them, and she saw Pacif a step briefly into her line of sight before they were shut from each other. It was curious to her that he stood with his hand upon the door as if he might have reason to flee at any moment.

He looked at her, hardly able to believe that here was not simply a manifestation (a hallucination even) of his desire but the woman herself. She could not at first meet his eyes but looked down at her hands. She stood with her back to the door of her room, but the alcove felt like a place of no escape, too small for her emotions, hardly offering enough air to breathe.

After the briefest sort of eternity she asked how he had been since she last saw him, the question sounding dull and stupid.

“My God, Charlotte!” he said. “You are more beautiful than ever!”

She did look into his eyes then, and sharply; his declaration somehow left her with more self-assurance and less guilt. She still saw in him the little boy, but not for the first time she thought she could recall the deceit and dissipation of the adult in generative form within the face of the child. It gave her room to breathe, not to feel such sadness for that young man.

“Charlotte,” he said, “I do have something to say to you.”

“What is it, Roger?”

“I know, of course,” he began, “that your father left you with a handsome legacy.” The look on her face indicated renewed suspicion, and he raised a hand to stop her from speaking, his words coming faster. “I also know that the swift loss of my own inheritance is no secret, to my family or my friends, not to say my enemies.” Charlotte looked ready to stop him at any moment, but he rushed onward, saying, “My dear, it has dawned on me and I understand how completely you must fear that any attachment with me would endanger your security. It is with that in mind that it occurs to me that I should, should have long ago, offered to suffer any legality, sign any paper to assure you that your bequest remains your own, with no danger from my imprudence, along with those assurances I repeatedly give you that such a marriage would be all I need to throw off the bad habits and low companionship that have heretofore characterized your opinion of me.”

Charlotte was appalled yet knew he was grasping at straws, that his understanding of her was lost beneath a distressing tangle of emotions. “Roger, I do not love you! Or if any love remains, it is the love of one cousin for another, the love that blood demands!”

No sooner were these words spoken than he launched himself at her and pinned her against the door to her room. He did not mean to shake her, but he was vibrating with such fear and anger that it translated itself to her like a current of electricity. Her first impulse was to cry out, though she thought it weak to do so, even as she realized that it was foolish not to.

There was Pacif a to think of, however, and least of all she wanted to draw her friend into this unhappy affair. She wondered what Pacif a could hear. Their previous words had been in tones no louder than would be considered conversational, but as he pressed her, his cheek against hers and their mouths within an inch of one another’s ears, what was said came in gasps and whispers, more rapid and furious and less comprehensible.

“You made a promise!” he almost sobbed, and repeated over and over, “You promised me! You made a promise!”

“We were children! Just children!”

The scent of her filled him: her hair, her skin, her breath, the pale and familiar essence of lavender. He gripped her shoulders in a rough caress and pressed his mouth to her cheek. They both wept, she more in sorrow than fear, he almost in rage. He pulled his face away, and the sight of her beautiful eyes welling with tears seemed only to increase his anger. He held her face, and she made a small, animallike cry, sure that he was going to force his mouth onto hers, when a sharp knock came upon the door behind them.

“Charlotte,” came Pacifa’s voice. “Charlotte, you have a visitor.”

“Yes?” said Charlotte. Noble stood away from her with a startled jerk.

“There is a gentleman here to see you,” said Pacif a through the door.

Charlotte was sure that Pacif a must be inventing a caller, and though Roger would be furious, he could be no more so than he was a moment before. Roger Noble meanwhile feared any man’s finding them in such straits.

“Yes,” said Charlotte. She had a handkerchief out and was wiping her eyes and wondering how she could put herself in order before the door was opened and realizing how improper it looked to have Roger and her step out, flushed and out of breath. She thought to ask Roger to wait in Uncle Ezra’s room, but that would be counter to Pacifa’s rescue of her, so she stepped past him and wrenched open the door.

A man was standing in the parlor, and Charlotte could hardly have been more surprised. He was a regular-looking fellow, hardly taller than she, with a pleasant face and broad mustaches. He was well tailored, and he held a crisp fedora before him. He blinked when she opened the door, and she knew that her face was blotched with emotion and that her eyes were still wet.

She stood stupidly in the door to the alcove, with Roger watching over her shoulder. “I beg your pardon,” she said, and with sudden inspiration asked, “Are you here to see my uncle? I am sorry, but he left this morning.”

“A it happens,” said the fellow, glancing from one to the other of the three people before him. “I was looking for Mr. Burnbrake, if he is your uncle, though it was more in the way of finding the Moosepath League.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Charlotte.

“The Moosepath League,” he said again, the drawl in his voice indicating just how much he belonged in the state of Maine.

“The Moosepath League,” she said, suppressing a sudden need to weep again. “The Moosepath League is with my uncle, sir.”

“My name is Daniel Plainway,” said the man. He nodded to Charlotte and Pacifa, then took in Noble.

“This is my good friend Charlotte Burnbrake,” said Pacifa, and she all but swooped Charlotte away from Noble. Roger was left in plain sight, and he mechanically stepped into the parlor.

“I apologize if I came at a bad time,” Daniel said as they shook hands awkwardly.

“Not at all,” said Pacifa. “We were just talking about lunch. Perhaps you could stay.”

Charlotte shot her friend a startled glance.

“Thank you, no,” said Daniel. “I’m simply interested in where I might find the Moosepath League-specifically, I should say, a Mister Tobias Walton. It is a matter of some urgency, as I have information that I know he has been waiting on for some time.” The man worked at the brim of his hat.

“I haven’t met Mister Walton myself,” said Charlotte, “but I can give you the address my uncle was reaching today, and from there you are sure to find Mister Walton’s friends, who may be of more help.” She moved across the room to a table beneath a window where there were some papers.

“Let me,” said Pacifa. Charlotte didn’t know how Pacif a could have any idea where her uncle would be, but her friend was across the room and scribbling something on a piece of paper before she could think of a response. “There,” said Pacifa, and she handed Mr. Plain way the supposed address.

Daniel Plainway thanked the dark-haired woman and nodded to the others. He knew that he had stepped into a private complication and was thankful to have what he came for so that he could leave. “Miss Burnbrake,” he said, then glanced at the piece of paper in his hand. There was no address on it at all, but only the words:

If you are at all gallant you will not leave until he is gone!

21. Beyond the Forest of Fallen Trees

“We can keep to the wooded trails,” said Capital Gaines, “but from a distance the steam from these creatures might look like a train passing through. Probably the snow is hiding us.”

The Percherons gave no evidence of tiring, but the vapor that rose from their backs, as they plowed the drifts, rose (when the snow and wind did not hinder it) to the height of a four-story building, well above many of the middle-aged pines and hardwoods ranking the banks of the brook that connected Oaks Pond with Lake George.

Twice Capital stopped the sleigh and, with a hammer, knocked off the snowballs that accumulated on the horses’ hooves. More than once, one of these accretions flew off of its own accord and banged loudly against the dashboard of the sleigh.

Capital’s passengers had only to appreciate his skill with the animals, squint through the increasing snow, and marvel at the wintry silence that occupied the woods and water. Mister Walton thought the husband and wife looked like a pleasant lithograph, snugly wrapped in their furs and blankets. He himself was a picture of wintry delight, with his bespectacled bright eyes and rosy cheeks; his hat was crammed down over his head as a precaution against losing it.

Though he had been impressed by the burglary at Mr. Thole’s home, Mister Walton likened his emotions to a child playing hide-and-seek, when the fear of being found grows out of proportion to the game. It was not altogether an unpleasant sensation, but he didn’t think it would remain so for very long. The hushed atmosphere, the hiss of falling snow, and the steady rush of their progress only heightened the sense of secrecy and the dread of discovery.

They reached the top of a particularly tall slope, and through the snow, as well as through a line of trees and over the heads of other pine and fir below them, they could see the frozen plain of Lake George. They had lost sight of the crow, though occasionally they could still hear a raucous call though the woods. Capital drew up the sleigh and considered their itinerary.

“There is someone on the lake,” said Sundry. He was standing on his seat, hoping that his own long form was hidden by the trees before them.

“What’s that?” Capital pulled a pair of binoculars from the pack at his feet and trained them toward Lake George. The falling snow between themselves and the lake made for an obscured view, but he was able to locate at least three dark figures some yards from the near shore. “They’re not moving,” he said after a bit. The others were straining their own necks. “Ice fishers, maybe,” he suggested. He pointed to two hills in the east. “There’s a small settlement at the foot of those mounds,” he continued, “and there’s a road along the opposite bank.”

“But that’s the other side of the lake,” said Isabelle.

“No telling where the best fishing is,” said the man.

“It’s an odd day to be fishing, isn’t it?” wondered Sundry, considering the rising storm and the persistent and heavy snow.

“It’s an odd day to be out at all,” said Capital with some humor. “They either are fishing or want us to think they are. There’s probably no telling, unless we go up and ask them, so I suggest we take note and carry on.”

“Do you know where we are going from here?” asked Frederick, who was feeling an increasing need for hurry. Capital had them moving, even as the clergyman spoke.

“We’ll head almost directly towards Foster Hill and into a wood of fallen trees.”

“Fallen trees?” said Sundry. “It’s been cut?”

“Not at all, but you’ll see for yourself.”

The horses seemed to enjoy charging down the opposite slope, and the passengers felt as if they were almost falling. Mister Walton held his hat to his head and thought of tobogganing down the Eastern Promenade.

The “Forest of Fallen Trees” (as it has been identified in the relevant annals) was not a grove brought dow by the hand of man but a curious testament to the speculative character of the natural world.

Forty years ago the country they traveled had been stripped of forest; many a house still stood and many a ship sailed that owed its physical existence, if not its soul, to the giants that once guarded these hills. But once the emptied land had been left to its own devices, the descendants of former pine and spruce, of oak and maple, and the soon-to-be-doomed elm, reoccupied the slopes deserted by lumbering armies, and the quicker growths of softwood ventured even into tracts where only bush and fern would safely grow. In peaty soil, amid stands of granite, the pines and their relatives increased their standard foot a year till the poor ground had not sufficient leverage against the wind and the weight of wood. and ice, the great trees crashed in the otherwise silent forest, as one by Throughout the year, but more commonly beneath the burden of snow one they reached some unstable height, and though new trees continued to raise their skeletal shoots, this expanse of thin soil had become a graveyard of leaning trees, the massive networks of roots, round as wheels, lifted like the upturned feet of dead and decaying giants. Snow hung upon everything, and the dark horizontal trunks were thickly shrouded in white.

But this was not an unknown stretch of land, and hunters had cleared a way through this wreckage to the stalking grounds beyond. It was a little sobering to ride past this natural destruction, where the trail picked its way between the fallen trees, occasionally ducking beneath the raised trunk of the largest of them. Mister Walton was reminded of cities he had visited after the war in the former Confederacy, where shattered buildings and heaps of brick lay abandoned and barren.

While they crept around one of these deadfalls, Moxie bounded from the sleigh and charged through the drifts ahead of them. Sundry envied her a little, thinking it might be pleasant to stretch a leg and explore this strange place more closely. The knock from a woodpecker came from the other side of the dying wood.

A the trail avoided the largest of these obstacles, it led them away from the stream and back again several times, so that their weaving path might have been laid out by a drunkard. The brook rose with the land, and the horses heaved against the steepening slope where even the dead pines grew few and massive boulders and sharp verges of granite formed the primary crop. They came to a narrow plateau above which there rose an abrupt and craggy height, what would have been called a tor in the Scottish Highlands.

This eminence lay another ten or twenty yards above them and was impossible for the horses and sleigh to reach. Frederick was the first to throw off his covers and jump down; he was surprised by the depth of the snow and a little daunted to think it would be that much deeper on their return. Isabelle was peering into the sky as he handed her down, as if she might gauge the snow that had yet to fall, but at present they were blinded from the sky itself by an atmosphere filled with heavy flakes.

Moxie bounded alongside them, looking ready to play. Mister Walton had never seen a dog so at home in the snow.

Frederick took up a shovel that he had packed in the rear of the sleigh and shouldered a bag of instruments. Mister Walton and Sundry stood aside, waiting to help with anything that Capital deemed necessary to bring. The older man, however, simply threw the strap of his field glasses over his shoulder, then reached beneath a blanket at his feet and produced a rifle.

“You never know what might be in season,” said Capital when he saw Mister Walton’s wide-eyed expression.

Mister Walton himself had handled a similar firearm not many months before, and the memory of knocking a man down with a single shot was perhaps uppermost in his mind. Frederick and Isabelle too were a little taken aback by Capital’s particular readiness.

“That’s not a rabbit gun,” said Sundry wryly.

“Swamping a man’s house is a severe business,” said Capital simply, referring to the burglary at Mr. Thole’s and suggesting, at the same time, that those capable of such a deed might be capable of other things as well. “You’ve thought of that?” he asked, and there was every indication that he was enjoying himself.

“I appreciate your caution, Mr. Gaines,” said Frederick.

“Capital!”

“I appreciate, Capital, your caution, but it seems-”

“Well?”

“I can’t imagine-”

“Can’t you!” Capital shrugged. “A you wish, Reverend,” he said with a wink, and he slipped the rifle back beneath its blanket, then vaulted down from the sleigh like a young man. “Will your dog stay with the sleigh?”

“I think, yes,” said Frederick.

“Then tell her to give a bark if anyone comes sniffing around.”

Daniel’s Story (May–June 1891)

They were coming out of choir practice one Wednesday evening when Clayton Bond told Daniel Plainway about seeing “the Linnett girl and that odd brother of Asher Willums down by Ten Mile River.” Clayton was a good fellow, and the information was not offered as a piece of gossip; it was an observation, like seeing an owl by day, and he was reminded of it at that moment only by a passing reference to Neils voice as he and Daniel were discussing the need for another alto in the choir. It was late in May, but the weather had been as warm and sultry as July; the spring had been mild and everything was early: the flowers, the leaves on the trees.

“Do you mean Jeram?” said Daniel. There were several odd Willum brothers in his estimation, but he knew the general consensus.

“I was out checking the west fence, “said Clayton. He was searching his pockets for tobacco, his pipe idle in the corner of his mouth. “They were a little ways away, and I didn’t know them at first. Sitting beneath one of those wild crab apples down by the river. “A Linnett and a Willum in casual conversation were of enough to merit note.

“They were probably both out walking, “said Daniel, who wanted to make the least possible news out of this. “Their places are not so far apart, really.”

“In one sense,” said Clayton; then he added, “Feram always seemed harmless enough.”

The conversation turned elsewhere, but Clayton’s last comment on the subject of Nell and Jeram held more meaning than was easily apparent. Daniel was known as a good friend to the Linnetts, and perhaps Clayton was absolving himself of his duty regarding this accidental knowledge by passing it over to his fellow tenor. Truthfully Daniel rather enjoyed the idea of a friendship between the two young people, Nell was well liked in the town and among her schoolmates but had never gotten very close to anyone her own age. Jeram, as far as he knew, had no friends at all. Then again, as he had said, they had probably simply been out walking separately and their meeting had been accidental.

The thought of Nell with Jeram Willum wasn’t what disturbed Daniel; it was connecting Nell with the Willums at all, as if Jeram might carry a disease, the symptoms of which he had yet to show. That shadowy den on Trafton Pond, hidden even from the water by a crowded stand of willows, stood out in Daniel’s mind like that unfortunate dog, straining at its chain-to be pitied perhaps but feared as well.

He took his own counsel, however-a good, lawyerlike decision-and put the concern from his mind. As it happened, something led his steps to the Linnett house the next afternoon, and he talked with old Ian about town aff airs and the recent problems with Canada over fishing grounds. Eventually he asked after Nell, who had not met him at the front door.

“She’ll be combing the fields,” her grand father said. “She does love walking the grounds after school. I don’t believe this hog;wash about young women staying indoors. If the sun and the fresh air are good for me and you, they will be good for her, I say.”

Daniel nodded his agreement.

“It was the matter with her mother, I think. She faded from lack of enterprise, though I’d never say it to anyone else.”

Daniel was pretty sure he had heard just those words from Ian Linnett before, and among other people than himself.

If a body meets a body,
  Coming through the rye…

The song followed Daniel home that afternoon, and why wouldn’t someone occasionally meet another body if one frequented the fields and forests? He himself had hailed another fisherman on the opposite bank of what he had considered a secluded pool and been warned of the approach of yet another by the sound of a snapping twig in a hushed autumn wood.

That Sunday, however, before dinner Nell announced that a friend was joining them, and no one was any more startled than Daniel Plainway when the knock came at the front door and Nell escorted Jeram Willum into the parlor. The dominoes of Daniel’s imaginative constructions began to fall, no more so than when Ian Linnett greeted the boy with a friendly handshake and he and Dora accepted Jeram’s presence with the very soul of graciousness. It appeared as if the old man and the great-aunt had known more about this friendship than Daniel could ever have supposed.

Dinner was the scene of further cordiality, and Nell beamed with pleasure, even as Jeram came some distance out of his strange shell and ventured an opinion or two about matters under conversation. He carried himself surprisingly well at the semiformal a ff air that was the Linnetts’sunday dinner, primarily, Daniel suspicioned, because of Nell’s careful tutoring; she did inf act watch him with both the nervousness and pride of a teacher.

Jeram was not made to feel that he must hurry after their meal, but when an appropriate amount of time had been spent in the parlor, he complimented the cook, thanked his hosts with great feeling, and took his leave. Ian himself saw the boy out.

But when they returned to the parlor, Daniel sensed a great wind let out of the old man, and Daniel’s own muscles tensed with sudden apprehension. Ian and Dora, Nell and Daniel had only settled themselves again when the old man spoke up, quietly and (the tone of his voice) kindly.

“You will not of course invite that boy again.”

Nell was confused, at first, then stunned as the import of Ian’s words struck home. Daniel considered his knees, hardly daring to glance at either the old man or the seventeen-year-old girl.

“Grand father?” she said.

“My dear, “said the old man, “it is very kind of you, and young Jeram seems like a nice enough lad, for a Willum. But he is a Willum, and if he does not behave like an animal, he is yet kin to those who do.”

“It was not kind of me at all!” said Nell with more vexation than Daniel had ever heard in her voice. “He is my friend.”

“Yes,” said Ian, “and that does raise another difficulty.” He raised his own eyes to hers for the first time since they returned to the parlor. “Any friendship between yourself and this boy would indicate that you have spent time together before today.”

Nell straightened in her chair, not knowing what to make of Ian’s tone. “W have met a time or so, walking-”

Ian’s gaze did not break, nor did his expression alter a whit.

“I have been helping him with his reading,” she continued. “I lent him a book or two.”

“He’s not the sort of boy I would have for you, Nell,” said the old man.

“Because his last name is Willum?”

“Yes, and other things.”

The girl was clearly angry now, and Daniel hated to glimpse such emotion in her eyes or hear it in her voice as she spoke to the old man.

“He is a very fine person,” she said. She was shaking, fighting back tears. Then her control faltered, and she rose from her chair.

“You will stay with us or go to your room,” said the old man flatly.

Daniel could almost hear her swallow as she paused to consider this choice. He was shamed for her humiliation and looked down at his knees again. Then she was gone, and they heard her footsteps on the stairs.

Dora let out an exclamation of astonishment.

“Thank you for standing by me in that, Daniel,” said Ian Linnett.

“I beg your pardon?” said the lawyer.

The old man nodded to Daniel. “For adding your tacit support.”

A maxim returned to Daniel: The heighth of presumption is the heighth of ignorance. He found himself standing, as if he were in court.

“Ian,” he said, “I was quiet out of respect to both you and Nell and with the understanding that I was privy to a private concern and therefore had nothing to say. But if you ask me to take a side in this issue, some thought on the matter may not bring me down where you are standing, and if Nell thinks as you that I support your banning, out of hand, Jeram Willum from her company, then I would ask for the opportunity to disabuse her of the notion.” Though he cared deeply for Ian Linnett, Daniel was yet a little daunted by the old man, and it took some nerve to pronounce these thoughts when he had hardly disagreed with the man in eighteen years.

“And you would allow a child in your care to mix with the Willums?” asked Ian.

“T befriend Jeram Willum, not the entire clan,” returned Daniel quietly. “I have known villains to rise from good families and good from bad.”

“It’s true,” conceded Linnett, his great white head nodding, “given some generations, there might be Willums of worth, and given the opportunity, Jeram might be the seed from which such a tree could eventually bear fruit.”

“I would judge the boy on his own merits, rather than those of his ancestors or his descendants.”

“I beg your pardon if my presumption has offended you, “said the old man simply, now looking away himself, “and also if I don’t see you out this afternoon, Daniel.”

