CHAPTER XIIIA SEPTEMBER SQUALL

It was a still, hazy September afternoon, so warm that the frost that had helped to open the chestnut burrs that very morning seemed to have been an hallucination. The lake was as calm as a millpond; but Lake Huron is notoriously treacherous.

Henry, the boatkeeper at Lakeview Hall, was not as weatherwise as he should have been. He had allowed a number of boats to be taken out that afternoon without warning the girls to beware of squalls.

Not that such warning would have been taken seriously by many of the girls, for a fairer day in the seeming had not appeared on the calendar. Nan and Bess decided to go out in one of the double canoes.

The chums from Tillbury did not own a boat. Several of the older girls did, and Bess had already written home for a motor boat.

“I’ll tease dad for a motor boat first,” she confided to Nan. “Of course he won’t hear tothat. So I’ll try to get a sailboat—what do they call ’em?—acat, with an auxiliary engine. And he won’t listen to that, either.”

“Why ask for something you know you can’t have?” asked the wondering Nan.

“Goodness! don’t you see?” exclaimed Bess, exasperated at such lack of understanding. “Why, if I ask for something big, dad will compromise in the end, and probably give me just what I originally expected to have. ‘Aim high’ is my motto. Oh, we’ll get a nice canoe, at the least, or a cedar boat with a portable engine and propeller.”

This way of getting what one wished rather shocked Nan, who always asked pointblank for what she wanted, but was usually wise enough not to think too much about what she knew she could not have.

“That’s an awfully roundabout way of getting what you desire,” she suggested to Bess.

“Oh! you don’t know my father. Mother has to do the same. He has plenty of money, but sometimes he hates to give it up. I can tease almost anything out of him.”

“Hush, Bess! Suppose anybody else should hear you?” Nan suggested.

“Well, it’s true,” said careless Bess. “There’s that Linda Riggs going down with Gracie Mason to the dock. I bet Walter is coming in hisBargain Rushfor Grace, and Linda will get invited. I’d just love to have a motor boat, Nan, just to get ahead of Linda. She can’t have one, I heard Cora say, because her father is afraid of them.”

“None of the girls own motor boats,” Nan said, calmly. “The canoe is all right.”

They were in the canoe and had put up the little leg-o’-mutton sail, before Walter Mason’sBargain Rushcame out around Lighthouse Point, from the inlet, and chugged over to the school dock where Walter’s sister was waiting.

“Walter is just devoted to Grace,” Nan said. “I think he is a dreadfully nice boy.”

“Better keep your opinion to yourself,” laughed Bess. “Linda thinks she about owns him. You see, he’s the only boy available about the school and Linda has always been used to having the best of everything.”

“So have you,” laughed Nan, roguishly.

“But not in boys!” cried Bess. “Billy is enough. If they are all like that brother of mine——”

“You know Walter isn’t,” said Nan.

“Goodness! No! Walter Mason is as meek as Moses! As meek as his own sister. And I think Gracie is the most milk-and-watery girl I ever saw.”

“She’s timid, I know,” began Nan, but her chum interrupted quickly:

“Oh, yes! You’ll find a good word to say for her, Nan. You always champion the cause of the weak and afflicted. Every sore-eyed kitten you saw on the street at Tillbury used to appeal to you.”

“Oh, bosh!” exclaimed Nan. “You make me out a whole lot worse than I am.”

The canoe suddenly dipped sideways and Bess squealed as a splash of water came inboard. “Sit down! you’re rocking the boat!” she sang.

“That was a flaw of wind. Guess we’ll have to watch out. Don’t tie the sheet to that cleat, Bess.”

“‘Sheet’? Oh! you mean this rope. I never can remember nautical names. But I’ve got to hitch the thing, Nan. I want to wash my hands. And this water ought to be got out. There’s a big sponge in the bow-locker. There! I got that right, didn’t I? ‘Bow locker.’”

Nan was steering with a paddle and could not give her full attention to the sail. The sea was choppy and it took some effort to keep the head of the canoe properly pointed.

Nan was bare-headed, but Bess wore a rubber bathing cap. Nan’s braids snapped about her shoulders when the boisterous wind swooped down upon them. Farther out upon the lake white-caps appeared.

“I guess we’d better not go very far to-day,” Nan said cautiously.

“There go Walter and those girls!” Bess cried. “Yes! Linda is aboard. What did I tell you?”

“Well, they can get back more quickly thanwecan,” Nan said seriously.

“Oh, let’s go a little farther. I like it when the canoe tumbles about,” declared reckless Bess.

Nan knew that if the wind held at its presentpoint it would be more aid to them in running back than while they were on this present tack, so she did not insist upon turning about immediately. What she did not know was, that the recurrent flaws in the wind foretold a sudden change in its direction.

There were plenty of other pleasure boats about them at first; and as Bess pointed out, Walter Mason’sBargain Rushhad passed the canoe, going out. What the two chums did not notice, however, was that these other boats, including theBargain Rush, soon made for the shore.

The fishing boats from Freeling were driving in toward the inlet, too. Wise boatmen saw the promise of “dirty weather.” Not so Nan and Bess. The tang of the spray on their lips, the wind blowing their braids and freshening the roses in their cheeks, the caress of it on their bare arms and necks, the excitement of sitting in the pitching canoe—all delighted and charmed the girls.

They were soon far from all other boats, the canoe was scuttling over the choppy waves like a quail running to cover, the bellying sail actually hiding from their eyes the threatening clouds that were piling up in the east and south.

Suddenly the wind died. Their sail hung flabbily from the pole. Nan began to look anxiously about.

“If we have to paddle clear back to the boathouse,” she began, when Bess suddenly gasped:

“Oh, Nan! Look there!”

