Breakfast was, if anything, duller and more gloomy than usual. So many “shining morning faces” only made the three freshmen involved in the escapade of the night before more nervous. When the meal was over and Arden, Sim, and Terry were waiting in the dean’s outer office, they were almost sick with dread.
“Come in, young ladies!” Tiddy opened the door to the inner sanctum herself and, with an almost imperious gesture of her lean brown hand, waved the three in ahead of her.
The office was large and bright. Green carpet covered the floor to the uttermost corners. The windows were draped with neutral-toned curtains. The founder of the college, in the form of a highly-varnished oil painting of a stern-faced, dark-featured and white-haired man, looked down at the three from a vantage point over the dean’s desk.
Miss Anklon asked and noted down the names of her visitors, though they were quite sure she well knew them already. She began:
“This prank of yours, my dear girls, is something we do not countenance at this college. You were put upon your honor when you went into New York and were expected to return as your classmates did.”
She looked sternly over the tops of her glasses. Then she resumed:
“If I remember correctly, you two were in your night clothes and this young lady was still dressed. Is that right?” She directed her gaze specifically at Sim.
“Yes, Miss Anklon,” Sim answered in a weak voice.
“Perhaps you will explain yourself, then.”
“I never thought it would cause so much trouble,” Sim began. “When I learned that the sophomores didn’t make as much money at the dance as they hoped to, I just decided to go to my father and ask him for it.” She paused uncertainly. “I came to this college, instead of going to some other, because I hope to become—” she paused and then went on—“because the swimming pool looked so lovely in the catalog.” Sim glanced shyly at the dean, whose face betrayed none of her feelings. It was no time to speak of expert diving ambitions.
“That is hardly a reason for coming to college, Miss Westover. But go on with your story. Why were you returning at such a late hour?”
“My father wasn’t where I thought he would be, and I forgot to leave the notes I wrote, explaining my absence and—and——”
Gradually Sim blurted out the whole story, Arden and Terry now and then adding a little to the telling. When Sim finally ended her recital, Miss Anklon was as stony as before. She sat behind her polished desk and looked at the girls more sternly than ever.
“I believe you have told me the truth, Miss Westover, although it seems strange you should be so heedless.” Miss Anklon tapped her desk with a pencil. “You other girls were almost as much to blame as Miss Westover. If anything had happened, you would have been responsible. While you are here in this college we are entrusted with your welfare.”
She paused a moment, looked up at the dark-faced founder as if for inspiration, and continued:
“Besides the seriousness of your act, I must tell you that you three girls do not seem to be starting your college life in the right spirit. Although you have been here for only a short time, you have already attracted some, shall I say, undesirable attention? Yes, that is it. Those stories about the orchard were your doing—am I not right?”
This time the dean looked directly at Arden.
“They were not stories, Miss Anklon,” Arden began. “We really were chased by something while we were in the garden gathering apples as a hazing stunt. And we did find the gardener’s helper lying wounded on the ground.”
The dean bowed her head in frosty acquiescence and said:
“It would have been better if you had come to me and told me of your—your experiences, instead of telling them to so many impressionable girls. Do you know I have received letters from several worried parents as a result of your spreading of this tale?”
“We tried not to talk of it, Miss Anklon, but it got around in some way. I think everyone in the college would like to know what really happened in the orchard.” This time it was Terry who spoke with all the dignity at her command.
“As to that, Miss Landry, the gardener, Tom, fell over a tree root, so I am told, and struck his head. Anything that chased you must have been a product of your too vivid imagination.”
“Oh, no—no, Miss Anklon!” Arden was emphatic in her denial, but the dean held up a quieting, protesting hand. Arden looked at Sim as if to say: “I’d like to tell her how it hurt when I sat down hard upon those stones!”
The dean, seeming to gather herself together for a final statement of the case, said:
“All this has nothing to do with your latest escapade. I regret very much that I must take this action, but I am forced to tell you that all three of you will be campused for three weeks and lose all your privileges.” Miss Anklon was stern and unsmiling. “I do not wish you to tell your classmates of your foolish experience, Miss Westover. It is best kept quiet. You may all go now.”
