Part 10

Pat's face reflected Aunt Pen's seriousness. "I just ought to feel sorry for her 'cause she hasn't a mother and a daddy and an Aunt Pen like I have! But, oh, I don't want to ever look another piece of chocolate candy in the face again! And I'm as broke as broke can be and have spent even my Victory money and I'll have to draw more from 'LaDue and Everett' to meet my pledge and save all this month to pay it back," with a groan. "But, Aunt Pen, will we have the sugar-camp picnic just the same?"

"We surely will," smiled Aunt Pen, folding the dress back into its box, "and a good time, too!"

So Pat quickly forgot Angeline's insults, her abused stomach and her empty pocketbook in a happy anticipation of the day in the woods at Hill-top with the boys and girls who were her "really worth-while friends."

*CHAPTER XVIII*

*FOR HIS COUNTRY*

"Paddy! Pad-dy Quinn! You get _right straight_ out of there!" The cry came from Sheila. Returning from school she had spied, as she turned into her walk, Paddy digging among her mother's precious tulips.

Sheila threw her books inside the kitchen door, taking pains to notice that the room was empty, and then went back to punish the culprit. Paddy lay crouched on the ground watching her with bright eyes and wagging his stub of a tail in a way that was anything but repentant!

Perhaps the only thing that Mrs. Quinn loved more than Paddy, except of course her Sheila and her Denny and her Matt and her Dare, were the bulbs that grew each spring in the little border bed along the old fence. Her tulips always put their tiny green leaves up through the earth long before any other tulips; they were always bigger and brighter and seemed almost human, the way they nodded on their silvery green stalks and leaned toward one another as though repeating, like old gossips the stories the robins sang over their heads. Each fall Mrs. Quinn carefully covered them over and each spring, at the first feel of warmth in the sunshine, she watched daily for the tiny green tips, as a mother might watch for the return of a long absent son.

The children shared her interest, too--they could not be her children if they did not love the flowers and birds and sunshine that made their living joyous! The fairy stories she had taught them in their babyhood, as she had rocked them in her loving arms, had made the familiar things about them have a magic of their own; the old clock in the corner was not ugly because elves lived in it by day and pranced from its old case at night; a fairy princess had her fairy-palace in the nearby tree tops, a prince hid in the wood box, the nodding posies that always budded and grew wherever Mrs. Quinn lived, were the souls of sprites and at night danced about under the star-light; the dew that could be found on the blades of grass in the early morning were the jewels that they dropped in their haste to flee back to hiding from the approaching dawn!

Trouble had been a frequent visitor in this magic household but the only mark it ever left was an added line in the corner of Mrs. Quinn's smiling lips, made by long night struggles over the dilapidated book which contained the family accounts. Even when left a widow with four children to bring up, she did not lose one bit of the optimism that, years before, had made the whole world her Denny's and hers for the conquering! Her Denny had been taken from her before any one of the dreams they had dreamed had come true; still, for her, he lived on in her Sheila and the three small boys who had red hair and blue eyes like the father, and she still dreamed the old dreams for them. "There was no cloud so dark but that it had its bright lining somewhere" was the brave philosophy with which she directed her household, and the meals that were often frugal she made cheery with some loving nonsense. The sacrifices Sheila had to make as she grew older were nothing because she knew her mother made them, too, and there was comfort in the sense of sharing. The summer before Mrs. Quinn had taken the old brick house, fashionable in its day, comfortable now, even in its shabbiness, and had rented its rooms to lodgers. With careful economy this slender income would keep them comfortable until the day, to which Sheila always looked forward, when she herself could earn money and give to the boys the advantages of education that she would not ask for herself. To her her own little ambitions were as nothing compared to the big things that must be done for the boys so that they would grow into great men!

