Belle Rogers was not always the bewitchingly pretty, dimpling, smiling young girl who had endeavored to annex Billie.
And when she was not pretty, Belle’s friends liked to keep well out of her vicinity. At such times two little white dents appeared on each side of her nose. Her large, china blue eyes were transformed into wells of steely gray and the smiling, baby mouth became two narrow white lips. All the color left her cheeks, and people who did not know her would exclaim:
“How faded and ill she looks!”
When Belle looked like this she was unusually quiet at first, but it was the quiet which comes before a tornado, and it was only when the storm burst that those unfamiliar with her ways realized that Belle had been very, very angry.
This is what happened on the day after the excitingexperience in Boulder Lane, and all because Wilhelmina Campbell, true to her old friends, the “Blue Birds,” after being formally invited, had positively declined to join the “Mystic Seven.”
“I am sorry,” she said, trying her best to be cordial, “but, you see, the others had first claim on me because I have known them a long time and I have already promised to become a Blue Bird.”
“We asked you first,” exclaimed Belle, in a preternaturally quiet tone of voice.
“I don’t see why that should make any difference,” answered Billie, feeling very uncomfortable.
“It makes a great deal of difference,” answered Belle, who was always gifted with a flow of words in the moments of her greatest anger. “You are probably not familiar with the ways of schools and school societies. I understand you have never been to school before.”
“Oh, yes, I have. I went to school in Paris for three months and to another in Dresden for a whole winter.”
“This is America,” went on Belle, in a slow,even tone, taking no other notice of the interruption, “and if you decline the honor we have paid you in the sophomore year, you will not only be blackballed in our societies the other two years, but you will not receive any invitations from me and my friends to our parties now or ever, and you will be obliged to associate with the commonest and most ordinary girls in West Haven. The children of cooks——”
“Mary Price,” thought Billie. Mrs. Price had a tea room.
“The daughters of seamen——”
“Nancy!” said Billie out loud. Nancy’s father was a sea captain.
“Yes, Nancy Brown,” continued Belle, growing angrier every moment. “You will simply be an outcast in West Haven, and I advise you to think the matter over well before you decide to join that low, common crowd, for I assure you it will be the last of you with us——”
Billie was so aghast at the insolence of the spoiled girl that she did not attempt to interrupt the rush of words which seemed to flow from her lips without any effort whatever. She was veryangry herself, as a matter of fact, but with the self-control she had learned from her father, she determined to hold her peace until Belle had run down, as she expressed it later to the other girls.
At last there came a pause, and Billie, who had been sitting on the window ledge in the gymnasium swinging her feet and thinking of what she was going to say when she was entirely prepared to speak, slipped down to the floor and stood before the enraged girl like a brave soldier in the face of battle.
But this was all she said, for Billie was really very much like a boy.
“I don’t think it is any honor to join your club, or go with you and your friends. I wouldn’t give up Mary and Nancy and Elinor for twenty Mystic Sevens. I’d rather go to boarding school any day, and that’s about the worst fate that could happen to me.”
Then she turned on her heel and walked away, leaving Belle in the grip of a tempest of sobs and tears. Such rages are quite like the West Indian storms which sweep up the coast with a greatblowing of wind and then, after a tremendous roar of thunder, the downpour follows.
That night in her pretty chintz-hung bedroom in the beautiful Rogers house, which was one of the show places of West Haven, Belle Rogers planned her revenge. Her temples were throbbing and her whole body ached with exhaustion. Tempers are really quite as devastating to the system as the West Indian tornadoes are to the country over which they sweep.
“I’ll get even with that rough tom-boy,” she said out loud. “I’ll pay her back if it takes all winter to do it. I’ll make her sorry she ever came to West Haven, and I’ll make the others pay, too. They’ll see what it means to interfere with me and my plans. Perhaps papa will give me a motor car, only I’m afraid of the things, and I never could run one. My hands are much too small and delicate to handle machinery.”
“Belle, darling, do you feel any better?” asked Mrs. Rogers, anxiously, outside the door.
Belle made no reply. It was her custom to pretend to be asleep when she wished to be alone, and she wished now to spend a long uninterruptedevening to herself, for her thoughts were very busy. A plan had come into her head. It had sprung up suddenly, full-grown, as if it had been secretly hatching in the bottom of her mind for a long time and now appeared a matured scheme.
Her blood tingled at the notion. It was such an audacious, daring thing that the very thought made her dizzy.
“I’ll do it,” she said at last, her mind made up. “I’ll do it, and I’ll get only one person to help me, because it will take two to work it. Now, who shall that person be? It would be best to ask a Blue Bird, but which one?”
Her thoughts ran over the girls in the despised society, but there was only one of the ten whom she would quite dare to approach. The others were fiercely loyal to each other.
This possible traitor was a new girl in West Haven. Her name was Francesca Alta, but her friends called her Fannie. She was the daughter of Mme. Alta, a music teacher lately established in the town. Many of the girls were taking music lessons of Mme. Alta, and Belle, who was one of her pupils, often had opportunitiesof speaking to the little dark-haired daughter, although she had only nodded to her coldly so far.
“I will speak to her to-morrow,” she exclaimed, as she swallowed the sleeping powder her indulgent mother always gave her after one of these violent headaches.
In the morning Belle had regained her baby smile. The red had left her nose and was now in its proper spots on her round, plump cheeks. Once more her large blue eyes looked appealingly into the eyes of those she honored with her glances. Belle never saw what she preferred to ignore, and one of the most delightful sights of that bright September morning was a red motor car filled with pretty young girls, which whirled into the High School grounds, making a bright splash of scarlet against the old gray walls of the building.
Belle did not see the “Comet” and its load, or would not see it, but later, Billie, who never bore malice, bowed a cheerful good morning to her enemy, and, to the surprise of the others, received a cordial bow in return.
