BACK AT LONG LAKE.
"Why, Bessie"s a regular brick!" said Charlie, as they sat at dinner that night. Eleanor and the two girls were going back to Long Lake on the first train in the morning, and they were celebrating with the best dinner the town of Hamilton could afford. "I told you I needed a nurse, Nell, and here one of you had to save me for the second time since I came here to look after you!"
"That man was terribly clever," said Eleanor, gravely. "I never even knew I was locked in--I was let out before I had had a chance to find it out for myself."
"Bessie and I didn"t know it, either, until she saw him tying Mr. Jamieson up," said Dolly. "We"d have found it out as soon as we wanted to leave the room to go down for lunch, of course, but he was so quiet about locking us in that neither of us heard him at all."
"He was just a little bit too clever," said Charlie. "If he hadn"t been so anxious to make a little more money out of me, he would have got clean away and given that paper to Holmes."
"Not getting it seemed to upset Mr. Holmes a good deal, didn"t it?" laughed Eleanor. "Is it true that he left town by the first train after he heard that the letter had been found when they searched that wretched man?"
"Quite true," said Charlie, happily.
"Just what did happen in court this afternoon?" asked Dolly. "I thought we were going to be witnesses and have all sorts of fun. And now it"s all over and our trip down here has just been wasted!"
"Why, Holmes"s lawyer, Curtin, threw up the case as soon as he heard about that letter, Dolly. There wasn"t anything else for him to do. With that, added to the stories you two girls had to tell, there wasn"t any way of getting those gypsies off."
"Are they going to send them to prison?"
"John will go to jail for six months. He"s the one who actually carried Dolly off, you know. As for Peter and Lolla, who helped him, they get off easily. They were sentenced, too, but the judge suspended sentence. If they forget, and do anything more that"s wrong, they"ll have to serve out their term."
"I"m very glad," said Eleanor. "Poor souls! I don"t believe they understood what a dreadful thing they were doing."
"It was a good thing for them they decided to plead guilty and take their medicine," said Charlie. "Or, I should say, it"s a good thing that Curtin decided it for them. Don"t worry about them any more. Holmes will have to pay John a good deal of money when he comes out of jail to make him keep quiet--if he manages, first, to shut up the people here, so that the whole story doesn"t come out."
"Can he do that, now that they"ve seen that letter?"
"I"m half afraid he can. He"s got a tremendous lot of money, you see, and this is a time when he naturally wouldn"t hesitate much about spending it. And I don"t know that it"s such a bad thing. It gives us a starting point, you see. And if the thing isn"t made public, he may get more reckless, and give us another chance to land him where he belongs, and that"s in the penitentiary. He"s cleared out now and we couldn"t persuade these people to go after him, even if it was worth while, which I don"t believe it is."
"How on earth did you get down?" Eleanor asked Bessie.
"Oh, I saw there wasn"t anything else to do," said Bessie, modestly. "If you could have seen that man"s face! I was terribly frightened. I didn"t know what he might be going to do to Mr. Jamieson, so I just knew I had to get help. And I was afraid to call out of the window."
"Why? Someone would have been sure to hear you," said Eleanor.
"Because I thought the only person who was absolutely sure to hear me was that man who was tying Mr. Jamieson up. And I didn"t know what he would do, but I was afraid he might do something dreadful right away if I called out and he knew that he was being watched."
"You"re all right, Bessie!" said Jamieson, admiringly. "Was it very hard, going down the waterspout?"
"No, it really wasn"t. Dolly was afraid I was going to fall, and she wanted to go herself. But I said I had seen it, and made the plan, and so I had a right to be the one to go. It really wasn"t so far."
"Far enough," said Jamieson, grimly. "You might easily have broken your neck, climbing down three flights that way."
"Oh, but it wasn"t three! It was only one. You see, there was a balcony outside the window, and on the next floor there was another, and I thought that window was pretty sure to be open. It was, so I got inside, and then I found the room I was in was empty, and the door was open, so all I had to do was to walk down the stairs and tell the manager. They all came up and, well, you know what happened then yourself."
