SUDDENLY THE OLD HORSE, AS IF DESPERATE, GAVE A JERK AND PULLED THE FIRE BIRD CLEAR.
“Hurrah!” yelled Ted, bounding through the snow.
“Great stunt!” corroborated Nat. “Peter, you are all right!”
“Peter did some,” replied the old man, freeing the horse from the rope that held him to the machine; “but that young lady—if she hadn’t kept Sanders busy—we might all have been arrested for horse-stealing.”
“She knew his weak spot,” agreed Nat. “That little Emily seems to be the one weak and soft spot in old Sanders’s life.”
“I had better go up and see what’s going on,” suggested Mabel, as everything seemed about in readiness to start off again.
“Good idea,” assented her brother, “he might be eating her up.”
Mabel rather timidly found her way up to the cottage. It was already dusk, but the light of a dim lamp showed her the way, as it gleamed through a gloomy window, onto the glistening snow.
“Won’t it be perfectly lovely, Emily?” she heard Doro saying, as she saw her with her arms about a little red-haired girl, both sitting on a sofa, while Sanders attempted to prop the Christmas tree up in a corner, bracing it with a wooden chair. Mabel raised the latch without going through the formality of knocking. As she entered the room, all but Dorothy started in surprise.