The Corner House Girls on a Tour

“I haven’t the least idea,” returned the boy. “But I know what I’m going to do.”

“What is that?” she asked.

“Hang to ’em! Hang just like a bulldog to a tramp’s coat-tail,” declared Neale O’Neil.

At that moment the little station at Hickton came into sight. There were two men, talking excitedly, standing directly in the middle of the highway, and, when they sighted these two men, the thieves in the runabout slowed down.

CHAPTER XXV – WELCOME HOME

“Oh, Neale!” gasped Agnes, hanging to his arm as the big car came roaring down to the Hickton railway station. “Oh, Neale! that’s that horrid Brady man.”

It was plain to be seen that one of the men in the middle of the road was the Milton politician, Jim Brady. But the other man —

“It’s the surveyor. I know him,” whispered Neale, shutting off the engine. “Mr. Philip Collinger, Mrs. Heard’s nephew. It’s all over now but the shouting, Aggie. I bet he doesn’t let that car of his get away again.”

Indeed, the two men from Milton had stopped the runabout, and the freckled-faced fellow and the ugly man with him were caught, red-handed.

“Get out of my car!” Neale and Agnes heard Mr. Collinger command the two rascals. “I’d like to know how you got it again? I know that it was in the hands of friends of mine yesterday. This henchman of yours, Brady, is a born thief.”

“He’s a born fool,” growled the fat man, mopping his bald brow and glaring at the cringing Joe.

The other fellow was quietly slipping around the corner of the railroad station. He was not going to be present during this altercation.

“He’s something besides a fool,” said Mr. Collinger sternly. “It’s you, Brady, who have shown a lack of wit. I know very well you put this fellow up to taking my car because you thought I was carrying those road maps around in it.”

“You think a whole lot, Collinger,” snarled the big man. “But you can’t prove a thing.”

“No. Not unless Joe, here, turns state’s evidence, and he wouldn’t dare do that. I know the sort of hold you have on such fellows, Brady. But, nevertheless, you are the goat in this matter.”

“Huh?” queried the politician.

Mr. Collinger went to his car, drawing a bunch of keys from his pocket as he did so. He selected a flat key and quickly inserted it in a tiny aperture in the face-panel of the seat – an aperture that the uninitiated would never dream was a keyhole.

To the amazement of all, the county surveyor slipped aside the panel and displayed a shallow closet filled with rolls of parchment.

“Just what I thought, Brady,” he said, with scorn. “You had ’em in the stolen auto all the time. Now the time has come to deliver them to the commission and I sha’n’t carry them any more. Now, who was the fool, Brady?”

But the big man was stamping away to the platform. Saleratus Joe slunk after him like a whipped cur.

“You are two of the young folks my aunt is traveling with, I take it?” said Mr. Collinger, turning to Neale and Agnes. “And I guess you were chasing those fellows.”

“Yes, Mr. Collinger,” Agnes said. “And they would not have got away from us.”

“I am sure they would not,” he returned, smiling. “Tell me about it.”

So the story was told, and then Mr. Collinger decided to drive back to the Higgins place and see Mrs. Heard before starting for Milton. He was warm in his praise of the Corner House girls and Neale, as well as of Sammy Pinkney, for what they had done toward aiding him in securing the car.

The girls did not understand fully the reasons underlying the stealing of the runabout, or why Mr. Collinger did not intend to prosecute Jim Brady and the freckled-faced man.

“I wouldn’t make anything out of it,” the surveyor said. “And I have the car back and, best of all, the maps and papers they wanted to get from me. I am satisfied.”

He remained to dinner with the touring party, and then started back for Milton. But it was not the intention of the Corner House girls and their party to go home immediately.

They spent four more days on the road – days of pure delight for all the Kenway sisters, for even Sammy behaved well during that part of the tour.

Yet, after all, they were glad to get home when the car rolled up to the Willow Street gate of the Stower homestead. Mrs. MacCall and Linda ran out of the gate to welcome them. Uncle Rufus hobbled around from the garden, swinging his tattered straw hat and cheering. Even Aunt Sarah Maltby appeared on the porch to welcome somewhat grimly her nieces and Neale O’Neil.

Then, from across the street came Mrs. Pinkney, with a delighted scream of welcome.

“Oh, Sammy! How you’ve grown!” she declared, when she had hugged and kissed the would-be pirate, and then stood off to look at him.

“Huh! that’s Ruth’s fault,” he said. “She made me wash so often. You know, watering things like that is what makes ’em grow.”

“This Corner House is the loneliest place in the world without you lassies in it,” declared Mrs. MacCall, having hugged the four girls in rotation, and then started all over again.

Aunt Sarah expressed herself as glad to see her nieces again. “As long as you haven’t been killed in that automobile, I presume we should all be thankful,” she said. “But I did not expect to see you all return with whole bones.”

“And one time, when me and Tess were lost, and before we found the Gypsies,” confessed Dot, “I thought that funny bone in my back was broke, Aunt Sarah. But it got mended again.”

There was a regular “party” of all the Corner House girls’ young friends soon after their return, and the adventures of the tour by automobile were related to everybody.

Ruth could remember all about the beautiful scenery they saw and the queer old inns they stopped at. She really had gained much entertainment from the trip.

Agnes’ mind was full of the incidents of the stolen automobile, and how it had been found, and how she and Neale had chased the thieves to the Hickton station where the car was captured. To hear her tell it, it had been a most exciting time.

Dot’s mind seemed full of the Gypsies and her adventures with Tess when they were lost and had slept all night under a tree. “And that old owl that shouted at us and wanted to know our names,” she said. “Just as plain as could be, he hollered: ‘Who? Who? Who?’”

But Tess was thoughtful. Somebody asked her what she was thinking of.

“Why, I’ll tell you,” said the next to the smallest Corner House girl. “I can’t get over Neale being so – so stingy. I’ve asked him, and I’ve asked him, and he just won’t.”

“He won’t what?”

“Why, he won’t tell me what he whispered into the ear of Mrs. Heard’s brown pony to make him go. And I think he might!”

THE END