“Pooh! It’s nothing. Girls and women are afraid of everything. Well, here’s the boy so strong that he could and would throttle seven customs officers, if necessary.”
Ugh! Karsten has grown so conceited lately that he is beyond everything. He is always saying that I am nothing but a girl, but that he is a boy, he is. (Oh, you wait, Karsten Cocky-cub; you’ll get paid for such talk, depend upon it.)
The thought of the customs officer wouldn’t bother me much if I didn’t need now and then to go into the top loft, but I do need to, you see. Up there in one corner lies a great heap of papers that old Mr. Borgen left in the house, stiff yellow papers with accounts on them. Whenever Karsten and I want any paper,—and that is almost every day, you know,—we are allowed to take what we need from that heap.
Mother doesn’t like us to bring too much of the old dusty paper down at one time, and that’s why I have to go up often for it. But I go like the wind up and back again. Not that I have ever seen old Mr. Borgen there, but it isn’t pleasant to think that he rambles around the loft in his felt shoes and with a shade over his eyes. That’s the way he looks, people say.
One evening Father and Mother were going out to a party, and Karsten and I would be alone at home, except that I was to have Massa and Mina to supper. The weather was perfectly horrid that night. The wind wrestled with the old maple-trees around the house, pulled and tugged at them till they creaked. The branches of the pear-tree outside the drawing-room windows swayed to and fro and struck against the panes.
We had been romping at a great rate all the afternoon before dark, and had danced so hard that the drawing-room floor shook, and Ingeborg, the cook, had come up from the basement to know whether we were going to tear the house down. But we didn’t bother ourselves about what she said, for she is always fussy.
Later we teased Karsten, chasing him through all the rooms, the parlor, the little room, dining-room, living-room and out through the kitchen; and we kept shouting at him:
“Karsten Cocky-Cub,
In a half butter-tub.”
The boys at school call him that, and it always makes him furious. His white hair was standing straight up, his face was fiery red. Suddenly he turned and sprang towards us, waving a piece of knotted rope which he said was a Russian “knout.” Massa, Mina, and I screeched like locomotive whistles, hid behind doors and shrieked again in terror when Karsten caught us.