“I am sorry I was cross to you yesterday, MissCampbell. Will you forgive me?” Belle asked her.
“Yes, indeed,” answered the warm-hearted young girl. “It’s awfully nice of you to admit it,” and she secretly decided that the others were rather hard on Belle Rogers, after all.
However, when the girls heard of the apology, they were skeptical.
“It’s the ‘Comet’ that won her over,” observed Nancy.
“I don’t believe it,” answered their new, inseparable friend, who after two days’ association was as intimate with the three girls as if she had known them always, so rapidly do young girl intimacies grow.
“Something does seem to have happened to her,” said Mary Price. “Perhaps you gave her such a dressing-down, Billie, that she’s turned over a new leaf. She would never have stooped to talk to Fannie Alta before, but she is doing it now, and look—will wonders never cease?”
The two girls were indeed in intimate conversation. They were walking arm in arm up and down the campus, nibbling sandwiches. AtWest Haven High School the girls either brought their luncheons with them to eat at recess or bought sandwiches of that plucky, hard-working little woman, Mrs. Price, Mary’s mother, who made the sandwiches and brought them to the school herself in a big basket.
That is why Mary Price had exclaimed, “Will wonders never cease?” She had recognized the package of sandwiches in oil paper, which Belle Rogers must have bought from her mother, and which she was now sharing with dark, shabby little Fannie Alta.
“She used to say she would rather starve than eat one of mother’s lettuce sandwiches,” Mary exclaimed, “but she appears even to have come to that.”
“If this is one of your mother’s own, it’s very delicious,” exclaimed Billie, gallantly turning the conversation into other channels. After all, it was just as well not to form the habit of discussing Belle too much. Her father had never approved of criticising people.
“It doesn’t lead to anything but bilious headaches,” he used to say. “Sick, bilious headachesand a very yellow complexion. Critical people always look like that, Billie, my girl.”
Billie’s complexion was clear and healthy. She had never had a bilious headache in her life. But, then, she was not given to picking flaws in other people’s characters.
However, the novelty of the richest and proudest girl in West Haven making friends with a poor music teacher’s daughter was soon to be eclipsed by a much more sensational and mysterious incident.
That afternoon, after school, when the four friends assembled in the carriage shed for their usual spin home in Billie’s motor car, they found a note stuck conspicuously between the cushion and the back of the seat. It was addressed in a large angular hand to “Miss Wilhelmina Campbell and her friends, both boys and girls, especially Miss Butler,” and inside it read:
“Keep quiet about Boulder Lane. You are watched and if you let a word slip out, the punishment will come quickly.”
“How ridiculous,” exclaimed Billie angrily, when she had shown the note to the others. “Ihave a great mind to write papa all about it, only it would worry him to death. It is only cowards who write anonymous letters, anyhow.”
But she did not write to her father, and the other girls, too, were silent on the matter.
They wondered many times who had put the note on the seat. Strangers were not unusual in West Haven, where sailors and seamen often came ashore, but the Girls’ High School was at the other end of town and visitors ashore seldom strayed so far away from the shops and the little theatre.
“I’d like to know what their grudge is against the Butler family,” Elinor had demanded, but no one could answer the question, and she was still determined not to disturb her highly excitable father.
One Saturday morning early in September Miss Helen Campbell gave a breakfast party to her four favorite Blue Birds. It was to be the beginning of an eventful day for the young girls, three of whom were to take their first long motor trip, and, furthermore, the motor party was to end with a visit to Shell Island, where this excited and happy company of young people were to spend the night, motoring back to West Haven next day.
Miss Campbell herself was excited.
“It’s a novelty for me, my dears,” she exclaimed, beaming on her guests from behind the silver urn at the head of the breakfast table. “I’m a very dull, lonesome old woman, and having this nice child here with me is going to wake me into life again. I shall never be able to give you up, Wilhelmina. You had better write yourfather that you have been adopted by a very obstinate old party, who believes that possession is nine points of the law.”
“I’m quite willing to be possessed, Cousin Helen,” answered Billie. “If I could only see papa sometimes, I think I could say that I never was so gloriously happy in all my life.”
Miss Campbell smiled with pleasure and the girls thought they had never seen her look more beautiful. Her white hair glistened like a bank of snow in the sunshine and her soft eyes were as blue as patches of West Haven Bay on a clear, still morning in summer.
There were times when the lonely spinster looked faded and worn, and at such times she used to shut herself up in her big gray stone house on Cliff Street and refuse to see even her most intimate friends.
“It’s just one of my lonesome moods,” she used to say, “and I would not for worlds inflict myself on innocent people when one is on me.”
But Miss Campbell had not had a single attack of loneliness since Billie had come to live with her. The vigorous, active young girl had awakened theentire household which had run on its steady even course for so many years, and now the place hardly recognized itself, filled with the happy voices and gay laughter of Billie and her friends.
It was an unusual sight for the big mahogany table in the dining room to be loaded with the best cut glass and silver and adorned with delicate lace doilies, which had belonged to Miss Campbell’s grandmother. These thing had been laid away for many years. In the centre of the table was a crystal vase filled with forget-me-nots.
“They are the only flowers I could think of which were the color of your blue birds,” Miss Campbell had explained. “Besides, they are my favorite color. You know, I always wear blue when I don’t wear gray. Sometimes I wear black——”
“Black, Cousin Helen?” repeated Billie. “I didn’t know you ever wore anything so mournful.”
“You shall never see me in it, child, if I canhelp it. But I have a black dress, only one, and I do wear it at times in my bedroom.”
Some thirty years before Miss Campbell, then a young and beautiful girl, had come to West Haven to live with her grandfather and there she had lived ever since, except for an occasional trip abroad. It was supposed that she had suffered a great sorrow at some time in her life, but the real story had never been known. Captain Campbell, her grandfather, had been a jovial, pleasure loving old man, fond of company and entertaining. He liked to have his beautiful granddaughter stand at his side and receive his guests in a brocaded ball gown, with the famous Campbell diamonds blazing in her hair and the diamond and sapphire necklace around her throat.
