The moon, hanging low upon the horizon, was young but brilliant. The air was so keen and clear that without the help of the moonlight it seemed as though the stars must have flooded the lake with white light.
Nearer the southern shore the jingle of sleigh-bells and the laughter and shouting of the skaters marked the revelers who gave a free course to the iceboats out here nearer the open water. For both east and west of Cavern Island, which lay in the middle of Lake Luna, opposite Centerport, the ice was either unsafe, or there were long stretches of open water. The freight boats up and down the lake kept this channel open.
But there was a wide and safer course before the flying aero-iceboat. And soon she was moving so fast that the girls heard nothing but the shriek of the wind rushing by.
Here and there before them lanterns glowed like huge fireflies. These lights were in the rigging of several ice-yachts. Chet and Lance had a pair of automobile searchlights rigged forward on their own boat.
Another yacht had started from the old boathouse at about the time our friends and their new-fangled craft got under way. There were girls aboard it, too; but at first the Beldings and Jess and Lance did not recognize the other party.
The strange yacht was distinguished, however, by a red and green lamp. As Chet had been slow in starting, the other boat got ahead. But now, although the wind was fair and the other yacht traveled splendidly, the aero-iceboat bore down upon it, beating it out and leaving it behind like an express train going by a freight.
However, Chet would not allow Lance to throw on all speed. There were too many other craft on the ice before them—and it was night.
The lights of the City of Centerport soon fell behind them; then, almost at once, they picked up the lights of Keyport at the extreme end of the lake. They were traveling some!
Chet had strapped on a megaphone, which he had borrowed from Short and Long, who was coxswain of the boys’ Central High eight-oared shell, and through this he shouted his orders to Lance. They ran down within a mile of Keyport, and then shut off the engine and circled about on the momentum they had gained. There were too many skaters and sleighs on the ice down here to make iceboating either safe or pleasurable.
“My goodness me! Wasn’t that fun?” gasped Jess.
“Felt like you was traveling some, eh?”
“Oh, Chet! it was great!”
“It certainly is a fine boat, Bobby,” agreed Laura. “You and Launcelot have done well.”
“Wait!” said Lance, warningly.
“Wait for what?” demanded Laura.
“We didn’t travel that time. We were only preparing you—warming her up, as it were. Wait till we let her out.”
“My goodness!” cried Jess. “Can you go faster?”
“We’ll show you, going home,” said Chet.
Just then the boat with the green and red light swooped down upon them and a voice shouted:
“What kind of a contraption is that you’ve got there, Belding?”
“Hullo!” exclaimed Chet. “That’s Ira Sobel’s yacht. Ira is Purt Sweet’s cousin.” Then he answered: “Oh, this is a little rigging of my own, Mr. Sobel. But she can travel. Rather beat’s your Nightkawk, eh?”
“Well, she did that time,” admitted Sobel, doubtfully.
“My goodness me!” the friends heard the Central High dandy exclaim. “I weally wouldn’t want to travel any faster, Ira. I—I haven’t weally got my breath yet!”
“Oh, I say!” cried another voice from the iceboat, and they recognized Lily Pendleton’s. “What do you think about the prize? Did you hear?”
“Why, they haven’t decided on the best play yet, have they?” returned Jess, eagerly, and before her chum could speak.
“No, But I heard they’d put it all into Mr. Monterey’s hands. He’s the manager of the Opera House, you know. And mother is very well acquainted with him. You girls laughed at my play——”
“Not I, Lily,” interrupted Laura, good-naturedly. “I was too afraid that the rest of you might have a chance to laugh at mine.”
“Well, I bet I’ve a good chance to win. Mr. Monterey is real nice, and mother is going to see him.”
“Pooh!” exclaimed Chet. “She’s one of those people who think influence brings things about. Don’t you be worried, girls; I bet Mr. Sharp won’t let anybody get that prize through favoritism.”
“That’s very encouraging, Chet,” said Jess. “But perhaps Lily will win it. You know, she goes to plays more than any other girl in the Junior class of Central High, that’s true. And she reads novels—real silly ones. Maybe she knows how to write just what would please a theatrical manager.”
“Pooh!” said Laura, “I’m not giving up all hope yet—especially because of Lil Pendleton’s say-so.”
“Now, look out!” shouted Lance. “All ready to go back, Chet?”
“Start her!” exclaimed his chum, “Cling tight, girls—and take a good breath. I want to time this trip. It’s all of nine miles to the starting point and we’ll show you——”
His voice trailed off and the girls did not hear the rest of his speech. The big propeller-wings began to beat the air, and the sound rose to a keen buzzing. Chet snapped his watch back into his pocket, raised his hand, and the iceboat tore ahead.
In twenty seconds the wind rushed past them so that the girls were forced to bend their heads. The way was clear and Lance had “let her out.” Chet bent sidewise watching the ice through his goggles. Occasionally he screamed an order to his chum, who signaled with his hand that he heard and understood.
It was like the flight of a meteor! Laura and Jess never had realized before what it meant to travel fast. Motoring on land was nothing like this. As though shot out of some huge cannon the aero-iceboat skimmed the lake. The wind was almost in their faces, but that made little difference to this new invention of the chums.
The other yachts had to tack against the wind; not so the aero-iceboat. Swift and straight she flew and suddenly Chet roared to Lance to shut down, and the propeller groaningly stopped.
Chet flung up his goggles and drew out his watch.
“Eight and a half minutes!” he cried, with glee. “And, as I told you, it’s a good nine miles.”
“Let me off! let me off!” gasped his sister, struggling down from the narrow body of the boat. “Why! I never want to travel any faster, Chet. Do you think it is safe?”
