CHAPTER IIG. K. TO THE RESCUE
Dorothy Dale and her friend Tavia Travers had often experienced very serious adventures, but the shock of this incident perhaps was as great and as thrilling as anything that had heretofore happened to them.
The series of eleven previous stories about Dorothy, Tavia, and their friends began with “Dorothy Dale: A Girl of To-day,” some years before the date of this present narrative. At that time Dorothy was living with her father, Major Frank Dale, a Civil War veteran, who owned and edited theBugle, a newspaper published in Dalton, a small town in New York State.
Then Major Dale’s livelihood and that of the family, consisting of Dorothy and her small brothers, Joe and Roger, depended upon the success of theBugle. Taken seriously ill in the midst of a lively campaign for temperance and for a general reform government in Dalton, it looked as though the major would lose his paper and the better element in the town lose their fight for prohibition; but Dorothy Dale, confident that she could do it,got out theBugleand did much, young girl though she was, to save the day. In this she was helped by Tavia Travers, a girl brought up entirely differently from Dorothy, and who possessed exactly the opposite characteristics to serve as a foil for Dorothy’s own good sense and practical nature.
Major Dale was unexpectedly blessed with a considerable legacy which enabled him to sell theBugleand take his children to The Cedars, at North Birchland, to live with his widowed sister and her two boys, Ned and Nat White, who were both older than their cousin Dorothy. In “Dorothy Dale at Glenwood School,” is related these changes for the better in the fortunes of the Dale family, and as well there is narrated the beginning of a series of adventures at school and during vacation times, in which Dorothy and Tavia are the central characters.
Subsequent books are entitled respectively: “Dorothy Dale’s Great Secret,” “Dorothy Dale and Her Chums,” “Dorothy Dale’s Queer Holidays,” “Dorothy Dale’s Camping Days,” “Dorothy Dale’s School Rivals,” “Dorothy Dale in the City,” and “Dorothy Dale’s Promise,” in which story the two friends graduate from Glenwood and return to their homes feeling—and looking, of course—like real, grown-up young ladies. Nevertheless, they are not then through with adventures, surprising happenings, and much fun.
About the time the girls graduated from school an old friend of Major Dale, Colonel Hardin, passed away, leaving his large estate in the West partly to the major and partly to be administered for the local public good. Cattle raising was not so generally followed as formerly in that section and dry farming was being tried.
Colonel Hardin had foreseen that nothing but a system of irrigation would save the poor farmers from ruin and on his land was the fountain of supply that should water the whole territory about Desert City and make it “blossom as the rose.” There were mining interests, however, selfishly determined to obtain the water rights on the Hardin Estate and that by hook or by crook.
Major Dale’s health was not at this time good enough for him to look into these matters actively or to administer his dead friend’s estate. Therefore, it is told in “Dorothy Dale in the West,” how Aunt Winnie White, Dorothy’s two cousins, Ned and Nat, and herself with Tavia, go far from North Birchland and mingle with the miners, and other Western characters to be found on and about the Hardin property, including a cowboy named Lance Petterby, who shows unmistakable signs of being devoted to Tavia. Indeed, after the party return to the East, Lance writes to Tavia and the latter’s apparent predilection for the cowboy somewhat troubles Dorothy.
However, after their return to the East the chums went for a long visit to the home of a school friend, Jennie Hapgood, in Pennsylvania; and there Tavia seemed to have secured other—and less dangerous—interests. In “Dorothy Dale’s Strange Discovery,” the narrative immediately preceding this present tale, Dorothy displays her characteristic kindliness and acute reasoning powers in solving a problem that brings to Jennie Hapgood’s father the very best of good fortune.
Naturally, the Hapgoods are devoted to Dorothy. Besides, Ned and Nat, her cousins, have visited Sunnyside and are vastly interested in Jennie. The girl chums now in New York City on this shopping tour, expect on returning to North Birchland to find Jennie Hapgood there for a promised visit.
At the moment, however, that we find Dorothy and Tavia at the beginning of this chapter, neither girl is thinking much about Jennie Hapgood and her expected visit, or of anything else of minor importance.
The flashily dressed woman who had run after Tavia down the aisle, again screamed her accusation at the amazed and troubled girl:
“That’s my bag! It’s cram full of money, too.”
There was no great crowd in the store, for New York ladies do not as a rule shop much beforeluncheon. Nevertheless, besides salespeople, there were plenty to hear the woman’s unkind accusation and enough curious shoppers to ring in immediately the two troubled girls and the angry woman.
“Give me it!” exclaimed the latter, and snatched the bag out of Tavia’s hand. As this was done the catch slipped in some way and the handbag burst open.
It was “cram full” of money. Bills of large denomination were rolled carelessly into a ball, with a handkerchief, a purse for change, several keys, and a vanity box. Some of these things tumbled out upon the floor and a young boy stooped and recovered them for her.
