The Corner House Girls Among the Gypsies

“Wouldn’t what?” he asked, surprised by her vehemence.

“Go away up to Alaska?”

“I’d like to,” admitted the boy. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Oh – well – if you can take me along,” rejoined Agnes with satisfaction, “all right. But under no other circumstances can you go, Neale O’Neil.”

CHAPTER XVI – THE DEAD END OF NOWHERE

Mr. Pinkney and Neale went to work to hoist the motor-car into the road again. No easy nor brief struggle was this. A dozen times Agnes started the car and the wheels slipped off the poles or Neale or Mr. Pinkney lost his grip.

Before long they were well bespattered with mud (for there was considerable water in the ditch) and so was the automobile. Neale and their neighbor worked to the utmost of their muscular strength, and Agnes was in tears.

“Pluck up your courage, Aggie,” panted her boy friend. “We’ll get it yet.”

“I just feel that it is my fault,” sobbed the girl. “All this slipping and sliding. If I could only just get it to start right – ”

“Again!” cried Neale cheerfully.

And this time the forewheels really got on solid ground. Mr. Pinkney thrust his lever in behind the sloughed hind wheel and blocked it from sliding back.

“Great!” yelled Neale. “Once more, Aggie!”

She obeyed his order, and although the automobile engine rattled a good deal and the car itself plunged like a bucking broncho, they finally got all the wheels out of the mud and on the firm road.

“Crickey!” gasped Neale. “It looks like a battlefield.”

“And we look as though we had been in the battle all right,” said Mr. Pinkney. “Guess Mamma Pinkney will have something to say about my trousers when we get home, let alone Sammy’s.”

“Do you suppose the car will run all right?” asked the anxious Agnes. “I don’t know what Ruth would say if we broke down.”

“She’d say a-plenty,” returned Neale. “But wait till I get some of this mud off me and I’ll try her out again. By the way she bucked that last time I should say there was nothing much the matter with her machinery.”

This proved to be true. If anything was strained about the mechanism it did not immediately show up. Neale got the automobile under way without any difficulty and they drove ahead through the now fast darkening road.

The belt of woods was not very wide, but the car ran slowly and when the searchers came out upon the far side, the old shack which housed the big, red-faced woman, who had been kind to Sammy, and her brood of children, some of whom had been not at all kind, the place looked to be deserted.

In truth, the family were berry pickers and had been gone all day (after Sammy’s adventure with the cherry-colored calf) up in the hills after berries. They had not yet returned for the evening meal, and although Neale stopped the car in front of the shack Mr. Pinkney decided Sammy would not have remained at the abandoned place.

And, of course, Sammy had not remained here. After his exciting fight with Peter and Liz, and fearing to return to the house to complain, he had gone right on. Where he had gone was another matter. The automobile party drove to the town of Crimbleton, which was the next hamlet, and there Mr. Pinkney made exhaustive inquiries regarding his lost boy, but to no good result.

“We’ll try again to-morrow, Mr. Pinkney, if you say so,” urged Neale.

“Of course we will,” agreed Agnes. “We’ll go every day until you find him.”

Their neighbor shook his head with some sadness. “I am afraid it will do no good. Sammy has given us the slip this time. Perhaps I would better put the matter in the hands of a detective agency. For myself, I should be contented to wait until he shows up of his own volition. But his mother – ”

Agnes and Neale saw, however, that the man was himself very desirous of getting hold of his boy again. They made a hasty supper at the Crimbleton Inn and then started homeward at a good rate of speed.

When they came up the grade toward the old house beside the road, at the edge of the wood, the big woman and her family had returned, made their own supper, and gone to bed. The place looked just as deserted as before.

“The dead-end of nowhere,” Neale called it, and the automobile gathered speed as it went by. So the searchers missed making inquiry at the very spot where inquiry might have done the most good. The trail of Sammy Pinkney was lost.

Neale O’Neil wanted to satisfy himself about one thing. He said nothing to Agnes about it, but after he had put up the car and locked the garage, he walked down Main Street to Byburg’s candy store.

June Wildwood was always there until half past nine, and Saturday nights until later. She was at her post behind the sweets counter on this occasion when Neale entered.

“I am glad to see you, Neale,” she said. “I’m awfully curious.”

“About that bracelet?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “What has come of it? Anything?”

“Enough. Tell me,” began Neale, before she could put in any further question, “while you were with the Gypsies did you hear anything about Queen Alma?”

