Tippy ate her dinner alone that day, glancing grimly through the open window from time to time to the sand dunes back of the house, where an old hag of a gypsy in a short red dress with a gay bandanna knotted over her head, broiled bacon and boiled corn over a smoky campfire; and two swaggering villains who smelled of tar and codfish (because of the old net which half-way filled the brigantine), sucked the very cobs when the corn was eaten from them, forever registering that feast high above all other feasts in the tablet of blessed memories.
The interruption to all this came as unexpectedly as a clap of thunder from a clear sky. A messenger boy on a wheel whirled up to the front gate with a telegram. Tippy signed for it, not wanting the boy to see Barbara in such outlandish dress, then carried it out to the picnickers. She held it under her apron until she reached them. Telegrams always spelled trouble to Mrs. Triplett, but Barbara took this one from her with a smiling thank you, without, rising from her seat on the sand. Her father often telegraphed instead of writing when away on his vacations, and she knew he was up at a lake resort in Michigan, at an Editors’ Convention. Telegrams had always been pleasant things in her experience. But as she tore this open and read she turned pale even under her brown stain.
“It’s papa,” she gasped. “Hurt in an automobile accident. They don’t say how bad--just hurt. And he wants me. I must take the first train.”
She looked up at Mrs. Triplett helplessly, not even making an effort to rise from the sand, she was so dazed and distressed by the sudden summons. It was the first time she had ever had the shock of bad news. It was the first time she had ever been called upon to act for herself in such an emergency, and she felt perfectly numb, mind and body. Tippy’s voice sounded a mile away when she said:
“You can catch the boat. It’s an hour till the _Dorothy Bradford_ starts back to Boston.”
Still Barbara sat limp and powerless, as one sits in a nightmare.
Georgina gave a choking gasp as two awful words rose up in her throat and stuck there. _"The Tishbite."_ Whatever that mysterious horror might be, plainly its evil workings had begun.
“Tut!” exclaimed Tippy, pulling Barbara to her feet. “Keep your head. You’ll have to begin scrubbing that brown paint off your face if you expect to reach the boat on time.”
Automatically Georgina responded to that “tut” as if it were the old challenge of the powder horn. No matter how she shivered she must show what brave stuff she was made of. Even with that awful foreboding clutching at her heart like an iron hand and Barby about to leave her, she mustn’t show one sign of her distress.
It was well that Georgina had learned to move briskly in her long following after Tippy, else she could not have been of such service in this emergency. Her eyes were blurred with tears as she hurried up to the garret for suitcase and satchel, and down the hall to look up numbers in the telephone directory. But it was a comfort even in the midst of her distress to feel that she could take such an important part in the preparations, that Tippy trusted her to do the necessary telephoning, and to put up a lunch for Barby without dictating either the messages or the contents of the lunch-box.