CHAPTER XX – PLOTTERS AT WORK
The adventures of the Corner House girls and their friends did not usually include anything very terrible. Perhaps there was no particular peril threatened by Costello, the Gypsy junkman, who was lurking about the premises at night. Just the same, Agnes Kenway was inclined to do what Mrs. McCall suggested and throw the silver bracelet out upon the ash heap.
Of course they had no moral right to do that, and the housekeeper’s irritable suggestion was not to be thought of for a serious moment. Yet Agnes would have been glad to get rid of the responsibility connected with possession of Queen Alma’s ornament.
“If it is that Costello heirloom!” she said. “Maybe after all it belongs to Miss Ann Titus’s friend, Sarah Whatshername. Goodness! I wonder how many other people will come to claim the old thing. I do wish Ruth would return.”
“Just so you could hand the responsibility over to her,” accused Neale.
“M-mm. Well?”
“We ought to hunt up those Gypsies – ‘Beeg Jeem’ and his crowd – and get their side of the story,” declared Neale.
“No! I will not!” cried Agnes. “I have met all the Gypsies I ever want to meet.”
But within the hour she met another. She was in the kitchen, and Linda and Mrs. McCall were both in the front of the house, cleaning. There came a timid-sounding rap on the door. Agnes unthinkingly threw it open.
A slender girl stood there – a girl younger than Agnes herself. This stranger was very ragged, not at all clean looking, and very brown. She had flashing white teeth and flashing black eyes.
Agnes actually started back when she saw her and suppressed a scream. For she instantly knew the stranger was one of the Gypsy tribe. That she seemed to be alone was the only thing that kept Agnes from slamming the door again right in the girl’s face.
“Will the kind lady give me something to eat?” whined the beggar. “I am hungry. I eat nothing all the day.”
Agnes was doubtful of the truth of this. The dark girl did not look ill-fed. But she had an appearance of need just the same; and it was a rule of the Corner House household never to turn a hungry person away.
“Stay there on the mat,” Agnes finally said. “Don’t come in. I will see what I can find for you.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” said the girl.
“Haven’t you had any breakfast?” asked Agnes, moving toward the pantry, and her sympathies becoming excited.
“No, Ma’am. And no supper last night. Nobody give me nothing.”
“Well,” said Agnes, with more warmth, expanding to this tale of woe, as was natural, “I will see what I can find.”
She found a plate heaped with bread and meat and a wedge of cake, which she brought to the screen door. The girl had stood there motionless, only her black eyes roved about the kitchen and seemed to mark everything in it.
“Sit down there on the steps and eat it,” said Agnes, passing the plate through a narrow opening, as she might have handed food into the cage of an animal at a menagerie. She really was half afraid of the girl just because she looked so much like a Gypsy.
The stranger ate as though she was quite as ravenously hungry as she had claimed to be. There could be no doubt that the food disappeared with remarkable celerity. She sat for a moment or two after she had eaten the last crumb with the plate in her lap. Then she rose and brought it timidly to the door.
“Did you have enough?” asked Agnes, feeling less afraid now.
“Oh, yes, Lady! It was so nice,” and the girl flashed her teeth in a beaming smile. She was quite a pretty girl – if she had only been clean and decently dressed.
She handed the plate to Agnes, and then turned and ran out of the yard and down the street as fast as she could run. Agnes stared after her in increased amazement. Why had she run away?
“If she is a Gypsy – Well, they are queer people, that is sure. Oh! What is this?”
Her fingers had found something on the under side of the plate. She turned it up and saw a soiled piece of paper sticking there. Agnes, wondering, if no longer alarmed, drew the paper from the plate, turned it over, and saw that some words were scrawled in blue pencil on the paper.
“Goodness me! More mysteries!” gasped the Corner House girl.
Briefly and plainly the message read: Do not give the bracelet to Miguel. He is a thief.
Agnes sat down and stared almost breathlessly at the paper. That it was a threatening command from one crowd of Gypsies or the other, she was sure. But whether it was from Big Jim’s crowd or from Costello, the junkman, she did not know.
