“I’ve a headache now,” confessed Norma, pushing her tumbled hair out of her eyes. “I can’t go down to dinner—I’m a perfect sight. There’s the bell!”
“Just lie down and try to rest,” advised Betty, smoothing the tangled covers with a deft hand. “I’ll bring you up some supper on a tray. Aunt Nancy thinks you’re an angel on general principles, and she has a special soft spot in her heart for you because her mother used to cook for your grandmother. Come on, Alice, we’ll turn the light out and let her rest her eyes.”
“I do wish some one would think up a way to get those pearls and the gold,” fretted Betty, turning restlessly on her pillow that night. “If Norma and Alice are ever going to be well-off now is the time. When they’re so old they can’t walk, money won’t do ’em any good!”
Which showed that Betty, for all her sound sense, was still a little girl. Very old ladies, who can not walk, certainly need money to make them comfortable and keep them so.
The next night was Friday, and Betty welcomed the prospect of the second degree necessary to stamp the freshmen as full-fledged members of the Mysterious For. The week had been noticeably tinged with indigo for at least two of Betty’s friends, and she hoped the initiation might take their minds from their troubles.
The second degree, it was whispered about among the girls, was bound to be a “hummer.”
“They say it’s a test of your character,” said Bobby, with a shiver. “Somehow, Betty, my character oozes out of my shoes when it knows it should be prancing up to the firing line.”
“I guess you imagine that,” smiled Betty. “Speak sternly to it, Bobby, and explain that funking is out of the question.”
However, more girls than Bobby found it necessary to clutch at their oozing courage when, upon assembling in the large hall, the lights suddenly went out. In the shadows, four white veiled figures were seen slowly to mount the platform.
“Tonight,” said one of them, stretching out a long arm and pointing toward the fascinated and expectant audience, “we are your fates! You have come to the final tests. We have no choice in these tests, nor have you. You are to come forward, one at a time, and take a slip from this basket here on the table. Go directly to your room after drawing your slip, and there open it and follow the directions explicitly. Come to the platform in the order in which you are seated, please.”
The lights did not come on, and one by one the girls stumbled up the steps to the platform, felt around in the basket, and drew a slip. Then they hurried away to their rooms to see what was to happen next.
Bobby and Betty could hardly wait to open their notes, and before they had them fairly digested, Frances and Libbie and Constance and Louise and the Guerin girls were crowding in to compare notes.
“I have to go and ask Miss Prettyman if I may telephone to Salsette Academy and ask for a lost-and-found notice on their bulletin board,” wailed Bobby. “I’m supposed to have lost a pair of gloves at the last football game. I always have the worst luck! Can’t you imagine how Miss Prettyman will lecture me? She’ll say that at my age I ought to have something in my head besides excuses to talk to the boys!”
The girls laughed, recognizing the ring of prophecy in Bobby’s speech.
“That’s nothing—I’m to row Dora Estabrooke twice around the lake,” mourned Louise. “She weighs two hundred, if she weighs a pound. Thank goodness, I don’t have to do it tonight.”
Norma was instructed to walk three times around the cellar, chanting “Little Boy Blue” before ten o’clock that night. Frances Martin, to her horror, was enjoined to produce six live angle worms the following morning—“and you know I despise the wiggling things,” she wailed. Alice Guerin, the silent member of the octette, was condemned to recite “The Children’s Hour” in the dining room “between cereal and eggs.” And Constance Howard was told she must add up an unbelievably long column of figures and present the correct answer within half an hour. Constance’s bête noir was figures, and already these long columns danced dizzily before her eyes.
“You needn’t tell me that chance made such canny selections,” observed Betty. “One of those girls manipulated the right notes into our hands. Libbie, what does yours say?”
Libbie handed her slip of paper to Betty without a word.
“Go to bed at once,” the latter read aloud.
There was a gale of laughter. Libbie, the curious, who dearly loved to hear and see, to be sent off to bed in the middle of the most wildly exciting night they had known in weeks!
