Ruth Fielding At College Part 25

But it was no laughing matter, as they all felt. They made a gloomy party in the pretty sitting-room that last evening of its occupancy as a community resort.

"There's Clara Mayberry in her rocker again on that squeaky board,"

Rebecca Frayne remarked. "I hope she rocks on that board every evening over this woman's head who has turned us out."

"Let's all hope so," murmured Helen.

Jennie Stone suddenly sat upright in the rocker she was occupying, but continued to glare at the ceiling. A board in the floor of the room above had frequently annoyed them before. Clara Mayberry sometimes forgot and placed her rocker on that particular spot.

"If--if she had to listen to that long," gasped Jennie suddenly, "she would go crazy. She's just that kind of nervous female. I saw her at chapel this morning."

"But even Clara couldn't stand the squeak of that board long," Ruth observed, smiling.

Without another word Jennie left the room. She came back later, so full of mystery, as Helen declared, that she seemed on the verge of bursting.

However, Jennie refused to explain herself in any particular; but the board in Clara Mayberry's room did not squeak again that evening.

CHAPTER XIX

A DEEP, DARK PLOT

"Heavy is actually losing flesh," Helen declared to Ruth. "I can see it."

"You mean you _can't_ see it," laughed her chum. "That is, you can't see so much of it as there used to be. If she keeps on with the rowing machine work in the gym and the basket ball practise and dancing, she will soon be the thinnest girl who ever came to Ardmore."

"Oh, never!" cried Helen. "I don't believe I should like Heavy so much if she wasn't a _little_ fat."

People who had not seen Jennie Stone for some time observed the change in her appearance more particularly than did her two close friends. This was proved when Mr. Cameron and Tom arrived.

For, as the girls did not go home for just a few days, Helen's father and her twin unexpectedly appeared at college on Christmas Eve, and their company delighted the chums immensely.

On Friday evenings the girls could have company, and on all Sat.u.r.day afternoons, even during the college term. Also a girl could have a young man call on her Sunday evening, provided he took her to service at chapel.

The three Briarwood friends had had no such company heretofore. They made the most of Mr. Cameron and Tom, therefore, during Christmas week.

There was splendid sleighing, and the skating on the lake was at its very best. Ruth insisted upon including Rebecca Frayne in some of their parties, and Rebecca proved to be good fun.

Tom stared at Jennie Stone, round-eyed, when first he saw her.

"What's the matter with you, Tom Cameron?" the fleshy girl asked, rather tartly. "Didn't you ever see a good-looking girl before?"

"But say, Jennie!" he cried, "are you going into a decline?"

"I decline to answer," she responded. But she dimpled when she said it, and evidently considered Tom's rather blunt remark a compliment.

The Christmas holidays were over all too soon, it seemed to the girls.

Yet they took up the cla.s.s work again with vigor.

Their acquaintanceship was broadening daily, both in the student body and among the instructors. Most of the strangeness of this new college world had worn off. Ruth and Helen and Jennie were full-fledged "Ardmores" now, quite as devoted to the college as they had been to dear old Briarwood.

After New Year's there was a raw and rainy spell that spoiled many of the outdoor sports. Practice in the gymnasium increased, and Helen said that Jennie Stone was bound to work herself down to a veritable shadow if the bad weather continued long.

Ruth was in Rebecca's room one dingy, rainy afternoon, having skipped gymnasium work of all kind for the day. The proprietor of the room had finished her baby blue cap and had worn it the first time that week.

"I feel that they are not all staring at me now," she confessed to Ruth.

Ruth was at the piles of old papers which Rebecca had hidden under a half-worn portierre she had brought from home.

"Do you know," the girl of the Red Mill said reflectively, "these old things are awfully interesting, Becky?"

"What old things?"

"These papers. I've opened one bundle. They were all printed in Richmond during the Civil War. Why, paper must have been awfully scarce then.

Some of these are actually printed on wrapping paper--you can scarcely read the print."

"Ought to look at those Charleston papers," said Rebecca, carelessly.

"There are full files of those, too, I believe. Why, some of them are printed on wall paper."

"No!"

"Yes they are. Ridiculous, wasn't it?"

Ruth sat silent for a while. Finally she asked:

"Are you sure, Becky, that you have quite complete files here of this Richmond paper? For all the war time, I mean?"

"Yes. And of the South Carolina paper, too. Father collected them during and immediately following the war. He was down there for years, you see."

"I see," Ruth said quietly, and for a long time said nothing more.

But that evening she wrote several letters which she did not show Helen, and took them herself to the mailbag in the lower hall.

Before this, Mrs. Jaynes, Dr. McCurdy's sister-in-law, was settled in the room which had formerly been used by the girls as their own particular sitting-room. She was not an attractive woman at all; so it was not hard for her youthful a.s.sociates on that corridor of Dare Hall to declare war upon Mrs. Jaynes.

Indeed, without having been introduced to a single girl there, Mrs.

Jaynes eyed them all as though she suspected they belonged to a tribe of Bushmen.

Naturally, during hours of relaxation, and occasionally at other times, the girls joked and laughed and raced through the halls and sang and otherwise acted as a crowd of young people usually act.

Mrs. Jaynes was plainly of that sort that believes that all youthfulness and ebullition of spirits should be suppressed. Luckily, she met the girls but seldom--only when she was going to and from her room. On stormy days she remained shut up in her apartment most of the time, and Mrs. Ebbetts sent a maid up with her tray at meal time. She never ate in the Dare Hall dining-room.

Meantime, Jennie Stone had several mysterious sessions with certain of the girls who felt quite as she did regarding the usurpation of Dr.

McCurdy's sister-in-law of the spare room. Had Ruth not been so busy in other directions she would have realized that a plot of some kind was in process of formation, for Helen was in it, as well.

Jennie Stone had made a friend of Clara Mayberry on the floor above. In fact, a number of the girls on the lower corridor affected by the presence of Mrs. Jaynes, were in and out of Clara's room all day long.

None of these girls remained long at a time--not more than half an hour; but another visitor always appeared before the first left, right through the day, from breakfast call till "lights out." And after retiring hour there began to be seen figures stealing through the corridors and on the stairway between the two floors. That is, there would have been seen such ghostly marauders had there been anybody to watch.