NAN SHERWOOD AT LAKEVIEW HALL OR THE MYSTERY OF THE HAUNTED BOATHOUSE

BY ANNIE ROE CARR

THE WORLD SYNDICATE PUBLISHING CO. CLEVELAND, O. NEW YORK, N.Y.

Copyright, MCMXVI by GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY

Printed in the United States of America by THE COMMERCIAL BOOKBINDING CO. CLEVELAND, O.

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CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XV CHAPTER XVI CHAPTER XVII CHAPTER XVIII CHAPTER XIX CHAPTER XX CHAPTER XXI CHAPTER XXII CHAPTER XXIII CHAPTER XXIV CHAPTER XXV CHAPTER XXVI CHAPTER XXVII CHAPTER XXVIII CHAPTER XXIX CHAPTER XXX Transcriber’s Notes

CHAPTER I THE BRAND NEW BAG

There would have been no trouble at all, Nan was sure, had it not been for that new bag.

In the first place it was a present from her Aunt Kate Sherwood, although Nan purchased it herself. The purchasing of most of her school outfit was supervised by Mrs. Harley, at the same time that her own daughter’s was bought, but a few last purchases were left to the girls and Nan and Bess certainly had a most delightful time shopping in Chicago for a week, before they started for Lakeview Hall.

Of course, Bess’ mother was right at hand to advise and guide; otherwise careless Bess would have bought with prodigal hand, and cautious Nan’s outfit would not have been as well selected as the girl’s absent mother would have desired.

But nobody interfered with the matter of the[2] brand new bag. Nan and her chum went to one of the smartest leather-goods shops and selected the shiny, russet-leather beauty without any adult interference save that of an obliging clerk. Mrs. Henry Sherwood had saved the money herself and insisted upon Nan’s taking it and purchasing “just the handsomest traveling bag the money would buy.”

“You know, honey-bird,” the good woman said to her niece, the evening before Nan left Pine Camp—which was away up in the Peninsula of Michigan. “You know, honey-bird, money’s been scarce with your Uncle Hen and me for some time back; but now that the trouble about the Perkins Tract is settled, and he can go to lumbering again, we’ll be all right.

“I honestly do believe, Nan, that if you hadn’t made such a friend of Toby Vanderwiller and of his wife and his crippled grandson, and if you and your Cousin Tom hadn’t helped Tobe out of the swamp when he got mired in the big storm, that maybe the trouble about the boundary line between your uncle’s timber option and Gedney Raffer’s tract, wouldn’t have been settled, in court or out, for a year or two.

“That being the case,” Mrs. Sherwood pursued, “your Uncle Henry and I, and Tom and Rafe, would have been mighty poor for a long time to come. Now the prospect’s bright before us, child, and I want you should take this I’ve saved from my[3] egg and berry money, and buy you just the handsomest traveling bag you can get for it.

“I’ve seen ’em all pictured out in the mail-order catalogue—full of brushes, and combs, and cut-glass bottles to hold sweet scent, and tooth-powder, and all sorts of didos. That’s the kind I want you to have.”

“Oh! but Aunt Kate!” Nan Sherwood said doubtfully, “this is a great deal of money to spend for a hand bag.”

“I wish ’twas twice as much!” declared the lumberman’s wife, vigorously.

“Twice as much?” Nan gasped.

“Yes. Then the things could be gold trimmed instead of only silver. I want you to have the very nicest bag of any girl going to that big school.”

The awe-struck Nan and the delighted Elizabeth were quite sure that the woman from the Michigan Peninsula had her wish when they walked out of the leather-goods shop, the handsome russet bag firmly clutched by its possessor.

The bag was packed at once, for its purchase was almost the last bit of shopping there was to do before the chums from Tillbury left Chicago. Mrs. Harley rose early in the morning to go with them to the train. She declared that afterward she intended going back to the hotel to “sleep for a week.”[4]

“I’d rather superintend the general fall cleaning at home than get you two girls ready to go to boarding school again,” she sighed.

“I’m sure you’ve been awfully good to me, Mrs. Harley,” said Nan. “My own dear Momsey Sherwood could have treated me no more kindly. And, of course, she couldn’t have shopped for me so well, for she has been too much of an invalid for a long while to take any interest in the shops.”