Her first thought, after she had digested the matter for a few moments, was to run with the paper to Mrs. McCall. But Mrs. McCall was not at all sympathetic about this bracelet matter. She was only angry with the Gypsies, and, perhaps, a little angry with Agnes for having unwittingly added to the trouble by putting the advertisement in the paper.
Neale, after all, could be her only confident; and, making sure that no other dark-visaged person was in sight about the house, the girl ran down the long yard beyond the garden to the stable and Billy Bumps’ quarters, and there climbed the board fence that separated the Kenway yard from that of Con Murphy, the cobbler.
“Hoo, hoo! Hoo, hoo!” Agnes called, looking over the top rail of the fence.
“Hoo, hoo, yerself!” croaked a voice. “I’d have yez know we kape no owls on these premises.”
The bent figure of Mr. Murphy, always busy at his bench, was visible through the back window of his shop.
“Is it that young yahoo called Neale O’Neil that yez want, Miss Aggie?” added the smiling cobbler. “If so – ”
But Neale O’Neil appeared just then to answer to the summons of his girl friend. He had been to the store, and he tumbled all his packages on Con’s bench to run out into the yard to greet Agnes.
“What’s happened now?” he cried, seeing in the girl’s face that something out of the ordinary troubled her.
“Oh, Neale! what do you think?” she gasped. “There’s been another of them at the house.”
“Not one of those Gypsies?”
“I believe she was.”
“Oh! A she!” said the boy, much relieved. “Well, she didn’t bite you, of course?”
“Come here and look at this,” commanded his friend.
Neale went to the fence, climbed up and took the paper that Agnes had found stuck to the plate on which she had placed the food for the Gypsy girl. When he had read the abrupt and unsigned message, Neale began to grow excited, too.
“Where did you get this?”
Agnes told him about it. Of course, the hungry girl had been a messenger from one party of Gypsies or the other. Which? was Agnes’ eager question.
“Guess I can answer that,” Neale said gravely. “It does look as though things were getting complicated. I bet this girl you fed is one of Big Jim’s bunch.”
“How can you be so positive?”
“There are probably only two parties of Gypsies fighting over the possession of that old bracelet. Now, I learned down there in that junk neighborhood that Costello – the Costello who is bothering us – is called Miguel. They are all Costellos – Big Jim’s crowd and all. June Wildwood says so. They distinguish our junkman from themselves by calling him by his first name. Therefore – ”
“Oh, of course I see,” sighed Agnes. “It is a terrible mess, Neale! I do wish Mr. Howbridge would get back. Or that the police would find that junkman and shut him up. Or – or that Ruthie would come home!”
“Oh, don’t be a baby, Aggie!” ejaculated Neale.
“Who is the baby, I want to know?” flashed back the girl. “I’m not!”
“Then pluck up your spirits and don’t turn on the sprinkler,” said the slangy youth. “Why, this is nothing to cry about. When it is all over we shall be looking back at the mystery as something great in our young lives.”
“You can try to laugh if you want to,” snapped Agnes. “But being haunted by a junkman, and getting notes from Gypsies like that! Huh! who wouldn’t be scared? Why, we don’t know what those people might do to us if we give up the bracelet to the wrong person.”
“It doesn’t belong to any of the Gypsies, perhaps.”
“That is exactly it!” she cried. “Maybe, after all, it is the property of Miss Ann Titus’ friend, Sarah.”
“And was lost somewhere on Willow Street – about where your garage now stands – forty years ago!” scoffed Neale. “Well, you are pretty soft, Agnes Kenway.”
This naturally angered the girl, and she pouted and got down from the fence without replying. As she went back up the yard she saw Mrs. Pinkney, with her head tied up with a towel, shaking a dustcloth at one of her front windows. It at least changed the current of the girl’s thought.
“Oh, Mrs. Pinkney!” she cried, running across the street to speak to Sammy’s mother, “have you heard anything?”
“About Sammy? Not a word,” answered the woman. “I have to keep working all the time, Agnes Kenway, or I should go insane. I know I should! I have cleaned this whole house, from attic to cellar, three times since Sammy ran away.”
“Why, Mrs. Pinkney! If you don’t go insane – and I don’t believe you will – I am sure you will overwork and be ill.”
“I must keep doing. I must keep going. If I sit down to think I imagine the most horrible things happening to the dear child. It is awful!”
