The Corner House Girls Among the Gypsies / How They Met, What Happened, and How It Ended

CHAPTER XV—UNCERTAINTIES

“What do you know about that?” murmured the amazed father of the embryo pirate. He rummaged through the conglomeration of chattels in the bag. “No, it is not here.”

“What are you looking for, Mr. Pinkney?” demanded Agnes, feeling rather serious herself. Something might have happened to the truant.

“That picture his mother spoke of,” the father answered, with a sigh.

“Hoh!” exclaimed Neale O’Neil, “if the kid thinks as much of it as Mrs. Pinkney says, he’s got it with him. Of course.”

“It looks so,” admitted Mr. Pinkney. “But why should he abandon his clothes—and all?”

“Oh, maybe he hasn’t!” cried Agnes eagerly. “Maybe he is coming back here.”

“You think this old tree,” said Mr. Pinkney in doubt, “is Sammy’s headquarters?”

“I—don’t—know—”

“That wouldn’t be like Sammy,” declared Neale, with conviction. “He always keeps moving—even when he is stowaway on a canalboat,” and he chuckled at the memory of that incident. “For some reason he was chased away from here. Or,” hitting the exact truth without knowing it, “he tucked the bag under that tree root and forgot where he put it.”

“Does that sound reasonable?” gasped Agnes.

“Quite reasonable—for Sammy,” grumbled Mr. Pinkney. “He is just so scatter-brained. But what shall I tell his mother when I take this bag home to her? She will feel worse than she has before.”

“Maybe we will find him yet,” Agnes interposed.

“That’s what we are out for,” Neale added with confidence. “Let’s not give up hope. Why, we’re finding clues all the time.”

“And now you manage to get us stuck in the mud,” put in Agnes, giving her boy friend rather an unfair dig.

“Have a heart! How could I help it? Anyway, we’ll get out all right. We sha’n’t have to camp here all night, if Sammy did.”

“That is it,” interposed Sammy’s father. “I wonder if he stayed here all night or if he abandoned the bag here and kept on. Maybe the woods were too much for his nerves,” and he laughed rather uncertainly.

“I bet Sammy was not scared,” announced Neale, with confidence. “He is a courageous chap. If he wasn’t, he would not start out alone this way.”

“True enough,” said Mr. Pinkney, not without some pride. “But nevertheless it would help some if we were sure he was here only twelve hours ago, instead of twenty-four.”

“Let’s get the car out of the ditch and see if we can go on,” Neale suggested. “I’ll get that pole you saw, Mr. Pinkney. And I see another lever over there.”

While Mr. Pinkney buckled the straps of the extension-bag again and stowed the bag under the seat, Neale brought the two sticks of small timber which he thought would be strong enough to lift the wheels of the stalled car out of the ditch. But first he used the butt of one of the sticks to knock down the edge of the bank in front of each wheel.

“You see,” he said to Agnes, “when you get it started you want to turn the front wheels, if you can, to the left and climb right out on to the road. Mr. Pinkney and I will do the best we can for you; but it is the power of the engine that must get us out of the ditch.”

“I—I don’t know that I can handle it right, Neale,” hesitated Agnes.

“Sure you can. You’ve got to!” he told her. “Come on, Mr. Pinkney! Let’s see if we can get these sticks under the wheels on this side.”

“Wait a moment,” urged the man, who was writing hastily on a page torn from his notebook. “I must leave a note for Sammy—if perhaps he should come back here looking for his bag.”

“Better not say anything about his torn trousers, Mr. Pinkney,” giggled Agnes. “He will shy at that.”

“He can tear all his clothes to pieces if he’ll only come home and stop his mother’s worrying. Only, the little rascal ought to be soundly trounced just the same for all the trouble he is causing us.”

“If only I had stayed with him at that beet bed and made sure he knew what he was doing,” sighed Agnes, who felt somewhat condemned.

“It would have been something else that sent him off in this way, if it hadn’t been beets,” grumbled Mr. Pinkney. “He was about due for a break-away. I should have paid more attention to him myself. But business was confining.

“Oh, well; we always see our mistakes when it is too late. But that boy needs somebody’s oversight besides his mother’s. She is always afraid I will be too harsh with him. But she doesn’t manage him, that is sure.”

“We’d better catch the rabbit before we make the rabbit stew,” chuckled Neale O’Neil. “Sammy is a good kid, I tell you. Only he has crazy notions.”

“Pooh!” put in Agnes. “You need not talk in so old-fashioned a way. You used to have somewhat similar ‘crazy notions’ yourself. You ran away a couple of times.”

“Well, did I have a real home and a mother and father to run from?” demanded the boy. “Guess not!”

“You’ve got a father now,” laughed Agnes.

“But he isn’t like a real father,” sighed Neale. “He has run away from me! I know it is necessary for him to go back to Alaska to attend to that mine. But I’ll be glad when he comes home for good—or I can go to him.”

“Oh, Neale! You wouldn’t?” gasped the girl.

“Wouldn’t what?” he asked, surprised by her vehemence.

“Go away up to Alaska?”

“I’d like to,” admitted the boy. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Oh—well—if you can take me along,” rejoined Agnes with satisfaction, “all right. But under no other circumstances can you go, Neale O’Neil.”

