Chapter XVIII: The Junkman Again

When Ruth started home with Luke and Cecile Shepard several days had elapsed since Neale O'Neil and Agnes had discovered that Mr. Howbridge was out of town.

The chief clerk at the lawyer's office had little time to give to the youthful visitors, for just then he had his hands full with a caller whom Neale and Agnes had previously found was a person not easily to be pacified.

"There is a crazy man in here," grumbled the clerk. "I don't know what he means. He says he 'comes from Kenway,' and there is something about Queen Alma and her bracelet. What do you know about this, Miss Kenway?"

"Oh, my prophetic soul!" gasped Neale O'Neil. "Costello, the junkman!"

"Dear, me! We thought we could see Mr. Howbridge before that man came."

"Tell me what it means," urged the clerk. "Then I will know what to say to the lunatic."

"I guess he's a nut all right," admitted Neale. He told the lawyer's clerk swiftly all they knew about the junkman, and all they knew about the silver bracelet.

"All right. It is something for Mr. Howbridge to attend to himself," declared the clerk. "You hang on to that bracelet and don't let anybody have it. I'll try to shoo off this fellow. Anyway, it may not belong to his family at all. I'll hold him here till you two get away."

Neale and Agnes were glad to escape contact with the junkman again. He was too vehement.

"He'll walk right in and search the house for the thing," grumbled Neale. "We can't have him frightening the children."

"And I don't want to be frightened myself," added Agnes.

They hurried home, and all that day, every time the bell rang or she heard a voice at the side door, the girl felt a sudden qualm. "Wish we had never advertised that bracelet at all," she confessed in secret. "Dear, me! I wonder what Ruth will say?"

Nevertheless she failed to take her older sister into her confidence regarding Queen Alma's bracelet when she wrote to her. She felt quite convinced that Ruth would not approve of what she and Neale had done, so why talk about it?

This was the attitude Agnes maintained. Perhaps the whole affair would be straightened out before Ruth came back. And otherwise, she considered, everything was going well at the Corner House in Milton.

It was Miss Ann Titus who evinced interest next in the "lost and found" advertisement. Miss Ann Titus was the woman whom Dot called "such a fluid speaker" and who said so many "and-so's" that "ain't-so's." In other words, Miss Titus, the dressmaker, was a very gossipy person, although she was not intentionally unkind.

She came in this afternoon, "stopping by" as she termed it, from spending a short sewing day with Mrs. Pease, a Willow Street neighbor of the Corner House girls.

"And I must say that Mrs. Pease, for a woman of her age, has young idees about dress," Miss Titus confided to Mrs. McCall and Agnes, who were in the sewing room. Aunt Sarah "couldn't a-bear" Miss Ann Titus, so they did not invite the seamstress to go upstairs.

"Yes, her idees is some young," repeated Miss Titus. "But then, nowadays if you foller the styles in the fashion papers nobody can tell you and your grandmother apart, back to! Skirts are so skimpy--and _short_!"

Miss Titus fanned herself rapidly, and allowed her emphasis to suggest her own opinion of modern taste in dress.

"Of course, Mrs. Pease is slim and ain't lost all her good looks; but it does seem to me if I was a married woman," she simpered here a little, for Miss Titus had by no means given up all hope of entering the wedded state, "I should consider my husband's feelings. I would not go on the street looking below my knees as though I was twelve year old instead of thirty-two."

"Maybe Mr. Pease likes her to look young," suggested Agnes.

"Hech! Hech!" clucked Mrs. McCall placidly. "Thirty-twa is not so very auld. Not as we live these days, at any rate."

"But think of the example she sets her children," sniffed Miss Titus, bridling.

"Tut, tut! How much d'you expect Margie and Holly Pease is influenced by their mother's style o' dress?" exclaimed the housekeeper. "The twa bairns scarce know much about that."

"I guess that is so," chimed in Agnes. "And I think she is a pretty woman and dresses nicely. So there!"

"Ah, you young things cannot be expected to think as I do," smirked Miss Titus.

"I take that as a compliment, my dear," said the housekeeper comfortably. "And I never expect tae be vairy old until I die. Still and all, I am some older than Agnes."

"That reminds me," said Miss Titus, more briskly (though it did not remind her, for she had come into the Corner House for the special purpose of broaching the subject that she now announced), "which of you Kenways is it has found a silver bracelet?"

"Now, _that_ is Agnes' affair," chuckled Mrs. McCall.

"Oh! It is not Ruth that advertised?" queried the curious Miss Titus.

"Na, na! Tell it her, Agnes," said the housekeeper.

But Agnes was not sure she wished to describe to this gossipy seamstress all the incidents connected with Queen Alma's bracelet. She only said:

"Of course, you do not know anybody who has lost such a bracelet?"

"How can I tell till I have seen it?" demanded Miss Titus.

