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Title: The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp

Author: Katherine Stokes

Release date: November 28, 2007 [eBook #23645]

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MOTOR MAIDS AT SUNRISE CAMP ***

E-text prepared by Roger Frank
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)

Presently Mr. Lupo came in with a tray of cups and saucers and a pot of steaming hot coffee.
Presently Mr. Lupo came in with a tray of cups and saucers
and a pot of steaming hot coffee.—Page 29.

THE MOTOR MAIDS

AT SUNRISE CAMP

BY

KATHERINE STOKES

AUTHOR OF “THE MOTOR MAIDS’ SCHOOL DAYS,” “THE MOTOR MAIDS

BY PALM AND PINE,” “THE MOTOR MAIDS ACROSS THE CONTINENT,”

“THE MOTOR MAIDS BY ROSE, SHAMROCK AND THISTLE,”

“THE MOTOR MAIDS IN FAIR JAPAN,” ETC.

WITH FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS

BY CHARLES L. WRENN

M. A. DONOHUE & COMPANY

CHICAGO        NEW YORK

Copyright, 1914,
BY
HURST & COMPANY

Made in U. S. A.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER |  |  | PAGE
I. |  | Off For the Mountains. | 5
II. |  | The Camp. | 19
III. |  | Rules and Regulations. | 34
IV. |  | Table Top. | 50
V. |  | In the Bog. | 67
VI. |  | The Doctor. | 83
VII. |  | Phoebe. | 101
VIII. |  | The Gypsy Cooks. | 114
IX. |  | A Lesson By the Wayside. | 132
X. |  | Alberdina Schoenbachler | 146
XI. |  | A Comedy of Errors. | 162
XII. |  | The Return. | 177
XIII. |  | Billie and the Doctor. | 190
XIV. |  | Chance News. | 204
XV. |  | A Warning. | 221
XVI. |  | The Attack. | 234
XVII. |  | The Force of Eloquence. | 249
XVIII. |  | The Morning After. | 262
XIX. |  | The Mills of God. | 273
XX. |  | A Long Sleep. | 286
XXI. |  | Comrades of the Road. | 304

The Motor Maids in Sunrise Camp.

CHAPTER I.

OFF FOR THE MOUNTAINS.

“Sunrise Camp! What next, pray tell me?” sighed Miss Helen Campbell.

“But it doesn’t mean getting up at sunrise, Cousin Helen,” Billie Campbell assured her. “Although Papa says we would like it, once we got started. Campers always do rise with the sun. It’s the proper thing to do.”

“But why do they give it that uncivilized name?” continued Miss Campbell in an injured tone of voice. “Why not Sunset Camp or Meridian Camp or even Moonrise Camp? There is nothing restful to me in the name of ‘Sunrise.’”

“It will be restful, indeed it will, dear cousin, once you are used to the life, and it couldn’t be called any of those other names because they would not be appropriate. You see there is a wonderful view of the sunrise from the camp, and every morning if you wake early enough you see a beautiful pink light all over the sky and you wonder where the sun is; and suddenly he comes shooting up from behind the tallest mountain in the range across the valley, and it’s really quite late by then. He has been up ever so long, but he’s been hiding behind the mountains.”

“And we are to sleep on the ground under those flimsy tents, I suppose?” asked Miss Campbell, who was not taking very kindly to the camping proposition.

“No, no,” protested her young cousin, laughing, “you’re thinking of soldiers, and they do have cots. This camp is a log house, a really beautiful log house. There is one immense room without any ceiling, and you look straight up through the beams into the roof. Papa says it’s splendid.”

Miss Campbell bestowed upon Billie a tolerant, suffering smile.

“And back of that room,” continued Billie, speaking quickly, “is a long sleeping porch that can be partitioned off into bedrooms——”

“No protection from rain and wild animals, I suppose?” put in Miss Campbell sadly.

“Oh, yes. There is a roof overhead and a floor underneath, and it’s all enclosed with wire netting to keep out mosquitoes. It can’t rain in far enough to wet the beds and, of course, nothing else matters——”

“Clothes?” groaned the little lady.

“But khaki skirts, cousin, and rubber-soled shoes and pongee blouses,—water couldn’t injure things like that.”

“I went camping once forty years ago,” went on Miss Campbell, without seeming to notice Billie’s reply. “It was terrible, I assure you, it was quite too dreadful. One night there was a storm, and the tents that were not blown away by the high winds were swamped by rain. Our clothes all mildewed, and the flies! I shall never forget the disgusting flies,—they were everywhere.”

“This camp couldn’t possibly be blown away even by the strongest wind,” broke in Billie, ready to refute every argument, “and the screens make it just as comfortable as your own home would be.”

“How far is it from anywhere?” demanded Miss Campbell suddenly.

Billie hesitated.

“It’s twenty-five miles, but there is a good road from the railroad station and the ‘Comet’ can take us across in no time. You see, there is a little village in the valley at the foot of our mountain, and in summer a ’bus runs twice a day with passengers and the mail, so the road must be fairly good. Papa says lots of automobiles go over it.”

“Twenty-five miles,” groaned Miss Campbell.

“Twenty-five miles from a telegraph station——”

“But there is no one for you to telegraph to if Papa and I are with you, dear Cousin, is there?” asked Billie ingenuously.

Miss Campbell’s expression softened. Nothing pleased her so much as for Billie to make one family of the three. The young cousin had become such a fixture in her home that she had grown quite jealous of Duncan Campbell’s possessive airs with his daughter.

“One would think she really belonged to him more than to me,” she would exclaim at such times, with some unreasonableness it must be admitted.

But it was plain that the little spinster’s resolutions against camping were beginning to crumble.

“We are not to eat on the ground, then, or drink coffee from tin cups, or sleep in our clothes, or be bitten to death by mosquitoes, and finally exterminated by wild animals?”

Billie laughed joyously. She knew by these extravagant remarks that her cousin had been won over.

“None of those things,” she cried. “We are to lead a comfortable, beautiful rustic life, and I know you’ll just love it. There are lakes, cousin, exquisite, beautiful little gems of lakes; and trails all through the pine forests, and the walking isn’t a bit difficult——”

“Khaki skirts, did you say?”

“Yes, and sneakers.”

“What are they, child?”

“Rubber-soled shoes to keep you from slipping.”

Miss Campbell sighed.

“And at my age!” she said aloud, answering some unspoken thought. “Tell your father I accept, but it’s the last straw, and I may never see my comfortable old home again.”

Billie did not pause to disprove this dejected statement. She kissed her relative with the wild abandon of eighteen, rushed from the room and was down the stairs in a breathlessly short space of time.

“She’s going! She’s going!” she cried, rushing into the drawing-room, where her three friends were anxiously awaiting news, and Mr. Campbell, almost as anxious himself, was pacing the floor, his hands thrust deep into his pockets.

“Good work, little daughter!” he said, pausing in his walk. “I knew you could win her over if anybody could, although last night I was afraid we hadn’t the ghost of a show. She was dead set against it. The word ‘camp’ alone seemed to make her wild.”

“But, you see, she thought it was tents and flies and mosquitoes and tin cups.”

Mr. Campbell smiled.

“I think we won’t tell her any more, now that she has made up her mind. We’ll give her a little surprise. Call the camp a log hut and let it go at that.”

“Now, about clothes——” began Nancy Brown, and her friends all smiled. “Well, one must have clothes, even on a camping trip. Don’t you think a blue corduroy would be attractive, with a touch of coral pink in the silk tie, say; and high russet walking boots—the kind that lace, you know——”

“They must have rubber soles,” put in Billie, “no matter what the tops are.”

“And a straw hat in the natural color, with a brim that droops slightly, and a pheasant’s tail feather, slightly at one side——”

There was another burst of laughter at this juncture, and Mr. Campbell joined in.

“Miss Nancy,” he said, “I’m afraid you’ll have everything from hedge hogs to wood choppers at your feet if you make yourself so attractive in silks and velvets and russets——”

“Nothing perishable,” protested Nancy. “It will be quite suitable, of course. It’s a mountain costume I saw in a French fashion magazine, and it was really intended for an Alpine climber; only it was much fancier. The French lady in the picture wore a lace jabot and high-heeled shoes, and she carried an Alpine stock with a pink bow tied just below the crook.”

“Was the skirt hobble?” demanded Billie.

“It sounds to me like a Little Bo-Peep costume,” put in Mary Price.

“I think one should dress quite quietly on a camping party,” observed Elinor Butler.

Mr. Campbell seized his hat.

“My only advice to you, ladies,” he announced as he reached the door, “is to wear shoes that won’t turn your ankles; skirts that give you plenty of leeway for climbing, and shirts that may be easily washed, because laundries are not abundant in those regions. As for hats,” he finished, “you’ll probably not wear any after the first day, even the latest thing from the Alps trimmed with the tail feather of a pheasant. As for colors, the first time you go camping you’ll probably let your fancy run riot and wear Assyrian purple or crushed strawberry. But the next time, you’ll pass right down the line until you get to brown, because you will know by that time that brown fades brown. If campers had been born wild animals instead of human beings, Nature would surely have provided them with brown coats for utilitarian as well as protective purposes.”

“I thought we could just wear old clothes,” put in Mary Price, doubtfully. “I didn’t know people had costumes made for camping.”

Mr. Campbell thrust his genial, handsome face back into the room.

“Camping clothes are like bathing suits,” he remarked. “After the first wetting or so, they all look alike.”

“I’m sure blue corduroy will last,” cried Nancy. “The man at the store said it was unfadeable.”

“You mean that curly-haired clerk who wears the ruby scarf pin?” laughed Billie. “What’s his name?”

“Delosia Moxley,” answered Elinor. “He is always giving Nancy pointers about the latest modes. He was responsible for that Spanish veil she would wear last winter——”

“He was not,” interrupted Nancy. “He merely told me they were the fashion in New York. I needn’t have bought it if I hadn’t wanted to.”

“I suppose he furnished that French lady’s Alpine costume, too, didn’t he, Nancy Bell?”

Nancy smiled good-naturedly. She never really minded being teased about her elaborate taste in dress.

“His taste is extremely good,” she said. “He expects to run a millinery shop in a year or so. He says he can trim hats charmingly.”

“My word!” exclaimed Billie. “I suppose his mother will make your suit and he’ll pin the feather on the hat, and between them they will equip you to climb the Adirondacks. But, oh, Nancy, I implore you to explain to Mrs. Moxley that hobbles don’t go in the mountains.”

“She understands,” replied Nancy with much dignity. “She is going to make me the very latest thing in mountain-climbing suits, and she gets all her fashions straight from New York.”

