The Bobbsey Twins Megapack

by Laura Lee Hope

  “I am so glad to see you! I am traveling to Chicago all alone, and I saw you get on as I looked from my window in the next car. I came back to speak to you.”

  “Why, it’s Mrs. Powendon!” exclaimed Mrs. Bobbsey as she saw a lady whom she had first met at a Red Cross meeting. Mrs. Powendon lived in a village near Lakeport, and often came over to see Mr. and Mrs. Bobbsey and other friends. “I am very glad you saw us and came in to see us,” went on Mrs. Bobbsey. “Do sit down! So you are going to Chicago?”

  “Yes. But what takes you away from Lakeport?”

  “I don’t suppose you heard the news, but an old uncle of mine, whom I had not seen for years, died and left me a western lumber tract and a cattle ranch. Mr. Bobbsey and I are on our way there now to look after matters, and we had to take the children with us.”

  “And I suppose they were very sorry about that,” said Mrs. Powendon with a smile, as she looked at Nan and Bert.

  “Oh, no!” exclaimed Bert “Indeed we weren’t sorry! We’re going to have fine times!”

  Then Mrs. Powendon sat down and began talking to Mr. and Mrs. Bobbsey, while Nan and Bert looked at magazines their father had bought for them from the train boy.

  No one paid much attention to Flossie and Freddie, and it was not until some little time later that Mrs. Bobbsey, looking around the drawing room, exclaimed:

  “Where are they?”

  “Who?” asked her husband.

  “Flossie and Freddie. They aren’t here!”

  That was very evident. There was no place in the little room for them to hide, and yet the children could not be seen.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Mrs. Bobbsey, “can they have fallen off the train?”

  “Of course not!” answered her husband “They must just have gone outside in the car. I’ll look.”

  Mr. Bobbsey was about to open the door when a knock came on it, and, as the door swung back, the face of a colored porter looked in. The man wore a white jacket.

  “’Scuse me, sah,” he said, talking just as Sam Johnson did, “but did you-all only want dinnah for two?”

  “Dinner for two? What do you mean?” asked Mr. Bobbsey.

  “Why, dey’s two li’l children in de dinin’ car. Dey says as how dey belongs back yeah, an’ dey’s done gone an’ ordered dinnah for two—jest fo’ der own selves—jest two! I was wonderin’ ef you-all folks wasn’t goin’ to eat!”

  CHAPTER X

  Freddie, As Usual

  “Dinner for two! Little children!” exclaimed Mr. Bobbsey.

  “It is Flossie and Freddie!” cried his wife. “Where is the dining car?”

  The waiter from the dining car, who had come back to the sleeping car where the Bobbseys had their places, smiled as he finished telling about the two children.

  “Dey’s right up forward in my dinin’ car,” he said to Mrs. Bobbsey. “An’ dey is all right, too, lady! I tooked good keer ob ’em. Dey jest walked right in, laik dey owned de place, an’ I says to ’em, what will dey hab?

  “Dey tells me dat dey done want dinnah fo’ two, an’ I starts to gib it to ’em, but de conductor says as how dey belonged to a party back heah, an’ mebby de odder folks would want somethin’ to eat, too. An’, as anyhow, dey had bettah be tol’.”

  “I’m hungry!” exclaimed Bert.

  “So’m I!” added Nan.

  “Dear me!” exclaimed Mrs. Bobbsey. “I must go and see about them.”

  “We will all go,” said Mr. Bobbsey. “I did not know it was so near lunch time. But I suppose Freddie and Flossie never forget anything so important as that.”

  “Trust children to remember their meals!” said Mrs. Powendon. “I fear I am to blame for your two little ones running away.”

  “Oh, no,” murmured Mr. Bobbsey.

  “How?” asked Mrs. Bobbsey.

  “By coming in here, and talking to you. Probably I left the door of your drawing room open. Flossie and Freddie must have slipped out that way.”

  “Very likely they did,” said their father. “But no great harm is done. We will all go to lunch now. Won’t you come with us, Mrs. Powendon?”

  “Thank you, I will,” answered the lady who had come visiting, and so the rest of the Bobbseys and their friend went to the dining car.

