Chapter V: Somebody Pays the Fiddler

If Neale O’Neil was not a good prophet, he certainly was a sure prophet, and Agnes Kenway admitted it. When the time came to leave the Poole party it did everything that the young fellow had said it would. It was as nasty and as cold a night as the two sisters ever remembered being out in.

Worst of all, in spite of the antiskid chains that Neale had spent a good hour from the party in adjusting to the rear wheels, something else went wrong, as he expressed it, and for fifteen long minutes they were stalled on the wind-swept Buckshot Road.

The icy fingers of that wind, if not the snow and sleet itself, sought the girls out, through every cranny of the automobile top. Ruth murmured an admission that her sister was right. They should have a closed car for winter.

By and by, when Neale managed to coax the engine to start again, the girls were clinging together for warmth and their teeth were chattering. Neale insisted on putting his robe about them in addition to their own, and drove barelapped himself for the rest of the journey.

Mrs. MacCall never went to bed when any of the flock were out in the evening, especially on a stormy night. On this night, Linda, the Finnish girl, had fallen out of her chair asleep before the kitchen stove and had been driven up to her room in a sleep-walking trance by the good housekeeper two hours before the arrival of Ruth and Agnes.

Tom Jonah, the faithful old watch dog, rose yawning from his place behind the stove as the girls stumbled into the kitchen. He went out with Neale to see if it really was as bad a night as it sounded.

“Ye puir bairns!” gasped Mrs. MacCall when she saw them. “Ye’re blue with the cold and perished of the snaw. Hech! Hech! What will Mr. Howbridge say to this, I want to know?”

“You ask him, Mrs. Mac,” faintly said the younger girl. “Oh!” and she began to cough.

“Hot drinks, Mrs. Mac, please,” said Ruth, trying to speak cheerfully. “I fear we have been very foolish. I fear we have.”

For once Mrs. MacCall did not scold when chances had been taken with her charges’ health. In fact the housekeeper considered the matter too serious. When she had hurried the sisters up to their rooms, she proceeded to telephone to Dr. Forsyth.

Dr. Forsyth had more than a practitioner’s interest in the Corner House girls. He had been treating Ruth and Agnes for their colds already. And when he heard over the telephone that they had been out into the country on this terrible night, he declared his intention of coming right over.

Dr. Forsyth had only turned away from his telephone, shivering a little in his bathrobe at the prospect of venturing out into the snow squalls, when he heard a dog barking at his door and an automobile horn tooting at the gate. He hurried to peer through the glass beside the door, and there saw the big head of Tom Jonah poked right against the glass.

“I’ll be right out, Neale!” shouted the doctor, glad enough that he had not to go out to the garage and tune up his own cold motor.

Neale had had the same thought Mrs. MacCall had. He knew that Agnes, whom he loved so dearly and with reason, and Ruth were both in need of immediate attention by the medical man. Dr. Forsyth got out as soon as he could, and Neale drove him back to the Corner House and waited there to take him home again.

When the doctor arrived the girls were in their beds. Agnes was already in a fitful sleep; but Ruth lay with wide-open eyes, burning up with fever, with her usual domestic anxieties riding her like a nightmare.

“Be sure and see that Tess wears her high shoes if she goes to school to-day, Mrs. Mac,” she murmured to the housekeeper. “Those others that she likes so, leak in the snow and slush. And Dot’s new gloves are in my sewing basket. I had been tightening the buttons.”

“Hold on!” commanded Dr. Forsyth. “Let’s pay a little attention to Ruth instead of Tess and Dot. How do you feel, my dear?”

“Like a Baltimore heater, thank you, Doctor,” Ruth replied, in a saner tone. “Have I been very crazy?”

“Very. Especially when you went to that party last evening,” declared the medical man. “Now be quiet—limbs and tongue! I’ve got to look you over pretty thoroughly.”

“If there’s any—anything fun—funda—any fun, doctor, I want to be in it!”

She really meant to say “fundamentally wrong” and that she wanted to know what it was; but in truth Ruth Kenway was light-headed, and it was some hours before she became her usually sane self. Agnes was not so seriously ill, but she was threatened, as Ruth was, with complications which might have resulted in the dreaded pneumonia.

