“Oh, you just don’t want to ask questions,” said Christine. “Men always hate to! I never can see why!”
The day had held many things for him; now his nerves were beginning to jump. “All right, we’ll ask,” he said, shortly.
The car, in its inanimate way, seemed glad enough to stop. “I will run in and ask,” said Christine, and Norwood was already busy over some of the mysterious attentions men love to bestow upon their engines.
“All right,” he said, without raising his head.
But in a moment she was back. “It isn’t a house, Ned! It’s only a barn!”
Still bent over his engine, he replied: “House probably across the road. They often fix them that way up here.”
But in another moment or two she was calling to him, above the voice of the gale: “Ned! Ned! There has been a fire! It must have been quite lately, for the snow melts as it falls on the place where the house was! How horrible to think of those poor people, burned out just before Christmas.”
At that he stood up. “Burned out, is it? They may be camping in the barn. We’ll see if we can’t rout them out.”
He went back a step or two and reached over to his horn, sending forth one honking, raucous blast after another. “That ought to fetch them,” he said.
There was, indeed, an answering sound from the barn—trampling of hoofs, the suffering call of an unmilked cow. Christine went toward the denser blackness, which was the door.