He had entered the house first on that evening when he was chased by Mr. Pinkney and the bulldog. Finding the back door open, he had run up the back stairs, and so climbed higher, and higher, until he reached the garret.
Nobody said anything to Master Tommy about the ghost, although Agnes wanted to. Ruth forbade her to broach the subject to the runaway.
Tommy had made a nest behind the old clothes, but some nights he had slept in a bed on the third floor. The day Ruth and Agnes ransacked the garret for Uncle Peter’s will, he had been down in that third floor room. When Ruth discovered the print of his body on the feather-bed, he was on the floor, under that bed, hidden by the comforter which hung down all around it.
He was pretty tired of the life he had been leading. He admitted to the Corner House girls that he had not seen a single Indian in all his wanderings. He was ready to go home—even if his mother thrashed him.
So Ruth telegraphed Mrs. Rooney. She took Tommy to a nearby store and dressed him neatly, if cheaply, and then bought his ticket and put him in the care of the conductor of the Bloomingsburg train. Tommy, much wiser than he had been, and quite contrite, went home.
“I s’pose he’s a dreadful bad boy,” sighed Dot. “But my! no girl would ever have such things happen to her—would she?”
“Would you want to be chased by bulldogs, and live in garrets, and steal just enough to keep alive—and—and never have on anything clean, Dot Kenway?” demanded Tess, in horror.
“No, I don’t s’pose I would,” confessed Dot. Then she sighed, and added: “It’s awful commonplace, just the same, bein’ a girl, isn’t it?”
“I agree with you, Dot-ums,” cried Agnes, who heard her. “Nothing ever happens to us.”
Almost on the heels of that statement, however, something happened to them that satisfied even Agnes’ longing for romance, for some time thereafter.