DOROTHY’S WITS AT WORK
“The Night of the White Giant,” whispered Ned Ebony, shrilly, as she
put her head in at the door of the chums’ room at Glenwood.
“Boo! how you scared me!” exclaimed Tavia, preparing to throw her Latin
grammar--it was a book she would willingly have spared altogether--at
Ned’s devoted head.
“Hist!”
Nita Brent looked over the stooping Edna. Above _her_ head at the
narrow opening appeared the rather puffy-looking face of Cologne. It
was evident that the “heavy lady” had been asleep, but now she yawned
and said:
“Hist twice! Come on, girls!”
“Don’t shoot, Tavia. Like Davy Crockett’s coon, we’ll come down,” said
Ned, dodging the threatening book.
“You’ll have Olaine--or some other teacher--upon our trail,” gasped
Nita.
“What’s up?” demanded Dorothy, shutting her book and leaving a hairpin
for a bookmark.
“We are. So must you be. And _they_ will have to!” declared Ned. “We’re
for getting the whole bunch. It’s the Night of the White Giant, I tell
you.”
“Oh, goody, goody-gander!” exclaimed Tavia, clapping her hands--but
softly. “I had forgotten. We haven’t had one this winter.”
“It’s kid tricks, girls,” complained Dorothy.
“List to her! Wow!” gasped Tavia, and landed a soft sofa pillow right
in the back of Dorothy’s neck. “Don’t you dare suggest we’re growing
old.”
“‘Silver threads among the gold’,” quoted Cologne. “I know. She’s
getting rheumatic, too. Second childhood is close upon her----”
“Stop ranting and come on!” commanded Ned Ebony. “High
overshoes--mittens--everything! the snow is just soft enough. If we’re
careful we’ll make Olaine’s eyes bulge out in the morning. _She_ never
saw an old-fashioned Glenwood ‘white giant.’”
“‘The little dimpled darling has never seen Christmas yet,’” quoted
Tavia in a high, mincing tone. “Where’s my rub-a-dub-dubs, Dorothy
Dale? Did you eat ’em, I want to know?”
But when the chums were dressed, and the other girls of the upper class
filed into the corridor, dressed for the frolic, there was little
noise. This was an escapade that was not indulged in every winter by
the Glenwood girls, for not often was the snow in the state it was at
present.
There was plenty of it; it was soft and “packy,” and there was
starlight enough to aid them in their work, although there was no moon.
The pedestal of the statue they proposed erecting was made of several
huge balls rolled on the campus and then set upright in a circle, in
the middle of the lawn, facing the teachers’ windows.
Other smaller balls were rolled swiftly and, as they had to be brought
from a greater distance as the figure progressed, they were rolled upon
sleds and dragged to the scene of operations. With pieces of board and
a couple of shovels Tavia, Dorothy and Cologne shaped the round body of
the giant as it grew in bulk and height.
“We’ll make the biggest and the tallest giant Glenwood ever saw,”
declared Tavia. “Come on with that ball, Neddie. Hoist it up here!”
When one of the snowballs, raised in the arms of four girls to be
adjusted upon the figure, chanced to burst like a bomb, there was much
smothered hilarity--from those who were not engulfed in the mishap.
“Oh! oh! oh!” cried Nita. “I feel as if I’d been caught in an avalanche
in the Alps! Goodness me! how wet that snow is!”
“All the dry snow’s ‘give out’, Nita. We’ve got to use the wet kind,”
giggled Tavia.
“If you had two quarts of snow down your back----” began Ned Ebony, in
disgust.
“Come on! come on!” urged Cologne. “You’re wasting time. Who knows but
Olaine will be out here any minute?”
“Oh, I hope not!” cried one of the other girls. “I am trying my very
best to treat her nicely; and I am sorry for her. But she is the most
cantankerous thing! So there!”
“Come on! come on!” Tavia kept urging. “Hand ’em up here---- My
goodness gracious, Agnes! I almost went down _that_ time. If I only had
a nice young man up here to help me hold on this slippery eminence----”
“Where would you ever get a young man--nice or otherwise--at Glenwood?”
demanded Ned Ebony.
“Don’t know. Advertise for one, I guess,” grunted the struggling Tavia.
“‘Lost, Strayed, or Stolen--One young man--preferably blue eyed.’ Going
to put that in the ‘Agony Column’ of the New York Screecher----”
“Oh, Tavia!” gasped Dorothy, standing up straight on the giant’s “waist
line” and staring up at her friend.
“What’s up now? Mercy!” ejaculated Tavia, making a grab for her.
“_You’ll_ be down next, if you don’t look out. What’s the matter?”
“You--you gave me an idea,” said Dorothy, slowly.
“Hope I never give you another,” declared Tavia. “Look out, now! here
comes that part of the giant called--colloquially--his ‘dining room’.
It must be adjusted properly. Let’s have a real shapely giant--do.”
“He’ll look as though he had swallowed Jack the Giant Killer, all
right,” panted Ned Ebony.
