Since Joseph Stagg had listened to the rambling tale of the sailor regarding the sinking of the Dunraven, he had borne the fate of his sister and her husband much in mind.
He had come no nearer to deciding what to do with the apartment in New York and its furnishings. Carolyn May had prattled so much about her home that Mr. Stagg felt as though he knew each room and each piece of furniture. And, should he go down to New York and make arrangements to have his sister’s possessions taken to an auction room, he would feel on entering the flat as though the ghosts of Carolyn May’s parents would meet him there.
Mr. Price had written him twice about the place. The second time he had found a tenant willing to sublet the furnished apartment. It would have made a little income for Carolyn May, but Mr. Stagg could not bring himself to sign the lease. The lawyer had not written since.
After listening to Benjamin Hardy’s story, the hardware dealer felt less inclined than before to close up the affairs of Carolyn May’s small “estate.” 211 Not that he for one moment believed that there was a possibility of Hannah and her husband being alive. Five months had passed. In these days of wireless telegraph and fast sea traffic such a thing could not be possible. The imagination of the practical hardware merchant could not visualise it.
Had the purser’s boat, in which the old sailor declared the Camerons were, been picked up by one of the Turkish ships, as the other refugees from the Dunraven had been rescued by the French vessel, surely news of the fact would long since have reached the papers, even had circumstances kept Mr. and Mrs. Cameron from returning home.
The Mediterranean is not the South Seas. A steam vessel could reach New York from the spot where the Dunraven had sunk in a week.
No, Mr. Stagg held no shred of belief that Hannah and her husband were not drowned.
Carolyn May did not speak of the tragedy; yet it was continually in the child’s mind. Her conversation with the sailor regarding the sufferings of drowning people only touched a single phase of the little girl’s trouble.
She was glad to be assured that her parents had not lingered in agony when they met their fate. She accepted the sailor’s statement regarding drowning quite at its par value. Nevertheless, neither this interview with Benjamin Hardy at the lumber camp nor Aunty Rose’s copious doses of boneset tea cheered the little girl. The excitement of the adventure 212 with the lynx lasted only a few hours. Then the cloud returned to Carolyn May’s countenance and she drooped once more.
Miss Minnie noticed it. By this time the sharp-eyed young teacher looked through her spectacles very kindly at the little girl.
“What is the trouble with you, Carolyn May?” the teacher asked on one occasion. “You used to be the happiest little girl in The Corners school; and you were brightening up everybody else, too. I don’t like to see you so glum and thoughtful. It isn’t like you. What about your ‘look up’ motto, my dear? Have you forgotten it?”
“I haven’t forgotten that—oh, no, Miss Minnie. I couldn’t forget that!” the child replied. “I ’spect my papa would be ’shamed of me for losing heart so. But, oh, Miss Minnie! I do get such an empty feeling now when I think of my papa and mamma. And I think of them ’most all the time. It just does seem as though they were going farther and farther away from me ev’ry day!”
Miss Minnie took the child in her arms and kissed her.
“Faithful little soul!” she murmured. “Time will never heal heart wounds for her.”
Miss Amanda understood Carolyn May, too. When the child went to the Parlow house she found sympathy and comfort in abundance.
Not that Aunty Rose and Uncle Joe were not sympathetic; but they did not wholly understand the 213 child’s nature. As the winter passed and Carolyn May grew more and more quiet, the hardware dealer and the woman who kept house for him decided that there was nothing the matter with Carolyn May save the natural changes incident to her growing up. For, physically, she was growing fast. As Aunty Rose said to Mr. Stagg, she was “stretching right out of her clothes.”
But Carolyn May did not always keep out of mischief, for she was a very human little girl, after all was said and done. Especially was she prone to escapades when she was in the company of Freda Payne, her black-eyed school chum.
Trouble seemed to gravitate towards Freda. Not that she was intentionally naughty, but she was too active and too full of curiosity to lead a very placid existence. Wherever Freda was the storm clouds of trouble soon gathered.
Carolyn May and Freda were playing one Saturday afternoon in the long shed that connected the blacksmith shop with Mr. Lardner’s house, and Amos Bartlett was with them.
