Tabitha's Vacation Part 5

UNWELCOME GUESTS

"Well, one whole week is gone," said Tabitha exultantly, as she bent over the heaped-up mending basket one hot afternoon, and tried to make neat darns of the gaping holes in the heels of Susie's stockings.

"Yes, and half of the first day of the second week," Gloriana replied cheerily. "But really, Puss, time hasn't dragged as slowly as I feared. That first day was the longest, I think, I ever knew."

"That first day was a horrible nightmare," the older girl emphatically declared. "I thought it _never_ would end, and I'd have quit my job on the spot if there had been anyone to take my place."

"I'd have quit it anyway if you had just said the word," laughed her companion. "I thought you'd never go to sleep that night--I wanted so badly to cry."

"Did you? So did I, but you kept tossing so restlessly that I knew you were still awake, and finally I dropped off without getting my cry at all."

"That's just what I did, too!" giggled Gloriana.

"And the next morning everything looked so different----"

"Yes, I could laugh then at the burro's nose in your lovely pie and the seeds in my gingerbread; but they didn't seem so funny the night before."

"They seemed anything but funny to me for several days, and I don't think I'll ever see a chocolate pie or a gingerbread again in my life without remembering this vacation."

"But things have gone splendidly since that first night," Gloriana reminded her. "The children have tried to be angels, even if they have executed some queer stunts for cherubs."

"Yes, I know, but I am glad just the same that half of our--apprenticeship--is over. If this week will pa.s.s as smoothly as last week did, it's all I'll-- What in the world is the matter with the children? Sounds as if they were having an Indian war dance. I wonder if those Swanberg boys are bothering again."

Both girls dropped their mending and hurried to the door just in time to hear Inez's voice say cuttingly, "Of course we know who you are, Williard and Theodore McKittrick!"

"Guess again!" drawled the older of two strange boys, lolling on suitcases in the middle of the yard.

"Well, those _are_ your names," Inez insisted.

"You look enough like you used to when you were here before, so we can't be mistaken," said Mercedes primly.

"Can't, eh? Well, our names are Williard and Theodore no longer. We are Billiard and Toady these days. Mind you don't forget! We've come to stay till the folks get back----"

"Didn't you get our telegram telling you not to come?" demanded belligerent Susie.

"Sure we did!"

"Then why didn't you stay at home?"

"'Cause ma had the arrangements all made to go across the ocean and there wasn't anyone else to send us to. Grandma's away travelling, and Aunt Helen's kids have got scarlet fever."

"But papa's in the hospital and mamma's there nursing him," said Irene indignantly.

"Truly?" The boy called Toady spoke for the first time.

"Do you think I'm lying?"

"Well, ma said she bet it was all a bluff to keep us from coming out here," Billiard explained, looking genuinely surprised at Irene's words.

"And anyway," supplemented Toady, "she said if it was true about your father and mother being away to Los Angeles, there'd have to be someone here to look after you kids, and two more wouldn't make much difference."

"Specially when she's paying for our board!"

Tabitha, a silent spectator in the doorway, ground her teeth in helpless rage, while Gloriana gasped audibly at the impudence of mother and sons.

"It's no more'n right that you should pay board," Susie declared in heat. "You make so much trouble wherever you go."

"Do, huh?" Billiard, frowning darkly, advanced threateningly toward his outspoken cousin, with fists doubled up and an ugly sneer on his face. But Susie was no coward, and when he shook his knuckles close to her little pug nose to emphasize his words, the girl's arm shot out unexpectedly and landed a blow fair and square on one eye.

With a yell of rage and pain, the surprised boy lunged forward, but instead of confronting Susie, he found himself in the grasp of a tall, irate young lady, who wore her shining black hair pinned up on top of her head, although her skirts were still short enough to show a pair of trim ankles. "Now stop right here!"

She spoke quietly, almost too quietly; but one look into the smouldering depths of those big, black eyes was enough to cow the bully, and he jerked himself free, muttering sulkily, "She hit me first!"

"She had to, or get hit herself," bawled Inez, jigging excitedly from one foot to the other in her exultation over her cousin's defeat.

"Inez!"

"Well, he needn't have come! We telegraphed them not to!"

"_Inez_!"

The girl subsided, and Billiard found courage to leer triumphantly at her discomfiture. But Tabitha intercepted the glance, and in that ominously calm voice which had struck terror to his cowardly heart before, she announced, "It is too late now to think of that side of the question. We'll have to make the most of a bad situation; but I _will not_ tolerate fighting. You may as well understand that first as last.

If you boys can't behave like gentlemen, you can just move on down to the hotel. Is that plain?"

"Yes, sir--ma'am," stammered the abashed Billiard, glancing uneasily about for some means of escape, but Tabitha had delivered her ultimatum, and now swept grandly into the house, satisfied that she had displayed her authority in a very impressive manner.

Hardly had the screen closed behind her, however, when her sharp ears caught Billiard's hoa.r.s.ely whispered question, "Who is that high-headed geezer?"

"The girl who is taking care of us," answered Mercedes unguardedly.

"Girl?"

"Sure! What did you take her for?"

"A--a new woman. A--one of these things that's trying to vote and do men's work and such like."

"Oho!" yelled the McKittrick girls in unison. "Why, she ain't much older'n us!"

"She goes to Ivy Hall in Los Angeles, the boarding school I belong to,"

said Mercedes.

"Honest Injun?"

"Cross my heart!"

"Huh!"

And instinctively Tabitha knew that there was trouble ahead for her.

"Isn't this the worst luck you ever heard of?" she groaned to Gloriana when once inside the house again.