initial commit of ebook 14546HEADmain

1 files changed, 5728 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/14546-8.txt b/old/14546-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..247ac96
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/14546-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5728 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp, by Alice B.
+Emerson
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp
+
+Author: Alice B. Emerson
+
+Release Date: December 31, 2004  [eBook #14546]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BETTY GORDON AT MOUNTAIN CAMP***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+BETTY GORDON AT MOUNTAIN CAMP
+
+Or, The Mystery of Ida Bellethorne
+
+by
+
+ALICE B. EMERSON
+
+Author of _Betty Gordon at Bramble Farm_, _Betty Gordon at Boarding
+School_, "Ruth Fielding Series," etc.
+
+Illustrated
+
+New York
+Cupples & Leon Company
+Publishers
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Books for Girls
+By ALICE B. EMERSON
+12mo. Cloth. Illustrated
+
+BETTY GORDON SERIES
+
+    BETTY GORDON AT BRAMBLE FARM
+    BETTY GORDON IN WASHINGTON
+    BETTY GORDON IN THE LAND OF OIL
+    BETTY GORDON AT BOARDING SCHOOL
+    BETTY GORDON AT MOUNTAIN CAMP
+
+RUTH FIELDING SERIES
+
+    RUTH FIELDING OF THE RED MILL
+    RUTH FIELDING AT BRIARWOOD HALL
+    RUTH FIELDING AT SNOW CAMP
+    RUTH FIELDING AT LIGHTHOUSE POINT
+    RUTH FIELDING AT SILVER RANCH
+    RUTH FIELDING ON CLIFF ISLAND
+    RUTH FIELDING AT SUNRISE FARM
+    RUTH FIELDING AND THE GYPSIES
+    RUTH FIELDING IN MOVING PICTURES
+    RUTH FIELDING DOWN IN DIXIE
+    RUTH FIELDING AT COLLEGE
+    RUTH FIELDING IN THE SADDLE
+    RUTH FIELDING IN THE RED CROSS
+    RUTH FIELDING AT THE WAR FRONT
+    RUTH FIELDING HOMEWARD BOUND
+    RUTH FIELDING DOWN EAST
+    RUTH FIELDING IN THE GREAT NORTH-WEST
+    RUTH FIELDING ON THE ST. LAWRENCE
+
+Cupples & Leon Co., Publishers, New York
+1922
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: THE WHOLE PARTY TURNED OUT GAILY.
+"Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp."]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+    CHAPTER
+
+        I  THE ORANGE SILK OVER-BLOUSE
+
+       II  THE FRUITS OF TANTALUS
+
+      III  OFF FOR A GALLOP
+
+       IV  A SECOND IDA BELLETHORNE
+
+        V  MEASLES
+
+       VI  A DISAPPEARANCE
+
+      VII  ALL MRS. STAPLES COULD SAY
+
+     VIII  UNCLE DICK MUST BE TOLD
+
+       IX  THE LIVE WIRE OCTETTE
+
+        X  BEAUTIFUL SNOW
+
+       XI  STALLED, AND WITHOUT A DOCTOR
+
+      XII  THE TUNNEL
+
+     XIII  AN ALARM
+
+      XIV  THE MOUNTAIN HUT
+
+       XV  THE LOST GIRL
+
+      XVI  THE CAMP ON THE OVERLOOK
+
+     XVII  OFF ON SNOWSHOES
+
+    XVIII  GREAT EXCITEMENT
+
+      XIX  THE EMERGENCY
+
+       XX  BETTY'S RIDE
+
+      XXI  BETTY COMES THROUGH
+
+     XXII  ON THE BRINK OF DISCOVERY
+
+    XXIII  CAN IT BE DONE?
+
+     XXIV  TWENTY MILES OF GRADE
+
+      XXV  ON THE DECK OF THE SAN SALVADOR
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE ORANGE SILK OVER-BLOUSE
+
+
+"This doesn't look like the street I came up through!" exclaimed Betty
+Gordon. "These funny streets, with their dear old-fashioned houses, all
+seem, so much alike! And if there are any names stuck up at the corners
+they must hide around behind the post when I come by like squirrels in the
+woods.
+
+"I declare, there is a queer little shop stuck right in there between two
+of those refined-looking, if poverty-stricken, boarding-houses. Dear me!
+how many come-down-in-the-world families have to take 'paying guests' to
+help out. Not like the Peabodys, but really needy people. What is it Bobby
+calls 'em? 'P.G.s'--'paying guests.'
+
+"I was a paying guest at Bramble Farm," ruminated Betty, still staring at
+the little shop and the houses that flanked it on either side. "And I
+certainly had a hard time there. Bobby says that these people in
+Georgetown are the remains of Southern aristocracy that were cast up on
+this beach as long ago as the Civil War. Unlike the castaways on cannibal
+islands that we read about, Bobby says these castaways live off the
+'P.G.s'--and that's what Joseph Peabody tried to do! He tried to live off
+me. There! I knew he was a cannibal.
+
+"Oh! Isn't that sweet?"
+
+Her sudden cry had no reference to the army of boarding-house keepers in
+the neighborhood, nor to any signpost that pointed the way back to the
+little square where the soldiers' monument stood and where Betty was to
+meet Carter, the Littells' chauffeur, and the big limousine. For she was
+still staring at the window of the little shop.
+
+"What a lovely orange color! And that starburst pattern on the front! It's
+lovely! What a surprising thing to see in a little neighborhood store like
+this. I'm going to buy it if it fits me and I've money enough left in my
+purse."
+
+Impetuous as usual, Betty Gordon marched at once to the door of the little
+side-street shop. The most famous of such neighborhood shops, as described
+by Hawthorne, Betty knew all about. She had studied it in her English
+readings at Shadyside only the previous term. But there was no
+Gingerbread Man in this shop window!
+
+In the middle of the display window, which was divided into four not very
+large panes, was arranged on a cross of bright metal a knitted over-blouse
+of the very newest burnt orange shade. The work was exquisitely done, as
+Betty could see even from outside the shop, and she did hope it would fit
+her.
+
+On pushing open the door a silvery bell--not an annoying, jangling
+bell--played a very lively tune to attract the attention of a girl who sat
+at the back of the shop, her head bent close above the work on which she
+was engaged. Although the bell stopped quivering when Betty closed the
+door, the girl did not look up from her work.
+
+Sharp-eyed Betty saw that the stranger was knitting, and she seemed to be
+engaged upon another over-blouse like that in the window, save that the
+silk in her lap was of a pretty dark blue shade. Betty saw her full, red
+lips move placidly. The girl was counting over her work and she actually
+was so deeply immersed in the knitting that she had not heard the bell or
+realized that a possible customer had entered.
+
+"Ahem!" coughed Betty.
+
+"And that's twenty-four, and--cross--and two--and four----" The girl was
+counting aloud.
+
+"Why," murmured Betty Gordon, her eyes dancing, "she's like Libbie
+Littell when she is somnambulating--I guess that is the right word.
+Anyway, when Libbie walks in her sleep she talks just like that----
+
+"_Ahem!_"
+
+This time Betty almost shouted the announcement of her presence in the
+shop and finally startled the other girl out of her abstraction. The
+latter looked up, winked her eyes very fast, and began to roll up her work
+in a clean towel. Betty noticed that her eyes were very blue and were
+shaded by dark lashes.
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the shopgirl. "Have you been waiting long?" She
+came forward quickly and with an air of assurance. Her look was not a
+happy one, however, and Betty wondered at her sadness. "What can I show
+you?" asked the shopgirl.
+
+She was not much older than Betty herself, but she was more self-possessed
+and seemed much more experienced than even Betty, much as the latter had
+traveled and varied as her adventures had been during the previous year
+and a half. But now the stranger's questions brought Betty to a renewed
+comprehension of what she had actually entered the shop for.
+
+"I'm just crazy about that blouse in the window--the orange one," she
+cried. "I know you must have made it yourself, for you are knitting
+another, I see, and that is going to be pretty, too. But I want this
+orange one--if it doesn't cost too much."
+
+"The price is twelve dollars. I hope it is not too much," said the
+shopgirl timidly. "I sold one for all of that before I left Liverpool."
+
+Betty was as much interested now in the other girl as she was in the
+orange silk over-blouse.
+
+"Why!" she exclaimed, "you are English, aren't you? And you and your
+family can't long have been over here."
+
+"I have been here only two months," said the girl quietly.
+
+There was a certain dignity in her manner that impressed Betty. She had
+very dark, smoothly arranged hair and a beautiful complexion. She was
+plump and strongly made, and she walked gracefully. Betty had noted that
+fact when she came forward from the back of the shop.
+
+"But you didn't come over from England all alone?" asked the curious young
+customer, neglecting the blouse for her interest in the girl who spread
+out its gossamer body for approval.
+
+"It took only seven days from Liverpool to New York," said the other girl,
+looking at Betty steadily, still with that lack of animation in her face.
+"I might have come alone; but it was better for me to travel with
+somebody, owing to the emigration laws of your country. I traveled as
+nursemaid to a family of Americans. But I separated from them in New York
+and came here."
+
+"Oh!" Betty exclaimed, not meaning to be impertinent. "You had friends
+here in Georgetown?"
+
+"I thought I had a relative in Washington. I had heard so. I failed to
+find her so--so I found this shop, kept by a woman who came from my
+county, and she gave me a chance to wait shop," said the English girl
+wearily.
+
+"Mrs. Staples lets me knit these blouses to help out, for she cannot pay
+large wages. The trade isn't much, you see. This one, I am sure, will look
+lovely on you. I hope the price is not too much?"
+
+"Not a bit, if it will fit me and I have that much money in my purse,"
+replied Betty, who for a girl of her age had a good deal of money to spend
+quite as she pleased.
+
+She opened her bag hastily and took out her purse. The purse was made of
+cut steel beads and, as Betty often said, "everything stuck to it!"
+Something clung to it now as she drew it forth, but neither Betty nor the
+shopgirl saw the dangling twist of tissue paper.
+
+"And I'll buy that other one you are knitting," Betty hurried to say as
+she shook the purse and dug into it for the silver as well as the bills
+she had left after her morning's shopping. "I know that pretty blue will
+just look dear on a friend of mine."
+
+She was busy with her money, and the English girl looked on hopefully. So
+neither saw the twist of tissue paper fly off the dangling fringe of beads
+and land with a soft little "plump" on the floor by the counter.
+
+"Dear me!" breathed the shopgirl, in reply to Betty's promise, "I shall
+like that. It will help a good bit--and everything so high in this
+country. A dollar, as you say, goes hardly anywhere! And this one will fit
+you beautifully. You can see yourself."
+
+"Of course it will. Do it up at once," cried the excited Betty. "Here is
+the money. Twelve dollars. I was afraid I didn't have enough. And be sure
+and keep that blue one for my friend. Maybe she will come for it herself,
+so give me a card or something so she can find the place. Shall she ask
+for you?"
+
+"If you please," and the English girl ran to write a card. She brought it
+back with the neatly made parcel of the over-blouse and slipped it into
+Betty Gordon's hand. The latter thanked her and looked swiftly at the name
+the other had written.
+
+"Good-bye, Ida Bellethorne," she said, smiling. "What a fine name! I hope
+I can sell some more blouses for you. I'll try."
+
+The shopgirl made a little bow and the silvery bell jangled again as Betty
+opened the door. Betty looked back at the English girl, and the latter
+looked after Betty. They were both interested, much interested, the one in
+the other, and for reasons that neither suspected. Ida Bellethorne was not
+much like the girls Betty knew. She seemed even more sedate than the
+seniors at Shadyside where Betty had attended school with the Littell
+girls since the term had opened in September.
+
+Ida Bellethorne was not, however, in any such happy condition as the girls
+Betty Gordon knew. She might have told the warm-hearted customer who had
+bought the over-blouse a story that would indeed have spurred Betty's
+interest to an even greater degree. But the English girl was naturally of
+a secretive disposition, and she was among strangers.
+
+She turned back into the store when Betty had gone and the door, swinging
+shut, set the bell above it jingling again. A door opened at the end of
+the room and a tall, aggressive woman in a long, straight, gingham frock
+strode into the room. She had very black, heavy brows that met over her
+nose and this, with the thick spectacles she wore, gave her a very stern
+expression.
+
+"What's the matter with that bell, Ida?" she demanded, in a sharp voice.
+"It seems to ring enough, but it doesn't ring any money into my
+cash-drawer as I can see."
+
+"I sold my over-blouse out of the window, Mrs. Staples," said the girl.
+
+"Humph! What else?"
+
+"Er--what else? Why--why, she said she might come back for the one I am
+making."
+
+"Humph!" ejaculated Mrs. Staples a second time. "I don't see as that will
+fill my cellar with coal. Couldn't you sell her anything else out of the
+shop?"
+
+"She didn't say she wanted anything else," said Ida timidly.
+
+"Oh! She didn't? You'll never make a sales-woman till you learn to sell
+'em things they don't want but that the shop wants to sell. And I was
+foolish enough to tell you that you could have all you could make out of
+those blouses. Oh, well! I'm always being foolishly generous. Come! What's
+that on the floor? Pick it up."
+
+Mrs. Staples was very near-sighted, yet nothing seemed to escape her
+observation. She pointed to the twist of white tissue paper on the floor
+which had been twitched out of Betty Gordon's bag. Ida stooped as she was
+commanded and got the paper. She was about to toss it into the
+waste-basket behind the counter when she realized that there was some hard
+object wrapped in the paper.
+
+"What is it?" asked Mrs. Staples, in her quick, stern way, as she saw Ida
+open the twist of paper.
+
+"Why, I--Oh, Mrs. Staples! look what this is, will you?"
+
+She held out in the palm of her hand a little, heart-shaped platinum
+locket with a tiny but very beautiful diamond set in the center of its
+face, and when she turned it over on the back was engraved the intertwined
+letters "E.G."
+
+"For the land's sake!" ejaculated Mrs. Staples, coming nearer and grabbing
+the locket out of Ida's hand. "Where did you get this?"
+
+"Why, Mrs. Staples, you saw me pick it up."
+
+"But how did it come there?"
+
+"Oh, I know!" Ida Bellethorne cried, with sudden animation. "That girl
+stood right there. She opened her bag to get out her purse and she must
+have flirted it out to the floor."
+
+"Humph!" said the storekeeper doubtfully.
+
+"Give it to me, Mrs. Staples, and I'll run after her," cried the English
+girl anxiously.
+
+"Humph!" This was Mrs. Staples' stock ejaculation and expressed a variety
+of emotions. Just now it expressed doubt. "And then you'd come back and
+tell me how thankful she was to get it, while maybe it doesn't belong to
+her at all. No," said Mrs. Staples, "let her come looking for it if she
+lost it."
+
+"Oh!" murmured Ida Bellethorne doubtfully.
+
+"Perhaps she will never guess she dropped it here."
+
+"That's no skin off your nose," declared the vulgar shopwoman. "You've no
+rights in this thing, anyway. What's found on the floor of my shop is just
+as much mine as what's on the counter or in the trays behind the counter.
+I know my rights. Until whoever lost this thing comes in and proves
+property, it's mine."
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Staples!" cried her employee. "Is that the law in this country?
+It doesn't seem honest."
+
+"Humph! It's honest enough for me. And who are you, I'd like to know, a
+greenhorn fresh from the old country, trying to tell me what's honest and
+what ain't? If that girl comes back----"
+
+"Yes, Mrs. Staples?"
+
+"You sell her that other blouse if you want to, or anything else out of
+the shop. But you keep your mouth shut about this locket unless she asks
+for it. Understand? I won't have no tattle-tales about me; and if you
+don't learn when to keep your mouth open and when to keep it shut, I'll
+have no use at all for you in my shop. Remember that now!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE FRUITS OF TANTALUS
+
+
+Betty Gordon had glanced hastily at her wrist watch as she went out of the
+little store. It was very near the minute appointed for her to meet Carter
+at the square. And she had forgotten to ask that girl, Ida Bellethorne
+(such an Englishy name!), how to find her rendezvous with the Littells'
+chauffeur.
+
+She hesitated, tempted to run back. Had she done so she would have been in
+time to see Ida pick up the little locket that Uncle Dick had given Betty
+that very Christmas and which she carried in her bag because it seemed the
+safest place to treasure it while she was visiting. Her trunk was at
+Shadyside.
+
+So it is that the very strangest threads of romance are woven in this
+world. And Betty Gordon had found before this that her life, at least, was
+patterned in a very wonderful way. Since she had been left an orphan and
+had found her only living relative, Mr. Richard Gordon, her father's
+brother, such a really delightful guardian the girl had been to so many
+places and her adventures had been so exciting that her head was
+sometimes quite in a whirl when she tried to think of all the happenings.
+
+Uncle Dick's contracts with certain oil promotion companies made it
+impossible as yet for him to have what Betty thought of as "a real,
+sure-enough home." He traveled here, there and everywhere. Betty loved to
+travel too; but Uncle Dick was forced to go to such rough and wild places
+that at first he could not see how Betty, a twelve year old, gently bred
+girl, could go with him.
+
+Therefore he had to find a home for his little ward for a few months, and
+remembering that an old school friend of his was married to the owner of a
+big and beautiful farm, he arranged for Betty to stay with the Peabodys at
+Bramble Farm. Her adventures as a "paying guest" in the Peabody household
+are fully related in the first book of the series, entitled "Betty Gordon
+at Bramble Farm," and a very exciting experience it was.
+
+In spite, however, of the disagreeable and miserly Joseph Peabody, Betty
+would not have missed her adventures at the farm for anything. In the
+first place, she met Bob Henderson there, and a better boy-chum a girl
+never had than Bob. Although Bob had been born and brought up in a
+poorhouse, and at first knew very little about himself and his relatives,
+even a girl like Betty could see that this "poorhouse rat" as he was
+slurringly called by Joseph Peabody, possessed natural refinement and a
+very bright mind.
+
+Betty and Bob became loyal friends, and when Betty, in the second volume,
+called "Betty Gordon in Washington," had fairly to run away from Bramble
+Farm to meet her Uncle Dick in the national capital, badly treated Bob ran
+away likewise, on the track of somebody who knew about his mother's
+relatives. Betty's adventures in Washington began with a most astonishing
+confusion of identities through which she met the Littells--a charming
+family consisting of a Mr. Littell, who was likewise an "Uncle Dick"; a
+motherly Mrs. Littell, who never found young people--either boys or
+girls--troublesome; three delightful sisters named Louise, Roberta, and
+Esther Littell; and a Cousin Elizabeth Littell, who good-naturedly becomes
+"Libbie" instead of "Betty" so as not to conflict in anybody's mind with
+"Betty" Gordon.
+
+The fun they all had in Washington while Betty waited for the appearance
+of her real Uncle Dick, especially after Bob Henderson turned up and was
+likewise adopted for the time being by the Littell family, is detailed to
+the full in that second story. And at last both Betty and Bob got news
+from Oklahoma, where Mr. Richard Gordon was engaged, which set them
+traveling westward in a great hurry--Betty to meet Uncle Dick at Flame
+City and her boy chum hard on the trace of two elusive aunts of his, his
+mother's sisters, who appeared to be the only relatives he had in the
+world.
+
+Betty and Bob discovered the aunts just in time to save them from selling
+their valuable but unsuspected oil holdings to sharpers, and in "Betty
+Gordon in the Land of Oil" one of the most satisfactory results that Betty
+saw accomplished was the selling of the old farm for Bob and his aunts for
+ninety thousand dollars.
+
+Uncle Dick decided that Betty must go to a good school in the fall, and
+they chose Shadyside because the Littells and their friends were going
+there. Bob, now on a satisfactory financial plane, arranged to attend the
+Salsette Military Academy which was right across the lake from the girls'
+boarding school, Uncle Dick, who was now Bob's guardian, having advised
+this.
+
+Hastening back from Oklahoma, while Uncle Dick was called to Canada to
+examine a promising oil field there, Betty and Bob met the girls and boys
+they previously got acquainted with in Washington and some other friends,
+and Betty at least began her boarding school experience with considerable
+confidence as well as delight.
+
+It was not all plain sailing as subsequent events prove; yet in "Betty
+Gordon at Boarding School," the fourth volume of the series, Betty had
+many; pleasant adventures as well as school trials. She was particularly
+interested in the fortunes of Norma and Alice Guerin, who had been Betty's
+friends when she was living at Bramble Farm; and it was through Betty's
+good offices that great happiness came to the Guerin girls and their
+parents.
+
+The hospitable Littells had invited their daughters' school friends (and,
+to quote Bob, there was a raft of them!) to come to Fairfields for the
+Christmas holidays, and at the close of the first term they bade good-bye
+to Shadyside and Salsette and took the train for Washington.
+
+Fairfields, which was over the river in Virginia, was one of the most
+delightful homes Betty Gordon had ever seen. It was closer to Georgetown
+than to the nation's capital, and that is why Betty on this brisk morning
+was shopping in the old-fashioned town and had come across the orange silk
+over-blouse in the window of the neighborhood shop.
+
+It was really too bad that Betty did not run back to the shop to ask for
+directions to the soldiers' monument square. She would have been just in
+season to interrupt the scene between Ida Bellethorne and Mrs. Staples and
+before the latter had threatened Ida with dismissal if she told Betty
+about the tiny locket. When she came to find it out, this loss of Uncle
+Dick's present, was going to trouble Betty Gordon very much.
+
+"Where in the world can that soldiers' monument be?" murmured Betty to
+herself as, after hurrying on for a distance and having turned two
+corners, she found herself in a neighborhood that looked stranger than
+ever to her.
+
+Not a soul was in sight at that moment, but presently she saw a small
+negro boy shuffling along, drawing a piece of chalk on the various houses
+and stoops as he passed.
+
+"Boy, come here!" called Betty to the little fellow.
+
+At once the colored boy stopped the use of his piece of chalk and stared
+at her with wide-open eyes.
+
+"I ain't done nuffin, lady, 'deed I ain't," he mumbled, and then began to
+back away.
+
+"I only want to know where the soldiers' monument is," she returned. "Do
+you know?"
+
+"Soldiers' monument am over that way," and the boy waved his hand to one
+side, where there was a hilly street, and then hurried out of sight.
+
+"Oh, dear! that's not very definite," sighed Betty.
+
+But now she ran down the hilly street at a chance, turned a crooked corner
+and came plump upon the square and the soldiers' monument. There was the
+Littells' big, closed car just turning into the square from another
+street.
+
+"What luck! Fancy!" gasped Betty, running swiftly to the place where the
+big car stopped.
+
+"You're better than prompt, Miss Betty," said the driver of the car. "I am
+glad I hadn't to wait for you, for Mister Bob told me particular to get
+you home for luncheon. You'll be wanted."
+
+"What for? Do tell me what for, Carter!" Betty cried. "I thought Bob
+Henderson was awfully mysterious this morning at breakfast. Do you know
+what is in the wind, Carter?"
+
+"Not me, Miss Betty," said the chauffeur, and having tucked the robes
+about her he shut the door and got into his own place. But before he
+started the car he said through the open window: "I have to delay a
+little, Miss. Must drive around by the bank and pick up Mr. Gordon. But I
+will hurry home after that."
+
+"Oh! Uncle Dick did go to the bank here," murmured Betty, nestling back
+into the cushions and robes. "I wonder if he is going to stop off at
+Mountain Camp on his way back to Canada. Oh!" and she sighed more deeply,
+"if we could only go up there with him----"
+
+The car stopped before the gray stone bank building. Uncle Dick seemed to
+have been on the watch for them, he came out so promptly. Although his
+hair was graying, especially about the temples, Mr. Richard Gordon was by
+no means an old looking man. He lived much out of doors and spent such
+physical energy only as his out-of-door life yielded, instead of living on
+his reserve strength as so many office-confined men do. Betty had learned
+all about that in physics. She was thoroughly an out-of-door girl herself!
+
+"Oh, Uncle Dick!" she cried when he stepped into the car, "are you really
+and truly getting ready to go north again?"
+
+"Must, my dear. Have still some work to do in spite of the ice and snow in
+Canada. And, as I told you, I mean to stop and see Jonathan Canary."
+
+"That is what I mean, Uncle Dick," she cried. "Will you go to that lovely
+Mountain Camp all alo-o-one?"
+
+"Mercy me, child, you never saw it--and in winter! You do not know whether
+it is lovely or not."
+
+"It must be," said Betty warmly, "You have explained it all so beautifully
+to us. The lovely lake surrounded by hills, and the long toboggan slide,
+and the skating, and fishing for pickerel through the ice, and--Oh, dear
+me! if we can't go----"
+
+"If who can't go?" demanded her uncle in considerable amazement.
+
+"Why, me. And Bob. And Bobby Littell and Louise, and the Tucker
+twins, and all the rest. We were talking about it last night.
+It--would--be--won--der--ful!"
+
+"Well, of all the--Why, Betty!" exclaimed Mr. Gordon, "you know you must
+go right back to school."
+
+"Yes, I know," sighed Betty. "It is like the fruits of Tantalus, isn't it?
+We read about him in Greek mythology--poor fellow! He stood up to his chin
+in water and over his head hung the loveliest fruits. But when he stooped
+to get a drink the water receded, and when he stood on tiptoe to reach the
+fruit, they receded too. It was dreadful! And Mountain Camp, where your
+friend Mr. Canary lives, is just like that. Uncle Dick. For us it is the
+fruits of Tantalus."
+
+Uncle Dick stared at her for a moment, then he burst out laughing. But
+Betty Gordon remained perfectly serious until they arrived at Fairfields.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+OFF FOR A GALLOP
+
+
+The crowd at the Littell lunch table (and it was literally a "crowd"
+although the Guerin girls and some of the other over Christmas visitors
+had already gone home) hailed Betty's arrival vociferously.
+
+"How do you stand it?" asked Uncle Dick, smiling at Mrs. Littell who
+presided at one end of the table. "I should think they would drive you
+distracted."
+
+Mrs. Littell laughed jovially and beamed at her young company. "I am only
+distracted when Mr. Littell and I are here alone," she rejoined. "This is
+what keeps us young."
+
+"You've only a shake to eat in, Betty," exclaimed Bobby Littell, who was
+very dark and very gay and very much alive all of the time. "Do hurry.
+We're 'most through."
+
+"Dear me! what can I eat in a shake?" murmured Betty, as the soup was
+placed before her. "And I am hungry."
+
+"A milk-shake should be absorbed in a shake," observed Bob Henderson,
+grinning at her from across the table.
+
+"I need more than that, Bob, after what I have been through this morning.
+Such a job as shopping is! And oh, Bobby! I've got the loveliest thing to
+show you. You'll just squeal!"
+
+"What is it?" cried Bobby, eager and big-eyed at once. "Do hurry your
+luncheon, Betty. We've all got to change, and it's almost time."
+
+"Time for what?" demanded Betty, trying to eat daintily but hurriedly.
+
+But Mrs. Littell called them to order here. "Give Betty time to eat
+properly. Whatever it is, Betty, it can't begin until you are ready."
+
+"I'm through, Mother," said Bobby. "May I be excused? I'll have to help
+Esther, you know. You'd better forget your appetite, Betty," she whispered
+as she passed the latter on her way out of the room. "Time and tide wait
+for no man--or girl either."
+
+"What does she mean?" wondered Betty, and became a little anxious as the
+others began to rise, too, and were excused. "Have we got to change? What
+is it--the movies? Or a party? Of course, it isn't skating? Even if there
+was a little scale of ice last night, it would never in this world bear
+us," added Betty, utterly puzzled.
