"I can do that part all right," declared Richard. "I can run an automobile."

There was no disputing that fact, no matter how contradictory Georgina's frame of mind. Only the day before she had seen him take the wheel and run the car for three miles under the direction of Cousin James, when they came to a level stretch of road.

"Yes, but you know your Cousin James said you were never to do it unless he was along himself. You wasn't to dare to touch it when you were out with only the chauffeur."

"He wouldn't care if we got in and didn't start anything but the engine," said Richard. "Climb in and play that I'm running away with you. With the motor chugging away and shaking the machine it'll seem as if we're really going."

By this time they were inside the garage, with the doors closed behind them.

"Now you get in and keep looking back the way Rosalind did to see how near they are to catching us."

Instantly Georgina threw herself into the spirit of the game. Climbing into the back seat she a.s.sumed the pose of the kidnapped bride whose adventures had thrilled them the night before.

"Play my white veil is floating out in the wind," she commanded, "and I'm looking back and waving to my husband to come faster and take me away from the dreadful villain who is going to kill me for my jewels. I wish this car was out of doors instead of in this dark garage. When I look back I look bang against the closed door every time, and I can't make it seem as if I was seeing far down the road."

"Play it's night," suggested Richard. He had put on a pair of goggles and was making a great pretence of getting ready to start. Georgina, leaning out as Rosalind had done, waved her lily hand in frantic beckonings for her rescuers to follow faster. The motor chugged harder and harder. The car shook violently.

To the vivid imaginations of the pa.s.sengers, the chase was as exciting as if the automobile were really plunging down the road instead of throbbing steadily in one spot in the dim garage. The gas rolling up from somewhere in the back made it wonderfully realistic. But out on the open road the smell of burning gasoline would not have been so overpowering. Inside the little box-like garage it began to close in on them and settle down like a dense fog.

Georgina coughed and Richard looked back apprehensively, feeling that something was wrong, and if that queer smoke didn't stop pouring out in such a thick cloud he'd have to shut off the engine or do something.

Another moment pa.s.sed and he leaned forward, fumbling for the key, but he couldn't find it. He had grown queerly confused and light-headed. He couldn't make his fingers move where he wanted them to go.

He looked back at Georgina. She wasn't waving her hands any more. She was lying limply back on the seat as if too tired to play any longer.

And a thousand miles away--at least it sounded that far--above the terrific noise the motor was making, he heard Captain Kidd barking. They were short, excited barks, so thin and queer, almost as thin and queer as if he were barking with the voice of a mosquito instead of his own.

And then--Richard heard nothing more, not even the noise of the motor.

His hand dropped from the wheel, and he began slipping down, down from the seat to the floor of the car, white and limp, overcome like Georgina, by the fumes of the poisonous gas rolling up from the carburetor.

Mr. Milford, up in the hammock, had been vaguely conscious for several minutes of unusual sounds somewhere in the neighborhood, but it was not until he reached the end of the chapter that he took any intelligent notice. Then he looked up thinking somebody's machine was making a terrible fuss somewhere near. But it wasn't that sound which made him sit up in the hammock. It was Captain Kidd's frantic barking and yelping and whining as if something terrible was happening to him.

Standing up to stretch himself, then walking to the corner of the porch, Mr. Milford looked out. He could see the little terrier alternately scratching on the garage door and making frantic efforts to dig under it. Evidently he felt left out and was trying desperately to join his little playmates, or else he felt that something was wrong inside.

Then it came to Mr. Milford in a flash that something _was_ wrong inside. n.o.body ever touched that machine but himself and the chauffeur, and the chauffeur, who was having a day off, was half-way to Yarmouth by this time. He didn't wait to go down by the steps. With one leap he was over the railing, crashing through the vines, and running down the terrace to the garage.

As he rolled back one of the sliding doors a suffocating burst of gas rushed into his face. He pushed both doors open wide, and with a hand over his mouth and nose hurried through the heavily-charged atmosphere to shut off the motor. The fresh air rushing in, began clearing away the fumes, and he seized Georgina and carried her out, thinking she would be revived by the time he was back with Richard. But neither child stirred from the gra.s.s where he stretched them out.

As he called for the cook and the housekeeper, there flashed into his mind an account he had read recently in a New York paper, of a man and his wife who had been asphyxiated in just such a way as this. Now thoroughly alarmed, he sent the cook running down the Green Stairs to summon Richard's father from the studio, and the housekeeper to telephone in various directions. Three doctors were there in a miraculously short time, but despite all they could do at the end of half an hour both little figures still lay white and motionless.

Then the pulmotor that had been frantically telephoned for arrived from the life-saving station, and just as the man dashed up with that, Mrs.

Triplett staggered up the terrace, her knees shaking so that she could scarcely manage to climb the last few steps.

Afterwards, the happenings of the day were very hazy in Georgina's mind.

She had an indistinct recollection of being lifted in somebody's arms and moved about, and of feeling very sick and weak. Somebody said soothingly to somebody who was crying:

"Oh, the worst is over now. They're both beginning to come around."

Then she was in her own bed and the wild-cat from the banks of the Brazos was bending over her. At least, she thought it was the wild-cat, because she smelled the liniment as strongly as she did when she climbed up in the wagon beside it. But when she opened her eyes it was Tippy who was bending over her, smoothing her curls in a comforting, purry way, but the smell of liniment still hung in the air.

