A SERIOUS PREDICAMENT

After nearly three months of suppressed curiosity, the revelation so calmly made by Squire Hanaford all but stunned Gloria.

“The children were right,” she pondered. “Their father’s time was put in on the fancy house and he never got paid for it. He expected to have a share in the big speculation.”

Somehow the children’s attempt at revenge carried a clear claim. They had been wronged. Their mother, Gloria learned, was a delicate woman who expected to have had hospital treatment when the big money would come in. Their father was a plain but indignant man. He made threats against the Towers, and when Charley Towers learned the true state of affaire he promptly undertook to pay back what he could of the debt contracted by his wife. He had been sending money weekly, but it was a small payment for the great loss. This mason was to have shared in the promised profit on the entire venture, and so had put into it, besides his own and his men’s time, quantities of material. Squire Hanaford had explained that Echo Park was the dream of a young man with noble ambitions. The place, like many other beauty spots, had been overlooked until the young discovered it. His name, the squire told Gloria, was Sherwood Graves, and his ambition reached the point of a fine piece of development with one of the model cottages completed. This was bought by Mrs. Harriet Towers, with the money due Gloria in time for her to go to boarding school. But before that time the land became mysteriously flooded, the eager but unscientific Board of Health condemned it, and the young man, cruelly disappointed, lost his health so completely, he was promptly ordered to a foreign clime or threatened with mental and physical fatality.

“What a romantic name, Sherwood Graves?” Gloria repeated, “and how noble for a young man to dream of beautiful parks and model cottages!” she sighed deeply. Why had her money been such an unfortunate agent?

In those first few days after Squire Hanaford’s revelations, Gloria had longed so for Jane that only Trixy’s comforting reassurance saved her from leaving Sandford and going out to the faithful friend at Logan Center. Twice Jane had promised to come in to see Gloria, but some sudden illness of one or more of the many children, caused a postponement fortunate for Gloria, as she had not yet told Jane the entire story of her stay in Sandford.

“Visiting with her aunt for a while” was a sufficiently reasonable excuse, and that Aunt Hattie was “so fussy” perhaps influenced Jane in her prolonged separation from Gloria, for Jane was at all times considerate.

Now it was clear to Gloria that Sandford girls had purposely avoided her. Those who sought her companionship were not such as she would have chosen, and only Trixy, the independent, was really her chum.

“And that’s why the girls have been avoiding me,” she mused bitterly. “The folks around here—are shunned—for being—in debt.” All the narrowness of a place like Sandford suddenly confronted her. Trixy, the brave and lovable, had been her friend, while the others turned their heads away scornfully. Suspicion painfully confirmed, brought to the little girl from Barbend a sense of something very like shame. She who had never known the blight of contempt, now felt the full blast of its venom. And being a girl, like a fragile human flower, the hidden thing was magnified. She suspected all Sandford as her enemy, she brooded over the disgrace until it seemed unbearable. Debt! How she had always pitied those in debt! But to owe a poor workman with a sick wife and a family of small children!

“I must see those children,” she determined. “Perhaps I can do something.” It was just before Thanksgiving and during a long damp spell of weather that so often proceeds the onset of heavy frost. For two days Gloria watched in vain for the Gorman children, then she learned from the boy in the drug store, that their mother was dangerously ill.

Her first impulse was to ask Trixy to drive her out to this place, wherever it might be, but that was discarded in the face of its consequent revelations. She could not let even Trixy know that money, which should have been hers, had been used with such disastrous consequences. She must find the children alone.

Second River, that section where the Gormans lived, according to the drug clerk, was too far away to admit of ordinary foot travel. It was well enough for the children who, no doubt, knew many short cuts, but not for Gloria. A bicycle was the most practical means of making the trip, and, fortunately, Mona Sheehan was friendly enough to lend Gloria her wheel for a few hours on this Saturday morning.

Each new development in her tangle added more to the already overwhelming weight of suspicious disgrace. And of all dreadful things possible, that of public censure seemed to the high-strung Gloria the most dreadful.

“If I could ride away from it all—and go to Jane,” she sighed as the borrowed wheel rolled over the country road out toward Second River. The roads were heavy with mud, and as Gloria pedaled along, her spirits became imbued with the unhealthy conditions surrounding her.

“I don’t blame them one bit,” she told herself. “They always have to live in the worst places, these poor hard working folks, and if any one has to wait for their money it’s the poorest. Jane always said so.”

One more long pull up a hill and a coast down another, then the house with the red barn out front, described as Gorman’s, hove into view. Confronting it Gloria felt a surge of apprehension sweep over her.

Suppose the mother should be very cross and unreasonable? Or worse yet, suppose the father were home and should scold—oh, she never could stand any one scolding, especially a stranger! Even Jane respected Gloria’s fear and hatred of a wordy war.

Fiercely she pumped the wheel. She would never stop until she pulled right up to the old gate post, and then she would have to go in, for the cottage looked directly into the road and, no doubt, some of the numerous children would espy her coming.

But just as she guided herself carefully over a rough spot and was taking a necessarily long breath after the exertion, a shout came from somewhere.

She knew the voice. It was Marty’s!

“Hey! Wait a minute!” came the appeal. “Stop! I want to ask you—”

So abruptly did Gloria back pedal she almost fell to the ground.