For several seconds the three freshmen stood facing the dean but saying nothing. The severity of their punishment was so great that they were stricken speechless. No going into town to shop or to the movies. No week-end guests. And not to leave the college grounds at all for three weeks!
“Miss Anklon,” Sim was the first to speak, “you don’t know how much my swimming means to me. I realize, now, how wrong I was to go away without permission, but Arden and Terry——”
“That will do, Miss Westover, I have made my decision!” Tiddy was at her fearful worst. “Good-morning!” The girls realized that the interview was over and that the decision was final.
Responding with almost whispered “good-mornings,” the three left the office and walked slowly toward the tennis courts. With one accord they sat on a white-painted bench and gazed moodily at a spirited doubles game.
The ping of the balls seemed to find echoes in the dull throbbings of their hearts.
“I suppose we were fortunate not to be expelled,” Arden said timidly, after a long silence.
“We might just as well have been. We can’t go anywhere. We can’t do anything. Added to that, we can’t even swim!” Sim was quite unhappy as she answered Arden’s attempted philosophy.
“Don’t take it so to heart, Sim,” Terry advised. “We’re all in the same boat. We can have lots of fun here, just the same. It will be a good chance for me to get caught up on my French.”
“That’s the spirit!” exclaimed Arden. “We can give more time to solving the mystery of the orchard. And I’ll have that pool fixed yet: you’ll see!”
“You mean with the reward money you’re going to get for finding that missing Pangborn chap?” asked Sim.
“Yes,” Arden nodded.
“We haven’t done a thing toward that yet,” spoke Terry. “We don’t even know whether or not he has been found, restored to his worried friends, and the reward paid to someone else. Don’t you think we had better check up on it?”
“Yes, we must,” Arden agreed. “And though we can’t leave the campus even to go to the post office and see if that reward poster is still there, still, perhaps we can do something. They can’t keep us out of the orchard, anyhow.”
“Except that I’m not going there again at night, not for ten swimming pools!” declared Terry.
“Nor I,” Sim added. “But I don’t suppose,” she went on, “that the mystery or the terror, or whatever you want to call it, of the orchard has anything to do with the missing man and the thousand dollars reward, do you, Arden?”
“I don’t know.”
“What a delicious mystery it would be if it worked out that way, wouldn’t it?” exclaimed Terry.
“If you’re making fun of my well-meant efforts,” spoke Arden a trifle stiffly, “why, I——”
“Oh, not at all!” Terry made haste to say, Sim chiming in with a murmured denial also. “And we’re going to help you all we can as soon as this horrid campusing is over. Really, there must be some reason for thinking this missing young man might be in this neighborhood, or it wouldn’t have said so on the poster.”
“Arden has the right of it there,” Sim declared, “and it’s sweet of both of you not to mind this so much. But I feel very badly about it. I got you into trouble, and I got Tiddy down on all of us.” Sim was impatiently kicking a clump of grass. “Well, we can’t do anything about it now. So let’s go back and write the real story home before our families have a chance to hear it from Tiddy.”
When it came to writing letters home, each girl approached her family from a different viewpoint, naturally. Arden, who was the most interesting writer of the three, was inclined to dramatize. Her missive was filled with descriptions, reflecting the fears they had felt at Sim’s disappearance and their resentment at the punishment inflicted by the dean. All this was set forth vividly.
Terry was diplomatic in her letter. Her mother, she knew, would worry needlessly if she felt that the girls were in any danger. So she made prominent mention of the good times they were having, culminating in a mistake they had mutually made which resulted in a curtailment of some of their privileges.
Sim was writing rapidly, her eyes bright and her lips compressed into a stern, determined line. She finished first, and after closing the envelope and sealing it, she scratched on the address and turned to her friends.
“I may as well tell you, before you hear it outside,” Sim began and hesitated, “but I’ve written to my father for permission to come home!”
