Chapter XIII: Humility, Calves and Ginger Pop

MRS. SCOLLARD lost no time in following Laura from her Waterloo. She and Happie hurried out of the chapel and down the road, leaving the Ark boys to carry out their hastily-laid plan of helping the Crestville boys to turn the occasion which Laura had meant should be so improving into an old-fashioned frolic, worthy the Day We Celebrate. But though Mrs. Scollard and Happie made their best pace down the road, Laura was nowhere in sight all the way, and when they reached the house there was still no trace of her. A window was open into the kitchen; if she were in the house, Laura must have climbed in that way, for her mother and Miss Bradbury had both keys.

Mrs. Scollard put hers into the lock with many misgivings. Her heart smote her for having let Laura go on to certain defeat; it might be--it would be--good for her in the end, but it was hard for the mother to give over the foolish child to discipline, and she yearned over her in her present mortification which must be cruelly hard to bear.

Inside the house everything was dark and quiet. Mrs. Scollard and Happie called Laura, but there was no reply.

Striking a light they looked through the rooms on the lower floor, but found only Jeunesse Dorée, who came out stretching and purring, telling Happie that he had slept during his family's absence not to waste time, and was now entirely at her disposal for a romp.

There was no Laura, and when the search was continued up-stairs it was not more successful.

Miss Bradbury came home with Rosie and Penny, leaving Polly under the boys' protection to see the fun, and found mother and daughter much perturbed. Rosie took the situation calmly.

"She hain't lost," she said, removing Penny's hat and rather tight little coat, for Penny was growing fast. "She's hidin' somewheres; she's too sore to want to face a cat. She'll turn up. Looked in the cellar and on the attic? After that I'd hunt the barn. Many's the time I've hid in the hay, already, when I was little and my pap was after me; if we could keep out of the way long enough pap'd always fergit he meant to whip us. There hain't many places better to hide in than the hay-loft. I remember I was up there oncet hidin', and I come on a nest a hen had stole up there--had fourteen aiggs in it yet! I gathered all them there aiggs in my aprun--had to reach far to git 'em, so I put one foot over a bundle of straw there was layin' there--kinder stood astride of it yet--and I'll be switched if that there straw bundle didn't set out a-slidin'! I couldn't git offen it, so I just dropped down as I stood, astride of it, and held up my aprun good, and I sez: Git ap! And I slid right down onto the barn floor's much's ten foot below. My days, I thought the floor had come up through the top of my head when I struck! But I held up them aiggs in my aprun, and there wa'n't one of 'em broke. But I was that stunted I didn't git over it for good two hours."

Happie shouted; even Mrs. Scollard laughed, in spite of her growing anxiety, and Penny sighed admiringly: "Oh, Rosie dear, you _are_ so funny!"

"Get a candle, Happie--I am afraid to carry a lighted lamp into the attic--and we'll look there first," said Mrs. Scollard. "Perhaps you had better stay here. I fancy Laura would rather not see you, nor Bob, till the first mortification is over."

Happie brought the candle, shading it with her hand from the strong breeze.

"Here it is, mother. I'll put Penny to bed in the meantime," she said.

Mrs. Scollard proceeded up the stairs, continuing her way to the attic, while Happy took Penny into her room.

There was nothing in sight when the mother reached the head of the narrow stairs, except a mouse which scuttled away to its hole as the light appeared, and just in time to escape Dorée, who had followed his mistress in the hope of adventures of this nature, and with an expression of deep interest on his saucy, short-nosed face. The rafters loomed out in fantastic, wavering shapes before the exaggerating flame of the candle; everything was quiet and orderly, and Mrs. Scollard was about to turn towards the stairs, when Dorée remarked: "M-m-ummm?" in his pleasant little calling tone, and trotted over to the darkest corner, with his tail preternaturally straight, and his back slightly arched, as if ready for a caressing hand.

Mrs. Scollard took the cat's advice, and hurried in the same direction that he was going, holding her candle high above her head to throw the light into the gloom before her. There, prostrate behind the old Bittenbender trunk, lay the genius rejected by the ungrateful Crestvillians.

Mrs. Scollard set down her candle with mingled solicitude for Laura herself, and for Laura's best dress, and with a gleam of amusement, now that her anxiety was relieved.

