CONTENTS

CHAPTER			PAGE
I.		Off For the Mountains.	5
II.		The Camp.	19
III.		Rules and Regulations.	34
IV.		Table Top.	50
V.		In the Bog.	67
VI.		The Doctor.	83
VII.		Phoebe.	101
VIII.		The Gypsy Cooks.	114
IX.		A Lesson By the Wayside.	132
X.		Alberdina Schoenbachler	146
XI.		A Comedy of Errors.	162
XII.		The Return.	177
XIII.		Billie and the Doctor.	190
XIV.		Chance News.	204
XV.		A Warning.	221
XVI.		The Attack.	234
XVII.		The Force of Eloquence.	249
XVIII.		The Morning After.	262
XIX.		The Mills of God.	273
XX.		A Long Sleep.	286
XXI.		Comrades of the Road.	304

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The Motor Maids in Sunrise Camp.

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“Sunrise Camp! What next, pray tell me?” sighed Miss Helen Campbell.

“But it doesn’t mean getting up at sunrise, Cousin Helen,” Billie Campbell assured her. “Although Papa says we would like it, once we got started. Campers always do rise with the sun. It’s the proper thing to do.”

“But why do they give it that uncivilized name?” continued Miss Campbell in an injured tone of voice. “Why not Sunset Camp or Meridian Camp or even Moonrise Camp? There is nothing restful to me in the name of ‘Sunrise.’”

“It will be restful, indeed it will, dear cousin, once you are used to the life, and it couldn’t be 6called any of those other names because they would not be appropriate. You see there is a wonderful view of the sunrise from the camp, and every morning if you wake early enough you see a beautiful pink light all over the sky and you wonder where the sun is; and suddenly he comes shooting up from behind the tallest mountain in the range across the valley, and it’s really quite late by then. He has been up ever so long, but he’s been hiding behind the mountains.”

“And we are to sleep on the ground under those flimsy tents, I suppose?” asked Miss Campbell, who was not taking very kindly to the camping proposition.

“No, no,” protested her young cousin, laughing, “you’re thinking of soldiers, and they do have cots. This camp is a log house, a really beautiful log house. There is one immense room without any ceiling, and you look straight up through the beams into the roof. Papa says it’s splendid.”

7Miss Campbell bestowed upon Billie a tolerant, suffering smile.

“And back of that room,” continued Billie, speaking quickly, “is a long sleeping porch that can be partitioned off into bedrooms——”

“No protection from rain and wild animals, I suppose?” put in Miss Campbell sadly.

“Oh, yes. There is a roof overhead and a floor underneath, and it’s all enclosed with wire netting to keep out mosquitoes. It can’t rain in far enough to wet the beds and, of course, nothing else matters——”

“Clothes?” groaned the little lady.

“But khaki skirts, cousin, and rubber-soled shoes and pongee blouses,—water couldn’t injure things like that.”

“I went camping once forty years ago,” went on Miss Campbell, without seeming to notice Billie’s reply. “It was terrible, I assure you, it was quite too dreadful. One night there was a storm, and the tents that were not blown away 8by the high winds were swamped by rain. Our clothes all mildewed, and the flies! I shall never forget the disgusting flies,—they were everywhere.”

“This camp couldn’t possibly be blown away even by the strongest wind,” broke in Billie, ready to refute every argument, “and the screens make it just as comfortable as your own home would be.”

“How far is it from anywhere?” demanded Miss Campbell suddenly.

Billie hesitated.

“It’s twenty-five miles, but there is a good road from the railroad station and the ‘Comet’ can take us across in no time. You see, there is a little village in the valley at the foot of our mountain, and in summer a ’bus runs twice a day with passengers and the mail, so the road must be fairly good. Papa says lots of automobiles go over it.”

“Twenty-five miles,” groaned Miss Campbell.

9“Twenty-five miles from a telegraph station——”

“But there is no one for you to telegraph to if Papa and I are with you, dear Cousin, is there?” asked Billie ingenuously.

Miss Campbell’s expression softened. Nothing pleased her so much as for Billie to make one family of the three. The young cousin had become such a fixture in her home that she had grown quite jealous of Duncan Campbell’s possessive airs with his daughter.

“One would think she really belonged to him more than to me,” she would exclaim at such times, with some unreasonableness it must be admitted.

But it was plain that the little spinster’s resolutions against camping were beginning to crumble.

“We are not to eat on the ground, then, or drink coffee from tin cups, or sleep in our clothes, or be bitten to death by mosquitoes, and finally exterminated by wild animals?”

10Billie laughed joyously. She knew by these extravagant remarks that her cousin had been won over.

“None of those things,” she cried. “We are to lead a comfortable, beautiful rustic life, and I know you’ll just love it. There are lakes, cousin, exquisite, beautiful little gems of lakes; and trails all through the pine forests, and the walking isn’t a bit difficult——”

“Khaki skirts, did you say?”

“Yes, and sneakers.”

“What are they, child?”

“Rubber-soled shoes to keep you from slipping.”

Miss Campbell sighed.

“And at my age!” she said aloud, answering some unspoken thought. “Tell your father I accept, but it’s the last straw, and I may never see my comfortable old home again.”

Billie did not pause to disprove this dejected statement. She kissed her relative with the wild 11abandon of eighteen, rushed from the room and was down the stairs in a breathlessly short space of time.

“She’s going! She’s going!” she cried, rushing into the drawing-room, where her three friends were anxiously awaiting news, and Mr. Campbell, almost as anxious himself, was pacing the floor, his hands thrust deep into his pockets.

“Good work, little daughter!” he said, pausing in his walk. “I knew you could win her over if anybody could, although last night I was afraid we hadn’t the ghost of a show. She was dead set against it. The word ‘camp’ alone seemed to make her wild.”

“But, you see, she thought it was tents and flies and mosquitoes and tin cups.”

Mr. Campbell smiled.

“I think we won’t tell her any more, now that she has made up her mind. We’ll give her a little surprise. Call the camp a log hut and let it go at that.”

12“Now, about clothes——” began Nancy Brown, and her friends all smiled. “Well, one must have clothes, even on a camping trip. Don’t you think a blue corduroy would be attractive, with a touch of coral pink in the silk tie, say; and high russet walking boots—the kind that lace, you know——”

“They must have rubber soles,” put in Billie, “no matter what the tops are.”

“And a straw hat in the natural color, with a brim that droops slightly, and a pheasant’s tail feather, slightly at one side——”

There was another burst of laughter at this juncture, and Mr. Campbell joined in.

“Miss Nancy,” he said, “I’m afraid you’ll have everything from hedge hogs to wood choppers at your feet if you make yourself so attractive in silks and velvets and russets——”

“Nothing perishable,” protested Nancy. “It will be quite suitable, of course. It’s a mountain costume I saw in a French fashion magazine, 13and it was really intended for an Alpine climber; only it was much fancier. The French lady in the picture wore a lace jabot and high-heeled shoes, and she carried an Alpine stock with a pink bow tied just below the crook.”

“Was the skirt hobble?” demanded Billie.

“It sounds to me like a Little Bo-Peep costume,” put in Mary Price.

“I think one should dress quite quietly on a camping party,” observed Elinor Butler.

Mr. Campbell seized his hat.

“My only advice to you, ladies,” he announced as he reached the door, “is to wear shoes that won’t turn your ankles; skirts that give you plenty of leeway for climbing, and shirts that may be easily washed, because laundries are not abundant in those regions. As for hats,” he finished, “you’ll probably not wear any after the first day, even the latest thing from the Alps trimmed with the tail feather of a pheasant. As for colors, the first time you go camping you’ll 14probably let your fancy run riot and wear Assyrian purple or crushed strawberry. But the next time, you’ll pass right down the line until you get to brown, because you will know by that time that brown fades brown. If campers had been born wild animals instead of human beings, Nature would surely have provided them with brown coats for utilitarian as well as protective purposes.”

“I thought we could just wear old clothes,” put in Mary Price, doubtfully. “I didn’t know people had costumes made for camping.”

Mr. Campbell thrust his genial, handsome face back into the room.

“Camping clothes are like bathing suits,” he remarked. “After the first wetting or so, they all look alike.”

“I’m sure blue corduroy will last,” cried Nancy. “The man at the store said it was unfadeable.”

“You mean that curly-haired clerk who wears 15the ruby scarf pin?” laughed Billie. “What’s his name?”

“Delosia Moxley,” answered Elinor. “He is always giving Nancy pointers about the latest modes. He was responsible for that Spanish veil she would wear last winter——”

“He was not,” interrupted Nancy. “He merely told me they were the fashion in New York. I needn’t have bought it if I hadn’t wanted to.”

“I suppose he furnished that French lady’s Alpine costume, too, didn’t he, Nancy Bell?”

Nancy smiled good-naturedly. She never really minded being teased about her elaborate taste in dress.

“His taste is extremely good,” she said. “He expects to run a millinery shop in a year or so. He says he can trim hats charmingly.”

“My word!” exclaimed Billie. “I suppose his mother will make your suit and he’ll pin the feather on the hat, and between them they will 16equip you to climb the Adirondacks. But, oh, Nancy, I implore you to explain to Mrs. Moxley that hobbles don’t go in the mountains.”

“She understands,” replied Nancy with much dignity. “She is going to make me the very latest thing in mountain-climbing suits, and she gets all her fashions straight from New York.”

Her friends exchanged covert glances and said nothing. Nancy’s conferences with Mrs. Moxley, the dressmaker, were a source of endless amusement to them. It was Mrs. Moxley who had made Nancy’s graduating costume that June, and never had been seen on the platform of West Haven High School such a fashionable toilette. It had a hobble skirt and a fancy little train that flopped about Nancy’s feet like a beaver’s tail, and at the reception afterwards the boys had teased her until she left in tears.

Two weeks had passed since graduation and our Motor Maids were just beginning to feel the results of their hard winter’s work. It had been 17a tough pull to catch up with their classes after the return from Japan. There had been no happyeties for them during the Christmas holidays, only continuous hard study, and for weeks afterwards Billie and Nancy and Elinor were tutored every afternoon. Mary Price, the best student of the three, had outstripped them, and in the end had carried off first honors and a scholarship besides. But after the excitement of finals, the four friends had collapsed like pricked balloons. Billie, mortified at what she considered a weakness in her character, had not been able to throw off a deep cold contracted in the spring. Mary Price was limp and white; Elinor had grown mortally thin, and even Nancy had lost her roundness, and her usually plump face was peaked and pale.

“My child needs mountain air!” said Mr. Campbell on one of his flying trips to West Haven. “She must not be in a hotel, and she must have her friends with her.”

18With characteristic energy he had set to work to find a place somewhere in the mountains, and he had made three trips before he satisfied himself that “Sunrise Camp” in the Adirondacks, to let furnished, was exactly what he had been searching for. The owners had gone abroad and were glad to rent it at a low price.

To “Sunrise Camp” therefore, after due preparation, Miss Helen Campbell, the Motor Maids and Mr. Campbell, who went up to install them, departed. At the station next day they found the “Comet,” still attired in his blue suit acquired in Japan, in charge of a chauffeur from a nearby hotel. Along twenty-five miles of mountainous road the faithful car carried them, patiently climbing the last steep grade which led to a kind of shelf in the mountain whereon stood “Sunrise Camp.”

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“Hurrah!” cried Billie, trying to pretend that she was not at all tired after the interminable hot journey on the train and across the mountains.

