The Girls of Central High on the Stage: or, The Play That Took The Prize

“That ain’t neither here nor there,” said the grocer, ponderously. “It’s a rule I have. Never let a bill run more than twenty dollars. ’Specially where there’s no man in the family. Hard to collect from a woman. Makes me bad friends if I press ’em. I can afford to risk losing twenty dollars; but no more!”

“How can you!” cried Jess, under her breath, for there was somebody else entering the store. “We have bought of you for years – ”

“And if I hadn’t stuck to the few business rules I have, I wouldn’t have been here selling you goods for years,” returned Mr. Closewick, grimly. “The sheriff would have sold me out. I’m sorry for your mother, and I don’t want to lose her trade. But business is business.”

“And you cannot favor us for this single occasion?” choked Jess.

“It would lead to others; I can’t break a rule,” said the grocer, stubbornly. “Come now, Miss Jess! You go home and tell your mother how it is. I’ll keep this basket right here for you, and you come back with the two-seven, and it will be all right.”

“That would be useless,” said Jess, clinging to the counter for support, and feeling for the moment as though she should sink, “We haven’t any money – at present. If we had I should not have asked you for any extension of credit. Please give me back my basket.”

“So?” returned the grocer, frowning. “Very well,” and he deliberately unpacked the parcels and handed her the basket – making a show of so doing in the presence of the newly arrived customer. “And what can I do for you, this evening, Mrs. Brown?” he asked, blandly, speaking to the new arrival while he handed Jess her basket without a word.

“And that woman will tell about it all over town!” thought the girl, as she hurried into the street. “Oh, dear, dear! whatever shall I do?”

For the cupboard at the Morse cottage was very bare indeed. Mrs. Mary Morse had some little standing as a contributor to the more popular magazines; but the returns from her pen-work being her entire means of income, there were sometimes weary waitings for checks. Jess had been used to these unpleasant occasions ever since she was a very little girl. Her mother was of a nervous temperament and easily disturbed; and as Jess had grown she had tried to shield her mother, at these times of famine, from its most unpleasant features.

As witness her passage-at-arms with the grocer, Mr. Closewick. No money in the house, an empty pantry, their credit cut off at the store where they had always traded, and no credit established at any other grocer’s shop! The situation looked desperate, indeed, to Jess Morse.

Jess shrank from trying the butcher’s and the dairy store, too. At each shop an unpaid bill would stare her in the face and to-night she felt as though each proprietor would demand a “payment on account.” It was a black night indeed. November was going out in its very mournfullest and dismallest manner.

And for Jess Morse there was an added burden of disappointment and trouble. She was not able to attend the M. O. R. reception, although she was a member. Laura Belding, her very dearest friend, would be there and would wonder why she, Jess, did not appear. And after the reception Chet Belding, Laura’s brother, would be waiting to take Jess home – she hadn’t had the heart to tell Chet that she would not need his escort from the reception.

But, as Jess had told her mother, that blue party dress had become impossible. Let alone its being months behind the fashion, it was frayed around the bottom and the front breadth was sorely stained. And she hadn’t another gown fit to put on in the evening. She did so long for something to wear at a party in which her friends would not know her two blocks away. So she had “cut” the reception at the M. O. R. house.

All this was a heavy load on Jess Morse’s mind as she approached, with hesitating steps, the butter and egg shop kept by Mr. Vandergriff.

“Certainly,” thought the troubled girl, “I either need a whole lot of courage, or a lot of money – either would come in very handy to-night.”

Just then Jess was aroused from her brown study by hearing somebody calling breathlessly after her.

“Hi! Hi! Aren’t you going to look around? Jess Morse!”

A girl smaller than herself, and dressed from neck to heels in a glistening raincoat, ran under Jess’s umbrella and seized her arm. She was a laughing, curly-haired girl with dancing black eyes and an altogether roguish look.

“Jess Morse! don’t you ever look back on the street – no matter what happens?” she demanded.

“For what was Lot’s wife turned to salt, Bobby?” returned Jess, solemnly.

“For good! Now you know, don’t you?” laughed Clara Hargrew, whose youthful friends knew her as “Bobby.”

“Why aren’t you at the ‘big doin’s’ to-night,” demanded the harum-scarum Bobby. “You’re a Mother of the Republic; what means this delinquency?”

“Just supposing I had something else to do?” returned Jess, trying to speak lightly. “I’m on an errand now.”

She wished to shake Bobby off. She dared not take her into Mr. Vandergriff’s store. Suppose the butter and egg man should treat her as the grocer had?

