Winter Holiday. Arthur Ransome

not?” said Nancy.

      “Is there anything else that’ll hold water?” said Dick.

      “Good man,” said John.

      “Let him take the saucepan,” said Susan.

      The four of them crawled out of the igloo, stood up outside and, led by Roger, went off among the thin, straggly underwood and over the frozen leaves of last year’s foxgloves to a little trickling beck that was finding its way down from the high fells to the lake. It was small enough to step across, and its tiny pools had edgings of ice, as if the stream had shrunk and left the ice outside itself. Branches that hung across splashed by its little waterfalls had turned to thick glass bars, inside which could be seen, like cores, the twigs on which the splashes had frozen. Dick dipped the saucepan.

      “Wait a minute,” said Roger, who was busy breaking off bits of ice. He put them one by into into the saucepan till they floated level with the brim like small icebergs. “Better than nothing,” he said. “Captain Nancy’ll be jolly pleased.”

      Titty filled the kettle from under one of the little waterfalls.

      “Let me carry it,” said Dorothea, who badly wanted to be of some use.

      “Better not,” said Titty. “You left your gloves in the igloo. Your hands would freeze to the handle.”

      On their way back, they met John, who was gathering moss to pack the holes between the stones of the igloo.

      “Why not earth?” asked Dick.

      “Frozen too hard,” said John. “We have to melt even the moss before it’s really any good.”

      He picked up the box in which he had been putting it, and came back with them.

      “Any amount of leaks to caulk,” he said, and they saw that the smoke which was pouring in a most homely manner from the stovepipe chimney was also finding its way out through all sorts of small holes in the stonework.

      “It is a lovely place,” said Dorothea, looking at the rough little hut with the smoke climbing from it.

      “Not half bad,” said John, “if only there was some snow.”

      They crawled in. There was a grand fire now blazing in the fireplace, and in spite of all the leakages in the walls and the cold outside, the igloo was very warm. Nancy and Peggy were sitting on two of the log stools, wriggling bare toes before the flames. Their stockings were hung just above the fireplace on a string stretched between two pegs. Their shoes were being dried, turned every minute like pieces of toast. The lantern hanging from the roof and the leaping flames on the hearth filled the little hut with cheerful light. John emptied his box of moss on a pile that was already thawing. Peggy spread it so that as much of it as possible should be warming at once. Susan had been waiting for the kettle, and hung it from the cross-bar in the chimney so that it dangled in the hottest of the fire.

      “We’ve got some real ice in the saucepan,” said Roger, and Dick, half blinded by the mist that settled on his cold spectacles in the warm hut, held out the saucepan to Nancy.

      “In the kettle, too?” she asked eagerly.

      “No.”

      “It’ll boil a lot quicker without,” said Susan.

      “All right,” said Nancy, “it can’t be helped.”

      “But why did you want it in the kettle?” asked Dick.

      Titty answered him. “Well, if we had to melt ice to make our tea,” she said, “anybody could see it would be much more like the real thing.”

      To Dick and Dorothea, as they sat on a bench sharing their pork pie with the explorers, and being given slabs of Holly Howe cake in return, things seemed very well, even as they were. The Arctic might be in a poor way for ice, but inside the igloo, with the lantern and the fire, what did it matter whether the world outside was as they had left it or fathoms deep in snow? Eagerly, when dinner was over, they helped in the washing up (the icebergs by that time had melted in the saucepan). Eagerly, during the short winter afternoon, they helped in the gathering of firewood. Eagerly, when they were allowed, they crammed warm moss between the stones of the walls until someone inside the igloo sang out that in that place at least he or she could see daylight no more. Eagerly they worked the moss into chinks in the stones round the chimney where wisps of smoke found their way through. Nothing was said about asking them actually to join the Polar expedition. But last thing, when it was time to go home, and Dorothea picked up the mugs they had been lent by Mrs Dixon, Nancy stopped her.

      “They may as well leave these with ours, mayn’t they, Susan? We’ll all be up here to-morrow.”

      That was enough for Dorothea. As she and Dick walked down the cart track to the farm, they were not talking. Dick was already thinking of the evening’s stars and his observatory. Dorothea, for once, was inventing no stories. She was living in one. Those two mugs, left in the igloo, were as good as a promise that there was more of the story to come.

      *

      The council among the explorers began the moment Dick and Dorothea were out of sight.

      “Of course, they aren’t sailors,” said John, “but that idea about Mars was really pretty good.”

      “They’ll have to sweat up signals,” said Nancy. “Think of having an idea like that and then not being able to say two words when the other side answered.”

      “She wears pigtails,” said Peggy.

      “There’s nothing absolutely wrong with pigtails,” said Nancy.

      “Sailors used to wear them once,” said Titty.

      “But not one at each side,” said Roger.

      Nothing was definitely settled, but that night, when it had been dark a couple of hours, and Susan was talking of bedtime for Roger, Titty said, “We may as well give them a flash or two.”

      The astronomer and his assistant must have had at least half an eye on Mars, for the flashing of a lamp in that upper window was instantly answered by other flashes high on the hill-side.

      “They’re watching,” said Titty.

      “It would be rather beastly to leave them out of things,” said Susan.

CHAPTER V

      SKATING AND THE ALPHABET

      MR DIXON had been up the fell before breakfast, and brought down the news that the ice on the tarn was bearing properly at last. Mrs Dixon had passed the news on. “Well,” she said, “you’ll be coming to no harm, if you follow Miss Susan.” School trunks had been opened, and skates and boots and knapsacks taken out. Mrs Dixon had made them two packets of sandwiches, given them a couple of oranges apiece, and put a big bottle of milk in Dorothea’s knapsack. “They’ll be bringing milk from Jackson’s, I’ve no doubt, but there’s no call for any to go short.” They rolled up their skates in newspaper and stowed them in the knapsacks for easy carrying.

      It was a fine, crisp day after a night of hard frost. There was a clear sky overhead, and as Dick and Dorothea climbed the cart track they could see above the trees every cleft and gully of the distant mountains. The climb to the old barn seemed only half as long as it had been when they had gone up there for the first time. Dorothea felt more like dancing than walking. Every now and then Dick seemed to be on the very point of breaking into a run on the cropped pale grass at the side of the track, and these sudden jerkinesses in his walking showed Dorothea that he, too, was as eager as herself.

      “I wonder if they’re at the igloo already,” she said.

      “They can’t be,” said Dick. “Not with the red-caps having to row across the lake.”

      But as they came up to the barn and caught the first glimpse of Holly