Billie Bradley and Her Classmates: or, The Secret of the Locked Tower

Luckily the children were not heavy, being thin almost to emaciation, or the girls could never have made their goal. As it was, they had to stop several times and set the children down on the ice to rest.

And more than once the treacherous ice cracked under their feet, frightening them horribly. They made it at last, however, and with a sigh of relief set the children on the ground while they fumbled with numbed fingers at their skate straps.

“Is this where you live?” asked Billie of the elder of the two little girls. Billie had undone the last strap buckle and was peering off through the woods in search of some sort of habitation.

“Yes,” answered the little girl through chattering teeth. “Our house is just a little way off, along that path.”

She pointed to a narrow foot path, or rather, to the place where a foot path had once been. For now it was obliterated by snow and was indicated only very faintly by footprints recently made.

Billie, seeing that the other girls were ready, caught up the little girl again, holding her close for warmth and started down the snow-covered path, Laura and Vi following.

The snow was hard, which made the going a little easier, and in a minute or two they came in sight of a shabby cabin set in the heart of a small clearing.

If the place had been a mansion, the girls could not have greeted the sight of it any more joyfully. They stumbled forward recklessly at the imminent risk of dropping the poor little children in the snow.

Before they could reach the cottage the door of it opened and a woman stood on the threshold, hatless and coatless and staring at them anxiously.

When she recognized the children she gave a gesture of relief and backed into the house, motioning to the girls to follow her.

This the girls were not in the least reluctant to do, for they were chilled through, and the warmth of Mrs. Haddon’s kitchen was wonderfully comforting.

They set the children on the floor, and the little ones ran straight to their mother. Polly Haddon dropped to her knees and put her arms around the three of them, cuddling them hungrily.

“My precious little lambs, you frightened mother so!” she said. “She thought you were lost – but you are wet – or you have been!” She rose to her feet and faced the girls while the children clung to her skirts.

“Where did you find my little ones?” she asked abruptly, looking anxiously from one to the other of them.

“We found them up to their waists in icy water,” Billie explained, knowing that no time was to be lost if the children were to be saved from a bad cold. “They fell through the ice on the lake.”

“Fell through the ice!” the woman repeated dumbly, then, seeming suddenly to realize the full seriousness of the situation, she roused herself to action.

With a quick motion she swept the children nearer to the warmth of the coal stove, then started for a door at the opposite end of the room. Then as if she realized that something was due the girls, she paused and looked back at them.

“Draw up chairs close to the fire and warm yourselves,” she directed. “You must be nearly frozen.”

The girls managed to find three rather rickety old chairs, and these they drew as close to the stove as they could without scorching their clothes. They tried to draw the children into their laps, but the children were either too miserable to want to be touched by strangers or they had become a little shy. At any rate, they drew away so sharply that one of them nearly fell on the stove. This frightened them all and they began to cry dismally.

The girls were glad when Mrs. Haddon returned with three shabby but warm little bath robes which she hung close to the stove. Then she undressed the children quickly, rubbed their little bodies till they were in a glow, then slipped them into the snug robes.

And all the time she was doing it she kept up a running fire of conversation with the girls.

“Thank goodness,” she said, “I only missed the children a little while ago. They have always been so good to play close to the house, and I was so busy I didn’t look out as usual. And to think that they ran away and fell into the lake! Well, it’s only one more trouble, that’s all. It’s funny how a person can become used to trouble after a while.”

“But it would have been so much worse,” Billie suggested, gently, “if the kiddies had fallen through into deeper water.”

“Eh?” said Mrs. Haddon, looking up at Billie quickly, then down again. “Yes, I suppose that would have been worse.” Then she added, with a bitterness the girls did not understand: “It isn’t often that the worst doesn’t happen to me.”

Puzzled, the girls looked at each other, then around the bare, specklessly clean little kitchen.

That Mrs. Haddon was very poor, there could be no doubt. The shabbiness of the place, her dress, and the children’s clothes all showed that. But could poverty alone account for the sadness in her voice?

Mrs. Haddon had once been a very pretty woman, and she was sweet looking yet, in spite of the lines of worry about her mouth. She had lovely hair, black as night and thick, but she had arranged it carelessly, and long strands of it had pulled loose from the pins and straggled down over her forehead. At this moment, as though she felt the eyes of the girls upon her, she flung the untidy hair back with an impatient movement.

“How old are the kiddies?” asked Laura, feeling that the silence was becoming awkward. “They look almost the same age.”

“There isn’t more than a year’s difference between Mary and Peter here,” indicating the taller of the two little girls and the boy. “And Isabel is thirteen months younger than Peter. Mary is nine years old,” she added as a sort of afterthought.

“Nine years old!” cried Vi, in surprise. “Why, that would make Peter eight and the little girl seven. I thought they were much younger than that.”

“Yes,” added Laura, thoughtlessly, “they are very tiny for their age.”

As though the innocent words had been a deadly insult, the woman rose from her knees and shot the girls so black a glance from her dark eyes that they were frightened.

“My children are tiny – yes,” she said in a hard voice, repeating what Laura had said. “And no wonder they are small, when for years they have been half starved.”

Then she turned quickly and herded the three frightened little ones out of the room.

“You go to bed,” she said to them as they disappeared through the door.

Left to themselves, the girls looked blankly at one another.

“Billie, did you hear what I heard?” asked Laura, anxiously. “Did she really mean that the kiddies are so little because they don’t get enough to eat?”

“Sounds that way,” said Billie pityingly. “Poor little things!”

“We must find some way to help them,” Vi was beginning when Mrs. Haddon herself came into the room.

She seemed to be sorry for what she had said, and she told them so. She drew up the only chair that was left in the bare little room and sat down, facing the chums.

“You must have thought it very strange for me to speak as I did,” she began, and went on hurriedly as the girls seemed about to protest. “But I have had so much trouble for years that sometimes I don’t know just what I’m doing.”

“Have you lived alone here for very long?” asked Billie, gently.

“Ever since my husband died,” answered Polly Haddon, leaning back in her chair as though she were tired and smoothing her heavy hair back from her forehead. “He was an inventor,” she went on, encouraged by the girls’ friendly interest, to tell of her troubles. “For years he made hardly enough to keep us alive, and after the children came we had a harder pull of it than ever. Then suddenly,” she straightened up in her chair and into her black eyes came a strange gleam, “suddenly, my husband found the one little thing that was wrong with the invention he had been working on for so long – just some little thing it was, that a child could almost see, yet that he had overlooked – and we were fairly crazy with happiness. We thought we had at last realized our dream of a fortune.”

She paused a moment, evidently living over that time in her mind, and the girls, fired by her excitement, waited impatiently for her to go on.

“What happened then?” asked Vi.

“Then,” said the woman, the light dying out of her eyes, leaving them tired and listless again, “the invention was stolen.”

“Stolen!” they echoed, breathlessly.

The woman nodded wearily. She had evidently lost all interest in her story.

“My husband suspected a Philadelphia knitting company, whom he had told of his invention and who were very enthusiastic over it, of having some hand in the robbery. But when he accused them of it they denied it and offered a reward of twenty thousand dollars for the recovery of the models of the machinery.”

“Twenty thousand dollars!” repeated Billie in an awed tone. “I guess they must have liked your husband’s invention pretty well to offer all that money for it.”