“With the boys at Tangen, of course. Why should they have that grand big coast all to themselves? We boys from the town never go there with a sled without their coming at us and hitting us; and we have only this miserable little hill to coast on.”
“Miserable little hill? This?”
“Yes, I call it a miserable little hill to coast down when Madam Land’s woodshed is right at the foot, blocking the way so that you have to twist your legs off, almost, to steer around on to the church green. But we have had a council of war, and this afternoon we shall thrash those Tangen boys thoroughly and take the hill for our use.”
This sounded frightfully interesting.
“What time are you going to fight?”
“Oh, you needn’t think that we’ll have you girls with us. You may be mighty sure we won’t.”
Karsten always pretends that he knows everything the bigger boys plan among themselves. As a matter of fact, they simply order him around as much as they please, but he will never acknowledge that.
“We were going to have that box to put our balls in,—snowballs, you know. We were going to make lots of them right after dinner, and then drag the box full of snowballs through Main Street and up Back Gorge and there we would be—right behind Tangen in a jiffy.”
I limped up the hill with my bruised knee aching, but I determined that I would go out to Tangen that afternoon to see the snow-fight, no matter how painful my knee was.
In the living-room all through the noon-hour I could hear Karsten in the woodshed, pounding and hammering at the box. Naturally I had wormed out of him that the fight was to begin at half-past three precisely.