The Corner House Girls on a Tour

“Why, about Mr. Collinger’s car and that Joe Dawson fellow. My! what mean people we do manage to meet.”

“And a little while ago you were thinking what good folks we had met,” laughed Neale. “But you are mistaken, Aggie. I spoke to the sheriff about Saleratus Joe and his mate and the lost car. Nothing doing. I’ve asked everybody else we have talked with – the blacksmith and Luke Shepard and all – about that bunch.”

“Oh! have you, Neale?” cried Mrs. Heard. “And has nothing come of it?”

“Well, Mrs. Heard,” said the boy, “all trace of that car and those fellows seems to have ended right there at the Higgins’ farm – where the Gypsy king saw them for the last time. That’s the way it looks to me.”

“Oh, dear me!” sighed Agnes. “I wish you’d have let me hunt in that barn for the car.”

“Or me,” put in Sammy, with confidence.

“Say! you two give me a pain,” cried Neale, and refused to talk about it any further.

They made a fine run that day, getting on good roads again, and they spent the night with friends of Mrs. Heard’s who had been on the lookout for them for two days. A letter was waiting for the chaperone from her nephew, stating that the police were looking for Saleratus Joe and another man in connection with the disappearance of the Maybrouke runabout, and that the information she had sent might aid in the arrest of the automobile thieves.

“Well,” said Agnes, “of course I hope the police catch them; but it would be fun if we could bring about their arrest and find the machine, too, Neale.”

“Don’t let it worry you, Aggie,” he advised. “There isn’t any reward offered, so you’d have your work for your pains.”

Just the same, neither of them forgot the matter, and it was a topic of conversation between them, now and then, throughout the entire tour.

They went on as far as Fort Kritchton, and spent the week-end at the Monolith Hotel there, to which their trunks had been forwarded. The car needed some slight repairs, and the girls found pleasant friends. This point was to be the farthest they expected to travel from Milton.

Neale found a party of boys camping up in the woods above the hotel, and he enjoyed himself, too; but he had to take Sammy along with him most of the time, and he declared to Agnes that if he ever went anywhere again and had his choice of taking Sammy or a flea, he would choose the flea!

“You have no more idea of where to find him from one moment to another than a flea,” growled the older boy. “I’m coming to the old bachelor’s belief in the treatment and bringing up of boys.”

“What is that?” asked the amused Agnes, who had had her own experiences with Sammy Pinkney.

“Why, the crabbed old bachelor, who had six small nephews, declared he believed all boys should be taken at about three years of age and put in barrels, the heads nailed on, and that they should be fed through the bungholes.”

“Goodness!” laughed Agnes. “And when they grew up?”

“‘Drive in the bungs,’” declared Neale, seriously. “That was his creed and I am about ready to subscribe to it.”

Sammy, however, had a good time. He confided to Mrs. Heard and Ruth that he had never had such a good time in his life. He got letters and money from his mother and father, just as the Corner House girls did, likewise, from home; and he was actually growing sturdy looking as well as brown.

“Whether this tour does anybody else good or not, Sammy P. is being helped,” declared Mrs. Heard.

“‘Sammy P. Buttinsky,’” sniffed Agnes. “Such a plague. I believe his mother will lose ten years of her age in appearance during this time of Sammy’s absence. She certainly ought to be our friend for life.”

After all, however, they none of them could really be “mad at” Sammy, as Tess said. He was a plague; but there was something really attractive about him, too.

“He is the most un-moral child I ever heard of,” Ruth said. “He seems to have stepped right out of the stone age.”

Mrs. Heard smiled at that statement. “My dear girl,” she said, “most boys are that way. Philly Collinger was – and look at him now,” for Mrs. Heard was very proud indeed of the county surveyor. “I think there is one very helpful thing that you Corner House girls are missing.”

“What is that, Mrs. Heard?” asked Ruth, in curiosity.

“You have missed having a brother or two. They are great educators for the feminine mind,” laughed the lady.

