The Girls of Central High in Camp: or, the Old Professor's Secret

CHAPTER XX
LAURA KEEPS HER SECRET

They left the farmer threatening vengeance upon the strange young man who had used his shot-gun to such good purpose.

“That fellow’s all right, whoever he is,” Lance declared. “And how quick he was with his gun!”

“He knows how to use one,” Short and Long agreed, with admiration. “I wish I could have thanked him.”

“And this dummy here!” added Lance, with a look of disgust at Purt. “You had that old pistol in your pocket, didn’t you?” he demanded of the dude.

“Ye-es,” agreed Purt.

“Then if you had kept still about it, I could have scared that farmer into holding his dog in leash. Just as glad the brute was shot, though. He’ll be tamed for a while, I bet!”

“It is too bad the dog was trained so badly,” Laura said. “It is not his fault that he was taught to attack people.”

“Well!” grunted Short and Long. “If he’d grabbed me, I reckon he’d have eaten me up before anybody could have helped.”

“You had no business on that man’s land,” said Laura, admonishingly. “And you did sauce him.”

“Ugh! who’d have thought he was so mean?” growled Short and Long.

“Bet you have a care next time,” said Lance, grinning. “But who do you suppose that fellow with the gun was? I’d really like to meet him again.”

“Good sort, whoever he is,” Short and Long agreed.

“No farmer.”

“Not much! He was city-dressed all right.”

Laura listened to their comments, but said nothing. She believed she could make a good guess as to who the young man was; but she was keeping that secret to herself.

When she and the three boys rejoined their companions down stream, they had enough to tell about the adventure without declaring the identity of the young man with the gun. It was exciting enough to have had Short and Long almost “chawed up” by a savage dog, as Lance expressed it.

“And this useless piece of goods,” he added taking Purt by the collar, “made a foozle – right off the reel! I could have scared that big bully easily enough if Purt had kept still about his old revolver being no good.”

“I don’t care,” complained Purt. “The revolver would have been all right if you hadn’t taken that screw out and thrown it away.”

“And you’d likely shot yourself – or somebody else – by this time.”

“No I wouldn’t,” said Purt, gloomily.

“How do you know?” asked Chet.

“Why – I find that when I bought cartridges for that pistol I got thirty-eights – and the pistol is a forty-five!”

The whole crowd laughed at that. Purt Sweet really was too funny for anything.

They got another good laugh on him before they went back to the island. There was a squatter’s cabin near the bank of the brook and they trooped up there for a drink of cool milk, for the woman had two cows and was willing to sell the milk to them, right from her log buttery.

The woman’s daughter – a girl about Lil Pendleton’s age – waited on them. She was a brown-skinned, big-eyed, healthy-looking girl – a regular country beauty. Laura whispered:

“Isn’t she a splendid creature?”

Purt had cocked an appreciative eye at her, and he murmured:

“Quite true – quite true, Miss Laura. She’s as beautiful as Hebe,” and gave the name of the goddess the very best pronunciation, according to Professor Dimp.

“Beautiful as he be?” drawled Chet, in exaggeration of bucolic twang, looking amusedly at the lank and lazy squatter himself who lay snoring on the platform before the hut. “Huh! she’s a sight purtier than he be. Why, he’s as humbly as a hedge-fence – an’ ye can see, Purt, that the girl takes after her mother.”

“It sure is too bad how they rig you, Pretty,” laughed Jess.

“Pretty’s all right!” joined in Billy Long. “Only one thing wrong with him. He starts easy, and he speeds up well, but just at the critical moment he always skids.”

“Hear the motor talk from Short and Long! Yow!” exclaimed Reddy Butts. “And old Purt’s not so slow at that!”

“Who said he was slow?” demanded Short and Long, with apparent indignation. “Bet you can’t do him, Reddy.”

“Bet I can – and for half a dollar, too,” declared the youth with the radiant head of hair.

