CHAPTER II.—NEIGHBORS.

Onoway House stood on the Centerville Road, on a farm of about four acres. All of the land was not worked, just the part that was laid out as a garden and a small orchard of peach trees. The rest was open meadow running down to the river. It had originally been a much larger farm—Old Deacon Waterhouse’s place—but after his death it had been divided up and sold in sections. Onoway House was the original home built by the deacon when he bought the farm as a young man. It was a very old place, large and rambling, and full of queer corners and passageways, and a big echoing cobwebby attic, crowded with old furniture and trunks. The house had been sold with all its furnishings at the Deacon’s death, and the old things were still in the rooms when the Bartletts bought it twenty-five years later. This made it unnecessary for the Gardiners, when they came, to bring any of their own furniture. The Bartletts had never lived on the place, hiring a caretaker to work the garden, and it was the sudden departure of this man that had given Migwan her chance.

On either side of Onoway House was a farm of much larger proportions. To the right there stood a big, homelike looking farmhouse painted white, with porches and vines and a lawn in front running down to the road; on the left was a smaller house, painted dark red, with a vegetable bed in front. The garden at Onoway House had been given a good start and the strawberries and asparagus and sundry other vegetables were ready to market when Migwan took possession. The Winnebagos looked on the gardening as a grand lark and pitched in with a will to help Migwan make her fortune from the ground.

“Did you ever see anything half so delicate as this little new pea-vine?” asked Migwan, puttering happily over one of the long beds.

“Or anything half so indelicate as this plantain bush?” asked Nyoda, busily grubbing weeds. “‘Scarce reared above the parent earth thy tender form,’” she quoted, “‘and yet with a root three times as long as the hair of Claire de Lorme!’”

“Burns would relish hearing that line of his applied to weeds,” said Migwan, laughing. “I wonder what he would have written if he had turned up a plantain weed with his plough instead of a mountain daisy.”

“He wouldn’t have turned up a plantain weed,” said Nyoda, with a vicious thrust of the long knife with which she was weeding, “it would have turned him up.”

Migwan rose from the ground slowly and painfully. “Oh dear,” she sighed, “I wonder if Burns ever got as stiff in the joints from close contact with Nature as I am?”

“He certainly must have,” observed Nyoda, straining her muscles to uproot the weedy homesteader, “haven’t you ever heard the slogan, ‘Omega Oil for Burns?’”

Migwan laughed as she straightened up and held her aching back. “Earth gets its price for what earth gives us,” she quoted, with a mixture of ruefulness and humor.

“Listen to the poetry floating around on the breeze,” cried Sahwah, passing them as she ran the wheel hoe up and down between the rows of plants.

“Come and trip it as you go On the light fantastic _hoe_,”

she sang. “Oh, I say,” she called over her shoulder, “do I have to hoe up the surface of the river around the watercress, too?”

“You certainly do,” said Nyoda gravely, “and while you’re at it just loosen up the air around that air fern of Mrs. Gardiner’s.” Sahwah made a grimace and trundled off with her wheel hoe.

“Are you looking for any field hands?” called a cheery voice. The girls looked up to see a white-haired, pleasant-faced old man of about seventy years standing in the garden. “My name’s Landsdowne, Farmer Landsdowne,” he said by way of introduction, with a friendly smile, which included all the girls at once, “and I’ve come to have a look at the new caretaker.”

“I’m the one,” said Migwan, stepping forward. “My name is Gardiner, and I _am_ a gardener just now.”

“And are all these your sisters?” asked Farmer Landsdowne, quizzically. Migwan laughed and introduced the girls in turn. They all liked Farmer Landsdowne immediately. He walked up and down among the rows of vegetables, and gave Migwan quantities of advice about soil cultivation, insects and diseases and various other things pertaining to gardening, for which she thanked him heartily. “Come over and see us,” he said hospitably, as he took his departure, “I live there,” and he pointed to the friendly looking white house on the right of Onoway House.

“Isn’t he a dear?” said Gladys, when he was gone. “I’m glad he’s our next door neighbor. What do you suppose the people on the other side are like?”

