Chapter XIX: On the Lake

Instantly Ruth was out of bed, and while she slipped on her bath robe and while her bare feet sought her slippers under the edge of her bunk, she cried:

"What is it, Tessie? Ruth is coming! Sister is coming!"

At once the interior of the _Bluebird_ seemed to pulsate with life. In the corridor which ran the length of the craft, and on either side of which the sleeping apartments were laid off, a night light burned. Opening her door Ruth saw Mrs. MacCall peering forth, a flaring candle in her hand.

"What is it, lass?" asked the sturdy Scotch woman. "I thought I heard a wee cry in the night."

"You did!" exclaimed Ruth. "It was Tess!"

In quick succession, with kimonas or robes over their sleeping garments, Neale, Mr. Howbridge and Agnes came from their rooms. But from the apartments of Tess and Dot no one came, and ominous quiet reigned.

"What was it?" asked Mr. Howbridge. "One of you girls screamed. Who was it?"

Something gleamed in his hand, and Ruth knew it to be a weapon.

"It was Tess who cried out!" Ruth answered. "All I could hear was something about her being afraid some one would catch her."

And then again from the room of Tess came a low cry of:

"Ruthie! Ruthie! Come here!"

"Yes, dear, I am coming," was the soothing reply. "What is it? Oh, my dear, what has happened?"

When she opened the door she saw her sister sitting up in bed, a look of fear on her face but unharmed. And a quick look in the adjoining apartment showed Dot to be peacefully slumbering, her "Alice-doll" close clasped in her arms.

"What was it, Tessie?" asked Ruth in a whisper, carefully closing Dot's door so as not to awaken her. "What did you see?"

"I--I don't just remember," was the answer. "I was dreaming that I was riding on that funny Uncle Josh mule that knows Neale, and then a clown chased me and I fell off and the elephant came after me. I called to you, and--"

"Was it all only a dream, dear?" asked Ruth with a smile.

"No, it wasn't all a dream," said Tess slowly. "A man looked in the window at me."

"What window?" asked Agnes.

Tess pointed to one of the two small casements in her small apartment. They opened on the bank of the river, and it would have been easy for any one passing along the bank of the stream to have looked into Tess's windows, or, for that matter, into any of the openings on that side of the craft. But the windows, though open on account of the warm night, were protected by heavy screens to keep out mosquitoes and other insects.

"Do you really mean some one opened your window in the night, or did you just dream that, too?" asked Ruth. "You have very vivid dreams sometimes."

"I didn't dream about the _man_," insisted Tess. "He really opened the screen and looked in. See, it's loose now!"

The screens swung outward on hinges, and there, plainly enough, the screen of one of the casements in Tess's room was partly open.

"Perhaps the wind blew it," suggested Agnes, wishing she could believe this.

Neale stepped over and tested the screen.

"It seems too stiff to have been blown open by the wind," was the comment.

"But of course," Mr. Howbridge suggested, "the screen may not have been tightly closed when Theresa went to bed."

"Oh, yes it was, sir!" exclaimed Mrs. MacCall positively. "I looked at them myself. I didn't want any of the mosquitoes to be eatin' ma pretties. The screens were tight closed!"

"Oh dear, I don't like it here!" said Tess, on the verge of tears. "I don't want tramps looking in my room, and this man was just like a tramp."

The noise of some one moving around on the upper deck of the craft attracted the attention of all.

"That's Hank!" exclaimed Neale. "I'll go and see if he heard anything unusual or saw any one. It may be that some fellow was passing along the river road and was impudent enough to pull open a screen and look in, thinking he might pick up something off a shelf."

But Hank, who in his curtained-off place had been awakened by the confusion below him, declared he had seen or heard nothing.

"I'm a sound sleeper," he said. "Once I get to bed I don't do much else but sleep."

So nothing was to be got out of him.

And it was difficult to tell whether or not Tess had dreamed about the man, as she had said she dreamed about the elephant and the mule. Neale volunteered to look on the bank underneath the window for a sign of footprints. He did look, using his flashlight, but discovered nothing.

"I guess it was all a dream," said Ruth. "Go to sleep, Tess dear. You'll be all right now."

"I'm not going to sleep alone," insisted the little girl, her lips beginning to quiver.

"I'll stay with you," offered Ruth, and so it was arranged.

"It's an awful queer happening," remarked Agnes.

"Lots of things seem queer on this trip," put in Tess. "Maybe we better give up the houseboat trip."

"You won't say that in the morning," laughed Neale.

