For a moment the cripple was silent and her eyes fell before Ruth's gaze. Suddenly the guest saw that Mercy's shoulders shook and that tears were actually dropping from Mercy's eyes.

"My dear!" she cried.

"Go away!" murmured the crippled girl. "I want to be alone. I ain't never believed," she went on, with more vigor than grammar, "that I'd ever get out to your house. Is--is it really so that I can?"

"Uncle Jabez is determined you shall come. So is Doctor Davison. So am I. Everybody is helping. Why, Mercy, you'd have to come to the Red Mill on a visit now, even if you didn't want to!" cried Ruth, laughing happily.

CHAPTER XXIII

IN OLAKAH GLEN

And Mercy Curtis really came to the Red Mill. Perhaps it was because of Doctor Davison, for it was notorious that when the good physician set out to do a thing, or to have it done, it was accomplished.

Yet in this case it seemed as though the miller himself had as much to do with the successful outcome of the plan as anybody. He had little to say about it--or little to say at first to the crippled girl. But he saw that Aunt Alvirah and Ruth had the east bedroom ready for Mercy's occupancy before he started to town with his usual load of flour and meal on Sat.u.r.day afternoon; and he was at home in good season for supper with the empty grain sacks, the fruits of his Sat.u.r.day's trading, and Mercy's wheel chair in the wagon. But before he returned to the Red Mill the Camerons' big car, with Helen and Tom and the chauffeur, flashed past the Red Mill on its way to town and in a remarkably short time reappeared with Mercy sitting beside Helen in the tonneau. Doctor Davison arrived at about the same time, too, and superintended the removal of the cripple into the house.

Mercy was as excited as she could be. There was actually color in her face. She was so excited that she forgot to be snappy, and thanked them all for their kindness to her.

"Into bed you go at once, Mercy," commanded Doctor Davison; "and in the morning you may get up as early as you please--or as early as Ruth gets up." For Ruth was to sleep on the couch in the sick girl's room during her visit to the Red Mill.

The doctor drove the Camerons away then, and adjured Mercy to be quiet, leaving her to the tender nursing of Ruth and Aunt Alvirah.

Mercy was in a mood to be friendly with everybody--for once. She was delighted with Aunt Alvirah. When Uncle Jabez arrived with the wheelchair she actually made him do errands for her and talked to him with a freedom that astonished both Ruth and Mrs. Alvirah Boggs.

"There! I knew you'd do it, Dusty Miller," Mercy said to the old man, tartly. "You men are all alike--just as forgetful as you can be. It's all very well to bring this old wheelchair; but where are my two sticks? Didn't they give you my canes, Dusty Miller? I a.s.sure you I have to move around a bit now and then without using this horseless carriage. I've got to have something to hobble on. I'm Goody Two-sticks, I am. You know very well that one of my legs isn't worth anything at all."

"Ha!" croaked Jabez Potter, eyeing her with his usual frown, "I didn't bring any canes; because why? There weren't any given me. They're not in the wagon."

"My! do you always frown just like that?" demanded Mercy Curtis, in a manner which would have been impertinent in any other person, but was her natural way of speaking. "You don't waste your time in smiling and smirking; do you?"

"I never saw any use in it--unless ye had something perticular to smile for," admitted Mr. Potter.

"Then it won't spoil your smile if I tell you that you'll have to find me canes somewhere if I'm to help myself at all," she said.

He gravely brought two rough staffs, measured them off at just the right height for her, and spent the bulk of the evening in smoothing the rough sticks and tacking on bits of leather at the small ends of the canes in lieu of ferrules.

The east bedroom was at the end of the pa.s.sage leading from the kitchen. It was right next to Uncle Jabez's own room. They all sat in the east room that evening, for its windows opened upon the wide, honeysuckle-shaded porch, and the breeze was cool. It was the beginning of many such evenings, for although Uncle Jabez sometimes retired to his bedroom where a lamp burned, and made up his cash-book and counted his money (or so Ruth supposed) not an evening went by that the miller was not, for a time at least, in the cripple's room.

He did not talk much. Indeed, if he talked to anyone more than to another it was to Ruth; but he seemed to take a quizzical interest in watching Mercy's wry faces when she was in one of her ugly moods, and in listening to her sharp speeches.

The outdoor air and sun, and the plentiful supply of fresh milk and vegetables and farm cooking, began to make another girl of Mercy before a week went over her head. She had actually some natural color, her hands became less like bird-claws, and her hollow cheeks began to fill out.

On Sunday Mr. and Mrs. Curtis drove out to see her. The Red Mill had not been so lively a place since Ruth came to it, she knew, and, she could imagine; for many a long year before. Doctor Davison was there every day. Other neighbors were continually running in to see Mercy, or to bring something for the invalid. At first, in her old, snappy, snarly way, Mercy would say:

"Old cat! just wanted to see how humpy and mean I look. Thought I was as ugly as a bullfrog, I s'pose. I know what they're after!"

But as she really began to feel better, and slept long and sweetly at night, and altogether to gain in health, she dropped such sharp speeches and had a smile when visitors came and when they left.