+
+Bob Henderson had slipped around to her side of the table and leaned over
+her chair back to whisper in Betty's ear:
+
+"You've got to be ready in twenty minutes. The horses won't stand this
+cold weather--not under saddle."
+
+"Saddle! Horses!" gasped Betty Gordon, rising right up from the table with
+the soup spoon in her hand. "I--I don't believe I want any more luncheon,
+Mrs. Littell. Really, I don't need any more. Will you please excuse me?"
+
+"Not if you run away with my spoon, Betty," laughed her hostess. "It was
+the dish that ran away with the spoon, and you are not a dish, dear."
+
+"She'll be dished if she doesn't hurry," called Bob from the door, and
+then he disappeared.
+
+"Sit down and finish your luncheon, Betty," advised Mrs. Littell. "I
+assure you that they will not go without you. The men can walk the horses
+about a little if it is necessary."
+
+"I haven't been in a saddle since I left the land of oil and my own dear
+Clover-pony!" cried Betty later, as she ran upstairs. "I know just where
+my riding habit is. Oh, dear! I hope I have as spirited a horse as dear
+Clover was. Are you all ready, Bobby? And you, too, Louise--and Esther?
+Goodness me! suppose Carter had broken down on the road and hadn't brought
+me back in time----
+
+"Libbie! For goodness' sake don't sit down in that chair. That package has
+got the loveliest orange silk over-blouse in it. Wait till you see it,
+Bobby."
+
+She fairly dragged the plump girl, Libbie, away from the proximity of the
+chair in question and then began to scramble into her riding dress. The
+clatter of hoofs was audible on the drive as she fixed the plain gold pin
+in her smart stock.
+
+"Of course," Betty said with a sigh, "one can't wear a locket, with or
+without a chain, when one is riding. That dear locket Uncle Dick gave me!
+I suppose it is safe enough in my bag. Well, I'm ready."
+
+They all ran down to the veranda to see the mounts. Betty's was a
+beautiful gray horse named Jim that she had seen before in the Fairfields
+stables.
+
+"He's sort of hard-bitted, Miss," said the smiling negro who held the
+bridle and that of Bobby's own pony, a beautiful bay. "But he ain't got a
+bad trick and is as kind as a lamb, Miss."
+
+"Oh, I'm not afraid of him," declared Betty. "You ought to see my Clover.
+All right, Uncle Dick, I'm up!"
+
+They were all mounted and cantering down the drive in a very few minutes.
+Even plump little Libbie sat her steed well, for she had often ridden over
+her own Vermont hills.
+
+"I don't know where we're going, but I'm on my way!" cried Betty, who was
+delighted to be once more in the saddle.
+
+"We're going right across country to Bolter's stock farm," Louise told
+her. "Here's where we turn off. There will be some fences. Can you jump a
+fence, Betty?"
+
+"I can go anywhere this gray horse goes," declared Betty proudly.
+
+But Bob rode up beside her before they came to the first jump. "Look out
+for the icy places, Betsey," he warned her. "None of these horses are
+sharpened. They never have ice enough down here in Virginia to worry
+about, so they say."
+
+Which was true enough on ordinary occasions. But the frost the night
+before had been a hard one and the air was still tingling with it. In the
+shady places the pools remained skimmed over. A gallop over the fields and
+through the woodland paths put both the horses and riders in a glow of
+excitement.
+
+Perhaps Betty was a little careless--at least too confident. Her gray got
+the lead and sped away across some rough ground which bordered a ravine.
+Bob shouted again for her to be careful, and Betty turned and waved her
+hand reassuringly to him.
+
+It was just then that Jim slipped on the edge of the bank. Both of his
+front feet slid on an icy patch and he almost came to his knees. Betty
+saved herself from going over his head by a skillful lunge backward,
+pulling sharply on the reins.
+
+But the horse did not so easily regain his foot-hold. The edge of the bank
+crumbled. Betty did not utter a sound, but the girls behind her screamed
+in unison.
+
+"Stop! Wait! She'll be killed!"
+
+Betty knew that Bob was coming at a thundering pace on his brown mount;
+but the gray horse was on its haunches, sliding down the slope of the
+ravine, snorting as it went. Betty could not stop her horse, but she clung
+manfully to the reins and sat back in her saddle as though glued to it.
+
+Just what would happen when they reached the bottom of the slope was a
+very serious question.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+A SECOND IDA BELLETHORNE
+
+
+The ravine was forty feet deep, and although the path, down which the gray
+horse slid with Betty Gordon on his back, was of sand and gravel only,
+there were some boulders and thick brush at the bottom that threatened
+disaster to both victims of the accident.
+
+Swiftly and more swiftly the frightened horse slid, and the girl had no
+idea what she should do when they came, bumpy-ti-bump to the bottom.
+
+She heard Bob shouting something to her, but she did not immediately
+comprehend what he said. Something, she thought it was, about her
+stirrups. But this was no time or place to look to see if her stirrup
+leathers were the proper length or if her feet were firmly fixed in the
+irons, which both Bob and Uncle Dick had warned her about when first she
+had begun to ride.
+
+Although she dared not look back, Betty knew that Bob had galloped to the
+very edge of the ravine and had now flung himself from his saddle. She
+heard his boots slam into the sliding gravel of the hill. He shouted
+again--that cheery hail that somehow helped Betty to hold on to her fast
+vanishing courage.
+
+"Kick your feet out of the stirrups, Betty!"
+
+What he meant finally seeped into Betty's clouded brain. She realized that
+Bob Henderson, her chum, the boy she had learned to have such confidence
+in, was coming down that bank in mighty strides, prepared to save her if
+it was possible.
+
+The gray horse was struggling and snorting; he was likely to tumble
+sideways at any moment. If he did, and Betty was caught under him----
+
+But she was not caught in any such crushing pressure. It was Bob's arm
+around her waist that squeezed her. She had kicked her feet loose of the
+stirrups, and now Bob, throwing himself backward, tore her out of the
+saddle. He fell upon his back, and Betty, struggling and laughing and
+almost crying, fell on top of him.
+
+"All right, Betty! All right!" gasped Bob. "No need to squeal now."
+
+"Who's squealing?" she demanded. "Let me up, do! Are you hurt, Bob?"
+
+"Only the wind knocked out of me. Woof! You all right?"
+
+"Oh, my dear!" shrieked Bobby at the top of the bank. "Are you killed,
+Betty?"
+
+"Only half killed," gasped Betty. "Don't worry. Spread the news. Elizabeth
+Gordon, Miss Sharpe's prize Latin scholar, will yet return to Shadyside
+to make glad the heart of----"
+
+"She's all right," broke in Tommy Tucker, having dismounted and looking
+over the brink of the bank. "She's trying to be funny. Her neck isn't
+broken."
+
+"I declare, Tommy!" cried Louise Littell admonishingly, "you sound as
+though you rather thought her poor little neck ought to be dislocated."
+
+"Cheese!" gasped Teddy, Tommy's twin. "You got that word out of a book,
+Louise--you know you did."
+
+"So I did; out of the dictionary. There are a lot more of them there, if
+you want to know," and Louise laughed.
+
+"Oh!" at this point rose a yearning cry. "Oh!" I just think he is too dear
+for anything!"
+
+"Cracky! What's broke loose now?" demanded Tommy Tucker, jerking back his
+head to stare all around at the group on the brink of the high bank.
+
+"Who is too expensive, Libbie?" asked Bobby, glancing at her cousin with a
+look of annoyance displayed in her features.
+
+"Robert Henderson. He is a hero!" gasped the plump girl.
+
+"I know that hero has torn his coat," Louise said, still gazing down into
+the ravine.
+
+Of course Bob had played a heroic part; but the rest of those present
+would have considered it almost indecent to speak of it as Libbie did. She
+continued to clasp her hands and gaze soulfully into the ravine. Bob,
+having made sure that Betty was all right, had gone down to the bottom of
+the slope and helped the gray horse to its feet. The animal was more
+frightened than hurt, although its legs were scratched some and it favored
+one fore foot when Bob walked it about.
+
+"Dear me!" cried Betty, coming closer. "Poor old Jim! Is he hurt much,
+Bob?"
+
+"I don't believe so," her friend replied.
+
+"Can we get him up the bank?"
+
+"I won't try that if there is any outlet to this ravine--and there must
+be, of course. Say! do you hear that silly girl?"
+
+"Who? Libbie?" Betty began to giggle. "She is going to make a hero of you,
+Bob, whether you want to be or not. And you are----"
+
+"Now, don't you begin," growled Bob.
+
+"I never saw such a modest fellow," laughed Betty, giving his free hand a
+little squeeze.
+
+"Huh! Libbie will want to put a laurel wreath on my brow if I climb up
+there. See! There is a bunch of laurels right over there--those
+glossy-leaved, runty sort of trees. Not for me! I am going to lead Jim out
+ahead, and you climb up, if you want to, and come along with the rest of
+the bunch. Ride my horse, if you will, Betty."
+
+"So you'd run away from a girl!" scoffed Betty, but laughing. "You are no
+hero, Bob Henderson."
+
+"Sure I'm not," he agreed cheerfully. "And I'd run away from a girl like
+Libbie any day. I wonder how Timothy Derby stands for her. But he's almost
+as mushy as a soft pumpkin!"
+
+With this disrespectful observation Bob started off with the gray horse
+and Betty scrambled up the bank down which she had plunged so heedlessly.
+
+Bobby was one of those who had dismounted at the brink of the ravine, and
+she held out a brown hand to Betty as the latter scrambled up the last
+yard or two of the steep bank and helped her to a secure footing.
+
+"Are you all right, Betty dear?" she cried.
+
+"No. One side of me is left," laughed Betty. "Wasn't that some slide?"
+
+"Now, don't try to make out that you did it on purpose!" exclaimed Esther,
+the youngest Littell sister.
+
+"It was too lovely for anything," sighed Libbie.
+
+"I'm glad you think so," said Betty. "Oh! you mean what Bob did. I see. Of
+course he is lovely--always has been. But don't tell him so, for it
+utterly spoils boys if you praise them--doesn't it Bobby?"
+
+"Of course it does," agreed Betty's particular chum, whose real name,
+Roberta, was seldom used even by her parents.
+
+"I like that!" chorused the Tucker twins. "Wait till we tell Bob, Betty,"
+added Tommy Tucker, shaking his head.
+
+"If you try to slide downhill on horseback again, we'll all just let you
+slide to the very bottom," said Teddy.
+
+"Don't fret," returned Betty gaily. "I don't intend to take another such
+slide----"
+
+"Not even if your Uncle Dick takes you up to Mountain Camp?" asked Bobby.
+"There's fine tobogganing up there, he says. Mmmm!"
+
+"Don't talk about it!" wailed Betty. "You know we can't go, for school
+begins next week and Uncle Dick won't hear to anything breaking in on my
+schooling."
+
+"Not even measles?" suggested Tommy Tucker solemnly. "Two of the fellows
+were quarantined with it when we left Salsette," he added.
+
+"Oh! don't speak of such a horrid thing," gasped Libbie, who did not
+consider measles in the least romantic. "You get all speckled like--like a
+zebra if you have 'em."
+
+The twins uttered a concerted shout and almost rolled out of their saddles
+into which they had again mounted after assisting the girls, Betty being
+astride Bob's horse.
+
+"Speckled like a zebra is good!" Bobby Littell said laughingly to her
+plump cousin. "I suppose you think a barber's pole is speckled, Libbie?"
+
+These observations attracted the deluded Libbie sufficiently from her
+hero-worship, so that when Bob Henderson came up out of the ravine to join
+them a mile beyond the scene of the accident, he was perfectly safe from
+Libbie's romantic consideration.
+
+The boy and girl friends were then in a deep discussion of the chances,
+pro and con, of Betty's Uncle Dick taking her with him to Mountain Camp
+despite the imminent opening of the term at Shadyside.
+
+"Of course there is scarcely a possibility of his doing so," Betty said
+finally with hopeless mien. "Mr. Canary--Uncle Dick's friend is named
+Jonathan Canary, isn't that a funny name?" she interrupted herself to ask.
+
+"He's a bird," declared Teddy Tucker solemnly.
+
+"Nothing romantic sounding about that name," his brother said, with a look
+at Libbie. "'Jonathan Canary'--no poetry in that."
+
+"He, he!" chuckled Ted wickedly. "Talking about poetry----"
+
+"But we weren't!" said Bobby Littell. "We were talking about going to
+Mountain Camp in the Adirondacks. Think of it--in the dead of winter!"
+
+"Talking about poetry," steadily pursued Teddy Tucker. "You know Timothy
+Derby is always gushing."
+
+"A 'gusher,'" interposed Betty primly, "is an oil well that comes in with
+a bang."
+
+"Don't you mean it comes out with a bang?" teased Louise.
+
+"In or out, Betty and I have seen 'em gush all right," cried Bob, as they
+cantered on together along a well-defined bridle-path.
+
+"Say! I'm telling you something," exploded Teddy Tucker, who did not
+purpose to have his tale lost sight of. "Something about Timothy Derby."
+
+"Oh, dear me, yes!" exclaimed Bobby. "Do tell it and get it over, Ted."
+
+The twins both began to chuckle and Teddy had some difficulty in going on
+with his story. But it seemed they had been at the Derby place the evening
+before and Timothy had been "boring everybody to distraction," Ted said,
+reading "Excelsior" to the family.
+
+"And believe me!" interjected Tommy Tucker, "that kid can elocute."
+
+"And he's always been at it," hurried on his twin, giggling. "Here's what
+Mr. Derby says Timothy recited the first time he ever spoke a piece at a
+Sunday School concert. You know; the stuff the little mites cackle."
+
+"How elegant are your expressions, Teddy!" remarked Louise, sighing.
+
+But she was amused as well as the others when Ted produced a paper on
+which he had written down the verse Mr. Derby said his son had recited,
+and just as Timothy had said it!
+
+"Listen, all of you," begged Teddy. "Now, don't laugh and spoil it all,
+Tom. Listen:
+
+    "'Lettuce denby uppan doing
+      Widow Hartford N E fate,
+    Still H E ving, still pursuing,
+      Learn to label Aunty Waite.'"
+
+Libbie's voice rose above the general laughter, and she was quite warm.
+For Libbie's was a loyal soul.
+
+"I don't care! I don't believe it. His father is always making fun of
+Timothy. He--he is cruel, I think. And, anyway, Timothy was only a little
+boy then."
+
+"What did he want to label his Aunty Waite for?" demanded Bob.
+
+"You all be pretty good," called Betty, seeing that Libbie was really
+getting angry. "If you aren't I'll ask Timothy and Libbie to my party at
+Mountain Camp and none of the rest of you shall go."
+
+"Easy enough said, that, Betty," Bob rejoined. "You haven't very much
+chance of going there. But, crimpy! wouldn't it be great if Uncle Dick
+did take us?"
+
+"Remember our school duties, children," drawled Louise. "'Still H E ving,
+still pursuing.' We must not cry for the moon."
+
+Thus, with a great deal of laughter and good-natured chatter, the
+cavalcade trotted on and came finally to what Louise and Bobby said was
+the entrance to Bolter's Farm.
+
+"All our horses were raised on this farm," explained Louise. "Daddy says
+that Lewis Bolter has the finest stock of any horseman in Virginia. Much
+of it is racing stock. He sells to the great stables up north. One of his
+men will know what to do for your gray's scratched legs, Betty."
+
+For Betty had changed with Bob again and rode Jim, the horse that had slid
+down into the ravine. Betty was really sorry about the scratches and felt
+somehow as though she were a little to blame for the accident. She should
+have been more careful in guiding the gray.
+
+Once at the great stables and paddocks, however, Betty's mind was relieved
+on this point. Louise had an errand from her father to Mr. Bolter and went
+away with Esther to interview the horse owner. Mr. Littell was a builder
+and constructor and he bought many work horses of Mr. Bolter's raising, as
+well as saddle stock.
+
+If there was anything on four feet that Betty and Bob loved, it was a
+horse. In the west they had ridden almost continually; their mounts out at
+Flame City had been their dearest possessions and they would have been
+glad to bring them east, both Betty's Clover-pony and Bob's big white
+horse, had it been wise to do so.
+
+At Shadyside and Salsette, however, there had been no opportunity for
+horseback riding. They had found pleasure in other forms of outdoor
+exercise. Now, enabled to view so many beautiful and sleek horses, Betty,
+as well as Bob and the others, dismounted with delight and entered the
+long stables.
+
+While her gray was being examined by one of the stablemen, Betty went
+along a whole row of box stalls by herself, in each of which a horse was
+standing quietly or moving about. More than one came to thrust a soft
+muzzle over the door of the stall and with pointed ears and intelligent
+gaze seemed to ask if the pretty, brown-eyed girl had something nice in
+her pocket.
+
+"Hi, Miss!" croaked a hoarse voice behind her. "If you want to see a
+bang-hup 'orse--a real topper--come down 'ere."
+
+Betty turned to see a little crooked man, with one shoulder much higher
+than the other, who walked a good deal like a crab, sideways. He grinned
+at her cheerfully in spite of his ugly body and twisted features. He
+really was a dreadfully homely man, and he was not much taller than Betty
+herself. He wore a grimy jockey cap, a blue blouse and stained white
+trousers, and it was quite evident that he was one of the stable helpers.
+
+"This 'ere is the lydy for you to see, Miss," continued the little man
+eagerly. "She's from old Hengland, Miss. I come with her myself and I've
+knowed her since she was foaled. Mr. Bolter ain't got in 'is 'ole stable,
+Miss, a mare like this one."
+
+He pointed to a glossy black creature in the end box. Before the animal
+raised her head and looked over the gate, Betty knew that the mare from
+England was one of the most beautiful creatures she had ever seen.
+
+"Hi, now, 'ow's that for a pretty lydy, Miss?" went on the rubber proudly.
+
+"Oh! See! She knows you! Look at the beauty!" gasped Betty, as the black
+mare reached over the gate and gently nipped the blue sleeve of the
+crooked little man.
+
+"Knows me? I should sye she does," he said proudly. "Why, she wouldn't
+take her meals from nobody but me. I told 'em so w'en I 'eard she was sold
+to Hamerica. And they found Hi was right, Miss, afore hever they got 'er
+aboard the ship. They sent for me, an' Mr. Bolter gave me a good job with
+'er. I goes with Ida Bellethorne wherever she goes. That's the----"
+
+"Ida Bellethorne?" interrupted Betty in amazement
+
+"Yes, Miss. That's 'er nyme. Ida Bellethorne. She comes of the true
+Bellethorne stock. The last of the breed out o' the Bellethorne stables,
+Miss."
+
+"Ida Bellethorne!" exclaimed Betty again. "Isn't that odd? A horse and a
+girl of the same name!"
+
+But this last she did not say audibly. The cockney rubber was fondling the
+mare's muzzle and he did not hear Betty's comment. The discovery of this
+second Ida Bellethorne excited Betty enormously.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+MEASLES
+
+
+Betty Gordon's active mind could not let this incident pass without
+further investigation. Not alone was she interested in the beautiful black
+mare and the girl in the neighborhood shop, but she wanted to know how
+they came to have the same name.
+
+Betty was a practical girl. Bob often said it was not easy to fool Betty.
+She had just as strong an imagination as any other girl of her age and
+loved to weave fancies in her own mind when it was otherwise idle. But she
+knew her dreams were dreams, and her imaginings unreal.
+
+It struck her that the name "Ida Bellethorne" was more suitable for a
+horse than for a girl. Betty wondered all in a flash if the English girl
+who had sold her the silk sweater in the neighborhood shop that morning
+and who confessed that she had come from England practically alone had not
+chosen this rather resounding name to use as an alias. Perhaps she had run
+away from her friends and was hiding her identity behind the name of a
+horse that she had heard of as being famous on the English turf.
+
+This was not a very hard thing for Betty to imagine. And, in any case, her
+interest was stirred greatly by the discovery she had made. She was about
+to speak to the little, crooked man regarding the name when something
+occurred to draw her attention from the point of her first surprise.
+
+The mare, Ida Bellethorne, coughed. She coughed twice.
+
+"Ah-ha, my lydy!" exclaimed the rubber, shaking his head and stepping away
+from the door of the stall that the mare should not muzzle his clothing.
+"That's a fine sound--wot?"
+
+"Is it dust in her poor nose?" asked the interested Betty.
+
+"'Tis worse nor dust. 'Tis wot they call 'ere the 'orse distemper, Miss.
+You tyke it from 'Unches Slattery, the change in climate and crossin' the
+hocean ain't done Ida Bellethorne a mite of good."
+
+"Is that your name? 'Hunches Slattery'?" Betty asked curiously.
+
+"That's wot they've called me this ten year back. You see, I was a jockey
+when I was a lad, and a good one, too, if Hi do say it as shouldn't. But I
+got throwed in a steeplechase race. When they let me out o' the 'orspital
+I was like this--'unchbacked and crooked. I been 'Unchie ever since,
+Miss."
+
+"I am so sorry," breathed Betty Gordon softly.
+
+But the crooked little rubber was more interested in Ida Bellethorne's
+history than he was in his own misfortune, which was an old story.
+
+"I was working in the Bellethorne stables when this mare was foaled. I was
+always let work about her. She's a wonnerful pedigree, Miss--aw, yes,
+wonnerful! And she was named for an 'igh and mighty lydy, sure enough."
+
+"Named for a lady?" cried Betty. "Don't you mean for a girl?"
+
+"Aw, not much! Such a lydy, Miss! Fine, an' tall, and wonnerful to look
+at. They said she could sing like a hangel, that she could. Miss Ida
+Bellethorne, she was. She ought've been a lord's daughter, she ought."
+
+"What became of her?" asked the puzzled Betty.
+
+"I don't know, Miss. I don't rightly know what became of all the family. I
+kept close to the mare 'ere; the family didn't so much bother me. But
+there was trouble and ruin and separation and death; and, after all,"
+added the rubber in a lower tone, "for all I know, there was cheating and
+swindling of the fatherless and orphan, too. But me, I kept close to this
+lydy 'ere," and he fondled the mare's muzzle again.
+
+"It's quite wonderful," admitted Betty. But what seemed wonderful to her,
+the stableman did not know anything about. "I suppose the pretty mare is
+worth a lot of money?"
+
+"Hi don't know wot Mr. Bolter would sell 'er for, if at all. But 'e paid
+four thousand pun, laid down at the stables where she was kep' after the
+smash of the Bellethorne family. She's got a pedigree longer than some
+lord's families, and 'er track record was what brought Mr. Lewis Bolter to
+Hengland when she was quietly put on the market.
+
+"Maybe they couldn't 'ave sold 'er to Henglish turfman," he added,
+whispering softly in Betty's ear, "for maybe the title to 'er would be
+clouded hand if she won another race somebody might go into court about
+it."
+
+Betty did not understand this; and just then the mare began to cough again
+and she was troubled by Ida Bellethorne's condition.
+
+"Is that the black mare, Slattery?" demanded a voice behind them.
+
+"Yes, sir," said the crooked little man respectfully, touching his cap.
+
+Betty turned to see a gentleman in riding boots and a short coat with a
+dog-whip in his gloved hand, whom she believed at once to be Mr. Bolter.
+Nor was she mistaken.
+
+"She's a beauty, isn't she, my dear?" the horseman said kindly. "But I do
+not like that cough. I've made up my mind, Slattery. She goes to-morrow to
+Cliffdale, and of course you go with her. Pack your bag to-night. I have
+already telephoned for a stable-car to be on the siding in the morning."
+
+"Yes, sir. Wot she needs is dry hair, an' the 'igher the better," said the
+crooked man, nodding.
+
+"They will put her on her feet again," agreed Mr. Bolter. "The balsam air
+around Cliffdale is the right lung-healer for man or beast."
+
+He went out and Betty heard the girls calling to her. She thanked Hunchie
+Slattery, patted Ida Bellethorne's nose, and ran out of the stable.
+
+But her head was full of the mystery of the striking name of "Ida
+Bellethorne." She felt she must tell somebody, and Bobby of course, who
+was her very closest chum, must be the recipient of her story as the
+cavalcade started homeward. It was Bobby whom Betty wanted to have the
+blue blouse just as soon as the shopgirl finished it.
+
+"Now, what do you think of that?" Betty demanded, after she had delivered,
+almost in a breath, a rather garbled story of the strange girl and the
+black mare from England.
+
+"Goodness, Betty, how wonderful!" exclaimed her friend. "I do so want to
+see that over-blouse you bought. And you say she is making another?"
+
+"Is that all you've got to say about it?" demanded Betty, staring.
+
+"Why--er--you know, it really is none of our business, is it?" asked
+Bobby, but with dancing eyes. "You know Miss Prettyman told us that the
+greatest fault of character under which young ladies labor to-day is
+vulgar curiosity. Oh, my! I can see her say it now," declared naughty
+Bobby, shaking her head.
+
+"But, Bobby! Do think a bit! A girl and a horse both of the same name, and
+just recently from England! I'm going to ask right out what it means."
+
+"Who are you going to ask--the horse?" giggled Bobby.
+
+"Oh, you! No, I can't ask the pretty black mare," Betty said, shaking her
+head. "For she is going to be sent away for her health. She's got what
+they call 'distemper.' She has to be acclimated, or something."
+
+"It sounds as though it might hurt," observed Bobby gravely.
+
+"Something ought to hurt you," said Betty laughing. "You are forever and
+ever poking fun. But I am going to see Ida Bellethorne in the shop and
+find out what she knows about the pretty mare."
+
+"Well, I'm sorry I didn't see the horse," confessed Bobby. "But I'll go
+with you to see the girl. And I do want to see the blouse."
+
+That, Betty showed her the moment they arrived at Fairfields and could run
+upstairs to the room the two girls shared while Betty visited here. The
+latter unfolded the orange-silk blouse and spread it on the bed. Bobby
+went into exstacies over it, as in duty bound.
+
+"Wait till you see the one she is making for you," Betty said. "You'll
+love it!"
+
+"What is that you are going to love?" asked a voice outside the open door.
+"Measles?"
+
+"Oh, Bob! Who ever heard the like?" demanded Betty. "Love measles, indeed.
+Why--What makes you look so queer?"
+
+"Greatest thing you ever heard, girls!" cried Bob, his face very red and
+his eyes shining. "I didn't really understand how much I had come to hate
+books and drill these last few weeks."
+
+"What do you mean?" demanded Roberta Littell. "If you don't tell us at
+once!"
+
+"Why, didn't you hear? Telegrams have come. To all our parents and
+guardians. Measles! Measles! Measles!"
+
+He began to dance a very poor imitation of the Highland Fling in the hall.
+The girls ran out and seized him, one on either side, and big as Bob was
+they managed to shake him soundly.
+
+"Tell us what you mean!" commanded Betty.
+
+"Who has the measles?" cried Bobby.
+
+"Everybody! Or, pretty near everybody, I guess. The chaps who had it and
+were quarantined when we came away from Salsette, gave it to the servants.
+And it has spread to the village. And Miss Prettyman's got it and a lot of
+the other folks at Shadyside. Oh, my eye!"
+
+"Are you fooling us, Bob?" demanded Betty.
+
+"Honor bright! It is just as I say. Of course, it all isn't in the
+messages the two schools have sent out to 'parents and guardians.' That is
+the way the messages are headed, you know. But the Shadyside _Mirror_ has
+come, too, and tells all about it. Opening is postponed for a fortnight.
+What do you know about that?" and Bob began his clumsy dance again.
+
+Betty broke away and darted down the stairs. She scarcely touched the
+steps with her feet she flew so fast, and if it had not been for the
+banister she surely would have come to the bottom in a heap.