Paddy had become, immediately upon his adoption, a favored member of the family. He had privileges, too, and these increased as he willed because, from the mother down, not one of them could speak crossly to what little Dare called "the orphing dog." He slept in a box near the stove when he was not stretched across the foot of one of the boy's beds; he ate from a plate under the chair in the corner, a spot of his own choosing, from which he could watch the course of the family meal and ask for a second helping when he wished. He shared the rise and fall of the family fortunes--a bit of liver when the rest had chicken, a good bone on a holiday, a new collar when Matt found, on the walk before the house, a crisp five-dollar bill that had no owner.

Though, as a dog--especially an "orphing" dog Paddy measured in good manners up to the average, he had occasionally, during the winter, fallen into deep disgrace. Time and again he had been found digging vigorously in the back yard. Both Mrs. Quinn and Sheila had protested violently! The bulbs were there and, too, it was Sheila's precious war-garden--the best in the troop! Paddy had been punished--severely for the Quinns; in spite of this he was found again and again at his mischief.

"Oh, dear, he'll ruin everything," Sheila had cried, eying the havoc Paddy had worked. The more the snow melted from the ground the more determined Paddy seemed to dig his way straight through to China!

Then Mrs. Quinn had made the ultimatum! The children heard it with worried faces; Paddy listened, disturbed, from the stove behind which, after a chastisement, he had taken refuge.

"If we find him at it _once more_ he'll go straight to the pound! I'm _not going_ to have my bulbs ruined!" And Mrs. Quinn had turned resolutely away from the dismay and grief she saw in four young faces.

Sheila knew that her mother had meant what she said. That was why, on this day, she had peeped into the kitchen before she went back to Paddy. If no one had seen him then he might have just one more chance!

"You're a _bad, bad_ dog!" she said, advancing threateningly upon the culprit.

But Paddy barked protestingly. His whole manner seemed to say: "I'm through now. See what I've found!" And between his paws he held a small tin tube, badly discolored from long contact with the earth.

As Sheila leaned over he jumped upon her, then pawed the ground where the tube lay.

"What have you got? Don't you dare bury that in the tulip bed!" But he barked so hard in protest that Sheila gingerly picked up his treasure.

Under her fingers it came apart and from it dropped three folded slips of paper.

"For goodness sake!" cried Sheila, almost frightened. She smoothed them out; except for a slightly mouldy smell they were in good condition and the writing upon them could be easily read.

They were the lost formulas!

"_Mother! Mother! Mother!_" With one bound Sheila was in the house confronting her mother who had come up from the cellar, panting with alarm.

"_Paddy's found 'em! Paddy's found 'em!_" And she threw her arms about her mother's neck in a hug that swept the two of them straight into the big rocker!

"Sheila Quinn, are you _loony_? What _have_ you got? And _do_ stop that dog's barking!"

"Oh, mumsey, it's the lost formulas--they were buried in the tulip bed! _That's_ what Paddy's been digging for--all this time!"

The two spread the papers out on the table and read them over and over.

"Don't they sound _dreadful_! Just's if they'd explode all by themselves!" whispered Sheila, recalling what Mr. Everett had said about the formulas.

So giving Paddy a warm hug by way of tribute Sheila put the formulas back in the tin tube and started forth to find Mr. Everett, to tell him the whole story. All through the winter the loss of the formulas had worried Mr. Everett. His experts had been working over the experiments again and in time would, of course, have made new formulas; it was the fear, however, that some other government already possessed the secret that had troubled, not only the officials of the Everett Works, but the United States government as well. So that when Sheila, with Aunt Pen, Pat and Renee, burst into the office with the wonderful news, Mr. Everett felt as though a great load was rolling off his shoulders!

A curious gathering inspected the dirty tube and listened to the story; Mr. Everett and his staff, some secret service men, two chemists from the experimental laboratory, in their long white coats, some workmen who were passing the door and had been attracted by the exclamations--and the girls. Mr. Everett questioned Sheila closely. She recalled that Paddy had--all winter long--barked a great deal at night, so much so that after awhile the family grew accustomed to it and did not notice it.

"Marx buried it--intending to go later and dig it up! The man was smart enough to know that if they'd been found on his possession nothing could have saved him. It was a lucky thing they kept him locked up so long! Your dog has done good work, Miss Sheila!"

