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So just before supper the team and the block-and-tackle were hitched on to that attenuated steel skeleton, Whinnie took one guide rope and I took the other, and our little Eiffel Tower slowly lifted itself up into the sky. Peter, when it was all over, and the last nut tightened up, walked about with the triumphant smile of a Master-Builder who beholds his work completed.
The cart track to Whinnie Knowe was commanded by a gable window, and Whinnie boasted that Marget had never been taken unawares. Tramps, finding every door locked, and no sign of life anywhere, used to express their mind in the "close," and return by the way they came, while ladies from Kildrummie, fearful lest they should put Mrs.
A'body's here except the heich Glen, an' we mauna luke for them." "Dinna be sae sure o' that, Jamie. Yon's terrible like them on the road, wi' Whinnie at their head;" and so it was, twelve in all, only old Adam Ross absent, detained by force, being eighty-two years of age.
For Whinnie had a foot frozen, his third winter on the Yukon, and this, of course, has left him lame. It means that he's not a great deal of good when it comes to working the land, but he's a clever carpenter, and a good cement-worker, and can chore about milking the cows and looking after the stock and repairing the farm implements.
But Peter, I suspect, sniffed something untoward in the air, for after a long study of my face which made me color a little, in spite of myself he became about as abstracted and solemn-eyed as Struthers herself. To my dying day I shall never forget that wait for Whinnie to come back. It threatened to become an endless one.
The delight on his face at the discovery of even two or three "cackle-berries," as Whinnie calls them, is worth the occasional breakage and yolk-stained rompers. For I share in that delight myself, since egg-gathering always gives me the feeling that I'm partaking of the bounty of Nature, that I'm getting something for next-to-nothing.
And when Whinnie finally appeared his seamed old face wore such a look of dour satisfaction that for a weak flutter or two of the heart I thought he'd brought Dinky-Dunk straight back with him. But that hope didn't live long. "Your maun's awa'," said Whinnie, with quite unnecessary curtness, as he held my own letter out to me. "He's away?"
A'body's here except the heich Glen, an' we mauna hike for them." "Dinna be sae sure o' that, Jamie. Yon's terrible like them on the road, wi' Whinnie at their head;" and so it was, twelve in all, only old Adam Ross absent, detained by force, being eighty-two years of age.
"He's just yon, as warm and safe as a bird in a nest," further expounded Whinstane Sandy. "Where?" demanded Lady Alicia. But Whinnie ignored her. "It was Bobs, ma'am," were the blessed words I heard the old lips saying to me, "who kept whimper-in' and grievin' about the upper stable door, which had been swung shut. It was Bobs who led me back yon, fair against my will.
Then I heard the signal-shots of a gun, and turned back toward the shack, which looked small and squat on the floor of the paling prairie. I couldn't run, for running was beyond me now. I heard Bobs barking, and the Twins crying, and I saw Whinnie. I thought for one fond and foolish moment, as I hurried toward the house, that they'd found my Dinkie. But it was a false hope.
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