But after General Campbell’s death there were no more balls and dinners in the big, old house. The long parlors were seldom opened except to be cleaned and aired, and Miss Campbell, now a somewhat shrivelled pink and white little lady of fifty-five, interested herself only in the charities of West Haven.
“Yes, my dear children, this household and itsmistress have got into such a lethargy that it is time they were waked up. We have been sunk in so deep a rut, my old servants and I, that it might have closed over our heads and the world gone on just the same.”
“Lots of poor families would have gone begging at Christmas, then, Miss Campbell,” put in Elinor.
“And what would all those poor old seamen have done?” went on Nancy.
“And the Blue Birds,” added Mary Price. “We should have had to use a corner of the gymnasium at school for our most secret society meetings.”
Miss Campbell paid the rent of the Blue Bird club rooms.
“And, pray, what should I have done?” finished Billie. “I should have been knocking around still with papa, trying to get on with the queer people who live in hotels, and never have had nice girls to go with or a delightful home to stay in.”
Miss Campbell blushed with pleasure.
“I have a great many surprises up my sleeve for my little Motor Maids. I shall only tell youone, though. What would you say to a Blue Bird Thanksgiving ball?”
“Oh, oh, oh! How splendid!” cried the young girls.
“Honk, honk!” went the motor horn at the front entrance, which was a signal for breakfast to come to an end and the party to be off.
A hamper of luncheon had been strapped behind the car with the suit cases. Miss Campbell sat between Elinor and Mary in the back, while Nancy took the seat now understood to be hers always, beside her friend Billie, in front. The four Campbell servants, who had grown old in their mistress’s service, stood in a row on the gravel walk to witness the strange sight of their beloved “Miss Helen” sailing away in a red infernal machine, her blue automobile veil streaming out behind like a piece of flying cloud.
“Don’t go too fast, Billie,” she exclaimed, as they turned the corner of Cliff Street, and whirled down the steep, rather slippery Main street of West Haven. “Remember that you have got a decrepit old woman in the back who has neverridden behind anything faster than a pair of ambling carriage horses in all her life.”
“How about the five-thirty express, Cousin Helen?” Billie called over her shoulder.
“A locomotive with an engineer is a very different thing from a young girl guiding a scarlet comet,” the little lady answered; but as they left the street for the country road and Billie gradually increased the speed, Miss Campbell leaned back with a look of blissful enjoyment on her face.
“It is one of the most exhilarating things I have ever experienced,” she confided to Elinor.
At noon they stopped for lunch. The road now lay along a high cliff overlooking the ocean, which on this calm September morning was as serenely blue and still as a mill pond. White sails dotted it here and there, and an occasional wave rippled on the pebbly beach with a murmuring, drowsy sound.
They had pulled up at the side of a little pine grove just off the road and spread the lunch cloth on a carpet of pine needles.
Then the delicious cakes and sandwiches whichMiss Campbell had ordered from Mrs. Price were arranged in neat piles, while Elinor opened her tea basket, a present from an aunt in Ireland, and made tea for the company.
It was all very delightful and they were enjoying themselves thoroughly, when Billie and Nancy, who were seated facing the others, received a slight shock. A tall, slender woman, dressed in black, with a long black chiffon veil completely concealing her face, suddenly emerged from behind a clump of dwarf oak and bay trees at the far end of the grove and beckoned to them.
The two girls exchanged glances of amazement and Nancy was about to say: “Why, look at that woman!” when the woman, herself, put her finger to her lips and shook her head violently.
“I think she’s crazy, Nancy,” said Billie, in a low voice, under cover of the conversation of the others. “We had better not take any notice. It would just alarm Cousin Helen and spoil the day.”
Nancy agreed with her, and the two girls were about to suggest that they start on again, when the woman began making the most extraordinarymotions of entreaty, imploring them with outstretched arms, beseeching them with every gesture to come to her. And still the two girls hung back. Then the woman raised the sleeve of her loose black silk wrap and showed her arm bound with a bloody handkerchief.
Nancy gasped at this. The sight of blood was always sickening to her. But, seeing Billie’s meaning glance in Miss Campbell’s direction, she pretended that she had choked on her tea.
The other three were deep in a conversation. Miss Campbell was describing a beautiful ball she had once been to where she had danced with a real prince, and they hardly noticed when Nancy and Billie strolled over to the clump of bushes.
The woman, who had been waiting for them, seized Billie’s arm and in a low, rapid voice said:
“I see that you are both unusually nice girls whom I can trust. I am in great trouble. You will help me, will you not? It is very simple, what I am going to ask you. You see, I have been in a wreck.”
“A motor wreck?” asked Billie.
“Yes, yes,” replied the woman, not impatientlybut as if she were very much pressed for time. “The car rolled over the embankment. You will see it below there. It happened just in the curve of the road. There was no excuse except that we were going too fast and the wheels did—what is it you call it? Skidded? We saved ourselves, all three, by jumping. Fortunately the back wheels were caught in the sand and there was just time to climb out as the car was overturned. The others have left me. They will return at any moment now with another car. Hidden under the seat of the wrecked car is a small box. I must have it. I must indeed. I cannot get it myself. I have sprained my knee, and can stand only by supporting myself against this tree. Will you get that box for me and place me in your debt always, always? You cannot understand how important it is for me to have it.”
“Of course, we will,” Billie assured her, “and won’t you let us help you over to our party, or make you comfortable here with the cushions until your friends come back?”
“No, no, no,” replied the stranger. “I do notwish to be seen if possible. I only beg you to make haste. I will wait here.”
