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Title: The Camp Fire Girls Solve a Mystery; Or, The Christmas
Adventure at Carver House

Author: Hildegard G. Frey

Release date: February 25, 2012 [eBook #38983]
Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CAMP
FIRE GIRLS SOLVE A MYSTERY; OR, THE CHRISTMAS
ADVENTURE AT CARVER HOUSE ***

The Camp Fire Girls
Solve a Mystery

or, THE CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE at CARVER HOUSE

By HILDEGARD G. FREY

AUTHOR OF
The Camp Fire Girls Series

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York

THE

Camp Fire Girls Series

A Series of Stories for Camp Fire Girls Endorsed by the Officials of the Camp Fire
Girls Organization

By HILDEGARD G. FREY

The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods
or, The Winnebago’s Go Camping

The Camp Fire Girls at School
or, The Wohelo Weavers

The Camp Fire Girls at Onoway House
or, The Magic Garden

The Camp Fire Girls Go Motoring
or, Along the Road That Leads the Way

The Camp Fire Girls’ Larks and Pranks
or, The House of the Open Door

The Camp Fire Girls on Ellen’s Isle
or, the Trail of the Seven Cedars

The Camp Fire Girls on the Open Road
or, Glorify Work

The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit
or, Over The Top With the Winnebago’s

The Camp Fire Girls Solve a Mystery
or, The Christmas Adventures at Carver
House

The Camp Fire Girls at Camp Keewaydin
or, Down Paddles

Copyright, 1919
By A. L. Burt Company

THE CAMP FIRE GIRLS SOLVE A MYSTERY

The old man swayed, clutched at the empty air, and fell heavily in the snow at her
feet.

The Camp-Fire Girls Solve a Mystery. Page 155.

[3]

THE CAMP FIRE GIRLS
SOLVE A MYSTERY

CHAPTER I
THE EMPTY HOUSE

Katherine Adams stepped from the train at Oakwood, glanced
expectantly up and down the station platform, hesitated a
moment, and then, picking out a conspicuous spot under a
glaring arc light, deposited her suitcase on the ground with a
thump, mounted guard beside it and patiently waited for
Nyoda to find her in the surging crowd.

It was two days before Christmas, and travel was heavy. It
seemed as though the entire population of Oakland was either
coming home, departing, or rushing madly up and down
before the panting train in search of friends and relatives.
Katherine was engulfed in a tidal wave of rapturous greetings
that rolled over her from every side, as a coachful of soldiers,
home for Christmas, were met and surrounded by the waiting
lines of townspeople.

Katherine stood still, absorbed in watching the various [4]
reunions taking place around her, while the tidal wave
gradually subsided, receding in the direction of Main Street.
The principal stream had already flowed past her and the
crowd was rapidly thinning out when Katherine woke to the
realization that she was still unclaimed. There was no sign of
Nyoda. The expectant smile faded from Katherine’s face and
in its place there came a look of puzzled wonder. What had
happened? Why wasn’t Nyoda there to meet her? Was there
some mistake? Wasn’t this Oakwood? Had she gotten off at
the wrong station, she thought in sudden panic. No, there was
the sign beside the door of the green boarded station; its
gilded letters gleamed down reassuringly at her. Katherine

stood on one foot and pondered. Was this the day she was
supposed to come? What day was it, anyway? The thick pad
calendar beside the ticket seller’s window inside the station
proclaimed it to be the twenty-third. All right so far; she
hadn’t mixed up the date, then. She had written Nyoda that
she would come on the twenty-third, on the five-forty-five
train. The train had been on time. Where was Nyoda?

Katherine was assailed by a sudden doubt. Had she mailed [5]
that letter? Yes, she was certain of that. She had run out to the
mail box at ten o’clock at night especially to mail it. What had
gone wrong? Why wasn’t there someone to meet her?

She looked around at the walls as if expecting them to answer,
and her roving eye caught sight of the lettering on a glass door
opposite. The telephone! Goose! Why hadn’t she thought of
that before? Of course there was some mistake responsible for
Nyoda’s not meeting her, but in a moment that would be all
straightened out.

She sprang across to the booth and picked up the directory
hanging beside the telephone. Then a queer, bewildered look
came into her eyes and she stood still with the book hanging
uncertainly from her fingers. She had forgotten Nyoda’s
name! She twisted her brows into a pucker and made a frantic
effort to recall it. No use; it was a fruitless endeavor. Where
that name used to be in her mind there was now a blank space,
empty and echoless as the original void. It was too ridiculous!
Katherine gave a little stamp of vexation. It was not the first
time a name had popped out of her mind at a critical moment.
And sometimes—O horror! it didn’t come back again for
days. Was there ever anything so utterly absurd as the plight
in which she now found herself? She knew Nyoda’s name as
well as her own. M. M. It certainly began with an M.

After nearly an hour’s exasperated wracking of her brains she [6]
gave it up in disgust and stalked out of the station. Not for
worlds would she have confided to anyone her plight.

“People will think you’re an escaped lunatic,” she told herself
in terrified wrath. “They might put you in an asylum, and it
would serve you right if they did. You aren’t fit to be out
without a guardian. After this you’ll have to have your
destination written out on a label tied to your ankle, like a
trunk.”

She had one recollection to guide her. The house Nyoda lived
in stood on top of a hill. The name of Carver House and the
address on Oak Street had faded along with Nyoda’s name.
“I’ll walk until I come to a house on the top of a hill,” she
decided, “and find it that way. There can’t be many houses on
hills in this town, it seems to be all in a valley. Come along,
Katherine, what you haven’t got in your head you’ll have to
have in your heels.”

No one, seeing the tall, clever looking girl stepping briskly
out of the station and turning up Main Street with a
businesslike tread, would have guessed that she was a stranger
in a strange town and hadn’t any idea where she was going.
There was such an air of confidence and capability about
Katherine that people would have been more likely to ask her
to help them out of their difficulties than to suspect that she
needed help herself.

Certainly, Nyoda’s house wouldn’t be hard to find. Oakwood [7]
lay in a valley, curled up among its sheltering hills like a
kitten in a heap of leaves. To be on a hill Nyoda must be on
the outskirts of the town. She inquired of a passing youngster
what part of Oakwood was on a hill and got the information
that Main Street ran up hill at the end.

She set out blithely in the direction he pointed, enjoying the
walk through the crisp, icy air. A light fall of snow, white as
swan’s down, covered the ground and the roofs, and sparkled
in the light of the street lamps in myriads of tiny twinkles. Not
many people were abroad, for it was the supper hour in
Oakland. A Christmas stillness hovered over the peaceful little

town, as though it lay hushed and breathless in anticipation of
the coming of the Holy Babe. Low in the eastern sky burned
the brilliant evening star, bright as that other Star in the East
which guided the shepherds on that far-off Christmas night.
Katherine felt the spell of it and gradually her hasty steps
became slower and at times she stood still and looked upon
the quiet scene with a feeling of awe and reverence. “Why, it
might be Bethlehem!” she said to herself. “It’s so still and
white, and there’s the star in the east, too!” Almost
unconsciously she began to repeat under her breath:

“O little town of Bethlehem, [8]
How still we see thee lie,
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by.”

“Only it isn’t quite true about the deep and dreamless sleep,”
she qualified, her literal-mindedness getting the upper hand of
her poetic feeling, “because they’re all inside eating supper.”
The thought of supper made Katherine suddenly realize that
she was ravenously hungry. She had had nothing to eat since
an early lunch on the train. “I hope I get there before supper’s
over,” she thought, and quickened her pace again. Not that she
wouldn’t get something anyhow, she reflected, but somehow
the idea of coming in just as supper was ready, and sitting
down to a table covered with steaming dishes seized her fancy
and warmed her through with a pleasant glow of expectation.

“Nearly there!” she said to herself cheerfully. “Here’s where [9]
Main Street starts to go uphill.” The houses had gradually
become farther and farther apart as she went on, until now she
was walking along between wide, open spaces, gleaming
white in the starlight, with only an occasional low cottage to
break the landscape. The walk was steeply uphill now, and
looking back Katherine saw Oakwood curled in its sheltering
valley, and again she thought of a sleek, well fed kitten lying

warm and comfortable and drowsy, at peace with all the
world.

“There aren’t any poor people here, I guess,” she thought to
herself. “All the houses look so prosperous. There probably
aren’t any hungry children crying for bread. I’m the only
hungry person in this whole town, I believe. My, but I am
hungry! I could eat a whole house right now, and a barn for
dessert! Thank goodness, there’s the top of the hill in sight,
and that must be Nyoda’s house.” A great dark bulk towered
before her at the top of the steep incline, its irregular outlines
standing sharply defined against the luminous sky. Katherine
charged up the remainder of the hill at top speed, slipping and
falling in the icy path several times in her eagerness, but
finally landing intact, though flushed and panting, upon its
slippery summit, and stood still to behold this wonderful
house that Nyoda lived in, whose charms had been the theme
of many an enthusiastic letter from the Winnebagos during the
previous summer. It loomed large and silent before her, its
frost covered window panes shining whitely in the starlight
with a faint, ghostly glimmer. No gleam of light came from
any of the doors or windows. The house was still and dark as
a tomb. Katherine stood wide-eyed with disappointment and
perplexity. Nyoda was not at home.

She clutched at a straw. Nyoda had gone to meet her and [10]
missed her; that was it. But at the same time she felt a doubt
rising in her mind which rapidly grew into a certainty. This
was not Nyoda’s house before which she stood on this lonely
hilltop. It was some other house and it was absolutely empty.
Not only was it untenanted, but it had the look of a house that
has stood so for years. Even the soft, sparkling mantle of
snow that lay upon it could not hide the sagging porch, the
broken steps, the broken-down fence, the general air of decay
which surrounded the place.

Katherine emitted a cluck of chagrin. She was puffing like an
engine from her dash up the hill, she was tired out, she was
ravenously hungry, she was unutterably cross at herself. She
scowled at the dark house with its spectral, frosty windows,
and made another frantic effort to recall Nyoda’s name, only
to be confronted with that baffling blank where the name once
had been.

With a growing feeling of helplessness she stood on one foot [11]
in the snow in the pose which she always assumed when
thinking deeply, and considered what she should do next.
Should she keep on walking and climbing all the hills until
she finally came to the right one; should she go all the way
back to the station and sit there until the name came back to
her, or should she walk boldly up to one of the hospitable
looking doors she had passed, confide her plight and ask to be
taken in for the night? Katherine was trying to decide between
the first two, leaving the third as the extreme alternative in
case she neither found the right hill nor succeeded in
remembering Nyoda’s name before bedtime, when suddenly
something occurred which sent a chill of ice into her blood
and left her standing petrified in her one-legged pose, like a
frozen stork. From the dark and empty house before her came
the sound of a song, ringing clear and distinct through the
frosty air. It was the voice of a woman, or a girl. Beginning
softly, the tone swelled out in volume till it seemed to
Katherine’s ears to fill the whole house and to come pouring
out of all the doors and windows. Then it subsided until it
came very faintly, like the merest ghost of a song. Katherine
felt the hair rising on her head; she gave an odd little dry gasp.
Wild terror assailed her and she would have fled, but fear
chained her limbs and she could not move hand or foot. She
stood riveted to the spot, staring fascinated at the dark,
untenanted house, which stared back at her with frost veiled,
inscrutable eyes; and all the while from somewhere in its
mysterious depths came the voice, now louder, now fainter,
but always distinctly heard.

A sudden thought struck Katherine. Was she already a victim [12]
of starvation, and was this the delirium which starving people
went into? They generally heard beautiful voices singing. No,
that wasn’t possible—she couldn’t be starving yet. She was
tremendously hungry, but there was still a fairly safe margin
between her and the last stages. Somehow the thought of
hunger, and the idea of food, commonplace, familiar victuals
which it connoted, dissipated the supernatural atmosphere of
the place, and Katherine shook off her terror. The blood
stopped pounding in her ears; her heart began to beat naturally
again; her limbs lost their paralysis.

“Goose!” she said to herself scornfully. “Flying into a panic at
the sound of a voice singing and thinking it’s ghosts! I’m
ashamed of you, Katherine Adams! Where’s your ’spicuity?
Vacant houses don’t sing by themselves. When empty houses
start singing they aren’t empty. Besides, no ghost could sing
like that. A voice like that means lungs, and ghosts don’t have
lungs. Anybody that’s got breath to sing can probably talk and
tell me where the next hill is. I’m going up and ask her.”

She passed through an opening in the tumble-down fence, in [13]
which there was no longer any gate, and went up the uneven,
irregular brick walk and up the broken steps, treading
carefully upon each one and half expecting them to go down
under her weight. They creaked and trembled, but they held
her and she went on over the sagging porch to the door, which
lay in deep shadow at the one side. She felt about for a bell or
knocker, and then she discovered that the door stood open.
She could hear the voice plainly, singing somewhere in the
house. Failing to find a doorbell she rapped loudly with her
knuckles on the door casing. To her nervous ears the sound
seemed to echo inside the house like thunder, but there was no
pause in the singing, no sound of footsteps coming to the
door.

She rapped again. Still no sign from within. A sportive north
wind, racing up the hill, paused at the top to whirl about in a
mad frolic, and Katherine shivered from head to foot. She felt
chilled through, and fairly ached to get inside a house;
anywhere to be in out of the cold. She rapped a third time.
Still the voice sang on as before, paying no heed to the knock.
Katherine grew desperate. Her teeth were chattering in her
head and her feet were going numb.

“Of course she can’t hear me knock when she’s singing,”
thought Katherine. “The sound of her own voice fills her ears.
I’m going in and find her. I’ll apologize for walking in on her
so unceremoniously, but it’s the only thing to do. I’ve got to
get in out of the cold pretty soon.”

Acting upon her resolution she stepped through the open door [14]
into the hall inside and tried to fix the direction from which
the voice was coming. She looked in vain for a glimmer of
light under a door to guide her to the mysterious dweller in
this strange establishment. The house was apparently as dark
on the inside as it looked from without. Katherine opened her
handbag and fumbled for her electric flash. In a moment a
tiny circle of light was boring valiantly into the gloom. By its
gleam Katherine saw that she stood in a long hall. Upon her
left was a succession of doors, all closed; upon her right a
staircase curved upward into the blackness above. Idly she
turned her flashlight on the staircase and noticed that the post
was of beautifully carved mahogany. The polish was gone, but
it must have been handsome once, must have been—
Katherine gave a great start and nearly dropped her flashlight.
Her eyes, traveling up the mahogany stair rail, encountered
those of a man who was leaning over the banister half way up.
His face, in the light of her flash, was white as a sheet, and he
seemed to be staring not so much at her as at the door behind
her, through which she at that moment discovered the voice to
be proceeding.

Katherine recovered from her surprise and remembered her [15]
manners. This man must live here. She must explain quickly,
or he would take her for a burglar, coming in that way and
looking around with a flashlight. Katherine suddenly felt
apprehensive. Suppose he wouldn’t believe her story? It was
one thing to go into a house in search of a voice that wouldn’t
come to the door; it was another thing to find a man inside.

She cleared her throat and wet her lips. “Excuse me for
coming in like this—” she began. She got no farther with her
apologies. At the sound of her voice the man gave a startled
jump, backed away from the banister, ran down the stairs two
steps at a time and disappeared through the front door, leaving
Katherine standing in the empty hall, open-mouthed with
astonishment.

[16]

CHAPTER II
THE PRINCESS SYLVIA

Katherine did not know whether she was more astonished or
relieved at the sudden flight of the man on the stairs. “I
suppose I do look pretty wild,” she reflected, “but I didn’t
suppose my appearance was enough to make a man run on
sight. Well anyhow, he isn’t going to trouble me, and that’s
some comfort. Now to find the singer.”

There was an open transom over the door before which
Katherine stood and she perceived that the voice came
through this. With hand raised to knock on the door panel she
paused in admiration. The song that floated through the
transom had such a gay swing, such an irresistible lilt, that it
set her head awhirl and her blood racing madly through her
veins in a wild May dance. It was as though Spring herself,
intoxicated with May dew and brimming over with all the joy
of all the world, were singing. Like golden drops from a sunlit
fountain the gay, glad notes showered down on her:

“Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings, [17]
And Phoebus ’gins arise
His steeds to water at those springs
On chaliced flower that lies;
And winking Mary buds begin
To ope their golden eyes,
With everything that pretty been,
My lady sweet arise!”

The voice fell silent, and Katherine came back to herself and
knocked on the door.

“Come in, my dear Duchess,” called a merry voice from
behind the door. There was no mistaking the note of glad
welcome.

Katherine turned the knob and opened the door. Only
darkness greeted her eyes.

“Where are you?” she asked.

From somewhere in the room came a sudden exclamation of
surprise.

“Who is it?” demanded the voice which had bidden her enter.
“You are not my lady-in-waiting, the Duchess.”

“I’m afraid I’m not,” said Katherine, considerably puzzled at
the salutation she had received. She stood still inside the door
trying to locate her mysterious hostess in the darkness. Her
flashlight lay in her hand, useless, its battery burned out.

“I’m looking for another house on another hill,” she began [18]
hurriedly, speaking into the darkness and feeling as though
she had slipped into the Arabian Nights, “and I got the wrong
hill and and now I’m so mixed up I don’t know where to go. I
heard you singing and came in to ask if you could tell me
where the other hill is. I knocked before I came in,” she added
hastily, “but you didn’t come to the door, so I took the liberty
of walking in. I beg your pardon for coming right in that way,
but I was so cold——”

“You are welcome in our lodge,” interrupted the invisible
voice with lofty graciousness. “Do you not know where you
have come?” it continued, in a tone which indicated there was
a delicious surprise in store. “This is the royal hunting lodge,
and I am the Princess Sylvia!”

“Oh-h-h!” said Katherine, too much astonished to say another
word. She did not know how to act when introduced to a

princess.

“Is there anything I can do for your majesty?” she asked
politely, remembering that the other had mentioned a lady-in-
waiting that she seemed to be expecting.

“Light the lights!” commanded the voice imperiously.

Katherine took a step forward uncertainly. “Where—” she
began.

“On the table beside you!” continued the voice.

Katherine put out her hand and came in contact with the edge [19]
of a table, and after groping for a moment found a box of
matches. She struck one and by its flare saw an oil lamp
standing on the table beside the matches. She lit it and looked
around the room curiously. She could not see the owner of the
voice at first. The room was large and shadowy and contained
very little furniture. A bare pine table on which the lamp
stood; a couple of kitchen chairs; a cot bed next to the wall; a
small stove; a rocking chair and a sewing machine; these were
the objects which the lamp illuminated. The other end of the
room lay in deep shadow. It was from this shadow that the
voice now issued again.

“Bring the lamp and come here,” it commanded.

Katherine picked up the lamp from the table and advanced
toward the shadowy corner of the room. The darkness fled
before her as she advanced and the corner sprang into light.
She saw that the corner was a bay, with three long windows,
in which stood a couch. On the couch was a mountain whose
slopes consisted of vari-colored piecework, and from whose
peak there issued, like an eruption of golden lava, a tangle of
bright yellow curls which framed about a pair of big, shining
eyes. The eyes were set in a face, of course—they had to be—
but the face was so white and emaciated as to be entirely

inconspicuous, so Katherine’s first impression consisted
entirely of hair and eyes. The eyes were dark brown, a strange
combination with the fair hair, and sparkled with a hundred
little dancing lights, as the girl on the couch—for it was a girl
apparently about fourteen years old—looked up at Katherine
with a roguish smile.

“You must be Her Grace, the Marchioness St. Denis,” she said [20]
with an air of stately courtesy, “of whose presence in our
realm we have been informed. I trust Your Grace is not over
fatigued. You will pardon the informality of our life here,” she
continued, her brown eyes traveling around the room and
resting somewhat regretfully on the shabby furnishings. “We
take up our residence in the Winter Palace for state
occasions,” she went on, “but for our daily life we prefer the
simplicity of our Hunting Lodge. We are less hampered by
formal etiquette here.”

Katherine stared in perplexity. Winter Palace? Hunting
Lodge? Her Grace the Marchioness? What was this strange
child talking about? Her feeling of having wakened in the
midst of a fairy tale deepened.

“You can see the Winter Palace from the window here, when
there isn’t any frost on it,” proceeded the “princess,” setting
up a volcanic disturbance inside the patchwork mountain by
turning herself inside of it, and she pointed toward one of the
bay windows with a thin white hand. “It’s on top of a high hill
and at night it twinkles.”

It came over Katherine in a flash that possibly it was Nyoda’s [21]
house that this queer child meant by the “Winter Palace.” A
big house set on a high hill——

A rippling laugh caused her to look down hastily, and there
was the girl on the couch fairy convulsed with laughter.

“It’s been such fun!” she exclaimed, demolishing the
mountain by throwing the quilt aside with a sudden
movement of her arms and disclosing a slender little body
wrapped in a grayish woolen dressing gown. “I never had
anybody from outside to play it with before. I get tired
playing it alone so much, and Aunt Aggie is mostly always
too busy to play it with me. Besides,” she said with a regretful
sigh, “she has no imagination, and she forgets most of the
really important things. Oh, it was wonderful when you said,
‘Is there anything I can do for you, Your Majesty?’ It was just
as real as real!” She laughed with delight at the remembrance.

Katherine, as much startled by the swift change in her little
hostess as she had been at her strange manner of speech in the
beginning, was still uncertain what to say. “Is it a game?” she
asked finally.

The girl nodded and began to explain, talking as though to an [22]
old friend.

“You see,” she began, “not being able to walk, it’s so hard to
find anything really thrilling to do.”

“You are lame?” asked Katherine with quick sympathy. It had
just come over her that while the slender arms had been
waving incessantly in animated gestures as the voice chattered
gaily on, the limbs under the dressing gown had not moved.

The girl nodded in reply to Katherine’s question. “Crippled,”
she explained. “I was following a horse down the middle of
the street trying to figure out which leg came after which
when I slipped and fell and hurt my spine, and I have never
walked since.”

“Oh-h!” said Katherine with a shudder of distress.

“And so,” continued the girl, “to pass away the time while
Aunt Aggie was working I began to pretend that I was a

princess and lived in a palace with my indulgent father, the
king, and had a grand court and a great train of attendants—
all dukes and duchesses and counts and things, and a royal
grand duchess for my lady-in-waiting. That one is Aunt
Aggie, of course, and it’s great fun to pretend she’s the
duchess.”

“‘My dear Duchess,’” she cried, giving an animated sample of [23]
her make believe, “‘what do you say to having our cousin, the
Crown Prince, in to tea!’ Then Aunt Aggie always forgets and
says, ‘Let’s see, which one is the Crown Prince, now?’ It’s
very disconcerting, the way the Grand Duchess forgets her
royal relations!” She giggled infectiously and Katherine
smiled too.

“What is your real name, Princess Sylvia?” she asked.

“Sylvia Deane,” replied the girl. “Only the princess part is
made up. My name is S-s-ylvia-a.”

Her teeth began to chatter on the last words and she drew the
quilt up around her tightly. Katherine suddenly felt cold, too.
Then she became conscious for the first time that there was no
heat in the room. In the first contrast to the biting wind
outside the place had seemed warm, and with her heavy fur-
collared winter coat she had not felt chilly. She glanced at the
stove. It was black and lifeless.

“The f-f-fire’s g-g-gone o-u-t,” chattered Sylvia, huddling
under the quilt as a fierce blast rattled the panes in the bay
windows. Katherine felt hot with indignation at the thought of
the invalid left all alone in the cold room.

“Where is your—lady-in-waiting?” she asked, a trifle sharply.

“Aunt Aggie’s gone to the city,” replied Sylvia. “She went at [24]
six o’clock this morning and she was going to back at noon.
She hasn’t come yet, and I’m so cold and——”

She checked herself suddenly and held her head up very
stiffly.

Katherine turned abruptly and made for the stove. It was a
small old-fashioned cook stove, the kind that Katherine had
been familiar with in her childhood on the farm. Beside it in a
box were several lumps of coal and some kindling. She
stripped off her gloves and set to work building a fire. When
the stove had begun to radiate heat she lifted Sylvia, quilt and
all, into the rocking chair and drew it up in front of the fire.

“And now, if you’ll tell me where things are I’ll prepare your
Majesty’s supper,” she said playfully.

“Thank you, but I’m not hungry,” replied Sylvia.

“I don’t see how you can help being,” said Katherine
wonderingly. “Or have you had something to eat since your
aunt went away?” she added.

“No,” replied Sylvia.

“Then you must be famished,” said Katherine decidedly, “and
I’m going to get you something.”

She moved toward a cupboard on the wall over in a corner of
the room where she conjectured the supplies must be kept.
The cupboard had leaded glass doors, she noticed, and the
framework was of mahogany to match the woodwork of the
room. It had probably been designed as a curio cabinet by the
builder of the house.

“Never mind, I don’t want anything to eat,” said Sylvia again, [25]
in a tone which was both commanding and pleading.

“You must,” said Katherine firmly, with her hand on the cut
glass knob of the cupboard door. “You’re cold because you’re
hungry.”

She opened the door and investigated the inside. There were
some cheap china dishes and some pots and pans, but no sign
of food. She glanced swiftly around the room, but nowhere
else were there any supplies. Then Katherine understood. Her
intuition was slow, but finally it came to her why Sylvia did
not want to admit that she was hungry. There was nothing to
eat in the house. There was a pinched, blue look about
Sylvia’s face that Katherine had seen before, in the settlement
where she had worked with Miss Fairlee. She recognized the
hunger look.

Sylvia met her eye with an attempt at lofty unconcern. “Our
royal larder,” she remarked, valiantly struggling to maintain
her royal dignity, “is exhausted at present. I must speak to my
steward about it.”

Then her air of lofty composure forsook her all at once, and
with a little wailing cry of “Aunt Aggie!” she put her head
down on the arm of the chair and wept, pulling the quilt over
her face so that Katherine could not see her cry.

Katherine was beside her in an instant, seeking to comfort her, [26]
and struggling with an unwonted desire to cry herself. The
thought of the brave little spirit, shut up alone here in the dark
and cold, hungry and anxious, singing like a lark to keep
down her loneliness and anxiety, and welcoming her chance
guest with the gracious air of a princess, moved Katherine as
nothing had ever done before.

“Tell me all about it,” she said, cuddling the golden head
close.

Sylvia struggled manfully to regain her composure, and sat up
and dashed the tears away with an impatient hand. “How dare
you cry, and you a princess?” she said aloud to herself
scornfully, with a flash of her brown eyes, and Katherine
caught a glimpse of an indomitable spirit that no hardship
could bow down.

“’Twas but a momentary weakness,” she said to Katherine,
with a return of her royal manner. Katherine felt like saluting.

“We’ve been having a hard time since Uncle Joe died,” began [27]
Sylvia. “He was sick a long time and it took all the money he
had saved. Then Aunt Aggie got sick after he died and isn’t
strong enough yet to do hard work. She makes shirts. There’s
a shop here that lets her take work home. You see, she can’t
leave me.” Here Sylvia gave an impatient poke at her useless
limbs. “We came here from Millvale, where we used to live, a
month ago. We couldn’t find any place to live, so Aunt Aggie
got permission from the town to come and live in here until
we could find a place. Nobody seems to own this house, that
is, nobody knows who owns it, it’s been empty so long. Aunt
Aggie sold all her furniture to pay her debts except her sewing
machine and the few things we have here. Aunt Aggie makes
shirts, but her eyes gave out this week and she couldn’t do
anything, so there wasn’t any pay. Aunt Aggie got credit for a
while at the store, but yesterday they refused her, so we
played that we would keep a fast to-day in honor of our pious
grandfather, the king, who always used to fast for three days
before Christmas. Aunt Aggie only had enough money to go
to the city and get glasses from somebody there that would
make them for nothing for her, so she could go on sewing.
She went on the earliest train this morning and expected to get
back by noon. I can’t think what’s keeping her so late.”

Katherine looked at her watch. It was half past seven. She
wondered if the shops were still open so that she could go out
and buy groceries. She began to draw on her gloves.

“Don’t go away,” pleaded Sylvia, catching hold of her hand in [28]
alarm. “Stay here till she comes. Oh, why doesn’t she come? I
know something’s happened to her. She’s never left me alone
so long before. Oh, what will I do if she doesn’t come back?”

Fear seized her with icy hands and her face worked pitifully.
“Aunt Aggie! Aunt Aggie!” she cried aloud in terror.

Katherine soothed her as best she could, mentioning all the
possible things that could have occurred to delay her in the
rush of holiday travel. Sylvia looked reassured after a bit and
Katherine was just on the point of running out to get some
supper for her when there was a sound of feet on the creaking
steps outside.

“Here she comes now,” said Sylvia with a great sigh of relief.

The footsteps crossed the porch and then stopped. Instead of
the sound of the front door opening as they expected there
came a heavy knock.

“How queer,” said Sylvia, “she never knocks. There’s no one
to let her in.”

Katherine hastened out to the hall door. A man stood outside.
“Does Mrs. Deane live in this house?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Katherine.

“I’m Mr. Grossman, the man she works for,” he said. [29]
Katherine admitted him. “The girl, is she here?” he asked.
Katherine brought him into the room. Sylvia looked up
inquiringly.

Without greeting or preamble he blurted out, “Your aunty,
she’s been hurt. Somebody just telephoned me from such a
hospital in the city. She was run over by a taxicab and her
collarbone broke and her head hurt. She’s now by the hospital.
She tells them to tell me and I should let you know.”

He stopped talking and whirled his hat around in his hand as
though ill at ease.

Sylvia sank back in her chair, dead white, her eyes staring at
him with a curiously intent gaze, as though trying to
comprehend the size of the calamity which had befallen her.

Tingling with pity, Katherine looked into Sylvia’s anguished
eyes, and in the stress of emotion she suddenly remembered
Nyoda’s name. Sheridan. Sheridan. Mrs. Andrew Sheridan.
Carver House. 241 Oak Street. How could she ever have
forgotten it?

“What’s going to become of me?” cried Sylvia in a terrified
voice.

Mr. Grossman shifted his weight from one foot to the other [30]
and scratched his head reflectively. Then he shrugged his
shoulders helplessly. He was a Russian Jew, living with his
numerous family in a few small rooms over his shop, and
what to do with this lame girl who knew not a soul in town
was too much of a problem for him. To his evident relief
Katherine came to the rescue. “I will take care of her,” she
said briefly. She opened her handbag and fished for pencil and
paper. “Go out and telephone this person,” she directed, after
scribbling for a minute, “and give her the message written
down there.”

Mr. Grossman departed, much relieved at being freed from all
responsibility regarding Sylvia, and Katherine sat down
beside her little princess and endeavored to soothe her distress
of mind regarding her aunt. Finally the warmth of the stove
made her drowsy and she fell into a doze with her head on
Katherine’s shoulder.

Half an hour later the long blast of an automobile horn woke
the echoes in front of the house. Sylvia half-awakened and
murmured sleepily, “Here come the king’s huntsmen.”

Katherine slipped out through the front door and flung herself
upon a fur-coated figure that was coming up the walk,
followed by a man.

“Nyoda!”

“Katherine! What in the world are you doing here?”

Katherine explained briefly how she came there.

“But I never received your letter!” cried Nyoda in [31]
astonishment. “I thought you were coming to-morrow with
the other girls. Poor Katherine, to come all alone and then not
find anybody to meet you! I’m so sorry! But it wouldn’t be
you, Katherine,” she finished with a laugh, “if everything
went smoothly. Now tell me the important thing your message
said you wanted to tell me.”

Katherine spoke earnestly for a few minutes, at the end of
which Nyoda nodded emphatically. “Certainly!” she said
heartily.

A minute later Katherine gently roused the sleeping princess.
“What is it, my dear Duchess?” asked Sylvia drowsily.

“Come, Your Majesty,” said Katherine, beginning to wrap the
quilt around her, “make ready for your journey. We leave at
once for the Winter Palace!”

[32]

CHAPTER III
THE SHUTTERED WINDOW

“Nyoda, isn’t there a secret passage in this house
somewhere?” asked Sahwah eagerly, pausing with the
nutcracker held open in her hand. “There generally was one in
these old houses, you know.”

