Chapter VII: The Queer Man

“Mother,” said Isabel with all the emphasis she could get into her voice, “we want to sneak!”

“Do you, dear? And can’t you?” asked Mrs. Lindsay with no apparent shock.

Mr. Lindsay looked up from his paper with a laugh in his eyes; they were at breakfast and Isabel had followed up her announcement by corking her lips with the biggest, most luscious strawberry on her plate.

“Just a general sneak, or a special sneak, do you crave, Miss Lindsay? Is it merely that you feel sneaking, or do you wish to sneak away from something?” Isabel’s father inquired.

Isabel always said that she “loved the way her father treated her.” He used toward her a playful, exaggerated politeness that delighted her soul; needless to say, his love for this sole little girl left to him was far beyond expression in words.

“Well, Mr. Lindsay,” said Isabel, hastily disposing of the big strawberry and replying after his manner of asking, “it’s a special sneak. We want to get away to Château Branche without Kathie and Dolly. They’re nice, you know, but we did so like to be there by ourselves!”

“I realize that I don’t know what I’m talking about, but why you have to take on new members of your Lucky Four Club, if you’d rather not, is beyond me,” said Mr. Lindsay. “I suppose it’s because you are all girls, all but Mark, and he can’t behave as he would if he weren’t muffled in girls, so to speak. Now, if boys had a club and didn’t care about new members, they’d say so, straight from the shoulder, not ill-naturedly, but honestly, and the would-be members would see that they were within their rights and take themselves off, unoffended. But you seem to feel obliged to be wax, and give in. It will end in a fuss--you see if it doesn’t! I want you to learn to take a stand firmly, but amiably, my dear, and, having taken it, stand pat on that stand!” Mr. Lindsay shook his head, as if this weakness in his Isa annoyed him.

“But they do want awfully to belong,” said Isabel, “and it seems so mean to keep lovely things to yourself--though we are four selves! Prue says we might as well take people to live with us because we have nice homes.”

“Prue is a sensible little person,” Mrs. Lindsay said. “She’s always obliging, but she can tell clearly which are the boundaries of her own fields, to use a figure that seems to express what I mean. Prue is just, in a common-sense way, while my little lass gets weak-kneed, fearing to hurt some one when she steps out.”

Mrs. Lindsay smiled most tenderly at Isabel, plainly finding her weakness very lovable.

“Run right away as soon as you have finished those berries; get Prue and the Hawthorne house pair, and climb up into Château Branche so early that nobody else will be there--for a while, at least. That’s my advice this perfect June morning,” Mrs. Lindsay added.

“And pull our legs up after us, so they won’t show?” cried Isabel gayly. “All right, motherums; you’re a dear to help me sneak.”

“There is a cake,” remarked Mrs. Lindsay slowly. “A fresh, round, two-story-and-basement cake, made late yesterday for a possible trip to Château Branche. I think I’ll get it and put it in a box, with a knife to cut it, and send it with you on your sneaking trip.”

“Oh, mother!” cried Isabel, rapidly eating her juicy strawberries as her mother went in pursuit of the cake.

She came back in a moment bearing it aloft on the palm of her outspread hand. Isabel’s back was toward her, but she heard the rustle of paraffine paper and she sniffed the air as Bunkie might have done, as Bunkie did do, in fact, for he lay at Isabel’s feet, under the table.

“Smells like fudge!” Isabel said.

“Wise little nose! It _is_ fudge; fudge icing and middle coatings!” cried Mrs. Lindsay, setting the cake where Isabel could see it.

She folded the paraffine paper over and around the cake and dropped it deftly into a box that might easily have been too small for it, and was so exactly the right size that it took skill to get the cake into it unharmed.

“I’m ready!” cried Isabel, hastily taking a long drink of water and folding her napkin with her left hand as she did so.

“May I walk with you, Miss Lindsay, as far as Miss Wayne’s door?” asked Mr. Lindsay, pushing back his chair.

As “Miss Wayne’s door” was the next door, the Wayne and Lindsay places adjoining, this did not seem too much to ask, and Isabel giggled as she tried to consent with dignity.

Hatless and happy, the cake in its box, resting on one arm, Isabel started out beside her father and pulled his head down to kiss him when they paused at the Wayne gate.

