“Well, let’s look for chestnuts,” proposed Nan.
With sticks the children began poking among the leaves, turning them over, for the little brown nuts, when the frost has popped them out of their prickly shells, have a great trick of hiding under the leaves.
“Oh, I’ve found one!” cried Nan. “Two—three! Oh, Bert, I’ve found three!”
She held out her hand with three shining brown nuts in it.
“Ought to be a lot more than that here,” said Bert, still poking away among the leaves. “There’s lots of trees and fresh burrs here. I guess the squirrels and chipmunks have been here too.”
“Oh, I’ve found two more! I’m beating you!” laughed Nan, as she picked up more nuts.
“I’ve found one, anyhow, and it’s a big one,” cried Bert, as he picked up his first. “But there aren’t as many as I thought there would be.”
The children continued to pick up a few nuts at a time, but there were not so many scattered over the ground as the lumberman had led them to expect.
“There’s the chap who’s been taking the nuts!” suddenly cried Bert.
“Who?” asked Nan, looking up after stooping to pick two of the brown prizes from a bursted burr.
“That squirrel!” cried Bert, pointing to one of the big-tailed gray fellows, sitting on a tree and looking down at the Bobbsey twins. “He and the chipmunks can soon clean up a chestnut grove.”
Just then a red squirrel, one of the most noisy chatterers of the woods, caught sight of the children and began to “scold” them. Oh, what a racket he made, his thin tail jerking from side to side as he gave his shrill cries! Bert and Nan laughed at him.
“He’s had his share of nuts,” said Bert, “and he’s mad ’cause we’re taking some, I guess. But we aren’t getting as many as we’d like.”
“No,” agreed Nan. “Maybe if we go on a little farther we’ll find more.”
“We’ll try,” agreed Bert and, almost before they knew it, the two children had wandered some distance from the place where Mr. Denton had told them to stop.
“Oh, look! There’s a pile of nuts here!” cried Nan, reaching another grove of chestnut trees. “The squirrels haven’t been here yet! Goodie!”
This was evident, for it did not take long, poking among the dried leaves, to show that the chestnuts were quite thick on the ground. In a short time Bert and Nan had half filled the salt bags they had brought with them to hold their spoils of the woods.
“Oh, this is great!” cried Nan, straightening up after four or five minutes of picking nuts from the ground.
“A little more of this and we’ll have enough,” said her brother.
But just then Nan looked up at the sky, which she could see through the overhead trees, and what she saw in the heavens made her exclaim:
“Bert, I believe it’s going to storm! Look at the clouds! And it’s getting ever so much colder, too!”
Indeed there was a chill in the air that had not been present when the Bobbsey twins started out that morning.
“Well, we’ll go back in a few minutes,” Bert suggested. But a little while after he had said this, there was a quick darkening of the air, the wind began to blow, and, so suddenly as to startle the children, they found themselves enveloped in such a blinding, driving squall of snow that they could not see ten feet on either side!
“Oh, Bert!” cried Nan. “It’s a blizzard! Oh, shall we ever get back to Cedar Camp and to mother?”
CHAPTER XI
Old Mrs. Bimby
“Pooh!” exclaimed Bert Bobbsey, as he ran through the half-blinding snowstorm toward Nan. “This isn’t anything! It’s only what they call a squall. I s’pose they call it that because the wind howls, or squalls, like a baby. Anyhow, I’m not afraid! It’s fun, I think!”
By this time he had reached Nan’s side, the two having been separated when the sudden storm burst. And now that Nan saw Bert near her and noticed that he had his bag of lunch, as she had hers, she took heart and said:
“Well, maybe it won’t be so bad if we can find a place to stay, and can eat our dinner.”
“Of course we can!” cried Bert. “There’s lots of places to stay in these woods. We can find a hollow tree! I’ll look for one!”
“Oh, don’t!” cried Nan, as Bert moved away from her. “I don’t want to go into a hollow tree. There might be owls in ’em!”
“Well, that’s so,” admitted Bert. “I’m not afraid of owls,” he said quickly, “but of course their claws could get tangled in your hair. I’ll look for another place—or I can make a lean-to. That’s what the lumbermen and hunters do.”