Christmas dinner was just drawing to a close in the big, holly
hung dining room at Carver House, and the merry group of
young folks who composed Nyoda’s Christmas house party,
too languid after their strenuous attack upon the turkey and
plum pudding to rise from their chairs, lingered around the
table to hear Nyoda tell stories of Carver House, while the
ruddy glow from the big log in the fireplace, dispelled the
gloom of the failing winter afternoon.

It was a jolly party that gathered around the historical old [33]
mahogany dining table, which had witnessed so many other
festivities in the one hundred and fifty years of its existence.
At the head sat Sherry, Nyoda’s soldier husband, still pale and
thin from his long illness; and with a long jagged scar
showing through the closely cropped hair on one side of his
head. He had never returned to duty after the wreck in which
he had so nearly lost his life. While he was still in the military
hospital to which he had been removed from the little
emergency hospital at St. Margaret’s where the sharp battle
for life had been fought and won, there came that day when
the last shot was fired, and when he was ready to leave the
hospital he came home to Carver House to stay.

Opposite him, at the foot of the table, sat Nyoda, girlish and
enthusiastic as ever, with only an occasional sober light in her
twinkling eyes to tell of the trying year she had passed
through. Along both sides of the table between them were
ranged five of the Winnebagos—Katherine, Sahwah, Migwan,
Hinpoha and Gladys, and in among them, “like weeds among
the posies,” as the captain laughingly put it, were Slim and the
captain, Slim filled to the bursting point as usual, and looking
more than ever like an overgrown cherub. Across from these
two sat a third youth, so slender and fine featured as to seem
almost frail in comparison with Slim’s overflowing stoutness.
This was Justice Dalrymple, Katherine’s “Perfesser,” now
engaged in his experimental work at Washington, whence
Nyoda had invited him up for her Christmas house party as a
surprise for Katherine.

Agony and Oh-Pshaw, whom Nyoda had also invited to come [34]
over to the house party, were spending the holidays with an
aunt in New York and could not come, much to Sahwah’s
disappointment, who had not seen them since the summer
before. Veronica was ill at her uncle’s home and also could
not be with them.

Enthroned beside Katherine in a great carved armchair that
had come over from England with the first Carvers, sat Sylvia
Deane, looking very much like a story book princess. With
their customary open-heartedness, the Winnebagos had
already made her feel as though she were an old friend of
theirs. The romantic way in which Katherine had found her
appealed to their imaginations and added to their interest in
her. Beside that, there was a fascinating something about her
dark eyes and light hair that kept drawing their eyes to her
face as though it were a magnet. There was so much
animation in her voice when she talked that the most
commonplace thing she said seemed extremely diverting. Her
eyes had a way of suddenly lighting up as though a lamp had
been kindled inside of her, and when she talked about other

people her voice would take on a perfect mimicry of their
intonations and expressions.

She showed not the slightest embarrassment at being thus [35]
transplanted into a strange household, so much more splendid
than anything she was accustomed to. She was entirely at her
ease in the great house, and acted as though she had been used
to luxurious surroundings all her life. Katherine was secretly
surprised to find her so completely unabashed. She herself
was still prone to make ridiculous blunders in the presence of
strangers, and was still ill at ease when anyone looked
critically at her.

They were all surprised to learn that Sylvia was eighteen
years old, instead of fourteen as they had all thought when
they first saw her. Her slender, childlike form, and her short,
curly hair made her look much younger than she really was.

The animated talk that had accompanied the first part of the
dinner gradually died away, as a sense of repleteness and
languor succeeded to eager appetites, and conversation had
begun to lag, when Sahwah stirred it into life again by asking
if there was not a secret passage in Carver House. A ripple of
interest went around the table, and all the girls and boys began
to sit up and take notice.

“Haven’t you had enough adventures yet to satisfy you?”
asked Sherry quizzically. “Aren’t you content with fishing a
lieutenant out of the Devil’s Punch Bowl the last time you
were here, that you must begin again looking for excitement?
By the way, where is this young Allison?”

“Still across,” replied Sahwah. “His last letter said he would [36]
be there for six months yet. He’s going on into Germany. He
isn’t a lieutenant any more. He’s a captain.”

“Captain Allison?” asked Justice. “Captain Robert Allison?
You don’t mean to say that you know Bob Allison?”

“Does she know Captain Allison!” echoed Hinpoha. “Who
sent her that spiked helmet, and that piece of marble from
Rheims Cathedral and that French flag with the bullet holes in
it, to say nothing of that package of French chocolates? But,
of course, you didn’t know,” she added, remembering that
Justice had only met Sahwah the day before.

“Do you know Captain Allison?” asked Sahwah.

“Best friend I had in college,” replied Justice. “He was
dreaming of flying machines then. Bob Allison, the fellow
you pulled out of the water! It seems that all my friends, as
well as my family, are going to get mixed up with you girls. It
seems like fate.”

“Wherever the Winnebagos come there’s sure to be something
doing,” said the captain. “I wonder what the next thing will
be. What’s this about secret passages now?”

“With so much paneling,” continued Sahwah, “it seems as if
there must be a hollow panel somewhere that would slide
back and reveal a passage behind it. Isn’t there one, Nyoda?”

“There may be one, for all I know,” replied Nyoda, “but I [37]
have never found it if there is. I have never looked for any
such thing. It takes all my time,” she proclaimed with a
comic-tragic air, “to keep all the open passages in this place
clean, without looking for any more behind panels.”

“Do you care if we try to find one?” asked Sahwah eagerly. “I
just feel it in my bones that there is one somewhere.”

“Search all you like,” replied Nyoda, with an amused laugh.

“O goody!” exclaimed Sahwah. “Let’s begin right away.”

She rose from the table and the rest followed, much taken up
with this new quest, and the search began immediately.

Upstairs and downstairs they tapped, peered, pried and
investigated, but without success. One by one they abandoned
the quest and drifted into the library where Nyoda and Sherry
and Sylvia sat in a close group before the fire; Sherry
smoking, Nyoda reading aloud, and Sylvia watching the
images in the fire. Sahwah and the captain were the last to
give up, but finally they, too, drifted in and joined the ranks of
the unsuccessful hunters.

Nyoda paused in her reading and looked up with a smile as
Sahwah and the captain came in.

“What have you to report, my darling scouts?” she asked [38]
gravely.

“Nothing,” replied the captain, rather sheepishly.

Sahwah rubbed her fingers tenderly. “There are miles of oak
paneling in this house,” she remarked wearily, “and I’ve
rapped on every inch of it with my knuckles, until they’re just
pulp, but not one of those panels sounded hollow.”

“Poor child!” said Nyoda sympathetically.

“You should have done the way the captain did,” said Slim.
“He used his head to knock with instead of his knuckles; it’s
harder.”

A scuffle seemed imminent, and was only averted by
Sahwah’s next remark. “Nyoda,” she asked, “where does that
door at the head of the stairs lead to, the one that is locked? It
was locked last summer when we were here, too.”

“That,” replied Nyoda, “is the room Uncle Jasper used as his
study. I’ve been using it as a sort of store room for furniture.
There were a number of pieces in the house that didn’t quite
fit in with the rest of the furniture and I set them in there until
I could make up my mind what to do with them. I didn’t want

to dispose of them without consulting Sherry, and as he has
been away from home ever since we have lived here until just
now, we have never had time to go over the stuff together. As
the room looks cluttered with those odd pieces in there I have
kept it locked.”

“Your uncle’s study!” exclaimed Sahwah. “Oh, I wonder if [39]
there wouldn’t be a concealed door in there! It seems such a
likely place. Would you care very much if we went and
looked there?”

Nyoda laughed at Sahwah’s eagerness in her quest. “You’re a
true Winnebago,” she said fondly. “Never leave a stone
unturned when you’re looking for anything. I might as well
say yes now as later, because I know you will never rest until
you have investigated that room. You’re worse than
Bluebeard’s wife. I have no objections to your going in if
you’ll excuse the disorderly look of the place and the dust that
has undoubtedly collected by this time. I’ll get you the key.”

With the prospect of a fresh field for investigation the others [40]
revived their interest in the search and followed Nyoda
eagerly as she led the way upstairs and unlocked the closed
door at the head. A faint, musty odor greeted their nostrils, the
close atmosphere of a room which has been shut up, although
the moonlight flooding the place through the long windows
gave it an almost airy appearance. Nyoda found the electric
light button and presently the room was brilliantly lighted
from the chandelier. The Winnebagos trooped in and looked
curiously about them at the queer old desks and tables and
cabinets that stood about. Sahwah’s attention was
immediately drawn to the window at the far end of the room.
She knew it was a window because it was framed in a
mahogany casement like the other windows in the house, but
instead of a pane of glass there was a dark, opaque space
inside the casement. Sahwah ran over to it at once, and a little
exclamation of astonishment escaped her as she examined it.

On the inside of the glass—if there was a pane of glass there
—was a heavy black iron shutter fastened to the casement
with great screws.

“What did you put up this shutter for, Nyoda?” asked Sahwah
wonderingly.

The others all came crowding over then to exclaim over the
iron shutter.

“I didn’t put it up,” replied Nyoda. “It was there when I came
here.”

“But what’s it for?” persisted Sahwah. “Is the window behind
it broken?”

“No, it doesn’t seem to be,” replied Nyoda. “I looked at it
from the outside.”

“Then what can it be for?” repeated Sahwah.

“I don’t know, I can’t imagine,” replied Nyoda. A note of [41]
wonder was creeping into her voice. “To tell the truth,” she
said, “I never thought anything about it. I noticed that there
was an iron shutter over that window when we first came
here, but I was too much taken up with Sherry’s going away
then even to wonder about it. The room has been closed up
ever since and I had forgotten all about it. It does seem a
queer thing, now that you call my attention to it. But Uncle
Jasper did so many eccentric things, I’m not surprised at
anything he might have done. We’ll take the shutter off in the
morning and see if we can discover any reason for having it
there.

“Now, aren’t you going to hunt for the secret passage after
I’ve opened the door for you?” she said quizzically. “There’s
still an hour or so before bedtime; long enough for all of you
to complete the destruction of your knuckles.”

Again the house resounded with the tapping of knuckles
against hardwood paneling, until it sounded as though an
army of giant woodpeckers were at work, but the eager
searchers continued to bruise their long suffering knuckles in
vain. The paneling in Uncle Jasper’s study was as solid as the
Great Wall of China.

[42]

CHAPTER IV
AN INTERVIEW WITH HERCULES

Among the furniture stored in the study was one piece which
Nyoda had pounced upon with an exclamation of joy the night
before when she opened the room to please the Winnebagos.
That was an invalid’s wheel chair.

“Just the thing for Sylvia!” she exclaimed delightedly. “She
can get around the house by herself in this. It’s a good thing
you got curious about this room, Sahwah dear; I’m afraid I
wouldn’t have thought of opening it until spring. I remember
now, Uncle Jasper had a paralytic stroke some months before
he died which left him lame, and he went about in a wheel
chair during his last days. This certainly comes in handy
now.”

The morning after Sahwah had discovered the iron shutter [43]
Sylvia was set in the wheel chair and rolled into the study, and
the rest came flocking up to watch Sherry and the boys
remove the shutter. It was no easy job, taking that shutter off,
for the screws had rusted in so that it was almost impossible
to turn them. Nyoda gave an exclamation of dismay at the
holes left in the mahogany casement. The Winnebagos were
too much absorbed in the window which was revealed by the
removal of the shutter to pay any attention to the damaged
casement. Unlike the other windows in the room, which were
of clear glass, this one was composed of tiny leaded panes in
colors. It was so dirty on the outside that it was impossible to
see what it really was like. Sahwah hastened out and got
cleaning rags and washed it inside and out, standing on the
roof of the side porch to get at it on the outside, because it did

not open. When it was clean, and the bright sun shone through
it, the beauty of the window struck them dumb.

The leaded panes were wrought into a design of climbing
roses, growing over a little arched gateway, the rich red and
green tints of the flowers and leaves glowing splendid in the
mellow light that streamed through it.

After a moment of breathless silence the Winnebagos found
their voices and broke into admiring cries. Hinpoha promptly
went into raptures.

“Why, you can almost smell those roses, they’re so natural!
Oh, the darling archway! Did you ever see anything so
beautiful? Don’t you just long to go through it? O why did
your uncle ever have that horrible old shutter put over it?”

“Maybe he was afraid it would get broken,” suggested [44]
Gladys.

“But why would he put the shutter on the inside?” asked
Sahwah shrewdly. “There would be more danger of the
window’s getting broken from the outside than from the
inside, I should think.”

“There wouldn’t be with Slim around,” said the captain, and
prudently barricaded himself behind a bookcase in the corner.
Slim gave him a withering glance, but did not deign to follow
him and open an attack. He could not have squeezed in behind
the bookcase, so he ignored the thrust.

“I wonder why he didn’t put shutters on the other windows
also,” said Katherine.

“Mercy, I’m glad he didn’t!” said Nyoda with a shiver, eyeing
the ugly screw holes in the smooth mahogany casement with
housewifely horror at such marring of beauty. “One set of
holes like that is enough. Isn’t it just like a man, though, to

put screws into that woodwork! It’s time a woman owned this
house. A few more generations of eccentric bachelors and the
place would be ruined.”

“But,” said Sahwah musingly, “didn’t you tell us once that
this house was the pride of your uncle’s heart, and he never
would let any children in for fear they would scratch the
floors and furniture?”

“That’s so, too,” replied Nyoda. “Uncle Jasper was so fond of [45]
this house that it was a byword among the relations. He loved
it as though it were his own child. How he ever allowed
anyone to put screws into that mahogany casement is a
mystery.”

“Don’t you think,” said Sahwah shrewdly, “that there must
have been some great and important reason for putting up that
shutter? A reason that made him forget all about the holes he
was making in the woodwork?”

A little thrill went through the group; all at once they seemed
to feel that they were standing in the shadow of some mystery.

“What kind of a man was your uncle Jasper?” asked Sahwah.

“He was a queer, silent man,” replied Nyoda, sitting down on
the edge of a table and rubbing her forehead to aid her
recollection. “He was an author—wrote historical works. I
confess I don’t know a great deal about him. I only saw him
twice; once when I was a very little girl and once a few years
ago. He never corresponded with any of his relations and
never visited them nor had them come to visit him. Most
everybody was afraid of him; he was so grim and stern
looking. He couldn’t have been very sociable here either, for
none of the people of Oakwood seemed to have been in the
habit of calling on him. None of those that called on me had
ever been inside the house before. The old man didn’t mix
with the neighbors, they said. He seldom went outside the

house. No one seems to know much about him. Of course,”
she added, “living up here on the hill he was sort of by
himself; there are no near neighbors.”

“Maybe he put up that shutter for protection,” suggested [46]
Hinpoha.

“With all the other windows in the house unshuttered?” asked
the captain derisively. “A lot of protection that would be!
Besides, do you think the neighbors were in the habit of
shooting pop guns at him?”

“Well, can you think of any other reason?” retorted Hinpoha.

“Why don’t you ask old Hercules?” suggested Sahwah. “He
might know.”

“To be sure!” cried Nyoda, springing down from the table.
“Why didn’t I think of Hercules before? Of course he’d know.
He was with Uncle Jasper all his life. I’ll call him in and ask
him and we’ll have the mystery cleared up in a jiffy. Will one
of you boys go out and bring him in?”

The captain and Justice sprang up simultaneously in answer to [47]
her request and raced for the stable. In a few minutes they
were back, bringing old Hercules with them. Hercules had a
somewhat forlorn air about him like that of a dog without a
master. Nyoda said he was grieving for Uncle Jasper; Sherry
said it was the goat he was mourning for. At any rate, he was a
pathetic figure as he hobbled painfully up the stairs one step
at a time on his shaky, stiff old limbs. His eyes brightened a
bit as he saw the door into Uncle Jasper’s study standing
open, and he looked around the room with an affectionate
gaze as the boys piloted him in. Nyoda saw his eyes rest on
the window from which the shutter had been removed, and it
seemed to her that he gave a start and gazed through the
window apprehensively.

“Hercules,” said Nyoda briskly, “we’ve just taken this ugly
old shutter off that stained glass window, and we’re curious to
know why it was put up. It seems such a pity to have put
those great screws into that mahogany casement. Why did
Uncle Jasper put it up?”

Hercules scratched his head and shifted his corn cob pipe to
the other side of his mouth. “Dat shutter’s bin up a good many
years, Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” he quavered.

“I see it has, from the way the screws were rusted in,” replied
Nyoda. “But why was it put up?”

“Dat shutter’s bin dere twenty-five years,” reiterated the old
man solemnly, still looking at it in a half-fascinated, half-
apprehensive way.

“Yes, yes,” said Nyoda, trying to control her impatience. “But [48]
why has it been there all this time? Why did Uncle Jasper put
it up?”

Hercules scratched his head again, and replaced his pipe in its
original position. “I disremember, Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” he said
deprecatingly. “It’s bin so long since. My memry’s bin
powerful bad lately, Mis’ ’Lizbeth. Seems like I caint
remember hardly anything. It’s de mizry, Mis’ ’Lizbeth; it’s
settled in my memry.” He carefully avoided her eyes.

“Please try to remember!” said Nyoda, trying hard to hold on
to her patience, but morally certain that Hercules was trying
to sidestep her questions. “Think, now. Twenty-five years ago
Uncle Jasper put up an iron shutter to cover the most beautiful
window in Carver House. Why did he do it?”

Nyoda turned so that she looked right into his face, and her
compelling black eyes held his shifty gaze steady. There was
something strangely magnetic about Nyoda’s eyes. People
could avoid answering her questions as long as they did not

look into her eyes, but once let her catch your gaze, and things
she wanted to know had a habit of coming out of their own
accord. Hercules seemed to be on the point of speaking; he
cleared his throat nervously and shifted the pipe once more.
Nyoda cast a triumphant glance at Sherry. In that instant
Hercules shifted his gaze from her face and met another pair
of eyes, eyes that seemed to look at him accusingly, and sent a
chill running down his spine. These were none other than the
eyes of Uncle Jasper, who, hanging in his frame on the study
wall, seemed to be looking straight at him, in the way that
eyes in pictures have. When Nyoda glanced back at Hercules
he was staring uneasily at Uncle Jasper’s picture and there
was a guilty look about him as if he had been caught in a
misdemeanor.

“I ’clare, I cain’t remember nothin’ ’bout why dat shutter was [49]
put up, Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” he said earnestly. “Come to think on it
now, Marse Jasper ain’t never told me why he want it put up,”
he continued triumphantly. “He just say, ‘Herc’les, put up dat
shutter,’ and he ain’t ever say why. I axed him, ‘Marse Jasper,
what for you puttin’ up dat shutter over dat window?’ and he
say, ‘Herc’les, you put up dat shutter and mind your business.
I ain’t tellin’ why I wants it put up; I jest wants it put up, dat’s
all.’ No’m, Mis’ ’Lizbeth, I’s often wondered myself about dat
shutter, but I never found out nothin’.”

He glanced up at Uncle Jasper’s picture as though expecting
some token of approval from the stern, grim face.

Nyoda saw it was no use trying to get anything out of
Hercules. Either he really did not know anything, or he would
not tell.

“You may go, Hercules,” she said. “That’s all we wanted of
you.”

Hercules looked unaccountably relieved and started for the [50]
door. Half way across the room he turned and looked long

through the clear panel of glass underneath the archway of the
gate in the stained glass window. He stood still, seemingly
lost in reverie, and quite oblivious to the group about him.
Finally his lips began to move, and he began to mutter to
himself, and Sahwah’s sharp ears caught the sound of the
words.

“Dey’s tings,” muttered the old man, “dat folks don’t want ter
look at, and dey’s tings dey dassent look at!”

Still lost in reverie he shuffled out of the room and hobbled
painfully downstairs.

[51]

CHAPTER V
THE FIRST LINK

“What did old Hercules mean?” asked Sahwah in
astonishment. “He said, ‘Dey’s some tings folks don’t want
ter look at, and dey’s tings dey dassent look at!’”

“I can’t imagine,” said Nyoda, thoroughly mystified. “But
there’s one thing sure, and that is, Uncle Jasper had some very
potent reason for putting that shutter over that window, and I
more than half believe Hercules knows what it was. Hercules’
explanations always become very fluent when he is not telling
the truth. If he really hadn’t known anything about it he
probably would have said so simply, in about three words, and
without any hesitation. The elaborate details he went into to
convince me that he knew nothing about it sounds suspicious
to me.

“But I don’t believe the exclamation he made when he went
out was intended to deceive me. I think it was the involuntary
utterance of what was in his thoughts. He seemed to be
thinking aloud, and was quite unconscious of our presence.

“But what a queer thing to say—‘Dey’s tings people dassent [52]
look at!’ I wonder what it was that Uncle Jasper dared not
look at? Was it something he saw through this window? What
is there to be seen out of this window, anyway?” She moved
over in front of the window with the others crowding after her
to see, too.

Uncle Jasper’s study was at the back of the house and the
windows looked out upon the wide open meadow which

stretched behind Carver Hill, between the town and the
woods. The front of Carver House looked out over the town.
Nearly half a mile to the east of Carver Hill another hill rose
sharply from the town’s edge. Upon its top stood another old-
fashioned dwelling. This hill, crowned with its red brick
mansion, was framed in the arch of the gateway in the
window like an artist’s picture, with nothing between to
obstruct the view. A beautiful picture it was, certainly, and one
which could not possibly have any connection with Hercules’
muttered words.

“Who lives in that house?” asked Sahwah.

“I don’t know,” said Nyoda. “It’s way up on the Main Street
Hill. I’m not acquainted with the people in that end of town.”

Sherry got out his binoculars and took a look through the
window. “Nothing but an old house on a hill,” he reported,
and handed the binoculars to Sylvia, that she might take a
look through them.

“Why,” said Sylvia after peering intently through the glasses [53]
for a minute, “it’s the house Aunt Aggie and I live in! What
did that old house have to do with your Uncle Jasper?” she
asked wondering. “It’s been empty for many, many years.”

“Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a romance in your
Uncle Jasper’s life?” exclaimed Hinpoha eagerly. “A blighted
romance. He never married, did he?”

“No, he never married,” replied Nyoda.

“Then I’m sure it’s a blighted romance!” said Hinpoha
enthusiastically. “I just know that some deep tragedy
darkened the sun of his life and left him shrouded in gloom
forever after!”

Even Nyoda smiled at Hinpoha’s sentimental language, and
the rest could not help laughing out loud.

“You sound like Lady Imogen, in ‘The Lost Heiress,’” said
Katherine derisively.

“Well, I don’t care, you’ll have to admit that there are some
very romantic possibilities, anyway,” said Hinpoha stoutly.

“Yes, and some very prosaic ones, too,” retorted Katherine.
“Uncle Jasper probably never married because he was a born
bachelor, and preferred to live alone.”

“O Katherine, why are you always taking the joy out of life?” [54]
wailed Hinpoha. “It’s lots more fun to think romantic things
about people than dull, stupid, everyday things.”

“I think so too,” said Sahwah, unexpectedly coming to the
defense of Hinpoha. “I’ve been thinking a lot about old Mr.
Carver, living alone here all those years, and I’ve wondered if
there wasn’t some reason for it. Certainly something
happened that made him put that shutter up, that’s clear.”

“Well, whatever motive the old man may have had for putting
it up, we’ll probably never find it out,” said Sherry, gathering
up the screws and screwdriver, “inasmuch as he’s dead and
it’s no use asking Hercules anything; so we might as well stop
puzzling over it. I’ll hunt up something to fill in those screw
holes with, Elizabeth, and polish them over.” Sherry, in his
matter-of-fact way, had already dismissed the matter from his
mind as not worth bothering over.

Not so Nyoda and the Winnebagos. The merest hint of a
possible mystery connected with the shutter set them on fire
with curiosity and desire to penetrate into its depths.

“I wonder,” said Nyoda musingly, eyeing the massive desk
before her with a speculative glance, “if Uncle Jasper left any

record of the repairs and improvements which he made to the
house while he was the owner. The item of the shutter might
be mentioned, with the reason for putting it up.”

“It might,” agreed the Winnebagos. [55]

Nyoda looked around at the litter of odd pieces of furniture
crowding the room. “Sherry,” she said briskly, “make up your
mind this minute whether you want any of that old stuff,
because I’m going to clear it out of here and sell it.”

“A lot of good it would do me to make up my mind to want
any of it, if you’ve made up your mind to sell it,” said Sherry
in a comically plaintive tone.

“All right,” responded Nyoda tranquilly, “I knew you didn’t
want any of it. Boys, will you help Sherry carry out those two
tables and that high desk and the chiffonier—all the oak
furniture. I’m not keeping anything but the mahogany. Set it
out in the hall; I’ll have the furniture man come and get it to-
morrow.

“There, now the room looks as it did when Uncle Jasper
inhabited it,” she remarked when the extra pieces had been
cleared out.

“It certainly was a pleasant room; I don’t see how Uncle
Jasper could have maintained such a gloomy disposition as he
did, working all day in a room like this. The very sight of that
open field out there makes me want to run and shout—and
that window! Oh, who could look at it all day long and be
crusty and sour?”

“But he had the shutter over the window,” Sahwah reminded
her.

“Yes, he did, the poor man!” said Nyoda in a tone of pity. She [56]
whisked about the room, straightening out rugs and wiping

the dust from the furniture, and soon announced that she was
ready to begin investigations. She looked carefully through
the desk first, through old account books and files of papers
and bills, but came upon nothing that touched upon repairs
made to the house. There was a long bookcase running the
entire length of one wall, and she tackled this next, while the
Winnebagos sat around expectantly and Sylvia looked on
from her chair, which she could move herself from place to
place, to her infinite delight.

The boys had gone downstairs with Sherry to hear
reminiscences from “across.” All three boys worshipped
Sherry like a god. To have been “across,” to have seen actual
fighting, to have been cited for bravery, and finally to have
been shipwrecked, were experiences for which the younger
boys would have given their ears, and they treated Sherry
with a deferential respect that actually embarrassed him at
times.

Nyoda opened the bookcase and began taking out the books
that crowded the shelves, opening them one by one and
examining their contents. Most of them were works on
history, some of them Uncle Jasper’s own; great solid looking
volumes with fine print and dingy leather bindings. Ancient
history, nearly all of them, and nowhere among them anything
so modern as to concern Carver House.

“What a collection of dry-as-dust works to have for your most [57]
intimate reading matter!” exclaimed Nyoda, making a wry
face at the books. “Not a single book of verse, not a single
romance or book of fiction, not the ghost of a love story!
There are plenty of them downstairs in the library, that
belonged to Uncle Jasper’s father and mother, who must have
had quite a lively taste in reading, judging from the books
down there; but Hercules told me that Uncle Jasper hadn’t
opened the cases down there for twenty-five years. He never
read anything but this ancient stuff up here.

“He did write one book that had some life in it, though,” she
continued musingly. “That was a story of the life of Elizabeth
Carver, his great grandmother, the one whose portrait hangs
downstairs over the harp in the drawing-room. He’s got all her
various love affairs in it, and it’s anything but dry. I sat up a
whole night reading it the time I came across it in the library
down below. But from the date of its publishing, Uncle Jasper
must have been a very young man when he wrote it, probably
before the ancient history spider bit him.”

“And before the shutter went up,” added Sahwah.

“Well,” said Nyoda, after she had peeped into nearly every [58]
book in the bookcase, “there doesn’t seem to be anything here
more modern than the Fall of Rome, and that’s still several
seasons behind the affairs of Carver House. Hello, what’s
this?” she suddenly exclaimed, holding up a book she had just
picked up, one that had fallen down behind the others on the
shelf.

It was a fat, ledger-like volume heavily bound in calfskin.
There was no title printed on the back of it and Nyoda opened
the cover. Two truly terrifying figures greeted her eyes, drawn
in India ink on the yellowed page; figures of two pirates with
fiercely bristling mustachios, and brandishing scimitars half
as large as themselves. Nyoda quite jumped, their attitude was
so menacing. Under one was printed in red ink, “Tad the
Terror,” and under the other “Jasper the Feend.” Underneath
the two figures was printed in sprawling capitals:

DIERY OF JASPER M. CARVER, ESQWIRE

Nyoda gave a little shriek of laughter and held it up for the
Winnebagos to see. “It must be Uncle Jasper’s Diary when he
was a boy,” she said. “His youthful idea of a man is a rather
bloodthirsty one, according to the portrait, I must say. I
suppose ‘Jasper the Feend’ is supposed to be Uncle Jasper.

His mustachios bristle more fiercely than the other’s, and his
scimitar is longer, so without doubt he was the artist.”

Her eyes ran down the pages following, glancing at the lines [59]
of writing, which, having apparently been done in India ink,
were still black, although the page on which they were written
was yellow with age. As she read, her eyes began to sparkle
with interest and enjoyment.

“O girls,” she exclaimed, “this is the best thing I’ve read in
ages. Sherry and the boys must see it. I have to go and get
lunch started now, but all of you come together after lunch
and I’ll read it out loud to you.”

“We’ll all help,” said Migwan, “and then we’ll get through
faster,” and the Winnebagos hurried downstairs in Nyoda’s
wake.

[60]

CHAPTER VI
UNCLE JASPER’S DIARY

After lunch the Winnebagos and the boys gathered around
Nyoda in Uncle Jasper’s study to hear her read aloud from
“The Diery of Jasper M. Carver, Esqwire.” She held the book
up that all might see the portraits of the fearsome pirates, and
then turned over to the next page, where the sprawly, uneven
writing began, and started to read.

“October 7, 1870. Confined to the house through bad
behavior while father and mother have gone to the fair. I
wasn’t lonesome though because I had company. A boy
ran into the yard chasing a cat and saw me sticking my
head out of the upstairs window and blew a bean shooter
at me and hit me on the chin and I hit him with an apple
core and then he dared me to come out and lick him but I
couldn’t go out of the house so I dared him to climb up
the porch post and come in the window. He came and I
licked him. He is a new boy in town and his name is
Sydney Phillips, but he wants to be called Tad. He lives
up on Harrison Hill. We are going to be pirates when we
grow up. I am going to be Jasper the Feend and he is
going to be Tad the Terror. We swore eternul frendship
and wrote our names in blood on the attic window sill.”

“Oh, how delicious!” cried Sahwah at the end of the first [61]
entry. “Your uncle must have been lots of fun when he was
young. What crazy things boys are, anyway! To start out by
fighting each other and end up by swearing eternal friendship!
Go on, Nyoda, what did they do next?”

Nyoda proceeded.

“November 10, 1870. Tad and I made a great discovery
this afternoon. There is a secret passage in this house. It
is——”

The concerted shriek of triumph that went up from the
Winnebagos forced Nyoda to pause.

“I told you there was!” shouted Sahwah above the rest.
“Please hurry and read where it is, I can’t wait another
minute!”

Nyoda turned the page and then paused. “The next page is [62]
torn out,” she said, holding the book up so they could all see
the ragged strip of paper left hanging in the binding, where
the page had been torn out.

“Oh, what a shame!” The wail rose on every side.

“Maybe it tells later,” said Sahwah hopefully. “Go on,
Nyoda.” The dairy continued on a page numbered six.

“January 4, 1871. Tad and I played pirat to-day. We made
a pirat’s den in the secret passage. We are going to hide
our chests of money there, all pieces of eight. We haven’t
any pieces of eight yet just some red, white and blue
dollars we found in the desk drawer in the library. Tad
thinks maybe they are patriotick curency they used in the
Revolushun”

Nyoda had to wait a minute until Sherry had got done [63]
laughing, and then she proceeded:

“February 19, 1871. I am in durrance vile, being locked
in my room for a week with nothing to eat but bread and
water because I shut Patricia up in the secret passage and
went away and forgot all about her because there was a

fire. I remembered and let her out as soon as I got home
but she had fainted, being a silly girl and afraid of the
dark, and she couldn’t scream because we tied a
handkerchief over her mouth when we kidnapped her,
being pirats. So now I am in durrance vile and cannot see
any of my family, not even Tad. But he stands behind the
hedge and shoots pieces of candy through my window
with the bean shooter and lightens my durrance vile
which is what a sworn frend has to do when their names
are written in blood on the attic window sill.”

