Chapter XI: An Adventure Begins

"That car was certainly not the stolen one," declared Neale O'Neil, after the automobile had whizzed out of sight in a cloud of dust.

"No; it wasn't a runabout," admitted Agnes. "But I just believe that man with Joe was the one who helped him steal Mr. Collinger's car."

"What are you two talking about?" demanded Ruth, for those in the tonneau had not recognized Saleratus Joe.

"Did you want to stop those men to see if they could help you, Neale?" asked Mrs. Heard. "It will be awful if we have to stand here all day. We're still a long way from Parmenter Lake."

Neale could not help uttering a grunt at that. Nervous people are very nagging--without meaning to be.

Just as he was getting down to crawl under the machine Sammy Pinkney, who had been keeping wonderfully quiet for him, suddenly asked:

"Say, Neale! You got any gas, do you s'pose?"

Neale straightened up, looked at the little chap who stood with his hands in his pockets and his legs very wide apart, and finally exclaimed:

"I don't know whether to be sore on you, Sammy, or not!"

"Huh? What's the matter?" asked Sammy, belligerently.

Neale O'Neil started for the tank. "Why didn't you suggest that before?" he demanded. "There! I declare, folks," he added, "the tank's almost dry. I should have bought gasoline before we left the hotel this morning."

"Goodness, gracious, me!" cried Agnes. "It can't be so, Neale!"

"It's empty," the boy assured her.

"And we stuck on this lonely road!" gasped Mrs. Heard. "No telling when another auto will come by."

"Oh, dear, Neale!" murmured Ruth, "how could you be so careless?"

"It's the easiest thing in the world to forget," the boy replied, with a quick grin.

"It was real smart of Sammy to remember about the gosoling, I think," said Dot.

"_'Gasoline'_--little goose," observed Tess, correcting her smaller sister, as she often did.

Agnes laughed outright. "Well, gosling is a little goose, sure enough, Dot." Then she added: "Now, Neale! what are you going to do?"

Neale O'Neil had opened the road guide and thumbed several of its pages.

"Last place we passed where gasoline is for sale, as I figure it, is twenty miles away."

"Oh!" was the chorused groan.

"But here!" added the boy, with sudden enthusiasm, "Procketts is but five miles ahead."

"What is Procketts?" demanded Agnes.

"_Who_ is Procketts?" added Ruth.

"A village. Gasoline is sold there," declared Neale O'Neil, confidently.

"But five miles!" cried Mrs. Heard. "Will you have to walk there and bring back the gasoline yourself? That is too bad!"

Neale smiled more broadly and returned the book to his pocket.

"We'll run along to Procketts and get our fill of gas. It won't take long," he said.

"But, Neale!" Ruth began.

"How can we?" cried Agnes.

"Did you say the tank was empty, young man?" demanded Mrs. Heard.

"Not a drop in it," agreed the boy, answering the chaperone's question. "But--you see----" and he bent over and manipulated a small cock, "here's the emergency tank. That's always filled, you know; and it will run us to Procketts, all right."

"Well, you awful boy!" cried Agnes, half angrily. "You let us think we were stuck here."

"Cricky!" ejaculated Neale O'Neil. "Didn't you all just jump on me for being careless and thoughtless? And none of you thought of the emergency tank. A fellow's got to protect himself when he's alone with a parcel of females," and he chuckled.

"You ain't alone, Neale. I'm with you," declared Sammy Pinkney, suddenly.

The girls shouted with laughter; but Neale said, preserving his gravity:

"Thanks, old chap. I guess we menfolk will have to pull together in self-defence."

They came to the next village in the course of time, and Neale bought gasoline. Before one o'clock they reached a delightfully wooded place for camping, and proceeded to have lunch as they had made it the previous day. They all declared these rustic meals to be the best of all.

Just beyond the little grove was a pasture, and, looking between the bars of the old stake and rider fence, Tess and Dot saw that the open space was studded with flowers of several kinds.

"Let's pick some for Ruthie," Tess suggested.

"Let's. And for Mrs. Heard," agreed Dot.

She ran back for the Alice-doll--for of course that precious child had to pick flowers, too--and to tell the older girls what they purposed doing.