“You bet it is, Miss Laura,” said Lance. “Or we wouldn’t have invited you girls to go with us.”
“Just wait till some day—say Saturday. By daylight I’d drive this thing faster than that. I tell you, we’ve got the speediest craft on the whole lake.”
“It beats what Mrs. Case told us about ski running in Sweden,” cried Jess, who was delighted with the experience. “And if Mrs. Case starts a class to travel on skis this winter, I want to be in it.”
“Well! it’s all right to hear about. But the experience is sort of shaking,” sighed Laura. “I’m not sure that I have an over-abundance of pluck, after all.”
The Morses were completely settled in their little house before school opened. Jess had had a busy vacation, but aside from her ride on Chet’s and Lance’s Blue Streak she had joined in little of the holiday fun of her mates at Central High.
There was one basketball game during the holiday recess. Central High met the Keyport team on their own court and outplayed them most decidedly; therefore the athletic temperature went up several degrees.
Mrs. Case, the physical instructor of Central High, was an enthusiastic out-of-doors woman, and as a heavy snow fell about New Year’s she easily interested the girls under her instruction in skiing. This exercise, she pointed out, might take the place of the fortnightly walking expeditions during the snowy weather, and there was so much broken country behind Centerport that the sport could be indulged in with profit.
The boys were getting so much sport out of ice hockey that—as the league approved of that form of exercise—the physical instructor introduced it on the girls’ athletic field. The field could be flooded, and had been; now it was a perfectly smooth piece of ice and upon it those of the older girls who were already good skaters, had a chance to learn the mysteries of hockey.
“Huh! Father Tom says it’s nothing but old-fashioned ‘shinny’ with a fancy name tacked onto it,” declared Bobby Hargrew. “But my! isn’t it fun?”
Jess and her chum, as well as the irrepressible, “took” to hockey, and there were enough of the other girls interested for two good teams to be made up.
Hester Grimes captained one team and Laura the other. There was still some little feeling of rivalry between Hester and Mother Wit—perhaps not much on the side of the latter; but the wholesale butcher’s daughter was inclined to be overbearing, and was never really satisfied unless she had an important part in whatever went on.
The struggle between the two teams for supremacy among the girls of Central High in this particular sport really led, however, to good results. Hester was backed by strong players; and being so muscular a girl herself she carried her side to victory two out of every three times.
“We ought to beat her—she’ll get too uppity to live with,” declared Bobby, discussing these games.
“It will do us good to be beaten occasionally,” laughed Laura. “You begin to think, Bobby, that you must belong to the winning side all the time.”
“Yes. Who doesn’t?” sniffed Miss Hargrew. “It’s all right—all this talk about playing the game for the game’s sake; but right down in the bottom of our hearts, don’t all of us play to win? If we don’t, we never play well, that’s as sure as shooting.”
When the school re-opened, however, on the first Monday in January, the subject uppermost in the minds of the girls of Central High was the prize contest in play-writing for the M. O. R’s. The girls crowded into Assembly that morning, all on the qui vive to hear what the principal would have to say.
But after the opening exercises, when Mr. Sharp came forward to speak, he surprised everybody by saying:
“We are not ready to report upon the matter of the plays. Mr. Monterey will confer with us at noon, and before school is dismissed to-day we will announce the winner.
“It is not often that a committee having in charge the decision of the winner in an amateur play-writing competition has the happiness to be aided by a professional manager of a theater, and a man, too, who has produced plays of importance himself.
“Mr. Monterey’s knowledge of what will act well will make our final decision, I believe, one that will strike all competitors as eminently fair. We have tried to decide upon the prize winner in a way that will satisfy the giver of the prize, too—Mrs. Kerrick. She demanded a play that would act well and that will draw an audience because of its dramatic value as a play—not merely because it is written by a girl of Central High, or is performed by the girls and their friends for the benefit of the M. O. R’s.
“Before the day closes, I can promise you, the decision will be made and the name of the prize-winner, and of the title of the play, will be announced. You are excused to your lessons for the morning.”
The buzz of excitement—especially from the girls’ side—when Mr. Sharp had ceased speaking, could scarcely be controlled. Not even Miss Carrington’s basilisk eye could quell it.
Of course, poor Bobby fell a victim to Gee Gee’s sour temper. She thought the teacher had long since reached the class room, and she was gabbling away to Nell Agnew and Jess “sixteen to the dozen,” as she would have said herself. When out of a door popped the bespectacled Miss Carrington, grimmer and more stern than usual.
“Indeed, Miss! are you supposed to rattle away like that about matters entirely foreign to your lessons, on the way to class room?” demanded the teacher.
“Oh, indeed, Miss Carrington,” exclaimed the contrite Bobby (she always was contrite when caught in a fault, for all her sauciness and lightness arose from thoughtlessness) “I really forgot—I did not mean to make a noise in the corridor.”
“Humph! did not mean—did not mean? What excuse is that, pray?”
“Not a very good one, I am afraid,” admitted Bobby. “But I truly did not intend to break a rule. We were all so much interested in the play——”
“Yes. Quite so. It is evident that I will get little out of you young ladies until the matter of this silly play is settled. I presume you are one of the contestants, Miss Clara?”
“Not at all, Miss Carrington,” said Bobby, demurely. “I did start to write one. It—it would have been a tragedy based upon several of the main incidents in the Punic Wars. But I found that to give the matter proper attention I should be obliged to neglect some of the studies, and——”
“That will do, Miss Hargrew,” interposed the teacher, severely. “You bring me on Friday afternoon a resume of those same Punic Wars—say a thousand words, I shall learn thereby just how much you know about the subject you selected for your play.”
