MOVING DAY
As soon as school was out the next day, the Riddle Club members hurried
to the Larue barn. True to her promise, Jess produced the key and there
was no delay about getting into the clubroom.
“Br-rr!” shivered Margy, as the door was opened.
They had not dreamed the room could be so cold. With the window and
door both closed, no fresh air could warm the atmosphere, as it did in
the barn below where, even though there was no heat, it usually felt
several degrees warmer than the outside temperature.
The threatened snowstorm had not come, but the day was raw and cold,
and each of the children found a sweater under his or her coat most
comfortable. Margy, who perhaps felt the cold more than any of the
others, was silently thankful that they would not have to hold another
meeting in the hayloft room.
“We’d better take the table first, I think,” said Fred. “That’s the
largest piece of furniture, and if any one gets hurt moving that, we
won’t miss him so much with the other things.”
“Huh?” inquired Ward, anxiously.
“Well, you know yourself that if the loving cup fell over and sprained
one of your fingers you wouldn’t be any help in moving the table,”
explained Fred. “But if we let the table fall on you, after it’s on the
barn floor, and it breaks your leg, there’ll still be plenty of us left
to lift the loving cup. Don’t you see?”
Apparently Ward saw, for he asked no further questions, but helped, at
Fred’s direction, tie the rope about the table and knot it securely.
“Do we have to take it in the second-story window of the house?” asked
Polly, watching the boys as they fastened the rope.
“Oh, we can get it up the stairs all right,” Fred assured her. “It’s
only because the loft ladder is so rickety that we’re letting it down
this way.”
When they came to take the table out through the doorway, a new
obstacle arose. The piece of furniture stuck.
“It _must_ go through,” said Fred, as though that settled it.
“It came through,” declared Margy, in quite as positive a tone. “I saw
it come through.”
“Well, it won’t go through now,” said Ward, wiping his red face with
his handkerchief. “Try it yourself, if you don’t believe me.”
Jess giggled a little.
“A table couldn’t grow fat, could it?” she suggested. “Maybe that
table’s gained in weight or something, since we moved it in.”
“No, I know what the trouble is,” said Polly. “When you brought it up
here, it just scraped through the doorway--don’t you remember? The boys
had to be extra careful not to get their fingers caught, the space was
so narrow between the frame and the table.”
“But it won’t even scrape through now,” Artie objected, frowning.
“That’s because you have that great rope wrapped around it,” said
Polly. “It hits the sides of the door frame. You’ll have to take it off
and push the table through.”
Grumbling, the boys set to work to untie the rope. This was not easy,
for Ward and Artie had put their best efforts into those knots, and
they were fearful and wonderful to behold. Then, too, in the pushing
and shoving exerted by the movers, the rope had twisted, so that the
knots were hard to get at. Artie finally succeeded in unloosening one
and Fred unfastened the other, and they pulled the rope out.
“Now I’ll push and you two pull,” said Fred, who would not allow the
girls to help.
The table stuck again. Fred gave a violent shove. Artie and Ward felt a
sharp prod in their ribs, and both went over backward.
“Laugh if you want to,” said the indignant Artie, rising and looking
reproachfully at the girls, who stood behind Fred. “I don’t see
anything funny myself. It’s a wonder that we don’t go through this fool
floor.”
The floor of the loft was not tight, and in many places the cracks were
wide enough for a very thin person’s foot. Some parts of the floor
were merely of poles laid closely together to hold the hay. When Ward
had been a very little boy, he had once fallen between these poles and
landed on a pile of hay on the main floor, a much frightened lad.
“We didn’t mean to laugh,” apologized Polly. “But you looked so funny!
You went down together just like two wooden soldiers.”
With much pushing and pulling and some scolding from Fred, the table
was dragged to the edge of the loft and the rope again tied around it,
ready to be lowered.
“What do we tie it to?” asked Fred suddenly. “Haven’t got the
confidence in your gun that you have, Artie.”
Artie grinned. He had fallen over a bluff in camp the past summer, and
a rope tied to his old gun stuck in the ground had proved to be his
ladder to safety. But even Artie could not trust his gun to stand the
weight of the table.
“We can hold it,” said Ward, confidently. “The three of us can do it
easily.”
“If the rope gets to going, it will skin our hands,” Fred warned him.
“Don’t stand too near the edge, or you’ll be dragged over,” said Polly,
who was eager to help in some way.
“Dump it over,” Artie advised, carelessly. “You can’t hurt a heavy
table like that.”
“Much you know about it,” said Fred. “One of these legs is likely to
crack off. Well, I suppose, as Ward says, the three of us can hold it.”
He dragged the table nearer the edge and took up the rope, standing
back about two feet. Ward and Artie, in the order named, took up the
rope, standing about the same distance from each other.
“I’ll give you the word,” said Fred, beginning to move the table nearer
and nearer, pushing cautiously with his foot.
Ward felt a stinging sensation in his eye--a grain of dust, most
likely. He rubbed frantically, while a cousin of the same mischievous
dust atom flew on to Artie and caused him to sneeze tremendously. As
every one will tell you, it is quite impossible to keep your mind on
any job and sneeze at the same time. Small wonder that Artie forgot the
rope, as Ward had done.
