NAN SHERWOOD
AT
LAKEVIEW HALL
OR
THE MYSTERY OF THE
HAUNTED BOATHOUSE

BY
ANNIE ROE CARR

THE WORLD SYNDICATE PUBLISHING CO.
CLEVELAND, O. NEW YORK, N.Y.

Printed in the United States of America
by
THE COMMERCIAL BOOKBINDING CO.
CLEVELAND, O.

Being initiated into all the rites and mysteries of Lakeview Hall. See page [83.]

[CHAPTER I]
[CHAPTER II]
[CHAPTER III]
[CHAPTER IV]
[CHAPTER V]
[CHAPTER VI]
[CHAPTER VII]
[CHAPTER VIII]
[CHAPTER IX]
[CHAPTER X]
[CHAPTER XI]
[CHAPTER XII]
[CHAPTER XIII]
[CHAPTER XIV]
[CHAPTER XV]
[CHAPTER XVI]
[CHAPTER XVII]
[CHAPTER XVIII]
[CHAPTER XIX]
[CHAPTER XX]
[CHAPTER XXI]
[CHAPTER XXII]
[CHAPTER XXIII]
[CHAPTER XXIV]
[CHAPTER XXV]
[CHAPTER XXVI]
[CHAPTER XXVII]
[CHAPTER XXVIII]
[CHAPTER XXIX]
[CHAPTER XXX]
[Transcriber’s Notes]

NAN SHERWOOD AT
LAKEVIEW HALL

CHAPTER I
THE BRAND NEW BAG

There would have been no trouble at all, Nan was sure, had it not been for that new bag.

In the first place it was a present from her Aunt Kate Sherwood, although Nan purchased it herself. The purchasing of most of her school outfit was supervised by Mrs. Harley, at the same time that her own daughter’s was bought, but a few last purchases were left to the girls and Nan and Bess certainly had a most delightful time shopping in Chicago for a week, before they started for Lakeview Hall.

Of course, Bess’ mother was right at hand to advise and guide; otherwise careless Bess would have bought with prodigal hand, and cautious Nan’s outfit would not have been as well selected as the girl’s absent mother would have desired.

But nobody interfered with the matter of the brand new bag. Nan and her chum went to one of the smartest leather-goods shops and selected the shiny, russet-leather beauty without any adult interference save that of an obliging clerk. Mrs. Henry Sherwood had saved the money herself and insisted upon Nan’s taking it and purchasing “just the handsomest traveling bag the money would buy.”

“You know, honey-bird,” the good woman said to her niece, the evening before Nan left Pine Camp—which was away up in the Peninsula of Michigan. “You know, honey-bird, money’s been scarce with your Uncle Hen and me for some time back; but now that the trouble about the Perkins Tract is settled, and he can go to lumbering again, we’ll be all right.

“I honestly do believe, Nan, that if you hadn’t made such a friend of Toby Vanderwiller and of his wife and his crippled grandson, and if you and your Cousin Tom hadn’t helped Tobe out of the swamp when he got mired in the big storm, that maybe the trouble about the boundary line between your uncle’s timber option and Gedney Raffer’s tract, wouldn’t have been settled, in court or out, for a year or two.

“That being the case,” Mrs. Sherwood pursued, “your Uncle Henry and I, and Tom and Rafe, would have been mighty poor for a long time to come. Now the prospect’s bright before us, child, and I want you should take this I’ve saved from my egg and berry money, and buy you just the handsomest traveling bag you can get for it.

“I’ve seen ’em all pictured out in the mail-order catalogue—full of brushes, and combs, and cut-glass bottles to hold sweet scent, and tooth-powder, and all sorts of didos. That’s the kind I want you to have.”

“Oh! but Aunt Kate!” Nan Sherwood said doubtfully, “this is a great deal of money to spend for a hand bag.”

“I wish ’twas twice as much!” declared the lumberman’s wife, vigorously.

“Twice as much?” Nan gasped.

“Yes. Then the things could be gold trimmed instead of only silver. I want you to have the very nicest bag of any girl going to that big school.”

The awe-struck Nan and the delighted Elizabeth were quite sure that the woman from the Michigan Peninsula had her wish when they walked out of the leather-goods shop, the handsome russet bag firmly clutched by its possessor.

The bag was packed at once, for its purchase was almost the last bit of shopping there was to do before the chums from Tillbury left Chicago. Mrs. Harley rose early in the morning to go with them to the train. She declared that afterward she intended going back to the hotel to “sleep for a week.”

“I’d rather superintend the general fall cleaning at home than get you two girls ready to go to boarding school again,” she sighed.

“I’m sure you’ve been awfully good to me, Mrs. Harley,” said Nan. “My own dear Momsey Sherwood could have treated me no more kindly. And, of course, she couldn’t have shopped for me so well, for she has been too much of an invalid for a long while to take any interest in the shops.”

Mrs. Harley kissed her heartily. “You blessed child!” she declared. “You’re no trouble to suit. Bess is the finicky person.” Her daughter began to pout. “Oh, you are, Miss!” and her mother held up an admonitory finger and shook it at Bess. “Next time I shall buy what I think is proper and leave you at home while I am buying. Why! these children nowadays are more fussy about their frocks, and more insistent upon the style of them, than their mothers. What I shall do, Elizabeth, when your little sisters are old enough to go away to school, I—do—not—see!”

“Oh, by that time,” said Bess, the modern, “I shall be ‘out,’ I hope, and may have really something to say about my own clothes.”

“Hear her!” ejaculated Mrs. Harley. “It will be several years yet, young lady, before you will be ‘out,’ as you call it, or be allowed to spend your father’s money as lavishly as you would like to.”

Nevertheless she kissed her daughter tenderly, just before the train started, and Bess forgot for a moment that she was anything but a young girl going a long way off from a very dear and indulgent mother. They clung to each other for that tender, heart-breaking moment, and Nan Sherwood’s eyes overflowed in sympathy.

Nan had been through the same ordeal six months before, when her own dear mother and father had started for Scotland, while she left Tillbury on the very same day for her uncle Henry’s backwoods home in the heart of the Upper Michigan forest.

“Don’t cry, Bess,” she begged her chum when the train was out of the station and the “clip, clip, clip-py-ti-clip” of the wheels over the rail joints had tailed off into a staccato chatter, scarcely discernible through the steady drumming of the great trucks under the chair-car. “Don’t cry. You know, honey, your mother isn’t going to be near as far from you as my dear Momsey is from me.”

“I don’t care,” sniffed Bess. “If I can’t see her. But oh, Nan Sherwood!” she added sharply. “What kind of grammar was that you just used—‘near as far’? If Mr. Mangel, our high-school principal at Tillbury, thought you would use such language he would never have written to Dr. Beulah Prescott that he considered you entitled to a rating equal with the remainder of our class.”

“Don’t sniff and turn up your nose, Miss, at my diction,” laughed Nan. “Your nose is bound to be red if you keep on—and your eyes, too.”

“Is it? Are they?” gasped Bess.

“Is it—are they what?” demanded Nan, rather startled.

“Why, my nose and eyes red!”

“Well! talk about grammar!” ejaculated Nan. “I wouldn’t criticise, if I were you.”

“Never mind the English language,” begged Bess. “Let me look in your mirror.”

Of course, that necessitated the opening of the brand new bag. Then, when Bess thought she had discovered a suspicious redness of the tip of her nose, she must needs use the powder puff which was one of the wonderful “didos” among the toilet requisites in the bag.

While Bess was so busily engaged in restoring the havoc made upon her fresh young countenance by her recent emotion, there sounded suddenly a heavy banging and thumping underneath the chair-car in which the girls were riding, though not at their end of the coach.

Nervous people at the rear of the car jumped up and one or two screamed. Almost instantly the train began to slow down, with much hissing of steam and compressed air, and soon came to a complete stop.

Nan had jumped up, too, but not because she was frightened. None of the trainmen came in of whom to ask about the stop and Nan went to the front door and out into the vestibule. Even the colored porter was not in sight.

“What is it, Nan?” Bess asked, still powdering her nose, for she had been obliged to postpone this delicate operation until the train had come to its bumping stop.

“I don’t know,” answered her chum. “I’m going forward to ask.”

But hardly had she said this, when the rear door of the car opened and a uniformed attendant said, speaking clearly:

“All passengers are requested to move into the rear coach, with all hand baggage. This car is to be taken out of the train at once because of an accident. All passengers will please move to the rear coach with hand baggage. Another chair car will be put in to accommodate you at the junction. All back to rear coach!”

He came through shouting these directions so that all in the car could hear him. Bess jumped up, very much excited now, with:

“Oh, my gracious! Do you hear that, Nan? Do get down my coat and suit-case. You’re taller than I am.”

Her chum good-naturedly did as she was requested and Bess started down the aisle. Indeed, the two friends were about the first to leave the chair-car by the rear door.

Just as they got into the vestibule, however, Nan noticed that her chum’s hands were empty.

“Why, Bess Harley!” she cried. “Where’s my bag?”

“Your bag?” returned Bess, with wide-open eyes. “Why! haven’t you brought it?”

“Well!” But there! What was the use? Nan knew well just how heedless Bess was. There was positively no good in getting angry with her. “Here!” she exclaimed, thrusting the suit-case, the lunch box, and her chum’s own wrap into Bess’ hands. “Get a seat if you can and hold on to these while I go back for that bag.”

“I must have left it right in the chair you sat in,” said Bess, feebly.

Nan did not hear this. She had some trouble in getting back into the car, for she was stemming the tide of outflowing passengers.

She reached the spot at last. The more moderately moving passengers were all about her. On the floor between two of the chairs was the russet bag.

Nan seized it quickly and turned to hasten back to her chum. The aisle was clear for the moment and she ran.

Almost instantly a shrill voice cried out behind her:

“Here! how dare you? That’s my bag. Stop thief!”

Nan Sherwood cast a horrified glance over her shoulder. Yes! the voice addressed her. An angry girl, very fussily and expensively dressed, had started wildly down the car after Nan, and again she shrieked:

“Stop thief!”

CHAPTER II
ALL ABOUT NAN

Nan Sherwood stumbled and would have fallen, for she could not pick her steps very safely with her gaze directed behind, had not a firm hand seized her shoulder. The gentleman who did this may have been as intent upon detaining the girl as upon saving her from an overthrow.

“Hoity-toity!” he ejaculated, in a rather querulous voice. “Hoity-toity!” he repeated. “What’s this I hear? ‘Stop thief’? Impossible!”

He was a lean-faced man with a deeply lined countenance, a big nose, and shell-bowed spectacles through which his pale, gray eyes twinkled, after all, in a rather friendly way. Or so the startled Nan thought in those few seconds that elapsed before the other girl reached them.

“Impossible!” repeated the man, having looked into Nan’s eyes.

“I guess it isn’t impossible!” cried the over-dressed girl, seizing the handle of the russet bag and trying to jerk it out of Nan’s hand. “The bold thing! She is a thief! And see her! She won’t give it up!”

“Why—it’s my bag!” murmured Nan, horrified by this utterly unexpected situation.

“It’s not! it’s mine!” asserted the other girl, striving with all her might to secure the bag.

But Nan Sherwood was no weakling. In fact, she was really very strong for her age. And her spring and summer in the Big Woods had bronzed her skin almost to the hue of a winter-cured oak-leaf. Her muscles were as well developed as a boy’s. The angry girl could not get the russet bag away from Nan’s secure grip.

“Wait! wait, young ladies!” urged the gentleman with the spectacles that made him look so owl-like. “There must be some mistake here.”

“There is!” snapped the angry girl. “It’s a mistake to let a little thief like her ride with respectable people. I’m going to have her arrested! I—I’ll tell my father——”

All the time she was thus incoherently accusing Nan, she was likewise endeavoring to get possession of the bag. But Nan had no idea of giving up her Aunt Kate’s beautiful present.

“Why—why!” Nan gasped. “It’s mine! I bought it myself!”

“What a story!” shrieked the other girl. “A dowdy little thing like you never owned such a bag. Look at my card on the handle.”

“That should settle it,” said the bespectacled gentleman, with confidence, and he reached for the bag.

Nan allowed him to take it. To her amazement he slipped an engraved visiting card out of the frame set into the bag’s handle. Nan almost dropped. She had not noticed the card during the struggle and she knew she never had owned a visiting card like that in her life.

The gentleman held the card very close to his eyes to read the name engraved upon it.

“Ahem!” he said. “I thought I recognized you, Miss Riggs, despite your wild state of alarm. ‘Miss Linda Riggs,’” he added, repeating the name on the card. “Quite right. The bag is yours, Miss Riggs.”

“I should think you would have known that, Professor Krenner, when I first spoke,” snapped the girl, seizing the bag ungratefully from his hand. “Anybody ought to see what that girl is!” and she eyed poor Nan with a measure of disdain that might have really pained the Tillbury girl had she not just then been so much troubled by another phase of the incident.

“Why! where—where is my bag, then?” Nan gasped.

Professor Krenner glanced sideways at her. He was a peculiar old gentleman, and he believed deeply in his own first impressions. Nan’s flushed face, her wide-open, pained eyes, her quivering lips, told a story he could not disbelieve. The professor’s mind leaped to a swift conclusion.

“Are you sure you sat just there, child?” he asked Nan.

“Oh—I——”

He could see over the heads of the few curious passengers who had surged around them.

“Was your bag like Miss Riggs’?” he asked.

“Exactly,” breathed Nan.

Just then a soft, drawling voice asked:

“Any ob yo’ ladies an’ gemmen done lef’ a bag?”

The porter held out a russet leather traveling bag. Nan leaped for it with a cry of relief.

“It belongs to the young lady, porter,” said Professor Krenner, authoritatively.

“Why, the bags are just alike!” cried one lady.

“I don’t believe a dowdy thing like her ever honestly owned a bag like mine in this world!” Linda Riggs exclaimed bitterly, “She stole it.”

Another passenger laughed. “As far as we know, my girl, you may have stolen your bag.”

“How dare you?” gasped the dressy girl. “I guess you don’t know who my father is?”

“I confess the crass ignorance that engulfs my mind upon that important point,” laughed the unimpressed man, who looked as though he might be of some importance himself. “Who is your father, my dear?”

“He is Mr. Henry W. Riggs, and he just about owns this railroad,” said the girl, proudly.

“I have heard of him,” agreed the man. “And you may tell him from me that if I owned as much stock in this road as he is supposed to, I’d give the public better service for its money,” and the passengers went away, laughing at the purse-proud and arrogant girl.

Meanwhile Nan Sherwood had thanked the porter for recovering her bag and Professor Krenner for championing her cause. She did not look again at the girl who had so hurt and insulted her. But she was very pale and quiet as she went back to rejoin her chum, Bess Harley, in the other car.

That was the way of Nan Sherwood. When she was hurt she never cried over it openly; nor was it often that she gave vent to a public expression of anger.

For her age, Nan was strangely self-contained and competent. Not that she was other than a real, happy, hearty schoolgirl with a deal more than her share of animal spirits. She was so very much alive that it had been hard for her to keep her body still enough to satisfy her teachers at the Tillbury High School which, until the middle of the previous winter, she had attended with her chum.

Bess’ father was well-to-do and Bess had had almost everything she really craved since the hour she was born, being the oldest of the “Harley tribe,” as she expressed it. When it was decided that she should, at the end of her freshman year in high school, attend the preparatory school for girls, known as Lakeview Hall, Bess was determined that her chum, Nan Sherwood, should go with her.