“Red isn’t nearly so pretty as white,” said Hinpoha, squinting at the bare looking house to the left of them. As they looked a man came along the edge of the land on which the red house stood. When he reached the fence which separated the two farms he stood still for a few minutes looking hard at Onoway House; then, seeing that the girls were looking in his direction he turned and went back to the house.

The strawberries were ready to pick the first week that the girls were at Onoway House, and Migwan had an idea about marketing them. She gave each picker two baskets with instructions to put only the largest and finest in one and the medium-sized and small ones in the other.

“What are you going to take them to town in?” asked Gladys. Although there was a large barn on the place there were no horses, for Mr. Mitchell, the last caretaker, had owned his own horse and taken it away with him when he left.

“I’ll have to hire one from some of the neighbors,” said Migwan. Mr. Landsdowne, when interviewed, would have been extremely glad to let them take a horse and wagon, but this was a busy time and one of his teams was sick so none could be spared. Feeling considerably more shy than she had when she went to Mr. Landsdowne, Migwan went over to the red house. As she went around the path to the back door she heard sounds of loud talking in a man’s voice, which ceased as she came up on the porch. A red faced man, (he almost matched the house, thought Migwan) came to the door. “I am your new neighbor, Elsie Gardiner,” said Migwan, “and I wonder if I could hire a horse and wagon from you three times a week to take my vegetables to town.”

“So you’ve come to live on the place, have you?” said the man. “How long are you going to stay?”

“All summer,” replied Migwan. She was not drawn to this man as she was to Farmer Landsdowne. There was something about him that seemed to repel her, although she could not have told what it was.

“Yes, I can let you have a horse and wagon,” he said, after a moment. “When do you want it?”

“In about an hour,” said Migwan.

“I’ll send it over,” said the master of the red house. “My name’s Smalley, Abner Smalley,” he said, as she took her leave.

In an hour the horse was at the door. It was brought over by a pleasant-faced, light-haired lad of about seventeen, who introduced himself as Calvin Smalley.

“You don’t look a bit like your father,” said Migwan.

“That’s not my father,” said Calvin, “that’s my uncle. My father’s dead. He was Uncle Abner’s brother. I live with Uncle Abner and Aunt Maggie. But the farm’s really mine,” he said proudly, as though he did not want anyone to think he was living on charity even though he was an orphan, “for Grandfather willed it to Father. Uncle Abner’s holding it in trust for me until I’m of age.”

There was something so frank and manly about him that the girls liked him at once. But if Calvin Smalley made such a good impression, the horse which he had brought over for the girls to drive to town was less fortunate. He was a hoary, moth-eaten looking creature that might easily have been the first white horse born west of the Mississippi. In looking at him you would be left with a lingering doubt in your mind as to whether he had originally been white or had turned white with age. He tottered so that each step threatened to be his last The wagon to which he was fastened with a patched and rotten harness had probably been on the scene some years before he was born. Migwan was much taken aback when she inspected him. “I wouldn’t dare attempt to drive that beast all the way to town,” she thought to herself. “He’d never get beyond the first bend in the road. And if he did make it he’d go so slowly that my berries would be out of season before I got to my customers.”

“Isn’t he rather—old?” she said, aloud. “I’m afraid he isn’t able to work much.”

Calvin blushed fiery red and his eyes sought the ground in distress. “It’s a shame,” he said, fiercely, “to try to hire out such a horse. I don’t blame you for not wanting it.” Without another word he climbed into the wagon and urged the feeble horse back to his home pasture.

“Didn’t you feel sorry for that poor boy?” said Migwan. “He felt ashamed clear down to his shoes at having to bring that old wreck of a horse over. I should have died if I had been in his place. He’s such a nice looking boy, too. I suppose his uncle is one of those stingy, grasping farmers who work everybody to death on the place. Anybody who plants vegetables in his front yard must be stingy. That horse probably couldn’t work on the farm any more so he thought he would make some money out of it by hiring it to us. He must have thought girls didn’t know a horse when they saw one. I didn’t exactly fall in love with Mr. Smalley when I went over. He wasn’t a bit friendly like Mr. Landsdowne.”

“I foresee where we will have little to do with our neighbors in the Red House,” said Sahwah. “I’m sorry, because I like to have lots of people to visit, and like to have them running in at odd times, the way Mr. Landsdowne appeared.”