“Hurry,” admonished Bobby. “You’re disobeying by staying up this long. Where’s your character, Libbie?”
Libbie scowled, but departed, grumbling that she didn’t see why she couldn’t stay up and watch Norma walk down in the cellar.
“Mine is the most spooky,” said Betty, when the door had closed behind Libbie. “Listen—I’m to climb the water tower at midnight and leave this card there to show I have complied.”
She held out a little plain white card in a green envelope.
“Hark! was that somebody at the door?” asked Bobby, and she ran over to it lightly and jerked it open.
The corridor was empty.
“We’re all nervous,” remarked Betty lightly. “I’ll set the alarm for eleven-forty-five and put the clock under my pillow so Miss Lacey won’t hear it. I’ll lie down all dressed, and then I won’t have to use a light. She might see that through the transom.”
“Don’t you want some of us to go with you?” asked Constance. “We needn’t go up into the tower, if you say not. But at least we could go that far with you; you might fall off the roof.”
“No, please, I’d rather go alone,” said Betty firmly. “It’s a test, you see, and the idea isn’t to make it easy. I’ll be all right, and in the morning the girls will find the card and know I didn’t flunk.”
After the girls had gone away to their own rooms the clock was set for a quarter of twelve, but Betty and Bobby decided that they might as well stay awake till midnight. They would lie down on their beds—Betty insisted that Bobby should undress and go to bed “right”—and wait for the time to come. Within twenty minutes they were both sound asleep.
The muffled whir of her alarm clock awakened Betty. For a moment she was dazed, then recollection cleared her mind. She slipped to the floor without waking Bobby and softly tiptoed from the room.
A dim light burned in the corridor, and Betty knew the way to the water tower. To reach it, one had to mount to the roof of the dormitory building. Betty experienced a little difficulty with the obstinate catch of the scuttle cover, but she finally mastered it and stepped out on the tarred graveled roof. The water tower, a huge tank on an iron framework, had a little enclosed room built directly under it reached by an iron ladder. Here the engineer kept various plumbing tools. It was in this room that Betty was to leave the card.
The night wind blew damp and keen, and the stars overhead seemed very far away. Betty had no sense of fear as she began to climb, mounting slowly and feeling for each step with her hands. The friendly dark shut in around her and somewhere in the distance a train whistle tooted shrilly.
She knew she had reached the last step when her hands encountered wood, and she felt about till she touched the knob of the door. It opened at her touch and she pulled herself in over the sill.
“Now the card,” she whispered, feeling in her pocket.
A gust of wind fanned her cheek and something clicked.
The door had blown shut!
CHAPTER XXI
DRAMATICS
There are pleasanter places to be at midnight than the dark room of a strange water tower, but Betty was not frightened. She tripped over some tool as she felt for the door and discovered that she had lost her sense of direction completely.
“I’m all turned around,” was the way she expressed it. “I must start and go around the sides, feeling till I come to the door.”
Following this plan, she did come to the door and confidently turn
ed the knob. The door stuck and she rattled the knob sharply. Then the explanation dawned on her.
The door was locked!
Could it have a spring lock? she wondered. Then she remembered a day when, on exploration bent, a group of girls had made the trip to the roof and the kindly Dave McGuire had taken a key from his pocket and unlocked the door of the little room for the more adventurous ones who wanted to climb up and see the inside.
“It was a flat key, like a latch key,” Betty reflected. “The girls must have had the door unlocked for me tonight, but I don’t think they would follow me and lock it. That would be mean!”
However, the door was locked and she was a prisoner. It was inky black and at every step she seemed to knock over something or stumble against cold iron. Gradually her eyes became accustomed to the lack of light, and she made out the outlines of something against the wall.
“Why, there is a window—I remember!” she said aloud. “I wonder if I can reach it.”
Cautiously she felt her way around and stretched up tentative fingers. She could barely touch the lower frame.
