Read Winterbound for Free Online Page B

the subject nearest to his heart. When the two boys were not outdoors together or confabulating in their special corner of the Rowe kitchen they were usually shut up in Martin’s room at home, deep in his model engine or his microscope, possessions which had taken onnew interest since this friendship began; while all Martin’s books in turn found their way across the road in exchange for copies of cowboy stories and other periodical Western literature.
    The Rowe kitchen had a special attraction for the younger Ellises. There were other rooms in the house, including all upstairs and the parlor with its old furniture, braided rugs on the oak floor, and a case of stuffed humming birds on the mantelshelf, but compared with the kitchen they might as well have been non-existent. It was in the kitchen that family life centered. It was a long low room (the Rowes, being country people, had preferred to keep the largest room in the house for its original use) with the stove at one end, flanked by a piled wood-box on one side and an old comfortable sofa on the other, set back in a sort of alcove and wide enough for the little girls to play house there of an afternoon and for three-year-old Tommy to take his midday nap on in cold weather, tucked under a patchwork quilt. Behind the stove the old chimney-breast bulged out, making a wide shelf on which the boys liked to sit dangling their legs and watch whatever was cooking on the stove top. An old pine dresser and a chest stood along one side of the room; on the other, Mary’s house plants occupied one sunny window and her sewing machine another. At the far end a row of outdoor coats hung from pegs, with ajumble of rubbers and boots below them, and Neal’s rifle and an old shotgun leaned in the corner next to the back door. Either Sam, the old black-and-tan foxhound, or Dolly, half hound, half pointer, usually lay stretched under the table in the middle of the floor, safe there from being trodden on or stumbled over, while Jimmie’s Ranger, a brown-and-white nondescript and the best woodchuck dog in the neighborhood, shared with three cats the warmer refuge under the stove.
    Here, when schoolwork was finished, Martin liked to spend his evenings, discussing plans with Jimmie in the sofa corner, reading at the table under the kerosene lamp, or, if Neal was in a talkative mood, listening to the hunting tales he would tell them as he lounged in the big wooden rocker, pausing now and then to reach out to the wood-box for a fresh stick to put on the stove, while Mary Rowe, who never seemed to sit down except at meals and not always then, moved on errands of her own about the room or just stood, to join in the talk.
    Garry, too, like the Rowes’ kitchen, for it was a room she felt thoroughly at home in, and Mary shared her own eagerness about gardening and flowers—especially wild flowers, and would drop whatever she was doing at any moment to look something up in the botany book or to exchange descriptions of plants she had seen or knew, and whereabouts they were to be found. She and Nealbetween them had at their fingertips, too, the history of every old house, abandoned or occupied, for miles around, of the people who had lived in them and of certain queer things that had happened there, stories just as exciting to Garry as hunting tales were to Martin.
    Martin was there one evening—Caroline too, for the next day was a Saturday—when Neal, who had been working late, came in, bringing a draft of cold air with him from the opened door.
    â€œGoing to snow before morning,” he said, hanging up his leather jacket and coming over to the stove. “You can smell it coming, on the air.”
    â€œAbout time,” said Mary. “We’ve had one or two flurries but no real snow yet. Generally it comes earlier than this. Want some supper, Neal? It’s right in the oven here.”
    â€œI had some over to George’s. They were just sitting down to