Betty Gordon at Boarding School Part 24

"How can I get out?" she cried aloud, a little wildly. "I can't breathe!"

In the uncanny silence that followed the sound of her voice, the sawing noise sounded regularly, rhythmically. In desperation Betty seized an iron crowbar she had backed into on the wall, and hurled it in the direction of the industrious rodents.

"Now I've done it," she admitted, as with a clatter and a bang that, she was sure, could be heard a mile away, an evident avalanche of tools tumbled to the floor. Her crowbar had struck a box of tools.

But the silence shut down again after that. Betty did not realize that the water tower was so isolated that even unusual noises inside it would not carry far, and with the door and the window both closed the room was practically sealed.

The sawing noise was not repeated, there was that much to be grateful for, Betty reflected. She wondered if she could batter down the door.

"I'll try, anyway," she thought wearily.

And then she could not find the crowbar! Around and around she went, feeling on the floor for the tools that had clattered down with such a racket and for the iron bar she had hurled among them. Not one tool could she put her hands on.

"I must be going crazy," she cried in despair. "I couldn't have dreamed those tools fell down, and yet where could they have gone? There's no hole in the floor--"

Now Betty's nerves were sorely tried by the lonely imprisonment, the bad air, the heat, and the darkness, and it is not to be wondered at that her usual sound common sense was tricked by her imagination. Her fancy suggested that the weight of the tools might have torn a hole in the floor, they might have dropped through to the roof, and Betty herself might be in momentary danger of stepping into this hole.

Nonsense? Well, wiser minds have conceived wilder possibilities under similar trying conditions.

"I won't walk another step!" cried poor Betty, as she visioned this yawning hole. "Not another step. I'll wait till it's light."

But she waited, fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes, and the darkness if anything grew blacker. She had no idea how long she had been locked in the room, and she could not calculate how far off the morning might be.

"I'll put my hands out before me and creep," she said finally. "That ought to be safe. Perhaps I can find something to stand on to reach that window. I guess I could drop to the roof from there."

Stiffly and painfully, she began to crawl, holding out her hands before her and starting back time and again as she fancied she felt an opening just ahead. But when she brought up against a step ladder she forgot her fears in the joy of her discovery.

It was a short ladder, but she dragged it over to the window and put it in place and mounted it, all in the twinkling of an eye. By stretching to her full height, she was able to raise the creaky window, but to her dismay the roof offered a very long drop. She had not realized how high she had climbed.

"Dave was fussing with ropes and buckets the other day," she recalled.

"Now I wonder--wouldn't it be the best luck in the world if I could find a rope?"

Hope was singing high in her heart now, but she almost despaired of such good fortune after a diligent search. Then something told her to feel about again on the floor. Round and round she went, getting her fingers into spider webs and sticky substances that renewed her inward shudders because she could not identify them. And when she found the rope, a tarry coil, she also solved the mystery of the tools. They had fallen down behind the coil of rope and were effectively fenced off from the circle of floor explored by the bewildered Betty.

It was the work of a moment to tie one end of the rope to a heavy staple driven under the window sill, and then, closing her eyes to the pitch black void beneath her, Betty let herself slide down to the roof. Her hands were cruelly scratched by the rope fibres and she was too tired to care about the evidences of her flight.

"If anybody wants to know about that rope and the locked door, let 'em!"

she sighed defiantly.

Bobby woke up as Betty came in the door, and then there were questions galore to be answered. Betty was covered with dust and her clothing was torn and rumpled. Bobby declared she looked as if she had been to war.

"I feel it," admitted Betty. "Let me take a hot bath and get into bed.

And, Bobby, promise me on your word of honor that you'll call me in the morning. Whoever locked me in expects me to stay there till I'm missed, and I want to walk into breakfast as usual."

She half regretted her instructions when Bobby called her at seven the next morning, but Betty was nothing if not gritty, and she sleepily struggled into her clothes. Ada Nansen's look of utter astonishment when she saw Betty come into the dining room with the rest for breakfast told those in the secret what they had already suspected.

"Bobby must have heard her listening at our door last night," said Betty. "What am I going to do? Why nothing, of course! That was part of the stunt, or at least I'm going to consider it so. My card is there, so they'll know I fulfilled my part."

Dave McGuire scratched his head when he found the rope and the open window, but he wisely said nothing. He had two keys, and one he had loaned at the request of the senior cla.s.s president to a fellow student.

