The red, low-hung car wabbled several times back and forth across the oiled driveway. They saw a hatless young fellow in front behind the wheel. In the narrow tonneau were two girls, and if they were not exactly frightened they did not look happy.
Nell Stanley cried: “It’s Bill Brewster’s racing car; and he’s got Belle and Sally with him.”
“Belle and Sally!” shrieked Amy.
Belle Ringold and her follower, Sally Moon, were not much older than Amy and Jessie, but they were overbearing and insolent and had made themselves obnoxious to many of their schoolmates. Wishing to appear grown up, and wishing, above all things, to attract Amy’s brother Darry and Darry’s chum, Burd Alling, and feeling that in some way the two Roselawn chums interfered in this design, they were especially unpleasant in their behavior toward them. Sometimes Belle and Sally had been able to make the Roselawn girls feel unhappy by their haughty speech and what Amy called their “snippy ways.” Just now, however, circumstances forbade the two unpleasant girls annoying anybody.
The others had identified the reckless driver and his passengers. At least, all had recognized the party save Montmorency Shannon. He just managed to jump out of the phaeton in time. The pony was still asleep when the rear of the skidding red car crashed against the phaeton and crushed it into a wreck across the curbstone.
CHAPTER III – A FLARE-UP
The red car stopped before it completely overturned. Then, when the exhaust was shut off, the screams of the two girls in the back seat could be heard. But nobody shouted any louder than Montmorency Shannon.
The red-haired boy had leaped from the phaeton and had seized the pony by the bit. Otherwise the surprised animal might have set off for home, Amy said, “on a perfectly apoplectic run.”
The little animal stood shaking and pawing, nothing but the shafts and whiffle-tree remaining attached to it by the harness. The rear wheels of the racing car were entangled in the phaeton and it was slewed across the road.
“Now see what you’ve done! Now see what you’ve done!” one of the girls in the car was saying, over and over.
“Well, I couldn’t help it, Belle,” whined the reckless young Brewster. “You and Sally Moon aren’t hurt. And you asked to ride with me, anyway.”
“Oh, I don’t mean you, Bill!” exclaimed the girl behind him. “But that horrid boy with his pony carriage! What business had he to get in the way?”
“Hey! ’Tain’t my carriage, you Ringold girl,” declared Monty Shannon. “It’s Cabbage-head Tony’s. He’ll sue your father for this, Bill Brewster. And you come near killing me and the pony.”
“I don’t see how you came to be standing just there,” complained the driver of the red car. “You might have been on the other side of the drive.”
“He ought to have been!” declared Belle Ringold promptly. “He was headed the wrong way. I’ll testify for you, Bill. Of course he was headed wrong.”
“Why, you’re another!” cried Monty. “If I’d been headed the wrong way you’d have smashed the pony instead of the carriage.”
“Never mind what they say, Monty,” Jessie Norwood put in quietly. “There are three of us here who saw the collision, and we can testify to the truth.”
“And me. I seen it,” added Henrietta eagerly. “Don’t forget that Spotted Snake, the Witch, seen it all. If you big girls tell stories about Monty and that pony, you’ll wish you hadn’t – now you see!” and she began making funny gestures with her hands and writhing her features into perfectly frightful contortions.
“Henrietta!” commanded Jessie Norwood, yet having hard work, like Nell and Amy, to keep from laughing at the freckle-faced child. “Henrietta, stop that! Don’t you know that is not a polite way – nor a nice way – to act?”
“Why, Miss Jessie, they won’t know that,” complained little Henrietta. “They are never nice or polite.”
At this statement Monty Shannon burst out laughing, too. The red-haired boy could not be long of serious mind.
“Never you mind, Brewster,” he said to the unfortunate driver of the red car, who was notorious for getting into trouble. “Never mind; we ain’t killed. And your father can pay Cabbage-head Tony all right. It won’t break him.”
“You impudent thing!” exclaimed Belle Ringold, who was a very proud and unpleasant girl. “You are always making trouble for people, Montmorency Shannon. It was you who would not finish stringing our radio antenna at the Carter place and so helped spoil our picnic.”
“He didn’t! He didn’t!” ejaculated Henrietta, dancing up and down in her excitement. “It was me – Spotted Snake! I brought down the curse of bad weather on your old picnic – the witch’s curse. I’m the one that brought thunder and lightning and rain to spoil your fun. And I’ll do it again.”
She was so excited that Jessie could not silence her. Sally Moon burst into a scornful laugh, but her chum, Belle, said, fanning herself as she sat in the stalled car:
“Don’t give them any attention. These Roselawn girls are just as low as the Dogtown kids. Thank goodness, Sally, we will get away from them all for the rest of the summer.”
“Your satisfaction will only be equaled by ours,” laughed Amy Drew.
“I don’t know whether you will get rid of me or not, Belle,” said Nell Stanley composedly. “If you mean to go to Hackle Island – ”
“Father has engaged the handsomest suite at the hotel there,” Belle broke in. “I fancy Doctor Stanley will not feel like taking you all there, Nellie. It is very expensive.”
“Oh, no, if we go we sha’n’t be able to live at the hotel,” confessed the clergyman’s daughter. “But the children will get the benefit of the sea air.”
“Oh!” murmured Amy. “Hackle Island is a nice place.”
“But it ain’t as nice as mine!” Henrietta suddenly broke in. “My island is the best. And I wouldn’t let those girls on it – not on my part of it.”
“What is that ridiculous child talking about?” demanded Belle scornfully, while Bill Brewster continued to crawl about under his car to discover if possible what had happened to it. “What does she mean?”
“I got an island, and everything,” announced Henrietta. “I’m going to be just as rich as you are, but I won’t be so mean.”
“Then you would better begin by not talking meanly,” advised Jessie, admonishingly.
“Well,” sniffed Henrietta, “I haven’t got to let ’em on my island if I don’t want to, have I?”
“You needn’t fret,” laughed Sally Moon. “Your island is like your witch’s curse. All in your mind.”
“Is that so?” flared out little Henrietta. “Your old picnic was just spoiled by my bad weather, wasn’t it? Well, then, wait till you try to get on my island,” and she shook a threatening head, and even her green parasol, in her earnestness.
Sally laughed again scornfully. But Belle flounced out of the automobile.
“Come on!” she exclaimed. “Bill will never get this car fixed.”
“Oh, yes, I will, Belle,” came Bill’s muffled voice from under the car. “I always do.”
“Well, who wants to wait all day for you to repair it, and then ride home with a fellow all smeared up with oil and soot? Come on, Sally.”
Sally Moon meekly followed. That was how she kept in Belle Ringold’s good graces. You had to do everything Belle said, and do just as she did, or you could not be friends with her.
“Well,” Monty Shannon drawled, “as far as I think, you both can go. I won’t weep none. But Bill’s going to weep when