CHAPTER XXIIDOROTHY DECIDES
Joe and Roger Dale did not feel that they were exactly neglected during these winter holidays. It is true they found their cousins, the “big fellows,” not so much fun as they were wont to be, and even Dorothy failed them at times.
But because of these very facts the lads had more freedom of action than ever before. They were learning to think for themselves, especially Joe. Nor was it always mischief they thought of, though frequently managing to get into trouble—for what live and healthy boys of their age do not?
Many of their narrow escapes even Dorothy knew nothing about. None of the family, for instance, knew about Joe and the lame pigeon until the North Birchland Fire Department was on the grounds with all their apparatus.
This moving incident (Tavia declared it should have been a movie incident) happened between Christmas and the new year. Although there had been a good fall of snow before Kris Kringle’s day, it had all gone now and the roads were firmlyfrozen again, so the Fire Department got to The Cedars in record time.
To begin with Joe and Roger were breeders of pigeons, as Ned and Nat had been several years before. On pleasant days in the winter they let their flock into the big flying cage, and occasionally allowed the carriers to take a flight in the open.
On one of these occasions when the flock returned there was a stray with them. Roger’s sharp eyes spied this bird which alighted on the ridgepole of the stable.
“Oh, lookut! lookut!” exclaimed the youngest Dale. “What a pretty one, Joe!”
“We’ll coax it down. It’s a stray,” his brother said eagerly, “and all strays are fair game.”
“But it’s lame, Joe,” Roger declared. “See! it can scarcely hop. And it acts as if all tired out.”
“It’s a carrier, all right,” Joe said. “I bet it’s come a long way.”
The bird, however, would not be coaxed to the ground or into the big cage. It really did appear exhausted.
“I bet if I could get up there on the stable roof, I could pick it right up in my hand,” cried Joe. “I’m—I’m a-going—to try it!”
“Oh!” murmured Roger, both his eyes and mouth very round.
Joe was no “blowhard,” as the boys say. When he said he’d do a thing he did his best to accomplish it. He threw off his thick jacket that would have hampered him, and kicked aside his overshoes that made his feet clumsy, and started to go aloft in the stable.
“You go outside and watch, Roger,” he commanded. “There’s no skylight in this old barn roof—only the cupola, and I can’t get out through that.”
“How are you going to do it then?” gasped Roger.
“You’ll see,” his brother said with assurance, and began to climb the hay ladder into the top loft of the building.
Roger ran out just in time to see Joe open the small door up in the peak of the stable roof. There were water-troughs all around the roof, for the cattle were supplied with drinking water from cisterns built under the ground.
A leader ran down each corner of the stable, and one of these was within reach of Joe Dale’s hands when he swung himself out upon the door he had opened.
Nobody, except the boys, were about the stable, and this end of the building could not be seen from the house. Joe had once before performed a similar trick. He had swung from the door to the leader-pipe and swarmed down to the ground.
“Look out you don’t tumble, Joe,” advised the eager Roger. But he had no idea that Joe would do so. The elder brother was a hero in the sight of the younger lad.
Joe’s skill and strength did not fail him now. He caught the leader, then the water-trough itself, and so scrambled upon the roof. But at his last kick some fastening holding the leader-pipe gave way and the top of it swung out from the corner of the stable.
“Oh, cricky!” yelled Roger. “Lucky you got up there, Joe. That pipe’s busted. How’ll you get down?”
“Never mind that,” grunted Joe, somewhat breathless, scrambling up the roof to the ridgepole. “We’ll see about that later.”
The boy reached the ridge and straddled it. There he got his breath and then hitched along toward the cooing pigeon. It was not frightened by him, but it certainly was lame and exhausted. Joe picked it up in his hand and snuggled it into the breast of his sweater.
“But how are you ever going to get down, Joe Dale?” shrilled Roger, from the ground.
The question was a poser, as Joe very soon found out. That particular leader had been the only one on the stable that he could reach with any measure of safety; and now it hung out a couple of feet from the side of the building andJoe would not have dared trust his weight upon it, even could he have reached it.
“What are you going to do?” again wailed the smaller lad.
“Aw, cheese it, Roger! don’t be bawling,” advised Joe from the roof. “Go and get a ladder.”
“There isn’t any long enough to reach up there—you know that,” said Roger.
Neither he nor Joe observed the fact that, even had there been a ladder, the smaller boy could not have raised it into place so that Joe could have descended upon it.
None of the men working on the place was at hand. Ned and Nat were off on some errand in their car. Secretly, Roger was panic stricken and might have run for Dorothy, for she was still his refuge in all troubles.
But Joe was older—and thought himself wiser. “We’ve just got to find a ladder—you’vegot to find it, Roger. I can’t sit up here a-straddle of this old roof all day. It’s co-o-old!”
