The Corner House Girls on a Tour

Luke had a rope long enough to surround the body of the stalled automobile, so that the strain could be properly distributed. He and Neale tackled on the horses and carefully started them.

At the second trial the automobile wheels came out of the mud, and she rolled out upon the harder center of the road.

“Whoop – ee!” yelled Neale. “Now we’re all right. And – and the rain is stopping! What do you know about that?”

CHAPTER XIX – THE TIN BADGE OF THE LAW

“The roads will be full of mudholes for miles,” said Luke Shepard. “Never mind if it does stop raining, it will be bad traveling for an automobile. You see, I know this section of the country pretty well.”

“Cracky!” groaned Neale. “We may get into another mess, then.”

“You’re likely to do so,” agreed Luke. “Of course, by morning, if it rains no more, the water will have practically all run off. The roads being sandy hereabout they soon dry out.”

“And meanwhile we’ll be running risks every mile,” growled Neale O’Neil.

“Every rod,” said Luke, smiling.

“Cracky! but you’re a cheerful fellow,” said the boy from Milton. “Don’t let the girls hear you say it. Agnes, especially. She’ll go up in the air.”

“You’d better take shelter with us, then,” proposed the young tinware peddler.

“How’s that?” asked Neale, curiously. “Not in that party-wagon of yours? We’d sure be a ‘close corporation.’”

“Oh, no!” and the other laughed. “We’re going to Alonzo Keech’s barn. It’s up a side road a piece – just around this turn. That’s where sis and I were heading for. You see,” Luke Shepard further explained, “we have established a regular route for our wares, and we have been here before – and put up at Keech’s barn, too.”

Meanwhile Cecile Shepard had suggested the same thing to Mrs. Heard and the Corner House girls. They all agreed to this, for to the automobile touring party it was “any port in a storm.”

The boys rehitched the span of very good horses to the peddler’s wagon, Luke got on the driver’s seat and the girls and Sammy returned to the automobile, and the procession started, the peddler’s wagon going ahead to lead the way.

Neale was very careful to keep in the middle of the road thereafter; for although the rain had ceased, as Luke foretold, the roads were still rivers. The branch road they turned into led back in the same general direction from which the tourists had come; but that made no difference now. It was shelter for the night they wanted, and in the on-coming darkness and the storm they all felt only too glad to be led without question.

In a half hour or so, they came out of the woods, after surmounting a hill, and found open fields all about them. The sky remained overcast and it was a dark night; but it was better here in the open than in the woods where the accident to the automobile had happened. There was not a gleam of lamplight anywhere; and when the peddler’s wagon stopped finally in front of a great hay barn, Luke Shepard assured them that the dwelling of the owner of the farm was beyond a patch of woods and could not be seen even in daylight.

“I hope he will not object to our stopping here,” Mrs. Heard said, when she climbed down from the van, in which she had stayed for the ride to the barn.

“Yes. We have had one experience with the natives,” Agnes said, laughing, “that was not pleasant.”

“Oh! Mr. Keech will not object,” Cecile assured them. “We have found the people around here very nice indeed.”

“So have we – for the most part,” Ruth hastened to say. “Nobody could be nicer than the people we stayed with last night”; and she told the Shepards about the blacksmith and “Mother.”

“Oh, we know them! They are the salt of the earth!” cried Cecile.

“Then that constable that wouldn’t let us eat our lunch in the woods over yonder must be the pepper,” said Neale, with a grin.

Luke and Cecile had to be told about that. But they did not recognize the officious constable.

“He must be a new one, and feels his oats,” said Luke.

“I think he was a cheap grafter and wanted to be tipped,” said Neale O’Neil. “That’s what I think.”

“But of course he was an officer of the law,” Mrs. Heard said. “He wore a badge.”

“‘The tin badge of courage,’” said Luke with a laugh. “I don’t know who he could be. But this Mr. Keech who owns this place is the county sheriff. So we have the law on our side while we stop here. Mr. Keech is our friend. We shall stop at his house to-morrow and spend most of the day. We always do when we get around this way.”

The door of the barn was found unbarred, and with the automobile lights and Luke’s lanterns, the party “made camp” very nicely indeed. The automobile was backed in on the floor of the barn, and the big doors left open. The Shepards’ tent – a very good wall tent – was erected on a well-drained piece of ground. It was decided that Mrs. Heard and the girls should sleep in the tent and in the van, while the male members of the two parties put back the motor car cover and made themselves comfortable on the cushioned seats of the car.

