“NO, DADDY,” SHE SAID, “I—I THINK I—I AM IN LOVE.”

Dorothy Dale’s Engagement

Page [165]

DOROTHY DALE’S
ENGAGEMENT

BY
MARGARET PENROSE
AUTHOR OF “DOROTHY DALE: A GIRL OF TO-DAY,” “DOROTHY
DALE AT GLENWOOD SCHOOL,” “DOROTHY DALE IN
THE CITY,” “THE MOTOR GIRLS SERIES,” ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

BOOKS BY MARGARET PENROSE

12mo. Cloth. Illustrated. Price, per volume,
75 cents, postpaid

THE DOROTHY DALE SERIES

DOROTHY DALE: A GIRL OF TO-DAY
DOROTHY DALE AT GLENWOOD SCHOOL
DOROTHY DALE’S GREAT SECRET
DOROTHY DALE AND HER CHUMS
DOROTHY DALE’S QUEER HOLIDAYS
DOROTHY DALE’S CAMPING DAYS
DOROTHY DALE’S SCHOOL RIVALS
DOROTHY DALE IN THE CITY
DOROTHY DALE’S PROMISE
DOROTHY DALE IN THE WEST
DOROTHY DALE’S STRANGE DISCOVERY
DOROTHY DALE’S ENGAGEMENT

THE MOTOR GIRLS SERIES

THE MOTOR GIRLS
THE MOTOR GIRLS ON A TOUR
THE MOTOR GIRLS AT LOOKOUT BEACH
THE MOTOR GIRLS THROUGH NEW ENGLAND
THE MOTOR GIRLS ON CEDAR LAKE
THE MOTOR GIRLS ON THE COAST
THE MOTOR GIRLS ON CRYSTAL BAY
THE MOTOR GIRLS ON WATERS BLUE
THE MOTOR GIRLS AT CAMP SURPRISE
THE MOTOR GIRLS IN THE MOUNTAINS

Cupples & Leon Co., Publishers, New York

Copyright, 1917, by
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

DOROTHY DALE’S ENGAGEMENT

CONTENTS

DOROTHY DALE’S
ENGAGEMENT

CHAPTER I
“ALONE IN A GREAT CITY”

“Now, Tavia!”

“Now, Dorothy!” mocked Octavia Travers, making a little face as she did so; but then, Tavia Travers could afford to “make faces,” possessing as she did such a naturally pretty one.

“We must decide immediately,” her chum, Dorothy Dale, said decidedly, “whether to continue in the train under the river and so to the main station, or to change for the Hudson tube. You know, we can walk from the tube station at Twenty-third Street to the hotel Aunt Winnie always patronizes.”

“With these heavy bags, Doro?”

“Only a block and a half, my dear Tavia. You are a strong, healthy girl.”

“But I do so like to have people do things for me,” sighed Tavia, clasping her hands. “And taxicabs are so nice.”

“And expensive,” rejoined Dorothy.

“Of course. That is what helps to make them nice,” declared Tavia. “Doro, I just love to throw away money!”

“You only think you do, my dear,” her chum said placidly. “Once you had thrown some of your own money away—some of that your father sent you to spend for your fall and winter outfit—you would sing a different tune.”

“I don’t believe I would—not if by throwing it away I really made a splurge, Doro,” sighed Tavia. “I love money.”

“You mean, you love what money enables us to have.”

“Yep,” returned the slangy Tavia. “And taxicab rides eat up money horribly. We found that out, Doro, when we were in New York before, that time—before we graduated from dear old Glenwood School.”

“But this isn’t getting us anywhere. To return——”

“‘Revenons à nos moutons!’ Sure! I know,” gabbled Tavia. “Let us return to our mutton. He, he! Have I forgotten my French?”

“I really think you have,” laughed Dorothy Dale. “Most of it. And almost everything else you learned at dear old Glenwood, Tavia. But, quick! Decide, my dear. How shall we enter New York City? We are approaching the Manhattan Transfer.”

“Mercy! So quick?”

“Yes. Just like that.”

“I tell you,” whispered Tavia, suddenly becoming confidential, her sparkling eyes darting a glance ahead. “Let’s leave it to that nice man.”

“Who? What man do you mean, Tavia?” demanded Dorothy, her face at once serious. “Do try to behave.”

“Am behaving,” declared Tavia, nodding. “But I’m a good sport. Let’s leave it to him.”

“Whom do you mean?”

“You know. That nice, Western looking young man who opened the window for us that time. He is sitting in that chair just yonder. Don’t you see?” and she indicated a pair of broad shoulders in a gray coat, above which was revealed a well-shaped head with a thatch of black hair.

“Do consider!” begged Dorothy, catching Tavia’s hand as though she feared her chum was about to get up to speak to this stranger. “This is a public car. We are observed.”

“Little silly!” said Tavia, smiling upon her chum tenderly. “You don’t suppose I would do anything so crude—or rude—as to speak to the gentleman? ‘Fie! fie! fie for shame! Turn your back and tell his name!’ And you don’t know it, you know you don’t, Doro.”

Dorothy broke into smiles again and shook her head; her own eyes, too, dancing roguishly.

“I only know his initials,” she said.

“What?” gasped Tavia Travers in something more than mock horror.

“Yes. They are ‘G. K.’ I saw them on his bag. Couldn’t help it,” explained Dorothy, now laughing outright. “But decide, dear! Shall we change at Manhattan Transfer?”

“If he does—there!” chuckled Tavia. “We’ll get out if the nice Western cowboy person does. Oh! he’s a whole lot nicer looking than Lance Petterby.”

“Dear me, Tavia! Haven’t you forgotten Lance yet?”

“Never!” vowed Tavia, tragically. “Not till the day of my death—and then some, as Lance would himself say.”

“You are incorrigible,” sighed Dorothy. Then: “He’s going to get out, Tavia!”

“Oh! oh! oh!” crowed her chum, under her breath. “You were looking.”

“Goodness me!” returned Dorothy, in some exasperation. “Who could miss that hat?”

The young man in question had put on his broad-brimmed gray hat. He was just the style of man that such a hat became.

The young man lifted down the heavy suitcase from the rack—the one on which Dorothy had seen the big, black letters, “G. K.” He had a second suitcase of the same description under his feet. He set both out into the aisle, threw his folded light overcoat over his arm, and prepared to make for the front door of the car as the train began to slow down.

“Come on, now!” cried Tavia, suddenly in a great hurry.

But Dorothy had to put on her coat, and to make sure that she looked just right in the mirror beside her chair. All Tavia had to do was to toss her summer fur about her neck and grab up her traveling bag.

“We’ll be left!” she cried. “The train doesn’t stop here long.”

“You run, then, and tell them to wait,” Dorothy said calmly.

They were, however, the last to leave the car—the last to leave the train, in fact—at the elevated platform which gives a broad view of the New Jersey meadows.

“My goodness me!” gasped Tavia, as the brakeman helped them to the platform, and waved his hand for departure. “My goodness me! We’re clear at this end of this awful platform, and the tube train stops—and of course starts—at the far end. A mile to walk with these bags and not a redcap in sight. Oh, yes! there’s one,” she added faintly.

“Redcap?” queried Dorothy. “Oh! you mean a porter.”

“Yes,” Tavia said. “Of course you would be slow. Everybody’s got a porter but us.”

Dorothy laughed mellowly. “Who’s fault do you intimate it is?” she asked. “We might have been the first out of the car.”

“He’s got one,” whispered Tavia.

Oddly enough her chum did not ask “Who?” this time. She, too, was looking at the back of the well-set-up young man whose initials seemed to be G. K. He stood confronting an importunate porter, whose smiling face was visible to the girls as he said:

“Why, Boss, yo’ can’t possibly kerry dem two big bags f’om dis end ob de platfo’m to de odder.”

The porter held out both hands for the big suitcases carried by the Western looking young man, who really appeared to be physically much better able to carry his baggage than the negro.

“I don’t suppose two-bits has anything to do with your desire to tote my bag?” suggested the white man, and the listening girls knew he must be smiling broadly.

“Why, Boss, yo’ can’t earn two-bits carryin’ bags yere; but I kin,” and the negro chuckled delightedly as he gained possession of the bags. “Come right along, Boss.”

As the porter set off, the young man turned and saw Dorothy Dale and Tavia Travers behind him. Besides themselves, indeed, this end of the long cement platform was clear. Other passengers from the in-bound train had either gone forward or descended into the tunnel under the tracks to reach the north-side platform. The only porter in sight was the man who had taken G. K.’s bags.

The weight of the shiny black bags the girls carried was obvious. Indeed, perhaps Tavia sagged perceptibly on that side—and intentionally; and, of course, her hazel eyes said “Please!” just as plain as eyes ever spoke before.

Off came the broad-brimmed hat just for an instant. Then he held out both hands.

“Let me help you, ladies,” he said, with the pleasantest of smiles. “Seeing that I have obtained the services of the only Jasper in sight, you’d better let me play porter. Going to take this tube train, ladies?”

“Yes, indeed!” cried Tavia, twinkling with smiles at once, and first to give him a bag.

Dorothy might have hesitated, but the young man was insistent and quick. He seized both bags as a matter of course, and Dorothy Dale could not pull hers away from him.

“You must let us pay your porter, then,” she said, in her quietly pleasant way.

“Bless you! we won’t fight over that,” chuckled the young man.

He was agreeably talkative, with that wholesome, free, yet chivalrous manner which the girls, especially the thoughtful Dorothy, had noticed as particular attributes of the men they had met during their memorable trip to the West, some months before.

She noticed, too, that his attentions to Tavia and herself were nicely balanced. Of course, Tavia, as she always did, began to run on in her light-hearted and irresponsible way; but though the young man listened to her with a quiet smile, he spoke directly to Dorothy quite as often as he did to the flyaway girl. He did not seek to take advantage of Tavia’s exuberant good spirits as so many strangers might have done.

Tavia’s flirtatious ways were a sore trial to her more sober chum; but this young man seemed to understand Tavia at once.

“Of course, you’re from the West?” Tavia finished one “rattlety-bang” series of remarks with this direct question.

“Of course I am. Right from the desert—Desert City, in fact,” he said, with a quiet smile.

“Oh!” gasped Tavia, turning her big eyes on her chum. “Did you hear that, Doro? Desert City!”

For the girls, during their visit to the West had, as Tavia often claimed in true Western slang, helped “put Desert City on the map.”

Dorothy, however, did not propose to let this conversation with a strange man become at all personal. She ignored her chum’s observation and, as the city-bound tube train came sliding in beside the platform, she reached for her own bag and insisted upon taking it from the Westerner’s hand.

“Thank you so much,” she said, with just the right degree of firmness as well as of gratitude.

Perforce he had to give up the bag, and Tavia’s, too, for there was the red-capped, smiling negro expectant of the “two-bits.”

“You are so kind,” breathed Tavia, with one of her wonderful “man-killing” glances at the considerate G. K., as Dorothy’s cousin, Nat White, would have termed her expression of countenance.

G. K. was polite and not brusk; but he was not flirtatious. Dorothy entered the Hudson tube train with a feeling of considerable satisfaction. G. K. did not even enter the car by the same door as themselves nor did he take the empty seat opposite the girls, as he might have done.

“There! he is one young man who will not flirt with you, Tavia,” she said, admonishingly.

“Pooh! I didn’t half try,” declared her chum, lightly.

“My dear! you would be tempted, I believe, to flirt with a blind man!”

“Oh, Doro! Never!” Then she dimpled suddenly, glancing out of the window as the train swept on. “There’s a man I didn’t try to flirt with.”

“Where?” laughed Dorothy.

“Outside there beside the tracks,” for they had not yet reached the Summit Avenue Station, and it is beyond that spot that the trains dive into the tunnel.

“We passed him too quickly then,” said Dorothy. “Lucky man!”

The next moment—or so it seemed—Tavia began on another tack:

“To think! In fifteen minutes, Doro my dear, we shall be ‘Alone in a Great City.’”

“How alone?” drawled her friend. “Do you suppose New York has suddenly been depopulated?”

“But we shall be alone, Doro. What more lonesome than a crowd in which you know nobody?”

“How very thoughtful you have become of a sudden. I hope you will keep your hand on your purse, dear. There will be some people left in the great city—and perhaps one may be a pickpocket.”

The electric lights were flashed on, and the train soon dived into the great tunnel, “like a rabbit into his burrow,” Tavia said. They had to disembark at Grove Street to change for an uptown train. The tall young Westerner did likewise, but he did not accost them.

The Sixth Avenue train soon whisked the girls to their destination, and they got out at Twenty-third Street. As they climbed the steps to the street level, Tavia suddenly uttered a surprised cry.

“Look, will you, Doro?” she said. “Right ahead!”

“G. K.!” exclaimed her friend, for there was the young man mounting the stairs, lugging his two heavy suitcases.

“Suppose he goes to the very same hotel?” giggled Tavia.

“Well—maybe that will be nice,” Dorothy said composedly. “He looks nice enough for us to get acquainted with him—in some perfectly proper way, of course.”

“Whew, Doro!” breathed Tavia, her eyes opening wide again. “You’re coming on, my dear.”

“I am speaking sensibly. If he is a nice young man and perfectly respectable, why shouldn’t he find some means of meeting us—if he wants to—and we are all at the same hotel?”

“But——”

“I don’t believe in flirting,” said Dorothy Dale, calmly, yet with a twinkle in her eyes. “But I certainly would not fly in the face of Providence—as Miss Higley, our old teacher at Glenwood, would say—and refuse to meet G. K. He looks like a really nice young man.”

“Doro!” gasped Tavia. “You amaze me! I shall next expect to see the heavens fall!”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said her friend, as they reached the exit of the tube station and stepped out upon the sidewalk.

There was the Westerner already dickering with a boy to carry his bags.

“He likes to throw money away, too!” whispered Tavia. “I suppose we must be economical and carry ours.”

“As there seems to be no other boy in sight—yes,” laughed her friend.

“That young man gets the best of us every time,” complained Tavia under her breath.

“He is typically Western,” said Dorothy. “He is prompt.”

But then, the boy starting off with the heavy bags in a little box-wagon he drew, the young man whose initials were G. K., turned with a smile to the two girls.

“Ladies,” he said, lifting his hat again, “at the risk of being considered impertinent, I wish to ask you if you are going my way? If so I will help you with your bags, having again cinched what seems to be the only baggage transportation facilities at this station.”

For once Tavia was really speechless. It was Dorothy who quite coolly asked the young man:

“Which is your direction?”

“To the Fanuel,” he said.

“That is where we are going,” Dorothy admitted, giving him her bag again without question.

“Oh!” exclaimed Tavia, “getting into the picture with a bounce,” as she would have expressed it. “Aren’t you the handiest young man!”

“Thank you,” he replied, laughing. “That is a reputation to make one proud. I never was in this man’s town before, but I was recommended to the Fanuel by my boss.”

“Oh!” Tavia hastened to take the lead in the conversation. “We’ve been here before—Doro and I. And we always stop at the Fanuel.”

“Now, I look on that as a streak of pure luck,” he returned. He looked at Dorothy, however, not at Tavia.

The boy with the wagon went on ahead and the three voyagers followed, laughing and chatting, G. K. swinging the girls’ bags as though they were light instead of heavy.

“I want awfully to know his name,” whispered Tavia, when they came to the hotel entrance and the young man handed over their bags again and went to the curb to get his own suitcases from the boy.

“Let’s,” added Tavia, “go to the clerk’s desk and ask for the rooms your Aunt Winnie wrote about. Then I’ll get a chance to see what he writes on the book.”

“Nonsense, Tavia!” exclaimed Dorothy. “We’ll do nothing of the kind. We must go to the ladies’ parlor and send a boy to the clerk, or the manager, with our cards. This is a family hotel, I know; but the lobby and the office are most likely full of men at this time in the day.”

“Oh, dear! Come on, then, Miss Particular,” groaned Tavia. “And we didn’t even bid him good-bye at parting.”

“What did you want to do?” laughed Dorothy. “Weep on his shoulder and give him some trinket, for instance, as a souvenir?”