“What is it, Marty?” she asked, noting the agitation of the child and his tear stained features.

“Oh, come quick! I think she’s dyin’!”

Dropping the wheel to the gutter bank, Gloria silently followed the frightened child to the cottage. He kept moaning and murmuring but his words were strangled in fright. “She’s dyin’,” he repeated.

A chill of terror seized Gloria at the word dying.

“Oh, no,” she cried. “She must not die, and leave all you babies—”

The boy darted ahead and Gloria quickly followed. She saw nothing of disorder as she went through the briar path, nor did she notice the other signs of neglect that confronted her as she hurried to get into the dingy old house.

But within! What a sight!

“She’s dyin’! She’s dyin’!” moaned Ellen, the oldest girl, who, with a tiny baby huddled in her arms, was wailing and swaying up and down against the disordered bed upon which Gloria now saw the afflicted mother.

“Oh!” gasped Gloria. “You poor—poor creature!”

Gasping for breath and uttering choking gasps the woman lay there, and even in her agony she seemed to be trying to quiet her panic-stricken little ones. Now she fastened her eyes upon the stranger and tossed her head from side to side, struggling to say something, but only biting back the attempt with colorless lips.

“What is it?” demanded Gloria, from Ellen.

“She—she took another—dose!”

“Of what?”

“The—medicine,” gasped the frightened girl. “He told her not to take any more, but—she couldn’t stand the pain! Oh, don’t let her die until father comes!”

“Where is he?”

“Away—workin’. He won’t be home till Saturday night!”

As if the hand of death would wait for time, this overwrought girl could think of nothing but the terror of her mother dying with the father not there to know. Her helplessness was pitiful. How they depended upon that father!

“Was the medicine poison?” demanded Gloria watching with terror the twitching of the sick woman’s face.

“Two doses was. And the doctor warned her—”

“Never mind that,” ordered Gloria, “and stop crying. We must do something. What do you give if she is—weak?”

“Coffee,” replied Marty promptly. “It’s on the stove.”

Following Gloria’s lead Ellen got to her feet, lay the baby in its cradle in spite of violent protests, and although the crying still kept up, its intensity was quickly lessened by something stuck in the infant’s mouth.

In a few moments Gloria had the coffee hot and was trying to make the woman drink some of it.

“Here, please,” she begged, with an arm under the frail shoulders, “drink a few mouthfuls—”

How she held the woman up Gloria did not stop to consider. She simply realized that something must be done promptly, and reasoned that the medicine must have been of a sort to relieve pain, therefore a sedative. For this, Gloria knew, coffee might act as a reacting stimulant.

Quite as if she had performed a miracle, the children gathered around the bed, wide eyed and wondering. Ellen stared so that her eyes fairly bulged out in glaring balls. She had been the most terrified, probably having a keener understanding of the fate that hung over them, and perhaps, feeling somewhat responsible for her mother’s accident.

“I put it on the chair,” she protested, “and ma was asleep. When she woke—” She clenched her hands and still stared at the figure on the bed as if trying to realize that it breathed and was not dead.

“Don’t be so excited,” cautioned Gloria, although her own heart beat so she could scarcely keep her arm under the shoulders, while the sick woman sipped and gasped. Finally, after taking perhaps two tablespoonsful of the reviving liquid, the heavy burden shifted itself from Gloria’s support, back to the pillow with a collapsing sigh.

“Better?” asked Gloria, with a sense of liberation.

“Yes,” came the word faintly spoken. Then the fluttering eyes closed and the woman’s breathing seemed less gasping.

“Now?” asked Gloria glancing around for the first time at the children who seemed huddled all over the place. “What shall we do?”

“Mrs. Berg ain’t home,” spoke up Marty, who appeared to have the most sense of any of the panic stricken brood. He seemed like Tommy in his self reliance.

“She’s the woman who comes in,” explained Ellen.

“She lives by the canal,” added another child, whom Ellen called May.

“I’ll jump on my wheel and get a doctor,” Gloria volunteered.

“Oh, please don’t go away!” begged Ellen, terror again straining her young face.

“But we must get a doctor,” insisted Gloria, anxiously.

“I’ll go,” spoke up Marty. “I can ride your wheel if y’u don’ mind.”

“Certainly, take it and hurry,” begged Gloria. “And, can you telephone, Marty?”

“Sure.”

Then she gave him Trixy Travers’ number and asked him to summon her friend with her car. The next moment Marty was off.

Gloria was deciding quickly that the sick woman should not die if the doctor would agree to her transference to the Marie Hospital.

“We’ll manage to get her there somehow,” she was deciding, but no hint of her intention was given to the hysterical Ellen, or to the other terrified little ones.

While Marty sped off Gloria heated more coffee and again undertook the difficult task of forcing the half conscious woman to drink some of it. But even the seriousness of this did not blot out the memory of her real mission there. Perhaps pride is a tyrant, yet it must be reckoned as inspiring, when the best that is in one responds to its call. Gloria was determined to see about that ill-fated little park with its fairy house, planned by the young man whose dreams failed him.

“Ben Hardy!” thought Gloria suddenly. “He ought to know. He is a student of nature and this seems to be entirely Nature’s fault.”