Читать бесплатно онлайн книгу автора  The Corner House Girls Under Canvas

Grace Livingston Hill

Hill Grace Brooks
The Corner House Girls Under Canvas / How they reached Pleasant Cove and what happened afterward

CHAPTER I – TOM JONAH

“Come here, Tess! Come quick and look at this poor dog. He’s just drip-ping-wet!”

Dot Kenway stood at a sitting-room window of the old Corner House, looking out upon Willow Street. It was a dripping day, and anything or anybody that remained out-of-doors and exposed to the downpour for half an hour, was sure to be saturated.

Nothing wetter or more miserable looking than the dog in question had come within the range of the vision of the two younger Corner House girls that Saturday morning.

Tess, who was older than Dot, came running. Anything as frightfully despondent and hopeless looking as that dog was bound to touch the tender heart of Tess Kenway.

“Let’s – let’s take him to the porch and feed him, Dot,” she cried.

“Will Ruthie let us?” asked Dot.

“Of course. She’s gone for her music lesson and won’t know, anyway,” declared Tess, recklessly.

“But maybe Mrs. MacCall won’t like it?”

“She’s upstairs and won’t know, either. Besides,” Tess said, bolstering up her own desire, “she says she hasn’t ever sent anybody away hungry from her door; and that poor dog looks just as hungry as any tramp that ever came to the old Corner House.”

The girls ran out of the sitting-room into the huge front hall which, in itself, was almost big enough for a ballroom. It was finished in dark, dark oak; there was a huge front door – like the door of a castle; the furniture was walnut, upholstered in haircloth, worn shiny by more than three generations of use; and out of the middle of the hall a great stairway arose, dividing when half-way up into two sections, while a sort of gallery was built all around the hall at the second floor, out of which the doors of the principal chambers opened.

There was a third story above, and above that a huge garret – often the playroom of the Corner House girls on such days as this. In the rear were two wings built on to the house, each three stories in height. The house had its “long” side to Willow Street, and only a narrow grass plot and brick walk separated the sitting-room windows from the boundary fence.

It faced Main Street, at its head, where the Parade Ground began. The dripping trees on the Parade were now in full leaf and the lush grass beneath them was green. The lawns of the old Corner House needed the mower, too; and at the back Uncle Rufus – the general factotum of the establishment – had laid out a wonderful kitchen garden which already had yielded radishes and tender onions and salad, and promised green peas to accompany the spring lamb to the table on the approaching Fourth.

Tess and Dot Kenway crossed the big hall of the Corner House, and went on through the dining-room with its big table, huge, heavily carved sideboard and comfortably armed chairs, through the butler’s pantry into the kitchen. As Tess had said, Mrs. MacCall, their good-natured and lovable housekeeper, was not in sight. Nobody delayed them, and they stepped out upon the half-screened porch at the back. The woodshed joined it at the far end. The steps faced Willow Street.

On the patch of drying green a goat was tethered, lying down in the rain, reflectively chewing a cud. He bleated when he saw the girls, but did not offer to rise; the rain did not disturb him in the least.

“Billy Bumps likes the rain,” Dot said, thoughtfully.

The dog outside the gate did not seem to be enjoying himself. He had dropped down upon the narrow strip of sward between the flagged walk and the curbing; his sides heaved as though he had run a long way, and his pink tongue lolled out of his mouth and dripped.

“My!” Dot murmured, as she saw this, “the rain’s soaked right through the poor doggy – hasn’t it? And it’s just dripping out of him!”

Tess, more practical, if no more earnest in her desire to relieve the dog’s apparent misery, ran down to the gate through the falling rain and called to him:

“Poor, poor doggie! Come in!”

She opened the gate temptingly, but the strange dog merely wagged his tail and looked at her out of his beautiful brown eyes. He was a Newfoundland dog, with a cross of some breed that gave him patches of deep brown in his coat and very fine, long, silky hair that curled up at the ends. He was strongly built and had a good muzzle which was powdered with the gray hairs of age.

“Come here, old fellow,” urged Tess, “Do come in!”

She snapped her fingers and held the gate more invitingly open. He staggered to his feet and limped toward her. He did not crouch and slink along as a dog does that has been beaten; but he eyed her doubtfully as though not sure, after all, of this reception.

He was muddied to his flanks, his coat was matted with green burrs, and there was a piece of frayed rope knotted about his neck. The dog followed Tess doubtfully to the porch. Billy Bumps climbed to his feet and shook his head threateningly, stamping his feet; but the strange dog was too exhausted to pay the goat any attention.

The visitor at first refused to mount the steps, but he looked up at Dot and wagged his tail in greeting.

“Oh, Tess!” cried the smallest girl. “He thinks he knows me. Do you suppose we have ever seen him before?”

“I don’t believe so,” said Tess, bustling into the woodshed and out again with a pan of broken meat that had been put aside for Sandyface and her children. “I know I should remember him if I had ever seen him before. Come, old fellow! Good doggie! Come up and eat.”

She put the pan down on the porch and stood back from it. The brown eyes of the dog glowed more brightly. He hesitatingly hobbled up the steps.

A single sniff of the tidbits in the pan, and the dog fell to wolfishly, not stopping to chew at all, but fairly jerking the meat into his throat with savage snaps.

“Oh, don’t gobble so!” gasped Dot. “It – it’s bad for your indigestions – and isn’t polite, anyway.”

“Guess you wouldn’t be polite if you were as hungry as he is,” Tess observed.

The dog was so tired that he lay right down, after a moment, and ate with his nose in the pan. Dot ventured to pat his wet coat and he thumped his tail softly on the boards, but did not stop eating.

At this juncture Uncle Rufus came shuffling up the path from the hen-coop. Uncle Rufus was a tall, stoop-shouldered, pleasantly brown negro, with a very bald crown around which was a narrow growth of tight, grizzled “wool.” He had a smiling face, and if the whites of his eyes were turning amber hued with age he was still “purty pert” – to use his own expression – save when the rheumatism laid him low.

“Whar’ yo’ chillen done git dat dawg?” he wanted to know, in astonishment.

“Oh, Uncle Rufus!” cried Dot. “He came along looking so wet – ”

“And he was so tired and hungry,” added Tess.

“I done spec’ yo’ chillen would take in er wild taggar, ef one come erlong lookin’ sort o’ meachin’,” grumbled the colored man.

“But he’s so good!” said Tess. “See!” and she put her hand upon the handsome head of the bedraggled beast.

“He jes’ er tramp dawg,” said Uncle Rufus, doubtfully.

“He’s only tired and dirty,” said Tess, earnestly. “I don’t believe he wants to be a tramp. He doesn’t look at all like the tramps Mrs. MacCall feeds at the back door here.”

“Nor like those horrid Gypsies that came to the house the other day,” added Dot eagerly. “I was afraid of them.”

“Well, it suah ain’t b’long ’round yere – dat dawg,” muttered Uncle Rufus. “It done run erway f’om somewhar’ an’ hit trabbel far – ya-as’m!”

He pulled the ears of the big dog himself, in a kindly fashion, and the dog pounded the porch harder with his tail and rolled a trusting eye up at the little group. Evidently the tramp dog was convinced that this would be a good place to remain in, and “rest up.”

A pretty girl of twelve or thirteen, with flower-like face, plump, and her blue eyes dancing and laughing in spite of her, ran in at the side gate. She had a covered basket of groceries on her arm, and was swathed in a raincoat with a close hood about her face.

“Agnes!” screamed Dot. “See what we’ve got! Just the nicest, friendfulnest dog – ”

“Mercy, Dot! More animals?” was the older sister’s first comment.

“But he’s such a nice dog,” wailed Dot.

“And so hungry and wet,” added Tess.

“What fine eyes he has!” exclaimed Agnes, stooping down to pat the noble head. Instantly the dog’s pink tongue sought her hand and – Agnes was won!

“He’s splendid! he’s a fine old fellow!” she cried. “Of course we’ll keep him, Dot.”

“If Ruthie says so,” added Tess, with a loyalty to the oldest Corner House girl born of the fact that Ruth had mothered the brood of three younger sisters since their real mother had died three years previous.

“I dunno wot yo’ chillen want er dawg for,” complained Uncle Rufus.

“To keep chicken thieves away,” said Agnes, promptly, laughing roguishly at the grumbling black man.

“Oh!” cried Tess. “You said yourself, Uncle Rufus, that those Gypsies that stopped here might be looking at Ruth’s chickens.”

“Well, I done guess dat tramp dawg knows when he’s well off,” said the old man, chuckling suddenly. “He’s layin’ down lak’ he’s fixin’ tuh stay – ya-as’m!”

The dog had crept to the most sheltered corner of the porch and curled up on an old rag mat Mrs. MacCall had left there for the cats.

“He ought to have that dirty old rope taken off,” said Agnes.

Uncle Rufus drew out his clasp knife and opened the blade. He approached the weary dog and knelt down to remove the rope.

“Glo-ree!” he exclaimed, suddenly. “He done got er collar on him.”

It was hidden in the thick hair about the dog’s neck. The three girls crowded close to see, Uncle Rufus unbuckled it and handed the leather strap to Agnes.

“See if there is any name and address on it, Aggie!” gasped Tess. “Oh! I hope not. Then, if we don’t know where he came from, he’s ours for keeps.”

There was a small brass plate; but no name, address, or license number was engraved upon it. Instead, in clear script, it was marked:

“THIS IS TOM JONAH. HE IS A

GENTLEMAN.”

“There!” cried Dot, as though this settled the controversy. “What did I tell you? He can’t be any tramp dog. He’s a gentleman.”

“‘Tom Jonah,’” murmured Agnes. “What a funny name!”

When Ruth came home the younger girls bore her off at once to see Tom Jonah sleeping comfortably on the porch. The old dog raised his grizzled muzzle, wagged his tail, and beamed at her out of his soft brown eyes.

“The dear love!” cried Tess, clasping her hands. “Isn’t he beautiful, Ruthie?”

“Beautifully dirty,” said Ruth, doubtfully.

“Oh, but Uncle Rufus says he will wash him to-morrow. He’s got some insect – insecty-suicide soap like he puts on the henroosts – ”

“Insecticide, Dot,” admonished Tess. “I wish you wouldn’t try to say words that you can’t say.”

Dot pouted. But Ruth patted her head and said, soothingly:

“Never mind, honey. We’ll let the poor dog stay till he rests up, anyway. He looks like a kind creature.”

But she, as well as the adults in the old Corner House, did not expect to see Tom Jonah the next morning when they awoke. He was allowed to remain on the porch, and despite the objections of Sandyface, the mother cat, and the army of younger felines growing up about her, Tom Jonah was given a bountiful supper by Mrs. MacCall herself.

Dot and Tess ran to peep at the dog just before going to bed that night. He blinked at them in the lampshine from the open door, and thumped the porch flooring with his tail.

It was past midnight before anything more was heard of Tom Jonah. Then the whole house was aroused – not to say the neighborhood. There was a savage salvo of barks from the porch, and down the steps scrambled Tom Jonah. They heard him go roaring down the yard.

Then there arose a great confusion at the hen house – a squawking of frightened hens, the loud “cut, cut, ca-da-cut!” of the rooster, mingling with which was the voice of at least one human being and the savage baying of Tom Jonah.

CHAPTER II – SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO

Uncle Rufus was too old and too stiff to get out of bed and down from his third-story room in the old Corner House, to be of any assistance at this midnight incident. But the girls were awakened the moment Tom Jonah began barking.

“It’s a hen thief!” squealed Tess, leaping out of her own warm nest.

“I hope that dog bites him!” cried Agnes, savagely, from the other room.

She ran to the window. It was a starlit, but foggy night. She could see only vaguely the objects out of doors.

Ruth was scrambling into a skirt and dressing sacque; she thrust her feet into shoes, too, and started downstairs. Mrs. MacCall’s window went up with a bang, and the girls heard the housekeeper exclaim:

“Shoo! shoo! Get out of there!”

Whoever it was that had roused Tom Jonah, the person was evidently unable to “get out of there.” The dog’s threatening growls did not cease, and the man’s voice which had first been heard when the trouble started, was protesting.

Agnes followed her older sister downstairs. Of course, Aunt Sarah Maltby, who slept in one of the grand front rooms in the main part of the house, did not even hear all the disturbance. And there were not any houses really near the Stower Homestead, which Milton people knew by the name of “the old Corner House.”

Therefore, the sounds of conflict at the Kenway hennery were not likely to arouse many people. But when Ruth and Agnes reached out-of-doors, the younger girl remembered one person who might hear and be of assistance.

“Let’s call Neale O’Neil!” she cried to Ruth. “He’ll help us.”

“We’d better call a policeman,” said Ruth, running down the brick path.

“Huh! you wouldn’t find a policeman in Milton at this hour of the night, if you searched for a week of Sundays,” was the younger girl’s ambiguous statement. Then she raised her voice and shouted: “Neale! Neale O’Neil! Help!”

Meantime the dog continued his threatening bayings. The fowls fluttered and squawked. Billy Bumps began to blat and butt the partition in his pen. Whoever had ventured into the hennery had gotten into hot quarters and no mistake!

Ruth stopped suddenly in the path and clutched at Agnes’ arm. Agnes was as lightly dressed as herself; but it was a warm June night and there was no danger of their getting cold.

“Suppose the dog does not remember us?” the older girl gasped in Agnes’ ear. “Maybe – maybe he’ll tear us to pieces. How savage he sounds!”

Agnes was frightened; but she had pluck, too. “Come on, Ruth!” she said. “He is only mad at the thief.”

“If it is a thief,” quavered Ruth. “I – I am afraid to go on, Aggie.”

At that moment the sound of little feet pattering behind them made both girls turn. There were Dot and Tess, both barefooted, and Dot with merely a doubled-up comforter snatched from her bed, wrapped over her night clothes.

“Mercy me, children!” gasped Ruth. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, we mustn’t let Tom Jonah bite that man,” Tess declared, and kept right on running toward the henhouse.

“If that dog bites – ” screamed Ruth, and ran after her smaller sister.

There was the big dog leaping savagely toward the low eaves of the hennery. A kicking figure was sprawled on the roof, clinging with both hands to the ridge of it. The girls obtained a glimpse of a dark face, with flashing teeth, and big gold rings in the marauder’s ears.

“Tak’ dog away! Tak’ dog away!” the man said, in a strangled voice.

“He’s one of those Gypsies,” whispered Agnes, in an awed voice.

A tribe of the nomads in question had passed through Milton but a day or two before, and the girls had been frightened by the appearance of the men of the tribe who had called at the old Corner House.

Now, whether this marauder belonged to the same people or not, Ruth saw that he looked like a Gypsy. For another reason, too, her mind was relieved at once; Tom Jonah was only savage toward the man on the roof.

When Tess ran right up to the leaping dog, he stopped barking, and wagged his tail, as though satisfied that he had done his duty in drawing the family to the scene. But he still kept his eyes on the man, and occasionally uttered a growl deep in his throat.

“What are you doing up there?” Ruth demanded of the man.

“Tak’ away dog!” he whined.

“No. I think I will let the dog hold you till a policeman comes. You were trying to rob our henroost.”

“Oh, no, Missee! You wrong. No do that,” stammered the man.

“What were you doing here, then?”

Before the fellow could manufacture any plausible tale, a shout came from beyond the back fence, and somebody was heard to scramble into the Corner House yard.

“What’s the matter, girls?” demanded Neale O’Neil’s cheerful voice.

“Oh, come here, Neale!” cried Agnes. “Tom Jonah’s caught a Gypsy.”

“Tom Who?” demanded the tall, pleasant-faced boy of fifteen, who immediately approached the henhouse.

“Tom Jonah,” announced Tess. “He’s just the nicest dog!”

The boy saw the group more clearly then. He looked from the savagely growling animal to the man sprawling on the roof, and burst out laughing.

“Yes! I guess that fellow up there feels that the dog is very ‘nice.’ Where did you get the dog, and where did he get his name?”

“We’ll tell you all about that later, Neale,” said Ruth, more gravely. “At least, we’ll tell you all we know about the dear old dog. Isn’t he a splendid fellow to catch this man at my hens?”

“And the fellow had some in this bag!” exclaimed Neale, finding a bag of flopping poultry at the corner of the hen-run.

“Tak’ away dog!” begged the man on the roof again.

“That’s all he’s afraid of,” said Agnes. “I bet he has a knife. Isn’t he a wicked looking fellow?”

“Regular brigand,” agreed Neale. “What we going to do with him?”

“Give him to a policeman,” suggested Agnes.

“Do you suppose the policeman would want him?” chuckled Neale. “To awaken a Milton officer at this hour of the night would be almost sacrilege, wouldn’t it?”

“What shall we do?” demanded Agnes.

Ruth had been thinking more sensibly for a few moments. Now she spoke up decisively:

“The man did not manage to do any harm. Put the poultry back in the house, Neale. If he ever comes again he will know what to expect. He thought we had no dog; but he sees we have – and a savage one. Let him go.”

“Had we better do that, sister?” whispered Agnes. “Oughtn’t he to be punished?”

“I expect so,” Ruth said, grimly. “But for once I am going to shirk my duty. We’ll take away the dog and let him go.”

“Who’ll take him away?” demanded Agnes, suddenly.

Neale had taken the sack in which the fowl struggled, to the door of the henhouse, opened it, and dumped the fowl out. Tom Jonah evidently recognized him for a friend, for he wagged his tail, but still kept his eye on the man upon the roof.

“I declare!” said Ruth. “I hadn’t thought. Whom will he mind?”

“Come here, Tom Jonah!” said Neale, snapping his fingers.

Tom Jonah still wagged his tail, but he remained ready to receive the Gypsy (if such the fellow was) in his jaws, if he descended.

“Come away, Tom!” exclaimed Agnes, confidently. “Come on back to the house.”

The man on the roof moved and Tom Jonah stiffened. He refused to budge.

“Guess you’ll have to call a cop after all,” said Neale, doubtfully.

“Here, sir!” commanded Ruth. “Come away. You have done enough – ”

But the dog did not think so. He held his place and growled.

“I guess you’re bound to stay up there, till daylight – or a policeman – doth appear, my friend,” called up Neale to the besieged.

“Tak’ away dog!” begged the frightened fellow.

“Why, Tom Jonah!” exclaimed Tess, walking up to the big dog and putting a hand on his collar. “You must come away when you are spoken to. You’ve caught the bad man, and that’s enough.”

Tom Jonah turned and licked her hand. Then he moved a few steps away with her and looked back.

