Ruth Fielding At Sunrise Farm; What Became of the Raby Orphans

Old Mammy, who presided over the doctor’s old-fashioned establishment, had spied the girls and almost immediately the tinkling of ice in a pitcher announced the approach of one of Mammy’s pickaninny grandchildren with a supply of her famous lemonade and a plate of cakes.

“Mammy said you done git hungery waitin’,” declared the grinning, kinky-haired child who presented herself with the refreshments. “An’ a drink on one o’ dese yere dusty days is allus welcome, misses.”

Then she giggled, and darted away to the lower regions of the house, leaving the two chums to enjoy the goodies. Helen was cheerfully curious, and had to go looking about the big office, peeking into the bookcases, looking at the “specimens” in bottles along the shelf, trying to spell out and understand the Latin labels on the jars of drugs.

“Miss Nosey!” whispered Ruth, admonishingly.

“There you go! hitting my nose again,” sighed Helen. And then she jumped back and almost screamed. For in fooling with the knob of a narrow closet door, it had snapped open, the door swung outward, and Helen found herself facing an articulated skeleton!

“Goodness gracious me!” exclaimed Helen.

“Oh, no,” giggled Ruth. “It’s not you at all. It’s somebody else.”

“Funny!” scoffed Helen. Then she laughed, too. “It’s somebody the doctor’s awfully choice of. Do you suppose it was his first patient?”

“Hush! Suppose he heard you?”

“He’d laugh,” returned Helen, knowing the kindly old physician too well to be afraid of him in any case. “Now, behave! Don’t say a word. I’m going to dress him up.”

“What?” gasped Ruth.

“You’ll see,” said the daring Helen, and she seized an old hat of the doctor’s from the top of the bookcase and set it jauntily upon the grinning skull.

“My goodness! doesn’t he look terrible that way? Oh! I’ll shut the door. He wiggles all over —just as though he were alive!”

Just then they heard the doctor bidding his caller good-bye, or Helen might have done some other ridiculous thing. The old gentleman came in, rubbing his hands, and with his eyes twinkling. He was a man who had never really grown old, and he liked to hear the girls tell of their school experiences, chuckling over their scrapes and antics with much delight.

“And how has my Goody Two-sticks gotten along this year?” he asked, for he was much interested in Mercy Curtis and her improvement, both physically and mentally. Had it not been for the doctor, Mercy might never have gotten out of her wheelchair, or gone to Briarwood Hall.

“She’s going to beat us all,” Helen declared, with enthusiasm. “Isn’t she, Ruth?”

“She will if we don’t work pretty hard,” admitted the girl of the Red Mill, who was hoping herself to be finally among the first few members of her class at the Hall. “But I would rather see Mercy win first place, I believe, than anybody else – unless it is you, Helen.”

“Don’t you fret,” laughed Helen. “You’ll never see little me at the head of the class – and you know it.”

The two friends did not bore the physician by staying too long, but after he bade them good-bye at the door, Helen ran down the path giggling.

“What do you suppose he’ll say when he finds that hat on the skeleton?” she demanded, her eyes dancing.

“He’ll say, ‘That Helen Cameron was in here – that explains it!’ You can’t fool Dr. Davison,” laughed Ruth.

Ruth had taken Helen into her confidence ere this about the strange runaway, Sadie Raby, and during their call at the doctor’s, she had asked that gentleman if he had seen the tramping girl, after the latter had left the Red Mill. But he had not. Oddly enough, however, Ruth found some trace of Sadie at Mercy’s house, where the girls in the automobile next went to call.

Mercy’s mother had taken the girl in for a night, and fed her. The latter had asked Mr. Curtis about the trains going west, but he had sold Sadie no ticket.

“She was very reticent,” Mrs. Curtis told Ruth. “She was so independent and capable-acting, in spite of her tender years, that I did not feel as though it was my place to try to stop her. She seemed to have some destination in view, but she would not tell me what it was.”

“I wonder if that wasn’t what Aunt Alvirah meant?” queried Ruth, thoughtfully, as she and Helen drove away. “That Sadie is awfully independent. I wish you had seen her.”

“Maybe she’s going to find her twin brothers that she told you about,” suggested Helen. “I wish I had seen her.”

“And maybe you’ve guessed it!” cried Ruth. “But that doesn’t help us find her, for she didn’t say where Willie and Dickie had been taken when they were removed from the orphanage.”

“Gracious, Ruthie!” exclaimed her chum, laughing. “You’re always worrying over somebody else’s troubles.”

CHAPTER VII – WHAT TOM CAMERON SAW

Of course, Ruth was not at all sure that she could do anything for Sadie Raby if she found her. Perhaps, as Helen said, she was fond of shouldering other people’s burdens.

It did seem to the girl of the Red Mill as though it were a very dreadful thing for Sadie to be wandering about the country all alone, and without means to feed herself, or get anything like proper shelter.

In her secret heart Ruth was thinking that she might have been as wild and neglected if Uncle Jabez, with all his crankiness, had not taken her in and given her a home at the Red Mill.

They stopped and saw Ruth’s old school teacher and then, it being past mid-afternoon, Helen turned the headlights of the car toward home again. As the machine slid so smoothly along the road toward the Lumano and the Red Mill, Ruth suddenly uttered a cry and pointed ahead. A huge dog had leaped out of a side road and stood, barring their way and barking.

“Reno! dear old fellow!” Ruth said, as Helen shut off the power. “He knows us.”

“Tom must be near, then. That’s the Wilkins Corner road,” Helen observed.

As the car came to a halt and the big mastiff tried to jump in and caress the girls with his tongue – poor fellow! he knew no better, though Helen scolded him – Ruth stood up and shouted for her friend’s twin brother.

“Tom! Tom! A rescue! a rescue! We’re being eaten up by a great four-legged beast – get down, Reno! Oh, don’t!”

She fell back in her seat, laughing merrily, and keeping the big dog off with both hands. A cheery whistle came from the wood. Reno started and turned to look. He had had his master back for only a day, but Tom’s word was always law to the big mastiff.

“Down, sir!” sang out Tom Cameron, and then he burst into view.

“Oh, Tom! what a sight you are!” gasped Ruth.

“My goodness me!” exclaimed his sister. “Have you been in a fight?”

“Down, Reno!” commanded her brother again. He came striding toward them. If he had not been so disheveled, anybody could have seen that, dressed in his sister’s clothes, and she in his, one could scarcely have told them apart. A boy and a girl never could look more alike than Tom and Helen Cameron.

“What has happened to you?” demanded Ruth, quite as anxious as Tom’s own sister.

“Look like I’d been monkeying with the buzz-saw – eh?” he demanded, but a little ruefully. “Say! I’ve had a time. If it hadn’t been for Reno – ”

“Why, Reno has hurt himself, too!” exclaimed Ruth, hopping out of the car and for the first time noticing that there was a cake of partially dried blood on the dog’s shoulder.

“He isn’t hurt much. And neither am I. Only my clothes torn – ”

“And your face scratched!” ejaculated Helen.

“Oh – well —that’s nothing. That was an accident. She didn’t mean to do it.”

“Who didn’t mean to do it? What are you talking about?” screamed his sister, at last fully aroused. “You’ve been in some terrible danger, Tom Cameron.”

“No, I haven’t,” returned Tom, beginning to grin again. “Just been playing the chivalrous knight.”