CHAPTER XVI—THE DEAD END OF NOWHERE

“Great!” yelled Neale. “Once more, Aggie!”

She obeyed his order, and although the automobile engine rattled a good deal and the car itself plunged like a bucking broncho, they finally got all the wheels out of the mud and on the firm road.

“Crickey!” gasped Neale. “It looks like a battlefield.”

“And we look as though we had been in the battle all right,” said Mr. Pinkney. “Guess Mamma Pinkney will have something to say about my trousers when we get home, let alone Sammy’s.”

“Do you suppose the car will run all right?” asked the anxious Agnes. “I don’t know what Ruth would say if we broke down.”

“She’d say a-plenty,” returned Neale. “But wait till I get some of this mud off me and I’ll try her out again. By the way she bucked that last time I should say there was nothing much the matter with her machinery.”

This proved to be true. If anything was strained about the mechanism it did not immediately show up. Neale got the automobile under way without any difficulty and they drove ahead through the now fast darkening road.

The belt of woods was not very wide, but the car ran slowly and when the searchers came out upon the far side, the old shack which housed the big, red-faced woman, who had been kind to Sammy, and her brood of children, some of whom had been not at all kind, the place looked to be deserted.

In truth, the family were berry pickers and had been gone all day (after Sammy’s adventure with the cherry-colored calf) up in the hills after berries. They had not yet returned for the evening meal, and although Neale stopped the car in front of the shack Mr. Pinkney decided Sammy would not have remained at the abandoned place.

And, of course, Sammy had not remained here. After his exciting fight with Peter and Liz, and fearing to return to the house to complain, he had gone right on. Where he had gone was another matter. The automobile party drove to the town of Crimbleton, which was the next hamlet, and there Mr. Pinkney made exhaustive inquiries regarding his lost boy, but to no good result.

“We’ll try again to-morrow, Mr. Pinkney, if you say so,” urged Neale.

“Of course we will,” agreed Agnes. “We’ll go every day until you find him.”

Their neighbor shook his head with some sadness. “I am afraid it will do no good. Sammy has given us the slip this time. Perhaps I would better put the matter in the hands of a detective agency. For myself, I should be contented to wait until he shows up of his own volition. But his mother—”

Agnes and Neale saw, however, that the man was himself very desirous of getting hold of his boy again. They made a hasty supper at the Crimbleton Inn and then started homeward at a good rate of speed.

When they came up the grade toward the old house beside the road, at the edge of the wood, the big woman and her family had returned, made their own supper, and gone to bed. The place looked just as deserted as before.

“The dead-end of nowhere,” Neale called it, and the automobile gathered speed as it went by. So the searchers missed making inquiry at the very spot where inquiry might have done the most good. The trail of Sammy Pinkney was lost.

Neale O’Neil wanted to satisfy himself about one thing. He said nothing to Agnes about it, but after he had put up the car and locked the garage, he walked down Main Street to Byburg’s candy store.

June Wildwood was always there until half past nine, and Saturday nights until later. She was at her post behind the sweets counter on this occasion when Neale entered.

“I am glad to see you, Neale,” she said. “I’m awfully curious.”

“About that bracelet?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “What has come of it? Anything?”

“Enough. Tell me,” began Neale, before she could put in any further question, “while you were with the Gypsies did you hear anything about Queen Alma?”

“Queen Zaliska. I was Queen Zaliska. They dressed me up and stained my face to look the part.”

“Oh, I know all about that,” Neale returned. “But this Queen Alma was some ancient lady. She lived three hundred years ago.”

“Goodness! How you talk, Neale O’Neil. Of course I don’t know anything about such a person.”

“Those Gypsies you were with never talked of her?”

“I didn’t hear them. I never learned much of the language they use among themselves.”

“Well, we got a tip,” said the boy, “that the bracelet belonged to this Queen Alma, and that there is a row among the Gypsies over the ownership of it.”

“You don’t tell me!”

“I am telling you. We heard so. Say, is that Big Jim a Spaniard? A Spanish Gypsy, I mean?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. He looks like a Spaniard, or a Mexican, or an Italian.”

“Yes. I thought he did. He comes of some Latin race, anyway. What is his last name?”

“Why—I—I am not sure that I know.”

“Is it Costello? Did you hear that name while you were with the Gypsies, June?”

“Some of them are named Costello. It is a family name among them I guess. And about that Jim. Do you know that I saw him yesterday driving down Main Street in an automobile?”

“You don’t mean it? Gypsies are going to become flivver traders instead of horse swappers, are they?” and Neale laughed.

“Oh, it was a big, seven-passenger car,” said June. “Those Gypsies have money, if they want to spend it.”

“Did you ever hear of a Gypsy junkman?” chuckled Neale.

“Of course not. Although I guess junkmen make good money nowadays,” drawled June Wildwood, laughing too. “You are a funny boy, Neale O’Neil. Do you want to know anything else?”

“Lots of things. But I guess you cannot tell me much more about the Gypsies that would be pertinent to the bracelet business. We hear that the Costello Gypsies are fighting over the possession of the heirloom—the bracelet, you know. That is why one bunch of them wanted to get it off their hands for a while—and so gave it into the keeping of Tess and Dot.”

