Jane Allen, Junior Part 20

Jane yelled in delight at the discovery and pointed it out to Dozia.

"Don't touch it!" whispered Dozia. "It may be inhabited!"

"Bos.h.!.+" roared Jane, laying hold of a dangling armlet.

As she did so the chains rattled! The metallic clangings clanged and the whole array of ghostly noises sounded out in the unholy hour of three o'clock broad daylight!

"The ghost! The ghost!" boomed Jane. "Dozia, see, this thing is hung so it goes off at a touch. Oh, isn't it delicious! To have found it and this way."

"I'm nervous watching that disappearing door," whined Dozia.

"Suppose we should get walled up in here, just two babes in the tower?"

"I'm going to get this thing down and show it to the girls," defied Jane. "Oh, Dozia, look there--a companion. One for you and one for me. Let's get into them and go down stairs. The girls will be there and--"

"Say, little girl!" drawled Dozia. "Do you expect me to get in under that sc.r.a.p iron works?"

"It's all padded," interrupted the excited Jane. "Here," she had the armor off its big hook and simply made Dozia hold the tumbling parts. "There's the helmet, the visor and these---"

"The trunks," said Dozia. "Cute little rompers, aren't they?"

"Called tonlets," said the intelligent Jane, sighing under the weight of the outfit she was trying to s.h.i.+ft to a trunk and a couple of boxes.

"I'd hate to have to get in that for a fire," remarked Dozia. She was, however, trying on the scaly breastplate, and attempting to poke her head into the helmet. "Are you sure this stuff is no world's war relic? I wouldn't care to rub shoulders with some old Prussian guard."

"Why, girlie, aside from bagging the ghost, I think we have made a great discovery. Think of this acquisition to Wellington!" and then Jane proceeded to dress up.

But things rattled and fell off almost as often as they were put on, and it was not an easy matter to get inside of anything pertaining to this dilapidated costume.

When an old sword dropped from its hook on a rafter, Jane danced in glee and declared "a ghost did it," although Dozia insisted she had cut a piece of cord on that very hook. Finally Jane was "canned," as Dozia described the state of being inside of tin things, and an attempt was made to move.

"If we should fall--" suggested Jane.

But they didn't.

CHAPTER XVII

"BEHOLD THE GHOST OF LENOX HALL!"

Dozia insisted on carrying the "tin rompers" down stairs in her hands and donning them in a convenient place to avoid possible disaster.

"Yours are shorter and jauntier than mine, Jane," she argued.

"Besides, you have a better figure for tonlets. Come along, I'll stop at the landing and buckle into the things. Give me a couple of chains. Don't they chime beautifully?"

"Wait a minute," Jane ordered. "I just discovered the usual slip of paper." She was extracting it from an armlet. "It's quite new and very modern, in fact regular typewriting kind--"

"Oh, tuck it away and come along," Dozia moaned. "I hear the horde howling and the sooner I get this stuff off the better I'll feel.

Pickles! but it's heavy."

Jane folded the slip of paper and made it secure some place, then they proceeded to forge their way into the recreation room on the second floor, whither the students had been hastily summoned by the matron.

"Now I know how the baby tanks felt in the big war," panted Jane, who was valiantly leading the way. "I mean those big human machines that rolled over the earth and ploughed things down, as they went."

"Say, Janie, just wait a minute," begged Dozia at the first landing.

"This looks a little like a joke but who is the joker? Who got up in that place and rattled these nightly? Also, who let out that wild scream we heard on that first night?" She was talking quickly and in a subdued voice. "We may be breaking the spell by raiding the secret chamber, but suppose the old spook breaks out in a new spot?"

"I've thought of all that," confessed Jane, her smile threatening to unhinge the visor. "But we must give the youngsters their show first. The details will be lost in their joy of rescue."

"They come! They come!" called out Miss Gifford in an uncertain treble. She had been waiting to give this signal.

"Land, I'm losing the panties," groaned Dozia, trying to hold up the tonlets with one hand while she made wild grabs all over the outfit with the other. Dozia's artistic effect was surely in jeopardy.

Majestically the two big, black walnut doors swung back, and the crusaders pa.s.sed between them.

"Behold the ghosts of Lenox Hall!" cried out Jane tragically.

"Behold, behold!" echoed Dozia, raising her arm in its chained gusset and attempting to salute at the peak of her helmet.

Shouts from the girls spoiled further efforts at the theatrical, and presently it was no longer a question of holding the old armor in place, but rather that of getting out of it safely, for what those freshmen didn't say and do to those ghosts!

"Nothing but strung up dishrags," sneered Maud Leslie. "They must have looted every hardware store in town for these. Look!"

She sacrilegiously yanked from their wire strings the metal dishcloths such as are used for scouring purposes, and truth to tell there was indeed a big collection in the string of armor.

"Let's try the breastplate," begged Nellie Saunders. "I've always longed to be a Joan of Arc." And she got her pretty hair inside the head cage with the mouth trap under her chin, then she corseted on the breastplate.

"And THAT'S the ghost?" scoffed Margie Winters, sitting far off in the corner safe from "spiritual" infection.

"Disappointed?" asked Jane.

"Of course I am," growled Margie. "I expected a holiday at least to fumigate, and here we have nothing but a lot of perfectly sanitary junk."

"And I thought we would find a beautiful maniac walled up there,"

sighed Velma Sigsbee. "It's a perfect shame to have the thing end so unromantically."

"Hard to suit you youngsters," commented Jane. She had fully divested herself of the trappings, and now stood aside while the freshmen surveyed the wreck. Someone suggested getting up surprise theatricals and bringing before the whole college the "ghosts of Lenox," This was a fuse to the bomb of excitement, and presently the roll was called, secrecy pledged, and a committee of arrangements appointed. Prompt freshmen!

"Give Sally Howland a part," called out Ruth Lawrence. "She's just suited for something angelic."

"We'll transpose Oth.e.l.lo and sprinkle it with cherubs," said Nellie Saunders, who had been made chairman of the cast. "But the one thing to remember, girls, is secrecy," she announced loftily. "No one outside of Lenox must know what the ghosts are, or anything about the show."

"You'll find tons of stuff up there to fit out the entire performance," Jane informed the excited students. "It seems to me the things have been stored there for ages, and perhaps were the remains of some very grand affair in the early history of Wellington. Now, girls, are you fully satisfied the ghost is annihilated?"

"Perfectly," spoke up Nellie. "And we just don't know how to thank you juniors. Cheers, girls, for our rescuers."

They cheered with the freshmen's dirge.