“Dorothy Dale!” exclaimed her friend. “I believe you have something up your sleeve. You seem just sure of seeing this nice cowboy person again.”

“All men from the West do not punch cattle for a living. And it would not be the strangest thing in the world if we should meet G. K. again, as he is stopping at this hotel.”

However, the girls saw nothing more of the smiling and agreeable Westerner that day. Dorothy Dale’s aunt had secured by mail two rooms and a bath for her niece and Tavia. The girls only appeared at dinner, and retired early. Even Tavia’s bright eyes could not spy out G. K. while they were at dinner.

Besides, the girls had many other things to think about, and Tavia’s mind could not linger entirely upon even as nice a young man as G. K. appeared to be.

This was their first visit to New York alone, as the more lively girl indicated. Aunt Winnie White had sprained her ankle and could not come to the city for the usual fall shopping. Dorothy was, for the first time, to choose her own fall and winter outfit. Tavia had come on from Dalton, with the money her father had been able to give her for a similar purpose, and the friends were to shop together.

They left the hotel early the next morning and arrived at the first huge department store on their list almost as soon as the store was opened, at nine o’clock.

An hour later they were in the silk department, pricing goods and “just looking” as Tavia said. In her usual thoughtless and incautious way, Tavia dropped her handbag upon the counter while she used both hands to examine a particular piece of goods, calling Dorothy’s attention to it, too.

“No, dear; I do not think it is good enough, either for the money or for your purpose,” Dorothy said. “The color is lovely; but don’t be guided wholly by that.”

“No. I suppose you are right,” sighed Tavia.

She shook her head at the clerk and prepared to follow her friend, who had already left the counter. Hastily picking up what she supposed to be her bag, Tavia ran two or three steps to catch up with Dorothy. As she did so a feminine shriek behind her startled everybody within hearing.

“That girl—she’s got my bag! Stop her!”

“Oh! what is it?” gasped Dorothy, turning.

“Somebody’s stolen something,” stammered Tavia, turning around too.

Then she looked at the bag in her hand. Instead of her own seal-leather one, it was a much more expensive bag, gold mounted and plethoric.

“There she is! She’s got it in her hand!”

A woman dressed in the most extreme fashion and most expensively, darted down the aisle upon the two girls. She pointed a quivering, accusing finger directly at poor Tavia.

CHAPTER II
G. K. TO THE RESCUE

Dorothy Dale and her friend Tavia Travers had often experienced very serious adventures, but the shock of this incident perhaps was as great and as thrilling as anything that had heretofore happened to them.

The series of eleven previous stories about Dorothy, Tavia, and their friends began with “Dorothy Dale: A Girl of To-day,” some years before the date of this present narrative. At that time Dorothy was living with her father, Major Frank Dale, a Civil War veteran, who owned and edited the Bugle, a newspaper published in Dalton, a small town in New York State.

Then Major Dale’s livelihood and that of the family, consisting of Dorothy and her small brothers, Joe and Roger, depended upon the success of the Bugle. Taken seriously ill in the midst of a lively campaign for temperance and for a general reform government in Dalton, it looked as though the major would lose his paper and the better element in the town lose their fight for prohibition; but Dorothy Dale, confident that she could do it, got out the Bugle and did much, young girl though she was, to save the day. In this she was helped by Tavia Travers, a girl brought up entirely differently from Dorothy, and who possessed exactly the opposite characteristics to serve as a foil for Dorothy’s own good sense and practical nature.

Major Dale was unexpectedly blessed with a considerable legacy which enabled him to sell the Bugle and take his children to The Cedars, at North Birchland, to live with his widowed sister and her two boys, Ned and Nat White, who were both older than their cousin Dorothy. In “Dorothy Dale at Glenwood School,” is related these changes for the better in the fortunes of the Dale family, and as well there is narrated the beginning of a series of adventures at school and during vacation times, in which Dorothy and Tavia are the central characters.

Subsequent books are entitled respectively: “Dorothy Dale’s Great Secret,” “Dorothy Dale and Her Chums,” “Dorothy Dale’s Queer Holidays,” “Dorothy Dale’s Camping Days,” “Dorothy Dale’s School Rivals,” “Dorothy Dale in the City,” and “Dorothy Dale’s Promise,” in which story the two friends graduate from Glenwood and return to their homes feeling—and looking, of course—like real, grown-up young ladies. Nevertheless, they are not then through with adventures, surprising happenings, and much fun.

About the time the girls graduated from school an old friend of Major Dale, Colonel Hardin, passed away, leaving his large estate in the West partly to the major and partly to be administered for the local public good. Cattle raising was not so generally followed as formerly in that section and dry farming was being tried.

Colonel Hardin had foreseen that nothing but a system of irrigation would save the poor farmers from ruin and on his land was the fountain of supply that should water the whole territory about Desert City and make it “blossom as the rose.” There were mining interests, however, selfishly determined to obtain the water rights on the Hardin Estate and that by hook or by crook.

Major Dale’s health was not at this time good enough for him to look into these matters actively or to administer his dead friend’s estate. Therefore, it is told in “Dorothy Dale in the West,” how Aunt Winnie White, Dorothy’s two cousins, Ned and Nat, and herself with Tavia, go far from North Birchland and mingle with the miners, and other Western characters to be found on and about the Hardin property, including a cowboy named Lance Petterby, who shows unmistakable signs of being devoted to Tavia. Indeed, after the party return to the East, Lance writes to Tavia and the latter’s apparent predilection for the cowboy somewhat troubles Dorothy.

However, after their return to the East the chums went for a long visit to the home of a school friend, Jennie Hapgood, in Pennsylvania; and there Tavia seemed to have secured other—and less dangerous—interests. In “Dorothy Dale’s Strange Discovery,” the narrative immediately preceding this present tale, Dorothy displays her characteristic kindliness and acute reasoning powers in solving a problem that brings to Jennie Hapgood’s father the very best of good fortune.

Naturally, the Hapgoods are devoted to Dorothy. Besides, Ned and Nat, her cousins, have visited Sunnyside and are vastly interested in Jennie. The girl chums now in New York City on this shopping tour, expect on returning to North Birchland to find Jennie Hapgood there for a promised visit.

At the moment, however, that we find Dorothy and Tavia at the beginning of this chapter, neither girl is thinking much about Jennie Hapgood and her expected visit, or of anything else of minor importance.

The flashily dressed woman who had run after Tavia down the aisle, again screamed her accusation at the amazed and troubled girl:

“That’s my bag! It’s cram full of money, too.”

There was no great crowd in the store, for New York ladies do not as a rule shop much before luncheon. Nevertheless, besides salespeople, there were plenty to hear the woman’s unkind accusation and enough curious shoppers to ring in immediately the two troubled girls and the angry woman.

“Give me it!” exclaimed the latter, and snatched the bag out of Tavia’s hand. As this was done the catch slipped in some way and the handbag burst open.

It was “cram full” of money. Bills of large denomination were rolled carelessly into a ball, with a handkerchief, a purse for change, several keys, and a vanity box. Some of these things tumbled out upon the floor and a young boy stooped and recovered them for her.

“You’re a bad, bad girl!” declared the angry woman. “I hope they send you to jail.”

“Why—why, I didn’t know it was yours,” murmured Tavia, quite upset.

“Oh! you thought somebody had forgotten it and you could get away with it,” declared the other, coarsely enough.

“I beg your pardon, Madam,” Dorothy Dale here interposed. “It was a mistake on my friend’s part. And you are making another mistake, and a serious one.”

She spoke in her most dignified tone, and although Dorothy was barely in her twentieth year she had the manner and stability of one much older. She realized that poor Tavia was in danger of “going all to pieces” if the strain continued. And, too, her own anger at the woman’s harsh accusation naturally put the girl on her mettle.

“Who are you, I’d like to know?” snapped the woman.

“I am her friend,” said Dorothy Dale, quite composedly, “and I know her to be incapable of taking your bag save by chance. She laid her own down on the counter and took up yours——”

“And where is mine?” suddenly wailed Tavia, on the verge of an hysterical outbreak. “My bag! My money——”

“Hush!” whispered Dorothy in her friend’s pretty ear. “Don’t become a second harridan—like this creature.”

The woman had led the way back to the silk counter. Tavia began to claw wildly among the broken bolts of silk that the clerk had not yet been able to return to the shelves. But she stopped at Dorothy’s command, and stood, pale and trembling.

A floorwalker hastened forward. He evidently knew the noisy woman as a good customer of the store.

“Mrs. Halbridge! What is the matter? Nothing serious, I hope?”

“It would have been serious all right,” said the customer, in her high-pitched voice, “if I hadn’t just seen that girl by luck. Yes, by luck! There she was making for the door with this bag of mine—and there’s several hundred dollars in it, I’d have you know.”

“I beg of you, Mrs. Halbridge,” said the floorwalker in a low tone, “for the sake of the store to make no trouble about it here. If you insist we will take the girl up to the superintendent’s office——”

Here Dorothy, her anger rising interrupted:

“You would better not. Mrs. Winthrop White, of North Birchland, is a charge customer of your store, and is probably just as well known to the heads of the firm as this—this person,” and she cast what Tavia—in another mood—would have called a “scathing glance” at Mrs. Halbridge.

“I am Mrs. White’s niece and this is my particular friend. We are here alone on a shopping tour; but if our word is not quite as good as that of this—this person, we certainly shall buy elsewhere.”

Tavia, obsessed with a single idea, murmured again:

“But I haven’t got my bag! Somebody’s taken my bag! And all my money——”

The floorwalker was glancing about, hoping for some avenue of escape from the unfortunate predicament, when a very tall, white-haired and soldierly looking man appeared in the aisle.

“Mr. Schuman!” gasped the floorwalker.

The man was one of the chief proprietors of the big store. He scowled slightly at the floorwalker when he saw the excited crowd, and then raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“This is not the place for any lengthy discussion, Mr. Mink,” said Mr. Schuman, with just the proper touch of admonition in his tone.

“I know! I know, Mr. Schuman!” said the floorwalker. “But this difficulty—it came so suddenly—Mrs. Halbridge, here, makes the complaint,” he finally blurted out, in an attempt to shoulder off some of the responsibility for the unfortunate situation.

“Mrs. Halbridge?” The old gentleman bowed in a most courtly style. “One of our customers, I presume, Mr. Mink?”

“Oh, yes, indeed, Mr. Schuman,” the floorwalker hastened to say. “One of our very good customers. And I am so sorry that anything should have happened——”

“But what has happened?” asked Mr. Schuman, sharply.

“She—she accuses this—it’s all a mistake, I’m sure—this young lady of taking her bag,” stuttered Mr. Mink, pointing to Tavia.

“She ought to be arrested,” muttered the excited Mrs. Halbridge.

“What? But this is a matter for the superintendent’s office, Mr. Mink,” returned Mr. Schuman.

“Oh!” stammered the floorwalker. “The bag is returned.”

“And now,” put in Dorothy Dale, haughtily, and looking straight and unflinchingly into the keen eyes of Mr. Schuman, “my friend wishes to know what has become of her bag?”

Mr. Schuman looked at the two girls with momentary hesitation.

There was something compelling in the ladylike look and behaviour of these two girls—and especially in Dorothy’s speech. At the moment, too, a hand was laid tentatively upon Mr. Schuman’s arm.

“Beg pardon, sir,” said the full, resonant voice that Dorothy had noted the day before. “I know the young ladies—Miss Dale and Miss Travers, respectively, Mr. Schuman.”

“Oh, Mr. Knapp—thank you!” said the old gentleman, turning to the tall young Westerner with whom he had been walking through the store at the moment he had spied the crowd. “You are a discourager of embarrassment.”

“Oh! blessed ‘G. K.’!” whispered Tavia, weakly clinging to Dorothy’s arm.

CHAPTER III
TAVIA IN THE SHADE

Mrs. Halbridge was slyly slipping through the crowd. She had suddenly lost all interest in the punishment of the girl she had accused of stealing her bag and her money.

There was something so stern about Mr. Schuman that it was not strange that the excitable woman should fear further discussion of the matter. The old gentleman turned at once to Dorothy Dale and Tavia Travers.

“This is an unfortunate and regrettable incident, young ladies,” he said suavely. “I assure you that such things as this seldom occur under our roof.”

“I am confident it is a single occurrence,” Dorothy said, with conviction, “or my aunt, Mrs. Winthrop White, of North Birchland, would not have traded with you for so many years.”

“One of our charge customers, Mr. Schuman,” whispered Mr. Mink, deciding it was quite time now to come to the assistance of the girls.

“Regrettable! Regrettable!” repeated the old gentleman.

Here Tavia again entered her wailing protest:

“I did not mean to take her bag from the counter. But somebody has taken my bag.”

“Oh, Tavia!” exclaimed her friend, now startled into noticing what Tavia really said about it.

“It’s gone!” wailed Tavia. “And all the money father sent me. Oh, dear, Doro Dale! I guess I have thrown my money away, and, as you prophesied, it isn’t as much fun as I thought it might be.”

“My dear young lady,” hastily inquired Mr. Schuman, “have you really lost your purse?”

“My bag,” sobbed Tavia. “I laid it down while I examined some silk. That clerk saw me,” she added, pointing to the man behind the counter.

“It is true, Mr. Schuman,” the silk clerk admitted, blushing painfully. “But, of course, I did not notice what became of the lady’s bag.”

“Nor did I see the other bag until I found it in my hand,” Tavia cried.

The crowd was dissipated by this time, and all spoke in low voices. Outside the counter was a cash-girl, a big-eyed and big-eared little thing, who was evidently listening curiously to the conversation. Mr. Mink said sharply to her:

“Number forty-seven! do you know anything about this bag business?”

“No—no, sir!” gasped the frightened girl.

“Then go on about your business,” the floorwalker said, waving her away in his most lordly manner.

Meanwhile, Dorothy had obtained a word with the young Mr. Knapp who had done her and Tavia such a kindness.

“Thank you a thousand times, Mr. Knapp,” she whispered, her eyes shining gratefully into his. “It might have been awkward for us without you. And,” she added, pointedly, “how fortunate you knew our names!”

He was smiling broadly, but she saw the color rise in his bronzed cheeks at her last remark. She liked him all the better for blushing so boyishly.

“Got me there, Miss Dale,” he blurted out. “I was curious, and I looked on the hotel register to see your names after the clerk brought it back from the parlor where he went to greet you yesterday. Hope you’ll forgive me for being so—er—rubbery.”

“It proves to be a very fortunate curiosity on your part,” she told him, smiling.

“Say!” he whispered, “your friend is all broken up over this. Has she lost much?”

“All the money she had to pay for the clothes she wished to buy, I’m afraid,” sighed Dorothy.

“Well, let’s get her out of here—go somewhere to recuperate. There’s a good hotel across the street. I had my breakfast there before I began to shop,” and he laughed. “A cup of tea will revive her, I’m sure.”

“And you are suffering for a cup, too, I am sure,” Dorothy told him, her eyes betraying her amusement, at his rather awkward attempt to become friendly with Tavia and herself.

But Dorothy approved of this young man. Aside from the assistance he had undoubtedly rendered her chum and herself, G. Knapp seemed to be far above the average young man.

She turned now quickly to Tavia. Mr. Schuman was saying very kindly:

“Search shall be made, my dear young lady. I am exceedingly sorry that such a thing should happen in our store. Of course, somebody picked up your bag before you inadvertently took the other lady’s. If I had my way I would have it a law that every shopper should have her purse riveted to her wrist with a chain.”

It was no laughing matter, however, for poor Tavia. Her family was not in the easy circumstances that Dorothy’s was. Indeed, Mr. Travers was only fairly well-to-do, and Tavia’s mother was exceedingly extravagant. It was difficult sometimes for Tavia to obtain sufficient money to get along with.

Besides, she was incautious herself. It was natural for her to be wasteful and thoughtless. But this was the first time in her experience that she had either wasted or lost such a sum of money.

She wiped her eyes very quickly when Dorothy whispered to her that they were going out for a cup of tea with Mr. Knapp.

“Oh dear, that perfectly splendid cowboy person!” groaned Tavia. “And I am in no mood to make an impression. Doro! you’ll have to do it all yourself this time. Do keep him in play until I recover from, this blow—if I ever do.”

