Kitabı oku: «The Corner House Girls on a Tour», sayfa 2
“Well, I declare!” exclaimed Mrs. Heard, her face alight with pleasure at this united invitation. “You are just the nicest girls I ever met. I wonder if I’d better?”
“Of course,” said Ruth. “You can find some place to leave the pony. Or Neale can, I’m sure.”
“Why, I know these people right in the very next house,” said Mrs. Heard. “Indeed I expected to call there if Jonas ever got that far.”
Neale got briskly out of the car again. “I’ll go and unharness him,” he said, cheerfully. “You just find out where I shall put him. He’d rather have you ride in an automobile than drag you himself,” and he laughed.
“Did – did he tell you so, Neale, when you were talking with him?” asked Dot, in amazement.
Then they all laughed.
CHAPTER III – WHAT MRS. HEARD TOLD
In ten minutes the Kenway car was moving again. Jonas had been put up at the barn of Mrs. Heard’s friends, near which the pony had balked, and Neale soon whisked them out of sight of the place.
“This – this is just delightful,” sighed Mrs. Heard. “Especially after sitting behind that brute of a pony. I do love an automobile.”
“So do I!” Agnes cried. “I’d rather ride in this car than in a golden chariot – I know I would.”
“I don’t know how they run chariots, nowadays,” said Neale, chuckling; “whether by horse-power or gas. But sometimes a car balks, you know.”
“Not so often as that Jonas,” declared Mrs. Heard. “I’ve been out with my nephew a lot. His is a nice car. I hope he’ll find it.”
“Why, of course the thieves will be apprehended,” said Ruth. “What good are the police?”
“When it comes to autos,” said Neale, slyly, “the police are mostly good for stopping you and getting you fined.”
“Well, don’t you dare drive too fast and get us fined, Neale O’Neil,” ordered Ruth, sternly.
“No, ma’am,” he returned. But Agnes whispered in his ear:
“I don’t care how fast you run it, Neale. I love to go fast.”
“You’ll be a speed fiend, Aggie,” he declared. “That’s what you’ll be.”
“Oh! I want to drive. I must learn.”
“You’ll have to ask Mr. Howbridge about that,” Neale told her.
“Oh!”
“Yes, ma’am! He told me that I shouldn’t allow anybody to run the car but a properly qualified person.”
“You don’t mean it?” gasped the eager girl.
“That’s right! A person with a license.”
“I can’t believe it, Neale O’Neil!” wailed Agnes. “How am I ever going to learn, then?”
“You’ll have to go to the garage as I did and take lessons.”
Agnes pouted over this. Mrs. Heard, meanwhile, was saying to Ruth:
“Yes, the stealing of my nephew’s auto was an outrage. Politics in this county are most disgraceful. If we women voted – ”
“But, Mrs. Heard! what have politics to do with your nephew’s auto being stolen?” cried Ruth.
“Oh! it wasn’t any ordinary thief, or perhaps thieves, who took his car. He is sure of that. You see, there are some politicians who want the plans and maps of the new road surveys his office has been making.”
“What sort of maps are those?” asked Tess, who was listening. “Like those we have to outline in the geography?”
“They are not like those, chicken,” laughed Ruth. “They are outlines – drawings. They show the road levels and grades. I guess you don’t understand. Don’t you remember those men who came the other day and looked through instruments on our sidewalk and measured with a long tape line, and all that?”
“Oh, yes,” confessed Tess. “I saw them.”
“Well, they were surveyors. And they were working for Mr. Collinger, I suppose,” said Ruth.
“Oh!”
“I saw them, too,” proclaimed Dot. “I thought they were photo – photographers. I went out there and stood with my Alice-doll right in front of one of those things on the three sticks.”
“You did?” cried Agnes, who heard this. “What for, Dottums?”
“To get our picture tooken,” said Dot, gravely. “And then I asked the man when it would be done and if we could see a picture.”
“Ho, ho!” laughed Neale O’Neil. “What did he say?”
“Why,” confessed the smallest Corner House girl, indignantly, “he said I’d be grown up – and so would Alice – before that picture was enveloped – ”
“‘Developed’!” cried Tess.
“No. Enveloped,” said Dot, stoutly. “You always get photograph proofs in an envelope.”
Ruth and Mrs. Heard were laughing heartily. Agnes said, admiringly:
“You’re a wonder, Dot! If there is a possible way of fumbling a thing, you do it.”