“Come on with me, Tom Jonah,” commanded the little girl, firmly. “Let the bad man go.”

“What do you know about that?” demanded Neale.

The next minute the fellow had scrambled up the roof, caught the low hanging limb of a shade tree that stood near the fence, and swinging himself like a cat into the tree, he got out on another branch that overhung the sidewalk, dropped, and ran.

Tom Jonah sprang to the fence with a savage bay; but the man only went the faster. The incident was closed in a minute, and the little party of half-dressed young folk went back to their beds, while the strange dog curled up on his mat in the corner of the porch again and slept the sleep of the just till morning.

And now that the excitement is over, let us find out a little something about the Corner House girls, their friends, their condition in life, and certain interesting facts regarding them.

When Mr. Howbridge, the lawyer from Milton and Uncle Peter Stower’s man of affairs and the administrator of his estate, came to the little tenement on Essex Street, Bloomingsburg, where the four orphaned Kenway girls had lived for some years with Aunt Sarah Maltby, he first met Tess and Dot returning from the drugstore with Aunt Sarah’s weekly supply of peppermint drops.

Aunt Sarah had been a burden on the Kenways for many years. The girls had only their father’s pension to get along on. Aunt Sarah claimed that when Uncle Peter died, his great estate would naturally fall to her, and then she would return all the benefits she had received from the Kenway family.

But the lawyer knew that queer old Uncle Peter Stower had made a will leaving practically all his property to the four girls in trust, and to Aunt Sarah only a small legacy. But this will had been hidden somewhere by the old man before his recent death and had not yet been found.

There seemed to be no other claimants to the Stower Estate, however, and the court allowed Mr. Howbridge to take the Kenway girls and Aunt Sarah to Milton and establish them in the Stower Homestead, known far and wide as the old Corner House.

Here, during the year that had passed, many interesting and exciting things had happened to Ruth and Agnes and Tess and Dot.

Ruth was the head of the family, and the lawyer greatly admired her good sense and ability. She was not a strikingly pretty girl, for she had “stringy” black hair and little color; but her eyes were big and brown, and those eyes, and her mouth, laughed suddenly at you and gave expression to her whole face. She was now completing her seventeenth year.

Agnes was thirteen, a jolly, roly-poly girl, who was fond of jokes, a bit of a tomboy, up to all sorts of pranks – who laughed easily and cried stormily – had “lots of molasses colored hair” as she said herself, and was the possessor of a pair of blue eyes that could stare a rude boy out of countenance, but who would spoil the effect of this the next instant by giggling; a girl who had a soulmate among her girl friends all of the time, but not frequently did one last for long in the catalog of her “best friends.”

Nobody remembered that Tess had been named Theresa. She was a wise little ten-year-old who possessed some of Ruth’s dignity and some of Agnes’ prettiness, and the most tender heart in the world, which made her naturally tactful. She was quick at her books and very courageous.

Dorothy, or Dot, was the baby and pet of the family. She was a little brunette fairy; and if she was not very wise as yet, she was faithful and lovable, and not one of “the Corner House girls,” as the Kenways were soon called by Milton people, was more beloved than Dot.

The girls’ best boy friend lived with the old cobbler, Mr. Con Murphy, on the rear street, and in a little house the yard of which adjoined the larger grounds of the old Corner House. We have seen how quickly Neale O’Neil came to the assistance of the Kenway girls when they were in trouble.

Neale had been brought up among circus people, his mother having traveled all her life with Twomley & Sorber’s Herculean Circus and Menagerie. The boy’s desire for an education and to win a better place in the world for himself, had caused him to run away from his uncle, Mr. Sorber, and support himself in Milton while he attended school.

The Corner House girls had befriended Neale and when his uncle finally searched him out and found the boy, it was they who influenced the man against taking Neale away. Neale had proved himself an excellent scholar and had made friends in Milton; now he was about to graduate with Agnes from the highest grammar grade to high school.

The particulars of all these happenings have been related in the first two volumes of the series, entitled respectively, “The Corner House Girls” and “The Corner House Girls at School.”

When Agnes woke up in the morning following the unsuccessful raid of the Gypsy man on the hennery, she had something of wonderful importance to tell Ruth. She had seen her “particular friend,” Trix Severn, on the street Saturday afternoon and Trix had told her something.

“You’ve heard the girls talking about Pleasant Cove, Ruthie?” said Agnes, earnestly. “You know Mr. Terrence Severn owns one of the big hotels there?”

“Of course. Trix talks enough about it,” said the older Kenway girl.

“Oh! you don’t like Trix – ”

“I’m not exceedingly fond of her. And there was a time when you thought her your very deadliest enemy,” laughed Ruth.

“Well! Trix has changed,” declared the unsuspicious Agnes, “and she’s proposed the very nicest thing, Ruth. She says her mother and father will let her bring all four of us to the Cove for the first fortnight after graduation. The hotel will not be full then, and we will be Trix’s guests. And we’ll have loads of fun.”

“I – don’t – know – ” began Ruth, but Agnes broke in warmly:

“Now, don’t you say ‘No,’ Ruthie Kenway! Don’t you say ‘No!’ I’ve just made up my mind to go to Pleasant Cove – ”

“No need of flying off, Ag,” said Ruth, in the cool tone that usually brought Agnes “down to earth again.” “We have talked of going there for a part of the summer. A change to salt air will be beneficial for us all – so Dr. Forsythe says. I have talked to Mr. Howbridge, and he says ‘Yes.’”

“Well, then!”

“But I doubt the advisability of accepting Trix Severn’s invitation.”

“Now, isn’t that mean – ”

“Hold your horses,” again advised Ruth. “We will go, anyway. If all is well we will stay at the hotel a while. Pearl Harrod’s uncle owns a bungalow there, too; she has asked me to come there for a while, and bring you all.”

“Well! isn’t that nice?” agreed Agnes. “Then we can stay twice as long.”

“Whether it will be right for us to accept the hospitality offered us when we have no means of returning it – ”

“Oh, dear me, Ruth! don’t be a fuss-cat.”

“There is a big tent colony there – quite removed from the hotel,” suggested Ruth. “Many of our friends and their folks are going there. Neale O’Neil is going with a party of the boys for at least two weeks.”

“Say! we’ll have scrumptious times,” cried Agnes, with sparkling eyes. Her anticipation of every joy in life added immensely to the joy itself.

“Yes – if we go,” said Ruth, slowly. But it was something for the others to look forward to with much pleasure.

CHAPTER III – THE DANCE AT CARRIE POOLE’S

Tess and Dot Kenway had something of particular interest to hold their attention, too, the minute they awoke on this Sunday morning. Dot voiced the matter first when she asked:

“Do you suppose that dear Tom Jonah is here yet, Tess?”

“Oh, I hope so!” cried the older girl.

“Let’s run see,” suggested Dot, and nothing loth Tess slipped into her bathrobe and slippers, too, and the two girls pattered downstairs. Their baths, always overseen by Ruth, were neglected. They must see, they thought, if the good old dog was on the porch.

Nobody was astir downstairs; Mrs. MacCall had not yet left her room, and on Sunday mornings even Uncle Rufus allowed himself an extra hour in bed. There was the delicious smell of warm baked beans left over night in the range oven; the big, steaming pot would be set upon the table at breakfast, flanked with golden-brown muffins on one side and the sliced “loaf,” or brownbread, on the other.

Sandyface came yawning from her basket behind the stove when Tess and Dot entered the kitchen. She had four little black and white blind babies in that basket which she had found in a barrel in the woodshed only a few days before.

Mrs. MacCall said she did not know what was to be done with the four kittens. Sandyface’s original family was quite grown up, and if these four were allowed to live, too, that would make nine cats around the old Corner House.

“And the goodness knows!” exclaimed the housekeeper, “that’s a whole lot more than any family has a business to keep. We’re overrun with cats.”

Tess unlocked the door and she and Dot went out on the porch, Sandyface following. There was no sign of the big dog.

“Tom Jonah’s gone!” sighed Dot, quaveringly.

“I wouldn’t have thought it – when we treated him so nicely,” said Tess.

Sandyface sniffed suspiciously at the old mat on which the dog had lain. Then she looked all about before venturing off the porch.

The sunshine and quiet of a perfect Sunday morning lay all about the old Corner House. Robins sought their very souls for music to tell how happy they were, in the tops of the cherry trees. Catbirds had not yet lost their love songs of the spring; though occasionally one scolded harshly when a roaming cat came too near the hidden nest.

Wrens hopped about the path, and even upon the porch steps, secure in their knowledge that they were too quick for Sandyface to reach, and with unbounded faith in human beings. An oriole burst into melody, swinging in the great snowball bush near the Willow Street fence.

There was a moist, warm smell from the garden; the old rooster crowed raucously; Billy Bumps bleated a wistful “Good-morning” from his pen. Then came a scramble of padded feet, and Sandyface went up the nearest tree like a flash of lightning.

“Here is Tom Jonah!” cried Tess, with delight.

From around the corner of the woodshed appeared the big, shaggy dog. He cocked one ear and actually smiled when he saw the cat go up the tree. But he trotted right up on the porch to meet the delighted girls.

His brown eyes were deep pools where golden sparks played. The mud had been mostly shaken off his flanks and paws. He was rested, and he acted as though he were sure of his position here at the old Corner House.

“Good old fellow!” cried Tess, putting out a hand to pat him.

At once Tom Jonah put up his right paw to shake hands. He repeated the feat with Dot the next moment, to the delight of both girls.

“Oh!” gasped Dot, “he’s a trick dog.”

“He’s just what his collar says; he’s a gentleman,” sighed Tess, happily. “Oh! I hope his folks won’t ever come after him.”

Ruth had to come down for Tess and Dot or they would not have been bathed and dressed in time for breakfast. The smaller girls were very much taken with Tom Jonah.

They found that he had more accomplishments than “shaking hands.” When Agnes came down and heard about his first manifestation of education, she tried him at other “stunts.”

He sat up at the word of command. He would hold a bit of meat, or a sweet cracker, on his nose any length of time you might name, and never offer to eat it until you said, “Now, sir!” or something of the kind. Then Tom Jonah would jerk the tidbit into the air and catch it in his jaws as it came down.

And those jaws! Powerful indeed, despite some of the teeth having been broken and discolored by age. For Tom Jonah was no puppy. Uncle Rufus declared him to be at least twelve years old, and perhaps more than that.

But he had the physique of a lion – a great, broad chest, and muscles in his shoulders that slipped under the skin when he was in action like a tiger’s. Now that he was somewhat rested from the long journey he had evidently taken, he seemed a very powerful, healthy dog.

“And he would have eaten that tramp up, if he’d gotten hold of him,” Agnes declared, as they gathered at the breakfast table.

“Oh, no, Aggie; I don’t think Tom Jonah would really have bitten that Gypsy man,” Tess hastened to say. “But he might have grabbed his coat and held on.”

“With those jaws – I guess he would have held on,” sighed Agnes.

“Anyway,” said Dot, “he saved Ruthie’s hens. Didn’t he, Ruthie?”

“I’ll gladly pay his license fee if he wants to stay with us,” said Ruth, gaily.

The cornmeal muffins chanced to be a little over-baked that morning; at least, one panful was. Dot did not like “crusts”; she had been known to hide very hard ones under the edge of her plate.

She played with one of these muffin crusts more than she ate it, and Aunt Sarah Maltby (who was a very grim lady indeed with penetrating eyes and a habit of seldom speaking) had an accusing eye upon the little girl.

“Dorothy,” she said, suddenly, “you will see the time, I have no doubt, when you will be hungry for that crust. You had better eat it now like a nice girl.”

“Aunt Sarah, I really do not want it,” said Dot, gravely. “And – and if I don’t, do you think I shall really some day be hungry for just this pertic’lar crust?”

“You will. I expect nothing less,” snapped Aunt Sarah. “The Kenways was allus spend-thrifts. Why! when I was your age, Dorothy, I was glad to get dry bread to eat!”

Dot looked at her with serious interest. “You must have been awfully poor, Aunt Sarah,” she said, sympathetically. “You have a much better time living with us, don’t you?”

Ruth shook her head admonishingly at the smallest girl; but for once Aunt Sarah was rather nonplussed, and nobody heard her speak again before she went off to church.

Neale came over later, dressed for Sunday school, and he was as much interested in the new boarder at the Corner House as the girls themselves.

“If he belongs anywhere around Milton, somebody will surely know about him,” said the boy. “I’ll make inquiries. Wherever he comes from, he must be well known in that locality.”

“Why so?” demanded Agnes.

“Because of what it says on his collar,” laughed Neale O’Neil.

“Because of what it doesn’t say, I guess,” explained Ruth, seeing her sister’s puzzled face. “There is no name of owner, or license number. Do you see?”

“It – it would be an insult to license a dog like Tom Jonah,” sputtered Tess. “Just – just like a tag on an automobile!”

“Yo’ right, honey,” chuckled Uncle Rufus. “He done seem like folkses – don’ he? I’se gwine tuh give him a reg’lar barf an’ cure up dem sore feetses ob his. He’ll be anudder dawg – sho’ will!”

The old man took Tom Jonah to the grass plot near the garden hydrant, and soaped him well – with the “insect-suicide” soap Dot had talked about – and afterward washed him down with the hose. Tom Jonah stood for it all; he had evidently been used to having his toilet attended to.

When the girls came home from Sunday school, they found him lying on the porch, all warm and dried and his hair “fluffy.” They had asked everybody they met – almost – about Tom Jonah; but not a soul knew anything regarding him.

“He’s going to be ours for keeps! He’s going to be ours for keeps!” sang Tess, with delight.

Sandyface’s earlier family – Spotty, Almira, Bungle and Popocatepetl – had taken a good look at the big dog, and then backed away with swelling tails and muffled objections. But the old cat had to attend to the four little blind mites behind the kitchen range, so she had grown familiar enough with Tom Jonah to pass him on her way to and from the kitchen door.

He was too much of a gentleman, as his collar proclaimed, to pay her the least attention save for a friendly wag of his bushy tail. To the four half-grown cats he gave little heed. But Tess and Dot thought that he ought to become acquainted with the un-named kittens in the basket immediately.

“If they get used to him, you know,” said Tess, “they’ll all live together just like a ‘happy family.’”

“Like us?” suggested Dot, who did not quite understand the reference, having forgotten the particular cage thus labeled in the circus they had seen the previous summer.

“Why! of course like us!” laughed Tess, and Sandyface being away foraging for her brood, Tess seized the basket and carried it out on the porch, setting it down before Tom Jonah who was lying in the sun.

The big dog sniffed at the basket but did not offer to disturb the sleeping kittens. That would not do for the curious girls. They had to delve deeper into the natural lack of affinity between the canine and the feline families.

So Tess lifted one little black and white, squirmy kitten – just as its mother did, by the back of its neck – and set it upon the porch before the dog’s nose. The kitten became awake instantly. Blind as it was, it stiffened its spine into an arch, backed away from the vicinity of the dog precipitately, and “spit” like a tiny teakettle boiling over.

“Oh! oh! the horrid thing,” wailed Dot. “And poor Tom Jonah didn’t do a thing to it!”

“But see him!” gasped Tess, in a gale of giggles.

For really, Tom Jonah looked too funny for anything. He turned away his head with a most embarrassed expression of countenance and would not look again at the spitting little animal. He evidently felt himself in a most ridiculous position and finally got up and went off the porch altogether until the girls returned the basket of kittens to its proper place behind the stove.

At dinner that Sunday, when Uncle Rufus served the roast, he held the swinging door open until Tom Jonah paced in behind him into the dining-room. Seeing the roast placed before Mrs. MacCall, Tom Jonah sat down beside her chair in a good position to observe the feast; but waited his turn in a most gentlemanly manner.

Mrs. MacCall cut some meat for him and put it on a plate. This Uncle Rufus put before Tom Jonah; but the big dog did not offer to eat it until he was given permission. And now he no longer “gobbled,” but ate daintily, and sat back when he was finished like any well-bred person, waiting for the next course.

Even Aunt Sarah looked with approval upon the new acquisition to the family of the old Corner House. She had heard the tale of his rescue of Ruth’s poultry from the marauding Gypsy, and patted Tom Jonah’s noble head.

“It’s a good thing to have a watch-dog on the premises,” she said, “with all that old silver and trash you girls insist upon keeping out of the plate-safe. Your Uncle Peter would turn in his grave if he knew how common you was makin’ the Stower plate.”

“But what is the good of having a thing if you don’t make use of it?” queried Ruth, stoutly.

Ruth was a girl with a mind of her own, and not even the carping criticisms of Aunt Sarah could turn her from her course if once she was convinced that what she did was right. Nor was she frightened by her schoolmates’ opinions – as note her friendship with Rosa Wildwood.

Bob Wildwood was a “character” in Milton. People smiled at him and forgave his peculiarities to a degree; but they could not respect him.

In the first place, Bob was a Southerner – and a Southerner in a New England town is just as likely to be misunderstood, as a Northerner in a Georgian town.

Bob and his daughter, Rosa, had drifted to Milton a couple of years previous. They had been “drifting” for most of the girl’s short life; but now Rosa was quite big enough to have some influence with her shiftless father, and they had taken some sort of root in the harsh New England soil, so different from their own rich bottom-lands of the South.

Besides, Rosa was in ill health. She was “weakly”; Bob spoke of her as having “a mis’ry in her chest.” Dr. Forsythe found that the girl had weak lungs, but he was sane and old-fashioned enough to scout the idea that she was in danger of becoming a victim of tuberculosis.

“If you go to work, Bob, and earn for her decent food and a warm shelter, she will pull through and get as hearty and strong as our Northern girls,” declared the doctor, sternly. “You say you lost her twin two years ago – ”

“But I didn’t done los’ Juniper by no sickness,” muttered Bob, shaking his head.

The Corner House girls thought Bob Wildwood a most amusing man, for he talked just like a darky (to their ears); but Uncle Rufus shook his head in scorn at Wildwood. “He’s jes’ no-’count white trash,” the old colored man observed.

However, spurred by the doctor’s threat, Bob let drink alone for the most part, and went to work for Rosa, his remaining daughter, who was just Ruth’s age and was in her class at High – when she was well enough to get there. In spite of her blood and bringing up, Rosa Wildwood had a quick and retentive mind and stood well in her classes.

Bob became a coal-heaver. He worked for Lovell & Malmsey. He drove a pair of mules without lines, ordering them about in a most wonderful manner in a tongue entirely strange to Northern teamsters; and he was black with coal-dust from week-end to week-end. Ruth said there only was one visible white part of Rosa’s father; that was the whites of his eyes.

