"Both must be destroyed," finished Bess. "But I see the tail of our bob, all right."
Just then Nan ran across the track. At the same moment a floundering figure, like a great polar bear in his winter coat, emerged from the opposite drift. The fat man, without his hat and with his face very red and wet, loomed up gigantically in the snow-pile.
"Oh! Nan Sherwood!" cried Laura. "Have you found him?"
The fat man glared at Nan malevolently. "So your name is Sherwood, it is?" he snarled. "You're the girl that was steering that abominable sled—and you steered it right into me."
"Oh, no, sir! Not intentionally!" cried the worried Nan.
"Yes, you did!" flatly contradicted the choleric fat man. "I saw you."
"Oh, Nan Sherwood!" gasped Amelia, "isn't he mean to say that?"
"Your name's Sherwood, is it?" growled the man. "I should think I'd had trouble enough with people of that name. Is your father Robert Sherwood, of Tillbury, Illinois?"
"Yes, sir," replied the wondering Nan.
"Ha! I might have known it," snarled the man, trying to beat the snow from his clothes. "I heard he had a girl up here at this school. The rascal!"