The Girls of Central High in Camp: or, the Old Professor's Secret
“Hear! hear!” cried Bobby. “How are you going to summon us if you need help, my dear little boys? Sha’n’t we give you each a penny whistle so you can call us?”
Chet only laughed. Lance said: “We’ve been camping before; most of you girls haven’t. Of course you will get into trouble forty times to our once.”
“Well! I like that,” sniffed Jess, who did not like it at all. “If girls aren’t just as well able to take care of themselves, as boys, I’d like to know why.”
“Jess is getting to be a regular suffragette,” chuckled Dora Lockwood.
“Reminds me of the little girl whose mother was chasing the hens out of the garden,” said Laura, with her low laugh. “The hen-chaser declared that ‘You can’t teach a hen anything, to save your life,’ when the little girl spoke up for her sex, and said: ‘Well! I think they know quite as much as the roosters!’”
“And that’s all right,” teased Lance, as the boys got under way. “I bet this bunch of hens on Acorn Island will holler for us roosters before we set the distress signal for them.”
“Get out, you horrid thing!” cried Bobby. “Calling us hens. We’re only pullets, at best.”
A lantern had been lit in each tent, for the shadows were thickening under the oak trees on the knoll. Lizzie Bean at once began to overhaul the cooking utensils and supplies in the cook-tent.
This tent was divided into two parts. Lizzie’s own cot was in the rear apartment. There was a long table, roughly built but serviceable, in the front with the stove and chest of drawers. There were folding campstools in plenty.
In the cabin was a comfortable straw mattress for Mrs. Morse in the wide bunk, a small table on which her typewriter case already stood, a rocker made in rustic fashion, a painted dressing case with mirror of good size, and shelves for books.
A small fire was burning on the hearth, for the cabin was apt to be damp after its many months of abandonment. It had been swept and garnished with boughs of sweet-smelling spruce and pine.
The girls’ sleeping tent housed seven cots, all supplied with unbleached cotton sheets and heavy double blankets. Lil Pendleton looked about it when she brought in her bag, and shivered.
“Goodness!” she said. “I’m glad we’re ’way out here in the wilderness if we’re going to dress and undress in this thing. Why! I shall feel just as much exposed as though the sides were made of window-glass.”
“What nonsense!” sniffed Bobby, who had been camping with her father and had spent many a night in a tent. “You’re too particular, Lil.”
“Who asked you to put in your oar?” demanded Miss Pendleton, crossly. “I have a right to my opinion, I hope.”
“I should hope it was nobody else’s opinion,” returned Miss Bobby, quick to pick up the gauntlet.
“Hush, girls!” advised Mother Wit. “Let us not be quarrelsome. We don’t want Mrs. Morse to think we are female savages right at the start.”
Lil sniffed; but good-tempered Bobby said, quickly: “You’re right, Laura. I beg the company’s pardon – and Lil’s particularly. We must be ‘little birds who in their nest agree.’”
“You’re a fine bird, Bobby,” laughed Dora. “Come on! I hear the dishes rattling. Let’s see what Lizzie has tossed up for supper.”
“I wonder if she managed to boil the water without burning it?” giggled Jess. “She’s the funniest girl!”
“I should think you and Laura could have found a maid who wasn’t quite such a gawk,” muttered Lil, unpleasantly.
“Hush!” admonished Mother Wit. “Don’t let her hear you.”
“Why not?” snapped Lil.
“You will hurt her feelings.”
“Pooh! she’s paid for it–”
“Not for having her feelings hurt,” declared Laura, sternly. “And I won’t have it. She’s odd; but she is quite as quick of hearing as the next person.”
“Aw, you’re too particular, Laura,” drawled Lil. But she stood a little in awe of Mother Wit.
They joined Mrs. Morse and filed into the cook-tent. Lizzie’s flushed face appeared behind the steaming biscuits and a big platter of ham and eggs. They did not really know how hungry they were until they sat down to these viands.
Lizzie stood with arms akimbo and waited for the verdict upon the cooking.
“Most excellent, Lizzie,” Mrs. Morse said, kindly.
“Suits ye, does it?” asked the strange girl. “I flatter myself them biscuits air light enough to sleep on.”
“They are a good deal more feathery than our ‘downy couches’ here in camp, I warrant, Lizzie,” laughed Laura.
“Glad ye like ’em. There’s plenty of biscuits – don’t be bashful.”
Jess giggled when she saw Lil’s face. “How rude!” muttered Miss Pendleton. “I don’t see what you and Mother Wit were thinking about when you hired that girl.”
