CHAPTER X—ALL IS NOT GOLD THAT GLITTERS

It was scarcely more than a tumbled-down hut, with broken panes of glass more common than whole ones in the windows, these apertures stuffed with hats and discarded garments, while half the bricks had fallen from the chimney-top. There were half a dozen barefooted children running about, while a very wide and red-faced woman stood in the doorway.

“Hullo, me bye!” she called to Sammy, as he lingered outside the broken fence with a longing eye upon her. “Where be yez bound so airly in the marnin’?”

“I’m just traveling, Ma’am,” Sammy returned with much dignity. “Could—could you sell me some breakfast?”

“Breakfast, is it?” repeated the smiling woman. “Shure, I’d give yez it, if mate wasn’t so high now. Come in me kitchen and sit ye down. There’s tay in the pot, and I’ll fry yez up a spider full o’ pork and taters, if that’ll do yez?”

The menu sounded tempting indeed to Sammy. He accepted the woman’s invitation instantly and entered the house, past the staring children. The two oldest of the group, a shrewd-faced boy and a sharp-featured girl, stood back and whispered together while they watched the visitor.

Sammy was so much interested in the bountiful breakfast with which the housewife supplied him that he thought very little about the children peering in at the door and open windows. When he had eaten the last crumb he asked his hostess how much he should pay her.

“Well, me bye, I’ll not overcharge ye,” she replied. “If yez have ten cents about ye we’ll call it square—an’ that’s only for the mate, as I said before is so high, I dunno.”

Sammy produced the knotted handkerchief, put it on the table and untied it, displaying the coins it held with something of a flourish. The jingle of so many dimes brought a sigh of wonder in unison from the young spectators at door and windows. The woman accepted her dime without comment.

Sammy thanked her politely, wiped his mouth on his sleeve (napery was conspicuous by its absence in this household) and started out the door. The smaller children scattered to give him passage; the older boy and girl had already gone out of the badly fenced yard and were loitering along the road in the direction Sammy was traveling.

“Hullo! Here’s raggedy-pants,” said the girl saucily, when Sammy came along.

“How did you get them holes in your breeches, kid?” added the boy.

“Never you mind,” rejoined Sammy gruffly. “They’re my pants.”

“Stuck up, ain’t you?” jeered the girl and stuck out her tongue at him.

Sammy thought these were two very impolite children, and although he was not rated at home for his own chivalrous conduct, he considered these specimens in the road before him quite unpleasant young people.

“Ne’er mind,” said the boy, looking at Sammy slyly, “he don’t know everything. He ain’t seen everything if he is traveling all by himself. I bet he’s run away.”

“I ain’t running away from you,” was Sammy’s belligerent rejoinder.

“You would if I said ‘Boo!’ to you.”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

“Ya!” scoffed the girl, leering at Sammy, “don’t talk so much. Do something to him, Peter.”

Peter glanced warily back at the house. Perhaps he knew the large, red-faced woman might take a hand in proceedings if he pitched upon the strange boy.

“I bet,” he said, starting on another tack, “that he never saw a cherry-colored calf like our’n.”

“I bet he never did,” crowed the girl in delight.

“A cherry-colored calf,” scoffed Sammy. “Get out! There ain’t such a thing. A calf might be red; there are red cows—”

“This calf is cherry-colored,” repeated the boy earnestly. “It’s down there in our pasture.”

“Don’t believe it,” said Sammy flatly.

“’Tis so!” cried the girl.

“I tell you,” said the very shrewd-looking boy. “We’ll show it to you for ten cents.”

“I don’t believe it,” repeated Sammy, but more doubtfully.

The girl laughed at him more scornfully than before. “He’s afraid to spend a dime—an’ him with so much money,” she cried.

“I don’t believe you’ve got a cherry-colored calf to show me.”

“Gimme the dime and I’ll show you whether we have or not,” said Peter.

“No,” said the cautious Sammy. “I’ll give you a dime if you show it to me. But no foolin’. I won’t give you a cent if the calf is any other color.”

“All right,” shouted the other boy. “Come on and I’ll show you. Come on, Liz.”

“All right, Peter,” said the girl, quite as eagerly. “Hurry up, raggedy-pants. We can use that dime, Peter and me can.”

The bare-legged youngsters got through a rail fence and darted down a path into a scrubby pasture, as wild as unbroken colts. Sammy, feeling fine after the bountiful breakfast he had eaten, chased after them wishing that he had thought to remove his shoes and stockings too. Peter and Liz seemed so much more free and untrammeled than he!

“Hold on!” puffed Sammy, coming finally to the bottom of the slope. “I ain’t going to run my head off for any old calf—Huh!”

