Phœbe smiled and turned to reënter the house.
“Saturday is my busy day,” she remarked brightly. “I suppose you’re going to practice for the baseball match, Phil?”
“Yes,” he said, “I promised the boys—” Then he stopped and shook his head. “I don’t know yet what I’ll do, Phœbe,” he added. “Just now I’ve an errand down town.”
He caught up his cap, kissed his twin and strode down the walk to the gate. Phœbe cautioned the younger ones not to raise a racket under Gran’pa Eliot’s window, but to keep in the front yard if they were going to play. Then she stole softly away to her own little room upstairs and locked herself in so as not to be disturbed.
CHAPTER II
PHIL INTERVIEWS THE LAWYER
Phil Daring walked toward the village with uneasy, nervous strides. There was an anxious expression upon his usually placid face.
“Queer,” he muttered to himself, “that I never thought to ask how we’re able to live. It costs money to feed five hungry youngsters; and where does it come from, I wonder?”
The Eliot house was on the brow of a knoll and the street sloped downward to the little village where the “business center” clustered around the railway station. The river was just beyond, flowing sleepily on its way to the gulf, and at Riverdale a long wooden bridge spanned the murky water. It was a quiet, pretty little town, but had such a limited population that every resident knew nearly everyone else who lived there and kept fairly well posted on the private affairs of each member of the community.
Wallace Daring, the father of the twins, had been the big man of Riverdale before he died a few months ago. He had come to the town many years before, when he was a young man, and built the great beet sugar factory that had made all the farmers around so prosperous, growing crops to supply it. Mr. Daring must have made money from the business, for he married Jonathan Eliot’s daughter and established a cosy home where Phil and Phœbe, and Donald and Becky were born. Afterward he erected a splendid mansion that was the wonder and admiration of all Riverdale. But no one envied Wallace Daring his success, for the kindly, energetic man was everybody’s friend and very popular with his neighbors.