THE TALISMAN
“What was that?”
“What?”
“I heard something. I felt the door open.”
“You’re dreaming. It isn’t daylight yet. Turn over and try the other
side.”
“Honest, Trixy,” Gloria raised her voice a trifle, “I did hear
something. I am going to get up and look around.”
She did. It was daylight but not yet very bright, as the late fall
morning was tardy in asserting itself.
“The door is open!” exclaimed Gloria. “I am sure I shut it.”
“I have always told you to lock it,” Trixy reminded her.
“But I hate bolted doors. They make me feel I’m being locked in a
jail.” Gloria shut the door almost noiselessly, and then turned on the
light.
“Nothing missing, that I can see----”
“Then, please, go back to bed,” begged Trixy from the other side of the
curtains. “I do hate to lose the last half hour.”
“Sorry,” Gloria went to the window and looked out at the early lights
and shadows. Then she quietly stole back to turn off the light that
hung over her dresser.
As she raised her hand her eye fell upon a strange object. There was
something, a small, white paper packet on the pin tray.
“Trix!” she exclaimed excitedly. “There’s something here----”
“What?”
“Get up. Let’s look. It has been slipped in the door and left on the
tray.”
There was no mistaking the seriousness of her voice. Gloria meant what
she was saying, so Trixy tumbled out of bed and joined her before the
dresser.
“It’s heavy,” she said.
“Open it. You’re not afraid of it?”
“Of course not, but I am surprised. I hope it’s no more blood
stones----”
“Just that. From the Pirate’s Daughter, I’ll bet! Hurry and let’s see!
I’m quivering with----”
“Come over on the bed and spread out something,” suggested Gloria. “I
don’t want the jools to roll under the rug this time.”
They both sat under a carefully spread pink coverlet, and then, very
gingerly, Gloria opened the little package.
“Maybe some trick,” she guessed, still delaying inspection. “I hate to
spoil our fun by finding some pop-corn, maybe.”
“Oh, do give it to me,” begged Trixy impatiently. “If it’s pop-corn I’m
not going to waste any more time over it.”
“A’w right,” agreed Gloria affably. “Half the responsibility is yours,
don’t forget that.”
The white tissue paper was carefully unfolded, and then there was
disclosed a little necklace, made of some dark, queer beads.
“Oh-oo-ho!” squealed Gloria. “More queer stones! And look! Here’s a
note!”
Eagerly scanning what was written in back-hand on a piece of plain
white note paper, the girls found this:
“TO GLORIA: I beg you to accept this trinket. That which was
found was very precious to me. Won’t you be generous enough to accept
this without question?
IN COG.”
They read it again. Gloria coiled the necklace around on the palm of
her hand until it looked like a little black snake. Then she gave it to
Trixy.
Held up to the light Trixy thought it looked like agate. Her father,
she said, had a ring, his grandfather gave every boy in the family a
moss agate stone each cut from the parent specimen, and this little
necklace had one stone at least that looked like agate.
“But these,” pointed out Gloria, “they just look like Egyptian beads
I bought at our fair. Don’t you know those you always liked? Black
pearls, or some imitation?”
“But these are each different?”
“Yes. Sort of home-made affair. Who ever could have wished it on me?”
Both girls sat there thinking. Each turned her head, this way and
that, cocking ears up as if some myth in the air might explain the
mystery, the necklace was passed back and forth automatically, but
neither offered to try it on. It was about big enough to slip over the
head, and the more they scrutinized it the better they liked it.
“It’s so odd,” conceded Gloria.
“Not as odd as its circumstances,” said Trixy. “Why in the world would
a girl want to be so mysterious? Seems to me sort of sensational.”
“And so wounds your social soul,” teased Gloria. “Never mind, dearie,
when I drag in the Pirate’s Daughter from her den, it may be in the
attic here, you know, and when I tame her so that she’ll eat out of my
hands, I fix it up to include you in our trip to her father’s cave. He
must be richer than old Captain Kidd to raise such a crop of gems or
illuminated spangles, as I glimpsed in that trunk. Now, why couldn’t In
Cog have sent me a little jewelled apron or a bedizened girdle to wear
to the dingus? You know we are invited?”
“Yes.” The “dingus” or regular social affair exclusively for the pupils
of Altmount, did not, at the moment, offer distraction.
“It seems to me we ought to detect a queer girl, easily. She is
queer, of course, or she couldn’t think this way. She had to follow
her own line of reasoning, and you’ve got to admit that’s queer,” said
Trixy, philosophically. “Therefore she must be queer. Now, who is the
queerest?”
“Impossible to select,” joked Gloria, “they’re all so queer. Pat’s
funny, Jack’s funny, Jean’s snippy, little Helen is just the kind of
girl to get an awful crush on one. She goes about with her eyes and
mouth at half mast, ready to weep or laugh at the crack of a whip; but
even at that she’d never have sense enough to plan all this. Well,
Ixy-love, you may wear my jools whenever thou wisheth, and be sure to
note the effect. They may give you chills or you might get a fever, or
even that black, squarish little stone may exert a beneficent influence
on the snippy Jean and make her perlite, for once in her sour life,”
Gloria’s manner is not transferable to words but it was flippantly
funny. “Perhaps we better start a new diary, the diary of the hoodooed
necklace,” she suggested, and would have turned a somersault right then
and there, had not Trixy grabbed her left leg ‘on the wing.’
