INTRODUCTIONS
"Oh, goodness to gracious! Here comes old Mr. Abel—and he has fire in his eye, Ruth!" gasped Agnes.
"What—what's he going to do?" stammered Ruth, clinging to Agnes' hand under the hymn-book which they shared together.
"Something awful! Poor Neale!"
"His head looks a fright," declared Ruth.
"And everybody's laughing," groaned Agnes.
"Girls!" admonished Mrs. MacCall, "try to behave."
The creaking of the deacon's boots drew near. Old Mr. Abel kept a cut-price shoe shop and it was a joke among the young folk of Milton that all the shoes he sold were talking shoes, for when you walked in them they said very plainly:
"Cheap! cheap! cheap!"
Soon the minister noted the approach of Deacon Abel. As the old man stopped by the Kenway pew, the minister lost the thread of his discourse, and stopped. A dread silence fell upon the church.
The deacon leaned forward in front of the little girls and Mrs. MacCall. His face was very red, and he shook an admonitory finger at the startled Neale O'Neil.
"Young man!" he said, sonorously. "Young man, you take off that wig and put it in your pocket—or leave this place of worship immediately."
It was an awful moment—especially awful for everybody in the Kenway pew. The girls' cheeks burned. Mrs. MacCall glared at the boy in utter stupefaction.
Deacon Abel was a very stern man indeed—much more so than the clergyman himself. All the young folk of the congregation stood in particular awe of him.
But poor Neale O'Neil, unconscious of any wrong intent, merely gazed at the old gentleman in surprise. "Wha—wha—what?" he gasped.
"Get out of here, young man!" exclaimed the deacon. "You have got the whole crowd by the ears. A most disgraceful exhibition. If I had the warming of your jacket I certainly would be glad."
"Oh!" exclaimed Ruth, horrified.
Agnes was really angry. She was an impulsive girl and she could not fail to espouse the cause of anybody whom she considered "put upon." She rose right up when Neale stumbled to his feet.
"Never you mind, Neale!" she whispered, shrilly. "He's a mean old thing! I'm coming, too."
It was a very wrong thing to say, but Agnes never stopped to think how a thing was going to sound when she was angry. The boy, his face aflame, got out through the next pew, which chanced to be empty, and Agnes followed right on behind him before Ruth could pull her back into her seat.
Nobody could have stopped her. She felt that Neale O'Neil was being ill-treated, and whatever else you could say about Aggie Kenway, you could not truthfully say that she was not loyal to her friends.
"Cheap! cheap! cheap!" squeaked the deacon's boots as he went back up one aisle while the boy and girl hurried up the other. It seemed to Neale as though the church was filled with eyes, staring at him.
His red face was a fine contrast for his rainbow-hued hair, but Agnes was as white as chalk.
The minister took up his discourse almost immediately, but it seemed to the culprits making their way to the door as though the silence had held the congregation for an hour! They were glad to get through the baize doors and let them swing together behind them.
Neale clapped his cap on his head, hiding a part of the ruin, but Deacon Abel came out and attacked him hotly:
"What do you mean by such disgraceful actions, boy?" he asked, with quivering voice. "I don't know who you are—you are a stranger to me; but I warn you never to come here and play such jokes again——"
"It isn't a joke, Mr. Abel!" cried Agnes.
"What do you call it, then? Isn't that one of them new-fangled wigs I read folks in the city wear to dances and other affairs? What's he got it on for?"
"It isn't a wig," Agnes said, while Neale clutched wildly at his hair.
"Don't tell me it's his own hair!" almost shouted the old gentleman.
"What's the matter with my hair?" demanded the puzzled boy.
"Doesn't he know? Do you mean to say he doesn't know what his head looks like?" cried the amazed deacon. "Come! come into this room, boy, and look at your hair."
There was the ushers' dressing-room at one end of the vestibule; he led Neale in by the arm. In the small mirror on the wall the boy got a fairly accurate picture of his hirsute adornment.
Without a word—after his first gasp of amazement—Neale turned and walked out of the room, and out of the church. It was a hot Sunday and the walks were bathed in sunshine. Neale involuntarily took the path across the Parade in the direction of the old Corner House.
At this hour—in the middle of sermon time—there was scarcely anybody in sight. Milton observed Sunday most particularly—especially in this better quarter of the town.
Neale had gone some way before he realized that Agnes was just beside him. He looked around at her and now his face was very pale.
"What did you come for?" he asked her, ungraciously enough.
"I'm so sorry, Neale," the girl whispered, drawing nearer to his elbow.