“Sim! Not to stay! Don’t leave us now, when things will be so dull here for Arden and me if you go!” Terry begged.
Sim looked uncompromising.
“Please don’t go, Sim! Don’t mail your letter. I feel as though I am to blame. Anyhow, Sim, there’d be nothing for you to do at home. Three weeks aren’t so long.” Arden arose and patted Sim maternally on the shoulder.
“It isn’t just three weeks. It’s the whole school year!” Sim declared. “It will take a long time to fix the pool, even if they get the money. Besides, I was told by my math teacher that I’d probably flunk out at mid-year if I didn’t improve, and I’d rather go home before that happens.”
“But we can help you, Sim,” Terry promised. “Won’t you think it over? Even if we are campused, I know of a few parties the girls have planned, and they’ll be fun.”
Arden decided to try a new method of approach.
“Sim, I wouldn’t mention it if I didn’t want you to stay,” she said. “But you got us into this, even if you meant it all for the best, and even if you do leave, Terry and I will still be campused. There are lots of other things to do besides swimming, and, don’t forget, we have a mystery here that no one dreams about but us.”
“I am sorry about you and Terry, but right now I don’t feel like being a good sport. I’ll go to Tiddy and ask her to let you two off.” Sim hesitated. “But I want to go home, Arden. Don’t ask me to stay.”
“If you feel you must go, Sim, all right. But what I ask you to do is not to mail your letter for a few days. Write another in its place, at least temporarily, and say everything is settled. And then, if you still feel the same way——” Arden shrugged and turned aside.
Sim left her desk and walked slowly to a window. The peacefulness of the scene below, framed by the trees in their bright autumn array, must have had some influence on the perturbed girl. For, after a few moments of silent contemplation, Sim swung around and exclaimed:
“All right, Arden. I’ll think it over. You can hold this letter for three days, and I’ll write another to send home. But it’s only because of my friendship for you both that I’m doing it.”
“That’s great, Sim! You won’t be sorry. We’ll forget about it now and——”
A small shuffling noise stopped Arden in the midst of her exultation. It came from the direction of the door, and, even as the three looked, a bright blue and white envelope was pushed under the portal. Terry picked up the missive and opened it.
“Why!” she exclaimed in delighted surprise, “it’s an invitation for a party tomorrow in the gym. The sophomores are giving it to the freshmen, and we must,” she was rapidly reading the note, “all wear some sort of a costume. Oh, how precious!” She was gleefully excited.
“What fun!” With the suddenness of youth Arden closed her mind to the subject of Sim threatening to go home and she began to plan for the party.
“What can we wear?” asked Terry.
“We haven’t much in the way of costumes,” Arden admitted. “I suppose, though, we can wear riding habits or blacken our faces and slick back our hair. We’ll probably have more fun that way than if we wore draperies.”
“Oh, yes,” Terry agreed.
“It will be a little break for us after what we know is in prospect,” said Sim in a low voice.
After lessons, the next day had been gotten through in some fashion and, following supper, the three hurried back to their room. Sim put on Terry’s riding clothes, which were much too big, and Terry wore a part of Sim’s sport suit with a woolly cap belonging to Arden. As for Arden, she put on a short, tight skirt and a sweater belonging to Jane Randall and knotted a scarf about her throat, Apache style.
Then, using a soft eyebrow pencil, the girls adorned their lips with villainous mustaches.
“How do we look?” asked Sim, trying to pose in front of a mirror that showed only part of her.
“Terrible!” laughed Terry.
“That’s the way we want to look,” decided Arden.
Down in the large gymnasium crêpe paper was used to cover the steam pipes, and many streamers, in the college colors, disguised the bare whitewashed walls. The room was crowded with noisy, laughing girls. At one end a portable phonograph was playing, with the loudest needle obtainable, a popular dance tune.
Arden and her two particular friends were met at the door by their sophomore tormentors, Toots Everett, Jessica Darglan, and Priscilla MacGovern.
Toots came forward and gave Sim a large paper carton made in imitation of a traveling bag. It was adorned with huge purple and green paper bows.
