Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.fadedpage.net
THE GIRLS OF CENTRAL HIGH ON TRACK AND FIELD
[Illustration: BOBBY WON BY A CLEAN TWO YARDS]
THE GIRLS OF CENTRAL HIGH ON TRACK AND FIELD
OR
THE CHAMPIONS OF THE SCHOOL LEAGUE
by
GERTRUDE W. MORRISON
Author of The Girls of Central High,
The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna, etc.
ILLUSTRATED
THE SAALFIELD PUBLISHING CO.
AKRON, OHIO -- NEW YORK
MADE IN U. S. A.
Copyright, 1914 by
GROSSET & DUNLAP
Table of Contents
- CHAPTER I--THE GIRL ON THE STONE FENCE
- CHAPTER II--HIDE AND SEEK
- CHAPTER III--THE GYPSY CAMP
- CHAPTER IV--THE GYPSY QUEEN
- CHAPTER V--THE SITUATION LOOKS SERIOUS
- CHAPTER VI--PRESSING HOSPITALITY
- CHAPTER VII--THE YELLOW KERCHIEF AGAIN
- CHAPTER VIII--THE GIRL IN THE STORM
- CHAPTER IX--THE GYPSIES AGAIN
- CHAPTER X--EVE'S ADVENTURE
- CHAPTER XI--BOBBY IS INTERESTED
- CHAPTER XII--THE RACES
- CHAPTER XIII--WHAT MARGIT SAID
- CHAPTER XIV--ANOTHER FLITTING
- CHAPTER XV--ANOTHER RIVALRY ON THE FIELD
- CHAPTER XVI--FIVE IN A TOWER
- CHAPTER XVII--EVE TAKES A RISK
- CHAPTER XVIII--THE CONSCIENCE OF PRETTYMAN SWEET
- CHAPTER XIX--MARGIT AND MISS CARRINGTON MEET
- CHAPTER XX--INTER-CLASS RIVALRY
- CHAPTER XXI--MARGIT'S MYSTERY
- CHAPTER XXII--LOU POTTER SCORES ONE
- CHAPTER XXIII--THE FIELD DAY
- CHAPTER XXIV--MARGIT PAYS A DEBT
- CHAPTER XXV--THE WINNING POINTS
CHAPTER I--THE GIRL ON THE STONE FENCE
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.
"She's gone!" spoke Bobby, finally, breaking the silence.
"But who's that coming after her?" demanded Nellie, looking back toward
the West. "There! down in the shadow of the trees. Isn't that a figure
moving, too?"