The Corner House Girls Among the Gypsies Part 13

"'Tis so!" cried the girl.

"I tell you," said the very shrewd-looking boy. "We'll show it to you for ten cents."

"I don't believe it," repeated Sammy, but more doubtfully.

The girl laughed at him more scornfully than before. "He's afraid to spend a dime--an' him with so much money," she cried.

"I don't believe you've got a cherry-colored calf to show me."

"Gimme the dime and I'll show you whether we have or not," said Peter.

"No," said the cautious Sammy. "I'll give you a dime _if_ you show it to me. But no foolin'. I won't give you a cent if the calf is any other color."

"All right," shouted the other boy. "Come on and I'll show you. Come on, Liz."

"All right, Peter," said the girl, quite as eagerly. "Hurry up, raggedy-pants. We can use that dime, Peter and me can."

The bare-legged youngsters got through a rail fence and darted down a path into a scrubby pasture, as wild as unbroken colts. Sammy, feeling fine after the bountiful breakfast he had eaten, chased after them wishing that he had thought to remove his shoes and stockings too.

Peter and Liz seemed so much more free and untrammeled than he!

"Hold on!" puffed Sammy, coming finally to the bottom of the slope. "I ain't going to run my head off for any old calf--Huh!"

From behind a clump of brush appeared suddenly a cow--a black and white cow, probably of the Holstein breed. There followed a scrambling in the bushes. Liz jumped into them with a shriek and drove out a little, blatting, stiff-legged calf. It was all of a glossy black, from its nose to the tip of its tail.

"That's him! That's him!" shrieked Liz. "A cherry-colored calf."

"What did I tell you?" demanded the boy, Peter. "Give us the dime."

"You go on!" exclaimed Sammy. "I knew all the time you were story-telling. That's no cherry-colored calf."

"'Tis too! It's just the color of a black-heart cherry," giggled Liz.

"You got to give up ten cents."

"Won't neither," Sammy declared.

"I'll take it off you," threatened Peter, growing belligerent.

"You won't," stubbornly declared Sammy, who did not propose to be cheated.

Peter jumped for him and Sammy could not run. One reason why he could not retreat was because Liz grabbed him from the rear, holding him around the waist.

She pulled him over backward, while her brother began to pummel Sammy most heartily from above. It was a most unfair attack and a most uncomfortable situation for the runaway. Although he managed to defend his face for the most part from Peter's blows, he could do little else.

"Lemme up! Lemme up!" bawled Sammy.

"Gimme the dime," panted Peter.

"I won't! 'Tain't fair!" gasped Sammy, too plucky to give in.

Liz had now squirmed from under the struggling boys. She must have seen at the house in which pocket Sammy kept the knotted handkerchief, for she thrust her hand into that pocket and s.n.a.t.c.hed out the h.o.a.rd of dimes before the owner realized what she was doing.

"Hey! Stop! Lemme up!" roared Sammy again.

"I got it, Peter!" shrieked Liz, and, springing up, she darted into the bushes and disappeared.

"Stop! She's stole my money," gasped Sammy in horror and alarm.

"She never! You didn't have no money!" declared Peter, and with a final blow that stunned Sammy for the moment, the other leaped up and followed his wild companion into the brush.

Sammy, weeping in good earnest now, bruised and scratched in body and sore in spirit, climbed slowly to his feet. Never before in any of his runaway escapades had he suffered such ignominy and loss.

Why! he had actually fallen among thieves. First his bag and all his chattels therein had been stolen. Now these two ragam.u.f.fins had robbed him of every penny he possessed.

He dared not go back to the house where he had bought breakfast and complain. The other youngsters there might fall upon and beat him again!

Sammy Pinkney at last was tasting the bitter fruits of wrong doing.

Even weeding another beet-bed could have been no more painful than these experiences which he was now suffering.

CHAPTER XI--MYSTERIES ACc.u.mULATE

"And if you go to the store, or anywhere else for Mrs. McCall or Linda, remember _don't_ take that bracelet with you," commanded Agnes in a most imperative manner, fairly transfixing her two smaller sisters with an index finger. "Remember!"

"Ruthie didn't say so," complained Dot. "Did she, Tess?"

"But I guess we'd better mind what Agnes says when Ruth isn't at home," confessed Tess, more amenable to discipline. "You know, Aggie has got to be responsible now."

"Well," muttered the rebellious Dot, "never mind if she is 'sponserble, she needn't be so awful bossy about it!"

Agnes did, of course, feel her importance while Ruth was away. It was not often that she was made responsible for the family welfare in any particular. And just now the matter of the silver bracelet loomed big on her horizon.

She scarcely expected the advertis.e.m.e.nt in the _Morning Post_ to bring immediate results. Yet, it might. The Gypsies' gift to the little girls was a very queer matter indeed. The suggestion that the bracelet had been stolen by the Romany folk did not seem at all improbable.

And if this was so, whoever had lost the ornament would naturally be watching the "Lost and Found" column in the newspaper.

"Unless the owner doesn't know he has lost it," Agnes suggested to Neale.

"How's that? He'd have to be more absent-minded than Professor Ware not to miss a bracelet like that," scoffed her boy chum.

"Oh, Professor Ware!" giggled Agnes, suddenly. "_He_ would forget anything, I do believe. Do you know what happened at his house the other evening when the Millers and Mr. and Mrs. Crandall went to call?"

"The poor professor made a bad break I suppose," grinned Neale. "What did he do?"

"Why, Mrs. Ware saw the callers coming just before they rang the bell and the professor had been digging in the garden. Of course she straightened things up a little before she appeared in the parlor to welcome the visitors. But the professor did not appear. Somebody asked for him at last and Mrs. Ware went to the foot of the stairs to call him.

"'Oh, Professor!' she called up the stairs, and the company heard him answer back just as plain: