Betty Wales on the campus

CHAPTER I
“TENDING UP” AGAIN

Betty Wales, with a red bandanna knotted tightly over all her yellow curls—except one or two particularly rebellious ringlets that positively refused to be hidden—pattered softly down the back stairs of the Wales cottage at Lakeside. Softly, because mother was taking her afternoon nap and must on no account be disturbed. Betty lifted a lid of the kitchen range, peered anxiously in at the glowing coals, and nodded approvingly at them for being so nice and red. Then she opened the ice-box, just for the supreme satisfaction of gazing once more upon the six big tomatoes that she had peeled and put away to cool right after lunch—which is the only proper time to begin getting dinner for a fastidious family like hers. Finally she slipped on over her bathing suit the raincoat that hung on her arm, and carefully opened the front door. On the piazza the Smallest Sister and a smaller friend were cozily ensconced in the hammock, “talking secrets,” as they explained eagerly to Betty.

“But you can come and talk too,” they assured her in a happy chorus, for Betty was the idol of all the little girls in the Lakeside colony.

Betty smiled at them and pulled back the raincoat to show what was underneath. “Thank you, dears, but I’m going for a dip while the sun is hot. And Dorothy, don’t forget that you’ve said that you’d stay here and see to everything till I get back. And if more girls come up, don’t make a lot of noise and wake mother. Good-bye.” And she was off like the wind down the path to the beach staircase.

Half a dozen welcoming shouts greeted her from the sand.

“We’ve waited ages for you,” cried one.

“Dare you to slide down on the rail,” called another.

“I’M SORRY I WAS LATE”

“No, slide down the bank,” suggested a third.

Betty gave her head a funny little toss, threw the raincoat down to one of them and slid, ran, jumped, and tumbled down the sheer bank, landing in a heap on a mound of soft sand that flew up in a dusty cloud around the party.

“I’m sorry,” she sputtered, wiping the dust out of her eyes. “Sorry that I was late, I mean. The sand is Don’s fault, because he dared me. You see, I had to mend all Will’s stockings, because he’s going off to-morrow on a little business trip. And then I had to see to my fire, and remind Dorothy that she is now in charge of mother and the house. Beat you out to the raft, Mary.”

Mary Hooper shook off her share of the sand-cloud resignedly. “All right,” she said. “Only of course I’ve been in once already, and I’m rather tired.”

“Tired nothing,” scoffed one of the Benson girls. “You paddled around the cove for five minutes an hour ago, poor thing! That’s all the exercise you’ve had to-day. Betty’s the one who ought to be tired, with all the cooking and scrubbing and mending she does. Only she’s a regular young steam engine——”

Betty leaned forward and tumbled Sallie Benson over on her back in the sand. “Hush!” she said. “I don’t work hard, and I’m not tired, and besides, I shall probably lose the race. Come along, Mary.”

The race was a tie, but Betty declared that Tom Benson got in her way on purpose, and Mary Hooper retorted that Sally splashed her like a whole school of porpoises. So they finally agreed to try again going back, and then they sat on the raft in the sunshine, throwing sticks for Mary’s setter to swim after, and watching the Ames boys dive, until Will appeared on the shore shouting and waving a letter wildly—an incentive to Betty’s getting back in a hurry that caused Mary to declare the return race off also, especially as she had lost it.

“Didn’t want to bother you,” explained Will amiably, “but Cousin Joe drove me out in his car, and I thought that maybe the chief cook——”

Betty seized the letter and ran. “I knew things were going to happen,” she murmured as she flopped up the beach stairway. “But there’s an extra tomato that my prophetic soul told me to peel, and lots of soup, and lots of ice-cream. Oh, dear, I’m getting this letter so wet that I shan’t ever be able to read it.” She held it out at arm’s length and looked at the address. It was typewritten, and there was a printed “Return to Harding College” in the corner. “Nothing but an old circular, I suppose,” she decided, and laid it carefully down in a spot of yellow sunshine on the floor of her room to dry off.

Of course there was no time to open it until dinner was cooked and eaten; and then Cousin Joe piled his big car full of laughing, chattering young people and drove them off through the pine woods in the moonlight.

Betty was in front with Cousin Joe. “Things look so much more enchanted and fairylike if you’re in front,” she explained as she climbed in.

Cousin Joe chuckled. “You always have some good reason for wanting to sit in front, young lady,” he said. “When you were a kid, you had to be where you could cluck to the horses. But I certainly didn’t suppose you went in for moonlight and fairies and that sort of thing. I thought you were a hard-headed business woman, with all kinds of remarkable money-making schemes up your sleeves.”

