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+Project Gutenberg's The Motor Maids' School Days, by Katherine Stokes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Motor Maids' School Days
+
+Author: Katherine Stokes
+
+Release Date: September 15, 2011 [EBook #37434]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MOTOR MAIDS' SCHOOL DAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by Cornell
+University Digital Collections)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: “You will simply be an outcast in West Haven, and I
+advise you to think the matter over.”]
+
+
+
+
+                            THE MOTOR MAIDS’
+                              SCHOOL DAYS
+
+                                   BY
+                            KATHERINE STOKES
+
+                                NEW YORK
+                            HURST & COMPANY
+                               PUBLISHERS
+
+
+
+
+                            Copyright, 1911,
+                                   BY
+                            HURST & COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+            CHAPTER                                        PAGE
+                 I. “The Comet”                               5
+                II. Friends in Need                          24
+               III. The Musicians of Bremen                  41
+                IV. Plots and Plans                          52
+                 V. The First Motor Picnic                   63
+                VI. The Box of Troubles                      81
+               VII. The Fire                                 95
+              VIII. Nancy’s Home                            110
+                IX. At the Sign of the Blue Tea Pot         128
+                 X. Rumors at School                        136
+                XI. Seven League Island                     147
+               XII. The Storm                               166
+              XIII. Wheels Within Wheels                    179
+               XIV. The Hallowe’en House Party              193
+                XV. The Ghost Party                         206
+               XVI. A Stray Ghost                           217
+              XVII. Mrs. Ruggles                            228
+             XVIII. Fannie Alta                             241
+               XIX. Mary Before Her Judges                  253
+                XX. Miss Campbell Wears Black               262
+               XXI. The Missing Link                        271
+              XXII. The Refugees                            280
+             XXIII. Belle’s Confession                      291
+              XXIV. Out of the Mists                        303
+
+
+
+
+THE MOTOR MAIDS’ SCHOOL DAYS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.—“THE COMET.”
+
+
+“Girls, in about ten minutes you’re going to have the surprise of your
+lives,” cried Nancy Brown, joining a group of her friends at the High
+School gate.
+
+“What is it, Nancy? Do tell us, please,” cried half a dozen voices at
+once.
+
+“No, you must wait,” answered Nancy. “If I told you what it was, I
+wouldn’t enjoy seeing your faces when the thing happened.”
+
+“Nancy, you have always got some mystery on foot,” put in her most
+intimate friend, Elinor Butler. “Is this one animal, vegetable, or
+mineral?”
+
+“Fine or superfine?”
+
+“Can it speak?”
+
+“Is it as large as a house?”
+
+“Don’t all talk at once,” exclaimed Nancy. “I’ll tell you this much.
+It’s animal and it’s superfine. And”—she wrinkled her brows—“and it’s
+mineral, too, I suppose.”
+
+“Superfine? At least it’s a woman, then?” cried all the girls in a
+chorus.
+
+“Yes,” laughed Nancy, who loved nothing better than to excite the
+curiosity of her friends to the utmost and then launch a genuine
+sensation into their midst.
+
+“Does the superfine animal wear the mineral?” demanded Elinor.
+
+“No, she doesn’t wear it. She’s in it.”
+
+“In it? How strange,” exclaimed another girl. “Perhaps it’s a lady
+oyster in her shell.”
+
+“There’s no surprise in an oyster unless there’s a pearl in it, goosey,”
+teased Nancy. “But here it comes! Here it comes!” she cried, clapping
+her hands joyfully, while six pairs of eyes peered curiously down the
+street, which, by gentle degrees, became a country road. The trim
+sidewalks of the little seaport town of West Haven became grassy paths
+and the pretty lawns broadened into flat green meadows.
+
+Far down the road a brilliant red object could be seen approaching. It
+was enveloped in a cloud of dust and it moved with great rapidity.
+
+“Why, it’s nothing but a red automobile,” cried Elinor, in
+disappointment.
+
+“Yes,” admitted Nancy, “it’s an automobile, but there’s something
+unusual about it besides its color.”
+
+“A girl is running it,” announced Mary Price, whose clear, dark eyes
+always seemed to be looking into the distance. “A girl is running it,
+and no one is with her, and——”
+
+But the motor car was now in full view. It was a graceful little machine
+large enough to hold five or six people comfortably, its body painted a
+warm and pleasing shade of red, its cushions upholstered in a slightly
+darker shade which harmonized perfectly with the red of the body. A
+young girl, sitting on the front seat, was running the car as easily and
+steadily as an experienced chauffeur. Making a graceful curve, she
+turned into the driveway which led to the school grounds and presently
+drew up under a large shed, where people were in the habit of hitching
+their horses and vehicles on Field Day, or when football was in season.
+
+“Who is she?” demanded Nancy’s schoolmates in a whisper.
+
+“Why, she’s Miss Helen Campbell’s cousin, Wilhelmina Campbell.”
+
+“Do you mean our old friend, Billie?” asked Elinor.
+
+“The same,” said Nancy, in a low voice, for Billie Campbell was now
+approaching within hearing distance. “Her mother’s dead and her father’s
+brought her here to live with Miss Campbell while he builds a railroad
+in Russia, and she’s going to High School and she’s in our class and
+she’s coming to and fro every day in her own motor car.”
+
+Nancy was speaking as rapidly as a talking machine going at full speed.
+
+Billie, as her father had always called her, might have guessed that she
+was the subject of all this buzzing undertone of conversation among the
+school girls; but she was too well accustomed to strange faces and new
+places to feel stiff and shy now at the looks of curiosity which were
+turned on her. On the contrary, the West Haven girls themselves felt a
+little ill at ease and countrified in the presence of this new
+sophomore, who, with her father, an engineer, had lived in many
+countries and seen a great deal of that mysterious outside world which
+sleepy, quiet West Haven had never troubled itself much about.
+
+But Billie Campbell was not destined to renew her acquaintance just then
+with these childhood friends of hers. A slender, very pretty girl,
+beautifully dressed, hurried out of the school building and called:
+
+“Oh, Miss Campbell, may I speak with you a moment?”
+
+“We might have known it,” cried Nancy Brown savagely. “If Billie
+Campbell hadn’t owned a motor car, Belle Rogers would never have given
+herself the trouble even to speak to her.”
+
+You perhaps know what a dangerous quality snobbishness is in a girl’s
+school. A very little of it is like a drop of strong poison in a pail of
+water. It pollutes the whole pail. So it was at West Haven High School.
+Belle Rogers, the prettiest and richest girl in town, had picked out six
+more or less wealthy and intimate friends in the sophomore class and
+constituted herself leader of what they called “The Mystic Seven.” These
+seven girls held themselves aloof from the poorer girls in the class and
+committed the unpardonable sin of snubbing every girl outside their
+charmed circle.
+
+Very bitter were the feelings of the other ten sophomores against the
+“Mystic Seven,” who refused to mingle in the sports of the class and
+kept themselves apart at recess, talking in low, mysterious voices and
+laughing behind their pocket handkerchiefs when the other girls strolled
+by.
+
+“They always make me feel shabbier than I really am,” Mary Price had
+once said.
+
+And now the “Mystic Seven” had snatched up this nice, athletic-looking,
+new sophomore, whom many of them remembered as a bright, romping little
+girl years before.
+
+“I suppose they’ll have to call themselves ‘The Mystic Eight’ now,” said
+one of the girls, a little bitterly.
+
+“Can’t we ask her to join the ‘Blue Birds’?” put in Elinor Butler, who
+was eligible in point of wealth to enter the richer society, but had
+coldly declined the honor and had formed a society herself, called the
+“Blue Birds.”
+
+“She couldn’t belong to both clubs,” said Nancy, “and you may be sure
+she has accepted the invitation of that little golden-haired, blue-eyed
+Belle Rogers, who put on an extra soft pedal even to call out her name.”
+
+“Well, Billie Campbell will probably never have cause to know that
+Belle’s tongue is sharper than a serpent’s tooth, so what’s the odds,”
+observed Mary Price philosophically. “We got on perfectly well before
+she came and I suppose we can manage to support life pretty comfortably
+even if she is a member of the ‘Mystic Seven.’”
+
+Her friends laughed, as they strolled by twos and threes into the broad,
+arched entrance leading into the corridor of the building. Mary Price
+often relieved their wounded feelings by ending discussions concerning
+the “Mystic Seven” with a joke, although not one of them had been cut
+more deeply than she herself by the cruel speeches of Belle Rogers and
+her friends; for, since the death of Captain Price, Mary Price and her
+mother, as you will see later, had had a hard struggle to make both ends
+meet.
+
+In the meantime, Belle Rogers was using all her arts on the unsuspecting
+Wilhelmina Campbell.
+
+“We have never met,” she was saying, “but I heard you were going to
+enter our class and I wanted to be the first to welcome you.”
+
+“Thank you,” said Billie, who had a boyish, direct way of answering
+people.
+
+“We wanted to know,” went on Belle quickly, “if you wouldn’t become a
+member of our society, the Mystic Seven. It is the most exclusive and
+nicest society in the school; the seven nicest girls in West Haven. We
+are all intimate friends, you know.”
+
+Billie gazed with admiration into Belle’s lovely, childlike face. Her
+own hair was straight and secretly she had always admired curls. Belle’s
+pale golden hair curled about her low forehead in soft ringlets. Her
+great china-blue eyes looked appealingly into Billie’s gray ones, and
+her rosy lips, which were much too thin when her face was in repose,
+parted with a winning smile. She was dressed in blue a little darker
+than her eyes and a small blue velvet toque was perched coquettishly on
+top of her curls.
+
+“She looks like a picture pasted inside of an old trunk mamma used to
+have,” said Billie to herself. “I could almost believe she was a bisque
+doll. I never saw anything like her.”
+
+“You will join us, won’t you?” went on Belle wistfully.
+
+“I’m afraid I should be one too many and make an unlucky number. Seven
+is supposed to be lucky, isn’t it?”
+
+“Oh, we’re not superstitious,” laughed Belle. “We can change the name to
+the ‘Happy Eight,’ or something of that sort. We are looking for nice
+girls, and as soon as I saw you I knew you would be the one for us. We
+want to enlarge the club.”
+
+“Dear me,” said Billie thoughtfully, “in a class of seventeen girls are
+only seven nice enough to be asked to join your club?”
+
+“Oh, they are nice enough,” replied Belle. “Elinor Butler is really
+quite nice, but they are not just our sort, don’t you know, and mamma
+has always cautioned me to be very careful about my companions.”
+
+“Elinor Butler?” questioned Billie. “She is my old friend, and Nancy
+Brown and Mary Price? Aren’t any of them members?”
+
+Just then the gong for chapel boomed out in the September stillness and
+Belle could only shake her head for denial, as the two girls hurried
+into the building.
+
+“I don’t think I could ever get on with that blonde doll baby,” thought
+Billie, as she followed Belle into the chapel for morning prayer, which
+always opened the day at West Haven High School.
+
+At recess the new sophomore was quite overwhelmed by the attentions of
+the Mystic Seven. They showed her the building and the grounds, the
+class locker rooms and the gymnasium, which interested her most of all.
+And in return she showed them her motor car. But, somehow, she did not
+quite like these stylish and rather over-dressed young girls. Their
+conversation really bored her and she was disappointed.
+
+It had been her own suggestion to go to West Haven High School when her
+father was summoned abroad to build a railroad.
+
+“I think it’s high time I met some nice outdoor girls, papa,” she had
+said. “I am afraid of boarding school girls. They are so different from
+you.”
+
+Her father had laughed joyfully over this speech.
+
+“I hope there’s not much resemblance between me and a boarding school
+girl, my little Billie,” he said, pinching her cheek.
+
+And now the nice open-air girls whom she had recalled with pleasure
+after a summer spent in West Haven had not come near enough even to
+greet her and she had been obliged to pair off with seven fashion
+plates.
+
+“It’s perfectly maddening,” she exclaimed to herself, giving the turf on
+the campus a savage little kick. “Nancy and Elinor actually avoid
+meeting my eyes as if I were some one unfit to know. I wish I had
+consented to go to boarding school, after all, instead of coming to
+Cousin Helen. I don’t want to belong to a silly society that does
+nothing but have afternoon teas. I want to play basket ball and go on
+long tramps with other girls and have picnics. I’m so disappointed, I
+could weep aloud.”
+
+This was the picture Billie had drawn in her mind of life at West Haven
+High School and here she was an outcast from all the good times and open
+air games of the class, simply because not one of her old friends would
+come near her. She long remembered that first day at school as the
+loneliest and most wretched of her whole life.
+
+Then the last gong sounded and everybody went home except Billie, who
+had an appointment with Miss Gray, the principal. After the interview,
+in a rebellious and disconsolate humor, homesick for her father and
+disappointed with the whole world, she cranked up her red car and
+whirled away toward the open country.
+
+As she sped along the road she passed the three friends of that summer
+of years ago, walking briskly away from town. They did not even look up
+as she whirled by and the lump in her throat grew so big that it
+resolved itself into a sob and two hot tears trickled down her cheeks.
+
+“Perhaps they’re going over to the woods; just what I would have loved
+to have done,” wept the disappointed young girl, whose life had been a
+lonely one in spite of her father’s devotion and constant companionship.
+
+She was still drying her eyes when she noticed some distance ahead a man
+leap into the road and wave his arms violently. Billie slowed down and
+came to a stop; for at the side of the road another very ill-looking man
+was lying prone on his back with closed eyes and slightly parted lips.
+
+“What is it?” she asked. “Has your friend been hurt?”
+
+“No, miss,” answered the man who had stopped her, “but he has walked
+fifteen miles to-day and I am afraid he’s about all in. I am trying to
+get him to his house, but I can’t carry him and he can’t take another
+step.”
+
+“Where is his house?” asked Billie.
+
+“Are you familiar with these parts, miss?”
+
+“No,” she answered.
+
+“It’s just up that lane about a mile. Only a matter of five minutes to
+you.”
+
+“Can you get him into the car?” asked Billie, noticing that this rather
+sinister looking stranger had only one arm; also that his right eye was
+out and there was a long scar across his upper lip.
+
+“Easily,” he replied, and without another word he expeditiously
+supported his friend to the motor car and lifted him into the back seat.
+
+“Poor fellow,” exclaimed Billie sympathetically. “It’s well I happened
+along.”
+
+The sick man was indeed a wretched looking object, with a thin,
+lantern-jawed face, hollow feverish eyes and a sunken chest.
+Occasionally he coughed behind his hands apologetically.
+
+“Down the lane, did you say?” she asked.
+
+“Yes, miss, you can just see the house. It’s the gray one up near the
+woods.”
+
+“I’ll have him there in a few minutes,” she answered, putting on all
+speed.
+
+The little machine flew along the hard sandy road like a redbird on the
+wing. Billie occasionally glanced over her shoulder at the sick man and
+each time her eyes met his, which seemed to burn like coals of fire. She
+had not liked the looks of the other man. His one remaining eye was much
+too close to his hooked nose; but the sick man appealed to her
+sympathies. Billie’s nature was not a suspicious one. She had
+encountered many people in her life, and it is only people who have
+lived out of the world who are apt to suspect strangers.
+
+As she drew up the car in front of what appeared to be a very old,
+long-deserted fisherman’s house and turned to see her passengers alight,
+she found the one-eyed man bending over his companion.
+
+“He’s fainted, miss,” he said. “If you’ll go around back of the house to
+the old well and draw up a pail of cold water, I guess we can revive
+him. Just let down the pail by the wheel at the side—you’ll see the
+handle,—and then get a glass or pitcher or something ’round there in
+the shed.”
+
+As the man was apparently very busy loosening the neck-band of his
+friend’s shirt, there seemed nothing else for Billie to do but to obey
+his directions. In fact, her sympathies were so deeply aroused that she
+was more than eager to help.
+
+She dashed around the corner in an instant, rushed to the old well, and
+exerting her strength turned the handle of the rusty wheel around and
+around while the rattling chain lowered the moss-covered bucket deeper
+and deeper until it struck the water. Waiting only until the bucket was
+filled, she began to raise it as rapidly as she could, but her muscles
+were sorely tried by the stubbornness of the rusty wheel and the
+additional weight of the water.
+
+The thought of the exhausted man spurred her on, however, and at length,
+flushed and perspiring, she succeeded in drawing the bucket to a little
+shelf where she left it while she searched for a receptacle in which to
+carry the water. She found no difficulty in pushing open a loosely-hung
+door at the end of the shed, and, after groping around a moment or two
+in the semi-darkness, she discovered a battered tin pail. Hastening back
+with it, she rinsed and filled it, and hurried around to the front of
+the house.
+
+As she turned the corner, she stopped short! Where were the two men?
+Where was her machine? _Where—was—her—machine?_
+
+Too dazed to move, Billie stood rooted to the spot while the water
+trickled out of a hole in the pail and made a little pool at her feet.
+
+Suddenly she gasped, “They must be around the other corner. They _must_
+be!”
+
+But they were not!—and then Billie noticed the tracks in the crushed
+grass that told the tale. The motor car had been turned and driven away
+up the lane!
+
+Billie sank down on the step in front of the old house almost too spent
+with her exertions and her shock to think.
+
+Then she flung down the pail and rushed up the lane as though she would
+try to catch the vanished car,—but she stopped as abruptly with a half
+laugh.
+
+“They may be miles and miles away by this time,—they had time enough
+while I was fussing over that old well. And the chain made such a noise
+and the wheel creaked so, I never heard another sound!”
+
+Billie’s eyes filled with indignant tears as she began slowly to saunter
+back to the old house. She felt somehow impelled to return to the scene
+of her loss, perhaps to persuade herself that it was really so.
+
+As she neared the spot where she had last seen her red car, she noticed
+a slip of paper blowing lightly about. Idly she picked it up and glanced
+over the words written upon it. Then she stood still and caught her
+breath as she realized what they meant.
+
+“Stay here. Tell no one. Back soon.”
+
+That was the message that Billie read, and she did not doubt for a
+moment that it was intended for her.
+
+“Yes, perhaps you will come back, and perhaps you won’t,” she said half
+aloud. “Maybe you think that I think that you have gone for a doctor.
+But I don’t. You are two mean, wicked men to outwit a girl like that.
+I’ll never see my car again!”
+
+Just as Billie uttered this despairing cry, she heard a distant hail,
+and then another.
+
+“Who is coming now?” she thought. “It’s too soon to expect my sick (?)
+passenger and his one-eyed friend, and anyway I hear no car,——nor
+anything else, now,” she added. “Maybe I imagined it. Oh, I’d like to be
+a man for about five minutes! Then they wouldn’t _dare_!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.—FRIENDS IN NEED.
+
+
+“There she goes,” Nancy Brown had exclaimed as “The Comet,” Billie’s
+motor, whirled by; “too proud even to ask her old friends to take a
+spin.”
+
+“Now, Nancy,” protested Elinor, “don’t be too hard on her. Remember, she
+has not seen any of us since we were children. Perhaps she’s forgotten
+all about us. Besides, I’ve been thinking that we ought to have done the
+first speaking. She was starting right for us when Belle Rogers stopped
+her.”
+
+“Well, I tried twice to speak to her,” said Nancy, “and she wouldn’t
+look at me. I am afraid we shall never get a ride in that pretty motor
+car, and the only one I was ever in was the stationary automobile at the
+tintype place at the County Fair.”
+
+The girls walked on silently for a few moments. The red motor car had
+turned a curve in the road and was out of sight and the place seemed
+very lonely and still. The afternoon shadows were beginning to lengthen
+as the sun moved slowly behind the pine woods, which formed a dark
+background against the flat, green meadows about West Haven.
+
+“I can’t imagine why we should be wasting time about a friend who has
+forgotten us,” exclaimed Mary Price, “when Elinor has brought us out
+here to tell us some mysterious secret. Don’t you think it’s about time
+to begin, Elinor? It’s getting late and we’ve still a good ways to go.”
+
+“I was just going to,” answered her friend, “but suppose we take the
+short cut across the fields, and I’ll tell you on the way. Two other
+people are in the secret, Charlie Clay and Ben Austen. They have
+promised to meet us at the old house. Of course, the whole thing may be
+of no importance.”
+
+“But what is it?” interrupted Nancy. “You keep dodging around the bush.”
+
+“Now, Nancy,” answered Elinor, who had a calm, placid disposition and
+never hurried about anything, “don’t put your most peculiar
+characteristic off on me. You know very well that you are the one who
+loves to keep a mystery until we are all of us nearly bursting with
+curiosity.”
+
+“Don’t quarrel, children,” interrupted Mary. “Remember that members of
+the Blue Bird Society are bound over not to quarrel.”
+
+“We aren’t quarreling; we’re just discussing. But do go on, Elinor. I
+can’t stand the suspense much longer.”
+
+“What I am going to tell you,” said Elinor, “may be of the vastest
+importance or it may be just nothing whatever. At any rate, I didn’t
+want to take any chances and it was simple enough for us to meet the
+boys out here and see for ourselves.”
+
+“See what, Elinor Butler?” ejaculated Nancy impatiently. “You always
+begin at the last of a story and tell backwards.”
+
+Elinor smiled provokingly.
+
+“That’s to see how much curiosity you can accumulate without exploding,
+Nancy, dear.”
+
+Nancy shut her lips tightly. She was determined now, at any cost, not to
+speak again until Elinor had really started on the story, but how
+irritating Elinor could be at times!
+
+Mary was never disturbed over these little tiffs of the two friends
+which were merely the ups and downs of the endless conversation that
+flowed between them.
+
+“This is what happened then, Nancy darling,” continued Elinor, slipping
+an arm around her friend’s waist, while she locked her other arm through
+Mary’s. And the three girls hurried on, too absorbed in their intimate
+talk to notice the flash of a scarlet motor car through the high bushes,
+which bordered both sides of Boulder Lane, the name of the road which
+intercepted the two meadows.
+
+“I was coming across Court House Square late yesterday afternoon after
+my music lesson. You know I have begun to study with the new teacher,
+Mme. Alta. Just as I came to the statue of Thomas Jefferson, I heard
+some one call very softly, or rather it was more like a hiss than a
+call. I suppose I should have rushed off frightened, but I am never
+afraid of people. It’s only spiders and snakes and bulls that make me
+shiver. So, I didn’t run away, but waited, and I discovered that the
+hiss came from around the other side of the statue and was not meant for
+me at all. Even then I should have gone on if I hadn’t heard some one
+cry out. I couldn’t understand the language, but another voice said in
+English: ‘There are only two boxes left. Take them to the old house in
+Boulder Lane to-night and never keep me waiting this long again.’ Then
+the other man said something and the English voice said: ‘You can haul
+them to-morrow morning. It’ll be time enough when I get the signal to do
+the rest.’ I couldn’t understand what the man answered, but the English
+voice said: ‘I’ll kill the whole crew of Butlers and anybody else who
+interferes with me. I’m in a desperate humor and I won’t be bothered.’
+Fortunately they took the walk that goes to the docks, because they
+would certainly have seen me if they had come around on the other side.
+But I saw them plainly when they passed under the electric light. They
+looked like seamen.”
+
+“‘Kill the whole crew of Butlers,’” repeated Mary Price. “Does he mean
+that he is going to wipe your family off the face of the earth? And for
+what?”
+
+“That is what I want to find out. It wouldn’t do any special harm to
+take a late afternoon stroll in this direction, if the boys are with us.
+I didn’t want to say anything to father about it. He is so busy, and you
+know how excitable he is. William is exactly like father. Edward and
+mother and I are the only calm, peaceful members of the family, and
+mother’s sick and Edward is at college. Besides, you know, the man may
+not have meant us. The county is full of Butlers, dozens of them. Some
+of them claim kin and some do not. They are the most quarrelsome,
+high-tempered people in existence—that is, all except Edward and me.”
+
+The other girls laughed.
+
+“Not high-tempered, Elinor,” said Nancy, “but you have a sort of royal
+manner when you are displeased that I imagine a queen might have when
+one of her subjects is disobedient.”
+
+“What’s that?” interrupted Mary. “I thought I heard some one call.”
+
+The girls paused and listened. They were standing in a broad, flat
+meadow which seemed to stretch out indefinitely in one direction like an
+enormous pale-green billiard table; but in the other direction, bordered
+by alder bushes, lay Boulder Lane; so called because of an immense gray
+boulder, which in some prehistoric upheaval had been tossed here, and
+which resembled now an old gray sentinel standing on perpetual guard.
+
+“Why, there’s the automobile,” exclaimed Nancy, after some minutes,
+following an occasional flash of red through the bushes, as the flying
+motor car sped on up the lane.
+
+“I wonder what she is doing up Boulder Lane? Exploring by herself, I
+suppose. It must be lonely,” observed Mary.
+
+A fresh salt breeze had sprung up from the ocean, bringing with it the
+chill of the oncoming night. The three girls hastened their footsteps.
+If they were late, the boys might not wait for them.
+
+“Boys are so unreliable,” Mary had remarked.
+
+“Not Ben Austen,” said Elinor. “Father says he is as trustworthy as the
+Bank of England. But he’s slow. He never likes to stop one thing until
+he finishes it, no matter what’s waiting. He and Charlie are building a
+boat somewhere down the beach and they spend all their afternoons at it,
+but they are sure to be there if they promised.”
+
+By this time the girls had reached the hedge. It was certainly a
+lonesome place. The old house which had been unoccupied for many years
+because its last occupant had committed suicide by hanging himself from
+a beam, appeared in the gathering dusk like a solitary gray ghost; the
+front windows resembled two large sad eyes gazing into space and the
+walls, streaked with the tempests of many seasons, had the appearance of
+a worn, tear-stained face.
+
+“Dear me,” whispered Nancy, “I had forgotten what a weird old place this
+was. It might be the entrance to a tomb.”
+
+“Halo-o-o!” called a boyish voice, and a tall, overgrown lad appeared
+coming up the lane from the direction of the beach, followed by a much
+smaller youth, who was so absorbed with whittling a little boat that he
+did not even look up when the girls answered the call.
+
+“Don’t make so much noise, Ben,” said Elinor, when they had climbed
+through the hedge and congregated together in the lane. “This is just an
+investigating party. We are not to take any risks.”
+
+“There seems to be nobody around,” replied Ben. “We saw an automobile go
+past a little while ago with two men in it and some big boxes in the
+back. It was almost stuck in the sand. I wonder it could get along at
+all. It looked like a big, red lobster.”
+
+“Red?” cried the girls in one voice.
+
+“I never saw anything redder in my life,” put in Charlie.
+
+“You must be mistaken about the men, then,” said Elinor decisively.
+“Because Billie Campbell owns it and was running it herself a little
+while ago.”
+
+“Well, we were not close enough to get a good look, but Billie Campbell
+appeared to be two men at that distance. But come along, girls. It is
+getting late and we had better not lose any more time. Now, what is it
+we are looking for? Butler bundles and boxes?”
+
+“I don’t think they can be called Butler bundles,” replied Elinor,
+“since my family is to be wiped out of existence if it interferes with
+the bundles, whatever they are.”
+
+The boys and girls who were thoroughly enjoying the fun and mystery of
+the expedition now advanced on tiptoe to the ghostly looking house, like
+a party of conspirators in a play.
+
+“I feel like a pirate,” whispered Nancy, giggling.
+
+Suddenly Ben, who was ahead of the others, stopped and put his fingers
+to his lips. He beckoned to them to follow him around to the side of the
+house.
+
+“I heard something inside the house,” he said, in a low voice. “Wait
+here, girls, with Charlie while I take a look.”
+
+He crept cautiously around to the front and presently they heard him
+open the door and walk boldly in.
+
+“I’m going, too,” said Charlie, unable to contain his curiosity any
+longer, and the girls followed him single-file into a low-studded, dusty
+room, unfurnished except for one rickety chair, but behind that
+stood—Billie Campbell! And facing Billie in the dim light just inside
+the door stood Ben, surprise written as plainly upon his face as
+bravery, defiance, and apprehension were mingled upon hers.
+
+The girls were too amazed to speak at first.
+
+“Billie Campbell!” cried Nancy, at last. “Did two men frighten you and
+run away with your automobile?”
+
+Billie nodded. Somehow it was very difficult to keep back her tears now
+that help had come; but she never had been a cry-baby even as a child
+and now she choked down her sobs with all her strength, for in the
+gathering dusk she had recognized the faces of her three childhood
+friends who had refused to remember her that day at school.
+
+“Oh, but I’m glad to see you!” she exclaimed. “After the men went off I
+noticed that the front door was open and I came in a minute to see if it
+really looked as though it were lived in now-a-days as the man said. But
+it just looks deserted, and it’s dreadfully dusty except here in the
+corner and from here to the door,—just as though something had been
+dragged across the floor.”
+
+The young girl had been talking excitedly, but now she stopped abruptly
+and with a friendly look and a gesture of intense relief she stretched
+her arms over her head, as though with the relaxation of her muscles she
+could also free herself from the sudden shock and dread that had bound
+her.
+
+She was tall for her age, fifteen, with a frank, almost boyish face,
+fine gray eyes, and a rather large mouth which curled up at the corners
+when she smiled and showed two graduated rows of strong white teeth. Her
+light brown hair was parted in the middle and rolled on each side into a
+thick, knobby plait in the back.
+
+“She’s not very strong on looks,” thought Nancy, who set great store on
+beauty herself, “but she’s got the nicest face I ever saw.”
+
+“How did it happen?” asked Ben.
+
+Then Billie told how the two men had duped her and left her behind the
+deserted house, and how she had found the message on the slip of paper.
+
+“Then the men are coming back?” cried Elinor.
+
+“Perhaps,” replied Billie, “and we’d better hurry away from here as fast
+as we can in case they come. They may not intend to do me any harm, but
+they are a very determined-looking pair of characters, as papa says, and
+one of them has a long pistol and a knife in his belt, for I saw them.”
+
+“But what about the red motor?” demanded Nancy, whose yearning to ride
+in the car had somewhat biased her good judgment.
+
+“I’ll just have to lose it, I suppose,” answered Billie.
+
+“I have a scheme,” put in Charlie, who rarely spoke without due
+deliberation. “Miss Campbell is just about as tall as I am—she may be a
+little shorter,” he added, stretching himself to his full height.
+
+The others smiled secretly at this, for Billie was at least an inch
+taller than Charlie, but they knew that the most sensitive spot in his
+nature was his height, since he was the oldest member of the party and
+Ben overtopped him by nearly three inches. And Charlie had a sneaking
+suspicion that he never would be tall enough. His bones were small and
+his frame as slender and delicate as a girl’s.
+
+“Suppose I put on your hat and veil and your long coat,” he continued,
+“and sit here on the step waiting. It’s getting darker all the time, and
+so if the men come back they’ll think it is you; but if they thought
+somebody was onto them, they would probably break their word and chase
+off with the motor.”
+
+“I don’t think that would be quite fair,” said Billie. “Suppose they
+found out you were a boy. They might shoot you or something.”
+
+“But they won’t find it out,” answered Charlie. “Hurry up. We have no
+time to lose.”
+
+“Yes, do,” urged Ben. “It’s much the best way. We couldn’t leave you for
+the thieves and it’s a pity to lose the car. Besides, the rest of us
+will hide in the house and if anything happens, we’ll come to the
+rescue.”
+
+Billie removed her ulster without another word.
+
+“She’s a dandy, sensible girl,” thought Ben to himself.
+
+“You’d better take the skirt, too. If they saw your trouser legs, it
+would be all off,” said Billie, as she unbuckled her belt and removed
+her gray walking skirt, standing before them without any embarrassment
+in a short, red silk petticoat.
+
+“What about shoes?” observed Mary Price. “Those Charlie is wearing are
+not much like a girl’s shoes.”
+
+“How about these pumps? I wear No. fives,” said Billie, calmly kicking
+off her slippers.
+
+Charlie, good-naturedly, unlaced his stout boy’s boots.
+
+“I might be able to get my big toe into them,” he said. “Like
+Cinderella’s step-sisters and the little glass slipper.”
+
+“These aren’t any Cinderella’s,” laughed Billie.
+
+How nice these boys and girls did seem to her and how fine it was to be
+with them, even in this strange and dangerous situation!
+
+Charlie could wear the slippers, however, although they were somewhat
+narrow in the toe, and presently he was fully dressed in a girl’s suit,
+with his face almost concealed by a long gray chiffon veil, twisted
+around Billie’s gray felt hat, trimmed with one red wing.
+
+“Hurry, they’re really coming,” called Billie, catching the familiar
+sound of a motor engine in the distance.
+
+“All right,” said Ben, who had been hovering around Charlie in pretended
+admiration of his changed appearance. “Good luck, old boy!” he added as
+he hastened after the girls up the narrow flight of stairs into the
+attic, which was perfectly dark and seemed a better place for hiding
+than outside, where enough twilight still lingered to make objects
+plainly visible.
+
+“We are a good deal like ‘The Musicians of Bremen,’” observed Mary, in a
+low voice, as they lay stretched face downward on the attic floor.
+“Don’t you remember that old fairy tale of Grimm’s; when the robber came
+back to the house in the wood he was bitten and kicked and scratched and
+pecked by the dog and the donkey and the cat and the rooster, and then
+they set up such a braying and barking and crowing and meowing that he
+ran away scared to death?”
+
+“If anything did happen, we might try the howling part,” said Billie. “I
+should think a piercing shriek from a place like this would scare a
+brave man——”
+
+“Sh-h, they’re almost here,” cautioned Ben. “Don’t move, any one. The
+floor will creak.”
+
+“I’m going to sneeze,” hissed Nancy, in the dark.
+
+“Press your upper lip and don’t dare do it,” whispered Elinor.
+
+“Shut up, all of you,” said Ben, as the motor car drew up beside the
+hedge at one side of the house.
+
+“If there is any shrieking to be done,” added Mary, “I’ll do it. I’m the
+best shrieker in the sophomore class. I know how to do it in the top of
+my head——”
+
+“Sh-h-h!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.—THE MUSICIANS OF BREMEN.
+
+
+Nancy could not keep from trembling slightly as she heard the car
+panting at a little distance and realized that perhaps a moment of real
+danger was near, in spite of their joking. Elinor, too, felt very much
+like giving away to a few tremors, but she reproached herself for such
+weak behavior and held her body as rigid as a stone image while she said
+sternly in her mind:
+
+“My knees are not at all weak. It’s only the position I am lying in that
+makes them feel queer.”
+
+A sound as though a heavy foot had been placed on the step outside was
+heard and then a voice which Billie recognized as that of the one-eyed
+man said:
+
+“Well, young lady, I suppose you have had about enough of this? We have
+kept our word, you see, which I judge you found on the paper, as you are
+still here.”
+
+There was a short silence. Evidently Charlie nodded assent to the
+supposition and the motion gave full satisfaction, for the voice went
+on, “Has any one been around, miss? You didn’t hear the sound of any
+voices, did you, while we were gone? We saw some people in the field as
+we left. Did they come this way? Speak up, miss.”
+
+Not a heart on the attic floor but thumped as the one-eyed man asked
+these questions. They had never thought of Charlie’s voice, which was
+about as deep as a full grown man’s!
+
+A perfectly death-like stillness reigned for a moment. It was plain that
+Charlie was not going to trust his voice.
+
+“Do not be frightened, Señorita,” put in the thin man. “You may speak
+without fear. Do not weep. Perhaps she did see something. It was not the
+ghost of the dead man who hanged himself in here, was it?” he added in a
+low voice.
+
+“Hold your tongue,” said the other man. “Speak up, young woman. Have you
+no voice left? You’ll not have strength enough to run the car if you go
+on like this.”
+
+A deep sob reached the ears of the listeners overhead.
+
+Then the alarming thought came to Ben: How was Charlie to run the motor
+car in case the men insisted on his leaving first? Plainly, it was
+necessary to get rid of these men somehow. Then they would all make a
+dash, and he would crank up while Billie jumped in and started the car.
+
+“I’ll have to hear the sound of your voice before I go,” insisted the
+one-eyed man. “I want to hear you give me your sacred word of honor to
+keep this little loan of your car a secret. If we find that you have
+told, and we’ll know it if you have, you and your family will regret it,
+that’s all. We know how to take our revenge, don’t we, Pedro? So speak
+up, young woman, and say the words. I promise——”
+
+Another deep sob.
+
+“Come, come. Hold up your head and let me see your face. Say, Pedro,
+look here; it doesn’t seem quite the same as it did half an hour ago,
+somehow. Strike a light!”
+
+There was great but noiseless commotion in the attic! What if the men
+should lift Charlie’s veil!
+
+Since Mary had mentioned “The Musicians of Bremen” an idea had been
+forming in Ben’s mind and he now hastily communicated it in a low
+whisper to his neighbor who passed it quickly down the line.
+
+Just as the thin man outside exclaimed in a high sharp tone, “Why, it’s
+a boy!” Ben whispered, “Ready!”
+
+Immediately the attic was filled with a pandemonium of noise,—the
+barking of a dog, cries, and screams! It was a truly terrifying
+combination, Mary’s shrill shriek rising weirdly above the other sounds
+as though from one in mortal agony.
+
+The two men outside were startled in spite of themselves and dashed away
+on an uncontrollable impulse, the thin man shouting, “The ghost of the
+dead man! His evil spirit haunts us!”
+
+“Good work, Ben,” called Charlie softly, after a moment. “Come out,
+quick! They’ve gone around back of the house. You can come this way, but
+hurry!”
+
+The adventure had been so exciting and was so quickly over that the
+girls hardly realized where they were when they found themselves in
+front of the house, standing in a half-bewildered group in the deepening
+twilight.
+
+“Nobody shall take any more chances for my motor car,” whispered Billie.
+“You have all risked your lives enough as it is, and I’m deeply
+grateful. The men may be around there by the machine, so let’s make a
+break for the fields and go straight home.”
+
+“No,” replied Ben stoutly; “it would be best for you girls to get away,
+but Charlie and I will finish the job. Those fellows are cowards, any
+way, and——”
+
+“But you can’t run the car,” said Billie, rapidly putting on her things,
+which Charlie had discarded with a sigh of relief. “I’ll have to stay.
+The other girls must go, though.”
+
+The discussion, however, was ended by Charlie, who had skipped off to
+reconnoiter and now appeared running at full speed around the side of
+the house.
+
+“Come on, let’s all go,” he said. “They’ve gone, but they might come
+back.”
+
+Without a word, the others followed him and jumped into the car, while
+Ben, who knew a little about motors, began to crank up the machine.
+Suddenly a voice spoke out of the darkness:
+
+“This looks like a nice little party. Get out of that car, every one of
+you, or I’ll shoot,” and the sinister looking one-armed man, who
+appeared to have sprung up from the earth, stood at the side of the
+automobile with his pistol pointed straight at Billie. “Did you
+imagine,” he continued, “that a parcel of children could fool a man like
+me?”
+
+There was no reply to the question. Mary and Nancy were so limp with
+fear they could not have lifted a little finger if there had been a
+dozen pistols pointing at them. Elinor might have slipped a ramrod down
+her back, so stiffly and proudly did she hold herself in that fearful
+moment. Billie had turned white as a sheet, but she still had strength
+enough left to make a move to get out when Ben, whose stubborn nature
+would not even now give up the fight, raised his overgrown, boyish
+figure from the ground where he had been kneeling, and with a quick
+motion pressed a piece of glittering steel to the man’s forehead.
+
+“Drop that pistol, or you’re a dead man,” he said in the deepest chest
+tones he could produce. His voice was still in the tenor stage.
+
+Not even a gentleman of fortune who had lost an eye and an arm in past
+dangerous adventures could quite keep from shrinking at this extremely
+unpleasant sensation produced by cold steel against his face, and
+without a word of protest he dropped the pistol in the road.
+
+“Now, back off,” said Ben, “and don’t stop until you get as far as that
+tree over there.”
+
+The man retreated, cursing under his breath, and in another instant they
+were off in the dark.
+
+“We forgot to pick up his pistol,” exclaimed Charlie, as three shots
+rang out in quick succession.
+
+“But Ben has one,” said Billie, feeling somehow that she had known these
+nice brave boys for a long time, instead of three-quarters of an hour.
+
+“That was only a monkey wrench,” answered Charlie, laughing.
+
+And Billie was moved with admiration and respect for the slow-speaking,
+quiet boy, who had twice in so short a time outwitted two very dangerous
+and experienced adventurers.
+
+It was a splendid ride in the darkness. The fresh salt air swept their
+faces and set their blood to tingling with a new enjoyment. They had
+just been through a most dangerous and exciting experience, these young
+people, and Nancy and Mary were not ashamed to admit that they at least
+had been very much frightened. But people who have lived always by the
+sea are used to looking danger calmly in the face.
+
+Half a mile beyond the quiet little harbor of West Haven a lighthouse
+stood on a small, rocky promontory, and from the shore on a calm day
+could be seen rows of sharp-pointed rocks thrust out of the water like
+great black teeth waiting to devour any chance ship which might be blown
+against them. In bad weather the water about the Black Reefs, as they
+were called, was lashed and churned into fury and sometimes after a
+great storm groups of people might be seen hurrying up the cliff path to
+the life-saving station, while out in the ocean, stuck fast to the teeth
+of the Black Reefs was a pretty three-masted schooner, perhaps, or a
+stained and scarred old freight ship, looking very small and helpless in
+its terrible plight.
+
+Billie, herself, was the only person in the motor car who had not seen a
+shipwreck on the Black Reefs. She had never even seen one of the
+September storms when the sea rolled itself into mountainous waves and
+dashed against the cliffs of West Haven.
+
+As they neared the town, Billie slowed down the motor and turned to
+speak to her new friends.
+
+“I can’t even try to thank all of you for what you have done for me, but
+I want to tell you that I think you are the bravest, nicest boys and
+girls in the whole world, and it was just to be with you that I came
+back to West Haven to go to school. I was very unhappy to-day because I
+was afraid that Nancy and Mary and Elinor had forgotten me and the
+splendid times we had together one summer when I was a little girl——”
+
+“Oh, Billie, we hadn’t forgotten you,” broke in Nancy. “We thought when
+you joined Belle Rogers’ crowd that you——”
+
+“But I didn’t join them,” Billie interrupted, laughing. “They kidnapped
+me and never let me out of their sight the whole time. I had almost made
+up my mind to write to papa to let me go to boarding school, after all.
+I wanted to know some real girls. I have never had a chance before, you
+know, and when I talked it over with papa, we decided that all of you
+were the nicest real girls we had ever known, and I just thought I would
+spend the winter with Cousin Helen and meet you again, while papa was in
+Russia.”
+
+The three girls blushed with pleasure at this gratifying compliment.
+
+“We were just as glad to see you, too, Billie,” said Elinor. “It was all
+a foolish mistake. But we shall be friends now, and you must join the
+Blue Birds. It’s the Sophomore Club, and we have lots of fun.”
+
+“Thank you, I’d love to,” answered Billie, as gratefully and modestly as
+if she had been paid the highest honor in the land. “I’ve been
+thinking,” she added, “that we’d better keep all this business about
+these men secret. You know Cousin Helen; if she hears about it, we’ll
+probably have to store the motor car. She’ll never let me out of her
+sight again.”
+
+“We’ll keep it secret,” cried the others in a chorus.
+
+So this very sensational adventure, which would certainly have spread
+like wildfire through the town of West Haven once it got out, remained a
+profound secret.
+
+Some good came of it, however, since it served to unite four old
+friends. But we have not seen the last of the mysterious individuals who
+borrowed Billie’s motor car.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.—PLOTS AND PLANS.
+
+
+Belle Rogers was not always the bewitchingly pretty, dimpling, smiling
+young girl who had endeavored to annex Billie.
+
+And when she was not pretty, Belle’s friends liked to keep well out of
+her vicinity. At such times two little white dents appeared on each side
+of her nose. Her large, china blue eyes were transformed into wells of
+steely gray and the smiling, baby mouth became two narrow white lips.
+All the color left her cheeks, and people who did not know her would
+exclaim:
+
+“How faded and ill she looks!”
+
+When Belle looked like this she was unusually quiet at first, but it was
+the quiet which comes before a tornado, and it was only when the storm
+burst that those unfamiliar with her ways realized that Belle had been
+very, very angry.
+
+This is what happened on the day after the exciting experience in
+Boulder Lane, and all because Wilhelmina Campbell, true to her old
+friends, the “Blue Birds,” after being formally invited, had positively
+declined to join the “Mystic Seven.”
+
+“I am sorry,” she said, trying her best to be cordial, “but, you see,
+the others had first claim on me because I have known them a long time
+and I have already promised to become a Blue Bird.”
+
+“We asked you first,” exclaimed Belle, in a preternaturally quiet tone
+of voice.
+
+“I don’t see why that should make any difference,” answered Billie,
+feeling very uncomfortable.
+
+“It makes a great deal of difference,” answered Belle, who was always
+gifted with a flow of words in the moments of her greatest anger. “You
+are probably not familiar with the ways of schools and school societies.
+I understand you have never been to school before.”
+
+“Oh, yes, I have. I went to school in Paris for three months and to
+another in Dresden for a whole winter.”
+
+“This is America,” went on Belle, in a slow, even tone, taking no other
+notice of the interruption, “and if you decline the honor we have paid
+you in the sophomore year, you will not only be blackballed in our
+societies the other two years, but you will not receive any invitations
+from me and my friends to our parties now or ever, and you will be
+obliged to associate with the commonest and most ordinary girls in West
+Haven. The children of cooks——”
+
+“Mary Price,” thought Billie. Mrs. Price had a tea room.
+
+“The daughters of seamen——”
+
+“Nancy!” said Billie out loud. Nancy’s father was a sea captain.
+
+“Yes, Nancy Brown,” continued Belle, growing angrier every moment. “You
+will simply be an outcast in West Haven, and I advise you to think the
+matter over well before you decide to join that low, common crowd, for I
+assure you it will be the last of you with us——”
+
+Billie was so aghast at the insolence of the spoiled girl that she did
+not attempt to interrupt the rush of words which seemed to flow from her
+lips without any effort whatever. She was very angry herself, as a
+matter of fact, but with the self-control she had learned from her
+father, she determined to hold her peace until Belle had run down, as
+she expressed it later to the other girls.
+
+At last there came a pause, and Billie, who had been sitting on the
+window ledge in the gymnasium swinging her feet and thinking of what she
+was going to say when she was entirely prepared to speak, slipped down
+to the floor and stood before the enraged girl like a brave soldier in
+the face of battle.
+
+But this was all she said, for Billie was really very much like a boy.
+
+“I don’t think it is any honor to join your club, or go with you and
+your friends. I wouldn’t give up Mary and Nancy and Elinor for twenty
+Mystic Sevens. I’d rather go to boarding school any day, and that’s
+about the worst fate that could happen to me.”
+
+Then she turned on her heel and walked away, leaving Belle in the grip
+of a tempest of sobs and tears. Such rages are quite like the West
+Indian storms which sweep up the coast with a great blowing of wind and
+then, after a tremendous roar of thunder, the downpour follows.
+
+That night in her pretty chintz-hung bedroom in the beautiful Rogers
+house, which was one of the show places of West Haven, Belle Rogers
+planned her revenge. Her temples were throbbing and her whole body ached
+with exhaustion. Tempers are really quite as devastating to the system
+as the West Indian tornadoes are to the country over which they sweep.
+
+“I’ll get even with that rough tom-boy,” she said out loud. “I’ll pay
+her back if it takes all winter to do it. I’ll make her sorry she ever
+came to West Haven, and I’ll make the others pay, too. They’ll see what
+it means to interfere with me and my plans. Perhaps papa will give me a
+motor car, only I’m afraid of the things, and I never could run one. My
+hands are much too small and delicate to handle machinery.”
+
+“Belle, darling, do you feel any better?” asked Mrs. Rogers, anxiously,
+outside the door.
+
+Belle made no reply. It was her custom to pretend to be asleep when she
+wished to be alone, and she wished now to spend a long uninterrupted
+evening to herself, for her thoughts were very busy. A plan had come
+into her head. It had sprung up suddenly, full-grown, as if it had been
+secretly hatching in the bottom of her mind for a long time and now
+appeared a matured scheme.
+
+Her blood tingled at the notion. It was such an audacious, daring thing
+that the very thought made her dizzy.
+
+“I’ll do it,” she said at last, her mind made up. “I’ll do it, and I’ll
+get only one person to help me, because it will take two to work it.
+Now, who shall that person be? It would be best to ask a Blue Bird, but
+which one?”
+
+Her thoughts ran over the girls in the despised society, but there was
+only one of the ten whom she would quite dare to approach. The others
+were fiercely loyal to each other.
+
+This possible traitor was a new girl in West Haven. Her name was
+Francesca Alta, but her friends called her Fannie. She was the daughter
+of Mme. Alta, a music teacher lately established in the town. Many of
+the girls were taking music lessons of Mme. Alta, and Belle, who was one
+of her pupils, often had opportunities of speaking to the little
+dark-haired daughter, although she had only nodded to her coldly so far.
+
+“I will speak to her to-morrow,” she exclaimed, as she swallowed the
+sleeping powder her indulgent mother always gave her after one of these
+violent headaches.
+
+In the morning Belle had regained her baby smile. The red had left her
+nose and was now in its proper spots on her round, plump cheeks. Once
+more her large blue eyes looked appealingly into the eyes of those she
+honored with her glances. Belle never saw what she preferred to ignore,
+and one of the most delightful sights of that bright September morning
+was a red motor car filled with pretty young girls, which whirled into
+the High School grounds, making a bright splash of scarlet against the
+old gray walls of the building.
+
+Belle did not see the “Comet” and its load, or would not see it, but
+later, Billie, who never bore malice, bowed a cheerful good morning to
+her enemy, and, to the surprise of the others, received a cordial bow in
+return.
+
+“I am sorry I was cross to you yesterday, Miss Campbell. Will you
+forgive me?” Belle asked her.
+
+“Yes, indeed,” answered the warm-hearted young girl. “It’s awfully nice
+of you to admit it,” and she secretly decided that the others were
+rather hard on Belle Rogers, after all.
+
+However, when the girls heard of the apology, they were skeptical.
+
+“It’s the ‘Comet’ that won her over,” observed Nancy.
+
+“I don’t believe it,” answered their new, inseparable friend, who after
+two days’ association was as intimate with the three girls as if she had
+known them always, so rapidly do young girl intimacies grow.
+
+“Something does seem to have happened to her,” said Mary Price. “Perhaps
+you gave her such a dressing-down, Billie, that she’s turned over a new
+leaf. She would never have stooped to talk to Fannie Alta before, but
+she is doing it now, and look—will wonders never cease?”
+
+The two girls were indeed in intimate conversation. They were walking
+arm in arm up and down the campus, nibbling sandwiches. At West Haven
+High School the girls either brought their luncheons with them to eat at
+recess or bought sandwiches of that plucky, hard-working little woman,
+Mrs. Price, Mary’s mother, who made the sandwiches and brought them to
+the school herself in a big basket.
+
+That is why Mary Price had exclaimed, “Will wonders never cease?” She
+had recognized the package of sandwiches in oil paper, which Belle
+Rogers must have bought from her mother, and which she was now sharing
+with dark, shabby little Fannie Alta.
+
+“She used to say she would rather starve than eat one of mother’s
+lettuce sandwiches,” Mary exclaimed, “but she appears even to have come
+to that.”
+
+“If this is one of your mother’s own, it’s very delicious,” exclaimed
+Billie, gallantly turning the conversation into other channels. After
+all, it was just as well not to form the habit of discussing Belle too
+much. Her father had never approved of criticising people.
+
+“It doesn’t lead to anything but bilious headaches,” he used to say.
+“Sick, bilious headaches and a very yellow complexion. Critical people
+always look like that, Billie, my girl.”
+
+Billie’s complexion was clear and healthy. She had never had a bilious
+headache in her life. But, then, she was not given to picking flaws in
+other people’s characters.
+
+However, the novelty of the richest and proudest girl in West Haven
+making friends with a poor music teacher’s daughter was soon to be
+eclipsed by a much more sensational and mysterious incident.
+
+That afternoon, after school, when the four friends assembled in the
+carriage shed for their usual spin home in Billie’s motor car, they
+found a note stuck conspicuously between the cushion and the back of the
+seat. It was addressed in a large angular hand to “Miss Wilhelmina
+Campbell and her friends, both boys and girls, especially Miss Butler,”
+and inside it read:
+
+“Keep quiet about Boulder Lane. You are watched and if you let a word
+slip out, the punishment will come quickly.”
+
+“How ridiculous,” exclaimed Billie angrily, when she had shown the note
+to the others. “I have a great mind to write papa all about it, only it
+would worry him to death. It is only cowards who write anonymous
+letters, anyhow.”
+
+But she did not write to her father, and the other girls, too, were
+silent on the matter.
+
+They wondered many times who had put the note on the seat. Strangers
+were not unusual in West Haven, where sailors and seamen often came
+ashore, but the Girls’ High School was at the other end of town and
+visitors ashore seldom strayed so far away from the shops and the little
+theatre.
+
+“I’d like to know what their grudge is against the Butler family,”
+Elinor had demanded, but no one could answer the question, and she was
+still determined not to disturb her highly excitable father.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.—THE FIRST MOTOR PICNIC.
+
+
+One Saturday morning early in September Miss Helen Campbell gave a
+breakfast party to her four favorite Blue Birds. It was to be the
+beginning of an eventful day for the young girls, three of whom were to
+take their first long motor trip, and, furthermore, the motor party was
+to end with a visit to Shell Island, where this excited and happy
+company of young people were to spend the night, motoring back to West
+Haven next day.
+
+Miss Campbell herself was excited.
+
+“It’s a novelty for me, my dears,” she exclaimed, beaming on her guests
+from behind the silver urn at the head of the breakfast table. “I’m a
+very dull, lonesome old woman, and having this nice child here with me
+is going to wake me into life again. I shall never be able to give you
+up, Wilhelmina. You had better write your father that you have been
+adopted by a very obstinate old party, who believes that possession is
+nine points of the law.”
+
+“I’m quite willing to be possessed, Cousin Helen,” answered Billie. “If
+I could only see papa sometimes, I think I could say that I never was so
+gloriously happy in all my life.”
+
+Miss Campbell smiled with pleasure and the girls thought they had never
+seen her look more beautiful. Her white hair glistened like a bank of
+snow in the sunshine and her soft eyes were as blue as patches of West
+Haven Bay on a clear, still morning in summer.
+
+There were times when the lonely spinster looked faded and worn, and at
+such times she used to shut herself up in her big gray stone house on
+Cliff Street and refuse to see even her most intimate friends.
+
+“It’s just one of my lonesome moods,” she used to say, “and I would not
+for worlds inflict myself on innocent people when one is on me.”
+
+But Miss Campbell had not had a single attack of loneliness since Billie
+had come to live with her. The vigorous, active young girl had awakened
+the entire household which had run on its steady even course for so many
+years, and now the place hardly recognized itself, filled with the happy
+voices and gay laughter of Billie and her friends.
+
+It was an unusual sight for the big mahogany table in the dining room to
+be loaded with the best cut glass and silver and adorned with delicate
+lace doilies, which had belonged to Miss Campbell’s grandmother. These
+thing had been laid away for many years. In the centre of the table was
+a crystal vase filled with forget-me-nots.
+
+“They are the only flowers I could think of which were the color of your
+blue birds,” Miss Campbell had explained. “Besides, they are my favorite
+color. You know, I always wear blue when I don’t wear gray. Sometimes I
+wear black——”
+
+“Black, Cousin Helen?” repeated Billie. “I didn’t know you ever wore
+anything so mournful.”
+
+“You shall never see me in it, child, if I can help it. But I have a
+black dress, only one, and I do wear it at times in my bedroom.”
+
+Some thirty years before Miss Campbell, then a young and beautiful girl,
+had come to West Haven to live with her grandfather and there she had
+lived ever since, except for an occasional trip abroad. It was supposed
+that she had suffered a great sorrow at some time in her life, but the
+real story had never been known. Captain Campbell, her grandfather, had
+been a jovial, pleasure loving old man, fond of company and
+entertaining. He liked to have his beautiful granddaughter stand at his
+side and receive his guests in a brocaded ball gown, with the famous
+Campbell diamonds blazing in her hair and the diamond and sapphire
+necklace around her throat.
+
+But after General Campbell’s death there were no more balls and dinners
+in the big, old house. The long parlors were seldom opened except to be
+cleaned and aired, and Miss Campbell, now a somewhat shrivelled pink and
+white little lady of fifty-five, interested herself only in the
+charities of West Haven.
+
+“Yes, my dear children, this household and its mistress have got into
+such a lethargy that it is time they were waked up. We have been sunk in
+so deep a rut, my old servants and I, that it might have closed over our
+heads and the world gone on just the same.”
+
+“Lots of poor families would have gone begging at Christmas, then, Miss
+Campbell,” put in Elinor.
+
+“And what would all those poor old seamen have done?” went on Nancy.
+
+“And the Blue Birds,” added Mary Price. “We should have had to use a
+corner of the gymnasium at school for our most secret society meetings.”
+
+Miss Campbell paid the rent of the Blue Bird club rooms.
+
+“And, pray, what should I have done?” finished Billie. “I should have
+been knocking around still with papa, trying to get on with the queer
+people who live in hotels, and never have had nice girls to go with or a
+delightful home to stay in.”
+
+Miss Campbell blushed with pleasure.
+
+“I have a great many surprises up my sleeve for my little Motor Maids. I
+shall only tell you one, though. What would you say to a Blue Bird
+Thanksgiving ball?”
+
+“Oh, oh, oh! How splendid!” cried the young girls.
+
+“Honk, honk!” went the motor horn at the front entrance, which was a
+signal for breakfast to come to an end and the party to be off.
+
+A hamper of luncheon had been strapped behind the car with the suit
+cases. Miss Campbell sat between Elinor and Mary in the back, while
+Nancy took the seat now understood to be hers always, beside her friend
+Billie, in front. The four Campbell servants, who had grown old in their
+mistress’s service, stood in a row on the gravel walk to witness the
+strange sight of their beloved “Miss Helen” sailing away in a red
+infernal machine, her blue automobile veil streaming out behind like a
+piece of flying cloud.
+
+“Don’t go too fast, Billie,” she exclaimed, as they turned the corner of
+Cliff Street, and whirled down the steep, rather slippery Main street of
+West Haven. “Remember that you have got a decrepit old woman in the back
+who has never ridden behind anything faster than a pair of ambling
+carriage horses in all her life.”
+
+“How about the five-thirty express, Cousin Helen?” Billie called over
+her shoulder.
+
+“A locomotive with an engineer is a very different thing from a young
+girl guiding a scarlet comet,” the little lady answered; but as they
+left the street for the country road and Billie gradually increased the
+speed, Miss Campbell leaned back with a look of blissful enjoyment on
+her face.
+
+“It is one of the most exhilarating things I have ever experienced,” she
+confided to Elinor.
+
+At noon they stopped for lunch. The road now lay along a high cliff
+overlooking the ocean, which on this calm September morning was as
+serenely blue and still as a mill pond. White sails dotted it here and
+there, and an occasional wave rippled on the pebbly beach with a
+murmuring, drowsy sound.
+
+They had pulled up at the side of a little pine grove just off the road
+and spread the lunch cloth on a carpet of pine needles.
+
+Then the delicious cakes and sandwiches which Miss Campbell had ordered
+from Mrs. Price were arranged in neat piles, while Elinor opened her tea
+basket, a present from an aunt in Ireland, and made tea for the company.
+
+It was all very delightful and they were enjoying themselves thoroughly,
+when Billie and Nancy, who were seated facing the others, received a
+slight shock. A tall, slender woman, dressed in black, with a long black
+chiffon veil completely concealing her face, suddenly emerged from
+behind a clump of dwarf oak and bay trees at the far end of the grove
+and beckoned to them.
+
+The two girls exchanged glances of amazement and Nancy was about to say:
+“Why, look at that woman!” when the woman, herself, put her finger to
+her lips and shook her head violently.
+
+“I think she’s crazy, Nancy,” said Billie, in a low voice, under cover
+of the conversation of the others. “We had better not take any notice.
+It would just alarm Cousin Helen and spoil the day.”
+
+Nancy agreed with her, and the two girls were about to suggest that they
+start on again, when the woman began making the most extraordinary
+motions of entreaty, imploring them with outstretched arms, beseeching
+them with every gesture to come to her. And still the two girls hung
+back. Then the woman raised the sleeve of her loose black silk wrap and
+showed her arm bound with a bloody handkerchief.
+
+Nancy gasped at this. The sight of blood was always sickening to her.
+But, seeing Billie’s meaning glance in Miss Campbell’s direction, she
+pretended that she had choked on her tea.
+
+The other three were deep in a conversation. Miss Campbell was
+describing a beautiful ball she had once been to where she had danced
+with a real prince, and they hardly noticed when Nancy and Billie
+strolled over to the clump of bushes.
+
+The woman, who had been waiting for them, seized Billie’s arm and in a
+low, rapid voice said:
+
+“I see that you are both unusually nice girls whom I can trust. I am in
+great trouble. You will help me, will you not? It is very simple, what I
+am going to ask you. You see, I have been in a wreck.”
+
+“A motor wreck?” asked Billie.
+
+“Yes, yes,” replied the woman, not impatiently but as if she were very
+much pressed for time. “The car rolled over the embankment. You will see
+it below there. It happened just in the curve of the road. There was no
+excuse except that we were going too fast and the wheels did—what is it
+you call it? Skidded? We saved ourselves, all three, by jumping.
+Fortunately the back wheels were caught in the sand and there was just
+time to climb out as the car was overturned. The others have left me.
+They will return at any moment now with another car. Hidden under the
+seat of the wrecked car is a small box. I must have it. I must indeed. I
+cannot get it myself. I have sprained my knee, and can stand only by
+supporting myself against this tree. Will you get that box for me and
+place me in your debt always, always? You cannot understand how
+important it is for me to have it.”
+
+“Of course, we will,” Billie assured her, “and won’t you let us help you
+over to our party, or make you comfortable here with the cushions until
+your friends come back?”
+
+“No, no, no,” replied the stranger. “I do not wish to be seen if
+possible. I only beg you to make haste. I will wait here.”
+
+As the woman grew more in earnest, her voice seemed to deepen and
+vibrate like a musical instrument, and the girls almost forgot to listen
+to her words under the spell of its wonderful tones; and when she threw
+back her veil, they still stood rooted to the spot, for she was really
+quite the most beautiful person they had either of them ever seen. Her
+eyes and hair were dark, her skin rather creamy in texture; there was a
+generous curve to her lips, a straight nose and full, rounded chin. She
+smiled a little as she noticed the admiration of the two girls, showing
+two rows of white, even teeth.
+
+“You will not refuse?” she asked again.
+
+And they helped her to sit down on the ground and hurried out of the
+grove to the roadside. There, sure enough, lying on its side in the
+sand, some forty feet below the road, was the wrecked motor car.
+
+“Nancy, I would do anything for her,” observed Billie, as they clambered
+down the embankment.
+
+“Isn’t she perfect?” exclaimed Nancy. “And still, Billie, I can’t help
+believing that she’s slightly off in her upper story. She was so queer.
+But a shock like that would be enough to turn anybody delirious, jumping
+out of an automobile as it turned over an embankment.”
+
+“It’ll all depend on whether we find the box. If it is just a delirious
+dream, there won’t be any box and we will have had our climb for
+nothing.”
+
+They searched the upturned car and there was nothing in it. The ground
+was strewn with wreckage. Cushions and rugs were scattered about in wild
+confusion. The girls searched the place hurriedly all the way down to
+the foot of the cliff.
+
+“There is no need of wasting any more time, Nancy, dear,” said Billie at
+last. “It’s very evident to me that the beautiful lady was out of her
+mind and we’ve been ‘stung,’ as the boys say. Let’s go back. Perhaps she
+will let us help her get somewhere.”
+
+[Illustration: Half buried in the sand was a small box of highly
+polished wood.]
+
+“Yes, I am afraid it’s just a case of King George’s men marched up the
+hill and then marched down again,” said Nancy.
+
+“And I got two grass stains when I fell down just now,” added Billie,
+looking ruefully at her white serge skirt.
+
+“My shoes are full of sand, and I’ve soiled my white stockings,” went on
+Nancy. “Look,” she cried suddenly; “look, Billie, here it is right under
+our noses. I suppose that little bay tree hid it from us on our way
+down. I ask the beautiful lady’s pardon; but I still can’t imagine why
+her own friends couldn’t have got it for her just as well as we could.”
+
+Half buried in the sand was a small box of highly polished wood, six or
+eight inches square. Two broad bands of silver reinforced it at the back
+and sides, and a little silver combination lock took the place of the
+keyhole. In the middle of the box was a small, round silver plate, on
+which a coat of arms was engraved.
+
+“This is the box, all right enough,” said Billie, examining it with much
+curiosity. “Now let’s return it to that mysterious lovely person and go
+on our ways, rejoicing.”
+
+But they were not destined to get rid of the box that day nor for many
+another day. Just as they reached the top of the cliff they heard the
+whirring of a motor engine. A car was just starting from the grove. Two
+men were on the front seat, while the owner of the box was lying almost
+helplessly in the back seat, her veil thrown back and her face white and
+drawn. There was no top to the car and the girls could see her plainly.
+They thought she must have fainted, but when Nancy called: “Wait, please
+wait,” she raised herself quickly, put her finger to her lips in token
+of silence and dropped a card into the road.
+
+The next instant the strange motor car was lost to sight around the
+curve. Billie picked up the card with some irritation.
+
+“How silly,” she exclaimed, “What are we to do with this thing? Why
+couldn’t she have waited a minute?”
+
+“Because she didn’t want the men to know she had the box, goosey,”
+answered Nancy. “It’s as plain as the nose on your face. What does the
+card say?”
+
+It was a man’s business card and read:
+
+  “Pierre Lafitte, Avocat,
+  Rue——21. Paris.”
+
+On the back of the card had been painfully written with a pencil:
+
+  “I knew when you were gone so long that you would be too late. If
+  you are merciful and kind, keep the box a secret from all the world.
+  You will not regret it. Send your name to this address and you shall
+  be relieved at once.”
+
+“Burdened with another secret,” cried Billie, in a resigned voice.
+“Where can we hide the thing?”
+
+“I’ll sit on it for the time being,” answered Nancy, laughing. “There
+come the girls.”
+
+“What are you two infants up to?” called Elinor, appearing just then at
+the edge of the grove. “We thought you had gone in the other direction
+and we’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
+
+“We have—er——” hesitated Billie, who never could tell fibs. “What
+have we been doing, Nancy?”
+
+“We’ve been looking at a wreck. Don’t you want to see it?”
+
+“Nancy Brown,” cried her friend Mary, putting her hands on Nancy’s
+shoulders and gazing into her face, “you’ve got a secret. I can tell by
+your expression. You are hiding something.”
+
+“I’m trying to hide it, but I find it rather difficult. I feel like a
+bantam hen sitting on a goose egg.”
+
+“Let’s push her off her goose egg,” cried Elinor, “and see what it
+really is.”
+
+“Help, Billie, help!” screamed Nancy, while the four friends engaged in
+a school girl romp, and Miss Campbell, who was dozing in the grove, half
+opened her eyes and smiled.
+
+“Is there anything more charming and sweeter than the sound of
+children’s voices out of doors?” she said to herself. She could never
+get used to the idea that Billie was not still the little eight-year-old
+girl who had spent a summer in West Haven seven years before.
+
+In the meantime, the guardian of the box was well defended by Billie
+until she began to laugh, and when Nancy was taken with the giggles her
+father used to say she was nothing but an abandoned lunatic. The place
+rang with the joyous peals and the other girls were obliged to pause in
+the struggle and join in. Then this foolishly happy child rolled
+helplessly onto the ground, upsetting the box.
+
+But there came a sudden end to the laughter, for the top of the box had
+sprung open and its contents were scattered on the roadside.
+
+The girls clasped their hands excitedly and gazed at each other with
+wide-eyed amazement, for at their feet glittered dozens of the most
+beautiful jewels. There were a diamond and sapphire necklace, strings of
+pearls, earrings, rings, and broaches.
+
+“Great heavens, what have you girls been doing?” exclaimed Mary.
+
+“Nancy, you explain,” answered Billie, grown very grave, all of a
+sudden. “I’ll gather these things up and get them out of sight as
+quickly as possible. I think my suit case is the safest place for the
+time being, and we can take it into the front of the car with us. Then
+we can discuss later what we had better do.”
+
+While the girls listened to Nancy’s strange story of the beautiful
+injured woman, Billie collected and replaced the jewels in the box with
+the card, and packed it in the bottom of her suit case.
+
+In another ten minutes the motor party was on the road again, the
+younger members somewhat sobered by the secret responsibility which had
+been thrust upon them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.—THE BOX OF TROUBLES.
+
+
+Shell Island is really only an island in name. A narrow creek which
+fills and empties with the incoming and outgoing tides divides it from
+the mainland. A bridge spans this chasm over which flows a constant
+stream of motor and driving parties from all the villages and summer
+resorts up and down the coast.
+
+Just at sundown, as the “Comet” took the steep road down the cliff to
+the bridge, a big touring car shot past.
+
+“Oh, dear,” exclaimed Nancy, “I did hope we would leave all care behind
+when we came away, and now I am perfectly certain that Belle Rogers was
+sitting on the front seat of that automobile. I suppose she’ll be
+floating around the ballroom in blue chiffons this evening.”
+
+“Is she a care?” asked Billie, who had a placid and rather masculine way
+of forgetting all about the people she didn’t like.
+
+“Oh, I don’t mind her, only she always makes me feel like a rag picker’s
+daughter.”
+
+“I think she’s over-dressed,” put in Billie. “I should feel utterly
+foolish with all that finery and jewelry on me. When papa and I used to
+buy my clothes, he would say: ‘Suppose we stick to plain white,
+daughter, and skip the furbelows. We can’t go very far wrong if we do
+that, and if my little daughter begins to put on ruffles and puffles and
+falals without anybody’s advice but mine, I’m afraid she might be taken
+for a walking fashion plate and some one will try to stand her up in a
+shop window.”
+
+Nancy laughed.
+
+“I think you have the prettiest dresses I ever saw, Billie, but I am
+glad Miss Campbell has persuaded you to stop dressing so much like a
+boy. Lace collars are lots more becoming than those stiff linen ones.”
+
+“They were chokers,” answered Billie, good-naturedly, as the car drew up
+at the steps of the hotel immediately behind the automobile which had
+passed it on the road.
+
+Belle and her party were waiting on the piazza, the women in long pongee
+coats with the very latest motor bonnets and veils.
+
+“Those are her rich friends, the Jordannes,” whispered Nancy, in awed
+tones. “They used to be just plain Jordan before they made so much
+money.”
+
+“I think Jordan is a much nicer name. It has such a fine Oriental sound,
+‘Where rolls the River Jordan.’”
+
+By this time several porters from the hotel had stepped to the motor car
+door and assisted Miss Campbell, somewhat stiff from the long ride, to
+alight. The girls jumped nimbly out after her and their luggage was
+unstrapped and piled on the ground near the Jordanne luggage. But Billie
+was careful to keep a firm hold on her own suit case with its precious
+load.
+
+“Let the man take your bag, dear,” called Miss Campbell. “You will
+strain your back carrying that heavy thing.”
+
+There was nothing for Billie to do but resign the suit case, although
+she tried to keep an eye on it as they followed the porter through the
+lobby to the elevator. Miss Campbell had telegraphed ahead for rooms.
+
+As luck would have it, there was another elevator for luggage, and the
+bag was temporarily out of Billie’s sight, but her mind was soon at ease
+when she saw it stacked with the others in the bedroom which she and
+Nancy were to share.
+
+“While we dress for dinner,” she observed, “we’ll have a talk about that
+jewelry. What on earth are we going to do with it?”
+
+“Don’t you think we’d better tell Miss Campbell?” suggested Elinor.
+
+“I suppose it would be best, but Cousin Helen does go off so about
+things, and I have a feeling that if she knew it she wouldn’t allow us
+to keep our promise to our poor beautiful lady. She would be sure to
+turn the box over to the police or call in a lawyer or something. And if
+we could only keep the box until we heard from the man in Paris, at
+least, we should be keeping our word about it.”
+
+Elinor and Mary were all for telling, but the other girls were still
+under the spell of the very beautiful and distressed woman, and since it
+was mostly their affair they concluded not to tell.
+
+You must not blame Billie for this want of frankness. Girls who have
+never had mothers to talk to in the intimate way that only a mother and
+daughter know, are apt to be reserved and self-reliant. Billie would
+certainly have told her father, but, then, he was in Russia.
+
+Mary and Elinor, whose room adjoined the other, had put on their kimonos
+and were lolling on the beds, while Nancy with solicitous care was
+removing her pretty muslin frock from the valise and smoothing out the
+pink taffeta ribbons tenderly.
+
+Billie knelt on the floor and opened her suit case.
+
+“Before I undress,” she said decisively, “I’m going to take this box
+straight down stairs and give it to the clerk to put in the safe. Then
+we can spend the evening with easy minds.”
+
+She flung back the top and sat down on the floor with a gasp.
+
+“In the name of all the powers, this is not my suit case.”
+
+The girls gathered around her in great excitement.
+
+“It’s exactly like mine,” she went on, “but there are no initials on it
+and mine has ‘W.H.C.’ on the end.”
+
+“Girls,” cried Nancy, flinging her bathrobe around her with a tragic
+gesture, “the very last person in the world we could wish to have
+Billie’s suit case is the very one who has it. She’ll look at everything
+in it; examine the underclothes to see if they are hand-made and the
+stockings to see if they are silk, and—she’ll open the box of jewels
+and read the card of the avocat from Paris and——”
+
+“Who? Who?” interrupted the other three.
+
+“Who but Belle Rogers,” cried Nancy, flourishing a towel in one hand and
+a hair brush in the other.
+
+“Yes, that’s her costume,” admitted Mary, laughing. “Blue chiffon with a
+wreath of pink roses for her hair.”
+
+She pulled up a corner of the pale blue gauzy material and pointed to a
+little pink wreath which lay in the folds of the dress.
+
+“There are her blue satin slippers, No. Two’s, absolutely not a size
+larger,” said Elinor, pointing to the toe of a little slipper which
+showed at one end of the suit case.
+
+“This is what I get for losing the keys to everything,” groaned Billie.
+“Telephone for a boy, quick, some one, while I fasten this thing up.
+Perhaps she hasn’t opened mine yet.”
+
+“Opened it!” echoed the others. “You don’t know her.”
+
+Presently a bell boy tapped at the door.
+
+Billie gave him the suit case with full instructions.
+
+“And hurry,” she added. “If you are back here in five minutes, you shall
+have an extra tip.”
+
+Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed. The other girls were almost dressed,
+and Billie was beginning to tap the floor nervously with an impatient
+foot, when at last there was a tap at the door.
+
+“Why didn’t you come sooner?” demanded Nancy and Billie in one voice.
+
+“The young lady wouldn’t let me, Miss.”
+
+“But what was she doing all that time?”
+
+“I don’t know, Miss. She simply told me to wait outside. She was very
+angry, Miss, about her bag.”
+
+“Angry, indeed,” answered Billie, seizing her own suit case. “At least
+no time was lost in sending it to her.”
+
+The two girls opened the suit case with great anxiety. The things in it
+were assuredly in rather a rumpled condition. They had the appearance of
+having been unfolded and hastily rolled up again in new folds.
+
+Nothing could be told about the box of jewels. They were all there
+apparently in a glittering bunch with the card laid on top.
+
+“Dear me, I’m sorry that combination lock broke,” exclaimed Billie. “I
+don’t mind Belle Rogers looking through my clothes if it gives her any
+satisfaction, but I would just as soon she hadn’t looked into this box
+of jewels. And we can’t explain to her, because we mustn’t seem to know
+that she was capable of doing anything so low and common as to go
+through my suit case.”
+
+She dressed herself hastily in a pretty white frock. Her smooth rolls of
+hair and trim braid did not need re-arranging, and she hurried
+downstairs to the desk with the troublesome box, which she gave into the
+charge of the clerk.
+
+“These are some really valuable things,” she said. “Will you put them in
+your safe?”
+
+The clerk wrapped the box up neatly in heavy brown paper, sealed it with
+red sealing wax, labelled it with her name and address and deposited it
+in the safe.
+
+“That’s off my mind,” she said, giving a sigh of relief, just as the
+elevator door opened and Miss Campbell appeared with the other girls.
+
+“Cousin Helen, you’re a dream,” cried Billie, taking her cousin’s arm.
+“You are like a young girl whose hair had gone and turned white in a
+single night.”
+
+“Thank you, my dear, but you may be sure that if anything happened which
+could make my hair turn white in a night, it wouldn’t leave me any
+girlish looks. But why didn’t you come to my room and let me have a look
+at you? Are you all exactly right and in place? That’s a sweet little
+frock. I suppose you got it in Paris last summer. You and your father
+are a pair of children shopping together, I imagine. All my girls look
+sweet,” she added, not wishing to wound any feelings by admiring one
+more than another. “See this lovely dress my little Mary is wearing.
+Could anything be more exquisitely made than that? Your mother is a
+wonderful woman, child. There’s nobody like her in West Haven.”
+
+At dinner there was another surprise for the girls. This time it was an
+agreeable one: four extra places at the table, and presently they were
+joined by four West Haven boys, looking rather embarrassed but quite
+happy as they shook hands with the fairy godmother of the party,
+Billie’s Cousin Helen.
+
+Two of the boys we have met before, Ben Austen and Charlie Clay. The
+other two were their intimate friends and boon companions, Americus
+Brown, Nancy’s brother, known as “Merry Brown,” and Percival Algernon
+St. Clair, whose mother’s fancy had run riot in naming her only child.
+He was called “Percy” by his friends for short.
+
+“Why, look who’s here,” exclaimed Nancy. “Percival Algernon St. Clair,
+why didn’t you tell us yesterday when you gave us soda water at the drug
+store that you were coming on this trip, too?”
+
+“Because it was secret,” answered Percy, who was very blond and blushed
+easily. “Miss Campbell wanted to surprise you.”
+
+“I thought it would be nice for my girls to have some partners for the
+dance to-night,” said Miss Campbell. “I wanted to see some real
+dancing.”
+
+“If you want to see the real thing, then, Miss Campbell,” said Merry
+Brown, “if you want to see the poetry of motion, you must see Ben
+dance.”
+
+“Shut up, bow-legs,” called Ben across the table. “I’ve been learning
+for months. I took lessons last summer.”
+
+“Where?” demanded his friends, because at the school dances, Ben’s
+expression of misery was well known when he towed an unfortunate friend
+around the room.
+
+“I know,” said Percy, “it’s all explained now. That’s what you were
+doing at the Dutch picnics every week.”
+
+“Well, they were pretty good teachers,” replied the imperturbable Ben.
+“They taught me that guiding a girl in a dance was very much like
+sailing a boat with a windmill for a sail. You have to guide and twirl
+at the same time, and the more speed you make in twirling the better
+your dancing is.”
+
+Everybody laughed uproariously at this description.
+
+“Ben Austen, I didn’t expect to be treated like a windmill sail boat
+when I promised to give you my first dance,” announced Elinor.
+
+“It would be better than to be treated like a stationary windmill and go
+turning around in one place like the Germans dance,” observed Billie.
+
+“You may all have your choice,” said Ben. “Stationary or progressive,
+it’s all one to me, only remember that you have each promised to do a
+Dutch twirl with me.”
+
+The ballroom was already quite filled with dancers and it seemed very
+bewildering and delightful to the young girls, if it was only a summer
+hotel with a piano and two violins and a flute for an orchestra. Ben’s
+Dutch whirl was so skillfully performed, because like everything else he
+attempted he had mastered it perfectly, that the girls found it rather
+exciting fun.
+
+“It’s a regular romp,” cried Billie, who, with glowing cheeks, dropped
+breathlessly into a chair beside her Cousin Helen.
+
+“Look,” whispered Mary Price, who had been dancing a quiet glide with
+Charlie Clay and had had a chance to notice some of the other dancers.
+
+For some reason both their young faces turned suddenly very grave. Was
+it a strange, unexplained premonition that told them the most dangerous
+enemy either was ever to have was dancing past that moment, in floating
+pale blue chiffon draperies?
+
+After the dance there was a merry supper party with sandwiches and
+lemonade in the grill room, and then the Motor Maids were glad enough to
+get to their beds.
+
+“What a relief it is, Nancy, dear, to have that box of jewels in the
+safe,” said Billie sleepily, as her eyelids drooped and she settled
+herself under the covers.
+
+But Nancy did not reply. She was sleeping deeply. Billie, too, was soon
+oblivious of everything in the world.
+
+As the night wore on, Nancy dreamed that she was dancing the Dutch twirl
+in a wonderful blue gauze dress, but that the diamond necklace she wore
+so weighed her down that she could not breathe.
+
+Billie also dreamed of the diamonds. They were not around her neck, but
+in their box, which had grown to the size of a trunk and pressed on her
+chest so heavily that she was suffocating.
+
+Suddenly a great bell clanged out in the night.
+
+Billie opened her eyes with difficulty. The room was filled with smoke
+and down the corridor there came the cry of “Fire! Fire!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.—THE FIRE.
+
+
+A bell with a deep baying note rang out in the darkness.
+
+If you have ever heard a fire bell boom out in the stillness, you will
+remember the terror which clutched your heart at the first ominous peal.
+It seemed to Billie, in going over it afterward, that the boom of that
+big fire bell was like the last trump on the day of judgment arousing
+the spirits of the dead.
+
+Then came the sound of voices. The corridors were filled with hurrying
+footsteps. Somebody ran down the hallway calling again:
+
+“Fire! Fire!”
+
+Billie jumped to the floor with a bound. Her senses had returned at
+last.
+
+“Nancy, Nancy!” she cried, shaking her friend violently back to
+consciousness. “The hotel is on fire. Get into your dressing gown as
+quickly as you can while I wake up the others.”
+
+As she switched on the light she saw that the room was filled with
+smoke, and she knew the fire must be in their wing of the hotel and that
+there was no time to lose.
+
+There is no better fire trap in the world than a wooden hotel at the
+seaside. The salt from the flying spray in winter storms has seasoned
+the wood into splendid burning material, and the breeze from the ocean
+fans the flames like a great natural bellows.
+
+As Billie waked the other girls Miss Campbell came into the room, with a
+white, scared face. But she was not excited.
+
+“Get into your dressing gowns, girls,” she said quietly. “Don’t lose a
+moment’s time. The boys are waiting for us outside.”
+
+Just then Ben Austen rattled on the door.
+
+“Hurry,” he called. “The elevators won’t run much longer and the stairs
+are burning.”
+
+Hardly two minutes had passed since the first clang of the bell when
+Miss Campbell and the girls joined the boys in the corridor. There had
+not been time even to snatch up a hair-pin from the bureau to catch
+tumbled locks together. But nobody looked at any one else. The place was
+crowded with hotel guests in exactly the same condition and all the
+passages opening into the main corridor of the hotel were emptying
+themselves of streams of people in every state of disarray. If it had
+been less serious, the girls might have laughed at the numbers of
+terrified and hysterical fat women, wrapping insufficient dressing gowns
+and blankets about their large forms as they pushed their way without
+ceremony toward the elevators.
+
+But a big tongue of flame suddenly leapt up the stairwell at the end of
+the hall. There was a crackling sound and clouds of black smoke poured
+into the corridor.
+
+“We must get out of this,” exclaimed Ben. “The fire has reached this
+floor and unless we knock a few people down, we’ll never get to either
+of those elevators.”
+
+“But where are the fire escapes?” demanded Miss Campbell.
+
+“At the end of the hall,” answered Charlie, “and we could never get past
+that burning pit.”
+
+The two elevators had been up and down several times, packed with
+people. The smoke was growing thicker each moment, and the next thing
+Billie remembered was that Elinor had fainted dead away, and that some
+one had screamed:
+
+“The elevators have stopped running!”
+
+In the stifling atmosphere she saw Ben and Charlie lift Elinor and call
+to the others to follow them into a bedroom. As she staggered after
+them, a grotesque figure, screaming hysterically, fought through the
+crowd, almost knocking Billie down. Even in that moment of danger she
+recognized Belle Rogers, every lock of whose golden hair was done up on
+red rubber curlers, the ends of which stuck straight up like scores of
+little devils’ horns.
+
+“Take me down! Take me down!” Billie heard her scream. “I will not die
+in this horrible way! Somebody save me!”
+
+Billie touched her on the shoulder.
+
+“Don’t scream,” she said. “It only makes things worse. The people who
+are left are going to get down by the windows. Come with us.”
+
+Belle, who had been separated from her friends, followed quietly enough.
+
+In another moment the corridor was empty, and the flames which had been
+fast eating their way along the hall had reached the elevator shafts. It
+had all happened in much less time than it takes to tell, but in the
+brief instant when Billie had paused to rescue Belle, she lost the
+others. Once in a bedroom, where the air was not so stifling, it was
+impossible to leave and rush again into the atmosphere outside.
+
+The two girls dashed into the nearest room and closed the door, too
+stifled to notice that the others, led by level-headed Ben and followed
+by the crowd of people left standing by the elevator shafts, had rushed
+into a front room at the end of the hall. In the closets of this room
+and the one adjoining, they found two fire ropes which this
+old-fashioned hotel provided for its guests whose rooms were not located
+near the fire escapes. Those who were not able to slide down the ropes
+were lowered in a chair, and the others, with a foot twisted around the
+rope and grasping a wet towel to keep the palm of the hand from
+blistering, slid down. In the darkness it was impossible to recognize
+faces, and it was not until they were all safe on the ground that they
+missed Billie Campbell.
+
+Then poor Miss Campbell, who had been admirably calm during the whole
+fearful experience, fainted away, and Elinor, now entirely restored by
+the fresh air, was left to take care of her.
+
+Nancy and Mary followed the four boys to the rescue. Tears were rolling
+down Nancy’s cheeks and Mary was as pale as death. Each girl had her own
+peculiar way of showing how much she had come to love their new friend,
+Billie.
+
+In the meantime, Billie, herself, was looking ruefully down into the
+darkness from the window of a room on the third floor and Belle was
+indulging in a fit of real hysterics.
+
+“How dare you bring me here?” she screamed hoarsely, stamping her foot.
+“I might have been saved if you had let me alone, and here we are
+trapped! I always hated you and now I detest you with my whole soul.”
+
+“I thought the others were in here,” said Billie apologetically.
+
+“Thought! Thought!” screamed the wretched girl. “You wanted me to die.
+You wanted me to lose my beauty.”
+
+“You haven’t any to lose just now,” answered Billie. “You look more like
+the Medusa of the snaky locks——”
+
+“Oh, oh!” wept Belle, too angry to articulate.
+
+“You may console yourself this much,” went on Billie. “If you die, I
+shall die with you, but I am going to do my best to save you and myself,
+too.”
+
+“Help! Help!” screamed Belle from the window, not taking any notice. But
+her voice was lost in the wild clamor which came up from below.
+
+Then she flung herself flat on the floor in an agony of sobs.
+
+“It’s better to pray than to cry, Belle. Crying won’t help and we are in
+a pretty warm place. If you were only a sport, it might do a lot of
+good.”
+
+Belle crawled to the window and leaned out. The air in the room was
+becoming unbearable.
+
+In the meantime, Billie’s thoughts were working rapidly. There were the
+sheets, but there wasn’t time to tear them into strips and knot the
+strips together. Besides, she didn’t believe they would reach halfway to
+the ground.
+
+“I am afraid we’ll have to climb it,” she said.
+
+“Climb what?”
+
+“Climb up the side of the shutter to the roof. This is the top floor.
+The flames haven’t reached the roof yet.”
+
+“But what good will the roof do us?”
+
+“I don’t know yet, but it’s better than this. Come on.”
+
+“I tell you I can’t climb. I never did such a thing in my life.”
+
+“You’ll just have to begin then,” said Billie sternly. “Shall I go
+first, or would you rather do it?”
+
+“I’ll go—no, you go.”
+
+“I’ll help you,” said Billie, hoisting herself to the window ledge.
+“Now, don’t look down. Just imagine you are only a few feet from the
+ground and that it’s a very easy stunt. If you decide beforehand that
+you can’t do it, why, of course, you can’t. But it will be much easier
+than staying here to be burned alive in the next few minutes.”
+
+Delivering herself of this boyish but unimpeachable logic, Billie kicked
+off her slippers and swung herself onto the shutter. Just for one brief
+instant a sickening nausea came over her as she looked down into the
+darkness.
+
+Then her fingers grasped the cornice of the roof and, pulling herself up
+with her two arms, as she had learned to do on the parallel bars in the
+gymnasium—only in this instance the shutter made a very uncertain elbow
+rest—she scrambled onto the roof.
+
+“All right, Belle,” she called. “It’s much easier than I thought. Take
+off your slippers and come ahead, and don’t forget to look up and not
+down.”
+
+Belle obeyed in sullen silence. She was as determined as Billie not to
+be burned alive, but her luxurious and self-indulgent nature revolted
+against this uncomfortable and dangerous method of getting out of the
+difficulty. However, there was nothing else to do, so she swung out on
+the shutter as Billie had done, only this time Billie, with all the
+strength in her body was holding the shutter rigid.
+
+As Belle clung on with her hands and her little pink toes, which she had
+stuck into the interstices of the shutter, she suddenly looked down. Her
+grasp weakened and she gave a shriek so piercing that Billie almost
+slipped headlong over the side of the roof, but she grasped Belle’s
+slackening wrist.
+
+“Take a breath,” she said, in a trembling voice. “You can do it, if you
+only make up your mind to.”
+
+“I’ll never, never forgive you,” cried Belle, “and if I live through
+to-night, I’ll pay you back.”
+
+“All right,” answered Billie calmly, seeing all at once that anger
+appeared to give Belle new strength, “only I advise you to get onto this
+roof first.”
+
+Another moment and Belle had clambered over the cornice and was
+stretched out breathless on the roof.
+
+“I would much rather have had a baby to look after,” thought Billie, as
+she looked contemptuously down at the other girl.
+
+“We had better not lose any more time now, Belle,” she said aloud. “If
+you have got your breath and your nerve back, come ahead.”
+
+Belle pulled herself wearily up and followed.
+
+“My feet are all splinters,” she complained, “and my hands are torn and
+bleeding.”
+
+  “’Tis the voice of the lobster: I heard him declare
+  ‘You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair,’”
+
+repeated Billie, half laughing and half sobbing that this foolish verse
+should have flashed through her brain at this strange time.
+
+The two girls hurried along the roof toward the front. It was plain that
+in the scramble to save the lives of the hotel guests there had been no
+time to save the building, and when the young girls turned the corner of
+the roof and looked for a moment across the broad expanse of ocean not a
+hundred yards away it seemed to them that they were alone in the whole
+world.
+
+“What are we going to do now?” demanded Belle.
+
+“I don’t know yet,” answered Billie patiently.
+
+The roof was hot under her feet and they could hear the crackling of
+flames as they hastened along the edge to the other side.
+
+The rest of that fearful adventure seemed like a dream to Billie
+afterwards.
+
+As they turned the corner of the house a voice called hoarsely:
+
+“Who can tie a rope?”
+
+Billie remembered to have replied vaguely and politely that she could
+tie a rope. A man emerged from behind the chimney with a long rope, but
+she hardly noticed at the time that he had only one arm.
+
+“It may not be long enough,” he said, “but tie it and we’ll take the
+risk. It’s our only chance.”
+
+Billie knotted the rope around the chimney. The man examined the knot
+carefully, pulled it with his one hand, and then threw it over the side
+of the house.
+
+“I’ll go first,” said Belle quietly, and Billie looked at her with
+amazement.
+
+“Humph!” said the man. “You are brave. Can you do it?”
+
+“Yes,” answered Belle, “I can do anything. Help me over the side.”
+
+“It’s going to hurt,” he observed, as he twisted the rope around her
+foot and showed her how to slide down. “It’s going to take all the skin
+off your hands and feet and maybe cut to the bone.”
+
+Belle made no reply to this cheerful prediction. She had already started
+down the rope.
+
+As Billie watched her disappear in the dark, the man said abruptly:
+
+“Did a number of girls and a white-haired woman in a red automobile come
+here this evening?”
+
+Billie hesitated.
+
+“I believe so,” she said.
+
+“Do you know so?” asked the man insistently.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Did you see one of them leave a rosewood box at the clerk’s desk?”
+
+Billie made a great effort to remember. Then, suddenly, the case of
+jewels loomed up in her mind. She had forgotten all about them.
+
+“Billie, Billie,” called a voice from below.
+
+“Yes,” she answered, looking over the roof.
+
+“She’s here,” shouted Ben, from the top of the ladder, which reached
+only to the second story.
+
+“All right,” called the one-armed man on the roof. “We have a rope here.
+We’ll swing down to the ladder.”
+
+The next thing Billie remembered she was surrounded by a crowd of her
+friends at the foot of the ladder. The girls were weeping and her Cousin
+Helen was giving vent to hysterical expressions of relief and
+thankfulness. The wet sand felt cool and soft to the parched soles of
+her bare feet, and she tried to smile; but she really had quite
+forgotten what it was all about. Some one close by her groaned and
+sobbed alternately, and a sickening feeling came over her when she saw a
+girl stretched on a blanket almost at her feet. The girl’s hands were
+torn and bleeding and her pale blue silk kimono was covered with blood.
+Down one cheek was a long, bloody mark and to complete her grotesque and
+terrible aspect, at least a dozen little red rubber devils’ horns stood
+upright all over her head.
+
+The next thing Billie remembered was huddling into her own beloved red
+motor car with the others, while some one took them somewhere, and all
+the time in her ears she heard a man’s voice saying:
+
+“Where is that box of jewels?”
+
+And her own voice replied:
+
+“Under the ruins of the Shell Island Hotel.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.—NANCY’S HOME.
+
+
+Nancy’s home was a favorite meeting place of the four friends. There was
+something very inviting about the old red brick house, with its
+low-ceiled, cheerful rooms and deep-silled windows.
+
+Nancy’s family had been seafaring people for many generations, and the
+place was filled with curios from foreign countries: carved chests,
+swords with curved blades, ivory elephants, funny little cross-legged
+grinning gods, beautiful Japanese vases and Oriental rugs.
+
+In cool weather there seemed to be a perpetual piece of old driftwood
+crackling on the hearth, and there was nothing the girls enjoyed more
+than sitting in a row on the floor in front of that cheerful blaze while
+they drank tea from curious Japanese cups and nibbled some of Mrs.
+Brown’s delicate cookies.
+
+Nancy’s father was the very picture of a sea captain, sunburned, ruddy,
+eyes very blue and little side whiskers like an English Squire’s. He had
+a hundred stories to tell of the sea, and Billie could have listened to
+him all day without tiring. Nancy’s mother was a gay, cheerful little
+body who kept her house polished like a ship’s cabin, and Nancy’s
+brother, Merry, was the image of his father. He felt the call of the
+sea, too, as his father and grandfather had before him, but he was not
+to be the captain of a merchant ship. He intended to go to Annapolis.
+
+Three weeks had passed since the great fire at Shell Island, when, one
+Saturday afternoon, a red motor car wound its way in and out of the
+country vehicles on Main Street, stopped at the express office, where
+the young mistress of the car alighted for a moment, returning with a
+package, and then, with a reckless flourish, turned into lower Cliff
+Street and presently stopped in front of Nancy’s house.
+
+Billie entered without ceremony, so intimate had she now become with the
+Brown household. Concealing the package in her gray ulster, she left it
+in the hall. Then, with the boyish freedom which seemed to characterize
+all her ways, pulling off her gray hat and gloves, she marched into the
+parlor.
+
+Nancy was huddled up on the settle doing the family darning, a Saturday
+task she loathed. Elinor was playing softly on the square piano between
+the front windows and Mary Price was reading a book.
+
+“I hope I don’t disturb any one,” said Billie, laughing as she burst
+into the room. “Everybody seems to be so busy here. I’m the only idle
+creature living to-day. Even Cousin Helen is at work.”
+
+“I hope she is doing something more to her taste than this,” said Nancy
+mournfully. “I’d rather dig for clams any day. Merry would wear out a
+sock made of steel chains.”
+
+“Hark, a doleful voice from the tombs,” cried Merry, who always made it
+an excuse to hunt for something in the parlor when Billie appeared.
+
+“It’s the truth,” complained Nancy. “If you would just keep still two
+minutes at a time, I wouldn’t have to give up my Saturdays slaving for
+you.”
+
+“‘When I hear the music play, I can’t keep right still,’” sang Merry,
+executing a double shuffle on the floor to a jig tune Elinor had struck
+up.
+
+“You’ll have to dance to a different tune when you go to Annapolis,”
+cried Nancy. “And who’ll do your darning there?”
+
+“Don’t borrow trouble, Nancy,” answered her brother. “Perform your daily
+task and cease to murmur. You’ll be a professional grumbler like Belle
+Rogers if you keep on.”
+
+“Do you know that she and her whole family are denouncing me as a sort
+of would-be murderer?” put in Billie. “All because I lost Ben and the
+rest of you at the Shell Island fire and took her into the wrong room.”
+
+“I heard that she was an early Christian martyr who had come near to
+being burned at the stake,” said Merry.
+
+“Yes,” continued Billie, “she tells how I enticed her into the room, and
+then climbed up onto the roof and left her, so that she had to follow
+and she even blames me because she would slide down the rope first and
+cut her hands so that she will never be able to play the piano. I am
+very sorry for that, because she liked music, but it was her own fault.”
+
+“It’s really making a sort of split-up in the town,” observed Elinor.
+“Mrs. Rogers and mamma almost had words on the subject the other day. As
+much as mamma will ever have words with any one. Mrs. Rogers tried to
+tell her that Belle was going one way and you made her go another, and
+all mamma said was, ‘My dear Julia, I have heard the correct version of
+the story,’ and swept away.”
+
+“Exactly as you will do, Elinor, when you begin to wear long dresses,”
+said Nancy.
+
+“Oh, she can sweep without a train,” cried Merry, giving a very good
+imitation of Elinor as he made for the door with his baseball bat and
+glove.
+
+“Now, don’t be silly, Americus Brown,” called Elinor after him.
+“Remember that you are to be a soldier of the nation some day, and
+you’ll have to stop walking pigeon-toed, then, and keep your bow-legs
+straight and stop grinning. It will be very difficult, I fear.”
+
+Merry shot a coffee bean at her with his thumb and forefinger as he left
+the room.
+
+“That boy will be the death of me,” exclaimed Nancy. “He reminds me of
+our sailor weather-cock in the garden that waves his arms and legs and
+turns every time there is the slightest breeze.”
+
+“He’s a nice boy,” said Billie, who always took Merry’s side in the
+arguments. “But I am here this morning, as the preacher says, to ask
+your advice in a grave matter. Several grave matters, in fact.”
+
+“Have you heard from Mr. Lafitte?” demanded the three girls in unison.
+
+“No,” said Billie, “and it’s been nearly three weeks since we sent my
+name and address. Perhaps there hasn’t been time, but I should think
+they might have cabled, or something.”
+
+“It only postpones the evil day of telling them the jewels were lost in
+the fire,” observed Mary.
+
+Billie disappeared in the hall for a moment and returned with the
+package she had hidden in her ulster.
+
+“The jewels came back by express this morning,” she said.
+
+“For heaven’s sake!” cried the others.
+
+“I don’t know whether to be glad or sorry,” said Billie. “I am sure
+Pandora’s box didn’t have any more troubles locked inside of it than
+this one has. What shall I do with it now?”
+
+“Why don’t you tell Miss Campbell all about it?” suggested Elinor, for
+the second time.
+
+“But, Elinor, it wouldn’t be right,” answered Billie. “Didn’t we give
+the woman our word of honor, Nancy, that we would keep the box for her
+until she sent for it, and tell no one? Even you and Mary would not have
+known about it if you hadn’t attacked Nancy like two wild Comanche
+Indians and knocked the box open.”
+
+“Don’t you think the woman was crazy, honestly now?” Elinor asked for
+the hundredth time. This was an old argument between the girls.
+
+“No, I don’t,” answered Billie emphatically.
+
+“She was much too beautiful and fascinating to be crazy,” put in Nancy.
+
+“They are the craziest of all sometimes,” said Elinor.
+
+“But to return to the jewels,” interrupted Mary, the peacemaker. “Did
+the hotel people send them back?”
+
+“No, that’s the queerest thing of all, and that’s what I’m here for to
+tell you now. The hotel people wrote me a letter which came this
+morning, saying that it was believed that the fire had been started by
+thieves who robbed the safe and that they, therefore, were not
+responsible for things lost.
+
+“In the same mail came another very nice letter from a strange man named
+Johnston. He said the night of the fire he saw a man who was carrying
+this package faint dead away on the bridge. He believes now the man was
+one of the thieves. Anyway, he took him into his automobile and the
+thief must have come to and not known where he was, because he escaped
+somehow, probably to go back and look for the package, which Mr.
+Johnston has expressed to me.”
+
+“Well, of all the strange stories!”
+
+“But the question is now, what to do with the thing?” continued Billie.
+
+If Billie had been a few years older, she would probably have gone
+straight to Miss Campbell, or to Miss Campbell’s lawyer, Mr. Richard
+Butler, Elinor’s uncle, for advice. The jewels would then have been
+stored in the bank for safe-keeping and proper means taken to find the
+owner. But it seemed to her that having given her word she must keep it,
+and hide the jewels herself in some safe place until she heard from Mr.
+Lafitte. After all, he might be on a journey somewhere, and they could
+only wait patiently.
+
+“Let’s go and consult our guide, counsellor, and friend,” suggested
+Mary.
+
+“Who?” asked the other girls, in some doubt.
+
+“Why, the motor car, of course. Isn’t he the cheerfullest, finest friend
+in the world; always ready to give pleasure; always smiling and ruddy,
+and ready to come and go, stay still or move on—bless him?”
+
+“He is a dear,” said Billie, pleased with this extravagant praise of her
+beloved car.
+
+The girls had come to consider “The Comet” almost as a living thing,
+like a pet horse or a favorite dog. They loved it as ardently as
+children love a pony which has borne them all on his back at one time
+around the garden.
+
+It was decided then to take a spin in the car and the four friends were
+soon in their accustomed places on the red leather seats.
+
+The scarlet car, full of young girls, was no longer an unusual sight in
+the town of West Haven, and people had ceased now to turn and stare at
+the “Motor Maids,” as Captain Brown had christened them one morning when
+they had taken him for a drive in the automobile.
+
+Through the town they sped and out to the open road. The crisp autumn
+air nipped their cheeks and brought the color to their faces. As they
+passed Boulder Lane they looked curiously at the fisherman’s house in
+the distance.
+
+“I am certain those men who took your car were smugglers,” announced
+Nancy. “Father says there are lots of them.”
+
+“Perhaps,” said Billie, “and I am certain of another thing: that it was
+the same one-armed man who was on the roof of the hotel the night of the
+fire.”
+
+“But there are lots of one-armed men in the world, child,” replied
+Nancy.
+
+“Perhaps, but there was something familiar about him. And, besides, why
+did he ask me those questions about the girls at the hotel in the red
+automobile?”
+
+“And, ‘curiser and curiser,’ what did he want with the box of jewels?
+And how did he know we had them?” said Elinor.
+
+“I really couldn’t say,” answered Nancy. “Ask me something easier.”
+
+Seeing nothing ahead of them in the road, Billie had let the car go full
+speed. It was what they all loved, even Mary Price, who had gradually
+got over a certain timidity she used to feel when the car shot through
+the air like a sky-rocket, and it was Mary Price now, grown unusually
+bold from familiarity with speeding, who suddenly jumped up and cried in
+her high, sweet voice:
+
+“I’ve got it! I’ve got it!”
+
+“Got what?” demanded the others.
+
+“Why, a place to put the jewels in, of course. Mother’s safe.”
+
+“But would she like us to use her safe?” asked Billie.
+
+“She won’t mind. I’ll tell her it’s something of yours. She never uses
+it. We haven’t anything to keep in it now,” Mary added simply. “Father
+used it in his life time and Mother has just kept it since because we
+are always expecting to make lots of money, you know, and then we might
+need it. I know the combination, and we can go straight home and put
+them in. No one would ever think of looking for jewels in our little
+house, and they ought to be as safe there as any place in the world.”
+
+“Mary, dear, you are a trump,” exclaimed Billie. “It’s a perfect idea.”
+
+In another moment, they had faced about and were on their way back to
+town.
+
+“Dear old car,” ejaculated Elinor, patting the red leather tenderly.
+“Mary’s right, we couldn’t get on without you. We consult you exactly as
+the ancients consulted oracles. I think all your cushions must be
+stuffed with good advice, instead of horse hair, and your big all-seeing
+eye is always on the lookout for danger——”
+
+“And his heart is true to his jolly crew,” sang Nancy.
+
+“He is better than a horse,” put in Mary, “because he never gets tired.”
+
+“And when he’s empty we fill him with gasoline, and he’ll go ahead as
+fresh as ever,” went on Billie.
+
+“And he always avoids broken glass and tacks in the road,” Elinor was
+saying, when “bang!” went one of the rear tires with a report as loud as
+a pistol shot.
+
+The “jolly crew” could not restrain their ever-ready laughter at this
+disconcerting behavior on the part of “The Comet” just at the very
+moment when their boasts were loudest.
+
+“Oh, well,” said Billie apologetically, “it’s time we had a puncture.
+We’ve never had one yet. We’ll take him to the garage and have him
+mended properly.”
+
+“Chocolates, marshmallows, peanut brittle, and other candies, fresh and
+dee-lishus!” called a voice from behind the motor as they pulled into
+the garage.
+
+It was Percival Algernon St. Clair, wearing a most engaging smile on his
+rosy, good-natured face, as he tipped his boyish cap at Nancy in
+particular in the most approved grown-up fashion.
+
+“Have you any ice cream sodas, Percy-Algy?” demanded Nancy impudently.
+
+“I don’t think the fountain’s dry yet, Nancy, and we’ll have a party, if
+you say so. The gang is close by. Shall I give the signal?”
+
+“I have no objections,” said Nancy, “if the girls haven’t.”
+
+“Why should we?” answered Billie. “Isn’t pineapple soda water my
+favorite beverage?”
+
+Percy put two fingers to his lips and gave three whistles, and, as if by
+magic, Ben Austen, Charlie Clay, and Merry Brown emerged from the shadow
+of a neighboring doorway.
+
+In spite of his theatrical name, his girlish complexion, and blond hair,
+Percy was a great favorite with his friends. He had received a spoiling
+from his doting and indulgent mother that would have turned many another
+boy into a selfish, vain egoist. But Percy had been saved from this
+wretched fate partly by his own frank and engaging disposition and
+partly by association with his three chums, Charlie, Ben, and Merry,
+wholesome, manly boys, who had never been mollycoddled in their lives.
+
+“Will some one carry this parcel then?” asked Billie, pulling the box of
+jewels from under the seat, and tearing the wrapping paper off of a
+corner as she did so.
+
+“I will,” said Merry promptly, taking charge of the box. “Why, it’s
+rather heavy,” he observed, weighing it in his hand. “It must be full of
+gold nuggets.”
+
+Billie was silent. She was beginning to be a little superstitious about
+that box, and she could have wished that the punctured tire and the soda
+water party, pleasant as was this last diversion, had not interrupted
+their plan to store the box in Mrs. Price’s safe.
+
+But Billie enjoyed being with girls and boys of her own age so much that
+she soon forgot her doubts and joined in the gay conversation of the
+little company.
+
+On Saturday afternoons a crowd of High School boys and girls was always
+congregated around the soda water fountain in the West Haven Pharmacy,
+as it was called, and the place was filled with gay talk and laughter,
+when the Motor Maids and their friends pushed their way up to the marble
+counter, while Percy, who had more pocket money in a week than some of
+the others had in a year, paid for the checks.
+
+As luck would have it, Billie and Americus Brown had found places next
+to Belle Rogers, who, very daintily and delicately, though with some
+thoroughness, was consuming a maple-nut sundae.
+
+Merry pushed the box onto the counter while he plunged into a glass of
+chocolate soda water without even noticing that Belle had turned a
+scornful glance, first at him and then at the much soiled and
+travel-stained wrapper on the package. Then, suddenly, something very
+particular claimed her attention. Mary Price, who was standing around
+the curve of the counter, saw the whole thing and reported it later to
+the girls. Where Billie had torn the paper, the polished rosewood
+surface of the box, with its silver mounting, was plainly visible. Belle
+gave one long, astonished stare of recognition.
+
+“After we leave this package at Mary’s, I invite all of you to take a
+ride in the motor,” Billie was saying to Merry Brown. “Do you think
+eight can sit where five are in the habit of sitting?”
+
+“One seat will be big enough for the midgets,”—a nickname given to Mary
+and Charlie,—Merry answered. “One of us can sit on the floor and the
+other four can squeeze onto the back seat. The chauffeur is the only
+person who must have plenty of room.”
+
+“Can’t you move up and give us a little room?” interrupted Nancy,
+pushing her way between her brother and his neighbor, while Percy stood
+patiently by with two glasses of soda water.
+
+Without meaning it, she had jostled Belle Rogers. The two girls turned
+and faced each other.
+
+“How do you do, Belle? Are you quite well again?” asked Nancy politely,
+but with a look in her eyes which meant mischief.
+
+Belle had not been back to school since the fire.
+
+“Miss Brown,” said Belle, bowing stiffly.
+
+“How well your hair stays in curl this foggy weather, Belle,” continued
+Nancy, in a high, pleasant voice, which could be heard by all the boys
+and girls at the counter. “You must put it up almost every night now,
+don’t you?”
+
+“Nancy!” expostulated Billie, as Belle sailed from the drug store,
+followed by several of her loyal friends.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.—AT THE SIGN OF THE BLUE TEA POT.
+
+
+Billie was thankful when they had got the box of jewels safely back into
+the motor car and were on their way at last to Mary’s home.
+
+Mary and her mother lived in a pretty old house facing the public
+square, and it was fortunate that Mrs. Price’s old home was so located.
+In order to support herself and her little daughter, the young widow had
+transformed the lower floor into a tea room and shop. A little blue
+board hung from the portico, which bore the inscription in old English
+script, “At Ye Signe of Ye Blue Tea Pot.” A large bulletin on the front
+door announced that tea and sandwiches of all varieties could be had
+within; also that luncheons were prepared for pleasure parties and
+journeys and that numerous dainty and pretty articles, made by hand,
+were there for sale.
+
+The inscription might have stated further that the plucky mistress of
+the little shop was as dainty and pretty as any of the articles for sale
+on the counter.
+
+As the soda water fountain was the Saturday afternoon meeting place of
+the boys and girls of West Haven, so the Sign of the Blue Tea Pot
+attracted the older crowd. It had seemed a bold undertaking for the
+widow to mortgage her home and put all the money in the chintz hangings
+and wicker furniture of those two charming tea rooms. Her old friends,
+Mr. Butler and Captain Brown, had strongly advised against it, but her
+venture had been a success from the first, although a mortgage still
+hung over the place like a black cloud and small debts would accumulate
+every time she got a little ahead.
+
+When the red motor with its load of young people drew up at the door of
+Mary’s home, the buzz of conversation from inside reached them out in
+the street.
+
+Mary’s mother appeared for a moment in the doorway, and smiled at them.
+
+“She’s as beautiful as an angel,” thought Billie, who never told how
+often she had yearned for a real mother of her very own as other girls
+had.
+
+Could any one else have looked so charming in a perfectly plain homemade
+gray chambray dress, with a white muslin fichu, and little white apron
+to set it off?
+
+“Won’t you come in and have some tea and cake, children?” Mrs. Price
+called to the young people, while she put an arm around Mary and shook
+hands with Billie, who had followed her friend to the front door with
+the troublesome box.
+
+“No, thank you, Mrs. Price,” replied Billie, as spokesman of the party.
+“I only came to ask a favor,” she added, in a lower voice. “Would you
+let me keep this box in your safe for a while? I have no place, I
+mean——” Billie hesitated and blushed. Of all things, she detested
+subterfuge, and yet here she was making all sorts of lame excuses
+instead of saying frankly that she was keeping the box for a friend.
+
+“You mean the old safe upstairs?” asked Mrs. Price, somewhat astonished.
+
+“Yes, mother,” put in Mary. “I told Billie I knew you wouldn’t mind
+locking this box up for her for a while.”
+
+“Certainly, dear, you are welcome to hide anything in it you like. Mary
+knows the combination better than I do. I always have to look it up in
+one of Captain Price’s old note books. I am sorry you won’t have some
+tea and cake, but I suppose you are all off for a spin this afternoon.
+It has done Mary more good than I can tell you, your motor car. The
+child is always studying so hard to hurry up and be a teacher and take
+care of her old mother, so she says.”
+
+“Only a few years more, Mother, and you shall never have to work again,”
+said Mary. “Some day I shall be the Principal of West Haven High School,
+when Miss Gray gets too old to work——”
+
+“What’s this?” exclaimed Miss Gray herself, at the door. She had been
+drinking tea inside with some friends. “Who’s going to lay me on the
+shelf before my time?”
+
+“Mary intends to step into your shoes, Miss Gray,” laughed Mrs. Price.
+“Look out for her. She is a dangerous rival. She means to pay off all
+our mortgages and things, and provide for her mother’s old age.”
+
+Miss Gray pinched Mary’s cheek.
+
+“Yes,” insisted Mary stoutly, “all I want is money, money, money.”
+
+The Principal patted the young girl’s cheek kindly.
+
+“Don’t be too mad about it, child. It won’t buy everything, you know.”
+
+It was only an idle speech of Mary’s but you all know how much meaning
+can sometimes be given to words spoken thoughtlessly and the day was to
+come when Mary was to regret very deeply having used those words.
+
+All this time Billie had been standing quietly waiting for the moment
+when they could leave the older people and consign the box to the iron
+safe upstairs.
+
+But before they could get away the tea room began to empty itself.
+Billie’s Cousin Helen appeared in the doorway, with Mrs. Butler, looking
+like Elinor grown middle-aged, the beautiful aquiline nose slightly more
+pronounced, the blue eyes a little faded, but the same erect carriage
+which made her look an inch or more taller than the other women.
+
+Mme. Alta, the music teacher, was there with Miss Gray. She was a fierce
+looking, dark-haired woman, her two upper teeth protruding over her
+lower lip like the tusks of a walrus, giving her a cruel animal
+expression. Mrs. Rogers, Belle’s mother, a small faded, intensely
+nervous little woman, joined the group, followed by Percival Algernon
+St. Clair’s doting parent, “the Widow St. Clair,” as she was known, a
+charming, plump, pretty woman, as good-natured as she was comfortably
+self-indulgent.
+
+“Why, Wilhelmina, my darling, what is that large package you are
+carrying?” demanded Miss Campbell anxiously. “Has your papa sent you a
+present?”
+
+“Oh, no, just—just a package of things I was going to leave here. We
+are going motoring for a while. You don’t mind, do you Cousin Helen?”
+
+“No, my child, as long as you don’t go too fast. But do put down that
+box. You will injure yourself carrying it so long. Why don’t you put it
+in the motor? Why do you leave it here?”
+
+“Oh, it isn’t mine,” said Billie.
+
+Mrs. Price looked up at this.
+
+“But I thought——” she commenced, when Mary pressed her hand.
+
+“I mean I am keeping it for some one,” went on Billie lamely.
+
+“My dear Miss Campbell,” put in Miss Gray—and Billie thanked her for
+the intervention—“it is a Blue Bird secret, you may depend upon it. You
+do not know school girls as well as I do.”
+
+“It ees a ver-ry eenter-resting looking package,” here remarked Mme.
+Alta. “It appears to be a ver-ry handsome box, as I can plainly see by
+one corner-r which protrudes. You perhaps use if for your club’s
+segrets, eh?”
+
+Billie turned the box guiltily around. She had not noticed that the torn
+end was in view.
+
+Mme. Alta looked at her unnecessarily hard, Billie thought. She had
+never liked the strange woman and had preferred not to take piano
+lessons of her, after one glance at those hard, cruel eyes and the
+fierce walrus teeth.
+
+“I’m sure it contains much more beautiful and interesting things than
+stupid secrets,” exclaimed good-natured, pretty Mrs. St. Clair, who
+disliked to see anybody around her uncomfortable and Billie looked very
+uncomfortable. “Now, dear,” she continued, giving Billie a little
+squeeze, “do go and hide your box, if you like. It’s not fair to quiz
+young girls about their secrets, any more than it is to quiz older
+people,” and she pushed Billie gently into the hall. Mary quickly
+followed and the two girls ran upstairs, glad to get away from the group
+of inquisitive ladies, and infinitely relieved to consign the unlucky
+box into the small safe in the hall closet.
+
+“What a joy to be rid of the thing,” exclaimed Billie, as they shoved
+the box inside, turned the combination lock, and fled downstairs.
+
+“I feel as if we need a good dose of fresh air, Mary, to revive us after
+that inquisition,” she added, as they hurried past the company of tea
+drinkers, who still lingered chatting in the doorway, and joined the
+others in the motor car.
+
+“Percival, my son,” called Mrs. St. Clair, “don’t lean out so far. You
+might fall and break your nose. Oh, oh, my precious boy, they’ll kill
+him!” she shrieked, as Charlie and Merry seized him by the arms and
+pretended to pitch him overboard.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.—RUMORS AT SCHOOL.
+
+
+West Haven High School, Miss Gray, the Principal, had often said, had
+all the merits of a public and private school combined. It was more
+thorough than a private school and the teachers were more in touch with
+the pupils than is usual at a public school. Miss Gray herself was
+deeply interested in the welfare of her girls and studied carefully the
+ability and temperament of each one.
+
+When, therefore, a strange and very terrible complaint was made to her
+one morning about one of her school girls, she was too shocked to reason
+intelligently about it, and ended by dismissing the complainants quietly
+from her private office until she sent for them again.
+
+Exactly what the complaint was no one knew except those who had made it.
+It was kept a careful secret. But in school rumors arise in the most
+subtle way. They are whispered about behind doors at recess; written on
+the margins of text books in class and hastily rubbed out; vaguely
+hinted at here and there until they spread from room to room and class
+to class and gradually the whole school is bursting with the news. And
+the poor victim may all this time be entirely unconscious that she is
+the very centre of a seething, boiling pot of gossip.
+
+This is how the present rumor started in West Haven High School:
+
+One afternoon when the last gong had sounded the sophomore class
+gathered in the locker room to put on their coats and hats. The lockers
+were only so in name. There had never been any keys to them, because
+there had never been any need to keep belongings under lock and key in
+West Haven High School, where most of the pupils had known each other
+all their lives.
+
+On this particular afternoon, every incident of which our four friends
+will remember as long as they live, Nancy was prinking at the glass, as
+usual; Elinor and Billie, with their heads bent over an automobile map,
+were making plans for a motor trip, and Mary Price was studying her
+Latin for the next day. It was that lingering, lazy time after school is
+over, which all school girls know.
+
+Fannie Alta hurried into the room and flung open the door of her locker,
+next to that of Belle Rogers, who was at that moment engaged in looking
+at herself in her own private mirror, hung on the inside of her locker
+door.
+
+“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” exclaimed Fannie Alta, with a very excited and
+strange manner. “I have lost something. Something which my mamma gave me
+to keep for her. What shall I do? What shall I do?”
+
+“Why, what was it, Fannie?” asked the other girls, gathering around her
+sympathetically. “Let us help you find it.”
+
+“Oh, oh, it is terrible!” cried the young Spanish girl, wringing her
+hands and weeping in her handkerchief alternately. “What shall I do?
+What shall I do?”
+
+“Was it money you lost?” asked Billie, in her usual rather abrupt
+manner.
+
+“Yes, yes; how did you know?”
+
+“I didn’t know, I guessed,” answered Billie.
+
+“Did you leave it in your locker?” some one else asked.
+
+“Yes, yes. I left it there at noon to-day. Twenty dollars my mamma gave
+to me to keep for her. Oh, is it not terrible? She will eat me with her
+anger.”
+
+Billie could hardly keep the corners of her mouth from curving with an
+irrepressible smile when she remembered those two front tusks of Mme.
+Alta’s, which seemed to be uncovered, ready for work at any moment.
+
+“Are you sure it is not there still?” asked Elinor quietly. “I happened
+to look up when you came into the room. You simply flung open your
+locker door and then began to cry. Why don’t you look in your pockets
+before you decide that you have lost the money?”
+
+Fannie flashed an angry glance at Elinor.
+
+“How did you know that I had not looked before; that I have not looked
+twice, many times?”
+
+“I didn’t,” answered Elinor. “Have you?”
+
+Fannie did not reply and from that moment she and Elinor disliked each
+other intensely.
+
+Then the girls began looking carefully about the room.
+
+“I feel as if I had it hidden about me,” said Nancy, giggling, as she
+helped in the search.
+
+The others laughed, too, which somewhat relieved the situation. Nothing
+is more uncomfortable than for money to be lost mysteriously in a
+company of people.
+
+“We do look as guilty as the forty thieves,” ejaculated Rosomond McLane,
+a fat, funny girl, who was popular with the whole class.
+
+No one was more active in the search than Belle Rogers. She shook
+Fannie’s text books violently and scattered the papers about, to
+Fannie’s intense annoyance. She felt in Fannie’s pockets, examined the
+lining of her hat, and made herself so officious and numerous that
+Fannie herself exclaimed with much irritation:
+
+“Please do not, Belle. You know it is not there.”
+
+Only Elinor sat quietly on the window sill watching the search, with
+just the faintest shadow of scornful incredulity on her handsome face.
+
+“Elinor Butler, do you believe I have been telling a falsehood?” Fannie
+finally exclaimed in exasperation.
+
+“What a little spitfire you are, Fannie,” answered Elinor. “Just because
+I don’t choose to grovel on the floor looking for your money. I can help
+you quite as much by thinking, and I am thinking very hard, I can assure
+you.”
+
+At last the search was abandoned. The pocketbook containing the money
+could not be found, and the young girls, swinging their book
+straps,—bags were too childish for High School girls,—strolled up the
+street in groups discussing the strange disappearance of Fannie’s twenty
+dollars.
+
+In the meantime, the Motor Maids, laughing and talking together, tossed
+their books into the red car and then climbed in themselves. Somehow,
+Fannie’s loss did not seem very real. Billie had cranked up the machine
+and was about to back out when Fannie’s voice called from the locker
+room:
+
+“Wait! Stop!”
+
+“Well, you see we haven’t gone yet,” answered Elinor severely.
+
+“Elinor, you are so hard on Fannie Alta. I’m sorry for her,” said Mary.
+“Mother wouldn’t bite me if I lost twenty dollars, but I’d hate to lose
+it just the same.”
+
+“I didn’t mean to be hard on her,” answered Elinor, “but my instincts
+tell me not to trust her.”
+
+“When did they tell you, Elinor?” laughed Billie.
+
+Elinor’s instincts were a great joke to her three devoted friends. But
+the appearance of Fannie running breathlessly, with Belle following at a
+dignified pace, interrupted Elinor’s invariable reply to jests about her
+instincts: “You know they are never wrong.”
+
+“What is the matter now, Fannie?” asked Billie, who was standing in the
+front of her car, her arms folded, like a captain on the hurricane deck
+of his ship.
+
+[Illustration: “Get out of the road,” cried Billie, backing recklessly
+out of the shed and whizzing out of the gate at full speed.]
+
+“Would you mind——” Fannie stammered. “I mean—I think I have a right
+to ask—I want you to look in your pockets. I believe——” she
+continued, getting bolder every moment. “I am sure that one of you will
+find my pocketbook——”
+
+Billie’s frank, candid face flushed as scarlet as her motor car, while
+the color left Elinor’s cheeks as white as death. Nancy gave a little
+frightened giggle, and Mary Price neither flushed nor turned white, but
+looked quietly on.
+
+“Really, Fannie,” spoke Elinor, “you are not in the lawless South
+American country you came from, whatever it is. You are among decent
+people, not thieves, and perhaps you had better remember that hereafter.
+Start on, Billie,” she commanded, sitting as erect as a queen at her own
+coronation.
+
+“But I insist!” screamed Fannie.
+
+“She has a right,” put in Belle.
+
+“Get out of the road,” cried Billie, backing recklessly out of the shed,
+turning with a wide, flourishing curve and whizzing out of the gate at
+full speed.
+
+“Well, of all the insolence,” cried Elinor. “What does she mean and how
+does she dare——” her voice choked with indignation.
+
+“Don’t you think it was Belle Rogers who put her up to it out of
+revenge?” suggested Mary.
+
+“If it was, I can’t see what she had to gain by it,” said Billie.
+“Elinor sailed into them and we nearly sailed over them. It seems to me
+we had a good deal the best of it.”
+
+Billie dropped the girls at their homes, as she was in the habit of
+doing every afternoon after school, and whirled up Cliff Street to the
+old Campbell homestead. On the way she passed Belle Rogers, who also
+lived in that fashionable section, but she did not ask her to get in and
+ride up the hill. Billie had a frank, open nature, but with her whole
+soul she distrusted that pink and white doll-baby face and those
+innocent china blue eyes.
+
+In the meantime Mary had taken off her rather threadbare little jacket
+and hung it in the closet. Her mother was resting on the couch. She
+looked pale and tired that day, and Mary walked softly so as not to
+disturb her. Slipping off her mittens, she thrust them into her coat
+pocket. Her fingers encountered something and she pulled out a flat,
+foreign-looking pocketbook. Mary’s face turned white and she leaned
+against the wall of the closet and closed her eyes.
+
+“They must have put it in my pocket,” she whispered. “What shall I do?”
+
+“Mary, dearest,” called her mother.
+
+“Yes, mother,” she answered, quietly slipping the purse into the pocket
+again. “I won’t tell her now,” she thought. “She is worried enough
+already.” And when presently she kissed her mother, no one could have
+told that the young girl was more frightened than she had ever been in
+all her lifetime.
+
+The next morning Mary hurried to school without waiting for Billie and
+her car. She had something to study, she said. But Fannie was there
+before her, waiting in the locker room. Mary tried to calm her beating
+heart as she looked steadily at the other girl. Then, with a sudden
+resolution, she marched straight up to Fannie, and thrust the pocketbook
+into her hand.
+
+“You put this in my pocket,” she said. “I don’t know what you have
+against me, or what I ever did to you, but if you ever do it again, I
+shall go straight to Miss Gray.”
+
+Fannie took the pocketbook without a word, and after that a very
+different version of the story got out. Finally it reached Miss Gray’s
+ears.
+
+But the most serious thing of all was that things began disappearing
+every day out of the girls’ lockers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.—SEVEN LEAGUE ISLAND.
+
+
+“Pile in any old way and make yourselves as comfy as you can,” said
+Billie, from the chauffeur’s seat, while seven boys and girls packed
+themselves into “The Comet” as tightly as sardines in a box.
+
+“Ben, I look to you to take good care of my girls,” called Miss Helen
+Campbell, from the front door steps of her home. “And all of you promise
+me three things: Don’t go too fast; don’t stay too late, and don’t go
+too far.”
+
+“We promise,” came eight voices in a chorus.
+
+“Good-by, Cousin Helen, dearest,” called Billie, kissing her hand
+affectionately to the little lady who was fast coming to fill an aching
+void in Billie’s heart.
+
+“Good-by, Miss Campbell,” called the others, while she smiled and bowed
+and waved her handkerchief like a favorite actress before an
+enthusiastic audience.
+
+What a difference the young people had made in her life, she thought, as
+the carload of boys and girls flashed down the street and the sound of
+their talk and laughter, growing fainter and fainter, floated back to
+her like a pleasant memory.
+
+It was a real seaside October day. Nothing could have been bluer than
+the bay, unless it was the sky. A warm, dry land breeze swept over the
+moors about West Haven. Wild asters and golden rod colored the roadside,
+and the stillness of Indian summer pervaded the whole country.
+
+“There was no need of the top to-day,” observed Billie, looking up at
+the cloudless sky. “I am glad we decided not to put it on. We might as
+well have left the rugs and wraps behind, too. They take up room and
+won’t be used, I am certain.”
+
+“I hope not,” answered Ben. “I see only one cloud on the horizon and
+that’s no larger than a man’s hand; but clouds do grow.”
+
+“Don’t borrow trouble, Rain-in-the-Face,” exclaimed Percy. “The last
+time you looked into the future we had a fire.”
+
+“All right, dummy,” answered his friend. “I am not predicting anything.
+I only mentioned the possibilities of a very small cloud. And the night
+of the Shell Island fire I said what certainly proved to be perfectly
+true—that the hotel was a regular fire trap.”
+
+“Are you really a good weather prophet, Ben?” asked Billie anxiously.
+She did not like to have her parties turn out disastrously.
+
+“He—he’s the poorest ever,” cried Merry.
+
+“Don’t go on what he says, Billie,” put in Percy. “The last camping trip
+we went on, he predicted fair weather and it rained for a week.”
+
+“Well, just to prove that I know what I’m talking about,” cried Ben, “I
+predict that it rains before night.”
+
+This unpopular prophecy was greeted by hoots of derision from the
+others.
+
+“What makes you think so, Ben?” asked Elinor. “It’s as clear as a bell
+now.”
+
+“Certain signs,” he answered.
+
+“Now, Ben Austen,” ejaculated Nancy. “Don’t go spoil our day before it’s
+begun. You know just as well as I do that it’s Indian summer, and it
+never rains in Indian summer.”
+
+“Never, Miss Nancy-Bell?” repeated Ben, smiling. He minded as little
+being teased by his friends as a big, good-natured dog minds the antics
+of a lot of puppies.
+
+“All right, Big Injun Ben,” said Merry, “let it rain before night. We’ve
+got a good many hours to enjoy ourselves in and get home, too, before
+dark. We’ll be at the ferry-boat landing in an hour, and if we’re lucky
+enough to catch the boat, we’ll reach Seven League Island by eleven
+o’clock. That will give us plenty of time to eat everything in sight,
+see Smugglers’ Cave, and all the other sights, and get home by seven
+o’clock.”
+
+“Of course, we can,” replied Ben. “I was only teasing Percival Algernon
+St. Clair, because he hates the rain worse than poison. I never saw a
+finer day in my life.”
+
+“Thank goodness!” exclaimed Billie, in tones of relief. She really had
+great faith in Ben’s judgment about most things.
+
+Seven League Island, a rocky strip of land some twenty-one miles long,
+was one of the most romantic places in the vicinity of West Haven. It
+was three miles from the mainland and, during the season when the summer
+resorts and camps which clustered on its shores were open, several
+ferry-boats carried passengers back and forth from the mainland to the
+island. In winter the place was almost deserted. The land was too poor
+for farming and few people cared to remain on that lonely, mournful
+island, where, in stormy weather, the waves thundered through the caves
+in the cliffs, and the wind in the pine trees made a mournful sound like
+the wail of a lost soul.
+
+To-day, however, it was as serene and smiling as the Islands of the
+Blest. The southwest wind stirred the pine needles gently, making a
+pleasant quiet song. The tiny waves, as they lapped the sides of the
+ferry, gave out a “cloop, cloop” sound that still water makes against
+the bow of a canoe.
+
+“What time does the last ferry go back, Captain?” asked Ben, of the old
+ferryman, whose face was as weather beaten and seamed as the hide of a
+hippopotamus.
+
+“Six, in good weather.”
+
+“What time in bad?”
+
+“Depends on the weather,” answered the old man briefly.
+
+“How many other ferry stations are there?” asked Charlie.
+
+“Three.”
+
+“Good,” exclaimed happy-go-lucky Americus Brown. “We’ll take the one
+that’s nearest when the time comes to go back and ride before the wind,
+and beat the rain and put old Ben out of business as a weather prophet.”
+
+The ferryman said nothing, but his small eyes twinkled with amusement.
+
+They were the only passengers on the boat that trip, and as the motor
+whirled up the hard-beaten road from the ferry landing, they noticed
+that the bungalows and summer cottages along the shore were closed for
+the season.
+
+“It’s because it’s so hard to get food,” Percy explained. He had once
+visited some friends at Flag Point, the first settlement, and was to be
+their guide this morning to the great cave, which had been used, it was
+said, in the days when smugglers were common in the land.
+
+The others were familiar only with the shore, where they had come on
+bathing and fishing excursions, and the boys and girls were eager to
+explore the rocky caverns, the fort, the little inlets, where pirates
+were supposed to have anchored their ships, and above all the smugglers’
+cave, which Percy told them was a great vaulted chamber in the rocks,
+with an entrance no broader than a narrow door.
+
+“Take the road going to the right,” called Percy, as Billie paused at
+the top of the cliff for directions. “It’s the best one for motoring and
+it goes past the old rifle-pit where we can eat lunch. We can leave the
+car there and climb down to the caves afterwards.”
+
+“The Comet” turned obediently to the right and shot down the
+interminable expanse of empty white road, like a shooting star on the
+milky way.
+
+Even Mary, who had been pale and silent all morning, regained her
+spirits on that glorious ride, when Merry, with head thrown back, began
+to sing:
+
+  “The sailor’s wife the sailor’s star shall be,
+  Yo-ho, yo-ho-ho, yo-ho, yo-ho-ho!”
+
+and she joined in the chorus with the others, her clear, sweet voice
+piping out like the notes of a field lark in a chorus of birds.
+
+At last Billie pulled up at the side of the road under a cliff, on top
+of which was an old grass-grown fort used during the Indian wars.
+
+“This must be it,” she said. “It’s peaceful enough looking now to make a
+good picnicing ground, but I don’t suppose it was much of a picnic for
+the people who built it to shoot Indians from.”
+
+“Nor much of a picnic for the Indians, either,” said Ben, helping Billie
+out while Charlie Clay assisted the other girls to the ground and Percy
+and Merry unstrapped the luncheon hamper.
+
+“Let’s eat up high,” suggested Billie. “That is, if you can carry the
+basket up that steep incline.”
+
+“The pack mules are here for that work,” said Ben, pointing to Merry and
+Percy. “Charlie, you bring the rugs for the ladies to sit on and I’ll
+help the ladies.”
+
+“Will you listen to Nervy Nat,” cried Percy, as he obediently shouldered
+his end of the luncheon hamper and followed Merry up the hill.
+
+How they laughed and scrambled and shoved as they clambered up the
+pebbly path. Once Mary, with a shrill cry, slipped and stumbled back on
+Nancy who fell against Charlie, who, in his turn, tumbled against Ben,
+and that pillar of strength, grasping a branch of a pine tree with each
+hand, supported the whole human weight without a tremor.
+
+It was like picnicing in the tops of the trees, when they finally spread
+the cloth in the grass-grown enclosure of the fort, and beyond them
+stretched the entire expanse of the ocean glimmering blue in the
+sunshine, with an occasional ship outlined on the horizon.
+
+“I hope the ginger ale is still cold,” cried Merry.
+
+“And the mayonnaise hasn’t melted,” said Nancy.
+
+“What, nothing to eat but victuals and drink?” exclaimed Percy.
+
+When they had waded through the piles of sandwiches and pyramids of
+cake, and drained the last drop of ginger ale, silent Charlie, who had
+an enormous appetite, remarked:
+
+“How hungry this piney-salty combination does make a fellow!”
+
+“Why, Charlie,” said Billie, “don’t say you are still hungry. You remind
+me of the elephant in Merry’s song:
+
+  “‘The elephant ate all night,
+  The elephant ate all day,
+  And feed as they would, as much as they could,
+  The cry was still more hay.’”
+
+Charlie pulled out his mouth organ and began to play such a rollicking
+dance tune that the boys and girls, almost before they knew it, were
+two-stepping over the grass as madly as a lot of wild young colts. Then
+Charlie, seizing Mary about the waist and still playing vigorously on
+his “harp,” as it was called in that section, joined the dancers
+himself.
+
+If they had not all of them been so absorbed in executing the Dutch
+twirl, or racing over the ground like Cossack dancers on the Russian
+Steppes, they would have been somewhat disturbed to have seen a man
+peering down at them from the top of a mound. He had crawled up the
+steep incline and was lying flat on his stomach in the tall grass. His
+face is familiar enough to us by now, for he had only one eye, but that
+one, like the eye of the three mythological witches, gleamed brilliantly
+and wickedly and nothing escaped its range. He smiled as if he rather
+enjoyed watching the dancers, and especially his one wicked eye followed
+the movements of Ben and Charlie and Billie Campbell. Presently when the
+whirling couples had tumbled breathlessly on the grass, fanning
+themselves with their hats and Ben had called out: “We’d better be
+getting along now,” the man slipped away as silently as a snake and
+disappeared somewhere below.
+
+“To the caves,” cried Percy, as they gathered up the rugs and cushions
+and hastened down the cliff to the motor.
