Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island Part 8

Poor Ann had neither--she was merely confused and miserable.

She saw the other girls of her room--and their close friends in the neighboring quartette--going cheerfully about the term's work. They had interests that the girl from the West, with her impoverished mind, could not even appreciate.

She had to study so hard--even some of the simplest lessons--that she had little time to learn games. She did not care for gymnasium work, although there were probably few girls at the school as muscular as herself. Tennis seemed silly to her. n.o.body rode at the Hall, and she longed to bestride a pony and dash off for a twenty-mile canter.

Nothing that she was used to doing on the ranch would appeal to these girls here--Ann was quite sure of that. Ruth and the others who had been with them for that all-too-short month at Silver Ranch seemed to have forgotten the riding, and the roping, and all.

Then, Helen had her violin--and loved it. Ruth was practicing singing all the time she could spare, for she was already a prominent member of the Glee Club. When the girl of the Red Mill sang, Ann Hicks felt her heart throb and the tears rise in her eyes. She loved Ruth's kind of music; yet she, herself, could not carry a tune.

Mercy was strictly attentive to her own books. Mercy was a bookworm--nor did she like being asked questions about her studies. Those first few weeks Ann Hicks's recitations did not receive very high marks.

Often some of the girls who did not know her very well laughed because she carried books belonging to the primary grade. Ann Hicks had many studies to make up that her mates had been drilled in while they were in the lower cla.s.ses.

One day at mail time (and in a boarding school that is a most important hour) Ann received a very tempting-looking box by parcel post. She had been initiated into the meaning of "boxes from home." Even Aunt Alvirah had sent a box to Ruth, filled with choicest homemade dainties.

Ann expected nothing like that. Uncle Bill would never think of it--and he wouldn't know what to buy, anyway. The box fairly startled the girl from Silver Ranch.

"What is it? Something good to eat, I bet," cried Heavy, who was on hand, of course. "Open it, Ann--do."

"Come on! Let's see what the goodies are," urged another girl, but who smiled behind her hand.

"I don't know who would send _me_ anything," said Ann, slowly.

"Never mind the address. Open it!" cried a third speaker, and had Ann noted it, she would have realized that some of the most trying girls in the school had suddenly surrounded her.

With trembling fingers she tore off the outside wrapper without seeing that the box had been mailed at the local post office--Lumberton!

A very decorative box was enclosed.

"H-m-m!" gasped Heavy. "Nothing less than fancy nougatines in _that_."

She was aiding the heartless throng, but did not know it. It would have never entered Heavy's mind to do a really mean thing.

Ann untied the narrow red ribbon. She raised the cover. Tissue paper covered something very choice----?

_A dunce cap._

For a moment Ann was stricken motionless. The girls about her shouted. One coa.r.s.e, thoughtless girl seized the cap, pulled it from the box, and clapped it on Ann Hicks's black hair.

The delighted crowd shouted more shrilly. Heavy was thunderstruck. Then she sputtered:

"Well! I never would have believed there was anybody so mean as that in the whole of Briarwood School."

But Ann, who had held in her temper as she governed a half-wild pony on the range, until this point, suddenly "let go all holts," as Bill Hicks would have expressed it.

She tore the cap from her head and stamped upon it and the fancy box it had come in. She struck right and left at the laughing, scornful faces of the girls who had so baited her.

Had it not been disgraceful, one might have been delighted with the change in the expression of those faces--and in the rapidity with which the change came about.

More than one blow landed fairly. The print of Ann's fingers was impressed in red upon the cheeks of those nearest to her. They ran screaming--some laughing, some angry.

Heavy's weight (for the fleshy girl had seized Ann about the waist) was all that made the enraged girl give over her pursuit of her tormentors.

Fortunately, Ruth herself came running to the spot. She got Ann away and sat by her all the afternoon in their room, making up her own delinquent lessons afterward.

But the affair could not be pa.s.sed over without comment. Some of the girls had reported Ann's actions. Of course, such a disgraceful thing as a girl slapping another was seldom heard of in Briarwood. Mrs. Tellingham, who knew very well where the blame lay, dared not let the matter go without punis.h.i.+ng Ann, however.

"I am grieved that one of our girls--a young lady in the junior grade--should so forget herself," said the princ.i.p.al. "Whatever may have been the temptation, such an exhibition of temper cannot be allowed. I am sure she will not yield to it again; nor shall I pa.s.s leniently over the person who may again be the cause of Ann Hicks losing her temper."

This seemed to Ann to be "the last straw." "She might have better put me in the primary grade in the beginning," the ranch girl said, spitefully.

"Then I wouldn't have been among those who despise me. I hate them all!

I'll just get away from here----"

But the thought of running away a second time rather troubled her. She had worried her uncle greatly the first time she had done so. Now he was sure she was in such good hands that she wouldn't wish to run away.

Ann knew that she could not blame Ruth Fielding, and the other girls who were always kind to her. She merely shrank from being with them, when they knew so much more than she did.

It was her pride that was hurt. Had she taken the teasing of the meaner girls in a wiser spirit, she knew they would not have sent her the dunce cap. They continued to tease her because they knew they could hurt her.

"I--I wish I could show them I could do things that they never dreamed of doing!" muttered Ann, angrily, yet wistfully, too. "I'd like to fling a rope, or manage a bad bronc', or something they never saw a girl do before.

"Book learning isn't everything. Oh! I have half a mind to give up and go back to the ranch. n.o.body made fun of me out there--they didn't dare! And our folks are too kind to tease that way, anyhow," thought the western girl.

"Uncle Bill is just paying out his good money for nothing. He said Ruth was a little lady--and Helen, too. I knew he wanted me to be the same, after he got acquainted with them and saw how fine they were.

"But you sure 'can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.' That's as certain as shootin'! If I stay here I've got a mighty hard row to hoe--and--and I don't believe I've got the pluck to hoe it." Ann groaned, and shook her tousled black head.

CHAPTER VIII

JERRY SHEMING AGAIN

Ruth, with all the fun and study of the opening of the fall term at Briarwood, could not entirely forget Jerry Sheming. More particularly did she think of him because of the invitation Belle Tingley had extended to her the day of their arrival.

It was a coincidence that none of the other girls appreciated, for none of them had talked much with the young fellow who had saved Ann Hicks from the wrecked car at Applegate Crossing. Even Ann herself had not become as friendly with the boy as had Ruth.

The fact that he had lived a good share of his life on the very island Belle said her father had bought for a hunting camp, served to spur Ruth's interest in both the youth and the island itself. Then, what Jerry had told her about his uncle's lost treasure box added to the zest of the affair.

Somewhere on the island Peter Tilton had lost a box containing money and private papers. Jerry believed it to have been buried by a landslide that had occurred months before.

There must be something in this story, or why should "Uncle Pete," as Jerry called him, have lost his mind over the catastrophe? Uncle Pete must be really mad or they would not have shut him up in the county asylum.

The loss of the papers supposed to be in the box made it possible for some man named Blent to cheat the old hunter out of his holdings on Cliff Island.

Not for a moment did Ruth suppose that Mr. Tingley, Belle's father, was a party to any scheme for cheating the old hunter. It was the work of the man Blent--if true.

Ruth was very curious--and very much interested. Few letters ever pa.s.sed between her and the Red Mill. Aunt Alvirah's gnarled and twisted fingers did not take kindly to the pen; and Uncle Jabez loved better to add up his earnings than to spend an evening retailing the gossip of the Mill for his grandniece to peruse.