CHAPTER XX

THE FRANKFURTER MAN

Dot screamed shrilly; but Tess said, with conviction: “Well! I think it serves him right. Let him holler. He had no business trying to steal Ruthie’s chickens.”

For the young man that Tom Jonah held on the ground, and threatened so dreadfully, was the very Gypsy that had gotten into the hen-coop at the old Corner House in Milton, weeks before.

“Now, don’t you be afraid for him, Dot,” added Tess, quite calmly. “Tom Jonah won’t really _bite_ him—not as long as he keeps still and doesn’t try to get up——”

The fellow was moaning and begging just as he had when the big dog “treed” him on the henhouse roof.

“Tak’ away dog! Tak’ away dog!” he begged.

“I don’t know why we should—do you, Dot?” pursued Tess, undisturbed. “He was going to hurt _her_——”

Tess turned around. The strange girl who had helped them out of the cedar boat and later had brought them to the river bank from Wild Goose Island, had disappeared like a shadow!

“Why—why,” stammered Tess. “And she never said ‘Good-bye’!”

“I guess she was afraid of this man,” Dot said, eyeing the prostrate and miserable victim of Tom Jonah’s attack without much pity. “What shall we do with him?”

“Oh!” cried Tess, with a sudden sharp idea. “She _was_ afraid of him. Let us help her. She helped us.”

“How will we?” inquired the smaller girl.

“Just let Tom Jonah hold him where he is. We will give that pretty girl a good chance to get away. Won’t we?”

“That will be just the thing,” agreed Dot. “We can sit down and wait. I hope it isn’t too long a walk to the camp, Tess. Somehow those strawberries didn’t stay by me—much. I’m hungry right now!”

“We’ll keep him here a few minutes. Then we’ll find the road and start right back home. I know the direction,” said Tess, with confidence.

The frightened Gypsy moaned and begged for them to call off the dog; and Tom Jonah growled most frightfully every time the man squirmed. Under other circumstances the girls would have been quite stricken with pity for the poor man; but he had tried to steal Ruth’s hens, and he had now frightened their new friend away, and, as Dot whispered, “it served him right.”

Of course, they knew that the big dog would not really harm the fellow.

After some fifteen minutes Tess got up and motioned Dot to do the same. “We’d better start. The afternoon is going,” she said to her younger sister. “And I guess it’s a long walk home. Come on, Tom Jonah.”

The old dog lifted his head enquiringly. The muscles of his shoulders and fore-paws relaxed.

“Come on!” commanded Tess. “Leave him alone. Let him up, Tom Jonah! I guess he has been punished enough. Don’t you think so, Dot?”

The smaller girl nodded seriously, staring at the trembling Gypsy. “I hope you won’t ever try to steal our Ruthie’s hens again,” she said, pointedly.

The moment the fellow knew he was free, he scrambled up and dodged into the bushes. He did not stay for a word.

“That big girl must have gotten away by this time,” Tess said, cheerfully. “And he is too scared to catch her, anyway.”

Which was probably true. The two small girls walked away from the river bank in the direction where they knew the auto-stage road lay. Tom Jonah paced beside them, looking about suspiciously, and licking his lips now and then with his red tongue.

It was remarkable how ferocious he had been with that Gypsy, and how perfectly kind he was to the small Kenways. And nothing much could have overtaken them just then that Tom Jonah would not have attacked.

They came out of the fringe of wood that bordered the river and crossed a farmer’s fields. But the house was at a distance, and in the other direction from Pleasant Cove and the camps; so the girls did not go to that house.

In fact, Tess felt quite brave now that she was again on the mainland. She was sure that they could easily find Willowbend Camp.

They came out into the hot, dusty road. It stretched before them as bare as a tennis-court and as hot as a sea-beach. The trees that bordered it were white with dust far up their trunks and the leaves of their lower branches, too, were dust-covered.

This was the result of rapidly passing automobiles on the road; but none of these vehicles was in sight now. The road seemed deserted.

Save for just one thing. Dot saw it before Tess.

“Oh, look!” the smaller girl cried. “Isn’t that a peanut man, Tess? Don’t you wish you had a nickel?”

“He isn’t a peanut man,” said Tess, after a sharp look at the man pushing the little wagon along the road before them.

“Isn’t he?” returned Dot, disappointedly.

“It’s a hot-frankfurter man,” declared Tess.

“Oh, Tess! a nickel would buy two frankfurter sandwiches,” gasped Dot. “And I’m _so_ hungry.”

So was Tess. The thought of the steaming sausages lying on the split Vienna roll, with a spoonful of mustard on each half-sausage, was enough to make _any_ hungry person’s mouth water. At least, any hungry person of the age of Tess and Dot Kenway.

Where the frankfurter man had been with his wagon away up this country road, the girls did not know; but before they overtook him they smelled the warm sausages and saw that the top of his boxlike wagon was covered over with a glass case and that everything was clean about his outfit.

So eager and hungry were they that Tess and Dot fairly trotted through the hot dust to overtake the man. He was a short, sturdy man in a blue shirt, khaki trousers, and a broad-brimmed straw hat. When Tom Jonah bounded along beside him, sniffing in a friendly fashion, he turned around and saw the girls.

“How-de-do!” he said, smiling. “You want a hot frankfurter, little girls?”

“Yes, sir,” said Dot, frankly.

“Oh, we can’t, sir—not till we get to Willowbend Camp,” Tess hastened to say, squeezing Dot’s hand admonishingly.

Dot’s lower lip trembled and the man asked:

“Why can’t you have ’em now?”

“We—we should have to ask Ruthie,” said Tess, slowly.

“Who’s she?”

