path: root/78419-0.txt

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78419 ***




  _The Jack-in-the-Box Books_

  THE QUEER LITTLE MAN

  MARION AMES TAGGART




  _The Jack-in-the-Box Books_
  BY
  MARION AMES TAGGART

  _Illustrated by_
  ANNE MERRIMAN PECK

  AT GREENACRES
  THE QUEER LITTLE MAN
  THE BOTTLE IMP
  POPPY’S PLUCK

  [Illustration]




[Illustration: “WHY NOT SIT UP ALL NIGHT,” SAID ISABEL. _p. 213_]




  _The Jack-in-the-Box Books_

  THE QUEER LITTLE MAN

  BY
  MARION AMES TAGGART

  AUTHOR OF “THE LITTLE GREY HOUSE,”
  “THE DAUGHTERS OF THE LITTLE
  GREY HOUSE,” ETC.

  _Illustrated by_
  ANNE MERRIMAN PECK

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY




  COPYRIGHT, 1921,
  BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




  DEDICATED
  TO
  HAROLD GERHART
  THAT DEAR LITTLE BOY
  WITH LOVE




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                     PAGE

     I OPENING DAY                              13

    II SAWS, HAMMERS AND NAILS--TWO KINDS!      27

   III HURRAH AND HURRAHING                     43

    IV THE CLOUD IN THE SKY                     57

     V “THE LUCKY FOUR”                         71

    VI THE DEAR HOUSE                           85

   VII THE QUEER MAN                            99

  VIII ROUND RED RADISHES                      113

    IX QUEER HAPPENINGS                        129

     X “YOU’D HARDLY KNOW GREENACRES!”         145

    XI THE SHADOW OF PARTING                   161

   XII MERRILY PUTTING OFF SORROW              177

  XIII GYPSYING                                191

   XIV UNDER THE STARS                         205

    XV A CLEAR DAY                             221

   XVI HAWTHORNE HOUSE ABLOOM                  237




ILLUSTRATIONS


  “WHY NOT SIT UP ALL NIGHT,” SAID ISABEL      _Frontispiece_

                                                         PAGE
  POPPY HELD THE LINES AND ISABEL AND PRUE
  JOUNCED UP AND DOWN SINGING                              32

  SO THEY WENT ON, SOWING THE WHOLE GARDEN
  FULL OF OLD-FASHIONED FLOWERS                            64

  POPPY CALLED, “RADISHES! ROUND RED RADISHES!
  GROWN BY A RED-HEAD”                                    120

  “WE’RE ALL TOGETHER, ALL TOGETHER, FOREVER AND
  FOR AYE,” THEY SANG                                     240




THE QUEER LITTLE MAN




THE QUEER LITTLE MAN


CHAPTER I

OPENING DAY


Four children sat around a large room which was empty of all furniture
except wooden packing cases, in attitudes that indicated their various
temperaments. Prue Wayne, twelve years old, sat up straight; she was
as trim in muscles as in her tightly braided fair hair, her fleckless
deep collar, her correctly laced shoes which were crossed, one over the
other at the ankles above her sturdy feet.

Isabel Lindsay, also twelve years old, half lay over the arm of her
chair on her elbow, every line of her body graceful and expressive of
interest, although her position might easily have been a lazy one. She
was far prettier than neat and shining Prudence; her dark hair turned
into rings wherever it could steal the chance, her gray-blue eyes were
brilliantly soft under their dark lashes; she had delicate, flexible
lips, and clear, healthy pallor of complexion.

The third little girl was not yet ten. No one, even if he had not
merely kissed, but had dined on the Blarney stone, could have said she
was pretty. Fiery red hair was the first thing one saw about Poppy
Meiggs, and that could be seen afar. She was a thin little creature,
with light lashes, a sharp face, now covered with more than its
ordinary quantity of freckles, because March had been and gone and had
left upon poor little Poppy’s sensitive skin a crop of these brown
reminders of its sunny days and strong winds.

Poor little Poppy was plain _plus_; she was downright ill-looking, but
those who loved her--and there were now several of these--forgot her
looks.

Her temper was as fiery as her hair; she had no patience, not yet much
self-control, but she was loyal and generous, and loved her beloveds
with all her tempestuous heart. She was clever, too. Now that dear
little Mrs. Hawthorne had rescued her from destitution, after her
father had died and her mother had run away and left her children,
Poppy was fast learning more than most children of her age know. “She
grabbed everything she heard with both hands and fairly crammed it
into herself,” Mark Hawthorne said.

Mark Hawthorne was the one boy in this group; he, like Poppy, was
perched on a window sill, but where Poppy sat up keen and small and
tense, like a sharp little splinter of redwood, Mark sat lightly
poised, swinging his crossed legs, giving the effect of a woodland,
winged thing that was his wonderful attraction. He was a beautiful
creature, lithe, graceful, his hair a tawny brown, his eyes brown and
gold, flecked like a goldstone. His face was full of witchery. He made
older people long to seize him in a tight embrace, yet feel as though
he would still be free, however tight they held him. Isabel and Prue
had dubbed him Jack-in-the-Box when they had first known him, because
he had appeared and disappeared so suddenly; like a jack-in-the-box
he was there and then he was not. But now that he and his father were
making a beautiful home for dear little Mrs. Hawthorne, Mr. Gilbert
Hawthorne’s mother, after years of cruel sorrow and separation and
bitter poverty for her, the nickname was passing into disuse.

“Well, am I housekeeper or amn’t I?” demanded Poppy. “That’s what I
want to know. Motherkins said I was to look after the men age; that’s
French for men and boys--Mr. Hawthorne and Mark--and it means the
whole shebang. So if I say we can have this room you don’t have to ask,
so there!” Poppy was excited, but then she usually was excited.

“I think we ought to ask her,” Prue said firmly. “My mother says no
matter if we know she’ll say yes about a thing, give her the chance to
say it. She calls it ‘proper deference.’”

“Oh, gosh!” Poppy exploded disgustedly. “It’s all right to be good, but
you’re a regular fussy! Ain’t what I say enough, Isabel?”

“Of course a housekeeper settles things, but if I were you I’d always
show little Motherkins you have her on your mind. She’ll love to be
told, Pops,” said Isabel, the tactful, who could get around Poppy’s
danger signals without causing an explosion, as Prue never could.

“Well, of course I like to tickle her,” conceded Poppy, her scowl
abating, and the question was settled.

“We’ve decided that this is Opening Day, and it sounds all right, but
I don’t know what we mean, not really! We’re to have this room for our
headquarters; Mrs. Hawthorne won’t care when Poppy asks her, because
they don’t use this half of the house, and we’re to furnish it in
packing boxes, and meet here and sit on the boxes, and have one for a
table. Please don’t any one tell me this, because we’ve said it over
and over and I’m kind of tired of it. But that’s all I do know. We
ought to open something, or open for something--or something!” Prue
apparently had got herself tangled up in the word and could not shake
it off.

“We’ll open--open--open to begin, like spring!” cried Isabel with
a laugh. “Just to be nice and have good times, and be ready for
everything, anything that comes along. It’s the twenty-fifth of April,
and Mark is thirteen years old to-day. He’s opening his ’teens; we’re
opening a club in his honor.”

Isabel seemed to feel that this explanation covered the case.

“Oh, well, my gracious!” cried Prue in a sort of patient exasperation;
“we were all together before now, and ready for good times. What I say
is if a thing doesn’t mean anything, why--why--well, what does it mean?”

“It means to run around all the faster, particular Prue; like
Pincushion when she tries to catch her tail. Now that doesn’t mean
anything, but look at the fun she has!” cried Mark catching up his
round kitten, Pincushion, now grown into a rounder little cat. “I’ll
tell you what, Prue: You’re thinking about opening things that are
full--like sardine boxes, or nuts, or a prize package. This club
isn’t like that! It’s opening _up_; not just opening. You open up
something to be filled after a while--like a new country, or a mine, or
possibilities! That’s it! We’re opening up possibilities! We don’t know
what we’re for; we just open _up_, don’t you see?” Mark explained this
with much waving of hands and with his shining eyes full of laughter,
but nevertheless he was not a little impressed by his own discovery. It
instantly became clear to him that wonderful things were to fill this
opening they were making.

Isabel kindled with him. These two were “of imagination all compact”:
they got out of every play and every day not only more than Prue, but
more than was there to get.

“You can’t tell _what_ will happen!” declared Isabel. “Look how we went
to the woods that day last spring, Prue! Just happened to race the way
we do, and we found Jack-in-the-Box-Mark! Shall I ever in all my life
forget how I thought maybe he was a fairy, or some one like Peter Pan,
when he told us to shut our eyes and count and then was nowhere to be
seen? Oh, you never can tell! I sort of think it’s better not to know
what we mean by Opening Day, because then we can feel it’s too big to
understand.”

Prue had not been following Isabel’s enthusiastic reasoning.

“Is that why you were named Mark, because you were born to-day?” she
asked. Prue-like she had been plodding along by herself the path
indicated by Isa’s allusion to the twenty-fifth of April.

“Surest thing you know!” Mark nodded hard. “Daddy liked naming me after
St. Mark, as long as I was born on his feast. He said he wouldn’t have
called me Martha or Clotilda if I’d been born on those days, but St.
Mark was just right.”

“How do you make packing box chairs?” asked Poppy, in her turn not
heeding what was said.

“I’m going to put one on top of another, instead of making legs; they’d
wobble, sure,” said Mark. “Then I’ll knock out one side and leave the
other three sides. Then I’ll wad it soft and easy. Then I’ll cover it
with some kind of nice stuff. Then----”

“Then I’ll sit on it!” shouted Poppy in high glee. “I bet it’ll
be funny! You can’t make ’em, Mark! Four, besides some for
comp’ny--Motherkins and your dad.”

“Certainly I can make them,” said Mark with scorn.

“I could do that, too,” said Prue, who had a taste for using a hammer,
and never failed to hit a nail on the head, nor ever hit her own nail.
“I can carpenter as well as you, Mark Hawthorne!”

“Carpenter away, Prudence! We’ll be able to use another hand in my
shop,” Mark smiled with the kindly toleration of the sex made by nature
to wield a hammer.

“I can’t build the chairs, but I can make the covers fit and plan how
they’ll be prettiest,” began Isabel, but Poppy, who had been looking
sharply from one to another, broke in upon her.

“Well, _I_ shall sweep up! A nice mess you’d make if I didn’t keep it
nice! And I shall get what there is for eats, and _I_ shall fix it, so
now!” she announced.

“Oh, mercy, you’ll do more than that, Poppy!” cried Isabel.

Sometimes it was a slight burden to keep in order Poppy’s touchy desire
to equal the rest. She was a jealous little creature, but in her
jealousy seemed less mean than in others. She adored Mrs. Hawthorne,
Mark and Mark’s father, and loved Isabel Lindsay with a sort of furious
worship. A poor, untaught child, made motherless by her mother’s
desertion, which was so much sadder than to lose a mother by death,
Poppy had set out in life with heavy handicaps. It was natural that
she should be on the watch lest these happier children should surpass
her. They never resented her touchiness, but understood and helped
her. Isabel especially made a point of smoothing the feathers which
Poppy was always ruffling up in the fear of being ever so little out of
things.

“I hear her!” shrieked Poppy suddenly, and darted out of the room at
top speed.

She came back panting, towing by the hand sweet little Motherkins, like
a little craft with a prize captured on the high seas.

“Here she is,” announced Poppy. “Now tell her and ask her.”

Motherkins smiled inquiringly, but calmly. She was used to Poppy’s
ways. She was a very dear little woman; that was to be seen at a
glance. She had soft brown hair turning gray; it had a sheen over it
like exquisite silk. Her face had an expression of playing laughter,
yet with it the patient sadness left by her long years of desolate
grief when she had been poor and had thought that her one child, Mark’s
father, was lost to her forever. He had come back rich enough in money,
richer by far in Mark, the dear lad! Now little Motherkins, brought
back into the big house that had been her home before trouble came, was
the happiest person outside a fairy tale. But her face still bore the
imprint of what she had suffered; it had made her tender to all things,
great and small.

The children’s name for her showed what she was. Mark could not think
of calling one as youthful and tiny as she was “grandmother,” so he
called her Motherkins, and she was a little mother to the other three.

“Dear me, Poppy,” Motherkins remonstrated as Poppy breathlessly tugged
her into the big unfurnished room. “I’ll come along peacefully! I won’t
run away. Why use violence?”

“We’re going to tell you something,” said Poppy putting her capture on
the most comfortable box, more comfortable than the others because it
was a better height to sit on, though not softer. “We’re having Opening
Day.”

“Are you?” asked Motherkins glancing about with a little laugh. “What
are you opening--or is it only the day that opens?”

“That’s it, Motherkins!” Mark leaped down from the window sill and ran
over to pat her approvingly. “That’s what I told ’em when they were
fidgetting to find out what it was about. It’s Opening Day; that’s all.”

“And my dear boy is opening his ’teens to-day!” Motherkins looked up
with shining eyes into the golden-brown eyes bent toward her. “It
sounds nice and uncertain, as if anything might come of it, from the
four and twenty blackbirds that were in the pie, to a congress! All
sorts of things are opened, when one comes to think of it.”

“You’re the one to catch on!” cried Mark with a triumphant crow of
delight, but Prue, steadily intent upon her duty, said:

“We thought, Mrs. Hawthorne, we ought to ask you if you cared if we
used this room? Right along, to meet in? We kind of think we’ll do
things and have it for our headquarters. Do you care?”

“Not in the least wee bit, except to be honored to have something so
cloudily splendid sounding in the house,” declared Motherkins. “The
room is yours from this instant.”

“We wanted it because of the balcony out that window and the piazza
roof,” said Isabel as though that explained the mystery.

“Oh!” said Motherkins, and Mark laughed.

“Might be handy,” he added.

“Certainly, but do be careful not to slip if you get in and out that
way,” said this understanding little lady.

“Thanks, oh, thanks, you darling Motherkins!” cried Isabel. “Is that
Bunkie I hear? I know it’s his voice.”

“It is Bunkie and has been for some time; he thinks you have been in
session without him long enough,” said Mrs. Hawthorne, rising. “And
I have a sort of Opening Day of my own. Mine is opened downstairs,
and it is not only a day, but a freezer opened! In honor of Mark
Jack-in-the-Box having a birthday. Won’t you come down to the dining
room and celebrate with me?”

With a shout the children rushed to the door, Poppy turning three
cartwheels in rapturous welcome of these tidings.

“I’d like to know where you hid it,” she panted coming right side
up once more. “I kinder thought maybe you and Mr. Daddy’d be doing
somethin’ for the birthday, and I sorter snooped, but not a freezer did
there be, nowheres.”

Poppy’s English still failed her under excitement.

Motherkins laughed. “Mark’s daddy and I can play tricks, too, little
Miss Gladys Popham Meiggs!” she cried.

“Well, there ain’t much I can’t hunt out when I try,” boasted Poppy
justly.

Dashing out of the room she fell over Isabel’s little rough haired
dog, mostly Scotch terrier, who had been named Bunker in honor of his
christening day, the seventeenth of June, and whom, like Poppy, Mrs.
Hawthorne had adopted when he sorely needed kindness, but against whom
Poppy harbored a little jealousy. Isabel had taken him into her heart
and home, but still Poppy disliked loving little Bunkie.

“Gee, that Punk!” Poppy exclaimed as she tripped over the small
creature, who was rapturously running to meet the children. “Pretty
near I went kersmash over him! He’s the snarledest looking dog! He’s
the limit. If you’d of made me tumble, you raggedy ravelledy thing!”

Laughing and shouting the three children, with Bunkie barking and
leaping, and Poppy stalking behind, really angry for a few minutes,
went down to the dining room. Only part of the house, occupied but
six months, was in order, but this room was one that was beautifully
furnished. A fire of logs blazed on the hearth in the library beyond,
its color reflected in the dark mahogany in line of the open door.

Mr. Hawthorne, Mark’s wonderful father who knew all sorts of woodland
lore and was in every way a child’s ideal, stood at one end of the
table. Before him sat a platter with a sliding mound of delectable
brown, pink and creamy white, which he was ready to serve.

“Many happy returns, dearest boy of mine!” he said giving Mark his ice
cream last of all.

“Yum-Yum; opening day!” said Mark significantly, stretching his mouth
wide to admit a heaped teaspoonful of ice cream.




CHAPTER II

SAWS, HAMMERS AND NAILS--TWO KINDS!


Prue sat back on her heels, her thumb in her mouth and that mouth
sagging at its corners.

Mark was sawing on the side of a packing case, making a cheerful
whistling through his teeth, but the saw was slender; it swayed and
bent a good deal, and the course it had so far followed through the
side of the box was as scalloped as if it had been cut by a cheese
scoop.

Isabel and Poppy were tacking bright colored chintz in deep pleats over
a much smaller box. Isabel was silent; she looked pale and her lips
were closed in a line that was almost grim. Poppy on the other hand was
red even to the tips of her ears, and she betrayed a decided tendency
to scold some one, any one who gave her the least opening.

As no one paid any attention to Prue, who had been hammering nails out
backward from a third box, she was forced to voice her woes in a bid
for pity.

“I shouldn’t be surprised if I had lockjaw,” she said plaintively.
Isabel looked up, saw her best friend’s miserable face and the thumb in
her mouth, around which she had spoken indistinctly, and jumped up to
run over to her.

“Did you hurt yourself, Prue darling?” she asked.

“I struck my nail like--like--I struck my thumb nail _awful_ hard,
Isabel! Do you suppose it doesn’t hurt? I just about can’t stand the
way it aches. I think likely I’ll have lockjaw, or lose the nail, or
something.” Prue struggled to keep back the tears, but her voice was
sadder than tears.

“Oh, no, dear!” cried Isabel. “It must be fearful, but it won’t come
off, or make lockjaw. Let me see. Poor, poor thumbling! It’s a dark
red!”

Isabel examined the short, sturdy little thumb with the air of a whole
college of physicians, and Prue bitterly turned it and bent it back and
forth as if newly introduced to it.

“I was not meant for a carpenter,” she said, feeling unjustly put upon.

“Well, who was?” exploded Poppy. “I can’t get these darned----”

“Poppy! You _must not_ say darned!” cried Prue, forgetting her pain in
her passionate desire to keep Poppy straight.

“They are!” said Poppy. “Well then: These sweet pretty red and blue
chintz parrots, or hens, or something! I can’t get ’em on straight. And
Isa keeps a-pulling the stuff all round and how can I?”

“Some job to saw through this box straight with a saw like a lemonade
straw, if you want to know,” Mark added to the lamenting chorus.

“Let’s chuck it!” cried Poppy. “It’s too hard to make our own
furniture, and ’twon’t be one bit of good if we do fuss and muss it,
and all our poor fids get pounded bust!”

“We’ve got to furnish this room, and where’d we get the money? It would
cost a lot. Mother bought some new piazza chairs, and she said the kind
that used to be about three and a half she paid seven for,” said Prue
removing her thumb to say this. It was like Prue to know about high
prices, and like her to be ready to keep on with the work in hand,
though for her it had proved to be work _on_ hand, most painful to
endure.

The instant she had spoken she jabbed her thumb quickly between her
lips again and wriggled the fingers on the same hand because it hurt so
much.

“Let’s go out and do stunts in the streets and people’d give us money
for it, and we’d buy furniture,” cried Poppy.

“Oh, Poppy! They’d know us!” Isabel’s voice was horrified.

“Sure. And not be afraid we’d be gypsies, or something, if they gave
it to us,” Poppy answered as if being known were a good thing, but she
understood Isabel nevertheless.

“’Course we couldn’t go around like that,” said Mark. “Maybe we could
get some stuff out of people’s attics; I mean maybe people have things
they don’t use and we could borrow them, or pay for ’em by doing
errands or weeding--if they’d sell them. I’m kind of thinking we shan’t
make much of a go at tinkering boxes into chairs and tables, and by the
time we got done we’d be too old to sit down if we could do it. By the
time we got ’em done we’d be ninety-nine, and stiff from old age.”

Isabel laughed. “Prue and I would be only ninety-eight when you were
ninety-nine, and Pops would be a young thing of ninety-six, nearly!
We’d have to stand, and let our callers sit down. Well, then, what are
we to do, Jack-in-the-Box? You’re the one that was so keen to make the
furniture, and Motherkins has given us this lovely chintz that I know
she wanted herself.”

“Beg,” said Prue. She found it sounded like “beck” with her thumb in
her mouth, so she removed it, and went on.

“My mother has lots of kind of wobbly chairs in the attic; so has
yours, Isa. It would be easier to brace ’em up than to fuss like this.
Besides there are some kind of outgrown, odd ones, that used to be
pretty. They are strong, but they got ugly. I don’t see why, but mother
always says when we go up there: ‘Do see those really awful chairs! And
when I was first married, and my mother bought them for me, we thought
they were beautiful!’ So they’d do for us; we’d be younger’n she was
when she was married, and maybe we’d think they were beautiful. Anyway
they’re chairs, and they’re heaps prettier than our packing box ones
would ever be, and I know mother’d let us have them.”

“Well, so would mother,” said Isabel, her meaning, if not her
expression clear. “I suppose--But we were planning to do it all
ourselves.”

“It’s awful silly to do things when you can’t,” said Poppy decisively.

“I think that would be pretty clever, Miss Gladys!” laughed Mark. “All
right, then; jig’s up! Jig saw? Mine wasn’t that kind. We’ll gather up
these tools and put them all back in dad’s bench drawer. Nothing gets
my sweet-tempered dad going like having me use his tools and not put
them back! Then we’ll go out begging furniture, like survivors of a
fire.”

“I know!” cried Poppy hopping around on her right foot, holding her
left ankle in her hand. “We’ll dress up! We must put on funny tastic
things and pretend we were all burnt up--I mean all we had in our
houses.”

“Trust you to see a chance to dress up, Popsy!” laughed Mark. “The
word is fantastic, my dear, but I shouldn’t wonder if funny tastic was
better when you’re the one dressing up!”

“It don’t make no odds to me, Mark Hawthorne,” said Poppy with dignity.
“I’m getting my learning as I go along, and I’m not near done with it,
and I don’t put on one single luggs, making believe I was to college.”

Isabel dove into one of the packing cases, pretending to be searching
for a screwdriver; it never would do to let Poppy see her laugh when
Poppy was so solemnly in earnest as she then was.

Isabel emerged flushed and short breathed.

“We might go right to Prue’s house and mine and see what’s there,” she
said.

[Illustration: POPPY HELD THE LINES AND ISABEL AND PRUE JOUNCED UP AND
DOWN SINGING.]

The spring was coming on so fast that now, on the 27th of April,
the sunshine was warm enough to do away with the necessity of much
preparation for going out. Prue and Isabel and Poppy needed no more
than their blue serge coats, all similar, and their hats. Mark pulled
a slip-on sweater over his head, caught up a cap, and they were ready.
Stopping only long enough to put the borrowed tools back in their
place, the four sallied out.

The big house, the old Hawthorne house, stood just beyond the woods.
There was a subterranean passage that had been made in Revolutionary
days, leading up to the house from the woods. It was because Mark knew
this passage and used mysteriously to appear and disappear through it,
to the wonder of Prue and Isabel, who almost suspected him of being
Peter Pan, or another citizen of fairyland, that they had dubbed Mark
Jack-in-the-Box when they had first seen him.

Now they did not go through the hidden passage, though they had come
to use it freely themselves, but they did go by the woods; no matter
where they were going, these four children nearly always were able to
persuade themselves that the nearest way to get there was to start by
going through the woods. Much as they loved them, well as they knew
them, there was always more to love, more to discover in the woods
each time that they went into them. To-day, with the buds swelling to
bursting on the trees, the willows, distant along the brook, showing
a golden mist through the shadows; the maples red in bud; the ferns
palely green, with brown caps on their full heads, turned over like a
bishop’s shepherd-crozier, the woods were lovely as a dream, a dream
that was at the same time an assured promise of joys to come. And the
air was fragrant with arbutus, lying deep under the damp brown deposit
of last year’s leaves, modestly anxious to hide its perfection, but,
like a lovely soul, revealing itself by its sweetness as it hid.

Isabel drew a long, inward breath. “Oh, how can it be so heavenly!” she
sighed.

“We must go down to the brook soon and see how Château Branche is
getting on,” said Prue, forgetting to nurse her thumb.

“Dad said we must not get up into it till he examines it, to make sure
it is strong after the winter,” said Mark. “But I’m sure it’ll be all
right. Dad built it to last. Say, isn’t it pretty nice to have a house
like that in a pine tree waiting for us when spring comes back? We’re
lucky kids!”

“Of course it is only a platform in the branches, really,” said Prue,
the exact. “But that’s nicer than a house with a roof--and it doesn’t
rain on us unless it simply pours down.”

“Château Branche is a house; don’t you spoil it, Prue Wayne, calling
it a platform,” cried Poppy. Prue’s literal way of getting everything
labelled exactly exasperated Poppy, and there was always within her
heart jealousy of Isabel’s affection for Prue; to Poppy Isa was
adorable perfection. On the other hand Prue had less patience with
Poppy than Isa had; her impatience, her flaming quick temper, her
sudden extremes of mood tried sensible Prue; she had to struggle to
be just to Poppy. It is to Prue’s credit that she did struggle to do
her justice, kept in mind her unfortunate childhood, and did not let
Poppy feel coolness toward her. Prue was a thoroughly good little girl,
though she was not as interesting as brilliant Mark, nor as exquisite
Isabel, nor as clever, wild little Poppy herself.

“I won’t spoil Château Branche, Poppy; I just was thinking it was a
platform after all. But I always think of it as our house in the tree,
same’s you do,” Prue answered gently.

“You can get some rustle in the dry places, but not like in the fall,”
said Poppy. She had forgotten her warning about Château Branche, and
was going along scuffling her feet through the piles of leaves which
eddying winter winds had heaped in places.

“I’ll be glad when we can come here and sit around; it’s a little
weeny bit damp yet,” said Isabel with a slight shiver.

“Race me out, the way we always did; you’ll get cold,” said Prue with
an anxious look at more delicate Isa.

“Oh, but I can’t go straight to your house, either of your houses,”
said Poppy unexpectedly, and with trouble as to her plurals. “I forgot!
Motherkins told me this morning I had to go to the store for her some
time to-day, and this is the last chance. Come with me.”

“Why didn’t you say so before, Poppy?” cried Prue.

“Well, what’s the odds? We’d go through the woods anyway, and turn
around,” Poppy reminded her.

“Nice to know,” observed Isabel, but they did “turn around,” and struck
out of the woods by another path leading to the business end of the
town, instead of keeping on toward Prue and Isabel’s homes.

Poppy’s errand was at the grocer’s, but she also went to the druggist
to get an insect destroyer for Motherkins’ beloved garden, to do away
with the hungry slugs waiting for her plants to put up their tender
shoots. The drug store was next to the post office. Greenacres’
postmaster was a character, a small, weazened, deformed man named
Babcock, toward whom all the children of Greenacres held two distinct
attitudes of mind in the first and second stages of their knowing him.
When they were small they were all afraid of him; his deformed body,
and sharp, curious face filled them with terror. After they were past
seven they swung from fear of him to love for Mr. Babcock; he was
eccentric, but kind, and did many things for the children that won
their gratitude; it mingled with pity for him to make them love him.

Now, as Isabel, Prue, Poppy and Mark came out of the drug store they
saw Mr. Babcock in the post office doorway.

“Saw you out of my private office,” he said. “How are you, Hawthorne
sprig? And how are you, Isabel Lindsay and Prudence Wayne? And you,
Miss Meiggs? Want a horse, Poppy?”

“Oh, my gracious!” gasped Poppy. “What do you mean?”

“A horse, a horse, a horse,” Mr. Babcock thrice repeated. “H-o-r-s-e,
an animal that used to be common, but got side-tracked by gasoline
engines and the farmers’ flivvers, but is still useful, and to my
mind beats autos. I’ve got a horse, a buckboard--old-time, sagging
buckboard!--to give away, and I sort of picked you out as the one to
have it.”

“Me! Me!” Poppy sat straight down on the sidewalk regardless of
everything.

“I won’t sell him. I could, to some one who’d get what was left in him
out of him in a year and let him starve after that,” said Mr. Babcock,
in a fury at his own imagining. “I won’t sell him. He’s twenty-two
years old, but he’s good for a long time, decently treated; sound and
can trot right along, not a bad looking fellow, chestnut, came of good
stock. Think your folks’d let Poppy have him, Mark?”

“I think so, I’m sure so,” said Mark, as surprised as Poppy, but rising
to the occasion as she was too overcome to do. “My father said he’d
like to have a horse on the place. I think he’d keep yours for Poppy,
if she’d let dad use him sometimes.”

“I won’t sell him,” said Mr. Babcock again, shaking his head hard. “I’d
just’s lieves as not Gilbert Hawthorne’d use him. When he was a littler
boy’n you are now he was as kind to animals as a lamb! But he’s to be
Poppy’s horse, mind that! _And_ her buckboard! Want to see him? Will
you have him, Poppy?”

“Oh, my days, my days!” cried Poppy, bursting into excited tears. “I
don’t want to see him! He’s a horse, he’s alive, he goes, don’t he? Oh
my, a horse! Say, I’ll die! He’ll haul me to the cemetery first thing!
Oh, Mr. Babcock, you ain’t postmaster, you’re an angel, just an angel!
Le’me hug you! Oh my land of lollypops, I’ll bust!”

“Well, come along to the stable; it’s better for busting than the
street, and you can see the horse,” said Mr. Babcock, laughing. “Here,
get up off the walk! I’ll hitch him up, or do you want to ask your
father first, Mark?”

