"That car was certainly not the stolen one," declared Neale O'Neil,
after the automobile had whizzed out of sight in a cloud of dust.
"No; it wasn't a runabout," admitted Agnes. "But I just believe that man
with Joe was the one who helped him steal Mr. Collinger's car."
"What are you two talking about?" demanded Ruth, for those in the
tonneau had not recognized Saleratus Joe.
"Did you want to stop those men to see if they could help you, Neale?"
asked Mrs. Heard. "It will be awful if we have to stand here all day.
We're still a long way from Parmenter Lake."
Neale could not help uttering a grunt at that. Nervous people are very
nagging--without meaning to be.
Just as he was getting down to crawl under the machine Sammy Pinkney,
who had been keeping wonderfully quiet for him, suddenly asked:
"Say, Neale! You got any gas, do you s'pose?"
Neale straightened up, looked at the little chap who stood with his
hands in his pockets and his legs very wide apart, and finally
exclaimed:
"I don't know whether to be sore on you, Sammy, or not!"
"Huh? What's the matter?" asked Sammy, belligerently.
Neale O'Neil started for the tank. "Why didn't you suggest that before?"
he demanded. "There! I declare, folks," he added, "the tank's almost
dry. I should have bought gasoline before we left the hotel this
morning."
"Goodness, gracious, me!" cried Agnes. "It can't be so, Neale!"
"It's empty," the boy assured her.
"And we stuck on this lonely road!" gasped Mrs. Heard. "No telling when
another auto will come by."
"Oh, dear, Neale!" murmured Ruth, "how could you be so careless?"
"It's the easiest thing in the world to forget," the boy replied, with a
quick grin.
"It was real smart of Sammy to remember about the gosoling, I think,"
said Dot.
"_'Gasoline'_--little goose," observed Tess, correcting her smaller
sister, as she often did.
Agnes laughed outright. "Well, gosling is a little goose, sure enough,
Dot." Then she added: "Now, Neale! what are you going to do?"
Neale O'Neil had opened the road guide and thumbed several of its pages.
"Last place we passed where gasoline is for sale, as I figure it, is
twenty miles away."
"Oh!" was the chorused groan.
"But here!" added the boy, with sudden enthusiasm, "Procketts is but
five miles ahead."
"What is Procketts?" demanded Agnes.
"_Who_ is Procketts?" added Ruth.
"A village. Gasoline is sold there," declared Neale O'Neil, confidently.
"But five miles!" cried Mrs. Heard. "Will you have to walk there and
bring back the gasoline yourself? That is too bad!"
Neale smiled more broadly and returned the book to his pocket.
"We'll run along to Procketts and get our fill of gas. It won't take
long," he said.
"But, Neale!" Ruth began.
"How can we?" cried Agnes.
"Did you say the tank was empty, young man?" demanded Mrs. Heard.
"Not a drop in it," agreed the boy, answering the chaperone's question.
"But--you see----" and he bent over and manipulated a small cock, "here's
the emergency tank. That's always filled, you know; and it will run us
to Procketts, all right."
"Well, you awful boy!" cried Agnes, half angrily. "You let us think we
were stuck here."
"Cricky!" ejaculated Neale O'Neil. "Didn't you all just jump on me for
being careless and thoughtless? And none of you thought of the emergency
tank. A fellow's got to protect himself when he's alone with a parcel of
females," and he chuckled.
"You ain't alone, Neale. I'm with you," declared Sammy Pinkney,
suddenly.
The girls shouted with laughter; but Neale said, preserving his gravity:
"Thanks, old chap. I guess we menfolk will have to pull together in
self-defence."
They came to the next village in the course of time, and Neale bought
gasoline. Before one o'clock they reached a delightfully wooded place
for camping, and proceeded to have lunch as they had made it the
previous day. They all declared these rustic meals to be the best of
all.
Just beyond the little grove was a pasture, and, looking between the
bars of the old stake and rider fence, Tess and Dot saw that the open
space was studded with flowers of several kinds.
"Let's pick some for Ruthie," Tess suggested.
"Let's. And for Mrs. Heard," agreed Dot.
She ran back for the Alice-doll--for of course that precious child had to
pick flowers, too--and to tell the older girls what they purposed doing.
