From down the road came the jingling of bells, coming nearer every moment; then a voice called, “Halloa! Halloa, there! Anyone about?”
“It’s Jim Parker!” Kitty cried joyously. “Here we are!” she called back.
“Well of all the tom-fool scrapes!” Jim drew his horse up with a jerk. “What do you mean by this, Kitty Clark! Setting the whole place by the ears!”
“It was just as much my fault!” Blue Bonnet protested.
“Well, we won’t stand here scrapping about that!” Jim bundled the two into the bottom of the box sleigh most unceremoniously, piling buffalo robes thick about them. “There’s blame enough to go shares on and have some left over.”
“Please don’t scold!” Kitty pleaded. “We’re dreadfully sorry, and if you knew how tired and hungry we were!”
Jim took up the reins—“And so you ought to be!” He was a big, hearty fellow of twenty, who had been pulling Kitty out of scrapes ever since she had been big enough to get into them,—and Kitty had begun early.
“How did you know where we were,—did Debby tell?” Kitty asked. Blue Bonnet cared neither to ask, nor answer questions.
“Why,” Jim explained, “when you didn’t come home your mother sent over to our place, thinking you must be there. Amanda hadn’t seen you since school; then Mrs. Clyde sent her Delia down to your place, in search of Blue Bonnet. Debby’d gone out to supper with Susy, and by the time we’d got ’round to the Doyles and found out where you had started for, it was getting pretty late, and some of the seniors were more or less anxious. Your father hadn’t got in yet. Some of the boys started up the pond with lanterns, and I came this way, thinking it barely possible you might have developed enough sense not to try to come back on the ice.”