The young man, who led the way to the side door of the store which was opposite the hotel and restaurant of which he had spoken, heard the last few words and turned to ask seriously:

“Surely Miss Travers did not lose all the money she had?”

“All I had in the world!” wailed Tavia. “Except a lonely little five dollar bill.”

“Where is that?” asked Dorothy, in surprise.

“In the First National Bank,” Tavia said demurely.

“Oh, then, that’s safe enough,” said Mr. Knapp.

“I didn’t know you had even that much in the bank,” remarked Dorothy, doubtfully. “The First National?”

“Yep!” declared Tavia promptly, but nudged her friend. “Hush!” she hissed.

Dorothy did not understand, but she saw there was something queer about this statement. It was news to her that her chum ever thought of putting a penny on deposit in any bank. It was not like Tavia.

“How do you feel now, dear?” she asked the unfortunate girl, as they stepped out into the open air behind the broad-shouldered young Westerner, who held the door open for their passage.

“Oh, dear me!” sighed Tavia. “I’m forty degrees in the shade—and the temperature is still going down. What ever shall I do? I’ll be positively naked before Thanksgiving!”

CHAPTER IV
SOMETHING ABOUT “G. KNAPP”

But how can three people with all the revivifying flow of youth in their veins remain in the dumps, to use one of Tavia’s own illuminating expressions. Impossible! That tea at the Holyoke House, which began so miserably, scaled upward like the notes of a coloratura soprano until they were all three chatting and laughing like old friends. Even Tavia had to forget her miserable financial state.

Dorothy believed her first impression of G. Knapp had not been wrong. Indeed, he improved with every moment of increasing familiarity.

In the first place, although his repartee was bright enough, and he was very jolly and frank, he had eyes and attention for somebody besides the chatterbox, Tavia. Perhaps right at first Tavia was a little under the mark, her mind naturally being upon her troubles; but with a strange young man before her the gay and sparkling Tavia would soon be inspired.

However, for once she did not absorb all the more or less helpless male’s attention. G. Knapp insisted upon dividing equally his glances, his speeches, and his smiles between the two young ladies.

They discovered that his full and proper name was Garford Knapp—the first, of course, shortened to “Garry.” He was of the West, Western, without a doubt. He had secured a degree at a Western university, although both before and after his scholastic course he had, as Tavia in the beginning suggested, been a “cowboy person.”

“And it looks as if I’d be punching cows and doing other chores for Bob Douglas, who owns the Four-Square ranch, for the rest of my natural,” was one thing Garry Knapp told the girls, and told them cheerfully. “I did count on falling heir to a piece of money when Uncle Terrence cashed in. But not—no more!”

“Why is that?” Dorothy asked, seeing that the young man was serious despite his somewhat careless way of speaking.

“The old codger is just like tinder,” laughed Garry. “Lights up if a spark gets to him. And I unfortunately and unintentionally applied the spark. He’s gone off to Alaska mad as a hatter and left me in the lurch. And we were chums when I was a kid and until I came back from college.”

“You mean you have quarreled with your uncle?” Dorothy queried, with some seriousness.

“Not at all, Miss Dale,” he declared, promptly. “The old fellow quarreled with me. They say it takes two to make a quarrel. That’s not always so. One can do it just as e-easy. At least, one like Uncle Terrence can. He had red hair when he was young, and he has a strong fighting Irish strain in him. The row began over nothing and ended with his lighting out between evening and sunrise and leaving me flat.

“Of course, I broke into a job with Bob Douglas right away——”

“Do you mean, Mr. Knapp, that your uncle went away and left you without money?” Dorothy asked.

“Only what I chanced to have in my pocket,” Garry Knapp said cheerfully. “He’d always been mighty good to me. Put me through school and all that. All I have is a piece of land—and a good big piece—outside of Desert City; but it isn’t worth much. Cattle raising is petering out in that region. Last year the mouth and hoof disease just about ruined the man that grazed my land. His cattle died like flies.

“Then, the land was badly grazed by sheepmen for years. Sheep about poison land for anything else to live on,” he added, with a cattleman’s usual disgust at the thought of “mutton on the hoof.”

“One thing I’ve come East for, Miss Dale, is to sell that land. Got a sort of tentative offer by mail. Bob wanted a lot of stuff for the ranch and for his family and couldn’t come himself. So I combined his business and mine and hope to make a sale of the land my father left me before I go back.

“Then, with that nest-egg, I’ll try to break into some game that will offer a man-sized profit,” and Garry Knapp laughed again in his mellow, whole-souled way.

“Isn’t he just a dear?” whispered Tavia as Garry turned to speak to the waiter. “Don’t you love to hear him talk?”

“And have you never heard from your old uncle who went away and left you?” Dorothy asked.

“Not a word. He’s too mad to speak, let alone write,” and a cloud for a moment crossed the open, handsome face of the Westerner. “But I know where he is, and every once in a while somebody writes me telling me Uncle Terry is all right.”

“But, an old man, away up there in Alaska——?”

“Bless you, Miss Dale,” chuckled Garry Knapp. “That dear old codger has been knocking about in rough country all his days. He’s always been a miner. Prospected pretty well all over our West. He’s made, and then bunted away, big fortunes sometimes.

“He always has a stake laid down somewhere. Never gets real poor, and never went hungry in his life—unless he chanced to run out of grub on some prospecting tour, or his gun was broken and he couldn’t shoot a jackrabbit for a stew.

“Oh, Uncle Terrence isn’t at all the sort of hampered prospector you read about in the books. He doesn’t go mooning around, expecting to ‘strike it rich’ and running the risk of leaving his bones in the desert.

“No, Uncle Terry is likely to make another fortune before he dies——”

“Oh! Then maybe you will be rich!” cried Tavia, breaking in.

“No.” Garry shook his head with a quizzical smile on his lips and in his eyes. “No. He vowed I should never see the color of his money. First, he said, he’d leave it to found a home for indignant rattlesnakes. And he’d surely have plenty of inmates, for rattlers seem always to be indignant,” he added with a chuckle.

Dorothy wanted awfully to ask him why he had quarreled with his uncle—or vice versa; but that would have been too personal upon first meeting. She liked the young man more and more; and in spite of Tavia’s loss they parted at the end of the hour in great good spirits.

“I’m going to be just as busy as I can be this afternoon,” Garry Knapp announced, as they went out. “But I shall get back to the hotel to supper. I wasn’t in last night when you ladies were down. May I eat at your table?” and his eyes squinted up again in that droll way Dorothy had come to look for.

“How do you know we ate in the hotel last evening?” demanded Tavia, promptly.

“Asked the head waiter,” replied Garry Knapp, unabashed.

“If you are so much interested in whether we take proper nourishment or not, you had better join us at dinner,” Dorothy said, laughing.

“It’s a bet!” declared the young Westerner, and lifting his broad-brimmed hat he left the girls upon the sidewalk outside the restaurant.

“Isn’t he the very nicest—but, oh, Doro! what shall I do?” exclaimed the miserable Tavia. “All my money——”

“Let’s go back and see if it’s been found.”

“Oh, not a chance!” gasped Tavia. “That horrid woman——”

“I scarcely believe that we can lay it to Mrs. Halbridge’s door in any particular,” said Dorothy, gravely. “You should not have left your bag on the counter.”

“She laid hers there! And, oh, Doro! it was full of money,” sighed her friend.

“Probably your bag had been taken before you even touched hers.”

“Oh, dear! why did it have to happen to me—and at just this time. When I need things so much. Not a thing to wear! And it’s going to be a cold, cold winter, too!”

Tavia would joke “if the heavens fell”—that was her nature. But that she was seriously embarrassed for funds Dorothy Dale knew right well.

“If it had only been your bag that was lost,” wailed Tavia, “you would telegraph to Aunt Winnie and get more money!”

“And I shall do that in this case,” said her friend, placidly.

“Oh! no you won’t!” cried Tavia, suddenly. “I will not take another cent from your Aunt Winnie White—who’s the most blessed, generous, free, open-handed person who ever——”

“Goodness! no further attributes?” laughed Dorothy.

“No, Doro,” Tavia said, suddenly serious. “I have done this thing myself. It is awful. Poor old daddy earns his money too hardly for me to throw it away. I should know better. I should have learned caution and economy by this time with you, my dear, as an example ever before me.

“Poor mother wastes money because she doesn’t know. I have had every advantage of a bright and shining example,” and she pinched Dorothy’s arm as they entered the big store again. “If I have lost my money, I’ve lost it, and that’s the end of it. No new clothes for little Tavia—and serves her right!” she finished, bitterly.

Dorothy well knew that this was a tragic happening for her friend. Generously she would have sent for more money, or divided her own store with Tavia. But she knew her chum to be in earnest, and she approved.

It was not as though Tavia had nothing to wear. She had a full and complete wardrobe, only it would be no longer up to date. And she would have to curtail much of the fun the girls had looked forward to on this, their first trip, unchaperoned, to the great city.

CHAPTER V
DOROTHY IS DISTURBED

Nothing, of course, had been seen or heard of Tavia’s bag. Mr. Schuman himself had made the investigation, and he came to the girls personally to tell them how extremely sorry he was. But being sorry did not help.

“I’m done for!” groaned Tavia, as they returned to their rooms at the hotel just before luncheon. “I can’t even buy a stick of peppermint candy to send to the kids at Dalton.”

“How about that five dollars in the bank?” asked Dorothy, suddenly remembering Tavia’s previous and most surprising statement. “And how did you ever come to have a bank account? Is it in the First National of Dalton?”

There was a laugh from Tavia, a sudden flash of lingerie and the display of a silk stocking. Then she held out to her chum a neatly folded banknote wrapped in tissue paper.

THE TWO GIRLS STEPPED OUT OF THE ELEVATOR AND FOUND GARRY KNAPP WAITING FOR THEM.

Dorothy Dale’s Engagement

Page [41]

“First National Bank of Womankind,” she cried gaily. “I always carry it there in case of accident—being run over, robbed, or an earthquake. But that five dollars is all I own. Oh, dear! I wish I had stuffed the whole roll into my stocking.”

“Don’t, Tavia! it’s not ladylike.”

“I don’t care. Pockets are out of style again,” pouted her friend. “And, anyway, you must admit that this was a stroke of genius, for I would otherwise be without a penny.”

However, Tavia was too kind-hearted, as well as light-hearted, to allow her loss to cloud the day for Dorothy. She was just as enthusiastic in the afternoon in helping her friend select the goods she wished to buy as though all the “pretties” were for herself.

They came home toward dusk, tired enough, and lay down for an hour—“relaxing as per instructions of Lovely Lucy Larriper, the afternoon newspaper statistician,” Tavia said.

“Why ‘statistician’?” asked Dorothy, wonderingly.

“Why! isn’t she a ‘figger’ expert?” laughed Tavia. “Now relax!”

A brisk bath followed and then, at seven, the two girls stepped out of the elevator into the lobby of the hotel and found Garry Knapp waiting for them. He was likewise well tubbed and scrubbed, but he did not conform to city custom and wear evening dress. Indeed, Dorothy could not imagine him in the black and severe habiliments of society.

“Not that his figure would not carry them well,” she thought. “But he would somehow seem out of place. Some of his breeziness and—and—yes!—his nice kind of ‘freshness’ would be gone. That gray business suit becomes him and so does his hat.”

But, of course, the hat was not in evidence at present. The captain of the waiters had evidently expected this party, for he beckoned them to a retired table the moment the trio entered the long dining-room.

“How cozy!” exclaimed Dorothy. “You must have what they call a ‘pull’ with people in authority, Mr. Knapp.”

“How’s that?” he asked.

“Why, you can get the best table in the dining-room, and this morning you rescued us from trouble through your acquaintanceship with Mr. Schuman.”

“The influence of the Almighty Dollar,” said Garry Knapp, briefly. “This morning I had just spent several hundred dollars of Bob Douglass’ good money in that store. And here at this hotel Bob’s name is as good as a gold certificate.”

“Oh, money! money!” groaned Tavia, “what crimes are committed in thy name—and likewise, what benefits achieved! I wonder what the person who stole it is doing with my money?”

“Perhaps it was somebody who needed it more than you do,” said Dorothy, rather quizzically.

“Can’t be such a person. And needy people seldom find money. Besides, needy folk are always honest—in the books. I’m honest myself, and heaven knows I’m needy!”

“Was it truly all the money you had with you?” asked Garry Knapp, commiseratingly.

“Honest and true, black and blue, lay me down and cut me in two!” chanted Tavia.

“All but the five dollars in the bank,” Dorothy said demurely, but with dancing eyes.

And for once Tavia actually blushed and was silenced—for a moment. Garry drawled:

“I wonder who did get your bag, Miss Travers? Of course, there are always light-fingered people hanging about a store like that.”

“And the money will be put to no good use,” declared the loser, dejectedly. “If the person finding it would only found a hospital—or something—with it, I’d feel a lot better. But I know just what will happen.”

“What?” asked Dorothy.

“The person who took my bag will go and blow themselves to a fancy dinner—oh! better even than this one. I only hope he or she will eat so much that they will be sick——”

“Don’t! don’t!” begged Dorothy, stopping her ears. “You are dreadfully mixed in your grammar.”

“Do you wonder? After having been robbed so ruthlessly?”

“But, certainly, dear,” cooed Dorothy, “your knowledge of grammar was not in your bag, too?”

Thus they joked over Tavia’s tragedy; but all the time Dorothy’s agile mind was working hard to scheme out a way to help her chum over this very, very hard place.

Just at this time, however, she had to give some thought to Garry Knapp. He took out three slips of pasteboard toward the end of the very pleasant meal and flipped them upon the cloth.

“I took a chance,” he said, in his boyish way. “There’s a good show down the street—kill a little time. Vaudeville and pictures. Good seats.”

“Oh, let’s!” cried Tavia, clasping her hands.

Dorothy knew that the theatre in question was respectable enough, although the entertainment was not of the Broadway class. But she knew, too, that this young man from the West probably could not afford to pay two dollars or more for a seat for an evening’s pleasure.

“Of course we’ll be delighted to go. And we’d better go at once,” Dorothy said, without hesitation. “I’m ready. Are you, Tavia?”

“You dear!” whispered Tavia, squeezing her arm as they followed Garry Knapp from the dining-room. “I never before knew you to be so amenable where a young man was concerned.”

“Is that so?” drawled Dorothy, but hid her face from her friend’s sharp eyes.

It was late, but a fine, bright, dry evening when the trio came out of the theatre and walked slowly toward their hotel. On the block in the middle of which the Fanuel was situated there were but few pedestrians. As they approached the main entrance to the hotel a girl came slowly toward them, peering, it seemed, sharply into their faces.

She was rather shabbily dressed, but was not at all an unattractive looking girl. Dorothy noticed that her passing glance was for Garry Knapp, not for herself or for Tavia. The young man had half dropped behind as they approached the hotel entrance and was saying:

“I think I’ll take a brisk walk for a bit, having seen you ladies home after a very charming evening. I feel kind of shut in after that theatre, and want to expand my lungs.”

“Good-night, then, Mr. Knapp,” Dorothy said lightly. “And thank you for a pleasant evening.”

“Ditto!” Tavia said, hiding a little yawn behind her gloved fingers.

The girls stepped toward the open door of the hotel. Garry Knapp wheeled and started back the way they had come. Tavia clutched her chum’s arm with excitement.

“Did you see that girl?”

“Why—yes,” Dorothy said wonderingly.

“Look back! Quick!”

Impelled by her chum’s tone, Dorothy turned and looked up the street. Garry Knapp had overtaken the girl. The girl looked sidewise at him—they could see her turn her head—and then she evidently spoke. Garry dropped into slow step with her, and they strolled along, talking eagerly.

“Why, he must know her!” gasped Tavia.

“Why didn’t he introduce her then?” Dorothy said shortly. “It serves me right.”

“What serves you right?”

“For allowing you, as well as myself, to become so familiar with a strange man.”

“Oh!” murmured Tavia, slowly. “It’s not so bad as all that. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”

But Dorothy would not listen.

