“Yes. He's got the tic-del-rew,” declared Margaret, rather unfeelingly. “Aunt Matildy says he's allus creakin' round like a rusty gate-hinge.”
“Why! That doesn't sound very nice,” objected Nan. “Don't you love your grandfather?”
“Not much,” said this perfectly frank young savage. “He's so awfully wizzled.”
“Yes. His face is all wizzled up like a dried apple.”
“But you love your aunt Matilda?” gasped Nan.
“Well, she's wizzled some,” confessed Margaret. Then she said: “I don't like faces like hern and Marm Sherwood's. I like your face. It's smooth.”
Nan had noticed that this half-wild girl was of beautifully fair complexion herself, and aside from her pop eyes was quite petty. But she was a queer little thing.
“You've been to Chicago, ain't you?” asked Margaret suddenly.
“We came through Chicago on our way up here from my home. We stayed one night there,” Nan replied.
“Bigger'n the Forks?” queried Margaret doubtfully.
“Why, it is much, much bigger,” said Nan, hopeless of making one so densely ignorant understand anything of the proportions of the metropolis of the lakes.
“That's what I told Bob,” Margaret said. “He don't believe it. Bob's my brother, but there never was such a dunce since Adam.”
Nan had to laugh. The strange girl amused her. But Margaret said something, too, that deeply interested the visitor at Pine Camp before she ended her call, making her exit as she had her entrance, by the window.
“I reckon you never seen this house of your uncle's before, did you?” queried Margaret at one point in the conversation.
“Didn't you uster visit 'em when they lived at Pale Lick?”
“No. I don't remember that they ever lived anywhere else beside here.”
“Yes, they did. I heard Gran'ther tell about it. But mebbe 'twas before you an' me was born. It was Pale Lick, I'm sure. That's where they lost their two other boys.”
“What two other boys?” asked Nan, amazed.
“Didn't you ever hear tell you had two other cousins?”
“Well, you did,” said Margaret importantly. “And when Pale Lick burned up, them boys was burned up, too.”
“Lots of folks was burned. Injun Pete come near being burned up. He ain't been right, I reckon, since. And I reckon that's where Marm Sherwood got that scar on the side of her neck.”