DOROTHY DALE’S PROMISE

DOROTHY DALE’S PROMISE

BY MARGARET PENROSE

AUTHOR OF “DOROTHY DALE: A GIRL OF TO-DAY,” “DOROTHY DALE AT GLENWOOD SCHOOL,” “THE MOTOR GIRLS SERIES,” ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

BOOKS BY MARGARET PENROSE

THE DOROTHY DALE SERIES

12mo. Cloth. Illustrated.

THE MOTOR GIRLS SERIES

12mo. Cloth. Illustrated.

Cupples & Leon Co., Publishers, New York

Copyright, 1914, BY CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

DOROTHY DALE’S PROMISE

CHAPTER I “THE BAD PENNIES”

The train started a second after the two almost breathless girls entered the half-empty chair car. They came in with a rush, and barely found their seats and got settled in them before the easily rolling train had pulled clear of the station and the yards.

“Back to dear old Glenwood School, Doro!” cried Tavia Travers, fairly hugging her more sober companion. “How do you feel about it?”

“De-lighted, Miss,” laughed Dorothy Dale. “After our trying experiences in New York——Well! a country life is strenuous enough for me, I guess.”

“But we did have some fun, Doro. And how we got the best of that hateful Akerson man! I just hate that fellow. I could beat him!”

“Your feeling is not scriptural,” groaned Dorothy,2 though her eyes twinkled. “Don’t you know, if you are struck on one cheek you should turn the other also?”

“But suppose you’re hit on the nose?” demanded Tavia. “One hasn’t two noses!”

“Well, Aunt Winnie is well rid of that Akerson,” said Dorothy, with a little sigh of satisfaction.

“And your cousins, Ned and Nat, have you to thank for the salvation of their income,” returned Tavia.

“Us, you mean,” laughed Dorothy. “You had more to do with the showing up of that real estate agent than I had, Tavia.”

“Nonsense—— Oh, here’s the station where the girls may join us. Do let me open that window, Doro! I don’t care if it is cold outside. I want to see if they are on the platform.”

Tavia was already struggling with the window. But windows in cars are made to stick, it would seem. Tavia cast a pleading glance from her big eyes at the trim young brakeman just then coming through the car.

“Please!” Tavia’s eyes said just as plainly as though she had spoken the word; but the young brakeman shook his head gravely.

“Do you really want it open, Miss?” he asked, hesitating at the chairs occupied by the two friends.

3 “I want to see out—just a little bit,” said Tavia, pouting.

“But if anybody objects——” the young brakeman continued, taking hold of the fixtures of the sash with his gloved hands.

“Isn’t he just a dear?” murmured Tavia to Dorothy, but loud enough for the young railroad man to hear.

“Do hush, Tavia!” gasped her friend.

The young man opened the window. The exertion seemed to have been considerable, for he grew red to the very tips of his ears while he was raising the sash!

“Oh, thank you—so much!” gushed Tavia, perfectly cool. And when the brakeman had gone, she turned to Dorothy, and demanded:

“Didn’t I say that prettily? Just like a New York society girl would say it—the one who took us to tea that time in the tea room that used to be a millionaire’s stable; do you remember?”

“You are just dreadful, Tavia!” groaned Dorothy Dale. “Will you never learn to behave?”

“There they are!” shrieked Tavia, with her head out of the window. “There are all the ‘bad pennies’—they always turn up again, you know.”

The train was slowing down and the long platform of the junction came into view.

“Who’s there?” begged Dorothy, willing to4 learn the details from her more venturesome companion.

“Ned Ebony—yes, ma’am! And there’s Cologne. Oh, bully! everybody’s here. This way, girls!” cried Tavia as the car passed a group of merry-faced girls of about their own age. “I hope you’ve all got chairs in this car.”

And, by good fortune, they had! Within the next few moments nearly a dozen of the pupils of Glenwood School had joined the chums—and all of these newcomers, as well as Dorothy and Tavia, belonged to the class that would graduate from the famous old school the coming June.

“Tell us all about New York—do!” cried Ned Ebony, otherwise Edna Black.

“And Miss Mingle!” urged Rose-Mary, whom the other girls called “Cologne” most of the time. “Is she coming back to Glenwood School to teach music?”

“Poor little Mingle has had a hard time,” Dorothy said. “But she is coming back to us—and we must treat her nicely, girls.”

“Oh, we must!” added Tavia. “Better than I treated her feather-bed.”

The girls all laughed at that, for it had been Tavia’s last prank at Glenwood to shower little Miss Mingle with the feathers from her own special tick.

