Gertrude Morrison - The Girls of Central High on Track and Field

At that moment Bobby burst from the fortune-teller’s tent. She presented a wonderful and a shocking sight to her friends, for usually they saw her laughing. She was in tears and she ran to Laura and clung to her in a frightened way.

“Oh! oh!” she cried. “I want to get away from this horrid place. Do let’s go, Mother Wit! Please do!”

“What’s the matter with you, Bobby?” demanded Jess, nervously. “You give me the creeps.”

“These hateful people – ” began Dora Lockwood, when the Gypsy queen appeared at the tent entrance. Her eyes sparkled and her handsome face was flushed. She called something in a low, clear voice, and the men, who had gathered in a knot at one side, started toward her.

One of them unfastened the dog again and held the end of the chain. The queen was talking excitedly in their own tongue to the others.

Laura shook Bobby a little and said, shrewdly:

“I guess she got out of you what she wanted to know, eh?”

Bobby only sobbed.

“Did you tell her what direction that girl was going – that she was wading up stream?”

“Oh, yes! I did!” gasped Bobby. “She made me.”

“Well, it can’t be helped. It’s really none of our business,” said Laura. “But if they try to stop us from going away now, we’ve got to scatter and run. They can’t hold us all very well, and one of us will surely find some house – ”

“They won’t dare stop us,” said Eve, decidedly.

At that moment Nell held up her hand. “Hark!” she exclaimed. “What is that?”

The rattling of a heavy wagon coming down the road from the east was audible. Eve instantly ran out to the edge of the road. One of the Gypsies uttered a shrill, warning cry, and the men turned to intercept the girls.

But into view came the heads of a team of bay horses, and then a farm-wagon, with a bewhiskered man in high boots on the seat, driving the team.

“Hullo! Whoa!” exclaimed the farmer, when he saw Eve. “I declare I Is that you, Evie?”

“Why, Mr. Crook! how glad I am to see you,” said the Swiss girl. “What have you got in the wagon? Just a few bags? Then you can give us a lift, can’t you? We are tired walking.”

“Sure I can, Miss Evie,” replied the farmer. “What are you girls doin’ with these ‘Gyptians? Gettin’ your fortunes told?”

“Oh, we just stopped here for a minute,” said Eve, carelessly.

The Gypsies had hesitated to approach closer. The men began to slip away, one after the other.

“Pile in, girls,” said the farmer, hospitably. “I’m going five or six miles on this road. Bound for Fielding?”

“Yes, we are,” replied Eve, as her friends gratefully clambered into the end of the wagon.

“Oh, dear me!” whispered Jess. “What luck this is! I believe those folks would have tried to keep us.”

“I don’t know about that,” returned her chum. “But the woman certainly managed to frighten Bobby most thoroughly.”

Bobby had hushed her sobs. But even when the wagon had started again and the Gypsy camp was out of sight, she was not willing to talk about what the Varey woman had told her.

School opened the next Monday and the girls of Central High took up their tasks “for the last heat” of the year, as Jess Morse expressed it.

“And I’m glad,” she told her chum, Laura Belding, “Just think! next Fall we’ll be seniors.”

“Wishing your life away,” laughed Laura. “We were awfully glad to be juniors, I remember.”

“Sure. But we’ll boss the school next fall,” said Jess.

“We’ve done very well for juniors, especially in athletics,” observed Laura. “Why, practically, our bunch has dominated athletics for a year, now. We made the eight-oared shell in our sophomore year.”

“True. And the champion basketball team, too.”

“And Eve is going to qualify for the broad jump as well as the shot-put, I verily believe,” said Laura. “I’m glad I found that girl and got her to come to Central High instead of going to Keyport.”

“She was a lucky find,” admitted Jess. “And she wasn’t much afraid of those Gypsies last week – did you notice?”

“Of course she wasn’t. She told me this morning that the constable over there looked for the camp, but the Romany folk had moved on.”

“I wonder if they caught that girl in the yellow kerchief,” said Jess, thoughtfully.

“Don’t know. But they managed to scare Bobby pretty thoroughly,” said Laura. “I never did see Bobby Hargrew quite so impressed.”

Jess smiled. “She seemed to know something about you, too, Laura – that Gypsy queen. She knew you had a negro mammy at home.”

“I don’t know how she guessed that,” admitted Laura. “But I believe all that fortune telling is foolishness. If she came to the house and told Mammy Jinny half what she did us, Mammy would be scared to death. We had a good laugh on the dear old thing yesterday. She’s had a cold for several days and mother insisted upon calling Dr. Agnew in to see her. You know how Nellie’s father is – always joking and the like; and he enjoys puzzling Mammy Jinny. So when he had examined her he said:

“‘Mammy, the trouble is in your thorax, larynx and epiglottis.’

“‘Ma soul an’ body, Doctor!’ exclaimed Mammy, turning gray. ‘An’ I only t’ought I had a so’ t’roat.’”

“But Mammy does like to use long words herself,” chuckled Jess. “She will remember those words and spring them on you some time. Remember when her nephew had the rheumatism?”

“Of course,” Laura replied. “We asked her if it was the inflammatory kind and she said:

“‘Sho’ it’s exclamatory rheumatism. He yells all de time.’”

“But I do wonder,” said Jess, again, “if the Gypsies caught that girl. She must have wanted badly to get away from them to have run the risk of being chased by a bloodhound.”

“And she was smart, too,” Laura agreed. “Running on that wall and wading in the stream threw the dog off the scent.”

“If one of us had done such a thing as that when the water was so cold we would have got our ‘never-get-over,’” declared Jess.

“I believe you. And a lot of us girls are ‘tender-feet,’ as Chet says, at this time of year. We have been in the house too much. I tell you, Jess, we’ve got to get ’em out in the field just as soon as it’s dry enough. Bill Jackway is working on the track and Mrs. Case says she thinks we can start outdoor relay practice and quarter-mile running on Saturday – if it’s pleasant.”

“That’s what we have got to practice up on, too, if we want to win the points we need to put Central High at the top of the list,” agreed her chum.

“I should say!”

The moment they were freed from the regular lessons of the day Laura and Jess and their particular friends made for the handsome gym, building and athletic field that Colonel Richard Swayne had made possible for them. Bobby Hargrew was very much down in the mouth, for she had gone up against Miss Carrington at several points and the martinet had been very severe with the irrepressible.

“I tell you what,” growled Bobby, “I believe that little brother of Alice Long hit it off about right when it comes to teachers.”

“How is that?” asked Laura.

“Why, he came home after going to school a few days last Fall, and says he: ‘I don’t think teachers know much, anyway. They keep asking you questions all the time.’”

“I agree with you there,” Jess said. “And such useless questions! Why, if you answered them literally half the time you’d be swamped in demerits. For instance, did you notice that one to-day: ‘Why did Hannibal cross the Alps?’ I felt just like answering: ‘For the same reason the chicken crossed the road!’”