  “Meeting is called to order!” Merry turned to beckon the girl, who, feeling rather like an intruder, had seated herself some distance from the others. “Gerry, come over and sit in Jack’s favorite easy chair,” their hostess said. “Then you’ll be in the circle with the rest of us.” Geraldine was conscious of the slight flush which she always felt in her cheeks when Jack’s name was mentioned, but she gladly joined the others, sinking into the luxurious depths of a softly upholstered cosy-comfort chair. “You’ll have to say interesting things to keep me awake,” she laughingly warned them as she snuggled down in it. “Don’t worry about this meeting not being interesting. It’s going to be a thriller,” the president announced. Whereupon the members all sat up ready to ask a chorus of questions, but Merry pounded on the table before her with her improvised gavel, an ornamented paper-cutter, as she said imperatively: “Silence, if you please! We will now have the roll call. Sleuth Rose, are you present?” A laughing response: “I am!” And so on until each had been called. Geraldine was very much awake. “Madame President,” she burst in, “if I’m not too much out of order, will you please tell me why you call these pretty maidens by such a terrible name? Sleuths! Ohoo!” she shuddered. “I thought sleuths were long, lank, stealthy creatures who steal around slums and underworld places trying to find criminals.” “Well, perhaps some sleuths do,” Merry acknowledged, “but we aren’t quite that desperate.” Then Peg put in: “O, I say, Merry, have a heart; don’t mystify Gerry any longer. Begin at the beginning and tell her what our club has stood for in the past, and what it will accomplish in the future.” “How can I reveal what nobody knows?” their president inquired. However, she turned to Geraldine and told how the seven girls who always walked back and forth to school together had formed a clique, which at first they had named Sunnyside Club with “Spread Sunshine” for a motto. “Our Saint Gertrude’s suggestion, you may be sure,” Rose interjected. “Well, we did do a great deal to make the children up in the orphanage happy,” Betty Byrd championed as though feeling that the absent member was in some way being maligned. Bertha Angel agreed with her emphatically: “Of course we did, little one, and we intend to keep it up. Being sleuths won’t in any way keep us from doing good deeds.” “But what is there to be sleuthing about in this sleepy little town of Sunnyside?” Geraldine wanted to know. “And why do you want to do it if there is?” “O, we don’t really,” Rose told her. “It’s sort of like taking a dare. The boys have a club which they call ‘C. D. C.,’ and they’re terribly secret about it. They have a mysterious meeting-place, and since we girls aren’t allowed to roam about nights unless our brothers are along to protect us, we never can find out where they meet. We sort of thought it might be in the old Walsley ruin on the East Lake Road. That’s why we asked them to take us there Saturday after that robbery. We thought if that was their secret meeting-place, they would have it fitted up like a clubroom some way, and then of course they wouldn’t want us to visit it. But when they said ‘sure thing,’ they’d take us if we wanted to go, why then we were convinced that’s not where they hold their secret meetings.” Peggy interrupted with: “Maybe you were convinced, old dear, but I was not. You say we can’t go up the East Lake Road at night when the boys hold their meetings. Of course we can’t, but what’s to hinder us from going up there alone some time in the daylight. If that old man who killed himself haunts the place at all, it wouldn’t be while the sun is shining.” “Ugh!” Gerry said with a shudder. “Now I believe you are sleuths. Wanting to visit a haunted house! But tell me, what kind of a club is the ‘C. D. C.’?” “It’s a detective club, and we, that is, Merry, figured out, by putting two and two together, that it means ‘Conan Doyle Club.’ Jack shut her in a closet one day, and before she could let him know she was there, she heard enough to know that he and his friends have tried to find some mystery to solve in Sunnyside, and have decided that there isn’t one, and so they take turns making up mysteries. They read them at these secret meetings and let the others try to figure out clues.” “Is that why you girls started to be sleuths?” Gerry wanted to know. Bertha nodded. “Merry heard one of the boys say that an uncle of his in New York, who is a lawyer, had written about a famous girl detective, and the others scoffed at the very idea. They said they couldn’t imagine girls ever solving a mystery, not if they were all like girls in Sunnyside. So, you see, that was sort of a dare, and we made up our mind we would find a mystery and solve it, and then crow about it; but the joke is, we haven’t found a mystery!” Merry continued with: “Peggy and Doris were a committee of two to find one, and they were to make their report last Saturday, but——” “But nothing,” Peg interrupted, “you