“And I guess we may as well crawl out and get into a shower,” she
continued, “before the infants rub their sleepy little eyes into the
early sunlight. Though it looks like rain. I couldn’t say anything
pretty without sunlight. There’s the seven-thirty bell. Would you ever
believe it was more than five A. M.?”
The necklace lay on the pink coverlet while the two girls locked arms
and swung back and forth like a pair of solemn Arabs. Anent nothing,
they embraced always in that fashion, and the signal to halt was
usually the realization of urgent duty. It was now time to dress.
“Scrum-bunctuous, anyhow,” decided Gloria. “Just think of all that’s
happened a-ready. I cracked open a trunk, had a precious stone hid
under my rug for nearly a month, returned it by way of a moldy old
vase, got a note from an In Cog and was the recipient of a coal miner’s
souvenir, the last strike settlement maybe; all this and nothing more
at Altmount, quoth the raven. Never-more! There! When it’s first worn
by either of us I fully expect a sensation.”
“Why don’t you put it right on and go down to breakfast? If a girl
should notice it you might have just cause for suspicion.”
“You put it on, if you want to,” retorted Gloria. “This isn’t my
day for necklaces. I have already decided to wear the ugly and
uncomfortable sailor’s noose, prescribed.”
But all the day and for sometime thereafter both girls were ever on the
alert to detect a clue to the original owner of the little talisman.
Many strings of beads were significantly fingered and admired, but
without provoking a tell-tale flush of admission, and as often as the
opportunity could be made, Gloria or Trixy talked about foreign stones,
especially dark ones with little light streaks running through. But at
the end of a week both girls were forced to admit “no progress.”
“Tell you what we’ll do,” proposed Gloria. “Just let’s forget it. Put
it away and wait. Some day the culprit will betray herself. Then, if
we are not parties to some dark plot that includes hiding the queen’s
jools, we’ll be lucky kids.”
“Just as you say,” agreed Trixy. “But don’t forget to-night is the
night we are supposed to celebrate. I hope you can express a note of
interest in this here Altmount without straining your conscience.
Me--I’m beginning to like it.”
“It is picking up,” admitted Gloria. Both were assuming facetiousness.
There was, however, plenty of interest, “without straining consciences”
at the dance. The fine old assembly room was gay with colors of many
classes no longer otherwise represented, there was a very creditable
orchestra composed of seniors and girls in the finishing classes, but
more than these mere details, the personalities of all those present
came out for the “acid test” according to Trixy.
Friends paired off, and groups assembled. Pretty gowns were praised
with wordless glances of approval, new dances were demonstrated and
various local peculiarities shown, even Pat declaring that the new
position was quite like the “old fashioned way her mother had always
insisted was the only correct way,” and so on passed a happy evening,
at the boy-less dance, after which, like the spreading of a map, the
personalities of students stood revealed.
No silly stunts nor traditional initiations were countenanced at
Altmount, not since that rather disastrous event, still talked of, but
no longer risked. It was the night one girl got locked in a closet and
another climbed from the third floor window on a rope of bed sheets.
Both were “laid up for repairs,” and a stringent rule against all rough
play or initiations was the outcome.
But there were even now some secret affairs held in junior or soph
quarters, usually followed the next day by pronounced fits of
absentmindedness in class. Neither Gloria nor Trixy had been invited
to any of these. First years usually were not, quite contrary to the
regulation college customs.
“That’s because they want a chance to find out Who’s Who before taking
one into their exclusive circles, I suppose,” Gloria remarked to Trixy,
after listening for the best part of an hour to a report given by
Janice. She had been asked by Jean’s contingent. She had the advantage
of belonging to a family whose ancestral trees were knotted by colonial
ties.
“But so far as I could gather,” scoffed Gloria, “it was an amateur
fudge party, and the fudge got badly scorched, so I guess we didn’t
miss much.”
“And, whereas it is against the rules to light little stoves in rooms,
and the perpetrators are apt to be censured, I guess we are well out
of it,” also scoffed Trixy.
“But they have to break rules, that’s the main idea,” Gloria explained.
“Yet, it must have been pathetic to see the dear things trying to get
fun out of the wicked pastime of making fudge on pin trays. I’d love to
have had a view from a convenient distance.”
“We’ll see if we can’t hire the real kitchen, some evening,” suggested
Trixy. “We’ll ask the faculty, invite them, I mean.”
“And all the kitchen staff,” added Gloria. “That would be fun. And the
fudge will run a far greater chance of being fit to eat.”
This was held to be a brilliant idea and worth working out. So it
happened that the domestic science class took on a new group of pupils
unawares, and not only did Gloria and Trixy hold a fudge party in
the kitchen a few afternoons later, as their part in the new year’s
activity but the idea spread, until pop-corn drills and taffy pulls
in the kitchen became almost common. Then it was that entertaining
afterwards, in rooms, while despoiled of the precious rule breaking,
offered real opportunities, and as a hostess Trixy became decidedly
popular, while Gloria and Pat achieved marked success as floaters.
But such ordinary school happenings were mere calendar incidents, and
like the calendar, interesting only to those who mark the days.