The other key, for emergency use, hung on a nail in the fourth story hall. That was the key Dave found in the door lock when he made his early morning tour of inspection. "But the young folks must be having their fun," he said indulgently, "and, short of burning down the place, 'tis not Dave McGuire who will be interfering with 'em."

Mid-term tests were approaching. Bobby, who, with all her love of fun, was a hard student, felt prepared and went around serenely. Constance Howard had, most humanly, neglected, so far as the teacher of mathematics permitted, the study that was hardest for her, her algebra. She now spent hours in "cramming" on this, meanwhile complaining to those of her special chums who would listen to her of "the unfairness of being made to study algebra."

"I can add--with the use of my fingers--and subtract and divide and multiply--at least I know the tables up through the twelves. Of what use will a's and b's and x's, y's and z's ever be to me?"

"Constance, you know that's nonsense," Bobby told her. "We're every one of us here because we want to play a bigger part in life than the two-plus-two-is-four people, and we've got to dig in and prepare ourselves. If you'd do your work when you ought to, you wouldn't be in such an upset state now."

"Yes'm," grinned Constance, and went back to her belated work.

Betty had found that her year away from school had made it hard for her to concentrate her mind on her studies, and while she had not deliberately neglected her work, as Constance had in her algebra, she had not always kept up to the highest pitch. She was working furiously now, with the tests to face so soon, and with it went the resolve to be more studious from day to day during the rest of the school year. The concentration was becoming easier, too, as the term advanced, and, the teaching at Shadyside being of the best, she felt sure she would feel that she had accomplished something by the end of the year.

The Dramatic Club of Shadyside woke to ambition as the term progressed.

Soon after the mid-term tests, which all the girls, even Constance, pa.s.sed successfully, by dint of threat and bribery, each student was "tried out" and her ability duly catalogued.

Betty liked to act, and proved to have a natural talent, while Bobby, professing a great love for things theatrical, was hopeless on the stage.

Her efforts either moved her coaches to helpless laughter or caused them to retire in indignant tears.

"She is--what you call it?--impossible!" sighed Madame, the French teacher, shaking her head after witnessing one rehearsal in which Bobby, as the villain, had convulsed the actors as well as the student audience.

"Well then, I'll be a stage hand," declared Bobby, whose feelings were impervious to slights. "I'm going to have something to do with this play!"

Ada Nansen was eager to be a.s.signed a part--the players were chosen on merit--and she aspired modestly to the leading role, mainly because, the girls hinted, the heroine wore a red velvet dress with a train and a string of pearls.

But Ada, it developed, was worse than Bobby as an actress. She was self-conscious, impatient of correction, and so arrogant toward the other players that even gentle Alice Guerin was roused to retort.

"I haven't been a.s.signed the maid's part yet!" she flashed, when Ada ordered her to remove several stage properties that were in the way.

"Give it to her, Alice!" encouraged the mischievous Bobby. "That girl would ruffle an angel."

Alice and Norma were both valuable additions to the Dramatic Club ranks. Norma especially proved to be a find, and she was given the hero's part after the first rehearsal while Alice was the heroine's mother. Betty, much to her surprise, was posted on the bulletin board as the "leading lady."

Down toward the end of the list of the cast was Ada Nansen's name as "the maid."

"She'll be furious," whispered Bobby. "Miss Anderson told Miss Sharpe, when she didn't think I could hear, that Ada wasn't really good enough to be the maid, but that they hoped she would sing for them between the acts. Miss Anderson said if they didn't let her have some part she'd be so sulky she wouldn't sing."

A rehearsal was held in the gymnasium after school that afternoon, and as she went through her first act Betty was uncomfortably conscious of Ada's glowering eyes following her. When the cue was given for the maid, Ada did not move.

"That's your cue, Ada," called Miss Anderson patiently.

"I've resigned, Miss Anderson," said Ada clearly. "It's a little too much to ask me to play maid to two charity students."

Norma and Alice shrank back, but Betty sprang forward.

"How dare you!" she flared, white with rage. "How dare you say such a thing! It's untrue, and you know it. Even if it were so, you have no right to say such an outrageous thing."

Betty was angrier than she had ever been in her life. She possessed a lively temper and was no meeker than she should be, but during the past summer she had learned to control herself fairly well. Ada's cruel taunt, directed with such a sneer at the Guerin sisters that every girl knew whom she meant, had sent Betty's temper to the boiling point.

"Easy, easy, Betty," counseled Miss Anderson, putting an arm about the shaking girl. "You're not mending matters, you know."