“Come on, Prue; we’re going early to have a little while all to ourselves, if Kathie and Dolly should come,” Isabel called, standing in the hall and trusting to luck that Prue would hear her.

“I’ll telephone Mark to be at Château Branche with Poppy when we get there, save time going after them,” said Prue, the practical, ringing up the Central as she spoke from the bend in the hall where the telephone table stood, and where she happened to be when Isabel came in.

After this was done, the two little girls sallied forth, Bunkie running ahead and pretending to startle himself with important discoveries along the way. They proceeded to Château Branche by a short cut into the woods.

Mark and Poppy were there waiting for them, thanks to Prue’s foresight, when they reached the great pine in which Mr. Hawthorne had built their house.

“We’ll get right up,” said Prue, beginning to climb the footholds which led into Château Branche.

Isabel handed up the cake to Prue and followed; Mark and Poppy seemed less to climb than to run up, like nuthatches, so agile they both were at this sort of feat.

“Ah!” Mark drew a long breath of delight. “It seems to smell more piney so early in the morning. Isn’t it great to be up in these dark branches?”

“Hark!” whispered Isabel, holding up her hand.

A song so sweet, so liquid, so heart-stirring, that it was like the voice of the woods, of the sky, the green leaves, of June itself, pierced the stillness from a point near at hand.

“Oh, it’s the veery!” whispered Mark, his eyes dilating. He had been taught by his father, wise in woods lore, the note of nearly every bird, and could himself imitate many of them, calling around him the little feathered denizens of the trees.

“It’s a thrush; the veery,” Mark repeated, and the four sat so still that they hardly seemed to breathe, listening to this exquisite song.

At last the veery flew away. The children saw the brown body come out from an oak that stood next to their pine, brighten as it crossed the sunshine, and disappear.

“Why do you sort of want to cry when things are nice that way?” asked Poppy.

“I think because they don’t last,” said Isabel, the poet, who always saw deeper than the others.

“You see one reason we don’t care about having Kathie,” said Prue unexpectedly, for the rest had forgotten all about Kathie for the moment, “is because she always wants to be doing something. When we come here we--we--well, we’re just _here_, don’t you see? We don’t want to do one thing but--be here.”

“I do, now,” said Poppy. She laughed apologetically, but she said her say. “It’s awful early after breakfast, but I want to try Isa’s cake right off.”

“’Course!” cried Isabel, getting it out. “It doesn’t matter when we eat it; it’s when it tastes good. There!”

She produced the cake, its icing slightly rubbed, and thrust the knife into its creamy middle. “Cut it, Prue.”

“Cut it yourself.” Prue promptly declined the honor. “It’s yours, and besides, I won’t; I’d jig it.”

“Sakes, don’t jig it! What is jigging it?” Mark laughed at Prue.

“Hacking,” explained Prue, watching Isabel, who was slowly penetrating the center of the three layers, her head on one side, her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, her wrist held stiff, her face expressive of the deepest concentration and anxiety.

“There, sir!” Isabel exclaimed at last. “If I get one piece cut I won’t mind the rest. Catch it, somebody. You, Pops!”

Poppy needed no urging. She held out both her hands, palms up, side by side, to receive the thick pointed piece which Isabel deposited in them.

“Um-m-m! Land, what cake!” Poppy tried to say, rolling up her eyes at her first mouthful, but because her mouth was indeed full, what she really said, all in one word, was: “Lawbake!”

In a few minutes there was complete silence in Château Branche because all four of its tenants were merrily--and also messily--devouring great wedges of a cake so creamily fresh and soft, so thickly spread with fudge-filling, that talking was out of the question.

Consequently any one coming along through the woods, past the tree, would not have suspected it of being different from other trees, inasmuch as it was occupied by children instead of birds. And some one was coming along! Mark was the first to spy him. He leaned forward and touched Prue and Isabel and Poppy, signaling them to keep quiet. Poppy nearly cried out, but Prue, with great presence of mind, clapped a fudgey hand over her mouth.

The four children peered down through the branch, which Mark pulled forward, the better to conceal them.

