If Neale O’Neil was not a good prophet, he certainly was a sure prophet, and Agnes Kenway admitted it. When the time came to leave the Poole party it did everything that the young fellow had said it would. It was as nasty and as cold a night as the two sisters ever remembered being out in.
Worst of all, in spite of the antiskid chains that Neale had spent a good hour from the party in adjusting to the rear wheels, something else went wrong, as he expressed it, and for fifteen long minutes they were stalled on the wind-swept Buckshot Road.
The icy fingers of that wind, if not the snow and sleet itself, sought the girls out, through every cranny of the automobile top. Ruth murmured an admission that her sister was right. They should have a closed car for winter.
By and by, when Neale managed to coax the engine to start again, the girls were clinging together for warmth and their teeth were chattering. Neale insisted on putting his robe about them in addition to their own, and drove barelapped himself for the rest of the journey.
Mrs. MacCall never went to bed when any of the flock were out in the evening, especially on a stormy night. On this night, Linda, the Finnish girl, had fallen out of her chair asleep before the kitchen stove and had been driven up to her room in a sleep-walking trance by the good housekeeper two hours before the arrival of Ruth and Agnes.
Tom Jonah, the faithful old watch dog, rose yawning from his place behind the stove as the girls stumbled into the kitchen. He went out with Neale to see if it really was as bad a night as it sounded.
“Ye puir bairns!” gasped Mrs. MacCall when she saw them. “Ye’re blue with the cold and perished of the snaw. Hech! Hech! What will Mr. Howbridge say to this, I want to know?”
“You ask him, Mrs. Mac,” faintly said the younger girl. “Oh!” and she began to cough.
“Hot drinks, Mrs. Mac, please,” said Ruth, trying to speak cheerfully. “I fear we have been very foolish. I fear we have.”
For once Mrs. MacCall did not scold when chances had been taken with her charges’ health. In fact the housekeeper considered the matter too serious. When she had hurried the sisters up to their rooms, she proceeded to telephone to Dr. Forsyth.
Dr. Forsyth had more than a practitioner’s interest in the Corner House girls. He had been treating Ruth and Agnes for their colds already. And when he heard over the telephone that they had been out into the country on this terrible night, he declared his intention of coming right over.
Dr. Forsyth had only turned away from his telephone, shivering a little in his bathrobe at the prospect of venturing out into the snow squalls, when he heard a dog barking at his door and an automobile horn tooting at the gate. He hurried to peer through the glass beside the door, and there saw the big head of Tom Jonah poked right against the glass.
“I’ll be right out, Neale!” shouted the doctor, glad enough that he had not to go out to the garage and tune up his own cold motor.
Neale had had the same thought Mrs. MacCall had. He knew that Agnes, whom he loved so dearly and with reason, and Ruth were both in need of immediate attention by the medical man. Dr. Forsyth got out as soon as he could, and Neale drove him back to the Corner House and waited there to take him home again.
When the doctor arrived the girls were in their beds. Agnes was already in a fitful sleep; but Ruth lay with wide-open eyes, burning up with fever, with her usual domestic anxieties riding her like a nightmare.
“Be sure and see that Tess wears her high shoes if she goes to school to-day, Mrs. Mac,” she murmured to the housekeeper. “Those others that she likes so, leak in the snow and slush. And Dot’s new gloves are in my sewing basket. I had been tightening the buttons.”
“Hold on!” commanded Dr. Forsyth. “Let’s pay a little attention to Ruth instead of Tess and Dot. How do you feel, my dear?”
“Like a Baltimore heater, thank you, Doctor,” Ruth replied, in a saner tone. “Have I been very crazy?”
“Very. Especially when you went to that party last evening,” declared the medical man. “Now be quiet—limbs and tongue! I’ve got to look you over pretty thoroughly.”
“If there’s any—anything fun—funda—any fun, doctor, I want to be in it!”
She really meant to say “fundamentally wrong” and that she wanted to know what it was; but in truth Ruth Kenway was light-headed, and it was some hours before she became her usually sane self. Agnes was not so seriously ill, but she was threatened, as Ruth was, with complications which might have resulted in the dreaded pneumonia.
“And I don’t want them to get the flu, either,” growled Dr. Forsyth. “That’s going around, too. Now, no school, remember, for the little ones! Nor are they to leave the warm rooms of the house—no playing in that ghost-haunted garret.” That referred to an old joke that had haunted the four Corner House girls when first they had come to live in Milton. “And keep them away from the sick ones. We do not know what may develop.”