Then Georgina remembered something that must have happened before she was carried home from the bungalow.--Captain Kidd squirming out of Tippy's arms, and Tippy with the tears streaming down her face trying to hold him and hug him as if he had been a person, and the Milford's cook saying: "If it hadn't been for the little beast's barkin' they'd have been dead in a few minutes more. Then there'd have been a double funeral, poor lambs."

Georgina smiled drowsily now and slipped off to sleep again, but later when she awakened the charm of the cook's phrase aroused her thoroughly, and she lay wondering what "a double funeral" was like. Would it have been at her house or Richard's? Would two little white coffins have stood side by side, or would each have been in its own place, with the two solemn processions meeting and joining at the foot of the Green Stairs. Maybe they would have put on her tombstone, "None knew her but to love her." No, that couldn't be said about her. She'd been wilfully disobedient too often for that, like the time she played with the Portuguese children on purpose to spite Tippy. She was sorry for that disobedience now, for she had discovered that Tippy was fonder of her than she had supposed. She had proved it by hugging Captain Kidd so gratefully for saving their lives, when she simply _loathed_ dogs.

Somehow Georgina felt that she was better acquainted with Mrs. Triplett than she had ever been before, and fonder of her. Lying there in the dark she made several good resolutions. She was going to be a better girl in the future. She was going to do kind, lovely things for everybody, so that if an early tomb should claim her, every heart in town would be saddened by her going. It would be lovely to leave a widespread heartache behind her. She wished she could live such a life that there wouldn't be a dry eye in the town when it was whispered from house to house that little Georgina Huntingdon was with the angels.

She pictured Belle's grief, and Uncle Darcy's and Richard's. She had already seen Tippy's. But it was a very different thing when she thought of Barby. There was no pleasure in imagining Barby's grief. There was something too real and sharp in the pain which darted into her own heart at the thought of it. She wanted to put her arms around her mother and ward off sorrow and trouble from her and keep all tears away from those dear eyes. She wanted to grow up and take care of her darling Barby and protect her from the Tishbite.

Suddenly it occurred to Georgina that in this escape she had been kept from the power of that mysterious evil which had threatened her ever since she called it forth by doing such a wicked thing as to use the "Sacred Book" to work a charm.

She had been put to bed in the daytime, hence her evening pet.i.tions were still unsaid. Now she pulled the covers over her head and included them all in one fervent appeal:

"And keep on delivering us from the Tishbite, forever and ever, Amen!"

CHAPTER XVI

WHAT THE STORM DID

NEXT morning nearly everyone in the town was talking about the storm.

Belle said what with the booming of the waves against the breakwater and the wind rattling the shutters, she hadn't slept a wink all night. It seemed as if every gust would surely take the house off its foundations.

Old Jeremy reported that it was one of the worst wind-storms ever known along the Cape, wild enough to blow all the sand dunes into the sea.

They'd had the best shaking up and shifting around that they'd had in years, he declared. Captain Ames' cranberry bog was buried so deep in sand you couldn't see a blossom or a leaf. And there was sand drifted all over the garden. It had whirled clear over the wall, till the bird pool was half full of it.

Georgina listened languidly, feeling very comfortable and important with her breakfast brought in to her on a tray. Tippy thought it was too chilly for her in the dining-room where there was no fire. Jeremy had kindled a cheerful blaze on the living-room hearth and his tales of damage done to the shipping and to roofs and chimneys about town, seemed to emphasize her own safety and comfort. The only thing which made the storm seem a personal affair was the big limb blown off the willow tree.

Mrs. Triplett and Jeremy could remember a storm years ago which shifted the sand until the whole face of the Cape seemed changed. That was before the Government planted gra.s.s all over it, to bind it together with firm roots. Later when the ring of an axe told that the willow limb was being chopped in pieces, Georgina begged to be allowed to go outdoors.

"Let me go out and see the tracks of the storm," she urged. "I feel all right. I'm all over the gas now."

But Mrs. Triplett preferred to run no risks. All she said to Georgina was:

"No, after such a close call as you had yesterday you stay right here where I can keep an eye on you, and take it quietly for a day or two,"

but when she went into the next room Georgina heard her say to Belle:

"There's no knowing how that gas may have affected her heart."

Georgina made a face at the first speech, but the second one made her lie down languidly on the sofa with her finger on her pulse. She was half persuaded that there was something wrong with the way it beat, and was about to ask faintly if she couldn't have a little blackberry cordial with her lunch, when she heard Richard's alley call outside and Captain Kidd's quick bark.

She started up, forgetting all about the cordial and her pulse, and was skipping to the front door when Tippy hurried in from the dining-room and reached it first. She had a piece of an old coffee sack in her hand.

"Here!" she said abruptly to Richard, who was so surprised at the sudden opening of the door that he nearly fell in against her.

"You catch that dog and hold him while I wipe his feet. I can't have any dirty quadruped like that, tracking up my clean floors."

Georgina looked at the performance in amazement. Tippy scrubbing away at Captain Kidd's muddy paws till all four of them were clean, and then actually letting him come into the house and curl up on the hearth!

Tippy, who never touched dogs except with the end of a broom! She could scarcely believe what her own eyes told her. She and Richard must have had a "close call," indeed, closer than either of them realized, to make such a wonderful change in Tippy.