The Girls of Central High at Basketball: or, The Great Gymnasium Mystery

CHAPTER XXI – WHAT HESTER DID

Dr. Agnew was very much troubled over his little patient down in the tenements, and he told Nellie about it one evening after supper.

“I have had to insist that the child be taken to the hospital,” said the good doctor. “That almost broke his mother’s heart; but their rooms were not sufficiently airy. And then, the child is suffering from pernicious anæmia, and unless he mends he will die, anyway.”

“That is an awful hard name to call little Johnny, Daddy Doctor,” said Nellie.

“It is awfully hard for little Johnny, that’s a fact,” said the doctor, thoughtfully. “It is awfully hard for his mother, who, like the plucky widow she is, has struggled so hard to bring those children to where they are. Bill, of course, has helped her; but Bill isn’t much smarter in some ways than silly Rufe. The widow’s done it all; and she’s just wrapped up in Johnny.”

“How cruel for anything to happen to him!” sighed Nellie.

“It looks so. We can’t see things in their true light very often, I suppose. It takes a Divine Eye to see straight,” and the doctor wagged his head. “Here’s this poor woman would give her heart’s blood – that’s the expression she uses – to save the little fellow. But her blood won’t do. She is not in a healthy condition herself. And Johnny needs perfectly healthy, normal blood – ”

“My goodness, Daddy Doctor!” exclaimed Nellie, with a shiver. “How you do talk!”

“Eh?”

“As though anybody’s blood could help poor Johnny.”

“Ah! but that’s just it, Nellie. Somebody’s blood would help poor little Johnny. A pint or so of somebody’s healthy, red blood – ”

“How horrid!” cried the girl, trying to jump off the chair; but her father’s big hand held her.

“Wait. Don’t be a ridiculous Miss Nancy!” he said, with a chuckle. “You are as much a surgeon’s daughter as a doctor’s daughter, I hope.”

“I’m proud that you heal folk of diseases, Daddy Doctor,” she said, laughing faintly. “But you talk now just like a butcher.”

“No. The transfusion of blood is one of the most wonderful and blessed discoveries of recent years. Perhaps not a discovery; but the proper way to do it is a recent discovery. And that is what we want to try on little Johnny at the hospital.”

“Oh, Daddy!” gasped Nellie, at last seeing that he was in earnest.

“Johnny’s condition is such that he needs good, red corpuscles pumping through his veins, and without a proper amount or a proper quality of blood, he cannot live. The nourishment he can take is insufficient to make this blood. What he must have is now in the possession of some other person. We must find that person very quickly – or not at all.”

“Oh, Daddy Doctor!” she whispered. “I could never do a thing like that!”

“I should say not,” responded her father, quickly. “Don’t make this a personal matter, Kitten. You need every ounce of blood you’ve got for yourself. You have been perilously near the anæmic state yourself in times past. This athletic business and the resultant hearty appetite you maintain has been the salvation of you, Nellie girl.

“Ah! we need a robust, healthy young person who would be willing to give a quantity of blood and not miss it. And I venture to say it’s healthy blood that gives her that color, despite the fact that you Miss Namby-pambies consider it ‘coarse’ and ‘horrid’ to have a red face.”

“Hester!” exclaimed Nellie.

The doctor nodded, then fell into silence again.

It was the next afternoon that they proposed taking little Johnny Doyle to the hospital. The good doctor was at the widow’s waiting for the ambulance when Hester Grimes came in. The widow was wailing as though her heart were broken; for with people of this degree of intelligence, to take a patient to the hospital is equal to signing his death warrant.

“Ochone! Ochone! I’ll never see me little Johnny runnin’ around the flure again,” she said to Hester. “He’s goin’ jest like his poor feyther.”

“What nonsense you’re talking, Mrs. Doyle!” cried Hester, cheerfully. “He’ll come back to you as chipper as a sparrow. Won’t he, Dr. Agnew?”