"I certainly do!" said Jamieson. "And I don"t think I"m likely to forget it very soon, either. That was a pretty tough character. I"ll remember his face, all right."
"Well," said Eleanor, happily, "all"s well that ends well, they say. I really believe Dolly had the worst time, when you think about it. She had to watch Bessie climbing down that waterspout."
"That was dreadful," said Dolly, shuddering at the memory. "But I think it was much worse for Mr. Jamieson and Bessie than for me."
"Bessie was so busy getting down that I don"t believe she had much time to think about the danger," said Eleanor. "And Mr. Jamieson didn"t know her door was locked, so he had the relief of thinking that she"d been able to get help in just an ordinary fashion. Of course, if he or I had known what a risk she was running we"d have been half wild with anxiety about her. So you see it really was hard for you not to scream or do anything to startle that man."
"That was what I was afraid of most," said Bessie. "I don"t know what I"d have done if Dolly had screamed."
"You needn"t have been afraid! I was too frightened even to open my mouth," said Dolly, honestly. "I couldn"t have uttered a sound, no matter what depended on it, until I saw you were all right. And then I just slumped down and laughed--as if there was something funny."
"Well, we can all laugh at it now," said Eleanor. "Are you going back to the city to-night, Charlie?"
"No, I guess I"ll be held up here until about noon to-morrow," he answered. "I"ve got to appear against that poor chap, and there are one or two other matters I want to attend to while I"m here. I"ll see you on your train in the morning, and I"ll try to look out for myself when you"re gone."
It was an enthusiastic and eagerly curious crowd of girls that welcomed them back to Long Lake the next day when, in the middle of the morning, the well-remembered camp appeared. Miss Drew, who had taken Eleanor"s place as Guardian, laughed as she greeted her friend.
"I don"t know how you do it, Nell," she said. "I never saw anything like these girls of yours. They did their best not to let me know, but I managed to find out, without their knowing it, that you did about everything in a different way from mine--and a much better way."
"Nonsense!" said Eleanor. "I"ve made a few changes in the theoretical rules of the Camp Fire. All Guardians are allowed to do that, you know. But it"s only because they seemed to suit us a little better--my ideas, I mean."
"You know," said Anna Drew, thoughtfully, "I think that"s the very best thing about the Camp Fire. It doesn"t hold you down to hard and fast rules that have got to be followed just so."
"If it did, it would defeat its own purposes," said Eleanor. "What we want to do--and it"s for Guardians, if they"re youngsters like you and me, as well as for the girls--is to train ourselves to attend to our jobs properly."
"Why, what jobs do you mean?"
"The job every girl ought to get sooner or later--running a home. It"s a lot more of a job, and a lot more difficult, and important, too, than waiting on people in a shop, or being a stenographer, and yet no one ever thinks an awful lot about it before it comes along."
"That"s so, Nell. I never thought of it just that way. But you"re right. We get married, and a whole lot of us don"t have any idea at all of how to look after a house."
"It isn"t fair to the men who marry us. Marriage is supposed to be a partnership--husband and wife as partners. But if the man knew as little about his part of the job as the woman generally does about hers when she gets married, most married couples would be in the poorhouse in a year."
"That sounds old-fashioned, but I don"t believe it is, somehow."
"It certainly is not. It"s what I try to keep in mind. That"s why we don"t go in much for talking about votes for women. I"m not saying we ought not to vote, or that we ought to. But I do think there are a lot of things we ought to think about first. Times have changed a lot, but after all women and men don"t change so very much. Or, at least, they ought not to change."
"I think I see what you"re driving at. You mean that your great grandmother and mine probably spun cloth and made clothes for themselves and most of the family, and did all sorts of other things that we never think of doing?"
"Yes. And I don"t mean that we ought to go back to that. A man can buy a better shirt in a shop now for less money than you or I would have to spend in making him one. But there are plenty of other things we could do in a house that we never seem to think of, somehow."
