"Eat soap," said Slim promptly.
Katherine grinned appreciatively at him. "Do you hear that, Anthony?"
Anthony began to look sick. "I"ll do it tomorrow," he said.
"No, you"ll not!" said Slim. "You"ll do it right here and now before all these folks."
Anthony looked beseechingly at Uncle Teddy, but the latter was looking at him sternly. "You brought it upon yourself," he said. "Now either make good your boast or take the alternative."
Slim filled the cup and handed it to Anthony. "I bet I can do it," he said defiantly, and set it to his lips. With the first mouthful his face puckered up. The soup was red hot with pepper. He himself had sprinkled a generous quant.i.ty into the kettle after touching up his own cupful.
But he had been more generous than he knew.
"I can"t drink that stuff," he sputtered. "It"s all pepper."
"That doesn"t make any difference," said Slim, unmoved. "Drink it anyway."
And they made him do it. Cupful after cupful they forced upon him, threatening an immediate diet of soap whenever he paused. After the fifth cup Anthony began to suspect that it was not wise to make rash statements about the capacity of the human stomach; after the sixth he was entirely convinced. The results of that sixth cup made the judges decide to suspend the last of the sentence. Anthony had got all that was coming to him.
A sorrier or more subdued boy never lived than Anthony that night.
"It was heroic treatment," said Uncle Teddy thoughtfully to Aunt Clara, as they wandered off by themselves in the moonlight, "but it took something like that to make any impression on him. He is the most insufferable little braggart that ever lived. I only hope the impression made was deep enough."
And beyond a doubt it was, for never again was Anthony heard to utter a boast in the presence of the rest.
CHAPTER IX
THE DARK OF THE MOON SOCIETY
Gladys stood in her tent under the big murmuring pine tree washing handkerchiefs in her washbasin. "I haven"t enough left to last any time at all now," she confided plaintively to Sahwah, "and I had three dozen when I came. They"re all gone where the good handkerchiefs go, I guess. Somebody is forever getting cut and needing a bandage in a hurry and my handkerchief is invariably the one to be sacrificed to the emergency."
"That"s what you get for always having a clean one," remarked Sahwah.
"Mine are never in fit condition to be used for bandages, consequently I still have them all."
"But you never know where they are," said Gladys. "If you don"t keep your things in order you might as well not own them, for you never have them when you want them anyway."
"And if you do keep them in order somebody else always borrows them and then you don"t have them when you want them either," said Sahwah.
"Life is awfully complicated, isn"t it?" sighed Gladys.
"I should say it was awfully simple," said Sahwah, laughing at Gladys"s solemn tone. "No matter what you do it turns out the same way anyway. I shouldn"t call that complicated."
Gladys hung her handkerchiefs on the tent ropes where they would dry in the wind and emptied the basin of water out of the end of the tent, which opened directly on the bluff. A dismal shriek from below proclaimed that somebody had received a shower bath. Gladys and Sahwah leaned over the tent railing at a perilous angle and peered down. Half way down the bluff, "between the devil and the deep sea," as Sahwah remarked, sat Katherine on a narrow ledge of rock, dangling her feet over the edge and leaning her head dejectedly on her hands. The descending flood had landed on her head and was running in streams over her face from the ends of her wispy hair, making her look more dejected than ever. Her appearance made both the girls above think immediately of Fifi on the occasion of his memorable bath.
"Oh, Katherine, I"m sorry," said Gladys contritely. "I ought to have looked before I poured. But I never expected anybody to be sitting there like a fly on the wall. What are you doing there anyway?"
"Just sitting," replied Katherine in her huskiest tones.
"What"s the matter?" asked Gladys, catching the doleful note in her voice and having inward qualms.
"Just low in my mind," replied Katherine lugubriously.
"Goodness gracious!" exclaimed Gladys. "What about? Can"t we come down and cheer you up? Is there room for two more on that ledge?"
"Always plenty of room on the mourners" bench," said Katherine, moving over.
"All right, we"ll come," said Gladys. "How do you get down? Oh, I see, there"s a sort of path going down behind mother"s tent. Look out, we"re coming."
Sahwah and Gladys crawled backward down the bluff, hanging on to the gra.s.s and roots, and dropped to the ledge beside Katherine. They settled themselves comfortably and swung their feet over the edge.
"Now, tell us your trouble," said Gladys, mopping Katherine"s head with her last clean handkerchief and getting it as wet as those up on the tent ropes.