“And I don’t want them to get the flu, either,” growled Dr. Forsyth. “That’s going around, too. Now, no school, remember, for the little ones! Nor are they to leave the warm rooms of the house—no playing in that ghost-haunted garret.” That referred to an old joke that had haunted the four Corner House girls when first they had come to live in Milton. “And keep them away from the sick ones. We do not know what may develop.”

“Oh, goodness gracious!” gasped Agnes, who chanced to hear this. “You don’t mean to say I’ve got anything catching, Dr. Forsyth?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me, Miss Flyabout,” he declared grimly.

“Oh!” cried Agnes, and then began coughing what Neale declared to be the real ‘Hark, from the tomb’ cough. “Do I spray everything with microbes when I cough like that?” she panted.

“With germs, perhaps.”

“Then give me a veil. I must strain ’em,” gasped Agnes.

“Never mind straining them,” chuckled Dr. Forsyth. “We’ll do the straining. You don’t want to keep all those squirmy germs to yourself. Cough and get rid of them.”

But although he could joke with Agnes (and she would certainly have been in a very bad way if she could not joke) the physician took extra precautions that this serious cold should not spread to the other members of the Corner House household. He left medicine for all.

After Tess and Dot had taken their several doses of medicine, they did not clamor to go to school.

“I feel so mean that I guess I wouldn’t be any good in school,” confessed Tess, and went to lie down.

Dot struggled with her dose, and although they both felt better the next morning, she could not wholly forgive Dr. Forsyth for ordering such a bad tasting draught.

“Hullo, Dorothy!” said the doctor jovially, when he appeared on that next day to see how his more important patients were getting on. “What do you think of the medicine I gave you yesterday?”

“I—I don’t want to—to think of it at all, sir,” stammered Dot. “I’m—I’m trying to forget it!”

Like Neale and the adult members of the household, Mr. Howbridge became at once anxious about Ruth and Agnes when he heard of their illness. Even Agnes’ jokes could not hide the fact that the two girls were in a serious condition.

“We lie here with only a wall separating us, barking like two strange dogs on either side of a picket fence,” said the flyaway sister. “How’s Ruth now? Bark, dear, and let me hear you!”

But Dr. Forsyth forbade much conversation—especially at the top of Agnes’ “barking voice,” as she expressed it. Mr. Howbridge said gloomily enough to the physician:

“I am really worried about those girls. I thought they were enough of a charge when I first assumed responsibility to the Court for them. But now I am afraid that I may lose them.”

“Nothing like that! Nothing like that!” exclaimed Dr. Forsyth. “But I won’t say that conditions are not serious. They may be housebound for a good part of the winter.”

“You don’t say! And just when I was considering very seriously getting into a more cheerful climate, myself, for January and February. You know, I begin to feel those two months in my bones, Doctor.”

“Ha!” exclaimed Dr. Forsyth with interest. “Going South, are you?”

“Say ‘were you?’” grumbled the lawyer.

“Oh, you can safely go when January comes,” said the physician cheerfully. “The girls will be in shape to travel by New Year’s, if there is no set-back.”

“What’s that?” demanded Mr. Howbridge, his eyes opening.

“You did not consider going without the girls, did you?”

“I certainly wasn’t considering going with them!” exclaimed the lawyer.

“Why not?”

“Ahem? And why?”

Dr. Forsyth burst into laughter. “It will be a breath of new life to Ruth and Agnes; and of course they could not be contented without Tess and Dot along.”

“Wait! Don’t say it all so fast,” groaned Mr. Howbridge. “I have only just got rid of those twins. Hedden and I have scarcely got our breaths. And to travel with those four girls——”

“You won’t mind it,” chuckled Dr. Forsyth. “You know you won’t.”

“But how about Hedden? I believe he will give me notice.”

However, the idea went with the lawyer, and stayed with him. The holidays were approaching. Although the two older Corner House girls got out of their beds and were supposed to be convalescent, they were weak. They just lay around the house and were willing to be waited upon. But Ruth did not forget the Pendletons and was glad that Mr. Howbridge found work for the man who had been injured.

Neale played games or read aloud with Agnes by the hour. Sandyface, the old cat, came dragging in her newest litter of kittens—all four of them—and bedded them down in Ruth’s sewing basket at that invalid’s feet.

“Aye,” declared Mrs. MacCall one day, standing to look from one sister to the other, “it’s somebody must always pay the fiddler. This time you two lassies be payin’ tae the full!”