Jane Allen, Junior Part 13

"I shan't bang unless there is nothing else to do, and then I'm sure I can explain. A Montana girl from a real ranch ought to have some credit for field work." Jane was twirling her capable bra.s.sie with rather a dangerous swing and the odd weapon now seemed formidable indeed.

"What's that?" exclaimed Dozia, as a shadow almost tripped them.

"It's an animal I know but--"

"A frightened little rabbit," replied Jane. "They have a lovely time when the thoughtless girls are safe behind doors. But, Dozia, honestly I think I do see something else--bigger than--a rabbit!"

Both girls stopped suddenly and drew back in the shadow of a tall lilac bush. They were well across the campus and now, at the end of the path, near the gate and not far from Lenox Hall, something moved in and out of the moonlit way. It seemed to cross from the big stone wall and glide into the grove of magnolia.

Jane dropped Dozia's arm and stepped out to peer after the shadow.

They were scarcely near enough to hear footfalls even had the padding of leaves and heavy gra.s.s not actually deadened that possibility.

"Lively ghost!" she whispered. "Let's head it off through the grove."

"But, Jane, it may be some dangerous prowler--"

"How could he get in here? Besides we are protected." She had the golf club firm in her right hand and seemed to depend on it to lay ghosts or prowlers. "Come on, Dozia. Of course that is not a bona fide ghost but it may be the noise maker."

Dozia followed Jane, although she did hang on to an end of the blue cape and pulled back whenever the darkness seemed too uncertain of penetration. The little thickets of ornamental evergreens suddenly loomed up into proportions of veritable forests, and every baby Christmas tree was swelled out like a circular blue fir, thick and p.r.i.c.kly.

But Jane headed straight as the foliage allowed, across the campus to the magnolia grove, where the eucalyptus trees shot up bare and leafless, ghostly, spectral in the searching moonlight.

A crisp snapping of some dry brambles sent out an alarm from the hedges close to Lenox Hall and the girls listened anxiously.

"Human," whispered Jane, "and rather dainty. Hardly a masculine foot to that light touch. Don't be alarmed, Dozia. We are two to one and evidently that other one is a female." She said this with a.s.sumed confidence, for she feared Dozia might turn and run at any moment.

They were almost in the little grove and it was between there and the boxwood that touched the side porch of Lenox that this hidden thing must be. Jane was by no means as brave as her carefree manner indicated, and every time she held a bush from brushing Dozia's face she took occasion to listen intently for vagrant noises.

Stumbling over low underbrush in their rubber soled tennis shoes was not like walking out in the open, and just as Dozia breathed a sigh of relief that the landscape gardening went no further, a wild scream, shrill and piercing, cut the night like an arrow!

Speechless, the girls stood terrified, while the wail seemed to linger suspended somewhere!

"Oh, what was it?" gasped Dozia, but Jane clung to her arm in silence.

The next instant a clanging of chains and rattling of metals broke out from Lenox Hall.

"Quick," exclaimed Jane, almost dragging her companion forward, "we must locate it, we must reach the dormitory!" But before they could even gain the pathway, the big fire bell pealed out its alarm and; suddenly every window in Lenox Hall blazed with light at a single flash--the answer of that electric b.u.t.ton pressed by the matron, who now swung open the big oaken door and stood summoning her frightened charges to "come out" in the order of fire drill.

"Don't hurry, be calm!" she called out in the voice of authority, and by now the freshmen who lined the halls and stairways, had recovered their composure and even courage in the face of rescue.

Jane and Dozia rushed up to Miss Gifford, the matron, and asked about the outside alarm. At her word Jane jumped to the fire box, smashed the gla.s.s with her golf club and then turned the key.

By this time the students were outside the building, and in their night robes the seventy-five freshmen shivered from fear and exposure, while Miss Gifford, Jane and Dozia tried to rea.s.sure them.

"Where's the fire?" asked Jane, as the local brigade of volunteer citizens dashed in the grounds through the main gateway.

"Where is it?" demanded Miss Gifford of the students. There was no smoke, no blaze, not even an odor of things burning could be distinguished.

"It must have been in the big attic," someone said, "for it was the old bra.s.s bell that rang first."

"Who gave the alarm?" demanded the matron.

No one answered this, and the momentary pause was broken now by the wild rush of the fire department along the roadway.

First the hose cart, the "hook and ladder" jerked up to the porch where the girls waited, breathless but calmer now that men and means had come to their rescue.

"One side! One side!" shouted the chief, and to the credit of that department it must be said his men stretched their line of hose along from the hydrant and up those steps, even through the crowd of trembling students, in regular fire drill time. Jane stepped inside the hall and was sniffing audibly.

"Wait a minute!" she commanded. "We haven't located the fire yet and it may not be very much. The house is equipped with extinguishers,"

she informed the alert chief. "They may answer without water."

The rubber coated men held their hose high and were ready to shout in signal to the man at the hydrant, while Jane took the chief upstairs. He never spoke but tramped ahead as if a word would imperil the dignity of the Wide Awake Hose Company. Neither did Jane venture further remarks for she was "gunning" for the fire and thinking of ghosts!

Doors to right and left were promptly pushed open but no evidence of fire could be found.

"Try the attic," said the chief finally, "rubbish might catch from a flue."

At his order Jane turned into the narrow box stairway, lighted only by a flash in the hands of Chief Murry.

The actual panic of that yell and its subsequent fire alarm was now subsiding in Jane's mind, and instead of Fire the whole situation a.s.sumed an aspect of Ghosts. In spite of her courage she was very glad the chief was at her heels, and when she finally reached the last narrow step and stood under the rafters, Jane Allen sent a sweeping eye over that dark attic.

"Not here!" declared the fireman before she could see more than the inky blackness of the old garret, with only that one spot of moonlight pasted on the slanting roof by an invisible window.

As he turned Jane felt obliged to follow, although she would have been glad to go further in and see what it was that moved over by the patch of moonlight. Something did move--she was sure of that, but a fireman and a chief could not be asked to investigate anything but smoke or flame, and neither element was discernible, so she followed down the box stairway to confront the waiting brigade.

"Who pulled that box?" demanded Chief Murry, angrily.

"I did," replied Jane. "But the alarm came from within and the students were out before I did so."

"Well, there's no fire here!" he announced witheringly. "And you young 'uns better get indoors. Been in all the sheds and corners, Ben?" to his a.s.sistant.

"Every inch, and there being no kitchen here, 'tain't likely a fire would be tucked away in a closet, though we looked thoroughly. Queer how the thing happened."

Miss Gifford was now trying to march her charges back, but a good sized contingent refused flatly to comply with her orders. They answered her quietly but firmly.

"They would never sleep another night in Lenox Hall. If it wasn't haunted it was surely queer."

With the courage of juniors Jane and Dozia attempted to laugh the whole thing off, but the freshmen were determined.

"How did YOU get over here?" suddenly demanded little Nellie Saunders of Dozia. '"I thought it was a rule to stay in your own dorm when a first alarm fire gong sounded in another building?"

"'We were visiting," replied Jane so quickly Nellie thought the reply meant something, and was too absorbed in the crisis of the situation to further press her question.

"But you children will be ill!" wailed Miss Gifford helplessly. "You simply must come indoors."

"Come into the recreation room," insisted Jane. "We won't ask you to go back upstairs yet."

"We just wouldn't go," declared Daisy Blaire. "If I can't sleep in another cottage I shall telegraph mamma to come and take me home this very night or day, whichever it is."