As the woman grew more in earnest, her voice seemed to deepen and vibrate like a musical instrument, and the girls almost forgot to listen to her words under the spell of its wonderful tones; and when she threw back her veil, they still stood rooted to the spot, for she was really quite the most beautiful person they had either of them ever seen. Her eyes and hair were dark, her skin rather creamy in texture; there was a generous curve to her lips, a straight nose and full, rounded chin. She smiled a little as she noticed the admiration of the two girls, showing two rows of white, even teeth.
“You will not refuse?” she asked again.
And they helped her to sit down on the ground and hurried out of the grove to the roadside. There, sure enough, lying on its side in the sand, some forty feet below the road, was the wrecked motor car.
“Nancy, I would do anything for her,” observed Billie,as they clambered down the embankment.
“Isn’t she perfect?” exclaimed Nancy. “And still, Billie, I can’t help believing that she’s slightly off in her upper story. She was so queer. But a shock like that would be enough to turn anybody delirious, jumping out of an automobile as it turned over an embankment.”
“It’ll all depend on whether we find the box. If it is just a delirious dream, there won’t be any box and we will have had our climb for nothing.”
They searched the upturned car and there was nothing in it. The ground was strewn with wreckage. Cushions and rugs were scattered about in wild confusion. The girls searched the place hurriedly all the way down to the foot of the cliff.
“There is no need of wasting any more time, Nancy, dear,” said Billie at last. “It’s very evident to me that the beautiful lady was out of her mind and we’ve been ‘stung,’ as the boys say. Let’s go back. Perhaps she will let us help her get somewhere.”
Half buried in the sand was a small box of highly polished wood.Half buried in the sand was a small box of highly polished wood.
“Yes, I am afraid it’s just a case of King George’s men marched up the hill and then marched down again,” said Nancy.
“And I got two grass stains when I fell down just now,” added Billie, looking ruefully at her white serge skirt.
“My shoes are full of sand, and I’ve soiled my white stockings,” went on Nancy. “Look,” she cried suddenly; “look, Billie, here it is right under our noses. I suppose that little bay tree hid it from us on our way down. I ask the beautiful lady’s pardon; but I still can’t imagine why her own friends couldn’t have got it for her just as well as we could.”
Half buried in the sand was a small box of highly polished wood, six or eight inches square. Two broad bands of silver reinforced it at the back and sides, and a little silver combination lock took the place of the keyhole. In the middle of the box was a small, round silver plate, on which a coat of arms was engraved.
“This is the box, all right enough,” said Billie, examining it with much curiosity. “Now let’s return it to that mysterious lovely person and go on our ways, rejoicing.”
But they were not destined to get rid of the box that day nor for many another day. Just as they reached the top of the cliff they heard the whirring of a motor engine. A car was just starting from the grove. Two men were on the front seat, while the owner of the box was lying almost helplessly in the back seat, her veil thrown back and her face white and drawn. There was no top to the car and the girls could see her plainly. They thought she must have fainted, but when Nancy called: “Wait, please wait,” she raised herself quickly, put her finger to her lips in token of silence and dropped a card into the road.
The next instant the strange motor car was lost to sight around the curve. Billie picked up the card with some irritation.
“How silly,” she exclaimed, “What are we to do with this thing? Why couldn’t she have waited a minute?”
“Because she didn’t want the men to know she had the box, goosey,” answered Nancy. “It’s as plain as the nose on your face. What does the card say?”
It was a man’s business card and read:
“Pierre Lafitte, Avocat,Rue——21. Paris.”
On the back of the card had been painfully written with a pencil:
“I knew when you were gone so long that you would be too late. If you are merciful and kind, keep the box a secret from all the world. You will not regret it. Send your name to this address and you shall be relieved at once.”
“Burdened with another secret,” cried Billie, in a resigned voice. “Where can we hide the thing?”
“I’ll sit on it for the time being,” answered Nancy, laughing. “There come the girls.”
“What are you two infants up to?” called Elinor, appearing just then at the edge of the grove. “We thought you had gone in the other direction and we’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
“We have—er——” hesitated Billie, who never could tell fibs. “What have we been doing, Nancy?”
“We’ve been looking at a wreck. Don’t you want to see it?”
“Nancy Brown,” cried her friend Mary, putting her hands on Nancy’s shoulders and gazing into her face, “you’ve got a secret. I can tell by your expression. You are hiding something.”
“I’m trying to hide it, but I find it rather difficult. I feel like a bantam hen sitting on a goose egg.”
“Let’s push her off her goose egg,” cried Elinor, “and see what it really is.”
“Help, Billie, help!” screamed Nancy, while the four friends engaged in a school girl romp, and Miss Campbell, who was dozing in the grove, half opened her eyes and smiled.
“Is there anything more charming and sweeter than the sound of children’s voices out of doors?” she said to herself. She could never get used to the idea that Billie was not still the little eight-year-old girl who had spent a summer in West Haven seven years before.
In the meantime, the guardian of the box was well defended by Billie until she began to laugh, and when Nancy was taken with the giggles herfather used to say she was nothing but an abandoned lunatic. The place rang with the joyous peals and the other girls were obliged to pause in the struggle and join in. Then this foolishly happy child rolled helplessly onto the ground, upsetting the box.
But there came a sudden end to the laughter, for the top of the box had sprung open and its contents were scattered on the roadside.
The girls clasped their hands excitedly and gazed at each other with wide-eyed amazement, for at their feet glittered dozens of the most beautiful jewels. There were a diamond and sapphire necklace, strings of pearls, earrings, rings, and broaches.
“Great heavens, what have you girls been doing?” exclaimed Mary.
“Nancy, you explain,” answered Billie, grown very grave, all of a sudden. “I’ll gather these things up and get them out of sight as quickly as possible. I think my suit case is the safest place for the time being, and we can take it into the front of the car with us. Then we can discuss later what we had better do.”
While the girls listened to Nancy’s strange story of the beautiful injured woman, Billie collected and replaced the jewels in the box with the card, and packed it in the bottom of her suit case.