“A gift for our most widely traveled freshman!” said Toots with a laugh. “You must keep this with you until refreshments are served. Those are the rules.”
Sim smiled grimly and accepted the box gracefully. So her story was known all over college in spite of the dean’s prohibition?
Arden and Terry received large, blank exercise books in which to keep a record of their engagements: gentle sarcasm when it was evidently known they couldn’t make any for three weeks at least.
One by one the freshmen were given articles to show up their various faults, failings, and follies.
The party was soon well under way and progressed happily. The girls who could lead were the most popular dancers that night. In fact, those girls were booked well ahead as partners.
Arden was dancing with Jane Randall at the far end of the gymnasium when she happened to glance up at one of the windows. What she saw startled her so that she made a mis-step and caused Jane to exclaim:
“Look out!”
Arden wanted to say she was looking with all her eyes, but she did not dare call her partner’s attention to what had so disturbed her. For, as she glanced up at the window, Arden saw gazing down at her with strange malevolence a mocking, smiling face. Then, in a second, it was gone, and only the black square of glass remained.
Arden was almost shaking with fright, so much so that she faltered in the dance. She glanced quickly at Jane to learn whether she had noticed the face, but now Jane was smiling over Arden’s head at the antics of some capering freshman.
As she circled the room with Jane, Arden’s fears subsided somewhat, and she resolved to say nothing about it to Jane. Then, when the record had played itself out, that dance came to an end. For a moment following the last strains of the music there was a lull in the noise of talk and laughter.
Then, suddenly, breaking in on the happy, peaceful silence, as though it had been planned, came the slow and mournful tolling of a heavy bell.
Dong! Ding-dong! Ding-dong!
“What is it?” questioned several.
“Do we unmask now?” others wanted to know. They thought it a signal.
“I’ve never heard a bell ring like that since I’ve been here at Cedar Ridge,” said a demure little sophomore in a low voice.
“It hasn’t rung—in a long time,” said one girl in a low voice.
“But what is it?” Arden demanded.
“Why does it ring now?” Terry wanted to know.
“Come on!” called the impulsive Toots Everett. “There’s something wrong somewhere.”
“That old outside fire-alarm bell hasn’t been tolled since we had the modern telephone system installed,” said one of the teachers who was overtaken in the hall by a rush of students from the gymnasium. The dance was momentarily forgotten.
“Oh, a fire!” gasped Terry.
“Let’s hurry out!” proposed Sim.
They were all hurrying.
The moon looked down upon a strange party of girls a moment later, for they had all rushed out of the gymnasium after the ringing of the alarm bell. Blackened faces and slicked-back hair, some in tattered garments and others in borrowed finery, sophomores and freshmen crowded forward to that side of the building where hung the bell.
But when they reached the spot nothing was to be seen. The bell rope was still swaying as though recently tugged at, but the hands that had done it were not in evidence. The bell itself still faintly vibrated from the recent violent clanging.
“Well, at least here’s something they can’t blame us for,” said Sim to the curious Arden and Terry. “We have perfect alibis and dozens of witnesses. This time somebody else can be campused.”
“Of course, Sim,” Terry agreed. “But the point is—who did it? It’s rather a childish thing to do—going about pulling bells and then running away. It doesn’t frighten anyone in the least, if that’s what it was intended for.”
“It was silly, that’s true, Terry; but listen to this.” Arden motioned for her two chums to come closer to her. “Come over here where the others won’t hear. We don’t want to have Tiddy blaming us for any more alarming stories.”
“Arden! You have something to tell us, I know!” Terry was pulling Sim away from a group of chattering girls. “Come over here, Sim. Arden knows something!”
The three from 513 separated from the main crowd of disguised girls, and Arden began.
“I was dancing with Jane Randall when something made me look up at one of the high gym windows, and there I saw a strange, white face staring in at me.”
“Arden—you didn’t!” gasped Sim quickly. “Do you mean directly at you the face was staring?”
“It seemed so.”
“Do you think that was the person who rang the bell?”