Everybody who drove by and saw her sitting on the porch, or wheeling herself, or being wheeled by Ruth, about the paths, had something to say to her, or waved a hand at her, and Mercy Curtis began to be pleasant mannered.

She hobbled around her room more on the "two-sticks" Uncle Jabez had made for her; but she never liked to have even Ruth see her at these exercises. She certainly did get about in a very queer manner--"just like a crab with the St. Vitus dance," so she herself said.

The doctor watched her closely. He was more attentive than he had been when she was much worse off in health; and finally, after Mercy had been at the Red Mill for nearly a month, he brought a strange physician to see her. This gentleman was a great surgeon from New York, who asked Mercy a few questions, but who watched her with so intent a look that the little crippled girl was half frightened at him. He inspired confidence, however, and when he said to her, on departing: "You are going to see me again before long," Mercy was quite excited about it. She never asked a question of Doctor Davison, or of anybody else, about the strange surgeon, or his opinion of her case; but Ruth often heard her humming an odd little song (she often made up little tunes and put words to them herself) of which Ruth did not catch the burden for some days. When Mercy was singing it she mumbled the words, or dropped her voice to a whisper whenever anybody came near. But one morning Ruth was bringing the beaten egg and milk that she drank as a "pick-me-up" between breakfast and dinner, and Mercy did not hear her coming, and the odd little song came clearly to the ears of the girl of the Red Mill:

"He's going to cure me! Oh, my back and oh, my bones!

He's going to cure me! Oh, my back and oh, my bones!"

Ruth knew instantly to what the little doggerel song referred. It is true Mercy had filched Aunt Alvirah's phrase and made it her own--and it applied to the poor child as well as to the rheumatic old woman.

But it was a song of joy--a song of expectation.

Ruth tried to be even more kind to Mercy after that. She was with her almost all the time. But there were occasions when Helen and Tom Cameron really made her come out with them on some little jaunt. Since Mercy's arrival at the Red Mill the Camerons had fallen into the habit of calling occasionally, and Uncle Jabez had said nothing about it.

Ostensibly they called on Mercy; but it was Ruth that they came for with the pony carriage one day and took away for a visit to Olakah Glen.

This beautiful spot was not so very far away, but it called for a picnic lunch, and Tubby was quite two hours in getting them there. It was a wild hollow, with great beech trees, and a noisy stream chaffing in a rocky bed down the middle of the glen. There were some farms thereabout; but many of the farmers were no more than squatters, for a vast tract of field and forest, including the glen, belonged to an estate which had long been in the courts for settlement.

Just before leaving all signs of civilization behind, Tom had pointed out a shanty and several outbuildings on a high hillock overlooking the road, and told the girls that that was where Jasper Parloe lived, all alone.

"I came up here fishing with some of the other fellows once, and Jasper tried to drive us out of the glen. Said he owned it. Likely story! He won't trouble us to-day."

Indeed, wild as the spot was, there was little likelihood of anybody troubling the young people, for they had Reno along. This faithful creature watched over the trio most jealously and, as they were eating on the gra.s.s, he found some sudden reason to become excited. He rose up, stiffening his back, the hair rising on his neck, and a low growl issuing from his throat. The girls were a little startled, but Tom sprang up, motioned to Helen and Ruth to keep still, and ran to the angry mastiff.

"What's the matter with you, Reno?" demanded Tom, softly, but putting a restraining hand upon his collar.

Reno lurched forward, and Tom gripped the collar tightly as he was dragged directly toward a thick dump of shrubbery not many yards away.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE INITIALS

There was no sound that Tom Cameron or the girls could hear from the shrubbery; but Reno evidently knew that somebody was lurking there.

And by the dog's actions Tom thought it must be somebody whom Reno disliked.

"Oh, don't leave us, Tom!" begged Helen, running behind her brother and the mastiff.

"Come on--both of you!" muttered Tom. "We'll see what this means.

Stick close to me."

He had picked up a stout club; but it was in the huge and intelligent mastiff that they all put their confidence. The dog, although he snuffed now and then as though the scent that had first disturbed him still came down the wind, had ceased to growl.

They came to a path in the thicket and followed it for a few yards only, when Reno stopped and stiffened again.

"Hush!" whispered Tom, and parted the bushes with one hand, his other still clinging to the mastic's collar.

There was a tiny opening in the shrubbery. It surrounded the foot of a huge beech tree. In some past day a careless hunter had built a fire close to the trunk of this tree. It was now hollow at the base, but vines and creepers growing up the tall tree had hidden the opening.

A man was on his knees at the foot of the tree and had drawn the matted curtain of creepers aside with one hand while with the other he reached in to the full length of his arm. He had no suspicion of the presence of the young people and Reno.

Out of the hollow in the tree trunk he drew something wrapped in an old pair of overalls. He unwrapped it, still with his back to the spot where the dog and his master and the girls stood. But the three friends could see over his shoulder as he knelt on the ground, and saw plainly that the object he had withdrawn from the tree trunk was a flat black box, evidently j.a.panned, and there was a fair-sized bra.s.s padlock which fastened it.

"Ha, ha, ha!" chuckled the man to himself, as he wrapped the box up again in the old clothes, and then thrust it hastily into the hollow tree. "Safe yet! safe yet!"