The man must have loved his daughter very much, however; for it was his nature to be shiftless. He would have gone hungry and ragged himself rather than work. He now kept steadily at his job for Rosa’s sake.

On Monday Rosa was not at school, and coming home to luncheon at noon, Ruth ran half a block out of her way to find out what was the matter. Not alone was the tenement the Wildwoods occupied a very poor one, but Rosa was no housekeeper. It almost disgusted the precise and prim Ruth Kenway to go into the three-room tenement.

Rosa had a cold, and of course it had settled on her chest. She was just dragging herself around to get something hot for Bob’s dinner. Ruth made her go back to bed, and she finished the preparations.

When she came to make the tea, the Corner House girl was horrified to observe that the metal teapot had probably not been thoroughly washed out since the day the Wildwoods had taken up their abode in Milton.

“Paw likes to have the tea set back on the stove,” drawled Rosa, with her pleasant Southern accent. “When he gets a chance, he runs in and ‘takes a swig,’ as he calls it, out of the pot. He says it’s good for the gnawin’ in his stomach – it braces him up an’ is so much better than when he useter mix toddies,” said the girl, gratefully. “We’d have had June with us yet, if it hadn’t been for paw’s toddies.”

“Oh!” cried Ruth, startled. “I thought your sister June died?”

Rosa shook her head and the tears flowed into her soft eyes. “Oh, no. She went away. She couldn’t stand the toddies no more, she said – and her slavin’ to keep the house nice, and us movin’ on all the time. June was housekeeper – she was a long sight smarter’n me, Ruth.”

“But the teachers at school think you are awfully smart,” declared the Corner House girl.

“June warn’t so smart at her books,” said Rosa. “But she could do anything with her hands. You’d thunk she was two years older’n me, too. She was dark and handsome. She got mad, and run away, and then we started lookin’ for her; but we’ve never found her yet,” sighed Rosa. “And now I’ve got so miserable that I can’t keep traveling with paw. So we got to stop here, and maybe we won’t ever see June again.”

“Oh! I hope you will,” cried Ruth. “Now, your father’s dinner is all ready to dish up. And I’ll come back after school this afternoon and rid up the house for you; don’t you do a thing.”

Ruth had time that noon for only a bite at home, and explained to Mrs. MacCall that she would be late in returning from school. She carried a voluminous apron with her to cover her school frock when she set about “ridding up” the Wildwood domicile.

Ruth wanted to help Rosa; she hoped Rosa would keep up with the class and be promoted at the end of the term, as she was sure to be herself. And she was sorry for sooty, odd-talking Bob Wildwood.

What Rosa had said about her lost twin sister had deeply interested Ruth Kenway. She wanted, too, to ask the Southern girl about “June,” or Juniper.

“We were the last children maw had,” said Rosa. “She just seemed to give up after we were born. The others were all sickly – just drooped and faded. And they all were girls and had flower names. Maw was right fanciful, I reckon.

“I wish June had held on. She’d stuck it out, I know, if she’d believed paw could stop drinking toddies. But, you see he has. He ‘swigs’ an awful lot of tea, though, and I expect it’s tanning him inside just like he was leather!”

Ruth really thought this was probable – especially with the teapot in the condition she had found it. But she had put some washing soda in the pot, filled it with boiling water, and set it back on the stove to stew some of the “tannin” out of it.

While the Corner House girl was talking with Rosa in the little bedroom the girl called her own, Bob brought his mules to a halt before the house with an empty wagon, and ran in as usual.

The girls heard him enter the outer room; but Ruth never thought of what the man’s object might be until Rosa laughed and said:

“There’s paw now, for a swig at the teapot. I hope you left it full fo’ him, Ruthie, dear.”

“Oh, goodness mercy me!” cried the Corner House girl, and darted out to the kitchen to warn the man.

But she was too late. Already the begrimed Bob Wildwood had the spout of the teapot to his lips and several swallows of the scalding and acrid mixture gurgled down his throat before he discovered that it was not tea!

“Woof! woof! woof!” he sputtered, and flung pot and all away from him. “Who done tryin’ poison me! Woof! I’s scalded with poison!”

He coughed and spluttered over the sink, and then tried a draught of cold water from the spigot – which probably did him just as much good as anything.

“Oh, dear me, Mr. Wildwood!” gasped Ruth, standing with clasped hands and looking at the sooty man, half frightened. “I – I was just boiling the teapot out.”

“Boilin’ it out?”

“Yes, sir. With soda. I – I – It won’t poison you, I guess.”

“My Lawd!” groaned Bob. “What won’t yo’ Northerners do nex’? Wash out er teapot!” and he grumblingly went forth to his team and drove away.

Ruth felt that her good intentions were misunderstood – to a degree. But Rosa thanked her very prettily for what she had done, and the next day she was able to come to school again.

It was only a few days later that Carrie Poole invited a number of the high school girls and boys – and some of the younger set – to the last dance of the season at her home. She lived in a huge old farmhouse, some distance out of town on the Buckshot road, and the Corner House girls and Neale O’Neil had spent several pleasant evenings there during the winter and spring.

The night before this party there was a big wind, and a part of one of the chimneys came down into the side yard during the night with a noise like thunder; so Ruth had to telephone for a mason before breakfast.

Had it not been for this happening, the Corner House girls – at least, Ruth and Agnes – and Neale O’Neil, would have escaped rather an embarrassing incident at the party.

Neale came over to supper the evening of the party, and he brought his pumps in a newspaper under his arm.

“Come on, girls, let’s have your dancing slippers,” he said to the two older Corner House girls, who were going to the dance. “I’ll put them with mine.”

And he did so – rolling the girls’ pretty slippers up in the same parcel with his own. He left the parcel in the kitchen. Later it was discovered that the mason’s helper had left a similarly wrapped parcel there, too.

When the three young folk started off, it was Agnes who ran back after the bundle of dancing slippers. Neale carried it under his arm, and they walked briskly out through the suburbs of Milton and on along the Buckshot road.

“Are you really going to Pleasant Cove this summer, Neale?” demanded Agnes, as they went on together.

“If I can. Joe has asked me. And you girls?”

“Trix says we must come to her father’s hotel for two weeks at least,” Agnes declared.

“Humph!” said Neale, doubtfully. “Are you going, Ruth?”

“I – don’t – know,” admitted the older Corner House girl.

“Now, isn’t that just too mean?” complained Agnes. “You just say that because you don’t like Trix.”

“I don’t know whether Trix will be of the same mind when the time comes,” said Ruth, firmly.

“I believe you,” grunted Neale.

Agnes pouted. “It’s just mean of you,” she said. “Of course she will want us to go.” While Agnes was “spoons” with a girl, she was always strictly loyal to her. She could not possibly see Trix Severn’s faults just now.

They arrived at the farmhouse and found a crowd already assembled. There was a great deal of talking and laughter, and while Neale stood chatting with some of the boys in the hall, Ruth and Agnes came to him for their slippers.

“Sure!” said the boy, producing the newspaper-wrapped bundle he carried. “Guess I’ll put on my own pumps, too.”

He unrolled the parcel. Then a yell of derision and laughter arose from the onlookers; instead of three pairs of dancing slippers, Neale produced two pairs of half-worn and lime-bespattered shoes belonging to the masons who had repaired the old Corner House chimney!

“Now we can’t dance!” wailed Agnes.

“Oh, Neale!” gasped Ruth, while the young folk about them went off into another gale of laughter.

“Well, it wasn’t my fault,” grumbled Neale. “Aggie went after the bundle.”

“Shouldn’t have left them right there with the masons’ bundle – so now!” snapped Agnes.

CHAPTER IV – THE MYSTERY OF JUNE WILDWOOD

Now, Trix Severn had maneuvered so as to get the very first dance with Neale O’Neil. Among all the boys who attended the upper grammar grades, and the High, of Milton, the boy who had been brought up in a circus was the best dancer. The older girls all were glad to get him for a partner.

Time had been when Trix sneered at “that circus boy,” but that was before he and the two older Corner House girls had saved Trix from a collapsing snow palace back in mid-winter.

Since that time she had taken up with Agnes Kenway as her very closest chum, and she had visited the old Corner House a good deal. When Agnes and her sister arrived at the party on this evening, with Neale as escort, Trix determined to have at least one dance with the popular boy.

“Oh, Neale!” she whispered, fluttering up to him in her very nicest way, “Ruth and Agnes will be half an hour primping, upstairs. The music is going to strike up. Do let us have the first dance.”

“All right,” said Neale, good-naturedly.

It was the moment later that the discovery was made of the masons’ shoes in the bundle he carried under his arm.

“Now we can’t dance,” repeated Agnes, when the laughter had somewhat subsided.

“Oh, Neale can dance just as well,” Trix said, carelessly. “Come on, Neale! You know this is our dance.”

Of course Neale could dance in his walking shoes. But he saw Agnes’ woebegone face and he hesitated.

“It’s too bad, Aggie,” he said. “If it wasn’t so far – ”

“Why, Neale O’Neill” snapped Trix, unwisely. “You don’t mean to say you’d be foolish enough to go clear back to the Corner House for those girls’ slippers?”

Perhaps it was just this opposition that was needed to start Neale off. He pulled his cap from his pocket and turned toward the door, with a shrug. “I guess I can get back in an hour, Ag. Don’t you and Ruth dance much in your heavy shoes until then. You’ll tire yourselves all out.”

“Why, Neale O’Neill” cried Trix. “You won’t do it?”

Even Ruth murmured against the boy’s making the trip for the slippers. “We can get along, Neale,” she said, in her quiet way.

“And you promised to dance with me this first dance,” declared Trix, angrily, as the music began.

Neale did not pay much attention to her – at the moment. “It’s my fault, I guess,” he said, laughing. “I’ll go back for them, Ag.”

But Trix got right between him and the door. “Now! you sha’n’t go off and leave me in the lurch that way, Neale O’Neill” she cried, shrilly.

“Aw – There are other dances. Wait till I come back,” he said.

“You can dance in the shoes you have on,” Trix said, sharply.

“What if?”

“But we can’t, Trix,” interposed Agnes, much distressed. “Ruth and I, you know – ”

“I don’t care!” interrupted Trix, boiling over at last. “You Corner House girls are the most selfish things! You’d spoil his fun for half the party – ”

“Aw, don’t bother!” growled Neale, in much disgust.

“I will bother! You – ”

“Guess she thinks she owns you, Neale,” chuckled one of the boys, adding fuel to the flames. Neale did not feel any too pleasant after that. He flung away from Trix Severn’s detaining grasp.

“I’m going – it isn’t any of your concern,” he muttered, to the angry girl.

Ruth bore Agnes away. She was half crying. The rift in the intimacy between her soulmate and herself was apparent to all.

To make the matter worse – according to Trix’s version – when Neale finally returned, almost breathless, with the mislaid slippers, he insisted, first of all, upon dancing with Ruth and Agnes. Then he would have favored Trix (Ruth had advised it), but the angry girl would not speak to him.

“He’s nothing but a low circus boy, anyway!” she told Lucy Poole. “And I don’t think really well-bred girls would care to have anything to do with him.”

Those who heard her laughed. They had known Trix Severn’s ways for a long time. She had been upon her good behavior; but it did not surprise her old acquaintances that she should act like this.

It made a difference to the Corner House girls, however, for it made their plans about going to Pleasant Cove uncertain.

The other girls knew that Trix had invited the Corner House girls for the first two weeks after graduation, and that Ruth had tentatively accepted. Therefore even Pearl Harrod – who wanted Ruth and her sisters, herself – scarcely knew whether to put in a claim for them or not.

Graduation Day was very near at hand; the very day following the closing of the Milton High, several family parties were to leave for the seaside resort which was so popular in this part of New England.

They had to pass through Bloomingsburg to get to it, but when the Kenways had lived in that city, they had never expected to spend any part of the summer season at such a beautiful summer resort as Pleasant Cove.

It was a bungalow colony, with several fine hotels, built around a tiny, old-fashioned fishing port. There was a still cove, a beautiful river emptying into it, and outside, a stretch of rocky Atlantic coast on which the ocean played grim tunes during stormy weather.

This was as much as the Corner House girls knew about it as yet. But they all looked forward to their first visit to the place with keen delight. Tess and Dot were talking about the expected trip a good deal of the time they were awake. Most of their doll-play was colored now by thoughts of Pleasant Cove.

They were not too busy to help Mrs. MacCall take the last of the winter clothing to the garret, however, and see her pack it away in the chests there. As she did this the housekeeper sprinkled, with lavish hand, the camphor balls among the layers of clothing.

Dot had tentatively tasted one of the hard, white balls, and shuddered. “But they do look so much like candy, Tess,” she said. Then she suddenly had another thought:

“Oh, Mrs. MacCall! what do you suppose the poor moths had to live on ’way back in the Garden of Eden before Adam and Eve wore any clothes?”

“Now, can you beat that?” demanded the housekeeper, of nobody in particular. “What won’t that young one get in her head!”

Meanwhile Ruth was helping Rosa Wildwood all she could, so that the girl from the South would be able to pass in the necessary examinations and stand high enough in the class to be promoted.

Housework certainly “told on” Rosa. Bob said “it jest seems t’ take th’ puckerin’ string all out’n her – an’ she jest draps down like a flower.”

“We’ll help her, Mr. Wildwood,” Ruth said. “But she really ought to have a rest.”

“Hi Godfrey!” ejaculated the coal heaver. “I tell her she kin let the housework go. We don’t have no visitors – savin’ an’ exceptin’ you, ma’am.”

“But she wants to keep the place decent, you see,” Ruth told him. “And she can scarcely do that and keep up with her studies – now. You see, she’s so weak.”

“Hi Godfrey!” exclaimed the man again. “Ain’t thar sech a thing as bein’ a mite too clean?”

But Bob Wildwood had an immense respect for Ruth; likewise he was grateful because she showed an interest in his last remaining daughter.

“I tell you, sir,” the oldest Corner House girl said, gravely. “Rosa needs a change and a rest. And all us girls are going to Pleasant Cove this summer. Will you let Rosa come down, too, for a while, if I pay her way and look out for her?”

The man was somewhat disturbed by the question. “Yuh see, Miss,” he observed, scratching his head thoughtfully, “she’s all I got. I’d plumb be lost ’ithout Rosa.”

“But only for a week or two.”

“I know. And I wouldn’t want tuh stand in her way. I crossed her sister too much – that’s what I did. Juniper was a sight more uppity than Rosa – otherwise she wouldn’t have flew the coop,” said Bob Wildwood, shaking his head.

Ruth, all tenderness for his bereavement, hastened to say: “Oh, you’ll find her again, sir. Surely you don’t believe she’s dead?”

“No. If she ain’t come to a bad end, she’s all right somewhar. But she’d oughter be home with her sister – and with me. Ye see, she was pretty – an’ smart. No end smart! She went off in bad comp’ny.”

“How do you mean, Mr. Wildwood?” asked Ruth, deeply interested.

“Travelin’ folks. They had a van an’ a couple team o’ mules, an’ the man sold bitters an’ corn-salve. The woman dressed mighty fine, an’ she took June’s eye.

“We follered ’em a long spell, me an’ Rosa. But we didn’t never ketch up to ’em. If we had, I’d sure tuck a hand-holt of that medicine man. He an’ his woman put all the foolishness inter Juniper’s haid.

“An’ Rosa misses her sister like poison, too,” finished Bob Wildwood, slowly shaking his head.

There seemed to be a mystery connected with the disappearance of Rosa’s sister, and Ruth Kenway was just as curious as she could be about it; but she stuck to her subject until Bob Wildwood agreed to spare his remaining daughter for at least a week’s visit to Pleasant Cove, while the Corner House girls would be there.

CHAPTER V – OFF FOR THE SEASIDE

The last hours of the school term were busy ones indeed. Even Tess had her troublesome “’zaminations.” At the study table on the last evening before her own grade had its closing exercises, Tess propounded the following:

“Ruthie, what’s a ’scutcheon?”

“Um – um,” said Ruth, far away.

“A what, child?” demanded Agnes.

“‘’Scutcheon?’”

“‘Escutcheon,’ she means,” chuckled Neale, who was present as usual at study hour.

“Well, what is it?” begged Tess, plaintively.

“Why?” demanded Ruth, suddenly waking up. “That’s a hard word for a small girl, Tess.”

“It says here,” quoth Tess, “that ‘There was a blot upon his escutcheon.’”

“Oh, yes – sure,” drawled Neale, as Ruth hesitated. “That must mean a fancy vest, Tess. And he spilled soup on it – sure!”

“Now Neale! how horrid!” admonished Ruth, while Agnes giggled.

“I do think you are all awful mean to me,” wailed Tess. “You don’t tell me a thing. You’re almost as mean as Trix Severn was to me to-day. I don’t want to go to her father’s hotel, so there! Have we got to, Ruthie?”

“What did she do to you, Tess?” demanded Agnes, with a curiosity she could not quench. For, deep as the chasm had grown between her and her former chum, she could not ignore Trix.

“She just turned up her nose at me,” complained Tess, “when I went by; and I heard her say to some girl she was with: ‘There goes one of them now. They pushed their way into our party, and I s’pose we’ve got to entertain them.’ Now, did we push our way in, Ruthie?”

Ruth was angry. It was not often that she displayed indignation, so that when she did so, the other girls – and even Neale – were the more impressed.

“Of course she was speaking of that wretched invitation she gave us to stay at her father’s hotel at Pleasant Cove,” said Ruth. “Well!”

“Oh, Ruthie! don’t say you won’t go,” begged Agnes.

“I’ll never go to that Overlook House unless we pay our way – be sure of that,” declared the angry Ruth.

“But we are going to the shore, Ruthie?” asked Tess.

“Yes.”

“Maybe Pearl Harrod will ask us again,” murmured Agnes, hopefully.

“I guess we can pay our way and be beholden to nobody,” said Ruth, shortly. “I will hire one of the tents, if nothing else. And we’ll start the very day after High closes, just as we planned.”

Despite the loss of her “soulmate,” Agnes was pretty cheerful. She was to graduate from grammar school; and although she was sorry to lose Miss Georgiana Shipman as a teacher, she was delighted to get out of “the pigtail classes,” as she rudely termed the lower grades.

“I’m going to do up my hair, Ruthie, whatever you say,” she declared, “just as soon as I get into high school next fall. I’m old enough to forget braids and hair-ribbons, I should hope!”

