The two girls stood side by side, and though they both had dark eyes and hair, there the resemblance ceased. Betty Littell was a dumpling of a girl with curly hair, a snub nose and round face. She looked the picture of good-nature, and her plumpness suggested a fondness for sweets that subsequent acquaintance with her fully sustained.
Betty Gordon had grown tall through the summer, and she was of a slender, wiry build that hinted of a fondness for outdoor life. Her heavy straight hair was wrapped around her well-shaped little head in braids, and her exquisite little hands and feet, so far her one claim to beauty, though later promises lay in her glowing face, gave her, as Louise afterward confided to her mother, “an air like an Indian princess.”
“No, you don’t look much alike,” conceded Bobby, after a prolonged scrutiny. “But Betty Gordon looks the way I thought Betty Littell would look, so I don’t see that I am to blame.”
“Trust Bobby to excuse herself from a scrape,” chuckled her father. “By the way, how are you going to arrange about names? Two Bettys in the family will involve complications.”
“I think we’ll have to call Betty Littell, ‘Libbie’” suggested Mrs. Littell, smiling. “That was your mother’s name at home, always, Betty.”
“Yes, I know it; and that’s why they called me Betty,” replied the Littell girl. “Two names, the same names, I mean, do make confusion. I’m willing to be called Libbie, Aunt Rachel, if you let me have a little time to get used to it. If I don’t answer right away, you’ll understand that I’m listening for ‘Betty.’”
“Well, Mother, I think at least two of these girls need sleep,” announced Mr. Littell. “Betty Gordon looks as if she couldn’t keep her eyes open another moment, and Betty Littell has yawned twice. I should say we all might retire—it’s after eleven.”
“Goodness, so it is,” said his wife hastily. “Time does fly so when you’re talking. Come, girls, if you are going sightseeing to-morrow, you’ll need a good night’s rest.”
There were three bedrooms and a private bath at the disposal of the girls, and separate beds in all the rooms. Betty Gordon shared a room with Bobby, Louise and Betty Littell had the one adjoining, and Esther slept alone in the third room, which was also connected with the others.
Long after the other girls were asleep Betty lay awake, thinking over the happenings of the day. Finally she worked around to the suggested change in names.
“They must expect me to stay if they plan to avoid confusion of names,” she thought. “I must talk to Mr. Littell in the morning and ask him if it’s really all right. I feel as if it were an imposition for me, a perfect stranger, to accept their hospitality like this.”
In the morning she was up and dressed before the rest, fortunately having a fresh blouse in her bag so that, although she had nothing but her suit skirt, she looked well-groomed and dainty. Betty Littell was also without her trunk, though Bobby promised that both trunks should be brought from the station that morning.
“I’d like to speak to your father a minute,” said Betty, when she was dressed.
Bobby, on the floor tying her shoes, blew her a kiss.
“You’ll find him on the terrace probably,” she said confidently. “Go ahead, dear, but it won’t do you any good. We’re determined to keep you to play with us.”
So the astute Bobby had guessed what she wanted to say! Nevertheless, Betty was determined to carry out her resolution. She went slowly down the wide staircase and stepped out through double screen doors on to the bricked terrace. Sure enough, there sat Mr. Littell, smoking comfortably and reading his morning paper.
CHAPTER XIII
WASHINGTON MONUMENT
“You’re up early!” the gentleman greeted Betty cordially. “Guess you’re ahead of even Esther, who usually leads the van. Sleep well? That’s good,” as she nodded. “No troubles this bright morning?”
Betty gave him a grateful glance.