“Oh, goodness gracious!” gasped Agnes, who chanced to hear this. “You don’t mean to say I’ve got anything catching, Dr. Forsyth?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me, Miss Flyabout,” he declared grimly.
“Oh!” cried Agnes, and then began coughing what Neale declared to be the real ‘Hark, from the tomb’ cough. “Do I spray everything with microbes when I cough like that?” she panted.
“Then give me a veil. I must strain ’em,” gasped Agnes.
“Never mind straining them,” chuckled Dr. Forsyth. “We’ll do the straining. You don’t want to keep all those squirmy germs to yourself. Cough and get rid of them.”
But although he could joke with Agnes (and she would certainly have been in a very bad way if she could not joke) the physician took extra precautions that this serious cold should not spread to the other members of the Corner House household. He left medicine for all.
After Tess and Dot had taken their several doses of medicine, they did not clamor to go to school.
“I feel so mean that I guess I wouldn’t be any good in school,” confessed Tess, and went to lie down.
Dot struggled with her dose, and although they both felt better the next morning, she could not wholly forgive Dr. Forsyth for ordering such a bad tasting draught.
“Hullo, Dorothy!” said the doctor jovially, when he appeared on that next day to see how his more important patients were getting on. “What do you think of the medicine I gave you yesterday?”
“I—I don’t want to—to think of it at all, sir,” stammered Dot. “I’m—I’m trying to forget it!”
Like Neale and the adult members of the household, Mr. Howbridge became at once anxious about Ruth and Agnes when he heard of their illness. Even Agnes’ jokes could not hide the fact that the two girls were in a serious condition.
“We lie here with only a wall separating us, barking like two strange dogs on either side of a picket fence,” said the flyaway sister. “How’s Ruth now? Bark, dear, and let me hear you!”
But Dr. Forsyth forbade much conversation—especially at the top of Agnes’ “barking voice,” as she expressed it. Mr. Howbridge said gloomily enough to the physician:
“I am really worried about those girls. I thought they were enough of a charge when I first assumed responsibility to the Court for them. But now I am afraid that I may lose them.”
“Nothing like that! Nothing like that!” exclaimed Dr. Forsyth. “But I won’t say that conditions are not serious. They may be housebound for a good part of the winter.”
“You don’t say! And just when I was considering very seriously getting into a more cheerful climate, myself, for January and February. You know, I begin to feel those two months in my bones, Doctor.”
“Ha!” exclaimed Dr. Forsyth with interest. “Going South, are you?”
“Say ‘were you?’” grumbled the lawyer.
“Oh, you can safely go when January comes,” said the physician cheerfully. “The girls will be in shape to travel by New Year’s, if there is no set-back.”
“What’s that?” demanded Mr. Howbridge, his eyes opening.
“You did not consider going without the girls, did you?”
“I certainly wasn’t considering going with them!” exclaimed the lawyer.
“Why not?”
“Ahem? And why?”
Dr. Forsyth burst into laughter. “It will be a breath of new life to Ruth and Agnes; and of course they could not be contented without Tess and Dot along.”
“Wait! Don’t say it all so fast,” groaned Mr. Howbridge. “I have only just got rid of those twins. Hedden and I have scarcely got our breaths. And to travel with those four girls——”
“You won’t mind it,” chuckled Dr. Forsyth. “You know you won’t.”
“But how about Hedden? I believe he will give me notice.”
However, the idea went with the lawyer, and stayed with him. The holidays were approaching. Although the two older Corner House girls got out of their beds and were supposed to be convalescent, they were weak. They just lay around the house and were willing to be waited upon. But Ruth did not forget the Pendletons and was glad that Mr. Howbridge found work for the man who had been injured.
Neale played games or read aloud with Agnes by the hour. Sandyface, the old cat, came dragging in her newest litter of kittens—all four of them—and bedded them down in Ruth’s sewing basket at that invalid’s feet.
“Aye,” declared Mrs. MacCall one day, standing to look from one sister to the other, “it’s somebody must always pay the fiddler. This time you two lassies be payin’ tae the full!”
Of course Tess and Dot Kenway had gone back to school after a few days. But while they were housed up Sammy Pinkney learned something. He scoffed at girls as playfellows quite openly when he was in the company of the smaller Corner House girls, but in secret he missed their companionship sorely.