Of course, supper came before this scheme of retiring had been adjusted. And a delightful time they had getting the meal and eating it. The food was mostly supplied by the “tin peddlers,” as Agnes insisted upon calling Luke and Cecile Shepard.

“I shall lay in some condensed foods myself just as soon as we find a town again,” declared Mrs. Heard. “These chances of being caught in lonely places without anything to eat come too frequently. Touring the country in a motor car is not very different from being cast away on a desert island!”

The children, of course, thought the experience quite as exciting as anything that had previously occurred.

“I like it better than the Gypsy camp,” said Dot, warmly. “That cart we are going to sleep in is just the cutest thing.”

“Just the same, I am glad Tom Jonah is with us this time,” Tess said. “Everything is so sort of open around here.”

The presence of the big dog made them all feel safer when the time to retire came, although the Shepards were used to camping out, and had never yet been molested in their two years’ experience.

The two parties gave each other full personal particulars. The brother and sister had friends in Milton, whom the Corner House girls knew. And then, there was another bond between Luke and Cecile Shepard and the four Corner House girls. They were all orphans.

Luke was in his sophomore year at college. Cecile was attending a preparatory school, and was going to have a college education, too. But they had partly to work for it, for their only relative was a maiden aunt who could help them but little, and there had been only money enough left by their mother to partly educate the brother and sister.

“And we get a nice vacation and lots of fun and some money by going out with our van for three months each year,” Cecile explained. “The rest of the year we rent the horses and van and the route to a man who has a little restaurant business at the shore in the summer. So we do pretty well.”

Tom Jonah, as watchman, made no sound all night long. The weather gradually cleared, and at daybreak there was every promise of a beautiful day, with everything washed clean by the rain.

The motoring party decided to make an early start – and without breakfast. The Shepards knew just where there was a good roadside hotel only twenty miles away, and Neale was sure they would get there in season for breakfast.

Their host and hostess, however, insisted upon their having coffee before they started, and when the automobile got under way, the Corner House girls and their party felt, as they had the morning previous, that they were leaving some very good friends behind. They hoped to meet Luke and Cecile again on their return trip; if not, Cecile was to write to Ruth. The “tin peddlers” had also promised to make the old Corner House, in Milton, a visit during the next winter.

“Dear me suz!” sighed Agnes, as they wheeled away, using one of Mrs. MacCall’s exclamations, “isn’t this just delightful? I think touring the country in this way, and meeting folks, and making friends, is just delightful.”

“Not so delightful last night when that storm was beating down upon us,” Mrs. Heard reminded her.

“And you did your share of the kicking then, all right all right,” put in Neale O’Neil. “Oh, you did squall, Aggie.”

“Horrid thing!” exclaimed Agnes. “Don’t remind me of unpleasant things this morning. I feel – I feel as happy as a big sunflower.”

Just then they turned a curve in the level road and saw a lanky man in a drooping-brimmed hat, standing in the middle of the way.

“Hul-lo!” ejaculated Neale, slowing down.

“Is the man deaf?” demanded Mrs. Heard.

Neale punched the horn a couple of times, and the man merely turned to face them and held up a warning hand.

“Oh, cracky!” cried Neale. “Another tin-badger.”

“And he’s holding one of those tin watches on us, too,” said Agnes, in despair.

“Say!” observed Sammy, the sharp-eyed. “That’s the cop that wouldn’t let us build the fire yesterday.”

“It certainly is,” gasped Ruth. “Now what shall we do?”

“I feel like bumping him,” growled Neale. Nevertheless, he shut off the engine as the constable seemed to have no intention of moving out of the road.

“Wal!” said the tall man, finally facing them completely and snapping the case of his watch shut in a very business-like way. “Got ye that time, I swan! Comin’ fifty mile an hour if ye was an inch – ”

Suddenly he discovered that he was not entirely a stranger to the touring party. His mouth sagged open for a moment and he did not continue his remarks before Neale got in a word or two.

“You are very much mistaken, constable,” he said. “I could not drive this car on this road at the speed you state – and if you knew anything about an auto you’d know it, too.”

“Oh, don’t, Neale!” whispered Ruth, from behind.