Thus the entries in the scrawling, boyish hand covered page
after page, recounting the adventurous and ofttimes seamy
career of the two youthful pirates, through all of which the
two stood up for each other stanchly, and never, never gave
each other away, because they were “sworn frends till deth us
do part,” and their names were “written in blood on the attic
window sill.”

The entries became farther apart after a while, and the
spelling improved until finally there came this announcement:

“Tad and I can’t be pirates any longer. We are going to
college next week.”

There the India ink ceased and also the illustrations. After that [64]
came page after page of neat entries in faded but still legible
blue ink, telling of the progress through college of the two
boys; chronicles of the joys, the troubles, the triumphs and the
escapades of the two friends, still so inseparable that their
names have become a byword among the students and they go
by the nickname of David and Jonathan. When one of them
gets into trouble the other one still does “what a sworn friend
has to do when their names are written in blood on the attic
window sill.” The Winnebagos listened with shining eyes
while Nyoda read the tale of this remarkable friendship.

The dates of the entries moved forward by months; records of
scrapes became fewer and fewer; David and Jonathan had
outgrown their colthood and were beginning to win honors
with brain and brawn. Then came the record of their
graduation and return to Oakwood; of “Tad the Terror”
becoming a doctor, of the marriage of Jasper’s sister Patricia
to a sea captain; the death of his father and the passing of
Carver House into his possession.

Later came the account of a delightful year spent abroad with
Tad Phillips, of mountain climbing in the Alps; of browsing
among rare old art treasures in France and Italy; of gay larks
in Paris. It was always he and Tad, he and Tad; still as loyal to
each other as in the days when they wrote their names in
blood on the attic window sill.

After the entry which chronicled Jasper’s return to Oakland [65]
and settling down in Carver House with his mother, and his
enthusiastic adoption of literature as a profession, came an
item which made the Winnebagos sit up and listen. It was:

“June 3, 1885. I have had a new window put into my
study on the side which faces toward’s Tad’s house on
Harrisburg Hill. I had the young Italian artist, Pusini,
who has lately come to New York, come and set the glass
for me. It is a representation of a charming scene I came
across in Italy—an arched gateway covered over with
climbing roses. The window is arranged so that through
the arch of the gateway I can look directly at Tad’s
house. It gives me inspiration in my work.”

“What a beautiful idea!” said Hinpoha, carried away
completely by the great love of Jasper Carver for his friend,
so simply expressed in his diary.

“So that was Tad’s house, that we are living in!” said Sylvia
excitedly. “I wonder where he is now.”

“Go on reading, Nyoda,” said Sahwah, consumed with [66]
interest in the tale. “See if he says anything about the shutter.”
Nyoda passed on to the next entry.

“June 27, 1885. Went to the Academy of Music in
Philadelphia to hear Sylvia Warrington sing. She is the
new singer from the South that has created such a furore.
The Virginia Nightingale, they call her. What a God-
gifted woman she is! There never was such a voice as
hers. She sang ‘Hark, hark, the lark,’ and the whole
house rose to its feet. She was Spring incarnate. Sylvia
Warrington! The name itself is music. I cannot forget her.
She is like a lark singing in the desert at dawning.”

A vague remembrance leaped up for an instant in Katherine’s
mind and died as it came.

Nyoda read on through pages that recorded Uncle Jasper’s [67]
meeting with Sylvia Warrington; his great and growing love
for her; his persistent wooing, her consenting to marry him;
his wild happiness, which found vent in page after page of
rapturous plans for the future. Then came the announcement
of Tad’s return from a period of study abroad, and Uncle
Jasper’s proud presentation of his bride-to-be. After that Tad’s
name appeared in connection with every occasion, still the
faithful David to his beloved Jonathan.

Then, almost without warning, the great friendship ran on the
rocks and was shattered. For Tad no sooner saw Sylvia
Warrington than he too, fell madly in love with her. A brief
and bitter entry told how she finally broke her engagement to
Uncle Jasper and married Tad, and how Uncle Jasper, beside
himself with grief and disappointment, turned against his
friend and hated him with the undying hate that is born of
jealousy. With heavy strokes of the pen that cut the paper he
wrote down his determination to have no more friends and to
live to himself thereafter. Then, in a shaky hand in marked
contrast to the fierce strokes just above, he wrote: “But Sylvia

—I love her still. I can’t help it.” That shaky handwriting
stood as a mute testimonial to his heart’s torment, and Nyoda,
reading it after all these years, felt a sympathetic spasm of
pain pass through her own heart at the sight of that wavering
entry.

“It’s just like a story in a book!” exclaimed Hinpoha, furtively
drying her eyes, which had overflowed during the reading of
the last page. “The beautiful lady, and the rival lovers, and the
disappointed one never marrying. Oh, it’s too romantic for
anything! Oh, please hurry and read what comes next.”

Nyoda turned the page and read the brief entry: [68]

“I have taken up the study of ancient history as a serious
pursuit. In it I hope to find forgetfulness.”

The eyes of the Winnebagos traveled to the bookcase, and
now they knew why there was nothing there but dull old
books in heavy bindings, and why Uncle Jasper Carver hated
love stories.

The next entry had them all sitting up again.

“I have had Hercules fasten an iron shutter over the
window in my study—the one through which I can see
Tad’s house when I sit at my desk. I cannot bear to look
at anything that reminds me of him.”

“There!” shouted all the Winnebagos at once. “That was the
reason for putting up the iron shutter! The mystery is solved!”

“Poor Uncle Jasper!” said Nyoda pityingly. “What a Spartan
he was! How thoroughly he set about removing every
memory of Tad from his mind! Think of covering up that
beautiful pane of glass because he couldn’t bear to look
through it at the house of his friend!” She finished reading the
entry:

“Hercules demurred at covering up the window—he
admired it more than anything else in the house—so to
give him a satisfactory reason for doing so I told him the
devil would come in through that gateway some day and
I was putting up the shutter to keep him out. There’s one
thing sure; Hercules will never take that shutter down as
long as he lives—he’s scared nearly into a Chinaman.”

“So that’s why Hercules threw such a fit when we took the [69]
shutter off!” said Sherry. “He thought that now the devil
would come in and get him. Poor, superstitious old nigger!”

“I wonder if Tad and Sylvia went to live in the house on
Harrisburg Hill,” said Sahwah curiously. “He doesn’t say
whether they did or not.”

“Oh, I wonder if they did!” cried Sylvia, with eager interest.
“To think I’ve been living in the same house they lived in—if
they did live there,” she added. “But how strange it seems to
hear them call that place Harrisburg Hill. It is called Main
Street Hill now.”

“I wonder what Tad and Sylvia did after they were married,” [70]
said Hinpoha, with romantic curiosity. “Did they stay in
Oakwood, or did they go away? Is there any more, Nyoda?”

Nyoda was already glancing down the next page, which was
written over with lines in blacker ink, and broader and heavier
strokes of the pen, which seemed somehow to express grim
satisfaction on the part of Uncle Jasper. Grim satisfaction
Uncle Jasper must indeed have felt when he wrote those lines,
for misfortune had overtaken the one who had caused his own
anguish of heart. The entry told how Tad had become staff
physician at one of the large army posts in the west. There
was an epidemic of typhoid and quite a few of the men were
ill at once, all requiring the same kind of medicine. Through
carelessness in making up a certain medicine he put in a
deadly poison instead of the harmless ingredient he intended

to put in, and a dozen men died of the dose. There was a
tremendous stir about the matter, and the newspapers all over
the country were full of it. He was court-martialed, and
though he was acquitted, the mistake being entirely
accidental, the matter had gained such publicity that his career
as a doctor was ruined. He left the army and fled out of the
country, taking Sylvia with him. Some months later the papers
brought the announcement of both their deaths from yellow
fever in Cuba. Again the handwriting began to waver on the
last sentence. “She is dead.” In those three little words the
Winnebagos seemed to hear the echo of the breaking of a
strong man’s heart. There were no more entries.

“Isn’t it perfectly thrilling!” gulped Hinpoha, with eyes [71]
overflowing again. “It’s better than any book I ever read! And
to think we never suspected there was anything like that
connected with your Uncle Jasper! There, now, Katherine
Adams, what did I tell you? You said he was a born bachelor,
and just look at the romance he had!”

“He certainly did,” said Katherine, in a tone of surrender.

“That must be why the house we lived in was shut up so
long,” said Sylvia musingly. “The man that said we could live
in it said that old Mrs. Phillips had moved away many years
ago and had never come back, and although people knew she
was dead, no one had ever come to live in the house, and
nobody in Oakwood knew who owned it. The man said he
had heard from older people in the town that Mrs. Phillips had
had a son who was away from home all the time after he was
grown up and who had gotten into some kind of trouble—he
couldn’t remember what it was. This must have been it! How
queer it is, that I should first come to live in Tad’s house, and
then stay in the house of his friend! I never dreamed, when I
heard that man telling Aunt Aggie about the almost forgotten
people that used to live in the old house, that I should ever
hear of them again. Things have turned out to be so

interesting since I came to stay in the Winter Palace!” she
finished up with sparkling eyes.

Darkness had fallen by the time Nyoda had finished reading [72]
Uncle Jasper’s Diary, and she jumped up with a little
exclamation as the clock on the mantel-piece chimed six. The
other hours had struck unnoticed. “Mercy!” she cried, “it’s
time dinner was on the table, and here we haven’t even begun
to get it! I forgot all about dinner, thinking about poor Uncle
Jasper.”

All the rest had forgotten about dinner, too, and the
Winnebagos could not get their minds off the tale they had
just heard read. “Poor Uncle Jasper!” they all said, looking up
at his picture, and to their pitying eyes his face was no longer
grim and stern, but only pathetic.

[73]

CHAPTER VII
SYLVIA’S STORY

“Katherine Adams, whatever has happened to you?” asked
Gladys suddenly, meeting her under the bright light in the hall
that evening after dinner.

“Why?” asked Katherine, looking startled. “Is there any soot
on my face?”

“No,” replied Gladys with a peal of laughter, “I didn’t mean
anything like that. I meant that you look different from the
way you used to look, that’s all. You’ve changed since the
days when I first knew you. What have you done to yourself
in the last year? You’re the same old Katherine, of course, but
you’re different, somehow. I noticed it when you first came to
Brownell last fall, but I’ve been too busy to give it much
thought. But since we’ve been here I’ve been watching you
and I can’t help noticing the difference. Now stand right there
under that light and let me look at you.”

Katherine laughed good humoredly and stood still dutifully [74]
while Gladys inspected her with appraising eyes that took in
all the little improvements in Katherine’s appearance. She was
heavier than she used to be; some of her angles were softened
into curves. She now stood erect, with her head up and her
shoulders thrown back, which made her look several inches
taller. Her hair no longer hung about her face in stringy wisps;
the loose ends were curled becomingly around her temples
and ears and held in place with invisible hairpins. She wore a
trim worsted dress of an odd shade of blue, which was just the
right shade to go with her dull blonde hair and with the dark

brown of her neat shoes. Her knuckles were no longer red and
rough; her fingernails were manicured; the sagging spectacles
of the old days had given way to intellectual looking nose
glasses with narrow tortoise shell rims.

“Well, what’s the verdict?” asked Katherine, smiling broadly
at Gladys.

“You’re wonderful!” said Gladys enthusiastically. “You’re
actually stunning! Whoever told you to get that particular
shade of blue to bring out the color of your hair?”

“Nobody told me,” answered Katherine. “I bought it because
it was a bargain.” But there was a knowing twinkle in her
eyes which gave her dead away, and Gladys, seeing it, knew
that Katherine had at last achieved that pride of appearance
which she had struggled so long to instill into her.

“However did you do it?” she murmured.

“It was your eleven Rules of Neatness that did it,” replied [75]
Katherine, laughing, “or was it seven? I forget. But I did do
just the things you told me to do, and it worked. There is no
longer any danger of my coming apart in public! What a trial I
used to be to you, though!” she said, flushing a little at the
recollection. “How you ever put up with me I don’t know.
How did you stand it, anyway?”

“Because we loved you, sweet child,” replied Gladys fondly,
“and because we all believed the motto, ‘While there’s life,
there’s hope.’ We knew you would be a paragon of neatness
some day as soon as you got around to it. You never could
think of more than one thing at a time, Katherine dear!”

“O my, O my, look at them hugging each other!” exclaimed a
teasing voice from above. Looking up they saw Justice
Dalrymple leaning over the banisters at the head of the stairs.
“You never do that to me,” he continued in a plaintive tone.

Katherine and Gladys merely laughed at him and walked on,
arm in arm, and Justice came down the stairs wringing mock
tears out of his handkerchief and singing mournfully,

“Forsaken, forsa-ken,
Forsa-a-a-ken a-m I,
Like the bones at a banquet
All men pass me-e-e by!”

“Do behave yourself, Justice,” said Katherine with mock [76]
severity. “If you disgrace me I’ll never get you invited
anywhere again. Why can’t you be good like the other two
boys?”

“’Cause I’m a Junebug,” warbled Justice, to the tune of “I’m a
Pilgrim,”

“’Cause I’m a Junebug,
And I’m a beetul,
And I can’t be no
Rhinoscerairus,
’Cause I’m a Junebug,
And I’m a beetul,
I can’t be no,
Rhinoscerairus!”

He advanced into the drawing room, where Katherine now
stood alone, and drew out the last syllable of his absurd song
into a long bleating wail that sent her into convulsions of
laughter till the tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Tears, idle tears——”

began Justice, picking up a vase from the table and holding it [77]
under her eyes, and then he stopped, as if struck by a sudden
recollection. “I said that to you once before,” he said, “don’t
you remember? The first time we really got acquainted with

each other. You were standing by the stove, weeping into the
apple sauce.”

“It was pudding,” Katherine corrected him, with a little
shamefaced laugh at the remembrance, “huckleberry pudding.
And I streaked it all over my face and you nearly died
laughing.”

“Well, you laughed too,” Justice defended himself, “and that’s
how we got to be friends.”

“That seems ages ago,” said Katherine, “and yet it’s only a
little over a year. What a year that was!”

Both stopped their bantering and looked at each other with
sober eyes, each thinking of what the trying year at Spencer
had been to them. Justice’s eyes traveled over Katherine, and
he, too, noticed that she was much better looking than when
he first knew her. Katherine noticed the admiration dawning
in his eyes and divined his thoughts. After Gladys’s
spontaneous outburst of approval she knew beyond any doubt
that her appearance no longer offended the artistic eye. The
knowledge gave her a new confidence in herself, and a thrill
of pleasure that she had never experienced before went
through her like an electric shock. At last people had ceased to
look upon her as a cross between a circus and a lunatic
asylum, she told herself exultingly.

“Well, what are you thinking about?” she asked finally, as [78]
Justice continued silent.

“I was just thinking,” replied Justice gravely, “about the
difference in plumage that different climates bring about.”

“Whatever made you think about birds?” asked Katherine
wonderingly. “You jump from one subject to another like a
flea. I don’t see how you can keep your mind on your work
long enough to invent anything. By the way, how is that

thingummy of yours going? You’re as mum as an oyster about
it.”

“Pretty well,” replied Justice. “I’m hampered though, by not
having the right kind of help, and not being able to get some
of the things I need.”

Katherine looked at him scrutinizingly. He looked tired and
rather worn. The nonsensical boy had vanished and a man
stood in his place, a man with a heavy responsibility on his
shoulders. Justice had that way of changing all in an instant
from a boy to a man. At times he would go frolicking about
the house till you would have sworn he was not a day older
than Slim and the Captain; an instant later he was all gravity,
and looked every day of his twenty-six years.

Katherine always stood in awe of him whenever that change [79]
took place. He seemed so old and wise and experienced then
that she felt hopelessly ignorant and childish beside him. She
liked him best when he seemed like the other boys.

“What do you think of my Winnebagos?” she asked him,
leading him away from the subject of his work. He always got
old looking when he talked about it.

“Greatest bunch of girls I ever saw,” he replied heartily.
“Never came across such an accomplished lot in all my life.
Each one’s more fun than the next. Hinpoha’s a beauty, and
Gladys is a dainty fairy, and Sahwah looks like a brown
thrush, and Migwan’s a regular Madonna. And, say—would
you mind telling me how you do it, anyway?”

“Do what?”

“Stick together like that. I thought girls always squabbled
among themselves. I never thought they could do things
together the way you girls do.”

“Camp Fire Girls can do things together!” Katherine informed
him with emphasis. “You boys think you’re the only ones that
know anything about teamwork. Teamwork is our first
motto.”

“I guess it must be,” admitted Justice. “You certainly are a
team.”

The rest of the “team” came in then, Sahwah and Gladys and [80]
Hinpoha, all three arm in arm, and Migwan behind them,
pushing Sylvia in her rolling chair. They settled in a circle
before the fireplace, and the talk soon drifted around to Uncle
Jasper and his blighted romance. Indeed, Hinpoha had done
nothing but talk about it all during dinner. Sylvia, too, was
completely taken up with it.

“I love Sylvia Warrington!” she exclaimed fervently. “I am
going to have her for my Beloved. I’m glad she had black
hair. I adore black hair. And I’m so glad my name is Sylvia,
too. I’ve been pretending that she was my aunt, and that I was
named after her. I’ve been pretending, too, that she taught me
to sing, ‘Hark, hark, the lark!’ Now, when I sing it I always
think of her. Wasn’t it beautiful, what Uncle Jasper said about
her? ‘She is like a lark, singing in the desert at dawning!’ Oh,
I can see it all, the desert, and the sun coming up, and the lark
soaring up and singing. I just can’t breathe, it’s so beautiful.
And my Beloved is like that!”

A radiant dream light came into her eyes, and she seemed
suddenly to have traveled far away from the group by the fire
and to be wandering in some far-off land.

“Sylvia is a beautiful name,” said Katherine. “For whom are
you called? Was your mother’s name Sylvia?” It was the first
time any of them had spoken of Sylvia’s mother, who they
knew must be dead.

Sylvia’s eyes lost their dreaminess and she looked up with a [81]
merry smile.

“I made it up myself,” she said. “I don’t know what my first
real name was, but when Aunt Aggie got me she named me
Aggie, after herself. But Aggie is such a hopelessly
unimaginative sort of name. It doesn’t make you think of a
thing when you say it. You might just as well be named
‘Empty’ as ‘Aggie.’ Then once we lived in the same house
with a lady who sang, and she used to sing, ‘Who is Sylvia?’
It was the most tuneful name I’d ever heard, and I wondered
and wondered who Sylvia was. But I guess the lady never
found out, because she kept right on singing, ‘Who is Sylvia?’
So one day I said to myself, ‘I’ll be Sylvia!’ Don’t you think
it’s a fragrant name? When I say it I can see festoons of pink
rosebuds tied with baby ribbon. I made people call me Sylvia,
and that’s been my name ever since.”

“Oh, you funny child!” said Nyoda, joining in the general
laugh at Sylvia’s tale of her name.

“But Sylvia,” said Sahwah wonderingly, “you said you didn’t
know what your first real name was before you came to live
with your aunt. Didn’t your aunt know it?”

“No,” replied Sylvia. “You see,” she continued, “Aunt Aggie
isn’t my real aunt. She adopted me when I was a baby.”

“Oh-h!” said the Winnebagos in surprise. [82]

“But why do you call her ‘aunt’?” asked Sahwah. “Why don’t
you call her ‘mother’?”

“She never would have it,” replied Sylvia. “She always taught
me to call her Aunt Aggie. I don’t know why.”

Sylvia moved restlessly in her chair, and from the folds of the
loose dressing gown which she wore a picture tumbled out.

Katherine picked it up and laid it back on her lap. It was a
small colored poster sketch of a red haired girl in a golf cape,
which had evidently been the cover design of a magazine
some years ago.

“Why are you so fond of that poster, Sylvia?” asked Katherine
curiously. “You brought it along with you when you came
here, and you keep it with you all the time.”

Sylvia’s tone when she answered was half humorous and half
wistful. “That’s my mother,” she said.

“Your mother!” exclaimed Katherine, incredulously.

“Oh, not my really real mother,” Sylvia continued quickly. “I
never saw a picture of her. But Aunt Aggie said my mother
had red hair and was most uncommonly good looking, so I
found a picture of a beautiful lady with red hair and called it
my mother. It’s better than nothing.” The Winnebagos nodded
silently and no one spoke for a moment.

Then Katherine asked gently, “What else do you know about [83]
mother?”

Sylvia sat up and related the tale told her hundreds of times by
Aunt Aggie, in answer to her eager questioning about her
mother. Unconsciously she used Aunt Aggie’s expressions and
gestures as she told it.

“‘Me an’ Joe was coming on the steam cars from Butler to
Philadelphy, and in back of us sat a young couple with a baby
about a month old. The girl—she wasn’t nothing but a girl
even though she was a married woman—was most
uncommon good looking. She had bright red hair and big grey
eyes, and she wore a golf cape. Her husband was a big, red
faced feller, homely but real honest lookin’. They weren’t
either of them twenty years old. Farmers, I could tell from
their talk, and as well as I could make out, the name on their

bag was Mitchell. Well, well, along between Waterloo and
Poland there suddenly come a terrible bump, and then a
smash and a crash, and the next thing I was layin’ under the
seat and Joe was trying to pull me out. When I did finally get
out the car was a-layin’ over on its side all smashed to bits.
Somehow or other when Joe dug me out from under the seat I
had ahold of the little baby that had been in the seat in back of
me. The young man and woman were under the wreck. They
were both killed, but the baby never had a scratch.

“‘Nobody ever found out who the red headed woman and the [84]
man were, because they were all burned up in the wreck, and
all their luggage.

“‘I had taken care of the baby, thinkin’ I’d keep her until her
people were found, but they were never heard from, so I
decided to keep her for my own. That baby was you, Sylvia.’

“So that’s all I know about my mother and father,” finished
Sylvia with a sigh. “But I can think up the most dazzling
things about them!”

“Sylvia,” said Katherine, “who was the man I saw on the
stairs of your house the night I came in and found you?”

Sylvia looked at her in wonder. “What man?”

“When I came into the hall there was a man leaning over the
banisters about half way up the stairs. When I came in he ran
down the stairs and out of the front door.”

“I can’t imagine,” said Sylvia. “No man ever came to the
house to see us. I didn’t hear anybody come in that day.”

“But the front door stood open when I came up on the porch,”
said Katherine. “That hadn’t been standing open all day, had
it?”

“No,” replied Sylvia, “for Aunt Aggie was always careful [85]
about closing it when she went out.”

“Then he must have opened it,” said Katherine.

“How queer!” said Sylvia. “What do you suppose he could
have been doing there? He never knocked on the inside door.”

“Possibly he thought the house was empty, and went in to get
out of the cold,” concluded Katherine. “Then he heard you
singing, and it scared him. He looked frightened out of his
wits when I saw him. When I came in he just ran for his life.”
Katherine laughed as she remembered her own dismay at
seeing the man and thinking that he was the owner of the
house, when he was only a stray visitor himself and worse
frightened than she. Here she had prepared such an elaborate
apology in her mind, and he was nothing but a tramp! The
humor of it struck her forcibly, now that it was all in the past,
and she laughed over it most of the evening.

About nine o’clock Hercules came shuffling in, suffering
from a bad cold, and asked Nyoda to give him something for
it. While Nyoda went upstairs to the medicine chest Sahwah
craftily asked the old man, “Hercules, did you ever hear of
there being a secret passage in this house?”

Hercules gave a visible start. “Whyfor you ask dat?” he
demanded.

“Oh, for no special reason,” said Sahwah casually. “I just [86]
thought maybe there was one and that you might know about
it. There always is one in these old houses, you know.”

“Well, dere ain’t in dis!” answered the old man vehemently,
and at the same time looking relieved. “Marse Jasper he
always useter say to me, ‘Herc’les,’ he useter say, ‘dere’s one
good thing about dis house, and dat is it ain’t cluttered up wif
no secrut passidges.’ Secrut passidges am powerful unlucky,

Mis’ Sahwah. Onct I knew a man dat lived in a house dat had
a secrut passidge an’ one night de ole debbil got in th’u dat
secrut passidge an’ run off wif him! Don’ you go huntin’ no
secrut passidges, Mis’ Sahwah, if you knows what’s good fer
you. Dey suttinly am powerful unlucky!”

Nyoda came down stairs and bore Hercules off to the kitchen,
and the Winnebagos and the boys had their laugh out behind
his back. “How can he tell such fibs in such a truthful
sounding way!” remarked Justice. “If I didn’t know about that
passage from Uncle Jasper’s diary I’d be inclined to believe
every word he said. But I bet the old sinner knows all about it,
just as Uncle Jasper did. Even if he doesn’t, how can he
invent such convincing speeches on the part of Uncle Jasper
out of the empty air? He’s the most engaging old fibber I ever
came across.”

Nyoda came back and bore Sylvia off to bed and then she [87]
returned to the library. “Sherry,” she said thoughtfully, leaning
her chin in her hand, “Dr. Crosby was here this morning to
return those binoculars he borrowed the other day, and I
talked to him about Sylvia. He said he had once been called in
to treat her for tonsilitis when she lived in Millvale, and had
examined her spine at the time. He said it was a splintered
vertebra and it could be fixed by grafting in a piece of bone.
They’re doing wonders now that way. He said Dr. Gilbert, the
famous specialist, could perform an operation that would cure
her. He hadn’t had a chance to talk it over with Sylvia’s aunt
because he had been called away suddenly and when he
returned to town the Deane’s were gone. He had no idea what
had become of them. He only made a hasty examination, but
he is positive she can be cured. I know the Deane’s can’t
afford to pay for such an operation, but Dr. Crosby said he
was sure he could persuade Dr. Gilbert to perform it free, in
his clinic. I told Dr. Crosby to bring Dr. Gilbert to Oakwood
as soon as he could. He said he thought it would be possible
soon. I thought as long as we are going to keep Sylvia in our

care until her aunt is well again we might as well have her
fixed up in the meantime. I would like to have the operation
over before her aunt knows anything about it, say the first
week of the new year. What do you think?”

“Whew!” whistled Sherry, looking at his wife in [88]
astonishment. The rapidity with which Nyoda got a project
under way was a nine days’ wonder to Sherry, who usually
spent more time in deliberating a course of action than she did
in carrying it out. “Go ahead!” was all he could say.

The Winnebagos gave long exclamations of joy. It had never
occurred to them that anything could be done for Sylvia.

“Does she know it?” asked Hinpoha.

“Not yet,” replied Nyoda. “I thought we would keep it for a
birthday surprise. Her birthday is the twenty-ninth. I’ll have
Dr. Gilbert come that day and let him tell her himself. Don’t
anybody mention it to her until then.”

“We won’t,” promised the Winnebagos, and trooped off to
bed, heavy with their delicious secret.

[89]

CHAPTER VIII
THE FOOTPRINTS ON THE STAIRS

The Winnebagos woke bright and early the next morning,
eager to begin the search for the secret passage again, but
whatever plans they had formed were driven entirely out of
their minds by the appearance of the footprints on the stairs.
Nyoda discovered them first when she raised the curtains on
the stair landing on her way down to bring in the morning
paper.

The day before, in anticipation of the coming of the men from
the second hand store to remove the discarded furniture from
Uncle Jasper’s study, she had improvised a runner to cover the
front stairs to keep them from being scratched. The stretch
from the upstairs to the landing she had covered with a strip
of rag carpet, and from the landing down she had used a
length of white canvas. The landing itself was still bare, as
she had not yet found the old rug she intended laying there.

Now, as she came downstairs, she noticed, on the strip of [90]
white canvas that covered the bottom half of the stairs, three
dark red footprints. On the white background they stood out
with startling distinctness. They began on the third step from
the top and appeared on every other step from then on to the
bottom. All three were the prints of a right foot. No heel
marks were visible, only the upper half of the foot. From the
direction which they pointed they were made by a person
descending the stairs, and from their size that person was a
man.

Nyoda’s first thought that Sherry had cut his foot and had
gone downstairs, leaving a bloody trail on her stair runner,
and full of concern she immediately sought him. But her
search revealed him down in the basement, coaxing up the
furnace, and there was nothing the matter with his feet. The
Captain was with him and he likewise disclaimed a cut foot.
The two of them had come down the back stairs. Nyoda
hurried back upstairs. Justice and Slim were in the upper hall
when she came up, just in the act of coming down.

“Good morning!” they both called out in cheery greeting.

“Which one of you has the cut foot?” she asked.

“Cut foot? Not I,” said Justice.

“Nor I,” said Slim. “Did somebody cut his foot?”

“Look,” said Nyoda, pointing to the marks on the lower steps.

“It must have been your husband, or the Captain,” said [91]
Justice. “It wasn’t either of us.”

“It wasn’t either of them,” replied Nyoda. “I asked them.
They’re down in the basement fussing with the furnace.”

“It’s the print of a foot with a shoe on,” said Justice,
examining the marks.

“Somebody must have gotten into the house last night!”
exclaimed Nyoda in a startled tone. “Sherry,” she called,
“come up here!”

Sherry came up from the basement on the run, for he
recognized something out of the ordinary in his wife’s tone,
and the Captain came hard on his heels. The girls came
running down from above to see what the commotion was

about, and the whole household stood staring at the
mysterious footprints in startled bewilderment.

“Burglars!” cried Hinpoha with a little shriek.

“Oh, my silverware!” exclaimed Nyoda in a stricken tone, and
raced into the dining room. She pulled open the sideboard
drawers with trembling hands, expecting to find them
ransacked, but nothing was amiss. Every piece was still in its
place. Neither had the sterling silver candlesticks on top of the
sideboard been disturbed. A thorough search through the
house revealed nothing missing. Various gold bracelets and
watches lay in plain sight on dressers, and Hinpoha’s gold
mesh bag hung on the back of a chair beside her bed. Sherry
reported no money gone.

Nothing stolen! Who had entered the house then, if not a [92]
burglar? The thing had resolved itself into a mystery, and
everyone looked at his neighbor with puzzled eyes. Breakfast
was completely forgotten.

“What gets me,” said Sherry, “is where those footprints
started from. By the way they point, the man was going
downstairs, but they begin in the middle of the stairway.
Clearly he didn’t start at the top. Do you suppose he came in
through the landing window?”

He examined the triple window on the landing closely, but
soon looked around with a puzzled expression on his face.

“The windows are all fastened from the inside,” he reported,
“and there’s no sign of their having been tampered with. It
doesn’t look as though anyone could have come in this way.”
He examined all the rest of the windows on the first floor, and
found them all latched and their latches undisturbed. The
doors, too, were locked from the inside. The cellar windows
had a heavy screening over them on the outside which could

not be removed without being destroyed, and this screening
was everywhere intact.

“He must have come in through one of the upstairs windows [93]
after all,” said Nyoda. “There were about a dozen open in the
various bedrooms. The window in the room Hinpoha and
Gladys sleep in is directly over the front porch.”

Hinpoha and Gladys gave a simultaneous shriek at the
thought of the mysterious intruder coming through their room
while they lay sleeping.

“But if he came down from upstairs, why aren’t the footprints
all the way down, instead of beginning in the middle?”
insisted Katherine. “He couldn’t have come down from
upstairs; he must have come in through this window on the
landing,” she said decidedly, going up to the window and
looking it over sharply for any sign of having been opened,
and, by shaking the wooden framework of the little square
panes vigorously, as if she would shake the truth out of it by
force.

The window, however, still yielded no sign of having been
opened, and the sill outside bore no marks of an instrument.
The mystery grew deeper. How could those footprints have
started under the landing window if the feet that made them
did not enter by that window?

“Maybe he did come from upstairs after all,” said Sahwah,
whose lively brain had been working hard on the puzzle, “but
his foot didn’t begin to bleed until he was half way down.
Maybe he hurt it on the landing.”

“Sat down to trim his toe-nails and cut his toe off, probably,” [94]
suggested Justice, and the girls giggled hysterically.

