“NO, DADDY,” SHE SAID, “I—I THINK I—I AM IN LOVE.”

Dorothy Dale’s Engagement

Page [165]

DOROTHY DALE’S
ENGAGEMENT

BY
MARGARET PENROSE
AUTHOR OF “DOROTHY DALE: A GIRL OF TO-DAY,” “DOROTHY
DALE AT GLENWOOD SCHOOL,” “DOROTHY DALE IN
THE CITY,” “THE MOTOR GIRLS SERIES,” ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

BOOKS BY MARGARET PENROSE

12mo. Cloth. Illustrated. Price, per volume,
75 cents, postpaid

THE DOROTHY DALE SERIES

DOROTHY DALE: A GIRL OF TO-DAY
DOROTHY DALE AT GLENWOOD SCHOOL
DOROTHY DALE’S GREAT SECRET
DOROTHY DALE AND HER CHUMS
DOROTHY DALE’S QUEER HOLIDAYS
DOROTHY DALE’S CAMPING DAYS
DOROTHY DALE’S SCHOOL RIVALS
DOROTHY DALE IN THE CITY
DOROTHY DALE’S PROMISE
DOROTHY DALE IN THE WEST
DOROTHY DALE’S STRANGE DISCOVERY
DOROTHY DALE’S ENGAGEMENT

THE MOTOR GIRLS SERIES

THE MOTOR GIRLS
THE MOTOR GIRLS ON A TOUR
THE MOTOR GIRLS AT LOOKOUT BEACH
THE MOTOR GIRLS THROUGH NEW ENGLAND
THE MOTOR GIRLS ON CEDAR LAKE
THE MOTOR GIRLS ON THE COAST
THE MOTOR GIRLS ON CRYSTAL BAY
THE MOTOR GIRLS ON WATERS BLUE
THE MOTOR GIRLS AT CAMP SURPRISE
THE MOTOR GIRLS IN THE MOUNTAINS

Cupples & Leon Co., Publishers, New York

Copyright, 1917, by
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

DOROTHY DALE’S ENGAGEMENT

CONTENTS

DOROTHY DALE’S
ENGAGEMENT

CHAPTER I
“ALONE IN A GREAT CITY”

“Now, Tavia!”

“Now, Dorothy!” mocked Octavia Travers, making a little face as she did so; but then, Tavia Travers could afford to “make faces,” possessing as she did such a naturally pretty one.

“We must decide immediately,” her chum, Dorothy Dale, said decidedly, “whether to continue in the train under the river and so to the main station, or to change for the Hudson tube. You know, we can walk from the tube station at Twenty-third Street to the hotel Aunt Winnie always patronizes.”

“With these heavy bags, Doro?”

“Only a block and a half, my dear Tavia. You are a strong, healthy girl.”

“But I do so like to have people do things for me,” sighed Tavia, clasping her hands. “And taxicabs are so nice.”

“And expensive,” rejoined Dorothy.

“Of course. That is what helps to make them nice,” declared Tavia. “Doro, I just love to throw away money!”

“You only think you do, my dear,” her chum said placidly. “Once you had thrown some of your own money away—some of that your father sent you to spend for your fall and winter outfit—you would sing a different tune.”

“I don’t believe I would—not if by throwing it away I really made a splurge, Doro,” sighed Tavia. “I love money.”

“You mean, you love what money enables us to have.”

“Yep,” returned the slangy Tavia. “And taxicab rides eat up money horribly. We found that out, Doro, when we were in New York before, that time—before we graduated from dear old Glenwood School.”

“But this isn’t getting us anywhere. To return——”

“‘Revenons à nos moutons!’ Sure! I know,” gabbled Tavia. “Let us return to our mutton. He, he! Have I forgotten my French?”

“I really think you have,” laughed Dorothy Dale. “Most of it. And almost everything else you learned at dear old Glenwood, Tavia. But, quick! Decide, my dear. How shall we enter New York City? We are approaching the Manhattan Transfer.”

“Mercy! So quick?”

“Yes. Just like that.”

“I tell you,” whispered Tavia, suddenly becoming confidential, her sparkling eyes darting a glance ahead. “Let’s leave it to that nice man.”

“Who? What man do you mean, Tavia?” demanded Dorothy, her face at once serious. “Do try to behave.”

“Am behaving,” declared Tavia, nodding. “But I’m a good sport. Let’s leave it to him.”

“Whom do you mean?”

“You know. That nice, Western looking young man who opened the window for us that time. He is sitting in that chair just yonder. Don’t you see?” and she indicated a pair of broad shoulders in a gray coat, above which was revealed a well-shaped head with a thatch of black hair.

“Do consider!” begged Dorothy, catching Tavia’s hand as though she feared her chum was about to get up to speak to this stranger. “This is a public car. We are observed.”

“Little silly!” said Tavia, smiling upon her chum tenderly. “You don’t suppose I would do anything so crude—or rude—as to speak to the gentleman? ‘Fie! fie! fie for shame! Turn your back and tell his name!’ And you don’t know it, you know you don’t, Doro.”

Dorothy broke into smiles again and shook her head; her own eyes, too, dancing roguishly.

