The in the Mountains Part 4 (1/2)
BACK AT LONG LAKE.
”Why, Bessie's a regular brick!” said Charlie, as they sat at dinner that night. Eleanor and the two girls were going back to Long Lake on the first train in the morning, and they were celebrating with the best dinner the town of Hamilton could afford. ”I told you I needed a nurse, Nell, and here one of you had to save me for the second time since I came here to look after you!”
”That man was terribly clever,” said Eleanor, gravely. ”I never even knew I was locked in--I was let out before I had had a chance to find it out for myself.”
”Bessie and I didn't know it, either, until she saw him tying Mr. Jamieson up,” said Dolly. ”We'd have found it out as soon as we wanted to leave the room to go down for lunch, of course, but he was so quiet about locking us in that neither of us heard him at all.”
”He was just a little bit too clever,” said Charlie. ”If he hadn't been so anxious to make a little more money out of me, he would have got clean away and given that paper to Holmes.”
”Not getting it seemed to upset Mr. Holmes a good deal, didn't it?” laughed Eleanor. ”Is it true that he left town by the first train after he heard that the letter had been found when they searched that wretched man?”
”Quite true,” said Charlie, happily.
”Just what did happen in court this afternoon?” asked Dolly. ”I thought we were going to be witnesses and have all sorts of fun. And now it's all over and our trip down here has just been wasted!”
”Why, Holmes's lawyer, Curtin, threw up the case as soon as he heard about that letter, Dolly. There wasn't anything else for him to do. With that, added to the stories you two girls had to tell, there wasn't any way of getting those gypsies off.”
”Are they going to send them to prison?”
”John will go to jail for six months. He's the one who actually carried Dolly off, you know. As for Peter and Lolla, who helped him, they get off easily. They were sentenced, too, but the judge suspended sentence. If they forget, and do anything more that's wrong, they'll have to serve out their term.”
”I'm very glad,” said Eleanor. ”Poor souls! I don't believe they understood what a dreadful thing they were doing.”
”It was a good thing for them they decided to plead guilty and take their medicine,” said Charlie. ”Or, I should say, it's a good thing that Curtin decided it for them. Don't worry about them any more. Holmes will have to pay John a good deal of money when he comes out of jail to make him keep quiet--if he manages, first, to shut up the people here, so that the whole story doesn't come out.”
”Can he do that, now that they've seen that letter?”
”I'm half afraid he can. He's got a tremendous lot of money, you see, and this is a time when he naturally wouldn't hesitate much about spending it. And I don't know that it's such a bad thing. It gives us a starting point, you see. And if the thing isn't made public, he may get more reckless, and give us another chance to land him where he belongs, and that's in the penitentiary. He's cleared out now and we couldn't persuade these people to go after him, even if it was worth while, which I don't believe it is.”
”How on earth did you get down?” Eleanor asked Bessie.
”Oh, I saw there wasn't anything else to do,” said Bessie, modestly. ”If you could have seen that man's face! I was terribly frightened. I didn't know what he might be going to do to Mr. Jamieson, so I just knew I had to get help. And I was afraid to call out of the window.”
”Why? Someone would have been sure to hear you,” said Eleanor.
”Because I thought the only person who was absolutely sure to hear me was that man who was tying Mr. Jamieson up. And I didn't know what he would do, but I was afraid he might do something dreadful right away if I called out and he knew that he was being watched.”
”You're all right, Bessie!” said Jamieson, admiringly. ”Was it very hard, going down the waterspout?”
”No, it really wasn't. Dolly was afraid I was going to fall, and she wanted to go herself. But I said I had seen it, and made the plan, and so I had a right to be the one to go. It really wasn't so far.”
”Far enough,” said Jamieson, grimly. ”You might easily have broken your neck, climbing down three flights that way.”
”Oh, but it wasn't three! It was only one. You see, there was a balcony outside the window, and on the next floor there was another, and I thought that window was pretty sure to be open. It was, so I got inside, and then I found the room I was in was empty, and the door was open, so all I had to do was to walk down the stairs and tell the manager. They all came up and, well, you know what happened then yourself.”
”I certainly do!” said Jamieson. ”And I don't think I'm likely to forget it very soon, either. That was a pretty tough character. I'll remember his face, all right.”
”Well,” said Eleanor, happily, ”all's well that ends well, they say. I really believe Dolly had the worst time, when you think about it. She had to watch Bessie climbing down that waterspout.”
”That was dreadful,” said Dolly, shuddering at the memory. ”But I think it was much worse for Mr. Jamieson and Bessie than for me.”