Her friends exchanged covert glances and said nothing. Nancy’s conferences with Mrs. Moxley, the dressmaker, were a source of endless amusement to them. It was Mrs. Moxley who had made Nancy’s graduating costume that June, and never had been seen on the platform of West Haven High School such a fashionable toilette. It had a hobble skirt and a fancy little train that flopped about Nancy’s feet like a beaver’s tail, and at the reception afterwards the boys had teased her until she left in tears.

Two weeks had passed since graduation and our Motor Maids were just beginning to feel the results of their hard winter’s work. It had been a tough pull to catch up with their classes after the return from Japan. There had been no gayeties for them during the Christmas holidays, only continuous hard study, and for weeks afterwards Billie and Nancy and Elinor were tutored every afternoon. Mary Price, the best student of the three, had outstripped them, and in the end had carried off first honors and a scholarship besides. But after the excitement of finals, the four friends had collapsed like pricked balloons. Billie, mortified at what she considered a weakness in her character, had not been able to throw off a deep cold contracted in the spring. Mary Price was limp and white; Elinor had grown mortally thin, and even Nancy had lost her roundness, and her usually plump face was peaked and pale.

“My child needs mountain air!” said Mr. Campbell on one of his flying trips to West Haven. “She must not be in a hotel, and she must have her friends with her.”

With characteristic energy he had set to work to find a place somewhere in the mountains, and he had made three trips before he satisfied himself that “Sunrise Camp” in the Adirondacks, to let furnished, was exactly what he had been searching for. The owners had gone abroad and were glad to rent it at a low price.

To “Sunrise Camp” therefore, after due preparation, Miss Helen Campbell, the Motor Maids and Mr. Campbell, who went up to install them, departed. At the station next day they found the “Comet,” still attired in his blue suit acquired in Japan, in charge of a chauffeur from a nearby hotel. Along twenty-five miles of mountainous road the faithful car carried them, patiently climbing the last steep grade which led to a kind of shelf in the mountain whereon stood “Sunrise Camp.”

CHAPTER II.

THE CAMP.

“Hurrah!” cried Billie, trying to pretend that she was not at all tired after the interminable hot journey on the train and across the mountains.

But her enthusiasm was not echoed by the others. Even Mr. Campbell, who always felt the heat, sat silent and dejected. Billie, however, usually endeavored to live up to her theories, and she had believed that pure mountain air would act as an instantaneous tonic on their jaded spirits. She was trying now to persuade herself that she was not hot and dusty and excessively weary.

They had drawn up in front of a rustic hut built of logs with the bark left on. The roof had a graceful slant from the central peak, and over the gallery in front was another low-hanging roof like the visor of a cap. On one side of the camp, at no great distance from the house, a majestic army of pine trees had ranged itself in the manner of a silent and faithful guard. At the other side, the ledge sloped down in natural, uneven terraces to the valley far below. From the sleeping porches in the back could be seen a broad vista of low country encircled by a wall of mountains, now clothed in a mantle of purple shadows as the sun sank behind the crests of the opposite range. The air was hot and sweet and very dry, and the atmosphere vibrated with the hum of insects like the low, steady accompaniment of stringed instruments in a great orchestra. But at close view, it must be confessed, Nature was very dingy. The pine trees had a rusty look and the parched earth cried out for rain.

“Well, ladies, we are here,” remarked Mr. Campbell, “and I hope you’ll find it to your several tastes.”

“I am sure we will,” answered Mary politely, while the others moved in a silent procession toward the house.

Miss Campbell was already wondering how long they could endure this crude and lonely existence a hundred miles from anywhere. The contagion of doubt had indeed spread like a plague over the entire company, and all for the want of a bath, a supper and a good night’s rest.

“Ah, here are Mr. and Mrs. Lupo,” exclaimed Mr. Campbell in a tone of relief, as a man and woman approached down the gallery. “They are half Indians,” he added in a low voice. “Mrs. Lupo will be cook and her husband, guide, protector and man of all work.”

Miss Campbell turned reproachful eyes upon her relative.

So then they were to be left in charge of two half-breed Indians in this wild mountainous place, while he was away. Really, men were too incorrigible. But Mr. and Mrs. Lupo, at first glimpse, were far removed from savages. They were, apparently, like two shy, gentle animals with dark, shining eyes, and when they spoke, which was seldom, it was almost as if they had broken a vow of silence. Winter and summer they lived in these high places, and only occasionally did Mrs. Lupo descend to the valley to visit the little shops in the village and look upon the vanities of life.

“Well, Mrs. Lupo,” said Mr. Campbell, after shaking hands with the husband and wife and properly introducing them to the others, “I trust you have some food ready for a crowd of very hungry people. It was too hot this afternoon to be enthusiastic about lunch at the Valley Inn and hunger has overtaken us.”

Mrs. Lupo looked gravely from one face to another but said nothing.

“Supper will be ready in fifteen minutes,” answered her husband, and the strange pair promptly and quietly disappeared.

“She reminds me,” said Mary to Billie, “of one of those genii in fairy tales that appear when you want them and melt away when you have finished with them.”

“I wonder if she can cook,” was Billie’s unpoetic reply.

During these brief moments they had lingered on the dusty gallery, and now Mr. Campbell, eager as a boy for their approval, led them through the broad opening into the only room of the camp, of which they had caught glimpses as they waited outside. But they were quite unprepared for its vast size, capped by the unceiled roof now fast filling with shadows.

“Why, it’s really grand,” cried Miss Campbell, with a sudden spurt of enthusiasm. “It’s like a cathedral.”

“Isn’t it fine?” answered Mr. Campbell. “I think the primeval huts must have looked like this, and when it came time to build churches it wasn’t a very far cry.”

“I expect Mr. Primeval Man would have been mighty glad to have had one of those nice Morris chairs,” observed Billie.

“It would have been good-by to cathedrals then,” answered her father. “Mr. Primeval Man would have passed so much of his time in the easy chair that he would never have got beyond the age of dull-edged tools.”

And in this thoroughly modern primeval hut there were plenty of inducements to be lazy. Grouped about the stone chimney of an immense open fire-place were numerous easy chairs, and ranged against the dim confines of the walls were quite half a dozen cots to be used by people who might prefer to sleep indoors, Mr. Campbell explained.

The heads of several deer with branching antlers looked down at them from the walls, and on the floor in front of the fire-place was stretched the skin of a great black bear.

“Papa, I think it’s really beautiful,” exclaimed Billie, rubbing her cheek against her father’s shoulder.

“So do we all, Mr. Campbell,” cried the other Motor Maids.

“I am delighted and relieved,” he answered, rubbing his hands together with pleasure over their pleasure. “Better introduce Cousin Helen to her—er bedroom now, and wash up before supper,” he added, winking and grinning behind that little lady’s back.

Anybody would approve of the big room of the camp. It was indeed a splendid place, but how was Miss Campbell going to take to the dormitory? A flight of rustic steps at one end led to a gallery opening on this doubtful territory.

“Oh, how delightful,” cried Billie, rushing through the door with a great show of enthusiasm. “I have always wanted to sleep in the open and never had a chance except that one night on the plains. Remember, Cousin Helen? And how you did enjoy it, too!”

“One night, yes, my dear, but this is for some sixty nights or more,” answered Miss Campbell, surveying a row of cots placed at intervals along the porch. “I never slept in the room with anybody in my life before.”

“But this is not sleeping in a room. This is sleeping in the world, under the great dome of heaven,” exclaimed Billie, laughing uneasily.

“If you want privacy, you can draw a veil,” remarked Elinor, pointing to denim curtains on poles between some of the beds.

“And be alone in the world, under the great dome of heaven? Never!” cried Miss Campbell. “But do we dress out here in sight of the entire range of mountains? I should feel that each mountain had an eye turned on me.”

“Really, cousin, you remind me of the old lady from Skye,” ejaculated Billie:

“‘There was an old lady from Skye
Who was so exceedingly shy,
When she undressed at night,
She put out the light,
For fear of the all-seeing eye.’”

Miss Campbell so far forgot her objections as to burst out laughing, and she was still further placated by finding at one end of the porch a good-sized locker room, and adjoining that a bathroom.

“The water comes from the top of the mountain,” announced Billie. “It’s just piped in and doesn’t have to be pumped. Think of bathing in such clear pure water as that. Oh, I know camping like this will be perfect!”

“It may and it may not be,” observed Miss Campbell, bathing her hands and face in some of the crystal water. “Good heavens, what’s that?” she demanded, startled by the sound of a bugle in the twilight stillness. The call was loud and clear, reverberating among the mountains and coming back to them in a softened, muffled echo.

“That’s Mr. Lupo blowing the supper horn,” called Mr. Campbell from the sleeping porch below. Down they all filed and seated themselves anywhere around a long rustic table apparently loaded with food, for all the meal had been placed upon it regardless of ceremony, and people were expected to help themselves.

“Fall to, fall to, ladies,” said Mr. Campbell, serving slices of broiled ham until the pile of plates in front of him was reduced to one.

“Let’s introduce scientific management into this business,” suggested Billie. “With one deft movement of the arm, I’ll help each plate to creamed potatoes, passing them along in order to Nancy, who can dish out the baked omelette. While we are doing that Mary can serve the butter and Elinor can pass around the biscuits. There is no labor wasted and the food is distributed in the quickest possible time.”

“What shall I be doing?” asked Miss Campbell. “I don’t see that I am being scientifically managed.”

“Yes you are,” answered Mr. Campbell with a mischievous glance at the pretty little lady. “You are being scientifically managed by not being allowed to do anything.”

There was a chorus of drowsy, good-natured laughter. The leavening influence of food at a journey’s end was already beginning to take effect. Presently Mr. Lupo came in with a tray of cups and saucers and a pot of steaming hot coffee, and Mrs. Lupo, silent and soft of foot, placed four tall wooden candlesticks on the table, the light from the tallow candles shedding a yellow glow on their faces.

“Excuse me,” said Mary, rising, after the hungry company had cleared up everything before them, “I want to go to the end of the room and see what we look like. I feel as if we were making a picture somebody ought to see. We are,” she called presently from the far end of the vast apartment. “You’ve no idea how picturesque you look around that dark wooden table with those candles and the blue water pitcher and the pewter coffee pot.”

“And the empty omelette dish,” called Billie.

“And only one biscuit left,” added Elinor.

“I’ve no doubt Mr. Rembrandt would have painted us just so,” said Mr. Campbell.

