The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted Part 4

"Here y'are, Bub, and there's Ma and Gramma."

Elsmere had taken a fancy to the newsboy and did not at all wish to stop at Edgewater. He ran down the track after the retreating train, howling miserably.

As for "Ma and Gramma," they had been overtaken by the dispatch just as they were starting to drive out to the farm, and had come in great perplexity to the station. The wailing baby running down the track suggested nothing to them, and the agent could give them no satisfaction. He was locking up his office. There was not another train to stop till No. 5 should return toward evening. So, still bewildered, Mrs. Peters and her mother-in-law gave up their fruitless errand and drove away, taking with them a problem for a lifetime's pondering.

Elsmere, as the train vanished around a curve, sat down on the track for a while and listened to his own howls. Tiring of that amus.e.m.e.nt presently, he strolled back to the station. Outwardly it looked much like that hospitable one where he had enjoyed life earlier in the day.

This one, however, offered no entertainment beyond wandering about the platform and the unoccupied waiting-room. Across the street was a little restaurant. There were pies in the window.

Elsmere obeyed the summons.

"Pie," he said, presenting his nose to the edge of the lunch counter.

"Don't you monkey with anything," snapped a girl from behind the counter.

"I'm aren't a monkey. I'm are a boy. Want pie," Elsmere answered sweetly.

"You can't get pie without money," said the girl.

Elsmere felt in his pocket and produced a quarter. Whatever his failings, Elsmere had a redeeming trait of forehandedness, and had always on hand a h.o.a.rd of articles which might be useful in an hour of need. The quarter bought respect at once and plenty of pie, also a sandwich, a tall gla.s.s of milk and a big "rubber doughnut."

When he had satisfied his hunger, the traveller returned to the depot, and, lying comfortably in the shade of a baggage truck, indulged in a siesta, a sleep so light this time, however, that the rolling back of the baggage-room door shattered it.

Sitting up, Elsmere watched the baggage-man get a tin trunk and a canvas telescope ready for shipping. Presently the stub train arrived, stopped, and while the conductor and the agent were exchanging gossip, Elsmere got inconspicuously aboard, and stowed himself away in a corner, so successfully that it was not till the brakeman called "Hampton" that the conductor discovered him.

Swearing softly and scratching his head in mystification, the conductor stood in the aisle staring at the ubiquitous babe, when a double cry arose:

"Elsmere, where in thunder?"

"Hullo, Algy!"

The young a.s.sistant, who had accompanied Catherine to the station for the sake of talking over mutual friends at Dexter, looked up in surprise as the dignified youth who had impressed her greatly by his intelligence and earnestness suddenly stooped and lifted a dirty, tear-and-pie-stained little boy in his arms. Catherine laughed. Elsmere could not greatly surprise her.

"Miss Adams," she said, "you have shown your interest in the new Winsted library. Let me introduce you to its mascot."

The morning after the Hampton expedition, Catherine struggled awake from dreams of book-lined trains, with Miss Adams and Elsmere as engineer and fireman, to open her eyes gratefully upon the substantial reality of her own great room in its fresh bareness. At the foot of her big carved bed, the broad window open to its utmost seemed to bring all out-of-doors within the room. A squirrel whisked his tail across the sill as he scurried in and out of the branches of the window-oak where a grosbeak and a wren chatted sociably. The sunshine through the leafy boughs lighted the bare floor and rested on the great writing table in the center of the room and on the high dark dresser. Catherine's gaze, following the light, rested at last upon the low bookcases filling the chimney corners.

"I can spare one _Child's Garden of Verses_," she mused, "and that second _Little Women_. I wish they could have the Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway picture-books, but I couldn't possibly let them go. I loved those little urchins in the children's room,--especially that curly-headed little boy reading a bound _Wide-Awake_--O!" She sat up in bed and tossed her thick braids back. "I wonder if I ought? Or even if I could?" Out of bed she slipped, and crossed the room to the bookcases. Opening one, she ran her finger-tips tenderly along the stout backs of a row of dark red volumes. "My very own _Wide-Awakes_!

What a storehouse they would be for the little folk! They needn't be allowed to circulate, so they'd not wear out badly. They could just come in and read them there. I was going to give them my little rocking-chair, anyhow. O, dear! I'm afraid I'm really going to let them have you, you dear, dear books. It would be selfish to keep you up here all the time, when I almost never open you. n.o.body shall have this one, though, with Hannah's letter in it."

