Chapter XIII: Gypsying

The children stampeded down stairs.

“Some one slept in the Club Room last night!” Isa shouted. “Some one’s been there! Not Kathie, because there’s the end of a cigar on the table.”

“It wouldn’t be Kathie if there weren’t a cigar,” said Prue. “Kathie wouldn’t come there to _sleep_!”

Mr. Hawthorne looked at his mother, she at him, and Mr. Burke gave his wife a startled look which he tried to change into a careless one and carry on to the sideboard, as if he were examining the silver on it, because he did not want to alarm the children more than they were already frightened. They could easily see, however, that the four grown people took their announcement seriously.

“There’s no kind of use in letting this go on longer without trying to find out who is at the bottom of all these mysterious happenings,” said Mr. Hawthorne. “I believe I’ll sleep in that room for a while.”

“Oh, daddy, let me!” implored Mark.

“You’re going gypsying with the Burkes in the morning, aren’t you? You can’t watch that room till you get back; then we’ll see.” Mark’s father evaded a direct answer. “If you are going you ought to be ready to-night, by the way. Gather your garden products while it is still light, and get together whatever you need for an early start.”

“Is that really a go? I was afraid it was fooling,” Mark said, looking delighted and forgetting the mystery of the Club Room for the moment.

“It’s a go an’ a going ’s far ’s I’m concerned, my young Hawberry,” said Mr. Burke, looking with admiration at Mark’s eager, handsome face, all alight with anticipation.

“You are nice to us, and we like you a great deal, Mr. Burke. It’s a pity you haven’t any children to go around with you,” Prue said in her elderly fashion.

“Whist!” said Mr. Burke, glancing anxiously at his wife to see if she heard.

“Oh, Prue, you mustn’t speak of that; they died!” whispered Isabel nervously.

“We’d take Poppy along the whole season, if she’d come,” Mr. Burke said loudly. “But it’s not every youngster we’d say it of.”

“I wouldn’t go, much ’s I love you. Come on and pick vegettubles,” said Poppy, pulling Isabel out of the room by her belt.

“I’ve gotter curry Hurrah. I thought you done--did--it with curry powder, but you don’t; Mr. Thomas Burke showed me how.”

“You can’t reach to curry him; he’s a tall horse, and you are a whippet, as the Burkes say,” Mark reminded her.

“I’ll curry all I can reach,” Poppy answered, not at all discouraged. “It’s elegant to do. You use something you call a comb, but ’tain’t, and you kind of hiss through your teeth when you rub him. Mr. Burke showed me. He says the hiss you mustn’t leave out, ’cause no one ever does it right who ain’t a hisser currying. I got heaps of radishes now to sell, and my second peas. We gotter hustle and pick things.”

“My string beans are as good as the best, and I’ll have a bushel to take, I’m pretty sure,” Mark said proudly.

“It’s been pretty dry for my lettuce, but some is tender,” said Prue anxiously.

“You can see for yourselves my flowers are lovely. But I wonder if there’s any use of taking them to sell?” sighed Isabel.

“I don’t see a bit of use in any of it,” said Prue. “We were just plain silly! We know now we couldn’t raise enough to keep the house, so what’s the use of doing a little?”

“Maybe they’ll need money till Mr. Hawthorne gets well started in business,” said Isabel, with a sense of delicacy upon her in alluding to Mark’s family affairs before him.

Poppy was not wasting time. She had taken a hoe out with her and was digging radishes so recklessly that she cut many of them, but she said she “didn’t care; there were tons too many of ’em.”

Then she picked peas, tearing down the vines to get them, and had her basket filled in an amazingly short time. Prue selected tender lettuce heads with care; Mark gathered a bushel basketful of crisply tender wax beans, and Isabel gathered quantities of sweet peas, mignonette, alyssum, which, piled on a tray, filled the air with fragrance.

“It seems ’s if we ought to make a good business. Now, you watch me curry!” said Poppy.

Without the least fear, nor reason for fear, for the tall horse knew and loved her, Poppy went into Hurrah’s stall and began to curry him, “hissing through her teeth” in approved hostler fashion.

Poppy could reach only Hurrah’s shoulders and chest and legs, so the currying left a good deal of him undone, but she rubbed and hissed and got warm and dusty over all that she could reach of her comrade, and suddenly threw her currycomb from her and burst into tempestuous tears.

“Oh, oh, oh! When you think I can’t keep on doing it!” she screamed.

Isabel vainly tried to soothe her, privately thinking that it was not a good reason for crying that one could not curry a horse, however dear.

There was an early and most exciting start in the morning of the remarkable expedition. First, the blue wagon, boxes in its body, rattling with bottles of sorts and sizes; on its high seat the jolly Burkes, both red in the face and full of laughter. And on a blanket, thrown over an empty box, set bottom-side-up, Mark, carrying a fantastic flag which he had hastily made after he had gone to his room the night before. It was a square of flaming scarlet, ornamented with pasted designs in white. Dangling from the two corners which were not attached to its pole hung a small bottle to announce to the world the business upon which this wagon rolled through it.