“And called it ‘The Guild of The Globe Trotters’,” Miss Campbell was saying, when Mary gave a low exclamation of surprise. In order not to obstruct the beautiful view across the valley, the rustic porch had not been enclosed with screens, but the openings into the living room were screened, and, standing just outside the broad door, Mary saw a man peering into the room.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, “I am afraid I frightened you. I was lost on the side of the mountain, and when I saw the light in the camp I thought I would stop and ask the way.”

“Come in, won’t you?” said Mr. Campbell hospitably. “Have you had your supper?”

“I am afraid not,” answered the stranger with a short laugh.

“Mrs. Lupo, will you get this gentleman some supper?” called Mr. Campbell, while Miss Campbell, almost lost in one of the big chairs, was wondering if this were the etiquette of campers, and if they would be expected to take in strangers after Duncan had departed.

“Sit down,” went on the incorrigible Duncan. “We only arrived ourselves an hour ago, and we are hardly familiar with the house yet, but there is plenty of room. Won’t you stop over night? My name is Campbell.”

“My name is St. Clair,” answered the stranger. “I live in a place called West Haven. Ever hear of it?”

“Percy St. Clair!” cried the girls and Miss Helen. “Where did you come from?”

“The scheme worked pretty well, eh, Percy?” laughed Mr. Campbell, after the young man, their old friend and playmate, had shaken hands all around and insisted on hugging Miss Campbell. “I thought I would keep you as a surprise. Where’s the motor cycle?”

“It’s outside. I walked it up the last climb.”

“Did you have any trouble finding the way?”

“Considerable. That’s why I’m so late. A fellow told me the wrong road, and I was lost for a while and had a foolish adventure besides.”

“What was it? What was it?” they demanded.

Percy seated himself at the supper table, while Nancy poured out his coffee and Billie served him with ham and eggs.

“Well, I asked a man the way and he said, ‘Are you a doctor?’ I said, ‘Not yet, but soon.’ Then he showed me a road and told me there was a very sick woman in a house at the top, and would I call and see what could be done. You may imagine my feelings when I found that the road led straight to an old ruined hotel, and there wasn’t a human being in it as far as I could see nor any sign of one. So I got on my cycle and went back down the mountain until I found a sign board that put me on the right track again. But it was queer, wasn’t it, and rather uncanny, too.”

It was a strange experience, and after supper they sat under the stars discussing it until bedtime, and came to the conclusion that Percy had met a crazy man.

Never had Miss Helen Campbell slept so well as she did that night on the sleeping porch. Toward morning there came a quiet life-giving rain that freshened the parched earth and brought out the pungency of the pine trees. Only Mary knew of the shower and of the soft wind that followed just before dawn, bearing with it the fragrance of the wet woods. Only Mary saw the miracle of the dawn; first the faint flush of pink; then a deep rosy blush; next, rays of orange and gold, and at last the sun bursting into view. It was Mary who softly let down the bamboo blinds to keep out the sunlight and who finally slipped back to bed and went to sleep with the songs of innumerable forest birds in her ears.

CHAPTER III.

RULES AND REGULATIONS.

At six o’clock they were awakened by a long, melodious trumpet call. The vigorous tripping melody drove the sleep from their brains like a dash of cold water. Billie found herself sitting up in bed humming:

“‘Oh, come to the stable,
As soon as you’re able
And feed the horses grain.
If you don’t do it
The Captain will know it
And raise particular Cain.’”

It was an energetic summons to rise and view a fresh and beautiful world, and Billie, glancing at her watch, was aware that, as a concession to new arrivals, the summons had come half an hour later than scheduled. Half-past five was to be the hour for rising in camp, provided the ladies were willing. And certainly they showed no signs of unwillingness at the six o’clock call. Miss Campbell glanced placidly down the line of white cots. Then she inhaled a breath of the delicious air.

“In all my life I never slept as I did last night,” she announced. “Did somebody put sleeping drops in my coffee, I wonder?”

“I fancy the sleeping drops fell in the night in the form of showers,” observed Mary from her cot at the end of the line. “There was no storm, just one of those quiet steady rains, and I never saw people sleep so hard. I thought you were all dead until I heard Miss Campbell——” Mary paused and blushed. “That is, until I heard some one breathing very heavily.”

“Now, Mary Price, don’t tell me you heard me snore. I never did such a thing in my life,” cried Miss Campbell.

With a laugh, Billie leapt from her bed and ran to take a cold plunge in the mountain water which gurgled from the faucet with the pleasant song it had not left off singing when it leaped out of the side of the rock into the pipe.

At seven o’clock came the clarion call for breakfast: inviting and persuasive it was, with a lingering last note that fell softly on the ear and gradually died into discreet silence.

“Mr. Lupo blows the horn with so much expression,” said Elinor. “I really think he must have had long experience in summoning people to breakfast who were never ready. He’ll be giving ‘Weber’s Invitation to the Dance’ for dinner, I suppose.”

They had finished their morning toilets in the locker room, and were about to go downstairs when something tapped against one of the bamboo blinds. Billie promptly drew it up and looked into the clearing below.

“Who’s tapping at our chamber door?” she demanded.

A long fishing pole on which dangled five little nosegays made of ferns and grasses and wild asters was thrust at her. “Why, Algernon Percival,” she called. “I never dreamed you were so energetic.”

“Not guilty,” answered that young man’s voice from the lower porch. “When the bugle sounded just now, I was taking a shower bath. I’m still busy, but it doesn’t take long to get into camping clothes. Who is the only person we know who would get up at dawn and go tramping off for wild flowers?”

A tall, lanky figure stepped out from the shadow of the gallery and lifted his handsome, thoughtful face up to the girls leaning over the railing.

“Why, it’s Ben Austen,” they cried. “Dear old Ben, when did you come?”

“Last night at ten o’clock,” he answered. “The ’bus wouldn’t come up from the village at that hour, so I walked. It was great. How are all of you?” he added, wiggling the nosegays in front of their noses.

“We’re as fine as silk,” answered Billie, with a happy laugh. “And it’s such fun that you and Percy are here. Papa kept it a secret so as to surprise us, I suppose.”

“I hope it’s a pleasant surprise.”

“The jolliest kind,” they cried, running downstairs at the second call to breakfast.

Those of you who have read the first volume of this series, “The Motor Maids’ School Days,” will recall Percy St. Clair and Ben Austen, two West Haven boys who were great friends of the girls during that winter when Billie Campbell and her red car first made their appearance in the town. Percy, in the transition from boyhood to manhood, has changed very little. He is of medium height, and his handsome fair face still flushes like a schoolgirl’s, to his great annoyance. Ben, at nineteen, is six feet tall. His face has developed since we knew him some years ago. His features are large and regular, his dark eyes filled with serious intent, and a mop of curly black hair covers his head like a thick cap.

Downstairs they found Mr. Campbell pouring for himself a cup of coffee. The camp table was never to be set for breakfast, but the dishes were to be piled at one end and the food at the other, and each camper was to help himself to what he chose. There was a good deal of laughing and scrambling at this morning meal. It started everybody off in a good humor, and in time it became the hour for jokes and absurdities that will never die out as long as there are boys and girls enough to keep them alive.

After they had disposed of quantities of very good food, at least it seemed good to mountain appetites, Mr. Campbell took a sheet of letter paper from his pocket and rapped for quiet.

“Young people, I want to read you a few rules which must be obeyed if camp is to be run on a military basis, the only way a camp can be successfully conducted. Here they are:

“‘RULES FOR SUNRISE CAMP.

“‘Unless physically unable, all persons must appear at breakfast promptly at six-thirty. Penalty for not appearing—general housework for a day.

“‘Every camper, except Captain Helen E. Campbell, must make his own bed and keep his part of the dormitory in first rate order.

“‘There will be inspection twice a week by Captain H. E. Campbell.’”

Miss Campbell bowed her head in acknowledgment of the honor.

“‘Dinner at twelve-thirty, unless picnics interfere.

“‘Supper at six.

“‘Sub-rules for Women Members.

“‘Females unattended or with each other are expressly forbidden to wander off bounds; that is, off the three trails which pass near this camp.

“‘Picnics are forbidden without male attendants.’”

“Dear me,” interrupted Billie, “aren’t there any laws for the men to follow? These are all against women.”

“They are merely for your protection, my dear.”

“That’s what the men always say when they begin to trample on women’s rights,” declared Billie.

“All right, Miss Suffragette, just wait a minute. There’ll be a few for the men.

“‘Sub-rules for Women Members—Continued.

“‘Hobble skirts are forbidden.’” Mr. Campbell gave a jovial wink and glanced at Nancy.

“‘Any individual who introduces a Parisian Alpine climbing suit into camp must pay the penalty by being made to climb a mountain in it.’”

“Now, you know that’s not on the list. You’re making it up,” exclaimed Nancy, blushing.

“‘The tail feather of a pheasant is not recommended as trimming for a camp hat,’” he went on blandly.

“‘No woman member is permitted to wear a lavender silk polonaise with lace ruffles.’”

“Polonaise?” cried Miss Campbell. “What on earth are you talking about, Duncan? Do you mean negligée?”

“Oh, excuse my ignorance. I thought it was called polonaise,” he answered humbly.

“Polonaise,” exclaimed the little lady, amid a wild whoop of laughter. “It’s a good thing you brought your daughter to a woman member to have her education finished. Goodness me!”

“Dearest Papa,” said Billie, kissing him, “don’t you wear negligée shirts most all the time? It’s the same thing.”

“I thought all ladies wore polonaises,” insisted Mr. Campbell. “It certainly was the fashion in my youth, at any rate.”

“Fashions change with the times and manners, my boy,” said Miss Campbell. “But do give us the rules for the men of this household before you forget it.”

“‘Sub-rules for Men Members.

“‘Men are required to look after the wants of the ladies and see that they obey their set of rules to the letter.’”

“And is that all?” demanded the women members with a great show of indignation. “Why, we have no rights at all and they have everything!”

“No indeed, children,” answered Mr. Campbell. “When a man is required to look after the wants of five ladies, he at once gives up all rights of his own and becomes a slave. There is no need of making any more rules for the men, but there is one more rule for general obedience.

“‘All questions and disputes arising shall be settled by Helen Eustace Campbell, Captain of Sunrise Camp.’”

“Three cheers for Captain Campbell,” cried Percy.

Miss Campbell rose and lifted her little crinkled hand for silence.

“I accept the responsibility of Sunrise Camp,” she said, “under the conditions I am about to state: that I am not asked to go canoeing in one of those tippy little boats without seats; that I am not persuaded against my better judgment to climb to the top of a mountain, for I simply won’t, I tell you beforehand; and that nothing shall interfere with my afternoon nap.”