They saw a small man with a queer, thin, wavering sort of face. He had dark eyes, that roved perpetually from side to side, but never were raised, for which the tree dwellers were duly grateful. His nose was so long and sharp that, set in the middle of his thin, narrow face, it lent itself to the children’s first thought of him as being some sort of wild creature. His short body was painfully thin; his shoulders were high; it took a few minutes for the children to discover that he was slightly deformed, one shoulder higher than the other, his back a little curved.

The queer little man seemed to have no plan as to the movements which he was restlessly making. He walked short distances in every direction, returning to the pine tree. Each time he started off the children hoped that he was going on, away from there, but he returned to the pine tree as if it were a magnet that drew him.

To their great terror, the children soon discovered that he was talking to himself. It struck them as past bearing that this queer little man should talk to himself alone, as he believed himself, in the middle of the woods. Stray words came up to them; he spoke too low for them to hear many.

“The brook,” he said. “Over there. Nice brook. Nice place. Should think they would live here, want to.”

Did he mean themselves? the children wondered. No one lived beside the lonely little brook that ran, talking to itself, much as this queer man did, near Château Branche all day and every day.

Isabel and Poppy were frightened almost out of their wits. Prue was frightened, too, as was Mark, but Mark was on fire with curiosity, and Prue’s imagination did not build all sorts of awful fancies upon the deformed creature as Isabel’s did. Poppy was so excitable that anything so out of the ordinary as this adventure would be sure to wind her up to the highest pitch.

“Better rest,” they heard the queer man say, and with that he lay down on the carpet of brown needles which for years the great tree had spread at its own feet.

“How shall we get away?” Isabel signaled to Mark.

Mark shook his head; he had no idea.

Presently, after a time of utter stillness and waiting, during which eight young legs and arms developed prickles of nervousness and grew numb from keeping so long in one position--no one dared to move--the children in the tree saw Kathie and Dolly coming through the woods, on their way to join them.

“Mercy me, he may kill them!” groaned Isabel, white to her lips and almost forgetting caution for themselves.

The queer little man sat up, listened; got quickly on his feet, listened.

With unspeakable relief the children saw that he was himself afraid of being seen. Of being caught? They could not tell what he feared, but he was evidently on the alert to get away unseen.

Their own fear vanished under this welcome discovery.

Mark grew positively rash. He had a beautiful, flexible singing voice, which, though it was still a high soprano, was capable of doing many queer feats. Dropping it low, Mark chanted in a way that even his companions found rather awful: “Get out, get out, get out of here!”

The queer man gave one wild glance all around him, and then he acted on the command. He got out of there, running like a deer, dodging around trees, looking over his shoulder, but not slackening speed, till, in a moment, he was gone.

Kathie and Dolly had not seen him; he had chanced to take the opposite direction from the one in which they were coming.

Isabel, Prue, Poppy and Mark lost no time in coming down from Château Branche.

“How could you, Mark; how dared you?” Isabel panted as she came down backward, very fast, talking as she came. “Suppose he hadn’t run? Suppose he had killed us!”

“I thought I’d try it before he saw Kathie and Dolly. You couldn’t tell what he might have done to them,” said Mark, by this time in high glee.

“What? Who?” demanded Kathie as she and Dolly came up in time to hear this answer.

All talking at once, the four children told the story of the queer little man. The story lost nothing of mystery and terror in the telling.

“Well, no more Château Branche for me, thank you!” said Kathie decidedly, as the tale ended.

“Not much!” Dolly supplemented her.

“We’ll be members in the club room, come there, I mean, but not up in that tree; not ever!” Kathie continued.

“But are the woods spoiled?” asked Prue piteously.

“That’s according as you look at it,” said Mark sagely, trying to catch Prue’s eye to convey to her that if Kathie and Dolly so looked at it the Lucky Four might be the gainers.

“I think it was perfectly dreadful to sit there, penned up there, and see that man lying at the foot of the tree, so we couldn’t get down, just as if he was a dog and we were ’possums!” said Prue. “Why, where is Bunkie? He didn’t bark!”

For the first time since she had owned him Bunkie had left Isabel and gone home.

“It’s a pretty queer time, every way,” said Isabel gravely. “Here, have some cake, Kathie and Dolly. Mother gave it to us, and I need some more after this fearful experience.”