“Our sister. We—we don’t carry any money in these old clothes. She’s afraid we’ll lose it out of our pockets,” said Tess, honestly.

“Oh-ho!” exclaimed the man.

“But we’re awful hungry,” ventured Dot. “And so’s my Alice-doll. We been shipwrecked, you see.”

“Shipwrecked?” asked the man, wonderingly.

“Not just _that_, Dot,” said Tess, doubtfully. “We were sort of castaways.”

“Well, we lost our boat, didn’t we?” demanded Dot. “And isn’t that being shipwrecked?” She was just hungry and tired enough to be rather “touchy.”

“Tell me about it,” said the frankfurter man, as the girls and Tom Jonah trotted along beside his little wagon.

So Tess—with much assistance from Dot—related their exciting adventures since the wooden-legged clam-digger had shown them what it was that squirted water up through the tiny holes on the clam-flat.

Sometimes the frankfurter man laughed, or chuckled; at other times he looked quite grave. And finally he insisted upon stopping under a broad, shady tree beside the road, and resting while he listened to the remainder of the story.

Meanwhile he opened the glass case and took out a couple of paper napkins and two rolls which were as white as snow when he split them with a very sharp knife. He buttered both sides of these rolls lavishly.

Then he opened the steaming frankfurter pot and oh! how the luscious steam gushed out! Dot grabbed Tess’ hand hard. She thought she was going to faint, for a moment—it smelled so good!

He selected two fat frankfurters and split them evenly. He placed them on the buttered rolls. He put on mustard with a lavish hand. And then he closed the rolls and wrapped the napkins about them.

Suddenly he saw Tom Jonah standing, too, watching him with wistful intentness, his pink tongue hanging out of his mouth. If ever a dog’s countenance expressed hunger, it was shown now in Tom Jonah’s face. But he was too much of a gentleman, just as his collar said, to bark.

So the frankfurter man, without saying a word, opened the pot again and took out a third sausage. This he did not split or put mustard on.

“Would you little girls like to eat a lunch now and pay me for it the next time you see me?” he asked, smiling at Tess and Dot.

“Oh!” gasped Dot, clasping her hands and almost letting the Alice-doll fall.

“You—you are _so_ kind!” said Tess, her voice fairly trembling.

He passed the two wrapped sandwiches over with a polite bow. “You are very welcome,” he said. “And I am going to give your dog one for himself because he grabbed that Gypsy. He’s a brave dog and deserves one.”

“Oh! if you would be so good!” cried Tess.

Tom Jonah made one mouthful of the frankfurter. You see, _he_ had not cared at all for the strawberries!

“Now,” said the frankfurter man, as the girls walked on beside him again, munching their sandwiches, “that road yonder to the left leads right down to the beach and to those tents. You can see the flags flying above them now—see?”

“Oh, yes, sir!” returned Tess and Dot, in delight.

“Then you can easy find your way. Good-day, young ladies. I know your sisters will be anxious to see you.”

“Thank you, sir,” Tess said, not forgetting her manners. “And we shall not forget that we owe you for the sausages.”

“That’s right. Always pay your debts,” said the man, laughing, and trundled his cart on through the dust, while the Kenway sisters trudged down the shadier road toward the beach.

In fifteen minutes they were seen coming. The entire encampment had turned out to search for the lost children. The boys from Milton had gone in all directions to look for Tess and Dot.

It was only to Ruth and Agnes that the small girls related the details of their surprising adventure. And Agnes did not understand entirely, and was much troubled over the identity of the girl who had befriended her sisters in so strange a fashion.

Ruth had no difficulty in guessing who she was. It was the girl with the Gypsies who had masqueraded as the queen. The oldest Corner House girl was sure that it was she. And Ruth understood that she must be striving to get away from the Gypsies.

“I hope she won’t go so far from here that I shall never see her again,” thought Ruth. “For she was interested in Rosa Wildwood, I am sure; and it might be that she could tell me something about Rosa’s missing sister.”

While Agnes put forth many “guesses” and “supposin’s” about the strange girl, Dot had quite another problem in her enquiring mind. And finally, as they were getting ready for bed that night, she threw out a leading question which attracted the immediate attention of her three sisters:

“Say, Ruthie,” she asked, “how do frankfurters grow?”

“What?” gasped Agnes, and clapped a hand over her own mouth to keep from laughing.

“How do they _grow_, dear?” returned Ruth, rather taken aback herself.

“Goodness gracious, child!” exclaimed Tess. “They don’t grow on bushes like pea-pods.”

“Oh, no, of course not!” ejaculated Dot, who did not like to be considered ignorant. “A frankfurter flies, doesn’t it?”

“Mercy!” murmured Ruth. “Hear her!”

“Oh! I mean it crawls—it _creeps_. Of course,” Dot hurried to add.

Agnes exploded here. She could not keep in any longer.

“Well, I think you’re real mean!” complained Dot. “You won’t tell me. I guess it’s a fish, then. Does it _swim_?”

“Goodness!” cried Tess.

“Then they come in bunches like bananas!” declared the frantic Dot.

_This_ was the worst yet. Agnes rolled on the matting of the bedroom and almost choked. Ruth herself was laughing heartily at her small sister as she gathered her into her arms and told her just how the sausage-meat was stuffed into the frankfurters’ skins.

“Well!” murmured Dot, at last, and rather sleepily. “I don’t care. I believe they are the very _nicest_ things there are to eat—so there! Those the frankfurter man gave us were perfectly lovely.”

That was what suggested the Frankfurter Party, and the Frankfurter Party was one of the very happiest thoughts that Ruth Kenway ever evolved. We shall have to hear about it, in another chapter.

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