CHAPTER XI

THE LITTLE OLD WOMAN WHO LIVED IN A SHOE

The Overlook House was nearest. Mr. Harrod made arrangements for the girls to go there and occupy several rooms. At least, he presumed he had made that arrangement with Mr. Severn when he left on the forenoon train for Bloomingsburg to arrange his insurance and hire mechanics to at once repair the bungalow.

The Spoondrift cottage was really not fit for occupancy and there seemed nothing else for the girls to do but follow his advice and go over to the Overlook. But Ruth Kenway had her doubts.

After the excitement of the fire, and the general “stir-about” which ensued, Pearl Harrod had quite forgotten that the Corner House girls were not on terms of intimacy with Trix Severn, the hotel keeper’s daughter. It probably never entered her good-natured mind that Trix would behave meanly when all hands from the Spoondrift had escaped the peril of the fire.

The girls trooped over to the hotel, after repacking their baggage, to look at the rooms which had been secured for them. Mr. Severn was not there, nor was the clerk on duty. Their schoolmate, Trix, was behind the desk.

“Oh, yes,” she said carelessly, “I presume we can find rooms for you. But father doesn’t care much to take in people who won’t stay the season out—especially at this time of the year. It’s a great inconvenience.”

“Pooh!” said Pearl, frankly, “I guess your father is running his hotel for money—not for sport. And Uncle Phil is going to pay him for all the accommodation we get.”

“Indeed?” returned Trix. “You seem to know a lot about our business, Miss Harrod.”

“Don’t you put on any of your high and mighty airs with me, Miss!” snapped Pearl. “For they don’t go down, let me tell you! Didn’t Uncle Phil secure rooms for us?”

“Well—he spoke of your coming here. There is Number 10, and 11, and 14; they’re all three double rooms, so you and Ann can have one, Maud and Lulu another, and Carrie and Lucy the third.”

“But, goodness gracious! there are ten of us!” cried Pearl. “You know that very well.”

“Those three rooms,” said Trix, with elaborate carelessness, “are all your uncle provided.”

“Why, Uncle Phil must be crazy! Didn’t he get a big room for the Kenways?”

“Humph!” said Trix, maliciously. “Are _they_ with you, Miss Harrod? Your uncle must have quite overlooked them. All the rooms I know anything about his securing for your party are the three I’ve mentioned.”

“Well, where’s your father——”

“He’s gone fishing,” said Trix, promptly, and with a flash of satisfaction in her eyes. “He won’t be back till late to-night.”

“Then, where’s the clerk?” demanded Pearl, much worried.

“Mr. Cheever doesn’t know anything about it. I was here when your uncle made his bargain. Nothing was said about those Corner House girls—so there! There is no room for them here.”

“Well! I call that the meanest thing!” began Pearl, but Ruth, who had stood close by, interrupted:

“Don’t let it worry you in the least, Pearl. We have plenty of time to find accommodations before night.”

“You won’t find them here, Miss!” snapped Trix.

“Nothing would make me remain under this roof for a night,” said Ruth, indignantly. “My sisters and I have never done you any harm, Trix; quite the contrary, as you would remember had you any gratitude at all. This hotel is not the only place at Pleasant Cove where we can find shelter, I am sure.”

“Oh, Ruth! don’t go!” begged Pearl. “This mean girl is not telling the truth, I am sure. You’ll break up our party,” Pearl wailed.

“I couldn’t stay here now,” the oldest Corner House girl declared. “I am going to secure a tent for us. I am quite sure we will be comfortable in one. If other people can stand it under canvas, of course _we_ can.”

She took Agnes by the hand and they went out of the hotel. Tess and Dot had not come with them, but had been left at the neighbor’s where they had all spent the night.

Pearl and the other girls could not very well follow them; they were not so independently situated as the Corner House girls. Ruth had a well filled pocket-book, as well as checks from Mr. Howbridge and an introductory letter to the branch bank at Pleasant Cove.

She had been so used to going ahead, and arranging matters for the whole family, during the past three years, that she was not troubled much by this emergency. She was sorry that the pleasant party had to be broken up, that was all. She was not sure that she and her sisters knew any of the campers along the riverside.

There were two men who supplied tents and outfits for those who wished to live under canvas, and so there were two distinct tent colonies, though they were side by side.

One was called Camp Enterprise, and the other Camp Willowbend. The latter was just at the bend of the river, and there were a few willows on the low bluff back of it.

There were not more than a dozen tents erected in either camp as yet, for it was early in the season. The Corner House girls rode quite a mile from the hotel to Willowbend Camp and selected a tent that was already erected.

It was a large wall-tent and it was divided in half by a canvas

## partition that made a bedroom of one end and a living-room of the

front part. In the latter was a small sheetiron cookstove, with a pipe that led the smoke outside of the tent. But there was an oilstove, too, and Ruth decided that they would make arrangements for buying most of their food cooked, so as to reduce the details of housekeeping.

Agnes cheered up at once when she saw the tent-cities. And the smaller girls were delighted with the prospect of living under canvas.

There were four cots in the tent, with sheets and blankets, and apologies for pillows; there was matting laid down on the sand, too, in this bedroom part of the tent.

