"She hit me
first!"

"She had to, or get hit herself," bawled Inez, jigging excitedly from
one foot to the other in her exultation over her cousin's defeat.

"Inez!"

"Well, he needn't have come! We telegraphed them not to!"

"_Inez_!"

The girl subsided, and Billiard found courage to leer triumphantly at
her discomfiture. But Tabitha intercepted the glance, and in that
ominously calm voice which had struck terror to his cowardly heart
before, she announced, "It is too late now to think of that side of the
question. We'll have to make the most of a bad situation; but I _will
not_ tolerate fighting. You may as well understand that first as last.
If you boys can't behave like gentlemen, you can just move on down to
the hotel. Is that plain?"

"Yes, sir--ma'am," stammered the abashed Billiard, glancing uneasily
about for some means of escape, but Tabitha had delivered her
ultimatum, and now swept grandly into the house, satisfied that she had
displayed her authority in a very impressive manner.

Hardly had the screen closed behind her, however, when her sharp ears
caught Billiard's hoarsely whispered question, "Who is that high-headed
geezer?"

"The girl who is taking care of us," answered Mercedes unguardedly.

"Girl?"

"Sure! What did you take her for?"

"A--a new woman. A--one of these things that's trying to vote and do
men's work and such like."

"Oho!" yelled the McKittrick girls in unison. "Why, she ain't much
older'n us!"

"She goes to Ivy Hall in Los Angeles, the boarding school I belong to,"
said Mercedes.

"Honest Injun?"

"Cross my heart!"

"Huh!"

And instinctively Tabitha knew that there was trouble ahead for her.
"Isn't this the worst luck you ever heard of?" she groaned to Gloriana
when once inside the house again.

"If I had my way about it, I'd ship them straight home on the next
train," declared the red-haired girl angrily. "The very idea of their
mother doing such a thing as that! What kind of a woman is she,
anyway?"

"I don't know much about her, except that she is utterly selfish and
very rich. The boys are sent away to school most of the year; and
during vacations she manages to shift them onto some of her relatives.
Fortunately, Jim McKittrick is too far away to be bothered with them
very often."

"But what shall you--we do with them? Shall we tell Mrs. McKittrick
that they have come?"

"Goodness, no! At least not yet. It would just worry her more than