“Mercy!”

“Does that seem improbable to you, June?”

“No-o. Not much. They might. It makes me think that maybe the Gypsies have been watching the old Corner House and know all about the Kenways.”

“They might easily do that. You know, they might know us all from that time away back when we brought you home from Pleasant Cove with us. This is some of the same tribe you were with—sure enough!”

“I know it,” sighed June Wildwood. “I’ve been scared a little about them too. But for my own sake. I haven’t dared tell Rosa; but pap comes down here to the store for me every evening and beaus me home. I feel safer.”

“The bracelet business has nothing to do with you, of course?”

“Of course not. But those Gypsies might have some evil intent about Ruth and her sisters.”

“Guess they are just trying to use them for a convenience. While that bracelet is in the Corner House no other claimant but those Gypsy women are likely to get hold of it. Believe me, it is a puzzle,” he concluded. “I guess we will have to put it up to Mr. Howbridge, sure enough.”

“Oh! The Kenways’s lawyer?” cried June.

“Their guardian. Sure enough. That is what we will have to do.”

But when Neale and Agnes Kenway, after an early breakfast, hurried downtown to Mr. Howbridge’s office the next morning to tell the lawyer all about the Gypsies and Queen Alma’s bracelet, they made a surprising discovery.

Mr. Howbridge had left town the evening before on important business. He might not return for a week.

CHAPTER XVII—RUTH BEGINS TO WORRY

“Isn’t that a fact?” agreed her brother. “You are all right, Sis! I am for you, strong.”

Ruth laughed. Yet there were worried lines between her eyes.

“It is all right,” she murmured. “I might have come in any case—for Mr. Howbridge advised it by this letter that they remailed to me. But I should not have left in such haste, and I should have left somebody besides Mrs. McCall to look after the girls.”

“Pooh!” ejaculated Luke. “What is the matter with Agnes?”

“That is just it,” laughed Ruth again, but shaking her head too. “It is Agnes, and what she may do, that troubles me more than anything else.”

“Goodness me! She is a big girl,” declared Cecile. “And she has lots of sense.”

“She usually succeeds in hiding her good sense, then,” rejoined Ruth. “Of course she can take care of herself. But will she give sufficient attention to the little ones. That is the doubt that troubles me.”

“Well, you just can’t go away now!” wailed Cecile. “You have got to stay till the doctor says we can move Luke. I can’t take him back alone.”

“Now, don’t make me out so badly off. I am lying here like a poor log because that sawbones and you girls make me. But I know I could get up and play baseball.”

“Don’t you dare!” cried his sister.

“You would not be so unwise,” said Ruth promptly.

“All right. Then you stop worrying, Ruth,” the young fellow said. “Otherwise I shall ‘take up my bed and walk’—you see! This lying around like an ossified man is a nuisance, and it’s absurd, anyway.”

Ruth had immediately written to Mr. Howbridge asking him to look closely after family affairs at the Corner House. Had she known the lawyer was not at home when her letter arrived in Milton she certainly would have started back by the very next train.

She wrote Mrs. McCall, too, for exact news. And naturally she poured into her letter to Agnes all the questions and advice of which she could think.

Agnes was too busy when that letter arrived to answer it at all. Things were happening at the old Corner House at that time of which Ruth had never dreamed.

Ruth was really glad to be with Cecile and Luke in the mountains. And she tried to throw off her anxiety.

Luke insisted that his sister and Ruth should go over to the hotel to dance in the evening when he had to go to bed, as the doctor ordered. He had become acquainted with most of the hotel guests before his injury, and the young people liked Luke Shepard.

They welcomed his sister and Ruth as one of themselves, and the two girls had the finest kind of a time. At least, Cecile did, and she said that Ruth might have had, had she not been thinking of the home-folk so much.

Several days passed, and although Ruth heard nothing from home save a brief and hurried note from Agnes, telling of their unsuccessful search for Sammy—and nothing much else—the older Kenway girl began to feel that her anxiety had been unnecessary.

Then came Mrs. McCall’s labored letter. The old Scotchwoman was never an easy writer. And her thoughts did not run to the way of clothing facts in readable English. She was plain and blunt. At least a part of her letter immediately made Ruth feel that she was needed at home, and that even her interest in Luke Shepard should not detain her longer at Oakhurst.

“We have got to have another watchdog. Old Tom Jonah is too old; it is my opinion. I mind he is getting deaf, or something, or he wouldn’t have let that man come every night and stare in at the window. Faith, he is a nuisance—the man, I mean, Ruth, not the old dog.

“I have spoke to the police officer on the beat; but Mr. Howbridge being out of town I don’t know what else to do about that man. And such a foxy looking man as he is!

“Neale O’Neil, who is a good lad, I’m saying, and no worse than other boys of his age for sure, offers to watch by night. But I have not allowed it. He and Aggie talk of Gypsies, and they show me that silver bracelet—a bit barbarous thing that you remember the children had to play with—and say the dark man who comes to the window nights is a Gypsy. I think he is a plain tramp, that is all, my lass.