But Nan’s parents were not situated at all as were Bess Harley’s—neither financially or otherwise. Mr. Robert Sherwood had been, for years, foreman of a department in the Atwater Mills. Suddenly the mills were closed and Nan’s father—with multitudes of other people—found his income cut off.

He owned a little cottage on Amity Street; but it was not all paid for, as Nan’s mother had been a semi-invalid for a number of years and much of the money Mr. Sherwood might have saved, had gone for medical attention for “Momsey,” as Nan called her mother.

But the invalid wife and mother was the bravest and most cheerful of the three who lived in “the dwelling in amity,” as Mr. Sherwood called the little cottage, and it was she who inspired them to hope for better times ahead.

Nan could not fail to be benefited in character by such an example as her mother set; but the girl very well knew that, in their then present circumstances, there was no possibility of her entering Lakeview Hall in the fall with Bess Harley.

This was really a tragic outlook for the school chums; but in the very darkest hour a letter arrived from a lawyer, named Andrew Blake, of Edinburgh, Scotland, stating that a great uncle of Mrs. Sherwood’s had recently died, bequeathing her an estate valued at something like ten thousand pounds.

The only shadow cast upon this delightful prospect was the fact that Mrs. Sherwood must appear before the Scotch Court to oppose the claim of more distant relatives who were trying to break the will.

The doctors had already recommended a sea voyage for Mrs. Sherwood. Now it seemed a necessity. But her parents could not take Nan across the ocean. What should be done with the troubled girl was the much mooted question, when there burst in upon the family Mr. Sherwood’s brother from Upper Michigan, a giant lumberman, who had come to Tillbury to offer any help in his power to Nan’s father in his financial straits.

Immediately upon hearing of the legacy, Mr. Henry Sherwood declared he would take Nan back to Pine Camp with him, and in the first volume of this series, entitled “Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp, or, The Old Lumberman’s Secret,” are told all Nan’s adventures in the Big Woods during the spring and summer, and until the time came for her to prepare to enter Lakeview Hall in September.

For, although the court proceedings regarding Mr. Hughie Blake’s will had not been entirely settled, money had been advanced by Mr. Andrew Blake to Mr. Sherwood and the desire of Nan’s heart was to be accomplished. She was now on her way to Lakeview Hall with Bess Harley; and, as we have seen, she had not gone far on the journey from Chicago before Adventure overtook her.

This first was not a pleasant adventure, however; and it brought in its train incidents which colored all Nan Sherwood’s initial semester at Lakeview Hall.

CHAPTER III
LINDA RIGGS

When Bess Harley heard about the over-dressed girl’s accusation, and how Nan had been treated, she wanted to jump right up and “give the stuck-up thing a piece of my mind!” as she expressed it. Bess was very angry indeed, and quite overlooked the fact, of course, that her own carelessness had brought the trouble about.

“I’d have slapped her,” declared the vigorous Bess. “Calling you a thief! Why! I couldn’t have kept my hands off of her. Who is she?”

“I—I did not pay much attention to what she said about herself,” Nan replied. “Only her name. That’s Riggs.”

“And that’s homely enough,” scoffed Bess.

“She is not homely,” Nan confessed. “That is, I think she may be quite pretty when she isn’t angry. And she had on a dress that would have made you gasp, Bess.”

“Was it so pretty?”

“No; but it was of very rich material, and daringly cut,” said her friend.

“Where is she now?” demanded Bess, standing up to look over the day coach in which they now rode, for the chair-car with the broken rod had been left behind and the train was hurrying on to the junction.

“I think she went into the dining car, forward,” said Nan.

“Humph! I wish we had. We could see out better.”

“But we have a nice lunch, you know,” Nan objected.

“Just the same, it’s common to eat lunch out of a shoe-box on a train. I don’t know what mother was thinking of. And we could have seen that girl with the fancy dress in the dining car.”

“Pshaw!” laughed Nan. “You’re always crazy after the styles. I don’t wish to see her again, I assure you.”

“I never saw such a girl as you,” complained her chum. “You’re as bold as a lion about some things and as meek as a mouse about others.”

Nan’s ready laugh was her only reply to this. She had begun to feel better. The sting of her encounter with the unkind and vulgar girl was soothed. She did not mind now the curious glances of those passengers from the chair-car who were within the limit of her view.

But Bess considered that one person’s interest in her and her chum was distasteful. She whispered to Nan.

“Do you see that old, goggle-eyed gentleman staring at us, Nan? I declare! Are we a pair of freaks?”

“Perhaps he thinks so,” chuckled Nan.

“He’s awfully impolite.”

Nan smiled frankly at the observant passenger across the aisle.

“Why, Nancy!” gasped Bess.

“He was kind to me. Professor Krenner is his name. I heard that girl call him so.”

“Then they know each other?” said Bess.

“I presume so. But that did not keep him from believing me,” Nan said. “He was nice.”

“Well,” whispered Bess. “He doesn’t look nice.” She began to giggle. “Did you ever see such glasses? He looks like an owl.”

“I suppose he is a learned man,” Nan returned, “so the look of wisdom becomes him.”

“Humph!” ejaculated Bess. “That does not follow. What sort of professor did you say he is?”

“I didn’t say. I only heard his name.”

“What’s that?” asked Bess, with growing curiosity.

“Professor Krenner,” repeated Nan.

“Why—ee!” squealed Bess, suddenly.

She opened her hand-bag, which was quite commodious, and began frantically to dig into its contents. A dollar bill, two lozenges, a handkerchief, part of a paper of chewing gum, an elastic band, a receipt for “freckle balm,” a carved horsechestnut that her brother Billy had given her for a keepsake at parting, two bits of silk she had tried to match and could not, a tiny piece of sealing-wax, a much-creased letter (the last Nan had written her from Pine Camp), a funny little carved piece of ivory with a toothpick inside, a silver thimble (for Bess was sometimes domestic), a pair of cuticle scissors in a case, a visiting card, a strip of torn lace (likewise saved to “match”), a big, pearl button off her coat, a safety pin, and a molasses “kiss,” fortunately wrapped in waxed paper, fell to the floor.

Nan patiently picked up the scattered possessions of her chum. There were other things in the bag, as Bess, with a squeal of satisfaction, proved by producing the folded announcement of Lakeview Hall.

“Goodness gracious, Bess!” sighed her friend. “How will you ever get all these things back into that bag?”

“Oh, tumble ’em in,” said the careless Bess. “There must be room for them, or they would never have got in there in the first place. But listen here! I thought I remembered the name. Your Professor Krenner is on the staff of the school.”

“What!”

“Yes. He teaches higher mathematics and architectural drawing. ‘Architectural drawing’! What girl wants to take that? Of course, the mathematics is compulsory, but the drawing is elective. Dear me! he’s a sour looking apple.”

“Not when you get close to him,” Nan said quickly. “He has kind eyes.”

“Humph!” Bess said again.

The man occupying the seat directly ahead of the two girls left at the very next station. Immediately Professor Krenner, who seemed to be much interested in Nan and Bess, crossed the aisle with his bag and sat down in the empty seat.

“Well, Miss,” he said to Nan, his eyelids wrinkling at the corners as though a smile lurked behind the shell-bowed spectacles, “I see you have not allowed that little contretemps to blast all the pleasure of your journey. Are you and your friend going to school?”

“Yes, sir. This is my chum, Elizabeth Harley, Professor Krenner,” Nan said.

“We are going to Lakeview Hall,” Bess put in.

“Indeed?”

Bess showed him the printed circular sent out by Dr. Beulah Prescott. “We know all about you, sir,” she said boldly.

“Do you?” he returned, with a rather grim smile about his wide mouth. “Then you know much more than I know myself, and I hope some day when we are better acquainted that you will explain to me, my dear, this complex personality that is known as Alpheus Krenner.”

Bess flushed a little; but Nan chuckled. She liked this odd, ugly man, with his querulous voice and dry way of speaking. The twinkling eyes took the rough edge off much that he said.

“So you are two of the new girls I shall meet in my mathematics classes this year,” he proceeded. “Do you both know your multiplication tables?”

“Yes, sir,” said Nan demurely, while Bess looked rather indignant. “And we have been a little farther, too, in arithmetic. But how about the drawing, sir? Don’t you expect to meet us in those classes?”

“No,” replied Professor Krenner, soberly. “No girl cares for such instruction.”

“No?” cried Bess, becoming interested.

“I have never had a single pupil in architectural drawing at Lakeview Hall,” admitted the gentleman.

“Then why do they have it in the list of elective studies?” asked Nan, as much puzzled as her chum.

“Why, you see,” said the perfectly serious professor, “Dr. Prescott insists upon each instructor having two courses—one study that is compulsory, and another that is elective. I am not a versatile man. I might have suggested instruction on the key-bugle, which I play to the annoyance of my neighbors; but there is already a musical instructor at the Hall.

“I might have suggested a class in the ancient and honorable calling of cobbling (which is the handmaid of Philosophy, I believe, for I have found most cobblers to be philosophers) as I often repair my own shoes,” pursued Professor Krenner, with the utmost gravity. “But there is a lady at the Hall who will teach you to do very ladylike tricks in burnt leather, and the two arts might conflict.

“So, being naturally of a slothful disposition, and being quite sure that no young girl would care for architecture, which is my hobby, I suggested my elective study. I think that Dr. Prescott considers it a joke.”

Bess gazed at him with a puzzled expression of countenance. She did not exactly understand. But Nan appreciated his dry humor, and her own eyes danced.

“I believe I should like to take architectural drawing,” she said demurely.

“Oh, Nan!” gasped Bess.

The professor’s eyes twinkled behind the great, round spectacles. “I shall have to guard against that,” he said. “No young lady at the Hall has ever yet expressed such a desire—not even your friend, Miss Riggs.”

“Oh! you don’t mean to say that that horrid girl who treated Nan so, goes to Lakeview Hall?” Bess cried out.

“She doesn’t, really, does she, sir?” asked Nan, anxiously.

“Linda Riggs? Oh, yes. Didn’t you know that?”

“Oh, dear, me,” sighed Nan.

“Well!” cried Bess. “Who is she?”

“It is no breach of confidence on my part,” replied the dry professor, “for she explains the fact to everybody, if I tell you that she is the daughter of Mr. Henry W. Riggs, the railroad magnate.”

“Then she must be very rich,” almost whispered Bess.

“Her father is,” Professor Krenner said briefly.

Bess was deeply impressed, it was evident. But Nan already dreaded the shadow of Linda Riggs’ presence in her school life.

CHAPTER IV
LUCK AND PLUCK

Nan found Professor Krenner a most amusing companion. She was eager to hear all she could from him regarding the school to which she and Bess Harley were bound.

The several male instructors at Lakeview Hall did not reside there, but lived near by in the village of Freeling. That is, the other gentlemen of Dr. Prescott’s staff did so. Professor Krenner, who was unmarried, lived in a cabin he had built under the bluff on the lake shore.

“I am not far from the old boathouse, which is quite a famous place, by the way, as you will find when you get to the Hall. I am not troubled much with visitors because of my proximity to the boathouse. That is taboo with most of the young ladies.”

“Why?” queried the curious Bess, promptly.

“I believe it is considered to possess one of those rare birds, a ‘hant,’” chuckled the professor. “By night, at least, it is given a wide berth by even the most romantic miss in the school.”

“Oh! a real ghost?” gasped Bess, deliciously excited.

“That is quite impossible, is it not?” queried Professor Krenner, in his gentle way of poking fun. “A ghost must necessarily be impalpable; then, how can it be real?”

Bess did not like being “made fun of,” so she whispered to Nan; but the latter liked to hear the professor talk. That he was an odd man she was sure; but he was nothing like Toby Vanderwiller, the lumberman, or the other crude characters she had met at Pine Camp. What would Bess have said to Mr. Fen Llewellen, for instance? Or what would her chum think, even, of her cousin, Tom Sherwood?

Bess soon became anxious for a change and she begged Nan to come into the dining car for luncheon.

“But we have our lunch,” Nan pointed out.

“I don’t care. I don’t want a lot of stale sandwiches and fruit,” Bess declared.

“I don’t want to waste what little money I have, when your mother bought us a perfectly lovely lunch,” said Nan, cheerfully.

“It isn’t nice to eat it here,” Bess objected.

“Other people are doing so.”

“I don’t care,” snapped Bess.

“Oh, now, Bess——”

“I’ve got a dollar,” interrupted Bess. “I don’t see why mother wouldn’t let me have more money while traveling; but she didn’t.”

“Good reason,” laughed Nan. “You know you’d lose it.” She failed to tell Bess that Mrs. Harley had entrusted her with some money to use, “if anything should happen.” Nan was dependable and Bess’ mother appreciated the fact.

“I’m going,” said Bess, firmly, rising from the seat. “You’d better come, Nan.”

“On a dollar?” declared Nan. “How far do you think you’ll get in a dining car with all that wealth?”

Bess made a little face. “At least, we can have some tea,” she said.

“Ex—cuse me!” exclaimed Nan. “I have a hearty appetite—and it is crying out for satisfaction right now. I know your mother did not fail to remember there were two high-school girls to feed. There is plenty here,” and she took down the ample box which Mrs. Harley’s thoughtfulness had supplied.

“That’s all right,” said her chum, slily. “There will be enough for me if I want some when I come back.”

“I don’t know about that,” replied Nan, with gravity. “I shall try to eat it all.”

There was no quarrel between them over such a small matter. Indeed, Nan and Bess had never really had a serious difference since they had sat side by side in the kindergarten.

Bess had a reason for going into the dining car which she did not explain to her chum. She was curious about Linda Riggs. Everybody had heard of Mr. Henry W. Riggs, one of the big railroad men of the Middle West. Linda, of course, must be very aristocratic, Bess thought. And she had lots of money and lots of fine clothes.

Bess was deeply interested in pretty frocks, and she spent more than a few minutes daily reading the society column in the paper. She knew that Linda Riggs had an older sister who was already out in society. And once Bess had seen a group picture of the Riggs family. She thought she remembered Linda as a rather long-legged girl with plenty of bone and a snub nose.

When she entered the dining car she scarcely noticed the colored man who bowed her to a seat, so interested was she in viewing the girl whom she knew must be the railroad magnate’s daughter.

As Nan had intimated, Linda Riggs’ frock was stunning. It was not fit for a girl of her age to wear, it was too loud and, really, somewhat immodest. But it was evident that Miss Linda Riggs was quite used to wearing such apparel.

Although she had completed her luncheon some time before, it was evident that she had no intention of going into the day coach to which the other dispossessed passengers had been relegated when the rod broke under the chair-car.

They would soon be at the junction where another chair-car was to be coupled on.

Meanwhile a waiter was hovering about Linda Riggs’ chair. She beckoned him, took the check nonchalantly, and with a pencil wrote her father’s name upon it, passing both the check and her visiting card to the negro.

Bess watched breathlessly. It would have been the height of human delight, in Bess Harley’s opinion, if she could do that.

The head-waiter came and bowed before Linda Riggs and showed that he appreciated the honor of her presence in the car. Bess forgot to drink her tea, and only crumbled her cake while she secretly watched the arrogant girl.

Bess had felt her anger rise at the unknown girl who so insulted Nan Sherwood, when first she had been told about the confusion over the traveling bags. But having heard the particulars of who Linda Riggs was, and of her father’s riches, Bess’ anger on her chum’s behalf was soon drowned in curiosity.