Agnes knew that never before had the woman been so much disturbed by her boy’s absences from home. It seemed as though she really had lost control of herself, and the Corner House girl was quite worried over Mrs. Pinkney.
“If we could only help you and Mr. Pinkney,” said Agnes doubtfully. “Do you suppose it would do any good to go off in the car again – Neale and me and your husband – to look for Sammy?”
“Mr. Pinkney is so tied down by his business that he cannot go just now,” she sighed. “And he has put the search into the hands of an agency. I did not want the police to get after Sammy. But what could we do? And they say there are Gypsies around.”
“Oh!” gasped Agnes. “Do you suppose – ?”
“You never can tell what those people will do. I am told they have stolen children.”
“Isn’t that more talk than anything else?” asked Agnes, trying to speak quite casually.
“I don’t know. One of my neighbors tells me she hears that there is a big encampment of Gypsies out on the Buckshot Road. You know, out beyond the Poole farm. They have autovans instead of horses, so they say, and maybe could carry any children they stole out of the state in a very short time.”
“Oh, dear me, Mrs. Pinkney! I would not think of such things,” Agnes urged. “It does not sound reasonable.”
“That the Gypsies should travel by auto instead of behind horse?” rejoined Sammy’s mother. “Why not? Everybody else is using automobiles for transportation. I tell Mr. Pinkney that if we had a machine perhaps Sammy might not have been so eager to leave home.”
“Oh, dear, me!” thought Agnes, as she made her way home again, “I am sorry for Mr. Pinkney. Just now I guess he is having a hard time at home as well as at business!”
But she treasured up what she had heard about the Gypsy encampment on the Buckshot Road to tell Neale – when she should not be so “put-out” with him. The Buckshot Road was in an entirely different direction from Milton than that they had followed in their automobile on the memorable search for Sammy. Agnes did not suppose for a moment that the missing boy had gone with the Gypsies.
CHAPTER XXI – TESS AND DOT TAKE A HAND
Up to this time Tess and Dot Kenway had heard nothing about the Gypsy junkman haunting the house at night, or about other threatening things connected with the wonderful silver bracelet.
Their young minds were quite as excited about the ornament as in the beginning, however; for in the first place they had to keep run exactly of whose turn it was to “wear” the Gypsies’ gift.
“I don’t see what we’ll do about it when Alice grows up,” Dot said. She was always looking forward in imagination to the time when her favorite doll should become adult. “She will want to wear that belt, Tess, for evening dress. You know, a lady’s jewelry should belong to her.”
“I’m not going to give up my share to your Alice-doll,” announced Tess, quite firmly for her. “And, anyway, you must not be so sure that it is going to be ours all the time. See! Aggie says we can’t take it out of the house to play with.”
“I don’t care!” whined Dot. “I don’t want to give it back to those Gypsy ladies.”
“Neither do I. But we must of course, if we can find them. Honest is honest.”
“It – it’s awful uncomfortable to be so dreadful’ honest,” blurted out the smaller girl. “And I think they meant us to have the bracelet.”
“All right, then. It’s only polite to offer it back to them. Then if they don’t want it we’ll know that it is ours and even Ruth won’t say anything.”
“But – but when my Alice-doll grows up – ”
“Now, don’t be a little piggie, Dot Kenway!” exclaimed Tess, rather crossly. “When your wrist gets big enough so the bracelet won’t slip over your hand so easy, you will want to wear it yourself – just as I do. And Agnes wants it, too.”
“Oh! But it’s ours – if it isn’t the Gypsy ladies’,” Dot hastened to say.
Two claimants for the ornament were quite enough. She did not wish to hear of any other people desiring to wear it.
As it chanced, Tess and Dot heard about the Gypsy encampment on the Buckshot Road through the tongue of neighborhood gossip, quite as had Sammy’s mother. Margaret and Holly Pease heard the store man tell their mother; and having enviously eyed the silver bracelet in the possession of the Kenway girls, they ran to tell the latter about the Gypsies.
“They’ve come back,” declared Margaret decidedly, “to look for that bracelet you’ve got. You’ll see them soon enough.”
