Carolyn May, who was quite used to taking a nap on the days that she did not go to school, woke up, as bright as a newly minted dollar, very soon after her Uncle Joe left for the store.
“I’m awfully sorry I missed him,” she confided to Aunty Rose when she danced into the kitchen. “You see, I want to get acquainted with Uncle Joe just as fast as possible. And he’s at home so little, I guess that it’s going to be hard to do it.”
“Oh, is that so? And is it going to be hard to get acquainted with me?” asked the housekeeper curiously.
“Oh, no!” cried Carolyn May, snuggling up to the good woman and patting her plump, bare arm. “Why, I’m getting ’quainted with you fast, Aunty Rose! You heard me say my prayers, and when you laid me down on the couch just now you kissed me.”
Aunty Rose actually blushed. “There, there, child!” she exclaimed. “You’re too noticing. Eat your dinner, that I’ve saved warm for you.” 49
“Isn’t Prince to have any dinner, Aunty Rose?” asked the little girl.
“You may let him out, if you wish, after you have had your own dinner. You can feed him under the tree. But stand by and keep the hens away, for hens haven’t any more morals than they have teeth, and they’ll steal from him. I don’t want him to snap any of their heads off before they’re ready for the pot.”
“Oh, Aunty Rose,” said Carolyn May seriously, “he’s too polite. He wouldn’t do such a thing. Really, you don’t know yet what a good dog Prince is.”
Carolyn May was very much excited about an hour later when a rusty, closed hack drew up to the front gate of the Stagg place and stopped. She and Prince were then playing in the front yard—at least, she was stringing maple keys into a long, long chain (a delight heretofore unknown to the little city girl), and the dog was watching her with wrinkling nose and blinking eyes.
An old man with a square-cut chin whisker and clothing and hat as rusty as the hack itself held the reins over the bony back of the horse that drew the ancient equipage.
“I say, young’un, ain’t ye out o’ yer bailiwick?” queried Tim, the hackman, staring at the little girl in the Stagg yard.
Carolyn May stood up quickly and tried to look over her shoulder and down her back. It was hard to get all those buttons buttoned straight. 50
“I don’t know,” she said, perturbed. “Does it show?”
“Huh?” grunted Tim. “Does what show?”
“What you said,” said Carolyn May accusingly. “I don’t believe it does.”
“Hey!” chuckled the hack driver suddenly. “I meant, do you ’low Mrs. Kennedy knows you’re playing in her front yard?”
“Aunty Rose? Why, of course!” Carolyn May declared. “Don’t you know I live here?”
“Live here? Get out!” exclaimed the surprised hackman.
“Yes, sir. And Prince, too. With my Uncle Joe and Aunty Rose.”
“Pitcher of George Washington!” ejaculated Tim. “You don’t mean Joe Stagg’s taken a young-’un to board?”
“He’s my guardian,” said the little girl primly.
“‘Guardian’?” repeated the hackman, puzzled. “You don’t mean you’re one o’ them fresh-airs, be ye?”
Carolyn May was quite as much puzzled by that expression as she had been by “bailiwick.” She shook her head.
“I don’t think I am,” she confessed. “Mrs. Price said I was an orphan. Is that anything like a fresh-air?”
“Most of them is,” the hackman said sententiously. “But here’s Mrs. Kennedy.”
Aunty Rose appeared. She wore a close bonnet, 51 trimmed very plainly, and carried a parasol of drab silk. Otherwise, she had not changed her usual attire, save to remove the voluminous apron she wore when at her housework.
“I would take you with me, child,” she said, looking at Carolyn May, “only I don’t know what to do with that dog. I suppose he would tear the house down if we shut him in?”
“I expect so,” admitted the little girl.
“And if he was outside, he would follow the hack?”
“Yes, ma’am,” agreed Carolyn May again.
“Then you’ll have to stay at home and watch him,” said Aunty Rose decisively. “I always claimed a dog was a nuisance.”
Between Uncle Joe and Aunty Rose, both of the visitors at the Stagg place were proving to be nuisances.
Aunty Rose climbed into the creaky old vehicle.
“Are you going to be gone long?” asked Carolyn May politely.
“Not more than two hours, child,” said the housekeeper. “Nobody will bother you here——”
“Not while that dog’s with her, I reckon,” put in Tim, the hackman.
“May I come down the road to meet you, Aunty Rose?” asked the little girl. “I know the way to Uncle Joe’s store.”
“I don’t know any reason why you can’t come to meet me,” replied Mrs. Kennedy. “Anyway, you 52 can come along the road as far as the first house. You know that one?”
“Yes, ma’am. Mr. Parlow’s,” said Carolyn May.
“She knows her way ’round, I warrant,” put in Tim.
“Very well, child,” said Aunty Rose, and the bony old horse started slowly down the dusty road. Carolyn May stood at the gate and watched it wabble away. The hush of the afternoon wrapped the place about. Such a stir as there had been about The Corners in the forenoon seemed to have been quite quenched. Not even the clank of iron on iron from the blacksmith shop was now audible.
