CHAPTER I AN INVITATION FOR A CRUISE

“Oh! Jack, Ellen, come here this instant!” cried Jane Pellew in so excited a manner that the mail rider almost fell out of his jumper in his effort to see what it was that made Miss Jane “take on so.” She was dancing around the broad old veranda waving one of the letters he had just handed her.

“Too hot, Sis, and we are too comfortable,” came Jack’s lazy voice from under the big ash tree that shaded one side of the porch.

“You have enough energy for all of us, so s’pose you come to us,” Ellen called.

“You won’t be hot for long, but you are going to be very uncomfortable in a minute.” With the warning, Jane jumped off the porch and landed in Ellen’s lap, then pulled herself up[Pg 8] quickly by means of one hand entwined in Jack’s thick chestnut hair.

“Shut up and listen!” commanded Jane.

“Nobody has a chance to do anything else with you around,” Jack reminded his sister.

“Who could do anything else but listen after having a hundred and thirty pounds of buoyant young Kentucky girl hurled on top of you from a distance of some ten feet? I don’t believe I shall ever get my breath again,” groaned Ellen.

“I’ll say you manage pretty well without it,” Jane laughed. “But, as I was saying, listen and you will hear the most wonderful piece of news that has happened in the history of mankind,” and she started reading from the letter she had still managed to keep in her hand:

“Dearest Jane:”

“Bet it is from one of the Camp Fire Girls,” interrupted her brother.

“Keep quiet, I have a good mind not to tell you after all. But I am such a nice girl I suppose I’ll have to. It’s from Mabel Wing. Now, let me finish,” pleaded Jane.

“Dearest Jane: “As long as Ellen Birch is staying with you, [Pg 9]read this to her, as I am so busy I’ll never have time to write two letters saying exactly the same thing. I am sending one to Ruth Garnier with the request that she read hers to Frances Bliss, who is staying at her home. “And telegraph me whether you will or won’t, but please do. I always do things backwards even in letters. What I mean is Daddy is going to give me a cruise on his yacht and I want you and Ellen and Jack to come. We will leave City Island, N. Y., July the first, and go till we get bored, up to the Maine coast and poke around all those little islands that Daddy says grow in the New England waters. “Don’t bring any clothes, as there never is any place to stow more than the bare essentials. And make Jack bring his banjo and, of course, your bathing suits and Camp Fire clothes. “I’ll be so disappointed I’ll die if you don’t. Hastily, “Mabel.”

“As if you couldn’t tell it was ‘hastily, Mabel,’” Jack laughed. “But I have no idea of bringing your bathing suits and Camp Fire regalia.”

“Goose! That is just the Mabel of it. She[Pg 10] writes just as she talks,” explained his sister.

“What fun for all of us! But we must telegraph right away,” said the practical Ellen.

“Here comes Father now,” and Jane pointed to a red-wheeled buggy and a briskly trotting bay horse driven up the shady approach to the Pellews’ home by the master of the house.

The three of them ran across to meet Mr. Pellew, a man beloved by his children’s friends as much as he was respected and loved by his own.

“Daddy dear, Mabel wants—” began Jane.

“It will be wonderful!” put in Ellen.

“Is it all right with you if I go too, Dad?” Jack interrupted both girls.

Mr. Pellew put his hands up to his ears and screamed above the hubbub: “How can I tell whether it will be wonderful for Ellen and all right for you or even what Mabel wants if the bunch of you try to rival the builders of the tower of Babel?”

“Ellen,” suggested Jack, “you tell him; Jane gets too excited.”

Ellen put one hand over Jane’s mouth and told Mr. Pellew of the interesting trip Mabel and her father had planned for them.

Squirming away from Ellen, Jane flung her[Pg 11] arms around her father’s neck and said, “But we don’t like leaving you when we have been home from school for only such a short while.”

“It never seems to enter your scatter-brained heads that I might oppose you in anything,” Mr. Pellew smiled at his daughter.

“You always are keen for us to have a good time,” Jack explained.

“And you went and had such clever good children that they know just exactly what to do and what is good for them and what is bad for them,” added Jane.

“Of course you can go and I’ll be mighty glad for my children to have such a wonderful summer. When do you expect to leave and from what point?” inquired Mr. Pellew.

“First of July, City Island!” came in chorus from the three.