”Bessie was so busy getting down that I don't believe she had much time to think about the danger,” said Eleanor. ”And Mr. Jamieson didn't know her door was locked, so he had the relief of thinking that she'd been able to get help in just an ordinary fas.h.i.+on. Of course, if he or I had known what a risk she was running we'd have been half wild with anxiety about her. So you see it really was hard for you not to scream or do anything to startle that man.”
”That was what I was afraid of most,” said Bessie. ”I don't know what I'd have done if Dolly had screamed.”
”You needn't have been afraid! I was too frightened even to open my mouth,” said Dolly, honestly. ”I couldn't have uttered a sound, no matter what depended on it, until I saw you were all right. And then I just slumped down and laughed--as if there was something funny.”
”Well, we can all laugh at it now,” said Eleanor. ”Are you going back to the city to-night, Charlie?”
”No, I guess I'll be held up here until about noon to-morrow,” he answered. ”I've got to appear against that poor chap, and there are one or two other matters I want to attend to while I'm here. I'll see you on your train in the morning, and I'll try to look out for myself when you're gone.”
It was an enthusiastic and eagerly curious crowd of girls that welcomed them back to Long Lake the next day when, in the middle of the morning, the well-remembered camp appeared. Miss Drew, who had taken Eleanor's place as Guardian, laughed as she greeted her friend.
”I don't know how you do it, Nell,” she said. ”I never saw anything like these girls of yours. They did their best not to let me know, but I managed to find out, without their knowing it, that you did about everything in a different way from mine--and a much better way.”
”Nonsense!” said Eleanor. ”I've made a few changes in the theoretical rules of the Camp Fire. All Guardians are allowed to do that, you know. But it's only because they seemed to suit us a little better--my ideas, I mean.”
”You know,” said Anna Drew, thoughtfully, ”I think that's the very best thing about the Camp Fire. It doesn't hold you down to hard and fast rules that have got to be followed just so.”
”If it did, it would defeat its own purposes,” said Eleanor. ”What we want to do--and it's for Guardians, if they're youngsters like you and me, as well as for the girls--is to train ourselves to attend to our jobs properly.”
”Why, what jobs do you mean?”
”The job every girl ought to get sooner or later--running a home. It's a lot more of a job, and a lot more difficult, and important, too, than waiting on people in a shop, or being a stenographer, and yet no one ever thinks an awful lot about it before it comes along.”
”That's so, Nell. I never thought of it just that way. But you're right. We get married, and a whole lot of us don't have any idea at all of how to look after a house.”
”It isn't fair to the men who marry us. Marriage is supposed to be a partners.h.i.+p--husband and wife as partners. But if the man knew as little about his part of the job as the woman generally does about hers when she gets married, most married couples would be in the poorhouse in a year.”
”That sounds old-fas.h.i.+oned, but I don't believe it is, somehow.”
”It certainly is not. It's what I try to keep in mind. That's why we don't go in much for talking about votes for women. I'm not saying we ought not to vote, or that we ought to. But I do think there are a lot of things we ought to think about first. Times have changed a lot, but after all women and men don't change so very much. Or, at least, they ought not to change.”
”I think I see what you're driving at. You mean that your great grandmother and mine probably spun cloth and made clothes for themselves and most of the family, and did all sorts of other things that we never think of doing?”
”Yes. And I don't mean that we ought to go back to that. A man can buy a better s.h.i.+rt in a shop now for less money than you or I would have to spend in making him one. But there are plenty of other things we could do in a house that we never seem to think of, somehow.”
”I don't see how you think of all that! I thought I'd spent a lot of time studying the Camp Fire, but I never got hold of those ideas.”
”Oh, they're not all mine--not a bit of it! You ought to talk to Mrs. Chester, our Chief Guardian. She'd make you think, and she'd make you believe you were doing it all by yourself, too.”
”Yes, she's wonderful. I don't know her very well, but I hope to see more of her this winter. I want to be Guardian of a Camp Fire of my own. I've had just enough of the work, subst.i.tuting for other girls, to want to spend a lot more time at it.”
”You'll get the chance all right--don't worry about that! It's Guardians we need more than anything else. It isn't as easy as you would think to get girls and women who've got the patience and the time for the work. But that's chiefly because they don't know how fascinating it is, and how much more fun there is in doing it than in spending all your time going about having what people call a 'good time.' I've never had such a good time in my life as since we got up this Manasquan Camp Fire.”
”Well, I wish I could stay with you, and go on this wonderful tramp with you. But I've got a lot of girls coming up to visit me, and I've simply got to be there to entertain them. So if you're really going to stay, and don't need me any more, I'll have to be getting Andrew to take me back home again.”