“But about New York,” urged one of the5 other girls who had never been to the metropolis. “We’re just dying to know something about it, Doro.”

“And if it is as wicked as they say it is,” cried another.

“And as nice,” urged Ned Ebony.

“And as horribly dirty as they say,” went on Cologne.

“And the subways—and elevated trains—and all the rest of it,” came the seemingly unending demands.

“Help! help! ‘Ath-thith-tanth, pleath!’” cried Tavia. “That’s the way one of the girls in a big store called the floorwalker—jutht like that!”

“Now, go ahead and tell us something wonderful,” begged Cologne.

“See here,” said Dorothy, laughing, and diving into her handbag. “Here’s something that I cut out of the paper. It is how New York struck the wondering eye of an Arab who visited it recently. He sent this letter to his brother at home:

“‘People in America travel like rats under the ground, and like squirrels in the air, and the buildings are so high that people have to be put in square boxes and pulled to the top by heavy ropes. In the day the sun furnishes the light as in Morocco. At night the light is as strong as in the day, but people here do not seem to have much use for6 sleep, as the streets are just as crowded at night as in the day.’

“There!” laughed Dorothy. “That is New York—that, and operas, and theatres, and ‘tea-fights,’ and automobiles whizzing, and car gongs banging, and the rattle of steam riveters, and newsboys shrieking, and——”

“My turn! I’ll relieve you,” interposed Tavia. “There are lots of nice boys—real dressy boys—and it’s fun to go to the tea-rooms, for you see everybody—and they dance! And we’ve learned to dance the very newest dances——”

“Oh, Tavia!” gasped Dorothy. “Only with each other—you know that. We’ve just picked up some of the steps, seeing others do it—and practised in our room at Aunt Winnie’s.”

“There! She always spoils everything,” declared Tavia. “I was just making Ned Ebony’s eyes ‘bulge right out’ at our wickedness. I think——”

At that moment brakes were put on the train and the girls were suddenly tumbled together in quite a heap. There was something ahead to cause this sudden stoppage, and Tavia struggled with her window again. It went up easier this time. Perhaps that was because there was no good looking young man—in or out of uniform—near at hand.

7 “Oh! it’s a fire!” gasped Cologne, looking over Tavia’s shoulder when the latter got the window open.

“On the tracks!” declared Tavia.

Dorothy got a glimpse of the fire now.

“It’s the bridge over Caloom Creek,” she cried. “It’s all ablaze! I declare, girls, suppose we are held here all night!”

“Don’t mention such a thing!” groaned Ned Ebony. “It’s only twenty miles from here to Glenwood.”

“Right,” agreed Tavia; “and Belding is the next station beyond the creek.”

“Let’s go out and ask the railroad men if we can’t get over the river and get a train on to Glenwood at once,” suggested Dorothy Dale.

“Let’s!” agreed Tavia, with a giggle. “That nice young brakeman, Doro—I’ll ask him, if you are bashful.”

But it was the conductor in charge of the train they found when the hilarious party of school girls got out with their hand baggage.

“How are you going to get across the river, young ladies?” he wanted to know. “The highway bridge is a mile through the woods.”

“But we know all about this river,” spoke up Tavia. “There are stepping stones across it right below this old railroad bridge. We’ve been across them before—haven’t we, Doro?”

8 “In the summer,” her friend admitted.

“Well, you can try it,” said the conductor. “That bridge is going to be unstable, even if they get the fire out. A train may not cross from either side before to-morrow.”

“Oh!” cried Ned Ebony, “we could never wait that long!”

“Come on!” commanded Tavia, leading the way into a path beside the railroad tracks. “Let’s at least see if the stones are uncovered.”

“You’ll probably find transportation from Belding to the Glen,” said the conductor, as the girls started on.

“Come on, now,” said Tavia. “Let’s show our pluck. Who’s afraid of a little water?”

“I’m always seasick on the water,” murmured Cologne.

“Never heard of anybody being troubled by mal de mer going over stepping stones,” snorted Tavia, in disgust. “Come on!”

There was a fringe of bushes along both sides of the creek. This path beside the railroad tracks forked, and one branch of it led right down to the stepping stones. The water was rough; but there was no ice, and the top of each stone was bare and dry.

Years and years before the people living in the neighborhood had put these flat-top boulders into the creek-bed, because the light wooden bridges9 were forever being carried away by the floods. Of course that was before the day of the railroad.