“Not yet, my child, not yet,” laughed Ruth. “Why! there are more girls in High who wear their hair down than up.”

“But I’m so big – ”

“You mean, you’d be big,” chuckled Neale, “if you were only rolled out,” for he was always teasing Agnes about her plumpness.

“Well! I want to celebrate some way,” sighed Agnes. “Can’t we have a specially nice supper that night?”

“Surely, child,” said her sedate sister. “What do you want?”

“Well!” repeated Agnes, slowly; “you know I’ll never graduate from Grammar again. Couldn’t we kill some of those nice frying chickens of yours, Ruthie?”

“Oh, my!” cried Neale. “What have the poor chickens done that they should be slaughtered to make a Roman holiday?”

“Mr. Smartie!” snapped Agnes. “You be good, or you sha’n’t have any.”

“If that Tom Jonah hadn’t been busy on a certain night, none of us would have eaten those particular frying chickens,” laughed Neale. “I wonder if that Gypsy is running yet?”

“He didn’t get the frying chickens in the bag,” said Agnes. “They were in another coop. We hatched them in January and brought them up by hand. Say! I don’t believe you know much about natural history, Neale, anyway.”

“I guess he knows more than Sammy Pinkney does,” Tess said, again drawn into the conversation. “Teacher asked him to tell us two breeds of dairy cattle and which gives the most milk. She’d been reading to us about it out of a book. So Sammy says:

“‘The bull and the cow, Miss Andrews; and the cow gives the most milk.’”

Dot’s school held its closing exercises one morning, and Tess’ in the afternoon. Then came the graduation of Agnes and Neale O’Neil from the grammar school. Ruth was excused from her own classes at High long enough to attend her sister’s graduation.

Although the plump Corner House girl was no genius, she always stood well in her classes. Ruth saw to that, for what Agnes did not learn at school she had to study at home.

So she stood well up in her class, and she did look “too distractingly pretty,” as Mrs. MacCall declared, when she gave the last touches to Agnes’ dress before she started for school that last day. Miss Ann Titus, Milton’s most famous seamstress and “gossip-in-ordinary,” had outdone herself in making Agnes’ dress. No girl in her class – not even Trix Severn – was dressed so becomingly.

The envious Trix heard the commendations showered on her former friend, and her face grew sourer and her temper sharper. She well knew she had invited the Corner House girls to be her guests at Pleasant Cove; but she did not want them in her party now. She did not know how to get out of “the fix,” as she called it in her own mind.

She had intimated to two or three other girls who were going, however, that Agnes and Ruth had forced the invitation from her in a moment of weakness. If she had to number them of her party, Miss Trix proposed to make it just as unpleasant for the Kenway sisters as she could.

High school graduation was on Thursday. On Friday a special through train was put on by the railroad from Milton to Pleasant Cove. It was scheduled to leave the former station at ten o’clock.

Luckily Mrs. MacCall had insisted upon having all the trunks and bags packed the day before, for on this Friday morning the Corner House girls had little time for anything but saying “good-bye” to their many friends, both human and dumb.

“Whatever will Tom Jonah think?” cried Tess, hugging the big dog that had taken up his abode at the Corner House so strangely. “He’ll think we have run away from him, poor fellow!”

“Oh! don’t you think that, Tom Jonah!” begged Dot, seizing the dog on the other side. “We all love you so! And we’ll come back to you.”

“You’ll give him just the best care ever, won’t you, Uncle Rufus?” cried Agnes.

“Sho’ will!” agreed the old colored man.

“Can’t we take him with us, Ruthie?” asked Dot.

Ruth would have been tempted to do just this had she been sure that they would hire a tent in the colony as soon as they reached Pleasant Cove. Tom Jonah was just the sort of a protector the Corner House girl would have chosen under those circumstances.

But Ruth was puzzled. She had not seen Pearl Harrod, and was not sure whether Pearl had completely filled her uncle’s bungalow with guests or not. Of one thing Ruth was sure: if they went to the Overlook House (Mr. Terrence Severn’s hotel), they would pay their board and refuse to be Trix’s guests.

When the carriage came for them, Tom Jonah stood at the gate and watched them get in and drive away with a rather depressed air. Dot and Tess waved their handkerchiefs from the carriage window at him as long as they could see the big dog.

There was much confusion at the station. Many people whom the girls knew were on the platform, or in the cars already. Trix Severn was very much in evidence. The Kenway sisters saw the other girls who were going to accept Miss Severn’s hospitality in a group at one side, but they hesitated to join this party.

Trix passed the Kenways twice and did not even look at them. Of course, she knew the sisters were there, but Ruth believed that the mean-spirited girl merely wished them to speak to her so that she could snub them publicly.

“Well, Ruthie Kenway!” exclaimed a voice suddenly behind the Corner House girls.

It was Pearl Harrod. Pearl was a bright-faced, big girl, jovial and kind-hearted. “I’ve just been looking for you everywhere,” pursued Pearl. “Here it is the last minute, and you haven’t told me whether you and the other girls are going to my uncle’s house or not.”

“Why – if you are sure you want us?” queried Ruth, with a little break in her voice.

“I should say yes!” exclaimed Pearl. “But I was afraid you had been asked by some one else.”

Trix turned and looked the four sisters over scornfully. Then she tossed her head. “Waiting like beggars for an invitation from somebody,” she said, loudly enough for all the girls nearby to hear. “You’d think, if those Corner House girls are as rich as they tell about, that they’d pay their way.”

CHAPTER VI – ON THE TRAIN

“Don’t you mind what that mean thing says,” whispered Pearl Harrod, quickly.

She had seen Ruth flush hotly and the tears spring to Agnes’ eyes when Trix Severn had spoken so ill-naturedly. The younger Corner House girls did not hear, but Ruth and Agnes were hurt to the quick.

“You are very, very kind, Pearl,” said Ruth. “But we had thought of going to the tent colony – ”

“Didn’t Trix Severn ask you to her place?” demanded Pearl, hotly. “I know she did. And now she insults you. If she hadn’t asked you first, and seemed so thick with your sister, Ruth, I would have insisted long ago that you all come to uncle’s bungalow. There’s plenty of room, for my aunt and the girls won’t be down for a fortnight.”

“But, Pearl – ”

“I’ll be mad if you don’t agree – now I know that Trix has released you, Ruth Kenway,” cried the good-hearted girl. “Now, don’t let’s say another word about it.”

“Oh, don’t be angry!” begged Ruth. “But won’t it look as though we were begging our way – as Trix says?”

“Pooh! who cares for Trix Severn?”

“You – you are very kind,” said Ruth, yielding at length.

“Then you come on. Hey, girls!” she shouted, running after her own particular friends who were climbing aboard the rear car. “I’ve gotten them to promise. The Corner House girls are going with us – for two weeks, anyway.”

At once the other girls addressed cheered and gathered the four Kenways into their group, with great rejoicing. The sting of Trix Severn’s unkindness was forgotten.

Mr. Howbridge, their guardian, came to the station to see them off, and shook hands with Ruth through the window of the car. When the train actually moved away, Neale O’Neil was there in the crowd, swinging his cap and wishing them heaps of fun. Neale expected to go to Pleasant Cove himself, later in the season.

This last car of the special train was a day coach; but the light-hearted girls did not mind the lack of conveniences and comforts to be obtained in the chair cars. The train was supposed to arrive at Pleasant Cove by three o’clock, and a five hour ride on a hot June day was only “fun” for the Corner House girls and their friends.

Ruth first of all got the brakeman to turn over a seat so that she and her three sisters could sit facing each other. Mrs. MacCall had put them up a nice hamper of luncheon and the older girl knew this would be better enjoyed if the seats were thus arranged.

Of course, there was the usual desire of some of the travelers to have windows open while others wished them closed. Cinders and dust flew in by the peck if the former arrangement prevailed, while the heat was intense if the sashes were down.

Tess and Dot were little disturbed by these physical ills. But they had their own worries. Dot, who had insisted on carrying the Alice-doll in her arms, was troubled mightily to remember whether she had packed the whole of the doll’s trousseau (this was supposed to be a wedding journey for the Alice-doll – a wedding journey in which the bridegroom had no part); while Tess wondered what would happen to Tom Jonah and Sandyface’s young family while they were all gone from the old Corner House.

“I feel condemned – I do, indeed, Dot,” sighed Tess. “We ought, at least, to have named those four kittens before we left. They’ll be awfully old before the christening – if we don’t come back at the end of our first two weeks.”

“What could happen to them?” demanded Dot.

“Why – croup – or measles – or chicken-pox. They’re only babies, you know. And if one should die,” added Tess, warmly, “we wouldn’t even know what name to put on its gravestone!”

“My! lots of things can happen in two weeks, I s’pose,” agreed Dot. “Do you think we ought to stay away from home so long?”

“I guess we’ll have to if Ruth and Aggie stay,” said Tess. “But I shall worry.”

Meanwhile Agnes, who sat with her back to the engine beside Ruth, had become interested in a couple sitting together not far down the car. They were strangers – and strangely dressed, as well.

“Oh, Ruth!” Agnes exclaimed, under her breath, “they look like Gypsies.”

“If they are, they are much better dressed than any Gypsies we ever saw before,” observed her sister.

“But how gay!”

This comment was just enough. The older one had shocking taste in millinery. She wore, too, long, pendant ear-rings and her fingers were covered with gaudy looking jewels. Her garments were rich in texture, but oddly made, and the contrasts in color were, as Agnes whispered, “fierce!”

“That girl with her is handsome, just the same,” Ruth declared.

“Oh! isn’t she!” whispered the enthusiastic Agnes. “A perfectly stunning brunette.”

If she were a Gypsy girl she was a very beautiful one. Her features were lovely and her complexion brilliant. When she smiled she flashed two rows of perfect teeth upon the beholder. She might have been a year or two older than Ruth.

“I don’t know – somehow – she reminds me of somebody,” murmured the latter.

“Who?”

“The girl.”

“She reminds me of that chicken-thief Tom Jonah treed on the henhouse roof,” chuckled Agnes.

“Oh!” exclaimed Ruth; “all Gypsies can’t be alike.”

“Humph! you never heard a good word said for them,” sniffed Agnes.

“But that doesn’t prove there are not good ones. They are a wandering people and have no particular trade or standing in any community. Naturally they have a lot of crimes laid upon their shoulders that they never commit,” said the just Ruth.

“That was one of them that tried to steal your hens, just the same,” said Agnes.

“I suppose so,” admitted her sister. “But surely these two cannot belong to the same kind of Gypsies. See how richly they are dressed.”

“I guess that doesn’t make any difference,” said Agnes. “They are all cut off the same piece of goods,” and immediately she lost interest in the strange couple when Lucy Poole came up the aisle to speak to her.

Ruth had the gaily dressed woman and her companion on her mind a good deal. She often looked at them when they did not notice her. The woman must have been forty, but was straight, lithe, and of good figure. She sat on the outer end of the seat, having the girl between her and the window.

The latter seemed more and more familiar in appearance to Ruth as she looked, yet the Corner House girl could not say whom the girl looked like.

The latter scarcely spoke to her companion. Indeed, she kept her face toward the window for the most part, and seemed to be in a sullen mood. She had smiled once at Dot and the Alice-doll, and that was the only time Ruth had seen the dark, beautiful face with an attractive expression upon it.

The woman seemed talkative enough, but what language she jabbered to her companion the Corner House girl could not tell. She frequently leaned toward the dark girl, her bejeweled fingers seizing the sleeve of her waist, and her speech was both emphatic and loud.

The rattle of the train drowned, however, most of the woman’s words. Ruth arose and went the length of the car for a drink, just for the purpose of overhearing the strange speech of the Gypsy (if such the woman was) for she was sure the language was not English.

She heard nothing intelligible. Ruth folded a cup, filled it at the ice-water tank, and brought it back for the children. Pearl Harrod was sitting directly behind the two strangers, in a seat with Carrie Poole.

“Oh, I say, Ruth!” Pearl said, “is it a fact that Rosa Wildwood is coming down to the Cove next week?”

Ruth turned to answer. As she did so the girl in the seat with the Gypsy sprang to her feet, her face transfigured with amazement, or alarm – Ruth did not know which. The woman grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her back into the seat, saying something of a threatening nature to her companion.

In her excitement the woman knocked the cup of water from Ruth’s hand. She turned to apologize, and Ruth, looking over her head, saw the dark-skinned girl sitting back in her corner quite colorless and broken. The Corner House girl was sure, too, that the strange girl’s lips formed the name “Rosa Wildwood” – but she made no sound.

“It is all right,” Ruth assured the Gypsy woman. “No harm done.”

“I am the ver’ awkward one – eh?” repeated the woman, with a hard smile.

“It does not matter,” said Ruth. “I can get another cup of water.”

She returned to do so. All the while she was wondering what the incident meant. It was not merely a chance happening, she was sure. Something about the name of her schoolmate, Rosa Wildwood, had frightened the beautiful girl who was evidently in the Gypsy woman’s care.

Ruth grew quite excited as she drew another cup of water, and she swiftly planned to discover the mystery, as she started up the aisle of the coach a second time.

CHAPTER VII – SOMETHING AHEAD

Pearl Harrod was now busily talking with Carrie Poole again; she had probably forgotten about Rosa Wildwood for the time being. But Ruth stopped at her seat – the seat directly behind that occupied by the two strangers.

“You asked about Rosa, Pearl?” said Ruth, speaking loudly enough, she was sure, for the girl in front to hear.

“Oh, hello! don’t spill that water again, Ruthie,” laughed Pearl. “Yes. I asked if she were coming down to the Cove!”

“Yes. Rosa Wildwood expects to come next week. I am going to find her a boarding place.”

Ruth spoke very distinctly, and she kept her eyes fastened upon the back of the strange girl’s head. But the latter gave no sign of having heard – at least, she appeared not to be interested in the name which had before so startled her.

“I don’t see how the poor girl can afford it,” Carrie Poole said, not unkindly. “They say she and her father are very poor.”

“Mr. Bob Wildwood works regularly. He doesn’t drink any more,” Ruth explained, intentionally speaking so that those in the forward seat could hear if they wished to listen.

“Rosa is an awfully sweet girl,” said Carrie.

“I love that little Southern drawl of hers!” cried Pearl. “She says ‘Ah reckon so’ in just the cunningest way!”

“She is very frail,” Ruth continued, clearly. “I was afraid she would break down before the school term closed. Now it has been arranged for her to stay at Pleasant Cove until she gains strength. Dr. Forsythe says it will do her a world of good.”

“We’ll give her a good time, all right,” declared Pearl. “Wish we could have her with us – ”

“Not at the bungalow,” said Ruth. “Nor at the hotel. We want a quiet place for her. I shall find it.”

Not a sign did the girl in front give that she heard any of this conversation. Yet Ruth believed there was a curious intentness in her manner – she held her head very still as though she were secretly listening, while apparently giving all her attention to what the train passed.

“What does your uncle call his bungalow – where we shall stop?” asked Ruth of Pearl.

“Why, the Spoondrift – don’t you remember? It’s at this end of the cove, near the river, and we have bathing rights on the shore. It’s a fine place. You’ll love it, Ruth Kenway.”

“I expect to,” said Ruth, seriously. “And you were very kind to ask me to stay two whole weeks with you,” and Ruth passed on.

She had intentionally said enough so that, if the strange girl were listening, she would learn just where Ruth could be found at Pleasant Cove.

For the Corner House girl felt that the dark beauty with the Gypsy woman held some keen interest in Rosa Wildwood. Of course – right at the start – the story of Rosa’s lost sister, June, had come into Ruth’s mind.

Yet, as the Corner House girl looked at the stranger, she could not say truthfully that it was Rosa of whom this girl reminded her. Ruth conjured before her mind’s eye the fair, delicate beauty of Bob Wildwood’s daughter; the two girls possessed no feature in common – and in complexion they were, of course, diametrically opposed.

This girl was dark enough and savage enough looking to be a Gypsy. Ruth scouted the idea that she might be Juniper Wildwood, who had run away with a traveling “medicine man” and his wife.

Nevertheless, Ruth believed that the strange girl must know something about the lost June Wildwood. She had been startled when Rosa’s name was mentioned. The Corner House girl was deeply interested in the affair; but at present she did not want to take anybody into her confidence about it – not even Agnes.

The girls did not remain quietly in their seats, by any manner of means. First there was a crowd blocking the aisle in one part of the car, then in another. Agnes was in and out of her seat half a dozen times between stations. The heat and dust was ignored as the girls shouted pleasantries back and forth; the air was vibrant with laughter.

“I’m just as anxious to see the ocean as I can be,” declared Lucy Poole who, like the Corner House girls, had never been to Pleasant Cove before.

“Oh, dear me!” scoffed her cousin Carrie. “It’s only a big, big pond! Our frog pond at home looks like a piece of the ocean – when it’s calm.”

The others laughed and Pearl said: “Guess Lucy wants to see Old Ocean in its might, eh? Big storm, whales, great ships – ”

“A sea serpent!” cried Agnes.

“Of course – if there is such a thing,” admitted Lucy. “A sea serpent must be an awfully interesting sight.”

“There aren’t any more,” said Pearl. “Father Neptune’s all out of stock.”

“I guess the sea serpent is something like the snakes alcoholic victims think they see,” proposed Carrie.

“Oh, no,” proclaimed Agnes. “Here’s what I read about the sea serpent:

 

“‘The old sea serpent used to rave

And fiercely roam about;

He hit a prohibition wave,

And that’s what knocked him out.’”

 

“‘Perils of the Deep!’” laughed Ruth. “But even if we don’t see serpents in the ocean, I expect we’ll have plenty of adventures down there at the shore.”

Which prophecy was strangely fulfilled.

The train reached Bloomingsburg about one o’clock, and was immediately shifted to the single-tracked branch line that connected that small city with Pleasant Cove. The speed of the train after leaving Bloomingsburg was not great, for it was often held up for trains coming from the shore to pass.

The adult passengers grew impatient and wearied. There were many complaints, and the babies began to fret and cry. But our friends in the last coach remained in a jolly and – for the most part – kindly mood.

Trix Severn had taken her crowd into a forward coach. Her father owning one of the big hotels at the Cove, the railroad company had presented him with a sheaf of chair coupons. So, as Pearl Harrod laughingly said, “Trix’s party was as swell as a wet sponge.”

“I don’t suppose any of that crowd at the Overlook House will talk to us,” said Pearl. “Just the same, I guess I can show you girls a good time at Spoondrift. Uncle always lets us do just as we like. He’s the dearest man.”