Daniel gave a short bow, then nodded to Dora, who had remained silent and troubled throughout the preceding scene. In the hall he found his hat and was almost out the front door when he glanced up the front stairs. On the top step sat Nell, in neither the parlor nor her room, and it was the first instance, he thought, that he had ever seen her disobey her grandfather.

There were tears on her face and an unreadable expression, but when Daniel turned and looked up at Nell, she gave him a frail smile and mouthed the words Thank you.

He did not know whom he had betrayed in the last few minutes. What if the whole town had taken an interest in the boy? he wondered. What if I had? He tried to smile back at Nell; then with a wave he left.

The following Saturday, when Daniel was stepping out of the post office and general store, Jeram’s wild brother Asher came riding through town on a handsome brown mare he had acquired by Lord only knows what means. Daniel took note immediately that someone in dress and petticoats was riding tandem behind the rake and stood gaping for some minutes after they had trotted by and he had seen Nell Linnett bouncing behind Asher with her arms about his middle.

22. Stones in the Lake

Roger Noble’s voice was cold and unwelcome after a brief silence in the parlor. “If you catch the next train,” he said to Daniel Plainway, “you might find the Moosepath League by this evening.”

From the moment he first saw Roger Noble, Daniel had felt a quiet dislike for the man. It was obvious that Noble had caused Miss Bumbrake distress, which was reason enough, but now his otherwise polite suggestion was couched in such ruthless tones and the use of the Moosepath League’s name was pronounced so flippantly and with such disrespect (Daniel had come to like these men though he had yet to meet them) that the lawyer felt his first impression of Noble unfavorably confirmed.

Daniel contemplated the scrawled note in his hand. He looked up, his expression difficult to read, and said, “I was just thinking that I haven’t had any lunch today.”

“We’ll call down,” said Pacif a with a great show of pleasure.

“They serve a very nice meal in the dining car,” said Noble.

“But they do not provide such lovely company,” replied Daniel. Such blatant flattery was not natural to him, but he nearly pulled it off without blushing.

“We’re sorry you have to leave,” said Pacif a to Noble in a very offhanded manner.

“I said nothing about leaving,” said Noble without taking his eyes from the other man. His enviable carriage stiffened. He was a hand and a half taller than Daniel and quite willing to wield his height in belligerent meetings with other male animals.

Daniel’s expression remained mild, his own posture unmoving. Pacifa stood between them, one dark eyebrow raised. Charlotte stared at the carpet; her face was flushed with shame. Noble’s glance went from Daniel’s almost humorous look to the dark woman’s quizzical eyebrow to Charlotte.

“Is that your coat?” asked Pacifa.

On his way across the room, Noble deliberately walked toward Daniel, who only stepped aside, and if Noble could have seen who looked foolish and who looked wise at this juncture, he might not have worn such rigid smile when he snatched up his coat and marched to the door. “Good-bye,” he said in a growl before stepping into the hall; then below his breath he said, “I will be back.” He did not quite slam the door behind him.

Now that the imbroglio was done, Daniel looked down at his hands and said, “I beg your pardon.”

“Good heavens!” said Pacifa, who had not entirely lost her humor.

“I must beg your pardon, Mr. Plain way,” said Charlotte. “I am sorry and deeply ashamed for having relied on your gentlemanly nature.”

“Quite the contrary, Miss Burnbrake,” said Daniel, with the lightest bow of his head. “I am grateful if I have been of any service.”

“Forgive me if I retire now,” said Charlotte, and unable to look the man in the eye, she hurried through the alcove to her room.

Daniel was profoundly affected by what had transpired these past minutes (hardly five had passed since he first stepped into the parlor of the apartment), and he looked distressed when he turned back to Pacifa. “If there is anything else I can do,” he said.

“You are very dear,” she said sincerely. She scrambled through the papers on the table and with a sound of discovery found the address that Daniel had first requested. “I wish I could welcome you to lunch, after all, Mr. Plainway, but-” She gestured toward the inner rooms. door, however, and spoke without exactly looking at Pacifa. “Of course,” he said. “Please don’t let me keep you.” He did stop at the “I hope Miss Burn brake will feel better soon.”

“I shall tell her.” Pacif a let the man shut the door himself, and after a moment in which to take a breath, she bustled into the alcove and rapped on Charlotte’s door.

“Charlotte, dear,” she said, knocking again, and at a soft note from within, she opened the chamber door. The windows were heavily curtained, and in the shadows it was difficult to tell Charlotte’s clothes from the bedcovers. Pacif a thought she would find her friend crying, but when she sat at the edge of the bed, Charlotte was only lying on her side with a crumpled handkerchief in one hand.

“Why does he persecute me?” said Charlotte.

“He’s gone,” said Pacifa.

“And in front of a stranger-”

“Be glad Mr. Plainway came when he did.”

“What did you write on that note?” asked Charlotte.

Pacif a thought that curiosity was a healthy signal.

“Oh, dear!” said Charlotte when Pacif a explained.

“He thought nothing of it,” assured Pacifa.

“How could he not?”

“It is the difference between a chivalrous man and your cousin.”

Charlotte sat up and began to fold her handkerchief when she realized that she had a crumpled piece of paper in her hand. It was the telegram from Uncle Ezra, warning her that her cousin had abandoned him and that she should follow her uncle to Hallowell.

“I’ll have to leave immediately,” said Charlotte.

“I was afraid you would say that,” Pacifa’s expression mitigated her disappointment with a soft smile.

“Uncle will be worried to death. Perhaps you would send him a wire that I’m coming.”

“Of course. I’ll help you get your things together. I can’t come with you, unfortunately.”

Charlotte nodded sadly. “He hasn’t the smallest notion what he has done and what pleasure he has spoiled, even by the most indirect means.”

“You might find the Moosepath League’s company more agreeable than mine.”

“I hope everything is well with them,” said Charlotte when she thought of this. “That gentleman seemed to think it urgent that he find their Mister Walton.”

Descending the broad stairs of the City Hotel, Daniel cast his eye about the foyer for the figure of Roger Noble. He had half expected the man to be waiting for him and was a little relieved to reach the door without a confrontation. Outside, the snow had accumulated so that traffic in the streets had slowed; the sidewalks were nearly empty.

The last few hours had been something of an odyssey for Daniel; in fact the last week had taken him to many unexpected places. The previous night he had spent pleasantly with Sheriff Piper and his family in Wiscasset, and this morning he was on the first train south. It was snowing with real intent by the time he arrived in Portland. He hired a carriage to take him to the Newspaper Exchange, where he found Editor Corbell of the Eastern Argus, working in his office within a smoky haze of his own making.

Sheriff Piper had shown Daniel several articles concerning the little boy that had appeared in the Arg, written by a competent wordsmith named Peter Mall. Editor Corbell was evasive, even cagey, when Daniel told him he would like to meet the writer. “You want to talk to Mister Walton,” is what Corbell said several times during the course of their conversation, puffing furiously at his cigar, and when Daniel realized that-for whatever reason-he was not going to meet this Peter Mall, he asked where he might find Mister Walton, whose reputation had already reached an almost legendary peak by way of the praise heaped upon him by Sheriff Piper.

It was nearing noon when Daniel arrived at Spruce Street and the home of Tobias Walton. The estate’s elderly retainer Mr. Baffin expressed regret that his employer was not at home but gave Daniel the address of Matthew Ephram, charter member of the Moosepath League. At this address Daniel was given the address to Christopher Eagleton’s apartment, and he had almost resigned himself to visiting the home of every person ever involved with this situation when the man at Eagleton’s informed him that the entire club was traveling with a Mr. Burnbrake, who had-at least till this morning-taken residence at the City Hotel.

Christopher Eagleton must have heaped some praise upon Mr. Burnbrake’s niece, and the servant at Eagleton’s was quick to pass on these good words. The man understood that the niece had been left behind, and Daniel hardly hoped that he was a little closer to finding where everyone had got to.

“I’m glad I left my bags at the station,” he said to himself as he left the hotel. He stepped out into the storm, turning the collar of his coat against the wind that drove the snow eastward down the street. He stopped again on the sidewalk and peered up at the second-story windows. The troubled face of Charlotte Burnbrake had affected him more than he had realized.

Charlotte dreaded even opening the door to the hall, she was so terrified of finding Noble waiting for her.

“Come,” said Pacifa, “it is better if we’re out among people.” They found a man to help them with Charlotte’s bags and felt a little safer as he escorted them to the foyer, where he excused himself and went out onto the stormy sidewalk to find a cab.

The scene from their carriage window was almost purely white, and Charlotte felt the storm pressing in on her. The closer they got to the station, the more bitterly hurt she was about it all, the absolute injustice. She and Pacif a said almost nothing till they had climbed from the carriage and paid the driver.

The train was giving one of its final whistles before leaving the station. “You take care,” said the cabdriver, adding, “This’ll be the last train out till the plow comes through.”

Pacif a walked her friend to the nearest car. Charlotte tried to apologize again, but Pacif a held a hand to her mouth. “We’ll get together soon,” said Pacifa, and she shushed Charlotte up the steps.

Charlotte sat by a window and looked for Pacifa, but the day was dimming, and the snow-that which was falling and that which had fallen but was now drifting-blinded her view; the station house was hardly more than a shadow. Charlotte sat back in her seat and glanced at the man on the other side of the aisle. He was reading a newspaper, and his brown hat sat in the otherwise empty seat beside him. She hadn’t been looking at people when she was seating herself, and she was a little startled by him.

A for the man, his expression was as mild as ever, and he did not press her with familiarity by looking directly at her when he spoke.

“Miss Burnbrake,” said Daniel Plainway.

23. Speech at Midnight

Past Brunswick conversation lagged and after announcing the time, tide, and weather at regular intervals, Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump looked to their newspapers, hoping to glean some item of interest for their new acquaintances but, most important, for Mr. Burnbrake, who was so concerned about the disappearance of his nephew and the well-being of his niece. The snow had increased so that there was very little to see beyond the windows of the train.

It was Thump who found in his chosen organ a column of some curiosity and conveyed its gist for the edification of them all, thus prompting an anecdote of decided curiosity from another party altogether.

“I do recall some discussion concerning the mysteries of Christmastide at the Shipswood the other night,” he said, as preamble to his reading.

“I too seem to remember,” agreed Eagleton.

“What have you there, Thump?” wondered Ephram, who looked forward to some instructive thoughts from his friend.

“It says here,” said Thump, “that ‘deep and manifold are the secrets of the Yuletide, not the least being that deed of nativity that is the feature of our celebration in this season. But mans desire for the enigmatic and his fanciful penchant for elaborating even so extraordinary a tale have led to the fabrication of many a wild idea. This writer takes, for example, the long-declared belief that on the night of the winter solstice, the spirits of the dead are permitted to roam their former environs.’”

“I never knew it!” said Eagleton, searching his pockets for his journal.

“The day of Doubting Thomas,” said Brink helpfully.

“Is it?” said Ephram.

“‘St. Thomas gray, St. Thomas gray,’” quoted Brink, “The longest night and the shortest day.’ My grandfather always brought his Christmas tree in on the twenty-first because it made the ghosts happy for some reason.”

“Did it?” said Ephram.

“Oh, I am sure it did.”

“Spirits can be very troublesome this time of year,”said Waverley.

“Can they?” said Ephram.

“I can’t tell you how often spirits have kept me up at night so that my head pounds fearfully the next morning.”

“That’s all year round,” said Durwood.

“Oh, so it is.”

This was yet more cryptic talk from the Dash-It-All Boys, and Thump was encouraged by Ephram and Eagleton to continue his reading.

“‘Strangest of all,” he did read, “‘and yet surely more prevalent still, is the almost universal conviction in the mystic powers of Christmas Eve itself, when at midnight the creatures of nature are said to be granted the fleeting git of speech.’”

“Why, that very thing was discussed at the Shipswood!” exclaimed Ephram.

“The writer here finds it ridiculous,” said Thump, who, reading further, was a little disappointed with the drift of the column.

“The notion seems harmless enough,” said Eagleton.

“I would have thought,” said Thump. “But this fellow insists that it has a deleterious effect upon our attentions to the season.”

“Good heavens!” said Ephram.

“Pagan superstition,’ he says.”

“If he had been with me one midnight on Christmas Eve, some years back,” came a new voice to the conversation, “he would think twice before dismissing the theory, I can promise you right now.”

Thump turned to look at a man who sat across the aisle and behind him by one seat. Already facing in the stranger’s direction, Eagleton and Ephram simply leaned a little toward the aisle. Mr. Burnbrake, who sat beside Thump, cocked an ear but did not turn around, and the membership of the Dash-It-All Boys gave various interpretations of a raised eyebrow or a puzzled frown.

He was a very trim-looking man who might have been seventy, or he might have been eighty. (He was eighty-six.) He wore a close-cropped beard and fine mustaches of white, and his pate gleamed through thinning hair. When he turned sideways in his seat, the better to address the members of the two clubs and Mr. Burnbrake, they were apprised of a pair of bright blue eyes, wrapped in crow’s-feet and peering from a pair of spectacles.

“He would think twice, I promise you,” the man said again. “Gentlemen,” he added, in greeting. “I beg your pardon, but I couldn’t help hearing the tendency of your conversation.”

“Not at all,” said Eagleton.

Durwood had not raised himself much above a recumbent position for several miles and did not bother himself even now, but spoke without actually seeing the other man. “Are you saying, sir, that you have heard the animals speak at midnight?”

“I am saying that I heard one animal speak at midnight,” returned the man, “Christmas Eve, eighteen seventy-nine.”

“You interest me greatly,” said Durwood.

“The tale has some worth, I think, no matter what some pencil pusher might have you believe.” The older fellow gave a nod to himself and looked ready to turn back in his seat.

“We would certainly like to hear it!” said Thump.

“Oh, it is an old story,” said the man, and though he dismissed the thought with a wave of a hand, he was smiling.

“The older the better! Wouldn’t you say, Eagleton?” said Thump.

“I think it is safe to say,” said that worthy. “Wouldn’t you say, Ephram?”

“I was about to say that very thing,” said the third Moosepathian.

The old man laughed. “I shall not make a long tale of it,” he said, “though it has room for a wrecked ship, a shank of sheep, and wrong heeled boots. And there’s a dog, several cats, a shipload of rats, and a blue jay. How far are you going?”

“We are getting of fat Hallowell, sir,” said Thump.

“Are you, really? Why, that’s my destination, so let me tell it.”

A the man commenced his tale, even the Dash-It-All Boys managed to straighten their postures so that they might have a better look at him. He looked up at the ceiling of the car and thought for a moment before speaking again. (Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump looked up with him.)

“What did I say? Eighteen seventy-nine? Yes, that was it. Eighteen seventy-nine. I was taking it a little easy by then, living down Georgetown way on a moderate height of land overlooking the ocean on the one side and Sagadahoc Bay on the other. I had bought a little place and the sheep that came with it sight unseen from a man named Musterhag who’d taken a sudden fear of water and went, the last I heard, into the Arizona Territory, where he met and fell in love with the daughter of a French count or something and eventually set up household with her in Saskatchewan.”

“And that’s the last you heard of him?” wondered Waverley.

“I had a horse,” continued the storyteller without pause, “that would sit down when you told him to stand, so when I was on my way to Georgetown to take possession of my new abode and two men with shotguns accosted me and ordered me to stand, the horse sat down, and any retreat was summarily ended before it began. Being the philanthropic sort, the highwayman relieved me of that particular animal, and I was left on foot.

“Now this did not seem an auspicious beginning for a new endeavor, but I was philosophical and not entirely unpleased when it turned out that being on foot meant that I was able to wander in search of a distressed bird I caught wind of on the Stage Road within sight of Flying Point in Arrowsic. On the far side of a fold in the field, overlooking the Sasanoa, there was a thicket of alders, where I found a half-grown blue jay.

“I’d had a crow once, as a youngster, and a macaw too, from the West Indies, not to mention a turkey that hid beneath my bed come every Thanksgiving, and so I thought nothing of taking up the little mite and carrying him in my coat pocket. I named him Mr. Thicket.

“I hadn’t a cent on me to eat by, but a fellow by the name of Carny Shalleck gave me a ride in his buckboard, the last mile or two, and when he heard my tale, he lent me some fish, which amounted to my first meal in my new home.

“It was a handsome little white two-room house with red trim, standing by itself on a bit of granite overlooking the point of land before it. Below the house was a small shack where the sheep stayed in bad weather, though most days they roamed the rock soil in search of feed. Mr. Thicket took occupation of the windowsill above the sink when he was indoors and the peak of the house when he was without, and out or in he liked nothing better than to holler and screech every morning till I was up and scrounging something special for him to eat.

“For myself, however, a little more than mutton seemed in order before too many weeks passed, and I was fortunate enough to take on with Carny Shalleck, who lobstered for a few dollars in his pocket till August and line fished for his own pot and his ow amazement when the weather permitted thereafter. First thing in the morning I would hike dow to the beach and Carny would bring in his dory, and we would go out for the day, which made for a pretty good life as Carny was practiced at both silence and fine storytelling by turns; you never got too weary of either.

“Now my shoes had not been thick when I began my trip to Georgetown, and the unexpected distance I had ridden shank’s mare had worn them to a considerable nothing, so that I repaired to the local bootmaker as soon as I had a few extra coins in my pocket. Feeling a little penurious, however, I accepted a pair of boots from the man with the heels on wrong.

His son had made them but wedged the heels the wrong way and simply turned them back to and nailed them, the result of which was that I made a strange print, with the toe of my boot pointing in one direction and the heel indicating the direct opposite. I kind of liked them.

“Mr. Thicket was with me when I got the boots, flying about, that is, and grazing the top of my head or landing briefly on my shoulder whenever he thought I had forgotten him. When we returned to the slopes that overlook the rocks and shore, I was startled by the sight of a fourmasted schooner foundering on the wrong side of Outer Head. Two or three boats were already meeting her in case she required abandoning, which she quickly did, and I clambered down the clify banks to see how I could help.

“I knew the ship was doomed when a school of tiny heads appeared between her and the shore. It is a strange sight when rats abandon a ship, and I was astonished, though I had been to sea, how many of these brutes paddled their way onto the little spit of sand where I stood. It is some eerie too when a swarm of these creatures reach the shore and mow by you like a herd of tiny buffalo, but they were past me and disappeared into the cliffside and the brush above before I had much time to think about it.”

This image was proof to some shivers among the old fellow’s listeners, and Thump in particular looked wide-eyed and astonished to think of such an army of rats swimming to shore.

“No one was lost in the wreck, and the ship itself was recovered soon after, which is a story itself, but I went home with my wrong-heeled boots and Mr. Thicket swooping over my head and thought the day had provided something interesting.

“I had not been long in my new abode before I noticed that a small herd of cats wandered by on most mornings, at about eight o’clock, like they were going to work, and I was careful about them around the house with Mr. Thicket nearby. I thought perhaps they were finding sport among the new rats in the neighborhood. There was also another old fellow, by the name of Hughie Borkhum, who had a large dog, and I seldom actually met the man, though I did see him once or twice, from my kitchen window, as he and the dog walked the short stretch of sand below my house.

“I rarely saw them, however, as they were not such early risers, and I was an hour or two out with Carny before Hughie made his rounds with his great dog.

“It was about this time that some odd things began to happen-that is, a run of bad luck. My sheep got further afield, and once or twice I was obliged to search them out. They knocked down a side of their shack one night, and I grew conscious that the rats were inhabiting the height of land with me and my sheep and Mr. Thicket with impunity. What were the cat doing? I wondered.

“Now there are several creatures that follow man about the globe-the flea, the bedbug, the mosquito-but none so daunting in its craftiness, or so difficult to be rid of, as the rat that populates every wharf and ship’s hold and wanders the comers of the earth as well as we do. If you have ever tried to dominate a piece of acreage or a cellar over the ambitions of a single one of these creatures, you will know that it takes some doing to catch or kill them. I was facing, then, an entire ship’s company of rats and whatever recent offspring they were busy raising, and it became all-out war that I must eventually lose, without the aid of the neighborhood cats.

“And then my well, which was spring-fed, dried up, and I searched out the source of the water on a height above me; the bank on the opposite side had broken away, and the spring was now flowing down the further slope. I tried to redirect the water back toward my home, but my engineering skills and a shovel were not up to the task. Any headway I made was soon knocked’ down by the force of the stream itself or the next ram.

“That was the late fall, and it did rain pretty hard through November, and I set up a cistern. Carny didn’t like the weather much, so we never got out for a month or so, and I had leave to think on the bad run of luck I was experiencing. I lived on mutton and rain till winter came.