+
+“I suppose it’s safe to leave ‘The Comet’ here without any one to look
+after him,” Billie had observed, and the others had agreed that it was.
+
+“As safe as on any other desert island,” Ben had answered.
+
+It seemed impossible that anything could happen in that lonely, quiet
+place, which was like a deserted paradise to the girls and boys that
+beautiful afternoon. There was nothing about the locality or the weather
+to arouse uncomfortable suspicions. The patch of sky, which was revealed
+to them just overhead between the tall, straight pine trees, was like a
+beautiful deep blue canopy. Even the watchful Ben could not have told
+that the cloud, so short a time ago no larger than a man’s hand, now
+stretched itself across the horizon in a long, thick line of black.
+
+“The caves are the most fun of all,” said Percy, leading the way to the
+cliffs overlooking the ocean. “There are dozens of them, some little and
+some very large. The lower ones fill up at high tide, but the upper ones
+are safe enough.”
+
+The cliff was honeycombed with small rocky chambers, and as they
+clambered, Indian file, along the narrow path which nature had so
+thoughtfully cut in the rocks they heard the boom of the incoming tide
+thundering through the caves on the beach.
+
+“I suppose people could live in these little caverns,” Percy continued,
+“if it wasn’t so all-fired lonely and inconvenient; but wait until you
+see Smugglers’ Cave. It has as many natural conveniences as a real house
+built by human beings.”
+
+“Here it is,” he cried at last, to the others who had run all the way
+down a steep embankment to see this romantic place.
+
+Certainly it might well have been a favorite spot for smugglers and
+robbers on the high seas. Too high for the tide to reach and still well
+hidden from above by a thick growth of scrubby pine and oak trees, the
+cave was as secret and safe a place as could be imagined. Rock-hewn
+steps led up from the smooth pebbly beach below and the curve of the
+coast made a charming little haven for ships and a natural landing place
+for small boats. The eight friends stood in a row on the beach.
+
+“This is called ‘Pirates’ Cove,’ you know,” went on Percy. “They say the
+pirates used to anchor their ships in this little haven and come ashore
+and have pirate tea parties on the beach.”
+
+“Here comes a sea rover now,” called Merry, scanning the entrance to the
+harbor where a ship could be seen outlined against the blue.
+
+“Oh, she isn’t coming this way, Old Tar,” answered Percy. “It’s too late
+in the season, for yachts and ships rarely come in here unless there is
+a storm. There’s nothing to come for and it takes them out of their
+course.”
+
+“She’s headed this way,” continued Merry, not taking any notice of
+Percy’s interruption, while he scanned the ship with his far-seeing
+sailor’s eyes. “She’s a brigantine, and she’s making for this cove.”
+
+“Oh, well, what of it?” put in Billie. “Perhaps she is coming here for
+the rest cure. But she doesn’t interest me half as much as Smugglers’
+Cave. Let’s not waste any more time here,” and she ran up the steps,
+followed by the others.
+
+The entrance to the cave had been as cleverly concealed as if nature had
+conspired with the outlaws to provide them with a safe hiding place for
+their contraband goods. The steps appeared to lead to nothing more than
+a blank wall, but, following Percy around the edge of an enormous rock
+which, in ages past must have slipped its fastenings above, they
+presently came to a narrow opening between the rock and the side of the
+cave, just large enough for a man to go through.
+
+“The smugglers must have had to do up their bales of silk pretty flat to
+get them through here,” said Ben, measuring the opening with his
+handkerchief, as he stooped to keep from bumping his head on the top.
+
+“How beautiful! How wonderful!” cried the four girls, when their eyes
+had become used to the change from the brilliant sunlight outside to the
+semi-twilight of the great vaulted chamber where they now found
+themselves.
+
+“Now, I’ll show you what a jim-dandy architect nature is,” said Percy.
+“Here’s the bathroom. No hot water, of course, but a perfectly good tub
+and cold water always on tap.”
+
+He pointed out a natural basin, probably worn in the rocks by the
+constant dripping of water from a spring that trickled down the wall of
+the cave.
+
+“Here’s the bedroom, that nice, comfortable shelf over there. Here’s
+your easy chair,” he continued, showing them a curious formation of
+rocks really resembling a big armchair with a high back.
+
+“It’s a rocky chair and not a rocking chair,” observed Charlie, taking a
+seat and rising quite suddenly. “Nature is as mischievous as a little
+boy if she is a good architect. Look at this,” and he pointed to a very
+sharp, almost needle-like, piece of stone in one corner of the seat.
+
+The others laughed gayly as they hurried after Percy and a hundred
+reverberating echoes startled them into silence.
+
+“And now, ladies and gentlemen, I have saved the most interesting sight
+for the last. You are about to see the store-room of the smugglers.” He
+led the way down two steps into another chamber.
+
+“By Jove!” he cried suddenly and stopped short.
+
+“What is it?” exclaimed the others, peering over his shoulder into the
+darkness.
+
+“Don’t you see?” he said, in a low voice. “They are still using it for a
+store-room.”
+
+They blinked their eyes with amazement, when presently there loomed up
+in the shadows a pile of long, flat packing boxes.
+
+Ben lit a candle, which he had thoughtfully brought along in his coat
+pocket, and they examined the boxes, which crowded one entire end of the
+smugglers’ store-room.
+
+“Will you look at this?” he called. “Elinor, you are in this.”
+
+Ben held the candle high and pointed to a sign on the nearest box, which
+read: “Automobile Supplies—Butler Brothers—West Haven——”
+
+“Why,” cried Elinor, “you surely don’t suppose Uncle Tom and Uncle
+Richard could be storing their goods here, do you?”
+
+No one answered her for a moment. Their thoughts were busy searching for
+an explanation to this strange discovery.
+
+“Elinor,” said Mary presently, “don’t you remember what those men who
+borrowed Billie’s automobile said about killing every Butler in the
+county who interfered?”
+
+“Yes,” said Elinor, in a frightened voice, “but what could these boxes
+have to do with it?”
+
+“They may have a great deal,” said Ben. “Those men are probably
+smuggling your uncles’ auto supplies out of the country. The boxes are
+smuggled up to this cave by degrees, I suppose, and then loaded on some
+ship when they have got enough to make it worth while. And, if it’s the
+same man we had dealings with that night, he is a pretty desperate kind
+of an individual.”
+
+“I don’t want any more fights,” exclaimed Billie. “Both of those men
+carried pistols and knives; I suppose all first-class smugglers do, but
+I don’t propose that my party is going to be ruined by any bloodshed. It
+is getting late, and we had better be going.”
+
+They quite agreed with Billie, although the boys would have liked to
+linger in the Smugglers’ Cave for a while.
+
+The outer air seemed very warm and oppressive after the cold damp
+atmosphere of the cave. They blinked their eyes and shivered as they
+hurried along the path which led to the road and in the change from dark
+to light they did not at first notice that the sun was hidden by a great
+cloud, as black as ink, which stretched from horizon to horizon. A hot,
+heavy wind stirred the pine needles and that sense of impending trouble
+which always comes before a great storm sobered the spirits of the boys
+and girls.
+
+Nobody spoke of the cloud. It seemed to be a question of honor with them
+not to mention it, but they hurried on silently, and in a few minutes
+reached the automobile.
+
+With a sigh of relief, the four girls were about to jump in, while Ben
+cranked up, when suddenly Nancy gave a little, pent-up scream.
+
+“Look!” she cried, pointing to a piece of paper stuck on the cushion of
+the back seat.
+
+This message was printed with a lead pencil on the paper:
+
+“He laughs best who laughs last.”
+
+“It was that man,” said Billie, examining the tires ruefully, each one
+of which had been slashed with a sharp knife.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.—THE STORM.
+
+
+“Billie, can you put on new tires?” demanded Ben, somewhat anxiously,
+making a mental determination to learn all about the mechanism of motor
+cars before he went on another motor trip.
+
+The others stood back rather helplessly. Merry, especially, felt stupid
+and uncomfortable in having to stand aside and let a girl do all the
+work.
+
+“Of course, I can,” replied Billie, trying to speak cheerfully, as a low
+cannonading of thunder rumbled in the distance. “I have done it dozens
+of times, only it will take time, of course. The tools are under the
+seat. Hustle up, everybody. Charlie, you get the new tires. Ben, you
+help me.”
+
+In a few moments Ben and Billie were kneeling on the ground adjusting
+the tire of the first wheel, while Charlie and Merry were engaged in
+examining the extra tires, which the motor carried in case of accident,
+and Percy made himself as useful as possible, unpacking all the wraps,
+Billie’s oilskin coat and cap and the rubber blankets.
+
+“Billie,” announced Charlie, “there are only three good tires here. The
+fourth has a puncture. It’s only a small one, but——”
+
+“I know,” interrupted Billie, looking extremely worried. “It was an
+imperfect one. I may be able to patch it.”
+
+Then Charlie and Merry held a whispered conference and disappeared
+around the bluff.
+
+“What’s up?” asked Ben, looking over his shoulder at their retreating
+figures.
+
+But nobody could answer the question. The girls were getting into their
+ulsters and Percy was arranging the rubber blankets and rugs in the car.
+
+“What a confoundedly low, mean trick of that fellow to do this,” he kept
+saying to himself, keeping one eye on the black clouds piling up and the
+other on Billie and Ben. He figured that it would take an hour and a
+half at least to get all four tires on and, he thought, Billie would be
+a pretty smart girl to do it that quickly. It was half-past three
+o’clock.
+
+“What about that ferry,” he said to himself.
+
+At last they were pumping up the third tire. It seemed an age to those
+who were idly looking on. The girls sat in a row on the side of the
+road, their hands folded patiently in their laps, while Percy paced up
+and down, watching the top of the bluff uneasily.
+
+“Where are Charlie and Merry?” he said at last, unable to conceal his
+anxiety any longer.
+
+“Idiots,” exclaimed Nancy. “Haven’t we enough to worry us?”
+
+While she spoke there came a blinding flash of lightning and a clap of
+thunder seemed to split the heavens in two.
+
+Nancy hid her face on Elinor’s shoulder. Billie and Ben kept on working
+steadily. They had reached the fourth tire now and Billie had managed to
+patch the punctured place just as the first great drops of rain began to
+fall.
+
+“Where are those boys?” Ben called over his shoulder, not stopping to
+look up.
+
+“I’ll call them,” said Percy, and running to the top of the cliff he
+began to halloo and whistle.
+
+It had grown suddenly so dark that they thought the sun must have set an
+hour earlier than usual. A cold wind sprang up and whizzed through the
+pines with a sound that made them shiver.
+
+“Hurrah, it’s done!” cried Billie triumphantly, just as a driving wall
+of rain struck her in the face. “Get in, girls, quick,” she shouted, as
+she slipped on her oil skins. “Boys, where are you? Crank up, Ben.”
+
+Suddenly, in the midst of the din and racket of the storm, came a wild
+halloo. Charlie and Merry appeared, running down the road toward the
+motor car, and six men were following them, shouting and gesticulating.
+
+“Get in as fast as you can,” commanded Ben, and the girls will never
+forget the terror of that moment as they tumbled into the car.
+
+The booming of the sea in the caves, the cannonading of the thunder, the
+sharp whistle of the wind in the tops of the trees, and the shouts of
+the men! But in the midst of it all came the kindly, cheering whir of
+the motor engine. Billie could have kissed the faithful “Comet” on his
+broad, good-natured forehead for his loyalty at this moment, when they
+most needed him. As Charlie and Merry leaped onto the step, she threw in
+the clutch, and they were off just as the first man reached the car,
+brandishing a long knife and yelling hoarsely.
+
+The boys climbed over into the back, too tired to speak. Merry had a
+black eye and Charlie had a bloody nose.
+
+“Billie, the next ferry is Payne’s,” called Percy. “It’s about a mile
+from here. Go straight ahead.”
+
+And Billie, sticking to her wheel like a good pilot, ducked her head and
+guided the flying motor along the slippery road.
+
+They seemed hardly to have taken breath before they reached Payne’s
+landing and found it empty and deserted of every human being who had
+ever ventured into that lonely place.
+
+“We’ll have to try for the next ferry landing then,” said Percy,
+dejectedly. “It’s back toward Flag Point.”
+
+Without a word, Billie turned the car, and putting on all speed they
+whizzed through the rain. At that moment she had only one prayer in her
+heart: to pilot her friends safely through the storm and get them to the
+ferry landing. There was no sign of any of their pursuers as they passed
+the fort. When at last they reached the second summer encampment they
+breathed a sigh of relief. The ferry boat was docked at the landing and
+a man stood under the shed, his hands in his pockets.
+
+Billie drew up at the entrance.
+
+“Captain, will you take us on?” called Ben. He always called boatmen and
+conductors captain. He found it pleased them, but this man did not reply
+and still stood with his back turned looking out on the now angry strip
+of water between Seven League Island and the mainland.
+
+Ben shouted and they all shouted together, but the man was as unmoved as
+a wooden statue.
+
+“He’s deaf,” said Billie. “Get out and shake him.”
+
+Ben jumped out and shook the man’s shoulder, who, with a strange
+guttural sound, turned slowly around.
+
+“And dumb,” exclaimed Ben, indicating with violent motions first the
+automobile and then the ferry-boat.
+
+The deaf mute shook his head and pointed in the direction of Flag Point.
+They offered him money, tried persuasion, threats, prayers, which he
+could not hear, and finally ended by dashing off toward the last ferry.
+
+“It’s our only chance,” said Ben, “but we’ll get over in that if we have
+to use force.”
+
+Meantime, the island, lashed by the storm, looked bleak and cold, and
+they wondered they could ever have admired it at all. Crouched under the
+rubber covers, they shivered with chill, while Billie, on the front
+seat, Ben and Percy beside her always on the lookout, with clinched
+teeth and hands gripped to the wheel, guided them through the hurricane.
+It seemed to her they must be riding on the very wings of the wind, and
+the speedometer announced fifty miles an hour.
+
+As they dashed through the straggling little street of that forlorn
+village of Flag Point, the few indifferent natives who braved the
+winters on the island looked out of their windows in wonder. It seemed
+to them that a streak of red lightning had flashed through the storm.
+
+“Cheer up, all of you, our troubles are over,” called Ben. “The
+ferry-boat’s at the landing.”
+
+The old boat seemed like a haven of rest when they pulled into the
+shelter of its alley for wagons and motor cars.
+
+“Captain, why didn’t you tell us that this was the only ferry running?”
+demanded Ben of the wrinkled old man.
+
+“Because I don’t never answer questions that ain’t first been put to
+me,” replied the laconic boatman.
+
+“Don’t scold him,” said Billie, wiping streams of water from her face.
+“Any one who is obliged to live in a God-forsaken, wretched place like
+Seven League Island couldn’t be supposed to have any human interest. I
+imagine they all get to be like their own flinty rocks, hard, sharp, and
+ugly.”
+
+“Well, bloody nose and blacky eye,” put in Percy, “it’s about time for
+you to give an account of yourselves.”
+
+“Yes,” said the others, who had been so stunned by the fast ride through
+the storm and the race for the ferry that they had almost forgotten what
+had happened.
+
+“When we found,” began Merry, “that one of the tires had a puncture,
+Charlie and I thought we might as well make that low, scoundrelly thief
+who slashed the tires pay back with one of those he had stolen from Mr.
+Butler. So we chased over to Smugglers’ Cave, but it took longer than we
+had expected, because we had taken the wrong path and had to crawl
+around a precipice and jump over crags like two mountain goats.”
+
+“Don’t forget to tell that your pirate brigantine was anchored out in
+the harbor,” put in Charlie. “We supposed it was lying up to get out of
+the storm, but we had another think coming——”
+
+“Yes, I guess you will all listen to me, next time,” went on Merry.
+“That was the most piratical-looking band of fellows with their knives
+and their red handkerchiefs as I ever saw in a story book. Well, we did
+get to the cave at last and found it as empty as it was before. Charlie
+had a chisel in his pocket. You know, he is the human tool box, and with
+that and a piece of stone we managed to loosen some of the boards. But
+there wasn’t a tire or anything else connected with an automobile inside
+the box. You’ll never guess what the boxes were filled with. Something
+about as foreign to a motor car, except in sound, when a tire bursts, as
+a caterpillar.”
+
+“You don’t mean guns?” demanded Ben.
+
+“We certainly do. Rifles by the dozens packed in all the boxes we had
+time to open.”
+
+“We were chumps,” interrupted Charlie. “If we had stopped sooner, I
+never would have had this bloody nose.”
+
+“Well, haven’t I got a black eye?” demanded his friend.
+
+“What happened? What happened?” cried Percy impatiently.
+
+“While we were tinkering with the boxes, we heard the sharpest, loudest
+whistle I ever heard in my life, and we both lit out and ran. I was in
+front and just as I got to the mouth of the cave, a one-eyed, one-armed
+ruffian leapt out at me. His one arm was as strong as most men’s two,
+but he couldn’t beat Charlie and me together, although he gave me this
+little souvenir and he planted his fist on Charlie’s nose. While we were
+fighting, a boat from the ship with six sailors in it landed below. They
+came tearing up the steps like a lot of bloodhounds, and Charlie and I
+had a run for our lives. Didn’t we, midget?”
+
+Charlie acknowledged the fact gravely. There was no denying that the two
+boys had been in a very dangerous situation.
+
+“We were ready just in the nick of time, too,” said Billie. “If Ben
+hadn’t cranked up, we’d have had those men on us in another minute.”
+
+It was good to be on land again, even though it wasn’t dry land, and the
+ride home, safe and swift, was blissful after the dangers and excitement
+of that thrilling picnic.
+
+It seemed that Seven League Island must have been the very centre of the
+hurricane and that West Haven had only been visited with a heavy shower.
+Miss Campbell, therefore, was spared any great anxiety.
+
+But, oh, the joy of drawing up to the cheerful blaze of the wood fire,
+while eight youthful adventurers related a somewhat softened version of
+the events of the day! Then the supper that followed, in Miss Campbell’s
+big, old-fashioned dining room, with fried chicken and hot biscuits and
+omelette as light as a feather, and strawberry jam that took the prize
+at the county fair!
+
+But best of all was what Merry did at the last, when, notwithstanding
+his stiff joints and bandaged eye, he rose from his seat and cried:
+
+“Hip, hip, hurrah! Three cheers for Billie, the pluckiest chauffeur that
+ever ran a motor car.”
+
+And all the rest joined in, even Miss Campbell, who clapped her hands
+and cried:
+
+“Three cheers for my dear, dear Billie.”
+
+Then Billie cried:
+
+“Three cheers for Ben because he never said ‘I told you so,’ about the
+rain.”
+
+That very night, before he went to his own home, Ben called at Mr.
+Richard Butler’s house and told him the story of the bogus automobile
+supplies marked with the name of Butler Brothers.
+
+There was a great telegraphing and telephoning by long distance. The
+Butler Brothers were very excited and angry, just as their niece had
+predicted they would be. Detectives were engaged and other ships warned
+to keep a sharp lookout, but nothing was heard of the pirate brigantine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.—WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS.
+
+
+Never since she had been Principal of West Haven High School had Miss
+Gray been so upset as she was now. For the first time a scandal was
+connected with her beloved institution. Every day there was a new
+complaint.
+
+“Miss Gray, I only left my ring on the washstand a minute, while I was
+washing my hands, and when I looked for it, it was gone,” said one girl.
+
+“But who was in the washroom, Julia?” asked the Principal wearily. She
+was disgusted and angry with this troublesome situation.
+
+“Oh, all the girls, Miss Gray, but nobody saw any one take it.”
+
+Small purses containing lunch money were emptied of their contents and
+put back into jacket pockets. Some of the teachers lost money and Miss
+Gray herself was robbed of ten dollars, the wages of the old janitor,
+which she had placed under a paper weight on the desk, in her own
+private office.
+
+The whole school had gone distracted, but the pilferer was too clever to
+be caught.
+
+Twice Miss Gray had summoned Mary Price to her office, but, after
+looking gravely into the young girl’s serious eyes, she kissed her and
+sent her off on some improvised errand.
+
+“I shall wait a few days,” the Principal said. “After all, there may be
+some mistake.”
+
+And it was then that she determined to try an experiment.
+
+One bleak autumn afternoon a thick, wet mist rolled in from the ocean
+and enveloped the town of West Haven so densely that it seemed like a
+city floating on a bank of cloud. Only the dim outline of objects twenty
+yards away could be seen and the muffled call of the fog horn at the
+lighthouse on the Black Reefs sounded its dismal warning through the
+mist.
+
+Billie and Mary were hurrying arm in arm down the street in earnest
+conversation. Notwithstanding it was after school hours, they were going
+toward the High School.
+
+“Do you think we can get it, Mary?” Billie was saying.
+
+“Oh, yes, the janitor always leaves the door to the basement corridor
+open until evening for Miss Gray and the teachers who sometimes stay
+late.”
+
+“It was stupid of me to have left that horrid old algebra, but you know
+I always forget the things I don’t like. If Miss Finch hadn’t called me
+down so thoroughly this morning about my average in mathematics, I would
+just let the lesson for to-morrow go, or if Miss Finch were only Miss
+Allbright, or Miss anybody else but just a stern, animated mathematical
+cube.”
+
+“She’s all right if you know your lessons,” said Mary, smiling. “It’s
+only the ones who don’t study hard enough to suit her who call her a
+human arithmetic.”
+
+The door to the corridor was open, as Mary had predicted, and the girls
+entered, their footsteps resounding with a hollow echo through the empty
+place.
+
+“‘I feel like one who treads alone some banquet hall deserted,’” quoted
+Billie. “Could anything be more ghostly than a deserted school?”
+
+“It’s not deserted,” said Nancy. “I heard voices somewhere, I am certain
+of it, just as you opened the door.”
+
+They paused and listened for a moment, but the place was as still as a
+tomb. A dim gas-light burned in the long corridor, on each side of which
+were the arched entrances to the locker rooms of the various classes,
+wash rooms and Miss Gray’s own private office.
+
+“It reminds me of the catacombs in this light,” whispered Billie. “I’m
+almost afraid of the sound of my own voice.”
+
+The girls slipped silently down the passage to the stairway leading to
+the class rooms. At her desk in the sophomore study room on the third
+floor Billie found her algebra. As she gathered together some of her
+scattered papers in the not over tidy interior of the little one-seated
+desk form, and searched for a certain favorite stubby pencil which she
+claimed brought her good luck with her problems, Mary at her own desk
+gave a cry of dismay and sat down limply.
+
+“What was it, a mouse?” asked Billie, her voice sounding quite loud in
+the empty room.
+
+“Oh, Billie, Billie, no, it was not a mouse. It was fifty dollars,”
+cried Mary. “I found it just now in my desk.”
+
+“Fifty dollars?” echoed Billie, slipping her algebra into her pocket and
+hurrying over to her friend’s desk. “Are you playing a trick on me,
+Mary?”
+
+“Listen, Billie,” said Mary. “I’m going to tell you something. I believe
+I am the victim of some kind of conspiracy. You know of course about all
+of the things that have been stolen from school lately?”
+
+“Yes, but I haven’t had any losses myself; so I haven’t talked about it
+much to the others.”
+
+“Of course you had no idea that I was supposed to be the thief,” Mary
+went on, with a sort of dry sob in her voice that was more
+heart-breaking to Billie than real weeping would have been.
+
+Mary told her the story of Fannie Alta and the twenty dollars.
+
+“I didn’t tell it before,” she continued, “because I was so ashamed
+somehow, I couldn’t bear for any one to know it.”
+
+Billie’s heart swelled with indignation.
+
+“The little wretch,” she exclaimed, “you should have gone straight to
+Miss Gray about it, Mary.”
+
+“I know it, and I am sorry now I didn’t, but I thought she wouldn’t dare
+do it again, and she hasn’t, but things are disappearing all the time,
+and I believe she has told it around school that I took the twenty
+dollars and all the other things. Nobody has said anything, of course,
+but I can’t help feeling that they are all whispering about me whenever
+my back is turned.”
+
+“You poor, blessed child,” exclaimed her friend. “And all this time you
+have been keeping it secret and suffering in silence.”
+
+Mary nodded her head.
+
+“And the worst of it is, Miss Gray suspects me too. But she is not going
+to say anything until she is sure. I thought of talking to her about it,
+but it would look as if I had a guilty conscience to complain before I
+am accused.”
+
+“How dare any one suspect you of stealing,” cried Billie, putting her
+arms around her friend and kissing her warmly. “Would Miss Gray or any
+one else be so stupid as to take the word of Fannie Alta before yours?”
+
+“But nobody has said anything that I know of,” groaned poor Mary. “It’s
+all in the air. That is why I don’t know what to do. Suppose after all I
+was mistaken and they didn’t suspect me. Suppose I took this money to
+Miss Gray and suppose she would think that I had taken all the other
+things and was just returning this because I had lost my nerve and
+suppose—suppose——”
+
+“But, Mary,” remonstrated Billie, “why suppose anything at all so awful?
+Why not suppose that Miss Gray will listen to you and believe every word
+you say. You are perfectly innocent and nothing on earth can make you
+guilty. Of course Fannie Alta must have left the money in your desk,
+though where she got so much is a mystery to me.”
+
+“But I tell you I am frightened, Billie. Such wretched things do happen
+and innocent people often suffer for guilty ones.”
+
+“Nonsense, Mary, you must not lose your nerve in this way. Take the
+money and go straight to Miss Gray with it now. I will go with you.”
+
+The two girls gathered their things together silently. Mary put the roll
+of money in her jacket pocket and they made for the door. It was almost
+dark now and the rows of empty desks down the big room were like
+kneeling phantoms in the half light.
+
+“Did you hear anything?” whispered Mary as they reached the door.
+
+“I heard a step,” answered Billie in a low voice. “It was probably the
+janitor.”
+
+With a mutual impulse they clasped hands and a wave of fear swept over
+them when they found that the door would not open.
+
+“It must have stuck,” whispered Mary. “Try it again.”
+
+But the door was locked fast.
+
+“There is only one way for you to get back the key to the door, young
+ladies,” said a voice so near to them that they both jumped back as if
+they had been struck in the face.
+
+The person who had spoken had been standing flat against the wall at the
+side of the door. He emerged from the shadows, as quietly as a shadow
+itself, and in the twilight his long, lank figure seemed almost to be
+floating in space. The small black mask which covered his face and his
+whole appearance reminded Billie of a gruesome picture she had once seen
+called “The Black Masque.”
+
+“You have a small sum of money there,” he went on, “which you evidently
+do not wish to keep and which I would be pleased to have and can use at
+once. By a strange coincidence, I happened to overhear your
+conversation, you see, and as the money appears to belong to nobody and
+is exactly the sum I require I must have it.”
+
+Mary tried to speak, but her lips refused to form the words, and she had
+no voice left. There was a sound in Billie’s ears like the pounding of
+surf on the beach and she felt quite dizzy.
+
+“This is fright,” she found herself saying, as a wave of homesickness
+for her father swept over her.
+
+“Oh, papa, papa,” she whispered.
+
+The man had seized Mary’s two hands in one of his with a grip of steel,
+while with the other he felt in her jacket pocket, took the roll of
+money, pushed Billie roughly from the door, and with a laugh pulled back
+the bolt; there had been no key after all. The next instant he had
+slipped downstairs as softly as a cat and was gone.
+
+The girls followed after him like two sleep walkers.
+
+“We’ve been robbed, Billie,” moaned Mary, giving her dry sob. “The fifty
+dollars is gone. What shall we do now?”
+
+Billie did not reply. She wanted to get out of that dark stuffy school
+building, and breathe in some fresh air before she dared trust her
+voice. It was good to feel the wet fog again in their faces as they
+hurried up the street.
+
+“Why not still tell Miss Gray, Mary?” asked Billie at last, but already
+there was a feeling of doubt in her heart. It was certainly a very
+unlikely sounding story, a robber in the school room.
+
+Suddenly a figure loomed up in the mist. It was Miss Gray herself.
+
+“You are out late, girls,” she said as she hurried past, and for some
+reason they both had an uncomfortable feeling of having done something
+wrong.
+
+Miss Gray hastened into the school building just as the janitor appeared
+to lock up.
+
+“Jennings,” she said, “switch on the light in the sophomore study room.
+I shall only be there a moment.”
+
+The janitor shuffled after her and turned on the light while Miss Gray
+opened Mary’s desk. She sighed deeply and shook her head.
+
+“She must have got here before me,” she thought. “It was cruel to tempt
+the child at such a time as this when her mother is in great need of
+money. I felt so sure she would bring it straight to me and that was the
+only test I required. Oh, dear, what a crooked world this is. I am out
+fifty dollars. But how will the poor child ever explain all this money
+to her mother? She must have saved a good deal out of her pilfering——”
+
+Miss Gray’s disconnected train of thought did not bring her any comfort,
+as she slowly descended the three flights of steps into the basement and
+plunged into the mist again.
+
+“At least I shall wait a day or two,” she continued. “The child may
+think better of it. She might have stopped me this evening, though. At
+all events I deserve to lose the money. It was a silly, stupid impulse,
+but I was so sure—so very sure——”
+
+The mist had grown so thick now that the Principal walked very slowly,
+keeping close to the fence in order to guide herself to the corner where
+she must turn to go to her own home. A voice reached her through the
+fog. Someone was coming up from behind.
+
+“I have procured fifty, Señor, a curious lucky stroke, and from a
+schoolroom, too—would you have believed——” the voice broke off in a
+laugh.
+
+“Be careful——” said another voice, and two figures passed Miss Gray in
+the fog and were swallowed up again immediately.
+
+“Is it possible,” she exclaimed, “robbers in West Haven High School?
+What does it mean? And I have been blaming that innocent child. What an
+imbecile I have been!”
+
+Her last resolution before sleep came to her that night was to notify
+the town police in the morning and hire a detective to stay about the
+High School day and night.
+
+Imagine the surprise of the bewildered Principal, when, next morning
+bright and early, Mary Price, after a timid knock on the office door,
+came hesitatingly into the room.
+
+“Miss Gray,” she said, “I found this money yesterday afternoon in my
+desk. I don’t know how it came there nor whose it is. But it would be
+better for you to take charge of it until the owner asks for it.”
+
+Mary spoke quickly, as if she had learned the little speech carefully by
+heart. There was a strange expression on Miss Gray’s face as she took
+ten crisp new five-dollar bills from the young girl’s outstretched hand.
+
+“This is not even the same money,” she thought, forgetting to answer
+Mary in her amazement. “Am I losing my senses or is the child a deep
+dyed villain?”
+
+Mary flushed scarlet under the Principal’s steady gaze, but she did not
+lower her eyes, and there was not a sign of guilt in the expression of
+the sad little face.
+
+“Very well, dear,” Miss Gray said at last.
+
+Mary, as she closed the door behind her, was more mystified than Miss
+Gray.
+
+“I should think she would have shown a little surprise,” she said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.—THE HALLOWE’EN HOUSE PARTY.
+
+
+“My Dear Miss Campbell:
+
+Do you think your nice young charge would be bored by a visit to our
+lonely old home in the country? Percival has set his heart on giving a
+Hallowe’en house party for some of his particular friends, and I find
+Wilhelmina’s name the very first on the list. I shall promise to look
+after her in every way exactly as if she were my own child, guard her
+from draughts, see that she has plenty of covering on her bed and that
+she wears her overshoes if the ground is damp.
+
+My boy would be quite inconsolable, and I should too, my dear friend, if
+she is not to be among our guests. I cannot offer many inducements
+except the pleasure which young people always bring to a house, but I
+candidly believe that Percival would give up the idea if she should not
+be able to come.
+
+
+                                                   Most cordially yours,
+                                          Antoinette Juliana St. Clair.”
+
+
+Miss Campbell smiled as she handed the note to Billie one morning at the
+breakfast table. The two fanciful names of the good-natured, cordial
+widow always amused her.
+
+“The lonely old home in the country,” so modestly referred to, was one
+of the finest places in the county, and nothing was more coveted by the
+young people in West Haven than an invitation to one of Percival’s house
+parties, where everything that the widow and her son could devise was
+done for the amusement of the guests.
+
+“Of course you must go, dear. I wouldn’t have you miss it for worlds.
+The change will do you good. I have been troubled about you lately, my
+child, and if this invitation had not come, I was going to insist on
+your seeing the doctor. I don’t think your liver has been behaving
+itself. You have been so out of sorts. But perhaps a little amusement
+will be better for you than a calomel pill.”
+
+“Oh, I am quite well, Cousin Helen,” exclaimed Billie. “It’s
+mathematics, I suppose, that affects my liver.”
+
+But Billie was more eager than she would admit to accept Mrs. St.
+Clair’s invitation. The truth is, the young girl’s conscience had not
+been easy lately. She felt that she had done something which would have
+grieved and displeased her father and she could not be perfectly happy
+until she had confessed her sins and been forgiven.
+
+You perhaps have guessed already that the ten new five-dollar bills
+which Mary Price had consigned to Miss Gray’s care the morning after the
+robbery in the school room, was Billie’s money.
+
+“You shall take it, Mary,” she insisted. “Aren’t we exactly the same as
+sisters? I don’t want the money, and I know papa would be glad if he
+knew.”
+
+Billie had finally agreed with Mary that it would only make matters more
+complicated to tell Miss Gray that fifty dollars some one had placed in
+Mary’s desk, no doubt to tempt or catch her, as in the case of the
+twenty dollars, had been stolen by a robber almost immediately.
+
+Older and wiser people would have told Billie that this was a very poor
+piece of advice, and the deed was no sooner accomplished than the two
+girls themselves realized that they had made a mistake. Miss Gray’s
+manner to Mary was cold and formal and the situation was not in the
+least relieved. The unhappy girl had hoped that the principal would
+speak to her again about the money, but the subject was never mentioned.
+
+“It was all my fault, Mary. I advised you and forced you to do it. It
+was not exactly dishonest, but it wasn’t sincere, and I am beginning to
+think Miss Gray is suspicious of me, too.”
+
+Another thing had happened which made Billie uncomfortably and extremely
+ill at ease in her mind. Burglars had broken into Mrs. Price’s home, but
+they had only succeeded in giving Mary and her mother a great fright,
+and had taken nothing.
+
+In her heart Billie knew what the robbers really wanted. It was the box
+of jewels locked up in Mrs. Price’s safe.
+
+“I have done wrong,” she kept saying to herself. “Papa always said that
+my heart ruled my head and that I had no judgment. I should never have
+burdened Mary and Mrs. Price with that wretched box. I am almost
+superstitious about it, because it brings so much bad luck on people.
+After the house party, I shall take it away.”
+
+As a matter of fact, everything was postponed until after the house
+party, and the world for eight young people seemed to stand still. The
+English nation could not look forward with greater eagerness to the
+Coronation than our four Motor Maids and their friends to Percy’s
+Hallowe’en house party. It was only a part of the good fortune which
+always followed Percy that Hallowe’en that year fell on Friday, and that
+the weather was perfect.
+
+They were to have three evenings of fun and frolic with the Hallowe’en
+ball on Friday night.
+
+In the joy of anticipation and preparation, Billie and Mary lost sight
+of their troubles. Nancy was bubbling over with delight and Elinor
+forgot her usual sense of dignity and gave an indecorous exhibition of
+happiness by doing a Dutch twirl all by herself.
+
+“Of course, we shall all go in ‘The Comet,’” announced Billie. “It will
+be lots more fun than driving behind those poky old carriage horses that
+bring Percy and Mrs. St. Clair in to church every Sunday.”
+
+“Of course,” echoed the others.
+
+There was, indeed, only one flaw in their happiness. Mrs. St. Clair, who
+was intimate with the Rogers family, had insisted on inviting Belle
+Rogers.
+
+“Who cares?” exclaimed Billie. “She can’t interfere with our good time
+and we certainly won’t interfere with hers.”
+
+The St. Clair place was eight miles outside of West Haven on the main
+road. A long avenue bordered with immense pine trees led up to the
+commodious, comfortable old house which seemed to reflect from its
+shining windows the cheerful and hospitable character of its mistress.
+
+And when the red motor pulled up in front of “Pine Lodge,” as the place
+was called, there was the mistress herself smiling in the doorway,
+making the most delightful picture of welcome Billie had ever seen.
+
+“Think of going to a real house party at last,” exclaimed Billie, with a
+sigh of pleasure.
+
+Percival rushed down to help them out; two colored men servants carried
+in their luggage, and presently they found themselves standing before a
+glowing fire in the hall, which was quite big enough and broad enough to
+be a room itself.
+
+“It is sweet of you to come out and cheer up two lonely country people,
+my dears,” Mrs. St. Clair was saying, as she kissed them all around
+twice. “You are really the nicest children. You must promise to tell me
+whatever you want, or if you are not warm enough. You know how draughty
+country houses are. Or if you are the least hungry or your beds are not
+comfortable or the water isn’t hot enough for your baths, or you wish
+any particular thing to eat——”
+
+“Dear me,” laughed Billie, looking around her, “you make us feel like
+four visiting princesses, Mrs. St. Clair. I am sure we could never want
+for anything in this cheerful, lovely house.”
+
+“Now, Mrs. St. Clair,” put in Elinor, “we all know perfectly well that
+all the chairs at Pine Lodge are easy and the beds are famous for being
+the most comfortable in the county.”
+
+Mrs. St. Clair blushed with pleasure. Next to saying nice things to
+people herself, she loved to have them say nice things to her.
+
+“Percival, my darling, where are the others?” she demanded presently.
+“Isn’t Belle coming and what is the name of that little foreign girl she
+asked to bring with her?”
+
+Percy grinned at his friends good-naturedly, when Merry seized a cushion
+from one of the long settees and began to rock it on his knees, and
+Charlie gave a silent imitation of a baby’s face in the act of crying.
+But he was used to these endearing names his mother heaped upon him, and
+he only replied:
+
+“Give them time, mother; give them time. Remember they didn’t ride on a
+comet the same as this dashing company did. The foreign girl is Fannie
+Alta.”
+
+“So it was, and it was sweet and thoughtful of Belle to want to bring
+her along. She described the poor little thing as being lonely and
+strange in West Haven.”
+
+The girls exchanged astonished glances at this piece of news. Was it
+possible that Belle Rogers and the crafty little Spanish girl whom they
+instinctively distrusted were so intimate as this?
+
+“Here comes Roly Poly McLane,” cried Percy, laughing, as he peered
+through a side light of the front door. “She’s as jolly and fat as a
+clown elephant in the circus.”
+
+“Percy, my love,” remonstrated his mother, which slight show of
+disapproval was about as near as she ever got in her life to scolding
+him.
+
+The boys raced down the hall to help Rosomond McLane out of the high
+trap in which she had driven over to Pine Lodge from her home a few
+miles away.
+
+“Wait, Roly Poly, until Percy gets a derrick. It’s the only safe way to
+unload heavy bales,” cried Merry.
+
+“Roly Poly,” said Percy, bowing politely, “these three noble friends
+have volunteered with me to help you get out. I offered to do it alone,
+but mother was afraid my young life would be crushed out of me, if
+anything should happen, you know, and——”
+
+“Percival, my darling!” cried Mrs. St. Clair.
+
+“Help me, indeed,” exclaimed Rosomond, with a jolly laugh that always
+started an echo of other jolly laughs. “Get out of my way all of you,”
+and she gave a flying leap from the trap and bounced as she hit the
+ground like a rubber ball.
+
+“My dear Rosomond,” cried the widow, running down the steps to meet her,
+“don’t take any notice of these foolish boys. You wouldn’t seem the same
+dear, delightful Rosomond if you weighed a pound less.”
+
+“Oh, I don’t mind them, Mrs. St. Clair. I’m used to it, you know. Father
+always calls me ‘Baby Elephant’ and ‘Jumbo,’ and the girls at school
+call me ‘Roly Poly,’ and Uncle Jim calls me ‘Fatty.’”
+
+Several more boys appeared just then and the company followed Mrs. St.
+Clair into what she called the sitting room, a gay apartment with chintz
+curtains at the windows and chintz covered cushions in the deep wicker
+chairs. Here they had tea and chocolate and hot-buttered toast.
+
+“You must eat plenty of food, you know,” Percy’s mother had admonished
+them, “because I warn you that you will need all your strength to put up
+with the fearful ordeals Percy has planned for to-night——”
+
+“Mother,” broke in Percy, “you mustn’t tell. You will spoil all the
+fun.”
+
+“I’m not telling, dear. I’m only warning. But you know those things that
+jump at you from behind——”
+
+“Stop her quick, somebody,” cried her son, pretending to gag her mouth
+with a napkin.
+
+It was all very gay and the room buzzed with talk and laughter when the
+door opened and a servant admitted Belle Rogers and Fannie Alta.
+
+Mrs. St. Clair greeted the new visitors as hospitably as she had the
+others. She even kissed Fannie’s dark, foreign little face and called
+her “dear” and drew the girl down beside her on the sofa.
+
+“I want you to feel perfectly at home,” she said. “It was so good of you
+to have come with Belle.”
+
+She was really the most delightful, beaming, good-natured creature
+imaginable, but all her efforts could not disguise the change which
+seemed suddenly to have taken place in the behavior of the others.
+
+Somehow the laughter was less free, the talk less gay and jolly than it
+had been, and presently our four particular Motor Maids were glad for an
+excuse to go away with Percy and see the conservatories, while Belle and
+Fannie drank their tea with Mrs. St. Clair.
+
+After that it was time to dress for dinner. A neat little maid had
+unpacked their bags and laid their best party dresses on the beds. They
+were very simple dresses indeed, and Nancy, at least, thought of
+floating blue chiffon draperies with a slight sigh of regret.
+
+“Do you know, girls,” said Billie, as she tied a pink bow around Nancy’s
+bunch of curls, “I think we should all take lessons in cheerfulness from
+Mrs. St. Clair. She’s so happy because she always sees the best side of
+everything. Just see how nice she is to Belle and Fannie Alta, for
+instance.”
+
+“With this beautiful house and all her money and such a nice,
+good-natured pink-cheeked boy for a son, I think I could even admire
+Belle Rogers and Fannie Alta,” observed Mary.
+
+Then Billie remembered that Mary and her mother were always troubled
+about money, and that Mrs. Price was the gentlest, sweetest woman she
+had ever known. She wondered if Mrs. St. Clair could ever be ruffled by
+disappointment and bad luck, or if everything were not exactly as it
+should be, if she would be the same placid, good-natured soul.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.—THE GHOST PARTY.
+
+
+“I don’t see how you can play any gruesome Hallowe’en tricks in this
+house, Mrs. St. Clair,” said Billie later at the dinner table. “It’s the
+abode of cheerfulness. Look at this dining room, for instance. A skull
+and crossbones wouldn’t even look dismal against this white wainscoting
+and these pale yellow walls.”
+
+“She’s trying to pump you, mother,” put in Percy. “Now don’t tell her
+anything.”
+
+Mrs. St. Clair smiled archly. How pretty she looked, Billie thought, in
+her pink crepe dress, with a beautiful collar of pearls around her
+throat. Nothing would induce the widow to wear black, and, after a year
+or two of mourning, she had gone back to colors and cheerfulness.
+
+“He has got some big surprises for you, my dear. I’ll only tell you this
+much. It will be quite as ghastly as you could possibly desire, and I
+hope nobody is wearing any clothes that will matter. Your dress, Miss
+Alta, I am afraid will spot if you do all the things Percy is planning
+for this evening. What a lovely frock, by the way. I think I have never
+seen a more beautiful dress for a young girl.”
+
+All eyes were fastened on Fannie’s dress, and there was general surprise
+among the girls to see that Fannie was wearing an exquisite gown of pale
+blue satin with an over-dress of blue gauze, edged with narrow silver
+fringe. In her hair was a wreath of pink roses.
+
+She was quite unembarrassed under the scrutiny of all these people, and
+smiled complacently at Mrs. St. Clair.
+
+Nobody had taken much notice of Belle until now. They had supposed she
+had kept so unusually quiet because she was not in her own “set,” as she
+loved to call her coterie of seven. But to those who were familiar with
+her, it was plain that something had happened. She did not seem herself.
+Her eyes had a strange gray look to them. Two little white dents
+appeared on either side of her nose and her lips were shrunk into pale,
+narrow lines. But that was not all. Were they dreaming or was this the
+first of Percy’s Hallowe’en jokes? The beautiful, proud Belle was
+wearing a faded yellow muslin.
+
+She had tried to cover her shoulders with a little blue scarf, but it
+was impossible to deceive the sharp eyes of her schoolmates.
+
+“Nobody’s clothes will be hurt, Mother,” put in Percy, feeling somehow
+that a cloud had fallen on the company, although he did not know enough
+about girls’ clothes to take in this remarkable change in Belle’s
+appearance. “Remember that this is a ghost party.”
+
+“What is a ghost party?” demanded Fannie, suddenly becoming animated
+from the admiration she felt she had attracted.
+
+“Everybody wears a sheet and pillow-case,” answered Percy, “and, for one
+thing, not a vestige of dress shows.”
+
+A look of triumph came into Belle’s eyes at this and the two dents began
+to disappear.
+
+“I hear the other people coming, so we had better get into our costumes
+if you are entirely through.”
+
+“Come up to my room, girls. Percy will take care of the boys. Marie and
+I are commissioned to dress you up. I am obeying orders, you see,” said
+Mrs. St. Clair.
+
+“And remember that you are supposed to be disguised,” called Percy.
+“Don’t give yourself away by giggling, Miss Nancy-Bell.”
+
+“I’m sure I shan’t want to giggle if I’m dressed as a ghost,” answered
+Nancy, following the others up the steps.
+
+Half an hour later a company of spectres invaded the halls and drawing
+room of Pine Lodge. There were silent ghosts and giggling ghosts, and a
+roly-poly ghost, who bumped against a thin ghost and knocked him flat
+and the thin ghost cried out:
+
+“Oh, shades of departed Jumbo, don’t sit on me!”
+
+Then all the ghosts laughed and one ghost danced a jig that had the
+shadow of a resemblance to the Fishers’ Horn Pipe.
+
+Presently there was a long and mournful trumpet call from up in the very
+top of the house and a portly ghost who seemed to be holding up a train
+under her white cotton shroud said:
+
+“Now, my dear spirits, we are all to go up, if you will be good enough
+to follow me,” and the whole troop of ghosts began moving in a spectral
+body up the front staircase.
+
+There was a second long-drawn-out and despairing trump, and the phantom
+beckoned them to hurry up, with her plump, pretty hand, and remarked:
+
+“My darling Percival is so impatient.”
+
+Up the next staircase they trooped and finally up a narrow flight, at
+the top of which hung a black curtain with cabalistic signs painted on
+it in bright red.
+
+Once past the curtain and there was a gasp of surprise and wonder. The
+great attic of Pine Lodge, which stretched over the entire house, had
+been transformed into a spirit dance hall. From the ceiling hung pumpkin
+jack-o-lanterns of every size. Plates of salt and alcohol were burning
+about the room, giving a ghastly greenish look to the picture. An old
+witch dressed in black, with a long broomstick, was stationed by a
+cauldron of melted lead, placed on a charcoal stove.
+
+Repeating a cabalistic verse with incredible rapidity, which sounded
+something like:
+
+  “Burra, burra pie, cat’s eye, devil fry,
+  Singer, dinger, singer dinger, blood!”
+
+the black witch dropped a spoonful of the lead into a bowl of water.
+
+“Here is your fortune,” she said, in a sing-song voice to the nearest
+ghost.
+
+“The lead has taken the shape of a letter. It brings news to you. It
+comes from over the water on a ship. The letter is about something
+round——”
+
+“Money is round,” put in a tall ghost, standing near. “So are rings and
+necklaces——”
+
+“There is trouble ahead,” went on the witch. “There is trouble before
+the letter ever reaches land.”
+
+The ghost who was listening moved away quickly.
+
+“Of course, it was just a coincidence,” she said to herself, “but I
+wonder who the person was who said that about rings and necklaces. Oh,
+dear! Oh, dear! I wish I had never taken that box in charge.”
+
+In another part of the room a red witch was engaged in launching little
+fortune sail boats, made of English walnuts, on a troubled sea in a tub.
+
+There were four other witches about the attic telling fortunes with
+cards and in other ways, two gray ones, a white one, and a green one,
+and there was an enormous gray cat with electric eyes and a tail four
+feet long that curled up over its back. At last from behind a curtain
+came the strains of weird music, and the witches and the gray cat danced
+a quadrille, the witches riding on their broomsticks in a circle,
+leaping over the cat as they advanced down the middle and finally ending
+with a romp when all the ghosts joined in and danced together.
+
+After a while the ghosts removed their sheets and pillow-cases and
+became human beings once more, and the side shows, as Percy called them,
+began. Every girl at the party bobbed for an apple, except Belle Rogers,
+who declined emphatically. But those who remembered the red rubber
+curlers understood her reasons for not wishing to wet her aureole of
+golden hair.
+
+Fannie Alta plunged her face and neck into the tub with a reckless
+laugh, and spotted her pretty dress without a quiver of regret.
+
+Nancy, in a little room hung in black in a remote corner of the attic,
+held a lighted candle over her head, while she looked fearfully in the
+glass and combed her hair. For just a breathing space a boy’s fair,
+ruddy face passed across the mirror and disappeared.
+
+With a little shriek, Nancy looked quickly over her shoulder, but she
+was entirely alone.
+
+Billie went rather later than the others to try her fortune in the
+mirror room. She had lingered along with a laughing, teasing circle
+around the apple plungers, and, seeing Nancy come out of the mirror room
+alone, she strolled over there. Nancy explained what she was to do, and
+left her alone to her fate.
+
+“Did you see any one, Nancy?” laughed Billie incredulously.
+
+“Yes,” she whispered mysteriously, “I did; but I wasn’t frightened
+because——”
+
+“Because what?” demanded Billie, pinching her friend’s round cheek.
+
+“Because—it wasn’t a person who would frighten any one,” answered
+Nancy, with a laugh, as she tripped away to the next side show, from
+whence issued suppressed screams and howls which were explained when she
+pulled the curtain and a skeleton jumped at her.
+
+In the meantime, Billie had gone into the mirror room alone. She stood
+looking gravely at herself in the glass, while she ran a comb through
+her smooth locks with one hand and held a candle with the other. She
+seemed to have waited a good while for the apparition which was supposed
+to appear to show its face.
+
+“I suppose this booth isn’t in working order any longer,” she thought,
+as she laid down the comb, when suddenly from the deep shadows reflected
+in the glass she made out the outline of a face.
+
+Billie smiled. She had been prepared to recognize one of her friends,
+but the smile faded from her lips; she put down the candle quickly and
+faced about. The black curtain forming the wall of the little room was
+still quivering, but no one was there.
+
+She ran out hurriedly and looked about her. All the boys and girls were
+dancing the barn dance, and the attic had become very cheerful and gay
+it seemed to her in the brief moment in which she had tried her fortune
+in the mirror room.
+
+“It was just a foolish, nervous notion,” she said to herself, turning to
+meet Merry Brown, who was looking for her to be his partner in the
+dance. “But that beaked nose and that wicked eye so close to it,” her
+thoughts continued. “Could I have been mistaken?”
+
+“Are there any strangers here to-night?” she asked Merry, as they danced
+down the room together.
+
+“Not a single stranger,” he replied. “Only the High School crowd.”
+
+When the dance was over, they filed in a long, laughing procession down
+the three flights of steps to supper, and there was nothing spectral or
+gruesome about the gay party which gathered around Mrs. St. Clair’s long
+table. Billie tried to talk and sing with the others and laugh at Roly
+Poly McLane and Percy, who recited an absurd dialogue they had prepared
+beforehand in which Roly Poly took the part of a fat, old man and Percy
+a thin old woman. But all the time she kept asking herself:
+
+“Did I see him, or was it just my imagination?”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.—A STRAY GHOST.
+
+
+When the front door closed after the departing merry-makers and the
+sound of the last wheels died away down the avenue, the guests of the
+house party filed slowly up to bed. Mrs. St. Clair, at the head of the
+stairs, kissed each of the girls good-night and shook hands with the
+boys. And, as a final token of their regard, before turning in, the boys
+trooped from door to door, singing, “Good-night, ladies,” with Charlie
+accompanying on his mouth organ.
+
+And now the house was still, and our four friends in their bathrobes
+were seated on the hearth rug around the wood fire in one of the
+bedrooms, talking in whispers, as girls will do after a party.
+
+“Do you suppose Belle Rogers has been converted, or reformed, or
+something?” observed Nancy. “What else could have induced her to be so
+unselfish as to wear Fannie’s old dress and let Fannie wear her best
+one?”
+
+“It’s the mystery of the age,” said Elinor. “And how different she
+seemed, too. How quiet and meek. Perhaps, after all, it was her clothes
+that made her haughty. Who could be anything but lowly in a faded yellow
+muslin?”
+
+“She was angry at first,” put in Mary. “I saw the danger signals at
+dinner. But I really believe she had as good a time as any of us
+afterwards. Perhaps she realized that without the blue satin, she was
+just on a par with the rest of us, and she forgot to be conscious.”
+
+“And how different Fannie was under the influence of the blue satin,”
+continued Elinor. “She talked and laughed quite loudly, and she was
+really rude to Belle several times. Girls, if we ever have blue satins,
+will they change our dispositions——”
+
+A tap at the door interrupted the conversation, and Mrs. St. Clair, in a
+long lavender dressing gown, tripped into the room.
+
+“I hope our talking hasn’t disturbed you, Mrs. St. Clair,” said Billie.
+
+“No, no, dear, I am glad you were talking, because I had hoped to find
+some one of you still awake. I have come to ask a great favor. Will one
+of you, or all of you, go with me up in the attic for a few minutes? I
+should have asked one of the servants, but their lights are all out. I
+suppose they are sound asleep. Percy is asleep, too. I have just come
+from his room. He is tired out. You can’t think how hard he has worked
+in the last few days.”
+
+“Let me go with you, Mrs. St. Clair,” put in Elinor.
+
+“Let us all go,” suggested Billie.
+
+“Very well, dear. The more of you the better. To tell the truth, I am a
+little worried. It’s nothing, of course; I am sure to find it, but I
+should like to take a look before I go to bed.”
+
+“Have you lost something, Mrs. St. Clair?” asked Mary.
+
+“Yes, I have lost my pearl necklace. I really never missed it until a
+few moments ago. I have looked downstairs everywhere, but I feel sure
+that I dropped it in the attic when I was dancing that ridiculous
+twirling waltz with Ben. It serves me right for trying to be a young
+girl when I am really such an old lady.”
+
+“You are really the youngest of us all,” protested the four young girls,
+following her on tiptoe up the stairs into the attic.
+
+All the members of the searching party were sure that the necklace would
+be found at once somewhere on the attic floor, or in the folds of the
+sheet or the pillow-case Mrs. St. Clair had been wearing. Yet Billie and
+Mary had good reason to know that robbers were at large in the village
+of West Haven, and the memory of the face Billie had seen in the mirror
+suddenly became painfully distinct.
+
+Mrs. St. Clair lit a few gas jets in the attic and the great place
+seemed ghastly enough in the half light with the grotesque
+jack-o-lanterns grinning at them from above; the black-curtained side
+shows and an occasional sheet and pillow-case made a weird picture.
+
+They searched the floor carefully, looked into the booths with candles,
+shook out sheets and pillow-cases, but there was no sign of the missing
+necklace.
+
+“If it had only been something else,” said Mrs. St. Clair. “I should
+rather have lost almost anything in the world than my pearl necklace. It
+was a wedding present from Percival’s father and I valued it more than
+all my other jewelry together. I don’t see how I could have dropped it
+so carelessly. When we went down to supper I threw a scarf around my
+shoulders and that is probably why I never noticed that my pearls were
+gone. You were standing near me, Mary, and Belle and her friend were
+there, too. You don’t remember to have noticed the necklace at that
+time, do you? One of you helped me on with my scarf.”
+
+Mary shook her head.
+
+“I must ask Belle and Miss Alta to-morrow. It is so important to know
+whether I lost the necklace up here or below.”
+
+“Perhaps you dropped it on the steps,” suggested one of the girls.
+
+“If I did, it must have been trod on by many pairs of feet, then. Oh,
+dear, I am so sorry. Only this evening I said to myself, I must have the
+clasp to the necklace repaired. I had intended to take it to town next
+week to the jeweller’s.
+
+“But I must not keep you up any longer. You were dear children to come
+up with me. Now go to bed and don’t think of it any more. I should not
+have been so selfish. You are all dead tired, I know, for I am myself.”
+
+They turned and trooped downstairs again, and with softly spoken
+good-nights separated at their bedroom doors.
+
+Billie and Mary were the last to enter the room they shared. They had
+stopped for a drink of ice water from a big glass pitcher, which had
+been placed with a tray of tumblers on a table at the far end of the
+hall. They were drinking their water silently, each absorbed in her own
+thoughts, when suddenly Mary grasped Billie’s hand and whispered:
+
+“Look! On the steps!”
+
+But Billie was looking with all her eyes before Mary had spoken.
+
+A figure was gliding down the steps wrapped in a sheet. The stray ghost
+had evidently seen the girls at the same moment they had caught sight of
+it, for it finished the flight almost with a bound, and with a swift run
+disappeared through a door leading to a passage back of the steps, with
+Billie and Mary running behind. But the sheeted figure was too swift for
+them, and they heard one of the doors in the passage open and close
+softly just as they reached the entrance.
+
+“It was this door,” said Mary.
+
+“Or this one,” said Billie, pointing to the door of the room next the
+one Mary had chosen as the door the phantom had disappeared through.
+
+“We’ll settle it,” said Billie. “I’ll knock on this one and you knock on
+that one.”
+
+“They are the small single rooms that Belle and Fannie and Roly Poly
+have,” whispered Mary, as she tapped on a door.
+
+There was no answer and she went in. It was Belle’s room and she was
+sleeping deeply. Mary smiled as she noticed that Belle now wore a night
+cap over the rubber curlers. Her cheek was pillowed on her hand and her
+breath came softly and regularly.
+
+No answer came to Billie’s tap, either, and when she turned the knob she
+found that the door was locked. She tapped again and rattled the knob.
+
+“Who is there?” came a sleepy voice.
+
+“Open the door,” called Billie.
+
+“Tell me who you are first.”
+
+“Billie Campbell.”
+
+Presently the door was thrown open and Fannie, with her dark hair
+standing out all over her head in a dishevelled mass, peered into the
+hall.
+
+“What is the matter?” she asked. “The house is not on fire?”
+
+“No, but Mary and I were in the hall and we saw some one come down from
+the attic and go into one of these rooms, and we thought we had better
+wake you up.”
+
+“They could not have come in here,” said Fannie. “My door was locked.”
+
+Billie looked at her curiously.
+
+“What a little actress you are,” she thought.
+
+“It doesn’t matter, only Mrs. St. Clair had lost something, and we were
+afraid a thief might be in the house. You know there have been several
+robberies lately in West Haven.”
+
+Fannie gave her a long and scornful stare.
+
+“At the High School, you mean?”
+
+“Particularly at the High School,” replied Billie gently. Somehow, she
+felt a sort of contemptuous pity for this unfortunate little creature
+who had been taught, perhaps by poverty, to stoop to so much villainy.
+
+“What’s all this racket about?” demanded Rosomond McLane, opening her
+door which was the third one along the passage and thrusting out her
+merry, round face.
+
+“You didn’t hear anything did you?” asked Billie. “Mary and I thought we
+saw some one in a ghost dress come down this passage and go into one of
+these doors.”
+
+“Good heavens! I am terrified out of my wits, I would rather it would be
+a burglar than a ghost. Did you really see something?”
+
+“Forget it,” said Billie. “Go back to bed and lock your door. It was
+just a shadow, I suppose.”
+
+Fannie had already locked her own door and the girls retreated to their
+room, somewhat crestfallen, feeling very much like two fighters who had
+been worsted in battle.
+
+When they had crawled into bed and settled themselves under the covers,
+Billie gave a deep sigh and whispered:
+
+“Mary, dear, which one do you think it was?”
+
+“There is only one thing that would make me think it was Belle,” replied
+Mary. “If she had really been asleep, she would have waked and come out
+to find what was the matter. She is the most deadly curious soul alive.”
+
+“That’s very slight evidence, Mary. She might have been specially tired
+to-night. Now, I believe it was Fannie. She had such a wild, dishevelled
+look and her door was locked. She is such a creeping, crawling little
+thing. Besides, I don’t believe Belle would have had the courage to go
+up in the attic alone.”
+
+“Billie,” observed Mary, after a short silence, “I don’t know what it is
+all about, but something is going on around us. I believe that you and
+I, in some way, are mixed up in some kind of conspiracy. The box of
+jewels is in it and Fannie and Belle are in it. It’s like seeing a lot
+of figures moving about through a thick curtain. You know they are
+there, but you don’t know what they are all doing. I’m frightened,
+Billie, very frightened.”
+
+Mary gave that dry sob which was just as painful as crying and much
+worse to hear.
+
+Billie put her arms around her friend and tried to comfort her.
+
+“Don’t be scared, Mary, dear. It will all come right. I have made up my
+mind to one thing. That is, I will not leave that unlucky box at your
+mother’s house any longer. We shall have to find some new place to keep
+it.”
+
+Presently the two girls dropped off to slumber, and of all the sleepers
+in the big house, only one person heard the clock in the hall strike the
+passing hours. She tossed and tumbled on her bed like a boat on a
+restless sea, and moaned to herself. Her lace-frilled night cap had
+slipped, and one red rubber horn pointed upward, like an accusing
+finger.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.—MRS. RUGGLES.
+
+
+Breakfast was late next morning, and there were some heavy eyes at the
+pretty table. Belle was pale and nervous, and Mary, too, wore an anxious
+look on her face. Even the plump and jovial Mrs. St. Clair was not quite
+herself. Her eyes had a puzzled, absent-minded expression, as if she
+were trying to remember something that had almost faded out of her
+memory. But she forced herself to smile and talk with her young guests,
+and only the Motor Maids really noticed her abstraction.
+
+“What do you intend to do to-day, Percival, dearest?” she asked her son.
+
+“Don’t you remember, mother, that Billie is to take some of us and the
+side-seated wagon the others over to Mrs. Ruggles? I wrote her to expect
+us by two this afternoon, and we’ll be hungry enough by then to eat
+everything in sight.”
+
+“Who is Mrs. Ruggles?” asked Billie, who was not yet familiar with
+various picturesque and interesting characters living around West Haven.
+
+“Wait until you see her,” replied Mrs. St. Clair. “She is a queer old
+woman, but she has a great many friends and you can’t help liking her,
+and her food—dear me, you never imagined such meals as she can get up.”
+
+“Now, don’t go and give things away, mother,” remonstrated Percy. “The
+others have all met Mrs. Ruggles, but Billie hasn’t and neither has Miss
+Alta, and we might as well give them a little surprise.”
+
+“It seems to me that West Haven is full of surprises,” observed Billie.
+“Papa and I used to wander about the world together like two vagabonds,
+but in all that time we never had so many adventures and excitements as
+I have had here.”
+
+“Well, there won’t be any excitement about this trip,” said Percy. “It’s
+just a ride across the country to the shore, one grand, large meal, and
+then home again in time for another feed, and you’ll all be ready for
+bed.”
+
+It was arranged for those who were to drive to start well ahead of the
+others in the “handicap race,” as Percy called it, in order to get to
+Mrs. Ruggles’ at the same time. The Motor Maids went in “The Comet” with
+their particular friends, which was tacitly agreed upon, and Roly Poly
+McLane drove with Belle and Fannie and three boys in the St. Clair
+trim-looking depot wagon. They were not even to take the same road as
+the motor car, but were to go by a short cut over a road too sandy for
+automobiles.
+
+Mrs. St. Clair, who was not to be in the party, inspected each girl with
+motherly interest before the start. She appeared to have an endless
+store of wraps, ulsters, sweaters and fur coats, veils and scarfs, which
+she bundled on her guests without the slightest regard for sex or size.
+
+“Young people never know how to keep warm,” she said. “Especially girls.
+They always think warm clothing is unbecoming, when really nothing is
+more unbecoming than purple noses and blue lips. Percival, my darling,
+don’t you think you’ll need your ear muffs?”
+
+“No, mother,” answered her son firmly, “not on the first of November.”
+
+“Oh, I implore you, my son; I entreat you,” cried the importunate woman,
+and Percy, with admirable patience permitted her to slip them on his
+ears, though he promptly removed them when the motor car had turned into
+the road and he could no longer see his mother waving her handkerchief.
+
+“I must look remarkably like Dr. Cook,” he said, laughing, as he removed
+some of the layers of wraps and scarfs his mother had loaded him with.
+
+“The Comet” was in splendid trim that morning.
+
+“He gets cranky and unmanageable exactly like a human being,” Billie had
+often said about him, but to-day he appeared almost to take human
+enjoyment in the long stretch of hard-beaten road and the crisp autumn
+air.
+
+“Does this mysterious Mrs. Ruggles live in a palace or a hut?” asked
+Billie, after a while, her curiosity increasing as the salty breeze
+straight from the ocean reminded her that they were approaching the
+coast.
+
+“It’s a little of both,” replied Percy.
+
+“She’s a queen, herself, Mrs. Ruggles is,” put in Ben.
+
+“I believe she thinks she is one, really,” said Elinor. “If she doesn’t
+like a person, she almost says, ‘Off with his head.’”
+
+“But I thought you said she was a cook?”
+
+“She is,” answered Merry. “She’s a queenly cook and a cookly queen.”
+
+“You are all a lot of crack-brained, foolish people,” exclaimed Billie,
+exasperated. “I feel as if ‘The Comet’ couldn’t take me fast enough to
+satisfy my curiosity about Mrs. Ruggles.”
+
+She put on the third speed and the red motor took to the course like a
+young race horse as he rounds the curve toward home. It was a long and
+rather chilly ride before they reached the abode of Mrs. Ruggles. The
+young people found themselves buttoning their wraps around them quite
+gratefully and snuggling down in the car.
+
+“Here we are,” said Percy, at last.
+
+Billie stopped the car and examined with much curiosity a quaint old
+house, rather tumbled down at second glance, but with an air of comfort
+about it that no amount of disrepair could overcome.
+
+Smoke was pouring out of the middle chimney and the reflection on the
+small window panes indicated that there was a roaring fire in the front
+room.
+
+What the place looked like on the inside was nothing more nor less than
+an old Spanish inn. Billie did not know this because she had never seen
+one, but the room reminded her vaguely of something very romantic and
+picturesque, and what was most curious about the place was that the
+outside seemed to have no connection whatever with the inside. They were
+not even related to each other by distant kinship. Outside were the
+dignified gray walls and gabled windows of an old seashore house. The
+inside appeared to be one very large room. The uneven floor was paved
+with red tile and in a big stone fireplace at one end burned an enormous
+fire of driftwood. From the blackened rafters hung garlands of red
+peppers, bunches of herbs and strings of onions and garlic. Shining
+copper vessels were ranged on shelves and around two sides of the room
+ran a gallery with steps leading up from one end.
+
+“Am I in a dream,” cried Billie. “I feel as if I had been transported
+somewhere suddenly.”
+
+“Isn’t it fascinating?” said Elinor. “The old house has been in Mrs.
+Ruggles’ family for two hundred years. It used to be a sort of sailors’
+inn, and there are many stories connected with it. But here she comes
+herself. She’s just as wonderful as her house.”
+
+Mrs. Ruggles was certainly a remarkable figure. She was very tall, one
+of the tallest women Billie had ever seen, with coal black hair, shiny
+dark eyes, rather too close together, a beaked eagle nose, and a very
+determined mouth, with a slightly humorous curve to the lips, which
+softened her somewhat stern face.
+
+She wore a most outlandish dress for that part of the world, of striped
+red and black cotton, but she was scrupulously clean, and the coarse
+cotton kerchief tied around her neck was as white as snow. Her stockings
+also were white, and she wore men’s low shoes of enormous size, even for
+a woman of her height.
+
+The boys and girls all shook hands with her as if she were an old
+friend. She called them by their first names and when she was introduced
+to Billie she gave her a long, keen look that seemed to read the young
+girl’s most hidden and secret thoughts. She walked with an erect
+carriage and majestic tread, and Billie had a feeling that she had been
+introduced to a personage.
+
+“She’s a great old girl,” said Merry Brown, when Mrs. Ruggles had
+disappeared into the back regions of the house to finish cooking the
+dinner. “She can sail a boat as well as anybody along this coast. She
+fishes, digs for clams, catches lobsters in traps, and does all the
+things the fishermen around here do and more, too, because she is the
+jim dandiest cook in the county.”
+
+“Hasn’t she any husband or family?” asked Billie.
+
+“She was married twice. Ruggles, the second husband, was an Irishman. He
+was a fine fellow, a sea captain, but he died long ago. Her children are
+floating about the country somewhere.”
+
+“What was her name before she married? Nothing like Ruggles, I am sure.”
+
+“No, it was Sabater. Mrs. Ruggles’ father was captain of a schooner
+which carried freight up and down the coast. They say her grandfather
+was a great old fighter and came near being hanged as a spy by both
+sides in the Revolution.”
+
+It was all very interesting, and Billie was still asking questions of
+the others when the carriage arrived with the rest of the party.
+
+“Why, where is Fannie?” they demanded, noticing her absence from the
+depot wagon.
+
+“She complained of a headache and went home,” answered Belle. “We met
+one of your vehicles on the road, Percy, coming from town, and she got
+in and drove back.”
+
+“Too bad,” answered Percy. “But she’s very sensible if she doesn’t feel
+well. It’s a long drive and fairly chilly when it gets late.”
+
+Fannie was not much missed, however, from the jolly party which now
+gathered around the crackling wood fire. Presently the inn-keeper,
+fish-woman, queen, whatever she was, led the girls up the narrow flight
+of stairs at one end of the room to the balcony, on which opened a row
+of little bedrooms, like ship cabins. She was a very silent, busy woman,
+and she did not linger while they smoothed their rumpled locks and
+washed the dust from their faces.
+
+Billie, who also was not one to linger at the dressing table, went out
+on the gallery and stood looking down into the picturesque room. The
+place fascinated her and she strolled along, peeping into the other
+small rooms, where, no doubt, Mrs. Ruggles’ father and grandfather had
+put up many a seafaring guest in years gone by.
+
+At the other end of the gallery were more rooms, and she could not
+resist the temptation to glance into them while she waited for the other
+girls. Two of the doors were open, one into a large empty room and one
+into a scantily furnished bedroom. The next door was half closed. Should
+she look in? Billie hesitated. It was very impolite of her, but she knew
+that old Mrs. Ruggles lived alone, and there could be no one to intrude
+on. She pushed the door gently and looked in, then retreated quickly.
+The room was not empty, after all. In the immense, old-fashioned bed so
+high that it was necessary to stand on a foot stool at one side in order
+to plunge into it, lay a woman. Billie thought she was asleep at first.
+Her eyes were closed and her long black hair was spread back of her on
+the pillow like a dusky mantel. The young girl stood transfixed on the
+threshold. Then the woman opened her eyes and looked straight into
+Billie’s.
+
+“I beg your pardon,” said Billie politely, and backed away, her heart
+beating so fast that she almost choked for breath.
+
+The others were just going downstairs, chatting and laughing together,
+even Belle Rogers, who seemed, somehow, softened and quite different.
+There was no chance to tell about the strange woman just then, and
+Billie kept her knowledge to herself. But the large dark eyes haunted
+her memory and she could not forget the face, of which she had caught
+only a fleeting glance.
+
+Then came the dinner. Mrs. Ruggles did not wait on the guests. The
+dishes were placed on the table and they helped themselves, while Merry
+and Percy, with napkins over their arms, like well-trained butlers,
+removed one set of plates and brought on another.
+
+Perhaps these young people, who were not epicures by any means, did not
+realize how delicious Mrs. Ruggles’ dinner really was. But an older and
+more experienced person would have appreciated some of those delightful
+concoctions of rice and pimentos, soup thick and rich, fowls done to a
+turn, and a dish of corn meal and chopped meat and tomatoes, like a
+Mexican tamale. But they enjoyed it and the pudding that followed and
+the cups of strong black coffee.
+
+It was a merry meal, too, with jokes and songs and much laughter. Mrs.
+Ruggles moved ponderously about the room or sat silently by the fire.
+Occasionally her face lit up with a delightful smile, and she would turn
+and beam approvingly at Percy or Merry or Roly Poly McLane, who were the
+chief fun-makers.
+
+After dinner Billie seized an opportunity to speak to the strange woman.
+
+“We had a splendid dinner, Mrs. Ruggles,” she said. “I should think you
+would have lots of people stopping here in this delightful place.”
+
+“The Inn is closed now,” she answered. “I don’t rent my rooms any more.”
+
+“And you have no guests at all?” asked Billie.
+
+Mrs. Ruggles looked at her for so long that Billie felt desperately
+uncomfortable.
+
+“No,” she answered shortly, and began clearing off the table with a
+scowl that reminded Billie of some one somewhere.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.—FANNIE ALTA.
+
+
+In the meantime, Mrs. St. Clair, left to the quiet seclusion of her own
+home, became forthwith a very determined and resolute character.
+
+First she summoned to her aid the old colored butler, who had been with
+her many years, and together they searched every part of the house where
+she had been the night before. They went over the attic thoroughly and
+satisfied themselves that the lost pearl necklace could not have been
+dropped there. They hunted through the downstairs rooms, shook out the
+sofa cushions, looked under the rugs and behind curtains. There was not
+a crack nor cranny of the rooms she had lately frequented that Mrs. St.
+Clair and old Randolph did not scour.
+
+Like many another easy-going, amiable soul, Mrs. St. Clair, when roused
+to action, was capable of the most surprising, almost fierce
+determination, and when Fannie Alta returned, pleading the excuse of a
+headache, she hardly recognized in the white intense face, the rosy,
+dimpled countenance of the widow.
+
+Fannie retired to her room, but when Mrs. St. Clair went to the
+telephone in the upper hall, she crept to the door, opened it a crack,
+and overheard snatches of this conversation:
+
+“Do you happen to have a good detective? That’s fortunate. The famous
+Mr. Bangs home on his vacation? Has a motor cycle? Very well, he ought
+to get here in an hour. Tell him to hurry. Thank you. Good-by.”
+
+A tray of luncheon was brought to Fannie, but she ate very little. She
+sat in her room thinking hard. Then, with a sudden resolution, she
+jumped up and began to move about. First she packed her valise. Then,
+tying her handkerchief about her head, she put on a very woe-begone
+expression and left the room. Mrs. St. Clair was in the living room, a
+maid told her, and Fannie found her pacing nervously up and down the
+bright, chintz-hung place.
+
+“I am afraid you are not feeling so well, Miss Alta,” the widow said
+politely, but with just a shade of coldness in her tone.
+
+“I am much worse,” answered Fannie. “I feel quite ill. I wish to return
+to my mamma. May I be driven home?”
+
+Mrs. St. Clair hesitated and a very strange expression came into her
+face.
+
+“You may go in a few hours, Miss Alta. There is no one to take you just
+now. Randolph is needed here and the other men are off working on the
+place. Perhaps you had better lie down in your room until I can arrange
+to send you back. Did you try the aromatic spirits of ammonia?”
+
+“If no one can take me,” said the Spanish girl irritably, not taking any
+notice of the question, “I shall walk.”
+
+“But I thought you were ill?”
+
+“I am, but the walk will help my head.”
+
+“No, I cannot permit it,” said Mrs. St. Clair firmly. “Go to your room
+and in another hour you will be sent home.”
+
+Fannie started to reply, but she checked herself and left the room. Mrs.
+St. Clair, stripped of her smiles and good-natured pleasantries, was not
+a person to be disobeyed, and Fannie was quick to recognize that fact.
+
+She had hardly reached the second floor, when she heard the whirring
+sound of a motor cycle, followed almost immediately by a quick ring of
+the bell. Fannie leaned far over the banisters, and when she turned to
+go to her room, after a small, dapper-looking man had been admitted, she
+was somewhat embarrassed to find Mrs. St. Clair’s maid looking at her
+with an expression of extreme amazement.
+
+Fannie hurried to her room and for the next fifteen minutes stood
+irresolutely first on one foot, then on the other. Finally, with an air
+of determination, she opened her satchel.
+
+In the sitting room downstairs Mrs. St. Clair and Mr. Bangs were in
+close conference.
+
+“I do not really know the girl, Mr. Bangs. She is a Cuban or a South
+American, or something. Her name is Alta and she was brought here by my
+son’s guest. It is impossible for me to accuse a visitor in my own house
+of stealing the most valued and handsomest possession I have in the
+world. She is a queer little creature and looks sly and unreliable to
+me. But, of course, that is not really evidence. What I have been
+racking my brain all night and morning to recall is whether it was not
+she who, when she helped me off with my ghost dress last night, fumbled
+at my neck a moment.
+
+“It amounts to this, Mr. Bangs,” the widow continued after a pause, “I
+can’t get over the impression that she has stolen my necklace. The other
+children here I have known all their lives. My servants have been with
+me for years, and she is the one suspicious person in the house. Now,
+what I want you to do is to help me to find out the whole thing without
+arousing her suspicions. If she is the thief, she may return the
+necklace, and be sent back to town before the others arrive, and it will
+be easy enough to make excuses. You are a very able man, Mr. Bangs, and
+I know that you are only home for a rest, but I do so need your help.
+Now, what do you advise?”
+
+“Have you looked among her things yet?” asked the detective.
+
+“No, because the conviction only came to me after she returned. I did
+have suspicions, I will admit, but I put them aside. When she came back
+I saw that she was uneasy and anxious, and only a few moments ago she
+asked to be sent home.”
+
+“H-m,” mused the detective. “Suppose,” he continued, “that you call her
+down and let me talk to her as if I needed her assistance, she being the
+only member of the party available.”
+
+The advice was acted upon, and presently Fannie, still with the
+handkerchief swathing her forehead, looking very nervous and pale,
+entered the room.
+
+“Miss Alta,” began the widow kindly, “I am sorry to have disturbed you
+when you were ill, but we are in great trouble and we thought perhaps
+you might help us. Did you know that last night I lost my beautiful
+pearl necklace, the most precious thing I have in the world?”
+
+Fannie showed great surprise.
+
+“Did it not come unclasped and slip?” she suggested.
+
+“I have reason to believe that it did not slip from my neck, because we
+have searched the place thoroughly. It must have been taken. I talked it
+all over with the other girls last night and they helped me look for it,
+but now I need some one else, and in their absence I have sent for you.
+Mr. Bangs, who is a detective, has come down to lend me his aid, and we
+thought we might take you into the conspiracy with us.”
+
+The widow paused for breath.
+
+Fannie sat down and folded her hands nervously.
+
+“I do not see how I can help,” she said, after a pause.
+
+“Possibly you cannot,” put in Mr. Bangs, “but Mrs. St. Clair thought you
+might have noticed something unusual, and being a guest were too polite
+to speak of it. For instance, were you standing near Mrs. St. Clair when
+she removed the sheet and pillow case?”
+
+“Yes,” said Fannie, “there were several of us in the party.”
+
+“Did you notice who unpinned the sheet for Mrs. St. Clair?”
+
+Fannie paused a long time without replying.
+
+“It was not you who did it?”
+
+The young girl compressed her lips and looked the detective squarely in
+the eye.
+
+“The girl who unpinned the sheet was Mary Price,” she replied, “and
+since you are determined to question me, I will tell you.”
+
+She drew a deep breath, looked first at the detective, then at Mrs. St.
+Clair, and proceeded:
+
+“I did notice that she removed the sheet from your shoulders and her
+actions were very strange. But, knowing what I did, I was not surprised,
+and I am not surprised to hear now that you have lost something
+valuable, Mrs. St. Clair,” she went on, more and more glibly, as she saw
+she was gaining the interest of the other two.
+
+“What were Miss Price’s actions?” asked the detective, taking Fannie’s
+statements in the order she had made them.
+
+Fannie frowned.
+
+“Oh, I do not know. She was strange. She behaved strangely and she went
+away at once.”
+
+“You mean she left the room?”
+
+“I cannot say. I saw her no more until supper.”
+
+“Where were you?”
+
+“Oh, I was about, dancing, playing, laughing with the others,” replied
+Fannie carelessly.
+
+“You said a moment ago you knew something about Miss Price. Will you
+tell us what it is?”
+
+“Ah, but I hesitate. It is unkind to spread so terrible a story.”
+
+“We will treat it confidentially,” said the detective drily.
+
+“A great many people know it already,” went on Fannie. “The whole school
+knows it, in fact. Miss Gray, the principal, and some of the teachers,
+who have lost money and articles. I, myself, have good reason to know
+it.”
+
+“What is it that you know?” asked the detective.
+
+“That Mary Price is a thief. She has been stealing all the autumn from
+the other girls and the teachers at the High School.”
+
+“Oh, impossible! I will not believe it,” cried Mrs. St. Clair. “Dear,
+sweet, quiet Mary. There must be some mistake, Miss Alta. You should be
+more careful how you spread such dangerous gossip. Mary Price and her
+mother have many devoted friends in West Haven.”
+
+“You may ask Miss Gray, then. She will tell you,” said Fannie stiffly.
+
+“Just to verify your statement, Miss Alta, I will telephone Miss Gray
+this instant,” exclaimed the widow angrily, leaving the room and
+hastening upstairs to the telephone.
+
+While she was gone, and she was away some time, the detective began to
+question Fannie. He was a very experienced man in his profession and he
+pressed her so skillfully that several times she tripped in her answers
+and finally grew excited.
+
+“I tell you it is true,” she cried. “She not only is a thief, but she
+has a confederate. Billie Campbell is her assistant. Perhaps you think I
+took the necklace,” she burst out at last. “You have the right to search
+among my things. I had no way to know that suspicion rested on me. If I
+took the necklace, it will still be among my things.”
+
+“Don’t get excited, Miss Alta, nobody has accused you of anything. We
+simply needed your valuable evidence. Why do you say Miss Campbell is a
+confederate to the thieving?”
+
+Fannie had gone farther than she intended, however, and she refused to
+give any more information. But the detective saw that when she was angry
+and frightened, she would talk, and after a pause, he said:
+
+“You perhaps know that you are the only person in the household on whom
+suspicion might rest.”
+
+“I don’t see why I should be suspected,” she exclaimed hotly, “when Mary
+Price is already known to be a thief——”
+
+“Perhaps you have a grudge against Miss Price?”
+
+“I have not,” she cried, stamping her foot.
+
+“Did no one ever suspect you of taking the things at the High School?
+You know that often happens—one girl is blamed for another’s——”
+
+Fannie flew into a passion.
+
+“I tell you Billie Campbell and Mary Price are thieves. They have a
+whole box of valuable things they have stolen, stored away in Mrs.
+Price’s safe.”
+
+“What sort of things?”
+
+“Jewelry,” burst out Fannie, then stopped and bit her lip. “But I may be
+mistaken about that,” she added, trying to speak calmly.
+
+Mrs. St. Clair hurried into the room with the necklace in her hand.
+
+“Where did you find it?” asked Mr. Bangs.
+
+“I found it,” she began, then paused. “It was found,” she added. “You
+may go, Miss Alta. Thank you very much. And if you care to go back to
+town, Randolph will drive you in at once.”
+
+When Fannie had left the room, the widow beat her hands together, and
+the tears rolled down her cheeks.
+
+“I found it in Mary Price’s bag,” she said. “And Miss Gray tells me that
+it is true. Mary has been suspected of stealing all autumn.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.—MARY BEFORE HER JUDGES.
+
+
+It was late when the young people returned from Mrs. Ruggles’. They were
+in gay spirits and Mrs. St. Clair could hear them talking and laughing
+in the hall, first the motorists and then the ones who had driven. She
+did not go down to meet them and they scattered to their rooms to wash
+their faces and smooth their wind-blown locks. There was no time to
+dress for supper.
+
+“I don’t see how I can face them,” she said to herself. “I’m so unhappy,
+and I’m afraid they will notice that I have been crying.”
+
+But she bathed her temples in cold water, put on a cheery-colored silk
+dress, and went downstairs when the gong sounded for supper. Down
+trooped the boys and girls with sparkling eyes and glowing cheeks. The
+sound of their happy laughter reached her below and she pressed her hand
+to her heart and sighed deeply. Then her expression hardened:
+
+“Little wretch,” she exclaimed. “She should be well punished, and she
+shall be, too.”
+
+“‘Soup of the evening, beautiful soup,’” sang Merry, dancing a jig in
+the hall:
+
+  “‘Beautiful soup so rich and green,
+  Waiting in a hot tureen!’”
+  “‘Who for such dainties would not stoop?
+  Soup of the evening, beautiful soup,’”
+
+continued Rosomond, seizing Merry’s hands and whirling with him up and
+down the hall until they both fell in a laughing heap on the floor.
+
+“Oh, we have had such a good time,” cried Billie and Mary together,
+taking each a hand of Mrs. St. Clair.
+
+“It has been such glorious fun,” went on Billie, “and we are just as
+hungry for supper as if we hadn’t eaten enough food to feed a regiment
+this afternoon.”
+
+“And such fine food, too, Mrs. St. Clair,” said Mary. “I think it was
+the most delightful party I have ever been to.”
+
+“I am glad you were so happy,” replied Mrs. St. Clair, making an effort
+to smile and succeeding very poorly.
+
+Mary, who was as sensitive to changes in manner as an aeolian harp is to
+the slightest breeze, looked at her hostess quickly and noticed the red
+rims on her eyelids.
+
+“Aren’t you feeling well, dear Mrs. St. Clair?” she asked gently.
+
+Mrs. St. Clair put her hands on the girl’s shoulders and looked into the
+clear dark eyes.
+
+“I am quite well, Mary. A little upset over something that happened
+to-day. That is all.”
+
+“You mean the pearl necklace?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“I am so sorry. I wish we could have found it for you.”
+
+“It has been found, Mary,” said the widow, turning her head away so as
+not to see Mary’s face.
+
+“Oh, you did find it? I am so glad. Where was it?”
+
+“Supper is served, Mrs. St. Clair,” said Randolph, opening the door to
+the dining room, where the others were already waiting.
+
+“We will talk about where it was found later,” she said to Mary, who
+gave her a puzzled look, as she followed into the room.
+
+When supper was over, the boys and girls scattered about the various
+rooms. Roly Poly and Nancy got up charades. Billie curled up in a big
+easy chair by the fire. She had got most of the wind in her face and she
+was very sleepy. No one noticed, therefore, when Mrs. St. Clair, drawing
+Mary’s hand through her arm, led her out of the room.
+
+“I want to see you upstairs, Mary,” she said. “Will you come to my
+little private sitting room? There is something I wish to talk with you
+about.”
+
+Mary was still wondering what in the world could be wanted of her, when
+Mrs. St. Clair drew her into a pretty little pink boudoir at the end of
+the hall. The door to the next room had been left open, but Mary did not
+notice a small, dapper man sitting there in a high-backed cretonne
+chair.
+
+The pearl necklace was lying on a table in the boudoir. Mrs. St. Clair
+picked it up and held it out to Mary.
+
+“Did you ever see it closely before, Mary?” she asked.
+
+“No, I never did,” answered the girl, with enthusiasm. “How beautiful it
+is. No wonder you were so unhappy. But where did you find it?”
+
+“That is just why I brought you in here, Mary. I wanted to ask you if
+you could guess where the necklace had been found at last.”
+
+Mary suddenly became very grave. She was beginning to notice now that
+Mrs. St. Clair was in an unusually serious frame of mind and that
+something must have happened concerning the necklace which the others
+had not heard.
+
+“I don’t understand,” she said, after a pause. “Why should I guess?”
+
+“Is it possible, Mary,” exclaimed the widow, “that even after you were
+told I had found the necklace you were not just a little frightened, a
+little uneasy? Didn’t you suspect when I asked you to come up here with
+me that I was going to speak to you about the necklace?”
+
+Mary looked at her in wonder for a few minutes. Then a light dawned on
+her.
+
+“It’s Fannie Alta again,” she said, in a low voice. “She must have put
+the necklace among some of my things.”
+
+“Then you do know where I found the necklace?” cried the widow
+triumphantly.
+
+“I can guess,” said Mary. “You found it in my suit case. It’s the second
+time she’s done something like that.”
+
+“Mary, Mary—don’t blame it on any one else. I did find the necklace in
+your valise——”
+
+Mary stood up. Her eyes were blazing and her small slender frame was
+shaken with emotion.
+
+“Do you mean to insinuate that I stole your pearl necklace?” she cried.
+
+Her words rang out in a high, clear tone that made the small man in the
+next room stir uneasily.
+
+“How else did the necklace get into your bag, Mary?”
+
+[Illustration: “Do you mean to insinuate that I stole your pearl
+necklace?”]
+
+“Fannie Alta put it there. She put twenty dollars into my pocket not
+long ago and tried to accuse me of taking that, and when I gave it back
+to her she hadn’t a word to say.”
+
+“But, Mary, Fannie is not your only accuser. Miss Gray tells me that you
+have been suspected of many thefts since school opened.”
+
+“Oh, oh!” cried Mary. “How dare she? How dare any one? What have I done
+that these people should try to make me out a thief? Oh, mother,
+mother!”
+
+“That is just why I brought you up here to-night, Mary. On account of
+your sweet, lovely mother. I want you to make me a promise in return for
+what I am going to do for you. I promise not to push this matter any
+farther. It shall never reach your mother’s ears. She will be spared all
+distress and misery, if you promise me never again, as long as you live,
+to steal. It was not nice of you, Mary, staying here as my guest, to
+steal from me. Will you make me that promise?”
+
+Mary did not reply. She sat down and clasped her hands in her lap. Once
+or twice her throat quivered with the little sob, which so went to
+Billie’s heart. She pressed her hands together and closed her eyes for a
+moment. Her face was so pale that Mrs. St. Clair thought she was going
+to faint, but her lips were moving.
+
+“Oh, God, help me,” she prayed softly. “Tell me what to say.”
+
+Presently her agitation ceased altogether. She opened her eyes and
+looked calmly at the widow.
+
+“No, I will not promise you that, Mrs. St. Clair, because I have never
+stolen anything in my life. I would prefer that my mother should know
+about this. I don’t wish to keep it from her. She would never believe me
+guilty, no matter what the evidence was against me, even if I had to go
+to jail. You say you found the necklace in my bag? How did you happen to
+look for it there?”
+
+“You see, I believed that Fannie Alta had taken it, and when we brought
+her into the living room and urged her to tell what she knew, she
+accused you. I would not believe it, however, until I had called up Miss
+Gray. It was only after that that I looked in your bag.”
+
+Mary stood up.
+
+“I know that things look very black for me, Mrs. St. Clair. I don’t
+understand why, but there is a conspiracy in the High School. It seems
+to have formed around Billie and me in particular. But there is
+something else, too. Something is going on in West Haven—something too
+big for us to understand. Billie and I are in it, and Fannie Alta is in
+it, and sometimes I think even Belle Rogers is, too. I don’t know what
+it all means, or why it should have anything to do with making me a
+thief, but I am not a thief, and I did not put the necklace in my bag.
+Good-night. I will not see you again. As soon as morning comes, Billie
+and I will go back in the motor. I know she will take me if I ask her.”
+
+Mary walked quietly out of the room.
+
+“That’s a girl of fine spirit,” thought Mr. Bangs. “The case is
+certainly interesting enough to keep me here another week.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.—MISS CAMPBELL WEARS BLACK.
+
+
+Mary went straight to her room that night and packed her bag. When
+Billie came up a little later she found her kneeling beside her bed, her
+face hidden in her hands. It seemed to the unhappy young girl in her
+misery and danger that no human power could aid her.
+
+When Billie heard the story, she was so angry with Mrs. St. Clair and
+Miss Gray and Fannie Alta that she took an imaginary aim and pitched
+both shoes across the room with all her force.
+
+“Oh, my dear, my dear,” she cried, throwing her arms about her friend’s
+neck with affectionate fervor, “you have at least one devoted friend who
+will stand by you through everything.”
+
+Mary was touched by Billie’s devotion and by and by the two girls
+dropped off to sleep in spite of their troubled hearts.
+
+But they were up and dressed before any one except the servants was
+stirring in the house. Randolph, greatly amazed, and imploring the young
+ladies to wait and take at least a cup of coffee, led the way to the
+carriage house where the motor had been left.
+
+“Tell Mrs. St. Clair,” said Billie, “that I was called home early and
+will write to her.”
+
+No one knew but the colored servant, and he did not understand, that
+Mary and Billie had refused to eat anything in a house where one of them
+had been called a thief.
+
+“Mary, tell your mother the whole story,” said Billie, as she dropped
+her friend at “The Sign of the Blue Tea Pot.” “Tell her not to be
+uneasy. Your friends know you are innocent and it is all obliged to come
+out right.”
+
+Then she dashed around the Square, turned up Cliff Street, and stopped
+at the home of Miss Helen Campbell.
+
+“No, I haven’t had breakfast,” she said to the old man servant, who
+opened the door. “I’ll eat with Cousin Helen if she hasn’t breakfasted.”
+
+“Miss Campbell will not eat any breakfast this morning, Miss Billie,”
+replied the butler.
+
+“Is she ill?”
+
+“No, Miss,” the old man lowered his voice, “but she’s wearing her black
+dress.”
+
+Billie frowned.
+
+“Is it an anniversary?” she asked.
+
+“No, Miss. That’s just the queer part. It ain’t the anniversary. We know
+when that comes now. But something’s happened.”
+
+“Nothing to do with papa?” she asked anxiously.
+
+“No, no, Miss.”
+
+“I’ll have some breakfast, then,” she said. “I’m very hungry from the
+ride in town.”
+
+Billie ate a hurried but hearty meal alone.
+
+“I never can do anything when I’m empty,” she often said, and
+instinctively she felt that trouble of some sort was brewing.
+
+After breakfast she tapped on her cousin’s door.
+
+“Come in,” came the tremulous answer, and Billie entered a darkened
+room.
+
+Miss Campbell, looking faded and pale and wearing a black crepe dress,
+was sitting alone at the far end of her apartment. Her hands were
+crossed on her breast like a mediæval saint’s, and she looked the very
+picture of hopeless misery.
+
+“Dear Cousin Helen, what has happened?” cried Billie, running to the
+little lady and kneeling beside her chair. “Is it something very
+terrible?”
+
+Miss Campbell put her arm around the girl’s neck and two tears slipped
+down her faded cheeks.
+
+“Billie, Billie, why have you deceived me so?” she exclaimed. “How could
+you have done this terrible thing? Oh, my dear, my dear, I have been so
+unhappy, and Mrs. Price, too. We have wept together.”
+
+“What in the world?” cried Billie.
+
+“The jewels, my dear. The box of wonderful jewels that you have kept.
+How could you have done such a thing? I know many young girls who would
+have been tempted by them. But not you, my dear, dear Billie. And Mary,
+too. Oh, heavens, I am so unhappy!”
+
+Miss Campbell was so shaken by her sobs and weeping that Billie was
+obliged to wipe her eyes with her own handkerchief.
+
+“But, dearest Cousin,” she said at last. “We haven’t done anything
+dishonest, or that we might be ashamed of. How did you find out about
+the box and who told you such a slander about us?”
+
+After being bolstered up with aromatic nerve drops and eau de cologne,
+Miss Campbell was able to speak coherently.
+
+“Yesterday a man came here to see me. He sent up his name and the
+message that he wished to speak to me about something in regard to you,
+so I had him shown in. And then, my child, he told me such a story. How
+his motor car had been wrecked on the very day we went to Shell Island
+and a box of jewels belonging to his wife had fallen in the sand. He had
+good reason to know, he said, that you had found the jewels and, instead
+of trying to find the owner or answering advertisements and notes, had
+kept them all this time in Mrs. Price’s safe. He gave me a list of the
+jewels and an exact description. I went at once to Mrs. Price. We found
+the combination, opened the safe, and got out the box. There they were,
+just as he had described them. Oh, my dear, what mortification! What
+will your father say?”
+
+“Did you give him the jewels?” exclaimed Billie, without waiting to make
+explanations until this important point was settled.
+
+“The man was very insistent. He has threatened to arrest you and Mary
+and even Mrs. Price. Think of that! For harboring stolen goods.”
+
+“Did you give them to him?” cried Billie, impatiently.
+
+“No, Mrs. Price refused to let him have them until she had seen you and
+Mary. For my part, I should have given them to the man and let him go.
+We had a terrible scene with him, but Mrs. Price was firm. She said it
+would do no harm for him to wait until she had seen you and she would
+not allow him to take them.”
+
+“Thank heavens for that,” burst out Billie. “Then the box is in Mrs.
+Price’s safe?”
+
+“No, I had it brought here for safe-keeping. The man was so angry he
+made threats and I thought it would be better to get it away from Mrs.
+Price’s at least.”
+
+“What was the man’s name?”
+
+“Lafitte. He wrote it on a piece of paper.”
+
+“Lafitte?” echoed Billie. “What did he look like?”
+
+“I cannot really recall, my dear. I was so agitated. But I think there
+was something wrong about one eye.”
+
+“He had only one eye,” Billie almost shrieked in her excitement.
+
+“I believe so, and only one arm. But you will see him. He will be back
+this morning.”
+
+“Cousin Helen, he will never come back. He is a thief and a robber and a
+smuggler. He is everything that is wicked and bad. I don’t know how he
+found out that we had the jewels, but he has been hot on our track ever
+since. I will tell you the real story of the jewels and then you will
+see what an injustice you have done us.”
+
+When Billie had finished the strange tale, Miss Campbell looked at her
+with a peculiar expression.
+
+“It’s a very remarkable story, my dear. And if I did not know you as
+well as I do, I could almost think you had imagined it. And I was there
+all the time. You should have confided in me. The woman was insane, I
+suppose.”
+
+“She was not,” insisted Billie. “She was perfectly sane and very
+beautiful. The man who calls himself ‘Lafitte’ is not the right person,
+and he shall not have the jewels until I hear from her or from the right
+Lafitte. You may be sure he will not dare have me or any one else
+arrested. We know too much about him already.”
+
+“But what are we to do with the things, child? They have brought nothing
+but trouble on you since you have had them.”
+
+“Suppose you put them in your safety box at the bank for a few days.
+There is something much more important than this at stake now. Mary has
+been accused of being a thief by Mrs. St. Clair and Miss Gray. It is a
+terrible thing. Mrs. St. Clair wouldn’t listen to reason.”
+
+Billie related to her cousin what had happened the day before and the
+chain of events which led up to it.
+
+“Oh, poor dear Mrs. Price! My unfortunate friend. What shall we do,
+Billie?” exclaimed the sympathetic little woman.
+
+“I don’t know yet, Cousin Helen. The whole thing is too much for me, but
+I have a scheme. Are there any detectives in West Haven?”
+
+“Call up the police station,” her cousin suggested, and presently
+Billie’s voice could be heard in the hall:
+
+“Have you a good detective? Bangs, you say. Send him to Miss Campbell’s
+please; upper Cliff Street, and the sooner the better. Good-by.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.—THE MISSING LINK.
+
+
+Mr. Bangs made three calls on that memorable Monday. The first was to
+Billie, as you already surmise. If he recognized the strong undercurrent
+which connected the strange adventures of the Motor Maids during the
+past two months, he said nothing, but listened gravely to the young
+girl’s account of the happenings in Boulder Lane, the box of jewels, the
+cases of rifles at Seven League Island, and so on through the events
+which have been told in this history.
+
+When Billie had finished, she paused and waited for the detective to
+speak, but he sat silently twirling his thumbs and looking down at the
+floor with half-closed eyes.
+
+Billie was slightly irritated.
+
+“I have sent for you, Mr. Bangs,” she continued with some dignity,
+“because, while I am certain of two things, I’m not at all sure of the
+third. The first is that Fannie Alta has some very good reason for
+trying to prove that Mary is a thief. The second is that this smuggler
+who has been trying to steal the jewels has something to do with it.”
+
+“And what is the third, Miss Campbell?” asked the detective, smiling,
+without looking up.
+
+“That is what I want you to tell me,” exclaimed Billie restlessly.
+“There is a third. It is the missing link. And it is what I wanted you
+to find out for me. I have thought and thought and puzzled and puzzled,
+but I can’t make it out. I believe with all my soul that there is some
+wicked force back of the whole thing.”
+
+Mr. Bangs raised his eyes at last and looked at the young girl with
+evident admiration.
+
+“You are taking the first step toward making a good detective, Miss
+Campbell,” he said. “You have expressed it in three words. It is the
+missing link we need to get at in this business and it is what I must
+find.”
+
+Billie flushed with pleasure at this professional praise. She had never
+had occasion to play the part of detective before. But devotion and
+loyalty to her friend had sharpened her wits.
+
+“Now, why?” asked the detective. “Isn’t Miss Alta the missing link?”
+
+“That is the strangest part of the whole business. She is a piece of the
+link, I think, but then she has nothing against Mary and me. There would
+be no object to what she has done unless she had.”
+
+“You did not know that she accused you of being the confederate of your
+friend or that she knew that you had the box of jewels hidden in the
+safe?”
+
+“What?” cried Billie, with amazement. “But how did she know——” she
+began.
+
+“Yes, how?”
+
+Billie sat looking down at her hands. She was not thinking of those
+slender, strong fingers, which appeared to clasp each other with a
+friendly grip. Her thoughts were busy going back over the past few
+weeks.
+
+“I think I’ve found the missing link,” she said at last, with a serious
+look in her eyes, as she turned toward the detective. “Belle Rogers is
+the missing link. I can’t understand why I haven’t thought of it before,
+but it seemed so incredible.”
+
+“Miss Campbell,” put in Mr. Bangs severely, “I am afraid you are not
+such a good detective, after all. You have left out one of the most
+important things. You did not tell me that some one besides your three
+friends knew about the jewels.”
+
+Billie had omitted the story of the confusion of the two suit cases at
+Shell Island. She had really quite forgotten it and Mr. Bangs chuckled
+with amusement when he heard how Belle had opened and examined all the
+contents of another girl’s suit case out of pure curiosity.
+
+“Then she must have read the name on the card, too,” he said presently.
+
+“I suppose so.”
+
+“Now, tell me, Miss Campbell, what is the grudge which this young lady
+perhaps has against you and your friends?”
+
+“Oh, it’s only a silly schoolgirl affair,” replied Billie. “I am ashamed
+to tell you, because it seems so utterly trivial in comparison to other
+things. She was angry because I wouldn’t join her club and because we
+saw her the night of the fire with her hair up in rubber curlers.”
+
+The detective laughed outright.
+
+“That’s a woman’s reason for taking revenge,” he said.
+
+“And she was angry again because I took her into the wrong room, when
+the hotel was burning and we had to escape over the roof.”
+
+“Humph!” exclaimed the detective. “Insult piled onto injury, eh? So this
+Miss Rogers is a very vindictive character?”
+
+Billie hesitated. It went against her straight-forward, honest nature to
+malign even Belle Rogers.
+
+“She has been spoiled all her life,” she said, “and you know how spoiled
+children must have their own way. That is all. She was angry because she
+planned to make me a member of her club and queen it over me as she does
+over the others, and I disappointed her. Her mother and friends have
+taken good care always that she should never be disappointed and she
+just didn’t know what the feeling was, I suppose.”
+
+“She must be quite a remarkably spoiled young woman to go to such
+lengths for such a trivial offence. But we sometimes get in deeper than
+we intend, you know.”
+
+The detective rose to go.
+
+“Good day, Miss Campbell,” he said, giving her hand quite a warm grip,
+considering what a quiet, cold individual he had seemed at first. “You
+will hear from me again, soon. I had not intended to work when I came
+down here. You know I am a West Haven boy. My father was old Bill Bangs,
+the jailer. You probably have heard of him. He was a famous character in
+his day. I came home to rest and see my people, but when a detective
+scents a good case he is not apt to let it slip by, even on a holiday.”
+
+“And you think this is a good case?”
+
+“It’s a corking one,” he replied, as he closed the door after him.
+
+Billie and Mary did not go to school that famous Monday. Billie had no
+mind to face the curious looks she felt certain would be turned upon her
+by the other girls, because news travels quickly in any school. Mary was
+lying on her mother’s bed with a throbbing sick headache. All day Mrs.
+Price sat beside her daughter and held her hand. At intervals she bathed
+her temples with eau de cologne and whispered:
+
+“My dearest, it will come out all right. Mother loves you and believes
+in you and so does Billie. Don’t sob like that for my sake, my little
+girl.”
+
+Belle Rogers also stayed at home that Monday. Mr. Bangs discovered this
+fact on his second visit of the day when he was closeted for an hour or
+more with Miss Gray and Mrs. St. Clair in the principal’s private
+office.
+
+After a tiresome interview with these two well meaning but mistaken
+ladies, in which he said little and they said much, he left the High
+School with a sigh of relief.
+
+Presently he found himself in the fashionable district of West Haven. It
+was the second time he had climbed the street that day, but he was a
+calm little person, not easily heated by emotion or exercise, and when
+he rang the bell at the Rogers home, there was just the suspicion of a
+smile on his face. He sent up his card for Miss Rogers and word was
+brought back that Miss Rogers was ill and not to be seen. Then, with a
+pencil, he wrote across the face of the card, “Lafitte—Paris.”
+
+In three minutes the swish of skirts down the steps announced that some
+one was coming.
+
+“I hope it’s not the mother,” he said to himself.
+
+But it was Belle, very pale, with violet circles around her eyes and a
+nervous quivering about the lips.
+
+When Mr. Bangs left the Rogers house after spending three-quarters of an
+hour with Belle, he remarked as he strolled down the gravel driveway to
+the street:
+
+“It will have to be an out and out confession from one or the other. If
+this one doesn’t give it, the Alta girl must. I shall pay my respects to
+Mme. Alta this evening.”
+
+He had hardly passed through the great iron gateway leading into the
+street, when Belle, wearing a heavy veil and a long ulster, hurried
+after him. She carried a music roll under her arm, although she was not
+taking lessons, since she had been injured in the fire, but it was
+understood by the servant who opened the door for her that she was going
+to see Mme. Alta.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.—THE REFUGEES.
+
+
+A ship had sailed into the little harbor of West Haven on Monday
+morning. She carried a load of lumber from down the coast and after
+showing her clearance papers and discharging her cargo with all due
+formality, she hoisted sails again and moved around the curve of the
+harbor into a deep inlet, where she rested at anchor in a position just
+opposite Boulder Lane.
+
+Darkness fell very early that Monday afternoon as those who were not in
+their homes will remember.
+
+Mr. Bangs will recall the inky blackness of the lowering sky, as he came
+out of the telegraph office, where he had wired to his chief to send
+down another man, and turned his steps toward the rooms occupied by Mme.
+Alta.
+
+Our Motor Maids have not forgotten how they sped back to town after a
+swift ride in their beloved “Comet,” in the late afternoon, when they
+discussed the situation long and earnestly.
+
+Three figures turned into Boulder Lane as the motor car flashed past,
+but the girls were too intent on their conversation to notice them. The
+first, who was a tall, stout woman, walked stoically along with the
+tread of a grenadier. She carried a large suit case with one hand and an
+enormous bundle with the other. Her two upper teeth protruding over her
+lower lip gave her that strange animal look which Billie had disliked so
+much. For it was Mme. Alta, as you have no doubt guessed, trudging up
+Boulder Lane. Her daughter, Francesca, walked behind. She also carried a
+suit case and a bundle. Occasionally she flashed a look of hatred back
+to the lights of West Haven, which place she had never loved.
+
+Can this be Belle Rogers who brings up the procession, staggering under
+a heavy satchel and moaning and weeping as she stumbles along?
+
+“I am glad I left word that I had gone out to spend the night,” she said
+to herself. “At least, they won’t know it for a while, and it will be
+too late then.”
+
+It was a long walk before they reached the end of Boulder Lane and found
+themselves on the beach of the little cove. The lights of the ship made
+a rippling, cheerful track on the water, but Belle shivered when she saw
+the black hull outlined in the darkness.
+
+Several men were waiting for them near a boat, which had been moored on
+the beach, and presently the three women climbed in; their luggage was
+piled at one end and they were rowed away in the darkness. Two wagons
+came lumbering up the beach, and half the night, Belle, who was tossing
+feverishly in her stuffy berth, trying to stifle her sobs, heard the
+sailors loading a cargo, while the boats plied back and forth from the
+shore to the ship.
+
+There was no wind that night and an ominous silence seemed to brood over
+the sea. At last in the stillness, Belle slept. Toward morning she was
+awakened by the sound of a voice. A man in a small boat just below her
+porthole was calling up to some one on deck.
+
+“Hello, Captain, it’s Ruiz. I’m coming aboard. We must sail by dawn.
+They’ve got word about us. If that girl has turned traitor, she shall
+pay for it.”
+
+Belle could not hear the captain’s reply, but he must have made some
+objection to sailing that morning, for the man named Ruiz answered:
+
+“Storm or no storm, I’m master here, and I say we sail at once.”
+
+And sail they did without more argument. She could hear the sailors
+running about the ship. The masts creaked and groaned. Chains rattled.
+Presently the boat was in motion, and from her porthole she saw the
+familiar shores glide past her.
+
+We cannot help pitying poor Belle in her misery and distress. She
+dragged herself from her berth—Fannie was still sleeping soundly—and
+put on her clothes. For the first time, she became aware of a sustained
+and ever-increasing sound. What she had mistaken in the beginning for
+the eternal noise of the waters, she recognized now as the wind. As she
+cast one long regretful look back to the shores of West Haven, which she
+had never really loved until now, the hurricane burst upon them with a
+roar like a thousand angry beasts. The ship went scurrying through the
+harbor entrance in the teeth of the gale.
+
+Belle hurried upstairs to the deck, pulling on her ulster as she ran.
+Not a vestige of curl had the wet air left in her light gold hair; but
+for the first time in her life, since she had been old enough to
+remember, she had forgotten that she had any hair and she did not even
+stop to push back the damp, uneven locks from her eyes.
+
+The boat had cleared the Black Reefs and was making for the open sea,
+when suddenly the demon wind played a trick on the captain of the little
+schooner and changed its tack. Down went the mainmast with a great
+crash. Through the shrieking of the wind, Belle could hear the curses
+and cries of the sailors and the yells of the captain. Mme. Alta
+appeared, looking more than ever like a walrus, in her greasy old black
+dressing gown. Fannie ran up behind her, making a great outcry.
+
+The hurricane seemed to lift the ship in its arms and carry it along.
+Then, with a hideous grinding noise, the vessel stood perfectly still.
+
+Some one screamed:
+
+“We’re on the rocks!”
+
+And Belle knew without being told that they had tossed onto the Black
+Reefs.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+“Wake up, Billie,” cried Nancy, shaking her friend’s shoulder violently.
+“Get up and dress. We are all waiting below.”
+
+“What’s happened?” asked Billie, sitting up in bed and rubbing her eyes.
+
+“A ship is wrecked on the Black Reefs.”
+
+Billie leaped from her bed and began to dress hurriedly.
+
+“It must be a fearful sight,” she exclaimed, as she pulled on her
+clothes. “The poor sailors, will they be saved?”
+
+“I haven’t heard,” answered Nancy, “but the whole town is rushing up the
+Cliff Road.”
+
+“Tell Ben to get ‘The Comet.’ He can run it as well as I can now.”
+
+“He has,” answered Nancy, with the privilege of friendship. “I made him
+get it while I routed you out.”
+
+In another five minutes “The Comet,” with its load of boys and
+girls,—only Mary and Percy were missing,—was climbing Cliff Road in a
+driving hurricane of wind.
+
+A straggling line of people hurried along the path toward the
+Life-Saving Station.
+
+“Is that it?” demanded Billie breathlessly, when the car had come to a
+standstill opposite the light house.
+
+“Yes,” replied Merry, looking through the glasses. “She doesn’t look
+much larger than a fishing smack from this distance, but she’s really a
+pretty big schooner and she’s in a bad fix, too. She has stuck right on
+the Serpent’s Fang, Ben. You remember that old fisherman showed it to us
+last summer when we were sailing? It’s a pointed rock that sticks up
+higher than the others and it looked to be a pretty fierce proposition
+to me.”
+
+“The life-boat is being launched!” exclaimed Elinor.
+
+They clutched each other in their excitement, while a boat, with six
+brave life-savers in it, leapt onto the crest of a big wave, only to be
+hurled back again.
+
+“They’ll have to use the gun,” put in Charlie. “They’ll never make it in
+this sea.”
+
+“What do you mean?” shouted Billie. It was almost impossible to be heard
+now above the noise of the wind.
+
+But before any one could shout back an explanation, her attention was
+claimed by a man in a long, thick ulster, buttoned to his chin, and a
+vizored cap pulled well over his eyes. He had come to the front of the
+motor car and, bowing to Billie politely, he stood on tiptoe and
+beckoned to her to lean down.
+
+“You’ll be surprised to hear that you have friends on that ship,” he
+said in her ear, and she recognized Mr. Bangs.
+
+“Friends?” she repeated, in amazement.
+
+“Wait and see,” he replied, as he moved away to join another man, who
+was leaning against a tree smoking a cigar.
+
+“Look!” cried some one, and just as Billie shifted her gaze from the
+ship to the beach she saw a long black line shoot out over the water and
+light on the deck of the ship. It was very confusing then, what
+happened. There was a great deal of shouting on shore and scurrying of
+sailors on the ship. Presently there seemed to be a double line of rope
+stretching out to the wreck.
+
+After a long pause, Billie saw, creeping along one of the lines of rope,
+swaying and swinging almost to sea level, an object which appeared to be
+shaped like a pair of clumsy trouser legs with the head and shoulders of
+a human being above.
+
+“It’s a woman,” cried Nancy, jumping up and down in her excitement, as
+she looked through the glasses. “It’s—it’s——”
+
+“It’s Mme. Alta,” exclaimed Billie, as the woman was lifted onto the
+beach.
+
+No one could explain why the music teacher should be found on a wrecked
+schooner, but Mr. Bangs and Billie exchanged meaning glances as Mme.
+Alta was supported into the Life-Saving Station.
+
+The next time the buoy was drawn into shore it carried Fannie Alta, a
+shivering, wretched little figure, who followed her mother silently into
+the life-savers’ house.
+
+“Who can the third one be?” said Billie out loud, although she was
+speaking to herself. “Can it be——”
+
+She jumped out of the car and ran down the path to the beach, followed
+by her three chums. As she passed Mr. Bangs, he caught her by the arm
+and said in her ear:
+
+“The missing link.”
+
+No one but Billie and Mr. Bangs recognized Belle Rogers in the miserable
+object which now crawled out of the breeches buoy. Her face was blue and
+pinched with cold. Her damp hair hung in her eyes, and she moaned and
+sobbed most pitifully.
+
+When she saw Billie, she flung her wet arms around the young girl’s
+neck.
+
+“Oh, forgive me! Forgive me!” she wept.
+
+A crowd of people gathered around them.
+
+Billie patted her on the shoulder.
+
+“I do forgive you,” she whispered, “and if you would rather not go into
+the station, we will take you home in ‘The Comet.’”
+
+“Any place but home,” sobbed Belle, as Ben threw his ulster around her
+shivering shoulders and Nancy wrapped a scarf about her head.
+
+The others had now recognized the poor girl, and with a generous impulse
+they tried to shield her from the gaze of the villagers.
+
+“Will you go to Cousin Helen’s, then?” asked Belle, as they half carried
+her up the steep path.
+
+“Yes,” she answered, and in another ten minutes the miserable refugee
+was being tenderly ministered to at Billie’s home by three of the most
+detested members of the Blue Bird Society.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.—BELLE’S CONFESSION.
+
+
+Belle, looking still very unlike herself, lay in Billie’s little brass
+bed, propped up on pillows.
+
+“How can you and Miss Campbell be so kind to me,” she was saying, “when
+you know how wicked I have been?”
+
+“But you are sorry and that means everything,” answered Billie, who was
+sitting on the side of the bed, feeding her hot beef tea.
+
+“When are the others coming?” asked the invalid.
+
+“They have come. I was just going to tell you after you had finished the
+tea. Shall I call them?”
+
+Belle nodded, and presently Miss Gray and Mary Price came into the room.
+
+The Principal took the sick girl’s hand kindly.
+
+“Speak out from the heart, Belle,” she said, “and don’t be afraid. You
+will be much happier when you get it off your mind.”
+
+“I promise to, Miss Gray,” replied Belle meekly, gazing miserably at
+Mary, who looked pale and ill.
+
+Miss Gray sat in a judicial looking armchair; Mary, with closed eyes,
+lay on a lounge near the fire, and Billie seated herself on the foot of
+the bed.
+
+“I suppose,” began Belle, “it would be almost impossible for you to
+believe that a well brought up girl of decent family could be as wicked
+as I have been. When I finally realized what I had done I thought I
+would rather run away to South America with those terrible people than
+stay here and bear the shame of it all. But I thank heavens for the
+storm. The ship was not sailing for any good purpose. I feel sure of
+that.
+
+“To begin at the beginning, perhaps you didn’t know how angry I was when
+you joined the Blue Birds, Billie? I hope I shall never be angry again.
+I was ill from it and I lay on my bed all afternoon planning a revenge
+on all the Blue Birds, but you, especially. I think I must have been
+insane with rage and mortification. I wanted to humiliate you, because I
+thought you had humiliated me before the whole school. I thought of
+dozens of ways of doing it, but the only plan that seemed good enough
+was to prove——”
+
+She paused and bit her lip.
+
+“To prove that you were—a—thief.”
+
+There was a long silence. Nothing could be heard but the ticking of the
+little French clock on the mantel. Miss Gray had started and flushed
+crimson. She was only just now realizing what this confession must mean
+to the two girls.
+
+“I asked Fannie Alta to help me because she was the only outsider in the
+class, but I never dreamed that she was a real thief, herself. She found
+out what it was I wanted her to do almost before I had half breathed it
+to myself, only she was afraid of Billie and put it on Mary. It was my
+twenty dollars she used, but we found the scheme didn’t work. Anyhow,
+she told it all over school and went so much farther than I had intended
+that I soon found myself too deeply involved to get out. She and her
+mother owned me, body and soul. I had to take Fannie with me everywhere
+I went, even to Mrs. St. Clair’s. I had to give her my clothes, and
+explain to mamma that she was my best friend. Her mother made me carry
+letters and messages back and forth. Once I had to go by myself all the
+way to Boulder Lane after dusk and meet a horrible creature who had only
+one eye and one arm. He gave me a letter for Mme. Alta. Another time I
+was to meet one of them, a man who helped him, up in the Sophomore class
+room of the High School. I didn’t go, because there was such a mist.”
+
+Billie and Mary exchanged glances.
+
+“He was the man who robbed us of the fifty dollars,” said Billie.
+
+“Then whose fifty dollars was it I got?” demanded Miss Gray.
+
+“My monthly allowance,” replied Billie.
+
+“Foolish, foolish girls,” said the Principal. “But it was my own fault.
+I blame no one else, and perhaps I wouldn’t have believed the story just
+at that time.”
+
+“Then,” continued Belle, “the most dreadful thing of all happened. These
+people were always in need of money. Everything they had seemed to go to
+some object. The one-eyed man, who was Fannie’s stepfather, was to get
+some high position in South America. She used to tell me what she was
+going to do when he was made Vice President, or something. When we went
+to the St. Clair’s, Fannie was almost unbearable. She made me give her
+my dress and I had to wear hers, and she insulted me at every turn. But
+I didn’t find out until after the party that her stepfather had been
+there dressed as a ghost. He wanted to rob Mrs. St. Clair. It was Fannie
+who took the necklace. She was to go back later and give it to him, so
+that if her bag was searched the next morning, when the necklace was
+missed, it wouldn’t be found. But she made me go back instead, after
+every one else was asleep, I supposed. It was terrible, when I found
+myself alone in the attic, with the necklace hidden under my wrapper. No
+one was there. The man must have been frightened and run away. Then I
+heard all of you come and I threw a sheet over me and hid in a far
+corner.”
+
+“It _was_ you, then?” exclaimed Billie.
+
+“Yes, and when I met you and Mary I had the necklace with me and I
+didn’t think I had strength enough to get to my room. When we got home
+from Mrs. Ruggles’ next day and I found Fannie had been sent to town, I
+knew something had happened. I thought perhaps she might have taken the
+necklace with her, but the next morning, when you and Mary left before
+breakfast, I was certain that one of you had been accused.
+
+“You never can understand how I suffered. And yet it was what I had
+planned when I was so angry. Late Monday afternoon Mr. Bangs, a
+detective, came to see me. He wrote across his card ‘Pierre Lafitte,’
+and I was convinced then that he knew everything.”
+
+“You did tell Fannie about the card that was in the box of jewels,
+then?”
+
+Belle hung her head.
+
+“Yes,” she said, at last. “In the very beginning, before I had learned
+to loathe her and myself so, I told it to Fannie.
+
+“After Mr. Bangs had left,” she went on, “I hurried as fast as I could
+to Mme. Alta’s lodgings and told her that everything had been
+discovered. The husband came in while I was there and ordered her to
+leave at once. The ship was in the harbor, he said. I was ordered to go,
+too, and it really did seem best. I felt I should be disgraced if I
+stayed and I was too miserable to reason much, anyway. They were glad to
+go. They hated it here, and they were afraid to leave me, I suppose, for
+fear I would tell. Ever since they were almost caught in Smugglers’
+Cave, they have been very careful.
+
+“I have made a great many people suffer,” Belle went on, “Mary and
+Billie and Mrs. Price and Mrs. St. Clair, and I have suffered, too,
+perhaps more than any of you. But I have learned a great deal. I never
+knew before what a wicked, spoiled girl I was. Mamma and papa never
+denied me anything in my life. I have been indulged and petted until I
+have been nothing but a bundle of selfishness. When the ship was wrecked
+and we thought we were going to sink any minute the scales dropped
+entirely from my eyes and I saw myself as I really was. I knelt on the
+deck and prayed and prayed for forgiveness until they came and told me
+it was my turn to be taken to shore.
+
+“You will forgive me, won’t you Mary? I will do everything I can to make
+up for the trouble and unhappiness I have caused you.”
+
+Belle stretched out her arms toward Mary and tears flowed down her
+cheeks and splashed on the coverlid.
+
+Miss Gray wiped her eyes and Billie’s face worked convulsively for a
+moment and she choked back a lump which would rise in her throat on
+occasions.
+
+Mary came over and took Belle’s hands.
+
+“Of course I forgive you, Belle,” she said, kissing the repentant girl
+on the lips.
+
+“But I must ask your forgiveness, too, Mary,” cried Miss Gray. “I feel I
+am not fit to be the principal of the High School to have so misjudged
+you. It was only the strange way you acted about the fifty dollars which
+made me credit for a moment the stories that were told.”
+
+When peace was entirely restored, Miss Gray took her departure. She did
+not return to the High School, but hurried to the livery stable, where
+she ordered a carriage and had herself driven straight to Mrs. St.
+Clair’s.
+
+As Belle will not again appear in this story, you will perhaps be
+interested to know how sincere her reformation really was. Her mother
+and father scarcely recognized the pale, quiet girl who returned to them
+in another day. Her entire nature had been shaken by the experience, and
+for some time she was dazed and silent. But no one ever saw her angry
+again, and as if she wished to give some visible sign of her repentance,
+the red rubber curlers were thrown away and from that time she has worn
+her hair straight.
+
+There was no evidence against Mme. Alta or Fannie, except what Belle
+Rogers could furnish, and they were finally allowed to go free. But they
+were not permitted to remain in quiet West Haven, where suspicious
+characters were not welcomed.
+
+The police cared little for the music teacher and her daughter. The
+prize they looked for was Ruiz, the famous filibuster and desperado who
+had smuggled hundreds of rifles into Venezuela and had robbed and
+pillaged and even killed, but had never been caught.
+
+Detective Bangs, standing on the shore, the day of the shipwreck,
+scanned eagerly the face of each sailor as he was drawn ashore. But Ruiz
+was not among them. It was supposed that he preferred death to arrest;
+for he remained on the sinking ship. But the sturdy little vessel clung
+desperately to the Serpent’s Fang until after sunset, and there are some
+who believe that Ruiz swam ashore with his one arm, which was as strong
+as iron, and is still at large somewhere working mischief and
+misfortune.
+
+On the day after the departure of Mme. Alta and Fannie, Miss Gray called
+a meeting of the Faculty and pupils of West Haven High School. Mary
+Price was there and so was Billie, and in the gallery sat Mrs. Price
+between Mrs. St. Clair and Miss Campbell.
+
+“I called this meeting,” said Miss Gray, “because I wanted to make an
+announcement to all of you at once, since the subject of the
+announcement concerns us all. We have recently had a very clever thief
+in our midst. She has robbed many of you and has brought unjust
+suspicion on some innocent persons by spreading reports. This girl has
+been dismissed from the school and from West Haven. She will never
+trouble us again.
+
+“Some of us have suffered deeply for the last few weeks on account of
+this disgrace and scandal in the school, and I don’t mind confessing
+that I have been one of those persons. I know that you will all rejoice
+with me that the affair is concluded.
+
+“I want to say further, that at a specially called meeting, the Board of
+Education has consented to add a new post to the school force. This
+position, which is that of private and confidential secretary to the
+principal and has a salary attached, is to be filled by Miss Mary Price.
+I hope you will all congratulate me on my good fortune in obtaining so
+competent and reliable an assistant.”
+
+There was wild applause when this announcement was made and Mary,
+smiling and happy, with her three devoted friends about her, was obliged
+to rise and bow her blushing acknowledgments to her schoolmates.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.—OUT OF THE MISTS.
+
+
+The Motor Maids were gathered in Mrs. Brown’s sunny parlor around a
+cheerful driftwood fire. You may easily guess it was Saturday morning,
+because Nancy was darning stockings, Elinor was at the piano, Mary was
+reading, while Billie lay flat on her back on the hearth rug, her hands
+crossed under her head, thinking deeply.
+
+“I wish people were not so careless of their diamond necklaces and
+things,” she observed, addressing the ceiling with some irritation.
+“Throwing them around in motor cars, giving them to the first person who
+comes along, and not caring to have them returned! It’s a nuisance——”
+
+Suddenly the door was thrown violently open and Merry appeared.
+
+“Mrs. Ruggles,” he announced, making a low bow.
+
+Nancy did not take the trouble to turn around. Elinor went on playing
+and Mary reading. It was only one of Merry’s jokes, they thought. But
+Billie jumped up in amazement; for there actually stood Mrs. Ruggles in
+the flesh—very much in the flesh, in fact. She was dressed in decent
+black and wore a black bonnet, and Billie could not decide whether she
+resembled a queen disguised as a fish-wife or a fish-wife dressed as a
+lady.
+
+“Why, it is Mrs. Ruggles,” cried Nancy, glancing over her shoulder.
+“Merry plays so many jokes that we can never tell when he is in earnest
+and when he isn’t. Do come in, Mrs. Ruggles. What brings you up to town
+so early?”
+
+Mrs. Ruggles, who was slow of speech, did not reply at first. She moved
+into the room with the step of a grenadier and stood before Billie.
+
+“Are you Miss Wilhelmina Campbell?” she asked.
+
+“She is the same,” put in Merry, “but she’ll answer to the name of
+Billie.”
+
+Billie nodded and smiled. She was really too much engaged in admiring
+Mrs. Ruggles to reply to her question.
+
+Nancy pushed up an armchair.
+
+“Please sit down, Mrs. Ruggles, and perhaps you will have a cookie or a
+cup of tea.”
+
+“No, Miss Nancy, I am not hungry and I couldn’t eat anyway, until I
+finished what I have to say.”
+
+“That’s right, Mrs. Ruggles. Get it off your system. Are you going to
+scold Billie?” cried Merry.
+
+“No, my boy. I’m going to thank her. She’s a fine young lady. I have
+just seen Miss Campbell and she has told me.”
+
+“Told you what?” asked Billie.
+
+“Told me that you have kept the box of jewels as you promised.”
+
+“But——” began Billie, a dozen thoughts flashing through her mind at
+once in tumultuous confusion.
+
+She saw again the face of the sick woman at Mrs. Ruggles’, her long hair
+spread over the pillow like a mantel of black and the troubled dark eyes
+which gazed into hers for one brief moment.
+
+“Then that was the automobile lady I saw in your bedroom?” she burst
+out.
+
+“Yes,” replied the old woman. “That was my daughter, Maria.”
+
+“Is Maria home again?” asked Elinor.
+
+“I thought she had married a South American,” said Nancy.
+
+“Maria is now a singer,” said Mrs. Ruggles proudly. “She has sung in
+Buenos Ayres and Paris, not in this country. Her husband was from
+Venezuela. He was very rich and he gave her many jewels. He loved her
+dearly for a few years, until he began to like something else better.”
+
+The old woman paused. It was extremely difficult for her to speak at
+such great length when she was so unaccustomed to talking at all.
+
+“My daughter is very beautiful and very clever. She will be a great
+singer. He was jealous of her singing. He wished to be great, too, and
+he became a politician. Gradually he spent all of his money in making
+trouble for the government of his country. He wished to bring about a
+war and make himself a ruler. My son, my daughter’s step brother, pushed
+him on. He was a bad boy, my only son. It is better that he should be
+dead. He was always in the thick of the fight. He couldn’t keep away.
+His arm was shot off; his eye put out. But nothing could stop him.”
+
+“Was Ruiz really your son, John, who went away to sea so many years
+ago?” interrupted Nancy.
+
+Mrs. Ruggles nodded.
+
+“What happened next, Mrs. Ruggles?” demanded Billie.
+
+“The next thing was that my Maria could not stand the life any longer.
+She came back to America with her jewels. They were all that was left of
+her husband’s fortune and those he wanted so much that he threatened her
+many times. If he had wished to use them for a good purpose and not for
+rifles to kill innocent people, Maria would have given them gladly. But
+he was too clever for her, that man. He followed on a fast steamer and
+caught up with her before she could get to me. He forced her to go with
+him in an automobile down the Shell Island road to meet John, my poor
+son, who was to take the jewels and sell them. Maria always carried her
+jewelry in a secret pocket inside of her skirt, but she had put it in a
+box that day and wrapped the box in her coat. Her husband did not know
+this. He thought she had it in the usual place. When they were upset
+going around a curve in the road my Maria was very seriously injured.
+She is still very lame. Her husband went away to get another car and you
+know the rest.
+
+“When they found out in a few hours that she did not have the jewels
+they were very angry. She told them the truth: that she had given them
+to a young lady she had met, and asked her to take care of them.
+Although she did not have the name or address of this young lady, she
+knew they would be safe.”
+
+“And Mr. Lafitte?” began Billie.
+
+“He is an old friend, a lawyer who lives in Paris. She happened to have
+his card in her pocket. But he had just started to America and the
+letter she wrote, and your letter, came back here. That is how I
+happened to get your name at last, Miss Wilhelmina. Mr. Lafitte was with
+my daughter yesterday.”
+
+“And what became of your son-in-law, Mrs. Ruggles?” asked Elinor.
+
+“He died some weeks ago,” replied Mrs. Ruggles. “He was accidentally
+shot with one of his own rifles, which exploded and killed him. My son
+had his body sent to us and we laid him to rest in the old Sabater
+burying ground, where all my family is buried. It is better that he
+should have died. He only made trouble while he lived, not only for poor
+Maria, but for his country, where many have been killed with the rifles
+he has smuggled in. He was a good man until he got in with those
+revolutionists. And my poor son, my poor John, how much sorrow he has
+brought us——”
+
+Billie wondered if Mrs. Ruggles really knew the extent of her poor son’s
+evil career. Perhaps she did, for the old woman’s face twitched
+nervously for a moment and she covered her eyes with her hand, as if she
+wished to hide her unhappiness from the young girls.
+
+“Maria and I are going away for a long time,” she went on at last, with
+a rather shaky voice. “I will close the Inn. It is hard for me to leave
+home in my old age, but Maria wishes it, and it is better for me to be
+with her. Good-by and thank you,” she said simply, rising and taking
+Billie’s hand.
+
+Billie stood on tiptoe and put her arms around Mrs. Ruggles’ neck.
+
+“Good-by, Mrs. Ruggles,” she said. “I hope that your troubles are all
+over now and you and your daughter will be happy together.”
+
+The old woman wiped her eyes. She could not speak when she said good-by
+to the other girls, but silently handed Billie a little package and
+hurried away.
+
+The package, when unwrapped, proved to be a small box containing a
+pretty gold filigree necklace. Written on a card inside was this
+message:
+
+“With my love and gratitude. This is a simple little necklace my father
+brought me once from a voyage to the East. I am fond of it and that is
+why I send it to you. Will you wear it sometimes and think of me? I
+shall never forget your kindness and loyalty.
+
+“Maria Ruggles Cortina.”
+
+And now we have reached the end of our tale. Those troublous first
+months of Billie Campbell’s early school days in West Haven are changed
+into happy, quiet times, with plenty of study and plenty of play. All
+doubts and mysteries are cleared up, and the Motor Maids, wholesome,
+nice girls, are none the worse for their adventures.
+
+It is in their beloved “Comet” that we see them last, flashing down Main
+Street toward the open country.
+
+Billie, like the good pilot she is, is seated at the wheel, her fine
+gray eyes ever on the lookout. Nancy is bubbling over with laughter and
+gaiety. Elinor, on the back seat, holds herself as proudly as a queen,
+and little Mary, with a grave smile on her face, looks out across the
+fields, her clear eyes, deep as pools, holding and reflecting, as ever,
+the beauty from without intensified by the purity of the spirit within.
+
+The friendship of these four school girls was of the quality that
+outlives a single season and many adventures. It held them together, in
+fact, so closely that they often found themselves planning for an
+indefinite future of partnership and mutual pleasures. That they
+realized their anticipations to some extent at least is assured, for the
+next volume of this series, “The Motor Maids by Palm and Pine,” is a
+further account of their good times together.
+
+                                THE END.
+
+
+
+
+BOY AVIATORS’ SERIES
+
+By Captain Wilbur Lawton
+
+Absolutely Modern Stories for Boys
+
+Cloth Bound
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+the GOLDEN EAGLE, rescue a chum from death in the clutches of the
+Nicaraguans, discover a lost treasure valley of the ancient Toltec race,
+and in so doing almost lose their own lives in the Abyss of the White
+Serpents, and have many other exciting experiences, including being
+blown far out to sea in their air-skimmer in a tropical storm. It would
+be unfair to divulge the part that wireless plays in rescuing them from
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+These books are technically correct, wholesomely thrilling and geared up
+to third speed.
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+BOY AVIATORS’ SERIES
+
+By Captain Wilbur Lawton
+
+Absolutely Modern Stories for Boys
+
+Cloth Bound
+
+Price, 50c per volume
+
+The Boy Aviators on Secret Service
+
+Or, Working With Wireless
+
+In this live-wire narrative of peril and adventure, laid in the
+Everglades of Florida, the spunky Chester Boys and their interesting
+chums, including Ben Stubbs, the maroon, encounter exciting experiences
+on Uncle Sam’s service in a novel field. One must read this vivid,
+enthralling story of incident, hardship and pluck to get an idea of the
+almost limitless possibilities of the two greatest inventions of modern
+times—the aeroplane and wireless telegraphy. While gripping and holding
+the reader’s breathless attention from the opening words to the finish,
+this swift-moving story is at the same time instructive and uplifting.
+As those readers who have already made friends with Frank and Harry
+Chester and their “bunch” know, there are few difficulties, no matter
+how insurmountable they may seem at first blush, that these up-to-date
+gritty youths cannot overcome with flying colors. A clean-cut, real
+boys’ book of high voltage.
+
+Sold by Booksellers Everywhere
+
+HURST & CO. Publishers NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Motor Maids' School Days, by Katherine Stokes
+
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+Project Gutenberg's The Motor Maids' School Days, by Katherine Stokes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Motor Maids' School Days
+
+Author: Katherine Stokes
+
+Release Date: September 15, 2011 [EBook #37434]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MOTOR MAIDS' SCHOOL DAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by Cornell
+University Digital Collections)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "You will simply be an outcast in West Haven, and I
+advise you to think the matter over."]
