Chapter IX: Ruth Is Suspicious

The day following Christmas Ruth went out of her way while she was marketing to step into the bank in which Mr. Howbridge kept their account, and where she was known to both the cashier and teller.

"Good morning, Mr. Crouch," she said to the latter gentleman. "Will you look at this bill?"

"Merry Christmas to you, Miss Ruth," said the teller. "What is the matter with the bill?" and he took the one she tendered him.

"Perhaps you can tell me better than I can tell you," Ruth returned, laughing; yet she looked a bit anxious, too, and her hand trembled.

"Has somebody been giving you a 'phony' ten dollar note?" asked the teller, taking up his glass and screwing it into his eye.

"I am not sure," replied Ruth, hesitatingly.

"Or is it a Christmas present and you are looking a gift horse in the mouth?" and Mr. Crouch chuckled as he bent above the banknote. "This appears to be all right. Do you want it broken--or changed for another note?"

"No-o. I guess not. I only wanted to be sure," Ruth said. "Of course you can't be mistaken, Mr. Crouch?"

"Mistaken? Of course I can," he cried. "Did you ever hear of a mere human who wasn't sometimes mistaken?" and he laughed again.

"About that being a good bill, I mean," she said, trying to laugh with him.

"I'm so sure that I'm willing to exchange good money for it," he said, with confidence. "I can say no more than that."

Ruth gravely folded the bill again and tucked it into one compartment of her purse, by itself. She looked very serious all the way home with her laden basket.

While the eldest Corner House girl was absent Tess and Dot had been very busy in their small way. Life was so "full of a number of things" for the two smallest Corner House girls that they were seldom at a loss for something to do.

First of all that morning Tess insisted upon calling at the Pinkneys' side door to ask after Sammy. She felt it her duty, she said.

When they approached the porch Dot's quick eyes caught sight of a brilliantly red card, about four inches square, tacked to the post.

"What do you suppose that is, Tess Kenway?" she demanded, stopping short.

"Goodness! what does it say?" responded Tess, puzzled for the moment.

"Why! it looks just like what was tacked on the front door of the Creamers' house when Mabel's sisters had quarantine. Don't you 'member?" demanded Dot.

"Oh, dear me!" cried Tess. "It's scarlet fever. Then Sammy's really got it!"

"Is--is it catching?" asked Dot, backing away and hugging tighter her Alice-doll, which she had snatched out of the carriage.

"I--guess--so," said Tess. "Oh, poor Sammy!"

"Do you 'spect he'll _die_?" asked Dot, in awed tone.

"Oh, goodness me! I don't know!" exclaimed Tess.

"And won't he ever grow up to be a pirate?" queried Dot, for to the mind of the smallest Corner House girl romance gilded Sammy Pinkney's proposed career.

"Scarlet fever's dreadful bad. And we mustn't go in," Tess said.

"I'm sorry for Sammy," observed Dot. "I think he's a terrible int'resting boy."

"You shouldn't be interested in the boys," declared prudish Tess.

"Huh! _you_ wanted to come here to see how he was," responded the smallest Corner House girl, shrewdly.

"But I don't think of him as a _boy_. I'm just sorry for him 'cause he's a human being," declared Tess, loftily.

"Oh!"

"I'd be sorry for anybody who had scarlet fever."

"Well," Dot said, rather weary of the subject, "let's go over to see Mabel Creamer. Now we're out with our doll carriages, we ought to call somewhere."

Tess agreed to this and the little girls wheeled their baby carriages around the corner to their next door neighbor's, on the other side of the old Corner House.

The Creamer cottage seemed wonderfully quiet and deserted in appearance as they went in at the gate and pushed their doll carriages up to the side porch.

"Do you s'pose they're all away?" worried Tess.

"Maybe they've got the scarlet fever, too," murmured Dot, in awe.

But just then a figure appeared at the sitting room window which, on spying the Corner House girls, began to jump up and down and make urgent gestures for them to come in.

"It's Mabel," said Tess. "And she must be all alone."

"Oh, goody! then her sisters can't boss us," cried Dot, hurrying to drag her Alice-doll's new go-cart up the steps.

Mabel, the Creamer girl nearest the little Kenways' own ages, ran to open the door.

"Oh, hurrah!" she cried. "Come in, _do_! Tess and Dot Kenway. I'm so lonesome I could kill flies! Dear me! how glad I am to see you," and she hugged them both and then danced around them again.

"Are you all alone, Mabel?" asked Dot, struggling with her hood and coat in the warm hall.

"Well, Minnie" (that was the maid's name) "has just run down to the store. She won't be gone long. But I might as well be all alone. Mother's gone to Aunt Em's and Lydia's taken Peg to have a tooth pulled."

"But the baby?" asked Tess. "Didn't I just hear him?"

"Oh, yes," said Mabel, scowling. "I've got to mind the baby. I told Lydia _I'd_ go have a tooth pulled and Peg could mind him. I'd rather."

"Oh!" cried Dot, in awe, while Tess marched straight into the sitting room to see if the Creamers' youngest was all right.

"You don't deserve to have a baby brother, Mabel Creamer," Tess said severely.

"Oh, I wish we could have one!" Dot said longingly.

"Say! you can have this one for all I care," declared Mabel. "You don't know what a nuisance babies are. Everybody else can go out but me. I've got to stay and mind the baby. Nasty thing!"

"Oh, Mabel!" said Tess, sorrowfully--for Tess had no objection to boys as small as Bubby Creamer. The baby laughed, and crowed, and stretched out his arms to her. "Isn't he the cunning little thing, Dot?" cooed Tess.

