Chapter XIX: The Tin Badge of the Law

"The roads will be full of mudholes for miles," said Luke Shepard. "Never mind if it does stop raining, it will be bad traveling for an automobile. You see, I know this section of the country pretty well."

"Cracky!" groaned Neale. "We may get into another mess, then."

"You're likely to do so," agreed Luke. "Of course, by morning, if it rains no more, the water will have practically all run off. The roads being sandy hereabout they soon dry out."

"And meanwhile we'll be running risks every mile," growled Neale O'Neil.

"Every rod," said Luke, smiling.

"Cracky! but you're a cheerful fellow," said the boy from Milton. "Don't let the girls hear you say it. Agnes, especially. She'll go up in the air."

"You'd better take shelter with us, then," proposed the young tinware peddler.

"How's that?" asked Neale, curiously. "Not in that party-wagon of yours? We'd sure be a 'close corporation.'"

"Oh, no!" and the other laughed. "We're going to Alonzo Keech's barn. It's up a side road a piece--just around this turn. That's where sis and I were heading for. You see," Luke Shepard further explained, "we have established a regular route for our wares, and we have been here before--and put up at Keech's barn, too."

Meanwhile Cecile Shepard had suggested the same thing to Mrs. Heard and the Corner House girls. They all agreed to this, for to the automobile touring party it was "any port in a storm."

The boys rehitched the span of very good horses to the peddler's wagon, Luke got on the driver's seat and the girls and Sammy returned to the automobile, and the procession started, the peddler's wagon going ahead to lead the way.

Neale was very careful to keep in the middle of the road thereafter; for although the rain had ceased, as Luke foretold, the roads were still rivers. The branch road they turned into led back in the same general direction from which the tourists had come; but that made no difference now. It was shelter for the night they wanted, and in the on-coming darkness and the storm they all felt only too glad to be led without question.

In a half hour or so, they came out of the woods, after surmounting a hill, and found open fields all about them. The sky remained overcast and it was a dark night; but it was better here in the open than in the woods where the accident to the automobile had happened. There was not a gleam of lamplight anywhere; and when the peddler's wagon stopped finally in front of a great hay barn, Luke Shepard assured them that the dwelling of the owner of the farm was beyond a patch of woods and could not be seen even in daylight.

"I hope he will not object to our stopping here," Mrs. Heard said, when she climbed down from the van, in which she had stayed for the ride to the barn.

"Yes. We have had one experience with the natives," Agnes said, laughing, "that was not pleasant."

"Oh! Mr. Keech will not object," Cecile assured them. "We have found the people around here very nice indeed."

"So have we--for the most part," Ruth hastened to say. "Nobody could be nicer than the people we stayed with last night"; and she told the Shepards about the blacksmith and "Mother."

"Oh, we know them! _They_ are the salt of the earth!" cried Cecile.

"Then that constable that wouldn't let us eat our lunch in the woods over yonder must be the pepper," said Neale, with a grin.

Luke and Cecile had to be told about that. But they did not recognize the officious constable.

"He must be a new one, and feels his oats," said Luke.

"I think he was a cheap grafter and wanted to be tipped," said Neale O'Neil. "That's what _I_ think."

"But of course he was an officer of the law," Mrs. Heard said. "He wore a badge."

"'The tin badge of courage,'" said Luke with a laugh. "I don't know who he could be. But this Mr. Keech who owns this place is the county sheriff. So we have the law on our side while we stop here. Mr. Keech is our friend. We shall stop at his house to-morrow and spend most of the day. We always do when we get around this way."

The door of the barn was found unbarred, and with the automobile lights and Luke's lanterns, the party "made camp" very nicely indeed. The automobile was backed in on the floor of the barn, and the big doors left open. The Shepards' tent--a very good wall tent--was erected on a well-drained piece of ground. It was decided that Mrs. Heard and the girls should sleep in the tent and in the van, while the male members of the two parties put back the motor car cover and made themselves comfortable on the cushioned seats of the car.

Of course, supper came before this scheme of retiring had been adjusted. And a delightful time they had getting the meal and eating it. The food was mostly supplied by the "tin peddlers," as Agnes insisted upon calling Luke and Cecile Shepard.

"I shall lay in some condensed foods myself just as soon as we find a town again," declared Mrs. Heard. "These chances of being caught in lonely places without anything to eat come too frequently. Touring the country in a motor car is not very different from being cast away on a desert island!"

The children, of course, thought the experience quite as exciting as anything that had previously occurred.

"I like it better than the Gypsy camp," said Dot, warmly. "That cart we are going to sleep in is just the _cutest_ thing."

"Just the same, I am glad Tom Jonah is with us this time," Tess said. "Everything is so sort of open around here."

The presence of the big dog made them all feel safer when the time to retire came, although the Shepards were used to camping out, and had never yet been molested in their two years' experience.