+
+
+
+
+                            THE MOTOR MAIDS'
+                              SCHOOL DAYS
+
+                                   BY
+                            KATHERINE STOKES
+
+                                NEW YORK
+                            HURST & COMPANY
+                               PUBLISHERS
+
+
+
+
+                            Copyright, 1911,
+                                   BY
+                            HURST & COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+            CHAPTER                                        PAGE
+                 I. "The Comet"                               5
+                II. Friends in Need                          24
+               III. The Musicians of Bremen                  41
+                IV. Plots and Plans                          52
+                 V. The First Motor Picnic                   63
+                VI. The Box of Troubles                      81
+               VII. The Fire                                 95
+              VIII. Nancy's Home                            110
+                IX. At the Sign of the Blue Tea Pot         128
+                 X. Rumors at School                        136
+                XI. Seven League Island                     147
+               XII. The Storm                               166
+              XIII. Wheels Within Wheels                    179
+               XIV. The Hallowe'en House Party              193
+                XV. The Ghost Party                         206
+               XVI. A Stray Ghost                           217
+              XVII. Mrs. Ruggles                            228
+             XVIII. Fannie Alta                             241
+               XIX. Mary Before Her Judges                  253
+                XX. Miss Campbell Wears Black               262
+               XXI. The Missing Link                        271
+              XXII. The Refugees                            280
+             XXIII. Belle's Confession                      291
+              XXIV. Out of the Mists                        303
+
+
+
+
+THE MOTOR MAIDS' SCHOOL DAYS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.--"THE COMET."
+
+
+"Girls, in about ten minutes you're going to have the surprise of your
+lives," cried Nancy Brown, joining a group of her friends at the High
+School gate.
+
+"What is it, Nancy? Do tell us, please," cried half a dozen voices at
+once.
+
+"No, you must wait," answered Nancy. "If I told you what it was, I
+wouldn't enjoy seeing your faces when the thing happened."
+
+"Nancy, you have always got some mystery on foot," put in her most
+intimate friend, Elinor Butler. "Is this one animal, vegetable, or
+mineral?"
+
+"Fine or superfine?"
+
+"Can it speak?"
+
+"Is it as large as a house?"
+
+"Don't all talk at once," exclaimed Nancy. "I'll tell you this much.
+It's animal and it's superfine. And"--she wrinkled her brows--"and it's
+mineral, too, I suppose."
+
+"Superfine? At least it's a woman, then?" cried all the girls in a
+chorus.
+
+"Yes," laughed Nancy, who loved nothing better than to excite the
+curiosity of her friends to the utmost and then launch a genuine
+sensation into their midst.
+
+"Does the superfine animal wear the mineral?" demanded Elinor.
+
+"No, she doesn't wear it. She's in it."
+
+"In it? How strange," exclaimed another girl. "Perhaps it's a lady
+oyster in her shell."
+
+"There's no surprise in an oyster unless there's a pearl in it, goosey,"
+teased Nancy. "But here it comes! Here it comes!" she cried, clapping
+her hands joyfully, while six pairs of eyes peered curiously down the
+street, which, by gentle degrees, became a country road. The trim
+sidewalks of the little seaport town of West Haven became grassy paths
+and the pretty lawns broadened into flat green meadows.
+
+Far down the road a brilliant red object could be seen approaching. It
+was enveloped in a cloud of dust and it moved with great rapidity.
+
+"Why, it's nothing but a red automobile," cried Elinor, in
+disappointment.
+
+"Yes," admitted Nancy, "it's an automobile, but there's something
+unusual about it besides its color."
+
+"A girl is running it," announced Mary Price, whose clear, dark eyes
+always seemed to be looking into the distance. "A girl is running it,
+and no one is with her, and----"
+
+But the motor car was now in full view. It was a graceful little machine
+large enough to hold five or six people comfortably, its body painted a
+warm and pleasing shade of red, its cushions upholstered in a slightly
+darker shade which harmonized perfectly with the red of the body. A
+young girl, sitting on the front seat, was running the car as easily and
+steadily as an experienced chauffeur. Making a graceful curve, she
+turned into the driveway which led to the school grounds and presently
+drew up under a large shed, where people were in the habit of hitching
+their horses and vehicles on Field Day, or when football was in season.
+
+"Who is she?" demanded Nancy's schoolmates in a whisper.
+
+"Why, she's Miss Helen Campbell's cousin, Wilhelmina Campbell."
+
+"Do you mean our old friend, Billie?" asked Elinor.
+
+"The same," said Nancy, in a low voice, for Billie Campbell was now
+approaching within hearing distance. "Her mother's dead and her father's
+brought her here to live with Miss Campbell while he builds a railroad
+in Russia, and she's going to High School and she's in our class and
+she's coming to and fro every day in her own motor car."
+
+Nancy was speaking as rapidly as a talking machine going at full speed.
+
+Billie, as her father had always called her, might have guessed that she
+was the subject of all this buzzing undertone of conversation among the
+school girls; but she was too well accustomed to strange faces and new
+places to feel stiff and shy now at the looks of curiosity which were
+turned on her. On the contrary, the West Haven girls themselves felt a
+little ill at ease and countrified in the presence of this new
+sophomore, who, with her father, an engineer, had lived in many
+countries and seen a great deal of that mysterious outside world which
+sleepy, quiet West Haven had never troubled itself much about.
+
+But Billie Campbell was not destined to renew her acquaintance just then
+with these childhood friends of hers. A slender, very pretty girl,
+beautifully dressed, hurried out of the school building and called:
+
+"Oh, Miss Campbell, may I speak with you a moment?"
+
+"We might have known it," cried Nancy Brown savagely. "If Billie
+Campbell hadn't owned a motor car, Belle Rogers would never have given
+herself the trouble even to speak to her."
+
+You perhaps know what a dangerous quality snobbishness is in a girl's
+school. A very little of it is like a drop of strong poison in a pail of
+water. It pollutes the whole pail. So it was at West Haven High School.
+Belle Rogers, the prettiest and richest girl in town, had picked out six
+more or less wealthy and intimate friends in the sophomore class and
+constituted herself leader of what they called "The Mystic Seven." These
+seven girls held themselves aloof from the poorer girls in the class and
+committed the unpardonable sin of snubbing every girl outside their
+charmed circle.
+
+Very bitter were the feelings of the other ten sophomores against the
+"Mystic Seven," who refused to mingle in the sports of the class and
+kept themselves apart at recess, talking in low, mysterious voices and
+laughing behind their pocket handkerchiefs when the other girls strolled
+by.
+
+"They always make me feel shabbier than I really am," Mary Price had
+once said.
+
+And now the "Mystic Seven" had snatched up this nice, athletic-looking,
+new sophomore, whom many of them remembered as a bright, romping little
+girl years before.
+
+"I suppose they'll have to call themselves 'The Mystic Eight' now," said
+one of the girls, a little bitterly.
+
+"Can't we ask her to join the 'Blue Birds'?" put in Elinor Butler, who
+was eligible in point of wealth to enter the richer society, but had
+coldly declined the honor and had formed a society herself, called the
+"Blue Birds."
+
+"She couldn't belong to both clubs," said Nancy, "and you may be sure
+she has accepted the invitation of that little golden-haired, blue-eyed
+Belle Rogers, who put on an extra soft pedal even to call out her name."
+
+"Well, Billie Campbell will probably never have cause to know that
+Belle's tongue is sharper than a serpent's tooth, so what's the odds,"
+observed Mary Price philosophically. "We got on perfectly well before
+she came and I suppose we can manage to support life pretty comfortably
+even if she is a member of the 'Mystic Seven.'"
+
+Her friends laughed, as they strolled by twos and threes into the broad,
+arched entrance leading into the corridor of the building. Mary Price
+often relieved their wounded feelings by ending discussions concerning
+the "Mystic Seven" with a joke, although not one of them had been cut
+more deeply than she herself by the cruel speeches of Belle Rogers and
+her friends; for, since the death of Captain Price, Mary Price and her
+mother, as you will see later, had had a hard struggle to make both ends
+meet.
+
+In the meantime, Belle Rogers was using all her arts on the unsuspecting
+Wilhelmina Campbell.
+
+"We have never met," she was saying, "but I heard you were going to
+enter our class and I wanted to be the first to welcome you."
+
+"Thank you," said Billie, who had a boyish, direct way of answering
+people.
+
+"We wanted to know," went on Belle quickly, "if you wouldn't become a
+member of our society, the Mystic Seven. It is the most exclusive and
+nicest society in the school; the seven nicest girls in West Haven. We
+are all intimate friends, you know."
+
+Billie gazed with admiration into Belle's lovely, childlike face. Her
+own hair was straight and secretly she had always admired curls. Belle's
+pale golden hair curled about her low forehead in soft ringlets. Her
+great china-blue eyes looked appealingly into Billie's gray ones, and
+her rosy lips, which were much too thin when her face was in repose,
+parted with a winning smile. She was dressed in blue a little darker
+than her eyes and a small blue velvet toque was perched coquettishly on
+top of her curls.
+
+"She looks like a picture pasted inside of an old trunk mamma used to
+have," said Billie to herself. "I could almost believe she was a bisque
+doll. I never saw anything like her."
+
+"You will join us, won't you?" went on Belle wistfully.
+
+"I'm afraid I should be one too many and make an unlucky number. Seven
+is supposed to be lucky, isn't it?"
+
+"Oh, we're not superstitious," laughed Belle. "We can change the name to
+the 'Happy Eight,' or something of that sort. We are looking for nice
+girls, and as soon as I saw you I knew you would be the one for us. We
+want to enlarge the club."
+
+"Dear me," said Billie thoughtfully, "in a class of seventeen girls are
+only seven nice enough to be asked to join your club?"
+
+"Oh, they are nice enough," replied Belle. "Elinor Butler is really
+quite nice, but they are not just our sort, don't you know, and mamma
+has always cautioned me to be very careful about my companions."
+
+"Elinor Butler?" questioned Billie. "She is my old friend, and Nancy
+Brown and Mary Price? Aren't any of them members?"
+
+Just then the gong for chapel boomed out in the September stillness and
+Belle could only shake her head for denial, as the two girls hurried
+into the building.
+
+"I don't think I could ever get on with that blonde doll baby," thought
+Billie, as she followed Belle into the chapel for morning prayer, which
+always opened the day at West Haven High School.
+
+At recess the new sophomore was quite overwhelmed by the attentions of
+the Mystic Seven. They showed her the building and the grounds, the
+class locker rooms and the gymnasium, which interested her most of all.
+And in return she showed them her motor car. But, somehow, she did not
+quite like these stylish and rather over-dressed young girls. Their
+conversation really bored her and she was disappointed.
+
+It had been her own suggestion to go to West Haven High School when her
+father was summoned abroad to build a railroad.
+
+"I think it's high time I met some nice outdoor girls, papa," she had
+said. "I am afraid of boarding school girls. They are so different from
+you."
+
+Her father had laughed joyfully over this speech.
+
+"I hope there's not much resemblance between me and a boarding school
+girl, my little Billie," he said, pinching her cheek.
+
+And now the nice open-air girls whom she had recalled with pleasure
+after a summer spent in West Haven had not come near enough even to
+greet her and she had been obliged to pair off with seven fashion
+plates.
+
+"It's perfectly maddening," she exclaimed to herself, giving the turf on
+the campus a savage little kick. "Nancy and Elinor actually avoid
+meeting my eyes as if I were some one unfit to know. I wish I had
+consented to go to boarding school, after all, instead of coming to
+Cousin Helen. I don't want to belong to a silly society that does
+nothing but have afternoon teas. I want to play basket ball and go on
+long tramps with other girls and have picnics. I'm so disappointed, I
+could weep aloud."
+
+This was the picture Billie had drawn in her mind of life at West Haven
+High School and here she was an outcast from all the good times and open
+air games of the class, simply because not one of her old friends would
+come near her. She long remembered that first day at school as the
+loneliest and most wretched of her whole life.
+
+Then the last gong sounded and everybody went home except Billie, who
+had an appointment with Miss Gray, the principal. After the interview,
+in a rebellious and disconsolate humor, homesick for her father and
+disappointed with the whole world, she cranked up her red car and
+whirled away toward the open country.
+
+As she sped along the road she passed the three friends of that summer
+of years ago, walking briskly away from town. They did not even look up
+as she whirled by and the lump in her throat grew so big that it
+resolved itself into a sob and two hot tears trickled down her cheeks.
+
+"Perhaps they're going over to the woods; just what I would have loved
+to have done," wept the disappointed young girl, whose life had been a
+lonely one in spite of her father's devotion and constant companionship.
+
+She was still drying her eyes when she noticed some distance ahead a man
+leap into the road and wave his arms violently. Billie slowed down and
+came to a stop; for at the side of the road another very ill-looking man
+was lying prone on his back with closed eyes and slightly parted lips.
+
+"What is it?" she asked. "Has your friend been hurt?"
+
+"No, miss," answered the man who had stopped her, "but he has walked
+fifteen miles to-day and I am afraid he's about all in. I am trying to
+get him to his house, but I can't carry him and he can't take another
+step."
+
+"Where is his house?" asked Billie.
+
+"Are you familiar with these parts, miss?"
+
+"No," she answered.
+
+"It's just up that lane about a mile. Only a matter of five minutes to
+you."
+
+"Can you get him into the car?" asked Billie, noticing that this rather
+sinister looking stranger had only one arm; also that his right eye was
+out and there was a long scar across his upper lip.
+
+"Easily," he replied, and without another word he expeditiously
+supported his friend to the motor car and lifted him into the back seat.
+
+"Poor fellow," exclaimed Billie sympathetically. "It's well I happened
+along."
+
+The sick man was indeed a wretched looking object, with a thin,
+lantern-jawed face, hollow feverish eyes and a sunken chest.
+Occasionally he coughed behind his hands apologetically.
+
+"Down the lane, did you say?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, miss, you can just see the house. It's the gray one up near the
+woods."
+
+"I'll have him there in a few minutes," she answered, putting on all
+speed.
+
+The little machine flew along the hard sandy road like a redbird on the
+wing. Billie occasionally glanced over her shoulder at the sick man and
+each time her eyes met his, which seemed to burn like coals of fire. She
+had not liked the looks of the other man. His one remaining eye was much
+too close to his hooked nose; but the sick man appealed to her
+sympathies. Billie's nature was not a suspicious one. She had
+encountered many people in her life, and it is only people who have
+lived out of the world who are apt to suspect strangers.
+
+As she drew up the car in front of what appeared to be a very old,
+long-deserted fisherman's house and turned to see her passengers alight,
+she found the one-eyed man bending over his companion.
+
+"He's fainted, miss," he said. "If you'll go around back of the house to
+the old well and draw up a pail of cold water, I guess we can revive
+him. Just let down the pail by the wheel at the side--you'll see the
+handle,--and then get a glass or pitcher or something 'round there in
+the shed."
+
+As the man was apparently very busy loosening the neck-band of his
+friend's shirt, there seemed nothing else for Billie to do but to obey
+his directions. In fact, her sympathies were so deeply aroused that she
+was more than eager to help.
+
+She dashed around the corner in an instant, rushed to the old well, and
+exerting her strength turned the handle of the rusty wheel around and
+around while the rattling chain lowered the moss-covered bucket deeper
+and deeper until it struck the water. Waiting only until the bucket was
+filled, she began to raise it as rapidly as she could, but her muscles
+were sorely tried by the stubbornness of the rusty wheel and the
+additional weight of the water.
+
+The thought of the exhausted man spurred her on, however, and at length,
+flushed and perspiring, she succeeded in drawing the bucket to a little
+shelf where she left it while she searched for a receptacle in which to
+carry the water. She found no difficulty in pushing open a loosely-hung
+door at the end of the shed, and, after groping around a moment or two
+in the semi-darkness, she discovered a battered tin pail. Hastening back
+with it, she rinsed and filled it, and hurried around to the front of
+the house.
+
+As she turned the corner, she stopped short! Where were the two men?
+Where was her machine? _Where--was--her--machine?_
+
+Too dazed to move, Billie stood rooted to the spot while the water
+trickled out of a hole in the pail and made a little pool at her feet.
+
+Suddenly she gasped, "They must be around the other corner. They _must_
+be!"
+
+But they were not!--and then Billie noticed the tracks in the crushed
+grass that told the tale. The motor car had been turned and driven away
+up the lane!
+
+Billie sank down on the step in front of the old house almost too spent
+with her exertions and her shock to think.
+
+Then she flung down the pail and rushed up the lane as though she would
+try to catch the vanished car,--but she stopped as abruptly with a half
+laugh.
+
+"They may be miles and miles away by this time,--they had time enough
+while I was fussing over that old well. And the chain made such a noise
+and the wheel creaked so, I never heard another sound!"
+
+Billie's eyes filled with indignant tears as she began slowly to saunter
+back to the old house. She felt somehow impelled to return to the scene
+of her loss, perhaps to persuade herself that it was really so.
+
+As she neared the spot where she had last seen her red car, she noticed
+a slip of paper blowing lightly about. Idly she picked it up and glanced
+over the words written upon it. Then she stood still and caught her
+breath as she realized what they meant.
+
+"Stay here. Tell no one. Back soon."
+
+That was the message that Billie read, and she did not doubt for a
+moment that it was intended for her.
+
+"Yes, perhaps you will come back, and perhaps you won't," she said half
+aloud. "Maybe you think that I think that you have gone for a doctor.
+But I don't. You are two mean, wicked men to outwit a girl like that.
+I'll never see my car again!"
+
+Just as Billie uttered this despairing cry, she heard a distant hail,
+and then another.
+
+"Who is coming now?" she thought. "It's too soon to expect my sick (?)
+passenger and his one-eyed friend, and anyway I hear no car,----nor
+anything else, now," she added. "Maybe I imagined it. Oh, I'd like to be
+a man for about five minutes! Then they wouldn't _dare_!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.--FRIENDS IN NEED.
+
+
+"There she goes," Nancy Brown had exclaimed as "The Comet," Billie's
+motor, whirled by; "too proud even to ask her old friends to take a
+spin."
+
+"Now, Nancy," protested Elinor, "don't be too hard on her. Remember, she
+has not seen any of us since we were children. Perhaps she's forgotten
+all about us. Besides, I've been thinking that we ought to have done the
+first speaking. She was starting right for us when Belle Rogers stopped
+her."
+
+"Well, I tried twice to speak to her," said Nancy, "and she wouldn't
+look at me. I am afraid we shall never get a ride in that pretty motor
+car, and the only one I was ever in was the stationary automobile at the
+tintype place at the County Fair."
+
+The girls walked on silently for a few moments. The red motor car had
+turned a curve in the road and was out of sight and the place seemed
+very lonely and still. The afternoon shadows were beginning to lengthen
+as the sun moved slowly behind the pine woods, which formed a dark
+background against the flat, green meadows about West Haven.
+
+"I can't imagine why we should be wasting time about a friend who has
+forgotten us," exclaimed Mary Price, "when Elinor has brought us out
+here to tell us some mysterious secret. Don't you think it's about time
+to begin, Elinor? It's getting late and we've still a good ways to go."
+
+"I was just going to," answered her friend, "but suppose we take the
+short cut across the fields, and I'll tell you on the way. Two other
+people are in the secret, Charlie Clay and Ben Austen. They have
+promised to meet us at the old house. Of course, the whole thing may be
+of no importance."
+
+"But what is it?" interrupted Nancy. "You keep dodging around the bush."
+
+"Now, Nancy," answered Elinor, who had a calm, placid disposition and
+never hurried about anything, "don't put your most peculiar
+characteristic off on me. You know very well that you are the one who
+loves to keep a mystery until we are all of us nearly bursting with
+curiosity."
+
+"Don't quarrel, children," interrupted Mary. "Remember that members of
+the Blue Bird Society are bound over not to quarrel."
+
+"We aren't quarreling; we're just discussing. But do go on, Elinor. I
+can't stand the suspense much longer."
+
+"What I am going to tell you," said Elinor, "may be of the vastest
+importance or it may be just nothing whatever. At any rate, I didn't
+want to take any chances and it was simple enough for us to meet the
+boys out here and see for ourselves."
+
+"See what, Elinor Butler?" ejaculated Nancy impatiently. "You always
+begin at the last of a story and tell backwards."
+
+Elinor smiled provokingly.
+
+"That's to see how much curiosity you can accumulate without exploding,
+Nancy, dear."
+
+Nancy shut her lips tightly. She was determined now, at any cost, not to
+speak again until Elinor had really started on the story, but how
+irritating Elinor could be at times!
+
+Mary was never disturbed over these little tiffs of the two friends
+which were merely the ups and downs of the endless conversation that
+flowed between them.
+
+"This is what happened then, Nancy darling," continued Elinor, slipping
+an arm around her friend's waist, while she locked her other arm through
+Mary's. And the three girls hurried on, too absorbed in their intimate
+talk to notice the flash of a scarlet motor car through the high bushes,
+which bordered both sides of Boulder Lane, the name of the road which
+intercepted the two meadows.
+
+"I was coming across Court House Square late yesterday afternoon after
+my music lesson. You know I have begun to study with the new teacher,
+Mme. Alta. Just as I came to the statue of Thomas Jefferson, I heard
+some one call very softly, or rather it was more like a hiss than a
+call. I suppose I should have rushed off frightened, but I am never
+afraid of people. It's only spiders and snakes and bulls that make me
+shiver. So, I didn't run away, but waited, and I discovered that the
+hiss came from around the other side of the statue and was not meant for
+me at all. Even then I should have gone on if I hadn't heard some one
+cry out. I couldn't understand the language, but another voice said in
+English: 'There are only two boxes left. Take them to the old house in
+Boulder Lane to-night and never keep me waiting this long again.' Then
+the other man said something and the English voice said: 'You can haul
+them to-morrow morning. It'll be time enough when I get the signal to do
+the rest.' I couldn't understand what the man answered, but the English
+voice said: 'I'll kill the whole crew of Butlers and anybody else who
+interferes with me. I'm in a desperate humor and I won't be bothered.'
+Fortunately they took the walk that goes to the docks, because they
+would certainly have seen me if they had come around on the other side.
+But I saw them plainly when they passed under the electric light. They
+looked like seamen."
+
+"'Kill the whole crew of Butlers,'" repeated Mary Price. "Does he mean
+that he is going to wipe your family off the face of the earth? And for
+what?"
+
+"That is what I want to find out. It wouldn't do any special harm to
+take a late afternoon stroll in this direction, if the boys are with us.
+I didn't want to say anything to father about it. He is so busy, and you
+know how excitable he is. William is exactly like father. Edward and
+mother and I are the only calm, peaceful members of the family, and
+mother's sick and Edward is at college. Besides, you know, the man may
+not have meant us. The county is full of Butlers, dozens of them. Some
+of them claim kin and some do not. They are the most quarrelsome,
+high-tempered people in existence--that is, all except Edward and me."
+
+The other girls laughed.
+
+"Not high-tempered, Elinor," said Nancy, "but you have a sort of royal
+manner when you are displeased that I imagine a queen might have when
+one of her subjects is disobedient."
+
+"What's that?" interrupted Mary. "I thought I heard some one call."
+
+The girls paused and listened. They were standing in a broad, flat
+meadow which seemed to stretch out indefinitely in one direction like an
+enormous pale-green billiard table; but in the other direction, bordered
+by alder bushes, lay Boulder Lane; so called because of an immense gray
+boulder, which in some prehistoric upheaval had been tossed here, and
+which resembled now an old gray sentinel standing on perpetual guard.
+
+"Why, there's the automobile," exclaimed Nancy, after some minutes,
+following an occasional flash of red through the bushes, as the flying
+motor car sped on up the lane.
+
+"I wonder what she is doing up Boulder Lane? Exploring by herself, I
+suppose. It must be lonely," observed Mary.
+
+A fresh salt breeze had sprung up from the ocean, bringing with it the
+chill of the oncoming night. The three girls hastened their footsteps.
+If they were late, the boys might not wait for them.
+
+"Boys are so unreliable," Mary had remarked.
+
+"Not Ben Austen," said Elinor. "Father says he is as trustworthy as the
+Bank of England. But he's slow. He never likes to stop one thing until
+he finishes it, no matter what's waiting. He and Charlie are building a
+boat somewhere down the beach and they spend all their afternoons at it,
+but they are sure to be there if they promised."
+
+By this time the girls had reached the hedge. It was certainly a
+lonesome place. The old house which had been unoccupied for many years
+because its last occupant had committed suicide by hanging himself from
+a beam, appeared in the gathering dusk like a solitary gray ghost; the
+front windows resembled two large sad eyes gazing into space and the
+walls, streaked with the tempests of many seasons, had the appearance of
+a worn, tear-stained face.
+
+"Dear me," whispered Nancy, "I had forgotten what a weird old place this
+was. It might be the entrance to a tomb."
+
+"Halo-o-o!" called a boyish voice, and a tall, overgrown lad appeared
+coming up the lane from the direction of the beach, followed by a much
+smaller youth, who was so absorbed with whittling a little boat that he
+did not even look up when the girls answered the call.
+
+"Don't make so much noise, Ben," said Elinor, when they had climbed
+through the hedge and congregated together in the lane. "This is just an
+investigating party. We are not to take any risks."
+
+"There seems to be nobody around," replied Ben. "We saw an automobile go
+past a little while ago with two men in it and some big boxes in the
+back. It was almost stuck in the sand. I wonder it could get along at
+all. It looked like a big, red lobster."
+
+"Red?" cried the girls in one voice.
+
+"I never saw anything redder in my life," put in Charlie.
+
+"You must be mistaken about the men, then," said Elinor decisively.
+"Because Billie Campbell owns it and was running it herself a little
+while ago."
+
+"Well, we were not close enough to get a good look, but Billie Campbell
+appeared to be two men at that distance. But come along, girls. It is
+getting late and we had better not lose any more time. Now, what is it
+we are looking for? Butler bundles and boxes?"
+
+"I don't think they can be called Butler bundles," replied Elinor,
+"since my family is to be wiped out of existence if it interferes with
+the bundles, whatever they are."
+
+The boys and girls who were thoroughly enjoying the fun and mystery of
+the expedition now advanced on tiptoe to the ghostly looking house, like
+a party of conspirators in a play.
+
+"I feel like a pirate," whispered Nancy, giggling.
+
+Suddenly Ben, who was ahead of the others, stopped and put his fingers
+to his lips. He beckoned to them to follow him around to the side of the
+house.
+
+"I heard something inside the house," he said, in a low voice. "Wait
+here, girls, with Charlie while I take a look."
+
+He crept cautiously around to the front and presently they heard him
+open the door and walk boldly in.
+
+"I'm going, too," said Charlie, unable to contain his curiosity any
+longer, and the girls followed him single-file into a low-studded, dusty
+room, unfurnished except for one rickety chair, but behind that
+stood--Billie Campbell! And facing Billie in the dim light just inside
+the door stood Ben, surprise written as plainly upon his face as
+bravery, defiance, and apprehension were mingled upon hers.
+
+The girls were too amazed to speak at first.
+
+"Billie Campbell!" cried Nancy, at last. "Did two men frighten you and
+run away with your automobile?"
+
+Billie nodded. Somehow it was very difficult to keep back her tears now
+that help had come; but she never had been a cry-baby even as a child
+and now she choked down her sobs with all her strength, for in the
+gathering dusk she had recognized the faces of her three childhood
+friends who had refused to remember her that day at school.
+
+"Oh, but I'm glad to see you!" she exclaimed. "After the men went off I
+noticed that the front door was open and I came in a minute to see if it
+really looked as though it were lived in now-a-days as the man said. But
+it just looks deserted, and it's dreadfully dusty except here in the
+corner and from here to the door,--just as though something had been
+dragged across the floor."
+
+The young girl had been talking excitedly, but now she stopped abruptly
+and with a friendly look and a gesture of intense relief she stretched
+her arms over her head, as though with the relaxation of her muscles she
+could also free herself from the sudden shock and dread that had bound
+her.
+
+She was tall for her age, fifteen, with a frank, almost boyish face,
+fine gray eyes, and a rather large mouth which curled up at the corners
+when she smiled and showed two graduated rows of strong white teeth. Her
+light brown hair was parted in the middle and rolled on each side into a
+thick, knobby plait in the back.
+
+"She's not very strong on looks," thought Nancy, who set great store on
+beauty herself, "but she's got the nicest face I ever saw."
+
+"How did it happen?" asked Ben.
+
+Then Billie told how the two men had duped her and left her behind the
+deserted house, and how she had found the message on the slip of paper.
+
+"Then the men are coming back?" cried Elinor.
+
+"Perhaps," replied Billie, "and we'd better hurry away from here as fast
+as we can in case they come. They may not intend to do me any harm, but
+they are a very determined-looking pair of characters, as papa says, and
+one of them has a long pistol and a knife in his belt, for I saw them."
+
+"But what about the red motor?" demanded Nancy, whose yearning to ride
+in the car had somewhat biased her good judgment.
+
+"I'll just have to lose it, I suppose," answered Billie.
+
+"I have a scheme," put in Charlie, who rarely spoke without due
+deliberation. "Miss Campbell is just about as tall as I am--she may be a
+little shorter," he added, stretching himself to his full height.
+
+The others smiled secretly at this, for Billie was at least an inch
+taller than Charlie, but they knew that the most sensitive spot in his
+nature was his height, since he was the oldest member of the party and
+Ben overtopped him by nearly three inches. And Charlie had a sneaking
+suspicion that he never would be tall enough. His bones were small and
+his frame as slender and delicate as a girl's.
+
+"Suppose I put on your hat and veil and your long coat," he continued,
+"and sit here on the step waiting. It's getting darker all the time, and
+so if the men come back they'll think it is you; but if they thought
+somebody was onto them, they would probably break their word and chase
+off with the motor."
+
+"I don't think that would be quite fair," said Billie. "Suppose they
+found out you were a boy. They might shoot you or something."
+
+"But they won't find it out," answered Charlie. "Hurry up. We have no
+time to lose."
+
+"Yes, do," urged Ben. "It's much the best way. We couldn't leave you for
+the thieves and it's a pity to lose the car. Besides, the rest of us
+will hide in the house and if anything happens, we'll come to the
+rescue."
+
+Billie removed her ulster without another word.
+
+"She's a dandy, sensible girl," thought Ben to himself.
+
+"You'd better take the skirt, too. If they saw your trouser legs, it
+would be all off," said Billie, as she unbuckled her belt and removed
+her gray walking skirt, standing before them without any embarrassment
+in a short, red silk petticoat.
+
+"What about shoes?" observed Mary Price. "Those Charlie is wearing are
+not much like a girl's shoes."
+
+"How about these pumps? I wear No. fives," said Billie, calmly kicking
+off her slippers.
+
+Charlie, good-naturedly, unlaced his stout boy's boots.
+
+"I might be able to get my big toe into them," he said. "Like
+Cinderella's step-sisters and the little glass slipper."
+
+"These aren't any Cinderella's," laughed Billie.
+
+How nice these boys and girls did seem to her and how fine it was to be
+with them, even in this strange and dangerous situation!
+
+Charlie could wear the slippers, however, although they were somewhat
+narrow in the toe, and presently he was fully dressed in a girl's suit,
+with his face almost concealed by a long gray chiffon veil, twisted
+around Billie's gray felt hat, trimmed with one red wing.
+
+"Hurry, they're really coming," called Billie, catching the familiar
+sound of a motor engine in the distance.
+
+"All right," said Ben, who had been hovering around Charlie in pretended
+admiration of his changed appearance. "Good luck, old boy!" he added as
+he hastened after the girls up the narrow flight of stairs into the
+attic, which was perfectly dark and seemed a better place for hiding
+than outside, where enough twilight still lingered to make objects
+plainly visible.
+
+"We are a good deal like 'The Musicians of Bremen,'" observed Mary, in a
+low voice, as they lay stretched face downward on the attic floor.
+"Don't you remember that old fairy tale of Grimm's; when the robber came
+back to the house in the wood he was bitten and kicked and scratched and
+pecked by the dog and the donkey and the cat and the rooster, and then
+they set up such a braying and barking and crowing and meowing that he
+ran away scared to death?"
+
+"If anything did happen, we might try the howling part," said Billie. "I
+should think a piercing shriek from a place like this would scare a
+brave man----"
+
+"Sh-h, they're almost here," cautioned Ben. "Don't move, any one. The
+floor will creak."
+
+"I'm going to sneeze," hissed Nancy, in the dark.
+
+"Press your upper lip and don't dare do it," whispered Elinor.
+
+"Shut up, all of you," said Ben, as the motor car drew up beside the
+hedge at one side of the house.
+
+"If there is any shrieking to be done," added Mary, "I'll do it. I'm the
+best shrieker in the sophomore class. I know how to do it in the top of
+my head----"
+
+"Sh-h-h!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.--THE MUSICIANS OF BREMEN.
+
+
+Nancy could not keep from trembling slightly as she heard the car
+panting at a little distance and realized that perhaps a moment of real
+danger was near, in spite of their joking. Elinor, too, felt very much
+like giving away to a few tremors, but she reproached herself for such
+weak behavior and held her body as rigid as a stone image while she said
+sternly in her mind:
+
+"My knees are not at all weak. It's only the position I am lying in that
+makes them feel queer."
+
+A sound as though a heavy foot had been placed on the step outside was
+heard and then a voice which Billie recognized as that of the one-eyed
+man said:
+
+"Well, young lady, I suppose you have had about enough of this? We have
+kept our word, you see, which I judge you found on the paper, as you are
+still here."
+
+There was a short silence. Evidently Charlie nodded assent to the
+supposition and the motion gave full satisfaction, for the voice went
+on, "Has any one been around, miss? You didn't hear the sound of any
+voices, did you, while we were gone? We saw some people in the field as
+we left. Did they come this way? Speak up, miss."
+
+Not a heart on the attic floor but thumped as the one-eyed man asked
+these questions. They had never thought of Charlie's voice, which was
+about as deep as a full grown man's!
+
+A perfectly death-like stillness reigned for a moment. It was plain that
+Charlie was not going to trust his voice.
+
+"Do not be frightened, Se�orita," put in the thin man. "You may speak
+without fear. Do not weep. Perhaps she did see something. It was not the
+ghost of the dead man who hanged himself in here, was it?" he added in a
+low voice.
+
+"Hold your tongue," said the other man. "Speak up, young woman. Have you
+no voice left? You'll not have strength enough to run the car if you go
+on like this."
+
+A deep sob reached the ears of the listeners overhead.
+
+Then the alarming thought came to Ben: How was Charlie to run the motor
+car in case the men insisted on his leaving first? Plainly, it was
+necessary to get rid of these men somehow. Then they would all make a
+dash, and he would crank up while Billie jumped in and started the car.
+
+"I'll have to hear the sound of your voice before I go," insisted the
+one-eyed man. "I want to hear you give me your sacred word of honor to
+keep this little loan of your car a secret. If we find that you have
+told, and we'll know it if you have, you and your family will regret it,
+that's all. We know how to take our revenge, don't we, Pedro? So speak
+up, young woman, and say the words. I promise----"
+
+Another deep sob.
+
+"Come, come. Hold up your head and let me see your face. Say, Pedro,
+look here; it doesn't seem quite the same as it did half an hour ago,
+somehow. Strike a light!"
+
+There was great but noiseless commotion in the attic! What if the men
+should lift Charlie's veil!
+
+Since Mary had mentioned "The Musicians of Bremen" an idea had been
+forming in Ben's mind and he now hastily communicated it in a low
+whisper to his neighbor who passed it quickly down the line.
+
+Just as the thin man outside exclaimed in a high sharp tone, "Why, it's
+a boy!" Ben whispered, "Ready!"
+
+Immediately the attic was filled with a pandemonium of noise,--the
+barking of a dog, cries, and screams! It was a truly terrifying
+combination, Mary's shrill shriek rising weirdly above the other sounds
+as though from one in mortal agony.
+
+The two men outside were startled in spite of themselves and dashed away
+on an uncontrollable impulse, the thin man shouting, "The ghost of the
+dead man! His evil spirit haunts us!"
+
+"Good work, Ben," called Charlie softly, after a moment. "Come out,
+quick! They've gone around back of the house. You can come this way, but
+hurry!"
+
+The adventure had been so exciting and was so quickly over that the
+girls hardly realized where they were when they found themselves in
+front of the house, standing in a half-bewildered group in the deepening
+twilight.
+
+"Nobody shall take any more chances for my motor car," whispered Billie.
+"You have all risked your lives enough as it is, and I'm deeply
+grateful. The men may be around there by the machine, so let's make a
+break for the fields and go straight home."
+
+"No," replied Ben stoutly; "it would be best for you girls to get away,
+but Charlie and I will finish the job. Those fellows are cowards, any
+way, and----"
+
+"But you can't run the car," said Billie, rapidly putting on her things,
+which Charlie had discarded with a sigh of relief. "I'll have to stay.
+The other girls must go, though."
+
+The discussion, however, was ended by Charlie, who had skipped off to
+reconnoiter and now appeared running at full speed around the side of
+the house.
+
+"Come on, let's all go," he said. "They've gone, but they might come
+back."
+
+Without a word, the others followed him and jumped into the car, while
+Ben, who knew a little about motors, began to crank up the machine.
+Suddenly a voice spoke out of the darkness:
+
+"This looks like a nice little party. Get out of that car, every one of
+you, or I'll shoot," and the sinister looking one-armed man, who
+appeared to have sprung up from the earth, stood at the side of the
+automobile with his pistol pointed straight at Billie. "Did you
+imagine," he continued, "that a parcel of children could fool a man like
+me?"
+
+There was no reply to the question. Mary and Nancy were so limp with
+fear they could not have lifted a little finger if there had been a
+dozen pistols pointing at them. Elinor might have slipped a ramrod down
+her back, so stiffly and proudly did she hold herself in that fearful
+moment. Billie had turned white as a sheet, but she still had strength
+enough left to make a move to get out when Ben, whose stubborn nature
+would not even now give up the fight, raised his overgrown, boyish
+figure from the ground where he had been kneeling, and with a quick
+motion pressed a piece of glittering steel to the man's forehead.
+
+"Drop that pistol, or you're a dead man," he said in the deepest chest
+tones he could produce. His voice was still in the tenor stage.
+
+Not even a gentleman of fortune who had lost an eye and an arm in past
+dangerous adventures could quite keep from shrinking at this extremely
+unpleasant sensation produced by cold steel against his face, and
+without a word of protest he dropped the pistol in the road.
+
+"Now, back off," said Ben, "and don't stop until you get as far as that
+tree over there."
+
+The man retreated, cursing under his breath, and in another instant they
+were off in the dark.
+
+"We forgot to pick up his pistol," exclaimed Charlie, as three shots
+rang out in quick succession.
+
+"But Ben has one," said Billie, feeling somehow that she had known these
+nice brave boys for a long time, instead of three-quarters of an hour.
+
+"That was only a monkey wrench," answered Charlie, laughing.
+
+And Billie was moved with admiration and respect for the slow-speaking,
+quiet boy, who had twice in so short a time outwitted two very dangerous
+and experienced adventurers.
+
+It was a splendid ride in the darkness. The fresh salt air swept their
+faces and set their blood to tingling with a new enjoyment. They had
+just been through a most dangerous and exciting experience, these young
+people, and Nancy and Mary were not ashamed to admit that they at least
+had been very much frightened. But people who have lived always by the
+sea are used to looking danger calmly in the face.
+
+Half a mile beyond the quiet little harbor of West Haven a lighthouse
+stood on a small, rocky promontory, and from the shore on a calm day
+could be seen rows of sharp-pointed rocks thrust out of the water like
+great black teeth waiting to devour any chance ship which might be blown
+against them. In bad weather the water about the Black Reefs, as they
+were called, was lashed and churned into fury and sometimes after a
+great storm groups of people might be seen hurrying up the cliff path to
+the life-saving station, while out in the ocean, stuck fast to the teeth
+of the Black Reefs was a pretty three-masted schooner, perhaps, or a
+stained and scarred old freight ship, looking very small and helpless in
+its terrible plight.
+
+Billie, herself, was the only person in the motor car who had not seen a
+shipwreck on the Black Reefs. She had never even seen one of the
+September storms when the sea rolled itself into mountainous waves and
+dashed against the cliffs of West Haven.
+
+As they neared the town, Billie slowed down the motor and turned to
+speak to her new friends.
+
+"I can't even try to thank all of you for what you have done for me, but
+I want to tell you that I think you are the bravest, nicest boys and
+girls in the whole world, and it was just to be with you that I came
+back to West Haven to go to school. I was very unhappy to-day because I
+was afraid that Nancy and Mary and Elinor had forgotten me and the
+splendid times we had together one summer when I was a little girl----"
+
+"Oh, Billie, we hadn't forgotten you," broke in Nancy. "We thought when
+you joined Belle Rogers' crowd that you----"
+
+"But I didn't join them," Billie interrupted, laughing. "They kidnapped
+me and never let me out of their sight the whole time. I had almost made
+up my mind to write to papa to let me go to boarding school, after all.
+I wanted to know some real girls. I have never had a chance before, you
+know, and when I talked it over with papa, we decided that all of you
+were the nicest real girls we had ever known, and I just thought I would
+spend the winter with Cousin Helen and meet you again, while papa was in
+Russia."
+
+The three girls blushed with pleasure at this gratifying compliment.
+
+"We were just as glad to see you, too, Billie," said Elinor. "It was all
+a foolish mistake. But we shall be friends now, and you must join the
+Blue Birds. It's the Sophomore Club, and we have lots of fun."
+
+"Thank you, I'd love to," answered Billie, as gratefully and modestly as
+if she had been paid the highest honor in the land. "I've been
+thinking," she added, "that we'd better keep all this business about
+these men secret. You know Cousin Helen; if she hears about it, we'll
+probably have to store the motor car. She'll never let me out of her
+sight again."
+
+"We'll keep it secret," cried the others in a chorus.
+
+So this very sensational adventure, which would certainly have spread
+like wildfire through the town of West Haven once it got out, remained a
+profound secret.
+
+Some good came of it, however, since it served to unite four old
+friends. But we have not seen the last of the mysterious individuals who
+borrowed Billie's motor car.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.--PLOTS AND PLANS.
+
+
+Belle Rogers was not always the bewitchingly pretty, dimpling, smiling
+young girl who had endeavored to annex Billie.
+
+And when she was not pretty, Belle's friends liked to keep well out of
+her vicinity. At such times two little white dents appeared on each side
+of her nose. Her large, china blue eyes were transformed into wells of
+steely gray and the smiling, baby mouth became two narrow white lips.
+All the color left her cheeks, and people who did not know her would
+exclaim:
+
+"How faded and ill she looks!"
+
+When Belle looked like this she was unusually quiet at first, but it was
+the quiet which comes before a tornado, and it was only when the storm
+burst that those unfamiliar with her ways realized that Belle had been
+very, very angry.
+
+This is what happened on the day after the exciting experience in
+Boulder Lane, and all because Wilhelmina Campbell, true to her old
+friends, the "Blue Birds," after being formally invited, had positively
+declined to join the "Mystic Seven."
+
+"I am sorry," she said, trying her best to be cordial, "but, you see,
+the others had first claim on me because I have known them a long time
+and I have already promised to become a Blue Bird."
+
+"We asked you first," exclaimed Belle, in a preternaturally quiet tone
+of voice.
+
+"I don't see why that should make any difference," answered Billie,
+feeling very uncomfortable.
+
+"It makes a great deal of difference," answered Belle, who was always
+gifted with a flow of words in the moments of her greatest anger. "You
+are probably not familiar with the ways of schools and school societies.
+I understand you have never been to school before."
+
+"Oh, yes, I have. I went to school in Paris for three months and to
+another in Dresden for a whole winter."
+
+"This is America," went on Belle, in a slow, even tone, taking no other
+notice of the interruption, "and if you decline the honor we have paid
+you in the sophomore year, you will not only be blackballed in our
+societies the other two years, but you will not receive any invitations
+from me and my friends to our parties now or ever, and you will be
+obliged to associate with the commonest and most ordinary girls in West
+Haven. The children of cooks----"
+
+"Mary Price," thought Billie. Mrs. Price had a tea room.
+
+"The daughters of seamen----"
+
+"Nancy!" said Billie out loud. Nancy's father was a sea captain.
+
+"Yes, Nancy Brown," continued Belle, growing angrier every moment. "You
+will simply be an outcast in West Haven, and I advise you to think the
+matter over well before you decide to join that low, common crowd, for I
+assure you it will be the last of you with us----"
+
+Billie was so aghast at the insolence of the spoiled girl that she did
+not attempt to interrupt the rush of words which seemed to flow from her
+lips without any effort whatever. She was very angry herself, as a
+matter of fact, but with the self-control she had learned from her
+father, she determined to hold her peace until Belle had run down, as
+she expressed it later to the other girls.
+
+At last there came a pause, and Billie, who had been sitting on the
+window ledge in the gymnasium swinging her feet and thinking of what she
+was going to say when she was entirely prepared to speak, slipped down
+to the floor and stood before the enraged girl like a brave soldier in
+the face of battle.
+
+But this was all she said, for Billie was really very much like a boy.
+
+"I don't think it is any honor to join your club, or go with you and
+your friends. I wouldn't give up Mary and Nancy and Elinor for twenty
+Mystic Sevens. I'd rather go to boarding school any day, and that's
+about the worst fate that could happen to me."
+
+Then she turned on her heel and walked away, leaving Belle in the grip
+of a tempest of sobs and tears. Such rages are quite like the West
+Indian storms which sweep up the coast with a great blowing of wind and
+then, after a tremendous roar of thunder, the downpour follows.
+
+That night in her pretty chintz-hung bedroom in the beautiful Rogers
+house, which was one of the show places of West Haven, Belle Rogers
+planned her revenge. Her temples were throbbing and her whole body ached
+with exhaustion. Tempers are really quite as devastating to the system
+as the West Indian tornadoes are to the country over which they sweep.
+
+"I'll get even with that rough tom-boy," she said out loud. "I'll pay
+her back if it takes all winter to do it. I'll make her sorry she ever
+came to West Haven, and I'll make the others pay, too. They'll see what
+it means to interfere with me and my plans. Perhaps papa will give me a
+motor car, only I'm afraid of the things, and I never could run one. My
+hands are much too small and delicate to handle machinery."
+
+"Belle, darling, do you feel any better?" asked Mrs. Rogers, anxiously,
+outside the door.
+
+Belle made no reply. It was her custom to pretend to be asleep when she
+wished to be alone, and she wished now to spend a long uninterrupted
+evening to herself, for her thoughts were very busy. A plan had come
+into her head. It had sprung up suddenly, full-grown, as if it had been
+secretly hatching in the bottom of her mind for a long time and now
+appeared a matured scheme.
+
+Her blood tingled at the notion. It was such an audacious, daring thing
+that the very thought made her dizzy.
+
+"I'll do it," she said at last, her mind made up. "I'll do it, and I'll
+get only one person to help me, because it will take two to work it.
+Now, who shall that person be? It would be best to ask a Blue Bird, but
+which one?"
+
+Her thoughts ran over the girls in the despised society, but there was
+only one of the ten whom she would quite dare to approach. The others
+were fiercely loyal to each other.
+
+This possible traitor was a new girl in West Haven. Her name was
+Francesca Alta, but her friends called her Fannie. She was the daughter
+of Mme. Alta, a music teacher lately established in the town. Many of
+the girls were taking music lessons of Mme. Alta, and Belle, who was one
+of her pupils, often had opportunities of speaking to the little
+dark-haired daughter, although she had only nodded to her coldly so far.
+
+"I will speak to her to-morrow," she exclaimed, as she swallowed the
+sleeping powder her indulgent mother always gave her after one of these
+violent headaches.
+
+In the morning Belle had regained her baby smile. The red had left her
+nose and was now in its proper spots on her round, plump cheeks. Once
+more her large blue eyes looked appealingly into the eyes of those she
+honored with her glances. Belle never saw what she preferred to ignore,
+and one of the most delightful sights of that bright September morning
+was a red motor car filled with pretty young girls, which whirled into
+the High School grounds, making a bright splash of scarlet against the
+old gray walls of the building.
+
+Belle did not see the "Comet" and its load, or would not see it, but
+later, Billie, who never bore malice, bowed a cheerful good morning to
+her enemy, and, to the surprise of the others, received a cordial bow in
+return.
+
+"I am sorry I was cross to you yesterday, Miss Campbell. Will you
+forgive me?" Belle asked her.
+
+"Yes, indeed," answered the warm-hearted young girl. "It's awfully nice
+of you to admit it," and she secretly decided that the others were
+rather hard on Belle Rogers, after all.
+
+However, when the girls heard of the apology, they were skeptical.
+
+"It's the 'Comet' that won her over," observed Nancy.
+
+"I don't believe it," answered their new, inseparable friend, who after
+two days' association was as intimate with the three girls as if she had
+known them always, so rapidly do young girl intimacies grow.
+
+"Something does seem to have happened to her," said Mary Price. "Perhaps
+you gave her such a dressing-down, Billie, that she's turned over a new
+leaf. She would never have stooped to talk to Fannie Alta before, but
+she is doing it now, and look--will wonders never cease?"
+
+The two girls were indeed in intimate conversation. They were walking
+arm in arm up and down the campus, nibbling sandwiches. At West Haven
+High School the girls either brought their luncheons with them to eat at
+recess or bought sandwiches of that plucky, hard-working little woman,
+Mrs. Price, Mary's mother, who made the sandwiches and brought them to
+the school herself in a big basket.
+
+That is why Mary Price had exclaimed, "Will wonders never cease?" She
+had recognized the package of sandwiches in oil paper, which Belle
+Rogers must have bought from her mother, and which she was now sharing
+with dark, shabby little Fannie Alta.
+
+"She used to say she would rather starve than eat one of mother's
+lettuce sandwiches," Mary exclaimed, "but she appears even to have come
+to that."
+
+"If this is one of your mother's own, it's very delicious," exclaimed
+Billie, gallantly turning the conversation into other channels. After
+all, it was just as well not to form the habit of discussing Belle too
+much. Her father had never approved of criticising people.
+
+"It doesn't lead to anything but bilious headaches," he used to say.
+"Sick, bilious headaches and a very yellow complexion. Critical people
+always look like that, Billie, my girl."
+
+Billie's complexion was clear and healthy. She had never had a bilious
+headache in her life. But, then, she was not given to picking flaws in
+other people's characters.
+
+However, the novelty of the richest and proudest girl in West Haven
+making friends with a poor music teacher's daughter was soon to be
+eclipsed by a much more sensational and mysterious incident.
+
+That afternoon, after school, when the four friends assembled in the
+carriage shed for their usual spin home in Billie's motor car, they
+found a note stuck conspicuously between the cushion and the back of the
+seat. It was addressed in a large angular hand to "Miss Wilhelmina
+Campbell and her friends, both boys and girls, especially Miss Butler,"
+and inside it read:
+
+"Keep quiet about Boulder Lane. You are watched and if you let a word
+slip out, the punishment will come quickly."
+
+"How ridiculous," exclaimed Billie angrily, when she had shown the note
+to the others. "I have a great mind to write papa all about it, only it
+would worry him to death. It is only cowards who write anonymous
+letters, anyhow."
+
+But she did not write to her father, and the other girls, too, were
+silent on the matter.
+
+They wondered many times who had put the note on the seat. Strangers
+were not unusual in West Haven, where sailors and seamen often came
+ashore, but the Girls' High School was at the other end of town and
+visitors ashore seldom strayed so far away from the shops and the little
+theatre.
+
+"I'd like to know what their grudge is against the Butler family,"
+Elinor had demanded, but no one could answer the question, and she was
+still determined not to disturb her highly excitable father.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.--THE FIRST MOTOR PICNIC.
+
+
+One Saturday morning early in September Miss Helen Campbell gave a
+breakfast party to her four favorite Blue Birds. It was to be the
+beginning of an eventful day for the young girls, three of whom were to
+take their first long motor trip, and, furthermore, the motor party was
+to end with a visit to Shell Island, where this excited and happy
+company of young people were to spend the night, motoring back to West
+Haven next day.
+
+Miss Campbell herself was excited.
+
+"It's a novelty for me, my dears," she exclaimed, beaming on her guests
+from behind the silver urn at the head of the breakfast table. "I'm a
+very dull, lonesome old woman, and having this nice child here with me
+is going to wake me into life again. I shall never be able to give you
+up, Wilhelmina. You had better write your father that you have been
+adopted by a very obstinate old party, who believes that possession is
+nine points of the law."
+
+"I'm quite willing to be possessed, Cousin Helen," answered Billie. "If
+I could only see papa sometimes, I think I could say that I never was so
+gloriously happy in all my life."
+
+Miss Campbell smiled with pleasure and the girls thought they had never
+seen her look more beautiful. Her white hair glistened like a bank of
+snow in the sunshine and her soft eyes were as blue as patches of West
+Haven Bay on a clear, still morning in summer.
+
+There were times when the lonely spinster looked faded and worn, and at
+such times she used to shut herself up in her big gray stone house on
+Cliff Street and refuse to see even her most intimate friends.
+
+"It's just one of my lonesome moods," she used to say, "and I would not
+for worlds inflict myself on innocent people when one is on me."
+
+But Miss Campbell had not had a single attack of loneliness since Billie
+had come to live with her. The vigorous, active young girl had awakened
+the entire household which had run on its steady even course for so many
+years, and now the place hardly recognized itself, filled with the happy
+voices and gay laughter of Billie and her friends.
+
+It was an unusual sight for the big mahogany table in the dining room to
+be loaded with the best cut glass and silver and adorned with delicate
+lace doilies, which had belonged to Miss Campbell's grandmother. These
+thing had been laid away for many years. In the centre of the table was
+a crystal vase filled with forget-me-nots.
+
+"They are the only flowers I could think of which were the color of your
+blue birds," Miss Campbell had explained. "Besides, they are my favorite
+color. You know, I always wear blue when I don't wear gray. Sometimes I
+wear black----"
+
+"Black, Cousin Helen?" repeated Billie. "I didn't know you ever wore
+anything so mournful."
+
+"You shall never see me in it, child, if I can help it. But I have a
+black dress, only one, and I do wear it at times in my bedroom."
+
+Some thirty years before Miss Campbell, then a young and beautiful girl,
+had come to West Haven to live with her grandfather and there she had
+lived ever since, except for an occasional trip abroad. It was supposed
+that she had suffered a great sorrow at some time in her life, but the
+real story had never been known. Captain Campbell, her grandfather, had
+been a jovial, pleasure loving old man, fond of company and
+entertaining. He liked to have his beautiful granddaughter stand at his
+side and receive his guests in a brocaded ball gown, with the famous
+Campbell diamonds blazing in her hair and the diamond and sapphire
+necklace around her throat.
+
+But after General Campbell's death there were no more balls and dinners
+in the big, old house. The long parlors were seldom opened except to be
+cleaned and aired, and Miss Campbell, now a somewhat shrivelled pink and
+white little lady of fifty-five, interested herself only in the
+charities of West Haven.
+
+"Yes, my dear children, this household and its mistress have got into
+such a lethargy that it is time they were waked up. We have been sunk in
+so deep a rut, my old servants and I, that it might have closed over our
+heads and the world gone on just the same."
+
+"Lots of poor families would have gone begging at Christmas, then, Miss
+Campbell," put in Elinor.
+
+"And what would all those poor old seamen have done?" went on Nancy.
+
+"And the Blue Birds," added Mary Price. "We should have had to use a
+corner of the gymnasium at school for our most secret society meetings."
+
+Miss Campbell paid the rent of the Blue Bird club rooms.
+
+"And, pray, what should I have done?" finished Billie. "I should have
+been knocking around still with papa, trying to get on with the queer
+people who live in hotels, and never have had nice girls to go with or a
+delightful home to stay in."
+
+Miss Campbell blushed with pleasure.
+
+"I have a great many surprises up my sleeve for my little Motor Maids. I
+shall only tell you one, though. What would you say to a Blue Bird
+Thanksgiving ball?"
+
+"Oh, oh, oh! How splendid!" cried the young girls.
+
+"Honk, honk!" went the motor horn at the front entrance, which was a
+signal for breakfast to come to an end and the party to be off.
+
+A hamper of luncheon had been strapped behind the car with the suit
+cases. Miss Campbell sat between Elinor and Mary in the back, while
+Nancy took the seat now understood to be hers always, beside her friend
+Billie, in front. The four Campbell servants, who had grown old in their
+mistress's service, stood in a row on the gravel walk to witness the
+strange sight of their beloved "Miss Helen" sailing away in a red
+infernal machine, her blue automobile veil streaming out behind like a
+piece of flying cloud.
+
+"Don't go too fast, Billie," she exclaimed, as they turned the corner of
+Cliff Street, and whirled down the steep, rather slippery Main street of
+West Haven. "Remember that you have got a decrepit old woman in the back
+who has never ridden behind anything faster than a pair of ambling
+carriage horses in all her life."
+
+"How about the five-thirty express, Cousin Helen?" Billie called over
+her shoulder.
+
+"A locomotive with an engineer is a very different thing from a young
+girl guiding a scarlet comet," the little lady answered; but as they
+left the street for the country road and Billie gradually increased the
+speed, Miss Campbell leaned back with a look of blissful enjoyment on
+her face.
+
+"It is one of the most exhilarating things I have ever experienced," she
+confided to Elinor.
+
+At noon they stopped for lunch. The road now lay along a high cliff
+overlooking the ocean, which on this calm September morning was as
+serenely blue and still as a mill pond. White sails dotted it here and
+there, and an occasional wave rippled on the pebbly beach with a
+murmuring, drowsy sound.
+
+They had pulled up at the side of a little pine grove just off the road
+and spread the lunch cloth on a carpet of pine needles.
+
+Then the delicious cakes and sandwiches which Miss Campbell had ordered
+from Mrs. Price were arranged in neat piles, while Elinor opened her tea
+basket, a present from an aunt in Ireland, and made tea for the company.
+
+It was all very delightful and they were enjoying themselves thoroughly,
+when Billie and Nancy, who were seated facing the others, received a
+slight shock. A tall, slender woman, dressed in black, with a long black
+chiffon veil completely concealing her face, suddenly emerged from
+behind a clump of dwarf oak and bay trees at the far end of the grove
+and beckoned to them.
+
+The two girls exchanged glances of amazement and Nancy was about to say:
+"Why, look at that woman!" when the woman, herself, put her finger to
+her lips and shook her head violently.
+
+"I think she's crazy, Nancy," said Billie, in a low voice, under cover
+of the conversation of the others. "We had better not take any notice.
+It would just alarm Cousin Helen and spoil the day."
+
+Nancy agreed with her, and the two girls were about to suggest that they
+start on again, when the woman began making the most extraordinary
+motions of entreaty, imploring them with outstretched arms, beseeching
+them with every gesture to come to her. And still the two girls hung
+back. Then the woman raised the sleeve of her loose black silk wrap and
+showed her arm bound with a bloody handkerchief.
+
+Nancy gasped at this. The sight of blood was always sickening to her.
+But, seeing Billie's meaning glance in Miss Campbell's direction, she
+pretended that she had choked on her tea.
+
+The other three were deep in a conversation. Miss Campbell was
+describing a beautiful ball she had once been to where she had danced
+with a real prince, and they hardly noticed when Nancy and Billie
+strolled over to the clump of bushes.
+
+The woman, who had been waiting for them, seized Billie's arm and in a
+low, rapid voice said:
+
+"I see that you are both unusually nice girls whom I can trust. I am in
+great trouble. You will help me, will you not? It is very simple, what I
+am going to ask you. You see, I have been in a wreck."
+
+"A motor wreck?" asked Billie.
+
+"Yes, yes," replied the woman, not impatiently but as if she were very
+much pressed for time. "The car rolled over the embankment. You will see
+it below there. It happened just in the curve of the road. There was no
+excuse except that we were going too fast and the wheels did--what is it
+you call it? Skidded? We saved ourselves, all three, by jumping.
+Fortunately the back wheels were caught in the sand and there was just
+time to climb out as the car was overturned. The others have left me.
+They will return at any moment now with another car. Hidden under the
+seat of the wrecked car is a small box. I must have it. I must indeed. I
+cannot get it myself. I have sprained my knee, and can stand only by
+supporting myself against this tree. Will you get that box for me and
+place me in your debt always, always? You cannot understand how
+important it is for me to have it."
+
+"Of course, we will," Billie assured her, "and won't you let us help you
+over to our party, or make you comfortable here with the cushions until
+your friends come back?"
+
+"No, no, no," replied the stranger. "I do not wish to be seen if
+possible. I only beg you to make haste. I will wait here."
+
+As the woman grew more in earnest, her voice seemed to deepen and
+vibrate like a musical instrument, and the girls almost forgot to listen
+to her words under the spell of its wonderful tones; and when she threw
+back her veil, they still stood rooted to the spot, for she was really
+quite the most beautiful person they had either of them ever seen. Her
+eyes and hair were dark, her skin rather creamy in texture; there was a
+generous curve to her lips, a straight nose and full, rounded chin. She
+smiled a little as she noticed the admiration of the two girls, showing
+two rows of white, even teeth.
+
+"You will not refuse?" she asked again.
+
+And they helped her to sit down on the ground and hurried out of the
+grove to the roadside. There, sure enough, lying on its side in the
+sand, some forty feet below the road, was the wrecked motor car.
+
+"Nancy, I would do anything for her," observed Billie, as they clambered
+down the embankment.
+
+"Isn't she perfect?" exclaimed Nancy. "And still, Billie, I can't help
+believing that she's slightly off in her upper story. She was so queer.
+But a shock like that would be enough to turn anybody delirious, jumping
+out of an automobile as it turned over an embankment."
+
+"It'll all depend on whether we find the box. If it is just a delirious
+dream, there won't be any box and we will have had our climb for
+nothing."
+
+They searched the upturned car and there was nothing in it. The ground
+was strewn with wreckage. Cushions and rugs were scattered about in wild
+confusion. The girls searched the place hurriedly all the way down to
+the foot of the cliff.
+
+"There is no need of wasting any more time, Nancy, dear," said Billie at
+last. "It's very evident to me that the beautiful lady was out of her
+mind and we've been 'stung,' as the boys say. Let's go back. Perhaps she
+will let us help her get somewhere."
+
+[Illustration: Half buried in the sand was a small box of highly
+polished wood.]
+
+"Yes, I am afraid it's just a case of King George's men marched up the
+hill and then marched down again," said Nancy.
+
+"And I got two grass stains when I fell down just now," added Billie,
+looking ruefully at her white serge skirt.
+
+"My shoes are full of sand, and I've soiled my white stockings," went on
+Nancy. "Look," she cried suddenly; "look, Billie, here it is right under
+our noses. I suppose that little bay tree hid it from us on our way
+down. I ask the beautiful lady's pardon; but I still can't imagine why
+her own friends couldn't have got it for her just as well as we could."
+
+Half buried in the sand was a small box of highly polished wood, six or
+eight inches square. Two broad bands of silver reinforced it at the back
+and sides, and a little silver combination lock took the place of the
+keyhole. In the middle of the box was a small, round silver plate, on
+which a coat of arms was engraved.
+
+"This is the box, all right enough," said Billie, examining it with much
+curiosity. "Now let's return it to that mysterious lovely person and go
+on our ways, rejoicing."
+
+But they were not destined to get rid of the box that day nor for many
+another day. Just as they reached the top of the cliff they heard the
+whirring of a motor engine. A car was just starting from the grove. Two
+men were on the front seat, while the owner of the box was lying almost
+helplessly in the back seat, her veil thrown back and her face white and
+drawn. There was no top to the car and the girls could see her plainly.
+They thought she must have fainted, but when Nancy called: "Wait, please
+wait," she raised herself quickly, put her finger to her lips in token
+of silence and dropped a card into the road.
+
+The next instant the strange motor car was lost to sight around the
+curve. Billie picked up the card with some irritation.
+
+"How silly," she exclaimed, "What are we to do with this thing? Why
+couldn't she have waited a minute?"
+
+"Because she didn't want the men to know she had the box, goosey,"
+answered Nancy. "It's as plain as the nose on your face. What does the
+card say?"
+
+It was a man's business card and read:
+
+  "Pierre Lafitte, Avocat,
+  Rue----21. Paris."
+
+On the back of the card had been painfully written with a pencil:
+
+  "I knew when you were gone so long that you would be too late. If
+  you are merciful and kind, keep the box a secret from all the world.
+  You will not regret it. Send your name to this address and you shall
+  be relieved at once."
+
+"Burdened with another secret," cried Billie, in a resigned voice.
+"Where can we hide the thing?"
+
+"I'll sit on it for the time being," answered Nancy, laughing. "There
+come the girls."
+
+"What are you two infants up to?" called Elinor, appearing just then at
+the edge of the grove. "We thought you had gone in the other direction
+and we've been looking everywhere for you."
+
+"We have--er----" hesitated Billie, who never could tell fibs. "What
+have we been doing, Nancy?"
+
+"We've been looking at a wreck. Don't you want to see it?"
+
+"Nancy Brown," cried her friend Mary, putting her hands on Nancy's
+shoulders and gazing into her face, "you've got a secret. I can tell by
+your expression. You are hiding something."
+
+"I'm trying to hide it, but I find it rather difficult. I feel like a
+bantam hen sitting on a goose egg."
+
+"Let's push her off her goose egg," cried Elinor, "and see what it
+really is."
+
+"Help, Billie, help!" screamed Nancy, while the four friends engaged in
+a school girl romp, and Miss Campbell, who was dozing in the grove, half
+opened her eyes and smiled.
+
+"Is there anything more charming and sweeter than the sound of
+children's voices out of doors?" she said to herself. She could never
+get used to the idea that Billie was not still the little eight-year-old
+girl who had spent a summer in West Haven seven years before.
+
+In the meantime, the guardian of the box was well defended by Billie
+until she began to laugh, and when Nancy was taken with the giggles her
+father used to say she was nothing but an abandoned lunatic. The place
+rang with the joyous peals and the other girls were obliged to pause in
+the struggle and join in. Then this foolishly happy child rolled
+helplessly onto the ground, upsetting the box.
+
+But there came a sudden end to the laughter, for the top of the box had
+sprung open and its contents were scattered on the roadside.
+
+The girls clasped their hands excitedly and gazed at each other with
+wide-eyed amazement, for at their feet glittered dozens of the most
+beautiful jewels. There were a diamond and sapphire necklace, strings of
+pearls, earrings, rings, and broaches.
+
+"Great heavens, what have you girls been doing?" exclaimed Mary.
+
+"Nancy, you explain," answered Billie, grown very grave, all of a
+sudden. "I'll gather these things up and get them out of sight as
+quickly as possible. I think my suit case is the safest place for the
+time being, and we can take it into the front of the car with us. Then
+we can discuss later what we had better do."
+
+While the girls listened to Nancy's strange story of the beautiful
+injured woman, Billie collected and replaced the jewels in the box with
+the card, and packed it in the bottom of her suit case.
+
+In another ten minutes the motor party was on the road again, the
+younger members somewhat sobered by the secret responsibility which had
+been thrust upon them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.--THE BOX OF TROUBLES.
+
+
+Shell Island is really only an island in name. A narrow creek which
+fills and empties with the incoming and outgoing tides divides it from
+the mainland. A bridge spans this chasm over which flows a constant
+stream of motor and driving parties from all the villages and summer
+resorts up and down the coast.
+
+Just at sundown, as the "Comet" took the steep road down the cliff to
+the bridge, a big touring car shot past.
+
+"Oh, dear," exclaimed Nancy, "I did hope we would leave all care behind
+when we came away, and now I am perfectly certain that Belle Rogers was
+sitting on the front seat of that automobile. I suppose she'll be
+floating around the ballroom in blue chiffons this evening."
+
+"Is she a care?" asked Billie, who had a placid and rather masculine way
+of forgetting all about the people she didn't like.
+
+"Oh, I don't mind her, only she always makes me feel like a rag picker's
+daughter."
+
+"I think she's over-dressed," put in Billie. "I should feel utterly
+foolish with all that finery and jewelry on me. When papa and I used to
+buy my clothes, he would say: 'Suppose we stick to plain white,
+daughter, and skip the furbelows. We can't go very far wrong if we do
+that, and if my little daughter begins to put on ruffles and puffles and
+falals without anybody's advice but mine, I'm afraid she might be taken
+for a walking fashion plate and some one will try to stand her up in a
+shop window."
+
+Nancy laughed.
+
+"I think you have the prettiest dresses I ever saw, Billie, but I am
+glad Miss Campbell has persuaded you to stop dressing so much like a
+boy. Lace collars are lots more becoming than those stiff linen ones."
+
+"They were chokers," answered Billie, good-naturedly, as the car drew up
+at the steps of the hotel immediately behind the automobile which had
+passed it on the road.
+
+Belle and her party were waiting on the piazza, the women in long pongee
+coats with the very latest motor bonnets and veils.
+
+"Those are her rich friends, the Jordannes," whispered Nancy, in awed
+tones. "They used to be just plain Jordan before they made so much
+money."
+
+"I think Jordan is a much nicer name. It has such a fine Oriental sound,
+'Where rolls the River Jordan.'"
+
+By this time several porters from the hotel had stepped to the motor car
+door and assisted Miss Campbell, somewhat stiff from the long ride, to
+alight. The girls jumped nimbly out after her and their luggage was
+unstrapped and piled on the ground near the Jordanne luggage. But Billie
+was careful to keep a firm hold on her own suit case with its precious
+load.
+
+"Let the man take your bag, dear," called Miss Campbell. "You will
+strain your back carrying that heavy thing."
+
+There was nothing for Billie to do but resign the suit case, although
+she tried to keep an eye on it as they followed the porter through the
+lobby to the elevator. Miss Campbell had telegraphed ahead for rooms.
+
+As luck would have it, there was another elevator for luggage, and the
+bag was temporarily out of Billie's sight, but her mind was soon at ease
+when she saw it stacked with the others in the bedroom which she and
+Nancy were to share.
+
+"While we dress for dinner," she observed, "we'll have a talk about that
+jewelry. What on earth are we going to do with it?"
+
+"Don't you think we'd better tell Miss Campbell?" suggested Elinor.
+
+"I suppose it would be best, but Cousin Helen does go off so about
+things, and I have a feeling that if she knew it she wouldn't allow us
+to keep our promise to our poor beautiful lady. She would be sure to
+turn the box over to the police or call in a lawyer or something. And if
+we could only keep the box until we heard from the man in Paris, at
+least, we should be keeping our word about it."
+
+Elinor and Mary were all for telling, but the other girls were still
+under the spell of the very beautiful and distressed woman, and since it
+was mostly their affair they concluded not to tell.
+
+You must not blame Billie for this want of frankness. Girls who have
+never had mothers to talk to in the intimate way that only a mother and
+daughter know, are apt to be reserved and self-reliant. Billie would
+certainly have told her father, but, then, he was in Russia.
+
+Mary and Elinor, whose room adjoined the other, had put on their kimonos
+and were lolling on the beds, while Nancy with solicitous care was
+removing her pretty muslin frock from the valise and smoothing out the
+pink taffeta ribbons tenderly.
+
+Billie knelt on the floor and opened her suit case.
+
+"Before I undress," she said decisively, "I'm going to take this box
+straight down stairs and give it to the clerk to put in the safe. Then
+we can spend the evening with easy minds."
+
+She flung back the top and sat down on the floor with a gasp.
+
+"In the name of all the powers, this is not my suit case."
+
+The girls gathered around her in great excitement.
+
+"It's exactly like mine," she went on, "but there are no initials on it
+and mine has 'W.H.C.' on the end."
+
+"Girls," cried Nancy, flinging her bathrobe around her with a tragic
+gesture, "the very last person in the world we could wish to have
+Billie's suit case is the very one who has it. She'll look at everything
+in it; examine the underclothes to see if they are hand-made and the
+stockings to see if they are silk, and--she'll open the box of jewels
+and read the card of the avocat from Paris and----"
+
+"Who? Who?" interrupted the other three.
+
+"Who but Belle Rogers," cried Nancy, flourishing a towel in one hand and
+a hair brush in the other.
+
+"Yes, that's her costume," admitted Mary, laughing. "Blue chiffon with a
+wreath of pink roses for her hair."
+
+She pulled up a corner of the pale blue gauzy material and pointed to a
+little pink wreath which lay in the folds of the dress.
+
+"There are her blue satin slippers, No. Two's, absolutely not a size
+larger," said Elinor, pointing to the toe of a little slipper which
+showed at one end of the suit case.
+
+"This is what I get for losing the keys to everything," groaned Billie.
+"Telephone for a boy, quick, some one, while I fasten this thing up.
+Perhaps she hasn't opened mine yet."
+
+"Opened it!" echoed the others. "You don't know her."
+
+Presently a bell boy tapped at the door.
+
+Billie gave him the suit case with full instructions.
+
+"And hurry," she added. "If you are back here in five minutes, you shall
+have an extra tip."
+
+Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed. The other girls were almost dressed,
+and Billie was beginning to tap the floor nervously with an impatient
+foot, when at last there was a tap at the door.
+
+"Why didn't you come sooner?" demanded Nancy and Billie in one voice.
+
+"The young lady wouldn't let me, Miss."
+
+"But what was she doing all that time?"
+
+"I don't know, Miss. She simply told me to wait outside. She was very
+angry, Miss, about her bag."
+
+"Angry, indeed," answered Billie, seizing her own suit case. "At least
+no time was lost in sending it to her."
+
+The two girls opened the suit case with great anxiety. The things in it
+were assuredly in rather a rumpled condition. They had the appearance of
+having been unfolded and hastily rolled up again in new folds.
+
+Nothing could be told about the box of jewels. They were all there
+apparently in a glittering bunch with the card laid on top.
+
+"Dear me, I'm sorry that combination lock broke," exclaimed Billie. "I
+don't mind Belle Rogers looking through my clothes if it gives her any
+satisfaction, but I would just as soon she hadn't looked into this box
+of jewels. And we can't explain to her, because we mustn't seem to know
+that she was capable of doing anything so low and common as to go
+through my suit case."
+
+She dressed herself hastily in a pretty white frock. Her smooth rolls of
+hair and trim braid did not need re-arranging, and she hurried
+downstairs to the desk with the troublesome box, which she gave into the
+charge of the clerk.
+
+"These are some really valuable things," she said. "Will you put them in
+your safe?"
+
+The clerk wrapped the box up neatly in heavy brown paper, sealed it with
+red sealing wax, labelled it with her name and address and deposited it
+in the safe.
+
+"That's off my mind," she said, giving a sigh of relief, just as the
+elevator door opened and Miss Campbell appeared with the other girls.
+
+"Cousin Helen, you're a dream," cried Billie, taking her cousin's arm.
+"You are like a young girl whose hair had gone and turned white in a
+single night."
+
+"Thank you, my dear, but you may be sure that if anything happened which
+could make my hair turn white in a night, it wouldn't leave me any
+girlish looks. But why didn't you come to my room and let me have a look
+at you? Are you all exactly right and in place? That's a sweet little
+frock. I suppose you got it in Paris last summer. You and your father
+are a pair of children shopping together, I imagine. All my girls look
+sweet," she added, not wishing to wound any feelings by admiring one
+more than another. "See this lovely dress my little Mary is wearing.
+Could anything be more exquisitely made than that? Your mother is a
+wonderful woman, child. There's nobody like her in West Haven."
+
+At dinner there was another surprise for the girls. This time it was an
+agreeable one: four extra places at the table, and presently they were
+joined by four West Haven boys, looking rather embarrassed but quite
+happy as they shook hands with the fairy godmother of the party,
+Billie's Cousin Helen.
+
+Two of the boys we have met before, Ben Austen and Charlie Clay. The
+other two were their intimate friends and boon companions, Americus
+Brown, Nancy's brother, known as "Merry Brown," and Percival Algernon
+St. Clair, whose mother's fancy had run riot in naming her only child.
+He was called "Percy" by his friends for short.
+
+"Why, look who's here," exclaimed Nancy. "Percival Algernon St. Clair,
+why didn't you tell us yesterday when you gave us soda water at the drug
+store that you were coming on this trip, too?"
+
+"Because it was secret," answered Percy, who was very blond and blushed
+easily. "Miss Campbell wanted to surprise you."
+
+"I thought it would be nice for my girls to have some partners for the
+dance to-night," said Miss Campbell. "I wanted to see some real
+dancing."
+
+"If you want to see the real thing, then, Miss Campbell," said Merry
+Brown, "if you want to see the poetry of motion, you must see Ben
+dance."
+
+"Shut up, bow-legs," called Ben across the table. "I've been learning
+for months. I took lessons last summer."
+
+"Where?" demanded his friends, because at the school dances, Ben's
+expression of misery was well known when he towed an unfortunate friend
+around the room.
+
+"I know," said Percy, "it's all explained now. That's what you were
+doing at the Dutch picnics every week."
+
+"Well, they were pretty good teachers," replied the imperturbable Ben.
+"They taught me that guiding a girl in a dance was very much like
+sailing a boat with a windmill for a sail. You have to guide and twirl
+at the same time, and the more speed you make in twirling the better
+your dancing is."
+
+Everybody laughed uproariously at this description.
+
+"Ben Austen, I didn't expect to be treated like a windmill sail boat
+when I promised to give you my first dance," announced Elinor.
+
+"It would be better than to be treated like a stationary windmill and go
+turning around in one place like the Germans dance," observed Billie.
+
+"You may all have your choice," said Ben. "Stationary or progressive,
+it's all one to me, only remember that you have each promised to do a
+Dutch twirl with me."
+
+The ballroom was already quite filled with dancers and it seemed very
+bewildering and delightful to the young girls, if it was only a summer
+hotel with a piano and two violins and a flute for an orchestra. Ben's
+Dutch whirl was so skillfully performed, because like everything else he
+attempted he had mastered it perfectly, that the girls found it rather
+exciting fun.
+
+"It's a regular romp," cried Billie, who, with glowing cheeks, dropped
+breathlessly into a chair beside her Cousin Helen.
+
+"Look," whispered Mary Price, who had been dancing a quiet glide with
+Charlie Clay and had had a chance to notice some of the other dancers.
+
+For some reason both their young faces turned suddenly very grave. Was
+it a strange, unexplained premonition that told them the most dangerous
+enemy either was ever to have was dancing past that moment, in floating
+pale blue chiffon draperies?
+
+After the dance there was a merry supper party with sandwiches and
+lemonade in the grill room, and then the Motor Maids were glad enough to
+get to their beds.
+
+"What a relief it is, Nancy, dear, to have that box of jewels in the
+safe," said Billie sleepily, as her eyelids drooped and she settled
+herself under the covers.
+
+But Nancy did not reply. She was sleeping deeply. Billie, too, was soon
+oblivious of everything in the world.
+
+As the night wore on, Nancy dreamed that she was dancing the Dutch twirl
+in a wonderful blue gauze dress, but that the diamond necklace she wore
+so weighed her down that she could not breathe.
+
+Billie also dreamed of the diamonds. They were not around her neck, but
+in their box, which had grown to the size of a trunk and pressed on her
+chest so heavily that she was suffocating.
+
+Suddenly a great bell clanged out in the night.
+
+Billie opened her eyes with difficulty. The room was filled with smoke
+and down the corridor there came the cry of "Fire! Fire!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.--THE FIRE.
+
+
+A bell with a deep baying note rang out in the darkness.
+
+If you have ever heard a fire bell boom out in the stillness, you will
+remember the terror which clutched your heart at the first ominous peal.
+It seemed to Billie, in going over it afterward, that the boom of that
+big fire bell was like the last trump on the day of judgment arousing
+the spirits of the dead.
+
+Then came the sound of voices. The corridors were filled with hurrying
+footsteps. Somebody ran down the hallway calling again:
+
+"Fire! Fire!"
+
+Billie jumped to the floor with a bound. Her senses had returned at
+last.
+
+"Nancy, Nancy!" she cried, shaking her friend violently back to
+consciousness. "The hotel is on fire. Get into your dressing gown as
+quickly as you can while I wake up the others."
+
+As she switched on the light she saw that the room was filled with
+smoke, and she knew the fire must be in their wing of the hotel and that
+there was no time to lose.
+
+There is no better fire trap in the world than a wooden hotel at the
+seaside. The salt from the flying spray in winter storms has seasoned
+the wood into splendid burning material, and the breeze from the ocean
+fans the flames like a great natural bellows.
+
+As Billie waked the other girls Miss Campbell came into the room, with a
+white, scared face. But she was not excited.
+
+"Get into your dressing gowns, girls," she said quietly. "Don't lose a
+moment's time. The boys are waiting for us outside."
+
+Just then Ben Austen rattled on the door.
+
+"Hurry," he called. "The elevators won't run much longer and the stairs
+are burning."
+
+Hardly two minutes had passed since the first clang of the bell when
+Miss Campbell and the girls joined the boys in the corridor. There had
+not been time even to snatch up a hair-pin from the bureau to catch
+tumbled locks together. But nobody looked at any one else. The place was
+crowded with hotel guests in exactly the same condition and all the
+passages opening into the main corridor of the hotel were emptying
+themselves of streams of people in every state of disarray. If it had
+been less serious, the girls might have laughed at the numbers of
+terrified and hysterical fat women, wrapping insufficient dressing gowns
+and blankets about their large forms as they pushed their way without
+ceremony toward the elevators.
+
+But a big tongue of flame suddenly leapt up the stairwell at the end of
+the hall. There was a crackling sound and clouds of black smoke poured
+into the corridor.
+
+"We must get out of this," exclaimed Ben. "The fire has reached this
+floor and unless we knock a few people down, we'll never get to either
+of those elevators."
+
+"But where are the fire escapes?" demanded Miss Campbell.
+
+"At the end of the hall," answered Charlie, "and we could never get past
+that burning pit."
+
+The two elevators had been up and down several times, packed with
+people. The smoke was growing thicker each moment, and the next thing
+Billie remembered was that Elinor had fainted dead away, and that some
+one had screamed:
+
+"The elevators have stopped running!"
+
+In the stifling atmosphere she saw Ben and Charlie lift Elinor and call
+to the others to follow them into a bedroom. As she staggered after
+them, a grotesque figure, screaming hysterically, fought through the
+crowd, almost knocking Billie down. Even in that moment of danger she
+recognized Belle Rogers, every lock of whose golden hair was done up on
+red rubber curlers, the ends of which stuck straight up like scores of
+little devils' horns.
+
+"Take me down! Take me down!" Billie heard her scream. "I will not die
+in this horrible way! Somebody save me!"
+
+Billie touched her on the shoulder.
+
+"Don't scream," she said. "It only makes things worse. The people who
+are left are going to get down by the windows. Come with us."
+
+Belle, who had been separated from her friends, followed quietly enough.
+
+In another moment the corridor was empty, and the flames which had been
+fast eating their way along the hall had reached the elevator shafts. It
+had all happened in much less time than it takes to tell, but in the
+brief instant when Billie had paused to rescue Belle, she lost the
+others. Once in a bedroom, where the air was not so stifling, it was
+impossible to leave and rush again into the atmosphere outside.
+
+The two girls dashed into the nearest room and closed the door, too
+stifled to notice that the others, led by level-headed Ben and followed
+by the crowd of people left standing by the elevator shafts, had rushed
+into a front room at the end of the hall. In the closets of this room
+and the one adjoining, they found two fire ropes which this
+old-fashioned hotel provided for its guests whose rooms were not located
+near the fire escapes. Those who were not able to slide down the ropes
+were lowered in a chair, and the others, with a foot twisted around the
+rope and grasping a wet towel to keep the palm of the hand from
+blistering, slid down. In the darkness it was impossible to recognize
+faces, and it was not until they were all safe on the ground that they
+missed Billie Campbell.
+
+Then poor Miss Campbell, who had been admirably calm during the whole
+fearful experience, fainted away, and Elinor, now entirely restored by
+the fresh air, was left to take care of her.
+
+Nancy and Mary followed the four boys to the rescue. Tears were rolling
+down Nancy's cheeks and Mary was as pale as death. Each girl had her own
+peculiar way of showing how much she had come to love their new friend,
+Billie.
+
+In the meantime, Billie, herself, was looking ruefully down into the
+darkness from the window of a room on the third floor and Belle was
+indulging in a fit of real hysterics.
+
+"How dare you bring me here?" she screamed hoarsely, stamping her foot.
+"I might have been saved if you had let me alone, and here we are
+trapped! I always hated you and now I detest you with my whole soul."
+
+"I thought the others were in here," said Billie apologetically.
+
+"Thought! Thought!" screamed the wretched girl. "You wanted me to die.
+You wanted me to lose my beauty."
+
+"You haven't any to lose just now," answered Billie. "You look more like
+the Medusa of the snaky locks----"
+
+"Oh, oh!" wept Belle, too angry to articulate.
+
+"You may console yourself this much," went on Billie. "If you die, I
+shall die with you, but I am going to do my best to save you and myself,
+too."
+
+"Help! Help!" screamed Belle from the window, not taking any notice. But
+her voice was lost in the wild clamor which came up from below.
+
+Then she flung herself flat on the floor in an agony of sobs.
+
+"It's better to pray than to cry, Belle. Crying won't help and we are in
+a pretty warm place. If you were only a sport, it might do a lot of
+good."
+
+Belle crawled to the window and leaned out. The air in the room was
+becoming unbearable.
+
+In the meantime, Billie's thoughts were working rapidly. There were the
+sheets, but there wasn't time to tear them into strips and knot the
+strips together. Besides, she didn't believe they would reach halfway to
+the ground.
+
+"I am afraid we'll have to climb it," she said.
+
+"Climb what?"
+
+"Climb up the side of the shutter to the roof. This is the top floor.
+The flames haven't reached the roof yet."
+
+"But what good will the roof do us?"
+
+"I don't know yet, but it's better than this. Come on."
+
+"I tell you I can't climb. I never did such a thing in my life."
+
+"You'll just have to begin then," said Billie sternly. "Shall I go
+first, or would you rather do it?"
+
+"I'll go--no, you go."
+
+"I'll help you," said Billie, hoisting herself to the window ledge.
+"Now, don't look down. Just imagine you are only a few feet from the
+ground and that it's a very easy stunt. If you decide beforehand that
+you can't do it, why, of course, you can't. But it will be much easier
+than staying here to be burned alive in the next few minutes."
+
+Delivering herself of this boyish but unimpeachable logic, Billie kicked
+off her slippers and swung herself onto the shutter. Just for one brief
+instant a sickening nausea came over her as she looked down into the
+darkness.
+
+Then her fingers grasped the cornice of the roof and, pulling herself up
+with her two arms, as she had learned to do on the parallel bars in the
+gymnasium--only in this instance the shutter made a very uncertain elbow
+rest--she scrambled onto the roof.
+
+"All right, Belle," she called. "It's much easier than I thought. Take
+off your slippers and come ahead, and don't forget to look up and not
+down."
+
+Belle obeyed in sullen silence. She was as determined as Billie not to
+be burned alive, but her luxurious and self-indulgent nature revolted
+against this uncomfortable and dangerous method of getting out of the
+difficulty. However, there was nothing else to do, so she swung out on
+the shutter as Billie had done, only this time Billie, with all the
+strength in her body was holding the shutter rigid.
+
+As Belle clung on with her hands and her little pink toes, which she had
+stuck into the interstices of the shutter, she suddenly looked down. Her
+grasp weakened and she gave a shriek so piercing that Billie almost
+slipped headlong over the side of the roof, but she grasped Belle's
+slackening wrist.
+
+"Take a breath," she said, in a trembling voice. "You can do it, if you
+only make up your mind to."
+
+"I'll never, never forgive you," cried Belle, "and if I live through
+to-night, I'll pay you back."
+
+"All right," answered Billie calmly, seeing all at once that anger
+appeared to give Belle new strength, "only I advise you to get onto this
+roof first."
+
+Another moment and Belle had clambered over the cornice and was
+stretched out breathless on the roof.
+
+"I would much rather have had a baby to look after," thought Billie, as
+she looked contemptuously down at the other girl.
+
+"We had better not lose any more time now, Belle," she said aloud. "If
+you have got your breath and your nerve back, come ahead."
+
+Belle pulled herself wearily up and followed.
+
+"My feet are all splinters," she complained, "and my hands are torn and
+bleeding."
+
+  "'Tis the voice of the lobster: I heard him declare
+  'You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair,'"
+
+repeated Billie, half laughing and half sobbing that this foolish verse
+should have flashed through her brain at this strange time.
+
+The two girls hurried along the roof toward the front. It was plain that
+in the scramble to save the lives of the hotel guests there had been no
+time to save the building, and when the young girls turned the corner of
+the roof and looked for a moment across the broad expanse of ocean not a
+hundred yards away it seemed to them that they were alone in the whole
+world.
+
+"What are we going to do now?" demanded Belle.
+
+"I don't know yet," answered Billie patiently.
+
+The roof was hot under her feet and they could hear the crackling of
+flames as they hastened along the edge to the other side.
+
+The rest of that fearful adventure seemed like a dream to Billie
+afterwards.
+
+As they turned the corner of the house a voice called hoarsely:
+
+"Who can tie a rope?"
+
+Billie remembered to have replied vaguely and politely that she could
+tie a rope. A man emerged from behind the chimney with a long rope, but
+she hardly noticed at the time that he had only one arm.
+
+"It may not be long enough," he said, "but tie it and we'll take the
+risk. It's our only chance."
+
+Billie knotted the rope around the chimney. The man examined the knot
+carefully, pulled it with his one hand, and then threw it over the side
+of the house.
+
+"I'll go first," said Belle quietly, and Billie looked at her with
+amazement.
+
+"Humph!" said the man. "You are brave. Can you do it?"
+
+"Yes," answered Belle, "I can do anything. Help me over the side."
+
+"It's going to hurt," he observed, as he twisted the rope around her
+foot and showed her how to slide down. "It's going to take all the skin
+off your hands and feet and maybe cut to the bone."
+
+Belle made no reply to this cheerful prediction. She had already started
+down the rope.
+
+As Billie watched her disappear in the dark, the man said abruptly:
+
+"Did a number of girls and a white-haired woman in a red automobile come
+here this evening?"
+
+Billie hesitated.
+
+"I believe so," she said.
+
+"Do you know so?" asked the man insistently.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Did you see one of them leave a rosewood box at the clerk's desk?"
+
+Billie made a great effort to remember. Then, suddenly, the case of
+jewels loomed up in her mind. She had forgotten all about them.
+
+"Billie, Billie," called a voice from below.
+
+"Yes," she answered, looking over the roof.
+
+"She's here," shouted Ben, from the top of the ladder, which reached
+only to the second story.
+
+"All right," called the one-armed man on the roof. "We have a rope here.
+We'll swing down to the ladder."
+
+The next thing Billie remembered she was surrounded by a crowd of her
+friends at the foot of the ladder. The girls were weeping and her Cousin
+Helen was giving vent to hysterical expressions of relief and
+thankfulness. The wet sand felt cool and soft to the parched soles of
+her bare feet, and she tried to smile; but she really had quite
+forgotten what it was all about. Some one close by her groaned and
+sobbed alternately, and a sickening feeling came over her when she saw a
+girl stretched on a blanket almost at her feet. The girl's hands were
+torn and bleeding and her pale blue silk kimono was covered with blood.
+Down one cheek was a long, bloody mark and to complete her grotesque and
+terrible aspect, at least a dozen little red rubber devils' horns stood
+upright all over her head.
+
+The next thing Billie remembered was huddling into her own beloved red
+motor car with the others, while some one took them somewhere, and all
+the time in her ears she heard a man's voice saying:
+
+"Where is that box of jewels?"
+
+And her own voice replied:
+
+"Under the ruins of the Shell Island Hotel."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.--NANCY'S HOME.
+
+
+Nancy's home was a favorite meeting place of the four friends. There was
+something very inviting about the old red brick house, with its
+low-ceiled, cheerful rooms and deep-silled windows.
+
+Nancy's family had been seafaring people for many generations, and the
+place was filled with curios from foreign countries: carved chests,
+swords with curved blades, ivory elephants, funny little cross-legged
+grinning gods, beautiful Japanese vases and Oriental rugs.
+
+In cool weather there seemed to be a perpetual piece of old driftwood
+crackling on the hearth, and there was nothing the girls enjoyed more
+than sitting in a row on the floor in front of that cheerful blaze while
+they drank tea from curious Japanese cups and nibbled some of Mrs.
+Brown's delicate cookies.
+
+Nancy's father was the very picture of a sea captain, sunburned, ruddy,
+eyes very blue and little side whiskers like an English Squire's. He had
+a hundred stories to tell of the sea, and Billie could have listened to
+him all day without tiring. Nancy's mother was a gay, cheerful little
+body who kept her house polished like a ship's cabin, and Nancy's
+brother, Merry, was the image of his father. He felt the call of the
+sea, too, as his father and grandfather had before him, but he was not
+to be the captain of a merchant ship. He intended to go to Annapolis.
+
+Three weeks had passed since the great fire at Shell Island, when, one
+Saturday afternoon, a red motor car wound its way in and out of the
+country vehicles on Main Street, stopped at the express office, where
+the young mistress of the car alighted for a moment, returning with a
+package, and then, with a reckless flourish, turned into lower Cliff
+Street and presently stopped in front of Nancy's house.
+
+Billie entered without ceremony, so intimate had she now become with the
+Brown household. Concealing the package in her gray ulster, she left it
+in the hall. Then, with the boyish freedom which seemed to characterize
+all her ways, pulling off her gray hat and gloves, she marched into the
+parlor.
+
+Nancy was huddled up on the settle doing the family darning, a Saturday
+task she loathed. Elinor was playing softly on the square piano between
+the front windows and Mary Price was reading a book.
+
+"I hope I don't disturb any one," said Billie, laughing as she burst
+into the room. "Everybody seems to be so busy here. I'm the only idle
+creature living to-day. Even Cousin Helen is at work."
+
+"I hope she is doing something more to her taste than this," said Nancy
+mournfully. "I'd rather dig for clams any day. Merry would wear out a
+sock made of steel chains."
+
+"Hark, a doleful voice from the tombs," cried Merry, who always made it
+an excuse to hunt for something in the parlor when Billie appeared.
+
+"It's the truth," complained Nancy. "If you would just keep still two
+minutes at a time, I wouldn't have to give up my Saturdays slaving for
+you."
+
+"'When I hear the music play, I can't keep right still,'" sang Merry,
+executing a double shuffle on the floor to a jig tune Elinor had struck
+up.
+
+"You'll have to dance to a different tune when you go to Annapolis,"
+cried Nancy. "And who'll do your darning there?"
+
+"Don't borrow trouble, Nancy," answered her brother. "Perform your daily
+task and cease to murmur. You'll be a professional grumbler like Belle
+Rogers if you keep on."
+
+"Do you know that she and her whole family are denouncing me as a sort
+of would-be murderer?" put in Billie. "All because I lost Ben and the
+rest of you at the Shell Island fire and took her into the wrong room."
+
+"I heard that she was an early Christian martyr who had come near to
+being burned at the stake," said Merry.
+
+"Yes," continued Billie, "she tells how I enticed her into the room, and
+then climbed up onto the roof and left her, so that she had to follow
+and she even blames me because she would slide down the rope first and
+cut her hands so that she will never be able to play the piano. I am
+very sorry for that, because she liked music, but it was her own fault."
+
+"It's really making a sort of split-up in the town," observed Elinor.
+"Mrs. Rogers and mamma almost had words on the subject the other day. As
+much as mamma will ever have words with any one. Mrs. Rogers tried to
+tell her that Belle was going one way and you made her go another, and
+all mamma said was, 'My dear Julia, I have heard the correct version of
+the story,' and swept away."
+
+"Exactly as you will do, Elinor, when you begin to wear long dresses,"
+said Nancy.
+
+"Oh, she can sweep without a train," cried Merry, giving a very good
+imitation of Elinor as he made for the door with his baseball bat and
+glove.
+
+"Now, don't be silly, Americus Brown," called Elinor after him.
+"Remember that you are to be a soldier of the nation some day, and
+you'll have to stop walking pigeon-toed, then, and keep your bow-legs
+straight and stop grinning. It will be very difficult, I fear."
+
+Merry shot a coffee bean at her with his thumb and forefinger as he left
+the room.
+
+"That boy will be the death of me," exclaimed Nancy. "He reminds me of
+our sailor weather-cock in the garden that waves his arms and legs and
+turns every time there is the slightest breeze."
+
+"He's a nice boy," said Billie, who always took Merry's side in the
+arguments. "But I am here this morning, as the preacher says, to ask
+your advice in a grave matter. Several grave matters, in fact."
+
+"Have you heard from Mr. Lafitte?" demanded the three girls in unison.
+
+"No," said Billie, "and it's been nearly three weeks since we sent my
+name and address. Perhaps there hasn't been time, but I should think
+they might have cabled, or something."
+
+"It only postpones the evil day of telling them the jewels were lost in
+the fire," observed Mary.
+
+Billie disappeared in the hall for a moment and returned with the
+package she had hidden in her ulster.
+
+"The jewels came back by express this morning," she said.
+
+"For heaven's sake!" cried the others.
+
+"I don't know whether to be glad or sorry," said Billie. "I am sure
+Pandora's box didn't have any more troubles locked inside of it than
+this one has. What shall I do with it now?"
+
+"Why don't you tell Miss Campbell all about it?" suggested Elinor, for
+the second time.
+
+"But, Elinor, it wouldn't be right," answered Billie. "Didn't we give
+the woman our word of honor, Nancy, that we would keep the box for her
+until she sent for it, and tell no one? Even you and Mary would not have
+known about it if you hadn't attacked Nancy like two wild Comanche
+Indians and knocked the box open."
+
+"Don't you think the woman was crazy, honestly now?" Elinor asked for
+the hundredth time. This was an old argument between the girls.
+
+"No, I don't," answered Billie emphatically.
+
+"She was much too beautiful and fascinating to be crazy," put in Nancy.
+
+"They are the craziest of all sometimes," said Elinor.
+
+"But to return to the jewels," interrupted Mary, the peacemaker. "Did
+the hotel people send them back?"
+
+"No, that's the queerest thing of all, and that's what I'm here for to
+tell you now. The hotel people wrote me a letter which came this
+morning, saying that it was believed that the fire had been started by
+thieves who robbed the safe and that they, therefore, were not
+responsible for things lost.
+
+"In the same mail came another very nice letter from a strange man named
+Johnston. He said the night of the fire he saw a man who was carrying
+this package faint dead away on the bridge. He believes now the man was
+one of the thieves. Anyway, he took him into his automobile and the
+thief must have come to and not known where he was, because he escaped
+somehow, probably to go back and look for the package, which Mr.
+Johnston has expressed to me."
+
+"Well, of all the strange stories!"
+
+"But the question is now, what to do with the thing?" continued Billie.
+
+If Billie had been a few years older, she would probably have gone
+straight to Miss Campbell, or to Miss Campbell's lawyer, Mr. Richard
+Butler, Elinor's uncle, for advice. The jewels would then have been
+stored in the bank for safe-keeping and proper means taken to find the
+owner. But it seemed to her that having given her word she must keep it,
+and hide the jewels herself in some safe place until she heard from Mr.
+Lafitte. After all, he might be on a journey somewhere, and they could
+only wait patiently.
+
+"Let's go and consult our guide, counsellor, and friend," suggested
+Mary.
+
+"Who?" asked the other girls, in some doubt.
+
+"Why, the motor car, of course. Isn't he the cheerfullest, finest friend
+in the world; always ready to give pleasure; always smiling and ruddy,
+and ready to come and go, stay still or move on--bless him?"
+
+"He is a dear," said Billie, pleased with this extravagant praise of her
+beloved car.
+
+The girls had come to consider "The Comet" almost as a living thing,
+like a pet horse or a favorite dog. They loved it as ardently as
+children love a pony which has borne them all on his back at one time
+around the garden.
+
+It was decided then to take a spin in the car and the four friends were
+soon in their accustomed places on the red leather seats.
+
+The scarlet car, full of young girls, was no longer an unusual sight in
+the town of West Haven, and people had ceased now to turn and stare at
+the "Motor Maids," as Captain Brown had christened them one morning when
+they had taken him for a drive in the automobile.
+
+Through the town they sped and out to the open road. The crisp autumn
+air nipped their cheeks and brought the color to their faces. As they
+passed Boulder Lane they looked curiously at the fisherman's house in
+the distance.
+
+"I am certain those men who took your car were smugglers," announced
+Nancy. "Father says there are lots of them."
+
+"Perhaps," said Billie, "and I am certain of another thing: that it was
+the same one-armed man who was on the roof of the hotel the night of the
+fire."
+
+"But there are lots of one-armed men in the world, child," replied
+Nancy.
+
+"Perhaps, but there was something familiar about him. And, besides, why
+did he ask me those questions about the girls at the hotel in the red
+automobile?"
+
+"And, 'curiser and curiser,' what did he want with the box of jewels?
+And how did he know we had them?" said Elinor.
+
+"I really couldn't say," answered Nancy. "Ask me something easier."
+
+Seeing nothing ahead of them in the road, Billie had let the car go full
+speed. It was what they all loved, even Mary Price, who had gradually
+got over a certain timidity she used to feel when the car shot through
+the air like a sky-rocket, and it was Mary Price now, grown unusually
+bold from familiarity with speeding, who suddenly jumped up and cried in
+her high, sweet voice:
+
+"I've got it! I've got it!"
+
+"Got what?" demanded the others.
+
+"Why, a place to put the jewels in, of course. Mother's safe."
+
+"But would she like us to use her safe?" asked Billie.
+
+"She won't mind. I'll tell her it's something of yours. She never uses
+it. We haven't anything to keep in it now," Mary added simply. "Father
+used it in his life time and Mother has just kept it since because we
+are always expecting to make lots of money, you know, and then we might
+need it. I know the combination, and we can go straight home and put
+them in. No one would ever think of looking for jewels in our little
+house, and they ought to be as safe there as any place in the world."
+
+"Mary, dear, you are a trump," exclaimed Billie. "It's a perfect idea."
+
+In another moment, they had faced about and were on their way back to
+town.
+
+"Dear old car," ejaculated Elinor, patting the red leather tenderly.
+"Mary's right, we couldn't get on without you. We consult you exactly as
+the ancients consulted oracles. I think all your cushions must be
+stuffed with good advice, instead of horse hair, and your big all-seeing
+eye is always on the lookout for danger----"
+
+"And his heart is true to his jolly crew," sang Nancy.
+
+"He is better than a horse," put in Mary, "because he never gets tired."
+
+"And when he's empty we fill him with gasoline, and he'll go ahead as
+fresh as ever," went on Billie.
+
+"And he always avoids broken glass and tacks in the road," Elinor was
+saying, when "bang!" went one of the rear tires with a report as loud as
+a pistol shot.
+
+The "jolly crew" could not restrain their ever-ready laughter at this
+disconcerting behavior on the part of "The Comet" just at the very
+moment when their boasts were loudest.
+
+"Oh, well," said Billie apologetically, "it's time we had a puncture.
+We've never had one yet. We'll take him to the garage and have him
+mended properly."
+
+"Chocolates, marshmallows, peanut brittle, and other candies, fresh and
+dee-lishus!" called a voice from behind the motor as they pulled into
+the garage.
+
+It was Percival Algernon St. Clair, wearing a most engaging smile on his
+rosy, good-natured face, as he tipped his boyish cap at Nancy in
+particular in the most approved grown-up fashion.
+
+"Have you any ice cream sodas, Percy-Algy?" demanded Nancy impudently.
+
+"I don't think the fountain's dry yet, Nancy, and we'll have a party, if
+you say so. The gang is close by. Shall I give the signal?"
+
+"I have no objections," said Nancy, "if the girls haven't."
+
+"Why should we?" answered Billie. "Isn't pineapple soda water my
+favorite beverage?"
+
+Percy put two fingers to his lips and gave three whistles, and, as if by
+magic, Ben Austen, Charlie Clay, and Merry Brown emerged from the shadow
+of a neighboring doorway.
+
+In spite of his theatrical name, his girlish complexion, and blond hair,
+Percy was a great favorite with his friends. He had received a spoiling
+from his doting and indulgent mother that would have turned many another
+boy into a selfish, vain egoist. But Percy had been saved from this
+wretched fate partly by his own frank and engaging disposition and
+partly by association with his three chums, Charlie, Ben, and Merry,
+wholesome, manly boys, who had never been mollycoddled in their lives.
+
+"Will some one carry this parcel then?" asked Billie, pulling the box of
+jewels from under the seat, and tearing the wrapping paper off of a
+corner as she did so.
+
+"I will," said Merry promptly, taking charge of the box. "Why, it's
+rather heavy," he observed, weighing it in his hand. "It must be full of
+gold nuggets."
+
+Billie was silent. She was beginning to be a little superstitious about
+that box, and she could have wished that the punctured tire and the soda
+water party, pleasant as was this last diversion, had not interrupted
+their plan to store the box in Mrs. Price's safe.
+
+But Billie enjoyed being with girls and boys of her own age so much that
+she soon forgot her doubts and joined in the gay conversation of the
+little company.
+
+On Saturday afternoons a crowd of High School boys and girls was always
+congregated around the soda water fountain in the West Haven Pharmacy,
+as it was called, and the place was filled with gay talk and laughter,
+when the Motor Maids and their friends pushed their way up to the marble
+counter, while Percy, who had more pocket money in a week than some of
+the others had in a year, paid for the checks.
+
+As luck would have it, Billie and Americus Brown had found places next
+to Belle Rogers, who, very daintily and delicately, though with some
+thoroughness, was consuming a maple-nut sundae.
+
+Merry pushed the box onto the counter while he plunged into a glass of
+chocolate soda water without even noticing that Belle had turned a
+scornful glance, first at him and then at the much soiled and
+travel-stained wrapper on the package. Then, suddenly, something very
+particular claimed her attention. Mary Price, who was standing around
+the curve of the counter, saw the whole thing and reported it later to
+the girls. Where Billie had torn the paper, the polished rosewood
+surface of the box, with its silver mounting, was plainly visible. Belle
+gave one long, astonished stare of recognition.
+
+"After we leave this package at Mary's, I invite all of you to take a
+ride in the motor," Billie was saying to Merry Brown. "Do you think
+eight can sit where five are in the habit of sitting?"
+
+"One seat will be big enough for the midgets,"--a nickname given to Mary
+and Charlie,--Merry answered. "One of us can sit on the floor and the
+other four can squeeze onto the back seat. The chauffeur is the only
+person who must have plenty of room."
+
+"Can't you move up and give us a little room?" interrupted Nancy,
+pushing her way between her brother and his neighbor, while Percy stood
+patiently by with two glasses of soda water.
+
+Without meaning it, she had jostled Belle Rogers. The two girls turned
+and faced each other.
+
+"How do you do, Belle? Are you quite well again?" asked Nancy politely,
+but with a look in her eyes which meant mischief.
+
+Belle had not been back to school since the fire.
+
+"Miss Brown," said Belle, bowing stiffly.
+
+"How well your hair stays in curl this foggy weather, Belle," continued
+Nancy, in a high, pleasant voice, which could be heard by all the boys
+and girls at the counter. "You must put it up almost every night now,
+don't you?"
+
+"Nancy!" expostulated Billie, as Belle sailed from the drug store,
+followed by several of her loyal friends.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.--AT THE SIGN OF THE BLUE TEA POT.
+
+
+Billie was thankful when they had got the box of jewels safely back into
+the motor car and were on their way at last to Mary's home.
+
+Mary and her mother lived in a pretty old house facing the public
+square, and it was fortunate that Mrs. Price's old home was so located.
+In order to support herself and her little daughter, the young widow had
+transformed the lower floor into a tea room and shop. A little blue
+board hung from the portico, which bore the inscription in old English
+script, "At Ye Signe of Ye Blue Tea Pot." A large bulletin on the front
+door announced that tea and sandwiches of all varieties could be had
+within; also that luncheons were prepared for pleasure parties and
+journeys and that numerous dainty and pretty articles, made by hand,
+were there for sale.
+
+The inscription might have stated further that the plucky mistress of
+the little shop was as dainty and pretty as any of the articles for sale
+on the counter.
+
+As the soda water fountain was the Saturday afternoon meeting place of
+the boys and girls of West Haven, so the Sign of the Blue Tea Pot
+attracted the older crowd. It had seemed a bold undertaking for the
+widow to mortgage her home and put all the money in the chintz hangings
+and wicker furniture of those two charming tea rooms. Her old friends,
+Mr. Butler and Captain Brown, had strongly advised against it, but her
+venture had been a success from the first, although a mortgage still
+hung over the place like a black cloud and small debts would accumulate
+every time she got a little ahead.
+
+When the red motor with its load of young people drew up at the door of
+Mary's home, the buzz of conversation from inside reached them out in
+the street.
+
+Mary's mother appeared for a moment in the doorway, and smiled at them.
+
+"She's as beautiful as an angel," thought Billie, who never told how
+often she had yearned for a real mother of her very own as other girls
+had.
+
+Could any one else have looked so charming in a perfectly plain homemade
+gray chambray dress, with a white muslin fichu, and little white apron
+to set it off?
+
+"Won't you come in and have some tea and cake, children?" Mrs. Price
+called to the young people, while she put an arm around Mary and shook
+hands with Billie, who had followed her friend to the front door with
+the troublesome box.
+
+"No, thank you, Mrs. Price," replied Billie, as spokesman of the party.
+"I only came to ask a favor," she added, in a lower voice. "Would you
+let me keep this box in your safe for a while? I have no place, I
+mean----" Billie hesitated and blushed. Of all things, she detested
+subterfuge, and yet here she was making all sorts of lame excuses
+instead of saying frankly that she was keeping the box for a friend.
+
+"You mean the old safe upstairs?" asked Mrs. Price, somewhat astonished.
+
+"Yes, mother," put in Mary. "I told Billie I knew you wouldn't mind
+locking this box up for her for a while."
+
+"Certainly, dear, you are welcome to hide anything in it you like. Mary
+knows the combination better than I do. I always have to look it up in
+one of Captain Price's old note books. I am sorry you won't have some
+tea and cake, but I suppose you are all off for a spin this afternoon.
+It has done Mary more good than I can tell you, your motor car. The
+child is always studying so hard to hurry up and be a teacher and take
+care of her old mother, so she says."
+
+"Only a few years more, Mother, and you shall never have to work again,"
+said Mary. "Some day I shall be the Principal of West Haven High School,
+when Miss Gray gets too old to work----"
+
+"What's this?" exclaimed Miss Gray herself, at the door. She had been
+drinking tea inside with some friends. "Who's going to lay me on the
+shelf before my time?"
+
+"Mary intends to step into your shoes, Miss Gray," laughed Mrs. Price.
+"Look out for her. She is a dangerous rival. She means to pay off all
+our mortgages and things, and provide for her mother's old age."
+
+Miss Gray pinched Mary's cheek.
+
+"Yes," insisted Mary stoutly, "all I want is money, money, money."
+
+The Principal patted the young girl's cheek kindly.
+
+"Don't be too mad about it, child. It won't buy everything, you know."
+
+It was only an idle speech of Mary's but you all know how much meaning
+can sometimes be given to words spoken thoughtlessly and the day was to
+come when Mary was to regret very deeply having used those words.
+
+All this time Billie had been standing quietly waiting for the moment
+when they could leave the older people and consign the box to the iron
+safe upstairs.
+
+But before they could get away the tea room began to empty itself.
+Billie's Cousin Helen appeared in the doorway, with Mrs. Butler, looking
+like Elinor grown middle-aged, the beautiful aquiline nose slightly more
+pronounced, the blue eyes a little faded, but the same erect carriage
+which made her look an inch or more taller than the other women.
+
+Mme. Alta, the music teacher, was there with Miss Gray. She was a fierce
+looking, dark-haired woman, her two upper teeth protruding over her
+lower lip like the tusks of a walrus, giving her a cruel animal
+expression. Mrs. Rogers, Belle's mother, a small faded, intensely
+nervous little woman, joined the group, followed by Percival Algernon
+St. Clair's doting parent, "the Widow St. Clair," as she was known, a
+charming, plump, pretty woman, as good-natured as she was comfortably
+self-indulgent.
+
+"Why, Wilhelmina, my darling, what is that large package you are
+carrying?" demanded Miss Campbell anxiously. "Has your papa sent you a
+present?"
+
+"Oh, no, just--just a package of things I was going to leave here. We
+are going motoring for a while. You don't mind, do you Cousin Helen?"
+
+"No, my child, as long as you don't go too fast. But do put down that
+box. You will injure yourself carrying it so long. Why don't you put it
+in the motor? Why do you leave it here?"
+
+"Oh, it isn't mine," said Billie.
+
+Mrs. Price looked up at this.
+
+"But I thought----" she commenced, when Mary pressed her hand.
+
+"I mean I am keeping it for some one," went on Billie lamely.
+
+"My dear Miss Campbell," put in Miss Gray--and Billie thanked her for
+the intervention--"it is a Blue Bird secret, you may depend upon it. You
+do not know school girls as well as I do."
+
+"It ees a ver-ry eenter-resting looking package," here remarked Mme.
+Alta. "It appears to be a ver-ry handsome box, as I can plainly see by
+one corner-r which protrudes. You perhaps use if for your club's
+segrets, eh?"
+
+Billie turned the box guiltily around. She had not noticed that the torn
+end was in view.
+
+Mme. Alta looked at her unnecessarily hard, Billie thought. She had
+never liked the strange woman and had preferred not to take piano
+lessons of her, after one glance at those hard, cruel eyes and the
+fierce walrus teeth.
+
+"I'm sure it contains much more beautiful and interesting things than
+stupid secrets," exclaimed good-natured, pretty Mrs. St. Clair, who
+disliked to see anybody around her uncomfortable and Billie looked very
+uncomfortable. "Now, dear," she continued, giving Billie a little
+squeeze, "do go and hide your box, if you like. It's not fair to quiz
+young girls about their secrets, any more than it is to quiz older
+people," and she pushed Billie gently into the hall. Mary quickly
+followed and the two girls ran upstairs, glad to get away from the group
+of inquisitive ladies, and infinitely relieved to consign the unlucky
+box into the small safe in the hall closet.
+
+"What a joy to be rid of the thing," exclaimed Billie, as they shoved
+the box inside, turned the combination lock, and fled downstairs.
+
+"I feel as if we need a good dose of fresh air, Mary, to revive us after
+that inquisition," she added, as they hurried past the company of tea
+drinkers, who still lingered chatting in the doorway, and joined the
+others in the motor car.
+
+"Percival, my son," called Mrs. St. Clair, "don't lean out so far. You
+might fall and break your nose. Oh, oh, my precious boy, they'll kill
+him!" she shrieked, as Charlie and Merry seized him by the arms and
+pretended to pitch him overboard.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.--RUMORS AT SCHOOL.
+
+
+West Haven High School, Miss Gray, the Principal, had often said, had
+all the merits of a public and private school combined. It was more
+thorough than a private school and the teachers were more in touch with
+the pupils than is usual at a public school. Miss Gray herself was
+deeply interested in the welfare of her girls and studied carefully the
+ability and temperament of each one.
+
+When, therefore, a strange and very terrible complaint was made to her
+one morning about one of her school girls, she was too shocked to reason
+intelligently about it, and ended by dismissing the complainants quietly
+from her private office until she sent for them again.
+
+Exactly what the complaint was no one knew except those who had made it.
+It was kept a careful secret. But in school rumors arise in the most
+subtle way. They are whispered about behind doors at recess; written on
+the margins of text books in class and hastily rubbed out; vaguely
+hinted at here and there until they spread from room to room and class
+to class and gradually the whole school is bursting with the news. And
+the poor victim may all this time be entirely unconscious that she is
+the very centre of a seething, boiling pot of gossip.
+
+This is how the present rumor started in West Haven High School:
+
+One afternoon when the last gong had sounded the sophomore class
+gathered in the locker room to put on their coats and hats. The lockers
+were only so in name. There had never been any keys to them, because
+there had never been any need to keep belongings under lock and key in
+West Haven High School, where most of the pupils had known each other
+all their lives.
+
+On this particular afternoon, every incident of which our four friends
+will remember as long as they live, Nancy was prinking at the glass, as
+usual; Elinor and Billie, with their heads bent over an automobile map,
+were making plans for a motor trip, and Mary Price was studying her
+Latin for the next day. It was that lingering, lazy time after school is
+over, which all school girls know.
+
+Fannie Alta hurried into the room and flung open the door of her locker,
+next to that of Belle Rogers, who was at that moment engaged in looking
+at herself in her own private mirror, hung on the inside of her locker
+door.
+
+"Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" exclaimed Fannie Alta, with a very excited and
+strange manner. "I have lost something. Something which my mamma gave me
+to keep for her. What shall I do? What shall I do?"
+
+"Why, what was it, Fannie?" asked the other girls, gathering around her
+sympathetically. "Let us help you find it."
+
+"Oh, oh, it is terrible!" cried the young Spanish girl, wringing her
+hands and weeping in her handkerchief alternately. "What shall I do?
+What shall I do?"
+
+"Was it money you lost?" asked Billie, in her usual rather abrupt
+manner.
+
+"Yes, yes; how did you know?"
+
+"I didn't know, I guessed," answered Billie.
+
+"Did you leave it in your locker?" some one else asked.
+
+"Yes, yes. I left it there at noon to-day. Twenty dollars my mamma gave
+to me to keep for her. Oh, is it not terrible? She will eat me with her
+anger."
+
+Billie could hardly keep the corners of her mouth from curving with an
+irrepressible smile when she remembered those two front tusks of Mme.
+Alta's, which seemed to be uncovered, ready for work at any moment.
+
+"Are you sure it is not there still?" asked Elinor quietly. "I happened
+to look up when you came into the room. You simply flung open your
+locker door and then began to cry. Why don't you look in your pockets
+before you decide that you have lost the money?"
+
+Fannie flashed an angry glance at Elinor.
+
+"How did you know that I had not looked before; that I have not looked
+twice, many times?"
+
+"I didn't," answered Elinor. "Have you?"
+
+Fannie did not reply and from that moment she and Elinor disliked each
+other intensely.
+
+Then the girls began looking carefully about the room.
+
+"I feel as if I had it hidden about me," said Nancy, giggling, as she
+helped in the search.
+
+The others laughed, too, which somewhat relieved the situation. Nothing
+is more uncomfortable than for money to be lost mysteriously in a
+company of people.
+
+"We do look as guilty as the forty thieves," ejaculated Rosomond McLane,
+a fat, funny girl, who was popular with the whole class.
+
+No one was more active in the search than Belle Rogers. She shook
+Fannie's text books violently and scattered the papers about, to
+Fannie's intense annoyance. She felt in Fannie's pockets, examined the
+lining of her hat, and made herself so officious and numerous that
+Fannie herself exclaimed with much irritation:
+
+"Please do not, Belle. You know it is not there."
+
+Only Elinor sat quietly on the window sill watching the search, with
+just the faintest shadow of scornful incredulity on her handsome face.
+
+"Elinor Butler, do you believe I have been telling a falsehood?" Fannie
+finally exclaimed in exasperation.
+
+"What a little spitfire you are, Fannie," answered Elinor. "Just because
+I don't choose to grovel on the floor looking for your money. I can help
+you quite as much by thinking, and I am thinking very hard, I can assure
+you."
+
+At last the search was abandoned. The pocketbook containing the money
+could not be found, and the young girls, swinging their book
+straps,--bags were too childish for High School girls,--strolled up the
+street in groups discussing the strange disappearance of Fannie's twenty
+dollars.
+
+In the meantime, the Motor Maids, laughing and talking together, tossed
+their books into the red car and then climbed in themselves. Somehow,
+Fannie's loss did not seem very real. Billie had cranked up the machine
+and was about to back out when Fannie's voice called from the locker
+room:
+
+"Wait! Stop!"
+
+"Well, you see we haven't gone yet," answered Elinor severely.
+
+"Elinor, you are so hard on Fannie Alta. I'm sorry for her," said Mary.
+"Mother wouldn't bite me if I lost twenty dollars, but I'd hate to lose
+it just the same."
+
+"I didn't mean to be hard on her," answered Elinor, "but my instincts
+tell me not to trust her."
+
+"When did they tell you, Elinor?" laughed Billie.
+
+Elinor's instincts were a great joke to her three devoted friends. But
+the appearance of Fannie running breathlessly, with Belle following at a
+dignified pace, interrupted Elinor's invariable reply to jests about her
+instincts: "You know they are never wrong."
+
+"What is the matter now, Fannie?" asked Billie, who was standing in the
+front of her car, her arms folded, like a captain on the hurricane deck
+of his ship.
+
+[Illustration: "Get out of the road," cried Billie, backing recklessly
+out of the shed and whizzing out of the gate at full speed.]
+
+"Would you mind----" Fannie stammered. "I mean--I think I have a right
+to ask--I want you to look in your pockets. I believe----" she
+continued, getting bolder every moment. "I am sure that one of you will
+find my pocketbook----"
+
+Billie's frank, candid face flushed as scarlet as her motor car, while
+the color left Elinor's cheeks as white as death. Nancy gave a little
+frightened giggle, and Mary Price neither flushed nor turned white, but
+looked quietly on.
+
+"Really, Fannie," spoke Elinor, "you are not in the lawless South
+American country you came from, whatever it is. You are among decent
+people, not thieves, and perhaps you had better remember that hereafter.
+Start on, Billie," she commanded, sitting as erect as a queen at her own
+coronation.
+
+"But I insist!" screamed Fannie.
+
+"She has a right," put in Belle.
+
+"Get out of the road," cried Billie, backing recklessly out of the shed,
+turning with a wide, flourishing curve and whizzing out of the gate at
+full speed.
+
+"Well, of all the insolence," cried Elinor. "What does she mean and how
+does she dare----" her voice choked with indignation.
+
+"Don't you think it was Belle Rogers who put her up to it out of
+revenge?" suggested Mary.
+
+"If it was, I can't see what she had to gain by it," said Billie.
+"Elinor sailed into them and we nearly sailed over them. It seems to me
+we had a good deal the best of it."
+
+Billie dropped the girls at their homes, as she was in the habit of
+doing every afternoon after school, and whirled up Cliff Street to the
+old Campbell homestead. On the way she passed Belle Rogers, who also
+lived in that fashionable section, but she did not ask her to get in and
+ride up the hill. Billie had a frank, open nature, but with her whole
+soul she distrusted that pink and white doll-baby face and those
+innocent china blue eyes.
+
+In the meantime Mary had taken off her rather threadbare little jacket
+and hung it in the closet. Her mother was resting on the couch. She
+looked pale and tired that day, and Mary walked softly so as not to
+disturb her. Slipping off her mittens, she thrust them into her coat
+pocket. Her fingers encountered something and she pulled out a flat,
+foreign-looking pocketbook. Mary's face turned white and she leaned
+against the wall of the closet and closed her eyes.
+
+"They must have put it in my pocket," she whispered. "What shall I do?"
+
+"Mary, dearest," called her mother.
+
+"Yes, mother," she answered, quietly slipping the purse into the pocket
+again. "I won't tell her now," she thought. "She is worried enough
+already." And when presently she kissed her mother, no one could have
+told that the young girl was more frightened than she had ever been in
+all her lifetime.
+
+The next morning Mary hurried to school without waiting for Billie and
+her car. She had something to study, she said. But Fannie was there
+before her, waiting in the locker room. Mary tried to calm her beating
+heart as she looked steadily at the other girl. Then, with a sudden
+resolution, she marched straight up to Fannie, and thrust the pocketbook
+into her hand.
+
+"You put this in my pocket," she said. "I don't know what you have
+against me, or what I ever did to you, but if you ever do it again, I
+shall go straight to Miss Gray."
+
+Fannie took the pocketbook without a word, and after that a very
+different version of the story got out. Finally it reached Miss Gray's
+ears.
+
+But the most serious thing of all was that things began disappearing
+every day out of the girls' lockers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.--SEVEN LEAGUE ISLAND.
+
+
+"Pile in any old way and make yourselves as comfy as you can," said
+Billie, from the chauffeur's seat, while seven boys and girls packed
+themselves into "The Comet" as tightly as sardines in a box.
+
+"Ben, I look to you to take good care of my girls," called Miss Helen
+Campbell, from the front door steps of her home. "And all of you promise
+me three things: Don't go too fast; don't stay too late, and don't go
+too far."
+
+"We promise," came eight voices in a chorus.
+
+"Good-by, Cousin Helen, dearest," called Billie, kissing her hand
+affectionately to the little lady who was fast coming to fill an aching
+void in Billie's heart.
+
+"Good-by, Miss Campbell," called the others, while she smiled and bowed
+and waved her handkerchief like a favorite actress before an
+enthusiastic audience.
+
+What a difference the young people had made in her life, she thought, as
+the carload of boys and girls flashed down the street and the sound of
+their talk and laughter, growing fainter and fainter, floated back to
+her like a pleasant memory.
+
+It was a real seaside October day. Nothing could have been bluer than
+the bay, unless it was the sky. A warm, dry land breeze swept over the
+moors about West Haven. Wild asters and golden rod colored the roadside,
+and the stillness of Indian summer pervaded the whole country.
+
+"There was no need of the top to-day," observed Billie, looking up at
+the cloudless sky. "I am glad we decided not to put it on. We might as
+well have left the rugs and wraps behind, too. They take up room and
+won't be used, I am certain."
+
+"I hope not," answered Ben. "I see only one cloud on the horizon and
+that's no larger than a man's hand; but clouds do grow."
+
+"Don't borrow trouble, Rain-in-the-Face," exclaimed Percy. "The last
+time you looked into the future we had a fire."
+
+"All right, dummy," answered his friend. "I am not predicting anything.
+I only mentioned the possibilities of a very small cloud. And the night
+of the Shell Island fire I said what certainly proved to be perfectly
+true--that the hotel was a regular fire trap."
+
+"Are you really a good weather prophet, Ben?" asked Billie anxiously.
+She did not like to have her parties turn out disastrously.
+
+"He--he's the poorest ever," cried Merry.
+
+"Don't go on what he says, Billie," put in Percy. "The last camping trip
+we went on, he predicted fair weather and it rained for a week."
+
+"Well, just to prove that I know what I'm talking about," cried Ben, "I
+predict that it rains before night."
+
+This unpopular prophecy was greeted by hoots of derision from the
+others.
+
+"What makes you think so, Ben?" asked Elinor. "It's as clear as a bell
+now."
+
+"Certain signs," he answered.
+
+"Now, Ben Austen," ejaculated Nancy. "Don't go spoil our day before it's
+begun. You know just as well as I do that it's Indian summer, and it
+never rains in Indian summer."
+
+"Never, Miss Nancy-Bell?" repeated Ben, smiling. He minded as little
+being teased by his friends as a big, good-natured dog minds the antics
+of a lot of puppies.
+
+"All right, Big Injun Ben," said Merry, "let it rain before night. We've
+got a good many hours to enjoy ourselves in and get home, too, before
+dark. We'll be at the ferry-boat landing in an hour, and if we're lucky
+enough to catch the boat, we'll reach Seven League Island by eleven
+o'clock. That will give us plenty of time to eat everything in sight,
+see Smugglers' Cave, and all the other sights, and get home by seven
+o'clock."
+
+"Of course, we can," replied Ben. "I was only teasing Percival Algernon
+St. Clair, because he hates the rain worse than poison. I never saw a
+finer day in my life."
+
+"Thank goodness!" exclaimed Billie, in tones of relief. She really had
+great faith in Ben's judgment about most things.
+
+Seven League Island, a rocky strip of land some twenty-one miles long,
+was one of the most romantic places in the vicinity of West Haven. It
+was three miles from the mainland and, during the season when the summer
+resorts and camps which clustered on its shores were open, several
+ferry-boats carried passengers back and forth from the mainland to the
+island. In winter the place was almost deserted. The land was too poor
+for farming and few people cared to remain on that lonely, mournful
+island, where, in stormy weather, the waves thundered through the caves
+in the cliffs, and the wind in the pine trees made a mournful sound like
+the wail of a lost soul.
+
+To-day, however, it was as serene and smiling as the Islands of the
+Blest. The southwest wind stirred the pine needles gently, making a
+pleasant quiet song. The tiny waves, as they lapped the sides of the
+ferry, gave out a "cloop, cloop" sound that still water makes against
+the bow of a canoe.
+
+"What time does the last ferry go back, Captain?" asked Ben, of the old
+ferryman, whose face was as weather beaten and seamed as the hide of a
+hippopotamus.
+
+"Six, in good weather."
+
+"What time in bad?"
+
+"Depends on the weather," answered the old man briefly.
+
+"How many other ferry stations are there?" asked Charlie.
+
+"Three."
+
+"Good," exclaimed happy-go-lucky Americus Brown. "We'll take the one
+that's nearest when the time comes to go back and ride before the wind,
+and beat the rain and put old Ben out of business as a weather prophet."
+
+The ferryman said nothing, but his small eyes twinkled with amusement.
+
+They were the only passengers on the boat that trip, and as the motor
+whirled up the hard-beaten road from the ferry landing, they noticed
+that the bungalows and summer cottages along the shore were closed for
+the season.
+
+"It's because it's so hard to get food," Percy explained. He had once
+visited some friends at Flag Point, the first settlement, and was to be
+their guide this morning to the great cave, which had been used, it was
+said, in the days when smugglers were common in the land.
+
+The others were familiar only with the shore, where they had come on
+bathing and fishing excursions, and the boys and girls were eager to
+explore the rocky caverns, the fort, the little inlets, where pirates
+were supposed to have anchored their ships, and above all the smugglers'
+cave, which Percy told them was a great vaulted chamber in the rocks,
+with an entrance no broader than a narrow door.
+
+"Take the road going to the right," called Percy, as Billie paused at
+the top of the cliff for directions. "It's the best one for motoring and
+it goes past the old rifle-pit where we can eat lunch. We can leave the
+car there and climb down to the caves afterwards."
+
+"The Comet" turned obediently to the right and shot down the
+interminable expanse of empty white road, like a shooting star on the
+milky way.
+
+Even Mary, who had been pale and silent all morning, regained her
+spirits on that glorious ride, when Merry, with head thrown back, began
+to sing:
+
+  "The sailor's wife the sailor's star shall be,
+  Yo-ho, yo-ho-ho, yo-ho, yo-ho-ho!"
+
+and she joined in the chorus with the others, her clear, sweet voice
+piping out like the notes of a field lark in a chorus of birds.
+
+At last Billie pulled up at the side of the road under a cliff, on top
+of which was an old grass-grown fort used during the Indian wars.
+
+"This must be it," she said. "It's peaceful enough looking now to make a
+good picnicing ground, but I don't suppose it was much of a picnic for
+the people who built it to shoot Indians from."
+
+"Nor much of a picnic for the Indians, either," said Ben, helping Billie
+out while Charlie Clay assisted the other girls to the ground and Percy
+and Merry unstrapped the luncheon hamper.
+
+"Let's eat up high," suggested Billie. "That is, if you can carry the
+basket up that steep incline."
+
+"The pack mules are here for that work," said Ben, pointing to Merry and
+Percy. "Charlie, you bring the rugs for the ladies to sit on and I'll
+help the ladies."
+
+"Will you listen to Nervy Nat," cried Percy, as he obediently shouldered
+his end of the luncheon hamper and followed Merry up the hill.
+
+How they laughed and scrambled and shoved as they clambered up the
+pebbly path. Once Mary, with a shrill cry, slipped and stumbled back on
+Nancy who fell against Charlie, who, in his turn, tumbled against Ben,
+and that pillar of strength, grasping a branch of a pine tree with each
+hand, supported the whole human weight without a tremor.
+
+It was like picnicing in the tops of the trees, when they finally spread
+the cloth in the grass-grown enclosure of the fort, and beyond them
+stretched the entire expanse of the ocean glimmering blue in the
+sunshine, with an occasional ship outlined on the horizon.
+
+"I hope the ginger ale is still cold," cried Merry.
+
+"And the mayonnaise hasn't melted," said Nancy.
+
+"What, nothing to eat but victuals and drink?" exclaimed Percy.
+
+When they had waded through the piles of sandwiches and pyramids of
+cake, and drained the last drop of ginger ale, silent Charlie, who had
+an enormous appetite, remarked:
+
+"How hungry this piney-salty combination does make a fellow!"
+
+"Why, Charlie," said Billie, "don't say you are still hungry. You remind
+me of the elephant in Merry's song:
+
+  "'The elephant ate all night,
+  The elephant ate all day,
+  And feed as they would, as much as they could,
+  The cry was still more hay.'"
+
+Charlie pulled out his mouth organ and began to play such a rollicking
+dance tune that the boys and girls, almost before they knew it, were
+two-stepping over the grass as madly as a lot of wild young colts. Then
+Charlie, seizing Mary about the waist and still playing vigorously on
+his "harp," as it was called in that section, joined the dancers
+himself.
+
+If they had not all of them been so absorbed in executing the Dutch
+twirl, or racing over the ground like Cossack dancers on the Russian
+Steppes, they would have been somewhat disturbed to have seen a man
+peering down at them from the top of a mound. He had crawled up the
+steep incline and was lying flat on his stomach in the tall grass. His
+face is familiar enough to us by now, for he had only one eye, but that
+one, like the eye of the three mythological witches, gleamed brilliantly
+and wickedly and nothing escaped its range. He smiled as if he rather
+enjoyed watching the dancers, and especially his one wicked eye followed
+the movements of Ben and Charlie and Billie Campbell. Presently when the
+whirling couples had tumbled breathlessly on the grass, fanning
+themselves with their hats and Ben had called out: "We'd better be
+getting along now," the man slipped away as silently as a snake and
+disappeared somewhere below.
+
+"To the caves," cried Percy, as they gathered up the rugs and cushions
+and hastened down the cliff to the motor.
+
+"I suppose it's safe to leave 'The Comet' here without any one to look
+after him," Billie had observed, and the others had agreed that it was.
+
+"As safe as on any other desert island," Ben had answered.
+
+It seemed impossible that anything could happen in that lonely, quiet
+place, which was like a deserted paradise to the girls and boys that
+beautiful afternoon. There was nothing about the locality or the weather
+to arouse uncomfortable suspicions. The patch of sky, which was revealed
+to them just overhead between the tall, straight pine trees, was like a
+beautiful deep blue canopy. Even the watchful Ben could not have told
+that the cloud, so short a time ago no larger than a man's hand, now
+stretched itself across the horizon in a long, thick line of black.
+
+"The caves are the most fun of all," said Percy, leading the way to the
+cliffs overlooking the ocean. "There are dozens of them, some little and
+some very large. The lower ones fill up at high tide, but the upper ones
+are safe enough."
+
+The cliff was honeycombed with small rocky chambers, and as they
+clambered, Indian file, along the narrow path which nature had so
+thoughtfully cut in the rocks they heard the boom of the incoming tide
+thundering through the caves on the beach.
+
+"I suppose people could live in these little caverns," Percy continued,
+"if it wasn't so all-fired lonely and inconvenient; but wait until you
+see Smugglers' Cave. It has as many natural conveniences as a real house
+built by human beings."
+
+"Here it is," he cried at last, to the others who had run all the way
+down a steep embankment to see this romantic place.
+
+Certainly it might well have been a favorite spot for smugglers and
+robbers on the high seas. Too high for the tide to reach and still well
+hidden from above by a thick growth of scrubby pine and oak trees, the
+cave was as secret and safe a place as could be imagined. Rock-hewn
+steps led up from the smooth pebbly beach below and the curve of the
+coast made a charming little haven for ships and a natural landing place
+for small boats. The eight friends stood in a row on the beach.
+
+"This is called 'Pirates' Cove,' you know," went on Percy. "They say the
+pirates used to anchor their ships in this little haven and come ashore
+and have pirate tea parties on the beach."
+
+"Here comes a sea rover now," called Merry, scanning the entrance to the
+harbor where a ship could be seen outlined against the blue.
+
+"Oh, she isn't coming this way, Old Tar," answered Percy. "It's too late
+in the season, for yachts and ships rarely come in here unless there is
+a storm. There's nothing to come for and it takes them out of their
+course."
+
+"She's headed this way," continued Merry, not taking any notice of
+Percy's interruption, while he scanned the ship with his far-seeing
+sailor's eyes. "She's a brigantine, and she's making for this cove."
+
+"Oh, well, what of it?" put in Billie. "Perhaps she is coming here for
+the rest cure. But she doesn't interest me half as much as Smugglers'
+Cave. Let's not waste any more time here," and she ran up the steps,
+followed by the others.
+
+The entrance to the cave had been as cleverly concealed as if nature had
+conspired with the outlaws to provide them with a safe hiding place for
+their contraband goods. The steps appeared to lead to nothing more than
+a blank wall, but, following Percy around the edge of an enormous rock
+which, in ages past must have slipped its fastenings above, they
+presently came to a narrow opening between the rock and the side of the
+cave, just large enough for a man to go through.
+
+"The smugglers must have had to do up their bales of silk pretty flat to
+get them through here," said Ben, measuring the opening with his
+handkerchief, as he stooped to keep from bumping his head on the top.
+
+"How beautiful! How wonderful!" cried the four girls, when their eyes
+had become used to the change from the brilliant sunlight outside to the
+semi-twilight of the great vaulted chamber where they now found
+themselves.
+
+"Now, I'll show you what a jim-dandy architect nature is," said Percy.
+"Here's the bathroom. No hot water, of course, but a perfectly good tub
+and cold water always on tap."
