“An’ git him grabbed by the police?” demanded Jimson.
“He ought to go back and fight it out,” Ruth declared firmly. “He ought not to knock about the world, and fall into bad associations as he may, and come to harm. I don’t believe he will be punished if he is not guilty.”
“It don’t a-tall matter whether a man’s innocent or guilty,” objected Mr. Jimson. “If the police is after him, he’s jest natcher’ly _scared_.”
“I suppose so,” Ruth admitted. “I would run away myself, I suppose. But I want Curly to go back to Mrs. Sadoc Smith.”
“Jest as you say, Miss Ruth. I’ll hold on to him,” the warehouse boss promised.
“I hope he doesn’t see us girls and get frightened, thinking that we’ll tell on him,” Ruth said.
“I’ll see to it that he doesn’t skedaddle,” Mr. Jimson assured her. “He’s sleepin’ at my shack nights. I’ll lock him in his room.”
Ruth laughed at that, and rather ruefully. “That’s what his grandmother did,” she observed. “But it didn’t do any good, you see. He got out of the window and went over the shed roof to the ground. And it was a twenty-foot drop, too.”
“Don’t yo’ fret,” said Mr. Jimson. “The windah of his room is barred. And he’d half t’ drop into the river. By the looks of things,” he added, cocking his eye at the treetops, “there’s goin’ to be plenty of water in this river pretty soon.”
Jimson was a prophet. That very night it began to rain.
Being kept indoors by the rain was not altogether a privation. At least, the three girls staying at the Big House did not find it such.
They became acquainted with Mammy Dilsey during that first day of rain. At least, the girls from the North did; Nettie had been a pet of the old woman for years.
Dilsey was full of old-time stories—just such stories as were calculated to enthrall girls of the age of Ruth Fielding and her friends. For even Ruth, with all her good sense and soberness, loved to hear of pretty ladies, in pretty frocks, and with beautifully dressed gentlemen dancing attendance upon them, such as in the old times often filled Merredith House.
Mammy Dilsey insisted she could remember when men really dressed in satin and lace, and wore wonderfully fluted shirt-bosoms, and fine linen and broadcloth. The pre-Civil War ladies, of course, with their crinolines, and tiny bonnets, and enormous shade-hats must have looked really beautiful. The girls listened to the tales of the parties at the Big House almost breathlessly.