“So! I’ve seen ye before, have I, young cock o’ the walk?” snarled the constable. “You was running over speed, an’ don’t you fergit it. And I’m goin’ to take ye all back to Tuckerville and let Jedge Winslow tell ye sumpin’.”

“Oh, dear me!” moaned Agnes. “And we haven’t had breakfast!”

Mrs. Heard here put in her word – and she spoke sternly:

“You are making a grave mistake, Mr. Officer. We do not drive our automobile at any time faster than the law allows. And certainly we were not doing so now. How do you know how fast we were coming? You could not even see us until we came around that curve.”

“Oh, I’ve had experience, I have, ma’am,” said the fellow with a mean grin on his homely face.

“This is a regular hold-up!” exclaimed Neale, in wrath. “Why didn’t you pull a gun and tell us to hold up our hands while you went through our pockets? It wouldn’t be any worse.”

“I’m likely to pull me a good switch an’ wear it out on ye, ye fresh Ike!” declared the constable. “Don’t you hand me no more sass – now I warn ye.”

“But to go away back to Tuckerville!” groaned Ruth.

“And not a hotel there,” Agnes said.

“I do not believe any justice of the peace will uphold this fellow if we do appear before him,” Mrs. Heard said.

“If ye don’t want to go,” said the constable, whose ears seemed to be as preternaturally keen as they were unnaturally large – “if ye don’t want to go back to Tuckerville, ye kin pay yer fine right here – ten dollars. That’ll be about right, unless I add on a coupla dollars more to pay for this boy’s sass.”

“What did I tell you?” exclaimed Neale, to the others. “It’s a hold-up!”

CHAPTER XX – EXCITEMENT

Neale O’Neil may not have been very wise in talking so plainly in the hearing of the mean-spirited fellow; but he could not be blamed for being indignant. It was positive that the Corner House girls’ automobile had not been speeding when the man with the badge stopped it. And now his demand for ten dollars showed plainly that his petty mind was interested only in getting money easily rather than in enforcing the law.

“You’d better keep a civil lip on you, young man,” said the constable, scowling at Neale. Then to Mrs. Heard he added: “Come now, lady, you can pay the fine to me and drive on; or you can go back to Tuckerville under arrest and pay it to Jedge Winslow. Take yer ch’ice.”

“Oh, dear me!” whispered Agnes. “Let’s give him the money and go on to the hotel Cecile Shepard told us about. Tuckerville, they say, is an awful place.”

“Yes. Pay him the ten dollars – do, Mrs. Heard,” Ruth urged the chaperone.

“Very well,” said the lady. “I disapprove of such a thing, but it at least will relieve us of this man’s presence – ”

“Here comes another car,” cried Tess, who was not wholly attentive to the argument.

“Now you’ll get a chance to sting another party,” snapped Neale, glaring at the constable.

But the latter made him no reply. In fact, he had suddenly changed his attitude. Instead of standing boldly before the machine, he cringed along to the tonneau door with his hand held out for the money Mrs. Heard was selecting from her bag.

“Hold on!” exclaimed Neale, suddenly. “Don’t pay that fellow too quickly. Let’s have witnesses. Here comes the car.”

“You pay me now, or ’twill be too late,” cried the constable, angrily.

Just then the coming car appeared around the curve – a heavy roadster. The plainly frightened constable gave the single occupant of the car one glance, and instantly turned without the money and ran.

“Hi! stop that fellow!” shouted the man in the car.

“With all my heart,” responded Neale O’Neil, joyfully, and, scrambling out of his seat, he gave chase to the lanky man.

The fellow did not keep long to the road, but vaulted a rail fence and started across a muddy field. Neale, protected by his leggings, did not mind the mud, and kept on after the rascal. He had a pretty well defined idea that this fellow who had tried to collect money from Mrs. Heard had merely played constable and was nothing more than a cheap robber. Neale was so angry that he was determined not to let the fellow get away.

He heard the second automobile stop, and supposed the man in it was following, too; but he did not glance back to see. Just then he felt that he could master the lanky man alone, if need be.

And that is exactly what happened. The fellow got to the other side of the field with Neale gaining on him at every jump. Once in the woods there, however, the Milton boy feared the fugitive would be able to hide from him. So Neale increased his pace, sprinting for the last few rods, and caught the fellow just as he reached the fence. Neale tackled low, in true football fashion, and brought the long-legged man down with a crash. There they both rolled on the muddy ground, Neale clinging to the fellow’s knees, and the latter clawing and snarling like a wildcat.