+
+He pointed out a natural basin, probably worn in the rocks by the
+constant dripping of water from a spring that trickled down the wall of
+the cave.
+
+"Here's the bedroom, that nice, comfortable shelf over there. Here's
+your easy chair," he continued, showing them a curious formation of
+rocks really resembling a big armchair with a high back.
+
+"It's a rocky chair and not a rocking chair," observed Charlie, taking a
+seat and rising quite suddenly. "Nature is as mischievous as a little
+boy if she is a good architect. Look at this," and he pointed to a very
+sharp, almost needle-like, piece of stone in one corner of the seat.
+
+The others laughed gayly as they hurried after Percy and a hundred
+reverberating echoes startled them into silence.
+
+"And now, ladies and gentlemen, I have saved the most interesting sight
+for the last. You are about to see the store-room of the smugglers." He
+led the way down two steps into another chamber.
+
+"By Jove!" he cried suddenly and stopped short.
+
+"What is it?" exclaimed the others, peering over his shoulder into the
+darkness.
+
+"Don't you see?" he said, in a low voice. "They are still using it for a
+store-room."
+
+They blinked their eyes with amazement, when presently there loomed up
+in the shadows a pile of long, flat packing boxes.
+
+Ben lit a candle, which he had thoughtfully brought along in his coat
+pocket, and they examined the boxes, which crowded one entire end of the
+smugglers' store-room.
+
+"Will you look at this?" he called. "Elinor, you are in this."
+
+Ben held the candle high and pointed to a sign on the nearest box, which
+read: "Automobile Supplies--Butler Brothers--West Haven----"
+
+"Why," cried Elinor, "you surely don't suppose Uncle Tom and Uncle
+Richard could be storing their goods here, do you?"
+
+No one answered her for a moment. Their thoughts were busy searching for
+an explanation to this strange discovery.
+
+"Elinor," said Mary presently, "don't you remember what those men who
+borrowed Billie's automobile said about killing every Butler in the
+county who interfered?"
+
+"Yes," said Elinor, in a frightened voice, "but what could these boxes
+have to do with it?"
+
+"They may have a great deal," said Ben. "Those men are probably
+smuggling your uncles' auto supplies out of the country. The boxes are
+smuggled up to this cave by degrees, I suppose, and then loaded on some
+ship when they have got enough to make it worth while. And, if it's the
+same man we had dealings with that night, he is a pretty desperate kind
+of an individual."
+
+"I don't want any more fights," exclaimed Billie. "Both of those men
+carried pistols and knives; I suppose all first-class smugglers do, but
+I don't propose that my party is going to be ruined by any bloodshed. It
+is getting late, and we had better be going."
+
+They quite agreed with Billie, although the boys would have liked to
+linger in the Smugglers' Cave for a while.
+
+The outer air seemed very warm and oppressive after the cold damp
+atmosphere of the cave. They blinked their eyes and shivered as they
+hurried along the path which led to the road and in the change from dark
+to light they did not at first notice that the sun was hidden by a great
+cloud, as black as ink, which stretched from horizon to horizon. A hot,
+heavy wind stirred the pine needles and that sense of impending trouble
+which always comes before a great storm sobered the spirits of the boys
+and girls.
+
+Nobody spoke of the cloud. It seemed to be a question of honor with them
+not to mention it, but they hurried on silently, and in a few minutes
+reached the automobile.
+
+With a sigh of relief, the four girls were about to jump in, while Ben
+cranked up, when suddenly Nancy gave a little, pent-up scream.
+
+"Look!" she cried, pointing to a piece of paper stuck on the cushion of
+the back seat.
+
+This message was printed with a lead pencil on the paper:
+
+"He laughs best who laughs last."
+
+"It was that man," said Billie, examining the tires ruefully, each one
+of which had been slashed with a sharp knife.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.--THE STORM.
+
+
+"Billie, can you put on new tires?" demanded Ben, somewhat anxiously,
+making a mental determination to learn all about the mechanism of motor
+cars before he went on another motor trip.
+
+The others stood back rather helplessly. Merry, especially, felt stupid
+and uncomfortable in having to stand aside and let a girl do all the
+work.
+
+"Of course, I can," replied Billie, trying to speak cheerfully, as a low
+cannonading of thunder rumbled in the distance. "I have done it dozens
+of times, only it will take time, of course. The tools are under the
+seat. Hustle up, everybody. Charlie, you get the new tires. Ben, you
+help me."
+
+In a few moments Ben and Billie were kneeling on the ground adjusting
+the tire of the first wheel, while Charlie and Merry were engaged in
+examining the extra tires, which the motor carried in case of accident,
+and Percy made himself as useful as possible, unpacking all the wraps,
+Billie's oilskin coat and cap and the rubber blankets.
+
+"Billie," announced Charlie, "there are only three good tires here. The
+fourth has a puncture. It's only a small one, but----"
+
+"I know," interrupted Billie, looking extremely worried. "It was an
+imperfect one. I may be able to patch it."
+
+Then Charlie and Merry held a whispered conference and disappeared
+around the bluff.
+
+"What's up?" asked Ben, looking over his shoulder at their retreating
+figures.
+
+But nobody could answer the question. The girls were getting into their
+ulsters and Percy was arranging the rubber blankets and rugs in the car.
+
+"What a confoundedly low, mean trick of that fellow to do this," he kept
+saying to himself, keeping one eye on the black clouds piling up and the
+other on Billie and Ben. He figured that it would take an hour and a
+half at least to get all four tires on and, he thought, Billie would be
+a pretty smart girl to do it that quickly. It was half-past three
+o'clock.
+
+"What about that ferry," he said to himself.
+
+At last they were pumping up the third tire. It seemed an age to those
+who were idly looking on. The girls sat in a row on the side of the
+road, their hands folded patiently in their laps, while Percy paced up
+and down, watching the top of the bluff uneasily.
+
+"Where are Charlie and Merry?" he said at last, unable to conceal his
+anxiety any longer.
+
+"Idiots," exclaimed Nancy. "Haven't we enough to worry us?"
+
+While she spoke there came a blinding flash of lightning and a clap of
+thunder seemed to split the heavens in two.
+
+Nancy hid her face on Elinor's shoulder. Billie and Ben kept on working
+steadily. They had reached the fourth tire now and Billie had managed to
+patch the punctured place just as the first great drops of rain began to
+fall.
+
+"Where are those boys?" Ben called over his shoulder, not stopping to
+look up.
+
+"I'll call them," said Percy, and running to the top of the cliff he
+began to halloo and whistle.
+
+It had grown suddenly so dark that they thought the sun must have set an
+hour earlier than usual. A cold wind sprang up and whizzed through the
+pines with a sound that made them shiver.
+
+"Hurrah, it's done!" cried Billie triumphantly, just as a driving wall
+of rain struck her in the face. "Get in, girls, quick," she shouted, as
+she slipped on her oil skins. "Boys, where are you? Crank up, Ben."
+
+Suddenly, in the midst of the din and racket of the storm, came a wild
+halloo. Charlie and Merry appeared, running down the road toward the
+motor car, and six men were following them, shouting and gesticulating.
+
+"Get in as fast as you can," commanded Ben, and the girls will never
+forget the terror of that moment as they tumbled into the car.
+
+The booming of the sea in the caves, the cannonading of the thunder, the
+sharp whistle of the wind in the tops of the trees, and the shouts of
+the men! But in the midst of it all came the kindly, cheering whir of
+the motor engine. Billie could have kissed the faithful "Comet" on his
+broad, good-natured forehead for his loyalty at this moment, when they
+most needed him. As Charlie and Merry leaped onto the step, she threw in
+the clutch, and they were off just as the first man reached the car,
+brandishing a long knife and yelling hoarsely.
+
+The boys climbed over into the back, too tired to speak. Merry had a
+black eye and Charlie had a bloody nose.
+
+"Billie, the next ferry is Payne's," called Percy. "It's about a mile
+from here. Go straight ahead."
+
+And Billie, sticking to her wheel like a good pilot, ducked her head and
+guided the flying motor along the slippery road.
+
+They seemed hardly to have taken breath before they reached Payne's
+landing and found it empty and deserted of every human being who had
+ever ventured into that lonely place.
+
+"We'll have to try for the next ferry landing then," said Percy,
+dejectedly. "It's back toward Flag Point."
+
+Without a word, Billie turned the car, and putting on all speed they
+whizzed through the rain. At that moment she had only one prayer in her
+heart: to pilot her friends safely through the storm and get them to the
+ferry landing. There was no sign of any of their pursuers as they passed
+the fort. When at last they reached the second summer encampment they
+breathed a sigh of relief. The ferry boat was docked at the landing and
+a man stood under the shed, his hands in his pockets.
+
+Billie drew up at the entrance.
+
+"Captain, will you take us on?" called Ben. He always called boatmen and
+conductors captain. He found it pleased them, but this man did not reply
+and still stood with his back turned looking out on the now angry strip
+of water between Seven League Island and the mainland.
+
+Ben shouted and they all shouted together, but the man was as unmoved as
+a wooden statue.
+
+"He's deaf," said Billie. "Get out and shake him."
+
+Ben jumped out and shook the man's shoulder, who, with a strange
+guttural sound, turned slowly around.
+
+"And dumb," exclaimed Ben, indicating with violent motions first the
+automobile and then the ferry-boat.
+
+The deaf mute shook his head and pointed in the direction of Flag Point.
+They offered him money, tried persuasion, threats, prayers, which he
+could not hear, and finally ended by dashing off toward the last ferry.
+
+"It's our only chance," said Ben, "but we'll get over in that if we have
+to use force."
+
+Meantime, the island, lashed by the storm, looked bleak and cold, and
+they wondered they could ever have admired it at all. Crouched under the
+rubber covers, they shivered with chill, while Billie, on the front
+seat, Ben and Percy beside her always on the lookout, with clinched
+teeth and hands gripped to the wheel, guided them through the hurricane.
+It seemed to her they must be riding on the very wings of the wind, and
+the speedometer announced fifty miles an hour.
+
+As they dashed through the straggling little street of that forlorn
+village of Flag Point, the few indifferent natives who braved the
+winters on the island looked out of their windows in wonder. It seemed
+to them that a streak of red lightning had flashed through the storm.
+
+"Cheer up, all of you, our troubles are over," called Ben. "The
+ferry-boat's at the landing."
+
+The old boat seemed like a haven of rest when they pulled into the
+shelter of its alley for wagons and motor cars.
+
+"Captain, why didn't you tell us that this was the only ferry running?"
+demanded Ben of the wrinkled old man.
+
+"Because I don't never answer questions that ain't first been put to
+me," replied the laconic boatman.
+
+"Don't scold him," said Billie, wiping streams of water from her face.
+"Any one who is obliged to live in a God-forsaken, wretched place like
+Seven League Island couldn't be supposed to have any human interest. I
+imagine they all get to be like their own flinty rocks, hard, sharp, and
+ugly."
+
+"Well, bloody nose and blacky eye," put in Percy, "it's about time for
+you to give an account of yourselves."
+
+"Yes," said the others, who had been so stunned by the fast ride through
+the storm and the race for the ferry that they had almost forgotten what
+had happened.
+
+"When we found," began Merry, "that one of the tires had a puncture,
+Charlie and I thought we might as well make that low, scoundrelly thief
+who slashed the tires pay back with one of those he had stolen from Mr.
+Butler. So we chased over to Smugglers' Cave, but it took longer than we
+had expected, because we had taken the wrong path and had to crawl
+around a precipice and jump over crags like two mountain goats."
+
+"Don't forget to tell that your pirate brigantine was anchored out in
+the harbor," put in Charlie. "We supposed it was lying up to get out of
+the storm, but we had another think coming----"
+
+"Yes, I guess you will all listen to me, next time," went on Merry.
+"That was the most piratical-looking band of fellows with their knives
+and their red handkerchiefs as I ever saw in a story book. Well, we did
+get to the cave at last and found it as empty as it was before. Charlie
+had a chisel in his pocket. You know, he is the human tool box, and with
+that and a piece of stone we managed to loosen some of the boards. But
+there wasn't a tire or anything else connected with an automobile inside
+the box. You'll never guess what the boxes were filled with. Something
+about as foreign to a motor car, except in sound, when a tire bursts, as
+a caterpillar."
+
+"You don't mean guns?" demanded Ben.
+
+"We certainly do. Rifles by the dozens packed in all the boxes we had
+time to open."
+
+"We were chumps," interrupted Charlie. "If we had stopped sooner, I
+never would have had this bloody nose."
+
+"Well, haven't I got a black eye?" demanded his friend.
+
+"What happened? What happened?" cried Percy impatiently.
+
+"While we were tinkering with the boxes, we heard the sharpest, loudest
+whistle I ever heard in my life, and we both lit out and ran. I was in
+front and just as I got to the mouth of the cave, a one-eyed, one-armed
+ruffian leapt out at me. His one arm was as strong as most men's two,
+but he couldn't beat Charlie and me together, although he gave me this
+little souvenir and he planted his fist on Charlie's nose. While we were
+fighting, a boat from the ship with six sailors in it landed below. They
+came tearing up the steps like a lot of bloodhounds, and Charlie and I
+had a run for our lives. Didn't we, midget?"
+
+Charlie acknowledged the fact gravely. There was no denying that the two
+boys had been in a very dangerous situation.
+
+"We were ready just in the nick of time, too," said Billie. "If Ben
+hadn't cranked up, we'd have had those men on us in another minute."
+
+It was good to be on land again, even though it wasn't dry land, and the
+ride home, safe and swift, was blissful after the dangers and excitement
+of that thrilling picnic.
+
+It seemed that Seven League Island must have been the very centre of the
+hurricane and that West Haven had only been visited with a heavy shower.
+Miss Campbell, therefore, was spared any great anxiety.
+
+But, oh, the joy of drawing up to the cheerful blaze of the wood fire,
+while eight youthful adventurers related a somewhat softened version of
+the events of the day! Then the supper that followed, in Miss Campbell's
+big, old-fashioned dining room, with fried chicken and hot biscuits and
+omelette as light as a feather, and strawberry jam that took the prize
+at the county fair!
+
+But best of all was what Merry did at the last, when, notwithstanding
+his stiff joints and bandaged eye, he rose from his seat and cried:
+
+"Hip, hip, hurrah! Three cheers for Billie, the pluckiest chauffeur that
+ever ran a motor car."
+
+And all the rest joined in, even Miss Campbell, who clapped her hands
+and cried:
+
+"Three cheers for my dear, dear Billie."
+
+Then Billie cried:
+
+"Three cheers for Ben because he never said 'I told you so,' about the
+rain."
+
+That very night, before he went to his own home, Ben called at Mr.
+Richard Butler's house and told him the story of the bogus automobile
+supplies marked with the name of Butler Brothers.
+
+There was a great telegraphing and telephoning by long distance. The
+Butler Brothers were very excited and angry, just as their niece had
+predicted they would be. Detectives were engaged and other ships warned
+to keep a sharp lookout, but nothing was heard of the pirate brigantine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.--WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS.
+
+
+Never since she had been Principal of West Haven High School had Miss
+Gray been so upset as she was now. For the first time a scandal was
+connected with her beloved institution. Every day there was a new
+complaint.
+
+"Miss Gray, I only left my ring on the washstand a minute, while I was
+washing my hands, and when I looked for it, it was gone," said one girl.
+
+"But who was in the washroom, Julia?" asked the Principal wearily. She
+was disgusted and angry with this troublesome situation.
+
+"Oh, all the girls, Miss Gray, but nobody saw any one take it."
+
+Small purses containing lunch money were emptied of their contents and
+put back into jacket pockets. Some of the teachers lost money and Miss
+Gray herself was robbed of ten dollars, the wages of the old janitor,
+which she had placed under a paper weight on the desk, in her own
+private office.
+
+The whole school had gone distracted, but the pilferer was too clever to
+be caught.
+
+Twice Miss Gray had summoned Mary Price to her office, but, after
+looking gravely into the young girl's serious eyes, she kissed her and
+sent her off on some improvised errand.
+
+"I shall wait a few days," the Principal said. "After all, there may be
+some mistake."
+
+And it was then that she determined to try an experiment.
+
+One bleak autumn afternoon a thick, wet mist rolled in from the ocean
+and enveloped the town of West Haven so densely that it seemed like a
+city floating on a bank of cloud. Only the dim outline of objects twenty
+yards away could be seen and the muffled call of the fog horn at the
+lighthouse on the Black Reefs sounded its dismal warning through the
+mist.
+
+Billie and Mary were hurrying arm in arm down the street in earnest
+conversation. Notwithstanding it was after school hours, they were going
+toward the High School.
+
+"Do you think we can get it, Mary?" Billie was saying.
+
+"Oh, yes, the janitor always leaves the door to the basement corridor
+open until evening for Miss Gray and the teachers who sometimes stay
+late."
+
+"It was stupid of me to have left that horrid old algebra, but you know
+I always forget the things I don't like. If Miss Finch hadn't called me
+down so thoroughly this morning about my average in mathematics, I would
+just let the lesson for to-morrow go, or if Miss Finch were only Miss
+Allbright, or Miss anybody else but just a stern, animated mathematical
+cube."
+
+"She's all right if you know your lessons," said Mary, smiling. "It's
+only the ones who don't study hard enough to suit her who call her a
+human arithmetic."
+
+The door to the corridor was open, as Mary had predicted, and the girls
+entered, their footsteps resounding with a hollow echo through the empty
+place.
+
+"'I feel like one who treads alone some banquet hall deserted,'" quoted
+Billie. "Could anything be more ghostly than a deserted school?"
+
+"It's not deserted," said Nancy. "I heard voices somewhere, I am certain
+of it, just as you opened the door."
+
+They paused and listened for a moment, but the place was as still as a
+tomb. A dim gas-light burned in the long corridor, on each side of which
+were the arched entrances to the locker rooms of the various classes,
+wash rooms and Miss Gray's own private office.
+
+"It reminds me of the catacombs in this light," whispered Billie. "I'm
+almost afraid of the sound of my own voice."
+
+The girls slipped silently down the passage to the stairway leading to
+the class rooms. At her desk in the sophomore study room on the third
+floor Billie found her algebra. As she gathered together some of her
+scattered papers in the not over tidy interior of the little one-seated
+desk form, and searched for a certain favorite stubby pencil which she
+claimed brought her good luck with her problems, Mary at her own desk
+gave a cry of dismay and sat down limply.
+
+"What was it, a mouse?" asked Billie, her voice sounding quite loud in
+the empty room.
+
+"Oh, Billie, Billie, no, it was not a mouse. It was fifty dollars,"
+cried Mary. "I found it just now in my desk."
+
+"Fifty dollars?" echoed Billie, slipping her algebra into her pocket and
+hurrying over to her friend's desk. "Are you playing a trick on me,
+Mary?"
+
+"Listen, Billie," said Mary. "I'm going to tell you something. I believe
+I am the victim of some kind of conspiracy. You know of course about all
+of the things that have been stolen from school lately?"
+
+"Yes, but I haven't had any losses myself; so I haven't talked about it
+much to the others."
+
+"Of course you had no idea that I was supposed to be the thief," Mary
+went on, with a sort of dry sob in her voice that was more
+heart-breaking to Billie than real weeping would have been.
+
+Mary told her the story of Fannie Alta and the twenty dollars.
+
+"I didn't tell it before," she continued, "because I was so ashamed
+somehow, I couldn't bear for any one to know it."
+
+Billie's heart swelled with indignation.
+
+"The little wretch," she exclaimed, "you should have gone straight to
+Miss Gray about it, Mary."
+
+"I know it, and I am sorry now I didn't, but I thought she wouldn't dare
+do it again, and she hasn't, but things are disappearing all the time,
+and I believe she has told it around school that I took the twenty
+dollars and all the other things. Nobody has said anything, of course,
+but I can't help feeling that they are all whispering about me whenever
+my back is turned."
+
+"You poor, blessed child," exclaimed her friend. "And all this time you
+have been keeping it secret and suffering in silence."
+
+Mary nodded her head.
+
+"And the worst of it is, Miss Gray suspects me too. But she is not going
+to say anything until she is sure. I thought of talking to her about it,
+but it would look as if I had a guilty conscience to complain before I
+am accused."
+
+"How dare any one suspect you of stealing," cried Billie, putting her
+arms around her friend and kissing her warmly. "Would Miss Gray or any
+one else be so stupid as to take the word of Fannie Alta before yours?"
+
+"But nobody has said anything that I know of," groaned poor Mary. "It's
+all in the air. That is why I don't know what to do. Suppose after all I
+was mistaken and they didn't suspect me. Suppose I took this money to
+Miss Gray and suppose she would think that I had taken all the other
+things and was just returning this because I had lost my nerve and
+suppose--suppose----"
+
+"But, Mary," remonstrated Billie, "why suppose anything at all so awful?
+Why not suppose that Miss Gray will listen to you and believe every word
+you say. You are perfectly innocent and nothing on earth can make you
+guilty. Of course Fannie Alta must have left the money in your desk,
+though where she got so much is a mystery to me."
+
+"But I tell you I am frightened, Billie. Such wretched things do happen
+and innocent people often suffer for guilty ones."
+
+"Nonsense, Mary, you must not lose your nerve in this way. Take the
+money and go straight to Miss Gray with it now. I will go with you."
+
+The two girls gathered their things together silently. Mary put the roll
+of money in her jacket pocket and they made for the door. It was almost
+dark now and the rows of empty desks down the big room were like
+kneeling phantoms in the half light.
+
+"Did you hear anything?" whispered Mary as they reached the door.
+
+"I heard a step," answered Billie in a low voice. "It was probably the
+janitor."
+
+With a mutual impulse they clasped hands and a wave of fear swept over
+them when they found that the door would not open.
+
+"It must have stuck," whispered Mary. "Try it again."
+
+But the door was locked fast.
+
+"There is only one way for you to get back the key to the door, young
+ladies," said a voice so near to them that they both jumped back as if
+they had been struck in the face.
+
+The person who had spoken had been standing flat against the wall at the
+side of the door. He emerged from the shadows, as quietly as a shadow
+itself, and in the twilight his long, lank figure seemed almost to be
+floating in space. The small black mask which covered his face and his
+whole appearance reminded Billie of a gruesome picture she had once seen
+called "The Black Masque."
+
+"You have a small sum of money there," he went on, "which you evidently
+do not wish to keep and which I would be pleased to have and can use at
+once. By a strange coincidence, I happened to overhear your
+conversation, you see, and as the money appears to belong to nobody and
+is exactly the sum I require I must have it."
+
+Mary tried to speak, but her lips refused to form the words, and she had
+no voice left. There was a sound in Billie's ears like the pounding of
+surf on the beach and she felt quite dizzy.
+
+"This is fright," she found herself saying, as a wave of homesickness
+for her father swept over her.
+
+"Oh, papa, papa," she whispered.
+
+The man had seized Mary's two hands in one of his with a grip of steel,
+while with the other he felt in her jacket pocket, took the roll of
+money, pushed Billie roughly from the door, and with a laugh pulled back
+the bolt; there had been no key after all. The next instant he had
+slipped downstairs as softly as a cat and was gone.
+
+The girls followed after him like two sleep walkers.
+
+"We've been robbed, Billie," moaned Mary, giving her dry sob. "The fifty
+dollars is gone. What shall we do now?"
+
+Billie did not reply. She wanted to get out of that dark stuffy school
+building, and breathe in some fresh air before she dared trust her
+voice. It was good to feel the wet fog again in their faces as they
+hurried up the street.
+
+"Why not still tell Miss Gray, Mary?" asked Billie at last, but already
+there was a feeling of doubt in her heart. It was certainly a very
+unlikely sounding story, a robber in the school room.
+
+Suddenly a figure loomed up in the mist. It was Miss Gray herself.
+
+"You are out late, girls," she said as she hurried past, and for some
+reason they both had an uncomfortable feeling of having done something
+wrong.
+
+Miss Gray hastened into the school building just as the janitor appeared
+to lock up.
+
+"Jennings," she said, "switch on the light in the sophomore study room.
+I shall only be there a moment."
+
+The janitor shuffled after her and turned on the light while Miss Gray
+opened Mary's desk. She sighed deeply and shook her head.
+
+"She must have got here before me," she thought. "It was cruel to tempt
+the child at such a time as this when her mother is in great need of
+money. I felt so sure she would bring it straight to me and that was the
+only test I required. Oh, dear, what a crooked world this is. I am out
+fifty dollars. But how will the poor child ever explain all this money
+to her mother? She must have saved a good deal out of her pilfering----"
+
+Miss Gray's disconnected train of thought did not bring her any comfort,
+as she slowly descended the three flights of steps into the basement and
+plunged into the mist again.
+
+"At least I shall wait a day or two," she continued. "The child may
+think better of it. She might have stopped me this evening, though. At
+all events I deserve to lose the money. It was a silly, stupid impulse,
+but I was so sure--so very sure----"
+
+The mist had grown so thick now that the Principal walked very slowly,
+keeping close to the fence in order to guide herself to the corner where
+she must turn to go to her own home. A voice reached her through the
+fog. Someone was coming up from behind.
+
+"I have procured fifty, Se�or, a curious lucky stroke, and from a
+schoolroom, too--would you have believed----" the voice broke off in a
+laugh.
+
+"Be careful----" said another voice, and two figures passed Miss Gray in
+the fog and were swallowed up again immediately.
+
+"Is it possible," she exclaimed, "robbers in West Haven High School?
+What does it mean? And I have been blaming that innocent child. What an
+imbecile I have been!"
+
+Her last resolution before sleep came to her that night was to notify
+the town police in the morning and hire a detective to stay about the
+High School day and night.
+
+Imagine the surprise of the bewildered Principal, when, next morning
+bright and early, Mary Price, after a timid knock on the office door,
+came hesitatingly into the room.
+
+"Miss Gray," she said, "I found this money yesterday afternoon in my
+desk. I don't know how it came there nor whose it is. But it would be
+better for you to take charge of it until the owner asks for it."
+
+Mary spoke quickly, as if she had learned the little speech carefully by
+heart. There was a strange expression on Miss Gray's face as she took
+ten crisp new five-dollar bills from the young girl's outstretched hand.
+
+"This is not even the same money," she thought, forgetting to answer
+Mary in her amazement. "Am I losing my senses or is the child a deep
+dyed villain?"
+
+Mary flushed scarlet under the Principal's steady gaze, but she did not
+lower her eyes, and there was not a sign of guilt in the expression of
+the sad little face.
+
+"Very well, dear," Miss Gray said at last.
+
+Mary, as she closed the door behind her, was more mystified than Miss
+Gray.
+
+"I should think she would have shown a little surprise," she said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.--THE HALLOWE'EN HOUSE PARTY.
+
+
+"My Dear Miss Campbell:
+
+Do you think your nice young charge would be bored by a visit to our
+lonely old home in the country? Percival has set his heart on giving a
+Hallowe'en house party for some of his particular friends, and I find
+Wilhelmina's name the very first on the list. I shall promise to look
+after her in every way exactly as if she were my own child, guard her
+from draughts, see that she has plenty of covering on her bed and that
+she wears her overshoes if the ground is damp.
+
+My boy would be quite inconsolable, and I should too, my dear friend, if
+she is not to be among our guests. I cannot offer many inducements
+except the pleasure which young people always bring to a house, but I
+candidly believe that Percival would give up the idea if she should not
+be able to come.
+
+
+                                                   Most cordially yours,
+                                          Antoinette Juliana St. Clair."
+
+
+Miss Campbell smiled as she handed the note to Billie one morning at the
+breakfast table. The two fanciful names of the good-natured, cordial
+widow always amused her.
+
+"The lonely old home in the country," so modestly referred to, was one
+of the finest places in the county, and nothing was more coveted by the
+young people in West Haven than an invitation to one of Percival's house
+parties, where everything that the widow and her son could devise was
+done for the amusement of the guests.
+
+"Of course you must go, dear. I wouldn't have you miss it for worlds.
+The change will do you good. I have been troubled about you lately, my
+child, and if this invitation had not come, I was going to insist on
+your seeing the doctor. I don't think your liver has been behaving
+itself. You have been so out of sorts. But perhaps a little amusement
+will be better for you than a calomel pill."
+
+"Oh, I am quite well, Cousin Helen," exclaimed Billie. "It's
+mathematics, I suppose, that affects my liver."
+
+But Billie was more eager than she would admit to accept Mrs. St.
+Clair's invitation. The truth is, the young girl's conscience had not
+been easy lately. She felt that she had done something which would have
+grieved and displeased her father and she could not be perfectly happy
+until she had confessed her sins and been forgiven.
+
+You perhaps have guessed already that the ten new five-dollar bills
+which Mary Price had consigned to Miss Gray's care the morning after the
+robbery in the school room, was Billie's money.
+
+"You shall take it, Mary," she insisted. "Aren't we exactly the same as
+sisters? I don't want the money, and I know papa would be glad if he
+knew."
+
+Billie had finally agreed with Mary that it would only make matters more
+complicated to tell Miss Gray that fifty dollars some one had placed in
+Mary's desk, no doubt to tempt or catch her, as in the case of the
+twenty dollars, had been stolen by a robber almost immediately.
+
+Older and wiser people would have told Billie that this was a very poor
+piece of advice, and the deed was no sooner accomplished than the two
+girls themselves realized that they had made a mistake. Miss Gray's
+manner to Mary was cold and formal and the situation was not in the
+least relieved. The unhappy girl had hoped that the principal would
+speak to her again about the money, but the subject was never mentioned.
+
+"It was all my fault, Mary. I advised you and forced you to do it. It
+was not exactly dishonest, but it wasn't sincere, and I am beginning to
+think Miss Gray is suspicious of me, too."
+
+Another thing had happened which made Billie uncomfortably and extremely
+ill at ease in her mind. Burglars had broken into Mrs. Price's home, but
+they had only succeeded in giving Mary and her mother a great fright,
+and had taken nothing.
+
+In her heart Billie knew what the robbers really wanted. It was the box
+of jewels locked up in Mrs. Price's safe.
+
+"I have done wrong," she kept saying to herself. "Papa always said that
+my heart ruled my head and that I had no judgment. I should never have
+burdened Mary and Mrs. Price with that wretched box. I am almost
+superstitious about it, because it brings so much bad luck on people.
+After the house party, I shall take it away."
+
+As a matter of fact, everything was postponed until after the house
+party, and the world for eight young people seemed to stand still. The
+English nation could not look forward with greater eagerness to the
+Coronation than our four Motor Maids and their friends to Percy's
+Hallowe'en house party. It was only a part of the good fortune which
+always followed Percy that Hallowe'en that year fell on Friday, and that
+the weather was perfect.
+
+They were to have three evenings of fun and frolic with the Hallowe'en
+ball on Friday night.
+
+In the joy of anticipation and preparation, Billie and Mary lost sight
+of their troubles. Nancy was bubbling over with delight and Elinor
+forgot her usual sense of dignity and gave an indecorous exhibition of
+happiness by doing a Dutch twirl all by herself.
+
+"Of course, we shall all go in 'The Comet,'" announced Billie. "It will
+be lots more fun than driving behind those poky old carriage horses that
+bring Percy and Mrs. St. Clair in to church every Sunday."
+
+"Of course," echoed the others.
+
+There was, indeed, only one flaw in their happiness. Mrs. St. Clair, who
+was intimate with the Rogers family, had insisted on inviting Belle
+Rogers.
+
+"Who cares?" exclaimed Billie. "She can't interfere with our good time
+and we certainly won't interfere with hers."
+
+The St. Clair place was eight miles outside of West Haven on the main
+road. A long avenue bordered with immense pine trees led up to the
+commodious, comfortable old house which seemed to reflect from its
+shining windows the cheerful and hospitable character of its mistress.
+
+And when the red motor pulled up in front of "Pine Lodge," as the place
+was called, there was the mistress herself smiling in the doorway,
+making the most delightful picture of welcome Billie had ever seen.
+
+"Think of going to a real house party at last," exclaimed Billie, with a
+sigh of pleasure.
+
+Percival rushed down to help them out; two colored men servants carried
+in their luggage, and presently they found themselves standing before a
+glowing fire in the hall, which was quite big enough and broad enough to
+be a room itself.
+
+"It is sweet of you to come out and cheer up two lonely country people,
+my dears," Mrs. St. Clair was saying, as she kissed them all around
+twice. "You are really the nicest children. You must promise to tell me
+whatever you want, or if you are not warm enough. You know how draughty
+country houses are. Or if you are the least hungry or your beds are not
+comfortable or the water isn't hot enough for your baths, or you wish
+any particular thing to eat----"
+
+"Dear me," laughed Billie, looking around her, "you make us feel like
+four visiting princesses, Mrs. St. Clair. I am sure we could never want
+for anything in this cheerful, lovely house."
+
+"Now, Mrs. St. Clair," put in Elinor, "we all know perfectly well that
+all the chairs at Pine Lodge are easy and the beds are famous for being
+the most comfortable in the county."
+
+Mrs. St. Clair blushed with pleasure. Next to saying nice things to
+people herself, she loved to have them say nice things to her.
+
+"Percival, my darling, where are the others?" she demanded presently.
+"Isn't Belle coming and what is the name of that little foreign girl she
+asked to bring with her?"
+
+Percy grinned at his friends good-naturedly, when Merry seized a cushion
+from one of the long settees and began to rock it on his knees, and
+Charlie gave a silent imitation of a baby's face in the act of crying.
+But he was used to these endearing names his mother heaped upon him, and
+he only replied:
+
+"Give them time, mother; give them time. Remember they didn't ride on a
+comet the same as this dashing company did. The foreign girl is Fannie
+Alta."
+
+"So it was, and it was sweet and thoughtful of Belle to want to bring
+her along. She described the poor little thing as being lonely and
+strange in West Haven."
+
+The girls exchanged astonished glances at this piece of news. Was it
+possible that Belle Rogers and the crafty little Spanish girl whom they
+instinctively distrusted were so intimate as this?
+
+"Here comes Roly Poly McLane," cried Percy, laughing, as he peered
+through a side light of the front door. "She's as jolly and fat as a
+clown elephant in the circus."
+
+"Percy, my love," remonstrated his mother, which slight show of
+disapproval was about as near as she ever got in her life to scolding
+him.
+
+The boys raced down the hall to help Rosomond McLane out of the high
+trap in which she had driven over to Pine Lodge from her home a few
+miles away.
+
+"Wait, Roly Poly, until Percy gets a derrick. It's the only safe way to
+unload heavy bales," cried Merry.
+
+"Roly Poly," said Percy, bowing politely, "these three noble friends
+have volunteered with me to help you get out. I offered to do it alone,
+but mother was afraid my young life would be crushed out of me, if
+anything should happen, you know, and----"
+
+"Percival, my darling!" cried Mrs. St. Clair.
+
+"Help me, indeed," exclaimed Rosomond, with a jolly laugh that always
+started an echo of other jolly laughs. "Get out of my way all of you,"
+and she gave a flying leap from the trap and bounced as she hit the
+ground like a rubber ball.
+
+"My dear Rosomond," cried the widow, running down the steps to meet her,
+"don't take any notice of these foolish boys. You wouldn't seem the same
+dear, delightful Rosomond if you weighed a pound less."
+
+"Oh, I don't mind them, Mrs. St. Clair. I'm used to it, you know. Father
+always calls me 'Baby Elephant' and 'Jumbo,' and the girls at school
+call me 'Roly Poly,' and Uncle Jim calls me 'Fatty.'"
+
+Several more boys appeared just then and the company followed Mrs. St.
+Clair into what she called the sitting room, a gay apartment with chintz
+curtains at the windows and chintz covered cushions in the deep wicker
+chairs. Here they had tea and chocolate and hot-buttered toast.
+
+"You must eat plenty of food, you know," Percy's mother had admonished
+them, "because I warn you that you will need all your strength to put up
+with the fearful ordeals Percy has planned for to-night----"
+
+"Mother," broke in Percy, "you mustn't tell. You will spoil all the
+fun."
+
+"I'm not telling, dear. I'm only warning. But you know those things that
+jump at you from behind----"
+
+"Stop her quick, somebody," cried her son, pretending to gag her mouth
+with a napkin.
+
+It was all very gay and the room buzzed with talk and laughter when the
+door opened and a servant admitted Belle Rogers and Fannie Alta.
+
+Mrs. St. Clair greeted the new visitors as hospitably as she had the
+others. She even kissed Fannie's dark, foreign little face and called
+her "dear" and drew the girl down beside her on the sofa.
+
+"I want you to feel perfectly at home," she said. "It was so good of you
+to have come with Belle."
+
+She was really the most delightful, beaming, good-natured creature
+imaginable, but all her efforts could not disguise the change which
+seemed suddenly to have taken place in the behavior of the others.
+
+Somehow the laughter was less free, the talk less gay and jolly than it
+had been, and presently our four particular Motor Maids were glad for an
+excuse to go away with Percy and see the conservatories, while Belle and
+Fannie drank their tea with Mrs. St. Clair.
+
+After that it was time to dress for dinner. A neat little maid had
+unpacked their bags and laid their best party dresses on the beds. They
+were very simple dresses indeed, and Nancy, at least, thought of
+floating blue chiffon draperies with a slight sigh of regret.
+
+"Do you know, girls," said Billie, as she tied a pink bow around Nancy's
+bunch of curls, "I think we should all take lessons in cheerfulness from
+Mrs. St. Clair. She's so happy because she always sees the best side of
+everything. Just see how nice she is to Belle and Fannie Alta, for
+instance."
+
+"With this beautiful house and all her money and such a nice,
+good-natured pink-cheeked boy for a son, I think I could even admire
+Belle Rogers and Fannie Alta," observed Mary.
+
+Then Billie remembered that Mary and her mother were always troubled
+about money, and that Mrs. Price was the gentlest, sweetest woman she
+had ever known. She wondered if Mrs. St. Clair could ever be ruffled by
+disappointment and bad luck, or if everything were not exactly as it
+should be, if she would be the same placid, good-natured soul.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.--THE GHOST PARTY.
+
+
+"I don't see how you can play any gruesome Hallowe'en tricks in this
+house, Mrs. St. Clair," said Billie later at the dinner table. "It's the
+abode of cheerfulness. Look at this dining room, for instance. A skull
+and crossbones wouldn't even look dismal against this white wainscoting
+and these pale yellow walls."
+
+"She's trying to pump you, mother," put in Percy. "Now don't tell her
+anything."
+
+Mrs. St. Clair smiled archly. How pretty she looked, Billie thought, in
+her pink crepe dress, with a beautiful collar of pearls around her
+throat. Nothing would induce the widow to wear black, and, after a year
+or two of mourning, she had gone back to colors and cheerfulness.
+
+"He has got some big surprises for you, my dear. I'll only tell you this
+much. It will be quite as ghastly as you could possibly desire, and I
+hope nobody is wearing any clothes that will matter. Your dress, Miss
+Alta, I am afraid will spot if you do all the things Percy is planning
+for this evening. What a lovely frock, by the way. I think I have never
+seen a more beautiful dress for a young girl."
+
+All eyes were fastened on Fannie's dress, and there was general surprise
+among the girls to see that Fannie was wearing an exquisite gown of pale
+blue satin with an over-dress of blue gauze, edged with narrow silver
+fringe. In her hair was a wreath of pink roses.
+
+She was quite unembarrassed under the scrutiny of all these people, and
+smiled complacently at Mrs. St. Clair.
+
+Nobody had taken much notice of Belle until now. They had supposed she
+had kept so unusually quiet because she was not in her own "set," as she
+loved to call her coterie of seven. But to those who were familiar with
+her, it was plain that something had happened. She did not seem herself.
+Her eyes had a strange gray look to them. Two little white dents
+appeared on either side of her nose and her lips were shrunk into pale,
+narrow lines. But that was not all. Were they dreaming or was this the
+first of Percy's Hallowe'en jokes? The beautiful, proud Belle was
+wearing a faded yellow muslin.
+
+She had tried to cover her shoulders with a little blue scarf, but it
+was impossible to deceive the sharp eyes of her schoolmates.
+
+"Nobody's clothes will be hurt, Mother," put in Percy, feeling somehow
+that a cloud had fallen on the company, although he did not know enough
+about girls' clothes to take in this remarkable change in Belle's
+appearance. "Remember that this is a ghost party."
+
+"What is a ghost party?" demanded Fannie, suddenly becoming animated
+from the admiration she felt she had attracted.
+
+"Everybody wears a sheet and pillow-case," answered Percy, "and, for one
+thing, not a vestige of dress shows."
+
+A look of triumph came into Belle's eyes at this and the two dents began
+to disappear.
+
+"I hear the other people coming, so we had better get into our costumes
+if you are entirely through."
+
+"Come up to my room, girls. Percy will take care of the boys. Marie and
+I are commissioned to dress you up. I am obeying orders, you see," said
+Mrs. St. Clair.
+
+"And remember that you are supposed to be disguised," called Percy.
+"Don't give yourself away by giggling, Miss Nancy-Bell."
+
+"I'm sure I shan't want to giggle if I'm dressed as a ghost," answered
+Nancy, following the others up the steps.
+
+Half an hour later a company of spectres invaded the halls and drawing
+room of Pine Lodge. There were silent ghosts and giggling ghosts, and a
+roly-poly ghost, who bumped against a thin ghost and knocked him flat
+and the thin ghost cried out:
+
+"Oh, shades of departed Jumbo, don't sit on me!"
+
+Then all the ghosts laughed and one ghost danced a jig that had the
+shadow of a resemblance to the Fishers' Horn Pipe.
+
+Presently there was a long and mournful trumpet call from up in the very
+top of the house and a portly ghost who seemed to be holding up a train
+under her white cotton shroud said:
+
+"Now, my dear spirits, we are all to go up, if you will be good enough
+to follow me," and the whole troop of ghosts began moving in a spectral
+body up the front staircase.
+
+There was a second long-drawn-out and despairing trump, and the phantom
+beckoned them to hurry up, with her plump, pretty hand, and remarked:
+
+"My darling Percival is so impatient."
+
+Up the next staircase they trooped and finally up a narrow flight, at
+the top of which hung a black curtain with cabalistic signs painted on
+it in bright red.
+
+Once past the curtain and there was a gasp of surprise and wonder. The
+great attic of Pine Lodge, which stretched over the entire house, had
+been transformed into a spirit dance hall. From the ceiling hung pumpkin
+jack-o-lanterns of every size. Plates of salt and alcohol were burning
+about the room, giving a ghastly greenish look to the picture. An old
+witch dressed in black, with a long broomstick, was stationed by a
+cauldron of melted lead, placed on a charcoal stove.
+
+Repeating a cabalistic verse with incredible rapidity, which sounded
+something like:
+
+  "Burra, burra pie, cat's eye, devil fry,
+  Singer, dinger, singer dinger, blood!"
+
+the black witch dropped a spoonful of the lead into a bowl of water.
+
+"Here is your fortune," she said, in a sing-song voice to the nearest
+ghost.
+
+"The lead has taken the shape of a letter. It brings news to you. It
+comes from over the water on a ship. The letter is about something
+round----"
+
+"Money is round," put in a tall ghost, standing near. "So are rings and
+necklaces----"
+
+"There is trouble ahead," went on the witch. "There is trouble before
+the letter ever reaches land."
+
+The ghost who was listening moved away quickly.
+
+"Of course, it was just a coincidence," she said to herself, "but I
+wonder who the person was who said that about rings and necklaces. Oh,
+dear! Oh, dear! I wish I had never taken that box in charge."
+
+In another part of the room a red witch was engaged in launching little
+fortune sail boats, made of English walnuts, on a troubled sea in a tub.
+
+There were four other witches about the attic telling fortunes with
+cards and in other ways, two gray ones, a white one, and a green one,
+and there was an enormous gray cat with electric eyes and a tail four
+feet long that curled up over its back. At last from behind a curtain
+came the strains of weird music, and the witches and the gray cat danced
+a quadrille, the witches riding on their broomsticks in a circle,
+leaping over the cat as they advanced down the middle and finally ending
+with a romp when all the ghosts joined in and danced together.
+
+After a while the ghosts removed their sheets and pillow-cases and
+became human beings once more, and the side shows, as Percy called them,
+began. Every girl at the party bobbed for an apple, except Belle Rogers,
+who declined emphatically. But those who remembered the red rubber
+curlers understood her reasons for not wishing to wet her aureole of
+golden hair.
+
+Fannie Alta plunged her face and neck into the tub with a reckless
+laugh, and spotted her pretty dress without a quiver of regret.
+
+Nancy, in a little room hung in black in a remote corner of the attic,
+held a lighted candle over her head, while she looked fearfully in the
+glass and combed her hair. For just a breathing space a boy's fair,
+ruddy face passed across the mirror and disappeared.
+
+With a little shriek, Nancy looked quickly over her shoulder, but she
+was entirely alone.
+
+Billie went rather later than the others to try her fortune in the
+mirror room. She had lingered along with a laughing, teasing circle
+around the apple plungers, and, seeing Nancy come out of the mirror room
+alone, she strolled over there. Nancy explained what she was to do, and
+left her alone to her fate.
+
+"Did you see any one, Nancy?" laughed Billie incredulously.
+
+"Yes," she whispered mysteriously, "I did; but I wasn't frightened
+because----"
+
+"Because what?" demanded Billie, pinching her friend's round cheek.
+
+"Because--it wasn't a person who would frighten any one," answered
+Nancy, with a laugh, as she tripped away to the next side show, from
+whence issued suppressed screams and howls which were explained when she
+pulled the curtain and a skeleton jumped at her.
+
+In the meantime, Billie had gone into the mirror room alone. She stood
+looking gravely at herself in the glass, while she ran a comb through
+her smooth locks with one hand and held a candle with the other. She
+seemed to have waited a good while for the apparition which was supposed
+to appear to show its face.
+
+"I suppose this booth isn't in working order any longer," she thought,
+as she laid down the comb, when suddenly from the deep shadows reflected
+in the glass she made out the outline of a face.
+
+Billie smiled. She had been prepared to recognize one of her friends,
+but the smile faded from her lips; she put down the candle quickly and
+faced about. The black curtain forming the wall of the little room was
+still quivering, but no one was there.
+
+She ran out hurriedly and looked about her. All the boys and girls were
+dancing the barn dance, and the attic had become very cheerful and gay
+it seemed to her in the brief moment in which she had tried her fortune
+in the mirror room.
+
+"It was just a foolish, nervous notion," she said to herself, turning to
+meet Merry Brown, who was looking for her to be his partner in the
+dance. "But that beaked nose and that wicked eye so close to it," her
+thoughts continued. "Could I have been mistaken?"
+
+"Are there any strangers here to-night?" she asked Merry, as they danced
+down the room together.
+
+"Not a single stranger," he replied. "Only the High School crowd."
+
+When the dance was over, they filed in a long, laughing procession down
+the three flights of steps to supper, and there was nothing spectral or
+gruesome about the gay party which gathered around Mrs. St. Clair's long
+table. Billie tried to talk and sing with the others and laugh at Roly
+Poly McLane and Percy, who recited an absurd dialogue they had prepared
+beforehand in which Roly Poly took the part of a fat, old man and Percy
+a thin old woman. But all the time she kept asking herself:
+
+"Did I see him, or was it just my imagination?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.--A STRAY GHOST.
+
+
+When the front door closed after the departing merry-makers and the
+sound of the last wheels died away down the avenue, the guests of the
+house party filed slowly up to bed. Mrs. St. Clair, at the head of the
+stairs, kissed each of the girls good-night and shook hands with the
+boys. And, as a final token of their regard, before turning in, the boys
+trooped from door to door, singing, "Good-night, ladies," with Charlie
+accompanying on his mouth organ.
+
+And now the house was still, and our four friends in their bathrobes
+were seated on the hearth rug around the wood fire in one of the
+bedrooms, talking in whispers, as girls will do after a party.
+
+"Do you suppose Belle Rogers has been converted, or reformed, or
+something?" observed Nancy. "What else could have induced her to be so
+unselfish as to wear Fannie's old dress and let Fannie wear her best
+one?"
+
+"It's the mystery of the age," said Elinor. "And how different she
+seemed, too. How quiet and meek. Perhaps, after all, it was her clothes
+that made her haughty. Who could be anything but lowly in a faded yellow
+muslin?"
+
+"She was angry at first," put in Mary. "I saw the danger signals at
+dinner. But I really believe she had as good a time as any of us
+afterwards. Perhaps she realized that without the blue satin, she was
+just on a par with the rest of us, and she forgot to be conscious."
+
+"And how different Fannie was under the influence of the blue satin,"
+continued Elinor. "She talked and laughed quite loudly, and she was
+really rude to Belle several times. Girls, if we ever have blue satins,
+will they change our dispositions----"
+
+A tap at the door interrupted the conversation, and Mrs. St. Clair, in a
+long lavender dressing gown, tripped into the room.
+
+"I hope our talking hasn't disturbed you, Mrs. St. Clair," said Billie.
+
+"No, no, dear, I am glad you were talking, because I had hoped to find
+some one of you still awake. I have come to ask a great favor. Will one
+of you, or all of you, go with me up in the attic for a few minutes? I
+should have asked one of the servants, but their lights are all out. I
+suppose they are sound asleep. Percy is asleep, too. I have just come
+from his room. He is tired out. You can't think how hard he has worked
+in the last few days."
+
+"Let me go with you, Mrs. St. Clair," put in Elinor.
+
+"Let us all go," suggested Billie.
+
+"Very well, dear. The more of you the better. To tell the truth, I am a
+little worried. It's nothing, of course; I am sure to find it, but I
+should like to take a look before I go to bed."
+
+"Have you lost something, Mrs. St. Clair?" asked Mary.
+
+"Yes, I have lost my pearl necklace. I really never missed it until a
+few moments ago. I have looked downstairs everywhere, but I feel sure
+that I dropped it in the attic when I was dancing that ridiculous
+twirling waltz with Ben. It serves me right for trying to be a young
+girl when I am really such an old lady."
+
+"You are really the youngest of us all," protested the four young girls,
+following her on tiptoe up the stairs into the attic.
+
+All the members of the searching party were sure that the necklace would
+be found at once somewhere on the attic floor, or in the folds of the
+sheet or the pillow-case Mrs. St. Clair had been wearing. Yet Billie and
+Mary had good reason to know that robbers were at large in the village
+of West Haven, and the memory of the face Billie had seen in the mirror
+suddenly became painfully distinct.
+
+Mrs. St. Clair lit a few gas jets in the attic and the great place
+seemed ghastly enough in the half light with the grotesque
+jack-o-lanterns grinning at them from above; the black-curtained side
+shows and an occasional sheet and pillow-case made a weird picture.
+
+They searched the floor carefully, looked into the booths with candles,
+shook out sheets and pillow-cases, but there was no sign of the missing
+necklace.
+
+"If it had only been something else," said Mrs. St. Clair. "I should
+rather have lost almost anything in the world than my pearl necklace. It
+was a wedding present from Percival's father and I valued it more than
+all my other jewelry together. I don't see how I could have dropped it
+so carelessly. When we went down to supper I threw a scarf around my
+shoulders and that is probably why I never noticed that my pearls were
+gone. You were standing near me, Mary, and Belle and her friend were
+there, too. You don't remember to have noticed the necklace at that
+time, do you? One of you helped me on with my scarf."
+
+Mary shook her head.
+
+"I must ask Belle and Miss Alta to-morrow. It is so important to know
+whether I lost the necklace up here or below."
+
+"Perhaps you dropped it on the steps," suggested one of the girls.
+
+"If I did, it must have been trod on by many pairs of feet, then. Oh,
+dear, I am so sorry. Only this evening I said to myself, I must have the
+clasp to the necklace repaired. I had intended to take it to town next
+week to the jeweller's.
+
+"But I must not keep you up any longer. You were dear children to come
+up with me. Now go to bed and don't think of it any more. I should not
+have been so selfish. You are all dead tired, I know, for I am myself."
+
+They turned and trooped downstairs again, and with softly spoken
+good-nights separated at their bedroom doors.
+
+Billie and Mary were the last to enter the room they shared. They had
+stopped for a drink of ice water from a big glass pitcher, which had
+been placed with a tray of tumblers on a table at the far end of the
+hall. They were drinking their water silently, each absorbed in her own
+thoughts, when suddenly Mary grasped Billie's hand and whispered:
+
+"Look! On the steps!"
+
+But Billie was looking with all her eyes before Mary had spoken.
+
+A figure was gliding down the steps wrapped in a sheet. The stray ghost
+had evidently seen the girls at the same moment they had caught sight of
+it, for it finished the flight almost with a bound, and with a swift run
+disappeared through a door leading to a passage back of the steps, with
+Billie and Mary running behind. But the sheeted figure was too swift for
+them, and they heard one of the doors in the passage open and close
+softly just as they reached the entrance.
+
+"It was this door," said Mary.
+
+"Or this one," said Billie, pointing to the door of the room next the
+one Mary had chosen as the door the phantom had disappeared through.
+
+"We'll settle it," said Billie. "I'll knock on this one and you knock on
+that one."
+
+"They are the small single rooms that Belle and Fannie and Roly Poly
+have," whispered Mary, as she tapped on a door.
+
+There was no answer and she went in. It was Belle's room and she was
+sleeping deeply. Mary smiled as she noticed that Belle now wore a night
+cap over the rubber curlers. Her cheek was pillowed on her hand and her
+breath came softly and regularly.
+
+No answer came to Billie's tap, either, and when she turned the knob she
+found that the door was locked. She tapped again and rattled the knob.
+
+"Who is there?" came a sleepy voice.
+
+"Open the door," called Billie.
+
+"Tell me who you are first."
+
+"Billie Campbell."
+
+Presently the door was thrown open and Fannie, with her dark hair
+standing out all over her head in a dishevelled mass, peered into the
+hall.
+
+"What is the matter?" she asked. "The house is not on fire?"
+
+"No, but Mary and I were in the hall and we saw some one come down from
+the attic and go into one of these rooms, and we thought we had better
+wake you up."
+
+"They could not have come in here," said Fannie. "My door was locked."
+
+Billie looked at her curiously.
+
+"What a little actress you are," she thought.
+
+"It doesn't matter, only Mrs. St. Clair had lost something, and we were
+afraid a thief might be in the house. You know there have been several
+robberies lately in West Haven."
+
+Fannie gave her a long and scornful stare.
+
+"At the High School, you mean?"
+
+"Particularly at the High School," replied Billie gently. Somehow, she
+felt a sort of contemptuous pity for this unfortunate little creature
+who had been taught, perhaps by poverty, to stoop to so much villainy.
+
+"What's all this racket about?" demanded Rosomond McLane, opening her
+door which was the third one along the passage and thrusting out her
+merry, round face.
+
+"You didn't hear anything did you?" asked Billie. "Mary and I thought we
+saw some one in a ghost dress come down this passage and go into one of
+these doors."
+
+"Good heavens! I am terrified out of my wits, I would rather it would be
+a burglar than a ghost. Did you really see something?"
+
+"Forget it," said Billie. "Go back to bed and lock your door. It was
+just a shadow, I suppose."
+
+Fannie had already locked her own door and the girls retreated to their
+room, somewhat crestfallen, feeling very much like two fighters who had
+been worsted in battle.
+
+When they had crawled into bed and settled themselves under the covers,
+Billie gave a deep sigh and whispered:
+
+"Mary, dear, which one do you think it was?"
+
+"There is only one thing that would make me think it was Belle," replied
+Mary. "If she had really been asleep, she would have waked and come out
+to find what was the matter. She is the most deadly curious soul alive."
+
+"That's very slight evidence, Mary. She might have been specially tired
+to-night. Now, I believe it was Fannie. She had such a wild, dishevelled
+look and her door was locked. She is such a creeping, crawling little
+thing. Besides, I don't believe Belle would have had the courage to go
+up in the attic alone."
+
+"Billie," observed Mary, after a short silence, "I don't know what it is
+all about, but something is going on around us. I believe that you and
+I, in some way, are mixed up in some kind of conspiracy. The box of
+jewels is in it and Fannie and Belle are in it. It's like seeing a lot
+of figures moving about through a thick curtain. You know they are
+there, but you don't know what they are all doing. I'm frightened,
+Billie, very frightened."
+
+Mary gave that dry sob which was just as painful as crying and much
+worse to hear.
+
+Billie put her arms around her friend and tried to comfort her.
+
+"Don't be scared, Mary, dear. It will all come right. I have made up my
+mind to one thing. That is, I will not leave that unlucky box at your
+mother's house any longer. We shall have to find some new place to keep
+it."
+
+Presently the two girls dropped off to slumber, and of all the sleepers
+in the big house, only one person heard the clock in the hall strike the
+passing hours. She tossed and tumbled on her bed like a boat on a
+restless sea, and moaned to herself. Her lace-frilled night cap had
+slipped, and one red rubber horn pointed upward, like an accusing
+finger.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.--MRS. RUGGLES.
+
+
+Breakfast was late next morning, and there were some heavy eyes at the
+pretty table. Belle was pale and nervous, and Mary, too, wore an anxious
+look on her face. Even the plump and jovial Mrs. St. Clair was not quite
+herself. Her eyes had a puzzled, absent-minded expression, as if she
+were trying to remember something that had almost faded out of her
+memory. But she forced herself to smile and talk with her young guests,
+and only the Motor Maids really noticed her abstraction.
+
+"What do you intend to do to-day, Percival, dearest?" she asked her son.
+
+"Don't you remember, mother, that Billie is to take some of us and the
+side-seated wagon the others over to Mrs. Ruggles? I wrote her to expect
+us by two this afternoon, and we'll be hungry enough by then to eat
+everything in sight."
+
+"Who is Mrs. Ruggles?" asked Billie, who was not yet familiar with
+various picturesque and interesting characters living around West Haven.
+
+"Wait until you see her," replied Mrs. St. Clair. "She is a queer old
+woman, but she has a great many friends and you can't help liking her,
+and her food--dear me, you never imagined such meals as she can get up."
+
+"Now, don't go and give things away, mother," remonstrated Percy. "The
+others have all met Mrs. Ruggles, but Billie hasn't and neither has Miss
+Alta, and we might as well give them a little surprise."
+
+"It seems to me that West Haven is full of surprises," observed Billie.
+"Papa and I used to wander about the world together like two vagabonds,
+but in all that time we never had so many adventures and excitements as
+I have had here."
+
+"Well, there won't be any excitement about this trip," said Percy. "It's
+just a ride across the country to the shore, one grand, large meal, and
+then home again in time for another feed, and you'll all be ready for
+bed."
+
+It was arranged for those who were to drive to start well ahead of the
+others in the "handicap race," as Percy called it, in order to get to
+Mrs. Ruggles' at the same time. The Motor Maids went in "The Comet" with
+their particular friends, which was tacitly agreed upon, and Roly Poly
+McLane drove with Belle and Fannie and three boys in the St. Clair
+trim-looking depot wagon. They were not even to take the same road as
+the motor car, but were to go by a short cut over a road too sandy for
+automobiles.
+
+Mrs. St. Clair, who was not to be in the party, inspected each girl with
+motherly interest before the start. She appeared to have an endless
+store of wraps, ulsters, sweaters and fur coats, veils and scarfs, which
+she bundled on her guests without the slightest regard for sex or size.
+
+"Young people never know how to keep warm," she said. "Especially girls.
+They always think warm clothing is unbecoming, when really nothing is
+more unbecoming than purple noses and blue lips. Percival, my darling,
+don't you think you'll need your ear muffs?"
+
+"No, mother," answered her son firmly, "not on the first of November."
+
+"Oh, I implore you, my son; I entreat you," cried the importunate woman,
+and Percy, with admirable patience permitted her to slip them on his
+ears, though he promptly removed them when the motor car had turned into
+the road and he could no longer see his mother waving her handkerchief.
+
+"I must look remarkably like Dr. Cook," he said, laughing, as he removed
+some of the layers of wraps and scarfs his mother had loaded him with.
+
+"The Comet" was in splendid trim that morning.
+
+"He gets cranky and unmanageable exactly like a human being," Billie had
+often said about him, but to-day he appeared almost to take human
+enjoyment in the long stretch of hard-beaten road and the crisp autumn
+air.
+
+"Does this mysterious Mrs. Ruggles live in a palace or a hut?" asked
+Billie, after a while, her curiosity increasing as the salty breeze
+straight from the ocean reminded her that they were approaching the
+coast.
+
+"It's a little of both," replied Percy.
+
+"She's a queen, herself, Mrs. Ruggles is," put in Ben.
+
+"I believe she thinks she is one, really," said Elinor. "If she doesn't
+like a person, she almost says, 'Off with his head.'"
+
+"But I thought you said she was a cook?"
+
+"She is," answered Merry. "She's a queenly cook and a cookly queen."
+
+"You are all a lot of crack-brained, foolish people," exclaimed Billie,
+exasperated. "I feel as if 'The Comet' couldn't take me fast enough to
+satisfy my curiosity about Mrs. Ruggles."
+
+She put on the third speed and the red motor took to the course like a
+young race horse as he rounds the curve toward home. It was a long and
+rather chilly ride before they reached the abode of Mrs. Ruggles. The
+young people found themselves buttoning their wraps around them quite
+gratefully and snuggling down in the car.
+
+"Here we are," said Percy, at last.
+
+Billie stopped the car and examined with much curiosity a quaint old
+house, rather tumbled down at second glance, but with an air of comfort
+about it that no amount of disrepair could overcome.
+
+Smoke was pouring out of the middle chimney and the reflection on the
+small window panes indicated that there was a roaring fire in the front
+room.
+
+What the place looked like on the inside was nothing more nor less than
+an old Spanish inn. Billie did not know this because she had never seen
+one, but the room reminded her vaguely of something very romantic and
+picturesque, and what was most curious about the place was that the
+outside seemed to have no connection whatever with the inside. They were
+not even related to each other by distant kinship. Outside were the
+dignified gray walls and gabled windows of an old seashore house. The
+inside appeared to be one very large room. The uneven floor was paved
+with red tile and in a big stone fireplace at one end burned an enormous
+fire of driftwood. From the blackened rafters hung garlands of red
+peppers, bunches of herbs and strings of onions and garlic. Shining
+copper vessels were ranged on shelves and around two sides of the room
+ran a gallery with steps leading up from one end.
+
+"Am I in a dream," cried Billie. "I feel as if I had been transported
+somewhere suddenly."
+
+"Isn't it fascinating?" said Elinor. "The old house has been in Mrs.
+Ruggles' family for two hundred years. It used to be a sort of sailors'
+inn, and there are many stories connected with it. But here she comes
+herself. She's just as wonderful as her house."
+
+Mrs. Ruggles was certainly a remarkable figure. She was very tall, one
+of the tallest women Billie had ever seen, with coal black hair, shiny
+dark eyes, rather too close together, a beaked eagle nose, and a very
+determined mouth, with a slightly humorous curve to the lips, which
+softened her somewhat stern face.
+
+She wore a most outlandish dress for that part of the world, of striped
+red and black cotton, but she was scrupulously clean, and the coarse
+cotton kerchief tied around her neck was as white as snow. Her stockings
+also were white, and she wore men's low shoes of enormous size, even for
+a woman of her height.
+
+The boys and girls all shook hands with her as if she were an old
+friend. She called them by their first names and when she was introduced
+to Billie she gave her a long, keen look that seemed to read the young
+girl's most hidden and secret thoughts. She walked with an erect
+carriage and majestic tread, and Billie had a feeling that she had been
+introduced to a personage.
+
+"She's a great old girl," said Merry Brown, when Mrs. Ruggles had
+disappeared into the back regions of the house to finish cooking the
+dinner. "She can sail a boat as well as anybody along this coast. She
+fishes, digs for clams, catches lobsters in traps, and does all the
+things the fishermen around here do and more, too, because she is the
+jim dandiest cook in the county."
+
+"Hasn't she any husband or family?" asked Billie.
+
+"She was married twice. Ruggles, the second husband, was an Irishman. He
+was a fine fellow, a sea captain, but he died long ago. Her children are
+floating about the country somewhere."
+
+"What was her name before she married? Nothing like Ruggles, I am sure."
+
+"No, it was Sabater. Mrs. Ruggles' father was captain of a schooner
+which carried freight up and down the coast. They say her grandfather
+was a great old fighter and came near being hanged as a spy by both
+sides in the Revolution."
+
+It was all very interesting, and Billie was still asking questions of
+the others when the carriage arrived with the rest of the party.
+
+"Why, where is Fannie?" they demanded, noticing her absence from the
+depot wagon.
+
+"She complained of a headache and went home," answered Belle. "We met
+one of your vehicles on the road, Percy, coming from town, and she got
+in and drove back."
+
+"Too bad," answered Percy. "But she's very sensible if she doesn't feel
+well. It's a long drive and fairly chilly when it gets late."
+
+Fannie was not much missed, however, from the jolly party which now
+gathered around the crackling wood fire. Presently the inn-keeper,
+fish-woman, queen, whatever she was, led the girls up the narrow flight
+of stairs at one end of the room to the balcony, on which opened a row
+of little bedrooms, like ship cabins. She was a very silent, busy woman,
+and she did not linger while they smoothed their rumpled locks and
+washed the dust from their faces.
+
+Billie, who also was not one to linger at the dressing table, went out
+on the gallery and stood looking down into the picturesque room. The
+place fascinated her and she strolled along, peeping into the other
+small rooms, where, no doubt, Mrs. Ruggles' father and grandfather had
+put up many a seafaring guest in years gone by.
+
+At the other end of the gallery were more rooms, and she could not
+resist the temptation to glance into them while she waited for the other
+girls. Two of the doors were open, one into a large empty room and one
+into a scantily furnished bedroom. The next door was half closed. Should
+she look in? Billie hesitated. It was very impolite of her, but she knew
+that old Mrs. Ruggles lived alone, and there could be no one to intrude
+on. She pushed the door gently and looked in, then retreated quickly.
+The room was not empty, after all. In the immense, old-fashioned bed so
+high that it was necessary to stand on a foot stool at one side in order
+to plunge into it, lay a woman. Billie thought she was asleep at first.
+Her eyes were closed and her long black hair was spread back of her on
+the pillow like a dusky mantel. The young girl stood transfixed on the
+threshold. Then the woman opened her eyes and looked straight into
+Billie's.
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Billie politely, and backed away, her heart
+beating so fast that she almost choked for breath.
+
+The others were just going downstairs, chatting and laughing together,
+even Belle Rogers, who seemed, somehow, softened and quite different.
+There was no chance to tell about the strange woman just then, and
+Billie kept her knowledge to herself. But the large dark eyes haunted
+her memory and she could not forget the face, of which she had caught
+only a fleeting glance.
+
+Then came the dinner. Mrs. Ruggles did not wait on the guests. The
+dishes were placed on the table and they helped themselves, while Merry
+and Percy, with napkins over their arms, like well-trained butlers,
+removed one set of plates and brought on another.
+
+Perhaps these young people, who were not epicures by any means, did not
+realize how delicious Mrs. Ruggles' dinner really was. But an older and
+more experienced person would have appreciated some of those delightful
+concoctions of rice and pimentos, soup thick and rich, fowls done to a
+turn, and a dish of corn meal and chopped meat and tomatoes, like a
+Mexican tamale. But they enjoyed it and the pudding that followed and
+the cups of strong black coffee.
+
+It was a merry meal, too, with jokes and songs and much laughter. Mrs.
+Ruggles moved ponderously about the room or sat silently by the fire.
+Occasionally her face lit up with a delightful smile, and she would turn
+and beam approvingly at Percy or Merry or Roly Poly McLane, who were the
+chief fun-makers.
+
+After dinner Billie seized an opportunity to speak to the strange woman.
+
+"We had a splendid dinner, Mrs. Ruggles," she said. "I should think you
+would have lots of people stopping here in this delightful place."
+
+"The Inn is closed now," she answered. "I don't rent my rooms any more."
+
+"And you have no guests at all?" asked Billie.
+
+Mrs. Ruggles looked at her for so long that Billie felt desperately
+uncomfortable.
+
+"No," she answered shortly, and began clearing off the table with a
+scowl that reminded Billie of some one somewhere.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.--FANNIE ALTA.
+
+
+In the meantime, Mrs. St. Clair, left to the quiet seclusion of her own
+home, became forthwith a very determined and resolute character.
+
+First she summoned to her aid the old colored butler, who had been with
+her many years, and together they searched every part of the house where
+she had been the night before. They went over the attic thoroughly and
+satisfied themselves that the lost pearl necklace could not have been
+dropped there. They hunted through the downstairs rooms, shook out the
+sofa cushions, looked under the rugs and behind curtains. There was not
+a crack nor cranny of the rooms she had lately frequented that Mrs. St.
+Clair and old Randolph did not scour.
+
+Like many another easy-going, amiable soul, Mrs. St. Clair, when roused
+to action, was capable of the most surprising, almost fierce
+determination, and when Fannie Alta returned, pleading the excuse of a
+headache, she hardly recognized in the white intense face, the rosy,
+dimpled countenance of the widow.
+
+Fannie retired to her room, but when Mrs. St. Clair went to the
+telephone in the upper hall, she crept to the door, opened it a crack,
+and overheard snatches of this conversation:
+
+"Do you happen to have a good detective? That's fortunate. The famous
+Mr. Bangs home on his vacation? Has a motor cycle? Very well, he ought
+to get here in an hour. Tell him to hurry. Thank you. Good-by."
+
+A tray of luncheon was brought to Fannie, but she ate very little. She
+sat in her room thinking hard. Then, with a sudden resolution, she
+jumped up and began to move about. First she packed her valise. Then,
+tying her handkerchief about her head, she put on a very woe-begone
+expression and left the room. Mrs. St. Clair was in the living room, a
+maid told her, and Fannie found her pacing nervously up and down the
+bright, chintz-hung place.
+
+"I am afraid you are not feeling so well, Miss Alta," the widow said
+politely, but with just a shade of coldness in her tone.
+
+"I am much worse," answered Fannie. "I feel quite ill. I wish to return
+to my mamma. May I be driven home?"
+
+Mrs. St. Clair hesitated and a very strange expression came into her
+face.
+
+"You may go in a few hours, Miss Alta. There is no one to take you just
+now. Randolph is needed here and the other men are off working on the
+place. Perhaps you had better lie down in your room until I can arrange
+to send you back. Did you try the aromatic spirits of ammonia?"
+
+"If no one can take me," said the Spanish girl irritably, not taking any
+notice of the question, "I shall walk."
+
+"But I thought you were ill?"
+
+"I am, but the walk will help my head."
+
+"No, I cannot permit it," said Mrs. St. Clair firmly. "Go to your room
+and in another hour you will be sent home."
+
+Fannie started to reply, but she checked herself and left the room. Mrs.
+St. Clair, stripped of her smiles and good-natured pleasantries, was not
+a person to be disobeyed, and Fannie was quick to recognize that fact.
+
+She had hardly reached the second floor, when she heard the whirring
+sound of a motor cycle, followed almost immediately by a quick ring of
+the bell. Fannie leaned far over the banisters, and when she turned to
+go to her room, after a small, dapper-looking man had been admitted, she
+was somewhat embarrassed to find Mrs. St. Clair's maid looking at her
+with an expression of extreme amazement.
+
+Fannie hurried to her room and for the next fifteen minutes stood
+irresolutely first on one foot, then on the other. Finally, with an air
+of determination, she opened her satchel.
+
+In the sitting room downstairs Mrs. St. Clair and Mr. Bangs were in
+close conference.
+
+"I do not really know the girl, Mr. Bangs. She is a Cuban or a South
+American, or something. Her name is Alta and she was brought here by my
+son's guest. It is impossible for me to accuse a visitor in my own house
+of stealing the most valued and handsomest possession I have in the
+world. She is a queer little creature and looks sly and unreliable to
+me. But, of course, that is not really evidence. What I have been
+racking my brain all night and morning to recall is whether it was not
+she who, when she helped me off with my ghost dress last night, fumbled
+at my neck a moment.
+
+"It amounts to this, Mr. Bangs," the widow continued after a pause, "I
+can't get over the impression that she has stolen my necklace. The other
+children here I have known all their lives. My servants have been with
+me for years, and she is the one suspicious person in the house. Now,
+what I want you to do is to help me to find out the whole thing without
+arousing her suspicions. If she is the thief, she may return the
+necklace, and be sent back to town before the others arrive, and it will
+be easy enough to make excuses. You are a very able man, Mr. Bangs, and
+I know that you are only home for a rest, but I do so need your help.
+Now, what do you advise?"
+
+"Have you looked among her things yet?" asked the detective.
+
+"No, because the conviction only came to me after she returned. I did
+have suspicions, I will admit, but I put them aside. When she came back
+I saw that she was uneasy and anxious, and only a few moments ago she
+asked to be sent home."
+
+"H-m," mused the detective. "Suppose," he continued, "that you call her
+down and let me talk to her as if I needed her assistance, she being the
+only member of the party available."
+
+The advice was acted upon, and presently Fannie, still with the
+handkerchief swathing her forehead, looking very nervous and pale,
+entered the room.
+
+"Miss Alta," began the widow kindly, "I am sorry to have disturbed you
+when you were ill, but we are in great trouble and we thought perhaps
+you might help us. Did you know that last night I lost my beautiful
+pearl necklace, the most precious thing I have in the world?"
+
+Fannie showed great surprise.
+
+"Did it not come unclasped and slip?" she suggested.
+
+"I have reason to believe that it did not slip from my neck, because we
+have searched the place thoroughly. It must have been taken. I talked it
+all over with the other girls last night and they helped me look for it,
+but now I need some one else, and in their absence I have sent for you.
+Mr. Bangs, who is a detective, has come down to lend me his aid, and we
+thought we might take you into the conspiracy with us."
+
+The widow paused for breath.
+
+Fannie sat down and folded her hands nervously.
+
+"I do not see how I can help," she said, after a pause.
+
+"Possibly you cannot," put in Mr. Bangs, "but Mrs. St. Clair thought you
+might have noticed something unusual, and being a guest were too polite
+to speak of it. For instance, were you standing near Mrs. St. Clair when
+she removed the sheet and pillow case?"
+
+"Yes," said Fannie, "there were several of us in the party."
+
+"Did you notice who unpinned the sheet for Mrs. St. Clair?"
+
+Fannie paused a long time without replying.
+
+"It was not you who did it?"
+
+The young girl compressed her lips and looked the detective squarely in
+the eye.
+
+"The girl who unpinned the sheet was Mary Price," she replied, "and
+since you are determined to question me, I will tell you."
+
+She drew a deep breath, looked first at the detective, then at Mrs. St.
+Clair, and proceeded:
+
+"I did notice that she removed the sheet from your shoulders and her
+actions were very strange. But, knowing what I did, I was not surprised,
+and I am not surprised to hear now that you have lost something
+valuable, Mrs. St. Clair," she went on, more and more glibly, as she saw
+she was gaining the interest of the other two.
+
+"What were Miss Price's actions?" asked the detective, taking Fannie's
+statements in the order she had made them.
+
+Fannie frowned.
+
+"Oh, I do not know. She was strange. She behaved strangely and she went
+away at once."
+
+"You mean she left the room?"
+
+"I cannot say. I saw her no more until supper."
+
+"Where were you?"
+
+"Oh, I was about, dancing, playing, laughing with the others," replied
+Fannie carelessly.
+
+"You said a moment ago you knew something about Miss Price. Will you
+tell us what it is?"
+
+"Ah, but I hesitate. It is unkind to spread so terrible a story."
+
+"We will treat it confidentially," said the detective drily.
+
+"A great many people know it already," went on Fannie. "The whole school
+knows it, in fact. Miss Gray, the principal, and some of the teachers,
+who have lost money and articles. I, myself, have good reason to know
+it."
+
+"What is it that you know?" asked the detective.
+
+"That Mary Price is a thief. She has been stealing all the autumn from
+the other girls and the teachers at the High School."
+
+"Oh, impossible! I will not believe it," cried Mrs. St. Clair. "Dear,
+sweet, quiet Mary. There must be some mistake, Miss Alta. You should be
+more careful how you spread such dangerous gossip. Mary Price and her
+mother have many devoted friends in West Haven."
+
+"You may ask Miss Gray, then. She will tell you," said Fannie stiffly.
+
+"Just to verify your statement, Miss Alta, I will telephone Miss Gray
+this instant," exclaimed the widow angrily, leaving the room and
+hastening upstairs to the telephone.
+
+While she was gone, and she was away some time, the detective began to
+question Fannie. He was a very experienced man in his profession and he
+pressed her so skillfully that several times she tripped in her answers
+and finally grew excited.
+
+"I tell you it is true," she cried. "She not only is a thief, but she
+has a confederate. Billie Campbell is her assistant. Perhaps you think I
+took the necklace," she burst out at last. "You have the right to search
+among my things. I had no way to know that suspicion rested on me. If I
+took the necklace, it will still be among my things."
+
+"Don't get excited, Miss Alta, nobody has accused you of anything. We
+simply needed your valuable evidence. Why do you say Miss Campbell is a
+confederate to the thieving?"
+
+Fannie had gone farther than she intended, however, and she refused to
+give any more information. But the detective saw that when she was angry
+and frightened, she would talk, and after a pause, he said:
+
+"You perhaps know that you are the only person in the household on whom
+suspicion might rest."
+
+"I don't see why I should be suspected," she exclaimed hotly, "when Mary
+Price is already known to be a thief----"
+
+"Perhaps you have a grudge against Miss Price?"
+
+"I have not," she cried, stamping her foot.
+
+"Did no one ever suspect you of taking the things at the High School?
+You know that often happens--one girl is blamed for another's----"
+
+Fannie flew into a passion.
+
+"I tell you Billie Campbell and Mary Price are thieves. They have a
+whole box of valuable things they have stolen, stored away in Mrs.
+Price's safe."
+
+"What sort of things?"
+
+"Jewelry," burst out Fannie, then stopped and bit her lip. "But I may be
+mistaken about that," she added, trying to speak calmly.
+
+Mrs. St. Clair hurried into the room with the necklace in her hand.
+
+"Where did you find it?" asked Mr. Bangs.
+
+"I found it," she began, then paused. "It was found," she added. "You
+may go, Miss Alta. Thank you very much. And if you care to go back to
+town, Randolph will drive you in at once."
+
+When Fannie had left the room, the widow beat her hands together, and
+the tears rolled down her cheeks.
+
+"I found it in Mary Price's bag," she said. "And Miss Gray tells me that
+it is true. Mary has been suspected of stealing all autumn."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.--MARY BEFORE HER JUDGES.
+
+
+It was late when the young people returned from Mrs. Ruggles'. They were
+in gay spirits and Mrs. St. Clair could hear them talking and laughing
+in the hall, first the motorists and then the ones who had driven. She
+did not go down to meet them and they scattered to their rooms to wash
+their faces and smooth their wind-blown locks. There was no time to
+dress for supper.
+
+"I don't see how I can face them," she said to herself. "I'm so unhappy,
+and I'm afraid they will notice that I have been crying."
+
+But she bathed her temples in cold water, put on a cheery-colored silk
+dress, and went downstairs when the gong sounded for supper. Down
+trooped the boys and girls with sparkling eyes and glowing cheeks. The
+sound of their happy laughter reached her below and she pressed her hand
+to her heart and sighed deeply. Then her expression hardened:
+
+"Little wretch," she exclaimed. "She should be well punished, and she
+shall be, too."
+
+"'Soup of the evening, beautiful soup,'" sang Merry, dancing a jig in
+the hall:
+
+  "'Beautiful soup so rich and green,
+  Waiting in a hot tureen!'"
+  "'Who for such dainties would not stoop?
+  Soup of the evening, beautiful soup,'"
+
+continued Rosomond, seizing Merry's hands and whirling with him up and
+down the hall until they both fell in a laughing heap on the floor.
+
+"Oh, we have had such a good time," cried Billie and Mary together,
+taking each a hand of Mrs. St. Clair.
+
+"It has been such glorious fun," went on Billie, "and we are just as
+hungry for supper as if we hadn't eaten enough food to feed a regiment
+this afternoon."
+
+"And such fine food, too, Mrs. St. Clair," said Mary. "I think it was
+the most delightful party I have ever been to."
+
+"I am glad you were so happy," replied Mrs. St. Clair, making an effort
+to smile and succeeding very poorly.
+
+Mary, who was as sensitive to changes in manner as an aeolian harp is to
+the slightest breeze, looked at her hostess quickly and noticed the red
+rims on her eyelids.
+
+"Aren't you feeling well, dear Mrs. St. Clair?" she asked gently.
+
+Mrs. St. Clair put her hands on the girl's shoulders and looked into the
+clear dark eyes.
+
+"I am quite well, Mary. A little upset over something that happened
+to-day. That is all."
+
+"You mean the pearl necklace?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I am so sorry. I wish we could have found it for you."
+
+"It has been found, Mary," said the widow, turning her head away so as
+not to see Mary's face.
+
+"Oh, you did find it? I am so glad. Where was it?"
+
+"Supper is served, Mrs. St. Clair," said Randolph, opening the door to
+the dining room, where the others were already waiting.
+
+"We will talk about where it was found later," she said to Mary, who
+gave her a puzzled look, as she followed into the room.
+
+When supper was over, the boys and girls scattered about the various
+rooms. Roly Poly and Nancy got up charades. Billie curled up in a big
+easy chair by the fire. She had got most of the wind in her face and she
+was very sleepy. No one noticed, therefore, when Mrs. St. Clair, drawing
+Mary's hand through her arm, led her out of the room.
+
+"I want to see you upstairs, Mary," she said. "Will you come to my
+little private sitting room? There is something I wish to talk with you
+about."
+
+Mary was still wondering what in the world could be wanted of her, when
+Mrs. St. Clair drew her into a pretty little pink boudoir at the end of
+the hall. The door to the next room had been left open, but Mary did not
+notice a small, dapper man sitting there in a high-backed cretonne
+chair.
+
+The pearl necklace was lying on a table in the boudoir. Mrs. St. Clair
+picked it up and held it out to Mary.
+
+"Did you ever see it closely before, Mary?" she asked.
+
+"No, I never did," answered the girl, with enthusiasm. "How beautiful it
+is. No wonder you were so unhappy. But where did you find it?"
+
+"That is just why I brought you in here, Mary. I wanted to ask you if
+you could guess where the necklace had been found at last."
+
+Mary suddenly became very grave. She was beginning to notice now that
+Mrs. St. Clair was in an unusually serious frame of mind and that
+something must have happened concerning the necklace which the others
+had not heard.
+
+"I don't understand," she said, after a pause. "Why should I guess?"
+
+"Is it possible, Mary," exclaimed the widow, "that even after you were
+told I had found the necklace you were not just a little frightened, a
+little uneasy? Didn't you suspect when I asked you to come up here with
+me that I was going to speak to you about the necklace?"
+
+Mary looked at her in wonder for a few minutes. Then a light dawned on
+her.
+
+"It's Fannie Alta again," she said, in a low voice. "She must have put
+the necklace among some of my things."
+
+"Then you do know where I found the necklace?" cried the widow
+triumphantly.
+
+"I can guess," said Mary. "You found it in my suit case. It's the second
+time she's done something like that."
+
+"Mary, Mary--don't blame it on any one else. I did find the necklace in
+your valise----"
+
+Mary stood up. Her eyes were blazing and her small slender frame was
+shaken with emotion.
+
+"Do you mean to insinuate that I stole your pearl necklace?" she cried.
+
+Her words rang out in a high, clear tone that made the small man in the
+next room stir uneasily.
+
+"How else did the necklace get into your bag, Mary?"
+
+[Illustration: "Do you mean to insinuate that I stole your pearl
+necklace?"]
+
+"Fannie Alta put it there. She put twenty dollars into my pocket not
+long ago and tried to accuse me of taking that, and when I gave it back
+to her she hadn't a word to say."
+
+"But, Mary, Fannie is not your only accuser. Miss Gray tells me that you
+have been suspected of many thefts since school opened."
+
+"Oh, oh!" cried Mary. "How dare she? How dare any one? What have I done
+that these people should try to make me out a thief? Oh, mother,
+mother!"
+
+"That is just why I brought you up here to-night, Mary. On account of
+your sweet, lovely mother. I want you to make me a promise in return for
+what I am going to do for you. I promise not to push this matter any
+farther. It shall never reach your mother's ears. She will be spared all
+distress and misery, if you promise me never again, as long as you live,
+to steal. It was not nice of you, Mary, staying here as my guest, to
+steal from me. Will you make me that promise?"
+
+Mary did not reply. She sat down and clasped her hands in her lap. Once
+or twice her throat quivered with the little sob, which so went to
+Billie's heart. She pressed her hands together and closed her eyes for a
+moment. Her face was so pale that Mrs. St. Clair thought she was going
+to faint, but her lips were moving.
+
+"Oh, God, help me," she prayed softly. "Tell me what to say."
+
+Presently her agitation ceased altogether. She opened her eyes and
+looked calmly at the widow.
+
+"No, I will not promise you that, Mrs. St. Clair, because I have never
+stolen anything in my life. I would prefer that my mother should know
+about this. I don't wish to keep it from her. She would never believe me
+guilty, no matter what the evidence was against me, even if I had to go
+to jail. You say you found the necklace in my bag? How did you happen to
+look for it there?"
+
+"You see, I believed that Fannie Alta had taken it, and when we brought
+her into the living room and urged her to tell what she knew, she
+accused you. I would not believe it, however, until I had called up Miss
+Gray. It was only after that that I looked in your bag."
+
+Mary stood up.
+
+"I know that things look very black for me, Mrs. St. Clair. I don't
+understand why, but there is a conspiracy in the High School. It seems
+to have formed around Billie and me in particular. But there is
+something else, too. Something is going on in West Haven--something too
+big for us to understand. Billie and I are in it, and Fannie Alta is in
+it, and sometimes I think even Belle Rogers is, too. I don't know what
+it all means, or why it should have anything to do with making me a
+thief, but I am not a thief, and I did not put the necklace in my bag.
+Good-night. I will not see you again. As soon as morning comes, Billie
+and I will go back in the motor. I know she will take me if I ask her."
+
+Mary walked quietly out of the room.
+
+"That's a girl of fine spirit," thought Mr. Bangs. "The case is
+certainly interesting enough to keep me here another week."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.--MISS CAMPBELL WEARS BLACK.
+
+
+Mary went straight to her room that night and packed her bag. When
+Billie came up a little later she found her kneeling beside her bed, her
+face hidden in her hands. It seemed to the unhappy young girl in her
+misery and danger that no human power could aid her.
+
+When Billie heard the story, she was so angry with Mrs. St. Clair and
+Miss Gray and Fannie Alta that she took an imaginary aim and pitched
+both shoes across the room with all her force.
+
+"Oh, my dear, my dear," she cried, throwing her arms about her friend's
+neck with affectionate fervor, "you have at least one devoted friend who
+will stand by you through everything."
+
+Mary was touched by Billie's devotion and by and by the two girls
+dropped off to sleep in spite of their troubled hearts.
+
+But they were up and dressed before any one except the servants was
+stirring in the house. Randolph, greatly amazed, and imploring the young
+ladies to wait and take at least a cup of coffee, led the way to the
+carriage house where the motor had been left.
+
+"Tell Mrs. St. Clair," said Billie, "that I was called home early and
+will write to her."
+
+No one knew but the colored servant, and he did not understand, that
+Mary and Billie had refused to eat anything in a house where one of them
+had been called a thief.
+
+"Mary, tell your mother the whole story," said Billie, as she dropped
+her friend at "The Sign of the Blue Tea Pot." "Tell her not to be
+uneasy. Your friends know you are innocent and it is all obliged to come
+out right."
+
+Then she dashed around the Square, turned up Cliff Street, and stopped
+at the home of Miss Helen Campbell.
+
+"No, I haven't had breakfast," she said to the old man servant, who
+opened the door. "I'll eat with Cousin Helen if she hasn't breakfasted."
+
+"Miss Campbell will not eat any breakfast this morning, Miss Billie,"
+replied the butler.
+
+"Is she ill?"
+
+"No, Miss," the old man lowered his voice, "but she's wearing her black
+dress."
+
+Billie frowned.
+
+"Is it an anniversary?" she asked.
+
+"No, Miss. That's just the queer part. It ain't the anniversary. We know
+when that comes now. But something's happened."
+
+"Nothing to do with papa?" she asked anxiously.
+
+"No, no, Miss."
+
+"I'll have some breakfast, then," she said. "I'm very hungry from the
+ride in town."
+
+Billie ate a hurried but hearty meal alone.
+
+"I never can do anything when I'm empty," she often said, and
+instinctively she felt that trouble of some sort was brewing.
+
+After breakfast she tapped on her cousin's door.
+
+"Come in," came the tremulous answer, and Billie entered a darkened
+room.
+
+Miss Campbell, looking faded and pale and wearing a black crepe dress,
+was sitting alone at the far end of her apartment. Her hands were
+crossed on her breast like a medi�val saint's, and she looked the very
+picture of hopeless misery.
+
+"Dear Cousin Helen, what has happened?" cried Billie, running to the
+little lady and kneeling beside her chair. "Is it something very
+terrible?"
+
+Miss Campbell put her arm around the girl's neck and two tears slipped
+down her faded cheeks.
+
+"Billie, Billie, why have you deceived me so?" she exclaimed. "How could
+you have done this terrible thing? Oh, my dear, my dear, I have been so
+unhappy, and Mrs. Price, too. We have wept together."
+
+"What in the world?" cried Billie.
+
+"The jewels, my dear. The box of wonderful jewels that you have kept.
+How could you have done such a thing? I know many young girls who would
+have been tempted by them. But not you, my dear, dear Billie. And Mary,
+too. Oh, heavens, I am so unhappy!"
+
+Miss Campbell was so shaken by her sobs and weeping that Billie was
+obliged to wipe her eyes with her own handkerchief.
+
+"But, dearest Cousin," she said at last. "We haven't done anything
+dishonest, or that we might be ashamed of. How did you find out about
+the box and who told you such a slander about us?"
+
+After being bolstered up with aromatic nerve drops and eau de cologne,
+Miss Campbell was able to speak coherently.
+
+"Yesterday a man came here to see me. He sent up his name and the
+message that he wished to speak to me about something in regard to you,
+so I had him shown in. And then, my child, he told me such a story. How
+his motor car had been wrecked on the very day we went to Shell Island
+and a box of jewels belonging to his wife had fallen in the sand. He had
+good reason to know, he said, that you had found the jewels and, instead
+of trying to find the owner or answering advertisements and notes, had
+kept them all this time in Mrs. Price's safe. He gave me a list of the
+jewels and an exact description. I went at once to Mrs. Price. We found
+the combination, opened the safe, and got out the box. There they were,
+just as he had described them. Oh, my dear, what mortification! What
+will your father say?"
+
+"Did you give him the jewels?" exclaimed Billie, without waiting to make
+explanations until this important point was settled.
+
+"The man was very insistent. He has threatened to arrest you and Mary
+and even Mrs. Price. Think of that! For harboring stolen goods."
+
+"Did you give them to him?" cried Billie, impatiently.
+
+"No, Mrs. Price refused to let him have them until she had seen you and
+Mary. For my part, I should have given them to the man and let him go.
+We had a terrible scene with him, but Mrs. Price was firm. She said it
+would do no harm for him to wait until she had seen you and she would
+not allow him to take them."
+
+"Thank heavens for that," burst out Billie. "Then the box is in Mrs.
+Price's safe?"
+
+"No, I had it brought here for safe-keeping. The man was so angry he
+made threats and I thought it would be better to get it away from Mrs.
+Price's at least."
+
+"What was the man's name?"
+
+"Lafitte. He wrote it on a piece of paper."
+
+"Lafitte?" echoed Billie. "What did he look like?"
+
+"I cannot really recall, my dear. I was so agitated. But I think there
+was something wrong about one eye."
+
+"He had only one eye," Billie almost shrieked in her excitement.
+
+"I believe so, and only one arm. But you will see him. He will be back
+this morning."
+
+"Cousin Helen, he will never come back. He is a thief and a robber and a
+smuggler. He is everything that is wicked and bad. I don't know how he
+found out that we had the jewels, but he has been hot on our track ever
+since. I will tell you the real story of the jewels and then you will
+see what an injustice you have done us."
+
+When Billie had finished the strange tale, Miss Campbell looked at her
+with a peculiar expression.
+
+"It's a very remarkable story, my dear. And if I did not know you as
+well as I do, I could almost think you had imagined it. And I was there
+all the time. You should have confided in me. The woman was insane, I
+suppose."
+
+"She was not," insisted Billie. "She was perfectly sane and very
+beautiful. The man who calls himself 'Lafitte' is not the right person,
+and he shall not have the jewels until I hear from her or from the right
+Lafitte. You may be sure he will not dare have me or any one else
+arrested. We know too much about him already."
+
+"But what are we to do with the things, child? They have brought nothing
+but trouble on you since you have had them."
+
+"Suppose you put them in your safety box at the bank for a few days.
+There is something much more important than this at stake now. Mary has
+been accused of being a thief by Mrs. St. Clair and Miss Gray. It is a
+terrible thing. Mrs. St. Clair wouldn't listen to reason."
+
+Billie related to her cousin what had happened the day before and the
+chain of events which led up to it.
+
+"Oh, poor dear Mrs. Price! My unfortunate friend. What shall we do,
+Billie?" exclaimed the sympathetic little woman.
+
+"I don't know yet, Cousin Helen. The whole thing is too much for me, but
+I have a scheme. Are there any detectives in West Haven?"
+
+"Call up the police station," her cousin suggested, and presently
+Billie's voice could be heard in the hall:
+
+"Have you a good detective? Bangs, you say. Send him to Miss Campbell's
+please; upper Cliff Street, and the sooner the better. Good-by."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.--THE MISSING LINK.
+
+
+Mr. Bangs made three calls on that memorable Monday. The first was to
+Billie, as you already surmise. If he recognized the strong undercurrent
+which connected the strange adventures of the Motor Maids during the
+past two months, he said nothing, but listened gravely to the young
+girl's account of the happenings in Boulder Lane, the box of jewels, the
+cases of rifles at Seven League Island, and so on through the events
+which have been told in this history.
+
+When Billie had finished, she paused and waited for the detective to
+speak, but he sat silently twirling his thumbs and looking down at the
+floor with half-closed eyes.
+
+Billie was slightly irritated.
+
+"I have sent for you, Mr. Bangs," she continued with some dignity,
+"because, while I am certain of two things, I'm not at all sure of the
+third. The first is that Fannie Alta has some very good reason for
+trying to prove that Mary is a thief. The second is that this smuggler
+who has been trying to steal the jewels has something to do with it."
+
+"And what is the third, Miss Campbell?" asked the detective, smiling,
+without looking up.
+
+"That is what I want you to tell me," exclaimed Billie restlessly.
+"There is a third. It is the missing link. And it is what I wanted you
+to find out for me. I have thought and thought and puzzled and puzzled,
+but I can't make it out. I believe with all my soul that there is some
+wicked force back of the whole thing."
+
+Mr. Bangs raised his eyes at last and looked at the young girl with
+evident admiration.
+
+"You are taking the first step toward making a good detective, Miss
+Campbell," he said. "You have expressed it in three words. It is the
+missing link we need to get at in this business and it is what I must
+find."
+
+Billie flushed with pleasure at this professional praise. She had never
+had occasion to play the part of detective before. But devotion and
+loyalty to her friend had sharpened her wits.
+
+"Now, why?" asked the detective. "Isn't Miss Alta the missing link?"
+
+"That is the strangest part of the whole business. She is a piece of the
+link, I think, but then she has nothing against Mary and me. There would
+be no object to what she has done unless she had."
+
+"You did not know that she accused you of being the confederate of your
+friend or that she knew that you had the box of jewels hidden in the
+safe?"
+
+"What?" cried Billie, with amazement. "But how did she know----" she
+began.
+
+"Yes, how?"
+
+Billie sat looking down at her hands. She was not thinking of those
+slender, strong fingers, which appeared to clasp each other with a
+friendly grip. Her thoughts were busy going back over the past few
+weeks.
+
+"I think I've found the missing link," she said at last, with a serious
+look in her eyes, as she turned toward the detective. "Belle Rogers is
+the missing link. I can't understand why I haven't thought of it before,
+but it seemed so incredible."
+
+"Miss Campbell," put in Mr. Bangs severely, "I am afraid you are not
+such a good detective, after all. You have left out one of the most
+important things. You did not tell me that some one besides your three
+friends knew about the jewels."
+
+Billie had omitted the story of the confusion of the two suit cases at
+Shell Island. She had really quite forgotten it and Mr. Bangs chuckled
+with amusement when he heard how Belle had opened and examined all the
+contents of another girl's suit case out of pure curiosity.
+
+"Then she must have read the name on the card, too," he said presently.
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+"Now, tell me, Miss Campbell, what is the grudge which this young lady
+perhaps has against you and your friends?"
+
+"Oh, it's only a silly schoolgirl affair," replied Billie. "I am ashamed
+to tell you, because it seems so utterly trivial in comparison to other
+things. She was angry because I wouldn't join her club and because we
+saw her the night of the fire with her hair up in rubber curlers."
+
+The detective laughed outright.
+
+"That's a woman's reason for taking revenge," he said.
+
+"And she was angry again because I took her into the wrong room, when
+the hotel was burning and we had to escape over the roof."
+
+"Humph!" exclaimed the detective. "Insult piled onto injury, eh? So this
+Miss Rogers is a very vindictive character?"
+
+Billie hesitated. It went against her straight-forward, honest nature to
+malign even Belle Rogers.
+
+"She has been spoiled all her life," she said, "and you know how spoiled
+children must have their own way. That is all. She was angry because she
+planned to make me a member of her club and queen it over me as she does
+over the others, and I disappointed her. Her mother and friends have
+taken good care always that she should never be disappointed and she
+just didn't know what the feeling was, I suppose."
+
+"She must be quite a remarkably spoiled young woman to go to such
+lengths for such a trivial offence. But we sometimes get in deeper than
+we intend, you know."
+
+The detective rose to go.
+
+"Good day, Miss Campbell," he said, giving her hand quite a warm grip,
+considering what a quiet, cold individual he had seemed at first. "You
+will hear from me again, soon. I had not intended to work when I came
+down here. You know I am a West Haven boy. My father was old Bill Bangs,
+the jailer. You probably have heard of him. He was a famous character in
+his day. I came home to rest and see my people, but when a detective
+scents a good case he is not apt to let it slip by, even on a holiday."
+
+"And you think this is a good case?"
+
+"It's a corking one," he replied, as he closed the door after him.
+
+Billie and Mary did not go to school that famous Monday. Billie had no
+mind to face the curious looks she felt certain would be turned upon her
+by the other girls, because news travels quickly in any school. Mary was
+lying on her mother's bed with a throbbing sick headache. All day Mrs.
+Price sat beside her daughter and held her hand. At intervals she bathed
+her temples with eau de cologne and whispered:
+
+"My dearest, it will come out all right. Mother loves you and believes
+in you and so does Billie. Don't sob like that for my sake, my little
+girl."
+
+Belle Rogers also stayed at home that Monday. Mr. Bangs discovered this
+fact on his second visit of the day when he was closeted for an hour or
+more with Miss Gray and Mrs. St. Clair in the principal's private
+office.
+
+After a tiresome interview with these two well meaning but mistaken
+ladies, in which he said little and they said much, he left the High
+School with a sigh of relief.
+
+Presently he found himself in the fashionable district of West Haven. It
+was the second time he had climbed the street that day, but he was a
+calm little person, not easily heated by emotion or exercise, and when
+he rang the bell at the Rogers home, there was just the suspicion of a
+smile on his face. He sent up his card for Miss Rogers and word was
+brought back that Miss Rogers was ill and not to be seen. Then, with a
+pencil, he wrote across the face of the card, "Lafitte--Paris."
+
+In three minutes the swish of skirts down the steps announced that some
+one was coming.
+
+"I hope it's not the mother," he said to himself.
+
+But it was Belle, very pale, with violet circles around her eyes and a
+nervous quivering about the lips.
+
+When Mr. Bangs left the Rogers house after spending three-quarters of an
+hour with Belle, he remarked as he strolled down the gravel driveway to
+the street:
+
+"It will have to be an out and out confession from one or the other. If
+this one doesn't give it, the Alta girl must. I shall pay my respects to
+Mme. Alta this evening."
+
+He had hardly passed through the great iron gateway leading into the
+street, when Belle, wearing a heavy veil and a long ulster, hurried
+after him. She carried a music roll under her arm, although she was not
+taking lessons, since she had been injured in the fire, but it was
+understood by the servant who opened the door for her that she was going
+to see Mme. Alta.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.--THE REFUGEES.
+
+
+A ship had sailed into the little harbor of West Haven on Monday
+morning. She carried a load of lumber from down the coast and after
+showing her clearance papers and discharging her cargo with all due
+formality, she hoisted sails again and moved around the curve of the
+harbor into a deep inlet, where she rested at anchor in a position just
+opposite Boulder Lane.
+
+Darkness fell very early that Monday afternoon as those who were not in
+their homes will remember.
+
+Mr. Bangs will recall the inky blackness of the lowering sky, as he came
+out of the telegraph office, where he had wired to his chief to send
+down another man, and turned his steps toward the rooms occupied by Mme.
+Alta.
+
+Our Motor Maids have not forgotten how they sped back to town after a
+swift ride in their beloved "Comet," in the late afternoon, when they
+discussed the situation long and earnestly.
+
+Three figures turned into Boulder Lane as the motor car flashed past,
+but the girls were too intent on their conversation to notice them. The
+first, who was a tall, stout woman, walked stoically along with the
+tread of a grenadier. She carried a large suit case with one hand and an
+enormous bundle with the other. Her two upper teeth protruding over her
+lower lip gave her that strange animal look which Billie had disliked so
+much. For it was Mme. Alta, as you have no doubt guessed, trudging up
+Boulder Lane. Her daughter, Francesca, walked behind. She also carried a
+suit case and a bundle. Occasionally she flashed a look of hatred back
+to the lights of West Haven, which place she had never loved.
+
+Can this be Belle Rogers who brings up the procession, staggering under
+a heavy satchel and moaning and weeping as she stumbles along?
+
+"I am glad I left word that I had gone out to spend the night," she said
+to herself. "At least, they won't know it for a while, and it will be
+too late then."
+
+It was a long walk before they reached the end of Boulder Lane and found
+themselves on the beach of the little cove. The lights of the ship made
+a rippling, cheerful track on the water, but Belle shivered when she saw
+the black hull outlined in the darkness.
+
+Several men were waiting for them near a boat, which had been moored on
+the beach, and presently the three women climbed in; their luggage was
+piled at one end and they were rowed away in the darkness. Two wagons
+came lumbering up the beach, and half the night, Belle, who was tossing
+feverishly in her stuffy berth, trying to stifle her sobs, heard the
+sailors loading a cargo, while the boats plied back and forth from the
+shore to the ship.
+
+There was no wind that night and an ominous silence seemed to brood over
+the sea. At last in the stillness, Belle slept. Toward morning she was
+awakened by the sound of a voice. A man in a small boat just below her
+porthole was calling up to some one on deck.
+
+"Hello, Captain, it's Ruiz. I'm coming aboard. We must sail by dawn.
+They've got word about us. If that girl has turned traitor, she shall
+pay for it."
+
+Belle could not hear the captain's reply, but he must have made some
+objection to sailing that morning, for the man named Ruiz answered:
+
+"Storm or no storm, I'm master here, and I say we sail at once."
+
+And sail they did without more argument. She could hear the sailors
+running about the ship. The masts creaked and groaned. Chains rattled.
+Presently the boat was in motion, and from her porthole she saw the
+familiar shores glide past her.
+
+We cannot help pitying poor Belle in her misery and distress. She
+dragged herself from her berth--Fannie was still sleeping soundly--and
+put on her clothes. For the first time, she became aware of a sustained
+and ever-increasing sound. What she had mistaken in the beginning for
+the eternal noise of the waters, she recognized now as the wind. As she
+cast one long regretful look back to the shores of West Haven, which she
+had never really loved until now, the hurricane burst upon them with a
+roar like a thousand angry beasts. The ship went scurrying through the
+harbor entrance in the teeth of the gale.
+
+Belle hurried upstairs to the deck, pulling on her ulster as she ran.
+Not a vestige of curl had the wet air left in her light gold hair; but
+for the first time in her life, since she had been old enough to
+remember, she had forgotten that she had any hair and she did not even
+stop to push back the damp, uneven locks from her eyes.
+
+The boat had cleared the Black Reefs and was making for the open sea,
+when suddenly the demon wind played a trick on the captain of the little
+schooner and changed its tack. Down went the mainmast with a great
+crash. Through the shrieking of the wind, Belle could hear the curses
+and cries of the sailors and the yells of the captain. Mme. Alta
+appeared, looking more than ever like a walrus, in her greasy old black
+dressing gown. Fannie ran up behind her, making a great outcry.
+
+The hurricane seemed to lift the ship in its arms and carry it along.
+Then, with a hideous grinding noise, the vessel stood perfectly still.
+
+Some one screamed:
+
+"We're on the rocks!"
+
+And Belle knew without being told that they had tossed onto the Black
+Reefs.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Wake up, Billie," cried Nancy, shaking her friend's shoulder violently.
+"Get up and dress. We are all waiting below."
+
+"What's happened?" asked Billie, sitting up in bed and rubbing her eyes.
+
+"A ship is wrecked on the Black Reefs."
+
+Billie leaped from her bed and began to dress hurriedly.
+
+"It must be a fearful sight," she exclaimed, as she pulled on her
+clothes. "The poor sailors, will they be saved?"
+
+"I haven't heard," answered Nancy, "but the whole town is rushing up the
+Cliff Road."
+
+"Tell Ben to get 'The Comet.' He can run it as well as I can now."
+
+"He has," answered Nancy, with the privilege of friendship. "I made him
+get it while I routed you out."
+
+In another five minutes "The Comet," with its load of boys and
+girls,--only Mary and Percy were missing,--was climbing Cliff Road in a
+driving hurricane of wind.
+
+A straggling line of people hurried along the path toward the
+Life-Saving Station.
+
+"Is that it?" demanded Billie breathlessly, when the car had come to a
+standstill opposite the light house.
+
+"Yes," replied Merry, looking through the glasses. "She doesn't look
+much larger than a fishing smack from this distance, but she's really a
+pretty big schooner and she's in a bad fix, too. She has stuck right on
+the Serpent's Fang, Ben. You remember that old fisherman showed it to us
+last summer when we were sailing? It's a pointed rock that sticks up
+higher than the others and it looked to be a pretty fierce proposition
+to me."
+
+"The life-boat is being launched!" exclaimed Elinor.
+
+They clutched each other in their excitement, while a boat, with six
+brave life-savers in it, leapt onto the crest of a big wave, only to be
+hurled back again.
+
+"They'll have to use the gun," put in Charlie. "They'll never make it in
+this sea."
+
+"What do you mean?" shouted Billie. It was almost impossible to be heard
+now above the noise of the wind.
+
+But before any one could shout back an explanation, her attention was
+claimed by a man in a long, thick ulster, buttoned to his chin, and a
+vizored cap pulled well over his eyes. He had come to the front of the
+motor car and, bowing to Billie politely, he stood on tiptoe and
+beckoned to her to lean down.
+
+"You'll be surprised to hear that you have friends on that ship," he
+said in her ear, and she recognized Mr. Bangs.
+
+"Friends?" she repeated, in amazement.
+
+"Wait and see," he replied, as he moved away to join another man, who
+was leaning against a tree smoking a cigar.
+
+"Look!" cried some one, and just as Billie shifted her gaze from the
+ship to the beach she saw a long black line shoot out over the water and
+light on the deck of the ship. It was very confusing then, what
+happened. There was a great deal of shouting on shore and scurrying of
+sailors on the ship. Presently there seemed to be a double line of rope
+stretching out to the wreck.
+
+After a long pause, Billie saw, creeping along one of the lines of rope,
+swaying and swinging almost to sea level, an object which appeared to be
+shaped like a pair of clumsy trouser legs with the head and shoulders of
+a human being above.
+
+"It's a woman," cried Nancy, jumping up and down in her excitement, as
+she looked through the glasses. "It's--it's----"
+
+"It's Mme. Alta," exclaimed Billie, as the woman was lifted onto the
+beach.
+
+No one could explain why the music teacher should be found on a wrecked
+schooner, but Mr. Bangs and Billie exchanged meaning glances as Mme.
+Alta was supported into the Life-Saving Station.
+
+The next time the buoy was drawn into shore it carried Fannie Alta, a
+shivering, wretched little figure, who followed her mother silently into
+the life-savers' house.
+
+"Who can the third one be?" said Billie out loud, although she was
+speaking to herself. "Can it be----"
+
+She jumped out of the car and ran down the path to the beach, followed
+by her three chums. As she passed Mr. Bangs, he caught her by the arm
+and said in her ear:
+
+"The missing link."
+
+No one but Billie and Mr. Bangs recognized Belle Rogers in the miserable
+object which now crawled out of the breeches buoy. Her face was blue and
+pinched with cold. Her damp hair hung in her eyes, and she moaned and
+sobbed most pitifully.
+
+When she saw Billie, she flung her wet arms around the young girl's
+neck.
+
+"Oh, forgive me! Forgive me!" she wept.
+
+A crowd of people gathered around them.
+
+Billie patted her on the shoulder.
+
+"I do forgive you," she whispered, "and if you would rather not go into
+the station, we will take you home in 'The Comet.'"
+
+"Any place but home," sobbed Belle, as Ben threw his ulster around her
+shivering shoulders and Nancy wrapped a scarf about her head.
+
+The others had now recognized the poor girl, and with a generous impulse
+they tried to shield her from the gaze of the villagers.
+
+"Will you go to Cousin Helen's, then?" asked Belle, as they half carried
+her up the steep path.
+
+"Yes," she answered, and in another ten minutes the miserable refugee
+was being tenderly ministered to at Billie's home by three of the most
+detested members of the Blue Bird Society.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.--BELLE'S CONFESSION.
+
+
+Belle, looking still very unlike herself, lay in Billie's little brass
+bed, propped up on pillows.
+
+"How can you and Miss Campbell be so kind to me," she was saying, "when
+you know how wicked I have been?"
+
+"But you are sorry and that means everything," answered Billie, who was
+sitting on the side of the bed, feeding her hot beef tea.
+
+"When are the others coming?" asked the invalid.
+
+"They have come. I was just going to tell you after you had finished the
+tea. Shall I call them?"
+
+Belle nodded, and presently Miss Gray and Mary Price came into the room.
+
+The Principal took the sick girl's hand kindly.
+
+"Speak out from the heart, Belle," she said, "and don't be afraid. You
+will be much happier when you get it off your mind."
+
+"I promise to, Miss Gray," replied Belle meekly, gazing miserably at
+Mary, who looked pale and ill.
+
+Miss Gray sat in a judicial looking armchair; Mary, with closed eyes,
+lay on a lounge near the fire, and Billie seated herself on the foot of
+the bed.
+
+"I suppose," began Belle, "it would be almost impossible for you to
+believe that a well brought up girl of decent family could be as wicked
+as I have been. When I finally realized what I had done I thought I
+would rather run away to South America with those terrible people than
+stay here and bear the shame of it all. But I thank heavens for the
+storm. The ship was not sailing for any good purpose. I feel sure of
+that.
+
+"To begin at the beginning, perhaps you didn't know how angry I was when
+you joined the Blue Birds, Billie? I hope I shall never be angry again.
+I was ill from it and I lay on my bed all afternoon planning a revenge
+on all the Blue Birds, but you, especially. I think I must have been
+insane with rage and mortification. I wanted to humiliate you, because I
+thought you had humiliated me before the whole school. I thought of
+dozens of ways of doing it, but the only plan that seemed good enough
+was to prove----"
+
+She paused and bit her lip.
+
+"To prove that you were--a--thief."
+
+There was a long silence. Nothing could be heard but the ticking of the
+little French clock on the mantel. Miss Gray had started and flushed
+crimson. She was only just now realizing what this confession must mean
+to the two girls.
+
+"I asked Fannie Alta to help me because she was the only outsider in the
+class, but I never dreamed that she was a real thief, herself. She found
+out what it was I wanted her to do almost before I had half breathed it
+to myself, only she was afraid of Billie and put it on Mary. It was my
+twenty dollars she used, but we found the scheme didn't work. Anyhow,
+she told it all over school and went so much farther than I had intended
+that I soon found myself too deeply involved to get out. She and her
+mother owned me, body and soul. I had to take Fannie with me everywhere
+I went, even to Mrs. St. Clair's. I had to give her my clothes, and
+explain to mamma that she was my best friend. Her mother made me carry
+letters and messages back and forth. Once I had to go by myself all the
+way to Boulder Lane after dusk and meet a horrible creature who had only
+one eye and one arm. He gave me a letter for Mme. Alta. Another time I
+was to meet one of them, a man who helped him, up in the Sophomore class
+room of the High School. I didn't go, because there was such a mist."
+
+Billie and Mary exchanged glances.
+
+"He was the man who robbed us of the fifty dollars," said Billie.
+
+"Then whose fifty dollars was it I got?" demanded Miss Gray.
+
+"My monthly allowance," replied Billie.
+
+"Foolish, foolish girls," said the Principal. "But it was my own fault.
+I blame no one else, and perhaps I wouldn't have believed the story just
+at that time."
+
+"Then," continued Belle, "the most dreadful thing of all happened. These
+people were always in need of money. Everything they had seemed to go to
+some object. The one-eyed man, who was Fannie's stepfather, was to get
+some high position in South America. She used to tell me what she was
+going to do when he was made Vice President, or something. When we went
+to the St. Clair's, Fannie was almost unbearable. She made me give her
+my dress and I had to wear hers, and she insulted me at every turn. But
+I didn't find out until after the party that her stepfather had been
+there dressed as a ghost. He wanted to rob Mrs. St. Clair. It was Fannie
+who took the necklace. She was to go back later and give it to him, so
+that if her bag was searched the next morning, when the necklace was
+missed, it wouldn't be found. But she made me go back instead, after
+every one else was asleep, I supposed. It was terrible, when I found
+myself alone in the attic, with the necklace hidden under my wrapper. No
+one was there. The man must have been frightened and run away. Then I
+heard all of you come and I threw a sheet over me and hid in a far
+corner."
+
+"It _was_ you, then?" exclaimed Billie.
+
+"Yes, and when I met you and Mary I had the necklace with me and I
+didn't think I had strength enough to get to my room. When we got home
+from Mrs. Ruggles' next day and I found Fannie had been sent to town, I
+knew something had happened. I thought perhaps she might have taken the
+necklace with her, but the next morning, when you and Mary left before
+breakfast, I was certain that one of you had been accused.
+
+"You never can understand how I suffered. And yet it was what I had
+planned when I was so angry. Late Monday afternoon Mr. Bangs, a
+detective, came to see me. He wrote across his card 'Pierre Lafitte,'
+and I was convinced then that he knew everything."
+
+"You did tell Fannie about the card that was in the box of jewels,
+then?"
+
+Belle hung her head.
+
+"Yes," she said, at last. "In the very beginning, before I had learned
+to loathe her and myself so, I told it to Fannie.
+
+"After Mr. Bangs had left," she went on, "I hurried as fast as I could
+to Mme. Alta's lodgings and told her that everything had been
+discovered. The husband came in while I was there and ordered her to
+leave at once. The ship was in the harbor, he said. I was ordered to go,
+too, and it really did seem best. I felt I should be disgraced if I
+stayed and I was too miserable to reason much, anyway. They were glad to
+go. They hated it here, and they were afraid to leave me, I suppose, for
+fear I would tell. Ever since they were almost caught in Smugglers'
+Cave, they have been very careful.
+
+"I have made a great many people suffer," Belle went on, "Mary and
+Billie and Mrs. Price and Mrs. St. Clair, and I have suffered, too,
+perhaps more than any of you. But I have learned a great deal. I never
+knew before what a wicked, spoiled girl I was. Mamma and papa never
+denied me anything in my life. I have been indulged and petted until I
+have been nothing but a bundle of selfishness. When the ship was wrecked
+and we thought we were going to sink any minute the scales dropped
+entirely from my eyes and I saw myself as I really was. I knelt on the
+deck and prayed and prayed for forgiveness until they came and told me
+it was my turn to be taken to shore.
+
+"You will forgive me, won't you Mary? I will do everything I can to make
+up for the trouble and unhappiness I have caused you."
+
+Belle stretched out her arms toward Mary and tears flowed down her
+cheeks and splashed on the coverlid.
+
+Miss Gray wiped her eyes and Billie's face worked convulsively for a
+moment and she choked back a lump which would rise in her throat on
+occasions.
+
+Mary came over and took Belle's hands.
+
+"Of course I forgive you, Belle," she said, kissing the repentant girl
+on the lips.
+
+"But I must ask your forgiveness, too, Mary," cried Miss Gray. "I feel I
+am not fit to be the principal of the High School to have so misjudged
+you. It was only the strange way you acted about the fifty dollars which
+made me credit for a moment the stories that were told."
+
+When peace was entirely restored, Miss Gray took her departure. She did
+not return to the High School, but hurried to the livery stable, where
+she ordered a carriage and had herself driven straight to Mrs. St.
+Clair's.
+
+As Belle will not again appear in this story, you will perhaps be
+interested to know how sincere her reformation really was. Her mother
+and father scarcely recognized the pale, quiet girl who returned to them
+in another day. Her entire nature had been shaken by the experience, and
+for some time she was dazed and silent. But no one ever saw her angry
+again, and as if she wished to give some visible sign of her repentance,
+the red rubber curlers were thrown away and from that time she has worn
+her hair straight.
+
+There was no evidence against Mme. Alta or Fannie, except what Belle
+Rogers could furnish, and they were finally allowed to go free. But they
+were not permitted to remain in quiet West Haven, where suspicious
+characters were not welcomed.
+
+The police cared little for the music teacher and her daughter. The
+prize they looked for was Ruiz, the famous filibuster and desperado who
+had smuggled hundreds of rifles into Venezuela and had robbed and
+pillaged and even killed, but had never been caught.
+
+Detective Bangs, standing on the shore, the day of the shipwreck,
+scanned eagerly the face of each sailor as he was drawn ashore. But Ruiz
+was not among them. It was supposed that he preferred death to arrest;
+for he remained on the sinking ship. But the sturdy little vessel clung
+desperately to the Serpent's Fang until after sunset, and there are some
+who believe that Ruiz swam ashore with his one arm, which was as strong
+as iron, and is still at large somewhere working mischief and
+misfortune.
+
+On the day after the departure of Mme. Alta and Fannie, Miss Gray called
+a meeting of the Faculty and pupils of West Haven High School. Mary
+Price was there and so was Billie, and in the gallery sat Mrs. Price
+between Mrs. St. Clair and Miss Campbell.
+
+"I called this meeting," said Miss Gray, "because I wanted to make an
+announcement to all of you at once, since the subject of the
+announcement concerns us all. We have recently had a very clever thief
+in our midst. She has robbed many of you and has brought unjust
+suspicion on some innocent persons by spreading reports. This girl has
+been dismissed from the school and from West Haven. She will never
+trouble us again.
+
+"Some of us have suffered deeply for the last few weeks on account of
+this disgrace and scandal in the school, and I don't mind confessing
+that I have been one of those persons. I know that you will all rejoice
+with me that the affair is concluded.
+
+"I want to say further, that at a specially called meeting, the Board of
+Education has consented to add a new post to the school force. This
+position, which is that of private and confidential secretary to the
+principal and has a salary attached, is to be filled by Miss Mary Price.
+I hope you will all congratulate me on my good fortune in obtaining so
+competent and reliable an assistant."
+
+There was wild applause when this announcement was made and Mary,
+smiling and happy, with her three devoted friends about her, was obliged
+to rise and bow her blushing acknowledgments to her schoolmates.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.--OUT OF THE MISTS.
+
+
+The Motor Maids were gathered in Mrs. Brown's sunny parlor around a
+cheerful driftwood fire. You may easily guess it was Saturday morning,
+because Nancy was darning stockings, Elinor was at the piano, Mary was
+reading, while Billie lay flat on her back on the hearth rug, her hands
+crossed under her head, thinking deeply.
+
+"I wish people were not so careless of their diamond necklaces and
+things," she observed, addressing the ceiling with some irritation.
+"Throwing them around in motor cars, giving them to the first person who
+comes along, and not caring to have them returned! It's a nuisance----"
+
+Suddenly the door was thrown violently open and Merry appeared.
+
+"Mrs. Ruggles," he announced, making a low bow.
+
+Nancy did not take the trouble to turn around. Elinor went on playing
+and Mary reading. It was only one of Merry's jokes, they thought. But
+Billie jumped up in amazement; for there actually stood Mrs. Ruggles in
+the flesh--very much in the flesh, in fact. She was dressed in decent
+black and wore a black bonnet, and Billie could not decide whether she
+resembled a queen disguised as a fish-wife or a fish-wife dressed as a
+lady.
+
+"Why, it is Mrs. Ruggles," cried Nancy, glancing over her shoulder.
+"Merry plays so many jokes that we can never tell when he is in earnest
+and when he isn't. Do come in, Mrs. Ruggles. What brings you up to town
+so early?"
+
+Mrs. Ruggles, who was slow of speech, did not reply at first. She moved
+into the room with the step of a grenadier and stood before Billie.
+
+"Are you Miss Wilhelmina Campbell?" she asked.
+
+"She is the same," put in Merry, "but she'll answer to the name of
+Billie."
+
+Billie nodded and smiled. She was really too much engaged in admiring
+Mrs. Ruggles to reply to her question.
+
+Nancy pushed up an armchair.
+
+"Please sit down, Mrs. Ruggles, and perhaps you will have a cookie or a
+cup of tea."
+
+"No, Miss Nancy, I am not hungry and I couldn't eat anyway, until I
+finished what I have to say."
+
+"That's right, Mrs. Ruggles. Get it off your system. Are you going to
+scold Billie?" cried Merry.
+
+"No, my boy. I'm going to thank her. She's a fine young lady. I have
+just seen Miss Campbell and she has told me."
+
+"Told you what?" asked Billie.
+
+"Told me that you have kept the box of jewels as you promised."
+
+"But----" began Billie, a dozen thoughts flashing through her mind at
+once in tumultuous confusion.
+
+She saw again the face of the sick woman at Mrs. Ruggles', her long hair
+spread over the pillow like a mantel of black and the troubled dark eyes
+which gazed into hers for one brief moment.
+
+"Then that was the automobile lady I saw in your bedroom?" she burst
+out.
+
+"Yes," replied the old woman. "That was my daughter, Maria."
+
+"Is Maria home again?" asked Elinor.
+
+"I thought she had married a South American," said Nancy.
+
+"Maria is now a singer," said Mrs. Ruggles proudly. "She has sung in
+Buenos Ayres and Paris, not in this country. Her husband was from
+Venezuela. He was very rich and he gave her many jewels. He loved her
+dearly for a few years, until he began to like something else better."
+
+The old woman paused. It was extremely difficult for her to speak at
+such great length when she was so unaccustomed to talking at all.
+
+"My daughter is very beautiful and very clever. She will be a great
+singer. He was jealous of her singing. He wished to be great, too, and
+he became a politician. Gradually he spent all of his money in making
+trouble for the government of his country. He wished to bring about a
+war and make himself a ruler. My son, my daughter's step brother, pushed
+him on. He was a bad boy, my only son. It is better that he should be
+dead. He was always in the thick of the fight. He couldn't keep away.
+His arm was shot off; his eye put out. But nothing could stop him."
+
+"Was Ruiz really your son, John, who went away to sea so many years
+ago?" interrupted Nancy.
+
+Mrs. Ruggles nodded.
+
+"What happened next, Mrs. Ruggles?" demanded Billie.
+
+"The next thing was that my Maria could not stand the life any longer.
+She came back to America with her jewels. They were all that was left of
+her husband's fortune and those he wanted so much that he threatened her
+many times. If he had wished to use them for a good purpose and not for
+rifles to kill innocent people, Maria would have given them gladly. But
+he was too clever for her, that man. He followed on a fast steamer and
+caught up with her before she could get to me. He forced her to go with
+him in an automobile down the Shell Island road to meet John, my poor
+son, who was to take the jewels and sell them. Maria always carried her
+jewelry in a secret pocket inside of her skirt, but she had put it in a
+box that day and wrapped the box in her coat. Her husband did not know
+this. He thought she had it in the usual place. When they were upset
+going around a curve in the road my Maria was very seriously injured.
+She is still very lame. Her husband went away to get another car and you
+know the rest.
+
+"When they found out in a few hours that she did not have the jewels
+they were very angry. She told them the truth: that she had given them
+to a young lady she had met, and asked her to take care of them.
+Although she did not have the name or address of this young lady, she
+knew they would be safe."
+
+"And Mr. Lafitte?" began Billie.
+
+"He is an old friend, a lawyer who lives in Paris. She happened to have
+his card in her pocket. But he had just started to America and the
+letter she wrote, and your letter, came back here. That is how I
+happened to get your name at last, Miss Wilhelmina. Mr. Lafitte was with
+my daughter yesterday."
+
+"And what became of your son-in-law, Mrs. Ruggles?" asked Elinor.
+
+"He died some weeks ago," replied Mrs. Ruggles. "He was accidentally
+shot with one of his own rifles, which exploded and killed him. My son
+had his body sent to us and we laid him to rest in the old Sabater
+burying ground, where all my family is buried. It is better that he
+should have died. He only made trouble while he lived, not only for poor
+Maria, but for his country, where many have been killed with the rifles
+he has smuggled in. He was a good man until he got in with those
+revolutionists. And my poor son, my poor John, how much sorrow he has
+brought us----"
+
+Billie wondered if Mrs. Ruggles really knew the extent of her poor son's
+evil career. Perhaps she did, for the old woman's face twitched
+nervously for a moment and she covered her eyes with her hand, as if she
+wished to hide her unhappiness from the young girls.
+
+"Maria and I are going away for a long time," she went on at last, with
+a rather shaky voice. "I will close the Inn. It is hard for me to leave
+home in my old age, but Maria wishes it, and it is better for me to be
+with her. Good-by and thank you," she said simply, rising and taking
+Billie's hand.
+
+Billie stood on tiptoe and put her arms around Mrs. Ruggles' neck.
+
+"Good-by, Mrs. Ruggles," she said. "I hope that your troubles are all
+over now and you and your daughter will be happy together."
+
+The old woman wiped her eyes. She could not speak when she said good-by
+to the other girls, but silently handed Billie a little package and
+hurried away.
+
+The package, when unwrapped, proved to be a small box containing a
+pretty gold filigree necklace. Written on a card inside was this
+message:
+
+"With my love and gratitude. This is a simple little necklace my father
+brought me once from a voyage to the East. I am fond of it and that is
+why I send it to you. Will you wear it sometimes and think of me? I
+shall never forget your kindness and loyalty.
+
+"Maria Ruggles Cortina."
+
+And now we have reached the end of our tale. Those troublous first
+months of Billie Campbell's early school days in West Haven are changed
+into happy, quiet times, with plenty of study and plenty of play. All
+doubts and mysteries are cleared up, and the Motor Maids, wholesome,
+nice girls, are none the worse for their adventures.
+
+It is in their beloved "Comet" that we see them last, flashing down Main
+Street toward the open country.
+
+Billie, like the good pilot she is, is seated at the wheel, her fine
+gray eyes ever on the lookout. Nancy is bubbling over with laughter and
+gaiety. Elinor, on the back seat, holds herself as proudly as a queen,
+and little Mary, with a grave smile on her face, looks out across the
+fields, her clear eyes, deep as pools, holding and reflecting, as ever,
+the beauty from without intensified by the purity of the spirit within.
+
+The friendship of these four school girls was of the quality that
+outlives a single season and many adventures. It held them together, in
+fact, so closely that they often found themselves planning for an
+indefinite future of partnership and mutual pleasures. That they
+realized their anticipations to some extent at least is assured, for the
+next volume of this series, "The Motor Maids by Palm and Pine," is a
+further account of their good times together.
+
+                                THE END.
+
+
+
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+End of Project Gutenberg's The Motor Maids' School Days, by Katherine Stokes
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diff --git a/37434-8.zip b/37434-8.zip
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+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" >
+<head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
+    <meta content="The Motor Maids’ School Days" name="DC.Title"/>
+    <meta content="Katherine Stokes" name="DC.Creator"/>
+    <meta content="en" name="DC.Language"/>
+    <meta content="1911" name="DC.Created"/>
+    <meta name="generator" content="ppgen (1.21) generated Sep 13, 2011 07:56 AM" />
+    <title>The Motor Maids’ School Days</title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+        body                    {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%;}
+        p                       {margin-top:1ex; margin-bottom:0; text-align:justify;}
+        .pagenum                {display:inline; font-size:x-small; text-align:right; text-indent:0;
+                                 position:absolute; right:2%; padding:1px 3px; font-style:normal;
+                                 font-variant:normal; font-weight:normal; text-decoration:none;
+                                 background-color:inherit; border:1px solid #eee;}
+        .pncolor                {color:silver;}
+        h1                      {text-align:center; font-weight:normal;
+                                 font-size:1.4em; margin-top:4em; margin-bottom:2em;}
+        h2                      {text-align:left; font-weight:normal;
+                                 font-size:1.2em; margin-top:4em; margin-bottom:2em;}
+        h3                      {text-align:center; font-weight:bold;
+                                 font-size:0.9em; margin-top:1.5em; margin-bottom:1em;}
+        hr.pb                   {margin:30px 0; width:100%; border:none; border-top:thin dashed silver; clear:both;}
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+        .larger                 {font-size:larger;}
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+        .figcenter              {margin: auto; text-align: center;}
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+        .caption                {font-size: 80%;}
+        .sc                     {font-variant:small-caps}
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Motor Maids' School Days, by Katherine Stokes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Motor Maids' School Days
+
+Author: Katherine Stokes
+
+Release Date: September 15, 2011 [EBook #37434]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MOTOR MAIDS' SCHOOL DAYS ***
+
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+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
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+produced from images generously made available by Cornell
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+</pre>
+
+<div class='figcenter' style='padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em'>
+<a name='i001' id='i001'></a>
+<img src='images/illus-cvr.jpg' alt='' title=''/><br />
+</div>
+<p>
+&#160;<br />
+&#160;<br />
+&#160;<br />
+</p>
+<div class='figcenter' style='padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em'>
+<a name='i002' id='i002'></a>
+<img src="images/illus-fpc.jpg" alt="“You will simply be an outcast in West Haven, and I advise you to think the matter over.”" title=""/><br />
+<span class='caption'>“You will simply be an outcast in West Haven,<br/>and I advise you to think the matter over.”</span>
+</div>
+<p>
+&#160;<br />
+&#160;<br />
+&#160;<br />
+</p>
+<div class='center'>
+<p><span style='font-size:1.6em;font-weight:bold;'>THE MOTOR MAIDS’</span></p>
+<p><span style='font-size:1.6em;font-weight:bold;'>SCHOOL DAYS</span></p>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<p>BY</p>
+<p><span style='font-size:1.2em;font-weight:bold;'>KATHERINE STOKES</span></p>
+<p>&#160;</p>
+<p>NEW YORK</p>
+<p>HURST &amp; COMPANY</p>
+<p>PUBLISHERS</p>
+</div>
+<p>
+&#160;<br />
+&#160;<br />
+&#160;<br />
+</p>
+<div class='center'>
+<p>Copyright, 1911,</p>
+<p>BY</p>
+<p>HURST &amp; COMPANY</p>
+</div>
+<p>
+&#160;<br />
+&#160;<br />
+&#160;<br />
+</p>
+<div class='center'>
+<p><span style='font-size:larger;'>CONTENTS</span></p>
+</div>
+<table class='c' summary='table of contents'>
+<tr><td style='font-size:smaller'>CHAPTER</td><td></td><td style='font-size:smaller'>PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>I.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>“The Comet”</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chI'>5</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>II.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Friends in Need</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chII'>24</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>III.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Musicians of Bremen</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chIII'>41</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>IV.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Plots and Plans</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chIV'>52</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>V.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The First Motor Picnic</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chV'>63</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>VI.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Box of Troubles</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chVI'>81</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>VII.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Fire</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chVII'>95</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>VIII.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Nancy’s Home</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chVIII'>110</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>IX.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>At the Sign of the Blue Tea Pot</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chIX'>128</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>X.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Rumors at School</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chX'>136</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>XI.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Seven League Island</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chXI'>147</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>XII.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Storm</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chXII'>166</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>XIII.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Wheels Within Wheels</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chXIII'>179</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>XIV.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Hallowe’en House Party</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chXIV'>193</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>XV.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Ghost Party</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chXV'>206</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>XVI.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>A Stray Ghost</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chXVI'>217</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>XVII.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Mrs. Ruggles</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chXVII'>228</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>XVIII.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Fannie Alta</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chXVIII'>241</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>XIX.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Mary Before Her Judges</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chXIX'>253</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>XX.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Miss Campbell Wears Black</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chXX'>262</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>XXI.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Missing Link</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chXXI'>271</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>XXII.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>The Refugees</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chXXII'>280</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>XXIII.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Belle’s Confession</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chXXIII'>291</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td valign='top' style='text-align:right; padding-right:1em;'>XXIV.</td><td valign='top' style='text-align:left; padding-right:3em;'><span style='font-variant:small-caps'>Out of the Mists</span></td><td valign='top' style='text-align:right;'><a href='#chXXIV'>303</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+<h1>THE MOTOR MAIDS’ SCHOOL DAYS</h1>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_5'></a>5</span><a name='chI' id='chI'></a>CHAPTER I.—“THE COMET.”</h2>
+<p>
+“Girls, in about ten minutes you’re going to
+have the surprise of your lives,” cried Nancy
+Brown, joining a group of her friends at the
+High School gate.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What is it, Nancy? Do tell us, please,” cried
+half a dozen voices at once.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, you must wait,” answered Nancy. “If I
+told you what it was, I wouldn’t enjoy seeing your
+faces when the thing happened.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nancy, you have always got some mystery on
+foot,” put in her most intimate friend, Elinor
+Butler. “Is this one animal, vegetable, or mineral?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Fine or superfine?”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_6'></a>6</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Can it speak?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is it as large as a house?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t all talk at once,” exclaimed Nancy.
+“I’ll tell you this much. It’s animal and it’s superfine.
+And”—she wrinkled her brows—“and
+it’s mineral, too, I suppose.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Superfine? At least it’s a woman, then?”
+cried all the girls in a chorus.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” laughed Nancy, who loved nothing better
+than to excite the curiosity of her friends to
+the utmost and then launch a genuine sensation
+into their midst.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Does the superfine animal wear the mineral?”
+demanded Elinor.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, she doesn’t wear it. She’s in it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“In it? How strange,” exclaimed another girl.
+“Perhaps it’s a lady oyster in her shell.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There’s no surprise in an oyster unless there’s
+a pearl in it, goosey,” teased Nancy. “But here
+it comes! Here it comes!” she cried, clapping her
+hands joyfully, while six pairs of eyes peered curiously
+down the street, which, by gentle degrees,
+became a country road. The trim sidewalks of
+the little seaport town of West Haven became
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_7'></a>7</span>
+grassy paths and the pretty lawns broadened into
+flat green meadows.
+</p>
+<p>
+Far down the road a brilliant red object could
+be seen approaching. It was enveloped in a cloud
+of dust and it moved with great rapidity.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, it’s nothing but a red automobile,” cried
+Elinor, in disappointment.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” admitted Nancy, “it’s an automobile,
+but there’s something unusual about it besides its
+color.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A girl is running it,” announced Mary Price,
+whose clear, dark eyes always seemed to be looking
+into the distance. “A girl is running it, and
+no one is with her, and——”
+</p>
+<p>
+But the motor car was now in full view. It
+was a graceful little machine large enough to
+hold five or six people comfortably, its body
+painted a warm and pleasing shade of red, its
+cushions upholstered in a slightly darker shade
+which harmonized perfectly with the red of the
+body. A young girl, sitting on the front seat,
+was running the car as easily and steadily as an
+experienced chauffeur. Making a graceful curve,
+she turned into the driveway which led to the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_8'></a>8</span>
+school grounds and presently drew up under a
+large shed, where people were in the habit of
+hitching their horses and vehicles on Field Day,
+or when football was in season.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who is she?” demanded Nancy’s schoolmates
+in a whisper.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, she’s Miss Helen Campbell’s cousin,
+Wilhelmina Campbell.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do you mean our old friend, Billie?” asked
+Elinor.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The same,” said Nancy, in a low voice, for
+Billie Campbell was now approaching within
+hearing distance. “Her mother’s dead and her
+father’s brought her here to live with Miss Campbell
+while he builds a railroad in Russia, and she’s
+going to High School and she’s in our class and
+she’s coming to and fro every day in her own
+motor car.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Nancy was speaking as rapidly as a talking
+machine going at full speed.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie, as her father had always called her,
+might have guessed that she was the subject of all
+this buzzing undertone of conversation among
+the school girls; but she was too well accustomed to
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_9'></a>9</span>
+strange faces and new places to feel
+stiff and shy now at the looks of curiosity which
+were turned on her. On the contrary, the West
+Haven girls themselves felt a little ill at ease and
+countrified in the presence of this new sophomore,
+who, with her father, an engineer, had
+lived in many countries and seen a great deal of
+that mysterious outside world which sleepy, quiet
+West Haven had never troubled itself much
+about.
