Chapter VIII: Lycurgus Billet's Eagle Bait

Ruth set the day--and an early one--for Tess and Dot to take tea with their new friend, Mrs. Eland. She wrote a very nice note in reply to that found in the core of the apple, and the little girls looked forward with delight to seeing the matron of the Woman's and Children's Hospital.

But before the afternoon in question arrived something occurred in which all the Corner House girls had a part, and Neale O'Neil as well; and it was an adventure not soon to be forgotten by any of them. Incidentally, Tom Jonah was in it too.

Ruth tried, on pleasant Saturdays, to invent some game or play that all could have a part in. This kept the four sisters together, and it was seldom that any Corner House girl found real pleasure away from the others. Ruth's only cross was that Agnes would drag Neale O'Neil into their good times.

Not that Ruth had anything against the white-haired boy. In spite of the fact that Neale was brought up in a circus--his uncle was Mr. Bill Sorber of Twomley & Sorber's Herculean Circus and Menagerie--he was quite the nicest boy the Corner House girls knew. But Ruth did not approve of boys at all; and she thought Agnes rude and slangy enough at times without having her so much in the company of a real boy like Neale.

She suggested a drive into the country for this late September Saturday, chestnuts being their main object, there having been a sharp frost. Of course Neale had to arrange for the hiring of the livery team, and the stableman refused to let them have a spirited span of horses unless Neale drove.

"Well, get an automobile then!" exclaimed Agnes. "It's only three dollars an hour, with a man to drive, at Acton's garage. Goodness knows I'm just _crazy_ to ride in an auto--one of those big, beautiful seven-passenger touring cars. I wish we could have one, Ruthie!"

"I wish we could," said Ruth, for she, too, was automobile hungry like the rest of the world.

"Do! _do!_ ask Mr. Howbridge," begged Agnes.

"Not for the world," returned Ruth, decidedly. "He'd think we were crazy, indeed. There is money enough to educate us, and clothe and feed us; but I do not believe that Uncle Peter's estate will stand the drain of automobiles--no indeed!"

"Well," sighed Agnes. "We're lucky to have Neale about. You know very well if it were not for him the livery man would give us a pair of dead-and-alive old things. Mr. Skinner knows Neale is to be trusted with any horse in his stable."

This was true enough; but it added Neale O'Neil to the party. When they were about to depart from the old Corner House there was another unexpected member added to the company.

Tess and Dot were squeezed in beside Neale on the front seat. Ruth and Agnes occupied the back of the carriage with wraps and boxes and baskets of eatables. This was to be an all day outing with a picnic dinner in the chestnut woods.

"All aboard?" queried Neale, flourishing the whip. "Got everything? Haven't left anything good to eat behind, have you?"

"Oh, you boys!" groaned Ruth. "Always thinking of your stomachs."

"Well! why were stomachs put in front of us, if not to be thought of and considered?" Neale demanded. "If not, they might as well have been stuck on behind like a knapsack, or like our shoulder-blades.

"I say, Mrs. MacCall," proceeded the irrepressible boy. "Plenty of baked beans and fishcakes for supper to-night. I see very plainly that these girls have brought very little to eat along of a solid character. I shall be hungry when we get back."

At that moment Tess cried: "Oh, poor Tom Jonah!" And Dot echoed her: "Poor Tom Jonah!"

"Look how eager he is!" cried Agnes.

The big dog stood at the gate. Old as he was, the idea of an outing pleased him immensely. He was always delighted to go picnicking with the Corner House girls; but as the legend on his collar proclaimed, Tom Jonah was a gentleman, and nobody had invited him to go on this occasion.

"Oh, Ruth! let him come!" cried the three younger girls in chorus.

"Why not?" added Agnes.

"Well, I don't know," said Ruth.

"It will be a long march for him," said Neale, doubtfully. "He'll get left behind. The horses are fast."

"Well, you are the one to see that he isn't left behind, Neale O'Neil," asserted Ruth.