Carolyn May did not often play with little boys. She did not much approve of them. They often played roughly and it must be confessed that their hands almost always were grubby. But she rather pitied Amos Bartlett because he had been endowed with a nose so generous that the other children laughed at him and called him “Nosey.” He snuffled, and he talked nasally, which made Carolyn 214 May shudder sometimes, but she was brave about it when in Amos’ company.
The three were playing in Mr. Hiram Lardner’s shed, which was half storeroom and half workshop. Back in a corner the inquisitive Freda found a great cask filled with something very yellow and foamy and delicious to look at.
“Oh, molasses, I do believe!” exclaimed Freda eagerly. “Don’t you s’pose it’s molasses, Car’lyn May? I just love molasses!”
Carolyn May was fond of syrup, too; and this barrelful certainly looked like the kind Aunty Rose sometimes put on the table for the griddle cakes. The little girl liked it better than she did maple syrup.
“I believe it is molasses,” she agreed.
“Here’s a tin cup to drink it with,” put in Amos.
“O-oh! Would you dare taste it, Car’lyn May?” cried Freda.
“No. I’d rather not. Besides, it isn’t ours,” Carolyn May returned virtuously.
“But there’s so much of it,” urged Freda. “I’m sure Mr. Lardner wouldn’t care—nor Mrs. Lardner, either.”
“But—but maybe it isn’t molasses,” Carolyn May suggested.
“I bet it is m’lasses,” declared Amos with a longing look.
“You try it, Amos,” ordered Freda, handing him the cup. 215
“Yes,” said Carolyn May coolly. “You’re a boy, and boys don’t mind messing into things. Just taste it, Amos.”
“Go on, Amos,” added Freda. “I dare you. I double-double dare you!”
Of course, Amos, boylike, could not take a dare, so he dipped the tin cup into the yellow, foamy mass and took a good big swallow. Then the trouble began.
He dropped the cup into the barrel, where it immediately disappeared from sight, while Amos hopped about, sputtering, coughing, crying, and generally acting like a boy distracted.
“Oh, I’m pizened! I’m pizened!” he bawled. “And you girls done it! I’m—I’m goin’ to tell my mother!”
His shrieks brought Mrs. Lardner from her kitchen.
“What under the sun are you children up to?” she demanded. “Amos Bartlett, behave yourself! What is it?”
Amos could not tell her. All he could shriek was that he was “pizened.”
He burst out of the shed, ran through the shop, and so home to his mother. Carolyn May was too frightened to speak, but Freda said shakingly: “We only got him to taste the molasses.”
“What molasses?” demanded the blacksmith’s wife, startled.
“Why—why—that,” said Freda, pointing. 216
“My mercy me!” gasped the woman. “That soft soap that Hiram just made for me? I don’t know but the boy is poisoned.”
Mrs. Lardner rushed after Amos, to see if she could help his mother. Carolyn May and Freda crept quietly home, two frightened little girls.
But Amos was not poisoned. The doctor brought him around all right. Freda suffered an old-fashioned spanking for her part in the performance; but Aunty Rose, who did not believe in corporal punishment, did not at first know what to do to Carolyn May.
“She should be punished, Joseph Stagg,” the housekeeper said to the hardware dealer. “I’ve put her to bed early——”
“Not without her supper?” he asked in alarm, dropping his own knife and fork.
“No-o,” she admitted. “I couldn’t do that.”
Mr. Stagg chuckled. “I reckon children are children,” he observed. “I don’t know as Hannah’s Car’lyn is any different from the rest.”
“I know one thing, Joseph Stagg,” said Aunty Rose severely. “If you ever have children of your own they will be utterly spoiled.”
But Mr. Stagg still seemed amused.
“If you had anything to do with ’em, I’d have plenty of help in spoiling ’em, Aunty Rose,” he declared.
Carolyn May took the matter somewhat seriously. She tried to make it up to Amos Bartlett by lending 217 him her sled, giving him candy when she had it, and otherwise petting him.