Carolyn May went back into the yard and sat on the front-porch steps, and Prince, yawning unhappily, curled down at her feet. There did not seem to be much to do at this place. The little girl lost interest in the maple-key chain which Aunty Rose had shown her how to make.
She had time now, had Carolyn May, to compare The Corners with the busy Harlem streets with which she had been familiar all her life. At this time of the afternoon the shady sides of the cross streets and the west side of the avenues were a-bustle with baby carriages and children, with nurses and mothers. And there were street pianos, and penny peep shows, and ice-cream-cone peddlers, and wagons, and many automobiles.
“Goodness me!” thought Carolyn May, startled 53 by her own imagination, “suppose all the folks in all these houses around here were dead!”
They might have been, for all the human noises she heard. She could count seven dwellings from where she sat on the Stagg porch, and there were others not in sight. No apparent life at the blacksmith shop; none at the store. Not even a vehicle on the road, now that the hack had crawled out of view towards Sunrise Cove.
“Goodness me!” she said again, and this time she jumped up, startling Prince from his nap. “Maybe there is a spell cast over all this place,” she went on. “Everybody has been put to sleep, just like in a fairy story. I don’t know whether a little girl who isn’t asleep can wake ’em up, or whether it must be a prince.
“Why, Princey,” she added, looking at the dog, “maybe it will be you that wakes ’em up. Anyway, let’s go and see if we can find somebody that’s alive.”
They went out of the yard together and took the dusty road towards the town. They passed the broad front of the church, its windows like so many blind eyes, and the little girl peered timidly over the rusty railing into the neglected churchyard, where many of the headstones were moss-grown and toppling.
“This is just the very deadest place,” murmured Carolyn May. “And I guess these folks buried here aren’t much quieter than the live folks. Oh, 54 dear me! these folks here at The Corners don’t look up to brighter things any more than the folks that are under ground. Why, maybe I’ll get that way if I stay here! And I know Papa Cameron wouldn’t approve of that!”
She sighed, and trudged on in the dust. The perspiration began to trickle down her pink face. The powdery dust rose from beneath her feet and was drifted over the wayside grass and weeds by the fretful breeze.
Prince paced on by her side, his nose wrinkling at the strange odours the breeze brought to his nostrils. A toad hopped suddenly out of its ambuscade beside the path, and Prince jumped.
“Don’t touch the toad, Princey,” said the little girl. “You know we learned about toads at school—and how good they are. And there was one in Central Park—don’t you ’member?”
A minute later, however, as they went on, something flashed into view on the top rail of the boundary fence. It brought a yelp of delight from Prince and a startled cry to Carolyn May’s lips.
“A squirrel!”
Prince leaped for the fence. With a whisk of its tail, the squirrel went up the hole of the nearest tree, and out on one of the branches, right over their heads.
Prince danced about madly in the dust and yelped.
“You silly thing, you,” the little girl told him. “You know you can’t climb that tree.” 55
The squirrel chattered angrily overhead.
“Now, come away,” Carolyn May commanded. “Don’t you see you’ve made that squirrel mad at you? You’ll never make friends out here in the country, if you act this way, Princey.”
Prince seemed little impressed by this prophecy, but he followed after his little mistress and left the squirrel to its own devices. They soon came in sight of the Parlow house and carpenter shop.
“We can’t go beyond that,” said Carolyn May. “Aunty Rose told us not to. And Uncle Joe says the carpenter-man isn’t a pleasant man.”
She looked wistfully at the premises. The cottage seemed quite as much under the “spell” as had been those dwellings at The Corners. But from the shop came the sound of a plane shrieking over a long board.
“Oh, Princey!” gasped Carolyn May. “I b’lieve he’s making long, curly shavings!”
If there was one thing Carolyn May adored, it was curls. Because her own sunny hair was almost perfectly straight, she thought the very loveliest thing a fairy godmother could do for her was to fit her out with a perfect suit of curls.
There had been a carpenter shop only two blocks from where she lived in Harlem, and she and her friend, Edna Price, had sometimes gone there and begged a few curly shavings with which to bedeck themselves. But they could never get as many shavings as they wanted there, for the man swept them up 56 every day and put them in bags, to be sold for baling.
But here, at this carpenter’s shop, she had seen, only the afternoon before, great heaps of the most beautiful, curly, smelly shavings! She drew nearer, her hand upon Prince’s collar, and stood looking at the old man with the silver-bowed spectacles pushing away at the jack-plane.
Suddenly, Mr. Jedidiah Parlow looked up and saw the wistful, dust-streaked face under the black hat-brim and above the black frock. He stared at her for fully a minute, poising the plane over his work. Then he put it down and came to the door of the shop.
“You’re Hannah Stagg’s little girl, aren’t you?” he asked in a voice Carolyn May thought almost as dry as his shavings.