"All right," said the boy, meekly, but winking at Uncle Rufus and Mrs. MacCall. Neale had wanted the old dog to go all the time, and his remark had turned the scale in Tom Jonah's favor.

"Come, boy! you can go, too," Ruth announced as the horses started.

Tom Jonah uttered a joyful bark, circled the carriage and pair two or three times in the exuberance of his delight, and then settled down to a steady pace under the rear axle. Neale saw to it that the lively ponies did not travel too fast for the old dog.

The carriage rattled across Main Street and out High Street. The town was soon left behind, Neale following the automobile road along which ran the interurban electric tracks to Fleeting and beyond.

"Oh, yes!" said Agnes, gloomily. "I know this is the way to Fleeting, Neale O'Neil. Wish I'd never been there."

"Has Mr. Marks ever said anything further to you girls about Bob Buckham's strawberries?" asked her boy friend.

"No. But you see, we haven't played any more outside games, either. And I _know_ they'll give _The Carnation Countess_ this winter and we won't any of us be allowed to play in it."

"I'm going to be a bee," announced Dot, seriously, "if they have the play. I'll have wings and a buzzer."

"A buzzer?" demanded Tess. "What's that?"

"Well, bees buzz, don't they? If they make bees out of us, as teacher says they will, we'll have to buzz, won't we? We're learning a buzzing song now."

"Goodness! and you'll be provided with a stinger, too, I suppose!" exclaimed Agnes.

"Oh! we shall be tame bees," Dot said. "Not at all wild. The song says so.

"'We are little honey-bees,
Honey sweet our disposition.
We appear here now to please,
Making sweets our avocation.
Buzz! buzz! buzz-z-z-z!'

That's a verse," concluded Dot.

"Miss Pepperill," observed Tess, sadly, "said only yesterday that if we were in the play at all we might act the part of imps better than anything else. It would come natural to us."

"Poor Miss Pepperpot!" laughed Agnes. "She must find your class a great cross, Tess. How's Sammy standing just now?"

"He hasn't done anything to get her very mad since he wrote about the duck," Tess said gravely. "But Sadie Goronofsky got a black mark yesterday. And Miss Pepperill laughed, too."

"What for?" asked Ruth.

"Why, teacher asked why Belle Littleweed hadn't been at school for two days and Alfredia Blossom told her she guessed Belle's father was dead. He was 'spected to die, you know."

"Well, what about Sadie?" asked Agnes, for Tess seemed to have lost the thread of her story.

"Why, Sadie speaks up and says: 'Teacher, I don't believe Mr. Littleweed is dead at all. I see their clothes on the line and they was all white--nightgowns and all.'"

"The idea!" giggled Agnes.

"That's what Miss Pepperill said. She asked Sadie if she thought folks wore black nightgowns when they went into mourning, and Sadie says: 'Why not, teacher? Don't they feel just as bad at night as they do in the daytime?' So then Miss Pepperill said Sadie ought not to ask such silly questions, and she gave her a black mark. But I saw her laughing behind her spectacles!"

"My! but Tess is the observant kid," said Neale, laughing. "She laughed behind her spectacles, did she?"

"Yes. I know when she laughs, no matter how cross her voice sounds," declared Tess, confidently. "If you look right through her spectacles you'll see her eyes jumping. But I guess she's afraid to let us all see that she feels pleasant."

"She's afraid to spoil her discipline, I suppose," said Ruth. "But if ever I teach school I hope I can govern my scholars by making them love me--not through fear."

"Why, of course they'll all fall in love with you, Ruthie!" cried Agnes, with assurance. "Who wouldn't? But that old Pepperpot is another proposition."

"Perhaps she is a whole lot better than she appears," Ruth said mildly. "And I don't think we ought to call her 'Pepperpot.' Tess certainly has found her blind side."

"Ah, of course! Tess is like you," rejoined Agnes. "She would disarm a wild tiger."

"Oh! oh!" cried Neale, hearing this remark--and certainly what Agnes said was wilder than any tiger! "How would you go to work to disarm a tiger, Aggie? Never knew they had arms."

"Oh, Mr. Smartie!"

