The Corner House Girls Among the Gypsies

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

Neale drove almost recklessly for the first few miles after passing the roadside store; but the eyes of all three people in the car were very wide open and their minds observant. Anything or anybody that might give trace of the truant Sammy were scrutinized.

“He was at that store before noon,” Agnes shouted into Neale’s ear. “How long before he would be hungry again?”

“No knowing. Pretty soon, of course,” admitted her chum. “But I heard that storekeeper tell Mr. Pinkney that the boy bought more than he could eat at once and he carried the rest away in a paper bag.”

“That is so,” admitted Mr. Pinkney, leaning over the forward seat. “But he has an appetite like a boa constrictor.”

“A boy-constrictor,” chuckled Neale. “I’ll say he has!”

“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.

CHAPTER XV – UNCERTAINTIES

The secret had now been revealed! But of course it did not do Sammy Pinkney the least bit of good. His extension-bag had not been stolen at all.

Merely, when that sleepy boy had stumbled away the night before to the spring for a drink of water, he had not returned to the right tree for the remainder of the night. In his excitement in the morning, after discovering his loss, Sammy ran about a good deal (as Uncle Rufus would have said) “like a chicken wid de haid cut off.” He did not manage to find the right tree at all.

The extension-bag was now in his father’s hands. Mr. Pinkney brought it to the mired car and opened it. There was no mistaking the contents of the bag for anything but Sammy’s possessions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I – don’t – know – ”

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

“Does that sound reasonable?” gasped Agnes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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