Chapter XX: Plotters at Work

The adventures of the Corner House girls and their friends did not usually include anything very terrible. Perhaps there was no particular peril threatened by Costello, the Gypsy junkman, who was lurking about the premises at night. Just the same, Agnes Kenway was inclined to do what Mrs. McCall suggested and throw the silver bracelet out upon the ash heap.

Of course they had no moral right to do that, and the housekeeper's irritable suggestion was not to be thought of for a serious moment. Yet Agnes would have been glad to get rid of the responsibility connected with possession of Queen Alma's ornament.

"If it is that Costello heirloom!" she said. "Maybe after all it belongs to Miss Ann Titus's friend, Sarah Whatshername. Goodness! I wonder how many other people will come to claim the old thing. I do wish Ruth would return."

"Just so you could hand the responsibility over to her," accused Neale.

"M-mm. Well?"

"We ought to hunt up those Gypsies--'Beeg Jeem' and his crowd--and get their side of the story," declared Neale.

"No! I will not!" cried Agnes. "I have met all the Gypsies I ever want to meet."

But within the hour she met another. She was in the kitchen, and Linda and Mrs. McCall were both in the front of the house, cleaning. There came a timid-sounding rap on the door. Agnes unthinkingly threw it open.

A slender girl stood there--a girl younger than Agnes herself. This stranger was very ragged, not at all clean looking, and very brown. She had flashing white teeth and flashing black eyes.

Agnes actually started back when she saw her and suppressed a scream. For she instantly knew the stranger was one of the Gypsy tribe. That she seemed to be alone was the only thing that kept Agnes from slamming the door again right in the girl's face.

"Will the kind lady give me something to eat?" whined the beggar. "I am hungry. I eat nothing all the day."

Agnes was doubtful of the truth of this. The dark girl did not look ill-fed. But she had an appearance of need just the same; and it was a rule of the Corner House household never to turn a hungry person away.

"Stay there on the mat," Agnes finally said. "Don't come in. I will see what I can find for you."

"Yes, Ma'am," said the girl.

"Haven't you had any breakfast?" asked Agnes, moving toward the pantry, and her sympathies becoming excited.

"No, Ma'am. And no supper last night. Nobody give me nothing."

"Well," said Agnes, with more warmth, expanding to this tale of woe, as was natural, "I will see what I can find."

She found a plate heaped with bread and meat and a wedge of cake, which she brought to the screen door. The girl had stood there motionless, only her black eyes roved about the kitchen and seemed to mark everything in it.

"Sit down there on the steps and eat it," said Agnes, passing the plate through a narrow opening, as she might have handed food into the cage of an animal at a menagerie. She really was half afraid of the girl just because she looked so much like a Gypsy.

The stranger ate as though she was quite as ravenously hungry as she had claimed to be. There could be no doubt that the food disappeared with remarkable celerity. She sat for a moment or two after she had eaten the last crumb with the plate in her lap. Then she rose and brought it timidly to the door.

"Did you have enough?" asked Agnes, feeling less afraid now.

"Oh, yes, Lady! It was so nice," and the girl flashed her teeth in a beaming smile. She was quite a pretty girl--if she had only been clean and decently dressed.

She handed the plate to Agnes, and then turned and ran out of the yard and down the street as fast as she could run. Agnes stared after her in increased amazement. Why had she run away?

"If she is a Gypsy--Well, they are queer people, that is sure. Oh! What is this?"

Her fingers had found something on the under side of the plate. She turned it up and saw a soiled piece of paper sticking there. Agnes, wondering, if no longer alarmed, drew the paper from the plate, turned it over, and saw that some words were scrawled in blue pencil on the paper.

"Goodness me! More mysteries!" gasped the Corner House girl.

Briefly and plainly the message read: _Do not_ _give the bracelet to Miguel. He is a thief._

Agnes sat down and stared almost breathlessly at the paper. That it was a threatening command from one crowd of Gypsies or the other, she was sure. But whether it was from Big Jim's crowd or from Costello, the junkman, she did not know.

Her first thought, after she had digested the matter for a few moments, was to run with the paper to Mrs. McCall. But Mrs. McCall was not at all sympathetic about this bracelet matter. She was only angry with the Gypsies, and, perhaps, a little angry with Agnes for having unwittingly added to the trouble by putting the advertisement in the paper.

Neale, after all, could be her only confident; and, making sure that no other dark-visaged person was in sight about the house, the girl ran down the long yard beyond the garden to the stable and Billy Bumps' quarters, and there climbed the board fence that separated the Kenway yard from that of Con Murphy, the cobbler.

"Hoo, hoo! Hoo, hoo!" Agnes called, looking over the top rail of the fence.

"Hoo, hoo, yerself!" croaked a voice. "I'd have yez know we kape no owls on these premises."

The bent figure of Mr. Murphy, always busy at his bench, was visible through the back window of his shop.

"Is it that young yahoo called Neale O'Neil that yez want, Miss Aggie?" added the smiling cobbler. "If so--"

But Neale O'Neil appeared just then to answer to the summons of his girl friend. He had been to the store, and he tumbled all his packages on Con's bench to run out into the yard to greet Agnes.

