[Illustration: Something suddenly shot out from the table end.]
_Patsy Carroll
Under
Southern Skies_
_By
Grace Gordon_
_Illustrated by
R. Emmet Owen_
_New York_
_Cupples & Leon Company_
PATSY CARROLL SERIES
BY GRACE GORDON
PATSY CARROLL AT WILDERNESS LODGE
PATSY CARROLL UNDER SOUTHERN SKIES
_Other Volumes in Preparation_
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY, New York
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY
Patsy Carroll Under Southern Skies
Printed in U. S. A.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I TIME TO GO WAYFARING AGAIN 1
II A HARD-HEARTED REGISTRAR 11
III NO LOSS WITHOUT GAIN 20
IV GLORIOUS NEWS 29
V THE LAND OF FLOWERS 43
VI THE BEGINNING OF NEW ADVENTURE 58
VII THE COTTAGE IN THE PALM GROVE 72
VIII PATSY SCENTS A MYSTERY 82
IX THE WOOD NYMPH 93
X GETTING ACQUAINTED WITH OLD OCEAN 105
XI A TIMID CALLER 113
XII INTERVIEWING CARLOS 122
XIII TWO LETTERS 134
XIV A REAL ADVENTURE 146
XV DOLORES 157
XVI NOTHING OR SOMETHING? 166
XVII PUZZLING OVER THE PUZZLE 179
XVIII SOMETHING! 190
XIX PATSY’S SCHEME 204
XX THE WAY THE SCHEME WORKED OUT 217
XXI THE GHOST 227
XXII THE RETURN OF DOLORES 237
XXIII THE MEMENTO 244
XXIV THE SECRET DRAWER 252
XXV WHAT THE SECRET DRAWER HELD 261
XXVI “THE TRUE SIGN OF THE ‘DRAGON’” 286
XXVII THE TREASURE OF LAS GOLONDRINAS 299
_Patsy Carroll Under Southern Skies_
CHAPTER I
TIME TO GO WAYFARING AGAIN
“Oh, dear!” loudly sighed Patsy Carroll.
The regretful exclamation was accompanied by the energetic banging of
Patsy’s French grammar upon the table.
“Stay there, tiresome old thing!” she emphasized. “I’ve had enough of
you for one evening.”
“What’s the matter, Patsy?”
Beatrice Forbes raised mildly inquiring eyes from the theme she was
industriously engaged in writing.
“Lots of things. I hate French verbs. The crazy old irregular ones most
of all. They start out one thing and by the time you get to the future
tense they’re something entirely different.”
“Is that all?” smiled Beatrice. “You ought to be used to them by this
time.”
“That’s only one of my troubles,” frowned Patsy. “There are others
a great deal worse. One of them is this Easter vacation business. I
thought we’d surely have three weeks. It’s always been so at Yardley
until this year. Two weeks is no vacation worth mentioning.”
“Well, that’s plenty of time to go home in and stay at home and see the
folks for a while, isn’t it?” asked Beatrice.
“But we didn’t intend going _home_,” protested Patsy.
“Didn’t intend going home?” repeated Beatrice wonderingly. “_What_ are
you talking about, Patsy Carroll? _I_ certainly expect to go home for
Easter.”
“You only think you do,” Patsy assured, her troubled face relaxing into
a mischievous grin. “Maybe you will, though. I don’t know. It depends
upon what kind of scheme my gigantic brain can think up.
“It’s like this, Bee,” she continued, noting her friend’s expression of
mystification. “Father and I made a peach of a plan. Excuse my slang,
but ‘peach of a plan’ just expresses it. Well, when I was at home over
Christmas, Father promised me that the Wayfarers should join him and
Aunt Martha at Palm Beach for the Easter vacation. He bought some land
down in Florida last fall. Orange groves and all that, you know. This
land isn’t so very far from Palm Beach. He was going down there right
after Christmas, but a lot of business prevented him from going. He’s
down there now, though, and----”
“You’ve been keeping all this a dead secret from your little chums,”
finished Beatrice with pretended reproach.
“Of course I have,” calmly asserted Patsy. “That was to be part of the
fun. I meant to spring a fine surprise on you girls. Your mother knows
all about it. So does Mrs. Perry. I went around and asked them if you
and Mab and Nellie could go while I was at home during the Christmas
holidays. Aunt Martha liked my plan, too. Now we’ll have to give it up
and go somewhere nearer home. We’d hardly get settled at Palm Beach
when we’d have to come right home again. One more week’s vacation would
make a lot of difference. And we can’t have it! It’s simply too mean
for anything!”
“It would be wonderful to go to Palm Beach,” mused Beatrice. “It would
be to me, anyway. You know I’ve never traveled as you have, Patsy.
Going to the Adirondacks last summer was my first real trip away from
home. Going to Florida would seem like going to fairy land.”
Readers of “PATSY CARROLL AT WILDERNESS LODGE,” are already well
acquainted, not only with Patsy Carroll and Beatrice Forbes, but also
with their chums, Mabel and Eleanor Perry. In this story was narrated
the adventures of the four young girls, who, chaperoned by Patsy’s
stately aunt, Miss Martha Carroll, spent a summer together in the
Adirondacks.
Wilderness Lodge, the luxurious “camp” leased by Mr. Carroll for the
summer, had formerly belonged to an eccentric old man, Ebeneezer
Wellington. Having died intestate the previous spring, his property
and money had passed into the hands of Rupert Grandin, his worthless
nephew, leaving his foster-daughter, Cecil Vane, penniless.