From behind a clump of brush appeared suddenly a cow—a black and white cow, probably of the Holstein breed. There followed a scrambling in the bushes. Liz jumped into them with a shriek and drove out a little, blatting, stiff-legged calf. It was all of a glossy black, from its nose to the tip of its tail.

“That’s him! That’s him!” shrieked Liz. “A cherry-colored calf.”

“What did I tell you?” demanded the boy, Peter. “Give us the dime.”

“You go on!” exclaimed Sammy. “I knew all the time you were story-telling. That’s no cherry-colored calf.”

“’Tis too! It’s just the color of a black-heart cherry,” giggled Liz. “You got to give up ten cents.”

“Won’t neither,” Sammy declared.

“I’ll take it off you,” threatened Peter, growing belligerent.

“You won’t,” stubbornly declared Sammy, who did not propose to be cheated.

Peter jumped for him and Sammy could not run. One reason why he could not retreat was because Liz grabbed him from the rear, holding him around the waist.

She pulled him over backward, while her brother began to pummel Sammy most heartily from above. It was a most unfair attack and a most uncomfortable situation for the runaway. Although he managed to defend his face for the most part from Peter’s blows, he could do little else.

“Lemme up! Lemme up!” bawled Sammy.

“Gimme the dime,” panted Peter.

“I won’t! ’Tain’t fair!” gasped Sammy, too plucky to give in.

Liz had now squirmed from under the struggling boys. She must have seen at the house in which pocket Sammy kept the knotted handkerchief, for she thrust her hand into that pocket and snatched out the hoard of dimes before the owner realized what she was doing.

“Hey! Stop! Lemme up!” roared Sammy again.

“I got it, Peter!” shrieked Liz, and, springing up, she darted into the bushes and disappeared.

“Stop! She’s stole my money,” gasped Sammy in horror and alarm.

“She never! You didn’t have no money!” declared Peter, and with a final blow that stunned Sammy for the moment, the other leaped up and followed his wild companion into the brush.

Sammy, weeping in good earnest now, bruised and scratched in body and sore in spirit, climbed slowly to his feet. Never before in any of his runaway escapades had he suffered such ignominy and loss.

Why! he had actually fallen among thieves. First his bag and all his chattels therein had been stolen. Now these two ragamuffins had robbed him of every penny he possessed.

He dared not go back to the house where he had bought breakfast and complain. The other youngsters there might fall upon and beat him again!

Sammy Pinkney at last was tasting the bitter fruits of wrong doing. Even weeding another beet-bed could have been no more painful than these experiences which he was now suffering.

CHAPTER XI—MYSTERIES ACCUMULATE

Agnes did, of course, feel her importance while Ruth was away. It was not often that she was made responsible for the family welfare in any particular. And just now the matter of the silver bracelet loomed big on her horizon.

She scarcely expected the advertisement in the Morning Post to bring immediate results. Yet, it might. The Gypsies’ gift to the little girls was a very queer matter indeed. The suggestion that the bracelet had been stolen by the Romany folk did not seem at all improbable.

And if this was so, whoever had lost the ornament would naturally be watching the “Lost and Found” column in the newspaper.

“Unless the owner doesn’t know he has lost it,” Agnes suggested to Neale.

“How’s that? He’d have to be more absent-minded than Professor Ware not to miss a bracelet like that,” scoffed her boy chum.

“Oh, Professor Ware!” giggled Agnes, suddenly. “He would forget anything, I do believe. Do you know what happened at his house the other evening when the Millers and Mr. and Mrs. Crandall went to call?”

“The poor professor made a bad break I suppose,” grinned Neale. “What did he do?”

“Why, Mrs. Ware saw the callers coming just before they rang the bell and the professor had been digging in the garden. Of course she straightened things up a little before she appeared in the parlor to welcome the visitors. But the professor did not appear. Somebody asked for him at last and Mrs. Ware went to the foot of the stairs to call him.

“‘Oh, Professor!’ she called up the stairs, and the company heard him answer back just as plain:

“‘Maria, I can’t remember whether you sent me up here to change my clothes or to go to bed.’”

“I can believe it!” chortled Neale O’Neil. “He has made some awful breaks in school. But I don’t believe he ever owned that bracelet, Aggie.”

The first person who displayed interest in the advertisement in the Post about the bracelet, save the two young people who put it in the paper, proved to add much to the mystery of the affair and nothing at all to the peace of mind of Agnes, at least.

Agnes was busy at some mending—actually hose-darning, for Ruth insisted that the flyaway sister should mend her own stockings, which Aunt Sarah’s keen eyes inspected—when she chanced to raise her head to glance out of the front window of the sewing room. A strange looking turnout had halted before the front gate.