  There, surely enough, seated at a little table all by themselves, were Flossie and Freddie. The two tots looked up as their father and mother, with Nan and Bert and Mrs. Powendon, came into the car.

  “I’m going to have a piece of pie!” shouted Freddie so loudly that every one in the car must have heard, for nearly every one laughed.

  “So am I going to have pie!” echoed Flossie, and there was another laugh.

  “Well, what have you children to say for yourselves?” asked Mrs. Bobbsey, in the voice she used when she was going to scold just a little bit. “What have you to say, Freddie?”

  “I like it in here!” he said. “It’s a nice place to eat.”

  “And I like it, too!” added Flossie.

  Mr. and Mrs. Bobbsey tried not to laugh.

  “But you shouldn’t have slipped away while we were talking and come in here all alone,” went on Mother Bobbsey. “Why did you do it?”

  “I was hungry,” said Freddie, and that seemed to be all there was to it.

  “Our cookies were all in crumbs,” explained Flossie. “They wasn’t a one left in my basket. I was hungry, too.”

  “I presume that’s as good an excuse as any,” said Mr. Bobbsey, with a laugh. “And so we’ll all sit down and have lunch.”

  And while they were eating Flossie and Freddie told how they had slipped out, when their mother and father were busy talking to Mrs. Powendon, and while Bert and Nan were looking out of the window. They had been in dining cars on railroad trains before, and so they knew pretty nearly what to do.

  But when they ordered dinner for themselves, or at least told the smiling, black waiter to bring them something to eat, the Pullman conductor, who had seen the children in the sleeping coach, suspected that all was not right, so he sent the waiter back to tell Mrs. Bobbsey about Flossie and Freddie.

  “And you mustn’t do it again,” said Mrs. Bobbsey, when the story had been told.

  “No’m, we won’t!” promised Freddie.

  “No, he won’t do just this again,” said Bert with a laugh to Nan. “But he’ll do something else just as strange.”

  And of course Freddie did.

  After lunch Mrs. Powendon went back to her car, and the Bobbseys took their seats in the drawing room which they occupied. The meal and the riding made Flossie and Freddie sleepy, so their mother fixed a little bed for them on the long seat, and soon they were dreaming away, perhaps of cowboys and Indians and big trees being cut down in the forest to make lumber for playhouses.

  The train rumbled on, stopping now and then at different stations, and, after a while, even Bert and Nan began to get tired of it, though they liked traveling.

  “How much farther do we have to go?” asked Bert, as the afternoon sun began to go down in the west.

  “Oh, quite a long way,” his father answered. “We are not even in Chicago yet. We shall get there to-morrow morning, and stay there two days. Then we will go on to Lumberville. How long we shall stay there I do not know. But as soon as we can attend to the business and get matters in shape, we will go on to Cowdon.”

  “That’s the place I want to get to!” exclaimed Bert. “I want to see some Indians and cowboys.”

  “There may not be any there,” said his mother.

  “What! No cowboys on a ranch?” cried the boy.

  “Why, Mother!” exclaimed Nan.

  “I meant Indians,” said Mrs. Bobbsey. “Of course there’ll be cowboys to look after the cattle, but Indians are not as plentiful as they once were, even out West.”

  “I only want to see an Indian baby and get an Indian doll,” put in Nan. “I don’t like grown-up Indians. They have a lot of feathers on, like turkeys.”

  “That’s what I lik
e!” Bert declared. “If I wasn’t going to be a cowboy I’d be an Indian, I guess.”

  Night came, and when the electric lights in the cars were turned on Freddie and Flossie awakened from their nap.

  “How do you feel?” asked his mother, as she smoothed her little boy’s rumpled hair.

  “I—I guess I feel hungry!” he said, though he was still not quite awake.

  “So’m I!” added Flossie. You could, nearly always, depend on her to say and do about the same things Freddie did and said.

  “Well, this is a good time to be hungry,” said Mr. Bobbsey with a laugh. “I just heard them say that dinner was being served in the dining car. We’ll go up and eat again.”

  After dinner the porter made up the funny little beds, or “berths,” as they are called, and soon the Bobbsey twins had crawled into them and were asleep.