Perhaps Bobby deserved what she got; but she “pulled a dreadfully long face” about it, while the other girls were inclined to enjoy her chagrin.
As for Jess Morse, it seemed to her that the waiting for the announcement of the prize-winner was too hard a cross to bear. So much depended upon the decision of the committee—it did seem as though she could not keep her mind upon the lessons.
If she won—if she won!—there would be plain sailing in the domestic waters of the Morses’ life—and that had come to mean a great deal to the girl. For even Mrs. Prentice’s kindness to them had not cleared away all the troubles for Jess Morse.
True, the account at Mr. Closewick’s had been paid. Jess, too, had seen to it that the month’s rent for their new home was met and a little something paid each week on the running store accounts.
But when Mrs. Morse drew her salary for the last week from the Courier—and it amounted to nearly ten dollars that week—she had been obliged to pay the money over to her dressmaker. She had found it necessary to order a new costume, if she was to follow the fashionable receptions, and the like, on the Hill. This matter of her mother being a society reporter, Jess feared, would cost them more in the end than it was worth to them.
And now they began the New Year with positively nothing in the family purse. And there was so much needed. There would be another reception at the M. O. R. house this very week and Jess told herself that she could not go because of her lack of a gown. Ah! these things were all veritable tragedies to her.
Lily Pendleton was very sure that she was going to take the prize. And she was not afraid to talk about it.
“Mother saw Mr. Monterey, and I am sure he was impressed by what she told him,” she announced. “Why, when the New Century Club met at our house last week, I read two acts of my play, and all the ladies said it was fine.”
“Aren’t you modest!” grumbled Bobby. “I should think it would pain you.”
“Now, don’t you get saucy, Bobby,” warned Lily. “You are not interested in this contest, that’s sure.”
“Huh!” cried Bobby. “I knew better than to try to write any such thing. If I won the prize nobody would believe that I wrote it.”
“Oh, Bob,” said Dora Lockwood. “You are too modest.”
“Yes, sir—ree!” returned Bobby. “I know it. I am of the same modest and withdrawing nature as the turtle.”
“The turtle?”
“Yep,” said Bobby, “You know what the little boy said when he first went into the country? He came running to his father and says: ‘Oh, Dad! what’s this thing I found? When I poked it, it put its hands and feet in its pockets and swallowed its head!’ Now, there can’t be anything much more retiring than the turtle—or me.”
The bell called them in for the final session then, and half an hour before closing time the signal from Mr. Sharp’s office announced that the girls of all classes were to file to the Assembly hall and take their seats. On this occasion the boys were not present.
“If I don’t get it I hope you do, Jess,” whispered Laura Belding to her chum as they went to their seats.
But to herself Jess kept saying: “Oh, it would be too good to be true—too good to be true! It would be just like a story-book.”
Mr. Sharp was smiling when he rose to speak.
“I must admit that I am surprised—happily surprised,” he began. “Several of the plays submitted to the committee are really marked by a vigor of style and originality of text and plot that have delighted me. Particularly are ‘The Strong Defense,’ by Miss Belding, ‘Appearances,’ by Miss Hilyard, ‘The Arrow’s Flight,’ by Miss Agnew and ‘Harrowdale,’ by Miss Buford to be praised upon these points.
“Of course, there were some handed in to the committee that were utterly unintelligible; the writers had not grasped the first principles of play-writing. But, as a whole, I am proud of your efforts, and I know Miss Gould is. I only fear that many of you young ladies who began plays did not finish them. It narrowed the choice down to a very few.
“And yet,” pursued Mr. Sharp, “there was really little doubt in the minds of any of the committee at the first reading of the manuscripts. And when the plays considered, from a literary standpoint, really acceptable, were put in the hands of Mr. Monterey for a final reading and judgment, we were assured that our opinion was correct.
“There is but one, among them all, that is a really actable (pardon the coining of the word), and that one, too, has in it the elements of a really heart-moving story. The author has failed in many of the professional rules of play-writing—even her grammar is somewhat shaky in spots,” added Mr. Sharp, smiling suddenly. “But the story is so sweet and so moving, and is so well fitted to the acting capacity of you girls and your brothers, that there is not the shadow of a doubt as to the worth of the piece and the success of the writer.”
For a moment he was silent. The girls were eager, Lily Pendleton preened herself in her seat. Her play had not been named when the principal gave lukewarm praise to those mentioned. She was sure that he now referred to her and to her play.
On the other hand, Jess Morse had lost all hope. Her poor little play was not even mentioned, as Chet would have said, “among the also rans!”
“I am glad to announce—and to congratulate the young lady at the same time,” said Mr. Sharp, “that Miss Josephine Morse is the winner of the two hundred dollars offered by Mrs. Kerrick, the title of her play being ‘The Spring Road.’”
It came like a thunderbolt! Jess could only gasp and stare up at him until his smiling, rosy face, and the big spectacles, were blurred in a mist that seemed to rise before her like a curtain.
Bobby Hargrew started the cheering; but it was Laura who reached Jess first and hugged her tight.
“I’m just as disappointed as I can be!” she cried. “I actually thought my play was going to be best. But as it wasn’t—— Why, Jess, I’m almost as happy over your winning it as you can be yourself!”
“I consider it a very unfair decision—unfair in every particular,” proclaimed Lily Pendleton, after school. “Why, he did not even mention ‘The Duchess of Dawnleigh.’ I can’t believe that Mr. Monterey even saw my play. I certainly shall make inquiries.”