“Don’t let these few lines worry you. Linda goes to bed with the stove poker every night, and Uncle Rufus says he has oiled up your great uncle’s old shotgun. But I know that gun has no hammer to it, so I am not afraid of the weapon at all. I just want to make that black-faced man go away from the house and mind his own business. It is a nuisance he is.”

“I must go home—oh, I must!” Ruth said to Cecile as soon as she had read this effusion from the old housekeeper. “Just think! A man spying on them—and a Gypsy!”

“Pooh! it can’t be anything of importance,” scoffed Cecile.

“It must be. Think! I told you about the Gypsy bracelet. There must be more of importance connected with that than we thought.”

She had already told Luke and Cecile about the mystery of the silver ornament.

“Why, I thought you had told Mr. Howbridge about it,” Cecile said.

“I did not. I really forgot to when the news of Luke’s illness came,” and Ruth blushed.

“That quite drove everything else out of your head, did it?” laughed the other girl. “But now why let it bother you? Of course Mr. Howbridge will attend to things—”

“But he seems to be away,” murmured Ruth. “Evidently Mrs. McCall and Agnes have not been able to reach him. Oh, Cecile! I must really go home.”

“Then you will have to come back,” declared Cecile Shepard. “I could not possibly travel with Luke alone.”

The physician had confided more to the girls than to Luke himself about the young man’s physical condition. The medical man feared some spinal trouble if Luke did not remain quiet and lie flat on his back for some time to come.

But the day following Ruth’s receipt of Mrs. McCall’s anxiety-breeding letter, Dr. Moline agreed to the young man’s removal.

“But only in a compartment. You must take the afternoon train on which you can engage a compartment. He must lie at ease all the way. I will take him to the station in my car. And have a car to meet him when you get to the Milton station.”

The first of these instructions Ruth was able to follow faithfully. The cost of such a trip was not to be considered. She would not even allow Luke and Cecile to speak about it.

Ruth had her own private bank account, arranged for and supervised, it was true, by Mr. Howbridge, and she prided herself upon doing business in a businesslike way.

Just before they boarded the train at Oakhurst station she telegraphed home that they were coming and for Neale to meet them with the car, late though their arrival would be. If on time, the train would stop at Milton just after midnight.

When that telegram arrived at the old Corner House it failed to make much of a disturbance in the pool of the household existence. And for a very good reason. So much had happened there during the previous few hours that the advent of the King and Queen of England (and this Mrs. McCall herself said) would have created a very small “hooroo.”

As for Neale O’Neil’s getting out the car and going down to the station to meet Ruth and her friends when they arrived, that seemed to be quite impossible. The coming of the telegram was at an hour when already the Kenway automobile was far away from Milton, and Neale and Agnes in it were having high adventure.

CHAPTER XVIII—THE JUNKMAN AGAIN

“I guess he’s a nut all right,” admitted Neale. He told the lawyer’s clerk swiftly all they knew about the junkman, and all they knew about the silver bracelet.

“All right. It is something for Mr. Howbridge to attend to himself,” declared the clerk. “You hang on to that bracelet and don’t let anybody have it. I’ll try to shoo off this fellow. Anyway, it may not belong to his family at all. I’ll hold him here till you two get away.”

Neale and Agnes were glad to escape contact with the junkman again. He was too vehement.

“He’ll walk right in and search the house for the thing,” grumbled Neale. “We can’t have him frightening the children.”

“And I don’t want to be frightened myself,” added Agnes.

They hurried home, and all that day, every time the bell rang or she heard a voice at the side door, the girl felt a sudden qualm. “Wish we had never advertised that bracelet at all,” she confessed in secret. “Dear, me! I wonder what Ruth will say?”

Nevertheless she failed to take her older sister into her confidence regarding Queen Alma’s bracelet when she wrote to her. She felt quite convinced that Ruth would not approve of what she and Neale had done, so why talk about it?

This was the attitude Agnes maintained. Perhaps the whole affair would be straightened out before Ruth came back. And otherwise, she considered, everything was going well at the Corner House in Milton.

It was Miss Ann Titus who evinced interest next in the “lost and found” advertisement. Miss Ann Titus was the woman whom Dot called “such a fluid speaker” and who said so many “and-so’s” that “ain’t-so’s.” In other words, Miss Titus, the dressmaker, was a very gossipy person, although she was not intentionally unkind.

She came in this afternoon, “stopping by” as she termed it, from spending a short sewing day with Mrs. Pease, a Willow Street neighbor of the Corner House girls.

“And I must say that Mrs. Pease, for a woman of her age, has young idees about dress,” Miss Titus confided to Mrs. McCall and Agnes, who were in the sewing room. Aunt Sarah “couldn’t a-bear” Miss Ann Titus, so they did not invite the seamstress to go upstairs.

“Yes, her idees is some young,” repeated Miss Titus. “But then, nowadays if you foller the styles in the fashion papers nobody can tell you and your grandmother apart, back to! Skirts are so skimpy—and short!”

Miss Titus fanned herself rapidly, and allowed her emphasis to suggest her own opinion of modern taste in dress.

“Of course, Mrs. Pease is slim and ain’t lost all her good looks; but it does seem to me if I was a married woman,” she simpered here a little, for Miss Titus had by no means given up all hope of entering the wedded state, “I should consider my husband’s feelings. I would not go on the street looking below my knees as though I was twelve year old instead of thirty-two.”

