“I give it up! She must be a deal better at arithmetic than I am. I should make the mixedest mess of that business;” answered Molly, equally curious.
“Yet you will see that she makes no mistakes. I’ve been traveling up and down the river on this same boat for many years and I’ve given her all sorts of sums, at times, on purpose to try her. But her memory never fails,” said Miss Greatorex who was in charge of the party. She sat quite calmly with the amount of three fares in her hand but with a most forbidding gaze at Alfaretta.
Who that young person was or why she had thrust herself into their company she did not understand. She had herself but known of this trip on the day before, when Miss Penelope Rhinelander had been obliged to give it up, on account of the extreme illness of a near relative.
However, here she was with her two pupils, whom she taught at the Rhinelander Academy, bound for a summer’s outing in—to her and them—unknown lands. Also, as there may be some who have not hitherto followed the fortunes of Dorothy, it may be well to explain that she was a foundling, left upon the doorstep of a man and wife, in a quiet street in Baltimore. That he had lost his health and his position as a letter-carrier in that city and had removed to his wife’s small farm in the Hudson Highlands. That among their friends there was somebody who had taken an interest in the orphan girl and had burdened himself—or herself—with the charge of her education. That she had passed the last school year at the Academy and had been in some most exciting episodes detailed in “Dorothy’s Schooling;” and that now, at the beginning of the long vacation, she was traveling with her closest school friend and a teacher, whose life she had been the means of saving at the time of the Academy fire, toward New York; and from thence to Nova Scotia—there to grow strong for another year of study.
Alfaretta Babcock’s home was near to her home upon the mountain; and though unlike, there was a sincere affection between this untaught country girl and the dainty Dorothy, and Alfy had begged a ride in a neighbor’s wagon going to Newburgh, that she might bid her friend good by and watch her set sail on what seemed must be the most wonderful of journeys.
She was to have returned home as she had come; but when the steamer was on the point of leaving an impulse had seized her to travel thus herself, if only for the brief distance between this landing and the one nearer her own home. She had a few cents in her purse and hoped they would be enough to pay her fare; and now when they were already moving down the stream and her familiar mountain-top came into view, she made a wild dart toward the stewardess, shouting:
“Ma’am, please, ma’am, take mine! I’ve got to get off the next place and—and—I mustn’t be left!”
Fanny picked up the camp-chair Alfy had stumbled over, remarked in a soothing voice, “Plenty of time, little gal, oceans of time, oceans of time,” and glanced at the money so suddenly thrust into her already crowded palm.
“Four cents, little gal? Hardly enough. Fifteen is the regular fare. All you got, sissy? Look and see.”
The tone was kind but the statement sounded like a knell in poor Alfaretta’s ears. Thousands of times she had watched the many boats pass up and down the river, but only once had she been upon any and that was a row-boat. It had been the dream of her life to voyage, as she was doing now, far and away beyond those Highlands, that seemed to meet and clasp hands across the mighty stream, and see the wonderful world that lay beyond. For the boats always disappeared around that projecting point of rock and forest, and so she knew that the mountains did not meet but merely seemed so to do. Well, of course, she wasn’t to find out about them to-day. She knew that quite well, because her own landing was on this side the “Point” and she could go no further. Indeed, could she now go even so far?