Bobby Hargrew was caustic. “‘The Duchess of Dawnleigh!’” she repeated. “Say Lil! would you really know a live duchess if you saw one coming up the street? Why didn’t you write about something you knew about?”
“I guess I know as much about duchesses as you do, Bobby Hargrew!”
“I hope so,” granted Bobby, cheerily. “If I had to go up against a duchess—a real, live one—I expect I’d be like the little milliner in Boston, when some great, high-and-mighty personages came there from England. One of them was a sure-enough duchess, and she sent for the little milliner to do some work for her.
“The little workwoman was just about scared into a conniption,” chuckled Bobby, “when she found she had to go to the grand hotel to meet the grand lady and so asked a friend who knew a little more about the nobility than she did, what she should do when she entered the grand lady’s presence.
“‘Why, when you enter the room,’ explained the friend, ‘merely bow, and in speaking to her say “Your Grace.”’
“The little milliner,” continued Bobby, “thought she could do that all right, and she went to the interview with the duchess without any dress rehearsal. When she got inside the lady’s door she bowed very low and says, right off:
“‘For what we are about to receive, Oh, Lord, make us truly grateful!’”
But While there may have been some disappointment in the hearts of some of the girls of Central High who had striven for the prize, they not yet having heard Jess Morse’s play read, even the disappointed ones were not niggardly with their congratulations.
Jess walked in a maze that afternoon when she went home, Laura on one side and Nell Agnew on the other, while Bobby pirouetted around them like a very brilliant and revolving planet.
“And is there a part in your play for me?” demanded the irrepressible. “I just dote on actin. But no thinking part for mine, young lady! I must at least be important enough in the play to say: ‘Me Lord! the carriage waits.’”
“You could play the part of Puck or Ariel, Bobby,” declared Nellie Agnew.
“Hah! did you use those characters in ‘The Arrow’s Flight’?” gibed Bobby. “No wonder it was turned down then. Stealing boldly from Shakespeare!”
“No, I didn’t, Miss!” returned Nell, rather sharply. “I hope you noticed that I was one of those who was ‘honorably mentioned.’”
“Sure. Mr. Sharp let you all down easy,” chortled Bobby.
“I believe the decision in the contest was eminently fair,” declared Laura. “Yet I thought I would surely win.”
“So did I,” cried Nell.
“And I didn’t even dare hope for it,” said Jess, awe-stricken. “It’s just the most wonderful thing that ever happened.”
But Mrs. Morse took the success of “The Spring Road” quite as a matter of course.
“There, Josephine!” she exclaimed. “Now you can have the new clothes you are really suffering for——”
Jess decided that the argument might as well come right then. So she halted her mother on the verge of her plans for renewing the girl’s wardrobe in a style more befitting the means of Lily Pendleton’s mother, than her own!
“We have got to pay our debts,” declared the girl, warmly. “Every penny must be paid, Mother, dear. Let’s be free of bills and duns for once, at least. Let us start square with the world—and stay square if we can.”
Mrs. Morse did not wish her daughter to use the prize money for their general needs. Jess had much trouble to convince her that it would make her, Jess, far happier to do that than to own the finest set of furs, or the most beautiful evening gown, that would be displayed upon the Hill that winter.
She did agree, finally, however, to have a new dress so that she could attend the M. O. R. reception that week, at which her play was read aloud by Miss Gould herself, and it was praised by the audience until Jess’s ears fairly burned. Then the committee properly appointed went into executive session and plans for the production of “The Spring Road” went with a rush.
It was easy to choose a cast of characters. With a little advice from Jess it was not hard to select the very girls and boys best fitted to act in the piece. And such selection was made that very week, the typewritten ‘sides’ distributed to the several players, and the boys and girls went to work to memorize their parts. Lance Darby and Chet Belding were both in the play, and although neither Laura, nor Jess herself, had a part, they were both so busy (for they were on the M. O. R. play committee) that for a few days athletics and sports were well-nigh neglected.
Through the good-natured manager of the Centerport Opera House, scenery and much of the properties and some costumes for the inferior characters were to be obtained. But the principal characters would furnish their own costumes, and that is where Lily Pendleton began to lose her dissatisfaction. Disappointed as she had been regarding the decision of the committee, when she found that she was cast for an important part in Jess’s play she “came out of the sulks,” as Bobby termed it.
Mr. Monterey suggested to the committee, too, the name of a man to take charge of the rehearsals—really, to be stage director of “The Spring Road.” He came to the M. O. R. house one afternoon to read the play—a dapper, foreign-looking man of an indeterminate age, who continually twirled a silken black mustache and listened devotedly to any girl who talked to him.
Lily began to cultivate Mr. Pizotti assiduously. Really, one might have supposed she had written the play, instead of Jess Morse, she was so frequently in conference with Mr. Pizotti that first afternoon.
Bobby, who had likewise been cast for a part in “The Spring Road,” watched Lily’s actions with the stage manager with a good deal of disgust.
“What do you know about that foolish girl?” she demanded. “I’ll wager that greasy foreigner has got a wife and ten children—and neglects them. He has brilliantine on that moustache, and he smells of hair-oil, and I’ll wager, too his hair will show gray at the roots, and I know it is thin on top.”
“How wise you are, Miss Bobby,” said Nellie, who heard her. “For a child you seem to have learned a lot.”
“I’m foxy,” returned Bobby, grinning impishly. “I’m fully as smart as that kid brother of Alice Long’s. He came up to see us the other day—Alice brought him. Aunt Mary is real old fashioned, you know, and she sat in the kitchen darning and Tommy was playing around the floor. She thought it was getting toward tea time and she said to him:
“‘Tommy, go into the front hall and see if the clock is running, that’s a good boy.’
