CHAPTER I AN ACCIDENT

CHAPTER I

AN ACCIDENT

"Aren't you glad that we are only going back to school for a little while?" cried Billie Bradley, as she gave a little exultant skip. "Suppose it were fall and we were beginning high--"

"Billie, stop it," commanded Laura Jordon, turning a pair of very blue and very indignant eyes upon her chum. "I thought we were going to forget school for a little while."

"Well, we're not going back for anything I forgot," Billie was asserting when Violet Farrington, the third of the trio, interposed:

"If you two are going to quarrel on a day like this, I'm going home."

"Who said we were quarreling?" cried Billie, adding with a chuckle: "We're just having what Miss Beggs" (Miss Beggs being their English teacher) "would call an 'amiable discussion.'"

"Listen to the bright child!" cried Laura mockingly. "I don't see how you ever get that way, Billie."

"Neither do I," replied Billie, adding with a chuckle as they turned to stare at her: "Just natural talent, I guess."

The three chums--and three brighter, prettier girls it would be hard to find--were on their way to the grammar school which had just closed the week before. Laura had forgotten a book which she prized highly and was in hope that the janitor, a good-natured old fellow, would let her in long enough to get it. At the last minute she had asked the other girls to go with her.

The three chums had lived in North Bend, a town of less than twenty thousand people, practically all their lives. The girls loved it, for it was a pretty place. Still, being only forty miles by rail from New York City, they had been taken to the roaring metropolis once in a while as a treat, and it was only with great difficulty that their parents had succeeded in luring them home again.

Among other things North Bend boasted a jewelry factory, of which Raymond Jordon, Laura's father, was the owner.

Billie's father was the prominent Martin Bradley, well known among real estate and insurance men, and it was from him that Billie, whose real name was Beatrice, had taken her brown eyes and brown hair and even that merry, irrepressible imp of mischief that made Billie Bradley the most popular, best-loved girl in all North Bend.

Her mother, Agnes Bradley, quiet, sincere and beautiful to look upon, kept just the check on her gay young daughter that the young girl needed.

Billie had a brother, Chetwood Bradley, commonly known as "Chet"--a boy as different from his sister as night is from day, yet, in his own more quiet way, extremely attractive.

Laura's brother, Theodore, known to his intimates as Teddy, was a handsome boy, as full of wild spirits as Billie herself. Teddy had entertained a lively admiration for Billie Bradley since he was seven and she was six. Teddy was tall for his fifteen years, and had already made a name for himself in the field of athletics.

The third of the chums was Violet Farrington, a daughter of Richard Farrington, a well-known lawyer of North Bend, and Grace Farrington, a sweet, motherly woman.

Nearly everybody loved Violet, who was tall and dark and sweet-tempered. She also acted as a sort of perpetual peace-maker between brown-eyed Billie and blue-eyed Laura.

So now she was acting again on this glorious day in July when the roses were out and the birds were singing and the sun was shining its brightest.

"What shall we do if we can't get in?" suggested Billie, waving her hand to Nellie Bane, another girl in her class, who passed on the opposite side of the street.

"I suppose we'd have to go home again," answered Laura, adding with a little worried frown: "Oh, I do hope I can get the book. I wouldn't lose it for anything."

"There goes Amanda Peabody," cried Violet suddenly, clutching Billie's arm.

"That makes no difference in my young life," Billie slangily assured her.

"As long as she _goes_, it's all right," added Laura, glancing after the lanky figure of Amanda Peabody as the girl swung off in the other direction.

Amanda Peabody was not popular with the girls. Nor was she with anybody, for that matter. As far as the girls knew, she had not one friend in the whole school.

Amanda was red-haired and freckled; and while these attributes alone could not have accounted for her unpopularity, she added to them a tendency to spy upon the other girls and then run and tell what she had seen or heard.

It was this last characteristic that no fair-minded girl would tolerate and so Amanda had lived in practical ostracism ever since she had come to North Bend two years before.

"I don't think we ought to be too hard on her," said Violet, as they turned the corner that brought the school into view. "She can't help her mean disposition, I suppose. And anyway, Miss Beggs says there's always some good to be found in everybody."

"Maybe," said Billie skeptically, "but hers is so small you would need a microscope to see it. There's the janitor now, just going out. If we run we can catch him."

And run they did, presenting themselves a minute later, rather red in the face and out of breath, before a very much amused janitor.

"Hello," he cried, his twinkling eyes under their shaggy brows lighting with pleasure as he looked at the girls. "Are you young ladies tryin' to catch a train, or what?"

"Oh, no, no," cried Violet eagerly. "We were just trying to catch you, Mr. Heegan."

"Oh-ho! An' it's mighty flattered I am," said Mr. Heegan, his Irish brogue coming to the fore. "An' what, if I might be askin' you--"

"It's a book we left here," Billie broke in quickly. "Laura wants to know if you will let us in long enough to get it."

"Sure, an' I will that," Mr. Heegan assured them, leading the way into the school yard and pulling out his bunch of keys. "It must be a verra important book," he added, smiling at them as he fitted the key in the lock, "to be bringing you back to school after school's out."

"It was a gift from Father," Laura explained. "And I wouldn't lose it for anything."

"All right, there you go," said the good-natured janitor, swinging the door wide for them. "I'm goin' home, but I'll be comin' back in a few minutes to lock up. You'd best not be stayin' here then," he added, with a twinkling backward glance at them, "or it will be locked up for the night you'll be."

"We won't be more than a minute," Violet assured him, and jubilantly the girls ran through the empty, echoing hall and stopped before a door at the farther end.

"It seems so horribly quiet," said Violet, looking around at them with her hands on the door knob. "It makes you feel like a thief."

"Must be your guilty conscience," said Laura wickedly. "Come on, Vi; we've got to hurry if we don't want to be 'locked in for the night.'"

"Are you sure you left the book here, Laura?" asked Billie, as Violet opened the door and they crowded in. "It would be too bad if it were gone--"

But a cry from Laura interrupted her.

"There it is," she said, running to a desk at the farther end of the room and picking up from an inner corner a prettily bound book. "Just the very place I left it, too. My, but I'm glad to get it back again."

"What do you think you're doing, Billie Bradley?" inquired Laura a minute later, for Billie had seated herself at the teacher's desk and was looking as severe as she knew how.

"Take your seats," she now commanded, rapping vigorously on the desk and fixing them with her best school-teacher stare. "Violet Farrington, go to the board--"

But she got no further, for with an indignant cry the girls had rushed on her. Dropping both her air of command and her dignity, Billie scurried wildly around the room, keeping the desks between her and her pursuers.

"You can't catch me! You can't catch me!" she taunted them, as she dodged nimbly in and out among the desks. "I could keep this up all day, I could--"

"Oh, you could, could you?" cried Laura, and, making a desperate lunge, she almost had her hand on Billie's dress. "We'll see about that. Billie! what are you doing?"

For Billie had suddenly doubled on her tracks, rushed to the back of the room, put her foot upon a steam radiator pipe and was trying to clamber to the top of a bookcase.

It was a tall bookcase, and on the top of it stood a marble statue.

"Billie, look out!" screamed Violet as the bookcase shook and the statue seemed about to topple over by reason of Billie's wild scrambling.

"You won't catch me this time," Billie was defying them, when--the awful thing happened!

The marble statue toppled once more, trembled as though it were not quite sure whether to fall or stay where it was, then came tumbling to the floor with a crash.

The girls cried out, and then stood dumbly looking at the pieces.

“One work. Many languages. One reading experience.”