"All right. You may need it later."

The taxi-cab driver paid no attention to the girls as they got in.

Scorch took his seat beside him, and they were off. In a very few minutes they stopped at Garvan's Hotel, in a much better-looking neighborhood, and Scorch paid for the cab.

"Come on, now, and let me do the talking," said the red-headed youth.

"That gray man is ahead of us; but he isn't the whole thing around _this_ hotel. They know me better than they do him."

n.o.body sought to stop them, however. They went up in the elevator and got out at the third floor. Scorch led the way along the corridor, and suddenly turned the k.n.o.b of a door without knocking. The door was unlocked.

"Here! What do you want in here, young man?" snapped a voice that Nancy and Jennie recognized.

It was Senator Montgomery. Scorch pushed ahead.

"I must see Mr. Gordon," he said. "I've been with him ever since he was brought in from the wreck. I'm takin' my orders from him."

"He is in no fit shape to give orders. You can't see him----"

He broke off with a startled cry when he saw the girls.

"Where--where did they come from?" he gasped.

"Right from where you locked them in, Mister," replied the boy, boldly.

"But you didn't count on me; did you? I was on the job. Mr. Gordon has asked to see Nancy Nelson, and he's going to see her."

"You young scoundrel!" exclaimed the man in gray. "I'll have you arrested for breaking and entering."

"All right, sir," returned the youth, quite calmly, but walking swiftly to the window of the room. "See yonder, Mister? See that cop on the corner? Well, that's Mike Dugan. He's my next-door neighbor. And if you were the President of the United States, instead of a senator, Mike Dugan would be a bigger man than you.

"Understand? Nancy Nelson sees Mr. Gordon just as soon as the nurse says it's all right. You try to interfere and I'll call my friend up here!"

The inner door opened and a white-capped nurse appeared.

"Not so much talking, please!" she said, severely. "You are disturbing Mr. Gordon. Has the girl appeared yet?"

Nancy Nelson ran forward. Senator Montgomery tried to stop her; but Scorch was right in his path.

"Stand back!" exclaimed the red-haired youth, emulating his favorite heroes of fiction. "She's a-going to see him!"

"Of course she is," said the nurse, taking Nancy's hand. "I believe it will do him more good than anything else. He is worried about something, and if he relieves his mind, the doctor says, he has a very good chance of recovering."

"He's mad. He's not fit to talk with anyone," declared Senator Montgomery, as the door closed behind Nancy and the nurse stood on guard.

The man was dripping with perspiration and showed every evidence of panic.

"Say, boss," advised Scorch, "if Mr. Gordon is likely to tell anything that is goin' to incriminate you, as the newspapers puts it, take my tip: Get away while you can."

And whether because of Scorch's word, or for other reasons, Mr.

Montgomery tiptoed from the room, and was not seen again about the hotel. Nancy and Jennie remained, however, for several days, being a.s.signed to a room next to Mr. Gordon's suite.

Just what pa.s.sed between the injured man and Nancy Nelson n.o.body but the two will ever know. Nancy did not tell everything even to her chum. But Mr. Bruce likewise had a long interview with the lawyer that very day and at once went to work under the injured man's direction to obtain certain property which might be tampered with by those who had kept Nancy out of her rightful fortune for so long.

Henry Gordon was equally guilty with his old partner, Montgomery. But the latter had benefited more largely from the crime, and Gordon had been a party to it under duress.

Years before, when he lived in California, Henry Gordon had been tempted to commit a crime. Had it become known he never could have practised law again--in any state. Montgomery knew of the lawyer's slip and held it over him.

The Senator's wife had a sister who was married to a very wealthy man--Arnold Nelson. It was supposed that Mr. Nelson's family--himself, his wife, and little daughter--had died suddenly of a fever during an epidemic in a coast town.

With the child dead, the entire property belonging to the Nelsons came to Senator Montgomery's wife, and he had the handling of it. But Gordon, who had known and loved, as a young man, Nancy's mother, after the parents' death found the deserted little girl, placed her with Miss Prentice at Higbee School, and forced Montgomery to pay, year by year, for the child's board and education.

Where Nancy was, Montgomery did not know until he came across her at Pinewood Hall. Gordon had no idea that the Senator intended sending his own daughter to Pinewood, too.

So that, in brief, was the story the broken and injured lawyer told his charge. Later he explained more fully to Mr. Bruce, Jennie's father, and with the aid of good counsel, Mr. Bruce made the Montgomerys disgorge the great fortune that they had withheld from Nancy's use all these years.

In the end Mr. Gordon did not die. He remained an invalid for some time, but slowly recovered. Nancy, by that time, had become such a necessity to him that he went to Clintondale for the weeks of convalescence when the doctors refused to let him get back into legal harness again.

He was really a changed man. He could not act as Nancy's guardian; Mr.

Bruce, Jennie's father, did that. But there was scarcely a pleasant afternoon during the remainder of Nancy's junior year, while Mr. Gordon was at Clintondale, that a very red-haired youth, in a smart auto outfit, did not drive up to the school entrance in a little runabout, and whisk Nancy down to the village hotel to see Mr. Gordon for an hour or so.

And Nancy learned to like Mr. Gordon better than she had ever expected to when she first bearded the lion in his den.

CHAPTER x.x.x

NO LONGER A n.o.bODY

After Jennie Bruce's father, on behalf of Nancy, made his first demand upon Senator Montgomery in reprisal of the latter's diversion of Nancy's fortune, Grace Montgomery disappeared suddenly from Pinewood Hall.

It had been so sudden that the girls--especially those who had been so friendly with her--could scarcely recover from the shock.

At first, when Nancy and Jennie had gone off at midnight, it was rumored around the school (said rumor starting from Cora Rathmore's room) that the two chums had been expelled for holding an "orgy" after hours. And there was n.o.body to contradict this statement, eagerly repeated by the Montgomery clique, until Jennie came back.

She was bound not to tell Nancy's secret, however; otherwise Grace Montgomery would have "sung small." The latter, however, was her bold and mischievous self right up to the very day--some weeks later--when she received a long letter from her heart-broken mother.

Mrs. Montgomery had never known the truth about her sister's child. It became known somehow that Grace's mother begged Grace to make a friend of Nancy and try to influence her to make her lawyer's demands less severe upon the Senator, for his fortune was toppling.

But Grace would never have done this. She had talked of, and to, Nancy Nelson too outrageously. She could not have asked a favor of the girl she so disliked--whom she doubly disliked now!

So she borrowed her fare of Madame Schakael and took the first train home; and Pinewood Hall never saw her again. Indeed, the girls she left behind scarcely heard of Grace Montgomery. She never wrote to Cora, even; and had Bob Endress not come over from Cornell for the New Year dance, Nancy and Jennie would not have heard much about her.

"They have all gone back to California," said Bob, who did not at all understand the rights of the matter. "Somehow the Senator has lost most of his money, and they had just enough left to buy a little fruit ranch down in the state somewhere. Too bad!"

Nancy did not explain. Why should she have injured his cousin in his estimation? But she and Bob remained very good friends.

Nancy lived quite as plainly as she had before. She saw no reason for changing her mode of living because the lawyers told her there were great sums of money in store for her.

That summer, however, she _did_ insist on taking the entire Bruce family to the mountains as her guests; for they had been very kind to her, and that while she was still "A Little Miss n.o.body."