“When the weather got bad, Carny would come up and play cards with me and we would talk about what was occurring in the neighborhood: a new set of twins, a boat lost in a storm, Hughie Borkhum, who was convinced that some sort of water troll or selkie had been frequenting the beach. He’d even gone so far as to plant a cross on the dunes above the sand, and as sign of the creature had not returned, Hughie considered the measure successful.

“Winter set in with due earnestness, and I hadn’t looked toward a snowy season with so little promise since I had a farm half wrecked up in Shirley Mills-well, come to think of it, that was a Christmas Eve as well…”

The man scratched at his beard, thought of something, and fished through his pockets till he found a pipe and some tobacco. There was not another word heard in the car, people were so anxious to hear the rest of his tale, but the wind howled outside the car, and the snow sprayed the windows.

When he had the pipe lit and puffed a few billows of smoke, the old fellow took stock of where he had left off and said, “Yes, Christmas came apace-all too quickly, for my money, since I knew how slow the rest of the winter would seem. I have often thought they should move Christmas to February, at least around these parts, when a body needs real distraction.

“Some of the neighbors came around on the day before Christmas, and there was a little cheer beyond the strict tenets of law, I am sure, but everything was fat and jovial, and I met several people I had only heard of before then. Everyone was glad to visit with one another, for the winter could be a long and lonely affair, there being some distance yet between houses outside the village.

“But I was near wore out with talk and a drop here and a drop there by the time the yule log was blazing and Mr. Thicket and I were dozing before the hearth. I must have fallen right to sleep after Carny dozing leck up and left, for I don’t remember much but a strange dream or two. I had a good deal on my mind in those days, for the rats had offered to join our little household and the battle had grown accordingly. I had even gotten myself a cat, along with an added nervousness for Mr. Thicket, but the great orange tom seemed disinclined to do his duty and slept beneath my chair, where he thought the rats would be least likely to bother him.

“Don’t imagine that I was living with the creatures running over me at night or scampering across the floor, but they were about, skittering in the walls and gnawing at the floor timbers. My dreams that night were filled with them, and nagging me as well was the sense that something indeed had brought me ill luck: the rats, the sheep ranging too far, the broken wall in the shack, the dried-up well.

“Then came a voice, saying, ‘It’s your boots! It’s your boots!’

“I woke with a start. I had no idea anyone was in the house with me, and I nearly tipped my chair into the fire as I leaped to my feet. The room was dark, save for the lowering fire, and I scanned about to see who had spoken.

“‘It’s your boots!’ came the voice again, and it sang out with an odd, somehow familiar pitch.

“‘What’s my boots?’ I asked, and lifted one foot then another to glance at them, though my feet were but shadows in the dark room. ‘Who’s talking?’”

“‘Quick, it’s midnight!’ came the voice, and I located it with enough accuracy to be pretty sure that Mr. Thicket, sitting on the mantel, was speaking to me.

“You can imagine that I pinched myself pretty hard, and I did. But Mr. Thicket cocked his head, gave a wink, and said again, ‘It’s your boots!’

“‘My boots?’ I said. ‘Are they bad luck then?’

“‘Hughie haunts the beach with his dog, and the cats don’t come,’said Mr. Thicket, and then he let out a more normal sort of screech for a blue jay and I knew that the minute of midnight was over.”

The fellow’s pipe had gone out. Hardly stirring himself from his languid position, Brink was able to offer the man a lighted match.

“Thank you,”said the white-bearded fellow.

“Had Hughie Borkhum been seeing your footprints on the beach?” asked Mr. Burnbrake.

“He had indeed,” said the man. “And he was alarmed to see something shod so waywardly as to have the toe pointing in one direction and the heel in another. It didn’t help that my prints always came down off the dunes and disappeared into the water, where Carny picked me up in his dory. Of course the waves would wash away the footprints nearer the water as well as the keel sign of the boat.

“So Hughie was haunting the beach for hours at a time with his great dog, and his dog would chase after the cats when they came, so they quit coming and simply took up visiting someone’s fish shack on the other side of the point. The rats were left more or less unhindered, and as their population increased, they frightened the sheep and ate their feed. The sheep of course knocked down a wall of the shack to get away from them one night and began, as is understandable, to range further for something sweet. Nothing was sweeter than the ground surrounding the head of the spring, but with the grass and plants grazed down, a good rain was all the further bank needed to wash out and redirect the water away from my well!”

The storyteller looked up to find one of his listeners scaratching away into a book. The mention of the cross upon the beach had reminded Eagleton of the cross he wore beneath his shirt, and he was torn between recording the story that was presently being yarned and recounting the experience with the blasphemous cabdriver and the French lady before he lost the sense of urgency and all the details.

“I never did disabuse Hughie Borkhum of his notions regarding the sea troll, he was that pleased with driving the creature off with his cross in the dunes. I enticed the cats back with a trail of bait, and it was not long before the rats had packed their things and floated themselves out to the wrecked ship, just as she was being raised. During the winter I was able to shore up the opposite bank of the spring, and my well filled up again.”

There was half a minute’s silence then as the Moosepathians and the Dashians and Mr. Burnbrake digested it all.

“The bird spoke,” said Thump quietly, trying to imagine such a thing.

“What happened to him?” asked Waverley.

“Mr. Thicket? He has passed on to his reward.” The old man nodded, but barely, and looked into his pipe as if something interesting were there.

“And did you ever hear him speak again?” wondered Mr. Burnbrake.

“I never did. I don’t know if it was considered good form to actually communicate with me, but we were good friends, and it had been a rough season. You can imagine, though, that I have stayed up past midnight most Christmas Eves since.”

“St. Nicholas won’t come by if you’re awake,” assured Durwood.

“That’s another story,” said the fellow, and he nodded softly again.

“I am sorry I didn’t get that fellow’s name,” said Eagleton later in the day. “I know the name of the bird, but not the man.” They had gotten of at Hallowell and bid the storyteller a good day, then hired a sleigh to the Worster House. The snow had not let up, and they wondered that the driver could find his way. Eagleton wished he had a name to attach with the story of the talking jay, and in his concern he once again forgot the chain around his neck and the talisman that depended from it.

24. The Tor

The way up the side of the tor was steep and treacherous, flanked by ledges that rose in a circle about the conical hill like giant steps, and bristling with low brush and scrub trees. Two or three of these ledges they used as goals in their climb, and Sundry, who took the lead, helped the others as they came up behind. They were a fit party: Capital was a common haunt in the woods, and Frederick and Isabelle were plainly used to physical exertion of this sort; even Mister Walton, despite his portly figure, proved to have strong legs and good lungs. While the others caught him up, Sundry looked below them, where Moxie sat dutifully beside the horses, and behind them in the woods, where silence and snow reigned.

At the very last bit of ledge before the top, Mister Walton caught Sundry frowning and asked what was the matter. Sundry only shook his head and turned his face to the last length of their climb, but he had lost sight of Moxie and thought she had left her post.

The head of the tor was surrounded by boulders and lengths of granite unfixed from their natural strata by the work of ancient glaciers.

“Or perhaps the labor of ancient men,” proposed Frederick when they were gathered there. The peak of the tor was almost level for a diameter of thirty feet or so, and the battlementlike rocks at its perimeter did have the look of human motive the more they considered them.

“This is Council Hill,” said Capital.

They looked out over the woods to the west, where long hills, faded behind a veil of snow, seemed to hover like shadows against the sky. The wind blew harder at this elevation, and they squinted into the teeth of it. The flutter of something black interpolated between white branches; snow flew as a limb danced with sudden weight and their friend the crow peered at them.

Sundry was moving with Frederick and Isabelle through the center of the little plateau toward a great head of rock overhanging the northeastern corner of the tor. Frederick let out a long breath, something between a sigh and a gasp of discovery. His sharp and educated eyes had caught sight of something that Sundry missed till he drew closer to the boulder. Isabelle stepped up with her husband, and the two made an affecting picture, handsome and handsomely dressed, she with both hands upon his arm and the snow all about them and falling upon their collars and hats.

Standing behind the Covingtons, as Frederick brushed at the granite, the others could see upon the face of the rock a column of odd striations that rose to the level of about seven feet and dropped below the mantle of snow. It was the artifact of Mr. Thole’s photographs, though a good deal more impressive in the live rock. The markings were regular and regularly distanced from one another, each about nine or ten inches long with three or four in each row.

“It mu be a human hand has made this,” said Mister Walton. Indeed, the entire place had the aura of human refinement, and they could believe that this had long (and long ago) been a place of messages and meetings, of tribal decisions and intertribal conclaves.

“Is it Indian?” wondered Sundry.

“A far as I can tell, it isn’t,” said Frederick. “The aboriginal people had no writing as such, though there is some evidence of pictographs. This bears resemblance to none of it.”

“And here is your ox, over to the side,” remarked Sundry. He leaned nearer to the boulder and touched the design that had been scratched into the rock face a foot or so away from the other figures.

“I can’t help wondering if it isn’t something separate from the runes,” said Frederick, “if they are runes.”

Mister Walton adjusted his spectacles and peered at the form in question. The figure was very simple, merely two rays of an angle, both intersected by a single line about a third of the way from their joining. He turned his gaze back to the runes, as he had already begun to think of them. “Are they Viking?” he asked.

“If I could make them say something, they might be,” said Frederick. “Let’s clear the snow away, so I can examine the entire stone. Mr. Thole might have missed something.” Covington was in his element now, serving out instructions like an officer. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind scouring the other rocks along the perimeter for more of these figures.” He rummaged through his instrument bag for a magnifying glass, unaware that his companions had frozen in their tracks. The crow took off with a sudden startling cry.

Sundry reached down and gripped Frederick’s arm meaningfully, and the clergyman looked up and beyond the others to see a stranger standing on one of the boulders at the southwestern corner of the tor. The man held a rifle, relaxed but ready and pointed in their general direction. He was well dressed for the weather and the snow formed a frosting upon his great blond beard.

“Good afternoon, sir,” said Capital as if they had met on a city street.

“Stay together, where you are,” said the man, his voice deep, but sounding distant through the snow and the current of wind upon the tor. He was sizing them up, frowning as if something were amiss. He threw the quickest glance behind him, then pointed his rifle into the air and fired a single shot.

Those gathered below the inclined boulder started with the report, and the echoes had hardly returned from the western hills when a flash of black and white leaped up behind the man and dragged him backward over the boulder. There was the sound of a human cry and the angry snarl of a dog even as Sundry charged across the tor. Then another shot split the air beyond the rock wall, and Sundry was scrambling over the point where the stranger had disappeared.

On the ledge below, possibly a ten-foot drop, the blond-bearded man was curled into a protective ball as Moxie struggled and snarled with his rifle arm. Sundry vaulted down to the ledge, missing the man but driving himself into the snow up to his knees.

The man with the rifle was attempting to get his free hand back beneath the trigger guard, but he had lost his glove and feared to put his unprotected flesh within reach of the dog’s teeth. Sundry had seldom seen such terror, and once he had struggled out of the deep snow, he very benevolently put the blond man’s fears to a temporary rest with a single sharp blow to the side of the head.

Moxie left off the limp arm, then let out another angry growl. The snow beside her erupted on the heel of a third gunshot, and Sundry saw over his shoulder a second figure on a slightly higher ledge some twenty feet away on the western side of the tor. The dog would have charged, leaping over the gulf between, but Sundry threw himself at the animal and shoved her some yards down the steep slope. He could hear another round being levered into the rifle and was using his momentum to follow Moxie down the hill when a fourth explosion came from above.

There was a shout of pain and anger, and Sundry looked up from his stomach. The men on the ledges were blocked from his view, but the head and shoulders of Capital Gaines were plain to be seen at the top of the slope.

“That was not a miss, hitting your rifle,” Capital was saying in a very clear and steady voice.

Sundry lifted himself up from the snow and could see that the old man was gripping a long-barreled pistol. Other heads, most noticeably that of Mister Walton, appeared behind Capital, looking for signs of Sundry and the dog. Get down! Sundry wanted to say, but his voice seemed unable to respond. There might be more of them!

Frederick was following Sundry’s path over the boulder, and Capital waved the others back.

“Sundry!” called Mister Walton. “Sundry!”

“I’m healthy, Mister Walton!” called the young man, finding his voice. Moxie had righted herself and was scrambling back up the slope, but Sundry reached out and got an arm around her middle. “Easy, girl, easy,” he repeated, along with “Good girl! Good girl!” He found terrific comfort in burying his face in the fur behind her ears.

Capital was half climbing, half sliding down the path they had asended, hardly taking his eyes or the intention of his pistol from the second man. When Sundry had clambered back up the slope, with Moxie calong side him, he could see the second stranger leaning against the rock wall above the other ledge. There was blood on his face and on his hands, and his rifle lay at his feet, its stock in splinters.

Frederick had reached the man, and it was clear that some rather unclergy like tension occupied the husband. He matter-of-factly inquired of the stranger’s injuries, however, and inspected the wounds on his face and his hands (wrought by the splinters from the rifle) with a degree of gentleness that Sundry admired, even if he knew he would not have been able to summon the same. The clergyman took the opportunity, also, of assuring himself that the man carried no other weapons.

Isabelle in the meantime had retrieved the first man’s rifle and expertly levered another round into the chamber before informing the fellow, who was then rousing himself from Sundry’s blow, that she was not a member of the clergy and thereby not beholden to that brotherhood’s charitable tenets. She emphasized this thought by prodding the man in the back with the business end of the rifle and seemed to be thinking of other means to impress the point upon him. In brief, she was livid.

“We mustn’t sit on our hands,” said Capital. “These gentlemen can climb down or tumble down. I don’t care which.” Moxie growled at the second gunman as Frederick helped him across the gap to the first ledge. “Good girl!” Capital declared. Then he grabbed the man’s collar and put the pistol to his head, shouting, “I would back away if l were you!” When the others looked up, they saw the flash of someone disappear from behind the rocky battlements. “Come, come,” said Capital quietly.

Isabelle escorted the first man down the hill, followed by Mister Walton and Frederick and finally by the second man in the grip of Sundry and the sights of Capital’s pistol.

It was an awkward and nervous descent, and no less a wait while Mister Walton demonstrated a hitherto undisclosed talent with knots as the two blond men were bound and placed at the bottom of the sleigh. It was a crowded place when they all climbed in; Moxie jumped onto the backs of the prostrate men, where the others’ feet were also resting.

Several figures, apparently armed, appeared at the top of the tor, but Sundry and Isabelle had the rifle and pistol nudging the backs of their prisoners’ necks. Capital pulled his own rifle from its place at his feet and passed it to Mister Walton. “I’m not so sure,” said Capital, “that they wouldn’t rather lose these two than let us get very far, so don’t hesitate to make them duck up there.” He cracked the reins, and the horses, snorting steam, limbered their legs a little with some preliminary shuffles before pulling the sleigh around.

“I am heartily sorry for bringing you into such a dangerous situation,” said Frederick. “Isabelle.”

She flashed a look at him that was sharp and forgiving all at once. “I should guess, my love,” she said, “that a man of the cloth without a trusting nature would be of little use to anyone.”

“They’ve left the tor,” said Mister Walton.

“They’ll be following,” said Capital.

The wind was rising, drifting snow into the tracks they had left.

25. Others Lost Their Hats as Well

When they arrived at Hallowell, Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump escorted Mr. Burnbrake to the Worster House. Even the Dash-It-All Boys came along, and there was some discussion among Durwood, Waverley, and Brink whether someone they knew might discover them if they took rooms there.

“It isn’t cheating, I think,” suggested Waverley, “unless you’re caught.”

“What did you bet?” wondered Durwood. “Perhaps it would be worth our splitting it three ways so that we can sleep in a bed tonight.”

The members of the Moosepath League and Mr. Burnbrake were not privy to this discussion and were rather more concerned with the disappearance of Roger Noble. It was a relief therefore when a telegram from Pacif a Means arrived saying that Miss Burnbrake would be joining them by the next available train. Mr. Burnbrake had been on the verge of making the return trip himself, and his great concern only deepened the suspicions in which the Moosepathians held the “troublesome cousin.”

The Dash-It-All Boys were never very near to the discussion regarding Mr. Noble, but the suspense surrounding his disappearance must have been too much for them, for they wandered off-out of doors! “Distracting themselves,” said Thump, “with the tangible challenge of the blizzard.”

“They were that distressed!” said Eagleton, shaking his head.

“It’s rather grand of them,” said Ephram.

A for Mr. Burnbrake, he decided to rest after his journey and retired to his room. Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump found themselves in need of diversion while lunch digested and dinner drew apace, and since the Dashian example was much admired, they decided to emulate their new acquaintances by following their footsteps-in a metaphorical sense.

Thus, with the temper of the snow and the determination of men, the die was cast. Further deeds were in the offing.

There is only the one word for it in the English language, and that is snow: not sleet or hail or freezing rain, but snow-white, light, and cumulative, thrall to the vagaries of sun and wind, impermanent blanket, poor man’s fertilizer.

There is only the one word, in English, but snow is a phenomenon of many dispositions: There is light snow and wet snow and crusted snow and snow that is fine for skiing and snow that is fine for snowshoeing and snow that encourages one to stay indoors, but only seldom does that singular snow, that snow of perfection, fall, for under certain conditions, snow will form easily into a ball that fits in the human hand and cries to be flung.

There has been infinite discussion on the street comers of the world’s wintry belt regarding the elements that best facilitate a good snowball (though less dialogue than one would expect in the responsible journals), but suffice it to say that a mysterious blend of granularity and temperature is necessary to bring about the proper factors and that it is a gift from on high (at several natural and theological levels) when it deigns to visit us with its superior presence.

There is no guarantee, of course, that even contiguous communities will be equally blessed in this capacity, for on a single day, during a single storm, the atmosphere of Newcastle might be deadly with white missiles, while in Damariscotta, just across the river, young men are puzzledly discussing the snow’s propensity to fall apart in their hands.

It is a riddle.

Strangely (and despite one of their number’s great fascination for all things weathery), this is a subject that, until December 1896, had never been discussed among the members of the Moosepath League.

All that was discussed when they stepped out of the Worster House that afternoon was the determination of the blizzard, which was deemed sufficient. Thump was the first out, and he turned the top of his top hat directly into the wind while Ephram and Eagleton joined him.

They stood with their haberdashery crammed over their ears and gesticulated in several directions before making the stouthearted decision to face the teeth of the storm and climb Winthrop Street. There were no gale-force winds onshore that day, but the charter members were accustomed to sitting blizzards out, and it is no wonder that they were thrilled by the challenge of the elements as they trudged the steep slope.

“Good heavens!” called Eagleton over the storm, “it reminds me of Arabella’s Winter Home by Mrs Alvina Plesock Dentin.”

“Exactly!” agreed Ephram. They all had read the book avidly. “It does remind one, don’t you think, Thump?” Ephram and Eagleton stopped when they realized that their friend was not alongside them.

He was in fact standing a few paces below on the slope, holding his hat to his head and looking very stern as the wind coated his magnificent beard with snow. “‘I have turned the corner of an eye to the white wind!’” he quoted.” ‘I have felt the bite of the winter storm upon the moor and known the heart-bruising twinkle of uncertainty when all about and ever landmark is hidden behind a curtain of snow; when direction means nothing and even something so simple as up and down comes to question; when there is not a blade of grass with which to compare your perceptions!’” This he boomed out above the sift of precipitation and the wail of the wind in the nearby trees.

“Good heavens!” cried Eagleton, for he recalled this passage.

“Marvelous!” pronounced Ephram.

“It is very like,” said Thump, squinting into the storm. The hill was indeed steep, and the wind blew against them so that they had the impression of walking almost parallel to the sidewalk. “I do hope the Dash-It-All Boys have not lost themselves,” said Thump, and they peered through the storm for some glimpse of Durwood, Waverley, and Brink.

As it happened, Durwood, Waverley, and Brink were not far away. They had left some twenty minutes before and had traveled partway up the slope before turning down a street, the sign of which was covered in wet snow and so not recorded in the pertinent annals. This sticking capacity of the present precipitation gave rise among the Dash-It-All Boys to fond memories of snowball fights long ago, and they reminisced in melancholy tones upon the various methods with which they had knocked other folk down and the wistful pleasures of stuffing snow under people’s collars.

“There is very little like it,” said Waverley. He remembered, in particular, the many gallons of snow he had, throughout the days of his youth, crammed down the neck of his sister, who unfortunately rarely talked to him anymore. Durwood was actually weighing a snowball in his hands and saying, “You know, there is never enough of the right stuff when you’re young. I don’t know when I have seen such perfect snow!”

