Page:The strange story book.djvu/95

 large curtain of skins hanging over that door. A very bad woman lives on the other side, and she does not like anyone to see her.'

'No; of course we won't,' answered they, and Mountain Dweller set out.

So the girls stayed in the house all day, and wondered what their friends were doing in the village, and if they were still seeking them. 'I expect,' said the elder, 'they think we have been eaten by wolves, and are mourning for us. And mother will have cut off her hair, and painted her face black.'

'Yes; she is sure to have done that,' answered the little girl; and so she had.

The days went by in much the same way, except that the big girl was now married to Mountain Dweller. Every morning he went out to hunt, so the two sisters had plenty to eat, and if they wanted any food between meals, they took it. They were quite happy until one unlucky morning when it was snowing so fast they could not leave the house, and at last they grew weary, and longed for something new.

'Who can the woman be that lives behind the curtain?' said the elder sister at last. 'I daresay she is not so very bad after all, and perhaps she can teach us some fresh games. I have noticed that there is a little hole in the curtain; I will peep through that, and if she looks kind and good-natured, I will go in.'

'Yes; that is a good plan,' answered the child, and they both went on tiptoe to the curtain.

The hole was very small, and it was hardly possible that anyone on the other side of the curtain should have seen them looking through. Yet the moment that the wife had fixed her eye on it, the woman threw up her hands and screamed, and both sisters fell down dead; and that is how Mountain Dweller found them when he returned from the hunt.

He guessed at once what had happened, and his anger was so great that the first thing he did was to run behind the curtain and kill the bad woman who lived there. Then he took some eagle-down and spread it over the girls' bodies, and walked