“Henceforth all my conversation will be nautical. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of two per cent substitute. Jack, do you have to have a horn or a pipe for stage property when you want to execute a briny jig?” and Jane began to cavort around in what she considered a truly seafaring manner.

“‘Shiver my timbers!’ and ‘Scuttle her amidships!’ is my contribution to this, but I am[Pg 12] the only person to be allowed to use these choice phrases until some one can think up better ones. Then, of course, I’ll be glad to cash in my old ones for the new ones,” was Ellen’s generous offer.

“Son, you had better order some horses saddled directly after dinner so you kids can ride over and send the necessary telegrams,” said Mr. Pellew to Jack.

With an “Aye, aye, sir,” Jack raced toward the stable.

“Home is so beautiful in the summer that I can hardly bear to leave it,” sighed Jane.

She and her father and Ellen were walking over the close-cut grass and she cast a rather wistful eye around the lovely lawn that stretched before the Pellew house. There were great trees whose spreading branches had shaded her grandparents, her own father and the mother she couldn’t remember, but loved because of the sweet pictures her father had of her. Where the lawn stopped the rolling fields of blue grass began and Jane could see the old mare, on which she and Jack had learned to ride, grazing contentedly. It was a hobby of her father’s never to sell the old horses on the place but to treat them as worthy[Pg 13] old pensioners and turn them out on the rich bluegrass pasture lands that bordered his place. Mr. Pellew had a string of race horses famous throughout Kentucky, and as Jane put it, she and Jack had “fallen from the cradle into a saddle.” Their father kept a model stable and Aunt Min, who took charge of the Pellew home, often complained that the expense of upkeep for the stable was far greater than that of their exceedingly well run home.

“Well, of course, I won’t force you to go,” teased her father.

“Why, Jane, I thought you were perfectly wild to go,” Ellen said.

“Oh, that is the way I always behave about leaving home. I am terribly sentimental over it and always indulge in dramatics when I go away. You see, I am bats about all the horses and dogs on the place and I can’t help thinking about Atta Boy, the Denmark colt Dad was letting me break for my own,” Jane explained. “All the work I have put in on him will come to nothing if he isn’t ridden regularly this summer, and Daddy doesn’t have time to do it for me and I wouldn’t trust anybody else with such a peach of a colt.”

“You honor me, daughter.” Mr. Pellew made[Pg 14] a low mocking bow. “To show my deep appreciation of the fact that you put my horsemanship on the level with your own, I suppose I will have to promise to ride Atta Boy every other day for you.”

“I love Kentucky too, Jane, and you can’t know how much it has meant to me to stay with you. Last summer it was too wonderful with the other girls here but this summer it has been just splendid with you and Jack.” Ellen blushed after mentioning Jack, because he had just been telling her what a wonderful summer it was for him with her visiting Jane.

“Ellen, did you ever hear this little tribute to our state?” Mr. Pellew asked and began:

“And the more days you spend in Kentucky the luckier you are,” stated Jane. “But goodness,[Pg 15] I sound like that girl from Virginia who was at Hillside last year.”

Aunt Min came out on the porch and interrupted the eulogy on the charms of Kentucky by telling them that dinner was ready. But anyone seeing the great platter of fried chicken on the table before Aunt Min would have said that the eulogy might well have been continued in the spacious old dining room.

[Pg 16]

CHAPTER II SERGEANT MURPHY ASSISTS

“Jack! have you your banjo? And Ellen, have you the box of candy Daddy gave us?” Jane called over her shoulder to the two who were sitting in the tonneau as they were driving over to the station to catch the train that was to take them to New York.

“You better keep your eyes on the road if you are to keep us in the road,” gently reproved Mr. Pellew from his seat beside his daughter.

“We’ve got everything we ought to have, but what have you remembered? Nothing for a change?” teased Jack, for Jane was an almost proverbial forgetter.

“Anything important that you have forgotten I can parcel post to you after I come back from New York,” said Aunt Min, who was to go along to chaperon them at the hotel in New York. The girls had some shopping to do and were going up a few days prior to their final departure to accomplish it.

[Pg 17]

“Aunt Min, you are a perfect peach, and I am so glad you finally joined the Camp Fire Girls.” Ellen reached over and patted affectionately the hand of the woman once disliked by the entire band of Jane’s friends and now the pet of all of them.

As the car, piloted by Jane, whirled up to the station, a rather fat young man was seen dashing frantically around, talking first to the station agent and then to the baggage man, all the time violently mopping his face with a huge white handkerchief.

