“Uh-huh, we should have guessed,” Walker Jamieson shook his head sadly. “Dumb of me. What did he get?”
“My visitor’s pass!” Nan exclaimed. “Now, what will I do?” Involuntarily, they both looked toward Adair MacKenzie who was just disappearing through the door. Then they laughed.
“I don’t know, kid,” Walker liked this youngster that Alice had already filled his ears with tales about. “But you’re in for it. It’s tough, these days, getting duplicates of the things. Shall I break the news to the ogre,” he nodded in Adair MacKenzie’s direction. “He’ll explode, but you’ve just got to take it.”
CHAPTER IV
TROUBLE AT THE BORDER
“Here, here, what’s eating you two?” Adair MacKenzie came bursting forth from the door he had entered just a few moments before Nan’s encounter with the Mexican. “H-m-m, lost your pass, I’ll wager.” With the uncanny instinct of many peppery old gentlemen, Adair MacKenzie as soon as he saw the baffled expression on Nan’s face, jumped immediately to the right conclusion.
“Might have known that would happen. Should have taken care of them all myself. Can’t depend on women and girls. Always tell Alice that. Ought to have a safe place to keep things. Old pouch my mother used to strap around her waist was a good idea.”
Nan couldn’t restrain the smile that came to her eyes at this. She had known one person in her life who tied a bag around her waist. That was grim old Mrs. Cupp, assistant to Dr. Beulah Prescott, principal at Lakeview Hall. Legend had it that Mrs. Cupp had a dark secret the key to which she carried in the black bag which someone, in days long before Nan and Bess descended on Lakeview Hall, had seen. Whether or not it was so, Nan didn’t know, but at Lakeview Hall, the words “Keep it a secret” were generally expressed by saying “Put it in the black bag.”
“Laughing at me, Miss!” Adair’s roar brought Nan out of her reveries. She jumped, and looking up into his face, she winged her way from Lakeview Hall on the shores of the Great Lakes back to Laredo, Texas and the immediate problem of the lost visitor’s pass.