“I think it would be just as easy to get under one of the big, green Christmas trees,” suggested Nan. “Look, hardly any snow falls under them.”
She pointed to a large cedar tree near them, and, as you may have noticed if you were ever in the woods where these trees grow, scarcely any snow drifts under their low-hanging branches.
“That would be a regular tent for us,” said Nan.
“Yes,” agreed Bert, peering through the storm at the tree toward which his sister pointed. “We could get under one of those. But I think maybe we’d better not stand still. Let’s walk on.”
“But toward home!” suggested Nan. “We oughtn’t to go any farther gathering nuts, Bert.”
“No, I guess not,” he agreed. “Anyhow, we have quite a lot. We’ll start back for Cedar Camp. And when we get hungry we’ll stop under a Christmas tree and eat. I’m beginning to feel hungry now,” and Bert felt in his overcoat pocket to make sure that the lunch, which he had put there, was still safe. It was, he was glad to find, and Nan had hers.
“Yes, we’ll eat in a little while,” she said. “But we’d better start back to camp.”
So the two older Bobbsey twins started off in the blinding snowstorm, little realizing that they were going directly away from camp instead of toward it. The wind whipped the snow into their faces, so that they could see only a little way in advance. And as they were in a strange woods, with only a small path leading back to camp, it is no wonder they became lost.
But we must not forget that we have left Flossie and Freddie, the smaller Bobbsey twins, in trouble. In playing sawmill Freddie had tipped Flossie out of the wheelbarrow, and the little girl had rolled down the slippery pine-needle hill into the stream just above the dam.
“Come quick! Come quick!” Freddie had cried. “Flossie’ll go over the waterfall! Oh, hurry, somebody!”
He knew enough about waterfalls to understand that they were dangerous; that once a boat or a person got into the current above the falls they would be pulled along, and cast over, to drop on the rocks below.
Poor Flossie was too frightened to cry. Besides, as she fell in her head went under the water, and you can’t call out when that happens. Flossie could only gurgle.
Luckily, however, there were several lumbermen on the bank of the stream, floating the logs down to be snaked out by the hook and chain, and sawed into boards. One of these men, Jake Peterson, was nearest to Flossie when the little girl tumbled into the stream.
“I’ll get you out!” cried Mr. Peterson.
He dropped the big iron-pointed pole with which he was pushing logs and ran toward the little girl, while Freddie, trying to do all he could, slid down the slippery hill, as it was a quicker way down than by running.
Into the water with his big rubber boots waded Mr. Peterson, and it was not a quarter of a minute after Flossie had fallen in before she was lifted out.
“Oh! Oh!” she managed to gasp and gurgle, as she caught her breath, after swallowing some of the ice-cold water. “Oh, am I dr-dr-drowned?”
“I should say not!” answered Mr. Peterson. “You’ll be all right. I’ll take you to mother.”
By this time Mrs. Bobbsey and Mrs. Baxter had rushed out of the log cabin, and Tom Case came from his sawmill. Several other lumbermen, hearing Freddie’s excited cries, came running up, but there was nothing for them to do, as Flo
ssie was already rescued.
“What has happened?” cried Mrs. Bobbsey, as she saw her little girl, dripping wet, in the arms of Mr. Peterson.
“She fell in,” explained the lumberman. “She wasn’t in more than a few seconds, though. All she needs is dry clothes!”
“I—I dumped her in!” sobbed Freddie. “But I didn’t mean to. We were playin’ sawmill with the wheelbarrow, and I gave Flossie a ride, an’ I slipped on the pine needles, and she rolled down the hill.”
“Never mind, dear! You didn’t mean to,” answered his mother, soothingly. “We must get Flossie to bed and keep her warm so she won’t take cold.”
With Mrs. Baxter’s help, this was soon done, and in a short time after the accident Flossie was sitting up in a warm bed, sipping hot lemonade and eating crackers, while Freddie sat near her, doing the same.
Unless Flossie caught cold there would be no serious results from the accident. But Mrs. Bobbsey used it as a lesson for Freddie, telling him always to be careful when on a pine-needle-covered hill, near the water especially.