Living as he did, just catercornered across Willow Street from the side door of the old Corner House, Sammy had been the most familiar playfellow of Tess and Dot since they had come to Milton. Sammy’s affairs had always entertained the Corner House family—even his attempts to run away to be a pirate.
Whatever Tess and Dot did, Sammy had a share in. During the brief time when they were kept indoors because Ruth and Agnes were so ill, Sammy concluded that he ought to do something big for the little girls on the coming holiday.
“I got to give something nice to Tess and Dot,” he told his mother and father. “They have done a lot of things for me, haven’t they?”
“They are very good friends of yours,” agreed his father.
“You could not have nicer playmates,” said Mrs. Pinkney with satisfaction. “What do you want to give Tess and Dot?”
“I don’t know yet,” answered Sammy thoughtfully. “I want it to be something they’ll remember me by after I get so big that I won’t want to play with girls any more.”
“Why, Sammy!” exclaimed his mother, “I hope that day will never come.”
“Huh!” growled her young son. “It’s bad for boys to play with girls all the time. Makes ’em sissies.”
Mrs. Pinkney was troubled; but her husband laughed loudly.
“Let me pick out something sweet for the little girls, Sammy,” said his mother, with a sigh.
“What do you mean, Mom? Candy?” asked Sammy suspiciously. “They always have candy.”
“No, no. I mean something pretty—for them to wear or look at.”
“Huh!” was the doubtful response. “They don’t need any clothes. Do you mean pictures? For they’ve got a lot of them. Their playroom walls are covered with ’em. Pictures printed on the wall-paper. Don’t see much good in that myself.”
Again Mr. Pinkney expressed his amusement. His wife, who was wholly without a sense of humor or fun, frowned at her husband’s openly expressed amusement. Moreover, she wished that Sammy was less boisterous. And she blamed Mr. Pinkney for encouraging Sammy’s ruder tastes.
“He is getting old enough now to appreciate better things,” she said in private to Mr. Pinkney. “See how nice it is of him to think of giving the little girls a nice present. I wonder what he will decide upon.”
“You leave it to Sammy,” chuckled her husband. “He’ll think of something that will surprise them—and probably surprise you, too.”
“I hope it will be nice.”
“Remember,” said the man in warning, “that it was Sammy who gave Tess and Dot that goat, Billy Bumps. It’s been a cross to the rest of the Corner House crowd, I have no doubt.”
“Oh, dear! Don’t suggest such a thing!” gasped Mrs. Pinkney.
Meanwhile the suggestion Dr. Forsyth had made to Mr. Howbridge regarding a winter trip South for the Corner House girls, bore fruit. The lawyer had business at St. Sergius, the capital of one of the island colonies in the Caribbean Sea. St. Sergius was a commercial port of some importance, and the business that called Mr. Howbridge there was of moment.
He had intended to remain at a hotel there for some weeks, and had even written for hotel booklets and the like. Now he proposed to make the trip a real outing, and he broached the matter to Ruth.
“Oh, Guardy!” she sighed, “that sounds fine,” and she began, Mrs. MacCall said, “to perk up immediately.” Heretofore she had shown little power of recovery from her illness—not as much as Agnes showed. Now she became almost as enthusiastic as her livelier sister over the proposed journey into warmer climes.
Of course she wrote at once to Luke about it and from him received the most amazing reply, worded about like this:
“Tell it not in Gath—nor in Pawtucket! I’ve been as worried as a ball of knitting-wool in the claws of a six-weeks’-old kitten! I had a chance offered me, and I didn’t know what to do about it. Believe me, the wind is tempered to the lawn sham! Professor Keeps, who is a good friend of mine, is going to spend some weeks in the Caribbean, starting soon after New Year’s, and he offered me the chance to go along—and get a salary for so doing! Think of it! Luke Shepard is to be assistant to a grave professor who is curious about the botany of those tropic isles.
“I am going to tell him now that I am his for keeps! Pardon the pun. I will be there with bells on, Ruthie. You can’t lose me. Maybe we can sail in the same boat for St. Sergius. Tell Mr. Howbridge to try to make the Horridole of the Black Pennant Line. She is some boat. I am coming down to see you before the start. Package of remembrances starts with this letter for Christmas. Hang ’em on the tree. I forbid your peeping into yours, Ruthie, until Christmas morning.”
