THE MYSTERY OF JUNE WILDWOOD
Now, Trix Severn had maneuvered so as to get the very first dance with
Neale O’Neil. Among all the boys who attended the upper grammar
grades, and the High, of Milton, the boy who had been brought up in a
circus was the best dancer. The older girls all were glad to get him
for a partner.
Time had been when Trix sneered at “that circus boy,” but that was
before he and the two older Corner House girls had saved Trix from a
collapsing snow palace back in mid-winter.
Since that time she had taken up with Agnes Kenway as her very closest
chum, and she had visited the old Corner House a good deal. When Agnes
and her sister arrived at the party on this evening, with Neale as
escort, Trix determined to have at least _one_ dance with the popular
boy.
“Oh, Neale!” she whispered, fluttering up to him in her very nicest
way, “Ruth and Agnes will be half an hour primping, upstairs. The
music is going to strike up. Do let _us_ have the first dance.”
“All right,” said Neale, good-naturedly.
It was the moment later that the discovery was made of the masons’
shoes in the bundle he carried under his arm.
“Now we can’t dance,” repeated Agnes, when the laughter had somewhat
subsided.
“Oh, Neale can dance just as well,” Trix said, carelessly. “Come on,
Neale! You know this is _our_ dance.”
Of course Neale could dance in his walking shoes. But he saw Agnes’
woebegone face and he hesitated.
“It’s too bad, Aggie,” he said. “If it wasn’t so far——”
“Why, Neale O’Neill” snapped Trix, unwisely. “You don’t mean to say
you’d be foolish enough to go clear back to the Corner House for those
girls’ slippers?”
Perhaps it was just this opposition that was needed to start Neale
off. He pulled his cap from his pocket and turned toward the door,
with a shrug. “I guess I can get back in an hour, Ag. Don’t you and
Ruth dance much in your heavy shoes until then. You’ll tire yourselves
all out.”
“Why, Neale O’Neill” cried Trix. “You won’t do it?”
Even Ruth murmured against the boy’s making the trip for the slippers.
“We can get along, Neale,” she said, in her quiet way.
“And you promised to dance with me this first dance,” declared Trix,
angrily, as the music began.
Neale did not pay much attention to her—at the moment. “It’s my
fault, I guess,” he said, laughing. “I’ll go back for them, Ag.”
But Trix got right between him and the door. “Now! you sha’n’t go off
and leave me in the lurch that way, Neale O’Neill” she cried, shrilly.
“Aw——There are other dances. Wait till I come back,” he said.
“You can dance in the shoes you have on,” Trix said, sharply.
“What if?”
“But _we_ can’t, Trix,” interposed Agnes, much distressed. “Ruth and
I, you know——”
“I don’t care!” interrupted Trix, boiling over at last. “You Corner
House girls are the most selfish things! You’d spoil his fun for half
the party——”
“Aw, don’t bother!” growled Neale, in much disgust.
“I will bother! You——”
“Guess she thinks she owns you, Neale,” chuckled one of the boys,
adding fuel to the flames. Neale did not feel any too pleasant after
that. He flung away from Trix Severn’s detaining grasp.
“I’m going—it isn’t any of _your_ concern,” he muttered, to the angry
girl.
Ruth bore Agnes away. She was half crying. The rift in the intimacy
between her soulmate and herself was apparent to all.
To make the matter worse—according to Trix’s version—when Neale
finally returned, almost breathless, with the mislaid slippers, he
insisted, first of all, upon dancing with Ruth and Agnes. Then he
would have favored Trix (Ruth had advised it), but the angry girl
would not speak to him.
“He’s nothing but a low circus boy, anyway!” she told Lucy Poole. “And
I don’t think really well-bred girls would care to have anything to do
with him.”
Those who heard her laughed. They had known Trix Severn’s ways for a
long time. She had been upon her good behavior; but it did not
surprise her old acquaintances that she should act like this.
It made a difference to the Corner House girls, however, for it made
their plans about going to Pleasant Cove uncertain.
The other girls knew that Trix had invited the Corner House girls for
the first two weeks after graduation, and that Ruth had tentatively
accepted. Therefore even Pearl Harrod—who wanted Ruth and her
sisters, herself—scarcely knew whether to put in a claim for them or
not.
Graduation Day was very near at hand; the very day following the
closing of the Milton High, several family parties were to leave for
the seaside resort which was so popular in this part of New England.
