Peggy Parsons at Prep School Part 11

The room settled down to a curious, stifling, nerve-racking silence while the prophetess gazed into her gleaming crystal.

She was breathing hard, and after a time it seemed to the two girls that a faint film or cloud went across the gla.s.sy brightness of the little globe, and this filminess took vague shape and disappeared.

Each girl thought as hard as she could. "How can we find Mr.

Huntington's grandson for him? Where is he now?"

Finally, in a sepulchral voice, startlingly different from her own, the woman began to speak: "I see a girl," she murmured.

This beginning was so far from promising and so utterly different from what they had someway expected that Katherine burst out into hysterical laughter. "She could see two of 'em if she looked very hard," she chortled too audibly in her friend's ear.

"There, you've broken the spell," complained the woman peevishly. "How can you expect me to find the future for a pack of laughing hyenas that don't believe what I'm telling them, anyway?"

"Oh, please," said Peggy, much ashamed of Katherine's rude outburst, "we want to hear it, and we will perhaps believe it when we have heard something. Indeed, Katherine wasn't doubting what you _did_ say, you know-she only-"

"Quiet," hissed the woman.

Was it true that a cloud, filmy and light and vapory went drifting across the clear crystal surface again? The girls felt no impulse to laugh now.

"I see a girl-I see snow-"

Katherine thought that she couldn't help it if she looked out of the window, but this time refrained from comment and held her breath while she watched the mysterious smoky appearance of the crystal.

"I see a loss of a long time ago-many years-relative torn from relative-"

Peggy and Katherine clutched at each other's knees.

"Walking, walking, so tired," mumbled the woman, "a long white field. I see an initial-let's see what the initial is. Is it A? no, it is not A.

Is it B-no, no, now I have it, it is H."

Peggy gave a tiny scream and the voice continued:

"Cold, very cold, far east of here and a little north. A college room, a mandolin, a young man plays on the mandolin. Also I see-" the voice rose excitedly, "a school lawn, a moon, this time it is warm, I do not understand it, and a group of young men are picking up little-little roses from the ground, and a girl leans from a window-"

"Peggy," screamed Katherine, "she means the time the rose tree fell out."

Here the prophetess burst into tears and shoving the crystal away from her declared that she would not read another thing for two such ill mannered young ladies who dragged her in and out of her trances just as if these were not the worst kind of nervous strain. She was through with them, she was. Just as she was beginning to see something of interest they shouted at her and spoiled it all. What kind of spirits would remain in a room with two girls that acted like that? They could pay her their dollar apiece, they could, and go, and she would go back to her music and think herself well rid of them, she was sure. Thank them, and _good-by_, and please don't ever come and bother her again with their hoydenish ways. Could they find their way to the street? She, for her part, was too unnerved to take them.

With their heads still whirling from the queerness of it all the two girls groped their way out through the dark hall and drew in great breaths when they were once more safe in the sunlight of the street.

They stumbled forward toward the car, where the imperturbable James was awaiting them. As they were about to clamber in Peggy clutched at her room-mate's sleeve.

"Look back, she's watching us," warned Peggy, and there sure enough in the window of the room they had just quitted were the outlines of the great figure of the black velvet prophetess, a curious brilliant fixedness in her dark eyes.

"I think she got her initial from the door of your car, Katherine-look."

Katherine's father's initials were H. B. F., Howard Baker Foster, and of course the seeress could have seen them, looking down into the street as she was now.

"Maybe," demurred Katherine, "but, Peggy, someway I don't believe she did. I think that H stood for Huntington just as all the rest of her story seemed to have some truth in it, and if only my feelings hadn't gotten away with me we'd be there yet, hearing all the things that are ever going to happen to us, I'm perfectly convinced."

"Well, evidently, Young Grandson is in college somewhere," interposed Peggy flippantly. "You remember about the college room and the mandolin?

I'm glad that his poverty didn't prevent his getting a fine education, anyway. Now we've got a clue, all we have to do to find him, friend Watson, is to go to all the men's colleges and walk through all the dorms until we come to a room from which the gentle tinkle of a mandolin steals forth-and then, and then-we knock on the door. Young Grandson answers it, and-there we are. We take him back to Mr. Huntington and all goes well. And listen, Watson, my dear detective companion, I think our search through those colleges is just going to be one of the jolliest things that ever happened to two nice-looking girls."

"You forget that we won't know Young Grandson when we see him."

"Clues, my dear Watson, clues. No detective ever went far without finding clues. First, we shall run across his picture in one of the college annuals. And we shall say, 'Why, here, what a strong resemblance this picture bears to Mr. Huntington, of Huntington House.' And that's the first thing. We read under the picture and find that his name is John James Smith, and then we go to the registrar-"

By this time the car was rounding the Foster drive, and the two girls alighted, in haste to tell all of Katherine's interested and somewhat disapproving family about their adventures with the soothsayer.

