CHAPTER XIIUNCERTAINTIES
Dorothy had no time before dinner, but after that meal she seized upon her brothers, Joe and Roger, and led them aside. The boys thought she had something nice for them, brought from New York. They very quickly found out their mistake.
“I want to know what you boys mean by taking such risks as you did this afternoon?” she demanded, when out of hearing of the rest of the family. She would not have her aunt or the major troubled by knowing of the escapade.
“You, especially, Joe,” she went on, with an accusing finger raised. “You both might have been killed.Thenhow would you have felt?”
“Er—dead, I guess, Sister,” admitted Roger, for Joe was silent.
“Didn’t you know the road was closed because of repairs on the bridge?” she asked the older boy sternly.
“No-o. We forgot. We didn’t go over to the nutting woods that way. Say! who told you?” blurted out Joe.
“Who told me what?”
“About our race with the train. Cricky, but it was great!”
“It was fine!” Roger added his testimony with equal enthusiasm.
“I saw you,” said Dorothy, her face paling as she remembered her fright in the train. “I—I thought I should faint I was so frightened.”
“Say! isn’t that just like a girl?” grumbled Joe; but he looked at his sister with some compunction, for he and Roger almost worshipped her. Only, of course, they were boys and the usual boy cannot understand the fluttering terror in the usual girl’s heart when danger threatens. Not that Dorothy was a weakling in any way; she could be courageous for herself. But her fears were always excited when those she loved were in peril.
“Why, we were only having fun, Sister,” Roger blurted out. Being considerably younger than his brother he was quicker to be moved by Dorothy’s expression of feeling.
“Fun!” she gasped.
“Yes,” Joe said sturdily. “It was a great race. And you and Tavia were in that train? We didn’t have an idea, did we, Roger?”
“Nop,” said his small brother thoughtlessly. “If we had we wouldn’t have racedthattrain.”
“Now, I want to tell you something!” exclaimed their sister, with a sharper note in hervoice. “You’re not to raceanytrain! Understand, boys? Suppose that engine had struck you as you crossed the tracks?”
“Oh, it wouldn’t,” Joe said stoutly. “I know the engineer. He’s a friend of mine. He saw I had the ‘right-of-way,’ as they call it. I’d beat him down the hill; so he held up the train.”
“Yes—he held up the train,” said Dorothy with a queer little laugh. “He put on brakes because I pulled the emergency cord. You boys would never have crossed ahead of that train if I hadn’t done so.”
“Oh, Dorothy!” gasped Joe.
“Oh, Sister!” cried Roger.
“Tavia and I almost had heart disease,” the young woman told them seriously. “Engineers do not watch boys on country roads when they are guiding a great express train. It is a serious matter to control a train and to have the destinies of the passengers in one’s hands. The engineer is looking ahead—watching the rails and the roadbed. Remember that, boys.”
“I’d like to be an engineer!” sighed Roger, his eyes big with longing.
“Pooh!” Joe said. “It’s more fun to drive an automobile—like this new one Ned and Nat have. You don’t have to stay on the tracks, you know.”
“Nobody but cautious people can learn to drive automobiles,” said Dorothy, seriously.
“I’m big enough,” stated Joe, with conviction.
“You may be. But you’re not careful enough,” his sister told him. “Your racing our train to-day showed that. Now, I won’t tell father or auntie, for I do not wish to worry them. But you must promise me not to ride down that hill in your little wagon any more or enter into any such reckless sports.”
“Oh, we won’t, of course, if you say not, Dorothy,” sniffed Joe. “But you must remember we’re boys and boys have got to take chances. Even father says that.”
“Yes. When you are grown. You may be placed in situations where your courage will be tested. But, goodness me!” finished Dorothy Dale. “Don’t scare us to death, boys. And now see what I bought you in New York.”
However, her lecture made some impression upon the boys’ minds despite their excitement over the presents which were now brought to light. Full football outfits for both the present was, and Joe and Roger were delighted. They wanted to put them on and go out at once with the ball to “pass signals,” dark as it had become.
However, they compromised on this at Dorothy’s advice, by taking the suits, pads and guards off to their room and trying them on, coming downstairs later to “show off” before the folks in the drawing-room.
Major Dale was one of those men who never grow old in their hearts. Crippled as he was—both by his wounded leg and by rheumatism—he delighted to see the young life about him, and took as much interest in the affairs of the young people as ever he had.