Nan gazed as her chum pointed “sou’east.” A mass of slate-colored clouds seemed to reach from the apex of the heavenly arch to the lead-colored water. Along the lower edge of this curtain of cloud ran a white line, like the bared teeth of a wolf!

Nan was for the moment speechless. She had never seen such alarming clouds. She and Bess had yet to see a storm on the Great Lakes. Nothing like this approach of wind and rain had ever been imagined by the two girls.

Out of the clouds came a low moaning—the voice of the rising wind. Soon, too, the swish of falling rain, which was beating the surface of the water to foam as it advanced, was also audible.

“Oh! what shall we do?” moaned Bess.

Nan was aroused by this. She glanced wildly around. They were a long way off Lighthouse Point, at the entrance to Freeling Inlet, and the storm was coming in such a direction that they must be driven up the lake and away from the Hall boat-landing—if, indeed, the canoe were not immediately swamped.

“Let go the sheet, Bess! Let go the sheet!” was Nan’s first cry.

“Goodness me! And the pillow cases, too, if you say so!” chattered Bess, clawing wildly at the rope in question.

But she had tied it in a hard knot to the cleat, and the more she tried to pull the knot loose, the tighter it became.

“Quick! quick!” Nan cried, trying to paddle the canoe around.

She understood nothing about heading into the wind’s eye; Nan only realized that they would likely be overturned if the wind and sea struck the canoe broadside.

The storm which had, at first, approached so slowly, now came down upon the canoe at terrific speed. The wind shrieked, the spray flew before it in a cloud, and the curtain of rain surrounded and engulfed the two girls and their craft.

The sail was torn to shreds. Nan had managed to head the canoe about and they took in the waves over the stern. She was saturated to the very skin by the first bucket of water.

Bess, with a wild scream of fear, cast herself into Nan’s arms.

“We’ll be drowned! we’ll be drowned!” was her cry.

Nan thought so, too, but she tried to remain calm.

The water fairly boiled about them. It jumped and pitched most awfully. The water that came inboard threatened to swamp the canoe.

Peril, Nan had faced before; but nothing like this. Each moment, as the canoe staggered on and the waves rose higher and the wind shrieked louder,Nan believed that they were nearer and nearer to death.

She did not see how they could possibly escape destruction. The sea fairly yawned for them. The canoe sank lower and lower as the foam-streaked water slopped in over the gunnels.They were going to be swamped!

Bess Harley clung to her chum in an agony of apprehension. Perhaps Nan would have utterly given way to terror, too, had she not felt herself obliged to bolster up poor Bess.

The wind shrieked so about the two girls, and the roar of the rain and sea so deafened them, that Nan could offer little verbal comfort. She could only hug Bess close to her and pat her shoulder caressingly.

Then suddenly Nan seized the bathing cap from her chum’s head, and, pushing Bess aside, began to bail frantically with the rubber head covering. The rain and spray were rapidly sinking the canoe, and to free it of the accumulation of water was their only hope.

“Oh, dear! Oh, dear, Nan!” groaned Bess, over and over.

Nan had no breath left for idle talk. She bailed out the water as fast as she could. The canoe was too water-logged already to be easily steered. The sea merely drove it on and on; providentially it did not broach to.

“Throw out the cushions!” Nan finally cried to her chum. “Throw them out, it will lighten the canoe a little.”

“But—but we’ll have to pay for them,” objected Bess, for perhaps the first time in her life becoming cautious.

“Do as I say!” commanded Nan. “What are a few cushions if we can save our lives?”

“But wecan’t!We’re sure to drown!” wailed Bess.

Nan was not at all sure that this was not true. She would not, however, own up that she thought so.

“You do as I say, Bess!” she ordered. “Throw out the cushions! Never mind if we drown the next minute!”

“You—you are awful!” sobbed Bess.

Nevertheless, she jerked the cushions out over the side. One after the other they floated away. Then Nan was suddenly stricken with fear. Maybe she had done the wrong thing. By the way the cushions floated they might be of cork and if worse came to worst, they might have been used as life-preservers.

But the canoe was lightened. Nan unhooked a chair-back amidships and threw it overboard. All the time she was bailing faithfully. After being thus lightened, the canoe began to rise upon the waves more buoyantly.

Perhaps, however, that was because the rain had passed over. The driving sleet-like fall of it had saturated the two girls in the canoe. They could be no wetter now—not if they were completely engulfed by the rising sea.

The violence of the wind had actually beaten the sea down; but behind the squall, as it swept on, the waves were rising tumultuously.

“This won’t last long—itcan’tlast long,” Nan thought.

She raised her eyes to look about. The darkness of evening seemed already to hover upon the bosom of the lake. The boat-landing and boathouse were both out of sight. On the crag-like bluff the Hall was merely a misty outline, hanging like a cloud-castle in the air.

Bess was crying steadily. Nan thought of her mother and her father, so far away. If anything happened to her they would be a long time finding it out.

And there was Uncle Henry and Aunt Kate and the boys! They would feel very bad, Nan knew, if anything happened to her. So would Toby Vanderwiller and Mrs. Vanderwiller and Corson. And perhaps queer little Margaret Llewellen and her brother, Bob——

Was it the spray, or did tears fill Nan Sherwood’s eyes so that she could see nothing moving on the face of the wild waters? Yet, of a sudden, therecame into hearing the sharp, staccato report of an engine exhaust.

“A motor boat!” Nan gasped, still bailing desperately.

The sputtering noise drew nearer.

“Oh, Bess!” Nan cried.

“Oh, Nan!” responded her chum.

“Do you hear it?”

“It’s that boat,” Bess said, sniffling. “If they only see us!”

“Can you see them?”

Nan could not stop bailing. Every now and then a wave would slop over the side and the canoe would settle deeper in the lake.

Bess climbed unsteadily to her knees. Hope revived in her breast. She wiped the spray out of her eyes with the back of her hand and stared all about. Yes! there was the darting motor boat.