The train rattled on and on. The alternate pine forests and swamp lands seemed interminable. Now and then they went through a cut, the railroad bisecting a hickory ridge.

But soon there was a change in the air. When the cinders and dust did not sift into the windows, there was a smell of salt marsh. The air seemed suddenly cleaner. At one station where they stopped, a salt creek came in, and there was a dock, and boats, and barrels of clams and fish piled on the platform ready for the next up-train.

“Regular maritime smell – whew!” sighed Carrie Poole, holding her nose delicately.

“Oh! The whole of Pleasant Cove doesn’t smell like this, does it?” demanded her cousin.

“Only the old part of it – the old village.”

“Well! that’s lucky,” said Lucy. “If this odor prevailed I should say the place ought to be called Un-pleasant Cove.”

“How far are we from the jumping-off place?” demanded Agnes. “I’d like to get out and run.”

Pearl stooped to look out under one of the drawn shades. “Why!” she said, “there are only two more stops before we reach the Cove station. It’s a winding way the railroad follows. But if we got off about here and went right through those woods yonder, we’d reach the Spoondrift bungalow in an hour. I’ve walked over here to Jumpertown many a time.”

“Jumpertown?”

“Yes. That’s what they called it before the real estate speculators gave it the fancy name of ‘Ridgedale Station.’”

At that moment the train suddenly slowed down. The brakes grated upon the wheels and everybody clung to the seats for support. One of the brakemen ran through from the front and the girls clamored to know the cause of the stoppage.

“Bridge down up front,” said the railroad employee. “Tide rose last night and loosened the supports. We’ve got to wait.”

“Oh, dear me!” was the general wail. When they could get hold of the conductor the girls demanded to know the length of time they would be delayed.

“Can’t tell you, young ladies,” declared the man of the punch. “There’s a repair gang at work on it now.”

“An hour?” demanded Pearl Harrod.

“Oh, longer than that,” the conductor assured her.

“But what shall we do? We want to get to the bungalow and air the bedclothes, and all that, before dark,” she cried.

“Guess you’ll have to walk, then,” said the conductor, laughing, and went away.

“That’s just what we’ll do,” Pearl said to her friends. “Can the children walk three miles, Ruth?”

“Surely they can!” Agnes cried. “If they can’t, we’ll carry them.”

Ruth was doubtful of the wisdom of the move, but her opinion was not asked.

“Come on! let’s get out quietly. We’ll fool all these other folks,” said Pearl. “We’ll get to Pleasant Cove long before they do.”

CHAPTER VIII – THE GYPSY CAMP

There were two things that encouraged Ruth Kenway, the oldest Corner House girl, to accompany Pearl Harrod’s party through the woods without objection. Pearl told her that when they reached the highway on the other side of the timber in all probability they would be overtaken by an auto-bus that ran four times a day between a station on a rival railroad line and the Cove.

This was one thing. The other reason for Ruth’s leaving the train with her sisters, and without objection, was the fact that the strangely dressed woman and the pretty, dark girl had left it already.

When the train first stopped and the brakeman announced the accident ahead, the woman had spoken to the girl and they both had risen and left the car. Perhaps nobody had noticed them but Ruth. The strange girl had not looked at Ruth when she passed her, but the woman had bowed and smiled in a cat-like fashion.

Pearl said they would follow a path through the timber to the road; and she pointed out the direction through the window. Ruth saw the woman and girl strike into this very path and disappear.

So curiosity, too, led the oldest Corner House girl to agree to Pearl’s plan. The party of ten girls, including Ruth, Agnes, Tess and Dot Kenway, slipped out of the car without being questioned by any of the older people there. Nobody observed them enter the cool and fragrant woods. Chattering and laughing, they were quickly in the shadowy depths and out of sight of the hot train.

“Oh, isn’t this heavenly!” cried Agnes, tossing up her hat by the ribbons that were supposed to tie it under her plump chin.

The green tunnel of the wood-path stretched a long way before them. It was paved with pine needles and last-year’s oak leaves.

Ruth looked sharply ahead, but did not see either the woman or the girl, in whom she was so much interested. Either they had gone on very rapidly, or had turned aside into the wood.

Dot had made no complaint upon being forced to leave the train; but she clung very tightly now to the Alice-doll, and finally ventured to ask Tess:

“What – what do you think is the chance for bears in this wood, Tess? Don’t you think there may be some?”

“Bears? Whoever heard the like? Of course not, child,” said Tess, in her most elder-sisterly way. “What gave you such an idea as that?”

“Well – it’s a strange woods, Tess. We aren’t really acquainted here.”

“But Pearl is,” declared Tess, stoutly.

“I don’t care. I’d rather have Tom Jonah with us. Suppose a bear should jump out and grab Alice?” and she hugged the doll all the closer in her arms. For her own safety she evidently was not anxious.

The girls, after their ride in the train, were like young colts let loose in a paddock. They sang and laughed and capered; and when they came to a softly carpeted hollow, Pearl Harrod led the way and rolled down the slope, instead of walking down in a “decorous manner, as high school young ladies should,” quoth Carrie.

“If our dear, de-ar teachers should see us now!” gasped Pearl sitting up at the foot of the slide, with a peck of pine needles in her hair and her frock all tousled.

Their only baggage was the lunch baskets and boxes. All other of their personal possessions were on the train, in the baggage car. But the remains of the luncheons came in very nicely. Before they had gone a mile through the wood they were all loudly proclaiming their hunger.

So they found a spring, and camped about it, eating the remainder of the lunches to the very last crumb. And such a hilarious “feed” as it was!

Ruth forgot all about the Gypsy woman and the girl who had so puzzled her by her actions. The rest by the spring refreshed even Dot. She was plucky, if she was little; and she made no complaint at all about the long walk through the stretch of timber.

The party did not hurry after that rest. It was still early in the afternoon and Pearl, referring to her watch, said they would surely catch the auto-stage that passed on the main road about four o’clock.

“You see, there are no servants at the bungalow yet,” Pearl explained. “Uncle has been taking his meals at one of the small boarding-houses nearby, that opens early. He is a great fisherman, and always goes down early and ‘roughs it’ at the bungalow until my aunt comes down.

“But she thought we girls would be able to get on all right – with Uncle Phil to give us a hand if we need him. We’ll have to air bedclothes, and get in groceries, and otherwise start housekeeping to-night.”

“Why! it will be great fun,” Ruth said. “Just like playing house together.”

“Say!” cried Agnes. “We want more than ‘play-house’ food to eat – now I warn you! No sweet crackers and ‘cambric tea’ for mine, if you please!”

“Oh! if I ask him,” said Pearl, laughing, “I know Uncle Phil will take us to his boarding-house to supper to-night – if we get there late. But I want to show him what ten girls can do toward housekeeping.”

“There’ll be plenty of cooks to spoil the broth,” sighed Agnes. “Did you ever see me fry an egg?”

Ruth began to laugh. The single occasion when Agnes had tried her hand at the breakfast eggs was a day marked for remembrance at the old Corner House.

“What can you do to a defenseless egg, Aggie?” Lucy Poole demanded.

“Plenty!” declared Agnes, shaking her head. “When I get through with an egg, a lump of butter, and a frying-pan, there is left a residue of charred ‘what is it?’ in the bottom of the pan, an odor of burned grease in the kitchen – and me in hysterics! It was an awful occasion when I tackled that egg. I’ve not felt just right about approaching an egg since that never-to-be-forgotten day.”

“I was left home to cook for my father, once,” said Carrie Poole, seriously, “and he asked to have boiled rice for supper. Mother never let me cook much, and I didn’t know a thing about rice.

“But I saw the grains were awfully small, and I knew my father liked a great, heaping bowlful when he had it, so I told the grocery boy to bring two pounds, and I tried to cook it all.”

A general laugh hailed this announcement. Agnes asked: “What happened, Carrie? I don’t know anything about rice myself – ’cepting that it’s good in cakes and you throw it after brides for luck – and – and Chinamen live on it.”

“Wait!” urged Carrie, solemnly. “It’s nothing to laugh at. I began cooking it in a four quart saucepan, so as to give it plenty of room; and when father came in just before supper time, I had the whole top of our big range covered with pots and pans into which I had dipped the overflow of that two pounds of rice!

“Oh, yes, I had!” said Carrie, warmly, while the others screamed with laughter. “And I had gotten so excited by that time that I begged father to go out to the washhouse and bring in the big clothes boiler, so’s to see if I could keep the stuff from running over onto the stove.

“You never saw such a mess,” concluded Carrie, shaking her head. “And we had to eat rice for a week!”

It was just here that Agnes spied something far ahead beside the woodspath.

“Oh!” she cried, “are we in sight of the tent colony you tell about, so soon?”

“Nonsense!” exclaimed Pearl Harrod. “We’re nowhere near the river.”

“But there’s a tent!” exclaimed Agnes, earnestly.

“And I see the top of another,” said Lucy Poole.

“Dirty brown things, both of them. Look more like Indian wigwams,” announced Ann Presby.

“My goodness, girls! there are the Gypsies Uncle Phil wrote about,” said Pearl, in some excitement. “Let’s get our fortunes told.”

“Oh, dear me,” said Ruth, rather worriedly. “I don’t just like Gypsies.”

“Oh, you haven’t got to hug and kiss them!” laughed Pearl. “Come on! they’re lots of fun.”

But when the party of girls drew nearer to the Gypsy camp, this particular tribe of Nomads did not appear to be “lots of fun,” after all.

In the first place, the tents – as Ann had said – were very shabby and dirty. The two covered wagons were dilapidated, too. Gypsies usually have good horses, but those the girls saw feeding in the little glade were mere “crowbaits.”

Several low-browed, roughly dressed men sat in a group on the grass playing cards. They were smoking, and one was tipping a black bottle to his lips just as the girls from Milton came near.

“Let’s hurry right by, Pearl!” begged Ruth.

Pearl, however, was not as observant as the Corner House girl. She failed to see danger in the situation, or in the looks the disturbed men cast upon the unprotected party of girls. As several of the fellows rose, Pearl called to them:

“Where’s your Pythoness? Where is the Queen of the Gypsies? We want our fortunes told.”

One man – a tall fellow with a scarred face – turned and shouted something in a strange tongue at the tents. Ruth recognized the language in which the woman had talked to the dark-faced girl on the train.

And then, the next moment, Ruth caught sight of the face of the very woman in question, peering from between the flaps of one of the dingy tents.

CHAPTER IX – THE SPOONDRIFT BUNGALOW

“I don’t think these are very nice looking men, do you, Tess?” Dot seriously asked her sister as the party halted before the Gypsy camp.

“Why, Dot!” gasped Tess. “That man there is the very fellow who tried to steal Ruth’s chickens!”

“Oh – o-o!”

“Yes, he is,” whispered the amazed Tess. “He’s the young man Tom Jonah chased up on to the henhouse roof.”

“Well,” said the philosophical Dot, “he can’t steal our chickens here.”

“Just the same I wish Tom Jonah was here with us. I – I’d feel better about meeting him,” confessed Tess.

The other girls did not hear this conversation between the two youngest Kenways. Ruth and Agnes, however, were really troubled by the meeting with the Gypsies; the former was, in addition, suspicious of the woman who had been on the train with them.

This strange woman did not come out of the tent. Indeed, almost at once she disappeared, dropping the curtain. She did not wish to be observed by the girls from Milton.

“Oh, come on!” cried the reckless Pearl. “They’ll only ask us a dime each. ‘Cross their palms with silver,’ you know. And they do tell the queerest things sometimes.”

“I don’t believe we’d better stop this afternoon, Pearl,” ventured Ruth, as one of the rough fellows drew nearer to the girls.

“Let the little ladies wait but a short time,” said this man. “They will have revealed to them all they wish to know.”

He had an ugly leer, and had Pearl looked at him she would have been frightened by his expression. But she was searching her chain-purse for dimes. It did not look to Ruth Kenway as though that purse would last long in the company of these evil fellows.

Now the same tent flap was pushed aside again and into the open hobbled an old crone. She seemed to be a toothless creature, and leaned upon a crutch. Gray strands of coarse hair straggled over her wrinkled forehead. She had a hump on her back – or seemed to have, for she wore a long cloak, the bedraggled tail of which touched the ground.

She hobbled across the lawn toward the girls. Ruth watched her closely for, it seemed, she came more hurriedly than seemed necessary.

A dog – one of the mongrels that infested the camp – ran at her, and the old crone struck at the creature with her crutch; he ran away yelping. She was plainly more vigorous of arm than one would have believed from her decrepit appearance.

The grinning fellows separated as the old hag came forward. She did not speak to them, but she was muttering to herself.

“Incantations!” whispered Pearl. “Isn’t she enough to give you the delicious shudders? Oh!”

Pearl was evidently enjoying the adventure to the full, but some of the girls besides Ruth and Agnes, did not feel so very pleasant. When one of the fellows took hold of Carrie Poole’s wrist-watch with a grimy finger and thumb, she screamed.

“Don’t fear, little lady,” said the tall, grim man, and he struck the officious fellow with his elbow in the ribs. “He means nothing harmful. Here is Zaliska, the Queen of the Romany. She is very old and very wise. She will tell you much for a silver shilling; but she will tell you more for two-bits.”

“He means a quarter,” said Pearl, explaining. “But a quarter’s too much. Show her your palms, girls. This is my treat. I have ten dimes.”

The tall man had motioned his fellows back, but they were arranged around the party of girls in such a way that, no matter which way they turned, one of the ruffians was right before them!

“Oh, Ruth! I am frightened!” whispered Agnes in her sister’s ear.

“Sh! don’t scare the children,” Ruth said, her first thought for Tess and Dot.

The old crone hobbled directly to Ruth and put out a brown claw. Ruth extended her own right hand tremblingly. The hag was mumbling something or other, but Ruth could not hear what she said at first, the other girls were chattering so.

Then she noticed that the grip of the old Gypsy was a firm one. The back of her hand seemed wrinkled and puckered; but suddenly Ruth knew that this was the effect of grease paint!

This was a made-up old woman – not a real old woman, at all!

The discovery frightened the Corner House girl almost as much as the rough men frightened her. “Zaliska” was a disguised creature.

She clung to Ruth’s hand firmly when the girl would have pulled it away, and now Ruth heard her hiss:

“Get you away from this place. Get you away with your friends – quick. And do not come back at all.”

Ruth was shaking with hysterical terror. The creature clung to her hand and mumbled this warning over and over again.

“What’s she telling you, Ruth?” demanded the hilarious Pearl.

“Trouble! trouble!” mumbled the supposed fortune-teller, shaking her head, but accepting the next girl’s dime.

Ruth whispered swiftly to Pearl: “Oh! let us get out of here. These men mean to rob us – I am sure.”

“They would not dare,” began the startled Pearl.

Just then there was a creaking of heavy wheels, and a voice shouting to oxen. The Gypsies glanced swiftly and covertly at one another, falling back farther from the vicinity of the girls.

Indeed, several of them returned to the card game. The fortune-teller mumbled her foolish prophecies quickly. Into the glade, along a wood-path from the thicker timber, came two spans of oxen dragging three great logs. A pleasant-faced young man swung the ox-goad and spoke cheerily to the slow-moving, ponderous animals.

“Let’s go at once, Pearl!” begged Ruth. “We’ll keep close to this lumberman. Dot and Tess can ride on the logs.”

“Come on, girls! I think this old woman is a faker,” cried Pearl. “She can’t even tell me whether I’m going to marry a blond man, or a brunette!”

“Don’t go yet, little ladies,” said the tall man, suavely. “Zaliska can tell you much – ”

“Let’s go, girls!” cried Carrie Poole, snatching her hand away from the supposed old woman.

Ruth and Agnes had already seized their sisters and were hurrying them toward the lumberman.

“Whoa, Buck! Whoa, Bright!” shouted the teamster, cracking the whiplash before the leading span of oxen. “Sh-h! Steady. What’s the matter, girls?”

“Won’t you take us to the main road where we can get the stage for Pleasant Cove?” cried Ruth.

“Sure, Miss. Going right there. Want to ride?”

“Oh, yes, sir!” cried the Corner House girls.

“That will be great fun!” shouted some of the others. “Come on!”

They clambered all over the logs, that were chained together and swung from the axle of the rear pair of wheels. The Gypsies began gathering around and some of them muttered threateningly, but the lumberman cracked his whip and the oxen started easily.

“Cling on, girls!” advised the driver. “No skylarking up there. Soon have you out to the pike road. And you want to keep away from that Gypsy camp. They are a tough lot – very different from the crowd that camped there last year and the year before. We farmers are getting about ready to run them out, now I tell ye!”

Ruth said nothing – not even to Agnes – about what she had discovered. She had penetrated “Queen Zaliska’s” disguise. She believed that the supposed old crone was the handsome, dark girl whom she had observed so narrowly on the train.

Perhaps nobody but Ruth, of the party of ten girls, really understood that they had been in peril from the Gypsies. She believed that, had they not gotten away from the camp as they had, the men would have robbed them.

The Gypsies were afraid of the husky lumberman, and they did not follow the girls. Once on the highway, Pearl declared the auto-stage would be along in ten minutes or so, and they bade the lumberman good-bye with a feeling of perfect safety.

The Gypsies had not dared follow the party. Soon the stage came along, and for ten cents each the girls rode into Pleasant Cove. There were only a few other passengers, and the party from Milton sat on top and had a lot of fun.

Pearl pointed out the byroad that led down to the river beach where the tent colony was set up, but the stage went right past Spoondrift bungalow, and the girls got down and charged that dwelling “like a horde of Huns,” Agnes declared.

Uncle Phillip Harrod was at home, and welcomed them kindly. “Help yourselves, girls, and go as far as you like,” he said, waving both hands, and retired to a corner of the piazza with his book and a pipe.

The girls took him at his word. They were very busy till nightfall. Then, however, everything was ready for their occupancy of the bungalow, and supper was cooking on the kerosene range.

They had forgotten the Gypsies – all but Ruth. She was bound to be puzzled by the disguised “queen” and wondered secretly what the masquerade meant, and who the beautiful girl was who posed as “Zaliska”?

CHAPTER X – SOME EXCITEMENT

“But why ‘Spoondrift’?” demanded Lucy. “What does it mean?”

“‘Spoondrift’ is the spray from the tops of the waves,” explained Pearl. “We think the name is awfully pretty.”

“And so is the bungalow – and the Cove,” sighed Ruth.

“And we’re going to have a scrumptious time here!” declared Agnes.

