CHAPTER VI

by Grace MacGowan Cooke

　　The Shiny Black Box

　　The thing was like a scene in a play, almost. Maudie stood, half abashed, half eager, and wholly frightened. Ruth came forward with a confident, buoyant step that reassured her mother. A girl who was going to do something impudently wrong would never act that way.

　　"There," said the plump, smiling Spooner girl, dropping into Maudie's outstretched palm a little lump of adobe clay that looked considerably like a rough pebble. "I picked that out of my pony's hoof, right in the path where I'd lost your ring."

　　"Wha--what is it?" faltered Maudie, afraid to look.

　　"Turn it over," prompted Elizabeth impatiently.

　　"O, Maudie's almost a paynim, or a caitiff," breathed the Babe, hiding a too sympathetic countenance against her mother's knee.

　　The Pratt girl turned the little lump of clay in trembling fingers. Something glittered on one side of it; the clay parted and a circlet with a wee, shining setting lay in her palm.

　　"My diamond ring!" she gasped.

　　Then before them all she flung it from her, so that it tinkled and skipped on the porch floor. This done she sat down on the step and burst into a tempest of wrathful tears.

　　"I always hated it," she sobbed. "It's such a miserable little diamond. I wanted that hundred dollars to go to Chicago and study music. How in the world am I going to go if you don't--"

　　"Hush, Maudie," Mrs. Pratt cautioned, and her father seconded the admonition rather more sternly.

　　The Spooner young folks had closed in around Mrs. Spooner's vehicle and were helping her out and explaining all about the earning of that hundred dollars. While they did so the Pratts managed to get Maudie straightened up with the assurance that she should be permitted somehow to go to Chicago; and by the time the two groups came together they were ready to drop the subject, Maudie looking self-conscious if not hang-dog, whenever anything remotely concerning a ring was mentioned.

　　They went on harmoniously enough to the Thanksgiving dinner at the McGregor ranch. Coming home after they had passed Emerald and the Pratt house, the matter was again brought up by the Spooners. The sky was all a delightful lavender, with the big, white stars of the plains country beginning to blossom in it, and there was still light enough to travel very comfortably over the winding, level road.

　　"I'm proud of the enterprise and persistance you all showed in earning that hundred dollars," said Mrs. Spooner fondly. "But it hurts me to think you could keep a secret from mother as long as that; and such a hard secret, too. I'd have been so glad to help you, dears."

　　"It was my fault," Elizabeth said, "that part of it. I wouldn't let Ruth bother you because I felt that you had worries enough. Of course if I'd dreamed for a minute that Maudie Pratt would tell a story about the value of her ring, and that twenty-five dollars was the real price of it, I should have let Ruth tell you; but a hundred dollars--why, Mother, until we tried, I wouldn't have believed it was possible for us to come anywhere near earning a hundred dollars. Would you?"

　　"No," said Mrs. Spooner. "That's why I say I'm proud of you. It's an achievement any three young persons of your age may well be proud of--and none of you neglected your other duties for it."

　　"It was lovely," sighed Elizabeth, reminiscently. "I think making money is almost more fun than spending it. Ruth can always earn with her cooking. I wish I had a special gift. What do you think I can do best, mother?"

　　"You do almost anything you do a little better than other people," declared Mrs. Spooner. "But there's one thing you can excel at, and that nobody else around here attempts, and that's photography. Why not try to make a profession of it."

　　Elizabeth thought it over.

　　"I suppose I'd have to go to some big town and study," she ruminated.

　　"Ruth didn't go to a big town to take cooking lessons," prompted Mrs. Spooner, smilingly. "And you were just admiring the fact that it was her good cooking that made the earning of the hundred dollars possible."

　　"Wise little mother," said Elizabeth, touching her heel to her pony and riding ahead, blowing back a kiss as she passed, and cantering on for some distance.

　　"I think that's a splendid idea," said Roy eagerly. "I knew a boy who worked his way through college almost entirely by camera work. And he was just an amateur photographer, too."

　　"I'd help her all I could," put in Ruth, loyally. "She helped me--you all did. I didn't near earn that hundred dollars alone."

　　Here Elizabeth came dashing back to announce to the family that there was an insuperable obstacle. If she went into the simplest kind of photography she would have a new camera--and oh, quite a lot of things.

　　"A camera is easy," said Mrs. Spooner, "since you've all agreed to give me the keeping of the hundred dollars, I intend to put it in the bank as a reserve fund to draw on in case of an emergency. I'll consider this case of yours as one, and buy you a camera with some of it."

　　"And I'll fix up a dark-room all right, Elizabeth," promised Roy, who was always intensely interested in all the Spooners' affairs. "I can do it easily; just board up an end of the back porch, fix a red lantern in it for a light, with some shelves and a sink, same as the kitchen. I can make it. It won't cost much, and you can do your own developing. Say, Elizabeth, that's easy!"

　　So it came about that, after some persuasion, Elizabeth finally accepted the camera--a small one, with chemicals, films and everything necessary for a start, all of them to be paid for out of the hundred dollars in the bank. Roy fixed up the darkroom with all the needed apparatus, and, thus equipped, Elizabeth declared herself ready for business, and let the public know it by adding to the sign down at the road gate another line, in smaller letters, which read:

　　"Photographs made to order.

　　Horseback pictures and views of places a

　　specialty."