The Camp Fire Girls Solve a Mystery Or The Christmas Adventure at Carver House Part 7

"Well, what are you thinking about?" she asked finally, as Justice continued silent.

"I was just thinking," replied Justice gravely, "about the difference in plumage that different climates bring about."

"Whatever made you think about birds?" asked Katherine wonderingly. "You jump from one subject to another like a flea. I don't see how you can keep your mind on your work long enough to invent anything. By the way, how is that thingummy of yours going? You're as mum as an oyster about it."

"Pretty well," replied Justice. "I'm hampered though, by not having the right kind of help, and not being able to get some of the things I need."

Katherine looked at him scrutinizingly. He looked tired and rather worn.

The nonsensical boy had vanished and a man stood in his place, a man with a heavy responsibility on his shoulders. Justice had that way of changing all in an instant from a boy to a man. At times he would go frolicking about the house till you would have sworn he was not a day older than Slim and the Captain; an instant later he was all gravity, and looked every day of his twenty-six years.

Katherine always stood in awe of him whenever that change took place. He seemed so old and wise and experienced then that she felt hopelessly ignorant and childish beside him. She liked him best when he seemed like the other boys.

"What do you think of my Winnebagos?" she asked him, leading him away from the subject of his work. He always got old looking when he talked about it.

"Greatest bunch of girls I ever saw," he replied heartily. "Never came across such an accomplished lot in all my life. Each one's more fun than the next. Hinpoha's a beauty, and Gladys is a dainty fairy, and Sahwah looks like a brown thrush, and Migwan's a regular Madonna. And, say-would you mind telling me how you do it, anyway?"

"Do what?"

"Stick together like that. I thought girls always squabbled among themselves. I never thought they could do things together the way you girls do."

"Camp Fire Girls can do things together!" Katherine informed him with emphasis. "You boys think you're the only ones that know anything about teamwork. Teamwork is our first motto."

"I guess it must be," admitted Justice. "You certainly are a team."

The rest of the "team" came in then, Sahwah and Gladys and Hinpoha, all three arm in arm, and Migwan behind them, pus.h.i.+ng Sylvia in her rolling chair. They settled in a circle before the fireplace, and the talk soon drifted around to Uncle Jasper and his blighted romance. Indeed, Hinpoha had done nothing but talk about it all during dinner. Sylvia, too, was completely taken up with it.

"I love Sylvia Warrington!" she exclaimed fervently. "I am going to have her for my Beloved. I'm glad she had black hair. I adore black hair. And I'm _so_ glad my name is Sylvia, too. I've been pretending that she was my aunt, and that I was named after her. I've been pretending, too, that she taught me to sing, 'Hark, hark, the lark!' Now, when I sing it I always think of her. Wasn't it beautiful, what Uncle Jasper said about her? 'She is like a lark, singing in the desert at dawning!' Oh, I can see it all, the desert, and the sun coming up, and the lark soaring up and singing. I just can't _breathe_, it's so beautiful. And my Beloved is like that!"

A radiant dream light came into her eyes, and she seemed suddenly to have traveled far away from the group by the fire and to be wandering in some far-off land.

"Sylvia is a beautiful name," said Katherine. "For whom are you called?

Was your mother's name Sylvia?" It was the first time any of them had spoken of Sylvia's mother, who they knew must be dead.

Sylvia's eyes lost their dreaminess and she looked up with a merry smile.

"I made it up myself," she said. "I don't know what my first real name was, but when Aunt Aggie got me she named me Aggie, after herself. But Aggie is such a hopelessly unimaginative sort of name. It doesn't make you think of a thing when you say it. You might just as well be named 'Empty' as 'Aggie.' Then once we lived in the same house with a lady who sang, and she used to sing, 'Who is Sylvia?' It was the most _tuneful_ name I'd ever heard, and I wondered and wondered who Sylvia was. But I guess the lady never found out, because she kept right on singing, 'Who is Sylvia?' So one day I said to myself, 'I'll be Sylvia!' Don't you think it's a _fragrant_ name? When I say it I can see festoons of pink rosebuds tied with baby ribbon. I made people call me Sylvia, and that's been my name ever since."

"Oh, you funny child!" said Nyoda, joining in the general laugh at Sylvia's tale of her name.

"But Sylvia," said Sahwah wonderingly, "you said you didn't know what your _first_ real name was before you came to live with your aunt. Didn't your aunt know it?"