+</p>
+<p>
+But Billie Campbell was not destined to renew
+her acquaintance just then with these childhood
+friends of hers. A slender, very pretty girl, beautifully
+dressed, hurried out of the school building
+and called:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, Miss Campbell, may I speak with you a
+moment?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We might have known it,” cried Nancy
+Brown savagely. “If Billie Campbell hadn’t
+owned a motor car, Belle Rogers would never
+have given herself the trouble even to speak to
+her.”
+</p>
+<p>
+You perhaps know what a dangerous quality
+snobbishness is in a girl’s school. A very little of
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_10'></a>10</span>
+it is like a drop of strong poison in a pail of water.
+It pollutes the whole pail. So it was at West
+Haven High School. Belle Rogers, the prettiest
+and richest girl in town, had picked out six more
+or less wealthy and intimate friends in the sophomore
+class and constituted herself leader of what
+they called “The Mystic Seven.” These seven
+girls held themselves aloof from the poorer girls
+in the class and committed the unpardonable sin
+of snubbing every girl outside their charmed circle.
+</p>
+<p>
+Very bitter were the feelings of the other ten
+sophomores against the “Mystic Seven,” who refused
+to mingle in the sports of the class and
+kept themselves apart at recess, talking in low,
+mysterious voices and laughing behind their
+pocket handkerchiefs when the other girls strolled
+by.
+</p>
+<p>
+“They always make me feel shabbier than I
+really am,” Mary Price had once said.
+</p>
+<p>
+And now the “Mystic Seven” had snatched up
+this nice, athletic-looking, new sophomore, whom
+many of them remembered as a bright, romping
+little girl years before.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_11'></a>11</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“I suppose they’ll have to call themselves ‘The
+Mystic Eight’ now,” said one of the girls, a little
+bitterly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Can’t we ask her to join the ‘Blue Birds’?”
+put in Elinor Butler, who was eligible in point of
+wealth to enter the richer society, but had coldly
+declined the honor and had formed a society herself,
+called the “Blue Birds.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She couldn’t belong to both clubs,” said
+Nancy, “and you may be sure she has accepted
+the invitation of that little golden-haired, blue-eyed
+Belle Rogers, who put on an extra soft
+pedal even to call out her name.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, Billie Campbell will probably never have
+cause to know that Belle’s tongue is sharper than
+a serpent’s tooth, so what’s the odds,” observed
+Mary Price philosophically. “We got on perfectly
+well before she came and I suppose we can
+manage to support life pretty comfortably even
+if she is a member of the ‘Mystic Seven.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+Her friends laughed, as they strolled by twos
+and threes into the broad, arched entrance leading
+into the corridor of the building. Mary
+Price often relieved their wounded feelings by
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_12'></a>12</span>
+ending discussions concerning the “Mystic Seven”
+with a joke, although not one of them had
+been cut more deeply than she herself by the
+cruel speeches of Belle Rogers and her friends;
+for, since the death of Captain Price, Mary Price
+and her mother, as you will see later, had had a
+hard struggle to make both ends meet.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the meantime, Belle Rogers was using all
+her arts on the unsuspecting Wilhelmina Campbell.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We have never met,” she was saying, “but I
+heard you were going to enter our class and I
+wanted to be the first to welcome you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you,” said Billie, who had a boyish,
+direct way of answering people.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We wanted to know,” went on Belle quickly,
+“if you wouldn’t become a member of our society,
+the Mystic Seven. It is the most exclusive
+and nicest society in the school; the seven nicest
+girls in West Haven. We are all intimate friends,
+you know.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie gazed with admiration into Belle’s lovely,
+childlike face. Her own hair was straight and
+secretly she had always admired curls. Belle’s
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_13'></a>13</span>
+pale golden hair curled about her low forehead
+in soft ringlets. Her great china-blue eyes looked
+appealingly into Billie’s gray ones, and her rosy
+lips, which were much too thin when her face
+was in repose, parted with a winning smile. She
+was dressed in blue a little darker than her eyes
+and a small blue velvet toque was perched coquettishly
+on top of her curls.
+</p>
+<p>
+“She looks like a picture pasted inside of an
+old trunk mamma used to have,” said Billie to
+herself. “I could almost believe she was a bisque
+doll. I never saw anything like her.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You will join us, won’t you?” went on Belle
+wistfully.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m afraid I should be one too many and
+make an unlucky number. Seven is supposed to
+be lucky, isn’t it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, we’re not superstitious,” laughed Belle.
+“We can change the name to the ‘Happy Eight,’
+or something of that sort. We are looking for
+nice girls, and as soon as I saw you I knew you
+would be the one for us. We want to enlarge the
+club.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Dear me,” said Billie thoughtfully, “in a class
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_14'></a>14</span>
+of seventeen girls are only seven nice enough to
+be asked to join your club?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, they are nice enough,” replied Belle.
+“Elinor Butler is really quite nice, but they are
+not just our sort, don’t you know, and mamma
+has always cautioned me to be very careful about
+my companions.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Elinor Butler?” questioned Billie. “She is my
+old friend, and Nancy Brown and Mary Price?
+Aren’t any of them members?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Just then the gong for chapel boomed out in
+the September stillness and Belle could only shake
+her head for denial, as the two girls hurried into
+the building.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t think I could ever get on with that
+blonde doll baby,” thought Billie, as she followed
+Belle into the chapel for morning prayer, which
+always opened the day at West Haven High
+School.
+</p>
+<p>
+At recess the new sophomore was quite overwhelmed
+by the attentions of the Mystic Seven.
+They showed her the building and the grounds,
+the class locker rooms and the gymnasium, which
+interested her most of all. And in return she
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_15'></a>15</span>
+showed them her motor car. But, somehow, she
+did not quite like these stylish and rather over-dressed
+young girls. Their conversation really
+bored her and she was disappointed.
+</p>
+<p>
+It had been her own suggestion to go to West
+Haven High School when her father was summoned
+abroad to build a railroad.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think it’s high time I met some nice outdoor
+girls, papa,” she had said. “I am afraid of
+boarding school girls. They are so different
+from you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Her father had laughed joyfully over this
+speech.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I hope there’s not much resemblance between
+me and a boarding school girl, my little Billie,”
+he said, pinching her cheek.
+</p>
+<p>
+And now the nice open-air girls whom she had
+recalled with pleasure after a summer spent in
+West Haven had not come near enough even to
+greet her and she had been obliged to pair off
+with seven fashion plates.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s perfectly maddening,” she exclaimed to
+herself, giving the turf on the campus a savage
+little kick. “Nancy and Elinor actually avoid
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_16'></a>16</span>
+meeting my eyes as if I were some one unfit to
+know. I wish I had consented to go to boarding
+school, after all, instead of coming to Cousin
+Helen. I don’t want to belong to a silly society
+that does nothing but have afternoon teas. I
+want to play basket ball and go on long tramps
+with other girls and have picnics. I’m so disappointed,
+I could weep aloud.”
+</p>
+<p>
+This was the picture Billie had drawn in her
+mind of life at West Haven High School and
+here she was an outcast from all the good times
+and open air games of the class, simply because
+not one of her old friends would come near her.
+She long remembered that first day at school as
+the loneliest and most wretched of her whole life.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then the last gong sounded and everybody
+went home except Billie, who had an appointment
+with Miss Gray, the principal. After the interview,
+in a rebellious and disconsolate humor,
+homesick for her father and disappointed with
+the whole world, she cranked up her red car and
+whirled away toward the open country.
+</p>
+<p>
+As she sped along the road she passed the
+three friends of that summer of years ago, walking
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_17'></a>17</span>
+briskly away from town. They did not even
+look up as she whirled by and the lump in her
+throat grew so big that it resolved itself into a
+sob and two hot tears trickled down her cheeks.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Perhaps they’re going over to the woods;
+just what I would have loved to have done,” wept
+the disappointed young girl, whose life had been
+a lonely one in spite of her father’s devotion and
+constant companionship.
+</p>
+<p>
+She was still drying her eyes when she noticed
+some distance ahead a man leap into the road and
+wave his arms violently. Billie slowed down and
+came to a stop; for at the side of the road another
+very ill-looking man was lying prone on his back
+with closed eyes and slightly parted lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What is it?” she asked. “Has your friend
+been hurt?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, miss,” answered the man who had
+stopped her, “but he has walked fifteen miles to-day
+and I am afraid he’s about all in. I am trying
+to get him to his house, but I can’t carry
+him and he can’t take another step.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Where is his house?” asked Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Are you familiar with these parts, miss?”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_18'></a>18</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“No,” she answered.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s just up that lane about a mile. Only a
+matter of five minutes to you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Can you get him into the car?” asked Billie,
+noticing that this rather sinister looking stranger
+had only one arm; also that his right eye was
+out and there was a long scar across his upper
+lip.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Easily,” he replied, and without another word
+he expeditiously supported his friend to the motor
+car and lifted him into the back seat.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Poor fellow,” exclaimed Billie sympathetically.
+“It’s well I happened along.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The sick man was indeed a wretched looking
+object, with a thin, lantern-jawed face, hollow
+feverish eyes and a sunken chest. Occasionally
+he coughed behind his hands apologetically.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Down the lane, did you say?” she asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, miss, you can just see the house. It’s
+the gray one up near the woods.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ll have him there in a few minutes,” she answered,
+putting on all speed.
+</p>
+<p>
+The little machine flew along the hard sandy
+road like a redbird on the wing. Billie occasionally
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_19'></a>19</span>
+glanced over her shoulder at the sick man
+and each time her eyes met his, which seemed to
+burn like coals of fire. She had not liked the
+looks of the other man. His one remaining eye
+was much too close to his hooked nose; but the
+sick man appealed to her sympathies. Billie’s
+nature was not a suspicious one. She had encountered
+many people in her life, and it is only
+people who have lived out of the world who are
+apt to suspect strangers.
+</p>
+<p>
+As she drew up the car in front of what appeared
+to be a very old, long-deserted fisherman’s
+house and turned to see her passengers alight,
+she found the one-eyed man bending over his
+companion.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He’s fainted, miss,” he said. “If you’ll go
+around back of the house to the old well and
+draw up a pail of cold water, I guess we can revive
+him. Just let down the pail by the wheel
+at the side—you’ll see the handle,—and then
+get a glass or pitcher or something ’round there
+in the shed.”
+</p>
+<p>
+As the man was apparently very busy loosening
+the neck-band of his friend’s shirt, there
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_20'></a>20</span>
+seemed nothing else for Billie to do but to obey
+his directions. In fact, her sympathies were so
+deeply aroused that she was more than eager
+to help.
+</p>
+<p>
+She dashed around the corner in an instant,
+rushed to the old well, and exerting her strength
+turned the handle of the rusty wheel around and
+around while the rattling chain lowered the moss-covered
+bucket deeper and deeper until it struck
+the water. Waiting only until the bucket was
+filled, she began to raise it as rapidly as she could,
+but her muscles were sorely tried by the stubbornness
+of the rusty wheel and the additional
+weight of the water.
+</p>
+<p>
+The thought of the exhausted man spurred her
+on, however, and at length, flushed and perspiring,
+she succeeded in drawing the bucket to a
+little shelf where she left it while she searched
+for a receptacle in which to carry the water.
+She found no difficulty in pushing open a loosely-hung
+door at the end of the shed, and, after groping
+around a moment or two in the semi-darkness,
+she discovered a battered tin pail. Hastening back
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_21'></a>21</span>
+with it, she rinsed and filled it, and hurried
+around to the front of the house.
+</p>
+<p>
+As she turned the corner, she stopped short!
+Where were the two men? Where was her machine?
+<em>Where—was—her—machine?</em>
+</p>
+<p>
+Too dazed to move, Billie stood rooted to the
+spot while the water trickled out of a hole in
+the pail and made a little pool at her feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+Suddenly she gasped, “They must be around
+the other corner. They <em>must</em> be!”
+</p>
+<p>
+But they were not!—and then Billie noticed
+the tracks in the crushed grass that told the tale.
+The motor car had been turned and driven away
+up the lane!
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie sank down on the step in front of the
+old house almost too spent with her exertions
+and her shock to think.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then she flung down the pail and rushed up
+the lane as though she would try to catch the
+vanished car,—but she stopped as abruptly with
+a half laugh.
+</p>
+<p>
+“They may be miles and miles away by this
+time,—they had time enough while I was fussing
+over that old well. And the chain made
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_22'></a>22</span>
+such a noise and the wheel creaked so, I never
+heard another sound!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie’s eyes filled with indignant tears as she
+began slowly to saunter back to the old house.
+She felt somehow impelled to return to the scene
+of her loss, perhaps to persuade herself that it
+was really so.
+</p>
+<p>
+As she neared the spot where she had last seen
+her red car, she noticed a slip of paper blowing
+lightly about. Idly she picked it up and glanced
+over the words written upon it. Then she stood
+still and caught her breath as she realized what
+they meant.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Stay here. Tell no one. Back soon.”
+</p>
+<p>
+That was the message that Billie read, and she
+did not doubt for a moment that it was intended
+for her.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, perhaps you will come back, and perhaps
+you won’t,” she said half aloud. “Maybe you
+think that I think that you have gone for a doctor.
+But I don’t. You are two mean, wicked
+men to outwit a girl like that. I’ll never see my
+car again!”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_23'></a>23</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+Just as Billie uttered this despairing cry, she
+heard a distant hail, and then another.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who is coming now?” she thought. “It’s too
+soon to expect my sick (?) passenger and his
+one-eyed friend, and anyway I hear no car,——nor
+anything else, now,” she added. “Maybe I
+imagined it. Oh, I’d like to be a man for about
+five minutes! Then they wouldn’t <em>dare</em>!”
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_24'></a>24</span><a name='chII' id='chII'></a>CHAPTER II.—FRIENDS IN NEED.</h2>
+<p>
+“There she goes,” Nancy Brown had exclaimed
+as “The Comet,” Billie’s motor, whirled by; “too
+proud even to ask her old friends to take a spin.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, Nancy,” protested Elinor, “don’t be too
+hard on her. Remember, she has not seen any
+of us since we were children. Perhaps she’s forgotten
+all about us. Besides, I’ve been thinking
+that we ought to have done the first speaking.
+She was starting right for us when Belle Rogers
+stopped her.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, I tried twice to speak to her,” said
+Nancy, “and she wouldn’t look at me. I am afraid
+we shall never get a ride in that pretty motor
+car, and the only one I was ever in was the
+stationary automobile at the tintype place at the
+County Fair.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The girls walked on silently for a few moments.
+The red motor car had turned a curve
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_25'></a>25</span>
+in the road and was out of sight and the place
+seemed very lonely and still. The afternoon
+shadows were beginning to lengthen as the sun
+moved slowly behind the pine woods, which
+formed a dark background against the flat, green
+meadows about West Haven.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I can’t imagine why we should be wasting
+time about a friend who has forgotten us,” exclaimed
+Mary Price, “when Elinor has brought
+us out here to tell us some mysterious secret.
+Don’t you think it’s about time to begin, Elinor?
+It’s getting late and we’ve still a good ways to
+go.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was just going to,” answered her friend,
+“but suppose we take the short cut across the
+fields, and I’ll tell you on the way. Two other
+people are in the secret, Charlie Clay and Ben
+Austen. They have promised to meet us at the
+old house. Of course, the whole thing may be of
+no importance.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But what is it?” interrupted Nancy. “You
+keep dodging around the bush.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, Nancy,” answered Elinor, who had a
+calm, placid disposition and never hurried about
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_26'></a>26</span>
+anything, “don’t put your most peculiar characteristic
+off on me. You know very well that you
+are the one who loves to keep a mystery until
+we are all of us nearly bursting with curiosity.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t quarrel, children,” interrupted Mary.
+“Remember that members of the Blue Bird Society
+are bound over not to quarrel.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We aren’t quarreling; we’re just discussing.
+But do go on, Elinor. I can’t stand the suspense
+much longer.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What I am going to tell you,” said Elinor,
+“may be of the vastest importance or it may be
+just nothing whatever. At any rate, I didn’t
+want to take any chances and it was simple
+enough for us to meet the boys out here and see
+for ourselves.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“See what, Elinor Butler?” ejaculated Nancy
+impatiently. “You always begin at the last of
+a story and tell backwards.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Elinor smiled provokingly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s to see how much curiosity you can accumulate
+without exploding, Nancy, dear.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Nancy shut her lips tightly. She was determined
+now, at any cost, not to speak again until
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_27'></a>27</span>
+Elinor had really started on the story, but how
+irritating Elinor could be at times!
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary was never disturbed over these little tiffs
+of the two friends which were merely the ups and
+downs of the endless conversation that flowed
+between them.
+</p>
+<p>
+“This is what happened then, Nancy darling,”
+continued Elinor, slipping an arm around her
+friend’s waist, while she locked her other arm
+through Mary’s. And the three girls hurried on,
+too absorbed in their intimate talk to notice the
+flash of a scarlet motor car through the high
+bushes, which bordered both sides of Boulder
+Lane, the name of the road which intercepted the
+two meadows.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I was coming across Court House Square late
+yesterday afternoon after my music lesson. You
+know I have begun to study with the new teacher,
+Mme. Alta. Just as I came to the statue of
+Thomas Jefferson, I heard some one call very
+softly, or rather it was more like a hiss than a
+call. I suppose I should have rushed off frightened,
+but I am never afraid of people. It’s only
+spiders and snakes and bulls that make me shiver.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_28'></a>28</span>
+So, I didn’t run away, but waited, and I discovered
+that the hiss came from around the other
+side of the statue and was not meant for me at
+all. Even then I should have gone on if I hadn’t
+heard some one cry out. I couldn’t understand
+the language, but another voice said in English:
+‘There are only two boxes left. Take them to
+the old house in Boulder Lane to-night and never
+keep me waiting this long again.’ Then the other
+man said something and the English voice said:
+‘You can haul them to-morrow morning. It’ll
+be time enough when I get the signal to do the
+rest.’ I couldn’t understand what the man answered,
+but the English voice said: ‘I’ll kill the
+whole crew of Butlers and anybody else who interferes
+with me. I’m in a desperate humor and
+I won’t be bothered.’ Fortunately they took the
+walk that goes to the docks, because they would
+certainly have seen me if they had come around
+on the other side. But I saw them plainly when
+they passed under the electric light. They looked
+like seamen.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Kill the whole crew of Butlers,’” repeated
+Mary Price. “Does he mean that he is going to
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_29'></a>29</span>
+wipe your family off the face of the earth? And
+for what?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is what I want to find out. It wouldn’t
+do any special harm to take a late afternoon stroll
+in this direction, if the boys are with us. I didn’t
+want to say anything to father about it. He is so
+busy, and you know how excitable he is. William
+is exactly like father. Edward and mother and
+I are the only calm, peaceful members of the family,
+and mother’s sick and Edward is at college.
+Besides, you know, the man may not have meant
+us. The county is full of Butlers, dozens of
+them. Some of them claim kin and some do not.
+They are the most quarrelsome, high-tempered
+people in existence—that is, all except Edward
+and me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The other girls laughed.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not high-tempered, Elinor,” said Nancy, “but
+you have a sort of royal manner when you are
+displeased that I imagine a queen might have
+when one of her subjects is disobedient.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What’s that?” interrupted Mary. “I thought
+I heard some one call.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The girls paused and listened. They were
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_30'></a>30</span>
+standing in a broad, flat meadow which seemed to
+stretch out indefinitely in one direction like an
+enormous pale-green billiard table; but in the
+other direction, bordered by alder bushes, lay
+Boulder Lane; so called because of an immense
+gray boulder, which in some prehistoric upheaval
+had been tossed here, and which resembled now
+an old gray sentinel standing on perpetual guard.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, there’s the automobile,” exclaimed
+Nancy, after some minutes, following an occasional
+flash of red through the bushes, as the
+flying motor car sped on up the lane.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I wonder what she is doing up Boulder Lane?
+Exploring by herself, I suppose. It must be
+lonely,” observed Mary.
+</p>
+<p>
+A fresh salt breeze had sprung up from the
+ocean, bringing with it the chill of the oncoming
+night. The three girls hastened their footsteps.
+If they were late, the boys might not wait for
+them.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Boys are so unreliable,” Mary had remarked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not Ben Austen,” said Elinor. “Father says
+he is as trustworthy as the Bank of England.
+But he’s slow. He never likes to stop one thing
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_31'></a>31</span>
+until he finishes it, no matter what’s waiting. He
+and Charlie are building a boat somewhere down
+the beach and they spend all their afternoons
+at it, but they are sure to be there if they promised.”
+</p>
+<p>
+By this time the girls had reached the hedge.
+It was certainly a lonesome place. The old house
+which had been unoccupied for many years because
+its last occupant had committed suicide by
+hanging himself from a beam, appeared in the
+gathering dusk like a solitary gray ghost;
+the front windows resembled two large sad eyes
+gazing into space and the walls, streaked with
+the tempests of many seasons, had the appearance
+of a worn, tear-stained face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Dear me,” whispered Nancy, “I had forgotten
+what a weird old place this was. It might be
+the entrance to a tomb.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Halo-o-o!” called a boyish voice, and a tall,
+overgrown lad appeared coming up the lane from
+the direction of the beach, followed by a much
+smaller youth, who was so absorbed with whittling
+a little boat that he did not even look up
+when the girls answered the call.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_32'></a>32</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t make so much noise, Ben,” said Elinor,
+when they had climbed through the hedge and
+congregated together in the lane. “This is just
+an investigating party. We are not to take any
+risks.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There seems to be nobody around,” replied
+Ben. “We saw an automobile go past a little
+while ago with two men in it and some big boxes
+in the back. It was almost stuck in the sand. I
+wonder it could get along at all. It looked like a
+big, red lobster.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Red?” cried the girls in one voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I never saw anything redder in my life,” put
+in Charlie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You must be mistaken about the men, then,”
+said Elinor decisively. “Because Billie Campbell
+owns it and was running it herself a little while
+ago.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, we were not close enough to get a good
+look, but Billie Campbell appeared to be two men
+at that distance. But come along, girls. It is
+getting late and we had better not lose any more
+time. Now, what is it we are looking for? Butler
+bundles and boxes?”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_33'></a>33</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t think they can be called Butler bundles,”
+replied Elinor, “since my family is to be
+wiped out of existence if it interferes with the
+bundles, whatever they are.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The boys and girls who were thoroughly enjoying
+the fun and mystery of the expedition now
+advanced on tiptoe to the ghostly looking house,
+like a party of conspirators in a play.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I feel like a pirate,” whispered Nancy, giggling.
+</p>
+<p>
+Suddenly Ben, who was ahead of the others,
+stopped and put his fingers to his lips. He beckoned
+to them to follow him around to the side of
+the house.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I heard something inside the house,” he said,
+in a low voice. “Wait here, girls, with Charlie
+while I take a look.”
+</p>
+<p>
+He crept cautiously around to the front and
+presently they heard him open the door and walk
+boldly in.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m going, too,” said Charlie, unable to contain
+his curiosity any longer, and the girls followed
+him single-file into a low-studded, dusty
+room, unfurnished except for one rickety chair,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_34'></a>34</span>
+but behind that stood—Billie Campbell! And
+facing Billie in the dim light just inside the door
+stood Ben, surprise written as plainly upon his
+face as bravery, defiance, and apprehension were
+mingled upon hers.
+</p>
+<p>
+The girls were too amazed to speak at first.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Billie Campbell!” cried Nancy, at last. “Did
+two men frighten you and run away with your
+automobile?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie nodded. Somehow it was very difficult to
+keep back her tears now that help had come; but
+she never had been a cry-baby even as a child and
+now she choked down her sobs with all her
+strength, for in the gathering dusk she had recognized
+the faces of her three childhood friends
+who had refused to remember her that day at
+school.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, but I’m glad to see you!” she exclaimed.
+“After the men went off I noticed that the front
+door was open and I came in a minute to see if
+it really looked as though it were lived in now-a-days
+as the man said. But it just looks deserted,
+and it’s dreadfully dusty except here in the corner
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_35'></a>35</span>
+and from here to the door,—just as though
+something had been dragged across the floor.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The young girl had been talking excitedly, but
+now she stopped abruptly and with a friendly look
+and a gesture of intense relief she stretched her
+arms over her head, as though with the relaxation
+of her muscles she could also free herself
+from the sudden shock and dread that had bound
+her.
+</p>
+<p>
+She was tall for her age, fifteen, with a frank,
+almost boyish face, fine gray eyes, and a rather
+large mouth which curled up at the corners when
+she smiled and showed two graduated rows of
+strong white teeth. Her light brown hair was
+parted in the middle and rolled on each side into
+a thick, knobby plait in the back.
+</p>
+<p>
+“She’s not very strong on looks,” thought
+Nancy, who set great store on beauty herself,
+“but she’s got the nicest face I ever saw.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How did it happen?” asked Ben.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then Billie told how the two men had duped
+her and left her behind the deserted house, and
+how she had found the message on the slip of
+paper.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_36'></a>36</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then the men are coming back?” cried Elinor.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Perhaps,” replied Billie, “and we’d better
+hurry away from here as fast as we can in case
+they come. They may not intend to do me any
+harm, but they are a very determined-looking
+pair of characters, as papa says, and one of them
+has a long pistol and a knife in his belt, for I
+saw them.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But what about the red motor?” demanded
+Nancy, whose yearning to ride in the car had
+somewhat biased her good judgment.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ll just have to lose it, I suppose,” answered
+Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have a scheme,” put in Charlie, who rarely
+spoke without due deliberation. “Miss Campbell
+is just about as tall as I am—she may be a little
+shorter,” he added, stretching himself to his full
+height.
+</p>
+<p>
+The others smiled secretly at this, for Billie
+was at least an inch taller than Charlie, but they
+knew that the most sensitive spot in his nature
+was his height, since he was the oldest member of
+the party and Ben overtopped him by nearly three
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_37'></a>37</span>
+inches. And Charlie had a sneaking suspicion
+that he never would be tall enough. His bones
+were small and his frame as slender and delicate
+as a girl’s.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Suppose I put on your hat and veil and your
+long coat,” he continued, “and sit here on the
+step waiting. It’s getting darker all the time,
+and so if the men come back they’ll think it is
+you; but if they thought somebody was onto them,
+they would probably break their word and chase
+off with the motor.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t think that would be quite fair,” said
+Billie. “Suppose they found out you were a boy.
+They might shoot you or something.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But they won’t find it out,” answered Charlie.
+“Hurry up. We have no time to lose.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, do,” urged Ben. “It’s much the best
+way. We couldn’t leave you for the thieves and
+it’s a pity to lose the car. Besides, the rest of us
+will hide in the house and if anything happens,
+we’ll come to the rescue.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie removed her ulster without another
+word.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_38'></a>38</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“She’s a dandy, sensible girl,” thought Ben to
+himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You’d better take the skirt, too. If they saw
+your trouser legs, it would be all off,” said Billie,
+as she unbuckled her belt and removed her gray
+walking skirt, standing before them without any
+embarrassment in a short, red silk petticoat.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What about shoes?” observed Mary Price.
+“Those Charlie is wearing are not much like
+a girl’s shoes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How about these pumps? I wear No. fives,”
+said Billie, calmly kicking off her slippers.
+</p>
+<p>
+Charlie, good-naturedly, unlaced his stout boy’s
+boots.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I might be able to get my big toe into them,”
+he said. “Like Cinderella’s step-sisters and the
+little glass slipper.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“These aren’t any Cinderella’s,” laughed Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+How nice these boys and girls did seem to her
+and how fine it was to be with them, even in this
+strange and dangerous situation!
+</p>
+<p>
+Charlie could wear the slippers, however, although
+they were somewhat narrow in the toe,
+and presently he was fully dressed in a girl’s
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_39'></a>39</span>
+suit, with his face almost concealed by a long
+gray chiffon veil, twisted around Billie’s gray felt
+hat, trimmed with one red wing.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Hurry, they’re really coming,” called Billie,
+catching the familiar sound of a motor engine
+in the distance.
+</p>
+<p>
+“All right,” said Ben, who had been hovering
+around Charlie in pretended admiration of his
+changed appearance. “Good luck, old boy!” he
+added as he hastened after the girls up the narrow
+flight of stairs into the attic, which was perfectly
+dark and seemed a better place for hiding
+than outside, where enough twilight still lingered
+to make objects plainly visible.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We are a good deal like ‘The Musicians of
+Bremen,’” observed Mary, in a low voice, as
+they lay stretched face downward on the attic
+floor. “Don’t you remember that old fairy tale of
+Grimm’s; when the robber came back to the house
+in the wood he was bitten and kicked and
+scratched and pecked by the dog and the donkey
+and the cat and the rooster, and then they set
+up such a braying and barking and crowing and
+meowing that he ran away scared to death?”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_40'></a>40</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“If anything did happen, we might try the
+howling part,” said Billie. “I should think a
+piercing shriek from a place like this would scare
+a brave man——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Sh-h, they’re almost here,” cautioned Ben.
+“Don’t move, any one. The floor will creak.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m going to sneeze,” hissed Nancy, in the
+dark.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Press your upper lip and don’t dare do it,”
+whispered Elinor.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Shut up, all of you,” said Ben, as the motor
+car drew up beside the hedge at one side of
+the house.
+</p>
+<p>
+“If there is any shrieking to be done,” added
+Mary, “I’ll do it. I’m the best shrieker in the
+sophomore class. I know how to do it in the top
+of my head——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Sh-h-h!”
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_41'></a>41</span><a name='chIII' id='chIII'></a>CHAPTER III.—THE MUSICIANS OF BREMEN.</h2>
+<p>
+Nancy could not keep from trembling slightly
+as she heard the car panting at a little distance
+and realized that perhaps a moment of real danger
+was near, in spite of their joking. Elinor,
+too, felt very much like giving away to a few
+tremors, but she reproached herself for such weak
+behavior and held her body as rigid as a stone
+image while she said sternly in her mind:
+</p>
+<p>
+“My knees are not at all weak. It’s only the
+position I am lying in that makes them feel
+queer.”
+</p>
+<p>
+A sound as though a heavy foot had been
+placed on the step outside was heard and then a
+voice which Billie recognized as that of the one-eyed
+man said:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, young lady, I suppose you have had
+about enough of this? We have kept our word,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_42'></a>42</span>
+you see, which I judge you found on the paper,
+as you are still here.”
+</p>
+<p>
+There was a short silence. Evidently Charlie
+nodded assent to the supposition and the motion
+gave full satisfaction, for the voice went on,
+“Has any one been around, miss? You didn’t
+hear the sound of any voices, did you, while we
+were gone? We saw some people in the field as
+we left. Did they come this way? Speak up,
+miss.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Not a heart on the attic floor but thumped as
+the one-eyed man asked these questions. They
+had never thought of Charlie’s voice, which was
+about as deep as a full grown man’s!
+</p>
+<p>
+A perfectly death-like stillness reigned for a
+moment. It was plain that Charlie was not going
+to trust his voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do not be frightened, Señorita,” put in the
+thin man. “You may speak without fear. Do
+not weep. Perhaps she did see something. It
+was not the ghost of the dead man who hanged
+himself in here, was it?” he added in a low
+voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Hold your tongue,” said the other man.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_43'></a>43</span>
+“Speak up, young woman. Have you no voice
+left? You’ll not have strength enough to run the
+car if you go on like this.”
+</p>
+<p>
+A deep sob reached the ears of the listeners
+overhead.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then the alarming thought came to Ben: How
+was Charlie to run the motor car in case the men
+insisted on his leaving first? Plainly, it was necessary
+to get rid of these men somehow. Then
+they would all make a dash, and he would crank
+up while Billie jumped in and started the car.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ll have to hear the sound of your voice before
+I go,” insisted the one-eyed man. “I want
+to hear you give me your sacred word of honor to
+keep this little loan of your car a secret. If we
+find that you have told, and we’ll know it if you
+have, you and your family will regret it, that’s
+all. We know how to take our revenge, don’t we,
+Pedro? So speak up, young woman, and say the
+words. I promise——”
+</p>
+<p>
+Another deep sob.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Come, come. Hold up your head and let me
+see your face. Say, Pedro, look here; it doesn’t
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_44'></a>44</span>
+seem quite the same as it did half an hour ago,
+somehow. Strike a light!”
+</p>
+<p>
+There was great but noiseless commotion in the
+attic! What if the men should lift Charlie’s
+veil!
+</p>
+<p>
+Since Mary had mentioned “The Musicians of
+Bremen” an idea had been forming in Ben’s mind
+and he now hastily communicated it in a low
+whisper to his neighbor who passed it quickly
+down the line.
+</p>
+<p>
+Just as the thin man outside exclaimed in a
+high sharp tone, “Why, it’s a boy!” Ben whispered,
+“Ready!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Immediately the attic was filled with a pandemonium
+of noise,—the barking of a dog, cries,
+and screams! It was a truly terrifying combination,
+Mary’s shrill shriek rising weirdly above
+the other sounds as though from one in mortal
+agony.
+</p>
+<p>
+The two men outside were startled in spite of
+themselves and dashed away on an uncontrollable
+impulse, the thin man shouting, “The ghost
+of the dead man! His evil spirit haunts us!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good work, Ben,” called Charlie softly, after
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_45'></a>45</span>
+a moment. “Come out, quick! They’ve gone
+around back of the house. You can come this
+way, but hurry!”
+</p>
+<p>
+The adventure had been so exciting and was
+so quickly over that the girls hardly realized
+where they were when they found themselves
+in front of the house, standing in a half-bewildered
+group in the deepening twilight.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nobody shall take any more chances for my
+motor car,” whispered Billie. “You have all
+risked your lives enough as it is, and I’m deeply
+grateful. The men may be around there by the
+machine, so let’s make a break for the fields and
+go straight home.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No,” replied Ben stoutly; “it would be best
+for you girls to get away, but Charlie and I will
+finish the job. Those fellows are cowards, any
+way, and——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But you can’t run the car,” said Billie, rapidly
+putting on her things, which Charlie had
+discarded with a sigh of relief. “I’ll have to stay.
+The other girls must go, though.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The discussion, however, was ended by
+Charlie, who had skipped off to reconnoiter and
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_46'></a>46</span>
+now appeared running at full speed around the
+side of the house.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Come on, let’s all go,” he said. “They’ve
+gone, but they might come back.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Without a word, the others followed him and
+jumped into the car, while Ben, who knew a little
+about motors, began to crank up the machine.
+Suddenly a voice spoke out of the darkness:
+</p>
+<p>
+“This looks like a nice little party. Get out of
+that car, every one of you, or I’ll shoot,” and
+the sinister looking one-armed man, who appeared
+to have sprung up from the earth, stood at
+the side of the automobile with his pistol pointed
+straight at Billie. “Did you imagine,” he continued,
+“that a parcel of children could fool a
+man like me?”
+</p>
+<p>
+There was no reply to the question. Mary and
+Nancy were so limp with fear they could not
+have lifted a little finger if there had been a dozen
+pistols pointing at them. Elinor might have
+slipped a ramrod down her back, so stiffly and
+proudly did she hold herself in that fearful moment.
+Billie had turned white as a sheet, but she
+still had strength enough left to make a move to
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_47'></a>47</span>
+get out when Ben, whose stubborn nature would
+not even now give up the fight, raised his overgrown,
+boyish figure from the ground where he
+had been kneeling, and with a quick motion
+pressed a piece of glittering steel to the man’s
+forehead.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Drop that pistol, or you’re a dead man,” he
+said in the deepest chest tones he could produce.
+His voice was still in the tenor stage.
+</p>
+<p>
+Not even a gentleman of fortune who had lost
+an eye and an arm in past dangerous adventures
+could quite keep from shrinking at this extremely
+unpleasant sensation produced by cold steel
+against his face, and without a word of protest
+he dropped the pistol in the road.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, back off,” said Ben, “and don’t stop
+until you get as far as that tree over there.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The man retreated, cursing under his breath,
+and in another instant they were off in the dark.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We forgot to pick up his pistol,” exclaimed
+Charlie, as three shots rang out in quick succession.
+</p>
+<p>
+“But Ben has one,” said Billie, feeling
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_48'></a>48</span>
+somehow that she had known these nice brave boys for
+a long time, instead of three-quarters of an hour.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That was only a monkey wrench,” answered
+Charlie, laughing.
+</p>
+<p>
+And Billie was moved with admiration and respect
+for the slow-speaking, quiet boy, who had
+twice in so short a time outwitted two very dangerous
+and experienced adventurers.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was a splendid ride in the darkness. The
+fresh salt air swept their faces and set their
+blood to tingling with a new enjoyment. They
+had just been through a most dangerous and exciting
+experience, these young people, and Nancy
+and Mary were not ashamed to admit that
+they at least had been very much frightened.
+But people who have lived always by the sea are
+used to looking danger calmly in the face.
+</p>
+<p>
+Half a mile beyond the quiet little harbor of
+West Haven a lighthouse stood on a small, rocky
+promontory, and from the shore on a calm day
+could be seen rows of sharp-pointed rocks thrust
+out of the water like great black teeth waiting to
+devour any chance ship which might be blown
+against them. In bad weather the water about
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_49'></a>49</span>
+the Black Reefs, as they were called, was lashed
+and churned into fury and sometimes after a
+great storm groups of people might be seen hurrying
+up the cliff path to the life-saving station,
+while out in the ocean, stuck fast to the teeth of
+the Black Reefs was a pretty three-masted
+schooner, perhaps, or a stained and scarred old
+freight ship, looking very small and helpless in
+its terrible plight.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie, herself, was the only person in the motor
+car who had not seen a shipwreck on the
+Black Reefs. She had never even seen one of the
+September storms when the sea rolled itself into
+mountainous waves and dashed against the cliffs
+of West Haven.
+</p>
+<p>
+As they neared the town, Billie slowed down
+the motor and turned to speak to her new friends.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I can’t even try to thank all of you for what
+you have done for me, but I want to tell you that
+I think you are the bravest, nicest boys and girls
+in the whole world, and it was just to be with you
+that I came back to West Haven to go to school.
+I was very unhappy to-day because I was afraid
+that Nancy and Mary and Elinor had forgotten
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_50'></a>50</span>
+me and the splendid times we had together one
+summer when I was a little girl——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, Billie, we hadn’t forgotten you,” broke
+in Nancy. “We thought when you joined Belle
+Rogers’ crowd that you——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But I didn’t join them,” Billie interrupted,
+laughing. “They kidnapped me and never let me
+out of their sight the whole time. I had almost
+made up my mind to write to papa to let me go
+to boarding school, after all. I wanted to know
+some real girls. I have never had a chance before,
+you know, and when I talked it over with
+papa, we decided that all of you were the nicest
+real girls we had ever known, and I just thought
+I would spend the winter with Cousin Helen and
+meet you again, while papa was in Russia.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The three girls blushed with pleasure at this
+gratifying compliment.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We were just as glad to see you, too, Billie,”
+said Elinor. “It was all a foolish mistake. But
+we shall be friends now, and you must join the
+Blue Birds. It’s the Sophomore Club, and we
+have lots of fun.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you, I’d love to,” answered Billie, as
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_51'></a>51</span>
+gratefully and modestly as if she had been paid
+the highest honor in the land. “I’ve been thinking,”
+she added, “that we’d better keep all this
+business about these men secret. You know
+Cousin Helen; if she hears about it, we’ll probably
+have to store the motor car. She’ll never let
+me out of her sight again.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We’ll keep it secret,” cried the others in a
+chorus.
+</p>
+<p>
+So this very sensational adventure, which
+would certainly have spread like wildfire through
+the town of West Haven once it got out, remained
+a profound secret.
+</p>
+<p>
+Some good came of it, however, since it served
+to unite four old friends. But we have not seen
+the last of the mysterious individuals who borrowed
+Billie’s motor car.
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_52'></a>52</span><a name='chIV' id='chIV'></a>CHAPTER IV.—PLOTS AND PLANS.</h2>
+<p>
+Belle Rogers was not always the bewitchingly
+pretty, dimpling, smiling young girl who had endeavored
+to annex Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+And when she was not pretty, Belle’s friends
+liked to keep well out of her vicinity. At such
+times two little white dents appeared on each
+side of her nose. Her large, china blue eyes
+were transformed into wells of steely gray and
+the smiling, baby mouth became two narrow
+white lips. All the color left her cheeks, and people
+who did not know her would exclaim:
+</p>
+<p>
+“How faded and ill she looks!”
+</p>
+<p>
+When Belle looked like this she was unusually
+quiet at first, but it was the quiet which comes before
+a tornado, and it was only when the storm
+burst that those unfamiliar with her ways realized
+that Belle had been very, very angry.
+</p>
+<p>
+This is what happened on the day after the exciting
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_53'></a>53</span>
+experience in Boulder Lane, and all because
+Wilhelmina Campbell, true to her old
+friends, the “Blue Birds,” after being formally
+invited, had positively declined to join the “Mystic
+Seven.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am sorry,” she said, trying her best to be
+cordial, “but, you see, the others had first claim
+on me because I have known them a long time and
+I have already promised to become a Blue Bird.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We asked you first,” exclaimed Belle, in a
+preternaturally quiet tone of voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t see why that should make any difference,”
+answered Billie, feeling very uncomfortable.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It makes a great deal of difference,” answered
+Belle, who was always gifted with a flow
+of words in the moments of her greatest anger.
+“You are probably not familiar with the ways of
+schools and school societies. I understand you
+have never been to school before.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, yes, I have. I went to school in Paris
+for three months and to another in Dresden for
+a whole winter.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“This is America,” went on Belle, in a slow,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_54'></a>54</span>
+even tone, taking no other notice of the interruption,
+“and if you decline the honor we have
+paid you in the sophomore year, you will not only
+be blackballed in our societies the other two years,
+but you will not receive any invitations from me
+and my friends to our parties now or ever, and
+you will be obliged to associate with the commonest
+and most ordinary girls in West Haven.
+The children of cooks——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mary Price,” thought Billie. Mrs. Price had
+a tea room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The daughters of seamen——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nancy!” said Billie out loud. Nancy’s father
+was a sea captain.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, Nancy Brown,” continued Belle, growing
+angrier every moment. “You will simply be
+an outcast in West Haven, and I advise you to
+think the matter over well before you decide to
+join that low, common crowd, for I assure you
+it will be the last of you with us——”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie was so aghast at the insolence of the
+spoiled girl that she did not attempt to interrupt
+the rush of words which seemed to flow from her
+lips without any effort whatever. She was very
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_55'></a>55</span>
+angry herself, as a matter of fact, but with the
+self-control she had learned from her father, she
+determined to hold her peace until Belle had run
+down, as she expressed it later to the other girls.
+</p>
+<p>
+At last there came a pause, and Billie, who
+had been sitting on the window ledge in the gymnasium
+swinging her feet and thinking of what
+she was going to say when she was entirely prepared
+to speak, slipped down to the floor and
+stood before the enraged girl like a brave soldier
+in the face of battle.
+</p>
+<p>
+But this was all she said, for Billie was really
+very much like a boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t think it is any honor to join your club,
+or go with you and your friends. I wouldn’t give
+up Mary and Nancy and Elinor for twenty Mystic
+Sevens. I’d rather go to boarding school any
+day, and that’s about the worst fate that could
+happen to me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Then she turned on her heel and walked away,
+leaving Belle in the grip of a tempest of sobs and
+tears. Such rages are quite like the West Indian
+storms which sweep up the coast with a great
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_56'></a>56</span>
+blowing of wind and then, after a tremendous
+roar of thunder, the downpour follows.
+</p>
+<p>
+That night in her pretty chintz-hung bedroom
+in the beautiful Rogers house, which was one of
+the show places of West Haven, Belle Rogers
+planned her revenge. Her temples were throbbing
+and her whole body ached with exhaustion.
+Tempers are really quite as devastating to the
+system as the West Indian tornadoes are to the
+country over which they sweep.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ll get even with that rough tom-boy,” she
+said out loud. “I’ll pay her back if it takes
+all winter to do it. I’ll make her sorry she ever
+came to West Haven, and I’ll make the others
+pay, too. They’ll see what it means to interfere
+with me and my plans. Perhaps papa will give
+me a motor car, only I’m afraid of the things,
+and I never could run one. My hands are much
+too small and delicate to handle machinery.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Belle, darling, do you feel any better?” asked
+Mrs. Rogers, anxiously, outside the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+Belle made no reply. It was her custom to
+pretend to be asleep when she wished to be alone,
+and she wished now to spend a long uninterrupted
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_57'></a>57</span>
+evening to herself, for her thoughts were very
+busy. A plan had come into her head. It had
+sprung up suddenly, full-grown, as if it had been
+secretly hatching in the bottom of her mind for a
+long time and now appeared a matured scheme.
+</p>
+<p>
+Her blood tingled at the notion. It was such
+an audacious, daring thing that the very thought
+made her dizzy.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ll do it,” she said at last, her mind made
+up. “I’ll do it, and I’ll get only one person to
+help me, because it will take two to work it. Now,
+who shall that person be? It would be best to
+ask a Blue Bird, but which one?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Her thoughts ran over the girls in the despised
+society, but there was only one of the ten whom
+she would quite dare to approach. The others
+were fiercely loyal to each other.
+</p>
+<p>
+This possible traitor was a new girl in West
+Haven. Her name was Francesca Alta, but her
+friends called her Fannie. She was the daughter
+of Mme. Alta, a music teacher lately established
+in the town. Many of the girls were taking
+music lessons of Mme. Alta, and Belle, who
+was one of her pupils, often had opportunities
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_58'></a>58</span>
+of speaking to the little dark-haired daughter,
+although she had only nodded to her coldly so far.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I will speak to her to-morrow,” she exclaimed,
+as she swallowed the sleeping powder her indulgent
+mother always gave her after one of these
+violent headaches.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the morning Belle had regained her baby
+smile. The red had left her nose and was now in
+its proper spots on her round, plump cheeks.
+Once more her large blue eyes looked appealingly
+into the eyes of those she honored with her
+glances. Belle never saw what she preferred to
+ignore, and one of the most delightful sights of
+that bright September morning was a red motor
+car filled with pretty young girls, which whirled
+into the High School grounds, making a bright
+splash of scarlet against the old gray walls of the
+building.
+</p>
+<p>
+Belle did not see the “Comet” and its load, or
+would not see it, but later, Billie, who never bore
+malice, bowed a cheerful good morning to her
+enemy, and, to the surprise of the others, received
+a cordial bow in return.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am sorry I was cross to you yesterday, Miss
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_59'></a>59</span>
+Campbell. Will you forgive me?” Belle asked
+her.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, indeed,” answered the warm-hearted
+young girl. “It’s awfully nice of you to admit
+it,” and she secretly decided that the others were
+rather hard on Belle Rogers, after all.
+</p>
+<p>
+However, when the girls heard of the apology,
+they were skeptical.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s the ‘Comet’ that won her over,” observed
+Nancy.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t believe it,” answered their new, inseparable
+friend, who after two days’ association
+was as intimate with the three girls as if she
+had known them always, so rapidly do young
+girl intimacies grow.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Something does seem to have happened to
+her,” said Mary Price. “Perhaps you gave her
+such a dressing-down, Billie, that she’s turned
+over a new leaf. She would never have stooped
+to talk to Fannie Alta before, but she is doing it
+now, and look—will wonders never cease?”
+</p>
+<p>
+The two girls were indeed in intimate conversation.
+They were walking arm in arm up
+and down the campus, nibbling sandwiches. At
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_60'></a>60</span>
+West Haven High School the girls either
+brought their luncheons with them to eat at recess
+or bought sandwiches of that plucky, hard-working
+little woman, Mrs. Price, Mary’s mother,
+who made the sandwiches and brought them to
+the school herself in a big basket.
+</p>
+<p>
+That is why Mary Price had exclaimed, “Will
+wonders never cease?” She had recognized
+the package of sandwiches in oil paper, which
+Belle Rogers must have bought from her mother,
+and which she was now sharing with dark,
+shabby little Fannie Alta.
+</p>
+<p>
+“She used to say she would rather starve than
+eat one of mother’s lettuce sandwiches,” Mary
+exclaimed, “but she appears even to have come to
+that.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“If this is one of your mother’s own, it’s very
+delicious,” exclaimed Billie, gallantly turning the
+conversation into other channels. After all, it
+was just as well not to form the habit of discussing
+Belle too much. Her father had never approved
+of criticising people.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It doesn’t lead to anything but bilious headaches,”
+he used to say. “Sick, bilious headaches
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_61'></a>61</span>
+and a very yellow complexion. Critical people always
+look like that, Billie, my girl.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie’s complexion was clear and healthy. She
+had never had a bilious headache in her life. But,
+then, she was not given to picking flaws in other
+people’s characters.
+</p>
+<p>
+However, the novelty of the richest and proudest
+girl in West Haven making friends with a
+poor music teacher’s daughter was soon to be
+eclipsed by a much more sensational and mysterious
+incident.
+</p>
+<p>
+That afternoon, after school, when the four
+friends assembled in the carriage shed for their
+usual spin home in Billie’s motor car, they found
+a note stuck conspicuously between the cushion
+and the back of the seat. It was addressed in a
+large angular hand to “Miss Wilhelmina Campbell
+and her friends, both boys and girls, especially
+Miss Butler,” and inside it read:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Keep quiet about Boulder Lane. You are
+watched and if you let a word slip out, the punishment
+will come quickly.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How ridiculous,” exclaimed Billie angrily,
+when she had shown the note to the others. “I
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_62'></a>62</span>
+have a great mind to write papa all about it, only
+it would worry him to death. It is only cowards
+who write anonymous letters, anyhow.”
+</p>
+<p>
+But she did not write to her father, and the
+other girls, too, were silent on the matter.
+</p>
+<p>
+They wondered many times who had put the
+note on the seat. Strangers were not unusual in
+West Haven, where sailors and seamen often
+came ashore, but the Girls’ High School was at
+the other end of town and visitors ashore seldom
+strayed so far away from the shops and the little
+theatre.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’d like to know what their grudge is against
+the Butler family,” Elinor had demanded, but no
+one could answer the question, and she was still
+determined not to disturb her highly excitable
+father.
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_63'></a>63</span><a name='chV' id='chV'></a>CHAPTER V.—THE FIRST MOTOR PICNIC.</h2>
+<p>
+One Saturday morning early in September
+Miss Helen Campbell gave a breakfast party to
+her four favorite Blue Birds. It was to be the
+beginning of an eventful day for the young girls,
+three of whom were to take their first long motor
+trip, and, furthermore, the motor party was
+to end with a visit to Shell Island, where this
+excited and happy company of young people
+were to spend the night, motoring back to West
+Haven next day.
+</p>
+<p>
+Miss Campbell herself was excited.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s a novelty for me, my dears,” she exclaimed,
+beaming on her guests from behind the
+silver urn at the head of the breakfast table.
+“I’m a very dull, lonesome old woman, and having
+this nice child here with me is going to wake
+me into life again. I shall never be able to give
+you up, Wilhelmina. You had better write your
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_64'></a>64</span>
+father that you have been adopted by a very obstinate
+old party, who believes that possession is
+nine points of the law.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m quite willing to be possessed, Cousin
+Helen,” answered Billie. “If I could only see
+papa sometimes, I think I could say that I never
+was so gloriously happy in all my life.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Miss Campbell smiled with pleasure and the
+girls thought they had never seen her look more
+beautiful. Her white hair glistened like a bank
+of snow in the sunshine and her soft eyes were as
+blue as patches of West Haven Bay on a clear,
+still morning in summer.
+</p>
+<p>
+There were times when the lonely spinster
+looked faded and worn, and at such times she
+used to shut herself up in her big gray stone
+house on Cliff Street and refuse to see even her
+most intimate friends.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s just one of my lonesome moods,” she used
+to say, “and I would not for worlds inflict myself
+on innocent people when one is on me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+But Miss Campbell had not had a single attack
+of loneliness since Billie had come to live with
+her. The vigorous, active young girl had awakened the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_65'></a>65</span>
+entire household which had run on its
+steady even course for so many years, and now
+the place hardly recognized itself, filled with the
+happy voices and gay laughter of Billie and her
+friends.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was an unusual sight for the big mahogany
+table in the dining room to be loaded with the
+best cut glass and silver and adorned with delicate
+lace doilies, which had belonged to Miss
+Campbell’s grandmother. These thing had been
+laid away for many years. In the centre of the
+table was a crystal vase filled with forget-me-nots.
+</p>
+<p>
+“They are the only flowers I could think of
+which were the color of your blue birds,” Miss
+Campbell had explained. “Besides, they are my
+favorite color. You know, I always wear blue
+when I don’t wear gray. Sometimes I wear
+black——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Black, Cousin Helen?” repeated Billie. “I
+didn’t know you ever wore anything so mournful.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You shall never see me in it, child, if I can
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_66'></a>66</span>
+help it. But I have a black dress, only one, and
+I do wear it at times in my bedroom.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Some thirty years before Miss Campbell, then
+a young and beautiful girl, had come to West
+Haven to live with her grandfather and there she
+had lived ever since, except for an occasional
+trip abroad. It was supposed that she had suffered
+a great sorrow at some time in her life, but
+the real story had never been known. Captain
+Campbell, her grandfather, had been a jovial,
+pleasure loving old man, fond of company and
+entertaining. He liked to have his beautiful
+granddaughter stand at his side and receive his
+guests in a brocaded ball gown, with the famous
+Campbell diamonds blazing in her hair and the
+diamond and sapphire necklace around her throat.
+</p>
+<p>
+But after General Campbell’s death there were
+no more balls and dinners in the big, old house.
+The long parlors were seldom opened except to
+be cleaned and aired, and Miss Campbell, now a
+somewhat shrivelled pink and white little lady of
+fifty-five, interested herself only in the charities
+of West Haven.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, my dear children, this household and its
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_67'></a>67</span>
+mistress have got into such a lethargy that it
+is time they were waked up. We have been sunk
+in so deep a rut, my old servants and I, that it
+might have closed over our heads and the world
+gone on just the same.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Lots of poor families would have gone begging
+at Christmas, then, Miss Campbell,” put in
+Elinor.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And what would all those poor old seamen
+have done?” went on Nancy.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And the Blue Birds,” added Mary Price.
+“We should have had to use a corner of the
+gymnasium at school for our most secret society
+meetings.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Miss Campbell paid the rent of the Blue Bird
+club rooms.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And, pray, what should I have done?” finished
+Billie. “I should have been knocking around still
+with papa, trying to get on with the queer people
+who live in hotels, and never have had nice girls
+to go with or a delightful home to stay in.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Miss Campbell blushed with pleasure.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have a great many surprises up my sleeve
+for my little Motor Maids. I shall only tell you
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_68'></a>68</span>
+one, though. What would you say to a Blue Bird
+Thanksgiving ball?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, oh, oh! How splendid!” cried the young
+girls.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Honk, honk!” went the motor horn at the
+front entrance, which was a signal for breakfast
+to come to an end and the party to be off.
+</p>
+<p>
+A hamper of luncheon had been strapped behind
+the car with the suit cases. Miss Campbell
+sat between Elinor and Mary in the back, while
+Nancy took the seat now understood to be hers
+always, beside her friend Billie, in front. The
+four Campbell servants, who had grown old in
+their mistress’s service, stood in a row on the
+gravel walk to witness the strange sight of their
+beloved “Miss Helen” sailing away in a red infernal
+machine, her blue automobile veil streaming
+out behind like a piece of flying cloud.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t go too fast, Billie,” she exclaimed, as
+they turned the corner of Cliff Street, and whirled
+down the steep, rather slippery Main street of
+West Haven. “Remember that you have got a
+decrepit old woman in the back who has never
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_69'></a>69</span>
+ridden behind anything faster than a pair of
+ambling carriage horses in all her life.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How about the five-thirty express, Cousin
+Helen?” Billie called over her shoulder.
+</p>
+<p>
+“A locomotive with an engineer is a very different
+thing from a young girl guiding a scarlet
+comet,” the little lady answered; but as they
+left the street for the country road and Billie
+gradually increased the speed, Miss Campbell
+leaned back with a look of blissful enjoyment on
+her face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is one of the most exhilarating things I
+have ever experienced,” she confided to Elinor.
+</p>
+<p>
+At noon they stopped for lunch. The road now
+lay along a high cliff overlooking the ocean,
+which on this calm September morning was as
+serenely blue and still as a mill pond. White sails
+dotted it here and there, and an occasional wave
+rippled on the pebbly beach with a murmuring,
+drowsy sound.
+</p>
+<p>
+They had pulled up at the side of a little pine
+grove just off the road and spread the lunch cloth
+on a carpet of pine needles.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then the delicious cakes and sandwiches which
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_70'></a>70</span>
+Miss Campbell had ordered from Mrs. Price were
+arranged in neat piles, while Elinor opened her
+tea basket, a present from an aunt in Ireland, and
+made tea for the company.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was all very delightful and they were enjoying
+themselves thoroughly, when Billie and
+Nancy, who were seated facing the others, received
+a slight shock. A tall, slender woman,
+dressed in black, with a long black chiffon veil
+completely concealing her face, suddenly emerged
+from behind a clump of dwarf oak and bay trees
+at the far end of the grove and beckoned to them.
+</p>
+<p>
+The two girls exchanged glances of amazement
+and Nancy was about to say: “Why, look at that
+woman!” when the woman, herself, put her finger
+to her lips and shook her head violently.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think she’s crazy, Nancy,” said Billie, in a
+low voice, under cover of the conversation of the
+others. “We had better not take any notice. It
+would just alarm Cousin Helen and spoil the
+day.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Nancy agreed with her, and the two girls were
+about to suggest that they start on again, when
+the woman began making the most extraordinary
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_71'></a>71</span>
+motions of entreaty, imploring them with outstretched
+arms, beseeching them with every gesture
+to come to her. And still the two girls hung
+back. Then the woman raised the sleeve of her
+loose black silk wrap and showed her arm bound
+with a bloody handkerchief.
+</p>
+<p>
+Nancy gasped at this. The sight of blood was
+always sickening to her. But, seeing Billie’s
+meaning glance in Miss Campbell’s direction, she
+pretended that she had choked on her tea.
+</p>
+<p>
+The other three were deep in a conversation.
+Miss Campbell was describing a beautiful ball
+she had once been to where she had danced with a
+real prince, and they hardly noticed when Nancy
+and Billie strolled over to the clump of bushes.
+</p>
+<p>
+The woman, who had been waiting for them,
+seized Billie’s arm and in a low, rapid voice said:
+</p>
+<p>
+“I see that you are both unusually nice girls
+whom I can trust. I am in great trouble. You
+will help me, will you not? It is very simple,
+what I am going to ask you. You see, I have
+been in a wreck.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“A motor wreck?” asked Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, yes,” replied the woman, not impatiently
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_72'></a>72</span>
+but as if she were very much pressed for time.
+“The car rolled over the embankment. You will
+see it below there. It happened just in the curve
+of the road. There was no excuse except that we
+were going too fast and the wheels did—what is
+it you call it? Skidded? We saved ourselves,
+all three, by jumping. Fortunately the back
+wheels were caught in the sand and there was just
+time to climb out as the car was overturned. The
+others have left me. They will return at any moment
+now with another car. Hidden under the
+seat of the wrecked car is a small box. I must
+have it. I must indeed. I cannot get it myself.
+I have sprained my knee, and can stand only
+by supporting myself against this tree. Will you
+get that box for me and place me in your debt
+always, always? You cannot understand how important
+it is for me to have it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course, we will,” Billie assured her, “and
+won’t you let us help you over to our party, or
+make you comfortable here with the cushions
+until your friends come back?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, no, no,” replied the stranger. “I do not
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_73'></a>73</span>
+wish to be seen if possible. I only beg you to
+make haste. I will wait here.”
+</p>
+<p>
+As the woman grew more in earnest, her voice
+seemed to deepen and vibrate like a musical instrument,
+and the girls almost forgot to listen to
+her words under the spell of its wonderful tones;
+and when she threw back her veil, they still stood
+rooted to the spot, for she was really quite the
+most beautiful person they had either of them
+ever seen. Her eyes and hair were dark, her
+skin rather creamy in texture; there was a generous
+curve to her lips, a straight nose and full,
+rounded chin. She smiled a little as she noticed
+the admiration of the two girls, showing two
+rows of white, even teeth.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You will not refuse?” she asked again.
+</p>
+<p>
+And they helped her to sit down on the ground
+and hurried out of the grove to the roadside.
+There, sure enough, lying on its side in the sand,
+some forty feet below the road, was the wrecked
+motor car.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nancy, I would do anything for her,” observed Billie,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_74'></a>74</span>
+as they clambered down the embankment.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Isn’t she perfect?” exclaimed Nancy. “And
+still, Billie, I can’t help believing that she’s
+slightly off in her upper story. She was so
+queer. But a shock like that would be enough to
+turn anybody delirious, jumping out of an automobile
+as it turned over an embankment.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’ll all depend on whether we find the box.
+If it is just a delirious dream, there won’t be any
+box and we will have had our climb for nothing.”
+</p>
+<p>
+They searched the upturned car and there was
+nothing in it. The ground was strewn with
+wreckage. Cushions and rugs were scattered
+about in wild confusion. The girls searched the
+place hurriedly all the way down to the foot of
+the cliff.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There is no need of wasting any more time,
+Nancy, dear,” said Billie at last. “It’s very evident
+to me that the beautiful lady was out of her
+mind and we’ve been ‘stung,’ as the boys say.
+Let’s go back. Perhaps she will let us help her
+get somewhere.”
+</p>
+<div class='figcenter' style='padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em'>
+<a name='i003' id='i003'></a>
+<img src="images/illus-074.jpg" alt="Half buried in the sand was a small box of highly polished wood." title=""/><br />
+<span class='caption'>Half buried in the sand was a small box of highly polished wood.</span>
+</div>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_75'></a>75</span></div>
+<p>
+“Yes, I am afraid it’s just a case of King
+George’s men marched up the hill and then
+marched down again,” said Nancy.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And I got two grass stains when I fell down
+just now,” added Billie, looking ruefully at her
+white serge skirt.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My shoes are full of sand, and I’ve soiled my
+white stockings,” went on Nancy. “Look,” she
+cried suddenly; “look, Billie, here it is right under
+our noses. I suppose that little bay tree hid it
+from us on our way down. I ask the beautiful
+lady’s pardon; but I still can’t imagine why her
+own friends couldn’t have got it for her just as
+well as we could.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Half buried in the sand was a small box of
+highly polished wood, six or eight inches square.
+Two broad bands of silver reinforced it at the
+back and sides, and a little silver combination
+lock took the place of the keyhole. In the middle
+of the box was a small, round silver plate, on
+which a coat of arms was engraved.
+</p>
+<p>
+“This is the box, all right enough,” said Billie,
+examining it with much curiosity. “Now let’s return
+it to that mysterious lovely person and go
+on our ways, rejoicing.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_76'></a>76</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+But they were not destined to get rid of the
+box that day nor for many another day. Just as
+they reached the top of the cliff they heard the
+whirring of a motor engine. A car was just
+starting from the grove. Two men were on the
+front seat, while the owner of the box was lying
+almost helplessly in the back seat, her veil thrown
+back and her face white and drawn. There was
+no top to the car and the girls could see her
+plainly. They thought she must have fainted,
+but when Nancy called: “Wait, please wait,”
+she raised herself quickly, put her finger to her
+lips in token of silence and dropped a card into
+the road.
+</p>
+<p>
+The next instant the strange motor car was
+lost to sight around the curve. Billie picked up
+the card with some irritation.
+</p>
+<p>
+“How silly,” she exclaimed, “What are we to
+do with this thing? Why couldn’t she have
+waited a minute?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Because she didn’t want the men to know she
+had the box, goosey,” answered Nancy. “It’s as
+plain as the nose on your face. What does the
+card say?”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_77'></a>77</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+It was a man’s business card and read:
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“Pierre Lafitte, Avocat,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Rue——21. Paris.”<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+On the back of the card had been painfully
+written with a pencil:
+</p>
+<p style='margin-left: 2em;margin-right: 2em;'>
+“I knew when you were gone so long that you
+would be too late. If you are merciful and kind,
+keep the box a secret from all the world. You
+will not regret it. Send your name to this address
+and you shall be relieved at once.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Burdened with another secret,” cried Billie, in
+a resigned voice. “Where can we hide the
+thing?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ll sit on it for the time being,” answered
+Nancy, laughing. “There come the girls.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What are you two infants up to?” called
+Elinor, appearing just then at the edge of the
+grove. “We thought you had gone in the other
+direction and we’ve been looking everywhere for
+you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We have—er——” hesitated Billie, who never
+could tell fibs. “What have we been doing,
+Nancy?”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_78'></a>78</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“We’ve been looking at a wreck. Don’t you
+want to see it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nancy Brown,” cried her friend Mary, putting
+her hands on Nancy’s shoulders and gazing
+into her face, “you’ve got a secret. I can tell by
+your expression. You are hiding something.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m trying to hide it, but I find it rather difficult.
+I feel like a bantam hen sitting on a goose
+egg.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Let’s push her off her goose egg,” cried Elinor,
+“and see what it really is.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Help, Billie, help!” screamed Nancy, while
+the four friends engaged in a school girl romp,
+and Miss Campbell, who was dozing in the grove,
+half opened her eyes and smiled.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is there anything more charming and sweeter
+than the sound of children’s voices out of doors?”
+she said to herself. She could never get used
+to the idea that Billie was not still the little eight-year-old
+girl who had spent a summer in West
+Haven seven years before.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the meantime, the guardian of the box was
+well defended by Billie until she began to laugh,
+and when Nancy was taken with the giggles her
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_79'></a>79</span>
+father used to say she was nothing but an abandoned
+lunatic. The place rang with the joyous
+peals and the other girls were obliged to pause in
+the struggle and join in. Then this foolishly
+happy child rolled helplessly onto the ground,
+upsetting the box.
+</p>
+<p>
+But there came a sudden end to the laughter,
+for the top of the box had sprung open and its
+contents were scattered on the roadside.
+</p>
+<p>
+The girls clasped their hands excitedly and
+gazed at each other with wide-eyed amazement,
+for at their feet glittered dozens of the most beautiful
+jewels. There were a diamond and sapphire
+necklace, strings of pearls, earrings, rings,
+and broaches.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Great heavens, what have you girls been doing?”
+exclaimed Mary.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nancy, you explain,” answered Billie, grown
+very grave, all of a sudden. “I’ll gather these
+things up and get them out of sight as quickly
+as possible. I think my suit case is the safest
+place for the time being, and we can take it into
+the front of the car with us. Then we can discuss
+later what we had better do.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_80'></a>80</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+While the girls listened to Nancy’s strange
+story of the beautiful injured woman, Billie collected
+and replaced the jewels in the box with the
+card, and packed it in the bottom of her suit case.
+</p>
+<p>
+In another ten minutes the motor party was on
+the road again, the younger members somewhat
+sobered by the secret responsibility which had
+been thrust upon them.
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_81'></a>81</span><a name='chVI' id='chVI'></a>CHAPTER VI.—THE BOX OF TROUBLES.</h2>
+<p>
+Shell Island is really only an island in name.
+A narrow creek which fills and empties with the
+incoming and outgoing tides divides it from the
+mainland. A bridge spans this chasm over which
+flows a constant stream of motor and driving parties
+from all the villages and summer resorts up
+and down the coast.
+</p>
+<p>
+Just at sundown, as the “Comet” took the steep
+road down the cliff to the bridge, a big touring
+car shot past.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, dear,” exclaimed Nancy, “I did hope we
+would leave all care behind when we came away,
+and now I am perfectly certain that Belle Rogers
+was sitting on the front seat of that automobile.
+I suppose she’ll be floating around the ballroom in
+blue chiffons this evening.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is she a care?” asked Billie, who had a placid
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_82'></a>82</span>
+and rather masculine way of forgetting all about
+the people she didn’t like.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, I don’t mind her, only she always makes
+me feel like a rag picker’s daughter.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think she’s over-dressed,” put in Billie. “I
+should feel utterly foolish with all that finery and
+jewelry on me. When papa and I used to buy
+my clothes, he would say: ‘Suppose we stick to
+plain white, daughter, and skip the furbelows.
+We can’t go very far wrong if we do that, and
+if my little daughter begins to put on ruffles and
+puffles and falals without anybody’s advice but
+mine, I’m afraid she might be taken for a walking
+fashion plate and some one will try to stand
+her up in a shop window.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Nancy laughed.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think you have the prettiest dresses I ever
+saw, Billie, but I am glad Miss Campbell has persuaded
+you to stop dressing so much like a boy.
+Lace collars are lots more becoming than those
+stiff linen ones.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“They were chokers,” answered Billie, good-naturedly,
+as the car drew up at the steps of the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_83'></a>83</span>
+hotel immediately behind the automobile which
+had passed it on the road.
+</p>
+<p>
+Belle and her party were waiting on the piazza,
+the women in long pongee coats with the very latest
+motor bonnets and veils.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Those are her rich friends, the Jordannes,”
+whispered Nancy, in awed tones. “They used to
+be just plain Jordan before they made so much
+money.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think Jordan is a much nicer name. It has
+such a fine Oriental sound, ‘Where rolls the River
+Jordan.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+By this time several porters from the hotel had
+stepped to the motor car door and assisted Miss
+Campbell, somewhat stiff from the long ride, to
+alight. The girls jumped nimbly out after her
+and their luggage was unstrapped and piled on
+the ground near the Jordanne luggage. But Billie
+was careful to keep a firm hold on her own suit
+case with its precious load.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Let the man take your bag, dear,” called Miss
+Campbell. “You will strain your back carrying
+that heavy thing.”
+</p>
+<p>
+There was nothing for Billie to do but resign
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_84'></a>84</span>
+the suit case, although she tried to keep an eye
+on it as they followed the porter through the
+lobby to the elevator. Miss Campbell had telegraphed
+ahead for rooms.
+</p>
+<p>
+As luck would have it, there was another elevator
+for luggage, and the bag was temporarily
+out of Billie’s sight, but her mind was soon at
+ease when she saw it stacked with the others in
+the bedroom which she and Nancy were to share.
+</p>
+<p>
+“While we dress for dinner,” she observed,
+“we’ll have a talk about that jewelry. What on
+earth are we going to do with it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t you think we’d better tell Miss Campbell?”
+suggested Elinor.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I suppose it would be best, but Cousin Helen
+does go off so about things, and I have a feeling
+that if she knew it she wouldn’t allow us to keep
+our promise to our poor beautiful lady. She
+would be sure to turn the box over to the police
+or call in a lawyer or something. And if we
+could only keep the box until we heard from the
+man in Paris, at least, we should be keeping our
+word about it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Elinor and Mary were all for telling, but the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_85'></a>85</span>
+other girls were still under the spell of the very
+beautiful and distressed woman, and since it was
+mostly their affair they concluded not to tell.
+</p>
+<p>
+You must not blame Billie for this want of
+frankness. Girls who have never had mothers
+to talk to in the intimate way that only a mother
+and daughter know, are apt to be reserved and
+self-reliant. Billie would certainly have told her
+father, but, then, he was in Russia.
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary and Elinor, whose room adjoined the
+other, had put on their kimonos and were lolling
+on the beds, while Nancy with solicitous care was
+removing her pretty muslin frock from the valise
+and smoothing out the pink taffeta ribbons tenderly.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie knelt on the floor and opened her suit
+case.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Before I undress,” she said decisively, “I’m
+going to take this box straight down stairs and
+give it to the clerk to put in the safe. Then we
+can spend the evening with easy minds.”
+</p>
+<p>
+She flung back the top and sat down on the
+floor with a gasp.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_86'></a>86</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“In the name of all the powers, this is not my
+suit case.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The girls gathered around her in great excitement.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s exactly like mine,” she went on, “but
+there are no initials on it and mine has ‘W.H.C.’
+on the end.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Girls,” cried Nancy, flinging her bathrobe
+around her with a tragic gesture, “the very last
+person in the world we could wish to have Billie’s
+suit case is the very one who has it. She’ll look
+at everything in it; examine the underclothes to
+see if they are hand-made and the stockings to see
+if they are silk, and—she’ll open the box of jewels
+and read the card of the avocat from Paris and——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who? Who?” interrupted the other three.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who but Belle Rogers,” cried Nancy, flourishing
+a towel in one hand and a hair brush in the
+other.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, that’s her costume,” admitted Mary,
+laughing. “Blue chiffon with a wreath of pink
+roses for her hair.”
+</p>
+<p>
+She pulled up a corner of the pale blue gauzy
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_87'></a>87</span>
+material and pointed to a little pink wreath which
+lay in the folds of the dress.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There are her blue satin slippers, No. Two’s,
+absolutely not a size larger,” said Elinor, pointing
+to the toe of a little slipper which showed at
+one end of the suit case.
+</p>
+<p>
+“This is what I get for losing the keys to
+everything,” groaned Billie. “Telephone for a
+boy, quick, some one, while I fasten this thing
+up. Perhaps she hasn’t opened mine yet.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Opened it!” echoed the others. “You don’t
+know her.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Presently a bell boy tapped at the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie gave him the suit case with full instructions.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And hurry,” she added. “If you are back
+here in five minutes, you shall have an extra tip.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed. The other
+girls were almost dressed, and Billie was beginning
+to tap the floor nervously with an impatient
+foot, when at last there was a tap at the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why didn’t you come sooner?” demanded
+Nancy and Billie in one voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The young lady wouldn’t let me, Miss.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_88'></a>88</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“But what was she doing all that time?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t know, Miss. She simply told me to
+wait outside. She was very angry, Miss, about
+her bag.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Angry, indeed,” answered Billie, seizing her
+own suit case. “At least no time was lost in
+sending it to her.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The two girls opened the suit case with great
+anxiety. The things in it were assuredly in
+rather a rumpled condition. They had the appearance
+of having been unfolded and hastily
+rolled up again in new folds.
+</p>
+<p>
+Nothing could be told about the box of jewels.
+They were all there apparently in a glittering
+bunch with the card laid on top.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Dear me, I’m sorry that combination lock
+broke,” exclaimed Billie. “I don’t mind Belle
+Rogers looking through my clothes if it gives
+her any satisfaction, but I would just as soon she
+hadn’t looked into this box of jewels. And we
+can’t explain to her, because we mustn’t seem to
+know that she was capable of doing anything so
+low and common as to go through my suit case.”
+</p>
+<p>
+She dressed herself hastily in a pretty white
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_89'></a>89</span>
+frock. Her smooth rolls of hair and trim braid
+did not need re-arranging, and she hurried downstairs
+to the desk with the troublesome box, which
+she gave into the charge of the clerk.
+</p>
+<p>
+“These are some really valuable things,” she
+said. “Will you put them in your safe?”
+</p>
+<p>
+The clerk wrapped the box up neatly in heavy
+brown paper, sealed it with red sealing wax, labelled
+it with her name and address and deposited
+it in the safe.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s off my mind,” she said, giving a sigh
+of relief, just as the elevator door opened and
+Miss Campbell appeared with the other girls.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Cousin Helen, you’re a dream,” cried Billie,
+taking her cousin’s arm. “You are like a young
+girl whose hair had gone and turned white in a
+single night.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank you, my dear, but you may be sure that
+if anything happened which could make my hair
+turn white in a night, it wouldn’t leave me any
+girlish looks. But why didn’t you come to my
+room and let me have a look at you? Are you
+all exactly right and in place? That’s a sweet little
+frock. I suppose you got it in Paris last summer. You
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_90'></a>90</span>
+and your father are a pair of children
+shopping together, I imagine. All my girls
+look sweet,” she added, not wishing to wound any
+feelings by admiring one more than another.
+“See this lovely dress my little Mary is wearing.
+Could anything be more exquisitely made than
+that? Your mother is a wonderful woman, child.
+There’s nobody like her in West Haven.”
+</p>
+<p>
+At dinner there was another surprise for the
+girls. This time it was an agreeable one: four
+extra places at the table, and presently they were
+joined by four West Haven boys, looking rather
+embarrassed but quite happy as they shook hands
+with the fairy godmother of the party, Billie’s
+Cousin Helen.
+</p>
+<p>
+Two of the boys we have met before, Ben Austen
+and Charlie Clay. The other two were their
+intimate friends and boon companions, Americus
+Brown, Nancy’s brother, known as “Merry
+Brown,” and Percival Algernon St. Clair, whose
+mother’s fancy had run riot in naming her only
+child. He was called “Percy” by his friends for
+short.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, look who’s here,” exclaimed Nancy.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_91'></a>91</span>
+“Percival Algernon St. Clair, why didn’t you tell
+us yesterday when you gave us soda water at the
+drug store that you were coming on this trip,
+too?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Because it was secret,” answered Percy, who
+was very blond and blushed easily. “Miss Campbell
+wanted to surprise you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I thought it would be nice for my girls to have
+some partners for the dance to-night,” said Miss
+Campbell. “I wanted to see some real dancing.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“If you want to see the real thing, then, Miss
+Campbell,” said Merry Brown, “if you want to
+see the poetry of motion, you must see Ben
+dance.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Shut up, bow-legs,” called Ben across the table.
+“I’ve been learning for months. I took lessons
+last summer.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Where?” demanded his friends, because at
+the school dances, Ben’s expression of misery
+was well known when he towed an unfortunate
+friend around the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I know,” said Percy, “it’s all explained now.
+That’s what you were doing at the Dutch picnics
+every week.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_92'></a>92</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, they were pretty good teachers,” replied
+the imperturbable Ben. “They taught me that
+guiding a girl in a dance was very much like
+sailing a boat with a windmill for a sail. You
+have to guide and twirl at the same time, and the
+more speed you make in twirling the better your
+dancing is.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Everybody laughed uproariously at this description.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ben Austen, I didn’t expect to be treated like
+a windmill sail boat when I promised to give you
+my first dance,” announced Elinor.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It would be better than to be treated like a
+stationary windmill and go turning around in
+one place like the Germans dance,” observed
+Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You may all have your choice,” said Ben.
+“Stationary or progressive, it’s all one to me, only
+remember that you have each promised to do a
+Dutch twirl with me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The ballroom was already quite filled with dancers
+and it seemed very bewildering and delightful
+to the young girls, if it was only a summer
+hotel with a piano and two violins and a flute for
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_93'></a>93</span>
+an orchestra. Ben’s Dutch whirl was so skillfully
+performed, because like everything else he
+attempted he had mastered it perfectly, that the
+girls found it rather exciting fun.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s a regular romp,” cried Billie, who, with
+glowing cheeks, dropped breathlessly into a chair
+beside her Cousin Helen.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Look,” whispered Mary Price, who had been
+dancing a quiet glide with Charlie Clay and had
+had a chance to notice some of the other dancers.
+</p>
+<p>
+For some reason both their young faces turned
+suddenly very grave. Was it a strange, unexplained
+premonition that told them the most dangerous
+enemy either was ever to have was dancing
+past that moment, in floating pale blue chiffon
+draperies?
+</p>
+<p>
+After the dance there was a merry supper
+party with sandwiches and lemonade in the grill
+room, and then the Motor Maids were glad
+enough to get to their beds.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What a relief it is, Nancy, dear, to have that
+box of jewels in the safe,” said Billie sleepily, as
+her eyelids drooped and she settled herself under
+the covers.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_94'></a>94</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+But Nancy did not reply. She was sleeping
+deeply. Billie, too, was soon oblivious of everything
+in the world.
+</p>
+<p>
+As the night wore on, Nancy dreamed that
+she was dancing the Dutch twirl in a wonderful
+blue gauze dress, but that the diamond necklace
+she wore so weighed her down that she could not
+breathe.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie also dreamed of the diamonds. They
+were not around her neck, but in their box, which
+had grown to the size of a trunk and pressed on
+her chest so heavily that she was suffocating.
+</p>
+<p>
+Suddenly a great bell clanged out in the night.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie opened her eyes with difficulty. The
+room was filled with smoke and down the corridor
+there came the cry of “Fire! Fire!”
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_95'></a>95</span><a name='chVII' id='chVII'></a>CHAPTER VII.—THE FIRE.</h2>
+<p>
+A bell with a deep baying note rang out in the
+darkness.
+</p>
+<p>
+If you have ever heard a fire bell boom out in
+the stillness, you will remember the terror which
+clutched your heart at the first ominous peal. It
+seemed to Billie, in going over it afterward, that
+the boom of that big fire bell was like the last
+trump on the day of judgment arousing the
+spirits of the dead.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then came the sound of voices. The corridors
+were filled with hurrying footsteps. Somebody
+ran down the hallway calling again:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Fire! Fire!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie jumped to the floor with a bound. Her
+senses had returned at last.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nancy, Nancy!” she cried, shaking her friend
+violently back to consciousness. “The hotel is on
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_96'></a>96</span>
+fire. Get into your dressing gown as quickly as
+you can while I wake up the others.”
+</p>
+<p>
+As she switched on the light she saw that the
+room was filled with smoke, and she knew the
+fire must be in their wing of the hotel and that
+there was no time to lose.
+</p>
+<p>
+There is no better fire trap in the world than
+a wooden hotel at the seaside. The salt from
+the flying spray in winter storms has seasoned the
+wood into splendid burning material, and the
+breeze from the ocean fans the flames like a great
+natural bellows.
+</p>
+<p>
+As Billie waked the other girls Miss Campbell
+came into the room, with a white, scared face.
+But she was not excited.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Get into your dressing gowns, girls,” she said
+quietly. “Don’t lose a moment’s time. The boys
+are waiting for us outside.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Just then Ben Austen rattled on the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Hurry,” he called. “The elevators won’t run
+much longer and the stairs are burning.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Hardly two minutes had passed since the first
+clang of the bell when Miss Campbell and the
+girls joined the boys in the corridor. There had
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_97'></a>97</span>
+not been time even to snatch up a hair-pin from
+the bureau to catch tumbled locks together. But
+nobody looked at any one else. The place was
+crowded with hotel guests in exactly the same
+condition and all the passages opening into the
+main corridor of the hotel were emptying themselves
+of streams of people in every state of disarray.
+If it had been less serious, the girls
+might have laughed at the numbers of terrified
+and hysterical fat women, wrapping insufficient
+dressing gowns and blankets about their large
+forms as they pushed their way without ceremony
+toward the elevators.
+</p>
+<p>
+But a big tongue of flame suddenly leapt up
+the stairwell at the end of the hall. There was
+a crackling sound and clouds of black smoke
+poured into the corridor.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We must get out of this,” exclaimed Ben.
+“The fire has reached this floor and unless we
+knock a few people down, we’ll never get to either
+of those elevators.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But where are the fire escapes?” demanded
+Miss Campbell.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_98'></a>98</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“At the end of the hall,” answered Charlie,
+“and we could never get past that burning pit.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The two elevators had been up and down several
+times, packed with people. The smoke was
+growing thicker each moment, and the next thing
+Billie remembered was that Elinor had fainted
+dead away, and that some one had screamed:
+</p>
+<p>
+“The elevators have stopped running!”
+</p>
+<p>
+In the stifling atmosphere she saw Ben and
+Charlie lift Elinor and call to the others to follow
+them into a bedroom. As she staggered
+after them, a grotesque figure, screaming hysterically,
+fought through the crowd, almost
+knocking Billie down. Even in that moment of
+danger she recognized Belle Rogers, every lock
+of whose golden hair was done up on red rubber
+curlers, the ends of which stuck straight up
+like scores of little devils’ horns.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Take me down! Take me down!” Billie heard
+her scream. “I will not die in this horrible way!
+Somebody save me!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie touched her on the shoulder.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t scream,” she said. “It only makes
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_99'></a>99</span>
+things worse. The people who are left are going
+to get down by the windows. Come with us.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Belle, who had been separated from her
+friends, followed quietly enough.
+</p>
+<p>
+In another moment the corridor was empty,
+and the flames which had been fast eating their
+way along the hall had reached the elevator
+shafts. It had all happened in much less time
+than it takes to tell, but in the brief instant when
+Billie had paused to rescue Belle, she lost the
+others. Once in a bedroom, where the air was
+not so stifling, it was impossible to leave and rush
+again into the atmosphere outside.
+</p>
+<p>
+The two girls dashed into the nearest room and
+closed the door, too stifled to notice that the others,
+led by level-headed Ben and followed by the
+crowd of people left standing by the elevator
+shafts, had rushed into a front room at the end
+of the hall. In the closets of this room and the
+one adjoining, they found two fire ropes which this
+old-fashioned hotel provided for its guests whose
+rooms were not located near the fire escapes.
+Those who were not able to slide down the ropes
+were lowered in a chair, and the others, with a
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_100'></a>100</span>
+foot twisted around the rope and grasping a wet
+towel to keep the palm of the hand from blistering,
+slid down. In the darkness it was impossible
+to recognize faces, and it was not until they
+were all safe on the ground that they missed Billie
+Campbell.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then poor Miss Campbell, who had been admirably
+calm during the whole fearful experience,
+fainted away, and Elinor, now entirely restored
+by the fresh air, was left to take care of
+her.
+</p>
+<p>
+Nancy and Mary followed the four boys to the
+rescue. Tears were rolling down Nancy’s cheeks
+and Mary was as pale as death. Each girl had
+her own peculiar way of showing how much she
+had come to love their new friend, Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the meantime, Billie, herself, was looking
+ruefully down into the darkness from the window
+of a room on the third floor and Belle was
+indulging in a fit of real hysterics.
+</p>
+<p>
+“How dare you bring me here?” she screamed
+hoarsely, stamping her foot. “I might have been
+saved if you had let me alone, and here we are
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_101'></a>101</span>
+trapped! I always hated you and now I detest
+you with my whole soul.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I thought the others were in here,” said Billie
+apologetically.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thought! Thought!” screamed the wretched
+girl. “You wanted me to die. You wanted me
+to lose my beauty.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You haven’t any to lose just now,” answered
+Billie. “You look more like the Medusa of the
+snaky locks——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, oh!” wept Belle, too angry to articulate.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You may console yourself this much,” went on
+Billie. “If you die, I shall die with you, but I am
+going to do my best to save you and myself, too.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Help! Help!” screamed Belle from the window,
+not taking any notice. But her voice was
+lost in the wild clamor which came up from below.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then she flung herself flat on the floor in an
+agony of sobs.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s better to pray than to cry, Belle. Crying
+won’t help and we are in a pretty warm place.
+If you were only a sport, it might do a lot of
+good.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_102'></a>102</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+Belle crawled to the window and leaned out.
+The air in the room was becoming unbearable.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the meantime, Billie’s thoughts were working
+rapidly. There were the sheets, but there
+wasn’t time to tear them into strips and knot the
+strips together. Besides, she didn’t believe they
+would reach halfway to the ground.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am afraid we’ll have to climb it,” she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Climb what?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Climb up the side of the shutter to the roof.
+This is the top floor. The flames haven’t reached
+the roof yet.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But what good will the roof do us?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t know yet, but it’s better than this.
+Come on.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I tell you I can’t climb. I never did such a
+thing in my life.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You’ll just have to begin then,” said Billie
+sternly. “Shall I go first, or would you rather
+do it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ll go—no, you go.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ll help you,” said Billie, hoisting herself to
+the window ledge. “Now, don’t look down. Just
+imagine you are only a few feet from the ground
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_103'></a>103</span>
+and that it’s a very easy stunt. If you decide beforehand
+that you can’t do it, why, of course,
+you can’t. But it will be much easier than staying
+here to be burned alive in the next few minutes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Delivering herself of this boyish but unimpeachable
+logic, Billie kicked off her slippers and
+swung herself onto the shutter. Just for one
+brief instant a sickening nausea came over her as
+she looked down into the darkness.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then her fingers grasped the cornice of the
+roof and, pulling herself up with her two arms,
+as she had learned to do on the parallel bars in
+the gymnasium—only in this instance the shutter
+made a very uncertain elbow rest—she scrambled
+onto the roof.
+</p>
+<p>
+“All right, Belle,” she called. “It’s much
+easier than I thought. Take off your slippers and
+come ahead, and don’t forget to look up and not
+down.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Belle obeyed in sullen silence. She was as determined
+as Billie not to be burned alive, but her
+luxurious and self-indulgent nature revolted
+against this uncomfortable and dangerous method
+of getting out of the difficulty. However, there
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_104'></a>104</span>
+was nothing else to do, so she swung out on the
+shutter as Billie had done, only this time Billie,
+with all the strength in her body was holding the
+shutter rigid.
+</p>
+<p>
+As Belle clung on with her hands and her little
+pink toes, which she had stuck into the interstices
+of the shutter, she suddenly looked down.
+Her grasp weakened and she gave a shriek so
+piercing that Billie almost slipped headlong over
+the side of the roof, but she grasped Belle’s slackening
+wrist.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Take a breath,” she said, in a trembling voice.
+“You can do it, if you only make up your mind
+to.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ll never, never forgive you,” cried Belle,
+“and if I live through to-night, I’ll pay you back.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“All right,” answered Billie calmly, seeing all
+at once that anger appeared to give Belle new
+strength, “only I advise you to get onto this roof
+first.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Another moment and Belle had clambered over
+the cornice and was stretched out breathless on
+the roof.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I would much rather have had a baby to look
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_105'></a>105</span>
+after,” thought Billie, as she looked contemptuously
+down at the other girl.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We had better not lose any more time now,
+Belle,” she said aloud. “If you have got your
+breath and your nerve back, come ahead.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Belle pulled herself wearily up and followed.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My feet are all splinters,” she complained,
+“and my hands are torn and bleeding.”
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“’Tis the voice of the lobster: I heard him declare<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;‘You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair,’”<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+repeated Billie, half laughing and half sobbing
+that this foolish verse should have flashed
+through her brain at this strange time.
+</p>
+<p>
+The two girls hurried along the roof toward
+the front. It was plain that in the scramble to
+save the lives of the hotel guests there had been
+no time to save the building, and when the young
+girls turned the corner of the roof and looked for
+a moment across the broad expanse of ocean not
+a hundred yards away it seemed to them that they
+were alone in the whole world.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_106'></a>106</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“What are we going to do now?” demanded
+Belle.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t know yet,” answered Billie patiently.
+</p>
+<p>
+The roof was hot under her feet and they could
+hear the crackling of flames as they hastened
+along the edge to the other side.
+</p>
+<p>
+The rest of that fearful adventure seemed like
+a dream to Billie afterwards.
+</p>
+<p>
+As they turned the corner of the house a voice
+called hoarsely:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who can tie a rope?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie remembered to have replied vaguely and
+politely that she could tie a rope. A man emerged
+from behind the chimney with a long rope, but
+she hardly noticed at the time that he had only
+one arm.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It may not be long enough,” he said, “but tie
+it and we’ll take the risk. It’s our only chance.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie knotted the rope around the chimney.
+The man examined the knot carefully, pulled it
+with his one hand, and then threw it over the side
+of the house.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ll go first,” said Belle quietly, and Billie
+looked at her with amazement.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_107'></a>107</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Humph!” said the man. “You are brave.
+Can you do it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” answered Belle, “I can do anything.
+Help me over the side.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s going to hurt,” he observed, as he twisted
+the rope around her foot and showed her how to
+slide down. “It’s going to take all the skin off
+your hands and feet and maybe cut to the bone.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Belle made no reply to this cheerful prediction.
+She had already started down the rope.
+</p>
+<p>
+As Billie watched her disappear in the dark,
+the man said abruptly:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did a number of girls and a white-haired
+woman in a red automobile come here this evening?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie hesitated.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I believe so,” she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do you know so?” asked the man insistently.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did you see one of them leave a rosewood box
+at the clerk’s desk?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie made a great effort to remember. Then,
+suddenly, the case of jewels loomed up in her
+mind. She had forgotten all about them.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_108'></a>108</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Billie, Billie,” called a voice from below.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” she answered, looking over the roof.
+</p>
+<p>
+“She’s here,” shouted Ben, from the top of the
+ladder, which reached only to the second story.
+</p>
+<p>
+“All right,” called the one-armed man on the
+roof. “We have a rope here. We’ll swing down
+to the ladder.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The next thing Billie remembered she was surrounded
+by a crowd of her friends at the foot of
+the ladder. The girls were weeping and her
+Cousin Helen was giving vent to hysterical expressions
+of relief and thankfulness. The wet
+sand felt cool and soft to the parched soles of
+her bare feet, and she tried to smile; but she
+really had quite forgotten what it was all about.
+Some one close by her groaned and sobbed alternately,
+and a sickening feeling came over her
+when she saw a girl stretched on a blanket almost
+at her feet. The girl’s hands were torn and
+bleeding and her pale blue silk kimono was covered
+with blood. Down one cheek was a long,
+bloody mark and to complete her grotesque and
+terrible aspect, at least a dozen little red rubber
+devils’ horns stood upright all over her head.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_109'></a>109</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+The next thing Billie remembered was huddling
+into her own beloved red motor car with
+the others, while some one took them somewhere,
+and all the time in her ears she heard a man’s
+voice saying:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Where is that box of jewels?”
+</p>
+<p>
+And her own voice replied:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Under the ruins of the Shell Island Hotel.”
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_110'></a>110</span><a name='chVIII' id='chVIII'></a>CHAPTER VIII.—NANCY’S HOME.</h2>
+<p>
+Nancy’s home was a favorite meeting place of
+the four friends. There was something very inviting
+about the old red brick house, with its low-ceiled,
+cheerful rooms and deep-silled windows.
+</p>
+<p>
+Nancy’s family had been seafaring people for
+many generations, and the place was filled with
+curios from foreign countries: carved chests,
+swords with curved blades, ivory elephants, funny
+little cross-legged grinning gods, beautiful Japanese
+vases and Oriental rugs.
+</p>
+<p>
+In cool weather there seemed to be a perpetual
+piece of old driftwood crackling on the hearth,
+and there was nothing the girls enjoyed more
+than sitting in a row on the floor in front of that
+cheerful blaze while they drank tea from curious
+Japanese cups and nibbled some of Mrs. Brown’s
+delicate cookies.
+</p>
+<p>
+Nancy’s father was the very picture of a sea
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_111'></a>111</span>
+captain, sunburned, ruddy, eyes very blue and
+little side whiskers like an English Squire’s. He
+had a hundred stories to tell of the sea, and Billie
+could have listened to him all day without tiring.
+Nancy’s mother was a gay, cheerful little body
+who kept her house polished like a ship’s cabin,
+and Nancy’s brother, Merry, was the image of
+his father. He felt the call of the sea, too, as
+his father and grandfather had before him, but
+he was not to be the captain of a merchant ship.
+He intended to go to Annapolis.
+</p>
+<p>
+Three weeks had passed since the great fire at
+Shell Island, when, one Saturday afternoon, a
+red motor car wound its way in and out of the
+country vehicles on Main Street, stopped at the
+express office, where the young mistress of the
+car alighted for a moment, returning with a package,
+and then, with a reckless flourish, turned
+into lower Cliff Street and presently stopped in
+front of Nancy’s house.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie entered without ceremony, so intimate
+had she now become with the Brown household.
+Concealing the package in her gray ulster, she
+left it in the hall. Then, with the boyish freedom
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_112'></a>112</span>
+which seemed to characterize all her ways, pulling
+off her gray hat and gloves, she marched into the
+parlor.
+</p>
+<p>
+Nancy was huddled up on the settle doing the
+family darning, a Saturday task she loathed.
+Elinor was playing softly on the square piano
+between the front windows and Mary Price was
+reading a book.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I hope I don’t disturb any one,” said Billie,
+laughing as she burst into the room. “Everybody
+seems to be so busy here. I’m the only idle creature
+living to-day. Even Cousin Helen is at
+work.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I hope she is doing something more to her
+taste than this,” said Nancy mournfully. “I’d
+rather dig for clams any day. Merry would wear
+out a sock made of steel chains.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Hark, a doleful voice from the tombs,” cried
+Merry, who always made it an excuse to hunt
+for something in the parlor when Billie appeared.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s the truth,” complained Nancy. “If you
+would just keep still two minutes at a time, I
+wouldn’t have to give up my Saturdays slaving
+for you.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_113'></a>113</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘When I hear the music play, I can’t keep
+right still,’” sang Merry, executing a double
+shuffle on the floor to a jig tune Elinor had struck
+up.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You’ll have to dance to a different tune when
+you go to Annapolis,” cried Nancy. “And who’ll
+do your darning there?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t borrow trouble, Nancy,” answered her
+brother. “Perform your daily task and cease to
+murmur. You’ll be a professional grumbler like
+Belle Rogers if you keep on.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do you know that she and her whole family
+are denouncing me as a sort of would-be murderer?”
+put in Billie. “All because I lost Ben and
+the rest of you at the Shell Island fire and took
+her into the wrong room.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I heard that she was an early Christian martyr
+who had come near to being burned at the
+stake,” said Merry.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” continued Billie, “she tells how I enticed
+her into the room, and then climbed up onto
+the roof and left her, so that she had to follow
+and she even blames me because she would slide
+down the rope first and cut her hands so that she
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_114'></a>114</span>
+will never be able to play the piano. I am very
+sorry for that, because she liked music, but it was
+her own fault.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s really making a sort of split-up in the
+town,” observed Elinor. “Mrs. Rogers and
+mamma almost had words on the subject the other
+day. As much as mamma will ever have words
+with any one. Mrs. Rogers tried to tell her that
+Belle was going one way and you made her go
+another, and all mamma said was, ‘My dear Julia,
+I have heard the correct version of the story,’
+and swept away.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Exactly as you will do, Elinor, when you begin
+to wear long dresses,” said Nancy.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, she can sweep without a train,” cried
+Merry, giving a very good imitation of Elinor as
+he made for the door with his baseball bat and
+glove.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, don’t be silly, Americus Brown,” called
+Elinor after him. “Remember that you are to
+be a soldier of the nation some day, and you’ll
+have to stop walking pigeon-toed, then, and keep
+your bow-legs straight and stop grinning. It
+will be very difficult, I fear.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_115'></a>115</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+Merry shot a coffee bean at her with his thumb
+and forefinger as he left the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That boy will be the death of me,” exclaimed
+Nancy. “He reminds me of our sailor weather-cock
+in the garden that waves his arms and legs
+and turns every time there is the slightest
+breeze.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He’s a nice boy,” said Billie, who always took
+Merry’s side in the arguments. “But I am here
+this morning, as the preacher says, to ask your
+advice in a grave matter. Several grave matters,
+in fact.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Have you heard from Mr. Lafitte?” demanded
+the three girls in unison.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No,” said Billie, “and it’s been nearly three
+weeks since we sent my name and address. Perhaps
+there hasn’t been time, but I should think
+they might have cabled, or something.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It only postpones the evil day of telling them
+the jewels were lost in the fire,” observed Mary.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie disappeared in the hall for a moment and
+returned with the package she had hidden in her
+ulster.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_116'></a>116</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“The jewels came back by express this morning,”
+she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+“For heaven’s sake!” cried the others.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t know whether to be glad or sorry,”
+said Billie. “I am sure Pandora’s box didn’t have
+any more troubles locked inside of it than this one
+has. What shall I do with it now?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why don’t you tell Miss Campbell all about
+it?” suggested Elinor, for the second time.
+</p>
+<p>
+“But, Elinor, it wouldn’t be right,” answered
+Billie. “Didn’t we give the woman our word of
+honor, Nancy, that we would keep the box for
+her until she sent for it, and tell no one? Even
+you and Mary would not have known about it
+if you hadn’t attacked Nancy like two wild Comanche
+Indians and knocked the box open.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t you think the woman was crazy, honestly
+now?” Elinor asked for the hundredth time.
+This was an old argument between the girls.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, I don’t,” answered Billie emphatically.
+</p>
+<p>
+“She was much too beautiful and fascinating to
+be crazy,” put in Nancy.
+</p>
+<p>
+“They are the craziest of all sometimes,” said
+Elinor.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_117'></a>117</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“But to return to the jewels,” interrupted
+Mary, the peacemaker. “Did the hotel people
+send them back?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, that’s the queerest thing of all, and that’s
+what I’m here for to tell you now. The hotel
+people wrote me a letter which came this morning,
+saying that it was believed that the fire had
+been started by thieves who robbed the safe and
+that they, therefore, were not responsible for
+things lost.
+</p>
+<p>
+“In the same mail came another very nice letter
+from a strange man named Johnston. He
+said the night of the fire he saw a man who was
+carrying this package faint dead away on the
+bridge. He believes now the man was one of
+the thieves. Anyway, he took him into his automobile
+and the thief must have come to and not
+known where he was, because he escaped somehow,
+probably to go back and look for the package,
+which Mr. Johnston has expressed to me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, of all the strange stories!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But the question is now, what to do with the
+thing?” continued Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+If Billie had been a few years older, she would
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_118'></a>118</span>
+probably have gone straight to Miss Campbell,
+or to Miss Campbell’s lawyer, Mr. Richard Butler,
+Elinor’s uncle, for advice. The jewels would
+then have been stored in the bank for safe-keeping
+and proper means taken to find the owner.
+But it seemed to her that having given her word
+she must keep it, and hide the jewels herself in
+some safe place until she heard from Mr. Lafitte.
+After all, he might be on a journey somewhere,
+and they could only wait patiently.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Let’s go and consult our guide, counsellor,
+and friend,” suggested Mary.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who?” asked the other girls, in some doubt.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, the motor car, of course. Isn’t he the
+cheerfullest, finest friend in the world; always
+ready to give pleasure; always smiling and ruddy,
+and ready to come and go, stay still or move on—bless
+him?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He is a dear,” said Billie, pleased with this
+extravagant praise of her beloved car.
+</p>
+<p>
+The girls had come to consider “The Comet”
+almost as a living thing, like a pet horse or a
+favorite dog. They loved it as ardently as children
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_119'></a>119</span>
+love a pony which has borne them all on his
+back at one time around the garden.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was decided then to take a spin in the car
+and the four friends were soon in their accustomed
+places on the red leather seats.
+</p>
+<p>
+The scarlet car, full of young girls, was no
+longer an unusual sight in the town of West
+Haven, and people had ceased now to turn and
+stare at the “Motor Maids,” as Captain Brown
+had christened them one morning when they had
+taken him for a drive in the automobile.
+</p>
+<p>
+Through the town they sped and out to the
+open road. The crisp autumn air nipped their
+cheeks and brought the color to their faces. As
+they passed Boulder Lane they looked curiously
+at the fisherman’s house in the distance.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am certain those men who took your car
+were smugglers,” announced Nancy. “Father
+says there are lots of them.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Perhaps,” said Billie, “and I am certain of
+another thing: that it was the same one-armed
+man who was on the roof of the hotel the night
+of the fire.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_120'></a>120</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“But there are lots of one-armed men in the
+world, child,” replied Nancy.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Perhaps, but there was something familiar
+about him. And, besides, why did he ask me
+those questions about the girls at the hotel in the
+red automobile?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And, ‘curiser and curiser,’ what did he want
+with the box of jewels? And how did he know
+we had them?” said Elinor.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I really couldn’t say,” answered Nancy. “Ask
+me something easier.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Seeing nothing ahead of them in the road,
+Billie had let the car go full speed. It was what
+they all loved, even Mary Price, who had gradually
+got over a certain timidity she used to feel
+when the car shot through the air like a sky-rocket,
+and it was Mary Price now, grown unusually
+bold from familiarity with speeding, who
+suddenly jumped up and cried in her high, sweet
+voice:
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ve got it! I’ve got it!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Got what?” demanded the others.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, a place to put the jewels in, of course.
+Mother’s safe.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_121'></a>121</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“But would she like us to use her safe?” asked
+Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“She won’t mind. I’ll tell her it’s something of
+yours. She never uses it. We haven’t anything
+to keep in it now,” Mary added simply. “Father
+used it in his life time and Mother has just kept
+it since because we are always expecting to make
+lots of money, you know, and then we might need
+it. I know the combination, and we can
+go straight home and put them in. No one would
+ever think of looking for jewels in our little
+house, and they ought to be as safe there as any
+place in the world.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mary, dear, you are a trump,” exclaimed
+Billie. “It’s a perfect idea.”
+</p>
+<p>
+In another moment, they had faced about and
+were on their way back to town.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Dear old car,” ejaculated Elinor, patting the
+red leather tenderly. “Mary’s right, we couldn’t
+get on without you. We consult you exactly as
+the ancients consulted oracles. I think all your
+cushions must be stuffed with good advice, instead
+of horse hair, and your big all-seeing eye
+is always on the lookout for danger——”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_122'></a>122</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“And his heart is true to his jolly crew,” sang
+Nancy.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He is better than a horse,” put in Mary, “because
+he never gets tired.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And when he’s empty we fill him with gasoline,
+and he’ll go ahead as fresh as ever,” went
+on Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And he always avoids broken glass and tacks
+in the road,” Elinor was saying, when “bang!”
+went one of the rear tires with a report as loud
+as a pistol shot.
+</p>
+<p>
+The “jolly crew” could not restrain their ever-ready
+laughter at this disconcerting behavior on
+the part of “The Comet” just at the very moment
+when their boasts were loudest.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, well,” said Billie apologetically, “it’s time
+we had a puncture. We’ve never had one yet.
+We’ll take him to the garage and have him mended
+properly.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Chocolates, marshmallows, peanut brittle, and
+other candies, fresh and dee-lishus!” called a
+voice from behind the motor as they pulled into
+the garage.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was Percival Algernon St. Clair, wearing a
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_123'></a>123</span>
+most engaging smile on his rosy, good-natured
+face, as he tipped his boyish cap at Nancy in particular
+in the most approved grown-up fashion.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Have you any ice cream sodas, Percy-Algy?”
+demanded Nancy impudently.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t think the fountain’s dry yet, Nancy,
+and we’ll have a party, if you say so. The gang
+is close by. Shall I give the signal?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have no objections,” said Nancy, “if the
+girls haven’t.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why should we?” answered Billie. “Isn’t
+pineapple soda water my favorite beverage?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Percy put two fingers to his lips and gave three
+whistles, and, as if by magic, Ben Austen, Charlie
+Clay, and Merry Brown emerged from the
+shadow of a neighboring doorway.
+</p>
+<p>
+In spite of his theatrical name, his girlish complexion,
+and blond hair, Percy was a great favorite
+with his friends. He had received a spoiling
+from his doting and indulgent mother that would
+have turned many another boy into a selfish, vain
+egoist. But Percy had been saved from this
+wretched fate partly by his own frank and engaging
+disposition and partly by association with
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_124'></a>124</span>
+his three chums, Charlie, Ben, and Merry, wholesome,
+manly boys, who had never been mollycoddled
+in their lives.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Will some one carry this parcel then?” asked
+Billie, pulling the box of jewels from under the
+seat, and tearing the wrapping paper off of a
+corner as she did so.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I will,” said Merry promptly, taking charge
+of the box. “Why, it’s rather heavy,” he observed,
+weighing it in his hand. “It must be
+full of gold nuggets.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie was silent. She was beginning to be a
+little superstitious about that box, and she could
+have wished that the punctured tire and the soda
+water party, pleasant as was this last diversion,
+had not interrupted their plan to store the box
+in Mrs. Price’s safe.
+</p>
+<p>
+But Billie enjoyed being with girls and boys of
+her own age so much that she soon forgot her
+doubts and joined in the gay conversation of the
+little company.
+</p>
+<p>
+On Saturday afternoons a crowd of High
+School boys and girls was always congregated
+around the soda water fountain in the West
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_125'></a>125</span>
+Haven Pharmacy, as it was called, and the place
+was filled with gay talk and laughter, when the
+Motor Maids and their friends pushed their way
+up to the marble counter, while Percy, who had
+more pocket money in a week than some of the
+others had in a year, paid for the checks.
+</p>
+<p>
+As luck would have it, Billie and Americus
+Brown had found places next to Belle Rogers,
+who, very daintily and delicately, though with
+some thoroughness, was consuming a maple-nut
+sundae.
+</p>
+<p>
+Merry pushed the box onto the counter while
+he plunged into a glass of chocolate soda water
+without even noticing that Belle had turned a
+scornful glance, first at him and then at the much
+soiled and travel-stained wrapper on the package.
+Then, suddenly, something very particular
+claimed her attention. Mary Price, who was
+standing around the curve of the counter, saw
+the whole thing and reported it later to the girls.
+Where Billie had torn the paper, the polished
+rosewood surface of the box, with its silver
+mounting, was plainly visible. Belle gave one
+long, astonished stare of recognition.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_126'></a>126</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“After we leave this package at Mary’s, I invite
+all of you to take a ride in the motor,” Billie
+was saying to Merry Brown. “Do you think
+eight can sit where five are in the habit of sitting?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“One seat will be big enough for the midgets,”—a
+nickname given to Mary and Charlie,—Merry
+answered. “One of us can sit on the floor
+and the other four can squeeze onto the back seat.
+The chauffeur is the only person who must have
+plenty of room.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Can’t you move up and give us a little room?”
+interrupted Nancy, pushing her way between her
+brother and his neighbor, while Percy stood patiently
+by with two glasses of soda water.
+</p>
+<p>
+Without meaning it, she had jostled Belle
+Rogers. The two girls turned and faced each
+other.
+</p>
+<p>
+“How do you do, Belle? Are you quite well
+again?” asked Nancy politely, but with a look in
+her eyes which meant mischief.
+</p>
+<p>
+Belle had not been back to school since the
+fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Miss Brown,” said Belle, bowing stiffly.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_127'></a>127</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“How well your hair stays in curl this foggy
+weather, Belle,” continued Nancy, in a high,
+pleasant voice, which could be heard by all the
+boys and girls at the counter. “You must put it
+up almost every night now, don’t you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nancy!” expostulated Billie, as Belle sailed
+from the drug store, followed by several of her
+loyal friends.
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_128'></a>128</span><a name='chIX' id='chIX'></a>CHAPTER IX.—AT THE SIGN OF THE BLUE TEA POT.</h2>
+<p>
+Billie was thankful when they had got the box
+of jewels safely back into the motor car and
+were on their way at last to Mary’s home.
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary and her mother lived in a pretty old
+house facing the public square, and it was fortunate
+that Mrs. Price’s old home was so located.
+In order to support herself and her little daughter,
+the young widow had transformed the lower
+floor into a tea room and shop. A little blue
+board hung from the portico, which bore the inscription
+in old English script, “At Ye Signe of
+Ye Blue Tea Pot.” A large bulletin on the front
+door announced that tea and sandwiches of all
+varieties could be had within; also that luncheons
+were prepared for pleasure parties and journeys
+and that numerous dainty and pretty articles,
+made by hand, were there for sale.
+</p>
+<p>
+The inscription might have stated further that
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_129'></a>129</span>
+the plucky mistress of the little shop was as dainty
+and pretty as any of the articles for sale on the
+counter.
+</p>
+<p>
+As the soda water fountain was the Saturday
+afternoon meeting place of the boys and girls of
+West Haven, so the Sign of the Blue Tea Pot attracted
+the older crowd. It had seemed a bold
+undertaking for the widow to mortgage her home
+and put all the money in the chintz hangings and
+wicker furniture of those two charming tea
+rooms. Her old friends, Mr. Butler and Captain
+Brown, had strongly advised against it, but her
+venture had been a success from the first, although
+a mortgage still hung over the place like
+a black cloud and small debts would accumulate
+every time she got a little ahead.
+</p>
+<p>
+When the red motor with its load of young
+people drew up at the door of Mary’s home, the
+buzz of conversation from inside reached them
+out in the street.
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary’s mother appeared for a moment in the
+doorway, and smiled at them.
+</p>
+<p>
+“She’s as beautiful as an angel,” thought Billie,
+who never told how often she had yearned for a
+real mother of her very own as other girls had.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_130'></a>130</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+Could any one else have looked so charming in
+a perfectly plain homemade gray chambray
+dress, with a white muslin fichu, and little white
+apron to set it off?
+</p>
+<p>
+“Won’t you come in and have some tea and
+cake, children?” Mrs. Price called to the young
+people, while she put an arm around Mary and
+shook hands with Billie, who had followed her
+friend to the front door with the troublesome
+box.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, thank you, Mrs. Price,” replied Billie, as
+spokesman of the party. “I only came to ask a
+favor,” she added, in a lower voice. “Would you
+let me keep this box in your safe for a while? I
+have no place, I mean——” Billie hesitated and
+blushed. Of all things, she detested subterfuge,
+and yet here she was making all sorts of lame excuses
+instead of saying frankly that she was
+keeping the box for a friend.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You mean the old safe upstairs?” asked Mrs.
+Price, somewhat astonished.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, mother,” put in Mary. “I told Billie I
+knew you wouldn’t mind locking this box up for
+her for a while.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_131'></a>131</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Certainly, dear, you are welcome to hide anything
+in it you like. Mary knows the combination
+better than I do. I always have to look it
+up in one of Captain Price’s old note books. I
+am sorry you won’t have some tea and cake, but
+I suppose you are all off for a spin this afternoon.
+It has done Mary more good than I can tell you,
+your motor car. The child is always studying
+so hard to hurry up and be a teacher and take
+care of her old mother, so she says.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Only a few years more, Mother, and you
+shall never have to work again,” said Mary.
+“Some day I shall be the Principal of West
+Haven High School, when Miss Gray gets too old
+to work——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What’s this?” exclaimed Miss Gray herself,
+at the door. She had been drinking tea inside
+with some friends. “Who’s going to lay me on
+the shelf before my time?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mary intends to step into your shoes, Miss
+Gray,” laughed Mrs. Price. “Look out for her.
+She is a dangerous rival. She means to pay off
+all our mortgages and things, and provide for
+her mother’s old age.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_132'></a>132</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+Miss Gray pinched Mary’s cheek.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” insisted Mary stoutly, “all I want is
+money, money, money.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Principal patted the young girl’s cheek
+kindly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t be too mad about it, child. It won’t buy
+everything, you know.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was only an idle speech of Mary’s but you
+all know how much meaning can sometimes be
+given to words spoken thoughtlessly and the day
+was to come when Mary was to regret very
+deeply having used those words.
+</p>
+<p>
+All this time Billie had been standing quietly
+waiting for the moment when they could leave
+the older people and consign the box to the iron
+safe upstairs.
+</p>
+<p>
+But before they could get away the tea room
+began to empty itself. Billie’s Cousin Helen appeared
+in the doorway, with Mrs. Butler, looking
+like Elinor grown middle-aged, the beautiful
+aquiline nose slightly more pronounced, the blue
+eyes a little faded, but the same erect carriage
+which made her look an inch or more taller than
+the other women.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_133'></a>133</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+Mme. Alta, the music teacher, was there with
+Miss Gray. She was a fierce looking, dark-haired
+woman, her two upper teeth protruding over her
+lower lip like the tusks of a walrus, giving her a
+cruel animal expression. Mrs. Rogers, Belle’s
+mother, a small faded, intensely nervous little
+woman, joined the group, followed by Percival
+Algernon St. Clair’s doting parent, “the Widow
+St. Clair,” as she was known, a charming, plump,
+pretty woman, as good-natured as she was comfortably
+self-indulgent.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, Wilhelmina, my darling, what is that
+large package you are carrying?” demanded Miss
+Campbell anxiously. “Has your papa sent you
+a present?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, no, just—just a package of things I was
+going to leave here. We are going motoring for
+a while. You don’t mind, do you Cousin Helen?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, my child, as long as you don’t go too fast.
+But do put down that box. You will injure yourself
+carrying it so long. Why don’t you put it in
+the motor? Why do you leave it here?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, it isn’t mine,” said Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+Mrs. Price looked up at this.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_134'></a>134</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“But I thought——” she commenced, when
+Mary pressed her hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I mean I am keeping it for some one,” went
+on Billie lamely.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My dear Miss Campbell,” put in Miss Gray—and
+Billie thanked her for the intervention—“it
+is a Blue Bird secret, you may depend upon it.
+You do not know school girls as well as I do.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It ees a ver-ry eenter-resting looking package,”
+here remarked Mme. Alta. “It appears to
+be a ver-ry handsome box, as I can plainly see by
+one corner-r which protrudes. You perhaps use
+if for your club’s segrets, eh?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie turned the box guiltily around. She had
+not noticed that the torn end was in view.
+</p>
+<p>
+Mme. Alta looked at her unnecessarily hard,
+Billie thought. She had never liked the strange
+woman and had preferred not to take piano lessons
+of her, after one glance at those hard, cruel
+eyes and the fierce walrus teeth.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m sure it contains much more beautiful and
+interesting things than stupid secrets,” exclaimed
+good-natured, pretty Mrs. St. Clair, who disliked
+to see anybody around her uncomfortable
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_135'></a>135</span>
+and Billie looked very uncomfortable. “Now,
+dear,” she continued, giving Billie a little squeeze,
+“do go and hide your box, if you like. It’s not
+fair to quiz young girls about their secrets, any
+more than it is to quiz older people,” and she
+pushed Billie gently into the hall. Mary quickly
+followed and the two girls ran upstairs, glad to
+get away from the group of inquisitive ladies,
+and infinitely relieved to consign the unlucky box
+into the small safe in the hall closet.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What a joy to be rid of the thing,” exclaimed
+Billie, as they shoved the box inside, turned the
+combination lock, and fled downstairs.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I feel as if we need a good dose of fresh air,
+Mary, to revive us after that inquisition,” she
+added, as they hurried past the company of tea
+drinkers, who still lingered chatting in the doorway,
+and joined the others in the motor car.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Percival, my son,” called Mrs. St. Clair,
+“don’t lean out so far. You might fall and break
+your nose. Oh, oh, my precious boy, they’ll kill
+him!” she shrieked, as Charlie and Merry seized
+him by the arms and pretended to pitch him overboard.
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_136'></a>136</span><a name='chX' id='chX'></a>CHAPTER X.—RUMORS AT SCHOOL.</h2>
+<p>
+West Haven High School, Miss Gray, the
+Principal, had often said, had all the merits of
+a public and private school combined. It was
+more thorough than a private school and the
+teachers were more in touch with the pupils than
+is usual at a public school. Miss Gray herself
+was deeply interested in the welfare of her girls
+and studied carefully the ability and temperament
+of each one.
+</p>
+<p>
+When, therefore, a strange and very terrible
+complaint was made to her one morning about one
+of her school girls, she was too shocked to reason
+intelligently about it, and ended by dismissing
+the complainants quietly from her private office
+until she sent for them again.
+</p>
+<p>
+Exactly what the complaint was no one knew
+except those who had made it. It was kept a
+careful secret. But in school rumors arise in
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_137'></a>137</span>
+the most subtle way. They are whispered about
+behind doors at recess; written on the margins of
+text books in class and hastily rubbed out;
+vaguely hinted at here and there until they spread
+from room to room and class to class and gradually
+the whole school is bursting with the news.
+And the poor victim may all this time be entirely
+unconscious that she is the very centre of a seething,
+boiling pot of gossip.
+</p>
+<p>
+This is how the present rumor started in West
+Haven High School:
+</p>
+<p>
+One afternoon when the last gong had sounded
+the sophomore class gathered in the locker
+room to put on their coats and hats. The lockers
+were only so in name. There had never been
+any keys to them, because there had never been
+any need to keep belongings under lock and key
+in West Haven High School, where most of the
+pupils had known each other all their lives.
+</p>
+<p>
+On this particular afternoon, every incident of
+which our four friends will remember as long
+as they live, Nancy was prinking at the glass,
+as usual; Elinor and Billie, with their heads bent
+over an automobile map, were making plans for
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_138'></a>138</span>
+a motor trip, and Mary Price was studying her
+Latin for the next day. It was that lingering,
+lazy time after school is over, which all school
+girls know.
+</p>
+<p>
+Fannie Alta hurried into the room and flung
+open the door of her locker, next to that of Belle
+Rogers, who was at that moment engaged in
+looking at herself in her own private mirror,
+hung on the inside of her locker door.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” exclaimed Fannie Alta,
+with a very excited and strange manner. “I
+have lost something. Something which my
+mamma gave me to keep for her. What shall I
+do? What shall I do?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, what was it, Fannie?” asked the other
+girls, gathering around her sympathetically.
+“Let us help you find it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, oh, it is terrible!” cried the young Spanish
+girl, wringing her hands and weeping in her
+handkerchief alternately. “What shall I do?
+What shall I do?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Was it money you lost?” asked Billie, in her
+usual rather abrupt manner.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, yes; how did you know?”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_139'></a>139</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“I didn’t know, I guessed,” answered Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did you leave it in your locker?” some one
+else asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, yes. I left it there at noon to-day.
+Twenty dollars my mamma gave to me to keep
+for her. Oh, is it not terrible? She will eat me
+with her anger.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie could hardly keep the corners of her
+mouth from curving with an irrepressible smile
+when she remembered those two front tusks of
+Mme. Alta’s, which seemed to be uncovered,
+ready for work at any moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Are you sure it is not there still?” asked Elinor
+quietly. “I happened to look up when you
+came into the room. You simply flung open your
+locker door and then began to cry. Why don’t
+you look in your pockets before you decide that
+you have lost the money?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Fannie flashed an angry glance at Elinor.
+</p>
+<p>
+“How did you know that I had not looked before;
+that I have not looked twice, many times?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I didn’t,” answered Elinor. “Have you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Fannie did not reply and from that moment she
+and Elinor disliked each other intensely.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_140'></a>140</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+Then the girls began looking carefully about
+the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I feel as if I had it hidden about me,” said
+Nancy, giggling, as she helped in the search.
+</p>
+<p>
+The others laughed, too, which somewhat relieved
+the situation. Nothing is more uncomfortable
+than for money to be lost mysteriously
+in a company of people.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We do look as guilty as the forty thieves,”
+ejaculated Rosomond McLane, a fat, funny girl,
+who was popular with the whole class.
+</p>
+<p>
+No one was more active in the search than
+Belle Rogers. She shook Fannie’s text books
+violently and scattered the papers about, to Fannie’s
+intense annoyance. She felt in Fannie’s
+pockets, examined the lining of her hat, and
+made herself so officious and numerous that Fannie
+herself exclaimed with much irritation:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Please do not, Belle. You know it is not
+there.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Only Elinor sat quietly on the window sill
+watching the search, with just the faintest
+shadow of scornful incredulity on her handsome
+face.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_141'></a>141</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Elinor Butler, do you believe I have been telling
+a falsehood?” Fannie finally exclaimed in exasperation.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What a little spitfire you are, Fannie,” answered
+Elinor. “Just because I don’t choose to
+grovel on the floor looking for your money. I
+can help you quite as much by thinking, and I am
+thinking very hard, I can assure you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+At last the search was abandoned. The pocketbook
+containing the money could not be found,
+and the young girls, swinging their book straps,—bags
+were too childish for High School girls,—strolled
+up the street in groups discussing the
+strange disappearance of Fannie’s twenty dollars.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the meantime, the Motor Maids, laughing
+and talking together, tossed their books into the
+red car and then climbed in themselves. Somehow,
+Fannie’s loss did not seem very real. Billie
+had cranked up the machine and was about to
+back out when Fannie’s voice called from the
+locker room:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Wait! Stop!”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_142'></a>142</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, you see we haven’t gone yet,” answered
+Elinor severely.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Elinor, you are so hard on Fannie Alta. I’m
+sorry for her,” said Mary. “Mother wouldn’t
+bite me if I lost twenty dollars, but I’d hate to
+lose it just the same.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I didn’t mean to be hard on her,” answered
+Elinor, “but my instincts tell me not to trust
+her.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“When did they tell you, Elinor?” laughed
+Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+Elinor’s instincts were a great joke to her
+three devoted friends. But the appearance of
+Fannie running breathlessly, with Belle following
+at a dignified pace, interrupted Elinor’s invariable
+reply to jests about her instincts: “You know
+they are never wrong.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What is the matter now, Fannie?” asked
+Billie, who was standing in the front of her car,
+her arms folded, like a captain on the hurricane
+deck of his ship.
+</p>
+<div class='figcenter' style='padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em'>
+<a name='i004' id='i004'></a>
+<img src="images/illus-142.jpg" alt="“Get out of the road,” cried Billie, backing recklessly out of the shed and whizzing out of the gate at full speed." title=""/><br />
+<span class='caption'>“Get out of the road,” cried Billie, backing recklessly out<br/>of the shed and whizzing out of the gate at full speed.</span>
+</div>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_143'></a>143</span></div>
+<p>
+“Would you mind——” Fannie stammered. “I
+mean—I think I have a right to ask—I want you
+to look in your pockets. I believe——” she
+continued, getting bolder every moment. “I am sure
+that one of you will find my pocketbook——”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie’s frank, candid face flushed as scarlet as
+her motor car, while the color left Elinor’s cheeks
+as white as death. Nancy gave a little frightened
+giggle, and Mary Price neither flushed nor
+turned white, but looked quietly on.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Really, Fannie,” spoke Elinor, “you are not
+in the lawless South American country you came
+from, whatever it is. You are among decent people,
+not thieves, and perhaps you had better remember
+that hereafter. Start on, Billie,” she
+commanded, sitting as erect as a queen at her own
+coronation.
+</p>
+<p>
+“But I insist!” screamed Fannie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“She has a right,” put in Belle.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Get out of the road,” cried Billie, backing
+recklessly out of the shed, turning with a wide,
+flourishing curve and whizzing out of the gate
+at full speed.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, of all the insolence,” cried Elinor.
+“What does she mean and how does she dare——” her
+voice choked with indignation.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_144'></a>144</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t you think it was Belle Rogers who put
+her up to it out of revenge?” suggested Mary.
+</p>
+<p>
+“If it was, I can’t see what she had to gain by
+it,” said Billie. “Elinor sailed into them and we
+nearly sailed over them. It seems to me we had a
+good deal the best of it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie dropped the girls at their homes, as she
+was in the habit of doing every afternoon after
+school, and whirled up Cliff Street to the old
+Campbell homestead. On the way she passed
+Belle Rogers, who also lived in that fashionable
+section, but she did not ask her to get in and
+ride up the hill. Billie had a frank, open nature,
+but with her whole soul she distrusted that pink
+and white doll-baby face and those innocent
+china blue eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the meantime Mary had taken off her rather
+threadbare little jacket and hung it in the closet.
+Her mother was resting on the couch. She looked
+pale and tired that day, and Mary walked softly
+so as not to disturb her. Slipping off her mittens,
+she thrust them into her coat pocket. Her
+fingers encountered something and she pulled out
+a flat, foreign-looking pocketbook. Mary’s face
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_145'></a>145</span>
+turned white and she leaned against the wall of
+the closet and closed her eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“They must have put it in my pocket,” she
+whispered. “What shall I do?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mary, dearest,” called her mother.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, mother,” she answered, quietly slipping
+the purse into the pocket again. “I won’t tell
+her now,” she thought. “She is worried enough
+already.” And when presently she kissed her
+mother, no one could have told that the young
+girl was more frightened than she had ever been
+in all her lifetime.
+</p>
+<p>
+The next morning Mary hurried to school
+without waiting for Billie and her car. She had
+something to study, she said. But Fannie was
+there before her, waiting in the locker room.
+Mary tried to calm her beating heart as she
+looked steadily at the other girl. Then, with a
+sudden resolution, she marched straight up to
+Fannie, and thrust the pocketbook into her hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You put this in my pocket,” she said. “I
+don’t know what you have against me, or what
+I ever did to you, but if you ever do it again, I
+shall go straight to Miss Gray.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_146'></a>146</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+Fannie took the pocketbook without a word,
+and after that a very different version of the
+story got out. Finally it reached Miss Gray’s
+ears.
+</p>
+<p>
+But the most serious thing of all was that
+things began disappearing every day out of the
+girls’ lockers.
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_147'></a>147</span><a name='chXI' id='chXI'></a>CHAPTER XI.—SEVEN LEAGUE ISLAND.</h2>
+<p>
+“Pile in any old way and make yourselves as
+comfy as you can,” said Billie, from the chauffeur’s
+seat, while seven boys and girls packed
+themselves into “The Comet” as tightly as sardines
+in a box.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ben, I look to you to take good care of my
+girls,” called Miss Helen Campbell, from the
+front door steps of her home. “And all of you
+promise me three things: Don’t go too fast;
+don’t stay too late, and don’t go too far.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We promise,” came eight voices in a chorus.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good-by, Cousin Helen, dearest,” called Billie,
+kissing her hand affectionately to the little lady
+who was fast coming to fill an aching void in
+Billie’s heart.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good-by, Miss Campbell,” called the others,
+while she smiled and bowed and waved her handkerchief
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_148'></a>148</span>
+like a favorite actress before an enthusiastic
+audience.
+</p>
+<p>
+What a difference the young people had made
+in her life, she thought, as the carload of boys
+and girls flashed down the street and the sound
+of their talk and laughter, growing fainter and
+fainter, floated back to her like a pleasant memory.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was a real seaside October day. Nothing
+could have been bluer than the bay, unless it was
+the sky. A warm, dry land breeze swept over
+the moors about West Haven. Wild asters and
+golden rod colored the roadside, and the stillness
+of Indian summer pervaded the whole country.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There was no need of the top to-day,” observed
+Billie, looking up at the cloudless sky. “I
+am glad we decided not to put it on. We might
+as well have left the rugs and wraps behind, too.
+They take up room and won’t be used, I am certain.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I hope not,” answered Ben. “I see only one
+cloud on the horizon and that’s no larger than a
+man’s hand; but clouds do grow.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t borrow trouble, Rain-in-the-Face,” exclaimed
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_149'></a>149</span>
+Percy. “The last time you looked into
+the future we had a fire.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“All right, dummy,” answered his friend. “I
+am not predicting anything. I only mentioned the
+possibilities of a very small cloud. And the night
+of the Shell Island fire I said what certainly
+proved to be perfectly true—that the hotel was a
+regular fire trap.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Are you really a good weather prophet, Ben?”
+asked Billie anxiously. She did not like to have
+her parties turn out disastrously.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He—he’s the poorest ever,” cried Merry.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t go on what he says, Billie,” put in
+Percy. “The last camping trip we went on, he
+predicted fair weather and it rained for a week.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, just to prove that I know what I’m
+talking about,” cried Ben, “I predict that it rains
+before night.”
+</p>
+<p>
+This unpopular prophecy was greeted by hoots
+of derision from the others.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What makes you think so, Ben?” asked Elinor.
+“It’s as clear as a bell now.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Certain signs,” he answered.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, Ben Austen,” ejaculated Nancy. “Don’t
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_150'></a>150</span>
+go spoil our day before it’s begun. You know
+just as well as I do that it’s Indian summer, and
+it never rains in Indian summer.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Never, Miss Nancy-Bell?” repeated Ben,
+smiling. He minded as little being teased by his
+friends as a big, good-natured dog minds the
+antics of a lot of puppies.
+</p>
+<p>
+“All right, Big Injun Ben,” said Merry, “let
+it rain before night. We’ve got a good many
+hours to enjoy ourselves in and get home, too, before
+dark. We’ll be at the ferry-boat landing in
+an hour, and if we’re lucky enough to catch the
+boat, we’ll reach Seven League Island by eleven
+o’clock. That will give us plenty of time to eat
+everything in sight, see Smugglers’ Cave, and all
+the other sights, and get home by seven o’clock.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course, we can,” replied Ben. “I was only
+teasing Percival Algernon St. Clair, because he
+hates the rain worse than poison. I never saw a
+finer day in my life.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank goodness!” exclaimed Billie, in tones
+of relief. She really had great faith in Ben’s
+judgment about most things.
+</p>
+<p>
+Seven League Island, a rocky strip of land some
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_151'></a>151</span>
+twenty-one miles long, was one of the most romantic
+places in the vicinity of West Haven. It
+was three miles from the mainland and, during
+the season when the summer resorts and camps
+which clustered on its shores were open, several
+ferry-boats carried passengers back and forth
+from the mainland to the island. In winter the
+place was almost deserted. The land was too
+poor for farming and few people cared to remain
+on that lonely, mournful island, where, in stormy
+weather, the waves thundered through the caves
+in the cliffs, and the wind in the pine trees made
+a mournful sound like the wail of a lost soul.
+</p>
+<p>
+To-day, however, it was as serene and smiling
+as the Islands of the Blest. The southwest wind
+stirred the pine needles gently, making a pleasant
+quiet song. The tiny waves, as they lapped
+the sides of the ferry, gave out a “cloop, cloop”
+sound that still water makes against the bow of
+a canoe.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What time does the last ferry go back, Captain?”
+asked Ben, of the old ferryman, whose
+face was as weather beaten and seamed as the
+hide of a hippopotamus.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_152'></a>152</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Six, in good weather.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What time in bad?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Depends on the weather,” answered the old
+man briefly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“How many other ferry stations are there?”
+asked Charlie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Three.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good,” exclaimed happy-go-lucky Americus
+Brown. “We’ll take the one that’s nearest when
+the time comes to go back and ride before the
+wind, and beat the rain and put old Ben out of
+business as a weather prophet.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The ferryman said nothing, but his small eyes
+twinkled with amusement.
+</p>
+<p>
+They were the only passengers on the boat that
+trip, and as the motor whirled up the hard-beaten
+road from the ferry landing, they noticed that
+the bungalows and summer cottages along the
+shore were closed for the season.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s because it’s so hard to get food,” Percy
+explained. He had once visited some friends
+at Flag Point, the first settlement, and was to be
+their guide this morning to the great cave, which
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_153'></a>153</span>
+had been used, it was said, in the days when
+smugglers were common in the land.
+</p>
+<p>
+The others were familiar only with the shore,
+where they had come on bathing and fishing excursions,
+and the boys and girls were eager to
+explore the rocky caverns, the fort, the little inlets,
+where pirates were supposed to have anchored
+their ships, and above all the smugglers’
+cave, which Percy told them was a great vaulted
+chamber in the rocks, with an entrance no broader
+than a narrow door.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Take the road going to the right,” called
+Percy, as Billie paused at the top of the cliff for
+directions. “It’s the best one for motoring and
+it goes past the old rifle-pit where we can eat
+lunch. We can leave the car there and climb
+down to the caves afterwards.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The Comet” turned obediently to the right
+and shot down the interminable expanse of empty
+white road, like a shooting star on the milky way.
+</p>
+<p>
+Even Mary, who had been pale and silent all
+morning, regained her spirits on that glorious
+ride, when Merry, with head thrown back, began
+to sing:
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_154'></a>154</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“The sailor’s wife the sailor’s star shall be,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Yo-ho, yo-ho-ho, yo-ho, yo-ho-ho!”<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+and she joined in the chorus with the others, her
+clear, sweet voice piping out like the notes of a
+field lark in a chorus of birds.
+</p>
+<p>
+At last Billie pulled up at the side of the road
+under a cliff, on top of which was an old grass-grown
+fort used during the Indian wars.
+</p>
+<p>
+“This must be it,” she said. “It’s peaceful
+enough looking now to make a good picnicing
+ground, but I don’t suppose it was much of a picnic
+for the people who built it to shoot Indians
+from.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nor much of a picnic for the Indians, either,”
+said Ben, helping Billie out while Charlie Clay
+assisted the other girls to the ground and Percy
+and Merry unstrapped the luncheon hamper.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Let’s eat up high,” suggested Billie. “That is,
+if you can carry the basket up that steep incline.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The pack mules are here for that work,” said
+Ben, pointing to Merry and Percy. “Charlie, you
+bring the rugs for the ladies to sit on and I’ll
+help the ladies.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_155'></a>155</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Will you listen to Nervy Nat,” cried Percy,
+as he obediently shouldered his end of the luncheon
+hamper and followed Merry up the hill.
+</p>
+<p>
+How they laughed and scrambled and shoved
+as they clambered up the pebbly path. Once
+Mary, with a shrill cry, slipped and stumbled
+back on Nancy who fell against Charlie, who, in
+his turn, tumbled against Ben, and that pillar of
+strength, grasping a branch of a pine tree with
+each hand, supported the whole human weight
+without a tremor.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was like picnicing in the tops of the trees,
+when they finally spread the cloth in the grass-grown
+enclosure of the fort, and beyond them
+stretched the entire expanse of the ocean glimmering
+blue in the sunshine, with an occasional
+ship outlined on the horizon.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I hope the ginger ale is still cold,” cried
+Merry.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And the mayonnaise hasn’t melted,” said
+Nancy.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What, nothing to eat but victuals and drink?”
+exclaimed Percy.
