“That girl’s just splendid! Johnny is going to live and be strong again, the doctors say. Oh! I feel so little when I think of Hester. I’m so sorry I signed that round robin, or said anything against her being on the team. I—I wish we had her back.”
“So—so do I,” exclaimed Dora, and Dorothy echoed her twin’s desire.
“I wouldn’t mind if old Hess was playing with us,” said Bobby, with a grin. “Huh! I guess I was the first one to say so.”
And this last incident marked the further—and stronger—interest the boys and girls of Central High had centered in the City Hospital.
Laura and Chet had not forgotten Mr. Billson’s odd remarks about the gymnasium mystery and Chet had gone again and again to the hospital to sound the man who had been so badly injured in the forest fire. But Billson was hard to approach. He considered Chet one of those who believed Hester Grimes guilty of instigating the raid on the gymnasium. Billson had acquired a fierce admiration for Hester, and it made him angry with anybody who expressed a doubt of her entire innocence of the crime which Rumor laid at her door.
But suddenly public opinion veered clear around. The story of little Johnny Doyle’s necessity and how Hester had volunteered to come to his aid spread about the Hill section of Centerport almost as quickly as had the story of the gymnasium mystery.
“What do you think?” Billson asked Chet Belding, when the boy visited him and Hebe Pocock again—but this was out of Hebe’s hearing. “What do you think—that a girl like this would hire a foolish boy to do such dirty work? If Miss Grimes had wanted to bust up that gymnasium, you bet she’d have had the pluck to go and do it herself! That’s my opinion.”
“Well, Rufe was there,” said Chet, quietly.
“Where?”
“In the gym. The first night the things were disturbed. Bill Jackway admits that. They’ve got time-clocks for him and he goes all over the building several times a night, now; and they have let him hire another man to help him on the field during the day. But he says that he let Rufe out at midnight because the boy was scared and wanted to go home. And the second time, Rufe could have slipped in when Bill had the door ajar, and afterward got out of the window and walked backward to the field fence. Oh, he could have done it.”