“Let’s not have any hard feelings against Calvin Smalley, though,” said Migwan. “He isn’t to blame for his uncle’s stinginess. I dare say he isn’t very happy over there. Let’s have him over as often as we can.”

“Spoken like a true Winnebago,” said Nyoda, approvingly.

“But in the meantime,” said Migwan, in perplexity, “what are we going to do for a horse and wagon to take our things to town?”

“Why not use our car?” said Gladys. The machine she had come in was still in the barn at Onoway House. “It’s a good thing I learned to run the big one—father said I might use it all summer if I would be a good girl and stay at home when they went out west.”

“Could we get everything in?” asked Migwan.

“I think so,” said Gladys, “if we arrange them carefully.” The berries and asparagus were loaded into the back of the machine and Gladys and Migwan drove off.

“What shall we do now, Nyoda?” asked Hinpoha, after the two girls were gone.

“I know what I’m going to do,” said Nyoda, moving in the direction of her bedroom. “Now,” she said, as she threw herself on the bed with a great yawn and stretch, “if anyone asks you what kind of a farmer I am you may tell them that I’m a retired one!” Nyoda had been up since four o’clock that morning, and was unused to such early rising. Hinpoha drew down the shade to shut out the strong sunlight and tiptoed from the room.

Gladys and Migwan stopped first at a large grocery store to inquire the prices of strawberries and asparagus. The proprietor offered to buy the whole load, but they would not sell, as they could get more for them by peddling them at retail prices. Migwan examined the berries in the store, and mentally fixed her middle grade berries at the same price with them, and her finest grade ones at three cents higher.

“I’ve an idea,” said Gladys, “that some of mother’s friends would take the berries at our own price.” Thus it was that Mrs. Davis, whose speculations about the financial standing of the Evans family had resulted in Gladys’s mother giving her such an elaborate party the winter before, was surprised by a call from Gladys at ten o’clock in the morning.

“Ah, good morning, my dear,” she said effusively, seating Gladys in the parlor, “you have come to spend the day, I hope? Caroline is not up yet—she was out late last night—but I shall make her get up right away.”

“Please don’t call Caroline,” said Gladys, “it’s you I came to see.”

“Oh, yes,” purred Mrs. Davis, “a message from your mother, I see.”

Gladys came to the point directly. “Have you canned your strawberries yet, Mrs. Davis?”

“No,” replied Mrs. Davis, a little puzzled by the question.

“Would you like to buy some extra fine ones?” continued Gladys.

“Why, yes, I suppose so,” said Mrs. Davis, “who has any for sale?”

“I have,” said Gladys, “right out here in the machine.” Mrs. Davis bought the whole eight quarts of large berries, paying fifteen cents a quart straight, and ordered another eight quarts as soon as they should be ripe. She also took two bunches of asparagus.

“Whatever are you doing, Gladys Evans?” she asked, curiously. “Peddling berries?”

Gladys laughed at her evident mystification, and tingled with a desire to keep her guessing. “We decided that I had better work this summer,” she said, gravely, “so I am peddling berries for a friend of ours who is a farmer. We will have to go on a farm ourselves, father said, if things to eat get much dearer, so I am getting the practice. Wouldn’t you like to be a regular customer, and have me bring you fresh vegetables and fruit three times a week all through the summer?”

“Why, yes,” stammered Mrs. Davis in a daze, “of course, certainly.”

“All right, then,” said Gladys, “I’ll put you down.” She drove off in high glee, and Mrs. Davis went into the house with a knowing smile on her face. So the Evanses were losing money after all, and Gladys was working this summer instead of traveling. Poor Gladys! She flew up-stairs to communicate the news to her energetic daughter Caroline who was just beginning to think about getting up. “I do feel so sorry for poor Gladys,” she said. “You must be very kind to her whenever you meet her.”

The rest of the berries and vegetables were disposed of to other friends of Gladys’s and Migwan’s, all for topnotch prices, and there were at least half a dozen names in the little note book when they started homeward, of people who wanted to be supplied regularly. To some of her friends Gladys told frankly whose fruit she was selling, and enlisted their sympathies in the enterprise, while to others, like the Davises and the Joneses, who were thorough snobs, she could not resist pretending that she was actually working for a farmer to earn money. She could not remember when she had enjoyed anything so much as the expressions on the various faces when she made her little speech at the door and offered her basket of fruit for inspection. “Wait until I tell dad about it,” she chuckled to Migwan.