“Thinking of you, Lily – thinking of you,” declared Jess. “She will willingly do your share of the dish-washing.”
“Dish-washing? Fancy!” exclaimed Lil. “I’d like to see myself!”
“Well I wouldn’t,” put in the omnipresent Bobby. “Not if I had to eat after your manipulation of the dish-mop.”
“But we didn’t come to do anything like that,” wailed Lil.
“Just the same we have got to do a part of the camp work,” declared Mother Wit. “It all can’t be shoved off onto Lizzie.”
“Let us arrange about that right here and now,” suggested Mrs. Morse.
“Oh, Mrs. Morse!” cried Nell, eagerly. “First of all I vote that Mrs. Morse is not called upon to do a thing! She’s company as well as chaperon.”
“I will make my own bed,” said the lady, smiling. “You girls can take turns sweeping and dusting the cabin, if you like.”
“And making the beds and cleaning up our tent,” added Laura. “Two at a time – it won’t seem so hard if two work together.”
“A good idea,” agreed Mrs. Morse.
“But that leaves an odd girl,” suggested Jess.
“We’ll change about. The odd girl shall help the cook. And one meal a day – either breakfast, dinner, or supper – we girls must cook, and Lizzie is going to have nothing to do with that meal.”
“Why! I can’t cook,” wailed Lil again.
“Good time for you to begin to learn, then,” Laura said, laughingly.
Some of the other girls looked disturbed at the prospect. “I can make fudge,” observed Nell, honestly, “but I never really tried anything else, except to make toast and tea for mother when she was ill and the maid was out.”
“Listen to that!” exclaimed the voice of Lizzie Bean, who had been listening frankly to the dialogue. “An’ I been doin’ plain cookin’ an’ heavy sweepin’ and hard scrubbin’ ever since I was knee-high to a toadstool!”
Bobby burst out laughing. “So have I, Lizzie!” she cried. “Only I have done it for Father Tom and my kid brothers and sisters when Mrs. Betsey was sick.”
Lily Pendleton turned up her nose – literally. “We’re going to have trouble with that girl,” she announced to Nellie. “She doesn’t know her place.”
But whatever Lizzie knew, or did not know, she did not shirk her share of the work. She stayed up after everybody else had retired and washed every pot and pan and plate, and set her bread to rise for morning, and stirred up a big pitcher of flapjack flour to rise over night, peeled potatoes to fry, leaving them in cold water so they would not turn black, and set the long table fresh for breakfast.
When the earliest riser among the girls (who was Laura herself) peeped into the cooking tent at daybreak, the fire in the stove was already roaring, and Lizzie had gone down to the shore to wash her face and hands in the cold water. Laura ran down in her bathing suit.
“What do you think of this place, Lizzie?” she asked the solemn-faced girl.
“For the land’s sake, Miss!” drawled Lizzie Bean, “I never had no idea the woods was so lonesome – for a fac’.”
“No?”
“I sh’d say not! I went to bed and lay there an’ listened. The trees creaked, and the crickets twittered, and some bird had the nightmare an’ kep’ cryin’ like a baby–”
“I expect that was a screech-owl, Lizzie,” interrupted Laura. “They come out only at night.”
“Goodness to gracious! Do they come out every night?” demanded the girl.
“I expect so.”
“And them frogs?”
“They are tree-toads. Yes, they are here all summer, I guess.”
“Goodness to gracious! And folks like to live in the woods? Well!”
“Do you think you can stand it?” queried Laura, much amused, yet somewhat anxious, too.
“As long as I’m goin’ to get all that money every week it’ll take more than birds with the nightmare an’ a passel of frogs to drive me away. Now! when do you want breakfast, Miss?”
“Not until Mrs. Morse gets up. And none of the other girls are out yet,” said Laura.
But very soon the other girls began to appear. They had agreed to have a dip the first thing, and the girls who first got into the water squealed so because of the cold, that it routed out the lie-abeds.
Lily would not venture in. She sat on a stump, with a blanket wrapped around her, and shivered, and yawned, and refused to plunge in with the others.
“And it’s so early,” she complained. “I had no idea you’d all get up so early and make such a racket. Why, when there isn’t school, I never get up before nine o’clock.”
“Ah! how different your life is going to be on Acorn Island,” said Bobby, frankly. “You’ll be a new girl by the time we go back home.”
“I don’t want to be a new girl,” grumbled Lily.
“Now, isn’t that just like her?” said Bobby, sotto voce. “She is perfectly satisfied with herself as she is. Humph! Lucky she is satisfied, I s’pose, for nobody else could be!”