+</p>
+<p>
+When they had waded through the piles of
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_156'></a>156</span>
+sandwiches and pyramids of cake, and drained
+the last drop of ginger ale, silent Charlie, who had
+an enormous appetite, remarked:
+</p>
+<p>
+“How hungry this piney-salty combination does
+make a fellow!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, Charlie,” said Billie, “don’t say you are
+still hungry. You remind me of the elephant in
+Merry’s song:
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“‘The elephant ate all night,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The elephant ate all day,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And feed as they would, as much as they could,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The cry was still more hay.’”<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+Charlie pulled out his mouth organ and began
+to play such a rollicking dance tune that the boys
+and girls, almost before they knew it, were two-stepping
+over the grass as madly as a lot of wild
+young colts. Then Charlie, seizing Mary about
+the waist and still playing vigorously on his
+“harp,” as it was called in that section, joined the
+dancers himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+If they had not all of them been so absorbed in
+executing the Dutch twirl, or racing over the
+ground like Cossack dancers on the Russian
+Steppes, they would have been somewhat disturbed to
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_157'></a>157</span>
+have seen a man peering down at them
+from the top of a mound. He had crawled up the
+steep incline and was lying flat on his stomach in
+the tall grass. His face is familiar enough to us
+by now, for he had only one eye, but that one, like
+the eye of the three mythological witches, gleamed
+brilliantly and wickedly and nothing escaped its
+range. He smiled as if he rather enjoyed watching
+the dancers, and especially his one wicked eye
+followed the movements of Ben and Charlie and
+Billie Campbell. Presently when the whirling
+couples had tumbled breathlessly on the grass,
+fanning themselves with their hats and Ben had
+called out: “We’d better be getting along now,”
+the man slipped away as silently as a snake and
+disappeared somewhere below.
+</p>
+<p>
+“To the caves,” cried Percy, as they gathered
+up the rugs and cushions and hastened down the
+cliff to the motor.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I suppose it’s safe to leave ‘The Comet’ here
+without any one to look after him,” Billie had observed,
+and the others had agreed that it was.
+</p>
+<p>
+“As safe as on any other desert island,” Ben
+had answered.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_158'></a>158</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+It seemed impossible that anything could happen
+in that lonely, quiet place, which was like a
+deserted paradise to the girls and boys that beautiful
+afternoon. There was nothing about the locality
+or the weather to arouse uncomfortable
+suspicions. The patch of sky, which was revealed
+to them just overhead between the tall,
+straight pine trees, was like a beautiful deep
+blue canopy. Even the watchful Ben could not
+have told that the cloud, so short a time ago no
+larger than a man’s hand, now stretched itself
+across the horizon in a long, thick line of black.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The caves are the most fun of all,” said Percy,
+leading the way to the cliffs overlooking the
+ocean. “There are dozens of them, some little
+and some very large. The lower ones fill up at
+high tide, but the upper ones are safe enough.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The cliff was honeycombed with small rocky
+chambers, and as they clambered, Indian file,
+along the narrow path which nature had so
+thoughtfully cut in the rocks they heard the
+boom of the incoming tide thundering through
+the caves on the beach.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I suppose people could live in these little caverns,”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_159'></a>159</span>
+Percy continued, “if it wasn’t so all-fired
+lonely and inconvenient; but wait until you see
+Smugglers’ Cave. It has as many natural conveniences
+as a real house built by human beings.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Here it is,” he cried at last, to the others who
+had run all the way down a steep embankment to
+see this romantic place.
+</p>
+<p>
+Certainly it might well have been a favorite
+spot for smugglers and robbers on the high seas.
+Too high for the tide to reach and still well hidden
+from above by a thick growth of scrubby
+pine and oak trees, the cave was as secret and
+safe a place as could be imagined. Rock-hewn
+steps led up from the smooth pebbly beach
+below and the curve of the coast made a charming
+little haven for ships and a natural landing
+place for small boats. The eight friends stood in
+a row on the beach.
+</p>
+<p>
+“This is called ‘Pirates’ Cove,’ you know,” went
+on Percy. “They say the pirates used to anchor
+their ships in this little haven and come ashore
+and have pirate tea parties on the beach.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Here comes a sea rover now,” called Merry,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_160'></a>160</span>
+scanning the entrance to the harbor where a
+ship could be seen outlined against the blue.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, she isn’t coming this way, Old Tar,” answered
+Percy. “It’s too late in the season, for
+yachts and ships rarely come in here unless there
+is a storm. There’s nothing to come for and it
+takes them out of their course.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She’s headed this way,” continued Merry, not
+taking any notice of Percy’s interruption, while
+he scanned the ship with his far-seeing sailor’s
+eyes. “She’s a brigantine, and she’s making for
+this cove.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, well, what of it?” put in Billie. “Perhaps
+she is coming here for the rest cure. But
+she doesn’t interest me half as much as Smugglers’
+Cave. Let’s not waste any more time
+here,” and she ran up the steps, followed by the
+others.
+</p>
+<p>
+The entrance to the cave had been as cleverly
+concealed as if nature had conspired with the
+outlaws to provide them with a safe hiding place
+for their contraband goods. The steps appeared
+to lead to nothing more than a blank wall, but,
+following Percy around the edge of an enormous
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_161'></a>161</span>
+rock which, in ages past must have slipped its
+fastenings above, they presently came to a narrow
+opening between the rock and the side of the
+cave, just large enough for a man to go through.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The smugglers must have had to do up their
+bales of silk pretty flat to get them through
+here,” said Ben, measuring the opening with his
+handkerchief, as he stooped to keep from bumping
+his head on the top.
+</p>
+<p>
+“How beautiful! How wonderful!” cried the
+four girls, when their eyes had become used to the
+change from the brilliant sunlight outside to the
+semi-twilight of the great vaulted chamber where
+they now found themselves.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, I’ll show you what a jim-dandy architect
+nature is,” said Percy. “Here’s the bathroom.
+No hot water, of course, but a perfectly
+good tub and cold water always on tap.”
+</p>
+<p>
+He pointed out a natural basin, probably worn
+in the rocks by the constant dripping of water
+from a spring that trickled down the wall of the
+cave.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Here’s the bedroom, that nice, comfortable
+shelf over there. Here’s your easy chair,” he
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_162'></a>162</span>
+continued, showing them a curious formation of
+rocks really resembling a big armchair with a
+high back.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s a rocky chair and not a rocking chair,”
+observed Charlie, taking a seat and rising quite
+suddenly. “Nature is as mischievous as a little
+boy if she is a good architect. Look at this,”
+and he pointed to a very sharp, almost needle-like,
+piece of stone in one corner of the seat.
+</p>
+<p>
+The others laughed gayly as they hurried after
+Percy and a hundred reverberating echoes
+startled them into silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And now, ladies and gentlemen, I have saved
+the most interesting sight for the last. You are
+about to see the store-room of the smugglers.”
+He led the way down two steps into another
+chamber.
+</p>
+<p>
+“By Jove!” he cried suddenly and stopped
+short.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What is it?” exclaimed the others, peering
+over his shoulder into the darkness.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t you see?” he said, in a low voice.
+“They are still using it for a store-room.”
+</p>
+<p>
+They blinked their eyes with amazement, when
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_163'></a>163</span>
+presently there loomed up in the shadows a pile
+of long, flat packing boxes.
+</p>
+<p>
+Ben lit a candle, which he had thoughtfully
+brought along in his coat pocket, and they examined
+the boxes, which crowded one entire end of
+the smugglers’ store-room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Will you look at this?” he called. “Elinor,
+you are in this.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Ben held the candle high and pointed to a
+sign on the nearest box, which read: “Automobile
+Supplies—Butler Brothers—West Haven——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why,” cried Elinor, “you surely don’t suppose
+Uncle Tom and Uncle Richard could be
+storing their goods here, do you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+No one answered her for a moment. Their
+thoughts were busy searching for an explanation
+to this strange discovery.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Elinor,” said Mary presently, “don’t you remember
+what those men who borrowed Billie’s
+automobile said about killing every Butler in the
+county who interfered?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” said Elinor, in a frightened voice, “but
+what could these boxes have to do with it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“They may have a great deal,” said Ben.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_164'></a>164</span>
+“Those men are probably smuggling your
+uncles’ auto supplies out of the country. The
+boxes are smuggled up to this cave by degrees, I
+suppose, and then loaded on some ship when they
+have got enough to make it worth while. And, if
+it’s the same man we had dealings with that
+night, he is a pretty desperate kind of an individual.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t want any more fights,” exclaimed
+Billie. “Both of those men carried pistols and
+knives; I suppose all first-class smugglers do, but
+I don’t propose that my party is going to be
+ruined by any bloodshed. It is getting late, and
+we had better be going.”
+</p>
+<p>
+They quite agreed with Billie, although the
+boys would have liked to linger in the Smugglers’
+Cave for a while.
+</p>
+<p>
+The outer air seemed very warm and oppressive
+after the cold damp atmosphere of the cave.
+They blinked their eyes and shivered as they hurried
+along the path which led to the road and in
+the change from dark to light they did not at
+first notice that the sun was hidden by a great
+cloud, as black as ink, which stretched from horizon
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_165'></a>165</span>
+to horizon. A hot, heavy wind stirred the
+pine needles and that sense of impending trouble
+which always comes before a great storm sobered
+the spirits of the boys and girls.
+</p>
+<p>
+Nobody spoke of the cloud. It seemed to be
+a question of honor with them not to mention it,
+but they hurried on silently, and in a few minutes
+reached the automobile.
+</p>
+<p>
+With a sigh of relief, the four girls were about
+to jump in, while Ben cranked up, when suddenly
+Nancy gave a little, pent-up scream.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Look!” she cried, pointing to a piece of paper
+stuck on the cushion of the back seat.
+</p>
+<p>
+This message was printed with a lead pencil
+on the paper:
+</p>
+<p>
+“He laughs best who laughs last.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was that man,” said Billie, examining the
+tires ruefully, each one of which had been slashed
+with a sharp knife.
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_166'></a>166</span><a name='chXII' id='chXII'></a>CHAPTER XII.—THE STORM.</h2>
+<p>
+“Billie, can you put on new tires?” demanded
+Ben, somewhat anxiously, making a mental determination
+to learn all about the mechanism of
+motor cars before he went on another motor trip.
+</p>
+<p>
+The others stood back rather helplessly. Merry,
+especially, felt stupid and uncomfortable in having
+to stand aside and let a girl do all the work.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course, I can,” replied Billie, trying to
+speak cheerfully, as a low cannonading of thunder
+rumbled in the distance. “I have done it
+dozens of times, only it will take time, of course.
+The tools are under the seat. Hustle up, everybody.
+Charlie, you get the new tires. Ben, you
+help me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+In a few moments Ben and Billie were kneeling
+on the ground adjusting the tire of the first
+wheel, while Charlie and Merry were engaged
+in examining the extra tires, which the motor
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_167'></a>167</span>
+carried in case of accident, and Percy made himself
+as useful as possible, unpacking all the wraps,
+Billie’s oilskin coat and cap and the rubber
+blankets.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Billie,” announced Charlie, “there are only
+three good tires here. The fourth has a puncture.
+It’s only a small one, but——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I know,” interrupted Billie, looking extremely
+worried. “It was an imperfect one. I may be
+able to patch it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Then Charlie and Merry held a whispered conference
+and disappeared around the bluff.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What’s up?” asked Ben, looking over his
+shoulder at their retreating figures.
+</p>
+<p>
+But nobody could answer the question. The
+girls were getting into their ulsters and Percy
+was arranging the rubber blankets and rugs in
+the car.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What a confoundedly low, mean trick of that
+fellow to do this,” he kept saying to himself, keeping
+one eye on the black clouds piling up and the
+other on Billie and Ben. He figured that it
+would take an hour and a half at least to get all
+four tires on and, he thought, Billie would be a
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_168'></a>168</span>
+pretty smart girl to do it that quickly. It was
+half-past three o’clock.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What about that ferry,” he said to himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+At last they were pumping up the third tire. It
+seemed an age to those who were idly looking on.
+The girls sat in a row on the side of the road,
+their hands folded patiently in their laps, while
+Percy paced up and down, watching the top of
+the bluff uneasily.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Where are Charlie and Merry?” he said at
+last, unable to conceal his anxiety any longer.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Idiots,” exclaimed Nancy. “Haven’t we
+enough to worry us?”
+</p>
+<p>
+While she spoke there came a blinding flash of
+lightning and a clap of thunder seemed to split
+the heavens in two.
+</p>
+<p>
+Nancy hid her face on Elinor’s shoulder.
+Billie and Ben kept on working steadily. They
+had reached the fourth tire now and Billie had
+managed to patch the punctured place just as
+the first great drops of rain began to fall.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Where are those boys?” Ben called over his
+shoulder, not stopping to look up.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_169'></a>169</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ll call them,” said Percy, and running to the
+top of the cliff he began to halloo and whistle.
+</p>
+<p>
+It had grown suddenly so dark that they
+thought the sun must have set an hour earlier
+than usual. A cold wind sprang up and whizzed
+through the pines with a sound that made them
+shiver.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Hurrah, it’s done!” cried Billie triumphantly,
+just as a driving wall of rain struck her in the
+face. “Get in, girls, quick,” she shouted, as she
+slipped on her oil skins. “Boys, where are you?
+Crank up, Ben.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Suddenly, in the midst of the din and racket of
+the storm, came a wild halloo. Charlie and Merry
+appeared, running down the road toward the motor
+car, and six men were following them, shouting
+and gesticulating.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Get in as fast as you can,” commanded Ben,
+and the girls will never forget the terror of that
+moment as they tumbled into the car.
+</p>
+<p>
+The booming of the sea in the caves, the cannonading
+of the thunder, the sharp whistle of the
+wind in the tops of the trees, and the shouts of
+the men! But in the midst of it all came the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_170'></a>170</span>
+kindly, cheering whir of the motor engine. Billie
+could have kissed the faithful “Comet” on his
+broad, good-natured forehead for his loyalty at
+this moment, when they most needed him. As
+Charlie and Merry leaped onto the step, she threw
+in the clutch, and they were off just as the first
+man reached the car, brandishing a long knife
+and yelling hoarsely.
+</p>
+<p>
+The boys climbed over into the back, too tired
+to speak. Merry had a black eye and Charlie had
+a bloody nose.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Billie, the next ferry is Payne’s,” called Percy.
+“It’s about a mile from here. Go straight ahead.”
+</p>
+<p>
+And Billie, sticking to her wheel like a good
+pilot, ducked her head and guided the flying motor
+along the slippery road.
+</p>
+<p>
+They seemed hardly to have taken breath before
+they reached Payne’s landing and found it
+empty and deserted of every human being who
+had ever ventured into that lonely place.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We’ll have to try for the next ferry landing
+then,” said Percy, dejectedly. “It’s back toward
+Flag Point.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Without a word, Billie turned the car, and putting
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_171'></a>171</span>
+on all speed they whizzed through the rain.
+At that moment she had only one prayer in her
+heart: to pilot her friends safely through the
+storm and get them to the ferry landing. There
+was no sign of any of their pursuers as they
+passed the fort. When at last they reached the
+second summer encampment they breathed a sigh
+of relief. The ferry boat was docked at the landing
+and a man stood under the shed, his hands in
+his pockets.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie drew up at the entrance.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Captain, will you take us on?” called Ben. He
+always called boatmen and conductors captain. He
+found it pleased them, but this man did not reply
+and still stood with his back turned looking out
+on the now angry strip of water between Seven
+League Island and the mainland.
+</p>
+<p>
+Ben shouted and they all shouted together, but
+the man was as unmoved as a wooden statue.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He’s deaf,” said Billie. “Get out and shake
+him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Ben jumped out and shook the man’s shoulder,
+who, with a strange guttural sound, turned slowly
+around.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_172'></a>172</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“And dumb,” exclaimed Ben, indicating with
+violent motions first the automobile and then the
+ferry-boat.
+</p>
+<p>
+The deaf mute shook his head and pointed in
+the direction of Flag Point. They offered him
+money, tried persuasion, threats, prayers, which
+he could not hear, and finally ended by dashing
+off toward the last ferry.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s our only chance,” said Ben, “but we’ll
+get over in that if we have to use force.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Meantime, the island, lashed by the storm,
+looked bleak and cold, and they wondered they
+could ever have admired it at all. Crouched under
+the rubber covers, they shivered with chill,
+while Billie, on the front seat, Ben and Percy
+beside her always on the lookout, with clinched
+teeth and hands gripped to the wheel, guided
+them through the hurricane. It seemed to her
+they must be riding on the very wings of the
+wind, and the speedometer announced fifty miles
+an hour.
+</p>
+<p>
+As they dashed through the straggling little
+street of that forlorn village of Flag Point, the
+few indifferent natives who braved the winters
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_173'></a>173</span>
+on the island looked out of their windows in wonder.
+It seemed to them that a streak of red lightning
+had flashed through the storm.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Cheer up, all of you, our troubles are over,”
+called Ben. “The ferry-boat’s at the landing.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The old boat seemed like a haven of rest when
+they pulled into the shelter of its alley for wagons
+and motor cars.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Captain, why didn’t you tell us that this was
+the only ferry running?” demanded Ben of the
+wrinkled old man.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Because I don’t never answer questions that
+ain’t first been put to me,” replied the laconic
+boatman.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t scold him,” said Billie, wiping streams
+of water from her face. “Any one who is obliged
+to live in a God-forsaken, wretched place like
+Seven League Island couldn’t be supposed to have
+any human interest. I imagine they all get to be
+like their own flinty rocks, hard, sharp, and
+ugly.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, bloody nose and blacky eye,” put in
+Percy, “it’s about time for you to give an account
+of yourselves.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_174'></a>174</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” said the others, who had been so
+stunned by the fast ride through the storm and
+the race for the ferry that they had almost forgotten
+what had happened.
+</p>
+<p>
+“When we found,” began Merry, “that one of
+the tires had a puncture, Charlie and I thought
+we might as well make that low, scoundrelly thief
+who slashed the tires pay back with one of those
+he had stolen from Mr. Butler. So we chased
+over to Smugglers’ Cave, but it took longer than
+we had expected, because we had taken the wrong
+path and had to crawl around a precipice and
+jump over crags like two mountain goats.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t forget to tell that your pirate brigantine
+was anchored out in the harbor,” put in
+Charlie. “We supposed it was lying up to get
+out of the storm, but we had another think coming——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, I guess you will all listen to me, next
+time,” went on Merry. “That was the most piratical-looking
+band of fellows with their knives
+and their red handkerchiefs as I ever saw in a
+story book. Well, we did get to the cave at last
+and found it as empty as it was before. Charlie
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_175'></a>175</span>
+had a chisel in his pocket. You know, he is the
+human tool box, and with that and a piece of
+stone we managed to loosen some of the boards.
+But there wasn’t a tire or anything else connected
+with an automobile inside the box. You’ll never
+guess what the boxes were filled with. Something
+about as foreign to a motor car, except in
+sound, when a tire bursts, as a caterpillar.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You don’t mean guns?” demanded Ben.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We certainly do. Rifles by the dozens packed
+in all the boxes we had time to open.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We were chumps,” interrupted Charlie. “If
+we had stopped sooner, I never would have had
+this bloody nose.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, haven’t I got a black eye?” demanded
+his friend.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What happened? What happened?” cried
+Percy impatiently.
+</p>
+<p>
+“While we were tinkering with the boxes, we
+heard the sharpest, loudest whistle I ever heard in
+my life, and we both lit out and ran. I was in
+front and just as I got to the mouth of the cave,
+a one-eyed, one-armed ruffian leapt out at me.
+His one arm was as strong as most men’s two,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_176'></a>176</span>
+but he couldn’t beat Charlie and me together, although
+he gave me this little souvenir and he
+planted his fist on Charlie’s nose. While we were
+fighting, a boat from the ship with six sailors in
+it landed below. They came tearing up the steps
+like a lot of bloodhounds, and Charlie and I had
+a run for our lives. Didn’t we, midget?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Charlie acknowledged the fact gravely. There
+was no denying that the two boys had been in a
+very dangerous situation.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We were ready just in the nick of time, too,”
+said Billie. “If Ben hadn’t cranked up, we’d
+have had those men on us in another minute.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was good to be on land again, even though it
+wasn’t dry land, and the ride home, safe and
+swift, was blissful after the dangers and excitement
+of that thrilling picnic.
+</p>
+<p>
+It seemed that Seven League Island must have
+been the very centre of the hurricane and that
+West Haven had only been visited with a heavy
+shower. Miss Campbell, therefore, was spared
+any great anxiety.
+</p>
+<p>
+But, oh, the joy of drawing up to the cheerful
+blaze of the wood fire, while eight youthful
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_177'></a>177</span>
+adventurers related a somewhat softened version
+of the events of the day! Then the supper that
+followed, in Miss Campbell’s big, old-fashioned
+dining room, with fried chicken and hot biscuits
+and omelette as light as a feather, and strawberry
+jam that took the prize at the county fair!
+</p>
+<p>
+But best of all was what Merry did at the
+last, when, notwithstanding his stiff joints and
+bandaged eye, he rose from his seat and cried:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Hip, hip, hurrah! Three cheers for Billie,
+the pluckiest chauffeur that ever ran a motor
+car.”
+</p>
+<p>
+And all the rest joined in, even Miss Campbell,
+who clapped her hands and cried:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Three cheers for my dear, dear Billie.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Then Billie cried:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Three cheers for Ben because he never said
+‘I told you so,’ about the rain.”
+</p>
+<p>
+That very night, before he went to his own
+home, Ben called at Mr. Richard Butler’s house
+and told him the story of the bogus automobile
+supplies marked with the name of Butler Brothers.
+</p>
+<p>
+There was a great telegraphing and telephoning by long
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_178'></a>178</span>
+distance. The Butler Brothers were
+very excited and angry, just as their niece had
+predicted they would be. Detectives were engaged
+and other ships warned to keep a sharp
+lookout, but nothing was heard of the pirate brigantine.
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_179'></a>179</span><a name='chXIII' id='chXIII'></a>CHAPTER XIII.—WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS.</h2>
+<p>
+Never since she had been Principal of West
+Haven High School had Miss Gray been so upset
+as she was now. For the first time a scandal
+was connected with her beloved institution.
+Every day there was a new complaint.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Miss Gray, I only left my ring on the washstand
+a minute, while I was washing my hands,
+and when I looked for it, it was gone,” said one
+girl.
+</p>
+<p>
+“But who was in the washroom, Julia?” asked
+the Principal wearily. She was disgusted and
+angry with this troublesome situation.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, all the girls, Miss Gray, but nobody saw
+any one take it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Small purses containing lunch money were
+emptied of their contents and put back into jacket
+pockets. Some of the teachers lost money and
+Miss Gray herself was robbed of ten dollars, the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_180'></a>180</span>
+wages of the old janitor, which she had placed
+under a paper weight on the desk, in her own
+private office.
+</p>
+<p>
+The whole school had gone distracted, but the
+pilferer was too clever to be caught.
+</p>
+<p>
+Twice Miss Gray had summoned Mary Price to
+her office, but, after looking gravely into the
+young girl’s serious eyes, she kissed her and
+sent her off on some improvised errand.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I shall wait a few days,” the Principal said.
+“After all, there may be some mistake.”
+</p>
+<p>
+And it was then that she determined to try an
+experiment.
+</p>
+<p>
+One bleak autumn afternoon a thick, wet mist
+rolled in from the ocean and enveloped the town
+of West Haven so densely that it seemed like
+a city floating on a bank of cloud. Only the dim
+outline of objects twenty yards away could be
+seen and the muffled call of the fog horn at the
+lighthouse on the Black Reefs sounded its dismal
+warning through the mist.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie and Mary were hurrying arm in arm
+down the street in earnest conversation. Notwithstanding
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_181'></a>181</span>
+it was after school hours, they were
+going toward the High School.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do you think we can get it, Mary?” Billie was
+saying.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, yes, the janitor always leaves the door to
+the basement corridor open until evening for Miss
+Gray and the teachers who sometimes stay late.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was stupid of me to have left that horrid
+old algebra, but you know I always forget
+the things I don’t like. If Miss Finch hadn’t
+called me down so thoroughly this morning about
+my average in mathematics, I would just let the
+lesson for to-morrow go, or if Miss Finch were
+only Miss Allbright, or Miss anybody else but
+just a stern, animated mathematical cube.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She’s all right if you know your lessons,” said
+Mary, smiling. “It’s only the ones who don’t
+study hard enough to suit her who call her a
+human arithmetic.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The door to the corridor was open, as Mary
+had predicted, and the girls entered, their footsteps
+resounding with a hollow echo through the
+empty place.
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘I feel like one who treads alone some banquet hall
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_182'></a>182</span>
+deserted,’” quoted Billie. “Could anything
+be more ghostly than a deserted school?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s not deserted,” said Nancy. “I heard
+voices somewhere, I am certain of it, just as you
+opened the door.”
+</p>
+<p>
+They paused and listened for a moment, but
+the place was as still as a tomb. A dim gas-light
+burned in the long corridor, on each side of
+which were the arched entrances to the locker
+rooms of the various classes, wash rooms and
+Miss Gray’s own private office.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It reminds me of the catacombs in this light,”
+whispered Billie. “I’m almost afraid of the
+sound of my own voice.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The girls slipped silently down the passage to
+the stairway leading to the class rooms. At her
+desk in the sophomore study room on the third
+floor Billie found her algebra. As she gathered
+together some of her scattered papers in the not
+over tidy interior of the little one-seated desk
+form, and searched for a certain favorite stubby
+pencil which she claimed brought her good luck
+with her problems, Mary at her own desk gave a
+cry of dismay and sat down limply.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_183'></a>183</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“What was it, a mouse?” asked Billie, her voice
+sounding quite loud in the empty room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, Billie, Billie, no, it was not a mouse. It
+was fifty dollars,” cried Mary. “I found it just
+now in my desk.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Fifty dollars?” echoed Billie, slipping her algebra
+into her pocket and hurrying over to her
+friend’s desk. “Are you playing a trick on me,
+Mary?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Listen, Billie,” said Mary. “I’m going to tell
+you something. I believe I am the victim of
+some kind of conspiracy. You know of course
+about all of the things that have been stolen from
+school lately?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, but I haven’t had any losses myself; so
+I haven’t talked about it much to the others.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course you had no idea that I was supposed
+to be the thief,” Mary went on, with a sort
+of dry sob in her voice that was more heart-breaking
+to Billie than real weeping would have been.
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary told her the story of Fannie Alta and the
+twenty dollars.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I didn’t tell it before,” she continued, “because
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_184'></a>184</span>
+I was so ashamed somehow, I couldn’t bear for
+any one to know it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie’s heart swelled with indignation.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The little wretch,” she exclaimed, “you should
+have gone straight to Miss Gray about it, Mary.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I know it, and I am sorry now I didn’t, but I
+thought she wouldn’t dare do it again, and she
+hasn’t, but things are disappearing all the time,
+and I believe she has told it around school that
+I took the twenty dollars and all the other things.
+Nobody has said anything, of course, but I can’t
+help feeling that they are all whispering about
+me whenever my back is turned.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You poor, blessed child,” exclaimed her
+friend. “And all this time you have been keeping
+it secret and suffering in silence.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary nodded her head.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And the worst of it is, Miss Gray suspects
+me too. But she is not going to say anything
+until she is sure. I thought of talking to her
+about it, but it would look as if I had a guilty
+conscience to complain before I am accused.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“How dare any one suspect you of stealing,”
+cried Billie, putting her arms around her friend
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_185'></a>185</span>
+and kissing her warmly. “Would Miss Gray or
+any one else be so stupid as to take the word of
+Fannie Alta before yours?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But nobody has said anything that I know
+of,” groaned poor Mary. “It’s all in the air.
+That is why I don’t know what to do. Suppose
+after all I was mistaken and they didn’t suspect
+me. Suppose I took this money to Miss Gray
+and suppose she would think that I had taken all
+the other things and was just returning this because
+I had lost my nerve and suppose—suppose——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But, Mary,” remonstrated Billie, “why suppose
+anything at all so awful? Why not suppose
+that Miss Gray will listen to you and believe every
+word you say. You are perfectly innocent and
+nothing on earth can make you guilty. Of
+course Fannie Alta must have left the money in
+your desk, though where she got so much is a
+mystery to me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But I tell you I am frightened, Billie. Such
+wretched things do happen and innocent people
+often suffer for guilty ones.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nonsense, Mary, you must not lose your
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_186'></a>186</span>
+nerve in this way. Take the money and go
+straight to Miss Gray with it now. I will go
+with you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The two girls gathered their things together
+silently. Mary put the roll of money in her
+jacket pocket and they made for the door. It was
+almost dark now and the rows of empty desks
+down the big room were like kneeling phantoms
+in the half light.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did you hear anything?” whispered Mary as
+they reached the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I heard a step,” answered Billie in a low
+voice. “It was probably the janitor.”
+</p>
+<p>
+With a mutual impulse they clasped hands and
+a wave of fear swept over them when they found
+that the door would not open.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It must have stuck,” whispered Mary. “Try
+it again.”
+</p>
+<p>
+But the door was locked fast.
+</p>
+<p>
+“There is only one way for you to get back
+the key to the door, young ladies,” said a voice
+so near to them that they both jumped back as
+if they had been struck in the face.
+</p>
+<p>
+The person who had spoken had been standing
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_187'></a>187</span>
+flat against the wall at the side of the door. He
+emerged from the shadows, as quietly as a
+shadow itself, and in the twilight his long, lank
+figure seemed almost to be floating in space. The
+small black mask which covered his face and his
+whole appearance reminded Billie of a gruesome
+picture she had once seen called “The Black
+Masque.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You have a small sum of money there,” he
+went on, “which you evidently do not wish to
+keep and which I would be pleased to have and
+can use at once. By a strange coincidence, I happened
+to overhear your conversation, you see, and
+as the money appears to belong to nobody and
+is exactly the sum I require I must have it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary tried to speak, but her lips refused to
+form the words, and she had no voice left. There
+was a sound in Billie’s ears like the pounding of
+surf on the beach and she felt quite dizzy.
+</p>
+<p>
+“This is fright,” she found herself saying, as
+a wave of homesickness for her father swept over
+her.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, papa, papa,” she whispered.
+</p>
+<p>
+The man had seized Mary’s two hands in one
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_188'></a>188</span>
+of his with a grip of steel, while with the other
+he felt in her jacket pocket, took the roll of
+money, pushed Billie roughly from the door, and
+with a laugh pulled back the bolt; there had been
+no key after all. The next instant he had slipped
+downstairs as softly as a cat and was gone.
+</p>
+<p>
+The girls followed after him like two sleep
+walkers.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We’ve been robbed, Billie,” moaned Mary,
+giving her dry sob. “The fifty dollars is gone.
+What shall we do now?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie did not reply. She wanted to get out of
+that dark stuffy school building, and breathe in
+some fresh air before she dared trust her voice.
+It was good to feel the wet fog again in their
+faces as they hurried up the street.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why not still tell Miss Gray, Mary?” asked
+Billie at last, but already there was a feeling of
+doubt in her heart. It was certainly a very unlikely
+sounding story, a robber in the school room.
+</p>
+<p>
+Suddenly a figure loomed up in the mist. It
+was Miss Gray herself.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You are out late, girls,” she said as she hurried
+past, and for some reason they both had an
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_189'></a>189</span>
+uncomfortable feeling of having done something
+wrong.
+</p>
+<p>
+Miss Gray hastened into the school building
+just as the janitor appeared to lock up.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Jennings,” she said, “switch on the light in
+the sophomore study room. I shall only be there
+a moment.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The janitor shuffled after her and turned on
+the light while Miss Gray opened Mary’s desk.
+She sighed deeply and shook her head.
+</p>
+<p>
+“She must have got here before me,” she
+thought. “It was cruel to tempt the child at
+such a time as this when her mother is in great
+need of money. I felt so sure she would bring
+it straight to me and that was the only test I required.
+Oh, dear, what a crooked world this is.
+I am out fifty dollars. But how will the poor
+child ever explain all this money to her mother?
+She must have saved a good deal out of her pilfering——”
+</p>
+<p>
+Miss Gray’s disconnected train of thought did
+not bring her any comfort, as she slowly descended
+the three flights of steps into the basement
+and plunged into the mist again.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_190'></a>190</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“At least I shall wait a day or two,” she continued.
+“The child may think better of it. She
+might have stopped me this evening, though.
+At all events I deserve to lose the money. It
+was a silly, stupid impulse, but I was so sure—so
+very sure——”
+</p>
+<p>
+The mist had grown so thick now that the
+Principal walked very slowly, keeping close to the
+fence in order to guide herself to the corner
+where she must turn to go to her own home. A
+voice reached her through the fog. Someone
+was coming up from behind.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have procured fifty, Señor, a curious lucky
+stroke, and from a schoolroom, too—would you
+have believed——” the voice broke off in a laugh.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Be careful——” said another voice, and two
+figures passed Miss Gray in the fog and were
+swallowed up again immediately.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is it possible,” she exclaimed, “robbers in
+West Haven High School? What does it mean?
+And I have been blaming that innocent child.
+What an imbecile I have been!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Her last resolution before sleep came to her
+that night was to notify the town police in the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_191'></a>191</span>
+morning and hire a detective to stay about the
+High School day and night.
+</p>
+<p>
+Imagine the surprise of the bewildered Principal,
+when, next morning bright and early, Mary
+Price, after a timid knock on the office door, came
+hesitatingly into the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Miss Gray,” she said, “I found this money
+yesterday afternoon in my desk. I don’t know
+how it came there nor whose it is. But it would
+be better for you to take charge of it until the
+owner asks for it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary spoke quickly, as if she had learned the
+little speech carefully by heart. There was a
+strange expression on Miss Gray’s face as she
+took ten crisp new five-dollar bills from the young
+girl’s outstretched hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+“This is not even the same money,” she
+thought, forgetting to answer Mary in her
+amazement. “Am I losing my senses or is the
+child a deep dyed villain?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary flushed scarlet under the Principal’s
+steady gaze, but she did not lower her eyes, and
+there was not a sign of guilt in the expression of
+the sad little face.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_192'></a>192</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very well, dear,” Miss Gray said at last.
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary, as she closed the door behind her, was
+more mystified than Miss Gray.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I should think she would have shown a little
+surprise,” she said.
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_193'></a>193</span><a name='chXIV' id='chXIV'></a>CHAPTER XIV.—THE HALLOWE’EN HOUSE PARTY.</h2>
+<p>
+“<span class='sc'>My Dear Miss Campbell:</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+Do you think your nice young charge would
+be bored by a visit to our lonely old home in the
+country? Percival has set his heart on giving
+a Hallowe’en house party for some of his particular
+friends, and I find Wilhelmina’s name the
+very first on the list. I shall promise to look
+after her in every way exactly as if she were my
+own child, guard her from draughts, see that she
+has plenty of covering on her bed and that she
+wears her overshoes if the ground is damp.
+</p>
+<p>
+My boy would be quite inconsolable, and I
+should too, my dear friend, if she is not to be
+among our guests. I cannot offer many inducements
+except the pleasure which young people
+always bring to a house, but I candidly believe
+that Percival would give up the idea if she should
+not be able to come.
+</p>
+<p style='text-align:right; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0;'>&#160;</p>
+<p style='text-align:right; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0;'>Most cordially yours,</p>
+<p style='text-align:right; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0;'><span class='sc'>Antoinette Juliana St. Clair</span>.”</p>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_194'></a>194</span></div>
+<p>
+Miss Campbell smiled as she handed the note
+to Billie one morning at the breakfast table. The
+two fanciful names of the good-natured, cordial
+widow always amused her.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The lonely old home in the country,” so modestly
+referred to, was one of the finest places in
+the county, and nothing was more coveted by
+the young people in West Haven than an invitation
+to one of Percival’s house parties, where
+everything that the widow and her son could devise
+was done for the amusement of the guests.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course you must go, dear. I wouldn’t
+have you miss it for worlds. The change will
+do you good. I have been troubled about you
+lately, my child, and if this invitation had not
+come, I was going to insist on your seeing the
+doctor. I don’t think your liver has been behaving
+itself. You have been so out of sorts. But
+perhaps a little amusement will be better for
+you than a calomel pill.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, I am quite well, Cousin Helen,” exclaimed
+Billie. “It’s mathematics, I suppose, that
+affects my liver.”
+</p>
+<p>
+But Billie was more eager than she would admit to accept
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_195'></a>195</span>
+Mrs. St. Clair’s invitation. The
+truth is, the young girl’s conscience had not been
+easy lately. She felt that she had done something
+which would have grieved and displeased
+her father and she could not be perfectly happy
+until she had confessed her sins and been forgiven.
+</p>
+<p>
+You perhaps have guessed already that the ten
+new five-dollar bills which Mary Price had consigned
+to Miss Gray’s care the morning after the
+robbery in the school room, was Billie’s money.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You shall take it, Mary,” she insisted.
+“Aren’t we exactly the same as sisters? I don’t
+want the money, and I know papa would be glad
+if he knew.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie had finally agreed with Mary that it
+would only make matters more complicated to
+tell Miss Gray that fifty dollars some one had
+placed in Mary’s desk, no doubt to tempt or catch
+her, as in the case of the twenty dollars, had
+been stolen by a robber almost immediately.
+</p>
+<p>
+Older and wiser people would have told Billie
+that this was a very poor piece of advice, and
+the deed was no sooner accomplished than the two
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_196'></a>196</span>
+girls themselves realized that they had made a
+mistake. Miss Gray’s manner to Mary was cold
+and formal and the situation was not in the least
+relieved. The unhappy girl had hoped that the
+principal would speak to her again about the
+money, but the subject was never mentioned.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was all my fault, Mary. I advised you and
+forced you to do it. It was not exactly dishonest,
+but it wasn’t sincere, and I am beginning to
+think Miss Gray is suspicious of me, too.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Another thing had happened which made Billie
+uncomfortably and extremely ill at ease in her
+mind. Burglars had broken into Mrs. Price’s
+home, but they had only succeeded in giving Mary
+and her mother a great fright, and had taken
+nothing.
+</p>
+<p>
+In her heart Billie knew what the robbers really
+wanted. It was the box of jewels locked up in
+Mrs. Price’s safe.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have done wrong,” she kept saying to herself.
+“Papa always said that my heart ruled my
+head and that I had no judgment. I should
+never have burdened Mary and Mrs. Price with
+that wretched box. I am almost superstitious
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_197'></a>197</span>
+about it, because it brings so much bad luck on
+people. After the house party, I shall take it
+away.”
+</p>
+<p>
+As a matter of fact, everything was postponed
+until after the house party, and the world for
+eight young people seemed to stand still. The
+English nation could not look forward with
+greater eagerness to the Coronation than our
+four Motor Maids and their friends to Percy’s
+Hallowe’en house party. It was only a part of
+the good fortune which always followed Percy
+that Hallowe’en that year fell on Friday, and that
+the weather was perfect.
+</p>
+<p>
+They were to have three evenings of fun and
+frolic with the Hallowe’en ball on Friday night.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the joy of anticipation and preparation,
+Billie and Mary lost sight of their troubles.
+Nancy was bubbling over with delight and Elinor
+forgot her usual sense of dignity and gave an
+indecorous exhibition of happiness by doing a
+Dutch twirl all by herself.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course, we shall all go in ‘The Comet,’”
+announced Billie. “It will be lots more fun than
+driving behind those poky old carriage horses
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_198'></a>198</span>
+that bring Percy and Mrs. St. Clair in to church
+every Sunday.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course,” echoed the others.
+</p>
+<p>
+There was, indeed, only one flaw in their happiness.
+Mrs. St. Clair, who was intimate with
+the Rogers family, had insisted on inviting Belle
+Rogers.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who cares?” exclaimed Billie. “She can’t interfere
+with our good time and we certainly won’t
+interfere with hers.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The St. Clair place was eight miles outside of
+West Haven on the main road. A long avenue
+bordered with immense pine trees led up to the
+commodious, comfortable old house which seemed
+to reflect from its shining windows the cheerful
+and hospitable character of its mistress.
+</p>
+<p>
+And when the red motor pulled up in front of
+“Pine Lodge,” as the place was called, there was
+the mistress herself smiling in the doorway, making
+the most delightful picture of welcome Billie
+had ever seen.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Think of going to a real house party at last,”
+exclaimed Billie, with a sigh of pleasure.
+</p>
+<p>
+Percival rushed down to help them out; two
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_199'></a>199</span>
+colored men servants carried in their luggage,
+and presently they found themselves standing before
+a glowing fire in the hall, which was quite
+big enough and broad enough to be a room itself.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It is sweet of you to come out and cheer up
+two lonely country people, my dears,” Mrs. St.
+Clair was saying, as she kissed them all around
+twice. “You are really the nicest children. You
+must promise to tell me whatever you want, or
+if you are not warm enough. You know how
+draughty country houses are. Or if you are the
+least hungry or your beds are not comfortable or
+the water isn’t hot enough for your baths, or
+you wish any particular thing to eat——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Dear me,” laughed Billie, looking around her,
+“you make us feel like four visiting princesses,
+Mrs. St. Clair. I am sure we could never want
+for anything in this cheerful, lovely house.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, Mrs. St. Clair,” put in Elinor, “we all
+know perfectly well that all the chairs at Pine
+Lodge are easy and the beds are famous for
+being the most comfortable in the county.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mrs. St. Clair blushed with pleasure. Next to
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_200'></a>200</span>
+saying nice things to people herself, she loved to
+have them say nice things to her.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Percival, my darling, where are the others?”
+she demanded presently. “Isn’t Belle coming and
+what is the name of that little foreign girl she
+asked to bring with her?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Percy grinned at his friends good-naturedly,
+when Merry seized a cushion from one of the
+long settees and began to rock it on his knees,
+and Charlie gave a silent imitation of a baby’s
+face in the act of crying. But he was used to
+these endearing names his mother heaped upon
+him, and he only replied:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Give them time, mother; give them time. Remember
+they didn’t ride on a comet the same as
+this dashing company did. The foreign girl is
+Fannie Alta.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“So it was, and it was sweet and thoughtful of
+Belle to want to bring her along. She described
+the poor little thing as being lonely and strange
+in West Haven.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The girls exchanged astonished glances at this
+piece of news. Was it possible that Belle Rogers
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_201'></a>201</span>
+and the crafty little Spanish girl whom they instinctively
+distrusted were so intimate as this?
+</p>
+<p>
+“Here comes Roly Poly McLane,” cried Percy,
+laughing, as he peered through a side light of
+the front door. “She’s as jolly and fat as a
+clown elephant in the circus.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Percy, my love,” remonstrated his mother,
+which slight show of disapproval was about as
+near as she ever got in her life to scolding him.
+</p>
+<p>
+The boys raced down the hall to help Rosomond
+McLane out of the high trap in which she
+had driven over to Pine Lodge from her home a
+few miles away.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Wait, Roly Poly, until Percy gets a derrick.
+It’s the only safe way to unload heavy bales,”
+cried Merry.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Roly Poly,” said Percy, bowing politely,
+“these three noble friends have volunteered with
+me to help you get out. I offered to do it alone,
+but mother was afraid my young life would be
+crushed out of me, if anything should happen,
+you know, and——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Percival, my darling!” cried Mrs. St. Clair.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Help me, indeed,” exclaimed Rosomond, with
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_202'></a>202</span>
+a jolly laugh that always started an echo of
+other jolly laughs. “Get out of my way all of
+you,” and she gave a flying leap from the trap
+and bounced as she hit the ground like a rubber
+ball.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My dear Rosomond,” cried the widow, running
+down the steps to meet her, “don’t take any
+notice of these foolish boys. You wouldn’t seem
+the same dear, delightful Rosomond if you
+weighed a pound less.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, I don’t mind them, Mrs. St. Clair. I’m
+used to it, you know. Father always calls me
+‘Baby Elephant’ and ‘Jumbo,’ and the girls at
+school call me ‘Roly Poly,’ and Uncle Jim calls me
+‘Fatty.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+Several more boys appeared just then and the
+company followed Mrs. St. Clair into what she
+called the sitting room, a gay apartment with
+chintz curtains at the windows and chintz covered
+cushions in the deep wicker chairs. Here
+they had tea and chocolate and hot-buttered
+toast.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You must eat plenty of food, you know,”
+Percy’s mother had admonished them, “because I
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_203'></a>203</span>
+warn you that you will need all your strength to
+put up with the fearful ordeals Percy has planned
+for to-night——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mother,” broke in Percy, “you mustn’t tell.
+You will spoil all the fun.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m not telling, dear. I’m only warning. But
+you know those things that jump at you from behind——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Stop her quick, somebody,” cried her son, pretending
+to gag her mouth with a napkin.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was all very gay and the room buzzed with
+talk and laughter when the door opened and a
+servant admitted Belle Rogers and Fannie Alta.
+</p>
+<p>
+Mrs. St. Clair greeted the new visitors as hospitably
+as she had the others. She even kissed
+Fannie’s dark, foreign little face and called her
+“dear” and drew the girl down beside her on the
+sofa.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I want you to feel perfectly at home,” she
+said. “It was so good of you to have come with
+Belle.”
+</p>
+<p>
+She was really the most delightful, beaming,
+good-natured creature imaginable, but all her efforts
+could not disguise the change which seemed
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_204'></a>204</span>
+suddenly to have taken place in the behavior of
+the others.
+</p>
+<p>
+Somehow the laughter was less free, the talk
+less gay and jolly than it had been, and presently
+our four particular Motor Maids were glad for
+an excuse to go away with Percy and see the
+conservatories, while Belle and Fannie drank
+their tea with Mrs. St. Clair.
+</p>
+<p>
+After that it was time to dress for dinner. A
+neat little maid had unpacked their bags and laid
+their best party dresses on the beds. They were
+very simple dresses indeed, and Nancy, at least,
+thought of floating blue chiffon draperies with a
+slight sigh of regret.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do you know, girls,” said Billie, as she tied
+a pink bow around Nancy’s bunch of curls, “I
+think we should all take lessons in cheerfulness
+from Mrs. St. Clair. She’s so happy because she
+always sees the best side of everything. Just
+see how nice she is to Belle and Fannie Alta, for
+instance.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“With this beautiful house and all her money
+and such a nice, good-natured pink-cheeked boy
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_205'></a>205</span>
+for a son, I think I could even admire Belle
+Rogers and Fannie Alta,” observed Mary.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then Billie remembered that Mary and her
+mother were always troubled about money, and
+that Mrs. Price was the gentlest, sweetest woman
+she had ever known. She wondered if Mrs. St.
+Clair could ever be ruffled by disappointment and
+bad luck, or if everything were not exactly as it
+should be, if she would be the same placid, good-natured
+soul.
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_206'></a>206</span><a name='chXV' id='chXV'></a>CHAPTER XV.—THE GHOST PARTY.</h2>
+<p>
+“I don’t see how you can play any gruesome
+Hallowe’en tricks in this house, Mrs. St. Clair,”
+said Billie later at the dinner table. “It’s the
+abode of cheerfulness. Look at this dining room,
+for instance. A skull and crossbones wouldn’t
+even look dismal against this white wainscoting
+and these pale yellow walls.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She’s trying to pump you, mother,” put in
+Percy. “Now don’t tell her anything.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mrs. St. Clair smiled archly. How pretty she
+looked, Billie thought, in her pink crepe dress,
+with a beautiful collar of pearls around her
+throat. Nothing would induce the widow to
+wear black, and, after a year or two of mourning,
+she had gone back to colors and cheerfulness.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He has got some big surprises for you, my
+dear. I’ll only tell you this much. It will be
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_207'></a>207</span>
+quite as ghastly as you could possibly desire, and
+I hope nobody is wearing any clothes that will
+matter. Your dress, Miss Alta, I am afraid will
+spot if you do all the things Percy is planning
+for this evening. What a lovely frock, by the
+way. I think I have never seen a more beautiful
+dress for a young girl.”
+</p>
+<p>
+All eyes were fastened on Fannie’s dress, and
+there was general surprise among the girls to
+see that Fannie was wearing an exquisite gown
+of pale blue satin with an over-dress of blue
+gauze, edged with narrow silver fringe. In her
+hair was a wreath of pink roses.
+</p>
+<p>
+She was quite unembarrassed under the scrutiny
+of all these people, and smiled complacently
+at Mrs. St. Clair.
+</p>
+<p>
+Nobody had taken much notice of Belle until
+now. They had supposed she had kept so unusually
+quiet because she was not in her own
+“set,” as she loved to call her coterie of seven.
+But to those who were familiar with her, it was
+plain that something had happened. She did not
+seem herself. Her eyes had a strange gray look
+to them. Two little white dents appeared on
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_208'></a>208</span>
+either side of her nose and her lips were shrunk
+into pale, narrow lines. But that was not all.
+Were they dreaming or was this the first of
+Percy’s Hallowe’en jokes? The beautiful, proud
+Belle was wearing a faded yellow muslin.
+</p>
+<p>
+She had tried to cover her shoulders with a little
+blue scarf, but it was impossible to deceive
+the sharp eyes of her schoolmates.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nobody’s clothes will be hurt, Mother,” put
+in Percy, feeling somehow that a cloud had fallen
+on the company, although he did not know enough
+about girls’ clothes to take in this remarkable
+change in Belle’s appearance. “Remember that
+this is a ghost party.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What is a ghost party?” demanded Fannie,
+suddenly becoming animated from the admiration
+she felt she had attracted.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Everybody wears a sheet and pillow-case,”
+answered Percy, “and, for one thing, not a vestige
+of dress shows.”
+</p>
+<p>
+A look of triumph came into Belle’s eyes at this
+and the two dents began to disappear.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I hear the other people coming, so we had better get
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_209'></a>209</span>
+into our costumes if you are entirely
+through.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Come up to my room, girls. Percy will take
+care of the boys. Marie and I are commissioned
+to dress you up. I am obeying orders, you see,”
+said Mrs. St. Clair.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And remember that you are supposed to be
+disguised,” called Percy. “Don’t give yourself
+away by giggling, Miss Nancy-Bell.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’m sure I shan’t want to giggle if I’m dressed
+as a ghost,” answered Nancy, following the
+others up the steps.
+</p>
+<p>
+Half an hour later a company of spectres invaded
+the halls and drawing room of Pine Lodge.
+There were silent ghosts and giggling ghosts,
+and a roly-poly ghost, who bumped against a thin
+ghost and knocked him flat and the thin ghost
+cried out:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, shades of departed Jumbo, don’t sit on
+me!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Then all the ghosts laughed and one ghost
+danced a jig that had the shadow of a resemblance
+to the Fishers’ Horn Pipe.
+</p>
+<p>
+Presently there was a long and mournful
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_210'></a>210</span>
+trumpet call from up in the very top of the
+house and a portly ghost who seemed to be holding
+up a train under her white cotton shroud
+said:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, my dear spirits, we are all to go up, if
+you will be good enough to follow me,” and the
+whole troop of ghosts began moving in a spectral
+body up the front staircase.
+</p>
+<p>
+There was a second long-drawn-out and despairing
+trump, and the phantom beckoned them
+to hurry up, with her plump, pretty hand, and remarked:
+</p>
+<p>
+“My darling Percival is so impatient.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Up the next staircase they trooped and finally
+up a narrow flight, at the top of which hung a
+black curtain with cabalistic signs painted on it
+in bright red.
+</p>
+<p>
+Once past the curtain and there was a gasp of
+surprise and wonder. The great attic of Pine
+Lodge, which stretched over the entire house,
+had been transformed into a spirit dance hall.
+From the ceiling hung pumpkin jack-o-lanterns
+of every size. Plates of salt and alcohol were
+burning about the room, giving a ghastly greenish look
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_211'></a>211</span>
+to the picture. An old witch dressed in
+black, with a long broomstick, was stationed by a
+cauldron of melted lead, placed on a charcoal
+stove.
+</p>
+<p>
+Repeating a cabalistic verse with incredible rapidity,
+which sounded something like:
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“Burra, burra pie, cat’s eye, devil fry,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Singer, dinger, singer dinger, blood!”<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+the black witch dropped a spoonful of the lead
+into a bowl of water.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Here is your fortune,” she said, in a sing-song
+voice to the nearest ghost.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The lead has taken the shape of a letter. It
+brings news to you. It comes from over the
+water on a ship. The letter is about something
+round——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Money is round,” put in a tall ghost, standing
+near. “So are rings and necklaces——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There is trouble ahead,” went on the witch.
+“There is trouble before the letter ever reaches
+land.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The ghost who was listening moved away
+quickly.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_212'></a>212</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course, it was just a coincidence,” she said
+to herself, “but I wonder who the person was who
+said that about rings and necklaces. Oh, dear!
+Oh, dear! I wish I had never taken that box in
+charge.”
+</p>
+<p>
+In another part of the room a red witch was
+engaged in launching little fortune sail boats,
+made of English walnuts, on a troubled sea in a
+tub.
+</p>
+<p>
+There were four other witches about the attic
+telling fortunes with cards and in other ways,
+two gray ones, a white one, and a green one, and
+there was an enormous gray cat with electric
+eyes and a tail four feet long that curled up over
+its back. At last from behind a curtain came the
+strains of weird music, and the witches and the
+gray cat danced a quadrille, the witches riding on
+their broomsticks in a circle, leaping over the cat
+as they advanced down the middle and finally ending
+with a romp when all the ghosts joined in and
+danced together.
+</p>
+<p>
+After a while the ghosts removed their sheets
+and pillow-cases and became human beings once
+more, and the side shows, as Percy called them,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_213'></a>213</span>
+began. Every girl at the party bobbed for an
+apple, except Belle Rogers, who declined emphatically.
+But those who remembered the red
+rubber curlers understood her reasons for not
+wishing to wet her aureole of golden hair.
+</p>
+<p>
+Fannie Alta plunged her face and neck into the
+tub with a reckless laugh, and spotted her pretty
+dress without a quiver of regret.
+</p>
+<p>
+Nancy, in a little room hung in black in a remote
+corner of the attic, held a lighted candle
+over her head, while she looked fearfully in the
+glass and combed her hair. For just a breathing
+space a boy’s fair, ruddy face passed across the
+mirror and disappeared.
+</p>
+<p>
+With a little shriek, Nancy looked quickly over
+her shoulder, but she was entirely alone.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie went rather later than the others to try
+her fortune in the mirror room. She had lingered
+along with a laughing, teasing circle
+around the apple plungers, and, seeing Nancy
+come out of the mirror room alone, she strolled
+over there. Nancy explained what she was to
+do, and left her alone to her fate.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_214'></a>214</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did you see any one, Nancy?” laughed Billie
+incredulously.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” she whispered mysteriously, “I did;
+but I wasn’t frightened because——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Because what?” demanded Billie, pinching her
+friend’s round cheek.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Because—it wasn’t a person who would
+frighten any one,” answered Nancy, with a laugh,
+as she tripped away to the next side show, from
+whence issued suppressed screams and howls
+which were explained when she pulled the curtain
+and a skeleton jumped at her.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the meantime, Billie had gone into the mirror
+room alone. She stood looking gravely at
+herself in the glass, while she ran a comb through
+her smooth locks with one hand and held a candle
+with the other. She seemed to have waited a
+good while for the apparition which was supposed
+to appear to show its face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I suppose this booth isn’t in working order
+any longer,” she thought, as she laid down the
+comb, when suddenly from the deep shadows reflected
+in the glass she made out the outline of a
+face.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_215'></a>215</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie smiled. She had been prepared to recognize
+one of her friends, but the smile faded from
+her lips; she put down the candle quickly and
+faced about. The black curtain forming the wall
+of the little room was still quivering, but no one
+was there.
+</p>
+<p>
+She ran out hurriedly and looked about her.
+All the boys and girls were dancing the barn
+dance, and the attic had become very cheerful and
+gay it seemed to her in the brief moment in which
+she had tried her fortune in the mirror room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was just a foolish, nervous notion,” she
+said to herself, turning to meet Merry Brown,
+who was looking for her to be his partner in the
+dance. “But that beaked nose and that wicked
+eye so close to it,” her thoughts continued.
+“Could I have been mistaken?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Are there any strangers here to-night?” she
+asked Merry, as they danced down the room together.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Not a single stranger,” he replied. “Only
+the High School crowd.”
+</p>
+<p>
+When the dance was over, they filed in a long,
+laughing procession down the three flights of
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_216'></a>216</span>
+steps to supper, and there was nothing spectral or
+gruesome about the gay party which gathered
+around Mrs. St. Clair’s long table. Billie tried to
+talk and sing with the others and laugh at Roly
+Poly McLane and Percy, who recited an absurd
+dialogue they had prepared beforehand in which
+Roly Poly took the part of a fat, old man and
+Percy a thin old woman. But all the time she
+kept asking herself:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did I see him, or was it just my imagination?”
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_217'></a>217</span><a name='chXVI' id='chXVI'></a>CHAPTER XVI.—A STRAY GHOST.</h2>
+<p>
+When the front door closed after the departing
+merry-makers and the sound of the last
+wheels died away down the avenue, the guests of
+the house party filed slowly up to bed. Mrs. St.
+Clair, at the head of the stairs, kissed each of
+the girls good-night and shook hands with the
+boys. And, as a final token of their regard, before
+turning in, the boys trooped from door to
+door, singing, “Good-night, ladies,” with Charlie
+accompanying on his mouth organ.
+</p>
+<p>
+And now the house was still, and our four
+friends in their bathrobes were seated on the
+hearth rug around the wood fire in one of the bedrooms,
+talking in whispers, as girls will do after
+a party.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do you suppose Belle Rogers has been converted,
+or reformed, or something?” observed
+Nancy. “What else could have induced her to be
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_218'></a>218</span>
+so unselfish as to wear Fannie’s old dress and let
+Fannie wear her best one?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s the mystery of the age,” said Elinor.
+“And how different she seemed, too. How quiet
+and meek. Perhaps, after all, it was her clothes
+that made her haughty. Who could be anything
+but lowly in a faded yellow muslin?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She was angry at first,” put in Mary. “I
+saw the danger signals at dinner. But I really
+believe she had as good a time as any of us afterwards.
+Perhaps she realized that without the
+blue satin, she was just on a par with the rest of
+us, and she forgot to be conscious.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And how different Fannie was under the influence
+of the blue satin,” continued Elinor.
+“She talked and laughed quite loudly, and she
+was really rude to Belle several times. Girls, if
+we ever have blue satins, will they change our
+dispositions——”
+</p>
+<p>
+A tap at the door interrupted the conversation,
+and Mrs. St. Clair, in a long lavender dressing
+gown, tripped into the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I hope our talking hasn’t disturbed you, Mrs.
+St. Clair,” said Billie.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_219'></a>219</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, no, dear, I am glad you were talking, because
+I had hoped to find some one of you still
+awake. I have come to ask a great favor. Will
+one of you, or all of you, go with me up in the
+attic for a few minutes? I should have asked
+one of the servants, but their lights are all out.
+I suppose they are sound asleep. Percy is asleep,
+too. I have just come from his room. He is
+tired out. You can’t think how hard he has
+worked in the last few days.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Let me go with you, Mrs. St. Clair,” put in
+Elinor.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Let us all go,” suggested Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Very well, dear. The more of you the better.
+To tell the truth, I am a little worried. It’s
+nothing, of course; I am sure to find it, but I
+should like to take a look before I go to bed.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Have you lost something, Mrs. St. Clair?”
+asked Mary.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, I have lost my pearl necklace. I really
+never missed it until a few moments ago. I have
+looked downstairs everywhere, but I feel sure
+that I dropped it in the attic when I was dancing
+that ridiculous twirling waltz with Ben. It
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_220'></a>220</span>
+serves me right for trying to be a young girl
+when I am really such an old lady.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You are really the youngest of us all,” protested
+the four young girls, following her on
+tiptoe up the stairs into the attic.
+</p>
+<p>
+All the members of the searching party were
+sure that the necklace would be found at once
+somewhere on the attic floor, or in the folds of
+the sheet or the pillow-case Mrs. St. Clair had
+been wearing. Yet Billie and Mary had good
+reason to know that robbers were at large in the
+village of West Haven, and the memory of the
+face Billie had seen in the mirror suddenly became
+painfully distinct.
+</p>
+<p>
+Mrs. St. Clair lit a few gas jets in the attic
+and the great place seemed ghastly enough in
+the half light with the grotesque jack-o-lanterns
+grinning at them from above; the black-curtained
+side shows and an occasional sheet and pillow-case
+made a weird picture.
+</p>
+<p>
+They searched the floor carefully, looked into
+the booths with candles, shook out sheets and
+pillow-cases, but there was no sign of the missing
+necklace.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_221'></a>221</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“If it had only been something else,” said Mrs.
+St. Clair. “I should rather have lost almost anything
+in the world than my pearl necklace. It
+was a wedding present from Percival’s father
+and I valued it more than all my other jewelry
+together. I don’t see how I could have dropped
+it so carelessly. When we went down to supper
+I threw a scarf around my shoulders and that
+is probably why I never noticed that my pearls
+were gone. You were standing near me, Mary,
+and Belle and her friend were there, too. You
+don’t remember to have noticed the necklace at
+that time, do you? One of you helped me on with
+my scarf.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary shook her head.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I must ask Belle and Miss Alta to-morrow. It
+is so important to know whether I lost the necklace
+up here or below.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Perhaps you dropped it on the steps,” suggested
+one of the girls.
+</p>
+<p>
+“If I did, it must have been trod on by many
+pairs of feet, then. Oh, dear, I am so sorry.
+Only this evening I said to myself, I must have
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_222'></a>222</span>
+the clasp to the necklace repaired. I had intended
+to take it to town next week to the jeweller’s.
+</p>
+<p>
+“But I must not keep you up any longer. You
+were dear children to come up with me. Now
+go to bed and don’t think of it any more. I
+should not have been so selfish. You are all dead
+tired, I know, for I am myself.”
+</p>
+<p>
+They turned and trooped downstairs again,
+and with softly spoken good-nights separated at
+their bedroom doors.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie and Mary were the last to enter the room
+they shared. They had stopped for a drink of
+ice water from a big glass pitcher, which had
+been placed with a tray of tumblers on a table
+at the far end of the hall. They were drinking
+their water silently, each absorbed in her own
+thoughts, when suddenly Mary grasped Billie’s
+hand and whispered:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Look! On the steps!”
+</p>
+<p>
+But Billie was looking with all her eyes before
+Mary had spoken.
+</p>
+<p>
+A figure was gliding down the steps wrapped
+in a sheet. The stray ghost had evidently seen
+the girls at the same moment they had caught
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_223'></a>223</span>
+sight of it, for it finished the flight almost with
+a bound, and with a swift run disappeared
+through a door leading to a passage back of the
+steps, with Billie and Mary running behind. But
+the sheeted figure was too swift for them, and
+they heard one of the doors in the passage open
+and close softly just as they reached the entrance.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was this door,” said Mary.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Or this one,” said Billie, pointing to the door
+of the room next the one Mary had chosen as the
+door the phantom had disappeared through.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We’ll settle it,” said Billie. “I’ll knock on this
+one and you knock on that one.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“They are the small single rooms that Belle and
+Fannie and Roly Poly have,” whispered Mary,
+as she tapped on a door.
+</p>
+<p>
+There was no answer and she went in. It was
+Belle’s room and she was sleeping deeply. Mary
+smiled as she noticed that Belle now wore a night
+cap over the rubber curlers. Her cheek was pillowed
+on her hand and her breath came softly and
+regularly.
+</p>
+<p>
+No answer came to Billie’s tap, either, and
+when she turned the knob she found that the door
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_224'></a>224</span>
+was locked. She tapped again and rattled the
+knob.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who is there?” came a sleepy voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Open the door,” called Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Tell me who you are first.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Billie Campbell.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Presently the door was thrown open and Fannie,
+with her dark hair standing out all over her
+head in a dishevelled mass, peered into the hall.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What is the matter?” she asked. “The house
+is not on fire?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, but Mary and I were in the hall and we
+saw some one come down from the attic and go
+into one of these rooms, and we thought we had
+better wake you up.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“They could not have come in here,” said Fannie.
+“My door was locked.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie looked at her curiously.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What a little actress you are,” she thought.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It doesn’t matter, only Mrs. St. Clair had
+lost something, and we were afraid a thief might
+be in the house. You know there have been several
+robberies lately in West Haven.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Fannie gave her a long and scornful stare.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_225'></a>225</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“At the High School, you mean?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Particularly at the High School,” replied
+Billie gently. Somehow, she felt a sort of contemptuous
+pity for this unfortunate little creature
+who had been taught, perhaps by poverty,
+to stoop to so much villainy.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What’s all this racket about?” demanded
+Rosomond McLane, opening her door which was
+the third one along the passage and thrusting out
+her merry, round face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You didn’t hear anything did you?” asked
+Billie. “Mary and I thought we saw some one in
+a ghost dress come down this passage and go into
+one of these doors.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good heavens! I am terrified out of my wits,
+I would rather it would be a burglar than a ghost.
+Did you really see something?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Forget it,” said Billie. “Go back to bed and
+lock your door. It was just a shadow, I suppose.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Fannie had already locked her own door and
+the girls retreated to their room, somewhat crestfallen,
+feeling very much like two fighters who
+had been worsted in battle.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_226'></a>226</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+When they had crawled into bed and settled
+themselves under the covers, Billie gave a deep
+sigh and whispered:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mary, dear, which one do you think it was?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“There is only one thing that would make me
+think it was Belle,” replied Mary. “If she had
+really been asleep, she would have waked and
+come out to find what was the matter. She is
+the most deadly curious soul alive.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s very slight evidence, Mary. She
+might have been specially tired to-night. Now,
+I believe it was Fannie. She had such a wild,
+dishevelled look and her door was locked. She
+is such a creeping, crawling little thing. Besides,
+I don’t believe Belle would have had the courage
+to go up in the attic alone.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Billie,” observed Mary, after a short silence,
+“I don’t know what it is all about, but something
+is going on around us. I believe that you
+and I, in some way, are mixed up in some kind of
+conspiracy. The box of jewels is in it and Fannie
+and Belle are in it. It’s like seeing a lot of
+figures moving about through a thick curtain.
+You know they are there, but you don’t know
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_227'></a>227</span>
+what they are all doing. I’m frightened, Billie,
+very frightened.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary gave that dry sob which was just as
+painful as crying and much worse to hear.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie put her arms around her friend and tried
+to comfort her.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t be scared, Mary, dear. It will all come
+right. I have made up my mind to one thing.
+That is, I will not leave that unlucky box at your
+mother’s house any longer. We shall have to
+find some new place to keep it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Presently the two girls dropped off to slumber,
+and of all the sleepers in the big house, only one
+person heard the clock in the hall strike the passing
+hours. She tossed and tumbled on her bed
+like a boat on a restless sea, and moaned to herself.
+Her lace-frilled night cap had slipped, and
+one red rubber horn pointed upward, like an accusing
+finger.
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_228'></a>228</span><a name='chXVII' id='chXVII'></a>CHAPTER XVII.—MRS. RUGGLES.</h2>
+<p>
+Breakfast was late next morning, and there
+were some heavy eyes at the pretty table. Belle
+was pale and nervous, and Mary, too, wore an
+anxious look on her face. Even the plump and
+jovial Mrs. St. Clair was not quite herself. Her
+eyes had a puzzled, absent-minded expression, as
+if she were trying to remember something that
+had almost faded out of her memory. But she
+forced herself to smile and talk with her young
+guests, and only the Motor Maids really noticed
+her abstraction.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What do you intend to do to-day, Percival,
+dearest?” she asked her son.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t you remember, mother, that Billie is to
+take some of us and the side-seated wagon the
+others over to Mrs. Ruggles? I wrote her to expect
+us by two this afternoon, and we’ll be hungry
+enough by then to eat everything in sight.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_229'></a>229</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who is Mrs. Ruggles?” asked Billie, who was
+not yet familiar with various picturesque and interesting
+characters living around West Haven.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Wait until you see her,” replied Mrs. St. Clair.
+“She is a queer old woman, but she has a great
+many friends and you can’t help liking her,
+and her food—dear me, you never imagined such
+meals as she can get up.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, don’t go and give things away, mother,”
+remonstrated Percy. “The others have all met
+Mrs. Ruggles, but Billie hasn’t and neither has
+Miss Alta, and we might as well give them a little
+surprise.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It seems to me that West Haven is full of
+surprises,” observed Billie. “Papa and I used to
+wander about the world together like two vagabonds,
+but in all that time we never had so many
+adventures and excitements as I have had here.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Well, there won’t be any excitement about
+this trip,” said Percy. “It’s just a ride across the
+country to the shore, one grand, large meal, and
+then home again in time for another feed, and
+you’ll all be ready for bed.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was arranged for those who were to drive
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_230'></a>230</span>
+to start well ahead of the others in the “handicap
+race,” as Percy called it, in order to get to
+Mrs. Ruggles’ at the same time. The Motor
+Maids went in “The Comet” with their particular
+friends, which was tacitly agreed upon, and
+Roly Poly McLane drove with Belle and Fannie
+and three boys in the St. Clair trim-looking depot
+wagon. They were not even to take the same
+road as the motor car, but were to go by a short
+cut over a road too sandy for automobiles.
+</p>
+<p>
+Mrs. St. Clair, who was not to be in the party,
+inspected each girl with motherly interest before
+the start. She appeared to have an endless store
+of wraps, ulsters, sweaters and fur coats, veils
+and scarfs, which she bundled on her guests
+without the slightest regard for sex or size.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Young people never know how to keep warm,”
+she said. “Especially girls. They always think
+warm clothing is unbecoming, when really nothing
+is more unbecoming than purple noses and
+blue lips. Percival, my darling, don’t you think
+you’ll need your ear muffs?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, mother,” answered her son firmly, “not
+on the first of November.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_231'></a>231</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, I implore you, my son; I entreat you,”
+cried the importunate woman, and Percy, with
+admirable patience permitted her to slip them on
+his ears, though he promptly removed them when
+the motor car had turned into the road and he
+could no longer see his mother waving her
+handkerchief.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I must look remarkably like Dr. Cook,” he
+said, laughing, as he removed some of the layers
+of wraps and scarfs his mother had loaded
+him with.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The Comet” was in splendid trim that morning.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He gets cranky and unmanageable exactly
+like a human being,” Billie had often said about
+him, but to-day he appeared almost to take human
+enjoyment in the long stretch of hard-beaten
+road and the crisp autumn air.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Does this mysterious Mrs. Ruggles live in a
+palace or a hut?” asked Billie, after a while, her
+curiosity increasing as the salty breeze straight
+from the ocean reminded her that they were approaching
+the coast.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s a little of both,” replied Percy.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_232'></a>232</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“She’s a queen, herself, Mrs. Ruggles is,” put
+in Ben.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I believe she thinks she is one, really,” said
+Elinor. “If she doesn’t like a person, she almost
+says, ‘Off with his head.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But I thought you said she was a cook?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She is,” answered Merry. “She’s a queenly
+cook and a cookly queen.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You are all a lot of crack-brained, foolish
+people,” exclaimed Billie, exasperated. “I feel
+as if ‘The Comet’ couldn’t take me fast enough
+to satisfy my curiosity about Mrs. Ruggles.”
+</p>
+<p>
+She put on the third speed and the red motor
+took to the course like a young race horse as he
+rounds the curve toward home. It was a long
+and rather chilly ride before they reached the
+abode of Mrs. Ruggles. The young people found
+themselves buttoning their wraps around them
+quite gratefully and snuggling down in the car.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Here we are,” said Percy, at last.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie stopped the car and examined with much
+curiosity a quaint old house, rather tumbled down
+at second glance, but with an air of comfort about
+it that no amount of disrepair could overcome.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_233'></a>233</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+Smoke was pouring out of the middle chimney
+and the reflection on the small window panes indicated
+that there was a roaring fire in the front
+room.
+</p>
+<p>
+What the place looked like on the inside was
+nothing more nor less than an old Spanish inn.
+Billie did not know this because she had never
+seen one, but the room reminded her vaguely of
+something very romantic and picturesque, and
+what was most curious about the place was that
+the outside seemed to have no connection whatever
+with the inside. They were not even related
+to each other by distant kinship. Outside
+were the dignified gray walls and gabled windows
+of an old seashore house. The inside appeared
+to be one very large room. The uneven
+floor was paved with red tile and in a big stone
+fireplace at one end burned an enormous fire of
+driftwood. From the blackened rafters hung
+garlands of red peppers, bunches of herbs and
+strings of onions and garlic. Shining copper vessels
+were ranged on shelves and around two sides
+of the room ran a gallery with steps leading up
+from one end.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_234'></a>234</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Am I in a dream,” cried Billie. “I feel as if
+I had been transported somewhere suddenly.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Isn’t it fascinating?” said Elinor. “The old
+house has been in Mrs. Ruggles’ family for two
+hundred years. It used to be a sort of sailors’
+inn, and there are many stories connected with
+it. But here she comes herself. She’s just as
+wonderful as her house.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mrs. Ruggles was certainly a remarkable figure.
+She was very tall, one of the tallest women
+Billie had ever seen, with coal black hair, shiny
+dark eyes, rather too close together, a beaked
+eagle nose, and a very determined mouth, with a
+slightly humorous curve to the lips, which softened
+her somewhat stern face.
+</p>
+<p>
+She wore a most outlandish dress for that part
+of the world, of striped red and black cotton, but
+she was scrupulously clean, and the coarse cotton
+kerchief tied around her neck was as white as
+snow. Her stockings also were white, and she
+wore men’s low shoes of enormous size, even for
+a woman of her height.
+</p>
+<p>
+The boys and girls all shook hands with her
+as if she were an old friend. She called them
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_235'></a>235</span>
+by their first names and when she was introduced
+to Billie she gave her a long, keen look that
+seemed to read the young girl’s most hidden and
+secret thoughts. She walked with an erect carriage
+and majestic tread, and Billie had a feeling
+that she had been introduced to a personage.
+</p>
+<p>
+“She’s a great old girl,” said Merry Brown,
+when Mrs. Ruggles had disappeared into the
+back regions of the house to finish cooking the
+dinner. “She can sail a boat as well as anybody
+along this coast. She fishes, digs for clams,
+catches lobsters in traps, and does all the things
+the fishermen around here do and more, too, because
+she is the jim dandiest cook in the county.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Hasn’t she any husband or family?” asked
+Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“She was married twice. Ruggles, the second
+husband, was an Irishman. He was a fine fellow,
+a sea captain, but he died long ago. Her children
+are floating about the country somewhere.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What was her name before she married?
+Nothing like Ruggles, I am sure.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, it was Sabater. Mrs. Ruggles’ father
+was captain of a schooner which carried freight
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_236'></a>236</span>
+up and down the coast. They say her grandfather
+was a great old fighter and came near
+being hanged as a spy by both sides in the Revolution.”
+</p>
+<p>
+It was all very interesting, and Billie was still
+asking questions of the others when the carriage
+arrived with the rest of the party.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, where is Fannie?” they demanded,
+noticing her absence from the depot wagon.
+</p>
+<p>
+“She complained of a headache and went
+home,” answered Belle. “We met one of your
+vehicles on the road, Percy, coming from town,
+and she got in and drove back.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Too bad,” answered Percy. “But she’s very
+sensible if she doesn’t feel well. It’s a long drive
+and fairly chilly when it gets late.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Fannie was not much missed, however, from
+the jolly party which now gathered around the
+crackling wood fire. Presently the inn-keeper,
+fish-woman, queen, whatever she was, led the
+girls up the narrow flight of stairs at one end of
+the room to the balcony, on which opened a row
+of little bedrooms, like ship cabins. She was a
+very silent, busy woman, and she did not linger
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_237'></a>237</span>
+while they smoothed their rumpled locks and
+washed the dust from their faces.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie, who also was not one to linger at the
+dressing table, went out on the gallery and stood
+looking down into the picturesque room. The
+place fascinated her and she strolled along, peeping
+into the other small rooms, where, no doubt,
+Mrs. Ruggles’ father and grandfather had put
+up many a seafaring guest in years gone by.
+</p>
+<p>
+At the other end of the gallery were more
+rooms, and she could not resist the temptation to
+glance into them while she waited for the other
+girls. Two of the doors were open, one into a
+large empty room and one into a scantily furnished
+bedroom. The next door was half closed.
+Should she look in? Billie hesitated. It was very
+impolite of her, but she knew that old Mrs. Ruggles
+lived alone, and there could be no one to
+intrude on. She pushed the door gently and
+looked in, then retreated quickly. The room was
+not empty, after all. In the immense, old-fashioned
+bed so high that it was necessary to stand
+on a foot stool at one side in order to plunge into
+it, lay a woman. Billie thought she was asleep at
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_238'></a>238</span>
+first. Her eyes were closed and her long black
+hair was spread back of her on the pillow like a
+dusky mantel. The young girl stood transfixed
+on the threshold. Then the woman opened her
+eyes and looked straight into Billie’s.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I beg your pardon,” said Billie politely, and
+backed away, her heart beating so fast that she
+almost choked for breath.
+</p>
+<p>
+The others were just going downstairs, chatting
+and laughing together, even Belle Rogers,
+who seemed, somehow, softened and quite different.
+There was no chance to tell about the
+strange woman just then, and Billie kept her
+knowledge to herself. But the large dark eyes
+haunted her memory and she could not forget
+the face, of which she had caught only a fleeting
+glance.
+</p>
+<p>
+Then came the dinner. Mrs. Ruggles did not
+wait on the guests. The dishes were placed on
+the table and they helped themselves, while Merry
+and Percy, with napkins over their arms, like
+well-trained butlers, removed one set of plates
+and brought on another.
+</p>
+<p>
+Perhaps these young people, who were not
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_239'></a>239</span>
+epicures by any means, did not realize how delicious
+Mrs. Ruggles’ dinner really was. But an
+older and more experienced person would have
+appreciated some of those delightful concoctions
+of rice and pimentos, soup thick and rich, fowls
+done to a turn, and a dish of corn meal and
+chopped meat and tomatoes, like a Mexican tamale.
+But they enjoyed it and the pudding that
+followed and the cups of strong black coffee.
+</p>
+<p>
+It was a merry meal, too, with jokes and songs
+and much laughter. Mrs. Ruggles moved ponderously
+about the room or sat silently by the
+fire. Occasionally her face lit up with a delightful
+smile, and she would turn and beam approvingly
+at Percy or Merry or Roly Poly McLane,
+who were the chief fun-makers.
+</p>
+<p>
+After dinner Billie seized an opportunity to
+speak to the strange woman.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We had a splendid dinner, Mrs. Ruggles,” she
+said. “I should think you would have lots of
+people stopping here in this delightful place.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The Inn is closed now,” she answered. “I
+don’t rent my rooms any more.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And you have no guests at all?” asked Billie.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_240'></a>240</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+Mrs. Ruggles looked at her for so long that
+Billie felt desperately uncomfortable.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No,” she answered shortly, and began clearing
+off the table with a scowl that reminded Billie
+of some one somewhere.
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_241'></a>241</span><a name='chXVIII' id='chXVIII'></a>CHAPTER XVIII.—FANNIE ALTA.</h2>
+<p>
+In the meantime, Mrs. St. Clair, left to the
+quiet seclusion of her own home, became forthwith
+a very determined and resolute character.
+</p>
+<p>
+First she summoned to her aid the old colored
+butler, who had been with her many years, and
+together they searched every part of the house
+where she had been the night before. They went
+over the attic thoroughly and satisfied themselves
+that the lost pearl necklace could not have been
+dropped there. They hunted through the downstairs
+rooms, shook out the sofa cushions, looked
+under the rugs and behind curtains. There was
+not a crack nor cranny of the rooms she had
+lately frequented that Mrs. St. Clair and old
+Randolph did not scour.
+</p>
+<p>
+Like many another easy-going, amiable soul,
+Mrs. St. Clair, when roused to action, was capable
+of the most surprising, almost fierce determination,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_242'></a>242</span>
+and when Fannie Alta returned,
+pleading the excuse of a headache, she hardly
+recognized in the white intense face, the rosy,
+dimpled countenance of the widow.
+</p>
+<p>
+Fannie retired to her room, but when Mrs. St.
+Clair went to the telephone in the upper hall,
+she crept to the door, opened it a crack, and overheard
+snatches of this conversation:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do you happen to have a good detective?
+That’s fortunate. The famous Mr. Bangs home
+on his vacation? Has a motor cycle? Very well,
+he ought to get here in an hour. Tell him to
+hurry. Thank you. Good-by.”
+</p>
+<p>
+A tray of luncheon was brought to Fannie, but
+she ate very little. She sat in her room thinking
+hard. Then, with a sudden resolution, she
+jumped up and began to move about. First she
+packed her valise. Then, tying her handkerchief
+about her head, she put on a very woe-begone expression
+and left the room. Mrs. St. Clair was
+in the living room, a maid told her, and Fannie
+found her pacing nervously up and down the
+bright, chintz-hung place.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am afraid you are not feeling so well, Miss
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_243'></a>243</span>
+Alta,” the widow said politely, but with just a
+shade of coldness in her tone.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am much worse,” answered Fannie. “I feel
+quite ill. I wish to return to my mamma. May
+I be driven home?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mrs. St. Clair hesitated and a very strange
+expression came into her face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You may go in a few hours, Miss Alta.
+There is no one to take you just now. Randolph
+is needed here and the other men are off working
+on the place. Perhaps you had better lie down
+in your room until I can arrange to send you
+back. Did you try the aromatic spirits of ammonia?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“If no one can take me,” said the Spanish girl
+irritably, not taking any notice of the question,
+“I shall walk.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But I thought you were ill?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am, but the walk will help my head.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, I cannot permit it,” said Mrs. St. Clair
+firmly. “Go to your room and in another hour
+you will be sent home.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Fannie started to reply, but she checked herself
+and left the room. Mrs. St. Clair, stripped of
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_244'></a>244</span>
+her smiles and good-natured pleasantries, was
+not a person to be disobeyed, and Fannie was
+quick to recognize that fact.
+</p>
+<p>
+She had hardly reached the second floor, when
+she heard the whirring sound of a motor cycle,
+followed almost immediately by a quick ring of
+the bell. Fannie leaned far over the banisters,
+and when she turned to go to her room, after a
+small, dapper-looking man had been admitted, she
+was somewhat embarrassed to find Mrs. St.
+Clair’s maid looking at her with an expression of
+extreme amazement.
+</p>
+<p>
+Fannie hurried to her room and for the next
+fifteen minutes stood irresolutely first on one foot,
+then on the other. Finally, with an air of determination,
+she opened her satchel.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the sitting room downstairs Mrs. St. Clair
+and Mr. Bangs were in close conference.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I do not really know the girl, Mr. Bangs. She
+is a Cuban or a South American, or something.
+Her name is Alta and she was brought here by
+my son’s guest. It is impossible for me to accuse
+a visitor in my own house of stealing the
+most valued and handsomest possession I have
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_245'></a>245</span>
+in the world. She is a queer little creature and
+looks sly and unreliable to me. But, of course,
+that is not really evidence. What I have been
+racking my brain all night and morning to recall
+is whether it was not she who, when she
+helped me off with my ghost dress last night,
+fumbled at my neck a moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It amounts to this, Mr. Bangs,” the widow
+continued after a pause, “I can’t get over the
+impression that she has stolen my necklace. The
+other children here I have known all their lives.
+My servants have been with me for years, and
+she is the one suspicious person in the house.
+Now, what I want you to do is to help me to
+find out the whole thing without arousing her
+suspicions. If she is the thief, she may return
+the necklace, and be sent back to town before the
+others arrive, and it will be easy enough to make
+excuses. You are a very able man, Mr. Bangs,
+and I know that you are only home for a rest,
+but I do so need your help. Now, what do you
+advise?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Have you looked among her things yet?”
+asked the detective.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_246'></a>246</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, because the conviction only came to me
+after she returned. I did have suspicions, I will
+admit, but I put them aside. When she came
+back I saw that she was uneasy and anxious, and
+only a few moments ago she asked to be sent
+home.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“H-m,” mused the detective. “Suppose,” he
+continued, “that you call her down and let me
+talk to her as if I needed her assistance, she being
+the only member of the party available.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The advice was acted upon, and presently Fannie,
+still with the handkerchief swathing her forehead,
+looking very nervous and pale, entered the
+room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Miss Alta,” began the widow kindly, “I am
+sorry to have disturbed you when you were ill,
+but we are in great trouble and we thought perhaps
+you might help us. Did you know that last
+night I lost my beautiful pearl necklace, the most
+precious thing I have in the world?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Fannie showed great surprise.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did it not come unclasped and slip?” she suggested.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_247'></a>247</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have reason to believe that it did not slip
+from my neck, because we have searched the
+place thoroughly. It must have been taken. I
+talked it all over with the other girls last night
+and they helped me look for it, but now I need
+some one else, and in their absence I have sent
+for you. Mr. Bangs, who is a detective, has come
+down to lend me his aid, and we thought we
+might take you into the conspiracy with us.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The widow paused for breath.
+</p>
+<p>
+Fannie sat down and folded her hands nervously.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I do not see how I can help,” she said, after
+a pause.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Possibly you cannot,” put in Mr. Bangs, “but
+Mrs. St. Clair thought you might have noticed
+something unusual, and being a guest were too
+polite to speak of it. For instance, were you
+standing near Mrs. St. Clair when she removed
+the sheet and pillow case?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” said Fannie, “there were several of us
+in the party.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did you notice who unpinned the sheet for
+Mrs. St. Clair?”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_248'></a>248</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+Fannie paused a long time without replying.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It was not you who did it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+The young girl compressed her lips and looked
+the detective squarely in the eye.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The girl who unpinned the sheet was Mary
+Price,” she replied, “and since you are determined
+to question me, I will tell you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+She drew a deep breath, looked first at the
+detective, then at Mrs. St. Clair, and proceeded:
+</p>
+<p>
+“I did notice that she removed the sheet from
+your shoulders and her actions were very strange.
+But, knowing what I did, I was not surprised, and
+I am not surprised to hear now that you have lost
+something valuable, Mrs. St. Clair,” she went on,
+more and more glibly, as she saw she was gaining
+the interest of the other two.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What were Miss Price’s actions?” asked the
+detective, taking Fannie’s statements in the order
+she had made them.
+</p>
+<p>
+Fannie frowned.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, I do not know. She was strange. She
+behaved strangely and she went away at once.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You mean she left the room?”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_249'></a>249</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“I cannot say. I saw her no more until supper.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Where were you?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, I was about, dancing, playing, laughing
+with the others,” replied Fannie carelessly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You said a moment ago you knew something
+about Miss Price. Will you tell us what it is?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Ah, but I hesitate. It is unkind to spread so
+terrible a story.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“We will treat it confidentially,” said the detective
+drily.
+</p>
+<p>
+“A great many people know it already,” went
+on Fannie. “The whole school knows it, in fact.
+Miss Gray, the principal, and some of the teachers,
+who have lost money and articles. I, myself,
+have good reason to know it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What is it that you know?” asked the detective.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That Mary Price is a thief. She has been
+stealing all the autumn from the other girls and
+the teachers at the High School.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, impossible! I will not believe it,” cried
+Mrs. St. Clair. “Dear, sweet, quiet Mary.
+There must be some mistake, Miss Alta. You
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_250'></a>250</span>
+should be more careful how you spread such dangerous
+gossip. Mary Price and her mother
+have many devoted friends in West Haven.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You may ask Miss Gray, then. She will tell
+you,” said Fannie stiffly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Just to verify your statement, Miss Alta, I
+will telephone Miss Gray this instant,” exclaimed
+the widow angrily, leaving the room and hastening
+upstairs to the telephone.
+</p>
+<p>
+While she was gone, and she was away some
+time, the detective began to question Fannie. He
+was a very experienced man in his profession and
+he pressed her so skillfully that several times she
+tripped in her answers and finally grew excited.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I tell you it is true,” she cried. “She not only
+is a thief, but she has a confederate. Billie Campbell
+is her assistant. Perhaps you think I took the
+necklace,” she burst out at last. “You have the
+right to search among my things. I had no way
+to know that suspicion rested on me. If I took
+the necklace, it will still be among my things.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Don’t get excited, Miss Alta, nobody has accused
+you of anything. We simply needed your
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_251'></a>251</span>
+valuable evidence. Why do you say Miss Campbell
+is a confederate to the thieving?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Fannie had gone farther than she intended,
+however, and she refused to give any more information.
+But the detective saw that when she
+was angry and frightened, she would talk, and
+after a pause, he said:
+</p>
+<p>
+“You perhaps know that you are the only person
+in the household on whom suspicion might
+rest.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t see why I should be suspected,” she
+exclaimed hotly, “when Mary Price is already
+known to be a thief——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Perhaps you have a grudge against Miss
+Price?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have not,” she cried, stamping her foot.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did no one ever suspect you of taking the
+things at the High School? You know that often
+happens—one girl is blamed for another’s——”
+</p>
+<p>
+Fannie flew into a passion.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I tell you Billie Campbell and Mary Price are
+thieves. They have a whole box of valuable
+things they have stolen, stored away in Mrs.
+Price’s safe.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_252'></a>252</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“What sort of things?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Jewelry,” burst out Fannie, then stopped and
+bit her lip. “But I may be mistaken about that,”
+she added, trying to speak calmly.
+</p>
+<p>
+Mrs. St. Clair hurried into the room with the
+necklace in her hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Where did you find it?” asked Mr. Bangs.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I found it,” she began, then paused. “It was
+found,” she added. “You may go, Miss Alta.
+Thank you very much. And if you care to go
+back to town, Randolph will drive you in at
+once.”
+</p>
+<p>
+When Fannie had left the room, the widow
+beat her hands together, and the tears rolled down
+her cheeks.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I found it in Mary Price’s bag,” she said.
+“And Miss Gray tells me that it is true. Mary
+has been suspected of stealing all autumn.”
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_253'></a>253</span><a name='chXIX' id='chXIX'></a>CHAPTER XIX.—MARY BEFORE HER JUDGES.</h2>
+<p>
+It was late when the young people returned
+from Mrs. Ruggles’. They were in gay spirits
+and Mrs. St. Clair could hear them talking and
+laughing in the hall, first the motorists and then
+the ones who had driven. She did not go down to
+meet them and they scattered to their rooms to
+wash their faces and smooth their wind-blown
+locks. There was no time to dress for supper.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t see how I can face them,” she said to
+herself. “I’m so unhappy, and I’m afraid they
+will notice that I have been crying.”
+</p>
+<p>
+But she bathed her temples in cold water, put
+on a cheery-colored silk dress, and went downstairs
+when the gong sounded for supper. Down
+trooped the boys and girls with sparkling eyes
+and glowing cheeks. The sound of their happy
+laughter reached her below and she pressed her
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_254'></a>254</span>
+hand to her heart and sighed deeply. Then her
+expression hardened:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Little wretch,” she exclaimed. “She should
+be well punished, and she shall be, too.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“‘Soup of the evening, beautiful soup,’” sang
+Merry, dancing a jig in the hall:
+</p>
+<p>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“‘Beautiful soup so rich and green,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Waiting in a hot tureen!’”<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;“‘Who for such dainties would not stoop?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Soup of the evening, beautiful soup,’”<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+continued Rosomond, seizing Merry’s hands and
+whirling with him up and down the hall until they
+both fell in a laughing heap on the floor.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, we have had such a good time,” cried
+Billie and Mary together, taking each a hand of
+Mrs. St. Clair.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It has been such glorious fun,” went on Billie,
+“and we are just as hungry for supper as if we
+hadn’t eaten enough food to feed a regiment this
+afternoon.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And such fine food, too, Mrs. St. Clair,” said
+Mary. “I think it was the most delightful party
+I have ever been to.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_255'></a>255</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am glad you were so happy,” replied Mrs.
+St. Clair, making an effort to smile and succeeding
+very poorly.
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary, who was as sensitive to changes in manner
+as an aeolian harp is to the slightest breeze,
+looked at her hostess quickly and noticed the red
+rims on her eyelids.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Aren’t you feeling well, dear Mrs. St. Clair?”
+she asked gently.
+</p>
+<p>
+Mrs. St. Clair put her hands on the girl’s
+shoulders and looked into the clear dark eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am quite well, Mary. A little upset over
+something that happened to-day. That is all.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You mean the pearl necklace?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am so sorry. I wish we could have found
+it for you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It has been found, Mary,” said the widow,
+turning her head away so as not to see Mary’s
+face.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, you did find it? I am so glad. Where
+was it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Supper is served, Mrs. St. Clair,” said Randolph,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_256'></a>256</span>
+opening the door to the dining room,
+where the others were already waiting.
+</p>
+<p>
+“We will talk about where it was found later,”
+she said to Mary, who gave her a puzzled look,
+as she followed into the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+When supper was over, the boys and girls
+scattered about the various rooms. Roly Poly
+and Nancy got up charades. Billie curled up in
+a big easy chair by the fire. She had got most
+of the wind in her face and she was very sleepy.
+No one noticed, therefore, when Mrs. St. Clair,
+drawing Mary’s hand through her arm, led her
+out of the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I want to see you upstairs, Mary,” she said.
+“Will you come to my little private sitting room?
+There is something I wish to talk with you
+about.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary was still wondering what in the world
+could be wanted of her, when Mrs. St. Clair drew
+her into a pretty little pink boudoir at the end of
+the hall. The door to the next room had been
+left open, but Mary did not notice a small, dapper
+man sitting there in a high-backed cretonne
+chair.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_257'></a>257</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+The pearl necklace was lying on a table in the
+boudoir. Mrs. St. Clair picked it up and held it
+out to Mary.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did you ever see it closely before, Mary?”
+she asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, I never did,” answered the girl, with enthusiasm.
+“How beautiful it is. No wonder you
+were so unhappy. But where did you find it?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is just why I brought you in here,
+Mary. I wanted to ask you if you could guess
+where the necklace had been found at last.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary suddenly became very grave. She was
+beginning to notice now that Mrs. St. Clair was
+in an unusually serious frame of mind and that
+something must have happened concerning the
+necklace which the others had not heard.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t understand,” she said, after a pause.
+“Why should I guess?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is it possible, Mary,” exclaimed the widow,
+“that even after you were told I had found the
+necklace you were not just a little frightened, a
+little uneasy? Didn’t you suspect when I asked
+you to come up here with me that I was going to
+speak to you about the necklace?”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_258'></a>258</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary looked at her in wonder for a few minutes.
+Then a light dawned on her.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s Fannie Alta again,” she said, in a low
+voice. “She must have put the necklace among
+some of my things.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then you do know where I found the necklace?”
+cried the widow triumphantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I can guess,” said Mary. “You found it in
+my suit case. It’s the second time she’s done
+something like that.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mary, Mary—don’t blame it on any one else.
+I did find the necklace in your valise——”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary stood up. Her eyes were blazing and
+her small slender frame was shaken with emotion.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Do you mean to insinuate that I stole your
+pearl necklace?” she cried.
+</p>
+<p>
+Her words rang out in a high, clear tone that
+made the small man in the next room stir uneasily.
+</p>
+<p>
+“How else did the necklace get into your bag,
+Mary?”
+</p>
+<div class='figcenter' style='padding-top: 1em; padding-bottom: 1em'>
+<a name='i005' id='i005'></a>
+<img src="images/illus-258.jpg" alt="“Do you mean to insinuate that I stole your pearl necklace?”" title=""/><br />
+<span class='caption'>“Do you mean to insinuate that I stole your pearl necklace?”</span>
+</div>
+<div><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_259'></a>259</span></div>
+<p>
+“Fannie Alta put it there. She put twenty dollars
+into my pocket not long ago and tried to
+accuse me of taking that, and when I gave it back
+to her she hadn’t a word to say.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But, Mary, Fannie is not your only accuser.
+Miss Gray tells me that you have been suspected
+of many thefts since school opened.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, oh!” cried Mary. “How dare she? How
+dare any one? What have I done that these people
+should try to make me out a thief? Oh,
+mother, mother!”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is just why I brought you up here to-night,
+Mary. On account of your sweet, lovely
+mother. I want you to make me a promise in
+return for what I am going to do for you. I
+promise not to push this matter any farther. It
+shall never reach your mother’s ears. She will
+be spared all distress and misery, if you promise
+me never again, as long as you live, to steal. It
+was not nice of you, Mary, staying here as my
+guest, to steal from me. Will you make me that
+promise?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary did not reply. She sat down and clasped
+her hands in her lap. Once or twice her throat
+quivered with the little sob, which so went to
+Billie’s heart. She pressed her hands together
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_260'></a>260</span>
+and closed her eyes for a moment. Her face was
+so pale that Mrs. St. Clair thought she was going
+to faint, but her lips were moving.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, God, help me,” she prayed softly. “Tell
+me what to say.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Presently her agitation ceased altogether. She
+opened her eyes and looked calmly at the widow.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, I will not promise you that, Mrs. St.
+Clair, because I have never stolen anything in
+my life. I would prefer that my mother should
+know about this. I don’t wish to keep it from
+her. She would never believe me guilty, no matter
+what the evidence was against me, even if I
+had to go to jail. You say you found the necklace
+in my bag? How did you happen to look
+for it there?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You see, I believed that Fannie Alta had taken
+it, and when we brought her into the living room
+and urged her to tell what she knew, she accused
+you. I would not believe it, however, until I had
+called up Miss Gray. It was only after that that
+I looked in your bag.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary stood up.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I know that things look very black for me,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_261'></a>261</span>
+Mrs. St. Clair. I don’t understand why, but
+there is a conspiracy in the High School. It
+seems to have formed around Billie and me in
+particular. But there is something else, too.
+Something is going on in West Haven—something
+too big for us to understand. Billie and
+I are in it, and Fannie Alta is in it, and sometimes
+I think even Belle Rogers is, too. I don’t
+know what it all means, or why it should have
+anything to do with making me a thief, but I am
+not a thief, and I did not put the necklace in my
+bag. Good-night. I will not see you again. As
+soon as morning comes, Billie and I will go back
+in the motor. I know she will take me if I ask
+her.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary walked quietly out of the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s a girl of fine spirit,” thought Mr.
+Bangs. “The case is certainly interesting enough
+to keep me here another week.”
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_262'></a>262</span><a name='chXX' id='chXX'></a>CHAPTER XX.—MISS CAMPBELL WEARS BLACK.</h2>
+<p>
+Mary went straight to her room that night
+and packed her bag. When Billie came up a little
+later she found her kneeling beside her bed,
+her face hidden in her hands. It seemed to the
+unhappy young girl in her misery and danger
+that no human power could aid her.
+</p>
+<p>
+When Billie heard the story, she was so angry
+with Mrs. St. Clair and Miss Gray and Fannie
+Alta that she took an imaginary aim and pitched
+both shoes across the room with all her force.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, my dear, my dear,” she cried, throwing
+her arms about her friend’s neck with affectionate
+fervor, “you have at least one devoted friend
+who will stand by you through everything.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary was touched by Billie’s devotion and by
+and by the two girls dropped off to sleep in spite
+of their troubled hearts.
+</p>
+<p>
+But they were up and dressed before any one
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_263'></a>263</span>
+except the servants was stirring in the house.
+Randolph, greatly amazed, and imploring the
+young ladies to wait and take at least a cup of
+coffee, led the way to the carriage house where
+the motor had been left.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Tell Mrs. St. Clair,” said Billie, “that I was
+called home early and will write to her.”
+</p>
+<p>
+No one knew but the colored servant, and he
+did not understand, that Mary and Billie had refused
+to eat anything in a house where one of
+them had been called a thief.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mary, tell your mother the whole story,” said
+Billie, as she dropped her friend at “The Sign of
+the Blue Tea Pot.” “Tell her not to be uneasy.
+Your friends know you are innocent and it is
+all obliged to come out right.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Then she dashed around the Square, turned up
+Cliff Street, and stopped at the home of Miss
+Helen Campbell.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, I haven’t had breakfast,” she said to the
+old man servant, who opened the door. “I’ll eat
+with Cousin Helen if she hasn’t breakfasted.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Miss Campbell will not eat any breakfast this
+morning, Miss Billie,” replied the butler.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_264'></a>264</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is she ill?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, Miss,” the old man lowered his voice,
+“but she’s wearing her black dress.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie frowned.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is it an anniversary?” she asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, Miss. That’s just the queer part. It
+ain’t the anniversary. We know when that comes
+now. But something’s happened.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Nothing to do with papa?” she asked anxiously.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, no, Miss.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I’ll have some breakfast, then,” she said. “I’m
+very hungry from the ride in town.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie ate a hurried but hearty meal alone.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I never can do anything when I’m empty,”
+she often said, and instinctively she felt that
+trouble of some sort was brewing.
+</p>
+<p>
+After breakfast she tapped on her cousin’s
+door.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Come in,” came the tremulous answer, and
+Billie entered a darkened room.
+</p>
+<p>
+Miss Campbell, looking faded and pale and
+wearing a black crepe dress, was sitting alone at
+the far end of her apartment. Her hands were
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_265'></a>265</span>
+crossed on her breast like a mediæval saint’s, and
+she looked the very picture of hopeless misery.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Dear Cousin Helen, what has happened?”
+cried Billie, running to the little lady and kneeling
+beside her chair. “Is it something very terrible?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Miss Campbell put her arm around the girl’s
+neck and two tears slipped down her faded
+cheeks.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Billie, Billie, why have you deceived me so?”
+she exclaimed. “How could you have done this
+terrible thing? Oh, my dear, my dear, I have
+been so unhappy, and Mrs. Price, too. We have
+wept together.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What in the world?” cried Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The jewels, my dear. The box of wonderful
+jewels that you have kept. How could you have
+done such a thing? I know many young girls
+who would have been tempted by them. But not
+you, my dear, dear Billie. And Mary, too. Oh,
+heavens, I am so unhappy!”
+</p>
+<p>
+Miss Campbell was so shaken by her sobs and
+weeping that Billie was obliged to wipe her eyes
+with her own handkerchief.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_266'></a>266</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“But, dearest Cousin,” she said at last. “We
+haven’t done anything dishonest, or that we
+might be ashamed of. How did you find out
+about the box and who told you such a slander
+about us?”
+</p>
+<p>
+After being bolstered up with aromatic nerve
+drops and eau de cologne, Miss Campbell was able
+to speak coherently.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yesterday a man came here to see me. He
+sent up his name and the message that he wished
+to speak to me about something in regard to you,
+so I had him shown in. And then, my child, he
+told me such a story. How his motor car had
+been wrecked on the very day we went to Shell
+Island and a box of jewels belonging to his wife
+had fallen in the sand. He had good reason to
+know, he said, that you had found the jewels and,
+instead of trying to find the owner or answering
+advertisements and notes, had kept them all this
+time in Mrs. Price’s safe. He gave me a list of
+the jewels and an exact description. I went at
+once to Mrs. Price. We found the combination,
+opened the safe, and got out the box. There
+they were, just as he had described them. Oh,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_267'></a>267</span>
+my dear, what mortification! What will your
+father say?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did you give him the jewels?” exclaimed
+Billie, without waiting to make explanations until
+this important point was settled.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The man was very insistent. He has threatened
+to arrest you and Mary and even Mrs.
+Price. Think of that! For harboring stolen
+goods.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Did you give them to him?” cried Billie, impatiently.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, Mrs. Price refused to let him have them
+until she had seen you and Mary. For my part, I
+should have given them to the man and let him go.
+We had a terrible scene with him, but Mrs. Price
+was firm. She said it would do no harm for him
+to wait until she had seen you and she would not
+allow him to take them.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Thank heavens for that,” burst out Billie.
+“Then the box is in Mrs. Price’s safe?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, I had it brought here for safe-keeping.
+The man was so angry he made threats and I
+thought it would be better to get it away from
+Mrs. Price’s at least.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_268'></a>268</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“What was the man’s name?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Lafitte. He wrote it on a piece of paper.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Lafitte?” echoed Billie. “What did he look
+like?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I cannot really recall, my dear. I was so
+agitated. But I think there was something
+wrong about one eye.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He had only one eye,” Billie almost shrieked
+in her excitement.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I believe so, and only one arm. But you will
+see him. He will be back this morning.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Cousin Helen, he will never come back. He
+is a thief and a robber and a smuggler. He is
+everything that is wicked and bad. I don’t know
+how he found out that we had the jewels, but he
+has been hot on our track ever since. I will tell
+you the real story of the jewels and then you
+will see what an injustice you have done us.”
+</p>
+<p>
+When Billie had finished the strange tale, Miss
+Campbell looked at her with a peculiar expression.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s a very remarkable story, my dear. And
+if I did not know you as well as I do, I could
+almost think you had imagined it. And I was
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_269'></a>269</span>
+there all the time. You should have confided in
+me. The woman was insane, I suppose.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“She was not,” insisted Billie. “She was perfectly
+sane and very beautiful. The man who
+calls himself ‘Lafitte’ is not the right person, and
+he shall not have the jewels until I hear from
+her or from the right Lafitte. You may be sure
+he will not dare have me or any one else arrested.
+We know too much about him already.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But what are we to do with the things, child?
+They have brought nothing but trouble on you
+since you have had them.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Suppose you put them in your safety box at
+the bank for a few days. There is something
+much more important than this at stake now.
+Mary has been accused of being a thief by Mrs.
+St. Clair and Miss Gray. It is a terrible thing.
+Mrs. St. Clair wouldn’t listen to reason.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie related to her cousin what had happened
+the day before and the chain of events which
+led up to it.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, poor dear Mrs. Price! My unfortunate
+friend. What shall we do, Billie?” exclaimed
+the sympathetic little woman.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_270'></a>270</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“I don’t know yet, Cousin Helen. The whole
+thing is too much for me, but I have a scheme.
+Are there any detectives in West Haven?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Call up the police station,” her cousin suggested,
+and presently Billie’s voice could be heard
+in the hall:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Have you a good detective? Bangs, you say.
+Send him to Miss Campbell’s please; upper Cliff
+Street, and the sooner the better. Good-by.”
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_271'></a>271</span><a name='chXXI' id='chXXI'></a>CHAPTER XXI.—THE MISSING LINK.</h2>
+<p>
+Mr. Bangs made three calls on that memorable
+Monday. The first was to Billie, as you already
+surmise. If he recognized the strong undercurrent
+which connected the strange adventures of
+the Motor Maids during the past two months, he
+said nothing, but listened gravely to the young
+girl’s account of the happenings in Boulder Lane,
+the box of jewels, the cases of rifles at Seven
+League Island, and so on through the events
+which have been told in this history.
+</p>
+<p>
+When Billie had finished, she paused and
+waited for the detective to speak, but he sat silently
+twirling his thumbs and looking down at
+the floor with half-closed eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie was slightly irritated.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have sent for you, Mr. Bangs,” she continued
+with some dignity, “because, while I am certain
+of two things, I’m not at all sure of the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_272'></a>272</span>
+third. The first is that Fannie Alta has some
+very good reason for trying to prove that Mary
+is a thief. The second is that this smuggler who
+has been trying to steal the jewels has something
+to do with it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And what is the third, Miss Campbell?” asked
+the detective, smiling, without looking up.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is what I want you to tell me,” exclaimed
+Billie restlessly. “There is a third. It is the
+missing link. And it is what I wanted you to
+find out for me. I have thought and thought and
+puzzled and puzzled, but I can’t make it out. I
+believe with all my soul that there is some wicked
+force back of the whole thing.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mr. Bangs raised his eyes at last and looked
+at the young girl with evident admiration.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You are taking the first step toward making
+a good detective, Miss Campbell,” he said. “You
+have expressed it in three words. It is the missing
+link we need to get at in this business and it
+is what I must find.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie flushed with pleasure at this professional
+praise. She had never had occasion to play the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_273'></a>273</span>
+part of detective before. But devotion and loyalty
+to her friend had sharpened her wits.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, why?” asked the detective. “Isn’t Miss
+Alta the missing link?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That is the strangest part of the whole business.
+She is a piece of the link, I think, but then
+she has nothing against Mary and me. There
+would be no object to what she has done unless
+she had.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You did not know that she accused you of
+being the confederate of your friend or that she
+knew that you had the box of jewels hidden in
+the safe?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What?” cried Billie, with amazement. “But
+how did she know——” she began.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, how?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie sat looking down at her hands. She was
+not thinking of those slender, strong fingers,
+which appeared to clasp each other with a
+friendly grip. Her thoughts were busy going
+back over the past few weeks.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I think I’ve found the missing link,” she said
+at last, with a serious look in her eyes, as she
+turned toward the detective. “Belle Rogers is
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_274'></a>274</span>
+the missing link. I can’t understand why I
+haven’t thought of it before, but it seemed so incredible.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Miss Campbell,” put in Mr. Bangs severely,
+“I am afraid you are not such a good detective,
+after all. You have left out one of the most important
+things. You did not tell me that some
+one besides your three friends knew about the
+jewels.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie had omitted the story of the confusion of
+the two suit cases at Shell Island. She had really
+quite forgotten it and Mr. Bangs chuckled with
+amusement when he heard how Belle had opened
+and examined all the contents of another girl’s
+suit case out of pure curiosity.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then she must have read the name on the
+card, too,” he said presently.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I suppose so.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Now, tell me, Miss Campbell, what is the
+grudge which this young lady perhaps has
+against you and your friends?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, it’s only a silly schoolgirl affair,” replied
+Billie. “I am ashamed to tell you, because it
+seems so utterly trivial in comparison to other
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_275'></a>275</span>
+things. She was angry because I wouldn’t join
+her club and because we saw her the night of the
+fire with her hair up in rubber curlers.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The detective laughed outright.
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s a woman’s reason for taking revenge,”
+he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+“And she was angry again because I took her
+into the wrong room, when the hotel was burning
+and we had to escape over the roof.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Humph!” exclaimed the detective. “Insult
+piled onto injury, eh? So this Miss Rogers is a
+very vindictive character?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie hesitated. It went against her straight-forward,
+honest nature to malign even Belle
+Rogers.
+</p>
+<p>
+“She has been spoiled all her life,” she said,
+“and you know how spoiled children must have
+their own way. That is all. She was angry because
+she planned to make me a member of her
+club and queen it over me as she does over the
+others, and I disappointed her. Her mother and
+friends have taken good care always that she
+should never be disappointed and she just didn’t
+know what the feeling was, I suppose.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_276'></a>276</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“She must be quite a remarkably spoiled young
+woman to go to such lengths for such a trivial
+offence. But we sometimes get in deeper than
+we intend, you know.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The detective rose to go.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good day, Miss Campbell,” he said, giving her
+hand quite a warm grip, considering what a quiet,
+cold individual he had seemed at first. “You will
+hear from me again, soon. I had not intended to
+work when I came down here. You know I am
+a West Haven boy. My father was old Bill
+Bangs, the jailer. You probably have heard of
+him. He was a famous character in his day. I
+came home to rest and see my people, but when a
+detective scents a good case he is not apt to let
+it slip by, even on a holiday.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And you think this is a good case?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s a corking one,” he replied, as he closed the
+door after him.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie and Mary did not go to school that famous
+Monday. Billie had no mind to face the
+curious looks she felt certain would be turned
+upon her by the other girls, because news travels
+quickly in any school. Mary was lying on her
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_277'></a>277</span>
+mother’s bed with a throbbing sick headache. All
+day Mrs. Price sat beside her daughter and held
+her hand. At intervals she bathed her temples
+with eau de cologne and whispered:
+</p>
+<p>
+“My dearest, it will come out all right. Mother
+loves you and believes in you and so does Billie.
+Don’t sob like that for my sake, my little girl.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Belle Rogers also stayed at home that Monday.
+Mr. Bangs discovered this fact on his second
+visit of the day when he was closeted for an hour
+or more with Miss Gray and Mrs. St. Clair in the
+principal’s private office.
+</p>
+<p>
+After a tiresome interview with these two well
+meaning but mistaken ladies, in which he said little
+and they said much, he left the High School
+with a sigh of relief.
+</p>
+<p>
+Presently he found himself in the fashionable
+district of West Haven. It was the second time
+he had climbed the street that day, but he was a
+calm little person, not easily heated by emotion
+or exercise, and when he rang the bell at the
+Rogers home, there was just the suspicion of a
+smile on his face. He sent up his card for Miss
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_278'></a>278</span>
+Rogers and word was brought back that Miss
+Rogers was ill and not to be seen. Then, with
+a pencil, he wrote across the face of the card,
+“Lafitte—Paris.”
+</p>
+<p>
+In three minutes the swish of skirts down the
+steps announced that some one was coming.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I hope it’s not the mother,” he said to himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+But it was Belle, very pale, with violet circles
+around her eyes and a nervous quivering about
+the lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+When Mr. Bangs left the Rogers house after
+spending three-quarters of an hour with Belle,
+he remarked as he strolled down the gravel driveway
+to the street:
+</p>
+<p>
+“It will have to be an out and out confession
+from one or the other. If this one doesn’t give
+it, the Alta girl must. I shall pay my respects
+to Mme. Alta this evening.”
+</p>
+<p>
+He had hardly passed through the great iron
+gateway leading into the street, when Belle,
+wearing a heavy veil and a long ulster, hurried
+after him. She carried a music roll under her
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_279'></a>279</span>
+arm, although she was not taking lessons, since
+she had been injured in the fire, but it was understood
+by the servant who opened the door for her
+that she was going to see Mme. Alta.
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_280'></a>280</span><a name='chXXII' id='chXXII'></a>CHAPTER XXII.—THE REFUGEES.</h2>
+<p>
+A ship had sailed into the little harbor of West
+Haven on Monday morning. She carried a load
+of lumber from down the coast and after showing
+her clearance papers and discharging her
+cargo with all due formality, she hoisted sails
+again and moved around the curve of the harbor
+into a deep inlet, where she rested at anchor in
+a position just opposite Boulder Lane.
+</p>
+<p>
+Darkness fell very early that Monday afternoon
+as those who were not in their homes will
+remember.
+</p>
+<p>
+Mr. Bangs will recall the inky blackness of the
+lowering sky, as he came out of the telegraph
+office, where he had wired to his chief to send
+down another man, and turned his steps toward
+the rooms occupied by Mme. Alta.
+</p>
+<p>
+Our Motor Maids have not forgotten how they
+sped back to town after a swift ride in their beloved
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_281'></a>281</span>
+“Comet,” in the late afternoon, when they
+discussed the situation long and earnestly.
+</p>
+<p>
+Three figures turned into Boulder Lane as the
+motor car flashed past, but the girls were too intent
+on their conversation to notice them. The
+first, who was a tall, stout woman, walked
+stoically along with the tread of a grenadier. She
+carried a large suit case with one hand and an
+enormous bundle with the other. Her two upper
+teeth protruding over her lower lip gave her that
+strange animal look which Billie had disliked so
+much. For it was Mme. Alta, as you have no
+doubt guessed, trudging up Boulder Lane. Her
+daughter, Francesca, walked behind. She also
+carried a suit case and a bundle. Occasionally
+she flashed a look of hatred back to the lights of
+West Haven, which place she had never loved.
+</p>
+<p>
+Can this be Belle Rogers who brings up the
+procession, staggering under a heavy satchel and
+moaning and weeping as she stumbles along?
+</p>
+<p>
+“I am glad I left word that I had gone out
+to spend the night,” she said to herself. “At
+least, they won’t know it for a while, and it will
+be too late then.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_282'></a>282</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+It was a long walk before they reached the
+end of Boulder Lane and found themselves on the
+beach of the little cove. The lights of the ship
+made a rippling, cheerful track on the water, but
+Belle shivered when she saw the black hull outlined
+in the darkness.
+</p>
+<p>
+Several men were waiting for them near a
+boat, which had been moored on the beach, and
+presently the three women climbed in; their luggage
+was piled at one end and they were rowed
+away in the darkness. Two wagons came lumbering
+up the beach, and half the night, Belle,
+who was tossing feverishly in her stuffy berth,
+trying to stifle her sobs, heard the sailors loading
+a cargo, while the boats plied back and forth from
+the shore to the ship.
+</p>
+<p>
+There was no wind that night and an ominous
+silence seemed to brood over the sea. At last in
+the stillness, Belle slept. Toward morning she
+was awakened by the sound of a voice. A man
+in a small boat just below her porthole was calling
+up to some one on deck.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Hello, Captain, it’s Ruiz. I’m coming aboard.
+We must sail by dawn. They’ve got word about
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_283'></a>283</span>
+us. If that girl has turned traitor, she shall pay
+for it.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Belle could not hear the captain’s reply, but he
+must have made some objection to sailing that
+morning, for the man named Ruiz answered:
+</p>
+<p>
+“Storm or no storm, I’m master here, and I
+say we sail at once.”
+</p>
+<p>
+And sail they did without more argument. She
+could hear the sailors running about the ship.
+The masts creaked and groaned. Chains rattled.
+Presently the boat was in motion, and from her
+porthole she saw the familiar shores glide past
+her.
+</p>
+<p>
+We cannot help pitying poor Belle in her misery
+and distress. She dragged herself from her
+berth—Fannie was still sleeping soundly—and
+put on her clothes. For the first time, she became
+aware of a sustained and ever-increasing sound.
+What she had mistaken in the beginning for the
+eternal noise of the waters, she recognized now
+as the wind. As she cast one long regretful look
+back to the shores of West Haven, which she
+had never really loved until now, the hurricane
+burst upon them with a roar like a thousand angry beasts.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_284'></a>284</span>
+The ship went scurrying through the
+harbor entrance in the teeth of the gale.
+</p>
+<p>
+Belle hurried upstairs to the deck, pulling on
+her ulster as she ran. Not a vestige of curl had
+the wet air left in her light gold hair; but for
+the first time in her life, since she had been old
+enough to remember, she had forgotten that she
+had any hair and she did not even stop to push
+back the damp, uneven locks from her eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+The boat had cleared the Black Reefs and was
+making for the open sea, when suddenly the
+demon wind played a trick on the captain of the
+little schooner and changed its tack. Down went
+the mainmast with a great crash. Through the
+shrieking of the wind, Belle could hear the curses
+and cries of the sailors and the yells of the captain.
+Mme. Alta appeared, looking more than
+ever like a walrus, in her greasy old black dressing
+gown. Fannie ran up behind her, making a
+great outcry.
+</p>
+<p>
+The hurricane seemed to lift the ship in its
+arms and carry it along. Then, with a hideous
+grinding noise, the vessel stood perfectly still.
+</p>
+<p>
+Some one screamed:
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_285'></a>285</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“We’re on the rocks!”
+</p>
+<p>
+And Belle knew without being told that they
+had tossed onto the Black Reefs.
+</p>
+<hr class='tb' />
+<p>
+“Wake up, Billie,” cried Nancy, shaking her
+friend’s shoulder violently. “Get up and dress.
+We are all waiting below.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What’s happened?” asked Billie, sitting up in
+bed and rubbing her eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+“A ship is wrecked on the Black Reefs.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie leaped from her bed and began to dress
+hurriedly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It must be a fearful sight,” she exclaimed, as
+she pulled on her clothes. “The poor sailors, will
+they be saved?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I haven’t heard,” answered Nancy, “but the
+whole town is rushing up the Cliff Road.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Tell Ben to get ‘The Comet.’ He can run it as
+well as I can now.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“He has,” answered Nancy, with the privilege
+of friendship. “I made him get it while I routed
+you out.”
+</p>
+<p>
+In another five minutes “The Comet,” with its
+load of boys and girls,—only Mary and Percy
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_286'></a>286</span>
+were missing,—was climbing Cliff Road in a
+driving hurricane of wind.
+</p>
+<p>
+A straggling line of people hurried along the
+path toward the Life-Saving Station.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is that it?” demanded Billie breathlessly,
+when the car had come to a standstill opposite
+the light house.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” replied Merry, looking through the
+glasses. “She doesn’t look much larger than a
+fishing smack from this distance, but she’s really
+a pretty big schooner and she’s in a bad fix, too.
+She has stuck right on the Serpent’s Fang, Ben.
+You remember that old fisherman showed it to us
+last summer when we were sailing? It’s a
+pointed rock that sticks up higher than the others
+and it looked to be a pretty fierce proposition to
+me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“The life-boat is being launched!” exclaimed
+Elinor.
+</p>
+<p>
+They clutched each other in their excitement,
+while a boat, with six brave life-savers in it,
+leapt onto the crest of a big wave, only to be
+hurled back again.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_287'></a>287</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“They’ll have to use the gun,” put in Charlie.
+“They’ll never make it in this sea.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“What do you mean?” shouted Billie. It was
+almost impossible to be heard now above the noise
+of the wind.
+</p>
+<p>
+But before any one could shout back an explanation,
+her attention was claimed by a man in
+a long, thick ulster, buttoned to his chin, and a
+vizored cap pulled well over his eyes. He had
+come to the front of the motor car and, bowing
+to Billie politely, he stood on tiptoe and beckoned
+to her to lean down.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You’ll be surprised to hear that you have
+friends on that ship,” he said in her ear, and she
+recognized Mr. Bangs.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Friends?” she repeated, in amazement.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Wait and see,” he replied, as he moved away
+to join another man, who was leaning against a
+tree smoking a cigar.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Look!” cried some one, and just as Billie
+shifted her gaze from the ship to the beach she
+saw a long black line shoot out over the water
+and light on the deck of the ship. It was very
+confusing then, what happened. There was a
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_288'></a>288</span>
+great deal of shouting on shore and scurrying of
+sailors on the ship. Presently there seemed to
+be a double line of rope stretching out to the
+wreck.
+</p>
+<p>
+After a long pause, Billie saw, creeping along
+one of the lines of rope, swaying and swinging
+almost to sea level, an object which appeared
+to be shaped like a pair of clumsy trouser legs
+with the head and shoulders of a human being
+above.
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s a woman,” cried Nancy, jumping up and
+down in her excitement, as she looked through
+the glasses. “It’s—it’s——”
+</p>
+<p>
+“It’s Mme. Alta,” exclaimed Billie, as the
+woman was lifted onto the beach.
+</p>
+<p>
+No one could explain why the music teacher
+should be found on a wrecked schooner, but Mr.
+Bangs and Billie exchanged meaning glances as
+Mme. Alta was supported into the Life-Saving
+Station.
+</p>
+<p>
+The next time the buoy was drawn into shore
+it carried Fannie Alta, a shivering, wretched little
+figure, who followed her mother silently into
+the life-savers’ house.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_289'></a>289</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Who can the third one be?” said Billie out
+loud, although she was speaking to herself. “Can
+it be——”
+</p>
+<p>
+She jumped out of the car and ran down the
+path to the beach, followed by her three chums.
+As she passed Mr. Bangs, he caught her by the
+arm and said in her ear:
+</p>
+<p>
+“The missing link.”
+</p>
+<p>
+No one but Billie and Mr. Bangs recognized
+Belle Rogers in the miserable object which now
+crawled out of the breeches buoy. Her face was
+blue and pinched with cold. Her damp hair hung
+in her eyes, and she moaned and sobbed most
+pitifully.
+</p>
+<p>
+When she saw Billie, she flung her wet arms
+around the young girl’s neck.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Oh, forgive me! Forgive me!” she wept.
+</p>
+<p>
+A crowd of people gathered around them.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie patted her on the shoulder.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I do forgive you,” she whispered, “and if you
+would rather not go into the station, we will take
+you home in ‘The Comet.’”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Any place but home,” sobbed Belle, as Ben
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_290'></a>290</span>
+threw his ulster around her shivering shoulders
+and Nancy wrapped a scarf about her head.
+</p>
+<p>
+The others had now recognized the poor girl,
+and with a generous impulse they tried to shield
+her from the gaze of the villagers.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Will you go to Cousin Helen’s, then?” asked
+Belle, as they half carried her up the steep path.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” she answered, and in another ten minutes
+the miserable refugee was being tenderly
+ministered to at Billie’s home by three of the most
+detested members of the Blue Bird Society.
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_291'></a>291</span><a name='chXXIII' id='chXXIII'></a>CHAPTER XXIII.—BELLE’S CONFESSION.</h2>
+<p>
+Belle, looking still very unlike herself, lay in
+Billie’s little brass bed, propped up on pillows.
+</p>
+<p>
+“How can you and Miss Campbell be so kind
+to me,” she was saying, “when you know how
+wicked I have been?”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But you are sorry and that means everything,”
+answered Billie, who was sitting on the side of
+the bed, feeding her hot beef tea.
+</p>
+<p>
+“When are the others coming?” asked the invalid.
+</p>
+<p>
+“They have come. I was just going to tell you
+after you had finished the tea. Shall I call
+them?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Belle nodded, and presently Miss Gray and
+Mary Price came into the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Principal took the sick girl’s hand kindly.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Speak out from the heart, Belle,” she said,
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_292'></a>292</span>
+“and don’t be afraid. You will be much happier
+when you get it off your mind.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“I promise to, Miss Gray,” replied Belle
+meekly, gazing miserably at Mary, who looked
+pale and ill.
+</p>
+<p>
+Miss Gray sat in a judicial looking armchair;
+Mary, with closed eyes, lay on a lounge near the
+fire, and Billie seated herself on the foot of the
+bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I suppose,” began Belle, “it would be almost
+impossible for you to believe that a well brought
+up girl of decent family could be as wicked as
+I have been. When I finally realized what I had
+done I thought I would rather run away to South
+America with those terrible people than stay here
+and bear the shame of it all. But I thank heavens
+for the storm. The ship was not sailing for
+any good purpose. I feel sure of that.
+</p>
+<p>
+“To begin at the beginning, perhaps you didn’t
+know how angry I was when you joined the Blue
+Birds, Billie? I hope I shall never be angry
+again. I was ill from it and I lay on my bed all
+afternoon planning a revenge on all the Blue
+Birds, but you, especially. I think I must have
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_293'></a>293</span>
+been insane with rage and mortification. I
+wanted to humiliate you, because I thought you
+had humiliated me before the whole school. I
+thought of dozens of ways of doing it, but the
+only plan that seemed good enough was to
+prove——”
+</p>
+<p>
+She paused and bit her lip.
+</p>
+<p>
+“To prove that you were—a—thief.”
+</p>
+<p>
+There was a long silence. Nothing could be
+heard but the ticking of the little French clock on
+the mantel. Miss Gray had started and flushed
+crimson. She was only just now realizing what
+this confession must mean to the two girls.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I asked Fannie Alta to help me because she
+was the only outsider in the class, but I never
+dreamed that she was a real thief, herself. She
+found out what it was I wanted her to do almost
+before I had half breathed it to myself, only
+she was afraid of Billie and put it on Mary. It
+was my twenty dollars she used, but we found
+the scheme didn’t work. Anyhow, she told it all
+over school and went so much farther than I had
+intended that I soon found myself too deeply involved
+to get out. She and her mother owned
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_294'></a>294</span>
+me, body and soul. I had to take Fannie with
+me everywhere I went, even to Mrs. St. Clair’s.
+I had to give her my clothes, and explain to
+mamma that she was my best friend. Her mother
+made me carry letters and messages back and
+forth. Once I had to go by myself all the way
+to Boulder Lane after dusk and meet a horrible
+creature who had only one eye and one arm.
+He gave me a letter for Mme. Alta. Another
+time I was to meet one of them, a man who
+helped him, up in the Sophomore class room of
+the High School. I didn’t go, because there was
+such a mist.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie and Mary exchanged glances.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He was the man who robbed us of the fifty
+dollars,” said Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then whose fifty dollars was it I got?” demanded
+Miss Gray.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My monthly allowance,” replied Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Foolish, foolish girls,” said the Principal.
+“But it was my own fault. I blame no one else,
+and perhaps I wouldn’t have believed the story
+just at that time.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then,” continued Belle, “the most dreadful
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_295'></a>295</span>
+thing of all happened. These people were always
+in need of money. Everything they had seemed
+to go to some object. The one-eyed man, who
+was Fannie’s stepfather, was to get some high
+position in South America. She used to tell me
+what she was going to do when he was made Vice
+President, or something. When we went to the
+St. Clair’s, Fannie was almost unbearable. She
+made me give her my dress and I had to wear
+hers, and she insulted me at every turn. But I
+didn’t find out until after the party that her stepfather
+had been there dressed as a ghost. He
+wanted to rob Mrs. St. Clair. It was Fannie who
+took the necklace. She was to go back later and
+give it to him, so that if her bag was searched
+the next morning, when the necklace was missed,
+it wouldn’t be found. But she made me go back
+instead, after every one else was asleep, I supposed.
+It was terrible, when I found myself
+alone in the attic, with the necklace hidden under
+my wrapper. No one was there. The man must
+have been frightened and run away. Then I
+heard all of you come and I threw a sheet over me
+and hid in a far corner.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_296'></a>296</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“It <em>was</em> you, then?” exclaimed Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes, and when I met you and Mary I had
+the necklace with me and I didn’t think I had
+strength enough to get to my room. When we
+got home from Mrs. Ruggles’ next day and I
+found Fannie had been sent to town, I knew
+something had happened. I thought perhaps she
+might have taken the necklace with her, but the
+next morning, when you and Mary left before
+breakfast, I was certain that one of you had been
+accused.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You never can understand how I suffered.
+And yet it was what I had planned when I was
+so angry. Late Monday afternoon Mr. Bangs, a
+detective, came to see me. He wrote across his
+card ‘Pierre Lafitte,’ and I was convinced then
+that he knew everything.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“You did tell Fannie about the card that was
+in the box of jewels, then?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Belle hung her head.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” she said, at last. “In the very beginning,
+before I had learned to loathe her and myself
+so, I told it to Fannie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“After Mr. Bangs had left,” she went on, “I
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_297'></a>297</span>
+hurried as fast as I could to Mme. Alta’s lodgings
+and told her that everything had been discovered.
+The husband came in while I was there
+and ordered her to leave at once. The ship was
+in the harbor, he said. I was ordered to go, too,
+and it really did seem best. I felt I should be disgraced
+if I stayed and I was too miserable to
+reason much, anyway. They were glad to go.
+They hated it here, and they were afraid to leave
+me, I suppose, for fear I would tell. Ever since
+they were almost caught in Smugglers’ Cave,
+they have been very careful.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I have made a great many people suffer,”
+Belle went on, “Mary and Billie and Mrs. Price
+and Mrs. St. Clair, and I have suffered, too, perhaps
+more than any of you. But I have learned a
+great deal. I never knew before what a wicked,
+spoiled girl I was. Mamma and papa never denied
+me anything in my life. I have been indulged
+and petted until I have been nothing but a
+bundle of selfishness. When the ship was wrecked
+and we thought we were going to sink any minute
+the scales dropped entirely from my eyes and I
+saw myself as I really was. I knelt on the deck
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_298'></a>298</span>
+and prayed and prayed for forgiveness until they
+came and told me it was my turn to be taken to
+shore.
+</p>
+<p>
+“You will forgive me, won’t you Mary? I will
+do everything I can to make up for the trouble
+and unhappiness I have caused you.”
+</p>
+<p>
+Belle stretched out her arms toward Mary and
+tears flowed down her cheeks and splashed on the
+coverlid.
+</p>
+<p>
+Miss Gray wiped her eyes and Billie’s face
+worked convulsively for a moment and she
+choked back a lump which would rise in her
+throat on occasions.
+</p>
+<p>
+Mary came over and took Belle’s hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Of course I forgive you, Belle,” she said, kissing
+the repentant girl on the lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+“But I must ask your forgiveness, too, Mary,”
+cried Miss Gray. “I feel I am not fit to be the
+principal of the High School to have so misjudged
+you. It was only the strange way you
+acted about the fifty dollars which made me credit
+for a moment the stories that were told.”
+</p>
+<p>
+When peace was entirely restored, Miss Gray
+took her departure. She did not return to the
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_299'></a>299</span>
+High School, but hurried to the livery stable,
+where she ordered a carriage and had herself
+driven straight to Mrs. St. Clair’s.
+</p>
+<p>
+As Belle will not again appear in this story,
+you will perhaps be interested to know how sincere
+her reformation really was. Her mother
+and father scarcely recognized the pale, quiet girl
+who returned to them in another day. Her entire
+nature had been shaken by the experience,
+and for some time she was dazed and silent. But
+no one ever saw her angry again, and as if she
+wished to give some visible sign of her repentance,
+the red rubber curlers were thrown away
+and from that time she has worn her hair
+straight.
+</p>
+<p>
+There was no evidence against Mme. Alta or
+Fannie, except what Belle Rogers could furnish,
+and they were finally allowed to go free. But
+they were not permitted to remain in quiet West
+Haven, where suspicious characters were not welcomed.
+</p>
+<p>
+The police cared little for the music teacher
+and her daughter. The prize they looked for
+was Ruiz, the famous filibuster and desperado
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_300'></a>300</span>
+who had smuggled hundreds of rifles into Venezuela
+and had robbed and pillaged and even
+killed, but had never been caught.
+</p>
+<p>
+Detective Bangs, standing on the shore, the
+day of the shipwreck, scanned eagerly the face
+of each sailor as he was drawn ashore. But Ruiz
+was not among them. It was supposed that he
+preferred death to arrest; for he remained on the
+sinking ship. But the sturdy little vessel clung
+desperately to the Serpent’s Fang until after sunset,
+and there are some who believe that Ruiz
+swam ashore with his one arm, which was as
+strong as iron, and is still at large somewhere
+working mischief and misfortune.
+</p>
+<p>
+On the day after the departure of Mme. Alta
+and Fannie, Miss Gray called a meeting of the
+Faculty and pupils of West Haven High School.
+Mary Price was there and so was Billie, and in
+the gallery sat Mrs. Price between Mrs. St. Clair
+and Miss Campbell.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I called this meeting,” said Miss Gray, “because
+I wanted to make an announcement to all
+of you at once, since the subject of the announcement
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_301'></a>301</span>
+concerns us all. We have recently had a
+very clever thief in our midst. She has robbed
+many of you and has brought unjust suspicion
+on some innocent persons by spreading reports.
+This girl has been dismissed from the school and
+from West Haven. She will never trouble us
+again.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Some of us have suffered deeply for the last
+few weeks on account of this disgrace and scandal
+in the school, and I don’t mind confessing that
+I have been one of those persons. I know that
+you will all rejoice with me that the affair is concluded.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I want to say further, that at a specially called
+meeting, the Board of Education has consented
+to add a new post to the school force. This position,
+which is that of private and confidential
+secretary to the principal and has a salary attached,
+is to be filled by Miss Mary Price. I hope
+you will all congratulate me on my good fortune
+in obtaining so competent and reliable an assistant.”
+</p>
+<p>
+There was wild applause when this announcement was
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_302'></a>302</span>
+made and Mary, smiling and happy,
+with her three devoted friends about her, was
+obliged to rise and bow her blushing acknowledgments
+to her schoolmates.
+</p>
+<h2><span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_303'></a>303</span><a name='chXXIV' id='chXXIV'></a>CHAPTER XXIV.—OUT OF THE MISTS.</h2>
+<p>
+The Motor Maids were gathered in Mrs.
+Brown’s sunny parlor around a cheerful driftwood
+fire. You may easily guess it was Saturday
+morning, because Nancy was darning stockings,
+Elinor was at the piano, Mary was reading,
+while Billie lay flat on her back on the hearth rug,
+her hands crossed under her head, thinking
+deeply.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I wish people were not so careless of their
+diamond necklaces and things,” she observed, addressing
+the ceiling with some irritation.
+“Throwing them around in motor cars, giving
+them to the first person who comes along, and
+not caring to have them returned! It’s a nuisance——”
+</p>
+<p>
+Suddenly the door was thrown violently open
+and Merry appeared.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_304'></a>304</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Mrs. Ruggles,” he announced, making a low
+bow.
+</p>
+<p>
+Nancy did not take the trouble to turn around.
+Elinor went on playing and Mary reading. It
+was only one of Merry’s jokes, they thought. But
+Billie jumped up in amazement; for there actually
+stood Mrs. Ruggles in the flesh—very much in
+the flesh, in fact. She was dressed in decent
+black and wore a black bonnet, and Billie could
+not decide whether she resembled a queen disguised
+as a fish-wife or a fish-wife dressed as a
+lady.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Why, it is Mrs. Ruggles,” cried Nancy, glancing
+over her shoulder. “Merry plays so many
+jokes that we can never tell when he is in earnest
+and when he isn’t. Do come in, Mrs. Ruggles.
+What brings you up to town so early?”
+</p>
+<p>
+Mrs. Ruggles, who was slow of speech, did not
+reply at first. She moved into the room with the
+step of a grenadier and stood before Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Are you Miss Wilhelmina Campbell?” she
+asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+“She is the same,” put in Merry, “but she’ll
+answer to the name of Billie.”
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_305'></a>305</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie nodded and smiled. She was really too
+much engaged in admiring Mrs. Ruggles to reply
+to her question.