But her enthusiasm was not echoed by the others. Even Mr. Campbell, who always felt the heat, sat silent and dejected. Billie, however, usually endeavored to live up to her theories, and she had believed that pure mountain air would act as an instantaneous tonic on their jaded spirits. She was trying now to persuade herself that she was not hot and dusty and excessively weary.

They had drawn up in front of a rustic hut built of logs with the bark left on. The roof had a graceful slant from the central peak, and over the gallery in front was another low-hanging 20roof like the visor of a cap. On one side of the camp, at no great distance from the house, a majestic army of pine trees had ranged itself in the manner of a silent and faithful guard. At the other side, the ledge sloped down in natural, uneven terraces to the valley far below. From the sleeping porches in the back could be seen a broad vista of low country encircled by a wall of mountains, now clothed in a mantle of purple shadows as the sun sank behind the crests of the opposite range. The air was hot and sweet and very dry, and the atmosphere vibrated with the hum of insects like the low, steady accompaniment of stringed instruments in a great orchestra. But at close view, it must be confessed, Nature was very dingy. The pine trees had a rusty look and the parched earth cried out for rain.

“Well, ladies, we are here,” remarked Mr. Campbell, “and I hope you’ll find it to your several tastes.”

“I am sure we will,” answered Mary politely, 21while the others moved in a silent procession toward the house.

Miss Campbell was already wondering how long they could endure this crude and lonely existence a hundred miles from anywhere. The contagion of doubt had indeed spread like a plague over the entire company, and all for the want of a bath, a supper and a good night’s rest.

“Ah, here are Mr. and Mrs. Lupo,” exclaimed Mr. Campbell in a tone of relief, as a man and woman approached down the gallery. “They are half Indians,” he added in a low voice. “Mrs. Lupo will be cook and her husband, guide, protector and man of all work.”

Miss Campbell turned reproachful eyes upon her relative.

So then they were to be left in charge of two half-breed Indians in this wild mountainous place, while he was away. Really, men were too incorrigible. But Mr. and Mrs. Lupo, at first glimpse, were far removed from savages. They 22were, apparently, like two shy, gentle animals with dark, shining eyes, and when they spoke, which was seldom, it was almost as if they had broken a vow of silence. Winter and summer they lived in these high places, and only occasionally did Mrs. Lupo descend to the valley to visit the little shops in the village and look upon the vanities of life.

“Well, Mrs. Lupo,” said Mr. Campbell, after shaking hands with the husband and wife and properly introducing them to the others, “I trust you have some food ready for a crowd of very hungry people. It was too hot this afternoon to be enthusiastic about lunch at the Valley Inn and hunger has overtaken us.”

Mrs. Lupo looked gravely from one face to another but said nothing.

“Supper will be ready in fifteen minutes,” answered her husband, and the strange pair promptly and quietly disappeared.

“She reminds me,” said Mary to Billie, “of one 23of those genii in fairy tales that appear when you want them and melt away when you have finished with them.”

“I wonder if she can cook,” was Billie’s unpoetic reply.

During these brief moments they had lingered on the dusty gallery, and now Mr. Campbell, eager as a boy for their approval, led them through the broad opening into the only room of the camp, of which they had caught glimpses as they waited outside. But they were quite unprepared for its vast size, capped by the unceiled roof now fast filling with shadows.

“Why, it’s really grand,” cried Miss Campbell, with a sudden spurt of enthusiasm. “It’s like a cathedral.”

“Isn’t it fine?” answered Mr. Campbell. “I think the primeval huts must have looked like this, and when it came time to build churches it wasn’t a very far cry.”

“I expect Mr. Primeval Man would have been 24mighty glad to have had one of those nice Morris chairs,” observed Billie.

“It would have been good-by to cathedrals then,” answered her father. “Mr. Primeval Man would have passed so much of his time in the easy chair that he would never have got beyond the age of dull-edged tools.”

And in this thoroughly modern primeval hut there were plenty of inducements to be lazy. Grouped about the stone chimney of an immense open fire-place were numerous easy chairs, and ranged against the dim confines of the walls were quite half a dozen cots to be used by people who might prefer to sleep indoors, Mr. Campbell explained.

The heads of several deer with branching antlers looked down at them from the walls, and on the floor in front of the fire-place was stretched the skin of a great black bear.

“Papa, I think it’s really beautiful,” exclaimed Billie, rubbing her cheek against her father’s shoulder.

25“So do we all, Mr. Campbell,” cried the other Motor Maids.

“I am delighted and relieved,” he answered, rubbing his hands together with pleasure over their pleasure. “Better introduce Cousin Helen to her—er bedroom now, and wash up before supper,” he added, winking and grinning behind that little lady’s back.

Anybody would approve of the big room of the camp. It was indeed a splendid place, but how was Miss Campbell going to take to the dormitory? A flight of rustic steps at one end led to a gallery opening on this doubtful territory.

“Oh, how delightful,” cried Billie, rushing through the door with a great show of enthusiasm. “I have always wanted to sleep in the open and never had a chance except that one night on the plains. Remember, Cousin Helen? And how you did enjoy it, too!”

“One night, yes, my dear, but this is for some sixty nights or more,” answered Miss Campbell, 26surveying a row of cots placed at intervals along the porch. “I never slept in the room with anybody in my life before.”

“But this is not sleeping in a room. This is sleeping in the world, under the great dome of heaven,” exclaimed Billie, laughing uneasily.

“If you want privacy, you can draw a veil,” remarked Elinor, pointing to denim curtains on poles between some of the beds.

“And be alone in the world, under the great dome of heaven? Never!” cried Miss Campbell. “But do we dress out here in sight of the entire range of mountains? I should feel that each mountain had an eye turned on me.”

“Really, cousin, you remind me of the old lady from Skye,” ejaculated Billie:

“‘There was an old lady from Skye
Who was so exceedingly shy,
When she undressed at night,
She put out the light,
For fear of the all-seeing eye.’”

27Miss Campbell so far forgot her objections as to burst out laughing, and she was still further placated by finding at one end of the porch a good-sized locker room, and adjoining that a bathroom.

“The water comes from the top of the mountain,” announced Billie. “It’s just piped in and doesn’t have to be pumped. Think of bathing in such clear pure water as that. Oh, I know camping like this will be perfect!”

“It may and it may not be,” observed Miss Campbell, bathing her hands and face in some of the crystal water. “Good heavens, what’s that?” she demanded, startled by the sound of a bugle in the twilight stillness. The call was loud and clear, reverberating among the mountains and coming back to them in a softened, muffled echo.

“That’s Mr. Lupo blowing the supper horn,” called Mr. Campbell from the sleeping porch below. Down they all filed and seated themselves anywhere around a long rustic table apparently 28loaded with food, for all the meal had been placed upon it regardless of ceremony, and people were expected to help themselves.

“Fall to, fall to, ladies,” said Mr. Campbell, serving slices of broiled ham until the pile of plates in front of him was reduced to one.

“Let’s introduce scientific management into this business,” suggested Billie. “With one deft movement of the arm, I’ll help each plate to creamed potatoes, passing them along in order to Nancy, who can dish out the baked omelette. While we are doing that Mary can serve the butter and Elinor can pass around the biscuits. There is no labor wasted and the food is distributed in the quickest possible time.”

“What shall I be doing?” asked Miss Campbell. “I don’t see that I am being scientifically managed.”

“Yes you are,” answered Mr. Campbell with a mischievous glance at the pretty little lady. “You are being scientifically managed by not being allowed to do anything.”

29There was a chorus of drowsy, good-natured laughter. The leavening influence of food at a journey’s end was already beginning to take effect. Presently Mr. Lupo came in with a tray of cups and saucers and a pot of steaming hot coffee, and Mrs. Lupo, silent and soft of foot, placed four tall wooden candlesticks on the table, the light from the tallow candles shedding a yellow glow on their faces.

“Excuse me,” said Mary, rising, after the hungry company had cleared up everything before them, “I want to go to the end of the room and see what we look like. I feel as if we were making a picture somebody ought to see. We are,” she called presently from the far end of the vast apartment. “You’ve no idea how picturesque you look around that dark wooden table with those candles and the blue water pitcher and the pewter coffee pot.”

“And the empty omelette dish,” called Billie.

“And only one biscuit left,” added Elinor.

30“I’ve no doubt Mr. Rembrandt would have painted us just so,” said Mr. Campbell.

“And called it ‘The Guild of The Globe Trotters’,” Miss Campbell was saying, when Mary gave a low exclamation of surprise. In order not to obstruct the beautiful view across the valley, the rustic porch had not been enclosed with screens, but the openings into the living room were screened, and, standing just outside the broad door, Mary saw a man peering into the room.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, “I am afraid I frightened you. I was lost on the side of the mountain, and when I saw the light in the camp I thought I would stop and ask the way.”

“Come in, won’t you?” said Mr. Campbell hospitably. “Have you had your supper?”

“I am afraid not,” answered the stranger with a short laugh.

“Mrs. Lupo, will you get this gentleman some supper?” called Mr. Campbell, while Miss Campbell, 31almost lost in one of the big chairs, was wondering if this were the etiquette of campers, and if they would be expected to take in strangers after Duncan had departed.

“Sit down,” went on the incorrigible Duncan. “We only arrived ourselves an hour ago, and we are hardly familiar with the house yet, but there is plenty of room. Won’t you stop over night? My name is Campbell.”

“My name is St. Clair,” answered the stranger. “I live in a place called West Haven. Ever hear of it?”

“Percy St. Clair!” cried the girls and Miss Helen. “Where did you come from?”

“The scheme worked pretty well, eh, Percy?” laughed Mr. Campbell, after the young man, their old friend and playmate, had shaken hands all around and insisted on hugging Miss Campbell. “I thought I would keep you as a surprise. Where’s the motor cycle?”

“It’s outside. I walked it up the last climb.”

32“Did you have any trouble finding the way?”

“Considerable. That’s why I’m so late. A fellow told me the wrong road, and I was lost for a while and had a foolish adventure besides.”

“What was it? What was it?” they demanded.

Percy seated himself at the supper table, while Nancy poured out his coffee and Billie served him with ham and eggs.

“Well, I asked a man the way and he said, ‘Are you a doctor?’ I said, ‘Not yet, but soon.’ Then he showed me a road and told me there was a very sick woman in a house at the top, and would I call and see what could be done. You may imagine my feelings when I found that the road led straight to an old ruined hotel, and there wasn’t a human being in it as far as I could see nor any sign of one. So I got on my cycle and went back down the mountain until I found a sign board that put me on the right track again. But it was queer, wasn’t it, and rather uncanny, too.”

33It was a strange experience, and after supper they sat under the stars discussing it until bedtime, and came to the conclusion that Percy had met a crazy man.

Never had Miss Helen Campbell slept so well as she did that night on the sleeping porch. Toward morning there came a quiet life-giving rain that freshened the parched earth and brought out the pungency of the pine trees. Only Mary knew of the shower and of the soft wind that followed just before dawn, bearing with it the fragrance of the wet woods. Only Mary saw the miracle of the dawn; first the faint flush of pink; then a deep rosy blush; next, rays of orange and gold, and at last the sun bursting into view. It was Mary who softly let down the bamboo blinds to keep out the sunlight and who finally slipped back to bed and went to sleep with the songs of innumerable forest birds in her ears.

