“I’ll Towser ’em!” ejaculated the little old lady, tugging at the door of the tonneau. “Let me jest git ’em!”
She hopped out into the road very briskly and the youthful Trimmins instantly backed away.
“What them young’uns need,” declared Mrs. Scattergood, “is a good tannin’. If ’twould do any good I’d tell their mom; but it won’t. She’s a poor, slimpsy thing without no backbone. If I could lay my han’s on ’em!”
But finding that their trick was fruitless of anything but a tongue-lashing from the brisk old lady, the two imps ran shrieking away into the wood. Janice removed the body of the poor dog to the roadside. She remembered now that the last day she had come past the squatters’ cabin the hound was almost too weak to get out of the path of the automobile.
“He is better dead,” she said to Miss ’Rill. “But, oh, my dear! I’m so sorry I was the means of bringing his death about.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Janice,” said her friend, soothingly.
“It must be the fault of us all that such children as these Trimmins are allowed to grow up about us, so hard and heartless! Something ought to be done for that family, Miss ’Rill—something ought to be done for them.”
“I don’t see how you would reach that black-haired girl, for instance,” sighed the little ex-schoolteacher. “She’s as wild as a colt.”
“That’s a problem,” said Janice, soberly. “I wonder if it isn’t a problem that we ought to solve?”
“I had one of her older sisters in my school,” rejoined Miss ’Rill, with a shudder, “and she was one awful girl! I never knew what she was going to do next.”