“It’s Walter!” she cried to her chum.

“Does he see us?”

“He’s—he’s going ri-i-ight past!” wailed Bess.

“Wave to him! Shout to him!” commanded Nan.

“A lot of good tha-a-at’ll do!” pursued the unhappy Bess. “They’re so-o fa-a-ar away.”

Nan uttered a shriek just then that must have been heard a long way down wind. A big wave boarded them, filling the canoe almost full, andthrowing Bess on her face. Nan seized her chum and drew her up out of the water so that she might get her breath.

The canoe shook and staggered. It was going down! Another such shipment of water and the girls would be engulfed!

“Scream! Let’s both scream together!” commanded Nan.

Her chum’s cry was a very weak one indeed. But Nan’s voice rang out vigorously across the waves.

“Help! We’re sinking!”

Almost immediately an answering cry came down the wind:

“Hold o-on! We’re coming!”

“I’d like to know what we’re to hold onto,” gasped Nan, kneeling waist-deep in the water.

She had to hold up Bess, who was almost ready to collapse. Left to herself, Nan’s chum would have succumbed before the motor boat arrived. It was Walter’s boat. To Nan’s surprise, his sister and Linda Riggs were still with him.

“Stand by for the buoy!” called out Walter, and flung the inflated ring attached to a strong line.

It floated near the submerged canoe almost at once. Nan felt the canoe going down, and with her arm about Bess, she flung herself away from the sinking craft.

“Oh! oh!” gurgled Bess.

“Keep up!” cried Nan.

“Don’t sink, girls!” shouted Walter Mason. “I’ll get you!”

He, however, had his hands pretty full with the boat. It had lost headway and was inclined to swing broadside to the waves, which, every minute, were running higher.

Nan and Bess were both good swimmers; yet Bess was now all but helpless through fright. She would have sunk immediately had not Nan’s arm been about her.

Nan struck out for the bobbing ring. A wave carried them toward the life-buoy and as they fell down the slant of that wave, they fairly plunged onto the big canvas-covered ring.

“I’ve got it!” yelled Nan, exultantly; and the next moment water filled her mouth and she swallowed so much that she felt almost water-logged.

“Hang on!” shouted Walter, encouragingly.

He started the screw again. Grace, who was thoroughly frightened, made out, however, to hold the wheel steady. Walter ran to the stern and drew in the life-buoy, towing the imperiled girls round to leeward of the plunging motor boat.

The rescue was barely in the nick of time. They lifted Bess Harley over the low rail of theBargain Rush, almost senseless. Nan managed to climb in unaided. They were not much wetter than those already aboard the motor boat.

Linda was very ill, and hung over the rail forward. Grace was crying, amidships, and trying to steer the boat while Walter tinkered with the engine. Bess and Nan lay in the cockpit, recovering from their fight with the sea.

It was a very miserable party, indeed.

Between her throes of sea-sickness, Linda began to be heard.

“I’ll never forgive you, never, Walter Mason! Nor you, either, Grace! You brought me out here to drown me! I’ll tell my father!”

This had probably been going on for some time before Nan and her chum were assisted aboard theBargain Rush. Walter seemed to be pretty well disgusted with the railroad magnate’s daughter.

“Don’t tell your father till you get ashore, Linda,” he advised.

“You’re just as horrid as you can be!” gasped Linda.

“Don’t mind him, Linda,” begged peace-loving Grace. “And, really, it isn’t his fault.”

“You’re just as bad as he is, every whit!” snapped the unpleasant girl. “You both were determined to come out here when I wanted to go ashore.”

“Why!” gasped Grace, showing some pluck for once, “you wouldn’t have had Walter leave Nan and Bess to drown, would you?”

“And now we’reallgoing to be drowned!” was Linda’s response, but hastily leaning over the rail again, her voice was stifled.

“If—if I ever get to shore alive,” she finally wailed, “I’ll never even go in wading again.”

Had the situation really not seemed so tragic, Nan would have laughed. Bess had joined Linda at the rail, being just as sick as the other. Grace looked green about the lips, herself; but she was plucky. Nan felt no qualms.

“Let me take the wheel, Walter,” she said to Grace’s brother. “I know how to steer.”

“Good for you, Miss Sherwood!” cried the boy. “And you’re not afraid, either?”

“No—notmuch,” answered Nan, stoutly.

“The boat’s as safe as a house. The squall’s gone over now. We’ll soon get to land. Let her off another point now.”

Nan obeyed. The propeller began kicking in regular time. They were able to head around toward the shore. Walter soon took the wheel again and guided theBargain Rushmore directly toward the anchorage before the Hall. They were all of three miles from the boathouse.

“We’ll make it all right now, Miss Sherwood,” said Walter, cheerfully.

“It was awfully good of you to come out for us,” Nan said.

“Goodness! we couldn’t do less, could we?”

“I guess Linda wouldn’t have come if she had had her way.”

“Well! Grace isn’t that kind,” said the brother, loyally. “Of course, we would have done everything in our power to save you girls.”

“And we will never forget it!” Nan cried warmly. “We would have drowned.”

“Never mind,” said Walter, in embarrassment. “It’s all right now.”

“I—I guess the other girls don’t think so,” said Nan, suddenly observing her chum and the other two. All three were violently sick. “It is awfully rough.”

“We’re catching these waves sideways,” Walter said. “Wait till we get in the lea of Lighthouse Point. It won’t be so bad then.”

This was a true prophecy, and theBargain Rushwas soon sailing on even keel. Linda, as well as the other girls, recovered in a measure from the feeling of nausea that had gripped them. As soon as the vulgar girl regained her voice she began to scold again.

“We’d never been in all this trouble if you’d listened to me, Walter Mason! This is awful!”

“Oh, it’s better now, Linda,” said Walter, cheerfully. “We’ll soon be at the Hall dock.”