The little girls were not likely to understand all that Mrs. Heard said about the disappearance of Mr. Collinger’s automobile – no more than Dot understood about the surveyor’s transit. But they listened.
“You understand, Miss Ruth,” said the aunt of the county surveyor, “that Phil Collinger is responsible for all those tracings and maps that are being made in this road survey.
“If it gets out just what changes are to be made in grades and routes through the county before the commission renders its report, there is a chance for some of these ‘pauper politicians,’ as Philly calls them, to make money.”
“I don’t see how,” said Agnes, putting her oar in. “What good would the maps do even dishonest people?”
“Because with foreknowledge of the highway commission’s determinations, men could go and get options upon property adjoining the highways that will be changed, and either sell to the county at a big profit or hold abutting properties for the natural rise in land values that will follow.”
“I understand what an option is,” said Ruth. “It is a small sum which a man pays down on a place, with the privilege of buying it at a stated price within a given length of time.”
“You talk just like a judge, Ruthie,” giggled Agnes. “For my part I don’t understand it at all. But I’m sorry Mr. Collinger lost his car.”
“And it was stolen so boldly,” said Neale, shaking his head.
“But why did they steal the car, Mrs. Heard?” demanded Ruth, sticking to the main theme. “What has that to do with the surveyors’ maps?”
“Why,” said the lady, slowly, “they must have seen Philly come out of the court house and throw a package into the car. He covered it with a robe. They knew – or supposed they knew – that he carried the maps around with him. He could not even trust the safe in his office. It’s no better than a tin can and could be opened with a hammer and chisel.”
“Oh, my!” exclaimed Agnes, interested again. “So they stole the car to get the maps? Just like a moving picture play, isn’t it?”
“Maybe it is,” sighed the lady. “But it is quite serious for Philly – whether they got the maps or not.”
“Oh! Didn’t they?” cried Ruth.
“That – that he won’t say,” said Mrs. Heard, shaking her head. “I’m sure I don’t know. Philly Collinger can be just as close-mouthed as an oyster – and so I tell him.
“But everybody thinks the maps were in that package he put in the car before he ran across the street to get a bite of lunch. And I’m pretty sure that he isn’t worried all that much over the stealing of his car. Though goodness knows when he can ever afford to buy another. The salary of surveyor in this county isn’t a fortune.
“So, there it is,” said Mrs. Heard. “The car’s gone, and I guess the maps and data are gone with it. Somebody, of course, hired the two scamps that took it to do the trick – ”
“Oh, were there two?” asked Neale, who had been running the car slowly again in order to listen.
“Yes. They were seen; but nobody supposed they were stealing the car, of course.”
“What kind of men were they? How did they look?” asked Agnes.
“What do you want to know for, Miss Detective?” chuckled Neale.
“So as to be on the watch for them. If I see one of them about our car, I shall make a disturbance,” announced the beauty, with decision.
“I don’t know much about them,” admitted Mrs. Heard, laughing with the others over Agnes’ statement. “But one was a young man with a fancy band on his straw hat and yellow freckles on his face. I believe he had a little mustache. But he might shave that,” she added, reflectively.
“And change the band on his hat,” whispered Neale to Agnes, his eyes dancing.
“Never mind about his hat-band, Neale O’Neil!” cried Agnes, standing up suddenly in a most disconcerting way. “What is that ahead?”
Neale promptly shut off the power and braked. Agnes was greatly excited, and she pointed to a place in the road not many yards in advance.
The way was narrow, with rocky fields on either side approached by rather steep banks. Indeed, the road lay through what might well be called a ravine. It was the worst piece of road, too (so the guidebook, said), of any stretch between Milton and Marchenell Grove.
As the car stopped, Neale saw what Agnes had seen. Right across the way – directly in front of the automobile – lay something long and iridescent. It was moving.
“Oh!” shrieked Agnes again. “It’s a snake – a horrid, great, big snake!”
“Well, what under the sun did you make me stop for?” demanded the boy. “I’d have gone right over it.”
“That would have been cruel, boy,” declared Mrs. Heard, from behind.
“Cruel? Huh! It’s a rattler,” returned Neale.
“Oh, Neale! It’s never!” gasped Agnes, not meaning to be impolite.
“A rattler, Neale?” asked Ruth. “Are you sure?”
“What’s a rattler?” asked Dot, composedly. “Is it what they make baby’s rattles out of?”