In another ten minutes the motor party was on the road again, the younger members somewhat sobered by the secret responsibility which had been thrust upon them.
Shell Island is really only an island in name. A narrow creek which fills and empties with the incoming and outgoing tides divides it from the mainland. A bridge spans this chasm over which flows a constant stream of motor and driving parties from all the villages and summer resorts up and down the coast.
Just at sundown, as the “Comet” took the steep road down the cliff to the bridge, a big touring car shot past.
“Oh, dear,” exclaimed Nancy, “I did hope we would leave all care behind when we came away, and now I am perfectly certain that Belle Rogers was sitting on the front seat of that automobile. I suppose she’ll be floating around the ballroom in blue chiffons this evening.”
“Is she a care?” asked Billie, who had a placidand rather masculine way of forgetting all about the people she didn’t like.
“Oh, I don’t mind her, only she always makes me feel like a rag picker’s daughter.”
“I think she’s over-dressed,” put in Billie. “I should feel utterly foolish with all that finery and jewelry on me. When papa and I used to buy my clothes, he would say: ‘Suppose we stick to plain white, daughter, and skip the furbelows. We can’t go very far wrong if we do that, and if my little daughter begins to put on ruffles and puffles and falals without anybody’s advice but mine, I’m afraid she might be taken for a walking fashion plate and some one will try to stand her up in a shop window.”
Nancy laughed.
“I think you have the prettiest dresses I ever saw, Billie, but I am glad Miss Campbell has persuaded you to stop dressing so much like a boy. Lace collars are lots more becoming than those stiff linen ones.”
“They were chokers,” answered Billie, good-naturedly, as the car drew up at the steps of thehotel immediately behind the automobile which had passed it on the road.
Belle and her party were waiting on the piazza, the women in long pongee coats with the very latest motor bonnets and veils.
“Those are her rich friends, the Jordannes,” whispered Nancy, in awed tones. “They used to be just plain Jordan before they made so much money.”
“I think Jordan is a much nicer name. It has such a fine Oriental sound, ‘Where rolls the River Jordan.’”
By this time several porters from the hotel had stepped to the motor car door and assisted Miss Campbell, somewhat stiff from the long ride, to alight. The girls jumped nimbly out after her and their luggage was unstrapped and piled on the ground near the Jordanne luggage. But Billie was careful to keep a firm hold on her own suit case with its precious load.
“Let the man take your bag, dear,” called Miss Campbell. “You will strain your back carrying that heavy thing.”
There was nothing for Billie to do but resignthe suit case, although she tried to keep an eye on it as they followed the porter through the lobby to the elevator. Miss Campbell had telegraphed ahead for rooms.
As luck would have it, there was another elevator for luggage, and the bag was temporarily out of Billie’s sight, but her mind was soon at ease when she saw it stacked with the others in the bedroom which she and Nancy were to share.
“While we dress for dinner,” she observed, “we’ll have a talk about that jewelry. What on earth are we going to do with it?”
“Don’t you think we’d better tell Miss Campbell?” suggested Elinor.
“I suppose it would be best, but Cousin Helen does go off so about things, and I have a feeling that if she knew it she wouldn’t allow us to keep our promise to our poor beautiful lady. She would be sure to turn the box over to the police or call in a lawyer or something. And if we could only keep the box until we heard from the man in Paris, at least, we should be keeping our word about it.”
Elinor and Mary were all for telling, but theother girls were still under the spell of the very beautiful and distressed woman, and since it was mostly their affair they concluded not to tell.
You must not blame Billie for this want of frankness. Girls who have never had mothers to talk to in the intimate way that only a mother and daughter know, are apt to be reserved and self-reliant. Billie would certainly have told her father, but, then, he was in Russia.
Mary and Elinor, whose room adjoined the other, had put on their kimonos and were lolling on the beds, while Nancy with solicitous care was removing her pretty muslin frock from the valise and smoothing out the pink taffeta ribbons tenderly.
Billie knelt on the floor and opened her suit case.
“Before I undress,” she said decisively, “I’m going to take this box straight down stairs and give it to the clerk to put in the safe. Then we can spend the evening with easy minds.”
She flung back the top and sat down on the floor with a gasp.
“In the name of all the powers, this is not my suit case.”
The girls gathered around her in great excitement.
“It’s exactly like mine,” she went on, “but there are no initials on it and mine has ‘W.H.C.’ on the end.”
“Girls,” cried Nancy, flinging her bathrobe around her with a tragic gesture, “the very last person in the world we could wish to have Billie’s suit case is the very one who has it. She’ll look at everything in it; examine the underclothes to see if they are hand-made and the stockings to see if they are silk, and—she’ll open the box of jewels and read the card of the avocat from Paris and——”
“Who? Who?” interrupted the other three.
“Who but Belle Rogers,” cried Nancy, flourishing a towel in one hand and a hair brush in the other.
“Yes, that’s her costume,” admitted Mary, laughing. “Blue chiffon with a wreath of pink roses for her hair.”
She pulled up a corner of the pale blue gauzymaterial and pointed to a little pink wreath which lay in the folds of the dress.
“There are her blue satin slippers, No. Two’s, absolutely not a size larger,” said Elinor, pointing to the toe of a little slipper which showed at one end of the suit case.
“This is what I get for losing the keys to everything,” groaned Billie. “Telephone for a boy, quick, some one, while I fasten this thing up. Perhaps she hasn’t opened mine yet.”
“Opened it!” echoed the others. “You don’t know her.”
Presently a bell boy tapped at the door.
Billie gave him the suit case with full instructions.
“And hurry,” she added. “If you are back here in five minutes, you shall have an extra tip.”
Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed. The other girls were almost dressed, and Billie was beginning to tap the floor nervously with an impatient foot, when at last there was a tap at the door.
“Why didn’t you come sooner?” demanded Nancy and Billie in one voice.