“And that’s where you should have landed Grace and me just as soon as the storm came up,” grumbled Linda.

“But we saw the canoe in trouble——”

“I didn’t see it!” snapped the girl, crossly.

“But I did,” Walter said warmly. “It would have been a wicked and inhuman thing to have turned away. We had to save Miss Sherwood and Miss Harley.”

“And riskmylife doing it!” cried Linda. “I shall tell my father.”

“If you tell your father everything you promise to,” said Walter, with some spirit, “he must be an awfully busy man just attending to your complaints.”

“Oh, my!” gasped Bess, with wan delight. Meek Walter Mason was beginning to show boldness in dealing with the purse-proud girl.

“You’re a nasty thing!” snapped Linda to Walter. “And I don’t like you.”

“I’ll get over that,” muttered the boy to himself.

“And your sister is just as bad!” scolded Linda, giving way to her dreadful temper as Nan and Bess had seen her do on the train. “I’ll show you both that you can’t treat me in any such way. I’ve always stood up for your dunce of a sister. That’s what she is, a dunce!”

“If you were a boy, I’d thrash you for saying that!” declared Walter, quietly, though in a white heat of passion himself.

“Oh! oh!” shrieked Linda. “So you threaten to strike me, do you? If I tell my fatherthat——”

“Oh, tell him!” exclaimed Walter, in exasperation.

“Of all the mean girls!” murmured Bess, with her arm about Grace, who was crying softly and begging her brother to desist.

“Oh! I can see what’s caused all this,” went on Linda, in her high-pitched voice. “Grace was mighty glad to have me and my friends even look at her before Nan Sherwood and Bess Harley came to the Hall. I wish her all the benefit she may derive from associating withthem. I know one is a thief and the other is no better.”

Bess turned upon the enraged girl with an angry retort. But Nan stopped her.

“Don’t reply, Bess,” said Nan, in a low voice. “Brawling never proves anything, or settles any argument. But if she keeps on saying in public that I am a thief I shall go to Dr. Prescott about it.”

“You wouldn’t be a tell-tale?” gasped Bess, horrified.

“In this case I will,” Nan said firmly. “And she shall apologize in public.”

Linda, by this time, had, in a measure, quieted down. She was sobbing angrily and did not hear what Nan said. The other young people left her strictly alone until theBargain Rushreached the dock.

Oddly enough not even the boatkeeper, Henry,had discovered the absence of the canoe in which Nan and Bess had sailed away from the landing two hours and more before. The other boats had come in, in a hurry, when the squall arose, and it was now so late that all the girls had gone up the bluff. The supper gong would sound soon.

Henry had gone to his supper, intending to return later to put all the boats under cover and lock up the house. The girls said Henry was afraid of the boathouse ghost himself, and would never go into the building after dusk without a lantern.

Linda stepped ashore and marched away with her head in the air. Grace had permission to go home with her brother to supper. Mr. Mason, who was an influential lawyer, owned a country home up the lake shore, beyond Professor Krenner’s queer little cabin, and the brother and sister proposed going to their home in theBargain Rush. Grace would return to the Hall later, by automobile.

Nan and Bess were grateful to Walter and Grace.

“We cannot tell you how we feel,inside, Walter,” Nan said softly. “Nothing we can ever do for you will repay you——”

“Oh, don’t!” begged the boy.

“You’ve got to hear your praises sung!” cried Bess, laughing and sobbing at once. “I shall write home to my folks about it. And we shall tell all the girls.”

“I wish you wouldn’t!” gasped the embarrassed youth.

“And your sister will never miss Linda Riggs’ friendship,” said Nan, stoutly. “We’ll see that Linda does not bother her, either.”

“Oh! you’re so brave, Nan,” murmured the timid Grace.

“It doesn’t take much courage to face a girl like Linda,” Nan retorted. “I’ve seen already that she has very few real friends in the school, and those she has to pay high to keep. I would rather have her for an enemy than a friend.”

Nan and Bess kissed Grace and shook hands with her brother. The chums were both as wet as they could be, and the evening air felt chill.

“We’d better get our sweaters,” Nan said.

“Oh! they’re in the dressing room of the boathouse,” objected Bess.

“Yes, I know it,” her chum said, starting off.

“But, Nan!”

“Well?”

“Sup—suppose weseesomething?” gasped Bess.

“Why, we want to see something,” said Nan, puzzled. “We want to see our sweaters. And we want to feel them, too.”

“But I don’t mean that,” insisted Bess.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what they say,” objected Bess Harley. “It’s haunted!”

“I declare! you don’t believe that foolishness, do you, Bess Harley?” cried Nan.

“I don’t know whether I believe it or not,” confessed her chum. “But I don’t want to see any ghost.”

“I don’t believe you ever will, honey,” Nan said, more seriously.

“You can laugh——”

“I’m not laughing: But we can’t stand here and take cold. We want those sweaters.”

“I’d rather not go,” Bess whispered, hanging back.

“ThenI’llgo.”

“But I don’t want you to leave me alone,” objected Bess.

“You’re the greatest girl I ever saw!” sputtered Nan.

“I know I’m a coward,” said her friend, shakingly. “I’d have given up all hope and been drowned, out there on the lake, if it hadn’t been for you, dear Nan.”

“Nonsense! Come on! Let’s get the sweaters. It’s almost supper time and Mrs. Cupp will give us fits.”

“She won’t, for I shall tell her just how brave you were, and how Walter saved us both.”

“Ha!” cried Nan. “After being through what we have this afternoon, Bess, I shouldn’t think you’d be afraid of the dark.”

“Itisdark,” murmured Bess, as they approached the boathouse.

“Bah!” repeated Nan, gently scornful.

“Maybe you won’t ‘bah’ so much before we get out,” whispered Bess, as they entered the open door and approached the girls’ dressing room and lockers.

