The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp Part 11

The doctor started. He had heard a stealthy step on the porch below.

"You will not think me impertinent if I ask you not to talk?" he said.

"Just a few more hours' quiet and you'll be quite fit. I'm going to leave you a moment."

Miss Campbell gave him a good natured smile. She liked his fine face and his clear brown eyes.

"Very well, doctor," she said. "I see you know your business. I'll be obedient."

Taking the lamp he went downstairs.

It could hardly be the gray-eyed Billie and her friends returning, he argued. They would never come creeping back in that stealthy manner.

"Well, who is it?" he called in a low voice.

Mrs. Lupo came out of the shadows and stood before him.

"Lady going die?" she asked in a terrified whisper.

"Pretty ill, but she's coming around."

The woman looked vastly relieved.

"Young lady know?"

"She has never come back."

Mrs. Lupo raised both hands in a gesture of despair.

"The marsh--I never told--I'm wicked woman!" she exclaimed.

"Good heavens!" said the doctor, "you mean to say you sent them through that bog? It's full of suck holes. You have done enough wickedness for one day. Where is your husband? Hurry up, quick. Wake up the villagers.

Get lanterns. Go find them!"

Mrs. Lupo seized a lantern from the gallery.

"I go myself," she said, and disappeared. All that night Mrs. Lupo searched Table Top. She knew the trail as intimately as the mountain girl, but at dawn she had found nothing. But as the light spread over the marsh, she saw something lying on the very edge of the most dangerous quicksand in the place. It was Nancy's hobble skirt.

"Oh, oh!" groaned the poor woman over and over with a kind of savage chant. "Oh, oh! I'm punished now."

Rolling the skirt into a bundle she turned her face from Sunrise Camp and disappeared in the pine forests.

About an hour after Mrs. Lupo had left the camp, the doctor heard the noise of hurrying footsteps on the gallery at the front and hastening downstairs he found Ben Austen and his guide.

"Miss Campbell--how has she stood it? Is she all right?" demanded Ben breathlessly.

"Not so loud," answered the doctor. Then he told Ben in a few words what had happened. "She doesn't even know you have been lost," he said.

While the two men were talking together in whispers, the girl looked about her with much curiosity. Was she in a palace? The high roof, the rugs and chairs were things new to her. And this was called a "camp"!

What was the inside of a real house like, she wondered.

"That virago!" she heard Ben say. "No wonder she drives Lupo to drink.

This young lady here has saved us all and guided me back through the swamp." He indicated the barefooted girl. "I suppose we would have been there yet if she hadn't heard us call."

"You must sit down," said the doctor kindly. "I'll just have a look at my patient and then help this young man get some supper. Your name is--?"

"Phoebe," she answered, shrinking with shyness.

"Phoebe what?"

"I have no other name."

Phoebe had been accustomed all her life to the courtesy and gentleness of one man, her father. The few others she had known were rough mountaineers, and here was she, barefooted and ragged, treated like a princess by two men.

While the doctor fried ham and eggs, the staple of every camp, Ben made a pot of tea, and presently drew up a table in front of her and placed on it a tray set as neatly as he knew how. Phoebe watched the proceedings with wide frightened eyes. She tried to hide her bare feet under her ragged dress and to draw down the sleeves over her hands, brown and stained with blackberry juice. Later, when they had made her a bed on one of the divans and left her to sleep until daylight, she was too bewildered to say good-night.

All her life Phoebe had lived in the little mountain cabin. She had never known a mother and she had never had a friend. Her father had taught her many things, however, and one was to read from the books on the shelf. There were several books on astronomy; Pilgrim's Progress; the Bible; a volume of Shakespeare; a history of England; a translation of the "Iliad", and some volumes of poetry:--Keats, Tennyson and Browning. Where her father had got these books and the silver and the blue china, she knew no more than he. He had tried and tried to remember, but he had forgotten. He had no ident.i.ty, no past. His name, his family, everything connected with his early life had gone. His past life had stopped when he had gone for a physician. He had taught his little girl to read, as we have said, and when old enough she had often read aloud in the long winter evenings. He had seemed to listen with absorbed interest, but it is difficult to say how much he grasped of the words he heard, or whether they were mere words to him with no collective significance.