Mrs. Heard was taking a nap in the car, which stood in the shade by the
roadside; the older girls were clearing up after the lunch. Neale and
Sammy had gone in the opposite direction, across the road, where there
was a pond and the promise of a bath, and Tom Jonah had gone with them.
So nobody gave the little girls much attention when they crept through
the fence and out of sight of the camping place.
Tess and Dot did not intend to go far. There were plenty of flowers in
sight of the place where they entered the pasture.
But you know how it is. The patches of blossoms at a distance appeared
much more inviting than those close to the fence. The little girls ran
from one to another patch, calling each other, delighted to find such a
wealth of lovely, brilliant blossoms.
"I never _did_ see such a lot of flowers in all my life, Dot Kenway!"
cried Tess.
"Maybe this is the place where all the flowers started from," suggested
the philosophical younger sister.
"Where all the flowers started from?" repeated Tess. "What do you mean,
Dot Kenway?"
"Why, didn't the flowers have to start _somewhere_--like everything else?
Our teacher says everything has had a beginning--like the first horses,
and the first cow, and--and Adam and Eve, I s'pose."
"Humph!" said the less orthodox Tess, "who told you there had to be a
first flower, anyway? Nonsense!"
"How did they come, then, if they didn't spread--oh! all around--from some
place like this?" demanded Dot, quite excited.
"Oh, they just _came_," declared Tess. "I suppose," she added,
reverently, "that God just _thought_ flowers, and at once there were
flowers--everywhere."
Dot stood up, picking up the Alice-doll, and holding all the blossoms
she could carry in her other hand.
"Well," she said, softly, looking out across the field so spangled with
the gay flowers, "He must have thought _hard_ about 'em when He made
this place, Tessie, for there's so many."
The next moment the smallest Corner House girl forgot all her unfledged
philosophy, for she suddenly shrieked:
"Oh, Tess! Oh, Tess! Look at that _awful, terrible bull_!"
Tess was so startled by her sister's cry that she jumped up, scattering
the blossoms she had herself gathered.
"Where? What bull?" she demanded, staring all around save in the right
direction.
"There!" moaned Dot, who was dreadfully afraid of all bovine creatures,
crushing both her flowers and her Alice-doll to her bosom.
Tess finally saw what Dot had beheld. A great head, with wide, dangerous
looking horns, had appeared above a clump of bushes not far away. The
animal was calmly chewing its cud; but the very sidewise motion of its
jaws seemed threatening to the two smallest Corner House girls.
"Oh, Tess!" moaned Dot, again. "Will it eat us?"
"Bulls--bulls don't eat folks," stammered Tess. "They--they hook 'em. And
how do you know it _is_ a bull, Dot Kenway?"
"Hasn't it got _horns_?" gasped the smallest Corner House girl. "Of
course it is a bull. Come, Tess Kenway! I'm going to run."
There seemed nothing else to do. Cow, or bull, it mattered not
which--both were comparatively strange animals to the sisters. Most of
the cattle they had seen were dehorned.
They now scampered away as fast as they could from the vicinity of the
threatening peril. To add wings to their flight the creature lowed after
them mournfully.
"Oh! I just _know_ he wants to eat us," gasped Dot.
"Hook us, you mean," corrected Tess, strictly a purist even in her
terror.
They scrambled on, panting. Tess tried to take Dot's hand; but the
smaller girl would drop neither the doll nor the flowers. Finally they
reached the fence at the edge of the woods, and plunged through it. Thus
defended from the enemy (which had not followed them a step) the little
girls fell to the ground, breathless, but relieved.
"That nawful, nawful bull!" groaned Dot. "I _did_ think he'd get us
before we reached the fence. See Alice! She's just as scared as she can
be." And as the blue-eyed doll was a widely staring creature, Dot's
statement seemed particularly apt.
"I lost all my flowers," mourned Tess.
"Well, there's a lot more yonder," said Dot, pointing ahead. "Mine
aren't so good. I squashed 'em, running so."
"Well," Tess suggested, recovering somewhat from her fright, "let's pick
some more. That old cow----"
"Bull!" interjected Dot, with confidence.
"Well, bull, then. He needn't think he's going to scare us so we can't
carry a bouquet to Ruthie and Mrs. Heard."
