The Corner House Girls Among the Gypsies

“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

“And if you go to the store, or anywhere else for Mrs. McCall or Linda, remember don’t take that bracelet with you,” commanded Agnes in a most imperative manner, fairly transfixing her two smaller sisters with an index finger. “Remember!”

“Ruthie didn’t say so,” complained Dot. “Did she, Tess?”

“But I guess we’d better mind what Agnes says when Ruth isn’t at home,” confessed Tess, more amenable to discipline. “You know, Aggie has got to be responsible now.”

“Well,” muttered the rebellious Dot, “never mind if she is ‘sponserble, she needn’t be so awful bossy about it!”

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

“You see, Mees Kenway,” sputtered the swarthy man eagerly, “I catch the paper, here.” He rapped the Post again with his finger. “I read the Engleesh – yes. I see the notice you, the honest Kenway, have put in the paper – ”

“Let me tell you, sir,” said Agnes, starting up, “all the Kenways are honest. I am not the only honest person in our family I should hope!”

Agnes was much annoyed. The excitable little foreigner spread abroad his hands again and bowed low before her.

“Please! Excuse!” he said. “I admire all your family, oh, so very much! But it is to you who put in the paper the words here, about the very ancient silver bracelet.” Again that woodpecker rapping on the Lost and Found column in the Post. “No?”

“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

Costello, the junkman, could not be further ignored, for at this point he began another excitable harangue. The Queen Alma bracelet, “Beeg Jeem,” his own sorrows, and the fact that he saw no reason why Agnes should not immediately give up to him the silver bracelet, were all mixed up together in a clamor that became almost deafening.

“Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?” exclaimed the Corner House girl.

But Neale O’Neil was quite level-headed. Like Agnes, at first he had for a little while been swept off his feet by the swarthy man’s vehemence. He regained his balance now.

“We’re not going to do anything. We won’t even show him the bracelet,” said the boy firmly.

“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.