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

The roads were muddy, but the uplands and the winding sheep-paths across them had dried out under the caressing rays of the Spring sun and, with the budding things of so many delicate shades of green, the groves and pastures – all nature, indeed – were garbed in loveliness.

The group of girls had toiled up the ascent to an overhanging rock on the summit of a long ridge. Below – in view from this spot for some rods – wound the brown ribbon of road which they had been following until the upland paths invited their feet to firmer tread.

There were seven of the girls and every one of the seven – in her way – was attractive. But the briskest, and most eager, and most energetic, was really the smaller – a black-eyed, be-curled, laughing miss who seemed bubbling over with high spirits.

“Sit down – do, Bobby! It makes me simply ache to see you flitting around like a robin. And I’m tired to death!” begged one girl, who had dropped in weariness on the huge, gray rock.

“How can you expect to dance half the night, Jess Morse, and then start off on a regular walking ‘tower?’” demanded the girl addressed. “ I didn’t go to Mabel Boyd’s party last night. As Gee Gee says, ‘I conserved my energies.’”

“I don’t believe anything ever tires you, Bobs,” said the girl who sat next to Jess – a vigorous, good looking maid with a very direct gaze, who was attractively gowned in a brown walking dress. “You are next door to perpetual motion.”

“How’d you know who I was next door to?” laughed Clara Hargrew, whom her friends insisted on calling “Bobby” because her father, Tom Hargrew, had nicknamed her that when she was little, desiring a boy in the family when only girls had been vouchsafed to him.

“And it is a fact that that French family who have moved into the little house next us are just as lively as fleas. They could be called ‘perpetual motion,’ all right.

“And oh, say!” cried the lively Bobby, “we had the greatest joke the other night on Lil Pendleton. You know, she thinks she’s some French scholar – and she does speak high school French pretty glibly – ”

“How’s that, young lady?” interposed the girl in brown. “Put away your hammer. Do you dare knock anything taught in Central High?”

“That’s all right, Mother Wit,” drawled Bobby Hargrew. “But any brand of French that one learns out of a book is bound to sound queer in the ears of the Parisian born – believe me! And these Sourat people are the real thing.”

“But what about Lily Pendleton?” demanded one of the two girls who were dressed exactly alike and looked so much alike that one might have been the mirrored reflection of the other.

“Why,” replied Bobby, thus urged by one of the Lockwood twins, “Lil had some of us over to her house the other evening, and she is forever getting new people around her – like her mother, you know. Mrs. Pendleton has the very queerest folk to some of her afternoons-long-haired pianists, and long-haired Anarchists, and once she had a short-haired pugilist – only he was reformed, I believe, and called himself a physical instructor, or a piano-mover, or something – ”

“Stop, stop!” cried Jess Morse, making a grab at Bobby. “You’re running on like Tennyson’s brook. You’re a born gossip.”

“You’re another! Don’t you want to hear about these Sourats?”

“I don’t think any of us will hear the end of your story if you don’t stick to the text a little better, Bobby,” remarked a quiet, graceful girl, who stood upright, gazing off over the hillside and wooded valley below, to the misty outlines of the city so far away.

“Then keep ’em still, will you, Nell?” demanded Bobby, of the last speaker. “Listen: The Sourats were invited with the rest of us over to Lily’s, and Lil sang us some songs in American French. Afterward I heard Hester Grimes ask the young man, Andrea Sourat, if the songs did not make him homesick, and with his very politest bow, he said:

“‘No, Mademoiselle! Only seek.’

“I don’t suppose the poor fellow knew how it sounded in English, but it certainly was an awful slap at Lil,” giggled Bobby.

“Well, I wish they wouldn’t give us languages at High,” sighed Nellie Agnew, Dr. Arthur Agnew’s daughter, when the laugh had subsided, and still looking off over the prospect. “I know my German is dreadful.”

“Let’s petition to do away with Latin and Greek, too,” suggested Bobby, who was always deficient in those studies. “‘Dead languages’ – what’s the good of ’em if they are deceased, anyway? I’ve got a good mind to ask Old Dimple a question next time.”

“What’s the question, Bobby?” asked Jess, lazily.

“Why, if they’re ‘dead languages,’ who killed ’em? He ought to have a monument, whoever he was – and if he’d only buried them good and deep he might have had two monuments.”

“If you gave a little more time to studying books and less time to studying mischief – ” began the girl in brown, when suddenly Nellie startled them all by exclaiming:

“Look there! See that girl down there? What do you suppose she is doing?”

Some of them jumped up to look over the edge of the rock on which they rested; but Jess Morse refused to be aroused.

“What’s the girl doing?” she drawled. “It’s got to be something awfully funny to get me on my feet again – ”

“Hush!” commanded the girl in brown.

“Can she hear us, ’way down there, Laura Belding?” asked Nellie Agnew, anxiously. “See here! Something’s chasing her – eh?”

The girl who had attracted their attention was quite unknown to any of the walking party. And she was, at first sight, an odd-looking person. She wore no hat, and her black hair streamed behind her in a wild tangle as she ran along the muddy road. She had a vivid yellow handkerchief tied loosely about her throat, and her skirt was green – a combination of colors bound to attract attention at a distance.

When the girls first saw this fugitive – for such she seemed to be – she was running from the thick covert of pine and spruce which masked the road to the west, and now she leaped upon the stone fence which bordered the upper edge of the highway as far as the spectators above could trace its course.

The stone wall was old, and broken in places. It must have offered very insecure footing; but the oddly dressed girl ran along it with the confidence of a chipmunk.

“Did you ever see anything like that?” gasped Bobby. “I’d like to have her balance.”

“And her feet!” agreed Jess, struggling to her knees the better to see the running girl.

“She’s bound to fall!” gasped Nellie.

“Not she!” said Eve Sitz, the largest and quietest girl of the group. “Those Gypsies run like dogs and are just as sure-footed as – as chamois,” added the Swiss girl, harking back to a childhood memory of her own mountainous country.

“A Gypsy!” asked Bobby, in a hushed voice. “You don’t mean it?”

“She’s dressed like one,” said Eve.

“And see how brown she is,” added Laura Belding, otherwise “Mother Wit.”

“There! she almost fell,” gasped one of the twins who stood now, with arms entwined, looking at the flying girl with nervous expectancy. It did not seem as though she could run the length of the stone fence without coming to grief.

But it was a quick journey. With a flying leap the girl in the green skirt and yellow scarf disappeared in a clump of brush which masked the wall at its easterly end, just where the road dipped toward the noisy brook which curved around that shoulder of the ridge and, later, fell over a ledge into a broad pool – the murmur of the cascade being faintly audible to the spectators on the summit of the ridge.