“No. Dad’ll say yes, but if he doesn’t I’ll bring the horse back. I’d
better take a bag of oats home on the buckboard,” said Mark.

Isabel and Prue had not spoken. This was too amazing to allow of
speech. They silently followed to the stable, and were introduced to
the horse, whose long brown nose thrust itself forward over the stall
door as they entered, showing that it was used to sugar in the pockets
of visitors.

“I’ve done my best for you, old man; I’d keep you if I could, but
you’ll be all right where you’re going. I wouldn’t sell you,” Mr.
Babcock said with a quaver in his voice.

Poppy solemnly took the brown face between her palms and kissed the
middle of the boney nose.

“My little darling, you are to be my child,” she said with rapturous
tears running down her own short, freckled nose.

Mr. Babcock led the horse out. He proved to be decidedly well-built,
with fine, straight legs, a full tail, a good head.

Mr. Babcock put on the harness and led the horse out to be backed into
the shafts of the buckboard, standing in the stable yard.

“Get up on the seat, Poppy. He’s yours, so you drive home. He won’t
play a trick on any one, not for the world. Mark, you might get up
along side of her. Good-by, all of you. Good-by, old friend. I’ve done
my best for you. I wouldn’t sell you,” Mr. Babcock said, handing Poppy
the lines.

Isabel and Prue climbed up on the buckboard. There was no question in
their minds of not going back to the Hawthorne house; this was too
exciting an adventure to leave unfinished.

As the horse began to move, obedient to Poppy’s tightening of the
lines, and Mark’s order to: “Get up,” Poppy being unable to speak,
Isabel found her tongue for the first time.

“What’s his name, Mr. Babcock?” she asked.

“Hurrah. He was born on the day of Dewey’s victory in Manila Bay,” said
Mr. Babcock.

He did not smile, but Isabel, Prue and Mark fell over rocking with
laughter.

Poppy was unable so much as to hear the horse’s name.

The quest of furniture was completely forgotten. Slowly and with
decorum, the buckboard started away, drawn by Hurrah and watched and
watched out of sight by Mr. Babcock whose eyes glistened with moisture.

After they had gone beyond the business streets, Hurrah voluntarily
began to trot.

Poppy held the lines and Isabel and Prue jounced up and down on the
body of the buckboard, singing with Mark at the tops of their voices:
“Hurrah, Hurrah, Hurrah!”




CHAPTER III

HURRAH AND HURRAHING


Poppy ate her supper in a daze that did not interfere with her
appetite, but did keep her from knowing what she ate.

Mark was not much less excited. It really was an amazing thing to come
home from the post office with a horse and buckboard, “precisely as if
it had been sent parcel post,” Mark said.

“And you would have to go down to get it, if it had come that way,
because the carrier won’t carry awful big packages,” Poppy added.

Mr. Hawthorne had raised his eyebrows doubtfully when they asked him if
Hurrah might stay on the place, but he had not the heart to say no, and
when he saw the horse he said yes, willingly.

“He’s not a colt, but he’s a healthy, good looking elderly gentleman,
and he’s welcome,” Mr. Hawthorne said. “You and Mark must take care of
him between you, Poppy, bed him, curry him and feed him; that’s fair if
I buy him feed. We’re the sort of people, thank God, that a horse, or
even a child more or less, can be tucked away among and not worry us.”

“Oh, dad, you peach! I like everything about you best of anything else;
I think the best thing about you is whatever I happen to think of, but
the very best thing about you, straight, right along, all the time, is
the way you are with birds and beasts and us kids!” cried Mark, beaming
adoringly on this ideal father of his.

After supper Mark came out on the piazza. Poppy’s rockers were making
such a racket that she did not hear him, so he stood still, shaking
with laughter, watching and listening to her.

She was deep in a great porch rocker, clasping its arms with her thin,
well-shaped little hands. She was rocking furiously, swinging her body
forward and back with the motion of the chair. Her flaming red hair
swung forward and back as she rocked; it had the effect of flames in
the wind--and indeed her excited little brain was on fire.

The rockers struck hard on their rear tips, then just as hard on their
front tips and made a great noise on the piazza floor as they rocked,
but high over their noise soared Poppy’s remarkably clear, true and
sweet voice, fairly shouting a song which she had just made. It
relieved her feelings, but the words were hardly poetry.

She sang:

  “Hurrah, hurrah for Hurrah, rah, rah!
  He’s brown and alive and better’n a car.
  He can eat oats and hay and not old gasoline;
  And his nose is so soft you might think it was cream.
  Hurrah! Hurrah loves me, if I am a red-head!
  He’s my own horsie darling and I’ve put him to bed.”

In her ecstasy Poppy lurched over an arm of the chair and caught sight
of Mark, crimson from suppressed laughter, his hand over his mouth.

“Laugh if you want to!” she shouted. “Just laugh! It’s all so, and I’ve
got a horse, and if I don’t die in the night thinking about it I’m
going to sing a whole uproar about it to-morrow. Oh, Jack-in-the-Box,
honest to goodness, am I Poppy; honest, am I?”

“You dear child, don’t you know no one but Poppy could be so glad?”
said Motherkins coming out past Mark and taking the quivering little
body in her arms. “Dear, your head is burning and your hands are icy!
You must quiet down, childie, or you won’t be able to look after
Hurrah. Come, sit on the arm of my chair, and let us plan how we’ll
drive through sweet, shady roads with Hurrah, when it is June.”

“You don’t know how it feels to have a horse given you. Who’ll wipe the
dishes?” cried Poppy.

Motherkins laughed. “You and I, perhaps, after a while, but we’ll rest
first. And the day after to-morrow we shall have some one to do it for
us.”

Mr. Hawthorne drew a chair into the farther corner of the piazza and
Mark came to sit on the arm of his chair, as Poppy sat on Motherkins’.

“Are you bothered, dad?” whispered Mark, sensing something unnatural in
his father’s silence.

Mr. Hawthorne rested a hand on the boy’s shoulder as the other dropped
on the rough coat of Semper Fidelis, “Semp,” his devoted dog, never far
from his master.

“S-sh!” warned Mr. Hawthorne. “Don’t let Motherkins hear that! I don’t
know, my laddie, whether I am bothered or not, or rather whether I’m
reasonably bothered or not. I suppose I do know that I am a little
uneasy in my mind.”

“Could I know?” hinted Mark.

“Not to-night. If there’s anything to tell you shall know, of course.
I’m not sure that there is. You tell me, instead, what you are going
to do about furnishing your club room--isn’t it a club room? You told
me that you’d given up making the furniture,” Mr. Hawthorne diverted
Mark’s thoughts.

“I guess the furniture gave up letting us make it!” Mark laughed.
“We’re going to see if we can’t get some, enough, from Mrs. Lindsay
and Mrs. Wayne; old stuff stored in their attics. We’re going in the
morning, Poppy and I, with Hurrah in the buckboard, and if there’s any
for us we’ll load it up.”

“I’ll drive,” Poppy called across. She had not heard anything else that
Mark and his father had said, but she instantly caught the allusion to
Hurrah.

Before it was light Poppy was out of bed the next morning, creeping
down the stairs, her shoes in her hand, making no more sound than a red
maple leaf makes eddying down from the tree in the wind of October.

She put on her shoes on the back porch and sped over the wet grass,
frantic to get into the stable to see whether Hurrah were a fact or a
dream. Almost she had convinced herself that she had dreamed the whole
marvelous story, and there was no one about to tell her that her joy
was real.

There was Hurrah, real enough, looking immense in the dim light. But
Poppy’s anxiety underwent a swift change. Hurrah was a fact, but he was
lying down! Poppy had never before seen a horse off his feet; instantly
she made up her mind that he was desperately ill.

“Oh, my darling, my darling, my darlingest!” she wailed, bursting into
a tempest of tears. “It’s those nasty little sharp oats! I thought
they’d stick you! Oh, Hurrah, Hurrah! That you can’t do! Get up and
speak to me, angel!”

Hurrah looked at Poppy languidly, then he yawned prodigiously, and this
finished her hope of him. She had never seen anything so alarming as
this cavernous mouth, stretched to show uneven brownish teeth. She did
not know that Hurrah was not accustomed to being called at four in the
morning and was not anxious to waken.

Poppy turned away with a great rending sob, and rushed back to the
house, crying so hard at the top of her penetrating voice that by the
time she got to the house Motherkins, Mr. Hawthorne and Mark all had
their heads out of windows on the side of the house nearest to the
stable.

“Poppy, dear, what is it?” cried Mr. Hawthorne. He was sure that some
one had stolen Hurrah in the night, or else that he had hung himself in
his halter.

“Come, come, come! He’s dying! My horse is dying!” shrieked Poppy.

“Choking in his halter probably,” said Mr. Hawthorne. “All right,
Poppy; wait there. I’ll be down in a minute.”

“But, daddy, we didn’t put a halter on the horse,” said Mark as they
both hurried to their rooms to throw on some clothes and go to Hurrah’s
rescue. They ran to the stable, Mark and his father out-stripping
Poppy, whose breath was nearly used up from running.

Hurrah had risen and stood sleepily looking over the low door at the
rear of his stall as his new friends entered.

“What’s wrong with you, old chap?” asked Mr. Hawthorne, putting one
hand on the soft brown ears, the other under Hurrah’s fore leg to try
his temperature. “Why, Poppy, I don’t see anything wrong with your
horse, except that he feels, like the Sluggard: ‘you have waked me too
early, let me slumber again.’ Why did you think he was dying?”

“He--he was lying down,” sobbed Poppy, “and he opened his mouth
fearful, as if he was sick at his stomach and gasping for breath.”

Mark uttered a shout of pure joy and his father laughed.

“Horses lie down to sleep; didn’t you know that, little Poppy? And he
was yawning. He doesn’t want to be called at four in the morning, at
his age. To tell the truth, neither do I! Let’s all turn in again, and
I’m afraid I’ll have to forbid your visiting Hurrah till we’re all up.
Never mind this time; I’ll wager you thought you’d dreamed him, and
came out to see if he were real.”

Mr. Hawthorne gently rumpled Poppy’s hair, which was already
sufficiently disturbed by a night of restless tossing.

After breakfast Mark, seated on the rear of the buckboard, with his
feet dangling, and Poppy on the seat to drive, started away in pursuit
of furniture.

Mr. Hawthorne called after them to say that Mark must get up beside
Poppy to be ready to help her if she needed help, but otherwise
their triumphal start was not hindered, and Hurrah showed no sign of
dangerous illness.

They found Prue at Isabel’s house. Both little girls hailed them
gleefully.

“We didn’t believe it was so; we thought we must have imagined it, but
there he is, and you have him!” cried Isabel. “Mother, motherums, come
see the horse! Poppy’s driving him. Where’s your whip, Pops?”

“I never strike him,” said Poppy sternly, as if she had driven Hurrah
for years.

“Well, he’s really a nice looking horse. Really very nice! And how
happy you are, little Poppet! I am delighted that you have him.” Mrs.
Lindsay looked delighted. She had a beautiful face, sweet and calm,
with a lovely light in her eyes, the beauty of one who had suffered.
She had lost her other children in an epidemic of diphtheria; only
Isabel had been left to her, and through the brightness of her smile
shone the strength that had conquered grief unselfishly.

“I asked my mother, and she says we may have some things she stowed
away,” said Prue.

“And you are welcome to several chairs and a table from my attic,”
added Mrs. Lindsay. “Shall we go up and look them over? Tie Hurrah,
Mark, and come up with us.”

The children trooped up the stairs, up the first and second flights,
but Poppy lagged behind unnaturally; she was usually ahead of the
others. She was sorely tempted to stay with Hurrah and keep flies off
him, though the flies were still not abundant.

Mrs. Lindsay was one of those delightful people who remember precisely
what they liked when they were in short skirts with their hair braided
and ribbon-tied.

She selected a low rocking chair that would fit any one not above four
feet high; another with a cheerful design of flowers painted on its
wooden back; a low, bulging willow armchair that had seen better days,
but might then have been stiffer; a queer old footstool covered with
worsted embroidery, and a table of oak with a drawer in it and a shelf
across the bottom which would comfortably hold games and sizable books,
besides not being too good to put one’s feet on, in case one were
writing at the table.

“Now, with Mrs. Wayne’s contributions, you will have enough,” said Mrs.
Lindsay dusting her hands as she emerged from beneath the eaves. “But I
think I shall contribute some dishes, for I’m sure you’ll like to have
your own, in case you ever entertain. And I have a small kerosene stove
I’ll let you use, if Mrs. Hawthorne isn’t afraid of fire; it’s really
quite safe. You can boil water and make tea on it, or candy, if you
watch it and don’t let it boil over.”

“Isn’t she the duckiest duck of a mother!” cried Isabel hugging this
Lady Bountiful of the Understanding Heart. “You see we can sort of keep
house.”

“And my mother has a cot bed she’s going to let us have for a couch,
with a cover thrown over it, so if anything happened we could stay
right there, over night, one or two of us!” Prue added.

“We’ll have to make a lot of trips to haul this all up on the
buckboard, but we can take our time at it,” said Mark.

“I’m perfec’ly willing to lend my horse, but I don’t want him tired
out,” said Poppy with much dignity.

“We’ll all walk beside him and sing to him as we march, Pops,” said
Mark, as Isabel and Prue chuckled over Poppy’s magnificence.

It did require many trips, but the loads were light, and even Poppy was
satisfied that the effort was not too much for Hurrah’s health since
they themselves bore up well trotting along beside him.

Mrs. Wayne had an old rug that gave the last touch of completeness to
the Club Room. They spread it in the middle of the room, and though it
did not reach far in either direction, as Prue pointed out, it made the
room look quite different than it would if the floor had been entirely
bare.

With the cot set up and spread with a faded striped cover, and the
chairs carefully set in careless positions, as if they had just been
used, and the table with books on its four corners and a checkerboard
and steeple chase and a box of Lotto, and Authors on the shelf
underneath, and an inkstand and paper and pens and pencils placed
exactly in the middle of the table top, the room looked as though there
might be a reason for calling it a Club Room. If there were such reason
the children had no notion of what it was. There was a Club Room, but
in no true sense was there a club.

“You may come in to see it, Motherkins,” said Mark, as Mrs. Hawthorne
peeped in at the door, asking if she might see what they had done. “Of
course we do want you to see it, but we shall ask you to come formally,
you and daddy, and Mrs. Wayne and Mrs. Lindsay--our Benefactors’ Day,
it will be, and then you must try to feel as if you hadn’t seen it
before. But come right in; we say it looks nifty; what do you say?”

“Nifty indeed!” cried Motherkins admiringly. “Why, it’s a regular
treasure house of grandeur! And it’s in bad taste to have everything
spick and span new, as if you were all varnished, and never had
anything in all your lives before! I see that the fastening is off that
window, but that doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, dear, no; nobody will bother these windows,” said Mark confidently.

“Your father could put a fastening on,” Motherkins went on, as if not
satisfied to feel that the window could not be fastened.

“Little Motherkins-wee is afraid some one will creep in here and carry
her off,” chanted Isabel, catching Mrs. Hawthorne around the waist and
making her dance.

“Because she’s so little and so nice, nice nice!” Poppy joined in the
song, dancing around Isabel and Motherkins, waving her hands to the
rhythm.

The children all treated Motherkins as if she were a superior sort of
toy.

“No fear of any one getting into the Club Room,” said Mark again.

And this showed exactly how much he knew about it!




CHAPTER IV

THE CLOUD IN THE SKY


“Say, Isa, I’m perfectly sure something is bothering dad,” Mark said
drawing his brow into an anxious knot.

“So am I,” Isabel agreed. “He thinks and thinks, not pleasant thoughts.
He frowns and looks straight through you as if you were cheesecloth,
and he is pale. You don’t suppose he is sick, and knows it, and is
worrying about you and Motherkins?”

“Oh, no-o-o!” Mark shook his head so hard that the negative came out
in syllables. “There’s nothing like that the matter! I can always tell
when dad doesn’t feel well. It’s bother. I wonder what can be worrying
him now, when everything has come out so just right!”

Isabel and Mark were on their way to get certain flower seeds which
Motherkins needed to plant her old-fashioned flower garden with all the
kinds of flowers which she had grown in that same garden long before
Mark was born. Then this great house had been her home; in the meantime
it had been lost to her, and now that she had got it back through the
return of her lost son, with a modest fortune with which to buy the old
place back, she was happily restoring her beloved garden in its old
place, with its old flowers.

The children had offered to help Motherkins with her planting. Prue
stayed with Poppy, getting ready the seeds already on hand, while
Isabel and Mark went to supply deficiencies from the store and also to
buy a new hoe and rake “to tuck them into the bed,” Mark said.

They came back sooner than they were expected, each with a long-handled
tool over their shoulder, and quite breathless and heated from hurrying.

Their haste was explained by the pasteboard box which Mark carried by
its tape handle. It was a treat for the stay-at-homes--strawberry and
vanilla!--to square accounts; Isa and he had eaten their cream in the
drug store and did not want to take advantage of their friends.

Isabel and Mark sipped cold water and watched Prue and Poppy eat
their ice cream, recovering breath meanwhile. Then all four went out
and began to dig and hoe vigorously in the garden that lay under the
eastern wall of the house under the direct rays of the morning sun, in
the best possible place for the well-being of flowers.

It had grown warm as the sun mounted. The dining room windows were open
and Motherkins sat in one of them studying a seedsman’s catalogue when
her son came into the room.

She looked up to greet him, and must have been struck by the troubled
look on his face which the children had been seeing, for they, working
below the window in the garden, heard her exclaim in a startled voice:

“Why, Gilbert, dear, what is wrong? You look distressed!”

Mr. Hawthorne dropped wearily into a chair opposite to her and rumpled
his hair in a way he had when things went wrong. Then he rumpled Semp’s
hair; he had come after him and was leaning against him.

“Oh, distressed is a strong word, small mother!” he said laughing at
her with no sound of merriment in the laugh. “I’m all right.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me about it, Gilbert?” said Motherkins
quietly, as if he had said that he was not all right. “I have noticed
that you looked anxious, as if something were on your mind, for several
days, but when you came in just now you startled me. You’d better tell
me, dear.”

“You’re a great little woman for seeing what lies behind people’s
foreheads!” said her son. “When I was a child you always knew what I
didn’t tell you quite as well as what I told! I remember believing
firmly that you had a sort of X-ray wireless apparatus--only I couldn’t
have called it that--which looked through me and caught my thoughts.
Well, then, I’ll own up! I have been somewhat troubled for a few days
over what must prove to be nonsense, and to-day I had a letter that
increased the worry.”

“A letter from----?” Motherkins waited for him to complete her sentence.

“From a firm of lawyers of shady reputation as to honor, but with a
reputation for skill in winning cases by their tricks. I have been
keeping off telling you, but I suppose you’ve got to know.” Mr.
Hawthorne looked disgusted, but he settled back in his chair to tell
the story, pulling Semp’s ears as he talked.

“You know, mother, I saved the life of young Maurice Ditson. He was the
son of James Ditson, who was the wealthy manufacturer--you know all
that, and how to prove his gratitude Mr. Ditson left me all the money
Mark and I have, except Mark’s small inheritance from his mother. Well,
Maurice Ditson turned out so badly that I’m afraid if his father had
lived to know about it he’d have felt that it would have been better
if I hadn’t saved his son, that it would have been better if he had
died innocent rather than lived to disgrace his father’s honorable
name. In any case, Maurice could spend all that his father and several
other millionaires could give him, and he wants now to get away from
me the money his father left to me. He’s trumped up a tale that is too
long to go into, that would set aside the will, if it could be proved.
He’s engaged Sharp and Geiger to take the case, and they have plenty
of skill and no conscience at all. So I don’t know! It’s an outrageous
attempt, of course, but that’s not saying it may not succeed, and if it
does----” Gilbert Hawthorne paused and looked at his mother.

“If it does,” she said, “we shall lose this dear place and be poor
again?”

“Oh, mother dear, that’s exactly what would happen!” cried Gilbert.

“Let us hope and pray that the wickedness will be foiled. It would be
cruelly hard when we are so happy, so gratefully, cloudlessly happy
in our old home! Somehow I think the plot can’t succeed. But in any
case I have you, my son; nothing can take from me my greatest joy in
having you again. And with you our dear lad, who seems to give me you
again twice over! So at the worst I shall not be as I was before,
heartbroken, alone! You must do all that may be done to prevent this
dishonesty from succeeding, dear, and after that we will try not to
worry,” said the brave little mother.

“You little wonder!” cried her son, jumping up to pick his small mother
up bodily and hug her hard in his relief that she took his dreaded
revelation so quietly. “You may be sure I’ll do all I can to defeat
Maurice Ditson! Why, mother, the few thousands his father left me, and
which the fine old fellow wanted me to have--and more!--was nothing out
of the great fortune which he left Maurice, and which he has already
wasted!”

“No. Mr. Ditson was deeply indebted to you; it was justice to prove his
gratitude. Well, dear, in the meantime the garden is to be sown, I hope
for us to enjoy, but whatever is to come, to-day the garden is to be
sown and planted! Will you help us? Try to put this whole dismal matter
out of your mind. It is a lovely day to be making a garden!”

Little Mrs. Hawthorne arose as she spoke and crossed over to gather
up from the table the boxes into which Prue and Poppy had put the
envelopes of seeds which they had assorted. She was a tiny woman,
almost like a creature all soul and no body, but the spirit in that
little frame was high and brave; it knew how to meet prosperity or
misfortune.

The children beneath the window had clearly heard every word that had
been said by the mother and son. They had made no pretense of working,
but had stood listening, horror-stricken, to what had been said.

Now Mark, white-faced, with blazing eyes, threw down the hoe upon which
he had been leaning.

“It can’t happen, you know!” he whispered hoarsely. “It would be too
awful. It can’t possibly happen.”

“But you know, Jack-in-the-Box, the things too awful to happen are the
ones that do happen, quite often. It frightens me!” said Isabel, and
her dilated eyes showed that it did frighten her.

“If you had to leave this dear, dear old house----” began Prue, looking
grim, but Poppy interrupted her with a scream of rage, dancing up and
down in a frenzy.

“We won’t, we sha’n’t, we won’t!” she cried. “We’ll get guns and drag
’em up the secret passage! We’ll boil water and pour it on ’em! We’ll
chuck ’em in the cellar with straw on top ’em and set ’em afire! Let
’em try to take this house! And if they took it I’d earn money for
Mis’ Hawthorne, ’nough, too! I’ll get that nice glass bottle man,
what deals in ’em, over to Hertonsburg, what picked me up the day I
went off, long ago, last year, and took me home to his house, to show
me how to make money out of bottles, or something. His wife was awful
smart--and nice. I’ll take boarders. Oh, Mark, Mark--Oh, Motherkins,
Mr. Daddy, don’t let ’em take your money and your life!”

Poppy hurled herself upon little Motherkins and her son as they came
into the garden, ending her appeal with a form of words which she must
have somewhere heard and retained.

“Oh, dear, we forgot the children, especially Poppy!” said Mrs.
Hawthorne in dismay. “Of course they heard every word! Poppy, child,
it’s far better to be poor than not to be able to control yourself. You
must learn to be quiet. You are shaking and are cold! None of us is
excited. You never will be helpful, a useful, wise, strong woman, if
you fly off like a Fourth of July sparkler over everything that stirs
you. But I know it is because you love me.”

[Illustration: SO THEY WENT ON SOWING THE WHOLE GARDEN FULL OF
OLD-FASHIONED FLOWERS.]

Motherkins stooped to stroke the frizzy, flaming hair and to kiss the
quivering face.

“All little Motherkins’ pills are sugar coated,” laughed Mark.

Poppy choked, and shook, and swallowed hard for a few moments, while
Motherkins continued to soothe and smooth her. Then she straightened
herself and said:

“I will, I will, honest to goodness, I will! I’ll keep the lid on. That
time I ran off and stopped over night to Mr. Thomas Burke’s, my nice
bottle man’s--906 North Street, Hertonsburg, is where ’tis--he told me
I’d be fine if I’d only keep the lid on, so I shall. I’d love to have
you poor if I could earn tons of money and give it to you, to sorter
pay back.”

“I shouldn’t be poor, Poppy dear, if you gave me tons of money,”
laughed Motherkins. “Don’t worry, child! You are too little a girl to
worry, and I’m sure we shall all be happy till the stars have eaten up
the moon because it is made of green cheese!”

The four children laughed over this suggestion, then Prue frowned and
began to say: “But it isn’t, you know, Mrs. Hawthorne,” when Mark
drowned her out, crying:

“They’ve begun to nibble at it already, Motherkins! There’s only a half
piece in the sky; I saw it last night. Does the Dog Star--Sirius--eat
the most?”

“Silly thing!” said Poppy, with a grown-up manner. “There’s terrible
much place for garden everywheres on this place. I wish I could have a
piece to raise stuff to sell, if we get poor.”

“Why, so you may!” cried Mr. Hawthorne, kindly refraining from pointing
out the fact that if they became poor the place would no longer be
theirs.

“Help yourself, Poppy! Pick out the spot you like best and I’ll have
it dug up for you and raked smooth and we’ll see what sort of a farmer
you’ll be.”

“I’ll be a very good raiser, I know that, because I ain’t lazy,” said
Poppy, with no mock modesty. “If you want to raise things you’ve got to
work like everything, that’s what you have. And I ain’t--am not lazy.”

“We could help you,” remarked Isabel wistfully, her eyes and voice
betraying how much she would like a share in this enterprise.

“Mr. Daddé,” as Isa used to call Mark’s father when she first knew
him because his name was a secret and she only knew Mark’s name for
him--Daddy, “Mr. Daddé” saw that Isabel envied Poppy her promised
garden, and he also saw what profitable pleasure there might be in a
garden apiece for them all.

“Instead of helping Poppy, why don’t each of you take a piece of land
and see what you can get out of it? I’ll spade the gardens myself, four
of them, each wherever its owner prefers it, and then do whatever you
like, each of you; plant what you please, make your garden the kind
you’d rather have. We’d have a sort of county fair of our own when they
all got bearing!” he said.

“Say, daddy!” cried Mark struck with admiration.

“I’d perfectly love it!” Isabel spoke with bated breath. Immediately
she added: “And I’d raise mignonette and sweet peas in mine----”

“Me for lettuce!” shouted Prue excitedly.

“Radishes! Red ’uns, like me!” shouted Poppy. “And peas--to eat, not
your no-good kind, Isa.”

“Well, string beans seem about all I can choose,” said Mark. “I suppose
as long as I’m Jack-in-the-Box I may as well be Jack and the Bean
Stalk, too.”

“Splendid!” cried Mr. Hawthorne. “No two alike, so each of you can be
first in your own class. Come along and pick out garden sites.”

“Oh, Gilbert, my poor flower seeds!” his mother remonstrated.

“Well, daddy!” cried Mark. “Walk right off like that and leave tiny
Motherkins to shift for herself! Come on, girls. I’ll make a trench and
you come over the top and take it, and fill it up with whatever our
General-in-chief, Motherkins, says. We’ll pick out gardens after we
plant this one. What’s in the front trench, General Motherkins? That’s
the most dangerous line.”

“Brave little dwarfs, Mark--candytuft. They’re not afraid of the
enemy,” said Motherkins entering into the play-work, and giving the
three little girls each a paper of seeds to scatter in the shallow
trench which Mark made with a stick and stood ready to cover as they
sowed.

So they went on sowing in rows, in squares, in circles, the entire
garden full of old-fashioned flowers, fragrant and modest, flaunting
and graceful, tall and short, “Just as I used to have it years ago!”
sighed Motherkins contentedly. Then she sighed again anxiously,
remembering that Gilbert had said that it was possible that she might
lose again this beautiful old place, and that if it did happen the
parting from it would this time be final.

At last the garden was sown and all the seeds “tucked into their beds,”
Isabel said. Dirty and tired, but with their enthusiasm unabated, the
four children followed Mr. Hawthorne across the grass to inspect the
various sites for possible gardens. Semp--Semper Fidelis, living up to
his name--Bunkie, and round, gray Pincushion, who adored Bunk, all of
whom had superintended the laying out of Motherkins’ garden, marched
behind their human friends to seek for more gardens to lay out.

There was considerable difference of opinion as to the best spots. The
discussion stood in some danger of growing unpleasant because Poppy was
tired enough to be more than ordinarily inflammable, and Prue was tired
enough to have less patience with her than ordinarily--and at best Prue
had not great patience with excitable little Poppy.

The decision was made easier by Isabel, the peacemaker, who suggested
that it would be far pleasanter to have all four gardens close together.

“You see,” she said, in her sweet, soothing voice that always fell on
the ear like the soft touch of a cool hand on a fevered head, “we’d be
tired to death working and working when it got hot, all by ourselves,
where we couldn’t call over to one another, back and forth. If
Daddy-dear doesn’t mind, why not divide off that nicest easterly field
into quarters, and give us each a corner quarter?”

“Daddy-dear” did not mind; he cordially approved, and so it was done.
By the next day the ground was plowed, harrowed and raked fine, and
the gardens, one exactly as good as the other, were apportioned. Thus
the children were installed as gardeners, precisely as if there were no
threat of the Hawthorne place being lost to its owners.




CHAPTER V

“THE LUCKY FOUR”


“Isa, child, do you realize that you and I are growing to be merely
calling acquaintances? That you are gone all day long, after your
practice and reading are done, and that we meet only at meals,
sometimes not then? It is painful to see my only child slipping into
a calling acquaintance, and to foresee that some day I may say: Miss
Lindsay? Miss _Isabel_ Lindsay? Oh, yes; I do know her! She calls on me
occasionally; I do not return her calls.”

Mrs. Lindsay tried to look pathetic, and succeeded so well that Isabel,
though she knew that her mother was playing with her, threw herself
upon her with a rush and hugged her violently.