“Queen Zaliska. I was Queen Zaliska. They dressed me up and stained my face to look the part.”

“Oh, I know all about that,” Neale returned. “But this Queen Alma was some ancient lady. She lived three hundred years ago.”

“Goodness! How you talk, Neale O’Neil. Of course I don’t know anything about such a person.”

“Those Gypsies you were with never talked of her?”

“I didn’t hear them. I never learned much of the language they use among themselves.”

“Well, we got a tip,” said the boy, “that the bracelet belonged to this Queen Alma, and that there is a row among the Gypsies over the ownership of it.”

“You don’t tell me!”

“I am telling you. We heard so. Say, is that Big Jim a Spaniard? A Spanish Gypsy, I mean?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. He looks like a Spaniard, or a Mexican, or an Italian.”

“Yes. I thought he did. He comes of some Latin race, anyway. What is his last name?”

“Why – I – I am not sure that I know.”

“Is it Costello? Did you hear that name while you were with the Gypsies, June?”

“Some of them are named Costello. It is a family name among them I guess. And about that Jim. Do you know that I saw him yesterday driving down Main Street in an automobile?”

“You don’t mean it? Gypsies are going to become flivver traders instead of horse swappers, are they?” and Neale laughed.

“Oh, it was a big, seven-passenger car,” said June. “Those Gypsies have money, if they want to spend it.”

“Did you ever hear of a Gypsy junkman?” chuckled Neale.

“Of course not. Although I guess junkmen make good money nowadays,” drawled June Wildwood, laughing too. “You are a funny boy, Neale O’Neil. Do you want to know anything else?”

“Lots of things. But I guess you cannot tell me much more about the Gypsies that would be pertinent to the bracelet business. We hear that the Costello Gypsies are fighting over the possession of the heirloom – the bracelet, you know. That is why one bunch of them wanted to get it off their hands for a while – and so gave it into the keeping of Tess and Dot.”

“Mercy!”

“Does that seem improbable to you, June?”

“No-o. Not much. They might. It makes me think that maybe the Gypsies have been watching the old Corner House and know all about the Kenways.”

“They might easily do that. You know, they might know us all from that time away back when we brought you home from Pleasant Cove with us. This is some of the same tribe you were with – sure enough!”

“I know it,” sighed June Wildwood. “I’ve been scared a little about them too. But for my own sake. I haven’t dared tell Rosa; but pap comes down here to the store for me every evening and beaus me home. I feel safer.”

“The bracelet business has nothing to do with you, of course?”

“Of course not. But those Gypsies might have some evil intent about Ruth and her sisters.”

“Guess they are just trying to use them for a convenience. While that bracelet is in the Corner House no other claimant but those Gypsy women are likely to get hold of it. Believe me, it is a puzzle,” he concluded. “I guess we will have to put it up to Mr. Howbridge, sure enough.”

“Oh! The Kenways’s lawyer?” cried June.

“Their guardian. Sure enough. That is what we will have to do.”

But when Neale and Agnes Kenway, after an early breakfast, hurried downtown to Mr. Howbridge’s office the next morning to tell the lawyer all about the Gypsies and Queen Alma’s bracelet, they made a surprising discovery.

Mr. Howbridge had left town the evening before on important business. He might not return for a week.

CHAPTER XVII – RUTH BEGINS TO WORRY

Oakhurst, in the mountains, was a very lovely spot. Besides the hotel where Luke Shepard had worked and where he had met with his accident, there were bungalows and several old-fashioned farmhouses where boarders were received. There was a lake, fine golf links, bridlepaths through the woods, and mountains to climb. It was a popular if quiet resort.

Ruth and Cecile Shepard had rooms in one of the farmhouses, for the hotel was expensive. Besides, the farmer owned a beautifully shaded lawn overlooking the lake and the girls could sit there under the trees while the invalid, as they insisted upon calling Luke, reclined on a swinging cot.

“Believe me!” Cecile often insisted, “I will never send another telegram as long as I live. I cannot forgive myself for making such a mess of it. But then, if I hadn’t done so, you would not be here now, Ruthie.”

“Isn’t that a fact?” agreed her brother. “You are all right, Sis! I am for you, strong.”

Ruth laughed. Yet there were worried lines between her eyes.

“It is all right,” she murmured. “I might have come in any case – for Mr. Howbridge advised it by this letter that they remailed to me. But I should not have left in such haste, and I should have left somebody besides Mrs. McCall to look after the girls.”