“Maybe Mr. Pease likes her to look young,” suggested Agnes.

“Hech! Hech!” clucked Mrs. McCall placidly. “Thirty-twa is not so very auld. Not as we live these days, at any rate.”

“But think of the example she sets her children,” sniffed Miss Titus, bridling.

“Tut, tut! How much d’you expect Margie and Holly Pease is influenced by their mother’s style o’ dress?” exclaimed the housekeeper. “The twa bairns scarce know much about that.”

“I guess that is so,” chimed in Agnes. “And I think she is a pretty woman and dresses nicely. So there!”

“Ah, you young things cannot be expected to think as I do,” smirked Miss Titus.

“I take that as a compliment, my dear,” said the housekeeper comfortably. “And I never expect tae be vairy old until I die. Still and all, I am some older than Agnes.”

“That reminds me,” said Miss Titus, more briskly (though it did not remind her, for she had come into the Corner House for the special purpose of broaching the subject that she now announced), “which of you Kenways is it has found a silver bracelet?”

“Now, that is Agnes’ affair,” chuckled Mrs. McCall.

“Oh! It is not Ruth that advertised?” queried the curious Miss Titus.

“Na, na! Tell it her, Agnes,” said the housekeeper.

But Agnes was not sure she wished to describe to this gossipy seamstress all the incidents connected with Queen Alma’s bracelet. She only said:

“Of course, you do not know anybody who has lost such a bracelet?”

“How can I tell till I have seen it?” demanded Miss Titus.

“Well, we have about decided that until somebody comes who describes the bracelet and can explain how and where it was lost that we had better not display it at all,” Agnes said, with more firmness than was usual with her.

“Oh!” sniffed Miss Titus. “I hope you do not think that I have any interest—any personal interest—in inquiring about it?”

“If I thought it was yours, Miss Titus, I would let you see it immediately,” Agnes hastened to assure her. “But of course—”

“There was a bracelet lost right on this street,” said Miss Titus earnestly, meaning Willow Street and pointing that way, “that never was recovered to my knowledge.”

“Oh! You don’t mean it?” cried the puzzled girl. “Of course, we don’t know that this one belongs to any of those Gypsies—”

“I should say not!” clucked Miss Titus. “The bracelet I mean was worn by Sarah Turner. She and I went together regular when we were girls. And going to prayer meeting one night, walking along here by the old Corner House, Sarah dropped her bracelet.”

“But—but!” gasped Agnes, “that must have been some time ago, Miss Titus.”

“It is according to how you compute time,” the dressmaker said. “Sarah and I were about of an age. And she isn’t more than forty years old right now!”

“I don’t think this bracelet we have is the one your friend lost,” Agnes said faintly, but confidently. She wanted to laugh but did not dare.

“How do you know?” demanded Miss Ann Titus in her snappy way—like the biting off of a thread when she was at work. “I should know it, even so long after it was lost, I assure you.”

“Why—how?” asked the Corner House girl curiously.

“By the scratches on it,” declared Miss Titus. “Sarah’s brother John made them with his pocketknife—on the inside of the bracelet—to see if it was real silver. Oh! he was a bad boy—as bad as Sammy Pinkney. And what do you think of his running away again?”

Agnes was glad the seamstress changed the subject right here. It seemed to her as though she had noticed scratches on the bracelet the Gypsies had placed in the basket the children bought. Could it be possible—

“No! That is ridiculous!” Agnes told herself. “It could not be possible that a bracelet lost forty years ago on Willow Street should turn up at this late date. And, having found it, why should those Gypsy women give it to Tess and Dot? There would be no sense in that.”

Yet, when the talkative Miss Titus had gone Agnes went to the room the little folks kept their playthings and doll families in, and picked up the Alice-doll which chanced that day to be wearing the silver band. She removed it from the doll and took it to the window where the light was better.

Yes! It was true as she had thought. There were several crosswise scratches on the inside of the circlet. They might easily have been made by a boy’s jackknife.

“I declare! Who really knows where this bracelet came from, and who actually owns it? Maybe it is not Queen Alma’s ornament after all. Dear, me! this Kenway family is forever getting mixed up in difficulties that positively have nothing to do with us.

“The silly old bracelet! Why couldn’t those Gypsy women have sold that basket to Margaret and Holly Pease, or to some other little girls instead of to our Tess and Dot. Mrs. McCall says that some people seem to attract trouble, just as lightning-rods attract lightning, and I guess the Kenways are some of those people!”

Neale did not come over again that day, so she had nobody to discuss this new slant in the matter with. And if Agnes could not “talk out loud” about her troubles, she was apt to grow irritable. At least, the little girls said after supper that she was cross.

“Ruth doesn’t talk that way to us,” declared Tess, quite hurt, and gathering up her playthings from the various chairs in the sitting room where the family usually gathered in the evenings. “I don’t think I should like her to be away all the time.”

This was Tess’s polite way of criticising Agnes. But Dot was not so hampered by politeness.

“Crosspatch!” she exclaimed. “That’s just what you are, Aggie Kenway.”