However, Sammy behaved himself pretty well – considering – all the time the touring party remained at the Monolith Hotel. The little girls whom Tess and Dot played with looked somewhat askance at Sammy, for his boasted intention of following in the sanguinary wake of Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, and Sir Henry Morgan, set him as a creature apart from the rest of boykind. In fact, among the little folk, Sammy Pinkney was quite the sensation for several days. Then little Eddie Haflinger developed a carbuncle on the back of his neck and Sammy’s swashbuckling tendencies rather paled before the general interest in Eddie’s stiff neck.

However, everybody had a good time at Fort Kritchton; but the “call of the wild,” as Agnes expressed it, was the stronger. They had had so many adventures – pleasant as well as disconcerting – on the road, that even Mrs. Heard was glad when the time came to leave the resort.

“Let’s send our trunks right back to Milton,” Agnes said. “No more ‘Fluffy Ruffles’ for mine till we get home. Let’s rough it.”

Their bags in the automobile really did contain all they would need, so it was agreed to live in plain and serviceable garments for the rest of the trip.

“If we run short of clean linen and handkerchiefs,” said Ruth, “we shall have to stop and do our washing in a brook. How about that?”

“I suppose you’ll want to stretch lines over the auto and dry your clothes as we travel,” growled Neale O’Neil. “Then if we meet some fidgety old farmer-woman with a more fidgety horse —good-night!”

“I wish,” Agnes declared, “that we had brought a tent with us – a nice one like the Shepards have. Wouldn’t it have been fun to camp out every night – just like those Gypsies?”

“How about it when it rained?” asked Ruth.

“Well, we’ve been out in one rainstorm – and we’re neither sugar nor salt,” said her sister, sticking to her guns.

“But never again – if I can help it,” cried Mrs. Heard. “It is all right for you young folks; but my blood is not so young as yours; nor is my appetite for adventure and what you call ‘fun’ quite so keen as it used to be.”

It was a fact. The young folks only laughed at that memorable experience when they were overtaken by the storm. It was all what Agnes called “fun.”

The touring party planned a roundabout way home to Milton, in order to see a part of the country that they had not before driven through.

“And we’ll take the good roads, too. I understand more about this map and guide book than I did,” proclaimed Neale O’Neil.

However, at one point they agreed to leave the better traveled roads so as to spend another night with the crossroads blacksmith and “Mother.” And they half hoped to meet the Shepards near there, also.

“That’ll bring us around past the Higgins farm, too,” Neale said, thoughtfully.

“Oh, Neale! I want to take a look into that barn myself,” cried Agnes.

“Pshaw!” responded her boy friend. “If that car of Mr. Collinger’s was ever there, Saleratus Joe and his chum have got it away long since, of course.”

But Agnes was hopeful. She usually was of a sanguine mind.

CHAPTER XXI – THE UNEXPECTED HAPPENS

The automobile party did not travel all day long – whirling over the dusty roads, past flower-spangled fields, or through pleasant woods. No, indeed.

Little folks especially – like Tess and Dot and Sammy – cannot sit patiently, even in an upholstered touring car, hour after hour. It was pleasant to ride so smoothly through the lovely country; it was nicer still to halt by the wayside and hunt for adventure.

Tom Jonah, who was by nature a tramp, enjoyed the excursions away from the automobile as much as did the children – and he was never again off their trail at such times. If Tess and Dot and Sammy left the party, somebody would be sure to speak to the old dog, and up he would get in order to follow the children. He had not forgotten the occasion when the two smallest Corner House girls had escaped his watchful eye. So Tom Jonah was what the slangy Sammy Pinkney called “Johnny on the Spot” one day when something quite exciting happened.

They had stopped beside the road for lunch, as they almost always did, and as soon as they had eaten the children were anxious to explore.

The almost dry bed of a water-course attracted their attention, and as they could step from rock to rock, and so keep their feet dry, they started up this ravine. Sammy, of course, led and recklessly leaped from rock to rock with the assurance of a goat. The little girls were agile enough; but Tess gave much attention to Dot, and the latter had to be sure that the Alice-doll got into no difficulty.