The Camp Fire Girls at School; Or, The Wohelo Weavers

by Hildegard G. Frey

The house was packed on this the first night of the Thessalonian play. It was already long past time for the performance to begin. The orchestra finished the overture and waited a few minutes; then began another selection. They played this through, and there was still no indication of the curtain going up. They played a third piece. The house became restless and began to clap for the appearance of the performers. No sign from the stage. Behind the curtain there was pandemonium. When everything was about ready to begin it was discovered that none of the stage lights would work. Neither the foot lights nor the big cluster up over the center of the stage nor any of the side lights could be turned on. A hasty examination of the wiring led to the discovery that the wires which supplied the current had been cut in the room where the switchboard was. The plaster had been broken into in order to reach them. This was the reason that the play was not beginning. The President of the Thessalonians came out in front and explained to the audience that something had gone wrong with the lights, which would cause a delay in the rising of the curtain, but the trouble was being fixed and he begged the indulgence of the house for a few minutes. The orchestra filled in the time by playing lively marches, while the boys behind the scenes worked feverishly to mend the severed wires, and the curtain went up a whole hour after scheduled time.

The first act went off famously. Gladys was a born actress and sustained the difficult role of Marie Latour well. The part where she defies her tyrannical father brought down the house. Sahwah came in for her share of applause too. Seeing her composed manner and hearing her calm voice, no one in the audience could ever have guessed the strenuous experience she had just been through. In the second scene Marie, driven from her home, wanders around in the streets with her child, until, faint from hunger, she sinks to the ground. The scene is laid before the wall of her father's large estate and she falls at his very gates. Gladys made the scene very realistic, and the audience sat tense and sympathetic. "Food, food," moaned Marie Latour, "only a crust to keep the life in me and my child!" She lay weakly in the road, unable to rise. "Food, food," she moaned again. At this moment there suddenly descended, as from the very heavens, a ham sandwich on the end of a string. It dangled within an inch of her nose. Gladys was petrified. The audience sat up in surprise, and a ripple of laughter ran through the house. It was such an unexpected anticlimax. That some one was playing a practical joke Gladys did not for a moment doubt, and she was furious at this ridiculous interruption of her big scene. In the play Marie loses consciousness and is found by a peasant, and it is on this occurrence that the rest of the play hinges. The sudden appearance of the ham sandwich in response to her cry for food was fatal to the pathos of the scene. The rest of the cast, standing in the wings, saw what had happened and were at their wits' end. But Gladys was equal to the occasion.

Moving her head wearily and passing her hand over her eyes she murmured faintly but audibly, "Cruel, cruel mirage to taunt me thus! Vanish, thou image of a fevered brain, thou absurd memory! Come not to mock me!" The actors in the wings, taking their cue from her speech, found the string to which the sandwich was tied and jerked it. The sandwich vanished from the sight of the audience. The scene was saved. The spectators simply passed it over as a more or less clumsy attempt to portray a vision of a disordered brain. The string on the sandwich had been passed over certain rigging above the stage that moved the scenery, and on through a little ventilator that came out on the fourth floor, from which point the manipulator had been able to listen to the speeches on the stage and time the drop of the sandwich. By the time the Thessalonian boys had traced the string to its end the perpetrator of the joke was nowhere to be found. He had fled as soon as the thing had been lowered. The scene ended without further calamity.

In the third scene—the one in the peasant's hut—there is a cat on the stage. The presence of this cat was the signal for further trouble. In one of the tense passages, where Marie Latour is pleading with the son of the peasant to flee for his life before the agents of her father come and capture them both, and the cat lies asleep on the hearth, there was a sudden uproar, and a dog bounded through the entrance of the stage. The cat rushed around in terror and finally ran up the curtain. The lovers parted hastily and tried to capture the dog, but eluding their pursuit he jumped over the footlights into the orchestra, landing with a crash on the keys of the piano, and then out into the audience. Nyoda and three or four of the Winnebagos, sitting together near the front on the first floor of the auditorium, recognized the dog with a good deal of surprise. It was Mr. Bob, Hinpoha's black cocker spaniel. How he had gotten in was a mystery, for Hinpoha herself was not there. Nyoda called to him sharply and he came to her wagging his tail, and allowed himself to be put out with the best nature in the world. But the scene had been spoiled.

During the rest of the evening Nyoda, as well as a number of the other teachers, sat with brows knitted, going over the various things that had happened to interrupt that play. As yet they did not know about the attempt to steal the statue, which Sahwah had accidentally nipped in the bud. But the following week, when the play was all over, and the various occurrences had been made known, there was a day of reckoning at Washington High School. Joe Lanning and Abraham Goldstein were called up before the principal and confronted with Sahwah, who told, to their infinite amazement, every move they had made in carrying off the statue. At first they denied everything as a made-up story gotten up to spite them, but when Sahwah led the way to the barn where she had been confined and triumphantly produced the base of the statue, they saw that further denial was useless and admitted their guilt. They also confessed to being the authors of the sandwich joke and the ones who had brought in the dog. Both were expelled from school.

But the thing which the principal and teachers considered the bigger crime—the cutting of the wires at the back of the stage—was still a mystery. Joe's and Abraham's complicity in the statue affair furnished them with a complete alibi in regard to the other. It was proven, beyond a doubt, that they had not been in the building in the early part of the afternoon nor after they had carried off the statue, until after the wires had been cut. Then who had cut the wires? That was the question that agitated the school. It was too big a piece of vandalism to let slip. The principal, Mr. Jackson, was determined to run down the offender. Joe and Abraham denied all knowledge of the affair and there was no clue. The whole school was up in arms about the matter.

Then things took a rather unexpected turn. In one of the teachers' meetings where the matter was being discussed, one of the teachers, Mr. Wardwell, suddenly got to his feet. He had just recollected something. "I remember," he said, "seeing Dorothy Bradford coming out of the electric room late on the afternoon of the play. She came out twice, once about three o'clock and once about four. Each time she seemed embarrassed about meeting me and turned scarlet." There was a murmur of surprise among the teachers. Nyoda sat up very straight.

The next day Hinpoha was summoned to the office. Unsuspectingly she went. She had been summoned before, always on matters of more or less congenial business. She found Mr. Jackson, Mr. Wardwell and Nyoda together in the private office.

"Miss Bradford," began Mr. Jackson, without preliminary, "Mr. Wardwell tells me he saw you coming out of the electric room on the afternoon of the play. In view of what happened that night, the presence of anybody in that room looks suspicious. Will you kindly state what you did in there?"

Nyoda listened with an untroubled heart, sure of an innocent and convincing reason why Hinpoha had been in that room. Hinpoha, taken completely by surprise, was speechless. To Nyoda's astonishment and dismay, she turned fiery red. Hinpoha always blushed at the slightest provocation. In the stress of the moment she could not think of a single worth-while excuse for having gone into the electric room. Telling the real reason was of course out of the question because she had promised to shield Emily Meeks.