“Wouldn’t it be the thing to stumble upon a good battle just now?” thought Brink. “Or perhaps start one?” Just then the storm hesitated for the briefest moment, and as the curtain of white lifted, they were witness to a line of boys hunkered behind a snowbank. Missiles were being lobbed from some unseen source and with expert precision, for the boys were being pelted with remarkable accuracy.

Brink couldn’t imagine that his desire for a battle had been so readily answered. “I’ve never had that happen before!” he said, taken aback. The storm reasserted itself, and the scene before them disappeared. “You don’t suppose I’ve used up a wish or something, do you?”

“If you have,” said Waverley, “you’ve spent it magnificently.”

It did not take long for the three men to race through the sheets of snow and join the boys behind the bank, where they inquired after the fortunes of war.

“They are!” informed a small fellow, when he was asked, “Who is winning?” He and his cohorts were hardly seven or eight years old.

Durwood, Waverley, and Brink wasted no time but tipped their hats, leaped over the parapet-dodging several snowballs-and joined the eleven- and twelve-year-old boys behind the opposite bank.

This older regiment looked with mixed amazement and horror at the arrival of three grown men.

“Yes!” said Waverley. “Very good!”

“Sound the bugle!” said Durwood.

“I think we can rout them with one good charge!” asserted Brink. “Don’t you?”

“Yes, sir!” said one of the older boys, and the entire regiment burst into sunny smiles as visions of seven- and eight-year-old children running in terror danced in their heads.

Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump experienced a strange sensation as they climbed Winthrop Street: the perception that the top of the hill was further away the further they traveled. It had appeared quite manageable when they began their journey and not so manageable when they had covered about a quarter of the distance. When they stopped for breath at about the halfway mark, the crest of the hill seemed leagues away.

“Perhaps we really couldn’t see it from the bottom of the hill,” suggested Eagleton, and that seemed reasonable.

They were standing in the wind and the snow, thinking about this paradox, when several shadows became visible down a side street. Thump saw them first, and he peered past his friends as if he were attempting to read a distant sign. Ephram and Eagleton were not very conscious of the approaching figures before the boys were upon them, and two or three nearly ran Thump down altogether, as they were more concerned with what lay behind than before them.

“Good heavens!” said Eagleton.

“My word!” said Ephram.

“What can it mean?” wondered Eagleton, and no sooner had he said this than something of a reply was forthcoming and his hat flew from his head.

The boys hesitated to run further, being out of breath and supposing that the company of three adults might constitute protection.

Eagleton was looking for his hat and Ephram was pointing to it when Ephram’s hat took similar leave from its perch, and no sooner were they retrieving this piece of headgear than Thump’s topper bounced from its place. a he bent over, something hit Eagleton in the end that does not wear a hat, and he straightened up with a shout. a very large portion of snow caught Ephram in the shoulder, and while he was wiping the cold stuff from beneath his collar, he saw Thump chase after his own hat, which was being encouraged by several missiles to cross the street.

While the Moosepathians drew fire, the young boys, of whom there were eight or nine, were afforded some respite from attack, and they began to return nearly as good as Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump were getting.

Eagleton was conscious of laughter through the storm but hardly had the opportunity to look in its direction as he was being pummeled with a great many snowballs. Thump, however, retrieved his hat and stalked back to his friends, despite the white missiles that shattered and scattered against his broad chest. One snowball caught him in the chin, and were it not for his magnificent beard, it might have stung rather badly.

Ephram alone, once he had his hat back on his head, seemed immune to the continuing volley. “Good heavens, Eagleton!”

“Yes, Ephram!” called Eagleton, picking up his hat for the third or fourth time.

“Thump!”

“Yes, Ephram!”

“I believe we are under attack!”

“You better stay off the street!” came a shout from behind the lacy sheets of snow.

“You better watch out, Harold Marsh!” returned one of the boys standing behind Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump. a laugh came back in reply.

“Stay off the street?” said Ephram. “Well, I never! Have you, Eagleton?”

“No, not ever! Have you, Thump?”

“Well, once, I think.”

The volleys were less frequent now, and the Moosepathians were learning how to dodge them, more or less, with their hands raised above their shoulders like innocent bystanders at a robbery; to an uninformed observer they might have appeared to be dancing some eccentric Highland fling, leaping in the air, then ducking down or simply raising a foot. Even the younger lads behind them grew to like it.

“Who are those people?” inquired Ephram in the course of this joggling.

“Just some older kids from school,” said one of the younger fellows.

“Well, they are difficult.”

“Two or three of them are very tall,” said Eagleton, who caught a glimpse of some larger figures behind the first line. The sport was too easy, it seemed, for the older boys were tiring of it and they drifted away in an organized retreat.

“We’ll be back tomorrow!” shouted one of the younger boys. He shook his fist in the air.

“Oh, my!” said Eagleton. “We are going to have to fight them tomorrow,” asserted the boy. “Thank you for your help.”

“Certainly, you are welcome,” said Eagleton, who shook the lad’s offered hand. “Anytime.”

“Would you come and help us tomorrow?” The small boy’s face beamed with sudden hope and inspiration.

“Tomorrow?” said Eagleton.

“It’s Sunday tomorrow!” said Ephram. It seemed altogether too warlike an activity for the Sabbath.

“There will be a big one after service!” said another child.

“You could throw further than any of us!” said a third.

“They’re all bigger than we are,” said the first boy, “but we’re not afraid.” He looked doubtful despite the assertion.

Now there is something in the Moosepathian soul (a soul that despises very little) that does despise a bully. Courage, on the other hand, is greatly admired, particularly after their reading, in Polly’s Conundrum by Elsa Wattel Berry, that “One who knows not fear can know no courage.” The leader of the younger boys was so obviously daunted by the prospect of tomorrow’s battle, yet so intent upon waging his side of it, that the three men could not think of abandoning them.

They were a sturdy lot, the boys, dressed in knee-lengths with coats barely warm enough for the weather. Some wore caps, and one, with his blond hair sticking out from beneath like straw, wore a battered bowler.

“We could never return fire ourselves,” said Ephram.

“That would be inappropriate,” agreed Eagleton. They did not want to be bullies in return.

“But we could-:-” began Ephram.

“Well, certainly, we might-” tried Eagleton.

“We shall lead them!” averred Thump. He looked very determined, with his hat cocked slightly to one side and his beard full of snow; they had all but forgotten the storm, and his friends were quite taken by the sight of Thump fleeced in white from head to foot. “We shall direct their forces!” he added.

“Bravo, Thump!” declared Ephram. “It is just the thing!” It did not occur to the Moosepathians, just then, that there was not a modicum of experience in tactics and strategy among them.

“Let us meet,” said Eagleton to the boys, “before the Worster House after services. Wind significantly decreasing by midnight, clearing by morning, tomorrow clear and bright.”

“High tide, adjusting for the distance from the ocean, should be about ten minutes before twelve,” calculated Thump.

“It’s twelve minutes past the hour of two,” announced Ephram.

“The woods are filled with Indians!” pronounced Waverley when the Dash-It-All Boys returned to the Worster House and found the Moosepath League drying themselves before the parlor hearth.

“We had no idea!” said Ephram, rather astonished.

“Is there forest nearabouts?” wondered Eagleton. He threw looks to several sides, as if he might see from the Worster House parlor these Indian filled groves. Their chairman had met a distinguished member of that race during the adventures of the previous fall, and they were accordingly much interested.

“There were only the young boys we met,” said Thump seriously.

Waverley had been referring to these very lads by metaphor and was a little surprised at having been taken so literally.

“Were they good lads?” wondered Brink.

“There were some who were a little high-spirited, we thought,” offered Eagleton.

“Quite honestly?” said Waverley.

“Knocked our hats off with snowballs,” added Ephram.

“Good heavens!” said Durwood.

“Good heavens?” said Brink, who had never heard so polite an exclamation from Durwood’s lips.

“Yes,” said Durwood, looking bland. “Good heavens, I said.”

“We said much the same,” sympathized Ephram.

“And these young fellows assailed you with snowballs?” asked Waverley.

“There was a younger group of boys who took protection behind us.”

“Ah!” said Durwood. “Very gallant of you!”

Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump were abashed. “We are going to lead them into battle tomorrow,” said Thump.

“How grand!” said Waverley.

“You don’t think it will be taking a gross advantage of the older boys if we direct the actions of the younger?” wondered Ephram. This ethical question had plagued them.

“Not at all!” assured Waverley.

“We won’t actually participate in the hurling,” added Eagleton.

“Won’t you?” asked Waverley.

Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump shook their heads, saying in chorus, “No, no, no, no.”

“What harm a snowball or two?” wondered Brink. “Knock one of the big fellows on his ear!”

“Oh, my,” said Eagleton.

“You’ve dealt with criminals and pirates in your day,” agreed Durwood. “These ruffians should be of little consequence to the Moosepath League.”

If not actually emboldened by this praise of their society, the members of the club were at least reinvigorated with a sort of robust pride. Just the knowledge that the readiness of the Moosepath League had communicated thus far to the public at large added to their resolve to see through the challenge of the morrow.

“Perhaps you have had some experience at snowballs yourselves,” said Thump, bright with sudden inspiration.

“Good heavens, no!” said Brink, who seemed to have caught Durwood’s decorous turn of phrase.

“We stay well away from such conflict,” said Waverley.

“Leave it to fellows like yourself,” said Durwood.

“Ah, well,” said Thump. “I thought you might have some thoughts on the matter.”

“Oh, we do,” assured Waverley, but he said nothing more, and Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump thought it was perhaps impolite to inquire further.

26. The Banks of Lake George

It was the crow that caused Capital to draw up, just the other side of the forest of fallen trees. They had almost begun to relax as they fled the woods, nearly silent and all but hidden by the snow. The black bird-perhaps thinking, after its discussion with Capital earlier in the day, that the bearded fellow was a kindred soul-lit before them on a fallen tree, where it flapped its wings and let out a terrific squawk. Capital pulled back on the reins and drew the horses to one side.

The old man stood on his seat and looked about them till he thought he saw the shadow of something moving parallel to their track. Moxie, lying on the two prostrate men, let out a low growl.

“What is-” Isabelle started to say, but Capital let out a “Heeah!” and snapped the reins above the horses’ backs. The crow shot into the snowy atmosphere without a sound, and they sped by the fallen tree.

Sundry saw them to the other side as well, forming a ring gauntlet beyond the veil of snow and a row of leaning pines. “Why don’t you scooch down, Mister Walton,” he suggested, but the portly fellow only shook his head and peered after the dark movements in the wood.

“Down!” said Capital sharply, but he was only warning them of a lowlying limb, and Sundry barely ducked his head in time. Frederick did insist that his wife hunker down, assuring her that they could argue about it later, and as they veered about another deadfall, he used the force of the turn to leverage her below the back of the seat.

“If you please, Mrs. Covington,” said Mister Walton quietly, and Frederick indicated his thanks to the man silently.

Mister Walton wondered how Capital and the horses could see far enough to keep them out of some trap of deadfalls, and indeed, they were sweeping through denser growth than they had traveled on the way in. Dark limbs and snow-streaked trunks loomed out of the blizzard like phantoms, and more than once they tottered over some long-fallen tree that lay just below the snow. Their self-appointed escorts flashed into view from behind a stand of trees or in a sudden, if temporary, decrease in the storm.

Sundry had the safety of the rifle on, but he fingered the button as he swung his head from one side to the other. He felt as if his heart were in his throat, and the silent chase and the blinding snow only made the swift minutes the more awful.

Then they broke from the acres of deadfall into an open grove, and emerging from the woods mere seconds after were a pair of sleighs on each side. There were two or three men in each sleigh, drawn by a single horse, and they only looked onward, with not a glimpse in the direction of their quarry. There was something eerie about this and Sundry felt like taking a shot at one of them just to gain their direct attention.

Capital shouted to the horses, and they picked up speed where the land opened up. He gave a fierce and frightful haw upon the reins, and the Percherons plunged to their left, crossing the path of the oncoming sleighs. a collision with their pursuers seemed imminent, the more so since the drivers had their heads thrust forward, but in the last instance the pilot of the first sleigh hawed as well and collided instead with the second sleigh. Snow and runners and limbs spun in a tangle, and only the horses kept their feet, dragging the remains of the vehicles in a path perpendicular to the sleigh in flight.

Sundry thought he would leap out of his seat, and he let out a whoop of sheer delight. In this new direction they were that much farther from the pursuers who remained, and they were feeling a surge of triumph when a shot rang out and the snow erupted just ahead of the left-hand horse.

Sundry had the safety off from the rifle in an instant, and as the others very willingly ducked, he threw himself against the back seat and sighted over the barrel at the closest sleigh. “They’re shooting at the horses!” shouted Capital, and he actually veered the sleigh and its occupants between their pursuers and the Percherons. The sudden lurch nearly spilled Sundry from his seat, and before he had the opportunity to realign his sights, they were dipping over a steep bank.

“Hang on!” shouted Capital.

Past sheets of snow, Lake George lay like a plain below them, and Sundry was horrified to see the dark shapes of several sleighs waiting for them on the ice. “What are you doing?” he called out as Capital drove the horses in a direct line toward the sleighs before them.

“Get down!” shouted Capital, but with the two blond men piled at their feet and the rest of them hunkered down as best they could, there was little place for Sundry to go. Another shot rang out from behind, and the corner of the sleigh splintered over Frederick’s back. There were several shouts, one from Isabelle for her husband and another from Mister Walton for Sundry.

The sleighs before them were surrounded by people, many of whom had rifles leveled at the slope, and Sundry thought he was letting out his last gasp at the sight of fire and smoke erupting from that line of barrels.

“Take that, you-” Capital’s rough colloquialism was lost as the roar of those guns reached them. “Beg your pardon, ma’am. Mr. Covington,” he added, but he was grinning ear to ear and nearly laughing.

An unmotivated glimpse back told Sundry that the sleighs behind them had pulled up. Then he looked ahead. They were almost falling down the last stretch of bank, the Percherons seemingly tireless as they thundered onto the lake.

Capital snapped the reins, which was a signal for the horses both to carry on and to ease their pace. Sundry’s trepidation of that row of rifles turned to confusion and then happiness as he recognized Paul Duvaudreuil, who had exchanged sleighs with them that morning, and Mr. Noel and Mr. Noggin, whom he and Mister Walton had met the night before.

The remainder of that armed band, some of whom were women, were relatives of Paul’s, and there was a concert of Canadian French amid the cheers and shots that greeted them. Capital pulled the sleigh around and lit onto the lake, where he was immediately attended by Mr. Noel and Mr. Noggin. Others were instructed as to the care of the two blond men, and several tended the horses, breaking them from harness, throwing blankets over the animals’ backs, and walking them down. Snow hissed on the Percherons’ backs.

“We didn’t really think to shoot till we saw them hit the sleigh, did we, Mr. Noggin?” said Mr. Noel.

“Certainly we didn’t, Mr. Noel,” said Mr. Noggin.

There was much praise in the air for Capital’s handling of the sleigh, and when his passengers looked back at the slope they had traveled to the lake, they wondered that they hadn’t all rolled down the bank, sleigh over, horse.

“That’s why I asked Capital along,” said Mister Walton to Sundry, “but I didn’t know it at the time.”

“It’s a wonder they were able to turn around on that slope,” said Sundry.

“They must have had to get out before the horses were able to pull those rigs back up.”

“I wasn’t watching,” admitted Mister Walton. “Are you all right?”

“Not a singe.”

“Gentlemen, I can’t tell you,” began Frederick as he and his wife approached them. “I can’t tell you how very fortunate I feel that you came with us and how very sorry I am as well.”

“We are only glad,” informed Mister Walton.

“If Moxie ever has any pups,” said Sundry.

“It is the very least we owe you,” said Isabelle. “Not to say Mr. Gaines and these other magnificent folk.” She spoke to one of the women nearby, and her French was very pretty.

“If they are that fearful of what we might know, Mr. Gaines,” said Frederick quietly, while his wife was otherwise engaged, “I fear what they might attempt still. And if they’ve guessed that I haven’t been able to translate the figures,” he surmised, “they’ll realize they have only to stop me and get the photographs to keep anyone else from doing so.”

“I believe,” said Sundry, who had stepped up to this conversation, “that I have an idea how to make your knowledge in the matter a moot point.”

“I have always been amused by that word, Mr. Noggin,” said Mr. Noel.

The two men had joined Capital and Frederick and Sundry. “Moot.”

“I am not familiar with it, I don’t think, Mr. Noel,” said Mr. Noggin.

Someone was lighting a lantern. Mister Walton looked into the mill of snow. “It’s getting dark,” he said to Sundry.

Daniel’s Story (July–November 1891)

“It’s a shame we hadn’t known all along Nell was that kind of girl.”

Joel Parson couldn’t have realized that Daniel was nearing the porch of the general store, or he wouldn’t have said it; some of the other boys facing Daniel were a little uncertain, inf act, when the statement fell from the young man)-lips, and Joel himself looked as if he had been caught poaching by the sheriff himself Joel Parson was a nice young man, really, though like most young men (and most people, to bef air), he spoke from time to time without thinking.

Daniel had dreaded hearing something like it, ever since it had become common knowledge that Nell Linnett was spending every available hour with Asher Willum, and now that the thought was in the air, he simply mounted the steps to the store and confronted the boys. Joel Parson was the ultimate focus of his attention, and there was silence for a moment.

Daniel said, “I have never had the inclination to strike a person, Joel, but I might have just now if I wasn’t so sure that you are a better man than your word would indicate.”

Joel looked almost sick as he stared down at his feet. Daniel knew that Joel would carry this blunder with him the rest of his life and that it would raise it head at unexpected moments to trouble him time and again; Daniel knew this because he had blundered enough himself.

“I don’t think one of you boys,” said Daniel to the rest of the crowd there, “have ever had so much as an unkind word from that girl.”

There was the sound of shuffling feet and the sight of several nodding heads, which irritated Daniel vaguely, so without another word he went about his business. Gemma Clyde didn’t say much to Daniel when he made his purchases, and he knew that she had heard him; it wasn’t only the young folk who had something to say about the fall of Ian Linnett, which was how recent events were perceived by some in town.

There were others, however, who were simply concerned about the safety of Nell Linnett, and no one saw anything but tragedy rising out of any association with Asher Willum. Asher himself would walk the porch with more than his usual measure of conceit and smile at people as if he had discovered something indecent about them all.

Word had gotten round that Asher and Nell had been seen dallying in the tall grass by Trafton Pond, and the heartbreak of it to Daniel Plainway was the pure sweetness of the image by itself: a young man and a young woman, handsome and beautiful, lingering in the warm July sun beside a calm water, amid the sounds of bees and warblers. How absolutely sweet might Nell think Asher Willum’s attentions, and how absolutely undeserving Asher was.

Word also floated about that Asher was still keeping time with at least two other girls in Brownfield, and there were days when Nell was seen without him, looking lonely. She said very little the few times that she and Daniel saw each other, and Daniel could not bring himself to speak to her about anything more profound than the weather.

It amazed everyone that Ian Linnett had not thrown his granddaughter out of the house, but when Daniel visited one Saturday, he found the place silent and sad. Aunt Dora had left to stay with relatives in Rockport, and the old man himself looked like a man furious, who yet is unable to vent that fury. Daniel had never seen such bitterness. There was very little said between them, and Daniel did not stay long.

Summer came to an end, and Asher Willum disappeared from public view.

For days Nell was sighted along the paths and roads, wandering listlessly on her own. Daniel himself saw her walk past his house, on the outskirts of town, with Jeram. Some wondered, not silently, if something “had happened” to Asher, which euphemism was pointed toward old man Linnett himself, but Asher was spotted some towns away by a drummer who knew the parties in question, and it was conjectured that he had tired of Nell and cast her aside.

The leaves began to turn, and weeks went by; Asher seemed to have quit the area entirely. Daniel began to hope that some lessons had been learned and that if Nell were to visit relatives herself, she might start over. When he found her at home one evening, and while her grand father occupied the other end of the house in granitic silence, she cried the entire time Daniel talked with her, otherwise revealing nothing of herself, of her relationship with Asher Willum, or her plans.

A week later, during the early days of a cold November, Nell left home, and Daniel heard that she was living at the Willums’ place. a few days later he barged into the old man presence to ask if it were true that Nell had married Jeram Willum and that Ian himself had signed the papers of consent.

“I beg your pardon,” said the old man, without looking at Daniel, “if I have offended you with my presumption.”