“Mercy, no!” shivered Tess. “Neale means it’s a rattlesnake.”
“Oh! I don’t like them,” declared Dot, immediately picking up the Alice-doll, of which she always first thought in time of peril.
“What shall we do?” demanded Ruth.
“Can’t he drive around it?” asked Mrs. Heard, rather excitedly. “I don’t believe at all in hurting any dumb animal – not even a snake or a spider.”
“How about breaking the whip on old Jonas?” whispered Neale to Agnes.
But his girl friend was all of a shiver. “Do get around it, Neale,” she begged.
“Can’t. The road’s too narrow,” declared the boy, with promptness. “And I am bound to run over the thing if it doesn’t move out of the way. I can’t help it.”
“Wait!” cried Mrs. Heard. “Get out and poke it with a stick.”
“Why, Mrs. Heard!” exclaimed Ruth, “do you realize that a rattlesnake is deadly poison? I wouldn’t let Neale do such a thing.”
“Besides being a suffragist,” declared Mrs. Heard, firmly, “I am a professing and acting member of the S.P.C.A. I cannot look on and see a harmless beast – it is not doing anything to us – wantonly killed or injured.”
“Good-night!” murmured Neale.
Just then the snake – and it was a big fellow, all of six feet long – seemed to awaken. Perhaps it had been chilled by the coolness of the night before; it was lethargic, at any rate.
It lifted its head, whirled into the very middle of the road, and faced the automobile defiantly. In a moment it had coiled and sprung its rattle. The whirring sound, once heard, is never to be mistaken for any other.
“Oh, dear! what shall we do?” gasped Agnes. “If you try to run over it, it may get into the car – or something,” said Ruth.
The roadway was narrower here than it had been back where the brown pony had held the party up. This first trip in their automobile seemed to be fraught with much adventure for the Corner House girls and Neale O’Neil.
CHAPTER IV – SALERATUS JOE
Neale O’Neil knew very well that he could not satisfy everybody – least of all the rattlesnake.
Mrs. Heard did not want her S.P.C.A. sensibilities hurt; Agnes wanted him to drive on; Ruth wished him to dodge the coiled rattler. As for getting out and “coaxing it to move on” with a stick, Neale had no such intention.
He tried starting slowly to see if the serpent would be frightened and open the way for the passage of the car. But the rattler instantly coiled and sprang twice at the hood. The second time it sank its fangs into the left front tire.
“Cricky!” gasped Neale. “They say you swell all up when one of those things injects poison into you; but I don’t believe that tire will swell any more than it is.”
“Don’t make fun!” groaned Agnes. “Suppose it should jump into the car?”
“If we only had a gun,” began Neale.
“Well, I hope you haven’t, young man,” cried Mrs. Heard. “I’m deadly afraid of firearms.”
“Don’t get out of the car, Neale,” begged Agnes, clasping her hands.
“Try to back away from it,” suggested Ruth.
The smaller girls clung to each other (Dot determinedly to the Alice-doll, as well), and, although they did not say much, they were frightened. Tess whispered:
“Oh, dear me! I’m ‘fraid enough of the wriggling fish-worms that Sammy digs in our garden. And this snake is a hundred times as big!”
“And fish-worms don’t shoot people with their tongues, do they?” suggested Dot.
Just at that very moment, when the six-foot rattler had coiled to strike again, there was a rattling and jangling of tinware from up the road. There was a turn not far ahead, and the young folks could not see beyond it.
“Goodness me!” exploded Agnes, “what’s coming now?”
“Not another rattlesnake, I bet a cent – though it’s some rattling,” chuckled Neale O’Neil.
The heads of a pair of horses then appeared around the turn. They proved to be drawing a tin-peddler’s wagon, and over this rough piece of driveway the wash-boilers, dishpans, kettles, pails, and a dozen other articles of tin and agate-ware, were making more noise than the passage of a battery of artillery.
Some scientists have pointed out that snakes – some snakes, at least – seem to be hard of hearing. That could not have been so with the big rattlesnake that had held up the Kenways and their automobile.
Before the Jewish peddler on the seat of the wagon could draw his willing horses to a halt, the snake swiftly uncoiled and wriggled across the road and into the bushes. All that was left to mark his recent presence was a wavy mark in the dust.
“Vat’s the madder?” called the peddler. “Ain’t dere room to ged by?”
“Sure,” said the relieved Neale. “Let me back a little and you pull out to the right, and we’ll be all right. We were held up by a snake.”
