During all this Rose was making up her mind to go straight out in the big world and find Tessie Wartliz.  She did not know just how she would set about it, but her mind was made up on the one important point, namely, that the finding must be undertaken and at once.  Rose could no longer stand the misery of secrecy concerning the lost scout pin.  Every headline in a paper glared out at her as if threatening to expose her guilty knowledge.  Every letter she received through the busy little post-office sent a frightened chill over her delicate form, and now she felt certain her benefactors, the Cosgrove family, must know she had heard from the runaway girl, and they were too generous to ask a single question concerning the matter.  They trusted her, and she must deceive them!

“I will have to say that mother has sent for me,” she decided after a bitter hour alone in her room, “and when I find Tessie——­”

She paused.  She was baffled!  What would she do if she did find Tessie?

CHAPTER XII

TESSIE

Again our scene shifts, and, as in the screen play, that retrospective distant picture brings one back to an earlier vision, so from the distance we now see the runaway, Tessie.

Step by step, along the dark, uncertain road of offences which in themselves were trivial, but which brought such dire results upon the erring girl as to make her all but an outcast, Tessie, after the first foolish blunder, found herself confronted with a seeming necessity for keeping up the false role she had almost unwittingly assumed.  The girl was not wicked.  Her untrained and unrestrained tongue was her worst enemy, and it very often belied her honest, generous heart.

In inducing Dagmar to leave home she actually believed she was assisting a friend—­her intention was to better that friend’s circumstances, but the methods!  How could she know that right could not result from deliberate wrong!  That doctrine had never been made a part of such education as she had the opportunity of acquiring.  True, the girl learned right from wrong, also her religion was very clear on the point, but she could not then believe it was wrong to fly from the horrors of mill drudgery, made unbearable by the more intimate environment of a miserable home.

So Tessie Wartliz was suffering from an inherited disease commonly called “Greed.”  Her parents were greedy for money, and she was greedy for good times.  She wanted much of anything she enjoyed, and had little care how that abnormal amount was obtained.

The fatal night she and Dagmar (now our own Rose Dixon) landed so suddenly in Franklin, where the jitney dropped them almost into the arms of Officer Cosgrove, Tessie, as we will remember, escaped, and carried with her the pocketbook she had been carrying for her companion, and in that little soiled purse was the much-prized, lost and found, scout badge of merit.