“And look where she’s carrying us: to Mexico! All the way to the land of mystery and romance!”
“I can hardly wait to get back down there again. I wonder if we’ll run into as thrilling adventures as we did last summer when we were visiting Florence.”
Peggy smiled. “You will. You’re always getting out of one mystery only to tumble headlong into another.”
Jo Ann nodded toward the prim, erect, gray-haired woman on the front seat beside Florence and murmured, “Miss Prudence’ll keep me on my good behavior this time. Even if some tremendous mystery bumps right into me this trip, I’m not going to pay one bit of attention to it.”
“Straight from Missouri am I,” Peggy replied, laughing.
“From Mississippi, you mean. From a year’s hard work in good old Evanston High. The work’s agreed with us, hasn’t it? We’re both four or five pounds heavier. School’s agreed with Carlitos, too.” Jo Ann leaned forward to smile at the round-faced eleven-year-old boy sitting on the other side of Peggy. “He’s as fat as a butter ball now.”
Ever since the five had started on their long automobile journey, Carlitos had been too busy viewing the scenery to talk, but at Jo Ann’s words he opened his blue eyes wide and asked in broken English, “Butter ball—what is dat?”
Both Jo Ann and Peggy exchanged smiles. It seemed strange to them that Carlitos could not understand the most commonplace phrases, yet when they stopped to think that he had spoken Spanish altogether till he had come to the States last fall, they marveled that he talked as well as he did.
While Jo Ann was explaining to him the meaning of the words “butter ball,” Peggy was mentally reviewing his strange life. When he was about a year old his parents had come from New Jersey to a remote Mexican village where his father, Charles Eldridge, owned a silver mine. A few months later Mr. Eldridge had met his death at the hands of a treacherous Mexican foreman, and shortly afterwards Mrs. Eldridge had died from the combined effects of shock and pneumonia, leaving the tiny Carlitos in the care of a poor ignorant Indian nurse. The foreman, who had taken possession of the mine, then tried to kidnap Carlitos, the rightful heir. Alarmed at this threatened danger, the nurse had fled across the mountains with Carlitos and her family where they were befriended by Jo Ann, Florence, and herself. Due to their efforts Carlitos’s uncle, Edward Eldridge, had been found and the mine restored to Carlitos. So dismayed had his uncle been at finding that his nephew could not speak English that he had sent him to Massachusetts to live with his aunt, Miss Prudence Eldridge.
Peggy smiled to herself as her thoughts wandered around to the New England spinster aunt who had come down by train with Carlitos to Mississippi and was accompanying them the rest of the way to Mexico. Miss Prudence’s never-ceasing astonishment at having a half-grown nephew who was just learning to speak English was a source of amusement to her and Florence and Jo Ann.