Betty patted the embroidery on her cuff and frowned disapprovingly at him. “You shouldn’t make fun of the Tally-ho Tea-Shop, Cousin Joe. It does make money—really and truly it does.”

“Well, I guess I know that,” Cousin Joe assured her solemnly, “and I understand the extremely marketable nature of ploshkins. Will keeps me very well posted about his wonderful sister’s wonderful enterprises that are backed by the Morton millions.”

“Don’t be silly, please, Cousin Joe,” begged Betty. “I’ve just done what any girl would have under the circumstances, and I’ve had such very scrumptious luck—that’s all.”

Cousin Joe put on slow speed, and leaned forward to stare at Betty in the moonlight. “You’ve pulled off a start that any man might envy you, little girl, and you’re just as pretty and young and jolly as if you’d never touched money except to spend it for clothes and candy. And you still love fun and look out for fairies, and some day a nice young man—I say, Betty, here’s a long straight stretch. Change seats and see how fast you can tool her up to the Pine Grove Country Club for a cool little supper all around.”

“Oh, could I truly try?”

Betty’s voice sounded like a happy child’s, and her eyes sparkled with pleasure and excitement, as her small hands clutched the big wheel.

Cousin Joe leaned back and watched her. “I had a tough pull when I started out in life,” he was thinking, “and no ‘such very scrumptious luck,’ either, and I let it sour me. Betty’s game, luck or no luck. Luck’s not the word for it, anyway. Of course people want to keep friends with the girl who owns that smile. It means something, her smile does. It’s not in the same class with Miss Mary Hooper’s society smirk. I can’t see myself why that nice young man that I almost said was going to fall in love with her some day doesn’t come along—several of him in fact. But I’m glad I didn’t finish that sentence; I suppose you could spoil even Betty Wales.”

Betty remembered her letter again when she stepped on it in the dark and it crackled. She had undressed by moonlight, so as not to wake little Dorothy, who shared her room at the cottage. Now she lit a candle, and opening her letter read it in the dim flickering light. Something dropped out—a long slip that proved, upon further examination, to be a railroad ticket from Cleveland to Harding and back again. And the typewritten letter—that might have been “only an old circular”—was signed by no less a personage than the President of Harding College himself. Seeing his name at the end, in the queer scraggly hand that every Harding girl knew, quite took Betty’s breath away, and as for the letter itself! When she had finished it Betty blew out the candle and sank down in an awe-stricken little heap on the floor by the window to think things over and straighten them out.

Prexy had written to her himself—the great Prexy! He wanted her to come and advise with him and Mr. Morton and the architects about the finishing touches for Morton Hall. Of all absurd, unaccountable ideas that was the queerest.

“Mr. Morton originally suggested asking you,” he wrote, “but I heartily second him. We both feel sure that the ingenuity of the young woman who made the Tally-ho Tea-Shop out of a barn will devise some valuable features for the new dormitory, thereby fitting it more completely to the needs of its future occupants.”

Morton Hall was the result of a suggestion Betty had made to her friend Mr. Morton, the millionaire. It was to give the poorer girls at Harding an opportunity to live on the campus and share in the college life.

“Gracious!” sighed Betty. “He thinks I thought up all the tea-room features. It’s Madeline that they want. But Madeline’s in Maine with the Enderbys, and wouldn’t come. And then of course Mr. Morton may need to be pacified about something. I can do that part all right. Anyway, I shall have to go, so long as they have sent a ticket—right away too, or Mr. Morton will be sure to need pacifying most awfully. I wonder what in the world that postscript means.”

The postscript said, “I had intended to write you in regard to another matter, connected not so much with the architecture of the new hall as with its management; but talking it over together will be much more satisfactory.”

Betty lay awake a long while wondering about that postscript. When she finally went to sleep she dreamed that Prexy had hired her to cook for Morton Hall, and that she scorched the ice-cream, put salt in the jelly-roll, and water on the fire. She burned her fingers doing that and screamed, and it was Will calling to remind her that he wanted breakfast and his bag packed in time for the eight-sixteen.

At the breakfast table the cook—she ate with the family—gave notice. She was going away that very afternoon.

“Most unbusinesslike,” Mr. Wales assured her solemnly, but with a twinkle in his eyes.

“Most absurd,” Betty twinkled back at him. “I can’t suggest a thing to those architects, of course, and they’ll just laugh at me, and Prexy and Mr. Morton will be perfectly disgusted.”