27. The Span Between Trains

Daniel Plainway was not sure what he should do, once Charlotte Burnbrake inadvertently seated herself across the aisle from him. While he suspected, after what had happened at the City Hotel barely an hour before, that his presence might be a source of embarrassment to her, it seemed that by removing himself to another car, he would appear to suggest she had reason to be ashamed.

Charlotte was not unaware of his quandary and true to human convolution felt a sympathetic discomfort for him on top of her own. They were doing their best to appear interested in whatever was before them, Daniel scanning (without reading) the sentences in a copy of Silas Marner, Charlotte considering a piece of paper (consisting of a list of errands she had written for herself several months ago) that she had taken from her purse.

It did seem that this might be the last train out of Portland before the end of the storm, and there were few people on it; as if persecuted by the Imp of Perverse, Daniel and Charlotte found themselves nearly alone in the car as they pulled out of the station. The car shivered with a sudden gust of wind; the station and the surrounding yard disappeared behind a white blind, but Charlotte was so concerned about the awkward circumstances that she had hardly room in her mind to worry about the inclemency without.

She felt deadened by the events of the past two hours and by her inability to rise to the present challenge; then it occurred to her to consider what Pacif a Means would do. She looked out her window at the white squall, took some deep breaths, and, before she knew what she was about, said, “It was agreed between Pacif a and myself that we were fortunate in your arrival this afternoon.” She said this loud enough but said it while still looking out the window. After a moment she turned and gave Mr. Plainway as bland and as brave an expression as she could muster.

“You are kind to say so,” he replied, still staring at his book, “but another person would have been of more assistance than I.” Quite by accident he mimicked her movement by taking off his half spectacles, once he had said this, and looking at her.

Charlotte was struck by something that had not occurred to her till that moment, her voice revealing the process of her thought. “I am not sure that is true, Mr. Plainway. You understood, I think, however instinctively, that a steady presence was required rather than active assistance. Another less circumspect man would have said more and made matters worse.”

Every ounce of compliment, stated or implied in these words, had its effect on Daniel, and he was moved to blush. He realized then that she was smiling and (not for the first time) that she was beautiful.

She in turn surprised herself by experiencing an almost puckish delight in making him redden.

The conductor came through the car, punching tickets. “There is a chance that the rails will be closed between here and Hallowell,” he said when he saw their destination. They simply nodded in reply, and he looked from one to the other of them, clearly wondering what they were doing on opposite sides of the aisle. When he was gone, Daniel tried to think of what to say next.

Again Charlotte found her voice. “Do you believe, Mr. Plainway,” she said, “that some people are, by nature and their very being, unhappy?”

“I have known folk who have suffered terrible misfortune,” he ventured to say, after some thought, “who yet knew some measure of content, who were perhaps grateful for small blessings, and others who might be embarrassed by their riches, worldly and otherwise, and who rarely smiled.”

“My cousin, then, is one of these,” she said, meaning the latter.

“Mr. Noble?”

She nodded.

“A stone thrown in the lake.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It is an Indian proverb. ‘Each is a stone thrown in the lake.’ The lake is life, and everything we do or say causes a ripple. The Abenaki would say that a person might cause good ripples or bad. I represented an Indian in a land dispute, and it was his own brother that brought his interests down. No one was entirely happy with the outcome of the case, but my client was philosophical. When I remarked on the damage his brother had done, he only said,’A stone in the lake.’ It was not meant, I think, as a direct criticism but only as a general statement about us all.”

“It was perhaps a warning,” said Charlotte, who liked the ambiguous nature of the proverb, “a reminder to himself.”

“That is it exactly, I think.”

“Roger and I were very close when we were children,” said the woman. She looked down at the aisle between them now, as if she were speaking to herself. “He is three years younger than I, but he always carried himself things. There was something foolish and romantic in me that was flattered like an older child and was precocious in his understanding…of certain by his attention, and I was only seventeen when he cajoled from me a promise of faithfulness to him. I thought it was all simply a chapter in one of the books I read with such passion. Cousins often fall in love in books.”

It would have taken more time than their trip allowed to explain all that had happened between Roger Noble and her, to explain the physical beauty of his youth, the rugged athleticism matched with his curly blond hair and almost girlish handsomeness. He had been precocious, and she had allowed him to kiss her behind his father’s garden wall at the house in Cape Elizabeth-first chastely, then with more passion, till finally he had wrested from her such an indiscreet promise.

She had hardly thought of him when her family was not visiting his or when she was not reading one of his barely restrained letters, and in retrospect she felt a terrible guilt for this. To her it had been a game played with a cousin seen three or four times in a year.

One night, as she neared her eighteenth birthday, she walked again (and as it happened, for the last time) in her uncle’s garden with Roger. The game had begun to pale for her by then; she was more aware and even a little fearful of his single-minded passion; she was more sensible to his temper, his petulance to everyone but herself, and her pleasure in his company had withered slightly as she considered how they had deceived their families. Yet as they strolled beside the moonlit roses and as he held her hand, a culpable excitement reawakened within her.

In a shadowed nook of the garden they stopped, and she had willingly lifted her face to his. The warm night, the scent of roses, the salt breeze from off the cape were like rhymes in a soft sonnet. She put her hands in his curly hair; she felt the weight of him press her shoulders against the brick of the garden wall. She could still remember every sensation, the thrill and the absolute fear, all these years later.

Roger had not been content with promises and stolen kisses behind their parents’ backs but had pressed on to other familiarities, and here her better judgment had risen up, and she had pushed him away.

A gust of wind drove snow with the sound of scattered sand against the side of the train. The entire affair, from childish sweetness to mature reflection, had traveled and occupied her thoughts for the span of about ten seconds.

Daniel only surmised the details of her story but felt as awkward as he would have had she told him everything. During this minor lapse in the conversation he wished he could think of something to say. It seemed incredible that her cousin could have been persecuting her for all these years, yet he considered her beauty and what he thought he understood of her nature and remembered what he knew of men like Roger Noble. He decided that it was time to change the subject.

“Your uncle has business in Hallowell?” he asked, not realizing that this was as close to not changing the subject as he could have gotten.

She looked almost startled, for it had been her bachelor uncle, Ezra Burnbrake, who had been sitting in the darkened garden, not ten yards self struggling with Roger, and Uncle Ezra in his prime who had raised his away, and Uncle Ezra who had come running when Charlotte found herwalking stick and thrashed his fifteen-year-old nephew to within an inch of his life.

“It was the last time we ever came to Cape Elizabeth,” she said aloud. Then she said, “I am sorry.”

“Not at all.”

“What do you do, Mr. Plain way?” she asked, falling back upon a lifetime of polite conversation.

“I’m a lawyer,” he said simply. “I live in Hiram.”

“And do you have family there?”

“A sister. The town is like family, you know.” He had been so absorbed by this lovely woman and her melancholy state that he had, for the first time in several days, momentarily forgotten the sad tale of the Linnetts and the plight of the little boy named Bird. Mentioning family brought them back again.

Charlotte caught the flash of this remembrance in his eyes and said, “I hope there isn’t bad news for the Moosepath League,” and she could not help smiling when she pronounced the name of the club. “In the short time I knew them I liked them very much. And they have high regard for their chairman, it seems,” she added with continued good humor.

“I’ve never met the man, but he certainly leaves an impression wherever he goes,” said Daniel. “No, I hope I have good news for them, Miss Burnbrake.”

There was a reservation in his words that caused her a moment of sympathetic apprehension. “I hope so then,” she said.

Some alliance of spent emotion and the rhythmic shiver of the train conquered Charlotte Burnbrake, and she drifted to sleep, quite unintentionally, while they talked about weather and travel and anything that did not directly touch upon whatever truly concerned them.

Daniel returned to his book and was able to concentrate, after some effort, upon the sorrows and joys of the old miser. He occasionally looked across the aisle at her, taking advantage of her sleeping to view her pretty features and feeling a little dubious about it.

The first and only warning of something wrong was when, three or four miles out of Richmond, there came a sudden blast of steam and the squeal of braking wheels upon the rails. The initial tug toward the front of the train frightened Charlotte awake. Daniel gripped the back of his own seat with one arm and poised himself as best he could against the inertial force while readying himself to catch Miss Burnbrake if the car should lurch in another direction.

Someone at the other end of the car let out a frightened cry. Past Charlotte, through the windows, Daniel had the glimpse of a man with a red lantern hurrying away from the tracks. The brakes had taken on a scream of their own. The train was slowing. Daniel held his breath, his eyes wide, his heart pounding. They seemed to be crawling, but the great mass of the engine and its several cars continued to push them, and when they were hardly moving at all, there was a sudden jolt.

For an awful moment, the car (and presumably the rest of the train) leaned, as if it were going to tip over altogether. Charlotte reached across the aisle and took hold of Daniel’s hand; they froze in apprehension.

With a shudder the train settled back onto the tracks, and they were stopped. Great gouts of steam sped past their windows, roiling the falling snow in hectic spirals. Shouts came from outside, and someone shouted out a prayerful thank-you.

“Are you all right?” asked Daniel.

“A little shaken,” Charlotte admitted, and realizing that she still had hold of his hand, she let him go.

This contact had a profound effect on Daniel, but he only said, “I’ll go see what has happened,” and hurried down the aisle.

The conductor appeared at the end of the car, all unhurried business, and inquired if everyone was safe.

“Yes, thank you,” said Charlotte, for herself.

“What is it?” asked Daniel, who stood at the door.

“The train ahead of us is off the track.”

“We didn’t hit anything?” offered Daniel.

“No, but the other train kicked the rails out when the caboose tipped over, and our engine was almost stopped when it wheeled off the break. The other train knocked down the lines between here and Richmond, so a wire wasn’t able to get through.”

“Could it have been the train my uncle was on?” wondered Charlotte before considering the time elapsed since Ezra Burnbrake and his party left Portland.

“I think there have been several trains since this morning,” assured Daniel. He was half out the door by now, and he pulled his collar about his neck as he clomped down the steps. He had not thought to take his hat or coat, and the driving snow stung his face. Up ahead there were lights and the shadows of men in the snow. a man with a lantern stopped by the next car to crane his head and answer a question from an opened window. With the storm, evening came early, and the lamp of day turned down with almost visible speed; even as he watched, the lanterns up ahead burned more fiercely, and a grove of trees nearby was lost against the approach of night.

“Mr. Plainway,” said Charlotte. He was surprised to find her standing beside him, holding out his hat and coat. She herself was well bundled, and there was the look of excitement in her face, as if a train derailment had been the very thing to take her mind from her unfortunate day.

He thanked her as he took the hat and then the coat, shivering beneath them as he realized how cold he had been.

“Shall we go and see?” she asked. They might have been friends all their lives there was such a note of cheer in her voice.

Daniel’s only concern was that the train was settled firmly. He looked up and down the line of cars but could tell nothing in the gathering dark. “Yes,” he said, “we might as well find out what’s expected of us.”

Quite naturally she took his arm, and they plodded through the drifts to the fore of the train. For her part Charlotte felt at ease with this man. He was indeed steady (as she had characterized him); she (as a rule) was serene in herself, and it would be difficult to explain why the one was so different from the other.

Others were coming off the train, and someone shouted questions from a window as they went by. a small man in engineer’s garb approached them, his face wet with steam and dark with coal dust, and he hoped aloud that they were unharmed after the incident.

The further they walked, the more flurried the activity around them. They came into the light of a dozen lanterns when they reached the broken tracks. The engine of the one train and the caboose of the other were not thirty feet apart.

A railroad man tipped his hat to Charlotte, then said to Daniel, “They’ve already roused some folk at lceboro, back down the way a mile or so. There’s a road, just on the ridge above us, and most of the passengers from the other train have been taken to lodgings already. The sleighs will be back soon, and we can get you folks off in half an hour, I’m sure.”

They stood back and watched as the engineer directed some safety measures. Loose rails were pulled from the bed and chocked against the wheels of the train. The engine still listed, and the conductor decided that everyone should wait outside for further transportation. Another man shoveled a bucket of glowing coals from the firebox, and a fire was started with some brush and a broken rail between the two trains.

“We just need a pond and some skates,” said Daniel.

The engineer passed them again, tipping his hat to Charlotte. “I do believe he thinks I am your wife,” said Charlotte with that same impishness that had taken pleasure in Daniel’s blush earlier.

“Does he?” Daniel was befuddled by this statement and wondered if she wanted him to correct this misapprehension. “Perhaps I should explain-” he began, and even took a step in that direction.

She kept hold of his arm, however, and laughed aloud. “I don’t think it will matter to him,” she said. There was the sound of relief in her voice, as if she had feared she had lost laughter altogether that afternoon. It was a deep, heartfelt sound, and Daniel was not offended to find himself its object, there was such comradery in the way it was shared. The woman, in her fur-collared coat, and her voice in the snow reached the level of beauty that only the unexpected can attain, and there was at the same time something so natural about her presence there that he could take a truly long look at her while she smiled in reply.

“No, I don’t suppose it will,” said Daniel.

28. More Sense of a Letter

“Capital?” said Sven Henslaw, when he answered the door and found the silver-bearded man at his back stoop. “What is it?” Sven peered past the old man at the small crowd gathered around several sleighs outside his house. The tail end of the storm drifted into the realm of a nearby streetlamp, and in that halo they looked like a calendar lithograph, bundled in furs and wrapped about with scarves and blankets.

“We’ve come to ask you a great favor, Sven,” said Capital. “Could we come in?”

“Not all of you?” wondered Sven, wide-eyed.

“No, no. Three or four of us, perhaps.”

“I don’t know, Capital. Mina likes to know ahead of time if company is coming.”

“Well, maybe two or three more than that,” added Capital, who wasn’t really listening to the man. “You don’t mind if we talk to the sheriff in your kitchen, do you, Sven, while you do us a favor?”

“Good Lord, Capital! What’s happened?”

“We’ll explain the whole thing while you print some pictures for us.”

“Print some pictures? Can’t that wait till tomorrow? We were just sitting down to dinner, Mina and I.”

Capital’s eyes shone with both humor and apology. “Well, Sven,” he said, “I wish I could say we won’t take up much of your evening.”

A small commotion had started out on the sidewalk, and a large, rugged-looking man pushed his way through the crowd toward Sven’s door. “What’s going on here, Capital?” said the fellow with the air of someone who has the right, perhaps the duty to know.

“Good Lord!” said Sven. “It is the sheriff!”

A dog was barking. Mr. Noggin and Mr. Noel, along with Paul Duvaudreuil and some other brawny fellows, were escorting a pair of men, none too gently, up the walk to the kitchen door, and Sven realized, after a look or two, that these two men had their hands bound behind them. The sheriff was quick to see this as well and didn’t seem too pleased about it.

“I’m surprised to find you at the head of a mob, Capital,” he said.

“Mob? We’re orderly enough.”

“Well, I want those men untied immediately.”

“Soon as we get them in the kitchen, Sheriff.”

“The kitchen? Capital, have you gone foolish? I thought there was trouble here at Sven’s!”

“No trouble here, Sheriff!” declared Mr. Henslaw. “And I want none. Mina and I were just sitting down to dinner.” Mrs. Henslaw at this point chose to appear behind her husband, and she demanded to know what was happening.

“Bernie,” said Capital to the sheriff, “have I ever given you reason to think I’d go off half cocked?” While the sheriff frowned and thought about this, Capital added, “Well, all right then. Let’s get them in Sven’s kitchen. We’ll get Sven working on a little favor for us and explain the whole thing all to once.”

Throughout this conversation the two blond men never altered their expressions, which were respectively bland and uninterested.

Sheriff Bernard Darwin gave the two bound men a curt look, then let out a large, heartfelt sigh and nodded to Sven. “Better let us in, I guess,” he said, and led the way through to the Henslaws’ kitchen. “You be easy with those fellows!”

Sven and Mina Henslaw lived near the northern end of Skowhegan’s main street, and not in the largest house, though it was very spruce, and the kitchen smelled nicely of the Henslaws’ dinner, which was simmering upon a cheerily humping stove. There was some confusion as Capital waved several people into the kitchen: Mrs. Henslaw stood across the room and continued to query anyone who would listen.

“Now, just hold on, Mina,” the sheriff said. “I don’t know myself. Get those men untied,” he demanded of Paul and some of his kin, who had lumbered after the Covingtons, Mister Walton, and Sundry Moss. “Are all these people necessary?” wondered the sheriff.

“You have the picture?” Capital asked Sundry.

The young man waved a photograph in the air. “Mr. Henslaw,” he said, “if we could take advantage of your talent with a camera as well as your good nature…” He sounded rather like Mister Walton, and Sven appeared slightly mollified as he led Sundry toward the back of his house, where he kept his studio.

A the two blond men came free of their bonds, Capital made sure they were securely fixed in seats behind the Henslaws’ kitchen table.

“Now, really, Capital,” said the sheriff, “for the last time, what is this all about?”

Capital Gaines was not to be hurried, however, and he conveyed introductions between the sheriff, Mrs. Henslaw, the Covingtons, and Mister Walton. “You know Paul and his family,” he finished.

The sheriff nodded to the Duvaudreuil clan, members of which continued to fill the kitchen. “Shut that door!” demanded the sheriff. “And who are these fellows?” he asked, nodding to the two seated men.

“They are simply the men who shot at us, out beyond Round Pond,” informed Capital.

“Round Pond? Today? What were you doing out in the woods in this blizzard?”

“Reverend Covington here was searching for a particular artifact that he believes might be of Viking origin.”

“Come again?”

“And these ne’er-do-wells,” continued Capital, who wasn’t ready to begin repeating himself just yet, “found it in their hearts to threaten us with guns-they and their accomplices-and even to shoot at us on three occasions.” Capital looked almost happy to say it.

“I am sorry for such a commotion in your house,” said Isabelle to Mrs. Henslaw, but their hostess had realized she was to have some excitement tonight with none of the attendant trouble once everyone was gone; it would be story enough to keep them the rest of the winter.

“Good heavens, Mrs. Covington!” said Mina Henslaw. “They shot at you?”

“And what’s your name?” demanded the sheriff of the beardless blond man.

The man replied as if he were in danger of going to sleep, “I don’t believe I am obliged to say anything under the circumstances.”

“I am pretty sure,” said the sheriff, “that it would behoove you to be on a first-name basis with me.”

The man gave Darwin a look of impeccable boredom. “Arthur,” he said simply. “This is Edgar.”

The sheriff was not to be irritated by any such fatuous methods, and he turned to Edgar. “Can you speak?”

“Yes,” said the bearded man with as much enthusiasm as his compamon.

“And what do you have to say about this?” inquired the sheriff.

The bearded man raised his chin, barely cleared his throat, and took in the remainder of the room with hooded eyes. “I came upon these people trespassing,” he began in a firm and untroubled tone, “and was simply wanting to know what they were about when I was attacked by their dog.”

“Trespassing?” said Frederick Covington, but the sheriff raised his hand.

“My friend here,” continued the man, with a nod to the other blond man, “did shoot once, hoping to drive the dog and the young man who just left with Mr. Henslaw away from me. The young man knocked me in the side of the head, and I was briefly unconscious. My friend was held at gunpoint. We were tied up like so much game, thrown into a sleigh, and carried off. Realizing that we had been kidnapped by these people, other friends came after us and did give warning shots in the pursuit.”

“Warning shots!” shouted Capital. “That’s a pretty story!”

“Trespassing?” said Frederick again.

The blond man actually smiled, the dubious light of which fell rather blatantly upon Isabelle, who offered no expression in return.

Capital shook his fist at the bearded man. “I’ll give you a shot that’s more than warning!”

Darwin demanded order, threatening to clear the room. Then the sheriff’s attention fell upon Mister Walton, who remained as calm as ever. Anyone else would have taken this as a signal to say what was on his mind, but the portly fellow simply said, “I beg your pardon?” as if the sheriff had said something he hadn’t heard.

“Please, speak up,” said the sheriff, who was only too glad to see a thoughtful expression among them.

“There is, you will easily believe,” said Mister Walton, “some history behind this, which can be explained easily enough. However, Mr. -the gentleman calling himself Edgar has used the term trespassing, which would indicate that he and his fellows either own or are the agents of those who own the land where the unfortunate events took place. Otherwise they have no reason, or right, to be pointing guns at anyone.”

“It’s not customary to point guns at all in these parts,” said the sheriff. He turned to Arthur and Edgar.

“We are the owners of that land,” stated Edgar flatly.

Frederick was incensed with the declaration. “How can that be when you didn’t even know of its existence until today? When we ourselves probably led you there?”