CHAPTER VI
SOMETHING OF A MYSTERY

Tavia slept her usually sweet, sound sleep that night, despite the strange surroundings of the hotel and the happenings of a busy day; but Dorothy lay for a long time, unable to close her eyes.

In the morning, however, she was as deep in slumber as ever her chum was when a knock came on the door of their anteroom. Both girls sat up and said in chorus:

“Who’s there?”

“It’s jes’ me, Missy,” said the soft voice of the colored maid. “Did one o’ youse young ladies lost somethin’?”

“Oh, mercy me, yes!” shouted Tavia, jumping completely out of her bed and running toward the door.

“Nonsense, Tavia!” admonished Dorothy, likewise hopping out of bed. “She can’t have found your money.”

“Oh! what is it, please?” asked Tavia, opening the door just a trifle.

“Has you lost somethin’?” repeated the colored girl.

“I lost my handbag in a store yesterday,” said Tavia.

“Das it, Missy,” chuckled the maid. “De clark, he axed me to ax yo’ ’bout it. It’s done come back.”

“What’s come back?” demanded Dorothy, likewise appearing at the door and in the same dishabille as her friend.

“De bag. De clark tol’ me to tell yo’ ladies dat all de money is safe in it, too. Now yo’ kin go back to sleep again. He’s done got de bag in he’s safe;” and the girl went away chuckling.

Tavia fell up against the door and stared at Dorothy.

“Oh, Doro! Can it be?” she panted.

“Oh, Tavia! What luck!”

“There’s the telephone! I’m going to call up the office,” and Tavia darted for the instrument on the wall.

But there was something the matter with the wires; that was why the clerk had sent the maid to the room.

“Then I’m going to dress and go right down and see about it,” Tavia said.

“But it’s only six o’clock,” yawned Dorothy. “The maid was right. We should go back to bed.”

Her friend scorned the suggestion and she fairly “hopped” into her clothes.

“Be sure and powder your nose, dear,” laughed Dorothy. “But I am glad for you, Tavia.”

“Bother my nose!” responded her friend, running out of her room and into the corridor.

She whisked back again before Dorothy was more than half dressed with the precious bag in her hands.

“Oh, it is! it is!” she cried, whirling about Dorothy’s room and her own and the bath and anteroom, in a dervish dance of joy. “Doro! Doro! I’m saved!”

“I don’t know whether you are saved or not, dear. But you plainly are delighted.”

“Every penny safe.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes. I counted. I had to sign a receipt for the clerk, too. He is the dearest man.”

“Well, dear, I hope this will be a lesson to you,” Dorothy said.

“It will be!” declared the excited Tavia. “Do you know what I am going to do?”

“Spend your money more recklessly than ever, I suppose,” sighed her friend.

“Say! seems to me you’re awfully glum this morning. You’re not nice about my good luck—not a bit,” and Tavia stared at her in puzzlement.

“Of course I’m delighted that you should recover your bag,” Dorothy hastened to say. “How did it come back?”

“Why, the clerk gave it to me, I tell you.”

“What clerk? The one at the silk counter?”

“Goodness! The hotel clerk downstairs.”

“But how did he come by it?”

Tavia slowly sat down and blinked. “Why—why,” she said, “I didn’t even think to ask him.”

“Well, Tavia!” exclaimed Dorothy, rather aghast at this admission of her flyaway friend.

“I do seem to have been awfully thoughtless again,” admitted Tavia, slowly. “I thanked him—the clerk, I mean! Oh, I did! I could have kissed him!”

“Tavia!”

“I could; but I didn’t,” said the wicked Tavia, her eyes sparkling once more. “But I never thought to ask how he came by it. Maybe some poor person found it and should be rewarded. Should I give a tithe of it, Doro, as a reward, as we give a tithe to the church? Let’s see! I had just eighty-nine dollars and thirty-seven cents, and an old copper penny for a pocket-piece. One-tenth of that would be——”

“Do be sensible!” exclaimed Dorothy, rather tartly for her. “You might at least have asked how the bag was sent here—whether by the store itself, or by some employee, or brought by some outside person.”

“Goodness! if it were your money would you have been so curious?” demanded Tavia. “I don’t believe it. You would have been just as excited as I was.”

“Perhaps,” admitted Dorothy, after a moment. “Anyway, I’m glad you have it back, dear.”

“And do you know what I am going to do? I am going to take that old man’s advice.”

“What old man, Tavia?”

“That Mr. Schuman—the head of the big store. I am going to go out right after breakfast and buy me a dog chain and chain that bag to my wrist.”

Dorothy laughed at this—yet she did not laugh happily. There was something wrong with her, and as soon as Tavia began to quiet down a bit she noticed it again.

“Doro,” she exclaimed, “I do believe something has happened to you!”

“What something?”

“I don’t know. But you are not—not happy. What is it?”

“Hungry,” said Dorothy, shortly. “Do stop primping now and come on down to breakfast.”

“Well, you must be savagely hungry then, if it makes you like this,” grumbled Tavia. “And it is an hour before our usual breakfast time.”

They went down in the elevator to the lower floor, Tavia carrying the precious bag. She would not trust it out of her sight again, she said, as long as a penny was left in it.

She attempted to go over to the clerk’s desk at the far side of the lobby to ask for the details of the recovery of her bag; but there were several men at the desk and Dorothy stopped her.

“Wait until he is more at leisure,” she advised Tavia. “And until there are not so many men about.”

“Oh, nonsense!” ejaculated Tavia, but she turned to follow Dorothy. Then she added: “Ah, there is one you won’t mind speaking to——”

“Where?” cried Dorothy, stopping instantly.

“Going into the dining-room,” said Tavia.

Dorothy then saw the gray back of Garford Knapp ahead of them. She turned swiftly for the exit of the hotel.

“Come!” she said, “let’s get a breath of air before breakfast. It—it will give us an appetite!” And she fairly dragged Tavia to the sidewalk.

“Well, I declare to goodness!” volleyed Tavia, staring at her. “And just now you were as hungry as a bear. And you still seem to have a bear’s nature. How rough! Don’t you want to see that young man?”

“Never!” snapped Dorothy, and started straight along toward the Hudson River.

Tavia was for the moment silenced. But after a bit she asked slyly:

“You’re not really going to walk clear home, are you, dear? North Birchland is a long, long walk—and the river intervenes.”

Dorothy had to laugh. But her face almost immediately fell into very serious lines. Tavia, for once, considered her chum’s feelings. She said nothing regarding Garry Knapp.

“Well,” she murmured. “I need no appetite—no more than I have. Aren’t you going to eat at all this morning, Dorothy?”

“Here is a restaurant; let us go in,” said her friend promptly.

They did so, and Dorothy lingered over the meal (which was nowhere as good as that they would have secured at the Fanuel) until she was positive that Mr. Knapp must have finished his own breakfast and left the hotel.

In fact, they saw him run out and catch a car in front of the hotel entrance while they were still some rods from the door. Dorothy at once became brisker of movement, hurrying Tavia along.

“We must really shop to-day,” she said with decision. “Not merely look and window-shop.”

“Surely,” agreed Tavia.

“And we’ll not come back to luncheon—it takes too much time,” Dorothy went on, as they hurried into the elevator. “Perhaps we can get tickets for that nice play Ned and Nat saw when they were down here last time. Then, if we do, we will stay uptown for dinner——”

“Mercy! All that time in the same clothes and without the prescribed ‘relax’?” groaned Tavia. “We’ll look as though we had been ground between the upper and the nether millstone.”

“Well——”

They had reached their rooms. Tavia turned upon her and suddenly seized Dorothy by both shoulders, looking accusingly into her friend’s eyes.

“I know what you are up to. You are running away from that man.”

“Oh! What——”

“Never mind trying to dodge the issue,” said Tavia, sternly. “That Garry Knapp. And it seems he must be a pretty nappy sort, sure enough. He probably knew that girl and was ashamed to have us see him speaking to one so shabby. Now! what do you care what he does?”

“I don’t,” denied Dorothy, hotly. “I’m only ashamed that we have been seen with him. And it is my fault.”

“I’d like to know why?”

“It was unnecessary for us to have become so friendly with him just because he did us a favor.”

“Yes—but——”

“It was I. I did it,” said Dorothy, almost in tears. “We should never allow ourselves to become acquainted with strangers in any such way. Now you see what it means, Tavia. It is not your fault—it is mine. But it should teach you a lesson as well as me.”

“Goodness!” said the startled Tavia. “I don’t see that it is anything very terrible. The fellow is really nothing to us.”

“But people having seen us with him—and then seeing him with that common-acting girl——”

“Pooh! what do we care?” repeated Tavia. “Garry Knapp is nothing to us, and never would be.”

Dorothy said not another word, but turned quickly away from her friend. She was very quiet while they made ready for their shopping trip, and Tavia could not arouse her.

Careless and unobservant as Tavia was, anything seriously the matter with her chum always influenced her. She gradually “simmered down” herself, and when they started forth from their rooms both girls were morose.

As they passed through the lobby a bellhop was called to the desk, and then he charged after the two girls.

“Please, Miss! Which is Miss Dale?” he asked, looking at the letter in his hand.

Dorothy held out her hand and took it. It was written on the hotel stationery, and the handwriting was strange to her. She tore it open at once. She read the line or two of the note, and then stopped, stunned.

“What is it?” asked Tavia, wonderingly.

Dorothy handed her the note. It was signed “G. Knapp” and read as follows:

“Dear Miss Dale:

“Did your friend get her bag and money all right?”

CHAPTER VII
GARRY SEES A WALL AHEAD

“Why, what under the sun! How did he come to know about it?” demanded Tavia. “Goodness!”

“He—he maybe—had something to do with recovering it for you,” Dorothy said faintly. Yet in her heart she knew that it was hope that suggested the idea, not reason.

“Well, I am going to find out right now,” declared Tavia Travers, and she marched back to the clerk’s desk before Dorothy could object, had she desired to.

“This note to my friend is from Mr. Knapp, who is stopping here,” Tavia said to the young man behind the counter. “Did he have anything to do with getting back my bag?”

“I know nothing about your bag, Miss,” said the clerk. “I was not on duty, I presume, when it was handed in. You are Miss——”

“Travers.”

The clerk went to the safe and found a memorandum, which he read and then returned to the desk.

“Your supposition is correct, Miss Travers. Mr. Knapp handed in the handbag and took a receipt for it.”

“When did he do that?” asked Tavia, quickly, almost overpowered with amazement.

“Some time during the night. Before I came on duty at seven o’clock.”

“Well! isn’t that the strangest thing?” Tavia said to Dorothy, when she rejoined her friend at the hotel entrance after thanking the clerk.

“How ever could he have got it in the night?” murmured Dorothy.

“Say! he’s all right—Garry Knapp is!” Tavia cried, shaking the bag to which she now clung so tightly, and almost on the verge of doing a few “steps of delight” on the public thoroughfare. “I could hug him!”

“It—it is very strange,” murmured Dorothy, for she was still very much disturbed in her mind.

“It’s particularly jolly,” said Tavia. “And I am going to—well, thank him, at least,” as she saw her friend start and glance at her admonishingly, “just the very first chance I get. But I ought to hug him! He deserves some reward. You said yourself that perhaps I should reward the finder.”

“Mr. Knapp could not possibly have been the finder. The bag was merely returned through him.” Dorothy spoke positively.

“Don’t care. I must be grateful to somebody,” wailed Tavia. “Don’t nip my finer feelings in the bud. Your name should be Frost—Mademoiselle Jacquesette Frost! You’re always nipping me.”

Dorothy, however, remained grave. She plainly saw that this incident foretold complications. She had made up her mind that she and Tavia would have nothing more to do with the Westerner, Garry Knapp; and now her friend would insist on thanking him—of course, she must if only for politeness’ sake—and any further intercourse with Mr. Knapp would make the situation all the more difficult.

She wished with all her heart that their shopping was over, and then she could insist upon taking the train immediately out of New York, even if she had to sink to the abhorred subterfuge of playing ill, and so frightening Tavia.

She wished they might move to some other hotel; but if they did that an explanation must be made to Aunt Winnie as well as to Tavia. It seemed to Dorothy that she blushed all over—fairly burned—whenever she thought of discussing her feelings regarding Garry Knapp.

Never before in her experience had Dorothy Dale been so quickly and so favorably impressed by a man. Tavia had joked about it, but she by no means understood how deeply Dorothy felt. And Dorothy would have been mortified to the quick had she been obliged to tell even her dearest chum the truth.

Dorothy’s home training had been most delicate. Of course, in the boarding school she and Tavia had attended there were many sorts of girls; but all were from good families, and Mrs. Pangborn, the preceptress of Glenwood, had had a strict oversight over her girls’ moral growth as well as over their education.

Dorothy’s own cousins, Ned and Nat White, though collegians, and of what Tavia called “the harum-scarum type” like herself, were clean, upright fellows and possessed no low ideas or tastes. It seemed to Dorothy for a man to make the acquaintance of a strange girl on the street and talk with her as Garry Knapp seemed to have done, savored of a very coarse mind, indeed.

And all the more did she criticise his action because he had taken advantage of the situation of herself and her friend and “picked acquaintance” in somewhat the same fashion with them on their entrance into New York.

He was “that kind.” He went about making the acquaintance of every girl he saw who would give him a chance to speak to her! That is the way it looked to Dorothy in her present mood.

She gave Garry Knapp credit for being a Westerner and being not as conservative as Eastern folk. She knew that people in the West were freer and more easily to become acquainted with than Eastern people. But she had set that girl down as a common flirt, and she believed no gentleman would so easily and naturally fall into conversation with her as Garry Knapp had, unless he were quite used to making such acquaintances.

It shamed Dorothy, too, to think that the young man should go straight from her and Tavia to the girl.

That was the thought that made the keenest wound in Dorothy Dale’s mind.

They shopped “furiously,” as Tavia declared, all the morning, only resting while they ate a bite of luncheon in one of the big stores, and then went at it again immediately afterward.

“The boys talk about ‘bucking the line’ about this time of year—football slang, you know,” sighed Tavia; “but believe me! this is some ‘bucking.’ I never shopped so fast and furiously in all my life. Dorothy, you actually act as though you wanted to get it all over with and go home. And we can stay a week if we like. We’re having no fun at all.”

Dorothy would not answer. She wished they could go home. It seemed to her as though New York City was not big enough in which to hide away from Garry Knapp.

They could not secure seats—not those they wanted—for the play Ned and Nat had told them to see, for that evening; and Tavia insisted upon going back to the hotel.

“I am done up,” she announced. “I am a dish-rag. I am a disgrace to look at, and I feel that if I do not follow Lovely Lucy Larriper’s advice and relax, I may be injured for life. Come, Dorothy, we must go back to our rooms and lie down, or I shall lie right down here in the gutter and do my relaxing.”

They returned to the hotel, and Dorothy almost ran through the lobby to the elevator, she was so afraid that Garry Knapp would be waiting there. She felt that he would be watching for them. The note he had written her that morning proved that he was determined to keep up their acquaintanceship if she gave him the slightest opening.

“And I’ll never let him—never!” she told herself angrily.

“Goodness! how can you hurry so?” plaintively panted Tavia, as she sank into the cushioned seat in the elevator.

All the time they were resting, Dorothy was thinking of Garry. He would surely be downstairs at dinner time, waiting his chance to approach them. She had a dozen ideas as to how she would treat him—and none of them seemed good ideas.

She was tempted to write him a note in answer to the line he had left with the clerk for her that morning, warning him never to speak to her friend or herself again. But then, how could she do so bold a thing?

Tavia got up at last and began to move about her room. “Aren’t you going to get up ever again, Doro?” she asked. “Doesn’t the inner man call for sustenance? Or even the outer man? I’m just crazy to see Garry Knapp and ask him how he came by my bag.”

“Oh, Tavia! I wish you wouldn’t,” groaned Dorothy.

“Wish I wouldn’t what?” demanded her friend, coming to her open door with a hairbrush in her hand and wielding it calmly.

Dorothy “bit off” what she had intended to say. She could not bring herself to tell Tavia all that was in her mind. She fell back upon that “white fib” that seems first in the feminine mind when trouble portends:

“I’ve such a headache!”

