CHAPTER XII
TESSIE
Again our scene shifts, and, as in the screen play, that retrospective distant picture brings one back to an earlier vision, so from the distance we now see the runaway, Tessie.
Step by step, along the dark, uncertain road of offences which in themselves were trivial, but which brought such dire results upon the erring girl as to make her all but an outcast, Tessie, after the first foolish blunder, found herself confronted with a seeming necessity for keeping up the false role she had almost unwittingly assumed. The girl was not wicked. Her untrained and unrestrained tongue was her worst enemy, and it very often belied her honest, generous heart.
In inducing Dagmar to leave home she actually believed she was assisting a friend—her intention was to better that friend's circumstances, but the methods! How could she know that right could not result from deliberate wrong! That doctrine had never been made a part of such education as she had the opportunity of acquiring. True, the girl learned right from wrong, also her religion was very clear on the point, but she could not then believe it was wrong to fly from the horrors of mill drudgery, made unbearable by the more intimate environment of a miserable home.
So Tessie Wartliz was suffering from an inherited disease commonly called "Greed." Her parents were greedy for money, and she was greedy for good times. She wanted much of anything she enjoyed, and had little care how that abnormal amount was obtained.
The fatal night she and Dagmar (now our own Rose Dixon) landed so suddenly in Franklin, where the jitney dropped them almost into the arms of Officer Cosgrove, Tessie, as we will remember, escaped, and carried with her the pocketbook she had been carrying for her companion, and in that little soiled purse was the much-prized, lost and found, scout badge of merit.
Tessie at first thought little or nothing of the trinket. As she had scoffed at its purpose, when Rose respected it, so she brushed it aside as of no importance when she emptied the pitiful pittance of her forsaken companion into her own pocketbook, when forced to use the funds or beg from strangers.
On the step of the last jitney that rumbled through Franklin making no stops, and being entirely unoccupied by passengers, Tessie managed to hide as the car slowed up at a turn, and later she crawled inside, when the sleepy driver, his day and night work finished, allowed the motor to "take its head" as we might say to a horse-drawn vehicle. Her heart almost ceased beating when the officer who commanded the line between the two villages, stopped Frank and demanded to know if he carried any passengers.
"Three empty dinner pails that came out full of supper," the driver called back, and Tessie actually under the seat, felt free to breathe again and keep watch for some turn where a kindly house light might gleam out to save her from a dreaded night, under a tree or behind some rugged, wild world shelter.