They had to cross the big room where the boats were hauled up the sloping plank floor from the cove. It was dark and mysterious.

Suddenly Bess clutched her chum by the arm. “Oh-o-o!” she moaned faintly.

Her shaking hand indicated the direction of a window across the room. It was lighter outside the boathouse than it was within. Against the gray background of the window-pane moved a figure! A black figure! A human figure!

The two girls halted and clung together. Even Nan’s heart beat faster.

The figure moved slowly across the window opening. It made no sound. It disappeared for a moment and then reappeared before a second window. It was all in black and not very tall. It was soon gone entirely.

The girls heard no door open and close. It was just as though the black figure had evaporated—melted into the air!

“The ghost! What did I tell you, Nan Sherwood?” moaned Bess.

“I won’t believe it!” declared Nan Sherwood.

“You saw it with your own eyes!”

“I don’t believe my own eyes, then!” was Nan’s energetic rejoinder.

“Well, I know I saw it!”

“That doesn’t convince me in the least, Bess Harley.”

“Well! you are the most obstinate girl!”

“I won’t own up to such foolishness!” cried Nan, hotly. “A ghostjust doesn’t exist!”

They were back in their own room at Lakeview Hall. Bess could not have told for the life of her how they had obtained their sweaters out of the locker, put them on, and escaped from the boathouse. But she knew that somehow Nan had kept her from running away in a panic.

“Why, Nan, wesawit!” Bess reiterated.

“Saw what?”

“The ghost.”

“We saw nothing of the kind. We saw something.”

“Well!”

“But a ghost is nothing. We could not see a spirit. That was something palpable we saw. It crossed in front of two windows and we could not see through it. It had a solid body.”

“We—ell,” Bess returned. “There may be solid ghosts.”

“Doesn’t stand to reason. There’s supper!”

“I—I don’t want supper much,” said Bess, shivering.

“We’ll go down and ask Susan for hot tea. That’s what we need,” said practical Nan. “And let’s keep still about this.”

“About Walter and all?”

“Oh, no! I mean about what we saw at the boathouse.”

“Then you do admit we saw something?” cried Bess.

“That’s just it,” said Nan drily. “We did see something. Therefore it was not a ghost.”

Her insistence on this point vexed Bess not a little. She felt that they had seen a strange thing, and she wanted to tell the other girls about it. But what would be the use of doing that if her chum pooh-poohed the idea of a ghost and merely went to Henry, as she threatened to, and told him that some tramp, or other prowler, was hanging about the boathouse?

“For,” said Nan, “the girls keep bathing suits and sweaters and all sorts of things down thereand that fellow, whoever he is, may be light-fingered.”

“Dear me!” grumbled Bess, “you never are romantic.”

“Humph! what’s romantic about a disembodied spirit? Smells of the tomb!” declared Nan.

There was one thing, however, that had to be told. The canoe was lost and Mrs. Cupp must be informed at once. So after supper the two chums sought that stern lady’s room, which was right at the top of the basement stairs.

As Nan and Bess approached this “ogress’ castle,” as the girls called Mrs. Cupp’s room, a tall, thin lady was going in ahead of them. She had on her coat and hat and was evidently a visitor from outside.

“Dear me! who’s that?” whispered Nan, to her chum.

“Oh! I know,” Bess replied eagerly. “One of the girls pointed her out to me on the street and I nevercouldforget that funny, old-fashioned hat.”

“Well!” exclaimed Nan, hanging back, “who is she?”

“Mrs. Cupp’s sister. She lives alone in the village. She’s a milliner. That’s why she wears such an awful hat, I suppose,” giggled Bess. “By the same token shoemakers’ wives go almost barefoot.”

“Hush!” breathed Nan.

The visitor’s high-pitched, querulous voicereached their ears plainly, for she had not taken pains to close the door.

“Well, now, Ida, what did I tell you?” she began. “He’s back again.”

“Goodness! how you startled me, Sadie Vane,” was Mrs. Cupp’s response. She had evidently been sitting at her desk with her back to the door.

“You’ll be more startled, Ida Cupp, when you hear what I have to tell you,” Miss Vane went on to say hurriedly.

“Well! do shut the door. You needn’t tell it to the whole school, Sadie,” said the matron, sharply.

The door banged.

“This is no time for us to interview Mrs. Cupp,” said Nan, sensibly, and she and her chum withdrew.

Linda Riggs had confided a garbled account of the boating accident to her particular chum and roommate, Cora Courtney. Of course, Cora eagerly spread the tidings. There was a group of excited girls in the main study when Nan and Bess came through the front hall, ready to pounce on them.

“Hey, sawneys!” ordered Mabel Schiff, a big girl who would graduate from the Hall at the end of the school year. “Come in here and give an account of yourselves.”

“Let’s not, Nan,” whispered Bess, hanging back.

“Come on!” commanded the big girl.

“Why not?” Nan asked her chum. “They’ve all got to know about it.”

“She’s a friend of Linda’s,” Bess again whispered.

“Then we’ll find out what Linda has told,” Nan said, and boldly entered the room.

“Hullo!” said the big girl. “You don’t look much like a couple of drowned rats. They tell me you’ve been overboard.”

“We got wet,” admitted Nan, quietly.

“Got wet! Why, you lost your canoe, and were almost drowned, and if it hadn’t been for Linda Riggs, you wouldn’t have been saved!”

“In spite of her we were saved, is nearer the truth,” Nan declared, but without showing any of the warmth that Bess was beginning to display.

“How ridiculous! She saw you and made that Mason boy sail over to you and pick you up, didn’t she?”

“No, she didn’t!” snapped Bess, quite losing her temper now.

“Oh, of course you kids would say that,” scoffed the big girl. “You don’t like Linda. But poor Linda was so sick she couldn’t come down to supper.”