When they returned to Onoway House they found that during their absence the girls, with the help of Mr. Landsdowne, had constructed a raft about seven feet square, which they were setting afloat on the river. “Oh, what fun!” cried Migwan when she saw it. “We needed another rapid vessel to go boating in. There’s only one rowboat and we could never all go out at once. What shall we call it?”

“Let’s name it the Tortoise,” said Hinpoha, “and call the rowboat the Hare.”

“Oh, no,” said Sahwah, “let’s call it the Crab, because it travels sort of sidewise.” Hinpoha held out for her name and Sahwah would not yield hers.

“Contest of arms!” cried Nyoda. “Decide the question by a test of physical prowess. Whichever one of you can pole the raft straight across the river and back again without mishap in the shortest time may have the privilege of naming it. Is that fair?”

“It is!” cried all the girls. Hinpoha and Sahwah, dressed in their bathing-suits, prepared for the contest. Hinpoha had the first trial because she had spoken first. Getting onto the raft and seizing the stout pole, she pushed off from the shore. It was difficult to keep the unwieldy craft going toward the opposite bank, because it had a strong inclination to be carried down-stream with the current. Halfway across she grounded on a rock and stood marooned. Sahwah watched the moments tick off on Nyoda’s watch with ill-concealed delight while Hinpoha pushed and strained on the pole to set the raft free. Finally she leaned all her weight, which was no small item, on the pole and shoved with her feet against the raft. It freed itself and glided away under her feet, leaving her clinging to the pole in the middle of the river, while her solid footing of a few moments ago swung into the current and floated off beyond her reach. She looked so comical clinging to the pole, which was fast losing its upright position under her weight, that the girls were unable to help her for laughter, and a minute later she plunged into the river with a mighty splash and swam disgustedly to shore.

“Our new boat will not be called the TORTOISE, it seems,” said Nyoda. “Cheer up, Hinpoha, you have made yourself more immortal by the picture you presented hanging over the water than you would have by naming the raft. As Hinpoha, the Polehanger, you will have your portrait in the Winnebago Hall of Fame. Now then, Sahwah, show her how it should be done.”

Sahwah, ever more skilful in watercraft than Hinpoha, poled the raft neatly across the stream to the opposite shore, paused a moment to see that the feat was properly registered by the judges, and then started back. Unlike Hinpoha, who forged blindly ahead, she felt carefully with her pole to locate the points of the rocks and then avoided them. “Here I come,” she hailed, when she was nearly back to the starting point, “on my new raft, the CRAB.” Striking a heroic attitude with arms crossed and one foot out ahead of the other she stepped to the edge of the raft, when the floating floor tipped under her weight and she lost her balance and fell head first into the water. The raft, released from her guiding hand, went off with the current as it had done before. The look of stupefaction on her face when she came up out of the water was even funnier than the sight of Hinpoha marooned on the pole.

“The raft will not be named the CRAB, either, it seems,” said Nyoda.

“I don’t care what it’s called,” said Sahwah, her temper up, “I’m going to pole that raft across the river.”

“So’m I,” said Hinpoha, her eye gleaming with resolution.

“Let’s do it together,” said Sahwah.

Thanks to Sahwah’s skill with the pole and Hinpoha’s judicious balancing of the raft at the right places, they made the trip over and back without mishap.

“Two heads are better than one,” said Sahwah, as they landed, “what neither of us could do alone we can do in combination.”

“Then why not combine the names?” said Nyoda. “You have each won equal rights in the contest.”

“Good idea,” said Sahwah. “We couldn’t find a better one than the Tortoise-Crab.” So the name was painted across the floor of the raft, this being the only space big enough.

Delighted with their new sport, the girls spent the whole evening on the river, all five Winnebagos and Betty and Tom on the raft at once, floating down-stream with the current and being towed up again by the rowboat. It was bright moonlight, and the air was full of romance. At one place along the riverbank there stood a high rock, grey on the moonlit side and black on the other. “It reminds me of the Lorelei Rock,” said Nyoda.

