CHAPTER I
WHERE, OH, WHERE?

Field day was past and gone and the senior class of Central High, Centerport’s largest and most popular school, was thinking of little but white dresses, bouquets, and blue-ribboned diplomas.

The group of juniors, however, who had made the school’s athletic record for the year in the Girls’ Branch Athletic League, had other matters to discuss – and in their opinion they were matters of much greater moment.

“Boiled down,” stated Bobby Hargrew, “to its last common divisor, it is ‘Where, oh, where shall we spend our vacation?’”

They had decided some weeks before – Bobby herself, Laura Belding, Jess Morse, the Lockwood twins and Dr. Agnew’s daughter, Nellie – that a portion at least of the long summer vacation should be spent in camp. The mooted question was, where?

“No seashore resort,” Nellie said, with more decision than she usually displayed, for Nellie was of a timid and peaceful disposition.

“No,” agreed Laura Belding. “We’ll eschew the three S’s – ‘sun, sand, and ’skeeter-bites.’ That is the slogan of the seashore resort. Besides, it costs too much to get there.”

“That’s an important item to take into consideration, girls, if I’m to go,” said Jess Morse.

“I thought you were a millionairess?” laughed Bobby. “Where are the royalties from your play?”

“Those won’t begin till the producer puts the play on next season,” returned Jess, who had been fortunate in writing a play for amateur production good enough to interest a professional theatrical manager.

“Well, we’ve got to have you, Jess,” said Bobby (otherwise Clara) Hargrew. “For we’re depending upon your mother to play chaperon for the crowd, wherever we go.”

“Let’s find a quiet spot, then,” said Jess, eagerly. “Mother wants to write a book this summer and she says she would love to be somewhere where she doesn’t need to play the society game, or dress–”

“Back to the Garden of Eden for hers!” chuckled Bobby. “Eve didn’t have to dress – that is, not before Fall.”

“Aren’t you awful, Bobby?” cried one of the Lockwood twins – but which one it was who spoke could not have been sworn to by their most familiar friend. Dora and Dorothy looked just alike, dressed just alike, their voices were alike, and they usually acted in perfect harmony, too!

“Well,” pursued Laura Belding, “if we are going to spend the first weeks of the summer vacation in camp, we must decide upon the spot at once. Are we all agreed that we shall not go to the salt water?”

“Oh, yes!” cried her particular chum, Jess, or Josephine, Morse.

“None of the troubles of the seaside boarder for ours,” Bobby announced, hurriedly groping amid the rubbish in her skirt pocket and bringing forth a crumpled newspaper clipping. Bobby insisted upon having a pocket in almost every garment she wore (it was whispered that she wore pajamas at night for that reason) and no boy ever carried a more heterogeneous collection in his pockets than she did.

“See here! here’s one seaside visitor’s complaint,” and she intoned in a singsong voice the following doggerel:

 
“‘Why don’t red-headed girls get tanned?
Why does a collar wilt?
Why is the sea so near the land?
Why were the billows built?
Why is the “crawl-stroke” hard to learn?
Why is the sea bass shy?
Why is the nose the first to burn?
Why is the stinging fly?
 
 
“‘Why do mosquito nettings leak?
Why do all fishers lie?
Why does the grunter-fish always squeak?
Why do they feed us on clam-pie?
Why does the boardwalk hurt the feet?
Why is the seaweed green?
Why can’t a bathing suit look neat?
Why won’t straw hats stay clean?
“‘Why–’”
 

“Stop it!” shrieked Jess, covering her ears. “How dare you read such preposterous stuff?”

“‘Whys to the wise,’ you know,” giggled Bobby.

“I vote we refuse to allow Bobby to go camping with the crowd unless she positively refrains from quoting verse on any and every occasion,” drawled Nellie.

“Hardhearted creature!” cried Dora Lockwood. “Poor Bobs couldn’t live without that ’scape-gap.”

“By the way, girls,” Laura Belding asked, briskly, “are we going to let any other girls join this camping party – or is it to be just us six?”

“Who else wants to go?” demanded Bobby, quickly.

“Lil Pendleton–”

“Always that!” ejaculated Bobby, in disgust.

“Why, Bobby!” cried Dorothy. “I thought you and Lilly kissed and made up?”

“Oh, yes – we did,” grunted the smaller girl. “That is, we kissed. Lil was already made up.”

“Now, Bobby!” admonished Laura.

“That’s horrid of you, Bobby,” Nellie declared. “You are incorrigible.”

Yet they all had to laugh. Bobby Hargrew was just a cut-up!

“I’m worse than the long word you called me, Nell,” said little Miss Hargrew. “But we’re not going to have any such spoil-sport as Lil Pendleton along.”

“But Chet and Lance say that Prettyman Sweet has begged so hard to go camping with them, that they’re going to take him – just for the fun they will have at his expense, I s’pose,” said Laura.

“That’s why Lil wants to go camping,” Dora said. “She’s got such an awful crush on Pretty Sweet that she wants to do everything he does.”

“That dude!” scoffed Bobby.

“He and Lil make a good pair,” said Jess.

“Wait a minute!” cried Dorothy Lockwood. “Where are the boys going to camp this year, Laura?”

“On the shore of Lake Dunkirk, somewhere.”

“Say, Mother Wit,” cried Bobby, addressing by her universal nickname the leader of the crowd of Central High girls. “Wouldn’t it be fun to camp near – That is, providing the boys are all nice.”