Sammy Pinkney had followed the chase as far as the top rail of the roadside fence, where Mrs. Heard had commanded him in no uncertain tone to stop. There the little fellow stood, waving his cap and yelling encouragement to Neale O’Neil, while the stranger from the second automobile strode across the field at a rapid gait.

“Good boy!” shouted this stranger, heartily. “Hang on to him.”

Neale hung. His face was scratched and his clothing muddy; but the long-legged fellow could not do him very much harm before help came. Indeed, when he once saw that he was bound to be captured he stopped struggling and began actually to blubber.

“I was only foolin’,” he whined. “Lemme up, boy. I wouldn’t hurt ye.”

“I know you won’t hurt me,” snapped Neale. “I won’t let you – that’s why.”

“Hold on to him!” shouted the other man again.

Neale let the rascal up; but he hung to his coat-collar with both hands.

“I was just a-foolin’,” repeated the captive, and he actually shook with terror. “Ye know, Sheriff, I’m always foolin’.”

Neale looked then with increased interest upon the big man who was approaching. This must be Sheriff Keech, Luke Shepard’s friend.

“So you got the ornery critter, did you?” demanded the county officer, panting from his exertions. “Good boy.”

“Aw, say, now, Sheriff! you know I’m only foolin’,” almost wept the captive.

“Oh, I know you’re the town cut-up, Abe,” growled the sheriff. “But this time you’ll have a chance to think it over in jail. Why!” he added, to Neale, “I knew who this must be the minute Luke Shepard told me about him; and as I saw him come down the road about an hour ago, I had a hunch I’d just about catch him at his capers.”

“Aw, Sheriff,” begged the fellow. “Don’t you be too hard on me. I jest found that star – ”

“You are a rascal!” snapped the county officer. “You sent off to a mail-order house and bought that bum badge and just couldn’t keep from flirting around with it. Showing what you thought you’d do if you was a constable. Oh, I’ll put you where the dogs won’t bite you.”

“I – I never collected no money from ’em,” whined the would-be constable.

“No. That’s because I came along just a little too soon. I wish you had got the money. Then I would have had you to rights, sure enough,” declared the sheriff, bitterly.

“Oh, let him go, young man. He won’t run now; for if he does he’ll be resisting arrest, and that’ll fix him with the judge for sure.”

“Why, say, he isn’t right in the head, is he?” demanded Neale O’Neil, wonderingly. “Making out to be a constable, and robbing people, and all that?”

“He’s one of these half-baked critters you find once in so often that take correspondence school courses to learn to be detectives, and all that sort of mush. Ugh!”

“Abe” was a very forlorn looking creature as he came out to the road. Sammy on the fence waved his cap again and cheered.

“I tell you, Neale, you’re some runner,” declared the boy, enthusiastically. “What are you going to do – hang him?”

“That horrid child!” exclaimed Agnes. “I never heard of such a bloodthirsty boy before.”

But the rest of the party were inclined to feel that the punishment to be meted out to the fellow who had posed as constable could not be too harsh.

Sheriff Keech ordered Abe to get into his car, and seemed to have no fear that the mean-spirited fellow might try to run away again.

“I know Abe,” he said to Mrs. Heard, when she suggested this possibility. “He hasn’t any more character than a dishrag. He’s arrested now, and he knows it. He wouldn’t dare run away from me once I’ve put my hand on him.

“Now, ma’am, tell me all about it.”

Mrs. Heard had plenty of help in relating the circumstances surrounding the touring party’s two adventures with this Abe. Everybody wanted to tell what he or she thought of the fellow, even to Dot. The latter said, with conviction:

“He is not a nice man at all, and I’m awfully glad he doesn’t live anywhere near our house.”

“I don’t know that any neighborhood would give Abe a bonus for moving into it,” chuckled Mr. Keech. “Well! I won’t detain you. I can scare him bad enough as it is. And thirty days in jail will do Abe a world of good. I won’t keep you folks as witnesses; you’ve had trouble enough.”

So the matter was settled very amicably, and the touring party from Milton hastened on to the Wayside Rose Inn, at Brampton, for breakfast.

“One thing we never thought about,” Agnes said to Neale, when they had bidden Sheriff Keech good-bye.

“What’s that?”

“Why, about Mr. Collinger’s car and that Joe Dawson fellow. My! what mean people we do manage to meet.”