The vehicle itself was a decrepit express wagon on the side of which in straggling blue letters was painted the one word “JUNK,” but the horse drawing the wagon was a surprisingly well-kept and good looking animal.

The back of the wagon was piled high with bundles of newspapers, and bags, evidently stuffed with rags, were likewise in the wagon body. The man climbing down from the seat just as Agnes looked did not seem at all like the usual junk dealer who passed through Milton’s streets heralded by a “chime” of tin-can bells.

He was a small, swarthy man, and even at the distance of the front gate from Agnes’ window the girl could see that he wore gold hoops in his ears. He was quick but furtive in his motions. He glanced in a birdlike way down the street and across the Parade Ground, which was diagonally opposite the old Corner House, before he entered the front gate.

“He’d better go around to the side door,” thought Agnes aloud. “He must be a very fashionable junkman to come to the front of the house. And at that I don’t believe Mrs. McCall has any rags or papers to sell just now.”

The swarthy man came straight on to the porch and up the steps. Agnes heard the bell, and knowing Linda was busy and being likewise rather curious, she dropped her stocking darning and ran into the front hall.

The moment she unlatched the big door the swarthy stranger inserted himself into the house.

“Why! who are you?” she demanded, fairly thrust aside by the man’s eagerness.

She saw then that he had a folded paper in one hand. He thrust it before her eyes, pointing to a place upon it with a very grimy finger.

“You have found it!” he chattered with great excitement. “That ancient bracelet which has for so many generations been an heirloom—yes?—of the Costello. Queen Alma herself wore it at a time long ago. You have found it?”

Agnes was made almost speechless by his vehemence as well as by the announcement itself.

“I—I—What do you mean?” she finally gasped.

“You know!” he ejaculated, rapping on the newspaper with his finger like a woodpecker on a dead limb. “You put in the paper—here. It is lost. You find. You are Kenway, and you say the so-antique bracelet shall be give to who proves property.”

“We will return it to the owner. Only to the owner,” interrupted Agnes, backing away from him again, for his vehemence half frightened her.

“Shall I bring Queen Alma here to say it was her property?” he cried.

“That would be better. If Queen Alma—whoever she is—owns the bracelet we will give it to her when she proves property.”

The little man uttered a staccato speech in a foreign tongue. Agnes did not understand. He spread wide his arms in a gesture of seemingly utter despair.

“And Queen Alma!” he sputtered. “She is dead these two—no! t’ree hundred year!”

“Mercy me!” gasped Agnes, backing away from him and sitting suddenly down in one of the straight-backed hall chairs. “Mercy me!”

CHAPTER XII—GETTING IN DEEPER

“Yes. I put the advertisement in the paper,” acknowledged Agnes, but wishing very much that she had not, or that Neale O’Neil was present at this exciting moment to help her handle the situation.

“So! I have come for it,” cried the swarthy man, as though the matter were quite settled.

But Agnes’ mind began to function pretty well again. She determined not to be “rushed.” This strange foreigner might be perfectly honest. But there was not a thing to prove that the bracelet given to Tess and Dot by the Gypsy women belonged to him.

“How do you know,” she asked, “that the bracelet we have in our possession is the one you have lost?”

“I? Oh, no, lady! I did not lose the ancient heirloom. Oh, no.”

“But you say—”

“I am only its rightful owner,” he explained. “Had Queen Alma’s bracelet been in my possession it never would have been lost and so found by the so—gracious Kenway. Indeed, no!”

“Then, what have you come here for?” cried Agnes, in some desperation. “I cannot give the bracelet to anybody but the one who lost it—”

“You say here the owner!” cried the man, beginning again the woodpecker tapping on the paper.

“But how do I know you own it?” she gasped.

“Show it me. In one moment’s time can I tell—at the one glance,” was the answer of assurance. “Oh, yes, yes, yes!”

These “yeses” were accompanied by the emphatic tapping on the paper. Agnes wondered that the Post at that spot was not quite worn through.

Perhaps it was fortunate that at this moment Neale O’Neil came in. That he came direct from the garage and apparently from a struggle with oily machinery, both his hands and face betrayed.

“Hey!” he exploded. “If we are going to take Mr. Pinkney out on a cross-country chase after that missing pirate this afternoon, we’ve got to get a hustle on. You going to be ready, Aggie? Mr. Pinkney gets home at a quarter to one.”

“Oh, Neale!” cried Agnes, turning eagerly to greet the boy. “Talk to this man—do! I don’t know what to say to him.”

The boy’s countenance broadened in a smile.

