ALL ABOUT NAN
Nan Sherwood stumbled and would have fallen, for she could not pick her
steps very safely with her gaze directed behind, had not a firm hand
seized her shoulder. The gentleman who did this may have been as intent
upon detaining the girl as upon saving her from an overthrow.
"Hoity-toity!" he ejaculated, in a rather querulous voice.
"Hoity-toity!" he repeated. "What's this I hear? 'Stop thief'?
Impossible!"
He was a lean-faced man with a deeply lined countenance, a big nose, and
shell-bowed spectacles through which his pale, gray eyes twinkled, after
all, in a rather friendly way. Or so the startled Nan thought in those
few seconds that elapsed before the other girl reached them.
"Impossible!" repeated the man, having looked into Nan's eyes.
"I guess it isn't impossible!" cried the over-dressed girl, seizing the
handle of the russet bag and trying to jerk it out of Nan's hand. "The
bold thing! She _is_ a thief! And see her! She won't give it up!"
"Why--it's my bag!" murmured Nan, horrified by this utterly unexpected
situation.
"It's not! it's mine!" asserted the other girl, striving with all her
might to secure the bag.
But Nan Sherwood was no weakling. In fact, she was really very strong
for her age. And her spring and summer in the Big Woods had bronzed her
skin almost to the hue of a winter-cured oak-leaf. Her muscles were as
well developed as a boy's. The angry girl could not get the russet bag
away from Nan's secure grip.
"Wait! wait, young ladies!" urged the gentleman with the spectacles that
made him look so owl-like. "There must be some mistake here."
"There is!" snapped the angry girl. "It's a mistake to let a little
thief like her ride with respectable people. I'm going to have her
arrested! I--I'll tell my father----"
All the time she was thus incoherently accusing Nan, she was likewise
endeavoring to get possession of the bag. But Nan had no idea of giving
up her Aunt Kate's beautiful present.
"Why--why!" Nan gasped. "It's mine! I bought it myself!"
"What a story!" shrieked the other girl. "A dowdy little thing like you
never owned such a bag. Look at my card on the handle."
"That should settle it," said the bespectacled gentleman, with
confidence, and he reached for the bag.
Nan allowed him to take it. To her amazement he slipped an engraved
visiting card out of the frame set into the bag's handle. Nan almost
dropped. She had not noticed the card during the struggle and she knew
she never had owned a visiting card like that in her life.
The gentleman held the card very close to his eyes to read the name
engraved upon it.
"Ahem!" he said. "I thought I recognized you, Miss Riggs, despite your
wild state of alarm. 'Miss Linda Riggs,'" he added, repeating the name
on the card. "Quite right. The bag is yours, Miss Riggs."
"I should think you would have known _that_, Professor Krenner, when I
first spoke," snapped the girl, seizing the bag ungratefully from his
hand. "Anybody ought to see what that girl is!" and she eyed poor Nan
with a measure of disdain that might have really pained the Tillbury
girl had she not just then been so much troubled by another phase of the
incident.
"Why! where--where is _my_ bag, then?" Nan gasped.
Professor Krenner glanced sideways at her. He was a peculiar old
gentleman, and he believed deeply in his own first impressions. Nan's
flushed face, her wide-open, pained eyes, her quivering lips, told a
story he could not disbelieve. The professor's mind leaped to a swift
conclusion.
"Are you sure you sat just there, child?" he asked Nan.
"Oh--I----"
He could see over the heads of the few curious passengers who had surged
around them.
"Was your bag like Miss Riggs'?" he asked.
"Exactly," breathed Nan.
Just then a soft, drawling voice asked:
"Any ob yo' ladies an' gemmen done lef' a bag?"
The porter held out a russet leather traveling bag. Nan leaped for it
with a cry of relief.
"It belongs to the young lady, porter," said Professor Krenner,
authoritatively.
"Why, the bags are just alike!" cried one lady.
"I don't believe a dowdy thing like her ever honestly owned a bag like
mine in this world!" Linda Riggs exclaimed bitterly, "She stole it."
Another passenger laughed. "As far as we know, my girl, you may have
stolen your bag."