“Tommy came back after a minute, and says:
“‘No, ma’am, it ain’t running; it’s standing still. But it’s wagging it’s tail!’”
“And there’s Lil putting on her hat in a hurry so as to meet the man when Miss Gould is through with him, and walk down the block——Did you ever?” exclaimed Jess.
“Poor Pretty Sweet!” groaned Bobby. “His nose is out of joint. He has been Lil’s bright and shining cavalier for months. Dear, dear me! The Duchess of Dusenberry—was that the name of Lil’s play?—sure does have her favorites, and like the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland,” has only one command for her discarded courtiers: ‘Off with their heads!’” and Bobby giggled as she peered from the window to watch the dapper Mr. Pizotti and Lily Pendleton walk down the street side by side.
The New Year had ushered in the first big fall of snow—and it kept coming. Every few days, for the following fortnight, snow fell until Centerport’s street-cleaning department was swamped, and the drifts lay deep upon the vacant lots and against fences and blind walls.
Skating was done for, for the ice on the lake had become overloaded, and had broken up into a shifting mass of blocks, grinding against each other when the wind blew, and threatening the safety of any craft that tried to put out in it.
So traffic on Lake Luna ceased, and, of course, iceboating was likewise impossible. Chet and Lance Darby, had they not been so extremely busy learning their parts in the new play, could not have used their aero-iceboat during this time. Sleds were out in force, however—bobsleds, double-runners, toboggans, “framers,” and every sort of coasting paraphernalia. Even the Whiffle Street hill was made a coasting place by the young folk of the neighborhood, much to the despair of some grouty people who had forgotten their own youth, and who either telephoned their complaints to the police, or sprinkled ashes on the slide in the early morning hours.
It was at this time, however, that Mrs. Case, the girls’ physical instructor of Central High, took her class in ski running out into the open.
At first the dozen or more girls had practiced on their athletic field, which was now snow-covered, too. It was a particularly odd experience to stand upon narrow boards of ash, some ten feet in length, and then try to shuffle along on them without tipping sideways, or plunging head-first into a drift.
Each ski runner held a pole, with a spike in one end, and this was an aid to balancing, as well as of additional use if one tumbled down. It was no easy task, the girls found, to get up when they had been thrown into a drift.
“My!” commented Bobby Hargrew, “if you cross your feet going down hill on these things, you’re likely to dislocate every joint in your body.”
“Be sure you do not cross your feet, then,” advised Mrs. Case, grimly. “I have shown you all the correct position to stand upon these skis. The professional ski runner does not even use a pole. He will take the steep sides of mountains at a two-mile a minute rate. I have seen them do so in Switzerland and in Sweden and Norway. And they will jump into the air from the verge of high banks, and land on the drift at the bottom with perfect balance.”
“This is going to be no cinch to learn,” pronounced Bobby. “I know it’s going to be some time before I am good enough at it to jump off the top of Boulder Head on Cavern Island—now you see!”
“You would better take a much less difficult jump first,” advised Mrs. Case, smiling. “It will be enough fun for us to learn to travel on the skis without any frills. In Europe—especially on the road between St. Moritz and Celerina—I have often seen ski riders with horses. A horse trots ahead, drawing several riders on skis, who cling together by the aid of a rope fastened to the horse’s collar. Sometimes each rider has a horse, and they race horses just as though they were riding in sleighs.
“It is great sport, but like every other healthful form of athletics, it is often made dangerous and objectionable by those who are reckless, or rough. We will learn to balance ourselves, and to coast down a gentle descent.”
So, the next Saturday, the teacher and more than a dozen girls of Central High piled into a big, straw-filled sleigh, and were whisked out into the hills south of the city. The inn at Robinson’s Woods—a popular picnicking ground in summer—was made their headquarters, and there they left the sleigh and took to the difficult skis.
The climb to the top of the bluff overlooking the speedway, on which everybody—almost—who owned a sleigh was driving that afternoon, was not an easy one for the girls. Mrs. Case, holding her body erect, yet easily, shuffled up the incline with such little apparent effort that some of her pupils were in despair.
“We’ll never be able to run as you do, Mrs. Case!” cried Dora Lockwood. “Never! Why—ouch! There, I came near tumbling down that time.”
“Keep your balance. Use the pole if you have to,” advised the instructor. “It is not a running motion—it is more like a slide.”
“Say!” growled Bobby, who was having trouble, too. “It beats the ‘debutante slink,’ that came in with narrow skirts. I feel as if I was tumbling down every second.”
But they gained confidence in time. They reached the top of the bluff and then the long, easy slope, right beside the speedway, spread, spotless, before them. Mrs. Case showed them how to start, and after a fashion several of the bigger girls reached the bottom of the hill, and then panted up again, pronouncing it the best ever!
Bobby would not be outdone, as she said, “by anything in skirts,” and so she ventured. Halfway down the hill one of her skis must have struck something—perhaps the stub of a bush sticking out of the snow. Whew! Bobby turned almost a complete somersault!
She was buried so deep in a drift—and head first, at that—that it took both Laura and Mrs. Case to pull her out.
“Oh-me-oh-my!” cried Bobby, who looked like an animated snow-girl for the moment. “And just as I was getting on so well, too! Wasn’t that mean?”
“Perhaps you’d better not try any more to-day, Clara” said the instructor.
“And let those other girls get ahead of me? Well! I guess not!” declared Miss Hargrew, and she ploughed back to the top of the hill, fastened her feet upon the skis again, and started once more.
Laura and Jess Morse were on the hilltop, looking out upon the white track over which the sleighs were flying.
