"What's the matter?" Anna Towne flushed deeply. She did not understand
the meaning of Jerry's loud exclamation. Perhaps she had presumed in
thus breaking in upon the chums.
"Matter! I don't know what's the matter, but I am going to find out.
Read this note. You didn't write that, now did you?" Jerry thrust the
note into Anna's hands.
The room grew very still as she fastened her attention upon the
communication, supposedly from herself.
"Of course I never wrote it." Anna looked up wonderingly. Almost
instantly her expression changed to one of alarm. "There is no one
living at 852 on our street," she asserted. "My landlady has not moved.
I still live at 856. I haven't had any trouble. I came here dressed for
the masquerade. I'm wearing a Kate Greenaway costume. See. She took the
silk scarf from her head disclosing a Kate Greenaway cap.
"No one living there!" came in a breath of horror from Ronny. It was
echoed by the other three Lookouts. "Then _who_ wrote that note and
_what_ has happened to Marjorie?"
"I am going to find out pretty suddenly." Jerry sprang to her dress
closet for her fur coat and overshoes. "Go and get ready to go over to
that house, girls. One, two, three, four--We are five strong. Get your
wraps and meet me downstairs. I am going to see if I can't find Leila
and Vera. You had better wait for me here, Miss Towne. I'll be back
directly."
Ten minutes later a bevy of white-faced girls met in the lower hall.
Leila and Vera were among them. Jerry had met them just in the act of
leaving for the gymnasium.
"I'd go for my car but if would take longer to get it than for us to
walk. We must make all haste. Now I have an idea of my own about this. I
am not far off the truth when I say the Sans are to blame for the whole
thing. I would rather think it was they than that the note had been
written by some unknown person." Leila's blue eyes were dark with
emotion. "And that beloved child trotted blindly off by herself never
dreaming that the note was a forgery. Well, I might have done the same."
"I think you are right, Leila. The Sans have planned some kind of seance
at that empty house to scare Marjorie. Probably they have dressed up in
some hideous fashion. They could easily get away with it on account of
the masquerade. The sooner we get there the better. We may be able to
catch them, unless they have got hold of her and hustled her off
somewhere else." Ronny's voice was not quite steady on the last words.
The seven worried rescuers were now crossing the campus and making for
the campus entrance nearest the direction of Miss Towne's boarding
house. They were swinging along at a pace that would have done credit to
an army detachment on a hike.
"She wouldn't stand for that. She would fight every inch of the ground
before she would go a step with that gang." Jerry spoke with a
confidence born of her knowledge of Marjorie.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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