Flossie was enjoying her importance now, and she was begging her mother to tell her a story, in which request Freddie joined, when Mrs. Bobbsey, looking out of the window, was surprised to see how dark the clouds had become all of a sudden.
“I believe we are going to have a snowstorm,” she said. And a few minutes later the snow came down so thick and fast that the lumbermen had to stop work, because they could not see where to drive the horses, nor to guide the logs down the stream to the mill.
“My, what a storm!” exclaimed Mrs. Bobbsey, as she went to the window to look out. “A regular blizzard!”
“We can have fun coasting down hill!” laughed Freddie. “And Flossie can be out to-morrow, can’t she, Mother?”
“Yes, I think so,” answered Mrs. Bobbsey, hardly thinking of what she was saying. “I hope Bert and Nan started back from the chestnut grove before this storm broke,” she said. “If they are out in this it will be dreadful! I must see if daddy has come back,” she added, for her husband had gone to see about the missing Christmas trees. “If Bert and Nan are out in this storm they will lose their way, I’m sure.”
And this is just what Bert and Nan did. Clutching their bundles of lunch, and with their bags of chestnuts in their hands, the two older Bobbsey twins were struggling onward through the storm. They were warmly dressed, and it was not as cold as weather they had often been out in before. But they had seldom been out in a worse storm.
“Hadn’t we—maybe we’d better stop and rest and eat something, Bert,” suggested Nan, after a while.
“Maybe we had,” he agreed, half out of breath because it was hard work walking uphill and against the wind. And almost before they knew it the children were going up a hill, though they did not remember having come down one on their trip to the chestnut grove.
They found a sheltered place under a big cedar tree, and, crawling beneath its protecting branches, they sat on the bare ground, where there was, as yet, no snow. The white flakes swirled and drifted all about them, but the thick branches of the tree, growing low down, made a place like a green tent.
“It’s nice in here,” said Bert, as he opened his bundle of lunch.
“Yes, but we ought to be at home,” said Nan.
“We’ll go home as soon as we eat a little,” said her brother.
But after they had each eaten a sandwich and some cookies, and Bert had cracked a few chestnuts between his teeth and had found them rather too cold and raw to be good, the twins decided to go on.
Out into the storm they went, away from the shelter of the friendly tree. The storm was worse, if anything, and, without knowing it, Bert and Nan had become completely turned around. Every step they took carried them farther and farther away from their home camp. And they had journeyed quite a distance from the cabin before finding any chestnuts.
“Oh, Bert!” Nan exclaimed after a while, half sobbing, “I can’t go a step farther. The snow is so thick, and it’s so hard to walk in. And the wind blows it in my face, and I’m cold! I can’t go another step!”
“That’s too bad!” Bert exclaimed. “Maybe we’re almost back to camp, Nan.”
“It doesn’t look so,” his sister answered, trying to peer about through the swirling flakes.
“Wait a minute!” suddenly cried Bert, as there came a lull in the blast of wind. “I think I see something—a cabin or a house.”
“Maybe it’s our cabin,” suggested Nan, “though I don’t remember any of the trees around here. There aren’t any cut down here as there are in camp.”
“Well, I see something, anyhow,” and Bert pointed to the left, off through the driving flakes. “Let’s go there, Nan.”
Through the storm the children struggled, hand in hand. They reached a log cabin—a lonely log cabin it was, standing all by itself in the midst of a little clearing in the woods.
“This isn’t our camp, Bert!” said Nan.
“No,” the boy admitted. “But somebody lives here. I see smoke coming from the chimney. I’m going to knock.”
With chilled fingers Bert pounded on the cabin door.
“Who’s there?” asked a woman’s voice above the racket of the storm.
“Two of the Bobbsey twins!” answered Nan, not stopping to think that everyone might not know her and her brother by this name.
“Please let us in!” begged Bert. “We’re from Cedar Camp! Who are you?”
“I’m Mrs. Bimby,” was the answer, but neither Bert nor Nan recognized the name. A moment later the cabin door was opened, and an old woman confronted them. She looked at the two children for a moment; then, “Did you bring any news of Jim?” she asked.