The table teetered a minute over the edge of the loft, then dropped.
Fred felt as though his arms were being pulled from the sockets for one
brief moment, and then the strain slackened. He looked back. The three
girls were holding the rope, their feet braced as they pulled. Ward and
Artie stood staring at him.
“Grab that rope!” shouted Fred. “What are you thinking of? Grab hold!
Do you want the thing to go bang?”
Ward and Artie “came to” with a jerk and grasped the rope. Fred
continued to lower the table gently, paying out the rope carefully,
until he felt it touch the barn floor.
“All right!” he said glumly. “And small thanks to you boys. If it
hadn’t been for the girls, we would have had one smashed table.”
Ward and Artie were eager to make up for their lapse, and they offered
to carry the table into the house alone.
“We’ll get everything downstairs first,” Fred decreed. “Then all we’ll
have to do will be to carry the stuff in.”
“Somebody ought to beat the rug,” said Margy. “Mother always beats her
rugs when she moves them, even if it’s only from one room to another.”
No one seemed very anxious to do any rug-beating, though Ward offered
to “shake it out of the window.”
“A good housekeeper doesn’t shake rugs out of the window,” said Polly.
“I’ll clean the rug myself.”
“Well, housework is girls’ work, anyway,” said Ward, placidly.
“I won’t clean the rug!” retorted Polly. “Mother has a man come and
beat her rugs--so there.”
“The rug is clean, so stop fussing,” commanded Fred. “We haven’t used
it much. I’ll get a broom and sweep it off and it will be all right.”
One by one they carried down the treasures from their clubroom--the
silver loving cup; the six chairs; the framed sketch, made by the
artist, Miss Perry; Artie’s gun; and the radio set. This last was to
go in the Larue living-room for the winter. It would not be needed in
the clubroom, for Artie had his own set, as did Fred. They left the
curtains, because Mrs. Marley had all her windows curtained alike, and
the new room already had ruffled white draperies screening the windows
above the window seat.
“I hope Carrie Pepper knows we have a clubroom,” said Margy, as she
helped Polly take down the pennant tacked in place on the loft-room
wall.
“She will know it, if she doesn’t now,” declared Jess. “That girl hears
everything, sooner or later.”
They could hardly blame Carrie if she learned about the new clubroom,
for ten minutes later Mrs. Pepper came out to feed her hens and
discovered something unusual going on in the barn.
“What are you doing, Fred Williamson?” she asked Fred, seeing him
start, whistling, for the Marley house, two chairs over his back.
“We’re moving, Mrs. Pepper,” he answered, politely.
“Moving? Where to? Is Mr. Larue moving?” asked Mrs. Pepper, forgetting
to sprinkle any more corn.
“No, Mr. Larue isn’t moving. The Riddle Club is,” Fred explained.
“We’re going to hold our meetings at the Marleys’ till warm weather
comes again. You ought to see the dandy room we’re going to have!”
“I pity Mrs. Marley with a parcel of young ones racketing over her
house,” sighed Mrs. Pepper. “I suppose she thinks she can keep an eye
on you better. But I wouldn’t give much for her furniture by spring
time.”
“We have our own furniture,” said Jess, indignantly. She had come
up with Fred in time to hear this last remark. “We stay in our own
clubroom for meetings, and we don’t hurt a thing.”
“Here, chick, chick,” called Mrs. Pepper, remembering her hungry flock.
“No, I don’t suppose you intend to do any damage. But the time Carrie
had the Conundrum Club at our house, it took me a week to get the place
to rights again; and some of the grease spots never did come out of the
rug.”
Jess opened her mouth to say that the Riddle Club didn’t spill grease
on any one’s carpets, but she thought in time that that might sound as
though she were criticizing the Conundrum Club.
“What a nice turkey!” she said instead.
“He will be nice,” admitted Mrs. Pepper, “when I get him fattened up,
if I ever do. I can’t abide a turkey for Thanksgiving that I don’t
fatten myself. I bought this cheap, because he’s so skinny, but I aim
to have him as fat as butter by Thanksgiving morning.”
Jess went on with the rug she was carrying, but she had to stop on the
side steps of the Marley house, for the three boys were getting the
table up the stairs with much noise and some laughter.
“What would they do if they had really to move!” said Polly, joining
Jess on the steps. “And to think we’ll have to go through with this
again in the spring. Did you see Mrs. Pepper’s turkey?”
“Yes, she says she’s getting it fat,” responded Jess, absently. “Say,
Polly, has your mother said anything about Thanksgiving yet?”
“No, she hasn’t.” Polly’s reply was prompt. “She hasn’t said a word.
And last year by this time we knew where we were going, didn’t we?”
Unless one of the families was going away over the holiday or had
invited relatives, it was the custom of the Marleys, the Larues, and
the Williamsons to have Thanksgiving dinner together at one of their
homes.
“I think it’s kind of queer,” said Jess, soberly.