“I am sure that these mild requests will be agreeable to all concerned,” said Mr. Campbell. “Will the company state objections, if any?”

There was a dead silence.

“Captain Campbell, consider yourself installed as absolute ruler in this camp.”

“Papa, why be so businesslike?” asked Billie.

“Because there must always be a certain amount of system in a camp or it won’t run. I’ve lived in camp so much more than in houses that I know, and since I can’t be with you until later, I think it wise to get things started in this way before I go——”

“The car is ready, sir,” said the village chauffeur at the door.

The Motor Maids had begun to learn by this time that it was invariably Mr. Campbell’s way to leave his guests in a cheerful frame of mind, and they all knew perfectly well that “Rules for Sunrise Camp” had been prepared chiefly for Billie’s sake, that she would be still laughing when her father kissed her good-by and still smiling when he turned to wave his hat for the last time. She had been very homesick for him lately during his absences from West Haven, perhaps because she had been run down in health and tired out. And to-day, in spite of all the laughing and joking, her eyes filled with tears as she watched the car creep down the mountain road to the valley.

For a little while the camp seemed lonely and remote.

“The truth is,” thought Mary, wandering down the path to look at the view, “Mr. Campbell is so splendid that when he goes away he always leaves a big empty space that doesn’t seem to fill up. And Billie is just like him. Nobody ever could fill the emptiness she would leave.”

As if drawn by these loyal and devoted thoughts, Billie had followed Mary, and the two girls stood with clasped hands watching the distant motor, now a black speck in the valley.

“Dearest, dearest Papa,” exclaimed Billie under her breath, as the tears welled into her eyes and slipped down her cheeks.

Mary pressed close to her side with silent sympathy.

Presently Billie wiped her eyes and began to smile.

“Don’t tell on me, Mary dear. I’m just like a foolish little girl. But I do love Papa so, and sometimes I can’t bear to have him leave me. Then I wish I had been born his twin brother and we never could be separated.”

Mary was about to dispute this argument on the grounds that marriage would have separated them, when they noticed coming up the steep road a small bony horse drawing a little cart. A girl was walking at one side, holding the reins. She wore a broad-brimmed jimmy hat and an old gingham dress faded to a soft mellowed pink. The two girls watched her with admiration as she swung along the road, swaying slightly at the waist like one who had adopted the easiest way of walking up hill. They were so intent upon her that they hardly noticed the blackberries and vegetables in the back of the cart.

Presently the girl paused and turned her beautiful dark blue eyes on them without any embarrassment.

“Want to buy any vegetables?” she asked.

“Perhaps they will up at the camp,” said Billie. “Ask Mrs. Lupo.”

The mountain girl looked at her strangely and shook her head.

“Do you know Mrs. Lupo?” asked Billie.

“Yes, but I will not ask her.”

“Very well, I’ll buy something myself. What have you got?”

“Blackberries, onions and beets.”

Billie bought a pail of berries.

“You had better come up to the camp and let me empty them,” she said.

“Keep the pail,” answered the mountain girl, and swung on up the road, flicking the little old horse with a long switch.

Billie and Mary followed with the berries, which they presently left in the kitchen where Mrs. Lupo was working.

“I bought these from a mountain girl, Mrs. Lupo,” said Billie.

The woman went on working without looking up. Billie repeated what she had said. There was still no answer, and the girls went out of the kitchen somewhat disconcerted.

“She’s a queer, shy creature,” said Billie, and thought no more about it.

CHAPTER IV.

TABLE TOP.

Miss Campbell was quite willing to trust her brood with Ben Austen.

“He was always reliable,” she remarked. “When he was a baby, his mother could depend on him not to cry at the wrong time, although, of course, he was only human.”

On the whole, she was relieved that her cousin had asked Ben to make them a visit. Mr. Lupo was all very well and had guided their walking parties up the trails, or, seated beside Billie in the “Comet,” had pointed out good roads for motoring; but Miss Campbell did not consider him as entirely to be trusted, because, as you probably recall, she never liked mixed bloods nor mixed colors, either.

Some days after their arrival, when they had quite recovered from that unconquerable disposition to sleep, which always attacks lowlanders visiting the mountains, Billie proposed that they take a walking trip across a tableland which separated their mountain from the one behind, and finally scale the peak beyond, where the view, it was said, was magnificent.

“Let’s go to-day while the spirit moves us and it’s so delightfully cool,” she suggested at breakfast.

“But Mr. Lupo isn’t here,” objected Miss Campbell. “He’s gone to the village.”

“We know the way, don’t we, Ben? Mr. Lupo showed us the trail yesterday. Most of it goes through the woods. It’s only two miles across ‘Table Top’ and then we get to the other mountain. I’m wild to go. I’m beginning to feel shut in, and I want to see what’s on the other side of this Chinese wall.”

“More Chinese walls,” observed Ben gravely.

“Mr. Lupo is such a restraining influence,” put in Nancy. “When he’s along, we have no real conversation.”

“He is a kind of a wet blanket,” observed Percy. “You never know whether he has heard you or not. You generally have a feeling he has, but that your remarks are too trivial for comment.”

“All of which means,” said Miss Campbell, “that you want to go off for the day without a guide.”

“Please, Cousin Helen,” pleaded Billie.

“Dear Miss Campbell, won’t you let us?” cried the other Motor Maids.

“Not because that feather-top Percy is with you, but because Ben is here, I suppose I might as well consent,” said Miss Campbell.

“Old Ben is just as much of a feather-top as I am, Miss Campbell,” protested Percy. “He deceives people because he looks like an Indian. I’ve got a serious mind underneath all this curl and color.”

“I don’t believe it,” answered Miss Campbell. “But I wouldn’t have you changed, my boy. I like you as you are.”

After this two-sided compliment, they took it for granted that consent had been given and Billie rushed off to see Mrs. Lupo about the lunch.

They had come to learn during that first week in camp that Mrs. Lupo was a law unto herself. For one thing, the blackberries that Billie had purchased of the mountain girl had never come to the table, although the girls kept looking for them to appear in the form of a cobbler or a roly-poly pudding. What had become of them they never learned, but Billie had an uncomfortable suspicion that they had been tossed into the garbage pail.

“We can’t do anything about it, my dear,” Miss Campbell had informed Billie. “The woman certainly holds us in the hollow of her hand unless we want to do our own cooking.”

Billie smiled. Miss Campbell was never known to boil a kettleful of water, let alone cook a meal. If there was any culinary work to be done the Motor Maids would do it, and Miss Campbell might possibly arrange the salt cellars or offer to go over the silver with a polishing cloth.

Mrs. Lupo dumbly acquiesced to the lunch.

“We will be glad to make the sandwiches, Mrs. Lupo,” said Billie timidly. “Please let us have some cold meat. I suppose there is plenty of bread? Will you hard-boil a dozen eggs?”

Mrs. Lupo rarely replied to any question addressed to her, but she went about getting the things for the lunch and Billie breathed a sigh of silent thanks.

“It’s really terrible to be a slave to one’s cook,” she thought. “But I know perfectly well that if I ever tried to subjugate Mrs. Lupo I’d get mad, and she would just fold her tent like the Arab and silently steal away, and one morning there would be no breakfast.”

Billie had tried several methods with Mrs. Lupo. She had said good morning with a polite smile, but received no response. Once she had added:

“How do you feel this morning, Mrs. Lupo?”

A dead silence had followed this courteous inquiry.

“Wires crossed,” Percy had cried. “Try again, Central.”

They had all laughed at this witticism and Billie had hoped Mrs. Lupo had not understood.

“If you had lived in the mountains all your life I guess you wouldn’t be very communicative, either,” she had admonished Percy, after Mrs. Lupo had glided noiselessly out of the room.

“I guess I wouldn’t miss a call,” answered Percy. “If there was any one to call, I wouldn’t hang up the receiver.”

There were times, however, when Billie could scarcely conceal her irritation, and this morning nothing went quite as she had planned.

There was only enough bread for a dozen sandwiches and there were only six eggs.

“But I said a dozen eggs, Mrs. Lupo,” she said, after she had sliced and buttered the bread and glancing up saw six eggs cooling in a pan. “You know we are going to take a long walk across Table Top to Indian Head.”

The silence was profound.

“And we need more bread. Will you get me another loaf, please?”

No reply. Mrs. Lupo was quietly stringing beans on a bench by the door of the lean-to which served the camp as a kitchen.

“Did you hear what I asked?” demanded Billie.

Nancy and Mary, placing ham between the slices of bread, looked up quickly, half amused and half frightened.

“Did you hear me ask you a question, Mrs. Lupo?” repeated Billie, exasperated beyond endurance.

Mrs. Lupo went on stringing beans.

Brandishing the long carving knife, Billie went over and stood in front of the strange woman. Percy, peeping through the half open door, was grinning, and Nancy stifled a giggle.

“When I speak to you I expect an answer, Mrs. Lupo,” said Billie, trying to keep her voice smooth and even. “Now, answer me at once.”

Mrs. Lupo looked up mildly surprised.

“There ain’t no more bread and there ain’t no more eggs,” she said, in a voice that sounded like an echo.

Billie went back to her work without a word, and later, when they had started on the walk with the small allowance of lunch packed in a candy box, Percy teased her and called her the javelin thrower.

“I was almost tempted to pitch it at her,” said Billie. “She is the most aggravating human being I ever saw. I’ll certainly never address another word to her, but it’s so hard to remember not to be agreeable.”

The placid depths of Billie’s amiable nature had been so stirred by the incident that it took her some time to calm down, and she went blindly along the trail following Ben without seeing anything or anybody.

“Don’t let her jar you, Billie,” said Ben, soothingly. “If you want to forget your troubles, just have a look at Nancy-Bell. She looks like a fashion plate lady standing on the top of Mont Blanc.”

Nancy had disappeared just when they were ready to start and kept them waiting fifteen minutes, which had also served to aggravate Billie’s ruffled temper.

“Goodness me,” exclaimed Billie, laughing, “the child has put on her new walking costume made by Delosia Moxley’s mother! When the climbing part comes, what will she do, Ben?”

Ben shook his head doubtfully.

“How do you like it, Billie dear?” asked Nancy in a honeyed tone, noticing her friend’s backward glances.

“It’s awfully pretty, Nancy. Lovely color, but——”

“You see, the skirt’s quite broad,” interrupted Nancy, anticipating objections and endeavoring to spread the skirt to the full limit of its yard and a quarter.

“Just about as broad as one trouser leg,” teased Ben.

Nancy ignored the remark, and the pheasant’s feather in her hat seemed to quiver with indignation.

