Who ate the pink sweetmeat?

I looked at the shut-up house, and felt a good deal worse than when I thought he was running off with us.

“O Steeley,” says Mrar, “le’s go in and stay. I want to come home so bad!”

“Now you see what you done!” says I to the Whizzer. He was man grown, and I’s only ten years old, but he ought to knowed better than to made Mrar cry till the tears run down her chin.

I’d been to look at the house myself, but never said a word to her about it. Once at noon I slipped up there by the cornfields roundabout, and sat on the fence and thought about mother till I could hardly stand it. The house looked lonesomer than an old cabin about to fall; because an old cabin about to fall has forgot its folks, but all our things were locked up here, except what aunt Ibby and cousin Andy Sanders had carried off. Our sale was to be in January. The snow was knee-deep in the yard, and drifted even on the porch, but tracks showed where aunt Ibby walked when she got out a load of provisions and bedclothes. She had the front door key, and took even the blue-and-white coverlid with birds wove in, that I heard mother say was to be Mrar’s, and the canned fruit for fear it would freeze, when our cellar is warmer than their stove. She said to uncle Moze, when I was by unbeknown, that Mrar and me would have ten times as much property as her children, anyhow, and she ought to be paid more for keeping us. She might had our money, for all I cared, but I did not know how to stand her robbing things out of mother’s house, and wished the sale would come quick, and scatter them all.

The Whizzer leant his chin on his breast and looked pitiful out of his eyes at Mrar, for seemed like the tears had a notion to freeze on her face, only she kept them running down too fast; and he says:

“Let’s go into the house.”

“Oh, do, Steeley!” says Mrar, hugging my knee, for I was alongside the sled. “And I’ll cook all your dinners. And we’ll hang up our Christmas stockings every Sunday,” says she, “and aunt Ibby’s boys won’t durse to take away my lead pencil mother give me, and if you see them coming here, you’ll set Bounce on them.”

“Mrar,” says I, “we will go in and make a fire and act like mother’s just gone out to a neighbor’s.”

Then she begun to laugh, and one of her tears stuck to an in-spot that comes and goes in her face like it was dented with your finger.

“But now you mind,” I says, “if aunt Ibby or uncle Moze goes to whip us for this, you tell them I put you up to it and made you go along with me.”

Mrar looked scared.

“And you tell them,” says the Whizzer, lifting his wheel across the snow toward the gate, “that I put you both up to it and made you go along with me.”

I pulled Mrar over the drifts, and we went to the side door.

“Aunt Ibby’s got the big key,” I says, “and I’ll have to raise a window while you wait here.”

The windows were all locked down, but we went round and round till the one in the shed give way, and I crawled through and bursted the latch off the kitchen door. I breathed so fast it made my heart thump when I unlocked the side door and let the Whizzer and Mrar into the sitting-room. I noticed then he’d hung his wheel on the limb of a tree, for it glittered.

“Bounce ain’t here to jump on us, is he, Mrar?” says I.

“No; and he hates to stay at cousin Andy Sanders’s,” says she.

Bounce would come to the schoolhouse and kind of cry till I asked the master, “Please may I go out?” And then Bounce and me’d have a talk behind the schoolhouse, and I’d tell him I could not help it, and he’d own that he might live at aunt Ibby’s with us if he could only keep from chawing up their miserable yellow dogs; and we’d both feel better.

But I did miss him that minute I opened the door, when here he come like a house a-fire, and lit down on the floor panting and pounding his tail and laughing; and then he jumped up and pawed us in the dark till Mrar had to hold him round the neck to keep him still while I got a light. He must snuffed our tracks when we whizzed past cousin Andy Sanders’s.

I felt to the pantry and put my hand in the candle box, but aunt Ibby never left one. I knew there’s a piece in a candlestick in the shed cupboard, though. It burnt half out the night mother died. So I got it, and the Whizzer scraped a match, and lit the wick. The Whizzer and me set to, then, and brought in loads from the woodhouse. We built a fire clear up into the chimney, and Mrar took the broom, and swept all the dust into it. Bounce laid on the carpet and licked at us, and whacked his tail till we’s in a broad laugh.

The fire got me warmer than I’d been since mother died. The Whizzer took out a thick gold watch, and wound our clock and set it. Then he says:

“Let’s go over the house.”

And we did. I carried the candle, and Mrar and the dog went along.

The Whizzer looked in all the up-stairs presses, and opened the bureau drawers. I staid outside of the parlor, and Mrar and Bounce did too. I did not want to think of the sheet stretched in the corner, for it was not like mother under the sheet. But her picture hung up in there, and so did my father’s.

The Whizzer staid in with the candle a good while. I heard him going from one thing to another, and wondered what he was about. I’d rather gone out to the graveyard, though, and set on the fence watching mother’s and father’s graves, and heard the dry sumac bushes scrape together, than to stepped into the parlor. Father died a year before mother, but I didn’t like him the same as I did her.

