TRAGEDY
There, pressed so close to the pane of the window that the nose was
flattened grotesquely, eyes wildly staring, hair disheveled, was a face
that even in that tense moment the girls recognized! the face of
Professor Dempsey!
It took the boys perhaps a second to fling out of the room, jump down
the steps of the porch and circle the house to the window.
And yet, in that second, the man was gone, leaving no more trace than
if the earth had opened and swallowed him up. For almost an hour the
boys searched the woods about the lodge, refusing to allow the girls to
accompany them, saying truly that they would hamper them more than they
could help.
“You see, I was right after all,” Amy stated for at least the tenth
time. “From the moment the idea came to me, I felt almost sure that
poor crazy Professor Dempsey was this thing that was frightening us.”
“But did you ever see such an awful face in all your life?” said
Mollie, shuddering at the recollection.
“And the look in his eyes as he stared at Roy,” Grace added in a hushed
voice. “I shouldn’t wonder if! if we hadn’t been there, he might have
murdered him.”
“Oh, Gracie, don’t!” Amy clapped her hands to her ears. “We are
frightened enough without having you say things like that.”
“Suppose,” said Mollie, in a sepulchral voice, “he should come back
before the boys do?”
“That’s just what I was thinking,” said a quiet voice behind them, and
they jumped and cried out in alarm. The next moment they saw it was
Mrs. Irving and felt ashamed of themselves.
“I think you had all better come into the house till the boys come
back,” their chaperon continued. “I shall feel safer when we are behind
locked doors.”
The girls shivered, but Mollie protested.
“Suppose anything should happen to the boys?” she asked, but here Mrs.
Irving chose to exercise her authority.
“We will talk about that when we are inside the house,” she said very
firmly, and Mollie had nothing else to do but obey.
The girls did breathe a little more freely when the door was locked,
but they found themselves wishing even more ardently that the boys
would come back.
The window against which the horribly distorted face had been pressed
seemed to hold a peculiar fascination for the Outdoor Girls and they
found themselves unable to turn their eyes away from it.
“Oh, I wish the boys would come back,” moaned Amy, after a few moments
more had passed in strained silence. “If anything should happen to them
I’m sure I would die.”
“Nonsense, Amy,” snapped Mollie. “What could one little mad old man do
to three big husky soldier boys?”
The words had hardly been spoken when the sound of voices could be
heard coming toward the house, and a moment later the boys themselves
stamped up on the porch.
“Not a sign of him,” said Will in response to the girls’ eager
questions. “I don’t see how he could have disappeared so completely in
such a short time.”
“We all took different directions, too,” said Roy, taking a seat on the
couch again and staring fascinatedly at the window. “If all the rest of
you hadn’t seen it too, I should certainly think I had been mistaken.”
“You weren’t mistaken,” Mollie assured him grimly. “I can vouch for
that.”
“Didn’t one of you girls call out something about Professor Dempsey?”
asked Frank, abruptly.
“Yes,” said Betty, going over to him, and putting an excited hand on
his shoulder. “That’s the thing that startled us so, Frank. We are sure
it was Professor Dempsey’s face. But, still, it was so wild and
distorted that we really wouldn’t feel like contradicting any one who
told us it wasn’t he,” she added slowly. “Do you understand what I
mean?”
Frank nodded, and Will broke in excitedly:
“But the poor old codger’s looks would naturally be changed,” he
argued, “after he had spent all this time wandering around the woods!
out of his mind at that. I am inclined to think that the girls are
right and that it is really Professor Dempsey.”
“If only I could have gotten my hands on him!” mourned Roy. “We
wouldn’t have been in any further doubt.”
“There is really no doubt, boys. We just want! oh, I don’t know what we
want!” exclaimed Mollie, who was excited and unstrung and nervous.
Soon after that they all went to bed, having first decided to make a
more thorough search of the woods in the morning and take the postponed
trip to the head of the falls.
They slept fitfully and were glad when at last they woke to find the
sun shining in their windows. For once Amy and Grace did not have to be
coaxed or wheedled or forced to get out of bed, but dressed quickly and
were ready almost as soon as Mollie and Betty.
“You know I rather hated to leave the boys in that room last night,”
Betty confided to Grace, stopping before the mirror for one final
little pat of her hair. “I was afraid that! he! might come back!!”