"No-o," agreed Dot, rather doubtfully. "But I don't want to go back
through that fence again, and into that field."
"We don't have to," declared Tess, promptly. She was standing up now and
could see farther than Dot. "There's another open place where there're
flowers--and there isn't any fence."
"And no bulls?" queried Dot.
"There _can't_ be," Tess assured her. "They always fence up cattle. We
shouldn't have gone through that fence in the first place."
So, having somewhat recovered from their panic, they pursued their
adventure without for a moment considering that the farther they went in
this direction, the greater the distance back to the place where their
friends and the automobile remained.
Ruth and Agnes did not think anything about the absence of the two
smaller girls until Neale, Sammy and the dog returned from their baths.
As Neale O'Neil came along from the pond and into sight of the
automobile and the girls, he was laughing heartily, while Sammy's face
was very red.
"What's the matter, Neale?" demanded Agnes, suspecting a joke.
"This kid'll be the death of me, girls," declared Neale, still
chuckling. "I took along a piece of soap with the towels and told Sammy
to see if he couldn't get some of the dust and grime off his face and
hands. Cricky! I never knew a kid could get so much dirt on him between
breakfast and noontime."
"Well, he looks clean now," said Ruth, kindly, seeing that Sammy was not
very happy because of Neale's fun.
"I guess he is," Neale chuckled. "I said to him, 'Sammy, did you scrub
your hands good?' And he said, 'Sure!' 'And wash your face?' 'Yep,' he
answered. And then I remembered the part of his anatomy that a kid
usually forgets is hitched to him. 'How about your ears?' I asked him.
And what do you s'pose he said?"
"I couldn't even guess," giggled Agnes. "What?"
"Why, Sammy said: 'I washed the one that's next to Aggie when I'm
sitting in the car. You needn't tell her 'bout the other one,'" and
Neale O'Neil burst into laughter again--as did all the others, save Sammy
himself.
It was Sammy trying to turn the current of conversation from his ears,
who discovered the continued absence of the two little girls.
"Where's Tess and Dot?" he inquired.
"Picking flowers," said Agnes, promptly.
"But, goodness!" added Ruth, "they have been picking them a long time.
Ever since you boys went for your swim. They must have gathered a
bushel."
"Go call 'em, Sammy," said Mrs. Heard. "We want to start now, I suppose.
It's a long way to Parmenter Lake yet, isn't it?"
Neale pulled out the much-thumbed guide.
"Let's see," he said, fluttering the pages. "There's where we
are--sixteen--no, seventeen miles beyond Procketts--where we bought the
gasoline. That pond we just went to--Oh! that's Silver Lake. I bet it
used to be called 'the mud-hole' before the day of automobile road
guides.
"Just beyond, along this road, is what the guide-book calls 'a mountain
tarn.' What's _that_, do you suppose?"
"A swamp," declared Ruth, promptly and wrongly.
"It's right near a village called Frog Hollow. Oh! 'Recently renamed
Arbutusville.' What do you know about _that_?" chuckled Neale,
delighted. "And a piece beyond there's a precipice, 'from the verge of
which can be seen the ever-changing view of the entire eastern end of
the Oxbow.' Cricky! I bet the view isn't half as changing as the names
of these rural frog-ponds and the like. And I bet the precipice is a
stone quarry," he added, with conviction.
"I expect that 'wayside inn' they speak of," said Agnes, who was looking
over his shoulder, "is nothing but one of those squalid old beer-shops
we see along the road."
"Humph!" commented Mrs. Heard, with a sniff, "it must take more
imagination to get up one of those road guides for automobilists than it
does to find all the virtues in a Presidential candidate."
Just then Sammy came plunging through the bushes. "Say!" he cried, "I
can't find 'em."
"Why, Sammy!" said Agnes. "Why didn't you call Tess and Dot?"
"Did," he declared. "Been hollering my head off."
"Isn't that funny?" commented Agnes.
"I don't know whether it is funny or not," Mrs. Heard said, briskly.
"Those children should be found."
"Yes. We're ready to start," said Neale.
"Surely they would not have gone far," Ruth added, in a worried tone.
Silence fell. The older members of the touring party looked at each
other with growing apprehension.