The Girl Scout Pioneers Part 12

"They do indeed," agreed Mrs. Cosgrove. "Have you heard from your folks?"

"Yes, I had a letter to-day," answered Rose truthfully. "They are getting along splendidly, and father says he thinks he will soon have a good place for me."

"That's fine. We are glad to have you with us, Rose, but with your own folks will be better, when things get all nicely fixed up."

"Yes," put in Molly. "When you go off to take your own place now, Rose, you will understand American ways much better than you did when you came. And wherever you go, I am going to send word ahead to the Girl Scouts so that you may join at once and keep up your training. Our own troop is going to organize to-morrow night. We are going to call ourselves the Venture Troop, as we will be the first troop yet formed in a manufacturing plant."

"Then the Franklin's will be organized before the True Treds take in the mill girls of Flosston?" queried Rose.

"They also meet this week to initiate a group of a dozen girls from Fluffdown. These are to be scattered in two troops and they will try the plan of putting the strangers in with the girls who have had scout experience. You see, we have no troop at all in Franklin, and I am ambitious to have the first formed of our own girls exclusively. They are very enthusiastic."

"I will be sorry if I have to go away," Rose murmured, and her eyes darkened into violet tones with deeper emotion.

"And I can't tell you how I shall miss you if you do have to go,"

spoke Molly. "But you are not gone yet. At least you will be made a troop leader before you go from Franklin. Then, in your new surroundings you will be able to a.s.sist others to do what you have seen done here."

"I never knew how much girls could help girls until I saw the scouts at that meeting the other night," said Rose, a note of sadness in her subdued voice. "If only I had such a chance before --before--"

"No regrets. Remember all our trials bring compensations. For instance, if you had not made the mistake of leaving home that night, you would never, perhaps, have met the Cosgroves," and she smiled happily in an attempt to cheer the drooping spirits of the girl sitting opposite, who had not touched her cake or even sipped her tea.

"Yet I did not do it. My mistake was not the--the real clue," Rose managed to say, her hold on useful English betraying its uncertain foundation. "It was your mother's good nature, not my mistake,"

she clarified.

"I'll accept the honors. Drink your tea and take your cake. It is not much of a compliment to turn aside from the cake I gave up the home lecture this afternoon to bake for you two. Marty is gone out of town on business, and won't be back for three days, and our big officer wants pie, and scorns cake. So you see it is the plain duty of you two to eat this," and Mrs. Cosgrove helped herself to a real sample of the iced pyramid.

"I cannot help thinking of that girl who ran off with the crippled children's money," Molly reverted to the earlier conversation. "I don't believe she was a girl scout at all," she declared emphatically.

"But the paper said she was," Rose spoke, fearing her voice would shake her into a full confession of her own conspiracy to shield Tessie.

"Oh, no, it did not state she was a scout," Molly corrected, "the paragraph read she claimed to be. There is a great difference."

"Well, it is very queer our own good officer," meaning Jim Cosgrove, "never found trace of that girl. She must have covered her tracks in some unusual way," declared Mrs. Cosgrove, "for Jim is not one to be easily fooled. So Rose, if you are not going out I am sure you will be glad to help with the tea things. Molly, I pressed your waist when I had the irons for Marty's neckties, so I treated you as well."

"Momsey, you are perfect in your plans. Never use an iron for one without applying it to the other. And I will be joyous in my fresh blouse. Rose, please put a tag on my piece of cake, I'll enjoy that end when I come in. I have only a little time to get ready now, as I must make out a programme for our preliminary drill.

I'll tell you all about it, Rose. Take a walk when you finish helping mother. You don't get any too much air, you know," and Molly hummed her newest waltz song as she capered around in preparation for the evening's activities. Molly was always jolly, if not singing she would be "chirping" as her brother Martin termed the queer sort of lispy whistle she indulged in, and even while dressing, it was a practice of hers to vary the operations with home-made jazz.

During all this Rose was making up her mind to go straight out in the big world and find Tessie Wartliz. She did not know just how she would set about it, but her mind was made up on the one important point, namely, that the finding must be undertaken and at once. Rose could no longer stand the misery of secrecy concerning the lost scout pin. Every headline in a paper glared out at her as if threatening to expose her guilty knowledge. Every letter she received through the busy little post-office sent a frightened chill over her delicate form, and now she felt certain her benefactors, the Cosgrove family, must know she had heard from the runaway girl, and they were too generous to ask a single question concerning the matter. They trusted her, and she must deceive them!

"I will have to say that mother has sent for me," she decided after a bitter hour alone in her room, "and when I find Tessie----"

She paused. She was baffled! What would she do if she did find Tessie?

CHAPTER XII

TESSIE

Again our scene shifts, and, as in the screen play, that retrospective distant picture brings one back to an earlier vision, so from the distance we now see the runaway, Tessie.

Step by step, along the dark, uncertain road of offences which in themselves were trivial, but which brought such dire results upon the erring girl as to make her all but an outcast, Tessie, after the first foolish blunder, found herself confronted with a seeming necessity for keeping up the false role she had almost unwittingly a.s.sumed. The girl was not wicked. Her untrained and unrestrained tongue was her worst enemy, and it very often belied her honest, generous heart.

