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Rowe laughed. “It hasn’t started to get cold yet! Why, I haven’t even looked out the children’s heavy underwear. You wait a bit!”
    She looked anything but wintry herself, with slim bare ankles above her keds and only a thin windbreaker over her cotton house frock. “I guess this house ought to be pretty comfortable for you. It was when we lived in it.”
    â€œI never knew you lived here,” said Garry.
    â€œTwo years, before we bought our place. Before Shirley was born; Jimmie was a baby. The hill keeps the north wind off, but you’ll get it from the south, and that’s a mean wind in winter. How are your windows, pretty tight?”
    â€œThey were drafty yesterday,” Mrs. Ellis told her. “That wind seemed to come in everywhere!”
    â€œIt’s the old sash. I’ll get Neal to look at them.” She went over and held her hand against the window sills, here and there. “Feel that? I tell you what you do. You get strips of newspaper and fill in all those cracks, poke it right down; that’ll make a difference. There’s plenty of little tricks to make a place comfortable, only you’ve got to know them. If you live in the country long you soon learn!”
    Next to Edna, of whom they saw little these days, the Rowes were rapidly becoming the mainstay of the Ellis family. Besides fixing the windows and planning thedoors—details which hadn’t mattered so much in warm weather but were important now—it was Neal who helped them bank the house with leaves and earth on the north side and nail over the woodshed cracks; Neal who cut and hauled their cord wood for them and sawed it up, not with the gas engine which, like many of the Rowe possessions, had permanently broken down—“giv’ up the ghost,” as its owner cheerfully remarked—but by means of the faithful truck harnessed to an improvised saw table, till there rose in the side yard a mountain of stove wood which the Ellises innocently imagined would more than last them all winter. It was Mary who advised in all household emergencies and who came miraculously to the rescue—dropping everything to dash bareheaded across the road the time their stovepipe caught fire, which it inevitably did before long, they having supposed that all one needed to do with a stovepipe was to set it up and leave it there.
    Martin and Caroline made no bones about preferring the Rowe household to their own. Jimmie was just a year older than Martin, while Shirley and Caroline could almost share birthdays. To see the two little girls together one might easily have taken pink-cheeked Caroline for the country child, for she was far sturdier in build, Shirley being slight and fair, with a pointed elfish face, upturned faintly freckled nose, and gray dark-lashed eyesthat looked too big for the rest of her features. While she and Caroline sewed, played dolls, and kept house, Martin and Jimmie were deep in their own plans and occupations. They spent evenings poring over the mailorder catalogues and knew by heart every item in the saddlery, gun, and hunting pages, their chief interests at this moment.
    The two were well matched. Jimmie owned a .22 rifle and could be trusted with it, since he took hunting seriously and would have scorned to shoot at a small bird or a squirrel; he had a born instinct for woodcraft and knew the name, habits, and ways of every bird and beast around, while Martin, though he had never handled a gun in his life, had more than the average boy’s knowledge of natural history, and moreover owned a father who knew all about prehistoric animals and dinosaurs’ eggs and was at this very moment away on a scientific expedition in Central America—enough in itself to invest him with an aura of magic and importance to Jimmie, who had never seen a museum or zoo in his life, had access to few books, and had long ago exhausted all that the school library could offer on