"I don"t see how you think of all that! I thought I"d spent a lot of time studying the Camp Fire, but I never got hold of those ideas."
"Oh, they"re not all mine--not a bit of it! You ought to talk to Mrs. Chester, our Chief Guardian. She"d make you think, and she"d make you believe you were doing it all by yourself, too."
"Yes, she"s wonderful. I don"t know her very well, but I hope to see more of her this winter. I want to be Guardian of a Camp Fire of my own. I"ve had just enough of the work, subst.i.tuting for other girls, to want to spend a lot more time at it."
"You"ll get the chance all right--don"t worry about that! It"s Guardians we need more than anything else. It isn"t as easy as you would think to get girls and women who"ve got the patience and the time for the work. But that"s chiefly because they don"t know how fascinating it is, and how much more fun there is in doing it than in spending all your time going about having what people call a "good time." I"ve never had such a good time in my life as since we got up this Manasquan Camp Fire."
"Well, I wish I could stay with you, and go on this wonderful tramp with you. But I"ve got a lot of girls coming up to visit me, and I"ve simply got to be there to entertain them. So if you"re really going to stay, and don"t need me any more, I"ll have to be getting Andrew to take me back home again."
"I wish you could stay, too, but if you can"t, you can"t. I"m ever so grateful to you for coming. I can tell you right now that there aren"t many people I"d trust my girls to, as I did with you!"
"I know it"s a compliment, Nell, so you needn"t talk about grat.i.tude. I"m the one to be grateful, I"m sure. The more experience I get before I"m a regular Guardian myself, the better chance I"ll have to make good when the time comes."
"I"m ever so glad you feel that way about it, Anna. You know, there are ever and ever so many girls who could do the work, and won"t try. I"m not sure that it"s so much "won"t" as--oh, I don"t know! I think they"re afraid--they haven"t any confidence in themselves. They think it would be absurd for them to try to direct others. I felt that way myself."
"Nearly everyone who is at all likely to make good does, Anna. That"s the strangest part of it. When I hear a girl talking about how easy it is to be a good Guardian, "and how sure she is that she"ll make good, I"m always afraid she"s going to fail. If you make the girls understand they"ve got to help you, and that you know that if they don"t you won"t be able to succeed, you get them ever so much more interested."
"That"s easy to understand. It makes them feel that they really do have a part in the work. I noticed that about your girls, particularly, Nell. They seemed to feel that they were all a part of the Camp Fire."
"Well, that"s the spirit I"ve always tried to put into them. I"m very glad if I"ve really succeeded in doing it. It was a good deal of a trust for me, as well as for them--leaving them to you. It shows, I think, that the Camp Fire is in good shape and able to get along, not exactly by itself, but under different conditions. I might easily have to leave them, you know, and if they couldn"t go right ahead under another Guardian, I"d feel that my work had been, in a way, at least, a failure."
"All ready, Miss Drew!" called old Andrew, and then the girls gathered on the beach and sung the Wo-he-lo song as the boat glided off.
Eleanor welcomed the quiet days that followed, during which she completed the plans for the field day in which the Boy Scouts were also to take part, and for the long tramp she planned as the chief event of the summer for her girls.
"It seems sort of slow, now that those gypsies have gone, and there"s no one to make trouble for us," Dolly complained. But Bessie and Zara, who heard her, only laughed at her.
"You"d better be careful," said Zara. "First thing you know you"ll be starting some new trouble."
"She"s right," said Bessie. "You said when we got away from that gypsy that you"d had enough excitement for awhile, Dolly."
"Oh, well," Dolly pouted, "it is slow up here--no place to buy soda, no moving picture shows--nothing!"
"I call the swimming and the walks pretty exciting," said Zara. "I"m really learning. I went about twenty yards this afternoon."
"But I know how to swim, and one walk is just like another," said Dolly.
"Well, we"ll have the field day pretty soon, and then, after that, we"ll start on our long walk. There"ll be plenty of excitement then, and one walk won"t be just like another. I bet you"ll be wishing for a train before we"re down in the valley again."