“She was sicker out in that boat,” Bess said, with a laugh. “You should have seen her.”

“And you can laugh?” groaned Miss Schiff.

“It was no laughing matter for a while,” Nan put in, good-naturedly. “We really were in great trouble. Our canoe was lost——”

“You’ll have to pay for that, children,” Mabel Schiff cried.

“We know all that!” Bess returned smartly. “And our folks are quite as well able to pay for the old thing as Linda’s father.”

“Oh, hush, Bess!” begged Nan,sotto voce. This sort of talk did sound so common!

“I don’t care! I’m sick of hearing about Linda’s riches,” Bess rejoined.

“I suppose you girls think you saved yourselves?” the big girl went on.

“No; we did not,” Nan said, with seriousness. “Walter Mason saved us. We would have drowned had it not been for Walter.”

“Oh! of course it was his boat——”

“It was Walter himself who did it all,” Nan went on, enthusiastically. “He is as brave as he can be.” She then related the whole incident, just as it had taken place. The girls listened attentively at last, for the story of the squall and the boating accident that followed it, with the details of the rescue, lost nothing in Nan’s telling.

“Great! great!” shouted Laura Polk, when Nan finished. “You ought to be class historian, Nancy Sherwood.”

“But how about Linda?” suggested another girl, slily. “She is some historian, too, isn’t she?”

Now, Nan had said nothing in her veracious tale about the purse-proud girl; but Mabel Schiff said:

“I don’t believe all that. I guess Linda was there as much as these freshies——”

“Yes, she was!” exclaimed Bess, excitedly. “And all she did was to be ill, over the rail of the boat, and scold Walter for making any effort to save us. That’s the sort of a girl Linda is.”

“That sounds a good deal like her,” announced the red-haired girl, bluntly. “Linda Riggs can’t pull the wool over our eyes—much! We’ve all seen enough of her to know pretty much what she would do at such a time.”

“You’re all jealous of her,” sniffed Mabel.

“Sure!” laughed Laura. “We’re jealous of her kind disposition, her honey-dripping tongue, and her delightfully social ways.”

“And her money!” flashed Mabel.

“I think,” said May Winslow, a peace-loving and, withal, ladylike girl—“I think we have discussed an absent fellow-pupil quite enough. Let us say nothing about Linda that we would not say to her.”

“Oh, goodness!” cried the impulsive Bess. “I’d say just what I think of her, to her face.”

“That would not make it the less ill-natured,” said May, quietly.

Dr. Beulah Prescott herself heard of the chums’ adventure and called Nan and Bess into her office before bedtime.

“What is all this I hear about your trying to cross Lake Huron in an open boat?” asked the principal, lightly.

But she looked grave enough before Nan had finished her true and particular narrative of the incident. Dr. Prescott did not scold the chums, as Mrs. Cupp certainly would have done. But she went much more thoroughly into the affair than the matron could, or would.

She sent for Henry, the boatkeeper, and that rather careless individual learned that he was expected to have a closer oversight over the use of the boats by the girls at all times; and especially was he to watch the weather signals which were flown from the pole at the life-saving station on Lighthouse Point.

Nan said nothing to the principal of the school about the person she and Bess had seen prowling about the boathouse. She thought that for once probably Henry had enough trouble!

When Grace Mason got back to the Hall at nine o’clock, she was also called in to see “Dr. Beulah,” as most of the girls affectionately called the preceptress. But Linda was not called upon to give her version of the adventure at all.

Later the preceptress wrote a very nice letter to Walter Mason’s father, commending his son for the bravery and good sense he had shown in saving the girl canoeists. Nan, and Bess, and even Grace, were made a good deal of by the other girls because of the adventure. And every time Walter Mason came to see his sister, Grace asked permission for Nan and Bess to meet him, too. In this way the chums from Tillbury got many an automobile ride and boat ride that they would not otherwise have enjoyed.

Because of this new association of Nan and Bess with Grace and her brother, Linda Riggs’ tongue dripped venom, not honey. The rich girl had gathered around her a coterie of girls like Cora Courtney and Mabel Schiff, and they echoed Linda’s ill-natured remarks and ridiculous stories. The great number of the older girls at Lakeview Hall, as Nan had very sensibly said, paid no attention whatsoever to the ill-natured talk of Linda Riggs’ clique. As for those girls smaller and younger than Nan and Bess (and there were many of them) they were little interested in the controversy.

Of course, right at the beginning of her schoollife at Lakeview Hall, Nan Sherwood had made friends with the little girls. They all soon learned that Nan was sympathetic, could enter into their play with perfect equality, was glad to help them in their lessons, and altogether filled the part of “Big Sister” to perfection.

Bess did not care so much for children. Perhaps it was because she had some bothersome small brothers and sisters at home. Nan, who was an only child, had always longed for a brother or sister. Although she could not remember him, the tiny brother who had lived a short few weeks at the “little dwelling in amity,” and then had gone away forever, was much in Nan Sherwood’s thoughts.

“It gets me,” Bess sputtered once to her chum, “how you can actually play dolls with those primary kids—a big girl like you.”

“I like dolls,” said Nan, placidly.

“Huh! I believe you do,” cried Bess. “I wonder you don’t litter up our room with ’em—and doll clothes and baby carriages and cradles,” and Bess laughed gaily, with no idea of how close she had come to touching upon Nan’s secret.

Dr. Prescott did not make the chums pay for the lost canoe, so Nan, relieved of the necessity for doing so, decided not to tell her father and mother about the canoe accident, as she knew they wouldworry needlessly. Nor did careless Bess tell her parents. Bess had a strong personal reason for keeping the adventure a secret. She did not want to put any obstacle in the way of the purchase of the boat she was teasing for.

