CHAINS ON HIS WHEELS
"How came you to meet Janet?" asked Laura Belding, remembering what her brother had first told her about the Red Cross girl.
"She was coming my way, of course."
"Coming your way?" Laura repeated, her eyebrows raised questioningly. "Oh! I see! You met her at the hospital."
"You said a forkful," declared the slangy youth.
"Dear me, Chet," Laura observed soberly. "I think your slang is becoming atrocious. So Janet was down there!"
"She had been calling on our friend with the broken leg, too," said Chet.
"She does seem interested in him, doesn't she?" Laura said thoughtfully. "I wonder why?"
"Because her mother's half-brother went to Alaska years ago and they never heard of him again," said Chet. "She told me."
"Oh!"
"Nothing wonderful about that," the brother declared.
"It is interesting."
"To them, I suppose," said Chet "But why don't you ask Miss Steele to join you girls in the play you are getting up?"
"I never thought of it," confessed Laura.
"Your thought-works are out of kilter, Sis," declared Chet, laughing again. "I'd certainly play Miss Steele off against the menace of Hester Grimes."
There was something besides mere sound in Chet Belding's advice, and his sister appreciated the fact. But she did not go bluntly to the other girls and suggest the Red Cross girl for the part of "the dark lady." She realized that, if the new girl could act, she would amply fill the part in the play. But Hester was supposed to have it now, and the very next day Mr. Mann gave that candidate an hour's training in the part Hester was supposed to fill.
When they all came together for rehearsal again the second day, Hester Grimes was present and she showed the effect of Mr. Mann's personal help. Yet her work was so stiffly done, and she was so awkward, that it seemed to most of the girls that she was bound to hurt and hinder rather than help in the production.
"She'd put a crimp in anything," declared Bobby Hargrew, as the Hill girls went home that afternoon.
The streets in this residential section had been pretty well cleared of snow, and people had their automobiles out once more.
"Say, Jess!" exclaimed Bobby.
"Say it," urged Josephine Morse. "I promise not to bite you."
"If Hester plays that part, what are they going to do with her hands and feet?" asked the unkind Bobby.
"Oh, hush!" exclaimed Laura.
"Well, when she's supposed to pick the rose and hold it up to the light, and kiss it, her hand is going to look like a full-grown lobster--and just as red."
"Girls, we must not!" begged Laura. "Somebody will surely tell Hester what we say, and then--"
"She'll refuse to play," said Jess.
"Oh, fine, fine!" murmured one of the Lockwood twins.
"If we get her mad it will do no good," Nellie Agnew said. "Maybe then she will insist on being 'the dark lady.'"
The boys were on the corner of Nugent Street waiting for the girls to come along.
"How goes the battle, Laura?" asked Lance Darby. "Have you learned your part yet?"
"I thought I had," sighed Laura. "But when I come to take cues and try to remember the business of the piece, I forget my lines."
"This being leading lady is pretty tough on Mother Wit," laughed Chet.
"Oh, my!" exclaimed Bobby Hargrew suddenly. "Here comes Pretty Sweet in his car. Why! he's got Lil with him. I thought that was all over."
They gaily hailed the driver of the automobile and his companion as the vehicle passed. Short and Long, with gloomy face, watched the car out of sight.
"Well," he growled, "he's got nonskid-chains on his wheels to-day, all right."
"Chains on his wheels, Billy?" asked Bobby. "What do you mean? Doesn't he always have them on in winter?"
"Humph! He forgot 'em once, anyway."
"Hey, Billy!" exclaimed Chet Belding, "you are skidding yourself, aren't you?"
"Aw----"
"Least said soonest mended," added Lance, likewise giving the smaller boy a quick, stern look.
"Oh, I see!" muttered Bobby, searching the flushed face of Short and Long. "Say, Billy----"
But Short and Long started on a quick trot for home, and left his friends to stare after him. It was Bobby who did most of the staring, however. She said to Jess and Laura, after they had parted from the other boys:
"What do you know about that boy? I'm just wise to him. I believe I know what is the matter with Short and Long."
"Do you mean," asked Laura, "what makes him act so to Purt?"
"You have guessed my meaning, Mother Wit."
"What is the trouble between them?" demanded Jess. "Although Billy never was much in love with Purt Sweet."
"Don't you two girls remember the Saturday night that man was hurt on Market Street?"
"I should say I do remember it!" Laura agreed. "He is in the hospital yet, and he doesn't know who he is or where he came from."
"Oh, it's nothing to do with his identity," Bobby hastened to say. "It is about the car that ran him down. You know the police never have found the guilty driver."
"Goodness!" gasped Jess. "You surely don't mean----"
"I mean that the car had no chains on its rear wheels. That is all that was noticed about it Nobody got the number. But I heard Short and Long say he knew somebody who had been driving a car that day without chains. And the boys left us, didn't they, to look up the car?"
"What has that to do with Purt Sweet?" demanded Laura.
"Why, you heard what Billy just said about him and his chains!" cried Bobby. "'He's got nonskid-chains on his wheels to-day, all right.' Didn't you hear him? And he's had a grouch against Pretty Sweet ever since the time--about--that the man was hurt."
"Oh, Purt wouldn't have done such a thing. He might have run the man down; but he would never have run off and left him in the street!"
"I don't know," Jess said. "He'd be frightened half to death, of course, if he did knock the man down."
"I do not believe Prettyman Sweet is heartless," declared Laura warmly. "The boys are making a mistake. I'm going to tell Chet so."
But when she took her brother to task about this matter she could not get Chet to admit a thing. He refused to say anything illuminating about the car that had run down the stranger at the hospital, or if the boys suspected anybody in particular.
"If we think we know anything, I can't tell you," Chet declared "Billy? Why, he's always sore at Purt Sweet. You can't tell anything by him!"
Just the same it was evident that the boys were hiding much from their girl chums; and, of course, that being the case, the girls were made all the more curious.