Mr. Everett then, turning the tube over and over in his hands, said to one of the others in a low tone:

"After all--perhaps the best service we could do for our country and the world would be to bury it again--where it would lie forever and ever!"

That night, for the second time, Mr. Everett, with Pat, came to the Quinn kitchen. But this time he was accompanied by Aunt Pen and Renee, too. They made a very loud noise at the doorstep, as though dragging to the door some heavy object. Mr. Everett insisted that the three small Quinns must stay up and to make it certain drew little Dare to his knee.

"We're going to have a regular ceremony," declared Pat so solemnly that Mrs. Quinn nervously fell to lighting more gas jets and Sheila sent Matt off to the sink to wash the jam from his face.

"We must decorate Mr. Paddy Quinn for distinguished service," Pat finished. So the boys with shouts dragged Paddy from his basket--for Paddy believed in an early bed-hour--and set him in the centre of the merry circle. Thereupon Mr. Everett produced a handsome collar decorated with a red, white and blue bow and allowed Dare to fasten it about the shaggy neck. Everyone laughed at the comical picture Paddy made in his gay decoration! Then a knock came at the door and in trooped Peggy and Keineth, trying to look as though they had not known what had been happening!

Mr. Everett rose with much seriousness. "And now that everyone is here I want to present _another_ badge of honor, that has been left in my keeping!" Sheila guessed what was coming! She threw one wildly happy look toward her mother and then stood quite still, blushing. Mr. Everett drew from his pocket the flat tissue-paper package, unwrapped it, and held up the badge of the Golden Eaglet.

"It gives me profound pleasure to return this to Miss Sheila Quinn! May she always keep and give to others, too, her sense of a true scout's honor! It is one of the strongest weapons we can carry!"

His voice was so earnest and the eyes he fixed on Sheila so full of sincere respect and admiration that the laughter in the room suddenly died. As Pat said afterwards: "It was just as though Sheila was a knight and was starting out on some crusade!" And Mrs. Quinn, who knew something of the weapons one needed to fight the battles of life, choked down a catch in her throat and Aunt Pen whispered something under her breath with a look that was like a caress for Sheila!

Then the girls opened the door and revealed a tub of ice cream on the threshold; while two of them were lifting it out of the ice Pat brought in and opened a big box full of dewy-wet pink roses.

Keineth went to the piano and played so that "the fairies danced," and then everyone sang--Dare, holding tightly to one of Mr. Everett's hands, almost splitting his throat in his effort to express his joy!

"_Such_ an evening!" said Mrs. Quinn as she closed the door behind the last guest. "And who'd have ever thought of it at six o'clock and you, Matty, with your elbow out of your sleeve! Well, well, I guess _those_ good folks don't mind a thing like that!"

"_Mother--look!_" Sheila had gone to the roses and had leaned over them to whisper good-night into the fragrant petals. And there, hidden among the leaves, she had found a small envelope addressed to "Miss Sheila Quinn."

She opened it quickly. "Oh, _Mumsey_!" she cried. For before her amazed eyes she unfolded a check for two hundred dollars!

And with it was just one short line.

"As a small token of appreciation for Paddy's services I present this to his mistress, begging her to do with it whatever she wants most in the world."

"Mumsey--the music!" Sheila ran to the piano, which had been scarcely touched during the long winter. With ecstatic fingers she ran up and down the scale.

And Mrs. Quinn, watching her girl with happy, misty eyes, seeing in the young face a look of the father who had gone on, and the glow of the rosy dreams she had used to dream in her own girlhood, thought it the most beautiful music in the world!

*CHAPTER XIX*

*A LETTER FROM FRANCE*

"A letter for you, Miss Renee!" and Jasper laid down at Renee's elbow a square, bluish envelope with a foreign postmark.