“Pooh!” ejaculated Luke. “What is the matter with Agnes?”

“That is just it,” laughed Ruth again, but shaking her head too. “It is Agnes, and what she may do, that troubles me more than anything else.”

“Goodness me! She is a big girl,” declared Cecile. “And she has lots of sense.”

“She usually succeeds in hiding her good sense, then,” rejoined Ruth. “Of course she can take care of herself. But will she give sufficient attention to the little ones. That is the doubt that troubles me.”

“Well, you just can’t go away now!” wailed Cecile. “You have got to stay till the doctor says we can move Luke. I can’t take him back alone.”

“Now, don’t make me out so badly off. I am lying here like a poor log because that sawbones and you girls make me. But I know I could get up and play baseball.”

“Don’t you dare!” cried his sister.

“You would not be so unwise,” said Ruth promptly.

“All right. Then you stop worrying, Ruth,” the young fellow said. “Otherwise I shall ‘take up my bed and walk’ – you see! This lying around like an ossified man is a nuisance, and it’s absurd, anyway.”

Ruth had immediately written to Mr. Howbridge asking him to look closely after family affairs at the Corner House. Had she known the lawyer was not at home when her letter arrived in Milton she certainly would have started back by the very next train.

She wrote Mrs. McCall, too, for exact news. And naturally she poured into her letter to Agnes all the questions and advice of which she could think.

Agnes was too busy when that letter arrived to answer it at all. Things were happening at the old Corner House at that time of which Ruth had never dreamed.

Ruth was really glad to be with Cecile and Luke in the mountains. And she tried to throw off her anxiety.

Luke insisted that his sister and Ruth should go over to the hotel to dance in the evening when he had to go to bed, as the doctor ordered. He had become acquainted with most of the hotel guests before his injury, and the young people liked Luke Shepard.

They welcomed his sister and Ruth as one of themselves, and the two girls had the finest kind of a time. At least, Cecile did, and she said that Ruth might have had, had she not been thinking of the home-folk so much.

Several days passed, and although Ruth heard nothing from home save a brief and hurried note from Agnes, telling of their unsuccessful search for Sammy – and nothing much else – the older Kenway girl began to feel that her anxiety had been unnecessary.

Then came Mrs. McCall’s labored letter. The old Scotchwoman was never an easy writer. And her thoughts did not run to the way of clothing facts in readable English. She was plain and blunt. At least a part of her letter immediately made Ruth feel that she was needed at home, and that even her interest in Luke Shepard should not detain her longer at Oakhurst.

“We have got to have another watchdog. Old Tom Jonah is too old; it is my opinion. I mind he is getting deaf, or something, or he wouldn’t have let that man come every night and stare in at the window. Faith, he is a nuisance – the man, I mean, Ruth, not the old dog.

“I have spoke to the police officer on the beat; but Mr. Howbridge being out of town I don’t know what else to do about that man. And such a foxy looking man as he is!

“Neale O’Neil, who is a good lad, I’m saying, and no worse than other boys of his age for sure, offers to watch by night. But I have not allowed it. He and Aggie talk of Gypsies, and they show me that silver bracelet – a bit barbarous thing that you remember the children had to play with – and say the dark man who comes to the window nights is a Gypsy. I think he is a plain tramp, that is all, my lass.

“Don’t let these few lines worry you. Linda goes to bed with the stove poker every night, and Uncle Rufus says he has oiled up your great uncle’s old shotgun. But I know that gun has no hammer to it, so I am not afraid of the weapon at all. I just want to make that black-faced man go away from the house and mind his own business. It is a nuisance he is.”

“I must go home – oh, I must!” Ruth said to Cecile as soon as she had read this effusion from the old housekeeper. “Just think! A man spying on them – and a Gypsy!”

“Pooh! it can’t be anything of importance,” scoffed Cecile.

“It must be. Think! I told you about the Gypsy bracelet. There must be more of importance connected with that than we thought.”

She had already told Luke and Cecile about the mystery of the silver ornament.

“Why, I thought you had told Mr. Howbridge about it,” Cecile said.

“I did not. I really forgot to when the news of Luke’s illness came,” and Ruth blushed.

“That quite drove everything else out of your head, did it?” laughed the other girl. “But now why let it bother you? Of course Mr. Howbridge will attend to things – ”

“But he seems to be away,” murmured Ruth. “Evidently Mrs. McCall and Agnes have not been able to reach him. Oh, Cecile! I must really go home.”