“That, my dear Watson, is just the point. It was such a short time after I saw the face that the bell rang, it couldn’t have been done by the person who looked in at me through the window.”
“How thrilling! For Pete’s sake, don’t let anyone know what you saw, Arden. If you do we’ll be in more trouble!” Terry said.
“She’s right,” Sim agreed. “We’ll keep it under our hats until we find out something more. The others are going back in, now. We’d better go in.”
The sophomores and freshmen, so rudely disturbed at their reconciliation party, having investigated as best they could in the uncertain moonlight, and having discovered nothing more than that the evidence of the swaying rope indicated the bell had rung (which evidence their ears already testified to), were returning to the gymnasium.
But before they went in, though just how it started no one appeared to know, they were all doing a sort of snake dance in the silvery sheen of the moonlight.
Twisting and turning, the line of masquerading girls in fantastic figures circled beneath the old alarm bell that hung on a projecting beam out from the side of the building. It thus projected to allow the sound of its alarm to vibrate freely in all directions. Above their heads and out of reach of the hands of the tallest of the girls, dangled the weathered rope attached to the bell.
“It must have been a very tall person who could reach that rope!” panted Terry as she circled with Sim.
“A veritable giant,” was the answer. “None of the girls could have done it.”
“No. That’s what I thought.”
“What are you talking about?” demanded Terry, who had been caught in the human maelstrom by some strange girl and whirled about.
“We don’t quite know,” said Arden.
Screaming and laughing, the sophomores in the lead took the freshmen running across the campus and stopped in front of the dormitory.
“Good-night, freshies!” cried Toots and some of the leaders. “And happy dreams!”
“That means the end of hazing,” said Arden. “It’s always done this way.”
“Thank goodness for that!” murmured Terry.
The party was over. Then the girls, sophomores and freshmen, formed a friendly circle and sang “Autumn Leaves,” the alma mater song. The girls’ voices carried softly through the moonlit night and even the most unromantic was impressed with the beauty of the words and melody.
Then, bidding one another good-night, the happy students hurried to their respective rooms, talking excitedly. And the dean and her helpers settled more comfortably in their beds, knowing that for another term this affair was successfully over.
The door of 513 shut on Arden, Sim, and Terry. For a moment they stood looking at one another, and then, as if by agreement, they began to laugh; hysterical laughs but none the less hearty.
“Oh, you do look such a sight, Sim!” Terry gasped.
“Why bring that up?” Sim chuckled.
“But we had a lovely time,” Arden said. “Even if there was a mysterious bell ringing and a face——”
“Tell us more about that,” begged Sim.
“I’ve told you all I know. I saw a face—an old man’s, I’m sure, staring in at me from the window. Then the bell rang.”
“But why?” demanded Terry.
“If we could find out, perhaps we could solve the mystery of several other things that have happened around Cedar Ridge,” Arden said.
“But that bell,” went on Sim. “I heard some of the girls talking. It seems it is an old alarm bell, to be rung in case of fires. But when the telephone system was put in the rope that originally reached close to the ground, so help could be summoned from the town and from nearby residents, was cut off. And it was cut off so high up that no ordinary person, standing under the rope, could reach it.”
“Why was that done?” asked Terry.
“Because it was found,” Sim explained, “that when the rope was left long enough to be reached, some students, thinking it fun, rang the alarm. That was long before our time. So the dean had the rope cut short.”
“Why didn’t she take it off altogether?” asked Arden.
“I asked a soph that,” explained Sim, “and she told me it was thought best to leave most of the rope in place so if ever it was necessary to sound the old bell, it could be done.”
“But how, if the rope was high up?” Terry inquired.
“By standing on a ladder, I suppose. Don’t ask me, for I really don’t know.”
With determination they began washing off the marks of the eyebrow-pencil mustaches, using cold cream, and finally they were ready for bed.
“Well,” remarked Arden in tones that told her chums she had made up her mind seriously, “something is going to happen, I feel sure of it.” Pressed for details, she would say nothing more.