“Poor dear!” cried Tavia. “I should think you had. You ate scarcely any luncheon——”

“Oh, don’t mention eating!” begged Dorothy, and she really found she did have a slight headache now that she had said so.

“Don’t you want your dinner?” cried Tavia, in horror.

“No, dear. Just let me lie here. You—you go down and eat. Perhaps I’ll have something light by and by.”

“That’s what the Esquimau said when he ate the candle,” said Tavia, but without smiling. It was a habit with Tavia, this saying something funny when she was thinking of something entirely foreign to her remark.

“You’re not going to be sick, are you, Doro?” she finally asked.

“No, indeed, my dear.”

“Well! you’ve acted funny all day.”

“I don’t feel a bit funny,” groaned Dorothy. “Don’t make me talk—now.”

So Tavia, who could be sympathetic when she chose, stole away and dressed quietly. She looked in at Dorothy when she was ready to go downstairs, and as her chum lay with her eyes closed Tavia went out without speaking.

Garry Knapp was fidgeting in the lobby when Tavia stepped out of the car. His eye brightened—then clouded again. Tavia noticed it, and her conclusion bore out the thought she had evolved about Dorothy upstairs.

“Oh, Mr. Knapp!” she cried, meeting him with both hands outstretched. “Tell me! How did you find my bag?”

And Garry Knapp was impolite enough to put her question aside for the moment while he asked:

“Where’s Miss Dale?”

Two hours later Tavia returned to her chum. Garry walked out of the hotel with his face heavily clouded.

“Just my luck! She’s a regular millionaire. Her folks have got more money than I’ll ever even see if I beat out old Methuselah in age! And Miss Tavia says Miss Dale will be rich in her own right. Ah, Garry, old man! There’s a blank wall ahead of you. You can’t jump it in a hurry. You haven’t got the spring. And this little mess of money I may get for the old ranch won’t put me in Miss Dorothy Dale’s class—not by a million miles!”

He walked away from the hotel, chewing on this thought as though it had a very, very bitter taste.

CHAPTER VIII
AND STILL DOROTHY IS NOT HAPPY

“But what did he say?” demanded Dorothy, almost wildly, sitting up in bed at Tavia’s first announcement. “I want to know what he said!”

“We-ell, maybe he didn’t tell the truth,” said Tavia, slowly.

“We’ll find out about that later,” Dorothy declared. “Go on.”

“How?”

“Why, of course we must hunt up these girls and give them something for returning your bag.”

“Oh! I s’pose so,” Tavia said. “Though I guess the little one, Number Forty-seven, wanted to keep it.”

“Now, tell me all” breathed Dorothy, her eyes shining. “All he said—every word.”

“Goodness! I guess your headache is better, Doro Dale,” laughed Tavia, sitting down on the edge of the bed. Dorothy said not a word, but her “listening face” put Tavia on her mettle.

“Well, the very first thing he said,” she told her chum, her eyes dancing, “when I ran up to him and thanked him for getting my bag, was:

“‘Where’s Miss Dale?’

“What do you know about that?” cried Tavia, in high glee. “You have made a deep, wide, long, and high impression—a four-dimension impression—on that young man from the ‘wild and woolly.’ Oh yes, you have!”

The faint blush that washed up into Dorothy Dale’s face like a gentle wave on the sea-strand made her look “ravishing,” so Tavia declared. She simply had to stop to hug her friend before she went on. Dorothy recovered her serenity almost at once.

“Don’t tease, dear,” she said. “Go on with your story.”

“You see, the little cash-girl—or ‘check’, as they call them—picked the bag up off the floor and hid it under her apron. Then she was scared—especially when Mr. Schuman chanced to come upon us all as we were quarreling. I suppose Mr. Schuman seems like a god to little Forty-seven.

“Anyhow,” Tavia pursued, “whether the child meant to steal the bag or not at first, she was afraid to say anything about it then. Her sister—this girl who came to the hotel—works in the house furnishing department. Before night Forty-seven told her sister. She had heard Mr. Knapp’s name, and from the shipping clerk the big girl obtained the name of the hotel at which Mr. Knapp was staying. Do you see?”

“Yes,” breathed Dorothy. “Go on, dear.”

“Why, the girl just came here and asked for Mr. Knapp and found he was out. She didn’t know any better than to linger about outside and wait for him to appear—like Mary’s little lamb, you know! Little Forty-seven had told her sister what Mr. Knapp looked like, of course.”

“Of course!” cried Dorothy, agreeing again, but in such a tone that Tavia frankly stared at her.

“I do wish I knew just what is the matter with you to-day, Doro,” she murmured.

“And the rest of it?” demanded Dorothy, her eyes shining and her cheeks still pink.

“Why, when little Forty-seven’s sister saw us with Mr. Knapp she jumped to the correct conclusion that we were the girls who had lost the money, and so she was afraid to speak right out before us——”

“Why?”

“Well, Dorothy,” said Tavia, with considerable gravity for her, “I guess because of the old and well-established reason.”

“What’s that?”

“Because a man will be kinder to a girl in trouble than other girls will—ordinarily, I mean.”

“Oh, Tavia!”

“Suppose it had been that Mrs. Halbridge who had really lost her bag,” Tavia went on to say. “If this girl had tried to return it, she and little Forty-seven both would have lost their jobs. Perhaps the police would have been called in. Do you see? I expect the big girl read kindness in Mr. Knapp’s face——”

Dorothy suddenly threw both arms about Tavia, and hugged her tightly. “Oh, you dear!” she cried; but she would not explain what she meant by this sudden burst of affection.

“Go on!” was her repeated demand.

“You are insatiable, my dear,” laughed Tavia. “Well, there isn’t much more ‘go on’ to it. The girl spoke to him when he passed her on the street and quickly told him all the story. Of course, he promised that nothing should happen to either of them. They are honest girls—the older one at least. And the temptation came so suddenly to little Forty-seven, whose wages are so pitiably small.”

“I know,” said Dorothy, gently. “You remember, we learned something about it when little Miette De Pleau told us how she worked as cash-girl here years ago.”

“Of course I remember,” Tavia said. “Well, that’s all, I guess. Oh no! I asked Mr. Knapp if he didn’t notice the big girl staring at us as we got to the hotel door last night. And what do you suppose he said?”

“I don’t know,” and Dorothy was still smiling happily.

“Why, he said he didn’t. ‘You see,’ he added, in that funny way of his, ‘I expect my eyes were elsewhere’; and he wasn’t complimenting me, either,” added Tavia, rolling her big eyes. “Whom do you suppose he could have meant he was looking at, Doro?”

Her friend ignored the question, but hopped out of bed.

“What are you going to do?” asked Tavia, in wonder.

“Dress.”

“But it is nine o’clock! Almost bedtime.”

“Bedtime?” demanded Dorothy. “And in the city? Why, Tavia! you amaze me, child!”

“But you’re not going out?” cried her friend.

“Do you realize I haven’t had a bite of dinner?” demanded the bold Dorothy. “I think you are very selfish.”

“Well, anyway,” snapped Tavia, suddenly showing her claws—and who does not once in a while?—“he’s gone out for a long walk and he expects to finish his business to-morrow and go home.”

“Oh!” gasped Dorothy.

She sat on the edge of her bed with her first stocking in her hand. Tavia had gone back into her own room. Had she been present she must have noticed all the delight fading out of Dorothy Dale’s countenance. Finally, the latter tossed away the stocking, and crept back into bed.

“I—I guess I’m too lazy to dress after all, dear,” she said, in a still little voice. “And you are tired, too, Tavia. The telephone has been fixed; just call down, will you, and ask them to send me up some tea and toast?”

CHAPTER IX
THEY SEE GARRY’S BACK

The following day Dorothy was her old cheerful self—or so Tavia thought. They did not shop with such abandon, but took matters more easily. And they returned to the hotel for luncheon and for rest.

“But he isn’t here!” Tavia exclaimed, when they entered the big restaurant for the midday meal. “And I remember now he said last evening that he would probably be down town almost all day to-day—trying to sell that property of his, you know.”

“Who, dear?” asked Dorothy, with a far-away look on her face.

“Peleg Swift!” snapped Tavia. “You know very well of whom I am talking. Garry Owen!” and she hummed a few bars of the old, old march.

Garry certainly was not present; but Dorothy still smiled. They went out again and purchased a few more things. When they returned late in the afternoon the young Westerner was visible in the lobby the moment the girls came through the doorway.

But he was busy. He did not even see them. He was talking with two men of pronounced New York business type who might have been brokers or Wall Street men. All three sat on a lounge near the elevators, and Dorothy heard one of the strangers say crisply, as she and Tavia waited for a car:

“That’s our top price, I think, Mr. Knapp. And, of course, we cannot pay you any money until I have seen the land, save the hundred for the option. I shall be out in a fortnight, I believe. It must hang fire until then, even at this price.”

“Well, Mr. Stiffbold—it’s a bet!” Garry said, and Dorothy could imagine the secret sigh he breathed. Evidently, he was not getting the price for the wornout ranch that he had hoped.

The two girls went up in the elevator and later made their dinner toilet. To-night Dorothy was the one who took the most pains in her primping; but Tavia said never a word. Nevertheless, she “looked volumes.”

They were downstairs again not much later than half past six. Not a sign of Garry Knapp either in the lobby or in the dining-room. The girls ate their dinner slowly and “lived in hopes,” as Tavia expressed it.

Both were frankly hoping Garry would appear. Tavia was grateful to him for the part he had taken in the recovery of her bag; and, too, he was “nice.” Dorothy felt that she had misjudged the young Westerner, and she was fired with a desire to be particularly pleasant to him so as to salve over her secret compunctions of conscience.

“‘He cometh not, she said,’” Tavia complained. “What’s the matter with the boy, anyway? Can he be eating in the cafê with those two men?”

“Oh, Tavia!” suddenly exclaimed Dorothy. “You said he was going home to-day.”

“Oh—ah—yes. He did say he expected to get out for the West again some time to-day——”

“Maybe he’s go-o-one!” and Dorothy’s phrase was almost a wail.

“Goodness! Never! Without looking us up and saying a word of good-bye?”

Dorothy got up with determination. “I am going to find out,” she said. “I feel that I would like to see Mr. Knapp again.”

“Well! if I said a thing like that about a young man——”

However, Tavia let the remark trail off into silence and followed her chum. As they came out of the dining-room the broad shoulders and broad-brimmed hat of Garry Knapp were going through the street door!

“Oh!” gasped Dorothy.

“He’s going!” added Tavia, stricken quite as motionless.

“Going——”

“Gone!” ended Tavia, sepulchrally. “It’s all off, Dorothy. Garry Knapp, of Desert City, has departed.”

“Oh, we must stop him—speak to him——”

Dorothy started for the door and Tavia, nothing loath, followed at a sharp pace. Just as they came out into the open street a car stopped before the hotel door and Garry Knapp, “bag and baggage” stepped aboard. He did not even look back!

As the girls returned to the hotel lobby the two men with whom they had seen Garry Knapp earlier in the evening, were passing out. They lingered while one of the men lit his cigar, and Dorothy heard the second man speaking.

“I could have paid him spot cash for the land right here and been sure of a bargain, Lightly. I know just where it is and all about it. But it will do no harm to let the thing hang fire till I get out there. Perhaps, if I’m not too eager, I can get him to knock off a few dollars per acre. The boy wants to sell—that’s sure.”

“Uh-huh!” grunted the one with the cigar. “It’ll make a tidy piece of wheat land without doubt, Stiffbold. You go for it!”

They passed out then and the girl who had listened followed her friend slowly to the elevator, deep in thought. She said not a word until they were upstairs again. Perhaps her heart was really too full just then for utterance.

As they entered Dorothy’s room the girls saw that the maid had been in during their absence at dinner. There was a long box, unmistakably a florist’s box, on the table.

“Oh, see what’s here!” cried Tavia, springing forward.

The card on the box read: “Miss Dale.”

“For you!” cried Tavia. “What meaneth it, fair Lady Dorothy? Hast thou made a conquest already? Some sweet swain——”

“I don’t believe you know what a ‘sweet swain’ is,” laughed Dorothy.

Her fingers trembled as she untied the purple cord. Tavia asked, with increased curiosity:

“Who can they be from, Doro? Flowers, of course!”

Dorothy said nothing in reply; but in her heart she knew—she knew! The cord was untied at last, the tissue paper, all fragrant and dewy, lifted.

“Why!” said Tavia, rather in disappointment and doubt. “Not roses—or chrysanthemums—or—or——”

“Or anything foolish!” finished Dorothy, firmly.

She lifted from their bed of damp moss a bouquet of the simplest old-fashioned flowers; mignonette, and several long-stemmed, dewy violets and buttercups, pansies, forget-me-nots——

“He must have been robbing all the old-fashioned gardens around New York,” said Tavia. “But that’s a lovely ribbon—and yards of it.”

Dorothy did not speak at first. The cost of the gift meant nothing to her. Yet she knew that the monetary value of such a bouquet in New York must be far above what was ordinarily paid for roses and the like.

A note was nestling in the stems. She opened it and read:

“Dear Miss Dale:

“Was mighty sorry to hear you are still in retirement. Your friend said last evening that you were quite done-up. Now I am forced to leave in a hurry without seeing you. Sent bellhop up to your room and he reports ‘no answer.’

“But, without seeming too bold, will hope that we shall meet again—and that these few flowers will be a reminder of

“Faithfully and regretfully yours,
“G. Knapp.”

CHAPTER X
“HEART DISEASE”

After one passes the railroad station at The Beeches, and before reaching the town limits of North Birchland, the traveler sees a gray road following closely the railway tracks, sometimes divided from them by rail-fences, sometimes by a ditch, and sometimes the railway roadbed is high on a bank overlooking the highway.

For several miles the road grades downward—not a sharp grade, but a steady one—and so does the railroad. At the foot of the slope the highway keeps straight on over a bridge that spans the deep and boisterous creek; but a fork of the road turns abruptly and crosses the railroad at grade.

There is no flagman at this grade crossing, nor is there a drop-gate. Just a “Stop, Look, Listen” sign—two words of which are unnecessary, as some philosopher has pointed out. There had been some serious accidents at this crossing; but thus far the railroad company had found it cheaper to pay court damages than to pay a flagman and the upkeep of a proper gate on both sides of its right-of-way.

When they came in sight of the down-hill part of the road Dorothy Dale and Tavia Travers knew it was time to begin to put on their wraps and take down their bags. The North Birchland station would soon be in sight.

It was Dorothy who first stood up to reach for her bag. As she did so she glanced through the broad window, out upon the highway.

“Oh, Tavia!” she gasped.

“What’s the matter, dear? You don’t see Garry Knapp, do you? Maybe his buying those flowers—that ‘parting blessing’—‘busted’ him and he’s got to walk home clear to Desert City.”

“Don’t be a goose!” half laughed Dorothy. “Look out. See if you see what I see.”

“Why, Doro! it’s Joe and Roger I do believe!”

“I was sure it was,” returned her friend. “What can those boys be doing now?”

“Well, what they are doing seems plain enough,” said Tavia. “What they are going to do is the moot question, my dear. You never know what a boy will do next, or what he did last; you’re only sure of what he is doing just now.”

What the young brothers of Dorothy Dale were doing at that moment was easily explained. They were riding down the long slope of the gray road toward North Birchland, racing with the train Dorothy and Tavia were on. The vehicle upon which the boys were riding was a nondescript thing composed of a long plank, four wheels, a steering arrangement of more or less dependence, and a soap box.

In the soap box was a bag, and unless the girls were greatly mistaken Joe and Roger Dale had been nutting over toward The Beeches, and the bag was filled with hickory nuts and chestnuts in their shells and burrs.

Roger, who was the youngest, and whom Dorothy continued to look upon as a baby, occupied the box with the nuts. Joe, who was fifteen, straddled the plank with his feet on the rests and steered. The boys’ vehicle was going like the wind. It looked as though a small stone in the road, or an uncertain jerk by Joe on the steering lines, would throw the contraption on which they rode sideways and dump out the boys.

