Betty Wales decides

Harding College had never gone in heavily for track athletics. President Wallace discouraged intercollegiate meets, and class spirit in the matter seemed to be consumed by basket-ball rivalries, with milder interest in the spring term tennis matches. But the affair of the popping mascots rankled in the breasts of the sophomores. They resented the trickery that had lost the Invincibles their game, and they were bent on revenge, slow if need be, but sure and crushing. Only opportunity was lacking. Impulsive spirits had suggested one or two plans, but the class hung back cautiously.

“It must be a sure thing and as hard a hit as they gave us, or it won’t do at all,” Susanna Hart declared wisely.

In pursuance of this policy the sophomores had waited until May blossoms scented the air and May languor threatened to dull the edge of craft and strategy, leaving the freshmen in complacent possession of their ill-gotten victory. Finally the leading sophomores held a long and agitated conference under a tree in Paradise. But nobody had an idea that anybody else considered at all feasible, and they were about to adjourn in despair when Binks Ames, who was late as usual, jumped a stone wall to avoid a détour, and thereby gave Susanna Hart an inspiration.

“There’s the track meet. We can beat them all to pieces at that. We’ve got splendid runners and jumpers, and they haven’t any who are even passable. We can simply whitewash them.”

“But who cares about a little old track meet?”

“We can make them care,” declared Susanna. “We can talk the subject up and raise an excitement. We can make track meets seem as important as basket-ball games. Well, nearly as important,” amended Susanna compromisingly.

There was a discouraging lack of response, but this only irritated Susanna into greater enthusiasm. “Oh, please don’t be so fussy,” she begged. “It’s our only chance—our very last chance till next year, and paying them up then won’t be the same thing at all. It’s silly to say that people don’t care for track meets. At other colleges they care a lot.”

“But it’s rather late to begin creating a sentiment for them here,” objected a big girl with a provoking drawl in her voice.

“Then we won’t begin,” retorted Susanna pluckily. “We’ll pretend that the sentiment is here already. We’ll be amazed—absolutely struck dumb—to find that the freshmen don’t understand about it. We will pretty nearly go into hysterics when they say that they haven’t yet made up their team. We might suggest combining the meet and the tennis tournament. I’ve often thought that would be a good idea.”

Susanna’s determined enthusiasm finally won the day. Anything was better than nothing, and her scheme had no rivals. Accordingly the bewildered freshmen found themselves, an hour or so later, fairly immersed in a strange tide of talk about a track meet. Track meets appeared suddenly to be the end and consummation of the Harding year. Nothing else in spring term mattered. The junior-senior meet was unimportant, like the junior-senior basket-ball game; after you stopped taking “required gym.” you naturally lost interest and got out of form. But the freshman-sophomore match was the event of the spring term. Bewildering allusions to broad and high jumps, to dashes, hurdle races, and hammer throws, mingled with ready references to the class champions, Binks and Susanna being prominent among them. It was a flood of sudden, unexpected, overwhelming oratory. The freshmen, dazed and blinded, retired to talk the matter over in private, and the sophomores retired also, to wonder whether they had opened fire too soon, and to arrange a program and assign parts.

“And now for practice. We mustn’t take chances. We must do so well that we can’t help winning,” decreed Susanna inexorably.

Every afternoon, accordingly, the sophomores who could run panted around the track in the hot gymnasium, and those who could jump were busy on the floor with bars and “horses.” Every possible candidate was forced to try out her powers. It was to be as complete a “whitewash” of those tricky little freshmen as infinite pains could achieve.

Meanwhile the freshmen consulted with the gym. director, who was secretly amazed and openly delighted at the sudden display of interest in her department. Miss Andrews picked a provisional team, superintended strenuous practice hours, and mingled praise and encouragement with tactful references to the extra year’s training and rather exceptional ability of the sophomores—“foemen worthy of your steel, by whom it’s an honor to be beaten.”

