CHAPTER XVIII—ON THE EVE OF THE CONTEST
So, thus carried kindly by the Swiss farmer and his son, Laura Belding came to the farmhouse on the hillside. It was a comfortable home, with a big tile stove in the sitting room, and shining china arranged in long rows on high shelves all around the kitchen. The Sitzes had kept up many of their old-world customs and made a comfortable living upon a rocky and hilly farm on which most Americans would have starved to death.
Mrs. Sitz was a comfortable looking, kindly woman, by her expression of countenance; but she spoke little English. There was a girl about Laura’s age, however, named Evangeline. She was a buxom, flaxen-haired, rosy girl, who was delighted to see the strange girl whom her father had found in the haunted house.
Evangeline took Laura into her own room, removed her shoe and stocking, and bathed the twisted ankle in cold water, and then insisted upon rubbing home-made liniment upon it, and bandaging the member tightly. All the time she was doing this, she was exclaiming “Oh!” and “Ah!” over Laura’s adventure as the latter related it.
“I think it was real mean of those other girls to run and leave you,” said Evangeline, sympathetically.
“I don’t think it mean,” laughed Laura—for she could laugh now that the adventure had ended so happily. “There were so many of them that I was not missed, I suppose, in the general stampede.”
“But you might have remained there all night.”
“No! And that reminds me, your father says you have a telephone. I must call up my father, or brother. And yet—I wonder if I won’t scare mother by calling at this time of night? Let me think.”
“You can use the telephone if you want to,” said Evangeline, hospitably. “It’s right here in the corner of the living room.”
But Laura had a bright idea about the telephoning. She knew that, by this time, the girls must have arrived home. She did not believe Jess would go right past her house without making inquiries for her. And by this time the household might have been aroused, and her father, or Chet, would be on the way to Robinson’s Woods to hunt for her.