“So I tell her – if God wills,” added the physician in a lower tone.

Hester glanced at him sharply and then walked to the front room window where Dr. Agnew sat.

“What is it he needs, Doctor?” she asked, in a low voice. “His mother’s always talking so wild I cannot make head nor tail of it. She says you want to put new blood in him.”

“That is it exactly,” said Dr. Agnew, his eyes twinkling. “A pint of blood such as your veins carry in such abundance might save Johnny’s life.”

“Do you mean that, Doctor?”

“Yes, Miss Hester.”

“Then he can have it,” returned the girl, quietly. “You can take it now, for all I care.”

The doctor jumped up and walked back and forth across the room. Then he saw Hester stripping up her sleeve.

“No, no,” he said. “It isn’t as easy as all that. And I’m not sure I’d be doing right to let you do it – ”

“I guess you’re not my conscience, Dr. Agnew,” said Hester, in her usual brusque way.

“No; but I have a conscience of my own,” said the doctor, grimly. “This isn’t a thing to be done in a minute, or in a corner, young lady. It includes one of the very nicest of surgical operations. It will keep you out of school for some time. It will keep you at the hospital. It will, indeed, keep you in bed longer than you care to stay, perhaps.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“To you? No. Not in any appreciable degree. You are a full-blooded girl. You can spare much more than Johnny needs – ”

“Then let it be done,” said Hester, firmly.

“We’ll have to see what your mother and father say.”

“You leave that to me,” said Hester. “I know how to manage them.”

Dr. Agnew looked at her for a moment with his brow wrinkled and his lips pursed up. “I’m not sure whether, if you were my daughter, I should be most proud of you, or afraid for you,” he said.

She only looked puzzled by his speech. “What do you want me to do?” she asked, finally.

“Come here to the light,” the doctor said, rummaging in his kit for a tiny instrument. He held her thumb firmly. “It will only be a needle prick.”

“Go ahead,” said Hester.

He shot the needle into the ball of her thumb and drew out a drop or two of blood in the glass bulb of the syringe.

“We’ll just find out what this tells about you in the laboratory,” said the doctor. “I’m much mistaken if it doesn’t tell a good story, Hester Grimes. Then I’ll come and see your father and mother this evening.”

“You needn’t bother if you’re going to be busy,” observed Hester, coolly. “They will give their permission. When will you want me at the hospital?”

“You will sleep there to-night under the care of one of our very nicest nurses – Miss Parraday,” said the doctor, smiling again. “And our little boy here – God willing – shall have a chance for life.”

CHAPTER XXII – WHAT MR. BILLSON COULD TELL

The champion basketball team of Central High was holding its own, and even gaining a point or two now and then in the trophy series; but it seemed impossible for the hard-working girls to change their standing in the schedule of the teams. They remained Number 3.

They could beat West High and Lumberport High School teams every time they played with them; but it was a hard struggle for Laura and her mates to break even with East High or Centerport, and the Keyport girls almost always downed them.

“It’s a boiling shame!” cried Bobby Hargrew, one day at Laura’s, when some of the team were talking matters over. “We’re getting swiped – ”

“Goodness me, Bobby!” gasped Laura.

“Don’t let poor mother hear you use such dreadful language. It positively hurts her to have Chet use slang; and you are worse than he is.”

“One would think that you had never been under the benign influence of Miss Carrington,” chuckled Jess Morse.

“Bah!” retorted Bobby. “I don’t know but I feel a good deal like my little cousin Effie about education. You know, Effie is only six. The other day her mother had company and her mother and the other lady were talking about something that they didn’t want ‘little pitchers’ to understand. So they spelled some of the words instead of speaking them out, and Effie listened with both eyes and mouth wide open. But she couldn’t catch the meaning of the spelled words. Finally she got mad and went out to her papa on the porch and says she:

“‘Daddy, there’s altogether too much education in this house!’