CHAPTER VIII.
A NOVEL RACE.
The morning of the long-awaited field day dawned clear and bright. The camp was stirring with the first rays of the rising sun, that gilded the tree tops to the east, and painted the surface of the lake, smooth as a mirror, with a hundred hues. The day promised to be hot in the open, but there was no danger of great heat on the march, which was entirely through the woods.
"We won"t worry about how hot it"s going to be under the sun," said Eleanor Mercer as the girls sat at their early breakfast.
"No. Our work is under the trees, until we get to the camping spot," said Margery Burton.
"Now here"s the plan of campaign," said Eleanor. "I am going to send two girls ahead to build the fire. That"s the most important thing, really--to get the fire started."
"We can"t use matches, can we?" asked Zara.
"No, the fire must be made Indian fashion, with two sticks. But we all know how to do that, I think. The idea of sending two girls ahead is to have that part of the work done when the main body reaches our camping ground."
"Where is that? We can know now, can"t we, Wanaka?" asked Margery.
"Yes, it"s all right to tell you now. You know those twin peaks beyond Little Bear Lake--North Peak and South Peak?"
"Yes," came the answer, in chorus.
"Well, our place is on North Peak, and Mr. Hastings will take his Scouts to South Peak. The trails are different, but they"re the same length."
"Why was that kept such a secret?" asked Bessie.
"Because Mr. Hastings and I decided that it would be fairer if there was no chance at all to go over the trail first and learn all about it. Then there was the chance that if either party thought of it they could locate kindling wood and fallen wood that could be used for the fire-making. On a regular hike, you see, you would go to a place that was entirely strange, and it seemed better to keep things just as near to regular hiking conditions as we could."
"Oh, I see! And that"s a good idea, too. It"s just as fair for one as for the other, then."
"Who are going to be the two girls to go ahead? And why can"t we all get there at the same time?" asked Dolly.
"One question at a time," said Eleanor, with a laugh. "I"ll answer the second one first. We"ve got to carry all the things we need for making camp and getting a meal cooked. So if we send out two girls ahead, with nothing to carry, they can make much better time than those who have the heavy loads."
"Will they do the same thing?" asked Zara. "The Boy Scouts, I mean?"
Eleanor smiled.
"Ah, I don"t know," she said. "They will if Mr. Hastings thinks of it, I"m sure, because it would be a good move in a race."
"Is it quite fair in case they don"t happen to think of it?" asked Margery, doubtfully.
"Why not? This isn"t just like a foot-race. It isn"t altogether a matter of speed and strength, or even of endurance--"
"I should hope not!" declared Dolly. "If it was, what chance would we have against those boys?"
"Suppose we found some new way of rubbing sticks that would make fire quicker than the regular way, it would be fair to use that, wouldn"t it, Margery?" asked Bessie.
"That"s the idea. Bessie"s right, Margery," said Eleanor. "We have a perfect right, and so have they, to employ any time-saving idea we happen to get hold of. And I"m quite sure this is a good one, and that Mr. Hastings will think of it, too."
"Well, I hope he doesn"t do anything of the sort!" said Margery, wholly converted and now enthusiastic for the plan.
"You haven"t told us yet who is to go ahead," said Dolly. "I"m just crazy to be one of the two--"
"We all are! Who wouldn"t like to get out of carrying a load?" cried two or three girls in chorus.
Eleanor laughed at the eagerness they displayed.
"It won"t be all fun for the pathfinders, as we"ll call them," she said. "They"ve got a lot of responsibility, you see."
"What sort of responsibility?" asked Margery. "All they"ve got to do is to go just as fast as they can and make a fire when they get to the peak."
"That isn"t all they"ve got to do, though. They"ve got to make a smoke signal, for one thing, by stopping the smoke with a blanket, and then letting it rise, straight up, three times. And they"ve got to go to work and get enough wood to keep the fire going, as soon as they"ve lighted it."
"But they"ll be able to go along ever so easily on the trail!"