But a few evenings after this, up to which time nothing of moment had happened save that the three from 513 began to feel more and more their campused bonds, a thick hazy fog enveloped the college grounds, spreading to the near-by town and villages about. Arden was walking alone from the library back to the dormitory. The fog seemed suddenly swept in from the distant sea, settling in the low places so that the upper stories of the building seemed floating in the air.
Arden thrust her hands into the deep pockets of her skirt and in one felt the letter Sim had entrusted to her—the letter asking her father for permission to leave college. The excitement of the masquerade party and the mysterious bell-ringing had done nothing to lighten Sim’s depression. She was still determined, it seemed, to carry out her intention.
Sim didn’t seem to care about anything. She was not the least bit excited by the bell-ringing nor by the strange face, and evidently had dismissed them from her mind.
Arden felt there was no time to be lost if Sim was to be kept at Cedar Ridge. The strange face she had seen through the obscured window when she was dancing with Jane Randall had seemed vaguely familiar, but she had glimpsed it for so short a time that it was impossible to recognize it. No one else had seen it, of that Arden was certain, for no one had spoken of it, and there were no more stories current of mysterious doings about the college.
“Sim will just pack up and go home unless something is done to make her change her mind,” thought Arden as she walked along through the fog. “And I’m going to do it!”
Campused or not, she would now go to the little railroad station and send a telegraph message to her always sympathetic father, asking him for the money to put the swimming pool in order. That would cause Sim to remain.
Arden had everything in her favor for concealment, and she needed concealment in this risky undertaking. The fog, becoming more dense every minute, and the fact that she was alone, would allow her to reach the station unobserved. Also it was just the time when most of the students were in their rooms preparing to go down to supper in a short time.
Arden ran through the gathering gloom across the campus and toward the post office. The yellow gleaming lights of the railroad station beckoned to her with their flickering rays from the other side of the tracks.
There was always the chance that someone from the college might be in the little suburban station looking up trains, inquiring about baggage or express shipments, or sending a telegram. But Arden, risking the discovery of her voidance of the campus prohibition, kept on her rather perilous way. At the same time she was trying to be cautious.
First, she walked with light footsteps toward the window of the telegraph and ticket office nearest the tracks. She tried to peer through this window into the waiting room beyond but could see nothing through the murky glass and the heavy mesh of wire that covered it, save the indistinct figure of the ticket agent whose duties were combined with those of baggage-man, train dispatcher, telegraph operator, and occasional expressman.
“I’ll try the side window,” Arden determined, and through this she was able to glance into the deserted station. There was no one in the waiting room, as far as she could see: not even one of the few town taxi-drivers escaping from the heavy fog and the chilly dampness of the approaching night.
“Here’s luck!” Arden thought. “If I’m quick I can send the telegram and be out of here before anyone sees me. Of course, the smart thing to have done would have been to write out my message before I came here. But I think it won’t take long.”
The dark brown door leading into the waiting room was heavy and stuck at the sill. That many feet had kicked it loose was evidenced by several dents and scratches showing at the bottom in the dim glow of an outside lamp under the station platform covering. After one or two futile efforts Arden managed to push back the door and enter.
The ticket and telegraph office was faintly lighted, but as Arden looked in through the little window, protected by a wicket of brass, she could not make out the form of the agent she was sure she had seen when she peered in from the outside platform.
“Oh, dear!” worried the girl. “He must have gone out, and before he comes back to take my message, someone from the college may stop in here and catch me. That’s the worst of these country places. I suppose there isn’t another train for some time and the agent went out for a rest. If I could only reach in and get a telegraph blank I could write the message, with a notation to send it collect, and leave it here for him. Let’s see—what shall I say? ‘Must have a thousand dollars at once. Can you send it? Letter follows.’ Dad will probably think I’ve embezzled some of the college funds or stolen some jewels. Oh, where is that agent?”
She drummed impatiently with a pencil on the shelf of the window and stood on tiptoes to look in. As she did so the agent suddenly emerged from where he was crouched low in a stooping position halfway into a small supply closet in one corner of his cubbyhole of an office, out of Arden’s sight. The agent stood up so quickly, directly in front of the wicket window confronting Arden, that it was as if some gigantic Jack-in-the-box had popped out at her.