“Look there!” gasped Jess, seizing her chum’s arm. “Isn’t that the Pendletons’ sleigh?”
“Of course it is. With the big plumes and the pair of dappled grays? And that stiff and starched coachman driving? No mistake,” admitted Laura.
“Who’s in the sleigh with Lil?” demanded Jess.
“As I live!” cried her chum, in a somewhat horrified tone. “It—it is that Pizotti—that man!”
“Can you beat her?” said Jess, shaking her head.
“How foolish!” added Laura. “He is not a good man. He has known her so short a time—and to go sleigh-riding with her. Lil will be talked about, sure enough.”
“Well, I don’t know as we need to worry about her,” said Jess, shrugging her shoulders.
But Laura Belding could not put her schoolmate’s indiscreet actions out of her mind so easily. She wondered if Mrs. Pendleton knew of Lily’s familiarity with the foreign-looking Pizotti. The man might know his business as a stage director; but he certainly was neither of the age, nor the condition in life, to be cultivated as a friend by any young girl.
Lily Pendleton was so foolishly romantic, and so crazy about theatrical matters, that to be noticed by any person connected with the stage, or theatrical affairs, quite turned her head. And then, she still talked a great deal about her own play, “The Duchess of Dawnleigh.” She was sure it had not been given a proper reading—especially by Mr. Monterey. Perhaps, for reasons best known to himself, this stranger, Mr. Pizotti, had promised the foolish girl that he would help her get “The Duchess of Dawnleigh” produced.
Laura Belding was a particularly frank, outspoken girl, and when she met Lily Pendleton that Saturday night at the rehearsal of Jess’s play, she came out “flat-footed,” as her chum would have said, with the question:
“Who was that in the sleigh with you to-day, Lil?”
Lily flushed instantly, bridled, and smiled. “Who do you s’pose?” she returned.
“I don’t believe your mother knew you had that theatrical man to drive with you,” said Laura, bluntly.
“Why, how you talk! I merely met Signor Pizotti, and took him up——”
“You don’t know who he is,” spoke Laura.
“Oh, indeed, Miss! And do you?” demanded Lily, rather sharply.
“No, And I don’t want to know him.”
“He is a very scholarly man—and he knows all about staging this play. If it wasn’t for him, I guess, ‘The Spring Road’ would suffer from frost,” said Lily, with an unkind laugh.
“That may be,” said Laura, flushing a little herself, for any slur cast upon her chum’s play hurt her, too. “But his knowledge of how to produce or stage a play does not establish his private character.”
“Pooh! you are interfering in something that you know nothing about,” declared Miss Pendleton, loftily. “And it does not concern you at all.”
“I do not believe your mother would approve,” ventured Laura.
“Never you mind about my mother,” snapped Lily, and turned her back on Mother Wit.
The latter took herself to task later, thinking she had been too presumptuous.
“But really,” she said to Jess, on their way home that evening, “I did not mean to be. Only, the man looks so unreliable. I’m afraid of him.”
“I’m not afraid of him,” said Jess, decidedly. “I only dislike him. But there is no accounting for tastes. My mother knew of a foolish girl who wrote to an opera tenor—one of those handsome, spoiled foreigners, and she sent him her photograph and told him how much she liked his singing—and all that. Just a silly letter, you know. But she didn’t sign her name and she thought he would never learn who she was.
“But he went to the photographer,” continued Jess, “and bribed him to tell who the girl was, and by that time she had written to the man several times, and he had written to her. So then he threatened her that if she did not give him five hundred dollars he would send her letters to her father. And she was in dreadful trouble, for she was afraid of what her father would do.”
“Oh, Lil won’t do anything like that!” gasped Laura. “I don’t believe she even thinks she cares about that Pizotti. It is only his foreign way that makes it appear so. But I believe he is flattering her about her play, and perhaps will get money from her or her mother.”
“Pizotti! Ha!” grunted Jess, before they separated. “I’m like Bobby Hargrew: I don’t believe that’s even his name. It sounds too fancy to be a real name.”
But Mr. Pizotti was an able man in his business. He came from time to time to the M. O. R. house and his advice regarding the play was always practical. He was something of a musician, too, and played the accompaniments for the girls who sang in “The Spring Road.” He suggested improvements in the costumes, too; and Lily Pendleton was entirely guided by his taste in her choice of the gowns she was to wear in the production.
Mrs. Pendleton was a very busy woman in a social way and allowed her daughter to do about as she pleased. Lily aped the manners of girls who had long since graduated from school and were flashy in their dress and manners.
To tell the truth, the after-hour athletics, governed by Mrs. Case, had been the one saving thing in Lily Pendleton’s life for some months. She would have become so enamored of fashion and frivolity, had it not been for the call of athletics, that she would have fallen sadly behind in her school work.
But she liked certain activities enjoyed by those who were attentive to Mrs. Case’s classes; and to gain these privileges one had to stand well in her general studies. Lily was smart enough, was a quick student, and so kept up her school work.
This business of acting appealed to her immensely. She was “just crazy about it,” as she admitted to her particular friend, Hester Grimes.
“I wish my folks were poor, so that I would have to work when I leave school,” she declared. “Then I’d go on the stage myself.”
“You wouldn’t!” exclaimed Hester.
“I would in a minute. And this Signor Pizotti could place me very advantageously——”
“Pooh! you don’t believe anything that fellow says, do you?” demanded her chum, who was eminently practical and had none of the silly ideas in her head that troubled Lily.
“You don’t know him!” exclaimed Lily.
“Don’t want to,” replied Hester, gruffly.
