A ROAD MYSTERY
Like a great many other beautiful streets, there was a
poverty-stricken section, if sparsely inhabited, just behind Bonwit
Boulevard. A group of shacks and squatters’ huts down in a grassy
hollow, with a little brook flowing through it to the lake, and woods
beyond. It would not have been an unsightly spot if the marks of the
habitation of poor and careless folk had been wiped away.
But at the moment Jesse Norwood and her chum, Amy Drew, darted around
from the broad boulevard into the narrow lane that led down to this
poor hamlet, neither of the girls remembered “Dogtown,” as the
group of huts was locally called. The real estate men who exploited
Roselawn and Bonwit Boulevard as the most aristocratic suburban
section of New Melford, never spoke of Dogtown.
“What do you suppose is the matter, Jess?” panted Amy.
“It’s a girl in trouble! Look at that!”
The chums did not have to go even as far as the brow of the hill
overlooking the group of houses before mentioned. The scene of the
action of this drama was not a hundred yards off the boulevard.
A big touring car stood in the narrow lane, headed toward the broad
highway from which Jessie and Amy had come. It was a fine car, and
the engine was running. A very unpleasant looking, narrow-shouldered
woman sat behind the steering wheel, but was twisted around in her
seat so that she could look behind her.
In the lane was another woman. Both were expensively dressed,
though not tastefully; and this second woman was as billowy and as
generously proportioned as the one behind the wheel was lean. She was
red-faced, too, and panted from her exertions.
Those exertions, it was evident at once to Jessie and Amy, were
connected with the capturing and the subsequent restraining of a very
active and athletic girl of about the age of the chums. She was quite
as red-faced as the fleshy woman, and she was struggling with all her
might to get away, while now and then she emitted a shout for help
that would have brought a crowd in almost no time in any place more
closely built up.
“Oh! What is the matter?” repeated Amy.
“Bring her along, Martha!” exclaimed the woman already in the
motor-car. “Here come a couple of rubber-necks.”
This expression, to Jessie’s mind, marked the driver of the
automobile for exactly what she was. Nor did the face of the fat
woman impress the girl as being any more refined.
As for the girl struggling with the second woman—the one called
“Martha”—she was not very well dressed. But she looked neat and
clean, and she certainly was determined not to enter the automobile
if she could help it. Jessie doubted, although she had at first
thought it possible, if either of these women were related to the
girl they seemed so determined to capture.
“What are they—road pirates? Kidnapers?” demanded Amy. “What?”
The two chums stopped by the machine. They really did not know what
to do. Should they help the screaming girl? Or should they aid the
fleshy woman? It might be that the girl had run away from perfectly
good guardians. Only, to Jessie’s mind, there was something of the
refinement that pertained to the girl lacking in the appearance of
these two women. She was not favorably impressed by them.
“What is the matter with the girl?” she asked the woman in the car.
Although she said it politely, the woman flashed her a scowling
glance and said:
“Mind your own business!”
“My!” gasped Amy at this, her eyes opening very wide.
Jessie was not at all reassured. She turned to the fleshy woman, and
repeated her question:
“What is the matter with the girl?”
“She’s crazy, that’s what she is!” cried the woman. “She doesn’t know
what is good for her.”
“I’ll learn her!” rasped out the driver of the car.
“Don’t!” shouted the girl. “Don’t let them take me back there——”
Just then the fleshy woman got behind her. She clutched the girl’s
shoulders and drove her harshly toward the car with her whole weight
behind the writhing girl. The other woman jumped out of the car,
seized the girl by one arm, and together the women fairly threw their
captive into the tonneau of the car, where she fell on her hands and
knees.
“There, spiteful!” gasped the lean woman. “I’ll show you!”
She hopped back behind the steering wheel. The fleshly woman climbed
into the tonneau and held the still shrieking girl. The car started
with a dash, the door of the tonneau flapping.
“Oh! This isn’t right!” gasped Jessie.
“They are running away with her, Jess,” murmured Amy. “Isn’t it
exciting?”
“It’s mean!” declared her chum with conviction. “How dare they?”
“Why, to look at her, I think that skinny woman would dare anything,”
remarked Amy. “And—haven’t—you seen her before?”
“Never! She doesn’t live around here. And that car is strange.”
The car had turned into the boulevard and headed out of town. When
the girls walked back to the broad highway it was out of sight. It
was being driven with small regard for the speed laws.
“I guess you are right,” reflected Amy. “I never saw that car before.
It is a French car. But the woman’s face——”
“There was enough of that to remember,” declared Jessie, quite
spitefully.
“I didn’t mean the fat woman’s face,” giggled Amy. “I mean that the
other woman looked familiar. Maybe I have seen her picture somewhere.”
“If my face was like hers I’d never have it photographed,” snapped
Jessie.
“How vinegarish,” said Amy. “Well, it was funny.”
“You do find humor in the strangest things,” returned her chum. “I
guess that poor girl didn’t think it was funny.”
“Of course, they had some right to her,” Amy declared.
“How do you know they did? They did not act so,” returned the more
thoughtful Jessie. “If they had really the right to make the poor
girl go with them, they would not have acted in such haste nor
answered me the way they did.”
“Well, of course, it wasn’t any of our business either to ask
questions or to interfere,” Amy declared.
“I don’t know about that, Amy,” rejoined her chum. “I wish your
brother had been here, or somebody.”
“Darry!” scoffed Amy.
“Or maybe Burd Alling,” and Jessie’s eyes twinkled.
“Well,” considered Amy demurely, “I suppose the boys might have known
better what to do.”
“Oh,” said Jessie, promptly, “I knew what to do, all right; only I
couldn’t do it.”
“What is that?”
“Stopped the women and made them explain before we allowed them to
take the girl away. And I wonder where she was going. When and where
did she run away from the women? Did you hear her beg us not to let
them take her back—back——”
“Back where?”
“That is it, exactly,” sighed Jessie, as the two walked on toward
town. “She did not tell us where.”
“Some institution, maybe. An orphan asylum,” suggested Amy.
“Did you think she looked like an orphan?”
“How does an orphan look?” giggled Amy. “I don’t know any except
the _Molly Mickford_ kind in the movies, and they are always too
appealing for words!”
“Somehow, she didn’t look like that,” admitted Jessie.
“She fought hard. I believe I would have scratched that fat woman’s
face myself, if I’d been her. Anyway, she wasn’t in any uniform.
Don’t they always put orphans in blue denim?”
“Not always. And that girl would have looked awful in blue. She was
too dark. She wasn’t very well dressed, but her clothes and their
colors were tasteful.”
“Aren’t you the observing thing,” agreed Amy. “She was dressed
nicely. And those women were never guards from an institution.”
“Oh, no!”
“It was a private kidnaping party, I guess,” said Amy.
“And we let it go on right under our noses and did not stop it,”
sighed Jessie Norwood. “I’m going to tell my father about it.”
Amy grinned elfishly. “He will tell you that you had a right, under
the law, to stop those women and make them explain.”
“Ye-es. I suppose so. But a right to do a thing and the ability to do
it, he will likewise tell me, are two very different things.”
“Wisdom from the young owl!” laughed Amy. “Well, I don’t suppose,
after all, it is any of our business, or ever will be. The poor thing
is now a captive and being borne away to the dungeon-keep. Whatever
that is,” she added, shrugging her shoulders.