“Might have been twelve,” Mark said cheerfully. “Bet there’s a bear or a moose right in the middle of it waiting to be made into hamburger. But then,” he sighed, “we couldn’t kill him. Can’t get a hunting license for a year.”
Two hours later Mark and Mary with their mother and Florence close at hand were listening to a tempting offer. Ramsey McGregor, a huge man from the western plains, had drawn a tract of land only a half mile from town. He had no cow. The Hughes family owned a cow, a very good milker. If they would trade tracts of land and throw in the cow, they might have his farm close to town.
“Think of it!” Mark cried. “Right in town, you might say!”
“Y-e-s,” Florence agreed. “But then—” Already she had seen quite enough of the noisy, quarrelsome camp. And besides, there was the cow. Precious possession, old Boss. Cows were dear—milk was hardly to be had at any price. “And yet—” she sighed. Long tramps through the deep snow, with a wild Arctic blizzard beating her back, seemed to haunt her. “You’ll have to decide,” she said slowly. “It’s to be your home. I—I’m only a helper.”
Into this crisis there stepped an angel in disguise, an unimportant appearing, dark-faced angel, the older of the two Indian girls Florence had seen and aided back there at the dock in Anchorage. Now the girl, approaching timidly, drew Florence’s head down to the level of her own and whispered, “Don’t trade!”
“Why?” Florence whispered back.
“Don’t trade,” the Indian girl repeated. “Bye and bye I show you.” She was gone.
“What did she say?” Mark asked. Mark was slow, steady, thoughtful, dependable. Florence had no relative she liked so much.
“She says not to trade.” There was a look of uncertainty on the big girl’s face.
“Greasy little Indian girl,” Ramsey McGregor growled. “What does she know?”