girl, at last.
“Wha-at!” gasped the young man. Then he grinned hugely. “That’s what some of his customers calls him, miss,” he agreed.
“Don’t – don’t you think there is some danger in your staying here alone?” asked Dot. “Suppose Uncle Rufus should come down stairs and catch you?”
“Hullo! who’s Uncle Rufus?” asked the young man.
“Why – why, he’s Uncle Rufus. He works for us – ”
“Oh! he’s the colored man?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why, he is down,” said the young man, coolly. “He let us in. We had to come early, ’cause we’ve got so much work to do, and we didn’t get through at Pinkney’s till nine o’clock last night.”
“At Pinkney’s?” cried Dot, as the young man yawned. “Did – did you burgle Sammy’s house, too?”
“What d’ye mean – ‘burgle’?” asked the young man, biting off the yawn and staring again at Dot.
“I beg your pardon,” said Dot, gently. “But – but what do you call it?”
Just then the door of the butler’s pantry opened and Uncle Rufus looked in.
“Dat oddah plumber done come, young man,” he said. “Dis ain’t no time in de mawnin’ – ‘fo’ six o’clock – t’ come t’ folks’s houses nohow t’ mend a busted watah-pipe – nossir! Yuh got all ob dem silber pieces out ob de safe?”
“They’re all out, Uncle,” said the young man.
“Whuffo’ dey run dat pipe t’rough de silber closet, I dunno,” complained the old darkey. “I use t’ tell Mistah Peter Stowah dat it was one piece of plain foolishness. What if de bat’room is ober dis closet – ”
He disappeared, his voice trailing off into silence, and the young man followed him. Dot was left breathless and rather abashed. Then the young man was not a burglar after all; he was only a plumber!
She crept back to bed, and said nothing to anybody about her early morning visit to the lower floor. But the young man told Uncle Rufus, and Uncle Rufus, chuckling hugely, told Mrs. MacCall.
“I’d like to know, for goodness’ sake, what you would have done if it had been a really truly burglar, Dot Kenway?” Agnes demanded, when the story was repeated at the breakfast table.
“I’d have given him my silver knife and fork and mug, and asked him to go away without waking up Ruthie,” declared the smallest Corner House girl, having thought it all out by that time.
“I believe you would – you blessed child!” cried Ruth, jumping up to kiss her.
“But suppose it had been Santa Claus?” Tess murmured, “and you had disturbed him filling our stockings?”
“Pooh!” said Dot. “If he’d felled down the chimbley like that brick, he wouldn’t have been filling stockings.”
CHAPTER IV – THE FAMILY ALBUM – AND OTHER THINGS
The day before Christmas was the busiest day of all. The dressing of the tree must be finished and the trimming and festooning of the big dining room completed. Neale O’Neil came over early to help the Corner House girls. He was a slim, rosy-cheeked, flaxen-haired boy, as agile as a monkey, and almost always smiling.
Ruth and Agnes would not hear to his helping trim the tree; but it was Neale’s agility that made it possible for the rope of green to be festooned from the heavy ceiling cornices. Uncle Rufus was much too stiff with rheumatism for such work.
“Well! boys are some good, you must admit,” Agnes said to Ruth, for the oldest Corner House girl was inclined to be a carping critic of the “mere male.”
“All right. If he’s so awfully useful, just let him clear up all this mess on the carpet, and then dust the rugs. Mercy, Agnes!” exclaimed Ruth, “what a lot of this green stuff there is all over the floor.”
“Yes, I know,” admitted Agnes.
“And there is other rubbish, too. Look at this old book you brought down from the attic and flung in the corner.”
Ruth picked it up. It was heavy, and she carried it over to the broad window-seat on which she sat to open the “family album,” as Agnes had called it.
The latter and Neale, having brought in basket and broom, began to gather up the litter. Ruth became very still at the window with the old volume in her lap. The smaller girls were out of the room.
“What’s in the old thing – pictures?” asked Agnes of her elder sister.
“Ye – yes, pictures,” Ruth said hesitatingly.
“Must be funny ones,” chuckled Neale, “by the look of her face.”
Ruth did look serious as she sat there, turning the pages of the big, old volume. Had the others noticed particularly they would have seen that the countenance of the oldest Corner House girl had become very pale.
It was so when Mrs. MacCall looked in and said to her: “Oh, Ruth! I do wish you’d come out here and see what that Sammy Pinkney’s brought. I dunno whether to laugh, to scream, or to spank him!”
“I’ll be there in a moment, Mrs. Mac,” Ruth said nervously, jumping up and closing the book.
Then she glanced at Agnes and Neale, seized the volume in her arms, and instead of going out through the butler’s pantry after Mrs. MacCall, she crossed the front hall to the sitting room at the rear of the house.
“I like that!” cried Agnes. “Why! I found that old album myself; and I haven’t had a chance to look into it yet.”
Ruth was only a moment in the sitting room. Then she ran to the kitchen and out upon the cold porch, where Sammy Pinkney, done up in the folds of a huge red comforter like a boa-constrictor suffering from scarlet fever, stood, holding a cage-trap in one mittened hand.
“What do you know about this?” demanded Mrs. MacCall, spectacles on nose and eyeing the contents of the round trap in alarm and disgust.
Uncle Rufus was chuckling hugely in the background. Sandyface, the mother cat, was arching her back and purring pleadingly about Sammy’s sturdy legs.
“What are they?” demanded Ruth.
“Mice,” grunted Sammy, gruffly. “For Tess’ cats. They like ’em, don’t they? But my mother says I’ve got to bring the trap back.”
“What’s to be done with a boy like that?” demanded Mrs. MacCall. “Being kicked to death with grasshoppers would be mild punishment for him, wouldn’t it? What’s to be done with eight mice?”
“One kitten will have to go without,” said Dot, the literal, as she and Tess joined the party on the porch.
“Come on, now! You gotter let ’em out. I gotter have the trap,” was Sammy’s gruff statement. He saw that his present was not entirely appreciated by the human members of the Corner House family, whether the feline members approved or not.
“Oh, I’ll call the family!” cried Dot, and raised her voice in a shrill cry for “Spotty, Almira, Popocatepetl, Bungle, Starboard, Port, Hard-a-Lee and Mainsheet!” She was breathless when she had finished.
Cats came from all directions. Indeed, they seemed to appear most mysteriously from the ground. Big cats and little cats, black cats and gray cats, striped cats and spotted cats.
“If there were any more of them they’d eat us out of house and home,” declared Mrs. MacCall.
“But Almira isn’t here!” wailed Dot. “Oh, Ruthie! don’t let him open the cage till Almira comes. She wants a chance to catch a mouse.”
“I believe you children are little cannibals!” exclaimed the housekeeper. “How can you? Wanting those cats to catch the poor little mice!”
“D’you