“Why didn’t you let go?” says I.
“Haven’t I brought you home?” he says.
I looked at the shut-up house, and felt a good deal worse than when I thought he was running off with us.
“O Steeley,” says Mrar, “le’s go in and stay. I want to come home so bad!”
“Now you see what you done!” says I to the Whizzer. He was man grown, and I’s only ten years old, but he ought to knowed better than to made Mrar cry till the tears run down her chin.
I’d been to look at the house myself, but never said a word to her about it. Once at noon I slipped up there by the cornfields roundabout, and sat on the fence and thought about mother till I could hardly stand it. The house looked lonesomer than an old cabin about to fall; because an old cabin about to fall has forgot its folks, but all our things were locked up here, except what aunt Ibby and cousin Andy Sanders had carried off. Our sale was to be in January. The snow was knee-deep in the yard, and drifted even on the porch, but tracks showed where aunt Ibby walked when she got out a load of provisions and bedclothes. She had the front door key, and took even the blue-and-white coverlid with birds wove in, that I heard mother say was to be Mrar’s, and the canned fruit for fear it would freeze, when our cellar is warmer than their stove. She said to uncle Moze, when I was by unbeknown, that Mrar and me would have ten times as much property as her children, anyhow, and she ought to be paid more for keeping us. She might had our money, for all I cared, but I did not know how to stand her robbing things out of mother’s house, and wished the sale would come quick, and scatter them all.
The Whizzer leant his chin on his breast and looked pitiful out of his eyes at Mrar, for seemed like the tears had a notion to freeze on her face, only she kept them running down too fast; and he says:
“Let’s go into the house.”
“Oh, do, Steeley!” says Mrar, hugging my knee, for I was alongside the sled. “And I’ll cook all your dinners. And we’ll hang up our Christmas stockings every Sunday,” says she, “and aunt Ibby’s boys won’t durse to take away my lead pencil mother give me, and if you see them coming here, you’ll set Bounce on them.”