Chapter XIII: Over the Hills and Far Away

Costello, the junkman, could not be further ignored, for at this point he began another excitable harangue. The Queen Alma bracelet, "Beeg Jeem," his own sorrows, and the fact that he saw no reason why Agnes should not immediately give up to him the silver bracelet, were all mixed up together in a clamor that became almost deafening.

"Oh, what shall I do? What _shall_ I do?" exclaimed the Corner House girl.

But Neale O'Neil was quite level-headed. Like Agnes, at first he had for a little while been swept off his feet by the swarthy man's vehemence. He regained his balance now.

"We're not going to do anything. We won't even show him the bracelet," said the boy firmly.

"But it is mine! It is the heirloom of the Costello! I, myself, tell you so," declared the junkman, beating his breast now instead of the newspaper.

"All right. I believe you. Don't yell so about it," said Neale, but quite calmly. "That does not alter the fact that we cannot give the bracelet up. That is, Miss Kenway cannot."

"But she say here--in the paper--"

"Oh, stop it!" exclaimed the exasperated boy. "It doesn't say in that paper that she will hand the thing out to anybody who comes and asks for it. If this other fellow you have been talking about should come here, do you suppose we would give it up to him, just on his say so?"

"No, no! It is not his. It never should have been in the possession of his family, sir. I assure you _I_ am the Costello to whose ancestors the great Queen Alma of our tribe delivered the bracelet."

"All right. Let it go at that," answered Neale. "All the more reason why we must be careful who gets it now. If it is honestly your bracelet you will get it, Mr. Costello. But you will have to see Miss Kenway's guardian and let him decide."

"Her--what you call it--does he have the bracelet?" cried the man.

"He will have it. You go there to-morrow. I will give you his address. To-morrow he will talk to you. He is not in his office to-day. He is a lawyer."

"Oh, la, la! The law! I no like the law," declared Costello.

"No, I presume you Gypsies don't," muttered Neale, pulling out an envelope and the stub of a pencil with which to write the address of Mr. Howbridge's office. "There it is. Now, that is the best we can do for you. Only, nobody shall be given the bracelet until you have talked with Mr. Howbridge."

"But, I no like! The honest Kenway say here, in the paper--"

As he began to tap upon the newspaper again Neale, who was a sturdy youth, crowded him out upon the veranda of the old Corner House.

"Now, go!" advised Neale, when he heard the click of the door latch behind him. "You'll make nothing by lingering here and talking. There's your horse starting off by himself. Better get him."

This roused the junk dealer's attention. The horse was tired of standing and was half a block away. Costello uttered an excited yelp and darted after his junk wagon.

Agnes let Neale inside the house again. She was much relieved.

"There! isn't this a mess?" she said. "I am glad you thought of Mr. Howbridge. But I _do_ wish Ruth had been at home. She would have known just what to say to that funny little man."

"Humph! Maybe it would have been a good idea if she had been here," admitted Neale slowly. "Ruth is awfully bossy, but things do go about right when she is on the job."

"We'll have to see Mr. Howbridge--"

"But that can wait until to-morrow morning," Neale declared. "We can't do so this afternoon in any case. I happen to know he is out of town. And we have promised Mr. Pinkney to take him on a hunt for Sammy."

"All right. It is almost noon. You'd better go and wash your face, Neale," and she began to giggle at him.

"Don't I know that? I came in here just to remind you to begin to prink before dinner or you'd never be ready."

She was already halfway up the stairs and she leaned over the balustrade to make a gamin's face at him.

"Just you tend to your own apple cart, Neale O'Neil!" she told him. "I will be ready as soon as you are."

At dinner, which was eaten in the middle of the day at this time of year at the old Corner House, Agnes appeared ready all but her hat for the car.

"Oh, Aggie! can we go too?" cried Dot. "We want to ride in the automobile, don't we, Tess?"

"We maybe want to go riding," confessed the other sister slowly. "But I guess we can't, Dot. You forget that Margie and Holly Pease are coming over at three o'clock. They haven't seen the fretted silver bracelet."

"That reminds me," said Agnes firmly. "You must not take that bracelet out of the house. Understand? Not at all."

"Why, Aggie!" murmured Tess, while Dot grew quite red with indignation.

"If you wish to play with it indoors, all right," Agnes said. "Whose turn to have it, is it to-day?"

"Mine," admitted Tess.

"Then I hold you responsible. Not out of the house. We have got to get Mr. Howbridge's advice about it, in any case."

"Ruth didn't say we couldn't wear the bracelet out-of-doors," declared Dot, pouting.

"I am in Ruth's place," responded the older sister promptly. "Now, remember! You might lose it anyway. And _then_ what would we do if the owner really comes for it?"

"But they won't!" cried Dot, confidently. "Those Gypsy ladies gave it to us for keeps. I am sure."

"You certainly would not wish to keep the bracelet if the person the Gypsies stole it from came here to get it?" said Agnes sternly.

"Oh--oo! No-o," murmured Dot.

"Of course we would not, Sister," Tess declared briskly. "If we knew just where their camp is we would take it to them anyway. Of course we would, Dot!"

"Oh, of course," agreed Dot, but very faintly.

"You children are so seldom observant," went on Agnes in her most grown-up manner. "You should have looked into that basket when you bought it of the Gypsies. Then you would have seen the bracelet before the women got away. You are almost _never_ observant."

"Why, Aggie!" Tess exclaimed, rather hurt by the accusation of her older sister. "That is what your Mr. Marks said when he came into our grade at school just before the end of term last June."