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At six o’clock they were awakened by a long, melodious trumpet call. The vigorous tripping melody drove the sleep from their brains like a dash of cold water. Billie found herself sitting up in bed humming:

“‘Oh, come to the stable,
As soon as you’re able
And feed the horses grain.
If you don’t do it
The Captain will know it
And raise particular Cain.’”

It was an energetic summons to rise and view a fresh and beautiful world, and Billie, glancing at her watch, was aware that, as a concession to new arrivals, the summons had come half an 35hour later than scheduled. Half-past five was to be the hour for rising in camp, provided the ladies were willing. And certainly they showed no signs of unwillingness at the six o’clock call. Miss Campbell glanced placidly down the line of white cots. Then she inhaled a breath of the delicious air.

“In all my life I never slept as I did last night,” she announced. “Did somebody put sleeping drops in my coffee, I wonder?”

“I fancy the sleeping drops fell in the night in the form of showers,” observed Mary from her cot at the end of the line. “There was no storm, just one of those quiet steady rains, and I never saw people sleep so hard. I thought you were all dead until I heard Miss Campbell——” Mary paused and blushed. “That is, until I heard some one breathing very heavily.”

“Now, Mary Price, don’t tell me you heard me snore. I never did such a thing in my life,” cried Miss Campbell.

36With a laugh, Billie leapt from her bed and ran to take a cold plunge in the mountain water which gurgled from the faucet with the pleasant song it had not left off singing when it leaped out of the side of the rock into the pipe.

At seven o’clock came the clarion call for breakfast: inviting and persuasive it was, with a lingering last note that fell softly on the ear and gradually died into discreet silence.

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With the exception of her three best friends, Billie Campbell had never met people who pleased her so much on short acquaintance as the Hooks and their guest. It had not taken them half an hour to bridge over the gap of unfamiliarity.

“What is it?” she asked of Maggie Hook, Richard’s small, whimsical sister, black haired, black eyed, with quick alert movements like a bird’s.

“I can tell you exactly the reason,” replied Maggie. “It’s because we all belong to the road. There is a bond between us. We go Gypsying in our van and you go Gypsying in your car. We be all of one blood like Kipling’s Mowgli and the animals in the jungle.”

“Only we aren’t the real thing as much as 178you,” said Billie modestly. “The ‘Comet’ is a dear old thing, but he’s not a house.”

“You wouldn’t enjoy it if he were,” said Maggie. “A motor traveling van would never do. You see the point of this kind of life is that it’s lazy and contemplative. We just amble along and it doesn’t matter whether we make ten miles or five. We are not attempting long distance records. We are just getting intimate with the ups and downs of the country; the streams and rivers; the little valleys and bits of green by the roadside. Sometimes, if we find a place that’s secluded enough, a little glen or a grove that screens off the road, we stay there for several days.”

“But what do you do?”

“We all do the things we like best. Richard reads and takes long walks or fishes, if there is a stream. I clean the van from top to bottom and polish everything up and bake a cake in the little oven. Then I darn all the stockings and mend the clothes.”

179Billie laughed.

“You’re not a Gypsy,” she said, “if you are a black-eyed wanderer. They never mend or clean anything. But what does Miss Swinnerton like to do? Is she fond of housework, too?”

“Amy? No, not specially. She sketches and paints in water colors, and botanizes, and looks for bits of stones and rocks which she examines through a glass, and translates French and generally potters around. She’s always busy. She can do anything from making an omelette to painting a picture.”

Billie turned her eyes half wistfully toward the plump brown-haired Amy Swinnerton. She felt suddenly very inefficient and worthless.

“I can’t do anything,” she said, frowning. “I’m ashamed of myself.”

“You can run a motor car and keep it in order,” answered the new friend. “I never knew another girl who could.”

“That’s ground into me by experience. But 180I hate sewing. I’m not a good cook and I can’t draw or paint or play the piano. We met a girl this summer who has been brought up in a cabin on the mountain and has never been to school in her life, who knows a lot more than I do.”

Billie told what little she knew of the strange history of Phoebe.

“It would make a wonderful story,” observed Maggie. “I should like to put it into a book.”

“Do you write, too?” asked Billie eagerly.

Maggie blinked her dark, bright eyes.

“When you see my name appear in book reviews and magazines and things, then you’ll know I write,” she replied.

This conversation occurred the next morning at breakfast. Billie had risen at dawn and repaired the “Comet” and the motor party was soon now to start on its homeward journey.

Richard Hook presently joined his sister and Billie. Sitting cross-legged on the ground at 181their feet, he munched a bacon sandwich and sipped black coffee from a tin cup. He reminded Billie of one of Shakespeare’s wise fools. All he lacked were the cap and bells. His whimsical, humorous eyes were rather far apart; his dark hair, cropped close, stood up straight over his forehead. His nose was distinguished in shape and his flexible mouth turned up at the corners. He talked slowly with a sort of twang like a farmer from the east coast and there was a kind of hidden humor under whatever he said. He had charming old-world manners, and an old-fashioned way of saying “I thank you,” or “Permit me, ma’am,” or “At your service, ma’am.” He was really quite a delightful person, they unanimously decided; and so was his sister and so was her friend.

Billie wondered what Richard Hook’s work was; or whether perhaps he was still in college. She wondered a great many things about him, and she felt quite sure that he was not well off. Presently she said:

182“It’s too bad when we are all just beginning to be friends that we must part so soon. Why can’t you turn old Dobbin right about face and come back and see us at Camp Sunrise?”

“Why not, indeed?” answered Richard.

“Do come,” urged Billie, never dreaming that in giving this invitation she had been moved by something stronger than her own friendly wish to know more of these nice people, and that destiny itself had a hand in the business.

Richard Hook took a little calendar from his pocket and contemplated it gravely.

“Another month has perished with her moon,” he remarked. “We’re in August, little sister. Did you realize that? I see no reason why we shouldn’t travel toward Sunrise Camp before——”

“Before——” repeated Maggie, and the brother and sister exchanged a swift glance.

“Then you do accept,” exclaimed Billie joyfully.

183“With the greatest pleasure,” answered Richard, “if you think old Dobbin can climb the hill.”

“Of course he can,” replied Billie.

“But, Richard, do you think we dare?” asked Maggie in a low voice.

Richard’s mouth turned up at the corners and his eyes gave a humorous blink.

“We dare anything,” he said. “Pray excuse this little aside, Miss Billie. It’s only that we are obliged to consider certain complications that arise to vex us at times. I think we can easily arrange to go to Camp Sunrise.”

Billie was more certain than ever that money was the complication. But surely that was an inexpensive way of spending one’s vacation, provided one owned the van and the horse.

“How much longer does your vacation last, Mr. Hook?” she asked.

“It depends. My boss is a very notionate old party. He might let me go wandering on like this for several weeks longer or he might suddenly 184decide to send for me, and I should have to go hiking back in the midst of my holiday.”

Maggie laughed, and Billie wondered what kind of work this unusual young man did that sent out sudden calls in the very middle of hard-earned vacations.

However, it was arranged that the caravanners should meander back toward Sunrise Camp and in the course of time stop there for a visit.

“They are delightful young people,” Miss Campbell said. “I don’t know who they are, I’m sure, nor what the young man does, but I find them quite the most charming young people with the exception of my own that I ever met.”

“It’s rather strange about his work,” remarked Dr. Hume. “I don’t know what he does now, but he wishes above all things to be a farmer, he informed me. He’s always looking for farms as he journeys along the road. That’s one of the reasons why he got the van, in order to see 185the country and decide where he’d like best to locate.”

They were not so merry on the journey back as they had been on the trip of the morning before. For one reason those who had slept in open camp had not had off their clothes for twenty-four hours, and all of them felt the crying need of baths after the two dusty journeys. But there was another reason besides these physical ones. They were beginning to feel conscience-stricken about Alberdina. How had she taken their long, unexplained absence? Would she still be singing “Ach, mein lieber Augustine!” when they returned, and would there be a long clothes line bowed under the weight of clean white linen bleaching in the sun ready to be ironed? So restless did they grow under these speculations, that they did not pause for lunch and, urging the “Comet” to the limit of his speed, they reached home a little before noon. Alberdina was there. Thank heavens for that. They 186could see her plainly as they turned the curve in the road. But her appearance was not promising. Perched on her head was that absurd comedy hat. She was sitting down, quite low, on the iron-bound trunk, in fact, leaning on her large cotton umbrella, as one prepared to depart on a journey.

If you have ever lived in a remote spot with an uncertain maid, you will recall how apologetic you were to her for your own shortcomings.

“Oh, dear, what shall I say to her?” exclaimed Miss Campbell. “She looks as if she were ready to go this minute.”

“Why can’t we tell her the truth? We simply couldn’t help it,” said Billie. “She ought not to be angry over something we couldn’t control.”

“You don’t know them, but I’ll just brazen it out. I know we’re entirely dependent on the creature for the comforts of life, but I won’t let her bully me. Well, Alberdina,” she called, as the car drew up at the camp door, “have you been lonesome?”

187“Lonesome?” repeated Alberdina, not moving from her ridiculous trunk. “I no time haf had for lonesomes. Many peoples to dis house come—crazy peoples—men and vimmen, hein? They haf my moneys took already yesterday! Ach, Gott! They haf me tied wid ropes. They have nogged and nogged in the night times. Dos vimmens, I hear the boice already yet. I no lig dees place. I to my home go bag to-day. Dey have robbed dis house. Dey haf made to turn red dos vite clothes.”

In dead silence they descended from the motor car and filed into the house to investigate Alberdina’s wild, incoherent story.

There were certainly signs of an invasion in the locker rooms, everything tipsy turvy on the floor. Alberdina showed them the ropes that had bound her. With rivers of tears she mentioned her loss of ten dollars.

“And the red clothes?” asked Billie doubtfully.

This had been reserved to the last by the wily-innocent 188Swiss girl. With cries of sorrow they beheld their underclothing and blouses all tinged a deep pink.

Suddenly Miss Campbell marched up and stood in front of the girl with a very cold steely look in her cerulean eyes.

“Answer me this instant,” she said, “and speak the truth. You boiled those clothes with a red silk handkerchief?”

Alberdina broke down and wept copiously.

“I knew not about dos red,” she exclaimed.

“But when you saw the clothes were turning red, why didn’t you take them off the fire?” asked Billie.

“I did nod see.”

“Not see? And why not, pray?” demanded Miss Campbell.

“I was asleeb and when I wog, I was wit rope tied.”

“Who cut the rope?” asked Dr. Hume, beginning to doubt the whole story.

189“A gentlemans who mag to play music on the zither.”

“Phoebe’s father!” exclaimed the girls.

They glanced at each other with a wild surmise.

“It couldn’t have been——”

“No, no, I’m sure he never would——”

“Hush,” said Ben, “here comes Phoebe.”

The mountain girl, looking pale and distraught, her hair flying, her face and hands scratched from contact with brambles, rushed into their midst.

“My father,” she cried. “He has been lost all night. I have looked and looked and I cannot find him. Oh, if he should be in the marshes——”

She fell on her knees at Billie’s feet and broke into sobbing.

---

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Several things had to be done before any steps could be taken to find Phoebe’s father. First Alberdina must be roundly scolded for her carelessness about the clothes and then placated with a ten dollar bill to compensate her for her loss. There must be lunch prepared for hungry travelers, and Phoebe, herself, must be given food and made to rest. In the meantime they questioned her concerning her father’s movements. He had left the cabin with his zither the morning of the day before and had not been seen since, except when he had appeared at the camp and cut Alberdina’s bonds.

