Betty Bonnet June 1915

Betty Bonnet is an ongoing serial story, released on the Sheep Among Wolves blog once a month. It follows the adventures of the Bonnet family, first created by Sheila Young as a paper doll series released in the Ladies’ Home Journal beginning 1915. To go to the first episode, click here.

I.

“Oh, but I’m not going in for athletics this year,” said Birdie, to the place where the tennis net was still waiting to be hung.

Betty and Billy stared blankly at her.

Bob stared also, but his stare was more than blank.

Belle, having come home in the same train as Birdie, evinced less surprise, but no less lack of enthusiasm.

“Athletics are so frivolous,” said Birdie, with the boundless confidence of a college sophomore. “This year, we’re going to do slums!”

There are slums in New York. No one can dispute the point. Taken square foot for square foot, there may even be more slums than tennis lawns.

This does not mean, at the outset, that one’s younger brothers and sisters, who have spent a large part of the previous month getting ready to be vanquished at tennis, are automatically drawn to slums with the same fascination as they are to the despised athletics.

It only means one has more facts to quote, when they are so impolitic as to complain.

II.

At the outset, Birdie and Betty were the only two Bonnet children interested in slumming.

The following swelled to three when Billy discovered one was let off the despised nursery constitutional, by accompanying the delegation to the Foster Street Mission.

Then Bob’s pocket compass got stolen.

It was a matter of dispute, between Bob and Birdie, whether this tragedy happened at the Mission or not. Bob avowed that he was almost nearly entirely certain that he had had the precious compass in his pocket when he went down with a message from his mother to the secretary. And everyone was absolutely certain the compass had disappeared by the time he got back.

Bob considered the evidence conclusive.

Birdie pointed out that it was the second compass Bob had lost in a fortnight—and defended the honesty of her slum class with possibly more valor than discretion.

One good deed, however, had been worked by the theft (if theft it was). Bob’s interest in the Foster Street Mission had been firmly secured.

III.

Thereafter, upon every rainy morning (and, spite of the charms of frivolous athletics, a good many sunny ones,) Bob, in the company of his flock of sisters and his solitary little brother, was to be seen marching dauntlessly down to the Foster Street Mission.

Birdie and Belle went to teach.

Betty and Billy went to gaze shyly, and help diffidently.

Bob went to find his missing compass.

“You ought to forgive the poor boy who took it,” Betty told him, reproachfully, on more than one occasion.

Bob remained obdurate.

He was going to forgive. It wasn’t the compass he wanted. It was the solution to the mystery.

IV.

All through the June heat, while the grown people were sighing for the mountains and the seaside, Bob was “slumming”—and hunting for that mysterious compass.

If it had been stolen at the mission, it had been stolen by a slum urchin. That went without saying.

Was it a slum urchin who had kept studiously away from Foster Street ever since?

That was not likely.

No thief clever enough to extract Bob’s compass from Bob’s pocket without drawing Bob’s attention would be so foolish as to identify himself by a sudden and unexplained absence from his usual haunts.

It had been stolen, then, by an urchin who still frequented the Foster Street Mission.

Well and good.

The urchin was there somewhere. So, likewise, was the compass.

Surely it was not in human nature to possess such a treasure, and not flaunt it, occasionally, before one’s companions’ eyes.

Bob had only to frequent Foster Street long enough, and with sufficient vigilance, to be certain of identifying his culprit, and discovering the whereabouts of his prized possession.

V.

And then, just as June was lengthening itself out towards July, a truly shocking thing happened.

It would have been shocking, I mean, to any respectable, grown-up person who had been privy to it.

As matters fell out, Bob was the only person who saw it, and while he was very much startled, I think it must be owned that Bob was more electrified by the thrill of the thing, than horrified by the corruption which it implied.

It happened on an especially sultry Monday.

Bob had been hanging about the mission, as was his want, running the odd errand when the mission secretary told him to, and chatting in a desultory—but keenly observant—fashion to whoever came through the doors, when she did not.

“Oh, Bob, dear,” said the secretary, suddenly, on her way to the soup kitchen with a handful of tickets, “I’ve left that distribution list in the office after all. Won’t you run up and fetch it for me?”

Bob, who really was quite a good-natured chap, set off obligingly. The secretary proceeded on her way to the kitchen, little fancying the revelation which chance was about to make to the shrewd detective disguised as a list-fetching boy!

VI.

It was a hot day. A very hot day. In her office, Miss Proctor (the secretary’s name was Miss Proctor) enjoyed the luxury of an electric fan.

It was a luxury.

Such a luxury as they only can appreciate who have been faithfully “slumming” for eight hours in a breezeless New York street while the thermometer stands at 80.

“Now that’s what I call comfortable,” said Bob, pausing to lean against Miss Proctor’s desk, and let the welcome air lift the hair from his damp forehead.

It was just at this moment, that Bob’s eye fell upon a drawer which Miss Proctor had apparently left carelessly open. The top part of the drawer seemed full of papers, and at first Bob watched them idly, as the current from the big fan ruffled them gently up and down.

He wasn’t prying. He wasn’t even curious what was in the drawer. He was only thinking how the fluttering sheets looked like stiff little waves breaking against a round, gleaming rock.

Come to think of it, what was that rock?

Bob looked—and then blinked—and then tried looking again.

It could not be!

It could not be!

Such a thrill of combined astonishment, exultation, and consternation as shot through Bob’s frame as he realized that yes, indeed, it was.

He recognized it—right down to the odd chip on the rim, like a dented figure 8, where he had dropped it on the marble washstand the day after he brought it home.

There—in Miss Proctor’s drawer—half-hidden by a pile of ruffling papers, was the compass Bob had been looking for all this time!!!

(To be continued.)

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