Bounce would come to the schoolhouse and kind of cry till I asked the master, “Please may I go out?” And then Bounce and me’d have a talk behind the schoolhouse, and I’d tell him I could not help it, and he’d own that he might live at aunt Ibby’s with us if he could only keep from chawing up their miserable yellow dogs; and we’d both feel better.
But I did miss him that minute I opened the door, when here he come like a house a-fire, and lit down on the floor panting and pounding his tail and laughing; and then he jumped up and pawed us in the dark till Mrar had to hold him round the neck to keep him still while I got a light. He must snuffed our tracks when we whizzed past cousin Andy Sanders’s.
I felt to the pantry and put my hand in the candle box, but aunt Ibby never left one. I knew there’s a piece in a candlestick in the shed cupboard, though. It burnt half out the night mother died. So I got it, and the Whizzer scraped a match, and lit the wick. The Whizzer and me set to, then, and brought in loads from the woodhouse. We built a fire clear up into the chimney, and Mrar took the broom, and swept all the dust into it. Bounce laid on the carpet and licked at us, and whacked his tail till we’s in a broad laugh.
The fire got me warmer than I’d been since mother died. The Whizzer took out a thick gold watch, and wound our clock and set it. Then he says:
“Let’s go over the house.”
And we did. I carried the candle, and Mrar and the dog went along.
The Whizzer looked in all the up-stairs presses, and opened the bureau drawers. I staid outside of the parlor, and Mrar and Bounce did too. I did not want to think of the sheet stretched in the corner, for it was not like mother under the sheet. But her picture hung up in there, and so did my father’s.
The Whizzer staid in with the candle a good while. I heard him going from one thing to another, and wondered what he was about. I’d rather gone out to the graveyard, though, and set on the fence watching mother’s and father’s graves, and heard the dry sumac bushes scrape together, than to stepped into the parlor. Father died a year before mother, but I didn’t like him the same as I did her.
Then we looked down cellar; and I thought I ought to tell the Whizzer about the provisions and bedclothes being taken out of the house, or he’d suppose mother never kept us nice. He smiled under his cap; and I found one jar of cand’ed honey behind some bar’ls where aunt Ibby overlooked it. We carried that up to the sitting-room. Mrar likes cand’ed honey better than anything.