“Now you’ve got to just tell me all about what it means!” declared Tavia, the moment the door had closed on the other girls and she and Dorothy were alone in their old room at Glenwood Hall. “Don’t you see that I’m just eaten up with curiosity?”
“Why, you don’t seem to have lost any flesh at all,” laughed Dorothy, pinching one of her friend’s cheeks while she kissed the other.
“Stop tantalizing! What does that card mean? Who is Tom Moran? How dare you have a gentleman friend, Dorothy Dale, with whom I am not acquainted?”
“What nonsense,” said Dorothy. “Tom Moran is—why, just Tom Moran.”
“Lucid as mud! And what, or who, is he to Olaine?”
“You puzzle me a whole lot more than you are puzzled yourself,” complained Dorothy. “I don’t116 understand—not the least little bit—what you tell me about Miss Olaine.”
“She was just as scared as she could be when she read this message to you, Doro,” and Tavia thrust the typewritten postal card under her friend’s eyes. “Read it and tell me what it means.”
“Oh, I can do that.”
“Well, do it!” cried Tavia. “Don’t hesitate so.”
“First I must tell you about Celia Moran——”
“Another stranger!” gasped Tavia.
“Just the dearest, funniest, most pitiful little girl——”
“I’m glad it’s a girl this time,” sniffed Tavia.
“Of course—Celia!”
“Well! go on?” urged Tavia.
So her friend began at the beginning—with her first meeting with the child from the foundling asylum in the Belding Station. And she related the particulars, too, of her recent adventure in the snow and her two nights and the Sunday spent at the Hogan farmhouse.
“That Hogan woman is a regular ogress. I wish I could take Celia away from there this very day,” sighed Dorothy. “Did you see her when she drove me in here?”
“The giantess? Of course! She looked so funny117 in that gray and purple sweater and the green hood——”
“No matter for laughing. Do you know what she made Mrs. Pangborn pay her for ‘me keep’, as she called it?”
“No.”
“Twenty dollars—think of it? She’s a terrible miser—and that poor little thing isn’t half fed.”
“The poor kid!” agreed Tavia, whose warm heart was touched by the story Dorothy told her.
“She wanted to come with us so badly,” sighed Dorothy. “But Mrs. Hogan made her stay and keep up the fire, and watch to see if the hens laid any eggs. They bring ’em right in from the nests for fear they will freeze,” explained Dorothy.
“I really believe, Tavia, if that little thing hadn’t been out gathering eggs Saturday evening, I would have laid down in the snow and died!”
“Oh, Doro! How dreadful!”
“I was ‘all in’, as Ned and Nat would say. Just at the last gasp when Celia heard me crying for help.”
“I’d like to hug her for that,” cried Tavia, her eyes shining.
“And so, I must find her brother if I can,” continued Dorothy, not very lucidly, it must be confessed. But Tavia had gained a general idea of the matter now and she said:
“That’s Tom Moran?”
118 “Yes. That’s her brother. ‘He builds bridges, and things.’ That is what Celia says. She remembers a lot for such a little thing. So I wrote to the local union in the city and asked if they knew him. And this,” said Dorothy, pursing her lips and shaking her head, “is their answer. It’s—it’s not very hopeful——”
“But for goodness sake tell me what Miss Olaine has to do with it?” demanded Tavia.
“Now, dear, you know very well I can’t tell you that,” admitted Dorothy, thoughtfully.
“She was just as startled——”
“Do you suppose it was Tom Moran’s name that startled her, or the signature of the secretary of the union? Or—or——?”
“Or, what else? What else is there in the note to scare her?” demanded Tavia.
“The school fire. Do you remember? It was an awful fire. Some of the children failed to get out in the fire drill. They were shut into a room on an upper floor, it seems to me—with a teacher——?”
“I can’t remember about it,” quoth Tavia, disappointed. “I remember the papers were full of it at the time. But what had this Tom Moran to do with it—with the fire, I mean?”
“I—I can’t think. I don’t remember his name, or any other detail of the fire,” agreed Dorothy.
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