The freshmen managed to see enough of the sophomores’ work to understand that their case was indeed hopeless, but they were not at all attracted by the honors of defeat. So they practiced harder than ever and thereby lost their best jumper, who sprained a knee in her frantic efforts to outdo herself.

This was felt by the freshmen to be a crisis. The jumper’s room was deluged with violets, and the rest of the team all at once became pampered darlings, for whom no attention was too delicate or too flattering. Even the basket-ball team had never been the center of more anxious consideration.

“It would be a perfect shame to lose.” So ran the popular clamor.

“The squad hasn’t any hope of winning.”

“We beat the Invincibles.”

“Let’s think up another plan.”

“Only it must be an entirely different kind.”

“Well, ask Montana Marie. She fixed things up before.”

So did public sentiment crystallize, and Montana Marie found herself once more waited upon by a deputation of leading spirits.

“Well, what do you want now?” she demanded gaily. “A way to beat those horrid sophs? But I never have ideas like that. Ask Fluffy Dutton—oh, she’s on their side. The other plan wasn’t my idea, was it? I just had the general idea of rattling the Invincibles. Couldn’t we rattle the squad? Oh, you don’t want to repeat yourselves. Then I should think you’d be willing to be beaten. If you win, you repeat.”

Montana Marie lapsed into meditative silence, watching the discussion as it wavered to and fro among her guests. But at the first pause she broke into speech again.

“Can’t you jump and run and so on?” she demanded of a sleek, sweet-faced, pink-and-white little girl named Amelia Pease.

Amelia shook her head, smiling gently. “No, of course not. I can’t do anything in gym. I guess you weren’t in my division.”

Montana Marie considered, frowning abstractedly. “No, I wasn’t—oh, I know now! It was a girl named Pease in Miss Mallon’s Select School pour les Americaines. She looked like you, too, only she had freckles and you’re all peaches and cream.”

Amelia blushed at finding herself obliged to own to a connection with Marie’s “gay Paree.” “That’s my twin sister, I suppose. She didn’t care for college, so mother sent her abroad instead of keeping her on at prep. school. She’s very athletic.”

Montana Marie laughed. “Her name is Aurelia, isn’t it? I should say she is very athletic. She used to get into awful scrapes sliding down banisters and vaulting tennis nets, and once she got caught turning hand-springs in the dormitory, with all our pillows piled on the floor to soften it.”

Amelia smiled faintly. “Yes, she’s a dreadful tomboy. She is a little stupider at books than I am, but I’ve always envied her because she was fine at something, instead of just poking along the way I do. She’s just back from Paris now, and she’s coming up to visit me pretty soon.”

“Then you’d better scrub off her freckles and let her jump for the freshmen,” suggested Montana Marie with the casual air of a person saying something trivial and rather foolish.

But the leading spirits, who had had not the least doubt that Betty’s queer freshman would somehow save the class again, exchanged delighted glances, and then burst into a flood of questions.

“Why couldn’t we?”

“Can’t people really tell you apart, Amelia?”

“But what scrubs off freckles? I never found anything that——”

“Would it be playing quite fair to use an outsider?”

“Oh, we’d own up afterward,” explained somebody, “when we’d laughed at them a lot and got them properly sorry for the fuss they’re making over track meets.”

“If we couldn’t get Aurelia’s freckles off, we could paint some on Amelia,” suggested somebody else.

“Nobody can tell us apart except by the freckles,” Amelia assured them.

“Then of course we can do it,” cried everybody at once.

Amelia was summarily ordered to send for her twin, who was to arrive exactly two days before the meet, spending the interval in training for the jumps, and, if possible, in getting rid of her freckles. Meanwhile the team was to be taken into the secret, and Rita Carson, who was wonderful about stage make-ups, was to be instructed to try her hand at freckles. Amelia reluctantly consented to be freckled if necessary.

