Produced by Roger Frank, the Google Books Library Project
(https://books.google.com) and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from images made available by the HathiTrust
Digital Library.)
[Illustration: LITTLE BY LITTLE THEY FORCED US BACK UNTIL ONE OF THEM
SQUEEZED THROUGH]
Mark Tidd’s Citadel
BY
CLARENCE BUDINGTON KELLAND
author of “Mark Tidd”
“Mark Tidd in the Backwoods”
“Mark Tidd in Business” etc.
ILLUSTRATED
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Books by
CLARENCE BUDINGTON KELLAND
MARK TIDD’S CITADEL. Illustrated. Post 8vo.
THE HIDDEN SPRING. Illustrated. Post 8vo.
MARK TIDD. Illustrated. Post 8vo.
MARK TIDD IN THE BACKWOODS. Illustrated. Post 8vo.
MARK TIDD IN BUSINESS. Illustrated. Post 8vo.
THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER. Illustrated. Cloth, Leather
HARPER A BROTHERS, NEW YORK
Mark Tidd’s Citadel
Copyright, 1916, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published October, 1916
ILLUSTRATIONS
Little by Little They Forced Us Back Until One of Them
Squeezed Through
The B-bass Was Taken by Somebody that Wasn’t Very Big
I Could See It Was a Man’s Head and He Was Spying In
Little by Little He Jerked Me Toward the Shore
I Could Get Into the Water without the Least Bit of Danger
of Anybody’s Seeing Me
There We Stood and Beat Them Back as Fast as They Came On
MARK TIDD’S CITADEL
CHAPTER I
The joke was on Mark Tidd!
All four of us, Mark, Plunk Smalley, Binney Jenks, and Tallow Martin,
which is me, stood and looked at the big, ramshackle summer hotel and
then looked at one another—and three of us grinned. Grinned, did I say?
Maybe it started out with a grin, but it ended up with us rolling on the
grass and yelling. For the hotel was closed tight, and anybody with half
an eye could see it hadn’t been opened for years!
The three of us who laughed didn’t include Mark Tidd. He didn’t laugh.
He looked as if he was attending three funerals at once and trying to do
his duty by all of them. He was flabbergasted—and that’s the first time
I ever saw him in that shape. The whole hundred and sixty pounds of him
was flabbergasted. His little eyes looked sort of dazed; his jaw dropped
till his fat cheeks stretched out almost thin, and he didn’t have a word
to say.
Was the joke on him? Well, I should say! Here he had brought us all the
way from Michigan to Vermont to spend our vacation in this summer hotel
in the mountains—and the hotel hadn’t been running since Ethan Allen
licked the British! Now I know why the driver who brought us over had
chuckled so much, and why everybody else in the little town had seemed
to know something funny that they didn’t want to tell us as soon as we
told them where we were going.
I don’t blame them. I’d have laughed, too. Think of us out there at Lake
Ravona, ten miles from town—and pretty nearly a million miles from
Wicksville, where we lived. Think of us there, and then think about the
hotel being shut up and ready to fall down—and us hungry and likely to
keep on being hungry, with no chance to get anything to eat. It had cost
each of us close to twenty dollars railroad fare to get there, and it
would cost that much to get home again—with nothing to show for it. Why,
the jokers at the grocery would never have done laughing at us! Life
would be close to unbearable, and Mark Tidd’s reputation for smartness
would be hit so hard it would pretty nearly be a total wreck.
We three finished up laughing and waited to see what Mark would have to
say. In a minute his face pulled back into shape and _he_ began to grin,
too. That was one fine thing about Mark—he was ready to own up when the
horse was on him, and to laugh just as loud as anybody else.
“It l-l-looks,” says he, stuttering worse than he had for a month
back—“it looks l-like that advertisin’ book wasn’t quite up to
d-d-date.” He fumbled in his pocket and brought out a little booklet
with a picture on the cover of it and began studying it. “Um!” says he,
and then he sat down ker-plump and laughed so he shook all over like a
plate of jelly. “Six years old. Six. Wonder how they kept it s-s-so
clean in the depot.”
We had found the book in the depot one day when we were down visiting
with old Sam Clarke, the agent, and it had got us all excited by what it
said about fishing and mountains and deer in the woods and such like. It
sounded like about the best place in the world to go—and we’d never
stopped to see when it was printed. Six years! The hotel didn’t look
like it had been run for twenty-six.
Even Mrs. Tidd hadn’t noticed, and she is one of the most noticing women
you ever heard of. She hadn’t noticed, and she had liked the place as
well as we did—so much that she got our mothers to let us go with Mark.
Mr. Tidd was paying our expenses. He was rich now because he had
invented a turbine engine, and, because we had helped a little once when
some men had gotten his model away from him, he was going to send us all
to college, and every little while he did something fine for us—like
paying for this vacation trip.
“Well,” says I, “what next?”
“Better climb back into the wagon and make for home,” says Plunk
Smalley.
Mark wrinkled up his nose and looked out at the lake. “D-don’t exactly
fancy goin’ home like this,” he says.
“Nothin’ else to do,” says Binney Jenks.
Mark turned to the man who drove us out. “Kind of a humorous feller,
ain’t you?” he says, and the man grinned, not mean, but like he was
enjoying himself and wouldn’t mind being right friendly.
“I calc’late to know a joke when I see one,” says he.
“This is one, all r-right,” says Mark; “but maybe we can pull some of
the laugh out of it if we can get a good holt onto it.... Who owns this
l-lumber-pile?”
