A little wrangle seemed to have begun before Ruth arrived, and the senior thought to settle the difficulty and start the day with "clear decks," by getting at the seat of the trouble.
"What is the matter, Mary Pease?" she asked a flushed and indignant girl who was angrily glaring at another. "Calm down, honey. Don"t let your anger rise."
"If Amy Gregg says again that I took her gold pen, I"ll tell something about _her_ she won"t like, now I warn her!" threatened Mary.
"Well, it"s gone!" stormed Amy, "and you"re the nearest. I"d like to know who took it if you didn"t?"
"Well! of all the nerve! I want you to understand that I don"t have to steal pens."
"Hold on, girls," put in Ruth. "This must not go on. You know, I shall be obliged to report you both."
"Of course!" snarled Amy. "You big girls are always telling on us."
"Oh!" and "Shame!" was the general murmur about the cla.s.sroom; for most of the girls loved Ruth.
"Why, you nasty thing!" cried Mary Pease, glaring at Amy. "You ought to be ashamed. I"ll tell what I know about _you_!"
"Mary!" exclaimed Ruth, with sudden fright. "Be still."
"I guess you don"t know what I know about Gregg, Ruth Fielding," cried the excited Mary.
"We do not want to know," Ruth said hastily. "Let us stop this wrangling and turn to our work. Suppose Miss Brokaw should come in?"
"And I guess Miss Brokaw or anybody would want to know what I saw that night of the fire," declared Mary Pease, wildly. "_I_ know whose room the fire started in, and _how_ it started."
"Mary!" cried Ruth, rising from her seat, while the girls of the cla.s.s uttered wondering exclamations.
But Mary was hysterical now.
"I saw a light in _her_ room!" she cried, pointing an accusing finger at the white-faced and shaking Amy. "I peeped through the keyhole, and it was a candle burning on her table. She said she didn"t have a candle. Bah!"
"Be still, Mary!" commanded Ruth again.
Amy Gregg was terror-stricken and shrank away from her accuser; but the latter was too excited to heed Ruth.
"I know all about it. So does Miss Scrimp. I told her. That Amy Gregg left the candle burning when she went to supper and it fell off her table into the waste basket.
"And that," concluded Mary Pease, "was how the fire started that burned down the West Dormitory, and I don"t care who knows it, so there!"
CHAPTER XVII
ANOTHER OF CURLY"S TRICKS
Miss Scrimp, the matron of the old West Dormitory, had bound Mary Pease to secrecy. But, as Jennie put it, "the binding did not hold and _Pease_ spilled the _beans_."
The story flew over the school like wildfire. Miss Scrimp, actually in tears, was inclined to blame Ruth Fielding for the outbreak of the story.
"You ought to have taken Mary Pease and run her right into a closet!"
declared the matron. "Such behavior!"
Ruth was a good deal chagrined that the story should have come out while she was monitor; but she really did not see how she could have helped it.
The quarrel between Amy Gregg and Mary Pease had commenced before Ruth had gone into the cla.s.sroom.
"And how could you help it?" cried the faithful Jennie. "I expect little Pease has been aching to tell all these weeks. She should have been quarantined, in the first place."
But there was nothing to do about it now, save "to pick up the pieces."
And that was no light task. Feeling ran high in Briarwood Hall against Amy Gregg.
Some of the girls of her own age would not speak to her. Many of the older girls made her feel by every glance and word they gave her that she was taboo. And it was whispered on the campus that Amy would be sent home by Mrs. Tellingham, if she could not be made to pay, or her folks be made to pay, something toward the damage her carelessness had brought about.
Ruth sheltered the unfortunate Amy all she could. She even influenced her closest friends to be kind to the child. At Mrs. Sadoc Smith"s Helen and Ann did not speak of the discovery of the origin of the fire, and, of course, good-natured Jennie Stone did just as Ruth asked, while even Mercy Curtis kept her lips closed.
Amy, however, not being an utterly callous girl, felt the condemnation of the whole school. There was no escaping that.
Amy had denied having a candle on the night of the fire, and it shocked and grieved Mrs. Tellingham very much to learn that one of her girls was not to be trusted to speak the truth at all times.
Not because of the fire did the preceptress consider sending Amy Gregg home, for the origin of the fire was plainly an accident, though bred in carelessness. For prevarication, however, Mrs. Tellingham was tempted to expel Amy Gregg.
The girl had denied the fact that she had left a candle burning in her room when she went to supper. Mary Pease had seen it, and both Miss Scrimp and Ruth Fielding knew that the fire started in that particular room.
Why the girl had left the candle burning was another mystery. Recklessly denying the main fact, of course Amy would not explain the secondary mystery. Nagged and heckled by some of the soph.o.m.ores and juniors, Amy declared she wished the whole school had burned down and then she would not have had to stay at Briarwood another day!
Ruth and Helen one day rescued the girl from the midst of a mob of larger girls who were driving Amy Gregg almost mad by taunting her with being a "fire bug."
"What are you wild animals doing?" demanded Helen, who was much sharper with the evil doers among the under cla.s.ses than was Ruth. "So she"s a "fire-bug?" Oh, girls! what better are you than poor little Gregg, I"d like to know? Every soul of you has done worse things than she has done--only your acts did not have such appalling results. Behave yourselves!"
Ruth could not have talked that way to the girls; but many of them slunk away under Helen"s reprimand. Ruth took the crying Amy away--but neither she nor Helen was thanked.
"I wish you girls would mind your own business and let me alone," sobbed the foolish child, hysterically. "I can fight my own battles, I"ll tear their hair out! I"ll scratch their faces for them!"
"Oh, dear me, Amy!" sighed Ruth. "Do you think that would be any real satisfaction to you? Would it change things for the better, or in the least?"
What made the girls so unfeeling toward Amy was the fact that from the beginning she had expressed no sorrow over the destruction of the dormitory, and that she had refused to write home to ask for a contribution to the fund being raised for the new building.
When every other girl at Briarwood Hall was doing her best to get money to help Mrs. Tellingham, Amy Gregg"s callousness regarding the fire and its results showed up, said Jennie, "just like a stubbed toe on a bare-footed boy!"
Really, Ruth began to think she would have to act as guard for Amy Gregg to and from the school. The girl was not allowed to play with the other girls of her age. Wherever she went a small riot started.
It had become general knowledge that Amy Gregg"s father was a wealthy man, and that the family lived very sumptuously. Amy had a stepmother and several half brothers and sisters; but she did not get along well with them and, therefore, her father had sent her to Briarwood Hall.
"I guess she was too mean at home for them to stand her," said Mary Pease, who was the most vindictive of Amy"s cla.s.s, "and they sent her here to trouble _us_. And see what she"s done!"
There was no stopping the younger girls from nagging. The fact that so much was being done by others to help the dormitory fund kept the feud against Amy Gregg alive. Her one partisan at this time (for Ruth could not be called that, no matter how sorry she was for her) was Curly Smith.