+
+She ran out on the porch to find her Uncle Dick smoking a cigar and
+reading the paper in a warm corner. Like a stone from a catapult she flung
+herself into his arms.
+
+"Oh, Uncle Dick! Uncle Dick! Now we can go!" she cried, seizing him
+tightly around the neck.
+
+"Goodness, child!" choked Uncle Dick, fairly throttled by her exuberance.
+"What is it? Go where, Betty?"
+
+"To Mountain Camp! With you! All of us! No school for more than two weeks!
+Oh, Uncle Dick!" Then she suddenly stopped and her glowing face lost its
+color and her excitement subsided. "Dear me!" she quavered, "I 'member now
+I had 'em when I was six, and they say you can't have 'em but once."
+
+"What can't you have but once?"
+
+"Measles," said Betty, sighing deeply. "I suppose after all I can go back
+to Shadyside. Maybe Mrs. Eustice will expect all of us that have had 'em
+to come."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A DISAPPEARANCE
+
+
+There was an exciting conclave at Fairfields that evening. Perhaps I
+should say two. For in one room given over by the good-natured Mrs.
+Littell to the young folks there was a most noisy conclave while the older
+members of the household held a more quiet if no less earnest conference
+in the library.
+
+There were eight in the young folks' meeting for Mrs. Littell insisted
+upon Esther's going to bed at a certain hour every evening "to get her
+beauty sleep."
+
+"And I'll say she is sure to be a raving beauty when she grows up, if she
+keeps going to bed with the chickens," giggled Bobby.
+
+"You know she can't go to Mountain Camp anyway," Louise said quietly, "for
+her school isn't measly and it begins again day after to-morrow."
+
+"Poor Esther!" sighed Betty. "We must make it up to her somehow. I was
+afraid she would cry at dinner this evening."
+
+"She's a good kid," agreed Bobby. "But are you sure, Betty, that we can
+go to the mountains? Just think! Eight of us!"
+
+"Some contract for Mr. Gordon," observed Tommy Tucker with unusual
+reflection.
+
+"How about it's being some contract for Mr. and Mrs. Canary?" suggested
+Bob Henderson. "Maybe they will shy at such a crowd."
+
+"I asked Uncle Dick about that," Betty said eagerly. "He told me all about
+Mr. and Mrs. Canary. He has known them for years and years. They must be
+awfully nice people and they have got a great, big, rambling bungalow sort
+of house, all built of logs in the rough. But inside there is a heating
+plant, and electric lights, and shower baths, and everything up-to-date.
+Mr. Canary is very wealthy; but his money could not keep him from getting
+tuber--tuber----"
+
+"'Tubers,'" said Bob with gravity, "are potatoes, or something of that
+kind."
+
+"Now, Bob! you know what I mean very well," cried Betty. "His lungs were
+affected. But they have healed and he is perfectly well as long as he
+stays up there in the wilderness. The air there has wonderful
+cur--curative properties. There!"
+
+"Look! Will it cure such a bad attack of poetry?" interrupted Bobby,
+drawing the attention of the others to Timothy Derby and Libbie who, with
+heads close together, were absorbed in a volume of verses the boy had
+brought with him from home.
+
+"It might help," said Bob. "It ought to be cold enough up there at
+Mountain Camp to freeze romance into an icicle."
+
+"I hope we all go then," Teddy Tucker agreed. "Our folks have said we
+could--haven't they, Tom?"
+
+"With suspicious alacrity," agreed his twin. "How's that for a fine
+phrase, Louise? Do you know, I think mother and dad were almost shocked
+when they got the telegram from Salsette and knew our vacation was to be
+prolonged. The idea of Mountain Camp seems to please them."
+
+"Goodness! I know dear Mrs. Littell doesn't feel that way about it," cried
+Betty.
+
+"She's got girls," said Ted dryly. "You know it is us boys who are not
+appreciated in this world."
+
+"Yes," said Bob, "you fellows are terribly abused, I'll say. But, now! Are
+we all sure of going? That's what I want to know."
+
+"Timothy----" began Louise; but Bob held up his hand to stop her.
+
+"I know from his father that Tim can go. Uncle Dick is sure to take us,
+Betty, isn't he?"
+
+"He sent off a telegram to Mrs. Canary this evening. If she sends back
+word 'Yes' we can go day after to-morrow."
+
+"That's all right then," said Bob, quite as eagerly. 'The thing to do then
+is to plan what to take and all that. It is cold up there, but dry. Much
+colder than it was at school before we came down. Furs, overcoats, boots,
+mittens--not gloves, for gloves are no good when it is really cold--and
+underthings that are warm and heavy. We don't want to come back with noses
+and toes frozen off."
+
+"Humph!" said Bobby scornfully, "what kind of underwear should you advise
+our getting for our noses, Bob Henderson?"
+
+"Aw--you know what I mean," said the boy, grinning. "Don't depend on a fur
+piece around your neck and a muff to keep the rest of you warm. Us fellows
+have all got Mackinaws and boots and such things. And we'll want 'em."
+
+And so they excitedly made their plans. At least, six of them did while
+Timothy and Libbie bent their minds upon the book. One thing about those
+two young romanticists, they agreed to the plans the others made and were
+quite docile.
+
+At ten Timothy and the Tucker twins went home and the others went
+cheerfully up to bed. While Betty Gordon remained at Fairfields Bobby
+insisted on sharing her own room with her. They were never separated at
+Shadyside, so why should they be here?
+
+When she was half undressed Betty suddenly went down on her knees before
+the tall chiffonier and opened the lower drawer. She dug under everything
+in the drawer until she came to her handbag, and drew it forth.
+
+"I declare!" chuckled Bobby, "I thought you were digging a new burrow like
+a homeless rabbit. What did you forget?"
+
+"Didn't forget anything," responded Betty, smiling up at her friend. "I
+remembered something."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"My locket. Uncle Dick's present. I wanted to see that it was safe."
+
+"Goodness! Do you carry it in your bag?"
+
+"I've got a lovely chain at Shadyside, you know. I told Uncle Dick not to
+buy a chain. And I don't believe Mrs. Eustice will object to a simple
+little locket like mine, will she?"
+
+"M-m-m! I don't know," replied Bobby. "You know she is awfully opposed to
+us girls wearing jewelry. And your locket is lovely. Just think! Platinum
+and a real diamond. Why! what is the matter, Betty?"
+
+For Betty had begun scrambling in her bag worse than she had in the bureau
+drawer. Everything came out--purse, tickets, gloves, handkerchief, the
+tiniest little looking-glass, a letter or two, a silver thimble, two
+coughdrops stuck together, a sample of ribbon which she had failed to
+match, a most disreputable looking piece of lead-pencil----
+
+But no twist of tissue paper with the locket in it!
+
+"What is the matter?" repeated Bobby, frightened by the expression of the
+other girl's face.
+
+"I--I----Oh, Bobby! It's gone!" wailed Betty.
+
+"Not your locket?"
+
+"Yes, my locket!" sobbed Betty, and she sat down on the floor and wept.
+
+"Why, it can't be! Who would take it? When did you see it last? Nobody
+here in the house would have stolen it, Betty."
+
+"It--it must have dropped out of my bag. Oh! what shall I do? I can't tell
+Uncle Dick."
+
+"He won't punish you for losing it, will he?"
+
+"But think how he'll feel! And how I'll feel!" wailed Betty. "He advised
+me to put it somewhere for safe keeping until I got my chain. And I
+wouldn't. I--I wanted it with me."
+
+"You should have put it downstairs in daddy's safe," said Bobby
+thoughtfully.
+
+"But that doesn't do me a bit of good now," sobbed Betty Gordon.
+
+"Don't you remember where you had it last?" asked her friend slowly.
+
+"In my bag, of course. And I carried my bag to town to-day. Yes! I
+remember seeing the paper it was in at the bottom of my bag more than
+once while I was shopping. Oh, dear! what shall I do?"
+
+"Then you are quite sure it was not stolen?" Bobby suggested.
+
+"No. I don't suppose it was. It just hopped out somehow. But where? That
+is the question, Bobby. I can't answer it."
+
+She rose finally and finished her preparations for bed. Bobby was very
+sympathetic; but there did not seem to be anything she could say that
+would really relieve Betty's heart, or help in any way. The locket was
+gone and no trace of how it had gone had been left in Betty's mind.
+
+When the light was out Bobby crept into Betty's bed and held her tightly
+in her arms.
+
+"Don't cry, Betty dear!" the other girl whispered. "Maybe your Uncle Dick
+will know how to find the locket."
+
+"Oh, Bobby! I can't tell him. I'm ashamed to," sighed Betty. "It looks as
+though I had not cared enough about his present to be careful with it. And
+I thought if I carried it about with me that there would be no chance of
+my losing it. And now----"
+
+"Then tell Bob," suggested her chum, hugging Betty tightly.
+
+"Bob?"
+
+"Tell him all about it," said Bobby Littell. "Perhaps he will know what
+to do. You can't really have lost that beautiful locket forever, Betty!"
+
+"Oh, I don't know! It's gone, anyway!" sobbed Betty.
+
+"Don't give up. That isn't like you, Betty," went on Bobby. "Maybe Bob can
+help. We can ask him, at least."
+
+"Yes, we can do that," was Betty's not very hopeful reply.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+ALL MRS. STAPLES COULD SAY
+
+
+The two girls sought out Bob Henderson before breakfast and told him of
+the disappearance of Betty's beautiful little locket. Betty's eyes, were a
+little swollen and even Bobby seemed not to have passed a very agreeable
+night. Bob was quite shrewd enough to see these evidences of trouble and
+he refrained from making any remark even in fun to ruffle the girls.
+
+"Here's a pretty mess!" exclaimed Bob, but cheerfully. "And we all going
+to Mountain Camp to-morrow if Mrs. Canary telegraphs 'Yes,' Hunted
+everywhere, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes, Bob," Betty assured him. "And there was but one place to hunt. In my
+bag."
+
+"Sure?"
+
+"Pos-i-tive!"
+
+"Carried it loose in your bag, did you?" he asked reflectively.
+
+"Wrapped up in white tissue paper. You know, the box it came in got
+broken."
+
+"I remember. Gee, Betty! that's an awfully pretty locket. You don't want
+to lose it."
+
+"But I have lost it!"
+
+"For keeps, I mean," rejoined Bob, smiling encouragingly. "Come on! Let's
+see the bag. Where did you carry it? When was the last time you saw the
+locket in the bag and where?"
+
+"Oh!" Betty cried suddenly. "I remember it was in the bag when I was
+shopping yesterday."
+
+"Shopping where? Let's hear about the last place you remember seeing it."
+
+Betty remembered very clearly seeing the twist of paper with the locket in
+it while she was at Purcell's where she had bought some veiling.
+
+"Then, Betty," said Bobby, "you went to that little store afterward, you
+said, where you got the over-blouse."
+
+"Ye--es. But I didn't notice it while I was there. I was so excited over
+the blouse and so interested in Ida Bellethorne that I don't remember of
+looking in my bag to see if my locket was safe."
+
+"'Ida Bellethorne'?" repeated Bob in surprise. "Why! that's the name of
+Mr. Lewis Bolter's new mare from England. I heard Mr. Littell and Uncle
+Dick talking about her."
+
+"And I met a girl named Ida Bellethorne. I'll tell you all about her
+later, Bob," said Betty. "Just now I want to know what to do about the
+locket."
+
+"I should say you did! And I'll tell you what," Bob said promptly. "Right
+after breakfast we'll borrow the little car and I'll take you over to
+Georgetown and we'll go to every place you went to yesterday, Betty, and
+inquire. I'm allowed to drive in the District of Columbia, you know."
+
+"Will you, Bob?" cried Betty. "Do you think there is any chance of our
+finding it?"
+
+"Why not? If it was picked up in one of the stores you went to. There are
+lots more honest people in the world than there are dishonest. Come on
+now, don't cry."
+
+"I'm not going to cry," declared Betty. "I've cried enough already. Don't
+tell the others, Bob. Nor Uncle Dick. I don't want him to know if I can
+help it. It looks just as though I didn't prize his present enough to take
+care of it."
+
+Somehow, Betty felt encouraged by Bob's taking hold of the matter. The
+small car was secured after breakfast and Bob and the two girls set off
+for the other side of the river. It was not alone because of Bob's advice
+that they stopped first at the little neighborhood shop on the hilly side
+street where Betty had bought her sweater. Bobby was anxious to see her
+blue sweater, and the two girls ran in as soon as the car halted before
+the door.
+
+The little bell over it jingled pleasantly at their entrance; but it was a
+tall and rather grim-looking woman who came from the back of the shop to
+meet them instead of the English girl with whom Betty had dealt on her
+former visit.
+
+"Humph!" said Mrs. Staples, for it was she, when she spied the over-blouse
+under Betty's coat. "You are the young lady who was to purchase the blue
+blouse when it was finished?"
+
+"For my friend here," said Betty, bringing Bobby forward. "I know she will
+like it."
+
+"I hope so," said Mrs. Staples. "It is finished. Ida sat up most of the
+night to finish it. Here it is," and she displayed the dark blue blouse
+for the girls to see.
+
+"How lovely!" ejaculated Bobby eagerly. "I like it even better than I do
+your orange one, Betty. It's sweet."
+
+"It's twelve dollars, Miss," said the shop woman promptly. "You can pay me
+and take the blouse. I paid Ida for it."
+
+"Isn't the girl who made it here?" asked Betty anxiously.
+
+"No, she ain't," said Mrs. Staples in her blunt way. "She left an hour
+ago."
+
+"Oh! Will she come back?"
+
+"I don't expect her. I am sure I cannot be changing help all the time. She
+left me very abruptly. I did not ask her to come back."
+
+"Why," said Betty, wonderingly, "I thought you were her friend. Isn't she
+all alone in this country?"
+
+"She is a girl who seems quite able to take care of herself," the grim
+shopwoman said. "Or she is determined to try. I advised her to write to
+her aunt----"
+
+"Then she has an aunt over here?" cried Betty eagerly.
+
+"So she thinks. An aunt for whom Ida was named. There was some family
+trouble, and Ida's father and her father's sister seem to have had nothing
+to do with each other for some years. The aunt is a singer--quite a noted
+concert singer, it seems. Ida came to Washington expecting to find her.
+She did not find the elder Ida Bellethorne----"
+
+"Then there are three Ida Bellethornes!" whispered Bobby in Betty's ear.
+
+"So she came here to help me," continued Mrs. Staples, all the time
+watching Betty with a rather strange manner. "She would better have
+remained with me, as I told her. But she found in the paper last night
+this notice," the woman produced a torn piece of paper from the counter
+and handed it to Betty, "and nothing would do but Ida must go right away
+to find the place and the person mentioned here."
+
+The two girls in great interest bent their heads above the piece of paper.
+The marked paragraph was one of several in the column and read as
+follows:
+
+    "It is stated upon good authority that the great Ida Bellethorne
+    will arrive at Cliffdale, New York, within a day or two, and will
+    remain for the winter."
+
+"Why, how odd," murmured Betty. "And did this make Ida go away?"
+
+"She has gone to Cliffdale to meet her aunt. That was her intention," said
+Mrs. Staples. "Are either of you young ladies prepared to buy this blue
+blouse?"
+
+"Oh, yes, indeed!" cried Bobby, who had taken a fancy to the blouse. "I've
+got money enough. And it was nice of Miss Bellethorne to finish it for me
+before she went. I wish I might thank her personally."
+
+"I do not expect to see Ida again," the shopwoman repeated in her most
+severe manner, wrapping up the over-blouse. "Twelve dollars--thank you,
+Miss. Can I show you anything else?"
+
+"Wait!" gasped Betty. "I want to ask you--I wanted to ask Ida Bellethorne
+if she saw me drop anything here in the store yesterday?"
+
+"I am sorry she is not here to answer that question," said Mrs. Staples.
+"I was not here when you came, Miss."
+
+"No, I know you weren't. But somewhere while I was shopping yesterday I
+lost something out of my bag. If it dropped out here----"
+
+"I can assure you I picked up nothing, Miss," declared the shop woman.
+
+"If Ida----"
+
+"If Ida Bellethorne did, she is not here, unfortunately, to tell you,"
+said Mrs. Staples in her same manner and without a change of expression on
+her hard face.
+
+"Oh, dear!" sighed Betty.
+
+"But you don't know that you dropped it here," Bobby said to encourage
+her. But perhaps it encouraged Mrs. Staples more!
+
+"I have nothing more to say, Miss," the woman declared. "Ida not being
+here----"
+
+"Oh, well," said Betty, trying to speak more cheerfully, "it is true I do
+not remember having seen it while I was here at all. So--so we will go to
+the other places. Of course, if Ida had found anything she would have told
+you?"
+
+"I cannot be responsible for what Ida Bellethorne would do or say,"
+replied the shopwoman grimly. "Not having been here myself when you came,
+Miss----"
+
+"Oh, yes! I understand," said Betty hastily. "Well, thank you for keeping
+the blouse for us. Good-bye."
+
+She and Bobby were not greatly pleased with Mrs. Staples. But they had no
+reason for distrusting her. When they had gone the shopwoman smiled a most
+wintry smile.
+
+"Well, I am not supposed to tell people how to go about their own affairs,
+I should hope," was her thought. "That chit never told me what she had
+lost. It might have been a pair of shoes or a boiled lobster! Humph! Folks
+would better speak plain in this world. I always do, I am sure."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+UNCLE DICK MUST BE TOLD
+
+
+The two girls did not tell Bob Henderson all that had happened in the
+little shop when they first came out. They were in too much haste to get
+to the other places where it might be possible that Betty had dropped her
+locket. Of all things, they did not suspect that Mrs. Staples knew the
+first thing about it.
+
+But they did tell the boy that Ida Bellethorne had gone away.
+
+"Where's she gone?" asked the inquisitive Bob. "Couldn't be that she found
+the locket and ran off with it?"
+
+"Why, you're almost horrid!" declared Betty, aggrieved. "You don't know
+what a nice girl Ida is."
+
+"Humph!" (Could he have caught that expression from waiting outside Mrs.
+Staples' shop?) "Humph! I don't believe you know how nice she is, or
+otherwise. You never saw her but once."
+
+"But she's seen the horse," giggled Bobby.
+
+"What horse?" demanded Bob.
+
+"Mr. Lewis Bolter's black mare, Ida Bellethorne."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"And, oh, Bob!" cried Betty, "there's another Ida Bellethorne, and this
+Ida has gone away to see her. She's her aunt."
+
+"Who's her aunt?" grumbled Bob, who was having some difficulty just then
+in driving the car and so could not give his full attention to the matter
+the girls were chattering about.
+
+"Why, see!" cried Betty, rummaging in her bag. "Here's the piece of
+newspaper with the society item, or whatever it is, in it that made Ida go
+away so suddenly this morning. It's about her aunt, the great concert
+singer. Ida's gone to meet her where that says," and she put the piece of
+paper into Bob's hand.
+
+"All right," he said. "Here's Markham and Boggs' place. You said you were
+in this store yesterday, Betty."
+
+"So I was. Come on, Bobby," cried the other girl, hopping out of the car.
+"I suppose we shall have to go to the manager or the superintendent or
+somebody. Dear me! if we don't find my locket I don't know what I shall
+do."
+
+When Betty and Bobby came out of the store, much disappointed, they found
+Bob grinning--as Bobby declared--"like a Cheshire cat."
+
+"But never mind the cat," continued Bobby. "What is the matter with that
+boy? For boys will laugh at the most serious things. And this is serious,
+my poor, dear Betty."
+
+"Indeed it is," agreed her friend, and so they crossed the walk to the
+grinning Bob Henderson who had the scrap of newspaper Betty had given him
+in his hand.
+
+"Say," he drawled, "who did you say this aunt of Ida Bellethorne is?"
+
+"Mrs. Staples says she is a concert singer--a prima donna," replied Betty.
+
+"She's a prima donna all right," chuckled Bob. "Where now? Oh! To Stone's
+shoe shop? Well, what do you know about this notice in the paper?" and his
+smile grew broader.
+
+"What do you mean, Bob?" demanded Betty, rather vexed. "You can read the
+paragraph yourself. 'The great Ida Bellethorne'. That means she is a great
+singer of course."
+
+"Yes, I see," replied Bob, giving some attention to the steering of the
+car. "But there is one thing about you girls--you never read the sporting
+page of the newspaper."
+
+"What is that?" gasped Bobby Littell.
+
+"This string of items you handed me is torn out of the sporting page. All
+the paragraphs refer to racing matters. That particular one deals with Mr.
+Bolter's black mare, Ida Bellethorne. Cliffdale is the place he was
+shipping her to far her health."
+
+"Never!" cried Bobby.
+
+"Oh, Bob! Is that so?" gasped Betty.
+
+Bob burst into open laughter. "That's a good one on you and on your
+friend, Ida," he declared. "If she has gone to meet her aunt up in New
+York State she'll meet a horse instead. How's that for a joke?"
+
+Betty Gordon shook her head without smiling. "I don't see the joke at
+all," she said. "Poor Ida! She will be sadly disappointed. And she has
+lost her position here with Mrs. Staples. We could see that Mrs. Staples
+was angry because she went away."
+
+"Why," cried Bobby, likewise sympathetic, "I think it is horrid--actually
+horrid! You needn't laugh, Bob Henderson."
+
+"Shucks!" returned the boy. "I can't cry over it, can I? Of course it is
+too bad the girl has made such a mistake. But our weeping won't help her."
+
+"No," confessed Bobby, "I suppose that is so."
+
+"And our weeping won't find my locket," sighed Betty. "Dear me! If I did
+drop it in Stone's place I hope they have saved it for me."
+
+But the locket was not to be found in that shop, either. Nor in the two
+others which Betty Gordon had visited the previous day. This indeed was a
+perfectly dreadful thing! The plainer it was that the locket could not be
+found, the more repentent and distracted Betty became.
+
+"I shall have to tell Uncle Dick--I shall have to," she wailed, when Bob
+drove them away from the last place and all hope was gone glimmering. "Oh,
+dear! It is dreadful."
+
+"Don't take on so, Betty!" Bob begged gruffly, for he could not bear to
+see the girl actually cry. "I'll tell him if you are afraid to."
+
+"Don't you dare!" she flared out at him. "I'm not afraid. Only I dread it.
+It was the nicest present he ever gave me and--and I loved it. But I did
+not take proper care of it. I realize that now, when it is too late."
+
+Bob remained serious of aspect after that. That his mind was engaged with
+the problem of Betty's lost trinket was proved by what he said on the way
+back to Fairfields:
+
+"I suppose you spoke to all the clerks you traded with in those stores,
+Betty?"
+
+"Why, yes. All but Ida Bellethorne, Bob."
+
+"And Mrs. Staples said she didn't know anything about Betty's locket,"
+Bobby put in.
+
+Of course, this was not so; but Bobby thought she was telling the exact
+truth. The two girls really had not explained Betty's loss to Mrs. Staples
+at all.
+
+"The English girl going off so suddenly, and on such a wild-goose chase,
+looks kind of fishy, you know," drawled Bob.
+
+"She thinks she is chasing her aunt!" Bobby cried.
+
+"Maybe."
+
+"You don't even know her, Bob," declared Betty haughtily. "You can't judge
+her character. I am sure she is honest."
+
+"Well," grumbled Bob, "being sure everybody is honest isn't going to get
+you that locket back, believe me!"
+
+"That's horrid, too! Isn't it, Betty?" demanded Bobby.
+
+"It's sort of, I guess," said Betty, much troubled, "But, oh, Bob! I don't
+want to think that poor girl found my locket and ran away with it. No, I
+don't want to believe that. And, anyway, it doesn't help me out a mite.
+I've got to tell Uncle Dick before he notices that I don't display his
+pretty present any more. Oh, dear!"
+
+"It's a shame," groaned Bobby, holding her chum's hand tightly.
+
+"Guess there are worse things than measles in this world," observed Bob,
+as he stopped the small car under the _porte cochère_ at Fairfields.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE LIVE WIRE OCTETTE
+
+
+It was not an easy thing to do; but Betty Gordon did it. She confessed the
+whole wretched thing to Uncle Dick and was assured of his forgiveness. But
+perhaps his serious forgiveness was not the easiest thing for the girl to
+bear.
+
+"I am sure, as you say, that you did not mean to be careless," Mr. Richard
+Gordon said gently. It was hard for him to be strict with Betty; but he
+knew her impulsiveness sometimes led her into a reckless path. "But mark
+you, Betty: The value of that locket should have, in itself, made you
+particularly careful of it."
+
+"I--I valued it more because you gave it to me, Uncle Dick," she sobbed.
+
+"And yet that did not make you particularly careful," the gentleman
+reminded her. "The main trouble with you, Betty, is that you have no very
+clear appreciation of the value of money."
+
+"Oh, Uncle Dick!" and she looked at him with trembling chin and tears
+welling into her eyes.
+
+"And why should you?" he added, laughing more lightly and patting her
+hand. "You have never been obliged to earn money. Think back to the time
+you were with the Peabodys. The money my lawyer sent you for your own use
+just burned holes in your pinafore pockets, didn't it?"
+
+"I didn't wear pinafores, Uncle Dick," Betty said soberly. "Girls don't
+nowadays."
+
+"No, I see they don't," he rejoined, smiling broadly again. "But they did
+in my day. However, in whatever pocket you put that money as you got it,
+the hole was figuratively burned, wasn't it?"
+
+"We--ell, it went mostly for food. Mr. Peabody was such a miser!
+And--and----"
+
+"And so when you wanted to come away from Bramble Farm you actually had to
+borrow money," went on Uncle Dick. "Of course, you were fortunate enough
+finally to get the lawyer's check and pay your debts. But the fact remains
+that you seem unable to keep money."
+
+"Oh, Uncle Dick!"
+
+"Now," continued her guardian still soberly, "a miser like Mr. Peabody for
+instance is a very unpleasant person. But a spendthrift often does even
+more harm in the world than a miser. I don't want my Betty-girl to be a
+spendthrift."
+
+"Oh, Uncle Dick!"
+
+"The loss of your pretty locket, my dear, has come because of that trait
+in your character which ignores a proper appreciation of the value of
+money and what can be bought with it. Now, I can buy you another
+locket----"
+
+"No, no, Uncle Dick! I don't deserve it," she said with her face hidden
+against his shoulder as she sat in his lap.
+
+"That is true, my dear. I don't really think you do deserve another--not
+right at once. And, anyway, we will advertise for the locket in the
+newspapers and may recover it in that way. So we will postpone the
+purchase of any other piece of jewelry at present.
+
+"What I have in my mind, however, and have had for some time, is the
+reorganization of your financial affairs," and now he smiled broadly as
+she raised her head to look at him. "I think of putting you on a monthly
+allowance of pocket money and asking you to keep a fairly exact account of
+your expenditures. Not an account to show me. I don't want you to feel as
+though you were being watched."
+
+"What do you mean, Uncle Dick?"
+
+"I want you to keep account for your own satisfaction. I want you to know
+at the end of the month where your money has gone to. It is the best
+training in the world for a girl, as well as a boy, to know just what she
+has done with the money that has passed through her hands. And in this
+case I am sure in time that it will give you a just comprehension of
+money's value.
+
+"If we do not recover the locket, why, in time, we will look about for
+another pretty trinket----"
+
+"No, Uncle Dick," Betty said seriously. "I loved that locket. I should
+have been more careful of it. I hope it will be found and returned to me.
+I do! I do! But I don't want you to give me another."