Behind the wagon came the buckboard drawn by tall Hurrah, all sorts of bundles lashed on its floor; on its seat three little girls, cleaner than they would long be, seated so low, driving through dusty roads; the smallest, with her flaming hair almost as conspicuous as Mark’s red flag on the big wagon, holding the lines, her brow knit, her lips pursed, her eyes intent, exactly as if Hurrah would be likely to do anything but follow his leader.

“Good-by, and we’ll be back the day after to-morrow, ma’ams,” said Mr. Burke to Mrs. Hawthorne and Mrs. Lindsay and Mrs. Wayne, who had come up to see the start.

“Oh, bring them home safe, Mr. Burke!” cried Mrs. Lindsay, her heart suddenly sinking as she wondered at herself for consenting to let her one ewe lamb go on this fantastic excursion.

“Sure, ma’am, if I was dead myself I’d look after them, that anxious am I to bring them back safe!” replied Mr. Thomas Burke, giving his horse the signal to start as he waved his hat in the air and grinned broadly over his shoulder.

“You may as well do your selling in Trout Brook, to which we’re coming shortly,” suggested Mr. Burke. “It’s a summer cottagers’ paradise, so ’tis, an’ they’ll buy fresh vegetables like crazy. An’ same with Isabel’s flowers.”

Mr. Burke proved a true prophet. At Trout Brook people were so tired of the lack of events in the quiet place where they had come for rest that they were eager to buy.

String beans and Poppy’s peas went in a trice. Isabel’s flowers were in such demand for the adornment of living rooms and dining tables that she was sold out in a few minutes, and hardly knew how to meet the rush of trade.

Lettuce was less desired, because, being so easily raised, some of the cottagers had planted it in their gardens. But most of that sold, too, and when the big and the little equipages and drivers started on there were no vegetables nor flowers left on the buckboard, only a little lettuce which Isa said would come in beautifully with their own lunch. Mark was made the cashier; he buttoned nearly sixteen dollars into his jacket pocket, the result of the children’s garden products.

They went off in a gay mood, trying not to laugh, because they heard a lady say as they started away, a lady who had evidently spent years abroad and wanted it known:

“What an extraordinary country America is! Really, do you know, those children appeared quite refined and intelligent! Not in the least like hucksters’ children!”

“Some of us ought to be refined, and some of us intelligent. No fair any one being the whole show!” muttered Mark softly. “Which do you choose to be, Poppy?”

“Don’t know what you mean. Don’t bother me; I’m driving,” said Poppy.

Mark had come over to ride on the buckboard with the other children, now that it was emptied of the vegetables.

“Here’s a watering place,” called Mr. Burke, putting his hand on the back of his seat and swinging half around to the children behind him.

“This is the brook that the village is named after. We’ve got to stop an’ let both horses drink. Drive ahead, Poppy, an’ I’ll let down Hurrah’s check.”

He prepared to dismount, but Mark called to him that he could and would let down Hurrah’s check rein, and the big wagon drew to one side of the road to let the buckboard go by.

Hurrah drank long and blissfully, knee deep in the middle of the brook, sucking up water and blowing it out, sniffing it into his dusty nostrils after he had had enough to drink.

“My, but it looks good! Makes you feel cool to watch him,” said Mark, reluctantly crawling out on the shaft to pull up Hurrah’s head and fasten the check rein again, the other horse whinnying and pawing, impatient for his turn.

The buckboard came up safely on the opposite bank of the watering place, going right through the brook; Isabel and Prue were nervous over the feat, but Hurrah knew his duty and did it.

“Well, he may not be so awfully young, nor fancy, but it’s pretty nice to know you can trust Hurrah,” said Isabel emphatically.

But, alas, horseflesh, like human nature, is likely to have some weakness that may make it break its record of sober good behavior!

Hurrah feared no automobile, not the biggest truck; locomotives, whole trains, were to him nothing to look at. But paper blowing around his feet was one thing that he could not endure. This the children had not yet found out, yet if they had known it they could hardly have helped what happened.

A large sheet of paper, which had got detached from a billboard, advertising an auction that had been held the previous spring, came rollicking down the road, and fluttered and flourished between Hurrah’s forelegs, and rustled noisily against his hind ones.

Hurrah drew himself together with a snort; all his insulted legs seemed to be bunched for an instant. Then he plunged, and ran down the road at a speed no one could have imagined he could have struck, the buckboard, and the children holding to it, bounding and curving behind him, Poppy still holding the reins, but only at the buckle, screaming at the top of her voice and powerless to check Hurrah.

Mr. Burke was still standing beside his horse in the stream. He could not go after the flying Hurrah for a moment; if he had been able to, he could not have hoped, with his lumbering wagon, to catch Hurrah and the light buckboard.