Nan was writing long and enthusiastic letters to Scotland. In return she received from both “Momsey” and “Papa Sherwood” most encouraging reports of the progress of the court proceedings over Mr. Hughie Blake’s will, under the terms of which Mrs. Sherwood was to receive considerable wealth. It seemed that the controversy was practically finished, and Nan’s parents would soon be coming home. In one of these letters, received early in the school year, Nan found a five pound note “to do just what she pleased with.”

“Oh! what’ll you do with so much money?” gasped Bess. “And all in a bunch. Twenty-five dollars! Why, Nan, your father must be richer than mine!”

“They know I haven’t had much heretofore to spend extravagantly,” responded Nan, her eyes twinkling, “while you have been extravagant all your life.”

“Well! My father never gives me such a sum all at once for spending money. But you’re so cautious, Nan. Ugh! ‘sensible!’ I hate that word!”

“So do I dislike it,” said Nan, briskly. “I don’tthink I am any more sensible than other girls—unless I’m more so than you, Bess,” and she laughed at her chum.

“Well! what will you do with your money?” asked Bess. “That will tell the story.”

“I—don’t know.”

“Have a regular big junket.”

“What? Treat the whole school to ice-cream?” laughed Nan.

“Ho! ice-cream melts too fast. It’s all over too soon,” returned Bess, with a frown.

“Buy lollypops, then—or jaw-breakers? They last longer.”

“Say! this is no time to joke. It’s serious,” declared Bess, putting her mind to the matter of the disbursement of her chum’s windfall.

“All right,” agreed Nan. “The Committee on Entertainment will now go into executive session. What’s your idea, Elizabeth, about buying every one of the two hundred girls at Lakeview Hall a twelve-and-a-half cent rubber doll?”

“Doll? Pah! your mind runs on dolls, Nan Sherwood. You are certainly getting into your second childhood,” said Bess, with disgust.

“Perhaps,” admitted Nan.

“Do let’s be serious,” Bess begged again. “What is the most popular thing among the girls?”

“Those new side-combs!” exclaimed Nan.

“Yes—and I’m going to have a pair just as soon as mother sends me my next spending money.”

“I’ll buy you a pair,” said generous Nan, quickly.

“No, you won’t, silly! I’ll not let you fritter away any of that perfectly splendid five pound note in foolishness.”

“Oh!” responded Nan, drily, much amused to hear Bess Harley so very practical.

The practicality of the discussion might be doubted by anybody save boarding-school girls. Bess quickly proved to her own satisfaction, if not entirely to Nan’s, that the small, “after-hours supper” was the most popular form of entertainment then in vogue at Lakeview Hall.

“You know, Cora Courtney and that crowd are always talking about a strawberry festival that she and Linda Riggs engineered last June. And now they are planning to have another big spread soon in some room on their corridor.”

“Well,” observed Nan, “we won’t be invited to it.”

“No. And they won’t be invited to ours,” cried Bess, promptly.

“If we have a spread,” agreed Nan.

“It’s just the thing,” Bess pursued, very enthusiastic. “Eating promotes fellowship——”

“And indigestion,” laughed Nan. “Especially such a combination as Laura had in her room theother night—sour pickles, ice-cream cones, and salted peanuts.”

“Whew! that was fierce!” acknowledged Bess. “I didn’t eat much; but I felt squirmy, just the same, after it. But if we give the girls the big eats, let’s have something nice, but digestible.”

“Let’s!” agreed Nan. “Of course, it’s against the rules——”

“Oh, dear, now! don’t begin that,” begged Bess.

“We—ell——”

“They all do it. If Dr. Beulah wasn’t so awfully strict about our having what she calls a ‘plain, wholesome supper,’ and refusing to let us add sweets, and the like, to the supper bill-of-fare, I’m sure the girls wouldn’t be dying for these spreads.”

“If the girls had what they wanted at supper, Dr. Prescott would have to charge about twice what she does now for tuition and board at Lakeview Hall.”

“Never mind that,” said Bess, briskly. “The question is: Shall we have the spread?”

“If you like,” agreed Nan.

So it was decided. With twenty-five dollars they could have a bountiful feast.

“A dollar a plate will give us a delightful supper, with salad, and ices, and all,” said Bess, who knew more about such things than Nan, for her mother entertained a great deal in Tillbury.

“But how’ll we ever get such things up to our room?” gasped Nan.

That puzzled Bess.

“And twenty-five girls would just about swamp us,” Nan added.

“Oh, dear!”

“Hire a hall?” suggested Nan, roguishly.

“Now, don’t, Nan Sherwood! You’re dreadful!” cried Bess, almost in tears as she saw her castle in the air dissolving.

“Wait!” commanded Nan, good-naturedly patting her chum on the shoulder. “All is not yet lost! Up and at ’em, guards! Never say die!”

“I’d just set my heart on the biggest kind of a spread,” mourned Bess. “I wanted anything Cora, and Linda, and Mabel, and that set did, to look like a punctured jitney.”

“Oh, Bess! what language!”

“We—ell.”

“Now let me think,” said Nan, seriously.

“Think what?”

“Thoughts, of course, goosey!” laughed Nan. “Wait! First we must plan to have the spread in a sufficiently roomy place.”

“But it’s got to be in the Hall,” cried Bess.

“Or near it,” suggested Nan.

“What do you mean?”

“Listen!” commanded Nan, dramatically. “I have thought of just the place. We can get thegoodies brought around from the caterer in Freeling, in a boat, and nobody’ll be the wiser.”

“But where—what?” demanded Bess.

So Nan told her.

Bess Harley had said the discussion of how to spend the five pound note was a serious matter; and when the conference was concluded and the two chums separated to attend different classes, Bess’ countenance certainly looked very grave.

Nan was secretly amused at the way in which her friend had taken the suggestion as to the place at which the proposed feast should be held. The thought had come to Nan in a flash; but to carry the scheme through was to test the courage of some of her school friends.