“Mother, you darling, dreadful mother! You know I’m not so awful as
that!” she cried. “But there’s so much, so _very_ much to do!”

“I had to try not to be pleased that school closed in April,” Mrs.
Lindsay went on in a pensive tone as she smoothed her disordered
garments. “It seemed wicked to be glad when the school had to close
because so many children had measles, but I had to try hard not to be
glad--and I’m not sure I succeeded!--because I was to have my daughter
at home. And she deserts me! It is a blow. She gives me our twilight
hour’s talk, but I may lose that.”

“Mother, stop!” begged Isabel. “I know you don’t mean it, but it’s
horrid, because it would be so horrid if you did mean it! You know I
wouldn’t miss my hour for anything in the world! It’s the loveliest
thing ever to sit down with you every night in the dusk and tell you
every single thing that I’ve done all day! But, mother, only think
all that we four have now! There’s the Club Room, all our own, and we
love it! And our gardens, and the things are poking right up since it
came so warm after this rain! And the woods to go to, which we’ve got
to love best of all, forever. And the secret passage, though we don’t
like to go through it much; it’s so dark and damp and probably spidery,
but it’s great to know it’s there, and it’s another of our places. And
there’s Château Branche. We haven’t been up in it yet, but now it’s
warm we thought we might go up and sit there this afternoon. Really, we
are so busy! I think we are pretty lucky to have all these places our
own. We are a sort of society, or club, or something now; our name is
‘the Lucky Four,’ and our badge is a four-leafed clover. I named us;
isn’t it fine?”

“Fine, indeed!” Mrs. Lindsay dropped her pretense of feeling abused,
and sympathized with Isabel’s pleasure, which was also her own
pleasure; the greatest joy she had was her beloved little girl’s
happiness.

“Are you going to Château Branche this afternoon? Because if you are
I’ve a fairly good-sized box of candy that might enjoy the Château, if
you’d take it with you and open it there,” she said.

“Mother, mother, there’s no other mother on earth like you!” Isabel
declared, as she declared so often that it was like a refrain to a song
that was hard to stop singing. “You think of such nice things!”

“Candy?” queried Mrs. Lindsay.

“And having it to take up into Château Branche to open there; that’s
one of them,” Isabel tempestuously embraced her mother over again.
“Now, I’ve got to go, duckie mother, or I’ll be late. Good-by till
half-past five.”

Isabel ran out calling: “Hoo-hoo-oo-oo,” for Prue to hear and join her.

Prue heard; she had been listening for the call, and was ready to run
the moment it fell on her ear. The two inseparable friends put their
arms around each other and went on happily, chattering as if they had
parted a month before, instead of at dinner time.

They met two little girls of their own age, schoolmates of theirs, who
stopped them. Kathie Stevens, the taller of the two, moved and spoke
energetically; she had a wilful face, with a snap in her eyes. Dolly
Harding, her friend, was shorter, decidedly plump, with round features
and a placid look that at the same time hinted of obstinacy. Dolly was
inclined to be lazy, while Kathie was more energetic than was always
pleasant. Prue and Isabel liked them, but they were too satisfied with
each other and Mark--Poppy, too, added to their pleasure--to have much
interest left to give any one else.

“Hello, Prue ’n Isa!” cried Kathie as they came toward one another from
opposite directions. “Say, we saw that funny Poppy Meiggs just a while
ago!”

“Did you?” Isabel answered. “What made her funny?”

“She is, all the time; she’s _funny_!” Kathie found it easier to repeat
her statement than to explain it. “She said you’d got up a club.”

“Well, kind of,” Prue admitted warily, foreseeing danger. “It’s just
us, same’s before, only we call it a club.”

“Lucky Four, Pop said it was,” Kathie persisted.

“Well, that’s what we _call_ it,” Prue said, as if it might,
nevertheless, be almost anything else.

“Say, girls,” Kathie spoke so vehemently that the two words seemed to
pop like corn on a popper, “say, let us be in it! Don’t be piggish with
your club. Let us belong. We want to, don’t we, Doll?”

“Surest thing in the world, we want to,” Dolly approved her. “We think
you might. We’d like to know why not? We wouldn’t hurt it, would we?
More the merrier!”

“It wouldn’t be the Lucky Four if it was six,” said Isabel, uttering
the first words that came into her head, to gain time. She knew
instantly that she and Prue did not want Kathie and Dolly to join the
club, and that Mark and Poppy would not want them; she was not at all
sure that “more” would be “merrier,” but she had no idea of how to
refuse the petition.

“Oh, well, my gracious! Can’t we change the name? Lucky Six is just as
good, even if you can’t have a four-leaf clover for the badge--Poppy
said that’s what you took. Have six rings all hitched together, in a
circle, like doughnuts, for the badge. Just ’s good!” Kathie resumed
her pleading.

“I shouldn’t care about doughnuts for my club badge,” said Prue, coming
to Isabel’s rescue before she could speak again. She knew it was hard
for Isa to say no to any one who wanted her to say yes, and Prue was
afraid Isa’s tender-heartedness would give them two more club members
on the spot unless she interfered.

“We couldn’t let you join right off like this, Kathie. We’d have to put
it to Mark and Poppy and let them vote on it, have a club meeting or
something, to decide, you know. We’re not the whole club; we’re only
half,” she said.

Isabel looked at Prue with profound admiration. She certainly was the
most sensible person! And her sense kept her out of scrapes into which
Isabel’s greater sweetness, her sensitive desire to make everything
pleasant, often landed her.

“Well, I suppose that’s fair,” Kathie admitted grudgingly. “We’ll go
right along with you now and put it up to Mark and Poppy, then we’ll
know how it went.”

“Oh, but clubs have to vote by themselves; only members there. You
mustn’t come unless we let you belong,” Prue cried.

Dolly set her chin in a way she had that meant she had first set her
mind. “It isn’t so much of a club. We’re going now,” she said.

And go they did, Kathie taking Prue by the arm, Dolly linking herself
with Isabel with so much decision that poor Prue and Isa saw no way to
prevent what they felt was an unwarrantable intrusion.

Mark and Poppy would be waiting for them at Château Branche; not in
it, for they would be sure to wait for Isabel and Prue to help them
up, and not choose places till they were there to choose fairly. There
was one side of the platform in the tall pine tree, which was the
children’s beloved summer house, that was not quite level, and these
four honorable comrades were all equally anxious not to get the best
of one another. So Mark and Poppy would surely wait till they had all
assembled to mount together into their beautiful perch.

“This is the first time this year,” said Prue, as they came through the
spring-green woods and espied the tree, with Mark and Poppy waiting
beside it, as they had expected.

“I know it is,” said Isabel, her voice answering in its mournful tone
Prue’s meaning, which was: “The first time this year, and Dolly and
Kathie here!”

“Well, hello, Dolly; hello, Kathie,” said Mark, striving to greet the
guests politely, but unable to greet them cordially.

Poppy frowned openly. “It’s a club now,” she remarked.

“We met the girls,” Prue at once plunged into an explanation to give
Mark a clew to what had happened. “They want to join our club--we’d
have to change the name, of course. And we said we couldn’t let ’em
without talking to you. So they came along. I told them we had to meet
first.”

Kathie saw the dismay that Mark could not keep out of his eyes, and
that Poppy fairly glowered, looking ready to do more.

“You let us join this,” she said instantly, “and we’ll do something for
you. We’ll kind of belong hitched on, not inside, so you can keep on
being the Lucky Four, if you want to. That can be the real club, and
we’ll be--I don’t know what we’d call it--just kind of belong, hitched
on. And I’ve got a whole nice, awful nice, collection of old coins. I
don’t want ’em, but they’re perfectly fine; I know that. You and Prue
and Isa love history, Mark, so you’d be crazy over ’em. Some of ’em
were Roman emperors’ money; pretty near two thousand years old, they
are. I’ll divide ’em up with you three--Poppy wouldn’t care any more’n
I do for ’em--and I won’t keep one myself, if you’ll let Doll and
I--Doll and me--into the club. How’s that? We could pretend the coins
were the club’s treasure!”

“Is that bribery, Mark?” asked Isabel.

“N-no,” Mark decided slowly. “It’s a fair offer. It’s kind of like
tribute paid to the king to be allowed to belong to his kingdom. That’s
all right. I’d love the coins. But, honestly, Kathie, you see this is
just ourselves, and we have such nice times! It’s kind of risky to let
in some one else. Suppose we let you come on trial? I don’t want to let
any one in for keeps till we know how it works.”

“But he doesn’t want to be selfish with our lovely times, and we do
like you both, you know that,” Isabel hastily interposed with her smile
that always disarmed wrath, for she saw that Kathie looked indignant,
and that Dolly was by no means pleased.

“Everybody keeps their own house for themselves, no matter if ’tis
nice, and they are happy. They don’t take in boarders, just ’cause it’s
nice,” said Poppy, her meaning only too plainly showing through her
figure of speech.

“Oh, well, on trial,” said Prue. “Want to join that way, girls?”

“All right. Any way you say,” agreed Kathie, banishing her annoyance.
“You’ll like us; we’ll be good clubbers. And I’ll bring the coins
to-morrow.”

“Just to look at. We wouldn’t let you divide them till you are taken
in,” said Mark firmly, as if he were afraid that he might be tempted.

“Now, let’s get up,” said Dolly, weary of waiting so long to get her
way.

The children clambered up into Château Branche. Mark’s father had
improved its entrance by footholds of wood nailed to the side of the
tree; last year the climb had been difficult for the girls.

“O my! It’s worth more than coins to come here!” cried Kathie, catching
her breath delightedly.

“We just love it,” said Isabel, softening toward the intruder when she
found her so enthusiastic. “But we have company here. You could come
here, if you didn’t belong, and without any coins.”

It was beautiful. No one could have resisted its loveliness. Lying
back on their abundant pillows, the children looked up through the
dark green pine, now pungent with the spring scent of newly mounted,
resinous sap, to see the flecks of deep blue that were revealed as the
branches moved in the breeze. Birds hopped about, most of them bits of
motion, rather than color or shape, so thick were the pine needles,
so heavy the shadows. But close above the branches which held Château
Branche robins were darting in and out, nest-building. At first they
doubted the children, discussing them between themselves with sharp
chirps and nervous tail twitching, but finally they decided that human
beings who had bird habits and nested in trees must be trustworthy, and
resumed their work without any more delay. It was easy to see, by the
short time between their trips after supplies and the rapid way they
tucked those supplies into the growing nest, that there was no time to
lose. For a long time--a long time for six children to be still--no one
spoke. Then Isabel said softly:

“It would be nice to be dead and lying out under the trees, all quiet
and lovely, among birds and grass and flowers, if only your body could
know it was there, wouldn’t it be?”

“Oh, Isabel!” cried Dolly, in strong protest and horror.

But Mark smiled at Isabel and nodded.

“I’ve thought that, too, Isa,” he said. “But we can have it all and be
alive; that’s still better.”

“Mother gave me a box of candy to open,” said Isa, sitting up and
throwing off her dreams by an effort that showed.

She produced the box, two pounds, and the six fell upon it as if
Château Branche were a desert island on which they had been shipwrecked
without food for days.

It doesn’t take long to do away with two pounds of candy when there
are six to eat it; after all, that is only a wee bit over five ounces
apiece! Mrs. Lindsay had not reckoned on the extra two. When the candy
was gone the spell of the quiet woods seemed broken; Kathie and Dolly
grew restless and wanted to go down again.

“You can’t keep quiet a whole afternoon,” said Kathie.

“We do. We read and talk and just sit and look. We never get tired,”
said Prue disapprovingly.

But they all came down, Mark with Pincushion on his shoulder in the
fashion of the preceding summer when Isabel and Prue had first known
him and Pincushion had been a kitten. Bunkie was waiting for them, and
they all wandered slowly through the woods, toward the Hawthorne house.

“Show us the Club Room, too; Pops said you had a club room,” said Dolly.

“We have,” said Mark. “This way, then.”

He led the way through the house, into the room at its rear which the
children claimed. It was furnished abundantly with the contributions
from the families which had helped it to completion, albeit the odds
and ends effect was somewhat queer, decidedly odds-and-endish.

“Now, I like this!” cried Kathie delightedly. “Isn’t it great to have
this all our own? And dishes! Why, what fun! I’m going to give a party
here--just us members!” she added, seeing disapproval of her instant
taking possession gathering on the other faces. “You could climb up
outside. Why don’t you come in that way always? Lots nicer.”

“Isabel and I like the stairs,” said Prue primly.

Poppy looked for the first time as if she found Kathie an addition to
the club ranks.

“We will,” she said. “Us, anyway, Kathie.”

“Let’s be the Lucky Four and a Half--six, you know!” cried Dolly.

“We’ll see,” Mark said cautiously. “Maybe yes; maybe no. But you come
and try. We don’t want things happening here to change it.”

But Mark was to discover things happening there, and that soon.




CHAPTER VI

THE DEAR HOUSE


Dolly and Kathie did not appear the next day. “The Lucky Four” had been
sure that they would come, they were so delighted with the idea of the
club and so anxious to belong to it.

It was the second day before they came, however. Isabel, Prue, Mark and
Poppy were working hard in their gardens. Poppy always worked hard in
hers; it seemed doubtful if anything planted in it could escape being
hoed up, so hard and so recklessly did she weed it.

Kathie and Dolly came across the grass toward the workers so slowly,
and Kathie’s face was so flushed and woe-begone that Isabel noticed it
and called: “What’s the matter?” as soon as she could make Kathie hear.

“Nothing. Aren’t you going up to the club room?” Kathie called back.

“We’re going to work out here exactly one hour; we’ve been at it twenty
minutes, only, so you may as well find the nicest seat on the ground
there is and wait for us,” said Mark.

“Oh, my land! More’n half an hour!” groaned Kathie, but Dolly bumped
down under a tree, where the grass grew thick, and, picking a blade,
began to blow on it without wasting time on argument.

“Why don’t you leave it, and do it in the morning before it gets hot?”
Kathie asked impatiently.

“We work one hour in the morning, one in the afternoon, Miss Stevens,
for we are out after first-class gardens,” Mark answered loftily.

“If I had a hoe I’d help, then you’d get through sooner,” said Kathie.

“No, you wouldn’t--thanks just the same,” Prue spoke with decision.
“Nobody who hadn’t planted it could tell what to dig up when things are
starting. I wouldn’t let any one loose to dig my garden for the world.”

“You might think I was a hen!” grumbled Kathie, throwing herself down
beside Dolly and joining in her blade of grass solo with a louder,
shriller blade.

“Bet you didn’t bring those cones!” exclaimed Poppy, who had been
eyeing the pair sharply.

“Did, too; here they are.” Kathie motioned to a box which she had
carried as if it were heavy. “They’re not cones; they’re coins, Poppy
Meiggs, and I got them; they are here. I won’t open them till we’re in
the club room, and then I’ll tell you something.”

“We’ll be as quick as we can, Kathie,” said Isabel.

“We can’t be quicker than twenty minutes, because we said we’d work an
hour, and we can’t stop sooner.” Prue was the firm person who made this
announcement. “Jack-in-the-Box keeps the time; we’re wasting some.”

One worker in each corner of the lot given over to these gardeners, the
hoes dug fast from this moment in a silence broken only by the dreadful
cries of the grass blowers, getting horrible sounds, now high, now low,
from the helpless blades.

“Time’s up!” Mark announced at last, looking at his wrist watch. “Say,
it’s a whole lot easier to eat vegetables than it is to raise them!”

“I guess it is! I’ve got a crick in my back from my neck all the way to
my heels,” Prue said, straightening herself with a heavy sigh.

“Quite a long back, Prue. You’ll be tall when you’re grown up,”
remarked Isa.

“It begins as a crick in my back. I suppose it gets to be cramp in my
legs after a while. Let’s make lemonade in our glasses in the Club
Room,” Prue suggested.

“No lemons, no sugar! I’ll go buy ’em,” cried Poppy, tired, but always
ready to do errands.

“But there are! Both things, Pops; I took them there yesterday. There
are nice lemons, the plump, smooth kind, and two pounds of sugar.” Prue
enjoyed the triumph of her foresightedness, though the rest expected
Prue to think of things of this sort.

The six children went toward the house, the workers mopping their
crimson faces, Kathie and Dolly still blowing grass till Isabel, warm
and tired, begged them to stop.

“All right; I don’t like it myself, much, but it’s something you keep
right on doing, once you start, though I get awful sick of it before
long,” said Dolly, amiably throwing away her grass blade.

“I’m going to climb in,” announced Kathie, surveying the balcony, which
was built out from one of the windows of the Club Room, and the roof of
the piazza, which ran all along the rear of the house, below the room.

“Oh, don’t, Kathie! The posts may be weak,” protested Isabel.

“’Course they’re not!” Kathie maintained. “I love to climb. Now, you
all watch me go up! Here, some one, take my box. Don’t lose it; it’s
the coins. Now, watch!” Kathie spat on her hands like a boy, but
she went up the piazza post and swung on the balcony like a monkey.
Wriggling her body expertly, she got herself into position to catch the
top of the balcony rail, from which it was no feat to get over and open
the window into the club room.

“Hey-yeh, pokies, I’m in! Hurry up if you’re coming through the house!”
she called down.

The others made haste to join her by the usual way, and the moment that
she got inside the door Prue made a dash for her lemons, while Poppy
caught up the club’s own private and particular water pitcher, and ran
off for water.

“Do show us the coins, Kathie,” said Mark. “I’m wild to see them.”

“Well, I will,” began Kathie slowly. “But, look here! You said you
wouldn’t divvy them up till I regularly belonged? Well, if I never
divvied, couldn’t I belong?”

“Oh, oh! Injun giver!” exclaimed a frowning Poppy, appearing in the
doorway with a steaming water pitcher, spilling its contents over the
top.

“No, honest; no, I’m not!” Kathie cried eagerly. “But my father says I
can’t give them away, and so I can’t. ’Tisn’t my fault. I’d do it in a
jiffy, but if he says I can’t, why, how can I?”

“Thought they were yours!” observed Prue, disgustedly, not because she
cared the least bit for the coins, but because she thought she had
caught Kathie pretending.

“They are mine. But they aren’t mine to do what I please with; not
now,” Kathie was quick to explain. “They were left to me, in a will;
some one father knew left ’em. They are mine, but father says I can’t
do one thing with them till I’m grown up and can tell a hawk from a
handsaw. That’s what he said; I don’t know what he meant, but I suppose
that’s two kinds of coins. I’ll show you how they are; they’re awful
old! Some of ’em go all the way back to Julius Cæsar and to old Egypt.”

“Oh, Kath, honest!” cried Mark, instantly excited; he was studying
Cæsar with his father, out of school, and the great Roman was one of
his heroes--Mark had many heroes, and so had Isabel.

Kathie opened the case that held the coins and began laying them out on
the table.

“I couldn’t bring all. This isn’t half, but it was so heavy Dolly and I
had to keep shifting hands; she helped me carry them,” Kathie said.

“We know it’s heavy; we carried it up stairs,” said Prue, coming over
with the brown paper bag of sugar in her hands. “They’re not so much;
just pieces of money. Our money’ll be nice ages from now.”

“Lots of people think it’s pretty nice now,” laughed Isabel. “I think
these coins are perfectly wonderful! Only think, when this one was made
in England George Washington was a little boy----”

“Cutting down a cherry tree!” Prue interrupted her unexpectedly. “What
of it if he was? We all know he had to be a little boy first. I think
it’s silly to make a fuss over that! Like it very sweet, Kath and Doll?
I don’t want to put in so much sugar that it stays at the bottom.”

“I guess I like it same as the rest,” said Kathie, and Dolly also
thought that she did.

“Oh, Mark, Mark, please see! This one is Queen Elizabeth! Shakespeare
had one like this in his pocket, most likely!” sighed Isabel, almost
tearful from emotion.

“He didn’t have much money in his pocket, did he?” laughed Mark. “Yes,
Isa; it does make you feel funny, doesn’t it? But only see this one!
Cæsar!”

“You didn’t say whether it made any difference about my belonging, now
I can’t divide up the coins,” hinted Kathie anxiously.

“Oh, it won’t; it isn’t your fault,” said Dolly easily. “And I’m going
to belong, and I haven’t one thing to do with the coins.”

“We thought we’d call it half-membership for awhile. Then we can go
either way with the other half. That’s fair, not to decide too soon,
isn’t it?” Isabel’s voice betrayed her anxiety not to offend Kathie and
Dolly.

“I’ve thought of such a splendid plan! There’s the secret passage into
this house! Nobody, hardly, knows about it, and nobody ever goes into
it. Put the box down there--it’s as safe as safe; safer than in any
house--and let’s play it is buried treasure. We could have lots of fun
knowing it was there and keeping it secret. Will you do that, Kathie?”

“And I belong?” Kathie would not yield her point.

“Y-es, but half-membership!” said Isabel, and Kathie accepted the terms.

“Well, this lemonade certainly does taste fine!” said Dolly, sipping
hers with a spoon and letting the refreshing drops trickle down her
throat. “I’d rather have this than the coins!”

“They’re different,” Kathie needlessly remarked. “Both are good, I
guess; I can tell more about lemonade myself. Doll, we’ve got to get
back. Didn’t your mother say something about your getting dressed
early?”

“Oh, mercy! ’Course she did! Her aunt, my great aunt, is coming, and
I’ve got to be fixed up; mother’s terribly anxious to please her. And
she’s as big as a haystack and just as deaf! Come on, Kathie; mother’ll
never forgive me if I don’t get to the station to meet her.” Indolent
Dolly sighed with real dismay at the prospect before her and slowly got
on her feet.

“I’ll take you down,” said Poppy, with a splendid air of young
ladyhood. “I can harness my horse myself now; he’s just as gentle as a
cream peppermint, and I’ll drive you home.”

“Maybe we would get there quicker if we walked; maybe he is as slow as
a cream peppermint!” cried Kathie cruelly.

“Then walk ’f you think so!” cried Poppy, angry in an instant. “Hurrah
is a lovely, lovely horse, and he goes like everything! Just walk!
Serves you right!”

“You harness and let me go, too, Pops! Show them how Hurrah trots,”
whispered Isa into Poppy’s burning ear. “Take us all down; Prue, too,
and meet Mr. Daddé and bring him home. He’s coming on the 4.30 train.”

“All right, Isa, for you I will. Not for any one who consults Hurrah,”
said Poppy. She meant “insults Hurrah,” but Isabel did not correct her.

It was true that Poppy had learned to harness her pet. She was small
for her not-great age, and had to stand on a box to do it, but Hurrah
knew, like the good and intelligent creature that he really was, that a
small girl must be considered. He put down his head for the bridle, and
moved over exactly as Poppy bade him, she meanwhile straining her arms
over his back, but refusing help, for her joy in Hurrah and being about
him increased with each day.

The five little girls piled on the buckboard, leaving to Mark, who was
not going with them, the task of placing the box of coins in the secret
passage.

Bunkie jumped up beside Isa as a matter of course; the small dog
enjoyed and approved the sociable, springy buckboard with all his might.

Poppy gathered up the lines and ordered Hurrah to “get up,” with a
dignity intended to show how many years she had driven spirited steeds.

Hurrah had preserved through his two decades an excellent gait. As he
trotted off down the driveway, and thence on down the street, Poppy
glanced scornfully over her shoulder at Kathie and Dolly, as one who
would say:

“Now do you see?” yet disdained to say it.

But she did say as they drew near the Harding and Stevens houses, which
stood next each other:

“I hope I can stop him! You get off quick, girls, ’cause Hurrah hates
to stand.”

“Good-night. We’ll be right up to the club!” Kathie called back as
Hurrah started up the instant they were off, as if he were young and
impatient, but Isabel, sitting beside Poppy, saw the twitch that young
jockey gave the lines.

Isabel and Prue stayed with Poppy as she drove toward the station,
instead of going straight home. It was understood between them and
Mark that Poppy was not to be left alone with her horse; quiet though
Greenacres streets were, Poppy was capable of getting into trouble in
them.

Mr. Hawthorne came from the train before they reached the station. He
took off a new straw hat and waved it gayly at the children, but all
six sharp eyes saw that the handsome face beneath the hat was grave and
anxious.

“Oh, dear Mr. Daddé, is it all right?” Isabel ventured to ask, after he
had jumped on the buckboard and it had been turned around, a feat that
always frightened Poppy more than it would have done had she realized
that Hurrah attended to the doing of it himself, leaving nothing to
her. Evidently he had no more confidence in Poppy’s wisdom in directing
him than she had herself.

“Dear little Isa, we must try to feel that it is all right, but
it looks as though it might not be as we want it to be,” said Mr.
Hawthorne sadly. “My lawyers told me to-day that Maurice Ditson has
made out a case that promises success for him. He claims that his
father’s will was not valid--I won’t try to explain to you how he
proves it. My lawyers are sure that he is hiring false witnesses, that
the whole thing is what they call ‘a frame up,’ fraud, you know! But
the thing is to prove that it is fraud, and my lawyers seem to fear it
may be more than difficult. If Maurice Ditson gets his case I lose the
money his father left to me, and----”

“The house? Oh, the house?” cried Isabel, clasping her hands.

“The house. Not because Ditson can claim that, but because it would
have to be sold; I put some of the money into buying it.” Mr. Hawthorne
showed how hard this was to say.

With a wail that made a man passing stop short and stare at them, Poppy
burst out crying.

“Hurrah, oh, Hurrah? Would my darling go?” she shrieked.

“Perhaps we can keep him to help us to earn our living, little Poppy,”
said Mr. Hawthorne, smiling, though his eyes were profoundly sad.

“I was so happy in putting my little mother back into her old home,” he
added.

“Oh, yes, oh, yes! And her garden, and the old flowers, and
everything!” cried Isabel. “Oh, dear, Mr. Daddé, it can’t happen, it
can’t possibly happen! But if it does, Motherkins has you and Mark, and
that’s more than a house.”

“I try to remember that, dear little loving heart!” Mr. Hawthorne’s
smile for the child he dearly loved was tender and grateful. “I know it
is true.”

“It is true,” said Prue dismally. “But, oh, the dear house!”

“Ah, yes; the dear house!” echoed Isabel.

“Oh, my jiminy, the dear house!” Poppy chimed in most tragically of
all.




CHAPTER VII

THE QUEER MAN


“Mother,” said Isabel with all the emphasis she could get into her
voice, “we want to sneak!”

“Do you, dear? And can’t you?” asked Mrs. Lindsay with no apparent
shock.

Mr. Lindsay looked up from his paper with a laugh in his eyes; they
were at breakfast and Isabel had followed up her announcement by
corking her lips with the biggest, most luscious strawberry on her
plate.

“Just a general sneak, or a special sneak, do you crave, Miss Lindsay?
Is it merely that you feel sneaking, or do you wish to sneak away from
something?” Isabel’s father inquired.

Isabel always said that she “loved the way her father treated her.” He
used toward her a playful, exaggerated politeness that delighted her
soul; needless to say, his love for this sole little girl left to him
was far beyond expression in words.

“Well, Mr. Lindsay,” said Isabel, hastily disposing of the big
strawberry and replying after his manner of asking, “it’s a special
sneak. We want to get away to Château Branche without Kathie and Dolly.
They’re nice, you know, but we did so like to be there by ourselves!”

“I realize that I don’t know what I’m talking about, but why you have
to take on new members of your Lucky Four Club, if you’d rather not,
is beyond me,” said Mr. Lindsay. “I suppose it’s because you are all
girls, all but Mark, and he can’t behave as he would if he weren’t
muffled in girls, so to speak. Now, if boys had a club and didn’t care
about new members, they’d say so, straight from the shoulder, not
ill-naturedly, but honestly, and the would-be members would see that
they were within their rights and take themselves off, unoffended.
But you seem to feel obliged to be wax, and give in. It will end in
a fuss--you see if it doesn’t! I want you to learn to take a stand
firmly, but amiably, my dear, and, having taken it, stand pat on that
stand!” Mr. Lindsay shook his head, as if this weakness in his Isa
annoyed him.

“But they do want awfully to belong,” said Isabel, “and it seems so
mean to keep lovely things to yourself--though we are four selves!
Prue says we might as well take people to live with us because we have
nice homes.”

“Prue is a sensible little person,” Mrs. Lindsay said. “She’s always
obliging, but she can tell clearly which are the boundaries of her
own fields, to use a figure that seems to express what I mean. Prue
is just, in a common-sense way, while my little lass gets weak-kneed,
fearing to hurt some one when she steps out.”

Mrs. Lindsay smiled most tenderly at Isabel, plainly finding her
weakness very lovable.

“Run right away as soon as you have finished those berries; get Prue
and the Hawthorne house pair, and climb up into Château Branche so
early that nobody else will be there--for a while, at least. That’s my
advice this perfect June morning,” Mrs. Lindsay added.

“And pull our legs up after us, so they won’t show?” cried Isabel
gayly. “All right, motherums; you’re a dear to help me sneak.”

“There is a cake,” remarked Mrs. Lindsay slowly. “A fresh, round,
two-story-and-basement cake, made late yesterday for a possible trip to
Château Branche. I think I’ll get it and put it in a box, with a knife
to cut it, and send it with you on your sneaking trip.”

“Oh, mother!” cried Isabel, rapidly eating her juicy strawberries as
her mother went in pursuit of the cake.

She came back in a moment bearing it aloft on the palm of her outspread
hand. Isabel’s back was toward her, but she heard the rustle of
paraffine paper and she sniffed the air as Bunkie might have done, as
Bunkie did do, in fact, for he lay at Isabel’s feet, under the table.

“Smells like fudge!” Isabel said.

“Wise little nose! It _is_ fudge; fudge icing and middle coatings!”
cried Mrs. Lindsay, setting the cake where Isabel could see it.

