An eventful day for Peggy came after two weeks of school. In it began a
curious series of happenings that added flavor to her whole school life,
and gave her, finally, the power to be, as her room-mate laughingly
said, "sort of magic."
And all this came about through so prosaic a thing as bacon. The
domestic science class, well under way with an excellent teacher,
decided to have a "bacon bat," after the custom of the Smith College
girls, all by themselves on some bit of rock that jutted into the river.
Peggy had helped Katherine do the shopping for the treat,--Katherine had
been at Andrews for two years now, and knew just how it was done. Then
the seven girls of the class started off, each with a paper bag in her
hand, for the method of conveying the supplies to the picnic grounds was
always very informal for a bacon bat. There were no little woven picnic
baskets to hang picturesquely over their arms, there were no daintily
packed little shoe-boxes of sandwiches. There was just the jar of bacon
strips in a paper bag, the bottle of olives in another paper bag, and
the two dozen rolls, a generous supply, in the biggest paper bag of all.
These were the simple requisites for a bacon bat, and even the olives
were not necessary, Katherine termed them useless frills. There was a
tiny box of matches, too, that Peggy slipped into the pocket of her red
jacket. It has happened that a merry group of girls has gone on a bacon
bat with everything but the matches, and then unless they were Camp Fire
girls and knew how to coax fire out of two dry sticks they met a
terrible disappointment, when, their appetites all worked up for the
occasion, they found they couldn't cook the party after all.
If you were on good terms with the grocer, he kept a box of matches--the
old fashioned kind--under the counter and offered you a dozen or so,
loose, when you bought your bacon. But Peggy had wanted to buy a little
box, insisting that if she had to start the fire a dozen might not be
enough.
"Where are we going to have it?" Peggy thought to ask as they strolled,
laughing, along the road away from the school.
"On the River Bank near Gloomy House," cried three girls at once,
"that's the ideal spot."
"Near--what?" asked Peggy in concern. It didn't sound very picnicky to
her.
"Right there, ahead," said Katherine, pointing, "right through those
grounds, and down to the water--because, of course, we can hardly have
our fire except on some sort of little stone island--with water enough
to put it out if it got rambunctious."
The girls were turning now over the long, dank grass, and making their
way in the direction of a great empty-looking ramshackle old house with
sagging porches and dull windows.
"Nobody lives there, do they?" Peggy asked.
"Oh,--sh--yes!"
The girls tiptoed over the grass, skirting the lawn in order to keep as
far away from Gloomy House as possible. Peggy was not yet familiar with
the traditions of the town in which Andrews was situated. It seemed
strange to her that after the girls had chosen this place with such
unanimous enthusiasm they should assume such an air of discomfort and
mystery now that they had come. She studied the old house, dignified
even in its decay, with its trailing, rasping vines blowing against the
pillars of the porch, and its sunken, uneven steps, and then quite
unaccountably she shivered and hurried past it as fast as the other
girls.
"I don't want to come here for a picnic," she panted, "if it's all so
queer. Why didn't we choose some nice sunny place with a little stream
to drink out of, and one big tree for shade? It's so dark and overgrown,
as we get through here, that it seems more like an exploring expedition
than a regular picnic to me."
"Oh," cried Florence Thomas, the best cook in the domestic science
class, "we can fry bacon down on those rocks in the river, and there is
a grape-vine swing on the bank that goes sailing way out over the water
with you. Why, there just isn't any other place so nice for a
picnic--here you always feel as if you might have adventures."
"Adventures, at a picnic, usually mean cows or snakes," sighed Peggy, "I
hope we don't have any."
The girls clambered down the steep slope to the water, and Florence and
Dorothy Trowbridge began at once to gather twigs and branches.
"How are we going to cook this bacon?" asked Peggy suddenly, "when we
get our fire? Nobody brought a frying pan."
"Frying pan!" echoed Florence over an armful of nice dry chips and
twigs. "We get sticks."
Peggy saw that each girl was breaking a branch from a near-by tree,
testing it to see that it was not "too floppy," as Katherine put it, and
would be green enough not to catch fire easily. Peggy found a delightful
little branch, and began stripping the end, as she saw the others do.
The fire was by this time crackling and it was a temptation to begin
right away, for the walk had made them hungry--or, perhaps, they hadn't
needed the walk: healthy girls like healthy boys are always hungry. But
Florence reminded them that their bacon would simply be burned to a
crisp if they thrust it in the flames now, so they waited a few minutes,
reluctantly enough, until the red and blue sparks sputtered down to a
steady glow, hotter and hotter at the heart of the fire. Then the girls
each pierced a piece of bacon with their pointed stick and held it
gloatingly into the red glow. Peggy enthusiastically opened rolls, so
that the crisp hot slices might go sizzling into place as soon as they
were taken from the fire, and the roll might be clapped together upon
them.
"Isn't this comfy?" asked Florence, munching her first fiery sandwich.
"If the rain and wind had never come, I suppose you could find the
ashes, on this flat rock, left by every class that ever went to Andrews.
Ouch!--Mercy!--Peggy, what did you let me bite that for, when the end
was still burning?"
Peggy laughingly dipped up a cupful of water from the river and passed
it to poor Florence, who was trying to wink back the tears from her
eyes.
"If you drink that now you'll smoke," she warned delightedly. "Girls,
girls,--fire!"
"I--don't--care--" gulped Florence, waving the rest of her roll and
bacon through the air to cool it. "Hot as that was, I guess old Mr.