“For he might have been poisoned,” she stated; “and then he’d be dead, and would never grow up to fit his nose.”
Carolyn May’s acquaintance broadened constantly. She made friends wherever she went, and the wintry weather did not often keep her in the house. Uncle Joe would not hear of her going into the woods again, unless he was with her, but she could go where she pleased among the neighbours.
At Sunrise Cove there were many people who loved Carolyn May Cameron. Her most faithful knight, however, was homely, optimistic Chetwood Gormley. Mr. Stagg declared that when Chet saw “Hannah’s Car’lyn” approaching he “grinned so wide that he was like to swallow his own ears.”
And they would have been a mouthful. Even Mrs. Gormley, who could see few faults in her son, declared that Chet “wasn’t behind the door when ears were given out.”
“Chet’s got a generous nature,” the good woman said to Carolyn May one day when the latter was making the seamstress a little visit. “It don’t take his ears to show that, though they do. He’d do anything for a friend. But I don’t know as he’s ’preciated as much as he’d oughter be,” sighed Mrs. Gormley. “Mr. Stagg, even, don’t know Chet’s good parts.”
“Oh, yes, Mrs. Gormley, I think Uncle Joe knows 218 all about Chet’s ears. He couldn’t hardly miss ’em,” the little girl hastened to observe.
“Humph! I didn’t mean actual parts of his body,” Mrs. Gormley replied, eyeing the little girl over her spectacles. “I mean character. He’s a fine boy, Car’lyn May.”
“Oh! I think he is, too,” agreed the child. “And I’m sure Uncle Joe ’preciates him.”
“Well, I hope so,” sighed the seamstress. “You can’t much tell just what Mr. Joe Stagg thinks of folks. There’s him and Mandy Parlow. Somebody was tellin’ me Mr. Stagg was seen comin’ out o’ the Parlow house one day. But, shucks! that ain’t so, of course?” and she looked narrowly at her little visitor.
“Oh, I wish he would make up with Miss Amanda,” sighed Carolyn May. “She’s so nice.”
“And I guess he thought so, too—once. But you can’t tell, as I say. Mr. Joe Stagg is a man that never lets on what’s in his mind.”
Just then in burst Chet, quite unexpectedly, for it was not yet mid-afternoon.
“Oh, dear me! Mercy me!” gasped Mrs. Gormley. “What is the matter, Chetwood? Mr. Stagg hain’t let you go, has he?”
“Let me go? Well, there, mother, I wish you warn’t always expectin’ trouble,” Chet said, though smiling widely. “Why should Mr. Stagg discharge me? Why, I’m gettin’ more and more valuable to him ev’ry day—sure I am!” 219
“He—he ain’t said nothin’ yet about—about a partnership, has he, Chetwood?” his mother whispered hoarsely.
“My goodness, maw—no! You know that’ll take time. But it’s almost sure to come. I seen him out the other day, across the street, looking up at the sign. And I’ll bet I know what was in his mind, maw.”
“I hope so,” sighed the seamstress. “But you ain’t told us how you come to be away from the store at this hour.”
“That’s ’cause of Car’lyn May,” responded Chet, smiling at the little girl. “He let me off to take her slidin’. The ice ain’t goin’ to be safe in the cove for long now. Spring’s in the air a’ready. Both brooks are runnin’ full.”
“Oh, Chet! Can we go sliding?” cried Carolyn May. “I brought my sled!”
“Sure. Your uncle says he knowed you wanted to go down on the ice. I’ll put on my skates and draw you. We’ll have such fun!”
Carolyn May was delighted. Although the sky was overcast and a storm threatening when they got down on the ice, neither the boy nor the little girl gave the weather a second thought. Nor had Mr. Stagg considered the weather when he had allowed Chet to leave the store that afternoon. He was glad to get Chet out of the way for an hour; for, if the truth be told, he sometimes found it difficult to make any use of young Gormley at all. 220
“I might as well lock up the store when I go home to dinner and supper,” Mr. Stagg sometimes observed to himself. “If the critter sells anything, it’s usually at the wrong price. He wants to sell wire nails by the dozen and brass hinges by the pound. I dunno what I keep him for, unless it’s for the good of my soul. Chet Gormley does help a feller to cultivate patience!”