Striking an attitude in imitation of a story book detective,
Justice began to address the group. “Gentlemen of the jury,”

he began, “we have here a mystery which has baffled the
brightest minds in the country, but unraveling it has been the
merest child’s play to a great detective like myself. Here are
the facts in the case. A man goes down a stairway. The first
half of his descent is shrouded in oblivion; half way down he
begins to leave bloody footprints. There is only one answer,
gentlemen; the one which occurred to me immediately. It is
this: Upon reaching the landing the mysterious descender
suddenly remembers that it is the day on which he annually
trims his toe-nails. Being a very methodical man, as I can
detect by the way his feet point when he goes downstairs, he
sits down and does it then and there. But the knife slips and he
cuts off his toe, after which he makes bloody footprints on the
rest of the stairs.”

“Justice Dalrymple, you awful boy!” exclaimed Katherine,
and then she laughed with the rest at his absurd explanation of
the mystery.

“Well, can you think up any argument that disproves my
theory?” he retorted calmly.

“I can,” replied the Captain. “If your theory was correct we’d [95]
have found the toe lying on the stairs.”

The girls shrieked and covered their ears with their hands.
The Captain chuckled wickedly, but said no more.

“I can think up another argument,” said Sahwah. “Your man
went barefoot after he cut his toe off, but this one had his shoe
on.”

“So he did!” admitted Justice. “Now you’ve ‘done upsot my
whole theory!’”

“But how could his foot bleed through his shoe?” asked
Katherine skeptically.

“The sole must have been cut through,” said Justice. “He
probably wore a rubber-soled shoe, like a sneaker, and
stepped on some broken glass that went right through the sole
into his foot. I did the same thing myself once. It bled
through, all right.”

“But what did he step on?” asked Nyoda, puzzled. “There
isn’t any sign of broken glass around.”

“I give it up,” said Sherry, who could make nothing from the
facts before him and had no imagination to help him supply
missing details. “The man undoubtedly got in through the
upstairs window and out the same way. He was a burglar, only
he got scared away before he could steal anything. Some
noise in the house, probably.”

“He must have heard Slim snoring, and thought it was a [96]
bombing plane coming after him,” said Justice, and then
dodged nimbly as Slim made a pass at his head with a
menacing hand.

“Whatever he did to his foot fixed him,” said Sherry. “He
called it a day when that happened and went off without
making a haul. Probably had a pal outside in a machine.”

“Nyoda,” said Sahwah, struck with a sudden thought, “do you
think it could have been Hercules? He might have come in for
something in the night.”

“Of course!” exclaimed Nyoda. “Why didn’t I think of that
before? Hercules has a key to the back door. How idiotic of
me not to have guessed before that it was Hercules. Here we
stand looking at these footprints like Robinson Crusoe
looking at Friday’s, and talking about burglars, and wracking
our brains wondering where he came in, and it must have
been Hercules all the while. He cut his foot and came in to get
something for it, or he came in to get something more for his
cold and cut his foot after he got in. Poor old Hercules! He

wouldn’t even wake us up to get help. I’ll go right out and
find out what happened to him.”

She started for the back door, but before she had reached the
kitchen there was a stamping of feet on the back doorstep, a
tapping on the door, and then Hercules opened it himself and
came in, as was his custom.

“Mawnin’, Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” he quavered genially, smiling a [97]
broad, toothless smile at the sight of her. “Mighty nippy dis
mawnin’.” He shivered and stamped his feet on the floor,
edging over toward the stove.

Nyoda looked down at his feet hastily and instantly realized
that it was not he who had left the print on the stairs. The
loose, flapping felt slippers which Hercules invariably wore,
bursting out on all sides, would have left a mark twice the size
of the mysterious footprints. Nobody knew just how big
Hercules’ feet were. He owned to wearing a size twelve, at
which Sherry openly scoffed.

“I’ll bet a size fifteen could hurt him,” he declared.

The rest also saw at a glance that there was no possibility of
Hercules having made the footprints.

Hercules, unconscious of the charged atmosphere of the
house, looked around for the breakfast which should be set
out for him on the end of the kitchen table at this hour.

“You-all overslep’?” he inquired good-temperedly of Nyoda.

“No, we didn’t,” replied Nyoda. “We’ve had a little
excitement this morning and forgot all about breakfast.
Somebody got into the house last night.”

“Burglars?” asked Hercules anxiously. “Did anything get
stole?”

“No,” replied Nyoda, “nothing was stolen, but the burglar left [98]
some bloody footprints on the stair runner. We thought at first
it might have been you, coming to get something for your
cold, but I see now that it is impossible for you to have left
the footprints. You didn’t come into the house last night, did
you?” she finished.

“No’m,” answered Hercules with simple directness. “I done
slep’ like a top, Miss’ ’Lizbeth. Took dat hot drink you-all
gave me to take, an’ never woke up till de sun starts shinin’
dis mawnin’. Feelin’ better now. Cold gittin’ well. Feelin’
mighty hungry.” His eye traveled speculatively toward the
stove.

There was absolutely no doubt about his telling the truth.
When Hercules was trying to conceal something his language
was much more eloquent and flowery.

“Your breakfast will be ready before long,” said Nyoda
kindly. Then, as Hercules hobbled toward the stove she asked
solicitously, “Have you a sore foot, Hercules?”

“No’m,” replied Hercules, “but the mizry in my knees is
powerful bad dis mawnin’, Mis’ ’Lizbeth. Seems like my old
jints is gittin’ plumb rusted.” He launched into a detailed
description of the various pains caused by his “mizry,” until
Nyoda sought refuge in the front part of the house. She had
heard the tale many times before.

Pretty soon Hercules hobbled in and took a look at the [99]
footprints on the stairs.

“Powerful sing’ler,” he said, scratching his head in a puzzled
way.

Sherry went on to explain all the details for the old man’s
benefit. “We thought at first he must have come in through the
window on the stair landing, but that hadn’t been touched, so

we decided he must have come in through one of the upstairs
windows. It seems queer, though, that the footprints should
have begun under the stair landing, doesn’t it?”

“What’s the matter, Hercules, are you sick?” asked Nyoda,
looking at the old man in alarm. For Hercules’ eyes were
rolling wildly in his head and his legs threatened to collapse
under him. He sat heavily down on a chair and began to rock
to and fro, muttering to himself in a terrified way. Straining
their ears to catch his words, they heard him say:

“Debbil’s a-comin’, debbil’s a-comin’, debbil’s a-comin’ after
old Herc’les for takin’ dat shutter down. Debbil done lef’ his
footprint fer a warnin’ fer old Herc’les.”

He seemed beside himself with fright. Nyoda and Sherry
looked at each other in perplexity.

“What’s the matter with him?” asked Nyoda, in a tone of
concern.

“Superstitious,” replied Sherry reassuringly. “Most negroes [100]
believe the devil is walking around on two legs, waiting to
grab them from behind every fence. You remember Uncle
Jasper mentioned in his diary that he told Jasper if he ever
took that shutter down the devil would come in through the
window and get him. Now he thinks it’s happened. Don’t be
alarmed at him. Get him his breakfast, and that’ll give him
something else to think about.”

The Winnebagos hastened to set out his breakfast on the table,
but he ate scarcely anything, and still trembled when he went
back to his rooms in the coach house.

“Funny old codger!” commented Sherry, looking after him.
“He’s chuck full of superstition. If he throws many more such
fits, I suppose I’ll have to nail up the old shutter again to keep
him from dying of fright.”

“You’ll do no such thing!” replied Nyoda. “I’ll have no more
holes in that casement. Hercules will be all right again in a
day or two. By that time he’ll have a new bogie.

“Now everybody come to breakfast, and forget all about this
miserable business.”

[101]

CHAPTER IX
THE TRIALS OF AN EXPLORER

“Oh, tell me again about the time you went camping, and the
people thought you were drowning,” begged Sylvia.

Hinpoha drew up a footstool under her feet, and sank back
into a cushioned chair with a long sigh of contentment. All
day long she had been helping the others search for the secret
passage, upstairs and downstairs, and back upstairs again,
until she dropped, panting and exhausted, into a chair beside
Sylvia in the library and declared she couldn’t stand up
another minute. The others never thought of stopping.

“But you aren’t fat,” she retorted when Sahwah protested
against her dropping out. “You can run up and downstairs like
a spider; no wonder you aren’t tired. I’m completely inside.”

“You’re what?”

“Completely inside. Classical English for ‘all in.’ ‘All in’ is
slang, and we can’t use slang in Nyoda’s house, you know.”

Sahwah snorted and returned to the search, which was now [102]
centered in Uncle Jasper’s study.

“Now tell me about your getting rescued,” said Sylvia.

“We were spending the week-end at Sylvan Lake,” recounted
Hinpoha, “and there were campers all around. Sahwah and I
wanted to get an honor for upsetting a canoe and righting it
again, so we put on our skirts and middies over our bathing
suits and paddled out into deep water. Nyoda was watching us

from the shore. We were going to take the complete test—
upset the canoe, undress in deep water, right the canoe and
paddle back to shore. We got out where the water was over
our heads and upset the canoe with a fine splash. We were just
coming up and beginning to pull off our middies, when we
heard a yell from the shore. Two young men from one of the
cottages were tearing down to the beach like mad, throwing
their coats into space as they ran.

“‘Hold on, girls, we’ll save you,’ they shouted across the
water, and jumped in and swam out toward us.

“‘O look what’s coming!’ giggled Sahwah.

“‘Oh, won’t they be surprised when they see us right the
canoe!’ I sputtered as well as I could for laughing. ‘Come on,
hurry up!’

“‘What a shame to spoil their chance of being heroes,’ said [103]
Sahwah. ‘They may never have another chance. Let’s let them
tow us in.’ Sahwah went down under water and did dead
man’s float and it looked as though she had gone under. I
followed her. But I laughed right out loud under water and
made the bubbles go up in a spout and had to go up for air.
The two fellows were almost up to us. Sahwah threw up her
hand and waved it wildly, and I began to laugh again.

“‘Keep still and be saved like a lady!’ Sahwah hissed, and I
straightened out my face just in time. The two fellows took
hold of us and towed us to shore. People were lined up all
along, watching, and they cheered and made a big fuss over
those two fellows. We could see Nyoda and Migwan and
Gladys running away with their handkerchiefs stuffed into
their mouths. We lay on the beach awhile, looking awfully
limp and scared and after a while we let somebody help us to
our cottage, and you should have heard the hilarity after we
were alone! We laughed for two hours without stopping.
Nyoda insisted that we go and express our grateful thanks to
the two young men for saving our lives, and we managed to
keep our faces straight long enough to do it, but the strain was
awful.”

“Oh, what fun!” cried Sylvia, laughing until the tears came, [104]
and then with an irresistible burst of longing she exclaimed,
“Oh, if I could only do things like other girls!”

“You are going to do things like other girls!” said Hinpoha in
the tone of one who knows a delightful secret. “You’re going
to walk again; Nyoda said the doctor said so.”

Sylvia’s face went dead white for an instant, and then lighted
up with that wonderful inner radiance that made her seem like
a glowing lamp.

“Am I?” she gasped faintly, catching hold of Hinpoha’s arm
with tense fingers.

“You certainly are,” said Hinpoha, in a convincing tone.
“Nyoda said you could be cured. The specialist is coming in a
day or two to arrange the operation. O dear, now I’ve told it!”
she exclaimed. “We were going to save it for a birthday
surprise.”

“Oh-h-h-h!” breathed Sylvia, and sank back in her chair
unable to say another word. Her eyes burned like stars. To
walk again! Not to be a burden to Aunt Aggie! The sudden joy
that surged through her nearly suffocated her. To walk!
Perhaps to dance! The desire to dance had always been so
strong in her that it sometimes seemed to her that she must die
if she couldn’t dance. All the joy that was coming to her
whirled before her eyes in a wild kaleidoscope of shifting
images.

“Then I can be a Camp Fire Girl!”

“You’re going to be a Winnebago!”

“Oh-h-h!” [105]

“You can go camping with us!”

“Oh-h-h!”

“You will be a singer, and go on the stage, maybe!”

“Oh-h-h-h-h-h!”

“Maybe you’ll even——” Hinpoha’s sentence was suddenly
interrupted by a mighty uproar from the basement. First came
a crash that rocked the house, followed by a series of lesser
thumps and crashes, mingled with the racket of breaking
glass. The Winnebagos, rushing out into the hall from Uncle

Jasper’s study, were brushed aside by Sherry and Justice and
the Captain, tearing down the attic stairs. Sherry snatched up
his revolver from his dresser and went down the stairs three at
a time, with the boys close at his heels.

“The burglars are in the basement!” came from the frightened
lips of the girls as they crept fearfully down the stairs. All felt
that the mystery of the footprints on the stairs was about to be
cleared up.

Sherry opened the cellar door and paused at the top. “Who’s
down there?” he called, in a voice of thunder.

From somewhere below came a dismal wail. “Throw me a
plank, somebody, I’m drowning. There’s a tidal wave down
here!”

“It’s Slim!” cried Nyoda, recognizing his voice. “What’s the [106]
matter?” she called.

She and Sherry raced down the cellar stairs, with the
Winnebagos and the two boys streaming after.

They found Slim lying on the floor of the fruit cellar, nearly
drowned in a pool of vinegar which was gushing over him
from the wreck of a two-hundred-gallon barrel lying beside
him. Around him and on top of him lay the debris of a shelf of
canned fruit.

Sherry and the boys rescued him and finally succeeded in
convincing him that he was not fatally injured. The stream of
vinegar was diverted into a nearby drain, and Slim told his
tale of woe.

He had been down in the cellar looking for the secret passage.
There was a place in the stone wall that sounded hollow when
he struck it with a hammer, and he went around to see what
was on the other side of that wall. It was the fruit cellar. While

he was poking around in it a big stone suddenly fell down out
of the wall and smashed in the head of the barrel, which
tipped over almost on top of him, and nearly drowned him in
vinegar, while the jars of fruit came down all around him.

“That loose stone in the wall!” exclaimed Sherry. “I forgot to
warn you boys about it when you were sounding the walls
with hammers. It’s a mighty good thing it fell on the barrel
and not on you.”

He and Nyoda turned cold at the thought of what might have [107]
happened.

But the sight of Slim, dripping with vinegar and covered with
canned peaches, drove all thoughts of tragedy out of their
minds, and the cellar resounded with peals of helpless
laughter for the next twenty minutes. Justice tried to sweep up
the broken glass, but sank weakly into a bin of potatoes and
went from one convulsion into another, until the Captain
finally poured a dipper of water over him to calm him down.

“O dear,” gasped Justice, mopping his face with the end of a
potato bag, “if Uncle Jasper could only have seen what he
started with that diary of his, it would have jolted him clean
out of his melancholy!”

[108]

CHAPTER X
THE SECRET PASSAGE

“Oh, tell Aunt Aggie I think the Winter Palace is the most
wonderful place in the whole world!” cried Sylvia
enthusiastically. “Tell her that the ladies-in-waiting are the
dearest that ever lived, and the three court jesters are the
funniest. Tell her I’m so happy I feel as though I were going
to burst! And be sure and tell her that I’m going to get well!”

Sylvia had not been able to conceal her rapture for a minute
after Hinpoha had told her the news the day before. They all
knew she knew it, and when they saw her rapture they did not
scold Hinpoha for letting the cat out of the bag before the time
set. To have given her those two extra days of happiness was
worth the sacrifice of their surprise. All morning she had
filled the house with her song and chattered happily of the
time when she would go camping with the Winnebagos.

“We’ve made more plans than we can carry out in a hundred [109]
years!” she told Nyoda gleefully. “Oh, please live that long,
so you can help us do all we’ve planned.” Nyoda smiled back
into the starry eyes, and promised faithfully to live forever, if
need be, to accommodate her.

“I’ll give Aunt Aggie all your messages,” she said now,
stopping in the act of drawing on her gloves to pat the shining
head.

“You’re so good to go and see Aunt Aggie!”

Nyoda patted her on the head again and then started cityward
with her big box of delicacies for Mrs. Deane. With her went
Migwan and Gladys and Hinpoha, who wanted to do some
shopping in the city.

Sahwah and Katherine refused to give up their search for the
passage even for one afternoon. Sahwah had an idea that
possibly there was a secret door in the back of one of the
built-in bookcases in the library, and had Nyoda’s permission
to take out all the books and look. Justice and Slim and the
Captain had promised to help take out the books. Sylvia was
wheeled into the library where she could watch the
proceedings, and the work of removing the books began.
Sherry looked on for a while and then went out to tinker with
the car.

Section by section they took the books from the cases and [110]
examined the wall behind them, but it was apparently solid.
Sahwah and the Captain worked faithfully, taking out the
books and replacing them, but Katherine would stop to read,
and Slim soon fell asleep with his head against the seat of a
chair. Justice spied Slim after a while and began to throw
magazines at him. Slim wakened with an indignant grunt and
returned the volley and then the two engaged in a good-
natured wrestling bout.

“I know a new trick,” said Justice. “It’s for handling a fellow
twice your size. A Japanese fellow down in Washington
taught it to me. Let me practice it on you, will you? You’re the
first one I’ve seen since I learned it who was so much heavier
than I.”

Slim consented amiably enough and Justice proceeded with a
series of operations that rolled his big antagonist around on
the floor like a meal sack.

“Don’t make so much noise, boys!” commanded Katherine,
putting a warning finger to her lips. “Don’t you see that

Sylvia has fallen asleep? Go on out into the hall and do your
wrestling tricks out there.”

Slim and Justice removed themselves to the hall and
continued their wrestling, and the Captain abandoned the
books to watch them and cheer them on.

“Bet you can’t back him all the way up the stairway!” said the
Captain, as Justice forced Slim up the first step.

“Bet I can!” replied Justice, and then began a terrific struggle, [111]
science against bulk. Slim fought every inch of the way, but,
nevertheless, went up steadily, step by step. Sahwah and
Katherine, drawn by the Captain’s admiring exclamations at
Justice’s feat, also abandoned the books and came out to
watch.

Justice got Slim as far as the landing, and there Slim got his
arms wound around the stair post and anchored himself
effectively. One step above the landing was as far as Justice
could get him. Justice leaned over him and tried another trick
to break his grip on the post and the two were see-sawing
back and forth when suddenly the Captain gave a yell that
made Justice loosen his hold on Slim and ask in a scared
voice, “What’s the matter?”

“The landing!” gasped the Captain. “Look at the landing!”

Justice looked, and the others looked, and they all stood
speechless with amazement, for the stair landing was doing
something that they had never in all their born days seen a
stair landing do before. It was sliding out of its place, sliding
out over the bottom flight of stairs as smoothly and silently as
though on oiled wheels. The five stood still and blinked
stupidly at the phenomenon, unable to believe their eyes. The
landing came out until there was a gap of about two feet
between it and the wall, and then noiselessly came to a stop.

In the opening thus made they could see the top of an iron
ladder set upright against the wall below.

Sahwah rallied her stunned senses first. “The secret passage!” [112]
she cried triumphantly.

“Daggers and dirks!” exclaimed the Captain.

“What made it open up?” asked Katherine curiously. “Where
is the spring that works it?”

Justice and the Captain shook their heads.

“The post!” exclaimed Slim, mopping the perspiration from
his brow. “I was pulling at it for dear life when all of a sudden
something clicked inside of it. Then the Captain yelled that
the stair landing was coming out. The spring that works it is
in the landing post!”

Slim reached out and tugged away at the post again, but
nothing happened. Then he got hold of the carved head and
began to twist it and it turned under his hands. There was a
click, faint, but audible to the eagerly listening ears, and the
landing began to slide smoothly back into place. In a moment
the opening was closed, and the landing was apparently a
solid piece of carpentry.

“Whoever invented that was a genius!” exclaimed Justice in
admiration. “And all the while we were trying to find a secret
passage through the walls by tapping on the panels! If it
hadn’t been for Slim we could have spent all the rest of our
lives looking for it and never would have found it, for we
never in all the wide world would have thought of twisting the
head of that stair post. Slim, you weren’t born in vain after
all.”

“See if you can make it open up again,” said Sahwah. [113]

Slim twisted the head of the post, and presently there came
the now familiar click and the floor slid out with uncanny
quietness.

“Let’s go down!” said the Captain, going to the edge of the
opening and looking in.

“What’s down there?” asked Katherine.

“Nothing but space,” replied the Captain, straining his eyes to
peer into the darkness, “at least that’s all I can see from here.
Give me your flashlight, Slim, I’m going down.”

Slim handed him his pocket flash and the Captain began to
descend the ladder. He counted twelve rungs before he felt
solid footing under him. He found himself in a tiny room
about six feet square, whose walls and floor were of stone.
The top was open to allow the passage of the ladder. The
Captain figured out that he was standing level with the floor
of the basement and that the space above the opening at the
top of the little room was the space under the stairway. There
was a door in the outside wall, next to the ladder.

“What’s down there?” asked Sahwah from above.

“Just a little place with a door in it,” replied the Captain,
retracing his steps up the ladder.

“The passage isn’t inside the house at all,” he reported when [114]
he reached the top. “It’s outside. There’s a door down there
that probably opens into it. I’m going to get my coat and see
where the passage leads to.”

“We’ll all go with you,” said Sahwah, and it was she who
went down the ladder first when the expedition started.

The Captain came next, carrying a lantern he had found in the
kitchen. At the bottom of the ladder he lit the lantern. The first

thing its light fell upon was a broken glass jar, lying in a
corner, and from it there extended across the floor a bright red
stream. Sahwah recoiled when she saw it, but the Captain
stooped over and streaked his finger through it.

“Paint!” he exclaimed. “Red paint.”

“Oh!” said Sahwah. “It looked just like blood. Why—that’s
what must have made the footprints on the stairs! The man
must have stepped in this paint! He came in through this
passage!”

The other three had come down by that time, and they all
looked at each other in dumb astonishment. How clear it all
was now! The footprints beginning under the stair landing—
the mystery connected with the entrance of the intruder—they
all fitted together perfectly.

“The paint’s still sticky,” said the Captain, examining his [115]
finger, which had a bright red daub on the end. “It must have
been spilled there quite recently.”

“The burglar must have spilled it himself,” said Katherine.

“But how on earth would a burglar know about this secret
entrance?” marveled Sahwah.

The others were not prepared to answer.

“Maybe Hercules told somebody,” said Justice.

“But Hercules doesn’t seem to know about it himself,” said
Katherine.

“He says he doesn’t, but I’ll bet he does, just the same,” said
Justice.

“Hercules wouldn’t tell any burglar about this way of getting
into the house!” Sahwah defended stoutly. “He’s as true as

steel. If anybody told the burglar it was somebody beside
Hercules.”

“Maybe the burglar discovered the other end of the passage
himself, by accident, just as we did this end,” said Slim.

“Come on,” said the Captain impatiently, “let’s go and see
where that other end is.”

“Wait a minute, what’s this,” said Justice, spying a long rope
of twisted copper wire hanging down close beside the ladder.
This rope came through the opening above them; that was as
far as their eyes could follow it. Its beginning was somewhere
up in the space under the stairs.

“Pull it and see what happens,” said Slim.

“I bet it works the slide opening from below here,” said [116]
Justice. He gave it a vigorous pull and they heard the same
click that had followed the twisting of the stair post. In a
moment the light that had come down through the opening
vanished, and they knew that the landing had gone back into
position. Another pull at the rope and it opened up again.

“Pretty slick,” commented Justice. “It works two ways, both
coming and going. A fellow on the inside could get out, and a
fellow on the outside could get in, without the people in the
house knowing anything about it.”

“Are you coming now?” asked the Captain. “I’m going to
start.”

He opened the door in the outer wall as he spoke. It swung
inward, crowding them in the narrow space in which they
stood. A rush of cold air greeted them. The Captain held the
lantern in front of him and peered out into the darkness.

“There are some steps down,” he said.

He stepped over the threshold and led the way. Six steps down
brought them to the floor of a rock-lined passage, a natural
tunnel through the hill.

“Carver Hill must be a regular stone quarry,” said Justice.
“All the cellar walls of Carver House are made of slabs of
stone like this, and so is the foundation.”

“There are big stones cropping out all over the hill,” said the [117]
Captain. “It’s a regular granite monument. What a jolly tunnel
this is!”

“And what a gorgeous way of escape!” remarked Justice
admiringly.

“But what need would there be of an underground way of
escape?” asked Katherine wonderingly. “What were the
people escaping from?”

“This house was built in the days of the Colonies,” replied
Justice sagely, “and the Carvers were patriots. That probably
put them in a pretty tight position once in a while. No doubt
they concealed American soldiers in their home at times. This
passage was probably built as a means of entrance and escape
when things got too hot up above. British troops may have
been quartered in the house, or watching the outside. What a
peach of a way this was to evade them!” he exclaimed in a
burst of admiration.

“I wish I’d lived in those times,” he went on, with envy in his
tone. “They didn’t keep fellows out of the army on account of
their throats then. What fun a soldier must have had, getting
in and out of this house, right under the nose of the British!
Suppose they suspected he was in the house and came in to
search for him? He’d just turn the post on the stairs, and click!
the landing would slide open and down the ladder he’d go and
out through this passage. The enemy would never discover
where he went in a million years.”

“Come on, let’s see where this passage comes out,” urged the [118]
Captain, and started ahead with the lantern.

The passage sloped steeply downward, with frequent turns
and twists.

“We’re going down the hill,” said the Captain.

“Whoever heard of going down the inside of a hill,” said
Sahwah.

“It’s like going through that passage under Niagara Falls,”
said Slim, “only it’s not quite so wet.”

After another sharp turn and a steep drop they came out in a
good-sized chamber whose walls, floor and ceiling were all of
rock.

“It’s a cave!” shouted the Captain, and his voice echoed and
re-echoed weirdly, until the place seemed to be filled with
dozens of voices. A cold draught played upon them from
somewhere, and, although they all had on sweaters and caps,
they shivered in the chilly atmosphere. There was no glimmer
of light anywhere to indicate an opening to the outside.

The light of the lantern fell upon a wooden bench and a rough
table, both painted bright red. On the table stood two tall
bottles, thickly covered with dust, and between them was a
grinning human skull with two cross bones behind it.
Katherine and Sahwah involuntarily jumped and shrieked
when they saw it.

“Somebody died down here!” gasped Sahwah. [119]

“Nonsense!” said Justice. “It was Uncle Jasper playing pirate.
See, there’s his chest over there.”

Against the rocky wall stood a large wooden chest, likewise
painted bright red, with a huge black skull and cross bones
done on its lid.

“That must be Uncle Jasper’s ‘Dead Man’s Chest,’ that he
mentions in his diary,” said Sahwah. “Of course, this is the
pirates’ den where he and Tad played.”

The five looked around them with interest at this playroom of
the two boys of long ago, its treasures living on after they
were both dead and gone. Truly the den was a place to inspire
terror in the heart of a luckless captive. Skulls and cross bones
were painted all over the rocky walls, grinning reflections of
the one on the table. Sahwah and Katherine clung to each
other and peered nervously over each other’s shoulders into
the darkness beyond the radius of the lantern light.

“What a peach of a pirate’s cave!” exclaimed the Captain
enthusiastically. “Captain Kidd himself couldn’t have had a
better one. It seems as if any minute we’ll hear a voice
muttering, ‘Pieces of eight, pieces of eight.’” He picked up
one of the bottles from the table and set it down again with a
resounding bang.

“‘Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, [120]
Yo! ho! ho! And a bottle of rum!’”

he shouted in a fierce voice which the echoes gave back from
all around. “This must have been the life!”

“Those must have been the bottles from which they drank the
molasses and water that they used for rum,” said Katherine.
“What fun it must have been!”

“I wish I’d known Uncle Jasper Carver when he was a boy,”
sighed the Captain. “He must have been no end of a chap, and
Tad, too.”

“Let’s have a look at what’s in the chest,” said Justice.

He raised up the heavy oak lid and the Captain held the
lantern down while they all crowded around to see. One by
one he lifted out the pirates’ treasures and held them up;
wooden swords, several tomahawks, a white flag with a skull
and cross bones done on it in India ink, a stuffed alligator, a
ship’s compass, a section of a hawser, a heavy iron chain,
deeply rusted, a pocket telescope, a brass dagger, a pair of
bows and a number of real flint-headed arrows, and a box of
loose arrow heads which the Captain seized eagerly.

“Glory! what wouldn’t I have given for a bunch of real Indian [121]
arrow heads when I was a kid,” he said enviously.

“They look like Delawares,” said Justice knowingly, pawing
them over.

“How can you tell?” asked the Captain.

Justice explained the characteristics of the dreaded weapon of
the Lenni-Lenape.

Slim and the Captain could not dispute him because they
didn’t know anything about arrow heads, so they listened to
him in respectful silence.

“They must have had fun, those two,” sighed the Captain
enviously. “I thought I had fun when I was a kid, but Uncle
Jasper Carver had it all over me with this cave and secret
passage of his.”

Slim and Justice echoed his envious sigh. In their minds’ eye
they too had traveled back with Uncle Jasper to his lively
boyhood and saw a panorama of delightful plays passing in
review, with the secret passage and the pirate’s cave as the
background.

The last thing that came out of the chest was a flat stone on [122]
which had been carved the names “Jasper the Feend” and
“Tad the Terror,” bracketed together at both ends and
surmounted by a wobbly skull and cross bones, under which
was carved the legend, “Frends til Deth.” When Sahwah saw
it she could not keep back the tears at the thought of this
wonderful boyish friendship which had endured through thick
and thin, and then had ended so bitterly. To Sahwah the
breaking up of a friendship was the most awful thing that
could happen. There were tears in Katherine’s eyes, too, and
the three boys looked very solemn as the stone was laid back
in the chest.

“Now let’s go and see where the passage leads on to,” said the
Captain, when the treasures of the two youthful pirates had
been replaced in the chest. At a point opposite to the passage
by which they had entered the cave another passage opened,
or rather, a continuation of the first one, for the cave was
merely a widening out of this subterranean tunnel.

“This way out,” said the Captain, lighting the way with his
lantern.

“Why, there’s a door here!” exclaimed the Captain, when they
had gone some thirty or forty feet into the passage.

The door was just like the one beside the ladder in Carver
House; tremendously heavy, bound in brass and studded
thickly with nails. It had been painted over with bright red
paint, but here and there the paint had chipped off, showing
the metal underneath. It was set into a doorway of brick and
mortar. Over the knob was a curious latch, the like of which
they had never seen. To their joy it snapped back without
great difficulty and they got the door open.

Several stone steps down, and then they saw they were in a [123]
cellar passage.

“The passage comes out in another house!” said the Captain.
“I wonder whose?”

“It must be that old empty brick cottage that stands at the foot
of the hill,” said Sahwah, who knew the lay of the land from
the previous summer. “We often used to poke around in it and
wonder who had lived in it. In the old days it must have been
a place of safety for the American soldiers. It’s at the back of
the hill, toward the woods. The soldiers probably escaped
through the woods.”

“Let’s go on into the cellar proper and up into the house,” said
the Captain, eager to continue his exploration.

But what he proposed was impossible, for they discovered
that the end of the passage was blocked by a huge stone that
had fallen out of the wall. It filled up the space from the floor
to the low ceiling, all but a few inches at the top and a few
inches at the one side, where an irregularity in its contour did
not fit against the straight side of the wall. A very faint light
from the cellar showed through these crevices, and a cold
draught of air played like a thin stream down the backs of
their necks.

“There doesn’t seem to be any way of getting out around that [124]
rock,” said the Captain. “Can you see any way?”

They all looked diligently for some way to get over, or around
it, or through it, and soon admitted that it was impossible.

“How on earth did that fellow ever get in from this end?”
asked Justice in perplexity. “There isn’t a ghost of a show of
getting through.”

“He couldn’t have,” said Katherine decidedly, “unless he
really was the devil, as Hercules believed.”

“Or unless the stone fell after he was in,” suggested the
Captain.

“But if he came in this way and went out again, how does it
happen that the door here was fastened on the other side?”
asked Sahwah.

“I give it up,” said Justice. “I don’t believe he came in this
way.”

“Maybe he didn’t come in through the secret passage at all,”
said Slim. “Maybe he did come in through the upstairs
window, as we thought at first.”