Tess and Dot were frankly sleepy, and Lucy begged the privilege of seeing them to bed.

“That’s real kind of you, I’m sure, Lute,” said Agnes.

“Don’t you praise her,” sniffed Carrie. “I know Lute. She’s sleepy, herself. You won’t see her downstairs again to-night.”

“I don’t care,” yawned Lucy Poole, following Tess and Dot. “I sleep so slowly that it takes a long time for me to get a good night’s rest.”

“Well! of all things!” ejaculated Carrie, as her cousin departed, following the two smaller girls. “What do you know about that?”

“Almost as stupid as the inhabitants of London,” chuckled Agnes.

“What do you mean by that, Ag?” demanded Ann Presby. “The people of London aren’t any more stupid than those of other cities, are they?”

“I don’t know,” returned Agnes; “but the book says ‘the population of London is very dense.’”

“Fine! fine!” cried Carrie Poole, laughing. “Oh! these ‘literal’ folk. You know, my Grandfather Poole has an awfully bald head. He was telling us once that in some famous battle of the Civil War in which he took part, his head was grazed by a bullet. My little brother Jimmy stared at his head thoughtfully for a minute, and then he said:

“‘My, Grandpa, there’s not much grazing up there now, is there?’”

These stories began the evening. Everybody had some story or joke to relate, and finally the girls began to guess riddles. Somebody propounded the old one about the wind: “What is it that goes all around the house and yet makes no tracks?” and Agnes had a new answer for it:

“Germs!” she shouted. “You know, Miss Georgiana gave us a lecture about them, and I bet we’re just surrounded by deadly bacilli right now.”

“Those aren’t germs – they’re mosquitos, Ag!” laughed Pearl, slapping vigorously at one of the pests. “Pleasant Cove isn’t entirely free from them.”

“And they are presenting their bills pretty lively, too,” yawned Ruth. “The bedrooms are screened. I believe we’d all better seek the haven of bed unless we want to be splotchy to-morrow from mosquito bites.”

In the morning the older girls divided the housework between them, and so got it all done in short order. The baggage had come up from the station the evening before, and they unpacked.

Then they set forth to explore the fishing port, as well as the more modern part of Pleasant Cove.

As they brisked along the walk past Mr. Terrence Severn’s Overlook House, they spied Trix and her party on the big veranda. The girls hailed each other back and forth; only Trix and the Corner House girls did not speak.

“We can’t speak to her if she won’t speak to us,” said Ruth to Agnes. “Now, never you mind, Aggie. She’ll get over her tantrum in time.”

The party from Spoondrift bungalow got back in season to get luncheon; after which they rested and then bathed. It was the Corner House girls’ first experience of salt water bathing and they all enjoyed it – even Dot.

“It does make you suck in your breath awfully hard when the waves lap upon you,” she confessed. “But there was the Alice-doll sitting on the shore watching me, and so I couldn’t let her see that I was afraid!”

Ruth, more than the other girls, aided Pearl in looking after housekeeping affairs. It was she who discovered the broken lamp in the front hall.

The bungalow was lighted by oil-lamps, and they used candles in the bed chambers; while there was a marvelous “blue-flame” kerosene range in the kitchen.

Not all of the girls understood the handling of kerosene lamps, and Pearl told a funny story about her own little sister who had never seen any lights but gas or electric.

“When she came down here to Uncle Phil’s bungalow for the first time, she was all excited about the lamps. She told mamma that ‘Uncle Phil had his ’lectricity in a lamp right on the supper table. It’s a queer kind of a light, for they fill it with water out of a can.’”

The hanging lamp in the front hall was set inside a melon-shaped globe. Finding that, as Ruth pointed out, it could not be used, Pearl made another trip to the village before teatime and in the local “department store” bought another lamp.

“I am afraid you ought not to use that lamp, Pearl,” Ruth said, when she saw that the chimney was not tall enough to stick out of the top of the globe.

“Pooh! why not? Guess it’s just as good as the old chimney was,” said Pearl.

“Seems to me Mrs. MacCall says that chimneys should always be tall enough to come up through the globe. I don’t know just why – ”

“Oh, pshaw!” interrupted Pearl. “It’s all right, I fancy.”

Neither girl had recourse to “applied physics.” Had she done so she could easily have discovered just why it was unwise to use a lamp with a short chimney inside such a shaped globe as that hanging in chains in the front hall of the bungalow.

Ruth forgot the matter. It was Pearl herself who lit the hall lamp that evening. As before, they sat on the porch and played games and sang or told stories, all the long, bright evening.

Tess and Dot had gone to bed at half after eight. It was an hour later that Lucy suddenly said:

“I smell smoke.”

“It isn’t Mr. Harrod,” said Ann. “He’s gone down to the Casino.”

“It isn’t tobacco smoke I smell,” declared Lucy, springing up.

“Oh, Lute!” shrieked Agnes. “Look at the door!”

A cloud of black, thick smoke was belching out of the front hall upon the veranda. One of the other girls shrieked “Fire!”

Those next few minutes were terribly exciting for all hands at the Spoondrift bungalow. A single glance into the hall showed Ruth Kenway that the hanging lamp had burst, and the place was all ablaze.

There was but one stairway, and the children were in one of the low-ceilinged rooms above. Tess and Dot could only be reached by climbing up the long, sloping roof of the bungalow, and getting in at the chamber window.

While some of the girls ran for water – which was useless in the quantity they could bring from the kitchen tap in pots and pans – and others ran screaming along the street for help, Ruth “shinnied” right up one of the piazza pillars and squirmed out upon the shingled roof.

She tore her dress, and hurt her knees and hands; but she did not think of this havoc at the moment. She got to the window of the room in which her sisters slept, and screamed for Tess and Dot, but in their first sleep the smaller girls were completely “dead to the world.”

There was the screen to be reckoned with before the oldest Corner House girl could enter. It was set into the window from the inside, and she could neither lift the window-sash nor stir the screen. So she beat the tough wire in with her fists, and they bled and hurt her dreadfully! Nevertheless, she got through, falling into the room just as the stifling smoke from below began to pour in around the bedroom door.

“Tess! Dot! Hurry up! Get up!” she shrieked, shaking them both.

Tess aroused, whimpering. Ruth seized Dot bodily, flung a blanket around her, and put her out of the window upon the roof. Then she dragged Tess to the window and made her climb out after her sister.

“Oh, oh!” gasped Tess, alive at last to the cause of the excitement. “Save the Alice-doll, Ruthie. Save Dot’s Alice-doll!”

And Ruth actually went back, groping through the gathering smoke, for the doll. With it she scrambled out upon the shingles.

By that time the street was noisy with shouting people. Mr. Harrod came with a fire extinguisher and attacked the flames. Other men came and helped the girls down from the roof.

Agnes had fainted when she realized the danger her sisters were in. Some of the other girls were quite hysterical. Neighbors took them all in for the night.

It was quite an hour before the fire was completely out. Then the Spoondrift bungalow certainly was in a mess.

“It will take carpenters and painters a fortnight and more to repair the damage,” said Mr. Harrod the next morning. “Luckily none of your guests lost their clothing, Pearl; but you will all have to go to the hotel to finish your visit to Pleasant Cove.”

CHAPTER XI – THE LITTLE OLD WOMAN WHO LIVED IN A SHOE

The Overlook House was nearest. Mr. Harrod made arrangements for the girls to go there and occupy several rooms. At least, he presumed he had made that arrangement with Mr. Severn when he left on the forenoon train for Bloomingsburg to arrange his insurance and hire mechanics to at once repair the bungalow.

The Spoondrift cottage was really not fit for occupancy and there seemed nothing else for the girls to do but follow his advice and go over to the Overlook. But Ruth Kenway had her doubts.

After the excitement of the fire, and the general “stir-about” which ensued, Pearl Harrod had quite forgotten that the Corner House girls were not on terms of intimacy with Trix Severn, the hotel keeper’s daughter. It probably never entered her good-natured mind that Trix would behave meanly when all hands from the Spoondrift had escaped the peril of the fire.

The girls trooped over to the hotel, after repacking their baggage, to look at the rooms which had been secured for them. Mr. Severn was not there, nor was the clerk on duty. Their schoolmate, Trix, was behind the desk.

“Oh, yes,” she said carelessly, “I presume we can find rooms for you. But father doesn’t care much to take in people who won’t stay the season out – especially at this time of the year. It’s a great inconvenience.”

“Pooh!” said Pearl, frankly, “I guess your father is running his hotel for money – not for sport. And Uncle Phil is going to pay him for all the accommodation we get.”

“Indeed?” returned Trix. “You seem to know a lot about our business, Miss Harrod.”

“Don’t you put on any of your high and mighty airs with me, Miss!” snapped Pearl. “For they don’t go down, let me tell you! Didn’t Uncle Phil secure rooms for us?”

“Well – he spoke of your coming here. There is Number 10, and 11, and 14; they’re all three double rooms, so you and Ann can have one, Maud and Lulu another, and Carrie and Lucy the third.”

“But, goodness gracious! there are ten of us!” cried Pearl. “You know that very well.”

“Those three rooms,” said Trix, with elaborate carelessness, “are all your uncle provided.”

“Why, Uncle Phil must be crazy! Didn’t he get a big room for the Kenways?”

“Humph!” said Trix, maliciously. “Are they with you, Miss Harrod? Your uncle must have quite overlooked them. All the rooms I know anything about his securing for your party are the three I’ve mentioned.”

“Well, where’s your father – ”

“He’s gone fishing,” said Trix, promptly, and with a flash of satisfaction in her eyes. “He won’t be back till late to-night.”

“Then, where’s the clerk?” demanded Pearl, much worried.

“Mr. Cheever doesn’t know anything about it. I was here when your uncle made his bargain. Nothing was said about those Corner House girls – so there! There is no room for them here.”

“Well! I call that the meanest thing!” began Pearl, but Ruth, who had stood close by, interrupted:

“Don’t let it worry you in the least, Pearl. We have plenty of time to find accommodations before night.”

“You won’t find them here, Miss!” snapped Trix.

“Nothing would make me remain under this roof for a night,” said Ruth, indignantly. “My sisters and I have never done you any harm, Trix; quite the contrary, as you would remember had you any gratitude at all. This hotel is not the only place at Pleasant Cove where we can find shelter, I am sure.”

“Oh, Ruth! don’t go!” begged Pearl. “This mean girl is not telling the truth, I am sure. You’ll break up our party,” Pearl wailed.

“I couldn’t stay here now,” the oldest Corner House girl declared. “I am going to secure a tent for us. I am quite sure we will be comfortable in one. If other people can stand it under canvas, of course we can.”

She took Agnes by the hand and they went out of the hotel. Tess and Dot had not come with them, but had been left at the neighbor’s where they had all spent the night.

Pearl and the other girls could not very well follow them; they were not so independently situated as the Corner House girls. Ruth had a well filled pocket-book, as well as checks from Mr. Howbridge and an introductory letter to the branch bank at Pleasant Cove.

She had been so used to going ahead, and arranging matters for the whole family, during the past three years, that she was not troubled much by this emergency. She was sorry that the pleasant party had to be broken up, that was all. She was not sure that she and her sisters knew any of the campers along the riverside.

There were two men who supplied tents and outfits for those who wished to live under canvas, and so there were two distinct tent colonies, though they were side by side.

One was called Camp Enterprise, and the other Camp Willowbend. The latter was just at the bend of the river, and there were a few willows on the low bluff back of it.

There were not more than a dozen tents erected in either camp as yet, for it was early in the season. The Corner House girls rode quite a mile from the hotel to Willowbend Camp and selected a tent that was already erected.

It was a large wall-tent and it was divided in half by a canvas partition that made a bedroom of one end and a living-room of the front part. In the latter was a small sheetiron cookstove, with a pipe that led the smoke outside of the tent. But there was an oilstove, too, and Ruth decided that they would make arrangements for buying most of their food cooked, so as to reduce the details of housekeeping.

Agnes cheered up at once when she saw the tent-cities. And the smaller girls were delighted with the prospect of living under canvas.

There were four cots in the tent, with sheets and blankets, and apologies for pillows; there was matting laid down on the sand, too, in this bedroom part of the tent.

The remainder of the furnishings consisted of four camp-chairs, a plain deal table, a chest of drawers that contained the chinaware and cooking utensils, and a small icebox. This front apartment had a plank floor, made in sections.

It was a rough enough shelter, and the camping arrangements were crude; nevertheless, the Corner House girls saw nothing but fun ahead of them, and they were as busy as bees all that day “getting settled.”

There were pleasant people in the other tents of Camp Willowbend, but none of them chanced to be Milton people. There were several girls of ages corresponding to those of the Corner House girls, and the latter were sure they would find these neighbors good sport.

The Kenways were so busy at noon that they only “took a bite in their fists,” as good Mrs. MacCall would have expressed it. Ruth had been wise enough to buy some cooked food in the village before they came over to the camp, but she learned from some of the ladies in the tents that there was a woman in the neighborhood who baked bread to sell, and sometimes cookies and pies.

“You go to see Mrs. Bobster. She’s the nicest old lady!” declared one city matron. “Make your arrangements for bread now, Miss Kenway, for after she takes orders for as many as she can well supply, she wouldn’t agree to bake another loaf. She has a real New England conscience, and she wouldn’t promise to bake a single biscuit more than she knows she can get in her oven.”

The directions for finding Mrs. Bobster interested and amused the Corner House girls.

“She is the little old woman who lives in the shoe,” laughed their informant. “You can’t miss the house, if you go along the beach road toward town. It’s just beyond the other camp.”

“Oh!” cried Dot, eagerly, “I want to see the lady who lives in a shoe. She must have lots of children, for they were a great bother.”

“And,” said Tess, “do you suppose she does whip them all soundly and send them to bed with a piece of bread to eat?”

“We’ll discover all that,” promised Ruth, and soon after luncheon, having fixed up the tent, and set to rights their things that the expressman had brought over from the Spoondrift bungalow, the four sisters set out to find Mrs. Bobster.

The girls had ridden over from the village along the highroad, on which they had traveled two days before in the auto-stage. This lower, or “beach” road was a much less important thoroughfare. In places it followed the line of the shore so closely that the unusual high tides that had prevailed that spring, had washed a great deal of white sand across the swamp-grass and out upon it.

So, in places, the girls plodded through sand over their shoe tops. “Might as well go barefooted,” declared Agnes, sitting down for the third time to take off her oxfords and shake out the sand.

“You’d find it pretty different, if you tried it,” laughed Ruth. “This sand is hot.”

“It does seem as though you slipped back half a step each time you tried to go forward,” said Tess, seriously. “Aren’t we ever going to get there, Ruth?”

“Oh!” cried Dot, suddenly, “isn’t that a giraffe? And there’s a camel!”

“For goodness’ sake!” gasped Agnes, plunging to her feet, and hopping along after her sisters, trying to get on her left shoe. “Is this the African desert?”

“It looks like it,” said Ruth, herself amazed.

“And it’s hot enough,” grumbled Agnes. “Oh! I see! it’s a wrecked carousel.”

There were decrepit lions and tigers, too; the rain-washed and broken animals were the remains of a carousel, the machinery of which had been taken away. Once somebody had tried to finance a small pleasure resort between the real village of Pleasant Cove and the two tent colonies, but it had been unsuccessful.

The wreck of a “shoot the chutes,” the carousel, a dancing pavilion and a short boardwalk with adjacent stands, had been abandoned by the unfortunate promoters. There was a tower – now a “leaning” tower; broken-down swings; an abandoned moving picture palace; and back from the rest of the wreckage, several hundred yards from the sandy shore, the girls saw a rusty looking frame structure, shaped like a shoe, with a flagstaff sticking out of the roof.

“There it is!” cried Tess, eagerly. “And it does look like a shoe.”

Originally the house had been a tiny brown cottage set in the midst of a garden. The fence surrounding the place was still well kept. The second story of the cottage had been transformed into the semblance of a congress-gaiter, with windows in the sides and front. It looked as though that huge shoe had been carefully placed upon the rafters of the first floor rooms of the cottage.

“What a funny looking place!” exclaimed Agnes. “Did you ever see the like, Ruth? I wonder if Mrs. Bobster is as funny as her house.”

At that moment a figure bobbed up among the beanpoles in the garden, and the girls saw that it was a little woman in a calico sunbonnet. Her face was very small and hard and rosy – like a well-shined Baldwin apple. She had twinkling blue eyes, as sharp as file-points.

“Shoo!” exclaimed the little woman. “Shoo, Agamemnon! Git aout o’ them pea-vines like I told you!”

For a moment the Corner House girls did not see Agamemnon; they could not imagine who he was.

“Shoo, I tell ye!” exclaimed the little old woman who lived in a shoe, and she struck out with the short-handled hoe she was using.

There was a squawk, and out leaped, with awkward stride, a long legged rooster – of what “persuasion” it was impossible to tell, for he was swathed from neck to spurs in a wonderful garment which had undoubtedly been made out of a red flannel undershirt!

Two or three bedraggled tail-feathers appeared at the aperture in the back of this garment; otherwise Agamemnon seemed to be quite featherless. And when, clear of his mistress’ reach, he flapped his almost naked wings and crowed, he was the most comical looking object the Corner House girls had ever seen.

CHAPTER XII – A PICNIC WITH AGAMEMNON

“You see, gals, Agamemnon’s been the most unlucky bird that ever was hatched,” said the little old woman, coming across the tiny lawn to the fence where the Corner House girls were staring, round-eyed, at the strange apparition of a rooster in a red-flannel sleeping-suit.

“But he’s the pluckiest! Yes, ma’am! He was only a pindling critter when he pipped the shell, an’ the vi-cis-si-tudes that bird’s been through since he fust scratched would ha’ made a human lay right down and die.

“The other chickens never would let him raise a pin-feather ter cover his nakedness; they picked on him suthin’ awful. I shet him up till his wings and tail growed, an’ a rat got in an’ gnawed the feathers right off him in one night; but Agamemnon picked and clawed so’t the old rat didn’t bleed him much.

“And now here, lately, a neighbor got a half-breed game rooster, an’ thet pesky fightin’ bird got down here an’ sasses Agamemnon on his own premises.

“Ag wouldn’t stand for that,” said the old lady, her blue eyes fairly crackling. “He sailed right inter that game chicken – an’ Neighbor Lincoln et his rooster the nex’ Sunday for dinner. ’Twas all he could do with the critter after Agamemnon got through with him.