know we were so busy planning that impromptu skating party out at the Drexel Lodge we didn’t have time to call a meeting.” “Well, if we had called one,” the president persisted, “you girls wouldn’t have had a mystery to present.” “Wouldn’t we, though?” Peg’s eyes fairly glistened. “Doris, now is the psychological moment, as Miss Preen would say, for springing our find.” The girls, except Geraldine, gasped. She was yet too mystified to realize the importance of the announcement. They watched Doris, who unstrapped her school books and drew from her history a clipping from a newspaper. “This is from the Dorchester Chronicle,” she announced, “and it certainly sounds mysterious to Peg and me.” She looked around at them, deliberately, tantalizing. “Oh, for goodness sakes, do hurry and read it,” Bertha Angel urged. “Peg, you read it. You can do it full justice.” Doris passed it over to her fellow-committeeman, who pretended to study it leisurely. “Peg, if you don’t hurry and tell us, we’ll mob you.” Bertha stood up and seized a pillow from the window seat, holding it threateningly. “Be calm, Sister Sleuth,” Peg said. Then she held the small scrap of paper close to a window as the short afternoon was drawing to a close. “It is headed, ‘Information wanted.’ A man owning a cattle ranch in Arizona has written the Chronicle asking that the following letter be given publicity: “‘Dear Sirs: “‘My young and pretty sister, Myra, was sent East to be educated. Our parents wanted to get her away from a ne’er-do-well gambler she had met in Douglas. He followed her East and married her. We never heard from her again, but believe she settled in some small community near Dorchester. I am running the ranch, but half of it belongs to Myra, and, as I believe if she is living she must be in need, I want to find her. “‘(Signed) Caleb K. Cornwall.’” Peg looked up triumphantly. “There! What do you think of that for a mystery?” Merry acknowledged that it was a mystery, of course, but why think the pretty young Myra settled in Sunnyside? “There are at least six small villages within a radius of forty miles,” she reminded them. “Oh, of course, maybe it isn’t our town, but, also, maybe it is.” Peg was not going to let them lose sight of whatever value there was in the “find” she and Doris had made. “Oh, how provoking, here come Jack and Alfred! Now we’ll have to adjourn just when the meeting is most interesting. Ssh! Don’t let them hear us talking about it. Let’s meet here again tomorrow afternoon.” Merry said hurriedly. “But you won’t want me to come, will you?” Geraldine asked, very much hoping that they would say that they did want her. Nor was she disappointed. “Why, of course we do, Gerry.” Then Merry exclaimed self-rebukingly: “How stupid of me! I started to tell in school that Gertrude wanted us to invite you to take her place in the ‘S. S. C.’ for the rest of the winter, while she is away, but I remember now, the gong rang, then I forgot and sort of thought I had told you.” Then Peg asked: “You’d like to be Sleuth Gerry, wouldn’t you?” How the older girl’s eyes were glowing! “I’d like it more than anything that has ever happened in my life,” she answered them. Then Merry put a finger on her lips and nodded toward the hall door. Doris, taking the hint, exclaimed: “And those dear little orphans will be simply delighted to have a Valentine party. We can fix things up so prettily. I do think——” The door had opened and Jack sang out: “Our Sunnyside Spreaders, I observe, are holding one of their most commendable meetings. Unlike the ‘C. D. C.’s,’ they have no secrets to hide.” He winked at Alfred, who laughed so understandingly that the observers were led to believe that Geraldine’s brother had also been admitted to the boys’ club. Nor were they wrong. “How did you like your first day in our country school?” Jack asked Gerry as he crossed to where she sat by the fire and stooped over the blaze to warm his hands. “O, I loved it!” that maiden frankly confessed; then acknowledged, “It’s really nicer in lots of ways than the Dorchester Seminary.” Then she rose. “We’d better be going, Brother,” she began when the telephone whirred. Merry turned from it to say that the Colonel was in town and would call for them in five minutes. “Well, we’ll be over tomorrow to plan that Valentine party for the orphans,” Peg called as the girls trooped away. Then the Colonel’s sleigh bells were heard coming up the drive. Just before she left, Geraldine drew Merry to one side to say in a low voice: “Tell the girls how very grateful I am to them for having taken me in after I had been so unforgivably horrid.” Merry gave her friend’s hand a loving squeeze. “I think we are the ones to ask forgiveness for the prank we played,” she said; then impulsively added: “Let’s be sister-friends, shall we?” Gerry felt the tell-tale flush in her cheeks, but Alfred was calling, “Do hurry, Sister. This isn’t good-bye forever.” And so laughingly they parted. |
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