Chapter IX. ON THE WAY TO THE WILDERNESS
It seemed to Nan Sherwood that night as though she never could get to sleep. Her mind and imagination worked furiously.
Momsey and Papa Sherwood had sent her to bed early. There had been no time to tell them about the accident on the ice and her part in it. Her parents had much to discuss, much to decide upon. The Scotch lawyer urged their presence before the court having jurisdiction in the matter of the late Mr. Hugh Blake's will, and that as soon as they could cross the ocean.
Transportation from the little Illinois town, across the intervening states to the seaport, and thence, over the winter ocean to Glasgow, and so on by rail to Edinburgh, was a journey the contemplation of which, to such a quiet family as the Sherwoods, was nothing less than appalling.
And there were many things to take into consideration that Nan did not wholly understand. Mrs. Sherwood would require her husband's undivided attention while she made the long and arduous journey. The sea voyage was right in line with the physician's opinion of what was needed to restore her health; but it was a venture at best.
Had the family possessed plenty of money it is doubtful if Mr. Sherwood would have risked more than a coasting voyage. Conditions rising out of the legacy from the great uncle in Scotland spelled necessity in this case. Of the little sum left in bank, most of it would be required to pay the fares of Mr. and Mrs. Sherwood to Edinburgh, and their modest living there for a few weeks. There was not enough money in hand to pay a third passage and the expenses of a third person in Scotland, until the court business should be settled.
Mr. Sherwood had already taken Mr. Bludsoe, the lawyer, into his confidence. He could make arrangements through him to mortgage the cottage if it became absolutely necessary. He shrank from accepting financial help from Mrs. Sherwood's relatives in Memphis.
Besides, decision must be made immediately. Plans must be made almost overnight. They must start within forty-eight hours to catch a certain steamer bound for the Scotch port of Glasgow, as Mr. Sherwood had already found out. And all their questions resolved finally into this very important one:
“WHAT SHALL WE DO ABOUT NAN?”
Nan, in her little white bed, had no idea that she was the greatest difficulty her parents found in this present event. It never entered her busy mind that Papa Sherwood and Momsey would dream of going to Scotland without her.
“What shall we do with Nan?” Momsey said over and over again. She realized as well as did Mr. Sherwood that to take the child was an utter impossibility. Their financial circumstances, as well as other considerations would not allow it.
Yet, what should they do with her, with whom to trust her during their uncertain absence on the other side? No answer that came to their minds seemed the right one. They rose that wintry morning without having this most important of all questions decided.
This was Sunday and Mrs. Joyce always came over for breakfast; for she lived alone and never had any too much to eat, Nan was sure. As for the old woman's eating with the family, that was a fiction she kept up for appearance's sake, perhaps, or to salve her own claims to former gentility. She always set a place for herself at the family table in the dining room and then was too busy to eat with them, taking her own meal in the kitchen.
Therefore it was she only who heard the commanding rap at the kitchen door in the midst of the leisurely meal, and answered it.
Just then Nan had dropped her knife and fork and was staring from Momsey's pitying face to Papa Sherwood's grave one, as she cried, in a whisper:
“Not me? Oh, my dears! You're never going without me, all that long journey? What, whatever shall I do without you both?”
“Don't, honey! Don't say it that way!” begged Momsey, putting her handkerchief to her eyes.
“If it was not quite impossible, do you think for a moment, daughter, that we would contemplate leaving you at home?” queried Mr. Sherwood, his own voice trembling.
“It, it seems impossible!” gasped Nan, “just as though it couldn't be. I won't know what to do without you, my dears. And what will you do without me?”
That seemed to be unanswerable, and it quite broke Momsey down. She sobbed openly into her handkerchief.
“Who's going to be her little maid?” demanded Nan, of her father. “Who's going to 'do' her beautiful hair? Who's going to wait on her when she has her dreadful headaches? And who's going to play 'massagist' like me? I want to know who can do all those things for Momsey if you take her away from me, Papa Sherwood?” and she ended quite stormily.