“I only know his initials,” she said.

“What?” gasped Tavia Travers in something more than mock horror.

“Yes. They are ‘G. K.’ I saw them on his bag. Couldn’t help it,” explained Dorothy, now laughing outright. “But decide, dear! Shall we change at Manhattan Transfer?”

“If he does—there!” chuckled Tavia. “We’ll get out if the nice Western cowboy person does. Oh! he’s a whole lot nicer looking than Lance Petterby.”

“Dear me, Tavia! Haven’t you forgotten Lance yet?”

“Never!” vowed Tavia, tragically. “Not till the day of my death—and then some, as Lance would himself say.”

“You are incorrigible,” sighed Dorothy. Then: “He’s going to get out, Tavia!”

“Oh! oh! oh!” crowed her chum, under her breath. “You were looking.”

“Goodness me!” returned Dorothy, in some exasperation. “Who could miss that hat?”

The young man in question had put on his broad-brimmed gray hat. He was just the style of man that such a hat became.

The young man lifted down the heavy suitcase from the rack—the one on which Dorothy had seen the big, black letters, “G. K.” He had a second suitcase of the same description under his feet. He set both out into the aisle, threw his folded light overcoat over his arm, and prepared to make for the front door of the car as the train began to slow down.

“Come on, now!” cried Tavia, suddenly in a great hurry.

But Dorothy had to put on her coat, and to make sure that she looked just right in the mirror beside her chair. All Tavia had to do was to toss her summer fur about her neck and grab up her traveling bag.

“We’ll be left!” she cried. “The train doesn’t stop here long.”

“You run, then, and tell them to wait,” Dorothy said calmly.

They were, however, the last to leave the car—the last to leave the train, in fact—at the elevated platform which gives a broad view of the New Jersey meadows.

“My goodness me!” gasped Tavia, as the brakeman helped them to the platform, and waved his hand for departure. “My goodness me! We’re clear at this end of this awful platform, and the tube train stops—and of course starts—at the far end. A mile to walk with these bags and not a redcap in sight. Oh, yes! there’s one,” she added faintly.

“Redcap?” queried Dorothy. “Oh! you mean a porter.”

“Yes,” Tavia said. “Of course you would be slow. Everybody’s got a porter but us.”

Dorothy laughed mellowly. “Who’s fault do you intimate it is?” she asked. “We might have been the first out of the car.”

“He’s got one,” whispered Tavia.

Oddly enough her chum did not ask “Who?” this time. She, too, was looking at the back of the well-set-up young man whose initials seemed to be G. K. He stood confronting an importunate porter, whose smiling face was visible to the girls as he said:

“Why, Boss, yo’ can’t possibly kerry dem two big bags f’om dis end ob de platfo’m to de odder.”

The porter held out both hands for the big suitcases carried by the Western looking young man, who really appeared to be physically much better able to carry his baggage than the negro.

“I don’t suppose two-bits has anything to do with your desire to tote my bag?” suggested the white man, and the listening girls knew he must be smiling broadly.

“Why, Boss, yo’ can’t earn two-bits carryin’ bags yere; but I kin,” and the negro chuckled delightedly as he gained possession of the bags. “Come right along, Boss.”

As the porter set off, the young man turned and saw Dorothy Dale and Tavia Travers behind him. Besides themselves, indeed, this end of the long cement platform was clear. Other passengers from the in-bound train had either gone forward or descended into the tunnel under the tracks to reach the north-side platform. The only porter in sight was the man who had taken G. K.’s bags.

The weight of the shiny black bags the girls carried was obvious. Indeed, perhaps Tavia sagged perceptibly on that side—and intentionally; and, of course, her hazel eyes said “Please!” just as plain as eyes ever spoke before.

Off came the broad-brimmed hat just for an instant. Then he held out both hands.

“Let me help you, ladies,” he said, with the pleasantest of smiles. “Seeing that I have obtained the services of the only Jasper in sight, you’d better let me play porter. Going to take this tube train, ladies?”

“Yes, indeed!” cried Tavia, twinkling with smiles at once, and first to give him a bag.

Dorothy might have hesitated, but the young man was insistent and quick. He seized both bags as a matter of course, and Dorothy Dale could not pull hers away from him.

“You must let us pay your porter, then,” she said, in her quietly pleasant way.

“Bless you! we won’t fight over that,” chuckled the young man.

He was agreeably talkative, with that wholesome, free, yet chivalrous manner which the girls, especially the thoughtful Dorothy, had noticed as particular attributes of the men they had met during their memorable trip to the West, some months before.

She noticed, too, that his attentions to Tavia and herself were nicely balanced. Of course, Tavia, as she always did, began to run on in her light-hearted and irresponsible way; but though the young man listened to her with a quiet smile, he spoke directly to Dorothy quite as often as he did to the flyaway girl. He did not seek to take advantage of Tavia’s exuberant good spirits as so many strangers might have done.

Tavia’s flirtatious ways were a sore trial to her more sober chum; but this young man seemed to understand Tavia at once.

“Of course, you’re from the West?” Tavia finished one “rattlety-bang” series of remarks with this direct question.