Fortunately, for the peace of mind of Chet and his widowed mother, they did not suspect the hardware dealer of holding this opinion. Just now the boy was delighted to lend himself to Carolyn May’s pleasure. He strapped on his skates, and then settled the little girl firmly on her sled. She sat forward, and he lifted Prince up behind her, where the dog sat quite securely, with his forepaws over his mistress’ shoulders, his jaws agape, and his tongue hanging out like a moist, red necktie.
“He’s laughin—just as broad as he can laugh, Car’lyn May,” chuckled Chet. “All ready, now?”
“Oh, we’re all right, Chet,” the little girl cried gaily.
The boy harnessed himself with the long tow-rope and skated away from the shore, dragging the sled after him at a brisk pace. Chet was a fine skater, and although the surface of the ice was rather spongy he had no difficulty in making good time towards the mouth of the cove.
“Oh, my!” squealed Carolyn May, “there isn’t anybody else on the ice.” 221
“We won’t run into nobody, then,” laughed the boy.
There were schooners and barges and several steam craft tied up at the docks. These had been frozen in all winter. They would soon be free, and lake traffic would begin again.
It was too misty outside the cove to see the open water; but it was there, and Chet knew it as well as anybody. He had no intention of taking any risks—especially with Carolyn May in his charge.
The wind blew out of the cove, too. As they drew away from the shelter of the land they felt its strength. It was not a frosty wind. Indeed, the temperature was rising rapidly, and, as Chet had said, there was a hint of spring in the air.
Naturally, neither the boy nor the little girl—and surely not the dog—looked back towards the land. Otherwise, they would have seen the snow flurry that swept down over the town and quickly hid it from the cove.
Chet was skating his very swiftest. Carolyn May was screaming with delight. Prince barked joyfully. And, suddenly, in a startling fashion, they came to a fissure in the ice!
The boy darted to one side, heeled on his right skate, and stopped. He had jerked the sled aside, too, yelling to Carolyn May to “hold fast!” But Prince was flung from it, and scrambled over the ice, barking loudly.
“Oh, dear me!” cried Carolyn May. “You 222 stopped too quick, Chet Gormley. Goodness! There’s a hole in the ice!”
“And I didn’t see it till we was almost in it,” acknowledged Chet. “It’s more’n a hole. Why! there’s a great field of ice broke off and sailin’ out into the lake.”
“Oh, my!” gasped the little girl, awed, “isn’t that great, Chet?”
“It’s great that we didn’t get caught on it,” muttered Chet, deeply impressed by the peril.
“We can’t go any farther, can we?” she asked.
“Nope. Got to turn back. Why, hullo! it’s snowin’!”
“Dear me! and we didn’t bring any umbrella,” observed Carolyn May.
“You call Prince. I guess we’d better get back,” Chet said more seriously. “We’re three miles from town, if we’re an inch.”
“And we can’t see the town or the boats or the docks! Oh, Chet! isn’t this fun? I never was out in a snowstorm on the ice before.”
The snow was damp and clung to their clothing. Chet saw that it was going to clog his skates, too. He would not let the child see that he was worried; but the situation was no ordinary one.
In the first place, it was hard to tell the points of the compass in the snowstorm. Prince might be able to smell his way back to land; but Chet Gormley was not endowed with the same sense of smell that Prince possessed. 223
The boy knew at once that he must be careful in making his way home with the little girl. Having seen one great fissure in the ice, he might come upon another. It seemed to him as though the ice under his feet was in motion. In the distance was the sound of a reverberating crash that could mean but one thing. The ice in the cove was breaking up!
The waters of the two brooks were pouring down into the cove. This swelling flood lifted the great sheet of spongy ice and set it in motion. Everywhere at the head of the cove the ice was cracking and breaking up. The wind helped. Spring had really come, and the annual freshet was likely now to force the ice entirely out of the cove and open the way for traffic in a few hours.