Betty Wales on the campus

“TENDING UP” AGAIN

BETTY WALES, with a red bandanna knotted tightly over all her yellow curls--except one or two particularly rebellious ringlets that positively refused to be hidden--pattered softly down the back stairs of the Wales cottage at Lakeside. Softly, because mother was taking her afternoon nap and must on no account be disturbed. Betty lifted a lid of the kitchen range, peered anxiously in at the glowing coals, and nodded approvingly at them for being so nice and red. Then she opened the ice-box, just for the supreme satisfaction of gazing once more upon the six big tomatoes that she had peeled and put away to cool right after lunch--which is the only proper time to begin getting dinner for a fastidious family like hers. Finally she slipped on over her bathing suit the raincoat that hung on her arm, and carefully opened the front door. On the piazza the Smallest Sister and a smaller friend were cozily ensconced in the hammock, “talking secrets,” as they explained eagerly to Betty.

“But you can come and talk too,” they assured her in a happy chorus, for Betty was the idol of all the little girls in the Lakeside colony.

Betty smiled at them and pulled back the raincoat to show what was underneath. “Thank you, dears, but I’m going for a dip while the sun is hot. And Dorothy, don’t forget that you’ve said that you’d stay here and see to everything till I get back. And if more girls come up, don’t make a lot of noise and wake mother. Good-bye.” And she was off like the wind down the path to the beach staircase.

Half a dozen welcoming shouts greeted her from the sand.

“We’ve waited ages for you,” cried one.

“Dare you to slide down on the rail,” called another.

“No, slide down the bank,” suggested a third.

Betty gave her head a funny little toss, threw the raincoat down to one of them and slid, ran, jumped, and tumbled down the sheer bank, landing in a heap on a mound of soft sand that flew up in a dusty cloud around the party.

“I’m sorry,” she sputtered, wiping the dust out of her eyes. “Sorry that I was late, I mean. The sand is Don’s fault, because he dared me. You see, I had to mend all Will’s stockings, because he’s going off to-morrow on a little business trip. And then I had to see to my fire, and remind Dorothy that she is now in charge of mother and the house. Beat you out to the raft, Mary.”

Mary Hooper shook off her share of the sand-cloud resignedly. “All right,” she said. “Only of course I’ve been in once already, and I’m rather tired.”

“Tired nothing,” scoffed one of the Benson girls. “You paddled around the cove for five minutes an hour ago, poor thing! That’s all the exercise you’ve had to-day. Betty’s the one who ought to be tired, with all the cooking and scrubbing and mending she does. Only she’s a regular young steam engine----”

Betty leaned forward and tumbled Sallie Benson over on her back in the sand. “Hush!” she said. “I don’t work hard, and I’m not tired, and besides, I shall probably lose the race. Come along, Mary.”

The race was a tie, but Betty declared that Tom Benson got in her way on purpose, and Mary Hooper retorted that Sally splashed her like a whole school of porpoises. So they finally agreed to try again going back, and then they sat on the raft in the sunshine, throwing sticks for Mary’s setter to swim after, and watching the Ames boys dive, until Will appeared on the shore shouting and waving a letter wildly--an incentive to Betty’s getting back in a hurry that caused Mary to declare the return race off also, especially as she had lost it.

“Didn’t want to bother you,” explained Will amiably, “but Cousin Joe drove me out in his car, and I thought that maybe the chief cook----”

Betty seized the letter and ran. “I knew things were going to happen,” she murmured as she flopped up the beach stairway. “But there’s an extra tomato that my prophetic soul told me to peel, and lots of soup, and lots of ice-cream. Oh, dear, I’m getting this letter so wet that I shan’t ever be able to read it.” She held it out at arm’s length and looked at the address. It was typewritten, and there was a printed “Return to Harding College” in the corner. “Nothing but an old circular, I suppose,” she decided, and laid it carefully down in a spot of yellow sunshine on the floor of her room to dry off.

Of course there was no time to open it until dinner was cooked and eaten; and then Cousin Joe piled his big car full of laughing, chattering young people and drove them off through the pine woods in the moonlight.

Betty was in front with Cousin Joe. “Things look so much more enchanted and fairylike if you’re in front,” she explained as she climbed in.

Cousin Joe chuckled. “You always have some good reason for wanting to sit in front, young lady,” he said. “When you were a kid, you had to be where you could cluck to the horses. But I certainly didn’t suppose you went in for moonlight and fairies and that sort of thing. I thought you were a hard-headed business woman, with all kinds of remarkable money-making schemes up your sleeves.”

Betty patted the embroidery on her cuff and frowned disapprovingly at him. “You shouldn’t make fun of the Tally-ho Tea-Shop, Cousin Joe. It does make money--really and truly it does.”

“Well, I guess I know that,” Cousin Joe assured her solemnly, “and I understand the extremely marketable nature of ploshkins. Will keeps me very well posted about his wonderful sister’s wonderful enterprises that are backed by the Morton millions.”