"What's happened now?" he cried, seeing in the girl's face that something out of the ordinary troubled her.

"Oh, Neale! what do you think?" she gasped. "There's been another of them at the house."

"Not one of those Gypsies?"

"I believe she was."

"Oh! A _she_!" said the boy, much relieved. "Well, she didn't bite you, of course?"

"Come here and look at this," commanded his friend.

Neale went to the fence, climbed up and took the paper that Agnes had found stuck to the plate on which she had placed the food for the Gypsy girl. When he had read the abrupt and unsigned message, Neale began to grow excited, too.

"Where did you get this?"

Agnes told him about it. Of course, the hungry girl had been a messenger from one party of Gypsies or the other. Which? was Agnes' eager question.

"Guess I can answer that," Neale said gravely. "It does look as though things were getting complicated. I bet this girl you fed is one of Big Jim's bunch."

"How can you be so positive?"

"There are probably only two parties of Gypsies fighting over the possession of that old bracelet. Now, I learned down there in that junk neighborhood that Costello--the Costello who is bothering us--is called Miguel. They are all Costellos--Big Jim's crowd and all. June Wildwood says so. They distinguish our junkman from themselves by calling him by his first name. Therefore--"

"Oh, of course I see," sighed Agnes. "It is a terrible mess, Neale! I do wish Mr. Howbridge would get back. Or that the police would find that junkman and shut him up. Or--or that Ruthie would come home!"

"Oh, don't be a baby, Aggie!" ejaculated Neale.

"Who is the baby, I want to know?" flashed back the girl. "I'm not!"

"Then pluck up your spirits and don't turn on the sprinkler," said the slangy youth. "Why, this is nothing to cry about. When it is all over we shall be looking back at the mystery as something great in our young lives."

"You can try to laugh if you want to," snapped Agnes. "But being haunted by a junkman, and getting notes from Gypsies like that! Huh! who wouldn't be scared? Why, we don't know what those people might do to us if we give up the bracelet to the wrong person."

"It doesn't belong to any of the Gypsies, perhaps."

"That is exactly it!" she cried. "Maybe, after all, it is the property of Miss Ann Titus' friend, Sarah."

"And was lost somewhere on Willow Street--about where your garage now stands--forty years ago!" scoffed Neale. "Well, you are pretty soft, Agnes Kenway."

This naturally angered the girl, and she pouted and got down from the fence without replying. As she went back up the yard she saw Mrs. Pinkney, with her head tied up with a towel, shaking a dustcloth at one of her front windows. It at least changed the current of the girl's thought.

"Oh, Mrs. Pinkney!" she cried, running across the street to speak to Sammy's mother, "have you heard anything?"

"About Sammy? Not a word," answered the woman. "I have to keep working all the time, Agnes Kenway, or I should go insane. I know I should! I have cleaned this whole house, from attic to cellar, three times since Sammy ran away."

"Why, Mrs. Pinkney! If you don't go insane--and I don't believe you will--I am sure you will overwork and be ill."

"I must keep doing. I must keep going. If I sit down to think I imagine the most horrible things happening to the dear child. It is awful!"

Agnes knew that never before had the woman been so much disturbed by her boy's absences from home. It seemed as though she really had lost control of herself, and the Corner House girl was quite worried over Mrs. Pinkney.

"If we could only help you and Mr. Pinkney," said Agnes doubtfully. "Do you suppose it would do any good to go off in the car again--Neale and me and your husband--to look for Sammy?"

"Mr. Pinkney is so tied down by his business that he cannot go just now," she sighed. "And he has put the search into the hands of an agency. I did not want the police to get after Sammy. But what could we do? And they say there are Gypsies around."

"Oh!" gasped Agnes. "Do you suppose--?"

"You never can tell what those people will do. I am told they have stolen children."

"Isn't that more talk than anything else?" asked Agnes, trying to speak quite casually.

"I don't know. One of my neighbors tells me she hears that there is a big encampment of Gypsies out on the Buckshot Road. You know, out beyond the Poole farm. They have autovans instead of horses, so they say, and maybe could carry any children they stole out of the state in a very short time."

"Oh, dear me, Mrs. Pinkney! I would not think of such things," Agnes urged. "It does not sound reasonable."

"That the Gypsies should travel by auto instead of behind horse?" rejoined Sammy's mother. "Why not? Everybody else is using automobiles for transportation. I tell Mr. Pinkney that if we had a machine perhaps Sammy might not have been so eager to leave home."

"Oh, dear, me!" thought Agnes, as she made her way home again, "I am sorry for Mr. Pinkney. Just now I guess he is having a hard time at home as well as at business!"

But she treasured up what she had heard about the Gypsy encampment on the Buckshot Road to tell Neale--when she should not be so "put-out" with him. The Buckshot Road was in an entirely different direction from Milton than that they had followed in their automobile on the memorable search for Sammy. Agnes did not suppose for a moment that the missing boy had gone with the Gypsies.