"Ho!" The Wilbur twin was brutal. "You're nothing but a girl!"

The runaway flashed him a hostile glance.

"Don't be silly! What difference does it make? Haven't I a cruel stepmother that is constantly making scenes if I do the least little thing, especially since Miss Murtree went home because her mother has typhoid in Buffalo. You wait till I get the right clothes."

"Does she beat you something awful?" demanded the Merle twin unctuously.

The victim hesitated.

"Well, you might call it that."

"What kind of right clothes?" asked his brother.

"Boy's clothes; filthy rags of boy's clothes--like yours," she concluded. Her appraising glance rested on the garments of the questioning twin. Both became conscious of their mean attire, and squirmed uneasily.

"These are just everyday clothes," muttered the Wilbur twin.

"We have fine new Sunday suits at home," boasted Merle. "Too fine to wear every day. If you saw those clothes once I guess you'd talk different. Shoes and stockings, too."

The girl effaced his grandeur with a shrug.

"That's nothing--everyone has mere Sunday clothes."

"Is Miss Murtree that old lady that brings you to the Sunday-school?"

demanded Wilbur.

"Yes; she's my governess, and had to go to her dying mother, and I hope she gets a cruel stepmother that will be harsh to her childish sports, like that Mrs. Blunt was. But she isn't old. It's her beard makes her look so mature."

"Aw!" cried both twins, denoting incredulity.

"She has, too, a beard! A little moustache and some growing on her chin. When I first got 'Ben Blunt, or from Rags to Riches,' out of the Sunday-school library I asked her how she made it grow, because I wanted one to grow on me, but she made a scene and never did tell me. I wish it would come out on me that way." She ran questing fingers along her brief upper lip and round her pointed chin. "But prob'ly I ain't old enough."

"You're only a girl," declared the Wilbur twin, "and you won't ever have a beard, and you couldn't be Ben Blunt."

"Only a girl!" she flashed, momentarily stung into a defense of her s.e.x.

"Huh! I guess I'd rather be a girl than a nasty little boy with his hands simply covered with warts."

The shamed hands of Wilbur Cowan sought the depths of his pockets, but he came up from the blow.

"Yes, you'd rather be a girl!" he retorted, with ponderous irony. "It's a good thing you wasn't born in China. Do you know what? If you'd been born in China, when they seen what it was they'd simply have chucked you into the river to drown'd."

"The idea! They would not!"

"Ho! You're so smart! I guess you think you know more than that missionary that told us so at the meeting. I guess you think he was telling lies. They'd have drownded you as soon as they seen it was a girl. But boys they keep."

"I don't listen to gossip," said the girl, loftily.

"And besides," continued the inquisitor, "if you think boys are such bad ones, what you trying to be one for, and be Ben Blunt and all like that?"

"You're too young to understand if I told you," she replied with a snappish dignity.

The Merle twin was regretting these asperities. His eyes clung constantly to the lemon and candy.

"She can be Ben Blunt if she wants to," he now declared in a voice of authority. "I bet she'll have a better moustache than that old Miss Murphy's."

"Murtree," she corrected him, and spoke her thanks with a brightening glance. "Here," she added, proffering her treasure, "take a good long suck if you want to."

He did want to. His brother beheld him with anguished eyes. As Merle demonstrated the problem in hydraulics the girl studied him more attentively, then gleamed with a sudden new radiance.

"Oh, I'll tell you what let's do!" she exclaimed. "We'll change clothes with each other, and then I'll be Ben Blunt without waiting till I get to the great city. Cousin Juliana could pa.s.s me right by on the street and never know me." She clapped her small brown hands. "Goody!" she finished.

But the twins stiffened. The problem was not so simple.

"How do you mean--change clothes?" demanded Merle.

"Why, just change! I'll put on your clothes and look like a mere street urchin right away."

"But what am I going to--"

"Put on my clothes, of course. I explained that."

"Be dressed like a girl?"

"Only till you get home; then you can put on your Sunday clothes."

"But they wouldn't be Sunday clothes if I had to wear 'em every day, and then I wouldn't have any Sunday clothes."

"Stupid! You can buy new ones, can't you?"

"Well, I don't know."

"I'd give you a lot of money to buy some."

"Let's see it."

Surprisingly the girl stuck out a foot. Her ankle seemed badly swollen; she seemed even to reveal incipient elephantiasis.

"Money!" she announced. "Busted my bank and took it all. And I put it in my stocking the way Miss Murtree did when she went to Buffalo to visit her dying mother. But hers was bills, and mine is nickels and dimes and quarters and all like that--thousands of dollars' worth of 'em, and they're kind of disagreeable. They make me limp--kind of. I'll give you a lot of it to buy some new clothes. Let's change quick." She turned and backed up to the Merle twin. "Unb.u.t.ton my waist," she commanded.

The Merle twin backed swiftly away. This was too summary a treatment of a situation that still needed thought.

"Let's see your money," he demanded.

"Very well!" She sat on the gra.s.sy low mound above her forebear, released the top of the long black stocking from the bite of a hidden garter and lowered it to the bulky burden. "Give me your cap," she said, and into Merle's cap spurted a torrent of coins. When this had become reduced to a trickle, and then to odd pieces that had worked down about the heel, the cap held a splendid treasure. Both twins bent excitedly above it. Never had either beheld so vast a sum. It was beyond comprehension. The Wilbur twin plunged a hand thrillingly into the heap.

"Gee, gosh!" he murmured from the sheer loveliness of it. Shining silver--thousands of dollars of it, the owner had declared.

"Now I guess you'll change," said the girl, observing the sensation she had made.