They stood for a few moments in silence gazing at the quiet resting place, wondering what the real story was of the stranger it sheltered.
"I think his servant could have told if he had so wished," Etoile said wisely. "I will ask my father about him. He knows many of the old stories of the places around here. He came here from Canada when he was a very little boy. There were gray wolves around in the winter time, and the spring came earlier then. He has found arbutus the first week in March."
"What kind of wild animals are here now?" asked Doris anxiously. "Nothing that's dangerous, is there?"
"Wild cats sometimes," Astrid said. "Deer, foxes, 'coons, muskrats, woodchucks, otters, rabbits, squirrels. What else, Ingeborg?"
"I can tell you of something that really happened over where I live," Abby interrupted. Under the excitement of the trip and its novelty, Abby had fairly bloomed. From a listless, rather unhappy girl she had become a sturdy, cheerful hiker. Kit had taken her under her wing from the start.
"It's fun getting hold of somebody so awfully hopeless," she had said, "and trying to make her see the sun shining and the flowers growing right under her nose. Abby's going to be happy. She's like some little half-drowned kitten."
It was because nobody had ever taken any interest in her before. Her father was the blacksmith, a silent, rather morose man who had quarreled with his own brothers and never spoke to them. Her mother was a frail, nervous woman, so used to being yelled at that she jumped the moment anyone spoke to her. Jean had driven over there one day to get Princess a new set of shoes, and Mrs. Tucker had come out from the kitchen door, a thin, flat-chested woman with straggly hair and vacant eyes.
"How be ye," she said wistfully, looking up at the pretty new neighbor. "How's your Ma? And Pa? Sickly, ain't he? I suffer something fearful all the time. Sometimes my head feels as if it was where my feet are, and my feet feel as if they were where my head is. I can't seem to make any doctor understand what I mean, but that's exactly the way I feel, and it's fearful confusing."
Then Abby had come out and sort of shooed her mother back into the house as one would a fretful hen.
"There was a circus up at Norwich," said Abby now. "And a real live panther escaped and the hunters said they found his tracks down our way. Then one night when I was in bed, they knocked on our door and said the tracks led right into our woodshed. And my father got out his shotgun and went with them, but I went down in the kitchen with Ma, because she's nervous, and when I started up the back stairs I saw its eyes shining at me right under my bed."