+
+"Why not?" he asked, yet giving her quite an understanding look.
+
+"I guess you know, Uncle Dick," she sighed. "I don't really deserve it.
+And it wouldn't be that locket that you gave me for Christmas, you see."
+
+"Well, my dear----"
+
+"Wait, dear Uncle Dick! I want to say something more," said the girl,
+hugging him tightly again. "If you give me a certain sum of money to spend
+for myself every month I am going to save out of it until I have enough to
+buy a locket exactly like that one I lost--If it isn't found, I mean."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"You approve, Uncle Dick?"
+
+"Most assuredly. That would be following out my suggestion of learning to
+take care of money in the fullest sense, my dear."
+
+"Then," said Betty, bouncing happily on his knee, "that is what I am going
+to try to do. But I do hope my locket will be found!"
+
+This serious conference was broken up at this point by the arrival of the
+telegram Uncle Dick had been expecting from Mountain Camp. Mrs. Jonathan
+Canary had signed it herself and it was to the effect that the young
+friends of Mr. Richard Gordon would be as welcome as that gentleman
+himself.
+
+Bob immediately saddled a horse and galloped to the Derbys and the Tuckers
+to carry the news. Final plans were made for departure the next morning
+and in spite of a rather threatening change in the weather the party left
+Fairfields on time and in high spirits for upper New York State.
+
+A few flakes of snow had begun fluttering down as the train pulled out of
+Washington; and as it raced across the Maryland fields and through the
+hills which grace that State the snow blew faster and faster and thicker
+and thicker. But even in midwinter snow storms do not much obstruct
+traffic so far south, and the gay party from Fairfields had no suspicion
+that it was being borne into any peril or trouble. What was a little snow
+which scarcely, at first, caught upon the brown fields?
+
+They had engaged two whole sections for the young folks and an extra place
+for Uncle Dick. The latter did not interfere at all with the fun and
+frolic of his charges. He was--he should have been--used by now to the
+ridiculous antics of the Tucker twins and the overflowing spirits of the
+rest of the octette. Bachelor as he was, Mr. Richard Gordon considered
+himself pretty well acquainted with young folks of their age.
+
+The two sections occupied by the eight girls and boys were opposite each
+other and they had that end of the car pretty much to themselves. Of
+course, people sometimes had to go through the aisle--and others besides
+the conductor and the porter; but after running the gauntlet of that
+lively troop once the restless passenger usually tried to keep out of the
+"line of fire."
+
+The fun the party had was good-natured sport for the most part. Their
+practical jokes were aimed at each other rather than at their fellow
+passengers. But it was a fact that there was very little peace for a
+nervous person in that Pullman coach.
+
+"We're the live-wire octette, and we are going to let everybody know it,"
+proclaimed Tommy Tucker vociferously. "Say! there's a chap up at the other
+end of the car, sprawled all over his seat--fresh kid, he is. Did you
+notice him?"
+
+"I did," replied his twin. "I fell over his foot twice when I went for a
+drink."
+
+"Why didn't you look where you were walking?" grinned Bob Henderson
+craning his neck to see up the aisle and mark the passenger in question.
+
+"Huh!" grumbled Ted, "he stuck it out for me to tumble over both
+times--and you know this train is joggling some."
+
+"Ill say so," agreed Bob.
+
+But Betty had jumped up to look and she said eagerly:
+
+"Do you mean the man with the silk handkerchief over his head? He must be
+asleep, or trying to sleep."
+
+"I tell you he is just a fresh kid," said Tommy Tucker. "And I'm going to
+fix him."
+
+"Now, boys, be careful what you do," advised Louise, who occasionally
+considered it her duty to put on a sober, admonishing air.
+
+Tommy, however, started for the nearest exit to the platform of the car.
+He was gone some time, and when he reappeared he carried in both hands a
+great soggy snowball, bigger than the biggest grapefruit.
+
+"Gee, folks!" he whispered, "it's snowing, and then some! I never saw such
+a snow. And the porter says it is likely to get worse the farther north we
+go. Suppose we should be snowbound?"
+
+There was a chorus of cries--of fearful delight on the part of the girls,
+at least--at this announcement.
+
+"Never mind," Bob Henderson said, "we have a dining car hitched to this
+train, so we sha'n't starve I guess, if we are snowed up. What are you
+going to do with that snow, Tommy?"
+
+The Tucker twin winked prodigiously. "I'm going to take it up the aisle
+and show it to Mr. Gordon. He doesn't know it's snowing like this," said
+the boy quite soberly.
+
+"Why, Tommy Tucker!" cried Betty, "of course Uncle Dick knows it is
+snowing. Can't he see it through the window?"
+
+But when she looked herself at the window beside her she was amazed to see
+that the pane was masked with wet snow and one could scarcely see through
+it at all. Besides, evening was falling fast.
+
+"I do hope," Teddy remarked, watching his brother start up the aisle, "he
+tumbles in the right place."
+
+"What is he going to do with that snowball?" demanded Louise.
+
+"I know! I know!" giggled Bobby, in sudden delight. "That man with the
+silk hander chief over his head is going to get a shower."
+
+"He isn't a man. He's just a fresh kid," declared Ted, but he said it
+somewhat anxiously now.
+
+"Stop him, somebody!" cried Louise. "He'll get into trouble."
+
+"If you ask me," drawled Bob Henderson, "I think that somebody else is
+going to get into trouble. I saw that chap stick his foot out and trip
+Ted before."
+
+"He did it unknowingly," cried Betty, under her breath. "He's asleep."
+
+"If he is he won't be long," whispered Bobby, clutching at Betty and
+holding her into the seat. "Let Tommy Tucker be. If that fellow trips
+him----"
+
+The next instant Tommy did trip. Without any doubt the well shod foot of
+the man lolling in the seat slid into the aisle as the boy with the
+snowfall approached, and Tommy pitched over it with almost a certainty of
+falling headlong. Indeed, he would have gone to the floor of the car had
+he not let go of the mass of snow in his hands and clutched at the seat
+arms.
+
+"Whoo!" burst out Teddy Tucker in delight. "Now that fresh kid's got his!"
+
+For the soft snowball in Tommy's hands landed plump upon the
+handkerchief-covered crown of the person sprawling so ungracefully in the
+Pullman seat! The victim uttered a howl audible above the drumming of the
+car wheels. And he leaped upright between the seats of his section, beat
+the fast-melting snow off his head and face, and displayed the latter to
+the young peoples' amazement as that of a very stern looking gentleman
+indeed with a bald head and gray side whiskers.
+
+"Oh, my aunt's cat and all her kittens!" gasped Bob Henderson. "Now Tommy
+has done it! See who it is, Ted?"
+
+Teddy Tucker was as pale as the snow his brother had brought in from
+outside and which now showered about the victim of the ill-timed jest.
+
+"Ma--Major Pater! From Salsette! He has an artificial leg, and that's why
+it was sticking out in the aisle whenever he nodded off. Oh,
+Jimminy-beeswax! what's going to become of Tommy?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+BEAUTIFUL SNOW
+
+
+The girls had heard the boys who attended Salsette Academy mention that
+martinet, Major Pater. Although his infirmity--or injury--precluded his
+having anything to do with the drilling of the pupils of the academy, in
+the schoolroom he was the most stern of all the instructors at Salsette.
+
+"Oh, poor Tommy!" gasped Betty, wringing her hands.
+
+"Served him right," declared Louise. "He should not have played that
+trick. A lame man, too!"
+
+"Oh, Louise!" exclaimed her sister Bobby, "Tommy didn't know it was an
+artificial limb he was stumbling over."
+
+"And I'm sure I didn't know it was his old peg-leg I tripped on twice,"
+declared Teddy Tucker in high dudgeon. "What did he want to go to sleep
+for, spraddled all over the aisle?"
+
+He said this in a very low voice, however; and be kept well behind Bob and
+the girls. As for Timothy Derby and Libbie Littell they actually never
+heard a word of all this! They sat side by side in one of the sections and
+read together Spenser's _Faerie Queene_--understanding, it must be
+confessed, but an infinitesimal part of that poem.
+
+The other passengers near Major Pater, without any doubt, were vastly
+amused by his condition. The melting snow cascaded off his head and
+shoulders, and not a little of it went down his neck. Such a military
+looking and grim-faced man, standing so stiff and upright, seemed all the
+more ridiculous under these conditions.
+
+"H-r-r-rrp!" barked Major Pater, glaring at Tommy Tucker as though his
+eyes would burn holes right through that boy's jacket.
+
+Tommy sprang to attention. He was in citizen's dress, as was the major;
+but Tommy was sure the martinet knew him.
+
+"What do you mean, young man, by pouring a bucket of slush over my head
+and shoulders?" demanded the angry Major.
+
+"Please, sir, if you'll let me wipe it off----"
+
+Tommy had produced his own handkerchief and made a feeble attempt to
+attack the melting snow on the Major's shoulders.
+
+"H-r-r-rrp!" barked the Major again, and Tommy translated it as meaning
+"as you were" and came once more to attention in the middle of the aisle.
+
+One could not really help the angry gentleman, if one was kept standing in
+that ridiculous position. And the passengers near by were more amused than
+before by the attitude and appearance of the two engaged in the
+controversy.
+
+"Are you aware of what you have done?" demanded Major Pater, at last
+"Humph! Tucker of the Fourth, isn't it?"
+
+"Ye--ye--yes, sir," gasped Tommy. Then: "One of the Tuckers, sir."
+
+"Oh! Ah! Can there be two such awkward Tuckers?" demanded Major Paten
+"Humph! Is this your father, Tucker?"
+
+For by this time Uncle Dick saw what was going on and he approached,
+smiling it must be confessed, but with a towel secured from the men's
+lavatory.
+
+"I am acting in the capacity of guardian for the present, sir," said Mr.
+Gordon frankly. "This is a ridiculous thing; but I do not think the boy
+quite intended all that happened."
+
+At once he began flicking away the melted snow, and then rubbed Major
+Pater's bald head dry. All the time he continued to talk to the military
+academy instructor:
+
+"I grant you that it looks very awkward on Tucker's part. But, you see,
+Mr.--er--?"
+
+"Ma--Major Pater!" stammered Tommy Tucker.
+
+"Quite so. Major, of course. Major Pater, you will realize that the boy in
+coming along the aisle--Er, by the way, Tommy, what were you coming for?"
+
+"I was coming to you, Mr. Gordon, to show you how fast the snow was
+gathering. I--I scraped that ball of it off the step. The porter opened
+the door for me just a moment. I say, Mr. Gordon, it's a fierce storm!"
+
+Tommy came through this explanation pretty well. Uncle Dick's
+understanding smile helped him a good bit.
+
+"Quite so," said Mr. Gordon, and looking at Major Pater again. "Of course,
+I would never have known it was snowing if you had not undertaken to show
+me. But you see, Major Pater, your foot was sticking out into the aisle. I
+saw it. You have the misfortune to----"
+
+"Artificial leg, sir," growled Major Pater.
+
+"Quite so. Well, accidents will happen, you know. There! You are quite dry
+again. I don't think you will get much sleep here until the porter makes
+up the berths. Suppose we go into the smoking compartment and soothe our
+minds, Major?"
+
+"Ah--Humph! Thank you, Mr.--er----?"
+
+"Mr. Gordon," explained Tommy Tucker still standing as though he had
+swallowed a very stiff poker indeed.
+
+"Ah! Glad to meet you, Mr. Gordon." They shook hands. Then Major Pater
+shot another command at Tommy: "H-r-r-rrp!" (or so it sounded) and the boy
+with vast relief dropped his stiff military pose.
+
+The rest of the "live wire octette"--even Timothy and Libbie--were highly
+delighted by the outcome of Tommy's joke. For, if there is fun in such a
+practical joke as Tommy had tried to carry through, they thought there was
+double fun in seeing the biter bitten!
+
+"Now will you be good?" crowed his brother, Ted. "See what you get for
+being so fresh! Tumbling over his game leg and pitching a wilted snowball
+at the Major's head. Aren't you ashamed of yourself?"
+
+"Oh, hush!" grumbled Tommy. "You needn't say anything. He doesn't know
+which of the Tucker twins it was crowned him with that snowball, and you
+are just as much in his bad books as I am. Remember that."
+
+"Listen to him!" cried Ted, at once feeling abused. "And Major Pater is
+near-sighted, too, although he scorns to wear glasses. You've got me into
+a mess, too, Tommy Tucker."
+
+"There! There!" said Betty Gordon, soothingly. "Never mind. Uncle Dick
+will smooth him down. But I do think, boys, that you need not have got
+into trouble at all."
+
+"Huh! that's our natural state," observed Teddy. "Boys out of trouble are
+like fish out of water. So my dad says. And he ought to know," he grinned.
+"He has twins."
+
+Tommy considered, however, that he had got out of a bad box pretty easily.
+
+"Your Uncle Dick is fine, Betty," he observed. "Think of his getting on
+the blind side of Major Pater so easy. But cracky! how that snow did
+squash all over him," and he ended with a wicked giggle.
+
+"One of your instructors, too!" exclaimed Louise. "For shame!"
+
+"My!" chuckled Bobby, "what we'd like to do to Miss Prettyman at
+Shadyside!"
+
+"I am afraid Miss Prettyman is no more beloved than Major Pater is."
+
+"Never mind, you girls!" interrupted Tommy, with renewed interest in the
+storm and trying to peer through the window. "It's a regular blizzard.
+When the porter opened the door of the vestibule for me to get that snow,
+I thought he wouldn't get it shut again."
+
+"Suppose we get stalled?" questioned Louise, inclined to be the most
+thoughtful of the party.
+
+"Well, suppose we do?" returned Bob. "I tell you we are all right for
+food, for the dining car----"
+
+"Oh, I forgot to tell you," Tommy put in. "The porter let me into a
+secret. The diner was dropped about thirty miles back. Broken flange of
+one wheel and no time, of course, to put on a new wheel."
+
+"Goodness!" exclaimed Betty. "I begin to feel hungry already."
+
+"Of course, we'll pick up another diner?" asked Libbie, though rather
+doubtfully.
+
+"We'll hope so!" Bobby cried.
+
+"If we get through to Tonawanda, yes," said Tommy Tucker. "That's what the
+porter told me. But we don't get there, if we are on schedule, until eight
+o'clock."
+
+"There! I knew I was perishing of hunger," exclaimed Betty. "It's half
+past four already," she added, looking at her wrist watch.
+
+"Three and a half hours to dinner time?" wailed Bobby. "Oh!
+That--is--tough!"
+
+"That is, if we make the regular time," Bob said thoughtfully. "And right
+now, let me tell you, this train is just about crawling, and that's all.
+Humph! The soup sure will get cold in that dining car at Tonawanda, if it
+waits there to be attached to our train."
+
+"Oh! Oh!" cried Bobby. "Don't let's think of it. I had no idea that snow
+could be so troublesome."
+
+"Beautiful snow!" murmured Betty. "Say, Libbie. Recite that for us, will
+you? You know: the poetry about 'Beautiful Snow.' You or Timothy should
+remember it."
+
+"Pah!" exclaimed Bobby, grumblingly. "I'll give you the proper version:
+
+    "Beautiful snow! If it chokes up this train,
+     It certainly will give me a pain!"
+
+"Goodness me, Bobby!" retorted her cousin, Libbie, "your versifying
+certainly gives me a pain."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+STALLED, AND WITHOUT A DOCTOR
+
+
+The rapidity with which the storm had increased and the drifts had filled
+the cuts through which the rails were laid was something that none of the
+party bound for Mountain Camp had experienced. Unless Uncle Dick be
+excepted. As Betty said, Mr. Richard Gordon had been almost everywhere and
+had endured the most surprising experiences. That was something that
+helped to make him such a splendid guardian.
+
+"Yes," he agreed, when Betty dragged him down the car aisle to the two
+sections which he had wisely abandoned entirely to his young charges, "we
+had considerable snow up there in the part of Canada where I have been
+this fall. Before I came down for the Christmas holidays there was about
+four feet of snow on the level in the woods and certain sections of the
+railroad up there had been entirely abandoned for the winter. Horse sleds
+and dog sleighs do all the transportation until the spring thaw."
+
+"Oh, do you suppose," cried Libbie, big-eyed, "that we may be snowbound at
+Mountain Camp so that we cannot get back until spring?"
+
+"Not a chance," replied Uncle Dick, laughing heartily. "But it does look
+as though we may have to lay by for a night, or perhaps a night and a day,
+before we can get on to Cliffdale, which is our station."
+
+"In a hotel!" cried Betty. "Won't that be fun?"
+
+"Perhaps not so much fun. Some of these country-town hotels up here in the
+woods are run in a more haphazard way than a lumber camp. And what you get
+to eat will come out of a can in all probability."
+
+The boys groaned in unison at this, and even Betty looked woebegone.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't talk about eating, Uncle Dick. Do you suppose we will
+catch up with that dining car?"
+
+"I do not think we shall. But there is an eating room at the junction we
+are coming to. We can buy it out. I only hope there will be milk to be had
+for the little folks. There is at least one baby aboard. It's in the next
+car."
+
+"But we'll get to this place we're going to by morning, shan't we?" cried
+Bobby, very much excited.
+
+"We're two hours late already I understand," said Mr. Gordon. "We have
+little to fear, however I fancy if the storm does not hold up they will
+not try to push past the junction until morning. We've got to sleep in the
+car anyway; and if we are on short rations for a few hours it certainly
+will do you boys and girls little harm. At Cliffdale----"
+
+"Oh, Uncle Dick!" suddenly exclaimed Betty, "that is where Mr. Bolter has
+sent that beautiful black horse that he bought in England."
+
+"Oh, indeed? I heard of that mare. To Cliffdale? I believe there is a
+stockfarm there. It is some distance from my friend Canary's camp,
+however."
+
+"Do you suppose that girl got there?" whispered Bobby to Betty.
+
+"Even if she did, how disappointed she must be," Betty rejoined. "I am
+awfully sorry for Ida Bellethorne."
+
+"I don't know," said Bobby slowly. "I've been thinking. Suppose she did
+find your beautiful locket and--and appropriate it for her own use,"
+finished Bobby rather primly.
+
+"You mean steal it," said Betty promptly. "No. I don't think she did. She
+didn't seem to be that sort of person. Do you know, the more I think of
+her the more I consider that Mrs. Staples would be capable of doing that."
+
+"Oh, Betty! Finding and keeping your locket?"
+
+Betty nodded with her lips pursed soberly. "I didn't like that woman," she
+said.
+
+"Neither did I," cried Bobby, easily influenced by her friend's opinion.
+"I didn't like her a bit."
+
+"But, of course, we don't know a thing about it," sighed Betty. "I do not
+suppose we should blame either of them, or anybody else. We have no
+evidence. I guess, Bobby, I am the only one to blame, after all."
+
+"Well, don't mind, Betty dear," Bobby said comfortingly. "I believe the
+locket will turn up. I told Daddy and he will telephone to the stores once
+in a while and see if it has been found. And, of course, we have no
+particular reason to think that you dropped it in Mrs. Staples' shop."
+
+"None at all," admitted Betty more cheerfully. "So I'll stop worrying
+right now. But I would like to know where Ida Bellethorne is in this
+blizzard."
+
+"Girl or horse?" chuckled Bobby.
+
+"Girl. I fancy that little cockney hostler, or whatever he is, will look
+out carefully for the mare. But who is there to care anything about poor
+Ida?"
+
+Gradually even Betty and Bobby were convinced that there were several
+other matters to worry about that were connected with neither Ida
+Bellethorne the girl nor Ida Bellethorne the horse. The belated train
+finally got to the junction where there was an eating place. But another
+train had passed, going south, less than an hour before and the lunch
+counter had been swept almost bare.
+
+Uncle Dick and Major Pater were old travelers, however; and they were
+first out of the train and bought up most of the food in sight. Others of
+the passengers purchased sandwiches and coffee and tea to consume at once.
+Uncle Dick and the military man swept the shelves of canned milk and
+fruit, prepared cocoa and other similar drinks, as well as all the loaves
+of bread in sight, a boiled ham complete, and several yards of
+frankfurters, or, as the Fairfields folks called them, "wienies."
+
+"We know what Mrs. Eustice and Miss Prettyman would say to such
+provender," said Louise when the party, the boys helping, returned with
+the spoils of the lunch-room. "How about calories and dietetics, and all
+that?"
+
+"We may be hungry enough before we see a regular meal in a dining-car or a
+hotel to forget all about such things," Uncle Dick said seriously. "There!
+We are starting already. And we're pushing straight into a blizzard that
+looks to me as though it would continue all night."
+
+"Well, Uncle Dick," Betty said cheerfully, "we can go to bed and sleep and
+forget it. It will be all over by morning of course."
+
+Uncle Dick made no rejoinder to this. They had a jolly lunch, getting hot
+water from the porter for their drink. Bob and the Tucker twins pretty
+nearly bought out the candy supply on the train, and the girls felt
+assured that they were completely safe from starvation as long as the
+caramels and marshmallows held out.
+
+By nine o'clock, with the train pushing slowly on, the head locomotive
+aided by a pusher picked up at the junction, the berths were made up and
+everybody in the Pullman coach had retired.
+
+Betty, as she lay in her upper berth with Libbie, heard the snow, or
+sleet, swishing against the side and roof of the car, and the sound lulled
+her to sleep. She slept like any other healthy girl and knew nothing of
+the night that passed. The lights were still burning when she awoke. Not a
+gleam of daylight came through the narrow ground-glass window at her head.
+And two other things impressed her unfavorably: The train was standing
+still and not a sound penetrated to the car from without.
+
+Libbie was sound asleep and Betty crept out of the berth without awakening
+the plump girl. She got into her wrapper and slippers and stole along the
+aisle to the ladies' room. Nobody as yet seemed to have come from the
+berths.
+
+She could not hear the wind or snow when she got into the dressing room.
+This convinced her at first that the storm was over. But she dropped one
+of the narrow windows at the top to see out, and found that a wall of
+hard-pack snow shrouded the window. She tried to break through this drift
+with her arm wrapped in a towel. But although she stood on a stool and
+thrust her arm out to her shoulder, her hand did not reach the open air!
+
+"My goodness me!" gasped Betty Gordon. "We're stalled! We're snowbound!
+What shall we ever do if the snow doesn't melt pretty soon, or they don't
+come and dig us out?"
+
+She washed in haste, and having brought her clothes with her, she dressed
+promptly. All the time she was considering what was to be done if, as it
+seemed, the train could not go on.
+
+Just as she opened the door of the dressing room excited voices sounded at
+the end of the car. The conductor and the porter were talking loudly. The
+former suddenly shouted:
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen! is there a doctor in this coach? We want a doctor
+right away! Day coach ahead! Child taken poison and must have a doctor."
+
+A breathless gabble of voices assured him that there was no physician in
+the coach. He had already searched the other cars. There was no doctor on
+the train.
+
+"And we're stalled here in this cut for nobody knows how long!" groaned
+the conductor. "That woman is crazy in the next car. Her two year old
+child got hold of some kind of poison and swallowed some of it. The child
+will die for sure!"
+
+Betty was terribly shocked at this speech. She wriggled past the conductor
+and the troubled porter, and ran into the car ahead. At first glance she
+spied the little group of mother and children that was the center of
+excitement.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE TUNNEL
+
+
+The baby was screaming, the little boy of four or five looked miserably
+unhappy, and the worn and meager-looking mother was plainly frightened out
+of her wits. She let the baby scream on the seat beside her while she held
+the little girl in her lap.
+
+That youngster seemed to be the least disturbed of any of the party. She
+was a pretty child, and robust. She kicked vigorously against being held
+almost upside down by her mother (as though by that means the dose of
+poison could be coaxed out of the child) but she did not cry.
+
+"The little dear!" cooed Betty, pushing through the ring of other
+passengers. "What has happened to her?"
+
+"She'll be dead in five minutes," croaked a sour visaged woman who bent
+over the back of the seat to stare at the crying baby without making an
+effort to relieve the mother in any way.
+
+"What is the poison?" demanded Betty excitedly.
+
+"It--it's----I don't know what the doctor called it," wailed the poor
+mother. "I had it in my handbag with other drops. Nellie here is always
+playing with bottles. She will drink out of bottles, much as I can do or
+say."
+
+Betty was sniffing--that may not be an elegant expression, but it is
+exactly what she did--and looking all about on the floor.
+
+"Something's been spilled here," she said. "It's a funny odor. Seems to me
+I remember smelling it before."
+
+"That's the poison," groaned the woman over the back of the seat. "Her ma
+knocked it out of the young one's hand. Too bad. She's a goner!"
+
+This seemed to Betty very dreadful. She darted an angry glance at the
+woman. "A regular Mrs. Job's comforter, she is!" thought Betty.
+
+But all the time she was looking about the floor of the car for the
+bottle. Finally she dropped to her knees and scrambled about among the
+boots of the passengers. She came up like a diver, with an object held
+high in one hand.
+
+"Is this it?" she asked.
+
+"That is the bottle, Miss," sobbed the mother. "My poor little Nellie!
+Isn't there a doctor, anywhere? They say milk is good for some kinds of
+poison, but I haven't any milk for baby even. That is what makes him cry
+so. Poor little Nellie!"
+
+Betty had been staring at the label on the bottle. Now she smelled hard
+at the mouth of it She held the bottle before the woman's eyes.
+
+"Are you sure this is the bottle the child drank out of?" she demanded.
+
+"Yes, Miss. That is it. Poor little Nellie!"
+
+"Why! can't you smell?" demanded Betty. "And can't you see? There is no
+skull and cross-bones on this label. And all that was in the bottle was
+sweet spirits of niter. I'm sure that won't do your Nellie any lasting
+harm."
+
+The mother was thunderstruck for a moment--and speechless. The gloomy
+woman looking over the back of the seat drawled:
+
+"Then it wasn't poison at all?"
+
+"No," said Betty. "And I should think among you, you should have found it
+out!"
+
+She was quite scornful of the near-by passengers. The mother let the
+struggling little girl slip out of her lap, fortunately feet first rather
+than head first, and grabbed up the screaming baby.
+
+"Dear me! You naughty little thing, Nellie! You are always scaring me to
+death," she said scoldingly. "And if we don't come to some place where I
+can buy milk pretty soon and get it warmed, this child will burst his
+lungs crying."
+
+Betty, however, considered that the baby was much too strong and vigorous
+to be in a starving state as yet. She wondered how the poor women expected
+to get milk with the train stalled in the snow. She had in her pocket
+some chocolate wafers and she pacified the two older children with these
+and then ran back to the sleeping car.
+
+She was in season to head off a procession of excited Pullman passengers
+in all stages of undress starting for the day coach with everything in the
+line of antidote for poison that could be imagined and which they had
+discovered in their traveling bags.
+
+"Baby's better. She wasn't poisoned at all," Betty told them. "But those
+children are going to be awfully hungry before long if we have to stay
+here. Do you know we're snowbound, girls?"
+
+This last she confided to the three Littell girls.
+
+"Won't they dig us out?" asked the practical Louise.
+
+"What a lark!" exclaimed Bobby, clapping her hands.
+
+"Just think! Buried in the snow! How wonderful!" murmured Libbie.
+
+"Cheese!" exclaimed Tommy Tucker, overhearing this. "You'll think it's
+wonderful. The brakeman told me that the drivers were clogged at six
+o'clock and the wheels haven't turned since. We're completely buried in
+snow and it's still snowing. Head engine's an oil-burner and there is
+plenty of fuel; but there isn't a chance of our being dug out for days."
