The Girls of Central High: or, Rivals for All Honors

CHAPTER XII – THE M. O. R. INITIATION

Now there was one girl of that walking party, you may be sure, who did not congratulate Laura Belding upon her happy thought in aiding the man on the steeple of St. Cecelia’s Church. That was Hester Grimes.

Since the evening previous Hester had had little to say to anybody – even to her chum. The fires of wrath always burned deeply in Hester; she hugged an injury – or a supposed injury – to her, and made it greater therefore than it was.

In the first place, she had hoped much that the M. O. R.’s would give her the “touch.” For months – ever since she had become a soph at Central High, indeed, she had been looking forward to that end. She wanted to “make” the secret society more than she wanted anything else in her school life.

And now it would be another year, at least, before she could stand her chance again, while Laura Belding, whom she hated, was one of the favored candidates. She could not understand it. Hester had toadied to juniors and seniors alike – especially to those who were members of the secret society. Of course, she had paid little attention to such girls as Mary O’Rourke. She could not understand how the daughter of a laborer, who had neither money nor influence, could have become a prominent member of the M. O. R.’s. But by the girls of wealthy parents Hester had tried to make herself noticed.

She could not understand her lack of popularity, when Laura, and Jess Morse, and Dr. Agnew’s daughter and the Lockwood twins had received the touch. And rage burned hotter in her heart.

Besides, Bobby’s impudent trick had made Hester appear ridiculous, she could not forget that. And she insisted upon holding Laura responsible for the joke. She told Lily she was sure that Laura Belding had put Bobby up to it. And it was nothing that would pass over quickly. Already, on this Saturday, she had heard some of the lines of the doggerel repeated by giggling girls – and she hated them all for it!

“I’ll get square – you just see,” she whispered to Lily Pendleton. “No girl like Laura Belding can treat me so – ”

“But it was those freshies and Bobby Hargrew,” interposed her chum.

“Laura was back of it – believe me!” declared Hester, shaking her head. “I should think you would feel the slight, too, Lily. For those stuck-up M. O. R.’s to choose Belding, and Morse, and those other girls of our class, and overlook us.”

“But the candidates had nothing to do with it,” said Lily, weakly.

“Belding and the others benefited, just the same – didn’t they?”

“Um – m. They’re in and we’re out.”

“Well!” said Hester, with flashing eyes.

“But what are you going to do about it? What can we do?”

“Never mind. You’ll see,” promised the butcher’s daughter, darkly.

It would not have changed Hester’s attitude at all – for she was not one to easily forgive – had she known that Laura Belding had taken occasion that very morning to take Bobby Hargrew to task for what she had done the evening before. Bobby came into Mr. Belding’s store while Laura was dusting and re-arranging the show cases.

“Have a scrumptious time at the club house, Laura?” asked the irrepressible.

“Oh, it is nice, Bobby!” cried Laura. “I wish you had been touched.”

“Me? Huh! I’d have about as much chance of ever being an M. O. R. as Hester Grimes,” and she chuckled.

“Less chance than Hester, I fear,” said Laura, with sudden gravity. “Especially after last evening. Bobby Hargrew, I never knew you to do so mean a thing before.”

“Well, wasn’t she mean to me?”

“That does not excuse you. And I told Mr. Sharp that you had never done a really mean thing within my knowledge – ”

“Ah! Now I see why I have not been promoted to the outside of Central High,” cried Bobby, quickly. “You have been interceding for me.”

“I – I – Well, it was nothing much I said, dear,” said Laura.

“I’m grateful,” said Bobby, really moved. “But I can’t tell you how much.”

“Show me, then,” urged Laura.

“How do you mean?”

“Give up this practical joking. Stop making trouble for the teachers – ”

“I have! Gee Gee hasn’t had a chance to criticize me all this week. And sometimes I feel as though I should burst,” cried the spirited girl.

“But I did tell the principal that you never did anything mean – and see what you have done to Hester!”

“And see what she has done to me,” snapped Bobby.

“Perhaps she thought she saw you throw something into that basket.”

“No, she didn’t. She and I sassed each other,” declared Bobby, who was plain if not elegant of speech at all times, “right there in the principal’s office when Miss Gee Gee sailed out into the music room. Hessie was the last girl to leave me – true enough. But she did not see me near that basket, for I started for the corridor when she was going out of the room.”

“But she might have been mistaken – ”

“You don’t more than half believe me yourself, Laura Belding!” accused Bobby.

“I do. I believe just what you say about it.”

“Then you can take it from me,” said the emphatic Bobby, “that Hester Grimes told that story to Miss Carrington for the sake of getting me into trouble – and for no other reason.”

