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"I got suthin' to say to him, I have!" Tom did not pay much attention to this; but Nan did. Her heart leaped for joy. She believed that Toby Vanderwiller's words promised help for Uncle Henry. But she said nothing to Tom about it. She only clung to his shoulder as the heavy timber cart rattled away from the island.
Uncle Henry never turned around at all; but he said: "If I had a gun I'd be tempted to shoot that old wolf hound of Toby Vanderwiller's. He's always running after sleds and yelling his head off." Nan was glad the creature following them was not really a wolf; but she knew she should be just as much afraid of him if she met him alone, as though he really were a wolf.
Mangel, the school principal, had written Nan and encouraged her to send a full description of some of Corson Vanderwiller's collection, especially of the wonderful death's-head moth, to a wealthy collector in Chicago. Nan did this at once. So, one day, a letter came from the man and in it was a check for twenty-five dollars. "This is a retainer," the gentleman wrote.
The cousins might easily reach the Vanderwiller's island, warn them of the fire, and return to town before it got very late, or before the fire crossed the wood-road. They rumbled along, soon striking the corduroy road, having the thick forest on either hand again. The ditches were running bank full.
Nan was full of the wonders she had seen, commonplace enough to her relatives who had lived all their lives in touch with the beautiful and queer things of Nature as displayed in the Michigan Peninsula. Perhaps none but Tom appreciated her ecstasy over crippled Corson Vanderwiller's collection.
Margaret did not wish to go into the swamp with Nan, however, on her first visit to Toby Vanderwiller's little farm. This was some weeks after the log drives, and lumbering was over for the season. Uncle Henry and the boys, rather than be idle, were working every acre they owned, and Nan was more alone than she had ever been since coming to Pine Camp.
The forest was atune from daybreak to midnight with winged denizens, for insect and bird life seemed unquenchable in the Big Woods. Especially was this true of the tamarack swamp. It was dreadfully hot at noontide on the corduroy road which passed Toby Vanderwiller's little farm; but often Nan Sherwood went that way in the afternoon. Mr.
Bears had not been seen for years; bobcats were very infrequently met with and usually ran like scared rabbits; foxes were of course shy, and the nearest approach to a wolf in all that section was Toby Vanderwiller's wolfhound that had once frightened Nan so greatly. Hares, rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, and many, many birds, peopled the forest and swamp.
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