“Of course I am. Right from the desert—Desert City, in fact,” he said, with a quiet smile.

“Oh!” gasped Tavia, turning her big eyes on her chum. “Did you hear that, Doro? Desert City!”

For the girls, during their visit to the West had, as Tavia often claimed in true Western slang, helped “put Desert City on the map.”

Dorothy, however, did not propose to let this conversation with a strange man become at all personal. She ignored her chum’s observation and, as the city-bound tube train came sliding in beside the platform, she reached for her own bag and insisted upon taking it from the Westerner’s hand.

“Thank you so much,” she said, with just the right degree of firmness as well as of gratitude.

Perforce he had to give up the bag, and Tavia’s, too, for there was the red-capped, smiling negro expectant of the “two-bits.”

“You are so kind,” breathed Tavia, with one of her wonderful “man-killing” glances at the considerate G. K., as Dorothy’s cousin, Nat White, would have termed her expression of countenance.

G. K. was polite and not brusk; but he was not flirtatious. Dorothy entered the Hudson tube train with a feeling of considerable satisfaction. G. K. did not even enter the car by the same door as themselves nor did he take the empty seat opposite the girls, as he might have done.

“There! he is one young man who will not flirt with you, Tavia,” she said, admonishingly.

“Pooh! I didn’t half try,” declared her chum, lightly.

“My dear! you would be tempted, I believe, to flirt with a blind man!”

“Oh, Doro! Never!” Then she dimpled suddenly, glancing out of the window as the train swept on. “There’s a man I didn’t try to flirt with.”

“Where?” laughed Dorothy.

“Outside there beside the tracks,” for they had not yet reached the Summit Avenue Station, and it is beyond that spot that the trains dive into the tunnel.

“We passed him too quickly then,” said Dorothy. “Lucky man!”

The next moment—or so it seemed—Tavia began on another tack:

“To think! In fifteen minutes, Doro my dear, we shall be ‘Alone in a Great City.’”

“How alone?” drawled her friend. “Do you suppose New York has suddenly been depopulated?”

“But we shall be alone, Doro. What more lonesome than a crowd in which you know nobody?”

“How very thoughtful you have become of a sudden. I hope you will keep your hand on your purse, dear. There will be some people left in the great city—and perhaps one may be a pickpocket.”

The electric lights were flashed on, and the train soon dived into the great tunnel, “like a rabbit into his burrow,” Tavia said. They had to disembark at Grove Street to change for an uptown train. The tall young Westerner did likewise, but he did not accost them.

The Sixth Avenue train soon whisked the girls to their destination, and they got out at Twenty-third Street. As they climbed the steps to the street level, Tavia suddenly uttered a surprised cry.

“Look, will you, Doro?” she said. “Right ahead!”

“G. K.!” exclaimed her friend, for there was the young man mounting the stairs, lugging his two heavy suitcases.

“Suppose he goes to the very same hotel?” giggled Tavia.

“Well—maybe that will be nice,” Dorothy said composedly. “He looks nice enough for us to get acquainted with him—in some perfectly proper way, of course.”

“Whew, Doro!” breathed Tavia, her eyes opening wide again. “You’re coming on, my dear.”

“I am speaking sensibly. If he is a nice young man and perfectly respectable, why shouldn’t he find some means of meeting us—if he wants to—and we are all at the same hotel?”

“But——”

“I don’t believe in flirting,” said Dorothy Dale, calmly, yet with a twinkle in her eyes. “But I certainly would not fly in the face of Providence—as Miss Higley, our old teacher at Glenwood, would say—and refuse to meet G. K. He looks like a really nice young man.”

“Doro!” gasped Tavia. “You amaze me! I shall next expect to see the heavens fall!”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said her friend, as they reached the exit of the tube station and stepped out upon the sidewalk.

There was the Westerner already dickering with a boy to carry his bags.

“He likes to throw money away, too!” whispered Tavia. “I suppose we must be economical and carry ours.”

“As there seems to be no other boy in sight—yes,” laughed her friend.

“That young man gets the best of us every time,” complained Tavia under her breath.

“He is typically Western,” said Dorothy. “He is prompt.”

But then, the boy starting off with the heavy bags in a little box-wagon he drew, the young man whose initials were G. K., turned with a smile to the two girls.

“Ladies,” he said, lifting his hat again, “at the risk of being considered impertinent, I wish to ask you if you are going my way? If so I will help you with your bags, having again cinched what seems to be the only baggage transportation facilities at this station.”

For once Tavia was really speechless. It was Dorothy who quite coolly asked the young man:

“Which is your direction?”

“To the Fanuel,” he said.

“That is where we are going,” Dorothy admitted, giving him her bag again without question.

“Oh!” exclaimed Tavia, “getting into the picture with a bounce,” as she would have expressed it. “Aren’t you the handiest young man!”

“Thank you,” he replied, laughing. “That is a reputation to make one proud. I never was in this man’s town before, but I was recommended to the Fanuel by my boss.”

“Oh!” Tavia hastened to take the lead in the conversation. “We’ve been here before—Doro and I. And we always stop at the Fanuel.”