“But that game rooster had tore ev’ry important feather off’n poor Agamemnon’s carcass. I had to do suthin’. ’Twarn’t decent for him to go ’round bare. So I made him that smock out of one o’ poor Eddie’s old shirts. And there ye be!” she finished breathlessly, smiling broadly upon the interested Corner House girls.

“I guess you are Mrs. Bobster?” asked Ruth, smiling in return.

“Are you really the – the lady who lives in the shoe?” asked Dot, round-eyed.

“That’s what they call me, pet,” said Mrs. Bobster, smiling at the smallest Kenway. “I’m the only little old woman who lives in this shoe. Poor Eddie thought we’d make a mint of money if we built over the top of our house like that, and I sold gingercakes and sweeties to the children who came down here to the beach. Eddie was allus mighty smart in thinkin’ up schemes for me to make money. But the Beach Company went up in smoke, as the sayin’ is; so we didn’t make our fortun’ after all.”

She laughed. Indeed, this little, apple-faced old lady was almost always laughing, it seemed.

“Poor Eddie!” she added. “I guess the Beach Company failin’ took about all the tuck out o’ him. He said himself it was the last straw on the camel’s back. He jest settled right down inter his chair, like; and he didn’t last that winter out. He was allus weakly, Eddie was.”

The Corner House girls knew she must be speaking of her husband. So now she was all alone in the house that had such a grotesque upper story.

“No. There ain’t no children here – only them that comes in to see me,” Mrs. Bobster said in answer to a question from Tess. “We never did have no children; but we allus loved ’em.”

Meanwhile she had opened the gate and invited the Corner House girls into the yard. There was an arbor which was already shaded by quick-growing vines. The little kitchen garden, with its border of gooseberries and currants, was as neat as it could be.

“I gotter cow of my own out back, and hens, too. I make a bare livin’ in winter, and put frills onto it in summer,” and the old lady laughed. “These folks from the city that come livin’ in tents here, like my bread and cookies.”

“That is what we have come to arrange for, Mrs. Bobster,” said Ruth.

“I dunno. Most all I can comferbly bake three times a week, is bespoke,” said the little old woman who lived in a shoe. “How many is there in your fam’bly, Miss?”

When she heard that there were just four of them – these girls alone – and that they were to live by themselves in a tent, she grew greatly interested.

“Surely I’ll bake for you – and cookies, too. Maybe a fruit pie oncet in a while – ’specially if you’ll go over beyond the bend when berries is ripe and pick ’em yourself. And you gals a-livin’ all alone? Sho! I’d think you’d be scaret to death.”

“Why, no!” said Ruth. “Why should we?”

“After dark,” said the old woman, shaking her hand.

“Who would hurt us?” asked the Corner House girl in wonder.

“Can’t most always sometimes tell,” said the old woman, shaking her head.

“But you live here alone!”

“No,” she said, quickly. “Not after dark. I ain’t never alone. Oh, no!”

She spoke as though she were afraid Ruth might not believe her, and repeated the denial several times.

Tess and Dot were very anxious to go upstairs and see the rooms in the “shoe,” and they made the request to Ruth in an audible whisper.

“For sure!” cried Mrs. Bobster. “All the children that come here want to go upstairs. If I had ’em of my own, that’s where I’d put ’em all to bed after I’d fed ’em bread and ‘whipped ’em all soundly,’” and she laughed.

“I don’t believe you’d have whipped the children, if you’d been the really truly little old woman that lived in the shoe,” quoth Dot, putting a confiding hand into the apple-faced lady’s hard palm.

“I bet you wouldn’t have had to be whipped,” laughed Mrs. Bobster, leading Dot away, with Tess following.

Later the hostess of the shoe-house brought out a pitcher of milk and glasses with a heaping plate of ginger cookies – the old-fashioned kind that just melt on your tongue!

“Sho!” she said, when Ruth praised them. “It’s easy enough to make good merlasses cookies. But ye don’t wanter have no conscience when it comes to butter – no, indeed!”

Agamemnon came to the feast. In his ridiculous red flannel suit he waddled up to his mistress and pecked crumbs off her lap when she sat down on the bench in the arbor.

“He looks just like a person ready to go in swimming,” chuckled Agnes. “It’s a red bathing suit.”

“That’s one thing Agamemnon can’t stand. He don’t like water,” said Mrs. Bobster. “But if I let him out at low tide he’ll beau a flock of hens right down to the clamflats. But now, poor thing! they won’t go with him.”

“Who – the hens!” asked Ruth, wonderingly.

“Yes. They don’t think he looks jest right, I s’pose. If he chassés up to one of my old biddies, she tries to tear that flannel suit right off’n him. It’s hard on poor Agamemnon; but until his feathers start to grow good again, I don’t dare have him go without it. He’d git sunburned like a brick, in the fust place.”

This tickled Agnes so that she almost fell off the bench.

“But I should think the red flannel would tickle him awfully,” murmured Tess, quite seriously disturbed over the plight of the rooster.

“Sho! keeps away rheumatics. So poor Eddie allus said,” declared the widow. “That’s why he wore red flannel for forty year – and he never had a mite of rheumatism. Agamemnon ought to be satisfied he’s alive, after all he’s been through.”

It was really very funny to see the rooster strutting about the yard in what Agnes called his red bathing suit.

The Corner House girls remained for some time with Mrs. Bobster. When they went back to the camp at the bend they carried their first supply of bread and cookies.

They arrived at their tent to find a wagonette Pearl had hired in the port, and all the other girls who had been at the Spoondrift bungalow had come visiting.

The crowd was delighted with the way Ruth and her sisters were situated. It looked as though to live under canvas would be great fun indeed.

“Wish I’d spoken to Uncle Phil about it, and gotten him to hire tents instead of putting us up at that old hotel,” declared Pearl. “And do you know, girls, that Trix Severn told a story?”

“I didn’t suppose she’d be above being untruthful,” Ruth said, rather indignantly.

“And you’re quite right. We found out that her father set aside a big, double-bedded room for you four girls. Trix says she did not know anything about it. But of course Uncle Phil would not have forgotten you.”

“Never mind,” said Agnes. “I’m glad she acted so. We’re a whole lot better off here.”

“I believe you!” said Carrie Poole.

“You going to have Rosa Wildwood here in the tent with you when she comes?” asked Ann Presby.

“I’m afraid she ought to have a better place,” said Ruth. “And I believe I know just where she would get the attention – and food – that she needs,” and the oldest Corner House girl told the crowd about Mrs. Bobster – the little old lady who lived in a shoe.

“If I can get the dear old thing to take Rosa to board, I know she’ll give her just what she needs – good food, plenty of it, well cooked, and Rosa will be in a quiet place where she can rest all she wants to,” said Ruth.

She had no idea at the time of the strange adventure that would arise out of this plan of hers to bring Rosa Wildwood to stay for a part of the summer with the little old woman who lived in a shoe.

CHAPTER XIII – THE NIGHT OF THE BIG WIND

“Ruthie! there’s another man wants to sell you a boat.”

“Ruthie! there’s another man wants to sell an elephant – and it’s so cute!”

“For the land’s sake!” gasped Ruth, throwing down a sputtering pen, where she was writing on the chest of drawers in the tent. “How can a body write? And an elephant, no less!”

She rushed out to see Dot’s elephant, as that seemed more important than Tess’ announcement that a man had merely a boat for sale. Dot’s man was a gangling young fellow with a covered basket from which he was selling sugar cakes made into fancy shapes. So Dot had her elephant for the Alice-doll (almost everything that appealed to Dot was bought for that pampered child of hers!) and was appeased.

But the man with the boat was a different matter. He proved to be a boat owner and he wanted to hire one of his craft to the Corner House girls by the week. Agnes was just crazy (so she said) to add rowing to her accomplishments, and Ruth thought it would be a good thing herself.

The boat was a safe, cedar craft, with two pairs of light oars and a portable kerosene engine and propeller to use if the girls got tired of rowing. Ruth made the bargain after thoroughly looking over the boat, which had had only one season’s use.

There was a chain and padlock for mooring it to a post at the edge of the water just below the tent.

The older girls had already learned to swim in the school gymnasium at Milton. Milton was pretty well up to date in its school arrangements.

Tess had been taught to “strike out” and could be left safely to paddle by herself in shallow water while Ruth and Agnes taught little Dot.

The latter refused to own to any fear of the water. Up here in the river the waves were seldom of any consequence, and of course on stormy days the girls would not go bathing at all.

Others of the Willowbend campers had rowboats for the season; and some even owned their own motorboats. The girls were well advised regarding fishing-tackle and the like. Crabbing was a favorite sport just then, for several small creeks emptied into the river nearby and soft-shell crabs and shedders were plentiful.

“I’d be afraid of these crabs if their teeth were hard,” Dot declared, for she insisted that the “pincers” of the crustaceans were teeth.

“They are dreadfully squirmy, anyway,” sighed Tess. “Just like spiders. And yet, we eat them!”

“But – but I always shut my eyes when I eat them; just as I do when I swallow raw oysters,” confessed Dot. “They taste so much better than they look!”

Having the boat, the Corner House girls rowed to the village for their supplies and to visit their friends. They did not go to the Overlook House; but Pearl Harrod and her party were at the burned bungalow almost all day. They always bathed there, and the Corner House girls went down to bathe with them. The beach was better there than at the camp.

It was Monday when Ruth Kenway and her sisters were established in their tent. On Thursday of that week they rowed over to Spoondrift bungalow in the morning. Pearl greeted them before they got ashore with:

“Oh, Ruth! The funniest thing has happened. You’d never guess.”

“Trix Severn has the mumps!” exclaimed Agnes. “I knew she was all swelled up.”

“Not as good as that,” laughed Pearl. “But worse may happen to that girl than mumps. However, it’s nothing to do with Trix.”

“What is it?” asked Ruth, calmly. “I’m not a good guesser, Pearl.”

“You remember those Gypsies?”

“That are camped up in the woods!”

“Yes.”

“If they are Gypsies,” said Ruth, doubtfully.

“Of course they are!” cried Pearl. “Well, they’ve been around here looking for you.”

“For goodness’ sake!” gasped Agnes. “What for?”

Ruth herself looked startled. But Pearl began to laugh again.

“At least, that queer old woman has been asking for you,” she explained.

“Zaliska!” exclaimed Ruth, although she was very sure that was not the person’s name. Of course the name was part of the strange girl’s masquerade.

“It was this morning,” Pearl went on to say. “We didn’t see many of the women of the tribe when we came past that camp last week. But a number of them came down into the village this morning – selling baskets and telling fortunes from door to door. We saw them over by the hotel – didn’t we, girls?”

“Yes. I bought a basket from one of them,” admitted Carrie Poole.

“But when we came up here to the bungalow,” pursued Pearl, “one of the men working here asked me if I’d seen ‘my friend, the Gypsy queen’? So, I said ‘No,’ of course.

“Then he told me that that Zaliska had asked him where the girl was who was called Ruth Kenway. He told her that after the bungalow got afire, all the girls went to the hotel.”

“Then she’ll never find you there, Ruth,” interposed Agnes, with satisfaction.

Ruth was not sure that she did not wish the supposed Gypsy queen to find her. She knew that “Zaliska” was really the very pretty, dark-skinned girl whom she had been so much interested in on the train coming down from Milton.

And that strange girl was interested in Rosa Wildwood. Of that Ruth was as sure as she could be.

“Maybe she’ll follow you up to the camp,” said Lucy Poole. “I’d be afraid to live all alone in that tent if I were you girls.”

“Pooh!” exclaimed Agnes. “What’s going to hurt us!”

“The crabs might come up the beach at night and pinch your toes,” laughed Maud Everts.

“I don’t know,” Pearl said, seriously. “I wouldn’t want those Gyps interested in me.”

“Now you are trying to frighten us,” laughed Ruth. “We have plenty of neighbors. Don’t you come up there and try to play tricks on us in the tent. You might get hurt.”

“Bet she has a gatling gun,” chuckled Carrie Poole.

“I’m going to have something better than that,” declared Ruth, smiling. But she refused to tell them what.

Ruth remembered that the little old woman who lived in a shoe had spoken of being afraid, too; so the oldest Corner House girl made her plans accordingly, but kept them to herself.

After their bath the sisters dressed in the Harrod tent that had been pitched on the lawn behind the bungalow, and then went on to the village. Ruth and Agnes rowed very nicely, for the former, at least, had had some practise at this sport before coming to Pleasant Cove.

They tied the painter of their boat to a ring in one of the wharf stringers, and went “up town” to the stores. The village of Pleasant Cove was never a bustling business center. There were but few people on the main street, and most of those were visitors.

“There are two of those Gypsy women, Ruth!” hissed Agnes in her sister’s ear, as they came out of a store.

Ruth looked up to see the woman who had been in the train, and another. They were both humbly dressed, but in gay colors. Ruth looked up and down the street for the disguised figure of the young girl, but she was not in sight.

“My goodness, Ruth!” said Agnes, “what do you suppose that old hag of a Gypsy wants you for?”

“She isn’t – ” began Ruth. Then she thought better of taking Agnes into her confidence just then and did not finish her impulsively begun speech, but said:

“We won’t bother about it. She probably won’t find us up at Willowbend Camp.”

“I should hope not!” cried Agnes. “I don’t want to get any better acquainted with those Gyps.”

The matter, however, caused Ruth to think more particularly of Rosa Wildwood. She had not yet found a boarding place for the Southern girl, and Rosa was to come down to Pleasant Cove the next Monday.

Ruth wanted to see Mrs. Bobster, and she did so that very afternoon. On their way back to the camp they tied the boat up at the foot of the wrecked pleasure park and walked up the broken boardwalk to the shoe-house.

“Here’s your bread, girls – warm from the oven,” said the brisk little woman. “And if you want a pan of seed cookies – ”

“Oh! don’t we, just!” sighed Agnes.

The girls sat down to eat some of the delicacies right then and there, and Mrs. Bobster brought a pitcher of cool milk from the well-curb. Ruth at once opened the subject of getting board for Rosa with the little old woman who lived in a shoe.

“Wal, I re’lly don’t know what ter say to ye,” declared Mrs. Bobster. “I ain’t never kalkerlated ter run a boardin’ house —

“But one young lady! I dunno. They wanted me to take old Mr. Kendricks ter board last winter; the town selectmen did. But I told ’em ‘No.’ I warn’t runnin’ a boardin’ house – nor yet the poorfarm.”

“Poorfarm?” questioned Ruth, puzzled by the reference.

“Yep. Ye see, there ain’t been no town poor here in Pleasant Cove for a number o’ years. Last winter old Mr. Kendricks see fit to let the town board him. He’s spry enough to go clammin’ in the summer; an’ he kin steer a boat when his rheumatics ain’t so bad. But winters is gittin’ hard on him.

“It didn’t seem good jedgment,” Mrs. Bobster said, reflectively, “to open the poorfarm jest for him. B’sides, they’d got the old farm let to good advantage for another year to Silas Holcomb. So they come to me.

“Now, Mr. Kendricks is as nice an old man as ever you’d wish ter see,” pursued Mrs. Bobster. “He comes of good folks – jest as good as my poor Eddie’s folks.

“The town selectmen had consid’rable trouble gettin’ Mr. Kendricks took, ’count o’ his being so pertic’lar. Yeast bread seemed ter be his chief objection. He couldn’t make up his mind to it on account of havin’ had sour milk biscuit all his life; but finally, after I’d said ‘No,’ they got Mis’ Ann ’Liza Cobbles to agree to give him hot bread three times a day like he was used to.

“But, lawsy me! She ain’t a com-plete cook – no, indeed! Mr. Kendricks said her cookin’ warn’t up to the mark, an’ if he has to go on the town this comin’ winter he shouldn’t go to Mis’ Cobbles.

“The selectmen may be driv’ to open the poorfarm ag’in, an’ to gittin’ somebody ter do for Mr. Kendricks proper.

“Maybe it’s a sort of lesson to the folks of Pleasant Cove,” sighed Mrs. Bobster, “for bein’ sort o’ proud-like through reason of not havin’ no town poor for endurin’ of ten years. I view it that way myself.

“Mr. Kendricks says he feels as if he was meant ter be a notice to ’em; ter be ready an’ waitin’ ter help people in a proper way; not to be boardin’ of ’em ’round where they might git dyspepsia fastened on ’em through eatin’ of unproper food.”

Agnes was giggling; but Ruth managed to get the talkative old lady back into the track she wanted her in. The Corner House girl expatiated upon how little trouble Rosa would be, and what a nice girl she was.

“Well!” said Mrs. Bobster, “I might try her. You offer awful temptin’ money, Miss. And poor Eddie allus said I’d do anything for money!”

It had been fortunate for the deceased Mr. Bobster, as Ruth had learned, that his wife had been willing to earn money in any honest way; for Mr. Bobster himself seldom had done a day’s work after his marriage to the brisk little woman.

So the matter of Rosa Wildwood’s board and lodging was arranged, and the Kenways went back to their boat. Evening was approaching, and with it dark clouds had rolled up from the horizon, threatening a bad night.

Ruth and Agnes found a head wind to contend with when they pushed off the cedar boat. Ruth had learned to run the little motor propeller, and she started it at once. Otherwise they would have a hard time pulling up to Willowbend Camp.

During the week there were few men at the tent colonies. On Saturdays and Sundays the husbands and fathers were present in force; but now there was not a handful of adult males in either the Enterprise or Willowbend encampments.

The Corner House girls were helped ashore, however, and they hauled their boat clear up to the front of their tent. There was quite a swell on, and the waves ran far up the beach, hissing and spattering spray into the air. The wind swept this spray against the tents in gusts, like rain.

But there was no rain – only wind. The black clouds threatened, but there was no downpour. There was no such thing as having a coal fire, however; the wind blew right down the stack and filled the tent with choking smoke.

They lit a lantern and ate a cold supper. The flaps of the tent were laced down, for they had been warned against letting the wind get under. Now and then, however, a chill draught blew over them and the partition creaked.

“It’s just like a storm at sea,” said Agnes, rather fearfully, yet enjoying the novel sensation. “We might as well be on a sailing ship.”

“Not much!” exclaimed Ruth. “At least, we’re on an even keel.”

They agreed to go to bed early. Lying in the cots, well covered with the blankets, seemed the safest place on such a night. There was no shouting back and forth from tent to tent, and no visiting.

Lights went out early. The wind shrieked in the treetops back from the shore, and in the lulls the girls could hear the breakers booming on the rocks outside the cove.

