The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross

"Well, if that isn't the oddest thing that ever happened!" murmured Laura Belding, sitting straight up on the stool before the high desk in her father's glass-enclosed office, from which elevation she could look down the long aisles of his jewelry store and out into Market Street, Centerport's main business thoroughfare.

But Laura was not looking down the vista of the electrically lighted shop and into the icy street. Instead, she gave her attention to that which lay right under her eyes upon the desk top. She looked first at the neat figures she had written upon the page of the day ledger, after carefully proving them, and thence at the packet of bills and piles of coin on the desk at her right hand.

"It is the oddest thing that ever happened," she affirmed, as though in answer to her own first declaration.

It was Saturday evening, and it was always Laura's duty to straighten out her father's books for him on that day, for although she was a high school girl, she was usually so well prepared in her studies that she could give the books proper attention weekly. Laura had taken a course in bookkeeping and she was quite familiar with the business of keeping a simple set of books like these.

She never let the day ledger and the cash get far apart. It was her custom to strike a balance weekly, and this she was doing at this time. Or she was trying to! But there seemed to be something entirely wrong with the cash itself.

She knew that the figures on the ledger were correct. She had asked her father, and even Chet, her brother, who was helping in the store this evening, if either of them had taken out any cash without setting the sum down in the proper record.

"It is an even fifty dollars--neither more nor less," she had told them, with a puzzled little frown corrugating her pretty forehead.

They had both denied any such act--Chet, of course, vigorously.

"What kind of hardware are you trying to hang on me, Mother Wit?" he demanded of his sister. "I know Christmas will soon be on top of us, and a fellow needs all the money there is in the world to buy even one girl a decent present. But I assure you I haven't taken to nicking papa's cash drawer."

"I don't know but mother is right," Laura sighed. "Your language is becoming something to listen to with fear and trembling. And I am not accusing you, Chetwood. I'm only asking you!"

"And I'm only answering you--emphatically," chuckled her brother.

"It is no laughing matter when you cannot find fifty dollars," she told him.

"You'd better stir your wits a little, then, Sis," he advised. "You know Jess and Lance will be along soon and we were all going shopping together, and skating afterward. Lance and I want to practice our grapevine whirl."

But being advised to hurry did not help. For half an hour since Chet had last spoken the girl had sat in a web of mystery that fairly made her head spin! Her ledger figures were proved over and over again. But the cash! Then once more she bent to her task.

The piles of coin were all right she finally decided. She counted them over and over again, and they came to the same penny exactly. So she pushed the coin aside.

Then she slowly and carefully counted again the bank-notes, turning them one by one face down from left to right. The amount, added to the sum of the coins, was equal to the figures on the ledger. Then she did what she had already done ten or a dozen times. She recounted the bills, turning them from right to left.

She was fifty dollars short!

Christmas was approaching, and the Belding jewelry store was, of course, rather busier than at other seasons. That was why Chet Belding was helping out behind the counters. Out there, he kept a closer watch on the front door than Laura, with her financial trouble, could.

Suddenly he darted down the long room to welcome a group of young people who pushed open the jewelry-store door. They burst in with a hail of merry voices and a clatter of tongues that drowned every other sound in the store for a minute, although there were but four of them.

"Easy! Easy!" begged Mr. Belding, who was giving his attention to a customer near the front of the store. "Take your friends back to Laura's coop, Chetwood."

Hushed for the moment, the party drifted back toward Laura's desk. The young girl was still too deeply engaged with the ledger and cash to look up at first.

"What is the matter, Mother Wit?" demanded the taller of the two girls who had just come in--a most attractive-looking maiden, whom Chet had at once taken on his arm.

"Engine trouble," chuckled Laura's brother. "The old thing just won't budge! Isn't that it, Laura?"

The tall youth--dark and delightfully romantic-looking, any girl would have told you--went around into the little office and looked over Laura's shoulder.

"What's gone wrong, Laura?" he asked, with sympathy in his voice and manner.

