The Corner House Girls on a Tour

“Don’ yo’ chillun run down nothin’ – nor run up nothin’ – w’ile yo’ is gone. I dunno ‘bout dat contraption. Ah hopes yo’ git back widout more’n a dozen laigs broke.”

“Goodness, Uncle Rufus!” cried Agnes. “What do you think we are – centipedes?”

“Dunno nottin’ ‘bout dem ’er,” declared the old colored man, chuckling. “Don’t hab center-pigs in Virginny, whar I done come from. Dey uses razorbacks fo’ de mos’ part in makin’ po’k.”

The car started amid a gale of laughter at this. Mrs. MacCall waved her cap from an open second story window. Some of the neighbors took a deep interest in their departure, too. It was certainly a fact that the Corner House girls had suddenly become of much importance since it was known that they had a car.

Ruth and the others looked up at Aunt Sarah Maltby’s windows at the front of the house as the car jounced delightfully across the tracks on Main Street. But the old lady kept her curtains drawn. She would not even look out at them.

They sped along so easily, the strong springs and shock-absorbers taking the jar at the crossings, that even Ruth sighed ecstatically. Agnes murmured:

“This is life. Oh, Neale! it’s the most delightful way to travel.”

“Is it better than riding horses in a circus, Neale?” demanded Tess, from the tonneau.

Neale laughed. He had been circus born and bred, and the little girls still believed that such a life must be one round of pleasure and excitement. They never could understand why Neale had run away from Twomley & Sorber’s Herculean Circus and Menagerie.

Suddenly Agnes, the volatile, thought of another thing. “Oh, me! Oh, my!” she cried. “What ever should we do?”

“Goodness! what’s the matter with you now?” demanded her older sister.

“Suppose our auto should be stolen like Mr. Collinger’s!”

“Don’t say that, Aggie!” wailed Tess.

“They couldn’t steal our auto,” declared Dot, with emphasis.

“Why not?” asked Neale, curiously.

“’Cause Tom Jonah wouldn’t let ’em,” said the smallest girl.

“Then we should have brought Tom Jonah with us,” Agnes said. “We’ll have to let him watch the car all the time.”

“Mr. Collinger’s car was taken right away from the front of the County Court House. Those thieves were bold,” said Ruth. “I heard Mr. Howbridge say that there was something behind that affair. He doubts if the car was stolen by any common thieves.”

“Common or uncommon,” cried Agnes, “we don’t want ours stolen!”

“Better set a watch at the garage door at night,” chuckled Neale.

They were out in the country now and had entered a smooth, but “woodsy,” road that passed through a rather thick forest. The road was very narrow in places and there were only a few houses along the track for some miles.

Suddenly they sighted just ahead a basket phaeton and a brown, fat pony hitched to it. Neale slowed down quickly, for the turnout was standing still. The driver was a middle-aged woman with a good many fussy looking ribbons in her bonnet and otherwise dressed quite gaily. The fat brown pony was standing still, flicking flies with his tail and wagging his ears comfortably. He was in the very middle of the road and by no possibility could the car be steered around the turnout.

The woman looked around at the car and its passengers and her face displayed a most exasperated expression.

“I don’t know what you’ll do!” she cried, in a rather shrill voice. “I can’t make him budge. He’s been standing here this way for fifteen minutes, and sometimes he balks for hours!”

CHAPTER II – WHAT MRS. HEARD HEARD

“Can’t you back, Neale?” asked Ruth Kenway, doubtfully. “We really don’t want to stay here all day.”

“Or wait upon the pleasure of a ridiculous beast like that,” snapped Agnes, more than a little exasperated herself.

The woman looked around again. She had a pleasant face, and Tess smiled at her. Tess knew that the lady must feel a good deal worse than they did about it.

“You don’t know how ridiculous he is,” said the woman, hopelessly. “He may start any minute; then again he may stay here until he gets hungry. And he’s only just eaten his breakfast.”