“Enough to give one heart disease,” said Tavia. “I declare! small brothers are a nuisance. When I’m at home in Dalton I have to wear blinders so as not to see my kid brothers at their antics.”

“If something should happen, Tavia!” murmured Dorothy.

“Something is always happening. But not often is it something bad,” said Tavia, coolly. “‘There’s a swate little cherub that sits up aloft, and kapes out an eye for poor Jack,’ as the Irish tar says. And there is a similar cherub looking out for small boys—or a special providence.”

The train was now high on the embankment over the roadway. The two boys sliding down the hill looked very small, indeed, below the car windows.

“Suppose a wagon should start up the hill,” murmured Dorothy.

“There’s none in sight. I never saw the road more deserted—oh, Doro!”

Tavia uttered this cry before she thought. She had looked far ahead to the foot of the hill and had seen something that her friend had not yet observed.

“What is it?” gasped Dorothy, whose gaze was still fixed upon her brothers.

“My dear! The bridge!”

The words burst from Tavia involuntarily. She could not keep them in.

At the foot of the hill the road forked as has before been shown. To the left it crossed the railroad tracks at grade. Of course, these reckless boys had not intended to try for the crossing ahead of the train. But the main road, which kept straight on beside the tracks, crossed the creek on a wooden bridge. Tavia, looking ahead, saw that the bridge boards were up and there was a rough fence built across the main road!

“They’ll be killed!” screamed Dorothy Dale, and sank back into her chair.

The train was now pitching down the grade. It was still a mile to the foot of the slope where railroad and highway were on a level again. The boys in their little “scooter” were traveling faster than the train itself, for the brakes had been applied when the descent was begun.

The boys and their vehicle, surrounded by a little halo of dust, were now far ahead of the chair car in which their sister and Tavia rode. The girls, clinging to each other, craned their necks to see ahead. There were not many other passengers in the car and nobody chanced to notice the horror-stricken girls.

It was a race between the boys and the train, and the boys would never be able to halt their vehicle on the level at the bottom of the hill before crashing into the fence that guarded the open bridge.

Were the barrier not there, the little cart would dart over the edge of the masonry wall of the bridge and all be dashed into the deep and rock-strewn bed of the creek.

There was but one escape for the boys in any event. Perhaps their vehicle could be guided to the left, into the branch road and so across the railroad track. But if Joe undertook that would not the train be upon them?

“Heart disease,” indeed! It seemed to Dorothy Dale as though her own heart pounded so that she could no longer breathe. Her eyes strained to see the imperiled boys down in the road.

The “scooter” ran faster and faster or was the train itself slowing down?

“For sure and certain they are beating us!” murmured Tavia.

She could appreciate the sporting chance in the race; but to Dorothy there loomed up nothing but the peril facing her brothers.

The railroad tracks pitched rather sharply here. It was quite a descent into the valley where North Birchland lay. When the engineers of the passenger trains had any time to make up running west they could always regain schedule on this slope.

Dorothy knew this. She realized that the engineer, watching the track ahead and not the roadway where the boys were, might be tempted to release his brakes when half way down the slope and increase his speed.

If he did so and the boys, Joe and Roger, turned to cross the rails, the train must crash into the “scooter.”

CHAPTER XI
A BOLD THING TO DO!

The threatening peril—which looked so sure to Dorothy Dale if to nobody else—inspired her to act, not to remain stunned and helpless. She jerked her hand from Tavia’s clutch and sprang to her feet. She had been reaching for her bag on first observing the boys coasting down the long hill beside the railroad tracks; and her umbrella was in the rack, too. She seized this. Its handle was a shepherd’s crook. Reaching with it, and without a word to Tavia, she hooked the handle into the emergency cord that ran overhead the length of the car, and pulled down sharply. Instantly there was a shriek from the engine whistle and the brakes were sharply applied.

The brake shoes so suddenly applied to the wheels on this downgrade did much harm to the wheels themselves. Little cared Dorothy for this well-known fact. If every wheel under the train had to go to the repair shop she would have made this bold attempt to stop the train or retard its speed, so that Joe and Roger could cross the tracks ahead of it.

Glancing through the window she saw the boys’ “scooter” dart swiftly and safely into the fork-road and disappear some rods ahead of the pilot of the engine. The boys were across before the brakeman and the Pullman conductor opened the car door and rushed in.

“Who pulled that emergency cord? Anybody here?” shouted the conductor.

“Oh! don’t tell him!” breathed Tavia.

But her friend, if physically afraid, was never a moral coward. She looked straight into the angry conductor’s face and said:

“I did.”

“What for?” he demanded.

“To stop the train. My brothers were in danger——”

“Say! What’s that?” demanded the Pullman conductor of Tavia. “Where are her brothers?”

The brakeman, who had long run over this road, pulled at the conductor’s sleeve.

“That’s Major Dale’s girl,” he whispered, and Tavia heard if Dorothy did not.

“Who’s Major Dale?” asked the conductor, in a low voice, turning aside. “Somebody on the road?”

“Owns stock in it all right. And a bigwig around North Birchland. Go easy, I say,” advised the brakeman, immediately turning back to the door.

The train, meanwhile, had started on again, for undoubtedly the other conductor had given the engineer the signal to go ahead. Through the window across the car Dorothy could see out upon the road beyond the tracks. There was the little “scooter” at a standstill. Joe and Roger were standing up and waving their caps at the train.

“They’re safe!” Dorothy cried to Tavia.

“I see they are; but you’re not—yet,” returned her chum.

“Who’s that is safe?” asked the conductor, still in doubt.

“My brothers—there,” answered Dorothy, pointing. “They had to cross in front of the train because the bridge is open. They couldn’t stop at the bottom of the hill.”

The Pullman conductor understood at last. “But I’ll have to make a report of this, Miss Dale,” he said, complainingly.

Dorothy had seated herself and she was very pale. The fright for her at least had been serious.

“Make a dozen reports if you like—help yourself,” said Tavia, tartly, bending over her friend. “If there is anything to pay send the bill to Major Dale.”

The conductor grumbled something and went out, notebook in hand. In a few moments the train came to a standstill at the North Birchland station. The girls had to bestir themselves to get out in season, and that helped rouse Dorothy.

“Those rascals!” said Tavia, once they were on the platform. “Joe and Roger should be spanked.”

“I’m afraid Joe is too big for that,” sighed Dorothy. “And who would spank them? It is something they didn’t get when they were little——”

“And see the result!”

“Your brothers were whipped sufficiently, I am sure,” Dorothy said, smiling at length. “They are not one whit better than Joe and Roger.”

“Dear me! that’s so,” admitted Tavia. “But just the same, I belieev in whippings—for boys.”

“And no whippings for girls?”

“I should say not!” cried Tavia. “There never was a girl who deserved corporal punishment.”

“Not even Nita Brandt?” suggested Dorothy, naming a girl who had ever been a thorn in the flesh for Tavia during their days at Glenwood.

“Well—perhaps she. But Nita’s about the only one, I guess.”

The next moment Tavia started to run down the long platform, dropping her bag and screaming:

“Jennie Hapgood! Jennie Jane Jemina Jerusha Happiness—good! How ever came you here?”

Dorothy was excited, too, when she saw the pretty girl whom Tavia greeted with such ebullition; but she looked beyond Jennie Hapgood, the expected guest from Pennsylvania.

There was the boys’ new car beside the station platform and Ned was under the steering-wheel while Nat was just getting out after Jennie. Of course, the two girls just back from New York were warmly kissed by Jennie. Then Nat came next and before Tavia realized what was being done to her, she was soundly kissed, too!

“Bold, bad thing!” she cried, raising a gloved hand toward the laughing Nat. But it never reached him. Then Dorothy had to submit—as she always did—to the bearlike hugs of both her cousins, for Ned quickly joined them on the platform. Tavia escaped Ned—if, indeed, he had intended to follow his brother’s example.

“What is the use of having a pretty cousin,” the White boys always said, “if we can’t kiss her? Keeps our hands in, you know. And if she has pretty friends, why shouldn’t we kiss them, too?”

“Did you boys kiss Jennie when she arrived this morning?” Tavia demanded, repairing the ruffled hair that had fallen over her ears.

“Certainly!” declared Nat, boldly. “Both of us.”

“They never!” cried Jennie, turning very red. “You know I wouldn’t let these boys kiss me.”

“I bet a boy kissed you the last thing before you started up here from home,” teased Nat.

“I never let boys kiss me,” repeated Jennie.

“Oh, no!” drawled Ned, joining in with his brother. “How about Jack?”

“Oh, well, Jack!”

“Jack isn’t a boy, I suppose?” hooted Nat. “I guess that girl he’s going to marry about Christmas time thinks he’s a pretty nice boy.”

“But he’s only my brother,” announced Jennie Hapgood, tossing her head.

“Is he really?” cried Tavia, clasping her hands eagerly.

“Is he really my brother?” demanded Jennie, in amazement. “Why, you know he is, Tavia Travers!”

“Oh, no! I mean are they going to be married at Christmas?”

“Yes. That is the plan now. And you’ve all got to come to Sunnyside to the wedding. Nothing less would suit Jack—or father and mother,” Jennie said happily. “So prepare accordingly.”

Nat raced with Tavia for the bag she had dropped. He got it and clung to it all the way in the car to The Cedars, threatening to open it and examine its contents.

“For I know very well that Tavia’s got oodles of new face powder and rouge, and a rabbit’s foot to put it on with—or else a kalsomine brush,” Nat declared. “Joe and Roger want to paint the old pigeon house, anyway, and this stuff Tavia’s got in here will be just the thing.”

In fact, the two big fellows were so glad to see their cousin and Tavia again that they teased worse than ever. A queer way to show their affection, but a boy’s way, after all. And, of course, everybody else at the Cedars was delighted to greet Dorothy and Tavia. It was some time before the returned travelers could run upstairs to change their dresses for dinner. Jennie had gone into her room to change, too, and Tavia came to Dorothy’s open door.

“Oh, that letter!” she exclaimed, seeing Dorothy standing very gravely with a letter in her hand. “Haven’t you sent it?”

“You see I haven’t,” Dorothy said seriously.

“But why not?”

“It seems such a bold thing to do,” confessed her friend. “We know so little about him. And it might encourage him to write in return——”

“Of course it will!” laughed Tavia.

“There! that’s what I mean. It is bold.”

“But, you silly!” cried Tavia. “You only write Mr. Knapp to do him a good turn. And he did us a good turn—at least, he did me one that I shall never forget.”

“True,” Dorothy said thoughtfully. “And I have only repeated to him in this note what I heard that man, Stiffbold, say about the purchase of Mr. Knapp’s ranch.”

“Oh, help the poor fellow out. Those men will rob him,” Tavia advised. “Why didn’t you send it at once, when you had written it?”

“I—I thought I’d wait and consult Aunt Winnie,” stammered Dorothy.

“Then consult her.”

“But—but now I don’t want to.”

Tavia looked at her with certainty in her own gaze. “I know what is the matter with you,” she said.

Dorothy flushed quickly and Tavia shook her head, saying nothing more. But when the girls went downstairs to dinner, Tavia saw Dorothy drop the stamped letter addressed to “Mr. Garford Knapp, Desert City,” into the mail bag in the hall.

CHAPTER XII
UNCERTAINTIES

Dorothy had no time before dinner, but after that meal she seized upon her brothers, Joe and Roger, and led them aside. The boys thought she had something nice for them, brought from New York. They very quickly found out their mistake.

“I want to know what you boys mean by taking such risks as you did this afternoon?” she demanded, when out of hearing of the rest of the family. She would not have her aunt or the major troubled by knowing of the escapade.

“You, especially, Joe,” she went on, with an accusing finger raised. “You both might have been killed. Then how would you have felt?”

“Er—dead, I guess, Sister,” admitted Roger, for Joe was silent.

“Didn’t you know the road was closed because of repairs on the bridge?” she asked the older boy sternly.

“No-o. We forgot. We didn’t go over to the nutting woods that way. Say! who told you?” blurted out Joe.

“Who told me what?”

“About our race with the train. Cricky, but it was great!”

“It was fine!” Roger added his testimony with equal enthusiasm.

“I saw you,” said Dorothy, her face paling as she remembered her fright in the train. “I—I thought I should faint I was so frightened.”

“Say! isn’t that just like a girl?” grumbled Joe; but he looked at his sister with some compunction, for he and Roger almost worshipped her. Only, of course, they were boys and the usual boy cannot understand the fluttering terror in the usual girl’s heart when danger threatens. Not that Dorothy was a weakling in any way; she could be courageous for herself. But her fears were always excited when those she loved were in peril.

“Why, we were only having fun, Sister,” Roger blurted out. Being considerably younger than his brother he was quicker to be moved by Dorothy’s expression of feeling.

“Fun!” she gasped.

“Yes,” Joe said sturdily. “It was a great race. And you and Tavia were in that train? We didn’t have an idea, did we, Roger?”

“Nop,” said his small brother thoughtlessly. “If we had we wouldn’t have raced that train.”

“Now, I want to tell you something!” exclaimed their sister, with a sharper note in her voice. “You’re not to race any train! Understand, boys? Suppose that engine had struck you as you crossed the tracks?”

“Oh, it wouldn’t,” Joe said stoutly. “I know the engineer. He’s a friend of mine. He saw I had the ‘right-of-way,’ as they call it. I’d beat him down the hill; so he held up the train.”

“Yes—he held up the train,” said Dorothy with a queer little laugh. “He put on brakes because I pulled the emergency cord. You boys would never have crossed ahead of that train if I hadn’t done so.”

“Oh, Dorothy!” gasped Joe.

“Oh, Sister!” cried Roger.

“Tavia and I almost had heart disease,” the young woman told them seriously. “Engineers do not watch boys on country roads when they are guiding a great express train. It is a serious matter to control a train and to have the destinies of the passengers in one’s hands. The engineer is looking ahead—watching the rails and the roadbed. Remember that, boys.”

“I’d like to be an engineer!” sighed Roger, his eyes big with longing.

“Pooh!” Joe said. “It’s more fun to drive an automobile—like this new one Ned and Nat have. You don’t have to stay on the tracks, you know.”

“Nobody but cautious people can learn to drive automobiles,” said Dorothy, seriously.

“I’m big enough,” stated Joe, with conviction.

“You may be. But you’re not careful enough,” his sister told him. “Your racing our train to-day showed that. Now, I won’t tell father or auntie, for I do not wish to worry them. But you must promise me not to ride down that hill in your little wagon any more or enter into any such reckless sports.”

“Oh, we won’t, of course, if you say not, Dorothy,” sniffed Joe. “But you must remember we’re boys and boys have got to take chances. Even father says that.”

“Yes. When you are grown. You may be placed in situations where your courage will be tested. But, goodness me!” finished Dorothy Dale. “Don’t scare us to death, boys. And now see what I bought you in New York.”

However, her lecture made some impression upon the boys’ minds despite their excitement over the presents which were now brought to light. Full football outfits for both the present was, and Joe and Roger were delighted. They wanted to put them on and go out at once with the ball to “pass signals,” dark as it had become.

However, they compromised on this at Dorothy’s advice, by taking the suits, pads and guards off to their room and trying them on, coming downstairs later to “show off” before the folks in the drawing-room.

Major Dale was one of those men who never grow old in their hearts. Crippled as he was—both by his wounded leg and by rheumatism—he delighted to see the young life about him, and took as much interest in the affairs of the young people as ever he had.

Aunt Winnie looked a very interesting invalid, indeed, with her lame ankle, and rested on the couch. The big boys and Dorothy and her friends always made much of Aunt Winnie in any case; now that she was “laid up in drydock,” as Nat expressed it, they were especially attentive.

Jennie and Tavia, with the two older boys, spent most of the evening hovering about the lady’s couch, or at the piano where they played and sang college songs and old Briarwood songs, till eleven o’clock. Dorothy sat between her father and Aunt Winnie and talked to them.

“What makes you so sober, Captain?” the major asked during the evening. He had always called her “his little captain” and sometimes seemed really to forget that she had any other name.

“I’m all right, Major,” she returned brightly. “I have to think, sometimes, you know.”