“Only she must use something that comes off easily,” she stipulated. “If I can’t have the fun that Aurelia does out of tearing around in the sun, why, I don’t want my complexion ruined—no, not even to win the track meet.”

With Amelia’s consent assured, Rita Carson was the incalculable element in the situation. Rita was artistic, and she had the artistic temperament strongly developed; which meant that she would make freckles wonderfully or not at all, that she could never be relied upon to keep an engagement, and that she was more likely than not to be missing on the crucial day of the track meet. But as it was a case of Rita or nobody, there was nothing to do but try to keep her interested, and hope that possibly the Paris sojourn had bleached out Aurelia.

Aurelia’s letter soon settled that: “I’ll come and do the jumps for you. All of my beauty spots (and a few more) came back on shipboard. I’d do quite a lot for you, but I draw the line at puttering any more over my face.

“P. S. They’re mostly on my forehead—small and millions of them.”

A week before the track meet Rita began freckling Amelia according to her twin’s general instruction. Various persons exclaimed over the way Amelia’s lovely white skin was getting sun-spotted. Amelia replied sweetly that skin like hers generally freckled in summer. To give color to this theory she spent her afternoons walking, canoeing, or driving without a hat, which was good Harding custom, but repugnant to poor Amelia. Another bother was having to put on a hot gym. suit in the middle of the afternoon and pretend to practice with the team, to the list of which her name had been added. Miss Andrews protested vaguely, but as she had suddenly decided to go abroad for the summer, she was too busy getting ready to take much interest in the freshman champions.

But the crowning horror of her situation Amelia found in the restrictions put upon face-washing.

“One wash a day.” Rita Carson was inexorable. “It’s absurd of you to insist upon being made up as often as that, and more I simply won’t do.”

This seemed reasonable enough, but Amelia tearfully declared that she never washed her face less than four times daily. “And being in the sun so much gets me hot, and the paint feels sticky, and I’m just miserable,” she wailed mournfully.

“You’re not game for things,” Rita told her crossly. “You agreed to this plan, and you can’t be any sicker of your bargain than I am. When your twin comes you’ll only have to go to classes. You can wash your face all the afternoon and evening if you want to, pussy-cat.”

“I shall be off the campus then,” Amelia retorted with dignity. “It’s been thought simpler for us to room together up on Main Street, so you’ll have a nice walk before breakfast for a day or two.”

Aurelia’s arrival was of course kept in the secret, while Amelia’s departure from the campus was easily explained on the ground of her wanting to be well rested for the meet. In the morning Amelia, duly freckled, went to classes, while Aurelia, too amused to protest, was locked into their room in hiding. In the afternoon Amelia hid, while Aurelia, escorted and surrounded by a watchful band of the initiated, went to practice. Her performances delighted the escort so extravagantly that they took her for a motor ride, showed her Paradise from a canoe, and promised her wonderful “eats” and “the time of her freckled life” as soon as the meet was over and the secret out. Meanwhile Amelia, who had “kept on” her freckles in order to make a necessary trip to the library, waited in vain for a chance to go out; and with the prospect of a total failure before her she got up the next morning in an extremely bad temper. Rita Carson was in a bad temper too—she was not used to getting up so early. To tease Amelia, she put the twins in a row and matched freckle to freckle with painstaking, maddening slowness. Then she daubed two huge ones on Amelia’s nose, for good measure, and departed, calling back a final warning against water.

“But I could wash my nose without doing any harm, couldn’t I, Aurelia?” asked Amelia indignantly.

Aurelia burst into an annoying peal of laughter. “I don’t know, I’m sure. Better not take the risk. Oh, Amelia, you look perfectly killing—so exactly like me. Come to the glass and see.”

Amelia refused to be comforted. “I can see those two freckles all the time,” she complained. “They worry me to death. I’d like to wash the whole thing off and—and——”

“Think what fun you’ll be having to-morrow,” suggested Aurelia artfully. “And think how the class is depending on you. And above everything, don’t cry.”