The boy stared for a moment, and then exclaimed: "Why, Aggie! you're a good little sport, all right."
Aggie blushed vividly, but she hastened to say: "Why did you do it, Neale?"
"I—I can't tell you," replied the boy, in some confusion. "Only I got to change the color of my hair."
"But, mercy! you needn't have changed it to so many colors all at once!" cried she.
"Huh! do you think—like that old man—that I did it a-purpose?"
"But you did dye it!"
"I tried to."
"That was the stuff you were buying yesterday in the drugstore?" she queried.
"Yes. And I put it on just before I started for church. He said it would make the hair a beautiful brown."
"Who said so?"
"That drugstore clerk," said Neale, despondently.
"He never sold you hair-dye at all!"
"Goodness knows what it was——"
"It's stained your collar—and it's run down your neck and dyed that green."
"Do you suppose I can ever get it off, Aggie?" groaned the boy.
"We'll try. Come on home and we'll get a lot of soapsuds in a tub in the woodshed—so we can splash it if we want to," said the suddenly practical Agnes.
They reached the woodshed without being observed by Uncle Rufus. Agnes brought the water and the soap and a hand-brush from the kitchen. Neale removed his collar and tie, and turned back the neck of his shirt. Agnes aproned her Sunday frock and went to work.
But, sad to relate, the more she scrubbed, and the more Neale suffered, the worse his hair looked!
"Goodness, Aggie!" he gasped at last. "My whole scalp is as sore as a boil. I don't believe I can stand your scrubbing it any more."
"I don't mean to hurt you, Neale," panted Agnes.
"I know it. But isn't the color coming out?"
"I—I guess it's set. Maybe I've done more harm than good. It's a sort of a sickly green all over. I never did see such a head of hair, Neale! And it was so pretty before."
"Pretty!" growled Neale O'Neil. "It was a nuisance. Everybody who ever saw me remembered me as the 'white-haired boy.'"
"Well," sighed Agnes, "whoever sees that hair of yours now will remember you, and no mistake."
"And I have to go to school with it to-morrow," groaned Neale.
"It will grow out all right—in time," said the girl, trying to be comforting.
"It'll take more time than I want to spend with green hair," returned Neale. "I see what I'll have to do, Aggie."
"What's that?"
"Get a Riley cut. I don't know but I'd better be shaved."
"Oh, Neale! you'll look so funny," giggled Agnes, suddenly becoming hysterical.
"That's all right. You have a right to laugh," said Neale, as Agnes fell back upon a box to have her laugh out. "But I won't be any funnier looking with no hair than I would be with green hair—make up your mind to that."
Neale slipped over the back fence into Mr. Murphy's premises, before the rest of the Kenway family came home, and the girls did not see him again that day.
"How the folks stared at us!" Ruth said, shaking her head. "It would have been all right if you hadn't gotten up and gone out with him, Aggie."
"Oh, yes! let that horrid old Deacon Abel put him out of church just as though he were a stray dog, and belonged to nobody!" cried Agnes.
"Well, he doesn't belong to us, does he?" asked Dot, wonderingly.
"We're the only folks he has, I guess, Dot," said Tess, as Agnes went off with her head in the air.
"He has Mr. Murphy—and the pig," said Dot, slowly. "But I like Neale. Only I wish he hadn't painted his hair so funny."
"I'd like to have boxed his ears—that I would!" said Mrs. MacCall, in vexation. "I thought gals was crazy enough nowadays; but to think of a boy dyeing his hair!"
Aunt Sarah shook her head and pursed her lips, as one who would say, "I knew that fellow would come to some bad end." But Uncle Rufus, having heard the story, chuckled unctuously to himself.
"Tell yo' what, chillen," he said to the girls, "it 'mind me ob de time w'en my Pechunia was a young, flighty gal. Dese young t'ings, dey ain't nebber satisfied wid de way de good Lawd make 'em.
"I nebber did diskiver w'y Pechunia was so brack, as I say afore. But 'tain't an affliction. She done t'ink it was. She done talk erbout face-bleach, an' powder, an' somet'ing she call 'rooch' wot white sassiety wimmens fixes up deir faces wid, an' says she ter me, 'Pap, I is gwine fin' some ob dese yere fixin's fur my complexion.'
"'Yo' go 'long,' I says ter her. 'Yo's a fast brack, an' dat's all dere is to hit. Ef all de watah an' soap yo' done use ain't take no particle of dat soot off'n yo' yit, dere ain't nottin' eber will remove it.'