“Has he ever stayed away before at night?” asked Dr. Hume.

“No, never. When he is not weaving baskets 191or carving, he is very restless and often is away for hours, but he always comes back before bed time. He never forgets me. That is why I am so uneasy now,” she went on, clasping and unclasping her hands in the agony of her uncertainty.

“Phoebe,” said the doctor, “what is it that gives you strength to do your day’s work, even if it means walking across a mountain in the hot sun carrying a heavy basket?”

Phoebe lowered her eyes and a flush spread over her sunburned face.

“I forgot,” she said. “I was so unhappy that I forgot. It has helped me, oh, so many times when we have had no money. Many times we have been snowed in on the mountain without food and it has always come. It saved us from the Lupos. I was lonesome and it brought me friends.” She glanced at the girls busily preparing lunch and at Ben and Percy talking in low voices on the porch.

192“Don’t you think it will help you now?”

“It has left me. I can’t find it,” replied poor Phoebe. “It is because I am so frightened. It never comes if you are frightened.”

“My child,” said the good doctor, “you are worn out. You must have lunch and take a good rest. In the meantime we will do everything we can to find your father. Perhaps he has lost his way and is wandering in the woods somewhere.”

“No,” said Phoebe, shaking her head miserably, “he never loses his way. He knows the trails better than I do myself.”

The doctor himself brought Phoebe a tray of lunch. She was ravenously hungry.

“The poor little thing hasn’t eaten for hours,” he thought, glancing at her covertly, as he returned with a basin of water, a soft towel and Miss Campbell’s private bottle of eau de cologne. When she had finished eating, he made her stretch out on the divan while he gave her face 193and hands and wrists an aromatic bath. Never before had Phoebe been ministered to and waited on. She smiled at the doctor with dumb gratitude.

“When people are hungry and tired and discouraged, they have a pretty hard time holding on to their faith, Phoebe,” he said. “Even when they haven’t anything to worry about, it’s hard enough. You go to sleep now and I promise you we will start on the search for your father at once.”

Phoebe raised her eyes gratefully to his. In those clear brown depths she read strength, gentleness and sympathy. She felt she was looking into the face of an angel with a shiny bald head and shaggy red-gray eyebrows.

“I believe God sent you,” she said, and in a few moments dropped off into a deep exhausted sleep.

After luncheon or dinner, whatever that meal might be called in camp, Percy got out his motor 194cycle and proceeded to the Antler’s Inn to ask for news of Phoebe’s father. Ben took the trail to Indian Head and Billie and Dr. Hume went down to the village in the motor car to drum up a search party or find guides to help them scour the mountains. In neither attempt were they in the least successful.

On the way down the mountain, Billie decided to unburden herself of something that had been on her mind for a long time.

“You have never seen Phoebe’s father, have you, Dr. Hume?”

The doctor shook his head.

“Have you ever heard of a case like his? I mean forgetting one’s past.”

“Oh, yes. I have seen a number of cases. The patient usually loses his memory altogether in time and goes insane.”

“But he’s not insane, doctor. He’s not even going insane. Really and truly, except about always trying to find a physician, his brain is as clear as anybody’s.”

195The doctor smiled. He liked this earnest, enthusiastic girl who was always doing things for other people and modestly disclaiming credit. There was something masculine in her disregard for small things and the largeness of her views.

“A very nice man has instilled her with extremely big ideas about life,” he reflected. “She is furthermore a wholesome, healthy young creature with a high order of intelligence and a very warm, tender heart.”

So much engaged was he in his diagnosis of Billie’s character that he had almost forgotten the subject of the conversation when she spoke up again rather timidly.

“What I’m driving at is this, doctor, and I’ve been thinking about it for days. Don’t you think you could operate on Phoebe’s father, put a silver plate on his skull or lift whatever’s pressing on his memory bump? Don’t you think you could undertake it, doctor? I know you are a famous surgeon. Papa wrote that to 196me long ago, but I knew it before he told me. I could tell just from seeing and being with you that you were a great man.”

The doctor laughed over these artless compliments.

“Are you a mind reader, Miss Billie?”

“But you will undertake it, doctor?” she urged.

“We must first catch our man, my child, and then have a look at him. A good many things would have to be considered: whether he would consent himself; whether he would be able to stand the shock of a serious operation, and whether he may not have some disease an operation wouldn’t help; paralysis or softening of the brain.”

“At any rate, you will undertake it?” cried Billie joyfully.

“Do you wish it so much?” he asked, watching her face as she guided the car down the steep road.

197“I do, I do! Think what it would mean to Phoebe to have this mystery cleared; think what it would mean to him, too!”

“I was thinking of it,” answered the doctor gravely. “That’s just the point. Suppose Phoebe’s father would not thank me for bringing his past back? Suppose, after all, he would be happier in this state than with his memory restored. Do you realize that a man like that, a man of education and refinement, I mean, must have had some very good reason for hiding himself away in these mountains? That he may have been flying from something?”

The enthusiasm died out of Billie’s face.

“Oh, Dr. Hume,” she began, “I hadn’t thought of that. Indeed, I couldn’t connect anything of the sort with Phoebe and her father. They are not a bit like that.”

“You never can tell. The people who have given way to some wild impulse that will cause them everlasting regret are not always bad people by any means. His reasons for hiding himself 198and his wife in a cabin in these mountains of course may have been entirely innocent; or he may have hoped to find oblivion and forgetfulness up here out of the world. If I give him back his memory, providing of course I can do it, I may give him the very thing he is running away from.”

“Don’t you think he has been punished enough and that Phoebe ought to have a chance?” argued Billie.

“Is there anything to prevent Phoebe’s having a chance without knowing her father’s past?” asked the doctor.

“Nothing, except there would always be that mystery hanging over her. Don’t you think it would be very unpleasant not to know who you were or even your father’s name?”

“I am a living example to the contrary,” said the doctor with a laugh. “My father and mother were really my adopted parents. They took me out of an orphan asylum when I was a little lad about five years old. I remember it vividly. 199Afterwards they had other children, but they always treated me like a beloved eldest son. I never knew any difference and I never bothered my head about my real parents. Whoever they were, they had died or shuffled me off on an institution. My adopted mother was the finest woman I have ever known and if Hume isn’t my real name, it doesn’t matter. I shall do everything I can to make it an honored one.”

“You are a wonderful man, doctor,” exclaimed Billie, quite overcome by this bit of confidence about his past. “It was because you were so fine that they were good to you. Perhaps God picked you out from all the other orphans to have a good home because he saw what fine material there was in you.”

“No indeed, my dear young lady,” laughed the doctor. “It was just a matter of chance. The little orphans were like the two women sitting in the market place. The one was taken and the other left. If they chose me for anything, it was solely and entirely because I had brown eyes.”

200“You may say what you please,” protested Billie. “They looked deeper than that, I am certain.”

“Simply luck, Miss Billie. I have always been lucky. The fellows at college called me ‘Lucky Bill.’ But to return to the original subject of the discussion: I don’t want to disappoint an unselfish, fine young woman like you,—you see I can pay compliments, too,——” he added, watching the flush of pleasure mount to Billie’s face; “I don’t want to make any promises about this man I can’t carry out, but I promise this much: I will do what I can.”

“Thank you a thousand times, Dr. Hume,” said Billie gratefully. “I would just like to shake hands with you if I could, but you see I have to guide the ‘Comet.’ It will be a wonderful thing to give a man back his senses after eighteen years.”

“Maybe so; maybe not,” answered the doctor as the car turned into the village street.

201They stopped in front of the only hostelry in the place, a cheap two-story wooden house with a horse trough in front of it. Here usually could be found several guides for camping trips and driving parties, and here Dr. Hume looked for help in rescuing Phoebe’s father.

The owner of the house, a thin sallow-faced man with pale shifting eyes came out to speak to them.

“You ain’t meanin’ it’s old crazy Frenchy you’re after?” he asked. “I don’t wonder he’s lost if it’s him.”

“That’s the man,” answered Dr. Hume, “but I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I guess he’s got wind he’s suspected of settin’ Razor Back Mountain on fire and he’s vamoosed. He ought to be shut up anyhow. He’s a dangerous character runnin’ around the country.”

Billie was shocked and angry.

“He is not,” she burst out. “I know Mr.—Mr. French quite well——”

The man broke into a loud rasping laugh.

202“Mr. French!” he repeated.

“He’s incapable of setting a mountain on fire and he is as gentle and courteous as possible.”

There was another laugh. This time it came from within the house and Billie and the doctor recognized the voice of Mr. Lupo.

“You’re a friend of Lupo, I see,” remarked the doctor looking very hard at the man.

“I guess that’s none of your affair,” answered the other angrily. “And nothin’ agin’ him nor me either, for the matter o’ that.”

The doctor lifted his eyebrows.

“I’d like to hire two or three guides. Are there any about?”

“There ain’t no guides connected with this here establishment goin’ to go huntin’ for crazy Frenchy,” announced the man roughly, “if that’s what you’re wantin’ with them. Most of ’em is fightin’ the flames anyhow.”

The doctor sat silently for a moment looking at the mountaineer, whose eyes shifted uneasily under his steady gaze.

203“I would advise you and your friend, Lupo, not to meddle too much in this affair,” he said, as the inn keeper with a snarling laugh shuffled back into the house.

Billy turned the automobile and they went slowly down the street.

“If we were in the Kentucky or the Virginia mountains, I should call this a feud,” remarked the doctor, “but up here there is something more than a revenge for a quarrel two generations old that creates a situation of this kind. That man has got some ugly reason for withholding his guides. He’s a sinister looking wretch, and no man with a shifting pair of eyes can be trusted around the corner.”

“But what are we to do?” asked Billie.

“If we can’t get guides,—we’ll just go alone,” answered Dr. Hume. “I think we’ll have to find your Mr. French, Miss Billie, seeing that a lot of cut-throats are trying to keep us from doing it.”

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---

Billie and the doctor were indeed in something of a quandary as to what to do about Phoebe’s father. It was evident from further inquiry that the tide of general opinion had been turned against Crazy Frenchy; not one soul could be interested in the search for him, not even after an offer of liberal pay.

“He ain’t no good anyhow,” one man said. “He and his daughter holds themselves above common people even when they don’t have enough to keep body and soul together. They lives on property that ain’t theirs by rights, and they don’t belong in this section of the country. The father’s crazy and the neighborhood will be glad to git rid of him.”

“An’ I’d jes’ like to mention,” added another 205man, “the people as takes up for ’em ain’t goin’ to find it no ways a easy proposition.”

Certainly Lupo had enlisted the sympathies of the entire village in his own behalf.

“I told your friend at the hotel a moment ago,” said the doctor, “that he and Lupo had better be careful how they meddled in this business. If you don’t want to engage yourself to me to find this unfortunate man, you have a perfect right to refuse. It’s only a common act of kindness at any rate. But I would warn you that if you and your friends intend to make trouble, you will get into trouble. That’s all.”

The mountaineer scowled.

“We can prove he set Razor Back on fire,” he said. “He was seen in the neighborhood prowling about with a can of oil yesterday morning.”

“At what time?” demanded Billie quickly.

“I don’t know the exact hour, lady, but it was some time in the forenoon.”