  It must have been about the middle of the night that Mrs. Bobbsey, who was sleeping with Flossie on one side of the aisle, heard a noise just outside her berth. It was as if something had fallen to the floor with a thud. She opened the curtains and looked out. Freddie and his father had gone to sleep in the berth just across from her, but now she saw a little white bundle lying on the carpeted floor of the car.

  “What is that? Who is it?” the mother of the twins exclaimed.

  Mr. Bobbsey poked his head out from between his curtains.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Anything gone wrong?” he added sleepily.

  “Look!” exclaimed his wife. “What’s that?” and she pointed to the bundle lying on the floor.

  “That? Oh, that must be Freddie,” answered Mr. Bobbsey. “As usual he’s done something we didn’t expect. He’s fallen out of his car bed.”

  CHAPTER XI

  In Chicago

  Surely enough Freddie Bobbsey had fallen out of bed, or his “berth,” as beds are called in sleeping cars. The little fellow had been resting with his father, and on the inside, too, But he must have become restless in his sleep, and have crawled over Mr. Bobbsey.

  At any rate, when Freddie fell out he made a thud that his mother, in her berth across the aisle, had heard.

  But the carpet on the floor of the car was so soft, and Freddie was such a fat, chubby little fellow, and he was so sound asleep, that he was not at all hurt in his tumble, and he never even awakened. He just went on sleeping, right there on the floor.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Bobbsey with a smile at his wife as he picked Freddie up, “you can generally depend on his doing something unusual, or different. Well, he’s a nice little boy,” he murmured softly, as he picked up the “fireman” and put him back in the berth.

  Even then Freddie did not completely wake up. But he murmured something in his dreams, though Mr. Bobbsey heard only a few words about Indians and cowboys and sugar cookies.

  “He’s hungry even in his sleep!” said the father, with a silent laugh.

  The other Bobbsey twins knew nothing of what had happened until morning, when they were told of Freddie’s little accident.

  “And did I really fall out of bed?” asked Freddie, himself as much surprised as any one.

  “You certainly did!” laughed his mother. “At first I was startled, being aroused so suddenly, but I saw that you were still sleeping and I knew you couldn’t be hurt very much.”

  “I didn’t even feel it!” laughed Freddie. “And now I want my breakfast!”

  “Dear me! You want to eat again, after dreaming about sugar cookies?” cried Mr. Bobbsey, and he told his little boy what he had heard him say in his sleep. “Well, we had all better go to the dining car again. It will be our last meal there.”

  “Our last meal!” cried Bert. “Aren’t we going to eat again?”

  “Not on this train,” his father answered. “We’ll be in Chicago in time for dinner.”

  Breakfast over, the Bobbseys began gathering up their different things to be ready to get out at Chicago when the train should reach that big and busy city.

  It was about ten o’clock when the station was reached, and the Bobbsey twins thought they had never been in such a noisy place, nor one in which there were more people.

  But Daddy Bobbsey had traveled to Chicago before, and he knew just what to do and where to go. He called an automobile, and in that the whole family rode to the hotel where they were to stay while they were in the city.

  Two days were to be spent in Chicago, which Mrs. Bobbsey had not visited for some time. She wanted to look around a little, and show the children the various sights. Mr. Bobbsey planned to attend to some business in the “Windy City,” as Chicago is sometimes called.

  Both Mr. and Mrs. Bobbsey wanted their children to see all there was to be seen.

  “Travel will broaden their minds,” Mrs. Bobbsey had said to her husband when they had talked the matter over one night after the twins had gone to bed. “Just see how much they learned when we took them to Washington.”

  “They not only learned something, but they brought back something—I mean Miss Pompret’s china pieces,” said Mr. Bobbsey. “Yes, traveling is good for children if they do not do too much of it.”

  So when the Bobbsey twins reached the big Chicago hotel they were not as strange and surprised as they would have been if they had never been at a hotel before.

  “I like this better than the hotel we stayed at in Washington,” said Nan to Bert, as they were shown to their rooms, after riding up in an elevator.

  “Yes, you can see lots farther,” agreed Bert, as he glanced from one of the windows.

  “I didn’t mean that,” his sister said. “I mean the curtains and chairs and such things are ever so much nicer.”

  “You can’t eat curtains!” exclaimed Bert. “And I’m hungry. I hope they have good things to eat.”