And she started for bed in quite a huff. Agnes was glad, a few minutes later, that the two smaller girls had gone upstairs, even if they had gone away in this unhappy state of mind. Mrs. McCall had come in and sat down at some mending and the room was very quiet. Suddenly a noise outside on the porch made Agnes raise her head and look at the nearest window.

“What is the matter wi’ ye, lassie?” asked Mrs. McCall, startled.

“Did you hear that?” whispered the girl, staring at the window.

The shade was not drawn down to the sill, and the curtains were the very thinnest of scrim. At the space of four inches below the shade Agnes saw a white splotch against the pane.

“Oh! See! A face!” gasped Agnes in three smothered shrieks.

“Hech, mon! Such a flibbertigibbet as the lass is.” Mrs. McCall adjusted her glasses and stared, first at the frightened girl, then at the window. But she, too, saw the face. “What can the matter be?” she demanded, half rising. “Is that Neale O’Neil up tae some o’ his jokes?”

“Oh, no, Mrs. Mac! It’s not Neale,” half sobbed Agnes. “I know who it is. It’s that awful junkman!”

“A junkman?” repeated Mrs. McCall. “At this time o’ night? We’ve naethin’ tae sellit him. The impudence!”

She rose, quite determined to drive the importunate junkman away.

CHAPTER XIX—THE HOUSE IS HAUNTED

“Gypsies! The idea! Is the house surrounded by Gypsies?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. McCall,” said Agnes faintly. “I only know they are giving us a lot of trouble.”

“Who are?”

“The Gypsies.”

“Hear the lass!” exclaimed the troubled housekeeper. “Who ever heard the like? Why should Gypsies give us any trouble? Is it that bit bracelet the bairns play wi’? Then throw it out and let the Gypsies have it.”

“But that would not be right, would it, Mrs. McCall?” demanded the troubled girl. “If—if the bracelet belongs to them—”

“Hech! To this junkman?”

“He claims it,” confessed Agnes.

“Tut, tut! What is going on here that I do not know about?” demanded the Scotch woman with deeper interest.

She closed the window, drew the shade again, and returned to her seat. She stared at Agnes rather sternly over her glasses.

“Come now, my lass,” said the housekeeper, “what has been going on so slyly here? I never heard of any Costello, junkman or not. Who is he? What does he want, peering in at a body’s windows at night?”

Agnes told the whole story then—and managed to tell it clearly enough for the practical woman to gain a very good idea of the whole matter.

“Of course,” was her comment, grimly said, “you and that Neale could not let well enough alone. You never can. If you had not advertised the bit bracelet, this junkman would not have troubled you.”

“But we thought it ought to be advertised,” murmured Agnes in defense.

“Aye, aye! Ye thought mooch I’ve nae doot. And to little good purpose. Well, ’tis a matter for Mr. Howbridge now, sure enough. And what he’ll say—”

“But I hope that Costello does not come to the house again,” ventured the girl, in some lingering alarm.

“You or Neale go to Mr. Howbridge’s clerk in the morning and tell him. He should tell the police of this crazy man. A Gypsy, too, you say?”

“I think he must be. The bracelet seems to be a bone of contention between two branches of the Gypsy tribe. If it belonged to that old Queen Alma—”

“Fiddle-faddle!” exclaimed the housekeeper. “Who ever heard of a queen among those dirty Gypsies? ’Tis foolishness.”

The fact that Costello, the junkman, was lingering about the old Corner House was not to be denied. They saw him again before bedtime. Uncle Rufus had gone to bed and Linda was so easily frightened that Mrs. McCall did not want to tell her.

So the housekeeper grabbed a broom and started out on the side porch with the avowed intention of “breaking the besom over the chiel’s head!” But the lurker refused to be caught and darted away into the shadows. And all without making a sound, or revealing in any way what his intention might be.

Mrs. McCall and the trembling Agnes went all about the house, locking each lower window, and of course all the doors. Tom Jonah, the old Newfoundland dog, slept out of doors these warm nights, and sometimes wandered away from the premises.

“We ought to have Buster, Sammy Pinkney’s bulldog, over here. Then that horrid man would not dare come into the yard,” Agnes said.

“You might as well turn that old billy-goat loose,” sniffed Mrs. McCall. “He’d do little more harm than that bull pup—and nae more good, either.”

They went to bed—earlier than usual, perhaps. And that may be the reason why Agnes could not sleep. She considered the possibility of Costello’s climbing up the porch posts to the roof, and so reaching the second story windows.

“If he is going to haunt the house like this,” Agnes declared to the housekeeper in the morning, “let us make Neale come here and stay at night.”

“That lad?” returned the housekeeper, who had no very exalted opinion of boys in any case—no more than had Ruth. “Haven’t we all troubles enough, I want to know? This is a case for the police. You go tell Mr. Howbridge’s clerk about the Gypsy, that is what you do.”

But Agnes would not do even that without taking Neale into her confidence. Neale at once was up in arms when he heard of the lurking junkman. He declared he would come over and hide in the closet on the Kenways’ back porch and try to catch the man if he appeared again at night.

“He is a very strong man, Neale,” objected Agnes. “And he might have a knife, too. You know, those Gypsies are awfully fierce-tempered.”

“I don’t know that he is,” objected Neale. “He looked to me like just plain crazy.”