She dawdled over her tea and cake until the train arrived at the junction, where another chair-car was in waiting. It was then, when Linda Riggs gathered up her purse and vanity bag, preparatory to leaving the dining car, that Bess Harley made a mortifying discovery.

She wished to pay her own modest check. Perhaps she would get into the corridor of the car at the same time as the stylishly gowned girl, and Linda might speak. But clutching her gloves and looking wildly all about, Bess could not find her hand-bag.

Had Nan Sherwood had the first suspicion just then of her chum’s predicament she would have flown to her assistance. But the train had halted, been broken in two, and the forward part of it had gone off with the locomotive to couple on to the waiting chair-car.

Nan asked the brakeman, and learned it would be ten minutes or more before the train would go on. The junction was not a very attractive spot; but already Nan was tired of riding. She asked Professor Krenner, who was reading, if he would look out for her baggage, and then she left the car.

Away up on a side track she saw the main part of the train, puffing down. The station, a weather-beaten, ugly old building, was not near. Indeed, there were not half a dozen houses in sight.

There were uncut weeds along the track, the cinderpaths were baked hard by the sun, and the whole situation was unlovely.

Near at hand was a shack, as ugly as all the other buildings; but there seemed to be some life about it.

At least, Nan, before she left the car, had seen the flutter of a child’s skirt at the door of the hovel. She now crossed the tracks and went cautiously toward the miserable dwelling.

Nan saw the child again at the door of the cabin, but only for an instant. She shouted to the little one, but the latter bashfully slipped inside the door.

Nan was very fond of children and this little towheaded child interested her. There was still plenty of time before the two halves of the train would be brought together.

Nan ran across the desert of cinders and weeds toward the cabin. Nobody else appeared at the broken window or the open door, but suddenly she heard an ear-piercing shriek from within.

It was the voice of the child. It sounded from the loft of the cabin, into which the little girl had doubtless climbed to escape from Nan’s thoughtless curiosity.

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter, my dear?” the girl from Tillbury cried, her feet spurred more quickly toward the cabin beside the railroad track.

The tiny girl shrieked for the second time—a shrill, agonized alarm. A more timid person would have been halted by the very nature of the cry. But Nan Sherwood did not hesitate. In a moment she was at the door of the hovel.

CHAPTER V
NAN SAVES ANOTHER, BUT IS HURT HERSELF

Nan looked searchingly into the gloomy interior of the hut. It was now no home, whatever it may have been in the past. It was only the wreck of a dwelling.

The girl could see little at first save the bare floor, the heaps of rubbish in the corners, and the fact that the rafters of the floor above were no longer covered with boards—if ever they had been.

The ladder which led to the loft was in the far corner. There was not a stick of furniture in sight.

Suddenly Nan saw something moving in a streak of dusty sunlight that penetrated the side window. It was a pair of child’s thin legs kicking in the air!

Above the knees was the little torn frock, and, looking higher, and looking aghast, Nan saw that the tiny girl was hanging by her hands from the rafters.

“Oh, my dear!” she began, and stepped over the broken sill.

Then she halted—halted as though she had been frozen in her tracks.

From the floor, almost at Nan’s feet, it seemed, came a quick rustle—then a distinct rattle. The flat, brisk sound can never be mistaken, not even by one who has not heard it before. Wide-eyed, her breath leashed tight behind her teeth, Nan Sherwood stared about the floor. It was there, the coiled rattlesnake, almost under the bare, twitching soles of the hanging child’s feet.

In these few passing seconds the eyes of the girl from Tillbury had become so used to the semi-gloom that she could see the fear-stricken face of the imperiled child. Horror and despair looked out of the staring eyes. Her frail arms could not long hold the weight of her body.

She must drop, and the arrogantly lifted head of the rattlesnake, crested with wrath, was ready for the stroke.

In running up the ladder to the loft the child had doubtless dislodged the rattlesnake which, upon slipping to the floor of the hut, had assumed an attitude of defense. The victim, flinging herself down between two rafters to escape, at once was in imminent danger of falling upon the angry snake.

The drop to the floor of the shack would not necessarily hurt the child, for the rafters were low. But a single injection of the poison of the serpent might be fatal.

These facts and conjectures had rushed into Nan Sherwood’s mind in a flood of appreciation. She understood it all.

As well, she realized that, if the child was to be saved, she must perform the act of rescue. Before she could summon help to the spot the child’s hold would slip and her tender body fall within striking distance of the snake.

Indeed, it seemed to Nan as though the little brown fingers were already slipping from the rough rafter. Her body stiffened as though she would leap forward to catch the child in her arms, as she fell.

But such a move might be fatal to herself, Nan knew. The serpent would change its tactics with lightning speed. Indeed, it sprang its rattle in warning again as though, with its beady, lidless eyes, it read Nan’s mind.

The seconds passed swiftly. The child did not scream again, but her pleading gaze rested upon Nan’s face. Nan was her only hope—her only possible chance of escape.

Nor did Nan fail her.

One glance the girl gave around the doorway. Then she stooped suddenly, seized upon a huge stone and hurled it at the upraised, darting crest of the snake.

Down upon the writhing coils the stone fell crushingly. The head of the snake was mashed, and the stone bounded across the floor.

Yet, as Nan leaped in with a cry and caught the falling child in her arms, a horrible thing happened.

The writhing, twisting body of the already dead snake coiled around her ankle and for that awful moment Nan was not at all sure but the poisonous creature had bitten her!

She staggered out of the hut with the child in her arms, and there fell weakly to the ground. Professor Krenner had been watching her from the car window, wondering at her recent actions. Now he leaped up and rushed out of the car. Several of the train crew came running to the spot, too, but it was the odd instructor who reached the fallen girl first, with the sobbing child beside her.

“Snake! snake!” was all the little one could gasp at first.

A brakeman ventured into the hut and kicked out the writhing body of the rattlesnake.

“Great heavens! the girl’s been bitten!” cried one man.

“And she saved the kid from it,” declared another.

“It can’t be,” said Professor Krenner, firmly. “You’re not bitten, are you?” he asked Nan.

“Oh! I—I—thought I was,” gasped the girl. Then she began to laugh hysterically. “But if I was the snake was dead first.”

“That would not be impossible,” murmured the professor.

Then he glanced at the crushed head of the rattlesnake, and felt relieved. “That thing never struck after the stone hit it!” he declared, with confidence. “You are safe, my dear.”

“But she’s a mighty brave girl,” cried one of the railroad men. “I was watching her at the door of that old shack, and wondered what she was doing.”

Professor Krenner had helped the trembling Nan to rise and beat the dust off her skirt. The little girl’s sobs soon ceased when she found she was not hurt.

“Here comes the rest of the train, Bill!” exclaimed one of the men.

“All back to the cars!” ordered Bill. “All aboard—them that’s goin’!”

Nan stooped and kissed the tear-stained face of the child. “I don’t know who you are, honey,” she crooned, “but I shall remember all the term at Lakeview that down here at this junction is a little girl I know.”

“No! no!” suddenly screamed the child, throwing her arms about Nan’s neck. “I want you! I want you! I want my mom to see you!”

Nan had to break away and run for the train, leaving the child screaming after her. Professor Krenner was already at the car step to help her aboard. The two parts of the train had come gently together, and had been coupled. To Nan’s amazement, as she approached the cars, she beheld her chum, Bess Harley, and the arrogant Linda Riggs, sitting comfortably together in a window of the chair-car, talking “sixteen to the dozen,” as Nan mentally expressed it. So busy was Bess, indeed, that she did not see Nan running for the train.

When the train had started, however, Bess came slowly back into the day coach.

“Let’s go into the other car, Nan,” she said. “Why! how rumpled you look! Did you eat all that lunch?”

“Not all,” Nan replied, rather seriously. Then, as she gathered their possessions together for transportation to the chair-car she, by accident, kicked her chum’s hand-bag out into the aisle. “Why! what’s this?” Nan cried.

“Oh! there it is,” Bess said. “The horrid thing! I didn’t know what had become of it. And I was so mortified when I came to pay for my tea.”

Nan looked at her aghast. “Whatever did you do?” she asked.

Bess had the grace to blush a little. But then she laughed, too.

“I will tell you,” she said. “That Riggs girl isn’t so bad, after all. She saw my difficulty and she just had my forty-five cents added to her check. It was real kind of her.”

“Well! I never!” was all Nan could say.

She followed Bess forward to the other car in something of a daze, bearing the bulk of their impedimenta herself. Bess Harley hobnobbing with the rude girl who had accused her, Nan, of being a thief! It seemed impossible.

“Where are you going?” Nan asked, as Bess continued up the aisle. “Here are empty seats.”

“There is plenty of room up front,” said Bess, cheerfully.

Nan saw Linda Riggs’ hat “up front,” too. “No,” she said firmly. “I shall sit here.”

“Oh—well!” Bess drawled, pouting.

For the first time in her life Nan Sherwood felt that a friend was disloyal to her—in appearance, if not actually. She realized that Bess must have been put in an exceedingly mortifying position in the dining car when she found she was without money with which to pay her check; and Miss Riggs may have been quite accommodating to offer to pay. Nan, however, could not imagine herself in her chum’s situation, accepting the offer.

Bess needed only to wait until the first half of the train backed down to the rear half, when she could either have found her mislaid bag, or got the money for her lunch from Nan.

And then—to be so eager to continue the acquaintanceship with the uncivil girl! That was what pointed the dart.

“I don’t care!” said the pouting Bess, at last. “I’ve got to pay her the forty-five cents. She’ll think it funny.”

“Pay her by all means,” Nan said, striving not to show how hurt she was.

Bess briskly went up the aisle at this permission; but she did not return for an hour or more. Linda Riggs’ conversation evidently quite charmed shallow, thoughtless Bess.

CHAPTER VI
HOW IT FEELS TO BE A HEROINE

Bess Harley came back to her chair facing Nan’s quite full of a brand new subject of conversation.

“Do you know, Nan Sherwood,” she cried, “that we’ve got a real, live heroine aboard this train?”

“Goodness!” exclaimed Nan. “What’s she done?”

“They say she saved another girl’s life back there where we stopped to take on the new car.”

“At the Junction?” murmured Nan.

“Yes.”

“Oh!” whispered her chum, and immediately became silent.

“My goodness!” ejaculated Bess. “I never saw such a girl. Aren’t you interested at all?”

“I—I don’t know,” her chum replied in a very small voice.

“I wonder at you, Nan Sherwood!” cried Bess, at last, after staring at Nan for some moments.

“Why?”

“You don’t seem at all interested. And this girl was awfully brave. Linda says she ought to have a purse of money given her—or a Carnegie medal—or something. Linda says——”

“Linda?” repeated Nan, in wonder.

“Why, yes,” Bess said. “She’s not at all a bad girl—nothing at all like what you said she was.”

“I said she was, Bess?” asked Nan, gently.

“Well! you don’t like her,” flared up Bess.

“I certainly do not,” confessed Nan.

“You’re prejudiced,” pouted her chum.

“I certainly am prejudiced against anybody who calls me a thief,” Nan declared firmly. “And so would you be, Bess.”

“But she didn’t know you, Nan.”

“And I wish never to know her,” said Nan, with spirit.

“But you’ll have to,” cried Bess. “She’s going to the same school we do. She’s been there for two years, you see, and she knows everything,” declared Bess.

“Everything except how to be kind and polite,” suggested Nan.

“There you go again!” cried Bess. “It doesn’t sound like you at all, Nan.”

“I’m sorry,” said her chum. “I thought you knew me pretty well by this time, Bess. But, it seems you know this Linda Riggs better.”

“Oh, Nan! I don’t,” and Bess was almost ready to cry. “She, Linda, was mad when she spoke to you, of course. You ought to hear her speak of this brave girl back in the day coach, who saved the other one from the snake.”

Nan was silent; but Bess was full of the topic and the pent up volume of her speech had to find an outlet. She rushed on with:

“It was just great of her, Nan! She reminds me of you when you saved Jacky Newcomb’s life in the pond last winter—when he broke through the ice that evening.”

Nan still was silent.

“This girl is just as brave as you were,” declared Bess, with confidence. “She got off the train when it stopped. And she saw a little girl inside a house there by the railroad track. The little girl was in there and a great, big rattlesnake was coiled all ready to strike the poor little thing,” went on Bess, breathlessly.

“The colored porter told Linda and me all about it. This brave girl threw a stone on the horrid snake and killed it before it could strike the child. And then she fainted and they carried her back to the car,” pursued Bess. “And the colored man says the passengers are going to get up a memorial to present to this girl. I want to see her—to know her. Don’t you, Nan?”

“Why!” gasped her chum, in much confusion, “I hope they won’t do anything like that.”

“Like what?” queried Bess, in amazement.

“Bother her with any memorial—or whatever you call it—about what she did.”

“Why, Nan!”

“Well——”

“You—you are perfectly horrid!” her chum declared. “She’s a heroine! Think of it! We ought to do something for her, Linda says.”

“We ought to let her alone,” Nan declared vigorously.

“I—I never knew you to speak so, Nan,” gasped Bess. “This brave girl——”

“How do you know she’s brave?” snapped Nan, who was really getting cross. “She probably was scared half to death.”

“Why! she’s a heroine,” declared Bess again.

“Well! how do we know how a heroine feels?” Nan asked, exasperated.

“Oh, Nan!”

“One thing I am sure of,” went on Nan Sherwood, rather wildly. “She doesn’t want a memorial—or a medal—or a purse——”

“Perhaps she’s poor,” put in Bess, obstinately.

“She’s not!”

“Why—do you know who she is?” gasped Bess.

Nan was silent. She saw she had gone too far. If Bess should suspect——

The door at the rear of the car banged open. The conductor, leading a committee of passengers from the other coach, entered. He was smiling and the ladies and gentlemen with him were smiling, too. When their gaze fell upon Nan they marched directly toward her.

Nan got up. She looked all about for some means of escape. Behind her, coming down the aisle, were several other people headed by Professor Krenner. And with them came the haughty girl, Linda Riggs.

“Oh! what’s the matter?” cried Bess, starting up, too.

Nan was speechless, and red with confusion. Professor Krenner was smiling, as though he rather enjoyed Nan Sherwood’s position.

“Oh, Miss Harley!” Linda Riggs cried to her new acquaintance. “They say that dear, brave girl is in this car.”

“Is she?” asked Bess, feebly. “Oh, Nan! what do all these people want?”

“We want your friend, Miss Harley,” Professor Krenner said drily. “I expect Linda did not know that. Nancy Sherwood, does she call herself? Well, Nancy Sherwood is a very brave girl, and we have all come to tell her so.”

“Nan!” shrieked Bess, seeing a great light suddenly. “It was you! You are the heroine!”

“She most certainly is the girl, Miss,” the conductor laughingly said. “And she has been trying to hide her light under a bushel, has she?”

Bess was stunned. The flushed countenance of Linda Riggs was a study. Professor Krenner seemed to be secretly enjoying the unpleasant girl’s amazement.

Linda seized Bess by the shoulder with a fierce grip—a grip that made the girl from Tillbury wince.

“Why didn’t you tell me you knew her?” she hissed in Bess’ ear as the passengers crowded about the much troubled Nan.

“I—I didn’t know I knew her,” gasped Bess. “How should I know Nan Sherwood was the girl who killed the rattlesnake?”

“I don’t care anything about that!” cried the enraged girl. “You knew she was the one who stole my bag——”

“Stole your bag?” repeated Bess, her own wrath rising. “She didn’t!”

“She did!”