"I don't know how smart I am," said Neale. "I was setting here thinking----"

"You mean you were _sitting_," snapped Agnes. "You're neither a hen nor a mason."

"Huh! who said I was?" asked Neale.

"Why," returned the girl, "a hen _sets_ on eggs, and a mason _sets_ the stone in a wall, for instance. You _sit_ on that seat, I should hope."

"Oh, cricky! Get ap, Dobbin and Dewlap! What do you know about Aggie's turning critic all of a sudden?" cried Neale.

"Alas for our learning!" chuckled Ruth. "A hen _sets_ only in colloquial language. To a purist she always _sits_--according to my English lesson of yesterday.

"But you'd better see where you are turning to, young man," she went on, briskly. "Isn't yonder the road to Lycurgus Billet's place? He owns the chestnut woods."

"We can go that way if you like," admitted Neale. "But I want to come around by the Ipswitch Curve on the interurban, either going or coming."

"What for?" asked Ruth, while Agnes cried:

"Oh, don't Neale! I never want to see that horrid place again."

"I just want to," said Neale to Ruth. "Mr. Bob Buckham lives near there and I worked for him once."

Until Neale's uncle, Mr. William Sorber, had undertaken to pay for the boy's education, Neale had earned his own living after he had run away from the circus.

"Oh, don't, Neale!" begged Agnes, faintly.

"Why shouldn't we drive back that way?" asked Ruth, surprised at her sister's manner and words. Ruth did not know all about Agnes' trouble over the raid on the farmer's strawberry patch. "But let's drive direct to the chestnut woods now."

"All right," said Neale, turning the horses. "Go 'lang! We'll have to stop at Billet's house and ask permission. He is choice of his woods, for there's a lot of nice young timber there and the blight has not struck the trees. He's awfully afraid of fire."

"Isn't that Mr. Billet rather an odd stick?" asked Ruth. "You know, we never were up this way but once. We saw him then. He was lying under a wall with his gun, watching for a chicken hawk. His wife said he'd been there all day, since early in the morning. _She_ was chopping wood to heat her water for tea," added Ruth with a sniff.

Neale chuckled. "Lycurgus ought to have been called 'Nimrod,'" he said.

"Why?" demanded Agnes.

"Because he is a mighty hunter. And that is really all he does take any interest in. I bet he'd lie out under a stone wall for a week if he thought he could get a shot at a snowbird! And he'd shoot it, too, if he had half a chance. He never misses, they say."

"Such shiftlessness!" sniffed Ruth again. "And his wife barefooted and his children in rags and tatters."

"That girl was a bright-looking girl," Agnes interposed. "You know--the one with the flour-sack waist on. Oh, Neale!" she added, giggling, "you could read in faint red marking, 'Somebody's XXXX Flour,' right across the small of her back!"

"Poor child," sighed Ruth. "That was Sue--wasn't that her name? Sue Billet."

"A scrawny little one with a tip-tilted nose, and running bare-legged, though she must be twelve," said Neale. "I remember her."

"Poor child," Ruth said again.

There were other things to arouse the oldest Corner House girl's sympathy about the Billet premises when the picnicking party arrived there. Two lean hounds first of all charged out from under the house to attack Tom Jonah.

"Oh!" cried Dot. "Stop them! They'll eat poor Tom Jonah up, they are so hungry."

Tess, too, was somewhat disturbed, for the hounds seemed as savage as bears. Tom Jonah, although slow to wrath, knew well how to acquit himself in battle. He snapped once at each of the hounds, and they fled, yelping.

"And serves 'em just right!" declared Agnes. "Oh! here comes Mrs. Lycurgus."

A slatternly woman in a soiled wrapper, men's shoes on her stockingless feet and her black, stringy hair hanging down her back, came from around the corner of the ramshackle, tumble-down house.

"Why--ya'as; I reckon so. You ain't folks that'll build fires in our woodlot an' leave 'em careless like. Lycurgus, he's gone up that a-way hisself. There's a big eagle been seed up there, an' he's a notion he might shoot it. Mebbe there's a pair on 'em. He wants ter git it, powerful. Sue, she's gone with her pap. But I reckon you know the way?"

