They struggled on, slipping over their boot tops, and though the snow was dry, Rose noticed that her voluminous skirts were getting heavy. She longed for the sensible clothes they wore at home. Suddenly a sound like some one sobbing struck her ears. She was a step or two ahead of Jo and her sister.
“Do you hear that, girls?” she asked, looking around anxiously. “I thought I heard some one crying.”
“Crying!” exclaimed Jo. “Perhaps it’s a fox or——”
But at that moment the sound broke out again, and crying it undoubtedly was. They hurried on, a little scared, turned a bend, and there, sure enough, huddled in the snow at the foot of a huge evergreen, sat a small, a very small boy.
“Gee-willikins!” grunted Rose, while Jo rushed forward, and Ruth stared, white and frightened. She was very young.
“He’s alive safe enough,” said Jo, in her deepest voice, as the small boy started wailing in earnest at sight of her. Rose joined her, and the two bent over the youngster, who looked up at them, pale and with his face streaked with tears. “Poor little thing! How on earth did he get here, d’you suppose?”
“He must be lost,” hazarded Rose, rubbing the boy’s hands, that were almost frozen. Ruth had come up by this time, and the three began to question the child all together. He only stared in response, but when Jo drew a cookie out of her pocket, he smiled faintly, and began to munch it.
“Poor baby, he’s famished. How did you get here all alone, little man?” And Jo bent over him, wrapping part of her cloak over the shivering little body.
He gurgled an unintelligible reply, but stopped crying.
Rose looked at Jo. “He’d have probably died out here if we hadn’t come this way,” she whispered. “What are we going to do with him?”