“The young lady wouldn’t let me, Miss.”
“But what was she doing all that time?”
“I don’t know, Miss. She simply told me to wait outside. She was very angry, Miss, about her bag.”
“Angry, indeed,” answered Billie, seizing her own suit case. “At least no time was lost in sending it to her.”
The two girls opened the suit case with great anxiety. The things in it were assuredly in rather a rumpled condition. They had the appearance of having been unfolded and hastily rolled up again in new folds.
Nothing could be told about the box of jewels. They were all there apparently in a glittering bunch with the card laid on top.
“Dear me, I’m sorry that combination lock broke,” exclaimed Billie. “I don’t mind Belle Rogers looking through my clothes if it gives her any satisfaction, but I would just as soon she hadn’t looked into this box of jewels. And we can’t explain to her, because we mustn’t seem to know that she was capable of doing anything so low and common as to go through my suit case.”
She dressed herself hastily in a pretty whitefrock. Her smooth rolls of hair and trim braid did not need re-arranging, and she hurried downstairs to the desk with the troublesome box, which she gave into the charge of the clerk.
“These are some really valuable things,” she said. “Will you put them in your safe?”
The clerk wrapped the box up neatly in heavy brown paper, sealed it with red sealing wax, labelled it with her name and address and deposited it in the safe.
“That’s off my mind,” she said, giving a sigh of relief, just as the elevator door opened and Miss Campbell appeared with the other girls.
“Cousin Helen, you’re a dream,” cried Billie, taking her cousin’s arm. “You are like a young girl whose hair had gone and turned white in a single night.”
“Thank you, my dear, but you may be sure that if anything happened which could make my hair turn white in a night, it wouldn’t leave me any girlish looks. But why didn’t you come to my room and let me have a look at you? Are you all exactly right and in place? That’s a sweet little frock. I suppose you got it in Paris last summer. Youand your father are a pair of children shopping together, I imagine. All my girls look sweet,” she added, not wishing to wound any feelings by admiring one more than another. “See this lovely dress my little Mary is wearing. Could anything be more exquisitely made than that? Your mother is a wonderful woman, child. There’s nobody like her in West Haven.”
At dinner there was another surprise for the girls. This time it was an agreeable one: four extra places at the table, and presently they were joined by four West Haven boys, looking rather embarrassed but quite happy as they shook hands with the fairy godmother of the party, Billie’s Cousin Helen.
Two of the boys we have met before, Ben Austen and Charlie Clay. The other two were their intimate friends and boon companions, Americus Brown, Nancy’s brother, known as “Merry Brown,” and Percival Algernon St. Clair, whose mother’s fancy had run riot in naming her only child. He was called “Percy” by his friends for short.
“Why, look who’s here,” exclaimed Nancy.“Percival Algernon St. Clair, why didn’t you tell us yesterday when you gave us soda water at the drug store that you were coming on this trip, too?”
“Because it was secret,” answered Percy, who was very blond and blushed easily. “Miss Campbell wanted to surprise you.”
“I thought it would be nice for my girls to have some partners for the dance to-night,” said Miss Campbell. “I wanted to see some real dancing.”
“If you want to see the real thing, then, Miss Campbell,” said Merry Brown, “if you want to see the poetry of motion, you must see Ben dance.”
“Shut up, bow-legs,” called Ben across the table. “I’ve been learning for months. I took lessons last summer.”
“Where?” demanded his friends, because at the school dances, Ben’s expression of misery was well known when he towed an unfortunate friend around the room.
“I know,” said Percy, “it’s all explained now. That’s what you were doing at the Dutch picnics every week.”
“Well, they were pretty good teachers,” replied the imperturbable Ben. “They taught me that guiding a girl in a dance was very much like sailing a boat with a windmill for a sail. You have to guide and twirl at the same time, and the more speed you make in twirling the better your dancing is.”
Everybody laughed uproariously at this description.
“Ben Austen, I didn’t expect to be treated like a windmill sail boat when I promised to give you my first dance,” announced Elinor.
“It would be better than to be treated like a stationary windmill and go turning around in one place like the Germans dance,” observed Billie.
“You may all have your choice,” said Ben. “Stationary or progressive, it’s all one to me, only remember that you have each promised to do a Dutch twirl with me.”
The ballroom was already quite filled with dancers and it seemed very bewildering and delightful to the young girls, if it was only a summer hotel with a piano and two violins and a flute foran orchestra. Ben’s Dutch whirl was so skillfully performed, because like everything else he attempted he had mastered it perfectly, that the girls found it rather exciting fun.
“It’s a regular romp,” cried Billie, who, with glowing cheeks, dropped breathlessly into a chair beside her Cousin Helen.
“Look,” whispered Mary Price, who had been dancing a quiet glide with Charlie Clay and had had a chance to notice some of the other dancers.
For some reason both their young faces turned suddenly very grave. Was it a strange, unexplained premonition that told them the most dangerous enemy either was ever to have was dancing past that moment, in floating pale blue chiffon draperies?
After the dance there was a merry supper party with sandwiches and lemonade in the grill room, and then the Motor Maids were glad enough to get to their beds.
“What a relief it is, Nancy, dear, to have that box of jewels in the safe,” said Billie sleepily, as her eyelids drooped and she settled herself under the covers.
But Nancy did not reply. She was sleeping deeply. Billie, too, was soon oblivious of everything in the world.
As the night wore on, Nancy dreamed that she was dancing the Dutch twirl in a wonderful blue gauze dress, but that the diamond necklace she wore so weighed her down that she could not breathe.
Billie also dreamed of the diamonds. They were not around her neck, but in their box, which had grown to the size of a trunk and pressed on her chest so heavily that she was suffocating.
Suddenly a great bell clanged out in the night.
Billie opened her eyes with difficulty. The room was filled with smoke and down the corridor there came the cry of “Fire! Fire!”