CHAPTER XI
LIZ SEES A “HA’NT”
After their bath the girls got into their gymnasium costumes. Then they clamored for breakfast, and had Mrs. Morse not appeared just then there certainly would have been a riot at the cook-tent. Lizzie was a stickler for orders, and she would not begin to fry cakes until Jess’ mother gave the signal.
Flapjacks! My! weren’t they good, with butter and syrup, followed by bacon and eggs and French fried potatoes? The girls ate for a solid hour. Lizzie’s face was the color of a well-burned brick when the girls admitted they were satisfied. The out-of-door air had given even Lil an enormous appetite.
“If my mother had any idea that I’d eat so much at this time in the morning she’d never have let me come camping,” she said. “Why! do you know – I only drink a cup of coffee and pick the inside out of a roll, at breakfast, at home.”
There was a general inclination to “laze” about the camp and read, or take naps after that heavy breakfast. But Laura would not allow the other six girls of Central High any peace.
“Of course, we have a big ham and a case of eggs with us,” said Mother Wit. “But we don’t want to eat ham and eggs, or bacon and eggs, three times a day while we stay here.
“Beside, the eggs, at least, won’t hold out. We must add to the larder–”
“What shall we do?” asked Dora Lockwood. “Paddle to the mainland and kill some farmer’s cow to get beef?”
“No, indeed,” Laura said, laughing. “We must, however, make an attempt to coax some of the finny denizens of the lake out of it and into Lizzie’s fry-pan.”
“Fishing!” cried Dorothy.
“I never went fishing in my life,” complained Lil.
But the other girls of Central High were not like Lil – no, indeed! They had been out with the boys on Lake Luna – both in summer and winter – and every one of them knew how to put a worm on a hook.
Lil squealed at the thought of “using one of the squirmy things.”
“Aw, you give me a pain!” said Bobby. “Don’t act as though you were made of something different from the rest of us. A worm never bit me yet, and I’ve been fishing thousands of times, I guess.”
Lil did not hear her, however. She was the only girl who had not brought fishing tackle. When she saw her six schoolmates going about the work of tolling the finny denizens of Lake Dunkirk onto the bank, she began to be jealous of the fun they were having. White perch, and roach, and now and then a lake trout, were being landed.
Lil got excited. She wanted to try her hand at the sport, too. Yes! Bobby had an extra outfit, and she even cut Lil a pole.
“But I tell you what it is, Miss,” said the black-eyed girl, “I’m going to hold you responsible for this outfit. If you break anything, or lose anything, or snarl the line up, you’ll have to pay me for it. I paid good money for that silk line and those hooks.”
Lil promised to make good if anything happened to the fishing tackle. She took her place on a rock near Bobby and made a cast. The other girls were very busy themselves and paid Lil very little attention.
The fish were biting freely, for the morning was cloudy and these waters about Acorn Island were far from being “fished out.” Bobby hauled in a couple of perch and had almost forgotten about Lil, when the latter said, mournfully:
“Say, Clara.”
“Well! what is it?” demanded the other.
“What do you call that little thing that bobbed up and down on the water?”
“The float,” replied the busy Bobby.
“Well, Clara!” whined Lil, mournfully.
“Well! what is it?” snapped the busy fisherman.
“I’ll have to buy you a new one.”
“Buy me what?” demanded the surprised Bobby.
“A new float.”
“What for?” was the amazed demand.
“Because that one you lent me has sunk,” mourned Lily.
“For goodness’ sake!” shrieked Bobby. “You’ve got a bite!”
She dropped her own pole, ran to the amazed Lily, and dragged in a big bullpout – sometimes called “catfish” – that was sulking in the mud at the bottom, with Lil’s hook firmly fastened in its jaws.
Lil shrieked. She would not touch the wriggling, black fish. She was afraid of being “horned,” she said!
Bobby put her foot on the fish and managed to extract the hook. Then she baited the hook again and bade Lil try her luck once more.
But the amateur fisherman was doomed to ill-luck on this occasion. She had scarcely dropped the bait into the water, when a fierce little head appeared right at the surface. It swallowed the bait – hook and all – at a gulp, and swam right toward the shore where Lil stood.
She began to squeal again: “A snake! a snake! Oh, Bobby, I’m deathly afraid of snakes.”
“So am I,” rejoined Bobby. “But you won’t catch a snake in the water with a hook and line.”
“I’ve caught one!” gasped the frightened Lil.
“Gee!” growled Bobby. “You’re more trouble than a box of bald-headed monkeys. What is the matter – Oo! it’s a snapper!”
“A what?” cried Lil, dropping the fishpole.
