The Outdoor Girls at Wild Rose Lodge Or, the hermit of Moonlight falls

Excerpt

TRAGEDY

There, pressed so close to the pane of the window that the nose was flattened grotesquely, eyes wildly staring, hair disheveled, was a face that even in that tense moment the girls recognized! the face of Professor Dempsey!

It took the boys perhaps a second to fling out of the room, jump down the steps of the porch and circle the house to the window.

And yet, in that second, the man was gone, leaving no more trace than if the earth had opened and swallowed him up. For almost an hour the boys searched the woods about the lodge, refusing to allow the girls to accompany them, saying truly that they would hamper them more than they could help.

"You see, I was right after all," Amy stated for at least the tenth time. "From the moment the idea came to me, I felt almost sure that poor crazy Professor Dempsey was this thing that was frightening us."

"But did you ever see such an awful face in all your life?" said Mollie, shuddering at the recollection.

"And the look in his eyes as he stared at Roy," Grace added in a hushed voice. "I shouldn't wonder if! if we hadn't been there, he might have murdered him."

"Oh, Gracie, don't!" Amy clapped her hands to her ears. "We are frightened enough without having you say things like that."

"Suppose," said Mollie, in a sepulchral voice, "he should come back before the boys do?"

"That's just what I was thinking," said a quiet voice behind them, and they jumped and cried out in alarm. The next moment they saw it was Mrs. Irving and felt ashamed of themselves.

"I think you had all better come into the house till the boys come back," their chaperon continued. "I shall feel safer when we are behind locked doors."

The girls shivered, but Mollie protested.

"Suppose anything should happen to the boys?" she asked, but here Mrs. Irving chose to exercise her authority.

"We will talk about that when we are inside the house," she said very firmly, and Mollie had nothing else to do but obey.

The girls did breathe a little more freely when the door was locked, but they found themselves wishing even more ardently that the boys would come back.

The window against which the horribly distorted face had been pressed seemed to hold a peculiar fascination for the Outdoor Girls and they found themselves unable to turn their eyes away from it.

"Oh, I wish the boys would come back," moaned Amy, after a few moments more had passed in strained silence. "If anything should happen to them I'm sure I would die."

"Nonsense, Amy," snapped Mollie. "What could one little mad old man do to three big husky soldier boys?"

The words had hardly been spoken when the sound of voices could be heard coming toward the house, and a moment later the boys themselves stamped up on the porch.

"Not a sign of him," said Will in response to the girls' eager questions. "I don't see how he could have disappeared so completely in such a short time."

"We all took different directions, too," said Roy, taking a seat on the couch again and staring fascinatedly at the window....