[Illustration: “THE INDIAN, HELPING HIMSELF TO A HUGE HANDFUL OF THE SOAP, WASHED HIS HANDS SOLEMNLY”]
As Remember watched him, her heart beat fast indeed. “As soon as he finishes he will take me away,” she thought.
Slowly the Indian dried his hands on the towel she gave him. Then he picked up the crock of soft soap. He set it on his shoulder. Pointing to the pair of turkeys that he had laid on the table to show that he was giving them to Remember in exchange for the soap, he strode out of the door and was soon lost to sight in the wood’s path.
Remember dropped down in a chair and could scarcely believe she was really safe. A quick clatter of hoofs roused her. She darted to the door.
Yes, it was indeed they; her father riding in front with her mother in the saddle behind.
“Just in time for Thanksgiving!” they cried as they jumped down and embraced Remember.
“And I’m here, too, and we have a pair of turkeys for dinner,” Remember said, half smiles and half tears, as she told them her strange adventure.
“If you will but help me, Hannah, as a little girl of ten should, with the candle dipping you will forget to fret all the day long about the home coming of father and Nathaniel,” Mistress Wadsworth said, laying a kind hand on the bent head of the little daughter.
All through the long, gray afternoon Hannah had looked out of the diamond-shaped panes of the window, past the fields of dried cornstalks that looked as if they were peopled with ghosts in their garments of snow, and toward the forest of pointed, green firs beyond. She turned from the window now, as her mother spoke to her, and looked up bravely, trying to smile.
“You are quite as anxious about dear brother Nathaniel and father as I am,” she said. “It is now two weeks since they started away with the sledge to bring us back the wood for the winter. Father said that it would take him no longer than ten days at the utmost. Brother Nathaniel is only twelve, and young for so hard a journey. There have been storms, and there are Indians—” a sob caught the little girl’s voice.
It was Mistress Wadsworth’s turn to look out now with saddened eyes through the window and into the falling twilight of the New England winter.
“Your father said that he would be home for Christmas Day,” she said, “and he will keep his word unless some ill befalls them. In the meantime, we will make the candles. Then the house will be brighter to welcome them than when we burn only pine knots. To-night, Hannah, we will measure the candle wicking for we shall be busy the greater part of to-morrow with the dipping.”