“My dear child!” Mr. Sherwood said urgently. “I want you to listen to me. Our situation is such that we cannot possibly take you with us. That is final. It is useless for us to discuss the point, for there is nothing to be gained by discussing it from now till Doomsday.”
Nan gulped down a sob and looked at him with dry eyes. Papa Sherwood had never seemed so stern before, and yet his own eyes were moist. She began to see that this decision was very hard upon her parents, too.
“Now do you understand,” he asked gently, “that we cannot take our little daughter with us, but that we are much worried by the fact, and we do not know what to do with her while we are gone?”
“You, you might as well put me in an orphan asylum,” choked Nan. “I'll be an orphan till you get back.”
“Oh, honey!” cried her mother.
“There now!” said Nan, jumping up quickly and going around the table to her mother's side. “You poor dear! I won't say anything more to hurt and trouble you. I'm a selfish thing, that's what I am.”
Momsey wound her arms about her. Papa Sherwood still looked grave. “We get no nearer to the proper solution of the difficulty,” he said. “Of course, Nancy, the orphan asylum is out of the question.”
“I'll stay here, of course,” Nan said, with some difficulty keeping her voice from quavering.
“Not alone in the house, honey,” Momsey said quickly.
“With Mrs. Joyce?” suggested Nan tentatively.
“No,” Mr. Sherwood said. “She is not the person to be trusted with you.”
“There's Mrs. Grimes' boarding house around the corner?” suggested Nan.
Momsey shuddered. “Never! Never! My little girl in a boarding house. Oh, Papa Sherwood! We must find somebody to care for her while we are away, who loves Nan.”
And it was just here that a surprisingly gruff voice took up the matter and decided it in a moment.
“That's me,” said the voice, with conviction. “She's just the sort of little girl I cotton to, sister Jessie. And Kate'll be fairly crazy about her. If you're going anywhere for a long spell, just let me take her up to Pine Camp. We have no little girls up there, never had any. But I bet we know how to treat 'em.”
“Hen!” shouted Mr. Sherwood, stumbling up from the table, and putting out both hands to the big man whom Mrs. Joyce had ushered in from the kitchen so unexpectedly.
“Henry Sherwood!” gasped Momsey, half rising herself in her surprise and delight.
“Why!” cried Nan, “it's the bear-man!” for Mr. Henry Sherwood wore the great fur coat and cap that he had worn the evening before when he had come to Nan's aid in rescuing the boy from Norway Pond.
Afterward Nan confessed, naively, that she ought to have known he was her Uncle Henry. Nobody, she was quite sure, could be so big and brawny as the lumberman from Michigan.
“She's the girl for me,” proclaimed Uncle Henry admiringly. “Smart as a whip and as bold as a catamount. Hasn't she told you what she did last night? Sho! Of course not. She don't go 'round blowing about her deeds of valor, I bet!” and the big man went off into a gale of laughter that seemed to shake the little cottage.
Papa Sherwood and Momsey had to learn all the particulars then, and both glowed with pride over their little daughter's action. Gradually, after numerous personal questions were asked and answered on both sides, the conversation came around to the difficulty the little family was in, and the cause of it.
Henry Sherwood listened to the story of the Scotch legacy with wide-open eyes, marveling greatly. The possibility of his brother's wife becoming wealthy amazed and delighted his simple mind. The fact that they had to take the long journey to Scotland to obtain the money troubled him but little. Although he had never traveled far himself, save to Chicago from the Michigan woods, Mr. Henry Sherwood had lived in the open so much that distances did not appall him.
“Sure you'll go,” he proclaimed, reaching down into a very deep pocket and dragging to light a long leather pouch, with a draw-string of home-cured deer skin. “And if you are short, Bob, we'll go down into this poke and see what there is left.