    “‘Say  “Hullo!”  and  “How-de-do!”
    “How’s  the  world  a-using  you?”’”

quoted Neale, and chuckled outright. “What’s his name? What does he want?”

“Costello—that me,” interposed the strange junkman. He gazed curiously at Neale with his snapping black eyes. “You are not Kenway—here in the pape’?”

Again the finger tapped upon the Lost and Found column in the Post. Neale shook his head. He glanced out of the open door and spied the wagon and its informative sign.

“You are a junkman, are you, Mr. Costello?”

“Yes, yes, yes! I buy the pape’, buy the rag and bot’—buy anytheeng I get cheap. But not to buy do I come this time to Mees Kenway. No, no! I come because of this in the paper.”

His tapping finger called attention again to the advertisement of the bracelet. Neale expelled a surprised whistle.

“Oh, Aggie!” he said, “is he after the Gypsy bracelet?”

The swarthy man’s face was all eagerness again.

“Yes, yes, yes!” he sputtered. “I am Gypsy. Spanish Gypsy. Of the tribe of Costello. I am—what you say?—direct descendent of Queen Alma who live three hunder’—maybe more—year ago, and she own that bracelet the honest Kenway find!”

“She—she’s dead, then? This Queen Alma?” stammered Neale.

“Si, si! Yes, yes! But the so-antique bracelet descend by right to our family. That Beeg Jeem—”

He burst again into the language he had used before which was quite unintelligible to either of his listeners; but Neale thought by the man’s expression of countenance that his opinion of “Beeg Jeem” was scarcely to be told in polite English.

“Wait!” Neale broke in. “Let’s get this straight. We—we find a bracelet which we advertise. You say the bracelet is yours. Where and how did you lose it?”

“I already tell the honest Kenway, I do not lose it.”

“It was stolen from you, then?”

“Yes, yes, yes! It was stole. A long ago it was stole. And now Beeg Jeem say he lose it. You find—yes?”

“This seems to be complicated,” Neale declared, shaking his head and gazing wonderingly at Agnes. “If you did not lose it yourself, Mr. Costello—”

“But it is mine!” cried the man.

“We don’t know that,” said Neale, somewhat bruskly. “You must prove it.”

“Prove it?”

“Yes. In the first place, describe the bracelet. Tell us just how it is engraved, or ornamented, or whatever it is. How wide and thick is it? What kind of a bracelet is it, aside from its being made of silver?”

“Ah! Queen Alma’s bracelet is so well known to the Costello—how shall I say? Yes, yes, yes!” cried the man, with rather graceful gestures. “And when Beeg Jeem tell me she is lost—”

“All right. Describe it,” put in Neale.

Agnes suddenly tugged at Neale’s sleeve. Her pretty face was aflame with excitement.

“Oh, Neale!” she interposed in a whisper. “Even if he can describe it exactly we do not know that he is the real owner.”

“Shucks! That’s right,” agreed the boy.

He turned to Costello again demanding:

“How can you prove that this bracelet—if it is the one you think it is—belongs to you?”

“She belong to the Costello family. It is an heirloom. I tell it you.”

“That’s all right. But you’ve got to prove it. Even if you describe the thing that only proves that you have seen it, or heard it described yourself. It might be so, you know, Mr. Costello. You must give us some evidence of ownership.”

“Queen Alma’s bracelet—” began Costello.

The junkman made a despairing gesture with wide-spread arms.

“Me? How can I tell you, sir, and the honest Kenway? It has always belong to the Costello. Yes, yes, yes! That so-ancient bracelet, Beeg Jeem have no right to it.”

“But he was the one who lost it!” exclaimed Neale, being quite confident now of the identity of “Beeg Jeem.”

“Yes, yes, yes! So he say. I no believe. Then I see the reading here in the pape’, of the honest Kenway”—tap, tap, tapping once more of the forefinger—“and I see it must be so. I—”

“Hold on!” exclaimed Neale. “You did not lose the bracelet. This other fellow did. You bring him here and let him prove ownership.”

“No, no!” raved Costello, shaking both clenched hands above his head. “He shall not have it. It is mine. I am the Costello. Queen Alma, she give it to the great, great, great gran’mudder of my great, great, great—”

“Shucks!” ejaculated Neale. “Now you are going too deep into the family records for me. I can’t follow you. It looks to me like a case for the courts to settle.”

“Oh, Neale!” gasped Agnes.

“Why, Aggie, we’d get into hot water if we let this fellow, or any of those other Gypsies, have the bracelet offhand. If this chap wants it, he will have to see Mr. Howbridge.”