“He looks as if he’d live as long without eating as a camel can go without drinking,” chuckled Neale O’Neil.

“It’s no laughing matter,” protested Agnes. “We want to get somewhere.”

“You can’t want to get somewhere worse than I do, my dear,” said the woman, with a sigh. “And only think! I have sat behind this pony hours and hours during the past ten years.”

“Can’t – can’t he be cured?” asked Tess, doubtfully.

“He’s a real pretty pony, I think,” said Dot.

“‘Handsome is as handsome does,’ Mrs. Mac would say,” Ruth declared. “Is there no way of turning, Neale?” she repeated.

“I don’t see how. We don’t want to scratch the car all up in those bushes and on those stumps. And if we back to where the road is wider we’ll have to back for half a mile.”

“A trolley car is lots better than an auto, then,” declared Dot, with conviction.

“Why, Dottie! how can you say that?” cried Tess, in utter disapproval.

“’Cause if it gets stuck the motorman can go to the back end and run it just as well as at the front end,” said the smallest Corner House girl, promptly.

“Some kid that!” murmured Neale, while the others laughed. “Have you tried the whip, ma’am?” he asked of the woman in the basket phaeton.

“I’ve broken it on him,” confessed the woman, shaking her head. “He doesn’t even feel it. The flies bother him more than a whip. He is just the most tantalizing brute of a horse that ever was. Jonas! Get up!”

Jonas stood still. He merely flicked flies and wagged his ears. He was really the most peaceful animate object visible in the whole landscape.

The Corner House girls, since coming to Milton to live in the old dwelling that Uncle Peter Stower had left them at his death, had enjoyed many adventures, but few more ridiculous than this. Here they sat in their new, high-powered car, ready and anxious to spin over the country roads to their goal – a famous picnicking grounds fifty miles from Milton – and a little old fat brown pony, with a stubborn disposition and a cropped mane, held them up as certainly as though he had been a highway robber!

The four young Kenways – Ruth, Agnes, Tess and Dot – with Aunt Sarah Maltby (who really was only an “adopted” aunt) had been very poor indeed before Uncle Peter Stower had died and left the girls the bulk of his estate and a small legacy to Aunt Sarah.

Mr. Howbridge, the administrator of the estate and the girls’ guardian, had come to the Kenways’ poor tenement in the city where they lived, and had taken them to the old Corner House – quite an old mansion overlooking the Parade Ground in Milton, and supposed by some of the neighbors to be “haunted.”

How the girls laid the “garret ghost” and how they proved their right and title to Uncle Peter’s estate against the claims of a certain Mrs. Treble (known as “Mrs. Trouble” to the rather pert Agnes) and her little girl, “Double-Trouble,” is told in the first volume of this series, entitled “The Corner House Girls.”

Afterward the little “Adamless Eden” on the corner of Willow and Main Streets is trespassed upon by a boy who has run away from a circus to get an education – Neale O’Neil. He proves to be a thoroughly likable boy, and even Ruth and Tess, who do not much approve of the opposite sex, are prone to like Neale.

In “The Corner House Girls at School” Neale becomes a fixture in the neighborhood, living with Mr. Con Murphy, the little old cobbler on the street back of the Stower place, and doing chores for the Corner House girls and other neighbors to help support himself while he attends school.

The girls extend their acquaintance widely during this first school year at Milton, and when summer comes they visit Pleasant Cove, where they befriend Rosa and June Wildwood, two Southern girls, and meanwhile have adventures galore along the shore. Indeed, “The Corner House Girls Under Canvas” introduces many new friends to both the girls themselves and to the reader, notable among whom is Tom Jonah, who, although only a dog, is a thorough gentleman.

The girls’ friendliness to all living creatures gathers about them, as is natural, a galaxy of pets, including a rapidly growing menagerie of cats, the dog in question, a goat, and (this is Agnes’ inclusion) Sammy Pinkney, the little boy who is determined to be a pirate when he grows up.