She folded the paraffine paper over and around the cake and dropped it
deftly into a box that might easily have been too small for it, and was
so exactly the right size that it took skill to get the cake into it
unharmed.

“I’m ready!” cried Isabel, hastily taking a long drink of water and
folding her napkin with her left hand as she did so.

“May I walk with you, Miss Lindsay, as far as Miss Wayne’s door?” asked
Mr. Lindsay, pushing back his chair.

As “Miss Wayne’s door” was the next door, the Wayne and Lindsay places
adjoining, this did not seem too much to ask, and Isabel giggled as she
tried to consent with dignity.

Hatless and happy, the cake in its box, resting on one arm, Isabel
started out beside her father and pulled his head down to kiss him when
they paused at the Wayne gate.

“Come on, Prue; we’re going early to have a little while all to
ourselves, if Kathie and Dolly should come,” Isabel called, standing in
the hall and trusting to luck that Prue would hear her.

“I’ll telephone Mark to be at Château Branche with Poppy when we get
there, save time going after them,” said Prue, the practical, ringing
up the Central as she spoke from the bend in the hall where the
telephone table stood, and where she happened to be when Isabel came in.

After this was done, the two little girls sallied forth, Bunkie running
ahead and pretending to startle himself with important discoveries
along the way. They proceeded to Château Branche by a short cut into
the woods.

Mark and Poppy were there waiting for them, thanks to Prue’s foresight,
when they reached the great pine in which Mr. Hawthorne had built their
house.

“We’ll get right up,” said Prue, beginning to climb the footholds which
led into Château Branche.

Isabel handed up the cake to Prue and followed; Mark and Poppy seemed
less to climb than to run up, like nuthatches, so agile they both were
at this sort of feat.

“Ah!” Mark drew a long breath of delight. “It seems to smell more
piney so early in the morning. Isn’t it great to be up in these dark
branches?”

“Hark!” whispered Isabel, holding up her hand.

A song so sweet, so liquid, so heart-stirring, that it was like the
voice of the woods, of the sky, the green leaves, of June itself,
pierced the stillness from a point near at hand.

“Oh, it’s the veery!” whispered Mark, his eyes dilating. He had been
taught by his father, wise in woods lore, the note of nearly every
bird, and could himself imitate many of them, calling around him the
little feathered denizens of the trees.

“It’s a thrush; the veery,” Mark repeated, and the four sat so still
that they hardly seemed to breathe, listening to this exquisite song.

At last the veery flew away. The children saw the brown body come out
from an oak that stood next to their pine, brighten as it crossed the
sunshine, and disappear.

“Why do you sort of want to cry when things are nice that way?” asked
Poppy.

“I think because they don’t last,” said Isabel, the poet, who always
saw deeper than the others.

“You see one reason we don’t care about having Kathie,” said Prue
unexpectedly, for the rest had forgotten all about Kathie for the
moment, “is because she always wants to be doing something. When we
come here we--we--well, we’re just _here_, don’t you see? We don’t want
to do one thing but--be here.”

“I do, now,” said Poppy. She laughed apologetically, but she said her
say. “It’s awful early after breakfast, but I want to try Isa’s cake
right off.”

“’Course!” cried Isabel, getting it out. “It doesn’t matter when we eat
it; it’s when it tastes good. There!”

She produced the cake, its icing slightly rubbed, and thrust the knife
into its creamy middle. “Cut it, Prue.”

“Cut it yourself.” Prue promptly declined the honor. “It’s yours, and
besides, I won’t; I’d jig it.”

“Sakes, don’t jig it! What is jigging it?” Mark laughed at Prue.

“Hacking,” explained Prue, watching Isabel, who was slowly penetrating
the center of the three layers, her head on one side, her tongue out of
the corner of her mouth, her wrist held stiff, her face expressive of
the deepest concentration and anxiety.

“There, sir!” Isabel exclaimed at last. “If I get one piece cut I won’t
mind the rest. Catch it, somebody. You, Pops!”

Poppy needed no urging. She held out both her hands, palms up, side by
side, to receive the thick pointed piece which Isabel deposited in them.

“Um-m-m! Land, what cake!” Poppy tried to say, rolling up her eyes at
her first mouthful, but because her mouth was indeed full, what she
really said, all in one word, was: “Lawbake!”

In a few minutes there was complete silence in Château Branche because
all four of its tenants were merrily--and also messily--devouring great
wedges of a cake so creamily fresh and soft, so thickly spread with
fudge-filling, that talking was out of the question.

Consequently any one coming along through the woods, past the tree,
would not have suspected it of being different from other trees,
inasmuch as it was occupied by children instead of birds. And some one
was coming along! Mark was the first to spy him. He leaned forward and
touched Prue and Isabel and Poppy, signaling them to keep quiet. Poppy
nearly cried out, but Prue, with great presence of mind, clapped a
fudgey hand over her mouth.

The four children peered down through the branch, which Mark pulled
forward, the better to conceal them.

They saw a small man with a queer, thin, wavering sort of face. He had
dark eyes, that roved perpetually from side to side, but never were
raised, for which the tree dwellers were duly grateful. His nose was
so long and sharp that, set in the middle of his thin, narrow face, it
lent itself to the children’s first thought of him as being some sort
of wild creature. His short body was painfully thin; his shoulders
were high; it took a few minutes for the children to discover that he
was slightly deformed, one shoulder higher than the other, his back a
little curved.

The queer little man seemed to have no plan as to the movements which
he was restlessly making. He walked short distances in every direction,
returning to the pine tree. Each time he started off the children hoped
that he was going on, away from there, but he returned to the pine tree
as if it were a magnet that drew him.

To their great terror, the children soon discovered that he was talking
to himself. It struck them as past bearing that this queer little man
should talk to himself alone, as he believed himself, in the middle of
the woods. Stray words came up to them; he spoke too low for them to
hear many.

“The brook,” he said. “Over there. Nice brook. Nice place. Should think
they would live here, want to.”

Did he mean themselves? the children wondered. No one lived beside the
lonely little brook that ran, talking to itself, much as this queer man
did, near Château Branche all day and every day.

Isabel and Poppy were frightened almost out of their wits. Prue was
frightened, too, as was Mark, but Mark was on fire with curiosity, and
Prue’s imagination did not build all sorts of awful fancies upon the
deformed creature as Isabel’s did. Poppy was so excitable that anything
so out of the ordinary as this adventure would be sure to wind her up
to the highest pitch.

“Better rest,” they heard the queer man say, and with that he lay down
on the carpet of brown needles which for years the great tree had
spread at its own feet.

“How shall we get away?” Isabel signaled to Mark.

Mark shook his head; he had no idea.

Presently, after a time of utter stillness and waiting, during which
eight young legs and arms developed prickles of nervousness and grew
numb from keeping so long in one position--no one dared to move--the
children in the tree saw Kathie and Dolly coming through the woods, on
their way to join them.

“Mercy me, he may kill them!” groaned Isabel, white to her lips and
almost forgetting caution for themselves.

The queer little man sat up, listened; got quickly on his feet,
listened.

With unspeakable relief the children saw that he was himself afraid of
being seen. Of being caught? They could not tell what he feared, but he
was evidently on the alert to get away unseen.

Their own fear vanished under this welcome discovery.

Mark grew positively rash. He had a beautiful, flexible singing voice,
which, though it was still a high soprano, was capable of doing many
queer feats. Dropping it low, Mark chanted in a way that even his
companions found rather awful: “Get out, get out, get out of here!”

The queer man gave one wild glance all around him, and then he acted on
the command. He got out of there, running like a deer, dodging around
trees, looking over his shoulder, but not slackening speed, till, in a
moment, he was gone.

Kathie and Dolly had not seen him; he had chanced to take the opposite
direction from the one in which they were coming.

Isabel, Prue, Poppy and Mark lost no time in coming down from Château
Branche.

“How could you, Mark; how dared you?” Isabel panted as she came down
backward, very fast, talking as she came. “Suppose he hadn’t run?
Suppose he had killed us!”

“I thought I’d try it before he saw Kathie and Dolly. You couldn’t tell
what he might have done to them,” said Mark, by this time in high glee.

“What? Who?” demanded Kathie as she and Dolly came up in time to hear
this answer.

All talking at once, the four children told the story of the queer
little man. The story lost nothing of mystery and terror in the telling.

“Well, no more Château Branche for me, thank you!” said Kathie
decidedly, as the tale ended.

“Not much!” Dolly supplemented her.

“We’ll be members in the club room, come there, I mean, but not up in
that tree; not ever!” Kathie continued.

“But are the woods spoiled?” asked Prue piteously.

“That’s according as you look at it,” said Mark sagely, trying to
catch Prue’s eye to convey to her that if Kathie and Dolly so looked at
it the Lucky Four might be the gainers.

“I think it was perfectly dreadful to sit there, penned up there, and
see that man lying at the foot of the tree, so we couldn’t get down,
just as if he was a dog and we were ’possums!” said Prue. “Why, where
is Bunkie? He didn’t bark!”

For the first time since she had owned him Bunkie had left Isabel and
gone home.

“It’s a pretty queer time, every way,” said Isabel gravely. “Here, have
some cake, Kathie and Dolly. Mother gave it to us, and I need some more
after this fearful experience.”




CHAPTER VIII

ROUND RED RADISHES


  “There was an old Woman, as I’ve heard tell,
  Went to market her eggs for to sell!”

sang Isabel close to Poppy’s ear, who was far too interested in what
she was planning to hear her.

“Five cents a bunch ’s awful little,” Poppy was saying, frowning over
her calculations. “But if you have a whole lot o’ bunches----”

“They ought to be ten cents a bunch. Everything is twice as much as it
was, and think what it would cost to go around peddling them if you had
a car, when gasoline is so high! You’ve got to think of gasoline when
you go out with the buckboard and Hurrah,” said Mark so gravely that it
did not seem as if he were talking nonsense.

Isabel laughed, but Prue said:

“Would she have to? Anyway, Hurrah has to eat, so you could think of
oats just as well, if you’d rather. I say ten cents a bunch, too,
Poppy.”

“Now, for pity’s sake, Pops, _don’t_ open another pea pod!”
remonstrated Isa, as Poppy pinched one of her pods to see how full it
felt. “You won’t have any peas at all if you keep on trying them! When
they’re ripe you can tell without opening the pods. It won’t be long;
they’re getting big.”

“My lettuce is nice,” remarked Prue with satisfaction. “It isn’t headed
up, but it’s as sweet and tender! Let’s start soon.”

“We’re to have an early lunch. I’m going to feed Hurrah now, ’cause you
hadn’t ought to drive a horse on his dinner,” said Poppy, turning from
the contemplation of her garden and picking up the can of glowing balls
of radishes which she intended to offer for sale that afternoon.

“No; it’s better to drive a horse on the road than on his dinner. And
it’s better to say ‘you ought not’ than ‘you hadn’t ought,’” hinted
Mark.

“Well, I gotta get something wrong once’n a while,” Poppy said
cheerfully. “You caught talking right from your families; I gotta learn
it. Do you s’pose I’ll sell ’em?”

“Gladys Popham Meiggs, that’s the nine hundred and ninety-ninth
time--pretty near--you’ve asked that! And how can we tell?” cried
Prue. “Do you think my lettuce will sell? That’s just as much to find
out.”

“Where is your lettuce, Prue?” asked Mark.

“I picked it early, came up before Isa did and picked it. It’s on the
ice. Motherkins lent me a flat tin pan--it would be great to cool taffy
in!--and we set it right on the ice, on top. I was going to put it in
a basket all trimmed with dandelions when we started--yellow and green
are so pretty!--but the dandelions would all shut up on the way, so
what’s the use?” Prue sighed over the ways of dandelions.

Isabel pulled Mark’s sleeve, and he fell behind the other two with her
as they went toward the house.

“Any more news? About the will? Did your father hear?” Isa asked.

Mark nodded without speaking.

“Oh, dear! It’s true!” groaned Isabel.

“Looks bad, dad’s lawyers say,” Mark said soberly. “This Maurice
Ditson is going to put it over. He’s got people to swear to another
will that left all Mr. Ditson had to his son, so that lets us out.
I’m afraid, Isa, dad and I will have to take Motherkins on our
shoulders--and I’ll have to carry Pincushion, too!--and go out of this
house. It makes us pretty sick!”

“Anybody as nice as Motherkins, who did so much for everybody, gave
Poppy a home and Bunkie, too, even when she was quite poor and didn’t
know how she could do it, ought not to lose this house,” said Isabel
emphatically. “Of course, you wouldn’t care for yourself; you’d be
happy in any house till you were old enough to earn a really nice one.”

“Suppose we had to leave Greenacres?” suggested Mark.

Isabel stopped short and stared at him, growing a little pale.

“Jack-in-the-Box! Why? Why should you leave Greenacres?” she cried.

“Dad would have to earn money; we wouldn’t have enough, and suppose he
couldn’t find a way to do it in Greenacres? We’d have to go, wouldn’t
we?” Mark spoke gently, as if to soften to Isabel the edge of his
words; her eyes were dilating with tears which brimmed on their lids,
but did not fall, and her lips were parting with her quickened breath.

“I never once, not ONCE, thought of that! I never ONCE thought you
could go away, Jack-in-the-Box!” she whispered, sharply realizing what
it would be to lose this dear boy, his quick fancy, his merry ways,
like a creature of the woods, half wild, wholly gentle; his charm, his
unfailing understanding of the thoughts, the imaginings which Prue
never could enter into.

“Well, there’s no saying how I hope we won’t have to go,” sighed Mark.

“Oh, you can’t go, Jack-in-the-Box!” cried Isabel. She used the first
name by which she had called him, unconsciously connecting her meeting
him with the awful threat of losing him.

“I can’t stay if I can’t, Isa. What do people do when they _must_ do a
thing? They do it and try to stand it, don’t they?” asked Mark sadly.

Isabel looked at him long and steadily, trying to adjust her mind
to this new idea. Then she straightened herself, throwing back her
slender shoulders, and tossed her dark, breeze-rumpled hair out of her
tear-dimmed, blue-gray eyes.

“It won’t happen! It can’t happen! Anything so dreadful _can’t_
happen. I won’t think of it for another single minute!” she declared.
“Hurry and catch up with the others, and talk about what we’ll do this
afternoon, when we go to take our garden things to market. If only my
flowers were ready! They’re budded. I dread to go, do you know that! It
seems funny to be hucksters right in Greenacres. Poppy always--well,
you know! The Meiggs family was poor, but my father is president of the
bank and Mr. Wayne is a lawyer, and your father is Mr. Hawthorne, and
people know the Hawthornes. You don’t think they’ll call it something
like going around begging, do you?”

“Selling isn’t one bit like begging, you know, it’s going into
business, Isa. But don’t, if you don’t want to! Let Poppy have all we
raise and sell it, and keep the money,” suggested Mark.

“Oh, she never would,” declared Isabel. “Besides, it’s rather backing
out. I’ll go, but I do feel rather queer about it.”

At the last minute, as it happened, Isabel did not go. Her mother
telephoned for her to come home because a friend of her mother’s, who
had not seen Isa since she was a baby, had unexpectedly arrived on a
tour which she was making in her car, and Isabel had to be summoned
home to see her for the brief hour which was all that she could spare
to visit Mrs. Lindsay.

So all that Isabel shared of this expedition to market with Prue’s
lettuce and Poppy’s radishes was storing the baskets, two of them,
under the seat of the buckboard and seeing her friends start. After
this she ran home.

Hurrah was in no mood for hurrying; the day was growing warm, the air
heavy, showers threatened to come up at night. Poppy sat straight
and stiff, driving, with Prue beside her. Mark sat on the end of the
buckboard, dangling his long legs, amusing himself by turning the
toes of his shoes toward each other, and admiring his ribbed brown
stockings, or else experimenting in keeping his legs out stiff and
straight while he raised himself on his hands and tried to hold himself
thus as long as he could while they jolted along.

They had decided to go first of all to Mrs. Wilkins’. She was a merry,
kindly old lady, nearing seventy, so friendly to children that half of
the youngsters in Greenacres called her “Grandma Wilkins,” though she
had no grandchild to give her the title.

“Whoa!” shouted Poppy, louder than was necessary, since Hurrah was not
in the least deaf. She hoped that Mrs. Wilkins would hear and come out.

This happened, and when she appeared on her piazza Poppy called:

“Radishes! Round, red radishes! Raised by a Red-head! Round red
radishes!” in a voice worthy of her new occupation.

“For goodness’ sake, Poppy! And you, Prudence Wayne! And Mark
Hawthorne! Are you turning into hucksters? Well, I want to know!” cried
Mrs. Wilkins.

“We’ve got gardens, and this is the first out o’ them, Mis’ Wilkins,”
said Poppy. “The other things ain’t ready, but just lettuce and round
red radishes--they’re mine, and the lettuce is Prue’s. We’ve gone into
business. This is our first trip; you’re our first stop.”

“Because you knew I’d want a lot of radishes! Though I don’t eat ’em
myself, other people do, and I like to send my neighbors some tidbits
occasionally. But lettuce I’m partial to; it’s a great help to a good
tea, with nice bread and butter. Give me all you can spare of your
stuff,” said the dear old plump person cordially.

“Now, Mrs. Wilkins, you mustn’t say that just to help us,” interposed
Prue, scowling anxiously. “We want to sell, but we don’t want to have
people do what isn’t fair, take what they don’t want.”

“Trust you, Prudence Wayne, to want to deal square,” laughed Mrs.
Wilkins. “But it isn’t good business to talk folks out of buying, my
dear! Don’t you worry; I’ve got a use for anything I buy.”

[Illustration: POPPY CALLED, “RADISHES! ROUND RED RADISHES! GROWN BY A
RED-HEAD.”]

She produced a worn pocketbook, with a nickel clasp, and a bill fold,
and pocket for change. Mark said afterward “it looked as if it belonged
to her.”

Prue put into the bright new pan, which Mrs. Wilkins fetched, a large
quantity of the tender young lettuce and three bunches of Poppy’s
“round red radishes.” The combination was pretty against the shining
tin.

“Well, we’ve begun!” Prue remarked, taking a long breath as they went
on their way with cordial good-bys and good wishes from Mrs. Wilkins,
the money of their first sale in Mark’s pocket, he being elected
treasurer, and four perfectly fresh, creamy cookies apiece, deliciously
sprinkled with cocoanut, held on the cookie by a coating of melted
sugar. No one, it had long ago been decided by Greenacres children,
ever made such cookies as Grandma Wilkins did.

“We can’t have such luck everywhere,” said Poppy, speaking with
difficulty as she removed cocoanut from her cheek at the extreme reach
of her tongue’s length because Hurrah had whisked his tail over the
lines and spoiled her aim when she took a bite of cookie. “There ain’t
many people so awful nice as she is. But we’ll keep right at it.”

They “kept right at it,” and, selling a little lettuce here, a bunch
of radishes there, soon got rid of all the stock except a few ragged
lettuce leaves.

Most people regarded the new vendors as a great joke, but one severe
person held them up to lecture them on taking trade from the poor--and
did not buy when Prue and Poppy refused to cheapen their wares.

“Gee, she might of took the stuff when we had to let her preach at us!”
said Poppy, too disgusted to remember the lessons in English which the
other children gave her, and which she was so anxious to learn.

Hurrah was turned homeward--he went that way more willingly than he
started out--and the children were wondering how much they had made.

“Don’t take it out to count it, Mark!” cried Prue. “It joggles so, you
might drop some. Help me count up in my head. I can remember just what
we sold.”

Prue began to recall aloud where they had stopped, what sales they had
made, and Mark added for her as she went along. He was a marvel at
mental addition; indeed, his quick brain excelled in all feats demanded
of it.

Poppy took no part in this calculation except to correct Prue sometimes
when she made a mistake in her recollection of sales.

There was a wagon ahead of them, a long one with a top, and it emitted
a pleasant sound of a bell hung somewhere upon it.

Poppy’s sharp eyes had been upon it for some time. At last she said:

“I like Hurrah terrible well, but I do wish I could hurry him up to
catch that wagon! He won’t hurry for a cent.”

“I’ll hurry him; he’ll go for me, Pops,” said Mark. “He knows your soft
heart by this time. I always can make animals do things, you know.”

As Poppy, to his surprise, instantly accepted Mark’s offer, he added:

“Why do you want to overhaul that wagon, Poppy?”

“It looks like a friend of mine,” said Poppy, mixing the wagon with
its driver in her reply. “If I know what, that’s Mr. Thomas Burke, 906
North Street, Hertonsburg, what took me along home that time I went
off, and I’d just love to see him, and I know he’d be crazy to see me.”

“Is it, honest?” cried Mark. “Well, we’ll overhaul him, all right. See
Hurrah!”

Sure enough, true to Mark’s prophecy, Hurrah was trotting along to
oblige Mark as he never did for Poppy. Soon the buckboard came up close
to the wagon, and Poppy made sure that the bulky form on its seat was,
indeed, her rescuer, the bottle dealer, and she shrieked wildly:

“Mr. Burke, Mr. Burke! Turn around and see me!”

Mr. Burke turned, not his head, but his whole body, which was a large
and thick one.

“Well, if it ain’t little Redtop!” shouted Mr. Burke, and, stopping his
horse, got down to greet Poppy, his broad face red with pleasure.

Poppy took him around the neck with gusto. She hugged him hard.

“You’re just as welcome as a flower in the spring!” she poetically said.

“Which I ain’t so strikin’ like!” said Mr. Burke with a grin. “Lucky I
haven’t got a gas truck, or you couldn’t have caught me. Say, how are
you, anyway, little Redtop? Just as calm an’ sort of slow an’ lazy as
you was? Don’t move around quick, nor fly off these days, do you? Are
these your friends you told me about? Miss Isabel Lindsay, that you
wrote the post card to?”

“This is Miss Prue Wayne; Isabel didn’t come,” explained Poppy, and as
Mr. Burke touched his hat to Prue she added: “This is my own horse and
buckboard, Mr. Burke.”

“Never!” exclaimed Mr. Burke.

“Ever!” Poppy corrected him. “It was a present to me from another
friend of mine, Mr. Babcock, the postmaster; he’s very nice, not quite
straight--I mean his back ain’t.”

“Well, you do be the great one for friends, little Poppy Redtop,” said
Mr. Burke admiringly. “It’s congratulations that’s due you, an’ that’s
the truth. Now I’ve met you, I might tell you my errand. I was aimin’
to see your--well, I don’t know the title you give ’em, but whoever
takes care of you--Mr. Gilbert Hawthorne, ’tis. I’ll not be goin’ to
the house, now I can tell you what I had to say.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Burke,” Mark cried. “Please come. Dad will be glad
enough to see you. He would be annoyed with us, with me, if you didn’t
come. Please come. We all know you well through Poppy. Motherkins--my
grandmother, Mrs. Hawthorne--would love to thank you for taking care of
Poppy last summer.”

“You’re a little gentleman!” declared Mr. Burke, regarding with frank
admiration Mark’s radiant face. “It’s no thanks are due me for pickin’
up a bit of a girl, out gettin’ herself into trouble. But I’ll go along
with pleasure. I’ve something to tell your father that maybe he ought
to know, an’ maybe it’s no matter. Will I lead an’ will you follow, or
will we turn it the other way, an’ me follow that war horse of Poppy’s?
How do you name him?”

“Hurrah,” said Poppy. “He’s not a war horse; he’s peaceful and loving.”

“’Deed, then, he looks it! An’ Hurrah is a name that couldn’t be beat
for belongin’ to a horse that you own, little Redtop; you’re the one
to go with a hurrah, as the sayin’ is!” Mr. Thomas Burke grinned at
Poppy so warmly that she could not suspect him of looking down on
Hurrah, as she at first thought he might do.

Mr. Burke went back and climbed up on his wagon, with grunts that
revealed the effort it cost him, and the two vehicles took their way up
to the Hawthorne house, Mr. Burke in the lead, Hurrah and his friends
in the rear.

At the gateway they were met by Isabel, too excited to stand still or
to wonder at Mr. Burke.

“Oh, I’ve been dying! I thought you’d never come back!” she cried,
jumping from one to the other foot. “Mother’s friend went and I came
back here to wait for you. I went up to the Club Room, and what do you
s’pose?”

Isabel barely paused at the end of her question, which she did not
expect answered. The other children murmured something, but Isabel went
on hurriedly.

“Some one’s been up there, in our room! They’ve been eating, and moved
things around. And they took out a pillow!”

“Who?” demanded the other three together.

“Well, who?” echoed Isabel. “I think it was Kathie and Dolly. Kathie
can climb up as easy! You know she did the other day. They aren’t
members yet; I don’t think they ought to go there when we’re not
there, and, of course, they can’t take anything out. Even one of us
couldn’t; we own those things together.”

“Well, that’s rather queer,” said Mark slowly. “I wouldn’t think they’d
do that. Maybe it was some one else--but who?”

“Yes, who?” echoed Isabel again. “Well, anyway, I’ve been crazy to have
you get back and come up to see.”

“We’ll come,” said Mark. “I’ve got to find dad and introduce Mr. Burke
to him. This is Mr. Burke, who found Poppy for us that time; this is
Isabel Lindsay, Mr. Burke.”

“Pleased to meet you, miss,” said Mr. Burke, again touching his cap.
His eyes lighted with pleasure at the sight of lovely little Isa. “I
had the honor to write you a post card, but I’d rather see you, an’
that’s no lie for me.”




CHAPTER IX

QUEER HAPPENINGS


“Could we hear what you are going to tell, Mr. Burke?” asked Poppy. Her
sharp little face almost looked as though it had been whittled, so much
was its natural pointedness increased by her devouring curiosity. Poppy
was always as curious as a cat.

Mr. Burke looked down on her with kindly amusement.

“Considerin’ it’s next to nothin’, unless Mr. Hawthorne has some
missin’ bits to put to it, like them pitcher puzzles, you may hear what
I’ve got to tell’s far’s I’m concerned--which is next to nothin’, as
I’ve just said,” he replied.

“But first be sure you will not have something more--one more cup of
tea?” suggested Motherkins hovering, anxious to do all that she could
for this kind man who had once been good to Poppy.

“’Deed, then, ma’am, there’s no more desire nor space left in me!”
declared Mr. Burke. “But I’d dearly love my pipeful of tobacco, if
there’s a place on the grounds where I could smoke it an’ not be
puttin’ you out.”

“My mother lets me smoke on the piazza, in the house, too, when it is
too chilly to sit outside. Come, then, Mr. Burke, and open your budget
of news!” said Mr. Hawthorne.

“It’s not much,” began Mr. Burke, when they were seated and he
had drawn deeply on his wooden pipe to get it going. All four
children--Isabel and Prue had obtained permission by telephone to stay
on at the Hawthorne house--sat close to Mr. Burke, not to miss a word.

“Well, then,” Mr. Burke fairly launched himself in his story this time,
“it was this way: I was drivin’ along one day, I’d say ten days back,
but it might be a matter of a few days more; time does be greatly
alike, seen from a cart seat. I came up wid a small man trampin’ along
the side of the way, an’ when he looks up at me I passed the time o’
day with him, civil like. He answered kind of funny, not just grumpy
like, but yet not ready; sort of hesitatin’. An’ the queerest face I
ever set me two eyes on was on the front side of the head of that same
little man! He had a nose you might use as a screwdriver, on a pinch,
that long and thin ’twas! He had a pair of dark eyes that shone like a
glass bottle beside the road when the sun strikes on it, an’ they was
never still a minute. He was a little misshapen creature besides----”

“The queer man in the woods!” cried Mark and Isabel at the same
instant, as Poppy shouted: “We saw him! We saw him! Out by Château
Branche and we were scared!”

“Did you see him now!” exclaimed Mr. Burke. “Small blame to you for
being scared, says I, for one! Then it’s you who knows how he looked
without me tellin’ you. Did he find you, sir?”

“No,” said Mr. Hawthorne. “This is the first I’ve heard of him; the
children did not speak of seeing any one so peculiar in the woods.”

“For fear you’d think we hadn’t ought--ought not to go there,”
explained Poppy.

“I certainly should want his record investigated,” said Mr. Hawthorne.
“Why did you ask if he found me, Mr. Burke? Was he looking for me?”

“When he’d eyed me for a minute, queer and uncertain like,” Thomas
Burke resumed, “he asked did I know the countryside well? An’ I told
him I ought to, drivin’ it constant for upwards of seven years. An’ he
asked did I know any one named Hawthorne, Gilbert Hawthorne, an’, says
I, I do. Leastways, I know a little about him, nor did I say he was
lookin’ after me friend, Poppy, though I might have, I might have!”
Mr. Burke smiled into Poppy’s face, thrust forward as she perched on
the edge of a chair as if afraid that a word might slip past her.

“Then he asked me, an’ I told him where you lived, sir, an’ he listened
tight, an’ he sort of muttered that maybe he’d see you. ‘Maybe I will,’
he said, an’ he shook his head hard. I misdoubted he was right in his
mind, but I let him go on--he wouldn’t ride wid me, though I asked
him. Ever since it’s been botherin’ me that maybe it was something you
ought to know about, an’ more an’ more did it bother me the longer I
thought about it, till the missus says: ‘Gwan wid you, Tom, an’ see Mr.
Hawthorne. Make it your way to go to Greenacres sooner than you’re due
there, an’ see him an’ tell him the little there is to tell, an’ get
it off your conscience.’ So I’m here, an’ you’re told, an’ for my part
of it, there’s no more about it. You don’t know the man; there’s no
mischief afoot, is there?”

“Not that I know of; no, I don’t know any one like the person you
describe. Curious, too, especially that he was in the woods near the
children’s tree house--if it were the same man,” said Mr. Hawthorne
slowly.