“Oh, yes!” murmured the girl with sudden relief in her voice. “We can tell Mr. Howbridge.”

“Guess we’ll have to,” agreed Neale. “We certainly have bit off more than we can chew, Aggie. I’ll say we have. I guess maybe we’d have been wiser if we had told your guardian about the old bracelet before advertising it. And Ruth has nothing on us, at that! She did not tell him.

“We’re likely,” concluded Neale, with a side glance at the swarthy man, “to have a dozen worse than this one come here to bother us. We surely did start something when we had that ad. printed, Aggie.”

CHAPTER XIII—OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY

“But it is mine! It is the heirloom of the Costello! I, myself, tell you so,” declared the junkman, beating his breast now instead of the newspaper.

“All right. I believe you. Don’t yell so about it,” said Neale, but quite calmly. “That does not alter the fact that we cannot give the bracelet up. That is, Miss Kenway cannot.”

“But she say here—in the paper—”

“Oh, stop it!” exclaimed the exasperated boy. “It doesn’t say in that paper that she will hand the thing out to anybody who comes and asks for it. If this other fellow you have been talking about should come here, do you suppose we would give it up to him, just on his say so?”

“No, no! It is not his. It never should have been in the possession of his family, sir. I assure you I am the Costello to whose ancestors the great Queen Alma of our tribe delivered the bracelet.”

“All right. Let it go at that,” answered Neale. “All the more reason why we must be careful who gets it now. If it is honestly your bracelet you will get it, Mr. Costello. But you will have to see Miss Kenway’s guardian and let him decide.”

“Her—what you call it—does he have the bracelet?” cried the man.

“He will have it. You go there to-morrow. I will give you his address. To-morrow he will talk to you. He is not in his office to-day. He is a lawyer.”

“Oh, la, la! The law! I no like the law,” declared Costello.

“No, I presume you Gypsies don’t,” muttered Neale, pulling out an envelope and the stub of a pencil with which to write the address of Mr. Howbridge’s office. “There it is. Now, that is the best we can do for you. Only, nobody shall be given the bracelet until you have talked with Mr. Howbridge.”

“But, I no like! The honest Kenway say here, in the paper—”

As he began to tap upon the newspaper again Neale, who was a sturdy youth, crowded him out upon the veranda of the old Corner House.

“Now, go!” advised Neale, when he heard the click of the door latch behind him. “You’ll make nothing by lingering here and talking. There’s your horse starting off by himself. Better get him.”

This roused the junk dealer’s attention. The horse was tired of standing and was half a block away. Costello uttered an excited yelp and darted after his junk wagon.

Agnes let Neale inside the house again. She was much relieved.

“There! isn’t this a mess?” she said. “I am glad you thought of Mr. Howbridge. But I do wish Ruth had been at home. She would have known just what to say to that funny little man.”

“Humph! Maybe it would have been a good idea if she had been here,” admitted Neale slowly. “Ruth is awfully bossy, but things do go about right when she is on the job.”

“We’ll have to see Mr. Howbridge—”

“But that can wait until to-morrow morning,” Neale declared. “We can’t do so this afternoon in any case. I happen to know he is out of town. And we have promised Mr. Pinkney to take him on a hunt for Sammy.”

“All right. It is almost noon. You’d better go and wash your face, Neale,” and she began to giggle at him.

“Don’t I know that? I came in here just to remind you to begin to prink before dinner or you’d never be ready.”

She was already halfway up the stairs and she leaned over the balustrade to make a gamin’s face at him.

“Just you tend to your own apple cart, Neale O’Neil!” she told him. “I will be ready as soon as you are.”

At dinner, which was eaten in the middle of the day at this time of year at the old Corner House, Agnes appeared ready all but her hat for the car.

“Oh, Aggie! can we go too?” cried Dot. “We want to ride in the automobile, don’t we, Tess?”

“We maybe want to go riding,” confessed the other sister slowly. “But I guess we can’t, Dot. You forget that Margie and Holly Pease are coming over at three o’clock. They haven’t seen the fretted silver bracelet.”

“That reminds me,” said Agnes firmly. “You must not take that bracelet out of the house. Understand? Not at all.”

“Why, Aggie!” murmured Tess, while Dot grew quite red with indignation.

“If you wish to play with it indoors, all right,” Agnes said. “Whose turn to have it, is it to-day?”

“Mine,” admitted Tess.

“Then I hold you responsible. Not out of the house. We have got to get Mr. Howbridge’s advice about it, in any case.”

“Ruth didn’t say we couldn’t wear the bracelet out-of-doors,” declared Dot, pouting.