Naturally this news could not be hidden. All the household at once knew that Luke Shepard would be able to spend some of the time, at least, with the party which was to go to St. Sergius.
By this time, too, Tess and Dot, knowing that they were to be included in the party, were telling everybody they met of the good times in store for them.
“Huh! You’d better stay home,” said Sammy Pinkney disappointedly, for he knew that this was a party which he could have no part in. “There’ll be more going on here than down there in the West Indies. You wait and see!”
“But they won’t be the same things,” declared Tess. “We know all about the things that happen in Milton in winter.”
“You don’t know everything,” said the boy, wagging his head.
“What’s going to happen here, Sammy?” cried Dot. “Oh! Do tell us.”
“You’re going to get a present.”
“We always get presents,” said Tess.
“What sort of present?” demanded Dot. “Something for my Alice-doll?”
“It’s going to be a great one!” said Sammy. “I’m going to give it to you. Mike Donlan——Well, never mind! You’re going to be surprised.”
“I like to be surprised,” confessed Dot.
“You will be,” said Sammy, nodding vigorously.
“Well, we are not going until after Christmas,” said Tess, with sudden memory. “So it will be all right.”
“But if I give you this present you ought to stay home and look out for it,” declared their boy friend.
“It must be alive,” said Tess thoughtfully.
At that, Sammy, much afraid that he might “give it away,” departed in haste. He could not be confident of his own ability to dodge any cross-examination of Tess Kenway’s.
Christmas Eve came at last. For the first time she could remember Ruth went to bed without putting the last touches to the Christmas tree in the big dining-room. But she really was not equal to it. So Mrs. MacCall did all that, aided by Linda and old Uncle Rufus.
As usual the toys and games for the little folks were numberless. And nobody was forgotten. Sammy Pinkney, however, had come to Uncle Rufus early in the evening and begged him to leave the side door of the Corner House unlocked when the family had got through dressing the tree.
“What yo’ got in your haid, boy?” Uncle Rufus demanded.
“’Tain’t in my head. It’s in our woodshed,” confessed Sammy. “But don’t you tell nobody, Uncle Rufus.”
“I can’t tell what I don’t know,” admitted the old colored man, who always entered into the spirit of the children’s plays.
“It’s going to be a surprise for everybody,” declared Sammy. “You leave the door unlocked, Uncle Rufus, and you’ll all know what it is in the morning.”
And it certainly was a surprise! Sammy Pinkney was famous for surprising people.
Everybody had at last gone to bed in the big house—Linda and Uncle Rufus on the third floor, and Mrs. McCall and the rest of the family in their several rooms on the second. Midnight had some time passed when everybody was awakened—but that gradually—by a tintinnabulation of silvery bells.
“What is it?” gasped Dot, from her little bed, to Tess, in hers. It was a wonder that the littlest Corner House girl woke up at all, for she was usually a very sound sleeper. But her head was full of Santa Claus on this night. “Is that reindeer bells, Tess?” she demanded.
“Then they are inside the house, and I don’t believe they could come down our chimney, big as it is,” declared Tess.
“Sammy Pinkney came down it once—you remember?”
“But he doesn’t ring like bells,” was the very practical reply.
Even Aunt Sarah Maltby heard the bells. She poked her head out of her room door in her nightcap and demanded:
“What’s all that? Those are the bells on the Christmas tree. What does it mean, Mrs. MacCall?”
The housekeeper was already up. She came out into the hall and sent the little folks back to bed.
“Whatever it is, human or sperrit, I’ll be goin’ by myself tae see,” she declared. “The night before Christmas is no time for you bairns to be out of your beds.”
“Do you s’pose it is Saint Nick?” asked Dot, in an awed tone.
“It may be,” said the housekeeper, descending the front stairs. “And if it is, he doesn’t want to see you. Go back to bed as I tell ye.”
The tinkle of the bells on the Christmas tree was silvery in tone, and there was nothing about the sound to frighten even Dot. But it was mysterious, and Mrs. MacCall approached the door of the dining-room with some hesitation.
She had only recently left the room with the arrangements completed for Christmas morning when the youngsters should first run down to look at the present-laden tree, and exclaim in “Ohs!” and “Ahs!” at the sight.
She could imagine nothing that would cause the tree to sway and thus make the silvery bells tinkle. There was no window open which would create a draft and so wag the branches back and forth. What could be the cause of the bells’ ringing?