Preparations for the first dress rehearsal of “The Spring Road” went on apace. But, of course, Bobby Hargrew would have bad luck! She was thrown from Short and Long’s bobsled one night and had to be helped home. The hurt to her foot was a small matter; but the doctor said she would have to wear her arm in a sling for a time.
“And how can I play Arista with my arm strapped to my side?” wailed Bobby, when Jess and Laura came in to commiserate with her over the accident. “Oh, dear me! I am the most unlucky person in the world. If it was raining soup I’d have a hole in my dipper!”
Mr. Monterey, the local manager, came himself to the dress rehearsal. He only sat out front, and watched and listened; and he went away without expressing an opinion to anybody. Yet Jess saw him there and was excited by the possibility of Mr. Monterey’s recognizing the value of the play for professional purposes.
At the Morse domicile things were going better, and the girl’s mind was vastly relieved from present troubles. Yet she was wise enough to see that in the offing the same danger of debt threatened them if they were not very, very careful.
It was true that scarcely half the prize money had been spent; yet Mrs. Morse’s regular work on the Courier barely fed them; and her success with the popular magazines was but fitful. Sometimes two months passed without her mother receiving even a ten-dollar check from her fugitive work.
Oh, if she could only find somebody who would take the play—after the M. O. R.’s had made use of it—and whip it into shape for professional use, and give her a part of the proceeds!
That was the thought continually knocking at the door of Jess Morse’s mind. It was “too good to be true,” yet she kept thinking about it, and hoping for the impossible, and dreaming of it.
However, the dress rehearsal of “The Spring Road” was pronounced by the teachers and Mr. Pizotti as eminently satisfactory. Bobby was letter-perfect in her part, if she did have “a damaged wing,” as she said. And most of the other important roles were well learned.
The very prettiest girl of Central High had been chosen for the chief female character, and in this case prettiness went with brains. She had learned her part, and was natural and graceful, and was altogether a delight.
As for Launcelot Darby, he was the most romantic looking Truant Lover that could have been found. And he played with feeling, too, although his mates were making a whole lot of fun of him on the side. But Laura had urged him to do his best, and Lance would have done anything in his power to please Mother Wit.
Chet Belding, as a peasant, “made up” well, and was letter perfect, too, in his part, if a little awkward. But that did not so much matter, considering the character he had to portray. And, of course, he would do nothing to belittle Jess’s play. His whole heart was in his work, too.
So, after that first dress rehearsal, the committee and Jess were hopeful of success. The time for the production of the play was set, the tickets printed, and out of school hours everything was in a bustle of preparation for the great occasion.
“Listen to this!”
Bobby Hargrew, her arm still in a sling, seized Jess Morse by the wrist and “tiptoed” along the corridor of the second wing of Central High, where the small offices were located, and with tragic expression pointed to a certain door that stood ajar.
Jess, amazed, did not speak, but listened. Out of the room came a muffled voice, but the words spoken were these:
“Unhand me! Nay, keep your distance, Count Mornay! I am no peasant wench to be charmed either by your gay coat or your gay manner. Ah! your villainies are known to me, nor can you hide the cloven hoof beneath the edge of Virtue’s robe.”
“Ha! ha!” chuckled Bobby, almost strangling with laughter. “He ought to have worn boots and so hidden his ‘cloven hoof.’ Come away, Jess, or I shall burst! Did you ever hear the like?”
“Why—why, what is it?” demanded Jess, mystified.
“Oh, don’t! Wait till I laugh!” chuckled Bobby, when they were around the corner of the corridor again. “Isn’t that rich?”
“Who was it talking?” asked Jess.
“Talking! Didn’t you recognize that oration?”
“I did not. Mother doesn’t allow me to read any penny-dreadful story papers, magazines or books.”
“Oh, ho! Wait!” gasped Bobby. “That’s Lil.”
“Lily Pendleton?”
“You evidently haven’t heard any of the ‘Duchess of Dusenberry’ before. That’s it!”
“Not part of her play?”
“That is one of the melodramatic bits,” said Bobby, weakly, leaning against the wall for support. “Yes, really, Jess. That is in her play. I’ve heard her recite it before.”
“My goodness me!” gasped Jess.
“It’s not all so bad, I guess. But when she gets flowery and romantic she just tears off such paragraphs as that. ‘Nor can you hide the cloven hoof beneath the edge of Virtue’s robe.’ Isn’t that a peach?”
“Bobby!” exclaimed Jess, breathless herself by now, “you use the worst slang of any girl in Central High.”
“That’s all right. But Lil’s using worse language than I ever dreamed of,” laughed Bobby. “I’ve heard her spouting that sort of stuff time and time again. When she shuts herself up, presumably to study her part in your play, half the time she is reciting her own lines. She likes the sound of ’em. And she had that Pizotti fellow backed in a corner of the front hall at the M. O. R. house the other afternoon, reciting that same sort of stuff to him.
“Repeating her play?”
“Yep. The silly! And he pretending that it was great, and applauding her. I’ll wager that he sees a way to make money out of Lil Pendleton, or he wouldn’t stand for it.”
Jess carried this idea in her mind, although she was not as much troubled by her schoolmate’s foolishness as was Mother Wit. There was a loyalty among the girls of Central High, however, that few ignored. Despite the fact that Jess had never especially liked Lily Pendleton, she would have done anything in her power to help her.
So, that very evening, when she was marketing, she chanced to see something that brought Lil’s affairs into her mind again. She was going into Mr. Vandergriff’s store when she saw a man, bundled in a big ulster, talking with the proprietor.
Griff came forward to wait on Jess, and the girl might not have noticed the man by the desk a second time had she not overheard Mr. Vandergriff say:
“You take advantage of my good nature, Abel. Because I knew you in the old country, you come here and plead poverty. I can’t see your family suffer, for your wife is a nice woman, if you are a rascal!”