“Now, I look on that as a streak of pure luck,” he returned. He looked at Dorothy, however, not at Tavia.

The boy with the wagon went on ahead and the three voyagers followed, laughing and chatting, G. K. swinging the girls’ bags as though they were light instead of heavy.

“I want awfully to know his name,” whispered Tavia, when they came to the hotel entrance and the young man handed over their bags again and went to the curb to get his own suitcases from the boy.

“Let’s,” added Tavia, “go to the clerk’s desk and ask for the rooms your Aunt Winnie wrote about. Then I’ll get a chance to see what he writes on the book.”

“Nonsense, Tavia!” exclaimed Dorothy. “We’ll do nothing of the kind. We must go to the ladies’ parlor and send a boy to the clerk, or the manager, with our cards. This is a family hotel, I know; but the lobby and the office are most likely full of men at this time in the day.”

“Oh, dear! Come on, then, Miss Particular,” groaned Tavia. “And we didn’t even bid him good-bye at parting.”

“What did you want to do?” laughed Dorothy. “Weep on his shoulder and give him some trinket, for instance, as a souvenir?”

“Dorothy Dale!” exclaimed her friend. “I believe you have something up your sleeve. You seem just sure of seeing this nice cowboy person again.”

“All men from the West do not punch cattle for a living. And it would not be the strangest thing in the world if we should meet G. K. again, as he is stopping at this hotel.”

However, the girls saw nothing more of the smiling and agreeable Westerner that day. Dorothy Dale’s aunt had secured by mail two rooms and a bath for her niece and Tavia. The girls only appeared at dinner, and retired early. Even Tavia’s bright eyes could not spy out G. K. while they were at dinner.

Besides, the girls had many other things to think about, and Tavia’s mind could not linger entirely upon even as nice a young man as G. K. appeared to be.

This was their first visit to New York alone, as the more lively girl indicated. Aunt Winnie White had sprained her ankle and could not come to the city for the usual fall shopping. Dorothy was, for the first time, to choose her own fall and winter outfit. Tavia had come on from Dalton, with the money her father had been able to give her for a similar purpose, and the friends were to shop together.

They left the hotel early the next morning and arrived at the first huge department store on their list almost as soon as the store was opened, at nine o’clock.

An hour later they were in the silk department, pricing goods and “just looking” as Tavia said. In her usual thoughtless and incautious way, Tavia dropped her handbag upon the counter while she used both hands to examine a particular piece of goods, calling Dorothy’s attention to it, too.

“No, dear; I do not think it is good enough, either for the money or for your purpose,” Dorothy said. “The color is lovely; but don’t be guided wholly by that.”

“No. I suppose you are right,” sighed Tavia.

She shook her head at the clerk and prepared to follow her friend, who had already left the counter. Hastily picking up what she supposed to be her bag, Tavia ran two or three steps to catch up with Dorothy. As she did so a feminine shriek behind her startled everybody within hearing.

“That girl—she’s got my bag! Stop her!”

“Oh! what is it?” gasped Dorothy, turning.

“Somebody’s stolen something,” stammered Tavia, turning around too.

Then she looked at the bag in her hand. Instead of her own seal-leather one, it was a much more expensive bag, gold mounted and plethoric.

“There she is! She’s got it in her hand!”

A woman dressed in the most extreme fashion and most expensively, darted down the aisle upon the two girls. She pointed a quivering, accusing finger directly at poor Tavia.

CHAPTER II
G. K. TO THE RESCUE

Dorothy Dale and her friend Tavia Travers had often experienced very serious adventures, but the shock of this incident perhaps was as great and as thrilling as anything that had heretofore happened to them.

The series of eleven previous stories about Dorothy, Tavia, and their friends began with “Dorothy Dale: A Girl of To-day,” some years before the date of this present narrative. At that time Dorothy was living with her father, Major Frank Dale, a Civil War veteran, who owned and edited the Bugle, a newspaper published in Dalton, a small town in New York State.

Then Major Dale’s livelihood and that of the family, consisting of Dorothy and her small brothers, Joe and Roger, depended upon the success of the Bugle. Taken seriously ill in the midst of a lively campaign for temperance and for a general reform government in Dalton, it looked as though the major would lose his paper and the better element in the town lose their fight for prohibition; but Dorothy Dale, confident that she could do it, got out the Bugle and did much, young girl though she was, to save the day. In this she was helped by Tavia Travers, a girl brought up entirely differently from Dorothy, and who possessed exactly the opposite characteristics to serve as a foil for Dorothy’s own good sense and practical nature.

Major Dale was unexpectedly blessed with a considerable legacy which enabled him to sell the Bugle and take his children to The Cedars, at North Birchland, to live with his widowed sister and her two boys, Ned and Nat White, who were both older than their cousin Dorothy. In “Dorothy Dale at Glenwood School,” is related these changes for the better in the fortunes of the Dale family, and as well there is narrated the beginning of a series of adventures at school and during vacation times, in which Dorothy and Tavia are the central characters.

