Little Fishers: and Their Nets

by Pansy

Now Nettie, busy with her fingers in the house next door, had not left the others to do all the thinking. She knew the price of "oil calico," and imitation cretonne, and unbleached muslin; she knew to a fraction how many yards of each would be needed, and the sum total appalled her. Yet she too knew that her father earned at least a dollar a day, and did not give them two a week to live on. This her mother had told her.

Also she knew that on this Saturday evening at about six o'clock, he would probably be paid for his week's work. Couldn't she contrive to coax some of the money from his keeping into hers? She had hinted the possibility of her mother's getting hold of it, and Mrs. Decker had said that the bare thought of trying made her feel faint and sick; that if she had ever seen her father in a passion such as he could get into when things did not go just to suit him, she would know what it was to ask him for anything. Nettie, who had not yet been at home a week, had some faint idea of what her father might do and say if he were very angry. Nevertheless, she was trying to plan a way to meet him before he left the shop, and secure some of that money if she could.

With this thought in view, she presently laid aside the neat little petticoat on which she had been sewing, brushed her hair, put on her brown ribboned hat, and her brown gloves, watched her chance while the children were quarreling over an apple that Jerry had given them, and stole out in the direction of the shop where her father worked. She would not ask Jerry to go with her, though he looked after her from the barn window and wished she had; if her father was to grow angry and swear, and possibly strike, no one should know it but herself, if she could help it.

I must not forget to tell you of one thing that she did before starting. She went into her mother's little tucked-up bedroom, put a nail over the door, which she had herself arranged for a fastening, and knelt there so long by the barrel which did duty as a table, that her mother, had she seen her, would have been frightened. But Nettie felt that she needed courage for this undertaking; and she knew where to get it.

Then she had to walk pretty fast; it was later than she thought, for just as she turned the corner by the shop where her father worked, the six o'clock bell began to ring.

"Halloo!" said one of the men, standing in the door while he untied his leather apron. "What party is this coming down the street? The neatest little woman I've seen for many a day. A stranger in this part of the world, I reckon. Doesn't fit in, somehow. Do you know who it is, Decker?"

And Mr. Decker, thus appealed to, came to the door in time to receive Nettie's bow and smile.

"That's my girl," he said, and a look of pride stole into his face. She was a trim little creature; it was rather pleasant to own her as his daughter.

"Your girl!" and the astonishment which the man felt was expressed by a slight whistle. "I want to know now if that is the little one who went away six, seven years ago, was it? She's as pretty a girl as I've seen in a year. Looks smart, too. I say, Decker, you better take good care of her. She is a girl to be proud of."

At just that moment Nettie sprang up the steps.