“I am in Ruth’s place,” responded the older sister promptly. “Now, remember! You might lose it anyway. And then what would we do if the owner really comes for it?”

“But they won’t!” cried Dot, confidently. “Those Gypsy ladies gave it to us for keeps. I am sure.”

“You certainly would not wish to keep the bracelet if the person the Gypsies stole it from came here to get it?” said Agnes sternly.

“Oh—oo! No-o,” murmured Dot.

“Of course we would not, Sister,” Tess declared briskly. “If we knew just where their camp is we would take it to them anyway. Of course we would, Dot!”

“Oh, of course,” agreed Dot, but very faintly.

“You children are so seldom observant,” went on Agnes in her most grown-up manner. “You should have looked into that basket when you bought it of the Gypsies. Then you would have seen the bracelet before the women got away. You are almost never observant.”

“Why, Aggie!” Tess exclaimed, rather hurt by the accusation of her older sister. “That is what your Mr. Marks said when he came into our grade at school just before the end of term last June.”

Mr. Curtis G. Marks was the principal of the High School which Agnes attended.

“What was Mr. Marks doing over in your room, Tess?” Agnes asked curiously.

“Visiting. Our teacher asked him to ‘take the class.’ You know, visiting teachers always are so nosey,” added Tess with more frankness than good taste.

“Better not let Ruth hear you use that expression, child,” laughed Agnes. “But what about being observant—or unobservant?”

“He told us,” Tess went on to say, “to watch closely, and then asked for somebody to give him a number. So somebody said thirty-two.”

“Yes?”

“And Mr. Marks went to the board and wrote twenty-three on it. Of course, none of us said anything. Then Mr. Marks asked for another number and somebody gave him ninety-four. Then he wrote forty-nine on the board, and nobody said a word.”

“Why didn’t you?” asked Agnes in wonder. “Did you think he was teaching you some new game?”

“I—I guess we were too polite. You see, he was a visitor. And he said right out loud to our teacher: ‘You see, they do not observe. Is it dense stupidity, or just inattention?’ That’s just what he said,” added Tess, her eyes flashing.

“Oh!” murmured Dot. “Didn’t he know how to write the number right?”

“So,” continued Tess, “I guess we all felt sort of hurt. And Belle Littleweed got so fidgety that she raised her hand. Mr. Marks says: ‘Very well, you give me a number.’

“Belle lisps a little, you know, Aggie, and she said right out: ‘Theventy-theven; thee if you can turn that around!’ He didn’t think we noticed anything, and were stupid; but I guess he knows better now,” added Tess with satisfaction.

“That is all right,” said Agnes with a sigh. “I heartily wish you and Dot had been observant when those women gave you the basket and you had found the bracelet in it before they got away. It is going to make us trouble I am afraid.”

Agnes told the little ones nothing about the strange junkman and his claim. Nor did she mention the affair to any of the remainder of the Corner House family. She only added:

“So don’t you take the bracelet out of the house or let anybody at all have it—if Neale or I are not here.”

“Why, it would not be right to give the bracelet to anybody but the Gypsy ladies, would it?” said Tess.

“Of course not,” agreed Dot. “And they haven’t come after it.”

Agnes did not notice these final comments of the two smaller girls. She had given them instructions, and those instructions were sufficient, she thought, to avert any trouble regarding the mysterious bracelet—whether it was “Queen Alma’s” or not.

The junkman, Costello, certainly had filled Agnes’ mind with most romantic imaginations! If the old silver bracelet was a Gypsy heirloom and had been handed down through the Costello tribe—as the junkman claimed—for three hundred years and more, of course it would not be considered stolen property.

The mystery remained why the Gypsy women had left the bracelet in the basket they had almost forced upon the Kenway children. The explanation of this was quite beyond Agnes, unless it had been done because the Gypsy women feared that this very Costello was about to claim the heirloom, and they considered it safer with Tess and Dot than in their own possession. True, this seemed a far-fetched explanation of the affair; yet what so probable?

The Gypsies might be quite familiar with Milton, and probably knew a good deal about the old Corner House and the family now occupying it. The little girls would of course be honest. The Gypsies were shrewd people. They were quite sure, no doubt, that the Kenways would not give the bracelet to any person but the women who sold the basket, unless the right to the property could be proved.

“And even if that Costello man does own the bracelet, how is he going to prove it?” Agnes asked Neale, as they ran the car out of the garage after dinner. “I guess we are going to hand dear old Mr. Howbridge a big handful of trouble.”

“Crickey! isn’t that a fact?” grumbled Neale. “The more I think of it, the sorrier I am we put that advertisement in the paper, Aggie.”