“Then you will have to come back,” declared Cecile Shepard. “I could not possibly travel with Luke alone.”

The physician had confided more to the girls than to Luke himself about the young man’s physical condition. The medical man feared some spinal trouble if Luke did not remain quiet and lie flat on his back for some time to come.

But the day following Ruth’s receipt of Mrs. McCall’s anxiety-breeding letter, Dr. Moline agreed to the young man’s removal.

“But only in a compartment. You must take the afternoon train on which you can engage a compartment. He must lie at ease all the way. I will take him to the station in my car. And have a car to meet him when you get to the Milton station.”

The first of these instructions Ruth was able to follow faithfully. The cost of such a trip was not to be considered. She would not even allow Luke and Cecile to speak about it.

Ruth had her own private bank account, arranged for and supervised, it was true, by Mr. Howbridge, and she prided herself upon doing business in a businesslike way.

Just before they boarded the train at Oakhurst station she telegraphed home that they were coming and for Neale to meet them with the car, late though their arrival would be. If on time, the train would stop at Milton just after midnight.

When that telegram arrived at the old Corner House it failed to make much of a disturbance in the pool of the household existence. And for a very good reason. So much had happened there during the previous few hours that the advent of the King and Queen of England (and this Mrs. McCall herself said) would have created a very small “hooroo.”

As for Neale O’Neil’s getting out the car and going down to the station to meet Ruth and her friends when they arrived, that seemed to be quite impossible. The coming of the telegram was at an hour when already the Kenway automobile was far away from Milton, and Neale and Agnes in it were having high adventure.

CHAPTER XVIII – THE JUNKMAN AGAIN

When Ruth started home with Luke and Cecile Shepard several days had elapsed since Neale O’Neil and Agnes had discovered that Mr. Howbridge was out of town.

The chief clerk at the lawyer’s office had little time to give to the youthful visitors, for just then he had his hands full with a caller whom Neale and Agnes had previously found was a person not easily to be pacified.

“There is a crazy man in here,” grumbled the clerk. “I don’t know what he means. He says he ‘comes from Kenway,’ and there is something about Queen Alma and her bracelet. What do you know about this, Miss Kenway?”

“Oh, my prophetic soul!” gasped Neale O’Neil. “Costello, the junkman!”

“Dear, me! We thought we could see Mr. Howbridge before that man came.”

“Tell me what it means,” urged the clerk. “Then I will know what to say to the lunatic.”

“I guess he’s a nut all right,” admitted Neale. He told the lawyer’s clerk swiftly all they knew about the junkman, and all they knew about the silver bracelet.

“All right. It is something for Mr. Howbridge to attend to himself,” declared the clerk. “You hang on to that bracelet and don’t let anybody have it. I’ll try to shoo off this fellow. Anyway, it may not belong to his family at all. I’ll hold him here till you two get away.”

Neale and Agnes were glad to escape contact with the junkman again. He was too vehement.

“He’ll walk right in and search the house for the thing,” grumbled Neale. “We can’t have him frightening the children.”

“And I don’t want to be frightened myself,” added Agnes.

They hurried home, and all that day, every time the bell rang or she heard a voice at the side door, the girl felt a sudden qualm. “Wish we had never advertised that bracelet at all,” she confessed in secret. “Dear, me! I wonder what Ruth will say?”

Nevertheless she failed to take her older sister into her confidence regarding Queen Alma’s bracelet when she wrote to her. She felt quite convinced that Ruth would not approve of what she and Neale had done, so why talk about it?

This was the attitude Agnes maintained. Perhaps the whole affair would be straightened out before Ruth came back. And otherwise, she considered, everything was going well at the Corner House in Milton.

It was Miss Ann Titus who evinced interest next in the “lost and found” advertisement. Miss Ann Titus was the woman whom Dot called “such a fluid speaker” and who said so many “and-so’s” that “ain’t-so’s.” In other words, Miss Titus, the dressmaker, was a very gossipy person, although she was not intentionally unkind.

She came in this afternoon, “stopping by” as she termed it, from spending a short sewing day with Mrs. Pease, a Willow Street neighbor of the Corner House girls.