“And I’m getting so saturated with Gee Gee’s English and Dimple’s Latin, and Miss Gould’s French, that positively I have to let off steam by using slang,” concluded Bobby.

“Just keep your slang for other places then, Bobby,” said Laura. “Mother is likely to overhear you – ”

“And Laura’s pretty prim and particular herself,” laughed Dora Lockwood.

Jess began to giggle. “She’s getting literary, I understand,” she said. “So Mammy Jinny says. I heard her grumbling to herself only this morning when Jinny was ‘ridding up’ the living room here. She says:

“‘Dese yere literary folk is suah a trouble. Leabin’ books, an’ papers, an’ pen an’ ink eroun’ fo’ odder folks to pick up.’”

“‘Is Laura literary, Mammy?’ I asked her.

“‘Suah is,’ says Mammy Jinny. ‘Littahs t’ings all ober de house!’”

When the laugh against her had subsided, Laura said:

“But what good is it to boil, Bobby, if we can’t win games? To reach the top and win the trophy, we must win every game of the series from now on.”

“And a fat chance we’ve got to do that!” exclaimed Bobby, scornfully.

“Four of them are as good as won,” said Dora, confidently. “Those with the West High and Lumberport teams.”

“Don’t be too sure of the Lumberport team,” advised Laura. “It improves all the time.”

“We can beat it if Roberta keeps up her end,” declared Jess.

“But how about Keyport and East High?”

“Keyport has outplayed us all but one game,” complained Dorothy Lockwood. “East High has beaten us two games and one was a draw. But we have beaten them and we ought to be able to do it again.”

“That’s when Hester was on the team,” said Laura, quietly.

Bobby stood up and smote her two hands together loudly.

“If we only had Hester back!” she cried.

“Why, Bobby!” cried Jess.

“I don’t care. It’s so. I don’t like Hester; but I hate to see Central High lose the trophy for the need of another good player.”

Nellie Agnew was just coming in and she heard part of what Bobby said.

“Oh, girls!” she cried. “Do you know where Hester is?”

“She wasn’t at school to-day,” said Dora.

“Nor yesterday,” added her twin.

“Nor the day before that,” cried Laura. “What’s happened to her?”

“She is in the hospital,” said Nellie, solemnly.

“My goodness me! what for?” gasped Bobby Hargrew.

Nellie told them. Indeed, she expatiated on the affair to the full. Hester had displayed a quality of courage that appealed strongly to the doctor’s daughter. It was no brave act inspired by impulse, and “of the minute.” It took right down moral courage to do what Hester had done.

“The transfusion of blood was accomplished yesterday. The operation was entirely successful. Hester and Johnny are side by side in little narrow beds in the children’s ward of the hospital. Daddy Doctor let me in to peek at them,” said Nellie, her eyes full of tears.

“That girl’s just splendid! Johnny is going to live and be strong again, the doctors say. Oh! I feel so little when I think of Hester. I’m so sorry I signed that round robin, or said anything against her being on the team. I – I wish we had her back.”

“So – so do I,” exclaimed Dora, and Dorothy echoed her twin’s desire.

“I wouldn’t mind if old Hess was playing with us,” said Bobby, with a grin. “Huh! I guess I was the first one to say so.”

And this last incident marked the further – and stronger – interest the boys and girls of Central High had centered in the City Hospital.

Laura and Chet had not forgotten Mr. Billson’s odd remarks about the gymnasium mystery and Chet had gone again and again to the hospital to sound the man who had been so badly injured in the forest fire. But Billson was hard to approach. He considered Chet one of those who believed Hester Grimes guilty of instigating the raid on the gymnasium. Billson had acquired a fierce admiration for Hester, and it made him angry with anybody who expressed a doubt of her entire innocence of the crime which Rumor laid at her door.

But suddenly public opinion veered clear around. The story of little Johnny Doyle’s necessity and how Hester had volunteered to come to his aid spread about the Hill section of Centerport almost as quickly as had the story of the gymnasium mystery.