“A snapping turtle,” explained Bobby. “Now you have caught it! I’ll lose hook and all, like enough.”
She jerked the turtle ashore. Lil had seen only its reptilian head. The beast proved to be more than a foot across.
“Makes bully soup,” said the practical Bobby. “But he won’t willingly let go of that bait and the hook in a month of Sundays.”
She ran up to the camp and came flying back in a minute with the camp-hatchet. Lil grew bold enough to hold the line taut. The turtle pulled back, and Bobby caught it just right and cut its head off!
Although Lonesome Liz had never seen a turtle before, she managed to clean it and with Mrs. Morse’s advice made a pot of soup. Lizzie was getting bolder as the hours passed; but she announced to Laura that she believed there must be “ha’nts” in the woods.
“What is a haunt?” asked Laura, curiously.
“Dead folks that ain’t contented in their minds,” declared the queer girl.
“And why should the spirits of the dead haunt these woods?” asked Laura. “Seems to me it’s an awfully out of the way place for dead people to come to.”
But Lizzie would not give up her belief in the “spooks.”
That first day in camp the girls had no visitors. Through their binoculars and opera glasses, they could see the boys very active about their camp across the lake. It was plain they were too busy to visit Acorn Island.
The girls of Central High, however, had plenty of fun without the boys. Only Bobby declared that Lil principally spent the time staring through her opera glasses across the lake, wishing Purt would come over in the Duchess; but Lil angrily denied that.
“And you stop trying to stir up a rumpus, Miss,” commanded Laura, to the cut-up. “Let us live, if we can, like a Happy Family.”
“My!” drawled Jess, “Mother Wit is nothing if not optimistic.”
“Ha! what is your idea of an optimist?” demanded Nellie Agnew.
“Why,” Jess said, smiling quietly, “I read of a real optimist once. He was strolling along a country road and an automobile came along and hit him in the back. It knocked him twenty feet.
“‘Oh, well!’ said he, as he got up, ‘I was going in this direction, anyway.’”
“Aw, say!” put in Bobby, “that’s all right for a story; but my idea of a real optimist is a man who’s dead broke, going into a restaurant and ordering oysters on the half shell with the hope that he can pay for the dinner by finding a pearl in one of the bivalves.”
They all laughed at that, and then Laura said:
“To get back to our original conversation, let us see if we can’t get on in this camp without friction. And that means that you, Bobby, must set a watch on your tongue.”
“What do you suppose my tongue is – a timekeeper?” cried the irreverent Bobby.
Laura herself helped get dinner, the main dish of which was fried fish. And how good they tasted, fresh out of the lake!
Mrs. Morse had kept her typewriter tapping at a swift pace in the cabin, and she could scarcely be coaxed to leave her story long enough to eat dinner.
“This quietude is an incentive to good work,” she said, reflectively, at table. “I shall be sorry to go back to town.”
But it was very early in their experience to say that. Lizzie Bean was not yet an enthusiast for the simple life, that was sure. She and Mother Wit had gotten better acquainted during the preparations for the noonday meal.
“I ain’t never been crazy about the country myself,” admitted Liz. “Cows, and bugs, and muskeeters, and frogs, don’t seem so int’restin’ to me as steam cars, and pitcher shows, and sody-water fountains, and street pianners.
“I like the crowds, I do. A place where all ye hear all day is a mowin’ merchine clackin’, or see a hoss switchin’ his tail to keep off the bluebottles, didn’t never coax me, much.”
“The bucolic life does not tempt you, then?” said Laura, her eyes twinkling.
“Never heard it called that afore. Colic’s it serious thing – ’specially with babies. But the city suits me, I can tell ye,” said Liz.
“I never seen no-one that liked the woods like you gals seem to before, ’ceptin’ a feller that lived in the boardin’ house I worked at in Albany. He was a bug on campin’ and fishin’ and gunnin’, and all that.”
“Did you work in Albany?” queried Laura, surprised.
“Yep. Last year. I had a right good place, too. Plenty of work. I got up at four o’clock in the mornin’ and I never did get through at night!”
“Oh, my!”
“Yep. I love work. It keeps yer mind off yer troubles, if you have enough and plenty to do. But if yer have too much of it, yer get fed up, as ye might say. I didn’t get time to sleep.”
Laura had to laugh at that.
“Yep. That chap I tell you about was the nicest chap I ever see. He was kind to me, too. When I cut my thumb most off – see the scar? – a-slicin’ bread in that boardin’ house, the missis put me out ’cause I couldn’t do my work.”
“How mean!” exclaimed Laura.
