The Second Girl Detective Megapack: 23 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls

by Julia K. Duncan

  “Oh, I’m going back,” explained Betty quickly. “They need some one to wait on them. Uncle Dick will let me, I know, and I really know quite a lot about taking care of sick people, Doctor Morrison.”

  “But you can’t stay there alone,” objected the doctor. “Why, child, I wouldn’t think of it. Some one will come along and carry you off.”

  “Bob will come and stay, too,” declared Betty confidently. “There are horses and cows to take care of, you know. I found them nearly dead of thirst, and all tied in their stalls.”

  The doctor interrupted impatiently.

  “Nice country we live in!” he muttered bitterly. “Every last man so bent on making money in oil he’d let his neighbor die under his very eyes. Here are two old women sick, and no one to lift a hand for ’em. I suppose they haven’t been able to get a hired man to tend to the stock since the oil boom struck Flame City. Well, child, I don’t see that I have much choice in the matter. I know as well as you do, that they must have some one to help out for a few days. That Henderson lad looks capable, and you’ll be safe, as far as that goes, with him in the house. But you musn’t try to do too much, and, above all, no lifting. I’ll keep an eye on you.”

  The doctor offered to take Betty back with him in the car but she was anxious that he should not be delayed and asked him to go as soon as he could. She herself would ride on to the Watterby farm, see if Bob was there, get her supper, and pack a few necessary things in a small bag. Then she and Bob would ride back to the Saunders’ place. Clover was fresh enough now, after her respite, far fresher than Betty, who was more tired than she had ever been in her life, though nothing would have dragged that confession from her. Of course her uncle must be notified, if he were not at the farm. Betty knew that a message left with the Watterbys would reach him. He had been off for four days, and was expected home very soon.

  Betty did not hurry Clover, for she wanted to save her for that evening’s trip, and it was well on toward six o’clock before she came in sight of the farm. A black dot resolved itself into Bob and he came running to meet her.

  “I was beginning to worry about you,” he called. “I waited up at the fields till afternoon, because Thorne was sure you would come back there. When I got here and found you hadn’t come in, I was half afraid the horse had thrown you. You look done up, Betty; are you hurt?”

  “I’m all right,” said Betty carelessly, dismounting. “Have you heard from Uncle Dick?”

  Bob did not answer, and she turned in surprise to look at him. His face was rather white under the tan, and his hands, fumbling with the reins, were trembling.

  CHAPTER XV

  UNEXPECTED NEWS

  “Bob!” Betty’s over-tired nerves seemed to jangle like tangled wires. “Bob, is anything the matter?”

  “Well, of course, nothing is really the matter,” replied Bob, his assumed calmness belied by his excited face. “Nothing that need worry you, Betty. But—there’s another oil fire!”

  “Another well on fire?” repeated Betty. “Oh, Bob, is it anywhere near Uncle Dick?”

  “You come in and sit down. Ki will look after Clover,” said Bob authoritatively. “Supper is almost ready, and I’ll tell you all I know. Mrs. Watterby has gone to bed with a sick headache, but Grandma is taking her place.”

  “Is it a very bad fire?” urged Betty. “Where is it? When did it start? Have you seen it?”

  “I guess it is pretty bad,” said Bob soberly. “It’s the north section, Betty. Just what Thorne has been afraid of.”

  “The north section!” Betty looked startled. “But, Bob, we were there this morning. Everything was all right.”

  “Well, when I came back with the record book Thorne sent me with and found you and Clover had dashed off, everything was all right, too. I hung round for an hour or so, hoping you’d ride back, and then MacDuffy asked me to take a message to Thorne. They were having dinner at the mess house, and Uncle Dick came in before we had finished. He was feeling great over some leases they’d signed that morning, and he thought he’d get home tonight. He didn’t seem to worry about you—said he knew Clover was a sensible and well-broken horse and that he guessed you’d come out none the worse for wear. Somebody called Thorne outside just as the Chink brought in the pie, and he was back in a few minutes, looking as if the bottom had dropped out of the world.

  “‘Two wells afire in the north section, Mr. Gordon,’ he said, and at that every man shot from the table out into the air. We could just see the two thin spirals of smoke—that section must be four miles from the bunk house.