+
+"How brutal you are," giggled Bobby, who could not be frightened by any
+misadventure. "How shall we live?"
+
+"After we eat up the bread and ham we will draw lots and eat up each
+other," Bob observed soberly.
+
+"But those little children can't eat each other," Betty declared with
+conviction. "Come on Bobby. You're dressed. Let's see what we can do for
+that poor mother and the babies."
+
+The two girls had to confer with Uncle Dick first of all. He had charge of
+the supplies. Betty knew there was some way of mixing condensed milk with
+water and heating the mixture so that it would do very well at a
+pinch--the pinch of hunger!--for a nursing child. Uncle Dick supplied the
+canned milk and some other food for the older children, and Betty and
+Bobby carried these into the day coach where the little family had spent
+such an uncomfortable night and were likely to spend a very uncomfortable
+day as well.
+
+For there was no chance of escaping from their present predicament--all
+the train crew said so--until plows and shovelers came to dig the train
+out of the cut.
+
+Of course the conductors and the rest of the crew knew just where they
+were. Behind them about three miles was a small hamlet at which the train
+had not been scheduled to stop, and had not stopped. Had the train pulled
+down there the situation of the crew and passengers would have been much
+better. They would not have been stalled in this drifted cut.
+
+Cliffdale, to which Uncle Dick and his party were bound, was twenty miles
+and more ahead. The roadbed was so blocked that it might be several days
+before the way would be opened to Cliffdale.
+
+"The roads will be opened by the farmers and teams will get through the
+mountains before the railroad will be dug out," Mr. Gordon told the boys.
+"If we could get back to that station in the rear we might find
+conveyances that would take us on to Mountain Camp. If I had a pair of
+snowshoes I certainly could make it over the hills myself in a short
+time."
+
+"You go ahead, Mr. Gordon," said Tommy Tucker, "and tell 'em we're
+coming."
+
+"I'll have to dig out of here and get the webs on my feet first," replied
+Uncle Dick, laughing.
+
+His speech put an idea in the head of the ingenious Tommy Tucker. While
+the girls were attending to the children in the car ahead, the twins and
+Bob and Timothy Derby went through the train to the very end. The
+observation platform was banked with snow, and the snow was packed pretty
+hard. But there were some tools at hand and the boys set to work with the
+two porters and a brakeman to punch a hole through the snowbank to the
+surface.
+
+It was great sport, although the quartette from Salsette Academy enjoyed
+it more than the men did. It was fun for the boys and work for the men,
+and the latter would have given it up in despair if the younger diggers
+had not been so eagerly interested in the task.
+
+They sloped the tunnel so that it was several yards long before it reached
+the surface. The snow underneath, they tramped hard; they battered their
+way through by pressing a good deal of the snow into solid walls on either
+side. When the roof at the end finally fell in on them, they found that it
+was still snowing steadily and the wind was pouring great sheets of it
+into the cut and heaping it yard upon yard over the roofs of the cars.
+They could barely see the top of the smokestack of the pusher a few feet
+away.
+
+That locomotive had been abandoned by its crew when the train was stalled.
+Keeping the boiler of the head engine hot was sufficient to supply the
+cars with heat and hot water.
+
+"Cricky!" cried Bob. "We've found the way out; but I guess even Uncle Dick
+wouldn't care to start out in this storm, snowshoes or not. Fellows, we're
+in a bad fix, just as sure as you live."
+
+"All right," said Teddy Tucker. "Let's go back and get something to eat
+before somebody else gets ahead of us. I suppose those girls have given
+all the milk to those kids up front, and maybe the ham sandwiches too."
+
+"Dear me!" sighed Timothy, "it is like being cast away on a desert island.
+We are Robinson Crusoes."
+
+"And haven't got even a goat!" chuckled Tommy Tucker.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+AN ALARM
+
+
+Mr. Richard Gordon was not minded to allow the young folks to portion out
+the little store of food as they pleased. He and Major Pater, who had now
+joined the party from Fairfields quite as a matter of course, had
+considered the use of the supplies to the best advantage. There was not
+much else to eat on the train, for even the crew had devoured their
+lunches, and most trainmen when obliged to carry food at all are supplied
+with huge tin buckets that hold at least three "square meals."
+
+"Though why meals should be 'square' I can't for the life of me see,"
+Betty observed. "Why not 'round' meals? I am sure we manage to get around
+them when we eat them."
+
+"Quite a philosopheress, aren't you?" joked Bob.
+
+"These rations are not to be considered with philosophy," complained
+Bobby. "They are too frugal."
+
+In truth, when the bread and meat and crackers and hot drink had been
+portioned to those needed food most, the amount each received was nothing
+to gorge upon.
+
+"If it stops snowing--or as soon as it does," Bob declared, "we've got to
+get out and make our way back to that station the brakeman says is only
+three miles away."
+
+"Uncle Dick won't let us try it, I am sure," sighed Betty. "How could we
+wade through such deep snow?"
+
+"If you had helped dig that tunnel," said Teddy Tucker confidently, "you'd
+know that the snow is packed so hard you wouldn't sink in very deep in
+walking."
+
+"But of course, you girls can't go," Tommy said. "We fellows will have to
+go for supplies."
+
+The girls did not much like this statement. Betty and Bobby at least
+considered that they were quite as well able to endure the hardships of a
+tramp through the snow as the boys.
+
+"I'd just like to see that tunnel, and see how hard it is snowing
+outside," said Betty privately to her chum.
+
+"Let's go look," exclaimed Bobby, equally curious.
+
+Libbie and Timothy had their heads together over a book. Louise and the
+boys were engaged socially with some of the other passengers in their
+coach. So Betty and Bobby were able to slip away, with their coats and
+caps, without being observed.
+
+There were two Pullman coaches and but one day coach besides the express
+and baggage and mail cars to the train. The passengers in the day coach
+were confined to that or to the smoker's end of the baggage car ahead. The
+occupants of the Pullman coaches could roam through both as they pleased;
+and had the weather been fine it is certain that the young folks from
+Fairfields would have occupied the observation platform at the rear of the
+train a good part of the daytime.
+
+They had been shut in by the storm the afternoon before, and now they were
+doubly shut in by the snow. The doors of the vestibules between the cars
+could not be opened, for the snow was banked up on both sides to the
+roofs. That tunnel the boys and train hands had made from the rear
+platform was the only means of egress for the passengers from the
+submerged train.
+
+Betty and Bobby passed through the rear car and out upon the snow-banked
+platform. They saw that several people must have thrust themselves through
+the tunnel since the boys had made it. Probably these explorers had
+wished, like the two girls, to discover for themselves just what state the
+weather was in.
+
+"Dear me!" gasped Bobby, "dare we poke through that hole? What do you
+think, Betty?"
+
+"The snow is hard packed, just as the boys say. I guess we can risk it,"
+declared the more daring Betty. "Anyway, I can go anywhere Bob Henderson
+can, my dear. I will not take a back seat for any boy."
+
+"Hear! Hear!" chuckled Bobby. "Isn't that what they cry at political
+meetings? You have made a good speech, Bettykins. Now go ahead and do it."
+
+"Go ahead and do what?"
+
+"Lead the way through that chimney. My! I believe it has stopped snowing
+and the boys don't know it."
+
+"Come on then and make sure," Betty cried, and began to scramble up the
+sloping tunnel on hands and knees.
+
+Both girls were warmly dressed, booted, and mittened. A little snow would
+not hurt them--not even a great deal of snow. And that a great deal had
+fallen and blown into this railroad cut, Betty and Bobby soon realized
+when they had scrambled out through what the latter had called "the
+chimney."
+
+Only a few big flakes drifted in the air, which was keen and biting. But
+the wind had ceased--at least, it did not blow here in the cut between the
+hills--and it seemed only an ordinary winter day to the two girls from the
+other side of the Potomac.
+
+Forward they saw a thin stream of smoke rising into the air from the stack
+of the front locomotive. The fires in the pusher were banked. It was not
+an oil-burner, nor was it anywhere near as large a locomotive as the one
+that pulled the train.
+
+Rearward they could scarcely mark the roadbed, so drifted over was it.
+Fences and other landmarks were completely buried. The bending telegraph
+poles, weighted by the pull of snow-laden wires, was all that marked the
+right of way through the glen.
+
+"What a sight!" gasped Betty. "Oh, Bobby! did you ever see anything so
+glorious?"
+
+"I never saw so much snow, if that is what you mean," admitted the
+Virginia girl. "And I am not sure that I really approve of it."
+
+But Bobby laughed. She had to admit it was a great sight. It was now
+mid-afternoon and all they could see of the sun was a round, hazy ball
+behind the misty clouds, well down toward the western horizon which they
+could see through the mouth of this cut, or valley between the hills. At
+first they beheld not a moving object on the white waste.
+
+"It is almost solemn," pursued Betty, who possessed a keen delight in all
+manifestations of nature.
+
+"It looks mighty solemn, I admit," agreed Bobby. "Especially when you
+remember that anything to eat is three miles away and the drifts are
+nobody knows how many feet deep."
+
+Betty laughed. She was about to say something cheerful in reply when a
+sudden sound smote upon their ears--a sound that startled the two girls.
+Somewhere from over the verge of the high bank of the cut on their left
+hand sounded a long-drawn and perfectly blood-curdling howl!
+
+"For goodness' sake!" gasped Bobby, grabbing her friend by the arm. "What
+sort of creature is that? Hear it?"
+
+"Of course I hear it," replied Betty, rather sharply. "Do you think I am
+deaf?"
+
+Only a very deaf person could have missed hearing that mournful howl. It
+drew nearer.
+
+"Is it a dog?" asked Bobby, almost in a whisper, as for a third time the
+howl sounded.
+
+"A dog barks, doesn't it? That doesn't sound like a dog, Bobby," said
+Betty. "I heard one out West. I do believe it is one!"
+
+"One what?" cried Bobby, almost shaking her in alarm and impatience.
+
+"A wolf. It sounds just like a wolf. Oh, Bobby! suppose there should be a
+pack of wolves in these hills and that they should attack this train?"
+
+"Wolves!" shrieked Bobby. "_Wolves_! Then me for in-doors! I am not going
+to stay here and be eaten up by wolves."
+
+As she turned to dive into the tunnel there was a sharper and more eager
+yelp, and a shaggy animal came to the edge of the bluff to their left and,
+without stopping an instant, plunged down through the drifts toward the
+two girls where they stood on the hard-packed snow at the mouth of the
+tunnel.
+
+"It is a wolf!" wailed Bobby, and immediately disappeared, head first,
+down the hole in the snow drift.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE MOUNTAIN HUT
+
+
+If Bobby had not gone first and had not stuck half way down the hole with
+her feet kicking madly just at the mouth of the tunnel, without doubt
+Betty Gordon would have been driven by her own fears back into the Pullman
+coach.
+
+That shaggy beast diving from the top of the embankment, plunging, yelping
+and whining, through the softer drifts of snow, frightened Betty just as
+much as it had Bobby Littell. The latter had got away with a flying start,
+however, and her writhing body plugged the only means of escape. So Betty
+really had to face the approaching terror.
+
+"Oh! Oh!" cried Betty, turning from the approaching beast in despair.
+"Hurry! Hurry, Bobby Littell! Do you want me to be eaten up?"
+
+But Bobby had somehow cramped herself in the winding passage through the
+snow, and her voice was muffled as she too cried for help.
+
+However, Bobby's demands for assistance were much more likely to bring it
+than the cries of the girl outside. The porter heard Bobby first, and
+when he opened the door of the coach several men who were near heard the
+girl.
+
+"Help! Help! A wolf is eating her!" shrieked the frightened Bobby.
+
+"Ma soul an' body! He must be a-chawin' her legs off!" cried the darkey
+and he seized Bobby by the wrists, threw himself backward, and the girl
+came out of the tunnel like an aggravating cork out of a bottle.
+
+"What's this?" demanded Mr. Richard Gordon, who happened to be coming back
+to the end of the train to look for his niece and her chum.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Gordon!" sputtered Bobby, scrambling up, "it's got her! A wolf!
+It's got Betty!"
+
+"A wolf?" repeated Uncle Dick. "I didn't know there were any wolves left
+in this part of the country."
+
+Major Pater was with him. Mr. Gordon grabbed the latter's walking stick
+and went up that tunnel a good deal quicker than Bobby had come down it.
+And when he got to the surface he found his niece, laughing and crying at
+once, and almost smothered by the joyful embraces of a big Newfoundland
+dog!
+
+"A wolf indeed!" cried Mr. Gordon, but beating off the animal
+good-naturedly. "He must be a friend of yours, Betty."
+
+"Oh, dear me, he did scare us so!" Betty rejoined, getting up out of the
+drift, trying to brush off her coat, and petting the exuberant dog at the
+same time. "But it is a dear--and its master must be somewhere about,
+don't you think, Uncle Dick?"
+
+Its master was, for the next moment he appeared at the top of the bank
+down which the "wolf" had wallowed. He hailed Uncle Dick and Betty with a
+great, jovial shout and plunged down the slope himself. He was a young man
+on snowshoes, and he proved to be a telegraph operator at that station
+three miles south.
+
+"Wires are so clogged we can't get messages through. But we knew that
+Number Forty was stalled about here. Going to be a job to dig her out.
+I've got a message for the conductor," he said when he reached the top of
+the drift that was heaped over the train.
+
+"Wasn't it a hard task to get here?" Mr. Gordon asked.
+
+"Not so bad. My folks live right over the ridge there, about half a mile
+away. I just came from the house with the dog. Down, Nero! Behave
+yourself!"
+
+"We are going to be hungry here pretty soon," suggested Mr. Gordon.
+
+"There will be a pung come up from the station with grub enough before
+night. Furnished by the company. That is what I have come to see the
+conductor about."
+
+"I tell you what," said Betty's uncle, who was nothing if not quick in
+thinking. "My party were bound for Cliffdale."
+
+"That's not very far away. But I doubt if the train gets there this week."
+
+"Bad outlook for us. We are going to Mountain Camp--Mr. Canary's place."
+
+"I know that place," said the telegraph operator. "There is an easy road
+to it from our farm through the hills. Get there quicker than you can by
+the way of Cliffdale. I believe my father could drive you up there
+to-morrow."
+
+"In a sleigh?" cried Betty delightedly. "What fun!"
+
+"In a pung. With four of our horses. They'd break the road all right.
+Ought to start right early in the morning, though."
+
+"Do you suppose you could get us over to your house to-night?" asked Mr.
+Gordon quickly. "There are a good many of us----"
+
+"How many in the party?" asked the young man. "My name's Jaroth--Fred
+Jaroth."
+
+Mr. Gordon handed him his card and said:
+
+"There are four girls, four boys, and myself. Quite a party."
+
+"That is all right, Mr. Gordon," said Fred Jaroth cheerfully. "We often
+put up thirty people in the summer. We've a great ranch of a house. And I
+can help you up the bank yonder and beat you a path through the woods to
+the main road. Nothing simpler. Your trunks will get to Cliffdale sometime
+and you can carry your hand baggage."
+
+"Not many trunks, thank goodness," replied Mr. Gordon. "What do you think,
+Betty? Does it sound good?"
+
+"Heavenly!" declared his niece.
+
+Just then a brakeman came up through the tunnel to find out if the wolf
+had eaten both the gentleman and his niece, and the telegraph operator
+went down, feet first, to find the conductor and deliver his message.
+
+"Then the idea of going on to Mountain Camp by sledge suits you, does it,
+young lady?" asked Mr. Gordon of Betty.
+
+"They will all be delighted. You know they will, Uncle. What sport!"
+
+The suggestion of the telegraph operator did seem quite inspired. Mr.
+Gordon and Betty reentered the train to impart the decision to the others,
+and, as Betty had claimed, her young friends were both excited and
+delighted by the prospect.
+
+In half an hour the party was off, Betty and her friends bundled up and
+carrying their bags while Mr. Gordon followed and Fred Jaroth led the way
+on his snowshoes and carrying two suitcases. He said they helped balance
+him and made the track through the snow firmer. As for Nero, he cavorted
+like a wild dog, and that, Bobby said, proved he was a wolf!
+
+Once at the top of the bank they found it rather easy following Jaroth
+through the woods. And when they reached the road--or the place where the
+highway would have been if the snow had not drifted over fences and
+all--they met the party from the station bringing up food and other
+comforts for the snowbound passengers. As the snow had really stopped
+falling it was expected that the plow would be along sometime the next day
+and then the train would be pulled back to the junction.
+
+"But if this man has a roomy sled and good horses we shall not be cheated
+out of our visit to Mountain Camp," Mr. Gordon said cheerfully.
+
+The old farmhouse when they reached it certainly looked big enough to
+accommodate them all. There was a wing thrown out on either side; but
+those wings were for use only in the summer. There were beds enough and to
+spare in the main part of the house.
+
+When they sat down to Mrs. Jaroth's supper table Bob declared that quite
+evidently famine had not reached this retired spot. The platters were
+heaped with fried ham and fried eggs and sausages and other staple
+articles. These and the hot biscuit disappeared like snow before a hot sun
+in April.
+
+Altogether it was a joyous evening that they spent at the Jaroth house.
+Yet as Betty and Bobby cuddled up together in the bed which they shared,
+Betty expressed a certain fear which had been bothering her for some time.
+
+"I wonder where she is, Bobby?" Betty said thoughtfully.
+
+"Where who is?" demanded her chum sleepily.
+
+"That girl. Ida Bellethorne. If she came up here on a wild goose chase
+after her aunt, and found only a horse, what will become of her?"
+
+"I haven't the least idea," confessed Bobby.
+
+"Did she return before this blizzard set in, or is she still up here in
+the woods? And what will become of her?"
+
+"Gracious!" exclaimed the sleepy Bobby, "let's go to sleep and think about
+Ida Bellethorne to-morrow."
+
+"And I wonder if it is possible that she can know anything about my
+locket," was another murmured question of Betty's. But Bobby had gone fast
+asleep then and did not answer.
+
+Under the radiance of the big oil lamp hanging above the kitchen table,
+the table itself covered with an old-fashioned red and white checked
+cloth, the young folks bound for Mountain Camp ate breakfast. And such a
+breakfast!
+
+Buckwheat cakes, each as big as the plate itself with "oodles of butter
+and real maple syrup," to quote Bob.
+
+"We don't even get as good as this at Salsette," said Tommy Tucker grimly.
+"Oh, cracky!"
+
+"I want to know!" gibed his twin, borrowing a phrase he had heard New
+England Libbie use on one occasion. "If Major Pater could see us now!"
+
+Libbie and Timothy forgot to quote poetry. The fact was, as Bobby pointed
+out, buckwheat cakes like those were poems in themselves.
+
+"And when one's mouth is full of such poems, mere printed verses lack
+value."
+
+Romantic as she was, Libbie admitted the truth of her cousin's remark.
+
+A chime of bells at the door hastened the completion of the meal. The boys
+might have sat there longer and, like boa-constrictors, gorged themselves
+into lethargy.
+
+However, adventure was ahead and the sound of the sledge bells excited the
+young people. They got on their coats and caps and furs and mittens and
+trooped out to the "pung," as the elder Jaroth called the low, deep,
+straw-filled sledge to which he had attached four strong farm horses.
+
+There were no seats. It would be much more comfortable sitting in the
+straw, and much warmer. For although the storm had entirely passed the
+cold was intense. It nipped every exposed feature, and their breath hung
+like hoar-frost before them when they laughed and talked.
+
+During the night something had been done to break out the road. Mr.
+Jaroth's horses managed to trample the drifts into something like a hubbly
+path for the broad sled-runners to slip oven They went on, almost always
+mounting a grade, for four hours before they came to a human habitation.
+
+The driver pointed his whipstock to a black speck before them and higher
+up the hill which was sharply defined against the background of pure
+white.
+
+"Bill Kedders' hut," he said to Mr. Gordon. "'Tain't likely he's there
+this time o' year. Usually he and his wife go to Cliffdale to spend the
+winter with their married daughter."
+
+"Just the same," cried Bob suddenly, "there's smoke coming out of that
+chimney. Don't you see it, Uncle Dick?"
+
+"The boy's right!" ejaculated Jaroth, with sudden anxiety. "It can't be
+that Bill and his woman were caught by this blizzard. He's as knowing
+about weather signs as an old bear, Bill is. And you can bet every bear in
+these woods is holed up till spring."
+
+He even urged the plodding horses to a faster pace. The hut, buried in the
+snow to a point far above its eaves, was built against a steep hillside
+at the edge of the wood, with the drifted road passing directly before its
+door. When the pung drew up before it and the horses stopped with a sudden
+shower of tinkling bell-notes, Mr. Jaroth shouted:
+
+"Hey, Bill! Hey, Bill Kedders!"
+
+There was no direct reply to this hail. But as they listened for a reply
+there was not one of the party that did not distinguish quite clearly the
+sound of weeping from inside the mountain hut.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE LOST GIRL
+
+
+"That ain't Bill!" exclaimed Jaroth. "That's as sure as you're a foot
+high. Nor yet it ain't his wife. If either one of them has cried since
+they were put into short clothes I miss my guess. Huh!"
+
+He hesitated, standing in the snow half way between the pung and the
+snow-smothered door of the hut. Sheltered as it had been by the hill and
+by the woods, the hut was not masked so much by the drifted snow on its
+front. They could see the upper part of the door-casing.
+
+"By gravy!" ejaculated Mr. Jaroth, "it don't sound human. I can't make it
+out. Funny things they say happen up here in these woods. I wouldn't be a
+mite surprised if that crying--or----"
+
+He hesitated while the boys and girls, and even Mr. Gordon, stared
+amazedly at him.
+
+"Who do you think it is?" asked Uncle Dick finally.
+
+"Well, it ain't Bill," grumbled Jaroth.
+
+The sobbing continued. So engaged was the person weeping in the sorrow
+that convulsed him, or her, that the jingling of the bells as the horses
+shook their heads or the voices of those in the pung did not attract
+attention.
+
+Jaroth stood in the snow and neither advanced nor retreated. It really did
+seem as though he was afraid to approach nearer to the hut on the
+mountain-side!
+
+"That is a girl or a woman in there," Bob declared.
+
+"Huh!" exclaimed Bobby sharply. "It might be a boy. Boys cry sometimes."
+
+"Really?" said Timothy. "But you never read of crying boys except in
+humorous verses. They are not supposed to cry."
+
+"Well," said Betty, suddenly hopping out of the sleigh, "we'll never find
+out whether it is a girl or a boy if we wait for Mr. Jaroth, it seems."
+
+She started for the door of the hut. Bob hopped out after her in a hurry.
+And he took with him the snow-shovel Jaroth had brought along to use in
+clearing the drifts away if they chanced to get stuck.
+
+"You'd better look out," said Jaroth, still standing undecided in the
+snow.
+
+"For what?" asked Bob, hurrying to get before Betty.
+
+"That crying don't sound natural. Might he a ha'nt. Can't tell."
+
+"Fancy!" whispered Betty in glee. "A great big man like him afraid of a
+ghost--and there isn't such a thing!"
+
+"Don't need to be if he is afraid of it," returned Bob in the same low
+tone. "You can be afraid of any fancy if you want to. It doesn't need to
+exist. I guess most fears are of things that don't really exist Come on,
+now. Let me shovel this drift away."
+
+He set to work vigorously on the snow heap before the door. Mr. Gordon,
+seeing that everything possible was being done, let the young people go
+ahead without interference. In two minutes they could see the frozen
+latch-string that was hanging out. Whoever was in the hut had not taken
+the precaution to pull in the leather thong.
+
+"Go ahead, Betty," said Bob finally. "You push open the door. I'll stand
+here ready to beat 'em down with the shovel if they start after you."
+
+"Guess you think it isn't a girl, then," chuckled Betty, as she pulled the
+string and heard the bar inside click as it was drawn out of the slot.
+
+With the shovel Bob pushed the door inward. The cabin would have been
+quite dark had it not been for a little fire crackling on the hearth. Over
+this a figure stooped--huddled, it seemed, for warmth. The room was almost
+bare.
+
+"Why, you poor thing!" Betty cried, running into the hut. "Are you here
+all alone?"
+
+She had seen instantly that it was a girl. And evidently the stranger was
+in much misery. But at Betty's cry she started up from the hearth and
+whirled about in both fear and surprise.
+
+Her hair was disarranged, and there was a great deal of it. Her face was
+swollen with weeping, and she was all but blinded by her tears. At Betty's
+sympathetic tone and words she burst out crying again. Betty gathered her
+right into her arms--or, as much of her as she could enfold, for the other
+girl was bigger than Betty in every way.
+
+"You?" gasped the crying girl. "How--how did you come up here? And in all
+this snow? Oh, this is a wilderness--a wilderness! How do people ever live
+here, even in the summer? It is dreadful--dreadful! And I thought I should
+freeze."
+
+"Ida Bellethorne!" gasped Betty. "Who would ever have expected to find you
+here?"
+
+"I know I haven't any more business here than I have in the moon," said
+the English girl. "I--I wish I'd never left Mrs. Staples."
+
+"Mrs. Staples told us you had come up this way," Betty said.
+
+Immediately the other girl jerked away from her, threw back her damp hair,
+and stared, startled, at Betty.
+
+"Then you--you found out? You know----"
+
+"My poor girl!" interrupted Betty, quite misunderstanding Ida's look, "I
+know all about your coming up here to find your aunt. And that was
+foolish, for the notice you saw in the paper was about Mr. Bolter's black
+mare."
+
+"Mr. Bolter's mare?" repeated Ida.
+
+"Now, tell me!" urged the excited Betty. "Didn't you come to Cliffdale to
+look for your aunt?"
+
+"Yes. That I did. But she isn't up here at all."
+
+By this time Uncle Dick and the others were gathered about the door of the
+hut. Jaroth, with a glance now and then at his horses, had even stepped
+inside.
+
+"By gravy!" ejaculated the man, "this here's a pretty to-do. What you been
+doing to Bill Kedders' chattels, girl?"
+
+"I--I burned them. I had to, to keep warm," answered Ida Bellethorne
+haltingly. "I burned the table and the chairs and the boxes and then
+pulled down the berths and burned them. If you hadn't come I don't know
+what I should have done for a fire."
+
+"By gravy! Burned down the shack itself to keep you warm, I reckon!"
+chuckled Jaroth. "Well, we'd better take this girl along with us, hadn't
+we, Mr. Gordon? She'll set fire to the timber next, if we don't, after
+she's used up the shack."
+
+"We most surely will take her along to Mountain Camp," declared Betty's
+uncle. "But what puzzles me, is how she ever got here to this, lonely
+place."
+
+"I was trying to find the Candace Farm," choked Ida Bellethorne.
+
+"I want to know!" said Jaroth. "That's the stockfarm where they pasture so
+many sportin' hosses. Candace, he makes a good thing out of it. But it's
+eight miles from here and not in the direction we're going, Mr. Gordon."
+
+"We will take her along to Mountain Camp," said Uncle Dick. "One more will
+not scare Mrs. Canary, I am sure."
+
+Ida brought a good-sized suitcase out of the hut with her. She had
+evidently tried to walk from Cliffdale to the stockfarm, carrying that
+weight. The girls were buzzing over the appearance of the stranger and the
+boys stared.
+
+"Oh, Betty!" whispered Bobby Littell, "is she Ida Bellethorne?"
+
+"One of them," rejoined Betty promptly.
+
+"Then do you suppose she has your locket?" ventured Bobby.