In inducing Dagmar to leave home she actually believed she was a.s.sisting a friend--her intention was to better that friend's circ.u.mstances, but the methods! How could she know that right could not result from deliberate wrong! That doctrine had never been made a part of such education as she had the opportunity of acquiring. True, the girl learned right from wrong, also her religion was very clear on the point, but she could not then believe it was wrong to fly from the horrors of mill drudgery, made unbearable by the more intimate environment of a miserable home.

So Tessie Wartliz was suffering from an inherited disease commonly called "Greed." Her parents were greedy for money, and she was greedy for good times. She wanted much of anything she enjoyed, and had little care how that abnormal amount was obtained.

The fatal night she and Dagmar (now our own Rose Dixon) landed so suddenly in Franklin, where the jitney dropped them almost into the arms of Officer Cosgrove, Tessie, as we will remember, escaped, and carried with her the pocketbook she had been carrying for her companion, and in that little soiled purse was the much- prized, lost and found, scout badge of merit.

Tessie at first thought little or nothing of the trinket. As she had scoffed at its purpose, when Rose respected it, so she brushed it aside as of no importance when she emptied the pitiful pittance of her forsaken companion into her own pocketbook, when forced to use the funds or beg from strangers.

On the step of the last jitney that rumbled through Franklin making no stops, and being entirely unoccupied by pa.s.sengers, Tessie managed to hide as the car slowed up at a turn, and later she crawled inside, when the sleepy driver, his day and night work finished, allowed the motor to "take its head" as we might say to a horse-drawn vehicle. Her heart almost ceased beating when the officer who commanded the line between the two villages, stopped Frank and demanded to know if he carried any pa.s.sengers.

"Three empty dinner pails that came out full of supper," the driver called back, and Tessie actually under the seat, felt free to breathe again and keep watch for some turn where a kindly house light might gleam out to save her from a dreaded night, under a tree or behind some rugged, wild world shelter.

Just as Frank, the driver, slowed down, preparatory to turning for the big shed, under which the modern carry-all would be laid up until daylight next morning, Tessie decided she would ask this rustic to a.s.sist her. Believing that most men, especially those not too old, were apt to be kind-hearted or maybe "softhearted,"

she climbed from her hiding place, and timidly tapped Frank on his astonished shoulder.

"Gosh!" he exclaimed, "where'd you come from?"

"I lost my way!" she answered not altogether untruthfully. "Can you help me? Where do you live?"

"Say," Frank challenged, "you look pretty near big enough to talk to traffic cops. How'd you get in this boat, anyhow?"

His voice was not friendly. That anyone should have climbed into the "Ark" without signalling him was evidently opposed to his sense of humor. Tessie did not reply as glibly as she had intended to. Instead she threw herself on his mercy, as actors might say in melodrama.

"Honest I did get lost. I'm on my way to the Woolston mills, and I missed so many trains, and caught so many jitneys I lost count.

Then, when I saw you come along I was so glad I almost--well, I just flopped. I was dog-tired. First I hailed you, but you were dozing I guess, then I was scared to death you would jolt by and leave me, so I had to climb on."

"Oh," replied Frank, not altogether convinced, but evidently on the way to conviction. "I did fall off a little, I'm out since four A.M. Now, young lady, what's your idea of fixin' for the night? My old lady, meaning a first-rate little mother, is awful strict about girls ridin' in this bus not accompanied by their parents, and I don't see my way clear to tote you home at this unearthly hour. I see by--the make-up" (with an inclusive glance over the now thoroughly frightened Tessie) "that you are a mill girl, and I know they are takin' on new hands at Woolston's, so that sounds natural, but findin' you like this in the Ark--even mother might think that a little bit stretched."

"Well, tell me the name of some one out this way, and I can say I'm goin' there, and you can fix it by objectin' to takin' me.

Say, you didn't know when I got on how far I wanted to go."

"Some cute little fixer, you are," Frank admitted, and this was the story Tessie clung to when Frank Apgar brought the girl into his mother's house a few minutes later.

Thus began her adventure weeks ago. Each day and every night adding new and more serious complications to the seemingly innocent quest for a broader life than could be lived in the mill end of Flosston, Tessie was compelled to add falsehood to fabrication, to bear out her original story, and save herself from being "picked up" and forcibly returned to her parents.

She knew the Franklin officer would trace her easily if she went by frequented ways, so instead of looking for work in a mill she sought and obtained employment in a family of rather influential suburbanites. The scarcity of domestic help a.s.sisted her in this enterprise, and being really skilled in handling machinery and materials, it was not difficult for her to follow orders, and a.s.sist a cook who was overjoyed to have help of any sort in the big country residence.

But the little human b.u.t.terfly had tried her wings, and she very quickly found life at Appleton too tame for her liking. Directly upon receiving pay for her first two weeks of service, Tessie (her a.s.sumed name meant nothing to her or to us) said good-bye to Rebecca the cook, and taking no chances with members of the family who were "interested in her," she left Appleton and journeyed forth again.

She had now acquired a new accomplishment. She could serve as waitress or second girl, and this advantage almost a.s.sured her of success in any sort of well-built community.

But it would be tame, slow, as Tessie figured it out, and only a big city could possibly satisfy her ambition "to be somebody."

Then came the temptation which resulted so disastrously.