A bell with a deep baying note rang out in the darkness.
If you have ever heard a fire bell boom out in the stillness, you will remember the terror which clutched your heart at the first ominous peal. It seemed to Billie, in going over it afterward, that the boom of that big fire bell was like the last trump on the day of judgment arousing the spirits of the dead.
Then came the sound of voices. The corridors were filled with hurrying footsteps. Somebody ran down the hallway calling again:
“Fire! Fire!”
Billie jumped to the floor with a bound. Her senses had returned at last.
“Nancy, Nancy!” she cried, shaking her friend violently back to consciousness. “The hotel is onfire. Get into your dressing gown as quickly as you can while I wake up the others.”
As she switched on the light she saw that the room was filled with smoke, and she knew the fire must be in their wing of the hotel and that there was no time to lose.
There is no better fire trap in the world than a wooden hotel at the seaside. The salt from the flying spray in winter storms has seasoned the wood into splendid burning material, and the breeze from the ocean fans the flames like a great natural bellows.
As Billie waked the other girls Miss Campbell came into the room, with a white, scared face. But she was not excited.
“Get into your dressing gowns, girls,” she said quietly. “Don’t lose a moment’s time. The boys are waiting for us outside.”
Just then Ben Austen rattled on the door.
“Hurry,” he called. “The elevators won’t run much longer and the stairs are burning.”
Hardly two minutes had passed since the first clang of the bell when Miss Campbell and the girls joined the boys in the corridor. There hadnot been time even to snatch up a hair-pin from the bureau to catch tumbled locks together. But nobody looked at any one else. The place was crowded with hotel guests in exactly the same condition and all the passages opening into the main corridor of the hotel were emptying themselves of streams of people in every state of disarray. If it had been less serious, the girls might have laughed at the numbers of terrified and hysterical fat women, wrapping insufficient dressing gowns and blankets about their large forms as they pushed their way without ceremony toward the elevators.
But a big tongue of flame suddenly leapt up the stairwell at the end of the hall. There was a crackling sound and clouds of black smoke poured into the corridor.
“We must get out of this,” exclaimed Ben. “The fire has reached this floor and unless we knock a few people down, we’ll never get to either of those elevators.”
“But where are the fire escapes?” demanded Miss Campbell.
“At the end of the hall,” answered Charlie, “and we could never get past that burning pit.”
The two elevators had been up and down several times, packed with people. The smoke was growing thicker each moment, and the next thing Billie remembered was that Elinor had fainted dead away, and that some one had screamed:
“The elevators have stopped running!”
In the stifling atmosphere she saw Ben and Charlie lift Elinor and call to the others to follow them into a bedroom. As she staggered after them, a grotesque figure, screaming hysterically, fought through the crowd, almost knocking Billie down. Even in that moment of danger she recognized Belle Rogers, every lock of whose golden hair was done up on red rubber curlers, the ends of which stuck straight up like scores of little devils’ horns.
“Take me down! Take me down!” Billie heard her scream. “I will not die in this horrible way! Somebody save me!”
Billie touched her on the shoulder.
“Don’t scream,” she said. “It only makesthings worse. The people who are left are going to get down by the windows. Come with us.”
Belle, who had been separated from her friends, followed quietly enough.
In another moment the corridor was empty, and the flames which had been fast eating their way along the hall had reached the elevator shafts. It had all happened in much less time than it takes to tell, but in the brief instant when Billie had paused to rescue Belle, she lost the others. Once in a bedroom, where the air was not so stifling, it was impossible to leave and rush again into the atmosphere outside.
The two girls dashed into the nearest room and closed the door, too stifled to notice that the others, led by level-headed Ben and followed by the crowd of people left standing by the elevator shafts, had rushed into a front room at the end of the hall. In the closets of this room and the one adjoining, they found two fire ropes which this old-fashioned hotel provided for its guests whose rooms were not located near the fire escapes. Those who were not able to slide down the ropes were lowered in a chair, and the others, with afoot twisted around the rope and grasping a wet towel to keep the palm of the hand from blistering, slid down. In the darkness it was impossible to recognize faces, and it was not until they were all safe on the ground that they missed Billie Campbell.
Then poor Miss Campbell, who had been admirably calm during the whole fearful experience, fainted away, and Elinor, now entirely restored by the fresh air, was left to take care of her.
Nancy and Mary followed the four boys to the rescue. Tears were rolling down Nancy’s cheeks and Mary was as pale as death. Each girl had her own peculiar way of showing how much she had come to love their new friend, Billie.
In the meantime, Billie, herself, was looking ruefully down into the darkness from the window of a room on the third floor and Belle was indulging in a fit of real hysterics.
“How dare you bring me here?” she screamed hoarsely, stamping her foot. “I might have been saved if you had let me alone, and here we aretrapped! I always hated you and now I detest you with my whole soul.”
“I thought the others were in here,” said Billie apologetically.
“Thought! Thought!” screamed the wretched girl. “You wanted me to die. You wanted me to lose my beauty.”
“You haven’t any to lose just now,” answered Billie. “You look more like the Medusa of the snaky locks——”
“Oh, oh!” wept Belle, too angry to articulate.
“You may console yourself this much,” went on Billie. “If you die, I shall die with you, but I am going to do my best to save you and myself, too.”
“Help! Help!” screamed Belle from the window, not taking any notice. But her voice was lost in the wild clamor which came up from below.
Then she flung herself flat on the floor in an agony of sobs.
“It’s better to pray than to cry, Belle. Crying won’t help and we are in a pretty warm place. If you were only a sport, it might do a lot of good.”
Belle crawled to the window and leaned out. The air in the room was becoming unbearable.
In the meantime, Billie’s thoughts were working rapidly. There were the sheets, but there wasn’t time to tear them into strips and knot the strips together. Besides, she didn’t believe they would reach halfway to the ground.