“Where’s the crook?” asked Mary politely.

“I’m her crook,” put in Percy. “You’ll find she’ll be using me as a staff presently when she has to take a step six inches instead of five.”

“We’ll be carrying her yet,” Ben predicted.

“I think you are all perfectly horrid,” ejaculated Nancy, who indeed looked as pretty as a picture in the blue velveteen. There was the coral tie at her throat, as she had planned, and perched on her curls was the jauntiest little hat imaginable that served only to keep the sun off the top of her head and was no protection whatever to her tip-tilted freckled nose. Mary and Elinor wore jimmies bought in the village, and Billie wore no hat at all.

“No, we aren’t, Nancy dear. We’re just teasing,” said Billie. “You look sweet, but why have you never worn it before?”

“To tell the truth, I was afraid of the scorn of Mr. Lupo,” said Nancy. “All of you are just like a family, so it didn’t matter, but Mr. Lupo might have thought me, well—an amateur. I’ve been dying to wear it,” she added, giving a dance step and looking down with pride at the snug-fitting skirt. “Of course, I know the skirt is a bit narrow. You know how Mrs. Moxley is,—just determined to have her own way. It was all I could do to get her to put the extra quarter of a yard in the skirt. But I think I can manage it if we don’t walk too fast. There is so much level ground on this walk, too,—all that table land, you know.”

Ben gave a covert smile and the others laughed openly.

“You funny child,” said Billie. “It’s really beautiful to see a person enjoy clothes like that. You look sweet enough to charm a snake, and if the walking is too stiff, we’ll just carry you.”

“So far so good,” said Ben, “but on the other side of Table Top there’ll be some climb.”

Nancy did not hear this prediction.

So far, indeed, the trail was a broad and honest path leading through the pine forest; but after a while, as it descended toward the tableland, it grew so narrow as to be imperceptible to everybody but Ben, whose eyes, trained by long months of camping and vacation walking trips, could pick out the faintest indication of a path where the others saw nothing at all.

It was well past noon when at last they arrived at a scooped out area of land between the two mountains, connecting them half way to their summit, like the web foot of a duck.

Here, hungry and tired, they paused for lunch, and somehow, two sandwiches and a boiled egg apiece didn’t seem to go very far.

“I have to apologize,” said Billie. “There was nothing in the camp to eat. I suppose that’s why Mr. Lupo made his mysterious visit to the village: to get supplies.”

“I’m thankful it’s all gone and there is no more,” announced Percy. “It’s something less to carry,” he added, tying a cord around Nancy’s coat and his own and hanging them over his back like a peddler’s pack.

“Be still,” whispered Elinor, raising a warning hand, “I was certain I heard music off in that direction.”

The six friends sat silently listening for strains of music. In the stillness of the forest they heard nothing but the songs of the birds, broken occasionally by the caw of a crow or the tapping of a woodpecker. But it was good to stop chattering for a while in this peaceful place, and Billie, lying on her back looking up into the interlacing branches of the trees, smiled happily.

How could she have been out of humor when just at their very doorstep lay the most wonderful enchanted forest? It would not be easy to recall silly domestic troubles in the midst of all this beauty.

“Curious. I was certain I heard the sound of some instrument like a mandolin or a zither,” said Elinor. “It was just one strain, almost as if the wind had blown over an aeolian harp.”

“It was fairy music,” put in Mary.

“Like enough,” said Ben; “and we had better be moving on,” he added, rising and leading the way. “The fairies don’t like human ears to hear their music and they might be playing tricks on us. Then we’d be in the deuce of a fix out in the wilderness.”

“They don’t mind at all,” said Mary. “You’re entirely mistaken, Ben. You are thinking of elves. The fairies are kind little people who never harm anyone.”

They had been walking for some time when they heard cries behind them.

“Help! Help!” screamed the voice of Nancy from around a curve in the trail.

“What did I tell you,” said Ben, running back with the others to see what had happened, and then bursting into a perfect roar of laughter.

There was Percy in the act of killing a long black snake, which was curled up with head thrust out in an attitude of defence, and there was Nancy, who had evidently started to run and, missing the trail, had rushed into a tall clump of bramble bushes. The brambles had wrapped themselves about her like the tentacles of an octopus, and the jaunty feather was caught in an overhanging branch.

“Don’t kill the snake, Percy,” objected Ben. “There are lots more just like him, and it won’t help any to kill one. Besides, they never start a quarrel.”

“All right, old S. P. C. A.,” said Percy, as relieved as the snake, which immediately glided off into the bushes as if it had actually understood that Ben was making a plea for its life.

With subdued giggles they released Nancy from the clutches of the brambles. The feather was broken in half and dragged dejectedly over the crown of her hat, and there was a long scratch across her left cheek.

“Do you remember Jim Phipps in the Fourth Grade, Ben,” began Percy, pointing to Nancy’s hat. “Do you remember the poem called ‘Absalom’ he recited? That is, he began it but he never got any farther than the first line, because he started out by saying, ‘Abalsom, my son Abalsom.’”

The laugh was against Nancy, but she took it good-naturedly and joined in, while she broke the feather in half and left the lower end standing up in the band in a straight cockade.

And now the path, although it was on level ground, seemed to grow more and more difficult. Ben, glancing behind him, doubtfully remarked:

“As long as there are only two miles of this, I suppose we can stand it, but if any person feels tired, sing out and we’ll start back without trying to make Indian Head.”

“We are all right,” they assured him.

For a long time they walked on in silence. The ground was soft and squashy under foot, and Billie privately believed that the trail lay only in Ben’s imagination.

“Ben,” she said at last. “I think maybe we had better start back. We don’t seem to be getting anywhere, and this ground is like a sponge.”

Silently they turned their faces in the other direction, feeling all at once chilled and tired and hungry. Ben, leading the way with Billie, began to look serious.

“Billie,” he said in a low voice after a while, “I am afraid I am not worthy the confidence Miss Campbell has placed in me. I am afraid I’ll have to confess that we are lost.”

CHAPTER V.

IN THE BOG.

It was not an unique experience to Billie to be lost. She had once known what it was to be out of sight of every human habitation on a Western plain, and furthermore half dead with hunger and thirst. You will recall how the “Comet” once carried the Motor Maids safely over an old wagon trail through a tropical forest in Florida, and perhaps also you have not forgotten how Billie and Mary Price were lost in the sacred groves of Nikko in Japan. Therefore, Billie was not in the least frightened when Ben confided to her private ear that he had missed the trail.

“We can’t be very much lost,” she answered. “‘Table Top’ is only two miles broad, and we’ll have to reach one side or the other pretty soon.”

“I hope so,” said Ben, “but don’t tell the others yet. If they lose confidence in me, it will only make matters worse. I wasn’t prepared for this bog. I should think Mr. Lupo might have mentioned it.”

“There couldn’t be a trail through a bog anyhow, could there?”

“Sometimes there is. I’ve seen a swamp with just a narrow path running through it. But a swamp path is the sneakiest kind of a trail. It hides itself wherever it can under tall grasses and bushes. Of course, Mr. Lupo didn’t know we were going, or he would certainly have stopped us, but do you suppose Mrs. Lupo understood we were taking this particular trail?”

“She certainly did. I told her myself just before I drew the knife on her.”

Ben smiled at the mental picture of Billie brandishing a carving knife.

“Hey, Ben,” called Percy. “Is this a trail? I think it’s a channel. I’m up to my knees.”

Ben made no reply. He was deeply mortified, and hung his head with a kind of animal-like humiliation.

“What’s the matter, old man?” demanded Percy, putting his arm affectionately on his friend’s shoulder. “You look like my collie did when I caught him sucking eggs.”

“I’ve missed the trail,” Ben burst out with a choke in his voice.

The others had gathered around now. Their shoes were wet, their stockings torn with brambles, and their skirts splattered and stained with grasses and the juices of wild berries. But they were a valiant little company, even Mary Price, the weakest and frailest among them, and the sight of Ben’s unhappiness and remorse only added to their courage.

“It’s all right, Ben,” said Elinor. “We’ll find the trail again. We’re obliged to. There is the mountain right over there. Why not walk until we get to it?”

“I’m afraid it looks nearer than it is,” said Ben, “and besides, it’s not Sunrise Mountain. It’s Indian Head. I thought some time ago we were getting well away from it, but these infernal bogs are so deceiving.”

“I move we start on,” put in Billie, briskly. “We’re obliged to get somewhere some time.”

“I’ll put it to the vote, then,” announced Ben. “Shall we go toward Indian Head or Sunrise? We are nearer to Indian Head, and we may strike a farm and hire a horse and wagon to take us home.”

This seemed a good suggestion, and they accordingly turned their faces toward the mountain, the rugged outline of which resembled the profile of an Indian.

Anything to get on solid dry land again was the unspoken thought of the six friends. Once on dry surfaces and out of the level treacherous monotony of the bog, they felt they might be equal to anything. For nearly two hours they worked their way through the morass without making any apparent progress toward the mountain. And now the sun was sinking behind the Western range. Ben watched the lessening rays with feelings very much like despair.

“If I had been alone or with some of the fellows it wouldn’t have mattered,” he thought, “but with the girls——”

In a little while Table Top took on the appearance of a vast plain shut in by high walls. It was a weird, lonely place.

“It reminds me of the Valley of the Shadow of Death in ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’,” Mary whispered to Ben, who was helping her over the rough, uneven ground. “Don’t you remember the Wilderness that Christian had to pass through before he reached the Celestial City?”

“I’m afraid I never read ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’,” Ben confessed in grief-stricken tones, “but I can see what you mean, and the white mist that’s rolling in looks like a troop of spirits.”

“Would any person or persons care to hear me sing some cheerful ditty?” asked Percy, and he forthwith began to sing in a rollicking tenor voice:

“‘It was a robber’s daughter and her name was Alice Brown;
Her father was the terror of a small Italian town,
Her mother was a foolish, weak, but amiable old thing,
But it isn’t of her parents that I’m going for to sing.

“‘As Alice was a-sitting at her window sill one day,
A beautiful young gentleman he chanced to pass that way,
She cast her eyes upon him and he looked so good and true
That she thought, “I could be happy with a gentleman like you.”’”

“Help! Help!” screamed Nancy. “Oh, Ben, Oh, Percy, Oh, Billie, save me!”

“What is the matter?” they cried.

“Don’t come near me,” she interrupted. “Don’t, don’t! Keep away. They’ll kill you, too.”

Nancy was jumping up and down in a perfect agony of fear, wringing her hands one moment and tearing at her skirts the next.