“I’d hate to think her so mean,” sighed Laura.

“I’d hate to be foolish enough to believe she was anything but mean,” growled Bobby, sullenly. “We’ve always known what she was. Why so tender of her all of a sudden?”

“But she must be hurt dreadfully by that trick you played on her last evening.”

“Serves her right, then. I’ve no love for her, I confess. But if you don’t want me to I’ll let her strictly alone hereafter. I guess I’ve squared things pretty well with her anyway,” and Bobby Hargrew laughed lightly.

“I want you to be good, Bobby,” said Laura, yet smiling at the younger girl. “Show them there is something in you besides mischief. The teachers have a wrong idea of you. You want to change all that.”

“Gee! I couldn’t be a Miss Nancy,” chuckled the other.

“Just see how you are cut out of all our good times,” warned Laura. “And we need you in athletics, Bobby! Our eight-oared shell will be without its cox – and we hoped to have a boat of our own this season. You see, Bobby, one girl can’t do wrong without hurting the rest of us. ‘All for one and one for all’ is the motto of Central High, you know.”

“Oh, dear, Laura, I didn’t set that fire,” cried Bobby, suddenly, and almost in tears.

“I don’t believe for a minute that you did,” returned her friend. “But you might use your superabundance of wit in finding out who did set it. I’ve racked my brains, I am sure, and I can’t see the answer.”

“Then, how do you expect me to do so – and you always so ingenious?” complained Bobby.

Laura’s ingenuity about the kite and the steeple-jack delighted most of the girls who were with her on that Saturday afternoon tramp. And when they knew she intended giving the gold eagle presented to her by Colonel Swayne to the treasury of the Girls’ Branch they cheered her – all but Hester and Lily.

The explanation of the fire in Mr. Sharp’s office eluded Laura, however, as it did everybody else. But she gave considerable thought to the problem as the days passed.

The Athletic Field was being put in shape as rapidly as possible. Already the high board fence was being erected and a large shed with lockers for the girls. As the field joined their old bathing pavilion there were shower and plunge baths already at hand. Mrs. Case promised the school that, other things being well, the girls should have an exhibition field day for parents and friends before many weeks. The indoor exercises were practiced assiduously, and most of the advanced classes, at least, tried to stand well in these so as to take part in the outdoor games.

With the regular school work, the physical instruction, and the after-hour athletics, the girls of Central High found their time filled. But Laura Belding and her close friends had the added excitement and interest of the coming M. O. R. initiation.

A full week elapsed from the Day of the Touch to the hour when the candidates were to be made full members of the secret society. This initiation was usually a novel affair, and on this occasion it was announced to the candidates that Robinson’s Woods was the scene and Saturday at four o’clock the time of the exercises. Secrecy was maintained – or should have been. No one but members of the M. O. R., or the candidates, was to know the time and place; but events which followed showed that there was a “leak” somewhere.

Robinson’s Woods was a fine picnicking ground, back among the hills. One of the Market Street cars passed a road which led to the grove; one needed to walk but half a mile, and through a pleasant byway. But once at the Woods, it was as though the primeval forest surrounded the place.

There was a small hotel, tables and benches in the open, swings and a carousel, and a dancing pavilion. But the M. O. R.’s did not propose to hold their exercises in so exposed a place. Up from the regular grounds devoted to entertainment led a narrow, rocky path through the thicker wood. The goal to which this path led was a high, open plateau in the midst of the forest, from which one could overlook a winding country road and a more winding, tumbling, noisy brook which came down from the heights.

Two special cars awaited the M. O. R. girls and the candidates for initiation, and it was a merry party that debarked at the head of the wood road. They marched straight away from the regular picnic grounds and were soon on the plateau.

The sun was going down and the view over the valley, in which lay the City of Centerport, was beautiful indeed. There were nearly a hundred girls, and in their bright dresses they made a very pretty picture in the open space in the forest.

They were far from human habitation. Indeed there was no house in sight, save an abandoned farmhouse at the upper end of the clearing. Surrounded by a straggling fence, with a gate hanging from one hinge, and the out-houses behind it fallen in ruins, this old dwelling presented a rather ghostly appearance. It did, indeed, go by the name of “Robinson’s Haunted House”; but in the late afternoon sunlight none of the visitors thought of the grewsome stories told of it.