They had to pass through Bloomingsburg to get to it, but when the
Kenways had lived in that city, they had never expected to spend any
part of the summer season at such a beautiful summer resort as
Pleasant Cove.
It was a bungalow colony, with several fine hotels, built around a
tiny, old-fashioned fishing port. There was a still cove, a beautiful
river emptying into it, and outside, a stretch of rocky Atlantic coast
on which the ocean played grim tunes during stormy weather.
This was as much as the Corner House girls knew about it as yet. But
they all looked forward to their first visit to the place with keen
delight. Tess and Dot were talking about the expected trip a good deal
of the time they were awake. Most of their doll-play was colored now
by thoughts of Pleasant Cove.
They were not too busy to help Mrs. MacCall take the last of the
winter clothing to the garret, however, and see her pack it away in
the chests there. As she did this the housekeeper sprinkled, with
lavish hand, the camphor balls among the layers of clothing.
Dot had tentatively tasted one of the hard, white balls, and
shuddered. “But they _do_ look so much like candy, Tess,” she said.
Then she suddenly had another thought:
“Oh, Mrs. MacCall! what do you suppose the poor moths had to live on
’way back in the Garden of Eden before Adam and Eve wore any clothes?”
“Now, can you beat _that_?” demanded the housekeeper, of nobody in
particular. “What won’t that young one get in her head!”
Meanwhile Ruth was helping Rosa Wildwood all she could, so that the
girl from the South would be able to pass in the necessary
examinations and stand high enough in the class to be promoted.
Housework certainly “told on” Rosa. Bob said “it jest seems t’ take
th’ puckerin’ string all out’n her—an’ she jest draps down like a
flower.”
“We’ll help her, Mr. Wildwood,” Ruth said. “But she really ought to
have a rest.”
“Hi Godfrey!” ejaculated the coal heaver. “I tell her she kin let the
housework go. We don’t have no visitors—savin’ an’ exceptin’ _you_,
ma’am.”
“But she wants to keep the place decent, you see,” Ruth told him. “And
she can scarcely do that and keep up with her studies—now. You see,
she’s so weak.”
“Hi Godfrey!” exclaimed the man again. “Ain’t thar sech a thing as
bein’ a mite _too_ clean?”
But Bob Wildwood had an immense respect for Ruth; likewise he was
grateful because she showed an interest in his last remaining
daughter.
“I tell you, sir,” the oldest Corner House girl said, gravely. “Rosa
needs a change and a rest. And all us girls are going to Pleasant Cove
this summer. Will you let Rosa come down, too, for a while, if I pay
her way and look out for her?”
The man was somewhat disturbed by the question. “Yuh see, Miss,” he
observed, scratching his head thoughtfully, “she’s all I got. I’d
plumb be lost ’ithout Rosa.”
“But only for a week or two.”
“I know. And I wouldn’t want tuh stand in her way. I crossed her
sister too much—that’s what _I_ did. Juniper was a sight more uppity
than Rosa—otherwise she wouldn’t have flew the coop,” said Bob
Wildwood, shaking his head.
Ruth, all tenderness for his bereavement, hastened to say: “Oh, you’ll
find her again, sir. Surely you don’t believe she’s dead?”
“No. If she ain’t come to a _bad_ end, she’s all right somewhar. But
she’d oughter be home with her sister—and with me. Ye see, she was
pretty—an’ smart. No end smart! She went off in bad comp’ny.”
“How do you mean, Mr. Wildwood?” asked Ruth, deeply interested.
“Travelin’ folks. They had a van an’ a couple team o’ mules, an’ the
man sold bitters an’ corn-salve. The woman dressed mighty fine, an’
she took June’s eye.
“We follered ’em a long spell, me an’ Rosa. But we didn’t never ketch
up to ’em. If we had, I’d sure tuck a hand-holt of that medicine man.
He an’ his woman put all the foolishness inter Juniper’s haid.
“An’ Rosa misses her sister like poison, too,” finished Bob Wildwood,
slowly shaking his head.
There seemed to be a mystery connected with the disappearance of
Rosa’s sister, and Ruth Kenway was just as curious as she could be
about it; but she stuck to her subject until Bob Wildwood agreed to
spare his remaining daughter for at least a week’s visit to Pleasant
Cove, while the Corner House girls would be there.