“Don’t be silly, please, Cousin Joe,” begged Betty. “I’ve just done what any girl would have under the circumstances, and I’ve had such very scrumptious luck--that’s all.”

Cousin Joe put on slow speed, and leaned forward to stare at Betty in the moonlight. “You’ve pulled off a start that any man might envy you, little girl, and you’re just as pretty and young and jolly as if you’d never touched money except to spend it for clothes and candy. And you still love fun and look out for fairies, and some day a nice young man--I say, Betty, here’s a long straight stretch. Change seats and see how fast you can tool her up to the Pine Grove Country Club for a cool little supper all around.”

“Oh, could I truly try?”

Betty’s voice sounded like a happy child’s, and her eyes sparkled with pleasure and excitement, as her small hands clutched the big wheel.

Cousin Joe leaned back and watched her. “I had a tough pull when I started out in life,” he was thinking, “and no ‘such very scrumptious luck,’ either, and I let it sour me. Betty’s game, luck or no luck. Luck’s not the word for it, anyway. Of course people want to keep friends with the girl who owns that smile. It means something, her smile does. It’s not in the same class with Miss Mary Hooper’s society smirk. I can’t see myself why that nice young man that I almost said was going to fall in love with her some day doesn’t come along--several of him in fact. But I’m glad I didn’t finish that sentence; I suppose you could spoil even Betty Wales.”

Betty remembered her letter again when she stepped on it in the dark and it crackled. She had undressed by moonlight, so as not to wake little Dorothy, who shared her room at the cottage. Now she lit a candle, and opening her letter read it in the dim flickering light. Something dropped out--a long slip that proved, upon further examination, to be a railroad ticket from Cleveland to Harding and back again. And the typewritten letter--that might have been “only an old circular”--was signed by no less a personage than the President of Harding College himself. Seeing his name at the end, in the queer scraggly hand that every Harding girl knew, quite took Betty’s breath away, and as for the letter itself! When she had finished it Betty blew out the candle and sank down in an awe-stricken little heap on the floor by the window to think things over and straighten them out.

Prexy had written to her himself--the great Prexy! He wanted her to come and advise with him and Mr. Morton and the architects about the finishing touches for Morton Hall. Of all absurd, unaccountable ideas that was the queerest.

“Mr. Morton originally suggested asking you,” he wrote, “but I heartily second him. We both feel sure that the ingenuity of the young woman who made the Tally-ho Tea-Shop out of a barn will devise some valuable features for the new dormitory, thereby fitting it more completely to the needs of its future occupants.”

Morton Hall was the result of a suggestion Betty had made to her friend Mr. Morton, the millionaire. It was to give the poorer girls at Harding an opportunity to live on the campus and share in the college life.

“Gracious!” sighed Betty. “He thinks I thought up all the tea-room features. It’s Madeline that they want. But Madeline’s in Maine with the Enderbys, and wouldn’t come. And then of course Mr. Morton may need to be pacified about something. I can do that part all right. Anyway, I shall have to go, so long as they have sent a ticket--right away too, or Mr. Morton will be sure to need pacifying most awfully. I wonder what in the world that postscript means.”

The postscript said, “I had intended to write you in regard to another matter, connected not so much with the architecture of the new hall as with its management; but talking it over together will be much more satisfactory.”

Betty lay awake a long while wondering about that postscript. When she finally went to sleep she dreamed that Prexy had hired her to cook for Morton Hall, and that she scorched the ice-cream, put salt in the jelly-roll, and water on the fire. She burned her fingers doing that and screamed, and it was Will calling to remind her that he wanted breakfast and his bag packed in time for the eight-sixteen.

At the breakfast table the cook--she ate with the family--gave notice. She was going away that very afternoon.

“Most unbusinesslike,” Mr. Wales assured her solemnly, but with a twinkle in his eyes.

“Most absurd,” Betty twinkled back at him. “I can’t suggest a thing to those architects, of course, and they’ll just laugh at me, and Prexy and Mr. Morton will be perfectly disgusted.”

“You’ve got to make good somehow,” Will assured her soberly. “It isn’t every girl that gets her expenses paid for a long trip like that, just to go and advise about things. You’re what they call a consulting expert, Betty. I’ll look up your trains and telephone you from town.”

“And I’ll help you pack a bag,” announced the Smallest Sister. “You’re just going in a bag, like Will, and coming back for Sunday, aren’t you, Betty dear?”

“Yes, I’m just going in a bag,” Betty assured her laughingly, “and coming right back to Lakeside for Sunday. But perhaps in September--well, we need not think about September when it’s only the middle of August; isn’t that so, little sister?”

The Smallest Sister stared solemnly at her. “We ought to make plans, Betty. Now Celissa Hooper wants me to be her chum if I’m going to school in Cleveland this winter, but if I’m going to be at Miss Dick’s again why of course I can’t be chums with Celissa, ’cause I’m chums with Shirley Ware. So I really ought to know before long who I’m to be chums with.”