“Not much! Give me that shovel,” cried Tavia. “I am going to slice off
some of his aldermanic proportions. Huh! we don’t want him to look as
though he’d suffered from earthquake and everything had fallen into his
‘dining room,’ do we?”
“You’re the most dreadful girl!” sighed Cologne.
Meanwhile Dorothy was thinking deeply. There was too much going on for
her to confide her “idea” to her chum. And, later, she decided to wait
and see how it “panned out.”
The white giant grew apace. The girls dragged around two of the
gardener’s ladders, by the aid of which they finished the effigy
handsomely. He had a noble round head, set firmly on a “bull neck”; a
white cardboard nose stuck in the middle of his face, with pieces of
coal for teeth----
“Shows the deplorable result of not using Somebody’s Toothpaste--a
‘horrible example’ for the youngsters. Miss Mingle is always at ’em to
use their toothbrushes,” declared Tavia.
The grinning mask of the white giant had black eyes, as well, and a
bushel basket served as a hat. The front of his waistcoat was decorated
with round turnips for buttons. Altogether he was a striking-looking
figure in the starlight, but was even more so the next day when the sun
shone on him.
His head was as high as the second story windows. The rest of the
school “oh-ed” and “ah-ed” about it, wondering how the big girls had
built such an enormous statue.
Miss Olaine expected Mrs. Pangborn to consider the frolic a punishable
offence. But the principal recognized the “white giant” as an
established outlet for the exuberance of the senior class of her
pupils. Many a snowman of huge proportions stood on the campus for
weeks, until the rains and winds of March and April carried away the
last vestige of the heaped-up snow.
Miss Olaine was used to the strict discipline of the city public
school; she could not understand Mrs. Pangborn’s leniency in her
treatment of perfectly harmless escapades--and those girls who took
part in them.
Meanwhile Dorothy’s wits--spurred by Tavia’s irresponsible remark about
the “Agony Column” of the newspaper--had been working overtime. The
personal column of a newspaper did not appeal to her; but she believed
that advertising for little Celia’s brother might bring about some
result.
She chose the Salvation Army paper, in which she knew there was a
column devoted to requests for news of “absent friends,” and she wrote
to the editor in New York all about Celia, and why she so desired to
get some trace of the missing ironworker.
The editor kindly put her paragraph in the paper and sent her a copy
with the request marked with a blue pencil. And that marked paragraph
occasioned more excitement in Glenwood school than Dorothy expected.
Matters had run along pretty smoothly after the Night of the White
Giant, and the giant himself was already a devastated, melting pillar
on the school lawn. The Easter vacation was in sight.
“You’ll surely go home with me, Doro--to dear old Dalton?” sang Tavia,
hugging her friend. “You promised----”
“And I wouldn’t miss it for anything!” declared Dorothy, laughing
gaily. “I’m just crazy to see all the folks there. And Nat and Ned say
they’ll come--going to stop with the Perritons. You know--Abe Perriton
is in college with my cousins.”
“Good enough!” exclaimed Tavia. “Perhaps there’ll be boys enough for
once to ‘go ’round.’”
“Oh!” exclaimed Dorothy, with twinkling eyes, “somebody else will be
there, too.”
“Who else? Joe and Roger?”
“I suppose they’ll tease to come. And they can stay with their little
friends just as I stay with you, and the big boys camp down on Abe’s
folks. But there is one other---- Oh, Tavia! can’t you guess?”
Tavia’s cheeks had begun to burn and she shook her head firmly. “I
don’t care to know. Nobody in particular, of course,” she said, with an
impudent assumption of not caring.
“You _do_ care,” frowned Dorothy. “And you must guess. Ned just wrote
me that he’s sure to be in Dalton if _you_ are there.”
“The cheek of those boys!” observed Tavia, tossing her head.
“‘B.N.,’” said Dorothy, teasingly.
“‘B.N.’?” queried Tavia, with an elaborate air of not understanding.
“Are you sure it isn’t ‘N.B.’? _That_ means ‘note well.’”
“It would never have happened if you hadn’t noted him well in the
first place,” chuckled Dorothy. “You have chained him to your chariot
wheels--you know you have--Pretty!” murmured Dorothy, and, hugging her
friend tightly, whispered in her burning ear:
“Bob Niles. You _know_ he’ll be there.”
“Oh!” yawned Tavia, beginning to recover from her confusion. “_That_
boy? Why, I had almost forgotten him.”
“Fibber!” said Dorothy, pinching her.
“I really thought you meant the young brakeman on the train when we
came over from New York,” sighed Tavia, affectedly. “Wasn’t he lovely?”
“You can’t fool me, Tavia,” declared her friend, laughing. “I don’t
believe you even remember the color of that railroad man’s eyes.”
“Blue--to match his uniform,” said Tavia, smartly.
“Who ever heard of a Navy blue eye?” demanded Dorothy.
“Sure! wait till you get struck in the eye once; I _was_. And
for a week before it turned yellow and green, it was the most
be-you-ti-ful--Navy--blue----”