“I don’t like it,” retorted Maggie. “May-be we’d best be returning home, now, Miss Polly.”
Polly’s eyes flashed. She caught Maggie by the shoulder.
“You are a mean girl,” she said. “You got me into this scrape, and now you mean to desert me. I was sitting quietly in my room, reading through the M’s in Webster’s Dictionary, and you came and asked me to run away; it was your doing, Maggie, you know that.”
“Yes, miss! yes, Miss!”
Maggie began to sob. “But I never, never thought it meant berries and spring-water; no, that I didn’t. Oh, I be so hungry!”
At this moment all angry recriminations were frozen on the lips of both little girls, for rising suddenly, almost as it seemed from the ground at their feet, appeared a gaunt woman of gigantic make.
“May-be you’ll be hungrier,” she said in a menacing voice. “What business have you to go through Deadman’s Copse without leave?”
Maggie was much too alarmed to make any reply, but Polly, after a moment or two of startled silence, came boldly to the rescue.
“Who are you?” she said. “Maggie and I know nothing of Deadman’s Copse; this is a wood, and we are going through it; we have got business on the other side of Peg-Top-Moor.”
“That’s as it may be,” replied the woman, “this wood belongs to me and to my sons, Nathaniel and Patrick, and to our dogs, Cinder and Flinder, and those what goes through Deadman’s Copse must pay toll to me, the wife of Micah Jones. My husband is dead, and he left the wood to me, and them as go through it must pay toll.”