Mrs. Heard was taking a nap in the car, which stood in the shade by the roadside; the older girls were clearing up after the lunch. Neale and Sammy had gone in the opposite direction, across the road, where there was a pond and the promise of a bath, and Tom Jonah had gone with them.

So nobody gave the little girls much attention when they crept through the fence and out of sight of the camping place.

Tess and Dot did not intend to go far. There were plenty of flowers in sight of the place where they entered the pasture.

But you know how it is. The patches of blossoms at a distance appeared much more inviting than those close to the fence. The little girls ran from one to another patch, calling each other, delighted to find such a wealth of lovely, brilliant blossoms.

"I never _did_ see such a lot of flowers in all my life, Dot Kenway!" cried Tess.

"Maybe this is the place where all the flowers started from," suggested the philosophical younger sister.

"Where all the flowers started from?" repeated Tess. "What do you mean, Dot Kenway?"

"Why, didn't the flowers have to start _somewhere_--like everything else? Our teacher says everything has had a beginning--like the first horses, and the first cow, and--and Adam and Eve, I s'pose."

"Humph!" said the less orthodox Tess, "who told you there had to be a first flower, anyway? Nonsense!"

"How did they come, then, if they didn't spread--oh! all around--from some place like this?" demanded Dot, quite excited.

"Oh, they just _came_," declared Tess. "I suppose," she added, reverently, "that God just _thought_ flowers, and at once there were flowers--everywhere."

Dot stood up, picking up the Alice-doll, and holding all the blossoms she could carry in her other hand.

"Well," she said, softly, looking out across the field so spangled with the gay flowers, "He must have thought _hard_ about 'em when He made this place, Tessie, for there's so many."

The next moment the smallest Corner House girl forgot all her unfledged philosophy, for she suddenly shrieked:

"Oh, Tess! Oh, Tess! Look at that _awful, terrible bull_!"

Tess was so startled by her sister's cry that she jumped up, scattering the blossoms she had herself gathered.

"Where? What bull?" she demanded, staring all around save in the right direction.

"There!" moaned Dot, who was dreadfully afraid of all bovine creatures, crushing both her flowers and her Alice-doll to her bosom.

Tess finally saw what Dot had beheld. A great head, with wide, dangerous looking horns, had appeared above a clump of bushes not far away. The animal was calmly chewing its cud; but the very sidewise motion of its jaws seemed threatening to the two smallest Corner House girls.

"Oh, Tess!" moaned Dot, again. "Will it eat us?"

"Bulls--bulls don't eat folks," stammered Tess. "They--they hook 'em. And how do you know it _is_ a bull, Dot Kenway?"

"Hasn't it got _horns_?" gasped the smallest Corner House girl. "Of course it is a bull. Come, Tess Kenway! I'm going to run."

There seemed nothing else to do. Cow, or bull, it mattered not which--both were comparatively strange animals to the sisters. Most of the cattle they had seen were dehorned.

They now scampered away as fast as they could from the vicinity of the threatening peril. To add wings to their flight the creature lowed after them mournfully.

"Oh! I just _know_ he wants to eat us," gasped Dot.

"Hook us, you mean," corrected Tess, strictly a purist even in her terror.

They scrambled on, panting. Tess tried to take Dot's hand; but the smaller girl would drop neither the doll nor the flowers. Finally they reached the fence at the edge of the woods, and plunged through it. Thus defended from the enemy (which had not followed them a step) the little girls fell to the ground, breathless, but relieved.

"That nawful, nawful bull!" groaned Dot. "I _did_ think he'd get us before we reached the fence. See Alice! She's just as scared as she can be." And as the blue-eyed doll was a widely staring creature, Dot's statement seemed particularly apt.

"I lost all my flowers," mourned Tess.

"Well, there's a lot more yonder," said Dot, pointing ahead. "Mine aren't so good. I squashed 'em, running so."

"Well," Tess suggested, recovering somewhat from her fright, "let's pick some more. That old cow----"

"Bull!" interjected Dot, with confidence.

"Well, bull, then. He needn't think he's going to scare us so we can't carry a bouquet to Ruthie and Mrs. Heard."