“Oh, it was, daddy; it had to be!” cried Mark. “There couldn’t be two
like that in one neighborhood. Say, isn’t it great? It sounds like a
story with a plot to it.”

“It sounds like a fairy story. The queer man is a gnome, or wicked
fairy, or maybe he is enchanted and unhappy and is trying to do good
to you, to get free of the spell upon him!” cried Isabel, who always
wove stories out of all material that came to her hand. “I think it’s
_terribly_ interesting! And strange! Last year we found Jack-in-the-Box
in the woods and thought he was a fairy at first, and now it is a
gnome!”

Prue had sat in rigid silence, listening, but not speaking. Her face
betrayed her alarm. Now she jumped up and said:

“I hope you don’t think they’re anything alike! Jack-in-the-Box was the
nicest thing that ever happened to us, but this is horrid! Perfectly,
horrid-awful! And I’m going home before it gets any darker, and, Mark
and Poppy, you must go half way with me, even now!”

“Let me see you home, little misses,” said Mr. Thomas Burke, rising.
He had received and accepted an invitation to stay over night at the
Hawthorne house, and his big horse, Cork, was to keep Hurrah company in
the next stall to him.

“Oh, we sha’n’t be afraid with Mark and Poppy,” said Prue hastily.

Prue was a proper little person, with considerable respect for social
distinctions; she did not care to be taken home by a bottle dealer.

Isabel, cleverer and finer than Prue, made friends with all sorts of
people, knew how to get pleasure out of talking to them, yet never for
an instant was less than an exceedingly fine little fine lady.

“Well, if you wouldn’t mind, if you aren’t tired, Mr. Burke, it would
be much nicer to have you come with us,” Isabel said, adding in an
undertone that only Prue could hear:

“Don’t be a goose, Prue Wayne!”

So Mr. Thomas Burke, dealer in second-hand bottles, escorted Isabel
Lindsay and Prue Wayne to their homes, Poppy trotting beside him,
holding his hand, admiringly looking up at him as he talked nonsense
and made the children laugh.

“He’s splendid!” said Isabel, when Mr. Burke had bade her and Prue
good-night and had gone off with Poppy and Mark. “He is as kind as
kind, and doesn’t he tell wonderful stories! I would like to ride
in his cart all over the country, hearing him talk and seeing life.
To-morrow, Prue, we must pitch into Dolly and Kathie for taking things
out of the Club Room, though, of course, it was only Kath climbed up.
Fancy lazy Dolly climbing up there!”

“We’ve got to ask them first if they did it,” said Prue justly. “Kathie
will not say she didn’t if she did. It seems to me rather queer for her
to do that; I can’t seem to believe she did.”

“Who else?” demanded Isabel. “I think it’s queer, too, but who else
would it be likely to be?”

“It isn’t likely to be Kathie, either,” persisted Prue. “Anyway, find
out before you say anything.”

“I’ve got to say, ‘did you?’ haven’t I, or how shall I find out?
Good-night, Grandma Wayne! Didn’t they know just how you were going to
turn out when they named you Prudence!”

Isabel kissed Prue hard; she loved her when she was so sensible and
cautious, partly because, though she, too, was sensible, Isabel was
likely to be rash.

Then Isabel ran into the house for her hour which she always spent in
intimate talk with her mother at twilight, and for which to-night she
was late.

The next morning Isabel was awake early, having a great deal on her
mind. The story of the queer man lost nothing of its interest in
telling it to her mother; she had gone to bed excited over its mystery.

Then there was the fact that the Club Room had been entered from
outside. Isabel was impatient to see Kathie and Dolly and find out what
they knew about it. She was tempted to feel a little hard-used that she
could not omit her lessons that morning. School had been closed in the
middle of April because of an epidemic of measles that hung along, a
new case coming on when it all seemed to be over, so late that there
would be no more school that season. Isabel and Prue were compelled to
keep on with their studies at home; this morning Isabel found the rule
hard. It was eleven before she was ready to go to call Prue, and set
out to find Kathie and Dolly.

They met Poppy running with all her might to meet them.

“I thought you’d be coming,” she panted. “I knew you’d go for those
girls soon’s you could get done. Mark’s taken Hurrah to the blacksmith;
his feet’s long, Mr. Burke said. Ain’t he a peach? I just love him!
He’s coming again and bring his missus. He calls her ‘the missus.’ I
like that name. They’re both’s peachy as they can be. I might go help
c’lect bottles, if Mr. Hawthorne’s prop’ty gets swiped by that nasty
Ditson man. Say, what I run to tell you was that one of the dishes out
o’ the Club Room’s under a tree. So it was took out, and who done it?”

“Oh, Poppy, there were more bad mistakes in what you’ve just said than
you’ve made for I-don’t-know-how-long!” sighed Prue, not to be torn
from her duty of correcting Poppy by any interest, however strong. And
this was an absorbing interest, the entering of the Club Room.

“Oh, well, I’m going to be a lady if I bust, but you can’t keep right
at it, no matter what you’re thinking about!” cried Poppy. “Who
done--did it?”

“We’re going right off this minute to ask Kathie and Dolly what they
know,” said Isabel, swinging around to carry out her words. And Poppy
joined her and Prue as a matter of course.

They found Dolly and Kathie eating strawberry sundaes in the drug store.

“We can’t treat because we had just enough money to pay for two, but
we’ll wait for you, if you’re after some,” said Kathie nobly.

“We’re not,” said Isabel, though Poppy looked exceedingly sorry that
this was true. “Walk with us if you’re through, we want to ask you
something. Now: Who climbed up into the Club Room by the piazza roof?”

“Me; you saw me,” said Kathie promptly, taking instant offence from a
tone in Isabel’s voice of which she was herself unconscious, but which
sprang from her certainty that Kathie had climbed in again, alone.

“Yes, but since; just the night before last, or that day,” Isabel went
on her voice still more accusing. “Do you know anything about it?”

“Why don’t you ask straight out if I did it?” demanded Kathie.

“I will: Did you?” said Isabel.

“I wouldn’t tell if I did, and I won’t say I didn’t,” said Kathie
angrily. “I’d just like to know, Isabel Lindsay, why you come at me
like this?”

“She--I mean we--aren’t coming at you, Kathie,” interposed Prue.
“Isabel is speaking sort of hard because she’s so bothered--I mean we
are. Some one went in there, and they took out a few little things,
and we’ve got to know if anybody’s breaking in. Greenacres is a little
queer lately; there’s a man in it.”

Kathie burst into mocking laughter, not in the least soothed by Prue’s
evident desire to keep the peace. “I always knew there was a man in
Greenacres! You silly, Prue Wayne!”

“Silly nothin’!” broke in Poppy in a blaze of wrath. “Think you’re
smart! Anybody that wasn’t a gump would know she meant a queer man----”

“You tend to your own affairs, you meddlesome monkey!” Dolly now took a
hand in the fast thickening atmosphere of thunder and lightning.

“Poppy, please don’t!” begged Prue distressed. “I don’t care what
Kathie said.”

“No! I’m not worth caring about! That’s what you mean, so just say so,”
stormed Kathie.

“I did not! I meant I didn’t feel mad,” cried Prue beginning to cry,
dismayed to find the battle around her head when she had but meant to
head off a battle.

“Well, but that isn’t the thing,” Isabel began over again. “There’s no
sense scrapping, saying things back and forth. What I want to know is
was it you who went up there alone and took out a pillow and a dish or
two? If it wasn’t you, it’s awful. If it is you, you hadn’t any right
to do it, for you’re not even a real member, and we real members can’t
take things away. So I want to know.”

“Oh, you want to know, do you!” echoed Kathie in a towering temper by
this time. “Well, then, find out! You won’t get me to tell you. I might
have told, if you hadn’t talked as if I was a thief or something! Now
you can find out any way you can work it, but not from me. Why don’t
you get up a detector from New York and lock me up, if I’m the one?”

“Detective,” murmured Prue in spite of herself, which did not make
things better.

“Oh, Kathie, how can you!” cried Isabel, following Prue’s tears with
sobs that brought no tears, but which shook her delicate little body
from head to foot.

“Oh, I hate a fuss, I can’t stand a fuss! I did not speak as you say. I
didn’t mean to speak unkindly. I just want to know, Kathie! Oh, Kathie,
don’t you see it’s dreadful to have some one coming in there and not
know who it is? Won’t you please, please, Kathie, tell if it’s you?
Just if it’s you, you know!”

“I won’t tell you one single thing, Isabel Lindsay,” said Kathie. “And
Dolly shall not!” she added, seeing Prue about to turn to Dolly.

Kathie put her hand on her chum’s shoulder with no gentle touch, and
Dolly would not have spoken for the world.

“’Cause you’re the one, that’s why!” shouted Poppy at the top of her
voice.

“Oh, hush, Pops!” cried Isabel, suddenly calm again. “I’m afraid that
is the reason, Kathie,” she added with great dignity. “I am afraid that
Poppy is right and that you did go up there, and that is why you won’t
answer. I’m afraid you can’t be a member, ever, and I think you’d
better stop being on trial now.”

“I suppose everything’s as you say! I suppose Mark hasn’t one thing to
say, only just mind you! Well, we wouldn’t be in that club, not for the
wealth of Indians! We resign. Dolly and me resign--don’t you, Doll?”
Kathie demanded shaking her friend without knowing that she did so.

“Sure!” said frightened Dolly, who never quarreled nor exerted herself
when she could help it.

“Isa said it first! Isa said it first! You can’t--what-do-you-call-it!
Isa put you out first!” chanted Poppy dancing around the girls so
excited that she had no consciousness of being in the street, nor of
the amazed amusement of some grown-up on-lookers.

“Because she knew we wouldn’t stay in!” cried Kathie, quite beside
herself at this triumphant war dance of Poppy’s.

“Well, it’s horrid! It’s awful! Why, _why_ do we have such a row? Just
asking--just asking--just asking----” Isabel broke down in another
storm of tearless sobbing.

“Come on home, Isa, my darling! I’ll wipe my shoes of their dust!” said
Prue, herself now in a white heat of anger since her beloved Isa was
so shattered.

“Dust! Yes, I guess! Shoes! Wipe!” Kathie’s scorn was scathing, though
its expression was not striking.

The two parties turned without another word and walked in opposite
directions, every muscle in each of the five bodies tautly declaring
the indignation that burned within them.

Isabel walked on sobbing uncontrollably, but not crying. Prue was no
longer in tears; her anger had dried them when she saw Isabel so hurt.
Poppy was in such a rage that it might have been funny if either of
the others had been capable of seeing it. She spun around and around,
making progress, but always as a top progresses, and she ceaselessly
uttered funny sounds, almost as if she were a furious little beast.

“Oh, it’s awful, it’s awful! It’s just like having a sort of fight!”
mourned Isabel.

“’Course!” cried Prue, and to her own surprise she laughed.

“Be nicer to fight,” said Poppy.

“Well, I think the worst is not knowing who got into that room,” said
Prue. “If Kathie wants to act like this, let her. You did speak sort
of stern, Isa darling, but anybody’d know you were stirred up; you’re
so gentle and not-hurting always, not even flies! I don’t care about
Kathie, because--I don’t! But who was it?”

“Oh, it was Kathie. I know it was now, and I knew it before--I mean I
was as sure as anything. Well, it won’t happen again. She’s too mad
with us to come either climbing in, or walking in and up the stairs,”
sighed Isabel.

“If only we hadn’t let them half-come, be the least bit members!” Prue
said, also sighing.




CHAPTER X

“YOU’D HARDLY KNOW GREENACRES”


Isabel had not found relief, as Prue had, in tears while the scene with
Kathie and Dolly was enacted. She kept from crying till she poured out
the story of the quarrel to her mother that night at twilight, but then
she poured out tears with the story and cried till, big girl as she was
getting to be, her mother gathered her into her lap--all of her that it
would hold!--and tried to check the flood.

Isa was not a child that cried easily, but, like most people to whom
tears are difficult, when she did cry she cried so hard that it often
made her a little ill. Mrs. Lindsay dreaded one of her breakdowns.

“There, there, my dear; there, my little Isabel!” she murmured patting
Isa’s heaving shoulder. “It really is not so bad as you think it is.
It will be straightened out. Kathie resented being questioned, but it
will look different to her to-morrow morning. You still think she is
the one who climbed up into your room? Her being so angry over the
suspicion might mean that she had not been there, or it might mean that
she was angry at being found out.”

“I’d believe her if she said she hadn’t gone, but she wouldn’t say it,
so I think it was--her? She?” Isabel tried at once to speak correctly
and to speak at all, keeping down her sobs.

“She. After was, or is, you know,” Mrs. Lindsay helped her in both
ways, supplying the pronoun and smoothing Isa’s hair. “It wasn’t a
crime to climb up and go in, after all. If Kathie did it, I think she
must be forgiven.”

“But taking out our things, mother?” cried Isabel, sitting erect with
symptoms that the storm was past.

“Oh, I forgot about that! No, that was not right. It doesn’t seem to me
like Kathie Stevens, either! Curious little affair, isn’t it? I hear
what story books might call ‘a well-known footstep!’ I think a person
called Harvey Lindsay is coming in!” Isabel’s mother arose as Isabel
got off her knees, and went to meet her husband, Isabel languidly
following.

“Why, what’s wrong, Lady Bird?” cried Mr. Lindsay at once.

“Isa is greatly troubled by a falling out between her and Kathie
Stevens, in fact between our four intimate children, and Kathie and
Dolly. Isa may have made a little mistake in the way she approached
a question that had to be asked Kathie, but she has not provoked the
quarrel, and I’m sure it will be healed soon.” Mrs. Lindsay explained
to her husband, but smiled hopefully at her tear-stained and swollen
daughter.

“Come now, that’s everything, not to be the cause of a rumpus, and to
be in the right!” Mr. Lindsay’s big voice sounded heartening. “I don’t
mind greatly what the other fellow does, not after a time, though I may
at first. I do mind like the mischief to see, when I cool off, that I
was in the wrong! Your trouble is not going to last, my dawtie! And
when I was about your age and had cried my fill, I found nothing as
refreshing to my throat and to my spirits as ice cream! So I’ll slip
back to Ebers’ and bring up a quart in a nice little tape-handled box.
What flavor, Lady Isabel-ladybird?”

“Maple walnut and strawberry,” said Isabel without an instant’s
hesitation. “Thank you, you dear Person,” she added with a smile rather
like melted ice cream, sweet, but lacking vigor.

When her father returned her mother helped herself and her husband
to a little less than a third of the cream apiece and handed Isa the
box, because she preferred it thus. Seated on the upper step under
the brilliant summer stars, taking heaped spoonfuls of the delicious
cream for which Ebers was famous for miles, and licking the top of
each spoonful into a cone to get the full flavor, a mannerless way of
eating that the night and out-of-doors allowed, Isabel began to feel
comforted. The strawberry ice cream was dotted with seeds to prove that
fruit, not flavoring gave it its flavor; the maple walnut was as strong
of maple syrup taste as a Vermont sugar camp vat.

Isabel licked her spoon blissfully, if inelegantly, since no one could
see her, and felt that life still held a great deal to enjoy. As to her
father, who had taken the walk to get the cream for her when he was
surely tired, how could she express the flavor of his love for his girl?

“Father, you blessing, my throat does feel scrumptious after that
cream, and I hope some day, I’ll have a big, hard thing to do for you
and mother, just to show you!” Isabel said at last, getting up from
the step with a contentedly-weary yawn, and going over to kiss her
best-beloveds good-night.

The first thing in the morning, while Isa was still at breakfast, there
appeared Mark in a state of great excitement.

“Well, what do you suppose!” he burst forth at once. “Oh, good
morning, Mrs. Lindsay! I forgot. But what _do_ you suppose, honest?”

“What are we to suppose about, Mark?” hinted Mrs. Lindsay.

“I’d say about ’most anything,” returned Mark. “Things are happening in
all directions. You couldn’t guess this; you didn’t know about it, I
suppose. Say, Isa, you know Kathie Stevens’ coins?”

“’Course,” said Isa, leaning forward breathlessly.

“Gone!” cried Mark.

“Gone?” echoed Isabel. “Where? How do you mean gone?”

“If I only knew where!” said Mark. “Don’t you know I put the box down
in the secret passage? They stayed there all right; I’ve looked once
in a while. Nobody on earth but us--father and Motherkins and we four
youngsters--knew a word about that passage. Kathie and Dolly knew there
was one, but they didn’t know how you got into it, not either from the
house, nor the woods end of it. I heard Kath once telling the girls
at school how we had a secret passage, made in the Revolution, when
Tories were around here, but I could tell she had no sort of idea where
it was. And somebody has got into it and taken off that box with the
coins in it! Isn’t it tough luck? What do you suppose Kathie will say,
or her father, for that matter? You see they are valuable. The minute
Pops came home and told about the fuss, how mad with you Kathie was, I
thought of the coins, and made up my mind I’d have them out of there,
ready to hand her if she came after them this morning--as I’m pretty
sure she will. So I got right out after them the first thing--and there
you are! Or there they’re not!” Mark waved his hands outward as if to
signify a flight.

“Well, of all awful things!” said Isabel slowly.

“It is awful,” agreed Mark. “It’s bad as it can be to lose the coins,
but it’s almost worse to have somebody know that secret passage and be
wriggling around in it! I never in all my life heard of anything like
these things--father going to lose that money almost certainly; that
queer little man in the woods, and the same man asking Mr. Burke for
father, and our club room entered, and now this! Why, you’d hardly know
Greenacres!”

“Well,” said Isabel slowly, weighing her words, “I don’t like it; I’m
sure I don’t like it, but I do think it is interesting--all but your
money being taken away; that’s just awful, every side and up and down
of it! But the other things are exciting! And interesting! We always
knew nothing would happen when we went to the woods, but now you can’t
tell.”

“Ah, but that makes _me_ feel that I can’t tell whether you may go
there now,” interposed Mrs. Lindsay. “I am far from pleased to think
that our safe woods are invaded by this queer little man.”

“Oh, mother, please don’t be afraid!” begged Isabel. “And he is in lots
of other places. Mr. Burke met him over toward Hertonsburg. We wouldn’t
like it a bit if we couldn’t go. We’ll take Semp; he could hold a man
down. Mark’s father says he would take any one by the throat who tried
to touch us, and you know how big and strong he is. Besides, the man
seemed to be afraid himself; he ran away when the girls came that day.
We want to go to Château Branche this very morning!”

“Oh, not to-day! Wait till your father decides it. I think, perhaps,
some one must lie in wait for this queer little man and find out about
him. The loss of the coins puts a new color on the case; that is theft,
you know,” said Mrs. Lindsay.

“But maybe he found them in the secret passage and didn’t think they
belonged to any one; maybe he isn’t a thief, Mrs. Lindsay,” cried Mark.

“Jack-in-the-Box, you are defending him, less from charity than because
you want to be free to roam the woods as you always have!” laughed
Isa’s mother. “And so do I want you still free, but we must wait to
find out more, so be content to keep away from Château Branche a short
time, please, dear!”

“All right, motherdy, but we want to go!” said Isabel kissing her
mother, and going with Mark to find Prue, and to work in their gardens
at Hawthorne House. The exciting events of the recent days had given
a chance to the weeds which they were quick to use, and, to be quite
truthful, the children’s enthusiasm for gardening cooled in proportion
as the weather warmed, nor had their first trip to market their produce
yielded the fortune that they had hoped to count.

Prue came out tying a last ribbon on her tight, light braid of hair;
she had seen Isabel and Mark coming and wanted to lose no time.

She listened with tense attention, frowning severely, to the story of
the disappearance of Kathie’s ancient coins.

“Well, she will be madder’n a whole army,” said Prue when it was
ended. “She will be right up this morning to get them, and when she
doesn’t----!” Prue did not attempt to describe what would happen when
Kathie did not get her coins.

“But, my goodness gracious, she knew where they were, and she let them
be put there!” cried Isabel. “It isn’t our fault, is it?”

“When you’re mad, you’re mad, and you’ve got to blame somebody,” said
Prue, with deep knowledge of human injustice. “Kathie will blame us;
you’ll see! I say let’s go down the secret passage first, and look for
the box again. I’ll run back and get my searchlight, and I’ll borrow
mother’s. We’ll go right in there and _hunt_!”

Now this was a much more heroic proposition than it sounds, coming
from Prue. She was deadly afraid of spiders, snakes, rats, of black
beetles almost most of all, and she had always had a horror of the
secret passage greater than Isabel’s, because she felt sure that it was
inhabited by all these things and others similar to them which she had
never seen, and she had not Isabel’s imagination to turn the passage
into a romantic story and thus off-set the dread of reptiles, insects
and beasts.

Isabel knew how Prue hated to explore the underground way that had been
a refuge in Revolutionary days. She stopped short and regarded her
friend with respectful admiration.

“You are great, Prue! You are truly _great_! I think if there were
a war you’d fire cannon, like Molly Stark, and hang out flags like
Barbara Frietchie, and do all those things, though when there isn’t a
war you don’t seem quite so brave,” Isa declared.

“I don’t know what I’d do, but, sometimes, I suppose you’ve got to
do what you hate. I’d heaps rather fire--well, hang out a flag,
anyway!--than walk on a squishy bug, or something,” said Prue trying to
look modest.

There was a walled opening to the secret passage in the woods, at the
place where Isabel and Prue had first seen Mark; they had dubbed it
“the Toy Shop” because there was where they got their Jack-in-the-Box,
and again Mark was a “jack-in-the-box” because he appeared and
disappeared through this opening.

The opening was so thoroughly hidden by shrubbery and trees that the
little girls had not then suspected it was there, nor could it be
better seen now.

This morning Mark went down first and turned back to help Isabel
and Prue. Prue had first nobly gone back after searchlights and had
overtaken the other two, breathless, scared, but resolute.

Both little girls were struggling to hold their skirts tight around
their legs, which did not help their progress.

Mark laughed at them as he watched this strapped-in descent.

“Nothing will get on you!” he said.

“It’s all very well for you, Mark Hawthorne, in knickers, but we’ve
got skirts, and _anything_ could cling on them,” said Prue sternly.
“It makes me _sick_!” She persisted nevertheless, and the three went
rapidly to the spot where Mark said he had set the box of coins.

“You see!” said Mark, holding up the searchlight which he carried to
show a rock in the side of the wall with nothing on it. “I put it there
and now where is it?”

“Let’s hunt all around--but of course it didn’t walk off itself, and
whoever took it would take it--I mean carry it off!” Isabel said. “Oh,
dear, oh, dear! We _are_ in trouble! Kathie will be nearly crazy, and
there’s her father! He will--why, we can’t tell what he’ll do to us! We
hardly know him at all; we don’t know whether he’s one of those awful
stern men, or not! Oh, if only we hadn’t brought it here! But how could
we guess there was a thief around, in this place? Do you suppose it is
a den of thieves now?”

The secret passage was full of turns, dark, sharp turns, around which
no one could see; only by making the turn and throwing a light ahead
could whatever chanced to be around these bends be seen.

“I am not a thief!” came a voice out of the darkness as Isabel finished
speaking.

Prue shrieked and shrieked. Isabel uttered one agonized scream, and
fell to trembling silently. Mark gasped, almost a groan, and after an
instant’s pardonable hesitation, went toward the sound of the voice.

“Say, keep off!” the same voice said in a high, squeaky tone. “Don’t
you come after me! I’ll run faster’n you can and I’ll never be caught.
You stay off. I’ve’s good a right in here’s you have; better! If you
want that black box of money just go look for it where I say, but don’t
you chase _me_! Count your turns. Count three turns back the way you
come. Then go down a short little narrow path somebody must of dug and
got sick of once. There’s a box, and it isn’t one penny lighter’n ’twas
when I found it. If you want it, take it. But I ain’t any more a thief
than you are, and I won’t let you call me one. I’ll make you good’n
sorry if you do.”

“My goodness, whoever you are!” cried Mark, his spirits rising as he
found a chance to answer the mystery. “If you return the box you’re not
a thief, so why should we call you one?”

“We’re very much obliged; you are very kind,” Isabel managed to say
faintly, feeling compelled to politeness for the favor done them.

“I won’t make trouble for kids,” said the voice. “Good-by.”

“Oh, come out and let us see you!” cried Prue, all her fear wiped out
by the sentiment the voice had just expressed, and curiosity seizing
her.

No answer came to this appeal. The children called several times, but
no sound came in return. A bat, aroused by the lights, flapped heavily
across Prue’s head, so close to her face that she screamed louder than
she had when the voice had first startled her.

“Oh, for mercy’s sake, get the old box and come out of here!” she
cried. “I don’t want to be buried first, and then killed by bats and
stuff!”

Isabel and Mark began to laugh, but there was no resisting the fervor
of poor Prue’s voice. They began to retrace their steps, counting as
the voice had bade them count. There, at the spot it had indicated,
they came upon the black box, and, as Mark lifted it, he said:

“It does feel exactly as heavy as ever! Maybe it is all right.”

The children came out of the secret passage at the end which led them
out into the grounds of Hawthorne House. Motherkins came to meet them.

“Kathie and Dolly are waiting for you,” she said. “If only you could
find the coins!”

“We have found them, Motherkins!” cried Isabel. “Just you wait till you
hear!”

Without delaying for the soap and water that the three faces needed
after passing through the secret passage, the children went in to find
Kathie and Dolly in the library.

“We came to get my coins, Mark,” said Kathie, ignoring Isabel’s feeble
“Hallo,” and not so much as seeing Prue, who did not attempt to speak
to them.

“All right; they’re here. We went to bring them up from where I put
them,” said Mark. “I don’t know how many there were, but I don’t
believe any are lost.”

“Thank you, Mark,” said Kathie with dignity. “You needn’t think
we’re mad with you, Mark, because we’re not. You didn’t ask us mean
questions!”

“Nobody did; we all wanted to know if you’d been into that room. I
asked the question just as much as any one else, if that’s all, but
there’s no sense in being mad about it. Only if mad you are, please
count me in. It’s just as much my mess as the girls’.” Mark spoke so
firmly that Isabel and Prue were proud of him.

“Just as you like. Then we’ll be mad with you, too. Come, Dolly!”
Kathie took the yielding Dolly under her command with a stern glance.
Neither Kathie nor Dolly had any desire to quarrel with Mark, whom they
admired greatly, but if he joined himself with Isabel and Prue, there
was no help for it. Mark escorted them to the door, polite in his own
home.

“Good-by; come again!” he said with a laugh as they departed.




CHAPTER XI

THE SHADOW OF PARTING


“Oh, dear, dear!” sighed Isabel watching the retreat of Kathie and
Dolly, who stalked away so wrathily that “they looked as if their backs
were calling names,” Isabel said. “They are staying mad. I hoped they’d
be over it when they’d had a night’s sleep. Mother says never to let
the sun go down upon your anger, but they did, and they let it rise
again, and still they’re mad!”

“Well, I don’t think their not speaking is half as much consequence
as that voice that did speak,” said Mark, who could not get up great
interest in Kathie and Dolly’s doings. “I’d like to know who, or what
that was.”

“I should--think--so!” Prue spoke with slow and awful emphasis. “It
gets worse every minute I remember it. I just about can’t stand it!
Everything is getting so queer! I wonder if we’re asleep and dreaming
these things? It’s like a queer, mixed-up dream.”

“All of us asleep, and dreaming the same thing?” laughed Mark. “And how
could we know what the rest of us were dreaming?”

“We couldn’t. But we could dream we were all together and heard the
voice, and saw that little man. And then I’d only be in your dream, or
Isa’s, and you’d only be in my dream--Oh, mercy! I’ll go crazy!” Prue
clapped her hands to her head and shook it hard, burrowing her chin
into her neck wildly.

“And how could we tell which was the one dreaming?” Isabel cried
gleefully; she dearly liked this sort of game. “There’d only be one
real one, the other two would be the dream, and how should we know
which they were? And there’s Poppy.”

“Where?” cried Prue.

“I mean she saw the queer little man, and the only reason she didn’t
hear the voice is because she wasn’t there, so she had one-half the
dream and not the other half,” Isabel explained. “I sort of think that
proves we are awake, but I don’t know how it does it. First we saw a
queer little man without a voice; then we heard a voice----”

“Without a queer little man!” cried Mark. “It’s like Alice and the
Cheshire cat! She said she’d seen cats without a smile, but never a
smile without a cat.”

“If you don’t stop talking about crazy things I’ll go crazy myself!”
Prue warned them sharply. “It’s making me feel all crawly inside me. It
almost has sense, but it hasn’t any! It’s like trying to catch the wet
soap in the bath tub. I’m so scared when I think of that awful, awful
voice I could curl up and die. I declare I think Greenacres is getting
dreadfully funny!”

“It wasn’t an awful voice, though; it was a pretty nice voice, telling
us where to find Kathie’s coins,” Isabel reminded her.

“What puzzles me is why the man--or the beast, or the bird, or the
ghost, whoever that voice belongs to--stole the box, and then right
away told us where to get it! What’s the use?” Mark observed.

“Probably he didn’t steal it; just happened to find it and took it.”
Isabel clearly saw the difference in these two actions, though it might
seem to another much the same. “Where’s Poppy?” she suddenly demanded;
it was odd for Poppy to absent herself for so long.

“I don’t know; queer, isn’t it?” said Mark. “When we were coming up out
of the secret passage I just barely saw her tearing off through the
trees, ever so far down the middle path through the woods. ’Tis queer
she doesn’t come back, now I think of it.”

“Dare you to go home that way, Prue, and see what she’s up to,” said
Isa.

“I’m scared,” Prue admitted honestly, “but we’ve got to keep on going
into the woods, or else there wouldn’t be any use in living at all.
So I’ll go. You’re probably just as scared as I am, anyway, Isabel
Lindsay! And the way you’ll do is hold it down, and then not go to
sleep to-night.”