206“Well,” ejaculated Billie angrily, “that shows how much evidence you have to go upon. There’s not a word of truth in it and you have no right to spread that wicked report founded on a falsehood. Mr. French was at Sunrise Camp just about that time and he couldn’t have got anywhere near Razor Back Mountain in hours. We have a witness to prove what we say.”

“It may not have been forenoon, come to think of it,” said the man doggedly.

“Nonsense,” exclaimed the exasperated Billie, as the “Comet” dashed away with a contemptuous honk-honk, leaving the defeated mountaineer standing in the middle of the road.

Only one person was awake in all the camp when the doctor and Billie returned: Alberdina, busy ironing pink-tinted clothes in the lean-to. Miss Campbell and the girls were napping on the upper porch and Phoebe still slept on a couch in the living room, while Ben and Percy had not 207returned from their search for news of her father.

“Miss Billie,” remarked the doctor, “if you will be kind enough to fix me up a lunch, I think I’ll pack my knapsack and start on the road again. I can’t say how long I shall be gone, but you mustn’t be uneasy if I don’t get back for a day or two. The boys will look after you and if you have any real trouble, you had better telegraph your father. If possible, try and keep Phoebe right here. Those men will go no further than threats in regard to us. They know we are too powerful for them, but I couldn’t say the same for that poor girl and her father. I suppose jealousy and Lupo’s treachery are the motives behind it. The father does better work than any of them can do and the mountaineers resent the difference between them, whatever it is, birth, breeding, education. But we can’t judge them by the usual standards, of course. They have never had any chances, these people, 208shut in by this wall of mountains. There is not much inspiration to be charitable and kind, living in one of these little shanties during the long cold winters. It’s a pretty fine nature that doesn’t get warped and narrowed by the life.”

“Phoebe’s didn’t,” thought Billie, while she sliced bread for the doctor’s lunch.

After he had departed with his staff and his telescope and his knapsack, Billie sat down in a steamer chair under the trees and began to think. She lifted her eyes to the wall of mountains now mystical and unreal under their mantle of blue shadow. How could treachery and hatred and jealousy exist where there was so much beauty? It seemed to her that she had only to look about her to be inspired and uplifted; but Billie was too young to realize that it takes more than scenery to furnish that kind of inspiration.

“I am not tired and I am not sleepy,” she thought. “Must I sit here all the afternoon waiting for the others to wake?” She glanced at her 209watch. “Only a quarter to three. Why can’t I take a walk? It’s against the rules as laid down by papa for women members, but that was only a joke anyhow and I shan’t go far.”

Billie chose a trail they often took after supper for the reason that it was brought to an early finish by the bed of a creek dry in summer, though probably a brave stream in the spring after the thaws. But it was a pretty walk, tunneled through the forest, carpeted with dried pine needles and bordered on either side by ferns.

Strolling along, Billie thought of many things; of the mountain on the other side of Indian Head on which fires had started and where bands of men were now fighting the flames. That was a dreadful thing to do, to set a forest on fire; a crime against nature as well as against man. She thought of Phoebe’s father, perhaps injured, or worse, who could tell? Then with a mental leap she thought of Richard Hook and his sister 210Maggie; the charm of their personalities; their simplicity; their joy in living. Billie wondered if she could be happy if she were poor, really quite poor. It was rather fun cooking, with Alberdina to clean up after them. It was only for a little while and it was just a sort of game.

“It would be a dog’s life to keep up forever,” thought Billie, “but Richard and Maggie Hook would never admit it. They make the best of being poor and pretend that living like Gypsies is the most delightful way of spending one’s vacation. I think they are just fine. There is Phoebe, too. How well she has got on without anything, education, money, friends. She is wonderful.”

Who was Phoebe? Who was her father? Were they not mysterious people? When the veil was lifted at last, Billie felt convinced that it would disclose no ordinary identity. They had the marks of distinguished people in exile. There was a look of family about them both that no ragged attire could disguise.

211Toward the end of the trail, Billie saw an old woman hobbling toward her, leaning on a stout stick. She looked remarkably like one of the aged forest trees unexpectedly come to life. A gnarled, brown, weather-beaten old creature she was, who reminded Billie of a dwarfed apple tree she had seen in Japan, a little old bent thing said to have been over two hundred years old. Attached to the woman’s waist was a pocket apron bulging with herbs, camomile and catnip, wood sorrel and sassafras root.

“Now, if Mary were here,” thought Billie, “she would at once make a story of this: ‘The Princess and the Old Witch.’ I am sure Mary would call me a princess,” she added modestly.

When the young girl and the old witch met, they paused without exactly knowing why. The herb gatherer had a strange, small, yellow face, crossed and re-crossed with wrinkles.

“Good afternoon,” said Billie politely, not knowing what else to say.

212The old woman waved aside this greeting with her stick.

“You come from Sunrise Camp?” she asked in a voice as cracked as her face was wrinkled.

Billie nodded.

“I bring message. You look for somebody?”

“Yes,” replied Billie eagerly.

“You not find him now. Too much enemies.”

“Where is he?” she demanded.

No answer came to this question.

“You will not tell me?”

“No tell,” answered the old creature.

“Is he ill or hurt?”

The herb gatherer touched her forehead.

“He safe,” she answered. “But people not safe who look for him. Too much enemies.”

After that not another word could Billie get out of the obstinate old creature.

Who had sent her? Who was looking after Phoebe’s father, if he were hurt or a prisoner? Could not Phoebe see him? Nothing would she reply to all these questions.

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Miss Campbell felt no ill effects from the visit of the mountaineers. She had not even thought of ill effects, in fact. Somehow, the presence of Phoebe, unruffled and calm through all the danger, had had its influence on all of them. Even Alberdina’s emotions had been hushed by contact with that peaceful nature.

It was well past six o’clock before the exhausted household awakened next morning at Percy’s trumpet call. Hurrying down before the others, Billie was amazed to see the traveling van drawn up in a clearing at the edge of the grove. Old Dobbin, tethered to a rope, stood nearby peaceably munching his breakfast from a wooden pail. Amy Swinnerton was seated in front of an easel sketching the log cabin and from inside of the 263van came the crisp voice of Maggie Hook, singing:

“‘I loved a lass, a fair one,
As fair as e’er was seen;
She was indeed a rare one,
Another Sheba Queen:
But, fool as then I was,
I thought she loved me, too:
But, now alas! she’s left me,
Falero, lero, loo!’”

“Good morning!” cried Billie, running over to the van. “You must have muffled old Dobbin’s feet to have crept in so quietly. How is Ri—Mr. Hook?” she added, all in one breath.

Maggie popped her head out of the front of the van. She reminded Billie of a little bird peeping from a bird house.

“Not ‘Mister,’” she called, smiling brightly. “Remember, Billie, that we brothers and sisters of the road never use titles.”

264“Oh, yes, I mustn’t forget that I’m one of the fraternity,” answered Billie, smiling.

“‘—Gypsy blood to the Gypsy blood
Ever the wide world over,’”

called Maggie, with much animation, from the top step of the van.

“You’ll have to know her better to understand her dual nature, Billie,” observed Amy Swinnerton, glancing up from her easel. “After she’s been a good housewife and got things shipshape and free from the dust of the road she loves so much, she’s ready to turn Gypsy and muss them all up again.”

“I never mussed anything up in my life,” broke in Maggie. “I only clean up other people’s musses.”

“But how is your brother Richard?” persisted Billie. “You see I feel some natural anxiety because I was the one who shot him last night. Has the wound been dressed?”

265“Shot him?” repeated the other girls.

“That was why he made me drive old Dobbin this morning,” said Amy.

“And to think he never told,” broke in Maggie, “and he’s gone off now, goodness only knows where.”

“And he didn’t tell you about the attack and how he saved us?” demanded Billie.

“Not a word.”

Billie gave them an account of what had happened the evening before. It was exciting enough to tell about and the girls listened breathlessly. Richard’s courage and tact with the outlaws when all the time his sleeve was soaked with blood from the wound in his arm, fired her with unusual eloquence.

“I don’t think they intended to harm any of us,” she finished. “It was Phoebe they wanted, and her father, who is hiding somewhere on the mountain. But we shall be thankful to him all our lives for what he did. Why didn’t he tell you?”

266“It’s too like him,” said Maggie. “I don’t know whether it’s modesty or indifference, but he never, never tells stories where he figures as a hero.”

“Do you wish us to stop here now after so much excitement?” Amy asked. “I don’t think it’s any time for outsiders to intrude in spite of Maggie’s rhymes about Gypsy blood and brothers of the road.”

“Indeed, we wouldn’t think of letting you go,” cried Billie hospitably. “You are not strangers to us, I assure you, after all your kindness. But I do wish I could find your brother. The place on his arm bled a lot last night. I am certain a wound like that should be washed and dressed every few hours. Do you think he could have gone very far away?”

“Oh, dear,” exclaimed Maggie. “Richard is incorrigible. He does make me so uneasy sometimes.”

“There is nothing to do but wait patiently until 267the spirit moves him to come back,” put in Amy calmly. “He is so strong and well that perhaps his wounds don’t have to be dressed as often as other people’s. There seems to be a special Providence that looks after him anyhow. It would be foolish to worry.”

Nevertheless, Billie did worry considerably in her heart, and even Phoebe, who presently joined them and was introduced to the girls, looked startled and uneasy when she heard that Richard Hook, her deliverer, had gone away without having his wound dressed.

The caravanners were greatly interested in seeing Phoebe, whose history they had heard.

“She is very beautiful,” Amy observed, “but she doesn’t look human, somehow. She has the expression of a person who sees visions, air pictures invisible to other people.”

“She is very religious,” Billie replied. “Not like the religious people we know, but—well like people in the time of Christ might have been. 268You see she got it all herself without any outside teaching. She just learned it out of the New Testament mostly, and she practices it all the time. It’s part of her life. Sometimes, I think it would be a pity to interfere with it.”

“How can you interfere with it, Billie?” asked Nancy.

“By taking her back to wicked West Haven with all its temptations,” laughed Billie.

“But shall you?” they asked in a chorus.

“We can’t leave her in this wild place.”

“And her father?” put in Mary.

“You’ll have to ask Dr. Hume about that,” answered Billie, and not another word would she say on the subject.

That morning the “Comet” conveyed a load of young people down to the village. Miss Campbell ordered a telegram to be sent to her cousin, demanding his immediate presence at the camp. Also a carpenter was secured to build a new door for the living room. This time the village street 269was singularly empty. No faces peeped from the half opened doors and no crowd gathered at the town pump. The rickety old wooden hotel was closed and the blinds drawn at every window. Evidently Richard Hook had frightened Lupo and the innkeeper very effectually.

“I don’t think they will ever trouble us again, Phoebe,” Billie remarked as they circled the pump and started home.

“They are sorry,” said Phoebe compassionately. “They are like children, and Mr. Hook understood that when he spoke to them as children. He is very wonderful and very good.”

“He is indeed,” agreed Billie. “He is a very remarkable young man.”

Phoebe seemed about to speak again, but kept silent. It was difficult for her to carry on a conversation.

“I love him,” she said at last, so simply and innocently that Billie smiled in spite of the earnestness of Phoebe’s expression.

270“You love everyone, do you not, Phoebe? It is what you have learned by yourself up here in the mountain.”

“I cannot do that,” answered Phoebe. “I have tried but I cannot. But I love Mr. Hook. May God protect him always and reward him for his kindness.”