“Well, you come down to the office with me,” commanded Agnes. “I don’t even want to meet that excitable Costello man on the street when I am alone.”

“I suppose you are scared, Aggie. But I don’t think he would really hurt you. Come on!”

So they went down to Mr. Howbridge’s office again and interviewed the clerk, telling him first of all of the appearance of the junkman the night before.

“I had fairly to drive him out of these offices,” said the clerk. “He is of a very excitable temperament, to say the least. But I did not think there was any real harm in him.”

“Just the same,” Neale objected, “he wants to keep away from the house and not frighten folks at night.”

“Oh, we will soon stop that,” said Mr. Howbridge’s representative. “I will report it to the police.”

“But perhaps he does not mean any harm,” faltered Agnes.

“I do not think he does,” said the man. “Nevertheless, we will warn him.”

This promise relieved Agnes a good deal. She was tender-hearted and she did not wish the junkman arrested. But when evening came and he once more stared in at the windows, and tapped on the panes, and wandered around and around the house—

“Well, this is too much!” cried the girl, when Neale and Mrs. McCall both ran out to try to apprehend the marauder. “I do wish we had a telephone. I am going to beg Ruth to have one put in just as soon as she comes back. We could call the police and they would catch that man.”

Perhaps the police, had they been informed, might have caught Costello. But Mrs. McCall and Neale did not. The latter remained until the family went to bed and then the boy did a little lurking in the bushes on his own account. But he did not spy the strange man again.

In the morning, without saying anything to the Kenway family about it, Neale O’Neil set out to find Costello, the junkman. He certainly was not afraid of the man by daylight. He had had experience with him.

From Mr. Howbridge’s clerk he had already obtained the address the junkman had given when he was at the office. The place was down by the canal in the poorer section of the town, of course.

There were several cellars and first-floors of old houses given up to ragpickers and dealers in junk of all kinds. After some inquiry among a people who quite evidently were used to dodging the answering of incriminating questions, Neale learned that there had been a junkman living in a certain room up to within a day or two before, whose name was Costello. But he had disappeared. Oh, yes! Neale’s informant was quite sure that Costello had gone away for good.

“But he had a horse and wagon. He had a business of his own. Where has he gone?” demanded the boy.

He was gone. That was all these people would tell him. They pointed out the old shed where Costello had kept his horse. Was it a good horse? It was a good looking horse, with smiles which seemed to indicate that Costello was a true Gypsy and was not above “doctoring” a horse into a deceiving appearance of worthiness.

“He drove away with that horse. He did not say where he was going. I guess he go to make a sale, eh? He will come back with some old plug that he make look fine, eh?”

This was the nearest to real information that Neale could obtain, and this from a youth who worked for one of the established junk dealers.

So Neale had to give up the inquiry as useless. When he came back to the old Corner House he confessed to Agnes:

“He is hiding somewhere, and coming around here after dark. Wish I had a shotgun—”

“Oh, Neale! How wicked!”

“Loaded with rock-salt,” grinned the boy. “A dose of that might do the Gyp. a world of good.”

CHAPTER XX—PLOTTERS AT WORK

“Just so you could hand the responsibility over to her,” accused Neale.

“M-mm. Well?”

“We ought to hunt up those Gypsies—‘Beeg Jeem’ and his crowd—and get their side of the story,” declared Neale.

“No! I will not!” cried Agnes. “I have met all the Gypsies I ever want to meet.”

But within the hour she met another. She was in the kitchen, and Linda and Mrs. McCall were both in the front of the house, cleaning. There came a timid-sounding rap on the door. Agnes unthinkingly threw it open.

A slender girl stood there—a girl younger than Agnes herself. This stranger was very ragged, not at all clean looking, and very brown. She had flashing white teeth and flashing black eyes.

Agnes actually started back when she saw her and suppressed a scream. For she instantly knew the stranger was one of the Gypsy tribe. That she seemed to be alone was the only thing that kept Agnes from slamming the door again right in the girl’s face.

“Will the kind lady give me something to eat?” whined the beggar. “I am hungry. I eat nothing all the day.”

Agnes was doubtful of the truth of this. The dark girl did not look ill-fed. But she had an appearance of need just the same; and it was a rule of the Corner House household never to turn a hungry person away.

“Stay there on the mat,” Agnes finally said. “Don’t come in. I will see what I can find for you.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” said the girl.

“Haven’t you had any breakfast?” asked Agnes, moving toward the pantry, and her sympathies becoming excited.

“No, Ma’am. And no supper last night. Nobody give me nothing.”

“Well,” said Agnes, with more warmth, expanding to this tale of woe, as was natural, “I will see what I can find.”

She found a plate heaped with bread and meat and a wedge of cake, which she brought to the screen door. The girl had stood there motionless, only her black eyes roved about the kitchen and seemed to mark everything in it.

“Sit down there on the steps and eat it,” said Agnes, passing the plate through a narrow opening, as she might have handed food into the cage of an animal at a menagerie. She really was half afraid of the girl just because she looked so much like a Gypsy.

The stranger ate as though she was quite as ravenously hungry as she had claimed to be. There could be no doubt that the food disappeared with remarkable celerity. She sat for a moment or two after she had eaten the last crumb with the plate in her lap. Then she rose and brought it timidly to the door.