Edgar never took his eyes from the sheriff. “You have only to go to the Registry of Deeds, where you will find the land in question to be under the ownership of the Broumnage Club.”

“The Norumbega Club, you mean,” said Frederick quietly.

Edgar managed to alter a small look of surprise into one of puzzlement as he turned to the clergyman.

“Broumnage Club?” the sheriff was saying. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s a sporting association,” explained Edgar.

“A league of vandals!” spouted Frederick.

The sheriff shook his head and sighed again. “I need someone to rouse up the town clerk,” he said, “and go with him to the Registry of Deeds.” And when, with proper instructions from Capital, Mr. Noel and Mr. Noggin (who seemed everywhere together) were after this errand, the sherifasked for a chair and a careful accounting of the day’s adventures.

The notion of photographing a positive photograph was a new one to Sven Henslaw; but as a professional he was interested in the challenge, and Sundry kept the man happy by explaining why he was missing his dinner and also why his kitchen was filled with people.

“You mean it!” Sven said several times while Sundry explained the possible origins of the artifact in the photograph, and “Good night!” another several times as the young man related the events of the day. Sven was adept at his craft and quickly formed a negative from the photograph, which they dried in the darkroom amid the acrid chemical fumes.

“The runes are the important thing,” said Sundry as they waited for the first print to come to life, but what he focused on, as it appeared, was the pictograph (an ox, Mr. Covington had thought) carved apart from the main column of figures. “We just need as many copies as we can make,” he said.

“Ah!” said Mr. Henslaw as he pulled the photograph from its bath. Shadow reigned over more of the scene than in the original, but they could make out the runes upon the boulder.

Sundry, who had never seen this process before, was enthralled, but in a little while he left Mr. Henslaw and returned to the kitchen to report their success. Mr. Noggin and Mr. Noel had returned, and the two blond sherifmen did not seem as complacent as before; Arthur was arguing with the sheriff at the state of deeds at the town registry, while Edgar simply stared at the table before him, appearing angry and astonished. “I am telling you that it is simply an oversight!” Arthur was shouting.

Sundry looked to Mister Walton, who stepped up and said in a small tone, “The deed to the parcel of land that contains the Council Hill was not in the name of the Broumnage Club, as these two clearly expected.”

“How could they have expected such a thing if they only learned about the location of the runes today?”

“They must have known their general whereabouts and needed Frederick to lead them to it directly. To cover eventualities, they meant to have the land under ownership.”

“But they don’t.”

“It seems not.” Mister Walton took Sundry by the elbow and moved him toward the pantry, where he could speak without being overheard. “Mr. Tempest’s letter, as it happens,” he said, “has had its effect.”

“Mr. Tempest?”

“Indeed.”

“The man on the ship? The one whose letter you wrote and delivered?”

“Or rather the Moosepath League delivered. The deed to the land where we encountered these fellows is in the name of Ezra Burnbrake.” Mister Walton chuckled at the look on Sundry’s face. “I had no more notion than yourself. But the letter that Mr. Tempest dictated makes more sense to me now. Mr. Tempest himself was to have been the agent by which the Broumnage Club meant to obtain the land, but he had a change of heart, it seems, and in rather oblique terms he called off the deal and warned Mr. Burnbrake from making a similar one with anyone else.”

“But where does this place Mr. Tempest?”

“A a member of the Broumnage Club himself perhaps.”

“And traveling on the same ship with the Covingtons was a way to watch them,” said Sundry.

“I have not mentioned the business to anyone else, fearing that Mr. Tempest’s decision may have put him in some danger with his fellows.”

“But if he was. a member of the club?”

“He had tired of the people he represented and said as much. And he also, now that I think of it, said something about dying.”

“Was he being prophetic regarding his friends’ reaction?”

“I wonder.”

“Gentlemen,” said the sheriff. He entered the pantry and was obviously interested in what they were speaking about.

“It is a peripheral business,” said Mister Walton, “which I would rather not speak of in…mixed company.” He indicated the blond men with a glance.

The sheriff nodded. “Arthur, Edgar,” he said to the blond men, who had not offered their surnames, “you will allow me to be your host tonight at the county jail.”

“You have no right to lock us up!” spat Arthur, his fair complexion turning ruddy with anger. Edgar sat straight in his straight-backed chair and glared at the sheriff.

“It was all one word against another, as far as I could tell,” explained the sheriff, “but you stuck it out a little too far with this claim of owning the land. Something isn’t square here, and perhaps the light of day will have a beneficial effect on my ability to understand the problem.”

“They kidnapped us!” pronounced Edgar.

“And brought you straight to the sheriff,” said Darwin. “Would that all kidnappers followed the same scheme. I know it’s Sunday tomorrow,” he said to the remainder of the room, “but I think we had better rectify things in the morning.”

“Thank you, Sheriff,” said Frederick.

“Bernard,” said Capital.

With the assistance of some of the other men, the sheriff ushered the two blond men to the door.

“If you will pardon me, gentlemen,” said Sundry, “I have something for you.” He advanced upon Arthur and Edgar, and though he wore the most amiable of expressions, they shied a little at his approach. The sherif watched Sundry closely. “This is what you were looking for, I think,” said Sundry, “at Mr. Thole’s house in Augusta.” And he held out the photograph of the boulder on Council Hill.

Edgar and Arthur considered the offered photograph with suspicion.

“Don’t thank me,” said Sundry. “We’re giving them to everyone in town and will be sending more to the papers in the morning.”

There was the flash of something dangerous in the expressions of the two men at the door, but Sundry only cocked his head to one side and thrust the picture toward them again.

“I am not finished with you,” said Edgar, whose cheek was still bruised from Sundry’s fist.

“If that’s a threat-” began the sheriff.

“Only of legal action,” said the man, but Sundry was looking into the man’s eyes and sensed the threat of something else entirely.

“You haven’t translated it, have you?” said Arthur to Frederick with something like a sneer, before they were prodded out the door.

“Don’t concern yourself,” assured Mister Walton, with a hand on Frederick Covington’s arm; “neither have they.”

29. Number Two in a Series of Three

There were bells on the harness of the horse that pulled their sleigh, and Daniel almost laughed, it so completed the cozy picture as they skimmed the white street beneath the lamp that bobbed on a pole behind them. There were two other people riding with them, and Charlotte sat in the seat opposite from Daniel but kept the accidental intimacy between them alive with happy conversation, making it difficult for him to be sorry about the train’s derailing.

They were not long arriving in Iceboro, the community named for the ice-cutting industry that was at its height in those days along that portion of the Kennebec River. The settlement itself was impressive for its huge warehouses and ice plants and the great boardinghouses that slept and fed the workers who cut the ice in winter and loaded ships with their precious harvest throughout the warmer months. “I take it we will not have to bunk with the ice cutters,” said Charlotte wryly to the driver.

“Mother Rose will take you in,” said the man around a long-stemmed pipe.

“Mother Rose?”

“She runs the hotel hereabouts.”

Mother Rose’s was more properly an old tavern, now making the most of its trade as an inn, and that rather briskly tonight. The ancient sign at the tavern door was adorned with a briar rose, lit by the lamp in an upper window, and swinging in a spiral of snow.

Daniel took up Charlotte’s bag as well as his own and followed her into the inn. The floor of the long tavern room was wet with snow from the boots of previous arrivals, and coats hung upon the near wall. The driver stomped in behind them, mumbling something about a warming draft; he leaned his head into a doorway to their left and hooted after help for his passengers, accepted a generous coin from Daniel, and left with a tip of his hat.

A young woman came in by the left-hand door and greeted them pleasantly. “You’ll be wanting a room for two then?” she asked, before Daniel could, with some awkwardness, explain that he and Miss Burnbrake were simply fellow travelers. The young woman begged their pardon, and perused her register accordingly. She was a smart young lady, with a pretty smile, and when Daniel asked after Mother Rose, it was his turn to beg her pardon since he was speaking to the very individual. “It’s what the ice cutters in town call me,” she said with a laugh, and hurried up the stairs to prepare, first, a room for Miss Burnbrake.

“She’s not what I had expected of a Mother Rose,” said Daniel to Charlotte. He didn’t know why he should be in constant embarrassment around this woman.

Charlotte didn’t know why she should be in such constant amusement; neither did she know why it felt so easy to speak with humor and frankness to this man. “I suspect she is a happy surprise to many a weary traveler,” she said.

They heard a door slam shut, and a man’s voice called after Rose, who stood at the head of the broad front stairs.

“Yes, sir?” she said.

“My bed has been slept in,” came the voice.

“Yes, it’s an inn, you know,” she said, managing the answer without sounding altogether flippant.

“But the sheets are old,” said the man with irritation rankling his voice.

“They are not new bought, if that is what you mean,” returned the young woman, “but they are clean, I assure you.”

“Get me the manager!” demanded the man.

“You are speaking to her,” said the woman.

“There must be someone else-”

“You can consult with my father if you care to brave the churchyard tonight,” she returned. By now another man came out of his room and added his own stare at the unseen malcontent.

Daniel couldn’t say why that irate voice vexed him so until he glanced back at Charlotte and saw that she had lost all color in her face. Then Daniel stepped around the register desk to get a look at the man before he disappeared back into his room; but there was the sound of a door slamming, and Charlotte caught his sleeve, saying, “Please, it’s him!”

“Could it be?”

“He must have been on the train ahead of us. I must go somewhere else. I can’t face him again after today, Mr. Plainway.”

“The driver was certain that everyone else was full up,” reminded Daniel. “Perhaps I had better speak with him. He might do the decent thing and find lodgings elsewhere.”

“He will not, I assure you.”

Rose had returned to her desk, and she watched the conversation for only a moment before she realized that the newcomer’s agitation had something to do with the man in the room above. The door of the man’s room sounded again, and with marvelous prescience, Rose hurried back up the stairs to stop Roger Noble from coming down. They could hear her placating him with promises of new sheets, and while she kept him busy, Charlotte and Daniel snatched up their bags and hurried onto the porch of the inn.

The storm had weakened considerably, and there was that soft hissing calm that accompanies the finale of such a snow. a horse and rider trotted past the inn and down the main street of the settlement. Lights blazed from a sprawling boardinghouse on the ridge above them.

“What would you have me do?” asked Daniel plainly, putting himself completely at Charlotte’s beck.

“If you could just find a sleigh and driver who would take me to the next town.”

“Perhaps there is a room somewhere else.”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t sleep, wondering if I’m to see him on the street tomorrow. I would have stayed in Portland if I had known he was coming this way!”

Daniel was only now understanding the depth of Miss Burn brake’s fear, and the more he understood, the less he liked Roger Noble, and the more his peaceful nature was nettled by a desire to punch the man in the nose. “You understand,” he said quietly, “that I can’t simply put you on a sleigh and send you into the night, and this storm could pick up again.”

There were tears in Charlotte’s eyes. “I’ve put you to such trouble already.”

“Not at all. It’s only that you’ll have to put up with my company for a while longer if you want to sled out of here.”

She put a hand on his arm, and her relief appeared to weaken her. “Could we, please, without delay!” She sent a look of apprehension in the direction of the inn’s door.

“Yes,” he said, “let’s go quickly.” When they were some distance up the street, they heard a door slam, and looking over his shoulder, Daniel thought he could see a figure standing on the porch of Mother Rose’s, smoking a cigarette.

Roger Noble heard the jingling of a harness somewhere up the street and he walked around the corner of the hotel porch out of idle curiosity and the need to move about. a sleigh was barely visible as a shadow flashing under the streetlamps in the direction of Gardiner. The lamps themselves had the appearance of producing the snow within the circle of their light.

He could not have put himself in worse straits: He had dared his uncle’s ire, distanced himself further from Charlotte, and now he was trapped in a country burg without diversion to while the hours and placate his fears and conscience. It occurred to him that he could hire a sleigh up the street, but the emotions that rankled him conversely sapped him of his will to take action against them. He looked up the hill to the boardinghouse for the ice cutters and wondered if there was anything as lowly as a card game or a bottle of beer to be had there.

A man stood below the porch steps watching Noble, and Roger was a little startled to think it might be a member of the Moosepath League. They had seemed fools to him, but they were connected to his uncle and he was uneasy about them.

“Good evening,” said the man as he mounted the steps. He took his hat from his blond head and smiled with the self-assurance that Noble spent most of his energies feigning.

Noble put his cigarette to his lips and drew on it while he watched as the man brushed the snow from his hat. How long was he standing there? wondered Roger. He simply nodded to the man.

“Bit of an unfortunate accident,” said the man, and when Noble frowned, he added, “The train.”

Roger didn’t consider this statement worthy of a reply. He wondered about the man, who seemed too well dressed to be a drummer.

“A rough day altogether,” continued the man, and there was something so pointed about the statement and so knowing about the manner in which it was delivered that Noble narrowed his eyes at the man and spoke for the first time.

“Do I know you?”

“No, Mr. Noble, I don’t believe you do.” wanted a drink. He began to bring the cigarette up to his lips again, but his I must owe him money! thought Roger, and his stomach lurched. He hand was shaking. But how could I owe him money if I don’t know him? He lowered his hand and took on an air of irritation. Then it hit him that the man was a debt enforcer and he wondered if he could make a run for it.

“No, you don’t owe any money to anyone I know or represent,” said the man, as if Roger had voiced his thoughts. Then with continued and unwarranted bonhomie, the man added, “But my colleagues and I may have the power to resolve some of your debts.”

“At two hundred percent and the risk of broken thumbs, no thank you,” said Roger, regaining some of his irritable mien now that his fears were momentarily placated.

“Not at all.” The man still had his hat in his hand, and he pointed at his head and said, “You have a calling card that allows you the opportunitto join my colleagues and myself in an enterprise that will enrich all involved.”

Noble narrowed his eyes again with renewed suspicion.

“We have been watching you, Mr. Noble,” said the man, “ever since we first instigated business with your uncle; and I am pretty sure that we can help to put you in an enviable position with Ezra Burnbrake as well as with your lovely cousin Charlotte. You see,” continued the man cryptically, “we’ve been caught short, you might say, as two of our colleagues north of here have just found out. And as you will find out, our society does not take kindly to embarrassment.”

Daniel thought afterward that the driver they hired at the nearby livery hid his drink well. He was a young man, and if there was anything odd about his behavior, it went unnoticed; Daniel blamed himself for not, at least, smelling it on the fellow’s breath until it was too late.

The manager of the stable was not on duty, so the driver had no one to answer to but himself, and he readily agreed to take them to Gardiner, where there would be lodgings. Daniel helped him harness a horse to a small sleigh. Though the snow had slowed considerably, the way was not short for a clouded night, and Daniel insisted on some additional throws for Miss Burnbrake and found an extra lantern in the livery office.

They put Iceboro behind them faster than Daniel would have credited.

Charlotte glanced back more than once, as if she expected to see her cousin, riding like the devil himself behind them. Daniel resisted looking back.

Night and distance swallowed them; they sensed the hills and trees to the west without seeing them, and the Kennebec along the eastern bank of the road harbored the wind so that the shifting air whined over the ice and these gusts blew over them at every point of exposure to the river. The horse kept a steady pace, undaunted by the dark and the snow; but a mile or so outside Iceboro, with four or five miles to go before they reached Gardiner, the driver got himself crossed up at a fork and put the horse and sleigh off the road.

Daniel had closed his eyes and had no idea they were in trouble until the sleigh took a lurch; he clutched the side of the seat and watched as the horse foundered in a drift. Still, it didn’t seem a terrible problem, and he was about to jump down and help lead the animal back to the road when a sudden snap and another lurch told him that they had broken a runner.

Charlotte fell against Daniel, and he helped her out of the sleigh. They struggled through the drift and away from the horse and vehicle. The lanter jiggled at the end of its pole, then leaped from its perch into the drift. The horse struggled in the ensuing dark, almost panicking, in the traces, and the driver managed to get himself knocked down before Daniel could pull him away from the animal.

It was then that Daniel realized the man was drunk, and astonished at himself and furious with the driver, he began to read the riot act.

“I ain’t drunk!” asserted the fellow, and Daniel saw there was no talking to him. Obliging enough till now, the driver grew surly when accused of that particular sin and called on his grandmother, who had passed from this vale, to bear him out. Daniel didn’t see how the boy’s grandmother, in whatever state, was going to be of service, and when the boy declared that he would get help, the older man tried to talk him from taking the horse, fearing he would break his neck or die of exposure if he fell.

The young man was adamant, promising that he would retrieve another sleigh, and as the driver took off in the dark with the halter in one hand and the extra lantern in the other, Daniel wondered what else could crash before the night was over. (Things, he later decided, often came in threes.)

“Now I’ve gotten us into a scrape,” said Charlotte, who had said little during the last few minutes. The snow had increased again, and the wind off the river was sharp.

“You didn’t stop the train,” said Daniel, “and you didn’t ditch the sleigh.” He relit the first lamp, and while she held this, he tipped the sleigh on its side; they used the cushions to sit upon and the blankets to wrap about them, with the sleigh itself a screen against the wind. Nevertheless, it seemed none too warm, and they kept the lantern as close as they dared to get what heat they could from it.

“Will your business with the Moosepath League suffer if you don’t reach them tomorrow?” asked Charlotte, who continued to worry herself over the deleterious effect she was having upon Mr. Plainway’s affairs.

“Not at all,” he replied. “It is only news of a sort that I have for them, and it has waited for some time now, so it can wait a little longer.”

“I’m glad,” she said.

“Two or three months ago,” he explained, “the Moosepath League was involved in rescuing a little boy from a gang of thieves, and the only clue they have to the child’s identity is the portrait of a woman with whom he shared, according to the account that I read, an unmistakable resemblance.”

“Do you know who he is then?”

“I know who the woman in the portrait was and that her son has been missing these past three years or more.”

Charlotte put a hand to her breast, as if she suddenly found it difficult to breathe. “The poor woman! She must be mad with grief! But you mu hurry!”

“She is dead,” said Daniel. Even these years after, the thought shocked him a little, and he glanced away from the light of the lantern.

“I’m so sorry,” was all she said for some time, but finally she asked, “His family?”

“All gone. On his mother’s side, they’re gone. a for his father’s side, I’m not sure that they are any better than the thieves he was rescued from.”

“Will he remember them?”

“His people? I don’t think so. He’s only four or five now.”

Charlotte shivered, and Daniel tried to give her one of his throws. “No, no,” she insisted. “It wasn’t really the cold.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “My choice of news could have been happier.”

“No,” she returned, “it’s just that there are so many people in the world willing to drive tragedy.”

“There are as many,” said Daniel, “more, really, who are willing to help put things right.”

She did not respond to this at first and looked as if she doubted the sentiment. Finally, however, she said, “There was the Moosepath League, of course, rescuing the little boy. And they were very kind about Uncle Ezra.”

“There’s this Mister Walton,” added Daniel, “whom I have yet to meet, but from the tales I have been told, he is a veritable engine of good works.”

“Well,”she said, smiling softly into the night, “there are other people too.”

When another shiver ran through her, he began to think they should look for other shelter. More than three-quarters of an hour had passed, and he thought it time enough for someone to have gotten back to them.

He may have broken his neck after all, Daniel thought but said nothing.

“Do you suppose he’s forgotten us?” wondered Charlotte. That of course was the other possibility.

“I think we’ve waited long enough,” said Daniel. “Let’s find the nearest house while there are still lights on to guide us.”

“Oh, yes,”she said. “I hadn’t thought.”

Daniel helped Charlotte wrap a blanket about her like a cloak, then took up one for himself. They had noticed several lights in the distance and with the lantern to guide them back to the road, they made steps northward, toward Gardiner, and toward the lights they deemed the closest.

“Where is he now?” asked Charlotte while they walked. “The little boy.”

“I am told he is with a family up in Veazie.”

“You were a friend to his people?” she said.

“I was their lawyer first, but yes, they were my friends.”

“Has he a bequest then?”

“Would you believe, if there is a bequest, it’s been hidden somewhere, and the boy may be the only one who can find it?”

“I don’t understand,” said Charlotte, intrigued. “How can a four-year old find it if no one else can?”

“I don’t know myself,” admitted Daniel. “It was something his grandfather said to me once. Then again, I may have misunderstood him. But it is certainly the reason he was kidnapped in the first place.”

Staying on the road was more difficult than they would have guessed; everything was so white, and the snow had drifted. The lights they were following disappeared for a while behind a rising bank, then appeared a good deal closer than they had expected. There was a house, but any driveway was invisible and they scrambled up a bank, deep with snow, to a wide front porch.