"Well, we have about decided that until somebody comes who describes the bracelet and can explain how and where it was lost that we had better not display it at all," Agnes said, with more firmness than was usual with her.

"Oh!" sniffed Miss Titus. "I hope you do not think that _I_ have any interest--any personal interest--in inquiring about it?"

"If I thought it was yours, Miss Titus, I would let you see it immediately," Agnes hastened to assure her. "But of course--"

"There was a bracelet lost right on this street," said Miss Titus earnestly, meaning Willow Street and pointing that way, "that never was recovered to my knowledge."

"Oh! You don't mean it?" cried the puzzled girl. "Of course, we don't _know_ that this one belongs to any of those Gypsies--"

"I should say not!" clucked Miss Titus. "The bracelet I mean was worn by Sarah Turner. She and I went together regular when we were girls. And going to prayer meeting one night, walking along here by the old Corner House, Sarah dropped her bracelet."

"But--but!" gasped Agnes, "that must have been some time ago, Miss Titus."

"It is according to how you compute time," the dressmaker said. "Sarah and I were about of an age. And she isn't more than forty years old right now!"

"I don't think this bracelet we have is the one your friend lost," Agnes said faintly, but confidently. She wanted to laugh but did not dare.

"How do you know?" demanded Miss Ann Titus in her snappy way--like the biting off of a thread when she was at work. "I should know it, even so long after it was lost, I assure you."

"Why--how?" asked the Corner House girl curiously.

"By the scratches on it," declared Miss Titus. "Sarah's brother John made them with his pocketknife--on the inside of the bracelet--to see if it was real silver. Oh! he was a bad boy--as bad as Sammy Pinkney. And what do you think of _his_ running away again?"

Agnes was glad the seamstress changed the subject right here. It seemed to her as though she had noticed scratches on the bracelet the Gypsies had placed in the basket the children bought. Could it be possible--

"No! That is ridiculous!" Agnes told herself. "It could not be possible that a bracelet lost forty years ago on Willow Street should turn up at this late date. And, having found it, why should those Gypsy women give it to Tess and Dot? There would be no sense in that."

Yet, when the talkative Miss Titus had gone Agnes went to the room the little folks kept their playthings and doll families in, and picked up the Alice-doll which chanced that day to be wearing the silver band. She removed it from the doll and took it to the window where the light was better.

Yes! It was true as she had thought. There were several crosswise scratches on the inside of the circlet. They might easily have been made by a boy's jackknife.

"I declare! Who really knows where this bracelet came from, and who actually owns it? Maybe it is not Queen Alma's ornament after all. Dear, me! this Kenway family is forever getting mixed up in difficulties that positively have nothing to do with _us_.

"The silly old bracelet! Why couldn't those Gypsy women have sold that basket to Margaret and Holly Pease, or to some other little girls instead of to our Tess and Dot. Mrs. McCall says that some people seem to attract trouble, just as lightning-rods attract lightning, and I guess the Kenways are some of those people!"

Neale did not come over again that day, so she had nobody to discuss this new slant in the matter with. And if Agnes could not "talk out loud" about her troubles, she was apt to grow irritable. At least, the little girls said after supper that she was cross.

"Ruth doesn't talk that way to us," declared Tess, quite hurt, and gathering up her playthings from the various chairs in the sitting room where the family usually gathered in the evenings. "I don't think I should like her to be away all the time."

This was Tess's polite way of criticising Agnes. But Dot was not so hampered by politeness.

"Crosspatch!" she exclaimed. "That's just what you are, Aggie Kenway."

And she started for bed in quite a huff. Agnes was glad, a few minutes later, that the two smaller girls had gone upstairs, even if they had gone away in this unhappy state of mind. Mrs. McCall had come in and sat down at some mending and the room was very quiet. Suddenly a noise outside on the porch made Agnes raise her head and look at the nearest window.

"What is the matter wi' ye, lassie?" asked Mrs. McCall, startled.

"Did you hear that?" whispered the girl, staring at the window.

The shade was not drawn down to the sill, and the curtains were the very thinnest of scrim. At the space of four inches below the shade Agnes saw a white splotch against the pane.

"Oh! See! A face!" gasped Agnes in three smothered shrieks.

"Hech, mon! Such a flibbertigibbet as the lass is." Mrs. McCall adjusted her glasses and stared, first at the frightened girl, then at the window. But she, too, saw the face. "What can the matter be?" she demanded, half rising. "Is that Neale O'Neil up tae some o' his jokes?"

"Oh, no, Mrs. Mac! It's not Neale," half sobbed Agnes. "I know who it is. It's that awful junkman!"

"A junkman?" repeated Mrs. McCall. "At this time o' night? We've naethin' tae sellit him. The impudence!"

She rose, quite determined to drive the importunate junkman away.