Laura Crane - The Automobile Girls at Newport - or, Watching the Summer Parade

“Pink hair ribbons!”

Barbara Thurston’s brown, bright face seemed to twinkle all over, as she clinked a yellow coin on the marble top of the little sewing table.

“Silk stockings!” chorused Mollie Thurston gleefully. “Wasn’t it the luckiest thing that the hotel people wanted so many berries this year!” And she, too, sent a gold piece spinning over the smooth surface. “But, perhaps, we won’t be invited after all,” she sighed.

“Nonsense!” rejoined Barbara energetically. “When Grace Carter says she’ll fix a thing, you can wager she will. She’s known Ruth Stuart for three summers now, and she’s told us we’d be invited to Ruth’s party this year. I can read the invitations already. The only thing worrying me was what we’d wear. Now the strawberry crop has turned out so well, and mother’s a brick, and will let us use our money as we wish – I think we’re fixed. Then – who knows?”

“I am sure Ruth Stuart’s lots of fun when you get to know her,” interrupted Mollie eagerly. “If Cousin Gladys wasn’t boarding at the hotel with her, we’d have met her long before. Isn’t Gladys a stuck-up goose? Never mind. We’ll have the laugh on her when she sees us at the party. Let’s be de-lighted to meet her. I should love to watch her when she is fussed!”

“After all,” mused Barbara, thoughtfully, “her father was in partnership with papa. It’s mighty funny that uncle got all the money. I wonder – ” She stopped playing with her gold piece and gazed thoughtfully out of the sitting room window at the hot, empty, yellow road that ran so near the tiny cottage.

Barbara Thurston was sixteen, Mollie just two years younger, and nearly all their lives had been spent in that little cottage. John Thurston, the girls’ father, had died suddenly when Mollie was only three years old.

He had been at that time in the wholesale clothing business with his wife’s brother, Ralph Le Baron, and was supposed to be a rich man. But when his affairs were settled up, his brother-in-law, the executor, announced that a very small interest in the business remained to Mrs. Thurston. He hinted, darkly, at stock speculation on her husband’s part, and poor Mrs. Thurston, overcome by grief, had not wanted to question deeply.

She, herself, happened to own the little cottage, in Kingsbridge, in which she and her brother had lived as children. Acting on his advice, she settled there with her two little girls, and had remained ever since, subsisting on the small income her brother regularly transmitted to her from her dead husband’s tiny business interest. Le Baron and his wife, with their daughter, Gladys, usually spent the summer in Kingsbridge, at the one “summer hotel” in the place; but intercourse between the two families had come to be little sought on either side. Kingsbridge was a quiet little village in New Jersey, and, except for the summer visitors, there was little gayety. Gladys Le Baron, especially, had shown herself icily oblivious of the existence of her younger cousins, Barbara and Mollie.

These two were delightful examples of self-reliant young America. Barbara, the elder, looked a regular “nut-brown maid,” with chestnut hair that never would “stay put,” and usually a mischievous twinkle in the brown eyes beneath the straying locks. But there was plenty of genuinely forceful energy stored away in her slim, well-knit young body, and her firm chin and broad forehead told both of determination and intelligence.

Her sister, Mollie, was fair, with lovely curling blond hair, and a quaint drollery of speech that won her many friends. Both sisters had grown up quietly, helping their mother about the house, as they could afford no servant, going to the village school, and, when they wanted anything beyond the plainest necessities of life, earning it.

This summer both had set their hearts on “really-truly” party clothes, not “hand-me-downs.” Their friend, Grace Carter, daughter of Squire Carter, the village dignitary, had promised them invitations to “the event of the season,” the party to be given by her friend Ruth Stuart, a rich Western girl who quite recently had come to spend her summer at Kingsbridge. And didn’t Ruth Stuart live at the same hotel with Gladys Le Baron, the snobbish cousin?

To meet the enemy on her own ground, and to have the fun of a party besides, was certainly worth picking strawberries for, thought Barbara and Mollie. So they scoured the country round for the sweet wild ones the hotel visitors liked best. Now each of the girls was fingering gleefully her twenty-dollar gold-piece that meant many days’ work in the past, but pretty dresses in the future.

The prospect was too alluring for Barbara to spend much time in wondering about the real “why” of their fallen fortunes, though the question had come to her before, and would again. Now she was ready to join Mollie in eager planning as to “just what they’d get.”

“Go get a pencil and paper, Molliekins, and we’ll set it all down,” she laughed.

Mollie went into the further room and Barbara waited, eyes absent-mindedly fixed on the yellow stretch of road.

Suddenly she became conscious of a curious pounding. There was a queer, wild rhythm to it, and it seemed to be coming nearer and nearer.

Barbara put her head out of the open window. She could see nothing but a cloud of dust far down the road. Yet the pounding sounded louder every moment.

Then she knew. The noise came from the furious feet of runaway horses. And they were coming past the house with their helpless, unknown victims.

What could Barbara do? Her mother was asleep upstairs and there was no man about the place. There was no other house near. Besides, the slightest delay might prove fatal.

All this seemed to flash through Barbara’s brain in a second. She knew she must act. Swiftly and easily as a boy she vaulted the open window, pausing only to snatch a closed umbrella that leaned against the sill. How glad she was she had forgotten to put it away in the closet when she came in from the shower yesterday!

In an instant the girl sped through the gate and out into the road, opening her umbrella as she ran.

There she paused, squarely in front of the approaching dust cloud, very near now. She could hear the click of the stones, cast aside by the flying feet of the horses, and she caught a glimpse of two black heads, wild-eyed and foam-flecked, through the whirling dust.

Barbara strained her eyes to locate hanging bridles. But meantime, swiftly and mechanically, she was opening and shutting the big black umbrella.

“If they’ll only stop!” she murmured.

And they did. Fear-crazed already, their legs trembling after a terrific run, the horses dared not seek encounter with that horrible bat-like creature that seemed to await them.

Scarcely five feet away, their wild pace broke. They hesitated, and Barbara flung herself forward and seized the dangling bridles. For a moment she pulled on them with wrists of steel, but it was not necessary. The horses drooped their weary heads and gladly stood still.

Then, and only then, Barbara glanced at the carriage and its occupants.

It was an open four-seated carriage, and in it were Ruth Stuart, Grace Carter, Gladys Le Baron and a strange young man somewhat older than the rest of the party. The girls were leaning back, with closed eyes and white faces. The young man was staring straight ahead, with a blank expression, fear depicted on every feature.

Barbara dared not leave the horses even now. “Mollie! Mollie!” she called.

Mollie was already out of the house. From the window, terror-stricken, she had seen it all.