She turned the knob of the door and pushed it open a tiny bit. There was no light in the room, although the tree was strung with electric bulbs of rainbow hues. Instead of an open fireplace now, as there once had been, there was a gas log under the old mantelpiece. But this was turned off. The steam-heating plant in the cellar warmed the house sufficiently and the logs were used only in the fall and spring before and after Uncle Rufus and Neale started the heater.
Mrs. MacCall’s finger searched for the button on the wall just inside the door which would light all the lamps in the room. And just then she heard a muffled thumping sound, and the bells all rang again!
“Slosh!” ejaculated the housekeeper. “’Tis ghosties, sure enough!”
She did not mean that, of course. She was just puzzled. But she knew, in spite of the darkness, that there was something moving under the Christmas tree where the rug had been turned back for the framework, which held the tree, to stand.
“Who is it?” demanded Aunt Sarah from above.
“I’m nae so sure ’tis not Sammy Pinkney,” grumbled the housekeeper. “He’s always up to something. To be sure! I was right,” she added, for now she had pressed the electric light button and the whole room was ablaze with light.
The thing under the tree jumped again and the bells once more jingled. The housekeeper stepped forward in wonder. Was it another big cat? Or—or——
“For the land’s sake!” gasped Mrs. MacCall. “I knew I was right. Nobody but that dratted Sammy would have brought in a rabbit and tied it to that tree. And there’s a Christmas card tied to the creature’s neck.”
She had to laugh, however. It was not a cat, but a big Belgian hare—the biggest Mike Donlan had in his pen. And the price of it had simply wiped out Sammy’s bank account!
He had scrawled on a mistletoe bepictured card the following:
“Fore Tes and Dot, from there fathefull frend S. P.”
Mrs. MacCall had not the heart to say anything about it when she went upstairs again, after having confined the Belgian hare in the sink closet in the kitchen, out of which he was not likely to gnaw his way before morning. The “Christmas bells” had ceased ringing, and so the two little girls went back to sleep without learning of their unexpected present until the proper time.
But a lot of fun was had over that gift of Sammy’s. Neale and Uncle Rufus made a proper pen for the Belgian hare in one end of the goat shed where Billy Bumps chewed his cud in lonely glory.
“Billy won’t eat him up, and maybe the two will become good friends,” said Neale.
“What won’t that boy think of next?” gasped Agnes, weak from laughter.
What Mrs. Pinkney said about it when she learned the nature of her son’s “nice present” to Tess and Dot, was plenty! And how Sammy’s father laughed!
“I can’t understand,” said the worried Mrs. Pinkney, “how that boy comes to do such ridiculous things. I know I never had such ideas when I was a child and I don’t believe you did.”
“No, I never did,” her husband chuckled. “I own up that Sammy has inventive traits—and others—that he does not come by, by heredity.”
“Say, Mom!” said Sammy thoughtfully.
“What is it, you strange boy?” sighed his mother.
“Didn’t you have a chance to see me before I was born?”
“Goodness! No,” gasped Mrs. Pinkney.
“Then I guess you must have ‘bought a pig in a poke’ and that’s something Mrs. MacCall says is awful silly to do. You ought to have been more careful when you was picking out a boy to last.”
Of course, Christmas was a great day in and about the old Corner House. Although the older girls could not, as usual, visit their tenants in a poor part of the town and take them presents, Neale drove the little girls over there in the automobile and Mrs. Kranz, the “delicatessen lady,” and the girls’ very good friend, undertook to distribute the gifts to the needy.
Uncle Rufus’s daughter, Petunia Blossom, and her large family, came in for a generous share of the good will that spilled out of the Corner House.
Neale O’Neil’s good friend, Mr. Con Murphy, the cobbler, with whom the boy still lived, was not forgotten, and included in his list of presents was a fine green ribbon which Neale soberly produced and proceeded to tie around the fat neck of the perennial pig that occupied a clean sty in Mr. Murphy’s back yard. For the old cobbler was always very fond of “the gintleman that pays the rint,” which was his name for the pig.
Agnes tried to be as merry as her condition would allow. And on Christmas afternoon her school friends came in, and they had a little party.
“Aggie is managing to inject considerable pep into these proceedings, in spite of her lack of strength,” Neale remarked to Ruth.