Billie looked away abashed. She had never heard anyone speak like that before outside of a church. She, too, hoped that God would protect Richard, but she would not have said it for worlds. She hoped also that Richard would be waiting for them at Sunrise Camp when they returned. He was not there, however. Miss Campbell, with Nancy and Percy, had looked for him in vain.

“No, he has not come back,” said the little lady. “And neither has Dr. Hume. Where is that foolish man? He shouldn’t have left us without news all this time.”

“Richard should remember that he is a guest 271and not an independent traveler,” exclaimed Maggie Hook. “I don’t think he has any right to go off and stay like this.”

“Now, Maggie, you are worrying and it’s very foolish,” put in practical Amy Swinnerton. “You know perfectly well he’ll be back by nightfall.”

Nobody felt quite in the humor to do anything. The day was exceedingly hot and the sun on its downward course in the heavens was like a red ball. Most of the party scattered for naps and letter writing and did not meet again until sunset.

That afternoon as they gathered around the supper table, Alberdina brought a note to Miss Campbell, written in a strange, old-fashioned handwriting on a scrap of paper. It read:

Miss Campbell groaned as she read the message aloud.

272“Really, Billie,” she exclaimed reproachfully, “you and your father between you induced me to come to this place for peace and rest——”

Billie’s eyes filled with tears.

“Never mind, child,” added the distracted lady. “It’s not your fault.”

“It all came about,” remarked Mary, who was fond of tracing things to their beginnings, “because Billie bought a pail of blackberries from Phoebe one morning and Mrs. Lupo was angry.”

This might be considered an interesting and perfectly true statement, but nobody heard it, because they were busy organizing a search party. A few moments later Billie and Ben went down to the village in the motor car for guides, and this time guides were forthcoming.

---

---

It was not often that Billie lost a night’s rest from anxiety, but that night her eyes refused to close and she lay staring into the darkness, straining her ears for sounds in the forest. Even Richard’s sister, Maggie, was not so abjectly miserable as Billie. She tried to explain to herself that it was all because she had been the one to shoot the young man in the arm.

“I’d much rather have shot that horrid Lupo,” she sobbed under her breath. “Suppose I’ve killed Richard? The wound may be much worse than we thought it was.” She wiped her eyes on the sheet and lay very still listening. Away off on the mountain somewhere a dog began to howl. The weird sound made her shiver and hide her face in the pillow.

274“Oh, God protect him,” she whispered, and then blushed furiously. “I suppose I have a perfect right to pray for a friend?” she thought in reply to some unspoken thought.

Besides the anxiety she felt, all sorts of new and unusual sensations were disturbing her peace of mind that wakeful night. She experienced a kind of irritation against Phoebe, which she could not explain to herself.

“He’ll think she’s lots braver than I am,” she thought, naming no names, “because I wouldn’t dare go out in the woods alone at night to hunt for him. She is braver and better than I am. She is wonderful and—and so beautiful. I—I wish my hair wasn’t so straight,” she added to the pillow into which she had poured these girlish secrets.

At last when the first gray streaks of dawn appeared, Billie rose and, quietly dressing, crept downstairs.

“How silly I have been,” she was admonishing 275herself, irritably, when she saw Phoebe run around the side of the house and stand looking up at the sleeping porch.

Billie dashed across the clearing.

“Phoebe, have you found him? Is he all right?” she demanded, grasping the girl’s shoulders and shaking her in her impatience.

“Yes. I found him and took him to my home,” answered Phoebe proudly. “He was lost in the marsh just as you were. His arm was bleeding and he was very weak.”

“He is very ill?”

“No, no. It was from losing so much blood, they said.”

“They?”

“Old Granny and Dr. Hume. My father is there, too.” Phoebe clasped her hands. “Oh, God is good to me,” she cried. “That I should find my father and Mr. Hook on the same day.”

Billie felt strangely irritated, and then reproachful of herself.

276“And your father, Phoebe,” she asked kindly. “What happened to him?”

“On the day he came to the camp, he said, the language of the German girl stirred up something in his mind. After he went away he must have been very confused and he only remembers walking for a long time and then falling. You would not guess who found and has cared for him all this time? Old Granny and Mrs. Lupo. They brought him to Granny’s cabin, where Mrs. Lupo has been hiding. Then the doctor came, and they got a wagon and moved him down the mountain to our home. That was yesterday.”

“I am so glad,” said Billie, endeavoring to be sympathetic, but feeling really much more relieved over the safety of Richard Hook.

“The doctor has sent you some written messages,” went on Phoebe, giving Billie a little note book. “They are inside.”

---

“My dear Miss Billie,” the note read, “not long ago you asked me to restore the sleeping 277memory of our friend and I told you it was sometimes best to let sleeping memories lie. Since that time I have become deeply interested in the personality of Phoebe’s father. He is a gentleman, undoubtedly, in birth and breeding. He is perfectly aware that he has lost his memory and has discussed the mystery of his identity with me so intelligently that I may say I feel it my duty to do what I can. Even his illusion regarding the physician is more in the nature of a deep and lasting impression evidently made just before he took the plunge into forgetfulness. I have mentioned that to him, too. He has never talked to people before on these subjects because there has never been anyone to talk to, but I have suggested the operation and he is keen to have it done. I must confess I am filled with curiosity about him. Who knows what distinguished niche he may have occupied once somewhere? I may be restoring—well, never mind. There is no use making guesses now. In spite of his broken leg, 278he is in good physical condition and I am going to have the thing over with. I am therefore asking you to send the telegrams you will find further over, to two young surgeons I know who will be interested enough in the case to put up with the inconvenience of the place. I would not risk exciting this mysterious person by moving him to a hospital. Mrs. Lupo appears anxious to make amends and will remain to cook and help generally. I think you had better bring over the ‘Comet’ to take back your friend, Mr. R. Hook, who seems strangely eager to return, although I have done my best to entertain him. I wonder if it could be a princess disguised as a beggar girl or a princess undisguised, who has so stirred young Richard’s soul. I need not say which princess has stirred mine.

“Faithfully, William Hume.”

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Now, what did the doctor mean by all this nonsense, Billie asked herself. It was true that 279Phoebe, when she had gone in search of Richard had put on her old faded gingham, and certainly Richard owed a great deal to the beggar maid in disguise, but she—Billie—did wish the doctor wouldn’t tease.

Billie blessed the “Comet” that morning from the bottom of her heart. It was a busy time and the swift, faithful machine enabled them to accomplish in a few hours what with a horse and wagon might have taken them at least a day to do. After breakfast he carried them down to the village, where Dr. Hume’s telegrams were sent, and where something happened that set Billie wondering about the identity of Phoebe and her father.

While Ben sent the telegrams and Maggie Hook and Mary looked over the souvenir post cards in the general store, Billie sat on the steps outside reading a letter from her father. Only Phoebe, once more attired in the white blouse and duck skirt, remained in the car. A big touring 280car containing two men and a chauffeur drew up alongside the “Comet,” and while one of the men went into the store, the other paced up and down outside. He was a man about Mr. Campbell’s age, tall and foreign looking with a soldierly bearing. Billie glanced at him only once and went on reading her letter. Presently she noticed that he was standing in front of her, his hat in his hand.

“Will you pardon me if I interrupt you?” he asked in good English with an accent. “May I take the liberty of asking you a question?”

“Oh, certainly,” answered Billie politely.

“May I inquire the name of the young lady in the motor car, if it is not too great an impertinence? I ask not from curiosity, but because I perceive a strong likeness.”

“Her name is ‘Phoebe,’” Billie answered.

“And her surname?”

Billie hesitated. After all it was absurd to assert that Phoebe’s last name was “French.”

281“You do not know her last name?”

“Well,—you see—she hasn’t any,” Billie stammered. “She—her father has forgotten who he was.”

“So?” ejaculated the stranger. “And they live?”

“They live on Indian Head Mountain in a little cabin.”

“Will you pardon me if again I seem inquisitive? The young lady—you say she lives in what you call a cabeen and yet she seems not to be poor—that is, in appearance, I mean.”

Billie flushed again. It did seem very much like gossiping to answer all these questions, but this stranger was commanding,—rather elegant in his manner.

“The young lady has friends, perhaps? People who have helped her?”

“Yes, that is it,” said Billie.

“Another question and I shall not trouble you further. Where is this—er—cabeen?”

282“It is on a ledge over ‘Table Top’ on ‘Indian Head Mountain,’” answered Billie promptly, having good reason to remember that location. “Take the road to the right at the end of this street and it takes you straight there. It’s called ‘Indian Head Road.’”

The stranger took a notebook and pencil from his pocket and wrote down the names. When he closed the book, Billie saw that it was of Russian leather with a coat of arms in dull gilt embossed on the back. The pencil fitted into a flat gold case on which also was the coat of arms. She glanced quickly at Phoebe and her heart gave a leap. It was not difficult to connect coats of arms and grand things with Phoebe. Billie could easily picture her in the midst of fine surroundings.

“She is a princess,” she thought wistfully. “And beautiful and good.”

The stranger also was watching Phoebe. His face worked with emotion and he said something in German in a low voice.

283“And her father?” he asked suddenly. “Where is he?”

“At the cabin,” answered Billie.

“You are indeed very kind,” and the stranger, making a low foreign bow, joined his companion in the touring car and in two minutes the great machine was lost in the distance.

Billie’s mind was filled with conjectures on the journey to Phoebe’s home a little later. When they left the car to climb the path to the cabin, she lingered behind the others, thinking deeply, although she had seen Richard from below standing on the very edge of a rocky shelf scanning the road with the doctor’s telescope.

With a shy obstinacy new to her candid nature she pretended not to notice him or to mind that Phoebe with ingenuous joy had run ahead to speak to him first.

“I’ve been waiting for you a long time, Miss Billie,” he exclaimed, having left the others and run down the path to meet her.

284“We had to go to the village first,” answered Billie.

“No, no. I mean it has seemed an infernal long time since the ‘Comet’ pulled up down there in the road and you lagged behind.”

“Not ten minutes.”

“I guess it would have seemed long to you if you had been sitting here since eight a. m. watching every vehicle that passed. Not long ago a big black car stopped down there and I was pretty sure it had come to fetch me.”

He gave her one of his ingratiating smiles.

“Who was it?” asked Billie.

“I don’t know. They saw the doctor for a minute and then went on. But I don’t want to talk about them. Why didn’t you hurry?”

“I always heard that sick men were children,” laughed Billie, “and I can see that you are quite ill because you are such a child. We shall take you home now and feed you up on cream and eggs, providing we can get any.”

285Billie was glad to see Dr. Hume again. They clasped hands like old comrades. There was a peculiar radiance in his brown eyes as he looked at her.

“You’ve had a great honor paid you, Miss Billie,” he said.

“What in the world?”

“The gods have chosen you to turn their mills a while and you are turning them pretty fast, I can tell you.”

---

---

The song of the “Comet’s” motor broke the stillness of the afternoon some ten days later as he cheerfully pushed upward on the Indian Head road. Mr. Campbell was at the wheel and beside him sat Billie, glancing up at him from time to time with eyes full of loving devotion. On the back seat was Phoebe, silently contented beside Richard Hook, and the other occupant was Alberdina Schoenbachler, that absurd little hat perched atop her big smiling face.

