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.
“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.