“Oh!” she gasped, preventing herself, by a strong effort, from springing back. Then again, but less hysterically: “Oh, here you are!”
“Well?” asked the agent and he smiled.
Arden opened her mouth to say she wanted to send a telegram, but the sudden appearance of the man, popping up into her view in that manner, was so disconcerting that she could only stand there and stare at him. And as she stared she realized, with a shock, that she had seen the face of this man somewhere before. She stood there, silent and perplexed, trying to solve the puzzle, trying to remember. Could she have seen the man before?
He stood patiently waiting for her to state her wants.
But Arden went into a strange panic of fear and uncertainty.
“I—I think I’ve forgotten something!” she gasped, backing nervously away from the window. “I—I’ll come back—later.” She forced to her face a rather sickly smile.
“Very well,” said the man behind the wicket. “I’ll be open for quite a while yet.”
Then, turning away, Arden fled, pulled open the door, scurried across the tracks and rushed back to college. Her one thought was to bring Terry and Sim with her to the station on a strange errand. She wanted them to help her identify the man in the ticket office as the missing Pangborn heir, pictured on the placard in the post office.
For that was exactly what Arden believed. So obsessed had she become with the poster picture and the reward offered for information about the original, that she was sure she was right.
The man who had popped up at the wicket window was Harry Pangborn.
“I’m positive of it!” murmured Arden as she ran faster. “But I must get Sim and Terry to look at him. I’ll need their evidence.”
With startling suddenness, the night, aided by the dense fog, settled down over Cedar Ridge. Arden was alarmed. She had not thought it was so late, though she was quite sure the supper bell had not yet rung. She ran faster, her beating heart keeping time with her pattering feet.
“Oh, I hope Terry and Sim will come back with me and see this for themselves,” she thought. “How wonderful that I have made this discovery! I need not wire Dad for that money after all. I’m sure,” she tried to convince herself, “that I am right. Quite sure!”
There was no time to be lost. Supper would soon be served and the three from 513 dared not be absent from their places at the table very long. Nor would they want to be. Appetites were remarkably keen at the college, in spite of all the mystery and excitement and notwithstanding the eating that was done between meals.
As Arden approached the main building which loomed up out of the fog like some dream castle, she called on her childhood friend, the “good fairy.” She murmured: “Good fairy, please don’t let us get caught, and for a wish, I wish that Terry and Sim will come back with me right away!”
It seemed the good fairy did not entirely desert her child, for, as Arden started up the stairs, she met her two chums coming down.
“Terry! Sim! I’ve the most exciting thing to tell you!” Arden gulped and continued: “Come outside a moment.”
“Good heavens! You look as if you’d seen a ghost! Take a breath—or something—before you pass out!” advised Terry, a little incredulous.
“Well, tell us, Arden!” Sim begged, wringing her hands in simulated melodramatic fashion. “This suspense is awful! It’s making an old woman of me!”
“I don’t want anyone to hear,” Arden confided. “Can’t you step outside for a few seconds? You won’t be cold. I want you to do something for me.”
Sim and Terry looked at each other.
“Better humor her, Sim. She might turn violent. Come on,” Terry said in an exaggerated attempt at soothing a patient.
“If I get violent it will be because you two show such little natural curiosity, Bernice Westover,” Arden retorted testily. “When you hear what I saw——”
“How can wehearwhat yousaw?” mocked Sim.
“Oh—you——” began Arden, really provoked now.
“All right, my dear.” Terry held open the main entrance door and motioned the other two out ahead of her. “If anyone wonders why we are going out when the supper bell has almost rung, we can say we want a breath of fresh air for an appetite.”
“As if anyone who knows the feed here would believe that!” mocked Sim.
But in spite of the banter, Arden finally herded her chums down to the cinder path in front of the dormitory building.
“Come along a little farther,” she urged. “No one must hear!”