From time to time Renee and Mr. Everett had received cards from Renee's guardian--but this was a fat envelope! Aunt Pen reached eagerly for it and turned it over and over in her fingers. Whereupon Pat nodded to Renee, as much as to say: "The plot thickens! The mystery clears!"

"What fun to have it come on a nasty, rainy day like this!" she declared aloud. "Let's take it to the Eyrie and read it very slowly so's to make it last a _long_ time!"

"Renee may want to read her own letter by herself, Pat," laughed Aunt Pen, looking as happy as though the letter had come straight to her.

"Oh, _no_, please! Let's do what Pat says! And _you_ read it, aloud, Aunt Pen!"

So the fat envelope was carried to the Eyrie and Aunt Pen sat down in the one sound chair while Pat and Renee stretched out on the floor at her feet. And as Aunt Pen began to read no one minded the rain beating in torrents against the Eyrie windows!

"My dear little girl and all her good friends, the Everetts," the letter began. "Because I am confined by an inconsiderate doctor to a very small bed in a very big room in what, in the sixteenth century, used to be a monastery and is now one of the best of the American base hospitals--though I wish the window was bigger so it could let in a little more sunshine to warm these ancient walls--I have time at last to write to you a real letter. Since I returned from God's country I have been continually on the jump. I got back to the boys just in time to fire one last shot at the Jerrys, though it was a waste of good honest steel, for they were running faster than even a bullet could go. After the armistice they sent us almost directly up to the Rhine. Somehow, now that I've got the time to write, and a fairly good pen, I can't seem to find the words that will describe to you just how we men felt when we knew we were there--at the old Rhine--the way we'd talked and sung about back in the training camp. Things were not tedious--not for a moment--and we were as busy as ever and constantly on the alert that Jerry didn't slip anything over us. And then just when I was getting used to the eternal rain and mud and the Germanness of everything--and good honest, sheets, too, on a regular old grandmother's feather bed--I was ordered back with a detachment to Le Mans.

"And now, Renee, I must tell you a little story. It is about a poor French soldier I found in one of the many small villages not far from Valenciennes. We were going back in lorries, one had broken down and that held us up for a couple of hours. Some of us were prowling around for souvenirs. (By the way I am sending a German helmet to you by mail. Turn it upside down, fill it with earth and plant flowers in it--that'll redeem it.) To go back to my story--I happened upon a very old man digging in a strip of a back yard that looked the way one of our streets home look when they're paving it and putting sewers through--it was back of what had been a cottage only the roof and two of the walls were gone. I asked him for a drink and he took me to the one room that was whole to give me some of the wine which--he told me proudly--he had hidden months before, and there I found his very old wife and a young French soldier. The Frenchman would not talk to me at all, just stared and shrank away as though he was frightened. I shall never forget how the poor fellow looked, a bag of bones, hollowed eyes that burned in his white face and an empty sleeve. The old man told me the boy's story, then, and with the knowledge of French I have picked up I was able to put it together. He had been released from a German prison, he had had to walk back with other French prisoners, but because he had had his arm amputated in the prison and had had a long run of fever and was half starved he had not been able to keep up with the others and had dropped behind. The old peasant had found him lying by the road, raving in delirium. There had been a nasty wound on his forehead, too, as though back in the prison camp some Jerry had struck him over the head. The old couple had taken him in and for weeks and weeks had nursed him as best they could, keeping him alive with their precious wine. His fever had gone, the wound had healed, his strength had begun to slowly return, but he could not remember one single thing of what had happened nor tell who he was--that blow had wiped everything out of his mind! He was like a little child. But the shock of seeing me started something working in his brain; he stared and stared, after a little he got up his courage to feel of my face and of my uniform--and then of his own uniform--or the rags and tatters of what had been a good French uniform, and I think at that moment blessed memory began to return!

"To make a long story short I just took him along on the lorry to Paris and put him in a hospital there under expert care and now he's as sane as he ever was and says he can remember the German doctor who struck him and wants to go back and find him! But I told him that a higher Justice was going to settle all those scores and that he was going back to America with me--when I go. That is why I am telling you the story; I know your kind little heart that is part French will find pity and affection for this poor fellow who has suffered so much that little girls like you might go on living happy safe lives in a good world, and you will be kind to him when I bring him home with me.