"Laura dear, come out," she said gently. "Be wise enough not to brood over a mistake that you will not make again."

Laura lifted her head quickly. "Mistake, mamma!" she cried. "I made no mistake. But do you think I can help minding being treated so ungratefully, even insulted by those horrid, ignorant people?"

"Come here, Laura," said her mother, in the tone which her children always obeyed.

Laura came forth, dusty, tear-stained, a wreck of her usual self-satisfied and trim little self. Her mother drew her on her knee as she seated herself on a chest, and began to smooth the tumbled hair, and to stroke the hot cheeks with a gentle hand.

"Let me show you the mistake, my dear," she said. "Here is a little girl, barely thirteen, who first of all prepares an entertainment, and gives it, not only without consulting her elders, but without their permission. You certainly have no right, Laura, to undertake a public appearance without asking leave. It is for this that you are punished; I knew that you would receive your just dues if I refrained from interfering, and I am glad that your punishment has been quite severe enough without one from me. For--and this is the second part of your mistake, and a part that affects your every action--you take your small self much too seriously, my Laura. You have talents, which I hope to have cultivated into value, but in the meantime they are but a childish promise of what may be. And because of them you plume yourself, hold yourself superior to your brother and sisters, who are in their way quite as clever as you in yours, and more clever in not overrating themselves. It is very stupid to be conceited in a world full of truly great things, my Laura. Another mistake was to allow yourself to feel and to speak to our neighbors to-night as if you were their superior. They were older than you, my dear, and you have been taught that people with fewer advantages than yourself may be quite as quick-witted; a very wholesome lesson! The audience which you invited to come to be addressed condescendingly was perfectly sweet-tempered and patient with the little girl who tried to patronize it. I am grateful to the Crestville people for understanding, and being so kind. So you are not to harbor bitterness, nor to go on making the old mistake of thinking that what a child like you does matters too much. You are to come down with mother, go to bed and go to sleep, a wiser little girl, saying to yourself: 'I shall never again be a conceited little goose!' and nobody will think twice of what was merely a little girl's folly in forgetting that she _was_ a little girl. But she's her mother's little girl, so give me a kiss, and forget all about this evening, except its lessons. I wonder if I can find a place not too dusty to kiss?"

Laura submitted to her mother's caress, but did not respond to it with an answering smile. She followed the wavering candle-light down the stairs with faltering steps; she was weak and ill from excessive crying, and the fall of her pride had bruised her mentally black and blue. Jeunesse Dorée, bringing up the rear, was the only cheerful person of the three.

In the morning Laura was feverish and not fit to get up. Mrs. Scollard left her in Rosie's care--she needed only rest,--and went for a drive with Miss Bradbury, who had of late summoned courage to brave automobiles with Don Dolor under her personal guidance.

Gretta came up shortly after breakfast, bringing the fresh peas with which Miss Bradbury had asked her to supplement the crop of the Ark garden.

"You haven't any calves, have you?" Gretta said by way of salutation the moment she entered. "I saw some down by your gate; they must have just turned in from the road, but they looked as if they had just run out of your place."

"Cæsar's ghost! Of course we have calves; Aunt Keren got three two days ago, goodness knows what for!" cried Bob. "But they can't be ours, because I put them in the cow-yard, and looked after the bars myself."

"You don't know calves," said Rosie. "They beat the Dutch at getting out. I've seen 'em already get out when you wouldn't have believed anything could. Just you wait till apple time comes, and then try penning up your cows! They get clear crazy when they smell the ripe apples all over, and you can't keep 'em in to save you. I advise you to go right out and drive in them calves, Bob, and not wait a minute."

"Yes," said Gretta, "or they'll be, no one knows where! If you have any calves they must be yours I saw, for they were just inside your gate. There were three of them. We'll all go help you drive, but there ought to be more of us."

"Polly, you look after Laura if she wants something, while we chase up them calves," said Rosie. "Mortification's set in with Laura, Gretta; she's sick in bed after last night."

Gretta laughed, then looked pitying. "It's too bad; it was hard," she said.

"Come on, Snigs; come on, Ralph," called Happie. "We're going to enjoy the pleasures of the chase. Run up and tell Laura we'll be right back; she'll hear us, and worry," she added to Polly.

