“The Girls of Central High at Basketball; Or, The Great Gymnasium Mystery,” the third volume of the series, told of the girls when they had become juniors and related the struggle of the rival basketball teams of the three Centerport highs, and the high schools of Keyport and Lumberport, at either end of Lake Luna, for the trophy cup. That series of games had just been finished and Central High had won the trophy, when Laura and her friends, as members of the M. O. R., are again introduced to the reader’s notice at the opening of this chapter.
CHAPTER II – WHAT JOSEPHINE MORSE NEEDED
In spite of the bright lights illuminating the windows of the M. O. R. house – and many other larger and finer houses at that end of Whiffle Street – outside it was dark and dreary enough. Especially was this so at the “poverty-stricken end,” as Josephine Morse called her section of the street. Jess and her widowed mother lived on the fringe of the wealthy Hill district, where Whiffle Street develops an elbow, suddenly becomes narrow, and debouches upon Market Street.
It was raining, too. Not an honest, splashing downpour, but a drizzling, half-hearted rain that drifted about the streets as though ashamed of itself, leaving a deposit of slime on all the crosswalks, and making the corner street-lamps weep great tears. The gas-lamps, too, seemed in a fog and struggled feebly against the blackness of the evening.
Under a huge umbrella which snuffed her almost like a candle, Jess had made her way into Market Street and to Mr. Closewick’s grocery store near the corner. She carried a basket on her arm and she had given the clerk rather a long list of necessary things, although she had studied to make the quantities as modest as possible. The clerk had put them all up now and packed them into the basket and stood expectantly with the list checked off in his hand.
“Two dollars and seven cents, Miss Jess,” he said.
“I’ll have to ask you to add that to our bill,” said the girl, flushing. “Mother is short of money just now.”
“Wait a moment, Miss Jess; I’ll speak to Mr. Closewick,” said the clerk, seemingly as much embarrassed as the girl herself, and he stepped hastily toward the glass-enclosed office at the rear of the store.
But the pursy old man with the double chin and spectacles on his forehead, the height of which the wisp of reddish-gray hair could not hide, had observed it all. He got down ponderously from his stool and squeaked out behind the long counter in his shiny boots.
“I sent my bill over to your mother this morning, Miss Jess,” he said. “It is more than twenty dollars without this list of goods to-night,” and he shook the modest little paper in his hand, having taken it from the clerk.
“Mother is short of money just now,” repeated Jess.
“So’m I. You tell her so. I can’t let you increase your indebtedness,” and his pudgy hand lifted the basket and put it on the shelf behind him.
“You pay me something on account, or pay for these goods you’ve ordered this evening. I’m needing money, too.”
“Mr. Closewick! I hope you won’t do that,” gasped Jess, paling under his stern glance. “We will pay you – we always have. Mother sometimes has to wait for her money – a long time. We spend many a twenty-dollar bill in your store during the year – ”
“That ain’t neither here nor there,” said the grocer, ponderously. “It’s a rule I have. Never let a bill run more than twenty dollars. ’Specially where there’s no man in the family. Hard to collect from a woman. Makes me bad friends if I press ’em. I can afford to risk losing twenty dollars; but no more!”
“How can you!” cried Jess, under her breath, for there was somebody else entering the store. “We have bought of you for years – ”
“And if I hadn’t stuck to the few business rules I have, I wouldn’t have been here selling you goods for years,” returned Mr. Closewick, grimly. “The sheriff would have sold me out. I’m sorry for your mother, and I don’t want to lose her trade. But business is business.”
“And you cannot favor us for this single occasion?” choked Jess.
“It would lead to others; I can’t break a rule,” said the grocer, stubbornly. “Come now, Miss Jess! You go home and tell your mother how it is. I’ll keep this basket right here for you, and you come back with the two-seven, and it will be all right.”
“That would be useless,” said Jess, clinging to the counter for support, and feeling for the moment as though she should sink, “We haven’t any money – at present. If we had I should not have asked you for any extension of credit. Please give me back my basket.”
“So?” returned the grocer, frowning. “Very well,” and he deliberately unpacked the parcels and handed her the basket – making a show of so doing in the presence of the newly arrived customer. “And what can I do for you, this evening, Mrs. Brown?” he asked, blandly, speaking to the new arrival while he handed Jess her basket without a word.
“And that woman will tell about it all over town!” thought the girl, as she hurried into the street. “Oh, dear, dear! whatever shall I do?”
For the cupboard at the Morse cottage was very bare indeed. Mrs. Mary Morse had some little standing as a contributor to the more popular magazines; but the returns from her pen-work being her entire means of income, there were sometimes weary waitings for checks. Jess had been used to these unpleasant occasions ever since she was a very little girl. Her mother was of a nervous temperament and easily disturbed; and as Jess had grown she had tried to shield her mother, at these times of famine, from its most unpleasant features.
As witness her passage-at-arms with the grocer, Mr. Closewick. No money in the house, an empty pantry, their credit cut off at the store where they had always traded, and no credit established at any other grocer’s shop! The situation looked desperate, indeed, to Jess Morse.
Jess shrank from trying the butcher’s and the dairy store, too. At each shop an unpaid bill would stare her in the face and to-night she felt as though each proprietor would demand a “payment on account.” It was a black night indeed. November was going out in its very mournfullest and dismallest manner.
And for Jess Morse there was an added burden of disappointment and trouble. She was not able to attend the M. O. R. reception, although she was a member. Laura Belding, her very dearest friend, would be there and would wonder why she, Jess, did not appear. And after the reception Chet Belding, Laura’s brother, would be waiting to take Jess home – she hadn’t had the heart to tell Chet that she would not need his escort from the reception.
But, as Jess had told her mother, that blue party dress had become impossible. Let alone its being months behind the fashion, it was frayed around the bottom and the front breadth was sorely stained. And she hadn’t another gown fit to put on in the evening. She did so long for something to wear at a party in which her friends would not know her two blocks away. So she had “cut” the reception at the M. O. R. house.
All this was a heavy load on Jess Morse’s mind as she approached, with hesitating steps, the butter and egg shop kept by Mr. Vandergriff.
“Certainly,” thought the troubled girl, “I either need a whole lot of courage, or a lot of money – either would come in very handy to-night.”
Just then Jess was aroused from her brown study by hearing somebody calling breathlessly after her.
“Hi! Hi! Aren’t you going to look around? Jess Morse!”
A girl smaller than herself, and dressed from neck to heels in a glistening raincoat, ran under Jess’s umbrella and seized her arm. She was a laughing, curly-haired girl with dancing black eyes and an altogether roguish look.
“Jess Morse! don’t you ever look back on the street – no matter what happens?” she demanded.
“For what was Lot’s wife turned to salt, Bobby?” returned Jess, solemnly.
“For good! Now you know, don’t you?” laughed Clara Hargrew, whose youthful friends knew her as “Bobby.”
“Why