A Dixie School Girl

by Gabrielle E. Jackson

Sally did as bidden. The room was as undisturbed as it had been twelve hours before.

Aileen ran to the closet. “Her riding things are gone!” she cried.

“And Wesley just told me that Apache had been stolen in the night,” wailed Sally.

“There is more to this than we thought,” said Mrs. Bonnell considerably perturbed. “Now I must report to Miss Woodhull.”

She turned and hurried from the room but had not gone ten steps down the corridor when she met that lady with wrath and fire in her eye.

“What is this fresh annoyance concerning Beverly Ashby? Jefferson has just told me that her horse was stolen in the night. A likely story! It is some new deception upon her part. Such duplicity it has never been my misfortune to encounter. I wish to speak to her at once,” stormed the principal, striding into the study.

Now to be responsible for a young girl not yet sixteen years of age, and one whose family is widely known throughout the entire state, and to discover that said young lady has been missing from beneath one’s roof all night, is, to say the least, disconcerting. For the first time in her domineering life the Empress was thoroughly alarmed. Alarmed for Beverly’s safety, the reputation of the school, and, last, but by no means least, for what such a denouement might bring to pass in the future financial outlook for her business. The school had paid well, but how long would its patronage continue if the facts of this case became widely known?

Miss Woodhull was an alien in the land of her adoption. She had never tried to be anything else. She had established herself at Leslie Manor because she wished to acquire health and wealth, and she had achieved her objects to a wonderful degree. But she had made no friends. She did not wish to make friends among the Southerners. She despised them and all their customs, and though in the beginning they had made many gracious overtures of friendship she had repulsed them at every turn. Consequently they soon began to regard her with indifference if not with contempt. There was absolutely nothing in common between them. She was merely a business proposition in their midst. Their children could acquire beneath her roof the education they desired for them, and there it ended. If, as rumor stated, she really came of gentle Northern blood it must have received a very peculiar infusion in her immediate forebears. They missed something of the noblesse oblige which was to them as a matter of course. So with each passing year the gulf had imperceptibly widened until Miss Woodhull was as much alone in hospitable Virginia as though she lived in Borneo.

Upon realizing that Beverly was really missing her first impulse was to phone to Kilton Hall, for, of course, she had risen early and rushed off to see Athol. Miss Woodhull’s blood boiled at the thought! Kilton Hall of all places the one she detested most. It had been a thorn in her flesh from the moment she knew of its existence for its policy was diametrically opposed to her own. Still, inquiries must be made without further delay, but she would be discreet. So she called the school up by phone:

“Had they seen anything of a stray horse? One of her pupil’s horses had escaped during the night and she was phoning in every direction in her endeavors to find it. It was Miss Ashby’s horse and he might have made his way as far as the hall.”