“Say! you ought to be up there,” cried the unconscious Bobby. “I just came past the house and it was all lit up like – like a hotel. And Mr. Sharp was just coming out with Mrs. Kerrick. Mrs. Kerrick is going to do something big for us girls of Central High.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jess, only half interested in Bobby’s gossip.

“Going to give us a chance to win a prize, or something,” pursued Bobby.

“Oh! how do you know?” Jess showed more interest now.

“Why, I heard Mr. Sharp say, as he was helping Mrs. Kerrick into Colonel Swayne’s auto:

“‘The girls of Central High should be delighted, Mrs. Kerrick – and very grateful to you, indeed. Two hundred dollars! And a chance for any smart girl to win it!’ – just like that. Now, Jess, you and I are both smart girls, aren’t we?” demanded Bobby, roguishly.

“We think we are, at any rate,” returned Jess, more eagerly. “Two hundred dollars! Oh! wouldn’t that be fine!”

“It would buy a lot of candy and ice-cream sodas,” chuckled Bobby.

But to herself Jess Morse thought: “And it would mean the difference, for mother and me, between penury and independence! Oh, dear me! is it something that I can do to earn two hundred dollars?”

And she listened to Bobby’s surmises about the mysterious prize without taking in half what the younger girl was saying. Two hundred dollars! And she and her mother did not have a cent. She looked up and saw the lights of the butter and egg store just ahead, and sighed.

CHAPTER III – WHAT MR. CHUMLEY NEEDED

“Well, old Molly-grubs, I’ve got to leave you here,” said Bobby Hargrew, pinching the arm of Jess. “You’re certainly down in the mouth to-night. I never saw you so before. I’d like to know what the matter is with you,” complained Bobby, and ran off in the rain.

Jess was heartily glad to get rid of her; and it was seldom that she ever felt that way about Bobby. Bobby was the double distilled essence of cheerfulness.

But Jess felt as though nothing could cheer her to-night but the finding of a big, fat pocket-book on the street – one that “didn’t belong to nobody!” There wasn’t such an object in sight, however, along the glistening walk – the walk that glistened in the lamplight from Mr. Vandergriff’s store.

She positively had to try her luck at the butter and egg shop. The man could do no more than refuse her, that was sure.

But when Jess had lowered her umbrella and backed into the shop, she found several customers waiting at the counter. Mr. Vandergriff and his son, whom the boys called “Griff” and who played fullback on the Central High football team, were waiting upon these customers. Soon Griff was through with the man he was waiting on and came to Jess.

“What’s yours to-night, Miss Morse?” he asked, and was so cheerful about it that the girl’s heart rose. They didn’t owe Mr. Vandergriff such a large bill, anyway. The proprietor was waiting upon the lady who stood beside Jess as she gave her order to Griff. The lady was a very dressy person and she laid her silver-mesh purse on the counter between herself and Jess. The latter saw the glint of gold coins between the meshes of the purse and her heart throbbed. She moved quietly away from the lady. Wasn’t it wicked – seemingly – that one should have so much money, while another needed the very necessities of life?

“Thank you, Griff,” Jess heard herself saying to the younger Vandergriff, as he packed her modest order in the basket. “I shall have to ask you to charge that.”

“All right, Miss Morse. Nothing more to-night?”

“No,” said Jess, and went back and unhooked her umbrella from the edge of the counter where she had hung it, and started for the door. A bright-eyed man in a long blue raincoat who had been waited upon by Griff already was just then going out, and he held open the door for her. As she stepped out the girl saw that the rain was no longer falling – merely a mist clung about the street lamps. She did not raise her umbrella, but hurried toward home.

There was enough in her basket for breakfast, at least. She would wait until to-morrow – which was Saturday – before she went to the butcher’s. Perhaps something would happen. Perhaps in the morning mail there would be a check for her mother instead of a returned manuscript.

And all the time, while her feet flew homeward, she thought of the prize of two hundred dollars that Mrs. Mabel Kerrick was to offer for the girls of Central High to work for. What was the task? Could it be something that she excelled in?

Jess was almost tempted to wait up until the reception was over and then run to the Belding house and see her chum before Laura went to bed. Laura might know all about it.

Two hundred dollars!

Jess saw the words before her in dancing, rain-drop letters. They seemed to beckon her on, and in a few minutes she was at the cottage, just at the “elbow” of Whiffle Street, and came breathlessly into the kitchen.

The room was empty, and the fire in the stove was but a spark. Jess tiptoed to the sitting-room door and peered in. Her mother, wearing an ink-stained jacket, was busy at her desk, the pen scratching on the big sheets of pad paper. The typewriter was open, too, and the girl could see that the title and opening paragraphs of a new story had already been written on the machine.