The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross.
by Gertrude W. Morrison.
CHAPTER I
THE ODDEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED
"Well, if that isn"t the oddest thing that ever happened!" murmured Laura Belding, sitting straight up on the stool before the high desk in her father"s gla.s.s-enclosed office, from which elevation she could look down the long aisles of his jewelry store and out into Market Street, Centerport"s main business thoroughfare.
But Laura was not looking down the vista of the electrically lighted shop and into the icy street. Instead, she gave her attention to that which lay right under her eyes upon the desk top. She looked first at the neat figures she had written upon the page of the day ledger, after carefully proving them, and thence at the packet of bills and piles of coin on the desk at her right hand.
"It is the oddest thing that ever happened," she affirmed, as though in answer to her own first declaration.
It was Sat.u.r.day evening, and it was always Laura"s duty to straighten out her father"s books for him on that day, for although she was a high school girl, she was usually so well prepared in her studies that she could give the books proper attention weekly. Laura had taken a course in bookkeeping and she was quite familiar with the business of keeping a simple set of books like these.
She never let the day ledger and the cash get far apart. It was her custom to strike a balance weekly, and this she was doing at this time. Or she was trying to! But there seemed to be something entirely wrong with the cash itself.
She knew that the figures on the ledger were correct. She had asked her father, and even Chet, her brother, who was helping in the store this evening, if either of them had taken out any cash without setting the sum down in the proper record.
"It is an even fifty dollars--neither more nor less," she had told them, with a puzzled little frown corrugating her pretty forehead.
They had both denied any such act--Chet, of course, vigorously.
"What kind of hardware are you trying to hang on me, Mother Wit?" he demanded of his sister. "I know Christmas will soon be on top of us, and a fellow needs all the money there is in the world to buy even one girl a decent present. But I a.s.sure you I haven"t taken to nicking papa"s cash drawer."
"I don"t know but mother is right," Laura sighed. "Your language is becoming something to listen to with fear and trembling. And I am not accusing you, Chetwood. I"m only asking you!"
"And I"m only answering you--emphatically," chuckled her brother.
"It is no laughing matter when you cannot find fifty dollars," she told him.
"You"d better stir your wits a little, then, Sis," he advised. "You know Jess and Lance will be along soon and we were all going shopping together, and skating afterward. Lance and I want to practice our grapevine whirl."
But being advised to hurry did not help. For half an hour since Chet had last spoken the girl had sat in a web of mystery that fairly made her head spin! Her ledger figures were proved over and over again. But the cash!
Then once more she bent to her task.
The piles of coin were all right she finally decided. She counted them over and over again, and they came to the same penny exactly. So she pushed the coin aside.
Then she slowly and carefully counted again the bank-notes, turning them one by one face down from left to right. The amount, added to the sum of the coins, was equal to the figures on the ledger. Then she did what she had already done ten or a dozen times. She recounted the bills, turning them from right to left.
She was fifty dollars short!
Christmas was approaching, and the Belding jewelry store was, of course, rather busier than at other seasons. That was why Chet Belding was helping out behind the counters. Out there, he kept a closer watch on the front door than Laura, with her financial trouble, could.
Suddenly he darted down the long room to welcome a group of young people who pushed open the jewelry-store door. They burst in with a hail of merry voices and a clatter of tongues that drowned every other sound in the store for a minute, although there were but four of them.
"Easy! Easy!" begged Mr. Belding, who was giving his attention to a customer near the front of the store. "Take your friends back to Laura"s coop, Chetwood."
Hushed for the moment, the party drifted back toward Laura"s desk. The young girl was still too deeply engaged with the ledger and cash to look up at first.
"What is the matter, Mother Wit?" demanded the taller of the two girls who had just come in--a most attractive-looking maiden, whom Chet had at once taken on his arm.
"Engine trouble," chuckled Laura"s brother. "The old thing just won"t budge! Isn"t that it, Laura?"
The tall youth--dark and delightfully romantic-looking, any girl would have told you--went around into the little office and looked over Laura"s shoulder.
"What"s gone wrong, Laura?" he asked, with sympathy in his voice and manner.
"You want to get a move on, Mother Wit!" cried the youngest girl of the troop, saucy looking, and with ruddy cheeks and flyaway curls. This was Clara Hargrew, whom her friends called Bobby, and whose father kept the big grocery store just a block away from the Belding jewelry store. "Everybody will have picked over the presents in all the stores and got the best of everything before we get there."
"That"s right," said the last member of the group; and this was a short and st.u.r.dy boy who had the same mischievous twinkle in his eye that Bobby Hargrew displayed.
His name was Long, and because he was short, everybody at Central High (save the teachers, of course) called him "Short and Long." He and Bobby Hargrew were what hopeless grown folk called "a team!" When they were not hatching up some ridiculous trick together, they were separately in mischief.
"But you say Short and Long has done some of his Christmas shopping already," Jess Morse, the tall visitor, said. "Just think, Laura! He has sent Purt Sweet his annual present."
"So soon?" said Laura Belding, but with her mind scarcely on what her friends were saying. "And Thanksgiving is only just pa.s.sed!"
"I thought I"d better be early," said Short and Long, with solemn countenance. "I wrote "Not to be opened till Christmas" upon the package."
Bobby and Jess and Lance burst into giggles. "Let"s have the joke!"
demanded Chet. "What did you send the poor fish, Short?"
"You guessed it! You guessed it, Chet Belding!" cried Bobby. "Aren"t you a clever lad?"
"What do you mean?" asked Laura, now becoming more seriously interested.
"Why," Jess Morse said, "he got a codfish down at the market and wrapped it up in a lot of paper and put it in a long, beautifully decorated Christmas box. If Purt Sweet keeps that box without opening it until Christmas, I am afraid the Board of Health will be making inquiries about the Sweet premises."
"You scamp!" exclaimed Laura sternly, to Short and Long.
"He"s all right!" declared Bobby warmly. "You know just how mean and stingy Purt Sweet is--and his mother has more money than anybody else in Centerport. Last Christmas, d"you know what Purt did?"
"Something silly, of course," Laura said.
"I don"t know what you call silly. I call it mean," declared the smaller girl. "Purt got it noised abroad that he was going to give a present to every fellow in his cla.s.s--didn"t he, Short?"
"That"s what he did," said Billy Long, taking up the story. "And the day before Christmas he got us all over to his house and offered each of us a drink of ice-water! And some of the kids had been foolish enough to buy him things--and give "em to him ahead of time, too!"
"Serves you right for being so piggish," commented Chet.
"It was a mean trick," agreed Laura, "for some of the boys in Purt"s grade are much younger than he is. But this idea of giving Christmas presents because you expect something in return----"
"Is pretty small potatoes," finished Lance Darby, the dark youth. "But what"s the matter here, Laura?" he added. "I"ve counted these bills and they are just exactly right by those figures you have set down there."
"You turned them from left to right as you counted, Lance," cried Laura.