The news that the Corner House girls were going South for two months or so, was now general knowledge; so the young folks when they departed bade the Kenways good-by. It was positive that Agnes’ face grew longer and longer during this proceeding, and when they had all gone she suddenly looked at Neale, gulped, grabbed him by both shoulders and shook him a bit, sobbing:
“You horrid boy! How can you be so cheerful, Neale O’Neil, when I’m go-going so—so far away?”
“Crackey, Aggie!” he exclaimed, “I thought you wanted to go!”
“I—I do! But Ruth is going to have Luke along, while you—you——”
“Hold on, Aggie! Don’t turn on the sprinkler,” he begged. “I’d thought of that. You bet I have been thinking about it every minute. And—and——Oh, you wait!”
He dashed away, and she did not see him again during Christmas day. But Mr. Howbridge was surprised to receive a visit from Neale O’Neil, whose affairs were in his care while Mr. O’Neil was in Alaska.
“What’s the matter now, Neale?” asked the old bachelor guardian. “What’s gone wrong?”
“Nothing, sir. Nothing yet, I mean. But something is bound to go wrong if you and those girls go off to the West Indies without making a provision that you have not thought of.”
“Yes? Is that so? I thought I had arranged for almost everything. Will you please tell me what you have discovered missing in the arrangements Hedden and I have made?” and the lawyer smiled grimly.
“First of all, I want you to look at that report, Mr. Howbridge,” said Neale respectfully, handing Mr. Howbridge a report from the principal of his school.
“Humph! Yes! I had already observed it. And I must say, Neale, that your standing does you credit.”
“Thank you, sir,” the young fellow said, glowing at this praise. “And I am away ahead in my classes. I can keep up all right if I chance to be out of school for a few weeks. I can show you——”
“What’s this? What’s this?” demanded the lawyer.
“Yes, sir, that’s just what I mean!” cried Neale O’Neil, rushing on. “I have just got to go with you all, Mr. Howbridge. I couldn’t bear to be left behind. And—and Agnes couldn’t bear it either.”
“Ah-ha!” cried the lawyer. “Sits the wind in that quarter? Then that is the explanation of the note I got this very day from our surprising Sister Agnes.”
“What’s that?” demanded Neale, amazed.
“She says here,” Mr. Howbridge said, reading the note which was written in Agnes’ unmistakable hand, but rather shakily, “that she thinks she doesn’t want to go with the party, but would rather go back to school and catch up with her class. And she needs the voyage just as much as Ruth does.”
“The blessed kid!” exploded Neale O’Neil, his face very red.
“Quite so, Neale,” said the lawyer soberly, and laying a hand upon the boy’s sleeve. “That is exactly what our Agnes is—‘a blessed kid.’ Don’t forget it. She is an impulsive, loving, blessed girl.”
“Never forget it,” repeated Mr. Howbridge. “But I want to tell you that I had already favorably considered taking you along. I think I can make use of you down there. Goodness! I can’t be expected to look out for four girls without any help at all, can I?”
This matter being satisfactorily settled, there was nothing left to do but to pack their trunks and otherwise prepare for the voyage into tropic climes, as Agnes, having suddenly recovered all her gayety, expressed it.
The new year came in with an old-fashioned snowstorm and Agnes and Ruth began to cough again. Mr. Howbridge looked grave, but Dr. Forsyth prophesied that the coughs would wear off as soon as the afflicted girls got into the belt of steady, warm weather.
On the third of January they started. Mrs. MacCall was red-eyed and Linda was really not fit to be seen! Old Uncle Rufus was as mournful as could be, but tried to show some cheerfulness.
Sammy, having observed certain weddings in the neighborhood, tied a number of old shoes on the back of the automobile for luck and was restrained with difficulty from throwing rice all over the Corner House girls as they left home.
Mr. Howbridge had taken Luke Shepard’s advice, and had booked passage on the steamship Horridole from the port of Boston. Luke met them with Professor Keeps and his outfit at the dock. It was a gay party indeed that went aboard and sought their reservations among the best staterooms on the boat.
“Dear me!” sighed Agnes ecstatically, and now quite her pleasure-loving self, “it is so nice to be wealthy. If we should ever be poor again, Ruth, I know I should be the hatefulest thing in skirts.”
“Why, Aggie! Don’t talk that way.”
“It is the truth,” said the flyaway sister. “Nothing poor or mean can ever satisfy me again. I sometimes think I shall have to marry a millionaire, or else I shall make my husband very miserable.”
“You won’t have to worry about that yet,” laughed Ruth, but she flushed very prettily and looked at Luke, who was out of earshot.