“You’ve got to make good somehow,” Will assured her soberly. “It isn’t every girl that gets her expenses paid for a long trip like that, just to go and advise about things. You’re what they call a consulting expert, Betty. I’ll look up your trains and telephone you from town.”

“And I’ll help you pack a bag,” announced the Smallest Sister. “You’re just going in a bag, like Will, and coming back for Sunday, aren’t you, Betty dear?”

“Yes, I’m just going in a bag,” Betty assured her laughingly, “and coming right back to Lakeside for Sunday. But perhaps in September—well, we need not think about September when it’s only the middle of August; isn’t that so, little sister?”

The Smallest Sister stared solemnly at her. “We ought to make plans, Betty. Now Celissa Hooper wants me to be her chum if I’m going to school in Cleveland this winter, but if I’m going to be at Miss Dick’s again why of course I can’t be chums with Celissa, ’cause I’m chums with Shirley Ware. So I really ought to know before long who I’m to be chums with.”

“You certainly ought,” agreed Betty earnestly. “But you’ll just have to be very good friends with Celissa and with Shirley and with all the other girls until I come back, and then mother and father and you and I can have a grand pow-wow over you and me and the tea-shop and Miss Dick’s and everything else under the sun. Now, who’s going to wipe dishes for me this morning?”

“I am. What’s a grand pow-wow?”

“We’ll have one in the kitchen,” Betty explained diplomatically, hurrying off with both hands full of dishes.

But the pow-wow was a rather spiritless affair.

“You’re thinking of something else, Betty Wales,” declared the Smallest Sister accusingly, right in the midst of the story of the Reckless Ritherum, who is second cousin to the Ploshkin and has a very nice tale of its own. “If you’re going to look way off over my head and think of something else, I guess I’d rather go up-stairs and make beds all by my lonesome.”

“I’m sorry, dearie,” Betty apologized humbly, “but you see I feel just like a reckless ritherum myself this morning—going out to play with three terrible giants.”

“What giants are you going to play with?” demanded the Smallest Sister incredulously.

“The fierce giant, the wise giant, and the head of all the giants,” Betty told her. “The fierce giant eats reckless little ritherums for his breakfast—that’s Mr. Morton. The wise giant laughs at them when they try to show him how to make the house that Jack built—that’s the New York architect. The head of all the giants—that’s Prexy—shakes the paw of the poor little Ritherum kindly, and asks it not to be so silly again as to try to play with giants, and it gets smaller and smaller and smaller——”

“Just exactly like Alice in Wonderland,” put in the Smallest Sister excitedly.

“Until it runs home,” Betty concluded, “to play with a little girl named Dorothy Wales, and then all of a sudden it gets big and happy and reckless again.”

“Then don’t be gone long,” advised Dorothy eagerly, “because I’m always in a hurry to begin playing with you some more.”

“Thank you,” Betty bowed gravely. “In that case I won’t let the fierce giant eat me, nor the wise giant blow me away with his big laugh, nor the head giant stare at me until I vanish, recklessness and all, into the Bay of the Ploshkin.”

“I’d fish you up, if you did fall into the bay,” Dorothy assured her, with a sudden hug that ended fatally for a coffee-cup she was wiping.

“But it was nicked anyway, so never mind,” Betty comforted her, “and you’ve fished me up lots of times already, so I know you would again.”

“Why, I never——” began the Smallest Sister in amazement.

“All right for you,” Betty threatened, putting away her pans with a great clatter. “If you’ve stopped believing in fairies and if you’ve forgotten how you ever went to the Bay of the Ploshkin and fished up ritherums and did other interesting things, why should I waste my time telling you stories?”

This terrible threat silenced the Smallest Sister, who therefore never found out how or when she had “fished up” her sister. But on the way east Betty, still feeling very like a ritherum, consoled herself by remembering first her own simile, and then Will’s “Maybe I’m not proud to know you!” blurted out as he had put her on board her train. A little sister to hug one and a big brother to bestow foolishly unqualified admiration are just the very nicest things that a reckless ritherum can have. And who hasn’t felt like a reckless ritherum some time or other?

Mr. Morton was pacing the station platform agitatedly when Betty’s train pulled in.

