The Camp Fire Girls at Onoway House Part 6

"It's a long story," said the man, taking off his hat, pulling a handkerchief out of it and putting it back on his head, and then falling to work again.

"Must be a genius," thought Sahwah, "that's what makes him act so queerly." She waited a few minutes in silence and then curiosity got the better of her. "Is it too long to tell?" she asked.

"Eh? What's that?" asked the man, turning toward her. He took off his hat, put his handkerchief back in again and then put the hat back on his head.

"I asked you," said Sahwah, politely, "if the story of what you are making is too long to tell."

"Not at all, not at all," said the man, and resumed his work without another word.

"How impolite!" thought Sahwah. "To urge me to stay and then refuse to answer my questions." Her eyes strayed around the room at the bookcases and cabinets. Every cabinet was filled with clocks or parts of clocks.

The books as far as she could see were all about machinery. One was a book of such astounding width of binding that she leaned over to read the t.i.tle. The letters were so faded that they were hardly visible. "L,"

she read, "E, F, E--"

"It's a machine for saving time," said the man at the table, so suddenly that Sahwah jumped.

"How interesting!" she said. "How does it work?"

The man fitted a rod into a wheel and apparently forgot her existence.

She sat silent a few minutes more and then decided she had better go home. She rose softly to her feet. "It's something like a clock," said the man, without looking up from his work.

"It's coming after all," she thought, and sat down again.

After a silence of about five minutes the man spoke again. "It measures the time just like any clock," he explained, "only, as the minutes are ticked off, they are thrown into a little compartment at the side,-this thing," he said, holding up a little metal box. He lapsed into silence again and after an interval resumed where he had left off. "This compartment," he said, "holds just an hour, and when it is full a bell rings and the compartment opens automatically, throwing the block of time, carefully wrapped to prevent leakage of seconds, out into this basket." He took off his hat, brought out his handkerchief, polished a bit of gla.s.s with it, put it carefully back into the crown and replaced the hat on his head.

It suddenly came over Sahwah that her ingenious host was not quite right in his mind, so rising abruptly she hastened out of the room. The man took no notice of her departure. She locked the door carefully after her, and went out by the window whence she had entered the house, pulling it shut from the outside. She did not undertake to cross the marsh again, but made a wide detour around it. When she was once more in the fallow field she looked back, but the house was invisible among the trees and bushes which surrounded it. As she sped past the rows of standing corn on her way home, Abner Smalley, bending low among them, saw her and straightened up with a suspicious look in his eyes. He glanced in the direction from which she had come. On one side was the empty field bordered by the marsh and the woody copse, and on the other was the path from the river which went in the direction of Onoway House.

He breathed a sigh of relief. The girl had come from the direction of Onoway House, of course. The next day he put his bull to graze in the empty field before the copse. Then, in different places along the rail fence which enclosed this field he put signs reading: BEWARE THE BULL.

HE IS UGLY.

When the girls came back from town Sahwah told her discovery. "Nyoda,"

said Gladys, suddenly, "do you suppose it could have been this man who threw the pepper at you?"

"Perhaps," said Nyoda, and all the girls shuddered at the thought.

Before Sahwah's discovery they had agreed among themselves to say nothing about the ghost episode to anyone outside the family, so that the perpetrator of the joke, if he were one of the farmer boys living near, would not have the satisfaction of knowing that they were wrought up about it. In the meantime they would send Tom to get acquainted with all the boys on the road and try to find out something about it from them.

Calvin Smalley was over that evening and something was said about Sahwah's adventure of the afternoon. "Calvin," said Nyoda, directly, "who is the old man who lives in that house?"

Calvin looked very much distressed, and frightened too, it must be admitted. Then he laughed, although to Nyoda his laugh seemed a trifle forced, and said in his usual straightforward manner, "The man in the old house among the trees? That is my great uncle Peter, grandfather's brother. He was something of an inventer and invented a time clock, but the patent was stolen by another and he never got the credit for inventing it. He worried about it until his mind became unbalanced. For years he has worked around with wheels and things, making strange contrivances for clocks. He is perfectly harmless and wouldn't hurt a fly. He will not live in a house with people and he will not leave the cottage he lives in even for an hour, he is so afraid something will happen to his machine while he is away. We don't like to have people know that he is there because they would say we ought to send him away, but Uncle Abner won't do that because Uncle Peter hates to be with folks and he might not be allowed to play with his machine in an inst.i.tution the way he can here. So as long as he is happy what is the difference?

But you know how country people talk. So would it be asking a great deal to request you not to say anything about this to anyone, not even the Landsdownes? If Uncle Abner ever found out you knew he would be very angry, and would sure think I told you. I don't see how you ever got in, anyway; the door is usually kept locked, and to all appearances the house is empty." Sahwah looked decidedly uncomfortable as she met the eyes of several of the girls, but no one mentioned the manner in which she had gained entrance. Inasmuch as she had pried into this secret she felt it was no more than right to promise to keep it.

"All right, we won't say anything," she said, rea.s.suringly. All the others gave an equally solemn promise, and were glad that Ophelia had heard none of the talk about the matter, for she had been over at the Landsdowne's since before Sahwah told her adventure. Little pitchers have wide mouths as well as big ears.

The girls all looked at each other when Calvin a.s.serted that his Uncle Peter never left the house even for an hour. Clearly then, he had not been the ghost.

Migwan had bad dreams that night. Just before going to bed she had been reading a volume of Poe, which is not the most sleep producing literature known. She dreamed that she was lying awake in her bed, looking at a big square of moonlight on the floor, when suddenly a black shadow fell across it, and the figure of a monkey appeared on the windowsill, stood there a moment and then jumped into the room.