"You want to get a move on, Mother Wit!" cried the youngest girl of the troop, saucy looking, and with ruddy cheeks and flyaway curls. This was Clara Hargrew, whom her friends called Bobby, and whose father kept the big grocery store just a block away from the Belding jewelry store. "Everybody will have picked over the presents in all the stores and got the best of everything before we get there."

"That's right," said the last member of the group; and this was a short and sturdy boy who had the same mischievous twinkle in his eye that Bobby Hargrew displayed.

His name was Long, and because he was short, everybody at Central High (save the teachers, of course) called him "Short and Long." He and Bobby Hargrew were what hopeless grown folk called "a team!" When they were not hatching up some ridiculous trick together, they were separately in mischief.

"But you say Short and Long has done some of his Christmas shopping already," Jess Morse, the tall visitor, said. "Just think, Laura! He has sent Purt Sweet his annual present."

"So soon?" said Laura Belding, but with her mind scarcely on what her friends were saying. "And Thanksgiving is only just passed!"

"I thought I'd better be early," said Short and Long, with solemn countenance. "I wrote 'Not to be opened till Christmas' upon the package."

Bobby and Jess and Lance burst into giggles. "Let's have the joke!" demanded Chet. "What did you send the poor fish, Short?"

"You guessed it! You guessed it, Chet Belding!" cried Bobby. "Aren't you a clever lad?"

"What do you mean?" asked Laura, now becoming more seriously interested.

"Why," Jess Morse said, "he got a codfish down at the market and wrapped it up in a lot of paper and put it in a long, beautifully decorated Christmas box. If Purt Sweet keeps that box without opening it until Christmas, I am afraid the Board of Health will be making inquiries about the Sweet premises."

"You scamp!" exclaimed Laura sternly, to Short and Long.

"He's all right!" declared Bobby warmly. "You know just how mean and stingy Purt Sweet is--and his mother has more money than anybody else in Centerport. Last Christmas, d'you know what Purt did?"

"Something silly, of course," Laura said.

"I don't know what you call silly. I call it mean," declared the smaller girl. "Purt got it noised abroad that he was going to give a present to every fellow in his class--didn't he, Short?"

"That's what he did," said Billy Long, taking up the story. "And the day before Christmas he got us all over to his house and offered each of us a drink of ice-water! And some of the kids had been foolish enough to buy him things--and give 'em to him ahead of time, too!"

"Serves you right for being so piggish," commented Chet.

"It was a mean trick," agreed Laura, "for some of the boys in Purt's grade are much younger than he is. But this idea of giving Christmas presents because you expect something in return----"

"Is pretty small potatoes," finished Lance Darby, the dark youth. "But what's the matter here, Laura?" he added. "I've counted these bills and they are just exactly right by those figures you have set down there."

"You turned them from left to right as you counted, Lance," cried Laura.

"Sure! I counted the face of each bill," was the answer.

"Now count them the other way!" exclaimed Laura in despair.

Her friends gathered around while Laura did this. Even Chet gave some attention to his sister's trouble now. From right to left the packet of bank-notes came to fifty dollars less than the sum accredited to them on the ledger.

"Well, what do you know about that?" breathed Lance.

"That's the strangest thing!" declared Jess Morse.

"Why," said Bobby of the quick mind, "must be some of the bills are not printed right."

"Nonsense!" ejaculated Chet.

"Who ever heard of such a thing as a banknote being printed wrong unless it was a counterfeit?" demanded Laura.

Mr. Belding, having finished with his customer, came back to the little office and heard this. "I am quite sure we have taken in no counterfeits--eh, Chet?" he said, smiling.

"And there's only one big bill--this hundred," said Chet, who had taken the package of bills and was flirting them through his fingers. "I took that in myself when I sold that lavallière to the man I told you about, Father. You remember? He was a stranger, and he said he wanted to give it to a young girl. I------"

"Let's see that bill, Chet!" exclaimed Bobby Hargrew suddenly.

Chet slipped the hundred-dollar note out of the packet and handed it to the grocer's daughter. But she immediately cried:

"I want to see the hundred-dollar bill, Chet. Not this one."