“Man named Ames.”
“What kind of a man is he?”
“Takes after you for flesh, and lets folks call him Jim,” says the
driver.
“Live in town?”
“Yes.”
“Guess we better call on Mr. Ames then,” says Mark. “Pile into the
wagon, f-fellers.”
“What’s the idea?” I asked him.
“’Ain’t g-got that far yet,” says Mark.
That was the way with him. You couldn’t get anything out of him till he
was ready to tell you. You could ask questions all day without finding
out a thing. So we got into the wagon and drove back the ten miles to
town. The driver stopped in front of a big white house.
“This here’s Ames’s place,” says he, “and there’s Jim.”
A fat man was working in the garden. He was not only fat, but tall and
wide across the shoulders. The fat was mostly in front and from his chin
to his legs he looked just like a whopping-big egg. There was a cane
hanging to his suspenders, I noticed.
He turned around to see who was stopping, and after squinting at us a
moment through colored glasses he dropped his hoe, reached for his cane,
and came hobbling toward us. He was lame. One of his legs—the left
one—was stiff at the knee. He leaned on his cane and sort of balanced
himself by holding his right hand on his hip. It made him come at you
side on.
I was so interested in his gait that I didn’t notice his face till he
was close by. Then I guessed I knew why the fellows all called him Jim.
He was the sort of man everybody would call Jim even if his name
happened to be Methuselah. His face was red—not the way Mark Tidd’s
cheeks are red, but red like a box-car. He had three chins in view and I
suspected a couple more hidden by his shirt. There was a little scraggly
mustache—hardly enough of it to pay him for keeping it, and right above
it was a nose. A nose, did I say? It was more like a monument. It was
the kind of nose folks call a pug, but this was a grown-up pug. It had
got its growth. If county fairs were to give prizes for the biggest pug
noses Mr. Ames would have the world’s championship. He had on a little
linen cap that looked as if he’d borrowed it from some boy.
“Howdy!” says he, and smiled—no, grinned.
“Howdy, Jim!” says our driver. “Some boarders just come in from the
Ravona House.”
“Whoo-oo-ssh!” says Mr. Ames, and stared at Mark. “Didn’t stay long, eh?
Board didn’t suit, maybe.”
“’Twasn’t the b-board, exactly,” says Mark, “though I’ve seen a better
t-t-table set. What we complain of is the crowds. We came to a quiet
p-place. Didn’t want to get in a jam. Soon’s we saw folks elbowin’ one
another all over the p-place we decided we couldn’t s-stay.”
“Git out of that wagon,” says Mr. Ames, “and set down.”
We did, while Mr. Ames grinned at us like we were good to eat.
“What d’ you calc’late on doin’?” says he.
“’Ain’t got no f-further than calc’latin’,” says Mark.
Mr. Ames pounded on the porch with his cane and shouted: “Ma, here’s
four boys—and one of ’em special size—to stay to supper. Don’t forget
the pie.”
That sounded pretty good to all of us, I can tell you. Twenty miles of
driving with nothing to eat is enough to make a fellow dance a jig at
the mention of a baked potato.
“Mr. Ames,” says Mark, “we ’ain’t never set anything on fire.”
“No?” says Mr. Ames, wondering what Mark was getting at, I expect.
“Nor we ’ain’t ever been arrested for doin’ d-d-damage to property.”
“You s’prise me,” says Mr. Ames.
“And we d-don’t want the whole town of Wicksville laughin’ at us.”
“Don’t wonder at it a mite.”
“We can c-cook.”
“And eat,” says Mr. Ames, with another grin.
“Folks say we can take care of ourselves.”
“I’d take their word for it.”
“Then, Mr. Ames, will you rent us your ho-ho-hotel?”
Well, sir! You could have knocked me over with a feather. You could have
done it with _half_ a feather, and wouldn’t have had to hit very hard,
either. Rent his hotel! I thought Mark had been hit by sunstroke.
“Calc’late to run it? Calc’late to go into the hotel business?”
“Calc’late to l-live in it,” says Mark. “Just the four of us.”
“Hum! Occupy the whole thirty-nine bedrooms, besides the office and
kitchens and dinin’-room and other parts of the buildin’?”
“We want the whole b-business. Don’t want anybody else there.”
Mr. Ames scratched his head and felt of his prize nose and eyed Mark and
the rest of us. “Shouldn’t be s’prised if we could make a deal,” says
he.
“How much?” says Mark, business-like as a banker.
“Calc’late to fish?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Calc’late to ketch any?”
“If they’re there.”
“Rent’ll be five pounds of bass, live weight, to be paid every Thursday.
I’ll come after it.” He pounded on the porch with his cane again and
bellowed: “Ma, I’ve rented the hotel. Got the fixin’s for four beds?”
“Got the fixin’s for forty,” says Ma Ames from the back of the house
somewheres. “Attic’s full of beddin’ from that tarnation summer-resort
place.”
“There.... How about dishes and cookin’-tools, ma?”
“Barn loft’s full of ’em.”
“Want to move in right away, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” says Mark.
“Haul you and your stuff out to-morrow. Included in the rent,” says Mr.
Ames.
Mark started in to thank him, and so did the rest of us, but it made him
bashful and fidgety and you could see he didn’t like it. Just in the
middle of it Ma Ames called, “Supper,” and in we went to one of the best
and biggest meals of victuals I ever tried to get the best of.