Subsequent books are entitled respectively: “Dorothy Dale’s Great Secret,” “Dorothy Dale and Her Chums,” “Dorothy Dale’s Queer Holidays,” “Dorothy Dale’s Camping Days,” “Dorothy Dale’s School Rivals,” “Dorothy Dale in the City,” and “Dorothy Dale’s Promise,” in which story the two friends graduate from Glenwood and return to their homes feeling—and looking, of course—like real, grown-up young ladies. Nevertheless, they are not then through with adventures, surprising happenings, and much fun.

About the time the girls graduated from school an old friend of Major Dale, Colonel Hardin, passed away, leaving his large estate in the West partly to the major and partly to be administered for the local public good. Cattle raising was not so generally followed as formerly in that section and dry farming was being tried.

Colonel Hardin had foreseen that nothing but a system of irrigation would save the poor farmers from ruin and on his land was the fountain of supply that should water the whole territory about Desert City and make it “blossom as the rose.” There were mining interests, however, selfishly determined to obtain the water rights on the Hardin Estate and that by hook or by crook.

Major Dale’s health was not at this time good enough for him to look into these matters actively or to administer his dead friend’s estate. Therefore, it is told in “Dorothy Dale in the West,” how Aunt Winnie White, Dorothy’s two cousins, Ned and Nat, and herself with Tavia, go far from North Birchland and mingle with the miners, and other Western characters to be found on and about the Hardin property, including a cowboy named Lance Petterby, who shows unmistakable signs of being devoted to Tavia. Indeed, after the party return to the East, Lance writes to Tavia and the latter’s apparent predilection for the cowboy somewhat troubles Dorothy.

However, after their return to the East the chums went for a long visit to the home of a school friend, Jennie Hapgood, in Pennsylvania; and there Tavia seemed to have secured other—and less dangerous—interests. In “Dorothy Dale’s Strange Discovery,” the narrative immediately preceding this present tale, Dorothy displays her characteristic kindliness and acute reasoning powers in solving a problem that brings to Jennie Hapgood’s father the very best of good fortune.

Naturally, the Hapgoods are devoted to Dorothy. Besides, Ned and Nat, her cousins, have visited Sunnyside and are vastly interested in Jennie. The girl chums now in New York City on this shopping tour, expect on returning to North Birchland to find Jennie Hapgood there for a promised visit.

At the moment, however, that we find Dorothy and Tavia at the beginning of this chapter, neither girl is thinking much about Jennie Hapgood and her expected visit, or of anything else of minor importance.

The flashily dressed woman who had run after Tavia down the aisle, again screamed her accusation at the amazed and troubled girl:

“That’s my bag! It’s cram full of money, too.”

There was no great crowd in the store, for New York ladies do not as a rule shop much before luncheon. Nevertheless, besides salespeople, there were plenty to hear the woman’s unkind accusation and enough curious shoppers to ring in immediately the two troubled girls and the angry woman.

“Give me it!” exclaimed the latter, and snatched the bag out of Tavia’s hand. As this was done the catch slipped in some way and the handbag burst open.

It was “cram full” of money. Bills of large denomination were rolled carelessly into a ball, with a handkerchief, a purse for change, several keys, and a vanity box. Some of these things tumbled out upon the floor and a young boy stooped and recovered them for her.

“You’re a bad, bad girl!” declared the angry woman. “I hope they send you to jail.”

“Why—why, I didn’t know it was yours,” murmured Tavia, quite upset.

“Oh! you thought somebody had forgotten it and you could get away with it,” declared the other, coarsely enough.

“I beg your pardon, Madam,” Dorothy Dale here interposed. “It was a mistake on my friend’s part. And you are making another mistake, and a serious one.”

She spoke in her most dignified tone, and although Dorothy was barely in her twentieth year she had the manner and stability of one much older. She realized that poor Tavia was in danger of “going all to pieces” if the strain continued. And, too, her own anger at the woman’s harsh accusation naturally put the girl on her mettle.

“Who are you, I’d like to know?” snapped the woman.

“I am her friend,” said Dorothy Dale, quite composedly, “and I know her to be incapable of taking your bag save by chance. She laid her own down on the counter and took up yours——”

“And where is mine?” suddenly wailed Tavia, on the verge of an hysterical outbreak. “My bag! My money——”

“Hush!” whispered Dorothy in her friend’s pretty ear. “Don’t become a second harridan—like this creature.”

The woman had led the way back to the silk counter. Tavia began to claw wildly among the broken bolts of silk that the clerk had not yet been able to return to the shelves. But she stopped at Dorothy’s command, and stood, pale and trembling.

A floorwalker hastened forward. He evidently knew the noisy woman as a good customer of the store.

“Mrs. Halbridge! What is the matter? Nothing serious, I hope?”

“It would have been serious all right,” said the customer, in her high-pitched voice, “if I hadn’t just seen that girl by luck. Yes, by luck! There she was making for the door with this bag of mine—and there’s several hundred dollars in it, I’d have you know.”