There was one matter which had troubled Ruth, and her friends, as well, before they left Milton and the old Corner House. Even her illness could not entirely turn Ruth’s mind from the sad case of the Pendletons.
While she had been so ill she could not visit the little family on Plane Street which seemed to have been so sorely stricken. But she knew that Mr. Pendleton had got up and was about, after a fortnight or so, and that Mr. Howbridge had found him a job. Dr. Forsyth told Ruth that with proper care the man would suffer no serious results from his fall in the chestnut woods.
At Christmas the family, especially the three children, was lavishly remembered by the Kenways. Margaret Ortwell Pendleton did not go to the same school as Tess and Dot, so the little Corner House girls did not see much of her, but they heard about the Pendleton children—especially of “Shot” Pendleton—quite frequently through Sammy. Sammy was a rover, and he kept in touch with the acquaintances which he made to a remarkable degree.
But it was through her guardian that Ruth Kenway learned more about Oscar Pendleton and his troubles and learned what was going on in the investigation into the robbery at the warehouse of Kolbeck & Roods. Mr. Howbridge had become interested in the case.
“My clerk has not really raked up anything satisfactory about that affair,” the lawyer reflected, as he sat with Ruth on the deck of the Horridole the second day out from port. “He has got Pendleton’s story from him and—my clerk, I mean—believes the man is innocent. It is not a mere opinion; he gains his judgments through logical reflection.
“But there is no evidence to the contrary that would be accepted by any court. You see, Kolbeck and Roods are not sure enough themselves to have Pendleton arrested. That makes it very bad——”
“Why, Guardy! I think that makes it very good. Consider how poor Mrs. Pendleton would feel if her husband was taken off to jail.”
“You don’t see very far, Ruth,” said the lawyer. “If he was arrested we’d bail him out, hurry the trial, and make Kolbeck and Roods try to prove their allegation. They couldn’t do so and the man would be discharged and his name practically cleared. We have no ‘Scotch verdicts’ in America.”
“What is a Scotch verdict, Guardian?”
“It is a custom in some courts of that country, when guilt is not assured, to render a verdict of ‘not proven’; but it does not clear the victim’s reputation. It is neither guilt nor acquittal. But if Kolbeck and Roods could not bring forward convincing proof of Oscar Pendleton’s guilt, he would be acquitted.”
“Oh! And can’t your clerk dig up any facts on the other side—that Mr. Pendleton could not have committed the robbery?”
“That is the job I have left him to do,” said Mr. Howbridge. “He tells me the man who saved Pendleton from arrest in the first place is Israel Stumpf.”
“‘Israel Stumpf’? Let me see—haven’t I heard that name before?”
“Perhaps. I understand he is Mr. Kolbeck’s stepson.”
“That is it!” cried Ruth. “Miss Titus spoke of him. And—and somehow I drew from what she said that Israel Stumpf was not a friend to Mr. Pendleton.”
“My clerk says he is the boy who saved Pendleton from immediate arrest.”
“Saved him?” quoted Ruth. “Don’t you mean that he balked the intention of the firm to arrest the suspect and have the matter cleared up at once?”
“You split hairs like any lawyer,” laughed Mr. Howbridge. Yet he stared at the girl thoughtfully for a long minute. Then: “I see your point. I am going to wireless my office a message. Perhaps a closer examination into the life and works of Israel Stumpf might prove important.”
The little folks were, of course, immensely interested in the sending of that message, although they did not know its purport. Tess and Dot wandered about the decks of the steamship in their furs, Dot with the Alice-doll hugged close to her breast, and stared at everything they saw new; and, in Dot’s case at least, asked innumerable questions.
When the Horridole got out into the Gulf Stream where the air and sea were both warmer—much warmer than at Boston—the two little girls began to enjoy themselves enormously. They did not have to bundle up so much and the sea-air was delightful.
Its effect upon Ruth and Agnes was equally efficacious. They soon stopped the “Hark, from the tomb a mournful sound!” as Neale had called their separate coughs. Ruth was soon able to walk about. Already Agnes, leaning on Neale’s arm at first, paced the upper deck, around and around, “to get an appetite,” she said.
“Don’t do it, Aggie,” begged Neale O’Neil, after watching her at dinner the second day. “Remember what devastation you are causing. This is a rich steamship line; but profits won’t stand many such passengers as you are proving to be.”