Tavia started across the stones, and Dorothy followed her. One after the other they got over safely. But Ned Ebony’s shoe came untied and she was last.

Perhaps she was careless; perhaps she tripped on her shoelace; perhaps she was heedless enough to step on the edge of a certain small boulder that Tavia warned her was not exactly steady.

However it was, the boulder rolled, poor Edna “sprawled” in the air for a moment to get her balance, and then the rock turned over and she went “splash!” into the water.

CHAPTER II CELIA MORAN, OF THE “FINDLING”

“To the rescue!” shrieked Tavia, charging back to the stepping stones. “Forward, my bold hearties! Man overboard! Who’s got a rope?”

Then she lost the power of speech in a burst of laughter; for certain it was, poor Ned Ebony was an awfully funny sight!

But Dorothy was at hand to do something practical. She sprang back upon the nearest boulder to the one that had turned under her unfortunate schoolmate, and in half a minute she had dragged Edna out of the cold water.

“Oh! oh! OH!” sputtered Edna in crescendo. “I—I’m drowned—dead! Oh, do help me out! You mean thing, Tavia! Oh, I’m frozen!”

The water was ice cold, and the temperature of the air was close to the freezing point. This adventure might easily become serious, and Dorothy knew it.

“We must hurry her to the Belding station,” she cried. “Come on, Neddie! You must run.”

11 “Run? I can’t. See how water-soaked my skirt is. I can’t run.”

“You must!” declared Dorothy. “Come, Tavia—take her other hand. Have you her bag, Cologne? We’ll run ahead with her and see if we can find somebody to take her in. She must be dried and have other clothing. Oh, hurry!”

“I can’t run, Doro Dale! I tell you I can’t,” wailed the saturated girl.

But they made her hurry, and in fifteen minutes had her in the sitting room belonging to the station agent’s wife, where she was helped to disrobe, dried, dosed with hot tea, and finally managed to dress herself in dry garments borrowed from the bags of her schoolmates, the contents of her own bag being wet, too.

There was no chance to get on to Glenwood for two hours; so the party of schoolgirls must of necessity occupy themselves as best they might around the Belding station. Meanwhile a better introduction to Dorothy Dale and her friends, as well as a brief sketch of “what has gone before” in this series, may not come amiss.

In “Dorothy Dale: A Girl of To-day” my heroine was some three years younger than she is when she makes her bow in this present volume. But even then she was a bright, sprightly girl, more thoughtful than the average of her age, perhaps; yet thoroughly a girl. Nevertheless, because12 of the illness of her father, Major Dale, of Dalton (she was motherless) Dorothy took up the work of publishing his weekly paper, The Dalton Bugle.

At that time the paper was all the Dales had to depend on for a livelihood; therefore Dorothy’s success as a publisher and editor meant much to herself and her immediate family which, beside the Major, consisted of her two much younger brothers, Joe and Roger. With her closest chum, Octavia Travers, Dorothy had many adventures while running the paper—some merely amusing but others of a really perilous nature.

Dorothy, however, survived these adventures, Major Dale recovered, and in the end secured a generous legacy which had been left him, which enhancement of the family’s fortune made possible the writing of the second volume of the series: “Dorothy Dale at Glenwood School.”

This story served, too, to introduce more effectually Dorothy’s aunt, Mrs. Winnie White, and her two boys, Nat and Ned, who lived at North Birchlands and with whom Major Dale and his motherless children had now, for some time, made their home. At school Dorothy had some fun, many adventures, and several little troubles; but with the help and companionship of Tavia, who was enabled to go to the school, too, after a very few months both chums decided that Glenwood13 was the very finest school “that ever happened.”

“Dorothy Dale’s Great Secret” came very nearly being Tavia Travers’ undoing, and that sprightly damsel’s adventures, and her friend’s wholesome influence over her, are fully related in the third volume of the above name.

In the fourth volume, “Dorothy Dale and Her Chums,” Dorothy came into really startling association with some gypsies and their queens; but there is likewise in the story plenty of school fun and excitement and almost a rebellion of the Glenwood girls against a harsh teacher who had charge while Mrs. Pangborn, the principal, was away.

Dorothy and her chums, with the help of Nat and Ned White and some of their friends, solved the mystery of the “castle” in the next volume, which is well entitled, “Dorothy Dale’s Queer Holidays.” The holidays were queer, indeed, and there was a time when serious trouble seemed to threaten them all.