+</p>
+<p>
+Nancy pushed up an armchair.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Please sit down, Mrs. Ruggles, and perhaps
+you will have a cookie or a cup of tea.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, Miss Nancy, I am not hungry and I
+couldn’t eat anyway, until I finished what I have
+to say.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“That’s right, Mrs. Ruggles. Get it off your
+system. Are you going to scold Billie?” cried
+Merry.
+</p>
+<p>
+“No, my boy. I’m going to thank her. She’s
+a fine young lady. I have just seen Miss Campbell
+and she has told me.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Told you what?” asked Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Told me that you have kept the box of jewels
+as you promised.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“But——” began Billie, a dozen thoughts
+flashing through her mind at once in tumultuous
+confusion.
+</p>
+<p>
+She saw again the face of the sick woman at
+Mrs. Ruggles’, her long hair spread over the
+pillow like a mantel of black and the troubled
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_306'></a>306</span>
+dark eyes which gazed into hers for one brief
+moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Then that was the automobile lady I saw in
+your bedroom?” she burst out.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Yes,” replied the old woman. “That was my
+daughter, Maria.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Is Maria home again?” asked Elinor.
+</p>
+<p>
+“I thought she had married a South American,”
+said Nancy.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Maria is now a singer,” said Mrs. Ruggles
+proudly. “She has sung in Buenos Ayres and
+Paris, not in this country. Her husband was
+from Venezuela. He was very rich and he gave
+her many jewels. He loved her dearly for a few
+years, until he began to like something else better.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The old woman paused. It was extremely difficult
+for her to speak at such great length when
+she was so unaccustomed to talking at all.
+</p>
+<p>
+“My daughter is very beautiful and very
+clever. She will be a great singer. He was jealous
+of her singing. He wished to be great, too,
+and he became a politician. Gradually he spent
+all of his money in making trouble for the government
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_307'></a>307</span>
+of his country. He wished to bring
+about a war and make himself a ruler. My son,
+my daughter’s step brother, pushed him on. He
+was a bad boy, my only son. It is better that he
+should be dead. He was always in the thick of
+the fight. He couldn’t keep away. His arm was
+shot off; his eye put out. But nothing could stop
+him.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“Was Ruiz really your son, John, who went
+away to sea so many years ago?” interrupted
+Nancy.
+</p>
+<p>
+Mrs. Ruggles nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+“What happened next, Mrs. Ruggles?” demanded
+Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“The next thing was that my Maria could not
+stand the life any longer. She came back to
+America with her jewels. They were all that was
+left of her husband’s fortune and those he wanted
+so much that he threatened her many times. If
+he had wished to use them for a good purpose and
+not for rifles to kill innocent people, Maria would
+have given them gladly. But he was too clever
+for her, that man. He followed on a fast steamer
+and caught up with her before she could get to
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_308'></a>308</span>
+me. He forced her to go with him in an automobile
+down the Shell Island road to meet John,
+my poor son, who was to take the jewels and sell
+them. Maria always carried her jewelry in a
+secret pocket inside of her skirt, but she had put
+it in a box that day and wrapped the box in her
+coat. Her husband did not know this. He
+thought she had it in the usual place. When
+they were upset going around a curve in the road
+my Maria was very seriously injured. She is
+still very lame. Her husband went away to get
+another car and you know the rest.
+</p>
+<p>
+“When they found out in a few hours that she
+did not have the jewels they were very angry.
+She told them the truth: that she had given them
+to a young lady she had met, and asked her to
+take care of them. Although she did not have the
+name or address of this young lady, she knew
+they would be safe.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And Mr. Lafitte?” began Billie.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He is an old friend, a lawyer who lives in
+Paris. She happened to have his card in her
+pocket. But he had just started to America and
+the letter she wrote, and your letter, came back
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_309'></a>309</span>
+here. That is how I happened to get your name
+at last, Miss Wilhelmina. Mr. Lafitte was with
+my daughter yesterday.”
+</p>
+<p>
+“And what became of your son-in-law, Mrs.
+Ruggles?” asked Elinor.
+</p>
+<p>
+“He died some weeks ago,” replied Mrs. Ruggles.
+“He was accidentally shot with one of his
+own rifles, which exploded and killed him. My
+son had his body sent to us and we laid him to
+rest in the old Sabater burying ground, where
+all my family is buried. It is better that he
+should have died. He only made trouble while he
+lived, not only for poor Maria, but for his country,
+where many have been killed with the rifles
+he has smuggled in. He was a good man until he
+got in with those revolutionists. And my poor
+son, my poor John, how much sorrow he has
+brought us——”
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie wondered if Mrs. Ruggles really knew
+the extent of her poor son’s evil career. Perhaps
+she did, for the old woman’s face twitched
+nervously for a moment and she covered her eyes
+with her hand, as if she wished to hide her unhappiness
+from the young girls.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_310'></a>310</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+“Maria and I are going away for a long time,”
+she went on at last, with a rather shaky voice. “I
+will close the Inn. It is hard for me to leave
+home in my old age, but Maria wishes it, and it
+is better for me to be with her. Good-by and
+thank you,” she said simply, rising and taking
+Billie’s hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie stood on tiptoe and put her arms around
+Mrs. Ruggles’ neck.
+</p>
+<p>
+“Good-by, Mrs. Ruggles,” she said. “I hope
+that your troubles are all over now and you and
+your daughter will be happy together.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The old woman wiped her eyes. She could not
+speak when she said good-by to the other girls,
+but silently handed Billie a little package and
+hurried away.
+</p>
+<p>
+The package, when unwrapped, proved to be
+a small box containing a pretty gold filigree necklace.
+Written on a card inside was this message:
+</p>
+<p>
+“With my love and gratitude. This is a simple
+little necklace my father brought me once
+from a voyage to the East. I am fond of it and
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_311'></a>311</span>
+that is why I send it to you. Will you wear it
+sometimes and think of me? I shall never forget
+your kindness and loyalty.
+</p>
+<p>
+“<span class='sc'>Maria Ruggles Cortina.</span>”
+</p>
+<p>
+And now we have reached the end of our tale.
+Those troublous first months of Billie Campbell’s
+early school days in West Haven are changed into
+happy, quiet times, with plenty of study and
+plenty of play. All doubts and mysteries are
+cleared up, and the Motor Maids, wholesome, nice
+girls, are none the worse for their adventures.
+</p>
+<p>
+It is in their beloved “Comet” that we see them
+last, flashing down Main Street toward the open
+country.
+</p>
+<p>
+Billie, like the good pilot she is, is seated at the
+wheel, her fine gray eyes ever on the lookout.
+Nancy is bubbling over with laughter and gaiety.
+Elinor, on the back seat, holds herself as proudly
+as a queen, and little Mary, with a grave smile on
+her face, looks out across the fields, her clear
+eyes, deep as pools, holding and reflecting, as ever,
+the beauty from without intensified by the purity
+of the spirit within.
+<span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page_312'></a>312</span>
+</p>
+<p>
+The friendship of these four school girls was
+of the quality that outlives a single season and
+many adventures. It held them together, in fact,
+so closely that they often found themselves planning
+for an indefinite future of partnership and
+mutual pleasures. That they realized their anticipations
+to some extent at least is assured,
+for the next volume of this series, “The Motor
+Maids by Palm and Pine,” is a further account
+of their good times together.
+</p>
+<div class='center'>
+<p>THE END.</p>
+</div>
+<p>
+&#160;<br />
+&#160;<br />
+&#160;<br />
+</p>
+<p>
+<span style='font-size:1.2em;font-weight:bold;'>BOY AVIATORS’ SERIES</span>
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+</p>
+<p>
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+<p>
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+</p>
+<p>
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+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Motor Maids' School Days, by Katherine Stokes
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+Project Gutenberg's The Motor Maids' School Days, by Katherine Stokes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Motor Maids' School Days
+
+Author: Katherine Stokes
+
+Release Date: September 15, 2011 [EBook #37434]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MOTOR MAIDS' SCHOOL DAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by Cornell
+University Digital Collections)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "You will simply be an outcast in West Haven, and I
+advise you to think the matter over."]
+
+
+
+
+                            THE MOTOR MAIDS'
+                              SCHOOL DAYS
+
+                                   BY
+                            KATHERINE STOKES
+
+                                NEW YORK
+                            HURST & COMPANY
+                               PUBLISHERS
+
+
+
+
+                            Copyright, 1911,
+                                   BY
+                            HURST & COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+            CHAPTER                                        PAGE
+                 I. "The Comet"                               5
+                II. Friends in Need                          24
+               III. The Musicians of Bremen                  41
+                IV. Plots and Plans                          52
+                 V. The First Motor Picnic                   63
+                VI. The Box of Troubles                      81
+               VII. The Fire                                 95
+              VIII. Nancy's Home                            110
+                IX. At the Sign of the Blue Tea Pot         128
+                 X. Rumors at School                        136
+                XI. Seven League Island                     147
+               XII. The Storm                               166
+              XIII. Wheels Within Wheels                    179
+               XIV. The Hallowe'en House Party              193
+                XV. The Ghost Party                         206
+               XVI. A Stray Ghost                           217
+              XVII. Mrs. Ruggles                            228
+             XVIII. Fannie Alta                             241
+               XIX. Mary Before Her Judges                  253
+                XX. Miss Campbell Wears Black               262
+               XXI. The Missing Link                        271
+              XXII. The Refugees                            280
+             XXIII. Belle's Confession                      291
+              XXIV. Out of the Mists                        303
+
+
+
+
+THE MOTOR MAIDS' SCHOOL DAYS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.--"THE COMET."
+
+
+"Girls, in about ten minutes you're going to have the surprise of your
+lives," cried Nancy Brown, joining a group of her friends at the High
+School gate.
+
+"What is it, Nancy? Do tell us, please," cried half a dozen voices at
+once.
+
+"No, you must wait," answered Nancy. "If I told you what it was, I
+wouldn't enjoy seeing your faces when the thing happened."
+
+"Nancy, you have always got some mystery on foot," put in her most
+intimate friend, Elinor Butler. "Is this one animal, vegetable, or
+mineral?"
+
+"Fine or superfine?"
+
+"Can it speak?"
+
+"Is it as large as a house?"
+
+"Don't all talk at once," exclaimed Nancy. "I'll tell you this much.
+It's animal and it's superfine. And"--she wrinkled her brows--"and it's
+mineral, too, I suppose."
+
+"Superfine? At least it's a woman, then?" cried all the girls in a
+chorus.
+
+"Yes," laughed Nancy, who loved nothing better than to excite the
+curiosity of her friends to the utmost and then launch a genuine
+sensation into their midst.
+
+"Does the superfine animal wear the mineral?" demanded Elinor.
+
+"No, she doesn't wear it. She's in it."
+
+"In it? How strange," exclaimed another girl. "Perhaps it's a lady
+oyster in her shell."
+
+"There's no surprise in an oyster unless there's a pearl in it, goosey,"
+teased Nancy. "But here it comes! Here it comes!" she cried, clapping
+her hands joyfully, while six pairs of eyes peered curiously down the
+street, which, by gentle degrees, became a country road. The trim
+sidewalks of the little seaport town of West Haven became grassy paths
+and the pretty lawns broadened into flat green meadows.
+
+Far down the road a brilliant red object could be seen approaching. It
+was enveloped in a cloud of dust and it moved with great rapidity.
+
+"Why, it's nothing but a red automobile," cried Elinor, in
+disappointment.
+
+"Yes," admitted Nancy, "it's an automobile, but there's something
+unusual about it besides its color."
+
+"A girl is running it," announced Mary Price, whose clear, dark eyes
+always seemed to be looking into the distance. "A girl is running it,
+and no one is with her, and----"
+
+But the motor car was now in full view. It was a graceful little machine
+large enough to hold five or six people comfortably, its body painted a
+warm and pleasing shade of red, its cushions upholstered in a slightly
+darker shade which harmonized perfectly with the red of the body. A
+young girl, sitting on the front seat, was running the car as easily and
+steadily as an experienced chauffeur. Making a graceful curve, she
+turned into the driveway which led to the school grounds and presently
+drew up under a large shed, where people were in the habit of hitching
+their horses and vehicles on Field Day, or when football was in season.
+
+"Who is she?" demanded Nancy's schoolmates in a whisper.
+
+"Why, she's Miss Helen Campbell's cousin, Wilhelmina Campbell."
+
+"Do you mean our old friend, Billie?" asked Elinor.
+
+"The same," said Nancy, in a low voice, for Billie Campbell was now
+approaching within hearing distance. "Her mother's dead and her father's
+brought her here to live with Miss Campbell while he builds a railroad
+in Russia, and she's going to High School and she's in our class and
+she's coming to and fro every day in her own motor car."
+
+Nancy was speaking as rapidly as a talking machine going at full speed.
+
+Billie, as her father had always called her, might have guessed that she
+was the subject of all this buzzing undertone of conversation among the
+school girls; but she was too well accustomed to strange faces and new
+places to feel stiff and shy now at the looks of curiosity which were
+turned on her. On the contrary, the West Haven girls themselves felt a
+little ill at ease and countrified in the presence of this new
+sophomore, who, with her father, an engineer, had lived in many
+countries and seen a great deal of that mysterious outside world which
+sleepy, quiet West Haven had never troubled itself much about.
+
+But Billie Campbell was not destined to renew her acquaintance just then
+with these childhood friends of hers. A slender, very pretty girl,
+beautifully dressed, hurried out of the school building and called:
+
+"Oh, Miss Campbell, may I speak with you a moment?"
+
+"We might have known it," cried Nancy Brown savagely. "If Billie
+Campbell hadn't owned a motor car, Belle Rogers would never have given
+herself the trouble even to speak to her."
+
+You perhaps know what a dangerous quality snobbishness is in a girl's
+school. A very little of it is like a drop of strong poison in a pail of
+water. It pollutes the whole pail. So it was at West Haven High School.
+Belle Rogers, the prettiest and richest girl in town, had picked out six
+more or less wealthy and intimate friends in the sophomore class and
+constituted herself leader of what they called "The Mystic Seven." These
+seven girls held themselves aloof from the poorer girls in the class and
+committed the unpardonable sin of snubbing every girl outside their
+charmed circle.
+
+Very bitter were the feelings of the other ten sophomores against the
+"Mystic Seven," who refused to mingle in the sports of the class and
+kept themselves apart at recess, talking in low, mysterious voices and
+laughing behind their pocket handkerchiefs when the other girls strolled
+by.
+
+"They always make me feel shabbier than I really am," Mary Price had
+once said.
+
+And now the "Mystic Seven" had snatched up this nice, athletic-looking,
+new sophomore, whom many of them remembered as a bright, romping little
+girl years before.
+
+"I suppose they'll have to call themselves 'The Mystic Eight' now," said
+one of the girls, a little bitterly.
+
+"Can't we ask her to join the 'Blue Birds'?" put in Elinor Butler, who
+was eligible in point of wealth to enter the richer society, but had
+coldly declined the honor and had formed a society herself, called the
+"Blue Birds."
+
+"She couldn't belong to both clubs," said Nancy, "and you may be sure
+she has accepted the invitation of that little golden-haired, blue-eyed
+Belle Rogers, who put on an extra soft pedal even to call out her name."
+
+"Well, Billie Campbell will probably never have cause to know that
+Belle's tongue is sharper than a serpent's tooth, so what's the odds,"
+observed Mary Price philosophically. "We got on perfectly well before
+she came and I suppose we can manage to support life pretty comfortably
+even if she is a member of the 'Mystic Seven.'"
+
+Her friends laughed, as they strolled by twos and threes into the broad,
+arched entrance leading into the corridor of the building. Mary Price
+often relieved their wounded feelings by ending discussions concerning
+the "Mystic Seven" with a joke, although not one of them had been cut
+more deeply than she herself by the cruel speeches of Belle Rogers and
+her friends; for, since the death of Captain Price, Mary Price and her
+mother, as you will see later, had had a hard struggle to make both ends
+meet.
+
+In the meantime, Belle Rogers was using all her arts on the unsuspecting
+Wilhelmina Campbell.
+
+"We have never met," she was saying, "but I heard you were going to
+enter our class and I wanted to be the first to welcome you."
+
+"Thank you," said Billie, who had a boyish, direct way of answering
+people.
+
+"We wanted to know," went on Belle quickly, "if you wouldn't become a
+member of our society, the Mystic Seven. It is the most exclusive and
+nicest society in the school; the seven nicest girls in West Haven. We
+are all intimate friends, you know."
+
+Billie gazed with admiration into Belle's lovely, childlike face. Her
+own hair was straight and secretly she had always admired curls. Belle's
+pale golden hair curled about her low forehead in soft ringlets. Her
+great china-blue eyes looked appealingly into Billie's gray ones, and
+her rosy lips, which were much too thin when her face was in repose,
+parted with a winning smile. She was dressed in blue a little darker
+than her eyes and a small blue velvet toque was perched coquettishly on
+top of her curls.
+
+"She looks like a picture pasted inside of an old trunk mamma used to
+have," said Billie to herself. "I could almost believe she was a bisque
+doll. I never saw anything like her."
+
+"You will join us, won't you?" went on Belle wistfully.
+
+"I'm afraid I should be one too many and make an unlucky number. Seven
+is supposed to be lucky, isn't it?"
+
+"Oh, we're not superstitious," laughed Belle. "We can change the name to
+the 'Happy Eight,' or something of that sort. We are looking for nice
+girls, and as soon as I saw you I knew you would be the one for us. We
+want to enlarge the club."
+
+"Dear me," said Billie thoughtfully, "in a class of seventeen girls are
+only seven nice enough to be asked to join your club?"
+
+"Oh, they are nice enough," replied Belle. "Elinor Butler is really
+quite nice, but they are not just our sort, don't you know, and mamma
+has always cautioned me to be very careful about my companions."
+
+"Elinor Butler?" questioned Billie. "She is my old friend, and Nancy
+Brown and Mary Price? Aren't any of them members?"
+
+Just then the gong for chapel boomed out in the September stillness and
+Belle could only shake her head for denial, as the two girls hurried
+into the building.
+
+"I don't think I could ever get on with that blonde doll baby," thought
+Billie, as she followed Belle into the chapel for morning prayer, which
+always opened the day at West Haven High School.
+
+At recess the new sophomore was quite overwhelmed by the attentions of
+the Mystic Seven. They showed her the building and the grounds, the
+class locker rooms and the gymnasium, which interested her most of all.
+And in return she showed them her motor car. But, somehow, she did not
+quite like these stylish and rather over-dressed young girls. Their
+conversation really bored her and she was disappointed.
+
+It had been her own suggestion to go to West Haven High School when her
+father was summoned abroad to build a railroad.
+
+"I think it's high time I met some nice outdoor girls, papa," she had
+said. "I am afraid of boarding school girls. They are so different from
+you."
+
+Her father had laughed joyfully over this speech.
+
+"I hope there's not much resemblance between me and a boarding school
+girl, my little Billie," he said, pinching her cheek.
+
+And now the nice open-air girls whom she had recalled with pleasure
+after a summer spent in West Haven had not come near enough even to
+greet her and she had been obliged to pair off with seven fashion
+plates.
+
+"It's perfectly maddening," she exclaimed to herself, giving the turf on
+the campus a savage little kick. "Nancy and Elinor actually avoid
+meeting my eyes as if I were some one unfit to know. I wish I had
+consented to go to boarding school, after all, instead of coming to
+Cousin Helen. I don't want to belong to a silly society that does
+nothing but have afternoon teas. I want to play basket ball and go on
+long tramps with other girls and have picnics. I'm so disappointed, I
+could weep aloud."
+
+This was the picture Billie had drawn in her mind of life at West Haven
+High School and here she was an outcast from all the good times and open
+air games of the class, simply because not one of her old friends would
+come near her. She long remembered that first day at school as the
+loneliest and most wretched of her whole life.
+
+Then the last gong sounded and everybody went home except Billie, who
+had an appointment with Miss Gray, the principal. After the interview,
+in a rebellious and disconsolate humor, homesick for her father and
+disappointed with the whole world, she cranked up her red car and
+whirled away toward the open country.
+
+As she sped along the road she passed the three friends of that summer
+of years ago, walking briskly away from town. They did not even look up
+as she whirled by and the lump in her throat grew so big that it
+resolved itself into a sob and two hot tears trickled down her cheeks.
+
+"Perhaps they're going over to the woods; just what I would have loved
+to have done," wept the disappointed young girl, whose life had been a
+lonely one in spite of her father's devotion and constant companionship.
+
+She was still drying her eyes when she noticed some distance ahead a man
+leap into the road and wave his arms violently. Billie slowed down and
+came to a stop; for at the side of the road another very ill-looking man
+was lying prone on his back with closed eyes and slightly parted lips.
+
+"What is it?" she asked. "Has your friend been hurt?"
+
+"No, miss," answered the man who had stopped her, "but he has walked
+fifteen miles to-day and I am afraid he's about all in. I am trying to
+get him to his house, but I can't carry him and he can't take another
+step."
+
+"Where is his house?" asked Billie.
+
+"Are you familiar with these parts, miss?"
+
+"No," she answered.
+
+"It's just up that lane about a mile. Only a matter of five minutes to
+you."
+
+"Can you get him into the car?" asked Billie, noticing that this rather
+sinister looking stranger had only one arm; also that his right eye was
+out and there was a long scar across his upper lip.
+
+"Easily," he replied, and without another word he expeditiously
+supported his friend to the motor car and lifted him into the back seat.
+
+"Poor fellow," exclaimed Billie sympathetically. "It's well I happened
+along."
+
+The sick man was indeed a wretched looking object, with a thin,
+lantern-jawed face, hollow feverish eyes and a sunken chest.
+Occasionally he coughed behind his hands apologetically.
+
+"Down the lane, did you say?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, miss, you can just see the house. It's the gray one up near the
+woods."
+
+"I'll have him there in a few minutes," she answered, putting on all
+speed.
+
+The little machine flew along the hard sandy road like a redbird on the
+wing. Billie occasionally glanced over her shoulder at the sick man and
+each time her eyes met his, which seemed to burn like coals of fire. She
+had not liked the looks of the other man. His one remaining eye was much
+too close to his hooked nose; but the sick man appealed to her
+sympathies. Billie's nature was not a suspicious one. She had
+encountered many people in her life, and it is only people who have
+lived out of the world who are apt to suspect strangers.
+
+As she drew up the car in front of what appeared to be a very old,
+long-deserted fisherman's house and turned to see her passengers alight,
+she found the one-eyed man bending over his companion.
+
+"He's fainted, miss," he said. "If you'll go around back of the house to
+the old well and draw up a pail of cold water, I guess we can revive
+him. Just let down the pail by the wheel at the side--you'll see the
+handle,--and then get a glass or pitcher or something 'round there in
+the shed."
+
+As the man was apparently very busy loosening the neck-band of his
+friend's shirt, there seemed nothing else for Billie to do but to obey
+his directions. In fact, her sympathies were so deeply aroused that she
+was more than eager to help.
+
+She dashed around the corner in an instant, rushed to the old well, and
+exerting her strength turned the handle of the rusty wheel around and
+around while the rattling chain lowered the moss-covered bucket deeper
+and deeper until it struck the water. Waiting only until the bucket was
+filled, she began to raise it as rapidly as she could, but her muscles
+were sorely tried by the stubbornness of the rusty wheel and the
+additional weight of the water.
+
+The thought of the exhausted man spurred her on, however, and at length,
+flushed and perspiring, she succeeded in drawing the bucket to a little
+shelf where she left it while she searched for a receptacle in which to
+carry the water. She found no difficulty in pushing open a loosely-hung
+door at the end of the shed, and, after groping around a moment or two
+in the semi-darkness, she discovered a battered tin pail. Hastening back
+with it, she rinsed and filled it, and hurried around to the front of
+the house.
+
+As she turned the corner, she stopped short! Where were the two men?
+Where was her machine? _Where--was--her--machine?_
+
+Too dazed to move, Billie stood rooted to the spot while the water
+trickled out of a hole in the pail and made a little pool at her feet.
+
+Suddenly she gasped, "They must be around the other corner. They _must_
+be!"
+
+But they were not!--and then Billie noticed the tracks in the crushed
+grass that told the tale. The motor car had been turned and driven away
+up the lane!
+
+Billie sank down on the step in front of the old house almost too spent
+with her exertions and her shock to think.
+
+Then she flung down the pail and rushed up the lane as though she would
+try to catch the vanished car,--but she stopped as abruptly with a half
+laugh.
+
+"They may be miles and miles away by this time,--they had time enough
+while I was fussing over that old well. And the chain made such a noise
+and the wheel creaked so, I never heard another sound!"
+
+Billie's eyes filled with indignant tears as she began slowly to saunter
+back to the old house. She felt somehow impelled to return to the scene
+of her loss, perhaps to persuade herself that it was really so.
+
+As she neared the spot where she had last seen her red car, she noticed
+a slip of paper blowing lightly about. Idly she picked it up and glanced
+over the words written upon it. Then she stood still and caught her
+breath as she realized what they meant.
+
+"Stay here. Tell no one. Back soon."
+
+That was the message that Billie read, and she did not doubt for a
+moment that it was intended for her.
+
+"Yes, perhaps you will come back, and perhaps you won't," she said half
+aloud. "Maybe you think that I think that you have gone for a doctor.
+But I don't. You are two mean, wicked men to outwit a girl like that.
+I'll never see my car again!"
+
+Just as Billie uttered this despairing cry, she heard a distant hail,
+and then another.
+
+"Who is coming now?" she thought. "It's too soon to expect my sick (?)
+passenger and his one-eyed friend, and anyway I hear no car,----nor
+anything else, now," she added. "Maybe I imagined it. Oh, I'd like to be
+a man for about five minutes! Then they wouldn't _dare_!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.--FRIENDS IN NEED.
+
+
+"There she goes," Nancy Brown had exclaimed as "The Comet," Billie's
+motor, whirled by; "too proud even to ask her old friends to take a
+spin."
+
+"Now, Nancy," protested Elinor, "don't be too hard on her. Remember, she
+has not seen any of us since we were children. Perhaps she's forgotten
+all about us. Besides, I've been thinking that we ought to have done the
+first speaking. She was starting right for us when Belle Rogers stopped
+her."
+
+"Well, I tried twice to speak to her," said Nancy, "and she wouldn't
+look at me. I am afraid we shall never get a ride in that pretty motor
+car, and the only one I was ever in was the stationary automobile at the
+tintype place at the County Fair."
+
+The girls walked on silently for a few moments. The red motor car had
+turned a curve in the road and was out of sight and the place seemed
+very lonely and still. The afternoon shadows were beginning to lengthen
+as the sun moved slowly behind the pine woods, which formed a dark
+background against the flat, green meadows about West Haven.
+
+"I can't imagine why we should be wasting time about a friend who has
+forgotten us," exclaimed Mary Price, "when Elinor has brought us out
+here to tell us some mysterious secret. Don't you think it's about time
+to begin, Elinor? It's getting late and we've still a good ways to go."
+
+"I was just going to," answered her friend, "but suppose we take the
+short cut across the fields, and I'll tell you on the way. Two other
+people are in the secret, Charlie Clay and Ben Austen. They have
+promised to meet us at the old house. Of course, the whole thing may be
+of no importance."
+
+"But what is it?" interrupted Nancy. "You keep dodging around the bush."
+
+"Now, Nancy," answered Elinor, who had a calm, placid disposition and
+never hurried about anything, "don't put your most peculiar
+characteristic off on me. You know very well that you are the one who
+loves to keep a mystery until we are all of us nearly bursting with
+curiosity."
+
+"Don't quarrel, children," interrupted Mary. "Remember that members of
+the Blue Bird Society are bound over not to quarrel."
+
+"We aren't quarreling; we're just discussing. But do go on, Elinor. I
+can't stand the suspense much longer."
+
+"What I am going to tell you," said Elinor, "may be of the vastest
+importance or it may be just nothing whatever. At any rate, I didn't
+want to take any chances and it was simple enough for us to meet the
+boys out here and see for ourselves."
+
+"See what, Elinor Butler?" ejaculated Nancy impatiently. "You always
+begin at the last of a story and tell backwards."
+
+Elinor smiled provokingly.
+
+"That's to see how much curiosity you can accumulate without exploding,
+Nancy, dear."
+
+Nancy shut her lips tightly. She was determined now, at any cost, not to
+speak again until Elinor had really started on the story, but how
+irritating Elinor could be at times!
+
+Mary was never disturbed over these little tiffs of the two friends
+which were merely the ups and downs of the endless conversation that
+flowed between them.
+
+"This is what happened then, Nancy darling," continued Elinor, slipping
+an arm around her friend's waist, while she locked her other arm through
+Mary's. And the three girls hurried on, too absorbed in their intimate
+talk to notice the flash of a scarlet motor car through the high bushes,
+which bordered both sides of Boulder Lane, the name of the road which
+intercepted the two meadows.
+
+"I was coming across Court House Square late yesterday afternoon after
+my music lesson. You know I have begun to study with the new teacher,
+Mme. Alta. Just as I came to the statue of Thomas Jefferson, I heard
+some one call very softly, or rather it was more like a hiss than a
+call. I suppose I should have rushed off frightened, but I am never
+afraid of people. It's only spiders and snakes and bulls that make me
+shiver. So, I didn't run away, but waited, and I discovered that the
+hiss came from around the other side of the statue and was not meant for
+me at all. Even then I should have gone on if I hadn't heard some one
+cry out. I couldn't understand the language, but another voice said in
+English: 'There are only two boxes left. Take them to the old house in
+Boulder Lane to-night and never keep me waiting this long again.' Then
+the other man said something and the English voice said: 'You can haul
+them to-morrow morning. It'll be time enough when I get the signal to do
+the rest.' I couldn't understand what the man answered, but the English
+voice said: 'I'll kill the whole crew of Butlers and anybody else who
+interferes with me. I'm in a desperate humor and I won't be bothered.'
+Fortunately they took the walk that goes to the docks, because they
+would certainly have seen me if they had come around on the other side.
+But I saw them plainly when they passed under the electric light. They
+looked like seamen."
+
+"'Kill the whole crew of Butlers,'" repeated Mary Price. "Does he mean
+that he is going to wipe your family off the face of the earth? And for
+what?"
+
+"That is what I want to find out. It wouldn't do any special harm to
+take a late afternoon stroll in this direction, if the boys are with us.
+I didn't want to say anything to father about it. He is so busy, and you
+know how excitable he is. William is exactly like father. Edward and
+mother and I are the only calm, peaceful members of the family, and
+mother's sick and Edward is at college. Besides, you know, the man may
+not have meant us. The county is full of Butlers, dozens of them. Some
+of them claim kin and some do not. They are the most quarrelsome,
+high-tempered people in existence--that is, all except Edward and me."
+
+The other girls laughed.
+
+"Not high-tempered, Elinor," said Nancy, "but you have a sort of royal
+manner when you are displeased that I imagine a queen might have when
+one of her subjects is disobedient."
+
+"What's that?" interrupted Mary. "I thought I heard some one call."
+
+The girls paused and listened. They were standing in a broad, flat
+meadow which seemed to stretch out indefinitely in one direction like an
+enormous pale-green billiard table; but in the other direction, bordered
+by alder bushes, lay Boulder Lane; so called because of an immense gray
+boulder, which in some prehistoric upheaval had been tossed here, and
+which resembled now an old gray sentinel standing on perpetual guard.
+
+"Why, there's the automobile," exclaimed Nancy, after some minutes,
+following an occasional flash of red through the bushes, as the flying
+motor car sped on up the lane.
+
+"I wonder what she is doing up Boulder Lane? Exploring by herself, I
+suppose. It must be lonely," observed Mary.
+
+A fresh salt breeze had sprung up from the ocean, bringing with it the
+chill of the oncoming night. The three girls hastened their footsteps.
+If they were late, the boys might not wait for them.
+
+"Boys are so unreliable," Mary had remarked.
+
+"Not Ben Austen," said Elinor. "Father says he is as trustworthy as the
+Bank of England. But he's slow. He never likes to stop one thing until
+he finishes it, no matter what's waiting. He and Charlie are building a
+boat somewhere down the beach and they spend all their afternoons at it,
+but they are sure to be there if they promised."
+
+By this time the girls had reached the hedge. It was certainly a
+lonesome place. The old house which had been unoccupied for many years
+because its last occupant had committed suicide by hanging himself from
+a beam, appeared in the gathering dusk like a solitary gray ghost; the
+front windows resembled two large sad eyes gazing into space and the
+walls, streaked with the tempests of many seasons, had the appearance of
+a worn, tear-stained face.
+
+"Dear me," whispered Nancy, "I had forgotten what a weird old place this
+was. It might be the entrance to a tomb."
+
+"Halo-o-o!" called a boyish voice, and a tall, overgrown lad appeared
+coming up the lane from the direction of the beach, followed by a much
+smaller youth, who was so absorbed with whittling a little boat that he
+did not even look up when the girls answered the call.
+
+"Don't make so much noise, Ben," said Elinor, when they had climbed
+through the hedge and congregated together in the lane. "This is just an
+investigating party. We are not to take any risks."
+
+"There seems to be nobody around," replied Ben. "We saw an automobile go
+past a little while ago with two men in it and some big boxes in the
+back. It was almost stuck in the sand. I wonder it could get along at
+all. It looked like a big, red lobster."
+
+"Red?" cried the girls in one voice.
+
+"I never saw anything redder in my life," put in Charlie.
+
+"You must be mistaken about the men, then," said Elinor decisively.
+"Because Billie Campbell owns it and was running it herself a little
+while ago."
+
+"Well, we were not close enough to get a good look, but Billie Campbell
+appeared to be two men at that distance. But come along, girls. It is
+getting late and we had better not lose any more time. Now, what is it
+we are looking for? Butler bundles and boxes?"
+
+"I don't think they can be called Butler bundles," replied Elinor,
+"since my family is to be wiped out of existence if it interferes with
+the bundles, whatever they are."
+
+The boys and girls who were thoroughly enjoying the fun and mystery of
+the expedition now advanced on tiptoe to the ghostly looking house, like
+a party of conspirators in a play.
+
+"I feel like a pirate," whispered Nancy, giggling.
+
+Suddenly Ben, who was ahead of the others, stopped and put his fingers
+to his lips. He beckoned to them to follow him around to the side of the
+house.
+
+"I heard something inside the house," he said, in a low voice. "Wait
+here, girls, with Charlie while I take a look."
+
+He crept cautiously around to the front and presently they heard him
+open the door and walk boldly in.
+
+"I'm going, too," said Charlie, unable to contain his curiosity any
+longer, and the girls followed him single-file into a low-studded, dusty
+room, unfurnished except for one rickety chair, but behind that
+stood--Billie Campbell! And facing Billie in the dim light just inside
+the door stood Ben, surprise written as plainly upon his face as
+bravery, defiance, and apprehension were mingled upon hers.
+
+The girls were too amazed to speak at first.
+
+"Billie Campbell!" cried Nancy, at last. "Did two men frighten you and
+run away with your automobile?"
+
+Billie nodded. Somehow it was very difficult to keep back her tears now
+that help had come; but she never had been a cry-baby even as a child
+and now she choked down her sobs with all her strength, for in the
+gathering dusk she had recognized the faces of her three childhood
+friends who had refused to remember her that day at school.
+
+"Oh, but I'm glad to see you!" she exclaimed. "After the men went off I
+noticed that the front door was open and I came in a minute to see if it
+really looked as though it were lived in now-a-days as the man said. But
+it just looks deserted, and it's dreadfully dusty except here in the
+corner and from here to the door,--just as though something had been
+dragged across the floor."
+
+The young girl had been talking excitedly, but now she stopped abruptly
+and with a friendly look and a gesture of intense relief she stretched
+her arms over her head, as though with the relaxation of her muscles she
+could also free herself from the sudden shock and dread that had bound
+her.
+
+She was tall for her age, fifteen, with a frank, almost boyish face,
+fine gray eyes, and a rather large mouth which curled up at the corners
+when she smiled and showed two graduated rows of strong white teeth. Her
+light brown hair was parted in the middle and rolled on each side into a
+thick, knobby plait in the back.
+
+"She's not very strong on looks," thought Nancy, who set great store on
+beauty herself, "but she's got the nicest face I ever saw."
+
+"How did it happen?" asked Ben.
+
+Then Billie told how the two men had duped her and left her behind the
+deserted house, and how she had found the message on the slip of paper.
+
+"Then the men are coming back?" cried Elinor.
+
+"Perhaps," replied Billie, "and we'd better hurry away from here as fast
+as we can in case they come. They may not intend to do me any harm, but
+they are a very determined-looking pair of characters, as papa says, and
+one of them has a long pistol and a knife in his belt, for I saw them."
+
+"But what about the red motor?" demanded Nancy, whose yearning to ride
+in the car had somewhat biased her good judgment.
+
+"I'll just have to lose it, I suppose," answered Billie.
+
+"I have a scheme," put in Charlie, who rarely spoke without due
+deliberation. "Miss Campbell is just about as tall as I am--she may be a
+little shorter," he added, stretching himself to his full height.
+
+The others smiled secretly at this, for Billie was at least an inch
+taller than Charlie, but they knew that the most sensitive spot in his
+nature was his height, since he was the oldest member of the party and
+Ben overtopped him by nearly three inches. And Charlie had a sneaking
+suspicion that he never would be tall enough. His bones were small and
+his frame as slender and delicate as a girl's.
+
+"Suppose I put on your hat and veil and your long coat," he continued,
+"and sit here on the step waiting. It's getting darker all the time, and
+so if the men come back they'll think it is you; but if they thought
+somebody was onto them, they would probably break their word and chase
+off with the motor."
+
+"I don't think that would be quite fair," said Billie. "Suppose they
+found out you were a boy. They might shoot you or something."
+
+"But they won't find it out," answered Charlie. "Hurry up. We have no
+time to lose."
+
+"Yes, do," urged Ben. "It's much the best way. We couldn't leave you for
+the thieves and it's a pity to lose the car. Besides, the rest of us
+will hide in the house and if anything happens, we'll come to the
+rescue."
+
+Billie removed her ulster without another word.
+
+"She's a dandy, sensible girl," thought Ben to himself.
+
+"You'd better take the skirt, too. If they saw your trouser legs, it
+would be all off," said Billie, as she unbuckled her belt and removed
+her gray walking skirt, standing before them without any embarrassment
+in a short, red silk petticoat.
+
+"What about shoes?" observed Mary Price. "Those Charlie is wearing are
+not much like a girl's shoes."
+
+"How about these pumps? I wear No. fives," said Billie, calmly kicking
+off her slippers.
+
+Charlie, good-naturedly, unlaced his stout boy's boots.
+
+"I might be able to get my big toe into them," he said. "Like
+Cinderella's step-sisters and the little glass slipper."
+
+"These aren't any Cinderella's," laughed Billie.
+
+How nice these boys and girls did seem to her and how fine it was to be
+with them, even in this strange and dangerous situation!
+
+Charlie could wear the slippers, however, although they were somewhat
+narrow in the toe, and presently he was fully dressed in a girl's suit,
+with his face almost concealed by a long gray chiffon veil, twisted
+around Billie's gray felt hat, trimmed with one red wing.
+
+"Hurry, they're really coming," called Billie, catching the familiar
+sound of a motor engine in the distance.
+
+"All right," said Ben, who had been hovering around Charlie in pretended
+admiration of his changed appearance. "Good luck, old boy!" he added as
+he hastened after the girls up the narrow flight of stairs into the
+attic, which was perfectly dark and seemed a better place for hiding
+than outside, where enough twilight still lingered to make objects
+plainly visible.
+
+"We are a good deal like 'The Musicians of Bremen,'" observed Mary, in a
+low voice, as they lay stretched face downward on the attic floor.
+"Don't you remember that old fairy tale of Grimm's; when the robber came
+back to the house in the wood he was bitten and kicked and scratched and
+pecked by the dog and the donkey and the cat and the rooster, and then
+they set up such a braying and barking and crowing and meowing that he
+ran away scared to death?"
+
+"If anything did happen, we might try the howling part," said Billie. "I
+should think a piercing shriek from a place like this would scare a
+brave man----"
+
+"Sh-h, they're almost here," cautioned Ben. "Don't move, any one. The
+floor will creak."
+
+"I'm going to sneeze," hissed Nancy, in the dark.
+
+"Press your upper lip and don't dare do it," whispered Elinor.
+
+"Shut up, all of you," said Ben, as the motor car drew up beside the
+hedge at one side of the house.
+
+"If there is any shrieking to be done," added Mary, "I'll do it. I'm the
+best shrieker in the sophomore class. I know how to do it in the top of
+my head----"
+
+"Sh-h-h!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.--THE MUSICIANS OF BREMEN.
+
+
+Nancy could not keep from trembling slightly as she heard the car
+panting at a little distance and realized that perhaps a moment of real
+danger was near, in spite of their joking. Elinor, too, felt very much
+like giving away to a few tremors, but she reproached herself for such
+weak behavior and held her body as rigid as a stone image while she said
+sternly in her mind:
+
+"My knees are not at all weak. It's only the position I am lying in that
+makes them feel queer."
+
+A sound as though a heavy foot had been placed on the step outside was
+heard and then a voice which Billie recognized as that of the one-eyed
+man said:
+
+"Well, young lady, I suppose you have had about enough of this? We have
+kept our word, you see, which I judge you found on the paper, as you are
+still here."
+
+There was a short silence. Evidently Charlie nodded assent to the
+supposition and the motion gave full satisfaction, for the voice went
+on, "Has any one been around, miss? You didn't hear the sound of any
+voices, did you, while we were gone? We saw some people in the field as
+we left. Did they come this way? Speak up, miss."
+
+Not a heart on the attic floor but thumped as the one-eyed man asked
+these questions. They had never thought of Charlie's voice, which was
+about as deep as a full grown man's!
+
+A perfectly death-like stillness reigned for a moment. It was plain that
+Charlie was not going to trust his voice.
+
+"Do not be frightened, Senorita," put in the thin man. "You may speak
+without fear. Do not weep. Perhaps she did see something. It was not the
+ghost of the dead man who hanged himself in here, was it?" he added in a
+low voice.
+
+"Hold your tongue," said the other man. "Speak up, young woman. Have you
+no voice left? You'll not have strength enough to run the car if you go
+on like this."
+
+A deep sob reached the ears of the listeners overhead.
+
+Then the alarming thought came to Ben: How was Charlie to run the motor
+car in case the men insisted on his leaving first? Plainly, it was
+necessary to get rid of these men somehow. Then they would all make a
+dash, and he would crank up while Billie jumped in and started the car.
+
+"I'll have to hear the sound of your voice before I go," insisted the
+one-eyed man. "I want to hear you give me your sacred word of honor to
+keep this little loan of your car a secret. If we find that you have
+told, and we'll know it if you have, you and your family will regret it,
+that's all. We know how to take our revenge, don't we, Pedro? So speak
+up, young woman, and say the words. I promise----"
+
+Another deep sob.
+
+"Come, come. Hold up your head and let me see your face. Say, Pedro,
+look here; it doesn't seem quite the same as it did half an hour ago,
+somehow. Strike a light!"
+
+There was great but noiseless commotion in the attic! What if the men
+should lift Charlie's veil!
+
+Since Mary had mentioned "The Musicians of Bremen" an idea had been
+forming in Ben's mind and he now hastily communicated it in a low
+whisper to his neighbor who passed it quickly down the line.
+
+Just as the thin man outside exclaimed in a high sharp tone, "Why, it's
+a boy!" Ben whispered, "Ready!"
+
+Immediately the attic was filled with a pandemonium of noise,--the
+barking of a dog, cries, and screams! It was a truly terrifying
+combination, Mary's shrill shriek rising weirdly above the other sounds
+as though from one in mortal agony.
+
+The two men outside were startled in spite of themselves and dashed away
+on an uncontrollable impulse, the thin man shouting, "The ghost of the
+dead man! His evil spirit haunts us!"
+
+"Good work, Ben," called Charlie softly, after a moment. "Come out,
+quick! They've gone around back of the house. You can come this way, but
+hurry!"
+
+The adventure had been so exciting and was so quickly over that the
+girls hardly realized where they were when they found themselves in
+front of the house, standing in a half-bewildered group in the deepening
+twilight.
+
+"Nobody shall take any more chances for my motor car," whispered Billie.
+"You have all risked your lives enough as it is, and I'm deeply
+grateful. The men may be around there by the machine, so let's make a
+break for the fields and go straight home."
+
+"No," replied Ben stoutly; "it would be best for you girls to get away,
+but Charlie and I will finish the job. Those fellows are cowards, any
+way, and----"
+
+"But you can't run the car," said Billie, rapidly putting on her things,
+which Charlie had discarded with a sigh of relief. "I'll have to stay.
+The other girls must go, though."
+
+The discussion, however, was ended by Charlie, who had skipped off to
+reconnoiter and now appeared running at full speed around the side of
+the house.
+
+"Come on, let's all go," he said. "They've gone, but they might come
+back."
+
+Without a word, the others followed him and jumped into the car, while
+Ben, who knew a little about motors, began to crank up the machine.
+Suddenly a voice spoke out of the darkness:
+
+"This looks like a nice little party. Get out of that car, every one of
+you, or I'll shoot," and the sinister looking one-armed man, who
+appeared to have sprung up from the earth, stood at the side of the
+automobile with his pistol pointed straight at Billie. "Did you
+imagine," he continued, "that a parcel of children could fool a man like
+me?"
+
+There was no reply to the question. Mary and Nancy were so limp with
+fear they could not have lifted a little finger if there had been a
+dozen pistols pointing at them. Elinor might have slipped a ramrod down
+her back, so stiffly and proudly did she hold herself in that fearful
+moment. Billie had turned white as a sheet, but she still had strength
+enough left to make a move to get out when Ben, whose stubborn nature
+would not even now give up the fight, raised his overgrown, boyish
+figure from the ground where he had been kneeling, and with a quick
+motion pressed a piece of glittering steel to the man's forehead.
+
+"Drop that pistol, or you're a dead man," he said in the deepest chest
+tones he could produce. His voice was still in the tenor stage.
+
+Not even a gentleman of fortune who had lost an eye and an arm in past
+dangerous adventures could quite keep from shrinking at this extremely
+unpleasant sensation produced by cold steel against his face, and
+without a word of protest he dropped the pistol in the road.
+
+"Now, back off," said Ben, "and don't stop until you get as far as that
+tree over there."
+
+The man retreated, cursing under his breath, and in another instant they
+were off in the dark.
+
+"We forgot to pick up his pistol," exclaimed Charlie, as three shots
+rang out in quick succession.
+
+"But Ben has one," said Billie, feeling somehow that she had known these
+nice brave boys for a long time, instead of three-quarters of an hour.
+
+"That was only a monkey wrench," answered Charlie, laughing.
+
+And Billie was moved with admiration and respect for the slow-speaking,
+quiet boy, who had twice in so short a time outwitted two very dangerous
+and experienced adventurers.
+
+It was a splendid ride in the darkness. The fresh salt air swept their
+faces and set their blood to tingling with a new enjoyment. They had
+just been through a most dangerous and exciting experience, these young
+people, and Nancy and Mary were not ashamed to admit that they at least
+had been very much frightened. But people who have lived always by the
+sea are used to looking danger calmly in the face.
+
+Half a mile beyond the quiet little harbor of West Haven a lighthouse
+stood on a small, rocky promontory, and from the shore on a calm day
+could be seen rows of sharp-pointed rocks thrust out of the water like
+great black teeth waiting to devour any chance ship which might be blown
+against them. In bad weather the water about the Black Reefs, as they
+were called, was lashed and churned into fury and sometimes after a
+great storm groups of people might be seen hurrying up the cliff path to
+the life-saving station, while out in the ocean, stuck fast to the teeth
+of the Black Reefs was a pretty three-masted schooner, perhaps, or a
+stained and scarred old freight ship, looking very small and helpless in
+its terrible plight.
+
+Billie, herself, was the only person in the motor car who had not seen a
+shipwreck on the Black Reefs. She had never even seen one of the
+September storms when the sea rolled itself into mountainous waves and
+dashed against the cliffs of West Haven.
+
+As they neared the town, Billie slowed down the motor and turned to
+speak to her new friends.
+
+"I can't even try to thank all of you for what you have done for me, but
+I want to tell you that I think you are the bravest, nicest boys and
+girls in the whole world, and it was just to be with you that I came
+back to West Haven to go to school. I was very unhappy to-day because I
+was afraid that Nancy and Mary and Elinor had forgotten me and the
+splendid times we had together one summer when I was a little girl----"
+
+"Oh, Billie, we hadn't forgotten you," broke in Nancy. "We thought when
+you joined Belle Rogers' crowd that you----"
+
+"But I didn't join them," Billie interrupted, laughing. "They kidnapped
+me and never let me out of their sight the whole time. I had almost made
+up my mind to write to papa to let me go to boarding school, after all.
+I wanted to know some real girls. I have never had a chance before, you
+know, and when I talked it over with papa, we decided that all of you
+were the nicest real girls we had ever known, and I just thought I would
+spend the winter with Cousin Helen and meet you again, while papa was in
+Russia."
+
+The three girls blushed with pleasure at this gratifying compliment.
+
+"We were just as glad to see you, too, Billie," said Elinor. "It was all
+a foolish mistake. But we shall be friends now, and you must join the
+Blue Birds. It's the Sophomore Club, and we have lots of fun."
+
+"Thank you, I'd love to," answered Billie, as gratefully and modestly as
+if she had been paid the highest honor in the land. "I've been
+thinking," she added, "that we'd better keep all this business about
+these men secret. You know Cousin Helen; if she hears about it, we'll
+probably have to store the motor car. She'll never let me out of her
+sight again."
+
+"We'll keep it secret," cried the others in a chorus.
+
+So this very sensational adventure, which would certainly have spread
+like wildfire through the town of West Haven once it got out, remained a
+profound secret.
+
+Some good came of it, however, since it served to unite four old
+friends. But we have not seen the last of the mysterious individuals who
+borrowed Billie's motor car.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.--PLOTS AND PLANS.
+
+
+Belle Rogers was not always the bewitchingly pretty, dimpling, smiling
+young girl who had endeavored to annex Billie.
+
+And when she was not pretty, Belle's friends liked to keep well out of
+her vicinity. At such times two little white dents appeared on each side
+of her nose. Her large, china blue eyes were transformed into wells of
+steely gray and the smiling, baby mouth became two narrow white lips.
+All the color left her cheeks, and people who did not know her would
+exclaim:
+
+"How faded and ill she looks!"
+
+When Belle looked like this she was unusually quiet at first, but it was
+the quiet which comes before a tornado, and it was only when the storm
+burst that those unfamiliar with her ways realized that Belle had been
+very, very angry.
+
+This is what happened on the day after the exciting experience in
+Boulder Lane, and all because Wilhelmina Campbell, true to her old
+friends, the "Blue Birds," after being formally invited, had positively
+declined to join the "Mystic Seven."
+
+"I am sorry," she said, trying her best to be cordial, "but, you see,
+the others had first claim on me because I have known them a long time
+and I have already promised to become a Blue Bird."
+
+"We asked you first," exclaimed Belle, in a preternaturally quiet tone
+of voice.
+
+"I don't see why that should make any difference," answered Billie,
+feeling very uncomfortable.
+
+"It makes a great deal of difference," answered Belle, who was always
+gifted with a flow of words in the moments of her greatest anger. "You
+are probably not familiar with the ways of schools and school societies.
+I understand you have never been to school before."
+
+"Oh, yes, I have. I went to school in Paris for three months and to
+another in Dresden for a whole winter."
+
+"This is America," went on Belle, in a slow, even tone, taking no other
+notice of the interruption, "and if you decline the honor we have paid
+you in the sophomore year, you will not only be blackballed in our
+societies the other two years, but you will not receive any invitations
+from me and my friends to our parties now or ever, and you will be
+obliged to associate with the commonest and most ordinary girls in West
+Haven. The children of cooks----"
+
+"Mary Price," thought Billie. Mrs. Price had a tea room.
+
+"The daughters of seamen----"
+
+"Nancy!" said Billie out loud. Nancy's father was a sea captain.
+
+"Yes, Nancy Brown," continued Belle, growing angrier every moment. "You
+will simply be an outcast in West Haven, and I advise you to think the
+matter over well before you decide to join that low, common crowd, for I
+assure you it will be the last of you with us----"
+
+Billie was so aghast at the insolence of the spoiled girl that she did
+not attempt to interrupt the rush of words which seemed to flow from her
+lips without any effort whatever. She was very angry herself, as a
+matter of fact, but with the self-control she had learned from her
+father, she determined to hold her peace until Belle had run down, as
+she expressed it later to the other girls.
+
+At last there came a pause, and Billie, who had been sitting on the
+window ledge in the gymnasium swinging her feet and thinking of what she
+was going to say when she was entirely prepared to speak, slipped down
+to the floor and stood before the enraged girl like a brave soldier in
+the face of battle.
+
+But this was all she said, for Billie was really very much like a boy.
+
+"I don't think it is any honor to join your club, or go with you and
+your friends. I wouldn't give up Mary and Nancy and Elinor for twenty
+Mystic Sevens. I'd rather go to boarding school any day, and that's
+about the worst fate that could happen to me."
+
+Then she turned on her heel and walked away, leaving Belle in the grip
+of a tempest of sobs and tears. Such rages are quite like the West
+Indian storms which sweep up the coast with a great blowing of wind and
+then, after a tremendous roar of thunder, the downpour follows.
+
+That night in her pretty chintz-hung bedroom in the beautiful Rogers
+house, which was one of the show places of West Haven, Belle Rogers
+planned her revenge. Her temples were throbbing and her whole body ached
+with exhaustion. Tempers are really quite as devastating to the system
+as the West Indian tornadoes are to the country over which they sweep.
+
+"I'll get even with that rough tom-boy," she said out loud. "I'll pay
+her back if it takes all winter to do it. I'll make her sorry she ever
+came to West Haven, and I'll make the others pay, too. They'll see what
+it means to interfere with me and my plans. Perhaps papa will give me a
+motor car, only I'm afraid of the things, and I never could run one. My
+hands are much too small and delicate to handle machinery."
+
+"Belle, darling, do you feel any better?" asked Mrs. Rogers, anxiously,
+outside the door.
+
+Belle made no reply. It was her custom to pretend to be asleep when she
+wished to be alone, and she wished now to spend a long uninterrupted
+evening to herself, for her thoughts were very busy. A plan had come
+into her head. It had sprung up suddenly, full-grown, as if it had been
+secretly hatching in the bottom of her mind for a long time and now
+appeared a matured scheme.
+
+Her blood tingled at the notion. It was such an audacious, daring thing
+that the very thought made her dizzy.
+
+"I'll do it," she said at last, her mind made up. "I'll do it, and I'll
+get only one person to help me, because it will take two to work it.
+Now, who shall that person be? It would be best to ask a Blue Bird, but
+which one?"
+
+Her thoughts ran over the girls in the despised society, but there was
+only one of the ten whom she would quite dare to approach. The others
+were fiercely loyal to each other.
+
+This possible traitor was a new girl in West Haven. Her name was
+Francesca Alta, but her friends called her Fannie. She was the daughter
+of Mme. Alta, a music teacher lately established in the town. Many of
+the girls were taking music lessons of Mme. Alta, and Belle, who was one
+of her pupils, often had opportunities of speaking to the little
+dark-haired daughter, although she had only nodded to her coldly so far.
+
+"I will speak to her to-morrow," she exclaimed, as she swallowed the
+sleeping powder her indulgent mother always gave her after one of these
+violent headaches.
+
+In the morning Belle had regained her baby smile. The red had left her
+nose and was now in its proper spots on her round, plump cheeks. Once
+more her large blue eyes looked appealingly into the eyes of those she
+honored with her glances. Belle never saw what she preferred to ignore,
+and one of the most delightful sights of that bright September morning
+was a red motor car filled with pretty young girls, which whirled into
+the High School grounds, making a bright splash of scarlet against the
+old gray walls of the building.
+
+Belle did not see the "Comet" and its load, or would not see it, but
+later, Billie, who never bore malice, bowed a cheerful good morning to
+her enemy, and, to the surprise of the others, received a cordial bow in
+return.
+
+"I am sorry I was cross to you yesterday, Miss Campbell. Will you
+forgive me?" Belle asked her.
+
+"Yes, indeed," answered the warm-hearted young girl. "It's awfully nice
+of you to admit it," and she secretly decided that the others were
+rather hard on Belle Rogers, after all.
+
+However, when the girls heard of the apology, they were skeptical.
+
+"It's the 'Comet' that won her over," observed Nancy.
+
+"I don't believe it," answered their new, inseparable friend, who after
+two days' association was as intimate with the three girls as if she had
+known them always, so rapidly do young girl intimacies grow.
+
+"Something does seem to have happened to her," said Mary Price. "Perhaps
+you gave her such a dressing-down, Billie, that she's turned over a new
+leaf. She would never have stooped to talk to Fannie Alta before, but
+she is doing it now, and look--will wonders never cease?"
+
+The two girls were indeed in intimate conversation. They were walking
+arm in arm up and down the campus, nibbling sandwiches. At West Haven
+High School the girls either brought their luncheons with them to eat at
+recess or bought sandwiches of that plucky, hard-working little woman,
+Mrs. Price, Mary's mother, who made the sandwiches and brought them to
+the school herself in a big basket.
+
+That is why Mary Price had exclaimed, "Will wonders never cease?" She
+had recognized the package of sandwiches in oil paper, which Belle
+Rogers must have bought from her mother, and which she was now sharing
+with dark, shabby little Fannie Alta.
+
+"She used to say she would rather starve than eat one of mother's
+lettuce sandwiches," Mary exclaimed, "but she appears even to have come
+to that."
+
+"If this is one of your mother's own, it's very delicious," exclaimed
+Billie, gallantly turning the conversation into other channels. After
+all, it was just as well not to form the habit of discussing Belle too
+much. Her father had never approved of criticising people.
+
+"It doesn't lead to anything but bilious headaches," he used to say.
+"Sick, bilious headaches and a very yellow complexion. Critical people
+always look like that, Billie, my girl."
+
+Billie's complexion was clear and healthy. She had never had a bilious
+headache in her life. But, then, she was not given to picking flaws in
+other people's characters.
+
+However, the novelty of the richest and proudest girl in West Haven
+making friends with a poor music teacher's daughter was soon to be
+eclipsed by a much more sensational and mysterious incident.
+
+That afternoon, after school, when the four friends assembled in the
+carriage shed for their usual spin home in Billie's motor car, they
+found a note stuck conspicuously between the cushion and the back of the
+seat. It was addressed in a large angular hand to "Miss Wilhelmina
+Campbell and her friends, both boys and girls, especially Miss Butler,"
+and inside it read:
+
+"Keep quiet about Boulder Lane. You are watched and if you let a word
+slip out, the punishment will come quickly."
+
+"How ridiculous," exclaimed Billie angrily, when she had shown the note
+to the others. "I have a great mind to write papa all about it, only it
+would worry him to death. It is only cowards who write anonymous
+letters, anyhow."
+
+But she did not write to her father, and the other girls, too, were
+silent on the matter.
+
+They wondered many times who had put the note on the seat. Strangers
+were not unusual in West Haven, where sailors and seamen often came
+ashore, but the Girls' High School was at the other end of town and
+visitors ashore seldom strayed so far away from the shops and the little
+theatre.
+
+"I'd like to know what their grudge is against the Butler family,"
+Elinor had demanded, but no one could answer the question, and she was
+still determined not to disturb her highly excitable father.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.--THE FIRST MOTOR PICNIC.
+
+
+One Saturday morning early in September Miss Helen Campbell gave a
+breakfast party to her four favorite Blue Birds. It was to be the
+beginning of an eventful day for the young girls, three of whom were to
+take their first long motor trip, and, furthermore, the motor party was
+to end with a visit to Shell Island, where this excited and happy
+company of young people were to spend the night, motoring back to West
+Haven next day.
+
+Miss Campbell herself was excited.
+
+"It's a novelty for me, my dears," she exclaimed, beaming on her guests
+from behind the silver urn at the head of the breakfast table. "I'm a
+very dull, lonesome old woman, and having this nice child here with me
+is going to wake me into life again. I shall never be able to give you
+up, Wilhelmina. You had better write your father that you have been
+adopted by a very obstinate old party, who believes that possession is
+nine points of the law."
+
+"I'm quite willing to be possessed, Cousin Helen," answered Billie. "If
+I could only see papa sometimes, I think I could say that I never was so
+gloriously happy in all my life."
+
+Miss Campbell smiled with pleasure and the girls thought they had never
+seen her look more beautiful. Her white hair glistened like a bank of
+snow in the sunshine and her soft eyes were as blue as patches of West
+Haven Bay on a clear, still morning in summer.
+
+There were times when the lonely spinster looked faded and worn, and at
+such times she used to shut herself up in her big gray stone house on
+Cliff Street and refuse to see even her most intimate friends.
+
+"It's just one of my lonesome moods," she used to say, "and I would not
+for worlds inflict myself on innocent people when one is on me."
+
+But Miss Campbell had not had a single attack of loneliness since Billie
+had come to live with her. The vigorous, active young girl had awakened
+the entire household which had run on its steady even course for so many
+years, and now the place hardly recognized itself, filled with the happy
+voices and gay laughter of Billie and her friends.
+
+It was an unusual sight for the big mahogany table in the dining room to
+be loaded with the best cut glass and silver and adorned with delicate
+lace doilies, which had belonged to Miss Campbell's grandmother. These
+thing had been laid away for many years. In the centre of the table was
+a crystal vase filled with forget-me-nots.
+
+"They are the only flowers I could think of which were the color of your
+blue birds," Miss Campbell had explained. "Besides, they are my favorite
+color. You know, I always wear blue when I don't wear gray. Sometimes I
+wear black----"
+
+"Black, Cousin Helen?" repeated Billie. "I didn't know you ever wore
+anything so mournful."
+
+"You shall never see me in it, child, if I can help it. But I have a
+black dress, only one, and I do wear it at times in my bedroom."
+
+Some thirty years before Miss Campbell, then a young and beautiful girl,
+had come to West Haven to live with her grandfather and there she had
+lived ever since, except for an occasional trip abroad. It was supposed
+that she had suffered a great sorrow at some time in her life, but the
+real story had never been known. Captain Campbell, her grandfather, had
+been a jovial, pleasure loving old man, fond of company and
+entertaining. He liked to have his beautiful granddaughter stand at his
+side and receive his guests in a brocaded ball gown, with the famous
+Campbell diamonds blazing in her hair and the diamond and sapphire
+necklace around her throat.
+
+But after General Campbell's death there were no more balls and dinners
+in the big, old house. The long parlors were seldom opened except to be
+cleaned and aired, and Miss Campbell, now a somewhat shrivelled pink and
+white little lady of fifty-five, interested herself only in the
+charities of West Haven.
+
+"Yes, my dear children, this household and its mistress have got into
+such a lethargy that it is time they were waked up. We have been sunk in
+so deep a rut, my old servants and I, that it might have closed over our
+heads and the world gone on just the same."
+
+"Lots of poor families would have gone begging at Christmas, then, Miss
+Campbell," put in Elinor.
+
+"And what would all those poor old seamen have done?" went on Nancy.
+
+"And the Blue Birds," added Mary Price. "We should have had to use a
+corner of the gymnasium at school for our most secret society meetings."
+
+Miss Campbell paid the rent of the Blue Bird club rooms.
+
+"And, pray, what should I have done?" finished Billie. "I should have
+been knocking around still with papa, trying to get on with the queer
+people who live in hotels, and never have had nice girls to go with or a
+delightful home to stay in."
+
+Miss Campbell blushed with pleasure.
+
+"I have a great many surprises up my sleeve for my little Motor Maids. I
+shall only tell you one, though. What would you say to a Blue Bird
+Thanksgiving ball?"
+
+"Oh, oh, oh! How splendid!" cried the young girls.
+
+"Honk, honk!" went the motor horn at the front entrance, which was a
+signal for breakfast to come to an end and the party to be off.
+
+A hamper of luncheon had been strapped behind the car with the suit
+cases. Miss Campbell sat between Elinor and Mary in the back, while
+Nancy took the seat now understood to be hers always, beside her friend
+Billie, in front. The four Campbell servants, who had grown old in their
+mistress's service, stood in a row on the gravel walk to witness the
+strange sight of their beloved "Miss Helen" sailing away in a red
+infernal machine, her blue automobile veil streaming out behind like a
+piece of flying cloud.
+
+"Don't go too fast, Billie," she exclaimed, as they turned the corner of
+Cliff Street, and whirled down the steep, rather slippery Main street of
+West Haven. "Remember that you have got a decrepit old woman in the back
+who has never ridden behind anything faster than a pair of ambling
+carriage horses in all her life."
+
+"How about the five-thirty express, Cousin Helen?" Billie called over
+her shoulder.
+
+"A locomotive with an engineer is a very different thing from a young
+girl guiding a scarlet comet," the little lady answered; but as they
+left the street for the country road and Billie gradually increased the
+speed, Miss Campbell leaned back with a look of blissful enjoyment on
+her face.
+
+"It is one of the most exhilarating things I have ever experienced," she
+confided to Elinor.
+
+At noon they stopped for lunch. The road now lay along a high cliff
+overlooking the ocean, which on this calm September morning was as
+serenely blue and still as a mill pond. White sails dotted it here and
+there, and an occasional wave rippled on the pebbly beach with a
+murmuring, drowsy sound.
+
+They had pulled up at the side of a little pine grove just off the road
+and spread the lunch cloth on a carpet of pine needles.
+
+Then the delicious cakes and sandwiches which Miss Campbell had ordered
+from Mrs. Price were arranged in neat piles, while Elinor opened her tea
+basket, a present from an aunt in Ireland, and made tea for the company.
+
+It was all very delightful and they were enjoying themselves thoroughly,
+when Billie and Nancy, who were seated facing the others, received a
+slight shock. A tall, slender woman, dressed in black, with a long black
+chiffon veil completely concealing her face, suddenly emerged from
+behind a clump of dwarf oak and bay trees at the far end of the grove
+and beckoned to them.
+
+The two girls exchanged glances of amazement and Nancy was about to say:
+"Why, look at that woman!" when the woman, herself, put her finger to
+her lips and shook her head violently.
+
+"I think she's crazy, Nancy," said Billie, in a low voice, under cover
+of the conversation of the others. "We had better not take any notice.
+It would just alarm Cousin Helen and spoil the day."
+
+Nancy agreed with her, and the two girls were about to suggest that they
+start on again, when the woman began making the most extraordinary
+motions of entreaty, imploring them with outstretched arms, beseeching
+them with every gesture to come to her. And still the two girls hung
+back. Then the woman raised the sleeve of her loose black silk wrap and
+showed her arm bound with a bloody handkerchief.
+
+Nancy gasped at this. The sight of blood was always sickening to her.
+But, seeing Billie's meaning glance in Miss Campbell's direction, she
+pretended that she had choked on her tea.
+
+The other three were deep in a conversation. Miss Campbell was
+describing a beautiful ball she had once been to where she had danced
+with a real prince, and they hardly noticed when Nancy and Billie
+strolled over to the clump of bushes.
+
+The woman, who had been waiting for them, seized Billie's arm and in a
+low, rapid voice said:
+
+"I see that you are both unusually nice girls whom I can trust. I am in
+great trouble. You will help me, will you not? It is very simple, what I
+am going to ask you. You see, I have been in a wreck."
+
+"A motor wreck?" asked Billie.
+
+"Yes, yes," replied the woman, not impatiently but as if she were very
+much pressed for time. "The car rolled over the embankment. You will see
+it below there. It happened just in the curve of the road. There was no
+excuse except that we were going too fast and the wheels did--what is it
+you call it? Skidded? We saved ourselves, all three, by jumping.
+Fortunately the back wheels were caught in the sand and there was just
+time to climb out as the car was overturned. The others have left me.
+They will return at any moment now with another car. Hidden under the
+seat of the wrecked car is a small box. I must have it. I must indeed. I
+cannot get it myself. I have sprained my knee, and can stand only by
+supporting myself against this tree. Will you get that box for me and
+place me in your debt always, always? You cannot understand how
+important it is for me to have it."
+
+"Of course, we will," Billie assured her, "and won't you let us help you
+over to our party, or make you comfortable here with the cushions until
+your friends come back?"
+
+"No, no, no," replied the stranger. "I do not wish to be seen if
+possible. I only beg you to make haste. I will wait here."
+
+As the woman grew more in earnest, her voice seemed to deepen and
+vibrate like a musical instrument, and the girls almost forgot to listen
+to her words under the spell of its wonderful tones; and when she threw
+back her veil, they still stood rooted to the spot, for she was really
+quite the most beautiful person they had either of them ever seen. Her
+eyes and hair were dark, her skin rather creamy in texture; there was a
+generous curve to her lips, a straight nose and full, rounded chin. She
+smiled a little as she noticed the admiration of the two girls, showing
+two rows of white, even teeth.
+
+"You will not refuse?" she asked again.
+
+And they helped her to sit down on the ground and hurried out of the
+grove to the roadside. There, sure enough, lying on its side in the
+sand, some forty feet below the road, was the wrecked motor car.
+
+"Nancy, I would do anything for her," observed Billie, as they clambered
+down the embankment.
+
+"Isn't she perfect?" exclaimed Nancy. "And still, Billie, I can't help
+believing that she's slightly off in her upper story. She was so queer.
+But a shock like that would be enough to turn anybody delirious, jumping
+out of an automobile as it turned over an embankment."
+
+"It'll all depend on whether we find the box. If it is just a delirious
+dream, there won't be any box and we will have had our climb for
+nothing."
+
+They searched the upturned car and there was nothing in it. The ground
+was strewn with wreckage. Cushions and rugs were scattered about in wild
+confusion. The girls searched the place hurriedly all the way down to
+the foot of the cliff.
+
+"There is no need of wasting any more time, Nancy, dear," said Billie at
+last. "It's very evident to me that the beautiful lady was out of her
+mind and we've been 'stung,' as the boys say. Let's go back. Perhaps she
+will let us help her get somewhere."
+
+[Illustration: Half buried in the sand was a small box of highly
+polished wood.]
+
+"Yes, I am afraid it's just a case of King George's men marched up the
+hill and then marched down again," said Nancy.
+
+"And I got two grass stains when I fell down just now," added Billie,
+looking ruefully at her white serge skirt.
+
+"My shoes are full of sand, and I've soiled my white stockings," went on
+Nancy. "Look," she cried suddenly; "look, Billie, here it is right under
+our noses. I suppose that little bay tree hid it from us on our way
+down. I ask the beautiful lady's pardon; but I still can't imagine why
+her own friends couldn't have got it for her just as well as we could."
+
+Half buried in the sand was a small box of highly polished wood, six or
+eight inches square. Two broad bands of silver reinforced it at the back
+and sides, and a little silver combination lock took the place of the
+keyhole. In the middle of the box was a small, round silver plate, on
+which a coat of arms was engraved.
+
+"This is the box, all right enough," said Billie, examining it with much
+curiosity. "Now let's return it to that mysterious lovely person and go
+on our ways, rejoicing."
+
+But they were not destined to get rid of the box that day nor for many
+another day. Just as they reached the top of the cliff they heard the
+whirring of a motor engine. A car was just starting from the grove. Two
+men were on the front seat, while the owner of the box was lying almost
+helplessly in the back seat, her veil thrown back and her face white and
+drawn. There was no top to the car and the girls could see her plainly.
+They thought she must have fainted, but when Nancy called: "Wait, please
+wait," she raised herself quickly, put her finger to her lips in token
+of silence and dropped a card into the road.
+
+The next instant the strange motor car was lost to sight around the
+curve. Billie picked up the card with some irritation.
+
+"How silly," she exclaimed, "What are we to do with this thing? Why
+couldn't she have waited a minute?"
+
+"Because she didn't want the men to know she had the box, goosey,"
+answered Nancy. "It's as plain as the nose on your face. What does the
+card say?"
+
+It was a man's business card and read:
+
+  "Pierre Lafitte, Avocat,
+  Rue----21. Paris."
+
+On the back of the card had been painfully written with a pencil:
+
+  "I knew when you were gone so long that you would be too late. If
+  you are merciful and kind, keep the box a secret from all the world.
+  You will not regret it. Send your name to this address and you shall
+  be relieved at once."
+
+"Burdened with another secret," cried Billie, in a resigned voice.
+"Where can we hide the thing?"
+
+"I'll sit on it for the time being," answered Nancy, laughing. "There
+come the girls."
+
+"What are you two infants up to?" called Elinor, appearing just then at
+the edge of the grove. "We thought you had gone in the other direction
+and we've been looking everywhere for you."
+
+"We have--er----" hesitated Billie, who never could tell fibs. "What
+have we been doing, Nancy?"
+
+"We've been looking at a wreck. Don't you want to see it?"
+
+"Nancy Brown," cried her friend Mary, putting her hands on Nancy's
+shoulders and gazing into her face, "you've got a secret. I can tell by
+your expression. You are hiding something."
+
+"I'm trying to hide it, but I find it rather difficult. I feel like a
+bantam hen sitting on a goose egg."
+
+"Let's push her off her goose egg," cried Elinor, "and see what it
+really is."
+
+"Help, Billie, help!" screamed Nancy, while the four friends engaged in
+a school girl romp, and Miss Campbell, who was dozing in the grove, half
+opened her eyes and smiled.
+
+"Is there anything more charming and sweeter than the sound of
+children's voices out of doors?" she said to herself. She could never
+get used to the idea that Billie was not still the little eight-year-old
+girl who had spent a summer in West Haven seven years before.
+
+In the meantime, the guardian of the box was well defended by Billie
+until she began to laugh, and when Nancy was taken with the giggles her
+father used to say she was nothing but an abandoned lunatic. The place
+rang with the joyous peals and the other girls were obliged to pause in
+the struggle and join in. Then this foolishly happy child rolled
+helplessly onto the ground, upsetting the box.
+
+But there came a sudden end to the laughter, for the top of the box had
+sprung open and its contents were scattered on the roadside.
+
+The girls clasped their hands excitedly and gazed at each other with
+wide-eyed amazement, for at their feet glittered dozens of the most
+beautiful jewels. There were a diamond and sapphire necklace, strings of
+pearls, earrings, rings, and broaches.
+
+"Great heavens, what have you girls been doing?" exclaimed Mary.
+
+"Nancy, you explain," answered Billie, grown very grave, all of a
+sudden. "I'll gather these things up and get them out of sight as
+quickly as possible. I think my suit case is the safest place for the
+time being, and we can take it into the front of the car with us. Then
+we can discuss later what we had better do."
+
+While the girls listened to Nancy's strange story of the beautiful
+injured woman, Billie collected and replaced the jewels in the box with
+the card, and packed it in the bottom of her suit case.
+
+In another ten minutes the motor party was on the road again, the
+younger members somewhat sobered by the secret responsibility which had
+been thrust upon them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.--THE BOX OF TROUBLES.
+
+
+Shell Island is really only an island in name. A narrow creek which
+fills and empties with the incoming and outgoing tides divides it from
+the mainland. A bridge spans this chasm over which flows a constant
+stream of motor and driving parties from all the villages and summer
+resorts up and down the coast.
+
+Just at sundown, as the "Comet" took the steep road down the cliff to
+the bridge, a big touring car shot past.
+
+"Oh, dear," exclaimed Nancy, "I did hope we would leave all care behind
+when we came away, and now I am perfectly certain that Belle Rogers was
+sitting on the front seat of that automobile. I suppose she'll be
+floating around the ballroom in blue chiffons this evening."
+
+"Is she a care?" asked Billie, who had a placid and rather masculine way
+of forgetting all about the people she didn't like.
+
+"Oh, I don't mind her, only she always makes me feel like a rag picker's
+daughter."
+
+"I think she's over-dressed," put in Billie. "I should feel utterly
+foolish with all that finery and jewelry on me. When papa and I used to
+buy my clothes, he would say: 'Suppose we stick to plain white,
+daughter, and skip the furbelows. We can't go very far wrong if we do
+that, and if my little daughter begins to put on ruffles and puffles and
+falals without anybody's advice but mine, I'm afraid she might be taken
+for a walking fashion plate and some one will try to stand her up in a
+shop window."
+
+Nancy laughed.
+
+"I think you have the prettiest dresses I ever saw, Billie, but I am
+glad Miss Campbell has persuaded you to stop dressing so much like a
+boy. Lace collars are lots more becoming than those stiff linen ones."
+
+"They were chokers," answered Billie, good-naturedly, as the car drew up
+at the steps of the hotel immediately behind the automobile which had
+passed it on the road.
+
+Belle and her party were waiting on the piazza, the women in long pongee
+coats with the very latest motor bonnets and veils.
+
+"Those are her rich friends, the Jordannes," whispered Nancy, in awed
+tones. "They used to be just plain Jordan before they made so much
+money."
+
+"I think Jordan is a much nicer name. It has such a fine Oriental sound,
+'Where rolls the River Jordan.'"
+
+By this time several porters from the hotel had stepped to the motor car
+door and assisted Miss Campbell, somewhat stiff from the long ride, to
+alight. The girls jumped nimbly out after her and their luggage was
+unstrapped and piled on the ground near the Jordanne luggage. But Billie
+was careful to keep a firm hold on her own suit case with its precious
+load.
+
+"Let the man take your bag, dear," called Miss Campbell. "You will
+strain your back carrying that heavy thing."
+
+There was nothing for Billie to do but resign the suit case, although
+she tried to keep an eye on it as they followed the porter through the
+lobby to the elevator. Miss Campbell had telegraphed ahead for rooms.
+
+As luck would have it, there was another elevator for luggage, and the
+bag was temporarily out of Billie's sight, but her mind was soon at ease
+when she saw it stacked with the others in the bedroom which she and
+Nancy were to share.
+
+"While we dress for dinner," she observed, "we'll have a talk about that
+jewelry. What on earth are we going to do with it?"
+
+"Don't you think we'd better tell Miss Campbell?" suggested Elinor.
+
+"I suppose it would be best, but Cousin Helen does go off so about
+things, and I have a feeling that if she knew it she wouldn't allow us
+to keep our promise to our poor beautiful lady. She would be sure to
+turn the box over to the police or call in a lawyer or something. And if
+we could only keep the box until we heard from the man in Paris, at
+least, we should be keeping our word about it."
+
+Elinor and Mary were all for telling, but the other girls were still
+under the spell of the very beautiful and distressed woman, and since it
+was mostly their affair they concluded not to tell.
+
+You must not blame Billie for this want of frankness. Girls who have
+never had mothers to talk to in the intimate way that only a mother and
+daughter know, are apt to be reserved and self-reliant. Billie would
+certainly have told her father, but, then, he was in Russia.
+
+Mary and Elinor, whose room adjoined the other, had put on their kimonos
+and were lolling on the beds, while Nancy with solicitous care was
+removing her pretty muslin frock from the valise and smoothing out the
+pink taffeta ribbons tenderly.
+
+Billie knelt on the floor and opened her suit case.
+
+"Before I undress," she said decisively, "I'm going to take this box
+straight down stairs and give it to the clerk to put in the safe. Then
+we can spend the evening with easy minds."
+
+She flung back the top and sat down on the floor with a gasp.
+
+"In the name of all the powers, this is not my suit case."
+
+The girls gathered around her in great excitement.
+
+"It's exactly like mine," she went on, "but there are no initials on it
+and mine has 'W.H.C.' on the end."
+
+"Girls," cried Nancy, flinging her bathrobe around her with a tragic
+gesture, "the very last person in the world we could wish to have
+Billie's suit case is the very one who has it. She'll look at everything
+in it; examine the underclothes to see if they are hand-made and the
+stockings to see if they are silk, and--she'll open the box of jewels
+and read the card of the avocat from Paris and----"
+
+"Who? Who?" interrupted the other three.
+
+"Who but Belle Rogers," cried Nancy, flourishing a towel in one hand and
+a hair brush in the other.
+
+"Yes, that's her costume," admitted Mary, laughing. "Blue chiffon with a
+wreath of pink roses for her hair."
+
+She pulled up a corner of the pale blue gauzy material and pointed to a
+little pink wreath which lay in the folds of the dress.
+
+"There are her blue satin slippers, No. Two's, absolutely not a size
+larger," said Elinor, pointing to the toe of a little slipper which
+showed at one end of the suit case.
+
+"This is what I get for losing the keys to everything," groaned Billie.
+"Telephone for a boy, quick, some one, while I fasten this thing up.
+Perhaps she hasn't opened mine yet."
+
+"Opened it!" echoed the others. "You don't know her."
+
+Presently a bell boy tapped at the door.
+
+Billie gave him the suit case with full instructions.
+
+"And hurry," she added. "If you are back here in five minutes, you shall
+have an extra tip."
+
+Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed. The other girls were almost dressed,
+and Billie was beginning to tap the floor nervously with an impatient
+foot, when at last there was a tap at the door.
+
+"Why didn't you come sooner?" demanded Nancy and Billie in one voice.
+
+"The young lady wouldn't let me, Miss."
+
+"But what was she doing all that time?"
+
+"I don't know, Miss. She simply told me to wait outside. She was very
+angry, Miss, about her bag."
+
+"Angry, indeed," answered Billie, seizing her own suit case. "At least
+no time was lost in sending it to her."
+
+The two girls opened the suit case with great anxiety. The things in it
+were assuredly in rather a rumpled condition. They had the appearance of
+having been unfolded and hastily rolled up again in new folds.
+
+Nothing could be told about the box of jewels. They were all there
+apparently in a glittering bunch with the card laid on top.
+
+"Dear me, I'm sorry that combination lock broke," exclaimed Billie. "I
+don't mind Belle Rogers looking through my clothes if it gives her any
+satisfaction, but I would just as soon she hadn't looked into this box
+of jewels. And we can't explain to her, because we mustn't seem to know
+that she was capable of doing anything so low and common as to go
+through my suit case."
+
+She dressed herself hastily in a pretty white frock. Her smooth rolls of
+hair and trim braid did not need re-arranging, and she hurried
+downstairs to the desk with the troublesome box, which she gave into the
+charge of the clerk.
+
+"These are some really valuable things," she said. "Will you put them in
+your safe?"
+
+The clerk wrapped the box up neatly in heavy brown paper, sealed it with
+red sealing wax, labelled it with her name and address and deposited it
+in the safe.
+
+"That's off my mind," she said, giving a sigh of relief, just as the
+elevator door opened and Miss Campbell appeared with the other girls.
+
+"Cousin Helen, you're a dream," cried Billie, taking her cousin's arm.
+"You are like a young girl whose hair had gone and turned white in a
+single night."
+
+"Thank you, my dear, but you may be sure that if anything happened which
+could make my hair turn white in a night, it wouldn't leave me any
+girlish looks. But why didn't you come to my room and let me have a look
+at you? Are you all exactly right and in place? That's a sweet little
+frock. I suppose you got it in Paris last summer. You and your father
+are a pair of children shopping together, I imagine. All my girls look
+sweet," she added, not wishing to wound any feelings by admiring one
+more than another. "See this lovely dress my little Mary is wearing.
+Could anything be more exquisitely made than that? Your mother is a
+wonderful woman, child. There's nobody like her in West Haven."
+
+At dinner there was another surprise for the girls. This time it was an
+agreeable one: four extra places at the table, and presently they were
+joined by four West Haven boys, looking rather embarrassed but quite
+happy as they shook hands with the fairy godmother of the party,
+Billie's Cousin Helen.
+
+Two of the boys we have met before, Ben Austen and Charlie Clay. The
+other two were their intimate friends and boon companions, Americus
+Brown, Nancy's brother, known as "Merry Brown," and Percival Algernon
+St. Clair, whose mother's fancy had run riot in naming her only child.
+He was called "Percy" by his friends for short.
+
+"Why, look who's here," exclaimed Nancy. "Percival Algernon St. Clair,
+why didn't you tell us yesterday when you gave us soda water at the drug
+store that you were coming on this trip, too?"
+
+"Because it was secret," answered Percy, who was very blond and blushed
+easily. "Miss Campbell wanted to surprise you."
+
+"I thought it would be nice for my girls to have some partners for the
+dance to-night," said Miss Campbell. "I wanted to see some real
+dancing."
+
+"If you want to see the real thing, then, Miss Campbell," said Merry
+Brown, "if you want to see the poetry of motion, you must see Ben
+dance."
+
+"Shut up, bow-legs," called Ben across the table. "I've been learning
+for months. I took lessons last summer."
+
+"Where?" demanded his friends, because at the school dances, Ben's
+expression of misery was well known when he towed an unfortunate friend
+around the room.
+
+"I know," said Percy, "it's all explained now. That's what you were
+doing at the Dutch picnics every week."
+
+"Well, they were pretty good teachers," replied the imperturbable Ben.
+"They taught me that guiding a girl in a dance was very much like
+sailing a boat with a windmill for a sail. You have to guide and twirl
+at the same time, and the more speed you make in twirling the better
+your dancing is."
+
+Everybody laughed uproariously at this description.
+
+"Ben Austen, I didn't expect to be treated like a windmill sail boat
+when I promised to give you my first dance," announced Elinor.
+
+"It would be better than to be treated like a stationary windmill and go
+turning around in one place like the Germans dance," observed Billie.
+
+"You may all have your choice," said Ben. "Stationary or progressive,
+it's all one to me, only remember that you have each promised to do a
+Dutch twirl with me."
+
+The ballroom was already quite filled with dancers and it seemed very
+bewildering and delightful to the young girls, if it was only a summer
+hotel with a piano and two violins and a flute for an orchestra. Ben's
+Dutch whirl was so skillfully performed, because like everything else he
+attempted he had mastered it perfectly, that the girls found it rather
+exciting fun.
+
+"It's a regular romp," cried Billie, who, with glowing cheeks, dropped
+breathlessly into a chair beside her Cousin Helen.
+
+"Look," whispered Mary Price, who had been dancing a quiet glide with
+Charlie Clay and had had a chance to notice some of the other dancers.
+
+For some reason both their young faces turned suddenly very grave. Was
+it a strange, unexplained premonition that told them the most dangerous
+enemy either was ever to have was dancing past that moment, in floating
+pale blue chiffon draperies?
+
+After the dance there was a merry supper party with sandwiches and
+lemonade in the grill room, and then the Motor Maids were glad enough to
+get to their beds.
+
+"What a relief it is, Nancy, dear, to have that box of jewels in the
+safe," said Billie sleepily, as her eyelids drooped and she settled
+herself under the covers.
+
+But Nancy did not reply. She was sleeping deeply. Billie, too, was soon
+oblivious of everything in the world.
+
+As the night wore on, Nancy dreamed that she was dancing the Dutch twirl
+in a wonderful blue gauze dress, but that the diamond necklace she wore
+so weighed her down that she could not breathe.
+
+Billie also dreamed of the diamonds. They were not around her neck, but
+in their box, which had grown to the size of a trunk and pressed on her
+chest so heavily that she was suffocating.
+
+Suddenly a great bell clanged out in the night.
+
+Billie opened her eyes with difficulty. The room was filled with smoke
+and down the corridor there came the cry of "Fire! Fire!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.--THE FIRE.
+
+
+A bell with a deep baying note rang out in the darkness.
+
+If you have ever heard a fire bell boom out in the stillness, you will
+remember the terror which clutched your heart at the first ominous peal.
+It seemed to Billie, in going over it afterward, that the boom of that
+big fire bell was like the last trump on the day of judgment arousing
+the spirits of the dead.
+
+Then came the sound of voices. The corridors were filled with hurrying
+footsteps. Somebody ran down the hallway calling again:
+
+"Fire! Fire!"
+
+Billie jumped to the floor with a bound. Her senses had returned at
+last.
+
+"Nancy, Nancy!" she cried, shaking her friend violently back to
+consciousness. "The hotel is on fire. Get into your dressing gown as
+quickly as you can while I wake up the others."
+
+As she switched on the light she saw that the room was filled with
+smoke, and she knew the fire must be in their wing of the hotel and that
+there was no time to lose.
+
+There is no better fire trap in the world than a wooden hotel at the
+seaside. The salt from the flying spray in winter storms has seasoned
+the wood into splendid burning material, and the breeze from the ocean
+fans the flames like a great natural bellows.
+
+As Billie waked the other girls Miss Campbell came into the room, with a
+white, scared face. But she was not excited.
+
+"Get into your dressing gowns, girls," she said quietly. "Don't lose a
+moment's time. The boys are waiting for us outside."
+
+Just then Ben Austen rattled on the door.
+
+"Hurry," he called. "The elevators won't run much longer and the stairs
+are burning."
+
+Hardly two minutes had passed since the first clang of the bell when
+Miss Campbell and the girls joined the boys in the corridor. There had
+not been time even to snatch up a hair-pin from the bureau to catch
+tumbled locks together. But nobody looked at any one else. The place was
+crowded with hotel guests in exactly the same condition and all the
+passages opening into the main corridor of the hotel were emptying
+themselves of streams of people in every state of disarray. If it had
+been less serious, the girls might have laughed at the numbers of
+terrified and hysterical fat women, wrapping insufficient dressing gowns
+and blankets about their large forms as they pushed their way without
+ceremony toward the elevators.
+
+But a big tongue of flame suddenly leapt up the stairwell at the end of
+the hall. There was a crackling sound and clouds of black smoke poured
+into the corridor.
+
+"We must get out of this," exclaimed Ben. "The fire has reached this
+floor and unless we knock a few people down, we'll never get to either
+of those elevators."
+
+"But where are the fire escapes?" demanded Miss Campbell.
+
+"At the end of the hall," answered Charlie, "and we could never get past
+that burning pit."
+
+The two elevators had been up and down several times, packed with
+people. The smoke was growing thicker each moment, and the next thing
+Billie remembered was that Elinor had fainted dead away, and that some
+one had screamed:
+
+"The elevators have stopped running!"
+
+In the stifling atmosphere she saw Ben and Charlie lift Elinor and call
+to the others to follow them into a bedroom. As she staggered after
+them, a grotesque figure, screaming hysterically, fought through the
+crowd, almost knocking Billie down. Even in that moment of danger she
+recognized Belle Rogers, every lock of whose golden hair was done up on
+red rubber curlers, the ends of which stuck straight up like scores of
+little devils' horns.
+
+"Take me down! Take me down!" Billie heard her scream. "I will not die
+in this horrible way! Somebody save me!"
+
+Billie touched her on the shoulder.
+
+"Don't scream," she said. "It only makes things worse. The people who
+are left are going to get down by the windows. Come with us."
+
+Belle, who had been separated from her friends, followed quietly enough.
+
+In another moment the corridor was empty, and the flames which had been
+fast eating their way along the hall had reached the elevator shafts. It
+had all happened in much less time than it takes to tell, but in the
+brief instant when Billie had paused to rescue Belle, she lost the
+others. Once in a bedroom, where the air was not so stifling, it was
+impossible to leave and rush again into the atmosphere outside.
+
+The two girls dashed into the nearest room and closed the door, too
+stifled to notice that the others, led by level-headed Ben and followed
+by the crowd of people left standing by the elevator shafts, had rushed
+into a front room at the end of the hall. In the closets of this room
+and the one adjoining, they found two fire ropes which this
+old-fashioned hotel provided for its guests whose rooms were not located
+near the fire escapes. Those who were not able to slide down the ropes
+were lowered in a chair, and the others, with a foot twisted around the
+rope and grasping a wet towel to keep the palm of the hand from
+blistering, slid down. In the darkness it was impossible to recognize
+faces, and it was not until they were all safe on the ground that they
+missed Billie Campbell.
+
+Then poor Miss Campbell, who had been admirably calm during the whole
+fearful experience, fainted away, and Elinor, now entirely restored by
+the fresh air, was left to take care of her.
+
+Nancy and Mary followed the four boys to the rescue. Tears were rolling
+down Nancy's cheeks and Mary was as pale as death. Each girl had her own
+peculiar way of showing how much she had come to love their new friend,
+Billie.
+
+In the meantime, Billie, herself, was looking ruefully down into the
+darkness from the window of a room on the third floor and Belle was
+indulging in a fit of real hysterics.
+
+"How dare you bring me here?" she screamed hoarsely, stamping her foot.
+"I might have been saved if you had let me alone, and here we are
+trapped! I always hated you and now I detest you with my whole soul."
+
+"I thought the others were in here," said Billie apologetically.
+
+"Thought! Thought!" screamed the wretched girl. "You wanted me to die.
+You wanted me to lose my beauty."
+
+"You haven't any to lose just now," answered Billie. "You look more like
+the Medusa of the snaky locks----"
+
+"Oh, oh!" wept Belle, too angry to articulate.
+
+"You may console yourself this much," went on Billie. "If you die, I
+shall die with you, but I am going to do my best to save you and myself,
+too."
+
+"Help! Help!" screamed Belle from the window, not taking any notice. But
+her voice was lost in the wild clamor which came up from below.
+
+Then she flung herself flat on the floor in an agony of sobs.
+
+"It's better to pray than to cry, Belle. Crying won't help and we are in
+a pretty warm place. If you were only a sport, it might do a lot of
+good."
+
+Belle crawled to the window and leaned out. The air in the room was
+becoming unbearable.
+
+In the meantime, Billie's thoughts were working rapidly. There were the
+sheets, but there wasn't time to tear them into strips and knot the
+strips together. Besides, she didn't believe they would reach halfway to
+the ground.
+
+"I am afraid we'll have to climb it," she said.
+
+"Climb what?"
+
+"Climb up the side of the shutter to the roof. This is the top floor.
+The flames haven't reached the roof yet."
+
+"But what good will the roof do us?"
+
+"I don't know yet, but it's better than this. Come on."
+
+"I tell you I can't climb. I never did such a thing in my life."
+
+"You'll just have to begin then," said Billie sternly. "Shall I go
+first, or would you rather do it?"
+
+"I'll go--no, you go."
+
+"I'll help you," said Billie, hoisting herself to the window ledge.
+"Now, don't look down. Just imagine you are only a few feet from the
+ground and that it's a very easy stunt. If you decide beforehand that
+you can't do it, why, of course, you can't. But it will be much easier
+than staying here to be burned alive in the next few minutes."
+
+Delivering herself of this boyish but unimpeachable logic, Billie kicked
+off her slippers and swung herself onto the shutter. Just for one brief
+instant a sickening nausea came over her as she looked down into the
+darkness.
+
+Then her fingers grasped the cornice of the roof and, pulling herself up
+with her two arms, as she had learned to do on the parallel bars in the
+gymnasium--only in this instance the shutter made a very uncertain elbow
+rest--she scrambled onto the roof.
+
+"All right, Belle," she called. "It's much easier than I thought. Take
+off your slippers and come ahead, and don't forget to look up and not
+down."
+
+Belle obeyed in sullen silence. She was as determined as Billie not to
+be burned alive, but her luxurious and self-indulgent nature revolted
+against this uncomfortable and dangerous method of getting out of the
+difficulty. However, there was nothing else to do, so she swung out on
+the shutter as Billie had done, only this time Billie, with all the
+strength in her body was holding the shutter rigid.
+
+As Belle clung on with her hands and her little pink toes, which she had
+stuck into the interstices of the shutter, she suddenly looked down. Her
+grasp weakened and she gave a shriek so piercing that Billie almost
+slipped headlong over the side of the roof, but she grasped Belle's
+slackening wrist.
+
+"Take a breath," she said, in a trembling voice. "You can do it, if you
+only make up your mind to."
+
+"I'll never, never forgive you," cried Belle, "and if I live through
+to-night, I'll pay you back."
+
+"All right," answered Billie calmly, seeing all at once that anger
+appeared to give Belle new strength, "only I advise you to get onto this
+roof first."
+
+Another moment and Belle had clambered over the cornice and was
+stretched out breathless on the roof.
+
+"I would much rather have had a baby to look after," thought Billie, as
+she looked contemptuously down at the other girl.
+
+"We had better not lose any more time now, Belle," she said aloud. "If
+you have got your breath and your nerve back, come ahead."
+
+Belle pulled herself wearily up and followed.
+
+"My feet are all splinters," she complained, "and my hands are torn and
+bleeding."
+
+  "'Tis the voice of the lobster: I heard him declare
+  'You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair,'"
+
+repeated Billie, half laughing and half sobbing that this foolish verse
+should have flashed through her brain at this strange time.
+
+The two girls hurried along the roof toward the front. It was plain that
+in the scramble to save the lives of the hotel guests there had been no
+time to save the building, and when the young girls turned the corner of
+the roof and looked for a moment across the broad expanse of ocean not a
+hundred yards away it seemed to them that they were alone in the whole
+world.
+
+"What are we going to do now?" demanded Belle.
+
+"I don't know yet," answered Billie patiently.
+
+The roof was hot under her feet and they could hear the crackling of
+flames as they hastened along the edge to the other side.
+
+The rest of that fearful adventure seemed like a dream to Billie
+afterwards.
+
+As they turned the corner of the house a voice called hoarsely:
+
+"Who can tie a rope?"
+
+Billie remembered to have replied vaguely and politely that she could
+tie a rope. A man emerged from behind the chimney with a long rope, but
+she hardly noticed at the time that he had only one arm.
+
+"It may not be long enough," he said, "but tie it and we'll take the
+risk. It's our only chance."
+
+Billie knotted the rope around the chimney. The man examined the knot
+carefully, pulled it with his one hand, and then threw it over the side
+of the house.
+
+"I'll go first," said Belle quietly, and Billie looked at her with
+amazement.
+
+"Humph!" said the man. "You are brave. Can you do it?"
+
+"Yes," answered Belle, "I can do anything. Help me over the side."
+
+"It's going to hurt," he observed, as he twisted the rope around her
+foot and showed her how to slide down. "It's going to take all the skin
+off your hands and feet and maybe cut to the bone."
+
+Belle made no reply to this cheerful prediction. She had already started
+down the rope.
+
+As Billie watched her disappear in the dark, the man said abruptly:
+
+"Did a number of girls and a white-haired woman in a red automobile come
+here this evening?"
+
+Billie hesitated.
+
+"I believe so," she said.
+
+"Do you know so?" asked the man insistently.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Did you see one of them leave a rosewood box at the clerk's desk?"
+
+Billie made a great effort to remember. Then, suddenly, the case of
+jewels loomed up in her mind. She had forgotten all about them.
+
+"Billie, Billie," called a voice from below.
+
+"Yes," she answered, looking over the roof.
+
+"She's here," shouted Ben, from the top of the ladder, which reached
+only to the second story.
+
+"All right," called the one-armed man on the roof. "We have a rope here.
+We'll swing down to the ladder."
+
+The next thing Billie remembered she was surrounded by a crowd of her
+friends at the foot of the ladder. The girls were weeping and her Cousin
+Helen was giving vent to hysterical expressions of relief and
+thankfulness. The wet sand felt cool and soft to the parched soles of
+her bare feet, and she tried to smile; but she really had quite
+forgotten what it was all about. Some one close by her groaned and
+sobbed alternately, and a sickening feeling came over her when she saw a
+girl stretched on a blanket almost at her feet. The girl's hands were
+torn and bleeding and her pale blue silk kimono was covered with blood.
+Down one cheek was a long, bloody mark and to complete her grotesque and
+terrible aspect, at least a dozen little red rubber devils' horns stood
+upright all over her head.
+
+The next thing Billie remembered was huddling into her own beloved red
+motor car with the others, while some one took them somewhere, and all
+the time in her ears she heard a man's voice saying:
+
+"Where is that box of jewels?"
+
+And her own voice replied:
+
+"Under the ruins of the Shell Island Hotel."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.--NANCY'S HOME.
+
+
+Nancy's home was a favorite meeting place of the four friends. There was
+something very inviting about the old red brick house, with its
+low-ceiled, cheerful rooms and deep-silled windows.
+
+Nancy's family had been seafaring people for many generations, and the
+place was filled with curios from foreign countries: carved chests,
+swords with curved blades, ivory elephants, funny little cross-legged
+grinning gods, beautiful Japanese vases and Oriental rugs.
+
+In cool weather there seemed to be a perpetual piece of old driftwood
+crackling on the hearth, and there was nothing the girls enjoyed more
+than sitting in a row on the floor in front of that cheerful blaze while
+they drank tea from curious Japanese cups and nibbled some of Mrs.
+Brown's delicate cookies.
+
+Nancy's father was the very picture of a sea captain, sunburned, ruddy,
+eyes very blue and little side whiskers like an English Squire's. He had
+a hundred stories to tell of the sea, and Billie could have listened to
+him all day without tiring. Nancy's mother was a gay, cheerful little
+body who kept her house polished like a ship's cabin, and Nancy's
+brother, Merry, was the image of his father. He felt the call of the
+sea, too, as his father and grandfather had before him, but he was not
+to be the captain of a merchant ship. He intended to go to Annapolis.
+
+Three weeks had passed since the great fire at Shell Island, when, one
+Saturday afternoon, a red motor car wound its way in and out of the
+country vehicles on Main Street, stopped at the express office, where
+the young mistress of the car alighted for a moment, returning with a
+package, and then, with a reckless flourish, turned into lower Cliff
+Street and presently stopped in front of Nancy's house.
+
+Billie entered without ceremony, so intimate had she now become with the
+Brown household. Concealing the package in her gray ulster, she left it
+in the hall. Then, with the boyish freedom which seemed to characterize
+all her ways, pulling off her gray hat and gloves, she marched into the
+parlor.
+
+Nancy was huddled up on the settle doing the family darning, a Saturday
+task she loathed. Elinor was playing softly on the square piano between
+the front windows and Mary Price was reading a book.
+
+"I hope I don't disturb any one," said Billie, laughing as she burst
+into the room. "Everybody seems to be so busy here. I'm the only idle
+creature living to-day. Even Cousin Helen is at work."
+
+"I hope she is doing something more to her taste than this," said Nancy
+mournfully. "I'd rather dig for clams any day. Merry would wear out a
+sock made of steel chains."
+
+"Hark, a doleful voice from the tombs," cried Merry, who always made it
+an excuse to hunt for something in the parlor when Billie appeared.
+
+"It's the truth," complained Nancy. "If you would just keep still two
+minutes at a time, I wouldn't have to give up my Saturdays slaving for
+you."
+
+"'When I hear the music play, I can't keep right still,'" sang Merry,
+executing a double shuffle on the floor to a jig tune Elinor had struck
+up.
+
+"You'll have to dance to a different tune when you go to Annapolis,"
+cried Nancy. "And who'll do your darning there?"
+
+"Don't borrow trouble, Nancy," answered her brother. "Perform your daily
+task and cease to murmur. You'll be a professional grumbler like Belle
+Rogers if you keep on."
+
+"Do you know that she and her whole family are denouncing me as a sort
+of would-be murderer?" put in Billie. "All because I lost Ben and the
+rest of you at the Shell Island fire and took her into the wrong room."
+
+"I heard that she was an early Christian martyr who had come near to
+being burned at the stake," said Merry.
+
+"Yes," continued Billie, "she tells how I enticed her into the room, and
+then climbed up onto the roof and left her, so that she had to follow
+and she even blames me because she would slide down the rope first and
+cut her hands so that she will never be able to play the piano. I am
+very sorry for that, because she liked music, but it was her own fault."
+
+"It's really making a sort of split-up in the town," observed Elinor.
+"Mrs. Rogers and mamma almost had words on the subject the other day. As
+much as mamma will ever have words with any one. Mrs. Rogers tried to
+tell her that Belle was going one way and you made her go another, and
+all mamma said was, 'My dear Julia, I have heard the correct version of
+the story,' and swept away."
+
+"Exactly as you will do, Elinor, when you begin to wear long dresses,"
+said Nancy.
+
+"Oh, she can sweep without a train," cried Merry, giving a very good
+imitation of Elinor as he made for the door with his baseball bat and
+glove.
+
+"Now, don't be silly, Americus Brown," called Elinor after him.
+"Remember that you are to be a soldier of the nation some day, and
+you'll have to stop walking pigeon-toed, then, and keep your bow-legs
+straight and stop grinning. It will be very difficult, I fear."
+
+Merry shot a coffee bean at her with his thumb and forefinger as he left
+the room.
+
+"That boy will be the death of me," exclaimed Nancy. "He reminds me of
+our sailor weather-cock in the garden that waves his arms and legs and
+turns every time there is the slightest breeze."
+
+"He's a nice boy," said Billie, who always took Merry's side in the
+arguments. "But I am here this morning, as the preacher says, to ask
+your advice in a grave matter. Several grave matters, in fact."
+
+"Have you heard from Mr. Lafitte?" demanded the three girls in unison.
+
+"No," said Billie, "and it's been nearly three weeks since we sent my
+name and address. Perhaps there hasn't been time, but I should think
+they might have cabled, or something."
+
+"It only postpones the evil day of telling them the jewels were lost in
+the fire," observed Mary.
+
+Billie disappeared in the hall for a moment and returned with the
+package she had hidden in her ulster.
+
+"The jewels came back by express this morning," she said.
+
+"For heaven's sake!" cried the others.
+
+"I don't know whether to be glad or sorry," said Billie. "I am sure
+Pandora's box didn't have any more troubles locked inside of it than
+this one has. What shall I do with it now?"
+
+"Why don't you tell Miss Campbell all about it?" suggested Elinor, for
+the second time.
+
+"But, Elinor, it wouldn't be right," answered Billie. "Didn't we give
+the woman our word of honor, Nancy, that we would keep the box for her
+until she sent for it, and tell no one? Even you and Mary would not have
+known about it if you hadn't attacked Nancy like two wild Comanche
+Indians and knocked the box open."
+
+"Don't you think the woman was crazy, honestly now?" Elinor asked for
+the hundredth time. This was an old argument between the girls.
+
+"No, I don't," answered Billie emphatically.
+
+"She was much too beautiful and fascinating to be crazy," put in Nancy.
+
+"They are the craziest of all sometimes," said Elinor.
+
+"But to return to the jewels," interrupted Mary, the peacemaker. "Did
+the hotel people send them back?"
+
+"No, that's the queerest thing of all, and that's what I'm here for to
+tell you now. The hotel people wrote me a letter which came this
+morning, saying that it was believed that the fire had been started by
+thieves who robbed the safe and that they, therefore, were not
+responsible for things lost.
+
+"In the same mail came another very nice letter from a strange man named
+Johnston. He said the night of the fire he saw a man who was carrying
+this package faint dead away on the bridge. He believes now the man was
+one of the thieves. Anyway, he took him into his automobile and the
+thief must have come to and not known where he was, because he escaped
+somehow, probably to go back and look for the package, which Mr.
+Johnston has expressed to me."
+
+"Well, of all the strange stories!"
+
+"But the question is now, what to do with the thing?" continued Billie.
+
+If Billie had been a few years older, she would probably have gone
+straight to Miss Campbell, or to Miss Campbell's lawyer, Mr. Richard
+Butler, Elinor's uncle, for advice. The jewels would then have been
+stored in the bank for safe-keeping and proper means taken to find the
+owner. But it seemed to her that having given her word she must keep it,
+and hide the jewels herself in some safe place until she heard from Mr.
+Lafitte. After all, he might be on a journey somewhere, and they could
+only wait patiently.
+
+"Let's go and consult our guide, counsellor, and friend," suggested
+Mary.
+
+"Who?" asked the other girls, in some doubt.
+
+"Why, the motor car, of course. Isn't he the cheerfullest, finest friend
+in the world; always ready to give pleasure; always smiling and ruddy,
+and ready to come and go, stay still or move on--bless him?"
+
+"He is a dear," said Billie, pleased with this extravagant praise of her
+beloved car.
+
+The girls had come to consider "The Comet" almost as a living thing,
+like a pet horse or a favorite dog. They loved it as ardently as
+children love a pony which has borne them all on his back at one time
+around the garden.
+
+It was decided then to take a spin in the car and the four friends were
+soon in their accustomed places on the red leather seats.
+
+The scarlet car, full of young girls, was no longer an unusual sight in
+the town of West Haven, and people had ceased now to turn and stare at
+the "Motor Maids," as Captain Brown had christened them one morning when
+they had taken him for a drive in the automobile.
+
+Through the town they sped and out to the open road. The crisp autumn
+air nipped their cheeks and brought the color to their faces. As they
+passed Boulder Lane they looked curiously at the fisherman's house in
+the distance.
+
+"I am certain those men who took your car were smugglers," announced
+Nancy. "Father says there are lots of them."
+
+"Perhaps," said Billie, "and I am certain of another thing: that it was
+the same one-armed man who was on the roof of the hotel the night of the
+fire."
+
+"But there are lots of one-armed men in the world, child," replied
+Nancy.
+
+"Perhaps, but there was something familiar about him. And, besides, why
+did he ask me those questions about the girls at the hotel in the red
+automobile?"
+
+"And, 'curiser and curiser,' what did he want with the box of jewels?
+And how did he know we had them?" said Elinor.
+
+"I really couldn't say," answered Nancy. "Ask me something easier."
+
+Seeing nothing ahead of them in the road, Billie had let the car go full
+speed. It was what they all loved, even Mary Price, who had gradually
+got over a certain timidity she used to feel when the car shot through
+the air like a sky-rocket, and it was Mary Price now, grown unusually
+bold from familiarity with speeding, who suddenly jumped up and cried in
+her high, sweet voice:
+
+"I've got it! I've got it!"
+
+"Got what?" demanded the others.
+
+"Why, a place to put the jewels in, of course. Mother's safe."
+
+"But would she like us to use her safe?" asked Billie.
+
+"She won't mind. I'll tell her it's something of yours. She never uses
+it. We haven't anything to keep in it now," Mary added simply. "Father
+used it in his life time and Mother has just kept it since because we
+are always expecting to make lots of money, you know, and then we might
+need it. I know the combination, and we can go straight home and put
+them in. No one would ever think of looking for jewels in our little
+house, and they ought to be as safe there as any place in the world."
+
+"Mary, dear, you are a trump," exclaimed Billie. "It's a perfect idea."
+
+In another moment, they had faced about and were on their way back to
+town.
+
+"Dear old car," ejaculated Elinor, patting the red leather tenderly.
+"Mary's right, we couldn't get on without you. We consult you exactly as
+the ancients consulted oracles. I think all your cushions must be
+stuffed with good advice, instead of horse hair, and your big all-seeing
+eye is always on the lookout for danger----"
+
+"And his heart is true to his jolly crew," sang Nancy.
+
+"He is better than a horse," put in Mary, "because he never gets tired."
+
+"And when he's empty we fill him with gasoline, and he'll go ahead as
+fresh as ever," went on Billie.
+
+"And he always avoids broken glass and tacks in the road," Elinor was
+saying, when "bang!" went one of the rear tires with a report as loud as
+a pistol shot.
+
+The "jolly crew" could not restrain their ever-ready laughter at this
+disconcerting behavior on the part of "The Comet" just at the very
+moment when their boasts were loudest.
+
+"Oh, well," said Billie apologetically, "it's time we had a puncture.
+We've never had one yet. We'll take him to the garage and have him
+mended properly."
+
+"Chocolates, marshmallows, peanut brittle, and other candies, fresh and
+dee-lishus!" called a voice from behind the motor as they pulled into
+the garage.
+
+It was Percival Algernon St. Clair, wearing a most engaging smile on his
+rosy, good-natured face, as he tipped his boyish cap at Nancy in
+particular in the most approved grown-up fashion.
+
+"Have you any ice cream sodas, Percy-Algy?" demanded Nancy impudently.
+
+"I don't think the fountain's dry yet, Nancy, and we'll have a party, if
+you say so. The gang is close by. Shall I give the signal?"
+
+"I have no objections," said Nancy, "if the girls haven't."
+
+"Why should we?" answered Billie. "Isn't pineapple soda water my
+favorite beverage?"
+
+Percy put two fingers to his lips and gave three whistles, and, as if by
+magic, Ben Austen, Charlie Clay, and Merry Brown emerged from the shadow
+of a neighboring doorway.
+
+In spite of his theatrical name, his girlish complexion, and blond hair,
+Percy was a great favorite with his friends. He had received a spoiling
+from his doting and indulgent mother that would have turned many another
+boy into a selfish, vain egoist. But Percy had been saved from this
+wretched fate partly by his own frank and engaging disposition and
+partly by association with his three chums, Charlie, Ben, and Merry,
+wholesome, manly boys, who had never been mollycoddled in their lives.
+
+"Will some one carry this parcel then?" asked Billie, pulling the box of
+jewels from under the seat, and tearing the wrapping paper off of a
+corner as she did so.
+
+"I will," said Merry promptly, taking charge of the box. "Why, it's
+rather heavy," he observed, weighing it in his hand. "It must be full of
+gold nuggets."
+
+Billie was silent. She was beginning to be a little superstitious about
+that box, and she could have wished that the punctured tire and the soda
+water party, pleasant as was this last diversion, had not interrupted
+their plan to store the box in Mrs. Price's safe.
+
+But Billie enjoyed being with girls and boys of her own age so much that
+she soon forgot her doubts and joined in the gay conversation of the
+little company.
+
+On Saturday afternoons a crowd of High School boys and girls was always
+congregated around the soda water fountain in the West Haven Pharmacy,
+as it was called, and the place was filled with gay talk and laughter,
+when the Motor Maids and their friends pushed their way up to the marble
+counter, while Percy, who had more pocket money in a week than some of
+the others had in a year, paid for the checks.
+
+As luck would have it, Billie and Americus Brown had found places next
+to Belle Rogers, who, very daintily and delicately, though with some
+thoroughness, was consuming a maple-nut sundae.
+
+Merry pushed the box onto the counter while he plunged into a glass of
+chocolate soda water without even noticing that Belle had turned a
+scornful glance, first at him and then at the much soiled and
+travel-stained wrapper on the package. Then, suddenly, something very
+particular claimed her attention. Mary Price, who was standing around
+the curve of the counter, saw the whole thing and reported it later to
+the girls. Where Billie had torn the paper, the polished rosewood
+surface of the box, with its silver mounting, was plainly visible. Belle
+gave one long, astonished stare of recognition.
+
+"After we leave this package at Mary's, I invite all of you to take a
+ride in the motor," Billie was saying to Merry Brown. "Do you think
+eight can sit where five are in the habit of sitting?"
+
+"One seat will be big enough for the midgets,"--a nickname given to Mary
+and Charlie,--Merry answered. "One of us can sit on the floor and the
+other four can squeeze onto the back seat. The chauffeur is the only
+person who must have plenty of room."
+
+"Can't you move up and give us a little room?" interrupted Nancy,
+pushing her way between her brother and his neighbor, while Percy stood
+patiently by with two glasses of soda water.
+
+Without meaning it, she had jostled Belle Rogers. The two girls turned
+and faced each other.
+
+"How do you do, Belle? Are you quite well again?" asked Nancy politely,
+but with a look in her eyes which meant mischief.
+
+Belle had not been back to school since the fire.
+
+"Miss Brown," said Belle, bowing stiffly.
+
+"How well your hair stays in curl this foggy weather, Belle," continued
+Nancy, in a high, pleasant voice, which could be heard by all the boys
+and girls at the counter. "You must put it up almost every night now,
+don't you?"
+
+"Nancy!" expostulated Billie, as Belle sailed from the drug store,
+followed by several of her loyal friends.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.--AT THE SIGN OF THE BLUE TEA POT.
+
+
+Billie was thankful when they had got the box of jewels safely back into
+the motor car and were on their way at last to Mary's home.
+
+Mary and her mother lived in a pretty old house facing the public
+square, and it was fortunate that Mrs. Price's old home was so located.
+In order to support herself and her little daughter, the young widow had
+transformed the lower floor into a tea room and shop. A little blue
+board hung from the portico, which bore the inscription in old English
+script, "At Ye Signe of Ye Blue Tea Pot." A large bulletin on the front
+door announced that tea and sandwiches of all varieties could be had
+within; also that luncheons were prepared for pleasure parties and
+journeys and that numerous dainty and pretty articles, made by hand,
+were there for sale.
+
+The inscription might have stated further that the plucky mistress of
+the little shop was as dainty and pretty as any of the articles for sale
+on the counter.
+
+As the soda water fountain was the Saturday afternoon meeting place of
+the boys and girls of West Haven, so the Sign of the Blue Tea Pot
+attracted the older crowd. It had seemed a bold undertaking for the
+widow to mortgage her home and put all the money in the chintz hangings
+and wicker furniture of those two charming tea rooms. Her old friends,
+Mr. Butler and Captain Brown, had strongly advised against it, but her
+venture had been a success from the first, although a mortgage still
+hung over the place like a black cloud and small debts would accumulate
+every time she got a little ahead.
+
+When the red motor with its load of young people drew up at the door of
+Mary's home, the buzz of conversation from inside reached them out in
+the street.
+
+Mary's mother appeared for a moment in the doorway, and smiled at them.
+
+"She's as beautiful as an angel," thought Billie, who never told how
+often she had yearned for a real mother of her very own as other girls
+had.
+
+Could any one else have looked so charming in a perfectly plain homemade
+gray chambray dress, with a white muslin fichu, and little white apron
+to set it off?
+
+"Won't you come in and have some tea and cake, children?" Mrs. Price
+called to the young people, while she put an arm around Mary and shook
+hands with Billie, who had followed her friend to the front door with
+the troublesome box.
+
+"No, thank you, Mrs. Price," replied Billie, as spokesman of the party.
+"I only came to ask a favor," she added, in a lower voice. "Would you
+let me keep this box in your safe for a while? I have no place, I
+mean----" Billie hesitated and blushed. Of all things, she detested
+subterfuge, and yet here she was making all sorts of lame excuses
+instead of saying frankly that she was keeping the box for a friend.
+
+"You mean the old safe upstairs?" asked Mrs. Price, somewhat astonished.
+
+"Yes, mother," put in Mary. "I told Billie I knew you wouldn't mind
+locking this box up for her for a while."
+
+"Certainly, dear, you are welcome to hide anything in it you like. Mary
+knows the combination better than I do. I always have to look it up in
+one of Captain Price's old note books. I am sorry you won't have some
+tea and cake, but I suppose you are all off for a spin this afternoon.
+It has done Mary more good than I can tell you, your motor car. The
+child is always studying so hard to hurry up and be a teacher and take
+care of her old mother, so she says."
+
+"Only a few years more, Mother, and you shall never have to work again,"
+said Mary. "Some day I shall be the Principal of West Haven High School,
+when Miss Gray gets too old to work----"
+
+"What's this?" exclaimed Miss Gray herself, at the door. She had been
+drinking tea inside with some friends. "Who's going to lay me on the
+shelf before my time?"
+
+"Mary intends to step into your shoes, Miss Gray," laughed Mrs. Price.
+"Look out for her. She is a dangerous rival. She means to pay off all
+our mortgages and things, and provide for her mother's old age."
+
+Miss Gray pinched Mary's cheek.
+
+"Yes," insisted Mary stoutly, "all I want is money, money, money."
+
+The Principal patted the young girl's cheek kindly.
+
+"Don't be too mad about it, child. It won't buy everything, you know."
+
+It was only an idle speech of Mary's but you all know how much meaning
+can sometimes be given to words spoken thoughtlessly and the day was to
+come when Mary was to regret very deeply having used those words.
+
+All this time Billie had been standing quietly waiting for the moment
+when they could leave the older people and consign the box to the iron
+safe upstairs.
+
+But before they could get away the tea room began to empty itself.
+Billie's Cousin Helen appeared in the doorway, with Mrs. Butler, looking
+like Elinor grown middle-aged, the beautiful aquiline nose slightly more
+pronounced, the blue eyes a little faded, but the same erect carriage
+which made her look an inch or more taller than the other women.
+
+Mme. Alta, the music teacher, was there with Miss Gray. She was a fierce
+looking, dark-haired woman, her two upper teeth protruding over her
+lower lip like the tusks of a walrus, giving her a cruel animal
+expression. Mrs. Rogers, Belle's mother, a small faded, intensely
+nervous little woman, joined the group, followed by Percival Algernon
+St. Clair's doting parent, "the Widow St. Clair," as she was known, a
+charming, plump, pretty woman, as good-natured as she was comfortably
+self-indulgent.
+
+"Why, Wilhelmina, my darling, what is that large package you are
+carrying?" demanded Miss Campbell anxiously. "Has your papa sent you a
+present?"
+
+"Oh, no, just--just a package of things I was going to leave here. We
+are going motoring for a while. You don't mind, do you Cousin Helen?"
+
+"No, my child, as long as you don't go too fast. But do put down that
+box. You will injure yourself carrying it so long. Why don't you put it
+in the motor? Why do you leave it here?"
+
+"Oh, it isn't mine," said Billie.
+
+Mrs. Price looked up at this.
+
+"But I thought----" she commenced, when Mary pressed her hand.
+
+"I mean I am keeping it for some one," went on Billie lamely.
+
+"My dear Miss Campbell," put in Miss Gray--and Billie thanked her for
+the intervention--"it is a Blue Bird secret, you may depend upon it. You
+do not know school girls as well as I do."
+
+"It ees a ver-ry eenter-resting looking package," here remarked Mme.
+Alta. "It appears to be a ver-ry handsome box, as I can plainly see by
+one corner-r which protrudes. You perhaps use if for your club's
+segrets, eh?"
+
+Billie turned the box guiltily around. She had not noticed that the torn
+end was in view.
+
+Mme. Alta looked at her unnecessarily hard, Billie thought. She had
+never liked the strange woman and had preferred not to take piano
+lessons of her, after one glance at those hard, cruel eyes and the
+fierce walrus teeth.
+
+"I'm sure it contains much more beautiful and interesting things than
+stupid secrets," exclaimed good-natured, pretty Mrs. St. Clair, who
+disliked to see anybody around her uncomfortable and Billie looked very
+uncomfortable. "Now, dear," she continued, giving Billie a little
+squeeze, "do go and hide your box, if you like. It's not fair to quiz
+young girls about their secrets, any more than it is to quiz older
+people," and she pushed Billie gently into the hall. Mary quickly
+followed and the two girls ran upstairs, glad to get away from the group
+of inquisitive ladies, and infinitely relieved to consign the unlucky
+box into the small safe in the hall closet.
+
+"What a joy to be rid of the thing," exclaimed Billie, as they shoved
+the box inside, turned the combination lock, and fled downstairs.
+
+"I feel as if we need a good dose of fresh air, Mary, to revive us after
+that inquisition," she added, as they hurried past the company of tea
+drinkers, who still lingered chatting in the doorway, and joined the
+others in the motor car.
+
+"Percival, my son," called Mrs. St. Clair, "don't lean out so far. You
+might fall and break your nose. Oh, oh, my precious boy, they'll kill
+him!" she shrieked, as Charlie and Merry seized him by the arms and
+pretended to pitch him overboard.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.--RUMORS AT SCHOOL.
+
+
+West Haven High School, Miss Gray, the Principal, had often said, had
+all the merits of a public and private school combined. It was more
+thorough than a private school and the teachers were more in touch with
+the pupils than is usual at a public school. Miss Gray herself was
+deeply interested in the welfare of her girls and studied carefully the
+ability and temperament of each one.
+
+When, therefore, a strange and very terrible complaint was made to her
+one morning about one of her school girls, she was too shocked to reason
+intelligently about it, and ended by dismissing the complainants quietly
+from her private office until she sent for them again.
+
+Exactly what the complaint was no one knew except those who had made it.
+It was kept a careful secret. But in school rumors arise in the most
+subtle way. They are whispered about behind doors at recess; written on
+the margins of text books in class and hastily rubbed out; vaguely
+hinted at here and there until they spread from room to room and class
+to class and gradually the whole school is bursting with the news. And
+the poor victim may all this time be entirely unconscious that she is
+the very centre of a seething, boiling pot of gossip.
+
+This is how the present rumor started in West Haven High School:
+
+One afternoon when the last gong had sounded the sophomore class
+gathered in the locker room to put on their coats and hats. The lockers
+were only so in name. There had never been any keys to them, because
+there had never been any need to keep belongings under lock and key in
+West Haven High School, where most of the pupils had known each other
+all their lives.
+
+On this particular afternoon, every incident of which our four friends
+will remember as long as they live, Nancy was prinking at the glass, as
+usual; Elinor and Billie, with their heads bent over an automobile map,
+were making plans for a motor trip, and Mary Price was studying her
+Latin for the next day. It was that lingering, lazy time after school is
+over, which all school girls know.
+
+Fannie Alta hurried into the room and flung open the door of her locker,
+next to that of Belle Rogers, who was at that moment engaged in looking
+at herself in her own private mirror, hung on the inside of her locker
+door.
+
+"Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" exclaimed Fannie Alta, with a very excited and
+strange manner. "I have lost something. Something which my mamma gave me
+to keep for her. What shall I do? What shall I do?"
+
+"Why, what was it, Fannie?" asked the other girls, gathering around her
+sympathetically. "Let us help you find it."
+
+"Oh, oh, it is terrible!" cried the young Spanish girl, wringing her
+hands and weeping in her handkerchief alternately. "What shall I do?
+What shall I do?"
+
+"Was it money you lost?" asked Billie, in her usual rather abrupt
+manner.
+
+"Yes, yes; how did you know?"
+
+"I didn't know, I guessed," answered Billie.
+
+"Did you leave it in your locker?" some one else asked.
+
+"Yes, yes. I left it there at noon to-day. Twenty dollars my mamma gave
+to me to keep for her. Oh, is it not terrible? She will eat me with her
+anger."
+
+Billie could hardly keep the corners of her mouth from curving with an
+irrepressible smile when she remembered those two front tusks of Mme.
+Alta's, which seemed to be uncovered, ready for work at any moment.
+
+"Are you sure it is not there still?" asked Elinor quietly. "I happened
+to look up when you came into the room. You simply flung open your
+locker door and then began to cry. Why don't you look in your pockets
+before you decide that you have lost the money?"
+
+Fannie flashed an angry glance at Elinor.
+
+"How did you know that I had not looked before; that I have not looked
+twice, many times?"
+
+"I didn't," answered Elinor. "Have you?"
+
+Fannie did not reply and from that moment she and Elinor disliked each
+other intensely.
+
+Then the girls began looking carefully about the room.
+
+"I feel as if I had it hidden about me," said Nancy, giggling, as she
+helped in the search.
+
+The others laughed, too, which somewhat relieved the situation. Nothing
+is more uncomfortable than for money to be lost mysteriously in a
+company of people.
+
+"We do look as guilty as the forty thieves," ejaculated Rosomond McLane,
+a fat, funny girl, who was popular with the whole class.
+
+No one was more active in the search than Belle Rogers. She shook
+Fannie's text books violently and scattered the papers about, to
+Fannie's intense annoyance. She felt in Fannie's pockets, examined the
+lining of her hat, and made herself so officious and numerous that
+Fannie herself exclaimed with much irritation:
+
+"Please do not, Belle. You know it is not there."
+
+Only Elinor sat quietly on the window sill watching the search, with
+just the faintest shadow of scornful incredulity on her handsome face.
+
+"Elinor Butler, do you believe I have been telling a falsehood?" Fannie
+finally exclaimed in exasperation.
+
+"What a little spitfire you are, Fannie," answered Elinor. "Just because
+I don't choose to grovel on the floor looking for your money. I can help
+you quite as much by thinking, and I am thinking very hard, I can assure
+you."
+
+At last the search was abandoned. The pocketbook containing the money
+could not be found, and the young girls, swinging their book
+straps,--bags were too childish for High School girls,--strolled up the
+street in groups discussing the strange disappearance of Fannie's twenty
+dollars.
+
+In the meantime, the Motor Maids, laughing and talking together, tossed
+their books into the red car and then climbed in themselves. Somehow,
+Fannie's loss did not seem very real. Billie had cranked up the machine
+and was about to back out when Fannie's voice called from the locker
+room:
+
+"Wait! Stop!"
+
+"Well, you see we haven't gone yet," answered Elinor severely.
+
+"Elinor, you are so hard on Fannie Alta. I'm sorry for her," said Mary.
+"Mother wouldn't bite me if I lost twenty dollars, but I'd hate to lose
+it just the same."
+
+"I didn't mean to be hard on her," answered Elinor, "but my instincts
+tell me not to trust her."
+
+"When did they tell you, Elinor?" laughed Billie.
+
+Elinor's instincts were a great joke to her three devoted friends. But
+the appearance of Fannie running breathlessly, with Belle following at a
+dignified pace, interrupted Elinor's invariable reply to jests about her
+instincts: "You know they are never wrong."
+
+"What is the matter now, Fannie?" asked Billie, who was standing in the
+front of her car, her arms folded, like a captain on the hurricane deck
+of his ship.
+
+[Illustration: "Get out of the road," cried Billie, backing recklessly
+out of the shed and whizzing out of the gate at full speed.]
+
+"Would you mind----" Fannie stammered. "I mean--I think I have a right
+to ask--I want you to look in your pockets. I believe----" she
+continued, getting bolder every moment. "I am sure that one of you will
+find my pocketbook----"
+
+Billie's frank, candid face flushed as scarlet as her motor car, while
+the color left Elinor's cheeks as white as death. Nancy gave a little
+frightened giggle, and Mary Price neither flushed nor turned white, but
+looked quietly on.
+
+"Really, Fannie," spoke Elinor, "you are not in the lawless South
+American country you came from, whatever it is. You are among decent
+people, not thieves, and perhaps you had better remember that hereafter.
+Start on, Billie," she commanded, sitting as erect as a queen at her own
+coronation.
+
+"But I insist!" screamed Fannie.
+
+"She has a right," put in Belle.
+
+"Get out of the road," cried Billie, backing recklessly out of the shed,
+turning with a wide, flourishing curve and whizzing out of the gate at
+full speed.
+
+"Well, of all the insolence," cried Elinor. "What does she mean and how
+does she dare----" her voice choked with indignation.
+
+"Don't you think it was Belle Rogers who put her up to it out of
+revenge?" suggested Mary.
+
+"If it was, I can't see what she had to gain by it," said Billie.
+"Elinor sailed into them and we nearly sailed over them. It seems to me
+we had a good deal the best of it."
+
+Billie dropped the girls at their homes, as she was in the habit of
+doing every afternoon after school, and whirled up Cliff Street to the
+old Campbell homestead. On the way she passed Belle Rogers, who also
+lived in that fashionable section, but she did not ask her to get in and
+ride up the hill. Billie had a frank, open nature, but with her whole
+soul she distrusted that pink and white doll-baby face and those
+innocent china blue eyes.
+
+In the meantime Mary had taken off her rather threadbare little jacket
+and hung it in the closet. Her mother was resting on the couch. She
+looked pale and tired that day, and Mary walked softly so as not to
+disturb her. Slipping off her mittens, she thrust them into her coat
+pocket. Her fingers encountered something and she pulled out a flat,
+foreign-looking pocketbook. Mary's face turned white and she leaned
+against the wall of the closet and closed her eyes.
+
+"They must have put it in my pocket," she whispered. "What shall I do?"
+
+"Mary, dearest," called her mother.
+
+"Yes, mother," she answered, quietly slipping the purse into the pocket
+again. "I won't tell her now," she thought. "She is worried enough
+already." And when presently she kissed her mother, no one could have
+told that the young girl was more frightened than she had ever been in
+all her lifetime.
+
+The next morning Mary hurried to school without waiting for Billie and
+her car. She had something to study, she said. But Fannie was there
+before her, waiting in the locker room. Mary tried to calm her beating
+heart as she looked steadily at the other girl. Then, with a sudden
+resolution, she marched straight up to Fannie, and thrust the pocketbook
+into her hand.
+
+"You put this in my pocket," she said. "I don't know what you have
+against me, or what I ever did to you, but if you ever do it again, I
+shall go straight to Miss Gray."
+
+Fannie took the pocketbook without a word, and after that a very
+different version of the story got out. Finally it reached Miss Gray's
+ears.
+
+But the most serious thing of all was that things began disappearing
+every day out of the girls' lockers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.--SEVEN LEAGUE ISLAND.
+
+
+"Pile in any old way and make yourselves as comfy as you can," said
+Billie, from the chauffeur's seat, while seven boys and girls packed
+themselves into "The Comet" as tightly as sardines in a box.
+
+"Ben, I look to you to take good care of my girls," called Miss Helen
+Campbell, from the front door steps of her home. "And all of you promise
+me three things: Don't go too fast; don't stay too late, and don't go
+too far."
+
+"We promise," came eight voices in a chorus.
+
+"Good-by, Cousin Helen, dearest," called Billie, kissing her hand
+affectionately to the little lady who was fast coming to fill an aching
+void in Billie's heart.
+
+"Good-by, Miss Campbell," called the others, while she smiled and bowed
+and waved her handkerchief like a favorite actress before an
+enthusiastic audience.
+
+What a difference the young people had made in her life, she thought, as
+the carload of boys and girls flashed down the street and the sound of
+their talk and laughter, growing fainter and fainter, floated back to
+her like a pleasant memory.
+
+It was a real seaside October day. Nothing could have been bluer than
+the bay, unless it was the sky. A warm, dry land breeze swept over the
+moors about West Haven. Wild asters and golden rod colored the roadside,
+and the stillness of Indian summer pervaded the whole country.
+
+"There was no need of the top to-day," observed Billie, looking up at
+the cloudless sky. "I am glad we decided not to put it on. We might as
+well have left the rugs and wraps behind, too. They take up room and
+won't be used, I am certain."
+
+"I hope not," answered Ben. "I see only one cloud on the horizon and
+that's no larger than a man's hand; but clouds do grow."
+
+"Don't borrow trouble, Rain-in-the-Face," exclaimed Percy. "The last
+time you looked into the future we had a fire."
+
+"All right, dummy," answered his friend. "I am not predicting anything.
+I only mentioned the possibilities of a very small cloud. And the night
+of the Shell Island fire I said what certainly proved to be perfectly
+true--that the hotel was a regular fire trap."
+
+"Are you really a good weather prophet, Ben?" asked Billie anxiously.
+She did not like to have her parties turn out disastrously.
+
+"He--he's the poorest ever," cried Merry.
+
+"Don't go on what he says, Billie," put in Percy. "The last camping trip
+we went on, he predicted fair weather and it rained for a week."
+
+"Well, just to prove that I know what I'm talking about," cried Ben, "I
+predict that it rains before night."
+
+This unpopular prophecy was greeted by hoots of derision from the
+others.
+
+"What makes you think so, Ben?" asked Elinor. "It's as clear as a bell
+now."
+
+"Certain signs," he answered.
+
+"Now, Ben Austen," ejaculated Nancy. "Don't go spoil our day before it's
+begun. You know just as well as I do that it's Indian summer, and it
+never rains in Indian summer."
+
+"Never, Miss Nancy-Bell?" repeated Ben, smiling. He minded as little
+being teased by his friends as a big, good-natured dog minds the antics
+of a lot of puppies.
+
+"All right, Big Injun Ben," said Merry, "let it rain before night. We've
+got a good many hours to enjoy ourselves in and get home, too, before
+dark. We'll be at the ferry-boat landing in an hour, and if we're lucky
+enough to catch the boat, we'll reach Seven League Island by eleven
+o'clock. That will give us plenty of time to eat everything in sight,
+see Smugglers' Cave, and all the other sights, and get home by seven
+o'clock."
+
+"Of course, we can," replied Ben. "I was only teasing Percival Algernon
+St. Clair, because he hates the rain worse than poison. I never saw a
+finer day in my life."
+
+"Thank goodness!" exclaimed Billie, in tones of relief. She really had
+great faith in Ben's judgment about most things.
+
+Seven League Island, a rocky strip of land some twenty-one miles long,
+was one of the most romantic places in the vicinity of West Haven. It
+was three miles from the mainland and, during the season when the summer
+resorts and camps which clustered on its shores were open, several
+ferry-boats carried passengers back and forth from the mainland to the
+island. In winter the place was almost deserted. The land was too poor
+for farming and few people cared to remain on that lonely, mournful
+island, where, in stormy weather, the waves thundered through the caves
+in the cliffs, and the wind in the pine trees made a mournful sound like
+the wail of a lost soul.
+
+To-day, however, it was as serene and smiling as the Islands of the
+Blest. The southwest wind stirred the pine needles gently, making a
+pleasant quiet song. The tiny waves, as they lapped the sides of the
+ferry, gave out a "cloop, cloop" sound that still water makes against
+the bow of a canoe.
+
+"What time does the last ferry go back, Captain?" asked Ben, of the old
+ferryman, whose face was as weather beaten and seamed as the hide of a
+hippopotamus.
+
+"Six, in good weather."
+
+"What time in bad?"
+
+"Depends on the weather," answered the old man briefly.
+
+"How many other ferry stations are there?" asked Charlie.
+
+"Three."
+
+"Good," exclaimed happy-go-lucky Americus Brown. "We'll take the one
+that's nearest when the time comes to go back and ride before the wind,
+and beat the rain and put old Ben out of business as a weather prophet."