“I beg of you, Mrs. Halbridge,” said the floorwalker in a low tone, “for the sake of the store to make no trouble about it here. If you insist we will take the girl up to the superintendent’s office——”

Here Dorothy, her anger rising interrupted:

“You would better not. Mrs. Winthrop White, of North Birchland, is a charge customer of your store, and is probably just as well known to the heads of the firm as this—this person,” and she cast what Tavia—in another mood—would have called a “scathing glance” at Mrs. Halbridge.

“I am Mrs. White’s niece and this is my particular friend. We are here alone on a shopping tour; but if our word is not quite as good as that of this—this person, we certainly shall buy elsewhere.”

Tavia, obsessed with a single idea, murmured again:

“But I haven’t got my bag! Somebody’s taken my bag! And all my money——”

The floorwalker was glancing about, hoping for some avenue of escape from the unfortunate predicament, when a very tall, white-haired and soldierly looking man appeared in the aisle.

“Mr. Schuman!” gasped the floorwalker.

The man was one of the chief proprietors of the big store. He scowled slightly at the floorwalker when he saw the excited crowd, and then raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“This is not the place for any lengthy discussion, Mr. Mink,” said Mr. Schuman, with just the proper touch of admonition in his tone.

“I know! I know, Mr. Schuman!” said the floorwalker. “But this difficulty—it came so suddenly—Mrs. Halbridge, here, makes the complaint,” he finally blurted out, in an attempt to shoulder off some of the responsibility for the unfortunate situation.

“Mrs. Halbridge?” The old gentleman bowed in a most courtly style. “One of our customers, I presume, Mr. Mink?”

“Oh, yes, indeed, Mr. Schuman,” the floorwalker hastened to say. “One of our very good customers. And I am so sorry that anything should have happened——”

“But what has happened?” asked Mr. Schuman, sharply.

“She—she accuses this—it’s all a mistake, I’m sure—this young lady of taking her bag,” stuttered Mr. Mink, pointing to Tavia.

“She ought to be arrested,” muttered the excited Mrs. Halbridge.

“What? But this is a matter for the superintendent’s office, Mr. Mink,” returned Mr. Schuman.

“Oh!” stammered the floorwalker. “The bag is returned.”

“And now,” put in Dorothy Dale, haughtily, and looking straight and unflinchingly into the keen eyes of Mr. Schuman, “my friend wishes to know what has become of her bag?”

Mr. Schuman looked at the two girls with momentary hesitation.

There was something compelling in the ladylike look and behaviour of these two girls—and especially in Dorothy’s speech. At the moment, too, a hand was laid tentatively upon Mr. Schuman’s arm.

“Beg pardon, sir,” said the full, resonant voice that Dorothy had noted the day before. “I know the young ladies—Miss Dale and Miss Travers, respectively, Mr. Schuman.”

“Oh, Mr. Knapp—thank you!” said the old gentleman, turning to the tall young Westerner with whom he had been walking through the store at the moment he had spied the crowd. “You are a discourager of embarrassment.”

“Oh! blessed ‘G. K.’!” whispered Tavia, weakly clinging to Dorothy’s arm.

CHAPTER III
TAVIA IN THE SHADE

Mrs. Halbridge was slyly slipping through the crowd. She had suddenly lost all interest in the punishment of the girl she had accused of stealing her bag and her money.

There was something so stern about Mr. Schuman that it was not strange that the excitable woman should fear further discussion of the matter. The old gentleman turned at once to Dorothy Dale and Tavia Travers.

“This is an unfortunate and regrettable incident, young ladies,” he said suavely. “I assure you that such things as this seldom occur under our roof.”

“I am confident it is a single occurrence,” Dorothy said, with conviction, “or my aunt, Mrs. Winthrop White, of North Birchland, would not have traded with you for so many years.”

“One of our charge customers, Mr. Schuman,” whispered Mr. Mink, deciding it was quite time now to come to the assistance of the girls.

“Regrettable! Regrettable!” repeated the old gentleman.

Here Tavia again entered her wailing protest:

“I did not mean to take her bag from the counter. But somebody has taken my bag.”

“Oh, Tavia!” exclaimed her friend, now startled into noticing what Tavia really said about it.

“It’s gone!” wailed Tavia. “And all the money father sent me. Oh, dear, Doro Dale! I guess I have thrown my money away, and, as you prophesied, it isn’t as much fun as I thought it might be.”

“My dear young lady,” hastily inquired Mr. Schuman, “have you really lost your purse?”

“My bag,” sobbed Tavia. “I laid it down while I examined some silk. That clerk saw me,” she added, pointing to the man behind the counter.

“It is true, Mr. Schuman,” the silk clerk admitted, blushing painfully. “But, of course, I did not notice what became of the lady’s bag.”

“Nor did I see the other bag until I found it in my hand,” Tavia cried.

The crowd was dissipated by this time, and all spoke in low voices. Outside the counter was a cash-girl, a big-eyed and big-eared little thing, who was evidently listening curiously to the conversation. Mr. Mink said sharply to her:

“Number forty-seven! do you know anything about this bag business?”

“No—no, sir!” gasped the frightened girl.

“Then go on about your business,” the floorwalker said, waving her away in his most lordly manner.

Meanwhile, Dorothy had obtained a word with the young Mr. Knapp who had done her and Tavia such a kindness.