“Oh, Betty, what a horrid idea,” said Grace. “Come on, let’s see if
everything is all right.”
But they found that their fears had been wasted. The boys were in the
kitchen hilariously helping Mrs. Irving get the breakfast to the
accompaniment of continual good-natured scolding from that flushed and
perspiring lady. It was Amy’s day to get the breakfast, but, as usual,
she was late in getting down.
“You make a good deal more trouble than you mend,” Mrs. Irving was
saying as the girls came to the door, then added relievedly as she
caught sight of them: “For goodness’ sake, get these young ruffians out
of the kitchen, my dears, or we’ll not have any breakfast until noon.”
So amid much fun and nonsense the boys were shooed forth into the
bright sunshine of the out-of-doors, and all the girls fell to to help
their chaperon, not wanting to put the extra work the boys made
entirely on Amy’s shoulders.
Breakfast was good, but they ate hurriedly, anxious to get at the
business of the day. They wanted more than they had wanted anything in
a very long time to find Professor Dempsey and tell him the joyful news
that his sons were alive.
“I’m horribly afraid of him at night,” Mollie confided, as they started
out at last, “but in the daytime I am only sorry for him.”
“Do you think we shall find him, Will?” asked Amy, with a helpless
little look into Will’s self-reliant young face. “I do want to so
much.”
Will looked down at her with an expression that said to any one who
would read it: “I would give you anything in the world you asked for,
if I only could.”
But all he really said was: “That remains to be seen. He proved himself
a rather slippery customer last night, and the chase we put up may only
serve to put him on his guard. Crazy people are tricky, you know.”
“Goodness,” said Grace, looking fearfully over her shoulder. “There is
nothing in the world I am so afraid of as a crazy person.”
“That’s why she has always been so afraid of me, I suppose,” grinned
Mollie.
“Afraid of you,” said Grace, her eyebrows raised in mock surprise.
“Little shrimp! who are you?”
There followed a characteristic scene that somewhat lifted the
oppression they had all been feeling, and it was not till they had
nearly reached the river at the head of the falls that they became
serious again.
“It was right about here,” said Betty soberly, “that we saw him the
night that he started to jump into the river! or I suppose it was the
same one,” she added.
“Let us hope so,” said Mollie fervently. “I wouldn’t like to think that
there were two lunatics wandering round these woods. One is quite
enough.”
As they came closer to the river they became more and more conscious
that they were not alone, that some one, hidden in the bushes, was
craftily watching them.
So strong did this feeling finally become that once the boys separated,
thrashing the bushes in all directions. They did not find anything, and
finally continued along the path, a little ashamed of what they thought
was an attack of nerves.
“Phew, this is getting a little hot for me,” said Frank, running his
hand through his shock of fair hair. “I don’t mind fighting anything in
the open!” He left the sentence unfinished, for at that moment they
broke through the bushes at the river’s edge upon a sight that struck
them speechless.
Not twenty yards down the bank stood a ragged scarecrow of a man, so
unkempt, so wild, so abandoned in its crouching attitude as to appear
hardly human.
Before they had time to utter a word or move a muscle, the man threw up
his arms in a gesture indescribably terrible, and with a hoarse shout
disappeared in the swirling waters.
It all happened so quickly that for the space of a dazed second they
wondered if they had really seen it at all. Then they recovered their
powers of motion and rushed to the spot where the man had disappeared.
Though they leaned far out over the water they could see no sign of
anything human, and with a creeping feeling of horror they began to
speak of what had probably already happened.
“It’s certain death down there,” Roy muttered, as though to himself,
gazing into the rushing river. “The poor old fellow! He has got his, I
guess.”
“Look here, fellows, here are some clothes,” Will called out suddenly,
and the boys rushed over to where he stood, a tattered old hat and an
equally ragged coat in his hands. “Maybe there will be something in the
jacket to tell us where the poor fellow has been staying and what he
has been up to.”
They searched through the coat and finally pulled out a wallet.
“Now if it only has some writing in it,” said Mollie breathlessly.
There was a card, and the card bore the words which they expected, yet
dreaded, Arnold Dempsey, Ph. D. But there was nothing else, and
suddenly tears dimmed their eyes and they had to turn away.
“It will be mighty hard on Jimmy and Arnold,” muttered Roy, gazing
somberly at the fast-flowing river. “To have their dad go that way!
They’ll take it mighty hard! those boys.”