Amelia finally departed for the campus, her freckles intact, her nerves unstrung, and a wet wad of handkerchief “to use when she just couldn’t stand it any longer” clutched defiantly in her hot little hand.

But if it hadn’t been for Montana Marie all might still have been well. Amelia “flunked dead” in her first class, and she looked so wan and woebegone over it that Montana Marie thought it would be only decent to try to cheer her up. She caught up with her between College Hall and the Morton, and drew her out of the crowd to congratulate her on Aurelia’s perfectly splendid records. Just then a big bottle-fly came buzzing along, preceding Straight Dutton like a noisy herald. Amelia struck out at it vigorously with her wet handkerchief, and somehow in her excitement hit her own nose instead of the fly. Naturally, off came the two big freckles.

“Oh, stop!” cried Montana Marie, her eyes wide with horror. “Stop! You’re losing them!”

“Losing what?” demanded Straight, joining them. Being Straight, she would probably have guessed at once, but Amelia saved her the trouble by letting fall two big tears and then dabbling wildly at the tears and the freckles, which mingled in a sticky brownish fluid on her peach-blossom cheeks.

Straight stared at the strange spectacle in absolute mystification, and Montana Marie boldly decided that the situation was not yet desperate.

“I told you not to fuss with any of those horrid face-washes,” she reproached the choking Amelia. “Freckles aren’t the worst thing in the world. You’ll be lucky if you haven’t ruined your pretty complexion. As for the freckles, I’ll bet they’re all back by afternoon, don’t you, Straight?”

Straight watched them go with vague stirrings of remorse, which dulled her suspicions. Amelia Pease was rather a goose, but it was mean to have gotten the freshmen so worked up and nervous over the meet. Spring term was meant for fun, not for strenuous, nerve-racking contests that brought tears and heart-burnings in their train.

But that afternoon it was a very trim, very alert, and perfectly self-possessed Miss A. Pease who jumped nonchalantly over the records and turned the sophomore audience pale with rage and dismay. The other freshman athletes did well too; even without Miss A. Pease the meet was no sophomore walk-over, and with her it was an overwhelming freshman victory.

“Just the same,” complained Susanna Hart irritably, “they needn’t act as if it was all so comical. They needn’t have hysterics once in about five minutes. They needn’t shriek with mirth every time they look at me.”

As a matter of fact, the joke connected with the freckles of Miss A. Pease was being passed along the freshman ranks, preparatory to its being spread still further. The freshmen had decided that, with Straight Dutton knowing more than she ought, the safest as well as the most dramatic procedure would be to let the cat out of the bag the minute the final score had been announced. Accordingly the freshman president rose promptly, called for silence, and with much dignity made her startling statement.

“Owing to a possibly regrettable mistake we are obliged to withdraw the scores of Miss A. Pease. That leaves the victory with the sophomore team. We congratulate them heartily, and”—with a sudden change of tone—“here comes the mistake. Wouldn’t you have made it too, if you could?”

This was a signal for Montana Marie to lead the Pease twins into the center of the field—Amelia again carefully freckled and dressed exactly like her sister.

“Alike as two Pease in a pod,” cried some would-be wit.

“Bully joke!” acknowledged a group of generous sophomores.

“Too good to keep to ourselves,” shrilled back Montana Marie.

“Who makes freckles? Rita Carson, she makes freckles,” chanted a riotous freshman chorus.

“Freckles that will come off,” added the enlightened Straight.

In a minute the field was pandemonium, with the Peases and Rita Carson being carried round it on freshman shoulders, and the sophomores clamoring eagerly for the whole story.

“It’s not so bad,” admitted Susanna magnanimously. “We’ve got you on muscle, but I’m afraid you’ve got us on brains. So honors are easy, and—oh, we’ve got another year coming!” concluded Susanna with a joyous little sigh.