He did not tell her that had he been alone he would have gone out and tramped the snowy streets for half the night. But he would not leave her alone in the hotel. “No, sir,” said Uncle Henry. “Robert would never forgive me if anything happened to his honey-bird. And fire, or something, might break out here while I was gone.”
He said nothing like this to Nan, however, but kissed her good night and told her she should always bid him good night in just that way as long as she was at Pine Camp.
“For Kate and I have never had a little girl,” said the big lumberman, “and boys get over the kissing stage mighty early, I find. Kate and I always did hanker for a girl.”
“If you owned a really, truly daughter of your own, Uncle Henry, I believe you'd spoil her to death!” cried Nan, the next morning, when she came out of the fur shop to which he had taken her.
He had insisted that she was not dressed warmly enough for the woods. “We see forty and forty-five below up there, sometimes,” he said. “You think this raw wind is cold; it is nothing to a black frost in the Big Woods. Trees burst as if there were dynamite in 'em. You've never seen the like.
“Of course the back of winter's about broken now. But we may have some cold snaps yet. Anyhow, you look warmer than you did.”
And that was true, for Nan was dressed like a little Esquimau. Her coat had a pointed hood to it; she wore high fur boots, the fur outside. Her mittens of seal were buttoned to the sleeves of her coat, and she could thrust her hands, with ordinary gloves on them, right into these warm receptacles.
Nan thought they were wonderfully served at the hotel where they stopped, and she liked the maid on her corridor very much, and the boy who brought the icewater, too. There really was so much to tell Bess that she began to keep a diary in a little blank-book she bought for that purpose.
Then the most wonderful thing of all was the message from Papa Sherwood which arrived just before she and Uncle Henry left the hotel for the train. It was a “night letter” sent from Buffalo and told her that Momsey was all right and that they both sent love and would telegraph once more before their steamship left the dock at New York.
Nan and Uncle Henry drove through the snowy streets to another station and took the evening train north. They traveled at first by the Milwaukee Division of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad; and now another new experience came Nan's way. Uncle Henry had secured a section in the sleeping car and each had a berth.