“There’s Charlie Preston in a stew as usual,” giggled Jane, pointing to the distraught young man, who was Mabel’s fiancé.

Suddenly Charlie stopped his gyrations and his face broke into a really charming smile.

“I was trying to find out from some of these misguided officials if you all had made arrangements to go on this train, for if you weren’t, I wasn’t either, but not one word could I get out of them but a polite ‘Speak to you after the train leaves,’ and, saving your presence, Miss Min, how the deuce would that help me?” Charlie exploded to his friends. He was a strange mixture of calmness in times of stress and great irritability and[Pg 18] excitability in times of petty trials.

“All aboa’d!” cried the white-jacketed and very black porter.

“Oh! Daddy, good-bye, good-bye, I am going to miss you all the time, no matter how much fun I am having,” and Jane ruffled Mr. Pellew’s collar in the last of a series of bear hugs that had begun the night before.

“Don’t make such rash promises but write me occasionally, and Jack, you telegraph me as soon as you get to New York. I hope the rooms I wired for will be all right. And now I am going because I won’t feel so alone if I leave before the train pulls out,” he said and drove off with a great show of bravery.

At last they were settled comfortably for the long trip to New York, Aunt Min with a magazine and the young people planning good times for the few days they were to be in the city before going aboard the yacht.

“We can go to see Emmeline Cerrito. Jack, you know she is our beautiful French friend who is studying for grand opera. She hopes to make her appearance this fall. Maybe she will sing for us. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a lovelier voice; have you, Jane?” Ellen loved music.

[Pg 19]

“And Sarah Manning is in training at the Presbyterian Hospital; we will certainly look her up and get her to come to dinner if she can get any time off,” suggested Jane.

“I want to get something for the ship’s library,” said Charlie, “and I think Carroll’s ‘Hunting of the Snark’ would be in order. It will help to comfort me during the first three or four days out. You know I’m nobody’s able seaman. My last year at college a bunch of us raced a yacht down to Bermuda and I want to say that, for three days, I wasn’t anything but in the way.” And poor Charlie winced at the unhappy memory.

“But that was one of those narrow little racing types,” soothed Ellen, “and Mabel says her father’s is a regular cruising boat and awfully comfortable.”

“Anyway, my beamish boy, I’ll stick by you and play ‘Heave-ho, my hearties’ on the trusty banjo while you lean o’er the rail,” Jack grinned.

“You boys are rather horrid,” said Aunt Min from behind her magazine. “And, by the way, I expect to be taken to the theatre every night, so don’t make too many plans.”

“Tickled to death to take you to any musical comedy you pick and to any roof garden afterwards,”[Pg 20] said Jack. “You know, nothing really good runs in New York in the summer months.”

“And I suspect that you are not at all sorry,” teased Aunt Min.

“Speaking of plays, that reminds me that Betty Wyndham is at Provincetown with the Provincetown Players for the summer getting ready for next winter. She got them to take her on this spring. I know we will go to Plymouth and if we are that near we just can’t help going to see Betty,” said Ellen, planning happily.

“So we will really see all of our friends by hook or crook during the summer.” Then Jane yawned and announced that she was going to crawl into her berth and go to sleep.

When New York was finally reached, it took two taxis to deposit the travelers at their hotel. There the little party separated, Aunt Min going to her room to rest, the boys going out to “see the town,” and Ellen and Jane going to do their shopping.

“I love the way the New Yorkers hurry along all so intent on where they are going and so certain they are going to get there in the end,” said Ellen. “Neither one of us has a really working knowledge of the city so, no doubt, we will be lost[Pg 21] one million times on the way to Abercrombie & Fitch’s.”

“Then we will just ask some genial Irish cop,” said Jane lightly. “I have never paid any attention to the ridiculous warnings of people who say, ‘Never talk to somebody you aren’t certain of.’ I flatter myself that I can tell at a glance whether a person is the kind of person to talk to or not.”

Deep in an argument in which Ellen favored getting gray flannel sport shirts and Jane khaki ones, the two girls got on the subway.

“We have been on here ten minutes, surely we will be there soon,” said Ellen glancing at her watch.

“So we would,” giggled the irrepressible Jane, “if we were going the right way. I noticed just now that we were on a car marked Bronx when we ought to be on a downtown express. I was going to give you to the next stop to notice it; after that of course I would have told you.”