  “Everybody ran for their horses, and Uncle Dick for his car. He cranked it and then saw me getting in with him.

  “‘You go back and stay with Betty,’ he cried to me. ‘Stay with her every minute till I come back. If I’m gone three hours or three days or three years, don’t leave her. And keep her away from the oil fields. We’ll be overrun as soon as news of this gets out, and the kind of crowd that will be here is no place for a girl. Promise me, Bob.’

  “So of course I promised,” concluded the lad earnestly. “He got into the car, and maybe he didn’t make that tin trap speed. All I saw was a cloud of dust. This afternoon all of Flame City has gone past here on foot, in cars, and on horseback. They say more wells have caught.”

  “Do you think Uncle Dick is in danger?” faltered Betty. “Aren’t the fire fighters surrounded sometimes and suffocated with smoke?”

  “What have you been reading?” demanded Bob with a stoutness he was far from feeling. “Uncle Dick knows too much to be caught like that. No, he may not get home for a couple of days more, but there is no need for you to lie awake and worry. Take my advice and go to bed the minute you’ve had supper; you look tired to death, Betty.”

  “Oh, Bob!” For the moment Betty had actually forgotten her great news, but now it came rushing back to her. “Oh, Bob, I’ve something wonderful to tell you!”

  “Won’t listen till you’ve had your supper,” said Bob firmly, marching her out to the dining-room table, as Grandma Watterby rang the bell. “You eat first, then you can talk.”

  Betty could hardly touch her food for excitement, but she did not want the Prices to hear what she had to tell Bob, so she made a pretense of eating. The Watterby household was eager to hear what had happened to her on her unplanned-for ride, and she told them that Clover had taken her some miles before she could be halted. She did not go into details.

  “Now, Bob!” She fairly dragged him from the supper table, ignoring his suggestion that they help Grandma Watterby wash the dishes. “I can’t wait another minute, not even to help Grandma. I have something to tell you, and you simply must listen. I’ve found your aunts!”

  Bob stared at her stupidly.

  “I found the three hills!” Betty hurried on excitedly. “Clover carried me ever so far, and I saw the three hills in the distance. I had to ride miles before I reached them, but it isn’t more than seven or eight by the road. And, Bob, both your aunts are very sick, and they have no one to take care of them or get them anything to eat. There aren’t any neighbors around here, you know; all the women are too old or too busy like Mrs. Watterby, and the men are crazy about oil. You and I have to go there tonight.”

  “Betty, are you sure you are not crazy?” demanded Bob uneasily. “How do you know they are my aunts? How can we go there and stay? They must need a doctor.”

  Betty was impatient of explanations, but she saw that Bob was genuinely bewildered, so she hastily sketched the proceedings of the afternoon for him.

  “And Doctor Morrison must be there now,” she wound up triumphantly. “They look so much like you, Bob. He’ll see it, too.”

  “I never saw any one like you, Betty!” Bob gazed at her in undisguised admiration. “No wonder you look tired. Why, I should think you’d be ready to drop. Hadn’t you better go to bed and get a good night’s sleep and let me go out to the farm? You can come to-morrow morning.”

  “I’m rested now,” insisted B
etty. “That hot supper made me feel all right again. Doctor Morrison will probably have some directions for me, and I promised the old ladies I’d be back and you promised Uncle Dick not to leave me. Let’s go and tell Grandma and leave word with her for Uncle Dick. Then you saddle up, and I’ll get my bag.”

  Bob forbore to argue further, more because he thought that it was best to get Betty away from the Watterby place on the main road to Flame City than because he approved of her taking another long ride after an exhausting day. The most disquieting rumors had come down from the fields that afternoon, and Bob knew that every kind of story, authentic and unfounded, would be promptly retailed over the Watterby gate. If Mr. Gordon’s life were in danger, and Bob feared it was, it would be agony for Betty to be unable to go to him and be forced to listen to hectic accounts of the fire.

  “Well, well,” said Grandma Watterby, when Betty told her that she had found the Saunders place. “So you rode to the three hills, did you? Ain’t they pretty? Many and many’s the time I’ve seen ’em. And Bob’s aunties—Hope and Charity—they living there?”