“Oh, Margie! do you think so?” murmured Tess, while Dot was immediately so horror-stricken that tears came to her eyes.
“Maybe they will bring the police and have you locked up,” continued the cheerful Pease child. “You know they might accuse you of stealing the bracelet.”
“We never!” wailed Dot. “We never! They gave it to us!”
“Well, they are going to take it back, so now!” Margaret Pease declared.
“I don’t think it is nice of you to say what you do, Margie,” said Tess. “Everybody knows we are honest. Why! if Dot and I knew how to find them, we would take the bracelet right to the Gypsy ladies. Wouldn’t we, Dot?”
“But – but we don’t know where to find them,” blurted out the youngest Corner House girl.
“You can find them I guess – out on the Buckshot Road.”
“We don’t know that our Gypsy ladies are there,” said Tess, with some defiance.
“You don’t dare go to see,” said Margaret Pease.
It was a question to trouble the minds of Tess and Dot. Should they try to find the Gypsies, and see if the very ladies who had given them the bracelet were in that encampment?
At least it was a leading question in Tess Kenway’s mind. It must be confessed that Dot only hoped it would prove a false alarm. She was very grateful to the strange Gypsy women for having put the silver ornament in the green and yellow basket; but she hoped never to see those two kind women again!
The uncertainty was so great in both of the small girls’ minds that they said nothing at all about it in the hearing of any other member of the family. Had Ruth been at home they might have confided in her. They had always confided everything to their eldest sister. But just now the two smaller Corner House girls were living their own lives, very much shut away from the existence Agnes, for instance, was leading.
Agnes had a secret – several of them, indeed. She did not take Tess and Dot into her confidence. So, if for no other reason, the smaller girls did not talk to Agnes about the Gypsies.
The Kenways owned some tenement property in a much poorer part of the town than that prominent corner on which the Corner House stood. Early in their coming to Milton from Bloomsburg, the Corner House girls had become acquainted with the humble tenants whose rents helped swell the funds which Mr. Howbridge cared for and administered.
Some of these poorer people, especially the children near their own age, interested the Kenway girls very much because they met these poorer children in school. So when news was brought to Agnes one afternoon (it was soon after lunch) that Maria Maroni, whose father kept the coal, wood, ice and vegetable cellar in one of the Stower houses and who possessed a wife and big family of children as well, had been taken ill, Agnes was much disturbed.
Agnes liked Maria Maroni. Maria was very bright and forward in her studies and was a pretty Italian girl, as well. The Maronis lived much better than they once had, too. They now occupied one of the upstairs tenements over Mrs. Kranz’s delicatessen store, instead of all living in the basement.
The boy who ran into the Kenway yard and told Agnes this while she was tying up the gladioli stems after a particularly hard night’s rain, did not seem to be an Italian. Indeed, he was no boy that Agnes ever remembered having seen before.
But tenants were changing all the time over there where Maria lived. This might be a new boy in that neighborhood. And, anyway, Agnes was not bothered in her mind much about the boy. It was Maria’s illness that troubled her.
“What is the matter with the poor girl?” Agnes wanted to know. “What does the doctor say it is?”
“They ain’t got no doc,” said the boy. “She’s just sick, Maria is. I don’t know what she’s got besides.”
This sounded bad enough to Agnes. And the fact that the sick girl had no medical attention was the greater urge for the Kenway girl to do something about it. Of course, Joe and his wife must have a doctor for Maria at once.
Agnes went into the house and told Mrs. McCall about it. She even borrowed the green and yellow basket from the little girls and packed some jelly and a bowl of broth and other nice things to take to Maria Maroni. The Kenways seldom went to the tenements empty-handed.
She would have taken Neale with her, only she felt that after their incipient “quarrel” of the previous morning she did not care immediately to make up with the boy. Sometimes she felt that Neale O’Neil took advantage of her easy disposition.
So Agnes went off alone with her basket. Half an hour later a boy rang the front door bell of the Corner House. He had a note for Mrs. McCall. It was written in blue pencil, and while the housekeeper was finding her reading glasses the messenger ran away so that she could not question him.