“What is the serious problem now, Dorothy?” asked her aunt, with a little laugh. “Did you forget to buy something while you were in New York?”

Dorothy dimpled. “Wait till you see all I did buy,” she responded, “and you will not ask that question. I have been the most reckless person!”

“Why the serious pucker to your brow, Captain?” went on the major.

“Oh, I have problems. I admit the fact,” Dorothy said, trying to laugh off their questioning.

“Out with them,” advised her father. “Here are two old folks who have been solving problems all their lives. Maybe we can help.”

Dorothy laughed again. “Try this one,” she said, with her eyes upon the quartette “harmonizing” at the piano in dulcet tones, singing “Seeing Nellie Ho-o-ome.” “Which of our big boys does Tavia like best?”

“Goodness!” exclaimed her aunt, while the major chuckled mellowly. “Don’t you know, really, Dorothy? I was going to ask you. I thought, of course, Tavia confided everything to you.”

“Sooner or later she may,” the young woman said, still with the thoughtful air upon her. “But I am as much in the dark about this query as anybody—perhaps as the boys themselves.”

“Humph!” muttered the major. “Which of them likes her the better?”

“And that I’d like to know,” said his sister earnestly. “There is another thing, Dorothy: Which of my sons is destined to fall in love with this very, very pretty girl you have invited here—Jennie Hapgood, I mean?”

“Oh! they’re all doing it, are they?” grunted the major. “How about our Dorothy? Where does she come in? No mate for her?”

“I think I shall probably become an old maid,” Dorothy Dale said, but with a conscious flush that made her aunt watch her in a puzzled way for some time.

But the major put back his head and laughed delightedly. “No more chance of your remaining a spinster—when you are really old enough to be called one—than there is of my leading troops into battle again,” he declared with warmth. “Hey, Sister?”

“Our Dorothy is too attractive I am sure to escape the chance to marry, at least,” said Aunt Winnie, still watching her niece with clouded gaze. “I wonder whence the right knight will come riding—from north, or south, east or west?”

And in spite of herself Dorothy flushed up again at her aunt’s last word.

It was a question oft-repeated in Dorothy Dale’s mind during the following days, this one regarding the state of mind of her two cousins and her two school friends.

It had always seemed to Dorothy, whenever she had thought of it, that one of her cousins, either Ned or Nat, must in the end be preferred by Tavia. To think of Tavia’s really settling down to caring for any other man than Ned or Nat, was quite impossible.

On the other hand, the boys had both shown a great fondness for the society of Jennie Hapgood when they were all at her home in Pennsylvania such a short time previous; and now that all four were together again Dorothy could not guess “which was which” as Tavia herself would have said.

The boys did not allow Dorothy to be overlooked in any particular. She was not neglected in the least; yet she did, as the days passed, find more time to spend with her father and with her Aunt Winnie.

“The little captain is getting more thoughtful. She is steadying down,” the major told Mrs. White.

“But I wonder why?” was that good woman’s puzzled response.

Dorothy Dale sitting by herself with a book that she was not reading or with fancywork on which she only occasionally took stitches, was entirely out of her character. She had never been this way before going to New York, Mrs. White was sure.

There were several uncertainties upon the girl’s mind. One of them almost came to light when, after ten days, her letter addressed to “Mr. Garford Knapp, Desert City,” was returned to her by the post-office department, as instructed in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope.

Her letter, warning Garry Knapp of the advantage the real estate men wished to take of him, would, after all, do him no good. He would never know that she had written. Perhaps her path and Garry Knapp’s would never cross again.

CHAPTER XIII
DOROTHY MAKES A DISCOVERY

The boys had a dog—Old Brindle he was called—and he had just enough bull in him to make him a faithful friend and a good watchdog. But, of course, he was of little use in the woods, and Joe and Roger were always begging for a hunting dog.

“We’ve got these now—pump-rifles,” Roger said eagerly to Dorothy, whom he thought able to accomplish any wonder she might undertake. “They shoot fifty shots. Think of it, Sister! That’s a lot. And father taught us how to use ’em long ago, of course. Just think! I could stand right up and shoot down fifty people—just like that.”

“Oh, Roger!” gasped Dorothy. “Don’t say such awful things.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t, you know; but I could,” the boy said confidently. “Now the law is off rabbits and partridges and quail. Joe and I saw lots of ’em when we went after those nuts the other day. If we’d had our guns along maybe we might have shot some.”

“The poor little birds and the cunning little rabbits,” said Dorothy with a sigh.

“Oh! they’re not like our pigeons and our tame rabbits. These are real wild. If some of ’em weren’t shot they’d breed an’ breed till there were so many that maybe it wouldn’t be safe to go out into the woods,” declared the small boy, whose imagination never needed spurring.

Joe came up on the porch in time to hear this last. He chuckled, but Dorothy was saying to Roger:

“How foolish, dear! Who ever heard of a rabbit being cross?”

“Just the same I guess you’ve heard of being as ‘mad as a March hare,’ haven’t you?” demanded Joe, his eyes twinkling. “And we do want a bird dog, Sis, to jump a rabbit for us, or to flush a flock of quail.”

“Those dear little bobwhites,” Dorothy sighed again. “Why is it that boys want always to kill?”

“So’s to eat,” Joe said bluntly. “You know yourself, Dorothy Dale, that you like partridge on toast and rabbit stew.”

She laughed at them. “I shall go hungry, then, I’m afraid, as far as you boys are concerned.”

“Of course we can’t get any game if we don’t have a dog. Brindle couldn’t jump a flea,” growled Joe.

“Say! the big fellows used to have lots more pets than we’ve got,” complained Roger, referring to Ned and Nat.

“They had dogs,” added Joe. “A whole raft of ’em.”

“Oh, dear me!” exclaimed Dorothy. “I’ll see what can be done. But another dog!”

“We won’t let him bite you, Sister,” proclaimed Roger. “We only want him to chase rabbits or to start up the birds so we can shoot ’em.”

Dorothy’s “I’ll see” was, of course, taken by the boys themselves as an out-and-out agreement to do as the boys desired. They were convinced that if she gave her mind to it their sister could perform almost any miracle. At least, she could always bring the rest of the family around to her way of thinking.

Ned and Nat had opposed the bringing of another dog upon the place. They were fond of old Brindle; but it must be confessed that the watchdog was bad tempered where other dogs were concerned.

Brindle seldom went off the place; but if he saw any other dog trespassing he was very apt to fly at the uninvited visitor. And once the bull’s teeth were clinched in the strange animal’s neck, it took a hot iron to make him loose his hold.

There had been several such unfortunate happenings, and Mrs. White had paid several owners of dogs damages rather than have trouble with the neighbors. She—and even the major—had strong objections to the coming of any other dog upon the place as long as Brindle lived.

So the chance for Joe and Roger to have their request granted was small indeed. Nevertheless, “hope springs eternal,” especially in the breast of a small boy who wants a dog.

“Maybe we can find somebody that’s got a good, trained dog and will sell him to us, Roger,” Joe said, as they set forth from the house.

“But I haven’t got much money—only what’s in the bank, and I can’t get that,” complained Roger.

“You spend all you get for candy,” scoffed Joe. “Now, I’ve got a whole half dollar left of my month’s spending money. But you can’t buy much of a dog for fifty cents.”

“Maybe somebody would give us a dog.”

“And folks don’t give away good dogs, either,” grumbled Joe.

“I tell you!” exclaimed Roger, suddenly. “I saw a stray dog yesterday going down the lane behind our stables.”

“How do you know it was a stray dog?”

“’Cause it looked so. It was sneaking along at the edge of the hedge and it was tired looking. Then, it had a piece of frayed rope tied around its neck. Oh, it was a stray dog all right,” declared the smaller boy eagerly.

“Where’d it go to?”

“Under Mr. Cummerford’s barn,” said Roger. “I bet we could coax it out, if it’s still there.”

“Not likely,” grunted Joe.

Nevertheless, he started off at once in the direction indicated by his brother, and the boys were soon at the stable of the neighbor whose place adjoined The Cedars on that side.

Oddly enough, the dog was still there. He had crawled out and lay in the sun beside the barn. He was emaciated, his eyes were red and rolling, and he had a lame front paw. The gray, frayed rope was still tied to his neck. He was a regular tramp dog.

But he allowed the boys to come close to him without making any attempt to get away. He eyed them closely, but neither growled nor wagged his tail. He was a “funny acting” dog, as Roger said.

“I bet he hasn’t had anything to eat for so long and he’s come so far that he hasn’t got the spunk to wag his tail,” Joe said, as eager as Roger now. “We’ll take him home and feed him.”

“He’s sure a stray dog, isn’t he, Joe?” cried the smaller boy. “I haven’t ever seen him before around here, have you?”

“No. And I bet his owner won’t ever come after him,” said Joe, picking up the end of the rope. “He’s just the kind of a dog we want, too. You see, he’s a bird dog, or something like that. And when he’s fed up and rested, I bet he’ll know just how to go after partridges.”

He urged the strange dog to his feet. The beast tottered, and would have lain down again. Roger, the tender-hearted, said:

“Oh! he’s so hungry. Bet he hasn’t had a thing to eat for days. Maybe we’ll have to carry him.”

“No. He’s too dirty to carry,” Joe said, looking at the mud caked upon the long hair of the poor creature and the dust upon him. “We’ll get him to the stable and feed him; then we’ll hose him off.”

Pulling at the rope he urged the dog on. The animal staggered at first, but finally grew firmer on his legs. But he did not use the injured fore paw. He favored that as he hopped along to the White stables. Neither the coachman nor the chauffeur were about. There was nobody to observe the dog or advise the boys about the beast. Roger ran to the kitchen door to beg some scraps for their new possession. The cook would always give Roger what he asked for. When he came back Joe got a pan of water for the dog; but the creature backed away from it and whined—the first sound he had made.

“Say! isn’t that funny?” Joe demanded. “See! he won’t drink. You’d think he’d be thirsty.”

“Try him with this meat,” Roger said. “Maybe he’s too hungry to drink at first.”

The dog was undoubtedly starving. Yet he turned his head away from the broken pieces of food Roger put down before his nose.

Joe had tied the rope to a ring on the side of the stable. The boys stepped back to see if the dog would eat or drink if they were not so close to him. Then it was that the creature flew into an awful spasm. He rose up, his eyes rolling, trembling in every limb, and trying to break the rope that fastened him to the barn. Froth flew from his clashing jaws. His teeth were terrible fangs. He fell, rolling over, snapping at the water-dish. The boys, even Joe, ran screaming from the spot.

At the moment Dorothy, Tavia and Jennie came walking down the path toward the stables. They heard the boys scream and all three started to run. Ned and Nat, nearer the house, saw the girls running and they likewise bounded down the sloping lawn.

Around the corner of the stables came Joe and Roger, the former almost dragging the smaller boy by the hand. And, almost at the same instant, appeared the dog, the broken rope trailing, bounding, snapping, rolling over, acting as insanely as ever a dog acted.

“Oh! what’s the matter?” cried Dorothy.

“Keep away from that dog!” shrieked Tavia, stopping short and seizing both Dorothy and Jennie. “He’s mad!”

The dog was blindly running, this way and that, the foam dripping from his clashing jaws. He was, indeed, a most fearful sight. He had no real intention in his savage charges, for a beast so afflicted with rabies loses eyesight as well as sense; but suddenly he bounded directly for the three girls.

They all shrieked in alarm, even Dorothy. Yet the latter the better held her self-possession than the others. She heard Jennie scream: “Oh, Ned!” while Tavia cried: “Oh, Nat!”

The young men were at the spot in a moment. Nat had picked up a croquet mallet and one good blow laid the poor dog out—harmless forever more.

Tavia had seized the rescuer’s arm, Jennie was clinging to Ned. Dorothy, awake at last to the facts of the situation, made a great discovery—and almost laughed, serious as the peril had been.

“I believe I know which is which now,” she thought, forgetting her alarm.

SUDDENLY HE BOUNDED DIRECTLY FOR THE THREE GIRLS.

Dorothy Dale’s Engagement

Page [108]

CHAPTER XIV
TAVIA IS DETERMINED

“After that scare I’m afraid the boys will have to go without a bird dog,” Tavia said that night as she and Dorothy were brushing their hair before the latter’s dressing-glass.

Tavia and Jennie and Ned and Nat were almost inseparable during the daytime; but when the time came to retire the flyaway girl had to have an old-time “confab,” as she expressed it, with her chum.

Dorothy was so bright and so busy all day long that nobody discovered—not even the major—that she was rather “out of it.” The two couples of young folk sometimes ran away and left Dorothy busy at some domestic task in which she claimed to find much more interest than in the fun her friends and cousins were having.

“It would have been a terrible thing if the poor dog had bitten one of us,” Dorothy replied. “Dr. Agnew, the veterinary, says without doubt it was afflicted with rabies.”

“And how scared your Aunt Winnie was!” Then Tavia began to giggle. “She will be so afraid of anything that barks now, that she’ll want all the trees cut down around the house.”

“That pun is unworthy of you, my dear,” Dorothy said placidly.

“Dear me, Doro Doodlekins!” exclaimed Tavia, suddenly and affectionately, coming close to her chum and kissing her warmly. “You are such a tabby-cat all of a sudden. Why! you have grown up, while the rest of us are only kids.”

“Yes; I am very settled,” observed Dorothy, smiling into the mirror at her friend. “A cap for me and knitting very soon, Tavia. Then I shall sit in the chimney corner and think——”

“Think about whom, my dear?” Tavia asked saucily. “That Garry Knapp, I bet.”

“I wouldn’t bet,” sighed Dorothy. “It isn’t ladylike.”

“Oh—de-ah—me!” groaned Tavia. “You are thinking of him just the same.”

“I happened to be just now,” admitted Dorothy, and without blushing this time.

“No! were you really?” demanded Tavia, eagerly. “Isn’t it funny he doesn’t write?”

“No. Not at all.”

“But you’d think he would write and thank you for your letter if nothing more,” urged the argumentative Tavia.

“No,” said Dorothy again.

“Why not?”

“Because Mr. Knapp never got my letter,” Dorothy said, opening her bureau drawer and pulling the letter out from under some things laid there. “See. It was returned to-day.”

“Oh, Dorothy!” gasped Tavia, both startled and troubled.

“Yes. It—it didn’t reach him somehow,” Dorothy said, and she could not keep the trouble entirely out of her voice.

“Oh, my dear!” repeated Tavia.

“And I am sorry,” her friend went on to say; “for now he will not know about the intentions of those men, Stiffbold and Lightly.”

“But, goodness! it serves him right,” exclaimed Tavia, suddenly. “He didn’t give us his right address.”

“He gave us no address,” said Dorothy, sadly.

“Why, yes! he said Desert City——”

“He mentioned that place and said that his land was somewhere near there. But he works on a ranch, which, perhaps, is a long way from Desert City.”

“That’s so,” grumbled Tavia. “I forgot he’s only a cowboy.”

At this Dorothy flushed a little and Tavia, looking at her sideways and eagerly, noted the flush. Her eyes danced for a moment, for the girl was naturally chock-full of mischief.

But in a moment the expression of Tavia Travers’ face changed. Dorothy was pensively gazing in the glass; she had halted in her hair brushing, and Tavia knew that her chum neither saw her own reflection nor anything else pictured in the mirror. The mirror of her mind held Dorothy’s attention, and Tavia could easily guess the vision there. A tall, broad-shouldered, broad-hatted young man with a frank and handsome face and a ready smile that dimpled one bronzed cheek ever so little and wrinkled the outer corners of his clear, far-seeing eyes.

Garry Knapp!

Tavia for the first time realized that Dorothy had found interest and evidently a deep and abiding interest, in the young stranger from Desert City. It rather shocked her. Dorothy, of all persons, to become so very deeply interested in a man about whom they knew practically nothing.

Tavia suddenly realized that she knew more about him than Dorothy did. At least, she had been with Garry Knapp more than had her friend. It was Tavia who had had the two hours’ tête-à-tête with the Westerner at dinner on the evening before Garry Knapp departed so suddenly for the West. All that happened and was said at that dinner suddenly unrolled like a panorama before Tavia’s memory.