  Betty explained briefly that they were ill and that she and Bob were going to look after things.

  “We may be gone two or three days or a week,” she said. “You tell Uncle Dick where we are if he comes, won’t you? Doctor Morrison will bring messages if you ask him. He’s going to see them, too.”

  Grandma Watterby hurried to the pantry and came back with a glass jar in her hands.

  “This is some o’ my home-made beef extract,” she told them. “You take it with you, Betty. There ain’t nothing better for building up a sick person. Dear, dear, to think of you finding Hope and Charity Saunders. Do they know ’bout Bob?”

  Betty said no, and the horses being brought round by Ki, who had insisted on saddling them, she and Bob rode off. It was faintly dusk, and a new moon hung low in the sky.

  “Isn’t it lovely?” sighed Betty. “In spite of sickness and danger and selfish people, I love this country on an evening like this. What do you think we ought to do about telling your aunts, Bob? I knew Grandma would ask that question.”

  “Why, if they’re sick, I think it would be utterly foolish to mention a nephew to ’em,” said Bob cheerfully. “They probably are blissfully unaware that I’m alive, and trying to explain to them would likely bring on an attack of brain fever. I’m just a neighbor dropped in to help while they’re laid up.”

  Betty could not bring herself to speak of the evident poverty of the lonely Saunders home. She had built so many bright castles for Bob, and the dilapidated house and buildings she had left that afternoon quite failed to fit into any of the pictures. However, she remembered happily, there was always the prospect of oil.

  “It can’t be out of the fields,” she argued to herself. “Just suppose oil should be discovered in that section! Bob might easily be a millionaire!”

  Bob was silent, too, but his thoughts were not on a problematical fortune. He was wondering, with a quickened beating of his heart, how his mother’s sisters would look and whether he should be able to see in them anything of the girlish face in the long-treasured little picture that was one of the few valuables in the black tin box.

  “There’s a team ahead,” said Betty suddenly.

  Her quick ears had caught the sound of wheels, and though it was almost dark now, no lantern was lit on the rattling buggy to which they presently caught up. The rig made such a noise, added to the breathing of the bony horse that was suffering from a bad case of that malady popularly known among farmers as “the heaves,” that the occupants were forced to raise their voices to make themselves heard. The top was up and it was impossible to see who was inside.

  “I tell you, let me handle it, and I’ll make you thousands,” some one was saying as they passed the buggy single file. “I can manage women and their money, and I don’t believe the idea of oil has as much as entered their heads.”

  “Always oil,” thought Bob, hurrying his horse to catch up with Betty. “In Oklahoma the stuff that dreams are made of comes up through an iron derrick, that’s sure.”

  At the Saunders place, bathed in faint moonlight, they found Doctor Morrison’s car, and a light in the window told that he was waiting for them.

  “Didn’t know whether you would make it tonight or not,” was his greeting, as they went around to the kitchen door and he opened it to show the room brightly lighted by two lamps. “Both patients are asleep. Miss Charity has laryngitis and Miss Hope a very heavy cold. But I think the worst is over.”

  He stopped, and shot a keen glance at Bob.

  “Funny,” he said abruptly. “For the moment I would have said you looked enough like Miss Hope to have been her younger brother.”

  Bob merely smiled at the doctor’s remark, for he did not want the relationship to be guessed before his aunts had recognized him.

  CHAPTER XVI

  HOUSEKEEPER AND NURSE

  “I must be going on,” Doctor Morrison continued, finishing his writing at the kitchen table which the entrance of Bob and Betty had evidently interrupted. “Here are a few directions for you, Betty. I do not think there will be anything for you to do tonight. Both should sleep right through, and I’ll be out in the morning. I have made a bed for you on the parlor sofa, and one for Bob here in the kitchen. I thought you’d want to be near the patients. And, then, too, the rooms upstairs are damp and musty; evidently the upper floor of the house hasn’t been used for some time. Now are you sure you will be all right? Does Mr. Gordon know you are here?”

  Bob explained that they had left a message for Mr. Gordon at the Watterby farm, and Doctor Morrison, who of course knew of the fire, nodded understandingly. Then he bade them good-night, promising to make them his first call in the morning.