“I came down to Chicago to see about a piece of timber that's owned by some sharps on Jackson Street. I didn't know but I might get to cut that timber. I've run it careless-like, and I know pretty near what there is in it. So I said to Kate:
“'I'll see Bob and his wife, and the little nipper——-”
“Goodness!” ejaculated Nan, under her breath.
Uncle Henry's eyes twinkled and the many wrinkles about them screwed up into hard knots. “Beg pardon!” he exclaimed, for his ears were very sharp. “This young lady, I should have said. Anyhow, I told Kate I'd see you all and find out what you were doing.
“Depending on mills and such for employment isn't any very safe way to live, I think. Out in the woods you are as free as air, and there aren't so many bosses, and you don't have to think much about 'the market' and 'supply and demand,' and all that.”
“Just the same,” said Mr. Robert Sherwood, his own eyes twinkling, “you are in some trouble right now, I believe, Hen?”
“Sho! You've got me there,” boomed his brother with a great laugh. “But there aren't many reptiles like old Ged Raffer. And we can thank a merciful Creator for that. I expect there are just a few miserly old hunks like Ged as horrible examples to the rest of us.”
“What is the nature of your trouble with this old fellow?” asked Mr. Robert Sherwood.
“We've got hold on adjoining options. I had my lines run by one of the best surveyors in the Peninsula of Michigan. But he up and died. Ged claims I ran over on his tract about a mile. He got to court first, got an injunction, and tied me all up in a hard legal knot until the state surveyors can go over both pieces of timber. The land knows when that'll be! Those state surveyors take a week of frog Sundays to do a job.
“I can't cut a stick on my whole piece 'cause Ged claims he'll have a right to replevin an equal number of sticks cut, if the surveyors back up his contention. Nasty mess. The original line was run years and years ago, and they're not many alive today in the Big woods that know the rights of it.
“I expect,” added Uncle Henry, shaking his bushy head, “that old Toby Vanderwiller knows the rights of that line business; but he won't tell. Gedney Raffer's got a strangle hold on Toby and his little swamp farm, and Toby doesn't dare say his soul's his own.
“Well!” continued the lumberman, with another of his big laughs. “This has nothing to do with your stew, Bob. I didn't want to come to the house last night and surprise you; so I stayed at the hotel. And all the time I was thinking of this little nip, Beg pardon! This young lady, and how smart and plucky she was.
“And lo and behold,” pursued Uncle Henry, “she turns out to be my own niece. I'm going to take her back with me to Pine Camp. Kate's got to see and know her. The boys will be tickled out of their boots to have a girl like her around. That's our one lack at Pine Camp. There never was a girl in the family.
“Seems that this was just foreordained. You and Jessie have got to go 'way off, over the water; can't leave this plucky girl alone. Her old uncle and aunt are the proper folks to take care of her. What do you say yourself, young lady?”
Nan had liked the big man from the very beginning. She was a sensible child, too. She saw that she must settle this matter herself, for it was too hard a question for either Momsey or Papa Sherwood to decide. She gained control of herself now; but nobody will ever know how much courage it took for her to say, promptly:
“Of course I will go home with you, Uncle Henry. It will be fun, I think, to go into the woods in the winter. And, and I can come right back as soon as Momsey and Papa Sherwood return from Scotland.”
So it was settled, just like that. The rush in which both parties got under way on Monday made Nan's head whirl. Momsey was to buy a few necessary things in New York before she boarded the steamer. Nan had a plentiful supply of warm winter clothing, and she took a trunkful.
Mrs. Joyce was left to take a peep at the little, locked cottage on Amity Street, now and then. Nan could say “Goodbye” only very hastily to Bess Harley and her other school friends. Her school had to be broken off at a bad time in the year, but there was the prospect of a change in Nan's method of education the next fall.
Momsey and Papa Sherwood took the train east an hour before Nan and Uncle Henry boarded that for Chicago. All went with a rush and clatter, and Nan found herself at last rumbling out of Tillbury, on her way to the northern wilderness, while a thin drive of fine snowflakes tapped on the car windows.