“Let’s play Lorelei,” said Sahwah.

“What do you mean?” asked Nyoda.

“Why,” answered Sahwah, “let Hinpoha climb up on the rock and comb her hair and sing, and we come along on the raft and listen to her song and run into the rock and upset. We want to go swimming before we go to bed anyhow.”

“I can’t sing,” objected Hinpoha.

“That doesn’t make any difference,” said Sahwah, “sing anyway.”

So Hinpoha mounted the moonlit rock and shook her long, red hair down over her shoulders, combing it out with her sidecomb and singing “Fairy Moonlight,” while the raft floated lazily down-stream toward the base of the cliff, its passengers sitting in attitudes of enraptured listening, and pointing ecstatically to the figure silhouetted against the moon. Sahwah adroitly steered the raft toward the rock and it struck with a great jar. It disobligingly kept its balance, however, and refused to upset. Sahwah deliberately rolled off the edge, tipping it as she did so, and the rest went off on all sides, giggling and splashing in the water. Hinpoha on the rock above wrung her hands in mock horror at the effect of her song. That instant a figure came running at top speed along the river bank. “I’ll save you, girls,” he shouted, jumping into the water with all his clothes on. Catching hold of Migwan, who was hanging on to the raft, he pulled her out of the water and set her on the shore. It was Calvin Smalley, their neighbor from the Red House.

“Oh,” gasped Migwan, trying not to laugh at him, “I thank you ever so much, but we’re not really drowning. We upset the raft on purpose.”

“Upset it on purpose!” said Calvin, in astonishment.

“Yes,” answered Migwan, “we were playing Lorelei, you know.”

Then Calvin noticed for the first time that the victims of the upset were all dressed in bathing-suits, and that they seemed to be very much at home in the water. “It looked like a dreadful smashup,” he said, “and I forgot that the river isn’t very deep here. Do you generally play such quiet games?”

“Sometimes we play much more quiet ones,” said Sahwah meaningly.

“It was too bad to frighten you so,” said Nyoda. “We’ll have to warn spectators the next time we do anything. We’ll have to have a flag that says ‘Stunt coming; look out for the splash!’ and whoever runs may read.” At this moment Hinpoha jumped from the rock, out into the middle of the stream, where it was deep, swam under water toward the bank, and came up suddenly beside Calvin so that he was quite startled.

“Say,” he said, looking around at the group of girls who were doing various astonishing things, “do you belong to the circus?”

The girls laughed at this inquiry. “Oh, no,” said Migwan, “we are only Camp Fire Girls.”

“Camp Fire Girls?” said Calvin. “I’ve heard of them, but I never knew any. Is that why you call each other by such funny names?”

“Yes,” answered Migwan, and she told him their names and their meanings.

“It must be great fun to be a Camp Fire Girl,” said Calvin thoughtfully.

“Come for a ride on the raft with us,” said Migwan, “we are going back now. We aren’t going to upset again,” she added reassuringly, “and if we did you couldn’t get any wetter.” Calvin smiled at the pleasantry, but said he must be going in. He was on his way home when he saw the raft upset. The Lorelei Rock was just on the other side of the Smalley farm. He bade them a friendly good-night, promising to come over to Onoway House soon, and took his way home across the fields.

“What a nice boy he is,” said Migwan. “He wasn’t a bit cross when he found that the joke was on him, as some would have been.”

Migwan woke up in the night and could not go to sleep again immediately. As she lay smiling to herself about the fun they had had with the raft that evening, she heard a sound as of something dropped on the attic floor above her room, followed by a faint creaking as of someone walking over bare boards. She clutched Hinpoha’s arm and woke her up. “There’s someone in the attic,” she whispered. Hinpoha yawned.

“I don’t hear anything,” she said.

“There it is again,” said Migwan, “listen.” Again there came a faint creak, accompanied by a far-away rustle as of crinkling paper.

“It’s mice,” said Hinpoha, “or maybe rats. They get between the walls and make noises that way.”

Migwan breathed a sigh of relief and composed herself to slumber again. “I suppose these dreadfully old houses are just overrun with things of that kind,” she said. “But for a moment it did give me a scare.”