Why! she could picture it all plainly. She had been highly delighted herself in the recovery of her bag and in listening to Garry’s story of how it had been returned by the cash-girl’s sister. And, of course, she had been pleased to be dining alone with a fine looking young man in a hotel dining-room. She had rattled on when her turn came to talk, just as irresponsibly as usual.

Now, in thinking over the occasion, she realized that the young man from the West had been a shrewd questioner. He had got her started upon Dorothy Dale, and before they came to the little cups of black coffee Tavia had told just about all she knew regarding her chum.

The reader may be sure that all Tavia said was to Dorothy’s glory. She had little need to explain to Garry Knapp what a beautiful character Dorothy Dale possessed. Tavia had told about Dorothy’s family, her Aunt Winnie’s wealth, the fortunes Major Dale now possessed both in the East and West, and the fact that when Dorothy came of age, at twenty-one, she would be wealthy in her own right. She had said all this to a young man who was struggling along as a cowpuncher on a Western ranch, and whose patrimony was a piece of rundown land that he could sell but for a song, as he admitted himself. “And no chorus to it!” Tavia thought.

“I’m a bonehead!” she suddenly thought fiercely. “Nat would say my noodle is solid ivory. I know now what was the matter with Garry Knapp that evening. I know why he rushed up to me and asked for Dorothy, and was what the novelists call ‘distrait’ during our dinner. Oh, what a worm I am! A miserable, squirmy worm! Ugh!” and the conscience-stricken girl fairly shuddered at her own reflection in the mirror and turned away quickly so that Dorothy should not see her features.

“It’s—it’s the most wonderful thing. And it began right under my nose, my poor little ‘re-trousered’ nose, as Joe called it the other day, and I didn’t really see it! I thought it was just a fancy on Dorothy’s part! And I never thought of Garry Knapp’s side of it at all! Oh, my heaven!” groaned Tavia, deep in her own soul. “Why wasn’t I born with some good sense instead of good looks? I—I’ve spoiled my chum’s life, perhaps. Goodness! it can’t be so bad as that.

“Of course, Garry Knapp is just the sort of fellow who would raise a barrier of Dorothy’s riches between them. Goodness me!” added the practical Tavia, “I’d like to see any barrier of wealth stop me if I wanted a man. I’d shin the wall in a hurry so as to be on the same side of it as he was.”

She would have laughed at this fancy had she not taken a look at Dorothy’s face again.

“Good-night!” she shouted into her chum’s ear, hugged her tight, kissed her loudly, and ran away into her own room. Once there, she cried all the time she was disrobing, getting into her lacy nightgown, and pulling down the bedclothes.

Then she did not immediately go to bed. Instead, she tiptoed back to the connecting door and closed it softly. She turned on the hanging electric light over the desk.

“I’ll do it!” she said, with determined mien. “I’ll write to Lance Petterby.” And she did so.

CHAPTER XV
THE SLIDE ON SNAKE HILL

Joe and Roger marched down at an early breakfast hour from the upper regions of the big white house, singing energetically if not melodiously a pæan of joy:

“‘The frog he would a-wooing go——

Bully for you! Bully for all!

The frog he would a-wooing go——

Bully for all, we say!’”

The boys’ determination to reach the low register of a bullfrog in that “bully for all” line was very, very funny, especially in Roger’s case, for his speaking voice was naturally a shrill treble.

Their joy, however, awoke any sleepers there might have been in the house, and most of them came to their bedroom doors and peered out.

“What’s the matter with you blamed little rascals?” Ned, in a purple bathrobe, demanded.

“Wouldn’t you boys just as lief sing as to make that noise?” Nat, in a gray robe, and at his door, questioned.

But he grinned at his small cousins, for it hadn’t been so long ago that he was just as much of a boy as they were.

“Hello, kids!” cried Tavia, sticking out a tousled head from her room. “Tell us: What’s the good news?”

Jennie Hapgood peered out for an instant, saw Ned and Nat, and darted back with an exclamatory “Oh!”

“I—I thought something had happened,” she faintly said, closing her door all but a crack.

“Something has,” declared Joe.

“What is it, boys?” asked Dorothy, appearing fully dressed from her room. “The ice?”

“What ice?” demanded Tavia. “Has the iceman come so early? Tell him to leave a big ten-cent piece.”

“Huh!” grunted Roger, “there’s a whole lot more than a ten-cent piece outside, and you’d see it if you’d put up your shade. The whole world’s ice-covered.”

“So it is,” Joe agreed.

“There was rain last evening, you know,” Dorothy said, starting down the lower flight of stairs briskly. “And then it turned very cold. Everything is sheathed in ice out-of-doors. Doesn’t the warm air from the registers feel nice? I do love dry heat, even if it is more expensive.”

“Bully!” roared Nat, who had darted back to run up the shade at one of the windows in his room. “Look out, girls! it’s great.”

Every twig on every bush and tree and every fence rail and post were covered with glistening ice. The sun, just rising red and rosy as though he had but now come from a vigorous morning bath, threw his rays in profusion over this fairy world and made a most spectacular scene for the young people to look out upon. In an hour all of them were out of doors to enjoy the spectacle in a “close up,” as Tavia called it.

“And we all ought to have spectacles!” she exclaimed a little later. “This glare is blinding, and we’ll all have blinky, squinty eyes by night.”

“Automobile goggles—for all hands!” exclaimed Nat. “They’re all smoked glasses, too. I’ll get ’em,” and he started for the garage.

“But no automobile to-day,” laughed Jennie. “Think of the skidding on this sheet of ice.” For the ground was sheathed by Jack Frost, as well as the trees and bushes and fences.

Joe and Roger, well wrapped up, were just starting from the back door and Dorothy hailed them:

“Where away, my hearties? Ahoy!”

“Aw—we’re just going sliding,” said Roger, stuttering.

“Where?” demanded the determined older sister.

“Snake Hill,” said Joe, shortly. He loved Dorothy; but this having girls “butting in” all the time frayed his manly patience.

“Take care and don’t get hurt, boys!” called Tavia, roguishly, knowing well that the sisterly advice was on the tip of Dorothy’s tongue and that it would infuriate the small boys.

“Aw, you——”

Joe did not get any farther, for Nat in passing gave him a look. But he shrugged his shoulders and went on with Roger without replying to Tavia’s advice.

“Oh, what fun!” cried Jennie Hapgood, suddenly. “Couldn’t we go coasting?”

“Sure we could,” Ned agreed instantly. Lately he seemed to agree with anything Jennie said and that without question.

“Tobogganing—oh, my!” cried Tavia, quick to seize upon a new scheme for excitement and fun. Then she turned suddenly serious and added: “If Dorothy will go. Not otherwise.”

Dorothy laughed at her openly. “Why not, Tavia?” she demanded. “Are you afraid to trust the boys unless I’m along? I know they are awful cut-ups.”

“I feel that Jennie and I should be more carefully chaperoned,” Tavia declared with serious lips but twinkling eyes.

“Oh! Oh! OH!” in crescendo from Nat, returning in time to hear this. “Who needs a ‘bag o’ bones’——Excuse me! ‘Chaperon,’ I mean? What’s afoot?”

Just then he slipped on the glare ice at the foot of the porch steps and went down with a crash.

“You’re not, old man,” cried Ned as the girls squealed. “I hope you have your shock-absorbers on. That was a jim-dandy!”

“Did—did it hurt you, Nat?” begged Tavia, with clasped hands.

“Oh-ugh!” grunted Nat, gingerly arising and examining the handful of goggles he carried to see if they were all right. “Every bone in my body is broken. Gee! that was some smash.”

“Do it again, dear,” Ned teased. “Your mother didn’t happen to see you and she’s at the window now.”

“Aw, you go fish!” retorted the younger brother, for his dignity was hurt if nothing else. “Wish it had been you.”

“So do I,” sighed Ned. “I’d have done it so much more gracefully. You see, practice in the tango and foxtrot, not to mention other and more intricate dance steps, does help one. And you never would give proper attention to your dancing, Sonny.”

“Here!” threatened Nat. “I’ll dance one of my fists off your ear——”

“I shall have to part you boys,” broke in Dorothy. “Threatening each other with corporal punishment—and before the ladies.”

“Why,” declared Ned, hugging his brother in a bearlike hug as Nat reached his level on the porch. “He can beat me to death if he likes, the dear little thing! Come on, ’Thaniel. What do you say to giving the girls a slide?”

“Heh?” ejaculated Nat. “What do you want to let ’em slide for? Got sick of ’em so quick? Where are your manners?”

“Oh, Ned!” groaned Tavia. “Don’t you want us hanging around any more?”

“I am surprised at Mr. Edward,” Jennie joined in.

“Gee, Edward,” said Nat, grinning, “but you do put your foot in your mouth every time you open it.”

Dorothy laughed at them all, but made no comment. Despite her late seriousness she was jolly enough when she was one of the party. And she agreed to be one to-day.

It was decided to get out Nat’s old “double-ripper,” see that it was all right, and at once start for Snake Hill, where the smaller boys had already gone.

“For this sun is going to melt the ice a good deal by noon. Of course, it will be only a short cold snap this time of year,” Dorothy said, with her usual practical sense.

They were some time in setting out, and it was not because the girls “prinked,” as Tavia pointed out.

“I’d have you know we have been waiting five whole minutes,” she proclaimed when Ned and Nat drew the long, rusty-ironed, double-ripper sled out of the barn. “For once you boys cannot complain.”

“Those kids had been trying to use this big sled, I declare,” Nat said. “And I had to find a couple of new bolts. Don’t want to break down on the hill and spill you girls.”

“That would be spilling the beans for fair,” Ned put in. “Oh, beg pardon! Be-ings, I mean. Get aboard, beautiful beings, and we’ll drag you to the foot of the hill.”

They went on down the back road and into the woods with much merriment. The foot of Snake Hill was a mile and a half from The Cedars. Part of the hill was rough and wild, and there was not a farm upon its side anywhere.

“I wonder where the kids are making their slide?” said Tavia, easily.

“That’s why I am glad we came this way,” Dorothy confessed. “They might be tempted to slide down on this steep side, instead of going over to the Washington Village road. That’s smooth.”

“Trust the boys for finding the most dangerous place,” Jennie Hapgood remarked. “I never saw their like.”

“That’s because you only have an older brother,” said Dorothy, wisely. “He was past his reckless age while you were still in pinafores and pigtails.”

“Reckless age!” scoffed Tavia. “When does a boy or a man ever cease to be reckless?”

“Right-oh!” agreed Nat, looking back along the towline of the sled. “See how he forever puts himself within the danger zone of pretty girls. Gee! but Ned and I are a reckless team! What say, Neddie?”

“I say do your share of the pulling,” returned his brother. “Those girls are no feather-weights, and this is up hill.”

“Oh, to be so insulted!” murmured Tavia. “To accuse us of bearing extra flesh about with us when we all follow Lovely Lucy Larriper’s directions, given in the Evening Bazoo. Not a pound of the superfluous do we carry.”

“Dorothy’s getting chunky,” announced Nat, wickedly.

“You’re another!” cried Tavia, standing up for her chum. “Her lovely curves are to be praised—oh!”

At that moment the young men ran the runners on one side of the sled over an ice-covered stump, and the girls all joined in Tavia’s scream. If there had not been handholds they would all three have been ignominiously dumped off.

“Pardon, ladies! Watch your step!” Ned said. “And don’t get us confused with your ‘beauty-talks’ business. Besides, it isn’t really modest. I always blush myself when I inadvertently turn over to the woman’s page of the evening paper. It is a delicate place for mere man to tread.”

“Hooray!” ejaculated his brother, making a false step himself just then. “Wish I had creepers on. This is a mighty delicate place for a fellow to tread, too, my boy.”

In fact, they soon had to order the girls off the sled. The way was becoming too steep and the side of the hill was just as slick as the highway had been.

With much laughter and not a few terrified “squawks,” to quote Tavia, the girls scrambled up the slope after the boys and the sled. Suddenly piercing screams came from above them.

“Those rascals!” ejaculated Ned.

“Oh! they are sliding on this side,” cried Dorothy. “Stop them, Ned! Please, Nat!”

“What do you expect us to do?” demanded the latter. “Run out and catch ’em with our bare hands?”

They had come to a break in the path now and could see out over the sloping pasture in which the boys had been sliding for an hour. Their sled had worked a plain path down the hill; but at the foot of it was an abrupt drop over the side of a gully. Dorothy Dale—and her cousins, too—knew that gully very well. There was a cave in it, and in and about that cave they had once had some very exciting adventures.

Joe and Roger had selected the smoothest part of the pasture to coast in, it was true; but the party of young folk just arrived could see that it was a very dangerous place as well. At the foot of the slide was a little bank overhanging the gully. The smaller boys had been stopping their sled right on the brink, and with a jolt, for the watchers could see Joe’s heelprints in the ground where the ice had been broken away.

They could hear the boys screaming out a school song at the top of the hill. Ned and Nat roared a command to Joe and Roger to halt in their mad career; but the two smaller boys were making so much noise that it was evident their cousins’ shout was not heard by them.

They came down, Joe sitting ahead on the sled with his brother hanging on behind, the feet of the boy sitting in front thrust out to halt the sled. But if the sled should jump over the barrier, the two reckless boys would fall twenty feet to the bottom of the gully.

“Stop them, do!” groaned Jennie Hapgood, who was a timid girl.

It was Dorothy who looked again at the little mound on the edge of gully’s bank. The frost had got into the earth there, for it had been freezing weather for several days before the ice storm of the previous night. Now the sun was shining full on the spot, and she could see where the boys’ feet, colliding with that lump of earth on the verge of the declivity, had knocked off the ice and bared the earth completely. There was, too, a long crack along the edge of the slight precipice.

“Oh, boys!” she called to Ned and Nat, who were struggling up the hill once more, “stop them, do! You must! That bank is crumbling away. If they come smashing down upon it again they may go over the brink, sled and all!”

CHAPTER XVI
THE FLY IN THE AMBER

“Oh, Dorothy!” cried Tavia.

Jennie, with a shudder, buried her face in her hands.

Joe and Roger Dale were fairly flying down the hill, and would endeavor to stop by collision with the same lump of frozen earth that had previously been their bulwark.

“See! Ned! Nat!” cried Dorothy again. “We must stop them!”

But how stop the boys already rushing down hill on their coaster? It seemed an impossible feat.

The White brothers dropped the towline of the big sled and scrambled along the slippery slope toward the edge of the gully.

With a whoop of delight the two smaller boys, on their red coaster, whisked past the girls.

“Stop them!” shrieked the three in chorus.

Ned reached the edge of the gully bank first. His weight upon the cracking earth sent the slight barrier crashing over the brink. Just as they had supposed there was not a possible chance of Joe’s stopping the sled when it came down to this perilous spot.

Tavia groaned and wrung her hands. Jennie burst out crying. Dorothy knew she could not help, yet she staggered after Ned and Nat, unable to remain inactive like the other girls.

Ned recovered himself from the slippery edge of the bank; but by a hair’s breadth only was he saved from being thrown to the bottom of the gully. He crossed the slide in a bound and whirled swiftly, gesturing to his brother to stay back. Nat understood and stopped abruptly.

“You grab Roger—I’ll take Joe!” panted Ned.

Just then the smaller boys on the sled rushed down upon them. Fortunately, the steeper part of the hill ended some rods back from the gully’s edge. But the momentum the coaster had gained brought it and its burden of surprised and yelling boys at a very swift pace, indeed, down to the point where Ned and Nat stood bracing themselves upon the icy ground.

“Oh, boys!” shrieked Tavia, without understanding what Ned and Nat hoped to accomplish. “Do something!”

And the very next instant they did!

The coaster came shooting down to the verge of the gully bank. Joe Dale saw that the bank had given way and he could not stop the sled. Nor did he dare try to swerve it to one side.

Ned and Nat, staring at the imperilled coasters, saw the look of fear come into Joe’s face. Ned shouted:

“Let go all holds! We’ll grab you! Quick!”

Joe was a quick-minded boy after all. He was holding the steering lines. Roger was clinging to his shoulders. If Joe dropped the lines, both boys would be free of the sled.