Algy and Juliette came hurrying up just as the rest of them, tired of waiting, were boarding the street car.
Juliette across the car aisle, now they could see her, looked pale. She had on her last winter's scarlet coat over a last summer's old white dress and looked dabby, poor, little, dark-eyed gypsy. But when a girl won't take the money her father offers her to buy any new summer clothes——
She had studied too hard, they all knew that. And for nothing. The examinations were but two days off now, in Cincinnati. There had been a final scene and row at her house recently, when she demanded again of her father that she be allowed to go, and again was refused with an almost brutal outburst of temper.
"And he said I'm under age," Juliette told Selina and Maud the day after this, "and if I ran off and started as I intimated I'd do, he could bring me back."
Juliette with Algy at her side was with the crowd as they left the car, and with baskets, wraps, and what not, went down the steep, rock-paved levee, to the river at its foot, rolling broad and serene, the evening ferryboats just starting on their pilgrimages, and a steamboat here and there laid up at its wharf, the red of the sun at the horizon line, turning their white paint to rosiness.
And Juliette and Algy went aboard the boathouse with them, everybody again was sure of that. Though the men couldn't recall that Algy was at his locker when they were at their own, getting into boating togs, and the girls spending their time out on the guards looking at the sunset on the water could not remember Juliette being with them.
One thing was sure. After the two barges were well started under the long strokes of the rowers, and as far on their way as the upper bridge, it was discovered that neither boat contained Juliette or Algy.
A halt following this discovery and a bringing of the barges alongside each other brought a bit of testimony from Tod Bacon.
"I saw them in one of the sculls before we got the barges out of the boathouse. I reckon they've plans of their own."
There was a good deal of grumbling over the absence of Algy when they landed for supper on the high, woody bank that overswept the river up and down in a mighty stretch of view. Algy always built the fire, and went to the nearest farmhouse for water, and fetched and carried generally.