"Oh, yes, ma'am," said Neale. Then, after he had driven on a few yards, he said to the girls: "Say! wouldn't it be great to catch sight of that eagle?"

"An eagle?" repeated Agnes, in doubt. "Do you suppose there really is an eagle so near to civilization?"

"You don't call Mrs. Lycurgus really civilized?" chuckled Neale. "And the Billets and Bob Buckham are the nearest neighbors for some miles to his eagleship, in all probability."

"I suppose it is lonely up here," admitted Ruth.

"This is a hilly country. There are plenty of wild spots back on the high ground, within a very few miles of this spot, where eagles might nest."

"An eagle's eyrie!" said Agnes, musingly. "And maybe eaglets in it."

"Like Mrs. Severn wears on her hat," said Dot, suddenly breaking in.

"What! Eaglets on her hat?" cried Agnes.

"Eaglets to trim hats with?" chuckled Neale. "That is a new style, for fair."

"Oh, dear me," said Ruth, with a sigh. "The child means aigrets. Though I am sorry if Mrs. Severn is cruel enough to follow such a fashion. That's a different kind of bird, honey."

"Anyway, there will not be young eagles at this time of year, I guess," Neale added.

"How would we ever climb up to an eyrie?" Tess asked. "They are in very inaccessible places."

"As inac--accessible," asked Dot, stumbling over the big word, "as Mrs. MacCall's highest preserve shelf?"

"Quite," laughed Ruth.

The road through which they now drove was really "woodsy." The leaves were changing from green to gold, for the sap was receding into the boles and roots of the trees. The leaves seemed to be putting on their bravest colors as though to flout Jack Frost.

Squirrels darted away, chattering and scolding, as the party advanced. These little fellows seemed to suspect that the woods were to be raided and some of the nuts, which they considered their own lawful plunder, taken away.

The Corner House girls, with their boy friend, did indeed find a goodly store of nuts. They camped in a pretty glade, where there was a spring, and tethered the horses where they could crop some sweet clover. And Neale built a real Gypsy fire, being careful that it should do no damage; and three stout stakes were set up over the blaze, a pot hung from their apex, and the tea made.

And the chestnuts! how they rained down when Neale climbed up the trees and swung himself out upon the branches, shaking them vigorously. The glossy brown nuts came out of their prickly nests in a hurry and were scattered widely on the leaf-carpeted ground.

Sometimes they came down in the burrs--maybe only "peeping" out; and getting them wholly out of the burrs was not so pleasant an occupation.

"Why is it," complained Dot sucking her fingers, stung by the prickly burrs, "that they put such thistles on these chestnuts? It's worse than a rosebush--or a pincushion. Couldn't the nuts grow just as good without such awfully sharp jackets on 'em?"

"Oh, Dot," said Tess, to whom the smallest Corner House girl addressed this speech. "I suspect the burrs are made prickly for a very good reason. You see, the chestnuts are not really ripe until the burrs are broken open by the frost. Then the squirrels can get at them easily."

"Well, I see _that_," agreed Dot.

"But don't you see, if the little squirrels--the baby ones--could get at the chestnuts before they were ripe, they would all get sick, and have the stomach-ache--most likely be like children, boys 'specially, who eat green apples? You know how sick Sammy Pinkney was that time he got into our yard and stole the green apples."

"Oh, I see," Dot acknowledged. "I s'pose you're right, Tess. But the burrs are dreadful. Seems to me they could have found something to put 'round a chestnut besides just old prickles."

"How'd they do it?" demanded Tess, rather exasperated at her sister's obstinacy. Besides, the "prickles" were stinging her poor fingers, too. "How do you suppose they could keep the little squirrels from eating the chestnuts green, then?"

"We--ell," said Dot, thoughtfully, "they might do like our teacher says poison ought to be kept. She read us about how dangerous it is to have poison around--and I read some in the book about it, too."

"But chestnuts aren't poison!" cried Tess.