+
+To tell the truth, Betty had not once thought of that!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE CAMP ON THE OVERLOOK
+
+
+Mountain Camp was rightly named, for it was built on the side of one
+mountain and was facing another. Between the two eminences was a lake at
+least five miles long and almost as broad. The wind had blown so hard
+during the blizzard that the snow had not piled upon the ice at all,
+although it was heaped man-high along the edges. The pool of blue ice
+stretched away from before Mountain Camp like a huge sheet of plate glass.
+
+The two storied, rambling house, built of rough logs on the outside, stood
+on a plateau called the Overlook forty feet above the surface of the lake.
+Indeed the spot did overlook the whole high valley.
+
+The hills sloped down from this height in easy descents to the plains.
+Woods masked every topographical contour of the surrounding country. Such
+woods as Betty Gordon and her friends had never seen before.
+
+"Virginia forests are not like this," confessed Louise Littell. "The pines
+are never so tall and there is not so much hardwood. Dear me! see that
+dead pine across the lake. It almost seems to touch the sky, it is so
+tall."
+
+This talk took place the next morning when they had all rested and, like
+all healthy young things, were eager for adventure. They had been welcomed
+by Mr. and Mrs. Canary in a way that put the most bashful at ease.
+
+Even Ida Bellethorne had soon recovered from that sense of strangeness
+that had at first overpowered her. The girls had been able to help her out
+a little in the matter of dress. She appeared at the dinner table quite as
+one of themselves. Betty would not hear of Ida's withdrawing from the
+general company, and for a particular reason.
+
+In truth, Betty felt a little condemned. She had considered a suspicion of
+Ida's honesty, and afterward she knew it could not be so! The English girl
+had no appearance of a dishonest person. Betty saw that Uncle Dick was
+favorably disposed toward Ida. If he did not consider her all right he
+surely would not have introduced her to Mr. and Mrs. Canary as one of his
+party.
+
+Nor did Uncle Dick allow Ida to tell her story the evening they arrived at
+the camp on the Overlook. "To-morrow will do for that," he had said.
+
+At breakfast time there were so many plans for exciting adventure
+discussed that Betty surely would have forgotten all about Ida
+Bellethorne's expected explanation had it not been for the lost locket.
+The possibility that Ida knew something about it had so impressed Betty
+that nothing else held her interest for long.
+
+Every one had brought skates from Fairfields, and the great expanse of
+blue ice--no ice is so blue as that of a mountain lake--was unmarked.
+Naturally skating was the very first pleasure that beckoned.
+
+"Oh, I'm just crazy to get on skates!" cried Bobby.
+
+"I think I'll be glad to do some skating myself," came from Libbie, who
+had been reading a book even before breakfast.
+
+"What do you say to a race on skates?" came from Tommy Tucker.
+
+"I think we had better get used to skating up here before we talk about a
+race," said Bob. "This ice looks tremendously hard and slippery. You won't
+be able to do much on your skates unless they are extra sharp."
+
+"Oh, I had 'em sharpened."
+
+"Don't forget to wrap up well," admonished Mrs. Canary. "Sometimes it gets
+pretty cold and windy."
+
+"Not to say anything about its being cold already," answered Bobby. "My,
+but the wind goes right through a person up here!"
+
+While the other seven ran off for skates and wraps, Betty nodded to Uncle
+Dick and then, tucking her arm through that of Ida Bellethorne, urged her
+to follow Mr. Gordon from the breakfast room to a little study, or "den,"
+that was possibly Mr. Canary's own.
+
+"Now, girls," said Uncle Dick in his quiet, pleasant way and smiling with
+equal kindness upon his niece and the English girl, "let us get
+comfortable and open our hearts to each other. I think you know, Ida, that
+Betty and I are immensely interested in your story and we are hungry for
+the details. But not altogether out of mere curiosity. We hope to give you
+aid in some way to make your situation better. Understand?"
+
+"Oh, Mr. Gordon, I quite understand that," said the English girl seriously
+and without smiling. "I never saw such friendly people as you are. And you
+both strangers to me! If I were at home I couldn't find better friends, I
+am sure."
+
+"That's fine!" declared Uncle Dick. "It is exactly the way I want you to
+feel. Betty and I are interested. Now suppose you sit down and tell us all
+about it."
+
+"Where shall I begin?" murmured the girl thoughtfully, hesitating.
+
+"If I were you," returned Uncle Dick, with a smile, "I would begin at the
+beginning."
+
+"Oh, but that's so very far back!"
+
+"Never mind that. One of the most foolish mistakes which I see in
+educational methods is to give the children lessons in modern history
+without any reference to ancient history which comes to them in higher
+grades. Ancient history should be gone into first. Suppose, Ida, you begin
+with ancient history."
+
+"Before Ida Bellethorne was born, do you mean?" asked the English girl
+doubtfully.
+
+"Which Ida Bellethorne do you mean?" asked Mr. Gordon, while Betty stared.
+
+"I was thinking of my beautiful black mare. The darling! She is seven
+years old now, Mr. Gordon; but I think that in those seven years enough
+has happened to me to make me feel three times seven years old."
+
+"Go ahead, Ida," said the gentleman cheerfully. "Tell it in your own way."
+
+Thus encouraged, the girl began, and she did tell it in her own way. But
+it was not a brief way, and both Mr. Gordon and Betty asked questions and
+that, too, increased the difficulty of Ida's telling her story.
+
+She had been the only living child of Gwynne Bellethorne, who had been a
+horse breeder and sometimes a turfman in one of the lower English
+counties. She had been motherless since her third birthday. Her only
+living relative was her father's sister, likewise Ida Bellethorne, who had
+been estranged from her brother for several years and had made her own
+way on the continent and later in America on the concert stage.
+
+Ida, the present Ida, remembered seeing her aunt but once. She had come to
+Bellethorne Park the very week the black mare was foaled. When they all
+went out to see the little, awkward, kicking colt in the big box stall,
+separated from its whinnying mother by a strong barred fence, the owner of
+the stables had laughingly named the filly after his sister.
+
+"But," Ida told them, "father told Aunt Ida that the filly was to be my
+property. He had, I think, suffered many losses even then. He made a bill
+of sale, or something, making the filly over to me; but I was a minor, and
+after father died my guardian had that bill of sale. He showed it to me
+once. I don't see how Mr. Bolter could have bought my lovely mare when I
+got none of the money for her."
+
+This was not, however, sticking to the main thread of the story. Ida knew
+that although her aunt had come to the Park in amity, there was a quarrel
+between her father and aunt before the haughty and beautiful concert
+singer went away, never more to appear at Bellethorne, not even to attend
+her brother's funeral.
+
+Before that sad happening the mare, Ida Bellethorne, had come to full
+growth and as a three-year-old had made an astonishing record on the
+English race tracks. The year Mr. Bellethorne died he had planned to ship
+her to France for the Grand Prix. Her name was in the mouths of every
+sportsman in England and her fame had spread to the United States.
+
+The death of her father had signaled the breaking up of her home and the
+severing of all home ties for Ida. Like many men of his class, Mr.
+Bellethorne had had no close friends. At least, no honorable friends. The
+man he had chosen as the administrator of his wrecked estate and the
+guardian of his unfortunate daughter, Ida felt sure had been dishonorable.
+
+There seemed nothing left for Ida when the estate was "settled." One day
+Ida Bellethorne, the mare, had disappeared, and Ida the girl could learn
+nothing about her or what had been done with her. At that she had run away
+from her guardian, had made her way to Liverpool, had taken service with
+an American family sailing for the United States, and so had reached New
+York.
+
+"I found a letter addressed to Aunt Ida after my father died," explained
+the girl, choking back a sob. "On the envelope in pencil father had
+written to me to find Aunt Ida and give it to her. He hoped she would
+forgive him and take some interest in me. I've got that letter safe in
+here." She touched the belt that held her blouse down so snugly. "I hope
+I'll find Aunt Ida and be able to give her the letter. I remember her as a
+most beautiful, tall woman. I loved her on sight. But, I don't know----"
+
+"Cheer up!" exclaimed Mr. Gordon, beamingly. "We'll find her. I take it
+upon myself to say that Betty and I will find her for you. Sha'n't we,
+Betty?"
+
+"Indeed we will. If she is singing in this country of course it will be
+comparatively easy to find her."
+
+"Do you think so?" asked Ida Bellethorne doubtfully. "I have not found it
+so, and I have been searching for her for three months now. This is such a
+big country! I never imagined it so big until I began to look for Aunt
+Ida. It seems like looking for a needle in a haystack."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+OFF ON SNOWSHOES
+
+
+Mr. Gordon encouraged the English girl at this point in her story by
+assuring her that he would, before returning to Canada, put the matter in
+the hands of his lawyers and have the search for the elder Ida Bellethorne
+conducted in a more businesslike way.
+
+"How did you expect to find your aunt," he asked, "when you first landed
+in New York?"
+
+"I knew of a musical journal published there which I believed kept track
+of people who sang. I went to that office. The last they knew of my aunt
+she was booked to sing at a concert in Washington," Ida said sadly. "The
+date was the very day I called at the office. I hurried to buy a ticket to
+Washington. But the distance was so great that when my train got into
+Washington the concert was over and I could do nothing more until the next
+day."
+
+"And then?" asked Uncle Dick.
+
+"She had gone again. All the company had gone and I could find nobody who
+knew anything about her. I--I didn't have much money left," confessed the
+girl. "And things do cost so much here in your country. I was frightened.
+I walked about to find a cheap lodging and reached that street in
+Georgetown where Mrs. Staples has her shop."
+
+"I see," commented Uncle Dick.
+
+"So I asked Mrs. Staples. She was English too, and she offered me lodgings
+and a chance to serve in her shop. I took it. What else could I do?"
+
+"You are a plucky girl, I must say. Don't you think so. Betty?" said Uncle
+Dick.
+
+"I think she is quite wonderful!" cried his niece. "And think of her
+making those blouses so beautifully! You know, Ida, Bobby bought the blue
+one of Mrs. Staples."
+
+"I am glad, if you like them," said the other girl, blushing faintly. "I
+had hard work to persuade Mrs. Staples to pay for that one on the chance
+of your coming back for it."
+
+"Well," interposed Uncle Dick, "tell us the rest. You thought you heard of
+your Aunt Ida up here, in the mountains?"
+
+"Yes, Mr. Gordon," said Ida. "I read it in the paper. But the notice must
+have referred to my dear little mare. I never dreamed she had been sent
+over here. I never dreamed of it!"
+
+"No?"
+
+"Of course I didn't! And when I got to Cliffdale there was nobody who had
+ever heard of my aunt. There are two hotels. One of them is closed at
+this time of year. At the other there was no such guest."
+
+"Dear me! How disappointed you must have felt," murmured Betty.
+
+"You can't imagine! But in talking with the clerk at the hotel I got news
+of my little darling."
+
+"Meaning the mare, of course?" suggested Uncle Dick.
+
+"Yes. She had arrived the night before and had been taken directly to
+Candace Farm. The clerk told me how to get there. I did not feel that I
+could afford to hire anybody to take me there. And I knew nobody. So I set
+out to walk day before yesterday morning."
+
+"Before it began to snow?" asked Betty.
+
+"Yes, Miss Gordon."
+
+"Oh, please," cried Betty, "call me Betty. I'm not old enough to be Miss
+Gordon. To a girl, anyway," she added. "With a strange boy it would be
+different."
+
+The English girl consented, and then went on with her story.
+
+"It was cloudy but I did not know anything about such storms as you have
+here. Oh, dear me, how it snowed and blew! I got to that little house and
+I could open the door. If I had had to go many yards farther I would have
+fallen down and been covered by the snow."
+
+"You poor dear!" murmured Betty, putting an arm around the other girl.
+
+Ida gave her a tearful smile, and Betty kissed her. And then the latter
+suddenly remembered again her lost locket. She gave a little jump in her
+chair. But she did not speak of it.
+
+Not for a moment did she believe Ida Bellethorne would be guilty of
+stealing her trinket. Uncle Dick evidently did not think of that
+possibility, either. Could Betty suggest such a matter when already Ida
+was in so much trouble? At least, she would wait and see what came of it.
+So she hugged Ida more closely and said:
+
+"Go on. What else?"
+
+"Not much else, Betty," said the English girl, wiping her eyes again and
+smiling. "I just stayed there in that house until you came along and saved
+me. There was nothing to burn but the furniture in the house, and I burned
+it. I suppose the poor man who owns it will want to be paid. Oh, dear!"
+
+"I wouldn't worry about that," said Mr. Gordon, cheerfully. "You seem to
+have come through a good deal. I'd take it easy now. Mrs. Canary and the
+girls are glad to have you here. When we go back to town we will take you
+with us and see what can be done."
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Gordon. You are very kind. I should like to know about my
+little mare. She is a darling! How this Mr. Bolter came to get her----"
+
+"Oh, Ida!" cried Betty, breaking in suddenly, "do you know a little man, a
+crooked little man, named Hunchie Slattery?"
+
+"My goodness, Betty! Of course I remember Hunchie. He worked in our
+stables."
+
+"He is with Ida Bellethorne, your pretty mare. He takes care of her. I
+talked with him at Mr. Bolter's farm in Virginia. The mare has a cough,
+and she was sent up here to get well. And I heard Mr. Bolter himself tell
+Hunchie Slattery that he was to go with her."
+
+"Dear me, Betty! if I could find Hunchie, too, I'd feel better. He might
+be able to tell me how it came that my mare was taken away and sold. She
+really did belong to me, Mr. Gordon. Mr. Jackwood, father's administrator
+and my guardian, showed me the bill of sale making me Ida's owner. And
+even if I was a minor, wouldn't that be a legal transfer paper?"
+
+"I am not sure of the English law, my dear. But it seems to me it would be
+in this country. At any rate, that will be another thing to consult my
+lawyers about. I understand Bolter paid somewhere near twenty thousand
+dollars for the mare. It would be quite a fortune for you, Ida."
+
+"Indeed it would. And the mare is worth all of four thousand pounds, I
+know. Father always said there was no better mare in all England than Ida
+Bellethorne, and Aunt Ida might be proud to have such a horse named after
+her."
+
+"We are not far from the Candace Farm and perhaps we can get over there
+before we leave Mountain Camp," Mr. Gordon said kindly. "Then you can see
+your horse and the man from home. I will get a statement from this jockey,
+or hostler, or whatever he is, and it may aid my lawyers in their search
+for the facts regarding the sale of the mare to Mr. Bolter."
+
+"Thank you very kindly, Mr. Gordon."
+
+The conference broke up and Betty ran out to join her mates on the lake.
+Ida could not skate. And, anyway, she preferred to sit indoors with Mrs.
+Canary. Ida had the silk for another sweater in her bag, and that very
+hour she began to knit an over-blouse for Libbie, who had expressed a
+desire to possess one like those Betty and Bobby had bought.
+
+The skating was fine, but the wind had risen again and this time it was a
+warm wind. The snow grew soft on the surface, and when the party came up
+the bluff for luncheon it was not easy to walk and they sank deeply into
+the snow.
+
+"This is a weather breeder," said Mr. Canary, standing on the porch to
+greet them. "I fear you young folks have come to Mountain Camp at the
+beginning of the roughest part of the winter."
+
+"Don't apologize for your weather, Jack," laughed Uncle Dick. "If it grows
+too boisterous or unpleasant outside, these young people must find their
+fun indoors."
+
+And this is what they did for the next two days. The temperature moderated
+a good deal, and then it rained. Not a hard downpour, but a drifting
+"Scotch mist" that settled the snowdrifts and finally left them saturated
+with water.
+
+Then back came the frost--sharp, snappy and robust. The air cleared like
+magic. The sun shone out of a perfectly clear sky. Just to put one's head
+out of the door make the blood tingle.
+
+Meanwhile both the girls and boys had found plenty of interesting things
+to do indoors, as Uncle Dick had prophesied. Especially the boys. Under
+the teaching of Uncle Dick and Mr. Canary they had learned to string
+snowshoes. Mr. Canary had the frames and the thongs of which the webs are
+woven. Even Timothy neglected the library to engage in this fascinating
+work.
+
+Of course, the girls must have webs as well. Betty and Bobby were
+particularly eager to learn to walk on snowshoes and, as Bob Henderson
+said, they "pestered" the boys until sufficient pairs of webs were made to
+enable the entire party to try walking on them when the time was ripe.
+
+On the third morning, just at dawn, there was a heavy snow squall for an
+hour. It left about four inches of downy snow upon the hard-packed and
+slippery surface of the drifts.
+
+"This is an ideal condition," said Mr. Gordon with enthusiasm. "My feet
+itch to be off on the webs myself. After breakfast we will try them out.
+Now remember the rules I have been telling you, and see how well you can
+all learn to shuffle over this snow."
+
+Thoughtful Bob had strung an extra pair of shoes for Ida. He knew that
+Betty did not want the English girl left out of their good times. And all
+the crowd liked Ida. Although she was in the main a very quiet girl, as
+one grew to know her she proved to possess charming qualities both of mind
+and heart.
+
+Ida was not as warmly dressed for venturing into the open as the other
+girls. But Mrs. Canary, one of the kindest souls in the world, mended this
+defect. She furnished Ida with a fur coat and gloves that secured her from
+frostbite.
+
+The whole party turned out gaily. Having been confined to the house for
+almost forty-eight hours, they were as full of life as colts. But in a few
+minutes the nine of them were on snowshoes and watched and instructed by
+Uncle Dick were learning their first lesson in the rather ticklish art of
+scuffling over the soft snow without tripping and plunging headlong into
+it.
+
+Not that there were not many laughable accidents. The capers both boys
+and girls involuntarily cut led to shouts of laughter, and sometimes to a
+little pain. For the frozen crust underneath the light surface snow
+offered a rather hard foundation when one fell flat.
+
+The necessary falls incident to learning the right trick of handling one's
+self on snowshoes soon cured the first enthusiasm of several of the party.
+Louise, for instance, found it too strenuous for her liking. And Timothy
+got a bump on the back of his head that no phrenologist could have easily
+described.
+
+The second day, however, Betty, Bobby and Ida, with Bob and Tommy Tucker,
+were just as enthusiastic on the subject of snowshoeing as at first. While
+the others swept off a part of the lake just below the Outlook, the
+snowshoeing party set off on their first real hike through the woods; and
+that hike led to an unexpected adventure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+GREAT EXCITEMENT
+
+
+Mr. Richard Gordon was, as Betty and Bob often declared, the very best
+uncle that ever lived! One good thing about him they thought was that he
+never "fussed."
+
+"He isn't always wondering what you are going to do next and telling you
+not to," explained Bob to Ida Bellethorne as the party started out from
+Mountain Camp. "Not like a woman, oh, no!"
+
+"Hush, bad boy!" cried Bobby. "What do you mean, throwing slurs at women?"
+
+"You know even if Mrs. Canary had seen us start off she would have given
+us a dozen orders before we got out of earshot. And she's a mighty nice
+woman, too. Almost as nice as your mother, Bobby," finished Bob.
+
+"Bob doesn't like chaperons," giggled Betty.
+
+"Nor me," said Tommy Tucker, sticking close to Bobby Littell as he always
+did when Roberta would let him. "Uncle Dick suits me as a chaperon every
+time."
+
+Uncle Dick had let the party troop away on their snowshoes without
+advising them when to return or asking where they were going, and
+presently Betty and Bob formed a sudden plan about their hike.
+
+From one of the men working about the camp Bob had got directions
+regarding the nearest way to Candace Farm. Ida longed to go there. It was
+but seven miles away in a direct line, and now, when Betty spoke of going
+there, Bob said that, with the aid of his compass, he knew he could find
+it without difficulty.
+
+"We didn't mention it to Uncle Dick, but he won't be bothered about it,"
+said Bob. "We've got all day. We can tell him where we have been when we
+get back, which will be just the same."
+
+"Will it, Bob?" the girl asked doubtfully. "But of course there is nothing
+really wrong in going."
+
+"I--should--say--not!" exploded Bob. "I'm sure it will be all right with
+Uncle Dick, Betty. Remember how he let us roam and explore in Oklahoma?"
+
+The others in the party were not troubled by doubts in the least. They
+went hurrying through the snow with shouts and laughter; and if any forest
+animals were astir that day they must have been frightened by the noise
+the party made scrambling along on snowshoes. Not one of them but fell at
+times--and the very "twistiest" kind of falls! But nobody was hurt;
+although at one point Bobby fell flat on her back at the verge of a steep
+descent and there was no stopping her until she plunged into a deep drift
+at the bottom.
+
+Tommy kicked off his snowshoes and ran down to haul her out while the
+others, seeing that she was unhurt, shouted their glee. Bobby was not
+often in a fix that she could not get out of by her own exertions. Being
+such an energetic and independent girl, she would not often accept help of
+her boy friends, especially of Tommy who hovered around her like a moth
+around a candle.
+
+But when she had lost her snowshoes she found the soft snow so much deeper
+than she expected at the bottom of that hill that she was glad indeed to
+accept Tommy's aid. He dragged her out of the drift and set her upright.
+Even then she found that she could not climb up again by herself to where
+her friends were enjoying her discomfiture.
+
+"Come on!" cried Tommy, who had kicked his own snowshoes off at the top of
+the slide. "Give us your hand, Bobby. We'll make it somehow."
+
+But they did not "make it" easily. It seemed as though they could climb
+only so high and then slide back again. Under the shallow top snow the
+frozen crust was like pebbled glass. Tommy could barely kick the toes of
+his boots into it to make steps, and just as he had secured a footing in a
+particularly slippery place, Bobby would utter a shriek and slide to the
+bottom again.
+
+Even Betty was almost ill with laughter as this occurred over and over
+again. But the Tucker twin finally proved himself to be master of the
+situation. He was determined to get Bobby to the top of the hill, and he
+succeeded.
+
+Tom Tucker was a strong lad. Stooping, he commanded the girl to put her
+arms over his shoulders so that he could seize both wrists with one hand.
+Then he bent forward, carrying Bobby on his back and her weight upon his
+aided in breaking through the snow-crust and getting a footing.
+
+He plodded up the slope, a little at a time, and after a while Betty and
+Bob helped them to the level brink of the hill. Tommy fell to the snow
+panting, and Bobby was inclined to scold for a minute. Then she gave Tommy
+one of her rare smiles and helped him up. She was not often so kind to
+him.
+
+"You are a good child, Tommy Tucker," she proclaimed saucily, as she beat
+the loose snow off his coat. "In time you may be quite nice."
+
+Betty and Ida Bellethorne praised him too; but Bob continued to laugh and
+when the party started on again the others learned why he was so amused.
+
+The way to Candace Farm lay right down that slope to the bottom of which
+Bobby had tumbled, and all the exertion Tommy had put forth to save her
+was unnecessary. Bob led them along a lane right past the spot where
+Tommy had pulled the girl out of the snowbank!
+
+"That's the meanest trick that was ever played on me!" declared Bobby, in
+high wrath at first. Then she began to appreciate the joke and laughed
+with the others. "I was going to tell the folks at home how Tommy saved me
+from the peril of being buried in the snowbank; but I guess I'd better
+not," she observed. "Don't blame me, Tommy. Give it to Bob."
+
+"Ill get square with Bob," grumbled the Tucker twin. "No fear of that."
+
+Bobby remained kind to him however; and as Tommy frankly admired her he
+was repaid for his effort. But every time Bob looked at Tom he burst out
+laughing.
+
+They had struck into a straight trough in the snow, with maples on either
+side standing gaunt and strong, and a windrow of drifted snow where the
+fences were supposed to be--a road which Bob said the man at Mountain Camp
+had told him led straight to Candace Farm.
+
+"Wish we had brought a sled with us," Tommy said. "We could have ridden
+the girls on it. Aren't you tired, Bobby?"
+
+"Not as tired as you are, I warrant," she said, laughing at him. "Poor
+Tommy!"
+
+"Aw, you go fish! I could carry you a mile and not feel it. Gee! What's
+this coming?"
+
+Far down the snow-covered road they first heard shouts, then a cloud of
+snow-dust spurted into the air and hid whatever it was coming along the
+way toward them. Bob immediately drew Betty and Ida to one side of the
+road and Tommy urged Bobby to follow.
+
+Suddenly out of the cloud of flying snow appeared a horse's head and
+plunging fore feet. Then another and another! They came along the road at
+a plunging, blundering pace, snorting and neighing. Behind them were men,
+evidently trying to stop the runaways.
+
+"Colts!" shouted Bob. "Yearlings. All young horses. And just about wild.
+Remember that bunch we saw in Oklahoma, Betty, that was being driven to
+the shipping station? They are wild as bears."
+
+Ida Bellethorne did not seem to be much disturbed by the possibility of
+the horses doing them any harm. She stood out before her companions and
+stared at the coming herd eagerly. The black mare she loved so, however,
+was not in this bunch of runaways.
+
+The young stock swept past the watching party from Mountain Camp, their
+pace rapid in spite of the hard going. They kept to the snow-covered road,
+however. Behind them came half a dozen men, wind-spent already and not a
+little angry.
+
+"Why didn't you stop 'em?" bawled one red-faced fellow. "If they spread
+out in some open pasture we'll be all day gathering them."
+
+"Easy to stop 'em, I guess," returned Tommy. "They'd have trampled us
+down."
+
+"Could stop a snowslide easier, I guess," Bob suggested. "But I tell you:
+We'll give you a hand collecting them. How did they get away?"
+
+"Went over the paddock fence like a flock of sheep. Snow is so deep, you
+know," said the red-faced man. "Come on, you boys, if you will. The girls
+can go on to the house and Mrs. Candace will let 'em warm up. It's only a
+little way."
+
+The "little way" proved to be a good two miles; but the three girls did
+not falter. They saw the big farmhouse and the great barns and snow-filled
+paddocks a long way ahead.
+
+"I'll be glad of that 'warm'," confessed Betty, as they turned in at the
+entrance to the lane. "And maybe Mrs. Candace will give us a cup of tea."
+
+At that moment Bobby clutched her arm and pointed up the lane. "See there!
+He'll fall! Oh, look!"
+
+Betty was as startled as her chum when she spied what Bobby had first
+seen. A little, crooked man was crawling out above the hay door of the
+main barn upon a timber that was here thrust out from the framework and to
+which was attached a block and fall. The rope had evidently fouled in the
+block and he was trying to detach it.
+
+"That's Hunchie Slattery!" gasped Betty, "What a chance he is taking!"
+
+For everything was sheathed in ice from the effect of the rain and frost
+of the night before. That timber was as slippery as glass.
+
+Ida Bellethorne set off on a run for the barn; but unlike Bobby she did
+not say a word. Had she thought of any way to help the crooked little man,
+however, she was too late. Hunchie suddenly slipped, clutched vainly at
+the rope, which gave under his weight, and he came down "on the run."
+
+The rope undoubtedly broke his fall. He would have been killed had he
+plunged immediately to the frozen ground beneath.
+
+As it was, when the three girls reached him, he was unconscious and it was
+plain by the attitude in which he lay that his leg was broken.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE EMERGENCY
+
+
+"Poor Hunchie!" murmured Ida Bellethorne, "I hope it wasn't because he was
+surprised to see me that he fell."
+
+"His surprise did not make that timber slippery with ice," said Betty,
+looking up. "Oh! Here's a lady!"
+
+A comfortable looking woman with a shawl over her head was hurrying from
+the kitchen door of the Candace farmhouse.
+
+"What has happened to that poor man? He's been battered and kicked about
+so much, it would seem, there ain't much can happen to him that he hasn't
+already suffered.
+
+"Ah! Poor fellow!" she added, stooping over the senseless Hunchie. "What a
+deal of trouble some folks seem bound to have. And not another man on the
+place!"
