The Knights of the White Shield Part 32

The white elephant's relative was a conspicuous character--after the lifting of the cover--that evening.

The next morning Charlie appeared before Will, hanging out a long, dismal face, and speaking with difficulty.

"She's gone!"

"Who, Aunt Stanshy?"

"No, Bunny!"

"Your rabbit? How?"

"I don't know. I left her all right in the maginary, last night."

"Let me go out and look round. But where did you put your box?"

"Well, Aunt Stanshy thought it would do just as well if I put the box out into the wood-shed--and--"

"Was the door left open?"

"I saw it open this morning."

"I will look about."

Will went into the wood-shed, and there before the door he saw two cats licking their chops, and their guilty eyes seemed to him to say, "Rabbit stew for breakfast! Keep dark!"

"Charlie," said Will, entering the house again, "I think two cats out there took your rabbit, and we will catch them and box them and exhibit them."

"As my maginary?"

"Yes, and I'll tell you how to label them."

The cats were caught and boxed, and this was the label their cage bore on the second and last evening of the "Helping Hand Sale:" "Destroyers of the Distant Cousin of the White Elephant of Siam." This device took, and many pennies were put by the neighbors into Charlie's hands. When the boys summed up the profits of the sale, they had for Tim Tyler's benefit the sum of thirty dollars, which Mr. Walton promised should be judiciously expended.

"It all shows," remarked Miss Barry to the club, "what we can do when we work in earnest, and also how much small sums amount to."

Simes Badger's comment on the affair was that Aunt Stanshy had shown herself a Christian, "knowin' as I do," said Simes, "the story of the Tyler affair way back."

Mr. Walton and his old mother had something also to say about the sale, and it was in connection with one of Tony's Italian pictures that Mr.

Walton bought.

"A house, mother, in Naples, not far from the water, you see."

The old lady was silent awhile. Then she murmured, "I have seen it, haven't you, somewhere?"

"Why, yes--no. What is it?"

But the old lady herself was confused about it. She looked at the fair home by the sea, and then looked again, but she could not seem to positively identify it.

"And still I have seen it before," she affirmed.

To identify the spot was like trying to get hold of the exact form of a ship that partially breaks through the fog and then recedes, ever coming yet ever vanishing.

CHAPTER XVII.

TWO MUD-TURTLES.

"There goes a man drunk, Aunt Stanshy."

Aunt Stanshy said nothing, but continued to thump away on her ironing-board.

"He is going down the lane, aunty."

Aunt Stanshy heard Charlie, but she said nothing, only ironing away steadily as ever. Charlie heard her sigh once, or thought he did.

"Did you speak, aunty?"

"Me, child? Why, no!"

Charlie continued to look out of the window that fronted the narrow lane.

The drunken man was not a very attractive object. Then it was a dark, lowery, and rainy day in the latter part of November. The streets were muddy, fences damp and clammy to the touch. Over the river hung a gray, cheerless fog. To such a day a staggering drunkard could not be said to contribute a cheering feature, and it was no wonder that Aunt Stanshy cared little to see him. Soon after this, Charlie went out into the barn.

It had a deserted look, especially up in the chamber.

"No White Shields here now," he said, mournfully.

That fastened window, too, the nail driven securely above the hook and staple, had a mournful look to Charlie's soul. He remembered the story that Simes Badger had told him about this window and the closed door below.

"I wonder if they will ever be open," thought Charlie.

He remembered the river view that was possible from the "cupelo" above, and he said, "Guess I'll climb up and see what the weather is." Charlie was not a very experienced weather-observer, but he thought he would like to obtain a wider outlook than the lane window had afforded him. He planted an eye between the slats of his watch-tower and then looked off.

The view was neither extensive nor varied, mostly one of mud-flats. A thick fog had come from the sea and stretched like a curtain across the mouth of the dock in the rear of Aunt Stanshy's premises. The low tide had left in the dock a stretch of ugly flats, out of which stuck various family relics like pots and kettles, then pots and kettles again, and finally a dead cat. Charlie saw several tall chimneys in the neighborhood, but the buildings they decorated had been covered by the fog, and the chimneys looked like a vessel's masts from which the hull had drifted away, leaving them standing in depths of river-mud. Toward the sea it was only mist, mist that looked extensive enough to reach as far as London, whose fog-lovers would have welcomed it. Did the dock, the tall chimneys, the mist, notice that curious eye up in the "cupelo" looking through the slats and watching them?

"Guess I'll go down," said their owner.

The mist continued to wrap Seamont all that day and far into the night.

Will Somers was preparing to leave Dr. Tilton's store that evening. He had sent off medicine to quiet the last earache in town that had been heard from. He had also given powders to make poor Miss Persnips sleep quietly.

She was sick with a nervous fever. Will now closed the store, turned the key in the lock, and went up the street, whistling "The Star-Spangled Banner." It was half after ten. One by one the house-lamps had been extinguished, and it was "dark as a pocket" in the lane. Still whistling, Will neared Aunt Stanshy's. He ceased his tune suddenly for he caught an outcry.

"Where does that come from!" asked Will. "Back of the barn, I guess. There it is again! It is from the dock, I know, sure as I'm born."

He sprang across Aunt Stanshy's garden and then leaped a fence which separated her estate from an open piece of ground bordering the dock and used for various purposes. Fishermen dried their fish here on long flakes.

Around three sides of the dock went a stone wall, against which the tide washed and rippled, mildly grumbling because the wall was stubborn and would not budge an inch. On the stone wall bordering the upper end of the dock rested that side of Aunt Stanshy's barn in which were the fastened door below and the fastened window above.

Will, having leaped the fence, ran past the fish-flakes to the edge of the stone dock-wall. It was so dark that his running was neither rapid nor straight.