This was after the party had returned to the creek and luncheon was in order. The other boys saw that the red-headed youth and Short and Long had a scheme between them, and they sat back and prepared to enjoy Purt’s discomfiture.

“You can’t fool Purt in a hundred years,” Short and Long reiterated, quite hotly.

“Can,” returned Reddy, briefly, with his mouth full. “Got a half dollar, Purt?”

“What if I have?” demanded the dude, suspiciously.

“You put it under that mug on the table, and I bet I can take the money without touching the mug.”

“You cawn’t trick me,” drawled Port. “You couldn’t do that, you know, Reddy.”

“Put your half dollar under the mug and see if I can’t,” chuckled the auburn-haired youth.

Thus urged, Purt did as agreed. He placed a half dollar on the table, and carefully covered it with an inverted mug that he had been drinking milk from.

Everybody was interested now and was watching the proceedings.

“Better put a napkin over it, Purt,” advised Reddy. “For I’m going to fool you a whole lot!”

“You cawn’t fool me, deah boy!” declared the dude, with growing conviction.

But he carefully covered the mug. Then Reddy, with a grin, reached under the rough table they were using and soon pulled his hand back with a half dollar in the palm.

The boys laughed, and wondered, and the girls were likewise puzzled. Purt looked both amazed and vexed. Then they began to laugh at him.

“Mighty easy way to make half a dollar,” commented Reddy, slipping it into his pocket. “I told you I’d get it, Purt, without touching the mug.”

“But you didn’t do it, doncher know!” cried Purt, growing exasperated. “My half dollar is there.”

He whipped off the napkin, lifted the mug – and Reddy, with a laugh, grabbed the coin that lay under it.

“I told you I’d get it without lifting the mug, Purt,” he said, and the crowd burst into a chorus of laughter. Purt had been made the victim of the joke, after all.

It was all good fun, however. Purt could well afford the half dollar, and after a minute he, too, laughed.

They started back for Acorn Island in good season, with a nice string of speckled trout and some two dozen white perch – the promise of a splendid “fish-fry” that evening. On the way they passed the heavy canoe seen several times before on the lake.

There was but one man in it now, fishing; and he sat with his shoulders hunched up and his hat drawn down about his face.

“I wonder who that old man is?” Chet said, reflectively, as the Bonnie Lass sped by.

“Wonder where his camp is?” responded Lance, idly.

“He looks like a native,” Reddy said. “If he’s no handsomer than that squatter back yonder, I wouldn’t want to see him any closer to.”

Laura, and Jess, and Bobby looked at each other surreptitiously. They knew that the man in the canoe was Professor Asa Dimp, Latin teacher at Central High!

CHAPTER XXI
THE SHERIFF WITH HIS DOGS

Another evening melted into night, leaving in the minds of most of the girls of Central High now encamped on Acorn Island, a feeling of contentment and pleasure because of a well-spent day.

Their activities had been joyous ones; their fun and sport healthful; and nothing had really occurred to trouble their minds.

Of course, Laura was an exception to the others. Jess and Bobby were to a degree disturbed over the mystery of the young man who had visited the camp on two occasions, and about their unexpected discovery of Professor Dimp’s presence on Acorn Island.

But it was Mother Wit who had thought out the true significance of these mysterious happenings. She had reason to believe that the “Mr. Norman” whom Lizzie Bean had talked about – and the man who had frightened the same Lizzie and robbed the camp of food – and the Norman Halliday who was wanted by the sheriff for the robbery of the Merchants and Miners Bank of Albany, was one and the same person.

Not alone that, but he was camping on this island, without a permit from the Rocky River Lumber Company; and his companion was their own respected, if not well-liked, Professor Dimp.

Certainly the old professor could have had nothing to do with the robbery of the bank; nor could he have reaped any benefit by such crime. Laura was sure that the old professor was perfectly honest and respectable.

He was surely not camping against his will, with the strange young man who had saved Short and Long from the farmer’s savage dog. Professor Dimp must have some deep interest in him.

