Phil’s humming upstairs stopped.  Why did that lazy farmer boy not get to his work?  And where were Lillian and Nellie?  Phil listened.  She thought she heard such an odd noise.  It was as though some one were trying to talk while choking.  She ran lightly down the outside cabin steps, her broom still in her hand.  She peered into the kitchen.  It was empty.  Phil did not go into the sitting room next.  Some instinct must have guided her.  Had she seen the plight poor Lillian and Eleanor were in, she must have screamed and betrayed herself.  Instead she stepped into Miss Jones’s bedroom.

The youth, with his back to the door, had ears like the creatures of the woods.  Under other circumstances he would have heard Phyllis’s approach.  But something in the discovery of Miss Jenny Ann’s poor little purse seemed to give him special joy.  He was opening it and emptying it of its last penny.

Phil saw him from the open cabin door.  She did not think—­she acted.  She saw, as she supposed, the farmer lad, intent on robbing them.  Phil brought her broom down on the boy’s head with a resounding whack.

The tramp started forward with a growl.  For the moment he was nearly blinded from the pain of the blow.

Phil recognized that discretion was now the better part of valor.  She dashed out of one door, then into another, the youth stumbling after her, raging with anger.  She knew every turn and twist of the tiny cabin.  Instead of running around the deck, where she would surely have been captured, she darted in and out of the cabin doors, those on the inside, swinging backward and forward, sometimes closing a door in the face of her pursuer.

She was almost overcome with horror when she saw Lillian and Eleanor in the sitting-room.  Lillian could not speak, but her eyes pleaded with Phil.  Phyllis had no reason not to cry out.  As she ran she screamed with all her might: 

“Help, help, help!” Some one would soon be passing along the shore who would come to their aid.

The thief did not like the noise Phyllis made.  He also thought her cries would be heard on the shore.  He had found what he wanted.  He had no idea of being caught on the houseboat.  But he had spied Eleanor’s caramel cake on the table.  He would take that and be off in a hurry.

As he grabbed Eleanor’s cake, the product of her morning’s work and the chief ornament of their tea party, Eleanor opened her eyes.  The sight was more than she could bear.  She gave a heart-rending scream.  It added to the tramp’s alarm.  He made for the shore as fast as he could run.

Phil saw him start.  She ran back of the kitchen and caught up something that lay coiled in a heap on the deck.  As the thief ran down the gang plank and leaped on the land, it flew through the air with a hissing, swinging noise.  The youth fell face downward, his arms close to his sides, letting the beloved cake drop to the ground.