Part 25 (1/2)

”This is a retainer,” the gentleman wrote. ”I am much interested in your account of the lame boy's specimens. I want the strangely marked moth in any case, and the check pays for an option on it until I can come and see his specimens personally.”

Nan went that very afternoon to the tamarack swamp to tell the Vanderwillers this news and give Toby the check. She knew poor Corson would be delighted, for now he could purchase the longed-for silk dress for his grandmother.

The day was so hot and the way so long that Nan was glad to sit down when she reached the edge of the sawdust strip, to rest and cool off before attempting this unshaded desert. A cardinal bird--one of the sauciest and most brilliant of his saucy and brilliant race, flitted about her as she sat upon a log.

”You pretty thing!” crooned Nan. ”If it were not wicked I'd wish to have you at home in a cage. I wish--”

She stopped, for in following the flight of the cardinal her gaze fastened upon a most surprising thing off at some distance from the sawdust road. A single dead tree, some forty feet in height and almost limbless, stood in solemn grandeur in the midst of the sawdust waste. It had been of no use to the woodcutters and they had allowed the sh.e.l.l of the old forest monarch to stand. Now, from its broken top, Nan espied a thin, faint column of blue haze rising.

It was the queerest thing! It was not mist, of course and she did not see how it could be smoke. There was no fire at the foot of the tree, for she could see the base of the bole plainly. She even got up and ran a little way out into the open in order to see the other side of the dead tree.

The sky was very blue, and the air was perfectly still. Almost Nan was tempted to believe that her eyes played her false. The column was almost the color of the sky itself, and it was thin as a veil.

How could there be a fire in the top of that tall tree?

”There just isn't! I don't believe I see straight!” declared Nan to herself, moving on along the roadway. ”But I'll speak to Toby about it.”

Chapter XXV. THE TEMPEST

Nan, however, did not mention to Toby the haze rising from the dead tree. In the first place, when she reached the little farm on the island in the tamarack swamp, old Toby Vanderwiller was not at home. His wife greeted the girl warmly, and Corson was glad to see her. When Nan spread the check before him and told him what it was for, and what he could do with so much money, the crippled boy was delighted.

It was a secret between them that the grandmother was to have the black silk dress that she had longed for all her married life; only Nan and Corson knew that Nan was commissioned to get the check cashed and buy the dress pattern at the Forks; or send to a catalogue house for it if she could not find a suitable piece of goods at any of the local stores.

Nan lingered, hoping that Toby would come home. It finally grew so late that she dared not wait longer. She had been warned by Aunt Kate not to remain after dusk in the swamp, nor had she any desire to do so.

Moreover there was a black cloud rolling up from the west. That was enough to make the girl hurry, for when it rained in the swamp, sometimes the corduroy road was knee deep in water.

The cloud had increased to such proportions when Nan was half way across the sawdust desert that she began to run. She had forgotten all about the smoking tree.

Not a breath of air was stirring as yet; but there was the promise of wind in that cloud. The still leaves on the bushes, the absence of bird life overhead, the lazy drone of insects, portended a swift change soon.

Nan was weather-wise enough to know that.

She panted on, stumbling through the loose sawdust, but stumbling equally in the ruts; for the way was very rough. This road was lonely enough at best; but it seemed more deserted than ever now.

A red fox, his tail depressed, shot past her, and not many yards away.

It startled Nan, for it seemed as though something dreadful was about to happen and the fox knew it and was running away from it.

She could not run as fast as the fox; but Nan wished that she could. And she likewise wished with all her heart that she would meet somebody.

That somebody she hoped would be Tom. Tom was drawing logs from some point near, she knew. A man down the river had bought some timber and they had been cut a few weeks before. Tom was drawing them out of the swamp for the man; and he had mentioned only that morning at breakfast that he was working within sight of the sawdust tract and the corduroy road.

Nan felt that she would be safe with big, slow Tom. Even the thought of thunder and lightning would lose some of its terrors if she could only get to Tom.

Suddenly she heard a voice shouting, then the rattle of chain harness.

The voice boomed out a stave of an old hymn:

”On Jordan's stormy bank I stand, And cast a wishful eye.”