“Did you have enough?” asked Agnes, feeling less afraid now.

“Oh, yes, Lady! It was so nice,” and the girl flashed her teeth in a beaming smile. She was quite a pretty girl—if she had only been clean and decently dressed.

She handed the plate to Agnes, and then turned and ran out of the yard and down the street as fast as she could run. Agnes stared after her in increased amazement. Why had she run away?

“If she is a Gypsy—Well, they are queer people, that is sure. Oh! What is this?”

Her fingers had found something on the under side of the plate. She turned it up and saw a soiled piece of paper sticking there. Agnes, wondering, if no longer alarmed, drew the paper from the plate, turned it over, and saw that some words were scrawled in blue pencil on the paper.

“Goodness me! More mysteries!” gasped the Corner House girl.

Briefly and plainly the message read: Do not give the bracelet to Miguel. He is a thief.

Agnes sat down and stared almost breathlessly at the paper. That it was a threatening command from one crowd of Gypsies or the other, she was sure. But whether it was from Big Jim’s crowd or from Costello, the junkman, she did not know.

Her first thought, after she had digested the matter for a few moments, was to run with the paper to Mrs. McCall. But Mrs. McCall was not at all sympathetic about this bracelet matter. She was only angry with the Gypsies, and, perhaps, a little angry with Agnes for having unwittingly added to the trouble by putting the advertisement in the paper.

Neale, after all, could be her only confident; and, making sure that no other dark-visaged person was in sight about the house, the girl ran down the long yard beyond the garden to the stable and Billy Bumps’ quarters, and there climbed the board fence that separated the Kenway yard from that of Con Murphy, the cobbler.

“Hoo, hoo! Hoo, hoo!” Agnes called, looking over the top rail of the fence.

“Hoo, hoo, yerself!” croaked a voice. “I’d have yez know we kape no owls on these premises.”

The bent figure of Mr. Murphy, always busy at his bench, was visible through the back window of his shop.

“Is it that young yahoo called Neale O’Neil that yez want, Miss Aggie?” added the smiling cobbler. “If so—”

But Neale O’Neil appeared just then to answer to the summons of his girl friend. He had been to the store, and he tumbled all his packages on Con’s bench to run out into the yard to greet Agnes.

“What’s happened now?” he cried, seeing in the girl’s face that something out of the ordinary troubled her.

“Oh, Neale! what do you think?” she gasped. “There’s been another of them at the house.”

“Not one of those Gypsies?”

“I believe she was.”

“Oh! A she!” said the boy, much relieved. “Well, she didn’t bite you, of course?”

“Come here and look at this,” commanded his friend.

Neale went to the fence, climbed up and took the paper that Agnes had found stuck to the plate on which she had placed the food for the Gypsy girl. When he had read the abrupt and unsigned message, Neale began to grow excited, too.

“Where did you get this?”

Agnes told him about it. Of course, the hungry girl had been a messenger from one party of Gypsies or the other. Which? was Agnes’ eager question.

“Guess I can answer that,” Neale said gravely. “It does look as though things were getting complicated. I bet this girl you fed is one of Big Jim’s bunch.”

“How can you be so positive?”

“There are probably only two parties of Gypsies fighting over the possession of that old bracelet. Now, I learned down there in that junk neighborhood that Costello—the Costello who is bothering us—is called Miguel. They are all Costellos—Big Jim’s crowd and all. June Wildwood says so. They distinguish our junkman from themselves by calling him by his first name. Therefore—”

“Oh, of course I see,” sighed Agnes. “It is a terrible mess, Neale! I do wish Mr. Howbridge would get back. Or that the police would find that junkman and shut him up. Or—or that Ruthie would come home!”

“Oh, don’t be a baby, Aggie!” ejaculated Neale.

“Who is the baby, I want to know?” flashed back the girl. “I’m not!”

“Then pluck up your spirits and don’t turn on the sprinkler,” said the slangy youth. “Why, this is nothing to cry about. When it is all over we shall be looking back at the mystery as something great in our young lives.”

“You can try to laugh if you want to,” snapped Agnes. “But being haunted by a junkman, and getting notes from Gypsies like that! Huh! who wouldn’t be scared? Why, we don’t know what those people might do to us if we give up the bracelet to the wrong person.”

“It doesn’t belong to any of the Gypsies, perhaps.”

“That is exactly it!” she cried. “Maybe, after all, it is the property of Miss Ann Titus’ friend, Sarah.”

“And was lost somewhere on Willow Street—about where your garage now stands—forty years ago!” scoffed Neale. “Well, you are pretty soft, Agnes Kenway.”

This naturally angered the girl, and she pouted and got down from the fence without replying. As she went back up the yard she saw Mrs. Pinkney, with her head tied up with a towel, shaking a dustcloth at one of her front windows. It at least changed the current of the girl’s thought.

“Oh, Mrs. Pinkney!” she cried, running across the street to speak to Sammy’s mother, “have you heard anything?”

“About Sammy? Not a word,” answered the woman. “I have to keep working all the time, Agnes Kenway, or I should go insane. I know I should! I have cleaned this whole house, from attic to cellar, three times since Sammy ran away.”