“But how about the paint?” objected Sahwah. “He stepped
into it and tracked it down the stairway. He must have come in
through this way.”

Just then Katherine reached up to brush her hair out of her [125]
eyes, and her cold hand brushed Slim’s neck. He jumped
convulsively, lost his footing, and pitched over against the
door, which went shut with a bang. He was up again
immediately, and stretched out his hand to open the door, but
it resisted his attempt.

“I guess she’s stuck,” he remarked. Justice and the Captain
both lent a hand, but not a bit would the door budge. They
gave it up after a few minutes, and stared at each other in
perplexity.

“The door’s locked!” said Justice in a voice of consternation.

“The lock must have snapped over from the jar when the door
banged,” said Sahwah.

“I don’t see how it could,” said Justice skeptically.

“Oh, yes, it could,” replied Sahwah. “The same thing
happened to me once with our back screen door at home. It
slammed on my skirt one day, when I was going out, and the
latch latched itself, and there I was, caught like a mouse in a
trap. I couldn’t pull my skirt loose and I couldn’t unlatch the
door from the outside. There was nobody at home and I had to
stand there a long while before someone came and set me
free. Latches do latch themselves sometimes, and that’s what
this one has done now!”

“Well, we’re caught like mice in a trap, too,” said Justice [126]
gloomily. “With the passage blocked at this end, and the door
locked, how are we going to get out of here?”

“Break the door down,” suggested Sahwah.

“Easier said than done,” replied the Captain. “What are we
going to break it down with? You can’t knock down a door
like that with your bare hands.”

Nevertheless they tried it, pounding frantically with their fists,
and kicking the solid panel furiously.

“No use, we can’t break it down,” said Slim crossly, nursing
his aching hand. “My knuckles are smashed and my toes are
smashed, but there’s never a dent in the door. You’d think the
old thing would be rotten down here in this hole, but it’s so
covered with paint that it’s waterproof. It isn’t wet enough to
rot it,” he finished unhappily, scowling at the piles of dust at
his feet.

“We’ll have to call until somebody hears us and comes
down,” said Sahwah.

“Nobody’ll ever hear us down here,” said Justice. “We’re on
the lonesome side of the hill, remember!”

Nevertheless they did shout at the tops of their lungs, and
called again and again until their ears ached with the racket
their voices made in the closed-in little place, and their throats
ached with the strain.

“Nobody can hear us!”

The disheartening realization came to them all at last. [127]

“Do you suppose we’ll have to stay down here until we starve
to death?” asked Sahwah in an awe-stricken voice, after a
terrified hush had reigned for several minutes.

“We’ll freeze to death before we starve,” said Justice
pessimistically, shivering until his teeth chattered.

“Nonsense!” said Katherine severely. “We’ll get out
somehow. Sherry and Nyoda will find the stair landing open
and will come after us,” she finished, and the rest shouted
aloud, so great was their relief at the thought.

Then Justice struck them cold again with his next words. “No,
they won’t find it open, because I closed it several times, but I
left it closed. They’ll never find that spring in a million
years.”

A groan of disappointment went up at his words and their
hearts sank like lead.

“We’ll get out somehow,” repeated Katherine determinedly,
after a minute. “We were shut up in a cave once before, and
we got out all right.”

“Yes, but that time Slim and I were on the outside, not on the
inside with you,” the Captain reminded her.

“Yes, and that time it wasn’t so cold,” said Sahwah, vainly [128]
trying to stop shivering, “and we had eaten so many

strawberries that we could have lasted for days. I’m hungry
already.”

“So’m I,” said Slim decidedly. “I’ve been hungry for an
hour.”

“You’re always hungry,” said Justice impatiently. “I guess
you’ll last as long as the rest of us, though.”

“Stop talking about ‘lasting,’” said Katherine with a shudder
of something besides cold. “You give me the creeps.”

“If we only had something to break the door down with!”
sighed Justice. “It would take a battering ram, though,” he
finished hopelessly.

“Too bad Hercules’ old goat isn’t down here with us,” said
Sahwah with a sudden reminiscent giggle. “He could have
smashed the door down in no time with his forehead.”

“But he isn’t here, and we are,” remarked Slim gloomily.

“I wish now I’d waked Sylvia up and shown her the stair
landing opening,” sighed Katherine regretfully. “She was so
sound asleep, though, I couldn’t bear to waken her. If she only
knew about it she could send Sherry after us!” Oh, the tragedy
bound up in that little word “if”!

Then to add to their troubles the lantern began to burn out [129]
with a series of pale flashes, and Slim was so agitated about it
that he dropped the biggest electric flashlight on the floor and
put it out of commission. Katherine’s small pocket flash had
burned out some time before. That left only two small
flashlights.

“Put them out,” directed Justice, “so they’ll last. We can flash
them when we need a light.”

It was much worse, being there in the darkness. Sahwah and
Katherine clung to each other convulsively and the boys
instinctively moved nearer together. Conversation dropped off
after a while and it seemed as if the silence of the tomb
hovered over them. No sound came from any direction.

During another one of these silences, following a desperate
outburst of shouting, a sound burst through the uncanny
stillness. It was a slight sound, but to their strained nerves it
was as startling as a cannon shot. It was merely a faint pat,
pat, pat, coming from somewhere. They could not tell the
direction, it was so far off.

“It’s footsteps!” said Sahwah, starting up wildly.

“No, it’s only water dropping,” said Justice, cupping his hand
over his ear in an attempt to locate the direction of the sound.
“I wonder where it can be.”

He flashed the light and looked for the dropping water, but
failed to find it. He turned the light out again. Then in the
darkness the sound seemed clearer than before—pat, pat, pat,
pat.

“It’s getting louder,” said Katherine.

“It is footsteps!” cried Sahwah positively. “They’re coming [130]
nearer! Listen!”

The tapping noise increased until it became without a doubt
the sound of a footfall drawing nearer along the passage on
the other side of the cave.

“It’s Sherry looking for us; he’s found the passage!” shrieked
Sahwah, “or maybe it’s Hercules!”

“Yell, everybody!” commanded Justice, “and let him know
where we are.”

They set up a perfectly ear-splitting shout, and as the echoes
died away they heard the snap of the lock on the other side of
the door. Slim, who was nearest, flung himself upon the door
handle and in another instant the door yielded under his hand
and swung inward.

“Sherry!” they shouted, and crowded out into the passage, all
talking at once.

“Sherry! Sherry! Where are you?” Sahwah called, suddenly
aware that no one had answered them. Justice and the Captain
sprang their flashlights and looked about them in
astonishment. There was no one in the passage beside
themselves.

Who had unfastened the latch and let them out?

Sahwah and Katherine suddenly gripped each other in terror, [131]
while the cold chills ran down their spines. The same thought
of a supernatural agency had come into the mind of each.
Then they both laughed at the absurdity of it.

“It couldn’t have been a ghost,” declared Katherine flatly.
“Ghosts don’t make any noise when they walk.”

As fast as they could they ran back through the passage to the
door in the cellar wall, jerked the cable that opened the trap,
and came out through the landing just as Nyoda, arriving
home, was taking off her furs at the foot of the stairs. They
never forgot her petrified expression when she saw them
coming up through the floor.

“We thought it must be nearly midnight!” said Sahwah in
amazement, when they found out that they had never even
been missed. They had only been gone from the house for two
hours.

Sherry came in presently and was as dumbfounded as Nyoda
when he saw the opening in the landing and heard the tale of
the Winnebagos and the boys.

“We thought you had found the passage and were coming to
let us out,” said Sahwah, “but it must have been Hercules,
after all!”

“But Hercules was with me all afternoon, helping me
overhaul the motor of the car,” said Sherry. “I just left him
now.”

“Then—who—unlocked the—door?” cried the five in a
bewildered way.

“Thunder!” suddenly shouted Justice. “It was the same man [132]
that made the footprints on the stairs! He got in through that
secret passage, and what’s more, he’s down there yet!”

[133]

CHAPTER XI
A CURE FOR RHEUMATISM

All wrought up over the idea of the strange midnight visitor
still lurking down in the passage, Nyoda made Sherry and the
boys arm themselves and search the tunnel and the cave
thoroughly, but they found no sign of anyone hidden down
there.

“It must have been a ghost that unlatched the door, after all,”
said Justice. “Most likely the ghost of the fellow that put the
latch on. He’s probably detailed to look after all the latches he
put on doors!—goes around with the ghost of an oil can and
keeps them from squeaking. Yesterday must have been the
date on his monthly tour of inspection. No, it couldn’t have
been a spook anyhow,” he contradicted himself. “There’s the
can of paint and the footprint on the stairs. Ghosts don’t leave
footprints. That was real paint. He’s a live spook, all right.”

“But where is he now?” asked Nyoda nervously. “I’m afraid [134]
to open a table drawer, for fear he’ll step out. Does he fold up
like an accordion, I wonder, or turn into smoke like the Imp in
the Bottle? I declare, I’m getting curious to see him. I’m sorry
now I made you barricade the door down there beside the
ladder; I’ve half a notion to sit on the stairs all night and see if
he won’t appear.”

“I know an easier way than that,” said Justice gravely. “Just
grease the stairs and then come when you hear him fall. It’ll
save you the trouble of sitting up.”

“You might recommend that method to the cat, instead of her
watching beside the mousehole,” replied Nyoda, laughing.

Then she heard a familiar fumbling at the back door. “Here
comes Hercules,” she said hastily. “Quick, close up the
landing. Don’t anybody mention finding the secret passage to
him, or he’ll make life miserable for me from now on,
worrying for fear his old friend, the devil, will come in and
carry us all off. Come, get away from the stairway, and don’t
act as if anything unusual had happened.

“What is it, Hercules?” she asked, as the old man shuffled
into the kitchen. “Is your cold worse?”

“I was jest goin’ to ask yer could I have some coffee,” said the
old man in a plaintive voice. “I got the mizry so bad it’s jest
tearin’ me ter pieces, an’ when it gits like dat it don’ seem like
anything’ll help it ’xcept drinkin’ hot coffee.”

Nyoda smiled at this novel cure for rheumatism, but she [135]
replied heartily, “Why, certainly you may have some coffee,
Hercules. Just sit down there at the kitchen table and I’ll get
you a cup. There’s some left in the pot; it’ll only take a minute
to warm it up.”

She heated the coffee and motioned Hercules to a seat at the
kitchen table, but he took the steaming cup and edged toward
the door.

“I’ll jest take it out an’ drink it gradual,” he said. “Never
seems ter help de mizry none ’less I drink it gradual an’ keep
my feet in hot water de while. Tanks, Mist’ Sher’dan, I don’
need no help. I kin git along by myself.”

Hercules shuffled out to the barn with his cup of hot coffee
and Nyoda waited until he was out of earshot before she
laughed aloud.

“That man certainly is a character!” she exclaimed. “Whoever
heard of curing rheumatism by drinking coffee ‘gradual’ and
holding your feet in water? I never know what queer notion
he’s going to have next. I put a pot of bright red geraniums in
his room once to brighten it up and he promptly brought it
back, because, ‘Jewraniums am powerful unlucky, Mis’
’Lizbeth. I was plantin’ jewraniums dat day de goat got
killed.’ Poor old Hercules, he does miss that goat so! He was
simply inconsolable at first, and finally I resigned myself to a
life of misery and told him to go and get himself another goat,
but he wouldn’t do it. Nothing could take the place of that
fiendish old animal in his affections. I believe he’ll mourn for
him all the rest of his life.”

“Let’s invite him in for Sylvia’s birthday party to-morrow [136]
night,” suggested Migwan. “That’ll cheer him up and make
him forget all about his ‘mizry’ for a while. Let’s find a
masquerade costume for him, too, so he can be one of us.”

Nyoda smiled brightly at Migwan. “Thoughtful child!” she
said fondly. “Always thinking of someone else’s pleasure.
Certainly we’ll ask Hercules to the party.

“Now, all you menfolk clear out of this kitchen, or we won’t
get any dinner to-night!”

[137]

CHAPTER XII
THE SPIRIT OF A PRINCESS

“O Nyoda, it can’t be true!”

Sahwah’s anguished wail cut across the stricken silence of the
room.

The eminent surgeon had just made his examination of Sylvia
and pronounced the verdict that had sent all their rosy air
castles tumbling about their ears: “Nothing can be done. An
operation would be useless. It is not a case of a splintered
vertebra which could be patched. The nerves which control
the limbs are paralyzed. She will never walk again.”

The last five words fell upon their ears like the tolling of a
sorrowful bell. “She will never walk again.” Stunned by the
unexpected verdict the Winnebagos stood mutely about Sylvia
in anguished sympathy.

She lay motionless on the sofa, a white-faced, pitiful little
ghost of a princess; her glad animation gone, her radiance
extinguished, her song stricken upon her lips.

“O why did you tell me?” she wailed. “Why did you tell me I [138]
could be cured, when I never can? Why didn’t you leave me
as I was? I was happy then, because I had never hoped to get
well. But since you told me I’ve been planning so——” Her
voice broke off and she lay back in silent misery.

“Now I can never be a Camp Fire Girl!” she cried a moment
later, her grief breaking out afresh. “I can never go camping! I
can never help Aunt Aggie!” All the joyful bubbles her fancy

had blown in the last two days burst one by one before her
eyes, each stabbing her with a fresh pang. “I’ll never be any
use in the world; I wish I were dead!” she cried wildly, her
rising grief culminating in an outburst of black despair.

“Oh, yes, you can too be a Camp Fire Girl,” said Nyoda
soothingly. “You can do lots of things the other girls can do—
and some they can’t. There isn’t any part of the Law you can’t
fulfill. You can Seek Beauty, and Give Service, and Pursue
Knowledge, and Be Trustworthy, and Hold on to Health, and
Glorify Work, and Be Happy! Campfire isn’t just a matter of
hikes and meetings. It’s a spirit that lives inside of you and
makes life one long series of Joyous Ventures. You can kindle
the Torch in your invalid’s chair as well as you could out in
the big, busy world, and pass it on to others.”

“How can I?” asked Sylvia wonderingly.

“In many ways,” answered Nyoda, “but chiefly by being [139]
happy yourself. Even if you never did anything else but be
happy, you would be doing a useful piece of work in the
world. Just sing as gayly as you used to, and everyone who
hears you will be brighter and happier for your song. If you
cannot do great deeds yourself, you may inspire others to do
them. What does it matter who does things, as long as they are
done? If you have encouraged someone else to do something
big and fine, all on account of your happy spirit, it is just as
well as if you had done the thing yourself. Did you ever hear
the line,

‘All service ranks the same with God,’?

“Sylvia, dear, you have the power to make people glad with
your song. That is the way you will pass on the Torch. You
already have your symbol; you chose it when you began to
hero-worship Sylvia Warrington, and loved her because she
was like a lark singing in the desert at dawning. That is the
symbol you have taken for yourself—the lark that sings in the

desert. Little Lark-that-sings-in-the-Desert, you will kindle
the Torch with your song! Instead of being a Guide
Torchbearer, or a Torchbearer in Craftsmanship, you will
become a Torchbearer in Happiness!”

With these words of hope and encouragement Nyoda left her [140]
sorrowful little princess to the quiet rest which she needed
after the fatiguing examination by the surgeon. Going into
Hinpoha’s room she found her lying face downward on the
bed in an agony of remorse, her red curls tumbled about her
shoulders.

“I told her, I told her,” she cried out to Nyoda with burning
self-condemnation. “I couldn’t keep my mouth shut till the
proper time; I had to go and tell her two days ahead. If I’d
only waited till we were sure she would never have had her
heart set on it so. Oh, I’ll never forgive myself.” She beat on
the pillow with her clenched fist and writhed under the lash of
her self scorn. For once she was not in tears; her misery was
far deeper than that. “I didn’t mean to tell her that day, Nyoda,
I knew you’d asked us to keep it a secret, but it just slipped
out before I thought.”

“Hinpoha, dear,” said Nyoda, sitting down on the bed beside
her and speaking seriously, “will it always be like this with
you? Will everything slip out ‘before you thought’? Will you
never learn to think before you speak? Will you be forever
like a sieve? Must we always hesitate to speak a private
matter out in front of you, because we know it will be all over
the town an hour later? Are you going to be the only one of
the Winnebagos who can’t keep a secret?”

Hinpoha’s heart came near to breaking. Those were the [141]
severest words Nyoda had ever spoken to her. Yet Nyoda did
not say them severely. Her tone was gentle, and her hand
stroked the dishevelled red curls as she spoke; but what she
said pierced Hinpoha’s heart like a knife. A vision of herself
came up as she must seem to others—a rattle brained creature

who couldn’t keep anything to herself if her life depended
upon it. How the others must despise her! Now she despised
herself! Above all, how Nyoda must despise her—Nyoda,
who always said the right thing at the right time, and whose
tongue never got her into trouble! Nyoda might have nothing
more to do with such a tattle tale! In her anguish she groaned
aloud.

“Don’t you see,” went on Nyoda earnestly, “what suffering
you bring upon yourself as well as upon other people by just
not thinking? You could escape all that if you acquired a little
discretion.”

“Oh, I’ll never tell anything again!” Hinpoha cried
vehemently. “I’ll keep my lips tight shut, I’ll sew them shut. I
won’t be like a sieve. You can tell all the secrets in front of me
you like, they’ll be safe. Oh, don’t say you’ll never tell me
any more secrets!” she said pleadingly. “Just try me and see!”

“Certainly I’ll keep on telling you secrets,” said Nyoda, [142]
“because I believe they really will be safe after this.” She saw
the depth of woe into which Hinpoha had been plunged and
knew that the bitter experience had taught her a lesson in
discretion she would not soon forget. Poor impulsive, short-
sighted Hinpoha! How her tongue was forever tripping her up,
and what agonies of remorse she suffered afterward!

Hinpoha uncovered one eye and saw Nyoda looking at her
with the same loving, friendly glance as always, and cast
herself impulsively upon her shoulder. “You’ll see how
discreet I can be!” she murmured humbly.

Nyoda smiled down at her and held her close for a minute.

“Listen!” she said. From the room where Sylvia lay there
came the sound of a song. It began falteringly at first and
choked off several times, but went bravely on, gaining in
power, until the merry notes filled the house. The indomitable

little spirit had fought its battle with gloom and come out
victorious.

“The spirit of a princess!” Nyoda exclaimed admiringly.
“Sylvia is of the true blood royal; she knows that the
thoroughbred never whimpers; it is only the low born who cry
out when hurt.”

“Gee, listen to that!” exclaimed Slim, sitting in the library
with Sherry and the other two boys, when Sylvia’s song rang
through the house, brave and clear. The four looked at each
other, and the eyes of each held a tribute for the brave little
singer. Sherry stood up and saluted, as though in the presence
of a superior officer.

“She ought to have a Distinguished Valor Cross,” he said, “for [143]
conspicuous bravery under fire.”

“Pluckiest little kid I ever saw!” declared Slim feelingly, and
then blew a violent blast on his nose.

“Sing a cheer!” called Sahwah, and the Winnebagos lined up
in the hall outside Sylvia’s door and sang to her with a vigor
that made the windows rattle:

“Oh, Sylvia, here’s to you,
Our hearts will e’er be true,
We will never find your equal
Though we search the whole world through!”

[144]

CHAPTER XIII
THE MASQUERADE

“I don’t suppose we’ll have the party now,” observed Gladys,
after Sylvia had fallen asleep. “It’s a shame. We were going to
have such a big time to-night.”

“Indeed, we will have the party anyhow!” said Nyoda
emphatically. “We’ll outdo ourselves to make Sylvia have a
hilarious time to-night. The time to laugh the loudest is when
you feel the saddest. Gladys, will you engineer the candy
making? You have your masquerade costume ready, haven’t
you? The rest of you will have to hurry to get yours fixed, it’s
three o’clock already. There are numerous chests of old
clothes up in the attic; you may take anything you like from
them. And that reminds me, I must go and bring out my old
Navajo blanket for—” “Goodness!” she said, stopping herself
just in time, “I almost told who is going to wear it. Now
everybody be good and don’t ask me any questions. I have to
bring it down and air it before it can be worn because it’s
packed away in mothballs.”

She ran lightly up the stairs, chanting: [145]

“There was an old chief of the Navajo,
Fell over the wigwam and broke his toe,
And now he is gone where the good Injuns go,
And his blanket is done up in cam-pho-o-or!”

She trailed out the last word into such a mournful wail that the
Winnebagos shrieked with laughter.

A few minutes later she came down the stairs with a mystified
face. “The blanket’s gone!” she announced. “Stolen. I had it
in the lower drawer of the linen closet off the hall upstairs, all
wrapped up in tar paper. The tar paper’s there in the drawer,
folded up, with the mothballs lying on top of it, and the
blanket is gone. Did any of you take it out to wear to-night?”
she asked, looking relieved at the thought.

No one had taken it, however. Slim was the only one who
wanted to be an Indian, and he was waiting for Nyoda to fetch
the blanket for him. Without a doubt it had been stolen. So the
midnight visitor had been a thief after all! But why did he take
a blanket and nothing else? It was a valuable blanket, but the
silverware and jewelry in the house were worth a great deal
more. The mystery reared its head again. What manner of
man was this strange visitor?

“My mother always used to keep her silver wrapped in the [146]
blankets in a clothes closet,” said Gladys, “and burglars broke
into our house and found it all. The policeman that papa
reported it to said that was a common place for people to hide
valuables and burglars usually searched through blankets.
This burglar must have been looking for valuables in the
blanket, and got scared away before he looked anywhere else,
but took the blanket because it was such a good one.”

“That must have been it,” said Nyoda. “I’ve heard of cases
before where valuables were stolen from their hiding places in
blankets and bedding. Well, we were lucky to get away as we
did.

“Slim, you’ll have to be something beside an Indian chief, for
I haven’t another Navajo blanket. It’s too bad, too, because
you had the real bow and arrows, but cheer up, we’ll find
something else. The trouble is, though,” she mourned, “we
haven’t much of anything that will fit you. The blanket would
have solved the problem so nicely.”

“Let him wear the mothballs,” suggested Justice. “He can be
an African chief instead of an Indian. A nice string of
mothballs would be all——”

Slim threw a sofa cushion at him and Justice subsided.

The stolen blanket remained the chief topic of conversation [147]
until late in the afternoon, when Katherine made a discovery
which furnished a new theme. She was up in the attic, hunting
something from which to concoct a masquerade suit, and
while rummaging through a trunk came upon a photograph
underneath a pile of clothes. It was the picture of a young girl
dressed in the fashion of a bygone day, with a tremendously
long, full skirt bunched up into an elaborate “polonaise.”
Above a pair of softly curved shoulders smiled a face of such
witching beauty that Katherine forgot all about the trunk and
its contents and gazed spellbound at the photograph. In the
lower right hand corner was written in a beautiful, even hand,
“To Jasper, from Sylvia.”

Katherine flew downstairs to show her find to the others.

“O how beautiful!” they cried, one after another, as they
gazed at the picture of the girl Uncle Jasper could not forget.
The small, piquant face, in its frame of dark hair, looked up at
them from the picture with a winning, friendly smile, and
looking at it the Winnebagos began to feel the charm of the
living Sylvia Warrington, and to fall in love with her even as
Uncle Jasper had done.

“Take it up to Sylvia,” said Migwan. “She’ll be delighted to
see a picture of her Beloved.”

Sylvia gazed with rapt fondness at the beautiful young face. [148]
“Isn’t—she—lovely?” she said in a hushed voice. “She looks
as though she would be sorry about my being lame, if she
knew. May I keep her with me all the time, Nyoda? She’s
such a comfort!”

“Certainly, you may keep the picture with you,” said Nyoda,
rejoicing that a new interest had come up just at this time, and
left her hugging the photograph to her bosom.

Right after supper Nyoda shooed all the rest upstairs to their
rooms while she arrayed Sylvia for the party. In her endeavor
to cheer and divert her she gathered materials with a lavish
hand and dressed her like a real fairy tale princess, in a
beautiful white satin dress, and a gold chain with a diamond
locket, and bracelets, and a coronet on her fine-spun golden
hair. The armchair she made into a throne, covered with a
purple velvet portiére; and she spread a square of gilt tapestry
over the footstool.

The effect, when Sylvia was seated upon the throne, was so
gorgeously royal that Nyoda felt a sudden awe stealing over
her, and she could hardly believe it was the work of her own
hands. Sylvia seemed indeed a real princess.

“We have on the robes of state to-night,” said Sylvia, with a
half hearted return to her once loved game, “for our royal
father, the king, is coming to pay us a visit with all his court.”

Nyoda made her a sweeping curtsey and hurried upstairs to [149]
dress herself. The costumes of all the rest were kept a secret
from one another, and no one was to unmask until the stroke
of eleven. She heard stifled giggles and exclamations coming
through the doors of all the rooms as she proceeded down the
hall.

Crash! went something in one of the rooms and Nyoda paused
to investigate. There stood Slim before a mirror, hopelessly
entangled in a sheet which he was trying to drape around
himself. A wild sweep of his hand had smashed the electric
light bulb at the side of the mirror, and sent the globe flying
across the room to shatter itself on the floor.

“Wait a minute, I’ll help you,” said Nyoda, coming forward
laughing.

Slim emerged from the sheet very red in the face, deeply
abashed at the damage he had done.

“I was only trying to grab ahold of the other end,” he
explained ruefully, “like this—” He flung out the other hand
in a gesture of illustration, and smash went the globe on the
other side of the mirror.

Nyoda laughed at his horror-stricken countenance, and
soothed his embarrassment while she pinned him into the
sheet and pulled over his head the pillow case which was to
act as mask.

“Just as if you could disguise Slim by masking him!” she [150]
thought mirthfully as she worked. “The more you try to cover
him up the worse you give him away. It’s like trying to
disguise an elephant.”

She got him finished, and as a precaution against further
accidents bade him sit still in the chair where she placed him
until the dinner gong sounded downstairs; then she hastened
on toward her own room.

“Oh, I forgot about Hercules!” she suddenly exclaimed aloud.
“I promised to get something for him.”

“Migwan’s gone down to fix him up,” said a voice from one
of the rooms in answer to her exclamation. “She found a
costume for him this afternoon, and she’s down in the kitchen
now, getting him ready.”

Nyoda breathed a sigh of gratitude for Migwan’s habitual
thoughtfulness, and went in to don her own costume.

Down in the kitchen Migwan was getting Hercules into the
suit she had picked out for him from the trunkfull of
masquerade costumes she had found up in the attic. It was a
long monkish habit with a cowl, made of coarse brown stuff,
and it covered him from head to foot. The mask was made of
the same material as the suit, and hung down at least a foot
below his grizzly beard.

“Sure nobody ain’t goin’ ter recognize me?” Hercules asked
anxiously.

Migwan’s prediction that an invitation to the party would [151]
cheer him up had been fulfilled from the first. Hercules was
so tickled that he forgot his misery entirely. He was in as
much of a flutter as a young girl getting ready for her first
ball; he had been in the house half a dozen times that day
anxiously inquiring if the party were surely going to be, and if
there would be a suit for him.

Migwan put in the last essential pin, and then stepped back to
survey the result of her efforts. “If you keep your feet
underneath the gown, not a soul will know you,” she assured
him. She had thoughtfully provided a pair of gloves, so that
even if he did put out his hands their color could not betray
him.

“Of course, you must not talk,” she warned him further.

“Course not, course not,” he agreed. “When’s all dese here
mask comin’ off?” he continued.

“When the clock strikes eleven we’ll all unmask,” explained
Migwan, “and then the Princess is going to give the prize to
the one that had the best costume.”

“An’ dey’s nobody ’xcept me an’ you knows I’m wearin’ dis
suit?” he inquired for the third time.

Migwan reassured him, and with a final injunction not to
show himself in the front part of the house until he heard the
dinner gong, she sped up the back stairs to her own belated
masking.

She had barely finished when the sound of the gong rose [152]
through the house, and the stairway was filled with a
grotesquely garbed throng making its way, with stifled
exclamations and smothered bursts of laughter, into the long
drawing room where the Princess sat. Migwan clapped on her
mask and sped down after them, getting there just as the fun
commenced. She spied Hercules standing in the corner behind
the Princess’s throne, maintaining a religious silence and
keeping his feet carefully out of sight. She kept away from
him, fearing that he would forget himself and speak to her,
entirely forgetting that he could not recognize her under her
disguise.

Sylvia shrieked with amusement at the grotesque figures
circling around her. It was the very first masque party she had
ever seen, and she could not get over the wonder of it. Nyoda
smiled mistily behind her mask as she watched her. How
lonely that valiant little spirit must have been all these years,
shut away from the frolics of youth; lonely in spite of the
brave make believe with which she passed away the time!
And now the years stretched out before her in endless
sameness; the poor little princess would never leave her
throne.

Sherry and Justice and the Captain kept Nyoda guessing as to [153]
which one was which, but she soon picked out the one she
knew must be Hercules, and watched him in amusement. She
had rather fancied that he would turn out to be the clown of
the party, but he sat still most of the time and kept his eyes on
the Princess. He seemed utterly fascinated by the glitter of her
costume. Even the Punch and Judy show going on in the other

end of the room failed to hold his attention, although the rest
of the spectators were in convulsions of mirth.

The Princess called on Punch and Judy to do their stunt over
and over again until they were too hoarse to utter another
sound. Migwan, who had been Judy, fled to the kitchen for a
drink of water to relieve her aching throat. She took the
opportunity to slip off the hot mask for a moment and get a
breath of fresh air. She was almost suffocated behind the
mask.

Then, while she stood there cooling off, she remembered the
big pan of candy Gladys had set outdoors to harden, and
hastened out to bring it in. Someone was walking across the
yard, and as Migwan looked up, startled, the light which
streamed out of the kitchen door fell full upon the black face
of Hercules. Migwan stood still, clutching the pan of candy
mechanically, her eyes wide open with surprise. Hercules
stood still too, and stood staring at her with an expression of
dismay. He no longer had the monk’s costume on.

“How did you get out here?” Migwan asked curiously.
“You’re inside—at the party.”

Hercules laughed nervously, and Migwan noticed that his jaw [154]
was trembling.

“What’s the matter, Hercules?” she asked. “What’s
happened?”

“Now, missy, missy—” began Hercules, and Migwan could
hear his teeth chatter, while his eyes began to roll strangely in
his head.

“What’s the matter, are you sick?” asked Migwan in alarm.

“Yes’m, dat’s it, dat’s it,” chattered Hercules, finding his
voice. “I’m awful sick. I had to come outside.”

“But I left you sitting in there a minute ago with your suit on,”
said Migwan wonderingly, “and you didn’t come out after me.
Did you go out of the front door?”

“Yes’m, dat’s it,” said Hercules hastily. “I come out de front
doah an’ roun’ dat way.”

A sudden impulse made Migwan look down the drive,
covered with a light fall of snow and gleaming white in the
glare of the street light.

“But there aren’t any footprints in the snow,” she said in
surprise. “Your footprints are coming from the barn.” A
nameless uneasiness filled her. What was Hercules doing out
here?

“Yes’m,” repeated Hercules vacuously, “I came from de
barn.”

Migwan stared at him in surprise. Was he out of his mind? [155]

“Hercules,” she began severely, but never finished the
sentence, for the old man swayed, clutched at the empty air,
and fell heavily in the snow at her feet.

[156]

CHAPTER XIV
AN UNINVITED GUEST

Migwan ran into the house and burst breathlessly in upon the
merrymakers.

“Nyoda!” she cried in a frightened voice, “Hercules is—”
Then she stopped as though she had seen a ghost, for there sat
Hercules in his monk’s costume, just as he had been all
evening!

“What’s the matter?” asked Nyoda in alarm, seeing her pale
face and staring eyes.

Migwan clutched her convulsively. “There’s a man outside,”
she panted, “that looks just like Hercules, and when I spoke to
him he fell down on the ground!”

In an instant all was pandemonium. Everybody rushed for the
kitchen door and ran out into the yard, where the figure of a
man lay dark upon the snow. Sherry tore off his mask and
flung it away, and bending over the prostrate man turned his
flashlight full on his face.