“Well, beside Chet and Lance and Pretty Sweet, there’ll be Short and Long, Reddy Butts and Arthur Hobbs, anyway. I don’t know how many more,” Laura said. “But you know that Chet and Lance wouldn’t have any but nice fellows in their crowd.”

“Barring Pretty,” said Bobby, “they are all good chaps – so far. We wouldn’t mind having them for neighbors.

“And why can’t we?” she added, suddenly. “Why, girls! Father Tom has recently bought into the Rocky River Lumber Company and that company owns Acorn Island.”

“Acorn Island? Great!” declared Jess.

“That’s the big island in Lake Dunkirk, you know,” explained Laura to the Lockwood twins, who looked puzzled.

“Acorn Island is just the finest kind of a place for a camp,” said the enthusiastic Jess. “It’s just like a wilderness.”

“Right! The company isn’t going to cut the timber on the island till next winter. Father Tom says so.”

“I’ve been to picnics on Acorn Island,” said Nellie Agnew. “It is a beautiful spot.”

“Acorn Island it is, then,” cried Bobby. “Hurrah! We’ll spend our vacation there!”

She almost shouted this declaration. The girls had been lingering to talk in the high school yard and were now at the gate. Nellie suddenly tugged at Laura’s sleeve and whispered:

“Look there! what do you suppose is the matter with Professor Dimp?”

Bobby spun around at the word, having heard the sibilant whisper. She likewise stared at the rusty-coated gentleman who had just passed the gate, having come from the main entrance of the Central High building.

“Gee!” exclaimed the slangy Bobby. “What’s got Old Dimple now? What have I ever done to him – except massacre the Latin language? – and that’s a ‘dead one,’ anyway!”

The Latin teacher – the bane of all careless and ill-prepared boys and girls of the Latin class – was a slightly built, stoop-shouldered man who never seemed to own a new coat, and was as forgetful as a person really could be, and be allowed to go about without a keeper.

He often passed the members of his class on the street without knowing them at all; the boys said you might as well bow to a post as to Old Dimple!

But here he had taken particular notice of Bobby Hargrew; indeed, he stopped to turn around and glare right at her – just as though she had said something particularly offensive to him as he passed the group.

“Goodness!” murmured Jess. “If you’re not in trouble with Gee Gee, Bobs, you manage to get one of the other instructors down on you. What have you done to the professor?”

“Nothing, I declare!” said Bobby, plaintively.

“If you’d murdered his grandmother he couldn’t look any harder at you,” chuckled Dora Lockwood.

The professor suddenly saw that he had disturbed the party of schoolgirls. He actually flushed, and turned hurriedly to move away.

As he did so he pulled a big, blue-bordered handkerchief from the tail pocket of his frock-coat. That pocket was notably a “catch-all” for anything the poor, absent-minded professor wished to save, or to which he took a fancy. Once Short and Long (otherwise a very short boy named Long) dropped a kitten into the professor’s tail pocket and the gentleman did not discover it until he reached for his bandana to wipe his moist brow when he stood up to lecture his Latin class.

However, it was nothing like a kitten that followed the blue-bordered handkerchief out of the voluminous skirt-pocket. A crumpled clipping from a newspaper fell to the walk as Professor Dimp strode away.

Bobby Hargrew’s quick eye noted the clipping first, and she darted to retrieve it. She came back more slowly, reading the printed slip.

“What is it, Bob?” asked Jess, idly.

“Why, Clara!” exclaimed Laura Belding, “aren’t you going to give it back to him?”

“Look here, girls!” ejaculated the excited and thoughtless Bobby, looking up from the newspaper clipping. “What do you think of this? Old Dimple must be secretly interested in modern crime as well as in the murdered ancient languages. This is all about those forgeries in the Merchants and Miners Bank, of Albany. You know, they say a young fellow – almost a boy – did them; and he can’t be found and they don’t know what he did with the money obtained by the circulating of the false paper.”

“My! Our Aunt Dora lost some securities. She just wrote us about it,” Dorothy Lockwood said, eagerly.

“And he wasn’t much but a boy!” murmured Nellie. But Laura said, sharply: “Bobby! that’s not nice. Run after Professor Dimp and give the clipping to him.”

“Gee! you’re so awfully particular,” grumbled the harum-scarum. But she started after the shabby figure of the Latin teacher and caught up with him before Professor Dimp had reached the end of the next block – for Bobby Hargrew had taken the palm in the quarter mile dash at the Girls’ Branch League Field Day and there were few girls at Central High who could compete with her as a sprinter.

When she returned to the group of her friends, still eagerly discussing the plane for their camping trip, her footsteps lagged. Laura noticed the curious expression on the smaller girl’s face.

“What has happened you, Bobby?” she demanded.

“Why! I’m so surprised,” gasped Bobby. “I must have done something awful to Old Dimple. When he saw what it was I handed him, he grabbed it and just snarled at me:

“‘Where did you get that, Miss Hargrew?’

“And when I told him, he looked as though he didn’t believe me and had to search his pocket to make sure he had dropped it. And he looked at me so fiercely and suspiciously. Goodness! I don’t know what I’ve done to him.”

“He’s odd, you know,” suggested Mother Wit.

“That’s all right,” said Bobby, somewhat tartly; “but what the mischief he wants to bother himself about where we go camping–”

“What do you mean, Bobs?” demanded Jess, while the other girls all looked amazed.

“Why he said to me just now,” answered the disturbed girl, “‘you girls better keep away from Acorn Island. That’s no place for you to go camping.’ And then walked right off with his old clipping, and without giving me a chance to ask him what he meant,” concluded Bobby Hargrew.