The Orchard Secret Part 23

"Good heavens! You look as if you'd seen a ghost! Take a breath--or something--before you pa.s.s out!" advised Terry, a little incredulous.

"Well, tell us, Arden!" Sim begged, wringing her hands in simulated melodramatic fas.h.i.+on. "This suspense is awful! It's making an old woman of me!"

"I don't want anyone to hear," Arden confided. "Can't you step outside for a few seconds? You won't be cold. I want you to do something for me."

Sim and Terry looked at each other.

"Better humor her, Sim. She might turn violent. Come on," Terry said in an exaggerated attempt at soothing a patient.

"If I get violent it will be because you two show such little natural curiosity, Bernice Westover," Arden retorted testily. "When you hear what I saw----"

"How can we _hear_ what you _saw_?" mocked Sim.

"Oh--you----" began Arden, really provoked now.

"All right, my dear." Terry held open the main entrance door and motioned the other two out ahead of her. "If anyone wonders why we are going out when the supper bell has almost rung, we can say we want a breath of fresh air for an appet.i.te."

"As if anyone who knows the feed here would believe that!" mocked Sim.

But in spite of the banter, Arden finally herded her chums down to the cinder path in front of the dormitory building.

"Come along a little farther," she urged. "No one must hear!"

Terry and Sim followed, now really convinced that Arden had something of moment to impart to them. She looked around half in caution, half in fear. When they were some distance from the main entrance and shrouded in the fog, Arden said in a low voice:

"I was just over to the station----"

"You were!" interrupted Sim. "Why, Arden Blake! If you were seen, it'll be just too bad! What if Tiddy finds out?"

"Yes, I know. But there are times when rules have to be broken," admitted Arden. "If George Was.h.i.+ngton and Thomas Jefferson or some historic personages like that hadn't drafted a new const.i.tution in Philadelphia when they had no right to do so, I wouldn't be telling you all this."

"All what? That you were over to the station? It's a grand night to break rules but a better one for murders," declared Terry, sniffing the fog with her head thrown back and her eyes half shut.

"If you'd stop interrupting I could tell you." Arden was beginning to lose patience. "I was over at the station, as I said, and I saw someone there: the night ticket agent, who is the very image of the missing man whose picture we saw on the reward notice in the post office! There!"

Arden paused to see what effect this statement had on her friends. They seemed to take it very calmly, and Terry said, most practically:

"Nonsense, Arden. If he was the man you think he is, someone else would have noticed him long ago and claimed the reward."

"Besides," added Sim, "no young man, or old one either, who wanted to keep his whereabouts secret would be so foolish as to appear in so public a place as a railroad ticket office, and near the place where there was hanging a poster offering a thousand dollars for information about him."

"Not necessarily," countered Arden calmly. "I have read somewhere that the cleverest criminals (not that Mr. Pangborn is one, though) always stay right in the place where they have committed a crime or are supposed to have vanished from. The trick is, that no one ever thinks of looking so near home for them. Poe has a story about a missing letter that was all the while right in the open, stuck in a rack with a lot of others."

"Oh, yes, we had to read that in English lit," admitted Terry.

"Well, what do you want to do, Sherlock--go over and identify the corpse?" asked Sim. "If you do, I'm afraid I can't come. I have to go to Mary Todd for a notebook."

"Please, Sim, it won't take a minute, or only two or three, anyhow. You can come right back and be in time for supper. Think how thrilling it would be if----"

"It most likely won't be," finished Terry. "But I'm game. I like fog.

It's good for the complexion."

"If you and Terry go, I'll come, too, of course. But I think you're on a wild-goose chase," declared Sim.

"But I tell you he looked exactly like the poster!" affirmed Arden. "I stood here looking at him, with my mouth open like a fish, while he waited for me to speak. I was so surprised I just had to stammer something about forgetting what I came for, say I'd be back later, and run away. I don't know what he thought of me."

"Maybe he can't think. Anyhow, come on, Sim. But make it snappy. I've got something else to do more important than this," said Terry.

Arm in arm the three girls, a little nervous when they realized what would happen if they were caught breaking the campus rule in effect against them, started for the station. Arden hurried them impatiently, but Terry was in one of her teasing moods and refused to be hastened, pausing now and then to remark on the beauty of the night and attempting to point out, in the dense fog, places of interest on their brief journey.

At the station a quick look through an end window showed the waiting room to be unoccupied except for a man standing near the big white pot-stove.

"There he is--the agent!" whispered Arden. "He's come out of his coop."

"You'd think he was a chicken!" chuckled Sim.

"Oh, be quiet!" Arden begged. "Now you two go in and look at him."

"Aren't you coming?" asked Terry.

"No. I'll wait outside here. I don't want him to see me again. You two go in. Get a good look at him. Ask for--for time-tables. Oh, I'm so excited!"

"Don't be so nervous," Terry admonished. "You'll be so disappointed if you're wrong. However--come on, Sim!"

Terry and Sim, with none of the reluctance Arden was sure she would have experienced, marched around to the door. Arden drew back into the shadows of the fog and waited. She heard her chums enter, dimly heard the murmurs of their voices as, presumably, they asked for time-tables and caught the squeak of the door hinges again.

"Where'd she go?" Terry murmured. Evidently she and Sim could not see the hidden Arden.

"I hope this isn't her idea of a joke, to get us here and then run back,"

grumbled Sim.

"No! No! Here I am!" exclaimed Arden, coming forth out of the gloom. "Did you--was he--is he----"

"Arden, my pet," began Terry, flipping a damp time-table, "we fear for your reason, we, your devoted friends. That agent looks no more like the picture of Harry Pangborn than you do!"

"No?" gasped Arden. "I thought he was the very image of the poster picture."

"Sorry, Arden," Sim continued. "But you'll have to do better than this to claim the reward. That's that, and as I'm dripping with dampness, I'm going back where it's light and dry and warm and where I can eat."

"Yes, let's go back!" agreed Terry, feeling a little sorry for Arden.

Arden looked sadly at her chums. "And I was almost sure," she murmured.

"Don't you think there's a small, a tiny resemblance?"

"Not the slightest!" chorused Terry and Sim.

"Well, then, we must get back, I suppose. But I certainly feel like a balloon that has suddenly lost its gas." Arden sighed.

Slowly the three started down the station platform to the walk that led across the tracks and on to the college. As they were about to leave the shadowy shelter of the overhanging roof, Arden, who was in the lead, reached back two cautioning and restraining hands toward Terry and Sim.