“Oh, well, I never pretended not to mind, and of course it’s much worse
to be afraid of something you can’t understand than of burglars, or
rats, or anything sensible,” Isabel did not shrink from admitting her
nervousness.

“Let’s go home through the woods, Prue. We can play we are pioneer
mothers daring wild beasts and Indians; that will help a whole lot. If
we put off going it will be much worse when we do go, as you said. And
let’s start _now_.”

“Mark, Mark dear, will you come here? I want you,” called Motherkins.

“Oh, I was going part of the way with you,” said Mark regretfully. “Now
I can’t, so good-by. I’ll see you after a while, maybe.”

“We’d rather not have you come; we’ve got to get used to being brave
alone,” said Prue. “Good-by. If anything should happen to us, why, you
know where we went.”

“Oh, gracious, Prue, don’t!” shuddered Isabel, profoundly disturbed by
the awful picture of herself and Prue lying wounded in the woods which
this suggestion at once called up.

Prue and Isabel wound their arms around each other for mutual support
in their adventure, but resolutely faced the woods and walked toward
them, not hurrying, but not loitering, with that steady pace that
betokens steady purpose.

“Let’s go the longest way, past Château Branche, then we’ll know we
didn’t get out of one thing because we were ’fraid-cats,” proposed Prue.

“Well, if here isn’t Bunkie coming to meet us!” cried Isabel surprised.
“I left him at home because he might get lost in the secret passage, I
always think. How could he know we were coming here when we didn’t know
it ourselves?”

The little dog came tearing toward Isabel, ears streaming backward,
tail wagging as fast as it could at the speed he was making. He leaped
up to his mistress with a great show of joy, gave Prue a rapid, but
cordial welcome, then turned in the direction from which he had come,
looking back to see that they were coming. At that moment the little
girls heard a sound of wailing and stood still.

“Now what’s that?” cried Prue sharply. “There’s something else awful,
and it’s quite new.”

“Doesn’t it sound horrible? But maybe it’s a panther--no, there aren’t
any! Maybe it’s a wild cat, and maybe they cry the way panthers do.
They say you can’t tell a panther from a baby; they fool hunters;
don’t you remember? In books I’ve seen that.” Isabel was trying to
be cheerful, though her teeth almost chattered, but Prue was not
appreciative.

“Yes, and maybe it’s an orphan asylum and they are real babies crying,”
she said scornfully. “There are just as many orphan asylums in these
woods as there are panthers and wild cats. Shall we go on, or do you
say to turn off right here?”

“I say to go on,” answered Isa, pale but heroic.

Their decision rejoiced Bunkie, who while they hesitated had been
imploring them by every sign he knew to come on.

The blood curdling wailing continued and grew louder as they advanced;
it took strong resolution to proceed. Prue clutched Isabel’s arm so
tight that she found it black and blue that night when she went to bed,
though she did not feel it then, while Isabel held Prue’s side in a
grasp that ticklish Prue could not have borne for a moment if her mind
had not been too fully occupied to notice it.

Slowly, trembling from head to foot, these Greenacres heroines
advanced, and their courage was rewarded, for in the midst of the
wailing two words came out clear, and these words were: “Oh gosh!”

It was Poppy! There was no mistaking the way she uttered her favorite
vent for her feelings, and Isabel and Prue laughed out in their relief,
though in another instant they began to feel troubled to find Poppy
like this, prone on her face, crying desperately, alone in the woods,
in which she, as well as Isabel and Prue, were beginning to feel afraid
to wander.

Bunkie darted ahead and up to Poppy, nosing her anxiously, but she
ungratefully pushed him away, not being minded to accept his pity then.

“Why, Poppy! Why, Poppy dear, what is it? Is anything the matter?”
cried Isabel and Prue together, running up and dropping on their knees
beside Poppy’s prostrate, sob-shaken little body.

At this Poppy’s crying began afresh, so violently that Isa and Prue
were frightened and there was no hope of getting a word from her.

“May as well wait,” said Prue, sitting back on her heels with a
resigned despair.

“Oh, try to stop, try to tell us what is wrong, Poppy!” begged Isabel.
“Is anything wrong?”

“Don’t you--don’t you know? Didn’t no one tell you?” Poppy managed to
gasp, losing her hold on English.

“No, indeed!” Isabel said. “Tell us, quick!”

“It’s settled!” Poppy moaned, and fell back into worse crying.

“For pity’s sake!” exclaimed Prue impatiently. “What is settled, Poppy
Meiggs?”

But Isabel had a sudden enlightenment.

“Oh, Poppy, is it really? Oh, Poppy!” she cried.

“Well, for pity’s sake!” Prue exclaimed again desperately. “Are you
going to be a puzzle, too! How _do_ you know what she means?”

“She means it is settled that Mr. Hawthorne has to lose the money that
Mr. Ditson left to him, and that they will have to give up that dear,
dear house, and Motherkins’ garden and everything, don’t you, Poppy?”
said Isabel pale to her lips over her shocking discovery.

Poppy nodded hard, raising her head to do so, and instantly burying her
face in the moss again.

“That’s not the whole of it,” she said in a muffled voice.

“Oh, not, not that they’re going away!” cried Isabel.

“They are, too!” Poppy sat up suddenly and spoke out of a gust of
anger. “We shall go away, away! Out of Greenacres! Mr. Hawthorne can’t
get anything here, he said--he means work. He’ll be poor; he must
work. They’ll go away, away! And I sha’n’t see you no more, Isabel,
my darling, dear! But Hurrah! They can’t take him along, my own, own
horse! They can’t feed him; it costs. And I love him more’n anything
in all this world, and they’ll leave him here. Oh, Hurrah, Hurrah,
Hurrah!” Poppy’s voice rose higher with each repetition of the name,
till it became a shriek, and had the effect of cheering.

But Poppy was far away from a cheer. She fell down again on the ground
and pulled up handfuls of mossy turf, kicking the while with such
violence that her striped gingham skirt fluttered as if it were in a
gale and one of her shoes flew off.

“There’s no use kicking, Poppy,” remarked Prue, picking up the shoe and
stooping to replace it. “Hold still, and I’ll put your shoe on again.
Goodness knows it makes me sick, if it’s true that Mark and all are
going away. How do you know it is true?”

“I heard Motherkins and Mr. Gilbert talking about it. They said the
lawyers had written a letter and said there wasn’t any show to help
it. And Motherkins kind of cried a little, then she said never mind,
Gilbert, because I shall not mind much, and I know you feel bad for
me. And that was worse’n her crying. Nearly kills me when she bucks
up brave that way! And they said they’d tell Mark’s soon as you two’d
gone, and now you’re here they likely telling him. And, oh, Hurrah,
Hurrah, Hurrah!” Once more Poppy gave herself up to the anguish of the
thought of parting from her horse, whose cheerful name so ill-fitted
this use of it.

“Now, Poppy, I’m going to tell you something,” said Isabel in her sweet
little womanly way, putting aside her own sharp pain over this news to
try to comfort Poppy. “If you don’t want to leave Hurrah, you needn’t.
My father and mother were talking about this, what would happen if
the Hawthornes had to give up the money, and father said--they both
said--that you could come to live with us, if you wanted to, and stay
right on in Greenacres, and keep on in our same school. And father said
he’d keep Hurrah for you; he said he was sure you’d feel perfectly
terrible to give him up. So now you know all about it. You needn’t give
up Hurrah, nor Greenacres, if you’d rather not. You can stay with us
and Hurrah’ll be yours just the same.”

Poor Poppy! She was in a bad state of nerves from grief and her
tempestuous crying, and at best she too easily flew into a temper.

Now she sprang up like a rocket, on her feet, and waved her arms up and
down, as if she wanted to hit something either in the sky, or beneath
it.

“I guess I won’t! I guess I won’t! I guess I won’t!” she screamed.
“What d’jer think I am! Leave Motherkins! Leave her! Didn’t she take
me in when she was poor’n poorhouses, and take care o’ me when nobody
wouldn’t, but her, but went and took all the rest o’ the Meiggses,
’cause there wa’n’t none of ’em red headed and freckled noses but me?
I guess I won’t live with your folks, not if I do love you cartloads,
Isabel Lindsay, and I won’t stay, not with no horse, Hurrah, nor
nobody, ’stead o’ Mis’ Hawthorne--Motherkins. So there!”

“Well, Poppy, I’m sorry,” faltered Isabel sincerely. “I didn’t mean to
make you mad. You said you loved Hurrah best of anything, so I thought
you’d like to know you might have him if you really did love him best.
That’s all.”

“Any gump’d know I didn’t mean Hurrah ’stead of Motherkins,” said Poppy
still disgusted and offended. Then with one of her sudden changes, she
threw her arms around Isabel and half crushed her in a tremendous hug,
crying, but with a new and gentler misery, as she did so.

“Oh, you darling Isa,” she moaned. “I’m the nastiest! I’m sorry, Isa!
And how shall I ever stand it without you?”

“Well, Poppy,” said Prue, who found Poppy trying, as she so often did,
“do you think you’re the only one feeling bad? Don’t you suppose we
care? Isn’t Mark--isn’t Mark--our own Jack--Jack-in-the-Box?”

Prue had great difficulty in getting to the end of her sentence, and
when she did haltingly reach it her own tears were flowing, but quietly.

“Shall we sit in Château Branche just a few minutes to get rested so
we can go home? I feel sort of weak,” said Isabel, and Prue saw that
she was as white as a white rose petal, even her lips colorless; it was
Isa’s way to take a blow silently, but with tragic intensity.

They climbed up into their house in the great pine, each one thinking
how beautifully Mark’s father had prepared this for them, as well as
so many other things which they enjoyed. And Isabel, looking off with
great tears on her lashes, her gray-blue eyes black from their dilated
pupils, with black hollows below them, realized how she and Prue might
come here by and by--provided they had the courage to come--and sit
here, as to-day, without Mark, forever without Mark. The thought was
unbearable.

Down went Isa’s head on her knees, which she was clasping with tense
fingers.

“Oh, it’s too awful, too awful!” she murmured. “It can’t be true! I’m
going to hope something will happen! I’m going to pray for it! Let’s
all pray for something to happen to let us keep our Jack-in-the-Box.”

“But it won’t,” said Prue dismally.

“It might!” cried Isabel, raising her head and tossing her hair out of
her eyes. “We must believe it will, and pray hard!”

“It could, couldn’t it, Isa?” cried Poppy, enkindled by the idea.
“Should we call this Church Branche, instead of Château Branche, and
pray and pray, right here?”

“Oh, here comes Mark! See how slowly he’s coming, and Semp marching
beside him! Oh, it must be true when he comes so very slowly!” said
Prue, before Poppy’s question could be answered.

“Are you up here?” asked Mark preparing to swing himself up into
Château Branche.

“We’re coming down, Mark,” said Isabel. “Don’t come up; we have to go
home.”

The three little girls descended, Mark quietly offering each his hand.
It was as if he had grown up since they had last seen him, so grave, so
kind, so gentle was his manner.

Isabel was last to get down. She stood where she alighted and looked at
Mark, and quietly Mark looked at her, his lips twitching.

“It is all true,” said Isabel slowly. “I hoped Poppy was mistaken. It
is all true that--that--you are going away, Jack-in-the-Box.”

“Hard luck, Isa,” muttered Mark. “But daddy has no chance at good
business here, and he has in Boston. Yes, Isa, it is true. Daddy and
Motherkins told me themselves. I--I--I’m horribly sorry, Isa, but we’ve
got to stand it the best that’s in us.”

“If we can stand it at all that’ll be the way we must,” said Isabel.
“It will take the best we can do even to live, let alone stand it!
Will--will you go soon, Jack-in-the-Box, dear?”

“About September first, daddy thought,” said Mark.

“Oh!” cried Isabel brightening; her mind had been keyed up to a parting
at once. “A lot can happen before then. We’re going to pray for
something to stop it, and that gives us time!”

She smiled quite cheerfully, as if the working of a miracle was made
more probable by allowing more time for it.




CHAPTER XII

MERRILY PUTTING OFF SORROW


“You’re to come home with Poppy and me, Isa and Prue; Motherkins said
so,” said Mark. “She was going to call up your mothers, and ask them to
let you stay to supper. She said we might get it ourselves. We’re going
to have ice cream.”

“Whatever in this world _for_?” demanded Prue. “Funny time to have a
party when we’re too miserable to talk!”

“Motherkins said we must have all the good times, and just as good
times, as we can while we--before we--go away.” Mark’s voice trembled
over the end of this sentence. “And of course it isn’t a party; just
ourselves puttering into things in the kitchen, the way we always do.”

“And of course we’ll love it!” Isabel came to Mark’s rescue. “Poppy,
try not to show how you feel about Hurrah, and don’t cry before
Motherkins.”

“H’uh! Don’t you s’pose she knows about Hurrah and me? I’ll bet she
hates to leave him her ownself!” said Poppy with a scornful sniff. “I
b’lieve you’n Prue’s full as likely to cry as me.”

“Well, we’ll all do our very best to be jolly,” said Isabel.

“I’m saddest now in my stomach; it aches, I cried so hard,” said Poppy,
and the other three could not help laughing, which proved to be a
helpful start toward cheerfulness.

Bunkie, blissfully ignorant of the misfortune that had befallen his
friends, ran back and forth ahead of them as the children started for
Hawthorne House. Pincushion came to meet them down the grass at the
rear of the house, talking, as she always did, with every step, softly
cooing: “M-m-m-m,” at the sight of Bunkie whom the little cat loved
with as great fervor as when she was a kitten.

“Oh, and there are Bunkie and Cushla! They love each other so; how will
they stand part----”

“Prue!” Isabel interrupted Prue’s lament. “Now, don’t begin that!
Aren’t we forgetting every single minute, with all our might, so why do
you want to remind us?”

There was no chance to be dismal in meeting Motherkins. She stood at
the top of the steps waving her hands girlishly. Behind her stood the
grim person who had come to Hawthorne House to do the housework,
and was so exceedingly gloomy that she made everybody else cheerful.
Flossie Doolittle was her name, not one bit suitable, for she was a
great worker, and nothing could have been less like her than “Flossie.”
But the trifling name, worn by the solemn and rather elderly woman, was
so funny that the children never got used to it.

“Ice cream, my guests!” called Motherkins the moment the children were
within reach of her voice. “My son Gilbert, your Mr. Daddé, has brought
us up a quantity of ice, and I have cream so heavy it will hold up a
spoon! Flossie is going to let you do anything that you please in her
kitchen, and not interfere, unless you ask her help. And I am going
to get out the plates you like best--those thin French ones with the
bronze-gold border--and we shall have one of those nicest parties, the
kind that you don’t plan, and which are not celebrating anything, but
having a good time. What will each of you make for supper? And what
sort of cream shall it be? We’ll have to take a vote on that.”

“Well,” said Prue with a vivid remembrance of an attempt she had
once made to get up a half dozen delicacies, and what a failure it
had been, “I say don’t try a whole lot of things. Don’t each of us
make something different, but let’s make about two things, and work
together. We don’t need such a lot--I think ice cream is enough for
supper.”

“Prudence always proves true to her name!” laughed Motherkins. “That’s
a sensible sugges--what shall it be?”

“I can frazzle--I mean frizzle dried beef nice,” said Prue, and they
all laughed.

“I can do potatoes in the oven, sliced and baked in milk,” said
Isabel. “We could use some of the milk you skimmed for the ice cream,
Motherkins.”

“Economical Isa! And that sort of potatoes is delicious. But not
everything done in milk, please! Prue, what else besides frizzled beef
could you offer us?”

“I’ll make cake,” said Prue, and they saw that she did not quite enjoy
having her beef laughed at.

“Oh, Motherkins, there’s cold chicken left! If only you’d let me make
those croquet ball things--you showed me how you did it; I’ll bet I
could!”

Poppy spoke as if she had long yearned to do this.

“Croquettes, funny Poppy!” cried Motherkins. “But they are balls, it’s
true. I don’t believe you could ever go through two wickets at a time
with one! Croquettes be it; isn’t that enough?”

“Too much,” said Prue decidedly. “What sort of cream?”

“Let’s make ourselves into a convention; daddy told me how they
nominate the president. I nominate chocolate ice cream. Anybody else
want my candidate?” asked Mark.

“I do,” said Poppy.

“I don’t; I want brown sugar caramel cream,” said Isabel.

“O-o-oh, so do I!” cried Prue, smacking her lips.

“Convention is evenly divided--unless you’ll vote, Motherkins-wee?”
said Mark.

Mrs. Hawthorne shook her head decidedly. “All your choice, this
supper,” she said.

“Then one of you must vote with us, or one of us with you,” said Mark.
“I don’t care; I’ll say caramel----”

“No, listen!” interrupted Isa. “I say make plain cream, without any
flavor, or else the weeniest little drop of vanilla in it--and make a
chocolate sauce to pour over it. We all like that.”

“That’s the dark horse in the convention!” cried Mark. “When they don’t
get enough votes for one candidate they put up a bran new one nobody
thought of, and get together on him. We’ll have the chocolate sauce
candidate, the dark horse Senator Isabel nominated!”

“It _is_ dark; chocolate sauce always is,” observed literal-minded Prue
thoughtfully.

“I suppose I may’s well get out pans for you young ones; young ones
always uses a great many they no need to,” said Flossie mournfully.
“I think you’ve got comp’ny to your party unexpected. There’s a wagon
drivin’ in, and if I’m not much mistook it’s the bottle man again that
come here not so long back, and is a friend o’ Poppy’s, who ought to be
called by her name and not such a no-name ’tall as Poppy, even though
her name is Gladys, which is by far too silly and ornamental for the
Meiggs part of her name.”

“Well, you should worry!” said Poppy indignantly. “Oh, Motherkins, it
is Mr. Thomas Burke, 906 North Street, Hertonsburg, and his wife’s
along!”

Poppy had run to the window in the pantry from which she could see the
barn and her friends alighting from the wagon, which they were leaving
in the barnyard. She ran back with her tidings, her face radiant; she
always gave Mr. Burke’s address when she spoke of him as if it were
part of his name.

“I’m glad that they’ve come,” said Motherkins heartily. “And the moral
of this, as the Duchess would say, is always to have a party ready in
case unexpected guests arrive.”

She went out to welcome and bring in the Burkes, and the children
looked after her admiringly. Sweet and calm, ready to give the children
a good time and to take part in it, who that had not known would have
guessed that brave little Motherkins had received a hard blow and bore
a heavy heart in her breast?

“I hope I shall grow up like her, just exactly like my mother and her!”
said Isabel, and it was not necessary to say why, for Prue echoed:

“So do I hope I shall!”

Poppy had run after Motherkins and now returned leading a large, sunny
looking woman, with a broad hat trimmed with cornflowers, much askew
from riding in the jolting wagon, crowning disordered hair.

“Yes,” she said, continuing something she had been telling Motherkins,
who followed her into the room, “my man had to be over beyond here
to-morrow, so he came around this way to-day to tell your husband--I
mean your son, ma’am--something about that little man he met one day,
as he was telling you the time he was here previous. It seems that
little hunchback man had something on his mind to do with you folks.
He was to the doctor’s over to Hertonsburg and was hinting at it. When
Poppy wrote us--’twasn’t just so easy to read, but we made out you was
in trouble and a-going to lose your fine home, and so we kinder put two
and two together, as the saying is, and wondered if the little man was
mixed up with your trouble some way.”

“Poppy wrote you about it?” Motherkins looked at Poppy with surprise,
and a little disapproval.

“I told Mis’ Burke that most likely you was goin’ to get poor again,
and I asked her, if you did, could they take me into the bottle
business and let me work for ’em? And I said I’d let ’em use my
horse--Hurrah, I mean--and I’d tag along behind on the buckboard,
working for ’em, if they’d take me into business,” said Poppy with
great dignity.

Mrs. Burke winked at Motherkins mysteriously, though a child less
bright than Poppy could not have missed that wink, nor failed to see
that it meant admiration of herself.

“She did that, ma’am,” said Mrs. Burke. “We’d be proud to travel like a
circus, as Tom said, with Poppy following the big wagon, but we didn’t
want to make a bargain by mail, not letting you in on it.”

“We’re having a kind of a party,” said Poppy, changing an unpleasant
for a pleasant subject, “and we’d ought to be fixing things.”

“Leave me help!” said Mrs. Burke, instantly unbuttoning and rolling up
her sleeves. “I know how to do most anything, if I do say it, and I
ain’t fond of not doin’ most anything, all the time--I hate loafin’!”

So in a short time the kitchen hummed with industry. Isabel was slicing
potatoes; Poppy was shredding chicken from its bones; Prue was beating
eggs, and Mark, pinned up in a roller towel, was scraping chocolate for
the sauce, a dark streak on one cheek that suggested--but it was not
sweetened chocolate, so perhaps he had not been taking toll-tastes of
his material.

When the table was set--Flossie had attended to that at a hint from
Motherkins--Isabel brought in her potatoes in their casserole, trying
not to look proud of the wrinkled brownness of their milky top. But
when they were served she tried--less successfully--not to look
mortified; the slices of potatoes were hard; the milk had boiled and
browned, but the potatoes were raw.

Poppy’s croquettes fell apart when they were taken out of the boiling
fat, and she had not been sure that she had salted them, so she had put
in a generous amount, which, as it was the second salting, made the
croquettes something to taste once, choke over and forever after to
avoid.

“Oh, well, who wants anything but ice cream and cake when it’s around,
anyway?” asked Poppy, winking back her tears of mortification.

“Got a whopping freezerful!” cried Mark. “I thought of a way to make it
three kinds, too! First, plain--and it’s good that way; it’s rich. Then
with chocolate sauce over it. Then with strawberry jam over it. Flossie
said we might do that, and it’s great.”

“Guessing, or knowledge, Mark?” hinted his father.

Mark laughed. “Knowledge; I tasted it,” he owned up.

Mark served the cream. Eight saucers were brought in by him heaped and
running over.

“Oh, Mark, dear, where _are_ we to put the sauce? I am sure there is a
pint of ice cream in this saucer! Poppy, dear, please hand me another
plate to put half of this on,” cried Motherkins.

“Oh, Motherkins, the freezer is full and it holds two gallons!”
remonstrated Mark. “Don’t take any off; we’ve as much again all around.”

“Sure you can pack it!” said Mr. Burke, speaking for the first time.

“Thank you, Mr. Burke; this boy cares more for the safety of the cream
than for his poor little grandmother!” said Motherkins pathetically.

“Eat a crater in the top first, and then put on sauce to fill it,”
advised Prue, rapidly taking helpings of cream from the top of her
piled-up plate, carefully keeping the sides alike by turning the spoon
around like a drill. “I think my cake is all right.”

“Your cake is delicious, Prue,” said Mr. Hawthorne, though everybody
else laughed at Prue. “And the ice cream is too good for it to grieve
us if we can’t find room for sauce over it. This is a nice party!”

“Oh, we have nice parties! We have nice parties!” Isabel’s voice
quavered as she said this and she bent forward and scooped out the
middle of her cream to hide her emotion, scooping so hard that the
melted cream at the base of the cone overflowed the edge of her plate
without her seeing it.

For a moment there was a dangerous tendency on the part of the four
children to tears; it was easy to understand that Isabel was thinking
of the day, now drawing near, when there would be no more of these
impromptu good times.

“Well!” It was Mr. Burke who saved the day by speaking as if he were
unconscious of this danger. “What I would be sayin’ is that if Mrs.
Hawthorne would trust me an’ my wife, an’ well she may, for we’d look
after Poppy our best an’ Mrs. Burke’s best is as good as best comes,
we’d take Poppy along to-morrow for a trip. We’ll be coming this way
again, back on our tracks, three days from now, an’ Poppy might harness
up her Arabian race horse an’ follow along on the buckboard, an’ try
how she’d like the business. What do you say to it?”

“Oh, yes! Oh, yes!” Poppy started up, clapping her hands. Then she
stopped, and fell back in her chair with a sudden gust of tears. “Oh,
no! Oh, no; I couldn’t! I couldn’t leave Isabel for so long, not
now--nor Prue,” she added, but plainly as an afterthought.

“Well, if that’s the only objection, take them along,” suggested Mr.
Burke. “An’ Mark, too. Even if you ain’t parting from him, like the
girls here, it’ll do no harm to have him with us. If it’s too big a
pull for Hurrah’s well-known delicacy of constitution, there’s room in
the wagon for the lot of ye, or any one of ye, to ride amongst me an’
Mrs. Tommy Burke an’ the bottles.”

“And sell our garden truck, the way we planned!” cried Prue. “It’s
ready this minute! We’ve got to sell it, because that’s why we raised
it, and we said we would, even if it is too late to save up money
enough for this house.”

“Might we, Mrs. Hawthorne? If you said Poppy and Mark could go, I know
mother would think I could. I’d love it.” Isabel leaned over the table,
her eyes shining, her lips parted by her quick breath.

“I don’t see any objections. It would be great sport for you,” said
Motherkins.

“You’re such a darling!” cried Prue. “You always see why things are
nice, just as we do. Hurry up with that cream, Mark. I’ve got to go up
to the Club Room for the scales.”

“What for?” asked Mark, filling the crater he had made in the middle of
his ice cream with a great spoonful of chocolate syrup. “My, but it’s
luscious! I will not hurry!”

“To weigh our vegetables. I left the scales up there.” Prue nearly
choked herself with ice cream covered with strawberry jam; she did not
mind that the others laughed. “We’ll be gypsying. We’ll sleep outdoors,
shan’t we? I want to! Poppy and Isa and I will roll up in blankets
and sleep on the buckboard! Mark can sleep in the wagon, or use his
father’s tent that he used to have last summer. Oh, Mr. Burke, you are
an angel!”

“I’ll be after getting a new sign painted: ‘T. Burke, Angel. Dealer in
Glass Bottles,’” said Mr. Burke with his twinkle.

“Come with me,” said Prue to Isa, as she hastily took her last spoonful
of ice cream, so large a spoonful that she clapped her hand to her
cheek, for it made her teeth ache.

Isa followed her out of the door and up to the Club Room. Nobody had
visited the room that day. As the little girls opened the door and
rushed in, being in a great hurry to get the scales, they stopped short
and looked around, then stared at each other.

The couch was pulled forward, its cover thrown off, its pillows piled
up and the top one dented with the unmistakable impression of a head in
it.

“Some one has slept here!” cried Prue.

“And it surely wasn’t Kathie,” added Isabel, pointing to a cigar stub
and ashes and burnt matches which lay on one of the saucers of their
cherished set of cups and saucers.




CHAPTER XIII

GYPSYING


The children stampeded down stairs.

“Some one slept in the Club Room last night!” Isa shouted. “Some one’s
been there! Not Kathie, because there’s the end of a cigar on the
table.”

“It wouldn’t be Kathie if there weren’t a cigar,” said Prue. “Kathie
wouldn’t come there to _sleep_!”

Mr. Hawthorne looked at his mother, she at him, and Mr. Burke gave
his wife a startled look which he tried to change into a careless one
and carry on to the sideboard, as if he were examining the silver on
it, because he did not want to alarm the children more than they were
already frightened. They could easily see, however, that the four grown
people took their announcement seriously.

“There’s no kind of use in letting this go on longer without trying to
find out who is at the bottom of all these mysterious happenings,” said
Mr. Hawthorne. “I believe I’ll sleep in that room for a while.”

“Oh, daddy, let me!” implored Mark.

“You’re going gypsying with the Burkes in the morning, aren’t you?
You can’t watch that room till you get back; then we’ll see.” Mark’s
father evaded a direct answer. “If you are going you ought to be ready
to-night, by the way. Gather your garden products while it is still
light, and get together whatever you need for an early start.”

“Is that really a go? I was afraid it was fooling,” Mark said, looking
delighted and forgetting the mystery of the Club Room for the moment.

“It’s a go an’ a going ’s far ’s I’m concerned, my young Hawberry,”
said Mr. Burke, looking with admiration at Mark’s eager, handsome face,
all alight with anticipation.

“You are nice to us, and we like you a great deal, Mr. Burke. It’s a
pity you haven’t any children to go around with you,” Prue said in her
elderly fashion.

“Whist!” said Mr. Burke, glancing anxiously at his wife to see if she
heard.

“Oh, Prue, you mustn’t speak of that; they died!” whispered Isabel
nervously.

“We’d take Poppy along the whole season, if she’d come,” Mr. Burke
said loudly. “But it’s not every youngster we’d say it of.”

“I wouldn’t go, much ’s I love you. Come on and pick vegettubles,” said
Poppy, pulling Isabel out of the room by her belt.

“I’ve gotter curry Hurrah. I thought you done--did--it with curry
powder, but you don’t; Mr. Thomas Burke showed me how.”

“You can’t reach to curry him; he’s a tall horse, and you are a
whippet, as the Burkes say,” Mark reminded her.

“I’ll curry all I can reach,” Poppy answered, not at all discouraged.
“It’s elegant to do. You use something you call a comb, but ’tain’t,
and you kind of hiss through your teeth when you rub him. Mr. Burke
showed me. He says the hiss you mustn’t leave out, ’cause no one ever
does it right who ain’t a hisser currying. I got heaps of radishes now
to sell, and my second peas. We gotter hustle and pick things.”

“My string beans are as good as the best, and I’ll have a bushel to
take, I’m pretty sure,” Mark said proudly.

“It’s been pretty dry for my lettuce, but some is tender,” said Prue
anxiously.

“You can see for yourselves my flowers are lovely. But I wonder if
there’s any use of taking them to sell?” sighed Isabel.

“I don’t see a bit of use in any of it,” said Prue. “We were just plain
silly! We know now we couldn’t raise enough to keep the house, so
what’s the use of doing a little?”

