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.”
Yet, when the talkative Miss Titus had gone Agnes went to the room the little folks kept their playthings and doll families in, and picked up the Alice-doll which chanced that day to be wearing the silver band. She removed it from the doll and took it to the window where the light was better.
Yes! It was true as she had thought. There were several crosswise scratches on the inside of the circlet. They might easily have been made by a boy’s jackknife.
“I declare! Who really knows where this bracelet came from, and who actually owns it? Maybe it is not Queen Alma’s ornament after all. Dear, me! this Kenway family is forever getting mixed up in difficulties that positively have nothing to do with us.
“The silly old bracelet! Why couldn’t those Gypsy women have sold that basket to Margaret and Holly Pease, or to some other little girls instead of to our Tess and Dot. Mrs. McCall says that some people seem to attract trouble, just as lightning-rods attract lightning, and I guess the Kenways are some of those people!”
Neale did not come over again that day, so she had nobody to discuss this new slant in the matter with. And if Agnes could not “talk out loud” about her troubles, she was apt to grow irritable. At least, the little girls said after supper that she was cross.
“Ruth doesn’t talk that way to us,” declared Tess, quite hurt, and gathering up her playthings from the various chairs in the sitting room where the family usually gathered in the evenings. “I don’t think I should like her to be away all the time.”
This was Tess’s polite way of criticising Agnes. But Dot was not so hampered by politeness.
“Crosspatch!” she exclaimed. “That’s just what you are, Aggie Kenway.”
And she started for bed in quite a huff. Agnes was glad, a few minutes later, that the two smaller girls had gone upstairs, even if they had gone away in this unhappy state of mind. Mrs. McCall had come in and sat down at some mending and the room was very quiet. Suddenly a noise outside on the porch made Agnes raise her head and look at the nearest window.
“What is the matter wi’ ye, lassie?” asked Mrs. McCall, startled.
“Did you hear that?” whispered the girl, staring at the window.
The shade was not drawn down to the sill, and the curtains were the very thinnest of scrim. At the space of four inches below the shade Agnes saw a white splotch against the pane.
“Oh! See! A face!” gasped Agnes in three smothered shrieks.
“Hech, mon! Such a flibbertigibbet as the lass is.” Mrs. McCall adjusted her glasses and stared, first at the frightened girl, then at the window. But she, too, saw the face. “What can the matter be?” she demanded, half rising. “Is that Neale O’Neil up tae some o’ his jokes?”
“Oh, no, Mrs. Mac! It’s not Neale,” half sobbed Agnes. “I know who it is. It’s that awful junkman!”
“A junkman?” repeated Mrs. McCall. “At this time o’ night? We’ve naethin’ tae sellit him. The impudence!”
She rose, quite determined to drive the importunate junkman away.
CHAPTER XIX – THE HOUSE IS HAUNTED
“Why do ye fash yoursel’ so?” demanded Mrs. McCall in growing wonder and exasperation. “Let me see the foolish man.”
She approached the window and raised the shade sharply. Then she hoisted the sash itself. But Costello, the junkman, was gone.
“There is naebody here,” she complained, looking out on the side porch.
“But he was there! You saw him,” faintly declared Agnes.
“He was nae ghost, if that’s what you mean,” said the housekeeper dryly. “But what and who is he? A junkman? How do you come to know junkmen, lassie?”
“I only know that junkman,” explained Agnes.
“Aye?” The housekeeper’s eyes as well as her voice was sharp. “And when did you make his acquaintance? Costello, d’you say?”
“So he said his name was. He – he is one of the Gypsies, I do believe!”
“Gypsies! The idea! Is the house surrounded by Gypsies?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. McCall,” said Agnes faintly. “I only know they are giving us a lot of trouble.”
“Who are?”
“The Gypsies.”
“Hear the lass!” exclaimed the troubled housekeeper. “Who ever heard the like? Why should Gypsies give us any trouble? Is it that bit bracelet the bairns play wi’? Then throw it out and let the Gypsies have it.”
“But that would not be right, would it, Mrs. McCall?” demanded the troubled girl. “If – if the bracelet belongs to them – ”
“Hech! To this junkman?”
“He claims it,” confessed Agnes.
“Tut, tut! What is going on here that I do not know about?” demanded the Scotch woman with deeper interest.
She closed the window, drew the shade again, and returned to her seat. She stared at Agnes rather sternly over her glasses.
“Come now, my lass,” said the housekeeper, “what has been going on so slyly here? I never heard of any Costello, junkman or not. Who is he? What does he want, peering in at a body’s windows at night?”
Agnes told the whole story then – and managed to tell it clearly enough for the practical woman to gain a very good idea of the whole matter.
“Of course,” was her comment, grimly said, “you and that Neale could not let well enough alone. You never can. If you had not advertised the bit bracelet, this junkman would not have troubled you.”
“But we thought it ought to be advertised,” murmured Agnes in defense.
“Aye, aye! Ye thought mooch I’ve nae doot. And to little good purpose. Well, ’tis a matter for Mr. Howbridge now, sure enough. And what he’ll say – ”
“But I hope that Costello does not come to the house again,” ventured the girl, in some lingering alarm.
“You or Neale go to Mr. Howbridge’s clerk in the morning and tell him. He should tell the police of this crazy man. A Gypsy, too, you say?”
