Vevi’s first thought was that Mr. Piff was joking about Mrs. Gabriel. “She didn’t really say that about me!” the little girl protested. “Oh, yes, she did,” Mr. Piff corrected. “But I don’t have any of her property.” “Then you should see her and tell her so,” the promoter declared. “If you don’t, she may turn you over to the police.” “She couldn’t do that,” Vevi gasped. “She must have me mixed up with some other person.” The Brownies now had lost all interest in the flower show. Vevi wanted to find Mrs. Gabriel at once to try to clear up the misunderstanding. From one booth to another the girls went, asking if anyone had seen Mrs. Gabriel. Finally they learned that she had left the building more than a half hour earlier. It seemed useless to try to seek her further. “I am not going to worry about her,” Vevi decided. “I will let her find me. I am going home to get my tulip bulbs. Let’s plant them right away.” “Why not wait until the next Brownie Scout meeting?” proposed Connie. “Then all the girls can help.” Vevi opposed any delay. “No, we must plant them right away,” she insisted. “Every day counts if they are to bloom this summer.” Leaving the auditorium, the girls started for Jane’s home to collect digging tools and fertilizer. They were only three blocks from the Tuttle home when they spied a group of children coming toward them. “What are they carrying?” Connie speculated. Each child in the group of six held a double handful of plump, round objects. “Onions,” declared Jane. “Tulip bulbs,” corrected Vevi. By this time the children were quite close. The youngsters would have dashed on past with their plunder, had not Jane stopped them. “Say, where’d you get those?” she demanded. The children halted, proudly showing the bulbs. “We found ’em,” one of the older boys said. “Why, those look just like the Golden Beauty culls that Hanny gave me,” Vevi commented as she gazed at the fistful of bulbs. “I’ve got some bigger ones,” announced another child in the group. He opened his hands to show the girls several large, plump bulbs. “They do look like onions,” declared Connie. “In Holland when times were hard, the people ate bulbs for food. Miss Mohr told me so.” Vevi thought that the bulbs, except for a few, looked like extremely good ones. “Where did you find them?” she asked. One of the boys indicated the direction from which he and the others had come. “Down the street a ways,” he said. “They were lying in a culvert.” “Thrown away?” Vevi asked in amazement. “Sure. Someone dumped a lot of ’em there.” “Are there any more?” Jane asked eagerly. “Scads of ’em.” “Let’s get some,” Jane proposed to her friends. “Come on, before they’re all gone.” Forgetting their plan to plant Vevi’s tulips, the three girls raced down the street. A block away, at the street corner, they saw the open culvert. Just as the boys had said, there lay hundreds of tulips, dumped on the street.