Now Snigs was just getting a bottle of ginger pop off the ice, intending to regale himself. The ice-box stood on the back stoop for lack of space in the kitchen, and when he heard the summons to chase calves, Snigs, nothing loathe to join in the sport, hastily shoved the bottle of ginger ale into his hip pocket, and ran around the side of the house to join the pursuing party.

There was no doubt that the calves were Bradburys--by adoption. Bob instantly recognized them as the three which, as he supposed, he had made fast in the cow-yard. Whether they recognized him or not was less certain. They all three faced the six bipeds with that peculiarly innocent gaze of calfhood, lowering their heads and spreading their feet, all three in a row, the ecru Jersey, the tan and brown part Jersey and the black and white Holstein.

"You just go around on that side, Snigs," said Bob, as he and Ralph prepared to dash forward. "Drive them right up. We'll head them off from around the house."

This confident announcement proved how truly Rosie had spoken when she said that Bob did not know cows.

Drive them up, indeed! The moment Snigs came up somewhere near close enough to be of any use, the calves with one simultaneous, if not concerted, movement, lowered their heads a little further, kicked up their six hind legs and scuttled out into the road.

"There! That's the way they always act!" cried Gretta. "There's nothing on earth so hard to drive as calves, except pigs. Bob, run; head 'em off! Ralph, Snigs, get on up the road, or they'll go over into the next county. Come, Happie!" And Gretta herself followed Rosie down the road at top speed.

The calves paused, looking as who should say: "How strangely excited you all are!" Then they trotted quietly up the road, slipping past Rosie, Gretta and Happie by the simple device of dividing forces, one on one side, the other two on the other side of the road. Then they saw the boys, and stopped short, eyeing them blandly as they crept towards them, whirled suddenly, threw up their legs again, whisked their tails into an arch, and bolted for the boundary fence of the farm opposite the Ark.

"Keep 'em out of there!" shrieked Rosie. "That there field belongs to the crabbedest man in the township. My days, but it's hot!"

There was not the slightest objection to keeping them out of the field, save to the minds of the lively beasts themselves. They seemed to think it would be a good joke to go through a broken paling and trample down their neighbor's clover--even calves are liable to have a different sense of humor from oneself.

The Holstein capered through--smiling, Happie declared--and the other two followed without the loss of a moment. Bob, Ralph and Snigs rushed after them, shouting like demented megaphones. The calves kept ahead of them without an effort.

"If they get over there by the woods that's the end of it!" cried Snigs despairingly. Suddenly the calves stopped, looked around inquiringly, wheeled right about face, and trotted easily up to the broken palings and out into the road, where they turned to gaze reproachfully at the irate boys whom they had left behind, plainly asking if they could not take their sport like gentlemen, and lose a race without losing their tempers.

"Now close up!" shouted Bob. "Head 'em off into our gate; they're bunched now." They were, but they immediately unbunched--if one may so express their sudden scattering.

Rosie and Gretta made a desperate lurch to stop this dispersion. Rosie stubbed her toe on a rock and fell headlong, her whole great length stretched out on the dusty road, and her arms extended; she looked like a fallen guide-post.

The boys uttered a war-whoop, and nearly fell over the fence they were climbing. Rosie was a wreck as Happie and Gretta raised her; dust--the red shale dust of the region reddening her clean gingham; her sunbonnet flattened into a reddish mass, and her face crimson from heat, wrath and the shock of her fall.

"Mahlon hain't much of a man, but he's got the right to swear; I hain't," she remarked grimly, evidently regretting masculine rights and her own limitations.

Gretta wiped away the tears of laughter on her own dusty apron.

"Eunice will be furious because I'm gone so long," she said, "but this is worth a scolding. And do look once at those calves!"

Apparently the three young reprobates had taken Rosie's fall as a melancholy warning of what happened when people ran, for they had turned into their own gate as meekly as if that had been their intention from the first, and stood chewing and looking out at the heated group of their pursuers.

"They look as if they were going to sing: 'Speak gently, it is better far to rule by love than fear,'" said Happie, pulling herself together; she was weak from laughter.