  “I think they will,” his father remarked with a laugh.

  And when, a little later, they went down to the dining room, the Bobbsey twins found that it was a very good hotel, indeed, as far as things to eat were concerned.

  Though Mrs. Bobbsey was very much interested in Chicago, and though Mr. Bobbsey was glad to get there to look after some matters of his lumber business, I must admit that none of the Bobbsey twins thought a great deal of the big city.

  “’Tisn’t any different from New York!” declared Bert, as he looked at the big buildings, the elevated roads, the street cars and the hurrying crowds. “I wouldn’t know but what I was in New York.”

  “Yes, in some ways it is much like New York,” his mother agreed.

  “But there isn’t any big lake in New York, such as there is here,” said Nan.

  “Well, I guess the New York Atlantic Ocean is bigger than Lake Michigan,” returned Bert. “And the ocean has salt water in it, too, and Lake Michigan is fresh!”

  “That makes it better!” declared Nan, who decided then and there to “stick up” for Chicago. “If you’re thirsty you can’t drink the salty ocean water, but you could drink the lake water.”

  “Well, maybe that’s better,” admitted Bert. “I didn’t think of that.”

  And when he and the other children had been taken by their father out to the city lake front, and had seen the bathing beach, Bert had to admit that, after all, Chicago was just as good as New York. But he would not say it was better.

  As for Flossie and Freddie, any place was nice to them if they had Bert and Nan and daddy and mother along. The smaller twins seemed to have fun over everything; even riding up and down in the hotel elevator amused them.

  After a day of sight-seeing about Chicago, Mrs. Bobbsey was rather tired, and she thought the children were, too, for she told them they had better go to bed early, as they would still have another day to-morrow to see things.

  “Oh, I don’t want to go to bed!” exclaimed Bert. “There’s a nice moving picture in the theater near this hotel! It’s all about Indians and cowboys, and daddy said he’d take us after supper. Anyhow, he said he’d take Nan and me.”

  “If he said so I suppose he
will,” said Mrs. Bobbsey. “But I can’t let Flossie and Freddie go, and I am too tired to go myself.”

  “Oh, I want to see the Indians!” cried Freddie when he heard what was being talked about.

  “No, dear. You and Flossie stay here with me in the hotel, and I’ll read you a story,” promised his mother. She knew by his tired little legs and his sleepy eyes that she would not have to read more than one story before he and Flossie would be fast asleep.

  And so it proved. Mr. Bobbsey took Nan and Bert to the moving picture theater a few doors from the hotel, promising to bring them back early, so they would not lose too much sleep. Then Mrs. Bobbsey sat down to read to Flossie and Freddie.

  Just as she had expected, before she reached the end of the story two little heads were nodding and four sleepy eyes could hardly keep open.

  “Bed is the place for my tots!” said Mrs. Bobbsey softly, and soon Flossie and Freddie were slumbering together.

  Mr. Bobbsey came in with Nan and Bert about an hour later, the pictures having been enjoyed very much.

  “I surely am going to be a cowboy!” declared Bert. “I can easily be one on the ranch you are going to own, can’t I, Mother?”

  “We’ll see,” replied Mrs. Bobbsey, with a quiet smile at her husband.

  Then Nan and Bert went to bed and were soon asleep.

  “Well, I hope Freddie doesn’t fall out of bed again tonight, and wake me up,” said the children’s mother.

  “So do I,” echoed her husband. “I think we shall all rest well tonight.”

  But trying to sleep in a big city hotel is quite different from trying to sleep in one’s own, quiet home. There seemed to be even more noises than on the railroad train, where the motion of the cars, and the clickety-click of the wheels, appears to sing a sort of slumber song. So it was that in the Chicago hotel Mrs. Bobbsey did not get to sleep as soon as she wished.

  However, after a while, she did close her eyes, and then she knew nothing of what happened until she heard a loud whistle, something like that of a steam locomotive outside. She also heard some shouting, and then she felt some one shaking her and a voice saying:

  “Mother! Mother! Come and see ’em!”

  Quickly Mrs. Bobbsey opened her eyes, and, in the dim light that came from the hall, she saw Freddie standing beside her bed.