“I know it!” cried his friend delightedly. “One would never think I had been eating at home, but would believe I had been saving up for this occasion. Do ask the steward for some more tongue, Neale. I’m ashamed to.”
“‘Every part strengthens a part,’” said Neale, quoting Mrs. MacCall. “I don’t know about that tongue, Aggie. You weren’t behind the door when they were giving tongues out.”
“Is that so!” and she tossed her head.
“But, still,” he added, his eyes twinkling, “this is the tongue that never gossiped, so perhaps it won’t hurt you to have a little more,” and he summoned the waiter.
“I like your impudence!” Agnes exclaimed. “Do you think I am in training to occupy Miss Titus’ exalted position when I get to be her age?”
“Don’t know. Can’t tell. You are getting kind of dried up and ancient, Aggie. I’m worried about you,” teased the boy.
“I’m not worried about you,” said she, tossing her head again. “I know just how you are going to turn out, Neale O’Neil.”
“How?” he inquired curiously.
“Bad.”
“I’m bound to be a bad man, am I?”
“You are. You are a tease, and you’re careless, and you don’t care what happens when you are out for fun, and you are reckless with your money, and—and——”
“So far,” interposed Ruth who had heard this, and she said it rather soberly, “you have related your own shortcomings to a nicety, Agnes. There is little use in the pot calling the kettle black.”
“Well! I declare! Isn’t it the result of my association with this boy that my own character is so bad?” Agnes demanded.
“You are both incorrigible,” declared Ruth, and thereafter paid no attention to them.
Agnes was feeling so much better by this time that she was ready for any gayety and almost any stroke of mischief. She was about with Neale O’Neil all the time; and usually the little ones were in their company. So that Mr. Howbridge had not to fret himself in the least regarding Tess and Dot.
Ruth and Luke were together most of the time, for aboard ship Professor Keeps did not need his young assistant. Ruth thought the bald-headed professor with the very pronounced near-sighted squint, rather an interesting man. He was still in the thirties; but he was so dry of speech and look that it was difficult not to think of him as much older.
He was interesting to talk with—or, rather, to listen to. Luke said what Professor Keeps did not know about botany, the flowers of the field themselves had forgotten!
“You speak almost as uproariously as Neale does,” said Ruth, smiling. “I never knew you to be so hilarious before, Luke—not since I have known you.”
“Why shouldn’t I be light-hearted?” he returned, smiling. “This is my first regular job. Of course, I worked at that hotel for part of last summer, and so showed Neighbor that I really mean to be self-supporting just as soon as I can be. But being a hotel clerk did not rise out of my college work.
“This is something different. Neighbor is just as pleased as Cecile and Aunt Lorena. I don’t suppose I shall be a professor of botany; but this experience will help, and while I am helping Professor Keeps I’ll be getting full credit in my regular course. Shan’t have much tutoring to do to catch up.”
“It is certainly nice that you can be with us,” sighed Ruth happily. “I wish Cecile might have come.”
“Aunt Lorena needs her. And whisper! I believe Cecile has a new interest near home.”
“No!” ejaculated Ruth, her eyes shining.
“Yes, ma’am! Cecile has a ‘gemplum friend.’ And he’s an all right fellow—‘Gene Barrows. He has a garage, and a business, and red hair. And he is going to make a good thing of all three,” chuckled Luke.
Agnes, as she regained her strength, regained her volubility and charm as well. She was a very pretty girl, and in spite of her youth she always attracted attention from both young and old. She was especially popular with the men and boys of the passenger list.
She showed preference for none of them, however, save Neale O’Neil, yet some of the girls of her own age aboard began, before long, to consider that the blond Kenway girl gathered altogether too many of the boys about her. The boys gathered about Neale, too, but the envious ones would not see that. In fact, having set their futile traps for Neale and failed to snare him, they were all the angrier with helpless Agnes.
“Who is that girl who stares at me so hard whenever she passes, Neale?” Agnes asked languidly, as she lolled in her steamer chair on the third morning out of Boston. “Have I seen her somewhere before, or do I owe her money?”
“Hush, my child!” urged Neale, grinning. “You know not of whom you speak in so careless a manner.”
“Is she somebody?” asked Agnes, with increased interest.
“She is. Her father is one of the high muck-a-mucks of the Black Pennant Line—owns oodles of stock. And she is from the coldest stratum of Back Bay society—pos-i-tive-ly.”