Tess and Dot went to sleep – tired with the day’s activities. Not so the older girls. They lay and listened, and shivered as the booming voice of the wind grew in volume, and the water seemed to drive farther and farther up the beaches.

Forever after, this night was known at Pleasant Cove as “the night of the big wind.” But as yet it had only begun and the Corner House girls had no idea of what was in store for them.

CHAPTER XIV – AN IMPORTANT ARRIVAL

Agnes did fall asleep; but Ruth only dozed, if she closed her eyes at all. The rumble of the storm shook the nerves of the oldest Corner House girl – and no wonder!

Ruth felt the weight of responsibility for her sisters’ safety. If anything happened while they were under canvas she knew that she would be blamed.

Sometimes the spray swept in from the river and spattered on the canvas like a drenching shower. The walls of the tent shook. She heard many sounds without that she could not explain – and some of these sounds frightened her.

Suppose the tent should blow down? The way the wind sometimes shook it reminded Ruth of a dog shaking a bit of rag.

Then, when the wind held its breath for a moment, the roaring of the sea in the distance was a savage sound to which the girl’s ears were not attuned.

She had left the lantern lit and it swung from a rope tied to the ridgepole of the tent, and beyond the half partition of canvas. Its flickering light cast weird shadows upon the canvas roof.

Now and then the spray beat against the front of the tent, while the roof shook and shivered as though determined to tear away from the walls. Ruth wished she had gone all around the tent before dark to make sure the pegs were driven well into the sand.

Occasionally children cried shrilly, for the noise of the elements frightened them; Ruth was thankful that Tess and Dot slept on.

She slept herself at last; how long she did not know, for when she awoke she was too greatly frightened to look at her watch. The wind seemed suddenly to have increased. It seemed struggling to tear the tent up by the roots!

And as the canvas shook, and swelled, and strove to burst its fastenings, there came a sudden snap on one side and one of the pegs flew high in the air at the end of its rope, coming down slap on the roof of the tent!

“The peg has pulled out!” gasped Ruth, sitting up in her cot and throwing off the blanket.

The canvas was straining and bellying fearfully at the point where the peg had drawn. It was likely to draw the pegs on either side. Ruth very well knew that if a broad enough opening was made for the wind to get under, the tent would be torn from its fastenings.

She hopped out upon the matting and shook Agnes by the shoulder.

“Get up! Get up, Ag!” she called, breathlessly. “Help me.”

She ran to the front of the tent for the maul – a long-handled, heavy-headed croquet-mallet. When she returned with it, Agnes was trying to rub her eyes open.

“Come quick, Ag! We’ll be blown away,” declared Ruth.

“I – I – What’ll we do?” whimpered Agnes.

“We must hold the tent down. Come on! Get into your mackintosh. I’ll get the lantern.”

Around the upright pole in the sleeping part of the tent were hung the girls’ outer garments. Ruth got into her own raincoat and buttoned it to her ankles. She left Agnes struggling with hers while she ran to unhang the lantern. She knew the night must be as black as a pocket outside.

“Wha – what you going to do?” stuttered Agnes.

“Drive the pegs in deeper. One of them pulled out.”

“Oh, dear! Can we?”

“I guess we’ll have to, if we don’t want to lose our tent. Hear that wind?”

“It – it sounds like cannon roaring.”

“Come on!”

“But that isn’t the front flap – ”

“Think I’m going to unlace that front flap when the wind’s blowing right into it?”

“Can’t we get out yonder, where the peg has been pulled?”

“But how’ll we get in again when all the stakes are driven down hard?” snapped Ruth, beginning to unlace the flaps of the rear wall of the tent.

“Oh! oh!” moaned Agnes. “Hear that wind?”

“I wouldn’t care if it only hollered,” gasped Ruth. “It’s what it will do if it ever gets under this tent, that troubles me!”

She unlaced the flaps only a little way. “Come along with that lantern, Ag. We’ve got to crawl under.”

“‘Get down and get under,’” giggled Agnes, hysterically.

But she brought the lantern and followed Ruth out of the tent, on hands and knees. When they stood up and tried to go around to that side of the tent where the peg had pulled out, the wind almost knocked them down.

“And how the sleet cuts!” gasped Agnes, her arm across her eyes for protection.

“It’s sand,” explained Ruth. “I thought it was spray from the river. But a good deal of it is sand – just like a sand-storm in the desert.”

“Well!” grumbled Agnes, “I hope it’s killing a lot of those sandfleas that bother us so. I don’t see how they can live and be blown about this way.”

Ruth tackled the first post at the corner and beat it down as hard as she could, Agnes holding the lantern so that the older girl could see where to strike.

They went from one peg to the next, taking each in rotation. And when they reached the one that had pulled out entirely, Ruth drove that into the ground just as far as it would go.

Strangely enough, throughout all this business, Tess and Dot did not awake. Ruth went clear around the tent, driving the stakes. The wind howled; the sand and spray blew; and the voices of the Night and of the Storm seemed fairly to yell at them. Still the smaller Corner House girls slept through it all. Ruth and Agnes crept back into the tent and laced the flaps down in safety.

A little later, before either of them fell asleep again, they heard shouting and confusion at a distance. In the morning they learned that two of the tents in the Enterprise Camp had blown down.

The shore was strewn with wreckage, too, when daybreak came; but the wind seemed to have blown itself out. Many small craft had come ashore, and some were damaged. It was not often that the summer visitors at Pleasant Cove saw any such gale as this had been.

Everything was all right with the Corner House girls, and Ruth decided they would stick to the tent, in spite of the fact that some of the camping families were frightened away from the tent colonies by this disgraceful exhibition of Mr. Wind!

The smaller Kenways, as well as the bigger girls, were enjoying the out-of-door life immensely. They were already as brown as berries. They ran all day, bare-headed and bare-legged, on the sands. It was plain to be seen that the change from Milton to Pleasant Cove was doing all the Corner House girls a world of good.

And during the extremely pleasant days that immediately followed the night of the big wind, many new colonists came to the tents. Two big tents were erected in the Willowbend Camp, for Joe Eldred and his friends – and that included, of course, Neale O’Neil. But the Milton boys would not arrive until the next week.

On Monday afternoon the Corner House girls walked down to the railroad station to greet Rosa Wildwood. It had been a very hot day in town and it was really hot at Pleasant Cove, as well.

“Oh! you poor thing!” gasped Ruth, receiving Rosa in her strong arms as she stumbled off the car steps with her bag.

“I’m as thin as the last run of shad, am I not?” asked Rosa, laughing. “That train was awful! I am baked. It’s never like this down South. The air is so much dryer there; there isn’t this humidity. Oh!”

“Well, you’re here all right now, Rosa,” cried Ruth. “We have a nice, easy carriage for you to ride in. And the dearest place for you to live!”

“And scrumptious eating, Rose,” added Agnes.

“With the little old woman who lives in a shoe,” declared Tess, eager to add her bit of information.

Dot’s finger had strayed to the corner of her mouth, as she stared. For she had never met Rosa before, and she was naturally rather a bashful child.

“Now!” cried Ruth, again. “Where is he?”

“Who?” demanded Agnes, staring all about. “Neale didn’t come, did he?”

“Oh, he’s up in the baggage-car ahead,” said Rosa, laughing.

“You sit right down here till I get him,” Ruth commanded.

“Here’s the check,” Rosa said, and to the amazement of the other Corner House girls Ruth ran right away toward the head of the train with the baggage check, and without saying another word.

There were two baggage cars on the long train and from the open door of the first one the man was throwing trunks and bags onto the big wheel-truck.

So Ruth ran on to the other car. The side-door was wheeled back just as she arrived, and a glad bark welcomed her appearance.

Tom Jonah stood in the doorway, straining at his leash held in the hands of the baggageman. His tongue lolled out on his chest like a red necktie, and he was laughing just as plainly as ever a dog did laugh.

“I see he knows you, Miss,” said the man. “You don’t have to prove property. He sure is glad to see you,” and he accepted the check.

“No gladder than I am to see him,” said Ruth. “Let him jump down, please.”

She caught the leather strap as the baggageman tossed it toward her, and Tom Jonah bounded about her in an ecstasy of delight.

“Down, sir!” she commanded. “Now, Tom Jonah, come and see the girls. But behave.”

He barked loudly, but trotted along beside her most sedately. Tess and Dot had heard him, and deserting Rosa and Agnes, they came flying up the platform to meet Ruth and the big dog.

The two younger Corner House girls hugged Tom Jonah, and he licked their hands in greeting. Agnes was as extravagantly glad to see him as were the others.

“How did you come to send for him, Ruthie?” Agnes cried.

“I thought we might need a chaperon at the tent,” laughed Ruth.

“The Gyps!” exclaimed Agnes, under her breath. “Let them come now, if they want to. You’re a smart girl, Ruthie.”

“Sh!” commanded the older sister. “Don’t let the children hear.”

They helped Rosa into the wagonette and then climbed in after her. Ruth had taken off Tom Jonah’s leash and the good old dog trotted after the carriage as it rolled through Main Street and out upon the Shore Road toward the tent colonies.

Rosa brought all the news of home to the Corner House girls and many messages from Mrs. MacCall and Uncle Rufus. Of course, they could expect no word from Aunt Sarah, for it was not her way to be sympathetic or show any deep interest in what her adopted nieces were doing.

The girls from the old Corner House might have been a little homesick had there not been so much to take up their attention each hour at Pleasant Cove.

They brought Rosa to the little old woman who lived in a shoe, and the moment Mrs. Bobster saw how weak and white she was her sympathy went out to her.

“Tut, tut, tut!” she said, clucking almost as loudly as Agamemnon himself. “We’ll soon fix you up, my dear. If you stay long enough here at the beach, you’ll be as brown and strong as these other gals.”

Rosa put her arm about Ruth’s neck when the Corner House girls were about to leave.

“This is a heavenly place, Ruth Kenway, and you are an angel for bringing me down heah. I don’t know what greater thing anybody could do fo’ me – and you aren’t even kin!”

“Don’t bother, Rosa. I haven’t done much – ”

“There’s nothing in the world – but one thing – that could make me happier.”

Ruth looked at her curiously, and Rosa added:

“To find June. I hope to find her some day – yes, I do.”

“And suppose I should help you do that?” laughed the oldest Corner House girl.

CHAPTER XV – TWO GIRLS IN A BOAT – TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG!

“Oh, Dot! do come here. Did you ever see such a funny thing in all your life?”

Tess Kenway was just as earnest as though the discovery she had made was really of great moment. The two bare-legged girls were on the sands below the tent colony of Willowbend, and the tide was out.

The receding waves had just left this wet flat bare. Here and there the sand still dimpled to the heave of the tide, and little rivers of water ran into the hollows and out again.

“What is the matter, Tess?” asked Dot, wonderingly.

“See!”

Tess pointed down at her feet – where the drab, wet sand showed lighter-colored under the pressure of her weight.

“What is it?” gasped the amazed Dot.

There was a tiny round hole in the sand – just like an ant hole, only there was no “hill” thrown up about it. As Tess tip-tilted on her toes to bring more pressure to bear near the orifice in the sand, a little fountain of water spurted into the air – shot as though from a fairy gun buried in the sand.

“Goodness!” gasped Dot again. “What is that?”

“That’s what I say,” responded Tess. “Did you ever see the like?”

“Oh! here’s another,” cried Dorothy, who chanced to step near a similar vent. “See it squirt, Tess! See it squirt!”

“What kind of a creature do you suppose can be down there?” asked the bigger girl.

“It – it can’t be anything very big,” suggested Dot. “At least, it must be awfully narrow to get down through the little hole, and pull itself ’way out of sight.”

This suggestion certainly opened a puzzling vista of possibilities to the minds of both inland-bred girls. What sort of an animal could possibly crawl into such a small aperture – and yet throw such a comparatively powerful stream of water into the air?

They found several more of the little air-holes. Whenever they stamped upon the sand beside one, up would spring the fountain!

“Just like the books say a whale squirts water through its nose,” declared Tess, who had rather a rough-and-ready knowledge of some facts of natural history.

A man with a basket on his arm and a four-pronged, short-handled rake in his hand, was working his way across the flats; sometimes stooping and digging quickly with his rake, when he would pick something up and toss it into his basket.

He drew near to two Corner House girls, and Dot whispered to Tess:

“Do you suppose he’d know what these holes are for? You ask him, Tess.”

“And he’s digging out something, himself. Do you suppose he’s collecting clams? Ruth says clams grow here on the shore and folks dig them,” Tess replied.

“Let’s ask about the holes,” determined Dot, who was persistent whether the cause was good or bad.

The two girls approached the clam-digger, hand in hand. Dot hugged tight in the crook of one arm her Alice-doll.

“Please, sir,” Tess ventured, “will you tell us what grows down under this sand and squirts water up at us through such a teeny, weeny hole?”

The man was a very weather-beaten looking person, with his shirt open at the neck displaying a brawny chest. He smiled down upon the girls.

“How’s that, shipmet?” he asked, in a very husky voice. “Show me them same holes.”

The sisters led the way, and the very saltish man followed. It was not until then that Tess and Dot noticed that one of his legs was of wood, and he stumped along in a most awkward manner.

“Hel-lo!” growled the man, seeing the apertures in the sand. “Them’s clams, an’ jest what I’m arter. By your lief – ”

He struck the rake down into the sand just beyond one of the holes and dug quickly for half a minute. Then he tossed out of the hole he had dug a nice, fat clam.

“There he be, shipmets,” declared the clam-digger, who probably had a habit of addressing everybody as “shipmate.”

“Oh – but – did he squirt the water up at us, sir?” gasped Dot.

The wooden-legged man grinned again and seized the clam between a firm finger and thumb. When he pinched it, the bivalve squirted through its snout a fine spray.

“Oh, mercy!” exclaimed Tess, drawing back.

“But – but how did he get down into the sand and only leave such a tiny hole behind him?” demanded Dot, bent upon getting information.

“Ah, shipmet! there ye have it. I ain’t a l’arned man. I ain’t never been to school. I went ter sea all my days till I got this here leg shot off me and had to take to wearin’ a timber-toe. I couldn’t tell ye, shipmets, how a clam does go down his hole an’ yet pulls the hole down arter him.”

“Oh!” sighed Dot, disappointedly.

“It’s one o’ them wonders of natur’ ye hear tell on. I never could understand it myself – like some ignerant landlubbers believin’ the world is flat! I know it’s round, ’cos I been down one side o’ it an’ come up the other!

“As for science, an’ them things, shipmets, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout ’em. I digs clams; I don’t pester none erbout how they grows – ”

And he promptly dug another and then a third. The girls watched him, fascinated at his skill. Nor did the “peg-leg” seem to trouble him at all in his work.

“Please, sir,” asked Tess, after some moments, “how did you come to lose your leg – your really truly one, I mean?”

“Pi-rats,” declared the man, with an unmoved countenance. “Pi-rats, shipmet – on the Spanish Main.”

“Oh!” breathed both girls together. Somehow that expression was faintly reminiscent to them. Agnes had a book about pirates, and she had read out loud in the evenings at the sitting-room table, at the old Corner House. Tess and Dot were not aware that “the Spanish Main” had been cleared of pirates, some years before this husky-voiced old clam-digger was born.

The clam-digger offered no details about his loss, and Tess and Dot felt some delicacy about asking further questions. Besides, Tom Jonah came along just then and evinced some distaste for the company of the roughly dressed one-legged man. Of course, he could not dig clams in his best clothes, as Tess pointed out; but Tom Jonah had confirmed doubts about all ill-dressed people. So the girls accompanied the dog back towards the tents.

The big girls had been out in the boat and Ruth had left Agnes to bring up the oars and crab nets, as well as to moor the boat, while she hastened to get dinner.

The tide being on the turn they could not very well pull the boat up to the mooring post; but there was a long painter by which it could be tied to the post. Agnes, however, carried the oars up to the tent and then forgot about the rest of her task as she dipped into a new book.

Tess and Dot came to the empty boat and at once climbed in. Tom Jonah objected at first. He ran about on the sand – even plunged into the water a bit, and put both front paws on the gunwale.

If ever a dog said, “Please, please, little mistresses, get out of the boat!” old Tom Jonah said it!

But the younger Corner House girls paid no attention to him. They went out to the stern, which was in quite deep water, and began clawing overboard with the crab nets. With a whine, the dog leaped into the craft.

Now, whether the jar the dog gave it as he jumped into the boat, or his weight when he joined the girls in the stern, set the cedar boat afloat, will never be known. However, it slid into the water and floated free.

“We can catch some crabs, too, maybe, Tess,” Dot said.

Neither of them noticed that the oars were gone, but had they been in the boat, Tess or Dot could not have used them – much. And surely Tom Jonah could not row.

They did not even notice that they were afloat until the tide, which was just at the turn, twisted the boat’s nose about and they began drifting up the river.

“Oh, my, Dot!” gasped Tess. “Where are we going?”

“Oh-oo-ee!” squealed Dot, raking wildly with one of the nets. “I almost caught one.”

“But we’re adrift, Dot!” cried Tess.

The younger girl was not so much impressed at first. “Oh, I guess they’ll come for us,” she said.

“But Ruth and Aggie can’t reach us – ’nless they swim.”

“Won’t we float ashore again? We floated out here,” said Dot.

She refused to be frightened, and Tess bethought her that she had no right to let her little sister be disturbed too much. She was old enough herself, however, to see that there was peril in this involuntary voyage. The tide was coming in strongly and the boat was quickly passing the bend. Before either Tess or Dot thought to cry out for help, they were out of sight of the camp and there was nobody to whom to call.

Tom Jonah had crouched down in the stern, with his head on his paws. He felt that he had done his duty. He had not allowed the two small girls to go without him on this voyage. He was with them; what harm could befall?

“I – I guess Alice would like to go ashore, Tess,” hesitated Dot, at last, having seized her doll and sat down upon one of the seats. The boat was jumping a good deal as the little waves slapped her, first on one side and then on the other. Without anybody steering she made a hard passage of it.

“I’d like to get ashore myself, child,” snapped Tess. “But I don’t see how we are going to do it.”

“Oh, Tess! are we going to be carried ’way out to sea?”

“Don’t be a goosey! We’re going up the river, not down,” said the more observant Tess.

“Well, then!” sighed Dot, relieved. “It isn’t so bad, is it? Of course, we’ll stop somewhere.”

“But it will soon be dinnertime,” said her sister. “And I guess Ruth and Aggie won’t know where we’ve gone to.”

In fact, nobody about the tent colony had noticed the cedar boat floating away with the two girls in it – to say nothing of the dog!