“And a little while ago you were thinking what good folks we had met,” laughed Neale. “But you are mistaken, Aggie. I spoke to the sheriff about Saleratus Joe and his mate and the lost car. Nothing doing. I’ve asked everybody else we have talked with – the blacksmith and Luke Shepard and all – about that bunch.”

“Oh! have you, Neale?” cried Mrs. Heard. “And has nothing come of it?”

“Well, Mrs. Heard,” said the boy, “all trace of that car and those fellows seems to have ended right there at the Higgins’ farm – where the Gypsy king saw them for the last time. That’s the way it looks to me.”

“Oh, dear me!” sighed Agnes. “I wish you’d have let me hunt in that barn for the car.”

“Or me,” put in Sammy, with confidence.

“Say! you two give me a pain,” cried Neale, and refused to talk about it any further.

They made a fine run that day, getting on good roads again, and they spent the night with friends of Mrs. Heard’s who had been on the lookout for them for two days. A letter was waiting for the chaperone from her nephew, stating that the police were looking for Saleratus Joe and another man in connection with the disappearance of the Maybrouke runabout, and that the information she had sent might aid in the arrest of the automobile thieves.

“Well,” said Agnes, “of course I hope the police catch them; but it would be fun if we could bring about their arrest and find the machine, too, Neale.”

“Don’t let it worry you, Aggie,” he advised. “There isn’t any reward offered, so you’d have your work for your pains.”

Just the same, neither of them forgot the matter, and it was a topic of conversation between them, now and then, throughout the entire tour.

They went on as far as Fort Kritchton, and spent the week-end at the Monolith Hotel there, to which their trunks had been forwarded. The car needed some slight repairs, and the girls found pleasant friends. This point was to be the farthest they expected to travel from Milton.

Neale found a party of boys camping up in the woods above the hotel, and he enjoyed himself, too; but he had to take Sammy along with him most of the time, and he declared to Agnes that if he ever went anywhere again and had his choice of taking Sammy or a flea, he would choose the flea!

“You have no more idea of where to find him from one moment to another than a flea,” growled the older boy. “I’m coming to the old bachelor’s belief in the treatment and bringing up of boys.”

“What is that?” asked the amused Agnes, who had had her own experiences with Sammy Pinkney.

“Why, the crabbed old bachelor, who had six small nephews, declared he believed all boys should be taken at about three years of age and put in barrels, the heads nailed on, and that they should be fed through the bungholes.”

“Goodness!” laughed Agnes. “And when they grew up?”

“‘Drive in the bungs,’” declared Neale, seriously. “That was his creed and I am about ready to subscribe to it.”

Sammy, however, had a good time. He confided to Mrs. Heard and Ruth that he had never had such a good time in his life. He got letters and money from his mother and father, just as the Corner House girls did, likewise, from home; and he was actually growing sturdy looking as well as brown.

“Whether this tour does anybody else good or not, Sammy P. is being helped,” declared Mrs. Heard.

“‘Sammy P. Buttinsky,’” sniffed Agnes. “Such a plague. I believe his mother will lose ten years of her age in appearance during this time of Sammy’s absence. She certainly ought to be our friend for life.”

After all, however, they none of them could really be “mad at” Sammy, as Tess said. He was a plague; but there was something really attractive about him, too.

“He is the most un-moral child I ever heard of,” Ruth said. “He seems to have stepped right out of the stone age.”

Mrs. Heard smiled at that statement. “My dear girl,” she said, “most boys are that way. Philly Collinger was – and look at him now,” for Mrs. Heard was very proud indeed of the county surveyor. “I think there is one very helpful thing that you Corner House girls are missing.”

“What is that, Mrs. Heard?” asked Ruth, in curiosity.

“You have missed having a brother or two. They are great educators for the feminine mind,” laughed the lady.

However, Sammy behaved himself pretty well – considering – all the time the touring party remained at the Monolith Hotel. The little girls whom Tess and Dot played with looked somewhat askance at Sammy, for his boasted intention of following in the sanguinary wake of Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, and Sir Henry Morgan, set him as a creature apart from the rest of boykind. In fact, among the little folk, Sammy Pinkney was quite the sensation for several days. Then little Eddie Haflinger developed a carbuncle on the back of his neck and Sammy’s swashbuckling tendencies rather paled before the general interest in Eddie’s stiff neck.