“If that bum actor stole your play, Ruth, he’s got clear way with it,” Tom said bluntly. “I’m awfully sorry——”
“Does that help?” demanded his sister snappishly, as though it were somewhat Tom’s fault. “You go home, Tom. I’m going to stay with Ruthie to-night,” and she followed her chum into the bedroom to which she had fled at Tom’s announcement of failure.
“Jimminy!” murmured Tom to the old miller who was still at the supper table. “And we aren’t even sure that that fellow did steal the scenario.”
“Humph!” rejoined Uncle Jabez. “You’ll find, if you live to be old enough, young feller, that women folks is kittle cattle. No knowing how they’ll take anything. That pen cost five dollars, I allow; but them papers only had writing on ’em, and it does seem to me that what you have writ once you ought to be able to write again. That’s the woman of it. She don’t say a thing about that pen, Ruthie don’t.”
However, Tom Cameron saw farther into the mystery than Uncle Jabez appeared to. And after a day or two, with Ruth still “moping about like a moulting hen,” as the miller expressed it, the young officer felt that he must do something to change the atmosphere of the Red Mill farmhouse.
“Our morale has gone stale, girls,” he declared to his sister and Ruth. “Worrying never did any good yet.”
“That’s a true word, Sonny,” said Aunt Alvirah, from her chair. “‘Care killed the cat.’ my old mother always said, and she had ten children to bring up and a drunken husband who was a trial. He warn’t my father. He was her second, an’ she took him, I guess, ’cause he was ornamental. He was a sign painter when he worked. But he mostly advertised King Alcohol by painting his nose red.
“We children sartain sure despised that man. But mother was faithful to her vows, and she made quite a decent member of the community of that man before she left off. And, le’s see! We was talkin’ about cats, warn’t we?”
“You were, Aunty dear,” said Ruth, laughing for the first time in several days.
“Hurrah!” said Tom, plunging head-first into his idea. “That’s just what I wanted to hear.”