Grace Hill: The Corner House Girls on a Houseboat

Their arms were filled with blossoms of the woods and fields, and without more ado they tossed them to a cleared place on the table, whence Linda had removed some of the pans and dishes.

“Oh, what a lovely lot of flowers!” cried Ruth. “It’s just darling of you to get them for me. Now do you want to help me put them into vases in the library?”

Dot shook her head.

“Why not?” asked Ruth gently.

“I promised my Alice-doll to take her down by the brook, and I just have to do it,” answered Dot. “And Tess is going to help me; aren’t you, Tess?” she added.

“Yes,” was the answer. “I’m going to take Almira.”

“Then you must take her kittens, too!” insisted Dot. “She’ll feel bad if you don’t.”

“I won’t take ’em all – I’ll take one kitten,” compromised Tess. “There she is, now!” And Tess darted from the room to pounce on the cat, which did not seem to mind very much being mauled by the children.

“Will ye gang a’wa’ to the store the noo?” asked Mrs. MacCall, with a warm smile as she came from the pantry. “There’s muckle we need an’ – ”

“I’ll go if you give me a cookie,” promised Dot.

“So’ll I,” chimed in Tess, coming in on the tribute. “We can take Almira and your Alice-doll when we come back,” she confided to her sister.

“Yes, I think they’ll wait. I know Alice-doll will, but I’m not so sure about Almira,” and Dot seemed rather in doubt. “She may take a notion to carry her kittens up in the bedroom – ”

“Don’t dare suggest such a thing!” cried Ruth.

“I’m to have company this afternoon, and if that cat and her kittens appear on the scene – ”

“Oh, I wasn’t going to carry them in!” interrupted Dot, with an air of injured innocence. “They’re Almira’s kittens, and she can do what she likes with them, I suppose,” she added as an afterthought. “Only I know that every once in a while she takes a notion to plant them in a new place. Once Uncle Rufus found them in his rubber boots, and they scratched him like anything when he put his foot inside.”

“Well, if you have to go to the store for Mrs. MacCall you won’t have any time to help me arrange the flowers,” observed Ruth, anxious to put an end to the discussion about the family cat and kittens, for she knew Dot had a fund of stories concerning them.

“Yes, traipse along now, my bonnie bairns,” advised the Scotch housekeeper, and, bribed by two cookies each, a special good measure on Saturday, Dot and Tess were soon on their way, or at least it was so supposed.

Linda was helping Mrs. MacCall clear away the baking utensils, and Ruth and Agnes were in the parlor and library, tastefully arranging the wild flowers that Dot and Tess had gathered.

“Isn’t Dot queer to cling still to her dolls?” remarked Agnes, as she stepped back to get the effect of a bunch of red flowers against a dark brown background in one corner of the room.

“Yes, she is a strange child. And poor Almira! Really I don’t see how that cat stands it here, the way Tess and Dot maul her.”

“They aren’t as bad as Sammy Pinkney. Actually I caught him yesterday tying the poor creature to the back of Billy Bumps!”

“Not on the goat’s back!” cried Ruth.

“Really, he was. I sent him flying, though!”

“What was his idea?”

“Oh, he said he’d heard Neale tell how, in a circus, a little dog rode on a pony’s back and Sammy didn’t see why a cat couldn’t ride on a goat.”

“Well, if he put it that way I suppose she could,” assented Ruth. “But Almira seems to take herself very seriously with all those kittens. We really must get rid of them. Vacation will soon be here, and with Tess and Dot around the house all day, instead of just Saturdays, I don’t know what we shall do.”

“Have you made any vacation plans at all?”

“Not yet, Agnes. I thought I’d wait until I saw Mr. Howbridge at the club meeting this afternoon.”

“What has he to do with our vacation – unless he’s going along?”

“Oh, no, I didn’t mean that, at all! But the financial question does enter into it; and as he is our guardian and has charge of our money, I want to know just how much we can count on spending.”

“Why, have we lost any money?”

“Not that I know of. I hope not! But I always have consulted him before we made any summer plans, and I don’t see why we should not now.”

“Well, I suppose it’s all right,” assented Agnes, as she took up another bunch of flowers. “But I wonder – ”

She never finished that sentence. From somewhere, inside or outside the house, a resounding crash sounded. It shook the walls and floors.

“Oh, my! what’s that?” cried Ruth, dropping the blossoms from her hands and hastening to the hall.

Deep, and perhaps portentous, silence had succeeded the crash. But both Ruth and Agnes knew enough of the goings and comings in the Corner House not to take this silence for serenity. It meant something, as the crash had.

“What was it?” murmured Ruth again, and she fairly ran out into the hall, followed by her sister.

Then came a series of bumps, as if something of no small size was rolling down the porch steps. By this time it was evident that the racket came from without and not from within. Then a voice cried:

“Hold it! Hold it! Don’t let it roll down!”

“That’s Dot!” declared Ruth.

And then a despairing voice cried:

“I can’t! I can’t hold it! Look out!”

Once again the rumbling, rolling, bumping sound came, and with it was mingled the warning of the Scotch housekeeper and the wail of Dot who cried:

“Oh, she’s dead! She’s smashed!”

“Something really has happened this time!” exclaimed Ruth, and her face became a little pale.

“If only it isn’t serious,” burst out Agnes. “Oh, dear, what those youngsters don’t think of for trouble!”

“They don’t mean to get into trouble, Agnes. It’s only their thoughtlessness.”

“Well then, they ought to think more. Oh, listen to that, will you!” Agnes added, as another loud bumping reached the two sisters’ ears.

“It’s something that’s sure,” cried Ruth, and grew paler than ever.

The happening was not really as tragic as it seemed, yet it was sufficiently momentous to cause a fright to the two older girls. Especially to Ruth, who felt herself to be, as she literally was, a mother to the other three; though now that Agnes was putting up her hair and putting down her dresses a new element had come into the household.

While yet in tender years the responsibilities of life had fallen on the shoulders of Ruth Kenway. In their former home – a city more pretentious in many ways than picturesque Milton, their present home – the Kenways had lived in what, literally, was a tenement house. Their father and mother were dead, and the small pension granted Mr. Kenway, who had been a soldier in the Spanish war, was hardly sufficient for the needs of four growing girls.

Then, almost providentially, it seemed, the Stower estate had come to Ruth, Agnes, Dot and Tess. Uncle Peter Stower had passed away, and Mr. Howbridge, the administrator of the estate, had discovered the four sisters as the next of kin, to use his legal phrase.

Uncle Peter Stower had lived for years in the “Corner House” as it was called. The mansion stood opposite the Parade Ground in Milton, and there Uncle Rufus, the colored servant of his crabbed master, had spent so many years that he regarded himself as a fixture – as much so as the roof.

At first no will could be found, though Mr. Howbridge recalled having drawn one; but eventually all legal tangles were straightened out, and the four sisters came to live in Milton, as related in the first book of the series, entitled “The Corner House Girls.”