CHAPTER XII
ALONGSHORE
Mr. Peterby Paul appeared after a short time striding down the wooded hillside balancing a five-gallon gasoline can in either hand.
“I reckon you can get to Ridgeton on this here,” he said jovially. “Guess I’d better set up a sign down here so’s other of you autermobile folks kin take heart if ye git stuck.”
“You are just as welcome as the flowers in spring, tra-la!” cried Helen, fairly dancing with delight.
“You are an angel visitor, Mr. Paul,” said the plump girl.
“I been called a lot o’ things besides an angel,” the bearded woodsman said, his eyes twinkling. “My wife, ’fore she died, had an almighty tart tongue.”
“And now?” queried Helen wickedly.
“Wal, wherever the poor critter’s gone, I reckon she’s l’arned to bridle her tongue,” said Mr. Peterby Paul cheerfully. “Howsomever, as the feller said, that’s another day’s job. Mr. Frenchy, let’s pour this gasoline into them tanks.”
Ruth insisted upon paying for the gasoline, and paying well. Then Peterby Paul gave them careful directions as to the situation of Abby Drake’s house, at which it seemed the lost woman must belong.
“Abby always has her house full of city folks in the summer,” the woodsman said. “She is pretty near a Whosis herself, Abby Drake is.”
With which rather unfavorable intimation regarding the despised “city folks,” Mr. Peterby Paul saw them start on over the now badly rutted road.
Helen drove the smaller car with Ruth sitting beside her. Henri Marchand took the wheel of the touring car, and the run to Boston was resumed.
“But we must not over-run Tom,” said Ruth to her chum. “No knowing what by-path he might have tried in search of the elusive gasoline.”
“I’ll keep the horn blowing,” Helen said, suiting action to her speech and sounding a musical blast through the wooded country that lay all about. “He ought to know his own auto-horn.”
The tone of the horn was peculiar. Ruth could always distinguish it from any other as Tom speeded along the Cheslow road toward the Red Mill. But then, she was perhaps subconsciously listening for its mellow note.
She tacitly agreed with Helen, however, that it might be a good thing to toot the horn frequently. And the signal brought to the roadside an anxious group of women at a sprawling farmhouse not a mile beyond the spot where the two cars had been stalled.
“That is the Drake place. It must be!” Ruth exclaimed, putting out a hand to warn Colonel Marchand that they were about to halt.
A fleshy woman with a very ruddy face under her sunbonnet came eagerly out into the road, leading the group of evidently much worried women.
“Have you folks seen anything of——”
“Abby!” shrieked the woman Ruth had found, and she struggled to get out of the car.
“Well, I declare, Mary Marsden!” gasped the sunbonneted woman, who was plainly Abby Drake. “If you ain’t a sight!”
“I—I’m so scared!” quavered the unforunate victim of her own nerves, as Ruth ran back to help her out of the touring car. “God is going to punish me, Abby.”
“I certainly hope He will,” declared her friend, in rather a hard-hearted way. “I told you, you ought to be punished for wearing that dress up there into the berry pasture, and—— Land’s sakes alive! Look at her dress!”
Afterward, when Ruth had been thanked by Mrs. Drake and the other women, and the cars were rolling along the highway again, the girl of the Red Mill said to Helen Cameron:
“I guess Tom is more than half right. Altogether, the most serious topic of conversation for all kinds and conditions of female humans is the matter of dress—in one way or another.”
“How dare you slur your own sex so?” demanded Helen.
“Well, look at this case,” her chum observed. “This Mary Marsden had been lost in the storm and killed for all they knew, yet Abby Drake’s first thought was for the woman’s dress.”
“Well, it was a pity about the dress,” Helen remarked, proving that she agreed with Abby Drake and the bulk of womankind—as her twin brother oft and again acclaimed.
Ruth laughed. “And now if we could see poor dear Tommy——”
The car rounded a sharp turn in the highway. The Drake house was perhaps a mile behind. Ahead was a long stretch of rain-drenched road, and Helen instantly cried:
“There he is!”
The figure of Tom Cameron with the empty gasoline can in his hand could scarcely be mistaken, although he was at least a mile in advance. Helen began to punch the horn madly.
“He’ll know that,” Ruth cried. “Yes, he looks back! Won’t he be astonished?”
Tom certainly was amazed. He proceeded to sit down on the can and wait for the cars to overtake him.
“What are you traveling on?” he shouted, when Helen stopped with the engine running just in front of him. “Fairy gasoline?”
“Why, Tommy, you’re not so smart!” laughed his sister. “It takes Ruth to find gas stations. We were stalled right in front of one, and you did not know it. Hop in here and take my place and I’ll run back to the other car. Ruth will tell you all about it.”