Laura, too, could not believe the young man with the gun to be a criminal of the character the newspapers had given the thief and forger who had betrayed his employers in the bank.

“That young man has a good face. If Lizzie’s story is true, too, he has a good heart. And he was quick to act to-day when he saved Billy Long; he took a chance for a stranger, when it was unwise for him to show himself.

“There is a mystery about him. The professor would not be with the young man if he were bad – oh! I am sure of that,” concluded Laura.

This discussion Laura carried on in her mind. She did not take even Jess into her inmost confidence, and Chet – of course – went back to the mainland with the rest of the boys, when bedtime came.

Poor old Professor Dimp! He had ever been the butt for his careless pupils’ pranks. His eccentricities, his absent-mindedness, and his devotion to what Bobby called “the dead parts of speech” had made him an object of the pupils’ dislike and a subject for their wit.

Of course, they knew he was wonderfully well educated – that the depths of Latin and Greek were easily plumbed by his thought. But respect for a teacher’s attainments does not always breed love for the teacher – nor an appreciation of the said teacher’s softer qualities, either.

Laura had come to the conclusion that there must be a side to “Old Dimple’s” character that few of his pupils had surmised.

There was a bond between Professor Dimp and that mysterious young man from Albany that Laura Belding did not understand. Yet she sought her cot that night with a belief that the old gentleman was good and kind, and that the accusation against his young companion must be very, very wrong!

Could she have climbed a tree like Short and Long, Laura would have gone to the top of one of the big oaks near the camp, the next morning at daybreak. From that height she knew she could see most of the open patches on the island, clear to the western end.

She was very curious as to whether Professor Dimp was still camping in the little glade where she and her comrades had met him. And had the young man returned from the north side of the lake where she had seen him the day before?

Laura was an early riser, as ever, that morning. She was tempted, before the camp was generally astir, to run out to the end of the island and see if the Professor’s camp were still established there.

But Professor Dimp had been so sharp with her and the other girls, that Laura half feared to meet him. He was certainly a stern old gentleman, and she remembered now that, from the time the girls of Central High had decided to come here to Acorn Island to camp, Professor Dimp had been quite put out about it.

“Why!” thought Laura, “he was planning to come here himself at that time. He must have already arranged to meet the young man here. And he considers us interlopers. It’s very, very strange!”

Nor did Laura wish to discuss the affair with Jess or Bobby Hargrew. She was afraid to tell anybody what she surmised about Professor Dimp’s companion.

It was after breakfast – which Liz served with all the spirit and cheerfulness, so Bobby said, of an Egyptian mummy with the mumps! – that they first spied the big barge coming from the north shore of the lake.

The slow-moving craft was under sail and there were several men aboard of her, as well as a pack of dogs which now and then gave tongue. Immediately the Barnacle went raving mad. The sigh and sound of so many canines heading toward the island that had been his own domain for a week, quite drove the Barnacle out of such few senses as he possessed.

He barked at the barge from the heights where the camp stood; then he raced down to the shore and emitted a salvo of barks from the landing on that side of the island. Then he raced back again, and so returned to the shore – alternating in his rushes in the craziest possible way.

Meanwhile the barge drew nearer and nearer. The general question at the girls’ camp was: “Why were the men and dogs coming to Acorn Island?”

“They can’t land here without a permit,” Bobby declared. “The Rocky River Lumber Company has posted the island.”

“And what sort of game can they hunt with hounds this time of year?” demanded Jess.

“Those are bloodhounds,” said her mother, calmly. “English bloodhounds.”

“Goodness!” squealed Bobby, suddenly. “Bloodhounds? Don’t you all feel just like Eliza crossing the ice, girls?”

“Not much!” cried Dora, laughing. “On a hot day like this?”

The cicadas were filing their saws in the tops of the trees and the promise of one of the hottest days of the season danced in the shimmer of haze over the water.