"They must be when they are green," declared the smaller girl, confidently, possessing just enough knowledge of her subject to make her positive. "Else the squirrels wouldn't have the stomach-ache. And you say they _do_."

"I said they _might_," denied Tess, hastily.

"Well, poison is a very dang'rous thing," went on Dot, pleased to air her knowledge. "It ought to be doctored at once and not allowed to run on--for _that's_ very ser'ous indeed. And we mustn't treat poison rough; it's li'ble to run into blood poison."

"Oh!" gasped Tess, who had not had the benefits of "easy lessons in physiology" when she was in Dot's grade, that being a new study.

"You ought to keep poison," went on Dot, nodding her dark little head vigorously, "in a little room under lock and key in a little bottle and the cork in so it can't get out, and hide the key and have a skeleton on the bottle and not let nobody go there!" and Dot came out, breathless but triumphant, with this complete and efficacious arrangement.

The bigger girls had gathered a great heap of the brown nuts before the picnic dinner was served. Neale had done something beside shake down the nuts. He had stripped off great pieces of bark from the yellow birch trees and cut them into platters and plates on which the food could be served very nicely. Neale was so resourceful, indeed, that Ruth had to acknowledge that boys really were of some account, after all.

When they sat down, Turk-fashion, around the tablecloth which had been spread, the oldest Corner House girl sighed, however: "But mercy! he eats his share. Where do you suppose he puts it all, Aggie?"

"I wouldn't be unladylike enough to inquire," returned the roguish sister, with a toss of her head. "How dreadful you are, Ruth!"

It was a very pleasant picnic. The crisp air was exhilarating; the dry leaves rustled every time the wind breathed on them; and the tinkle of the spring made pleasant music. Squirrels chattered noisily; jays shrieked their alarm; the lazy caw of a crow was heard from a distance.

The tang of balsam was in the air and the fall haze looked blue and mysterious at the end of the aisles made by the rows of tall trees. It was after dinner that a seemingly well-beaten path attracted them, and the whole party, including Tom Jonah, started for a stroll.

The path led them to an opening in the forest where a stake-and-rider fence was all that separated them from a great rolling pasture. In the distance were the craggy hills, where great boulders cropped out and the forest was thin and straggly.

It was a narrow valley that lay before the young explorers. Directly opposite was a crag as barren as a bald head.

"Look at the cloud shadow sailing over the field," said Ruth, contemplatively.

Her remark might have passed without comment had not the shadow, thus mentioned, changed form and darted suddenly to one side.

"Hi!" exclaimed Neale. "That's no cloud shadow."

"Look! look!" squealed Tess. "See the aeroplane!"

A flying machine had been exhibited at Milton only a few weeks before, and the aviator had done some fancy flying over the house-roofs of the town. Little wonder that Tess thought this must be another aeroplane, for the huge bird that swooped earthward cast a shadow quite as large as had the aeroplane she had seen.

"The eagle!" exclaimed Neale. "Oh, look! look!"

The whole party--even Tom Jonah--was transfixed with wonder as they observed a huge bird sail slowly across the valley toward them and finally alight upon a bare branch of a tall, dead pine at the edge of the field. There the eagle poised for a few moments, its wings half spread, "tip-tilting," as Agnes said, till he had struck the right balance. Then he settled more comfortably on his perch, turned his head till his harsh beak and evil eye were aimed over his shoulder, steadily viewing something in the field below him.

The bird did not see the party of spectators at the boundary fence; but they quickly discovered the object which the bird of prey observed.

"There! Oh, look there!" gasped Agnes. "_That thing's moving!_"

"It's a girl!" murmured Ruth.

"Sue Billet--as sure as you live," muttered Neale. "There's Lycurgus--over behind the fence--he's after the eagle!"

"What a dreadful thing!" exclaimed Ruth, aloud. "Is he using his own child for bait! That's what he's doing! Oh, Neale! Oh, Agnes! He's sent that child out there to attract the eagle's attention," Ruth went on to cry. "What a wicked, wicked thing to do!"