Mrs. Dow looked up thoughtfully at the clock. “I doubt if you’ll find little Margaret there now. It’s half-past four, and she’ll have been out of school an hour and more. She’ll be most likely coasting on Lupton’s Hill. She usually makes for it with her sled the minute she is out of the school-house door. You know, it’s the old hill where you all used to slide. If you stop in at the church about six o’clock, you’ll likely find Mrs. Spinny there with the baby. I promised to go down and help Mrs. Freeze finish up the tree, and Mrs. Spinny said she’d run in with the baby, if ’t wasn’t too bitter. She won’t leave him alone with the Swede girl. She’s like a young woman with her first.”
Lupton’s Hill was at the other end of town, and when I got there the dusk was thickening, drawing blue shadows over the snowy fields. There were perhaps twenty children creeping up the hill or whizzing down the packed sled-track. When I had been watching them for some minutes, I heard a lusty shout, and a little red sled shot past me into the deep snow-drift beyond. The child was quite buried for a moment, then she struggled out and stood dusting the snow from her short coat and red woolen comforter. She wore a brown fur cap, which was too big for her and of an old-fashioned shape, such as girls wore long ago, but I would have known her without the cap. Mrs. Dow had said a beautiful child, and there would not be two like this in Riverbend. She was off before I had time to speak to her, going up the hill at a trot, her sturdy little legs plowing through the trampled snow. When she reached the top she never paused to take breath, but threw herself upon her sled and came down with a whoop that was quenched only by the deep drift at the end.
“Are you Margaret Spinny?” I asked as she struggled out in a cloud of snow.
“Yes, ’m.” She approached me with frank curiosity, pulling her little sled behind her. “Are you the strange lady staying at Mrs. Dow’s?” I nodded, and she began to look my clothes over with respectful interest.
“Your grandmother is to be at the church at six o’clock, isn’t she?”
“Yes, ’m.”
“Well, suppose we walk up there now. It’s nearly six, and all the other children are going home.” She hesitated, and looked up at the faintly gleaming track on the hill-slope. “Do you want another slide? Is that it?” I asked.
“Do you mind?” she asked shyly.
“No. I’ll wait for you. Take your time; don’t run.”
Two little boys were still hanging about the slide, and they cheered her as she came down, her comforter streaming in the wind.