“Nan Sherwood would not do such a thing. It was all a mistake, Linda, and you know it. She didn’t have to steal your bag! She has one of her own quite as good——”

“And where did she get it?” sneered the railroad magnate’s daughter, her face deeply flushed and her eyes fairly aflame.

“She bought it,” declared Bess.

“Yes—she—did!” sneered Linda.

“She did! she did! I was with her yesterday when she bought it! So there!”

“And who are you?” responded the enraged girl. “I don’t know why I should believe you any more than that other one. You couldn’t pay for your lunch just now, and I had to pay for you——”

“Oh!” gasped Bess, now quite in tears. “I paid you back—you horrid girl!”

“Dear me! did you?” responded Linda, airily.

“Yes, I did! You know I did!” Bess cried stormily.

“Perhaps. I never pay attention to such small matters,” and the other tossed her head.

Of course, all this was very foolish, and Bess should not have paid Linda the compliment of attention. But she did, and Linda saw that her words stung—so she went on with her ill-natured tirade:

“There is one matter that I shall pay attention to,” and she laughed, sneeringly. “I shall see to it that the girls of Lakeview Hall are informed of the character of you and your friend. One of you stealing my bag——”

“She didn’t!” gasped Bess.

“Oh, she was stopped before she got very far, I grant you,” laughed Linda, sarcastically. “And the other obliged to borrow forty-five cents to pay for her luncheon in the dining car. It will amuse my friends at the Hall, I assure you.”

Nan had heard none of this conversation between her chum and Linda Riggs. Her own ears were actually burning because of the complimentary speeches the conductor and the passengers were making. Poor Nan was backed up against her chair, blushing furiously and almost in tears of confusion, while Bess was carrying on her wordy battle with Linda, a few steps up the aisle.

But suddenly Nan, as well as those about her, were quite startled by Bess Harley’s shrill outburst.

“Linda Riggs!” she cried. “You are the very meanest girl I ever saw! If you say another mean thing about Nan Sherwood I’ll box your ears for you!” and the superheated Bess advanced upon her antagonist, her hand raised, prepared to put her threat into execution.

CHAPTER VII
LAKEVIEW HALL APPEARS

“Well! I would have boxed her ears, I don’t care!” Bess gasped, when Nan succeeded in pulling her down into her chair. “You ought to have heard what she said about you——”

“I’m glad I didn’t,” Nan answered and sighed. “And one good thing—it broke up that foolish speech-making. I’m so ashamed——”

“Of me!” flared up Bess. “I was only standing up for you.”

“Hereafter, dear, do your standing up, sitting down,” laughed Nan, hugging her still overwrought chum.

“Well,” pouted the tearful Bess, “I—I don’t care!”

“I’ll fight my own battles.”

“But you never fight!” burst out Bess.

“Isn’t that just as well?” Nan observed, rather gravely. “Suppose your mother heard of your wanting to box a girl’s ears in a public place like this car? And how Professor Krenner looked at you!”

“Oh, I don’t care for him,” muttered Bess.

“Of course you do. He will be one of our teachers.”

“That Riggs girl says that none of the girls at the Hall think much of Professor Krenner,” grumbled Bess. “They say he’s cracked.”

“I wouldn’t repeat what that Riggs girl says,” admonished Nan, with some sharpness. It exasperated her for Bess to show that she had been influenced at all by the rude rich girl.

“Well, I’ve found out I don’t like her,” Bess sighed.

“I discovered I didn’t, before,” Nan rejoined, dryly.

“But she’ll tell awful stories about us at Lakeview Hall,” Bess said with a worried air.

“Let her tell,” scoffed the more sensible Nan.

“We—ell! We don’t want to begin school with all the girls against us.”

“They’ll not be. Do you suppose that girl has much influence with the nice, sensible girls who attend Lakeview Hall?”

“We—ell!” exclaimed Bess, again. “She’s rich.”

“Bess! I’m astonished at you,” declared Nan, with some heat. “Any one to hear you would think you a money-worshipper. How can you bear to be friends with me when my folks are poor.”

Bess began to laugh at her. “Poor?” she repeated. “And your dear mother just fallen heir to fifty thousand dollars?”

“Oh—well—I forgot that,” returned Nan, meekly. “But I know you loved me before we had any prospect of having money, Bess. Don’t let’s toady to rich girls when we get to this school. Let’s pick our friends by some other standard.”

“I guess you’re right,” agreed her chum. “I’ve had a lesson. That hateful thing! But if she does tell stories about us to the other girls——”

“We can disprove them by Professor Krenner,” added Nan. “Don’t worry.”

“I don’t like him,” repeated Bess, pouting.

But Nan did. She was quite sure the instructor with the big, shell-rimmed spectacles, understood girls very well indeed, and that he would be a good friend and a jolly companion if one would allow him to be.

There was that about Professor Krenner that reminded her of her own dear father. They were both given to little, dry jokes; they were both big men, with large, strong hands; and they were both very observant.

How she would get along with the other instructors at Lakeview Hall, and with Dr. Beulah Prescott, herself, Nan did not know; but she felt that she and Professor Krenner would always be good friends.

Nor was she afraid of what Linda might say about her at the Hall. Nan Sherwood was deeply hurt by the girl’s arrogance and unkindness; but she had too large a fund of good sense to be disturbed, as Bess was, over Linda’s threatened scandal.

“I don’t believe a girl like her really has much influence among other girls—not the right kind of girls, at any rate,” Nan thought. “And Bess and I don’t want to get in with any other kind.”

She was just as eager as she could be, however, to get to Lakeview Hall, and find out what it and the girls were like. Boarding school was an unknown world to Nan. She felt more confidence now in herself, as the train bore her toward the wild Huron shore on which the school stood, than she had when she journeyed up into the Michigan woods with her Uncle Henry, back in mid-winter.

In that past time she was leaving her dear parents and they were leaving her. Each revolution of the car wheels were widening the space between “Momsey” and “Papa Sherwood,” and herself. By this time Nan had grown used to their absence. She missed them keenly—she would do that up to the very moment that they again rejoined her; but the pain of their absence was like that of an old wound.

Meanwhile she was determined, was Nan, to render such a report of her school-life to her parents as would make them proud of her.

Nan was not a particularly brilliant girl in her books. She always stood well in her classes because she was a conscientious and a faithful student. Bess, really, was the quicker and cleverer of the two in their studies.

Nan was very vigorous, and loved play much more heartily than she did her books. Demerits had not often come her way, however, either in grammar school or high school. Mr. Mangel, the Tillbury principal, had felt no hesitancy in viséing Nan’s application blank for entrance to the same grade as Bess Harley at Lakeview Hall. Nan, he knew, would not disappoint Dr. Beulah Prescott.

This school that she was going to, Nan knew, would be very different from the public school she had attended heretofore. In the first place, it was a girls’ world; there would be neither association with, nor competition with, pupils of the other sex.

Nan was not wholly sure that she would like this phase of her new school life. She liked boys and had always associated with them.

Nan could climb, row, skate, swim, and cut her initials in the bark of a tree without cutting her fingers.

Her vigorous life in the woods during the past six months had stored up within her a greater supply of energy than she had ever before possessed. She had, too, seen men and boys doing really big things in the woods; she had seen courage displayed; she had partaken of adventures herself that called upon her reserves of character, as well as muscle.

Indeed, Nan was quite a different girl in some respects from the timid, wondering child who had gone away from Tillbury clinging to Uncle Henry’s hand. More than ever she felt the protecting instinct stir within her when she saw her chum going wrong. She knew she must assume the burden of looking after Bess Harley in this new world they were entering.

Two hundred girls to compete with! It looked to be such a lot! Lakeview Hall was a very popular institution, and although the building was not originally intended for a school, it answered amply for that purpose—as Professor Krenner told her. One end of the great structure had never been completed; for its builder’s ideas had been greater than his resources.

She knew that the castle-like structure standing upon the bluff overlooking Freeling and the troubled waters of Lake Huron, was much too vast for a private dwelling, and that as a summer hotel it had years before signally failed.

Under the executive care of Dr. Beulah Prescott the place had expanded into a large and well-governed school. Nan looked forward with both hope and fear to meeting so many other girls all at the same time.

The cost of tuition at Lakeview precluded the presence of many pupils whose parents were not at least moderately wealthy. In fact, it was a very exclusive school, or “select” as Linda Riggs had called it during her brief hour of friendship with Bess Harley. Nan devoutly hoped that not many of the other girls would be as “select” as Linda Riggs.

Among the two hundred girls, surely not many could be so purse-proud and arrogant as the railroad magnate’s daughter. Nan had not been long enough removed from poverty to feel that she really was rich, nor was it, after all, an enormous fortune. Her mother’s money was altogether too new an acquisition to have made much of an impression upon Nan’s mind, save to stir her imagination.

She could, and did, imagine a sublimated “dwelling in amity” on the little by-street in Tillbury. She looked forward to the time when she and her parents would be together in their old home; but she could not imagine their style of living changed to any degree.

The life before Nan in the boarding school, however, she realized would be different from anything she had ever experienced. Later, as dusk began to shut down and the switch targets twinkled along the right of way, she peered ahead eagerly for the first sight of the school.

It appeared. Like an old, gray castle on the Rhine, such as she and Bess had read about, the sprawling, huge building was outlined against the sky on which the glories of the sunset were reflected. The little town in the valley was scarcely discernible save for its twinkling evening lamps; but the Hall stood out boldly on the headland—a silhouette cut out of black cardboard, for not a single lamp shone there.

CHAPTER VIII
THE BOY AT THE STATION

Bess was in a great bustle as the train slowed down for Freeling. She gathered all their possessions, that nothing might be missed this time, and then started for the door with only her shopping-bag and raincoat.

“You’re forgetting something, Bess,” cried Nan.

“Oh, no!” returned her chum, her eyes opening very wide and very innocently. “Can’t be possible. Suit-case, bag, coats, lunch box—I wish you would throw that away, Nan! Sure, that’s everything.”

“Yes. But you forget I’m not a dray-horse,” Nan said drily. “Come on and take your share of the load for once.”

“Oh! I forgot,” murmured Bess, faintly, as Nan proceeded to load her down.

They got out on the platform and the train steamed away. Professor Krenner had disappeared. They did not know that he had remained aboard the train, which stopped at a flag-station a mile up the track—a point nearer to his cabin than Freeling proper.

There were a few bustling passengers in sight, but none of them were girls. Even Linda Riggs had disappeared.

“What shall we do?” asked Bess, helplessly. “Not a soul to meet us, Nan!”

“Well, you didn’t expect all the girls would turn out with a brass band to greet us, did you?” chuckled Nan.

“But surely there must be some means of conveyance to the Hall!”

“Shank’s mare, maybe,” returned her cheerful chum.

“You can laugh!” cried Bess, as though she considered Nan’s serenity a fault. “But I don’t want to climb away up that hill to-night in the dark, and with this heavy old suit-case.”

“Quite right. That would be too big a premium placed upon education,” laughed Nan. “Let us ask.”

A man with a visored cap who was hurrying past at this juncture, was halted and questioned.

“B’us for the Hall? Yes, Miss. Just the other side of the station if it hasn’t already gone,” he said.

“There! we’ve lost it,” complained Bess, starting on a run.

“Impossible! How could we lose it when we never have had it?”

“Oh, you can be funny——”

They rounded the corner of the station just as a pair of slowly-moving horses attached to a big, lurching omnibus, were starting forward. The man driving them leaned down from the seat, speaking to somebody inside the ’bus.

“Sure there ain’t no more of you to-night, Miss?” he asked. “Dr. Prescott said——”

“I know there’s no more of me, Charley,” Miss Linda Riggs’ voice interrupted tartly. “And if you don’t hurry along you won’t get your usual tip, I can tell you that!”

“Oh!” murmured Bess, hanging back.

“She’s trying to run away with the school ’bus,” declared Nan, in some anger. “Now, she sha’n’t do that, Bess!”

“Let her go,” begged Bess. “I don’t want to ride with her.”

“Pshaw! I’m not dying for her company, either,” Nan confessed. “But I want to get up to that Hall to-night.”

The omnibus had completely turned around, heading away from the station.

“Hi, there!” cried Nan.

“Drive on, Charley,” commanded Linda Riggs, loudly.

The ’bus driver evidently did not hear Nan’s call. The latter dropped her bag and tossed her own coat to Bess.

“I’m not going to let him get away from us,” she cried.

But Bess seized her arm. “Oh, don’t! Let’s not have another quarrel with that Riggs girl right here.”

“Dear me! I haven’t quarreled with her at all, yet,” said Nan, somewhat amused.

“She’s—so—mean,” began Bess, when Nan interrupted:

“Well! we’ll just beat her to it at that!”

“Oh, how, Nan?”

“We’ll get there first.”

“But, how?” asked her chum again.

Several automobiles were standing beside the platform and Nan swiftly approached the driver of the nearest one.

“Do you know how to get to Lakeview Hall?” she asked of this person.

“Why—yes,” he said. “Of course.”

Nan saw that he was only a young boy; but he wore gauntlets, had goggles attached to his cap, and was evidently old enough to drive the car.

“Can you take us up there?” Nan asked.

“Why—yes,” again rather doubtfully.

“Come on, Bess!” called Nan, with satisfaction. “We’ll beat that Linda Riggs after all.”

“Oh, I say!” murmured the youthful automobile driver.

But Nan paid little attention to him. Having engaged him for the trip she hustled Bess and the baggage into his car without another word to him. Finally she leaped in, too, and banged the door of the tonneau.

“There! we’re all ready,” she said to the boy.

“Oh—well—if you say so,” he murmured, and obediently cranked up and then stepped into the car himself.

“Say!” whispered Nan to Bess. “He’s an awfully slow thing, isn’t he? I don’t see how he makes any money tooling people around in this auto.”

“What’s bothering me,” whispered Bess, “is how we’re going to pay him? I haven’t but twenty cents left. You know I bought candy on the train, beside that lunch.”

“Not having wasted my money in riotous living,” laughed Nan, “I can pay him all right.”

The automobile whisked through the streets of the lower town in a few moments. They passed the lumbering ’bus with a scornful toot of the horn. In the suburbs they went even faster, although they were climbing the bluff all the time.

Lakeview Hall was alight now, and as they approached it between the great granite posts at the foot of the private driveway it looked more friendly.

A honk of the automobile-horn in notification of their approach, and immediately the cluster of incandescent lights under the reflector on the great front porch blazed into life. The wide entrance to the Hall, and all the vicinity, was radiantly illumined.

“Goodness!” ejaculated Nan. “I guess they do meet us with a brass band!”

For, with shouts of welcome, and a great flutter of frocks and ribbons, a troop of girls ran out of the Hall to welcome the newcomers.

“Here she is, girls!”

“Walter’s the boy to do an errand right!”

“Weren’t we the thoughtful bunch to send him after you?”

“Hey, Linda! we’re going to have the same old room, Mrs. Cupp says.”

The automobile came to a stop. The boy driver drawled:

“Some mistake, girls. I didn’t see Linda Riggs at all. But here’s a couple of new ones.”

Bess had uttered a horrified gasp; but Nan was almost convulsed with laughter. She could usually appreciate the funny side of any situation; and to her mind this most certainly was funny!

It was plain that Linda Riggs was popular enough with some of her schoolmates to have them welcome her with special éclat. They had engaged this boy with the automobile to meet her at the station.

In place of Linda, arriving in the motor car, Nan and Bess had usurped her place; while even now the old ’bus was rumbling up the driveway with Linda inside.