The note purported to be from Hedden, Mr. Howbridge’s butler. It said that the lawyer had been “brought home” and had asked for Mrs. McCall to be sent for. It urged expedition in her answer to the request, and it threw Mrs. McCall into “quite a flutter” as she told Linda and Aunt Sarah Maltby.
“The puir mon!” wailed the Scotch woman who before she came to the old Corner House to care for the Kenway household had been housekeeper for Mr. Howbridge himself for many years. “There is something sad happened to him, nae doot. I must go awa’ wi’ me at aince. See to the bairns, Miss Maltby, that’s the good soul. Even Agnes is not in the hoose.”
“Of course I will see to them – if it becomes necessary,” said Aunt Sarah.
Her idea of attending to the younger children, however, was to remain in her own room knitting, only occasionally going to the head of the back stairs to ask Linda if Tess and Dot were all right. The Finnish girl’s answer was always “Shure, Mum,” and in her opinion Tess and Dot were all right as long as she did not see that they were in trouble.
To tell the truth, Linda saw the smaller girls very little after Mrs. McCall hurried out of the house to take the street car for the lawyer’s residence. Once Linda observed Tess and Dot in the side yard talking to a boy through the pickets. She had no idea that the sharp-featured boy was the same who had brought the news of Maria Maroni’s illness to Agnes, and the message from Hedden to Mrs. McCall!
The boy in question had come slowly along the pavement on Willow Street, muttering to himself as he approached as though saying over several sentences that he had learned by rote. He was quite evidently a keen-minded boy, but he was not at all a trustworthy looking one.
Tess and Dot both saw him, and that he was a stranger made the little girls eye him curiously. When he hailed them they were not quite sure whether they ought to reply or not.
“I guess you don’t know us,” Tess said doubtfully. “You don’t belong in this neighborhood.”
“I know you all right,” said the boy. “You’re the two girls those women sold the basket to. I know you.”
“Oh!” gasped Tess.
“The Gypsy ladies!” murmured Dot.
“That’s the one. They sold you the basket for forty-five cents. Didn’t they?”
“Yes,” admitted Tess.
“And it’s ours,” cried Dot. “We paid for it.”
“That’s all right,” said the boy slowly. “But you didn’t buy what was in it. No, sir! They want it back.”
“Oh! The basket?” cried Tess.
“What you found in it.”
The boy seemed very sure of what he was saying, but he spoke slowly.
“They want that silver thing back. It wasn’t meant for you. It was a mistake. You know very well it isn’t yours. If you are honest – and you told them you were – you will bring it back to them.”
“Oh! They did ask us if we were honest,” Tess said faintly. “And of course we are. Aren’t we, Dot?”
“Why – why – Do we have to be so dreadful’ honest,” whispered the smallest Corner House girl, quite borne down with woe.
“Of course we have. Just think of what Ruthie would say,” murmured Tess. Then to the boy: “Where are those ladies?”
“Huh?” he asked. “What ladies?”
“The Gypsy ladies we bought the basket from?”
“Oh, them?” he rejoined hurriedly, glancing along the street with eagerness. “You go right out along this street,” and he pointed in the direction from which he had come. “You keep on walking until you reach the brick-yard.”
“Oh! Are they camped there?” asked Tess.
“No. But a man with an automobile will meet you there. He is a man who will take you right to the Gypsy camp and bring you back again. Don’t be afraid, kids. It’s all right.”
He went away then, and the little girls could not call him back. They wanted to ask further questions; but it was evident that the boy had delivered his message and was not to be cross-examined.
“What shall we do?” Tess exclaimed.
“Oh, let’s wait. Let’s wait till Ruth comes home,” cried Dot, saying something very sensible indeed.
But responsibility weighed heavily on Tess’s mind. She considered that if the Gypsy women wished their bracelet returned, it was her duty to take it to them without delay. Besides, there was the man in the automobile waiting for them.
Why the man had not come to the house with the car, or why he had not brought the two Gypsy women to the Corner House, were queries that did not occur to the little girls. If Tess Kenway was nothing else, she was strictly honest.
“No,” she sighed, “we cannot wait. We must go and see the women now. I will go in and get the bracelet, Dot. Do you want your hat? Mrs. McCall and Agnes are both away. We will have to go right over and tend to this ourselves.”