"No-o," agreed Dot, rather doubtfully. "But I don't want to go back through that fence again, and into that field."

"We don't have to," declared Tess, promptly. She was standing up now and could see farther than Dot. "There's another open place where there're flowers--and there isn't any fence."

"And no bulls?" queried Dot.

"There _can't_ be," Tess assured her. "They always fence up cattle. We shouldn't have gone through that fence in the first place."

So, having somewhat recovered from their panic, they pursued their adventure without for a moment considering that the farther they went in this direction, the greater the distance back to the place where their friends and the automobile remained.

Ruth and Agnes did not think anything about the absence of the two smaller girls until Neale, Sammy and the dog returned from their baths.

As Neale O'Neil came along from the pond and into sight of the automobile and the girls, he was laughing heartily, while Sammy's face was very red.

"What's the matter, Neale?" demanded Agnes, suspecting a joke.

"This kid'll be the death of me, girls," declared Neale, still chuckling. "I took along a piece of soap with the towels and told Sammy to see if he couldn't get some of the dust and grime off his face and hands. Cricky! I never knew a kid could get so much dirt on him between breakfast and noontime."

"Well, he looks clean now," said Ruth, kindly, seeing that Sammy was not very happy because of Neale's fun.

"I guess he is," Neale chuckled. "I said to him, 'Sammy, did you scrub your hands good?' And he said, 'Sure!' 'And wash your face?' 'Yep,' he answered. And then I remembered the part of his anatomy that a kid usually forgets is hitched to him. 'How about your ears?' I asked him. And what do you s'pose he said?"

"I couldn't even guess," giggled Agnes. "What?"

"Why, Sammy said: 'I washed the one that's next to Aggie when I'm sitting in the car. You needn't tell her 'bout the other one,'" and Neale O'Neil burst into laughter again--as did all the others, save Sammy himself.

It was Sammy trying to turn the current of conversation from his ears, who discovered the continued absence of the two little girls.

"Where's Tess and Dot?" he inquired.

"Picking flowers," said Agnes, promptly.

"But, goodness!" added Ruth, "they have been picking them a long time. Ever since you boys went for your swim. They must have gathered a bushel."

"Go call 'em, Sammy," said Mrs. Heard. "We want to start now, I suppose. It's a long way to Parmenter Lake yet, isn't it?"

Neale pulled out the much-thumbed guide.

"Let's see," he said, fluttering the pages. "There's where we are--sixteen--no, seventeen miles beyond Procketts--where we bought the gasoline. That pond we just went to--Oh! that's Silver Lake. I bet it used to be called 'the mud-hole' before the day of automobile road guides.

"Just beyond, along this road, is what the guide-book calls 'a mountain tarn.' What's _that_, do you suppose?"

"A swamp," declared Ruth, promptly and wrongly.

"It's right near a village called Frog Hollow. Oh! 'Recently renamed Arbutusville.' What do you know about _that_?" chuckled Neale, delighted. "And a piece beyond there's a precipice, 'from the verge of which can be seen the ever-changing view of the entire eastern end of the Oxbow.' Cricky! I bet the view isn't half as changing as the names of these rural frog-ponds and the like. And I bet the precipice is a stone quarry," he added, with conviction.

"I expect that 'wayside inn' they speak of," said Agnes, who was looking over his shoulder, "is nothing but one of those squalid old beer-shops we see along the road."

"Humph!" commented Mrs. Heard, with a sniff, "it must take more imagination to get up one of those road guides for automobilists than it does to find all the virtues in a Presidential candidate."

Just then Sammy came plunging through the bushes. "Say!" he cried, "I can't find 'em."

"Why, Sammy!" said Agnes. "Why didn't you call Tess and Dot?"

"Did," he declared. "Been hollering my head off."

"Isn't that funny?" commented Agnes.

"I don't know whether it is funny or not," Mrs. Heard said, briskly. "Those children should be found."

"Yes. We're ready to start," said Neale.

"Surely they would not have gone far," Ruth added, in a worried tone.

Silence fell. The older members of the touring party looked at each other with growing apprehension.