“But we aren’t mixed up in the House Party at all, Miss Snively,” she said earnestly. “We heard about it, and I found out that Cora Burton was going to be in it and I tried to make her stay home and she refused, so we girls decided we would take action to take her out of it by luring her up here and keeping her until the thing was over. That’s why I asked Cora to meet me on the corner, and I really thought you were Cora all the while. You imitated her squeaky voice to perfection.”
As Katherine was telling her perfectly truthful story she had a dreadful feeling that it didn’t sound plausible at all. Under Miss Snively’s cold eye nothing seemed real.
“Likely story!” said Miss Snively sneeringly. “And how does it happen that if you wanted to bring Cora out of temptation you should take her to the place where the mice were being boxed up ready to be taken to the party?” All the girls looked so disconcerted. Those dreadful mice did complicate matters so! They would have given anything if Nyoda had been there then.
The Captain was beginning to take in the situation. He came forward frankly. “It’s our fault about the mice,” he said, looking Miss Snively straight in the eye. “We found them in a field near here all boxed up and thought it would be a good joke on the girls to bring them over here and let them out. We don’t know anything about your squabbles at Washington High, except what little the girls here have told us; we’re all from Carnegie Mechanic. And we know the girls didn’t have a hand in it, because they were giving a show here to-night.”
His story was backed up by all the other boys, and then Mrs. Evans got in a word and declared that Katherine was telling the whole truth about Cora, and Miss Snively was forced, however ungraciously, to admit that she had been mistaken in her suspicions.
“If she’d been a man I’d have made her eat her words,” declared Slim wrathfully, after Miss Snively had departed from the scene.
Mrs. Evans and Gladys, with perfect courtesy, offered to drive her home in their car, and for the present oil was poured on the troubled waters.
Katherine sat hunched gloomily before the fire and held-forth to the Winnebagos. “I don’t know whether the joke’s on her or on us,” she said pessimistically; “but one thing I’m sure of, and that is, that never, never, as long as I live, will I ever again try to save a girl from herself.”