“Arden has the right of it there,” Sim declared, “and it’s sweet of both of you not to mind this so much. But I feel very badly about it. I got you into trouble, and I got Tiddy down on all of us.” Sim was impatiently kicking a clump of grass. “Well, we can’t do anything about it now. So let’s go back and write the real story home before our families have a chance to hear it from Tiddy.”
CHAPTER XV
The Alarm Bell
When it came to writing letters home, each girl approached her family from a different viewpoint, naturally. Arden, who was the most interesting writer of the three, was inclined to dramatize. Her missive was filled with descriptions, reflecting the fears they had felt at Sim’s disappearance and their resentment at the punishment inflicted by the dean. All this was set forth vividly.
Terry was diplomatic in her letter. Her mother, she knew, would worry needlessly if she felt that the girls were in any danger. So she made prominent mention of the good times they were having, culminating in a mistake they had mutually made which resulted in a curtailment of some of their privileges.
Sim was writing rapidly, her eyes bright and her lips compressed into a stern, determined line. She finished first, and after closing the envelope and sealing it, she scratched on the address and turned to her friends.
“I may as well tell you, before you hear it outside,” Sim began and hesitated, “but I’ve written to my father for permission to come home!”
“Sim! Not to stay! Don’t leave us now, when things will be so dull here for Arden and me if you go!” Terry begged.
Sim looked uncompromising.
“Please don’t go, Sim! Don’t mail your letter. I feel as though I am to blame. Anyhow, Sim, there’d be nothing for you to do at home. Three weeks aren’t so long.” Arden arose and patted Sim maternally on the shoulder.
“It isn’t just three weeks. It’s the whole school year!” Sim declared. “It will take a long time to fix the pool, even if they get the money. Besides, I was told by my math teacher that I’d probably flunk out at mid-year if I didn’t improve, and I’d rather go home before that happens.”
“But we can help you, Sim,” Terry promised. “Won’t you think it over? Even if we are campused, I know of a few parties the girls have planned, and they’ll be fun.”
Arden decided to try a new method of approach.
“Sim, I wouldn’t mention it if I didn’t want you to stay,” she said. “But you got us into this, even if you meant it all for the best, and even if you do leave, Terry and I will still be campused. There are lots of other things to do besides swimming, and, don’t forget, we have a mystery here that no one dreams about but us.”
“I am sorry about you and Terry, but right now I don’t feel like being a good sport. I’ll go to Tiddy and ask her to let you two off.” Sim hesitated. “But I want to go home, Arden. Don’t ask me to stay.”
“If you feel you must go, Sim, all right. But what I ask you to do is not to mail your letter for a few days. Write another in its place, at least temporarily, and say everything is settled. And then, if you still feel the same way—” Arden shrugged and turned aside.
Sim left her desk and walked slowly to a window. The peacefulness of the scene below, framed by the trees in their bright autumn array, must have had some influence on the perturbed girl. For, after a few moments of silent contemplation, Sim swung around and exclaimed:
“All right, Arden. I’ll think it over. You can hold this letter for three days, and I’ll write another to send home. But it’s only because of my friendship for you both that I’m doing it.”
“That’s great, Sim! You won’t be sorry. We’ll forget about it now and—”
A small shuffling noise stopped Arden in the midst of her exultation. It came from the direction of the door, and, even as the three looked, a bright blue and white envelope was pushed under the portal. Terry picked up the missive and opened it.
“Why!” she exclaimed in delighted surprise, “it’s an invitation for a party tomorrow in the gym. The sophomores are giving it to the freshmen, and we must,” she was rapidly reading the note, “all wear some sort of a costume. Oh, how precious!” She was gleefully excited.
“What fun!” With the suddenness of youth Arden closed her mind to the subject of Sim threatening to go home and she began to plan for the party.
“What can we wear?” asked Terry.
“We haven’t much in the way of costumes,” Arden admitted. “I suppose, though, we can wear riding habits or blacken our faces and slick back our hair. We’ll probably have more fun that way than if we wore draperies.”
“Oh, yes,” Terry agreed.
“It will be a little break for us after what we know is in prospect,” said Sim in a low voice.
After lessons, the next day had been gotten through in some fashion and, following supper, the three hurried back to their room. Sim put on Terry’s riding clothes, which were much too big, and Terry wore a part of Sim’s sport suit with a woolly cap belonging to Arden. As for Arden, she put on a short, tight skirt and a sweater belonging to Jane Randall and knotted a scarf about her throat, Apache style.
Then, using a soft eyebrow pencil, the girls adorned their lips with villainous mustaches.
“How do we look?” asked Sim, trying to pose in front of a mirror that showed only part of her.
“Terrible!” laughed Terry.
“That’s the way we want to look,” decided Arden.
Down in the large gymnasium crêpe paper was used to cover the steam pipes, and many streamers, in the college colors, disguised the bare whitewashed walls. The room was crowded with noisy, laughing girls. At one end a portable phonograph was playing, with the loudest needle obtainable, a popular dance tune.
Arden and her two particular friends were met at the door by their sophomore tormentors, Toots Everett, Jessica Darglan, and Priscilla MacGovern.