Mr. Curtis G. Marks was the principal of the High School which Agnes attended.

"What was Mr. Marks doing over in your room, Tess?" Agnes asked curiously.

"Visiting. Our teacher asked him to 'take the class.' You know, visiting teachers always _are_ so nosey," added Tess with more frankness than good taste.

"Better not let Ruth hear you use that expression, child," laughed Agnes. "But what about being observant--or _un_observant?"

"He told us," Tess went on to say, "to watch closely, and then asked for somebody to give him a number. So somebody said thirty-two."

"Yes?"

"And Mr. Marks went to the board and wrote twenty-three on it. Of course, none of us said anything. Then Mr. Marks asked for another number and somebody gave him ninety-four. Then he wrote forty-nine on the board, and nobody said a word."

"Why didn't you?" asked Agnes in wonder. "Did you think he was teaching you some new game?"

"I--I guess we were too polite. You see, he was a visitor. And he said right out loud to our teacher: 'You see, they do not observe. Is it dense stupidity, or just inattention?' That's _just_ what he said," added Tess, her eyes flashing.

"Oh!" murmured Dot. "Didn't he know how to write the number right?"

"So," continued Tess, "I guess we all felt sort of hurt. And Belle Littleweed got so fidgety that she raised her hand. Mr. Marks says: 'Very well, you give me a number.'

"Belle lisps a little, you know, Aggie, and she said right out: 'Theventy-theven; thee if you can turn that around!' He didn't think we noticed anything, and were stupid; but I guess he knows better now," added Tess with satisfaction.

"That is all right," said Agnes with a sigh. "I heartily wish you and Dot had been observant when those women gave you the basket and you had found the bracelet in it before they got away. It is going to make us trouble I am afraid."

Agnes told the little ones nothing about the strange junkman and his claim. Nor did she mention the affair to any of the remainder of the Corner House family. She only added:

"So don't you take the bracelet out of the house or let anybody at all have it--if Neale or I are not here."

"Why, it would not be right to give the bracelet to anybody but the Gypsy ladies, would it?" said Tess.

"Of course not," agreed Dot. "And _they_ haven't come after it."

Agnes did not notice these final comments of the two smaller girls. She had given them instructions, and those instructions were sufficient, she thought, to avert any trouble regarding the mysterious bracelet--whether it was "Queen Alma's" or not.

The junkman, Costello, certainly had filled Agnes' mind with most romantic imaginations! If the old silver bracelet was a Gypsy heirloom and had been handed down through the Costello tribe--as the junkman claimed--for three hundred years and more, of course it would not be considered stolen property.

The mystery remained why the Gypsy women had left the bracelet in the basket they had almost forced upon the Kenway children. The explanation of this was quite beyond Agnes, unless it had been done because the Gypsy women feared that this very Costello was about to claim the heirloom, and they considered it safer with Tess and Dot than in their own possession. True, this seemed a far-fetched explanation of the affair; yet what so probable?

The Gypsies might be quite familiar with Milton, and probably knew a good deal about the old Corner House and the family now occupying it. The little girls would of course be honest. The Gypsies were shrewd people. They were quite sure, no doubt, that the Kenways would not give the bracelet to any person but the women who sold the basket, unless the right to the property could be proved.

"And even if that Costello man does own the bracelet, how is he going to prove it?" Agnes asked Neale, as they ran the car out of the garage after dinner. "I guess we are going to hand dear old Mr. Howbridge a big handful of trouble."

"Crickey! isn't that a fact?" grumbled Neale. "The more I think of it, the sorrier I am we put that advertisement in the paper, Aggie."

There was nothing more to be said about that at the time, for Mr. Pinkney was already waiting for them on his front steps. His wife was at the door and she looked so weary-eyed and pale of face that Agnes at least felt much sympathy for her.

"Oh, don't worry, Mrs. Pinkney!" cried the girl from her seat beside Neale. "I am sure Sammy will turn up all right. Neale says so--everybody says so! He is such a plucky boy, anyway. Nothing would happen to him."

"But this seems worse than any other time," said the poor woman. "He must have never meant to come back, or he would not have taken that picture with him."

"Nonsense!" exclaimed her husband cheerfully. "Sammy sort of fancied himself in that picture, that is all. He is not without his share of vanity."

"That is what _you_ say," complained Sammy's mother. "But I just feel that something dreadful has happened to him this time."

"Never mind," called Neale, starting the engine, "we'll go over the hills and far away, but we'll find some trace of him, Mrs. Pinkney. Sammy can't have hidden himself so completely that we cannot discover where he has been and where he is going."

That is exactly what they did. They flew about the environs of Milton in a rapid search for the truant. Wherever they stopped and made inquiries for the first hour or so, however, they gained no word of Sammy.

It was three o'clock, and they were down toward the canal on the road leading to Hampton Mills, when they gained the first possible clue of the missing one. And that clue was more than twenty-four hours old.

A storekeeper remembered a boy who answered to Sammy's description buying something to eat the day before, and sitting down on the store step to eat it. That boy carried a heavy extension-bag and went on after he had eaten along the Hampton Mills road.

"We've struck his trail!" declared Neale with satisfaction. "Don't you think so, Mr. Pinkney?"

"How did he pay you for the things he bought?" asked the father of the runaway, addressing the storekeeper again. "What kind of money did he have?"

"He had ten cent pieces, I remember. And he had them tied in a handkerchief. Nicked his bank before he started, did he?" and the man laughed.

"That is exactly what he did," admitted Mr. Pinkney, returning hurriedly to the car. "Drive on, Neale. I guess we are on the right trail."