“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.

“let’s ask miss olaine.”

119 “i wouldn’t dare! you wouldn’t dare yourself, tavia?”

“no—o. i guess i wouldn’t. she—she’s so different from the other teachers. i feel just as though she’d slap me!”

“wait a minute!” exclaimed dorothy, thinking hard. “something mrs. pangborn said to me—i remember.”

“what about? what’s mrs. pangborn got to do with the mystery?”

“she hinted that there had been something in miss olaine’s life that excused her harshness—something that if we girls knew it would make us forgive her irritability.”

“what is it?” asked the curious tavia.

“i don’t know. i haven’t the least idea. mrs. pangborn intimated that she had no right to tell us.”

“why, i think that’s puzzling,” admitted tavia. “but i can’t work up much sympathy for olaine on that showing. i want details.”

“and i want details of tom moran’s mix-up with the rector street school fire. oh, tavia!”

“what is it?” demanded her friends, quite startled by the way dorothy had clutched at her.

“i know how we can find out.”

“about miss olaine?”

“about tom moran and the fire. there are the files of the city papers. father used to always120 keep files of the bugle when he ran it in dalton. let’s go to town the very next chance we get and go to the office of the courier. we can read all about the fire of two years ago.”

“of course it would take you, dorothy dale, to think of that,” said tavia, admiringly.

“will you do it?”

“of course. we’ll go saturday.”

“but you will have to be careful and get no ‘conditions’ this week,” warned dorothy.

“oh! i’ll be as good as gold—you see,” promised tavia.

and, really, it did seem as though even miss olaine could find nothing for which to find fault in tavia’s conduct that week. the irrepressible tried very hard indeed to attend to nothing but her studies—and her meals!

she was almost perfect, even, in her french, and tavia was not partial to french. “goodness knows, i’ll never get to paris, and what use is there in learning french in these united states, just so’s to be able to read the menus at the fashionable hotels?” complained tavia.

“but, it is considered quite the thing,” suggested ned ebony.

“oh, sure! everybody who’s made a little money in oil, or coal, or pork, or wheat, has to have a french teacher. say, doro! do you remember121 mrs. painter, in dalton? the lady whose husband had an awful lot of money left him?”

“oh, i remember!” laughed dorothy. “poor woman! she wanted to be so refined and educated all of a sudden.”

“that’s the lady,” said tavia.

“what about her?” demanded cologne.

“she tried to learn french. at any rate, she learned a few phrases, and she used to work them into conversation in such a funny way,” tavia explained, giggling over the thought of the poor lady.

“she went into the butcher shop one day and asked sam smike, the butcher, if he had any ‘bon-vivant’.”

“‘bon-vivant’?” gasped cologne. “what—what——”

“that’s what sam wanted to know,” giggled tavia. “he says to her: ‘boned what, ma’am?’

“and mrs. painter said, perfectly serious: ‘why, bon-vivant, you know. that’s the french for good liver.’”

“why, tavia! how ridiculous!” exclaimed ned ebony. “it couldn’t be——”

“it’s true, just the same. at any rate, sam smike told it to me himself.”

however, even french did not floor tavia that week. on saturday mrs. pangborn made no objection122 to the two friends going to the city by train—presumably to do a little shopping.

and they did shop. they had three full hours in town, and they could afford the time. then they went to the courier office, and dorothy sent in her father’s card and her own to one of the editors, and he kindly came out and allowed them to visit “the morgue,” as he called the biographical room, where a young man in spectacles and with a streak of dust on the side of his nose, lifted down heavy, bound volumes of the courier and showed them how to find the articles for which they were in search.

the rector street school fire had been a local disaster of some moment. the first hastily written account, on the day of the fire, did not contain that which interested dorothy and tavia. but in the second day’s edition they found what they had never expected to learn—about both celia moran’s brother and miss olaine.