CHAPTER XII
Mr. Bobbsey Is Worried
Bert and Nan Bobbsey stood on the step of the log cabin, while Mrs. Bimby, the old woman, held open the door. The snow blew swirling in around her, and a wave of grateful warmth seemed to rush out as if to wrap itself around the cold twins. For a moment they stood there, and Bert was just beginning to wonder if the old woman was going to shut the door in the faces of his sister and himself.
“Did you bring any news of Jim?” asked old Mrs. Bimby.
“Jim?” repeated Bert.
“Do you mean Jim Denton, the foreman at Cedar Camp?” asked Nan.
“No, child! I mean my Jim—Jim Bimby. He went off to town just before this awful storm. But land sakes! here I am talking and keeping you out in the cold. Come in!”
It was cold. Bert and Nan were beginning to feel that now, for the storm was growing worse, and it was now late afternoon. The sun was beginning to go down, though of course it could not be seen on account of the snow and clouds. The Bobbsey twins had wandered farther and longer than they had thought. But at last they had found a place of shelter.
“It’s just like me to keep you standing there while I talk,” said Mrs. Bimby. “I’m sorry. But I’m so worried about Jim that I reckon I don’t know what I’m doing. Come in and get warm, and I’ll give you something to eat.”
“We’ve got something to eat, thank you,” said Nan. “But we would like to get warm,” and she followed Bert inside the log cabin, as Mrs. Bimby stepped aside to make room for them to enter.
“Got something to eat, have you?” questioned the old woman. “Well, you’re lucky, that’s all I’ve got to say. I’ve only a little, but I expect Jim back any minute with more, though a dollar don’t buy an awful lot these days.”
“Does Jim live here?” asked Bert, as he walked over to a stove, in which a fire of wood was burning, sending out a grateful heat.
“Of course he lives here,” said Mrs. Bimby. “He’s my husband. He’s a logger—a lumberman.”
“Oh, maybe he works for my father!” exclaimed Nan. “Mr. Bobbsey, you know. He owns part of Cedar Camp.”
“No, I don’t know him,” said Mrs. Bimby, “though I’ve heard of Cedar Camp. They got a lot of Christmas trees out of there.”
“That
’s what we came up about,” explained Bert. “Some Christmas trees my father bought to sell didn’t come to Lakeport, and he came up here to see about them. We came with him—and my mother and the other twins.”
“Good land! are there more of you?” asked Mrs. Bimby in surprise. “You two are twins, for a fact. But—”
“There’s Flossie and Freddie,” interrupted Nan. “We left them back in camp while we went after chestnuts.”
“We got some, too,” added Bert. “But we sort of got lost in the storm. Do you s’pose your husband could take us back to Cedar Camp?” he asked Mrs. Bimby. “My father will pay him,” he said, quickly, as he saw Mrs. Bimby shaking her head.
“Maybe Mr. Bimby works at the sawmill,” suggested Nan.
“No,” said the old woman, “Jim is a logger and wood cutter, but he doesn’t work at Cedar Camp. That’s too far off for him to go to and get back from.”
“Too far off!” echoed Nan, and she began to have a funny feeling, as she told Bert afterward.
“Yes,” resumed Mrs. Bimby. “Cedar Camp is away over on the other side of the hills. You’re a long way from home. You must have taken the wrong road in the storm.”
“I—I guess we did,” admitted Bert. “But couldn’t your husband take us back?”
Again Mrs. Bimby shook her head.
“Jim, my husband, isn’t home,” she said. “He went over to town just before the storm to get us something to eat. But now I don’t see how he’s going to get back,” and she went to a window to look out at the storm.
It was getting much worse, as Bert and Nan could see. The wind howled around the corners of the log cabin of Jim Bimby, the logger, and the blast whistled down the chimney, even blowing sparks out around the door of the wood-burning stove.
“Yes, it’s a bad storm,” went on the old woman. “I wish Jim was back, and with some victuals to eat. When you twins knocked I thought it was Jim. I wish he’d come back, but he’s an old man, and he may fall down in the snow and not be able to get up. He isn’t as strong as he used to be. I’m certainly worried about Jim!”
The Bobbsey Twins Megapack Page 165