John Bruce met the girls at the station, to which Scorch escorted them in time for the afternoon train. Nancy shook hands with her champion warmly before they separated.
“You be a good boy and keep out of trouble,” she advised him. “Maybe Mr. Gordon isn’t as bad as—as you think. He never refuses me anything, and I feel ashamed to doubt him so.”
“Say! what did he ever give you but money?” demanded Scorch.
“But that, you once told me,” said Nancy, laughing, “was about the best thing in the world.”
“It’s good to have, just the same,” quoth Scorch. “But perhaps havin’ folks is better. And if Old Gordon has hidden you away from your folks, Miss Nancy, he’d oughter be made to give you up to them.”
“That’s a new idea, Scorch,” returned Nancy, reflectively. “Do you suppose that I might have been stolen from my people for some reason?”
“Maybe you were stolen by Gypsies!” cried Jennie.
“Old Gordon doesn’t look like a Gypsy,” said Scorch, slowly, “nor yet the gray man I was telling you about.”
“Come on and get aboard,” said John Bruce, smiling. “I wouldn’t worry my head about such things, if I were you, Nancy. We all like you quite as well as we should if you had a family as big as the Bruces’.”
That was not the only time the girls saw Scorch O’Brien that summer; and on one occasion the entire O’Brien family—from the fat, ruddy-faced Mother O’Brien, down to Aloysius Adolphus O’Brien, the baby—came clear out to Hollyburg on the train, where they were met by the Bruces’ man, and Nancy and Jennie, with a two-horse beach-wagon and transported to the lake for a picnic.