Bess was too proud, after all, to refuse to meet the terms on which her chum agreed to give the banquet; but it was plain she thought the suggestion a risky one. So she carried a rather glum face to Mademoiselle’s music class, while Nan sought Professor Krenner for—yes!—a lesson in architectural drawing.

Actually, Nan had taken up this elective study. She had demurely marked a cross against that study at first, in a spirit of mischief. She liked queer old Professor Krenner from the start; and she hadthreatened on the train coming up from Chicago, to become his pupil in the art which he admitted was his hobby. The professor was surprised nevertheless when Dr. Prescott passed Nan’s name over to him without comment.

But once caught in the mesh of his own net, Professor Krenner was game. He put Nan down before him in the classroom, where the boards were for the most part covered with mathematical problems, and began to talk seriously, but in a popular strain, of form, color, and periods of architecture.

He was interested himself and he interested Nan. She took fire from his enthusiasm. He went to the board and illustrated his meaning with bold, rapid strokes of the chalk. He even erased problems and examples, in his eagerness to explain to an intelligent, youthful mind, ideas that he had long since evolved but had not put into words before.

“Hoity-toity!” he cried at last, in his odd, querulous way. “I’ve rubbed out half my work for to-morrow. Nancy Sherwood, you’ve bewitched me. You’ve set me talking on a theme I don’t often touch. Now, are you satisfied?”

“I’m beginning to be just awfully interested,” Nan declared, rising with a sigh. “Is the lesson over?”

“Ah! ’tis over,” he growled, looking ruefully at his free-hand elevation of the Colosseum at Rome.

“And when do I come again?” asked Nan.

“Eh? And do you wish to continue this course?”

“I truly believe I’d like to see if I have a talent for architecture. I’m awfully interested. It’s lots more entertaining than drawing butterflies and flowers. Can’t a woman be an architect?”

“Hoity-toity! what’s this?” asked the professor, and sat down again to stare at her.

“I really do like it, Professor,” repeated Nan.

And from that time there dated a friendship between, and companionship of, Nan Sherwood and Professor Krenner that really made a great difference in both their lives.

Just now both chums from Tillbury were, immensely interested in the secret banquet to which twenty-five of their closest friends were to be invited. Nor was it a small task to select those two score and five out of a possible hundred—for, of course, the “primes,” or lower-grade girls, were not considered at all.

And then, there was the possibility of some of the invited guests being unwilling to attend. They had to face that from the start.

“You know very well,” said Bess, when she had digested Nan’s idea for a day or two, and grown more accustomed to it—“You know very well that wild horses wouldn’t drag May Winslow to the feast.”

“Why not?”

“You know how she feels about that place.”

“And she’s one of the very girls I want there,” cried Nan. “We want to kill superstition and have a grand feast at one fell swoop. It’s all nonsense! Some of the little girls have got hold of the foolish stories that have been told and they are almost afraid to go to bed at night in their big dormitories with all the other girls about them. It’s ridiculous!”

“Oh, dear me, Nan!” groaned her chum. “You’re too, too bold!”

“It doesn’t take much boldness to disbelieve such old-wives’ fables.”

“And your own eyesight, too?” suggested Bess, slily.

“I’ll never admit I have seen anything either spiritual or spirituous,” laughed Nan.

“But they say there are underground passages from the unfinished part of the Hall, down there.”

“What were they for?”

“Maybe smugglers,” replied Bess, big-eyed at her own thought.

“Well! I never!”

“Lots of smuggling about Freeling years ago. Henry says so,” declared Bess, stoutly.

“Goodness! what have you been reading?” demanded Nan. “Dime novels, I do believe, Bess Harley!”

“Just wait!” said her chum, prophetically. “I’m afraid we’ll get into trouble over this after all.”

And she was quite right; but it was not at all the sort of trouble Bess expected.

The chums obtained permission to go down town shopping and they made arrangements with the caterer for the supper to be ready on a certain evening—salads, sandwiches, and cake in hampers; cream packed in ice; coffee and chocolate ready to warm on a stove which Nan knew would be in readiness; and plates, cups and saucers, knives and forks, and all other needfuls packed in proper containers, to be transported by water.

Nan had already bribed Henry; for the place where she was determined to have the banquet was in an unused part of the big boathouse, a sort of kitchen and dining room where there was a stove. Picnics had been held there before; but never at night. Many of the girls had declared they would not go there after dark because of the ghost. But Nan was determined to prick the bubble of that superstition. Where one girl would not go for fear of the supernatural, twenty-five would be afraid not to go because of the ridicule that would fall upon them.

Grace Mason and her roommate, the flaxen-haired Lillie Nevin, were among those who Bess had prophesied would not dare attend the banquet at the haunted boathouse. But Nan pleaded with them. She had to get Grace interested, for Nan desired to make use of Walter and hisBargainRush. The caterer could not deliver the supper after dark at the Lakeview Hall boat landing; but Walter could, and gladly agreed to do so. It was his enthusiasm over the proposed party that encouraged Grace—and through her, Lillie—to promise to attend.

Nan went to May Winslow in a personal way, too. She showed May, who was one of the larger girls, that her example would go far to kill the foolish belief rife among the girls that the boathouse was haunted.

Nan and Bess had never told any of their mates about their own strange experience in the boathouse. Nothing new had developed regarding the haunt. The “black ghost—all black” had not been reported seen since the previous spring. So the general excitement rife in the school at that time had subsided.

Gradually Nan and Bess spoke to, and obtained the promise of attendance of twenty-five girls. Each was bound to secrecy; but a secret among twenty-five girls has about as much chance as a kitten in a kennel of fox terriers.

It was whispered from one to the other that Nan Sherwood had twenty-five dollars—some said fifty—to spend on a single “spread.” The girls were eager to be invited; all were curious; and the Linda Riggs clique was clamorously jealous.

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