The remainder of the furnishings consisted of four camp-chairs, a plain deal table, a chest of drawers that contained the chinaware and cooking utensils, and a small icebox. This front apartment had a plank floor, made in sections.

It was a rough enough shelter, and the camping arrangements were crude; nevertheless, the Corner House girls saw nothing but fun ahead of them, and they were as busy as bees all that day “getting settled.”

There were pleasant people in the other tents of Camp Willowbend, but none of them chanced to be Milton people. There were several girls of ages corresponding to those of the Corner House girls, and the latter were sure they would find these neighbors good sport.

The Kenways were so busy at noon that they only “took a bite in their fists,” as good Mrs. MacCall would have expressed it. Ruth had been wise enough to buy some cooked food in the village before they came over to the camp, but she learned from some of the ladies in the tents that there was a woman in the neighborhood who baked bread to sell, and sometimes cookies and pies.

“You go to see Mrs. Bobster. She’s the nicest old lady!” declared one city matron. “Make your arrangements for bread now, Miss Kenway, for after she takes orders for as many as she can well supply, she wouldn’t agree to bake another loaf. She has a real New England conscience, and she wouldn’t promise to bake a single biscuit more than she knows she can get in her oven.”

The directions for finding Mrs. Bobster interested and amused the Corner House girls.

“She is the little old woman who lives in the shoe,” laughed their informant. “You can’t miss the house, if you go along the beach road toward town. It’s just beyond the other camp.”

“Oh!” cried Dot, eagerly, “_I_ want to see the lady who lives in a shoe. She must have lots of children, for they were a great bother.”

“And,” said Tess, “do you suppose she _does_ whip them all soundly and send them to bed with a piece of bread to eat?”

“We’ll discover all that,” promised Ruth, and soon after luncheon, having fixed up the tent, and set to rights their things that the expressman had brought over from the Spoondrift bungalow, the four sisters set out to find Mrs. Bobster.

The girls had ridden over from the village along the highroad, on which they had traveled two days before in the auto-stage. This lower, or “beach” road was a much less important thoroughfare. In places it followed the line of the shore so closely that the unusual high tides that had prevailed that spring, had washed a great deal of white sand across the swamp-grass and out upon it.

So, in places, the girls plodded through sand over their shoe tops. “Might as well go barefooted,” declared Agnes, sitting down for the third time to take off her oxfords and shake out the sand.

“You’d find it pretty different, if you tried it,” laughed Ruth. “This sand is hot.”

“It does seem as though you slipped back half a step each time you tried to go forward,” said Tess, seriously. “Aren’t we ever going to get there, Ruth?”

“Oh!” cried Dot, suddenly, “isn’t that a giraffe? And there’s a camel!”

“For goodness’ sake!” gasped Agnes, plunging to her feet, and hopping along after her sisters, trying to get on her left shoe. “Is this the African desert?”

“It looks like it,” said Ruth, herself amazed.

“And it’s hot enough,” grumbled Agnes. “Oh! I see! it’s a wrecked carousel.”

There were decrepit lions and tigers, too; the rain-washed and broken animals were the remains of a carousel, the machinery of which had been taken away. Once somebody had tried to finance a small pleasure resort between the real village of Pleasant Cove and the two tent colonies, but it had been unsuccessful.

The wreck of a “shoot the chutes,” the carousel, a dancing pavilion and a short boardwalk with adjacent stands, had been abandoned by the unfortunate promoters. There was a tower—now a “leaning” tower; broken-down swings; an abandoned moving picture palace; and back from the rest of the wreckage, several hundred yards from the sandy shore, the girls saw a rusty looking frame structure, shaped like a shoe, with a flagstaff sticking out of the roof.

“There it is!” cried Tess, eagerly. “And it _does_ look like a shoe.”

Originally the house had been a tiny brown cottage set in the midst of a garden. The fence surrounding the place was still well kept. The second story of the cottage had been transformed into the semblance of a congress-gaiter, with windows in the sides and front. It looked as though that huge shoe had been carefully placed upon the rafters of the first floor rooms of the cottage.

“What a funny looking place!” exclaimed Agnes. “Did you ever see the like, Ruth? I wonder if Mrs. Bobster is as funny as her house.”

At that moment a figure bobbed up among the beanpoles in the garden, and the girls saw that it was a little woman in a calico sunbonnet. Her face was very small and hard and rosy—like a well-shined Baldwin apple. She had twinkling blue eyes, as sharp as file-points.

“Shoo!” exclaimed the little woman. “Shoo, Agamemnon! Git aout o’ them pea-vines like I told you!”

For a moment the Corner House girls did not see Agamemnon; they could not imagine who he was.

“Shoo, I tell ye!” exclaimed the little old woman who lived in a shoe, and she struck out with the short-handled hoe she was using.

There was a squawk, and out leaped, with awkward stride, a long legged rooster—of what “persuasion” it was impossible to tell, for he was swathed from neck to spurs in a wonderful garment which had undoubtedly been made out of a red flannel undershirt!

Two or three bedraggled tail-feathers appeared at the aperture in the back of this garment; otherwise Agamemnon seemed to be quite featherless. And when, clear of his mistress’ reach, he flapped his almost naked wings and crowed, he was the most comical looking object the Corner House girls had ever seen.

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