"But yo' kyan't change a gal's natur. Pechunia done break her back ober de washtub ter earn de money to buy some o' dem make-up stuff, an' she goes down ter de drug sto' ter mak' her purchases. She 'low ter spen' much as six bits fer de trash.
"An' firs' t'ing she axed for was face powder—aw, my glo-ree! De clerk ask her: 'Wot shade does yo' want, Ma'am? An' Pechunia giggles an' replies right back:
"'Flesh color, Mister.'
"An' wot you t'ink dat young scalawag ob a clerk gib her?" chuckled Uncle Rufus, rolling his eyes and shaking his head in delight. "W'y, he done gib her powdered charcoal! Dat finish Pechunia. She nebber tried to buy nottin' mo' for her complexion—naw, indeedy!"
The girls of the old Corner House learned that Neale was up early on Monday morning, having remained in hiding the remainder of Sunday. He sought out a neighbor who had a pair of sheep-shears, and Mr. Murphy cropped the boy's hair close to his scalp. The latter remained a pea-green color and being practically hairless, Neale looked worse than a Mexican dog!
He was not at all the same looking youth who had dawned on Agnes' vision the Monday morning previous, and had come to her rescue. She said herself she never would have known him.
"Oh, dear!" she said to Ruth. "He looks like a gnome out of a funny picture-book."
But Neale O'Neil pulled his cap down to his ears and followed behind the Kenway girls to school. He was too proud and too sensitive to walk with them.
He knew that he was bound to be teased by the boys at school, when once they saw his head. Even the old cobbler had said to him:
"'Tis a foine lookin' noddle ye have now. Ye look like a tinder grane onion sproutin' out of the garden in the spring. Luk out as ye go over th' fince, me la-a-ad, for if that ormadhoun of a goat sees ye, he'll ate ye alive!"
This was at the breakfast table, and Neale had flushed redly, being half angry with the old fellow.
"That's right, la-a-ad," went on Mr. Murphy. "Blushin' ain't gone out o' fashion where you kem from, I'm glad ter see. An' begorra! ye're more pathriotic than yer name implies, for I fear that's Scotch instead of Irish. I see now ye've put the grane above the red!"
So Neale went to school on this first day in no very happy frame of mind. He looked so much different with his hair cropped, from what he had at church on Sunday, that few of the young folks who had observed his disgrace there, recognized him—for which the boy was exceedingly glad.
He remained away from the Kenway girls, and in that way escaped recognition. He had to get acquainted with some of the fellows—especially those of the highest grammar grade. Being a new scholar, he had to meet the principal of the school, as well as Miss Shipman.
"Take your cap off, sir," said Mr. Marks, sternly. Unwillingly enough he did so. "For goodness' sake! what have you been doing to your head?" demanded the principal.
"Getting my hair clipped, sir," said Neale.
"But the color of your head?"
"That's why I had the hair clipped."
"What did you do to it?"
"It was an accident, sir," said Neale. "But I can study just as well."
"We will hope so," said the principal, his eyes twinkling. "But green is not a promising color."
Ruth had taken Dot to the teacher of the first grade, primary, and Dot was made welcome by several little girls whom she had met at Sunday school during the summer. Then Ruth hurried to report to the principal of the Milton High School, with whom she had already had an interview.
Tess found her grade herself. It was the largest room in the whole building and was presided over by Miss Andrews—a lady of most uncertain age and temper, and without a single twinkle in her grey-green eyes.
But with Tess were several girls she knew—Mable Creamer; Margaret and Holly Pease; Maria Maroni, whose father kept the vegetable and fruit stand in the cellar of one of the Stower houses on Meadow Street; Uncle Rufus' granddaughter, Alfredia (with the big red ribbon bow); and a little Yiddish girl named Sadie Goronofsky, who lived with her step-mother and a lot of step-brothers and sisters in another of the tenements on Meadow Street which had been owned so many years by Uncle Peter Stower.
Agnes and Neale O 'Neil met in the same grade, but they did not have a chance to speak, for the boys sat on one side of the room, and the girls on the other.
The second Kenway girl had her own troubles. During the weeks she lived at the old Corner House, she had been looking forward to entering school in the fall, so she had met all the girls possible who were to be in her grade.
Now she found that, school having opened, the girls fell right back into their old associations. There were the usual groups, or cliques. She would have to earn her place in the school, just as though she did not know a soul.
Beatrice, or "Trix" Severn, was not one of those whom Agnes was anxious to be friendly with; and here Trix was in the very seat beside her, while Eva Larry and Myra Stetson were across the room!
The prospect looked cloudy to Agnes, and she began the first school session with less confidence than any of her sisters.