“It’s a hornet’s nest,” exclaimed Ben. “Keep still, Nancy. Don’t run. They won’t sting you if you are perfectly still.”

But it was needless to tell Nancy not to run. What with her narrow skirt and the spongy ground she could scarcely walk.

“There are dozens of them crawling inside my skirt,” she sobbed, “and you tell me to keep still.”

“Don’t be frightened, Nancy-Bell. I’ll stand with you,” announced Percy, boldly offering himself as a sacrifice to hornets, as he drew Nancy’s arm through his.

“Come on, hornets,” he cried. “Sting a man. Don’t attack a helpless girl.”

The others could not keep from laughing at the picture of Nancy and Percy standing arm in arm in the wilderness.

“You remind me of a bridal couple walking up the aisle,” exclaimed Billie. But Nancy was too frightened to withdraw her arm from Percy’s even at this witticism. She leaned on him in an attitude of relief and extreme confidence.

“Didn’t I tell you I would be her staff before the day was over?” he remarked with a grin.

“I’ve been stung in a dozen different places,” sobbed Nancy.

“Stand still,” ordered Ben. “They will leave you and go back to their nest if you are quiet.”

And as he had predicted, the hornets did leave off their attack and return to their home, but not until Percy had been stung several times without a murmur. For the sake of Nancy Brown, he would voluntarily have stepped into any number of hornets’ nests.

At last the procession started on. In the misty twilight, they were a company of gray shadows moving silently along. When people are lost, really and unquestionably lost, their true natures rise to the surface: if there is any selfishness hidden away, it develops into complainings and reproaches; the faint-hearted make unhappy predictions; the lazy ones get tired before they have any right to. Ben had always admired the Motor Maids, but never more than now when he saw them quiet and courageous in the face of a night in the swamp. Nancy might shriek over hornets and snakes, but she would never confess to being tired or frightened. Not once had they complained or reproached him, and now when the will-o’-the-wisps began their ghostly dance through the mists, and the great wall of mountain loomed up in front of them black and threatening, it seemed to poor Ben that it would make it easier for him to bear his sorrows if some one would only make one little complaint.

It was Mary who gave out first. She was just sinking to her knees when Billie called out cheerfully:

“I see a light and it’s not a will-o’-the-wisp.”

There indeed was a light sending out a kindly beam in the darkness, and while they watched it, it went out.

“Listen,” exclaimed Elinor, “I hear the music again.” There came to them the sweet fairy notes of the zither.

“Halloo!” called Ben again and again, and presently the others joined in the chorus.

“What is it?” answered a voice quite near, and a figure bounded toward them through the mists.

“We have been lost,” answered Ben. “Do you think you could let these young ladies rest in your cabin while we get a vehicle and drive them home?”

“Yes,” answered the voice, and Billie then recognized the mountain girl who had sold them the blackberries that Mrs. Lupo had pitched out.

After a stiff climb up a rocky path, they reached a little cabin.
After a stiff climb up a rocky path, they reached
a little cabin.—Page 77.

“Come this way,” she added, and they presently realized they were on rising ground and that the morass with its glimmering will-o’-the-wisps and its floating veils of thin mist was now well below them. After a stiff climb up a rocky path they reached a little cabin built in a clearing, commanding a wide vista of the treacherous Table Top and the mountains beyond. At the door of the cabin sat the zither player, his hands traveling aimlessly over the strings while he listened to the approaching footsteps.

“Father,” called the girl, “visitors!”

“Eh? Eh?” answered the man. “Physicians, with medicines? Will they save her? Come in! Come in!”

They filed slowly into the cabin wondering what sort of a person it was sitting in the darkness and calling for physicians. The girl struck a match and lighted two candles, and at least three of the visitors noticed that the candlesticks were of silver, tall and graceful in design, and as bright as rubbing could make them.

The father like the daughter was tall and slender, with the same dark blue eyes, although his had a strange unseeing look in them. His hair was very thick and almost white, his frame spare to emaciation, but he carried himself erect and his shoulders were broad and well developed.

“Make a fire, father,” the girl ordered, and he obediently left the room, presently returning with an armful of wood.

Oh, the joy of sinking to the floor in front of that warm blaze! Ben consulted with the girl at the door of the cabin, and the strange father, rubbing his hands and smiling absently, remarked with an accent that was very different from Mr. Lupo’s or any of the natives thereabouts:

“Not half bad, this fire, eh? Rather cheerful on a dull night.”

Presently his daughter began preparing supper on a little wood stove in the lean-to back of the house. Swiftly and silently, with Ben’s assistance, she made coffee, scrambled eggs and fried bacon.

“You may set the table,” she said to Percy, pointing to some shelves at one end of the cabin.

Percy obediently placed on the plain deal table six blue plates, nicked and cracked in a dozen places, but undoubtedly of Canton; also in a tin box he found knives and forks and spoons, all shining as brightly as the candlesticks, and, he felt perfectly certain, all of silver. It was necessary to revive Mary with some hot coffee before she could eat a mouthful, and after she had taken a little food, Ben hoisted her in his arms and carried her into a small adjoining room where he laid her on a cot; all this under the supervision of the young mistress of the cabin.

There was no attempt at conversation while they satisfied their ravenous appetites, but later, when the wanderers had risen and Billie was consulting with Ben and Percy what was best to do, the father pointed to Nancy sitting in the darkest corner of the room in a small huddled heap.

“Rosalind has come out of the Forest of Arden,” he said.

All eyes were turned on Nancy who shrank into the shadow. Suddenly Percy seized one of the tall candlesticks and held it over her head.

“Why, Nancy-Bell,” he cried, “what has happened to your——”

Nancy spread her hands over her lap and turned her large blue eyes to them with a piteous expression.

“I took it off and threw it away in the swamp,” she said tremulously. “I did hate the thing so, and it was full of hornets and not big enough to take a decent step in anyhow. I hoped no one would notice.”

They were tired, but not too tired to laugh.

“If I had been dying, I should have died laughing,” Billie often afterwards remarked in telling of this incident.

Nancy, minus her narrow velveteen skirt, was really a beguiling figure in blue pongee knickerbockers. The straight velveteen jacket reached just below her waist, and with her rumpled curls and weary expression she might easily have been taken for Rosalind, just arrived at the Forest of Arden with Celia and Touchstone.

But the wonder of it was how a half-crazed mountaineer could know anything about the greatest comedy in the world. This did not trouble them until afterwards, however.

“Billie,” observed Ben presently, “I’ve been consulting with—with this young lady here. She knows the trail through the swamp and has consented to guide me back to the camp to-night. We may be able to make it in less than two hours by a short cut, she says, and we ought to start at once. Miss Campbell will be half wild with uneasiness. As soon as it’s daylight, I’ll come back by the road in the ‘Comet.’ There are some bearskins and blankets. You can all put up here for the night. Percy will stay of course.”

“But isn’t that a great deal to ask of you, to take that long trip to-night?” asked Billie gratefully, turning to the girl.

“It is nothing,” she answered shortly and set about lighting a lantern. Then she beckoned to Ben and they silently left the cabin.

In a few moments, the father, who had been smoking a pipe at the cabin door, took one of the silver candlesticks from the mantel.

“Good night,” he said courteously. “I trust you will have a pleasant rest after your journey. I presume you have been shown your rooms?”

“Yes, sir,” answered Percy.

The man paused at the door of his bedroom at the other side of the cabin.

“I trust the physician will come soon,” he said. “With luck he may reach there before I do.”

“That’s the man who sent me to the old ruined hotel,” whispered Percy. “He’s certainly touched, but he’s harmless.”

They found two steamer rugs and several blankets in a heap on a bench, left there by the mountain girl for their comfort; and it was not long before they lay in a circle around the fire, sound asleep.

CHAPTER VI.

THE DOCTOR.

After the young people had departed on the morning of that eventful day, Miss Helen Campbell settled herself in a hammock on the upper porch with a novel and two new magazines. She loved the “children,” as she called them, and the sound of their voices and laughter was as music to her ears, but occasionally she enjoyed a peaceful morning to herself without any chatter to disturb her quietude.

Who would have imagined as she sat there idly swinging in the hammock, that the dainty little lady was all the way to sixty years old? Her eyes were as blandly blue and clear as a child’s; her complexion had never lost its peach blossom glow, and the fine network of wrinkles around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth was only faintly visible.

“But I’m getting old,” she thought. “Those long trips have rejuvenated my spirits but my body is tired. I haven’t the physique for adventuring any longer. I don’t think I could stand a shock of any kind, great or small.”

Her thoughts broke off at this point and she idly touched the railing of the porch with one of her little feet and set the hammock to a gentle motion like a rocking cradle.

“No, I shall not put myself in the way of shocks. I am glad we are not touring this summer; just taking life peacefully——”

Again her thoughts broke off. Her eyes wandered across the wide vista of valley flanked by a range of mountains. The landscape was flecked by great shadows cast by lazily moving ribbons of cloud. The foliage of the trees and the undergrowth on the opposite mountains were like rugs of velvet. One might imagine a gigantic figure stretched out on the soft green patches of forest. There were no harsh outlines to the mountains. Their rugged edges were veiled and softened by the shadows of the passing clouds. Miss Campbell closed her eyes.

“Life is very pleasant,” she thought, “even at sixty.”

After a long dreamy period as untroubled as a summer sea, some instinct compelled her to open her eyes, and she found herself looking straight into the eyes of Mrs. Lupo who was standing at the foot of the hammock. Mrs. Lupo held her hands behind her back. Miss Campbell noticed at once that the woman’s expression had changed. She had lost that look of a shy gentle animal. Her eyes had narrowed into little slits and her upper lip was drawn back showing an even row of glistening teeth. Without taking her eyes off Mrs. Lupo’s, Miss Campbell sat up very straight and stiff.

“Well, what do you want?” she demanded, always holding the woman’s gaze with hers.

Mrs. Lupo moved a step nearer, still with her hands behind her back.

“Stand where you are,” ordered Miss Campbell, fired with superhuman courage and never once shifting her gaze. “Stand where you are,” she repeated. There was not a tremor in her voice. “Now, give me what you are hiding behind you.”

For at least a moment the two women stood looking at each other. If Miss Campbell had flinched, there is no telling what the half-savage creature, insane with rage, might have done.

And even now, with a swift movement, Mrs. Lupo brandished a long carving knife in Miss Campbell’s face.

“Drop that instantly,” thundered Miss Campbell in a voice that did not seem to be her own.

But the force of her splendid will and courage struck home. The carving knife slipped from Mrs. Lupo’s hand and stood upright between them in the board floor of the porch.

