Chapter IV: Was It Foolish?

Ruth, and her three sisters as well, loved to play “Lady Bountiful.” Having been placed for a time in close financial straits themselves, the older girls at least well understood the plight of those unfortunate people whom they met who were short of funds.

The condition of the Pendletons’ exchequer was a source of worry to Ruth especially. She had ways of helping the children and Mrs. Pendleton which were not too obvious; but how to aid the man of the family when he could once more get about was a question not so easily answered.

She saw Mr. Howbridge one day in his office and put the matter up to her guardian with her usual practical sense.

“Mr. Oscar Pendleton does not impress me at all as a man who would commit a crime. I do not see how he came to be accused by his employers. There is either something very much the matter with the judgment of the members of that firm, Kolbeck and Roods, or there is something so queer in the affair that it needs expert looking into.”

“You think he could not have been tempted to steal, Ruth?” asked Mr. Howbridge, giving her trouble the attention that it deserved, for he knew well her sound sense.

“A man with a nice wife and three such cute kiddies? Impossible!”

“If he needed more money than he was making?”

“I have asked Mrs. Pendleton for the particulars—as she knows them. The goods stolen could not have been sold under cover for more than a thousand dollars. And Mr. Pendleton was earning a fair salary and they were getting on well, and paying for their home. He would be crazy to do such a thing for a mere thousand dollars.”

“That sounds reasonable,” replied the lawyer. “I tell you what I will do, Ruth. I’ll have one of my clerks look up the case and get all the particulars. Perhaps something can be done to explain the matter and relieve Oscar Pendleton of the onus of this charge.”

“That is my good guardian!” cried Ruth. “You are a regular fairy godmother. You——”

She suddenly stopped to cough a little. Mr. Howbridge frowned.

“What does Dr. Forsyth mean by letting you get such a cold on your chest?” the lawyer demanded. “I thought I paid him to keep you Corner House girls in good health.”

“Chinese style?” laughed Ruth. “Well, his system has slipped a cog somehow, Guardy, for both Agnes and I have colds.”

The colds did not enter into the consideration of the two older Kenway sisters when it came to the night of Carrie Poole’s big party. The Pooles, who lived in a big house out on the Buckshot Road, always gave several very enjoyable entertainments during the winter season. The date of the first one of this season was close at hand, and Ruth and Agnes had insisted on having new frocks for the occasion.

That brought Miss Ann Titus into the old Corner House for several days; for after all, nobody could quite cut and fit a party dress like the gossipy spinster whom Tess had once called “such a fluid talker.” It was from the birdlike Miss Titus and her rather tart tongue that the Corner House girls learned of another slant in the Pendleton matter.

“Yes, I got plenty of work, the goodness’ knows,” Miss Titus observed in response to a query from Aunt Sarah Maltby, in whose room the seamstress always worked when she was at the Corner House. “I was that glad when Mrs. Pendleton said she couldn’t have me this fall as usual, that I didn’t know what to do. It give me a chance to take on other folks that could afford to pay better,” and Miss Titus sniffed.

“Oh!” exclaimed Agnes who chanced to be present, “you know Mrs. Pendleton, then? You know her husband was hurt, of course?”

“I know they say he was hurt,” responded the sharp-tongued woman promptly. “But as to that——”

“We know he was hurt, Miss Titus,” interposed Ruth, smiling. “For we found him after he fell in the woods and we took him home in our car.”

“Do tell!”

“And we think the Pendletons are very nice people, if unfortunate,” added Ruth, thinking it better to warn the seamstress against going too far. Ruth abhorred ill-natured gossip, and Miss Titus was inclined to repeat the bitter dregs of neighborhood news.

“Well, handsome is as handsome does,” said Miss Titus, with a toss of her head. “I must say I think Mrs. Pendleton is a nice woman, and her children are as well behaved as any. But that man——”

“You mean Mr. Pendleton,” said Ruth gravely. “We know all about his trouble.”

“And I think it is a shame that Kolbeck and Roods should have made such an accusation against him,” cried Agnes.

“Hoity-toity!” exclaimed the seamstress. “You have gone off the handle just the same as usual, Aggie Kenway. The man certainly stole those goods.”

“Never!” murmured Ruth, almost in horror.

“Yes, he did. I know Mrs. Kolbeck. She told me all about it. Her own son—you know she’s Mr. Kolbeck’s second wife and her name was Stumpf before she married Kolbeck. Well, Israel Stumpf, Mrs. Kolbeck’s own son, told her there wasn’t a doubt but that Pendleton—perhaps with somebody to help him—stole those bolts of silk and satin and sold them down to New York.”

“Oh, I can’t believe it!” murmured Ruth.

“It’s a story, I don’t care what they say,” said Agnes hotly. Agnes could never be anything but partisan. She was always much in favor or much against everybody whom she knew.