“It is Hercules!” he exclaimed in astonishment.

“Is he dead?” faltered Migwan.

“No, he’s breathing, but he’s unconscious,” said Sherry. “It’s [157]
his heart, I suppose. He’s been having spells with it lately.
Run into the house, somebody, and get that leather covered
flask in the medicine chest.”

Justice raced in for the flask and Sherry raised Hercules’ head
from the ground and poured some of the brandy between his
lips. In a few minutes the old man began to stir and mutter,
and Nyoda, holding his wrist, felt his pulse come up. They
carried him to his room in the stable and laid him down on his
bed, and Nyoda found the heart drops which Hercules had
been taking for some time.

“But where is the one I thought was Hercules—the one with
the monk’s suit on?” cried Migwan, after the first fright about
Hercules had subsided.

Sherry and the boys looked at one another dumfounded. None
of them had known, as Migwan did, that the brown robe and
cowl presumably covered Hercules. They looked about for the
brown figure that had moved so unobtrusively amongst them
that evening. It had vanished.

“He’s gone!” shouted Sherry excitedly. “There’s something
queer going on here.”

The monk was certainly not in the house any longer, and there
were no footprints in the snow outside the house.

“Did he fly away?” asked Sherry in perplexity.

Justice jumped up with a great exclamation. “The secret [158]
passage!” he shouted, “he’s gone down the secret passage!”

They flew back inside the house to the stair landing, half
expecting to find it standing open, but it was closed and
looked perfectly natural. Sherry grasped the post, the landing
slid out and the four went down the ladder. Justice gave a
triumphant exclamation when he reached the bottom. “The
barricades are taken down! He did come this way!”

They hurried through the door into the passage, half expecting
to see a figure flying along ahead of them, but the passage

was empty and no sound of a footfall broke the silence. They
searched the place thoroughly, but nowhere did they find their
man hidden. Behind the chest in the cave, however, Justice
pounced upon something with a shout. It was the long brown
costume that had been worn by the monk at the party.

[159]

CHAPTER XV
HERCULES’ STORY

When Sherry and the boys returned from their fruitless chase
Hercules had regained consciousness, and was telling Nyoda
in a shaking voice that he felt better, but he was still too weak
to sit up.

“Mah time’s come, Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” he said mournfully. “I’se a
goner.”

“Nonsense,” said Nyoda brightly. “You’ll be up and around in
the morning. The doctor that gave you this medicine said
you’d have these spells once in a while, but the heart drops
would always bring you round all right.”

“I’se a-goin’ dis time,” he repeated. “I’se had a token.
Dreamed about runnin’ water las’ night, an’ dat’s a sure sign.
Ain’t no surer sign den dat anywhere, Mis’ ’Lizbeth.”

“Nonsense,” said Nyoda again. “You shouldn’t believe in
signs. Tell us what happened to-night and that’ll make you
feel better.”

“Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” said the old man solemnly, “I’se goin’ ter tell [160]
de whole thing. I wasn’t goin’ ter say nothin’ a-tall, but gon’
ter die, like I am, I’se skeered ter go an’ not tell you-all.”

He took a sip from the tumbler at his hand and cleared his
throat.

“Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” he began, “dat weren’t no burglar dat git
inter de house dat night. You jus’ lissen till I tell you de whole

bizness. Dat day you-all find dem footprints on de stairs I
mos’ had a fit, ’case I knowed somebody’d got in th’u de
secrut passidge.”

“But you said you didn’t know anything about a secret
passage,” said Nyoda, in surprise.

“Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” said Hercules deprecatingly, evidently urged
on to open confession by the knowledge that death had him
by the coat tail, “I said dat, but it weren’t true. Ole Marse
Jasper, he say once if I ever tell about dat secrut passidge de
debbel’d come in th’u it an’ carry me off, an’ I’se bin skeered
even ter say secrut passidge.

“Dere weren’t nobody livin’ dat knew about dat secrut
passidge, an’ when I sees dem footprints I reckons it mus’ be
de debbel himself. But yestidday I sees a man hangin’ roun’
behin’ de barn, an’ I axs him what he wants, an’ he sticks up
two fingers an’ makes a sign dat I uster know yeahs ago. I
looks at de man agin, an’ I says, ‘Foh de Lawd, am de dead
come ter life?’ ’Case it’s Marse Jasper’s ole frien’, Tad
Phillips.”

A sharp exclamation of astonishment went around the circle [161]
of listeners.

“He’s an ole man, an’ his hair’s nearly white, but I see it were
Marse Tad, all right.

“‘I hearn you-all was dead,’ I says ter him, but Marse Tad, he
say no, people all thought he’s dead an’ he let ’em think so,
’case he cain’t never meet up wif his ole frien’s no more. You
see, Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” he threw in an explanation, “Marsh Tad
he gave some sick folks poison instead of medicine, an’ dey
die, an’ he go ’way, outen de country, an’ bimeby de papers
say he’s dead an’ his wife’s dead. But dey ain’t; it’s a mistake,
but he don’ tell nobody, an’ bimeby he come back, him an’ his
wife. Dey take another name, an’ dey goes to a town whar

nobody knows ’em. Bimeby a baby girl gits born an’ his wife
she dies.

“Marse Tad he ain’t never bin himself since he gave dem
folks dat poison; he cain’t fergit it a-tall. It pester him so he
cain’t work, an’ he cain’t sleep, an’ he cain’t never laugh no
more. He give up bein’ a doctor ’case he say he cain’t trust
himself no more. He get so low in his mind when his wife die
dat he think he’ll die too, an’ he sends de baby away to some
folks dat wants one.

“But he don’t die; he jest worry along, but he’s powerful low [162]
in his mind all de time. He think all de time ’bout dem people
he poisoned. Fin’lly he say he’ll go ’way agin; he’ll go back
ter South America. But before he goes, he gits ter thinkin’
he’d like ter see his chile once. He fin’s out dat de people he
sent her to ain’t never got her; dat she’s with somebody else,
in a place called Millvale, in dis very state. He go to Millvale,
an’ he look in th’u de winder, an’ he see her. She’s the livin’
image of his dead wife, light hair an’ dark eyes an’ all.

“He never let her know he’s her father, ’case he feel so
terrible ’bout dem folks he poisoned dat he thinks he ain’t no
good, a-tall, an’ mustn’t speak to her. But he’s so wild to see
her dat he hang aroun’ in dat town, workin’ odd jobs, an’ at
night lookin’ in de window where she sits.

“Den suddenly de folks she’s wif up an’ move away, an’ he
cain’t see her no more. He jest cain’t stand it. He finds out dat
dey come here to Oakwood, an’ he comes too. But he don’t
know which house she live in and he cain’t find her. He gets
to wanderin’ around, and one night he comes to de ole big
house he uster live in, way up on Main Street Hill. It’s all dark
and tumble down, and he thinks he’ll just go in once and look
around. He goes in, and inside he hears a voice singin’. It
sounds jest like his wife’s voice. She were a beautiful singer,
Mis’ ’Lizbeth—de Virginia nightingale, folks uster call her.
He stands dere in dat dark, empty house, lissenin’ ter dat

voice and he thinks it’s his wife’s sperrit singin’ ter him. She’s
singin’ a song she uster sing when she were young, somethin’
about larks.”

Katherine made a convulsive movement, and her heart began [163]
to pound strangely.

“Den he say a lady come in de front door and he gits scairt
and runs out.”

Katherine’s head began to whirl, and she kept silence with an
effort.

“He stand around outside for a while and bimeby an
autermobile comes along and de folks carries a girl out of de
house and takes her away. He sees de girl when dey’s bringin’
her out, and he knows she’s his. He watches where dat
autermobile goes and it comes here.”

The old man paused for a minute and looked around at the
group at his bedside, all hanging spellbound upon his words.

“Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” he said dramatically, “little Missy Sylvia am
Tad Phillips’ little girl!”

When the sensation caused by his surprising story had
subsided, Hercules continued:

“He jest have ter see her before he go ’way, and he remember [164]
about de secrut passidge th’u de hill dat he and Marse Jasper
uster play in. He come th’u in de night an get inter de house,
but he cain’t find her. He see dere’s people sleepin’ in all de
spare rooms dat uster be empty, and he cain’t go lookin’
round. He left dem footprints on de stairs, Mis’ ’Lizbeth; it
ain’t blood; it’s paint. Dey’s a ole jar of paint down dere in de
passidge, and he knocks it over and it breaks and he steps
inter de paint.”

“But Hercules,” interrupted Sherry, “how did he get into the
passage from the outside? The way is blocked.”

“Dere’s another way ter git out,” replied Hercules, “before
you come to de doah down dere. I disremember jest how it is,
but it comes up th’u de floah of dat little summerhouse down
de hillside. De boys fixed it up after de other way was
blocked.

“When I find Marse Tad out behind de barn he’s feelin’ sick,
and I brought him in and put him in my bed.”

A light flashed through Nyoda’s mind. “Was that what you
wanted the hot coffee for yesterday?” she asked.

“Yessum,” replied Hercules meekly. Then he continued:

“Marse Tad he wanter see little missy so bad I promise ter
help him. When you-all gives me dat invite to de party and
says I gotter wear a mask I fixes it up wif Marse Tad to put on
de maskrade suit after I get it and go in and see little missy.
While he’s inside I stays outside. Den all of a sudden out
come Missy Camphor Girl and sees me and screeches dat she
jest left me inside. I got so scairt I jest nat’chly collapsed.
Dat’s all.”

“Your friend Tad ran out through the secret passage and [165]
disappeared,” said Sherry.

“He’s gone on de train by dis time,” said Hercules, his voice
getting weak again. “He was goin’ on de ten-ten. He’s goin’
ter sail Noo Year’s Day.”

“Whew!” whistled Sherry. “What a drama has been going on
right under our very noses, and we knowing nothing about it!
Sylvia the child of Uncle Jasper’s old friend! And by what a
narrow chance we came upon her!”

Into this excitement came Migwan, who had been in the
house with Sylvia.

“Sylvia’s sick,” she said in a troubled voice to Nyoda. “Her
head is hot and her hands are like ice, and she’s been
coughing hard for the last half hour. She couldn’t hold her
head up for another minute, and I put her to bed.”

“I was afraid she was going to be sick,” said Nyoda. “She
been coughing off and on all day long, and her cheeks were so
bright to-night, it seemed to me she looked feverish. I’m
afraid the excitement of the party was too much for her. Don’t
anyone breathe a word of what Hercules has told us just now,
she must be kept quiet.”

They all promised.

In the moment when they stood looking at Hercules and [166]
waiting for Nyoda to start back to the house, Slim suddenly
thought of something.

“If it wasn’t a thief that came in, why did he take your
blanket?” he asked.

Hercules answered, addressing himself to Nyoda. “Marse Tad
didn’t take dat blanket, Mis’ ’Lizbeth. I took dat blanket. But I
didn’t steal it. I jest borried it. Borried it to wrap around
Marse Tad. I couldn’t ask you-all fer one, ’case you-all knew I
had plenty, and I was skeered you’d be gettin’ ’spicious. I saw
you-all puttin’ dat ole blanket away in dat drawer a long time
ago, and I thought you-all never used it and would never
know if it was gone fer a day. It ain’t hurt a might, Mis’
’Lizbeth, dere it is, over in de corner. How’s you-all know it
was gone?” he asked, in comical amazement.

Nyoda explained, and soothed his agitation about the blanket
in a few words.

The strain of telling his story had worn him out and he lay
back and began to gasp feebly.

“Everybody go back to the house,” commanded Nyoda, “and
let Hercules rest.”

“I’se a-goin’ dis time,” murmured the old man. “I’se goin’ ter
Abram’s bosom. Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ fer to carry
me home!”

“Nonsense!” said Nyoda, “you’ll be all right in the morning,”
but she called Sherry back and asked him to stay with
Hercules the rest of the night.

Then she went back to the house and found Sylvia burning [167]
with fever and too hoarse to speak. She applied the usual
remedies for a hard cold and rose from bed to see how she
was every hour throughout the night. Morning brought no
improvement, however, and with a worried look on her face
Nyoda went downstairs and telephoned the doctor.

[168]

CHAPTER XVI
A LETTER

Sylvia’s illness increased during the day; her fever rose
rapidly and the coughing spells grew more violent and more
frequent. Nyoda turned Hercules over to Sherry and Justice
and gave Sylvia her whole attention. No whisper of the
exciting news that rocked the family was allowed to come to
her ears for fear of its effect upon the fever.

“Bronchitis,” the doctor had said whom Nyoda had hastily
summoned, “watch out for pneumonia.”

The Winnebagos roamed the house, anxious and excited,
talking in low tones about the amazing turn of events, and
listening eagerly for Nyoda to come out of the sick room.
Slim and the Captain shifted uneasily from one chair to
another until Katherine begged them to go out and take a long
walk.

“You make me nervous, trying so hard to keep quiet,” she said
to Slim.

The boys went out.

Migwan made some lemon jelly for Hercules and Sahwah
carried it out to him.

“Does he still believe he’s dying?” asked Katherine when [169]
Sahwah returned to the house.

“He’s surer than ever,” replied Sahwah. “He’s making the
arrangements for his funeral. He’s sorry now that he didn’t

join the Knights of Pythias when he had the chance so he
could have had a band.”

“Is he really as sick as that?” asked Hinpoha in a scared voice.

“Sherry says he isn’t,” said Sahwah, “but Hercules insists that
he won’t live till morning. Sherry’s getting sort of anxious
about him himself, Justice told me outside the barn. Sherry
said that Hercules believed so firmly in signs he’d just
naturally worry himself to death before long, if he didn’t stop
thinking about the ‘token’ he’d had. People do that
sometimes. Hercules’ heart is bad and believing that his end
was near might bring on a fatal spell.”

“Can’t we do something to make him stop thinking about it?”
asked Migwan. “Remember the Dark of the Moon Society,
Sahwah, that you got up to bring Katherine out of a fit of the
blues that time up on Ellen’s Isle?”

“We can’t do anything like that now, though,” said Sahwah.
“The foolish things we do wouldn’t have any effect upon him
at all.”

“I guess you’re right,” said Migwan with a sigh, after various [170]
things had been suggested and immediately abandoned. “But I
wish we could do something to rouse him from the dumps
he’s fallen into,” she added with a sigh. “It seems as though
we Winnebagos ought to be equal to the emergency.”

“You might read something to him,” said Katherine
desperately, after several minutes of hard thinking had
sprouted no ideas. “Read him ‘The Hound of the
Baskervilles.’ That will gently divert his thoughts. It’s
absolutely the biggest thriller that was ever written. Judge
Dalrymple bought it on the train once, when he was going
from Milwaukee to some little town in Wisconsin, and he got
so absorbed in it that he never came to until the train pulled
into St. Paul, hundreds of miles beyond his stop. You might

read him one chapter a day and he won’t think of dying before
he knows how it is coming out. It’ll be a sort of Arabian
Nights performance.”

“Where will I get the book?” asked Migwan.

“I saw it in one of the cases in the library,” replied Katherine.
“It must have belonged to Mr. Carver’s housekeeper, for I’m
sure he never owned such a book.”

“All right,” said Migwan, “let’s take it out and tell Justice to
read it to Hercules.”

Katherine found the book on the library shelf and opened it to [171]
a picture she wanted the girls to see. As she turned the pages a
letter fell out and dropped to the floor. She stopped to pick it
up, and could not help reading the address. It was addressed
to Mr. Jasper Carver, Esquire, and had never been opened.

“Here’s a letter for Uncle Jasper that must have come after he
died,” said Katherine, “for it hasn’t been opened.” Nyoda
came into the room just then, and she handed it to her.

Nyoda looked at the date. “April 12, 1917,” she read. “That’s
the very day Uncle Jasper died. This letter must have come
while he lay dead in the house here, and in the confusion
somebody put it into that book, where it has stayed all this
while. I opened all the other letters that came after his death
and took care of the matters they concerned. I hope this isn’t a
bill—the creditor will think we are poor business people not
to reply.” She reached for the letter opener and slit the
envelope.

Inside was a letter, not a bill, written in a cramped, shaky
hand upon coarse notepaper. It was dated from a small town
in New York State. Nyoda carried it over to the window and
read it:

“Mr. Jasper Carver, Esq., [172]

Oakwood, Pa.

Dear Sir:

I take the liberty of writing to you, for you are the only
one I can find a trace of who was a friend of the late Dr.
Sidney Phillips. I found a card with your name and
address on the floor of his room after he left the army
post at Ft. Andrews, and to you I am committing the task
of clearing his name from a disgrace which has unjustly
been fastened upon it. He is dead, and the wrong can
never be righted to him, but for the sake of his friends
and relatives his memory must not remain dishonored.

This letter is at once an explanation and a confession. I
was a Captain of Infantry at Ft. Andrews when Dr.
Phillips came there as army surgeon. There was another
officer there, a sneaking, underhand sort of chap with
whom I was having constant trouble. Upon one occasion
he committed a grave breach of military discipline, but
managed to throw the blame upon me and I was deprived
of my captain’s commission and reduced to the ranks,
besides doing time in the guard house.

I brooded upon my wrong until I was ready to murder [173]
the man who had brought it upon me. At the time of the
typhoid epidemic, matters were in bad shape at Ft.
Andrews. That was before the days of Red Cross nurses,
and many of the boys had to turn in and nurse their
comrades. I was detailed to help Dr. Phillips. The man
who had ruined me was down with the fever. Ever since I
had been reduced to the ranks he had taunted me openly
with my disgrace and even as he lay in bed he made
insulting remarks when I brought him his medicine.
Finally in a mad rage I decided to be revenged upon him
once and forever. I put a deadly poison into the dose Dr.

Phillips had just mixed for him, slipping it in while the
doctor was out of the room for a moment. I thought the
dose was intended for him alone, but to my horror it was
given to a dozen men, and they all died.

The whole country became stirred up about it, and such
abuse was hurled at Dr. Phillips as no man ever suffered
before. It was supposed that he had carelessly mistaken
the poison for another harmless ingredient. I dared not
confess that it was I who had done it, for in my case it
would mean trial for first degree murder, while with the
doctor it was simply a case of accident, and would blow
over in time.

The doctor left the Post, a broken-down, ruined man, and [174]
died of yellow fever in Cuba not long after.

I have kept the secret for twenty-five years, suffering
tortures of conscience, but not brave enough to confess.
Now, however, I am in the last stages of a fatal disease
and cannot live a week longer. By the time this reaches
you I shall be gone. Take this confession and publish it to
the world, that tardy justice may be done the memory of
Dr. Phillips. He was innocent of the whole thing. May
God forgive me!

George Ingram.”

The confession was witnessed by two doctors whose
signatures appeared under his.

“He didn’t do it! Tad didn’t do it!”

The amazed cry rang through the library, as the Winnebagos
and Nyoda clutched each other convulsively.

“We must bring him back!” said Nyoda, and ran out to the
barn to Sherry with the letter in her hand.

An hour later Sherry and Hercules sat drinking strong, hot [175]
coffee at the kitchen table while Nyoda hastily packed
traveling bags for them. Hercules had forgotten all about
dying. When he heard the news in the letter he sprang from
bed and began dressing with greater speed than he had ever
done in his life. The train for New York went in two hours and
he and Sherry must catch it if they hoped to reach the steamer
before she sailed. There was no way of reaching Tad by
telegraph. They did not know what name he was going under,
nor the name of the boat on which he was to sail. The only
thing they could do was rush to New York, find out which
boat was sailing for South America on the first, go on board
and search for Tad. Only Hercules would be able to identify
him. Hercules rose to the occasion.

“We certainly gave Hercules something to make him forget
his superstition,” said Katherine, sitting down on the sink to
collect her thoughts after the meteoric flight of the two men
from the house.

“We certainly did,” said Migwan, trembling with excitement.

A racking cough sounded through the house. “Sh, Sylvia’s
worse,” said Migwan, putting her fingers to her lips. “Don’t
anybody go near her, or she’ll notice how excited you are.
How on earth does Nyoda manage to keep so calm when she’s
with her?”

“If Sylvia should get pneumonia—” began Sahwah, and then
chocked over the dreadful possibility.

“If they only bring Mr. Phillips back in time,” said Katherine, [176]
as if echoing the thing that lay in Sahwah’s thoughts.

“Don’t say such dreadful things,” said Hinpoha, with starting
tears.

“Maybe they won’t be able to find him at all,” said Katherine
dubiously.

“They must, they must,” said Sahwah, with dry lips.

“They must,” echoed the others, and hardly daring to think,
they entered upon the trying period of waiting.

[177]

CHAPTER XVII
WAITING

“How is Sylvia?” Katherine’s voice was husky with anxiety.

Nyoda looked grave over the tray she was carrying down to
the kitchen. “No better yet; a little worse this morning, if
anything. Her fever has gone up one degree during the night
and she is coughing more than ever.”

“Is it going to be pneumonia?” asked Katherine steadily, her
eyes searching Nyoda’s face.

“Not if I can help it,” replied Nyoda, in a tone of grim
determination, the light of battle sparkling in her eyes.
Nevertheless, there was a note of worry in her voice that
struck cold fear into Katherine’s heart, stoutly optimistic as
she was. What if Sylvia should die before her father came
back? The other Winnebagos, clustering around Nyoda to hear
the latest news from Sylvia’s bedside, stood hushed and
solemn. Nyoda set the tray down on the table and leaned
wearily against the door, her eyes heavy from lack of sleep.
Instantly Migwan was at her side, all solicitude.

“Go, lie down and sleep awhile, Nyoda,” she urged. “You’ve [178]
been up nearly all night. I can look after Sylvia for a few
hours—I know how. Go to bed now and we’ll bring some
breakfast up to you, and then you can go to sleep.” Putting her
arm around Nyoda she led her upstairs and tucked her into
bed, smoothing the covers over her with gentle, motherly
hands, while the girls below prepared a dainty breakfast tray.

“Nice—child!” murmured Nyoda, from the depths of her
pillow. “Nice—old—Migwan! Always—taking—care—of—
someone!” Her voice trailed off in a tired whisper, and by the
time the breakfast tray arrived she was sound asleep.

Sylvia also slept most of the time that Migwan watched
beside her, a fitful slumber broken by many coughing spells
and intervals of difficult breathing. Never had Sylvia seemed
so beautiful and so princesslike to Migwan as when she lay
there sleeping in the big four-poster bed, her shining curls
spread out on the pillow and her fever-flushed cheeks glowing
like roses. Lying there so still, with her delicate little white
hand resting on top of the coverlet, she brought to Migwan’s
mind Goethe’s description of the beautiful, dead Mignon, in
whom the vivid tints of life had been counterfeited by skillful
hands. To Migwan’s lively imagination it seemed that Sylvia
was another Mignon, this child of lofty birth and breeding
also cast by accident among humble surroundings, and
singing her way into the hearts of people. Would it be with her
as it had been with Mignon; would she never be reunited in
life with her own people? The resemblance between the two
lives struck Migwan as a prophecy and her heart chilled with
the conviction that Sylvia was going to die. Tears stole down
her cheek as she saw, in her mind’s eye, the father coming in
just too late, and their beautiful, radiant Sylvia lying cold and
still, her joyful song forever hushed.

Migwan’s melancholy mood lasted all morning, even after [179]
Nyoda came back and sent her out of the sick-room, and she
sat staring into the library fire in gloomy silence, quite unlike
her busy, cheery self. The day crept by on leaden feet. The
hands of the clock seemed to be suffering from paralysis; they
stayed so long in one spot. Ordinarily clock hands at Carver
House went whirling around their dials like pinwheels, and
the chimes were continually striking the hour. Now each
separate minute seemed to have brought its knitting and come
to stay.

“No word from Sherry and Hercules yet!” sighed Sahwah
impatiently, as the whistles blew half past eleven.

“Give them a chance,” said Katherine, her voice proceeding
in muffled tones from the depths of the music cabinet, which,
in order to pass away the time, she had undertaken to set to
rights.

“They’ve had plenty of chance by this time to get down on [180]
board the boat,” returned Sahwah, getting up from her chair
and pacing restlessly up and down the room. Sahwah was not
equipped by nature to bear suspense calmly; under the stress
of inaction she threatened to fly to pieces.

Katherine looked up with a faint smile from the heaps of sheet
music lying on the floor around her.

“Come and help me sort this music,” she advised mildly, “it’ll
settle your mind somewhat, besides giving me a lift. I’m
afraid I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. This is one grand
mess of pieces without covers and covers without pieces. You
might get all the covers in order for me.”

Sahwah gazed without enthusiasm upon the littered floor.
“Sort music—ugh!” she said, with a grimace and a disgusted
shrug of her shoulders. She picked her way to the other end of
the library and stood staring restlessly out of the window.

It was a dreary, dull day. The Christmas snow had vanished in
a thaw, and a chilly rain beat against the window panes with a
dismal, melancholy sound. The three boys fidgeted from one
end of the house to the other, but could not get up enough
steam to go out for a hike. Slim and the Captain drummed
chopsticks on the piano, and Justice tried to keep up with
them on the harp, until Migwan ordered them to be quiet so
Sylvia could sleep, after which they sat in preternatural
silence before the library fire, listlessly turning over the pages
of magazines which they did not even pretend to read. The

atmosphere of the house got so on everybody’s nerves that the
snapping of a log in the fireplace almost caused a panic.

The clock struck twelve, and Migwan, rousing herself from [181]
her preoccupation, went out into the kitchen to prepare lunch,
aided by Gladys and Hinpoha, while Sahwah continued to
pace the floor and Katherine went on nervously fitting covers
to pieces and pieces to covers, her ear ever on the alert for the
sound of the telephone bell. Justice and Slim and the Captain,
grown weary of their own company, trooped out into the
kitchen after the girls, declaring they were going to get lunch,
and it was not long before the inevitable reaction had set in,
and pent-up spirits began to find vent in irrepressible hilarity.

Protests were useless. In vain Migwan flourished her big iron
spoon and ordered them out. Justice calmly took her apron
and cap away from her and announced that he was going to be
Chief Cook. Tying the apron around him wrong side out, and
setting the cap backward on his head, he held the spoon aloft
like a Roman short-sword, and striking an attitude in imitation
of Spartacus addressing the Gladiators, he declaimed
feelingly:

“Ye call me Chef, and ye do well to call him Chef [182]
Who for seven long years has camped in summertime,
And made his coffee out of rain when there was no spring
water handy,
And mixed his biscuits in the wash-basin,
Because the baking-pan no longer was.

But I was not always thus, an unhired butcher,
A savage Chef of still more savage menus——”

The teakettle suddenly boiled over with a loud hissing and
sizzling, and the impassioned orator jumped as though he had
been shot; then, collecting himself, he rushed over and picked

the kettle from the stove and stood holding it in his hand,
uncertain what to do with it.

“Set it down on the back of the stove!” commanded Migwan.
“A great cook you are! Even Slim would know enough to do
that!”

“Thanks for the implied compliment,” said Slim stiffly.

“Slim ought to be Chief Cook,” said the Captain. “He’s fat.
Chief cooks are always fat.”

“Right you are!” cried Justice, taking off the apron and tying
it around Slim as far as it would go.

“But I can’t cook!” protested Slim.

“That doesn’t make any difference,” replied Justice. “You [183]
look the part, and that’s all that’s needed. Looks are
everything, these days.”

He perched the cap rakishly on top of Slim’s head and stood
off a little distance to eye the effect critically.

“Nobody could tell the difference between you and the Chef
of the Waldorf,” was his verdict.

Indeed, Slim, with his full moon face shining out under the
cap, and the apron tied around his extensive waistline, looked
just like the pictured cooks in the spaghetti advertisements.

“Isn’t he the perfect Chef, though?” continued Justice
admiringly. “He must have been born with an iron spoon in
his hand, instead of a gold one in his mouth.” Then, turning to
Slim and bowing low before him, he chanted solemnly, “Go
forth, go forth, Lars Porsena, go forth, beloved of heaven! All
the other cooks will drown themselves in their soup kettles in
despair when they see you coming. All hail the Chief Cook!”

“But I can’t cook!” repeated Slim helplessly.

“You don’t have to,” Justice reassured him. “Chief Cooks
don’t have to cook; they just direct the others. Behold, we
stand ready to obey your lightest command.”

“All right,” said Slim, “suppose you pare the potatoes.”

“Ask me anything but that!” Justice begged him. “I never get [184]
the eyes cut out, and then when they’re on my plate they look
up at me reproachfully, like this——”

Justice screwed up his face and rolled his eyes into a grimace
that convulsed the girls.

“No, you pare the potatoes, Slim,” he continued. “The Chief
Cook always pares the potatoes himself. It’s too delicate a job
to entrust to a subordinate.”

Slim had his mouth open to protest, and Sahwah and
Katherine, who had just wandered out into the kitchen, were
in a gale of merriment over Slim’s costume, when the
doorbell rang and a messengerboy passed in a telegram.

They all pressed around eagerly while Katherine read it. It
was from Sherry:

“South America boat sailed yesterday. Dr. Phillips gone.
Can get no clue. Coming home to-night.”

A long, tragic “Oh-h-h!” from Hinpoha broke the stricken
silence which had fallen on the group at the reading of the
message.

“Tough luck,” said the Captain feelingly, and Justice repeated,
“Tough luck,” like an echo.

The Winnebagos glanced uncertainly toward the stairway and
looked at each other inquiringly.

“Somebody go up and call Nyoda,” said Katherine. [185]

Just at that moment the door of Sylvia’s room opened and
Nyoda came running downstairs with light, swift footsteps,
her face wreathed in smiles.

“Sylvia’s better,” she called, before she was halfway down.
“The fever left her while she was sleeping, and her
temperature is normal. The danger of pneumonia is over. I’m
so relieved.” She skipped down the last of the stairs like a
young girl.

Then she caught sight of the telegram in Katherine’s hand,
and sensed the atmosphere of depression that prevailed in the
lower hall. She knew the truth before a word was spoken, and
composed herself to meet it.

“They were too late?” she said quietly, as she joined the
group, and held out her hand for the bit of yellow paper.

“Poor Sylvia!” she exclaimed huskily. “She would soon be
well enough to hear the news—and now there is nothing to
tell her. If we had only found that letter a day sooner!”

[186]

CHAPTER XVIII
KATHERINE GOES TO THE CITY

“Does anyone want to go in to the city this afternoon?” asked
Nyoda, as they rose from luncheon. It had been a rather silent,
dispirited meal, and quickly gotten over with. “I had planned
to go in and take a few things to Mrs. Deane to-day, but now
it will be impossible for me to get away. Sylvia has been
fretting about her aunt and I think someone ought to go.”

“I’ll go,” said Katherine readily, her spirits rising at this
prospect of action. The suspense of the morning, ending in
such a disappointment, had begun to react upon her in a fit of
the blues. Sahwah and Hinpoha, with Slim and the Captain,
had planned during luncheon to go roller-skating that
afternoon, but as Katherine could not roller-skate the plan
held no attraction for her. Justice had promised Sherry that he
would go over the lighting system on his car while he was
away and was planning to spend the whole afternoon in the
garage; Migwan was going to sit with Sylvia to give Nyoda a
chance to rest; and Gladys had a sore throat which made her
disinclined to talk. Taking it by and large, Katherine had
anticipated a rather dismal afternoon, a prospect which was
pleasantly altered by Nyoda’s request.

“You can make the two o’clock train if you start [187]
immediately,” continued Nyoda, “and the five-fifteen will
bring you back in time for dinner. I have the things for Mrs.
Deane all ready.”

Katherine rose with alacrity and put on her hat and coat. “Any
errands while I am in town?” she asked, hunting for her

umbrella in the stair closet.

“None that I can think of,” replied Nyoda, after wrinkling her
brow for a moment, “unless you want to stop at the jeweller’s
and get my watch. It’s been there for several weeks, being
regulated.”

“All right,” said Katherine, writing down the name of the
jeweller in her memorandum book. “You’ll notice I’m not
trusting my memory this time,” she remarked laughingly.

“I’ll take the five-fifteen train back,” she called over her
shoulder as she went out of the front door.

“Be careful how you hold that package!” Nyoda called
warningly after her. “There’s a glass of jelly in it that’ll
upset!”

