The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross | Page 2

right," Laura sighed. "Your language is
becoming something to listen to with fear and trembling. And I am not
accusing you, Chetwood. I'm only asking you!"
"And I'm only answering you--emphatically," chuckled her brother.
"It is no laughing matter when you cannot find fifty dollars," she told
him.
"You'd better stir your wits a little, then, Sis," he advised. "You know
Jess and Lance will be along soon and we were all going shopping
together, and skating afterward. Lance and I want to practice our
grapevine whirl."
But being advised to hurry did not help. For half an hour since Chet
had last spoken the girl had sat in a web of mystery that fairly made her
head spin! Her ledger figures were proved over and over again. But the
cash! Then once more she bent to her task.
The piles of coin were all right she finally decided. She counted them
over and over again, and they came to the same penny exactly. So she
pushed the coin aside.
Then she slowly and carefully counted again the bank-notes, turning
them one by one face down from left to right. The amount, added to the
sum of the coins, was equal to the figures on the ledger. Then she did
what she had already done ten or a dozen times. She recounted the bills,
turning them from right to left.
She was fifty dollars short!

Christmas was approaching, and the Belding jewelry store was, of
course, rather busier than at other seasons. That was why Chet Belding
was helping out behind the counters. Out there, he kept a closer watch
on the front door than Laura, with her financial trouble, could.
Suddenly he darted down the long room to welcome a group of young
people who pushed open the jewelry-store door. They burst in with a
hail of merry voices and a clatter of tongues that drowned every other
sound in the store for a minute, although there were but four of them.
"Easy! Easy!" begged Mr. Belding, who was giving his attention to a
customer near the front of the store. "Take your friends back to Laura's
coop, Chetwood."
Hushed for the moment, the party drifted back toward Laura's desk.
The young girl was still too deeply engaged with the ledger and cash to
look up at first.
"What is the matter, Mother Wit?" demanded the taller of the two girls
who had just come in--a most attractive-looking maiden, whom Chet
had at once taken on his arm.
"Engine trouble," chuckled Laura's brother. "The old thing just won't
budge! Isn't that it, Laura?"
The tall youth--dark and delightfully romantic-looking, any girl would
have told you--went around into the little office and looked over
Laura's shoulder.
"What's gone wrong, Laura?" he asked, with sympathy in his voice and
manner.
"You want to get a move on, Mother Wit!" cried the youngest girl of
the troop, saucy looking, and with ruddy cheeks and flyaway curls.
This was Clara Hargrew, whom her friends called Bobby, and whose
father kept the big grocery store just a block away from the Belding
jewelry store. "Everybody will have picked over the presents in all the
stores and got the best of everything before we get there."

"That's right," said the last member of the group; and this was a short
and sturdy boy who had the same mischievous twinkle in his eye that
Bobby Hargrew displayed.
His name was Long, and because he was short, everybody at Central
High (save the teachers, of course) called him "Short and Long." He
and Bobby Hargrew were what hopeless grown folk called "a team!"
When they were not hatching up some ridiculous trick together, they
were separately in mischief.
"But you say Short and Long has done some of his Christmas shopping
already," Jess Morse, the tall visitor, said. "Just think, Laura! He has
sent Purt Sweet his annual present."
"So soon?" said Laura Belding, but with her mind scarcely on what her
friends were saying. "And Thanksgiving is only just passed!"
"I thought I'd better be early," said Short and Long, with solemn
countenance. "I wrote 'Not to be opened till Christmas' upon the
package."
Bobby and Jess and Lance burst into giggles. "Let's have the joke!"
demanded Chet. "What did you send the poor fish, Short?"
"You guessed it! You guessed it, Chet Belding!" cried Bobby. "Aren't
you a clever lad?"
"What do you mean?" asked Laura, now becoming more seriously
interested.
"Why," Jess Morse said, "he got a codfish down at the market and
wrapped it up in a lot of paper and put it in a long, beautifully
decorated Christmas box. If Purt Sweet keeps that box without opening
it until Christmas, I am afraid the Board of Health will be making
inquiries about the Sweet