The next day Nancy was to try the new horse; but she was not so good a rider as Beatrice, and the astute Buck, guessing that fact at once, took liberties with her that she did not enjoy. She gave her sister a lively account of her misadventures in the evening when they were going to bed.
“I wanted to ride up to your cabin, but Buck had other plans. I saw most of the town and part of this end of the valley and then the pony decided to take me home. Some workmen, coming in from the place where they are digging that big ditch, scowled and stared at me and I didn’t like it. I sometimes wonder a little why Aunt Anna wanted to come here.”
“Who was with her when she was here long ago?” Beatrice asked. “It seems to me that I heard her talking of it to dad, and that she said something about her—her brother.”
“Her brother—why, she hasn’t any but our father,” objected Nancy. “If she had one he would be our uncle, and we would know him. It couldn’t be!”
Beatrice was thinking so deeply that she paused in brushing her hair.
“It does seem as though I remembered about some such person, oh, a very long time ago when we were little. It was some one younger than father or Aunt Anna, with yellow hair like hers. He used to come up to the nursery to play with us, and then all of a sudden he didn’t come any more and no one talked about him, so I just forgot.”
“It is very puzzling,” returned Nancy. “Perhaps we might write home about it, but it would never do to worry Aunt Anna with asking her. Meanwhile we will sleep on it, for it is time to go to bed.”
Sleeping on it, however, was the one thing that they did not do. Nancy had put out the light and was putting up the curtains when she aroused her drowsy sister with a sudden cry:
They stood together at the open window, startled and terrified by what they saw. The big hall in the next block was plainly visible, with its shutters down and its door wide open, as though the air within had become close and stifling beyond endurance. The place was still packed with men, but no orderly company now. They were all standing, some of them had climbed upon the benches, and every one seemed to be shouting at once. In the depths of the building, almost beyond where they could see, somebody was waving a red flag. Presently a group of men came rushing down the steps, then more and more, until the street was filled with an irregular, shouting throng, waving hats, bandannas, and banners and shrieking together, so many of them in foreign tongues that it was impossible to guess what they said.