“Do you stay here all through the cold winter?” she asked, when at last, quite exhausted, they dropped in a pile on the deck.
“Oh, yes,” Nelse said cheerfully. “There is great fun! Snow for forts, ice for sliding. Winter is grand!”
“But there is no school!” she protested.
They did not seem very sorry about this, but Jeanne, recalling Swen’s desire for a boat that more money might be made by fishing and that these little ones might go to the mainland where there were schools, wished harder than ever that Florence’s dream of finding a barrel of gold might come true.
“A barrel of gold!” she murmured. “What a lot of gold that must be!”
She thought of her castle in France and almost wished she might spend it for these bright-eyed little ones.
“But then,” she sighed, “one may not spend a castle. And there is Great-Aunt Minyon who would not allow me to spend a penny of it, even if it were possible. No! No! We must find our barrel of gold!”
All this time there remained in the back of the little French girl’s head a question. “What did Swen mean when he said his doorstep had been broken, his bench overturned and bits of cloth scattered before his door? Just what he said, to be sure.
“And the bear!” she whispered. “He was on shore a long time. What did he do?”
To these questions she was destined to find no certain answer. When she had told Swen her part of the story and together they had searched the vicinity of Swen’s strange home for some clue as to the whereabouts of the head hunter, they could arrive at no definite conclusions regarding any part of the mysterious affair.