"No," replied Sylvia. "You see," she continued, "Aunt Aggie isn't my real aunt. She adopted me when I was a baby."

"Oh-h!" said the Winnebagos in surprise.

"But why do you call her 'aunt'?" asked Sahwah. "Why don't you call her 'mother'?"

"She never would have it," replied Sylvia. "She always taught me to call her Aunt Aggie. I don't know why."

Sylvia moved restlessly in her chair, and from the folds of the loose dressing gown which she wore a picture tumbled out. Katherine picked it up and laid it back on her lap. It was a small colored poster sketch of a red haired girl in a golf cape, which had evidently been the cover design of a magazine some years ago.

"Why are you so fond of that poster, Sylvia?" asked Katherine curiously.

"You brought it along with you when you came here, and you keep it with you all the time."

Sylvia's tone when she answered was half humorous and half wistful.

"That's my mother," she said.

"Your mother!" exclaimed Katherine, incredulously.

"Oh, not my really real mother," Sylvia continued quickly. "I never saw a picture of her. But Aunt Aggie said my mother had red hair and was most uncommonly good looking, so I found a picture of a beautiful lady with red hair and called it my mother. It's better than nothing." The Winnebagos nodded silently and no one spoke for a moment.

Then Katherine asked gently, "What else do you know about mother?"

Sylvia sat up and related the tale told her hundreds of times by Aunt Aggie, in answer to her eager questioning about her mother. Unconsciously she used Aunt Aggie's expressions and gestures as she told it.

"'Me an' Joe was coming on the steam cars from Butler to Philadelphy, and in back of us sat a young couple with a baby about a month old. The girl-she wasn't nothing but a girl even though she was a married woman-was most uncommon good looking. She had bright red hair and big grey eyes, and she wore a golf cape. Her husband was a big, red faced feller, homely but real honest lookin'. They weren't either of them twenty years old. Farmers, I could tell from their talk, and as well as I could make out, the name on their bag was Mitch.e.l.l. Well, well, along between Waterloo and Poland there suddenly come a terrible b.u.mp, and then a smash and a crash, and the next thing I was layin' under the seat and Joe was trying to pull me out. When I did finally get out the car was a-layin' over on its side all smashed to bits. Somehow or other when Joe dug me out from under the seat I had ahold of the little baby that had been in the seat in back of me. The young man and woman were under the wreck. They were both killed, but the baby never had a scratch.

"'n.o.body ever found out who the red headed woman and the man were, because they were all burned up in the wreck, and all their luggage.

"'I had taken care of the baby, thinkin' I'd keep her until her people were found, but they were never heard from, so I decided to keep her for my own. That baby was you, Sylvia.'

"So that's all I know about my mother and father," finished Sylvia with a sigh. "But I can think up the most _dazzling_ things about them!"

"Sylvia," said Katherine, "who was the man I saw on the stairs of your house the night I came in and found you?"

Sylvia looked at her in wonder. "What man?"

"When I came into the hall there was a man leaning over the banisters about half way up the stairs. When I came in he ran down the stairs and out of the front door."

"I can't imagine," said Sylvia. "No man ever came to the house to see us.

I didn't hear anybody come in that day."

"But the front door stood open when I came up on the porch," said Katherine. "That hadn't been standing open all day, had it?"

"No," replied Sylvia, "for Aunt Aggie was always careful about closing it when she went out."

"Then he must have opened it," said Katherine.

"How queer!" said Sylvia. "What do you suppose he could have been doing there? He never knocked on the inside door."

"Possibly he thought the house was empty, and went in to get out of the cold," concluded Katherine. "Then he heard you singing, and it scared him. He looked frightened out of his wits when I saw him. When I came in he just ran for his life." Katherine laughed as she remembered her own dismay at seeing the man and thinking that he was the owner of the house, when he was only a stray visitor himself and worse frightened than she.

Here she had prepared such an elaborate apology in her mind, and he was nothing but a tramp! The humor of it struck her forcibly, now that it was all in the past, and she laughed over it most of the evening.

About nine o'clock Hercules came shuffling in, suffering from a bad cold, and asked Nyoda to give him something for it. While Nyoda went upstairs to the medicine chest Sahwah craftily asked the old man, "Hercules, did you ever hear of there being a secret pa.s.sage in this house?"

Hercules gave a visible start. "Whyfor you ask dat?" he demanded.

"Oh, for no special reason," said Sahwah casually. "I just thought maybe there was one and that you might know about it. There always is one in these old houses, you know."