Toots came forward and gave Sim a large paper carton made in imitation of a traveling bag. It was adorned with huge purple and green paper bows.
“A gift for our most widely traveled freshman!” said Toots with a laugh. “You must keep this with you until refreshments are served. Those are the rules.”
Sim smiled grimly and accepted the box gracefully. So her story was known all over college in spite of the dean’s prohibition?
Arden and Terry received large, blank exercise books in which to keep a record of their engagements: gentle sarcasm when it was evidently known they couldn’t make any for three weeks at least.
One by one the freshmen were given articles to show up their various faults, failings, and follies.
The party was soon well under way and progressed happily. The girls who could lead were the most popular dancers that night. In fact, those girls were booked well ahead as partners.
Arden was dancing with Jane Randall at the far end of the gymnasium when she happened to glance up at one of the windows. What she saw startled her so that she made a mis-step and caused Jane to exclaim:
“Look out!”
Arden wanted to say she was looking with all her eyes, but she did not dare call her partner’s attention to what had so disturbed her. For, as she glanced up at the window, Arden saw gazing down at her with strange malevolence a mocking, smiling face. Then, in a second, it was gone, and only the black square of glass remained.
Arden was almost shaking with fright, so much so that she faltered in the dance. She glanced quickly at Jane to learn whether she had noticed the face, but now Jane was smiling over Arden’s head at the antics of some capering freshman.
As she circled the room with Jane, Arden’s fears subsided somewhat, and she resolved to say nothing about it to Jane. Then, when the record had played itself out, that dance came to an end. For a moment following the last strains of the music there was a lull in the noise of talk and laughter.
Then, suddenly, breaking in on the happy, peaceful silence, as though it had been planned, came the slow and mournful tolling of a heavy b
ell.
Dong! Ding-dong! Ding-dong!
“What is it?” questioned several.
“Do we unmask now?” others wanted to know. They thought it a signal.
“I’ve never heard a bell ring like that since I’ve been here at Cedar Ridge,” said a demure little sophomore in a low voice.
“It hasn’t rung—in a long time,” said one girl in a low voice.
“But what is it?” Arden demanded.
“Why does it ring now?” Terry wanted to know.
“Come on!” called the impulsive Toots Everett. “There’s something wrong somewhere.”
“That old outside fire-alarm bell hasn’t been tolled since we had the modern telephone system installed,” said one of the teachers who was overtaken in the hall by a rush of students from the gymnasium. The dance was momentarily forgotten.
“Oh, a fire!” gasped Terry.
“Let’s hurry out!” proposed Sim.
They were all hurrying.
CHAPTER XVI
Arden’s Adventure
The moon looked down upon a strange party of girls a moment later, for they had all rushed out of the gymnasium after the ringing of the alarm bell. Blackened faces and slicked-back hair, some in tattered garments and others in borrowed finery, sophomores and freshmen crowded forward to that side of the building where hung the bell.
But when they reached the spot nothing was to be seen. The bell rope was still swaying as though recently tugged at, but the hands that had done it were not in evidence. The bell itself still faintly vibrated from the recent violent clanging.
“Well, at least here’s something they can’t blame us for,” said Sim to the curious Arden and Terry. “We have perfect alibis and dozens of witnesses. This time somebody else can be campused.”
“Of course, Sim,” Terry agreed. “But the point is—who did it? It’s rather a childish thing to do—going about pulling bells and then running away. It doesn’t frighten anyone in the least, if that’s what it was intended for.”
“It was silly, that’s true, Terry; but listen to this.” Arden motioned for her two chums to come closer to her. “Come over here where the others won’t hear. We don’t want to have Tiddy blaming us for any more alarming stories.”
“Arden! You have something to tell us, I know!” Terry was pulling Sim away from a group of chattering girls. “Come over here, Sim. Arden knows something!”
The three from 513 separated from the main crowd of disguised girls, and Arden began.
“I was dancing with Jane Randall when something made me look up at one of the high gym windows, and there I saw a strange, white face staring in at me.”
“Arden—you didn’t!” gasped Sim quickly. “Do you mean directly at you the face was staring?”
“It seemed so.”
“Do you think that was the person who rang the bell?”
“That, my dear Watson, is just the point. It was such a short time after I saw the face that the bell rang, it couldn’t have been done by the person who looked in at me through the window.”
“How thrilling! For Pete’s sake, don’t let anyone know what you saw, Arden. If you do we’ll be in more trouble!” Terry said.
“She’s right,” Sim agreed. “We’ll keep it under our hats until we find out something more. The others are going back in, now. We’d better go in.”
The sophomores and freshmen, so rudely disturbed at their reconciliation party, having investigated as best they could in the uncertain moonlight, and having discovered nothing more than that the evidence of the swaying rope indicated the bell had rung (which evidence their ears already testified to), were returning to the gymnasium.
But before they went in, though just how it started no one appeared to know, they were all doing a sort of snake dance in the silvery sheen of the moonlight.
Twisting and turning, the line of masquerading girls in fantastic figures circled beneath the old alarm bell that hung on a projecting beam out from the side of the building. It thus projected to allow the sound of its alarm to vibrate freely in all directions. Above their heads and out of reach of the hands of the tallest of the girls, dangled the weathered rope attached to the bell.