Then, for the first time, Betty felt a little shiver of fear and apprehension. It was close in the tower room, and the smell of oil and dead air began to be oppressive. She had no wish to shout, even if she could be heard, a doubtful probability, for she had no mind to be rescued before the curious eyes of the entire school.
“I’ll get out of it somehow, if I have to stay here all night,” she told herself pluckily. “Oh, my goodness, what was that?”
A tiny sawing noise in one corner of the room sent Betty scurrying to the other side. She would have indignantly denied any fear of mice or rats, but the bravest girl might be excused from a too close acquaintance thrust upon her in the dark. Betty had no wish to put her fingers on a mouse.
“How can I get out?” she cried aloud, a little wildly. “I can’t breathe!”
In the uncanny silence that followed the sound of her voice, the sawing noise sounded regularly, rhythmically. In desperation Betty seized an iron crowbar she had backed into on the wall, and hurled it in the direction of the industrious rodents.
“Now I’ve done it,” she admitted, as with a clatter and a bang that, she was sure, could be heard a mile away, an evident avalanche of tools tumbled to the floor. Her crowbar had struck a box of tools.
But the silence shut down again after that. Betty did not realize that the water tower was so isolated that even unusual noises inside it would not carry far, and with the door and the window both closed the room was practically sealed.
The sawing noise was not repeated, there was that much to be grateful for, Betty reflected. She wondered if she could batter down the door.
“I’ll try, anyway,” she thought wearily.
And then she could not find the crowbar! Around and around she went, feeling on the floor for the tools that had clattered down with such a racket and for the iron bar she had hurled among them. Not one tool could she put her hands on.
“I must be going crazy,” she cried in despair. “I couldn’t have dreamed those tools fell down, and yet where could they have gone? There’s no hole in the floor—”
Now Betty’s nerves were sorely tried by the lonely imprisonment, the bad air, the heat, and the darkness, and it is not to be wondered at that her usual sound common sense was tricked by her imagination. Her fancy suggested that the weight of the tools might have torn a hole in the floor, they might have dropped through to the roof, and Betty herself might be in momentary danger of stepping into this hole.
Nonsense? Well, wiser minds have conceived wilder possibilities under similar trying conditions.
“I won’t walk another step!” cried poor Betty, as she visioned this yawning hole. “Not another step. I’ll wait till it’s light.”
But she waited, fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes, and the darkness if anything grew blacker. She had no idea how long she had been locked in the room, and she could not calculate how far off the morning might be.
“I’ll put my hands out before me and creep,” she said finally. “That ought to be safe. Perhaps I can find something to stand on to reach that window. I guess I could drop to the roof from there.”
Stiffly and painfully, she began to crawl, holding out her hands before her and starting back time and again as she fancied she felt an opening just ahead. But when she brought up against a step ladder she forgot her fears in the joy of her discovery.
It was a short ladder, but she dragged it over to the window and put it in place and mounted it, all in the twinkling of an eye. By stretching to her full height, she was able to raise the creaky window, but to her dismay the roof offered a very long drop. She had not realized how high she had climbed.
“Dave was fussing with ropes and buckets the other day,” she recalled. “Now I wonder—wouldn’t it be the best luck in the world if I could find a rope?”
Hope was singing high in her heart now, but she almost despaired of such good fortune after a diligent search. Then something told her to feel about again on the floor. Round and round she went, getting her fingers into spider webs and sticky substances that renewed her inward shudders because she could not identify them. And when she found the rope, a tarry coil, she also solved the mystery of the tools. They had fallen down behind the coil of rope and were effectively fenced off from the circle of floor explored by the bewildered Betty.
It was the work of a moment to tie one end of the rope to a heavy staple driven under the window sill, and then, closing her eyes to the pitch black void beneath her, Betty let herself slide down to the roof. Her hands were cruelly scratched by the rope fibres and she was too tired to care about the evidences of her flight.
