Johnston Annie Fellows
Georgina of the Rainbows

CHAPTER XV
A NARROW ESCAPE

MR. MILFORD was stretched out in a hammock on the front porch of the bungalow when the children came back from the dunes with their empty basket. They could not see him as they climbed up the terrace, the porch being high above them and draped with vines; and he deep in a new book was only vaguely conscious of approaching voices.

They were discussing the "Rescues of Rosalind," the play they had seen the night before on the films. Their shrill, eager tones would have attracted the attention of anyone less absorbed than Mr. Milford.

"I'll bet you couldn't," Georgina was saying. "If you were gagged and bound the way Rosalind was, you couldn't get loose, no matter how you squirmed and twisted."

"Come back in the garage and try me," Richard retorted. "I'll prove it to you that I can."

"Always an automobile dashes up and there's a chase. It's been that way in every movie I ever saw," announced Georgina with the air of one who has attended nightly through many seasons.

"I can do that part all right," declared Richard. "I can run an automobile."

There was no disputing that fact, no matter how contradictory Georgina's frame of mind. Only the day before she had seen him take the wheel and run the car for three miles under the direction of Cousin James, when they came to a level stretch of road.

"Yes, but you know your Cousin James said you were never to do it unless he was along himself. You wasn't to dare to touch it when you were out with only the chauffeur."

"He wouldn't care if we got in and didn't start anything but the engine," said Richard. "Climb in and play that I'm running away with you. With the motor chugging away and shaking the machine it'll seem as if we're really going."

By this time they were inside the garage, with the doors closed behind them.

"Now you get in and keep looking back the way Rosalind did to see how near they are to catching us."

Instantly Georgina threw herself into the spirit of the game. Climbing into the back seat she assumed the pose of the kidnapped bride whose adventures had thrilled them the night before.

"Play my white veil is floating out in the wind," she commanded, "and I'm looking back and waving to my husband to come faster and take me away from the dreadful villain who is going to kill me for my jewels. I wish this car was out of doors instead of in this dark garage. When I look back I look bang against the closed door every time, and I can't make it seem as if I was seeing far down the road."

"Play it's night," suggested Richard. He had put on a pair of goggles and was making a great pretence of getting ready to start. Georgina, leaning out as Rosalind had done, waved her lily hand in frantic beckonings for her rescuers to follow faster. The motor chugged harder and harder. The car shook violently.

To the vivid imaginations of the passengers, the chase was as exciting as if the automobile were really plunging down the road instead of throbbing steadily in one spot in the dim garage. The gas rolling up from somewhere in the back made it wonderfully realistic. But out on the open road the smell of burning gasoline would not have been so overpowering. Inside the little box-like garage it began to close in on them and settle down like a dense fog.

Georgina coughed and Richard looked back apprehensively, feeling that something was wrong, and if that queer smoke didn't stop pouring out in such a thick cloud he'd have to shut off the engine or do something. Another moment passed and he leaned forward, fumbling for the key, but he couldn't find it. He had grown queerly confused and light-headed. He couldn't make his fingers move where he wanted them to go.

He looked back at Georgina. She wasn't waving her hands any more. She was lying limply back on the seat as if too tired to play any longer. And a thousand miles away – at least it sounded that far – above the terrific noise the motor was making, he heard Captain Kidd barking. They were short, excited barks, so thin and queer, almost as thin and queer as if he were barking with the voice of a mosquito instead of his own.

And then – Richard heard nothing more, not even the noise of the motor. His hand dropped from the wheel, and he began slipping down, down from the seat to the floor of the car, white and limp, overcome like Georgina, by the fumes of the poisonous gas rolling up from the carburetor.

Mr. Milford, up in the hammock, had been vaguely conscious for several minutes of unusual sounds somewhere in the neighborhood, but it was not until he reached the end of the chapter that he took any intelligent notice. Then he looked up thinking somebody's machine was making a terrible fuss somewhere near. But it wasn't that sound which made him sit up in the hammock. It was Captain Kidd's frantic barking and yelping and whining as if something terrible was happening to him.

Standing up to stretch himself, then walking to the corner of the porch, Mr. Milford looked out. He could see the little terrier alternately scratching on the garage door and making frantic efforts to dig under it. Evidently he felt left out and was trying desperately to join his little playmates, or else he felt that something was wrong inside.

Then it came to Mr. Milford in a flash that something was wrong inside. Nobody ever touched that machine but himself and the chauffeur, and the chauffeur, who was having a day off, was half-way to Yarmouth by this time. He didn't wait to go down by the steps. With one leap he was over the railing, crashing through the vines, and running down the terrace to the garage.