“Ah! ye don’t know about boardin’ house missises. They ain’t human,” said Liz, confidently. “But Mr. Norman, he seen me goin’ out with my verlise, and he knowed about my sore thumb. He slipped me five dollars out o’ his pocket. But he was rich,” sighed Liz, ecstatically. “He owned a bank.”
“Owned a bank?” gasped Laura.
“Yep.”
“And lived in a cheap boarding house?” for Laura knew that Liz could not have worked in a very aristocratic place.
“Well! he went to a bank every day,” said the simple girl. “And if he warn’t rich why should he have slipped me the five dollars?”
“True – very true,” admitted Laura, much amused.
But she did not think it so funny that evening when, as the girls sat about a fire they had made in the open, singing and telling jokes, and Lizzie was washing up the supper dishes, a sudden shrill whoop arose from the cook-tent.
“Gee! what’s that?” demanded the slangy Bobby.
“A mouse!” declared Nellie. “That funny girl must be just as much afraid of them as I am.”
“I hope it’s nothing worse than a mouse,” Lil said, tremblingly.
Laura had sprung up on the instant and run to the cook tent. Liz had dropped a pile of plates, and some of them were broken. She had deposited herself stiffly in a campstool. Her body was quite stiffened and her eyes fairly bulged – and it was not easy for Liz Bean’s eyes to bulge!
“What is the matter, Liz?” demanded Laura, seizing her by the shoulder.
“I seen him,” gasped Liz.
“You have seen whom?”
“Him.”
“But that doesn’t mean anything to me,” declared Laura, shaking her. “Who is he?”
“The feller I was tellin’ you about. That feller that give me the five dollars.”
“What?”
“Yes, Ma’am!” uttered Liz, solemnly. “He was standin’ right yonder – just at the edge of them woods. I took the cover off the stove and the fire flashed out and showed me his face – just as plain!”
“You’ve been dreaming,” said Laura, slowly.
“Git out!” ejaculated Liz, with emphasis. “I never fell asleep yet washin’ greasy dishes – no, Ma’am!”
“Well!”
“I know what it means,” Liz said, solemnly. “Yes, I do.”
“What does it mean?” demanded Laura, doubtful whether to laugh or be serious.
“He’s dead,” said the odd girl.
“Dead?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“But why should he appear to you, even if he were dead?” demanded Laura, seeing that she must never let this superstition take root in the camp. “Do you suppose he’s come to try to get his five dollars back?”
“My goodness to gracious!” said Liz. “No. The ha’nt of a man that owned a bank wouldn’t come to bother a poor gal like me for money, would he?”
CHAPTER XII
THE “KLEPTOMANIANTIC” GHOST
The other girls crowded around then and wanted to know what had happened. Laura pinched Liz and said:
“She dropped those plates. Guess we won’t make her pay for the broken ones, girls. Go on, now. I’ll finish helping Liz wipe them.”
So the matter of the “ha’nt” did not become public property just then. In fact, Mother Wit talked so seriously to the maid-of-all-work that she hoped the “ha’nt” had been laid, before they sought their cots that night.
But in the morning there was a most surprising sequel to the incident. The larder had been robbed!
“It can’t be,” said Laura, who heard of the trouble first of all when she popped out of the sleeping tent. Lizzie Bean had awakened Mrs. Morse and that lady – bundled in a blanket-robe – had come to the cook-tent to see.
“I ain’t never walked in my sleep yet – and knowed it,” stated Lizzie, with conviction. “And there’s the things missin’–”
The remainder of the big ham, a strip of bacon, coffee, sugar, syrup, canned milk, and half a sack of flour were among the things which had disappeared.
While the three stood there, amazed, Bobby came. “Bet it was those boys,” said she. “Playing a joke on us. They’re over here somewhere.”
The sun was just rising, and its early beams shone on the camp across the lake. Laura ran for the binoculars and examined the boys’ camp. Both powerboats were there, and the five canoes. The boys were all disporting themselves in the water – Laura could count the six.
“If they did it,” she said, “they got back to their camp very early.”
“See this!” shrieked Bobby, suddenly.
She was pointing to the table, set as usual for breakfast. Pinned to the red and white checked table-cloth was a crisp ten dollar bill.
“Whoever robbed us paid for the goods,” Mrs. Morse said, feebly.
“It was that ha’nt!” declared Liz.
At that the story of the man’s face she had seen at the edge of the wood the evening before, came out. All the girls heard the story, and at once there was a great hullabaloo!
“A man on the island!” gasped Nellie. “I’m going home.”
“Pooh!” said Bobby. “Liz says it’s a ghost. A kleptomaniac ghost at that.”