“Get down on your knees,” ordered Miss Campbell, and all this time she had never taken her eyes off Mrs. Lupo’s.

The knife was still swaying on the point of its blade, as the woman sank to the floor in a quivering, sobbing heap.

“What do you mean by coming to me like this?” demanded Miss Campbell.

“Your daughter, she try cut my throat this morning with same. I take revenge,” answered Mrs. Lupo between her sobs.

“Nonsense! Absurd!”

“She have dislike me from first,” went on Mrs. Lupo, who seemed to eliminate all articles from her conversation. “She joke at me. She buy berries of girl I hate.”

Miss Campbell leaned against the rail and watched the woman crouched at her feet like a whipped dog. Only an instant did she allow the thought to come to her that she was alone in camp with a half-crazed savage.

“She is a very weak, pitiable object,” she said to herself. “I must manage her and I shall. I am not afraid.”

Suddenly she leaned over and put her hand very softly on the woman’s shoulder.

“I am so sorry for you,” she said. “Won’t you let me help you? I think you are much too fine and capable to fly into rages like this. What is the reason of it?”

“Not know,” answered Mrs. Lupo. “When they come, I see red. I wish to break up—kill.”

“Do you love your husband?”

“Yes,” answered the other with so much eloquence of expression that Miss Campbell knew she spoke the truth.

“And he loves you?”

“He loves me, but not so much. He leaves me for long time,—alone.”

“Has he ever seen you in a rage?”

“Yes,” answered Mrs. Lupo in a low voice, her head sinking on her breast.

“Of course, then, that is why he leaves you. Men like gentleness in a woman. A violent-tempered wife never keeps her husband’s love. If you were gentle and quiet, your husband would take you with him to the village. But you are jealous and uncontrolled. You make a spectacle of yourself and of him. You look very ugly as you looked a while ago, like an angry animal instead of a handsome young woman. Try being gentle and always looking pretty and see how it works.”

Mrs. Lupo looked up. Miss Campbell had captured her interest and she was listening to that sage spinster’s advice with entire attention.

“You think me handsome woman?”

“Very, when you are in a good temper.”

“Suppose I can’t keep back anger?”

“The next time your eyes see red, make a little prayer. It will always be answered.”

“To Christ?” asked Mrs. Lupo, who had been to a mission school as a girl.

“Yes, to Christ, who never spoke a harsh word even when He was struck in the face and spit upon and finally nailed to a cross.”

“What shall I say?” asked the other, as interested as a child.

“When you feel the rage coming on, say over and over: ‘Oh, Christ, take my anger from me and make me gentle and kind.’”

Mrs. Lupo repeated the prayer several times.

“And it will come true?” she asked.

“Always, always. Try it and see.”

At last the half-breed rose to her feet. The knife stood upright between them swaying on its blade.

“You forgive?” she asked.

“I forgive.”

“I will go away. I am afraid yet when the daughter comes. There is still hate here,” she pointed to her temples. “But it will be gone if I stay away. When Lupo goes to village he stays long time. It is better for me not to see him when he comes back. Until I learn, I will not see him no more. Good-by. I’m thankful to you.”

Mrs. Lupo departed, leaving the knife where it had fallen. It was on the tip of Miss Campbell’s tongue to say:

“You must not leave me alone.” But she checked herself. She doubted if she could exert her will another time like that. Already beads of perspiration stood out on her brows. A feeling of extreme lassitude crept over her and she slipped back into the hammock with a sensation of nausea. Then unconsciousness bound her with invisible cords and the brave little woman fainted dead away.

As Mrs. Lupo turned into the gallery, she glanced back but she only saw the train of Miss Campbell’s white wrapper fluttering from the hammock in the breeze.

There had been several loud raps downstairs, but to Miss Campbell, fighting her way slowly back to consciousness, it sounded hundreds of miles away, like spirit rapping; or perhaps it was the pounding of her own pulses. A man entered the living room. He was of medium height and spare with a lean brown face, and he was dressed as men usually dress for walking trips, in knickerbockers, heavy shoes laced well up the leg, a gray flannel shirt open at the neck with a brown silk tie. He wore a pith helmet; on his back was strapped a flat knapsack, and he carried a cane and a telescope. As he hurried through the living room, he tossed his helmet into a chair. There was a bald spot on his head fringed with reddish hair turning gray. His features were distinguished and because of a certain dignity with which he carried himself, a certain air of command and confidence, people were apt to wonder who he was.

“It was upstairs, I am certain,” the visitor remarked to himself, glancing into the empty kitchen and then mounting the rustic steps to the upper sleeping porch. With quick, comprehensive eyes he took in the five white cots standing in a row, on the porch the group of wicker chairs, the murderous looking knife, swaying on the tip of its shining blade, and lastly the high-backed canvas sleeping hammock from which trailed the train of a white muslin dress.

“Whew!” he exclaimed, under his breath.

For a moment it looked as if something unspeakably dreadful had happened that beautiful morning, and his fears were not set at rest even when he bounded past the knife and stood leaning over Miss Campbell’s half conscious form.

“Water,” she gasped faintly.

“I wonder if there’s a bathroom,” he thought, running along the porch to the nearest door after the one leading to the passage. “Of course they always have them in these so-called camps,” he added, catching the flash of a porcelain tub beyond. In another moment he had wet Miss Campbell’s lips from a glass of water and was dabbing her temples with the end of a wet towel. “Better now?” he asked, as she opened her heavenly blue eyes.

She nodded with a faint smile and closed them again.

“Curious how a doctor is always finding work to do even in the wilderness,” he thought, feeling Miss Helen’s pulse. With an exclamation, he hurried back to the bathroom, and among a perfect army of tooth powder and talcum powder boxes,—“enough for half a dozen people,” he thought,—he spied a bottle of aromatic spirits of ammonia. He mixed a dose in the glass with professional dexterity and hurried back.

“Just as well I happened along,” he thought, moistening her lips with the mixture. “That does the trick,” he added, as she presently opened her eyes again and swallowed a little of the ammonia and water.

The white, pinched look left her face, the color crept back to her cheeks, and she gave a sigh of relief as she shifted her position in the hammock.

“My pillows?” she asked, feeling for the pillows which he had slipped from under her head to the floor.

“Better lie flat for a while,” he ordered in a tone of authority. “I wonder where her people are?” the doctor added to himself, glancing again at the five cot beds. Then he drew up a chair and watched Miss Helen Campbell as she dropped into a doze.

In a little while she exclaimed in a much stronger tone of voice:

“Please take me out of this wobbly thing; I want to lie on my own bed.” The walking-doctor promptly lifted her in his arms like a little child and deposited her on one of the cots. Her hands were cold, and he covered her with a Roman blanket that lay on the foot of the bed. Then he found two hot water bottles, marched down stairs, heated a kettle of water on the kerosene stove, searched for beef tea in the ice chest and by good luck found half a jar. With the water bottles at her feet and a little beef tea to nourish her, Miss Campbell at last fell into a deep sleep, while the doctor, sitting near at hand, read one of the magazines and, occasionally tip-toeing to her bedside, listened to her breathing and felt her pulse.

Toward late afternoon, he descended into the lower regions of the log house and foraged for food. He found crackers and cheese, a tin of beans and a bottle of ginger ale. Having refreshed himself, he was about to return to his patient when Mr. Lupo staggered into the kitchen with a market basket on his arm.

“Where is my wife?” he asked in a thick voice.

“She is not here and you’d better go, too, quick,” answered the doctor.

Mr. Lupo looked at him with an ugly expression, his eyes narrowing, as his wife’s had done when she had approached Miss Campbell with the carving knife.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I am a doctor.”

“Has anything happened? My wife, she is crazy when she is mad. Is that the reason why she ran away?”

“Does your wife flourish carving knives?”

Mr. Lupo retreated with a terrified expression.

“She has—?” he was too frightened to finish.

“No,” replied the doctor. “The lady was too strong for her here.” He touched his forehead with his finger.

“She was not touched—the lady?”

“No, but she has collapsed from fright,—she is very ill,—I could not answer for her recovery if you gave her another shock.”

Without a word, Mr. Lupo rushed out of doors, jumped into a rickety wagon drawn by an old mountain-climbing horse and in another instant was clattering down the road.

Toward evening Miss Campbell grew stronger. The doctor raised her head and fed her by the spoonful a cup of malted milk, also found in the ice chest.

“Billie?” she said.

“That’s my name,” answered the doctor. “William for long.”

“Nice boy,” she added, patting him on the shoulder, with a very small limp hand. “Have the children got back?”

“They will be here pretty soon, now,” he answered, frowning and glancing at his watch.

“Ben is a safe guide. They are safe with him. Wake me when they arrive,” and turning over on her side, Miss Campbell went back to sleep.

Occasionally the doctor scanned the side of the mountain with his telescope.

“The children are taking a long time,” he said to himself. “They had better look alive, if they want to make it before nightfall.”

But night fell and there was no sign of the wanderers. The doctor lit a cigar and watched the shadows creep up the side of the mountains. He listened to the last twittering of the birds and then a silence, profound and deep, settled on the camp.

Again he descended to the living room of the camp now in darkness. Presently he lighted the green shaded lamp and two lanterns, hanging one at the front of the house and the other at the back. He unpacked the market basket and cooked himself some supper, and finally with a glass of milk and a slice of bread for Miss Campbell when she waked, returned to the upper sleeping porch.

“A telescope is an excellent thing,” he observed, settling himself in a steamer chair, a lamp on the floor beside him with a tin protector to keep draughts from the flame. “I saw the woman plainly enough flourishing the carving knife. It must have been sheer force of will on the part of this little lady that made her drop it.”

And now the darkness had indeed fallen, a black, impenetrable curtain. Only the outline of the opposite range could be seen. It seemed to have closed in on the camp, and like a gigantic wall, to shut it off from the outer world. An owl hooted in a tree not far away and from a cleft in the mountains came the weird song of the whippoorwill.

CHAPTER VII.

PHOEBE.

Fate had chosen a very simple way of bringing about events of great importance to persons in this history. A doctor off on a walking trip had idly lifted his telescope to scan the village in the valley. As he swept his glass over the country, it had brought near to him glimpses of white farmhouses, men working in the fields and then looming quite close and unexpectedly large to his eye, a woman brandishing a long knife over the head of a person in white.

The doctor lost no time in idle speculation.

“It’s in that camp on the lower ledge,” he said to himself as he dashed down the path, and in some twenty minutes or more entered the living room of Sunrise Camp.