The house was a massive thing, couched in its bed of snow and surrounded by extraordinary trees; the house rose so loftily, with tall wings on either side, and the tree trunks were so wide, themselves like walls, that the house and the wooden giants seemed like one edifice, whether natural or man-made.

“If your story didn’t sound like something from a book,” said Charlotte, “we have certainly walked into one.”

There were lights in the lower windows on the right-hand side of the house and a dim glow through the panes on either side of the front door. The drifts on the porch were nearly as deep as in the road, and Daniel had to kick snow out of the way to open a heavy storm door. Beyond this was a proper Gothic portal, and he knocked at it three times.

He sensed Charlotte shivering beside him and thought how pleasant it would be had he the license, the privilege, to put an arm about her. It was perhaps not just the cold that made her shake; there was something a little eerie about standing on this strange porch with the great house looming over them. The night was dark, and they were distant from the general warmth of humanity. They would know no one.

No one came to the door at first, and Daniel knocked again. Then he started, for someone appeared and peeked from below the glass in the door, pulling the lace curtain aside to reveal a single eye. He heard a sound of surprise from Charlotte, even as he realized that the person was not a sneak but by nature short or stooped. It was a bright wide eye though marked by age. He raised the lantern so as to illuminate Charlotte, thinking that the face of a woman was bound to cause less apprehension on the other side of the door.

A second eye joined the first, every bit as wide and bright, and Daniel thought he caught the note of a voice. Another figure moved like a shadow behind the first, and soon two pairs of eyes were considering them. There was a definite discussion then and finally the sound of a key in the lock. The door was tugged at several times, and Daniel kept himself from giving it a good shove. Let them let us in, he thought.

“Haloo?” came a reedy voice from within when there was a crack in the door. “Is someone there?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Daniel. “We’ve been stranded. Our sleigh foundered, and we need a place to sit and warm ourselves.”

“Oh, dear! Louella, help me here! I must rescue these persons!”

This time Daniel did lend a little weight to the struggle with the door and he stepped aside so that Charlotte could enter first. Relative warmth and the comfort and smells that accompany oiled floors, oriental carpets, and rooms crammed with furnshings greeted them like an overwhelming act of generosity. The two elderly women did their best to wrestle the door closed behind their unexpected guests, and Daniel offered his assistance.

“Allow me,” he said, his hat in hand, and having pulled shut the storm door, he closed the front door as well.

“Oh, my!” said the first woman. “How strong! Curier could never do that!”

“Curier shuts the door all the time, Lavona,” said Louella.

“Yes, I suppose he does! But in such a storm! Oh, my! How strong!” Lavona ted a sweet face to Daniel. “I was just saying how very strong you are!” Everything she said was at a pitch somewhat louder than normal and therefore had the sound of an exclamation.

“Lavona is always pleased with strong men,” explained Louella.

“Oh, well,”said Daniel, a little abashed, “I’m afraid I won’t please her ver much.”

Louella’s face wrinkled into a beautiful smile, and she waved a hand at him. If Daniel hadn’t seen her face, he would have thought the laugh coming from her was a sob. He realized, then, that a third elderly woman was standing at the head of the broad stairs before them. She was saying something he couldn’t hear, but the first two women knew the problem. “She’s just gone upstairs!” said Lavona.

“Dear,” said Louella, “you’re shouting.”

“What’s that, dear?”

“You’re shouting!”

“I’m shouting?!”

“You are!!”

Lavona laid a hand on Daniel’s arm and shouted apologetically. “I do shout, I know!”

“Please, I didn’t notice.”

“Oh, dear, you’re cold,” said Louella to Charlotte. Charlotte had taken off her gloves, and her hands did look a little blue. Louella took one of Charlotte’s hands and rubbed it. “Dear, dear.”

“Bring them in!” said Lavona.

The third woman was halfway down the stairs, and Daniel gave her a smile and a nod as he and Charlotte were led into a brightly lit parlor, where they were made to stand before the fire. Two more elderly women sat near the hearth, and they were introduced to the unexpected guests.

“This is our sister, Larinda,” Louella was saying.

“Oh, my, what a terrible night,” Larinda intoned.

“And this is Lavilda.”

“Have you had supper?” wondered this person. “And here is our baby, Alvaid,” finished Louella when the woman from the stairs entered the room. “We are the Pettengills.”

“You’re all sisters?” wondered Charlotte. There were smiles all around for an answer, and Charlotte declared, “How marvelous!”

The pronouncement pleased the old ladies and even made them laugh a bit. “That’s Father and Mother,” said Louella, pointing to two intrepid-looking individuals caught in oil above the mantel.

“They’re magnificent!” said Charlotte, quite sincerely, and Daniel thought three or four years fell off the Pettengill sisters right then, they were so proud.

The marvel of it was there couldn’t have been a one of them less than eighty years old, and though they were of different stature (and Alvaid was not as thin as her older sisters), they were like distinct creations of the same hand, perhaps images of the same subject in different moods or light. They were fine, delicate-looking creatures, every one of them exquisite in the absolute honesty of her age.

“I think there’s pie in the kitchen,” said Larinda, the way a person might tease a child with sweets.

Daniel knew the way to these ladies’ hearts, and he went straight to it without compunction. “I will be honest with you, ladies, and tell you that we have survived a wrecked train and a ditched sleigh and as yet have had no supper tonight.”

Oh, the cries that went up! Every one of the women must rise from her seat or wring her hands in horror at such news, and as one they hurriedinly a shuffling manner-toward the hall and stopped only occasionally to draw Daniel and Charlotte along with them to the kitchen.

“I can see you are a hand with the ladies,” said Charlotte with the sort of puckishness she had exhibited earlier.

Daniel, who had not expected such an immense response to his tactics, chuckled.

“I shall watch myself in future,” said Charlotte.

30. Advice Did Not Come Cheap

When Miss Burnbrake did not arrive at the Worster House by nightfall, her uncle began to fret, and when word did arrive that two trains had been stopped by a derailment south of Hallowell, the old man was beside himself and hired a sleigh that would take him to the scene of the accident. Before he was able to leave, however, a sequel to the story was broadcast over the wire, stating that no one had been injured in the accident and that the passengers from both trains had found quarters in nearby inns and private homes. With these assurances, Mr. Burnbrake was prevailed upon to stay at the Worster House and wait upon his niece’s arrival on the morrow. a practical man, having assuaged his fears, he went upstairs to take a nap before dinner.

He rose an hour later, dressed, and joined the Moosepath League and the Dash-It-All Boys in the dining room; it made for a jolly table, and Roderick Waverley himself stood from his seat with a glass of cider raised and declared, “Though we part, members of our separate societies-the Moosepath League and the Dash-It-All Boys-let us tonight think of ourselves as the Moose-Dashians!”

Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump were so moved that they rose as one and cried out, “Moxie!” This was completely inexplicable to the Dash-It-All Boys but did not discourage them from taking part. Durwood, in particular, derived some pleasure from declaring, “Moxie,” at odd intervals throughout the meal.

Neither Moxie nor young cider, however, interested the Dash-It-All Boys very much, though Brink did find some medicinal tonic in a pocket, and the addition of this to the mugs of the Dashians greatly elevated their level of energy. Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump admired Durwood, Waverley, and Brink’s animation; Mr. Burnbrake was pretty sure they were tight.

After dinner the Dash-It-All Boys bade good evening and wandered into the lobby in search of their hats and coats. It was here that Durwood found on the manager’s desk a short stack of card stock that was meant to be used for messages and addresses. “How is your hand?” he asked of a young housemaid who walked past him at that moment.

“I beg your pardon,” she said.

Waverley and Brink took interest in the question and gathered around him. Durwood waggled his hand in the air, as if he were writing something. “Do you have a nice hand?” he said.

“It looks very nice to me,” expressed Waverley.

“Go away,” suggested Durwood.

“Both of them, in fact,” added Brink.

“It is nice enough, I suppose,” said the young woman.

Durwood snatched up one of the blank cards and laid it beside the register pen. “Would you do me the favor of demonstrating?” he inquired.

Though the request was unusual, the young woman was accustomed to obliging the hotel’s patrons; she stepped up to the desk and dipped the pen.

“Would you please write ‘Mrs. Dorothea Roberto’?” asked Durwood.

A pair of eyebrows lifted, one each on the faces of Waverley and Brink. They joined Durwood in leaning close to the work as it was accomplished. The young woman had a very nice, formal hand, and feminine; the requested name was expressed in many fine loops and curls, and one might have thought that something of the actual Mrs. Roberto had been discovered in those letters.

“Marvelous!” said Durwood, and he answered the young woman’s obliging nature with a generous gratuity. She looked back as she continued on her errand but soon forgot the business. Durwood fanned the card in the air till the ink was dry.

“And what is that toward?” wondered Brink.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Durwood. “The woman was on my mind, and I thought I would like to have some remembrance of her.” This seemed logical enough (for the time being), and Waverley and Brink led the way from the lobby. “And she never lived on the waterfront,” said Durwood with great finality.

So they left the Worster house for some unnamed establishment, though the storm had not abated, and they did not return till well after their Moosepathian counterparts had retired.

Whiling the remainder of their evening in the parlors of the Worster House with Ezra Bumbrake, Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump began to wonder if they were prepared to lead forces into battle.

The shank of night passed in swift fashion; the dinner had been excellent, and there had been enough of it, Mr. Burnbrake was amiable, if quiet, company, and the sitting rooms at the hotel were handsomely accoutred and filled with many interesting people. Between pronouncements concerning the weather, time, and tide, however, the subject of discourse eventually did turn upon the appointed snowball fight, and it was Thump in fact (or rather the obvious depth of his musing after dinner) who raised to light the concern so universal among them.

“You appear very thoughtful, Thump,” said Ephram.

“I am mindful of tomorrow’s contest,” said Thump, after the moment it took to rise from his reverie.

“Ah!” returned Ephram, and his relief was plain, for it was clear to him now that Thump had been applying his significant aptitude to the stratagems and tactics necessary to their martial responsibilities. But they waited in vain for some pronouncement or plan from their bearded associate: Thump only blinked back at them as if confused by the sudden attention.

“The snowball fight,” said Eagleton finally.

“Was there?” wondered Mr. Burnbrake, and he was wide-eyed and amused as they explained the details of their conscription.

“Good heavens,” said the old man, “I used to join in some awful campaigns when I was a lad.”

“Did you really?” said Eagleton, who couldn’t imagine such a thing.

“Oh, certainly,” said the old man. “I was hiding behind the stoop at my home in Concord one day-I couldn’t have been more than eight or nine waiting for my best friend, Harmon Oldgate, to walk past. I saw a shadow preceding someone up the sidewalk and let fly with as tightly packed a snowball as I ever threw. Hit a constable.” The memory made Mr. Burnbrake laugh, but the members of the club were stunned to tn of it.

“My word,” said Eagleton, who searched in his pockets for his journal and pen.

“Did the constable know?” wondered Ephram.

“I should say he did!”

“But what did you do?”

“Ran like fire!” And Mr. Burnbrake laughed some more-from retrospective relief, Thump guessed.

“We must watch for constables,” suggested Ephram solemnly. Mr. Burnbrake’s tale awakened them to the true and chancy nature of battle.

“Perhaps you could give us some advice regarding tactics,” said Eagleton.

“That’s a very good idea, Eagleton.”

“Thank you, Ephram.”

“Load quickly and fire at will!” declared Mr. Bum brake with another laugh. “Perhaps you should ask old Colonel Barkoddel. He’s fought the real thing.”

“Colonel Barkoddel?” said Eagleton. He glanced around the room.

“There. By the fire,” said Mr. Burnbrake. He indicated with a nod of the head a man sitting at the other end of the room, who was more elderly than himself.

“Do you think?” wondered Thump.

Mr. Burnbrake reminded them of their chairman then, his laughter had such a Waltonian quality about it; there was both humor and kindness in his voice. “The poor colonel hasn’t been with himself as of late, I’m afraid. His mind is on those other battlefields.”

And the conversation was allowed to drift to other matters till Mr.

Burnbrake retired. a soon as the older man was gone, however, having assured them that he was quite able to climb the stairs on his own, Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump began to wonder if approaching Colonel Barkoddel with questions regarding the expected dispute might encourage some advice from the elderly fellow.

Having discussed this at some circuitous length, the Moosepathians moved in concert to the hearth, which glowed with great cheer and vigor. Colonel Barkoddel, as it happened, was nodding in the warmth of the fire, and they stood for several minutes looking at him before considering it beyond the gravity of the situation to wake him.

They had just settled upon this last point when the old man’s eyes snapped open, and he cast his rheumy sight upon the three friends. “Have you their position?” he demanded in a rather sharp tone.

“I beg your pardon?” said Ephram, to whom, in the absence of their chairman, the capacity of spokesman often fell.

“They’ll show soon enough, I daresay,” growled the man. “Though I’d rather know from what quarter, and I wonder that you hazard to return without anything but a ‘beg your pardon.’”

“There’s to be a contest tomorrow,” ventured Eagleton.

“I’ll say there’ll be a contest!” declared the fellow, the volume and the emphatic nature of his words drawing attention from several other people in the parlor. “I daresay some of you won’t see the end of it!” he added, in what seemed a dire prediction. The Moosepathians were attempting to take a graceful and courteous leave, but the old man followed their ever movement with a glaring eye. “What is it then?” he said. “You didn’t come here to ask me what you already know!”

“We would like to know the best way to lead our boys,” spoke up Thump, much to the surprise and admiration of his friends.

“What?” said the colonel.

Thump had read some books on military affairs, and apparently the terms therein had adhered to his mind more completely than he had realized. “Whether to take advantage of the terrain,” he added, “and make the sneak attack or to press forward with a bold charge.”

“Load quickly and fire at will, I say!” said Colonel Barkoddel. “What? Up to it again, are they?” he continued, seemingly in another conversation altogether. His eyes took on a new light. “The devil!”

“Oh, my!” said Ephram. He knew that military men had the reputation for startling oaths and was sorry to have occasioned this one by their discourse. The three friends looked to one another with profound misgivings. “Seven past eight,” declared Ephram, and he checked a second watch to be sure of this.

“High tide at about fifty minutes past eleven,” offered Thump.

Eagleton smiled at certain onlookers and bowed politely. “Clearing tomorrow; wind to fall off after midnight.” Then to the elderly fellow before the fire, he said, “It has been a great pleasure, Colonel.”

“The devil!” shouted Colonel Barkoddel again.

The three men jumped, reached for hats that weren’t on their heads, bowed, bumped noggins, wobbled away from the fireplace, nodded to several of the people who watched them with either curiosity or annoyance, and hurried upstairs in the wake of Mr. Burnbrake. They could hear the colonel shouting something as they hurried down the upstairs hall.

31. The Ox at Plow

“You said yourself that Norumbega was simply ancient Bangor,” said Sundry to Mister Walton when they were calling the exhausting day done in neighboring rooms at the house of Capital Gaines. They had met in the upstairs hall, both on their way to say good-night to their host.

“Did I?” Mister Walton said.

“Well, you indicated that it was more or less common knowledge.”

Thinking back on the conversation of the day before, the bespectacled fellow laughed softly. “Perhaps I was ting to impress Mr. Covington,” he offered. “It is more a common belief than a knowledge, I think.”

“But it is a pretty well accepted belief, for all that.” Sundry knew better than to concede to his employer’s self-criticism.

Mister Walton nodded. They were paused at the top of the stairs. Mr. Noel and Mr. Noggin came in from a walk around the immediate property and hailed the guests on their way to the kitchen. “If there is an ancient crumbling city within a hundred miles of where we stand,” said Mister Walton, by way of answering Sundry’s implicit question, “it would be a strange thing that no one has stumbled upon it by this time.”

“Still,” said Sundry, “these fellows are putting a great deal of effort into searching such a place out.”

“People will attach themselves to all manner of curious tenets,” said Mister Walton. He recommenced his journey down the stairs. “What might be viewed from the outside as the boundaries of logic might seem from within simply boundaries to be got over.”

“And yet, as you said, it would be a strange thing if such a place existed.”

“But I would like to know what is written on that stone,” admitted Mister Walton.

Sundry nodded his agreement.

“Have you gentlemen sorted it all out then?” asked Capital Gaines when they entered the kitchen.

“I am so weary,” said Mister Walton, though he looked bright enough, “that I will be lucky to sort out the bedclothes and get between them.”

“Mr. Noggin is wafming some bread and apple butter,” said their host, “if you’ve a mind before you retire. That and a cup of hot milk will do wonders for a night’s sleep.”

This sounded a pleasant way to finish their labors, and the five men sat about and did for two loaves of bread before they were finished. In the midst of their repast, however, Mister Walton raised the mysterious business again by stating, “I say that I have no theories regarding the runes at Council Hill and the attendant business, but I wonder if Sundry hasn’t been lending his keen mind to the problem.” It was clear, from his earlier questions, that Sundry was pondering the situation, and Mister Walton was curious what direction his friend’s thoughts were taking.

“Bust her feeding,” said Sundry.

Mister Walton expressed his “beg your pardon” with wide eyes.

“It’s something my father always says whenever he sees a team of oxen at the plow. ‘She’ll bust her feeding.’”

“Does he?”

“Well, he does.” Sundry was considering this deeply and looked unlikely to offer more on the subject.

“It seems an unusual expression,” suggested Mr. Noggin.

“Doesn’t it?”

“I’ve never heard anything like it,” announced Mr. Noel.

“She’ll bust her feeding?” asked Mister Walton, wondering if he had heard aright.

“To begin with, it was just ‘bust her feeding,’ but now he always says, ‘She’ll bust her feeding,’ whenever he sees an ox at the plow.”

“But an ox is not a she, is it?”

“That’s what makes it odd.”

“Part of it, at any rate.”

“What do you make of it, Capital?” asked Mister Walton.

“This is a farm, to be sure,” said their host, “but it’s Mr. Noel and Mr. Noggin keep it running. I’m a woodsman by inclination. It’s an odd locution, though, no doubt.”

“Dad knows he’s saying it wrong,” admitted Sundry.

“He does?”

“It’s some word, really, he’s using: Greek or Latin. His own father used it, and he learned it from old Parson Leach, an itinerant preacher who used to come through years ago.”

“Bust her feeding,” said Mister Walton to himself.

“Bust her feeding.”

Capital and Mr. Noggin and Mr. Noel each tried their hands (or rather their tongues) at the odd phrase but could make nothing out of it.

“Does this have anything to do with that figure on the rock?” wondered Mister Walton. “The one that Frederick thought might depict an ox?”

“The pictograph?” said Capital

“I was just thinking,” said Sundry, “that it might be a plow rather than an ox.”

“Were you?” Mister Walton wondered that this element of their recent experiences had caught his friend’s attention so.

“Yes,” replied Sundry. He cut himself another piece of bread and proceeded to lose sight of it beneath a slab of butter. “But I’m also thinking,” he said, raising the bread to his mouth, “that it might be the same thing ox or plow-ne way or another.”

32. The Third Crash

“Do you know?” announced Lavona, more to her sisters than their guests.

“We haven’t had married people under this roof for years!”

“We’ve had Mr. Petty,” said Larinda.

“And Mr. Bungle,” added Alvaid.

“But not their wives!”

“Oh, Lavona!” exclaimed Louella with something like a laugh.

“Nor Mrs. Sharpsteen’s husband,” agreed Lavilda. “Good heavens! Do you suppose we haven’t had a married couple beneath this roof since Mother and Father died?”

“Posh!” said Louella, but she was thinking on this very heavily.

The kitchen was spacious, with two stoves, numerous cupboards, and doors to pantries and cellars. The long simple table that ran half the length of the room had once accommodated servants at their meals and their tasks. Daniel and Charlotte were very nearly pushed into their seats with orders to do absolutely nothing toward their own comfort, while the sisters tended to their guests and discussed the dearth of married people beneath their roof.

Daniel was blushing by this time, and Charlotte smiling. The lawyer cleared his throat. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “but Miss Bumbrake and I are not married.”

All heads came about. Lavona turned from the warming oven, where she was retrieving the pie: Larinda hesitated in the doorway to the cold pantry, where other victuals and milk were kept; Louella paused in her getting of an extra chair (there were only six at the table, and she had refused Daniel’s help); Lavilda stood with the silverware in her hand, and Alvaid with the table linen.

“Not married,” said one of the sisters, and the elderly women glanced from Daniel’s discomfort to Charlotte’s smile.

“Saints and stars!” declared Lavona. “They’re eloping!”

Now the cry that rose was that of five schoolgirls who have just been informed of some gloriously romantic notion. Larinda sat down, she was so out of breath with it, and Lavilda dropped the silverware.

“In the snow!” declared Alvaid. “In the storm!”