“Perhaps we had better let Colonel Marchand and Jennie have this honeymoon car,” Ruth said doubtfully.
“Humph!” her chum observed, “I begin to believe it will be just as much a honeymoon car with you and Tom in it as with that other couple. ‘Bless you, my children!’”
She ran back to the big car with this saucy statement. Tom grinned, slipped behind the wheel, and started the roadster slowly.
“It must be,” he observed in his inimitable drawl, “that Sis has noticed that I’m fond of you, Ruthie.”
“Quite remarkable,” she rejoined cheerfully. “But the war isn’t over yet, Tommy-boy. And if our lives are spared we’ve got to finish our educations and all that. Why, Tommy, you are scarcely out of short pants, and I’ve only begun to put my hair up.”
“Jimminy!” he grumbled, “you do take all the starch out of a fellow. Now tell me how you got gas. What happened?”
Everybody has been to Boston, or expects to go there some time, so it is quite immaterial what happened to the party while at the Hub. They only remained two days, anyway, then they started off alongshore through the pleasant old towns that dot the coast as far as Cape Ann.
They saw the ancient fishing ports of Marblehead, Salem, Gloucester and Rockport, and then came back into the interior and did not see salt water again until they reached Newburyport at the mouth of the Merrimac.
The weather remained delightfully cool and sunshiny after that heavy tempest they had suffered in the hills, and they reached Portsmouth and remained at a hotel for three days when it rained again. The young folks chafed at this delay, but Aunt Kate declared that a hotel room was restful after jouncing over all sorts of roads for so long.
“They never will build a car easy enough for auntie,” Jennie Stone declared. “I tell pa he must buy some sort of airship for us——”
“Never!” cried Aunt Kate in quick denial. “Whenever I go up in the air it will be because wings have sprouted on my shoulder blades. And I should not call an aeroplane easy riding, in any case.”
“At least,” grumbled Tom, “you can spin along without any trouble with country constables, and that’s a blessing.”
For on several occasions they had had arguments with members of the police force, in one case helping to support a justice and a constable by paying a fine.
They did not travel on Sunday, however, when the constables reap most of their harvest, so they really had little to complain of in that direction. Nor did they travel fast in any case.
After the rainy days at Portsmouth, the automobile party ran on with only minor incidents and no adventures until they reached Portland. There Ruth telegraphed to Mr. Hammond that they were coming, as in her letter, written before they left Cheslow, she had promised him she would.
Herringport, the nearest town to the moving picture camp at Beach Plum Point, was at the head of a beautiful harbor, dotted with islands, and with water as blue as that of the Bay of Naples. When the two cars rolled into this old seaport the party was welcomed in person by Mr. Hammond, the president and producing manager of the Alectrion Film Corporation.
“I have engaged rooms for you at the hotel here, if you want them,” he told Ruth, after being introduced to Aunt Kate and Colonel Marchand, the only members of the party whom he had not previously met.
“But I can give you all comfortable bunks with some degree of luxury at the camp. At least, we think it luxurious after our gold mining experience in the West. You will get better cooking at the Point, too.”
“But a camp!” sighed Aunt Kate. “We have roughed it so much coming down here, Mr. Hammond.”
“There won’t be any black ants at this camp,” said her niece cheerfully.
“Only sand fleas,” suggested the wicked Tom.
“You can’t scare me with fleas,” said Jennie. “They only hop; they don’t wriggle and creep.”
“My star in the ‘Seaside Idyl,’ Miss Loder, demanded hotel accommodations at first. But she soon changed her mind,” Mr. Hammond said. “She is now glad to be on the lot with the rest of the company.”
“It sounds like a circus,” Aunt Kate murmured doubtfully.
“It is more than that, my dear Madam,” replied the manager, laughing. “But these young people——”
“If Aunt Kate won’t mind,” said Ruth, “let us try it, while she remains at the Herringport Inn.”
“I’ll run her back and forth every day for the ‘eats’,” Tom promptly proposed.
“My duty as a chaperon——” began the good woman, when her niece broke in with:
“In numbers there is perfect safety, Auntie. There are a whole lot of girls down there at the Point.”
“And we have chaperons of our own, I assure you,” interposed Mr. Hammond, treating Aunt Kate’s objection seriously. “Miss Loder has a cousin who always travels with her. Our own Mother Paisley, who plays character parts, has daughters of her own and is a lovely lady. You need not fear, Madam, that the conventions will be broken.”
“We won’t even crack ’em, Aunt Kate,” declared Helen rouguishly. “I will watch Jen like a cat would a mouse.”
“Humph!” observed the plump girl, scornfully. “This mouse, in that case, is likely to swallow the cat!”