“It must have been a very tall person who could reach that rope!” panted Terry as she circled with Sim.
“A veritable giant,” was the answer. “None of the girls could have done it.”
“No. That’s what I thought.”
“What are you talking about?” demanded Terry, who had been caught in the human maelstrom by some strange girl and whirled about.
“We don’t quite know,” said Arden.
Screaming and laughing, the sophomores in the lead took the freshmen running across the campus and stopped in front of the dormitory.
“Good-night, freshies!” cried Toots and some of the leaders. “And happy dreams!”
“That means the end of hazing,” said Arden. “It’s always done this way.”
“Thank goodness for that!” murmured Terry.
The party was over. Then the girls, sophomores and freshmen, formed a friendly circle and sang “Autumn Leaves,” the alma mater song. The girls’ voices carried softly through the moonlit night and even the most unromantic was impressed with the beauty of the words and melody.
Then, bidding one another good-night, the happy students hurried to their respective rooms, talking excitedly. And the dean and her helpers settled more comfortably in their beds, knowing that for another term this affair was successfully over.
The door of 513 shut on Arden, Sim, and Terry. For a moment they stood looking at one another, and then, as if by agreement, they began to laugh; hysterical laughs but none the less hearty.
“Oh, you do look such a sight, Sim!” Terry gasped.
“Why bring that up?” Sim chuckled.
“But we had a lovely time,” Arden said. “Even if there was a mysterious bell ringing and a face—”
“Tell us more about that,” begged Sim.
“I’ve told you all I know. I saw a face—an old man’s, I’m sure, staring in at me from the window. Then the bell rang.”
“But why?” demanded Terry.
“If we could find out, perhaps we could solve the mystery of several other things that have happened around Cedar Ridge,” Arden said.
“But that bell,” went on Sim. “I heard some of the girls talking. It seems it is an old alarm bell, to be rung in case of fires. But when the telephone system was put in the rope that originally reached close to the ground, so help could be summoned from the town and from nearby residents, was cut off. And it was cut off so high up that no ordinary person, standing under the rope, could reach it.”
“Why was that done?” asked Terry.
“Because it was found,” Sim explained, “that when the rope was left long enough to be reached, some students, thinking it fun, rang the alarm. That was long before our time. So the dean had the rope cut short.”
“Why didn’t she take it off altogether?” asked Arden.
“I asked a soph that,” explained Sim, “and she told me it was thought best to leave most of the rope in place so if ever it was necessary to sound the old bell, it could be done.”
“But how, if the rope was high up?” Terry inquired.
“By standing on a ladder, I suppose. Don’t ask me, for I really don’t know.”
With determination they began washing off the marks of the eyebrow-pencil mustaches, using cold cream, and finally they were ready for bed.
“Well,” remarked Arden in tones that told her chums she had made up her mind seriously, “something is going to happen, I feel sure of it.” Pressed for details, she would say nothing more.
But a few evenings after this, up to which time nothing of moment had happened save that the three from 513 began to feel more and more their campused bonds, a thick hazy fog enveloped the college grounds, spreading to the near-by town and villages about. Arden was walking alone from the library back to the dormitory. The
fog seemed suddenly swept in from the distant sea, settling in the low places so that the upper stories of the building seemed floating in the air.
Arden thrust her hands into the deep pockets of her skirt and in one felt the letter Sim had entrusted to her—the letter asking her father for permission to leave college. The excitement of the masquerade party and the mysterious bell-ringing had done nothing to lighten Sim’s depression. She was still determined, it seemed, to carry out her intention.
Sim didn’t seem to care about anything. She was not the least bit excited by the bell-ringing nor by the strange face, and evidently had dismissed them from her mind.
Arden felt there was no time to be lost if Sim was to be kept at Cedar Ridge. The strange face she had seen through the obscured window when she was dancing with Jane Randall had seemed vaguely familiar, but she had glimpsed it for so short a time that it was impossible to recognize it. No one else had seen it, of that Arden was certain, for no one had spoken of it, and there were no more stories current of mysterious doings about the college.
“Sim will just pack up and go home unless something is done to make her change her mind,” thought Arden as she walked along through the fog. “And I’m going to do it!”
Campused or not, she would now go to the little railroad station and send a telegraph message to her always sympathetic father, asking him for the money to put the swimming pool in order. That would cause Sim to remain.
Arden had everything in her favor for concealment, and she needed concealment in this risky undertaking. The fog, becoming more dense every minute, and the fact that she was alone, would allow her to reach the station unobserved. Also it was just the time when most of the students were in their rooms preparing to go down to supper in a short time.
Arden ran through the gathering gloom across the campus and toward the post office. The yellow gleaming lights of the railroad station beckoned to her with their flickering rays from the other side of the tracks.
There was always the chance that someone from the college might be in the little suburban station looking up trains, inquiring about baggage or express shipments, or sending a telegram. But Arden, risking the discovery of her voidance of the campus prohibition, kept on her rather perilous way. At the same time she was trying to be cautious.
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