“Twenty-three minutes late, Miss B. A.,” he panted, rushing up to her. He had always called her that. It stood for Benevolent Adventurer, and some other things. Grasping her bag and her arm, he pulled her down the stairs to his big red touring car. “The way these railroads are run is abominable—a disgrace to the country, in my opinion. Now when I say I’ll get to a place at four P. M.—I mean it. And very likely I arrive at six by train—most unbusinesslike. Well, it’s not exactly your fault that idiots run our railroads, is it, Miss B. A.? I thought of that without your telling me—give me a long credit mark for once. Well, I certainly am glad to see you, and to find you looking so brown and jolly. No bothers and worries these days, Miss B. A.?”

“Except the responsibility of having to think up enough good suggestions for Morton Hall to pay you for asking me to come and for taking the time to be here to meet me,” Betty told him laughingly.

Mr. Morton snorted his indignation. “That responsibility may worry you, but it doesn’t me—not one particle. Now, by the way, don’t be upset by any idiotic remarks of the young architect chap that has this job in charge. Whatever a person wants, he says you can’t have it—that seems to be his idea of doing business. Then after you’ve shown him that your idea of doing business is to do it or know the reason why, he sits down and figures the thing out in great shape. He’s a very smart young fellow, but he hates to give in. I presume that’s why Parsons and Cope put him on this job—they’ve done work for me before, and they know that I have ideas of my own and won’t be argued out of them except by a fellow who can convince me he really knows more about the job than I do. Just the same, don’t you pay much attention to his obstruction game. Remember that you’re here because I want this dormitory to be the way you want it.”

Betty promised just as the car drew up in front of the Tally-ho. “Thought you’d like a cup of your own tea,” explained Mr. Morton, “and a sight of your new electric fixtures, and so forth. Miss Davis is expecting you. Let’s see.” He consulted his watch, comparing it carefully with Betty’s and with the clock in the automobile, which aroused his intense irritation by being two minutes slow. “It’s now three forty-one. I’ll be back in nineteen minutes. If I can find that architect chap, I’ll bring him along. He knows all the main features of the building better than I do, and he’s a pretty glib talker, so I guess we’ll let him take you over the place the first time.”

Exactly nineteen minutes later, just as Betty and Emily Davis had “begun to get ready to start to commence,” according to Emily’s favorite formula, the inspection of the tea-shop and the exchange of summer experiences, the big red car came snorting back and stopped with a jerk to let out a tall young man, who ran across the lawn and in at the Tally-ho’s hospitably opened door.

“Mr. Morton wishes to know if Miss Wales——” he began. Then he rushed up to Betty. “By all that’s amazing, the great Miss Wales is the one I used to know! How are you, Betty?”

“Why, Jim Watson, where did you come from?” demanded Betty in amazement.

Jim’s eyes twinkled. “From the Morton Mercedes most recently, and until I get back to it with you I’m afraid we’d better defer further explanations.”

Betty nodded. “Only you must just meet Emily Davis—Miss Davis, Mr. Watson. She’s a friend of Eleanor’s too. And you must tell me one thing. Is the architect out there with Mr. Morton?”

“No,” said Jim solemnly, “he isn’t, naturally, since he’s in here with you. Architect Watson, with Parsons and Cope, at your service, Miss Wales.”

“Are you the real one—the one in charge?” persisted Betty. “You aren’t the one that won’t let Mr. Morton have his own way?”

“I am that very one,” Jim assured her briskly, “but there are some lengths to which I don’t go. So please come along to the car in a hurry, or I shall certainly be sent back to New York forthwith.”

“Gracious! That would be perfectly dreadful! Good-bye, Emily.” Betty sped down the path at top speed, Jim after her.

“Did you stop to introduce yourself in detail, Watson?” inquired Mr. Morton irritably, opening the door of the tonneau.

“He didn’t have to introduce himself,” Betty put in breathlessly, “but I made him stop to explain himself, and now I certainly shan’t worry about his objections and opinions, because I’ve known him for ages. Why, he’s Eleanor Watson’s brother Jim. You’ve heard Babe and me talk about Eleanor.”

“I should say that I have,” cried Mr. Morton jubilantly. “So you can manage her brother as nicely as you manage me, can you, Miss B. A.? I knew you ought to come up and see to things. Hurry along a little, Jonas, can’t you? We’re not out riding for our health to-day. There are some little things I haven’t just liked, and now that I’ve got Miss B. A. to help me manage you—— Feeling scared, Watson?”

“Not a bit, sir, thank you,” said Jim with his sunniest smile. “But I’m certainly feeling glad to see Miss Betty again.”

“What’s that? Glad to see Miss B. A.? Well, I should certainly hope so,” snapped Jasper J. Morton. “I’d have a good deal less use for you, sir, than I’ve had so far, if you weren’t.”