“Never mind, dear! You didn’t mean to,” answered his mother, soothingly. “We must get Flossie to bed and keep her warm so she won’t take cold.”
With Mrs. Baxter’s help, this was soon done, and in a short time after the accident Flossie was sitting up in a warm bed, sipping hot lemonade and eating crackers, while Freddie sat near her, doing the same.
Unless Flossie caught cold there would be no serious results from the accident. But Mrs. Bobbsey used it as a lesson for Freddie, telling him always to be careful when on a pine-needle-covered hill, near the water especially.
Flossie was enjoying her importance now, and she was begging her mother to tell her a story, in which request Freddie joined, when Mrs. Bobbsey, looking out of the window, was surprised to see how dark the clouds had become all of a sudden.
“I believe we are going to have a snowstorm,” she said. And a few minutes later the snow came down so thick and fast that the lumbermen had to stop work, because they could not see where to drive the horses, nor to guide the logs down the stream to the mill.
“My, what a storm!” exclaimed Mrs. Bobbsey, as she went to the window to look out. “A regular blizzard!”
“We can have fun coasting down hill!” laughed Freddie. “And Flossie can be out to-morrow, can’t she, Mother?”
“Yes, I think so,” answered Mrs. Bobbsey, hardly thinking of what she was saying. “I hope Bert and Nan started back from the chestnut grove before this storm broke,” she said. “If they are out in this it will be dreadful! I must see if daddy has come back,” she added, for her husband had gone to see about the missing Christmas trees. “If Bert and Nan are out in this storm they will lose their way, I’m sure.”
And this is just what Bert and Nan did. Clutching their bundles of lunch, and with their bags of chestnuts in their hands, the two older Bobbsey twins were struggling onward through the storm. They were warmly dressed, and it was not as cold as weather they had often been out in before. But they had seldom been out in a worse storm.
“Hadn’t we—maybe we’d better stop and rest and eat something, Bert,” suggested Nan, after a while.