The Accidental Orphan by Constance Horne

Author:Constance Horne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUV000000
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 1998-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

It was a good thing Ellen had her letter to remind her there was a warmer place on earth than Manitoba. She couldn’t believe the cold of those bright January days! Everything was frozen solid. Mr. Aitken or Fred drove the girls to school in the morning, but they walked home as usual, arriving just as the sun and the temperature sank again.

Ellen got itchy toes from sticking her cold feet as soon as she could get her mocassins off into the warm oven every day. They nearly drove her crazy.

“What a country!” said Fred one day, as he watched Ellen rub her sore feet. He had just spent half an hour thawing the pump to get a pail of water for the kitchen. He held his hands over the range and rubbed them together. “Don’t you wish we were home?” he asked.

“Oh, yes!” agreed Ellen.

“What’s it like in England now?” asked May.

“Warmer than here!” declared Fred. “Damp, though,” he admitted.

Ellen remembered last January. She had spent the month indoors with a racking cough. For almost two weeks she’d been in bed. Uncle Bert had been scared. “Your mother died of consumption you know,” he had said. “Don’t you leave me Nellie.” When she wrote again she must tell him that she hadn’t coughed all winter.

“I don’t know which is worse,” she moaned, “itchy feet or a cough.”

“A cough,” replied Mrs. Aitken promptly. “Ellen, I keep telling you that you cause your own problems. How many times have I told you not to put your feet in the oven? Let them warm up gradually.”

“But they’re so cold! I can’t walk.”

“Cheer up child,” Mr. Aitken said. “It won’t last forever. You’re not going to admit you can’t take a little cold are you?”

But one morning, when he came in from the barn, he said, “No school today Charlotte. There’s a storm brewing.”

“A bad one?” she asked, as he lifted down a long coil of rope from a hook beside the door.

“Looks like it. It’s snowing now.”

May breathed on the frosted window and peeked out the little hole she made. “Is it windy?” she asked.

“Right. We’re in for a blizzard.”

“Oh,” said Ellen, excited. “Am I going to see a blizzard?”

“You won’t like it!” declared Mrs. Aitken.

Her husband went out with the rope.

“What’s that for?” asked Ellen.

“He’s going to rig a line from the house to the barn,” explained May. “If it’s a real blizzard, you won’t be able to see more than a few inches in front of your face. He’ll use the rope to guide him when he goes to tend the animals.”

Ellen shivered with fear. Then she stood at May’s peephole and watched the snow pile up in tiny drifts on the window sill. Almost mesmerized by the dancing flakes, she jumped when a gust of wind battered the pane with hard pellets.

The storm increased in fury as the hours passed. By mid-afternoon the farmhouse was totally isolated. Inside, the kitchen formed a fortress inside the cold-gripped house, the area around the stove, the only spot really comfortable.

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