“Goodness! who can they be?” remarked one of the girls, staring at Nan and Bess.

The former was quite composed as, with her own and Bess Harley’s possessions about her on the lower of the four broad steps leading up to the veranda, she drew out her purse to pay the boy for the trip from the station.

“How much?” she asked him, without observing the surprised group in her rear.

“Why—I——It’s nothing,” stammered the young chauffeur.

“Oh, yes it is!” exclaimed Nan. “Of course you have some regular charge—even if you were not there at the station just to meet us.”

“No—o, I don’t,” he declared. “There’s nothing to pay.”

“But there must be!” cried Nan, a little wildly. “Surely you run a public car?”

“No. This is my father’s car,” admitted the boy, whom Nan now saw was a very good looking boy and very well dressed. “I was just down there to meet a friend——”

“Yes, and I don’t see how you missed her, Walter,” interrupted the girl behind Nan, and who had spoken before. “For here is Linda now, in Charley’s old ’bus.”

“Oh my!” murmured Bess.

Nan began to feel great confusion herself. It was not so funny, after all!

“Why—why, then you do not have this car for hire?” she asked.

“No, ma’am,” said the boy, meekly. He was looking at Nan Sherwood admiringly, for she made a very pretty picture standing there in the strong glow of the electric light. “But I didn’t mind bringing you up—not at all.”

“Oh!” gasped Nan.

“You are an awful chump, Walter,” observed the girl who had spoken before. “Grace said you could do an errand right; but it seems you’re quite as big a dunce as your sister.”

“Grace is not a dunce, Cora Courtney!” exclaimed the boy, with some show of spirit, as he started his car, not having shut off his engine. “Good night,” he said to Nan, and was gone around the curve of the drive as Charley brought his lazy horses to a halt before the door.

“Here I am, girls!” cried Linda Riggs, putting her head out of the ’bus window. Then she saw Nan and Bess standing on the steps of the portico, and she demanded involuntarily:

“How did those two girls get here ahead of me?”

CHAPTER IX
THE RED-HAIRED GIRL

“Well! I must say it’s a good joke on you, Linda,” said the tall girl, called Cora Courtney, in response to Miss Riggs’ observation.

“What do you mean?” snapped the railroad magnate’s daughter.

“Why, they came up from the station in the auto we girls sent after you. You know it’s against the rules for us to go down into the town so late, so we couldn’t send a delegation for you; but that little Grace Mason said her brother would bring you up.”

“Walter Mason!” exclaimed Linda, hopping out of the old ’bus. “Is that who was driving that car?”

“Yes. That was Walter. And Walter is as big a dunce as his sister,” declared Cora, crossly. “He went right by you and brought up these two girls.”

Linda’s face was very much flushed. That she had overreached herself in this matter, taught the obstinate girl nothing. She had deliberately misinformed the ’bus driver, when she told him there were no other girls on the train, and had hurried him away from the station.

So she had overlooked Walter Mason and his car, and the boy had not seen her. Her scowl as she looked upon the now calm Nan and the almost petrified Bess, did not improve Linda’s personal appearance.

“Oh! I am not surprised at anything those two do,” scoffed the rich girl, loftily.

“Hullo!” exclaimed Cora. “They don’t seem to have done anything except to get a free ride.”

“Indeed, that is just it!” cried Linda, with a toss of her head. “Anything free is just what they are looking for. One of them let me pay for her lunch on the train. And the other——”

“Girls!”

The voice, very mellow and sweet (it reminded Nan Sherwood of her mother’s own in its soft cadence) seemed to quell all harsher sounds instantly—the sharp voice of Linda, even the querulous notes of the katydids in the grove before the Hall, and the strident tones of the crickets.

“Girls!”

Nan flashed a glance up the steps. There had softly swept to the break of the short flight, a lovely lady in trailing robes, gray bands of hair smoothed over her ears, gray eyes as luminous as stars; and only the soft lace at the low-cut neck of her gown to divide its gray shade from the softly pink complexion of Dr. Beulah Prescott.

“She’s beautiful,” breathed Nan in her chum’s ear.

“Girls!” then said the preceptress of Lakeview Hall again. “The supper gong is sounding. Bring the new arrivals in. They may have ten minutes in the lavatory on this floor before appearing at table.”

“How do you do, Linda? I hope you are quite well. And these are two of our new girls?”

Nan and Bess had picked up their possessions and now mounted the steps hesitatingly.

“Come right here, my dears,” said Dr. Prescott, holding out a slim, beautifully white hand on which there was no jewel. “It must be that you are the two friends from Tillbury, who were to arrive by this train.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Nan said.

“You are Nancy Sherwood?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“And this other is Elizabeth Harley?” pursued Dr. Prescott, shaking hands with them both.

Bess began to breathe more freely. It was one thing to face Linda Riggs down in the train; but in the presence of all these girls who knew her and did not know the newcomers—bold Elizabeth found her pluck oozing rapidly away.

Dr. Prescott beckoned to one girl of the group, and said: “Play hostess in my stead, Laura, please. This is Laura Polk, Nancy and Elizabeth. She will show you where to freshen up a bit before supper, and lead you to the dining hall, as well. Owing to the delay of the workmen in making some repairs, we are still in some confusion, but you will be assigned to your rooms before supper is over. I hope you will be very happy with us.”

She patted Nan’s shoulder, put her arm for a moment around Bess, and then floated—rather than walked—away. Nan had never seen anybody so graceful of carriage as this lady. Even “Momsey,” whom she worshipped, could not cross a room as did the preceptress of Lakeview Hall.

The girl whom she had introduced to the two friends, Laura Polk, was a smiling, freckled girl, with a fiery thatch of hair. It was not bronze, or red-gold, or any other fashionable color. It was just plain, unmistakable red—nothing else.

She seemed to be a very pleasant girl. What Linda Riggs had said about Nan and Bess in her hearing made no impression on Laura.

“Come on, lambkins,” she said. “I wager you feel all cinders and smutch after such a long ride in the cars.”

“We do,” Nan agreed fervently.

“W’ay from Chicago?”

“Yes,” said Bess, finding her voice.

“I came up myself day-before-yesterday,” said Laura. “I know what it is.”

She led the way through the great entrance hall and down a side passage to the tiled and enameled lavatory. Even Bess was impressed by the elegance of the furnishings. The rugs were handsome, the carpets soft, thick pile, the hangings richly decorative. Nan, of course, had never seen anything like it.

“What a delightful place,” Bess said to her chum. “And such good taste in the decorating.”

“Hope the supper will taste just as good,” Nan returned grimly. “I’m hungry in spite of the lunch I ate. You spoiled your appetite with tea and candy.”

“I didn’t suppose there was anything left for me in that old box when you got through,” sniffed Bess.

“Oh, yes there was—and is,” laughed Nan. “It’s good, too.”

“Oh, girls!” broke in their red-headed guide. “Have you really part of your train lunch left?”

“Yes,” said Nan, shyly.

“Is it in that box?” asked Laura Polk, quickly.

“Yes.”

“Then hang onto it, do!” begged Laura.

Nan and Bess looked at each other wonderingly, and then both of them questioningly at Laura.

“Oh, you’ll be glad of my advice—probably this very night. Dr. Beulah doesn’t approve of us girls eating between meals, and the girl that manages to sneak a bite up to her room to eat at bedtime is lucky, indeed,” Laura declared, quite seriously. “I tell you, I have sometimes lain for hours in the throes of starvation because I didn’t have even a cracker.”

“Goodness!” gasped Bess. “I should think you would take up something from the supper table.”

“Ha! ha!” laughed Laura, hollowly. “Wait till you have seen the supper table.”

“What do you mean?” queried Nan, curiously.

“You see all this luxury about you,” proclaimed the red-haired girl, solemnly. “You beheld the magnificence of the main hall as you came in. And it extends to Dr. Beulah’s apartments, which are downstairs here, on the right of the main door.

“But when you turn the other way,” continued Laura, “and approach the chaste and nunnery-like rooms devoted to the uses of ‘us young ladies,’ as Mrs. Cupp calls us, you will at once and immediately be struck, stroke, and stricken with the vast and monstrous difference between our part of the castle and Dr. Beulah’s.

“Oh!” cried this extravagantly speaking girl, “Dr. Beulah has her course dinner at night, carried in by black Susan on a mighty tray. I have often thought that it would be a great lark to catch Susan in the back hall, blindfold her, threaten her with the boathouse ghost if she squealed, and bear off the doctor’s dinner as the spoils of the campaign.”

“But goodness me!” cried Nan, when she could speak for laughter. “Don’t they really give you enough supper?”

“Wait! Only wait!” repeated Laura, warmly. “You’ll soon see. Dr. Beulah believes most thoroughly in ‘the simple life’—for us girls. Oh, she do—believe me! And I think Mrs. Cupp even counts the crackers that go on each dish that is set on the table at supper time.

“Sometimes we have crackers and milk for supper,” added Laura, dropping her voice to the tone of one telling a ghost story at midnight. Then in a still more ghost-like voice she repeated: “Sometimes we have crackers and milk. The lacteal fluid is usually twice skimmed, first for the teachers’ table (they have cream in their coffee in the morning), secondly for the thin, anæmic fluid we get on our oatmeal. But, anyhow, it is milk.

“There are never more than seven crackers on a plate—just seven, the perfect number,” sighed this hyperbolical girl. “I’ve counted them again and again. Why seven, and not six, or eight, deponent knoweth not. I think Mrs. Cupp counts them out that way for some fell purpose of her own,” went on Laura, reflectively. “She must have the crackers all numbered and she deals ’em around as in a game at cards. Anyhow, I tried a trick once and it didn’t work, so I believe she has them numbered.”

“What did you do?” asked wide-eyed Bess.

“The girl next to me didn’t appear at supper. I took her crackers and slipped them down my stocking. But Mrs. Cupp caught me before I got out of the room, took me to her den, and made me disgorge the booty——”

A mellow gong clanged through the building. Nan and Bess, who were now almost convulsed by their new friend’s remarks, had managed to make some sort of a toilet.

“Come on!” whispered the red-haired girl, hoarsely. “Never mind your bags and wraps. They will be perfectly safe on that settee. But hang onto the lunch box. If Mrs. Cupp finds that she will confiscate its contents, I assure you.”

She thrust the box into Bess’ hands and drove both the new girls before her, like a fussy hen with two chickens.

CHAPTER X
A FAMOUS INTRODUCTION

The girls crowded into the dining hall from all directions. Nan and Bess were told that there were many who had not yet arrived; but to the two strangers from Tillbury it seemed as though there was a great throng.

The curious glances flung at Nan and her chum confused them, the buzz of conversation added to their embarrassment, and had it not been for the red-haired girl, Laura Polk, they would have been tempted to turn and flee. They were quickly shown to seats, however, at a table where every seat was filled with laughing, chattering girls. As the school was not yet fully organized for work, there was no person in authority to take the head of the table. Nan and Bess were glad to note that their acquaintance, the red-haired girl, was with them. Bess was under the embarrassing necessity of holding the lunch box in her lap.

“Hullo, Laura!” whispered one mischievous girl from across the table. “I thought you were going to have your hair dyed this vacation?”

“So I did,” declared Miss Polk gravely.

“Well! I must say it didn’t seem to do it any good,” was the next observation.

“That’s just it,” said the serious, red-haired girl. “The dye didn’t take.”

“I really do wonder, Laura,” said another of her schoolmates, “how your hair ever came to be such a very reddish red.”

“I had scarlet fever when I was very young,” said Miss Polk, promptly, “and it settled in my hair.”

The smothered laughter over this had scarcely subsided when another girl asked: “Say, Polk! what’s your new chum, there, got in her lap?”

This pointed question was aimed at Bess, who blushed furiously. Laura remained as grave as a judge, and explained:

“Why, it’s her lunch. She seems to be afraid she won’t get supper enough here and has brought reinforcements.”

The laughter that went up at this sally drew the attention of many sitting near to that table. Bess Harley’s eyes filled with angry tears. She saw that the red-haired girl had set a trap for her, and she had walked right into it.

Bess really had feared she would not have supper enough. Having refused to eat out of the lunch box on the train, her appetite had now begun unmistakably to manifest itself. If the usual supper served the pupils of Lakeview Hall was as scanty as Laura Polk had intimated, the remains of the lunch Bess’ mother had bought for the two chums in Chicago would be very welcome indeed.

A glance around the table, however, soon assured even unobservant Bess that the red-haired girl was letting her tongue run idly when she criticised the food served. There were heaps of bread and biscuit, plenty of golden butter, and a pitcher of milk that had not been twice skimmed, beside each plate. Besides, there were apple sauce and sliced peaches and cold meat in abundance. The supper was plain, but plentiful enough, considering that Dr. Prescott believed in giving her girls their hearty meal at noon.

Nan had at once suspected that Laura Polk was joking. But, even she had not appreciated the fact that the red-haired girl was deliberately laying a trap for them until the subject of the lunch box was brought up. Nan whispered quickly to Bess:

“Laugh! laugh! Laugh with them, instead of letting them laugh at you!”

But Bess could not do that. She was very angry. And as soon as these fun-loving girls saw she had lost her temper, they kept the joke up.

Bess angrily allowed the lunch box to fall to the floor under the table. But, as the meal progressed, gradually almost every dish on the table gravitated toward Bess’ plate.

“Want any more of your apple sauce, Cora?” the question would be raised, quite gravely. “No? Well do pass it this way, we’re hungry over here,” and the half-eaten apple sauce would appear at Bess Harley’s elbow.

Her plate was soon ringed about with pitchers of milk, half-empty butter plates, broken biscuits, dabs of peaches and apple sauce in lonely-looking saucers. Nan was almost choked with a desire to laugh; and yet she was sorry for her chum, too. If Bess had only been able to take the joke in good part!

“Don’t show that you are so disturbed by their fun,” begged Nan of her friend.

“Fun! I’ll write my mother and have her take me away from here,” muttered Bess, in a rage. “Why, these girls are all beasts!”

“Hush, honey! don’t make it worse than it already is,” advised sensible Nan. “The madder you get the more they will enjoy teasing you.”

A rather severe and plainly dressed woman, wearing spectacles, who had been walking about among the tables, now came to the one where Nan and Bess were seated. She looked somewhat suspiciously at the dishes pushed so close to Bess Harley’s plate; but all the girls at the table were as sober as they could be.

“Dr. Prescott tells me you are the two girls from Tillbury,” she said to Nan.

“Yes,” was the reply. “My friend is Bess Harley and I am Nan Sherwood.”

“We are glad to have you with us, and you have been assigned to Number Seven, Corridor Four. Your trunks will be unpacked in the trunk room in the basement to-morrow.” Then she flashed another glance at the array of dishes before Bess.

“What is the meaning of this?” she demanded.

“I—I——,” Bess stammered, and some of the girls gave suppressed giggles.

Laura Polk soberly came to her rescue—or appeared to.

“This is her birthday, and all the girls have been giving her presents. At least, that is the way I understand it.”

Irrepressible laughter broke out around the table. Even Mrs. Cupp smiled grimly.

“I fancy you started the birthday presentation, Laura,” she said. “Let us have no more of it.”

When she had passed along Laura Polk leaned forward to whisper shrilly across Nan to Bess:

“Have a care, Bess! I think Mrs. Cupp suspects you. Don’t try to smuggle any of that apple sauce up to Room Seven, Corridor Four, in your stocking!”