Mrs. Harley kissed her heartily. “You blessed child!” she declared. “You’re no trouble to suit. Bess is the finicky person.” Her daughter began to pout. “Oh, you are, Miss!” and her mother held up an admonitory finger and shook it at Bess. “Next time I shall buy what I think is proper and leave you at home while I am buying. Why! these children nowadays are more fussy about their frocks, and more insistent upon the style of them, than their mothers. What I shall do, Elizabeth, when your little sisters are old enough to go away to school, I—do—not—see!”

“Oh, by that time,” said Bess, the modern, “I shall be ‘out,’ I hope, and may have really something to say about my own clothes.”

“Hear her!” ejaculated Mrs. Harley. “It will be several years yet, young lady, before you will be ‘out,’ as you call it, or be allowed to spend your father’s money as lavishly as you would like to.”

Nevertheless she kissed her daughter tenderly,[5] just before the train started, and Bess forgot for a moment that she was anything but a young girl going a long way off from a very dear and indulgent mother. They clung to each other for that tender, heart-breaking moment, and Nan Sherwood’s eyes overflowed in sympathy.

Nan had been through the same ordeal six months before, when her own dear mother and father had started for Scotland, while she left Tillbury on the very same day for her uncle Henry’s backwoods home in the heart of the Upper Michigan forest.

“Don’t cry, Bess,” she begged her chum when the train was out of the station and the “clip, clip, clip-py-ti-clip” of the wheels over the rail joints had tailed off into a staccato chatter, scarcely discernible through the steady drumming of the great trucks under the chair-car. “Don’t cry. You know, honey, your mother isn’t going to be near as far from you as my dear Momsey is from me.”

“I don’t care,” sniffed Bess. “If I can’t see her. But oh, Nan Sherwood!” she added sharply. “What kind of grammar was that you just used—‘near as far’? If Mr. Mangel, our high-school principal at Tillbury, thought you would use such language he would never have written to Dr. Beulah Prescott that he considered you entitled to a rating equal with the remainder of our class.”

“Don’t sniff and turn up your nose, Miss, at my[6] diction,” laughed Nan. “Your nose is bound to be red if you keep on—and your eyes, too.”

“Is it? Are they?” gasped Bess.

“Is it—are they what?” demanded Nan, rather startled.

“Why, my nose and eyes red!”

“Well! talk about grammar!” ejaculated Nan. “I wouldn’t criticise, if I were you.”

“Never mind the English language,” begged Bess. “Let me look in your mirror.”

Of course, that necessitated the opening of the brand new bag. Then, when Bess thought she had discovered a suspicious redness of the tip of her nose, she must needs use the powder puff which was one of the wonderful “didos” among the toilet requisites in the bag.

While Bess was so busily engaged in restoring the havoc made upon her fresh young countenance by her recent emotion, there sounded suddenly a heavy banging and thumping underneath the chair-car in which the girls were riding, though not at their end of the coach.

Nervous people at the rear of the car jumped up and one or two screamed. Almost instantly the train began to slow down, with much hissing of steam and compressed air, and soon came to a complete stop.

Nan had jumped up, too, but not because she was frightened. None of the trainmen came in of[7] whom to ask about the stop and Nan went to the front door and out into the vestibule. Even the colored porter was not in sight.

“What is it, Nan?” Bess asked, still powdering her nose, for she had been obliged to postpone this delicate operation until the train had come to its bumping stop.

“I don’t know,” answered her chum. “I’m going forward to ask.”

But hardly had she said this, when the rear door of the car opened and a uniformed attendant said, speaking clearly:

“All passengers are requested to move into the rear coach, with all hand baggage. This car is to be taken out of the train at once because of an accident. All passengers will please move to the rear coach with hand baggage. Another chair car will be put in to accommodate you at the junction. All back to rear coach!”

He came through shouting these directions so that all in the car could hear him. Bess jumped up, very much excited now, with:

“Oh, my gracious! Do you hear that, Nan? Do get down my coat and suit-case. You’re taller than I am.”

Her chum good-naturedly did as she was requested and Bess started down the aisle. Indeed, the two friends were about the first to leave the chair-car by the rear door.[8]

Just as they got into the vestibule, however, Nan noticed that her chum’s hands were empty.

“Why, Bess Harley!” she cried. “Where’s my bag?”

“Your bag?” returned Bess, with wide-open eyes. “Why! haven’t you brought it?”

“Well!” But there! What was the use? Nan knew well just how heedless Bess was. There was positively no good in getting angry with her. “Here!” she exclaimed, thrusting the suit-case, the lunch box, and her chum’s own wrap into Bess’ hands. “Get a seat if you can and hold on to these while I go back for that bag.”