"How do you know that?"

"Oh, I know," the boy laughed.

They all went back to their beds, but it was some time before several of them resumed their interrupted slumbers. Tess, the innocent cause of it all, fell off to dreamland with Ruth's arm around her in the rather cramped quarters, for the bunks were not intended to accommodate two. But once Tess was breathing deeply and regularly, Ruth slipped back to her own apartment, pausing to whisper to Agnes that Tess seemed all right now.

Ruth remained awake for some time, her mind busy with many things, and mingled with her confused thoughts were visions of the mule driver, Hank Dayton, signaling to some tramp confederates in the woods the fact that all on board the _Bluebird_ were deep in slumber, so that robbery might be easily committed.

"Oh, but I'm foolish to think such things," the Corner House girl told herself. "Absolutely foolish!"

And at last she convinced herself of that and went to sleep.

The next morning Neale and Mr. Howbridge, with Hank to help, made a careful examination of the soft earth on the river bank under Tess's window. They saw many footprints, and the stub of a cigarette.

But the footprints might have been made by themselves when they had moored the boat the evening before. As for the cigarette stub, though Hank smoked, he said he never used cigarettes. A pipe was his favorite, and neither Mr. Howbridge nor Neale smoked.

"Some one passing in the daytime before we arrived may have flung the stub away," said the lawyer. "I think all we can do is to ascribe the alarm to a dream Tess had."

The little girl had forgotten much of the occurrence of the night when questioned about it next morning. She hardly recalled her dream, but she did insist that a man had looked in her window.

"Well, next time we tie up over night we'll do it in or near some city or village, and not in such a lonely place," decided Mr. Howbridge.

Neale and Hank made good their promise to repair the motor, and shortly after breakfast the craft was in shape to travel on.

The weather continued fine, and if it had not been for the alarm of the night before, and the shadow of the robbery hanging over Ruth and Agnes, and Neale's anxiety about his father, the travelers would have been in a most happy mood. The trip was certainly affording them many new experiences.

"It's almost as exciting as when we were snowbound," declared Agnes.

"But I'm glad we don't have to look for two little runaways or lost ones," put in Ruth, with a glance at Tess and Dot as they went out to play on the upper deck.

It was just before noon, when Ruth was helping Mrs. MacCall prepare the dinner, that the oldest Kenway girl heard a distressing cry from the upper deck where Tess and Dot had been playing all the morning.

"Tess, stop!" Ruth heard Dot exclaim. "I'm going to tell Ruthie on you! You'll drown her! Oh, Tess!"

"She can't drown! Haven't I got a string on her?" demanded Tess. "This is a new way of giving her a bath. She likes it."

"Give her to me! Ruthie! Ruthie! Make Tess stop!" pleaded Dot.

"I wonder what the matter is," said Ruth, as she set down the dish she was holding and hastened to the upper deck.

There she saw Dot and Tess both leaning over the rail, at rather a dangerous angle, and evidently struggling, one to get possession of and the other to retain, some object Ruth could not see.

"Be careful! You'll fall in!" Ruth cried.

At the sound of her voice her sisters turned toward her, and Ruth saw they each had hold of a cord.

"What are you doing; fishing?" Ruth asked. "Don't you know Hank said you couldn't catch fish when the boat was moving unless you trolled with what he called a spoon?"

"We're not fishing!" said Dot.

"I'm just giving the Alice-doll a bath," explained Tess. "I tied her on the end of a string and I'm letting her swim in the water. She likes it!"

"She does not! And you must stop! And you must give her to me! Oh, Ruthie!" cried Dot, trying to pull the cord away from Tess. In an instant there was a struggle between the two little girls.

"Children! Children!" admonished Ruth, in perfect amazement at such behavior on the part of the gentle and considerate Tess. "I'm surprised at you! Tess, dear, give Dot her doll. You shouldn't have put her in water unless Dot allowed you to."

"Well, but she needed a bath!" insisted Tess. "She was dirty!"

"I know it, and I was going to give her a bath; but she has a cold and I was waiting till she got over it!" explained Dot. "Tess, give me that string, and I'll pull my Alice-doll up!" she demanded.

The struggle was renewed, and Ruth was hastening across the deck to stop it by the force of more authority than mere words, when Neale, who was steering the craft, called out.

"There's the big water! We're at Lake Macopic now!"

Hardly had the echo of his words died away than Dot cried:

"There! Now look what you did! You let go the string and my Alice-doll is gone!"