Terry and Sim followed, now really convinced that Arden had something of moment to impart to them. She looked around half in caution, half in fear. When they were some distance from the main entrance and shrouded in the fog, Arden said in a low voice:
“I was just over to the station——”
“You were!” interrupted Sim. “Why, Arden Blake! If you were seen, it’ll be just too bad! What if Tiddy finds out?”
“Yes, I know. But there are times when rules have to be broken,” admitted Arden. “If George Washington and Thomas Jefferson or some historic personages like that hadn’t drafted a new constitution in Philadelphia when they had no right to do so, I wouldn’t be telling you all this.”
“All what? That you were over to the station? It’s a grand night to break rules but a better one for murders,” declared Terry, sniffing the fog with her head thrown back and her eyes half shut.
“If you’d stop interrupting I could tell you.” Arden was beginning to lose patience. “I was over at the station, as I said, and I saw someone there: the night ticket agent, who is the very image of the missing man whose picture we saw on the reward notice in the post office! There!” Arden paused to see what effect this statement had on her friends. They seemed to take it very calmly, and Terry said, most practically:
“Nonsense, Arden. If he was the man you think he is, someone else would have noticed him long ago and claimed the reward.”
“Besides,” added Sim, “no young man, or old one either, who wanted to keep his whereabouts secret would be so foolish as to appear in so public a place as a railroad ticket office, and near the place where there was hanging a poster offering a thousand dollars for information about him.”
“Not necessarily,” countered Arden calmly. “I have read somewhere that the cleverest criminals (not that Mr. Pangborn is one, though) always stay right in the place where they have committed a crime or are supposed to have vanished from. The trick is, that no one ever thinks of looking so near home for them. Poe has a story about a missing letter that was all the while right in the open, stuck in a rack with a lot of others.”
“Oh, yes, we had to read that in English lit,” admitted Terry.
“Well, what do you want to do, Sherlock—go over and identify the corpse?” asked Sim. “If you do, I’m afraid I can’t come. I have to go to Mary Todd for a notebook.”
“Please, Sim, it won’t take a minute, or only two or three, anyhow. You can come right back and be in time for supper. Think how thrilling it would be if——”
“It most likely won’t be,” finished Terry. “But I’m game. I like fog. It’s good for the complexion.”
“If you and Terry go, I’ll come, too, of course. But I think you’re on a wild-goose chase,” declared Sim.
“But I tell you he looked exactly like the poster!” affirmed Arden. “I stood here looking at him, with my mouth open like a fish, while he waited for me to speak. I was so surprised I just had to stammer something about forgetting what I came for, say I’d be back later, and run away. I don’t know what he thought of me.”
“Maybe he can’t think. Anyhow, come on, Sim. But make it snappy. I’ve got something else to do more important than this,” said Terry.
Arm in arm the three girls, a little nervous when they realized what would happen if they were caught breaking the campus rule in effect against them, started for the station. Arden hurried them impatiently, but Terry was in one of her teasing moods and refused to be hastened, pausing now and then to remark on the beauty of the night and attempting to point out, in the dense fog, places of interest on their brief journey.
At the station a quick look through an end window showed the waiting room to be unoccupied except for a man standing near the big white pot-stove.
“There he is—the agent!” whispered Arden. “He’s come out of his coop.”
“You’d think he was a chicken!” chuckled Sim.
“Oh, be quiet!” Arden begged. “Now you two go in and look at him.”
“Aren’t you coming?” asked Terry.
“No. I’ll wait outside here. I don’t want him to see me again. You two go in. Get a good look at him. Ask for—for time-tables. Oh, I’m so excited!”
“Don’t be so nervous,” Terry admonished. “You’ll be so disappointed if you’re wrong. However—come on, Sim!”
Terry and Sim, with none of the reluctance Arden was sure she would have experienced, marched around to the door. Arden drew back into the shadows of the fog and waited. She heard her chums enter, dimly heard the murmurs of their voices as, presumably, they asked for time-tables and caught the squeak of the door hinges again.