In “Dorothy Dale’s Camping Days,” the sixth volume of the series, Dorothy was mistaken for a demented girl who had escaped from a sanitarium, and our heroine suffered imprisonment and much anxiety before the mistake was explained. In this, as in “Dorothy Dale’s School Rivals,” the seventh book, Tavia Travers had a prominent part in the action of the story; but Tavia was a14 flyaway and often Dorothy was anxious about her. The irresponsible Tavia had a heart of gold, however, and her love for Dorothy, and her loyalty to her in any and every difficulty, kept the girl from going very far wrong.

The girls had boarded the train for Glenwood, which had met this obstruction of the burning bridge, after the winter vacation; and that vacation had been spent by Dorothy and Tavia in New York. The account of the fun and adventures they had there is too long to tell here, but it is all related in the volume next preceding this, entitled, “Dorothy Dale in the City.”

The chums not only found the great metropolis a veritable fairyland of surprises, but they had adventures galore. By a fortunate turn of circumstances the two girls were able to save Dorothy’s Aunt Winnie from the machinations of a dishonest real estate agent who had been handling some of that lady’s property; and likewise they had been able to befriend Miss Mingle, the music teacher at Glenwood School, and her invalid sister.

As the other girls were looking after Ned Ebony, and offering her the contents of their own bags—from “mule” slippers to powder-puffs—Dorothy was not needed; so she went back to the railroad station to make sure that no train was made up for Glenwood without her and her friends being aware of it.

15 There, in the waiting room, she spied a tall, burly woman, with a very hard red face, who had just placed upon one of the benches a little girl of some six or seven years. The child was poorly dressed, and although she was not crying, she looked very woe-begone indeed.

The big woman gave the child a little shake when she had placed her on the bench.

“There now, Celia Moran!” she snapped. “You stay put; will yer? I never seen no child more like an eel than you be.”

“Am—am I really like a—neel, Mrs. Hogan?” demanded the little girl, timidly. “Do—does a—neel have feets an’ hands?”

“You shet up with your questions!” commanded the woman, shaking a finger at her. “As sure as me name’s Ann Hogan I’d never tuk ye from that Findling Asylum if I’d knowed ye had a tongue in your mout’ that’s hung in the middle and wags both ends. Sorra the day I tuk ye!”

Little Celia Moran put a tentative finger in her mouth to see if it was verily so—that her tongue was “hung” different from other people’s tongues.

“Are—are you sure my tongue’s that way, Mrs. Hogan?” she asked, plaintively as the big woman was turning away. “It—it feels all right.”

“Now, you shet up!” warned Mrs. Hogan, wrathfully. “Ax me another question an’ I’ll spank ye—so I will! I’m goin’ now to find Jim16 Bentley’s waggin’. Do you sit right there still—don’t move! If ye do, I’ll know it when I come back an’ ’twill be the wuss for ye.”

With this threat the big woman departed with an angry stride. Dorothy had stopped to listen to the conversation; and she was greatly interested in the little girl. She immediately went and sat down by Celia Moran.

She was not a very big girl for her age, being thin and “wriggly.” It did seem quite impossible for her to keep either her limbs or her tongue still.

But she was, without doubt, a most appealing little thing. Dorothy smiled at her, and Dorothy’s smile was bound to “make friends” with any one.

“I guess you don’t know me; do you?” asked the child, looking up from under long, black lashes at Dorothy. Those lashes, and the velvety black eyes they almost hid, were all the really pretty features the child possessed. She was not plump enough to be pretty of form, and the expression of her features was too shrewd and worldly-wise to make a child of her age attractive.

“I guess you don’t know me; do you?” she repeated, looking in a sly little way at Dorothy.

“Oh, yes, I do,” declared Dorothy Dale, laughing outright. “You are Celia Moran,” she added,17 remembering the name the sour-faced woman had used.

“But you don’t know where I come from?”

The ugly gingham uniform she wore told that story only too well. Dorothy became grave at once.

“You come from some orphan asylum, my dear.”

“From the Findling,” said the little girl, pursing up her lips and nodding.

“From a foundling asylum?”

“Yes’m. But I wasn’t really a ‘findling.’ I didn’t come there like the babies do. I was two an’ a ha’f years old when they took me in. That ain’t no baby; is it?”

“Two and a half? Why, that’s a big girl,” agreed Dorothy.

“’Course it is. But my papa had been dead a long time; and my mamma, too. And then my auntie died, so I had to go to the Findling.”

“And wasn’t there anybody else to look out for you?” asked the interested Dorothy.

“Only Tom. And he went away.”

“Tom who?”

“Tom Moran. He’s my brother. I don’t suppose you know him; do you?”