“What do you think?” Billson asked Chet Belding, when the boy visited him and Hebe Pocock again – but this was out of Hebe’s hearing. “What do you think – that a girl like this would hire a foolish boy to do such dirty work? If Miss Grimes had wanted to bust up that gymnasium, you bet she’d have had the pluck to go and do it herself! That’s my opinion.”

“Well, Rufe was there,” said Chet, quietly.

“Where?”

“In the gym. The first night the things were disturbed. Bill Jackway admits that. They’ve got time-clocks for him and he goes all over the building several times a night, now; and they have let him hire another man to help him on the field during the day. But he says that he let Rufe out at midnight because the boy was scared and wanted to go home. And the second time, Rufe could have slipped in when Bill had the door ajar, and afterward got out of the window and walked backward to the field fence. Oh, he could have done it.”

“But why mix Hester Grimes up with it?” growled Billson.

“Rufe would never have thought of the thing himself, I don’t believe. And Hester threatened to ‘fix’ all the girls, and said she hated them, and the gym., and the whole thing.”

“Guess she was mad,” said the man.

“Quite likely. She sure wasn’t glad,” returned the boy, drily.

“And I suppose you think,” said Mr. Billson, scowling, “that she is doing all this for the Doyles to pay Rufus for his monkey-shines, eh?”

“No I never said such a thing,” cried the indignant Chet.

“Then what? If folks have really got anything against Miss Hester, why don’t they come out square and say so? This hinting at things – going ‘all ’round Robin Hood’s barn’ – gets my goat – it does so!”

“I guess the girls of Central High feel a whole lot differently toward Hester than they did,” admitted Chet. “At least, they talk differently.”

And it was a fact. While Chet and Billson were talking the basketball team had gathered at the Belding house and had concocted another “round robin.” But this one was couched in quite different language from the first that had been presented to their physical instructor. This time both Lily Pendleton and Roberta Fish signed the paper, which was an unequivocal request that Hester Grimes be invited to take her old position on the team.

Hester had not come back to school yet; the doctor would not allow it. But she was taking her lessons at home. Johnny Doyle was well on the way to recovery and all Hester needed was a little rest, the doctor said, to put her in as good condition as usual.

The round robin went to Mrs. Case and, after an interview with the principal, Mrs. Case went again to call on Hester at her home.

“Ain’t she the greatest girl you ever heard of, Mis’ Case?” demanded Mrs. Grimes, fluttering about as she ushered the teacher into Hester’s presence. “Me and her father can’t do a thing with her when Hess is set on doing anything she wants to do. And this at the hospital – well, if we say a thing about it she gets that mad!”

“How-do, Mrs. Case?” yawned Hester, who had been reading, curled up in the window-seat. “Do take that easy chair. Mother! I declare – you have got a grease spot on that wrapper.”

“Oh, excuse me!” exclaimed the simple Mrs. Grimes. “I’ll go change it for a fresh one.”

Thus her daughter got her out of the room before Mrs. Case began to talk. And, indeed, it was Hester herself who began the conversation in her usual abrupt way.

“I don’t know how you feel towards me, Mrs. Case, but I know I was impudent to you when you were here before. But you said you could show me how to get back on the basketball team, and I guess I do want to get back – if it isn’t too late?” she concluded, wistfully.

“That’s what I’ve come to talk about,” said Mrs. Case, promptly. “The girls want you back – ”

“Oh, no!” exclaimed Hester, in surprise.

“Oh, yes!” returned the teacher, smiling, and bringing out the paper the members of the team had signed. She put it into Hester’s hand; the girl read it quickly and then turned her face away so that Mrs. Case should not see her eyes for a moment.

“They say they need me!” Hester said, in a choked tone.

“Yes,” returned the teacher, simply.

“That they can’t win the trophy without me,” added Hester, devouring the writing again.

“Yes.”

“And they don’t say a word about that foolish business at the hospital. Folks talk too much about that,” said Hester, recovering her usual manner. “If these girls really want me to help the team, I’ll play.”