Each of the small brothers agreed with Katherine that it must be all true, but that was the only support she found at home for her belief.

When it came time for the girls to start back to Andrews, they were torn with conflicting emotions. They were glad they were going back, and yet they could hardly bear to tear themselves away from the home that seemed now to belong to Peggy, too. So when they and their suit-cases were at last regretfully taken to the train by the entire family, the girls were dissolved in a flood of tears as they settled themselves for the journey, and the train had been under way some two hours before they managed to say a single word to each other.

CHAPTER X-MISS ROBINSON CRUSOE

It was the snowiest part of the season that Katherine and Peggy rode back into when they returned from their Christmas vacation in the Middle West.

The school grounds shone and blazed under a triumphant sun, and out around them as far as they could see was a great white world. One of the most important gifts of the Foster family to the two girls had been two pairs of snow-shoes: not the poorly constructed, make-believe affairs that are sometimes on sale in cities where there is never enough snow to use them, but real Indian-made shoes for which Mrs. Foster had sent to Canada.

Naturally, they wanted more than anything else to try them. So the first day that Mrs. Forest gave them permission they went out on the porch of the Andrews dormitory, comfortably dressed in white sweaters and white tam-o'-shanters, with moccasins on their feet and their beloved snow-shoes ready to strap on in their hands. After some grunting and much tugging the shoes were adjusted, and then the two expected to fairly sail over the white world, away, away, like ice-boats, as fast as the wind. But, oh, for the things that look so easy! There was a good crust over the snow, but at the first step-well, Katherine seemed to be trying to walk on her head instead of her feet, that was all. In trying to pick her up Peggy herself fell headlong, and there they lay, ignominiously waving their snow-shoes in the air, shrieking with laughter and so limp from their merriment that they could not get up again.

It was only after many attempts that they stood erect once more, powdered over and caked with snow where they had plunged through the crust, and very red in the face and still shaking with laughter.

"I put my toe down first," gasped Katherine between spasms, "just as I would if I was walking ordinarily. I forgot that father said the foot must come down flat. I've seen people snow-shoe, but I never-t-tried it-oh, dear me, I'm almost exhausted to start out with."

Then once again, with the utmost gravity, the two made the attempt, and Peggy almost at once got the wonderful swinging motion of the far northerners that makes snow-shoeing one of the most delightful and exhilarating sports in the world. To be warm in the midst of cold, to glow from forehead to feet with life and heat and happiness, all this glorious new experience she was feeling for the first time. But Katherine could not put her foot down correctly and failed to get into the rhythm of the thing at all. And as sure as they came to a hillock over she went helplessly, and remained deep in the snow until Peggy pulled her out, with scant sympathy, but with much merry appreciation of her snow-powdered face and its look of wondering appeal.

Nevertheless, in spite of difficulties and delays, they had covered two meadows and a large open field without more stress of adventure than they found pleasant. All of a sudden Peggy pointed ahead. There, gleaming on before them, straight ahead and over the crest of a bit of rising ground, were the glistening snow-shoe marks of another explorer who had recently gone that way before them. The sun shone into the criss-cross pattern of the steps, which seemed to the girls to be both invitation and challenge.

Katherine adapted the quotation, laughing. "If I could leave behind me any such even tracks as that it might be worth while going on, but when you can't get the swing of it, Peggy, you can't keep warm, and while I want to learn, sometime, I think it wasn't born in me as it was in you, and it will need several practice attempts before I can be in your cla.s.s at all. So I'm going back-for now-do you want to come, or are you going on-?"

Peggy looked back toward the familiar roofs of Andrews, and then she looked away out over the barren fields in their whiteness, new and untouched save for the gleaming snow-shoe tracks that called and called to her to be as adventurous as they.

"I guess I'll go on," she said, a hint of abandon in her voice.

"Well, good-by, hon," said Katherine, meekly taking her leave. "I will get about as much more of this as I want going back, but I hope you have a nice time-and-and end up at tea somewhere just as we were going to."

"Tea by myself would be horrid," Peggy called after her. "I won't be long, but I just must have some more, I love it so."

Then she turned her face to the snow-shoe tracks, and with a little gay song on her lips took up their trail.

"I'm Robinson Crusoe," she told herself blithely, "and these tracks are the good man Friday's. And we are the only two people that there are at all, and both of us have been finding it so lonely by ourselves."

Several of the Andrews girls had snow-shoes and Peggy wondered which one the maker of these tracks might be.