There had been many days of anxiety and suspense for the people at Sunrise Camp. It was impossible not to feel deeply interested in the strange things that were transpiring in the little cabin on Indian Head. The two young surgeons had arrived; a tent had been pitched alongside 287the cabin, and one morning early the operation was performed. Since that time the patient had lain in a stupor. And now Dr. Hume had sent Mrs. Lupo, tamed and domestic, to take Alberdina’s place at the camp, and Alberdina was to come at once to the cabin. Mrs. Lupo could give no reason; that was all the message stated, except that the patient was doing well.

The doctor went down the path to meet them, when the car stopped under the brow of the hill. He shook hands with Richard Hook, patted Phoebe on the cheek, and said:

“Hang on to your faith, little girl. It’s a wonderful reservoir to draw on.”

Then he grasped hands with Mr. Campbell, whom he had met several times now and liked immensely, nodded to Alberdina, and drawing Billie’s arm through his, marched on ahead.

“Anybody might think my little girl was a consulting physician,” remarked Mr. Campbell, amused at the earnest conversation the young girl 288and the great surgeon had plunged into,—and proud, too, that it should be so.

“Oh, they have lots of secrets from us, Mr. Campbell,” replied Richard Hook. “Miss Billie is confidential adviser to the doctor. I don’t believe he takes a step without consulting her first.”

“Wise man,” answered Billie’s father. “He’ll get some good sound advice, if not entirely professional.”

In the meantime, Billie was saying:

“Oh, doctor, what has happened? Is he conscious? Has he spoken? Does he recognize anyone?”

“How could he, child, when there is no one for him to recognize? Recollect that in coming to, the man has taken up the thread of his life of eighteen or twenty years ago. I would not trust him to see Phoebe at this point. Only the faces of strangers are safe for him for the time being.”

“And the stranger never came back who inquired about him that day?”

289“No. I told him two weeks would be safer. There is no doubt the man was a personage of some sort. His companion said, ‘Yes, Excellency,’ as they went down the path. I suppose he’s got some kind of a title.”

“Did he seem excited?” asked Billie.

“I could hardly say excited. He appeared a good deal moved by the story of Phoebe and her father. He asked me if any money was needed.”

“Of course you said ‘no’?” observed Billie.

“I did. It’s my turn now. His turn may come later. I explained to him that any excitement or sudden recognition immediately after the operation might prove fatal or disastrous, and he took himself off. But I consider that Phoebe’s father is practically identified.”

“Is he conscious?” asked Billie with subdued excitement.

“Not only conscious, but, my dear child, what do you think? Speaking German; not English.”

Billie gasped.

290“That’s why you wanted Alberdina.”

“Yes, I needed someone who could speak with him, and a servant would be excellent; better, really, than an educated German. Just now the man’s mind is in terrible confusion. He is back in another country somewhere, but he is holding his own, and if he can get over the shock which must come when he links his past with his present, I believe we need have no fear for his reason; but it will be a pretty ticklish moment.”

The doctor looked down into Billie’s eager, earnest face, and his eyes were filled with admiration.

“Oh, doctor,” she exclaimed, “you are so wonderful. Next to Papa, the most wonderful man I have ever met. Richard and I——”

“What!” interrupted the doctor, smiling, “do you mean to say that that young whipper snapper, with his Gypsy notions and his clever tongue, has already photographed himself on your mind? I should never have bathed and bound his wounds if I had guessed it.”

291“You know you would,” laughed Billie, blushing a little. “But he’s only a comrade.”

The doctor looked into her eyes again.

“That’s what they all should be, Miss Billie,” he said. “Comrades. And if I were only fifteen years younger, I should be looking for just such a comrade as you.”

“But I am your comrade,” protested the young girl. “Just as much as Richard’s. I’m proud to be. It’s the greatest honor that’s ever been paid to me.”

“Oh, to be young again,” sighed the doctor with a humorous lift to his eyebrows. “Oh, to be young, like young Richard, there. But I must remember that I am a very busy middle-aged person with an extremely interesting patient to pull through. I trust he’ll thank me for the job.”

“Don’t you honestly believe he is some distinguished person?”

“I couldn’t say, little comrade, but I could guess that he’s no ordinary one.”

292They had reached the cabin now. The others had come up, and they all stood outside talking in low voices. After a brief word with Alberdina, Dr. Hume conducted her into the little room where the Motor Maids and their friends had once found refuge. From the doorway, Billie could see the silver candlesticks on the mantel shelf. Mrs. Lupo had kept them brightly polished and they lent a strange charm and refinement to the bare apartment. Phoebe crept in and knelt outside her father’s door.

“Now, Alberdina,” said the doctor as a last caution, “you understand that you are not to speak unless the gentleman inside asks you a question in German. Answer him in three words if you can. Then come out quietly. If he calls, you may go back.”

Alberdina laid aside her comedy hat and followed the doctor into the sick room. The others gathered noiselessly outside the window and listened. There was a long silence. Then the man 293on the bed spoke in a low, weak voice. It was only a mumble of sounds to Billie and Richard, but Mr. Campbell understood German and listened intently.

Alberdina replied not in three words but in a long voluble speech.

They held their breath.

“Come out,” called the doctor softly.

The sick man had begun to speak again. He seemed to be giving orders.

At the door Phoebe was weeping softly. Her father, restored to himself, was a stranger who spoke in a foreign tongue. Billie was fairly shaking with excitement.

“Do you suppose he’s forgotten English?” she whispered to Richard, who made the most absurd reply that had nothing whatever to do with Phoebe’s father and lost memories.

“I think the doctor had better take you in hand,” said Billie.

“I have an incurable disease,” answered the young man, not in the least ashamed.

294Mr. Campbell had joined the doctor and Alberdina at the other end of the house where their voices could not be heard in the sick room. The young surgeons were also in the group. When Billie and Richard came up, the German girl was saying:

“I cannot from the German English mag. He is a German already yet?”

“Of course,” answered the doctor impatiently, “but what did he ask you?”

Alberdina broke into German.

“No, no. In English.”

“He very sig yet ees——”

The doctor gave poor Alberdina a withering glance.

“I think I can tell you most of the conversation, Doctor,” put in Mr. Campbell. “The patient asked Alberdina if she were one of the maids at the palace. She answered at great length that she was laundress at Sunrise Camp. ‘This was not a palace,’ she explained, ‘but a hut.’

295“‘I have been in an accident?’” the sick man asked, as Mr. Campbell translated it.

“When Alberdina acquiesced, he told her to call Franz or Karl.

“Seeing her shake her head, he said:

“‘The Baron von Metz is here?’

“‘No,’ answered Alberdina.

“‘None of the household?’”

Then he gave her orders to telegraph the Baron von Metz at an address in Dresden and sign it A. J. Mr. Campbell had failed to catch the telegram, although he distinctly heard the second telegram to a “Miss Phoebe Jones,” at an address in England. It said she was not to worry. He had been detained by illness. Twice he made the blundering maid repeat the telegram, and finally exhausted with the mental effort, dropped into unconsciousness.

Was it not strange and terrible to take up the thread of one’s life where it had been so ruthlessly snapped off some two decades ago?

296Richard and Billie, seated on a rock out of hearing distance of the cabin, discussed the anomaly together.

“It’s like Rip Van Winkle,” Billie observed, “only worse because there have been so many inventions.”

“Yes, there are motor cars, for instance. They were only on trial then; and flying machines.”

“And hobble skirts,” added Billie with an inward laugh, remembering Nancy’s.

“It’s very interesting,” said Richard, “a good deal like missing the middle act of a drama.”

“Don’t you imagine that Phoebe’s father belonged to a noble family? Perhaps he was a younger son, and fell in love with a pretty English girl named Phoebe Jones. They eloped to America and hid themselves in the mountains, and the old Archduke or Prince or Baron who was the father perhaps gave it out that his son was insane. They always do that, you know.”

“Very romantic,” said Richard, “but why has he been speaking only English all these years?”

297“Don’t ask me anything so scientific, please.”

“It would go hard with me,” pursued Richard, “if I got a blow on the head over my English-language bump, because I wouldn’t have any other to take its place.”

Having arranged the history of the sick man to their own satisfaction, and as a matter of fact, to the doctor’s and Mr. Campbell’s also, they returned to Sunrise Camp, leaving Alberdina and Phoebe behind them.

Poor Phoebe had watched Billie and Richard together from the doorstep of the cabin. Then she had folded her hands with a gesture of resignation and closed her eyes. Something had hurt her. She still felt the pain and not all her faith nor prayers could ease it.

That night the campers gathered around the fire and discussed the mystery of the “Prince in Exile,” as they had named Phoebe’s father. They told stories of similar cases, of men with double identities who had been lost for years, of men 298who had made new lives for themselves and even earned fortunes.

“I knew he was a prince the first time I saw him,” Mary exclaimed.

“And now Phoebe will be a princess and perhaps very rich,” observed Elinor.

“Think of stepping from a cabin to a palace,” went on Amy Swinnerton. “From being a barefooted girl selling blackberries on the mountain to being a noble lady with a retinue of servants.”

And so they all talked and discussed and enjoyed themselves immensely until a motor horn interrupted them. A car had evidently stopped in front and someone now hurried over to the group around the fire.

“Well, children,” called Dr. Hume, “I daresay you’ll be interested in the news I am bringing you.”

“Wasn’t I right?” cried Billie.

“He was a prince?”

“Or a duke, perhaps?”

299“Even a baron is pretty good.”

There was a long pause.

“You are wonderful guessers,” said the doctor. “He lived in a palace.”

“I knew it,” cried Mary.

“Would it disappoint you very much if I were to tell you that the gentleman without a memory who lived in a palace was not a prince, nor a duke, nor a baron, but at one time a clergyman?”

“Oh!” they exclaimed in varying tones of surprise and disappointment.

“Then how the palace?” asked Maggie Hook.

“The Rev. Archibald Jones, a highly educated English gentleman of no means to speak of, was tutor in a noble family in Germany.”

“But his wife? She was a princess?” cried Mary, almost weeping.

“Every woman is a princess, my dear young lady,” replied the gallant doctor.

“But a real one, Doctor? One who lived in a palace?”

300“She lived in the palace, yes. She was attached to the household as English governess. The tutor and the governess met, as well they might even in a grand castle, and being in the same boat as regards teaching and birth, they fell in love. The lady was very beautiful, I understand.”

“And then?” demanded the chorus.

“Then they came to America where the field was larger even than in a palace with the noblesse. The young wife fell sick and the young husband, having saved a bit of money, brought her up into the mountains. The night Phoebe was born he tried to take a short cut down the mountainside to get a doctor who was stopping at a hotel now in ruins——”

Percy bowed his head.

“I recognize the spot,” he said.

“And the young tutor husband not of the nobility fell and hit his head against a rock. He was brought back insensible by an old Indian grandfather 301of Mrs. Lupo. The beautiful young wife only lived a few days, and when the father was better and the baby stronger the Indian took them and their belongings across the valley to Indian Head, where they have lived ever since.”

“Poor things,” exclaimed Miss Campbell. “What a pitiful, sad story!”

“And the wife’s name was Phoebe Jones?” asked Billie.

“Wrong again,” replied the doctor. “Would you have a Jones marry a Jones?”

“Then who, pray, was Miss Phoebe Jones?”

“Aunt of the Rev. Archibald. For some reason he remembered the name and I suppose gave it to the child.”

“Then who was the German gentleman who recognized Phoebe?”

“Now you are getting down to real romance,” replied the doctor.