"How dare you?" gasped the dressy girl. "I guess you don't know who my
father is?"
"I confess the crass ignorance that engulfs my mind upon that important
point," laughed the unimpressed man, who looked as though he might be of
some importance himself. "Who is your father, my dear?"
"He is Mr. Henry W. Riggs, and he just about owns this railroad," said
the girl, proudly.
"I have heard of him," agreed the man. "And you may tell him from me
that if I owned as much stock in this road as he is supposed to, I'd
give the public better service for its money," and the passengers went
away, laughing at the purse-proud and arrogant girl.
Meanwhile Nan Sherwood had thanked the porter for recovering her bag and
Professor Krenner for championing her cause. She did not look again at
the girl who had so hurt and insulted her. But she was very pale and
quiet as she went back to rejoin her chum, Bess Harley, in the other
car.
That was the way of Nan Sherwood. When she was hurt she never cried over
it openly; nor was it often that she gave vent to a public expression of
anger.
For her age, Nan was strangely self-contained and competent. Not that
she was other than a real, happy, hearty schoolgirl with a deal more
than her share of animal spirits. She was so very much alive that it had
been hard for her to keep her body still enough to satisfy her teachers
at the Tillbury High School which, until the middle of the previous
winter, she had attended with her chum.
Bess' father was well-to-do and Bess had had almost everything she
really craved since the hour she was born, being the oldest of the
"Harley tribe," as she expressed it. When it was decided that she
should, at the end of her freshman year in high school, attend the
preparatory school for girls, known as Lakeview Hall, Bess was
determined that her chum, Nan Sherwood, should go with her.
But Nan's parents were not situated at all as were Bess
Harley's--neither financially or otherwise. Mr. Robert Sherwood had
been, for years, foreman of a department in the Atwater Mills. Suddenly
the mills were closed and Nan's father--with multitudes of other
people--found his income cut off.
He owned a little cottage on Amity Street; but it was not all paid for,
as Nan's mother had been a semi-invalid for a number of years and much
of the money Mr. Sherwood might have saved, had gone for medical
attention for "Momsey," as Nan called her mother.
But the invalid wife and mother was the bravest and most cheerful of the
three who lived in "the dwelling in amity," as Mr. Sherwood called the
little cottage, and it was she who inspired them to hope for better
times ahead.
Nan could not fail to be benefited in character by such an example as
her mother set; but the girl very well knew that, in their then present
circumstances, there was no possibility of her entering Lakeview Hall in
the fall with Bess Harley.
This was really a tragic outlook for the school chums; but in the very
darkest hour a letter arrived from a lawyer, named Andrew Blake, of
Edinburgh, Scotland, stating that a great uncle of Mrs. Sherwood's had
recently died, bequeathing her an estate valued at something like ten
thousand pounds.
The only shadow cast upon this delightful prospect was the fact that
Mrs. Sherwood must appear before the Scotch Court to oppose the claim of
more distant relatives who were trying to break the will.
The doctors had already recommended a sea voyage for Mrs. Sherwood. Now
it seemed a necessity. But her parents could not take Nan across the
ocean. What should be done with the troubled girl was the much mooted
question, when there burst in upon the family Mr. Sherwood's brother
from Upper Michigan, a giant lumberman, who had come to Tillbury to
offer any help in his power to Nan's father in his financial straits.
Immediately upon hearing of the legacy, Mr. Henry Sherwood declared he
would take Nan back to Pine Camp with him, and in the first volume of
this series, entitled "Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp, or, The Old
Lumberman's Secret," are told all Nan's adventures in the Big Woods
during the spring and summer, and until the time came for her to prepare
to enter Lakeview Hall in September.
For, although the court proceedings regarding Mr. Hughie Blake's will
had not been entirely settled, money had been advanced by Mr. Andrew
Blake to Mr. Sherwood and the desire of Nan's heart was to be
accomplished. She was now on her way to Lakeview Hall with Bess Harley;
and, as we have seen, she had not gone far on the journey from Chicago
before Adventure overtook her.
This first was not a pleasant adventure, however; and it brought in its
train incidents which colored all Nan Sherwood's initial semester at
Lakeview Hall.