nes was hurt.

She now looked around, rather wildly, at Amelia Boggs' question. The fat
man had utterly disappeared. Surely the bobsled, having struck him only a
glancing blow, had not throw him completely off the earth!

Bess was looking up into the snowy tree-tops, and Laura Polk suggested
that maybe the fat man had been only an hallucination.

"Hallucination! Your grandmother's hat!" exclaimed Amelia Boggs. "If his
wasn't a solid body, there never was one!"

"What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?"
murmured Laura.

"Both must be destroyed," finished Bess. "But I see the tail of our bob,
all right."

Just then Nan ran across the track. At the same moment a floundering
figure, like a great polar bear in his winter coat, emerged from the
opposite drift. The fat man, without his hat and with his face very red
and wet, loomed up gigantically in the snow-pile.

"Oh! Nan Sherwood!" cried Laura. "Have you found him?"

The fat man glared at Nan malevolently. "So your name is Sherwood, it
is?" he snarled. "You're the girl that was steering that abominable
sled--and you steered it right into me."

"Oh, no, sir! Not intentionally!" cried the worried Nan.

"Yes, you did!" flatly contradicted the choleric fat man. "I saw you."

"Oh, Nan Sherwood!" gasped Amelia, "isn't he mean to say that?"

"Your name's Sherwood, is it?" growled the man. "I should think I'd had
trouble enough with people of _that_ name. Is your father Robert
Sherwood, of Tillbury, Illinois?"

"Yes, sir," replied the wondering Nan.

"Ha! I might have known it," snarled the man, trying to beat the
snow from his clothes. "I heard he had a girl up here at this
school. The rascal!"

Professor Krenner had just reached the spot from the top of the hill.
From below had hurried the crews of bobsleds number two and three. Linda
Riggs, who led one of the crews, heard the angry fat man speaking so
unfavorably of Nan Sherwood's father. She sidled over to his side of the
track to catch all that he said.

Nan, amazed and hurt by the fat man's words and manner, would have
withdrawn silently, had it not been for the last phrase the man used in
reference to her father. Nan was very loyal, and to hear him called
"rascal" was more than she could tamely hear.

"I do not know what you mean, sir," she said earnestly. "But if you
really _know_ my father, you know that what you say of him is wrong. He
is not a rascal."

"I say he is!" ej