CHAPTER I – WHAT THE M. O. R.’S NEEDED

The M. O. R. house was alight from cellar to garret. It was the first big reception of the winter and followed closely the end of the first basketball trophy series and the football game between the Central High team and that of West High.

The M. O. R. was the only girls’ secret society countenanced by Franklin Sharp, the principal of Central High. Until you belonged to it you never knew what the three initials stood for; after you were lucky enough to belong, the name of the society became such a deep and dark mystery that you never dared whisper it, even to your very closest “spoon.”

Therefore, in all probability, we shall never learn just what “M. O. R.” stands for.

Among the boys of Central High, their sisters and the other girls belonging to the secret society were spoken of as “Mothers of the Republic.” But the boys were only jealous. They were entirely shut out of the doings of the M. O. R.’s, which long antedated the Girls’ Branch Athletic League; the boys never were allowed within the sacred precincts of the “House” save on the occasion of the special reception at Easter.

The house was a narrow slice of brownstone front in the middle of a block of similar dwellings, within sight of the schoolhouse, and in the Hill section of Centerport. The Hill was supposed to be very exclusive, and rents were high. And the rental of the thirteen-foot slice of brownstone had become a serious problem to the Board of Governors of the M. O. R.

Some M. O. R.’s had gone to college, many of them had married, some had moved many, many miles away from Centerport. But most of them remembered tenderly the first school society of which they had been members. The alumnae were loyal to M. O. R.

And some of the alumnae were on the present Board of Governors, and were – on this reception night – discussing seriously with the more active members of the board the financial state of the society. The owner of the house had notified them of a raise in rent for the coming year to an absolutely impossible figure. The M. O. R.’s must look for new quarters.

“If we could only interest the pupils of Central High, as a whole, members and those who are not in the M. O. R.,” sighed Mrs. Mabel Kerrick.

The presence of this widowed lady, daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Centerport, and an alumna of the school, upon the Board of Governors of the M. O. R. needs an explanation that must be deferred.

“I don’t see how we can interest the boys – they only make fun,” said a very bright looking girl sitting upon the other side of the room, and beside another very bright looking girl who looked so much like her (they were dressed just alike) that unless one had seen her lips move one could never have told whether Dora Lockwood, or Dorothy Lockwood, had spoken.

“And how are you going to interest the girls who haven’t been asked to join the M. O. R. – and are not likely to be asked?” demanded the other twin. “The very exclusiveness of the society makes it impossible for us to call upon the school in general for help.”

“Just raise the fees and we can pay the higher rent,” remarked another girl, briskly.

“And then, at the end of next year, Mr. Chumley will raise it again. He owns more rentable property than any other man on the Hill, and just as soon as he is sure his tenant is settled he begins to put up the rent on him,” observed a fourth girl.

“That is just it,” Mrs. Kerrick responded, slowly. “The society should not pay rent. We should own our own house. We should build. We should raise a goodly sum of money this winter toward the building fund. But we must find some method of interesting everybody in our need.

“A membership in the M. O. R. has always been a reward of merit. Freshmen cannot, of course, be ‘touched’ for the M. O. R., and few sophomores attain that enviable eminence. But by the time a girl has reached her senior year at Central High it is her own fault if she is not a member.

“Therefore, the girls of the younger classes should be interested in the stability of the society, irrespective of whether they are members yet, or not. And naturally, if the girls are interested, they can interest their brothers and their parents.”

“Suppose, Mrs. Kerrick, a girl hasn’t any brothers?” demurely asked a quiet girl in the corner.

“Very well, then, Nellie Agnew!” said the lady, laughing. “You go and interest some other girl’s brother. But we haven’t heard from little Mother Wit,” added Mrs. Kerrick, turning suddenly to a pretty, plump girl, all in brown and with shining hair and eyes, who sat by herself at the far end of the room. “Haven’t you a thing to say, Laura Belding?”

“Won’t it be a little difficult,” asked the girl addressed, diffidently, “to invent anything that will interest everybody in the building fund of the M. O. R.?”

