Part 42 (1/2)

It did not take Ike long to study out what she meant. Then he did some more ”figgering.” He knew exactly where the branch road led to.

He was so successful in this figuring that he encouraged the young people from Milton to believe as he did. He saw a chance for the three little folks who had gone sliding to be safely housed in the cave that he called ”Ralph and little Missie's playhouse.”

The Birdsall twins had often camped out in that cave hollowed in the hillside at the bottom of the valley. If Sammy and Tess and Dot had slid down there, more than likely, so Ike said, they had found the cave and had taken refuge there.

In addition (but this was his own secret) the timber cruiser believed that the twins, having been in Red Deer Lodge, had started for that very cave some hours before the gale broke.

If the young Birdsalls were there, the lost children would be safe enough. This had proved to be the case.

Nevertheless, the old woodsman scolded Ralph and Rowena heartily.

”What d'you mean?” he demanded, ”by running way from your guardian!

Mr. Howbridge is as fine a man as ever stepped in shoe-leather. I'm ashamed of you children. And when you did come clean up here, why didn't you come to my shack and stay?”

”We did go there; but you were away. Then we thought we had a right to live in our own house. You know papa built it,” said Rowena, bravely.

”We didn't know anybody was coming there this winter. And we brought some food with us from c.o.xford. Then those people came, and we waited till we could get out without being caught at it.”

”Some young ones! Some young ones!” groaned M'Graw. ”Well, now, you'll go back to the Lodge and see what Mr. Howbridge has to say to you. And you dressed like a boy, Roweny!”

”I don't care,” said ”Rowdy.” ”Ralph dressed up like a girl at first.

We came up here that way. But other kids picked on us so that I thought I'd better be a boy as well as Ralph. And we had these clothes at Red Deer Lodge. I make as good a boy as he does a girl.”

”Say!” asked Neale O'Neil, vastly interested, ”you two stopped a week at the village on the ice and fished, didn't you?”

”Yes,” said Rowena.

”And you were girls there?”

”Yes.”

”Well,” said Neale, laughing now, ”what I want to know is, which of you it was that thrashed those two boys that tried to steal your set-lines?”

”That was Rowena!” croaked Ralph from the bed. ”I acted just like a girl ought to and let them take the lines; but Rowena fought them, and licked them good, too!”

There was a deal of talk after that, but most of it was done following the arrival of the party at Red Deer Lodge. As soon as that had occurred, however, and Mrs. MacCall had heard Ralph cough and heard about the itching, she made an examination.

”There!” she declared, half an hour later after she had put the boy between blankets and given him a hot drink, ”I might have known something would happen if we came up to this out-of-the-world place.”

”I should think something had happened!” murmured Ruth, who still held Dot in her lap and hugged her as though she could not let her go again. ”What is the matter with Ralph?”

”Chickenpox. And it's coming out thick on him right this minute.”

”Oh! Oh! _Chickens?_” gasped the smallest Corner House girl. ”Are they roosting on him? No wonder Rafe scratched.”