Aunt Winnie looked a very interesting invalid, indeed, with her lame ankle, and rested on the couch. The big boys and Dorothy and her friends always made much of Aunt Winnie in any case; now that she was “laid up in drydock,” as Nat expressed it, they were especially attentive.
Jennie and Tavia, with the two older boys, spent most of the evening hovering about the lady’s couch, or at the piano where they played and sang college songs and old Briarwood songs, till eleven o’clock. Dorothy sat between her father and Aunt Winnie and talked to them.
“What makes you so sober, Captain?” the major asked during the evening. He had always called her “his little captain” and sometimes seemed really to forget that she had any other name.
“I’m all right, Major,” she returned brightly. “I have to think, sometimes, you know.”
“What is the serious problem now, Dorothy?” asked her aunt, with a little laugh. “Did you forget to buy something while you were in New York?”
Dorothy dimpled. “Wait till you see all I did buy,” she responded, “and you will not ask that question. I have been the most reckless person!”
“Why the serious pucker to your brow, Captain?” went on the major.
“Oh, I have problems. I admit the fact,” Dorothy said, trying to laugh off their questioning.
“Out with them,” advised her father. “Here are two old folks who have been solving problems all their lives. Maybe we can help.”
Dorothy laughed again. “Try this one,” she said, with her eyes upon the quartette “harmonizing” at the piano in dulcet tones, singing “Seeing Nellie Ho-o-ome.” “Which of our big boys does Tavia like best?”
“Goodness!” exclaimed her aunt, while the major chuckled mellowly. “Don’t you know, really, Dorothy? I was going to askyou. I thought, of course, Tavia confided everything to you.”
“Sooner or later she may,” the young woman said, still with the thoughtful air upon her. “But I am as much in the dark about this query as anybody—perhaps as the boys themselves.”
“Humph!” muttered the major. “Which of them likesherthe better?”
“AndthatI’d like to know,” said his sister earnestly. “There is another thing, Dorothy: Which of my sons is destined to fall in love withthis very, very pretty girl you have invited here—Jennie Hapgood, I mean?”
“Oh! they’re all doing it, are they?” grunted the major. “How about our Dorothy? Where does she come in? No mate for her?”
“I think I shall probably become an old maid,” Dorothy Dale said, but with a conscious flush that made her aunt watch her in a puzzled way for some time.
But the major put back his head and laughed delightedly. “No more chance of your remaining a spinster—when you are really old enough to be called one—than there is of my leading troops into battle again,” he declared with warmth. “Hey, Sister?”
“Our Dorothy is too attractive I am sure to escape the chance to marry, at least,” said Aunt Winnie, still watching her niece with clouded gaze. “I wonder whence the right knight will come riding—from north, or south, east or west?”
And in spite of herself Dorothy flushed up again at her aunt’s last word.
It was a question oft-repeated in Dorothy Dale’s mind during the following days, this one regarding the state of mind of her two cousins and her two school friends.
It had always seemed to Dorothy, whenever she had thought of it, that one of her cousins, either Ned or Nat, must in the end be preferredby Tavia. To think of Tavia’s really settling down to caring for any other man than Ned or Nat, was quite impossible.
On the other hand, the boys had both shown a great fondness for the society of Jennie Hapgood when they were all at her home in Pennsylvania such a short time previous; and now that all four were together again Dorothy could not guess “which was which” as Tavia herself would have said.
The boys did not allow Dorothy to be overlooked in any particular. She was not neglected in the least; yet she did, as the days passed, find more time to spend with her father and with her Aunt Winnie.
“The little captain is getting more thoughtful. She is steadying down,” the major told Mrs. White.
“But I wonderwhy?” was that good woman’s puzzled response.
Dorothy Dale sitting by herself with a book that she was not reading or with fancywork on which she only occasionally took stitches, was entirely out of her character. She had never been this way before going to New York, Mrs. White was sure.
There were several uncertainties upon the girl’s mind. One of them almost came to light when, after ten days, her letter addressed to “Mr. GarfordKnapp, Desert City,” was returned to her by the post-office department, as instructed in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope.
Her letter, warning Garry Knapp of the advantage the real estate men wished to take of him, would, after all, do him no good. He would never know that she had written. Perhaps her path and Garry Knapp’s would never cross again.