Huntington of Gloomy House, up there, would be glad to have it. If he
can smell the smoke of this little feast--with that lovely amber coffee
Dorothy is making--I guess he wishes he was a girl and could come down
and get some. Just think," she turned to Peggy, "in twenty years he's
never had any hot coffee--or more than enough to keep a bird alive."
Peggy sat down on a stone and poised an olive half-way to her mouth.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"He's very poor, you know," said Florence.
"Too poor to buy coffee?--I should think somebody in the town--"
"Oh, my dear," interrupted one of the other girls, "scared to death!
Nobody'd think of offering to do anything for him. He's the proudest man
in the world. He used to own most of this town, but everything has
drifted away from him. He never goes anywhere--nobody ever sees him. He
wouldn't want to see anyone. He telephones to the grocery for just a few
things once in a while, and that's how he gets along. Why, Peggy, you
look so funny."
"While we're sitting here, having a party, do you mean to tell me the
man that lives in Gloomy House is starving?" asked Peggy in a hushed
voice.
"Well, sort of hungry, but don't you worry about it, we can't do
anything about it, Peggy." Florence handed Peggy a fresh roll with a
crisp slice of bacon temptingly projecting from the ends. "He couldn't
have been starving for twenty years, you know--but it would be nearer
that than I'd like to experience for myself."
Peggy's head drooped thoughtfully. The sunlight, glinting down here and
there through the dense green of the trees, shone in a little patch of
light on her brown-gold hair. She was a vivid little person, with
laughing black eyes and cheeks that flared red through their tan. Her
brown arms were clasped over her knees now, as she studied the moist,
pebbly sand at her feet.
"_I'd_ have made him some coffee," she said at last, her crooked dimple
flickering into view for just an instant.
"No, you wouldn't," denied Florence Thomas, "nobody has been in that
house to do anything as daring as that for years. There's a mystery
about it, I tell you--and, in spite of story books, nobody likes to
probe too deeply into mysteries. Some people even say that a relative of
Mr. Huntington's stole all his money from him and that's why he has to
live so poorly. Yes, there are lots of stories--"
Peggy brushed the crumbs out of her lap serenely.
"How silly," she said, "as if anybody's stealing from the poor old man
were reason enough why all the rest of the townspeople should stay away
from him and leave him poor," she said. "What has that to do with my
making him some coffee? Even if he'd been the one who stole--still I
don't see the application to this particular question," she concluded.
"Well, there are other tales," insisted the crestfallen Florence, and,
their coffee cups in their hands, the girls gathered around to tell
Peggy many harrowing incidents connected with the great house back from
the river, and she heard them quietly, piercing slices of bacon with her
stick the while.
"Let's go up and cook him a dinner," she cried, springing to her feet
when they had done. "We are a cooking class, aren't we, and that's the
best thing we do, isn't it? And here we go on just preparing all the
good things back at school for us to eat ourselves--it seems, well,
piggish. Wouldn't it be lovely to demonstrate our next lesson by
bringing all the materials up to Gloomy House and cooking up a big,
wonderful dinner, and having it with Mr. Huntington? We can't give him a
million dollars or anything like that, but we can make one day a lot
brighter--and, besides, I can't stand it to think of anyone
hungry--_will_ you, girls? What do you say?"
She stood before them, lifting her slim hand for the vote, her eyes
shining with eagerness to put her plan at once into execution.
The other girls gasped. Peggy, although she had been with them so short
a time, had won a large place in their admiration.
"He wouldn't let us," reminded Florence, puckering her forehead
thoughtfully. "Didn't I tell you he'd bite anybody, fairly, that dreamed
of trying to offer him charity? Peggy, I believe you're partly right,
though, maybe we could do something, but it would never work that way."
"Well," said Peggy promptly, sitting down to think it out, "how can it
be done?"
For to Peggy life presented no unsolvable problems. She never thought of
cluttering her joyous way with impossibilities. Once a plan seemed good
to her it was only a question of How, and not of Whether.
"We might invite a lot of people to the school," timidly suggested one
of the young cooks.
"He'd never come," Florence shook her head.
"Well, then," cried Peggy, "here we are! Let's give a series of
dinners--at the houses of the trustees, and the different girls in the
class, just to show what we can do, and we'll have the accounts put in
the town paper, so he'll see what we're doing, and _then_--" her eyes
shone and she could hardly talk fast enough to let the girls see the
glory of her new idea, "then we'll go to his house and ask permission to
give _him_ one, and it won't be charity or anything, and it will be fun
for everybody--oh, girls, isn't that gorgeous?"
"OOoo--oo," shivered Florence at the thought of really committing
herself to such a daring decision. "Ye-es, I think we might do that. But
we'd never have the courage to go and invite him."
"Peggy would," championed the timid one. "Let's appoint her a committee
of one."
"Unanimously appointed a committee of one," shouted the other girls
gleefully. "Peggy, how soon will all this be?"
Peggy laughingly flung aside her toasting stick, sprang erect, and tried
vainly to smooth back her flying gold-toned hair. "Right--NOW!" she
declared triumphantly, "we won't wait to give it to the trustees first."
"Good-by, Peggy," murmured Florence demurely, and the others drew closer
together as Peggy actually turned her back on them and went up the slope
to Gloomy House.
Surprised at her daring, overwhelmed by the boldness of the thing she
had undertaken, they watched Peggy disappear over the top of the river
bank.