"He's the nicest baby I ever saw," agreed the smallest Corner House girl.

"Oh, yes," growled Mabel, who had been the baby in the family herself for a long time before Bubby came. "Oh, yes, he's so cunning! Look at him now--trying to get his foot in his mouth. If I bite my fingernails mother raps me good; but that kid can swallow his whole foot and they think he's cute!"

"Oh, Mabel! does he really swallow his foot?" gasped Dot. "I should think it would choke him."

"Wish it would!" declared the savage sister of the cooing Bubby Creamer. "Then I could get out and play once in a while. Lydia and Peg put it on me, anyway. They get the best of everything."

"Oh, let's play right here," suggested Tess, interrupting this ill-natured tirade. "You get your new doll, Mabel."

"No. If I do _he'll_ want it. See! he's trying to grab your Alice-doll right now, Dot Kenway."

"Oh! he can't have _her_," Dot gasped, in alarm. "Haven't you an _old_ dolly you can let him play with, Mabel?"

"He's got one of his own--a black boy. As black as your Uncle Rufus. I'll hunt around for it," said the ungracious Mabel.

Afterward, when the little Kenways were on their way home, after bidding Mabel and Bubby good-bye, Dot confessed to her sister:

"I don't so much like to go to see Mabel Creamer, after all. She's always so scoldy."

"I know," agreed Tess. "And she's real inquisitive, too. Did you hear her asking 'bout Neale?"

"I didn't notice," Dot said.

"Why, she says they saw Neale O'Neil going through our yard with a heavy traveling bag yesterday morning, and he went out our front gate. She asked where he was going."

"But you don't know where Neale has gone," said Dot, complacently, "so she didn't find out anything. And _I'd_ like to know where he's gone, too. There's all his presents off the Christmas tree; and we can't see them till he comes back, Ruthie says."

More than Dot expressed a desire to see Neale at the old Corner House. Agnes had gone about all the morning openly wondering where Neale could have gone, and what he had gone for.

"I think he's just too mean for anything," she said to Ruth, querulously, when the older girl came home from market.

"Who is mean?" Ruth returned absently.

"Neale. To go off and never say a word to us. I am offended."

Had Agnes' mind not been so strongly set upon the subject of Neale O'Neil's defection she would surely have noticed how Ruth's hands trembled and how her face flushed and paled by turns.

"Never mind about Neale O'Neil," the older sister said, rather impatiently for her.

"Well, I just do mind!" Agnes declared. "He has no business to have secrets from us. Aren't we his best friends?"

"Perhaps he doesn't consider us such," said Ruth, who would have been amused by her sister's seriousness at another time. "There's Joe Eldred. Perhaps he knows where Neale has gone."

"Joe Eldred!" cried Agnes. "If I thought Neale had taken a mere boy into his confidence and hadn't told me, I'd never speak to him again! At least," she temporized, knowing her own failing, "I never would forgive him!"

"Never mind worrying about Neale," Ruth said again. "Come into the sitting room. I want to show you something."

Agnes followed her rather grumpily. To her mind there was nothing just then so important as Neale O'Neil's absence and the mystery thereof.

Ruth turned to her when the door was closed and started to open her purse and her lips at the same time. Her eyes sparkled; her cheeks were deeply flushed. She looked just as eager and excited as ever quiet, composed Ruth Kenway could look.

"Oh, Aggie!" she quavered.

"Well!" said Agnes, querulously. "I don't care. He--"

"Never mind Neale O'Neil!" cried Ruth, for a third time, and quite exasperated with her sister.

She closed her purse again and ran across the room. She looked behind the machine. Then she pulled the machine away from the wall so that she could get down on her knees and creep behind it.

"What's the matter with you, Ruthie?" asked Agnes, finally awakening to her sister's strange behavior. "What are you looking for?"

"Where--where is it? Where has it gone?" gasped Ruth, still on hands and knees.

"What _are_ you after, Ruth Kenway?" cried Agnes again. "Oh! are you looking for that old scrap-book I found upstairs in the garret?"

"Yes," answered Ruth, quaveringly.

"Why? Did you see what was in it?" demanded her sister.

"Yes," Ruth said again.

"Wasn't it funny? All that counterfeit money and those old bonds. Neale and I looked at it Christmas Eve."

"Neale?" gasped Ruth, getting upon her feet, but sitting down in a chair quickly as though her knees were too weak to bear her up.

"Oh, dear me!" rattled on Agnes. "Wouldn't it have been _great_ if the money and bonds were good? Why! it would have been a fortune. Neale added it all up."

"But what became of the book?" Ruth finally got a chance to ask again.

"Oh! Neale took it."

"Neale took it?"

"Yes."

"What for?"

"Why, I don't know. He was curious. He said maybe the bonds were worth something and he'd find out. Of course, that is silly," said Agnes, lightly, "and I told him so."

"And didn't he bring all that money back?" gasped Ruth.

"'All that money,'" repeated Agnes, with laughter. "How tragic you sound--just as though it were not stage money. And I wish it were not!"

"He--he didn't return the book?" asked Ruth, controlling herself with difficulty.

"Not yet. He went away so suddenly. Mean thing! I'd just like to know where he's gone."

Agnes was quite unaware of her sister's trouble. Her own mind reverted to Neale's strange absence as of more importance. Ruth began to be troubled by that same query, too. Where _was_ Neale O'Neil? And what had he done with the old album found in the Corner House garret?

The ten dollar bill Ruth had had examined at the bank that morning was one she had taken out of the old volume!