Gingerly holding the package by the string, Katherine picked
her way through the rapidly widening puddles on the
sidewalks to the station. By some miracle of good luck the
package was still right side up when she arrived at the
hospital, and she breathed an audible sigh of relief when it
was at last safely out of her hands.

She found Mrs. Deane a frail, kindly-faced woman, bearing [188]
her discomfort cheerfully, but, nevertheless, lonesome in this
strange hospital ward and very grateful for any attention
shown her. Katherine began, as she described it, to “express
her sympathy quietly and in a ladylike manner,” and ended up
by delivering her famous “Wimmen’s Rights” speech for the
benefit of the whole ward. She finally escaped, after her sixth
encore, and fetched up breathless on the sidewalk, only to
discover that she had left her umbrella behind, and before she
retrieved it she had to give her speech all over again, for the
benefit of an old lady who had been asleep during the first
performance.

There still being three-quarters of an hour before train time
after she had called at the jewellers for Nyoda’s watch,
Katherine dropped into a smart little tea-room to while away
the intervening moments with a cup of tea and a dish of her
favorite shrimp salad. As she nibbled leisurely at a dainty
round of brown bread and idly watched the throngs coming
and going at the tables around her, a shrill cry of delight
suddenly rang out above the hum of voices and the clatter of
dishes.

“Katherine! Katherine Adams!”

Katherine looked up to see an animated little figure in a [189]
beaver coat and fur hat coming toward her through the crowd.

“Katherine Adams!” repeated the voice, “don’t you know
me?”

“Why—Veronica! Veronica Lehar!” gasped Katherine in
amazement. “What are you doing here? I thought you were in
New York.” She caught the little brown-gloved hands in her
own big ones and squeezed them until Veronica winced.

“Katherine! Dear old K! How I’ve missed you!” Veronica
cried rapturously, and drawing her hands from Katherine’s
grip she flung her arms impulsively around her neck,
regardless of the curious stares of the onlookers.

“Let them stare!” she murmured stoutly, seeing Katherine’s
face flush with embarrassment as she encountered the
quizzical gaze of a keen-eyed young man at the next table. “If
they hadn’t seen their beloved K for nearly two years they’d
want to hug her, too.”

She released Katherine after a final squeeze, and stood staring
at her with a puzzled expression on her vivacious face.

“What’s the matter?” asked Katherine wonderingly. “Have I
got something on wrong-side before?”

“That’s just what is the matter,” replied Veronica, her [190]
bewilderment also manifesting itself in her tone. “You haven’t
anything on wrong-side before. You don’t look natural. What
has happened to you?”

“Nothing,” replied Katherine, laughing, “and—everything.
I’ve just learned that clothes do matter, after all.”

“Why, Katherine Adams, you’re perfectly stunning!”
exclaimed Veronica in sincere admiration. “That shade of blue
in your dress—it was simply made for you.”

“I just happened to get it by accident,” said Katherine
deprecatingly, almost sheepishly, yet thrilled through and
through with pleasure at Veronica’s words of appreciation. It
was no small triumph to be admired by Veronica, whose
highly artistic nature made her extremely critical of people’s
appearance.

“How I used to make your artistic eye water!” said Katherine
laughingly. “It’s a wonder you stood me as well as you did.”

“It was not I who had to ‘stand’ you, but you who had to
‘stand’ me,” said Veronica seriously. “In spite of your loose
ends you were—what do you call it? ‘all wool and a yard
wide,’ but I was the original prune.” Veronica, while a perfect
master of literary English, still faltered deliciously over slang
phrases.

Katherine, as usual, steered away from the subject of [191]
Veronica’s former attitude toward her. When a thing was over
and done with, Katherine argued, there was no use of
dragging it out into the light again.

“You haven’t told me yet how you happen to be here in this
tea-room this afternoon,” she said, by way of changing the
subject, “when you told us, over your own signature, that you
would have to stay in New York all this week. What do you
mean,” she finished with mock gravity, “by deceiving us so?”

“I have to play at a concert here in town to-night,” explained
Veronica. “It will be necessary for me to be back at the
Conservatory to-morrow, and am returning by a late train to-
night. I didn’t know about it when I wrote to Nyoda, or I
should have insisted on her coming in for the concert and
bringing all the girls along. It’s an emergency case; I’m just
filling in on the program in place of a ’cello soloist who was
taken suddenly ill with influenza. The concert managers sent a
hurry call to Martini last night, asking him to send over the
first student who happened to be handy, and as I happened to
be taking a lesson from Martini at the time, I was the lucky
one. I just came over this afternoon.”

Veronica modestly suppressed the fact that it had been the
great Martini himself who had been urgently requested to play
at the concert, but having a previous engagement, had chosen
her, out of the whole Conservatory, to play in his stead.

“My aunt is here with me,” continued Veronica. “She’s over at [192]
that table in the far corner behind that palm. I suppose she is
wondering what has become of me by this time. When I saw
you over here I just jumped up and ran off without a word of
explanation. She’s probably eaten up my nut rolls by this
time, too; they were just being served when I rushed away.
Come on over and see her.”

Katherine followed Veronica through the crowded room to the
far corner, where, at a little table beneath a softly shaded wall
lamp Veronica’s aunt, Mrs. Lehar, sat placidly sipping tea and
eating cakes. She did not recognize Katherine at first, never
having seen her otherwise than with clothes awry and hair
tumbling down over her eyes, and Katherine was secretly

amused at the gentle lady’s look of astonishment upon being
told who it was.

“She did eat my rolls, after all,” said Veronica to Katherine. “I
knew she would. But I’m glad she did; I am in far too exalted
a mood for nut rolls now. Nothing but nectar and ambrosia
will do to celebrate our meeting. Look and see if there’s any
nectar and ambrosia on your menu card, will you, Katherine
dear? There doesn’t seem to be any on mine.”

“None here, either,” reported Katherine, after gravely reading
her card through.

“Then let’s compromise on lobster croquettes,” said Veronica. [193]
“I never eat them ordinarily, but I feel as though I could eat a
dozen to celebrate this occasion.”

“Be careful what you eat, now,” warned her aunt. “It would be
rather awkward if you were to be taken with an attack of acute
indigestion just when you are due to appear on the platform.”

“Never fear!” laughed Veronica. “I am so transported over
meeting Katherine that nothing could give me indigestion
now. What an inspiration I shall have to play to-night!”

Then, taking Katherine’s hand, she said coaxingly, “You will
come and hear me play, won’t you?”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” replied Katherine regretfully. “I’m due to
go back on the five-fifteen train.”

“O, but you must come!” cried Veronica pleadingly. “I’ll be so
miserable if you don’t that I sha’n’t be able to play at all. You
wouldn’t want me to spoil the concert on your account, would
you, Katherine dear? There is a later train you can go home on
just as well, isn’t there?”

“There is one at ten-forty-five,” replied Katherine, consulting
the time-table which she carried in her hand bag.

“You can hear me play, and make that train, too,” said [194]
Veronica eagerly. “My numbers come in the early part of the
program, all but one. If you went out after I had played my
first group you could make your train beautifully. Do
telephone Nyoda that you are going to stay over, and have her
send somebody down to meet you at the later train. That
Justice person——” she said mischievously, finishing with an
expressive movement of her eyebrows.

Katherine finally yielded to her pleading, and telephoned
Nyoda that she was going to stay in town until the ten-forty-
five, which so delighted Veronica that she ordered another
croquette all the way around to celebrate the happy
circumstance.

“Do be careful, dear,” warned her aunt a second time. “Those
croquettes are distressingly rich. What would happen if you
were to be taken ill to-night?”

Veronica smiled serenely. “I’m not going to be taken ill to-
night, aunty dear,” she replied. “I’m going to be like
Katherine, who can eat forty lobster croquettes without
getting sick.”

“Remember the mixtures we used to cook up in the House of
the Open Door?” she asked, turning to Katherine. “They were
lots worse than lobster croquettes, if the plain truth were
known. You wouldn’t worry at all, aunty, dear, if you knew
what we used to eat at those spreads without damaging
ourselves!”

Katherine was completely carried away by Veronica’s [195]
vivaciousness and temperamental whimsies. If she had
admired the fiery little Hungarian in the days of the House of
the Open Door, she was now absolutely enslaved by her. To

plain, matter-of-fact Katherine, Veronica, with her artistic
temperament, was a creature from another world, inspiring a
certain amount of awed wonder, as well as admiring affection.

“What are you going to play at the concert to-night?”
Katherine asked respectfully.

Veronica’s eyes began to glow, and she pushed aside her plate,
leaving the second croquette to grow cold while she spoke
animatedly upon the subject that lay ever nearest her heart.

“I’m going to play a cycle from Nágár, a Roumanian Gypsy
composer,” she replied. “One of the pieces is the most
wonderful thing; it’s called ‘The Whirlwind.’ It fairly carries
you away with its rush and movement, until you want to fly,
and shout, and go sailing away on the wings of the wind.
Another one is named ‘Fata Morgana.’ You know that’s what
people call the mirage that we can see out on the steppes—the
open plains—of Hungary.”

“Yes?” murmured Katherine in a tone of eager interest. She
loved to hear Veronica tell tales of her homeland.

“Many a time I have seen it,” continued Veronica, her eyes [196]
sparkling with a dreamy, far-off light, “a beautiful city
standing out clear and fair against the horizon; and have gone
forth to find it, only to see it vanish into the hot, quivering air,
and to find myself lost out on the wide, lonely steppe.”

Katherine listened, fascinated, while Veronica told stories of
the curious mirage that lured and mocked the dwellers on the
lonely steppes of her native land, and so deep was her
absorption that she absent-mindedly ate up Veronica’s
croquette while she listened, to the infinite amusement of
Mrs. Lehar.

“Aren’t you going to play any of your own compositions?”
asked Katherine, when Veronica had finished talking about

the Nágár cycle.

“Not as a regular number,” replied Veronica, taking up her
fork to finish her croquette, and deciding that she must
already have eaten it, since her plate was empty. “If, by any
chance, I should be encored, I shall play a little piece of my
own that I have named ‘Fire Dreams,’ and dedicated to the
Winnebagos. I wrote it one night after a ceremonial meeting
out in the woods where we danced around the fire and then sat
down in a circle to watch it burn itself away to embers. We all
told our dreams for the future that night, don’t you remember?
I have woven everything together in my piece—the tall pines
towering up to the sky; the stars peering through the branches;
the wind fiddling through the leaves, and the river lapping on
the stones below; with the firelight waving and flickering, and
coaxing us to tell our dreams. I love to play it, because it
brings back that scene so vividly; that and all the other
beautiful times we had around the camp fire.”

Katherine gazed at Veronica in speechless admiration. With [197]
absolutely no musical ability herself, it seemed to her that
anyone who could compose music was a child of the gods.
Veronica smiled back frankly into Katherine’s admiring eyes,
and gave her hand a fond squeeze.

“Now, tell me about Carver House and all the dear people
there,” she said, settling herself comfortably in her chair and
propping her elbows on the table. “We still have an hour to
spare. Aunty won’t mind if we talk about our own affairs, will
you, aunty? Now, Katherine, take a long breath and begin.”

The hour was up before Katherine was half way through
telling the exciting things that had happened at Carver House
in the past week, and with a sigh Veronica rose from the table
and drew on her gloves.

“Come,” she said regretfully, “we’ll have to be starting. I have
to go over to the hotel first and get my violin, and the

auditorium where I am to play is some distance out.”

As they stepped from the tea-room into the street Katherine [198]
paused to buy Veronica a huge bunch of violets at a little
stand just inside the entrance of the tall building next door.
Not having enough money in her change-purse to pay for
them, she took a roll of bills from a bill-fold in her inner
pocket, and, taking five dollars from the roll, returned it to its
place of safety in the lining of her coat. Lounging against the
glass counter beside her was a slender, long-fingered man,
whose gaze suddenly became concentrated when the roll of
bills made its appearance. Katherine noticed his look of
absorbed interest and a little thrill of uneasiness prickled
along her spine. She looked sharply at this inquisitive
stranger, fixing in her mind the details of his appearance. He
wore a long, light-colored overcoat and a visor cap pulled
down over his eyes, which were small and dark, and set close
together in his thin, sallow face, giving him a peculiar, ratlike
expression. Katherine buttoned her coat carefully over the
bill-fold and hastily rejoined Veronica and Mrs. Lehar in the
street outside, conscious that the man’s eyes were still upon
her and that he had followed her out of the shop. To her relief,
Mrs. Lehar hailed a taxicab, and in a moment more they were
being whirled rapidly away from the scene.

An hour later Katherine found herself sitting in state in one of [199]
the front boxes of a crowded auditorium, impatiently waiting
for the soprano soloist to finish a lengthy operatic aria and
yield her place to Veronica. The soloist bowed her way out at
last, and Veronica, looking like a very slender little child in
contrast to the massive singer, tripped out on the stage with
her violin under her arm, just as she had always carried it
around in the House of the Open Door.

“She isn’t a bit scared!” was Katherine’s admiring thought.

Nodding brightly to the audience, Veronica laid her bow
across the strings with that odd little caressing gesture that

Katherine remembered so well, and began to play her long
cycle from memory.

Strange images flitted through Katherine’s brain as she
listened; the lighted stage faded from sight, and in its place
there stretched a wide, grassy plain, shimmering in the
sunlight and flecked with racing cloud shadows, far ahead,
gleaming clear against the gray-blue horizon, rose the white
towers and spires of a fair city, which seemed to call to her in
friendly invitation, awakening in her an irresistible longing to
travel toward it and behold its wonders at near hand. But ever
as she approached it receded into the distance, vanishing at
last in the twinkling of an eye, and leaving her alone in the
heart of a wild, desolate moor upon which darkness was
swiftly falling. She started in affright at the long, eerie cry of
a nightbird; the deepening shadows were filled with fearful,
unnamable terrors. Her head reeled; the strength went out
from her limbs, and with icy hands pressed tightly over her
eyes to shut out the menacing shadow-shapes, she sank
shuddering to the ground. She was roused by the sound of
thunder, and opening her eyes found the lonely moor
vanished, and in its place the brightly lighted stage, while the
thunder which echoed in her ears resolved itself into a tumult
of hand-clapping.

Katherine rubbed her eyes and sat up straight. “What was that [200]
piece she just played?” she asked in a whisper.

“That was the ‘Fata Morgana,’” replied Mrs. Lehar.

It was several minutes after ten o’clock when Veronica
finished her last encore, and Katherine, glancing at her watch,
hastily reached for her coat, and leaving a goodnight message
for Veronica with Mrs. Lehar, started from the auditorium.

[201]

CHAPTER XIX
THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF KATHERINE

The curious spell of the “Fata Morgana” descended upon
Katherine again as she emerged from the concert hall and
made her way through a poorly lighted side street toward the
main avenue where the street cars passed. The long, waving
shadows seemed to clutch at her ankles as she walked; strange
noises sounded in her ears; the trees that bordered the curb
left their places and began to move toward her with a
grotesque, circling motion, while the distant glare of light
toward which she was traveling began to recede until it was a
mere twinkling speck, miles away in the distance. Again her
strength forsook her, and with violently trembling hands she
grasped an iron fence railing and clung desperately to keep
herself from falling. The touch of the cold metal sent a little
shock tingling through her; she braced herself and looked
steadily at the spectres crowding about her. The trees had
gone back into their places; the shadows no longer seemed to
be crouching ready to spring at her.

“Silly!” exclaimed Katherine, though her teeth still chattered. [202]

She let go of the fence and started on; immediately the trees
resumed their fantastic circling, and again her knees
threatened to double under her. Then she realized that it was
not the “Fata Morgana” that held her in thrall, but the extra
lobster croquette. The disastrous fate which Mrs. Lehar had
predicted would overtake Veronica had befallen her instead—
she was in the throes of acute indigestion! O, if only she had
not eaten that second croquette! Lobster never agreed with
her; she should have known better than to eat it, especially

after she had just eaten shrimp salad. Why hadn’t she had the
sense to refuse that second one? (Katherine was still unaware
that she had eaten, not two, but three of the deadly things, a
circumstance which had undoubtedly saved Veronica from a
like fate.)

She clung dizzily to the fence for a few moments, and then,
feeling somewhat relieved by the cold wind blowing strongly
against her face, struck out once more for the carline. A few
steps convinced her that she could not make it; the world was
whirling around her, and her limbs refused to obey her will. A
little farther up the street, where the fence ended, the arched
entrance-way into a church offered a resting-place and shelter
against the high wind and beating rain. Stumbling up the
steps, she sank down on the stone floor, and, pressing her cold
hand against her throbbing temples, leaned weakly against the
wall of her little sanctuary.

Weariness overcame her and she sank gradually into a doze, [203]
from which she wakened with a start at the sound of a steeple
clock chiming. Boom! Boom! Boom! The clanging tones
echoed through the narrow street. Katherine sat up hastily and
stared around her in bewilderment for a moment; then
recollected herself and rose cautiously to her feet. To her
infinite relief she found that her knees no longer had any
inclination to knock together; the feeling of illness had
passed. Taking a deep breath, and setting her hat straight on
her head, she walked steadily down the steps and out upon the
street once more. The clock which had wakened her so rudely
was in the steeple just above her and Katherine gave a gasp of
dismay when she saw the time. A quarter to eleven! She
should be down at the station now, taking the ten-forty-five
train back to Oakwood. What had happened? Could she
possibly have fallen asleep in that cozy little entrance way?
Why had she not heard the clock strike the half hour? How
worried Nyoda would be when she did not come in on that
ten-forty-five train! she thought in sudden panic. She must

hasten down to the station immediately and telephone Nyoda
that she had missed that train, but would come on the next.

Was there another train to-night? she wondered, in fresh [204]
panic. Ten-forty-five sounded like the last local. She stopped
under a street light for the purpose of consulting her time-
table, and then she made a discovery which drove the matter
of time-tables out of her head entirely, and brought the
weakness back to her knees in full force, namely, the
discovery that she no longer carried her handbag. Her heart
almost stopped beating, for in that handbag was Nyoda’s
watch—the little jewelled watch Sherry had given her for an
engagement present. Aside from its intrinsic value, which was
considerable, Nyoda cherished that watch above all her other
possessions.

She must have left the bag in the entrance-way where she had
stopped to rest, Katherine decided, and, forgetting all about
the weakness of a half hour ago, she ran swiftly across the
street and up the steps of the church. She felt over every inch
of the floor in the darkness, but the bag was not there.

Had she brought it with her out of the auditorium? Yes, [205]
because she had dropped it in the lobby, and in stooping to
pick it up had felt the first touch of that dizzyness which had
overpowered her so soon afterward. She must have lost it in
the street. She retraced her steps back to the concert hall, now
dark and deserted, carefully searching all the way. Her search,
however, was unavailing; and with a sinking feeling she
realized that either someone had picked it up, or else she had
been deliberately robbed while she slept; in either event, the
bag was gone, and with it Nyoda’s watch.

It seemed to her that she could never go home and tell Nyoda
that it was lost; she wished the earth would open up and
swallow her where she stood, thus releasing her, at one stroke,
from her distressful position. She bitterly reproached herself
for having stayed in town that evening,—if she had gone
home on the five-fifteen train this wouldn’t have happened.
Nyoda had given her precious watch into her keeping, trusting
her to bring it back safely, and she had betrayed that trust; had
proved herself unreliable. Nyoda would never trust her with
anything valuable again; would never send her on another
errand. True, it was not exactly her fault that she had lost the
bag; but if she had not been foolish enough to eat all those
lobster croquettes after eating shrimp salad she would not
have had any dizzy spell to distract her attention from her
responsibility.

For fully five minutes she stood still and called herself every [206]
hard name she could think of, and ended up by making an
emphatic resolution in regard to the future attitude toward
lobster croquettes. In the meantime, she decided, she had
better notify the police about the watch. A block ahead of her
the green and blue lights of a drug store shone blurred but
unmistakable through the misty atmosphere, and she splashed
her way toward it, only to find on arriving that the place was
closed. She walked several more blocks, searching either for

an open drug store where she could telephone, or a corner
policeman, and finding neither. A street clock pointed to
eleven, and from somewhere in the darkness behind her came
the subdued tone of the steeple chime.

The rain had stopped now, and it was growing colder; the
puddles on the sidewalk began to be filmed over with ice. The
wind took on a cutting edge and came sallying forth in great
gusts, shrieking along the telephone wires and setting the
electric arc lights overhead swaying wildly back and forth,
until the rapidly shifting lights and shadows below gave the
street the look of a tossing lake. Now billowing out like a sail,
now wrapping itself determinedly around her ankles,
Katherine’s long coat began to make walking a difficult
proceeding. Then, without warning, the arc lights suddenly
went out, plunging the world into utter blackness. With that,
Katherine abandoned her intention of searching for a
telephone and decided to get down to her train as fast as she
could. With every other step she went crashing through a thin
coating of ice into a puddle, for in the darkness it was
impossible to see where she was going, and once she tripped
over an uneven edge of flagging and went sprawling on her
hands and knees. Thereafter, she felt her way, like a blind
person, with the point of her umbrella.

It was gradually borne in upon Katherine, as she floundered [207]
on through the puddles, that she was not retracing her steps
toward the carline, but was proceeding in a new and entirely
unknown direction. The store fronts which loomed
indistinctly through the darkness were not the same ones she
had passed before; surely those others had not been so shabby
and disreputable looking. But so intense was the blackness of
the night that she could not be sure about anything; she might
be on the right track after all. Undoubtedly the next turn
would bring her back to the lighted drug store, and from that
point she could easily locate herself. No green and blue lights
appeared when she turned the next corner, however; as far as

she could see, there was only gloom in the distance. Katherine
tried street after street with no better success; they all led
endlessly on into darkness. She met no one from whom she
dared ask the way; for there was only an occasional passer-by,
and he usually looked tipsy. It was evidently a factory district
Katherine had wandered into, for all around her were great
dark buildings with high chimneys, long, dim warehouses,
box cars standing on sidings, silent, gloomy freight sheds;
there seemed to be no end of them anywhere; in all directions
they stretched out, like Banquo’s descendents, apparently to
the crack of doom. The nightmare of the “Fata Morgana” had
come true, and she was lost in the wilderness of a strange city.

For a long time Katherine had not heard the rumble of a street [208]
car, and this phenomenon finally became so noticeable that
she realized what must have happened—the traction power
had been cut off as well as the lighting current. With that
realization her last hope of getting down to the station went
glimmering—unless she could get a taxicab. But where was
one to find a taxicab in this district? A faint light gleaming in
the window of a small shop that crouched between two tall
factories lured Katherine on with the hope that here was a
telephone, or at least someone about who could tell her the
way. She hastened toward it, but her heart turned to water
within her when she saw that the lettering on the window
pane was Chinese. More than anything else in the whole
universe, Katherine feared a Chinaman; she was so afraid of
the little yellow men that even in broad daylight she could
never go by a Chinese laundry without holding her breath and
shuddering. Even the picture of a Chinaman gave her the
creeps. When she discovered that she was in a Chinese
neighborhood after eleven o’clock at night, with the street
lamps all out, a hoarse cry of terror broke involuntarily from
her lips, and she began to run blindly, she knew not where,
penetrating deeper and deeper into that jungle of factories
which flanks the railroad on both sides for miles.

Out of breath finally, she came to a stop, and for a few [209]
moments stood gasping, with a hand to her side. Not far ahead
of her a light from a building shone across the darkness of the
street, and loud sounds of revelry coming from the direction
of the light told her that the place was a saloon. She stood still
for another moment, trying to get up courage to pass it;
decided at last that with Chinamen in the other direction it
was the lesser of two evils, and walked on, praying fervently
that none of the revellers inside would come out at the
moment she was going by. She had hardly gone a few steps
when a figure appeared on the lighted sidewalk in front of the
place with a suddenness which left no doubt of his having
come from within. In the bright glare Katherine recognized
the long light coat and visor cap of the man who had stood
beside her that evening in the flower shop where she had
purchased Veronica’s violets, and who had looked with such a
covetous eye upon the roll of bills she had taken from her
inside coat pocket. The bills were still there, and it seemed to
her now that they made a very telltale bulge over her right
breast. The man was coming toward her; in a few minutes he
would see and recognize her, and then——

Katherine darted into an alleyway which opened near her, and [210]
on through a half-open gate in a low, solid wooden fence, and
crouching there behind the fence in the darkness, she waited
until the footsteps had gone past,—creak, creak, creakety-
creak, with a rhythmic squeaking of shoes. Not until the
sound had died away completely did she venture forth from
her hiding place, and then she stood perfectly still and looked
cautiously about her in every direction before she made a
move to proceed. With the knowledge that the danger had
passed, her feeling of panic began to leave her, and her native
coolness began to assert itself. She took a careful stock of her
situation and tried to think up a way to escape from her
predicament. That she was hopelessly lost in this wilderness
of streets whose names meant nothing to her, even if she had
been able to see the sign boards, she realized full well; instinct

warned her not to betray her situation to anyone she might
meet in this neighborhood—providing she met any one, for
the wind seemed to have blown all pedestrians off the streets;
and the lateness of the hour made it extremely unprobable that
she would find a telephone. She stood on one leg in the
storklike attitude which always indicated deep thought with
her, and pondered all the phases of her dilemma with the calm
deliberation which invariably came to her in moments of great
stress. “The only time Katherine is composed,” Sahwah had
said once, “is when she is in a pickle.” And if Katherine was
now in the biggest pickle she had ever experienced, by the
same token her brain had never worked so coolly and
logically before.

“When lost in the woods,” she said to herself, going over in [211]
her mind her knowledge of woodcraft, “the first thing to do is
to climb a tree and get your bearings. That’s all right for the
woods, but there aren’t any trees here to climb. I might climb
a telegraph pole,” she thought whimsically, as her eye fell
upon one nearby, “and see if I can locate myself. No, that
wouldn’t do, either, for the whole city is dark, and I couldn’t
see anything if I did get up. So much for rule number one.

“Now for rule number two. ‘Establish your directions by
observing and reading the signs of nature. Moss always grows
on the north side of trees.’ Hm. Trees again, and telegraph
poles won’t do as substitutes this time. Moss doesn’t grow on
the north side of telegraph poles. There isn’t any difference
between the north side of a telegraph pole and any other——”

Katherine’s train of thought was suddenly interrupted by her [212]
glance resting on the pole in question. One side of it, she
could see in the light from the saloon, was glazed with ice
where the driving rain had frozen in the chill wind. That wind
was now coming from every direction—north, south, east and
west—at once, and it was therefore impossible to judge from
the whirling gusts which was north; but earlier in the evening,

when the rain was falling, the wind had blown steadily from
the north. Accordingly, the strip of ice on those poles carried
the very same message as the moss on the trees in the woods.
Katherine exclaimed aloud in delight at her discovery. In a
twinkling she had her bearings.

“North, south, east, west,” she said triumphantly, pointing in
the four respective directions. “Not a bad piece of scouting,
that. What’s the difference, whether it’s moss or ice?—it’s the
same principle. Talk about your pole stars!

“I believe I know approximately where I am,” she continued,
her brain keeping up its logical working. “We turned south
from B—— Avenue to go to the Music Hall, I remember
hearing Veronica say so; therefore, not yet having come to B
—— Avenue in my wanderings, I must still be on the south
side of it, and by going due north will come to it eventually.
The way is as plain as the nose on your face; just follow the
ice on the telegraph poles. I can feel it in places where it’s too
dark to see. All aboard for B—— Avenue!”

Katherine set off as fast as she could go through the darkness, [213]
whistling in her relief, and confidently keeping her feet
pointed toward the north. As if acting upon the principle that
the gods help them who help themselves, the street lights
came on again just at that moment, showing up the corners
and crossings, and making progress very much easier. She had
gone some half dozen blocks, and was once more passing the
long row of gloomy, windowless warehouses which she
remembered having seen before, when it became apparent to
her alert senses that she was being followed. For the last two
or three blocks she had heard the sound of a footfall behind
her, turning the same corners she had turned, taking the same
short-cut she had taken through a factory yard, and gradually
drawing nearer. “Creak, creak, creakety-creak!” Through the
still night air it sounded with startling distinctness; the same
squeaking footfall that had passed her ten minutes before,

when she had crouched, with wildly beating heart, behind the
fence in the dark alley. Filled with prophetic apprehension,
she turned and looked around, and in the light of a street lamp
several hundred yards behind her saw the figure that had
loomed so large in her fears all evening. It required no second
glance to recognize the long, light overcoat and the visor cap
drawn low over the eyes. For an instant, Katherine’s feeling of
alarm held her rooted to the spot, even while she noticed that
the man had increased his speed and the distance between
them was rapidly lessening; then the power of locomotion
came back with a rush and she began to run. Her worst fears
were confirmed when she heard the man behind her start to
run also.

Katherine doubled her speed and fled like a deer, slipping [214]
wildly over the icy sidewalk and expecting every minute to
fall down, but by some miracle of good luck managing to
retain her balance. Yet, run as she might, she realized that her
pursuer was gaining; the footsteps pounding along behind her
sounded nearer and nearer every minute. Her long coat,
winding about her knees, caused her to slacken speed; her
breath began to give out; she developed an agonizing pain in
her side. She knew that the race was lost; in a moment more
she would be overtaken. She had just summoned breath for a
last final spurt when she heard a crash behind her and the
sound of a body falling on the sidewalk; she dashed on
without slackening speed. The next minute she slipped on a
sheet of ice in the middle of a crossing and fell headlong to
the ground, just as a taxicab, coming out of the side street,
turned the corner. Katherine heard a hoarse shout and the
jamming of an emergency brake, then, before she had time to
draw breath, the car was on top of her. A blinding light flashed
for a moment in her eyes; her ears were filled with a
deafening roar; then all of a sudden light and sound both
ceased to be.

[215]

Hearing came back first with returning consciousness. The
roaring noise no longer sounded in her ears, and from
somewhere, a long distance off, came the sound of a voice
speaking.

“Can’t you lift the car? She’s pinned underneath the wheels.
No, you can’t back up; you’ll run over her head. Don’t you
see it’s right behind that left wheel? Got a jack in your tool
box? All right. Here—— Now——”

Gradually the weight that was pinning her to the ground was
lifted, and she opened her eyes to find herself beside, and no
longer under, the quivering monster with the hot breath. Three
figures were moving about her in the light of the head-lamps,
and now one of them knelt beside her and laid a hand on her
head.

“She isn’t killed,” said a voice which sounded strangely
familiar in Katherine’s ears, a voice which somehow carried
her back to Carver House and the library fire.

Carver House. Nyoda. Nyoda would be worried to death
because she did not come home. Poor Nyoda, how sorry she
would be about the watch!

Unconsciously Katherine groaned aloud.

“She must be pretty badly hurt,” continued the voice beside [216]
her ear. “Help me lift her now and we’ll get her into the car. A
hand under her shoulders—so. I’ll take her head. Easy now.”

Katherine felt herself being lifted from the ground and carried
past the glare of the headlamps. Suddenly there came an
explosive exclamation from one of the rescuers—the one who
had done the talking—and the hand that supported her head
trembled violently.

“Good God! It’s Katherine.”

Katherine opened her eyes fully and looked up into the
dumfounded face of Sherry.

“Fo’ de lan’ sakes!” came an echoing exclamation from beside
Sherry, and the black face of Hercules shone out in the light.

“Hello Sherry,” said Katherine, in a voice which sounded
strange in her own ears.

“Katherine!” cried Sherry in terrified accents, “are you badly
hurt?”

“I d-o-n-’t k-n-o-w,” replied Katherine thickly, through a
mouthful of fur from the collar of her coat.

“I guess not,” she resumed, after Sherry had laid her on the
back seat of the car. “Nothing cracks when I wiggle it. My
nose is skinned,” she supplemented a minute later, “and
there’s a comb sticking straight into my head. I guess that’s
all.”

“Oh,” breathed Sherry in immeasurable relief. “It’s a miracle [217]
you weren’t killed. I thought sure you were. It looked as
though both front wheels had gone over you.”