+
+She stood up again and stared at the three girls. Her broad, florid face
+was all creased with trouble now, but Betty thought she must ordinarily be
+a very cheerful woman indeed.
+
+"They've gone chasing the young stock that broke away. Dear me! what is
+going to happen to this poor fellow? Bill and the rest may be gone for
+hours, and there's bones broke here, that's sure."
+
+"Where's a doctor?" asked Bobby eagerly.
+
+"Eleven miles away, my dear, if he's an inch. Dr. Pevy is the only man for
+a broken bone in these woods. Poor Hunchie!"
+
+"Can't we get him into his bed?" asked Betty. "He'll freeze here."
+
+"You're right," replied the woman, who afterward told them she was Mrs.
+Candace. "Yes, we'll take him into the house and put him into a good bed.
+Can you girls lift him?"
+
+They could and did. And without too much effort the three transported the
+injured man, who was but a light weight, across the yard, into the house,
+and to a room which Mrs. Candace showed them. He began to groan and mutter
+before they managed to get him on the bed.
+
+There was an old woman who helped Mrs. Candace in the house, and the two
+removed Hunchie's outer garments and made him as comfortable as possible
+while the girls waited in much excitement in the sitting room.
+
+"He saw one of you girls and knows you," said Mrs. Candace, coming out of
+the bedroom. "But he talks about that mare, Ida Bellethorne."
+
+"This is Ida Bellethorne," said Betty, pointing to the English girl.
+
+"I declare! I thought Hunchie was out of his head. How comes you are named
+after that horse, girl?"
+
+Ida explained her connection with the black mare and with Hunchie.
+
+"You'd better go in and talk to him. Maybe it will case his pain. But that
+shin bone is sticking right through the flesh of his leg. It's awful! And
+he's in terrible pain. If Bill don't come back soon----"
+
+"Isn't there any man on the place?" asked Betty, interrupting.
+
+"None but them with Bill hunting the young stock."
+
+"And the boys--our friends--have gone with them," explained Betty.
+"Somebody must get the surgeon."
+
+"How are we going to do it? The telephone wires are down," explained Mrs.
+Candace. "And there ain't a horse properly shod for traveling on this ice.
+I fear some of that young stock will break their legs."
+
+"We saw them skating all over the road," said Bobby. "But how gay and
+excited they were!"
+
+"A ridin' horse would have to go at a foot pace," explained Mrs. Candace,
+"unless it was sharpened. I don't know----"
+
+Ida had gone into the bedroom to speak with the injured man. She looked
+out at this juncture and excitedly beckoned to Betty. Betty ran in to find
+the crooked little man looking even more crooked and pitiful than ever
+under the blankets. He was groaning and the perspiration stood on his
+forehead. That he was in exceeding pain there could be no doubt.
+
+"He says Ida Bellethorne is sharpened," gasped Ida.
+
+"Oh! You mean she is fixed to travel on ice on frozen ground?"
+
+"I 'ad to lead 'er up 'ere from the station, Miss. Ain't I saw you before,
+Miss?" said Hunchie, staring at Betty. "At Mr. Bolter's?"
+
+"Yes, yes!" cried Betty. "Can the mare travel on this hard snow?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am. I didn't draw the calks for I exercised 'er each d'y, I did.
+I didn't want 'er to fall. An' now I failed myself!"
+
+The two girls looked at each other significantly. Ida was easily led out
+of the room. Betty put the question to her.
+
+"That's just it, Betty," said the English girl, almost in tears. "I never
+learned to ride. I never did ride. My nurse was afraid to let me learn
+when I was little, and although I love horses, I only know how to drive
+them. It's like a sailor never having learned to swim."
+
+Betty beat her hands together in excitement. "Never mind! Never mind!" she
+cried. "I can ride. I can ride any horse. I am not afraid of your Ida
+Bellethorne. And none of the boys or men is here. I'll go for the doctor."
+
+"I don't know if it is best for you to," groaned Ida.
+
+"Call Mrs. Candace." They were in the kitchen, and Ida ran to summon the
+farm woman while Betty got into her coat. Mrs. Candace came, hurrying.
+
+"What is this I hear?" she demanded. "I couldn't let you ride that horse.
+You will be thrown or something."
+
+"No I shan't, Mrs. Candace. I can ride. And Hunchie says the mare is
+sharpened."
+
+"So she is. I had forgotten," the woman admitted thoughtfully.
+
+"And the poor fellow suffers so. Some lasting harm may be done if we don't
+get a surgeon quickly. Where does Dr. Pevy live?" demanded Betty urgently.
+
+The fact that the injured hostler was really in great pain and possibly in
+some danger, caused Mrs. Candace finally to agree to the girl's demand.
+Betty ran out with Ida to get the mare and saddle her. Betty was not
+dressed properly for such a venture as this; but she wore warm
+undergarments, and stout shoes.
+
+The black mare was so gentle with all her spirit and fire that Betty did
+not feel any fear. She and Ida led the beautiful creature out upon the
+barn floor and found saddle and bridle for her. In ten minutes Betty was
+astride the mare and Ida led her out of the stable.
+
+Mrs. Candace had already given Betty clear directions regarding the way to
+Dr. Pevy's; but she now stood on the door-stone and called repetitions of
+these directions after her.
+
+Bobby waved her fur piece and shouted encouragement too. But Ida
+Bellethorne ran into the house to attend the injured Hunchie and did not
+watch Betty and the black mare out of sight as the others did.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+BETTY'S RIDE
+
+
+When Betty Gordon and her young friends had set out from Mountain Camp on
+their snowshoe hike the sun shone brilliantly and every ice-covered branch
+and fence-rail sparkled as though bedewed with diamond dust. Now that it
+was drawing toward noon the sky was overcast again and the wind, had Betty
+stopped to listen to it, might be heard mourning in the tops of the pines.
+
+But Ida Bellethorne, the black mare, gave Betty no opportunity of stopping
+to listen to the wind mourn. No, indeed! The girl had all she could do for
+the first mile or two to keep her saddle and cling to the reins.
+
+When first they set forth from the Candace stables the mare went gingerly
+enough for a few rods. She seemed to know that the frozen crust of the old
+drifts just beneath the loose snow was perilous.
+
+But her sharpened calks gave her a grip on the frozen snow that the wise
+mare quickly understood. She lengthened her stride. She gathered speed.
+And once getting her usual swift gait, with expanded nostrils and erect
+ears, she skimmed over the frozen way as a swallow skims the air. Betty
+had never traveled so fast in her life except in a speeding automobile.
+
+She could easily believe that Ida Bellethorne had broken most of the track
+records of the English turf. She might make track history here in the
+United States, if nothing happened to her!
+
+Betty was wise enough to know that, had Mr. Candace been at home, even in
+this earnest need for a surgeon he would never have allowed the beautiful
+and valuable mare to have been used in this way. But there was no other
+horse on the place that could be trusted to travel at any gait.
+
+Ida Bellethorne certainly was traveling! The speed, the keen rush of the
+wind past her, the need for haste and her own personal peril, all served
+to give Betty a veritable thrill.
+
+If Ida made a misstep--if she went down in a heap--Betty was pretty sure
+that she, herself, would be hurt. She retained a tight grip upon the
+reins. The mare was no velvet-mouthed animal. Betty doubted if she had the
+strength in her arms to pull the creature down to a walk now that she was
+started.
+
+The instructions Mrs. Candace had given the girl pointed to a descent into
+the valley for some miles, and almost by a direct road, and then around a
+sharp turn and up the grade by a branch road to the village where Dr. Pevy
+lived. Betty was sure she would not lose her way; the question was, could
+she cling to the saddle and keep the mare on her feet until the first
+exuberance of Ida's spirit was controlled? The condition of the road did
+not so much matter, for once the mare found that she did not slip on the
+crust she trod the way firmly and with perfect confidence.
+
+"She is a dear--she undoubtedly is," Betty thought. "But I feel just as
+though I were being run away with by a steam engine and did not know how
+to close the throttle or reverse the engine. Dear me!"
+
+She might well say "dear me." Uncle Dick would surely have been much
+worried for her safety if he could know what she was doing. Betty by no
+means appreciated in full her danger.
+
+Indeed, she scarcely thought of danger. Ida Bellethorne seemed as
+sure-footed as a chamois. Her calks threw bits of ice-crust behind her,
+and she never slipped nor slid. There was nobody on the road. There was
+not even the mark of a sledge, although along the ditch were the shuffling
+prints of snowshoes. Some pedestrian had gone this way in the early
+morning.
+
+This was not the road by which Betty and her friends had been transported
+by Mr. Jaroth. There was not even a hut like Bill Kedders' beside it. In
+places the thick woods verged right on the track on either side and in
+these tunnels it seemed to be already dusk.
+
+It flashed into Betty's mind that there might be savage animals in these
+thick woods. Bears, and wild cats, and perhaps even the larger Canadian
+lynx, might be hovering in the dark wood. It would not be pleasant to have
+one of those animals spring out at one, perhaps from an overhanging limb,
+as the little mare and her rider dashed beneath!
+
+"Just the same," the girl thought, "at the pace Ida Bellethorne is
+carrying me, such wild animals couldn't jump quick enough to catch me.
+Guess I needn't be afraid of them."
+
+There were perils in her path--most unexpected perils. Betty would never
+have even dreamed of what really threatened her. For fifteen minutes Ida
+Bellethorne galloped on and the girl knew she must have come a third of
+the way to Dr. Pevy's office.
+
+The mare's first exuberance passed. Of her own volition she drew down to a
+canter. Her speed still seemed almost phenominal to the girl riding her,
+but Betty began to feel more secure in the saddle.
+
+They reached the top of a steep hill. The hedge of tall pines and
+underbrush drew closer in on either side. The road was very narrow. As
+the mare started down the incline it seemed as though they were going into
+a long and steep chute.
+
+Before this Betty had noted the ice-hung telephone and telegraph wires
+strung beside the road. Sheeted in the frozen rain and snow the heavy
+wires had dragged many of the poles askew. Here and there a wire was
+broken.
+
+It never entered the girl's mind that there was danger in those wires.
+And, perhaps, in most of them there was not. But across this ravine into
+which the road plunged, and slantingly, were strung much heavier
+wires--feed cables from the Cliffdale power station over the hill.
+
+"Why, look at those icicles!" exclaimed Betty, with big eyes and watching
+the hanging wires ahead. "If they fell they would kill a person, I do
+believe!"
+
+She tugged with all her might at Ida Bellethorne's reins, and now, well
+breathed, the mare responded to the unuttered command. She came into a
+walk. Betty continued to stare at the heavily laden wires spanning the
+road, the heavier power wires above the sagging series of telephone and
+telegraph wires.
+
+In watching them so closely the girl discovered another, and even more
+startling fact. One of the poles bearing up the feed wires was actually
+pitched at such an angle from the top of the bank on the right hand that
+Betty felt sure the wires themselves were all that held the pole from
+falling.
+
+"There is going to be an accident here," declared the girl aloud. "I
+wonder the company doesn't send out men to fix it. Although I guess they
+could not prop up that pole. It has gone too far."
+
+Even as she spoke the mare stopped, snorting. Her instinct was more keen
+than Betty's reasoning.
+
+With a screeching breaking and tearing of wood and wire the trembling pole
+fell! Betty might, had she urged her mount, have cleared the place and
+escaped. But the girl lacked that wisdom.
+
+The pole fell across the deep road and its two heavy cables came in
+contact with the wires strung from the other poles below. Instantly the
+ravine was lit by a blinding flash of blue flame--a flame that ran from
+wire to wire, from pole to pole, melting the ice that clung to them,
+hissing and crackling and giving off shooting spears of flame that
+threatened any passer-by.
+
+The mare, snorting and fearful, scrambled back, swerved, and tried to
+escape from the ravine; but Betty had her under good control now. She had
+no spurs, but she yanked savagely at the bit and wheeled Ida Bellethorne
+again to face the sputtering electric flames that barred the road.
+
+Only a third of the way to the doctor's and the way made impassable! What
+should she do? If she turned back, Betty did not know where or how to
+strike into the thick and pathless forest. Hunchie, suffering from his
+injured leg, must be aided as soon as possible. Her advance must not be
+stayed.
+
+Yet there before her the sparking, darting flames spread the width of the
+ravine. Burning a black hole already in the deep drifts, the crossed wires
+forbade the girl to advance another yard!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+BETTY COMES THROUGH
+
+
+Betty admitted that she was badly frightened. She was afraid of the
+crossed wires, and would have been in any case. The spurting blue flames
+she knew would savagely burn her and Ida Bellethorne if they touched them,
+and the wires might give a shock that would kill either girl or horse.
+
+But seven miles or so beyond those sputtering flames was Dr. Pevy's
+office. And Dr. Pevy was needed right away at Candace Farm.
+
+A picture of poor Hunchie lying white and moaning in the bed rose in
+Betty's memory. She could not return and report that it was impossible for
+her to reach the doctor's office. Afraid as she was of the crossed wires,
+she was more afraid of showing the white feather.
+
+If Bob Henderson were here in her situation Betty was sure he would not
+back down. And if Bob could overcome difficulties, why couldn't Betty? The
+thought inspired the girl to do as Bob would do--come through.
+
+"I must do it!" Betty choked, holding the mare firmly headed toward the
+writhing, crackling wires. "Ida! Get up! You can jump it.
+You--just--must!"
+
+The black mare crouched and snorted. Betty would have given a good deal
+for tiny spurs in the heels of her shoes or for a whip to lay along the
+mare's flank. Spirited as the creature was, and well trained, too, her
+fear of fire made her shrink from the leap.
+
+There was a width of six feet of darting flames. The electricity in the
+heavy cables was melting the other wires, and from the broken end of each
+wire the blue light spurted. The snow was melting all about, turning black
+and yellow in streaks. Betty did not know how long this would keep up; but
+every minute she delayed poor Hunchie paid for in continued suffering.
+
+"We must do it!" she shrieked to the horse. "You've got to--there!"
+
+She whipped off her velvet hat and struck Ida Bellethorne again and again.
+The mare crouched, measured the distance, and leaped into the air. Well
+for her and for Betty that Ida Bellethorne had a good pedigree; had come
+of a long line of forebears that had been taught to jump hedges, fences,
+water-holes and bogs. None of them had ever made such a perilous leap as
+this!
+
+The mare landed in softening snow, for the scathing flames were melting
+the drifts on either side. Betty had felt the rush of heat rising from
+the cables and had put her hat over her face.
+
+Ida Bellethorne squealed. Without doubt she had been scorched somewhere.
+And now secure on her feet she darted away through the ravine, running
+faster than she had run while Betty had bestrode her.
+
+Betty could not glance back at the sputtering wires. She must keep her
+gaze fixed ahead. Although at the speed the mare was now running it is
+quite doubtful if the girl could have retarded her mount in any degree.
+They came to the forks that Mrs. Candace had told her of, and Betty
+managed to turn the frightened mare up the steeper road to the left. There
+were few landmarks that the snow had not hidden; but the way to Dr. Pevy's
+was so direct that one could scarcely mistake it.
+
+Ida Bellethorne began to cool down after a while and Betty could guide her
+more easily. She had begun to talk to the pretty creature soothingly, and
+leaned forward in her saddle to pat the mare's neck.
+
+"I don't blame you for being scared, Ida Bellethorne," crooned Betty. "I
+was scared myself, and I'm scared yet. But don't mind. Just be easy. Your
+pretty black apron in front is all spattered with froth, poor dear! I
+wonder if this run has done your cough any harm--or any good. Anyway, you
+haven't coughed since we started."
+
+But Betty knew that if the mare stood for a minute she must be covered and
+rubbed down. She had this in her mind when she came to the blacksmith shop
+and the store, directly opposite each other. Dr. Pevy's, she had been
+told, was the second house beyond on the blacksmith side of the road.
+
+It proved to be a comfortable looking cottage with a barn at the back, and
+she urged Ida Bellethorne around to the barn without stopping at the
+house. The barn door was open and a man in greasy overalls was tinkering
+about a small motor-car. He was a pleasant-looking man with a beard and
+eyeglasses and Betty was sure he must be the doctor before he even spoke
+to her.
+
+"Hullo!" exclaimed the amateur machanic, rising up with a wrench in one
+hand and an oil can in the other. "Whew! That mare has been traveling
+some. And such a beauty! You're from Bill Candace's I'm sure. Did she run
+away with you? Here, let me help you."
+
+But Betty was out of the saddle and had led the mare in upon the floor,
+although Ida Bellethorne looked somewhat askance at the partly dismantled
+car.
+
+"Needn't be afraid of the road-bug, my beauty," said Dr. Pevy, putting out
+a knowing hand to stroke the mare's neck. "She must be rubbed down and a
+cloth put on her----"
+
+"I know," said Betty hastily. "I'll do it if you'll let me. But can you go
+back with me, Doctor?"
+
+"To the Candace Farm?"
+
+"Yes, sir. A man has been seriously hurt and there was nobody else to
+come."
+
+"Wonder you got here without having a fall," said Dr. Pevy.
+
+"She is sharpened. And she is a dear!" gasped Betty. "But I hope you can
+start right away. Hunchie is suffering so."
+
+"Can't use the road-bug, that's sure," said Dr. Pevy, glancing again at
+the car. "That's why I was doctoring her now while the snow is too deep.
+But I still have old Standby and the sleigh. I'll start back with you in a
+few minutes and we'll lead the mare. The exercise will do her good. My!
+What a handsome creature she is."
+
+"Yes, sir. She is quite wonderful," said Betty; and while they gave Ida
+Bellethorne the attention she needed Betty told the doctor all about
+Hunchie and her ride through the forest. When Dr. Pevy heard about the
+broken wires in the road, he went to the house and telephoned to the
+Cliffdale power house to tell them where the break was. The linemen were
+already searching for it.
+
+"That peril will be averted immediately," he said coming back with his
+overalls removed, a coat over his arm and carrying his case in his other
+hand. "That's it, my dear. Walk her up and down. Such a beauty!"
+
+He got out his light sleigh and then led Standby, a big, red-roan horse,
+out on the floor to harness him.
+
+"These automobiles are all right when the snow doesn't fly," Dr. Pevy
+remarked. "But up here in the hills we have so much snow that one has to
+keep a horse anyway or else give up business during the winter. You were a
+plucky girl to come so far on that mare, my dear. A Washington girl, you
+say?"
+
+"We just came from Washington," Betty explained. "But I can't really claim
+to belong there. I--I'm sort of homeless, I guess. I do just love these
+mountains and this air."
+
+"This air," commented Dr. Pevy, "smells just now of a storm. And I think
+it may drizzle again. Now, if you are ready, my dear."
+
+He unbuckled Ida Bellethorne's bridle rein and made it a leading rein. He
+helped Betty into the sleigh and gave her the rein to hold. The mare led
+easily, and merely snorted when Standby leaned into the collar and started
+the sleigh.
+
+The roan was heavy footed, and his shoes, too, were calked. They started
+off from the village at a good jog with the blanketed black mare trotting
+easily behind the sleigh.
+
+Betty tried to mould her velvet hat into shape. It had been a hat that she
+very much prized, and was copied after one Ada Nansen wore, and Ada set
+the fashions at Shadyside. But that little hat would never be the same
+again after being used as a goad for Ida Bellethorne. Betty sighed, and
+gave up her attempt.
+
+When they came to the place in the ravine where the wires were down Dr.
+Pevy drew up Standby. The mare snorted, recognizing the spot. But the
+electrical display was over, for the power had been turned off.
+
+"You certainly must have had a narrow squeak here," remarked the
+physician, as he looked at the fallen wires.
+
+"Oh, Doctor, it was awful!" breathed Betty. "I thought sure that we were
+going to have the worst kind of accident."
+
+"The company ought really to put up a new line of poles, so many of these
+are getting rotten," was the doctor's reply. "But I suppose they are hard
+up for money these days, and can afford only the necessary repairs."
+
+The sleigh climbed the mountain after that to the Candace Farm. As they
+came in sight of it Betty saw the troop of young stock being driven in
+through the lane, and saw Bob and Tommy with the stock farmer and his men.
+It was well she had ventured for the doctor on the black mare, or poor
+Hunchie Slattery would have suffered much longer without medical
+attention.
+
+Bobby ran out to meet them when the sleigh came into the yard. Mrs.
+Candace stood at the back door explaining to the red-faced man, her
+husband. It was Bob who came to take the leading rein of the black mare
+from Betty's hand.
+
+"Cricky!" he exclaimed. "What have you been up to now, Betsey? Is this
+that English mare? Isn't she a beauty! And you've been riding her?"
+
+"I've been flying on her," sighed Betty, "Don't talk, Bob! I never expect
+to travel so fast in the saddle again unless I become a jockey. And I know
+I am growing too fat for that."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+ON THE BRINK OF DISCOVERY
+
+
+The three girls and their boy friends remained at the farm until Dr. Pevy
+had set the bad fracture that Hunchie had suffered and the poor little man
+had been made as comfortable as he could be made at the time. He had been
+badly shaken in falling so far at the barn, and the surgeon declared he
+would be confined to his bed for some weeks.
+
+"And oo's to take care of Ida Bellethorne, I ask you?" demanded Hunchie
+faintly. "Mr. Bolter hexpects me to give hundivided hattention to 'er."
+
+"She shall have the best of care," said Candace, the farmer, warmly. "A
+mare like her ought to be bedded down in roses. The way she took this
+little girl over the drifts was a caution. She is some horse, she is! We
+will give her the best of attention, Hunchie, never you fear."
+
+The cockney was so much troubled about his charge that he seemed to have
+forgotten Ida Bellethorne, the girl. But Betty heard him say one thing to
+Ida before they left.
+
+"You ought to be 'appy, Miss Ida, even if the mare was sold. She brought a
+good price, and ev'rybody about Bellethorne Park knows as Mr. Bellethorne
+give 'er to you when she was a filly. I 'ope you'll come to see us
+again--me and the mare."
+
+"I surely will, Hunchie," said the English girl.
+
+But when they came out of the house and bade the family good-bye, Betty
+saw that Ida was very grave. Hunchie's words seemed to have been
+significant.
+
+It was late in the afternoon when the quintette arrived at Mountain Camp.
+Mrs. Canary had expressed some anxiety about them, but Uncle Dick had
+scouted any peril that might threaten the young folks. He admitted that he
+had overlooked some possibilities when he heard the full account of their
+adventures--and especially of his niece's adventures--at the dinner table.
+
+"I declare, Betty," he said with some little exasperation, "I believe if
+you were locked inside a trunk with only gimlet holes to breathe through
+you would manage to get into trouble."
+
+"I think I'd be in trouble fast enough in that case," answered Betty,
+laughing.
+
+"I don't know," said Louise thoughtfully. "Locked up in a box, you really
+couldn't get into much harm, Betty."
+
+"Sure she could get into trouble," declared Bobby. "Bees could crawl in
+through the gimlet holes and sting her."
+
+"I'd like to have seen her jumping that fire on horseback," sighed Libbie.
+"It must have been wonderful!"
+
+Mr. Gordon looked rather disturbed as he stared at his niece.
+
+"That's exactly what I shouldn't want to see her do," he said. "I do not
+know what I am going to do if, as she gets older, she grows more
+energetic," he added to Mr. and Mrs. Canary. "Betty is more than a handful
+for a poor bachelor uncle, I do believe!"
+
+He forbade any more excursions away from the camp after that unless the
+excursionists took some adult person with them. He went himself to Candace
+Farm to see Hunchie Slattery; but he took only Ida Bellethorne with him.
+They went on their snowshoes. During this trip Mr. Gordon won the abiding
+confidence of the girl.
+
+Meanwhile the youthful visitors at Mountain Camp allowed no hour to be
+idle. There was always something to do, and what one could not think of in
+the way of fun another could.
+
+Mr. Canary's men had smoothed a coasting course down the hillside to the
+lake not a quarter of a mile from the Overlook. There was a nest of
+toboggans in one of the outhouses. Tobogganing afforded the nine young
+people much sport.
+
+For the others insisted that Ida Bellethorne share in all their good
+times. She declared she never would get Libbie's blouse done in time; but
+Libbie said that she could finish it afterward and send it on to
+Shadyside. Just now the main thing was to crowd as much fun as possible
+into the remaining days of their vacation.
+
+The young folks from Fairfields were paired off very nicely; but they did
+not let Ida feel that she was a "fifth wheel," and she really had a good
+time. These snow-sports were so unfamiliar to her that she enjoyed them
+the more keenly.
+
+"I do think these boys are so nice," she said to Betty as they climbed the
+hill from the lakeshore, dragging the toboggan behind them by its rope.
+
+"Of course they're nice," said the loyal Betty. "Especially Bob Henderson.
+He's just like a brother to me. If he wasn't nice to you I should scold
+him--that I should, Ida."
+
+"I never can repay you for your kindness," sighed the English girl, quite
+serious of visage. "And your uncle, too."
+
+Betty flashed her a penetrating look and was on the verge of speaking of
+something that she, at least, considered of much importance. Then she
+hesitated. Ida had never mentioned the possibility of Betty's having
+dropped anything in Mrs. Staples' store. Betty shut her lips tight again
+and waited. If Ida did know anything about her lost locket, Betty wanted
+the English girl to speak of it first.
+
+They went in to dress for dinner that afternoon just before a change in
+the weather. A storm had been threatening for some hours, and flakes of
+snow began to drift down before they left the slide.
+
+"Let's dress up in our best, girls," Louise said gaily. "Put on our best
+bibs and tuckers. Make it a gala occasion. Teddy, be sure and scrub behind
+your ears, naughty boy!"
+
+"I feel as though I ought to be in rompers the way you talk," said the
+Tucker twin, but he laughed.
+
+The boys ran off to "primp," and what the girls did to make themselves
+lovely, Libbie said "was a caution!" One after the other they came into
+Betty's and Bobby's room and pirouetted to show their finery. Ida had been
+decked out very nicely by her friends, and her outfit did not seem shabby
+in the least.
+
+But the English girl noted one thing about Betty, and it puzzled her. The
+other girls from Shadyside School wore their pieces of jewelry while Betty
+displayed not a single trinket. As the other girls were hurrying out to
+join the boys and descend to the big hall, Ida held Betty back.
+
+"Where is it, Betty?" she asked. "Don't you wear it at all? Are you
+afraid of losing it again?"
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Betty, her heart pounding suddenly and her eyes
+growing brighter. Ida Bellethorne placed her hand upon Betty's chest,
+looking at her closely as she asked the question:
+
+"Didn't Mrs. Staples give it to you? That beautiful locket, you know.
+Aren't you allowed to wear it?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+CAN IT BE DONE?
+
+
+"Dear me!" exclaimed Betty. "How curious you are. I am not allowed to wear
+my diamond earrings that Doctor and Mrs. Guerin gave me, of course. They
+are the old-fashioned kind for pierced ears, and would have to be reset,
+and diamonds are too old for me anyway. But Uncle Dick lets me wear any
+thing else I own----"
+
+"That locket," questioned Ida. "That pretty locket. It did fall out of
+your bag in the shop, didn't it, Betty?"
+
+"My goodness!" stammered Betty, "did you find it?"
+
+"I picked it up," said Ida soberly. "Mrs. Staples would not let me run
+after you with it. But she promised to give it to you when you came and
+asked for it."
+
+"She did? She never----"
+
+Then Betty hesitated a moment. She remembered clearly just what had been
+said in the little neighborhood shop when she and Bobby had called there
+to get Bobby's blue over-blouse.