“That’s what we’re all saying, Laura,” said one of the other members of the Board. “Now you invent something!”

“You give me a hard task,” laughed the brown girl. “Of course, all members – both active and graduate – will be interested for their membership’s sake. The problem is, then, in addition, to interest, first, the girls who may be members, and, second, the boys and general public who can never be members of the M. O. R.”

“Logically put, Laura,” urged Mrs. Kerrick. “Then what?”

“Why wouldn’t a play fill the bill?” asked Laura. “Offer a prize for an original play written by a girl of Central High, irrespective of class or whether she is an M. O. R. or not – that will interest the girls in general. Have the play presented by boys and girls of the school – that will hold the boys. And the parents and general public can help by paying to see the performance.”

The younger members of the committee looked at one another doubtfully; but Mrs. Kerrick clapped her hands enthusiastically.

“A play! The very thing! And Mr. Sharp will approve that, no doubt. We will appoint him chief of the committee to decide upon the play. And we will offer a prize big enough to make it worth while for every girl to try her best to produce a good one.”

“But that prize must be deducted from the profits of the performance,” objected the practical Nellie Agnew.

“No,” replied Mrs. Kerrick, promptly. “That will be my gift. I will offer the prize – two hundred dollars – for the best play submitted before New Year’s. How is that? Do you think it will ‘take’? Come, Laura, does your inventive genius approve of that suggestion?”

“I think it is very lovely of you, Mrs. Kerrick,” cried Mother Wit. “Oh, my! Two hundred dollars! It is magnificent. Let us find Mr. Sharp at once and see if he approves. He is still in the house, I know,” and at her suggestion somebody was sent to hunt for the principal of Central High, who was one of the guests of honor of the M. O. R. on this particular evening.

Centerport was a lively, wealthy inland city situated on the shore of Lake Luna, and boasting three high schools within its precincts. The new building of Central High was much finer and larger than the East and West Highs, and there was considerable rivalry between the girls of the three schools, not only in athletic matters, but in all other affairs. Out of school hours, basketball and other athletics had pretty well filled the minds of the girls of Central High; and Laura Belding and her particular chums had been as active in these inter-school athletics as any.

In fact, it was Mother Wit, as her friends and schoolmates called Laura, who interested Colonel Richard Swayne, Mrs. Kerrick’s father, in the matter of girls’ athletics and so made possible for the girls of Central High the finest athletic field and gymnasium in the State.

Incidentally she had interested Mrs. Kerrick in the girls of Central High, too, and reminded the widowed lady that she was an alumna and a member of the M. O. R. In her renewed interest in the affairs of the secret society and in the Girls’ Branch Athletic League, Mrs. Kerrick had become very different from the almost helpless invalid first introduced to the reader in the first volume of this series, entitled “The Girls of Central High; Or, Rivals for All Honors.”

In that first volume was related the establishment of athletics for girls at Central High, and introduced Laura Belding and her especial chums in their school trials and triumphs. In the second volume, “The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna; Or, The Crew That Won,” were narrated the summer aquatic sports of the same group of girls and their boy friends.

“The Girls of Central High at Basketball; Or, The Great Gymnasium Mystery,” the third volume of the series, told of the girls when they had become juniors and related the struggle of the rival basketball teams of the three Centerport highs, and the high schools of Keyport and Lumberport, at either end of Lake Luna, for the trophy cup. That series of games had just been finished and Central High had won the trophy, when Laura and her friends, as members of the M. O. R., are again introduced to the reader’s notice at the opening of this chapter.

CHAPTER II – WHAT JOSEPHINE MORSE NEEDED

In spite of the bright lights illuminating the windows of the M. O. R. house – and many other larger and finer houses at that end of Whiffle Street – outside it was dark and dreary enough. Especially was this so at the “poverty-stricken end,” as Josephine Morse called her section of the street. Jess and her widowed mother lived on the fringe of the wealthy Hill district, where Whiffle Street develops an elbow, suddenly becomes narrow, and debouches upon Market Street.