“They want you, Hester, for just that purpose. If they have more kindly feelings toward you than they have had of late, that is between them and you. But as for your joining the team again – ”

“Yes, Mrs. Case?”

“You must remember the rules and play the game in a sportsmanlike manner,” declared the instructor firmly. “You understand me?”

“Yes, Mrs. Case,” returned the girl, hanging her head.

“Then I shall expect you to appear for practice just as soon as Dr. Agnew allows you to take up that work,” said the teacher, rising briskly. “And I shall be glad to have you back on the first team,” she added, giving Hester’s hand a hearty squeeze.

CHAPTER XXIII – CLIMBING UP

By the middle of the next week Hester was playing regularly in her old position on the basketball team. Roberta Fish had dropped back into the second team with all the grace of the sweet-tempered girl she was.

“I’m only too glad she’s come back,” said Roberta, referring to Hester Grimes. “It’s much more important that Central High should win that beautiful silver trophy than for me to have the honor of playing on the champion team.”

“You’re a good sort, Roberta,” said Bobby Hargrew, admiringly. “Now, I’d be mad if they’d asked me to step down and let somebody take my place.”

“No,” said Laura. “You’d be loyal, too, Bobby.”

“And that’s the A. B. C. of athletics, child,” said Nellie Agnew, remembering very clearly what the doctor had said to her weeks before on the subject.

“‘A. B. C.,’ indeed!” sniffed Bobby. “You make me feel like a primary kid again, I declare!”

Jess Morse began to laugh. “Some of these primary kids, as Bobby calls them, are pretty smart. Allison Mapes – you know her? – who teaches the first grade, was telling of a little Bohemian boy in her class. He is smart as a whip, but English is quite a paralyzing language to him. She asked him the other day:

“‘Ivan, what is a calf?’

“And the boy answered: ‘Missis, that’s the child of a cow and the back of your leg!’”

When the laugh over this had subsided Laura spoke seriously. They were talking in one of the small offices of the school, having retired to discuss the forthcoming games.

“It isn’t all plum cake and lemonade, girls, even to beat West High and Lumberport – ”

“Oh, my!” croaked Bobby. “See what we did to West High last time without Hester.”

“That was a fluke,” declared the captain.

“Why, they’re babies!” said Josephine Morse, confidently. “And Lumberport as well.”

“Don’t get the idea in your head that we are going to whip any team so easily. That’s when we are going to lose,” urged Laura. “Being too sure is as bad as being careless in your play.”

“Now she is hitting me,” grumbled her chum.

“Well, Jess, if the cap fits, put it on.”

“But do let us encourage ourselves, Mother Wit,” cried one of the twins. “Goodness knows, we need it.”

“That’s right,” said her sister. “We’ve had such bad luck!”

“Aw, she’s a regular old croaker!” shouted Bobby, dancing up and down. “We are going to win every game from now on!”

“Hush!” exclaimed Laura. “We’re making too much noise. Somebody will come and put us out.”

“Nope. Nobody here but John, the janitor. Gee Gee’s gone home, you bet. I wish those other girls would come and we could get down to business.”

“You look out, Bobby. If you get black marks again maybe you’ll be taken off the team for the rest of the term.”

“Oh, oh!” cried the irrepressible. “Don’t say such a thing.”

“That would be too mean!” cried Dora.

“Indeed it would!” added her sister.

They were all making a deal of noise. As Laura said, “one could scarcely hear one’s self think.” And noise was not allowed in the school building, whether in classes, or out. Suddenly, at the height of the revelry, there came a stern knock on the door. Behind the thick oak the startled girls heard a sharp voice exclaim:

“Young ladies!”

“Oh, gee!” gasped Bobby.

“Hush!” commanded Laura.

“Shucks! Somebody’s fooling us,” cried Bobby, springing to the door. “Who’s there?” she shouted.

“It is me – Miss Carrington,” said the muffled voice.