Of course this was all very ridiculous, and, taken in the right spirit, the introduction of Nan Sherwood’s chum to Lakeview Hall, would not have been so bad. This was really a mild initiation to the fraternal companionship of a lot of gay, fun-loving girls.

But Bess had a high sense of her own dignity. At home, in Tillbury, because her father was an influential man, and her family of some local importance, nobody had ever treated her in this way. To be an object of the ridicule of strangers is a hard trial at best. Just then, to Bess’ mind, it seemed as though her whole school life at Lakeview Hall must be spoiled by this opening incident.

Nan felt for her friend, for she well knew how sensitive Bess was. But she knew this was all in fun. She could not help but be amused by the red-haired girl’s jokes. There wasn’t a scrap of harm in anything the exuberant one did or said. There was no meanness in Laura Polk. She was not like Linda Riggs.

Had it not been for Nan, Bess would never have found her way to Room Seven, Corridor Four, she was so blinded with angry tears. The room they were to occupy together was up two flights of broad stairs, and had a wide window overlooking the lake. Nan knew this to be the fact at once, for she went to the open window, heard the soughing of the uneasy waves on the pebbly beach far below, and saw the red, winking eye of the lighthouse at the mouth of Freeling Inlet.

“This is a lovely room, Bess,” she declared, as she snapped on the electric light.

Bess banged the door viciously. “I don’t care how nice it is! I sha’n’t stay here!” she cried.

“Oh, pshaw, Bess! you don’t mean that,” returned Nan.

“Yes, I do—so now! I won’t remain to be insulted by these girls! My mother won’t want me to. I shall write her——”

“You wouldn’t?” cried Nan, in horror.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“You don’t mean to say you would trouble and worry your mother about such a thing, just as soon as you get here?”

“We—ell!”

“I wouldn’t do that for anything,” Nan urged. “And, besides, I don’t think the girls meant any real harm.”

“That homely, red-headed Polk girl is just as mean as she can be!”

“But she has to take jokes herself about her red hair.”

“I don’t care!” grumbled Bess. “She has no right to play such mean tricks on me. Why did she tell me to take that horrid old lunch box in to supper?”

“Because she foresaw just what would happen,” chuckled Nan.

“Oh! you can laugh!” cried Bess.

“We should not have been so gullible,” Nan declared. “That was a perfectly ridiculous story Laura told us about the food being so poor and scanty, and we should not have believed it.”

Bess was staring at her with angry sparks in her eyes. She suddenly burst out with:

“That old lunch box! If it hadn’t been for you, Nan Sherwood, we would not have brought it here with us.”

“Why——Is that quite right, Bess?” gently suggested Nan.

“Yes, it is!” snapped her chum. “If you had taken my advice you would have flung it out of the window and eaten in the dining car in a proper manner.”

There were a good many retorts Nan might have made. She wanted to laugh, too. It did seem so ridiculous for Bess to carry on so over a silly joke. She was making a mountain out of a molehill.

But it would be worse than useless to argue the point, and to laugh would surely make her chum more bitter—perhaps open a real breach between them that not even time could heal.

So Nan, in her own inimitable, loving way, put both arms suddenly about Bess and kissed her. “I’m awfully sorry, dear; forgive me,” she said, just as though the fault was all hers.

Bess broke down and wet Nan’s shoulder with her angry tears. But they were a relief. She sobbed out at last:

“I hope I’ll never, never see a shoe-box lunch again! I just do——”

To interrupt her came a solemn summons on the door of Number Seven—rap, rap, rap! The two newcomers to Lakeview Hall looked at each other, startled.

CHAPTER XI
THE PROCESSION OF THE SAWNEYS

“Goodness! what can that be?” demanded Nan.

Rap! rap! rap! the knock was repeated.

“Did you lock that door, Bess?” exclaimed Nan.

Before her chum could answer, the knob was turned and the door swung slowly open. Several figures crowded about the opening portal. It was no summons by one of the teachers, as Nan and Bess had expected. The first figure that appeared clearly to the startled vision of the two chums was rather appalling.

It was a tall girl with a pillow case drawn over her head and shoulders. Her arms were thrust through two holes in the sides and she could see through two smaller holes burned in the pillow case. She leaned on a broom, the brush part of which was also covered with white muslin. Upon this background was drawn a horned owl in charcoal.

This horned owl was no more solemn than were the girls themselves who came filing in behind their leader. They came in two by two and circled around the work table which was set across the room at the foot of the two beds. The second couple bore a big tea-tray and on that tray reposed—the forgotten lunch box Bess had dropped under the supper table!

Poor Bess uttered a horrified gasp; Nan came near disgracing herself in her chum’s eyes forever, by exploding into laughter. There was a faint giggle from some hysterical girl down the line and the leader rapped smartly upon the floor with the handle of the decorated broom.

“Ladies!” ejaculated the leader, her voice somewhat muffled behind the pillowslip.

“Votes for women!” was the faint response from somewhere in the line.

“Silence in the ranks!” exclaimed Laura Polk, snatching the tin tray away from her partner and banging on it with her fist. The lunch box, decorated with a soiled bow of violet ribbon, had been placed on the table.

“Ladies!” repeated the girl behind the mask. “We have with us to-night, in our very midst, as it were, two sawneys who should be [initiated into all the rites and mysteries of Lakeview Hall].”

“Hear! hear!” sepulchrally came from the red-haired girl.

“You’d better keep still, too, Laura,” admonished another girl.

“Oh! very well!” answered Laura.

“These sawneys must be taught their place,” pursued the leader of the gay company.

The term “sawney” in the lumber camps and upon the Great Lakes, means tyro, or novice. These girls had picked up the phrase from their brothers, without doubt. Bess thought it a particularly objectionable name.

“First of all,” said the girl in the pillowslip, “they must join our procession and march as shall be directed. Fall in, sawneys, behind the first two guards. Refuse at your peril!”

Nan’s mind was already made up. This was only fun—it was a great game of ridicule. To refuse to join in the sport would mark her and Bess for further, and future, punishment.

Before her chum could object, Nan seized her and ran her right into line ahead of the red-haired girl and her companion.

“Ready! March!” commanded the masked girl.

“Hold on!” objected Laura Polk. “These two sawneys ought to be made to eat their lunch.”

Bess fairly snorted, she was so angry. But Nan would not let her pull away. She cried, before her chum could say anything:

“Oh! we promise to eat it all before we go to bed.”

“That will do,” declared the leader. “Be still, Polk. March!”

Against her will at first, then because she did not know what else to do, Bess Harley went along beside her chum. “The Procession of the Sawneys”—quite a famous institution, by the way, at Lakeview Hall—was begun.

“Where’s the next innocent?” demanded one girl, hoarsely.

“Number Eighteen, on this corridor,” was the reply. “That girl from Wauhegan.”

“Wau—what-again?” sputtered Laura Polk.

“There, there, Polk!” admonished the masked leader. “Never mind your bad puns. Here we are. Attention!”

The procession halted. The leader banged the door three times as she had at Number Seven, with the handle of the broom.

“Come in! don’t stop to knock,” called somebody inside.

“There! that’s the way to treat us,” grunted Laura, as the door swung inward.

“Sh!” the girls all became silent.

There was a light in the room and a tall, thin girl, with rather homely features but a beautiful set of teeth, scrambled up from the floor where she had been sitting cross-legged, arranging her lower bureau drawer.

“Gracious—goodness—Agnes!” she gasped, when she saw the head of the procession.

Then silence fell again—that is, human voices ceased. But the visiting girls marked instantly the peculiar fact that the room sounded like a clock-shop, with all the clocks going.

There was an alarm clock hung by a ribbon right beside the head of one of the two beds in the room. A little ormolu clock was ticking busily on the bureau, and an easel clock stood upon the work table. In the corner hung an old-fashioned cuckoo clock in one of the elaborately carved cases made in the Black Forest, and just at this moment the door at the top flew open and the Cuckoo jerked her head out and announced the time—nine o’clock.

This was too much for the risibility of the girls crowding in at the door, and no pounding of the broom handle could entirely quell the giggles.

“And she’s wearing a watch!” gasped one girl. “And there’s another hanging on the side of the mirror.”

“Why, girls!” burst out Laura Polk. “We’ve certainly caught Miss Procrastination herself. You know, ‘procrastination is the thief of time,’ and this Wau—what-again girl must have stolen all these timepieces.”

“Didn’t either!” declared the occupant of the room. “Pop and I took ’em for a debt.”

“Hush!” commanded the girl in the pillow case. “What is your name, sawney?”

“Amelia Boggs,” was the prompt reply.

“Amelia, you must come with us,” commanded the leader of the sawney procession.

“Oh! I haven’t time,” objected the victim.

There was another outburst of laughter at this.

“Let her take her time with her,” Laura declared; and they proceeded to hang the alarm clock around Miss Boggs’ neck, the ormolu on one arm and the table clock on the other. Both watches were pinned prominently on her chest, and thus adorned, the girl from Wauhegan was added to the procession.

It had certainly become a merry one by this time. Even Bess discovered that this sort of fun was all a good-natured play. She could not laugh at others and remain sullen herself; so her sky gradually cleared.

At the next door behind which a “sawney” lurked, instead of knocking, the leader set off the alarm-clock. It was a sturdy, loud-voiced alarm, and it buzzed and rattled vigorously.

The two girls inside, both the new one and the sophomore whose room she was to share, rushed to the door at this terrible din. This initiate was a little, fluffy, flaxen-haired, pink and white girl, of a very timid disposition. She had been put to room with Grace Mason, of whom Nan and Bess had heard before.

Nan was particularly interested in Grace, who seemed to be of a very retiring disposition, and was very pretty. But her new room-mate was even more timid. She at once burst into tears when she saw the crowd of strange girls, having been told that the girls of Lakeview Hall hazed all strangers unmercifully.

The visiting party tied a pillow case on the flaxen-haired girl for a bib, and made her carry a towel in each hand for handkerchiefs. One girl carried a pail and bath sponge, and the procession halted at frequent intervals while imaginary pools of tears were sponged up from the floor before the victim’s feet.

The procession might have continued indefinitely had not Mrs. Cupp appeared at ten o’clock and put a stop to it.

“You’re over time, young ladies, half an hour,” she said in her abrupt way. “A bad example to the new pupils, and to your juniors. Postpone any more of this till to-morrow night. To your rooms!”

They scattered to their rooms. Mrs. Cupp’s word was law. She was Dr. Prescott’s first assistant, and had the interior management of the school in her very capable hands. There was nothing very motherly or comforting about Mrs. Cupp. But Nan decided that Mrs. Cupp was not really wholly unsympathetic after all.

Nan and Bess hurried back to Number Seven, Corridor Four. All Bess’ anger and tears had evaporated, and she was full of talk and laughter. Moreover, she and Nan ate every crumb of the shoe-box lunch before they went to bed!

CHAPTER XII
EVERYTHING NEW

Lessons were not taken up for several days after Nan Sherwood and Bess Harley arrived at Lakeview Hall. This gave them an opportunity for getting acquainted with the other girls and their strange surroundings, as well as the routine of the school.

At this time of the year the rising bell was at six and breakfast at seven. The girls could either spend the hour before breakfast in study or out-of-door recreation. The grounds connected with the Hall comprised all the plateau at the top of the bluff, with a mile of shore at its foot. At one place a roughly built, crooked flight of steps all the way down the face of the bluff, offered a path to the boathouse. By day that sprawling stone building was merely a place to shelter the school’s many boats, and a boatkeeper was on hand to attend to the girls’ needs. But at night, so it was whispered, the boathouse had a ghostly occupant.

“Nonsense!” exclaimed Nan Sherwood, with laughter, when she was told this. “What kind of a ghost?”

“A black ghost—all black,” declared May Winslow, who seemed to be of a rather superstitious nature.

“You mean the ghost of a colored man?” demanded Nan.

“Oh! nobody ever saw his face. But he’s all in black,” Miss Winslow stated.

“Well! that’s a novelty, at least,” chuckled Nan. “Usually ghosts are sheeted in white, with phosphorescent eyes and clammy hands.”

“Goodness!” gasped May. “Nobody ever got near enough to him to let him touch her! I should say not!”

“And why should he haunt that boathouse?” was Nan’s further demand.

“Oh! we don’t know that.”

“Ever been a murder committed there?”

“Why! how you talk! A murder at Lakeview Hall? The idea!”

“All the ghosts I ever heard of were supposed to be the disembodied spirits either of persons who met with some catastrophe, or who committed a capital crime. They usually haunt the spot where the tragedy occurred. Now, my dear, what did this poor, black ghost do in life that he has to haunt that boathouse?”

“Oh, you can laugh!” exclaimed May, rather offended. “But if you ever see the ghost you won’t be so light-minded about it.”

And, oddly enough, May Winslow was a true prophet in this case; but Nan Sherwood, at the time, only laughed.

She and Bess, on the morning following their arrival at the school, went down to the trunk room to get their possessions. Mrs. Cupp abrogated to herself the right of search for, and seizure of, all contraband goods brought to the school by the pupils. The trunks must be unpacked under her eye—and a watchful eye it was!

Many a foolish or unwise mother allowed her daughter to wear garments or articles of adornment that Mrs. Cupp did not approve. And, as has before been said, at Lakeview Hall Mrs. Cupp’s will was law.

“No, Miss Annie, I told you last year that those low-cut garments were not fit for winter wear in this climate. You should have told your aunt that I disapproved.”

“I did,” snapped the black-eyed girl who was thus addressed. “But auntie says she has worn them all her life, and there is no reason why I should not.”

“Oh, yes there is. I am the reason,” returned Mrs. Cupp, grimly. “Leave those things in your trunk, or return them. And tell your aunt that if she does not send you suitable and warm under-garments for the winter, that I will buy them and the cost will appear upon your quarterly bill.

“Now, Lettie Roberts! you know very well that no girl can wear a heel on her shoes like that in this school. What would Miss Gleason say?” Miss Gleason was the physical instructor. “If you wish to retain those shoes I will have the heels lowered.”

“Oh, mercy me, Mrs. Cupp!” remonstrated the victim this time. “Those are my brand new dancing pumps!”

“You’ll not dance in these pumps here,” responded the matron, firmly. “Make up your mind quickly.”

“Heel ’em!” shot in Lettie, who knew of old that Mrs. Cupp was adamant. “Oh, dear!”

“No use trying to balk Mrs. Cupp,” Laura Polk had warned Nan and Bess. “It would be just as wise to butt your heads against a brick wall to make an impression on the wall!”

Mrs. Cupp had a sharp eye for anything the girls desired to take out of their trunks. And that which went back into the trunks remained in her care, for she insisted upon keeping the trunk keys as well as the key of the trunk-room.

“What’s this you have buried at the bottom of your trunk, Nancy?” she asked Nan, sharply, when she came to a long, narrow box, made very neatly of cabinet wood by the skilful fingers of Tom Sherwood.

“Mercy, Nan!” whispered Bess, peering over her chum’s shoulder, “it looks horribly like a baby’s coffin.”

“I—I’d rather you didn’t take that out, Mrs. Cupp,” said Nan, hastily.

“What?” repeated the lady, eyeing Nan suspiciously through her glasses.

“No, ma’am! please don’t take it out,” fluttered Nan.

“You wish to let it remain in my care, then, do you?” asked Mrs. Cupp, drily.

“Ye—yes, ma’am,” Nan murmured.

Bess’ eyes were big with wonder. Her chum had a secret that was not known to her!