Katherine hunched her shoulders and drooped her head until it almost touched her chest. "I can"t bear to think of going home!" she said heavily.
"Going home!" echoed Sahwah and Gladys, nearly falling off the ledge in alarm. "You"re not going home, are you? Don"t tell us that you----"
Words failed them and they stared in blank dismay.
It was Katherine"s turn to look alarmed when she caught their meaning.
"Oh, I don"t mean that I"m going home now," she said hastily. "I mean that I can"t bear to think of going home at the end of the summer."
"Gracious!" said Gladys weakly. "Who"s thinking about the end of the summer already? Why, it"s hardly begun. You don"t mean to say that you"re worrying now about going home in September?"
Katherine nodded, without cheering up one bit. "That"s the trouble," she said laconically. "I know it"s a crazy thing to worry about, but when we were having such a good time on the lake this morning I got to thinking how I hated to leave it, even to go to college, and started to get blue right away. And the more I thought about it the bluer I got, and the bluer I got the more I thought about it, and--that"s all there is to it!" she finished with a characteristic gesture of her long arms. "And now I can"t stop thinking about it and I"ve just got the indigoes!"
"Well, of all things!" exclaimed Sahwah. "Aren"t some people the funniest things, though?"
She and Gladys leaned back and regarded Katherine curiously. Here was the girl who stood unmoved by fire or flood, who never worried about an exam; the girl who had calmly rallied the demoralized volley ball team and s.n.a.t.c.hed victory in the face of overwhelming odds, who seemed to have optimism in her veins instead of blood, at the very beginning of the most charming summer in her life, worrying because some time or other it must come to an end! Katherine"s "indigoes" were as startling and unaccountable as her inspirations. And it was not put on for momentary effect, either. She sat limp and listless, the very picture of dejection, and no amount of rallying on the part of the two served to bring her back to her breezy, merry self.
They left her at last in despair, and wearily climbed back to the tents.
"I wish we hadn"t talked to her at all," wailed Sahwah. "Now the thought of going home makes me so blue I can"t bear to think about it." And her voice had such a suspicious catch in it that it made a sympathetic moisture rise in Gladys"s eyes, and she declared she wished they had never come, because it would be so hard to leave!
"Oh, mercy! What geese we are!" said Sahwah, coming to herself with a start. "Worrying about something that"s miles off! Cheer up. We may all get drowned and never have to go home at all. You always want to look on the bright side of things!" And then the pendulum swung the other way, and the two leaned against each other and laughed until their sides ached at their foolishness.
"But poor Katherine was really blue," said Gladys, when they were themselves again. "She has those awful spells once in a long while and they last for days unless she gets mixed up in something exciting and forgets herself. I was really worried on her account once and asked Nyoda about it and she said it was because Katherine has always had to work too hard all her life and it"s done something to her nerves, or whatever you call them, and that"s what makes her have the blues sometimes. She said we should always try to give her something else to think about right off when she got that way and she"d get over it sooner and by and by when she grew stronger she wouldn"t have them at all any more."
"Poor, dear old Katherine!" said Sahwah fervently. "I wish something would happen to cheer her up. If she doesn"t get over it soon she will have the whole family feeling as she does, and think how dreadful it would be!" And then the Captain and the Bottomless Pitt appeared between the trees and challenged them to a canoe race and they speedily forgot Katherine and her woes.
That evening the twins got into a dispute as to who should sit on the bow of the launch on the trip to St. Pierre with the mail and neither would give in, so Uncle Teddy suggested that they settle the point by a crab race on the beach. The crab race consisted of traveling on all fours in a sidewise direction and was as difficult as it was ridiculous.
Anthony won because Antha stepped on her skirt and lost her balance.
Then Sahwah spoke up and said she must insist on her s.e.x having fair play and that in order to make the race fair and above board Anthony must wear a skirt, too. Anthony protested loudly, but the Chiefs ruled that it was right and just, and Anthony, still protesting, was hustled into a skirt of his sister"s and made to run the race over again. The spectators wept with laughter as he fell all over himself, first to one side and then to the other, as he stepped on the skirt, and Antha touched the goal before he had completed half the distance.
"Oh, Anthony," jeered Pitt, "can"t you make a better showing than that?"
"He probably did as well as any of you would," said Hinpoha.
"Bet I could do better," said the Captain.