There was nothing more to be said about that at the time, for Mr. Pinkney was already waiting for them on his front steps. His wife was at the door and she looked so weary-eyed and pale of face that Agnes at least felt much sympathy for her.

“Oh, don’t worry, Mrs. Pinkney!” cried the girl from her seat beside Neale. “I am sure Sammy will turn up all right. Neale says so—everybody says so! He is such a plucky boy, anyway. Nothing would happen to him.”

“But this seems worse than any other time,” said the poor woman. “He must have never meant to come back, or he would not have taken that picture with him.”

“Nonsense!” exclaimed her husband cheerfully. “Sammy sort of fancied himself in that picture, that is all. He is not without his share of vanity.”

“That is what you say,” complained Sammy’s mother. “But I just feel that something dreadful has happened to him this time.”

“Never mind,” called Neale, starting the engine, “we’ll go over the hills and far away, but we’ll find some trace of him, Mrs. Pinkney. Sammy can’t have hidden himself so completely that we cannot discover where he has been and where he is going.”

That is exactly what they did. They flew about the environs of Milton in a rapid search for the truant. Wherever they stopped and made inquiries for the first hour or so, however, they gained no word of Sammy.

It was three o’clock, and they were down toward the canal on the road leading to Hampton Mills, when they gained the first possible clue of the missing one. And that clue was more than twenty-four hours old.

A storekeeper remembered a boy who answered to Sammy’s description buying something to eat the day before, and sitting down on the store step to eat it. That boy carried a heavy extension-bag and went on after he had eaten along the Hampton Mills road.

“We’ve struck his trail!” declared Neale with satisfaction. “Don’t you think so, Mr. Pinkney?”

“How did he pay you for the things he bought?” asked the father of the runaway, addressing the storekeeper again. “What kind of money did he have?”

“He had ten cent pieces, I remember. And he had them tied in a handkerchief. Nicked his bank before he started, did he?” and the man laughed.

“That is exactly what he did,” admitted Mr. Pinkney, returning hurriedly to the car. “Drive on, Neale. I guess we are on the right trail.”

CHAPTER XIV—ALMOST HAD HIM

“He would not likely stop anywhere along here to buy more food, then,” Agnes said.

“He could have gone off the road, however, for a dozen different things,” said the missing boy’s father. “That child has got more crotchets in his head than you can shake a stick at. There is no knowing—”

“Hold on!” ejaculated Neale suddenly. “There are some kids down there by that pond. Suppose I run down and interview them?”

“I don’t see anybody among them who looks like Sammy,” observed Agnes, standing up in the car to look.

“Never mind. You go ahead, Neale. They will talk to you more freely, perhaps, than they will to me. Boys are that way.”

“I’ll try,” said Neale, and jumped out of the car and ran down toward the roof of the old ice-house that the afternoon before had so attracted Sammy Pinkney—incidentally wrecking his best trousers.

As it chanced, Neale had seen and now interviewed the very party of boys with whom Sammy had previously made friends. But Neale said nothing at first to warn these boys that he was searching for one whom they all considered “a good kid.”

“Say, fellows,” Neale began, “was this an ice-house before it got burned down?”

“Yep,” replied the bigger boy of the group.

“And only the roof left? Crickey! What have you chaps been doing? Sliding down it?” For he had observed as he came down from the car two of the smaller boys doing just that.

“It’s great fun,” said the bigger boy, grinning, perhaps at the memory of what had happened to Sammy Pinkney’s trousers the previous afternoon. “Want to try?”

Neale grinned more broadly, and gave the shingled roof another glance. “I bet you don’t slide down it like those little fellows I just saw doing it. How do their pants stand it?”

The boys giggled at that.

“Say!” the bigger one said, “there was a kid came along yesterday that didn’t get on to that—till afterward.”

“Oh, ho!” chuckled Neale. “He wore ’em right through, did he?”

“Yes, he did. And then he was sore. Said his mother would give him fits.”

“Where does he live? Around here?” asked Neale carelessly.

“I never saw him before,” admitted the bigger boy. “He was a good fellow just the same. You looking for him?” he asked with sudden suspicion.

“I don’t know. If he’s the boy I mean he needn’t be afraid to go home because of his torn pants. You tell him so if you see him again.”

“Sure. I didn’t know he was running away. He didn’t say anything.”

“Didn’t he have a bag with him—sort of a suitcase?”

“Didn’t see it,” replied the boy. “We all went home to supper and he went his way.”

“Which way?”

“Could not tell you that,” the other said reflectively, and was evidently honest about it. “He was coming from that way,” and he pointed back toward Milton, “when he joined us here at the slide.”