“He was the young noble for whom the Rev. Archibald acted as tutor.” Here the doctor spoke 302slowly and impressively. “He loved the English governess and when she married the poor tutor, his noble heart was broken and never has been mended.”

“And he never married another?” piped up Mary’s small voice.

“Oh yes, my dear. The nobility always marries. Singleness is against the rules. He married and has a family of six.”

“And is that the end of the story?” asked Billie.

“No, there is a sequel. It seems that when the Rev. and Mrs. Archibald Jones disappeared from the stage of life without explanation only one person, after a decade or more, still clung to the belief that they were not dead. None other than Miss Phoebe Jones herself, spinster, living in Surrey, England. She recently died leaving her property to her nephew, his wife or possible heirs. It seems that the gentlemen who just now dropped me at your door——”

303“The disappointed lover?”

“Yes. The broken-hearted noble with a wife and six children, knew about this will because the lawyers in trying to trace Mr. Jones and his wife had got into communication with him.”

“And so they won’t be poor,” said Nancy. “I’m glad of that. Phoebe looked beautiful in good clothes.”

Everybody laughed, and then the doctor remarked:

“And so the story has a plain ending, after all. Phoebe is not a princess and you are all disappointed.”

“No, no, no,” they protested, but the doctor knew better.

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Already the scarlet sumac lit the road with its flaming torch, and here and there on the mountainside a flash of scarlet like a redbird’s wing appeared among the masses of foliage. Autumn was at hand, the autumn of the Adirondacks, when the evening air is nipped with the hint of frosts to come and the sky is a deeper blue than ever it is at mid-summer.

Summer comrades of the road may not linger in the hills at this enchanting season. There is work to be done in the valleys where the busy people live. In a few days now the shutters of log cabin camps will be closed and traveling vans will be sent to winter quarters.

The boys and girls who have lingered around the campfire, singing songs and telling stories 305under the great harvest moon, all comrades of the road, must turn their thoughts to soberer things than roasting apples and school day reminiscences. The grown people, too, stretched out in their steamer chairs, have been idling away the hours. Vaguely, as in a mist, a great surgeon recalls that there is a hospital somewhere he has been neglecting for weeks. An engineer is thinking of his tunnel only just started through the heart of a mountain. A little old spinster, fair and fresh as a rose, recalls with a start that for many weeks she has been sleeping under the stars and eating strange food on a bare deal table; and down in the valley her beautiful old home, filled with memories of her girlhood, is waiting to shelter her.

Near the spinster sits a tall man with a delicate, nervous face. He sits with folded arms, his eyes fixed on the back wall of mountains across the valley. He is thinking not of the future of the little home in Surrey that awaits 306him, but of the twenty black years behind him, as blank and empty as the years of a prisoner spent in solitary confinement. Sometimes, with a curious, startled gaze, he turns his eyes toward his daughter, seated in the circle with the young people.

While we have been taking this leisurely view of our friends, Alberdina has approached, smiling broadly over a great tray of cakes and ginger ale. Mrs. Lupo is hovering in the background.

“It was that skirt of the young lady’s that brought me really back to my senses,” Mrs. Lupo had confessed to Miss Campbell. “I thought the young lady had sunk in the mire. The misery that come to me then made me see things different; that and the prayer you taught me. Lupo, he’s workin’ now in the valley and when the camp is broke up, I guess we’ll forgive and forgit.”

Miss Campbell, glancing at Mrs. Lupo now in the background, wondered if that awful memory of the carving knife was not a dream.

307“Papa,” Billie called from her place near the campfire, “you mustn’t forget to send pounds and pounds of really good coffee to old Granny, the herb gatherer, enough to last her all winter.”

“I’ll make a note of it, daughter. Are there any other old parties you wish to pension off with coffee or tea this winter?”

“No, papa. But I’d like to keep old Granny in coffee for the rest of her life because she loves it so.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” called Percy, rising and flourishing an apple on the end of a long stick, “I made a discovery this morning through a letter from a friend, and I’ve been saving it until this moment to spring it on the Motor Maids and company.”

“About whom is this discovery?” asked Richard uneasily, raising his eyebrows and blinking his humorous eyes.

“It’s about two impostors who travel around in a little wooden house on wheels and live like Gypsies——”

308“Oh, dear,” cried Maggie, “now what have you been finding out about us, pray?”

“I know,” said Richard. “You’ve found that we are really Gypsies and only pretending to be amateurs.”

“Nothing of the sort. I’ve discovered that you have been traveling under a disguise——”

“My name is certainly ‘Hook,’” put in Richard.

“And mine is Maggie,” piped his sister.

“Maybe so,” went on Percy. “That’s not the disguise. You’ve been wearing the cloak of poverty, when you are really as rich as cream, the pair of you, with an old grandfather in England who has a title and castles and much pleasing property; and every now and then the old grandpapa sends for you and you have to give up Gypsying and fly.”

“And he’s your boss who’s always interfering with your vacations?” interrupted Billie.

“And you just pretend to be poor for the novelty 309of the experience?” asked Nancy. “I wish I could pretend to be rich in the same way.”

“But we are Gypsies at heart,” put in Maggie, “and I do love to scrub and cook. Grandpapa’s is so dull.”

“And where does Grandpapa think you are now? Not in a traveling van, I’ll wager,” said Miss Campbell.

Maggie laughed.

“We are supposed to be visiting Aunt Lucretia. She’s our American aunt, Papa’s sister, who brought us up, before Grandpapa decided to recognize us. You see Mamma would marry Papa, who was poor then, and came from Maine. He looked just like Richard and I don’t blame her. Grandpapa lets us come every summer to visit Aunt Lucretia now.”

“And where does Aunt Lucretia think you are?”

“Why, visiting Amy Swinnerton.”

Who could keep from laughing over this 310brother and sister who loved the life on the road and the campfire?

“Thank fortune, I’m not in line for the title,” Richard whispered to Billie under cover of the conversation of the others, “and Grandpapa or no Grandpapa, I shall buy that farm,—do you guess where?”

“I can’t imagine,” answered Billie.

“In West Haven. I’ve never seen it, but that is the place you like best, isn’t it?”

“I think I like the traveling van best,” answered Billie irrelevantly,—“that is, next to the ‘Comet,’” she added with a sudden feeling of loyalty toward the faithful motor car.

“The traveling van would be a part of it and the ‘Comet,’ too, for that matter.”

Then he calmly slipped his hand over hers under the folds of her scarlet cape.

“Shall we be comrades of the road?” he whispered.

“Some day, perhaps,” Billie answered, not 311taking her hand away, but glancing shyly at her father, who was watching her face in the fire light.

Then she smiled at Richard. After all, she was past eighteen and Richard,—well, Richard was the most delightful person she had ever met in all her life.

Let us take leave of our young people before they go back to the valleys where work is waiting for them. Brown and strong and happy, they sit in a circle talking and laughing, as boys and girls will, under the light of the harvest moon.

While they are still comrades of the road, we will bid them good-night.

Good-night, little Mary, calm and sweet, watching the stars twinkling through the tree tops. Good-night to you, Nancy, dimpling and smiling, while Percy whispers in your ear; and Elinor, too, talking quietly and happily to Ben. And now a last good-night to Billie, best of comrades, kindest and truest of friends.

THE END

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THE “HOW-TO-DO-IT” BOOKS

By J. S. ZERBE

Carpentry for Boys

A book which treats, in a most practical and fascinating manner all subjects pertaining to the “King of Trades”; showing the care and use of tools; drawing; designing, and the laying out of work; the principles involved in the building of various kinds of structures, and the rudiments of architecture. It contains over two hundred and fifty illustrations made especially for this work, and includes also a complete glossary of the technical terms used in the art. The most comprehensive volume on this subject ever published for boys.

Electricity for Boys

The author has adopted the unique plan of setting forth the fundamental principles in each phase of the science, and practically applying the work in the successive stages. It shows how the knowledge has been developed, and the reasons for the various phenomena, without using technical words so as to bring it within the compass of every boy. It has a complete glossary of terms, and is illustrated with two hundred original drawings.

Practical Mechanics for Boys

This book takes the beginner through a comprehensive series of practical shop work, in which the uses of tools, and the structure and handling of shop machinery are set forth; how they are utilized to perform the work, and the manner in which all dimensional work is carried out. Every subject is illustrated, and model building explained. It contains a glossary which comprises a new system of cross references, a feature that will prove a welcome departure in explaining subjects. Fully illustrated.

For sale by all Booksellers, or sent postpaid on receipt of $1.00.

M. A. DONOHUE & COMPANY
711 S. DEARBORN STREET    ::    CHICAGO

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THE VICTORY BOY SCOUTS

BY
CAPTAIN ALAN DOUGLAS
SCOUTMASTER

Stories from the pen of a writer who possesses a thorough knowledge of his subject. In addition to the stories there is an addenda in which useful boy scout nature lore is given, all illustrated. There are the following twelve titles in the series:

1. The Campfires of the Wolf Patrol.
2. Woodcraft; or, How a Patrol Leader Made Good.
3. Pathfinder; or, the Missing Tenderfoot.
4. Great Hike; or, the Pride of Khaki Troop.
5. Endurance Test; or, How Clear Grit Won the Day.
6. Under Canvas; or, the Search for the Carteret Ghost.
7. Storm-bound; or, a Vacation Among the Snow-Drifts.
8. Afloat; or, Adventures on Watery Trails.
9. Tenderfoot Squad; or, Camping at Raccoon Lodge.
10. Boy Scout Electricians; or, the Hidden Dynamo.
11. Boy Scouts in Open Plains; or, the Round-up not Ordered.
12. Boy Scouts in an Airplane; or, the Warning from the Sky.

12mo. Lintex. Postpaid, Price each 50c

M. A. DONOHUE & COMPANY
711 S. DEARBORN STREET    ::    CHICAGO

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THE BOYS’ ELITE SERIES

12mo, cloth. Price 75c each.

Contains an attractive assortment of books for boys by standard and favorite authors. Printed from large, clear type on a superior quality of paper, bound in a superior quality of binders’ cloth, ornamented with illustrated original designs on covers stamped in colors from unique and appropriate dies. Each book wrapped in attractive jacket.

1.	Cudjo’s Cave	Trowbridge
2.	Green Mountain Boys
3.	Life of Kit Carson	Edward L. Ellis
4.	Tom Westlake’s Golden Luck	Perry Newberry
5.	Tony Keating’s Surprises	Mrs. G. R. Alden (Pansy)
6.	Tour of the World in 80 Days	Jules Verne

THE GIRLS’ ELITE SERIES

12mo, cloth. Price 75c each.

Contains an assortment of attractive and desirable books for girls by standard and favorite authors. The books are printed on a good quality of paper in large clear type. Each title is complete and unabridged. Bound in clothene, ornamented on the sides and back with attractive illustrative designs and the title stamped on front and back.

1.	Bee and the Butterfly	Lucy Foster Madison
2.	Dixie School Girl	Gabrielle E. Jackson
3.	Girls of Mount Morris	Amanda Douglas
4.	Hope’s Messenger	Gabrielle E. Jackson
5.	The Little Aunt Marion	Ames Taggart
6.	A Modern Cinderella	Amanda Douglas

12mo. Lintex. Postpaid, Price each 50c

M. A. DONOHUE & COMPANY
711 S. DEARBORN STREET    ::    CHICAGO

 

 

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