“I can’t help it,” she said bravely. “You know how I feel, coming here like this—you don’t know me—”
“No-o,” drawled Mr. Littell, pulling forward a gay-cushioned chair and motioning for her to sit down. (“Can’t have any manners when your foot is smashed,” he explained in an aside.) “No, Betty, it’s true we don’t know you. But mother and I think we know a nice girl when we see her, and we’re glad to have you stay with us just as long as you can feel comfortable and at home. If I were you, I’d just bury these uneasy feelings you speak of. Fact is, I’ll give you two good reasons why you should make us a little visit. One is that if we had had the pleasure of your acquaintance you would have had a regular letter from mother weeks ago, asking you to come and spend the summer with us. The second is that I know how your uncle would feel to think of you alone in the city or the country. Guess how I’d take it if one of my own daughters was waiting for word from me and no one made things pleasant for her. Won’t you shake hands and make a bargain with me that you’ll try to see our side of it, your uncle’s and mine, and then just plan to have a happy time with the girls until we can reach him in the West?”
Betty placed her small hand in the larger one held out to receive it, and smiled back at Mr. Littell. He had a smile very few people could resist.
“That’s better,” he said with satisfaction. “Now we’re friends. And, remember, I’m always ready to give advice or listen. That’s what fathers and uncles are for, you know. And I’d like to have you look on me as a second Uncle Dick.”
Thus encouraged, Betty briefly outlined for him her story, touching lightly on her experiences at Bramble Farm, but going into detail about Bob Henderson, her uncle, and her pleasant recollections of Pineville.
By the time she had finished, the four girls had joined them on the terrace and presently a table was brought out and spread with a cloth, and, Mrs. Littell following the maid with a silver coffee urn, breakfast was served.
“The girls will want to go into town today, I suppose,” said the motherly lady, selecting the brownest muffin for Betty and signaling her husband to see that the maid served her an extra portion of omelet. “I have some shopping to do, so I’ll go in with them in the car. But I absolutely refuse to ‘do’ the Monument again.”
“Poor mother!” laughed Bobby. “She hates to ride in an elevator, and yet I know by actual count she’s gone up in the Monument a dozen times.”
“I suppose every one who comes to Washington wants to go sightseeing,” said Betty Littell, or, as she must begin to be called now, Libbie, “I know how it is in our little town at home. There’s just one monument—erected to some Revolutionary hero—and I get fairly sick of reading the inscription to all the visiting aunts and uncles.”
“Well, I like to go around,” declared the energetic Bobby. “But just once I had an overdose. We had a solemn and serious young theological student who made notes of everything he saw. He was devoted to walking, and one of his favorite maxims was never to ride when he could walk. He dragged me up every one of those nine hundred steps in the Washington Monument and down again, and I was in bed for two days.”
“Wait till you see the steps, and you’ll understand,” said Louise to Libbie and Betty. “If you try to walk down you’re apt to get awfully dizzy.”
After breakfast Carter brought the car around, and Mr. Littell hobbled to the door to see them off.
“Betty wants to send a telegram to her uncle,” he said in an aside to his wife, while she stood at the long glass in the hall adjusting her veil. “Better help her, for she’ll feel that she is doing something. If Gordon is in the oil regions, as I think from what she tells me he is, there isn’t much chance of a telegram reaching him any quicker than a letter. However, there’s no use in dampening her hopes.”
“Now we’ll drop you at the Monument,” planned Mrs. Littell, as the car bore them down the driveway. “You can walk from there to that pretty tea-room—what is its name, Bobby?—can’t you?”
“The Dora-Rose, you mean, Mother,” supplied Bobby. “Of course w
e can walk. But Carter is taking the longest way to the Monument.”
“We’re going to the station first,” answered her mother. “Betty wants to send her uncle a telegram, and Carter is going to leave directions to have the trunks sent up to the house. You have your baggage checks, haven’t you, girls?”
They produced them, and Carter slipped them into his pocket. Betty had leisure and opportunity to enjoy the beauty of the handsome building as they approached it this perfect morning, and she could not help exclaiming.
“Yes, it is fine, every one says so,” admitted Bobby, with the carelessness of one to whom it was an old story. “Finer, daddy says, than the big terminals in New York.”
Libbie had the advantage of being the only one of the girls who had been to New York.
“This has lots more ground around it,” she pronounced critically. “Course in a city like New York, they need the land for other buildings. But you just ought to see the Pennsylvania Station there!”
“All right, take your word for it,” said Bobby. “Where do we go to send a telegram, Momsie?”