“Do you really suppose they are coming here with those dogs?” repeated Nell.

“They have no business to land,” said Bobby, again serious.

“I know who they are!” Jess cried, suddenly.

“Who?” asked her mother.

“Chet said something about a sheriff coming to the boys’ camp over yonder. And he had a pack of bloodhounds with him.”

“But why should an officer of the law come here?” queried Mrs. Morse.

Laura, and Jess, and Bobby looked at each other. Of course, Mother Wit had understood the approach of the barge from the first; but she had said nothing. Now Jess and Bobby burst out with:

“Oh! he must be after that young man.”

“What young man?” was the chorus of the other campers.

“The young man who is with Professor Dimp,” said the thoughtless Bobby. “Isn’t that it, Laura?”

Laura groaned. The cat was out of the bag now, and she foresaw much trouble in the camp on Acorn Island.

CHAPTER XXII
WHERE PROFESSOR DIMP COMES IN BIG

“What under the sun are you talking about, Bobby?” demanded Lil Pendleton; and Nell cried:

“Professor Dimp! What do you know about the professor?”

“Is he here?” demanded Dora.

“Not Old Dimple?” chimed in her twin.

“You surprise me, Clara,” said Mrs. Morse. “Are you referring to your Latin teacher? and is he anywhere near here?”

“Oh, gracious! I’m always putting my foot into it whenever I open my mouth,” groaned Bobby.

“A highly impossible athletic feat, I am sure, Bobby,” said Jess, unable to keep from laughing, although she knew Bobby deserved chiding.

“I want to know what this means,” exclaimed Lil again. “Who is this sheriff after? And why is Old Dimple mixed up in it?”

“It’s the fellow who came and robbed our larder!” shrieked Nell, guessing the enigma at last.

“I am afraid that is who the sheriff is looking for,” admitted Laura, gravely.

“And why here?” cried Lil. “Didn’t that fellow take the food and get away from the island?”

“We did not find him – that’s sure!” said Dora Lockwood.

“Barnacle found his camp, and we saw Professor Dimp there,” explained Laura seeing that a clean breast of it was the better way.

“Who’s ‘we?’” demanded Lil.

“Jess and Bobby and I. We spoke to the old professor, and he was real cross to us. He would not tell us anything about the young man.”

“Then Liz did see that Mr. Norman the night we were robbed?” said Nell.

“Yes. I expect so.”

“‘Mr. Norman?’” Nell repeated, reflectively. “And the fellow who robbed that bank in Albany is Norman Halliday? The very same!”

“And you knew this all along, Laura Belding?” cried Lil. “You mean thing!”

“Oh, quit, Lil,” advised Bobby, gruffly. “Why should Laura stir up a row and scare you all? I never till this very moment guessed who the fellow might be, myself. Of course the sheriff is looking for him!”

“And on this island!” murmured Lil. “A criminal!”

“We don’t know how much of a criminal he is,” said Laura, stoutly. “He was the fellow that saved Short and Long from that dog yesterday, I verily believe,” and she wagged her head. “He didn’t look very desperate, I can tell you!”

“My goodness! that’s so,” said Bobby, eagerly. “Let’s keep the sheriff off.”

“How are you going to do it?” asked Jess. “Go down there and stone him when the barge comes near?” and she chuckled.

“He hasn’t any permit. This is private land–”

“But can’t he search the island for a lawbreaker?” asked Dorothy.

“I don’t know that he has a right to, without a warrant.”

“But if we try to stop him,” said Laura, slowly, “won’t he suspect that we don’t want him to search the island?”

“Say!” exclaimed Lil, angrily. “What do we care?”

“We don’t want him to find that poor fellow,” said Bobby.

“Why not?” repeated Lil, sharply.

“After he saved Short and Long’s life?”

“Humph! should we pass a vote of thanks to him for that?” demanded Lil, with, sarcasm.

“Not for that, perhaps,” Laura said, gently. “But think of the old professor.”