It was raining, too. Not an honest, splashing downpour, but a drizzling, half-hearted rain that drifted about the streets as though ashamed of itself, leaving a deposit of slime on all the crosswalks, and making the corner street-lamps weep great tears. The gas-lamps, too, seemed in a fog and struggled feebly against the blackness of the evening.

Under a huge umbrella which snuffed her almost like a candle, Jess had made her way into Market Street and to Mr. Closewick’s grocery store near the corner. She carried a basket on her arm and she had given the clerk rather a long list of necessary things, although she had studied to make the quantities as modest as possible. The clerk had put them all up now and packed them into the basket and stood expectantly with the list checked off in his hand.

“Two dollars and seven cents, Miss Jess,” he said.

“I’ll have to ask you to add that to our bill,” said the girl, flushing. “Mother is short of money just now.”

“Wait a moment, Miss Jess; I’ll speak to Mr. Closewick,” said the clerk, seemingly as much embarrassed as the girl herself, and he stepped hastily toward the glass-enclosed office at the rear of the store.

But the pursy old man with the double chin and spectacles on his forehead, the height of which the wisp of reddish-gray hair could not hide, had observed it all. He got down ponderously from his stool and squeaked out behind the long counter in his shiny boots.

“I sent my bill over to your mother this morning, Miss Jess,” he said. “It is more than twenty dollars without this list of goods to-night,” and he shook the modest little paper in his hand, having taken it from the clerk.

“Mother is short of money just now,” repeated Jess.

“So’m I. You tell her so. I can’t let you increase your indebtedness,” and his pudgy hand lifted the basket and put it on the shelf behind him.

“You pay me something on account, or pay for these goods you’ve ordered this evening. I’m needing money, too.”

“Mr. Closewick! I hope you won’t do that,” gasped Jess, paling under his stern glance. “We will pay you – we always have. Mother sometimes has to wait for her money – a long time. We spend many a twenty-dollar bill in your store during the year – ”

“That ain’t neither here nor there,” said the grocer, ponderously. “It’s a rule I have. Never let a bill run more than twenty dollars. ’Specially where there’s no man in the family. Hard to collect from a woman. Makes me bad friends if I press ’em. I can afford to risk losing twenty dollars; but no more!”

“How can you!” cried Jess, under her breath, for there was somebody else entering the store. “We have bought of you for years – ”

“And if I hadn’t stuck to the few business rules I have, I wouldn’t have been here selling you goods for years,” returned Mr. Closewick, grimly. “The sheriff would have sold me out. I’m sorry for your mother, and I don’t want to lose her trade. But business is business.”

“And you cannot favor us for this single occasion?” choked Jess.

“It would lead to others; I can’t break a rule,” said the grocer, stubbornly. “Come now, Miss Jess! You go home and tell your mother how it is. I’ll keep this basket right here for you, and you come back with the two-seven, and it will be all right.”

“That would be useless,” said Jess, clinging to the counter for support, and feeling for the moment as though she should sink, “We haven’t any money – at present. If we had I should not have asked you for any extension of credit. Please give me back my basket.”

“So?” returned the grocer, frowning. “Very well,” and he deliberately unpacked the parcels and handed her the basket – making a show of so doing in the presence of the newly arrived customer. “And what can I do for you, this evening, Mrs. Brown?” he asked, blandly, speaking to the new arrival while he handed Jess her basket without a word.

“And that woman will tell about it all over town!” thought the girl, as she hurried into the street. “Oh, dear, dear! whatever shall I do?”

For the cupboard at the Morse cottage was very bare indeed. Mrs. Mary Morse had some little standing as a contributor to the more popular magazines; but the returns from her pen-work being her entire means of income, there were sometimes weary waitings for checks. Jess had been used to these unpleasant occasions ever since she was a very little girl. Her mother was of a nervous temperament and easily disturbed; and as Jess had grown she had tried to shield her mother, at these times of famine, from its most unpleasant features.