She turned the pages of one of the latest volumes and paused at a neat little paragraph:

"_Dear Wide-Awake:_

"I have been taking you ever since I was a child. I will be fourteen my next birthday. I like you very much. I would like to correspond with any one who is about my age. I have no brothers and sisters, and get very lonely. I have read all Miss Alcott, but I wish she had let Jo marry Laurie. I like the _Wide-Awake_ stories. Please have a good long one about boarding-school in the next number. I like d.i.c.kens, but I can't bear Scott. I know John Gilpin and Baby Bell by heart, and I am in the eighth grade. I like skating and rowing. There is a fine pond near us.

"Your loving reader,

"Violet Ethelyn Eldred.

"P. S. n.o.body knows that I am writing this letter, so please print it soon to surprise them."

Catherine kissed the page and closed the book. "Isn't it too unbelievable that that queer little letter with that ridiculous fancy name at the end should have done so much? Violet Ethelyn Eldred! It hasn't nearly so pleasant a sound to me now as Hannah. And the child thought no one would write to her if she signed her own name,--it was so 'homely'! Ah me! I suppose I should be getting dressed instead of sitting about in the sunshine, mooning. I wonder if Inga will remember the m.u.f.fins for breakfast."

"Polly Osgood wants to see you, Catherine."

Catherine, busily sorting linen in the up-stairs linen room a little later in the morning, leaned over the railing in answer to her mother's announcement from the hall below.

"O, Polly, do come on up. I've a little more to do and we might just as well talk while I'm at it. Have you called the Boat Club meeting?"

Polly Osgood came running up the stairs. She was a slender little girl with big blue eyes and yellow hair.

"Yes," she answered brightly. "I've called it at ten. It's almost that now. Tom can't come, of course; he's always so busy daytimes, but I think all the others will be there."

"Hasn't Bert something to keep him?"

"Not just now," Polly laughed. "He subst.i.tuted in the post-office last week, and the week before that in a hardware store, but just now he says n.o.body seems to need him, and he's reading law in private."

"He's such a goose," and Catherine put two mated pillow-cases together with a little pat. "Inga never knows enough to put things in pairs, and Mother wouldn't dare begin to look them over. If she should do anything so domestic, half Winsted would break out with mumps or chickenpox.

Where did you say we'd have the meeting?"

"At the boat house. We might as well use it, now we have it. But I didn't know you broke out with mumps."

"That's only figurative. Polly, why have you gone back to braids and bows? You look very infantile for a real Wellesley soph.o.m.ore."

"I got tired of the bird-cages and puffs, and decided I'd go back to nature. Besides, playing around with Peter and Perdita you need something stationary. They work dreadful havoc with a stylish coiffure."

"I wonder if I'd have to put my hair down just to teach them on Sundays?

Mrs. Henley is going away, you know, and I've been asked to take her cla.s.s."

"O, I do hope you will," cried Polly. "You would have a civilising influence on Perdita, and she needs it. Peter keeps her in order so well she never _does_ anything very bad, but she is potentially a little terror."

"She always seems very mild when I see her," commented Catherine, patting her piles into straight lines. "But you can't always tell about people by looking at them. I, for instance, have all my life been expected to be lady-like, just because when I was little I hadn't strength enough to be naughty. And many and many a time I have felt like doing something wild and shocking!"

"Why, Catherine Smith!" exclaimed Polly in amazement. "You always seemed to me a sort of beautiful princess up here on the hill, and, good as any of the rest of us might try to be, we never could hope to be as good as you. Have you honestly ever wanted to be bad?"

Catherine laughed, a funny little gurgling laugh. "I honestly have--not wicked you know, but--well, reckless! And I never had the courage to do anything very startling till last year at college."

She stopped and laughed again.

"Tell me," Polly insisted. "I'll never tell. What did you do? Was it fun? Tell me!"

Catherine's eyes twinkled. "I made up my mind that it was my one chance, for no one there belonged to me, and my tiresome reputation for propriety hadn't had time to get started. So one day I got up late, and was late to breakfast, and cut a cla.s.s, and--" She laughed so hard that Polly wanted to shake her. "O, Polly it was such a ridiculous thing to do! I talked slang and chewed gum!"

Polly gasped. "Did you like it? What made you stop?"