“Thank you a thousand times, Mr. Knapp,” she whispered, her eyes shining gratefully into his. “It might have been awkward for us without you. And,” she added, pointedly, “how fortunate you knew our names!”

He was smiling broadly, but she saw the color rise in his bronzed cheeks at her last remark. She liked him all the better for blushing so boyishly.

“Got me there, Miss Dale,” he blurted out. “I was curious, and I looked on the hotel register to see your names after the clerk brought it back from the parlor where he went to greet you yesterday. Hope you’ll forgive me for being so—er—rubbery.”

“It proves to be a very fortunate curiosity on your part,” she told him, smiling.

“Say!” he whispered, “your friend is all broken up over this. Has she lost much?”

“All the money she had to pay for the clothes she wished to buy, I’m afraid,” sighed Dorothy.

“Well, let’s get her out of here—go somewhere to recuperate. There’s a good hotel across the street. I had my breakfast there before I began to shop,” and he laughed. “A cup of tea will revive her, I’m sure.”

“And you are suffering for a cup, too, I am sure,” Dorothy told him, her eyes betraying her amusement, at his rather awkward attempt to become friendly with Tavia and herself.

But Dorothy approved of this young man. Aside from the assistance he had undoubtedly rendered her chum and herself, G. Knapp seemed to be far above the average young man.

She turned now quickly to Tavia. Mr. Schuman was saying very kindly:

“Search shall be made, my dear young lady. I am exceedingly sorry that such a thing should happen in our store. Of course, somebody picked up your bag before you inadvertently took the other lady’s. If I had my way I would have it a law that every shopper should have her purse riveted to her wrist with a chain.”

It was no laughing matter, however, for poor Tavia. Her family was not in the easy circumstances that Dorothy’s was. Indeed, Mr. Travers was only fairly well-to-do, and Tavia’s mother was exceedingly extravagant. It was difficult sometimes for Tavia to obtain sufficient money to get along with.

Besides, she was incautious herself. It was natural for her to be wasteful and thoughtless. But this was the first time in her experience that she had either wasted or lost such a sum of money.

She wiped her eyes very quickly when Dorothy whispered to her that they were going out for a cup of tea with Mr. Knapp.

“Oh dear, that perfectly splendid cowboy person!” groaned Tavia. “And I am in no mood to make an impression. Doro! you’ll have to do it all yourself this time. Do keep him in play until I recover from, this blow—if I ever do.”

The young man, who led the way to the side door of the store which was opposite the hotel and restaurant of which he had spoken, heard the last few words and turned to ask seriously:

“Surely Miss Travers did not lose all the money she had?”

“All I had in the world!” wailed Tavia. “Except a lonely little five dollar bill.”

“Where is that?” asked Dorothy, in surprise.

“In the First National Bank,” Tavia said demurely.

“Oh, then, that’s safe enough,” said Mr. Knapp.

“I didn’t know you had even that much in the bank,” remarked Dorothy, doubtfully. “The First National?”

“Yep!” declared Tavia promptly, but nudged her friend. “Hush!” she hissed.

Dorothy did not understand, but she saw there was something queer about this statement. It was news to her that her chum ever thought of putting a penny on deposit in any bank. It was not like Tavia.

“How do you feel now, dear?” she asked the unfortunate girl, as they stepped out into the open air behind the broad-shouldered young Westerner, who held the door open for their passage.

“Oh, dear me!” sighed Tavia. “I’m forty degrees in the shade—and the temperature is still going down. What ever shall I do? I’ll be positively naked before Thanksgiving!”

CHAPTER IV
SOMETHING ABOUT “G. KNAPP”

But how can three people with all the revivifying flow of youth in their veins remain in the dumps, to use one of Tavia’s own illuminating expressions. Impossible! That tea at the Holyoke House, which began so miserably, scaled upward like the notes of a coloratura soprano until they were all three chatting and laughing like old friends. Even Tavia had to forget her miserable financial state.

Dorothy believed her first impression of G. Knapp had not been wrong. Indeed, he improved with every moment of increasing familiarity.

In the first place, although his repartee was bright enough, and he was very jolly and frank, he had eyes and attention for somebody besides the chatterbox, Tavia. Perhaps right at first Tavia was a little under the mark, her mind naturally being upon her troubles; but with a strange young man before her the gay and sparkling Tavia would soon be inspired.

However, for once she did not absorb all the more or less helpless male’s attention. G. Knapp insisted upon dividing equally his glances, his speeches, and his smiles between the two young ladies.

They discovered that his full and proper name was Garford Knapp—the first, of course, shortened to “Garry.” He was of the West, Western, without a doubt. He had secured a degree at a Western university, although both before and after his scholastic course he had, as Tavia in the beginning suggested, been a “cowboy person.”

“And it looks as if I’d be punching cows and doing other chores for Bob Douglas, who owns the Four-Square ranch, for the rest of my natural,” was one thing Garry Knapp told the girls, and told them cheerfully. “I did count on falling heir to a piece of money when Uncle Terrence cashed in. But not—no more!”