Roger started off blindly. He could not remember whether any of the neighbors possessed long ladders or not. But as he came down to the street corner of the White property he saw a red box affixed to a telegraph pole on the edge of the sidewalk.
“Oh, bully!” gasped Roger, and immediately scrambled over the fence.
He knew what that red box was for. It had been explained to him, and he had longed for a good reason for experimenting with it. You broke the little square of glass and pulled down the hook inside—-
That is how Ned and Nat, whizzing homeward in their car, came to join the procession of the Fire Department racing out of town toward The Cedars.
“Where’s the fire, Cal?” yelled Nat, seeing a man he knew riding on the ladder truck.
“Right near your house, Mr. White. At any rate, that was the number pulled—that box by the corner of your mother’s place.”
“Did you hear that, Ned?” shouted his brother, and Ned, who was at the wheel, “let her out,” breaking every speed law of the country to flinders.
The Fire Chief in his red racing car was only a few rods ahead of the Whites, therefore, when Ned whirled the automobile into the driveway. They saw a small boy, greatly excited, dancing up and down on the gravel beside the chief’s car.
“Yep—he’s up on the stable roof, I tell you. We’ve got to use your extension ladders to get him down,” Roger was saying eagerly. “I didn’t mean for all of the things to come—the engine, and hose cart, and all. Just the ladders we wanted,” and Roger seemed amazed that his pulling thehook of the fire-alarm box had not explained all this at fire headquarters down town.
There was some excitement, as may well be believed in and about The Cedars. The Fire Chief was at first enraged; then he, as well as his men, laughed. They got Joe, still clinging to the stray pigeon, down from the roof, and then the firemen drilled back to town, reporting a “false alarm.”
Major Dale, however, sent in a check to the Firemen’s Benefit Fund, and Joe and Roger were sent to bed at noon and were obliged to remain there until the next morning—a punishment that was likely long to be engraved upon their minds.
The incident, however, had broken in upon a very serious conference between Dorothy Dale and her father. And nowadays their conferences were very likely to be for the discussion of but one subject:
Garry Knapp and his affairs.
Aunt Winnie, too, had been taken into Dorothy Dale’s confidence. “I want you both,” the girl said, bravely, “to meet Garry Knapp and decide for yourselves if he is not all I say he is. And to do that we must get him to come here.”
“How will you accomplish it, Dorothy?” asked her aunt, still more than a little confused because of this entirely new departure upon the part of her heretofore demure niece.
Dorothy explained. Another—a third—letter had come from Lance Petterby. He had identified Garry Knapp as the Dimples Knapp he had previously known upon the range. Knapp was about to sell a rundown ranch north of Desert City and adjoining the rough end of the great Hardin Estate, that now belonged to Major Dale, to some speculators in wheat lands. The speculators, Lance said, were “sure enough sharks.”
“First of all have our lawyers out there make Mr. Knapp a much better offer for his land—quick, before Stiffbold and Lightly close with him,” Dorothy suggested. “Oh! I’ve thought it all out. Those land speculators will allow that option they took on Garry’s ranch to lapse. What is a hundred dollars to them? Then they will play a waiting game until they make him come to new terms—a much lower price even than they offered him in New York. He must not sell his land to them, and for a song.”
“And then?” asked the major, his eyes bright with pride in his daughter’s forcefulness of character, as well as with amusement.
“Have our lawyers bind the bargain with Mr. Knapp and ask him to come East to close the transaction with their principal. That’syou, Major. Meanwhile, have the lawyers send an expert to Mr. Knapp’s ranch to see if it is really promising wheat land if properly developed.”
“And then?” repeated her father.
“If itis,” said Dorothy, laughing blithely, “when Garry shows up and you and Aunt Winnie approve of him, as I know you both will, offer to advance the money necessary to develop the wheat ranch instead of buying the land.
“That,” Dorothy Dale said earnestly, “will give him the start in business life he needs. I know he has it in him to make good. He can expect no fortune from his uncle in Alaska, who is angry with him; he willneverhear to using any of my money to help bring success; but in this way he will have his chance. I believe he will be independent in a few years.”
“And, meanwhile, what of you?” cried her aunt.
“I shall be waiting for him,” replied Dorothy with a smile that Tavia, had she seen it, would have pronounced “seraphic.”
“Major! did you ever hear of such talk from a girl?” gasped Aunt Winnie.
“No,” said her brother, with immense satisfaction, and thumping approval on the floor with his cane. “Because there never was just such a girl since the world began as my little captain.
“I want to see this wonderful Garry Knapp—don’t you, Sister? I’m sure he must be a perfectly wonderful young man to so stir our Dorothy.”
“No,” Dorothy said slowly shaking her head. “I know he is only wonderful in my eyes. But I am quite sure you and Aunt Winnie will commend my choice when you have met him—if we can only get him here!”