“Maybe they’ll need money till Mr. Hawthorne gets well started in
business,” said Isabel, with a sense of delicacy upon her in alluding
to Mark’s family affairs before him.

Poppy was not wasting time. She had taken a hoe out with her and was
digging radishes so recklessly that she cut many of them, but she said
she “didn’t care; there were tons too many of ’em.”

Then she picked peas, tearing down the vines to get them, and had her
basket filled in an amazingly short time. Prue selected tender lettuce
heads with care; Mark gathered a bushel basketful of crisply tender
wax beans, and Isabel gathered quantities of sweet peas, mignonette,
alyssum, which, piled on a tray, filled the air with fragrance.

“It seems ’s if we ought to make a good business. Now, you watch me
curry!” said Poppy.

Without the least fear, nor reason for fear, for the tall horse knew
and loved her, Poppy went into Hurrah’s stall and began to curry him,
“hissing through her teeth” in approved hostler fashion.

Poppy could reach only Hurrah’s shoulders and chest and legs, so the
currying left a good deal of him undone, but she rubbed and hissed and
got warm and dusty over all that she could reach of her comrade, and
suddenly threw her currycomb from her and burst into tempestuous tears.

“Oh, oh, oh! When you think I can’t keep on doing it!” she screamed.

Isabel vainly tried to soothe her, privately thinking that it was not a
good reason for crying that one could not curry a horse, however dear.

There was an early and most exciting start in the morning of the
remarkable expedition. First, the blue wagon, boxes in its body,
rattling with bottles of sorts and sizes; on its high seat the jolly
Burkes, both red in the face and full of laughter. And on a blanket,
thrown over an empty box, set bottom-side-up, Mark, carrying a
fantastic flag which he had hastily made after he had gone to his room
the night before. It was a square of flaming scarlet, ornamented with
pasted designs in white. Dangling from the two corners which were not
attached to its pole hung a small bottle to announce to the world the
business upon which this wagon rolled through it.

Behind the wagon came the buckboard drawn by tall Hurrah, all sorts of
bundles lashed on its floor; on its seat three little girls, cleaner
than they would long be, seated so low, driving through dusty roads;
the smallest, with her flaming hair almost as conspicuous as Mark’s
red flag on the big wagon, holding the lines, her brow knit, her lips
pursed, her eyes intent, exactly as if Hurrah would be likely to do
anything but follow his leader.

“Good-by, and we’ll be back the day after to-morrow, ma’ams,” said Mr.
Burke to Mrs. Hawthorne and Mrs. Lindsay and Mrs. Wayne, who had come
up to see the start.

“Oh, bring them home safe, Mr. Burke!” cried Mrs. Lindsay, her heart
suddenly sinking as she wondered at herself for consenting to let her
one ewe lamb go on this fantastic excursion.

“Sure, ma’am, if I was dead myself I’d look after them, that anxious am
I to bring them back safe!” replied Mr. Thomas Burke, giving his horse
the signal to start as he waved his hat in the air and grinned broadly
over his shoulder.

“You may as well do your selling in Trout Brook, to which we’re coming
shortly,” suggested Mr. Burke. “It’s a summer cottagers’ paradise,
so ’tis, an’ they’ll buy fresh vegetables like crazy. An’ same with
Isabel’s flowers.”

Mr. Burke proved a true prophet. At Trout Brook people were so tired
of the lack of events in the quiet place where they had come for rest
that they were eager to buy.

String beans and Poppy’s peas went in a trice. Isabel’s flowers were in
such demand for the adornment of living rooms and dining tables that
she was sold out in a few minutes, and hardly knew how to meet the rush
of trade.

Lettuce was less desired, because, being so easily raised, some of the
cottagers had planted it in their gardens. But most of that sold, too,
and when the big and the little equipages and drivers started on there
were no vegetables nor flowers left on the buckboard, only a little
lettuce which Isa said would come in beautifully with their own lunch.
Mark was made the cashier; he buttoned nearly sixteen dollars into his
jacket pocket, the result of the children’s garden products.

They went off in a gay mood, trying not to laugh, because they heard
a lady say as they started away, a lady who had evidently spent years
abroad and wanted it known:

“What an extraordinary country America is! Really, do you know, those
children appeared quite refined and intelligent! Not in the least like
hucksters’ children!”

“Some of us ought to be refined, and some of us intelligent. No fair
any one being the whole show!” muttered Mark softly. “Which do you
choose to be, Poppy?”

“Don’t know what you mean. Don’t bother me; I’m driving,” said Poppy.

Mark had come over to ride on the buckboard with the other children,
now that it was emptied of the vegetables.

“Here’s a watering place,” called Mr. Burke, putting his hand on the
back of his seat and swinging half around to the children behind him.

“This is the brook that the village is named after. We’ve got to stop
an’ let both horses drink. Drive ahead, Poppy, an’ I’ll let down
Hurrah’s check.”

He prepared to dismount, but Mark called to him that he could and would
let down Hurrah’s check rein, and the big wagon drew to one side of the
road to let the buckboard go by.

Hurrah drank long and blissfully, knee deep in the middle of the
brook, sucking up water and blowing it out, sniffing it into his dusty
nostrils after he had had enough to drink.

“My, but it looks good! Makes you feel cool to watch him,” said Mark,
reluctantly crawling out on the shaft to pull up Hurrah’s head and
fasten the check rein again, the other horse whinnying and pawing,
impatient for his turn.

The buckboard came up safely on the opposite bank of the watering
place, going right through the brook; Isabel and Prue were nervous over
the feat, but Hurrah knew his duty and did it.

“Well, he may not be so awfully young, nor fancy, but it’s pretty nice
to know you can trust Hurrah,” said Isabel emphatically.

But, alas, horseflesh, like human nature, is likely to have some
weakness that may make it break its record of sober good behavior!

Hurrah feared no automobile, not the biggest truck; locomotives, whole
trains, were to him nothing to look at. But paper blowing around his
feet was one thing that he could not endure. This the children had not
yet found out, yet if they had known it they could hardly have helped
what happened.

A large sheet of paper, which had got detached from a billboard,
advertising an auction that had been held the previous spring, came
rollicking down the road, and fluttered and flourished between Hurrah’s
forelegs, and rustled noisily against his hind ones.

Hurrah drew himself together with a snort; all his insulted legs seemed
to be bunched for an instant. Then he plunged, and ran down the road at
a speed no one could have imagined he could have struck, the buckboard,
and the children holding to it, bounding and curving behind him, Poppy
still holding the reins, but only at the buckle, screaming at the top
of her voice and powerless to check Hurrah.

Mr. Burke was still standing beside his horse in the stream. He could
not go after the flying Hurrah for a moment; if he had been able to, he
could not have hoped, with his lumbering wagon, to catch Hurrah and the
light buckboard.

“Oh, angels in heaven, go after that horse!” Thomas Burke groaned. “Oh,
it’s killed entirely they’ll be! However will I face their mothers! Oh,
sweet guardian angels, take care of them.”

Mrs. Burke was clambering down backward from the wagon, not aware that
she was coming down into the brook.

“What’ll you be doin’, Ellen Burke? Do you think you can catch ’em
walkin’?” demanded her husband.

“I’m no angel, but I’m going after that mad horse to see what I can do
for them children when I come up to where they’ll be lyin’, alive or
dead,” said Mrs. Burke, pale and resolute.

“Well, well, I’m goin’ to drive after ’em, ain’t I? Stay where ye are,
me poor woman, an’ I’ll make Cork go his best after the track of ’em,”
said Mr. Burke.

Cork, the big Burke horse, was urged forward and did his best, but
Hurrah had a start, a light load, and was frightened, so he went far
beyond the Burkes’ power to help.

None of the children jumped. Mark bade them hold on for their lives and
not try to jump out of the buckboard.

“It’s low, if we do tip over, and we’ll take the chance of Hurrah’s
stopping soon,” he said, keeping his presence of mind and trying to
speak courage to the cowering little girls.

Prue sat with her head bent, her eyes closed, holding to the seat.
Isabel, deadly white, held herself fast by one hand; the other grasped
Poppy, whom Mark also held, and who was so frightened that she could
not understand anything said to her, nor in any way help the situation;
she would have thrown herself out if Isa and Mark had not clutched her
tight.

Suddenly, while Hurrah was still in full flight, there sprang out of
the thick growth on the side of the road a figure that seized Hurrah’s
bridle.

So suddenly it happened that the horse was flung back on his haunches;
he threw back his head so high that the man, a tiny creature, was swung
off his feet. But he held on pluckily, and Hurrah stopped. The children
were saved.

After a moment, in which all that they could understand was that they
were not killed, not harmed, and were not going to be, they looked at
the one to whom they owed their escape.

It was the queer little man whom they had seen in the woods! There was
no mistaking his long nose, his thin, dark face, his crooked little
body.

“Oh, how do you do?” gasped Prue.

In spite of the fact that Isabel was crying quietly, Poppy noisily,
from the nervous relief of being saved, the others giggled at this
remark from Prue.

“I’m pretty well,” said the queer little man in a thin, high, queer
little voice that seemed, when you heard it, to be the only voice that
could come out of that body.

“I don’t think you’d oughter drive such a mettlesome horse. It’s
dang’rous to be run away with--for little girls like you,” he said.

Mark and Isabel giggled again, but Poppy, drying her eyes with a swift
stroke of the back of her hand across them, cried indignantly:

“He ain’t meddlesome. He never meddles. That old paper meddled with him
and scared him. He never run away before, and it’s because a big paper
went and flew all through his legs!”

“That’ll do it, that’ll do it! That’ll scare ’em when trains a-rushin’
won’t,” said the little man, not in the least tempted to laugh.

“Well, I’m kinder glad I happened to be here to keep you from getting
killed. I think most likely your folks’d been awful upset if you’d been
killed.”

“They wouldn’t have liked it,” Mark admitted without a smile. “We’re
grateful to you. We’re so grateful that we don’t know how to say it!
What can any one say for thanks when it’s like this?”

Mark jumped over the buckboard wheel and went up to the little man with
his hand out; his beautiful eyes, which were the color of an oak leaf
in autumn, shone out through tears and his voice shook.

“Goodness me, ’twan’t anything; I happened to be here,” said the little
man. “You’re entirely welcome.”

“Please tell me your name,” said Mark. “Isabel, Prue, Poppy, come;
aren’t you going to thank him?”

“You’re a wonderful sweet, pretty child,” said the little man to
Isabel. “My name is Ichabod Lemuel Rudd. You’re perfectly welcome, ’s I
said. I’d like to hear how you’re called, if ’tisn’t impudence.”

“Well, considering what you’ve done, I wouldn’t call it that,” said
Mark. “Mr. Rudd, this is Prudence Wayne. This is Poppy Meiggs. This is
Isabel Lindsay. I am Mark Hawthorne.”

“What!” fairly shouted the little man. “Not Gilbert Hawthorne’s boy?
How’d you come here? Gilbert’s boy! And I caught that horse! Well,
well!”

He stood staring at Mark, forgetting the little girls completely,
excitement in his eyes and manner.

“Do you know my father?” asked Mark. “Come home with us and let him
thank you. There’s a big wagon coming along soon; we were driving
behind it, in the man’s care. You can ride with him. Come home with us
and see my father.”

“No, no, no! Maybe I’ll see him some day before long; maybe not. I
can’t seem to get it right in my mind. Jiminy cats, it’s the bottle
man!” Ichabod Rudd cried, the first to catch sight of the Burkes
tearing, in a cloud of dust, toward them. “Good-by, Gilbert Hawthorne’s
boy!”

Turning, the queer little man plunged into the thick undergrowth, out
of which he had sprung to save the children, and instantly disappeared.




CHAPTER XIV

UNDER THE STARS


Mr. Burke’s wagon came rattling down the road, its load of bottles
jumping around in their boxes in a way that threatened their existence
as bottles.

“Whoa, there!” shouted Mr. Burke when he espied the children standing
at the side of the road. He pulled in his horse so suddenly that he
threw the reliable beast back on his haunches.

“Well, thank the Lord, you’re all right!” cried Mrs. Burke, clambering
down from the wagon backward in her usual fashion. Her face was deadly
pale. “You _are_ all right, ain’t you?” she added.

“All right; every one of us!” Mark called back.

“Well, by cricky, that was goin’ _some_!” said Mr. Burke.

“It was stopping some!” cried Mark, letting Mr. Burke take his hand,
which he had come down out of the wagon to do. But Mark was too much
absorbed in the fact of their rescue by the queer little man to be
interested in the danger they had escaped.

“Say, Mr. Burke, who do you suppose caught Hurrah?” he said.

“Yes, who’d you s’pose? Who’d you s’pose?” echoed Poppy, dancing about
like a firefly. “That man! The queer little man! And we know his name;
it’s Kickabout! Did you ever!”

Poppy was in such haste to tell all the news herself that her tongue
tripped over her words and she stammered.

“Oh, Poppy, it is not! It’s Ichabod!” Prue said disgustedly. “He said
Ichabod Lemuel Rudd. Kickabout! Whoever heard such a name!”

“No, nor the other one, the right one,” said Poppy. “Ain’t Hurrah just
fine? I tell you, he can go like a colt!”

Poppy spoke with great enthusiasm thrown into her voice, because she
felt considerable fear of Mr. Burke’s disapproving of Hurrah’s running
away.

Mr. Burke shook his head, frowning.

“Well, I’m not so sure about the performance bein’ fine! It depends on
how you look at it. There’s a lot of people wouldn’t call a horse that
ran away so killin’ fine for a little girl to drive,” he said.

“Oh, but it was paper! There’s hardly ever handbills blowing around in
the road. You don’t see ’em!” Poppy swept the road in both directions
with a wide gesture of her right arm, meaning to prove that handbills
were not to be seen. “It came along just flopping, and it flopped right
in under Hurrah’s legs. You couldn’t blame him for getting nervous. I
think it’s great the way he ran, and folks saying he’s old!”

“If you want a good jounce it’s the old horse you think you know’ll be
givin’ it to you,” said Mr. Burke, again shaking his head dubiously.
“I’ll be watchin’ out for handbills cavortin’ along after this, for I
suppose you’ll have to drive back, seein’ as none of you, nor my wife
no more, could drive the wagon. Whatever did you do with your little
friend, wid the long nose on him, Mark? There’s no sign of him.”

“He dropped down through the undergrowth and took to his heels like a
rabbit when he saw you coming. He said, ‘Oh, it’s the bottle man!’ and
off he went,” said Mark. “I was asking him to come to see my father;
he seemed half to want to, but instead he melted off quicker than an
icicle.”

“Which is about the shape an’ size of him! Maybe he was afraid the
bottle man would put him in one of them flat, thin bottles, an’ be off
to set the black little wisp of a man he is on the shelf, mistakin’
him for ink! It is a queer one he is, whatever’s the matter wid him!”
laughed Mr. Burke.

“Now, I’m thinkin’ that we’ll make a camp for the night, for I promised
ye we’d sleep out, though we might push on an’ find a place under
cover, did you vote for it.”

“We vote to sleep out!” cried Isabel, who had been so badly frightened
by the runaway that she now spoke for the first time.

“Oh, mercy, yes; all the nights,” said Poppy decidedly.

“Well, I’d not wonder if this was the one night we were gone. I’m
thinkin’ I’ll be turnin’ back to-morrow an’ make the rest of the trip
the next time,” said Mr. Burke, not caring to explain to Poppy that
Hurrah’s running had brought his wife and himself to this decision as
they gave chase to the buckboard with hearts frozen with fear.

“Let us once get them, and no great harm done, and it’s back we’ll
go with those children to-morrow, Thomas Burke, and take no risk of
another scare,” Mrs. Burke had said, as she and her husband tore down
the road in pursuit of Hurrah amid the rattling bottles.

“We should be willing to stay longer,” said Poppy, most politely.

“Now, that’s kind of you!” Mr. Burke spoke with extreme heartiness,
but though she looked at him quickly, Poppy’s sharp eyes could not
discover that he was making fun of her. “All the same, I’d forgotten to
remember, but now I’m remembering not to forget, that I must go back to
Greenacres to-morrow an’ take in the country beyond another time. I’d
like the opinion of the sailors on the good ship Buckboard as to the
best place to anchor for the night.”

“Take soundings, Captain,” said Mark, responding in kind to Mr. Burke’s
fooling, offering him a piece of ribbon that had been around a candy
box, hardly long enough to “take soundings” in a bath tub.

Mr. Burke tied the horses to trees and started out, followed by the
four children.

“I’ll stop where I am,” Mrs. Burke announced, making herself
comfortable in the wagon. “I’m that tired with the fright and holding
myself fast when we walloped along, chasing you young ones, that
sittin’ down looks good to me. When you’ve found the place to sleep
you’ll be back here, anyways, to get the things there’s here, and I
may as well be one of ’em.”

It was not necessary to go far to find a camping place that could not
have been bettered. Isabel was right when she said it was a pity not to
use it for more than one night, so perfect it was.

They came upon a glade surrounded by trees, reached by a sloping
clearing, so that there would be no difficulty in bringing the horses
to it. A little spring was just beyond, making its presence known by a
thread of sound as it trickled down over rocks on its way to the river
that flowed on to the outskirts of Greenacres. It was such a sweet,
refreshingly restful little sound, so full of hints of flowers watered
by the spring, of far-off, hidden places where the stream rose, such a
gentle lullaby to which to sleep, that Mr. Burke said it was a shame
not to stay awake to think how nice it was to sleep by, and he couldn’t
see why Isabel and Mark laughed.

“Well, unless we marched on to Eden, an’ I’m not clear where we’d be
findin’ it, since Adam an’ Eve destroyed the map of the road there,
we’d never come upon another such spot to spend the night, so it’s
back Mark an’ I go to bring the chariot an’ band wagon of this circus,
an’ the star performer, who is Mrs. Thomas Burke, by the same token!”
announced Mr. Burke, leading the way again to whence they had started
out.

“Put a fire in the range, Poppy, an’ cut the fruit cake, while Isabel
an’ Prue lays the damask an’ the silver, for we’ll have supper once we
get here,” Mr. Burke turned back to say.

Neither the fire, nor the range to hold it, nor silver, nor damask
were to be seen when the Burkes came back with Mark, bringing horses
and belongings. But the little girls had laid the largest leaves which
they could find for plates in a circle on the grass, and Isabel had
cleverly bound twigs into an approach to the shape of a vase and had
put them in the center of the circle, which represented the table, so
that it really might be imagined to be a table, if one brought to it a
respectable amount of imagination.

There were wonderful things to eat--or was it that the shadowy, poetic
spot transformed everything with its charm?

Bread and butter is every-day enough to us lucky people who have not
been taught what it is to lack it, yet this white bread, with its
golden-brown crust--“the color of Mark’s eyes,” Prue said, unexpectedly
observant--the yellow, yellow butter, fragrant of the grass and clover
which had gone to make its cream, seemed raised above bread and butter
known in houses, and to be a sort of fairy food. And there were slices
of beef as thin as leaves, and of ham, all rosy and white; and jams and
jellies in glasses--surely no jam and jelly had ever looked like this
at home! And cake! Golden, with white icing, as if a peach had stayed
out too late on its tree and got caught in the first light snow of
November. There was white cake with a brown coating in layers and on
top, that proved, when bitten into, to be not ordinary chocolate icing,
but fudge. It was fudge delicious enough to make any one’s very palate
sing, all crumbly, yet smooth and soft, chocolatey, yet buttery--the
sort of fudge that every fudge-maker knows comes by luck in boiling and
beating, and may or may not ever be got a second time!

And there were big, bulging blackberries, full of juice and sweetness,
but not of seeds, all ready to go to pieces and yield up their perfect
flavor when any one pressed them, with a delighted tongue, up against
the roof of a mouth that would surely promptly open to get another such
berry! And, last of all, there was lemonade, kept cool in stone jugs,
because thermos bottles, not even all that the Hawthornes and Waynes
and Lindsays owned, would not hold enough.

“Some supper!” said Poppy, or meant to.

What she really said was, “Thum thupper!” a thick lisp, because of too
large a mouthful of fudge cake and the fudge clogging her tongue.

“If you asked me,” said Mark solemnly, “I’d say it wasn’t a supper, but
a banquet.”

“Does it make it a banquet to eat too much?” asked Prue. “Because, if
it does, it is; I have eaten too much, a great deal too much, and I’m
so uncomfortable that I love it--to feel so tight! Because I never,
NEVER in all my life, ate such good things!”

“Why not sit up all night?” suggested Isabel, her eyes fixed on the
afterglow of the sunset seen through the trees, its soft colors still
more softened by the half-veiling green, and upon the few stars
beginning to appear in the east, opposite the purpling pinks of the
west.

“We all turn in at nine,” said Mr. Burke, consulting his able-bodied,
open-faced watch. “It’s now eight o’clock an’ fifteen minutes. Mark
my words, by nine there won’t be one of you hardly able to see where
you’re turnin’ in, that sleepy will you be! I’m goin’--with Mark’s
help--to turn the buckboard over an’ let the three little girls have
plenty blankets an’ sleep under it; ’twill make a kind of roof over ’em
for keepin’ off dampness. The big wagon’s not altogether comfortable,
but Mark’ll make out in it, along wid us. You’re not so fussy, sleepin’
out, as you do be in your homes, when you complain if there’s a small
wrinkle in the sheet under you! How’d it be to be givin’ us a small
concert till bedtime--if there’s enough breath in you after that
supper? Some nice songs, an’ then hymns, last of all, for a help to
night prayers an’ safe sleepin’?”

The children all sang well, all but Prue, whose ear was not wholly
reliable. Isabel was decidedly musical; she was alive to beauty in
every form, and her voice was sweet and true. Mark had a rarely lovely
voice, a pure, high boy soprano that was a delight, but Poppy, Poppy
with her plain little face, her red hair and freckles, had the gift of
a voice so exquisite that no one could think of her as a child while
she was singing; she became only a voice to be listened to with the
same sort of joy felt when the little brown thrasher sings unseen on a
tree near by. She seemed only a song so lovely that it was impossible
to consider the body from which it sprang.

“All right,” said Poppy, at once assenting to Mr. Burke’s suggestion.

Without waiting for any one else, she at once began to sing “Loch
Lomond,” that haunting, sweet, pathetic song, filled with patient
sorrow for a joy that is done.

The others joined in, Isabel singing softly her true little alto,
keeping it down because she loved to listen to Poppy and Mark.

They sang and sang “Annie Laurie,” “Bonny Charley,” “Sweet Afton,”
“Bonny Doon,” for they all loved the Scotch songs best, and Isabel
Lindsay, as her name showed, had a right to, if the blood of her
Highland forebears was truly in her.

“Well, now, some Irish ones, the best of all!” hinted Mr. Burke, and
he started them with “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms,”
which they all knew. He was half offended that they knew few others,
but Mark saved his feelings by singing “Kathleen Mavourneen” as it
should be sung, and making him cry a little without being ashamed that
they all knew it.

By this time there were many stars in the east and south. Cassiopeia’s
Chair and Andromeda and Perseus were up, as well as the Great Bear, in
the north, though only Isabel and Mark knew them all. Isabel’s mother
had taught them to her in the twilight talks they always had, and which
Isabel was missing that night, and Mark had learned them from his
father when he was a tiny lad, out under the stars, camping with his
wonderful daddy.

“Now the hymns,” said Mr. Burke, once more looking at his watch. “An’,
moreover, there’s not time for half I’d like of them, if we keep to the
hour.”

“Let us not keep to the hour, dear Mr. Burke; let us keep to the
singing,” whispered Isabel, putting her hand on his arm.

“I’ll not believe you’re of Scotch descent at all; it’s Irish your
ancestors were, acushla!” declared Mr. Burke, looking fondly down on
her. No one could ever resist Isabel; her sweetness was of the sort
that penetrates and softens hearts.

So they did not “keep to the hour,” but sang their hymns until Prue
fell asleep and Mark was drowsy. Isabel could have sung on all night,
and Poppy grew more like an electric spark the later the evening wore
on.

Mr. Burke and his wife tipped over the buckboard; Mark tried to help,
but he was too sleepy to be of much use. Isa thought that it looked
unpleasantly queer, propped up with its seat beneath and its wheels in
the air, and Prue voiced her feeling.

“I hate it; it’s scarey for night, wouldn’t matter in daytime,” she
said.

“We can’t see it when we’re asleep under it,” said Isa, careful not to
show that she agreed. “It will be like a nice, funny little house.”

Leafy branches made a good mattress, a new horse blanket that had
never been used was so heavy that the cool hours after midnight would
not chill the three little girls, snuggled up together under the
buckboard, with the big brown and red plaid blanket spread over them.

Mark said good-night and crawled into his own shelter in the big wagon
the moment the buckboard was established upside down.

“Goodness, but I’m sleepy!” he said, yawning and staggering as he
walked off.

Nobody was to undress. Prue’s orderly soul was further afflicted by
lying down to sleep, even on a wildwood bed of boughs, with all her
clothes on.

“Isn’t it queer?” she whispered, welcoming with both arms Isa, who was
to sleep in the middle, because both Prue and Poppy wanted to be next
to her.

It _was_ decidedly queer, but it really was exceedingly nice!

The night seemed deep and vast out here under the stars, surrounded by
its complete silence. The little sounds of earth went on, the children
discovered after the first few minutes, when they had thought the
stillness unbroken. Leaves rustled steadily; sometimes a twig snapped;
little birds stirred and chirped softly, sweetly; the crickets and
other insects played a ceaseless symphony of the night with their legs
drawn over their wings, or their wings whirring in the air. Yet, with
all these many soft sounds of earth, the stillness of the night seemed
somehow to brood over them and remain unbroken. Isabel and Poppy had
been sure that they should not go to sleep all night. It was a pity
that going off tight asleep in a few minutes kept them from knowing and
being very much surprised that they were not awake one-half hour!

Isabel woke with a great start. She did not know how long she had been
asleep, but it seemed to her a long time, though it still was dark.
Something had touched her face, something damp and cold!

Poppy was gone; Isabel put out her hand, groping for her, though the
space in which they lay was so small that she could not have missed
Poppy if she had been there. Poppy was gone! Prue was there, asleep.
Isabel grasped her and spoke her name close to her ear.

“Prue, Prue, something is here! Poppy’s gone!” she said.

“Oh, are you awake! I’m dying!” said Poppy hoarsely from somewhere near
in the darkness.

“Oh, did you feel it, too?” whispered Isabel, putting out her hand and
catching Poppy’s arm as she came, crawling and shaking, toward the bed.

“It got--it got up on--on--me,” Poppy managed to gasp.

With that, Isabel shrieked horribly and dove under the blanket, and
Prue and Poppy ably seconded her screams.

“Mr. Burke! Mr. Burke! Mrs. Burke! Mark!” the three little girls
screamed.

“Well, what in the name of Mike----” said Mr. Burke, coming toward them.

He turned a flashlight in upon the terror-stricken three and burst out
laughing.

“Well, wherever did you get Bunkie? An’ why do you scare the poor
little beast’s hide off of him?” Mr. Burke inquired.

“Bunkie!” shouted the three little girls in one breath, and threw off
the blanket to sit up and see if it possibly could be Bunkie.

It certainly was Bunkie, standing afar, wistfully wagging his tail,
puzzled to be received so unkindly when he had followed the trail of
his beloveds’ journey, wearily and patiently, and was so delighted to
have overtaken them, so sure that Isa would be as glad to see him as
she always was, as he was to see her. But Poppy and she had both jumped
up when his nose touched their cheeks, and they had thrown him off the
bed where he had joyously leaped to say that he had come up with them
at last, shrieking as if he were a rat!

Poor Bunkie, low in his mind, tired and longing, stood wagging his tail
and eyeing his mistress wistfully.

“Oh, Bunkie, Bunkie, my dearest!” cried Isabel, holding out her arms.

This was as it should be! With a whine of happiness, Bunkie sprang into
these arms and curled down between Isa and Prue to finish the night.




CHAPTER XV

A CLEAR DAY


Mark came singing over to the buckboard in the morning. He sang a tune
of his own, but the words were Tweedledee’s.

  “‘Oh, Oysters,’ said the Carpenter,
      ‘You’ve had a pleasant run!
    Shall we be trotting home again?
      But answer came there none--
    And this was scarcely odd, because
      They’d eaten every one.’

“You aren’t eaten, are you? I sure thought you were going to be last
night! My goodness gracious, but you did yell! And all about Bunkie!”
he cried.

“Bunkie feels as awful as a wild animal when you don’t see him, and his
nose’s just as cold!” Poppy answered, and her manner was far colder
than poor Bunkie’s nose could have been. “Anyhow, I just got right
out; I didn’t yell, nor anything.”

“Well, then, as long as you aren’t eaten you’ll be trotting home
again?” Mark returned to the idea of his song. “Mr. Burke told me to
tell you that it was going to be ‘a day right off the griddle’--that’s
exactly what he said--and that he wanted to start back early. So you
get ready for breakfast--the only thing you’ve got to do when you don’t
undress is to wash your face and hands in the spring over there--and
we’ll soon break camp.”

Mark ran back to make himself useful in the preparation of breakfast,
taking out the food that they had brought with them, carrying
sticks for the fire to boil the coffee which Mrs. Burke, who was an
experienced camper, was to make for herself and her husband; the
children were to drink the water from the nearby spring, cold and
delicious as only spring water can be.

“Now, pack up; every one of us is to get at it, an’ we’ll be off for
Greenacres in good time. It’ll be one of the days when you’ve got to
take a step-ladder to read the thermometer, the mercury’s going that
high! We’ll get as far’s we can before it is too uppish, an’ let the
horses have a noontide rest, in a shady place, for a good bit. Cork
is going to want it, an’ Hurrah’ll have not a word against it,” said
Mr. Burke, setting an example by gathering up his cup and saucer and
throwing his paper plate on the fire.