"Home--Renee, it seems so funny for me to think of a home! I used to dream of having one but I have found out some dreams don't come true, and since then I've just wandered from one country to another building bridges and railroads and such things. But I feel tired now and I think when I go back I'll fix over an old house I own in a little town up in the Adirondack mountains, and we'll go there and we'll be happy, or at least I promise I'll see that you are happy. And we'll keep the French soldier I've adopted as long as he will stay, won't we?

"When I was in Paris I went down and spent a whole day with Susette and Gabriel. They are well, Gabriel's rheumatism is better, and he declares it is the slippers you sent him--he wears them all the time. They are happy getting their garden ready, and the florists in Paris are placing more orders for violets than before the war. Prosperity shines in every wrinkle in Susette's face. She pointed out to me where she has hung the Stars and Stripes alongside of the Tri-color and told me that I must tell you. Your picture was in a place of honor on the shelf under the Madonna and there was over it a tiny wreath of waxed snowdrops which Susette says she made herself. I looked at the picture and I said to myself: 'Bill Allan, that big girl with the very nice eyes is your ward, given into your care by the bravest lad you ever knew--see that you live up to the charge with the best that's in you!' That was the vow I made in front of your picture, Renee.

"Some day when we've saved enough money we'll go back and visit Susette. But she's happy, Renee--the way we're all happy over here--the fighting is over!

"You and I can never thank the Everetts for all they have done for us. I bless the Fate that brought that very lively Miss Pat into the Red Cross office for I'll admit right at that moment I didn't know what to do with you! I think that in a few weeks I'll be sent back to America and then I will try to tell them how grateful we are..."

The letter concluded with a brief description of the hospital and its beautiful, cloistered grounds where, long before, monks had found rest from the world's strife. But not one of the three listened; Aunt Pen's thoughts, even while her lips went on framing the words of the letter, were back, repeating over and over--"I used to dream of having a home but I found out some dreams can't come true!" and, as she finished and folded the letter, her eyes, staring out over the wet housetops, saw vividly again the college campus and the old stone bench under a spreading elm where she and another had talked about that very house in the Adirondacks!

"It _is_ my Will!" she murmured almost aloud. But for once Pat was too concerned with her own worry to notice her Aunt Pen's absorption!

"I think it's just _mean_ in him to say he's coming over here and take Renee away to some old place--we _won't_ let her go!" she exploded.

A little dread of this same thing was disturbing Renee! Though she had in the long trip across the sea learned to respect and trust her new guardian, and, because Emile had placed her under his care, would always feel a strong loyalty for him, she shrank a little from the thought of leaving these kind friends and going to a strange home. Aunt Pen, coming with an effort back from her own dreams, read what was passing in both Pat's and Renee's minds.

"Let's not worry, girlies! I know everything is going to turn out just the way that will make everyone happy--when Capt. Allan returns!"

Now Pat suddenly grew suspicious!

"You speak _just as though_ you knew something we didn't know, Penelope Everett! What _is_ it? _Did_ you know Renee's guardian before? You've _got_ to tell us every thing!" And Pat, a vision in her mind of romance and mystery unfolded at last, knelt before Aunt Pen and rested her elbows upon Aunt Pen's knees with an air that said: "I'm ready now to hear the whole story!"

But Aunt Pen's face, rosy red, did not suggest the secret sorrow that Pat had liked to imagine! She laughingly pushed Pat away.

"What an old teaser you are! Yes, this _is_ the same Will Allan I knew! He used to tell me, sometimes, of the old house in the mountains which an aunt had left him. Then he went to South America to build a bridge or something! There's nothing more to tell!"

Pat was visibly disappointed.

"Well, anyway, will you promise to keep him from separating Ren and me?" she begged.

Aunt Pen slipped the letter back into its envelope.