“I am afraid we’ll have to climb it,” she said.
“Climb what?”
“Climb up the side of the shutter to the roof. This is the top floor. The flames haven’t reached the roof yet.”
“But what good will the roof do us?”
“I don’t know yet, but it’s better than this. Come on.”
“I tell you I can’t climb. I never did such a thing in my life.”
“You’ll just have to begin then,” said Billie sternly. “Shall I go first, or would you rather do it?”
“I’ll go—no, you go.”
“I’ll help you,” said Billie, hoisting herself to the window ledge. “Now, don’t look down. Just imagine you are only a few feet from the groundand that it’s a very easy stunt. If you decide beforehand that you can’t do it, why, of course, you can’t. But it will be much easier than staying here to be burned alive in the next few minutes.”
Delivering herself of this boyish but unimpeachable logic, Billie kicked off her slippers and swung herself onto the shutter. Just for one brief instant a sickening nausea came over her as she looked down into the darkness.
Then her fingers grasped the cornice of the roof and, pulling herself up with her two arms, as she had learned to do on the parallel bars in the gymnasium—only in this instance the shutter made a very uncertain elbow rest—she scrambled onto the roof.
“All right, Belle,” she called. “It’s much easier than I thought. Take off your slippers and come ahead, and don’t forget to look up and not down.”
Belle obeyed in sullen silence. She was as determined as Billie not to be burned alive, but her luxurious and self-indulgent nature revolted against this uncomfortable and dangerous method of getting out of the difficulty. However, therewas nothing else to do, so she swung out on the shutter as Billie had done, only this time Billie, with all the strength in her body was holding the shutter rigid.
As Belle clung on with her hands and her little pink toes, which she had stuck into the interstices of the shutter, she suddenly looked down. Her grasp weakened and she gave a shriek so piercing that Billie almost slipped headlong over the side of the roof, but she grasped Belle’s slackening wrist.
“Take a breath,” she said, in a trembling voice. “You can do it, if you only make up your mind to.”
“I’ll never, never forgive you,” cried Belle, “and if I live through to-night, I’ll pay you back.”
“All right,” answered Billie calmly, seeing all at once that anger appeared to give Belle new strength, “only I advise you to get onto this roof first.”
Another moment and Belle had clambered over the cornice and was stretched out breathless on the roof.
“I would much rather have had a baby to lookafter,” thought Billie, as she looked contemptuously down at the other girl.
“We had better not lose any more time now, Belle,” she said aloud. “If you have got your breath and your nerve back, come ahead.”
Belle pulled herself wearily up and followed.
“My feet are all splinters,” she complained, “and my hands are torn and bleeding.”
“’Tis the voice of the lobster: I heard him declare‘You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair,’”
repeated Billie, half laughing and half sobbing that this foolish verse should have flashed through her brain at this strange time.
The two girls hurried along the roof toward the front. It was plain that in the scramble to save the lives of the hotel guests there had been no time to save the building, and when the young girls turned the corner of the roof and looked for a moment across the broad expanse of ocean not a hundred yards away it seemed to them that they were alone in the whole world.
“What are we going to do now?” demanded Belle.
“I don’t know yet,” answered Billie patiently.
The roof was hot under her feet and they could hear the crackling of flames as they hastened along the edge to the other side.
The rest of that fearful adventure seemed like a dream to Billie afterwards.
As they turned the corner of the house a voice called hoarsely:
“Who can tie a rope?”
Billie remembered to have replied vaguely and politely that she could tie a rope. A man emerged from behind the chimney with a long rope, but she hardly noticed at the time that he had only one arm.
“It may not be long enough,” he said, “but tie it and we’ll take the risk. It’s our only chance.”
Billie knotted the rope around the chimney. The man examined the knot carefully, pulled it with his one hand, and then threw it over the side of the house.
“I’ll go first,” said Belle quietly, and Billie looked at her with amazement.
“Humph!” said the man. “You are brave. Can you do it?”
“Yes,” answered Belle, “I can do anything. Help me over the side.”
“It’s going to hurt,” he observed, as he twisted the rope around her foot and showed her how to slide down. “It’s going to take all the skin off your hands and feet and maybe cut to the bone.”
Belle made no reply to this cheerful prediction. She had already started down the rope.
As Billie watched her disappear in the dark, the man said abruptly:
“Did a number of girls and a white-haired woman in a red automobile come here this evening?”
Billie hesitated.
“I believe so,” she said.
“Do you know so?” asked the man insistently.
“Yes.”
“Did you see one of them leave a rosewood box at the clerk’s desk?”
Billie made a great effort to remember. Then, suddenly, the case of jewels loomed up in her mind. She had forgotten all about them.
“Billie, Billie,” called a voice from below.
“Yes,” she answered, looking over the roof.
“She’s here,” shouted Ben, from the top of the ladder, which reached only to the second story.
“All right,” called the one-armed man on the roof. “We have a rope here. We’ll swing down to the ladder.”
The next thing Billie remembered she was surrounded by a crowd of her friends at the foot of the ladder. The girls were weeping and her Cousin Helen was giving vent to hysterical expressions of relief and thankfulness. The wet sand felt cool and soft to the parched soles of her bare feet, and she tried to smile; but she really had quite forgotten what it was all about. Some one close by her groaned and sobbed alternately, and a sickening feeling came over her when she saw a girl stretched on a blanket almost at her feet. The girl’s hands were torn and bleeding and her pale blue silk kimono was covered with blood. Down one cheek was a long, bloody mark and to complete her grotesque and terrible aspect, at least a dozen little red rubber devils’ horns stood upright all over her head.
The next thing Billie remembered was huddling into her own beloved red motor car with the others, while some one took them somewhere, and all the time in her ears she heard a man’s voice saying:
“Where is that box of jewels?”
And her own voice replied:
“Under the ruins of the Shell Island Hotel.”