“O, Tate, I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to talk!”
“And who tried to go back to the school-house, Dotty Dimple, but you wouldn’t? And then we’d have been alive now!”
Dotty did not listen. She was thinking about the whooping-cough. Had she been saved from it in her babyhood, and lived six years, to meet with such a doom at last?
“My mamma said I had the whooping-cough so my face was purple. She thought I’d die in it; but I never. I lived over it, and the purple went off, and I’ve been alive ever since till to-day. O, my mamma didn’t think this morning how I was going to die before she’d see me again! She’d have kissed me a million times for good by; she’d have hugged me like everything! And then, after she’d cried her eyes out, she’d have said, ‘Dotty, take off your water proof, dear; I don’t want my little girl to go to school and never come home any more.’
“My father didn’t know what he’s doing, when he said I wasn’t tender! He thought I’d cough to death when I was little; he didn’t know this was a great deal worse’n the whooping-cough.”
Unhappy Dotty! Unhappy Tate! Two forlorn little creatures, fighting against a terrible fate!
“There don’t anybody care what ’comes of us,” said Dotty aloud, at last. “There isn’t anybody anywhere, Tate Penny, and nothing in this world but just snow!”
“O, dear,” echoed Tate, hugging herself. “I never was so cold but just once, and then my mother rolled me in a shawl.”
“You never’ll see your mother again,” said Dotty, in a hard tone, as if she took a grim pleasure in it; “never again; nor your house, nor your brother Ben, nor your little sister Tid. O, no! Just ’cause your nose bleeds so easy.”
“You stop saying that, Dotty Dimple; it’s bad enough—”