Shuddering with fright she woke up, and could hardly rid herself of the impression of the dream, it had seemed so real. There was a big square of moonlight on the floor. "I must have seen it in my sleep," she thought, "it's exactly like the one in my dream." She lay wondering if it were possible to see things with your eyes closed, when all of a sudden her heart began to thump madly. Into the moonlight there was creeping a black shadow. It remained still for a few seconds, a grotesque-shaped thing with a long tail, and then something came hurtling through the window and landed on the floor beside the bed.

Migwan gave a scream that roused the house. Hinpoha, starting up wildly, jumped from bed and landed squarely on the black specter on the floor.

The form struggled and squirmed and sent forth a long wailing ME-OW-W-W.

"What is the matter?" cried Nyoda and Gladys and Betty and Sahwah, running to the rescue.

"It's a cat!" said Migwan, faintly. "I thought it was a monkey!"

"Moral: Don't read Poe before going to bed," said Nyoda, while the rest shouted with laughter at the cause of Migwan's fright.

"It must have jumped in from the tree," said Hinpoha. "I see our screen has fallen out."

There was little sleep in the house the rest of the night. During the time when the screen was out of the window the room had filled with mosquitoes, which soon found their way to the rest of the rooms. "If you offered me the choice of sleeping in a room with a monkey or a swarm of mosquitoes, I believe I'd take the monkey," said Nyoda, slapping viciously. Altogether it was a heavy-eyed group that came down to breakfast the next morning.

"What are we going to do to-day?" asked Gladys.

"The usual thing," said Migwan, "pull weeds. That is, I am. You girls don't need to help all the time. I don't want you to think of my garden as merely a lot of weeds to be forever pulled. I want you to remember only the beautiful part of it."

"We don't mind pulling weeds," cried the girls, stoutly, "it's fun when we all do it together," and they fell to work with a will.

"I declare," said Migwan, "I have become so zealous in the pursuit of weeds that I mechanically start to pull them along the roadside. I actually believe that if a weed grew on my grave I'd rise up and eradicate it. I little thought when I proudly won an honor last summer for identifying ten different weeds that they'd get to haunting my dreams the way they do now. Now I know what people mean when they say 'meaner than pusley.' It's the meanest thing I've ever dealt with. I cut off and pull up every trace of it one day and the next day there it is again, just as flourishing as ever."

"I don't call that meanness," said Nyoda, "that's just cheerful persistence. Think what a success we'd all be in life if we got ahead in the face of obstacles in that way. If I didn't already have a perfectly good symbol I'd take pusley for mine. If it were edible I think I'd use it as an exclusive article of diet for a time and see if I couldn't absorb some of its characteristics."

While she was talking Ophelia came along with a frog on a shovel, which she proceeded to throw over the fence. "Come back with that frog," said Migwan, "I need him in my business. Don't you know that frogs eat the insects off the plants and we have that many less to kill?" Ophelia was standing in the strong sunlight, and Nyoda noticed that the circle of light hair on her head was still golden clear to the roots, although the ringlets were visibly growing.

"It must be a freak of Nature," she concluded, "for it certainly isn't bleached."

Rest at Onoway House was again doomed to be broken that night. Nyoda had been peacefully sleeping for some time when she woke up at the touch of something cold upon her face. She started up and the feeling disappeared. She went to sleep again, thinking she had been dreaming.

Soon the feeling came again, as of something cold lying on her forehead.

She put up her hand and encountered a cold and k.n.o.bby object. At her touch the thing-whatever it was-jumped away. She sprang out of bed and lit the lamp. The sight that met her eyes as she looked around the room made her pinch herself to see if she were really awake and not in the midst of some nightmare. All over the floor, chairs, table, beds, bureau and wash-stand sat frogs; big frogs, little frogs, medium-sized frogs; all goggling solemnly at her in the lamplight. She stared open mouthed at the apparition. Could this be another Plague of Frogs, she asked herself, such as was visited upon Pharaoh? At her horrified exclamation Gladys woke up, gave one look around the room and dove under the bedclothes with a wild yell. To her excited eyes it looked as if there were a million frogs in the room.

"What's the matter?" asked Ophelia, sitting up in bed and staring around her sleepily.

"Don't you see the frogs?" cried Nyoda.

"Sure I see them," said Ophelia. "Aren't you glad I got so many?"

"Ophelia!" gasped Nyoda, "did you bring those frogs in here?"

"Betcher I did," said Ophelia, with pride, "and it took me most all afternoon to catch the whole sackful, too. What's wrong?" she asked, as she saw the expression on Nyoda's face. "Yer said they'd eat the bugs and yer made such a fuss about the mosquitoes last night that I brought the toads to eat them while we slept." Nyoda dropped limply into a chair. The inspirations of Ophelia surpa.s.sed anything she had ever read in fiction.

If anybody has ever tried to catch a roomful of frogs that were not anxious to be caught they can appreciate the chase that went on at Onoway House that night. The first faint streaks of dawn were appearing in the sky before the family finally retired once more. Sufficient to say that Ophelia never set up another mosquito trap made of frogs.

CHAPTER VI.-THE WINNEBAGOS SCENT A PLOT.

"Where are you going, my pretty maid, and why the step ladder?" said Nyoda to Migwan one morning. "Have your beans grown up so high over night that you have to climb a ladder to pick them?"

"Come and see!" said Migwan, mysteriously. Nyoda followed her to the front lawn. Migwan set the ladder up beside a dead tree, from which the branches had been sawn, leaving a slender trunk about seven feet high.

On top of this Migwan proceeded to nail a flat board.