“Well, Israel Stumpf works right there in the wholesale house, and he ought to know all about it,” declared Miss Titus, nodding emphatically.

“Why ought he to know, Miss Titus?” asked Dot, who proved on this occasion to be “a little pitcher with big ears.”

“Because he worked right there with Pendleton.”

“Would that make him know everything about it?” Dot pursued, with her usual insistence.

“Of course,” was the thoughtless reply.

“Then why didn’t he see Carrie Pendleton’s father do it—do whatever he says he did?”

“Good gracious alive!” ejaculated Miss Titus. “Was there ever such a child for asking questions? I should think your jaws ’ud ache trying to find out things.”

“They don’t,” said Dot, rather hurt.

“And I should think,” went on the seamstress, “that you had asked so many questions that there wasn’t another thing in this world for you to learn. Is there anything that you really don’t know, that you’d like to have me tell you, Dorothy Kenway?”

Dot brightened tremendously. She became quite eager.

“Oh, yes, Miss Titus! There’s one thing that’s been bothering me for a long time and nobody—nobody can’t seem to tell me.”

“Tell Miss Titus, honey,” said the woman, who really loved the little girl, after all. “Maybe I can give you the answer.”

“Well, then,” said Dot, coming nearer to lean against the woman’s knee, “tell me, will you please, why it is little fishes don’t drown before they grow up and learn to swim?”

* * * * *

It was quite evident that the story of Mr. Pendleton’s misfortune was spreading all through certain strata of Milton society. Although Ruth was sorry for this fact, she could only hope that Mr. Howbridge’s clerk could uproot some information regarding the robbery of the Kolbeck and Roods warehouse that would explain away the suspicion attached to the unfortunate man.

For neither she nor Agnes, nor Neale nor Luke, believed that a man like Oscar Pendleton could be guilty of robbery. And while the injured man was confined to the house the Kenways and Neale showed in every way they could their friendliness for the Pendletons. Of course, Luke Shepard had gone back to college and could have no part in what the others tried to do for the unfortunate family.

All their thought was not given to this matter, however. That dance at Carrie Poole’s loomed, before Agnes at least, as one of the most important things that had ever entered into her life. Even Ruth put special importance upon the affair, and that for more than one reason.

The Pooles had engaged a string band from the city, a decorator from the same big town, and a famous caterer. There would be invited guests from Washington, including members of some of the foreign embassies and their wives and daughters. For Carrie Poole’s father during the last eighteen months had served the district in Washington as representative; and the family was, as Agnes said, “cutting a wide swath.”

“But ’tis borne on my mind,” Mrs. McCall, the Corner House housekeeper declared, “that them’s not fittin’ frocks for a pair o’ young leddies to wear on a cold winter night. Hech! They are like gossamer, so they are.”

“Now, dear Mrs. Mac!” cried Agnes, “don’t carp and criticize. Aren’t they pretty?” and she pirouetted before the good matron to display her own new dress.

“Pretty enough for the stage. But nae sensible,” sniffed the housekeeper. “I’m astonished at Ruth, so I am.”

“Now, don’t!” gasped Agnes. “Don’t criticize Ruth when for once in her life she is thinking more of her good looks than of her good sense.”

“Ye’ve said muckle when ye say that,” sniffed Mrs. MacCall. “There is nae guid sense in it. And both of ye hoarse as crows with a cold.”

“Am not!” denied Agnes hastily.

She was hoarse, however, as was Ruth. Somehow, the colds the two girls had caught in some mysterious way, continued to cling to them. Agnes was so afraid that her older, and usually so much more sensible sister, would at the last moment refuse to go to the party that she did not know what to do. She confessed this to Neale O’Neil.

“If you ask me,” said the boy with more gravity than he usually displayed, “I think you’d both be sensible if you cut the party. I hate to hear you hacking around like a dull meat-ax, Aggie.”

“How horrid!” she cried.

He grinned ruefully. “It threatens a bad night. I’ll make you as warm as I can in the car. But it isn’t like a limousine.”

“Oh, dear,” sighed Agnes, the young elegant. “I think we should have a closed car for winter. If Ruth would only speak to Mr. Howbridge about it——”

When the evening drew in and the time arrived for them to start for the Poole house, Neale O’Neil brought the car to the side door. Ruth and Agnes appeared, bundled in their furs, but of course, and especially on Agnes’ part, with a plentiful display of the thinnest of silk hose above dancing pumps.

“Whew!” whistled Neale, holding open the tonneau door for the sisters. “The foolish virgins certainly are in evidence to-night. It’s going to snow and hail and sleet and everything else mean, before we get home.”

“See that you put in the tire chains then, Neale,” was all that Ruth vouchsafed him.

Perhaps, already, she was secretly admitting the folly of this venture.