  “I’ll go out and bed down the horses and feed the stock,” said Bob, after the light of the doctor’s car had disappeared down the road. “Do go to bed, Betty; you’re all tuckered out.”

  But Betty flatly refused to stay in the house without Bob. She tagged sleepily after him while he carried water to the horses and cows, bedded them down and littered the pig pens with fresh straw. He bolted the doors of the barns and hen house and made everything snug for the night. Then he and Betty went back to the house, having stabled their own horses in two empty stalls that, judging from the dusty hay in the mangers, had not been used recently.

  Both patients were sleeping, breathing rather heavily and hoarsely, it is true, but apparently resting comfortably. Betty and Bob were thoroughly tired out and glad to say good-night and go to bed. As Betty snuggled down on the comfortable old couch, she thought how kind of the doctor to have made things ready for them.

  The sun streaming in through the windows woke her the next morning. With a start she jumped up and put on her slippers and blue robe. With the healthy vigor of youth she had slept without once waking during the night, and not once had the thought of her patients disturbed her. Cautiously she tiptoed into the two bedrooms. Miss Charity and Miss Hope were sleeping quietly. A swift peep into the kitchen showed her a fire snapping briskly in the stove and the teakettle sending out clouds of steam. Bob was nowhere in sight.

  “He’s out at the barn,” thought Betty. “I must hurry and get breakfast.”

  She dressed quickly but trimly, as usual, and raised the windows of the parlor. Screens or not, she felt the house would be the better for quantities of fresh air. She closed the door softly and went down the narrow little passage into the kitchen.

  She found a bowl of nice-looking eggs in the pantry and a piece of home-cured bacon neatly sewed into a white muslin bag and partly sliced. This, with slices of golden brown toast—the bread box held only half a loaf of decidedly stale bread—solved her breakfast menu. There were two pans of milk standing on the table, thick with yellow cream, and Betty was just wondering if Bob had milked and when, for the cream could not have risen under two or three hours’ time, when the boy came whistling cheerfully in, carrying a pail of foaming
milk.

  “Sh!” warned Betty. “Don’t wake your aunts up. When did you milk, Bob? You can’t have done it twice in one morning.”

  “Well hardly,” admitted Bob, lowering his voice discreetly. “I went out last night after I was sure you were asleep. I knew the cows had to be milked and that you’d probably insist on staying out there if you went to sleep standing up. So I took a lantern I found under the bench on the back porch and went out about an hour after you went to bed. Gee, fried eggs and bacon! You’re a good cook, Betsey!”

  Betty had spread one end of the table with a clean brown linen cloth, and now, after Bob had washed his hands and she had strained the milk, she placed the smoking hot dishes before him, and they proceeded to enjoy the meal heartily.

  “I wonder if the fire is out,” said Betty anxiously. “Perhaps Doctor Morrison will know when he comes. What are you going to do now, Bob?”

  “You tell me what will help you,” answered Bob. “I suppose you have to cook breakfast for the aunts—doesn’t that sound funny? I thought I’d kind of hang around the house—you might want furniture moved or something like that—till you had ’em all fixed comfy, and then you could go out to the barn with me while I finished out there. It’s lonesome in a new place.”

  “Sometimes I think,” announced Betty, stopping with the frying pan in her hand and beaming upon Bob, “that you have more sense than any one I ever knew. You needn’t do a thing, if you’ll just wait for me. There’s a pile of old magazines in the parlor. You can read the stories in those.”

  Leaving Bob comfortably established in a padded rocking chair, she went in to see if either of her patients was awake. Both were, as it happened, and though they looked slightly bewildered at first, Betty soon recalled to their minds her coming and the visit from the doctor. Both were very weak, and Miss Charity still was voiceless, but their eyes were clear and there was no sign of delirium.

  Betty had brought an enveloping white apron and cap with her, and she presented an immaculate little figure as she gently sponged the hands and faces of the old ladies and made their beds tidy and smooth. Doctor Morrison had ordered water toast and weak tea for their breakfast, and when Betty went out to the kitchen to prepare two trays she found that Bob had pumped two pails of fresh water, cleared the table and stacked the dishes in the dishpan and was taking up ashes from the stove while he waited for the kettle of water which he had put on for them to heat.