Jane and Dozia rushed up to Miss Gifford, the matron, and asked about the outside alarm.  At her word Jane jumped to the fire box, smashed the glass with her golf club and then turned the key.

By this time the students were outside the building, and in their night robes the seventy-five freshmen shivered from fear and exposure, while Miss Gifford, Jane and Dozia tried to reassure them.

“Where’s the fire?” asked Jane, as the local brigade of volunteer citizens dashed in the grounds through the main gateway.

“Where is it?” demanded Miss Gifford of the students.  There was no smoke, no blaze, not even an odor of things burning could be distinguished.

“It must have been in the big attic,” someone said, “for it was the old brass bell that rang first.”

“Who gave the alarm?” demanded the matron.

No one answered this, and the momentary pause was broken now by the wild rush of the fire department along the roadway.

First the hose cart, the “hook and ladder” jerked up to the porch where the girls waited, breathless but calmer now that men and means had come to their rescue.

“One side!  One side!” shouted the chief, and to the credit of that department it must be said his men stretched their line of hose along from the hydrant and up those steps, even through the crowd of trembling students, in regular fire drill time.  Jane stepped inside the hall and was sniffing audibly.

“Wait a minute!” she commanded.  “We haven’t located the fire yet and it may not be very much.  The house is equipped with extinguishers,” she informed the alert chief.  “They may answer without water.”

The rubber coated men held their hose high and were ready to shout in signal to the man at the hydrant, while Jane took the chief upstairs.  He never spoke but tramped ahead as if a word would imperil the dignity of the Wide Awake Hose Company.  Neither did Jane venture further remarks for she was “gunning” for the fire and thinking of ghosts!

Doors to right and left were promptly pushed open but no evidence of fire could be found.

“Try the attic,” said the chief finally, “rubbish might catch from a flue.”

At his order Jane turned into the narrow box stairway, lighted only by a flash in the hands of Chief Murry.

The actual panic of that yell and its subsequent fire alarm was now subsiding in Jane’s mind, and instead of Fire the whole situation assumed an aspect of Ghosts.  In spite of her courage she was very glad the chief was at her heels, and when she finally reached the last narrow step and stood under the rafters, Jane Allen sent a sweeping eye over that dark attic.

“Not here!” declared the fireman before she could see more than the inky blackness of the old garret, with only that one spot of moonlight pasted on the slanting roof by an invisible window.

As he turned Jane felt obliged to follow, although she would have been glad to go further in and see what it was that moved over by the patch of moonlight.  Something did move—­she was sure of that, but a fireman and a chief could not be asked to investigate anything but smoke or flame, and neither element was discernible, so she followed down the box stairway to confront the waiting brigade.