Nan Sherwoods Winter Holidays | Page 5

with Nan, the goodness only knows. Her father worked in one of the mills that shut down last New Year. He was out of work a long time and then came this fortune in Scotland they claim was left Mrs. Sherwood by an old uncle, or great uncle. I guess it's nothing much to brag about."
"Bess said once it might be fifty thousand dollars," said Cora, speaking the sum unctuously. Cora was poor herself and she loved money.
"Oh, maybe!" exclaimed Linda Riggs, tossing her head. "But I guess nobody knows the rights of it. Maybe it isn't so much. You know that there were other heirs who turned up when Nan's father and mother got over to Scotland, and one while Nan thought she would have to leave school because there wasn't money enough to pay her tuition fees."
"Yes, I know all about that," admitted Cora, hurriedly. She had a vivid remembrance of the unfinished letter from Nan to her mother, which she had found and shown to Linda. Cora was not proud of that act. Nan had never been anything but kind to her and secretly Cora did not believe this ill-natured history of Nan Sherwood that Linda repeated.
Those of my readers who have read the first volume of this series, entitled "Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp, Or, The Old Lumberman's Secret," will realize just how much truth and how much fiction entered into the story of Nan's affairs related by the ill-natured Linda Riggs.
When Mr. and Mrs. Sherwood started for Scotland to make sure of the wonderful legacy willed to Nan's mother by the Laird of Emberon's steward, Nan was sent up into the Peninsula of Michigan to stay with her Uncle Henry and Aunt Kate Sherwood at a lumber camp. Her adventures there during the spring and summer were quite exciting. But the most exciting thing that had happened to Nan Sherwood was the decision on her parents' part that she should go with her chum, Bess Harley, to Lakeview Hall, a beautifully situated and popular school for girls on the shore of Lake Huron.
In "Nan Sherwood at Lakeview Hall, Or, The Mystery of the Haunted Boathouse," the second volume of the series, were narrated the incidents of Nan's first term at boarding school. She and Bess made many friends and had some rivals, as was natural, for they were very human girls, in whom no angelic quality was over-developed.
In Linda Riggs, daughter of the rich and influential railroad president, Nan had an especially vindictive enemy. Nan had noticed Linda's eagerness to hear all the ill-natured fat man had to say about Mr. Sherwood.
"I do wish Linda had not heard that horrid man speak so of Papa Sherwood," Nan said to Bess Harley, as they toiled up the hill again after the overturning of the _Sky-rocket_.
"Oh, what do you care about Linda?" responded Bess.
"I care very much about what people say of my father," Nan said. "And the minute I get home I'm going to find out what that Bulson meant."
CHAPTER III
AN ADVENTURE ON THE RAIL
That adventurous afternoon on Pendragon Hill was the last chance the girls of Lakeview Hall had that term for bobsledding. School closed the next day and those pupils who lived farthest away, and who went home for the holidays, started that very evening by train from Freeling.
Nan and her chum, Bess Harley, were two who hurried away from the Hall. Tillbury was a night's ride from Lakeview Hall, and the chums did not wish to lose any of their short stay at home.
It had already been planned and agreed to that Nan and Bess were to go to Chicago to visit in the Masons' home during a part of this vacation, and the two friends, who knew very little of city life, were eager indeed for the new experience.
Walter and Grace had started for Chicago that morning, and when the two Tillbury girls saw how hard it was snowing when Charley, with his 'bus on runners, drove them to the station, they wished that they had asked the privilege of Dr. Beulah Prescott, the principal, of going early, too.
"This yere's goin' to be a humdinger of a storm," prophesied Charley. "You gals'll maybe get snowed up on the train."
"Oh! What fun!" cried the thoughtless Bess.
"I hope not!" proclaimed Nan.
"I think it would be fun, Nan," urged her chum.
"Humph! How about eating?" queried the red-haired girl, Laura Polk, who would be one of the party as far as the Junction.
"Oh, there's a dining-car on this train," said May Winslow, who was to speed away to the South to spend Christmas, where there was no ice or snow, and where the darkeys celebrate the holiday with fire-crackers, as Northern people do the Fourth of July.
"That's all right about the dining-car," said Nan. "All right