"For mercy's sake, drive them in before they change their minds again!" cried Bob. "Here come mother and Aunt Keren back."

Rosie, Gretta and Happie ran up to the gate of the Ark just as the boys reached it from the other side, and just as Don Dolor, in the road, was nearly abreast of it. To every one's horror there came a loud report, apparently a pistol shot. Snigs shot up into the air about a yard, and fell, screaming aloud. Don Dolor arose on his hind legs, danced a moment as Miss Bradbury vainly tried to get control of him, then bolted down the road in a cloud of dust.

It had all happened so quickly that for an instant the terrified group around Snigs stood petrified, gazing at the prostrate boy, and down the road after the flying horse. Then Ralph picked up Snigs with agony stamped on his face, and Rosie cried: "What in time has happened? Why," she added, feeling of Snigs, "you're all wet; are you bleeding?"

"I guess so," moaned Snigs. "It's the ginger--ginger ale."

"Ginger ale!" echoed Ralph with a darting thought that the wound was in his brother's head, and that he was wandering in his mind.

"What ginger ale?" demanded Rosie, more than ever mystified.

"Went off in my pock--pocket," sobbed Snigs, trying to control his unmanly emotion.

Bob, experienced in being a boy, plunged his hand into Snigs' hip pocket, and drew it out quicker than he had put it in, dripping with blood.

"Great Scott! His pocket's full of broken glass!" he cried. "Did you have a bottle of ginger pop in there, Snigs?"

"Yes," said Snigs, mastering the tears that flowed more from nervousness than from pain. "I was just getting one when you called me to catch those calves--plague take them! So I stuffed it into my pocket, because I was in too big a hurry to go into the house with it, and now it's bust!"

"It got hot and worked!" cried Bob. "Christopher Columbus, what a morning!" He couldn't help laughing, but he looked worried. "I wish I knew where mother was; Aunt Keren can't drive when a horse needs driving. They may be upset."

"I guess not; the road's straight," said Rosie. "Are you hurt, Snigs? Maybe that there glass blew somewhere into his flesh."

"Oh!" cried Happie, laughing and crying hysterically as she pictured glass blowing into flesh, and straining her eyes for a sight of Don Dolor.

"They're coming!" cried Gretta, who had the long vision of eyes accustomed to mountain reaches. "My, they must be worried! It sounded exactly like a shot."

"I'm going to help Ralph carry Snigs up-stairs," said Rosie, but Laura intercepted her, coming over the grass in a trailing wrapper of her mother's, with Polly and Penny clinging to her hands.

"Who did that pistol kill?" she demanded tragically, with no doubt that a case of not-knowing-that-it-was-loaded had occurred in her family.

"Snigs has been wounded by ginger pop," cried Happie over her shoulder, flying to meet the returning buggy.

"Who is wounded; tell me quick who is wounded?" gasped Mrs. Scollard, leaning far out of the carriage, while at the same time Miss Bradbury demanded: "Where did you get it?"

"Snigs is wounded; he got it out of the ice box--it was a ginger pop bottle that exploded in his pocket. It's not serious, mother," shouted Bob.

Even Miss Bradbury's laugh rang out at this statement, and Mrs. Scollard fell back into her seat, sobbing and laughing at the relief.

Don Dolor looked ashamed of himself, yet glad that he had so quickly allowed himself to be brought under control by his inexperienced driver, hoping, probably, that his family would make due allowance for the fact that the explosion had sounded enough like a pistol to deceive them, and that he had not been expecting such a sound at his own gate.

"Such a morning, and all for those dreadful calves!" sighed Happie, as she and Gretta climbed into the buggy to go after the doctor, and Ralph and Bob bore Snigs into the house. "By the way, where are the abominable things?"

"Rosie has them," said Polly. "She drove them around the house."

"You'd better go in, Laura; you're not dressed for public--for being out of doors," said Happie, altering her sentence, fearing to allude to public appearances when Laura was emerging from her tragic frame of mind in relation to her recent experience in that line.

Gretta and Happie looked back as they drove out of the yard. They saw Rosie putting up the cow-yard bars, while the three calves looked over them with gentle, peaceful faces. Even at that distance the girls could recognize the emphasis with which Rosie put the bars in the posts, and made them fast.