The S. P. Mystery

by Harriet Pyne Grove

The forlorn, tumble-down place of the Kleins was on what had once been its own private road, the road that led into a large, well-kept farm of thrifty German immigrants. But this was long ago. A worthless son and a still more worthless grandson had scattered the holdings. The woodland and nearly all of the farm besides had been sold off for debts and living. All that was left numbered a few acres and those badly kept in the intervals of Jacob Klein’s drinking.

Mrs. Klein, Jacob’s wife, was almost as far from German thrift and ideas of cleanliness as her husband, though, if some one else did the work, she was capable of having things done. And it was the girl known as Greta Klein that did them, for Greta did not even go to school. The district was thinly populated, or had been until people began to build cottages on the farther end of the lake. No one took an interest in these unattractive people and though it was quite probable that a school census had been taken and a visitor had called, possibly more than once, so far as Greta might have known, no one summoned her to school, no one passed that way to go to school, and Greta had never seen the quite distant spot where learning was the central idea.

As the speech of the family was German, Greta spoke their poor dialect of that language, though she had recently found an old German Bible, of her great-grandmother’s, she supposed, in an ancient trunk which was in the queer little attic. But aside from this and a few papers, the trunk was empty, for everything which could possibly be used in the way of clothing had long since been put into use. But after the Bible was found, Greta’s German improved.

The house consisted of a one-story cottage, the first building of the original immigrant, and built solidly by the farmer himself. To this two-roomed cottage an addition had once been made, with one room on the first floor, a low room above and a tiny attic. The addition had never been painted. The paint upon the first cottage had worn off with the years and the storms until the shabby, dilapidated house looked all of one piece with its dark, dingy exterior.

Birthdays were never celebrated in the Klein family, but when Greta once asked her mother when she was born she was told that so far as her mother remembered it was the fifteenth of June. This Greta did not forget, though she never mentioned it again. For some reason her parents did not like her, she was sure. There was a little boy of five and a little girl of three, for whom her mother seemed to have some affection, but Jacob Klein paid scant attention to any of them except to threaten and be as abusive as a man who drinks can be. For Greta there was only hard work with an effort to avoid her father as far as possible. In this her mother helped her. More than once she had sent Greta into the woods with the younger children and taken a severe beating herself from the quarrelsome Jacob.

“I’m going to go off by myself on my birthday,” Greta promised herself. She had never done it before, and she was not sure just what would happen if she did; but she would. Probably the campers would have come by this time at the cottages and Mrs. Klein would get some washing to do, or, rather, for Greta to do. But that would not matter. She would take one day. If she only dared walk into town! But that was a long way off, and then her clothes were so queer that she was ashamed to be seen. Once in a great while Jacob Klein would take his wife and the two younger children in the old wagon, behind the bony horse, and drive to the village. But since some one had asked why he did not send Greta to school she had never been taken, and that was as much as three years before.

Unloved and unloving except for a sort of affection for the two ill-natured children, Greta was an unhappy child, often puzzled over many things, odd things that had happened. For the woods and the river and most of all the lake that shimmered its blue in these early summer days, Greta had a great love. There clothes did not matter, nor whether she had enough to eat, and with a feeling that she must be personally clean, a feeling not shared by the other Kleins, she had gotten into the habit of slipping out of the house in the summer days, before the rest had wakened, and of taking a plunge into the often cold water of the lake. Then, refreshed, she would return, ready for the hard work of the day, or for the tiresome task of looking after the children.

It was about four o’clock one morning when Greta flew through the woods on the opposite side of the road past the Klein house. Mrs. Klein had told her that she must catch some fish before there would be anything to eat for breakfast. They were out of flour and there would be no more killing of the few hens they had, whatever Jacob had to say about it. He could work a little.

Through the trees Greta darted while the birds sang and the life of the woods stirred about her. She carried a little bundle beside her fishing pole and when she came to a large willow that hung over the water, she stopped, stepped among some screening bushes and threw off the dingy clothes she was wearing, to put on a queer patchwork of a bathing suit which she had sewed together from pieces. She did not dare to wear any of the clothes her mother knew about, and as there was an occasional early fisherman on the lake she must have something in the way of a water garment.

But it was fun to dive from the long, heavy limb that extended into the water. It was deep enough for a good dive at this point, and Greta enjoyed a short swim before she landed a little further down, ran to the bushes and dressed again. Then she hung her shapeless bathing suit on a high limb, to dry, and hurried to where an old boat was moored. In a few minutes she was far from the shore, sending her boat to the fishing ground where she thought she would have the best and quickest success.