“If anybody wants to know about that rope and the locked door, let ’em!” she sighed defiantly.
Bobby woke up as Betty came in the door, and then there were questions galore to be answered. Betty was covered with dust and her clothing was torn and rumpled. Bobby declared she looked as if she had been to war.
“I feel it,” admitted Betty. “Let me take a hot bath and get into bed. And, Bobby, promise me on your word of honor that you’ll call me in the morning. Whoever locked me in expects me to stay there till I’m missed, and I want to walk into breakfast as usual.”
She half regretted her instructions when Bobby called her at seven the next morning, but Betty was nothing if not gritty, and she sleepily struggled into her clothes. Ada Nansen’s look of utter astonishment when she saw Betty come into the dining room with the rest for breakfast told those in the secret what they had already suspected.
“Bobby must have heard her listening at our door last night,” said Betty. “What am I going to do? Why nothing, of course! That was part of the stunt, or at least I’m going to consider it so. My card is there, so they’ll know I fulfilled my part.”
Dave McGuire scratched his head when he found the rope and the open window, but he wisely said nothing. He had two keys, and one he had loaned at the request of the senior class president to a fellow student. The other key, for emergency use, hung on a nail in the fourth story hall. That was the key Dave found in the door lock when he made his early morning tour of inspection. “But the young folks must be having their fun,” he said indulgently, “and, short of burning down the place, ‘tis not Dave McGuire who will be interfering with ’em.”
Mid-term tests were approaching. Bobby, who, with all her love of fun, was a hard student, felt prepared and went around serenely. Constance Howard had, most humanly, neglected, so far as the teacher of mathematics permitted, the study that was hardest for her, her algebra. She now spent hours in “cramming” on this, meanwhile complaining to those of her special chums who would listen to her of “the unfairness of being made to study algebra.”
“I can add—with the use of my fingers—and subtract and divide and multiply—at least I know the tables up through the twelves. Of what use will a’s and b’s and x’s, y’s and z’s ever be to me?”
“Co
nstance, you know that’s nonsense,” Bobby told her. “We’re every one of us here because we want to play a bigger part in life than the two-plus-two-is-four people, and we’ve got to dig in and prepare ourselves. If you’d do your work when you ought to, you wouldn’t be in such an upset state now.”
“Yes’m,” grinned Constance, and went back to her belated work.
Betty had found that her year away from school had made it hard for her to concentrate her mind on her studies, and while she had not deliberately neglected her work, as Constance had in her algebra, she had not always kept up to the highest pitch. She was working furiously now, with the tests to face so soon, and with it went the resolve to be more studious from day to day during the rest of the school year. The concentration was becoming easier, too, as the term advanced, and, the teaching at Shadyside being of the best, she felt sure she would feel that she had accomplished something by the end of the year.
The Dramatic Club of Shadyside woke to ambition as the term progressed. Soon after the mid-term tests, which all the girls, even Constance, passed successfully, by dint of threat and bribery, each student was “tried out” and her ability duly catalogued.
Betty liked to act, and proved to have a natural talent, while Bobby, professing a great love for things theatrical, was hopeless on the stage. Her efforts either moved her coaches to helpless laughter or caused them to retire in indignant tears.
“She is—what you call it?—impossible!” sighed Madame, the French teacher, shaking her head after witnessing one rehearsal in which Bobby, as the villain, had convulsed the actors as well as the student audience.
“Well then, I’ll be a stage hand,” declared Bobby, whose feelings were impervious to slights. “I’m going to have something to do with this play!”
Ada Nansen was eager to be assigned a part—the players were chosen on merit—and she aspired modestly to the leading rôle, mainly because, the girls hinted, the heroine wore a red velvet dress with a train and a string of pearls.
But Ada, it developed, was worse than Bobby as an actress. She was self-conscious, impatient of correction, and so arrogant toward the other players that even gentle Alice Guerin was roused to retort.
The Second Girl Detective Megapack: 23 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls Page 235