“I think he must be. The bracelet seems to be a bone of contention between two branches of the Gypsy tribe. If it belonged to that old Queen Alma – ”
“Fiddle-faddle!” exclaimed the housekeeper. “Who ever heard of a queen among those dirty Gypsies? ’Tis foolishness.”
The fact that Costello, the junkman, was lingering about the old Corner House was not to be denied. They saw him again before bedtime. Uncle Rufus had gone to bed and Linda was so easily frightened that Mrs. McCall did not want to tell her.
So the housekeeper grabbed a broom and started out on the side porch with the avowed intention of “breaking the besom over the chiel’s head!” But the lurker refused to be caught and darted away into the shadows. And all without making a sound, or revealing in any way what his intention might be.
Mrs. McCall and the trembling Agnes went all about the house, locking each lower window, and of course all the doors. Tom Jonah, the old Newfoundland dog, slept out of doors these warm nights, and sometimes wandered away from the premises.
“We ought to have Buster, Sammy Pinkney’s bulldog, over here. Then that horrid man would not dare come into the yard,” Agnes said.
“You might as well turn that old billy-goat loose,” sniffed Mrs. McCall. “He’d do little more harm than that bull pup – and nae more good, either.”
They went to bed – earlier than usual, perhaps. And that may be the reason why Agnes could not sleep. She considered the possibility of Costello’s climbing up the porch posts to the roof, and so reaching the second story windows.
“If he is going to haunt the house like this,” Agnes declared to the housekeeper in the morning, “let us make Neale come here and stay at night.”
“That lad?” returned the housekeeper, who had no very exalted opinion of boys in any case – no more than had Ruth. “Haven’t we all troubles enough, I want to know? This is a case for the police. You go tell Mr. Howbridge’s clerk about the Gypsy, that is what you do.”
But Agnes would not do even that without taking Neale into her confidence. Neale at once was up in arms when he heard of the lurking junkman. He declared he would come over and hide in the closet on the Kenways’ back porch and try to catch the man if he appeared again at night.
“He is a very strong man, Neale,” objected Agnes. “And he might have a knife, too. You know, those Gypsies are awfully fierce-tempered.”
“I don’t know that he is,” objected Neale. “He looked to me like just plain crazy.”
“Well, you come down to the office with me,” commanded Agnes. “I don’t even want to meet that excitable Costello man on the street when I am alone.”
“I suppose you are scared, Aggie. But I don’t think he would really hurt you. Come on!”
So they went down to Mr. Howbridge’s office again and interviewed the clerk, telling him first of all of the appearance of the junkman the night before.
“I had fairly to drive him out of these offices,” said the clerk. “He is of a very excitable temperament, to say the least. But I did not think there was any real harm in him.”
“Just the same,” Neale objected, “he wants to keep away from the house and not frighten folks at night.”
“Oh, we will soon stop that,” said Mr. Howbridge’s representative. “I will report it to the police.”
“But perhaps he does not mean any harm,” faltered Agnes.
“I do not think he does,” said the man. “Nevertheless, we will warn him.”
This promise relieved Agnes a good deal. She was tender-hearted and she did not wish the junkman arrested. But when evening came and he once more stared in at the windows, and tapped on the panes, and wandered around and around the house —
“Well, this is too much!” cried the girl, when Neale and Mrs. McCall both ran out to try to apprehend the marauder. “I do wish we had a telephone. I am going to beg Ruth to have one put in just as soon as she comes back. We could call the police and they would catch that man.”
Perhaps the police, had they been informed, might have caught Costello. But Mrs. McCall and Neale did not. The latter remained until the family went to bed and then the boy did a little lurking in the bushes on his own account. But he did not spy the strange man again.
In the morning, without saying anything to the Kenway family about it, Neale O’Neil set out to find Costello, the junkman. He certainly was not afraid of the man by daylight. He had had experience with him.
From Mr. Howbridge’s clerk he had already obtained the address the junkman had given when he was at the office. The place was down by the canal in the poorer section of the town, of course.
There were several cellars and first-floors of old houses given up to ragpickers and dealers in junk of all kinds. After some inquiry among a people who quite evidently were used to dodging the answering of incriminating questions, Neale learned that there had been a junkman living in a certain room up to within a day or two before, whose name was Costello. But he had disappeared. Oh, yes! Neale’s informant was quite sure that Costello had gone away for good.
“But he had a horse and wagon. He had a business of his own. Where has he gone?” demanded the boy.
He was gone. That was all these people would tell him. They pointed out the old shed where Costello had kept his horse. Was it a good horse? It was a good looking horse, with smiles which seemed to indicate that Costello was a true Gypsy and was not above “doctoring” a horse into a deceiving appearance of worthiness.
“He drove away with that horse. He did not say where he was going. I guess he go to make a sale, eh? He will come back with some old plug that he make look fine, eh?”
This was the nearest to real information that Neale could obtain, and this from a youth who worked for one of the established junk dealers.
So Neale had to give up the inquiry as useless. When he came back to the old Corner House he confessed to Agnes:
“He is hiding somewhere, and coming around here after dark. Wish I had a shotgun – ”
“Oh, Neale! How wicked!”
“Loaded with rock-salt,” grinned the boy. “A dose of that might do the Gyp. a world of good.”