“Next time we better not talk so much,” observed Ellen wisely as the girls rose to leave the car.

“Whew! I would like to come up for air. It’s so stuffy down here I can’t think which way we ought to go. If we just had some working hypothesis[Pg 22] of where we are, then we might dope out some route to take,” lamented Jane.

Both girls looked round them with rather amused expressions. Finally, Ellen squealed and punched Jane. “There’s your genial Irish cop; go over and ask him how we must get to Abercrombie & Fitch’s.”

Jane marched over to the big fat policeman, plainly from Erin. He grinned invitingly at the world in general and, as she stopped in front of him, at her in particular.

“Yes, Mum,” he said.

“We took that horrid old Bronx subway and we didn’t mean to,” began Jane by way of lucid explanation.

“And not the first are ye, young lady, to do the same. Indade, it looks to me like folks only get to the Bronx by tryin’ to go some other place,” the big man announced.

Then Jane told him where they did want to go.

“I’m off duty now and it’s goin’ that way I am myself, so if it pleases ye I’ll just take ye,” said Sergeant Murphy.

Ellen had come up to them and was very profuse in her thanks, but the Sergeant brushed them aside with a hearty “’Tis nothin’.”

[Pg 23]

The two girls seated on either side of the big Irishman kept him grinning with their amusing chatter about nothing. The three of them were entirely oblivious of the utter unconventionality of the situation and would have been much surprised if they had heard the old women across the aisle whispering to one another.

It is certain that Ellen would have been very indignant if she had known that the young Russian on her left had kept his hand in his pocket all the way, so firm was the belief in his mind that she was a pickpocket.

Surprise showed through even the suave manner of the young salesman at Abercrombie & Fitch’s, but Ellen thought that it was brought forth by the fact that two girls wanted such a surprising number of men’s shirts.

As twilight came and with it no Ellen and Jane, Aunt Min began to get worried and called the boys in consultation. They decided to wait until time to go down for dinner and, if the girls hadn’t come in then, to notify the authorities so they might organize a search for them.

Aunt Min stood wringing her hands and moaning: “Such terrible things could happen to them. Charlie, don’t you remember that awful[Pg 24] Chinaman that killed a girl in New York and put her in a trunk where they didn’t find her for ages and ages afterwards?”

“Ellen is so little. Oh! why didn’t I go with them?” and Jack cursed himself roundly for not taking care of the girl with whom he was in love.

Charlie was seated in a lounging chair taking the whole affair quite calmly. “Jack, please behave as though you had some sense. Those girls are about twenty years old, both of them with the average amount of intelligence, plenty of money in their pockets, and both on the outside of a good lunch. So they won’t starve to death and, if they are lost, they can grab a taxi and come to the hotel. I’m willing to bet on Plain Jane’s ingenuity to get ’em home even if they are both dead and in some Chinaman’s laundry bag. Probably what really happened is that they met someone they know and went some place for tea,” and Charlie went on peacefully eating chocolate creams.

“Oh! it is all very well for you to talk, but just suppose it was Mabel Wing who was lost and not Ellen. How about it then?” Jack asked.

“Mabel is too big to lose, so that is one thing I don’t have to worry about,” answered Charlie.

[Pg 25]

“Anyway, let’s go down in the lobby and wait,” said Aunt Min and led the way.

Once there they took seats facing the entrance and glued their eyes to the door. Consequently, when the girls came in flanking a big policeman, Aunt Min, Jack, and Charlie rose simultaneously and advanced upon them.

Aunt Min cried: “Thank heavens, Charlie Preston knows law! Jane Pellew, what have you done now?”

Jack beside himself was squeezing Ellen’s hand and saying: “Ellen, I am so glad they didn’t take you to jail first. I just know Charlie and I can fix it up with the cop.”

Charlie looked at them in a ruminating manner and murmured: “Too happy-looking for anything to be really the matter. Wish they’d come on and go in to dinner.”

“You are perfectly ridiculous, all of you. Aren’t they, Sergeant Murphy?” and Jane received an understanding wink from that son of the Emerald Isle.

“It was this way,” began Ellen and told of how the big policeman had taken them from shop to shop, and piloted them around all afternoon.

“So when we finished shopping,” broke in[Pg 26] Jane, “I suggested that all of us go to a movie.”

“And a fine picture it was, Mum,” said Sergeant Murphy to Aunt Min, “with that Fairbanks lad abusting things wide open with every foot of reel.”