“Ho, ho!” laughed Neale O’Neil. “What did he say?”
“Why,” confessed the smallest Corner House girl, indignantly, “he said I’d be grown up—and so would Alice—before that picture was enveloped——”
“‘Developed’!” cried Tess.
“No. Enveloped,” said Dot, stoutly. “You always get photograph proofs in an envelope.”
Ruth and Mrs. Heard were laughing heartily. Agnes said, admiringly:
“You’re a wonder, Dot! If there is a possible way of fumbling a thing, you do it.”
The little girls were not likely to understand all that Mrs. Heard said about the disappearance of Mr. Collinger’s automobile—no more than Dot understood about the surveyor’s transit. But they listened.
“You understand, Miss Ruth,” said the aunt of the county surveyor, “that Phil Collinger is responsible for all those tracings and maps that are being made in this road survey.
“If it gets out just what changes are to be made in grades and routes through the county before the commission renders its report, there is a chance for some of these ‘pauper politicians,’ as Philly calls them, to make money.”
“I don’t see how,” said Agnes, putting her oar in. “What good would the maps do even dishonest people?”