CHAPTER XIII – THE HAUNTED HOUSE

Every girl had brought a box of luncheon, and besides, somebody had “toted” two huge pots for chocolate and the little individual cups they all carried made sufficient drinking vessels. Mary O’Rourke, with the help of Laura and another girl who knew something about wood-lore, built a campfire, while two other girls climbed down to the road and followed it across the brook on the stepping-stones and up the hill to the nearest farmhouse for milk. There was a spring of clear water in the hillside at the edge of the plateau.

The red sun dropped behind the forest-clad hills upon the distant shore of Lake Luna. They could see the rippling water sparkle in the last rays of the sun. A white sail was set in this background of red and purple glory, like a single, flashing diamond. The birds were winging homeward to their nests in the hills behind the girls’ camp.

“What a quiet, soothing picture,” sighed one of the seniors.

“It might be altogether too quiet up here after dark if there weren’t such a bunch of us,” said Josephine Morse. “Ugh!”

“The haunted house, eh?” suggested Laura.

“Don’t say a word! I bet there are ghosts in it,” declared another girl, with a shiver.

“I’ll guarantee there are rats in it,” laughed Laura.

“You’re so brave!” exclaimed Jess, with scorn. “But you wouldn’t want to go into that house even in the daytime.”

“I don’t like rats,” admitted her chum.

“That’s all right,” put in Celia Prime. “But there really is a ghost connected with the old Robinson house.”

“There always is,” laughed Laura.

“Mary will tell you about it,” said the senior, gravely. “You have been brought here for that purpose, you candidates. Wait until after supper.”

“Oh!” squealed one of the Lockwood twins. “A real ghost story?”

“Just as real as any ghost story possibly can be,” said Mary O’Rourke, laughing. “Gather around the fire, you infants. Never mind the smoke – it will keep away the mosquitoes. Here come Jennie and Belle with the milk, and we can make the chocolate. The table is spread – and we’ve got to hurry so as to get our share away from the black ants.”

“Oh – o! Don’t!” begged somebody. “Don’t remind us of them. I feel them crawling all over me now!”

“To say nothing of the spiders,” laughed the wicked Mary.

“Oo – h! That’s the only trouble with picnics. Somebody ought to go ahead and sweep off the grass,” declared Dorothy Lockwood.

“That would surely be ‘adorning nature’ – ‘painting the lily’ – and all that,” laughed Mary.

The shadows were creeping up from the valley. The electric lights flashed out all over the city and made a brilliant spectacle below them. The night wind rustled the trees and the whip-poor-will began his complaint from his pitch upon a dead branch.

A bell began to toll at intervals from somewhere far up the hillside. Some wandering cow wore this bell, but it sounded ghostly.

“Listen!” commanded Mary O’Rourke, standing beyond the fire where she could be seen and heard by all the candidates, at least, who were grouped in one place. “And especially you infants who this night appear before our solemn body for initiation into its ancient rites and mysteries. Listen!

“Before it grew dark we could all see right down there beyond the fording place in the brook, where the road crosses a ploughed field on the other side. Not a year ago, this farmer from whom Bell bought the milk, Mr. Sitz, was driving home just on the edge of the evening, with his son and his father-in-law, in a spring wagon. He drove a pair of young horses, and was giving them particular attention, so he says. But as they came up the hill toward the brook he saw a light moving down the road between them.

“In his opinion it was a lantern under a carriage. He saw the light flash back and forth, low above the ground, as though a horse’s legs were between the lantern and those approaching it.

“‘Here comes a carriage, Dad,’ said his son.

“‘It’s a top-buggy, Israel,’ declared the old gentleman on the other side of Mr. Sitz.

“The young horses sprang forward nervously as they reached the ford. The wagon splashed through the brook and out upon the hard road. The horses had crowded over to the left hand, and Mr. Sitz knew that he was not giving the coming carriage sufficient room to pass.

“But as he pulled his team back to the right hand side of the road he glanced ahead again and saw that the light had disappeared. Black as the night was he was confident there was no vehicle there – where he had expected to see one.

“‘What’s come o’ that carriage, Father?’ he asked the old man.

“‘Why – why it went by, didn’t it?’ returned his father-in-law.

“‘I didn’t see it,’ declared the son.

“‘It did not pass us on the high side,’ Mr. Sitz declared.

“‘Must have turned into the ploughed field,’ suggested the boy again.

“Mr. Sitz stopped his horses and gave the lines to his son to hold. He climbed down with his own lantern and searched for wheel tracks in the field beside the road. He was positive no vehicle had passed his wagon on the right hand side of the road. He could find no marks of the wheels anywhere in the soft ground. But as he turned back to climb into his wagon again he saw a light flash up for an instant in the windows of that front room yonder – in the haunted house,” said Mary, with emphasis and pointing dramatically.