“Cork! Is that your horse’s name? I don’t think I ever heard his name
before, Mr. Burke,” cried Isabel, laughing. “How funny!”

“I’d like to know what’s funny about it?” said Mr. Burke. “My father
come from County Cork, for one thing. An’ for another, ain’t I the
bottle man? An’ what goes better with a bottle than a cork, would ye be
tellin’ me?”

“Yes, but you pull corks, and this Cork pulls you!” laughed Isabel.

“Sure; isn’t turn about fair play? He’s payin’ the debts of his
namesakes! Now, then, let’s set Cork to pullin’ us as soon’s may be,
for in no time we’ll feel like St. Lawrence when they roasted him over
the fire, barrin’ his sanctity,” said Mr. Burke, and he pushed Poppy
before him a few steps in the direction of the buckboard to emphasize
his wish.

There was little to do to get this small gypsying party started. In
twenty minutes they were going along the road at a good pace, the
rested horses not unwilling to trot, especially as they were headed
homeward.

All four children were on the buckboard this time, the wagon ahead.

“I’ll go first,” said Mr. Burke, “an’ if I see any poster, or the like,
gambolin’ along the road, I’ll meet it first an’ politely hold it up,
askin’ it to let me roll it up an’ take it in, as the fine gentleman
haulin’ the equipage in the rear of me wagon is that nervous he’d never
be able to stand the sight of it.”

Following this arrangement, therefore, Hurrah came trotting along
behind Cork, in the big wagon, holding his head up and showing no
sense of disgrace at his scandalous behavior when he was going in the
opposite direction the day before.

The children chattered happily, but quietly; the country road was
soothing, lined with beauty on either hand. Not a bird escaped Mark’s
trained eye, taught as he had been by his father to know them and to
imitate their notes. Sometimes he would lay his hand over Poppy’s,
holding the lines, and stop Hurrah while he whistled to some small
feathered acquaintance he spied on a shrub. The bird would answer the
note, mistaking it for the call of one of his nearer kin than this
brown boy who, nevertheless, always seemed to Isabel and Prue near
kindred to the birds.

So they jogged on pleasantly homeward, with a long nooning, as Mr.
Burke had planned. The day grew almost unbearably hot as the sun
mounted, but the road was shady, so the heat was somewhat softened,
though there was little air under the trees. Isabel and Prue tipped
over against each other and fell asleep. Poppy was wide awake, giving
her whole mind to driving, and Mark waked with her, giving his whole
mind--though Poppy did not know it--to seeing that nothing went wrong
because she drove.

Isabel sat up and rubbed her eyes.

“Mercy, my neck is cracked! It’s all stiff holding my head on one
side!” she said.

“What do you think of me?” demanded Prue, also waking. “My shoulder is
more than cracked; it’s ruined, holding your head! Where are we; near
home, Mark?”

“Not so far from it,” said Mark. “Ought to be about an hour more
getting there.”

“I’ve been thinking----” began Isabel.

“Never would have guessed it! Any one would have guessed you were
asleep,” interrupted Mark.

“Jack-in-the-Box, go down into your box and pull the lid down; you’re
impertinent, sir!”

Isabel pretended to be angry. “I thought before I went to sleep, and
while I was waking up; kind of a sleep sandwich, with thinking between!
And I was thinking that something must happen to keep you from going
away, Mark. It just plain _must_!”

“I don’t see what can,” Mark began, but got no farther.

“I say don’t talk about it,” Prue said firmly. “We came to gypsy, and
have a good time, and I say let’s have it to the end. It’s hot enough,
too! Isa, will you take Bunkie a while? I’ve held him all this time,
and he’s just like a chestnut roaster; he’s burning right through my
skirt, and cramping me besides! Take your ragged little dog and let me
stretch.”

“Little scalawag to follow us! But I’m glad he found us, as long as he
came!” commented Isabel, relieving patient Prue of Bunkie’s warmth and
weight.

The subject of losing Mark was thus dropped for the time, and it was
not long before the gypsies turned in at the gate of the Hawthorne
house. They stirred Cork and Hurrah up to their best speed, drove up
singing, “Marching Through Georgia,” which Poppy had said was “Hurrah’s
national hymn,” because of the words of its chorus.

Motherkins hastened out to meet them, but she looked pale and her eyes
showed that they had lately been swollen with tears.

There, on the piazza, stood trunks, three of them, new ones, with
their lids set back against the wall, as if waiting to be filled!

Mark laid a hand on the buckboard wheel and vaulted it to run up the
steps and seize his tiny grandmother, who always seemed too young and
too small for that title, around the waist and kiss her hard.

“Motherkins, little wee Motherkins, what are these for?” he cried,
pointing to the trunks.

“Oh, Mark, dear, I can’t bear to have your pleasant trip end in grief!
We did not look for you till to-morrow,” Motherkins said.

“Hurrah got scared and ran away; it wasn’t safe to let Poppy drive
further, so we came back,” Mark said, forgetting that Poppy was not to
know why Mr. Burke had changed his plans, and not seeing the anger with
which she heard him. “What do you mean by grief, Motherkins? What is
wrong?” Mark asked, almost as if he were grown up.

“Your father, dear, has found that he must leave here at once, since he
is to go, or else lose the business opening which is too good to lose.
So we are to go away from Greenacres within a few days. Oh, Isabel,
Isabel, I know, and I’m so sorry, dear child! But, remember, it is
hard for us, too.” Gentle Motherkins patted Isabel’s head and smoothed
her hair, as, with a cry, she threw herself into Motherkins’ arms and
sobbed uncontrolledly.

There was a sad supper eaten in silence by Poppy and Mark at the
Hawthorne house, by Isabel and Prue in their own homes. It did not
seem possible that they had all been light-hearted and had set out
pleasuring so short a time ago. As long as the Hawthornes were not to
leave Greenacres until September the children could postpone grief at
parting. But trunks all ready to receive their contents! The parting
but a week distant! Ah, there was no shaking off this horrible reality.

“Mark will come to us summers, Isa, darling; I have that promise. We
shall not lose him,” Mrs. Lindsay strove to console Isabel, whose
head lay on her mother’s shoulder as they sat in the deep window seat
spending “Isabel’s hour” together at the close of this eventful day.

“We shall not lose him, we shall keep friends, but, oh, mother, a
friend on a telephone, or writing letters, is not the same at all as
a friend where you can touch him!” sighed Isabel, and Mrs. Lindsay
could not answer. She knew better than Isabel could, with her longer
experience, that separation is a wedge that often makes friends
completely forget.

Early in the morning Isabel and Prue met Mark and Poppy by appointment
at Château Branche.

There had been a shower in the night which had refreshed the heated
earth and put new beauty into every growing thing and had left them all
shining with brilliance in the early morning sunshine.

Birds were singing everywhere, the birds which Mark could name and
call. Flowers brightened the woods here and there; Mark knew them all.
How everything was going to speak of Mark and emphasize his loss when
he was gone! And Poppy! Funny, excitable, explosive, but honorable,
devoted, high-hearted little Poppy! Isabel and Prue felt that her plain
face was almost beautiful when they realized that they were not long to
see it.

Mark sat whittling, whistling between his tight closed teeth. He was
so miserable that he did not attempt to disguise it, nor to speak. For
once Poppy was not talking. Pale under her many brown freckles, her
lips drawn and drooping, she stared at Isa, trying to learn her face by
heart to take away with her each detail of its sweetness.

“Let’s go over to the Toy Shop,” said Prue.

No one answered, but one after another they all slid down from Château
Branche to follow Prue, knowing that she wanted to go there because
it was the spot in the woods where she and Isa had found their
Jack-in-the-Box. They went along single file, till Poppy stepped back
and, without a word, put her arm around Isabel’s waist.

The Toy Shop was a pleasant little glade; on one side of it was the
hidden opening to the secret passage up to the Hawthorne house. As
they came into the Toy Shop now, there, just outside the bushes which
concealed this opening, sat the queer little man whom now they knew as
Ichabod Lemuel Rudd.

“Jiminy cribs! Look who’s here!” cried Poppy, as Prue fairly shouted:

“Ichabod Lemuel Rudd!” as if she had gone to school with him.

“Good morning, young ladies,” said Ichabod, in his high falsetto voice.

“And good morning to you, Gilbert Hawthorne’s boy! Now, what I want to
say is: Take me right on to your father, and do it quick, ’cause I’ve
got my mind on it, and cats can’t say how long it will stay set!”

“All right; come on,” said Mark, taking this as part of the strange
doings of recent days and not stopping to discuss why cats should be
able to tell how long Ichabod’s mind would stay set.

“That’s the ticket!” said Ichabod, in evident relief. “If you knew
what a time I’ve had! I’ve fairly hung around. Been down in that secret
passage--I found it when I fell into it--and going up to the house, and
then going back----”

“Secret passage! You found the box of coins in there?” cried Mark.

“Returned ’em, too, undisturbed. More’n could be said of me, these
days,” said Ichabod, nodding hard. “Been skinning up outside the house,
into a room where I judged you youngsters played----”

“What!” cried all four children together.

“Sure!” said Ichabod. “Once I slept there. And yet I couldn’t make up
my mind to tell what I’m going to tell to-day--provided you get me
there quick enough. I tell you, Gilbert Hawthorne’s boy, I’ve been that
exercised in my mind, what with wanting to do one right, and wanting to
do another right----There, if we talk about it I may slip my cogs and
not tell!”

“Sure, you’ll tell!” said Mark, beginning to feel that there really
must be something important behind all this. “And it was you came up
into our Club Room! And you slept there? And you took out our cups----”

“Not to steal ’em!” cried Ichabod quickly. “They’re safe. I needed ’em
for tea, so I borrowed ’em, but I’ve got ’em for you.”

“And we thought maybe it was Kathie!” said Prue, as one talking in her
sleep.

“Been troublous times. Trouble for your father, and in my mind! Oh,
jiminy cats, are we there? Oh, I’d rather do a whole lot of worse
things than tell!” cried Ichabod, as they came suddenly upon the house
from the side entrance.

“Daddy, daddy, come here, quick!” Mark called, as he ran ahead of the
rest up the steps.

But Mr. Hawthorne was out under the trees; he came forward from the
opposite side of the house from that around which the children emerged.

“Oh, jiminy cats and jiminy kittens!” cried Ichabod Rudd. “As sure as
death, ’tis you, Gilbert Hawthorne!”

“Well,” said Mr. Hawthorne, “it doesn’t seem to me strange that I
should be myself.”

“No, not put that way, but it’s strange to me to see you at last, when
I’ve been backing and filling about seeing you for dear knows how long!
I’ve been hanging around here, climbing up outside your house, getting
into a room on that rear side. Been up to every sort of hanging around
stunt! Once I asked a bottle dealer about you, but when I found he did
know you I faded right out,” said Ichabod earnestly. “I guess I’ll
fade now. Glad to have seen you, Mr. Gilbert.” He turned as if to go
rapidly away, but Mark caught him.

“Not much!” he cried. “Whatever this thing is you’ve got to tell, tell
it and get it over with, quick!”

“Is there something you want to say to me? Shall we go inside? Where
have I ever seen you? I have a sort of recollection of seeing you
somewhere,” said Mr. Hawthorne.

“I don’t mind the kids,” said Ichabod. He began to speak quickly, as
if he were in danger of not speaking, and he got his strange tale over
with briefly.

“You saw me once at Mr. Ditson’s house. I worked for him for years. He
was the best friend to me I ever could have had. He liked me; I loved
him. His son is putting up a job to get the money his father left you.
He don’t need it; he has too much. He near killed his father, sorrowing
over him. I got the proof it’s a put-up job. I can prove the money’s
yours. I hated to speak because, after all, Maurice is a Ditson. But he
near killed his father, and his father wanted you to have the money.
I always tried to do what my dear old employer wanted done; alive or
dead, I’ve always tried to please him. So I hated to tell on his son,
but I had to tell to get his way for Mr. Ditson. Take me down to the
lawyer’s and I’ll come over with the goods. I can prove by line and
word, written and my own knowledge, that Maurice Ditson has faked the
whole plot. There! It’s told!”

For a moment no one spoke. Gilbert Hawthorne looked steadily into the
eyes of the queer little man, but they never flinched.

“Ichabod Rudd----”

“Ichabod Lemuel Rudd,” said the little man.

“Ichabod Lemuel Rudd.” Mr. Hawthorne adopted the correction with a
slight smile. “We were getting ready to give up all that we love, our
home and its associations, for I have bought back my mother’s old home
with part of Mr. Ditson’s legacy. I don’t know how to tell you what
this means to us. And two days ago you caught the horse, and perhaps
saved the children from a horrible accident. I think it is safe to say
that Mr. Ditson would bless and thank you, if he could speak to you. I
think he does bless and thank you, but that we are not able to hear it.
I hope he will; I can’t!”

“It was right,” said Ichabod Lemuel Rudd, struggling with strong
emotion. “I hated to give away a Ditson, but Maurice was the worst
sorrow his father ever had; my dear old master told me so. And he had
money enough, anyway.”

“Come in and see my little mother; you’ll love her, too,” said Mr.
Hawthorne, and gently drew the queer little man into the house.

The children stood motionless, gazing after them and at one another,
speechless.

Then the great truth rushed over them, and they fell upon one another,
yelling like Comanches, even gentle Isa and staid Prue equaling Poppy
in yelling.

“We’ve got you all, we’ve got our Jack-in-the-Box forever, ever, ever!”
screamed Isabel, and Prue and Poppy and Mark joined her, madly echoing:

“Forever, ever, ever, forever!”




CHAPTER XVI

HAWTHORNE HOUSE ABLOOM


Prue was the first to sober somewhat after the first delirium of joy
had been vented.

“I feel as though we’d all been hung up to die, and some one had come
along and cut every single rope, just as we were going to squirm our
last squirm,” she said, which graphic bit of inelegance made Isabel
exclaim in protest:

“Oh, Prue!”

“It’s just like that, a what-do-you-call-it? A relieve?” Prue
persisted, ignoring Isa.

“A reprieve,” Mark told her. “So it is, Prue! In stories some one comes
riding madly, his horse white with foam, just as the hero is standing
blindfolded against the wall, waiting to be shot--they don’t hang
heroes in stories. The rider turns out to be the king’s messenger. He
waves a paper in the air, shouting: ‘Reprieve! Reprieve!’ The king
has found out the hero is innocent, and has sent the messenger with
the reprieve; he gets there barely in time. It’s always like that in
stories. This is like that! Is Ichabod the king’s messenger? But I
don’t dare be glad till after he has told the lawyers what he knows.
Let’s wait till daddy’s had him down to their office and they say we’re
all right. _Then_ let’s raise the roof!”

It needed no more than a suggestion that everything might not be all
right to quiet the little girls; it would be worse to be disappointed
than not to have hoped, as it always is.

Mr. Hawthorne went away to the city in the earliest train that left
Greenacres in the morning. He would not return until the second day,
and the four children were in difficulties with the intervening time.

How to fill the weary hours till they could know positively that the
cruel parting was not to be--they would not consider Ichabod Rudd’s
testimony being useless to the Hawthornes--was a hard question to solve.

Prue withdrew herself from her playmates. She said she “did not want to
see Mark till she knew that she could see him right along.” She set her
bureau drawers in apple-pie order, though they did not need tidying;
Prue was an orderly child. She got her mother to give her long-promised
lessons in cutting and putting together a middy blouse--altogether,
Prudence filled in her time in ways so useful as to be absorbing,
which kept her from fretting too much and gave her the pleasant sense
of being “womanly” under affliction of mind.

Isabel, on the other hand, haunted Mark’s footsteps. She was not
capable of thinking of anything else than of his loss, and now that in
so short a time she was to know whether or not she should lose him, now
that there was likelihood of keeping him, she could bear the strain
of waiting only by keeping him in sight, and dogged his footsteps as
Bunkie followed hers.

Poppy did not bear the delay at all. It had to be put up with, but she
did not _bear_ it; she fumed her way through the two days, getting so
cross that even Motherkins herself, so patient and understanding, found
it hard to excuse her, though she knew that the child’s nerves were on
edge.

But Mark, sunny, even-tempered Mark, would not admit that there was
anything to worry over. He alone of the four was his natural self while
his father was gone to get the evidence that was going to make such a
tremendous difference in his life.

With Pincushion on his shoulder, where she best loved to be, Mark went
calmly about his work and play.

“No good fussing, Isa Bell,” he said, smiling into Isa’s worried eyes
and using the twist of her name which he had invented by way of caress.

“You don’t care, Mark Jack-in-the-Box!” Isabel reproached him.

“Don’t I, though! Maybe I care too much to dare to begin to be afraid
it will come out wrong,” said Mark, and Isa caught a note in the boy’s
voice that betrayed that his anxiety was intense.

When the train was due on which Mr. Hawthorne’s return was hoped for,
Poppy went down to the end of the driveway and climbed up on the stone
post. There she sat like a statue, eyes set rigidly, looking in the
direction from which Mr. Hawthorne would come, although it was long
before he could appear.

Isabel and Prue had come up to the Hawthorne house to be there when the
decision of their fate was made known. They and Mark prowled up and
down, from room to room, unable to keep still. Motherkins tried to hem
a napkin, but her hands trembled and her thread knotted a great deal;
her sewing was not a success.

[Illustration: “WE’RE ALL TOGETHER, FOREVER AND FOR AYE,” THEY SANG.]

At last Poppy came tearing into the house.

“They’ve come! They’ve come!” she shouted. “Ichybod’s along. _Oh_,
gosh!”

Everybody who heard her echoed what Poppy meant when she exclaimed:
“_Oh_, gosh!” It didn’t sound prayerful, but Poppy’s feeling when she
said it made it a prayer for good news.

“Hello, daddy!” shouted Mark, without turning to see the expression on
his father’s face. If he were the bearer of ill-tidings Mark wanted one
cheerful greeting to reach him before his family knew it; afterward no
one would be able to speak quite cheerfully.

But as Gilbert Hawthorne came into the room, followed by queer little
Ichabod Lemuel Rudd, before any of the children had ventured to look at
him, Motherkins cried:

“Oh, Gilbert! Oh, my son!”

Then the children turned to see. Motherkins sat erect, leaning forward
in her chair, her work fallen, her hands clasped, her face radiant.

One glance at Mr. Hawthorne, and they all knew the gist of what he had
to tell. He looked triumphantly young and happy; his eyes were beaming.
He strode over and caught up little Motherkins, as he might have swung
Poppy, high in his arms.

“Surest thing in the world, Motherkins!” he cried, laughing in joyous
excitement. “Ichabod told what he knew, and the lawyers cross-examined
him--Maurice Ditson’s fellows were present, too--and he couldn’t be
tripped up; besides, he had his proofs! And Ditson’s lawyers advised
him to drop it as quick, and considerably quicker, than he could!
He should be grateful not to be prosecuted for attempted felony. Of
course, nobody wants to bother with him, but it’s not a pretty thing to
have known about a man that he has tried to steal!”

“I wouldn’t of told,” said Ichabod, in a worried voice, “but I knew my
dear old friend, the kindest friend a man ever had, would have wanted
me to. He’d have blamed me if I hadn’t. I wish Maurice wasn’t his son;
I wish his name wasn’t Ditson! But often and often his father wished
the same. He was a sore trial to his father, a sorrow that ate right
into him. I know he’d say I must stop his doing any more harm, if I
could.”

“Surely he would! Whether we were to gain or lose by it, I should say
the same, you faithful Ichabod!” said Motherkins, touching the queer
little man’s arm, and as he revered Motherkins beyond all words, this
consoled him for the pain of doing something that distressed him to do.

“And we are safe, Gilbert dear?” she added, turning to her son.

“Completely safe, and for always,” said Mr. Gilbert. “Mark, old
chum-son, I haven’t spoken to you. Good news, laddie; everything is
all right.”

“Pretty good to hear, daddy,” said Mark. “I’m too glad to know how glad
I am.”

Isabel, Prue and Poppy had stood motionless, soundless, listening and
watching.

Now Isabel stirred, pale from excitement, and seized Prue around the
neck, hugging her till she choked her.

“They--are--not--going! They--are--not--going--away--at--all!” Isa said
slowly, in a sort of rapturous trance.

This set free Poppy’s pent-up emotion; she realized that what Isa said
was true.

With a shriek that made everybody jump, Poppy threw herself over on
her hands and cartwheeled all around the room and out of it before
Motherkins, a little shocked, could stop her. Out of the room she went
and down the hall. Then they heard her singing at the top of her really
wonderfully beautiful voice, the song growing fainter, and they knew
she was running around the house, just as Bunkie and Pincushion ran
when they wanted to have a celebration.

The words of her song reached them; they were simply these:

“Oh, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoopity whoopity whoop. And whoop, oh,
whoop, _oh_, whoop! Forever whoop, whoop, whoop, amen!”

“What we’re going to do,” announced Isabel after they had laughed at
Poppy, “is to trim this house all over with all the flowers we can get!
We’re going to take Hurrah--please, Motherkins!--and get flowers from
every one we can. And we’re just going to hang them all over Hawthorne
House to show it how we feel about it’s staying Hawthorne House.”

“Second the motion!” cried Mark, starting up ready to go.

“Oh, but, Isabel, Hurrah may meet paper in the road!” objected
Motherkins.

“Not in such a neat town as Greenacres! Oh, Motherkins, we took him
all the time before that one day when it happened, so please don’t be
afraid!” Isa pleaded.

“We must take some risks,” Mr. Hawthorne said, to Isa’s intense relief,
when his mother looked at him for an opinion. “We don’t have papers
flying around our streets; Isa is right. The children must have a vent,
little mother!”

So in a short time the buckboard, with its three girls and a boy,
started off to get a load of flowers. Poppy had thoughtfully taken
the clothes basket, and Mark played at juggling with a bushel basket,
seated on the end of the buckboard, facing outward and dangling his
slender legs, as he always did.

At the Wayne and the Lindsay houses there were many flowers, so many
that it seemed likely that the children could not pick them in time to
go farther.

Mrs. Lindsay had run across to her neighbor’s to enjoy the children’s
good news with her, and she said:

“Helen, we will gather all the flowers that we have, you and I, and
take them up to Hawthorne House, while the children go on begging for
more; shall we?”

And Mrs. Wayne had answered:

“Yes, Margaret; we couldn’t keep away, could we? Aren’t you quite
beside yourself to see dear little Mrs. Hawthorne with her last anxiety
forever laid at rest? The dear little soul! I’ve been so troubled over
it all!”

“Drive on, then, Merry Beggars, and ask all Greenacres to give you
blossoms!” cried Mrs. Lindsay, looking like a happy child herself.

Flowers! Isabel, Prue and Mark had to walk beside the buckboard,
there were so many! They had no expectation of what happened, but
everybody loved Motherkins, the whole town knew how sad her life had
been and rejoiced that another sorrow had not fallen upon her, so the
Greenacres women showed this feeling by stripping their gardens of all
their bloom to adorn Hawthorne House for its rejoicing.

Walking up the street, with Poppy’s red hair topping masses of red
blossoms in the buckboard abreast of them in the road, Isabel and Prue
met Kathie and Dolly coming around the corner of a side street, turning
in the direction in which they were going.

All four little girls stopped and looked at one another, half smiling,
hesitatingly, sheepishly. None of them had the slightest desire not to
speak, but no one knew whether the others felt like answering.

“Hello,” said Isabel, realizing that something must be done by
somebody; it would never do for every one to stand there always,
waiting for some one else to break the ice.

“Hello. Are you mad?” asked Kathie.

“We never were, so we’re not now,” said Prue reasonably.

“I was,” Kathie said, “but I’m over it. I’d like to make up.”

“We only wanted to know who it was went into that room; we only asked,”
Prue said unwisely.

“But if we get to talking about that we shall not make up,” Isabel
interposed.

“Call it made up and let it go at that,” Mark advised. “Every one
agreed?”

“Yes. Agreed!” the four little girls repeated.

“Come on up to the house. We’re going to trim it up and be glad. We
know now who it was climbed up into the Club Room; the same one who
took the coins and returned them; the queer little man we saw in the
woods. Oh, it is a wonderful story!” cried Isabel, taking Kathie’s arm,
who at once pulled it away to put it around Isabel’s waist in closer
token of reconciliation.

“Tell it,” Kathie said, and Isabel told it, frequently helped and
hindered by Prue’s and Mark’s additions, or Kathie and Dolly’s
exclamations.

“And we’re going to trim the house with flowers everywhere; in all the
rooms, anyway. It looks as though we had enough to trim all the trees
outside, but they don’t reach as far as you’d think when you see them
like that.” Isabel ended the story of the narrow escape and the queer
little man, with a gesture toward the buckboard, heaped high with
blossoms.

“There are our mothers with more!” cried Prue, as they turned into the
driveway and caught sight of Mrs. Wayne and Mrs. Lindsay on the lawn,
shaking out and assorting the baskets of flowers which they had got
Prue’s big brother to help them bring to Hawthorne House.

It was lucky that Kathie and Dolly had come up to the rejoicing. There
were such quantities of flowers to place! Everybody talked at once, but
it did not matter; nobody waited for, nor wanted a reply.

With amazing speed Hawthorne House was set abloom. In every room
there were flowers, masses of flowers, and over the front door, on
the ledge of its old-fashioned transom, Mr. Hawthorne had the bright
idea of setting bowls, from which long festoons of vines and blossoms
of nasturtiums made a glory that looked almost as if a bonfire were
blazing there.

At last it was done; Hawthorne House was abloom!

“Well, it truly does look glad!” sighed Isabel in profound contentment,
leaning her head, all ringed with her disordered dark hair, against her
mother.

“What shall we do with Ichabod Lemuel Rudd, children?” asked Mr.
Hawthorne. “Quick before he comes! He is alone in the world. Mr. Ditson
looked after him, but since his death the queer, devoted little chap
has gone solitary, with a lonely heart. And he saved us from the loss
of this house and one another. Who can suggest a plan for him, to be
told him when he comes back?”

“I can!” said Poppy instantly. “Adopt him, like you did me, and we’ll
give up the Club Room, and it can be his, and he can shin up outside
whenever he wants to.”

Mark laughed, but he said: “Pops hit it! There’s room enough for the
queer little man in this great place, and we all like him a whole lot
now.”

“Mother?” queried Mr. Hawthorne, turning to little Motherkins.

Motherkins smiled her placid smile, eyes and lips warm with it.

“I adopted Bunkie when he was hurt--to be sure, Isabel took him
afterward--but I did adopt him! And Poppy, too. And then I had no home
that was my own, and no certainty of enough for myself. I think we
ought to give a share of our happiness to Ichabod Lemuel Rudd--I’m sure
he’ll give us as much as we do him, in another way! And think of the
pleasure of calling his name!”

“Trust Motherkins to cover up her goodness with a laugh!” cried her son.

“A laugh doesn’t cover up goodness; I think it often proves it,
Gilbert--that kind of laughter!” said Mrs. Lindsay.

“He’s coming; tell him, Mark,” murmured Motherkins.

“Ichabod, we--I mean Motherkins and my father--well, all of us--oh,
gracious! Say, Ichabod, we want you to live with us, here, you know;
take that room we had to play in, where you climbed in and slept, you
know. Live with us right along; will you?” Mark said rapidly after he
had hesitated for a beginning; he blushed painfully, embarrassed by his
office.

“Oh, jiminy cats! Oh, what’ll I say? I--I--I appreciate it,” said poor
Ichabod, and burst into tears. He was indeed a lonely, longing little
creature, and it seemed to him that heaven had almost opened when Mark
voiced a desire on the part of these dear people to befriend him.

“I’ll do things; I’ll help; you shall never be sorry,” he managed to
say, gulping down great sobs.

“Do you remember, Prue and Poppy, the day we opened the Club Room, we
said it was just opening it, and we didn’t know what would go into it?”
whispered Isabel, drawing Prue and Poppy’s heads together, the better
to hear her. “It was true, wasn’t it? Isn’t it nice to have the dear
little queer man, who so needs it and all of us, go into it?”

“I feel that there is ice cream somewhere!” said Mr. Hawthorne,
sniffing the air. “I smell ice cream and beau-ti-ful cream puffs
somewhere! Come on and find them, all of you! I guess there’s an ice
cream freezer full, and that it holds four gallons--one vanilla, one
chocolate, one strawberry, one caramel! Come and see how well I can
guess!”

“Because you know!” shouted Poppy with shrill ecstasy. “Oh, you great
Mark’s-daddy! You treated!”

“It’s the house,” Mr. Daddé corrected her solemnly. “The house treats
us all--treats us the best it can. Let’s cheer the house gratefully,
thankful it’s to hold us all together.”

The cheers arose, loud and prolonged, and Bunkie and Semper Fidelis
barked their parts in them, while Cushla-machree, alias Pincushion, ran
up a tree to be on the safe side, in case it meant danger.

Mark caught Isabel’s hand; she understood and took hold of Prue, Prue
of Poppy, Poppy of Kathie, Kathie of Dolly, Dolly of Mrs. Lindsay,
she of Mrs. Wayne, and Isabel completed the circle by taking Mr.
Hawthorne’s hand in her other hand.

“Oh, gracious, there’s Ichabod!” cried Poppy, and widened the circle to
let in the queer little man, just as they had widened their home circle
to take him in.

Then, with shrieks of joy, they danced around and around Motherkins,
and Isabel put the meaning of the dance into words:

“We’re all together, all together, all together forever and for aye,”
she sang.

The others joined in her song, and thus they wheeled and danced,
grown-ups and children, quite dementedly singing the words that mean so
much when people love one another:

“We are all together, all together, all together forever and for aye!”




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78419 ***