Hardly were the Wayfarers, as the four girls had named themselves,
established at the Lodge when its owner decided, for reasons of his
own, to oust them from his property. A chance meeting between Beatrice
and Cecil Vane revealed the knowledge that the latter had been
defrauded of her rights and was firm in the belief that her late uncle
had made a will in her favor, which was tucked away in some corner of
the Lodge.
The long-continued hunt for the missing will and the strange
circumstances which attended the finding of it furnished the Wayfarers
with a new kind of excitement, quite apart from other memorable
incidents and adventures which crowded the summer.
In the end, Cecil came into her own, and the Wayfarers returned to
Morton, their home town, to make ready to enter Yardley, a preparatory
school, in which Mabel, Eleanor and Patsy were to put in another year
of study before entering college.
When Beatrice Forbes had joined the chums on the eventful vacation in
the mountains, she had fully expected on her return to Morton to become
a teacher in one of the grade schools. Fortune, however, had smiled
kindly on her. Her great-aunt, whom her mother had visited that summer
for the first time, had exhibited a lively interest in the great-niece
whom she had never seen.
Learning from Mrs. Forbes, Beatrice’s longing ambition to obtain a
college education, she had privately decided to accompany Beatrice’s
mother to the latter’s home when her visit was ended, and thus view
her ambitious young relative at close range.
This she had done. She had found Beatrice quite up to her expectations.
She had also met Patsy Carroll and promptly fallen into the toils
of that most fascinating young person. Patsy had privately advanced
Beatrice’s cause to so great an extent that it was not long until
Beatrice was making joyful preparations to accompany Mabel, Eleanor and
Patsy to Yardley, as a result of her aunt’s generosity.
So it was that the congenial quartette of Wayfarers had settled down
together at Yardley for a year of conscientious study. It now lacked
but ten days until the beginning of the Easter vacation and, as usual,
energetic Patsy was deeply concerned in the problem of how to make the
best of only two weeks’ recreation when she had fondly looked forward
to three.
“It wouldn’t do us a bit of good to ask for an extra week,” mourned
Patsy. “Three girls I know have tried it and been snubbed for their
pains. What we must do is to get together and plan some sort of outing
that won’t take us so far away from here. Of course we can’t be sure
of anything unless Aunt Martha approves. She’ll be disappointed about
not going to Palm Beach. She just loves to travel around with the
Wayfarers, only she won’t say so right out. Come on, Bee. Let’s go and
see the girls. Now that the great secret has all flattened out, like a
punctured tire on my good old car, I might as well tell Mab and Nellie
the sad tale.”
“You go, Patsy. I must finish this theme.” Beatrice cast a guilty
glance at the half-finished work on the table. “I must hand it in at
first recitation to-morrow and it’s a long way from being finished.”
“Oh, bother your theme! You can finish it later. It’s only eight
o’clock. We’ll stay just a few minutes.”
“Hello, Perry children!” greeted Patsy, when five minutes afterward she
and Beatrice broke in upon their chums, who roomed on the floor above
Patsy and Beatrice.
“Hello, yourself,” amiably responded Mabel, as she ushered them into
the room. “Of course you can’t read or you would have seen the ‘Busy’
sign on the door.”
“Pleasure before business,” retorted Patsy. “Kindly ask us to sit down,
but not on your bed. I want a chair with a back to it. It’s strictly
necessary to my comfort.”
“Help yourself.”
This from Eleanor who had laid aside her book and come forward.
“What’s on your mind, Patsy?” asked Mabel curiously. “Something’s
happened. I can tell that by the way you look.”
“I have a heavy load on my mind,” declared Patsy with deep
impressiveness.
Dramatically striking her forehead, she cried, “Ouch! That hurt!”
giggled and dropped down into a nearby chair.
“You almost knocked it off,” chuckled Beatrice, seating herself on the
edge of Mabel’s bed. “The load, I mean.”
“I did not. I almost knocked my forehead off. The load is still there.
Now to get rid of it.”
Whereupon Patsy plunged into the subject of the great secret.
“And Mother said we could go?” asked Eleanor eagerly when Patsy had
finished speaking.
“Certainly, but the powers that be, here at Yardley, say you can’t,”
reminded Patsy. “Palm Beach is not for us this Easter. I’m so disgusted
over this vacation business!”
“It’s a shame!” exclaimed Mabel. “I don’t want to go any place else.
Why can’t we go there, anyway? It would take us two or three days to go
and the same length of time to come back. We’d have a week there. That
would be better than nothing.”
“I suppose it would,” concurred Patsy rather reluctantly. “It’s only
that I hate being torn up by the roots and hustled back here just the
very minute I’m getting used to things at the Beach. There is so much
to see there. Besides, I’m simply crazy to go to the Everglades. Father
promised that he’d hire a real Indian guide, to take us there on an
expedition.”
“Let’s write to our people and tell them to write to the registrar,
asking if we can’t have that extra week,” proposed Eleanor eagerly. “If
your Aunt Martha, our mother and Bee’s mother would all write to her,
it might do some good.”
“We can try it. I doubt whether it will help much,” Patsy said
gloomily. “Miss Osgood is so awfully strict, you know. It’s our only
chance and a slim one. I’m going straight to my room and write to Aunt
Martha. Bee can write to her mother as soon as she finishes a theme
she’s toiling over. You’d better write to-night, too. The sooner we
find out the best or the worst, the sooner we’ll knew what to do about
Easter. If we can only have two weeks, Aunt Martha may want to do the
Beach anyway. If she doesn’t--well, we’ll have to think up some place
nearer Yardley to go to. I’m determined to have some kind of trip, if
it’s only to Old Point Comfort. The Wayfarers have been cooped up all
winter. It’s time they went wayfaring again.”