“And I must say that Mrs. Pease, for a woman of her age, has young idees about dress,” Miss Titus confided to Mrs. McCall and Agnes, who were in the sewing room. Aunt Sarah “couldn’t a-bear” Miss Ann Titus, so they did not invite the seamstress to go upstairs.

“Yes, her idees is some young,” repeated Miss Titus. “But then, nowadays if you foller the styles in the fashion papers nobody can tell you and your grandmother apart, back to! Skirts are so skimpy – and short!”

Miss Titus fanned herself rapidly, and allowed her emphasis to suggest her own opinion of modern taste in dress.

“Of course, Mrs. Pease is slim and ain’t lost all her good looks; but it does seem to me if I was a married woman,” she simpered here a little, for Miss Titus had by no means given up all hope of entering the wedded state, “I should consider my husband’s feelings. I would not go on the street looking below my knees as though I was twelve year old instead of thirty-two.”

“Maybe Mr. Pease likes her to look young,” suggested Agnes.

“Hech! Hech!” clucked Mrs. McCall placidly. “Thirty-twa is not so very auld. Not as we live these days, at any rate.”

“But think of the example she sets her children,” sniffed Miss Titus, bridling.

“Tut, tut! How much d’you expect Margie and Holly Pease is influenced by their mother’s style o’ dress?” exclaimed the housekeeper. “The twa bairns scarce know much about that.”

“I guess that is so,” chimed in Agnes. “And I think she is a pretty woman and dresses nicely. So there!”

“Ah, you young things cannot be expected to think as I do,” smirked Miss Titus.

“I take that as a compliment, my dear,” said the housekeeper comfortably. “And I never expect tae be vairy old until I die. Still and all, I am some older than Agnes.”

“That reminds me,” said Miss Titus, more briskly (though it did not remind her, for she had come into the Corner House for the special purpose of broaching the subject that she now announced), “which of you Kenways is it has found a silver bracelet?”

“Now, that is Agnes’ affair,” chuckled Mrs. McCall.

“Oh! It is not Ruth that advertised?” queried the curious Miss Titus.

“Na, na! Tell it her, Agnes,” said the housekeeper.

But Agnes was not sure she wished to describe to this gossipy seamstress all the incidents connected with Queen Alma’s bracelet. She only said:

“Of course, you do not know anybody who has lost such a bracelet?”

“How can I tell till I have seen it?” demanded Miss Titus.

“Well, we have about decided that until somebody comes who describes the bracelet and can explain how and where it was lost that we had better not display it at all,” Agnes said, with more firmness than was usual with her.

“Oh!” sniffed Miss Titus. “I hope you do not think that I have any interest – any personal interest – in inquiring about it?”

“If I thought it was yours, Miss Titus, I would let you see it immediately,” Agnes hastened to assure her. “But of course – ”

“There was a bracelet lost right on this street,” said Miss Titus earnestly, meaning Willow Street and pointing that way, “that never was recovered to my knowledge.”

“Oh! You don’t mean it?” cried the puzzled girl. “Of course, we don’t know that this one belongs to any of those Gypsies – ”

“I should say not!” clucked Miss Titus. “The bracelet I mean was worn by Sarah Turner. She and I went together regular when we were girls. And going to prayer meeting one night, walking along here by the old Corner House, Sarah dropped her bracelet.”

“But – but!” gasped Agnes, “that must have been some time ago, Miss Titus.”

“It is according to how you compute time,” the dressmaker said. “Sarah and I were about of an age. And she isn’t more than forty years old right now!”

“I don’t think this bracelet we have is the one your friend lost,” Agnes said faintly, but confidently. She wanted to laugh but did not dare.

“How do you know?” demanded Miss Ann Titus in her snappy way – like the biting off of a thread when she was at work. “I should know it, even so long after it was lost, I assure you.”

“Why – how?” asked the Corner House girl curiously.

“By the scratches on it,” declared Miss Titus. “Sarah’s brother John made them with his pocketknife – on the inside of the bracelet – to see if it was real silver. Oh! he was a bad boy – as bad as Sammy Pinkney. And what do you think of his running away again?”

Agnes was glad the seamstress changed the subject right here. It seemed to her as though she had noticed scratches on the bracelet the Gypsies had placed in the basket the children bought. Could it be possible —

“No! That is ridiculous!” Agnes told herself. “It could not be possible that a bracelet lost forty years ago on Willow Street should turn up at this late date. And, having found it, why should those Gypsy women give it to Tess and Dot? There would be no sense in that.”