For a breath the other girls were stricken dumb when the name of the strict disciplinarian of the school was spoken. But it was Bobby who recovered her speech first, and she broke into a loud laugh.

“Go ’way!” she cried. “You can’t fool us. If it was Gee Gee she would have said: ‘It is I’!”

“Oh, my goodness! suppose it should be Miss Carrington?” gasped Nellie, in horror.

But the sounds outside the door ceased. Bobby, after a trembling moment, snapped open the lock and unlatched the door. The corridor was empty. But in a moment Hester Grimes appeared from the stairway and approached the meeting place of the team.

“You said you wanted everybody here, Laura,” she said. “But did you have Miss Carrington at your meeting?”

“Miss Carrington!” they shrieked in chorus.

“Yes. I just met her. And she had the funniest look on her face. What was the matter with her?” demanded Hester.

“Oh, my soul!” groaned Jess. “I can tell you what the matter is. Bobby just corrected Miss Carrington’s English. What do you know about that?”

But the occasion was not one for laughter or joking now. That had surely been Miss Carrington at the door, and the reckless Bobby had called her “Gee Gee” to her face, and been saucy into the bargain!

“We’re done for!” Dora Lockwood groaned. “Wait till assembly to-morrow. Bobby will be called out before the whole school.”

“Oh! she’d never be mean enough for that!” almost wept Dorothy.

“But something dreadful will happen to Bobby,” urged Nellie.

“She’ll be forbidden after-hour athletics, as sure as shooting!” declared Jess Morse.

Bobby, for once, was stricken dumb. She saw in an instant all the horrid possibilities of her reckless speech. Barred from the team for the rest of the term would be the lightest punishment she could hope for.

“And Gee Gee is always lying in wait for a chance to spoil our athletics,” wailed Lily Pendleton, who for once felt the sorrows of her fellows.

Hester wanted to know what it all meant, and they told her.

“She certainly did look funny when I met her on the stairs,” admitted the butcher’s daughter. “And you told her she couldn’t be herself because she said, ‘It is me?’ My! that must have been a shock to her. One of her pupils correcting Miss Carrington’s use of the English language!”

“It isn’t any laughing matter!” flared up Bobby.

“And I don’t see that crying over it will help any,” returned Hester, grimly.

The team as a whole, however, was worried a good deal by Bobby’s “bad break.” To be obliged to break in a new girl at Bobby’s place would be almost ruinous now. Just having gotten the team into shape once more, it seemed an awful thing to contemplate.

But assembly passed the next morning without Mr. Sharp saying a word about Bobby. The session dragged on till closing time without Gee Gee’s speaking to Bobby Hargrew. That very day East High was to come to play the girls of Central High on their court.

The uncertainty, however, made Bobby less sure in classes, and she came near to being held to make up her Latin. But she slipped through somehow and ran away from the school building as hard as she could run, for fear that Gee Gee would send for her at the last moment.

“Something’s happened to her. She’s had a change of heart. I’m afraid she isn’t well,” gasped Bobby, once safely in the dressing room of the gym. “She is never going to overlook that awful break of mine – is she?”

“You’d better walk a chalk line from now to the end of the term,” advised Jess. “If she ever does get you on any other matter she will double your punishment. I believe she is ashamed to call you up for what you said to her yesterday, because you caught her using language unbecoming a purist.”

“Be thankful, Bobby – and be good,” advised Laura. “You have certainly escaped ‘by the skin of your teeth,’ as the prophet has it. No, that is not slang; it is Scripture. And do, do be good for the rest of this half.”

“Oh, I’ll be a lamb – a little, woolly lamb,” groaned Bobby. “You see if I’m not!”

The girls of Central High played a splendid game of basketball that afternoon. They beat the East High team fairly and squarely, and their winning this game put them up a notch in the series. They took East High’s place as Number 2. There was still the Lumberport and Keyport teams to whip before Central High could win the trophy.