+
+"It's a fact, I never asked her for it," she said slowly. "No, I never. I
+just asked her if she had found anything, and she said 'No.'"
+
+"She would! That would be like her!" cried Ida Bellethorne. "She is a
+person who prides herself upon being exactly honest; and I guess that
+means barely honest. Oh, Betty Gordon!"
+
+"Well, now what's the matter?" asked Betty.
+
+"Did--did you know you lost it in Mrs. Staples' shop?"
+
+"No. I didn't know where I lost it. I only thought----"
+
+"That I might have picked it up and said nothing about it?" demanded Ida
+Bellethorne.
+
+"Why Ida! I would not have hurt your feelings by saying anything about it
+for the world," said Betty honestly. "That was why I didn't tell you. You
+see, if you really had known nothing about the locket when I asked you,
+all the time you would be afraid that I suspected you. Isn't that so?"
+
+"You dear, good girl!" gasped Ida, dabbling her eyes with her
+handkerchief. "And I didn't say anything because I thought you would think
+I wanted a reward for returning it."
+
+"So, you see, I couldn't speak of it. But now, of course, we'll get it
+away from Mrs. Staples. I think she's horrid mean!"
+
+Betty expressed her opinion of the shopwoman vigorously, but she put her
+arms around the English girl at the same time and kissed her warmly.
+
+"You're a dear!" repeated Ida.
+
+"You're another!" cried Betty gaily. "Now come on! Maybe those boys will
+eat up all the dinner, and I am so hungry!"
+
+One of the men arrived from Cliffdale during dinner with the mail and the
+information that another cold rain was falling and freezing to everything
+it touched.
+
+"The whole country about here will be one glare of ice in the morning,"
+said Mr. Canary. "You young folks will have all the sledding you care for,
+I fancy. I have seen the time when, after one of these ice storms, one
+might coast from here to Midway Junction on the railroad, and that's a
+matter of twenty miles."
+
+"What a lark that would be," cried Tommy Tucker. "Some slide, eh, Bob?"
+
+"How about walking back?" asked the other boy promptly, grinning.
+
+Letters and papers were distributed. There was at least one letter for
+everybody but Ida, and Betty squeezed her hand under the table in a
+comforting way.
+
+When they all retired from the table and gathered in groups in the big
+living room where the log fire roared Uncle Dick beckoned Betty to him. He
+put a letter from Mrs. Eustice into the girl's hand and at one glance she
+"knew the worst."
+
+"Oh Betty!" gasped Louise, "what's the matter?"
+
+For Betty had emitted a squeal of despair. She shook the paper before
+their eyes.
+
+"Come on, Betty!" cried Bob. "Get it out--if it's a fishbone."
+
+"It's all over!" wailed Betty. "Measles don't last as long as we thought
+they did. Shadyside opens two days from to-morrow, and we have got to be
+there. That's Monday. Oh, dear, dear, dear!"
+
+"Say a couple more for me, Betty," growled Teddy Tucker. "I suppose
+Salsette will open too. Back to Major Pater and others too murderous to
+mention."
+
+"And the Major's got it in for you Tucker twins," Bob reminded him
+wickedly.
+
+"That's Tom's fault," grumbled Teddy. "If he hadn't sprung that snowball
+stunt--Oh, well! What's the use?"
+
+"Life, Ted believes," said Louise, "is just one misfortune after another.
+But I do hate to leave here just as we have got nicely settled. My
+goodness! what's the matter with Ida? Something's happened to her, too."
+
+Ida had sprung to her feet with one of the recently arrived New York
+papers in her hand. Actually she was pale, and it was no wonder the
+company stared at her when her cheeks were usually so ruddy.
+
+"What is the matter, dear?" asked Mrs. Canary.
+
+Betty went to the English girl at once and put an arm about her shoulders.
+
+"Did you see something in the paper that frightened you, Ida?" she asked.
+
+"It doesn't frighten me," replied the girl, with trembling lips. "See.
+Read it. This time I am sure it is my aunt. See!"
+
+Uncle Dick joined the group about the excited girl. Her color had come
+back into her cheeks now and her eyes shone. She was usually so
+self-contained and quiet that Mr. Gordon now thought perhaps they had not
+really appreciated how much the hope of joining her aunt meant to Ida.
+
+"Read it aloud, Betty," said her uncle quietly.
+
+"Oh! Here's her name! It must be right this time!" cried Betty; and then
+she obeyed her uncle's request:
+
+    "'The Toscanelli Opera Company, Salvatore Toscanelli manager,
+    which has made a very favorable impression among the music lovers
+    of the East and Middle West during the last few months, will sail
+    for Rio Janeiro on Sunday on the _San Salvador_ of the Blue Star
+    Line. The company has been augmented by the engagement of
+    several soloists, among them Madam Ida Bellethorne, the English
+    soprano, who has made many friends here during the past few
+    years.'"
+
+"Day after to-morrow!" exclaimed Bobby, the first to speak. "Why! maybe if
+you can go to New York you will see her, Ida."
+
+"Day after to-morrow," repeated Ida, anxiously. "Can I get to New York by
+that time? I--I have a little money----"
+
+"Don't worry about the money, honey," Betty broke in. "You will have to
+start early in the morning, won't she, Uncle Dick?"
+
+"If she is to reach the steamer in time, yes," said the gentleman rather
+doubtfully.
+
+"Oh! if I don't get there what shall I do?" cried Ida. "Rio Janeiro, why,
+that is in South America! It would cost hundreds of your dollars to pay my
+passage there. I must get to Aunt Ida before she sails. I must!"
+
+"Now, now!" put in Mrs. Canary soothingly. "Don't worry about it, child.
+That will not help. We will get you to the train to-morrow----"
+
+"If we can," interrupted her husband softly.
+
+He beckoned Uncle Dick away and they went out through the hall to look at
+the weather, leaving the young folks and Mrs. Canary to encourage the
+English girl.
+
+Outside the two men did not find much in the appearance of the weather to
+encourage them. It was raining softly, for there was no wind; and it was
+freezing as fast as it fell.
+
+"And that old shack-a-bones I keep here during the winter isn't sharpened.
+Ought to be, I know. But he isn't," grumbled Jonathan Canary.
+
+"No use to think of snowshoes if it freezes, Jack," rejoined Mr. Gordon.
+"It is too far to the railroad anyway. I doubt if these children get to
+school on time."
+
+"Telephone wires are down again. I just tried to get Cliffdale before
+dinner. This is a wilderness up here, Dick."
+
+"I am sorry for that young English girl," mused Mr. Gordon. "She is fairly
+eaten up with the idea of getting in touch with her aunt. Good reason,
+too. She has told me all about it. She carries a letter from her dead
+father to the woman and he begged the girl to be sure to put it into his
+sister's hands. Family troubles, Jack."
+
+"Well, come on in. You're here without your hat. Want to get your death of
+cold?" growled Mr. Canary.
+
+The young folks did not dream at this time that nature was doing her best
+to make it impossible for Ida Bellethorne to reach New York by Sunday
+morning when the steamship _San Salvador_ would leave her dock. It was,
+however, the general topic of conversation during the evening. When
+bed-time came they went gaily to bed, not even Betty doubting the
+feasibility of their getting to the train on the morrow.
+
+Her uncle, however, put his head out of the door again when the others had
+gone chamberward and seeing the shining, icy waste of the Overlook,
+muttered with growing anxiety:
+
+"Can it be done?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+TWENTY MILES OF GRADE
+
+
+Ida slept in the room with Betty and Bobby that night. Betty had confided
+to her chum, as well as to Uncle Dick, the outcome of the mystery of her
+locket. Because of Ida's information, Uncle Dick had assured his niece
+they would recover the trinket.
+
+"If Mrs. Staples is not a dishonest woman, she shades that character
+pretty closely. There are people like that--people who think that a found
+article is their own unless absolutely claimed by the victim of the loss.
+A rather prejudiced brand of honesty to say the least."
+
+The two Shadyside girls made much of Ida Bellethorne on this evening after
+they had fore-gathered in the bedroom. Just think! her Aunt Ida might take
+her to South America. Ida already had traveled by boat much farther than
+even Betty had journeyed by train.
+
+"Although I am not at all sure how my aunt will meet me," the English girl
+said. "She was very angry with my father. She wasn't fair to him. She is
+impulsive and proud, and maybe she will think no better of me. But I must
+give her father's letter and see what comes of it."
+
+The main difficulty was to get to New York in time to deliver the letter
+before the _San Salvador_ sailed. When the girls awoke very early and saw
+a sliver of moon shining low in the sky, they bounced up with glad if
+muffled cries, believing that everything was all right. The storm had
+ceased. And when they pushed up the window a little more to stick their
+heads out they immediately discovered something else.
+
+"Goodness me!" gasped Bobby. "It's one glare of ice--everything! And so-o
+cold! Ugh!" and she shivered, bundled as she was in a blanket robe.
+
+First Betty and then Ida had to investigate. The latter looked very
+mournful.
+
+"The horse can never travel to-day," she groaned. "You saw how he slipped
+about in the soft snow the other day when they had him out. He is not shod
+properly."
+
+"If you only had Ida Bellethorne here!" cried Betty.
+
+"But she is a long way off, and in the wrong direction. Why, none of us
+could walk on this ice!"
+
+"How about skating?" cried Bobby eagerly.
+
+"Mr. Canary says it is all downhill--or mostly to the railroad station,"
+Betty said. "I would be afraid to skate downhill."
+
+They dressed quickly and hastened to find Uncle Dick. He had long been up
+and had evidently canvassed the situation thoroughly. His face was very
+grave when he met his niece and her friends.
+
+"This is a bad lookout for our trip," he said. "I don't really see how any
+of you will get to school on Monday, let alone Ida's reaching New York
+to-morrow morning."
+
+"Oh, Uncle Dick, don't say that!" cried Betty. "Is it positive that we
+cannot ride or walk?"
+
+"Walk twenty miles downhill on ice?" he exclaimed, "Does it seem
+reasonable? We can neither ride nor walk; and surely we cannot swim or
+fly!"
+
+"We could fly if we had an aeroplane. Oh, dear!" sighed Bobby. "Why didn't
+we think of that? And now the telephone wires are down."
+
+But Betty was thoughtful. She only pinched Ida's arm and begged her to
+keep up her courage--perhaps something would turn up. She disappeared then
+and was absent from the house, cold as the morning was, until breakfast
+time.
+
+The whole party had gathered then, excited and voluble. It was not only
+regarding Ida's need that they chattered so eagerly. In spite of the fun
+they were having at Mountain Camp, the thought that Shadyside and Salsette
+might begin classes before they could get there was, after all, rather
+shocking.
+
+"Measles is one thing," said Bob. "But being out of bounds when classes
+really begin is another. The other fellows will learn some tricks that we
+don't know."
+
+"And somebody else may be put in our room, Betty!" wailed Bobby, as her
+chum now appeared.
+
+Betty was very rosy and full of something that was bound to spill over at
+once. As soon as she had bidden Mr. and Mrs. Canary good morning she cried
+to all:
+
+"What do you think!"
+
+"Just as little as possible," declared Tommy Tucker. "Thinking tires me
+dreadfully."
+
+"Behave, Tommy!" said Louise admonishingly.
+
+"There's a big two-horse pung here. I found it in the barn. Like Mr.
+Jaroth's. It has a deep box like his. And a tongue. It's like a
+double-runner sled, Bob--you know. The front runners are independent of
+the rear."
+
+"I know what it is, Betty," said Bob, while the others stared at her.
+"I've seen that pung."
+
+"Your observations are correct, Miss Betty," said Mr. Canary, smiling at
+the girl. "I own such a pung. But I do not own two horses to draw it. And
+I am sorry to say that the horse I have got cannot stand on this ice."
+
+"Gee!" exclaimed Teddy, "if we got old Bobsky started down that hill he'd
+never stop till he got to the bottom. How far do you say it is to the
+station, Mr. Canary?"
+
+"It is quite twenty miles down grade. Of course there are several places
+where the road is level--or was level before the snow fell. But once
+started there would not be many places where you would have to get out and
+push," and the gentleman laughed.
+
+Betty's mind was fixed upon her argument. Her face still glowed and she
+scarcely tasted her breakfast.
+
+"I believe we can do it," she murmured.
+
+"What under the sun do you mean, Betty?" asked Louise.
+
+"I hope it is something nice we can do," said Libbie dreamily. "I looked
+out the window and it is all like fairyland--isn't it, Timothy?"
+
+"Uh-huh!" said Timothy Derby, his mouth rather full at the moment. "It is
+the most beautiful sight I ever saw. Will you please pass me another
+muffin?"
+
+But Bob gave Betty his undivided attention. He asked:
+
+"What do you believe we can do, Betty?"
+
+"Make use of Mr. Canary's pung."
+
+"Cricky! What will draw it? Where is the span of noble steeds to be found?
+Old Bobsky would break his neck."
+
+"One horse. One wonderful horse, Bob!" cried Betty clapping her hands
+suddenly. "I am sure I'm right. Uncle Dick!"
+
+"What do you mean, Betty?" cried Bobby, shaking her. "What horse?"
+
+"Gravitation," announced Betty, her eyes shining. "That's his name."
+
+"Great goodness!" gasped Bob. "I see a light. But Betty, how'd we steer
+it?"
+
+"The front runners are attached to the tongue. Tie ropes to the tongue and
+steer it that way," Betty said, so eagerly that her words tumbled over
+each other. "Can't we do it, Uncle Dick? We'll all pile into the pung,
+with a lot of straw to keep us warm, and just slide down the hills to the
+railroad station. What say?"
+
+For a while there was a good deal said by all present. Mr. and Mrs. Canary
+at first scouted the reasonableness of the idea. But Mr. Gordon, being an
+engineer and, as Bob said, "up to all such problems," considered Betty's
+suggestion carefully.
+
+In the first place the need was serious. Especially for the much troubled
+Ida. If she could not reach the dock on New York's water-front by eleven
+o'clock the next morning, her aunt would doubtless sail on the _San
+Salvador_, and then there was no knowing when the English girl would be
+able to find her only living relative.
+
+The party had ridden over the mountain road in coming to Mountain Camp,
+and Uncle Dick remembered the course pretty well. Although it was a
+continual grade, as one might say, it was an easy grade. And there were
+few turns in the road.
+
+Drifted with snow as it was, and that snow crusted, the idea of coasting
+all the way to the railroad station did not seem so wild a thought. The
+road was fenced for most of the way on both sides. And over those fences
+the drifts rose smoothly, making almost a trough of the road.
+
+"When you come to think of it, Jack," Uncle Dick said to Mr. Canary, "it
+is not very different from our toboggan chute yonder. Only it is longer."
+
+"A good bit longer," said Mr. Canary, shaking his head.
+
+However, it was plain that the idea interested Uncle Dick. He hastened out
+to look at the pung. Bob followed him, and they were gone half an hour or
+more. When they returned Bob was grinning broadly.
+
+"Get ready for the time of your lives, girls," he whispered to Betty and
+Bobby. "The thing is going to work. You wait and see!"
+
+Uncle Dick called them all into the living room and told them to pack at
+once and prepare for a cold ride. There was plenty of time, for the train
+they had to catch did not reach the station until noon.
+
+"If our trip is successful--and it will be, I feel sure--it will not take
+an hour to reach the station. But we shall give ourselves plenty of time.
+Now off with you! I guess Mrs. Canary will be glad to see the last of us."
+
+But their hostess denied this. The delight of having young people at the
+lonely camp in the hills quite counterbalanced the disturbance they made.
+But she bustled about somewhat anxiously, aiding the girls and the boys to
+make ready for departure. The Canarys, being unused to roughing it, even
+if they did live in the Big Woods, were much more afraid of the
+possibility of an accident arising out of this scheme Betty had conceived
+than was Uncle Dick.
+
+A little after ten o'clock they all piled out of the bungalow with their
+baggage. The two men working at the camp had filled the box of the pung
+with straw and had drawn it out to the brow of the hill where the road
+began. The tongue was raised at a slant, as high as it would go, and half
+of it had been sawed off. Ropes were fastened from this stub of the tongue
+to ringbolts on either side of the pung-box.
+
+"It will take two of us to steer," said Uncle Dick, "and we must work
+together. Get in here, Bob, and I'll show you how it works."
+
+It worked easily. The girls and the baggage were piled into the pung. The
+Tucker twins were each handed an iron-shod woodsman's peavey and were
+shown how the speed of the pung might be retarded by dragging them in the
+crust on either side.
+
+"You boys are the brakes," sang out Uncle Dick, almost as excited as the
+young people themselves. "When we shout for 'Brakes!' it is up to you
+twins to do your part."
+
+"We will, sir!" cried Tommy and Teddy in unison.
+
+"And don't hang your arms or legs over the sides," advised Uncle Dick.
+"Farewell, Jack! Take care of him, Mrs. Canary. And many, many thanks for
+a jolly time."
+
+The boys and girls chorused their gratitude to the owner of Mountain Camp
+and his wife. The men behind gave the pung just the tiniest push. The
+runners creaked over the ice, and the forward end pitched down the slope.
+They had started.
+
+And what a ride that was! It is not likely that any of them will ever
+forget it. Yet, as it proved, the danger was slight. They coasted the
+entire down-grade to the little railroad station where Fred Jaroth was
+telegraph operator with scarcely more peril than as though they had been
+riding behind the Jaroth horses.
+
+But they were on the _qui vive_ all the time. Bobby declared her heart was
+in her mouth so much that she could taste it.
+
+There were places when the speed threatened disaster. But when Uncle Dick
+shouted for "Brakes!" the twins broke through the crust with their peaveys
+and the hook broke up the thick ice and dragged back on the pung so that
+the latter was brought almost to a stop. The handles of the peaveys were
+braced against the end staffs of the pung, and to keep them in position
+did not exceed the twins' strength.
+
+Once Ted's peavey was dragged from his hands; but he jumped out and
+recovered it, and then, falling, slid flat on his back down the slippery
+way until he overtook the slowly moving pung again amid the delighted
+shouts of his chums.
+
+Otherwise there were no casualties, and the pung flew past the Jaroth
+house a little before eleven to the great amazement of the whole family,
+who ran out to watch the coasting party.
+
+"I don't know how Jonathan Canary will recover his pung," said Mr. Gordon
+when they alighted on the level ground. "But I will leave it in Jaroth's
+care, and when the winter breaks up, or before, it can be taken back to
+Mountain Camp.
+
+"Now how do you feel, young folks? All right? No bones broken?"
+
+"It was delightful," they cried. But Ida added something to this. "I feel
+rather--rather dazed, Mr. Gordon," she said. "But I am very thankful. And
+I know whom I have most to thank."
+
+"Who is that; my dear?" asked Uncle Dick smiling.
+
+"Betty."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+ON THE DECK OF THE SAN SALVADOR
+
+
+Mr. Richard Gordon sent several telegrams before the train arrived, and
+they were all of importance. One recovered Betty's locket, for, informed
+of the circumstances by this telegram, the lawyer in Washington sent his
+clerk to Mrs. Staples and showed her in a very few words that she was
+coasting very close to the law by keeping the little platinum and diamond
+locket.
+
+"So," said Betty to Bobby, "if the lawyer gets it--and Uncle Dick says he
+will--I can wear the locket to parties at the school."
+
+"If Mrs. Eustice allows it," said her chum grimly. "You know, she's down
+on jewelry. Remember how she got after Ada Nansen and Ruth Gladys Royal
+for wearing so much junk?"
+
+"My goodness!" giggled Betty, "what would she say to you if she heard you
+use such an expression? Anyway, I am going to show her Uncle Dick's
+present and ask her. I know the beautiful diamond earrings Doctor and Mrs.
+Guerin sent me can't be worn till I grow up a bit. But my locket is just
+right."
+
+It was a noisy crowd that boarded the train; and it continued to be a
+noisy crowd to the junction where it broke up. All the young folks would
+have been glad to go with Uncle Dick and Ida Bellethorne to New York; but
+he sent all but Betty and Bob on to school. They would reach the Shadyside
+station soon after daybreak the next morning, and Mr. Gordon had
+telegraphed ahead for the school authorities to be on the look-out for
+them.
+
+Betty and Bob, with Uncle Dick and the English girl, left the train at the
+junction and boarded another for New York City in some confidence of
+reaching their destination in good season.
+
+The train, however, was late. It seemed merely to creep along for miles
+and miles. Luckily they had secured berths, and while they slept the
+delayed train did most of its creeping.
+
+But in the morning they were dismayed to find that they were already two
+hours late and that it would be impossible for the train to pick up those
+two hours before reaching the Grand Central Terminal in New York City.
+
+"Now, hold your horses, young people!" advised Mr. Gordon. "We are not
+beaten yet. The _San Salvador_ does not leave her dock until eleven at the
+earliest. It may be several hours later. I have wired to Miss Bellethorne
+aboard the ship and in care of the Toscanelli Opera Company as well. I do
+not know the hotel at which Miss Bellethorne has been staying."
+
+"But, Uncle Dick!" cried Betty, who seemed to have thought of every chance
+that might arise, "suppose Ida's aunt wants to take her along to Brazil?
+Her passport----"
+
+"Can be viséd at the British consulate on Whitehall Street in a very few
+minutes. I have examined Ida's passport, and there is no reason why there
+should be any trouble over it at all. She is a minor, you see, and if her
+aunt wishes to assume responsibility for her no effort will be made to
+keep her in the country, that is sure."
+
+"Then it all depends upon Ida's aunt," sighed Betty.
+
+"And our reaching the dock in time," amended Uncle Dick. "I would not wish
+to interfere with Miss Bellethorne's business engagement in Rio Janeiro;
+but I am anxious for her to authorize me, on behalf of her niece, to get
+legal matters in train for the recovery of that beautiful mare. I believe
+that she belongs--every hair and hoof of her--to our young friend here.
+There has been some trickery in the case."
+
+"Oh, Uncle Dick!" shrieked Betty.
+
+"When I went to see that poor little cripple Hunchie Slattery he told me
+that the very papers that were given to Mr. Bolter with the horse must
+prove Ida's ownership at one time of the mare. There was some kind of a
+quit-claim deed signed by her name, and that signature must be a forgery.
+
+"The horse could never have been sold in England, for the Bellethorne
+stable was too well known there. The men who grabbed the string of horses
+left when Ida's father died are well-to-do, and Mr. Bolter will be able to
+get his money back, even if he has already paid the full price agreed upon
+for Ida Bellethorne.
+
+"I am convinced," concluded Uncle Dick, "that the girl has something
+coming to her. And it may even pay Miss Bellethorne to remain in the
+United States instead of going to Rio Janeiro until the matter of the
+black mare's ownership is settled beyond any doubt."
+
+When the train finally reached New York, Uncle Dick did not even delay to
+try to reach the dock by telephone. He bundled his party into a taxicab
+and they were transported to the dock where the _San Salvador_ lay.
+
+A steward seemed to be on the look-out for the party, and addressed Uncle
+Dick the moment he alighted from the cab.
+
+"Mr. Gordon, sir? Yes, sir. Madam Bellethorne has received your wire and
+is waiting for you. I have arranged for you all to be passed through the
+inspection line. The steamship, sir, is delayed and will not sail until
+next tide."
+
+"And that is a mighty good thing for us," declared Mr. Gordon to his
+charges.
+
+His business card helped get them past the inspectors. It is not easy to
+board a ship nowadays to bid good-bye to a sailing friend. But in ten
+minutes or so they stood before the great singer.
+
+She was a tall and handsome woman. Betty at first glance saw that Ida, the
+niece, would very likely grow into a very close resemblance to Madam
+Bellethorne.
+
+The woman looked swiftly from Betty to Ida and made no mistake in her
+identification of her brother's daughter. Ida was crying just a little,
+but when she realized how close and kindly was her aunt's embrace she
+shook the drops out of her eyes and smiled.
+
+"Father wanted I should find you, Aunt Ida," she said. "He wrote a letter
+to you and I have it. I think it was the principal thing he thought of
+during his last illness--his misunderstanding with you."
+
+"My fault as much as his," Madam Bellethorne said sadly. "We were both
+proud and high-tempered. But no more of this now. Something in this
+gentleman's long telegram to me----"
+
+She bowed to Mr. Gordon. He quickly stated the matter of the black mare's
+ownership to the singer.
+
+"If you will come to the British consulate where Ida's passport must be
+viséd, and sign there a paper empowering me to act in your behalf, you
+assuming the guardianship of Ida, I can start lawyers on the trail of this
+swindle."
+
+Miss Bellethorne was a woman of prompt decision and of a business mind,
+and immediately agreed. She likewise saw that her niece had made powerful
+friends during the weeks she had been in America and she was content to
+allow Mr. Gordon to do the girl this kindness.
+
+It was a busy time; but the delay in the sailing of the _San Salvador_
+made it possible for everything necessary to be accomplished. Uncle Dick
+and Betty and Bob accompanied the Bellethornes aboard the ship again and
+had luncheon with them. Ida cried when she parted with Betty; but it would
+be only for the winter. When the opera company returned to New York it was
+already planned that the younger Ida Bellethorne should join the friends
+of her own age she had so recently made at Shadyside School.
+
+It was an astonishing sight for Betty and Bob to see the great ship
+worried out of her dock by the fussy little tugs. It was growing dark by
+that time and the great steamship was brilliantly lighted. They watched
+until she was in midstream and was headed down the harbor under her own
+steam.
+
+"There! It's over!" sighed Betty. "I feel as if a great load had been
+lifted from my mind. Dear me, Bob! do you suppose we can ever again have
+so much excitement crowded into a few hours?"
+
+As Betty was no seeress and could not see into the future she of course
+did not dream that in a very few weeks, and in very different
+surroundings, she would experience adventures quite as interesting as any
+which had already come into her life. These will be published in the next
+volume of this series, entitled: "Betty Gordon at Ocean Park; or, Gay
+Doings on the Boardwalk."
+
+Bob shook his head at Betty's last observation. "Does seem as though we
+manage to get hooked up to lots of strange folks and strange happenings.
+Certain metals attract lightning, Betty, and I think you attract
+adventures. What do you say, Uncle Dick?"
+
+Mr. Gordon only laughed. "I say that you young folks had better have
+supper and a long night's rest. I shall not let you go on to school until
+to-morrow. For once you will be a day late; but I will chance explaining
+the circumstances to your instructors."
+
+They got into the taxicab again and bowled away up town. The lights came
+up like rows of fireflies in the cross streets. When they struck into the
+foot of Fifth Avenue at the Washington Arch the globes on that
+thoroughfare were all alight. It was late enough for the traffic to have
+thinned out and their driver could travel at good speed save when the red
+lights flashed up on the traffic towers.
+
+"Isn't this wonderful?" said Betty. "Libbie is always enthusing about
+pretty views and fairylike landscapes. What would she and Timothy say to
+this?"
+
+"Something silly, I bet," grumbled Bob. "Cricky! but I'm hungry," proving
+by this speech that he had a soul at this moment very little above mundane
+things.
+
+Uncle Dick chuckled in his corner of the car, and made no comment. And
+Betty said nothing further just then. The brilliant lights of the avenue
+were shining full in her face, but her thoughts were far away, with Ida
+Bellethorne on that ocean-going steamer bound for South America. What a
+wonderful winter of adventures it had been!
+
+"And the best of it is, it all came out right in the end," murmured the
+girl softly to herself.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BETTY GORDON AT MOUNTAIN CAMP***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 14546-8.txt or 14546-8.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/5/4/14546
+
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://www.gutenberg.org/about/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit:
+https://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+