The Fortunes of Oliver Horn

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

The outlook was really serious. Old Bald Face had not only lost his smile—a marvelously happy one with the early sun upon his wrinkled countenance—but he had put on his judgment-cap of gray clouds and had begun to thunder out his disapproval of everything about him. Moose Hillock evidently heard the challenge, for he was answering back in the murky darkness. Soon a cold, raw wind, which had been asleep in the hills for weeks, awoke with a snarl and started down the gorge. Then the little leaves began to quiver, the big trees to groan, in their anxiety not knowing what the will of the wind would be, and the merry little waves that had chased each other all the morning over the sunny shallows of the brook, grew ashy pale as they looked up into the angry face of the Storm-God, and fled shivering to the shore.

Oliver whipped out his knife, stripped the heavy outer bark from a white birch, and before the dashing rain could catch up with the wind, had repaired the slant so as to make it water-tight—Hank had taught him this—then he started another great fire in front of the slant and threw fresh balsam boughs on the bed that had rested Hank's tired limbs, and he and Margaret crept in and were secure.

The equanimity of Margaret's temper, temporarily disturbed by her vivid misconception of Kennedy Square, was restored. The dry shelter, the warm fire, the sense of escape from the elements, all filled her heart with gladness. Never since the day she met him on the bridge had she been so happy. Again, as when Oliver championed her in the old Academy school-room, there stole over her a vague sense of pleasure in being protected.

"Isn't it jolly!" she said as she sat hunched up beside him. "I'm as dry as a bone, not a drop on me."

Oliver was even more buoyant. There was something irresistibly cosey and comfortable in the shelter which he had provided for her—something of warmth and companionship and rest. But more intensely enjoyable than all was the thought that he was taking care of a woman for the first time in his life, as it seemed to him. And in a house of his own making, and in a place, too, of his own choosing, surrounded by the big trees that he loved. He had even outwitted the elements—the wind and the rain and the chill—in her defence. Old Moose Hillock could bellow now and White Face roar, and the wind and rain vent their wrath, but Margaret, close beside him, would still be warm and dry and safe.

By this time she had hung her tam-o'-shanter and jacket on a nail that she had found in the bark over her head, and was arranging her hair.

"It's just like life, Oliver, isn't it?" she said, as she tightened the coil in her neck. "All we want, after all, is a place to get into out of the storm and wet, not a big place, either."

"What kind of a place?" He was on his knees digging a little trench with his knife, piling up the moist earth in miniature embankments, so that the dripping from the roof would not spatter this Princess of his whom he had saved from the tempest outside.

"Oh, any kind of a place if you have people you're fond of. I'd love a real studio somewhere, and a few things hung about—some old Delft and one or two bits of stuff—and somebody to take care of me."

Oliver shifted his pipe in his mouth and looked up. Would she, with all her independence, really like to have someone take care of her? He had seen no evidence of it.