“You’re a bad, bad girl!” declared the angry woman. “I hope they send you to jail.”
“Why—why, I didn’t know it was yours,” murmured Tavia, quite upset.
“Oh! you thought somebody had forgotten it and you could get away with it,” declared the other, coarsely enough.
“I beg your pardon, Madam,” Dorothy Dale here interposed. “It was a mistake on my friend’s part. Andyouare making another mistake, and a serious one.”
She spoke in her most dignified tone, and although Dorothy was barely in her twentieth year she had the manner and stability of one mucholder. She realized that poor Tavia was in danger of “going all to pieces” if the strain continued. And, too, her own anger at the woman’s harsh accusation naturally put the girl on her mettle.
“Who areyou, I’d like to know?” snapped the woman.
“I am her friend,” said Dorothy Dale, quite composedly, “and I know her to be incapable of taking your bag save by chance. She laid her own down on the counter and took up yours——”
“And whereismine?” suddenly wailed Tavia, on the verge of an hysterical outbreak. “My bag! My money——”
“Hush!” whispered Dorothy in her friend’s pretty ear. “Don’t become a second harridan—like this creature.”
The woman had led the way back to the silk counter. Tavia began to claw wildly among the broken bolts of silk that the clerk had not yet been able to return to the shelves. But she stopped at Dorothy’s command, and stood, pale and trembling.
A floorwalker hastened forward. He evidently knew the noisy woman as a good customer of the store.
“Mrs. Halbridge! What is the matter? Nothing serious, I hope?”
“It would have been serious all right,” said the customer, in her high-pitched voice, “if Ihadn’t just seen that girl by luck. Yes, by luck! There she was making for the door with this bag of mine—and there’s several hundred dollars in it, I’d have you know.”
“I beg of you, Mrs. Halbridge,” said the floorwalker in a low tone, “for the sake of the store to make no trouble about it here. If you insist we will take the girl up to the superintendent’s office——”
Here Dorothy, her anger rising interrupted:
“You would better not. Mrs. Winthrop White, of North Birchland, is a charge customer of your store, and is probably just as well known to the heads of the firm as this—this person,” and she cast what Tavia—in another mood—would have called a “scathing glance” at Mrs. Halbridge.
“I am Mrs. White’s niece and this is my particular friend. We are here alone on a shopping tour; but if our word is not quite as good as that of this—this person, we certainly shall buy elsewhere.”
Tavia, obsessed with a single idea, murmured again:
“But I haven’t got my bag! Somebody’s taken my bag! And all my money——”
The floorwalker was glancing about, hoping for some avenue of escape from the unfortunate predicament, when a very tall, white-haired and soldierly looking man appeared in the aisle.
“Mr. Schuman!” gasped the floorwalker.
The man was one of the chief proprietors of the big store. He scowled slightly at the floorwalker when he saw the excited crowd, and then raised his eyebrows questioningly.
“This is not the place for any lengthy discussion, Mr. Mink,” said Mr. Schuman, with just the proper touch of admonition in his tone.
“I know! I know, Mr. Schuman!” said the floorwalker. “But this difficulty—it came so suddenly—Mrs. Halbridge, here, makes the complaint,” he finally blurted out, in an attempt to shoulder off some of the responsibility for the unfortunate situation.
“Mrs. Halbridge?” The old gentleman bowed in a most courtly style. “One of our customers, I presume, Mr. Mink?”
“Oh, yes, indeed, Mr. Schuman,” the floorwalker hastened to say. “One of ourverygood customers. And I am so sorry that anything should have happened——”
“But what has happened?” asked Mr. Schuman, sharply.
“She—she accuses this—it’s all a mistake, I’m sure—this young lady of taking her bag,” stuttered Mr. Mink, pointing to Tavia.
“She ought to be arrested,” muttered the excited Mrs. Halbridge.
“What? But this is a matter for the superintendent’soffice, Mr. Mink,” returned Mr. Schuman.
“Oh!” stammered the floorwalker. “The bag is returned.”
“And now,” put in Dorothy Dale, haughtily, and looking straight and unflinchingly into the keen eyes of Mr. Schuman, “my friend wishes to know what has become ofherbag?”
Mr. Schuman looked at the two girls with momentary hesitation.
There was something compelling in the ladylike look and behaviour of these two girls—and especially in Dorothy’s speech. At the moment, too, a hand was laid tentatively upon Mr. Schuman’s arm.
“Beg pardon, sir,” said the full, resonant voice that Dorothy had noted the day before. “I know the young ladies—Miss Dale and Miss Travers, respectively, Mr. Schuman.”
“Oh, Mr. Knapp—thank you!” said the old gentleman, turning to the tall young Westerner with whom he had been walking through the store at the moment he had spied the crowd. “You are a discourager of embarrassment.”
“Oh! blessed ‘G. K.’!” whispered Tavia, weakly clinging to Dorothy’s arm.