“I must have left it right in the chair you sat in,” said Bess, feebly.

Nan did not hear this. She had some trouble in getting back into the car, for she was stemming the tide of outflowing passengers.

She reached the spot at last. The more moderately moving passengers were all about her. On the floor between two of the chairs was the russet bag.

Nan seized it quickly and turned to hasten back to her chum. The aisle was clear for the moment and she ran.

Almost instantly a shrill voice cried out behind her:

“Here! how dare you? That’s my bag. Stop thief!”[9]

Nan Sherwood cast a horrified glance over her shoulder. Yes! the voice addressed her. An angry girl, very fussily and expensively dressed, had started wildly down the car after Nan, and again she shrieked:

“Stop thief!”

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CHAPTER II ALL ABOUT NAN

Nan Sherwood stumbled and would have fallen, for she could not pick her steps very safely with her gaze directed behind, had not a firm hand seized her shoulder. The gentleman who did this may have been as intent upon detaining the girl as upon saving her from an overthrow.

“Hoity-toity!” he ejaculated, in a rather querulous voice. “Hoity-toity!” he repeated. “What’s this I hear? ‘Stop thief’? Impossible!”

He was a lean-faced man with a deeply lined countenance, a big nose, and shell-bowed spectacles through which his pale, gray eyes twinkled, after all, in a rather friendly way. Or so the startled Nan thought in those few seconds that elapsed before the other girl reached them.

“Impossible!” repeated the man, having looked into Nan’s eyes.

“I guess it isn’t impossible!” cried the over-dressed girl, seizing the handle of the russet bag and trying to jerk it out of Nan’s hand. “The bold thing! She is a thief! And see her! She won’t give it up!”[11]

“Why—it’s my bag!” murmured Nan, horrified by this utterly unexpected situation.

“It’s not! it’s mine!” asserted the other girl, striving with all her might to secure the bag.

But Nan Sherwood was no weakling. In fact, she was really very strong for her age. And her spring and summer in the Big Woods had bronzed her skin almost to the hue of a winter-cured oak-leaf. Her muscles were as well developed as a boy’s. The angry girl could not get the russet bag away from Nan’s secure grip.

“Wait! wait, young ladies!” urged the gentleman with the spectacles that made him look so owl-like. “There must be some mistake here.”

“There is!” snapped the angry girl. “It’s a mistake to let a little thief like her ride with respectable people. I’m going to have her arrested! I—I’ll tell my father——”

All the time she was thus incoherently accusing Nan, she was likewise endeavoring to get possession of the bag. But Nan had no idea of giving up her Aunt Kate’s beautiful present.

“Why—why!” Nan gasped. “It’s mine! I bought it myself!”

“What a story!” shrieked the other girl. “A dowdy little thing like you never owned such a bag. Look at my card on the handle.”

“That should settle it,” said the bespectacled gentleman, with confidence, and he reached for the bag.[12]

Nan allowed him to take it. To her amazement he slipped an engraved visiting card out of the frame set into the bag’s handle. Nan almost dropped. She had not noticed the card during the struggle and she knew she never had owned a visiting card like that in her life.

The gentleman held the card very close to his eyes to read the name engraved upon it.

“Ahem!” he said. “I thought I recognized you, Miss Riggs, despite your wild state of alarm. ‘Miss Linda Riggs,’” he added, repeating the name on the card. “Quite right. The bag is yours, Miss Riggs.”

“I should think you would have known that, Professor Krenner, when I first spoke,” snapped the girl, seizing the bag ungratefully from his hand. “Anybody ought to see what that girl is!” and she eyed poor Nan with a measure of disdain that might have really pained the Tillbury girl had she not just then been so much troubled by another phase of the incident.

“Why! where—where is my bag, then?” Nan gasped.

Professor Krenner glanced sideways at her. He was a peculiar old gentleman, and he believed deeply in his own first impressions. Nan’s flushed face, her wide-open, pained eyes, her quivering lips, told a story he could not disbelieve. The professor’s mind leaped to a swift conclusion.[13]

“Are you sure you sat just there, child?” he asked Nan.

“Oh—I——”

He could see over the heads of the few curious passengers who had surged around them.

“Was your bag like Miss Riggs’?” he asked.

“Exactly,” breathed Nan.

Just then a soft, drawling voice asked:

“Any ob yo’ ladies an’ gemmen done lef’ a bag?”

The porter held out a russet leather traveling bag. Nan leaped for it with a cry of relief.