“Hard words! Hard words, Vandergriff,” muttered the other.
Jess saw that he was a little man, and the high ulster collar muffled the lower part of his face. But as he turned toward the door she caught a glimpse of a glossy black mustache, and two beady black eyes.
It was Mr. Pizotti!
The girl was so astonished, for the man was shabbily dressed, and shuffled out with several bundles under his arm, that she could scarcely remember what else she wanted to buy when Griff asked her.
“Oh, I say, Griff!” she demanded, breathlessly, and in a whisper. “Who was that man who just went out?”
“Why—oh, that was only Abel Plornish.”
“Abel Plornish!”
“Yep. Poor, useless creature,” said the boy, with disgust. “Or, so father says. He knew Abel in England. You know, father came from London before he was married,” and Griff smiled.
“But this man—are you sure his name is Plornish?”
“Quite, Jess. Why, he plays the violin, or the piano, in some cheap moving picture place, I believe.”
“Then he is a musician?” demanded Jess, breathlessly.
“And a bad one, I reckon. But he has done other things. He’s been on the stage. And he’s even worked in the Centerport Opera House, I believe.”
“And that is really his name?” asked Jess.
“It’s an awful one, isn’t it? Plornish! Nothing very romantic or fancy about that,” laughed Griff. “Now, what else, Jess?”
Jess was so disturbed by this discovery that she could only think to ask Griff one more question. That related to where Plornish lived.
“Somewhere on Governor Street. I think it’s Number 9. Tenement house. Oh, they’re poor, and I believe when he gets any money he spends it on himself. I saw him once on Market Street dressed like a dandy. But when his wife and children come in here they look pretty shabby.”
It wasn’t very late, and, anyway, Jess couldn’t have slept that night without talking the matter over with Mother Wit. She left her basket in the kitchen, saw that her mother was busy at her desk, and ran up Whiffle Street hill to the Belding house.
“Is dat suah yo’, Miss Jess?” asked Mammy Jinny, peering out of the side door when Jess rang the bell. “Come right erlong in, honey. Yo’s jes’ as welcome as de flowers in de Maytime. B-r-r! ain’t it cold?”
“It is cold, Mammy,” said Jess to the Beldings’ old serving woman. “Where’s Laura?”
“She’s done gone up to her room ter listen ter Mars’ Chet an’ dat Lance Darby boy orate dem pieces dey is goin’ to recite in school nex’ week.”
“They are going to act in my play, Mammy!” cried Jess.
“Mebbe so. Mebbe so. But it’s all recitationin’ ter me. Dat leetle Bobby Hargrew was in here and she say it’s jes’ like w’en you-all useter recite at de Sunday night concerts in de Sunday school room. An’ dem pieces yo’ orated den was a hull lot nicer dan w’at Mars’ Chet is sayin’. ’Member how you recited dat ‘Leetle drops o’ water, leetle grains o’ sand’ piece, Miss Jess? Dat was suah a nice piece o’ po’try.”
“And you don’t care for the parts you have heard of my play, Mammy?” asked Jess, much amused.
“Suah ’nuff, now! Did you make up disher play dey is goin’ ter act?” demanded Mammy Jinny.
“I certainly did.”
“Wal, I hates ter hu’t yo’ feelin’s, Miss Jess,” said Mammy, gravely, “but dat ‘Leetle drops o’ water’ po’try was a hull lot better—ter my min’! Ya’as’m! yo kin’ go right up. Yo’ll hear dem-all a-spoutin’—spoutin’ jes’ like whales!”
And so she did. Chet was reading his lines with much unction while striding up and down Laura’s pretty little room. Lance and Mother Wit were his audience.
“For goodness sake, Chet!” cried Jess, breaking in. “Who told you your part was tragic, and that ‘The Spring Road’ was tragedy?”
“Huh?” questioned Chet, stopping short and blinking at her.
“Do read the lines naturally. Don’t be ‘orating,’ as Mammy Jinny calls it. I guess she’s right. ‘Little drops of water’ is better than all that bombastic stuff. Do, do, my dear, speak it naturally.”
“Hear her!” growled Chet “And she wrote it!”
“I never really meant it to sound like that, Chet,” declared Jess, shaking her head. “I really didn’t. Why! it sounds almost as bad as ‘The Duchess of Dawnleigh.’”
“Wha—what’s that?” demanded Lance.
“Not Lil’s play?” cried Laura. “Have you heard it?”
Jess told what she had heard at the door of the recitation room that afternoon, and they laughed over it.
“Yet I can see very well,” continued Jess, “that you actors can make my words sound just as absurd if you want to. Do, do be natural.”
“That’s what I tell them,” sighed Laura. “I am glad you heard Chet spouting here. One would think he was playing ‘Hamlet,’ or ‘Richard III.’”
Chet was a little miffed. But he soon “came out of it,” as Lance said, and he was so fond of Jess anyway that he would have tried his best to please her.
He grew more moderate in his “orating” and the girls, as critics, were better pleased. Lance took a leaf out of his chum’s book, too, and when he declaimed his lines he succeeded in pleasing Jess and Laura the first time. Besides, Lance was naturally a better actor than Chet.
Mr. Pizotti had taught them how to enter properly, and how to take their cues; but to Jess’s mind he was not the man to train amateurs to speak their parts with naturalness. If Miss Gould had not given so much time to the rehearsals of “The Spring Road” the play would have not been half the success it promised to be. And, of course, the Central High teacher gave her attention mainly to the girls in the cast of characters.