As he rolled back one of the sliding doors a suffocating burst of gas rushed into his face. He pushed both doors open wide, and with a hand over his mouth and nose hurried through the heavily-charged atmosphere to shut off the motor. The fresh air rushing in, began clearing away the fumes, and he seized Georgina and carried her out, thinking she would be revived by the time he was back with Richard. But neither child stirred from the grass where he stretched them out.

As he called for the cook and the housekeeper, there flashed into his mind an account he had read recently in a New York paper, of a man and his wife who had been asphyxiated in just such a way as this. Now thoroughly alarmed, he sent the cook running down the Green Stairs to summon Richard's father from the studio, and the housekeeper to telephone in various directions. Three doctors were there in a miraculously short time, but despite all they could do at the end of half an hour both little figures still lay white and motionless.

Then the pulmotor that had been frantically telephoned for arrived from the life-saving station, and just as the man dashed up with that, Mrs. Triplett staggered up the terrace, her knees shaking so that she could scarcely manage to climb the last few steps.

Afterwards, the happenings of the day were very hazy in Georgina's mind. She had an indistinct recollection of being lifted in somebody's arms and moved about, and of feeling very sick and weak. Somebody said soothingly to somebody who was crying:

"Oh, the worst is over now. They're both beginning to come around."

Then she was in her own bed and the wild-cat from the banks of the Brazos was bending over her. At least, she thought it was the wild-cat, because she smelled the liniment as strongly as she did when she climbed up in the wagon beside it. But when she opened her eyes it was Tippy who was bending over her, smoothing her curls in a comforting, purry way, but the smell of liniment still hung in the air.

Then Georgina remembered something that must have happened before she was carried home from the bungalow. – Captain Kidd squirming out of Tippy's arms, and Tippy with the tears streaming down her face trying to hold him and hug him as if he had been a person, and the Milford's cook saying: "If it hadn't been for the little beast's barkin' they'd have been dead in a few minutes more. Then there'd have been a double funeral, poor lambs."

Georgina smiled drowsily now and slipped off to sleep again, but later when she awakened the charm of the cook's phrase aroused her thoroughly, and she lay wondering what "a double funeral" was like. Would it have been at her house or Richard's? Would two little white coffins have stood side by side, or would each have been in its own place, with the two solemn processions meeting and joining at the foot of the Green Stairs. Maybe they would have put on her tombstone, "None knew her but to love her." No, that couldn't be said about her. She'd been wilfully disobedient too often for that, like the time she played with the Portuguese children on purpose to spite Tippy. She was sorry for that disobedience now, for she had discovered that Tippy was fonder of her than she had supposed. She had proved it by hugging Captain Kidd so gratefully for saving their lives, when she simply loathed dogs.

Somehow Georgina felt that she was better acquainted with Mrs. Triplett than she had ever been before, and fonder of her. Lying there in the dark she made several good resolutions. She was going to be a better girl in the future. She was going to do kind, lovely things for everybody, so that if an early tomb should claim her, every heart in town would be saddened by her going. It would be lovely to leave a widespread heartache behind her. She wished she could live such a life that there wouldn't be a dry eye in the town when it was whispered from house to house that little Georgina Huntingdon was with the angels.

She pictured Belle's grief, and Uncle Darcy's and Richard's. She had already seen Tippy's. But it was a very different thing when she thought of Barby. There was no pleasure in imagining Barby's grief. There was something too real and sharp in the pain which darted into her own heart at the thought of it. She wanted to put her arms around her mother and ward off sorrow and trouble from her and keep all tears away from those dear eyes. She wanted to grow up and take care of her darling Barby and protect her from the Tishbite.

Suddenly it occurred to Georgina that in this escape she had been kept from the power of that mysterious evil which had threatened her ever since she called it forth by doing such a wicked thing as to use the "Sacred Book" to work a charm.

She had been put to bed in the daytime, hence her evening petitions were still unsaid. Now she pulled the covers over her head and included them all in one fervent appeal:

"And keep on delivering us from the Tishbite, forever and ever, Amen!"

CHAPTER XVI
WHAT THE STORM DID

NEXT morning nearly everyone in the town was talking about the storm. Belle said what with the booming of the waves against the breakwater and the wind rattling the shutters, she hadn't slept a wink all night. It seemed as if every gust would surely take the house off its foundations.