Some of the other girls were listeners, too. Linda Riggs was impatiently awaiting her turn to have Mrs. Cupp examine the contents of her trunk. She tossed her head and said, in scarcely a muffled tone, to Cora Courtney:

“That Sherwood girl has probably succeeded in taking something and hiding it in her trunk. I told you, Cora, how she came so near getting away with my new bag when I was not looking.”

“Why, her bag is just like yours, Linda,” said Cora.

“Nonsense! They’re not alike, at all,” cried the ill-natured Linda. “She couldn’t afford to own such a bag honestly. Mine cost nearly forty dollars.”

“Well, maybe the Sherwood girl has more money than we think,” whispered Cora. “I saw her give Mrs. Cupp some bank notes to take care of.”

“Stolen!” exclaimed Linda.

“Well, she has them, at least,” said Cora, who was poor herself but loved money, and was always making friends with richer girls that she might share in their spending money. “You know, we want to have some bang-up banquets this fall, and parties and the like. Somebody’s got to furnish the ‘sinews of war’—and you can’t do it all, Linda. Better make friends with Sherwood.”

“I’ll do nothing of the kind!” cried Linda.

But Cora was a crafty girl. She herself said nothing and did nothing to offend Nan or Bess. It became common report, however, that Nan Sherwood had something in her trunk of which she would rather go without the use than show to Mrs. Cupp. And, of course, that aroused general curiosity.

Bess, on her part, felt not a little hurt. She was sure there was nothing she would not tell or show Nan. She did not speak of the matter to her chum, for Nan pointedly avoided it. But it troubled Bess, when the other girls tried to pump her about the box in Nan’s trunk, that she was unable to look knowing and refuse to tell.

“I don’t know anything about it,” she snapped. “She doesn’t tell me her secrets.”

“Ho!” cried Laura. “What’s the use of being chums with a girl who locks up the innermost recesses of her heart against you—and her trunk, as well? Why! I and my chum even borrow each other’s chewing gum!” she added with her usual exaggeration.

Nan, however, would not be offended at anything Bess said, and was so helpful and kind that her chum could not long retain even a shadow of unfriendliness. During the first days of school the two friends from Tillbury gathered a number of girls about them; some novices like themselves; others, girls of about their own age who had spent from one to three terms at the Hall previous to this fall semester.

Laura Polk, the red-haired joker, was on the same corridor as Nan and Bess, so naturally they saw a good deal of her. And she was always good fun.

Grace Mason and her room-mate, flaxen-haired Lillie Nevin, were two more who soon took shelter under Nan Sherwood’s wing. The more boisterous girls harassed Grace and Lillie at times, and yet they courted them, too, for Grace’s parents and brother lived on the outskirts of Freeling and she could communicate through Walter much more easily with the outside world than could many of her schoolmates.

Then there was “Procrastination Boggs,” as the queer girl from Wauhegan had been nicknamed. She joined forces with the girls of Number Seven, Corridor Four, right at the start.

Nan and Bess, in fact, found themselves in a very busy world indeed. Lessons, study, gymnasium work, boating, walking, tennis, basket-ball, and a dozen other activities, occupied their days. And sometimes at night,—even after the solemn tolling of the half-past nine curfew,—slippered feet ran about the dim corridors with as little noise as the mice made behind the wainscoting. Bands of whispering, giggling girls gathered in the various rooms and told stories, played games, held bare-foot dances, and ate goodies, when they were supposed to be deeply engaged in the preparation of the morrow’s work, or long after they should have retired.

Nan was careful to break no important rules, nor did she allow careless Bess to fall into the company of girls who broke them. Of innocent amusement there was plenty at Lakeview Hall.

Both chums were fond of boating and other aquatic sports. Lake Huron, of course, was entirely different from the millpond at home; but they knew how to row and paddle, and there were plenty of boats and canoes to use here, for the asking.

And it was because of their delight in paddling a canoe that Nan Sherwood and Bess Harley first fell into a real adventure at Lakeview Hall.

CHAPTER XIII
A SEPTEMBER SQUALL

It was a still, hazy September afternoon, so warm that the frost that had helped to open the chestnut burrs that very morning seemed to have been an hallucination. The lake was as calm as a millpond; but Lake Huron is notoriously treacherous.

Henry, the boatkeeper at Lakeview Hall, was not as weatherwise as he should have been. He had allowed a number of boats to be taken out that afternoon without warning the girls to beware of squalls.

Not that such warning would have been taken seriously by many of the girls, for a fairer day in the seeming had not appeared on the calendar. Nan and Bess decided to go out in one of the double canoes.

The chums from Tillbury did not own a boat. Several of the older girls did, and Bess had already written home for a motor boat.

“I’ll tease dad for a motor boat first,” she confided to Nan. “Of course he won’t hear to that. So I’ll try to get a sailboat—what do they call ’em?—a cat, with an auxiliary engine. And he won’t listen to that, either.”

“Why ask for something you know you can’t have?” asked the wondering Nan.

“Goodness! don’t you see?” exclaimed Bess, exasperated at such lack of understanding. “Why, if I ask for something big, dad will compromise in the end, and probably give me just what I originally expected to have. ‘Aim high’ is my motto. Oh, we’ll get a nice canoe, at the least, or a cedar boat with a portable engine and propeller.”

This way of getting what one wished rather shocked Nan, who always asked pointblank for what she wanted, but was usually wise enough not to think too much about what she knew she could not have.

“That’s an awfully roundabout way of getting what you desire,” she suggested to Bess.

“Oh! you don’t know my father. Mother has to do the same. He has plenty of money, but sometimes he hates to give it up. I can tease almost anything out of him.”

“Hush, Bess! Suppose anybody else should hear you?” Nan suggested.

“Well, it’s true,” said careless Bess. “There’s that Linda Riggs going down with Gracie Mason to the dock. I bet Walter is coming in his Bargain Rush for Grace, and Linda will get invited. I’d just love to have a motor boat, Nan, just to get ahead of Linda. She can’t have one, I heard Cora say, because her father is afraid of them.”

“None of the girls own motor boats,” Nan said, calmly. “The canoe is all right.”

They were in the canoe and had put up the little leg-o’-mutton sail, before Walter Mason’s Bargain Rush came out around Lighthouse Point, from the inlet, and chugged over to the school dock where Walter’s sister was waiting.

“Walter is just devoted to Grace,” Nan said. “I think he is a dreadfully nice boy.”

“Better keep your opinion to yourself,” laughed Bess. “Linda thinks she about owns him. You see, he’s the only boy available about the school and Linda has always been used to having the best of everything.”

“So have you,” laughed Nan, roguishly.

“But not in boys!” cried Bess. “Billy is enough. If they are all like that brother of mine——”

“You know Walter isn’t,” said Nan.

“Goodness! No! Walter Mason is as meek as Moses! As meek as his own sister. And I think Gracie is the most milk-and-watery girl I ever saw.”

“She’s timid, I know,” began Nan, but her chum interrupted quickly:

“Oh, yes! You’ll find a good word to say for her, Nan. You always champion the cause of the weak and afflicted. Every sore-eyed kitten you saw on the street at Tillbury used to appeal to you.”

“Oh, bosh!” exclaimed Nan. “You make me out a whole lot worse than I am.”

The canoe suddenly dipped sideways and Bess squealed as a splash of water came inboard. “Sit down! you’re rocking the boat!” she sang.

“That was a flaw of wind. Guess we’ll have to watch out. Don’t tie the sheet to that cleat, Bess.”

“‘Sheet’? Oh! you mean this rope. I never can remember nautical names. But I’ve got to hitch the thing, Nan. I want to wash my hands. And this water ought to be got out. There’s a big sponge in the bow-locker. There! I got that right, didn’t I? ‘Bow locker.’”

Nan was steering with a paddle and could not give her full attention to the sail. The sea was choppy and it took some effort to keep the head of the canoe properly pointed.

Nan was bare-headed, but Bess wore a rubber bathing cap. Nan’s braids snapped about her shoulders when the boisterous wind swooped down upon them. Farther out upon the lake white-caps appeared.

“I guess we’d better not go very far to-day,” Nan said cautiously.

“There go Walter and those girls!” Bess cried. “Yes! Linda is aboard. What did I tell you?”

“Well, they can get back more quickly than we can,” Nan said seriously.

“Oh, let’s go a little farther. I like it when the canoe tumbles about,” declared reckless Bess.

Nan knew that if the wind held at its present point it would be more aid to them in running back than while they were on this present tack, so she did not insist upon turning about immediately. What she did not know was, that the recurrent flaws in the wind foretold a sudden change in its direction.

There were plenty of other pleasure boats about them at first; and as Bess pointed out, Walter Mason’s Bargain Rush had passed the canoe, going out. What the two chums did not notice, however, was that these other boats, including the Bargain Rush, soon made for the shore.

The fishing boats from Freeling were driving in toward the inlet, too. Wise boatmen saw the promise of “dirty weather.” Not so Nan and Bess. The tang of the spray on their lips, the wind blowing their braids and freshening the roses in their cheeks, the caress of it on their bare arms and necks, the excitement of sitting in the pitching canoe—all delighted and charmed the girls.

They were soon far from all other boats, the canoe was scuttling over the choppy waves like a quail running to cover, the bellying sail actually hiding from their eyes the threatening clouds that were piling up in the east and south.

Suddenly the wind died. Their sail hung flabbily from the pole. Nan began to look anxiously about.

“If we have to paddle clear back to the boathouse,” she began, when Bess suddenly gasped:

“Oh, Nan! Look there!”

Nan gazed as her chum pointed “sou’east.” A mass of slate-colored clouds seemed to reach from the apex of the heavenly arch to the lead-colored water. Along the lower edge of this curtain of cloud ran a white line, like the bared teeth of a wolf!

Nan was for the moment speechless. She had never seen such alarming clouds. She and Bess had yet to see a storm on the Great Lakes. Nothing like this approach of wind and rain had ever been imagined by the two girls.

Out of the clouds came a low moaning—the voice of the rising wind. Soon, too, the swish of falling rain, which was beating the surface of the water to foam as it advanced, was also audible.

“Oh! what shall we do?” moaned Bess.

Nan was aroused by this. She glanced wildly around. They were a long way off Lighthouse Point, at the entrance to Freeling Inlet, and the storm was coming in such a direction that they must be driven up the lake and away from the Hall boat-landing—if, indeed, the canoe were not immediately swamped.

“Let go the sheet, Bess! Let go the sheet!” was Nan’s first cry.

“Goodness me! And the pillow cases, too, if you say so!” chattered Bess, clawing wildly at the rope in question.

But she had tied it in a hard knot to the cleat, and the more she tried to pull the knot loose, the tighter it became.

“Quick! quick!” Nan cried, trying to paddle the canoe around.

She understood nothing about heading into the wind’s eye; Nan only realized that they would likely be overturned if the wind and sea struck the canoe broadside.

The storm which had, at first, approached so slowly, now came down upon the canoe at terrific speed. The wind shrieked, the spray flew before it in a cloud, and the curtain of rain surrounded and engulfed the two girls and their craft.

The sail was torn to shreds. Nan had managed to head the canoe about and they took in the waves over the stern. She was saturated to the very skin by the first bucket of water.

Bess, with a wild scream of fear, cast herself into Nan’s arms.

“We’ll be drowned! we’ll be drowned!” was her cry.

Nan thought so, too, but she tried to remain calm.

The water fairly boiled about them. It jumped and pitched most awfully. The water that came inboard threatened to swamp the canoe.

Peril, Nan had faced before; but nothing like this. Each moment, as the canoe staggered on and the waves rose higher and the wind shrieked louder, Nan believed that they were nearer and nearer to death.

She did not see how they could possibly escape destruction. The sea fairly yawned for them. The canoe sank lower and lower as the foam-streaked water slopped in over the gunnels. They were going to be swamped!

CHAPTER XIV
IN THE NICK OF TIME

Bess Harley clung to her chum in an agony of apprehension. Perhaps Nan would have utterly given way to terror, too, had she not felt herself obliged to bolster up poor Bess.

The wind shrieked so about the two girls, and the roar of the rain and sea so deafened them, that Nan could offer little verbal comfort. She could only hug Bess close to her and pat her shoulder caressingly.

Then suddenly Nan seized the bathing cap from her chum’s head, and, pushing Bess aside, began to bail frantically with the rubber head covering. The rain and spray were rapidly sinking the canoe, and to free it of the accumulation of water was their only hope.

“Oh, dear! Oh, dear, Nan!” groaned Bess, over and over.

Nan had no breath left for idle talk. She bailed out the water as fast as she could. The canoe was too water-logged already to be easily steered. The sea merely drove it on and on; providentially it did not broach to.

“Throw out the cushions!” Nan finally cried to her chum. “Throw them out, it will lighten the canoe a little.”

“But—but we’ll have to pay for them,” objected Bess, for perhaps the first time in her life becoming cautious.

“Do as I say!” commanded Nan. “What are a few cushions if we can save our lives?”

“But we can’t! We’re sure to drown!” wailed Bess.

Nan was not at all sure that this was not true. She would not, however, own up that she thought so.

“You do as I say, Bess!” she ordered. “Throw out the cushions! Never mind if we drown the next minute!”

“You—you are awful!” sobbed Bess.

Nevertheless, she jerked the cushions out over the side. One after the other they floated away. Then Nan was suddenly stricken with fear. Maybe she had done the wrong thing. By the way the cushions floated they might be of cork and if worse came to worst, they might have been used as life-preservers.

But the canoe was lightened. Nan unhooked a chair-back amidships and threw it overboard. All the time she was bailing faithfully. After being thus lightened, the canoe began to rise upon the waves more buoyantly.

Perhaps, however, that was because the rain had passed over. The driving sleet-like fall of it had saturated the two girls in the canoe. They could be no wetter now—not if they were completely engulfed by the rising sea.

The violence of the wind had actually beaten the sea down; but behind the squall, as it swept on, the waves were rising tumultuously.

“This won’t last long—it can’t last long,” Nan thought.

She raised her eyes to look about. The darkness of evening seemed already to hover upon the bosom of the lake. The boat-landing and boathouse were both out of sight. On the crag-like bluff the Hall was merely a misty outline, hanging like a cloud-castle in the air.

Bess was crying steadily. Nan thought of her mother and her father, so far away. If anything happened to her they would be a long time finding it out.

And there was Uncle Henry and Aunt Kate and the boys! They would feel very bad, Nan knew, if anything happened to her. So would Toby Vanderwiller and Mrs. Vanderwiller and Corson. And perhaps queer little Margaret Llewellen and her brother, Bob——

Was it the spray, or did tears fill Nan Sherwood’s eyes so that she could see nothing moving on the face of the wild waters? Yet, of a sudden, there came into hearing the sharp, staccato report of an engine exhaust.

“A motor boat!” Nan gasped, still bailing desperately.

The sputtering noise drew nearer.

“Oh, Bess!” Nan cried.

“Oh, Nan!” responded her chum.

“Do you hear it?”

“It’s that boat,” Bess said, sniffling. “If they only see us!”

“Can you see them?”

Nan could not stop bailing. Every now and then a wave would slop over the side and the canoe would settle deeper in the lake.

Bess climbed unsteadily to her knees. Hope revived in her breast. She wiped the spray out of her eyes with the back of her hand and stared all about. Yes! there was the darting motor boat.

“It’s Walter!” she cried to her chum.

“Does he see us?”

“He’s—he’s going ri-i-ight past!” wailed Bess.