“Old Dimple!”

“The old Prof?”

“What about him?”

The chorus rose loud and general. Laura flushed, but held her ground.

“Our loyalty to Central High ought to be enough to prompt us to help one of our teachers. In some way the old professor is connected with this young man who is in danger of arrest. I don’t mean that we should actually thwart the officer of the law. But I, for one, certainly will not help the officer.”

“You are right, Mother Wit!” cried Bobby. “I’ll go a step farther. I’ll try to keep that man from landing here with his dogs.”

“I know nothing about the right or wrong of the case,” said Mrs. Morse; “but I am afraid of those awful beasts. There are five of them!”

“And Barnacle will only get into a fight with them if they land,” declared Jess, rather amused. “Let’s go down to the lake in a body and refuse to allow the dogs to come ashore.”

Liz Bean had listened from the cook-tent, but said nothing. Her plain face was as expressionless as ever.

Now, when Mrs. Morse and the girls of Central High started down the slope on the northern side of the knoll, Liz slipped into the woods to the west, and quickly disappeared in the thick underbrush.

The big mainsail of the barge had been dropped and the men with the sheriff were paddling the craft in to the shore. Now and then a hound would lift its head and utter a mournful bay. Then Barnacle would strive to bark his own head off!

Laura recognized one of the paddlers with a start of surprise. It was the vicious farmer who had set his dog on Short and Long, on Bang-up Creek!

If she had had any doubts about the right and wrong of an attempt to thwart the sheriff before, Laura had none now. Perhaps her course was indefensible; but intuitively she believed that farmer to be a bad man. And she was sure that he was the one who had set the sheriff on this trail.

He had doubtless followed the young man with the gun and seen him join Professor Dimp. The two had paddled for Acorn Island. The farmer had communicated with the sheriff.

Right then, so hotly burned Laura’s righteous indignation, that she would have done her very best to keep the officer of the law from landing those bloodhounds, and chasing the mysterious “Mr. Norman” out of his hiding place.

But it was Bobby who put the ball into play first.

“Say, Mister! don’t you bring those dogs ashore here!” she called to the sheriff.

He was a big, red-faced, beefy-looking man, with a bristling mustache and little, piglike eyes.

“I wanter know!” he said, huskily. “Who do you think you are giving orders to, young lady?”

“You are a sheriff, aren’t you?”

“Yes I be,” said the man.

“And you are searching all the woods around about for a convict?”

“Not perzactly. But he’s likely ter be a convic’ arter I git him,” and he chuckled, hoarsely.

“Well, this island is posted. We have a permit to camp here, but I don’t believe you have any warrant for landing at all,” said Bobby, sharply. “And my father, who is one of the directors of the Rocky River Lumber Company, certainly does not want a pack of hounds like those, running the game on this island – out of season, too.”

“This ain’t that kind o’ game, young lady,” said the sheriff, slowly. Then he stopped. A figure had suddenly appeared from the wood. It was a shabby but commanding figure, and the girls themselves shrank together and waited for the old Latin professor to speak.

“Miss Hargrew is quite right,” said Professor Dimp, in his iciest tone. “Those hounds must not land here.”

“I say, now!” growled the sheriff.

“This is private property,” continued Professor Dimp, coldly, “as Miss Hargrew tells you. You can see the signs. You will trespass here if you are determined. But I warn you that if you bring those dogs ashore you will be prosecuted.”

“I’m a-goin’ to search this islan’,” growled Sheriff Larkin, uglily.

“You may. You have no warrant to do so, but you may. But you must not bring ashore those dogs. And,” added the professor, turning and bowing with old-fashioned courtesy to Mrs. Morse, “you must keep away from the camp where this lady and her young charges are ensconced.”

He turned on his heel in conclusion, and walked into the woods again.

“Three rousing cheers!” whispered Bobby under her breath. “What’s the matter with Old Dimple? He’s all right!”