Old Jeremy reported that it was one of the worst wind-storms ever known along the Cape, wild enough to blow all the sand dunes into the sea. They'd had the best shaking up and shifting around that they'd had in years, he declared. Captain Ames' cranberry bog was buried so deep in sand you couldn't see a blossom or a leaf. And there was sand drifted all over the garden. It had whirled clear over the wall, till the bird pool was half full of it.

Georgina listened languidly, feeling very comfortable and important with her breakfast brought in to her on a tray. Tippy thought it was too chilly for her in the dining-room where there was no fire. Jeremy had kindled a cheerful blaze on the living-room hearth and his tales of damage done to the shipping and to roofs and chimneys about town, seemed to emphasize her own safety and comfort. The only thing which made the storm seem a personal affair was the big limb blown off the willow tree.

Mrs. Triplett and Jeremy could remember a storm years ago which shifted the sand until the whole face of the Cape seemed changed. That was before the Government planted grass all over it, to bind it together with firm roots. Later when the ring of an axe told that the willow limb was being chopped in pieces, Georgina begged to be allowed to go outdoors.

"Let me go out and see the tracks of the storm," she urged. "I feel all right. I'm all over the gas now."

But Mrs. Triplett preferred to run no risks. All she said to Georgina was:

"No, after such a close call as you had yesterday you stay right here where I can keep an eye on you, and take it quietly for a day or two," but when she went into the next room Georgina heard her say to Belle:

"There's no knowing how that gas may have affected her heart."

Georgina made a face at the first speech, but the second one made her lie down languidly on the sofa with her finger on her pulse. She was half persuaded that there was something wrong with the way it beat, and was about to ask faintly if she couldn't have a little blackberry cordial with her lunch, when she heard Richard's alley call outside and Captain Kidd's quick bark.

She started up, forgetting all about the cordial and her pulse, and was skipping to the front door when Tippy hurried in from the dining-room and reached it first. She had a piece of an old coffee sack in her hand.

"Here!" she said abruptly to Richard, who was so surprised at the sudden opening of the door that he nearly fell in against her.

"You catch that dog and hold him while I wipe his feet. I can't have any dirty quadruped like that, tracking up my clean floors."

Georgina looked at the performance in amazement. Tippy scrubbing away at Captain Kidd's muddy paws till all four of them were clean, and then actually letting him come into the house and curl up on the hearth! Tippy, who never touched dogs except with the end of a broom! She could scarcely believe what her own eyes told her. She and Richard must have had a "close call," indeed, closer than either of them realized, to make such a wonderful change in Tippy.

And the change was towards Richard, too. She had never seemed to like him much better than his dog. She blamed him for taking the cream bottles when they played pirate, and she thought it made little girls boisterous and rude to play with boys, and she wondered at Barby's letting Georgina play with him. Several times she had done her wondering out loud, so that Georgina heard her, and wanted to say things back – shocking things, such as Rosa said to Joseph. But she never said them. There was always that old silver porringer, sitting prim and lady-like upon the sideboard.

Things were different to-day. After the dog's paws were wiped dry Tippy asked Richard how he felt after the accident, and she asked it as if she really cared and wanted to know. And she brought in a plate of early summer apples, the first in the market, and told him to help himself and put some in his pocket. And there was the checker-board if they wanted to play checkers or dominoes. Her unusual concern for their entertainment impressed Georgina more than anything else she could have done with the seriousness of the danger they had been in. She felt very solemn and important, and thanked Tippy with a sweet, patient air, befitting one who has just been brought up from the "valley of the shadow."

The moment they were alone Richard began breathlessly:

"Say. On the way here I went by that place where we buried the pouch, and what do you think? The markers are out of sight and the whole place itself is buried – just filled up level. What are we going to do about it?"

The seriousness of the situation did not impress Georgina until he added, "S'pose the person who lost it comes back for it? Maybe we'd be put in prison."

"But nobody knows it's buried except you and me."

Richard scuffed one shoe against the other and looked into the fire.

"But Aunt Letty says there's no getting around it, 'Be sure your sin will find you out,' always. And I'm awfully unlucky that way. Seems to me I never did anything in my life that I oughtn't to a done, that I didn't get found out. Aunt Letty has a book that she reads to me sometimes when I'm going to bed, that proves it. Every story in it proves it. One is about a traveler who murdered a man, and kept it secret for twenty years. Then he gave it away, talking in his sleep. And one was a feather in a boy's coat pocket. It led to its being found out that he was a chicken thief. There's about forty such stories, and everyone of them prove your sin is sure to find you out some time before you die, even if you cover it up for years and years."

