AN OLD ENEMY
Pushing rudely between the two girls, the stranger succeeded, by means of
a skillful bit of elbow play, in knocking the souvenirs out of their
hands. As if to avoid stepping on the scattered berries and flowers, he
took a couple of quick side steps, planting his huge feet directly upon
them, and thereby ruining them completely. It was all done so quickly
that the girls hardly realized what had happened until they stood looking
down at the remains of many days of labor.
Desiré was quite speechless, and seemed momentarily paralyzed. Not so
Priscilla, whose quick eyes followed the stranger, striding away over one
of the bridges in the Garden.
“Dissy,” she whispered, “it’s that _same man_.”
“What _same man_?”
“The one who fought Jack.”
“It does _look_ a lot like him, but—”
“It’s him all right! The mean old pig!”
“Why, Prissy! It was an accident.”
“Wasn’t either, and now we can’t make any money to take to Jack.”
Excitedly she burst into tears.
“Don’t, dear,” begged Desiré. “We mustn’t act like babies every time
something goes wrong. We’ll just start over again. These didn’t cost
anything, and it will be easy to make new ones.”
“What’s the trouble?” asked Jack, who had come up behind them.
Both girls explained at once.
“Where’s the fellow now?” demanded the boy, his jaw set, his eyes
flashing.
“He went over that bridge,” pointed Priscilla.
“Don’t bother about him,” urged Desiré. “You might get arrested. Let’s go
back to the wagon.”
Struggling between the wish to avenge the wrong to his little sisters,
and the conviction that it was perhaps wiser to avoid conflict in a
strange city, he turned abruptly away from the big iron gates.
“Where are we going next?” asked Desiré, as they walked along the street
toward the place where the wagon had been left.
“I bought all the stock we need, and I thought, since Simon always did,
we’d go on down the South Shore a ways and then come back here to start
for—”
“_Home!_” concluded Desiré, “and what fun we’ll have settling down in
it.”
“More fun in a wag’n,” declared René.
“You’d holler all right, when the snow blew in on you,” said Priscilla.
Jack hardly heard what they were saying, so puzzled and disturbed was he
over the reappearance of his enemy. Was the man following them, or was
the meeting purely accidental? Had he been tampering with the horses the
night Priscilla roused them? If the fellow were bent on revenge, they
were likely to suffer from the effects of his anger and jealousy almost
any time.
The next morning they were following the very irregular South Shore line
along the Atlantic; past ragged points, around deep bays, through tangles
of woodland, then back beside the yellow sands again. Numerous offshore
islands looked so inviting that Priscilla was always wishing they could
drive out to them. As they rounded St. Margaret’s Bay, the sunshine was
brilliant; but almost without warning, a mile farther on, they were
completely enveloped in fog which cut off all view of the ocean.
“Do be very careful, Jack,” pleaded Desiré nervously, as they almost felt
their way around an especially blind curve. “Someone might run into us.”
They reached Chester in safety, and spent some time looking about that
busy little town. The souvenir shop up the hill above the Lovett House
especially attracted Priscilla, and it was with great reluctance that she
left it.
“I’d like to have money enough to buy everything I wanted there,” she
said, looking longingly back at it.
In a few minutes they missed René, who had been lagging along behind
them.
“That boy is hopeless,” groaned Jack, as they retraced their steps to
look for him.
Not very far back they discovered him, leaning over the edge of a
cobblestone well, trying to lower the heavy bucket.
“I was thirsty,” he explained, as Jack detached him.
“But you might have fallen in!” said Desiré severely.
“I’ll tell you what we can do,” proposed Priscilla; “tie a rope to him,
like you do to a little dog, and I’ll lead him. I saw a lady at Halifax
with a little boy fastened that way,—”
The proposal called forth a howl from René.
“Won’t be tied like a dog! Won’t have Prissy lead me!”
“Well, let’s go on now before we get into any more difficulties,” said
Jack, starting for the shed where he had left the wagon.
“That is Mahone Bay,” he told them, as they gazed out over the large arm
of the ocean upon which Chester is located; “and all this section was
once a great retreat for pirates. There are so many islands where they
hid their booty, and so many little bays and inlets where they could take
refuge if pursued.”
“Want to go out there and see pirates,” announced René, as Jack tightened
the reins, and Dolly and Dapple began to move.
“There are no pirates there now,” said Priscilla in a disgusted tone.
“Go and see. _I’m_ going to be a pirate when I grow up. I think they’re
_fine_.”
“It’s a good thing you didn’t give us that piece of information before,
Jack,” laughed Desiré, “or we should have been swimming out to find
Renny.”
Not very far beyond Chester, they ran into fog again. The road was
winding, and very much up and down hill; and as they were about to round
a curve near Lunenburg, a heavy automobile loomed up suddenly at their
left, out of the grey blanket which enfolded the landscape.