r?"

"Not much," said this perfectly frank young savage. "He's so awfully
wizzled."

"'Wizzled'?" repeated Nan, puzzled.

"Yes. His face is all wizzled up like a dried apple."

"But you love your aunt Matilda?" gasped Nan.

"Well, she's wizzled some," confessed Margaret. Then she said: "I
don't like faces like hern and Marm Sherwood's. I like your face. It's
smooth."

Nan had noticed that this half-wild girl was of beautifully fair
complexion herself, and aside from her pop eyes was quite petty. But she
was a queer little thing.

"You've been to Chicago, ain't you?" asked Margaret suddenly.

"We came through Chicago on our way up here from my home. We stayed one
night there," Nan replied.

"It's bigger'n Pine Camp, ain't it?"

"My goodness, yes!"

"Bigger'n the Forks?" queried Margaret doubtfully.

"Why, it is much, much bigger," said Nan, hopeless of making one
so densely ignorant understand anything of the proportions of the
metropolis of the lakes.

"That's what I told Bob," Margaret said. "He don't believe it. Bob's my
brother, but there never was such a dunce since Adam."

Nan had to laugh. The strange girl amused her. But Margaret said
something, too, that deeply interested the visitor at Pine Camp before
she ended her call, making her exit as she had her entrance, by the
window.

"I reckon you never seen this house of your uncle's before, did you?"
queried Margaret at one point in the conversation.

"Oh, no. I never visited them before."

"Didn't you uster visit 'em when they lived at Pale Lick?"

"No. I don't remember that they ever lived anywhere else beside here."

"Yes, they did. I heard Gran'ther tell about it. But mebbe 'twas before
you an' me was born. It was Pale Lick, I'm sure. That's where they lost
their two other boys."

"What two other boys?" asked Nan, amazed.

"Didn't you ever hear tell you had two other cousins?"

"No," said Nan.

"Well, you did," said Margaret importantly. "And when Pale Lick burned
up, them boys was burned up, too."

"Oh!" gasped Nan, horrified.

"Lots of folks was burned. Injun Pete come near being burned up. He
ain't been right, I reckon, since. And I reckon that's where Marm
Sherwood got that scar on the side of her neck."

Nan wondered.

Chapter XIV. AT THE LUMBER CAMP

Nan said nothing just then about her queer little visitor. Aunt Kate
asked her when she came out of the east room and crossed the chill
desert of the parlor to the g