"But we didn't do any sin," protested Georgina. "We just buried a pouch that the dog found, to keep it safe, and if a big wind came along and covered it up so we can't find it, that isn't our fault. We didn't make the wind blow, did we?"

"But there was gold money in that pouch," insisted Richard, "and it wasn't ours, and maybe the letter was important and we ought to have turned it over to Dad or Uncle Darcy or the police or somebody."

Aunt Letty's bedtime efforts to keep Richard's conscience tender were far more effective than she had dreamed. He was quoting Aunt Letty now.

"We wouldn't want anybody to do our things that way." Then a thought of his own came to him, "You wouldn't want the police coming round and taking you off to the lockup, would you? I saw 'em take Binney Rogers one time, just because he broke a window that he didn't mean to. He was only shying a rock at a sparrow. There was a cop on each side of him a hold of his arm, and Binney's mother and sister were following along behind crying and begging them not to take him something awful. But all they could say didn't do a speck of good."

The picture carried weight. In spite of her light tone Georgina was impressed, but she said defiantly:

"Well, nobody saw us do it."

"You don't know," was the gloomy answer. "Somebody might have been up in the monument with a spy glass, looking down. There's always people up there spying around, or out on the masts in the harbor, and if some sleuth was put on the trail of that pouch the first thing that would happen would be he'd come across the very person with the glass. It always happens that way, and I know, because Binney Rogers has read almost all the detective stories there is, and he said so."

A feeling of uneasiness began to clutch at Georgina's interior. Richard spoke so knowingly and convincingly that she felt a real need for blackberry cordial. But she said with a defiant little uplift of her chin:

"Well, as long as we didn't mean to do anything wrong, I'm not going to get scared about it. I'm just going to bear up and steer right on, and keep hoping that everything will turn out all right so hard that it will."

Her "line to live by" buoyed her up so successfully for the time being, that Richard, too, felt the cheerful influence of it, and passed to more cheerful subjects.

"We're going to be in all the papers," he announced. "A reporter called up from Boston to ask Cousin James how it happened. There's only been a few cases like ours in the whole United States. Won't you feel funny to see your name in the paper? Captain Kidd will have his name in, too. I heard Cousin James say over the telephone that he was the hero of the hour; that if he hadn't given the alarm we wouldn't have been discovered till it was too late."

Richard did not stay long. The finished portrait was to be hung in the Art gallery in the Town Hall that morning and he wanted to be on hand at the hanging. Later it would be sent to the New York exhibition.

"Daddy's going to let me go with him when Mr. Locke comes for him on his yacht. He's going to take me because I sat still and let him get such a good picture. It's the best he's ever done. We'll be gone a week."

"When are you going?" demanded Georgina.

"Oh, in a few days, whenever Mr. Locke comes."

"I hope we can find that pouch first," she answered. Already she was beginning to feel little and forlorn and left behind. "It'll be awful lonesome with you and Barby both gone."

Tippy came in soon after Richard left and sat down at the secretary.

"I've been thinking I ought to write to your mother and let her know about yesterday's performance before she has a chance to hear it from outsiders or the papers. It's a whole week to-day since she left."

"A week," echoed Georgina. "Is that all? It seems a month at least. It's been so long."

Mrs. Triplett tossed her a calendar from the desk.

"Count it up for yourself," she said. "She left two days before your birthday and this is the Wednesday after."

While Mrs. Triplett began her letter Georgina studied the calendar, putting her finger on a date as she recalled the various happenings of it. Each day had been long and full. That one afternoon when she and Richard found the paper in the rifle seemed an age in itself. It seemed months since they had promised Belle and Uncle Darcy to keep the secret.

She glanced up, about to say so, then bit her tongue, startled at having so nearly betrayed the fact of their having a secret. Then the thought came to her that Emmett's sin had found him out in as strange a way as that of the man who talked in his sleep or the chicken thief to whom the feather clung. It was one more proof added to the forty in Aunt Letty's book. Richard's positiveness made a deeper impression on her than she liked to acknowledge. She shut her eyes a moment, squinting them up so tight that her eyelids wrinkled, and hoped as hard as she could hope that everything would turn out all right.

"What on earth is the matter with you, child?" exclaimed Tippy, looking up from her letter in time to catch Georgina with her face thus screwed into wrinkles.

Georgina opened her eyes with a start.

"Nothing," was the embarrassed answer. "I was just thinking."