"I'll get some stamps," said Shirley, "while you girls hunt for your soaps. Let's round this corner—-" She stopped short, for as they cut suddenly from the side street into the main avenue they almost stumbled into a crowd!
"What's up?" asked Shirley tritely.
"An arrest," answered a man pushing his bicycle. "And I guess old
Sandy ain't made no mistake this time. He's caught the banshee!"
"Yes, sir," snapped an overgrown boy. "That's what she is. Keepin' folks awake howlin'!"
Sally clutched Shirley's arm. "See, it's Dol's friend, the actress!"
"Sure enough, the foreign element with a name like crocheting," said Shirley. "I always knew she would come to grief with that howling. Girls!" to Jane and the others. "Could we go to the Town Hall and find out what happens? That's the ghost of Lenox Hall, the woman who screamed at midnight."
Too astonished to offer comment the girls drifted along with the crowd, and a break in the ranks afforded just a glimpse of Officer Sandy with a very tall, fancifully dressed, but very much disheveled prisoner. She walked along with the officer as if he might have been a creature of a lower order of creation, but as the boys said, "Sandy did have her goin'."
And she was the "foreign element," the obnoxious visitor at the beauty shop, who was so sorely and fatally stage struck that she had seriously disturbed the peace of decorous little Bingham!
"She would yell right out in the night, like a hoot owl only fiercer!" insisted one of her followers. "And she ain't safe to be loose with a habit like that."
"Defyin' the law and disturbin' the peace," growled Sandy. "I've had a warrant for that noise ever since it scared old Mrs. Miner into fits and she was took to the horspittal on account of it."