As witness her passage-at-arms with the grocer, Mr. Closewick. No money in the house, an empty pantry, their credit cut off at the store where they had always traded, and no credit established at any other grocer’s shop! The situation looked desperate, indeed, to Jess Morse.

Jess shrank from trying the butcher’s and the dairy store, too. At each shop an unpaid bill would stare her in the face and to-night she felt as though each proprietor would demand a “payment on account.” It was a black night indeed. November was going out in its very mournfullest and dismallest manner.

And for Jess Morse there was an added burden of disappointment and trouble. She was not able to attend the M. O. R. reception, although she was a member. Laura Belding, her very dearest friend, would be there and would wonder why she, Jess, did not appear. And after the reception Chet Belding, Laura’s brother, would be waiting to take Jess home – she hadn’t had the heart to tell Chet that she would not need his escort from the reception.

But, as Jess had told her mother, that blue party dress had become impossible. Let alone its being months behind the fashion, it was frayed around the bottom and the front breadth was sorely stained. And she hadn’t another gown fit to put on in the evening. She did so long for something to wear at a party in which her friends would not know her two blocks away. So she had “cut” the reception at the M. O. R. house.

All this was a heavy load on Jess Morse’s mind as she approached, with hesitating steps, the butter and egg shop kept by Mr. Vandergriff.

“Certainly,” thought the troubled girl, “I either need a whole lot of courage, or a lot of money – either would come in very handy to-night.”

Just then Jess was aroused from her brown study by hearing somebody calling breathlessly after her.

“Hi! Hi! Aren’t you going to look around? Jess Morse!”

A girl smaller than herself, and dressed from neck to heels in a glistening raincoat, ran under Jess’s umbrella and seized her arm. She was a laughing, curly-haired girl with dancing black eyes and an altogether roguish look.

“Jess Morse! don’t you ever look back on the street – no matter what happens?” she demanded.

“For what was Lot’s wife turned to salt, Bobby?” returned Jess, solemnly.

“For good! Now you know, don’t you?” laughed Clara Hargrew, whose youthful friends knew her as “Bobby.”

“Why aren’t you at the ‘big doin’s’ to-night,” demanded the harum-scarum Bobby. “You’re a Mother of the Republic; what means this delinquency?”

“Just supposing I had something else to do?” returned Jess, trying to speak lightly. “I’m on an errand now.”

She wished to shake Bobby off. She dared not take her into Mr. Vandergriff’s store. Suppose the butter and egg man should treat her as the grocer had?

“Say! you ought to be up there,” cried the unconscious Bobby. “I just came past the house and it was all lit up like – like a hotel. And Mr. Sharp was just coming out with Mrs. Kerrick. Mrs. Kerrick is going to do something big for us girls of Central High.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jess, only half interested in Bobby’s gossip.

“Going to give us a chance to win a prize, or something,” pursued Bobby.

“Oh! how do you know?” Jess showed more interest now.

“Why, I heard Mr. Sharp say, as he was helping Mrs. Kerrick into Colonel Swayne’s auto:

“‘The girls of Central High should be delighted, Mrs. Kerrick – and very grateful to you, indeed. Two hundred dollars! And a chance for any smart girl to win it!’ – just like that. Now, Jess, you and I are both smart girls, aren’t we?” demanded Bobby, roguishly.

“We think we are, at any rate,” returned Jess, more eagerly. “Two hundred dollars! Oh! wouldn’t that be fine!”

“It would buy a lot of candy and ice-cream sodas,” chuckled Bobby.

But to herself Jess Morse thought: “And it would mean the difference, for mother and me, between penury and independence! Oh, dear me! is it something that I can do to earn two hundred dollars?”

And she listened to Bobby’s surmises about the mysterious prize without taking in half what the younger girl was saying. Two hundred dollars! And she and her mother did not have a cent. She looked up and saw the lights of the butter and egg store just ahead, and sighed.