Mrs. Littell smiled.
“Betty and I are all who are necessary for that little errand,” she said firmly. “The rest of you stay right in the car.”
Carter opened the door for them and then went in search of the baggage man. Betty and Mrs. Littell found the telegraph window and in a few minutes a message was speeding out to Richard Gordon, Flame City, Oklahoma, telling him that his niece was in Washington, giving her address and asking what he wished her to do.
“I’ll write him a letter tonight,” promised Mrs. Littell when this was accomplished. “Then he’ll know that you are in safe hands. You must write to him, too, dear. Flame City may consist of one shack and a hundred oil wells and be twenty miles from a post-office, you know.”
Carter reported that the trunks were already on their way to Fairfields, and now the car was turned toward the gleaming Monument that seemed to be visible from every part of the city, Betty, her mind relieved by the sending of the telegram, abandoned herself to the joys of sightseeing. Here she was, young, well and strong, in a luxurious car, surrounded by friends, and driving through one of the most beautiful cities in the United States. Any girl who, under those circumstances, could remain a prey to doubts and gloom, would indeed be a confirmed misanthrope.
The car was stopped at one of the concrete walks leading to the base of the Monument, and with final instructions as to the time and place they were to meet her, Mrs. Littell drove away.
“Why, there’s a crowd there!” cried Libbie in wonder.
“Waiting to be taken up,” explained Louise. “Come on, we’ll have to stand in line.”
The line of waiting people extended half way around the Monument. The girls took their places, and when the crowd streamed out and they were permitted to go inside, Betty and Libbie, the two strangers, understood the reason for the delay. The elevator seemed huge, but it was quickly filled, and when the gates were closed the car began to mount very slowly.
“We’d be sick and dizzy if they went up as fast as they do in department stores and office buildings,” said Bobby. “It takes about fifteen minutes to reach the top. Watch, and you’ll see lots of interesting things on the floors we pass.”
Betty was wondering how Bobby had ever survived the climb up the stairs and the trip down again with the enthusiastic theological student, when a cry somewhere in the back of the car startled her.
“What’s the matter?” demanded the elevator operator, without turning his head.
“John isn’t here!” declared a hysterical feminine voice. “Oh, can’t you stop the car and go down and get him? He pushed me in, and I thought he was right behind me. Aren’t you going back?”
“Can’t, Madam,” was the calm answer. “Have to finish the trip. You can go right back with the next load.”
“Oh, goodness gracious,” moaned the voice. “What’ll I do? If I go back I may miss him. If I wait at the top it will be half an hour. Suppose he walks up? Maybe I’d better start to walk down to meet him.”
Bobby stifled a giggle with difficulty.
“Bride and groom,” she whispered to Betty. “Washington’s full of ’em. Guess the poor groom was lost in the shuffle. Is she pretty—can you see?”
Betty tried to look back in the car, though the press of passengers standing all about her made it difficult. The bride was easily identified because she was openly crying. She was an exceedingly pretty girl, modishly gowned and apparently not more than twenty years old.
“We’ll get hold of her and persuade her to wait,” planned Bobby. “I’ll show her the sights to amuse her while we’re waiting for the next elevator load to come up. Here we are at the top.”
A crowd was waiting to descend, and as they walked from the elevator, the bride meekly following, Bobby plucked her sleeve.
“Excuse me,” she said bluntly, but with a certain charm that was her own, “I couldn’t help hearing what you were saying. Your husband missed the elevator, didn’t he?”
The bride blushed and nodded.
“Well, don’t try to walk down,” advised Bobby. “I did it once, and was in bed for two days. He’ll come up with the next load. No one ever walks up unless they are crazy—or going to theological seminary. Your husband isn’t a minister, is he?”
“Oh, no, he’s a lawyer,” the bride managed to say.
“All right,” approved Bobby, noting with satisfaction that the elevator gate had closed. “Come round with us and see the sights, and then when your husband comes up you can tell him all the news. This is Betty Gordon, Libbie Littell and Louise, Esther and Bobby Littell, all at your service.”