“Oh, angels in heaven, go after that horse!” Thomas Burke groaned. “Oh, it’s killed entirely they’ll be! However will I face their mothers! Oh, sweet guardian angels, take care of them.”

Mrs. Burke was clambering down backward from the wagon, not aware that she was coming down into the brook.

“What’ll you be doin’, Ellen Burke? Do you think you can catch ’em walkin’?” demanded her husband.

“I’m no angel, but I’m going after that mad horse to see what I can do for them children when I come up to where they’ll be lyin’, alive or dead,” said Mrs. Burke, pale and resolute.

“Well, well, I’m goin’ to drive after ’em, ain’t I? Stay where ye are, me poor woman, an’ I’ll make Cork go his best after the track of ’em,” said Mr. Burke.

Cork, the big Burke horse, was urged forward and did his best, but Hurrah had a start, a light load, and was frightened, so he went far beyond the Burkes’ power to help.

None of the children jumped. Mark bade them hold on for their lives and not try to jump out of the buckboard.

“It’s low, if we do tip over, and we’ll take the chance of Hurrah’s stopping soon,” he said, keeping his presence of mind and trying to speak courage to the cowering little girls.

Prue sat with her head bent, her eyes closed, holding to the seat. Isabel, deadly white, held herself fast by one hand; the other grasped Poppy, whom Mark also held, and who was so frightened that she could not understand anything said to her, nor in any way help the situation; she would have thrown herself out if Isa and Mark had not clutched her tight.

Suddenly, while Hurrah was still in full flight, there sprang out of the thick growth on the side of the road a figure that seized Hurrah’s bridle.

So suddenly it happened that the horse was flung back on his haunches; he threw back his head so high that the man, a tiny creature, was swung off his feet. But he held on pluckily, and Hurrah stopped. The children were saved.

After a moment, in which all that they could understand was that they were not killed, not harmed, and were not going to be, they looked at the one to whom they owed their escape.

It was the queer little man whom they had seen in the woods! There was no mistaking his long nose, his thin, dark face, his crooked little body.

“Oh, how do you do?” gasped Prue.

In spite of the fact that Isabel was crying quietly, Poppy noisily, from the nervous relief of being saved, the others giggled at this remark from Prue.

“I’m pretty well,” said the queer little man in a thin, high, queer little voice that seemed, when you heard it, to be the only voice that could come out of that body.

“I don’t think you’d oughter drive such a mettlesome horse. It’s dang’rous to be run away with--for little girls like you,” he said.

Mark and Isabel giggled again, but Poppy, drying her eyes with a swift stroke of the back of her hand across them, cried indignantly:

“He ain’t meddlesome. He never meddles. That old paper meddled with him and scared him. He never run away before, and it’s because a big paper went and flew all through his legs!”

“That’ll do it, that’ll do it! That’ll scare ’em when trains a-rushin’ won’t,” said the little man, not in the least tempted to laugh.

“Well, I’m kinder glad I happened to be here to keep you from getting killed. I think most likely your folks’d been awful upset if you’d been killed.”

“They wouldn’t have liked it,” Mark admitted without a smile. “We’re grateful to you. We’re so grateful that we don’t know how to say it! What can any one say for thanks when it’s like this?”

Mark jumped over the buckboard wheel and went up to the little man with his hand out; his beautiful eyes, which were the color of an oak leaf in autumn, shone out through tears and his voice shook.

“Goodness me, ’twan’t anything; I happened to be here,” said the little man. “You’re entirely welcome.”

“Please tell me your name,” said Mark. “Isabel, Prue, Poppy, come; aren’t you going to thank him?”

“You’re a wonderful sweet, pretty child,” said the little man to Isabel. “My name is Ichabod Lemuel Rudd. You’re perfectly welcome, ’s I said. I’d like to hear how you’re called, if ’tisn’t impudence.”

“Well, considering what you’ve done, I wouldn’t call it that,” said Mark. “Mr. Rudd, this is Prudence Wayne. This is Poppy Meiggs. This is Isabel Lindsay. I am Mark Hawthorne.”

“What!” fairly shouted the little man. “Not Gilbert Hawthorne’s boy? How’d you come here? Gilbert’s boy! And I caught that horse! Well, well!”

He stood staring at Mark, forgetting the little girls completely, excitement in his eyes and manner.

“Do you know my father?” asked Mark. “Come home with us and let him thank you. There’s a big wagon coming along soon; we were driving behind it, in the man’s care. You can ride with him. Come home with us and see my father.”

“No, no, no! Maybe I’ll see him some day before long; maybe not. I can’t seem to get it right in my mind. Jiminy cats, it’s the bottle man!” Ichabod Rudd cried, the first to catch sight of the Burkes tearing, in a cloud of dust, toward them. “Good-by, Gilbert Hawthorne’s boy!”

Turning, the queer little man plunged into the thick undergrowth, out of which he had sprung to save the children, and instantly disappeared.