The two parties gave each other full personal particulars. The brother and sister had friends in Milton, whom the Corner House girls knew. And then, there was another bond between Luke and Cecile Shepard and the four Corner House girls. They were all orphans.

Luke was in his sophomore year at college. Cecile was attending a preparatory school, and was going to have a college education, too. But they had partly to work for it, for their only relative was a maiden aunt who could help them but little, and there had been only money enough left by their mother to partly educate the brother and sister.

"And we get a nice vacation and lots of fun and some money by going out with our van for three months each year," Cecile explained. "The rest of the year we rent the horses and van and the route to a man who has a little restaurant business at the shore in the summer. So we do pretty well."

Tom Jonah, as watchman, made no sound all night long. The weather gradually cleared, and at daybreak there was every promise of a beautiful day, with everything washed clean by the rain.

The motoring party decided to make an early start--and without breakfast. The Shepards knew just where there was a good roadside hotel only twenty miles away, and Neale was sure they would get there in season for breakfast.

Their host and hostess, however, insisted upon their having coffee before they started, and when the automobile got under way, the Corner House girls and their party felt, as they had the morning previous, that they were leaving some very good friends behind. They hoped to meet Luke and Cecile again on their return trip; if not, Cecile was to write to Ruth. The "tin peddlers" had also promised to make the old Corner House, in Milton, a visit during the next winter.

"Dear me suz!" sighed Agnes, as they wheeled away, using one of Mrs. MacCall's exclamations, "isn't this just delightful? I think touring the country in this way, and meeting folks, and making friends, is just delightful."

"Not so delightful last night when that storm was beating down upon us," Mrs. Heard reminded her.

"And you did your share of the kicking then, all right all right," put in Neale O'Neil. "Oh, you did squall, Aggie."

"Horrid thing!" exclaimed Agnes. "Don't remind me of unpleasant things this morning. I feel--I feel as happy as a big sunflower."

Just then they turned a curve in the level road and saw a lanky man in a drooping-brimmed hat, standing in the middle of the way.

"Hul-_lo_!" ejaculated Neale, slowing down.

"Is the man deaf?" demanded Mrs. Heard.

Neale punched the horn a couple of times, and the man merely turned to face them and held up a warning hand.

"Oh, cracky!" cried Neale. "Another tin-badger."

"And he's holding one of those tin watches on us, too," said Agnes, in despair.

"Say!" observed Sammy, the sharp-eyed. "That's the cop that wouldn't let us build the fire yesterday."

"It certainly _is_," gasped Ruth. "Now what shall we do?"

"I feel like bumping him," growled Neale. Nevertheless, he shut off the engine as the constable seemed to have no intention of moving out of the road.

"Wal!" said the tall man, finally facing them completely and snapping the case of his watch shut in a very business-like way. "Got ye that time, I swan! Comin' fifty mile an hour if ye was an inch----"

Suddenly he discovered that he was not entirely a stranger to the touring party. His mouth sagged open for a moment and he did not continue his remarks before Neale got in a word or two.

"You are very much mistaken, constable," he said. "I could not drive this car on this road at the speed you state--and if you knew anything about an auto _you'd_ know it, too."

"Oh, don't, Neale!" whispered Ruth, from behind.

"So! I've seen ye before, have I, young cock o' the walk?" snarled the constable. "You was running over speed, an' don't you fergit it. And I'm goin' to take ye all back to Tuckerville and let Jedge Winslow tell ye sumpin'."

"Oh, dear me!" moaned Agnes. "And we haven't had breakfast!"

Mrs. Heard here put in her word--and she spoke sternly:

"You are making a grave mistake, Mr. Officer. We do not drive our automobile at any time faster than the law allows. And certainly we were not doing so now. How do you _know_ how fast we were coming? You could not even see us until we came around that curve."

"Oh, I've had experience, _I_ have, ma'am," said the fellow with a mean grin on his homely face.

"This is a regular hold-up!" exclaimed Neale, in wrath. "Why didn't you pull a gun and tell us to hold up our hands while you went through our pockets? It wouldn't be any worse."

"I'm likely to pull me a good switch an' wear it out on ye, ye fresh Ike!" declared the constable. "Don't you hand me no more sass--now I warn ye."

"But to go away back to Tuckerville!" groaned Ruth.

"And not a hotel there," Agnes said.

"I do not believe any justice of the peace will uphold this fellow if we _do_ appear before him," Mrs. Heard said.

"If ye don't want to go," said the constable, whose ears seemed to be as preternaturally keen as they were unnaturally large--"if ye don't want to go back to Tuckerville, ye kin pay yer fine right here--ten dollars. That'll be about right, unless I add on a coupla dollars more to pay for this boy's sass."

"What did I tell you?" exclaimed Neale, to the others. "It's a hold-up!"