“I’m Mrs. Hale,” said the bride, stumbling a little over the name and yet pronouncing it with obvious pride.
CHAPTER XIV
LIBBIE IS ROMANTIC
The girls, marshaled by Bobby, made a tour of the windows, and though Betty was fascinated by the views of the city spread out before her and bought post cards to send to the Pineville friends and those she knew in Glenside and Laurel Grove, her mind was running continuously on young Mrs. Hale’s announcement.
“She couldn’t be the old bookstore man’s wife,” she speculated, her eyes fixed on the Potomac while Bobby cheerfully tangled up history and geography in a valiant effort to instruct her guests. “Lockwood Hale was an old man, Bob said. He didn’t say he had a son, but I wonder—Oh, Bobby, the Jesuit fathers didn’t sail down the Potomac, did they?”
“Well, it was some river,” retorted Bobby. “Anyway, Miss, you didn’t seem to be listening to a word I said. What were you thinking about in such a brown study?”
Betty made a little face, but she had no intention of revealing her thoughts. She wanted to find out about the bookshop quietly, and if possible get the address. Always providing that Mrs. Hale was related to the man who had shown such an interest in Bob Henderson’s almshouse record.
“Of course Hale is an ordinary enough name,” she mused. “And yet there is just a chance that it may be the same.”
The girls were planning to take the next car down, and yet when it came up they lingered diplomatically to catch a glimpse of the bridegroom. “John” proved to be a good-looking young man, not extraordinary in any way, but with a likeable open face and square young shoulders that Libbie, who startled them all by turning poetical late that night, declared were “built for manly burdens.”
Louise, Esther and Bobby were the last to squeeze into the car, Libbie, the prudent, having ducked earlier. As Betty turned to follow them, the gate closed.
“Car full!” said the operator.
“Oh, Betty!” Bobby’s wail came to her as the car began to disappear. “We’ll wait for you,” came the parting message before it dropped from sight.
Mrs. Hale laughed musically.
“Now you know something of how I felt,” she said merrily. “May I present my husband? John, those five girls have been so nice to me. And now you’ll
go round with us, won’t you?”
But Betty knew better than that.
“I’m going to write some of my post cards,” she said. “But I would love to ask you a question before you go. Do you know a man in Washington who keeps a bookshop? His name is Lockwood Hale.”
Mr. and Mrs. Hale exchanged glances.
“Know him?” repeated the young man. “Why, I should think we did! He’s my great-uncle.”
“I’m very anxious to see him to ask about a friend of mine,” explained Betty. “Mr. Hale thought he might be able to tell him something of his parents who died when he was a baby. As soon as I heard your name I hoped you could tell me where to find the bookstore.”
“Yes, uncle is a wizard on old family records,” admitted the nephew. “Sometimes I think that is why he hates to part with a book. He keeps a secondhand bookshop, you know, and he’s positively insulting to customers who try to buy any of the books. The old boy is really queer in his head, but there’s nothing to be afraid of. He wouldn’t hurt a flea, would he, Elinor?”
Mrs. Hale said doubtfully, no, she supposed not.
“Elinor didn’t have a very good impression of him,” laughed her husband. “We’re on our wedding trip, you know,”—he blushed slightly—“and mother made us promise we’d stop in to see the old man. He hasn’t seen me since I wore knickerbockers, and we had a great time making him understand who we were. Then he said that he hoped we liked Washington, and went back to his reading.”
“And the shop is so dirty!” shuddered the bride. “I don’t think she ought to go to such a place alone, John.”
“I won’t,” promised Betty hastily. “If you’ll let me have the address, I’ll be ever so grateful and it may be a great help to my friend.”
Young Mr. Hale wrote down the street and number on the back of the brand-new visiting card his wife pulled from her brand-new purse, and Betty thanked them warmly and turned to her card writing, leaving them free to enjoy each other and the view to their hearts’ content. She had directed post cards to a dozen friends before the elevator returned, and this time both she and the bridal couple made sure that they were among the first to step in.
The Second Girl Detective Megapack: 23 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls Page 245