“Mr. Sitz will tell you about it, if you ask him. He will also tell you what the mysterious carriage and the mysterious light in the haunted house meant.”

“Oh, dear!” murmured Jess in Laura’s ear. “Doesn’t she make you feel creepy?”

“Not yet,” whispered Laura. “Lots of people have seen intermittent lights on marshy ground, and the flare of light in the window of the old house was the reflection of his own lantern, perhaps.”

“Silence!” commanded Mary, sternly. “No comments. Besides, those who try to explain ghost stories have a thankless job on their hands,” and she laughed. “We all are like the old woman who declared she didn’t believe in ghosts, but she was awfully afraid of them!

“This is the weird tale: Years ago an old man named Robinson and his unmarried sister lived in that house. They were the last of their family, and both were miserly. For that reason they had never married, for fear the other would get the larger share of the property here on the side of the mountain. And they had money, too.

“Sarah Robinson,” pursued Mary, “was of that breed of misers who delight in handling their gold, and worshipping it. She could not enjoy figures in a bank-book as she enjoyed handling the actual money. But John Robinson was of a more practical turn, and he banked his money as he made it.

“One day a man who had borrowed of John paid him a large sum of money – took up a mortgage, in fact. It was wild spring weather and the stream yonder was running full. But although it rained so hard John Robinson would not risk his money in the house over night.

“His sister and he quarreled about it. She said he was a fool to go to town to bank his money on such a day. She would have been glad to sit up all night and watch it – and every night, too. But John harnessed his decrepit mare to his ramshackle buggy, and started for town.

“‘You put the lamp in the east window for me when it comes dark, and I’ll get back all right,’ he told her.

“Sarah scolded all the time until he was gone. She even said she hoped he’d be drowned in the river – he and his money together. Oh! she was quite a savage old creature, they say.

“Along towards evening a dreadful tempest burst up in the hills – a regular cloudburst. A thunderous torrent overflowed the banks of that pretty brook yonder. It became dark and they say old Sarah did not set the lamp in the window as she usually did when John was away from home.

“In the midst of the storm and darkness she must have seen his lantern jogging along the road, under the hind axle of his carriage, just as Mr. Sitz saw it,” continued Mary, in a solemn voice. “But the old woman would not light her lamp. The old man came down to the brook in the pitch darkness, missed the ford, drove into the deeper water below the crossing, and was swept away, horse, carriage and all, by the flood!”

“Oh – oh!” was the murmured chorus.

“How awful!” cried one girl.

“What an old witch!” exclaimed Jess Morse.

“But Sarah ran to set her light in the window – when it was too late,” pursued Mary, the story teller. “And every night for years thereafter, while she lived alone here in the old house, Sarah Robinson put her lamp in the window just after dark. And they say she often puts it in the window now! But usually the ghost light is preceded by the light and carriage on the road beyond the ford.”

“I declare! I thought I saw a light flare up in the old house just then!” cried one of the girls on the outskirts of the sitting crowd of listeners.

“Very likely,” returned Mary O’Rourke, in a sepulchral voice; “for it is on a night like this that the ghost of Sarah Robinson is supposed to walk.”

CHAPTER XIV – THE TEST

The end of Mary’s story seemed to be a signal awaited by the M. O. R.’s, for they all began to rise now and quickly surrounded the little group of candidates for initiation. Some of these girls started to rise, too, but Mary commanded:

“Wait! Candidates for the honors and the secrets of the M. O. R.’s must show both bravery and obedience. The hour has arrived for those candidates who desire to enter into the confidence and trust of the older members of the society, to show such desire. Obedience and courage are our watch words to-night. Those of the candidates who desire to go back – who dare not submit to The Test – may now make final decision. But she who puts her hand to the plough may not turn back after this decision.”

“Well, I’m going to stick it out, ploughing and all!” giggled Jess in her chum’s ear.

None of the candidates expressed a desire to back out in the silence that ensued, although the mournful bell tinkled on the hillside and now a “booby” owl added its mournful complaint to the note of the whip-poor-will.

“We are ready for the test, then,” said Mary, still solemnly. “Let the ballot-box be brought. In it have been placed the names of the candidates, each on a separate slip of paper. They will be drawn in quartettes, and each quartette will be given a task which will require both courage and obedience.”

There was a little rustle among the girls as one of them brought forward one of the lunch boxes.

“The first test,” said Mary O’Rourke, “will be for the first four candidates drawn to take each three nails and this hammer and go together to the haunted house, enter by the front door, go into the east front room where Old Sarah is wont to show her light, and drive the nails, one after another, in the floor of the room.”