“Why is that?” Dorothy asked, seeing that the young man was serious despite his somewhat careless way of speaking.

“The old codger is just like tinder,” laughed Garry. “Lights up if a spark gets to him. And I unfortunately and unintentionally applied the spark. He’s gone off to Alaska mad as a hatter and left me in the lurch. And we were chums when I was a kid and until I came back from college.”

“You mean you have quarreled with your uncle?” Dorothy queried, with some seriousness.

“Not at all, Miss Dale,” he declared, promptly. “The old fellow quarreled with me. They say it takes two to make a quarrel. That’s not always so. One can do it just as e-easy. At least, one like Uncle Terrence can. He had red hair when he was young, and he has a strong fighting Irish strain in him. The row began over nothing and ended with his lighting out between evening and sunrise and leaving me flat.

“Of course, I broke into a job with Bob Douglas right away——”

“Do you mean, Mr. Knapp, that your uncle went away and left you without money?” Dorothy asked.

“Only what I chanced to have in my pocket,” Garry Knapp said cheerfully. “He’d always been mighty good to me. Put me through school and all that. All I have is a piece of land—and a good big piece—outside of Desert City; but it isn’t worth much. Cattle raising is petering out in that region. Last year the mouth and hoof disease just about ruined the man that grazed my land. His cattle died like flies.

“Then, the land was badly grazed by sheepmen for years. Sheep about poison land for anything else to live on,” he added, with a cattleman’s usual disgust at the thought of “mutton on the hoof.”

“One thing I’ve come East for, Miss Dale, is to sell that land. Got a sort of tentative offer by mail. Bob wanted a lot of stuff for the ranch and for his family and couldn’t come himself. So I combined his business and mine and hope to make a sale of the land my father left me before I go back.

“Then, with that nest-egg, I’ll try to break into some game that will offer a man-sized profit,” and Garry Knapp laughed again in his mellow, whole-souled way.

“Isn’t he just a dear?” whispered Tavia as Garry turned to speak to the waiter. “Don’t you love to hear him talk?”

“And have you never heard from your old uncle who went away and left you?” Dorothy asked.

“Not a word. He’s too mad to speak, let alone write,” and a cloud for a moment crossed the open, handsome face of the Westerner. “But I know where he is, and every once in a while somebody writes me telling me Uncle Terry is all right.”

“But, an old man, away up there in Alaska——?”

“Bless you, Miss Dale,” chuckled Garry Knapp. “That dear old codger has been knocking about in rough country all his days. He’s always been a miner. Prospected pretty well all over our West. He’s made, and then bunted away, big fortunes sometimes.

“He always has a stake laid down somewhere. Never gets real poor, and never went hungry in his life—unless he chanced to run out of grub on some prospecting tour, or his gun was broken and he couldn’t shoot a jackrabbit for a stew.

“Oh, Uncle Terrence isn’t at all the sort of hampered prospector you read about in the books. He doesn’t go mooning around, expecting to ‘strike it rich’ and running the risk of leaving his bones in the desert.

“No, Uncle Terry is likely to make another fortune before he dies——”

“Oh! Then maybe you will be rich!” cried Tavia, breaking in.

“No.” Garry shook his head with a quizzical smile on his lips and in his eyes. “No. He vowed I should never see the color of his money. First, he said, he’d leave it to found a home for indignant rattlesnakes. And he’d surely have plenty of inmates, for rattlers seem always to be indignant,” he added with a chuckle.

Dorothy wanted awfully to ask him why he had quarreled with his uncle—or vice versa; but that would have been too personal upon first meeting. She liked the young man more and more; and in spite of Tavia’s loss they parted at the end of the hour in great good spirits.

“I’m going to be just as busy as I can be this afternoon,” Garry Knapp announced, as they went out. “But I shall get back to the hotel to supper. I wasn’t in last night when you ladies were down. May I eat at your table?” and his eyes squinted up again in that droll way Dorothy had come to look for.

“How do you know we ate in the hotel last evening?” demanded Tavia, promptly.

“Asked the head waiter,” replied Garry Knapp, unabashed.

“If you are so much interested in whether we take proper nourishment or not, you had better join us at dinner,” Dorothy said, laughing.

“It’s a bet!” declared the young Westerner, and lifting his broad-brimmed hat he left the girls upon the sidewalk outside the restaurant.

“Isn’t he the very nicest—but, oh, Doro! what shall I do?” exclaimed the miserable Tavia. “All my money——”

“Let’s go back and see if it’s been found.”

“Oh, not a chance!” gasped Tavia. “That horrid woman——”

“I scarcely believe that we can lay it to Mrs. Halbridge’s door in any particular,” said Dorothy, gravely. “You should not have left your bag on the counter.”

“She laid hers there! And, oh, Doro! it was full of money,” sighed her friend.

“Probably your bag had been taken before you even touched hers.”

“Oh, dear! why did it have to happen to me—and at just this time. When I need things so much. Not a thing to wear! And it’s going to be a cold, cold winter, too!”

Tavia would joke “if the heavens fell”—that was her nature. But that she was seriously embarrassed for funds Dorothy Dale knew right well.