"I don't go into the garden excepting in schooltime. Then the young ones aren't always running by and tormenting me," snapped the cripple, chopping off her speech at the end.

She was a self-tormentor. It was plain that the poor child made herself very miserable by believing that everybody possessing a strong back and lively legs felt his or her superiority to her and delighted in "showing off" before her. The girl of the Red Mill felt only pity for a sufferer possessing such an unfortunate disposition.

She tried to turn the conversation always into pleasant channels. She held Mercy's interest in the Red Mill and her life there. She told her of the broods of downy chicks that she cared for, and the b.u.t.ter-making, and the household tasks she was able to help Aunt Alviry about.

"And don't you go to school?" demanded Mercy.

"I am going now. I hope this spring and summer to prepare myself for entering the Cheslow High."

"And then you'll be in town every day?" said Mercy, with one of her occasional wistful looks.

"I hope to. I don't know how I will get here. But I mean to try. Miss Cramp says if I'll come two or three times a week this summer, after our school closes, that she will help me to prepare for the High School exams., so I can enter at the beginning of the fall term.

"I know Miss Cramp," said Mercy. "She lives on this street. You'll be so busy then that you'll never get in to see me at all, I suppose."

"Why, I can come much oftener," cried Ruth. "Of course I will."

If Mercy was pleased by this statement, she would not show it.

"I studied to enter High," she said, after a little silence. "But what's the use? I'll never go to school again. Reading books isn't any fun. Just studying, and studying, and studying doesn't get you anywhere."

"Why, I should think that would be nice," Ruth declared. "You've got so much chance to study. You see, you don't have to work around the house, or outside, and so you have all your time to devote to study. I should like that."

"Yah!" snarled Mercy, in her most unpleasant way. "That's what you say. I wish you were here to try it, and I could be out to the Red Mill." Then she paid more softly: "I'd like to see that mill and the river--and all the things you tell about."

"You wait!" cried Ruth. "I'll ask Uncle Jabez and Aunt Alviry. Maybe we can fix it so you could come out and see me. Wouldn't that be fine?"

"Yah!" snarled the cripple again. "I'll never get that far away from this old chair."

"Perhaps not; but you might bring the chair with you," returned Ruth, unshaken. "Wait till vacation. I'll not give up the idea until I've seen if it can't be arranged."

That the thought pleased Mercy, the cripple could not deny. Her eyes shone and a warmth of unusual color appeared in her thin cheeks. Her mother came in with a tray of cakes and lemonade, and Mercy became quite pleasant as she did the honors. Having already eaten her fill at the doctor's, Ruth found it a little difficult to do justice to this collation; but she would not hurt Mercy's feelings by refusing.

The hour pa.s.sed in more pleasant converse. The cripple's mind was evidently coaxed from its wrong and unhappy thoughts. When Ruth rose to leave, promising to come again as soon as she could get into town, Mercy was plainly softened.

"You just hate to come--I know you do!" she said, but she said it wistfully. "Everybody hates to come to see me. But I don't mind having you come as much as I do them. Oh, yes; you can come again if you will," and she gave Ruth her hand at parting.

Mrs. Curtis put her arms about the girl from the Red Mill and kissed her warmly at the door.

"Dear, dear!" said the cripple's mother, "how your own mother would have loved you, if she had lived until now. You are like sunshine in the house."

So, after waving her hand and smiling at the cripple in the window, Ruth went slowly back to the corner to meet Helen, and found herself wiping some tender tears from her eyes because of Mrs. Curtis's words.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE SPELLING BEE

In spite of the fact that the big girls at the district school, led by Julia Semple, whose father was the chairman of the board of trustees, had very little to say to Ruth Fielding, and shunned her almost altogether outside of the schoolroom, Ruth was glad of her chance to study and learn. She brought home no complaints to Aunt Alvirah regarding the treatment she received from the girls of her own cla.s.s, and of course uncle Jabez never spoke to her about her schooling, nor she to him.

At school Ruth pleased Miss Cramp very much. She had gradually worked her way toward the top of the cla.s.s--and this fact did not make her any more friends. For a new scholar to come into the school and show herself to be quicker and more thorough in her preparation for recitations than the older scholars naturally made some of the latter more than a little jealous.

Up to this time Ruth had never been to the big yellow house on the hill--"Overlook," as Mr. Macy Cameron called his estate. Always something had intervened when Ruth was about to go. But Helen and Tom insisted upon the very next Sat.u.r.day following the girls' trip to Cheslow as the date when Ruth must come to the big house to luncheon.

The Camerons lived all of three miles from the Red Mill; otherwise Ruth would in all probability have been to her chum's home before.

Tom agreed to run down in the machine for his sister's guest at half-past eleven on the day in question, and Ruth hurried her tasks as much as possible so as to be all ready when he appeared in the big drab automobile. She even rose a little earlier, and the way she flew about the kitchen and porch at her usual Sat.u.r.day morning tasks was, as Aunt Alvirah said, "a caution." But before Tom appeared Ruth saw, on one of her excursions into the yard, the old, dock-tailed, bony horse of Jasper Parloe drawing that gentleman in his rickety wagon up to the mill door.

"Hi, Jabe!" called Jasper, in his cracked voice. "Hi, Jabe! Here's a grindin' for ye. And for ma.s.sy's sake don't take out a double toll as you us'ally do. Remember I'm a poor man--I ain't got lashin's of money like you to count ev'ry night of my life--he, he, he!"

The boy had appeared at the mill door first, and he stepped down and would have taken the bag of grain out of the wagon, had not the miller himself suddenly appeared and said, in his stern way:

"Let it be."

"Hi, Jabe!" cackled Jasper. "Don't be mean about it. He's younger than me, or you. Let him shoulder the sack into the mill."

"The sack isn't coming into the mill," said Jabez, shortly.

"What? what?" cried Parloe. "You haven't retired from business; have you, miller? Ye ain't got so wealthy that ye ain't goin' to grind any more?"

"I grind for those whom it pleases me to grind for," said the miller, sternly.

"Then take in the bag, boy," said Jasper, still grinning.

But Mr. Potter waved the boy away, and stood looking at Jasper with folded arms and a heavy frown upon his face.

"Come, come, Jabe! you keep a mill. You grind for the public, you know," said Jasper.

"I grind no more for you," rejoined the miller. "I have told you so.

Get you gone, Jasper Parloe."

"No," said the latter, obstinately. "I am going to have my meal."

"Not here," said the miller.

"Now, that's all nonsense, Jabe," exclaimed Jasper Parloe, wagging his head. "Ye know ye can't refuse me."

"I do refuse you."

"Then ye'll take the consequences, Jabe--ye'll take the consequences.

Ye know very well if I say the word to Mr. Cameron--"

"Get away from here!" commanded Potter, interrupting. "I want nothing to do with you."

"You mean to dare me; do ye, Jabe?" demanded Jasper, with an evil smile.

"I don't mean to have anything to do with a thief," growled the miller, and turning on his heel went back into the mill.

It was just then that Ruth spied the automobile coming down the road with Tom Cameron at the steering wheel. Ruth bobbed into the house in a hurry, with a single wave of her hand to Tom, for she was not yet quite ready. When she came down five minutes later, with a fresh ribbon in her hair and one of the new frocks that she had never worn before looking its very trimmest, Jasper Parloe had alighted from his ramshackle wagon and was talking with Tom, who still sat in the automobile.

And as Ruth stood in the porch a moment, while Aunt Alvirah proudly looked her over to see that she was all right, the girl saw by the expression on Tom's face that whatever Parloe talked about was not pleasing the lad in the least.