“One went over my hat and the other over the tail of my
coat,” replied Katherine cheerfully. “They just missed me by a
hair’s breadth.”

“Are you sure your head isn’t hurt?” Sherry continued
anxiously. “You were unconscious when we lifted the car off
of you, you know.”

Katherine solemnly felt her head all over. “There is a bump
there—no; that’s my bump of generosity; it belongs there.
Anyway, it doesn’t hurt when I press it, so it must be all
right,” she assured him. “I must have fainted, I guess, when

the car came on top of me. It came so suddenly, and it made
such a terrible noise. You can’t think how awful it was.”

“It must have been.” A shudder went quivering through
Sherry’s frame at the thought of it. “I can’t get it out of my
mind. I thought those wheels went right over you. It’s nothing
short of a miracle that they went on each side of you instead
of over you,” he said, repeating the sentiment he had just
uttered a moment before. “It all happened so quickly the
driver didn’t have a chance to turn aside. There was no one in
sight one minute, and the next minute we were right on top of
you. That driver out there’s so scared he can’t stand up on his
legs yet.”

“How did you happen to be in that taxicab?” Katherine [218]
inquired curiously.

“We’re on our way home,” replied Sherry. “We missed the
Pennsylvania out of New York and had to take the Nickel
Plate, which meant we had to change from one station to the
other here in Philadelphia. We were going across in a taxi.”

“So you were too late to catch Dr. Phillips?” said Katherine
soberly.

“Yes,” replied Sherry gloomily. “The boat had gone
yesterday.”

“How did Hercules stand the disappointment?” asked
Katherine, with quick sympathy.

“He’s pretty badly cut up about it,” replied Sherry. “He had
quite a bad spell with his heart on the train. He says he’s had a
‘token’ that he’ll never see Marse Tad, as he calls him, again.
I’m afraid he won’t, myself. Even I’ve got a gloomy hunch
that fate has the cards stacked against us this time. From
Hercules’ account, I don’t think Dr. Phillips will live to reach
South America.”

“How unutterably tragic that would be!” sighed Katherine,
beginning to feel a load of world-sorrow pressing on her
heart. What a dismal business life was, to be sure!

Sherry interrupted her doleful reverie. “But tell me, [219]
Katherine, what, in the name of all that’s fantastic, were you
doing here in this neighborhood at this time of night?”

Katherine explained briefly, and in her overwrought state,
burst into tears at the mention of the watch.

“And you say there was a footpad actually following you?”
asked Sherry in consternation. “You were running away from
this man when you fell under the car? Where is he now?”

Katherine shook her head. “I don’t know. He slipped and fell
just before I did, and I don’t know what became of him after
that.”

Sherry gave a long whistle, and, thrusting his head out of the
taxi, gave a look around.

“There’s a man coming up the street now,” he said. “He’s
limping badly. Is that the man? He’s probably trying to slip
away quietly in the excitement.”

Katherine raised her head and glanced out. “That’s the man,”
she exclaimed. “He’s the same one that followed me. Why,
he’s coming over here toward us!” she said, in a tone of
surprise. “How queer! Is he going to hold us all up, I
wonder?”

The man in the light overcoat, limping painfully, crossed the
curb and approached the car standing, temporarily disabled, in
the middle of the street. Sherry thrust out a belligerent face, at
the same time looking, out of the tail of his eye, for his driver
and Hercules. Both were out of sight, kneeling on the ground
at the other side of the raised engine hood.

The stranger limped up and hesitated before Sherry. [220]
Katherine, looking over Sherry’s shoulder, noticing with a
start of surprise that the man had snow white hair. Although
the long, light coat and the visor cap were the same as those
she had seen on the man in the flower shop, this was an
entirely different man. His blue eyes were mild and pensive;
his whole bearing was gentle and retiring, and, standing there
with the electric light behind him making a halo of his white
hair, he looked like some little, old, melancholy saint.

“The young lady that you just picked up,” said the stranger in
a voice mellow with old-fashioned courtesy, raising his cap
politely. “I have been following her for some time, trying
unsuccessfully to catch up with her. I saw her drop this bag on
the street, some two hours ago, and since then have been
attempting to restore it to her, but have not been able to reach
her. As soon as I saw her drop the bag I picked it up and
hurried after her, but she suddenly disappeared like a
conjurer’s trick. I walked around for some time, looking for
her, when all of a sudden the street lights went out, and in the
darkness I mistook my way and wandered down into the
factory district, where it was not long before I was hopelessly
lost. The only place that showed any signs of life was a saloon
down on a corner, and, although I have my opinion of those
places, sir, I went in and asked the proprietor the way out of
the neighborhood. It was not long afterward that I saw this
same young lady who had dropped the handbag not far ahead
of me in the street, having evidently wandered down there in
the darkness just as I had done. I hurried after her, but she
became frightened and began to run. I ran, too, thinking to
overtake her and explain the reason for my pursuit, but just
when I was nearly up to her I slipped and fell on the sidewalk.
I must have lain there stunned for several minutes, for when
things had become clear again I saw this car standing here and
you gentlemen carrying the young lady into it. She is not
badly hurt, I trust? Here is the bag I spoke of.”

He spied Katherine looking over Sherry’s shoulder at that [221]
moment, and held out the handbag, again lifting his cap as he
did so.

At sight of the precious bag Katherine gave a shriek of joy,
and seizing it with trembling fingers, looked inside to see if
Nyoda’s watch was still there. She almost sobbed with relief
when her fingers closed upon the little velvet case, from
which a faint ticking came to reassure her.

“Then you aren’t the man I saw in the flower shop at all!” [222]
exclaimed Katherine, covered with confusion. “When I saw
your light coat and that cap I was sure it was the same.”

The two men laughed heartily.

“Isn’t that just like a woman, though?” said Sherry. “They
think that every man walking on the streets at night is a
burglar, as a matter of course. It never occurs to them that an
honest man could possibly have any business on the street
after dark.”

“I’m awfully sorry,” said Katherine sheepishly, “but I really
was frightened to death when you began to run after me. You
say you have been following me ever since I dropped the bag?
Where did I drop it?”

“Along by that iron fence on —th Street,” answered the old
man.

“That’s where I was taken with the dizzy spell,” said
Katherine. “I must have dropped it without knowing it when I
caught ahold of the fence to steady myself.”

“But where did you go right after that?” asked the old man
curiously. “You disappeared as suddenly as if the earth had
swallowed you. I put up my umbrella for a few minutes to

shield my face from the rain and when I looked out from
behind it you were nowhere in sight.”

“That was where I went into the dark doorway of a church, [223]
and sat down to wait for the dizzy spell to wear off,” replied
Katherine. “I must have fallen asleep, for the first thing I
knew a clock was striking a quarter to eleven. When I
discovered the bag was gone I ran around like mad looking
for it, and the first thing I knew I was lost, and the lights were
out, and there I was down in those awful factory yards. I saw
you coming out of that saloon and thought you were the man
who had watched me take out some bills out of an inner
pocket earlier this evening, and hid behind a fence until you
had gone by.”

“But fate evidently intended that our paths should cross
again,” resumed the old man, with the faint flicker of a smile
on his pensive countenance, “for it was not long before you
were just ahead of me again. The lights came on then, and I
saw you plainly.”

“And I saw you, and started to run,” finished Katherine,
joining in Sherry’s burst of laughter.

Just then Hercules straightened up from the ground and came
around the front of the car.

“Kin we have yo’ pocket flasher, Mist’ Sherry?” he asked.

Then his glance fell upon the stranger standing beside the car.
His eyes started from their sockets; his jaw dropped, and for a
moment he stood as if petrified. Then he gave a great gasp,
and with a piercing cry of “Marse Tad!” he sank upon his
knees at the old man’s feet.

[224]

CHAPTER XX
THE END OF A PERFECT DAY

“Daggers and dirks!” exclaimed Sherry, weakly sitting down
on the car step when it was finally borne in upon him that
Katherine’s highwayman was none other than Sylvia’s father,
Hercules’ “Marse Tad,” the man for whom he and Hercules
had been futilely fine-combing the earth for the last twenty-
four hours.

“Am I awake?” he continued, “or is this all an opium dream?
First Katherine, whom we thought at home at Carver House,
materializes before us out of thin air; then Dr. Phillips, whom
we thought on a ship bound for South America. What’s
happening here to-night, anyway? Is it witchcraft?”

“O, Marse Tad,” quavered Hercules, still on his knees, “we
shore thought you was gone on dat South Ameriky boat. We
bin a-lookin’ for you so. Mist’ Sher’dan an’ I bin down to
N’Yawk all day.”

“You have been looking for me?” asked Dr. Phillips in
surprise.

Hercules, trying to tell the story all at once, became utterly [225]
incoherent in his excitement, and Sherry saw that he would
have to step in. And so there, in the light from the lamps of
the disabled taxicab, with the fitful explosions of the reviving
engine drowning out Sherry’s speech every few minutes, Tad
Phillips heard the great news that would lift the crushing load
of anguish from his heart, and would turn the world once
more into a place of laughter, and light, and happiness.

“It was a miracle, my deciding to stay over for the next boat,”
he declared solemnly, a few minutes later, after nearly
wringing Sherry’s hand off in an effort to express his joy and
gratitude. “It was the hand of Providence, sir, nothing less
than the hand of Providence. I had fully made up my mind to
go on that boat yesterday; then for no reason at all I suddenly
decided to wait until next week before sailing.” His voice
sank away into a whisper of awe as he repeated, “It was
Providence itself, sir, nothing less than the hand of
Providence, that made me change my mind about sailing
yesterday.”

“You may have been inspired by Providence to change your
mind about sailing,” rejoined Sherry, “but if it hadn’t been for
Katherine, here, we never would have found you, for it never
occurred to us that you were still in Philadelphia. It’s all
Katherine’s doing—her losing that handbag.”

“But if I hadn’t eaten those lobster croquettes and gotten sick [226]
I wouldn’t have lost the handbag,” said Katherine comically.
“It all comes back to the lobster croquettes. Providence and
lobster croquettes! What a combination to work miracles!”

It was a rather dishevelled, but altogether triumphant quartet
that arrived at Carver House some few hours later. Katherine’s
hair had escaped from its net and hung in straggling wisps
over her eyes; her hat had been so completely crushed by its
contact with the wheel of the taxi that it was unrecognizable
as an article of millinery, and hung, a mere twisted piece of
wreckage, in a dejected lump over one ear. Her coat was
plastered with dirt from neck to hem, and her gloves were stiff
and discolored. One eye was closed in a permanent wink by a
black smudge that decorated her forehead and half of her
cheek.

Blissfully unconscious of her startling appearance, she burst
into the library, where the household were waiting to welcome
the returned wanderers.

“O Katherine,” cried all the Winnebagos in chorus when they
beheld her, “now you look natural again!”

The tale of Katherine’s adventure, with its astonishing ending,
left them all staring and breathless.

“Katherine surely must have been born under a different sign
of the Zodiac than those you see in the ordinary almanacs,”
said Nyoda. “There is some special influence of planets
guiding her that is denied to ordinary mortals.”

“Must be the sign of the Lobster, then,” laughed Katherine, [227]
gratefully sipping the hot milk Migwan had brought her, and
allowing Justice to draw the hatpins from her hat and remove
the battered wreck from her head.

“How’s Sylvia?” asked Sherry.

“Very much improved,” replied Nyoda, “but her heart is still
acting queerly. I don’t know how she is going to stand this
excitement.”

Dr. Phillips agreed with her that he must not appear before
Sylvia too suddenly, or the shock might be fatal. Impatient as
he was for the recognition to take place, he knew that it would
have to be brought about with caution. There was too much at
stake to make a misstep now. Nyoda must prepare her
gradually, first telling her that her father was alive, and letting
her recover from the excitement of that announcement before
breaking the news that he was actually in the house.

The Winnebagos looked at Dr. Phillips with a surprise which
it was difficult to conceal. This mild-eyed, white-haired
gentleman was utterly different from the picture they had
conjured up of the bold intruder who had so determinedly
made his entrance into Carver House. They had expected to
see a grim-faced, resolute-looking man, and Hinpoha
confided afterward that her mental picture had included a pair

of pistols sticking out of his pockets. The early portrait of
“Tad the Terror,” in Uncle Jasper’s diary, had been slightly
misleading in regard to his appearance.

Nyoda saw Dr. Phillips’ eyes fixed, with a sorrowful [228]
expression, upon the portrait of Uncle Jasper above the library
fireplace, and she guessed what bitter pangs the breaking up
of that friendship had cost him; guessed also, that he had held
no such bitter feeling against Jasper Carver as the master of
Carver House had held against him, and understanding the
characters of the two men, she saw why it was that Sylvia
Warrington had preferred the one to the other.

Over by the fireplace, Justice was teasing Katherine
unmercifully about the lobster croquettes, while behind her
back the Captain had taken one of the broken feathers from
her hat and was tickling Slim with it, who had fallen asleep in
his chair. The clock on the stairway chimed four.

An irrepressible attack of yawning seized the whole party, and
with one impulse the Winnebagos began to steal toward the
stairway.

“Well,” said Katherine, with a sigh of deep content, as she
went wearily up the stairs leaning on Migwan’s shoulder,
“well, this is the end of a perfect day!”

[229]

CHAPTER XXI
FATHER AND DAUGHTER

In the morning Sylvia was so much better that Nyoda allowed
her to sit up out of bed, and there, sitting beside the wheel
chair which was to be the throne of the little princess all her
life, she told Sylvia the story of her parentage. For a moment
Sylvia sat as if turned to stone; then with a cry of unbelieving
ecstasy, she clasped the picture of Sylvia Warrington to her
heart.

“My mother!”

Nyoda stole out softly and left the two of them together.

* * * * * * *

Later on in the afternoon there was a lively bustle of
preparation in Sylvia’s room. The great carved armchair that
had served as throne on the night of the party had been
brought up from the library, and once more covered with its
purple velvet draperies. Sylvia, whose romantic fancy had
seized eagerly upon the immense dramatic possibilities of the
occasion, had insisted upon being arrayed as the princess
when her father should come in to see her.

“The king is coming! The king is coming!” she exclaimed [230]
every few moments. “Array me in my most splendid robes,
for my royal father, the king, is coming!”

Thrills of excitement, like little needle pricks, ran up and
down her spine; her whole being seemed alight with some

wonderful inner radiance, that shone through the flesh and
transfigured it with unearthly beauty.

Nyoda brought the fairy-like white dress and draped it about
her, playing the rôle of lady-in-waiting with spirit. Every time
she passed before Sylvia she bowed low; she made the
Winnebagos stand up in a line and pass in the bracelets from
hand to hand; she herself brought in the crown on a cushion,
and placed it upon Sylvia’s head with much ceremony.

“Doesn’t she look like a real royal princess, though!” Migwan
exclaimed to Hinpoha in the far end of the room. “I feel
actually abashed before her, knowing all the while that it’s
only playing.”

“O, if she could only have been cured!” Hinpoha sighed in
answer. “How much jollier it would have been!”

Migwan echoed the sigh. “Life is very strange,” she said
musingly. “Things don’t always come out the way we want
them to.”

“That’s so,” said Hinpoha, beginning to see a great many [231]
sober possibilities in life which had never before occurred to
her.

An automobile horn sounded outside. “There’s Sherry now,
bringing Dr. Phillips back from their ride,” said Migwan.
“They’ll be coming up in a few minutes.”

The horn sounded again.

“The royal trumpeter!” cried Sylvia. “Our royal father, the
king, approaches!”

She settled the crown more firmly upon her head, and sat up
very straight on her throne. Her cheeks glowed like roses; her

eyes were like great stars. Nyoda watched her keenly for any
signs of being overcome with excitement.

From the hall came the sound of footsteps.

“His Majesty, the King,” said Nyoda, throwing open the door
with a dramatic flourish.

For a moment Dr. Phillips stood transfixed upon the
threshold, overcome by the scene of splendor within.

Then he held out his arms to her, forgetting that she was
paralyzed.

“Sylvia—daughter!”

“Father!”

Then the amazing thing happened. Sylvia rose to her feet,
stepped from the throne, and ran across the room into her
father’s arms.

“It happens sometimes,” explained Dr. Phillips a few [232]
moments later, when they had all recovered from their first
stupefied amazement. “Some great shock, and the paralyzed
nerves wake to life again. That is what has taken place here.
She is cured.”

[233]

CHAPTER XXII
ONE MORE TOAST

“To the Christmas Adventure at Carver House!” proposed
Katherine, raising on high her glass of fruit punch.

New Year’s dinner was over, and they all stood in their places
around the table, drinking toast after toast.

“The Christmas Adventure at Carver House!” echoed the
Winnebagos. “The best adventure we’ve had yet. Drink her
down!” The toast was drunk with a will.

Sylvia stood beside her father, her face one big sparkle, while [234]
a more subdued, but equally rapturous, gleam shone from the
doctor’s eye as he gazed on the adored child from whom he
need never more be separated. The Captain stood opposite
Hinpoha and gave her a long look as he touched her glass, as
if he wished to fix every detail of her in his mind against the
separation that was coming on the morrow; Slim also had his
eyes turned toward Hinpoha as he clicked glasses with Gladys
across the table. Justice gave Katherine’s glass a little nudge
as he touched it, to attract her attention, for she had her face
turned away from him toward Sylvia; Sahwah’s eye had a far-
away look as she matched with Migwan. Nyoda and Sherry
beamed impartially upon them all, and Hercules smacked his
lips over his glass in the corner by himself. Hercules had
abandoned his intention of dying, and announced that he was
planning to get himself another goat, because life was too
uneventful for a man of his vigor without something to fuss
over and take up his time.

“And it all happened because Katherine forgot Nyoda’s
name!” said Sahwah, setting her glass down.

“I wasn’t born in vain after all!” laughed Katherine, meeting
Justice’s eye bent upon her in a close, quizzical scrutiny.

“Which goes to prove,” said Nyoda, “that everything has its
use in this world, even our shortcomings. Let’s celebrate that
discovery. We have drunk to the memory of Uncle Jasper
Carver and to the memory of Sylvia Warrington; we have
drunk to the memory of the man who built Carver House with
the secret passage; we have one swallow of punch left. Let’s
drink one more toast, not to the memory of Katherine Adams,
but to her forgettory!”

And amid a great shout of laughter the last toast was drunk. [235]

THE END

[236]

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The story of the part they took in its brave defence.
By William P. Chipman.

THE BOY SPIES OF OLD NEW YORK.

The story of how the young spies prevented the
capture of General Washington. By James Otis.

For sale by all booksellers, or sent postpaid on receipt of price
by the publishers, A. L. BURT COMPANY, 114-120 East 23d
Street, New York

The Boy Allies
(Registered in the United States Patent Office)
With the Navy

By ENSIGN ROBERT L. DRAKE

Handsome Cloth Binding, Price 60 Cents per Volume

Frank Chadwick and Jack Templeton, young American lads,
meet each other in an unusual way soon after the declaration
of war. Circumstances place them on board the British cruiser
“The Sylph” and from there on, they share adventures with
the sailors of the Allies. Ensign Robert L. Drake, the author, is
an experienced naval officer, and he describes admirably the
many exciting adventures of the two boys.

THE BOY ALLIES ON THE NORTH SEA PATROL;
or, Striking the First Blow at the German Fleet.

THE BOY ALLIES UNDER TWO FLAGS; or,
Sweeping the Enemy from the Seas.

THE BOY ALLIES WITH THE FLYING
SQUADRON; or, The Naval Raiders of the Great
War.

THE BOY ALLIES WITH THE TERROR OF THE
SEA; or, The Last Shot of Submarine D-16.

THE BOY ALLIES UNDER THE SEA; or, The
Vanishing Submarine.

THE BOY ALLIES IN THE BALTIC; or, Through
Fields of Ice to Aid the Czar.

THE BOY ALLIES AT JUTLAND; or, The Greatest
Naval Battle of History.

THE BOY ALLIES WITH UNCLE SAM’S
CRUISERS; or, Convoying the American Army
Across the Atlantic.

THE BOY ALLIES WITH THE SUBMARINE D-32;
or, The Fall of the Russian Empire.

THE BOY ALLIES WITH THE VICTORIOUS
FLEETS; or, The Fall of the German Navy.

For sale by all booksellers, or sent postpaid on receipt of price
by the publishers A. L. BURT COMPANY, 114-120 East
23rd St., New York

The Boy Allies With
(Registered in the United States Patent Office)
the Army

By CLAIR W. HAYES

Handsome Cloth Binding, Price 60 Cents per Volume

In this series we follow the fortunes of two American lads
unable to leave Europe after war is declared. They meet the
soldiers of the Allies, and decide to cast their lot with them.
Their experiences and escapes are many, and furnish plenty of
the good, healthy action that every boy loves.

THE BOY ALLIES AT LIEGE; or, Through Lines of
Steel.

THE BOY ALLIES ON THE FIRING LINE; or, Twelve
Days Battle Along the Marne.

THE BOY ALLIES WITH THE COSSACKS; or, A
Wild Dash Over the Carpathians.

THE BOY ALLIES IN THE TRENCHES; or, Midst
Shot and Shell Along the Aisne.

THE BOY ALLIES IN GREAT PERIL; or, With the
Italian Army in the Alps.

THE BOY ALLIES IN THE BALKAN CAMPAIGN;
or, The Struggle to Save a Nation.

THE BOY ALLIES ON THE SOMME; or, Courage
and Bravery Rewarded.

THE BOY ALLIES AT VERDUN; or, Saving France
from the Enemy.

THE BOY ALLIES UNDER THE STARS AND
STRIPES; or, Leading the American Troops to the
Firing Line.

THE BOY ALLIES WITH HAIG IN FLANDERS; or,
The Fighting Canadians of Vimy Ridge.

THE BOY ALLIES WITH PERSHING IN FRANCE;
or, Over the Top at Chateau Thierry.

THE BOY ALLIES WITH THE GREAT ADVANCE;
or, Driving the Enemy Through France and Belgium.

THE BOY ALLIES WITH MARSHAL FOCH; or, The
Closing Days of the Great World War.

For sale by all booksellers, or sent postpaid on receipt of price
by the publishers A. L. BURT COMPANY, 114-120 East
23rd St., New York

The Boy Scouts Series

By HERBERT CARTER

Handsome Cloth Binding, Price 60 Cents per Volume

THE BOY SCOUTS’ FIRST CAMP FIRE; or, Scouting
with the Silver Fox Patrol.

THE BOY SCOUTS IN THE BLUE RIDGE; or,
Marooned Among the Moonshiners.

THE BOY SCOUTS ON THE TRAIL; or, Scouting
through the Big Game Country.

THE BOY SCOUTS IN THE MAIN WOODS; or, The
New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol.

THE BOY SCOUTS THROUGH THE BIG TIMBER;
or, The Search for the Lost Tenderfoot.

THE BOY SCOUTS IN THE ROCKIES; or, The Secret
of the Hidden Silver Mine.

THE BOY SCOUTS ON STURGEON ISLAND; or,
Marooned Among the Game Fish Poachers.

THE BOY SCOUTS DOWN IN DIXIE; or, The Strange
Secret of Alligator Swamp.

THE BOY SCOUTS AT THE BATTLE OF
SARATOGA. A story of Burgoyne’s defeat in 1777.

THE BOY SCOUTS ALONG THE SUSQUEHANNA;
or, The Silver Fox Patrol Caught in a Flood.

THE BOY SCOUTS ON WAR TRAILS IN BELGIUM;
or, Caught Between the Hostile Armies.

THE BOY SCOUTS AFOOT IN FRANCE; or, With the
Red Cross Corps at the Marne.

For sale by all booksellers, or sent postpaid on receipt of price
by the publishers A. L. BURT COMPANY, 114-120 East
23rd St., New York

Our Young Aeroplane Scout Series
(Registered in the United States Patent Office)

By HORACE PORTER

Handsome Cloth Binding, Price 60 Cents per Volume
A series of stories of two American boy aviators in the great
European war zone. The fascinating life in mid-air is
thrillingly described. The boys have many exciting
adventures, and the narratives of their numerous escapes
make up a series of wonderfully interesting stories.

OUR YOUNG AEROPLANE SCOUTS IN FRANCE
AND BELGIUM; or, Saving the Fortunes of the
Trouvilles.

OUR YOUNG AEROPLANE SCOUTS IN GERMANY.

OUR YOUNG AEROPLANE SCOUTS IN RUSSIA; or,
Lost on the Frozen Steppes.

OUR YOUNG AEROPLANE SCOUTS IN TURKEY;
or, Bringing the Light to Yusef.

OUR YOUNG AEROPLANE SCOUTS IN ENGLAND;
or, Twin Stars in the London Sky Patrol.

OUR YOUNG AEROPLANE SCOUTS IN ITALY; or,
Flying with the War Eagles of the Alps.

OUR YOUNG AEROPLANE SCOUTS AT VERDUN;
or, Driving Armored Meteors Over Flaming Battle
Fronts.

OUR YOUNG AEROPLANE SCOUTS IN THE
BALKANS; or, Wearing the Red Badge of Courage.

OUR YOUNG AEROPLANE SCOUTS IN THE WAR
ZONE; or, Serving Uncle Sam In the Cause of the
Allies.

OUR YOUNG AEROPLANE SCOUTS FIGHTING TO
THE FINISH; or, Striking Hard Over the Sea for the
Stars and Stripes.

OUR YOUNG AEROPLANE SCOUTS AT THE
MARNE; or, Harrying the Huns From Allied
Battleplanes.

OUR YOUNG AEROPLANE SCOUTS IN AT THE
VICTORY; or, Speedy High Flyers Smashing the
Hindenburg Line.

For sale by all booksellers, or sent postpaid on receipt of price
by the publishers A. L. BURT COMPANY, 114-120 East
23rd St., New York

The Jack Lorimer Series

Volumes By WINN STANDISH

Handsomely Bound in Cloth
Full Library Size —

CAPTAIN JACK LORIMER; or, The Young Athlete of
Millvale High.

Jack Lorimer is a fine example of the all-around
American high-school boy. His fondness for clean,
honest sport of all kinds will strike a chord of
sympathy among athletic youths.

JACK LORIMER’S CHAMPIONS; or, Sports on Land
and Lake.

There is a lively story woven in with the athletic
achievements, which are all right, since the book

has been O.K’d by Chadwick, the Nestor of
American sporting journalism.

JACK LORIMER’S HOLIDAYS; or, Millvale High in
Camp.

It would be well not to put this book into a boy’s
hands until the chores are finished, otherwise they
might be neglected.

JACK LORIMER’S SUBSTITUTE; or, The Acting
Captain of the Team.

On the sporting side, the book takes up football,
wrestling, tobogganing. There is a good deal of fun
in this book and plenty of action.

JACK LORIMER, FRESHMAN; or, From Millvale
High to Exmouth.

Jack and some friends he makes crowd innumerable
happenings into an exciting freshman year at one of
the leading Eastern colleges. The book is typical of
the American college boy’s life, and there is a lively
story, interwoven with feats on the gridiron, hockey,
basketball and other clean, honest sports for which
Jack Lorimer stands.

For sale by all booksellers, or sent postpaid on receipt of price
by the publishers A. L. BURT COMPANY, 114-120 East
23d Street, New York

The Broncho Rider Boys Series

By FRANK FOWLER

A series of stirring stories for boys, breathing the adventurous
spirit that lives in the wide plains and lofty mountain ranges
of the great West. These tales will delight every lad who loves
to read of pleasing adventure in the open; yet at the same time
the most careful parent need not hesitate to place them in the
hands of the boy.

THE BRONCHO RIDER BOYS WITH FUNSTON AT
VERA CRUZ; or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars
and Stripes.

When trouble breaks out between this country and
Mexico, the boys are eager to join the American
troops under General Funston. Their attempts to
reach Vera Cruz are fraught with danger, but after
many difficulties, they manage to reach the trouble
zone, where their real adventures begin.

THE BRONCHO RIDER BOYS AT KEYSTONE
RANCH; or, Three Chums of the Saddle and Lariat.

In this story the reader makes the acquaintance of
three devoted chums. The book begins in rapid
action, and there is “something doing” up to the
very time you lay it down.

THE BRONCHO RIDER BOYS DOWN IN
ARIZONA; or, A Struggle for the Great Copper
Lode.

The Broncho Rider Boys find themselves impelled
to make a brave fight against heavy odds, in order
to retain possession of a valuable mine that is
claimed by some of their relatives. They meet with
numerous strange and thrilling perils and every
wideawake boy will be pleased to learn now the
boys finally managed to outwit their enemies.

THE BRONCHO RIDER BOYS ALONG THE
BORDER; or, The Hidden Treasure of the Zuni
Medicine Man.

Once more the tried and true comrades of camp and
trail are in the saddle. In the strangest possible way
they are drawn into a series of exciting happenings
among the Zuni Indians. Certainly no lad will lay
this book down, save with regret.

THE BRONCHO RIDER BOYS ON THE WYOMING
TRAIL; or, A Mystery of the Prairie Stampede.

The three prairie pards finally find a chance to visit
the Wyoming ranch belonging to Adrian, but
managed for him by an unscrupulous relative. Of
course, they become entangled in a maze of
adventurous doings while in the Northern cattle
country. How the Broncho Rider Boys carried
themselves through this nerve-testing period makes
intensely interesting reading.

THE BRONCHO RIDER BOYS WITH THE TEXAS
RANGERS; or, The Smugglers of the Rio Grande.

In this volume, the Broncho Rider Boys get mixed
up in the Mexican troubles, and become acquainted
with General Villa. In their efforts to prevent
smuggling across the border, they naturally make
many enemies, but finally succeed in their mission.

The Boy Chums Series

By WILMER M. ELY
In this series of remarkable stories are described the adventure
of two boys in the great swamps of interior Florida, among
the cays off the Florida coast, and through the Bahama
Islands. These are real, live boys, and their experiences are
worth following.

THE BOY CHUMS IN MYSTERY LAND; or, Charlie
West and Walter Hazard among the Mexicans.

THE BOY CHUMS ON INDIAN RIVER; or, The Boy
Partners of the Schooner “Orphan.”

THE BOY CHUMS ON HAUNTED ISLAND; or,
Hunting for Pearls in the Bahama Islands.

THE BOY CHUMS IN THE FOREST; or, Hunting for
Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades.

THE BOY CHUMS’ PERILOUS CRUISE; or,
Searching for Wreckage on the Florida Coast.

THE BOY CHUMS IN THE GULF OF MEXICO; or, A
Dangerous Cruise with the Greek Spongers.

THE BOY CHUMS CRUISING IN FLORIDA
WATERS; or, The Perils and Dangers of the Fishing
Fleet.

THE BOY CHUMS IN THE FLORIDA JUNGLE; or,
Charlie West and Walter Hazard with the Seminole
Indians.

The Big
Five Motorcycle Boys

Series

By RALPH MARLOW

It is doubtful whether a more entertaining lot of boys ever
before appeared in a story than the “Big Five,” who figure in
the pages of these volumes. From cover to cover the reader
will be thrilled and delighted with the accounts of their many
adventures.

THE BIG FIVE MOTORCYCLE BOYS ON THE
BATTLE LINE; or, With the Allies in France.

THE BIG FIVE MOTORCYCLE BOYS AT THE
FRONT; or, Carrying Dispatches Through Belgium.

THE BIG FIVE MOTORCYCLE BOYS UNDER
FIRE; or, With the Allies in the War Zone.

THE BIG FIVE MOTORCYCLE BOYS’ SWIFT
ROAD CHASE; or, Surprising the Bank Robbers.

THE BIG FIVE MOTORCYCLE BOYS ON
FLORIDA TRAILS; or, Adventures Among the Saw
Palmetto Crackers.

THE BIG FIVE MOTORCYCLE BOYS IN
TENNESSEE WILDS; or, The Secret of Walnut
Ridge.

THE BIG FIVE MOTORCYCLE BOYS THROUGH
BY WIRELESS; or, A Strange Message from the Air.

Transcriber’s Notes
Silently corrected palpable typos in spelling and
punctuation
Harrison Hill becomes Harrisburg Hill in the course of
the narrative; this was not changed
Adjusted front matter to give a complete list of the series

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