+
+The ferryman said nothing, but his small eyes twinkled with amusement.
+
+They were the only passengers on the boat that trip, and as the motor
+whirled up the hard-beaten road from the ferry landing, they noticed
+that the bungalows and summer cottages along the shore were closed for
+the season.
+
+"It's because it's so hard to get food," Percy explained. He had once
+visited some friends at Flag Point, the first settlement, and was to be
+their guide this morning to the great cave, which had been used, it was
+said, in the days when smugglers were common in the land.
+
+The others were familiar only with the shore, where they had come on
+bathing and fishing excursions, and the boys and girls were eager to
+explore the rocky caverns, the fort, the little inlets, where pirates
+were supposed to have anchored their ships, and above all the smugglers'
+cave, which Percy told them was a great vaulted chamber in the rocks,
+with an entrance no broader than a narrow door.
+
+"Take the road going to the right," called Percy, as Billie paused at
+the top of the cliff for directions. "It's the best one for motoring and
+it goes past the old rifle-pit where we can eat lunch. We can leave the
+car there and climb down to the caves afterwards."
+
+"The Comet" turned obediently to the right and shot down the
+interminable expanse of empty white road, like a shooting star on the
+milky way.
+
+Even Mary, who had been pale and silent all morning, regained her
+spirits on that glorious ride, when Merry, with head thrown back, began
+to sing:
+
+  "The sailor's wife the sailor's star shall be,
+  Yo-ho, yo-ho-ho, yo-ho, yo-ho-ho!"
+
+and she joined in the chorus with the others, her clear, sweet voice
+piping out like the notes of a field lark in a chorus of birds.
+
+At last Billie pulled up at the side of the road under a cliff, on top
+of which was an old grass-grown fort used during the Indian wars.
+
+"This must be it," she said. "It's peaceful enough looking now to make a
+good picnicing ground, but I don't suppose it was much of a picnic for
+the people who built it to shoot Indians from."
+
+"Nor much of a picnic for the Indians, either," said Ben, helping Billie
+out while Charlie Clay assisted the other girls to the ground and Percy
+and Merry unstrapped the luncheon hamper.
+
+"Let's eat up high," suggested Billie. "That is, if you can carry the
+basket up that steep incline."
+
+"The pack mules are here for that work," said Ben, pointing to Merry and
+Percy. "Charlie, you bring the rugs for the ladies to sit on and I'll
+help the ladies."
+
+"Will you listen to Nervy Nat," cried Percy, as he obediently shouldered
+his end of the luncheon hamper and followed Merry up the hill.
+
+How they laughed and scrambled and shoved as they clambered up the
+pebbly path. Once Mary, with a shrill cry, slipped and stumbled back on
+Nancy who fell against Charlie, who, in his turn, tumbled against Ben,
+and that pillar of strength, grasping a branch of a pine tree with each
+hand, supported the whole human weight without a tremor.
+
+It was like picnicing in the tops of the trees, when they finally spread
+the cloth in the grass-grown enclosure of the fort, and beyond them
+stretched the entire expanse of the ocean glimmering blue in the
+sunshine, with an occasional ship outlined on the horizon.
+
+"I hope the ginger ale is still cold," cried Merry.
+
+"And the mayonnaise hasn't melted," said Nancy.
+
+"What, nothing to eat but victuals and drink?" exclaimed Percy.
+
+When they had waded through the piles of sandwiches and pyramids of
+cake, and drained the last drop of ginger ale, silent Charlie, who had
+an enormous appetite, remarked:
+
+"How hungry this piney-salty combination does make a fellow!"
+
+"Why, Charlie," said Billie, "don't say you are still hungry. You remind
+me of the elephant in Merry's song:
+
+  "'The elephant ate all night,
+  The elephant ate all day,
+  And feed as they would, as much as they could,
+  The cry was still more hay.'"
+
+Charlie pulled out his mouth organ and began to play such a rollicking
+dance tune that the boys and girls, almost before they knew it, were
+two-stepping over the grass as madly as a lot of wild young colts. Then
+Charlie, seizing Mary about the waist and still playing vigorously on
+his "harp," as it was called in that section, joined the dancers
+himself.
+
+If they had not all of them been so absorbed in executing the Dutch
+twirl, or racing over the ground like Cossack dancers on the Russian
+Steppes, they would have been somewhat disturbed to have seen a man
+peering down at them from the top of a mound. He had crawled up the
+steep incline and was lying flat on his stomach in the tall grass. His
+face is familiar enough to us by now, for he had only one eye, but that
+one, like the eye of the three mythological witches, gleamed brilliantly
+and wickedly and nothing escaped its range. He smiled as if he rather
+enjoyed watching the dancers, and especially his one wicked eye followed
+the movements of Ben and Charlie and Billie Campbell. Presently when the
+whirling couples had tumbled breathlessly on the grass, fanning
+themselves with their hats and Ben had called out: "We'd better be
+getting along now," the man slipped away as silently as a snake and
+disappeared somewhere below.
+
+"To the caves," cried Percy, as they gathered up the rugs and cushions
+and hastened down the cliff to the motor.
+
+"I suppose it's safe to leave 'The Comet' here without any one to look
+after him," Billie had observed, and the others had agreed that it was.
+
+"As safe as on any other desert island," Ben had answered.
+
+It seemed impossible that anything could happen in that lonely, quiet
+place, which was like a deserted paradise to the girls and boys that
+beautiful afternoon. There was nothing about the locality or the weather
+to arouse uncomfortable suspicions. The patch of sky, which was revealed
+to them just overhead between the tall, straight pine trees, was like a
+beautiful deep blue canopy. Even the watchful Ben could not have told
+that the cloud, so short a time ago no larger than a man's hand, now
+stretched itself across the horizon in a long, thick line of black.
+
+"The caves are the most fun of all," said Percy, leading the way to the
+cliffs overlooking the ocean. "There are dozens of them, some little and
+some very large. The lower ones fill up at high tide, but the upper ones
+are safe enough."
+
+The cliff was honeycombed with small rocky chambers, and as they
+clambered, Indian file, along the narrow path which nature had so
+thoughtfully cut in the rocks they heard the boom of the incoming tide
+thundering through the caves on the beach.
+
+"I suppose people could live in these little caverns," Percy continued,
+"if it wasn't so all-fired lonely and inconvenient; but wait until you
+see Smugglers' Cave. It has as many natural conveniences as a real house
+built by human beings."
+
+"Here it is," he cried at last, to the others who had run all the way
+down a steep embankment to see this romantic place.
+
+Certainly it might well have been a favorite spot for smugglers and
+robbers on the high seas. Too high for the tide to reach and still well
+hidden from above by a thick growth of scrubby pine and oak trees, the
+cave was as secret and safe a place as could be imagined. Rock-hewn
+steps led up from the smooth pebbly beach below and the curve of the
+coast made a charming little haven for ships and a natural landing place
+for small boats. The eight friends stood in a row on the beach.
+
+"This is called 'Pirates' Cove,' you know," went on Percy. "They say the
+pirates used to anchor their ships in this little haven and come ashore
+and have pirate tea parties on the beach."
+
+"Here comes a sea rover now," called Merry, scanning the entrance to the
+harbor where a ship could be seen outlined against the blue.
+
+"Oh, she isn't coming this way, Old Tar," answered Percy. "It's too late
+in the season, for yachts and ships rarely come in here unless there is
+a storm. There's nothing to come for and it takes them out of their
+course."
+
+"She's headed this way," continued Merry, not taking any notice of
+Percy's interruption, while he scanned the ship with his far-seeing
+sailor's eyes. "She's a brigantine, and she's making for this cove."
+
+"Oh, well, what of it?" put in Billie. "Perhaps she is coming here for
+the rest cure. But she doesn't interest me half as much as Smugglers'
+Cave. Let's not waste any more time here," and she ran up the steps,
+followed by the others.
+
+The entrance to the cave had been as cleverly concealed as if nature had
+conspired with the outlaws to provide them with a safe hiding place for
+their contraband goods. The steps appeared to lead to nothing more than
+a blank wall, but, following Percy around the edge of an enormous rock
+which, in ages past must have slipped its fastenings above, they
+presently came to a narrow opening between the rock and the side of the
+cave, just large enough for a man to go through.
+
+"The smugglers must have had to do up their bales of silk pretty flat to
+get them through here," said Ben, measuring the opening with his
+handkerchief, as he stooped to keep from bumping his head on the top.
+
+"How beautiful! How wonderful!" cried the four girls, when their eyes
+had become used to the change from the brilliant sunlight outside to the
+semi-twilight of the great vaulted chamber where they now found
+themselves.
+
+"Now, I'll show you what a jim-dandy architect nature is," said Percy.
+"Here's the bathroom. No hot water, of course, but a perfectly good tub
+and cold water always on tap."
+
+He pointed out a natural basin, probably worn in the rocks by the
+constant dripping of water from a spring that trickled down the wall of
+the cave.
+
+"Here's the bedroom, that nice, comfortable shelf over there. Here's
+your easy chair," he continued, showing them a curious formation of
+rocks really resembling a big armchair with a high back.
+
+"It's a rocky chair and not a rocking chair," observed Charlie, taking a
+seat and rising quite suddenly. "Nature is as mischievous as a little
+boy if she is a good architect. Look at this," and he pointed to a very
+sharp, almost needle-like, piece of stone in one corner of the seat.
+
+The others laughed gayly as they hurried after Percy and a hundred
+reverberating echoes startled them into silence.
+
+"And now, ladies and gentlemen, I have saved the most interesting sight
+for the last. You are about to see the store-room of the smugglers." He
+led the way down two steps into another chamber.
+
+"By Jove!" he cried suddenly and stopped short.
+
+"What is it?" exclaimed the others, peering over his shoulder into the
+darkness.
+
+"Don't you see?" he said, in a low voice. "They are still using it for a
+store-room."
+
+They blinked their eyes with amazement, when presently there loomed up
+in the shadows a pile of long, flat packing boxes.
+
+Ben lit a candle, which he had thoughtfully brought along in his coat
+pocket, and they examined the boxes, which crowded one entire end of the
+smugglers' store-room.
+
+"Will you look at this?" he called. "Elinor, you are in this."
+
+Ben held the candle high and pointed to a sign on the nearest box, which
+read: "Automobile Supplies--Butler Brothers--West Haven----"
+
+"Why," cried Elinor, "you surely don't suppose Uncle Tom and Uncle
+Richard could be storing their goods here, do you?"
+
+No one answered her for a moment. Their thoughts were busy searching for
+an explanation to this strange discovery.
+
+"Elinor," said Mary presently, "don't you remember what those men who
+borrowed Billie's automobile said about killing every Butler in the
+county who interfered?"
+
+"Yes," said Elinor, in a frightened voice, "but what could these boxes
+have to do with it?"
+
+"They may have a great deal," said Ben. "Those men are probably
+smuggling your uncles' auto supplies out of the country. The boxes are
+smuggled up to this cave by degrees, I suppose, and then loaded on some
+ship when they have got enough to make it worth while. And, if it's the
+same man we had dealings with that night, he is a pretty desperate kind
+of an individual."
+
+"I don't want any more fights," exclaimed Billie. "Both of those men
+carried pistols and knives; I suppose all first-class smugglers do, but
+I don't propose that my party is going to be ruined by any bloodshed. It
+is getting late, and we had better be going."
+
+They quite agreed with Billie, although the boys would have liked to
+linger in the Smugglers' Cave for a while.
+
+The outer air seemed very warm and oppressive after the cold damp
+atmosphere of the cave. They blinked their eyes and shivered as they
+hurried along the path which led to the road and in the change from dark
+to light they did not at first notice that the sun was hidden by a great
+cloud, as black as ink, which stretched from horizon to horizon. A hot,
+heavy wind stirred the pine needles and that sense of impending trouble
+which always comes before a great storm sobered the spirits of the boys
+and girls.
+
+Nobody spoke of the cloud. It seemed to be a question of honor with them
+not to mention it, but they hurried on silently, and in a few minutes
+reached the automobile.
+
+With a sigh of relief, the four girls were about to jump in, while Ben
+cranked up, when suddenly Nancy gave a little, pent-up scream.
+
+"Look!" she cried, pointing to a piece of paper stuck on the cushion of
+the back seat.
+
+This message was printed with a lead pencil on the paper:
+
+"He laughs best who laughs last."
+
+"It was that man," said Billie, examining the tires ruefully, each one
+of which had been slashed with a sharp knife.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.--THE STORM.
+
+
+"Billie, can you put on new tires?" demanded Ben, somewhat anxiously,
+making a mental determination to learn all about the mechanism of motor
+cars before he went on another motor trip.
+
+The others stood back rather helplessly. Merry, especially, felt stupid
+and uncomfortable in having to stand aside and let a girl do all the
+work.
+
+"Of course, I can," replied Billie, trying to speak cheerfully, as a low
+cannonading of thunder rumbled in the distance. "I have done it dozens
+of times, only it will take time, of course. The tools are under the
+seat. Hustle up, everybody. Charlie, you get the new tires. Ben, you
+help me."
+
+In a few moments Ben and Billie were kneeling on the ground adjusting
+the tire of the first wheel, while Charlie and Merry were engaged in
+examining the extra tires, which the motor carried in case of accident,
+and Percy made himself as useful as possible, unpacking all the wraps,
+Billie's oilskin coat and cap and the rubber blankets.
+
+"Billie," announced Charlie, "there are only three good tires here. The
+fourth has a puncture. It's only a small one, but----"
+
+"I know," interrupted Billie, looking extremely worried. "It was an
+imperfect one. I may be able to patch it."
+
+Then Charlie and Merry held a whispered conference and disappeared
+around the bluff.
+
+"What's up?" asked Ben, looking over his shoulder at their retreating
+figures.
+
+But nobody could answer the question. The girls were getting into their
+ulsters and Percy was arranging the rubber blankets and rugs in the car.
+
+"What a confoundedly low, mean trick of that fellow to do this," he kept
+saying to himself, keeping one eye on the black clouds piling up and the
+other on Billie and Ben. He figured that it would take an hour and a
+half at least to get all four tires on and, he thought, Billie would be
+a pretty smart girl to do it that quickly. It was half-past three
+o'clock.
+
+"What about that ferry," he said to himself.
+
+At last they were pumping up the third tire. It seemed an age to those
+who were idly looking on. The girls sat in a row on the side of the
+road, their hands folded patiently in their laps, while Percy paced up
+and down, watching the top of the bluff uneasily.
+
+"Where are Charlie and Merry?" he said at last, unable to conceal his
+anxiety any longer.
+
+"Idiots," exclaimed Nancy. "Haven't we enough to worry us?"
+
+While she spoke there came a blinding flash of lightning and a clap of
+thunder seemed to split the heavens in two.
+
+Nancy hid her face on Elinor's shoulder. Billie and Ben kept on working
+steadily. They had reached the fourth tire now and Billie had managed to
+patch the punctured place just as the first great drops of rain began to
+fall.
+
+"Where are those boys?" Ben called over his shoulder, not stopping to
+look up.
+
+"I'll call them," said Percy, and running to the top of the cliff he
+began to halloo and whistle.
+
+It had grown suddenly so dark that they thought the sun must have set an
+hour earlier than usual. A cold wind sprang up and whizzed through the
+pines with a sound that made them shiver.
+
+"Hurrah, it's done!" cried Billie triumphantly, just as a driving wall
+of rain struck her in the face. "Get in, girls, quick," she shouted, as
+she slipped on her oil skins. "Boys, where are you? Crank up, Ben."
+
+Suddenly, in the midst of the din and racket of the storm, came a wild
+halloo. Charlie and Merry appeared, running down the road toward the
+motor car, and six men were following them, shouting and gesticulating.
+
+"Get in as fast as you can," commanded Ben, and the girls will never
+forget the terror of that moment as they tumbled into the car.
+
+The booming of the sea in the caves, the cannonading of the thunder, the
+sharp whistle of the wind in the tops of the trees, and the shouts of
+the men! But in the midst of it all came the kindly, cheering whir of
+the motor engine. Billie could have kissed the faithful "Comet" on his
+broad, good-natured forehead for his loyalty at this moment, when they
+most needed him. As Charlie and Merry leaped onto the step, she threw in
+the clutch, and they were off just as the first man reached the car,
+brandishing a long knife and yelling hoarsely.
+
+The boys climbed over into the back, too tired to speak. Merry had a
+black eye and Charlie had a bloody nose.
+
+"Billie, the next ferry is Payne's," called Percy. "It's about a mile
+from here. Go straight ahead."
+
+And Billie, sticking to her wheel like a good pilot, ducked her head and
+guided the flying motor along the slippery road.
+
+They seemed hardly to have taken breath before they reached Payne's
+landing and found it empty and deserted of every human being who had
+ever ventured into that lonely place.
+
+"We'll have to try for the next ferry landing then," said Percy,
+dejectedly. "It's back toward Flag Point."
+
+Without a word, Billie turned the car, and putting on all speed they
+whizzed through the rain. At that moment she had only one prayer in her
+heart: to pilot her friends safely through the storm and get them to the
+ferry landing. There was no sign of any of their pursuers as they passed
+the fort. When at last they reached the second summer encampment they
+breathed a sigh of relief. The ferry boat was docked at the landing and
+a man stood under the shed, his hands in his pockets.
+
+Billie drew up at the entrance.
+
+"Captain, will you take us on?" called Ben. He always called boatmen and
+conductors captain. He found it pleased them, but this man did not reply
+and still stood with his back turned looking out on the now angry strip
+of water between Seven League Island and the mainland.
+
+Ben shouted and they all shouted together, but the man was as unmoved as
+a wooden statue.
+
+"He's deaf," said Billie. "Get out and shake him."
+
+Ben jumped out and shook the man's shoulder, who, with a strange
+guttural sound, turned slowly around.
+
+"And dumb," exclaimed Ben, indicating with violent motions first the
+automobile and then the ferry-boat.
+
+The deaf mute shook his head and pointed in the direction of Flag Point.
+They offered him money, tried persuasion, threats, prayers, which he
+could not hear, and finally ended by dashing off toward the last ferry.
+
+"It's our only chance," said Ben, "but we'll get over in that if we have
+to use force."
+
+Meantime, the island, lashed by the storm, looked bleak and cold, and
+they wondered they could ever have admired it at all. Crouched under the
+rubber covers, they shivered with chill, while Billie, on the front
+seat, Ben and Percy beside her always on the lookout, with clinched
+teeth and hands gripped to the wheel, guided them through the hurricane.
+It seemed to her they must be riding on the very wings of the wind, and
+the speedometer announced fifty miles an hour.
+
+As they dashed through the straggling little street of that forlorn
+village of Flag Point, the few indifferent natives who braved the
+winters on the island looked out of their windows in wonder. It seemed
+to them that a streak of red lightning had flashed through the storm.
+
+"Cheer up, all of you, our troubles are over," called Ben. "The
+ferry-boat's at the landing."
+
+The old boat seemed like a haven of rest when they pulled into the
+shelter of its alley for wagons and motor cars.
+
+"Captain, why didn't you tell us that this was the only ferry running?"
+demanded Ben of the wrinkled old man.
+
+"Because I don't never answer questions that ain't first been put to
+me," replied the laconic boatman.
+
+"Don't scold him," said Billie, wiping streams of water from her face.
+"Any one who is obliged to live in a God-forsaken, wretched place like
+Seven League Island couldn't be supposed to have any human interest. I
+imagine they all get to be like their own flinty rocks, hard, sharp, and
+ugly."
+
+"Well, bloody nose and blacky eye," put in Percy, "it's about time for
+you to give an account of yourselves."
+
+"Yes," said the others, who had been so stunned by the fast ride through
+the storm and the race for the ferry that they had almost forgotten what
+had happened.
+
+"When we found," began Merry, "that one of the tires had a puncture,
+Charlie and I thought we might as well make that low, scoundrelly thief
+who slashed the tires pay back with one of those he had stolen from Mr.
+Butler. So we chased over to Smugglers' Cave, but it took longer than we
+had expected, because we had taken the wrong path and had to crawl
+around a precipice and jump over crags like two mountain goats."
+
+"Don't forget to tell that your pirate brigantine was anchored out in
+the harbor," put in Charlie. "We supposed it was lying up to get out of
+the storm, but we had another think coming----"
+
+"Yes, I guess you will all listen to me, next time," went on Merry.
+"That was the most piratical-looking band of fellows with their knives
+and their red handkerchiefs as I ever saw in a story book. Well, we did
+get to the cave at last and found it as empty as it was before. Charlie
+had a chisel in his pocket. You know, he is the human tool box, and with
+that and a piece of stone we managed to loosen some of the boards. But
+there wasn't a tire or anything else connected with an automobile inside
+the box. You'll never guess what the boxes were filled with. Something
+about as foreign to a motor car, except in sound, when a tire bursts, as
+a caterpillar."
+
+"You don't mean guns?" demanded Ben.
+
+"We certainly do. Rifles by the dozens packed in all the boxes we had
+time to open."
+
+"We were chumps," interrupted Charlie. "If we had stopped sooner, I
+never would have had this bloody nose."
+
+"Well, haven't I got a black eye?" demanded his friend.
+
+"What happened? What happened?" cried Percy impatiently.
+
+"While we were tinkering with the boxes, we heard the sharpest, loudest
+whistle I ever heard in my life, and we both lit out and ran. I was in
+front and just as I got to the mouth of the cave, a one-eyed, one-armed
+ruffian leapt out at me. His one arm was as strong as most men's two,
+but he couldn't beat Charlie and me together, although he gave me this
+little souvenir and he planted his fist on Charlie's nose. While we were
+fighting, a boat from the ship with six sailors in it landed below. They
+came tearing up the steps like a lot of bloodhounds, and Charlie and I
+had a run for our lives. Didn't we, midget?"
+
+Charlie acknowledged the fact gravely. There was no denying that the two
+boys had been in a very dangerous situation.
+
+"We were ready just in the nick of time, too," said Billie. "If Ben
+hadn't cranked up, we'd have had those men on us in another minute."
+
+It was good to be on land again, even though it wasn't dry land, and the
+ride home, safe and swift, was blissful after the dangers and excitement
+of that thrilling picnic.
+
+It seemed that Seven League Island must have been the very centre of the
+hurricane and that West Haven had only been visited with a heavy shower.
+Miss Campbell, therefore, was spared any great anxiety.
+
+But, oh, the joy of drawing up to the cheerful blaze of the wood fire,
+while eight youthful adventurers related a somewhat softened version of
+the events of the day! Then the supper that followed, in Miss Campbell's
+big, old-fashioned dining room, with fried chicken and hot biscuits and
+omelette as light as a feather, and strawberry jam that took the prize
+at the county fair!
+
+But best of all was what Merry did at the last, when, notwithstanding
+his stiff joints and bandaged eye, he rose from his seat and cried:
+
+"Hip, hip, hurrah! Three cheers for Billie, the pluckiest chauffeur that
+ever ran a motor car."
+
+And all the rest joined in, even Miss Campbell, who clapped her hands
+and cried:
+
+"Three cheers for my dear, dear Billie."
+
+Then Billie cried:
+
+"Three cheers for Ben because he never said 'I told you so,' about the
+rain."
+
+That very night, before he went to his own home, Ben called at Mr.
+Richard Butler's house and told him the story of the bogus automobile
+supplies marked with the name of Butler Brothers.
+
+There was a great telegraphing and telephoning by long distance. The
+Butler Brothers were very excited and angry, just as their niece had
+predicted they would be. Detectives were engaged and other ships warned
+to keep a sharp lookout, but nothing was heard of the pirate brigantine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.--WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS.
+
+
+Never since she had been Principal of West Haven High School had Miss
+Gray been so upset as she was now. For the first time a scandal was
+connected with her beloved institution. Every day there was a new
+complaint.
+
+"Miss Gray, I only left my ring on the washstand a minute, while I was
+washing my hands, and when I looked for it, it was gone," said one girl.
+
+"But who was in the washroom, Julia?" asked the Principal wearily. She
+was disgusted and angry with this troublesome situation.
+
+"Oh, all the girls, Miss Gray, but nobody saw any one take it."
+
+Small purses containing lunch money were emptied of their contents and
+put back into jacket pockets. Some of the teachers lost money and Miss
+Gray herself was robbed of ten dollars, the wages of the old janitor,
+which she had placed under a paper weight on the desk, in her own
+private office.
+
+The whole school had gone distracted, but the pilferer was too clever to
+be caught.
+
+Twice Miss Gray had summoned Mary Price to her office, but, after
+looking gravely into the young girl's serious eyes, she kissed her and
+sent her off on some improvised errand.
+
+"I shall wait a few days," the Principal said. "After all, there may be
+some mistake."
+
+And it was then that she determined to try an experiment.
+
+One bleak autumn afternoon a thick, wet mist rolled in from the ocean
+and enveloped the town of West Haven so densely that it seemed like a
+city floating on a bank of cloud. Only the dim outline of objects twenty
+yards away could be seen and the muffled call of the fog horn at the
+lighthouse on the Black Reefs sounded its dismal warning through the
+mist.
+
+Billie and Mary were hurrying arm in arm down the street in earnest
+conversation. Notwithstanding it was after school hours, they were going
+toward the High School.
+
+"Do you think we can get it, Mary?" Billie was saying.
+
+"Oh, yes, the janitor always leaves the door to the basement corridor
+open until evening for Miss Gray and the teachers who sometimes stay
+late."
+
+"It was stupid of me to have left that horrid old algebra, but you know
+I always forget the things I don't like. If Miss Finch hadn't called me
+down so thoroughly this morning about my average in mathematics, I would
+just let the lesson for to-morrow go, or if Miss Finch were only Miss
+Allbright, or Miss anybody else but just a stern, animated mathematical
+cube."
+
+"She's all right if you know your lessons," said Mary, smiling. "It's
+only the ones who don't study hard enough to suit her who call her a
+human arithmetic."
+
+The door to the corridor was open, as Mary had predicted, and the girls
+entered, their footsteps resounding with a hollow echo through the empty
+place.
+
+"'I feel like one who treads alone some banquet hall deserted,'" quoted
+Billie. "Could anything be more ghostly than a deserted school?"
+
+"It's not deserted," said Nancy. "I heard voices somewhere, I am certain
+of it, just as you opened the door."
+
+They paused and listened for a moment, but the place was as still as a
+tomb. A dim gas-light burned in the long corridor, on each side of which
+were the arched entrances to the locker rooms of the various classes,
+wash rooms and Miss Gray's own private office.
+
+"It reminds me of the catacombs in this light," whispered Billie. "I'm
+almost afraid of the sound of my own voice."
+
+The girls slipped silently down the passage to the stairway leading to
+the class rooms. At her desk in the sophomore study room on the third
+floor Billie found her algebra. As she gathered together some of her
+scattered papers in the not over tidy interior of the little one-seated
+desk form, and searched for a certain favorite stubby pencil which she
+claimed brought her good luck with her problems, Mary at her own desk
+gave a cry of dismay and sat down limply.
+
+"What was it, a mouse?" asked Billie, her voice sounding quite loud in
+the empty room.
+
+"Oh, Billie, Billie, no, it was not a mouse. It was fifty dollars,"
+cried Mary. "I found it just now in my desk."
+
+"Fifty dollars?" echoed Billie, slipping her algebra into her pocket and
+hurrying over to her friend's desk. "Are you playing a trick on me,
+Mary?"
+
+"Listen, Billie," said Mary. "I'm going to tell you something. I believe
+I am the victim of some kind of conspiracy. You know of course about all
+of the things that have been stolen from school lately?"
+
+"Yes, but I haven't had any losses myself; so I haven't talked about it
+much to the others."
+
+"Of course you had no idea that I was supposed to be the thief," Mary
+went on, with a sort of dry sob in her voice that was more
+heart-breaking to Billie than real weeping would have been.
+
+Mary told her the story of Fannie Alta and the twenty dollars.
+
+"I didn't tell it before," she continued, "because I was so ashamed
+somehow, I couldn't bear for any one to know it."
+
+Billie's heart swelled with indignation.
+
+"The little wretch," she exclaimed, "you should have gone straight to
+Miss Gray about it, Mary."
+
+"I know it, and I am sorry now I didn't, but I thought she wouldn't dare
+do it again, and she hasn't, but things are disappearing all the time,
+and I believe she has told it around school that I took the twenty
+dollars and all the other things. Nobody has said anything, of course,
+but I can't help feeling that they are all whispering about me whenever
+my back is turned."
+
+"You poor, blessed child," exclaimed her friend. "And all this time you
+have been keeping it secret and suffering in silence."
+
+Mary nodded her head.
+
+"And the worst of it is, Miss Gray suspects me too. But she is not going
+to say anything until she is sure. I thought of talking to her about it,
+but it would look as if I had a guilty conscience to complain before I
+am accused."
+
+"How dare any one suspect you of stealing," cried Billie, putting her
+arms around her friend and kissing her warmly. "Would Miss Gray or any
+one else be so stupid as to take the word of Fannie Alta before yours?"
+
+"But nobody has said anything that I know of," groaned poor Mary. "It's
+all in the air. That is why I don't know what to do. Suppose after all I
+was mistaken and they didn't suspect me. Suppose I took this money to
+Miss Gray and suppose she would think that I had taken all the other
+things and was just returning this because I had lost my nerve and
+suppose--suppose----"
+
+"But, Mary," remonstrated Billie, "why suppose anything at all so awful?
+Why not suppose that Miss Gray will listen to you and believe every word
+you say. You are perfectly innocent and nothing on earth can make you
+guilty. Of course Fannie Alta must have left the money in your desk,
+though where she got so much is a mystery to me."
+
+"But I tell you I am frightened, Billie. Such wretched things do happen
+and innocent people often suffer for guilty ones."
+
+"Nonsense, Mary, you must not lose your nerve in this way. Take the
+money and go straight to Miss Gray with it now. I will go with you."
+
+The two girls gathered their things together silently. Mary put the roll
+of money in her jacket pocket and they made for the door. It was almost
+dark now and the rows of empty desks down the big room were like
+kneeling phantoms in the half light.
+
+"Did you hear anything?" whispered Mary as they reached the door.
+
+"I heard a step," answered Billie in a low voice. "It was probably the
+janitor."
+
+With a mutual impulse they clasped hands and a wave of fear swept over
+them when they found that the door would not open.
+
+"It must have stuck," whispered Mary. "Try it again."
+
+But the door was locked fast.
+
+"There is only one way for you to get back the key to the door, young
+ladies," said a voice so near to them that they both jumped back as if
+they had been struck in the face.
+
+The person who had spoken had been standing flat against the wall at the
+side of the door. He emerged from the shadows, as quietly as a shadow
+itself, and in the twilight his long, lank figure seemed almost to be
+floating in space. The small black mask which covered his face and his
+whole appearance reminded Billie of a gruesome picture she had once seen
+called "The Black Masque."
+
+"You have a small sum of money there," he went on, "which you evidently
+do not wish to keep and which I would be pleased to have and can use at
+once. By a strange coincidence, I happened to overhear your
+conversation, you see, and as the money appears to belong to nobody and
+is exactly the sum I require I must have it."
+
+Mary tried to speak, but her lips refused to form the words, and she had
+no voice left. There was a sound in Billie's ears like the pounding of
+surf on the beach and she felt quite dizzy.
+
+"This is fright," she found herself saying, as a wave of homesickness
+for her father swept over her.
+
+"Oh, papa, papa," she whispered.
+
+The man had seized Mary's two hands in one of his with a grip of steel,
+while with the other he felt in her jacket pocket, took the roll of
+money, pushed Billie roughly from the door, and with a laugh pulled back
+the bolt; there had been no key after all. The next instant he had
+slipped downstairs as softly as a cat and was gone.
+
+The girls followed after him like two sleep walkers.
+
+"We've been robbed, Billie," moaned Mary, giving her dry sob. "The fifty
+dollars is gone. What shall we do now?"
+
+Billie did not reply. She wanted to get out of that dark stuffy school
+building, and breathe in some fresh air before she dared trust her
+voice. It was good to feel the wet fog again in their faces as they
+hurried up the street.
+
+"Why not still tell Miss Gray, Mary?" asked Billie at last, but already
+there was a feeling of doubt in her heart. It was certainly a very
+unlikely sounding story, a robber in the school room.
+
+Suddenly a figure loomed up in the mist. It was Miss Gray herself.
+
+"You are out late, girls," she said as she hurried past, and for some
+reason they both had an uncomfortable feeling of having done something
+wrong.
+
+Miss Gray hastened into the school building just as the janitor appeared
+to lock up.
+
+"Jennings," she said, "switch on the light in the sophomore study room.
+I shall only be there a moment."
+
+The janitor shuffled after her and turned on the light while Miss Gray
+opened Mary's desk. She sighed deeply and shook her head.
+
+"She must have got here before me," she thought. "It was cruel to tempt
+the child at such a time as this when her mother is in great need of
+money. I felt so sure she would bring it straight to me and that was the
+only test I required. Oh, dear, what a crooked world this is. I am out
+fifty dollars. But how will the poor child ever explain all this money
+to her mother? She must have saved a good deal out of her pilfering----"
+
+Miss Gray's disconnected train of thought did not bring her any comfort,
+as she slowly descended the three flights of steps into the basement and
+plunged into the mist again.
+
+"At least I shall wait a day or two," she continued. "The child may
+think better of it. She might have stopped me this evening, though. At
+all events I deserve to lose the money. It was a silly, stupid impulse,
+but I was so sure--so very sure----"
+
+The mist had grown so thick now that the Principal walked very slowly,
+keeping close to the fence in order to guide herself to the corner where
+she must turn to go to her own home. A voice reached her through the
+fog. Someone was coming up from behind.
+
+"I have procured fifty, Senor, a curious lucky stroke, and from a
+schoolroom, too--would you have believed----" the voice broke off in a
+laugh.
+
+"Be careful----" said another voice, and two figures passed Miss Gray in
+the fog and were swallowed up again immediately.
+
+"Is it possible," she exclaimed, "robbers in West Haven High School?
+What does it mean? And I have been blaming that innocent child. What an
+imbecile I have been!"
+
+Her last resolution before sleep came to her that night was to notify
+the town police in the morning and hire a detective to stay about the
+High School day and night.
+
+Imagine the surprise of the bewildered Principal, when, next morning
+bright and early, Mary Price, after a timid knock on the office door,
+came hesitatingly into the room.
+
+"Miss Gray," she said, "I found this money yesterday afternoon in my
+desk. I don't know how it came there nor whose it is. But it would be
+better for you to take charge of it until the owner asks for it."
+
+Mary spoke quickly, as if she had learned the little speech carefully by
+heart. There was a strange expression on Miss Gray's face as she took
+ten crisp new five-dollar bills from the young girl's outstretched hand.
+
+"This is not even the same money," she thought, forgetting to answer
+Mary in her amazement. "Am I losing my senses or is the child a deep
+dyed villain?"
+
+Mary flushed scarlet under the Principal's steady gaze, but she did not
+lower her eyes, and there was not a sign of guilt in the expression of
+the sad little face.
+
+"Very well, dear," Miss Gray said at last.
+
+Mary, as she closed the door behind her, was more mystified than Miss
+Gray.
+
+"I should think she would have shown a little surprise," she said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.--THE HALLOWE'EN HOUSE PARTY.
+
+
+"My Dear Miss Campbell:
+
+Do you think your nice young charge would be bored by a visit to our
+lonely old home in the country? Percival has set his heart on giving a
+Hallowe'en house party for some of his particular friends, and I find
+Wilhelmina's name the very first on the list. I shall promise to look
+after her in every way exactly as if she were my own child, guard her
+from draughts, see that she has plenty of covering on her bed and that
+she wears her overshoes if the ground is damp.
+
+My boy would be quite inconsolable, and I should too, my dear friend, if
+she is not to be among our guests. I cannot offer many inducements
+except the pleasure which young people always bring to a house, but I
+candidly believe that Percival would give up the idea if she should not
+be able to come.
+
+
+                                                   Most cordially yours,
+                                          Antoinette Juliana St. Clair."
+
+
+Miss Campbell smiled as she handed the note to Billie one morning at the
+breakfast table. The two fanciful names of the good-natured, cordial
+widow always amused her.
+
+"The lonely old home in the country," so modestly referred to, was one
+of the finest places in the county, and nothing was more coveted by the
+young people in West Haven than an invitation to one of Percival's house
+parties, where everything that the widow and her son could devise was
+done for the amusement of the guests.
+
+"Of course you must go, dear. I wouldn't have you miss it for worlds.
+The change will do you good. I have been troubled about you lately, my
+child, and if this invitation had not come, I was going to insist on
+your seeing the doctor. I don't think your liver has been behaving
+itself. You have been so out of sorts. But perhaps a little amusement
+will be better for you than a calomel pill."
+
+"Oh, I am quite well, Cousin Helen," exclaimed Billie. "It's
+mathematics, I suppose, that affects my liver."
+
+But Billie was more eager than she would admit to accept Mrs. St.
+Clair's invitation. The truth is, the young girl's conscience had not
+been easy lately. She felt that she had done something which would have
+grieved and displeased her father and she could not be perfectly happy
+until she had confessed her sins and been forgiven.
+
+You perhaps have guessed already that the ten new five-dollar bills
+which Mary Price had consigned to Miss Gray's care the morning after the
+robbery in the school room, was Billie's money.
+
+"You shall take it, Mary," she insisted. "Aren't we exactly the same as
+sisters? I don't want the money, and I know papa would be glad if he
+knew."
+
+Billie had finally agreed with Mary that it would only make matters more
+complicated to tell Miss Gray that fifty dollars some one had placed in
+Mary's desk, no doubt to tempt or catch her, as in the case of the
+twenty dollars, had been stolen by a robber almost immediately.
+
+Older and wiser people would have told Billie that this was a very poor
+piece of advice, and the deed was no sooner accomplished than the two
+girls themselves realized that they had made a mistake. Miss Gray's
+manner to Mary was cold and formal and the situation was not in the
+least relieved. The unhappy girl had hoped that the principal would
+speak to her again about the money, but the subject was never mentioned.
+
+"It was all my fault, Mary. I advised you and forced you to do it. It
+was not exactly dishonest, but it wasn't sincere, and I am beginning to
+think Miss Gray is suspicious of me, too."
+
+Another thing had happened which made Billie uncomfortably and extremely
+ill at ease in her mind. Burglars had broken into Mrs. Price's home, but
+they had only succeeded in giving Mary and her mother a great fright,
+and had taken nothing.
+
+In her heart Billie knew what the robbers really wanted. It was the box
+of jewels locked up in Mrs. Price's safe.
+
+"I have done wrong," she kept saying to herself. "Papa always said that
+my heart ruled my head and that I had no judgment. I should never have
+burdened Mary and Mrs. Price with that wretched box. I am almost
+superstitious about it, because it brings so much bad luck on people.
+After the house party, I shall take it away."
+
+As a matter of fact, everything was postponed until after the house
+party, and the world for eight young people seemed to stand still. The
+English nation could not look forward with greater eagerness to the
+Coronation than our four Motor Maids and their friends to Percy's
+Hallowe'en house party. It was only a part of the good fortune which
+always followed Percy that Hallowe'en that year fell on Friday, and that
+the weather was perfect.
+
+They were to have three evenings of fun and frolic with the Hallowe'en
+ball on Friday night.
+
+In the joy of anticipation and preparation, Billie and Mary lost sight
+of their troubles. Nancy was bubbling over with delight and Elinor
+forgot her usual sense of dignity and gave an indecorous exhibition of
+happiness by doing a Dutch twirl all by herself.
+
+"Of course, we shall all go in 'The Comet,'" announced Billie. "It will
+be lots more fun than driving behind those poky old carriage horses that
+bring Percy and Mrs. St. Clair in to church every Sunday."
+
+"Of course," echoed the others.
+
+There was, indeed, only one flaw in their happiness. Mrs. St. Clair, who
+was intimate with the Rogers family, had insisted on inviting Belle
+Rogers.
+
+"Who cares?" exclaimed Billie. "She can't interfere with our good time
+and we certainly won't interfere with hers."
+
+The St. Clair place was eight miles outside of West Haven on the main
+road. A long avenue bordered with immense pine trees led up to the
+commodious, comfortable old house which seemed to reflect from its
+shining windows the cheerful and hospitable character of its mistress.
+
+And when the red motor pulled up in front of "Pine Lodge," as the place
+was called, there was the mistress herself smiling in the doorway,
+making the most delightful picture of welcome Billie had ever seen.
+
+"Think of going to a real house party at last," exclaimed Billie, with a
+sigh of pleasure.
+
+Percival rushed down to help them out; two colored men servants carried
+in their luggage, and presently they found themselves standing before a
+glowing fire in the hall, which was quite big enough and broad enough to
+be a room itself.
+
+"It is sweet of you to come out and cheer up two lonely country people,
+my dears," Mrs. St. Clair was saying, as she kissed them all around
+twice. "You are really the nicest children. You must promise to tell me
+whatever you want, or if you are not warm enough. You know how draughty
+country houses are. Or if you are the least hungry or your beds are not
+comfortable or the water isn't hot enough for your baths, or you wish
+any particular thing to eat----"
+
+"Dear me," laughed Billie, looking around her, "you make us feel like
+four visiting princesses, Mrs. St. Clair. I am sure we could never want
+for anything in this cheerful, lovely house."
+
+"Now, Mrs. St. Clair," put in Elinor, "we all know perfectly well that
+all the chairs at Pine Lodge are easy and the beds are famous for being
+the most comfortable in the county."
+
+Mrs. St. Clair blushed with pleasure. Next to saying nice things to
+people herself, she loved to have them say nice things to her.
+
+"Percival, my darling, where are the others?" she demanded presently.
+"Isn't Belle coming and what is the name of that little foreign girl she
+asked to bring with her?"
+
+Percy grinned at his friends good-naturedly, when Merry seized a cushion
+from one of the long settees and began to rock it on his knees, and
+Charlie gave a silent imitation of a baby's face in the act of crying.
+But he was used to these endearing names his mother heaped upon him, and
+he only replied:
+
+"Give them time, mother; give them time. Remember they didn't ride on a
+comet the same as this dashing company did. The foreign girl is Fannie
+Alta."
+
+"So it was, and it was sweet and thoughtful of Belle to want to bring
+her along. She described the poor little thing as being lonely and
+strange in West Haven."
+
+The girls exchanged astonished glances at this piece of news. Was it
+possible that Belle Rogers and the crafty little Spanish girl whom they
+instinctively distrusted were so intimate as this?
+
+"Here comes Roly Poly McLane," cried Percy, laughing, as he peered
+through a side light of the front door. "She's as jolly and fat as a
+clown elephant in the circus."
+
+"Percy, my love," remonstrated his mother, which slight show of
+disapproval was about as near as she ever got in her life to scolding
+him.
+
+The boys raced down the hall to help Rosomond McLane out of the high
+trap in which she had driven over to Pine Lodge from her home a few
+miles away.
+
+"Wait, Roly Poly, until Percy gets a derrick. It's the only safe way to
+unload heavy bales," cried Merry.
+
+"Roly Poly," said Percy, bowing politely, "these three noble friends
+have volunteered with me to help you get out. I offered to do it alone,
+but mother was afraid my young life would be crushed out of me, if
+anything should happen, you know, and----"
+
+"Percival, my darling!" cried Mrs. St. Clair.
+
+"Help me, indeed," exclaimed Rosomond, with a jolly laugh that always
+started an echo of other jolly laughs. "Get out of my way all of you,"
+and she gave a flying leap from the trap and bounced as she hit the
+ground like a rubber ball.
+
+"My dear Rosomond," cried the widow, running down the steps to meet her,
+"don't take any notice of these foolish boys. You wouldn't seem the same
+dear, delightful Rosomond if you weighed a pound less."
+
+"Oh, I don't mind them, Mrs. St. Clair. I'm used to it, you know. Father
+always calls me 'Baby Elephant' and 'Jumbo,' and the girls at school
+call me 'Roly Poly,' and Uncle Jim calls me 'Fatty.'"
+
+Several more boys appeared just then and the company followed Mrs. St.
+Clair into what she called the sitting room, a gay apartment with chintz
+curtains at the windows and chintz covered cushions in the deep wicker
+chairs. Here they had tea and chocolate and hot-buttered toast.
+
+"You must eat plenty of food, you know," Percy's mother had admonished
+them, "because I warn you that you will need all your strength to put up
+with the fearful ordeals Percy has planned for to-night----"
+
+"Mother," broke in Percy, "you mustn't tell. You will spoil all the
+fun."
+
+"I'm not telling, dear. I'm only warning. But you know those things that
+jump at you from behind----"
+
+"Stop her quick, somebody," cried her son, pretending to gag her mouth
+with a napkin.
+
+It was all very gay and the room buzzed with talk and laughter when the
+door opened and a servant admitted Belle Rogers and Fannie Alta.
+
+Mrs. St. Clair greeted the new visitors as hospitably as she had the
+others. She even kissed Fannie's dark, foreign little face and called
+her "dear" and drew the girl down beside her on the sofa.
+
+"I want you to feel perfectly at home," she said. "It was so good of you
+to have come with Belle."
+
+She was really the most delightful, beaming, good-natured creature
+imaginable, but all her efforts could not disguise the change which
+seemed suddenly to have taken place in the behavior of the others.
+
+Somehow the laughter was less free, the talk less gay and jolly than it
+had been, and presently our four particular Motor Maids were glad for an
+excuse to go away with Percy and see the conservatories, while Belle and
+Fannie drank their tea with Mrs. St. Clair.
+
+After that it was time to dress for dinner. A neat little maid had
+unpacked their bags and laid their best party dresses on the beds. They
+were very simple dresses indeed, and Nancy, at least, thought of
+floating blue chiffon draperies with a slight sigh of regret.
+
+"Do you know, girls," said Billie, as she tied a pink bow around Nancy's
+bunch of curls, "I think we should all take lessons in cheerfulness from
+Mrs. St. Clair. She's so happy because she always sees the best side of
+everything. Just see how nice she is to Belle and Fannie Alta, for
+instance."
+
+"With this beautiful house and all her money and such a nice,
+good-natured pink-cheeked boy for a son, I think I could even admire
+Belle Rogers and Fannie Alta," observed Mary.
+
+Then Billie remembered that Mary and her mother were always troubled
+about money, and that Mrs. Price was the gentlest, sweetest woman she
+had ever known. She wondered if Mrs. St. Clair could ever be ruffled by
+disappointment and bad luck, or if everything were not exactly as it
+should be, if she would be the same placid, good-natured soul.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.--THE GHOST PARTY.
+
+
+"I don't see how you can play any gruesome Hallowe'en tricks in this
+house, Mrs. St. Clair," said Billie later at the dinner table. "It's the
+abode of cheerfulness. Look at this dining room, for instance. A skull
+and crossbones wouldn't even look dismal against this white wainscoting
+and these pale yellow walls."
+
+"She's trying to pump you, mother," put in Percy. "Now don't tell her
+anything."
+
+Mrs. St. Clair smiled archly. How pretty she looked, Billie thought, in
+her pink crepe dress, with a beautiful collar of pearls around her
+throat. Nothing would induce the widow to wear black, and, after a year
+or two of mourning, she had gone back to colors and cheerfulness.
+
+"He has got some big surprises for you, my dear. I'll only tell you this
+much. It will be quite as ghastly as you could possibly desire, and I
+hope nobody is wearing any clothes that will matter. Your dress, Miss
+Alta, I am afraid will spot if you do all the things Percy is planning
+for this evening. What a lovely frock, by the way. I think I have never
+seen a more beautiful dress for a young girl."
+
+All eyes were fastened on Fannie's dress, and there was general surprise
+among the girls to see that Fannie was wearing an exquisite gown of pale
+blue satin with an over-dress of blue gauze, edged with narrow silver
+fringe. In her hair was a wreath of pink roses.
+
+She was quite unembarrassed under the scrutiny of all these people, and
+smiled complacently at Mrs. St. Clair.
+
+Nobody had taken much notice of Belle until now. They had supposed she
+had kept so unusually quiet because she was not in her own "set," as she
+loved to call her coterie of seven. But to those who were familiar with
+her, it was plain that something had happened. She did not seem herself.
+Her eyes had a strange gray look to them. Two little white dents
+appeared on either side of her nose and her lips were shrunk into pale,
+narrow lines. But that was not all. Were they dreaming or was this the
+first of Percy's Hallowe'en jokes? The beautiful, proud Belle was
+wearing a faded yellow muslin.
+
+She had tried to cover her shoulders with a little blue scarf, but it
+was impossible to deceive the sharp eyes of her schoolmates.
+
+"Nobody's clothes will be hurt, Mother," put in Percy, feeling somehow
+that a cloud had fallen on the company, although he did not know enough
+about girls' clothes to take in this remarkable change in Belle's
+appearance. "Remember that this is a ghost party."
+
+"What is a ghost party?" demanded Fannie, suddenly becoming animated
+from the admiration she felt she had attracted.
+
+"Everybody wears a sheet and pillow-case," answered Percy, "and, for one
+thing, not a vestige of dress shows."
+
+A look of triumph came into Belle's eyes at this and the two dents began
+to disappear.
+
+"I hear the other people coming, so we had better get into our costumes
+if you are entirely through."
+
+"Come up to my room, girls. Percy will take care of the boys. Marie and
+I are commissioned to dress you up. I am obeying orders, you see," said
+Mrs. St. Clair.
+
+"And remember that you are supposed to be disguised," called Percy.
+"Don't give yourself away by giggling, Miss Nancy-Bell."
+
+"I'm sure I shan't want to giggle if I'm dressed as a ghost," answered
+Nancy, following the others up the steps.
+
+Half an hour later a company of spectres invaded the halls and drawing
+room of Pine Lodge. There were silent ghosts and giggling ghosts, and a
+roly-poly ghost, who bumped against a thin ghost and knocked him flat
+and the thin ghost cried out:
+
+"Oh, shades of departed Jumbo, don't sit on me!"
+
+Then all the ghosts laughed and one ghost danced a jig that had the
+shadow of a resemblance to the Fishers' Horn Pipe.
+
+Presently there was a long and mournful trumpet call from up in the very
+top of the house and a portly ghost who seemed to be holding up a train
+under her white cotton shroud said:
+
+"Now, my dear spirits, we are all to go up, if you will be good enough
+to follow me," and the whole troop of ghosts began moving in a spectral
+body up the front staircase.
+
+There was a second long-drawn-out and despairing trump, and the phantom
+beckoned them to hurry up, with her plump, pretty hand, and remarked:
+
+"My darling Percival is so impatient."
+
+Up the next staircase they trooped and finally up a narrow flight, at
+the top of which hung a black curtain with cabalistic signs painted on
+it in bright red.
+
+Once past the curtain and there was a gasp of surprise and wonder. The
+great attic of Pine Lodge, which stretched over the entire house, had
+been transformed into a spirit dance hall. From the ceiling hung pumpkin
+jack-o-lanterns of every size. Plates of salt and alcohol were burning
+about the room, giving a ghastly greenish look to the picture. An old
+witch dressed in black, with a long broomstick, was stationed by a
+cauldron of melted lead, placed on a charcoal stove.
+
+Repeating a cabalistic verse with incredible rapidity, which sounded
+something like:
+
+  "Burra, burra pie, cat's eye, devil fry,
+  Singer, dinger, singer dinger, blood!"
+
+the black witch dropped a spoonful of the lead into a bowl of water.
+
+"Here is your fortune," she said, in a sing-song voice to the nearest
+ghost.
+
+"The lead has taken the shape of a letter. It brings news to you. It
+comes from over the water on a ship. The letter is about something
+round----"
+
+"Money is round," put in a tall ghost, standing near. "So are rings and
+necklaces----"
+
+"There is trouble ahead," went on the witch. "There is trouble before
+the letter ever reaches land."
+
+The ghost who was listening moved away quickly.
+
+"Of course, it was just a coincidence," she said to herself, "but I
+wonder who the person was who said that about rings and necklaces. Oh,
+dear! Oh, dear! I wish I had never taken that box in charge."
+
+In another part of the room a red witch was engaged in launching little
+fortune sail boats, made of English walnuts, on a troubled sea in a tub.
+
+There were four other witches about the attic telling fortunes with
+cards and in other ways, two gray ones, a white one, and a green one,
+and there was an enormous gray cat with electric eyes and a tail four
+feet long that curled up over its back. At last from behind a curtain
+came the strains of weird music, and the witches and the gray cat danced
+a quadrille, the witches riding on their broomsticks in a circle,
+leaping over the cat as they advanced down the middle and finally ending
+with a romp when all the ghosts joined in and danced together.
+
+After a while the ghosts removed their sheets and pillow-cases and
+became human beings once more, and the side shows, as Percy called them,
+began. Every girl at the party bobbed for an apple, except Belle Rogers,
+who declined emphatically. But those who remembered the red rubber
+curlers understood her reasons for not wishing to wet her aureole of
+golden hair.
+
+Fannie Alta plunged her face and neck into the tub with a reckless
+laugh, and spotted her pretty dress without a quiver of regret.
+
+Nancy, in a little room hung in black in a remote corner of the attic,
+held a lighted candle over her head, while she looked fearfully in the
+glass and combed her hair. For just a breathing space a boy's fair,
+ruddy face passed across the mirror and disappeared.
+
+With a little shriek, Nancy looked quickly over her shoulder, but she
+was entirely alone.
+
+Billie went rather later than the others to try her fortune in the
+mirror room. She had lingered along with a laughing, teasing circle
+around the apple plungers, and, seeing Nancy come out of the mirror room
+alone, she strolled over there. Nancy explained what she was to do, and
+left her alone to her fate.
+
+"Did you see any one, Nancy?" laughed Billie incredulously.
+
+"Yes," she whispered mysteriously, "I did; but I wasn't frightened
+because----"
+
+"Because what?" demanded Billie, pinching her friend's round cheek.
+
+"Because--it wasn't a person who would frighten any one," answered
+Nancy, with a laugh, as she tripped away to the next side show, from
+whence issued suppressed screams and howls which were explained when she
+pulled the curtain and a skeleton jumped at her.
+
+In the meantime, Billie had gone into the mirror room alone. She stood
+looking gravely at herself in the glass, while she ran a comb through
+her smooth locks with one hand and held a candle with the other. She
+seemed to have waited a good while for the apparition which was supposed
+to appear to show its face.
+
+"I suppose this booth isn't in working order any longer," she thought,
+as she laid down the comb, when suddenly from the deep shadows reflected
+in the glass she made out the outline of a face.
+
+Billie smiled. She had been prepared to recognize one of her friends,
+but the smile faded from her lips; she put down the candle quickly and
+faced about. The black curtain forming the wall of the little room was
+still quivering, but no one was there.
+
+She ran out hurriedly and looked about her. All the boys and girls were
+dancing the barn dance, and the attic had become very cheerful and gay
+it seemed to her in the brief moment in which she had tried her fortune
+in the mirror room.
+
+"It was just a foolish, nervous notion," she said to herself, turning to
+meet Merry Brown, who was looking for her to be his partner in the
+dance. "But that beaked nose and that wicked eye so close to it," her
+thoughts continued. "Could I have been mistaken?"
+
+"Are there any strangers here to-night?" she asked Merry, as they danced
+down the room together.
+
+"Not a single stranger," he replied. "Only the High School crowd."
+
+When the dance was over, they filed in a long, laughing procession down
+the three flights of steps to supper, and there was nothing spectral or
+gruesome about the gay party which gathered around Mrs. St. Clair's long
+table. Billie tried to talk and sing with the others and laugh at Roly
+Poly McLane and Percy, who recited an absurd dialogue they had prepared
+beforehand in which Roly Poly took the part of a fat, old man and Percy
+a thin old woman. But all the time she kept asking herself:
+
+"Did I see him, or was it just my imagination?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.--A STRAY GHOST.
+
+
+When the front door closed after the departing merry-makers and the
+sound of the last wheels died away down the avenue, the guests of the
+house party filed slowly up to bed. Mrs. St. Clair, at the head of the
+stairs, kissed each of the girls good-night and shook hands with the
+boys. And, as a final token of their regard, before turning in, the boys
+trooped from door to door, singing, "Good-night, ladies," with Charlie
+accompanying on his mouth organ.
+
+And now the house was still, and our four friends in their bathrobes
+were seated on the hearth rug around the wood fire in one of the
+bedrooms, talking in whispers, as girls will do after a party.
+
+"Do you suppose Belle Rogers has been converted, or reformed, or
+something?" observed Nancy. "What else could have induced her to be so
+unselfish as to wear Fannie's old dress and let Fannie wear her best
+one?"
+
+"It's the mystery of the age," said Elinor. "And how different she
+seemed, too. How quiet and meek. Perhaps, after all, it was her clothes
+that made her haughty. Who could be anything but lowly in a faded yellow
+muslin?"
+
+"She was angry at first," put in Mary. "I saw the danger signals at
+dinner. But I really believe she had as good a time as any of us
+afterwards. Perhaps she realized that without the blue satin, she was
+just on a par with the rest of us, and she forgot to be conscious."
+
+"And how different Fannie was under the influence of the blue satin,"
+continued Elinor. "She talked and laughed quite loudly, and she was
+really rude to Belle several times. Girls, if we ever have blue satins,
+will they change our dispositions----"
+
+A tap at the door interrupted the conversation, and Mrs. St. Clair, in a
+long lavender dressing gown, tripped into the room.
+
+"I hope our talking hasn't disturbed you, Mrs. St. Clair," said Billie.
+
+"No, no, dear, I am glad you were talking, because I had hoped to find
+some one of you still awake. I have come to ask a great favor. Will one
+of you, or all of you, go with me up in the attic for a few minutes? I
+should have asked one of the servants, but their lights are all out. I
+suppose they are sound asleep. Percy is asleep, too. I have just come
+from his room. He is tired out. You can't think how hard he has worked
+in the last few days."
+
+"Let me go with you, Mrs. St. Clair," put in Elinor.
+
+"Let us all go," suggested Billie.
+
+"Very well, dear. The more of you the better. To tell the truth, I am a
+little worried. It's nothing, of course; I am sure to find it, but I
+should like to take a look before I go to bed."
+
+"Have you lost something, Mrs. St. Clair?" asked Mary.
+
+"Yes, I have lost my pearl necklace. I really never missed it until a
+few moments ago. I have looked downstairs everywhere, but I feel sure
+that I dropped it in the attic when I was dancing that ridiculous
+twirling waltz with Ben. It serves me right for trying to be a young
+girl when I am really such an old lady."
+
+"You are really the youngest of us all," protested the four young girls,
+following her on tiptoe up the stairs into the attic.
+
+All the members of the searching party were sure that the necklace would
+be found at once somewhere on the attic floor, or in the folds of the
+sheet or the pillow-case Mrs. St. Clair had been wearing. Yet Billie and
+Mary had good reason to know that robbers were at large in the village
+of West Haven, and the memory of the face Billie had seen in the mirror
+suddenly became painfully distinct.
+
+Mrs. St. Clair lit a few gas jets in the attic and the great place
+seemed ghastly enough in the half light with the grotesque
+jack-o-lanterns grinning at them from above; the black-curtained side
+shows and an occasional sheet and pillow-case made a weird picture.
+
+They searched the floor carefully, looked into the booths with candles,
+shook out sheets and pillow-cases, but there was no sign of the missing
+necklace.
+
+"If it had only been something else," said Mrs. St. Clair. "I should
+rather have lost almost anything in the world than my pearl necklace. It
+was a wedding present from Percival's father and I valued it more than
+all my other jewelry together. I don't see how I could have dropped it
+so carelessly. When we went down to supper I threw a scarf around my
+shoulders and that is probably why I never noticed that my pearls were
+gone. You were standing near me, Mary, and Belle and her friend were
+there, too. You don't remember to have noticed the necklace at that
+time, do you? One of you helped me on with my scarf."
+
+Mary shook her head.
+
+"I must ask Belle and Miss Alta to-morrow. It is so important to know
+whether I lost the necklace up here or below."
+
+"Perhaps you dropped it on the steps," suggested one of the girls.
+
+"If I did, it must have been trod on by many pairs of feet, then. Oh,
+dear, I am so sorry. Only this evening I said to myself, I must have the
+clasp to the necklace repaired. I had intended to take it to town next
+week to the jeweller's.
+
+"But I must not keep you up any longer. You were dear children to come
+up with me. Now go to bed and don't think of it any more. I should not
+have been so selfish. You are all dead tired, I know, for I am myself."
+
+They turned and trooped downstairs again, and with softly spoken
+good-nights separated at their bedroom doors.
+
+Billie and Mary were the last to enter the room they shared. They had
+stopped for a drink of ice water from a big glass pitcher, which had
+been placed with a tray of tumblers on a table at the far end of the
+hall. They were drinking their water silently, each absorbed in her own
+thoughts, when suddenly Mary grasped Billie's hand and whispered:
+
+"Look! On the steps!"
+
+But Billie was looking with all her eyes before Mary had spoken.
+
+A figure was gliding down the steps wrapped in a sheet. The stray ghost
+had evidently seen the girls at the same moment they had caught sight of
+it, for it finished the flight almost with a bound, and with a swift run
+disappeared through a door leading to a passage back of the steps, with
+Billie and Mary running behind. But the sheeted figure was too swift for
+them, and they heard one of the doors in the passage open and close
+softly just as they reached the entrance.
+
+"It was this door," said Mary.
+
+"Or this one," said Billie, pointing to the door of the room next the
+one Mary had chosen as the door the phantom had disappeared through.
+
+"We'll settle it," said Billie. "I'll knock on this one and you knock on
+that one."
+
+"They are the small single rooms that Belle and Fannie and Roly Poly
+have," whispered Mary, as she tapped on a door.
+
+There was no answer and she went in. It was Belle's room and she was
+sleeping deeply. Mary smiled as she noticed that Belle now wore a night
+cap over the rubber curlers. Her cheek was pillowed on her hand and her
+breath came softly and regularly.
+
+No answer came to Billie's tap, either, and when she turned the knob she
+found that the door was locked. She tapped again and rattled the knob.
+
+"Who is there?" came a sleepy voice.
+
+"Open the door," called Billie.
+
+"Tell me who you are first."
+
+"Billie Campbell."
+
+Presently the door was thrown open and Fannie, with her dark hair
+standing out all over her head in a dishevelled mass, peered into the
+hall.
+
+"What is the matter?" she asked. "The house is not on fire?"
+
+"No, but Mary and I were in the hall and we saw some one come down from
+the attic and go into one of these rooms, and we thought we had better
+wake you up."
+
+"They could not have come in here," said Fannie. "My door was locked."
+
+Billie looked at her curiously.
+
+"What a little actress you are," she thought.
+
+"It doesn't matter, only Mrs. St. Clair had lost something, and we were
+afraid a thief might be in the house. You know there have been several
+robberies lately in West Haven."
+
+Fannie gave her a long and scornful stare.
+
+"At the High School, you mean?"
+
+"Particularly at the High School," replied Billie gently. Somehow, she
+felt a sort of contemptuous pity for this unfortunate little creature
+who had been taught, perhaps by poverty, to stoop to so much villainy.
+
+"What's all this racket about?" demanded Rosomond McLane, opening her
+door which was the third one along the passage and thrusting out her
+merry, round face.
+
+"You didn't hear anything did you?" asked Billie. "Mary and I thought we
+saw some one in a ghost dress come down this passage and go into one of
+these doors."
+
+"Good heavens! I am terrified out of my wits, I would rather it would be
+a burglar than a ghost. Did you really see something?"
+
+"Forget it," said Billie. "Go back to bed and lock your door. It was
+just a shadow, I suppose."
+
+Fannie had already locked her own door and the girls retreated to their
+room, somewhat crestfallen, feeling very much like two fighters who had
+been worsted in battle.
+
+When they had crawled into bed and settled themselves under the covers,
+Billie gave a deep sigh and whispered:
+
+"Mary, dear, which one do you think it was?"
+
+"There is only one thing that would make me think it was Belle," replied
+Mary. "If she had really been asleep, she would have waked and come out
+to find what was the matter. She is the most deadly curious soul alive."
+
+"That's very slight evidence, Mary. She might have been specially tired
+to-night. Now, I believe it was Fannie. She had such a wild, dishevelled
+look and her door was locked. She is such a creeping, crawling little
+thing. Besides, I don't believe Belle would have had the courage to go
+up in the attic alone."
+
+"Billie," observed Mary, after a short silence, "I don't know what it is
+all about, but something is going on around us. I believe that you and
+I, in some way, are mixed up in some kind of conspiracy. The box of
+jewels is in it and Fannie and Belle are in it. It's like seeing a lot
+of figures moving about through a thick curtain. You know they are
+there, but you don't know what they are all doing. I'm frightened,
+Billie, very frightened."
+
+Mary gave that dry sob which was just as painful as crying and much
+worse to hear.
+
+Billie put her arms around her friend and tried to comfort her.
+
+"Don't be scared, Mary, dear. It will all come right. I have made up my
+mind to one thing. That is, I will not leave that unlucky box at your
+mother's house any longer. We shall have to find some new place to keep
+it."
+
+Presently the two girls dropped off to slumber, and of all the sleepers
+in the big house, only one person heard the clock in the hall strike the
+passing hours. She tossed and tumbled on her bed like a boat on a
+restless sea, and moaned to herself. Her lace-frilled night cap had
+slipped, and one red rubber horn pointed upward, like an accusing
+finger.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.--MRS. RUGGLES.
+
+
+Breakfast was late next morning, and there were some heavy eyes at the
+pretty table. Belle was pale and nervous, and Mary, too, wore an anxious
+look on her face. Even the plump and jovial Mrs. St. Clair was not quite
+herself. Her eyes had a puzzled, absent-minded expression, as if she
+were trying to remember something that had almost faded out of her
+memory. But she forced herself to smile and talk with her young guests,
+and only the Motor Maids really noticed her abstraction.
+
+"What do you intend to do to-day, Percival, dearest?" she asked her son.
+
+"Don't you remember, mother, that Billie is to take some of us and the
+side-seated wagon the others over to Mrs. Ruggles? I wrote her to expect
+us by two this afternoon, and we'll be hungry enough by then to eat
+everything in sight."
+
+"Who is Mrs. Ruggles?" asked Billie, who was not yet familiar with
+various picturesque and interesting characters living around West Haven.
+
+"Wait until you see her," replied Mrs. St. Clair. "She is a queer old
+woman, but she has a great many friends and you can't help liking her,
+and her food--dear me, you never imagined such meals as she can get up."
+
+"Now, don't go and give things away, mother," remonstrated Percy. "The
+others have all met Mrs. Ruggles, but Billie hasn't and neither has Miss
+Alta, and we might as well give them a little surprise."
+
+"It seems to me that West Haven is full of surprises," observed Billie.
+"Papa and I used to wander about the world together like two vagabonds,
+but in all that time we never had so many adventures and excitements as
+I have had here."
+
+"Well, there won't be any excitement about this trip," said Percy. "It's
+just a ride across the country to the shore, one grand, large meal, and
+then home again in time for another feed, and you'll all be ready for
+bed."
+
+It was arranged for those who were to drive to start well ahead of the
+others in the "handicap race," as Percy called it, in order to get to
+Mrs. Ruggles' at the same time. The Motor Maids went in "The Comet" with
+their particular friends, which was tacitly agreed upon, and Roly Poly
+McLane drove with Belle and Fannie and three boys in the St. Clair
+trim-looking depot wagon. They were not even to take the same road as
+the motor car, but were to go by a short cut over a road too sandy for
+automobiles.
+
+Mrs. St. Clair, who was not to be in the party, inspected each girl with
+motherly interest before the start. She appeared to have an endless
+store of wraps, ulsters, sweaters and fur coats, veils and scarfs, which
+she bundled on her guests without the slightest regard for sex or size.
+
+"Young people never know how to keep warm," she said. "Especially girls.
+They always think warm clothing is unbecoming, when really nothing is
+more unbecoming than purple noses and blue lips. Percival, my darling,
+don't you think you'll need your ear muffs?"
+
+"No, mother," answered her son firmly, "not on the first of November."
+
+"Oh, I implore you, my son; I entreat you," cried the importunate woman,
+and Percy, with admirable patience permitted her to slip them on his
+ears, though he promptly removed them when the motor car had turned into
+the road and he could no longer see his mother waving her handkerchief.
+
+"I must look remarkably like Dr. Cook," he said, laughing, as he removed
+some of the layers of wraps and scarfs his mother had loaded him with.
+
+"The Comet" was in splendid trim that morning.
+
+"He gets cranky and unmanageable exactly like a human being," Billie had
+often said about him, but to-day he appeared almost to take human
+enjoyment in the long stretch of hard-beaten road and the crisp autumn
+air.
+
+"Does this mysterious Mrs. Ruggles live in a palace or a hut?" asked
+Billie, after a while, her curiosity increasing as the salty breeze
+straight from the ocean reminded her that they were approaching the
+coast.
+
+"It's a little of both," replied Percy.
+
+"She's a queen, herself, Mrs. Ruggles is," put in Ben.
+
+"I believe she thinks she is one, really," said Elinor. "If she doesn't
+like a person, she almost says, 'Off with his head.'"
+
+"But I thought you said she was a cook?"
+
+"She is," answered Merry. "She's a queenly cook and a cookly queen."
+
+"You are all a lot of crack-brained, foolish people," exclaimed Billie,
+exasperated. "I feel as if 'The Comet' couldn't take me fast enough to
+satisfy my curiosity about Mrs. Ruggles."
+
+She put on the third speed and the red motor took to the course like a
+young race horse as he rounds the curve toward home. It was a long and
+rather chilly ride before they reached the abode of Mrs. Ruggles. The
+young people found themselves buttoning their wraps around them quite
+gratefully and snuggling down in the car.
+
+"Here we are," said Percy, at last.
+
+Billie stopped the car and examined with much curiosity a quaint old
+house, rather tumbled down at second glance, but with an air of comfort
+about it that no amount of disrepair could overcome.
+
+Smoke was pouring out of the middle chimney and the reflection on the
+small window panes indicated that there was a roaring fire in the front
+room.
+
+What the place looked like on the inside was nothing more nor less than
+an old Spanish inn. Billie did not know this because she had never seen
+one, but the room reminded her vaguely of something very romantic and
+picturesque, and what was most curious about the place was that the
+outside seemed to have no connection whatever with the inside. They were
+not even related to each other by distant kinship. Outside were the
+dignified gray walls and gabled windows of an old seashore house. The
+inside appeared to be one very large room. The uneven floor was paved
+with red tile and in a big stone fireplace at one end burned an enormous
+fire of driftwood. From the blackened rafters hung garlands of red
+peppers, bunches of herbs and strings of onions and garlic. Shining
+copper vessels were ranged on shelves and around two sides of the room
+ran a gallery with steps leading up from one end.
+
+"Am I in a dream," cried Billie. "I feel as if I had been transported
+somewhere suddenly."
+
+"Isn't it fascinating?" said Elinor. "The old house has been in Mrs.
+Ruggles' family for two hundred years. It used to be a sort of sailors'
+inn, and there are many stories connected with it. But here she comes
+herself. She's just as wonderful as her house."
+
+Mrs. Ruggles was certainly a remarkable figure. She was very tall, one
+of the tallest women Billie had ever seen, with coal black hair, shiny
+dark eyes, rather too close together, a beaked eagle nose, and a very
+determined mouth, with a slightly humorous curve to the lips, which
+softened her somewhat stern face.
+
+She wore a most outlandish dress for that part of the world, of striped
+red and black cotton, but she was scrupulously clean, and the coarse
+cotton kerchief tied around her neck was as white as snow. Her stockings
+also were white, and she wore men's low shoes of enormous size, even for
+a woman of her height.
+
+The boys and girls all shook hands with her as if she were an old
+friend. She called them by their first names and when she was introduced
+to Billie she gave her a long, keen look that seemed to read the young
+girl's most hidden and secret thoughts. She walked with an erect
+carriage and majestic tread, and Billie had a feeling that she had been
+introduced to a personage.
+
+"She's a great old girl," said Merry Brown, when Mrs. Ruggles had
+disappeared into the back regions of the house to finish cooking the
+dinner. "She can sail a boat as well as anybody along this coast. She
+fishes, digs for clams, catches lobsters in traps, and does all the
+things the fishermen around here do and more, too, because she is the
+jim dandiest cook in the county."
+
+"Hasn't she any husband or family?" asked Billie.
+
+"She was married twice. Ruggles, the second husband, was an Irishman. He
+was a fine fellow, a sea captain, but he died long ago. Her children are
+floating about the country somewhere."
+
+"What was her name before she married? Nothing like Ruggles, I am sure."
+
+"No, it was Sabater. Mrs. Ruggles' father was captain of a schooner
+which carried freight up and down the coast. They say her grandfather
+was a great old fighter and came near being hanged as a spy by both
+sides in the Revolution."
+
+It was all very interesting, and Billie was still asking questions of
+the others when the carriage arrived with the rest of the party.
+
+"Why, where is Fannie?" they demanded, noticing her absence from the
+depot wagon.
+
+"She complained of a headache and went home," answered Belle. "We met
+one of your vehicles on the road, Percy, coming from town, and she got
+in and drove back."
+
+"Too bad," answered Percy. "But she's very sensible if she doesn't feel
+well. It's a long drive and fairly chilly when it gets late."
+
+Fannie was not much missed, however, from the jolly party which now
+gathered around the crackling wood fire. Presently the inn-keeper,
+fish-woman, queen, whatever she was, led the girls up the narrow flight
+of stairs at one end of the room to the balcony, on which opened a row
+of little bedrooms, like ship cabins. She was a very silent, busy woman,
+and she did not linger while they smoothed their rumpled locks and
+washed the dust from their faces.
+
+Billie, who also was not one to linger at the dressing table, went out
+on the gallery and stood looking down into the picturesque room. The
+place fascinated her and she strolled along, peeping into the other
+small rooms, where, no doubt, Mrs. Ruggles' father and grandfather had
+put up many a seafaring guest in years gone by.
+
+At the other end of the gallery were more rooms, and she could not
+resist the temptation to glance into them while she waited for the other
+girls. Two of the doors were open, one into a large empty room and one
+into a scantily furnished bedroom. The next door was half closed. Should
+she look in? Billie hesitated. It was very impolite of her, but she knew
+that old Mrs. Ruggles lived alone, and there could be no one to intrude
+on. She pushed the door gently and looked in, then retreated quickly.
+The room was not empty, after all. In the immense, old-fashioned bed so
+high that it was necessary to stand on a foot stool at one side in order
+to plunge into it, lay a woman. Billie thought she was asleep at first.
+Her eyes were closed and her long black hair was spread back of her on
+the pillow like a dusky mantel. The young girl stood transfixed on the
+threshold. Then the woman opened her eyes and looked straight into
+Billie's.
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Billie politely, and backed away, her heart
+beating so fast that she almost choked for breath.
+
+The others were just going downstairs, chatting and laughing together,
+even Belle Rogers, who seemed, somehow, softened and quite different.
+There was no chance to tell about the strange woman just then, and
+Billie kept her knowledge to herself. But the large dark eyes haunted
+her memory and she could not forget the face, of which she had caught
+only a fleeting glance.
+
+Then came the dinner. Mrs. Ruggles did not wait on the guests. The
+dishes were placed on the table and they helped themselves, while Merry
+and Percy, with napkins over their arms, like well-trained butlers,
+removed one set of plates and brought on another.
+
+Perhaps these young people, who were not epicures by any means, did not
+realize how delicious Mrs. Ruggles' dinner really was. But an older and
+more experienced person would have appreciated some of those delightful
+concoctions of rice and pimentos, soup thick and rich, fowls done to a
+turn, and a dish of corn meal and chopped meat and tomatoes, like a
+Mexican tamale. But they enjoyed it and the pudding that followed and
+the cups of strong black coffee.
+
+It was a merry meal, too, with jokes and songs and much laughter. Mrs.
+Ruggles moved ponderously about the room or sat silently by the fire.
+Occasionally her face lit up with a delightful smile, and she would turn
+and beam approvingly at Percy or Merry or Roly Poly McLane, who were the
+chief fun-makers.
+
+After dinner Billie seized an opportunity to speak to the strange woman.
+
+"We had a splendid dinner, Mrs. Ruggles," she said. "I should think you
+would have lots of people stopping here in this delightful place."
+
+"The Inn is closed now," she answered. "I don't rent my rooms any more."
+
+"And you have no guests at all?" asked Billie.
+
+Mrs. Ruggles looked at her for so long that Billie felt desperately
+uncomfortable.
+
+"No," she answered shortly, and began clearing off the table with a
+scowl that reminded Billie of some one somewhere.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.--FANNIE ALTA.
+
+
+In the meantime, Mrs. St. Clair, left to the quiet seclusion of her own
+home, became forthwith a very determined and resolute character.
+
+First she summoned to her aid the old colored butler, who had been with
+her many years, and together they searched every part of the house where
+she had been the night before. They went over the attic thoroughly and
+satisfied themselves that the lost pearl necklace could not have been
+dropped there. They hunted through the downstairs rooms, shook out the
+sofa cushions, looked under the rugs and behind curtains. There was not
+a crack nor cranny of the rooms she had lately frequented that Mrs. St.
+Clair and old Randolph did not scour.
+
+Like many another easy-going, amiable soul, Mrs. St. Clair, when roused
+to action, was capable of the most surprising, almost fierce
+determination, and when Fannie Alta returned, pleading the excuse of a
+headache, she hardly recognized in the white intense face, the rosy,
+dimpled countenance of the widow.
+
+Fannie retired to her room, but when Mrs. St. Clair went to the
+telephone in the upper hall, she crept to the door, opened it a crack,
+and overheard snatches of this conversation:
+
+"Do you happen to have a good detective? That's fortunate. The famous
+Mr. Bangs home on his vacation? Has a motor cycle? Very well, he ought
+to get here in an hour. Tell him to hurry. Thank you. Good-by."
+
+A tray of luncheon was brought to Fannie, but she ate very little. She
+sat in her room thinking hard. Then, with a sudden resolution, she
+jumped up and began to move about. First she packed her valise. Then,
+tying her handkerchief about her head, she put on a very woe-begone
+expression and left the room. Mrs. St. Clair was in the living room, a
+maid told her, and Fannie found her pacing nervously up and down the
+bright, chintz-hung place.
+
+"I am afraid you are not feeling so well, Miss Alta," the widow said
+politely, but with just a shade of coldness in her tone.
+
+"I am much worse," answered Fannie. "I feel quite ill. I wish to return
+to my mamma. May I be driven home?"
+
+Mrs. St. Clair hesitated and a very strange expression came into her
+face.
+
+"You may go in a few hours, Miss Alta. There is no one to take you just
+now. Randolph is needed here and the other men are off working on the
+place. Perhaps you had better lie down in your room until I can arrange
+to send you back. Did you try the aromatic spirits of ammonia?"
+
+"If no one can take me," said the Spanish girl irritably, not taking any
+notice of the question, "I shall walk."
+
+"But I thought you were ill?"
+
+"I am, but the walk will help my head."
+
+"No, I cannot permit it," said Mrs. St. Clair firmly. "Go to your room
+and in another hour you will be sent home."
+
+Fannie started to reply, but she checked herself and left the room. Mrs.
+St. Clair, stripped of her smiles and good-natured pleasantries, was not
+a person to be disobeyed, and Fannie was quick to recognize that fact.
+
+She had hardly reached the second floor, when she heard the whirring
+sound of a motor cycle, followed almost immediately by a quick ring of
+the bell. Fannie leaned far over the banisters, and when she turned to
+go to her room, after a small, dapper-looking man had been admitted, she
+was somewhat embarrassed to find Mrs. St. Clair's maid looking at her
+with an expression of extreme amazement.
+
+Fannie hurried to her room and for the next fifteen minutes stood
+irresolutely first on one foot, then on the other. Finally, with an air
+of determination, she opened her satchel.
+
+In the sitting room downstairs Mrs. St. Clair and Mr. Bangs were in
+close conference.
+
+"I do not really know the girl, Mr. Bangs. She is a Cuban or a South
+American, or something. Her name is Alta and she was brought here by my
+son's guest. It is impossible for me to accuse a visitor in my own house
+of stealing the most valued and handsomest possession I have in the
+world. She is a queer little creature and looks sly and unreliable to
+me. But, of course, that is not really evidence. What I have been
+racking my brain all night and morning to recall is whether it was not
+she who, when she helped me off with my ghost dress last night, fumbled
+at my neck a moment.
+
+"It amounts to this, Mr. Bangs," the widow continued after a pause, "I
+can't get over the impression that she has stolen my necklace. The other
+children here I have known all their lives. My servants have been with
+me for years, and she is the one suspicious person in the house. Now,
+what I want you to do is to help me to find out the whole thing without
+arousing her suspicions. If she is the thief, she may return the
+necklace, and be sent back to town before the others arrive, and it will
+be easy enough to make excuses. You are a very able man, Mr. Bangs, and
+I know that you are only home for a rest, but I do so need your help.
+Now, what do you advise?"
+
+"Have you looked among her things yet?" asked the detective.
+
+"No, because the conviction only came to me after she returned. I did
+have suspicions, I will admit, but I put them aside. When she came back
+I saw that she was uneasy and anxious, and only a few moments ago she
+asked to be sent home."
+
+"H-m," mused the detective. "Suppose," he continued, "that you call her
+down and let me talk to her as if I needed her assistance, she being the
+only member of the party available."
+
+The advice was acted upon, and presently Fannie, still with the
+handkerchief swathing her forehead, looking very nervous and pale,
+entered the room.
+
+"Miss Alta," began the widow kindly, "I am sorry to have disturbed you
+when you were ill, but we are in great trouble and we thought perhaps
+you might help us. Did you know that last night I lost my beautiful
+pearl necklace, the most precious thing I have in the world?"
+
+Fannie showed great surprise.
+
+"Did it not come unclasped and slip?" she suggested.
+
+"I have reason to believe that it did not slip from my neck, because we
+have searched the place thoroughly. It must have been taken. I talked it
+all over with the other girls last night and they helped me look for it,
+but now I need some one else, and in their absence I have sent for you.
+Mr. Bangs, who is a detective, has come down to lend me his aid, and we
+thought we might take you into the conspiracy with us."
+
+The widow paused for breath.
+
+Fannie sat down and folded her hands nervously.
+
+"I do not see how I can help," she said, after a pause.
+
+"Possibly you cannot," put in Mr. Bangs, "but Mrs. St. Clair thought you
+might have noticed something unusual, and being a guest were too polite
+to speak of it. For instance, were you standing near Mrs. St. Clair when
+she removed the sheet and pillow case?"
+
+"Yes," said Fannie, "there were several of us in the party."
+
+"Did you notice who unpinned the sheet for Mrs. St. Clair?"
+
+Fannie paused a long time without replying.
+
+"It was not you who did it?"
+
+The young girl compressed her lips and looked the detective squarely in
+the eye.
+
+"The girl who unpinned the sheet was Mary Price," she replied, "and
+since you are determined to question me, I will tell you."
+
+She drew a deep breath, looked first at the detective, then at Mrs. St.
+Clair, and proceeded:
+
+"I did notice that she removed the sheet from your shoulders and her
+actions were very strange. But, knowing what I did, I was not surprised,
+and I am not surprised to hear now that you have lost something
+valuable, Mrs. St. Clair," she went on, more and more glibly, as she saw
+she was gaining the interest of the other two.
+
+"What were Miss Price's actions?" asked the detective, taking Fannie's
+statements in the order she had made them.
+
+Fannie frowned.
+
+"Oh, I do not know. She was strange. She behaved strangely and she went
+away at once."
+
+"You mean she left the room?"
+
+"I cannot say. I saw her no more until supper."
+
+"Where were you?"
+
+"Oh, I was about, dancing, playing, laughing with the others," replied
+Fannie carelessly.
+
+"You said a moment ago you knew something about Miss Price. Will you
+tell us what it is?"
+
+"Ah, but I hesitate. It is unkind to spread so terrible a story."
+
+"We will treat it confidentially," said the detective drily.
+
+"A great many people know it already," went on Fannie. "The whole school
+knows it, in fact. Miss Gray, the principal, and some of the teachers,
+who have lost money and articles. I, myself, have good reason to know
+it."
+
+"What is it that you know?" asked the detective.
+
+"That Mary Price is a thief. She has been stealing all the autumn from
+the other girls and the teachers at the High School."
+
+"Oh, impossible! I will not believe it," cried Mrs. St. Clair. "Dear,
+sweet, quiet Mary. There must be some mistake, Miss Alta. You should be
+more careful how you spread such dangerous gossip. Mary Price and her
+mother have many devoted friends in West Haven."
+
+"You may ask Miss Gray, then. She will tell you," said Fannie stiffly.
+
+"Just to verify your statement, Miss Alta, I will telephone Miss Gray
+this instant," exclaimed the widow angrily, leaving the room and
+hastening upstairs to the telephone.
+
+While she was gone, and she was away some time, the detective began to
+question Fannie. He was a very experienced man in his profession and he
+pressed her so skillfully that several times she tripped in her answers
+and finally grew excited.
+
+"I tell you it is true," she cried. "She not only is a thief, but she
+has a confederate. Billie Campbell is her assistant. Perhaps you think I
+took the necklace," she burst out at last. "You have the right to search
+among my things. I had no way to know that suspicion rested on me. If I
+took the necklace, it will still be among my things."
+
+"Don't get excited, Miss Alta, nobody has accused you of anything. We
+simply needed your valuable evidence. Why do you say Miss Campbell is a
+confederate to the thieving?"
+
+Fannie had gone farther than she intended, however, and she refused to
+give any more information. But the detective saw that when she was angry
+and frightened, she would talk, and after a pause, he said:
+
+"You perhaps know that you are the only person in the household on whom
+suspicion might rest."
+
+"I don't see why I should be suspected," she exclaimed hotly, "when Mary
+Price is already known to be a thief----"
+
+"Perhaps you have a grudge against Miss Price?"
+
+"I have not," she cried, stamping her foot.
+
+"Did no one ever suspect you of taking the things at the High School?
+You know that often happens--one girl is blamed for another's----"
+
+Fannie flew into a passion.
+
+"I tell you Billie Campbell and Mary Price are thieves. They have a
+whole box of valuable things they have stolen, stored away in Mrs.
+Price's safe."
+
+"What sort of things?"
+
+"Jewelry," burst out Fannie, then stopped and bit her lip. "But I may be
+mistaken about that," she added, trying to speak calmly.
+
+Mrs. St. Clair hurried into the room with the necklace in her hand.
+
+"Where did you find it?" asked Mr. Bangs.
+
+"I found it," she began, then paused. "It was found," she added. "You
+may go, Miss Alta. Thank you very much. And if you care to go back to
+town, Randolph will drive you in at once."
+
+When Fannie had left the room, the widow beat her hands together, and
+the tears rolled down her cheeks.
+
+"I found it in Mary Price's bag," she said. "And Miss Gray tells me that
+it is true. Mary has been suspected of stealing all autumn."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.--MARY BEFORE HER JUDGES.
+
+
+It was late when the young people returned from Mrs. Ruggles'. They were
+in gay spirits and Mrs. St. Clair could hear them talking and laughing
+in the hall, first the motorists and then the ones who had driven. She
+did not go down to meet them and they scattered to their rooms to wash
+their faces and smooth their wind-blown locks. There was no time to
+dress for supper.
+
+"I don't see how I can face them," she said to herself. "I'm so unhappy,
+and I'm afraid they will notice that I have been crying."
+
+But she bathed her temples in cold water, put on a cheery-colored silk
+dress, and went downstairs when the gong sounded for supper. Down
+trooped the boys and girls with sparkling eyes and glowing cheeks. The
+sound of their happy laughter reached her below and she pressed her hand
+to her heart and sighed deeply. Then her expression hardened:
+
+"Little wretch," she exclaimed. "She should be well punished, and she
+shall be, too."
+
+"'Soup of the evening, beautiful soup,'" sang Merry, dancing a jig in
+the hall:
+
+  "'Beautiful soup so rich and green,
+  Waiting in a hot tureen!'"
+  "'Who for such dainties would not stoop?
+  Soup of the evening, beautiful soup,'"
+
+continued Rosomond, seizing Merry's hands and whirling with him up and
+down the hall until they both fell in a laughing heap on the floor.
+
+"Oh, we have had such a good time," cried Billie and Mary together,
+taking each a hand of Mrs. St. Clair.
+
+"It has been such glorious fun," went on Billie, "and we are just as
+hungry for supper as if we hadn't eaten enough food to feed a regiment
+this afternoon."
+
+"And such fine food, too, Mrs. St. Clair," said Mary. "I think it was
+the most delightful party I have ever been to."
+
+"I am glad you were so happy," replied Mrs. St. Clair, making an effort
+to smile and succeeding very poorly.
+
+Mary, who was as sensitive to changes in manner as an aeolian harp is to
+the slightest breeze, looked at her hostess quickly and noticed the red
+rims on her eyelids.
+
+"Aren't you feeling well, dear Mrs. St. Clair?" she asked gently.
+
+Mrs. St. Clair put her hands on the girl's shoulders and looked into the
+clear dark eyes.
+
+"I am quite well, Mary. A little upset over something that happened
+to-day. That is all."
+
+"You mean the pearl necklace?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I am so sorry. I wish we could have found it for you."
+
+"It has been found, Mary," said the widow, turning her head away so as
+not to see Mary's face.
+
+"Oh, you did find it? I am so glad. Where was it?"
+
+"Supper is served, Mrs. St. Clair," said Randolph, opening the door to
+the dining room, where the others were already waiting.
+
+"We will talk about where it was found later," she said to Mary, who
+gave her a puzzled look, as she followed into the room.
+
+When supper was over, the boys and girls scattered about the various
+rooms. Roly Poly and Nancy got up charades. Billie curled up in a big
+easy chair by the fire. She had got most of the wind in her face and she
+was very sleepy. No one noticed, therefore, when Mrs. St. Clair, drawing
+Mary's hand through her arm, led her out of the room.
+
+"I want to see you upstairs, Mary," she said. "Will you come to my
+little private sitting room? There is something I wish to talk with you
+about."
+
+Mary was still wondering what in the world could be wanted of her, when
+Mrs. St. Clair drew her into a pretty little pink boudoir at the end of
+the hall. The door to the next room had been left open, but Mary did not
+notice a small, dapper man sitting there in a high-backed cretonne
+chair.
+
+The pearl necklace was lying on a table in the boudoir. Mrs. St. Clair
+picked it up and held it out to Mary.
+
+"Did you ever see it closely before, Mary?" she asked.
+
+"No, I never did," answered the girl, with enthusiasm. "How beautiful it
+is. No wonder you were so unhappy. But where did you find it?"
+
+"That is just why I brought you in here, Mary. I wanted to ask you if
+you could guess where the necklace had been found at last."
+
+Mary suddenly became very grave. She was beginning to notice now that
+Mrs. St. Clair was in an unusually serious frame of mind and that
+something must have happened concerning the necklace which the others
+had not heard.
+
+"I don't understand," she said, after a pause. "Why should I guess?"
+
+"Is it possible, Mary," exclaimed the widow, "that even after you were
+told I had found the necklace you were not just a little frightened, a
+little uneasy? Didn't you suspect when I asked you to come up here with
+me that I was going to speak to you about the necklace?"
+
+Mary looked at her in wonder for a few minutes. Then a light dawned on
+her.
+
+"It's Fannie Alta again," she said, in a low voice. "She must have put
+the necklace among some of my things."
+
+"Then you do know where I found the necklace?" cried the widow
+triumphantly.
+
+"I can guess," said Mary. "You found it in my suit case. It's the second
+time she's done something like that."
+
+"Mary, Mary--don't blame it on any one else. I did find the necklace in
+your valise----"
+
+Mary stood up. Her eyes were blazing and her small slender frame was
+shaken with emotion.
+
+"Do you mean to insinuate that I stole your pearl necklace?" she cried.
+
+Her words rang out in a high, clear tone that made the small man in the
+next room stir uneasily.
+
+"How else did the necklace get into your bag, Mary?"
+
+[Illustration: "Do you mean to insinuate that I stole your pearl
+necklace?"]
+
+"Fannie Alta put it there. She put twenty dollars into my pocket not
+long ago and tried to accuse me of taking that, and when I gave it back
+to her she hadn't a word to say."
+
+"But, Mary, Fannie is not your only accuser. Miss Gray tells me that you
+have been suspected of many thefts since school opened."
+
+"Oh, oh!" cried Mary. "How dare she? How dare any one? What have I done
+that these people should try to make me out a thief? Oh, mother,
+mother!"
+
+"That is just why I brought you up here to-night, Mary. On account of
+your sweet, lovely mother. I want you to make me a promise in return for
+what I am going to do for you. I promise not to push this matter any
+farther. It shall never reach your mother's ears. She will be spared all
+distress and misery, if you promise me never again, as long as you live,
+to steal. It was not nice of you, Mary, staying here as my guest, to
+steal from me. Will you make me that promise?"
+
+Mary did not reply. She sat down and clasped her hands in her lap. Once
+or twice her throat quivered with the little sob, which so went to
+Billie's heart. She pressed her hands together and closed her eyes for a
+moment. Her face was so pale that Mrs. St. Clair thought she was going
+to faint, but her lips were moving.
+
+"Oh, God, help me," she prayed softly. "Tell me what to say."
+
+Presently her agitation ceased altogether. She opened her eyes and
+looked calmly at the widow.
+
+"No, I will not promise you that, Mrs. St. Clair, because I have never
+stolen anything in my life. I would prefer that my mother should know
+about this. I don't wish to keep it from her. She would never believe me
+guilty, no matter what the evidence was against me, even if I had to go
+to jail. You say you found the necklace in my bag? How did you happen to
+look for it there?"
+
+"You see, I believed that Fannie Alta had taken it, and when we brought
+her into the living room and urged her to tell what she knew, she
+accused you. I would not believe it, however, until I had called up Miss
+Gray. It was only after that that I looked in your bag."
+
+Mary stood up.
+
+"I know that things look very black for me, Mrs. St. Clair. I don't
+understand why, but there is a conspiracy in the High School. It seems
+to have formed around Billie and me in particular. But there is
+something else, too. Something is going on in West Haven--something too
+big for us to understand. Billie and I are in it, and Fannie Alta is in
+it, and sometimes I think even Belle Rogers is, too. I don't know what
+it all means, or why it should have anything to do with making me a
+thief, but I am not a thief, and I did not put the necklace in my bag.
+Good-night. I will not see you again. As soon as morning comes, Billie
+and I will go back in the motor. I know she will take me if I ask her."
+
+Mary walked quietly out of the room.
+
+"That's a girl of fine spirit," thought Mr. Bangs. "The case is
+certainly interesting enough to keep me here another week."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.--MISS CAMPBELL WEARS BLACK.
+
+
+Mary went straight to her room that night and packed her bag. When
+Billie came up a little later she found her kneeling beside her bed, her
+face hidden in her hands. It seemed to the unhappy young girl in her
+misery and danger that no human power could aid her.
+
+When Billie heard the story, she was so angry with Mrs. St. Clair and
+Miss Gray and Fannie Alta that she took an imaginary aim and pitched
+both shoes across the room with all her force.
+
+"Oh, my dear, my dear," she cried, throwing her arms about her friend's
+neck with affectionate fervor, "you have at least one devoted friend who
+will stand by you through everything."
+
+Mary was touched by Billie's devotion and by and by the two girls
+dropped off to sleep in spite of their troubled hearts.
+
+But they were up and dressed before any one except the servants was
+stirring in the house. Randolph, greatly amazed, and imploring the young
+ladies to wait and take at least a cup of coffee, led the way to the
+carriage house where the motor had been left.
+
+"Tell Mrs. St. Clair," said Billie, "that I was called home early and
+will write to her."
+
+No one knew but the colored servant, and he did not understand, that
+Mary and Billie had refused to eat anything in a house where one of them
+had been called a thief.
+
+"Mary, tell your mother the whole story," said Billie, as she dropped
+her friend at "The Sign of the Blue Tea Pot." "Tell her not to be
+uneasy. Your friends know you are innocent and it is all obliged to come
+out right."
+
+Then she dashed around the Square, turned up Cliff Street, and stopped
+at the home of Miss Helen Campbell.
+
+"No, I haven't had breakfast," she said to the old man servant, who
+opened the door. "I'll eat with Cousin Helen if she hasn't breakfasted."
+
+"Miss Campbell will not eat any breakfast this morning, Miss Billie,"
+replied the butler.
+
+"Is she ill?"
+
+"No, Miss," the old man lowered his voice, "but she's wearing her black
+dress."
+
+Billie frowned.
+
+"Is it an anniversary?" she asked.
+
+"No, Miss. That's just the queer part. It ain't the anniversary. We know
+when that comes now. But something's happened."
+
+"Nothing to do with papa?" she asked anxiously.
+
+"No, no, Miss."
+
+"I'll have some breakfast, then," she said. "I'm very hungry from the
+ride in town."
+
+Billie ate a hurried but hearty meal alone.
+
+"I never can do anything when I'm empty," she often said, and
+instinctively she felt that trouble of some sort was brewing.
+
+After breakfast she tapped on her cousin's door.
+
+"Come in," came the tremulous answer, and Billie entered a darkened
+room.
+
+Miss Campbell, looking faded and pale and wearing a black crepe dress,
+was sitting alone at the far end of her apartment. Her hands were
+crossed on her breast like a mediaeval saint's, and she looked the very
+picture of hopeless misery.
+
+"Dear Cousin Helen, what has happened?" cried Billie, running to the
+little lady and kneeling beside her chair. "Is it something very
+terrible?"
+
+Miss Campbell put her arm around the girl's neck and two tears slipped
+down her faded cheeks.
+
+"Billie, Billie, why have you deceived me so?" she exclaimed. "How could
+you have done this terrible thing? Oh, my dear, my dear, I have been so
+unhappy, and Mrs. Price, too. We have wept together."
+
+"What in the world?" cried Billie.
+
+"The jewels, my dear. The box of wonderful jewels that you have kept.
+How could you have done such a thing? I know many young girls who would
+have been tempted by them. But not you, my dear, dear Billie. And Mary,
+too. Oh, heavens, I am so unhappy!"
+
+Miss Campbell was so shaken by her sobs and weeping that Billie was
+obliged to wipe her eyes with her own handkerchief.
+
+"But, dearest Cousin," she said at last. "We haven't done anything
+dishonest, or that we might be ashamed of. How did you find out about
+the box and who told you such a slander about us?"
+
+After being bolstered up with aromatic nerve drops and eau de cologne,
+Miss Campbell was able to speak coherently.
+
+"Yesterday a man came here to see me. He sent up his name and the
+message that he wished to speak to me about something in regard to you,
+so I had him shown in. And then, my child, he told me such a story. How
+his motor car had been wrecked on the very day we went to Shell Island
+and a box of jewels belonging to his wife had fallen in the sand. He had
+good reason to know, he said, that you had found the jewels and, instead
+of trying to find the owner or answering advertisements and notes, had
+kept them all this time in Mrs. Price's safe. He gave me a list of the
+jewels and an exact description. I went at once to Mrs. Price. We found
+the combination, opened the safe, and got out the box. There they were,
+just as he had described them. Oh, my dear, what mortification! What
+will your father say?"
+
+"Did you give him the jewels?" exclaimed Billie, without waiting to make
+explanations until this important point was settled.
+
+"The man was very insistent. He has threatened to arrest you and Mary
+and even Mrs. Price. Think of that! For harboring stolen goods."
+
+"Did you give them to him?" cried Billie, impatiently.
+
+"No, Mrs. Price refused to let him have them until she had seen you and
+Mary. For my part, I should have given them to the man and let him go.
+We had a terrible scene with him, but Mrs. Price was firm. She said it
+would do no harm for him to wait until she had seen you and she would
+not allow him to take them."
+
+"Thank heavens for that," burst out Billie. "Then the box is in Mrs.
+Price's safe?"
+
+"No, I had it brought here for safe-keeping. The man was so angry he
+made threats and I thought it would be better to get it away from Mrs.
+Price's at least."
+
+"What was the man's name?"
+
+"Lafitte. He wrote it on a piece of paper."
+
+"Lafitte?" echoed Billie. "What did he look like?"
+
+"I cannot really recall, my dear. I was so agitated. But I think there
+was something wrong about one eye."
+
+"He had only one eye," Billie almost shrieked in her excitement.
+
+"I believe so, and only one arm. But you will see him. He will be back
+this morning."
+
+"Cousin Helen, he will never come back. He is a thief and a robber and a
+smuggler. He is everything that is wicked and bad. I don't know how he
+found out that we had the jewels, but he has been hot on our track ever
+since. I will tell you the real story of the jewels and then you will
+see what an injustice you have done us."
+
+When Billie had finished the strange tale, Miss Campbell looked at her
+with a peculiar expression.
+
+"It's a very remarkable story, my dear. And if I did not know you as
+well as I do, I could almost think you had imagined it. And I was there
+all the time. You should have confided in me. The woman was insane, I
+suppose."
+
+"She was not," insisted Billie. "She was perfectly sane and very
+beautiful. The man who calls himself 'Lafitte' is not the right person,
+and he shall not have the jewels until I hear from her or from the right
+Lafitte. You may be sure he will not dare have me or any one else
+arrested. We know too much about him already."
+
+"But what are we to do with the things, child? They have brought nothing
+but trouble on you since you have had them."
+
+"Suppose you put them in your safety box at the bank for a few days.
+There is something much more important than this at stake now. Mary has
+been accused of being a thief by Mrs. St. Clair and Miss Gray. It is a
+terrible thing. Mrs. St. Clair wouldn't listen to reason."
+
+Billie related to her cousin what had happened the day before and the
+chain of events which led up to it.
+
+"Oh, poor dear Mrs. Price! My unfortunate friend. What shall we do,
+Billie?" exclaimed the sympathetic little woman.
+
+"I don't know yet, Cousin Helen. The whole thing is too much for me, but
+I have a scheme. Are there any detectives in West Haven?"
+
+"Call up the police station," her cousin suggested, and presently
+Billie's voice could be heard in the hall:
+
+"Have you a good detective? Bangs, you say. Send him to Miss Campbell's
+please; upper Cliff Street, and the sooner the better. Good-by."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.--THE MISSING LINK.
+
+
+Mr. Bangs made three calls on that memorable Monday. The first was to
+Billie, as you already surmise. If he recognized the strong undercurrent
+which connected the strange adventures of the Motor Maids during the
+past two months, he said nothing, but listened gravely to the young
+girl's account of the happenings in Boulder Lane, the box of jewels, the
+cases of rifles at Seven League Island, and so on through the events
+which have been told in this history.
+
+When Billie had finished, she paused and waited for the detective to
+speak, but he sat silently twirling his thumbs and looking down at the
+floor with half-closed eyes.
+
+Billie was slightly irritated.
+
+"I have sent for you, Mr. Bangs," she continued with some dignity,
+"because, while I am certain of two things, I'm not at all sure of the
+third. The first is that Fannie Alta has some very good reason for
+trying to prove that Mary is a thief. The second is that this smuggler
+who has been trying to steal the jewels has something to do with it."
+
+"And what is the third, Miss Campbell?" asked the detective, smiling,
+without looking up.
+
+"That is what I want you to tell me," exclaimed Billie restlessly.
+"There is a third. It is the missing link. And it is what I wanted you
+to find out for me. I have thought and thought and puzzled and puzzled,
+but I can't make it out. I believe with all my soul that there is some
+wicked force back of the whole thing."
+
+Mr. Bangs raised his eyes at last and looked at the young girl with
+evident admiration.
+
+"You are taking the first step toward making a good detective, Miss
+Campbell," he said. "You have expressed it in three words. It is the
+missing link we need to get at in this business and it is what I must
+find."
+
+Billie flushed with pleasure at this professional praise. She had never
+had occasion to play the part of detective before. But devotion and
+loyalty to her friend had sharpened her wits.
+
+"Now, why?" asked the detective. "Isn't Miss Alta the missing link?"
+
+"That is the strangest part of the whole business. She is a piece of the
+link, I think, but then she has nothing against Mary and me. There would
+be no object to what she has done unless she had."
+
+"You did not know that she accused you of being the confederate of your
+friend or that she knew that you had the box of jewels hidden in the
+safe?"
+
+"What?" cried Billie, with amazement. "But how did she know----" she
+began.
+
+"Yes, how?"
+
+Billie sat looking down at her hands. She was not thinking of those
+slender, strong fingers, which appeared to clasp each other with a
+friendly grip. Her thoughts were busy going back over the past few
+weeks.
+
+"I think I've found the missing link," she said at last, with a serious
+look in her eyes, as she turned toward the detective. "Belle Rogers is
+the missing link. I can't understand why I haven't thought of it before,
+but it seemed so incredible."
+
+"Miss Campbell," put in Mr. Bangs severely, "I am afraid you are not
+such a good detective, after all. You have left out one of the most
+important things. You did not tell me that some one besides your three
+friends knew about the jewels."
+
+Billie had omitted the story of the confusion of the two suit cases at
+Shell Island. She had really quite forgotten it and Mr. Bangs chuckled
+with amusement when he heard how Belle had opened and examined all the
+contents of another girl's suit case out of pure curiosity.
+
+"Then she must have read the name on the card, too," he said presently.
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+"Now, tell me, Miss Campbell, what is the grudge which this young lady
+perhaps has against you and your friends?"
+
+"Oh, it's only a silly schoolgirl affair," replied Billie. "I am ashamed
+to tell you, because it seems so utterly trivial in comparison to other
+things. She was angry because I wouldn't join her club and because we
+saw her the night of the fire with her hair up in rubber curlers."
+
+The detective laughed outright.
+
+"That's a woman's reason for taking revenge," he said.
+
+"And she was angry again because I took her into the wrong room, when
+the hotel was burning and we had to escape over the roof."
+
+"Humph!" exclaimed the detective. "Insult piled onto injury, eh? So this
+Miss Rogers is a very vindictive character?"
+
+Billie hesitated. It went against her straight-forward, honest nature to
+malign even Belle Rogers.
+
+"She has been spoiled all her life," she said, "and you know how spoiled
+children must have their own way. That is all. She was angry because she
+planned to make me a member of her club and queen it over me as she does
+over the others, and I disappointed her. Her mother and friends have
+taken good care always that she should never be disappointed and she
+just didn't know what the feeling was, I suppose."
+
+"She must be quite a remarkably spoiled young woman to go to such
+lengths for such a trivial offence. But we sometimes get in deeper than
+we intend, you know."
+
+The detective rose to go.
+
+"Good day, Miss Campbell," he said, giving her hand quite a warm grip,
+considering what a quiet, cold individual he had seemed at first. "You
+will hear from me again, soon. I had not intended to work when I came
+down here. You know I am a West Haven boy. My father was old Bill Bangs,
+the jailer. You probably have heard of him. He was a famous character in
+his day. I came home to rest and see my people, but when a detective
+scents a good case he is not apt to let it slip by, even on a holiday."
+
+"And you think this is a good case?"
+
+"It's a corking one," he replied, as he closed the door after him.
+
+Billie and Mary did not go to school that famous Monday. Billie had no
+mind to face the curious looks she felt certain would be turned upon her
+by the other girls, because news travels quickly in any school. Mary was
+lying on her mother's bed with a throbbing sick headache. All day Mrs.
+Price sat beside her daughter and held her hand. At intervals she bathed
+her temples with eau de cologne and whispered:
+
+"My dearest, it will come out all right. Mother loves you and believes
+in you and so does Billie. Don't sob like that for my sake, my little
+girl."
+
+Belle Rogers also stayed at home that Monday. Mr. Bangs discovered this
+fact on his second visit of the day when he was closeted for an hour or
+more with Miss Gray and Mrs. St. Clair in the principal's private
+office.
+
+After a tiresome interview with these two well meaning but mistaken
+ladies, in which he said little and they said much, he left the High
+School with a sigh of relief.
+
+Presently he found himself in the fashionable district of West Haven. It
+was the second time he had climbed the street that day, but he was a
+calm little person, not easily heated by emotion or exercise, and when
+he rang the bell at the Rogers home, there was just the suspicion of a
+smile on his face. He sent up his card for Miss Rogers and word was
+brought back that Miss Rogers was ill and not to be seen. Then, with a
+pencil, he wrote across the face of the card, "Lafitte--Paris."
+
+In three minutes the swish of skirts down the steps announced that some
+one was coming.
+
+"I hope it's not the mother," he said to himself.
+
+But it was Belle, very pale, with violet circles around her eyes and a
+nervous quivering about the lips.
+
+When Mr. Bangs left the Rogers house after spending three-quarters of an
+hour with Belle, he remarked as he strolled down the gravel driveway to
+the street:
+
+"It will have to be an out and out confession from one or the other. If
+this one doesn't give it, the Alta girl must. I shall pay my respects to
+Mme. Alta this evening."
+
+He had hardly passed through the great iron gateway leading into the
+street, when Belle, wearing a heavy veil and a long ulster, hurried
+after him. She carried a music roll under her arm, although she was not
+taking lessons, since she had been injured in the fire, but it was
+understood by the servant who opened the door for her that she was going
+to see Mme. Alta.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.--THE REFUGEES.
+
+
+A ship had sailed into the little harbor of West Haven on Monday
+morning. She carried a load of lumber from down the coast and after
+showing her clearance papers and discharging her cargo with all due
+formality, she hoisted sails again and moved around the curve of the
+harbor into a deep inlet, where she rested at anchor in a position just
+opposite Boulder Lane.
+
+Darkness fell very early that Monday afternoon as those who were not in
+their homes will remember.
+
+Mr. Bangs will recall the inky blackness of the lowering sky, as he came
+out of the telegraph office, where he had wired to his chief to send
+down another man, and turned his steps toward the rooms occupied by Mme.
+Alta.
+
+Our Motor Maids have not forgotten how they sped back to town after a
+swift ride in their beloved "Comet," in the late afternoon, when they
+discussed the situation long and earnestly.
+
+Three figures turned into Boulder Lane as the motor car flashed past,
+but the girls were too intent on their conversation to notice them. The
+first, who was a tall, stout woman, walked stoically along with the
+tread of a grenadier. She carried a large suit case with one hand and an
+enormous bundle with the other. Her two upper teeth protruding over her
+lower lip gave her that strange animal look which Billie had disliked so
+much. For it was Mme. Alta, as you have no doubt guessed, trudging up
+Boulder Lane. Her daughter, Francesca, walked behind. She also carried a
+suit case and a bundle. Occasionally she flashed a look of hatred back
+to the lights of West Haven, which place she had never loved.
+
+Can this be Belle Rogers who brings up the procession, staggering under
+a heavy satchel and moaning and weeping as she stumbles along?
+
+"I am glad I left word that I had gone out to spend the night," she said
+to herself. "At least, they won't know it for a while, and it will be
+too late then."
+
+It was a long walk before they reached the end of Boulder Lane and found
+themselves on the beach of the little cove. The lights of the ship made
+a rippling, cheerful track on the water, but Belle shivered when she saw
+the black hull outlined in the darkness.
+
+Several men were waiting for them near a boat, which had been moored on
+the beach, and presently the three women climbed in; their luggage was
+piled at one end and they were rowed away in the darkness. Two wagons
+came lumbering up the beach, and half the night, Belle, who was tossing
+feverishly in her stuffy berth, trying to stifle her sobs, heard the
+sailors loading a cargo, while the boats plied back and forth from the
+shore to the ship.
+
+There was no wind that night and an ominous silence seemed to brood over
+the sea. At last in the stillness, Belle slept. Toward morning she was
+awakened by the sound of a voice. A man in a small boat just below her
+porthole was calling up to some one on deck.
+
+"Hello, Captain, it's Ruiz. I'm coming aboard. We must sail by dawn.
+They've got word about us. If that girl has turned traitor, she shall
+pay for it."
+
+Belle could not hear the captain's reply, but he must have made some
+objection to sailing that morning, for the man named Ruiz answered:
+
+"Storm or no storm, I'm master here, and I say we sail at once."
+
+And sail they did without more argument. She could hear the sailors
+running about the ship. The masts creaked and groaned. Chains rattled.
+Presently the boat was in motion, and from her porthole she saw the
+familiar shores glide past her.
+
+We cannot help pitying poor Belle in her misery and distress. She
+dragged herself from her berth--Fannie was still sleeping soundly--and
+put on her clothes. For the first time, she became aware of a sustained
+and ever-increasing sound. What she had mistaken in the beginning for
+the eternal noise of the waters, she recognized now as the wind. As she
+cast one long regretful look back to the shores of West Haven, which she
+had never really loved until now, the hurricane burst upon them with a
+roar like a thousand angry beasts. The ship went scurrying through the
+harbor entrance in the teeth of the gale.
+
+Belle hurried upstairs to the deck, pulling on her ulster as she ran.
+Not a vestige of curl had the wet air left in her light gold hair; but
+for the first time in her life, since she had been old enough to
+remember, she had forgotten that she had any hair and she did not even
+stop to push back the damp, uneven locks from her eyes.
+
+The boat had cleared the Black Reefs and was making for the open sea,
+when suddenly the demon wind played a trick on the captain of the little
+schooner and changed its tack. Down went the mainmast with a great
+crash. Through the shrieking of the wind, Belle could hear the curses
+and cries of the sailors and the yells of the captain. Mme. Alta
+appeared, looking more than ever like a walrus, in her greasy old black
+dressing gown. Fannie ran up behind her, making a great outcry.
+
+The hurricane seemed to lift the ship in its arms and carry it along.
+Then, with a hideous grinding noise, the vessel stood perfectly still.
+
+Some one screamed:
+
+"We're on the rocks!"
+
+And Belle knew without being told that they had tossed onto the Black
+Reefs.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Wake up, Billie," cried Nancy, shaking her friend's shoulder violently.
+"Get up and dress. We are all waiting below."
+
+"What's happened?" asked Billie, sitting up in bed and rubbing her eyes.
+
+"A ship is wrecked on the Black Reefs."
+
+Billie leaped from her bed and began to dress hurriedly.
+
+"It must be a fearful sight," she exclaimed, as she pulled on her
+clothes. "The poor sailors, will they be saved?"
+
+"I haven't heard," answered Nancy, "but the whole town is rushing up the
+Cliff Road."
+
+"Tell Ben to get 'The Comet.' He can run it as well as I can now."
+
+"He has," answered Nancy, with the privilege of friendship. "I made him
+get it while I routed you out."
+
+In another five minutes "The Comet," with its load of boys and
+girls,--only Mary and Percy were missing,--was climbing Cliff Road in a
+driving hurricane of wind.
+
+A straggling line of people hurried along the path toward the
+Life-Saving Station.
+
+"Is that it?" demanded Billie breathlessly, when the car had come to a
+standstill opposite the light house.
+
+"Yes," replied Merry, looking through the glasses. "She doesn't look
+much larger than a fishing smack from this distance, but she's really a
+pretty big schooner and she's in a bad fix, too. She has stuck right on
+the Serpent's Fang, Ben. You remember that old fisherman showed it to us
+last summer when we were sailing? It's a pointed rock that sticks up
+higher than the others and it looked to be a pretty fierce proposition
+to me."
+
+"The life-boat is being launched!" exclaimed Elinor.
+
+They clutched each other in their excitement, while a boat, with six
+brave life-savers in it, leapt onto the crest of a big wave, only to be
+hurled back again.
+
+"They'll have to use the gun," put in Charlie. "They'll never make it in
+this sea."
+
+"What do you mean?" shouted Billie. It was almost impossible to be heard
+now above the noise of the wind.
+
+But before any one could shout back an explanation, her attention was
+claimed by a man in a long, thick ulster, buttoned to his chin, and a
+vizored cap pulled well over his eyes. He had come to the front of the
+motor car and, bowing to Billie politely, he stood on tiptoe and
+beckoned to her to lean down.
+
+"You'll be surprised to hear that you have friends on that ship," he
+said in her ear, and she recognized Mr. Bangs.
+
+"Friends?" she repeated, in amazement.
+
+"Wait and see," he replied, as he moved away to join another man, who
+was leaning against a tree smoking a cigar.
+
+"Look!" cried some one, and just as Billie shifted her gaze from the
+ship to the beach she saw a long black line shoot out over the water and
+light on the deck of the ship. It was very confusing then, what
+happened. There was a great deal of shouting on shore and scurrying of
+sailors on the ship. Presently there seemed to be a double line of rope
+stretching out to the wreck.
+
+After a long pause, Billie saw, creeping along one of the lines of rope,
+swaying and swinging almost to sea level, an object which appeared to be
+shaped like a pair of clumsy trouser legs with the head and shoulders of
+a human being above.
+
+"It's a woman," cried Nancy, jumping up and down in her excitement, as
+she looked through the glasses. "It's--it's----"
+
+"It's Mme. Alta," exclaimed Billie, as the woman was lifted onto the
+beach.
+
+No one could explain why the music teacher should be found on a wrecked
+schooner, but Mr. Bangs and Billie exchanged meaning glances as Mme.
+Alta was supported into the Life-Saving Station.
+
+The next time the buoy was drawn into shore it carried Fannie Alta, a
+shivering, wretched little figure, who followed her mother silently into
+the life-savers' house.
+
+"Who can the third one be?" said Billie out loud, although she was
+speaking to herself. "Can it be----"
+
+She jumped out of the car and ran down the path to the beach, followed
+by her three chums. As she passed Mr. Bangs, he caught her by the arm
+and said in her ear:
+
+"The missing link."
+
+No one but Billie and Mr. Bangs recognized Belle Rogers in the miserable
+object which now crawled out of the breeches buoy. Her face was blue and
+pinched with cold. Her damp hair hung in her eyes, and she moaned and
+sobbed most pitifully.
+
+When she saw Billie, she flung her wet arms around the young girl's
+neck.
+
+"Oh, forgive me! Forgive me!" she wept.
+
+A crowd of people gathered around them.
+
+Billie patted her on the shoulder.
+
+"I do forgive you," she whispered, "and if you would rather not go into
+the station, we will take you home in 'The Comet.'"
+
+"Any place but home," sobbed Belle, as Ben threw his ulster around her
+shivering shoulders and Nancy wrapped a scarf about her head.
+
+The others had now recognized the poor girl, and with a generous impulse
+they tried to shield her from the gaze of the villagers.
+
+"Will you go to Cousin Helen's, then?" asked Belle, as they half carried
+her up the steep path.
+
+"Yes," she answered, and in another ten minutes the miserable refugee
+was being tenderly ministered to at Billie's home by three of the most
+detested members of the Blue Bird Society.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.--BELLE'S CONFESSION.
+
+
+Belle, looking still very unlike herself, lay in Billie's little brass
+bed, propped up on pillows.
+
+"How can you and Miss Campbell be so kind to me," she was saying, "when
+you know how wicked I have been?"
+
+"But you are sorry and that means everything," answered Billie, who was
+sitting on the side of the bed, feeding her hot beef tea.
+
+"When are the others coming?" asked the invalid.
+
+"They have come. I was just going to tell you after you had finished the
+tea. Shall I call them?"
+
+Belle nodded, and presently Miss Gray and Mary Price came into the room.
+
+The Principal took the sick girl's hand kindly.
+
+"Speak out from the heart, Belle," she said, "and don't be afraid. You
+will be much happier when you get it off your mind."
+
+"I promise to, Miss Gray," replied Belle meekly, gazing miserably at
+Mary, who looked pale and ill.
+
+Miss Gray sat in a judicial looking armchair; Mary, with closed eyes,
+lay on a lounge near the fire, and Billie seated herself on the foot of
+the bed.
+
+"I suppose," began Belle, "it would be almost impossible for you to
+believe that a well brought up girl of decent family could be as wicked
+as I have been. When I finally realized what I had done I thought I
+would rather run away to South America with those terrible people than
+stay here and bear the shame of it all. But I thank heavens for the
+storm. The ship was not sailing for any good purpose. I feel sure of
+that.
+
+"To begin at the beginning, perhaps you didn't know how angry I was when
+you joined the Blue Birds, Billie? I hope I shall never be angry again.
+I was ill from it and I lay on my bed all afternoon planning a revenge
+on all the Blue Birds, but you, especially. I think I must have been
+insane with rage and mortification. I wanted to humiliate you, because I
+thought you had humiliated me before the whole school. I thought of
+dozens of ways of doing it, but the only plan that seemed good enough
+was to prove----"
+
+She paused and bit her lip.
+
+"To prove that you were--a--thief."
+
+There was a long silence. Nothing could be heard but the ticking of the
+little French clock on the mantel. Miss Gray had started and flushed
+crimson. She was only just now realizing what this confession must mean
+to the two girls.
+
+"I asked Fannie Alta to help me because she was the only outsider in the
+class, but I never dreamed that she was a real thief, herself. She found
+out what it was I wanted her to do almost before I had half breathed it
+to myself, only she was afraid of Billie and put it on Mary. It was my
+twenty dollars she used, but we found the scheme didn't work. Anyhow,
+she told it all over school and went so much farther than I had intended
+that I soon found myself too deeply involved to get out. She and her
+mother owned me, body and soul. I had to take Fannie with me everywhere
+I went, even to Mrs. St. Clair's. I had to give her my clothes, and
+explain to mamma that she was my best friend. Her mother made me carry
+letters and messages back and forth. Once I had to go by myself all the
+way to Boulder Lane after dusk and meet a horrible creature who had only
+one eye and one arm. He gave me a letter for Mme. Alta. Another time I
+was to meet one of them, a man who helped him, up in the Sophomore class
+room of the High School. I didn't go, because there was such a mist."
+
+Billie and Mary exchanged glances.
+
+"He was the man who robbed us of the fifty dollars," said Billie.
+
+"Then whose fifty dollars was it I got?" demanded Miss Gray.
+
+"My monthly allowance," replied Billie.
+
+"Foolish, foolish girls," said the Principal. "But it was my own fault.
+I blame no one else, and perhaps I wouldn't have believed the story just
+at that time."
+
+"Then," continued Belle, "the most dreadful thing of all happened. These
+people were always in need of money. Everything they had seemed to go to
+some object. The one-eyed man, who was Fannie's stepfather, was to get
+some high position in South America. She used to tell me what she was
+going to do when he was made Vice President, or something. When we went
+to the St. Clair's, Fannie was almost unbearable. She made me give her
+my dress and I had to wear hers, and she insulted me at every turn. But
+I didn't find out until after the party that her stepfather had been
+there dressed as a ghost. He wanted to rob Mrs. St. Clair. It was Fannie
+who took the necklace. She was to go back later and give it to him, so
+that if her bag was searched the next morning, when the necklace was
+missed, it wouldn't be found. But she made me go back instead, after
+every one else was asleep, I supposed. It was terrible, when I found
+myself alone in the attic, with the necklace hidden under my wrapper. No
+one was there. The man must have been frightened and run away. Then I
+heard all of you come and I threw a sheet over me and hid in a far
+corner."
+
+"It _was_ you, then?" exclaimed Billie.
+
+"Yes, and when I met you and Mary I had the necklace with me and I
+didn't think I had strength enough to get to my room. When we got home
+from Mrs. Ruggles' next day and I found Fannie had been sent to town, I
+knew something had happened. I thought perhaps she might have taken the
+necklace with her, but the next morning, when you and Mary left before
+breakfast, I was certain that one of you had been accused.
+
+"You never can understand how I suffered. And yet it was what I had
+planned when I was so angry. Late Monday afternoon Mr. Bangs, a
+detective, came to see me. He wrote across his card 'Pierre Lafitte,'
+and I was convinced then that he knew everything."
+
+"You did tell Fannie about the card that was in the box of jewels,
+then?"
+
+Belle hung her head.
+
+"Yes," she said, at last. "In the very beginning, before I had learned
+to loathe her and myself so, I told it to Fannie.
+
+"After Mr. Bangs had left," she went on, "I hurried as fast as I could
+to Mme. Alta's lodgings and told her that everything had been
+discovered. The husband came in while I was there and ordered her to
+leave at once. The ship was in the harbor, he said. I was ordered to go,
+too, and it really did seem best. I felt I should be disgraced if I
+stayed and I was too miserable to reason much, anyway. They were glad to
+go. They hated it here, and they were afraid to leave me, I suppose, for
+fear I would tell. Ever since they were almost caught in Smugglers'
+Cave, they have been very careful.
+
+"I have made a great many people suffer," Belle went on, "Mary and
+Billie and Mrs. Price and Mrs. St. Clair, and I have suffered, too,
+perhaps more than any of you. But I have learned a great deal. I never
+knew before what a wicked, spoiled girl I was. Mamma and papa never
+denied me anything in my life. I have been indulged and petted until I
+have been nothing but a bundle of selfishness. When the ship was wrecked
+and we thought we were going to sink any minute the scales dropped
+entirely from my eyes and I saw myself as I really was. I knelt on the
+deck and prayed and prayed for forgiveness until they came and told me
+it was my turn to be taken to shore.
+
+"You will forgive me, won't you Mary? I will do everything I can to make
+up for the trouble and unhappiness I have caused you."
+
+Belle stretched out her arms toward Mary and tears flowed down her
+cheeks and splashed on the coverlid.
+
+Miss Gray wiped her eyes and Billie's face worked convulsively for a
+moment and she choked back a lump which would rise in her throat on
+occasions.
+
+Mary came over and took Belle's hands.
+
+"Of course I forgive you, Belle," she said, kissing the repentant girl
+on the lips.
+
+"But I must ask your forgiveness, too, Mary," cried Miss Gray. "I feel I
+am not fit to be the principal of the High School to have so misjudged
+you. It was only the strange way you acted about the fifty dollars which
+made me credit for a moment the stories that were told."
+
+When peace was entirely restored, Miss Gray took her departure. She did
+not return to the High School, but hurried to the livery stable, where
+she ordered a carriage and had herself driven straight to Mrs. St.
+Clair's.
+
+As Belle will not again appear in this story, you will perhaps be
+interested to know how sincere her reformation really was. Her mother
+and father scarcely recognized the pale, quiet girl who returned to them
+in another day. Her entire nature had been shaken by the experience, and
+for some time she was dazed and silent. But no one ever saw her angry
+again, and as if she wished to give some visible sign of her repentance,
+the red rubber curlers were thrown away and from that time she has worn
+her hair straight.
+
+There was no evidence against Mme. Alta or Fannie, except what Belle
+Rogers could furnish, and they were finally allowed to go free. But they
+were not permitted to remain in quiet West Haven, where suspicious
+characters were not welcomed.
+
+The police cared little for the music teacher and her daughter. The
+prize they looked for was Ruiz, the famous filibuster and desperado who
+had smuggled hundreds of rifles into Venezuela and had robbed and
+pillaged and even killed, but had never been caught.
+
+Detective Bangs, standing on the shore, the day of the shipwreck,
+scanned eagerly the face of each sailor as he was drawn ashore. But Ruiz
+was not among them. It was supposed that he preferred death to arrest;
+for he remained on the sinking ship. But the sturdy little vessel clung
+desperately to the Serpent's Fang until after sunset, and there are some
+who believe that Ruiz swam ashore with his one arm, which was as strong
+as iron, and is still at large somewhere working mischief and
+misfortune.
+
+On the day after the departure of Mme. Alta and Fannie, Miss Gray called
+a meeting of the Faculty and pupils of West Haven High School. Mary
+Price was there and so was Billie, and in the gallery sat Mrs. Price
+between Mrs. St. Clair and Miss Campbell.
+
+"I called this meeting," said Miss Gray, "because I wanted to make an
+announcement to all of you at once, since the subject of the
+announcement concerns us all. We have recently had a very clever thief
+in our midst. She has robbed many of you and has brought unjust
+suspicion on some innocent persons by spreading reports. This girl has
+been dismissed from the school and from West Haven. She will never
+trouble us again.
+
+"Some of us have suffered deeply for the last few weeks on account of
+this disgrace and scandal in the school, and I don't mind confessing
+that I have been one of those persons. I know that you will all rejoice
+with me that the affair is concluded.
+
+"I want to say further, that at a specially called meeting, the Board of
+Education has consented to add a new post to the school force. This
+position, which is that of private and confidential secretary to the
+principal and has a salary attached, is to be filled by Miss Mary Price.
+I hope you will all congratulate me on my good fortune in obtaining so
+competent and reliable an assistant."
+
+There was wild applause when this announcement was made and Mary,
+smiling and happy, with her three devoted friends about her, was obliged
+to rise and bow her blushing acknowledgments to her schoolmates.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.--OUT OF THE MISTS.
+
+
+The Motor Maids were gathered in Mrs. Brown's sunny parlor around a
+cheerful driftwood fire. You may easily guess it was Saturday morning,
+because Nancy was darning stockings, Elinor was at the piano, Mary was
+reading, while Billie lay flat on her back on the hearth rug, her hands
+crossed under her head, thinking deeply.
+
+"I wish people were not so careless of their diamond necklaces and
+things," she observed, addressing the ceiling with some irritation.
+"Throwing them around in motor cars, giving them to the first person who
+comes along, and not caring to have them returned! It's a nuisance----"
+
+Suddenly the door was thrown violently open and Merry appeared.
+
+"Mrs. Ruggles," he announced, making a low bow.
+
+Nancy did not take the trouble to turn around. Elinor went on playing
+and Mary reading. It was only one of Merry's jokes, they thought. But
+Billie jumped up in amazement; for there actually stood Mrs. Ruggles in
+the flesh--very much in the flesh, in fact. She was dressed in decent
+black and wore a black bonnet, and Billie could not decide whether she
+resembled a queen disguised as a fish-wife or a fish-wife dressed as a
+lady.
+
+"Why, it is Mrs. Ruggles," cried Nancy, glancing over her shoulder.
+"Merry plays so many jokes that we can never tell when he is in earnest
+and when he isn't. Do come in, Mrs. Ruggles. What brings you up to town
+so early?"
+
+Mrs. Ruggles, who was slow of speech, did not reply at first. She moved
+into the room with the step of a grenadier and stood before Billie.
+
+"Are you Miss Wilhelmina Campbell?" she asked.
+
+"She is the same," put in Merry, "but she'll answer to the name of
+Billie."
+
+Billie nodded and smiled. She was really too much engaged in admiring
+Mrs. Ruggles to reply to her question.
+
+Nancy pushed up an armchair.
+
+"Please sit down, Mrs. Ruggles, and perhaps you will have a cookie or a
+cup of tea."
+
+"No, Miss Nancy, I am not hungry and I couldn't eat anyway, until I
+finished what I have to say."
+
+"That's right, Mrs. Ruggles. Get it off your system. Are you going to
+scold Billie?" cried Merry.
+
+"No, my boy. I'm going to thank her. She's a fine young lady. I have
+just seen Miss Campbell and she has told me."
+
+"Told you what?" asked Billie.
+
+"Told me that you have kept the box of jewels as you promised."
+
+"But----" began Billie, a dozen thoughts flashing through her mind at
+once in tumultuous confusion.
+
+She saw again the face of the sick woman at Mrs. Ruggles', her long hair
+spread over the pillow like a mantel of black and the troubled dark eyes
+which gazed into hers for one brief moment.
+
+"Then that was the automobile lady I saw in your bedroom?" she burst
+out.
+
+"Yes," replied the old woman. "That was my daughter, Maria."
+
+"Is Maria home again?" asked Elinor.
+
+"I thought she had married a South American," said Nancy.
+
+"Maria is now a singer," said Mrs. Ruggles proudly. "She has sung in
+Buenos Ayres and Paris, not in this country. Her husband was from
+Venezuela. He was very rich and he gave her many jewels. He loved her
+dearly for a few years, until he began to like something else better."
+
+The old woman paused. It was extremely difficult for her to speak at
+such great length when she was so unaccustomed to talking at all.
+
+"My daughter is very beautiful and very clever. She will be a great
+singer. He was jealous of her singing. He wished to be great, too, and
+he became a politician. Gradually he spent all of his money in making
+trouble for the government of his country. He wished to bring about a
+war and make himself a ruler. My son, my daughter's step brother, pushed
+him on. He was a bad boy, my only son. It is better that he should be
+dead. He was always in the thick of the fight. He couldn't keep away.
+His arm was shot off; his eye put out. But nothing could stop him."
+
+"Was Ruiz really your son, John, who went away to sea so many years
+ago?" interrupted Nancy.
+
+Mrs. Ruggles nodded.
+
+"What happened next, Mrs. Ruggles?" demanded Billie.
+
+"The next thing was that my Maria could not stand the life any longer.
+She came back to America with her jewels. They were all that was left of
+her husband's fortune and those he wanted so much that he threatened her
+many times. If he had wished to use them for a good purpose and not for
+rifles to kill innocent people, Maria would have given them gladly. But
+he was too clever for her, that man. He followed on a fast steamer and
+caught up with her before she could get to me. He forced her to go with
+him in an automobile down the Shell Island road to meet John, my poor
+son, who was to take the jewels and sell them. Maria always carried her
+jewelry in a secret pocket inside of her skirt, but she had put it in a
+box that day and wrapped the box in her coat. Her husband did not know
+this. He thought she had it in the usual place. When they were upset
+going around a curve in the road my Maria was very seriously injured.
+She is still very lame. Her husband went away to get another car and you
+know the rest.
+
+"When they found out in a few hours that she did not have the jewels
+they were very angry. She told them the truth: that she had given them
+to a young lady she had met, and asked her to take care of them.
+Although she did not have the name or address of this young lady, she
+knew they would be safe."
+
+"And Mr. Lafitte?" began Billie.
+
+"He is an old friend, a lawyer who lives in Paris. She happened to have
+his card in her pocket. But he had just started to America and the
+letter she wrote, and your letter, came back here. That is how I
+happened to get your name at last, Miss Wilhelmina. Mr. Lafitte was with
+my daughter yesterday."
+
+"And what became of your son-in-law, Mrs. Ruggles?" asked Elinor.
+
+"He died some weeks ago," replied Mrs. Ruggles. "He was accidentally
+shot with one of his own rifles, which exploded and killed him. My son
+had his body sent to us and we laid him to rest in the old Sabater
+burying ground, where all my family is buried. It is better that he
+should have died. He only made trouble while he lived, not only for poor
+Maria, but for his country, where many have been killed with the rifles
+he has smuggled in. He was a good man until he got in with those
+revolutionists. And my poor son, my poor John, how much sorrow he has
+brought us----"
+
+Billie wondered if Mrs. Ruggles really knew the extent of her poor son's
+evil career. Perhaps she did, for the old woman's face twitched
+nervously for a moment and she covered her eyes with her hand, as if she
+wished to hide her unhappiness from the young girls.
+
+"Maria and I are going away for a long time," she went on at last, with
+a rather shaky voice. "I will close the Inn. It is hard for me to leave
+home in my old age, but Maria wishes it, and it is better for me to be
+with her. Good-by and thank you," she said simply, rising and taking
+Billie's hand.
+
+Billie stood on tiptoe and put her arms around Mrs. Ruggles' neck.
+
+"Good-by, Mrs. Ruggles," she said. "I hope that your troubles are all
+over now and you and your daughter will be happy together."
+
+The old woman wiped her eyes. She could not speak when she said good-by
+to the other girls, but silently handed Billie a little package and
+hurried away.
+
+The package, when unwrapped, proved to be a small box containing a
+pretty gold filigree necklace. Written on a card inside was this
+message:
+
+"With my love and gratitude. This is a simple little necklace my father
+brought me once from a voyage to the East. I am fond of it and that is
+why I send it to you. Will you wear it sometimes and think of me? I
+shall never forget your kindness and loyalty.
+
+"Maria Ruggles Cortina."
+
+And now we have reached the end of our tale. Those troublous first
+months of Billie Campbell's early school days in West Haven are changed
+into happy, quiet times, with plenty of study and plenty of play. All
+doubts and mysteries are cleared up, and the Motor Maids, wholesome,
+nice girls, are none the worse for their adventures.
+
+It is in their beloved "Comet" that we see them last, flashing down Main
+Street toward the open country.
+
+Billie, like the good pilot she is, is seated at the wheel, her fine
+gray eyes ever on the lookout. Nancy is bubbling over with laughter and
+gaiety. Elinor, on the back seat, holds herself as proudly as a queen,
+and little Mary, with a grave smile on her face, looks out across the
+fields, her clear eyes, deep as pools, holding and reflecting, as ever,
+the beauty from without intensified by the purity of the spirit within.
+
+The friendship of these four school girls was of the quality that
+outlives a single season and many adventures. It held them together, in
+fact, so closely that they often found themselves planning for an
+indefinite future of partnership and mutual pleasures. That they
+realized their anticipations to some extent at least is assured, for the
+next volume of this series, "The Motor Maids by Palm and Pine," is a
+further account of their good times together.
+
+                                THE END.
+
+
+
+
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+Serpents, and have many other exciting experiences, including being
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+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Motor Maids' School Days, by Katherine Stokes
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