The Jew (he was a little man with fiery hair and whiskers, and he had a narrow-brimmed derby hat jammed down upon his head), seemed to study over this answer of the boy for fully a minute. Then, as Neale was steering the automobile slowly past his rig, he leaned sidewise and asked, with a broad smile:
“I say, mister! Vat did you say stopped you?”
“A snake,” declared Neale, grinning.
“Oy, oy! And that it iss yedt to drive one of them so benzine carts? No! Mein horses iss petter. They are not afraid of snakes.”
He still sat, without starting his team, thinking the surprising matter over, when the automobile turned the curve in the road and struck better going.
“Well!” ejaculated Agnes, “I only hope he stays there till that snake comes out of the bushes again and climbs into his cart.”
“My! how disagreeable you can be,” returned Neale, laughing. “I don’t believe you’ll get your wish, however.”
“I’m glad we didn’t run over that snake,” declared Mrs. Heard, nodding her head. “I’m opposed to killing any dumb creature.”
“Then,” suggested Dot, earnestly, “you must be like Mr. Seneca Sprague.”
“Me? Like Seneca Sprague?” gasped the lady, yet rather amused. “I like that!”
“Why, how can that be, Dot?” asked Ruth, rather puzzled herself, for Seneca Sprague was a queer character who was thought by most Milton people to be a little crazy.
“Why, he’s a vegetablearian. And Mrs. Heard must be,” announced Dot, confidently, “if she doesn’t believe in killing dumb beasts.”
“There’s logic for you!” exclaimed Neale. “Score one for Dot.”
The lady laughed heartily. “I suppose I ought to be a ‘vegetablearian’ if I’m not,” she said. “I dunno as I could worship beasts the way some of the ancients did; but I don’t believe in killing them unnecessarily.”
“I know about some of the animal gods and goddesses the Greeks and Egyptians used to worship,” ventured Tess, who had not taken much part in the conversation of late. “Did any of them worship snakes, do you s’pose?”
“I believe some peoples did,” Ruth told her.
“Oh, I know about gods and goddesses,” cried Dot, eagerly. “Our teacher read about them – or, some of them – only yesterday, in school.”
“Well, Miss Know-it-all,” said Agnes, good-naturedly, “what did you learn about them?”
“I – I remember ‘bout one named Ceres,” said the smallest Corner House girl, with corrugated brow, trying to remember what she had heard read.
“Well, what about her?” asked Agnes, encouragingly.
“What was Ceres the goddess of, honey?” pursued Ruth, as Dot still hesitated.
“Why – why she was the goddess of dressmaking,” declared the child, with sudden conviction.
“Oh, oh, oh!” ejaculated Neale, under his breath.
“For goodness sake! where did you get that idea?” demanded Ruth, while Agnes and Mrs. Heard positively could not keep from laughing, and Tess looked at her smaller sister with something like horror. “Why – Dot Kenway!” she murmured.
“She is, too!” pouted Dot. “My teacher said so. She said Ceres was the goddess of ‘ripping and sewing.’ Now, isn’t that dressmaking?”
“Oh, cricky!” gasped Neale, and swerved the car to the left in his emotion.
“Do be careful, Neale!” squealed Agnes.
“Yes. You’ll have us into something,” warned Ruth.
“Then put ear-muffs on me,” groaned the boy. “That child will be the death of me yet. ‘Sowing and reaping’ – ‘ripping and sewing’ – wow!”
“Humph!” observed Agnes. “You needn’t be the death of us if she does say something funny. Do keep your mind on what you are about, Neale.”
But Neale O’Neil was a careful driver. He was a sober boy, anyway, and would never qualify in the joy-riding class, that was sure.
The remainder of the ride to Marchenell Grove was a jolly and enjoyable one. They all liked Mrs. Heard more and more as they became better acquainted with her. She seemed to know just how to get along with young folk, and despite her stated suffragist and S.P.C.A. proclivities, even Neale pronounced her “good fun.”
The Grove was a very popular resort, and very large. Perhaps it was just as well that Mrs. Heard was with the girls, for unexpectedly a situation developed during the day that might have been really unpleasant had not an older person – like the good and talkative lady – been with them.