“Then he probably kept on toward—What is in that direction?” and Neale pointed at the nearest road, the very one into which Sammy had turned.

“Oh, that goes up through the woods,” said the boy. “Hampton Mills is over around the pond—you follow yonder road.”

“Yes, I know. But you think this fellow you speak of might have gone into that by road?”

“He was headed that way when we first saw him,” said the boy. “Wasn’t he, Jimmy?”

“Sure,” agreed the smaller boy addressed. “And, Tony, I bet he did go that way. When I looked back afterward I remember I saw a boy lugging something heavy going up that road.”

“I didn’t see that that fellow had a bag,” argued the bigger boy. “But he might have hid it when he came down here.”

“Likely he did,” admitted Neale. “Anyway, we will go up that road through the woods and see.”

“Is his mother going to give him fits for those torn pants?” asked another of the group.

“She’ll be so glad to see him home again,” confessed Neale, “that he could tear every pair of pants he’s got and she wouldn’t say a word!”

He made his way up the bank to the car and reported.

“I don’t know where that woods-road leads to. I neglected to bring a map. But it looks as though we could get through it with the car. We’ll try, sha’n’t we?”

“Oh, do, Neale,” urged Agnes.

“I guess it is as good a lead as any,” observed Mr. Pinkney. “Somehow, I begin to feel as though the boy had got a good way off this time. Even this clue is almost twenty-four hours old.”

“He must have stayed somewhere last night,” cried Agnes suddenly. “If there is a house up there in the woods—or beyond—we can ask.”

“Right you are, Aggie,” agreed Neale, starting the car again.

“Sammy Pinkney is an elusive youngster, sure enough,” said the truant’s father. “Something has got to stop him from running away. It costs too much time and money to overtake him and bring him back.”

“And we haven’t done that yet,” murmured Agnes.

The car struck heavy going in the road through the woods before they had gone very far up the rise. In places the road was soft and had been cut up by the wheels of heavy trucks or wagons. And they did not pass a single house—not even a cleared spot in the wood—on either hand.

“If he started up this way so near supper time last evening, as those boys say,” Mr. Pinkney ruminated, “where was he at supper time?”

“Here, or hereabout, I should say!” exclaimed Neale O’Neil. “Why, it must have been pretty dark when he got this far.”

“If he really came this far,” added Agnes.

“Well, let us run along and see if there is a house anywhere,” Mr. Pinkney said. “Of course, Sammy might have slept out—”

“It wouldn’t be the first time, I bet!” chuckled Neale.

“And of course there would be nothing to hurt him in these woods?” suggested Agnes.

“Nothing bigger than a rabbit, I guess,” agreed their neighbor.

“Well—”

Neale increased the speed of the car again, turned a blind corner, and struck a soft place in the road before he could stop. Having no skidding chains on the rear wheels of course, the car was out of control in an instant. It slued around. Agnes screamed. Mr. Pinkney shouted his alarm.

The car slid over the bank of the ditch beside the road and both right wheels sank in mud and water to the hubs.

“Some pretty mess—I’ll tell the world!” groaned Neale O’Neil, shutting off the engine, while Agnes clung to his arm grimly to keep from sliding out into the ditch, too.

“Now, you have done it!” shrilled the girl.

“Thanks. Many thanks. I expected you to say that, Aggie,” he replied.

“M-mm! Well, I don’t suppose you meant to—”

“No use worrying about how it was done or who did it,” interposed Mr. Pinkney, briskly getting out of the tonneau on the left side. “The question is, how are we going to right the car and get under way again?”

“A truer word was never spoken,” agreed Neale O’Neil. “Come on, Agnes. We’ll creep out on this side, too. That’s it. Looks to me, Mr. Pinkney, as though we should need a couple of good, strong levers to pry up the wheels. You and I can do that while Agnes gets in under the wheel and manipulates the mechanism, as it were.”

“You are the boss, here, Neale,” said the older man, immediately entering the wood on the right side of the road. “I see a stick here that looks promising.”

He passed under the broadly spreading branches of a huge chestnut tree. There were several of these monsters along the edge of the wood. Mr. Pinkney suddenly shouted something, and dropped upon his knees between two outcropping roots of the tree.

“What is it, Mr. Pinkney?” cried Agnes, running across the road.

Their neighbor appeared, erect again. In his hand he bore the well-remembered extension-bag which Sammy Pinkney had so often borne away from home upon his truant escapades.

“What do you know about this?” demanded Sammy’s father. “Here’s his bag—filled with his possessions, by the feel of it. But where is the boy?”

“He—he’s got away!” gasped Agnes.

“And we almost had him,” was Neale’s addition to the amazed remarks of the trio of searchers.