With a certain instinct left to him from that mysterious dead past, he had imparted to his daughter an unmistakable refinement of speech and manner. About some things he was even fastidious,--her way of eating, the appearance of the table and the silver. He himself was excessively neat and orderly and had periods of great industry, weaving baskets of sweet gra.s.s and carving wood, not crudely, but with unusual taste, boxes and chalets, napkin rings and figures of animals. Where he had learned these arts his daughter never knew, but she imagined from an old Indian who had lived in the little cabin in the early days and had died when Phoebe was still quite small. As far as a man may be sane whose memory extends back only some eighteen years and who has only one illusion, Phoebe's father was sane. The baskets and woodcarving he and his daughter peddled through the country with success, because they were exceedingly well done, and the money earned was sufficient for their small needs.

Too excited from the unusual events of the night to sleep, Phoebe lay on the divan in the living room and reviewed the mysteries that filled her life. She had a strange smattering of knowledge for a girl of eighteen.

It would seem that she had been gifted with a memory for two since her father had none, and whatever she learned from the row of books on the shelves she remembered. That is, whatever interested her.

She knew the constellations and the planets, and on summer nights had located them in the heavens by means of the book chart. She would point them out to her father, who glanced at them vaguely, smiled and went on playing the zither, his consolation in idle moments.

She had read and re-read the history of England so many times that some of the chapters she could repeat word for word. She understood little of the poetry, but the rhythm of the lines sang in her head, and without knowing the meaning she could repeat in a sing-song voice long poems and sonnets. "Pilgrim's Progress" and the "Iliad" and the New Testament with the Psalms were her solace on the long winter evenings. One after the other she read them with unending pleasure. She would read slowly so as not to finish too soon, as a child nibbles at her sweet cake to make it last the longer, and having finished one volume she would take up another with all the eagerness of one about to plunge into a new book.

Just how much she had gained from the teachings of Christ was hidden deep in her own soul, but we will find later that Phoebe had learned a secret which those who have had the advantage of broad education have often pa.s.sed by.

When at last the first pipings of the birds came to herald the dawn, she rose and went out to the gallery. The last star was fading into the grayness of the sky and already morning was at hand. In the growing light it might be seen that Phoebe had an unusually beautiful face. Her eyes, of very dark blue, were almost black at times; her reddish brown hair, coiled into a thick knot on her neck, grew low on her forehead.

Her features were well molded, her mouth fine and strong, and a full, rounded chin added sweetness to her expression.

Standing in the very spot where she had first seen Billie and Mary, she turned her face toward the east and watched for the sun.

"I believe my prayers are answered," she said.

Some twenty minutes later, seated by Ben in the motor car, she guided him along a mountain road, which led at last to a point near her father's cabin.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE GYPSY COOKS.

"Dearest Papa:" (wrote Billie) "Cousin Helen has entirely recovered from her fright,--anger she calls it. She is not afraid of either of the Lupos, although the dent in the plank where the knife was still standing when we finally did get home will always make me feel trembly. Dr. Hume is making us a visit. Cousin Helen will not hear of his leaving us. She says she will certainly have another attack of heart failure if he goes away, but that it's of a different variety from the last. I think we all have a touch of that kind of heart disease as a matter of fact, boys and girls. He is a wonderful man and has taken us on some beautiful walks over the mountain. Nancy and Percy always stay behind with Cousin Helen, and we are finally beginning to understand that it's as much preference as self-denial. Nancy and I are doing the cooking with some help from Ben and Dr. Hume. It's great fun. We cook on a camp fire outside and not on that wretched little stove, which is like a bad child and never behaves when it is expected to. Ben and Percy wash the dishes. Thank heavens for that. I could never make a living as a scullery maid. It's a dog's life. Elinor and Mary make up our cots and keep things tidy. It is really and truly camping now, and such a relief not to have those Lupos.

But there is trouble about the laundry. n.o.body in these high places will stoop to wash clothes. If you could send us up a strong, fearless girl, it doesn't matter how little she knows, it would be fine. We want her strong to scour pans and wash clothes, and fearless enough to be left at the camp alone when we all go off in the 'Comet' on a picnic.

"The mountain girl who saved us is named Phoebe. Her father is not insane, but he has no memory. His accent might be English. At any rate it's better than ours. n.o.body on the mountain knows anything about them.

An old Indian brought them to the cabin when Phoebe was a baby and took care of them both for several years. The people call the man 'Frenchy,'