“Are there many after you?” asked Larinda.

“Oh, my!” said Lavona. “They’ll be pursued! Just like Mother and Father!”

Daniel was attempting to get a word in edgewise but was not assisted by his own astonishment, or by Charlotte, who was fit to be tied with laughter, her hand over her mouth. It was the sight of Daniel laughing that finally stopped the ladies, though not before they had constructed a scenario that would have done the rashest, most fire-headed melodramatist proud. Charlotte let out a single peep of laughter when the room quieted, and apologized by saying, “Oh, dear, I am tired!” She wiped a tear away and told the sisters, “We’ve met only this morning.”

But the Pettengill sisters had been so convinced by the cry of elopement that this announcement produced a stunned silence.

“My, that’s quick,” said Larinda finally.

Louella swatted the air and clicked her tongue. “What she is saying is that they are not eloping.”

“That’s too bad,” said Larinda.

“But Mr. Plainway has done a valiant service in rescuing me nonetheless,” added Charlotte, who couldn’t bear to leave the sisters with nothing after the ecstatic peak of their previous misconstruction.

The elderly women cast glowing eyes in Daniel’s direction, and the man realized that he was outnumbered with no hope of reinforcement.

“I was truly and physically threatened this morning, when Mr. Plainway arrived, and since then he has been nothing but benefit to me and I nothing but trouble to him.”

“Nonsense,” he said, but it was so under his breath that it was hardly heard. He cleared his throat again and said a little louder, “Nonsense.”

“I have much to thank him for,” she finished, and it was perhaps less awkward for her to say her thanks in such a public manner than to wait for a private moment.

“There’s hope for them yet,” whispered Lavilda to Alvaid.

“We certainly do beg your pardon,” pronounced Louella. “Mother and Father eloped, you know, and we have always just loved the tale.”

“They didn’t elope in the end,” said Alvaid.

“Well, it is all the same as if they had.”

“Oh, my!” said Lavona with a dreamy smile. There were tears in her eyes. “Mother was so beautiful, and Father so very handsome!”

“You always say that,” countered Larinda, “but they were no more than plain good-looking people.”

“Didn’t you think they were very beautiful and very handsome?” asked Lavona of Daniel.

Daniel thought back on the portraits in the parlor and, glancing from one sister to the other, gave the impression of a Solomon-like reflection. “Paintings of course do not always do their subjects justice, but what I was most impressed with was that they appeared to be very fine people.”

One of Charlotte’s very fine eyebrows lifted a quarter of an inch.

“That’ not a big enough piece of pie for you, Mr. Plainway!” said Lavona, though it was herself serving it. She whisked the plate from under the man’s nose and returned to the warming oven to find a piece large enough for a man of such perspicacity.

Larinda brought a plate of ham and a bottle of milk from the cold pant and set it on the table. “We don’t always give our guests the cold shoulder,” she said as she uncovered the meat, and her sisters laughed.

“You must forgive us,” said Louella. “We have guests too infrequently these days, though there was a time when this house was filled with people.”

“Summer on the back lawn or down at the riverbank,” said Larinda with a sigh.

“The oak swing,” said Alvaid.

“The oak swing,” said Lavilda. “I haven’t thought of it for years.”

“How do you get along?” wondered Charlotte, for the situation of these ladies had begun to concern her.

“Oh, we have friends, you know,” said Louella. “Curier is by every day. No doubt you’ll see him in the morning.”

“Whose rooms shall we put them in?” wondered Lavona in her usual shout.

“Oh, please,” said Charlotte. “Don’t go to any trouble. Certainly not this late at night.”

“I can fit on a couch in the parlor,” said Daniel. “Or even the floor by the fire.”

The sisters would hear none of it and discussed among them whose rooms would be used.

“Please,” insisted Charlotte, “we couldn’t turn anyone out of her room.”

“No, no, dear,” said Louella. “You misunderstand.” She patted Charlotte’s shoulder softly. “When Father passed on, he left the house to all of us, but certain rooms very specifically.”

“He left individual rooms to particular people?” wondered Daniel.

“Yes,” said Larinda. “He divided it up quite fairly.”

“And expressly left the halls and entryways for the use of us all,” said Alvaid.

“We’ve just never been very sure if that means we actually own the halls and entryways!” added Lavona.

“He was a very peace-loving man,” breathed Lavilda.

“But he was death on curiosity!” exclaimed Lavona.

Larinda let out a heartfelt sigh. “Though we never suspected it while he was alive, bless his soul,” she said.

“No?” Daniel knew enough of human nature to sense a story here.

“Oh, my!” said Lavona. “The inquisitive wouldn’t survive long in this house! There’s the locked room, you know, in the west wing!”

“Lavona!” said Louella.

“A I shouting again?”

“No…well, yes, you are, but more important, you are telling tales.”

“Howsoever, it is true! We’ve never seen the other side of that door!”

“I think, when we were young, it wasn’t locked,” said Lavilda.

“You always say that!” shouted Lavona.

“Well, I always think it!”

Larinda leaned close between Daniel and Charlotte, encouraging the guests themselves to lean forward. “We’re not even sure that we should be talking of it,” she said in something of a stage whisper.

“It used to smell very nice outside the room!” shouted Lavona.

Daniel had taken it upon himself to cut some portions from the shoulder of ham, and Charlotte was only now realizing (as she warmed up) how hungry she was, but this last statement lifted their eyes from the table, and they exchanged perplexed glances before Daniel spoke. “And what harm is there in talking of it?” Daniel wondered.

“If we ever saw the inside of that room, we’d lose everything!” asserted Lavona.

“What?” said Daniel.

“If any one of us saw it!” said Lavilda, shouting like her sister.

“Good heavens!” said Daniel. He looked to Louella.

Louella nodded, saying quietly, “It’s what we’ve been told.”

“Has it?” Daniel couldn’t imagine such an article in a will and didn’t know if it was binding if it existed.

“Mr. Edward has been very definite on that subject,” agreed Lavilda. “No one is to go into the west wing room save for himself.”

“Mr. Edward?”

“Yes.”

“And he is your lawyer?”

“He is. He was Father’s lawyer before Father died.”

Alvaid added her own note, saying, “Mr. Edward is the one with a key.”

Daniel returned to the ham and laid some slices on Charlotte’s plate.

Lavona had doled out some herculean portions of pie, and Louella placed glasses on the table. The sisters were pleased as could be to have the two “young people” eating heartily at the table. Appetite did indeed overtake curiosity as Daniel and Charlotte made a late dinner, but when the edge was gone from his hunger, Daniel found his mind considering the mysterious west wing room and this Mr. Edward, who kept its secret hidden.

“Never heard of such a thing,” he said to himself as he looked across the table at Charlotte, who was listening very intently to a genealogy of the Pettengill family. His curiosity was again whisked aside, but by something else entirely, as he watched her.

“Mother and Father might never have been married if not for an old Finn who lived in Hallowell in those days,” said Larinda.

“Old Kalf,” added Lavilda.

“And did he help them elope?” asked Daniel.

“He helped them not to elope, in a manner of speaking,” said Larinda.

“He was a magician,” said another of the sisters.

“A wizard, I think,” said still another. “I think the Finns have wizards.”

Charlotte sat back in a large wing-backed chair, a quilt over her knees, as she soaked up the warmth from the hearth and grew spellbound by the flames. Standing with his back to the fire in the parlor, Daniel lost track of who was speaking as the words came thick and fast.

“A wizard is a magician.”

“I’m sure I don’t know, but I’ve seen a magician when I was a girl, but I’ve never seen a wizard.”

“There was a magician who came to the fair.”

“I think there may be a difference.”

“The difference is that a magician has tricks.”

“Well, the story! Old Kalf had his tricks, to be sure!”

“Mother and Father believed it! Grandmother believed it!”

“They all saw it!”

“They saw something, certainly, but-”

“It is very impolite to be carrying on like this when Mr. Plainway and Miss Burn brake haven’t the slightest idea what we are talking about.”

This last was from Louella, and they quietly accepted her chastisement, falling silent while the burden of the story found its speaker. Daniel glanced over his shoulder at the portraits above the mantel; they were fine-looking people, he mostly bald with large mustaches and a square jaw, she with dark hair in a bun and her own chin lifted a little defiantly perhaps. They had thoughtful eyes, however, and Daniel could believe that they were both kind.

“Father’s family had been greatly dashed by the Revolution,” said Larinda. “Their political aspirations an their fortunes suffered, for they were Tories, you see.” Glances sped from sister to sister as this admission was made. “But as unwanted as they were in Boston, they found themselves without welcome in New Brunswick, where so many of their persuasion fled after the surrender at Yorktown. Despised by the colonists, they were condescended to by the English, and Grandfather took his family, which had yet to include Father, to the coast of Maine, where the ownership of land was much in dispute and where a person might settle without reference to his past.

“Father was born in 1784 and grew up in the tavern that his parents built and managed downriver from here at Bowdoinham. It was a roughhewn affair at the outset, but Grandfather made improvements over the years so that there was hardly a finer inn or finer food to eat along the river than at the Kennebec House.”

Daniel thought that a man telling this story must have a pipe or a mug of something before him, but Larinda told her tale with a sweet, sad smile and her hands knitting without needles before her. Her head leaned to one side, so that she had the wistful air of one who listens carefully for something she wishes, but doesn’t expect, to hear.

“A Father and his siblings grew, they became part of the tavern, and as his older siblings came to maturity, they went off to sea, or married perhaps and helped settle some nearby town, till there were only Father and a sister left to help.

“One day the stage came up, as it did several times a week, and a man, his wife, and their daughter took rooms at the Kennebec House. Father was sent out to get their things, and he was pulling their bags from the top of the carriage when he first set eyes upon Mother.”

A general sigh went up among the sisters. “It was a love match from the first,” informed Lavilda.

“That is what they always said,” said Larinda. “Mother was a frightened young woman. Her family, as it happened, was running as well, but from matters of less credit, I fear. The story was never fully told, but Mother’s father was fortunate, it was whispered, to leave Kennebunk in one piece. He had purchased land in Richmond and planned to set himself up in business.

“But Mother’s family’s stopping at the Kennebec House was, as they say, fate without hiding its face. They stayed three days, and on the first, Father said, he spoke to Mother as a servant, on the second he spoke to her as a peer, and on the third he spoke to her as a suitor. He was twenty, and she was only eighteen, neither yet people of their own in the eyes of the law. She was frightened of him, really, but did not forget him when she and her family continued on to Richmond, and Father contrived somehow to see her now and again, though without her parents’ knowledge.

“One day he went to Mother’s father and announced his intentions, whereupon he was called a rapscallion and his father a traitor, for the old man had heard rumors of their Tory background. Well, it was worse than the pot calling the kettle black-”

“The kettle calling the porcelain black, is what Mother called it!” said Lavona.

“Mother’s father had all but been convicted of criminal doings,” continued Larinda, who seemed oblivious of the interruption, “and here he was cursing a man because his father honestly stuck to his beliefs. But Father was a canny one, you see, and let the old man believe he’d been subdued by the tongue thrashing. He conspired to see Mother again, in Richmond village, whereupon he proposed the elopement.

“Father was not one to leave anything to chance, so he traveled the roads to Augusta like a scout and arranged the wedding and considered every possible pitfall. Then, by chance, he heard of Old Kalf while tarrying at a tavern in Hallowell; the Finn was something of a legend in the town, and it was said he had the power to talk with animals and affect the weather.

“I am told Old Kalf’s house even now stands upon the bank, overlooking the river, and that there are shadows still upon the ridge, not entirely the manufacture of the oaks and maples there.” Larinda’s eyes glistened with the mystery of her words, and she appeared to have much in common with some younger variant of herself. “Old Kalf’s house was on the way home for Father that day, and the ancient fellow himself was sitting on his stoop looking out over the river when Father passed by.

“‘A fast bit of work cut out for you, aye, boy?’ the old fellow said when Father pulled his horse up below the wizard’s house.

“Father never blinked. ‘I wished the next time I pass here,’ he said to the old man,’I had leave to be as untroubled as now.’

“‘Ah, well,’said Old Kalf,’there’s things might get between you and those behind.’

“‘Do you have something?’ asked Father, as bold as can be.

“‘I have some weather in this bag, ‘said Kalf,’which is doing me no good and is fit to spoil.’ He held up a cloth sack, pulled tight with a drawstring.’It was a big wind when I put it in there,’said the old man, ‘but it’ll be nothing more than a little rain and a sunny day thereafter if it isn’t used very soon.’

“‘If you have no use for it,’ ventured Father, ‘I might find something to do with it.’

“Whereupon Old Kalf offered the bag up to Father, saying, ‘Point it where you will, but remember that the wind will do nothing for you that your own goodwill won’t do better.’ And the Finn, his beard down to his waist and his eyes mostly blind, turned about and disappeared into his strange house.

“Now Father didn’t exactly believe in wizards, and he didn’t believe at all that you could catch a wind in a bag, even if, as he said when Mother wasn’t nearby, his prospective father-in-law was something of a bag of wind.” Larinda laughed, and one of her sisters gave a “tut-tut.”

“But the bag itself had a peculiar way about it, bobbing in the air like a kite where he tied it to the pommel of his saddle, or like an empty barrel in the water, and when he put his ear to it, he thought he could hear the sound of a wind, but far away, as if there were a storm in the next county.

“And he brought it home, and he hid it, and he made his plans, and the next time that Mother was to meet him, he came with an extra horse.”

“You should understand, Mr. Plainway,” said Louella, “Miss Burnbrake, that Mother was more than fond of Father by now. He was a gallant sort of young man, she told us, tall and with a straightforward way of looking a person in the eye.”

“He had hair then too!” shouted Lavona.

“Of course he had hair,” said Louella.

“Father had bought a new cape for Mother,” continued Larinda, this time more conscious of the interruption but willing to overlook it. “A new cape as a wedding present and as a means to disguise her, he hoped. It was broad daylight, however, and some word was quickly broadcast that Mother had left with a strange young man. Mother’s father was furious and charged after with several pillars from the village community.

“Father was an excellent rider, but Mother had little experience on horseback, and their progress was necessarily slow. By the time they were crossing the line into Hallowell, they had glimpses of pursuit from the tops of hills. It was early May as well, and the roads were still wet enough so that their tracks were plain to see, and turning off would do them no good.

“Finally, at the top of a rise, Father turned about and saw their pursuers cresting the hill behind them. He and Mother came to a small bridge that crossed a stream, a tributary to the Kennebec, and here he told Mother to ride on. Taking Kalf’s bag from its place at his saddle, he laid it in the road, pointed it toward the bridge, and pulled it open.

“He felt as if the ground were shivering beneath him, and the sounds coming from the bag were like the sounds of a gale when you are safely indoors. He did not stay to hear or see any more but jumped on his horse and rode after Mother. The sound behind them only increased as they hurried toward Hallowell. But as they came up beside Old Kalf’s house, Father reined in, for the wizard was sitting on his stoop again, looking down at them.

“The roar of the wind behind them had grown almost deafening, and Father called up to Kalf, ‘What have you given me?’

“‘What have you taken?’ asked the old man in return.

“Father heard other sounds-the crash of water and the cries of men and he wheeled his horse about and charged back to the bridge, which was gone in a sudden wind-rushed torrent. Several riders were steadying their mounts on the opposite side, but Mother’s father was not among them, and the men were shouting and pointing. Father saw a horse scrambling up the bank of the swollen stream and also the figure of a man struggling in the water.

“Without thinking twice, Father leaped from his horse and dived in after the man who had cursed him and his family. Mother arrived on the scene in time to see the two of them carried by the torrent to the Kennebec and thought then she had lost both father and lover.

“But down the stream Father caught hold of the old man’s collar with the one hand and a length of exposed root with the other. It was the root of an oak tree, and the oaks around this house were grown from acorns found beneath it. Father filled his pockets with them before he left that place.”

“So he saved your grandfather,” said Charlotte when there was a lengthy silence. Daniel thought she had gone asleep and had been watching her a little more intently than decorum allowed. Now he was startled, thinking that she might have been watching him in return from partly closed eyes.

“He did indeed,” said Larinda. “And it is difficult to bear ill will against a man who has risked his life to save your own. They were never overly fond of one another, Father and Mother’s father, but the old man gave permission for his daughter to be married as soon as she was twenty.”

“And what happened to the bag?” wondered Charlotte dreamily; the heat of the fire seemed to slow even her speech.

Larinda was astonished by the question, and she referred to her sisters, each in turn, and met the mirror image of her expression in them all. “My word!” she said when she turned back to Charlotte. “We never asked!”

The fire in the parlor hearth was banked, and the lamps were dimmed. Louella and Lavona led a procession up the stairs, and they paused at the landing to listen to the hiss of snow and the wail of the wind. The sisters embraced one another gently, and those sisters not accompanying one of the guests bussed Charlotte and Daniel as well; then they wished one another “Happy St. Nicholas’s Eve” and parted.

The hall above the kitchen, where Larinda and Lavilda had inherited their rooms (and a room or two besides), was deemed by the sisters to be the warmest and Charlotte and Daniel were led to chambers on opposite ends and opposite sides of this wing.

“I think one of Father’s nightshirts would fit you just fine,” said Larinda, who stopped before one door and, from her own candle, lit the candle that sat upon the stand outside the room. “I’ll get you one.”

“Please,” said Daniel, “I will be fine without it.”

“If you are sure?”

He nodded. His eye was caught by a large, ornately carved door across the hall. Charlotte, who was being led by Lavilda, stopped to consider the portal.

“That is the locked door,” said Lavilda when she realized that Charlotte had not kept up with her.

“Don’t say a thing,” said Larinda, in a hush that could be heard the length of the hall. “Lavona is convinced we’ll fly up in flames if we so much as blink at it.”

“It’s very impressive,” said Charlotte.

“It’s the locked door,” said Lavilda again, nodding softly. She waved a negligent hand. “I hardly see it anymore.”

Daniel wanted to approach the door, to touch its heavy carvings, to peer through the keyhole, which, he suspected, must have a hinged guard on the inside.

“Thank you, Mr. Plainway,” said Charlotte. She was in fact glad for the company of the two sisters at this point.

The two sisters, contrarily, wondered if they should scramble out of sight and stood uncertainly, even awkwardly in the midst of the hall, blinking at one another.

“It has been a memorable day, Miss Burnbrake,” returned Daniel, “and a pleasant one.” Her smile, as she turned away, was reward enough.

“Leave your boots outside the door, Mr. Plainway,” said Larinda, with a shake of her finger, after she had pecked him on the cheek.

“Oh? Do you have a bootblack, or are you afraid I’ll run off in the night?”

“No, silly,” she replied. “It’s St. Nicholas’s Eve. You must leave your boots outside your door so that he can leave you sweets.”

He made no answer but a silent 0 and nodded his understanding. Down the hall Lavilda was showing Charlotte her room.

“Good night, Mr. Plain way.”

“Good night, miss,” he intoned to Larinda.

His candle seemed of little value in the lofty room beyond the door. In the far corner was the dark form of a curtained bed, and he considered the spectral shapes of draped furnishings as he made his way across the carpeted floor. The shadows upon the ceiling as he moved were dim and shapeless, and a chair by the bed looked like an animal, crouched and watching.

He pulled off his boots and wondered how he could be so tired and not have noticed it till this very moment. The distance between the chair and door seemed like a mile to him, but he dutifully picked up his boots and carried them back. The hinges of his door whined; leaning from the room, he laid his boots on the hall runner.

Across from him was the locked door, and he considered this for a brief moment. Then he looked down the hall toward Miss Burnbrake’s room and saw her dropping her own boots outside her door.

Charlotte gave him a conspiratorial smile, and he thought she even laughed softly to see him set his boots out for St. Nicholas. Daniel chuckled all the way to the bed; it had a deep feather mattress that he sank into, feeling the warmth of his own body reflected back upon him almost immediately.

There was a sudden crack and a crash as the bed broke beneath him. Daniel was startled almost into shouting but found himself laughing quietly instead. He climbed from the embrace of the feather bed, disentangled himself from the covers, and considered what was to be done. Had anyone heard? Would they come knocking in a moment to see what was the matter?

He waited, but no one knocked, and the room was so dark he couldn’t see well enough to think about putting the bed back together-and he was weary. He shook the mattresses all the way to the floor and climbed back in beneath the covers, the ghost of his former warmth still glowing there.

He lay for some time, thinking of his day, and finally realized that the crashes had indeed come in threes. He thought Charlotte would be amused. She missed this one, however he thought, which was unintentionally suggestive, and he blushed in the darkness.