“Yes, sir,” she said, and sighed. Dear me, he knew who she was right away! There would not be any chance of her getting a suit of long curls.
“You’ve come here to live, have you?” said Mr. Parlow slowly.
“Yes, sir. You see, my papa and mamma were lost at sea—with the Dunraven. It was a mistake, I guess,” sighed the little girl, “for they weren’t fighting anybody. But the Dunraven got in the way of some ships that were fighting, in a place called the Mediterranean Ocean, and the Dunraven was sunk, and only a few folks were saved from it. My papa and mamma weren’t saved.” 57
“So?” said the carpenter, pushing his big spectacles up to his forehead. “I read about it. Too bad—too mighty bad! I remember Hannah Stagg,” he added, winking his eyes, Carolyn May thought, a good deal as Prince did. “You look like her.”
“Do I?” Carolyn May returned, drawing nearer. “I’m glad I do. And I’m glad I sleep in what used to be her bed, too. It doesn’t seem so lonesome.”
“So? I reckoned you’d be lonesome up there at The Corners,” said the carpenter. “Is that your dog?”
“He’s Prince—yes, sir,” Carolyn May said, looking at the panting mongrel proudly. “He’s a splendid dog. I know he must be valuable, even if he is a mongorel. He got his paw hurt once, and papa and I took him to a vetrernary.
“A vetrernary,” explained Carolyn May, “is a dog doctor. And I heard this one tell my papa that there must be blood of ’most all kinds of dogs there was in Prince’s veins. There aren’t many dogs like him.”
“No, I reckon not. Not many have such a pedigree,” admitted the carpenter, taking up his plane. Then he squinted curiously across it at Carolyn May. “I guess your papa was some different from Joe Stagg, wasn’t he?”
“Oh, yes; he didn’t look much like Uncle Joe. You see, they aren’t really related,” explained Carolyn May innocently.
Mr. Parlow grunted and stripped another shaving 58 from the edge of the board he was planing. Carolyn May’s eager eyes followed that curling ribbon, and her lips parted. There were just bushels of shavings lying all about the shop—and Uncle Joe said Mr. Parlow would not give away a single one!
The carpenter paused before pushing the plane a second time the length of the board. “Don’t you want a drink of water, little girl?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, sir—I would. And I know Prince would like a drink,” she told him quickly.
“Go right around to the well in the back yard,” said Mr. Parlow. “You’ll find a glass there—and Mandy keeps a pan on the well-curb for the dogs and cats.”
“Thank you; I’ll go,” the little girl said, and started around by the green lane to the yard behind the cottage and the carpenter shop.
She hoped she would see Miss Amanda Parlow; but she saw nobody. The well was like the one in the Stagg back yard—it had a sweep and a smooth pole and chain that lowered the bucket into the depth of the shaft.
But it seemed as though somebody must have known the little girl was coming, for a dripping bucket of water had just been lifted upon the shelf, and the pan on the well-curb was filled. Prince lapped up the water from this eagerly.
All the time Carolyn May was getting her drink she felt she was being watched. She gazed frankly all about, but saw nobody. The green blinds were 59 tightly closed over the cottage windows; yet the child wondered if somebody inside was not looking out at her. Was it the nice-looking lady she had seen the day before—Miss Amanda, who would not look at Uncle Joe?
She went back to the door of the carpenter shop and found Mr. Parlow still busily at work.
“Seems to me,” he said, in his dry voice, after a little while, “you aren’t much like other little girls.”
“Aren’t I?” responded Carolyn May wonderingly.
“No. Most little girls that come here want shavings to play with,” said the carpenter, quizzically eyeing her over his work.
“Oh!” cried Carolyn May, almost jumping. “And do you give ’em to ’em?”
“’Most always,” admitted Mr. Parlow.
“Oh! Can I have some?” she gasped.
“All you want,” said Mr. Parlow, and perhaps that funny noise he made in his throat was as near to a laugh as he ever got.
When Tim’s old hack crawled along the road from town, with Aunty Rose sitting inside, enthroned amidst a multitude of bundles, Carolyn May was bedecked with a veritable wig of long, crisp curls, each carefully thrust under the brim of her hat. And when she shook the curls, Prince barked at her.
“Well, child, you certainly have made a mess of yourself,” said the housekeeper. “Has she been annoying you, Jedidiah Parlow?” 60
“She’s the only Stagg that ain’t annoyed me since her mother went away,” said the carpenter gruffly.
Aunty Rose looked at him levelly. “I wonder,” she said. “But, you see, she isn’t wholly a Stagg.”
This, of course, did not explain matters to Carolyn May in the least. Nor did what Aunty Rose said to her on the way home in the hot, stuffy hack help the little girl to understand the trouble between her uncle and Mr. Parlow.
“Better not let Joseph Stagg see you so friendly with Jedidiah Parlow. Let sleeping dogs lie,” Mrs. Kennedy observed.