"Why, that's the hundred------"

"This is a fifty," interrupted Bobby. "Can't you see?"

She displayed the face of a fifty-dollar bank-note to their wondering eyes. Their exclamations drowned Mr. Belding's voice, and he had to speak twice before Bobby heard him.

"Turn it over!"

The grocer's daughter did so. The other side of the bill was the face of a hundred-dollar bank-note! At this there certainly was a hullabaloo in and around the office. Mr. Belding could scarcely make himself heard again. He was annoyed.

"What is the matter with that bank-note? Whether it is counterfeit or not, you took it in over the counter, Chetwood," he said coldly.

"This very day," admitted his oldest son.

"Then, my boy, it is up to you," said the jeweler grimly.

"What----Just what do you mean?" asked Chet, somewhat troubled by his father's sternness.

"In a jewelry store," said Mr. Belding seriously, "as I have often told you, a clerk must keep his eyes open. You admit taking in this bill. If the Treasury Department says it is worth only fifty dollars, I shall expect you to make good the other fifty."

The young people stared at each other in awed silence as the jeweler turned away. They could feel how annoyed he was.

"Gee!" gasped Chet, "if I'm nicked fifty dollars, how shall I ever be able to buy Christmas presents, or even give anything for the Red Cross drive?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, Chet!" Jess Morse murmured.

"Looks as if hard times had camped on your trail, old boy," declared Lance.

"But maybe it is a hundred-dollar bill," Laura said.

"It's tough," Short and Long muttered.

"Try to pass it on somebody else," chuckled Bobby, who was not very sympathetic at that moment.

"Got it all locked up, Laura?" Jess asked. "Well, let us go then. You can't make that bill right by looking at it, Chet."

"I--I wish I could get hold of the man who passed it on me," murmured the big fellow.

"Would you know him again?" Lance asked.

"Sure," returned his chum, getting his own coat and hat while his sister put on her outdoor clothing. "All ready? We're going, Pa."

"Remember what I said about that bill, Chetwood," Mr. Belding admonished him. "You will learn after this, I guess, to look at both sides of a hundred-dollar bill--or any other--when it is offered to you."

"Aw, it's a good hundred, I bet," grumbled Chet.

"If it is, I'll add an extra fifty to my Red Cross subscription," rejoined his father with some tartness.

"Well, that's something!" Bobby Hargrew said quickly. "We want to boost the fund all we can. And what do you think?"

"My brain has stopped functioning entirely since I got so bothered by that bank-note," declared Laura Belding, shaking her head. "I can't think."

"Mr. Sharp and the rest of the faculty have agreed that we shall give a show for the Red Cross," declared Bobby, with enthusiasm. "Just what we wanted them to do!"

"Oh, joy!" cried Jess, clasping her hands in delight.

"Miss Josephine Morse, leading lady, impressarioess, and so forth," laughed Lance Darby, "will surely be in on the theatricals."

"Maybe they will let you write the play, Jess," said Chet admiringly.

They reached the door and stepped into the street. There had been rain and a freeze. The sidewalks, as well as the highway itself, were slippery. Bobby suddenly screamed:

"See there! Oh! He'll be killed!"

A rapidly-driven automobile turned the corner by the Belding store. A man was crossing Market Street, coming toward the group of young people.

The careless driver had not put on his chains. The car skidded. The next instant the pedestrian was knocked down, and at least one wheel ran over his prostrate body.

Instead of stopping, the car went into high speed and dashed up the street and was quickly out of sight. The young people ran to the prostrate man. Nobody for the moment thought of the automobile driver who was responsible for the affair.

The victim had blood on his face from a cut high up on his crown. He was unconscious. It was Chet Belding who stood up and spoke, first of all.

"I thought so! I thought so!" he gasped. "Do you know who this is?"

"Who?" asked Jess, clinging to his arm as the crowd gathered.

"This is the man who passed that phony hundred-dollar bill on me. The very one!"

"Is he dead?" whispered Bobby Hargrew, looking under Chefs elbow down at the crimson-streaked face of the unfortunate man.

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