“Wave to him! Shout to him!” commanded Nan.

“A lot of good tha-a-at’ll do!” pursued the unhappy Bess. “They’re so-o fa-a-ar away.”

Nan uttered a shriek just then that must have been heard a long way down wind. A big wave boarded them, filling the canoe almost full, and throwing Bess on her face. Nan seized her chum and drew her up out of the water so that she might get her breath.

The canoe shook and staggered. It was going down! Another such shipment of water and the girls would be engulfed!

“Scream! Let’s both scream together!” commanded Nan.

Her chum’s cry was a very weak one indeed. But Nan’s voice rang out vigorously across the waves.

“Help! We’re sinking!”

Almost immediately an answering cry came down the wind:

“Hold o-on! We’re coming!”

“I’d like to know what we’re to hold onto,” gasped Nan, kneeling waist-deep in the water.

She had to hold up Bess, who was almost ready to collapse. Left to herself, Nan’s chum would have succumbed before the motor boat arrived. It was Walter’s boat. To Nan’s surprise, his sister and Linda Riggs were still with him.

“Stand by for the buoy!” called out Walter, and flung the inflated ring attached to a strong line.

It floated near the submerged canoe almost at once. Nan felt the canoe going down, and with her arm about Bess, she flung herself away from the sinking craft.

“Oh! oh!” gurgled Bess.

“Keep up!” cried Nan.

“Don’t sink, girls!” shouted Walter Mason. “I’ll get you!”

He, however, had his hands pretty full with the boat. It had lost headway and was inclined to swing broadside to the waves, which, every minute, were running higher.

Nan and Bess were both good swimmers; yet Bess was now all but helpless through fright. She would have sunk immediately had not Nan’s arm been about her.

Nan struck out for the bobbing ring. A wave carried them toward the life-buoy and as they fell down the slant of that wave, they fairly plunged onto the big canvas-covered ring.

“I’ve got it!” yelled Nan, exultantly; and the next moment water filled her mouth and she swallowed so much that she felt almost water-logged.

“Hang on!” shouted Walter, encouragingly.

He started the screw again. Grace, who was thoroughly frightened, made out, however, to hold the wheel steady. Walter ran to the stern and drew in the life-buoy, towing the imperiled girls round to leeward of the plunging motor boat.

The rescue was barely in the nick of time. They lifted Bess Harley over the low rail of the Bargain Rush, almost senseless. Nan managed to climb in unaided. They were not much wetter than those already aboard the motor boat.

Linda was very ill, and hung over the rail forward. Grace was crying, amidships, and trying to steer the boat while Walter tinkered with the engine. Bess and Nan lay in the cockpit, recovering from their fight with the sea.

It was a very miserable party, indeed.

CHAPTER XV
THE BOATHOUSE GHOST

Between her throes of sea-sickness, Linda began to be heard.

“I’ll never forgive you, never, Walter Mason! Nor you, either, Grace! You brought me out here to drown me! I’ll tell my father!”

This had probably been going on for some time before Nan and her chum were assisted aboard the Bargain Rush. Walter seemed to be pretty well disgusted with the railroad magnate’s daughter.

“Don’t tell your father till you get ashore, Linda,” he advised.

“You’re just as horrid as you can be!” gasped Linda.

“Don’t mind him, Linda,” begged peace-loving Grace. “And, really, it isn’t his fault.”

“You’re just as bad as he is, every whit!” snapped the unpleasant girl. “You both were determined to come out here when I wanted to go ashore.”

“Why!” gasped Grace, showing some pluck for once, “you wouldn’t have had Walter leave Nan and Bess to drown, would you?”

“And now we’re all going to be drowned!” was Linda’s response, but hastily leaning over the rail again, her voice was stifled.

“If—if I ever get to shore alive,” she finally wailed, “I’ll never even go in wading again.”

Had the situation really not seemed so tragic, Nan would have laughed. Bess had joined Linda at the rail, being just as sick as the other. Grace looked green about the lips, herself; but she was plucky. Nan felt no qualms.

“Let me take the wheel, Walter,” she said to Grace’s brother. “I know how to steer.”

“Good for you, Miss Sherwood!” cried the boy. “And you’re not afraid, either?”

“No—not much,” answered Nan, stoutly.

“The boat’s as safe as a house. The squall’s gone over now. We’ll soon get to land. Let her off another point now.”

Nan obeyed. The propeller began kicking in regular time. They were able to head around toward the shore. Walter soon took the wheel again and guided the Bargain Rush more directly toward the anchorage before the Hall. They were all of three miles from the boathouse.

“We’ll make it all right now, Miss Sherwood,” said Walter, cheerfully.

“It was awfully good of you to come out for us,” Nan said.

“Goodness! we couldn’t do less, could we?”

“I guess Linda wouldn’t have come if she had had her way.”

“Well! Grace isn’t that kind,” said the brother, loyally. “Of course, we would have done everything in our power to save you girls.”

“And we will never forget it!” Nan cried warmly. “We would have drowned.”

“Never mind,” said Walter, in embarrassment. “It’s all right now.”

“I—I guess the other girls don’t think so,” said Nan, suddenly observing her chum and the other two. All three were violently sick. “It is awfully rough.”

“We’re catching these waves sideways,” Walter said. “Wait till we get in the lea of Lighthouse Point. It won’t be so bad then.”

This was a true prophecy, and the Bargain Rush was soon sailing on even keel. Linda, as well as the other girls, recovered in a measure from the feeling of nausea that had gripped them. As soon as the vulgar girl regained her voice she began to scold again.

“We’d never been in all this trouble if you’d listened to me, Walter Mason! This is awful!”

“Oh, it’s better now, Linda,” said Walter, cheerfully. “We’ll soon be at the Hall dock.”

“And that’s where you should have landed Grace and me just as soon as the storm came up,” grumbled Linda.

“But we saw the canoe in trouble——”

“I didn’t see it!” snapped the girl, crossly.

“But I did,” Walter said warmly. “It would have been a wicked and inhuman thing to have turned away. We had to save Miss Sherwood and Miss Harley.”

“And risk my life doing it!” cried Linda. “I shall tell my father.”

“If you tell your father everything you promise to,” said Walter, with some spirit, “he must be an awfully busy man just attending to your complaints.”

“Oh, my!” gasped Bess, with wan delight. Meek Walter Mason was beginning to show boldness in dealing with the purse-proud girl.

“You’re a nasty thing!” snapped Linda to Walter. “And I don’t like you.”

“I’ll get over that,” muttered the boy to himself.

“And your sister is just as bad!” scolded Linda, giving way to her dreadful temper as Nan and Bess had seen her do on the train. “I’ll show you both that you can’t treat me in any such way. I’ve always stood up for your dunce of a sister. That’s what she is, a dunce!”

“If you were a boy, I’d thrash you for saying that!” declared Walter, quietly, though in a white heat of passion himself.

“Oh! oh!” shrieked Linda. “So you threaten to strike me, do you? If I tell my father that——”

“Oh, tell him!” exclaimed Walter, in exasperation.

“Of all the mean girls!” murmured Bess, with her arm about Grace, who was crying softly and begging her brother to desist.

“Oh! I can see what’s caused all this,” went on Linda, in her high-pitched voice. “Grace was mighty glad to have me and my friends even look at her before Nan Sherwood and Bess Harley came to the Hall. I wish her all the benefit she may derive from associating with them. I know one is a thief and the other is no better.”

Bess turned upon the enraged girl with an angry retort. But Nan stopped her.

“Don’t reply, Bess,” said Nan, in a low voice. “Brawling never proves anything, or settles any argument. But if she keeps on saying in public that I am a thief I shall go to Dr. Prescott about it.”

“You wouldn’t be a tell-tale?” gasped Bess, horrified.

“In this case I will,” Nan said firmly. “And she shall apologize in public.”

Linda, by this time, had, in a measure, quieted down. She was sobbing angrily and did not hear what Nan said. The other young people left her strictly alone until the Bargain Rush reached the dock.

Oddly enough not even the boatkeeper, Henry, had discovered the absence of the canoe in which Nan and Bess had sailed away from the landing two hours and more before. The other boats had come in, in a hurry, when the squall arose, and it was now so late that all the girls had gone up the bluff. The supper gong would sound soon.

Henry had gone to his supper, intending to return later to put all the boats under cover and lock up the house. The girls said Henry was afraid of the boathouse ghost himself, and would never go into the building after dusk without a lantern.

Linda stepped ashore and marched away with her head in the air. Grace had permission to go home with her brother to supper. Mr. Mason, who was an influential lawyer, owned a country home up the lake shore, beyond Professor Krenner’s queer little cabin, and the brother and sister proposed going to their home in the Bargain Rush. Grace would return to the Hall later, by automobile.

Nan and Bess were grateful to Walter and Grace.

“We cannot tell you how we feel, inside, Walter,” Nan said softly. “Nothing we can ever do for you will repay you——”

“Oh, don’t!” begged the boy.

“You’ve got to hear your praises sung!” cried Bess, laughing and sobbing at once. “I shall write home to my folks about it. And we shall tell all the girls.”

“I wish you wouldn’t!” gasped the embarrassed youth.

“And your sister will never miss Linda Riggs’ friendship,” said Nan, stoutly. “We’ll see that Linda does not bother her, either.”

“Oh! you’re so brave, Nan,” murmured the timid Grace.

“It doesn’t take much courage to face a girl like Linda,” Nan retorted. “I’ve seen already that she has very few real friends in the school, and those she has to pay high to keep. I would rather have her for an enemy than a friend.”

Nan and Bess kissed Grace and shook hands with her brother. The chums were both as wet as they could be, and the evening air felt chill.

“We’d better get our sweaters,” Nan said.

“Oh! they’re in the dressing room of the boathouse,” objected Bess.

“Yes, I know it,” her chum said, starting off.

“But, Nan!”

“Well?”

“Sup—suppose we see something?” gasped Bess.

“Why, we want to see something,” said Nan, puzzled. “We want to see our sweaters. And we want to feel them, too.”

“But I don’t mean that,” insisted Bess.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what they say,” objected Bess Harley. “It’s haunted!”

“I declare! you don’t believe that foolishness, do you, Bess Harley?” cried Nan.

“I don’t know whether I believe it or not,” confessed her chum. “But I don’t want to see any ghost.”

“I don’t believe you ever will, honey,” Nan said, more seriously.

“You can laugh——”

“I’m not laughing: But we can’t stand here and take cold. We want those sweaters.”

“I’d rather not go,” Bess whispered, hanging back.

“Then I’ll go.”

“But I don’t want you to leave me alone,” objected Bess.

“You’re the greatest girl I ever saw!” sputtered Nan.

“I know I’m a coward,” said her friend, shakingly. “I’d have given up all hope and been drowned, out there on the lake, if it hadn’t been for you, dear Nan.”

“Nonsense! Come on! Let’s get the sweaters. It’s almost supper time and Mrs. Cupp will give us fits.”

“She won’t, for I shall tell her just how brave you were, and how Walter saved us both.”

“Ha!” cried Nan. “After being through what we have this afternoon, Bess, I shouldn’t think you’d be afraid of the dark.”

“It is dark,” murmured Bess, as they approached the boathouse.

“Bah!” repeated Nan, gently scornful.

“Maybe you won’t ‘bah’ so much before we get out,” whispered Bess, as they entered the open door and approached the girls’ dressing room and lockers.

They had to cross the big room where the boats were hauled up the sloping plank floor from the cove. It was dark and mysterious.

Suddenly Bess clutched her chum by the arm. “Oh-o-o!” she moaned faintly.

Her shaking hand indicated the direction of a window across the room. It was lighter outside the boathouse than it was within. Against the gray background of the window-pane moved a figure! A black figure! A human figure!

The two girls halted and clung together. Even Nan’s heart beat faster.

The figure moved slowly across the window opening. It made no sound. It disappeared for a moment and then reappeared before a second window. It was all in black and not very tall. It was soon gone entirely.

The girls heard no door open and close. It was just as though the black figure had evaporated—melted into the air!

“The ghost! What did I tell you, Nan Sherwood?” moaned Bess.

CHAPTER XVI
RELATING IT ALL

“I won’t believe it!” declared Nan Sherwood.

“You saw it with your own eyes!”

“I don’t believe my own eyes, then!” was Nan’s energetic rejoinder.

“Well, I know I saw it!”

“That doesn’t convince me in the least, Bess Harley.”

“Well! you are the most obstinate girl!”

“I won’t own up to such foolishness!” cried Nan, hotly. “A ghost just doesn’t exist!”

They were back in their own room at Lakeview Hall. Bess could not have told for the life of her how they had obtained their sweaters out of the locker, put them on, and escaped from the boathouse. But she knew that somehow Nan had kept her from running away in a panic.

“Why, Nan, we saw it!” Bess reiterated.

“Saw what?”

“The ghost.”

“We saw nothing of the kind. We saw something.”

“Well!”

“But a ghost is nothing. We could not see a spirit. That was something palpable we saw. It crossed in front of two windows and we could not see through it. It had a solid body.”

“We—ell,” Bess returned. “There may be solid ghosts.”

“Doesn’t stand to reason. There’s supper!”

“I—I don’t want supper much,” said Bess, shivering.

“We’ll go down and ask Susan for hot tea. That’s what we need,” said practical Nan. “And let’s keep still about this.”

“About Walter and all?”

“Oh, no! I mean about what we saw at the boathouse.”

“Then you do admit we saw something?” cried Bess.

“That’s just it,” said Nan drily. “We did see something. Therefore it was not a ghost.”

Her insistence on this point vexed Bess not a little. She felt that they had seen a strange thing, and she wanted to tell the other girls about it. But what would be the use of doing that if her chum pooh-poohed the idea of a ghost and merely went to Henry, as she threatened to, and told him that some tramp, or other prowler, was hanging about the boathouse?

“For,” said Nan, “the girls keep bathing suits and sweaters and all sorts of things down there and that fellow, whoever he is, may be light-fingered.”

“Dear me!” grumbled Bess, “you never are romantic.”

“Humph! what’s romantic about a disembodied spirit? Smells of the tomb!” declared Nan.

There was one thing, however, that had to be told. The canoe was lost and Mrs. Cupp must be informed at once. So after supper the two chums sought that stern lady’s room, which was right at the top of the basement stairs.

Nan Sherwood at Lakeview Hall; Or, The Mystery of the Haunted Boathouse

NAN SHERWOODATLAKEVIEW HALLORTHE MYSTERY OF THEHAUNTED BOATHOUSE

NAN SHERWOOD ATLAKEVIEW HALL

CHAPTER ITHE BRAND NEW BAG

CHAPTER IIALL ABOUT NAN

CHAPTER IIILINDA RIGGS

CHAPTER IVLUCK AND PLUCK

CHAPTER VNAN SAVES ANOTHER, BUT IS HURT HERSELF

CHAPTER VIHOW IT FEELS TO BE A HEROINE

CHAPTER VIILAKEVIEW HALL APPEARS

CHAPTER VIIITHE BOY AT THE STATION

CHAPTER IXTHE RED-HAIRED GIRL

CHAPTER XA FAMOUS INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER XITHE PROCESSION OF THE SAWNEYS

CHAPTER XIIEVERYTHING NEW

CHAPTER XIIIA SEPTEMBER SQUALL

CHAPTER XIVIN THE NICK OF TIME

CHAPTER XVTHE BOATHOUSE GHOST

CHAPTER XVIRELATING IT ALL