There was a large party of picnickers that had come together and that made one end of the grounds very lively. There was an orchestra with them and they usurped the dancing pavilion. Not that Ruth or Agnes would have danced here; neither Mr. Howbridge nor Mrs. MacCall would have approved; nor did Mrs. Heard countenance dancing in such a public place. But after they had all been out in boats on the river, and had eaten their lunch, and enjoyed the swings, and strolled through the pleasant paths of the Grove, it was only natural that the two older Kenways should wish to see the dancing. They had no idea that the crowd about the pavilion was rowdyish.
Neale was busy with the car in preparation for their return to Milton. The little girls were watching him at work, and Mrs. Heard was resting in the car, too. So Ruth and Agnes went alone down to the pavilion.
“Dear me,” sighed Agnes. “I really wish we could have just one spin on the floor – just us two. That music makes my feet fairly itch.”
“You will have to possess your soul with patience – or else scratch your poor little feet,” laughed her sister. “To think of your wanting to dance here! I am afraid all these people – especially the boys – are not nice.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want to dance with them,” pouted Agnes. “Only with you. I just love to dance to this piece the orchestra is playing.”
“Save it till next week’s school dance,” laughed Ruth. “Oh!”
Her startled ejaculation was brought out by the appearance of a strange young man at her elbow. He was really not a nice looking fellow at all, his face was unpleasantly freckled, and the corners of his lips and the ends of the first three fingers of his right hand were stained deeply by the use of cigarettes.
“Aft’noon!” said this stranger, affably. “Want a whirl? The floor’s fine – come on in.”
Agnes, who was much more timid in reality than she usually appeared, shrank from the fellow, trying to draw Ruth with her.
“Let the kid wait for us,” suggested the freckled young man, leering good-naturedly enough at Agnes, and probably not at all aware that he was distasteful to the Kenway girls. “We can have one whirl.”
“I am much obliged to you,” Ruth said, rather falteringly. “I would rather not.”
“Aw, say – just a turn. Don’t throw me down,” said the fellow, his eyes becoming suddenly hard and the smile beginning to disappear from his face.
“No, thank you. Neither my sister nor I wish to dance here,” said Ruth, growing bolder – and more indignant.
“Don’t tell me you don’t know how to dance?” growled the freckled one.
“I don’t tell you anything, but that we do not wish to dance,” and Ruth tried to turn away from him.
The fellow stepped directly in their path. They were just on the fringe of loiterers about the pavilion. Agnes clapped a hand upon her lips to keep from screaming.
“Aw, come on,” said the fellow, laying a detaining hand upon Ruth’s arm.
Then something very unexpected, but very welcome, happened. Mrs. Heard, seeing a hand’s breadth of cloud in the sky and fearing a thunder storm, had sent Neale O’Neil scurrying for the girls. He came to the spot before this affair could go any farther.
“Hullo!” he exclaimed, sharply. “What’s this?”
“This – this gentleman,” said Ruth, faintly, “offers to dance with me, but I tell him ‘no.’”
“What are you butting in for, kid?” demanded the freckled young fellow, thrusting his jaw forward in an ugly manner. But he took his hand from Ruth’s arm.
Neale said to the girls, quite quietly though his eyes flashed:
“Mrs. Heard wants you to come back to the car at once. Please hurry.”
“Say! I don’t get you,” began the rough again.
“You will in a moment,” Neale shot at him. “Go away, girls!”
Agnes did not want to go now; but Ruth saw it would be better and she fairly dragged her sister away.
“Neale will be hurt!” moaned Agnes, all the way to the car. “That awful rowdy has friends, of course.”
What really happened to Neale the girls never knew, for he would not talk about it. Trained from his very babyhood as an acrobat, the ex-circus boy would be able to give a good account of himself if it came to fisticuffs with the freckled-faced fellow. Although the latter was considerably older and taller than Neale, the way he had lived had not hardened his muscles and made him quick of eye and foot or handy with his fists.
Perhaps Neale did not fight at all. At least he came back to the car without a mark upon him and without even having had his clothes ruffled. All he said in answer to the excited questions of the girls was:
“That’s a fellow called Saleratus Joe. You can tell why – his face with all those yellow freckles looks like an old fashioned saleratus biscuit. He belongs in Milton. I’ve seen him before. He isn’t much better than a saloon lounger.”
“Goodness me!” exclaimed Mrs. Heard. “Saleratus Joe is one of the fellows who my nephew thinks stole his automobile. I must tell him that we saw the fellow. Perhaps the car can be traced after all.”
“Through Saleratus Joe?” said Neale O’Neil. “Well – maybe.”