Then we looked down cellar; and I thought I ought to tell the Whizzer about the provisions and bedclothes being taken out of the house, or he’d suppose mother never kept us nice. He smiled under his cap; and I found one jar of cand’ed honey behind some bar’ls where aunt Ibby overlooked it. We carried that up to the sitting-room. Mrar likes cand’ed honey better than anything.

Just as we come into the sitting-room, I heard somebody pound on the front door.

“They’re after us!” says Mrar.

“Let me see to it,” says the Whizzer.

So he stepped around the house, and came back with his wheel on his arm, and held the door open. The snow made out-doors light; and we saw a little fellow lead a horse and buggy through the yard into the barn lot, and he came right in, carrying a couple of baskets.

“All right, Sam,” says the Whizzer. “Put your horse in the stable, and then build a fire in the kitchen stove.”

The man he called Sam stopped to warm himself at our hearth, and I never saw such a looking creature before. He had a cap with a button on top of his head, and his hair was braided in a long tail behind. He laughed, and his eyes glittered; and they sloped up like a ladder set against the house. He was just as yellow as brass, and wore a cloth circular with big sleeves, but the rest of him looked like other folks. Mrar went back into the corner, and I noticed the Whizzer set his wheel against the wall, and I wondered if he’d left it out for a sign so the little yellow man would know where to stop.

The yellow man went out to his horse, and the Whizzer took off his cap and gloves and coat, and hung them in the sitting-room closet. He looked nice. His eyes snapped, and his hair was cut off close, except a brush right along the middle of his head. We set our chairs up to the fire, and I watched him and watched him.

“If you and that fellow travel together,” I says, “what makes him go in a buggy, and you on a wheel?”

“Oh, I like the bicycle,” says he. “I’ve run thousands of miles on it. I sent Sam out from San Francisco by the railroad, but I came through on the wheel. It took me three months.”

I thought he was a funny man, but I liked him, too.

When Sam came in from the stable, Mrar and I went to the kitchen and saw him cook supper. For one of the baskets was jam-full of vittles. He heated a roasted turkey, and made oyster soup and mashed potatoes and chopped cabbage. There were preserves the Whizzer called Scotch, and hot rolls, and jelly, and cold chicken, and little round cakes that melted in your mouth, and pickles, and nuts, and oranges; and we put the cand’ed honey on the table. The coffee smelt like Thanksgiving. Sam waited on us, and I eat till I’s ashamed. We never expected to have such a dinner in mother’s house any more.

When Mrar and I got down and begun to toss our oranges, the Whizzer told Sam to clear the things away and have his supper in the kitchen, and then to fix the beds as comfortable as he could. I’d made up my mind even if the Whizzer did travel ahead that Mrar and m’d stay there all night. Aunt Ibby’s would think we were at cousin Andy Sanders’s, and cousin Andy Sanders’s would think we were at aunt Ibby’s.

He sat in mother’s big chair before the fire and I felt willing. If it had been uncle Moze in the chair I wouldn’t felt willing. When a stick broke on the dog-irons we piled on more wood, and the clock ticked and struck nine, and I wished we’s never going away from there again. Mrar and I played and jumped, and he was blind man, and we had solid fun till we’s tired out. I showed him my books, for I never took one to uncle Moze’s. The boys there make you give up everything, and they lick their dirty thumbs to turn leaves.

Mrar and I stood and looked into the glass doors of the bookcase like we used to when the fire made them like a looking-glass, and there were our faces, hers round and wide between the eyes, and curly-headed; and mine long, and narrow between the eyes, and my hair in a black roach.

I told the Whizzer she better have a bed made down by the fire, considering the blankets and comforts were most all out a-visiting, and he guessed so, too; and Sam helped me bring lots of quilts and a feather tick from my old room to fix up the lounge with. Sam went into the kitchen and slept by the stove.

Then I undressed Mrar, and heard her prayers after I tucked her in. She’s six years old, and dressed herself before mother died, all but hooking up. I hooked her up, and sometimes she’d swell out for mischief when she ought to swell in. But now I tended to her entirely because she missed her mother. The Whizzer acted like he saw something in the fire, but when Mrar was asleep and I sat down by him, he pushed up my roach, and he says:

“You’re a very fatherly little fellow, Steele Pedicord.”

It put me in mind to ask him if he’s Sam’s father, but he laughed out loud at the notion.

“Sam’s smaller than you and he minds so well,” says I. “And I never saw a man that was so handy at girl’s work.”

“Sam is an excellent fellow,” says the Whizzer, “but I don’t deserve to have a Chinaman called my son.”

“Oh!” I says. “Is he a Chinaman? Well, I’ve read about them, but I never saw one before.”

Then I concluded to ask the Whizzer what his own name was. But just then he got up from his chair and brought the other basket to the fire.

“Do you know who Santa Claus is?” he says, talking low.

“I found that out two years ago,” says I.