“And we won’t know where,” growled Marty.
“But we’ll ask at every house after we get out of town,” suggested the teacher. “That is, every one but the Elder’s. I guess she wouldn’t have gone in there.”
“Say! I don’t know about that,” shouted Marty so his friend could hear him. “Janice and the Elder have been thicker than thieves lately.”
“What’s that?” said Nelson. “You don’t mean it!”
“Yep. Janice never said a thing about it. You know, she’s closer-mouthed than a clam with the lockjaw. But it’s beginnin’ to leak out.”
“What is?”
“Why, how she took the old Elder for a ride in her car. And it was some joy ride, believe me!” and Marty laughed heartily, despite the buffeting of the storm.
He repeated for the teacher’s benefit an aggravated account of that ride to Middletown for the money, with annotations and additions by everybody who had repeated it, beginning with Bill Embers, Si Littlefield, and the Warners, and so on, down the line.
“And if ye notice, Mr. Haley,” concluded Marty, “the Elder hasn’t had a word to say lately about the Prophet Daniel foreseein’ the automobile craze of the Twentieth Century. He donated a spankin’ big tree for the Girls’ Guild entertainment——”
“And he told me last week that he would give fifty dollars toward the series of lectures and educational moving picture shows that we’re going to have in the school hall after New Year’s. Was it Janice who started the trustees on that idea?” queried Haley, as they halted in the lee of a shed to get their breath.