“It belongs to the young lady, porter,” said Professor Krenner, authoritatively.

“Why, the bags are just alike!” cried one lady.

“I don’t believe a dowdy thing like her ever honestly owned a bag like mine in this world!” Linda Riggs exclaimed bitterly, “She stole it.”

Another passenger laughed. “As far as we know, my girl, you may have stolen your bag.”

“How dare you?” gasped the dressy girl. “I guess you don’t know who my father is?”

“I confess the crass ignorance that engulfs my mind upon that important point,” laughed the unimpressed man, who looked as though he might be of some importance himself. “Who is your father, my dear?”

“He is Mr. Henry W. Riggs, and he just about owns this railroad,” said the girl, proudly.

“I have heard of him,” agreed the man. “And[14] you may tell him from me that if I owned as much stock in this road as he is supposed to, I’d give the public better service for its money,” and the passengers went away, laughing at the purse-proud and arrogant girl.

Meanwhile Nan Sherwood had thanked the porter for recovering her bag and Professor Krenner for championing her cause. She did not look again at the girl who had so hurt and insulted her. But she was very pale and quiet as she went back to rejoin her chum, Bess Harley, in the other car.

That was the way of Nan Sherwood. When she was hurt she never cried over it openly; nor was it often that she gave vent to a public expression of anger.

For her age, Nan was strangely self-contained and competent. Not that she was other than a real, happy, hearty schoolgirl with a deal more than her share of animal spirits. She was so very much alive that it had been hard for her to keep her body still enough to satisfy her teachers at the Tillbury High School which, until the middle of the previous winter, she had attended with her chum.

Bess’ father was well-to-do and Bess had had almost everything she really craved since the hour she was born, being the oldest of the “Harley tribe,” as she expressed it. When it was decided that she should, at the end of her freshman year in high school, attend the preparatory school for girls,[15] known as Lakeview Hall, Bess was determined that her chum, Nan Sherwood, should go with her.

But Nan’s parents were not situated at all as were Bess Harley’s—neither financially or otherwise. Mr. Robert Sherwood had been, for years, foreman of a department in the Atwater Mills. Suddenly the mills were closed and Nan’s father—with multitudes of other people—found his income cut off.

He owned a little cottage on Amity Street; but it was not all paid for, as Nan’s mother had been a semi-invalid for a number of years and much of the money Mr. Sherwood might have saved, had gone for medical attention for “Momsey,” as Nan called her mother.

But the invalid wife and mother was the bravest and most cheerful of the three who lived in “the dwelling in amity,” as Mr. Sherwood called the little cottage, and it was she who inspired them to hope for better times ahead.

Nan could not fail to be benefited in character by such an example as her mother set; but the girl very well knew that, in their then present circumstances, there was no possibility of her entering Lakeview Hall in the fall with Bess Harley.

This was really a tragic outlook for the school chums; but in the very darkest hour a letter arrived from a lawyer, named Andrew Blake, of Edinburgh, Scotland, stating that a great uncle of Mrs.[16] Sherwood’s had recently died, bequeathing her an estate valued at something like ten thousand pounds.

The only shadow cast upon this delightful prospect was the fact that Mrs. Sherwood must appear before the Scotch Court to oppose the claim of more distant relatives who were trying to break the will.

The doctors had already recommended a sea voyage for Mrs. Sherwood. Now it seemed a necessity. But her parents could not take Nan across the ocean. What should be done with the troubled girl was the much mooted question, when there burst in upon the family Mr. Sherwood’s brother from Upper Michigan, a giant lumberman, who had come to Tillbury to offer any help in his power to Nan’s father in his financial straits.

Immediately upon hearing of the legacy, Mr. Henry Sherwood declared he would take Nan back to Pine Camp with him, and in the first volume of this series, entitled “Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp, or, The Old Lumberman’s Secret,” are told all Nan’s adventures in the Big Woods during the spring and summer, and until the time came for her to prepare to enter Lakeview Hall in September.

For, although the court proceedings regarding Mr. Hughie Blake’s will had not been entirely settled, money had been advanced by Mr. Andrew Blake to Mr. Sherwood and the desire of Nan’s heart was to be accomplished. She was now on her way to Lakeview Hall with Bess Harley; and, as we[17] have seen, she had not gone far on the journey from Chicago before Adventure overtook her.

This first was not a pleasant adventure, however; and it brought in its train incidents which colored all Nan Sherwood’s initial semester at Lakeview Hall.

[18]

CHAPTER III LINDA RIGGS