It is not pleasant to think of what might have happened to Miss Helen Campbell if the doctor’s alert, intelligent eyes had not caught and instantly comprehended the significance of the picture brought to him by the telescope. How long might she have lain there unconscious, or how dealt with the half-intoxicated Lupo if he had mounted the steps in search of his wife? Then, as the hours slipped on and no human soul came near to minister to her and comfort her, and she had finally realized that her young people had never returned, how would she have endured that second shock?

Fate had brought the doctor in the nick of time to perform an inestimable service to the Motor Maids and to all those who knew and loved Miss Helen Campbell.

And through this service to the friends of Miss Campbell, another was to follow,—one filled with danger and interest, which would require all the skill of his profession.

About ten o’clock Miss Campbell awoke, refreshed and rested. She took the milk and bread with an appetite. Then she examined the stranger at her bedside with some curiosity.

“I suppose they sent for you from the village?” she asked.

“I happened to be nearer than that,” he answered.

Memory was returning by slow degrees.

“I had a shock of some sort; or was it a fall? I remember fainting and the next thing I recall was aromatic ammonia and you.” The doctor smiled. “I suppose they are all in bed now. They were too tired to sit up.”

“It was so late, you see,” he said apologetically.

“They needn’t have left me this enormous porch to myself. I know they will hate sleeping down there. Can’t Billie come and speak to me?”

“I am afraid he’s sound asleep by now.”

“He?” ejaculated the patient. “But, of course, how could you be expected to know my young cousin by name. She is the tall girl with the gray eyes. I think she is beautiful. Perhaps you might not—but you would—”

The doctor started. He had heard a stealthy step on the porch below.

“You will not think me impertinent if I ask you not to talk?” he said. “Just a few more hours’ quiet and you’ll be quite fit. I’m going to leave you a moment.”

Miss Campbell gave him a good natured smile. She liked his fine face and his clear brown eyes.

“Very well, doctor,” she said. “I see you know your business. I’ll be obedient.”

Taking the lamp he went downstairs.

It could hardly be the gray-eyed Billie and her friends returning, he argued. They would never come creeping back in that stealthy manner.

“Well, who is it?” he called in a low voice.

Mrs. Lupo came out of the shadows and stood before him.

“Lady going die?” she asked in a terrified whisper.

“Pretty ill, but she’s coming around.”

The woman looked vastly relieved.

“Young lady know?”

“She has never come back.”

Mrs. Lupo raised both hands in a gesture of despair.

“The marsh—I never told—I’m wicked woman!” she exclaimed.

“Good heavens!” said the doctor, “you mean to say you sent them through that bog? It’s full of suck holes. You have done enough wickedness for one day. Where is your husband? Hurry up, quick. Wake up the villagers. Get lanterns. Go find them!”

Mrs. Lupo seized a lantern from the gallery.

“I go myself,” she said, and disappeared. All that night Mrs. Lupo searched Table Top. She knew the trail as intimately as the mountain girl, but at dawn she had found nothing. But as the light spread over the marsh, she saw something lying on the very edge of the most dangerous quicksand in the place. It was Nancy’s hobble skirt.

“Oh, oh!” groaned the poor woman over and over with a kind of savage chant. “Oh, oh! I’m punished now.”

Rolling the skirt into a bundle she turned her face from Sunrise Camp and disappeared in the pine forests.

About an hour after Mrs. Lupo had left the camp, the doctor heard the noise of hurrying footsteps on the gallery at the front and hastening downstairs he found Ben Austen and his guide.

“Miss Campbell—how has she stood it? Is she all right?” demanded Ben breathlessly.

“Not so loud,” answered the doctor. Then he told Ben in a few words what had happened. “She doesn’t even know you have been lost,” he said.

While the two men were talking together in whispers, the girl looked about her with much curiosity. Was she in a palace? The high roof, the rugs and chairs were things new to her. And this was called a “camp”! What was the inside of a real house like, she wondered.

“That virago!” she heard Ben say. “No wonder she drives Lupo to drink. This young lady here has saved us all and guided me back through the swamp.” He indicated the barefooted girl. “I suppose we would have been there yet if she hadn’t heard us call.”

“You must sit down,” said the doctor kindly. “I’ll just have a look at my patient and then help this young man get some supper. Your name is—?”

“Phoebe,” she answered, shrinking with shyness.

“Phoebe what?”

“I have no other name.”

Phoebe had been accustomed all her life to the courtesy and gentleness of one man, her father. The few others she had known were rough mountaineers, and here was she, barefooted and ragged, treated like a princess by two men.

While the doctor fried ham and eggs, the staple of every camp, Ben made a pot of tea, and presently drew up a table in front of her and placed on it a tray set as neatly as he knew how. Phoebe watched the proceedings with wide frightened eyes. She tried to hide her bare feet under her ragged dress and to draw down the sleeves over her hands, brown and stained with blackberry juice. Later, when they had made her a bed on one of the divans and left her to sleep until daylight, she was too bewildered to say good-night.

All her life Phoebe had lived in the little mountain cabin. She had never known a mother and she had never had a friend. Her father had taught her many things, however, and one was to read from the books on the shelf. There were several books on astronomy; Pilgrim’s Progress; the Bible; a volume of Shakespeare; a history of England; a translation of the “Iliad”, and some volumes of poetry:—Keats, Tennyson and Browning. Where her father had got these books and the silver and the blue china, she knew no more than he. He had tried and tried to remember, but he had forgotten. He had no identity, no past. His name, his family, everything connected with his early life had gone. His past life had stopped when he had gone for a physician. He had taught his little girl to read, as we have said, and when old enough she had often read aloud in the long winter evenings. He had seemed to listen with absorbed interest, but it is difficult to say how much he grasped of the words he heard, or whether they were mere words to him with no collective significance.

With a certain instinct left to him from that mysterious dead past, he had imparted to his daughter an unmistakable refinement of speech and manner. About some things he was even fastidious,—her way of eating, the appearance of the table and the silver. He himself was excessively neat and orderly and had periods of great industry, weaving baskets of sweet grass and carving wood, not crudely, but with unusual taste, boxes and chalets, napkin rings and figures of animals. Where he had learned these arts his daughter never knew, but she imagined from an old Indian who had lived in the little cabin in the early days and had died when Phoebe was still quite small. As far as a man may be sane whose memory extends back only some eighteen years and who has only one illusion, Phoebe’s father was sane. The baskets and woodcarving he and his daughter peddled through the country with success, because they were exceedingly well done, and the money earned was sufficient for their small needs.

Too excited from the unusual events of the night to sleep, Phoebe lay on the divan in the living room and reviewed the mysteries that filled her life. She had a strange smattering of knowledge for a girl of eighteen. It would seem that she had been gifted with a memory for two since her father had none, and whatever she learned from the row of books on the shelves she remembered. That is, whatever interested her.

She knew the constellations and the planets, and on summer nights had located them in the heavens by means of the book chart. She would point them out to her father, who glanced at them vaguely, smiled and went on playing the zither, his consolation in idle moments.

She had read and re-read the history of England so many times that some of the chapters she could repeat word for word. She understood little of the poetry, but the rhythm of the lines sang in her head, and without knowing the meaning she could repeat in a sing-song voice long poems and sonnets. “Pilgrim’s Progress” and the “Iliad” and the New Testament with the Psalms were her solace on the long winter evenings. One after the other she read them with unending pleasure. She would read slowly so as not to finish too soon, as a child nibbles at her sweet cake to make it last the longer, and having finished one volume she would take up another with all the eagerness of one about to plunge into a new book. Just how much she had gained from the teachings of Christ was hidden deep in her own soul, but we will find later that Phoebe had learned a secret which those who have had the advantage of broad education have often passed by.

When at last the first pipings of the birds came to herald the dawn, she rose and went out to the gallery. The last star was fading into the grayness of the sky and already morning was at hand. In the growing light it might be seen that Phoebe had an unusually beautiful face. Her eyes, of very dark blue, were almost black at times; her reddish brown hair, coiled into a thick knot on her neck, grew low on her forehead. Her features were well molded, her mouth fine and strong, and a full, rounded chin added sweetness to her expression.

Standing in the very spot where she had first seen Billie and Mary, she turned her face toward the east and watched for the sun.

“I believe my prayers are answered,” she said.

Some twenty minutes later, seated by Ben in the motor car, she guided him along a mountain road, which led at last to a point near her father’s cabin.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE GYPSY COOKS.

“Dearest Papa:” (wrote Billie) “Cousin Helen has entirely recovered from her fright,—anger she calls it. She is not afraid of either of the Lupos, although the dent in the plank where the knife was still standing when we finally did get home will always make me feel trembly. Dr. Hume is making us a visit. Cousin Helen will not hear of his leaving us. She says she will certainly have another attack of heart failure if he goes away, but that it’s of a different variety from the last. I think we all have a touch of that kind of heart disease as a matter of fact, boys and girls. He is a wonderful man and has taken us on some beautiful walks over the mountain. Nancy and Percy always stay behind with Cousin Helen, and we are finally beginning to understand that it’s as much preference as self-denial. Nancy and I are doing the cooking with some help from Ben and Dr. Hume. It’s great fun. We cook on a camp fire outside and not on that wretched little stove, which is like a bad child and never behaves when it is expected to. Ben and Percy wash the dishes. Thank heavens for that. I could never make a living as a scullery maid. It’s a dog’s life. Elinor and Mary make up our cots and keep things tidy. It is really and truly camping now, and such a relief not to have those Lupos. But there is trouble about the laundry. Nobody in these high places will stoop to wash clothes. If you could send us up a strong, fearless girl, it doesn’t matter how little she knows, it would be fine. We want her strong to scour pans and wash clothes, and fearless enough to be left at the camp alone when we all go off in the ‘Comet’ on a picnic.

“The mountain girl who saved us is named Phoebe. Her father is not insane, but he has no memory. His accent might be English. At any rate it’s better than ours. Nobody on the mountain knows anything about them. An old Indian brought them to the cabin when Phoebe was a baby and took care of them both for several years. The people call the man ‘Frenchy,’ why I’m sure I can’t imagine, perhaps because he seems foreign. He does really beautiful wood carving and basket weaving and he seemed quite pleased over getting orders from us. We all of us want to do something for Phoebe but she is not the kind you can approach easily. I would not dare even offer her a pair of shoes, and she’s generally barefooted. Cousin Helen thought perhaps she might like to work for us, but I would as soon think of asking our dear cousin herself. I’m the best coffee maker in the compound and I’ve learned by the cookbook how to poach eggs, after breaking six to get the hang of it. Dr. Hume knows a Scotch dish that’s a dream and so easy to make. Nancy and I are going to give them a surprise. It’s ‘Mock Duck,’ made of beefsteak stuffed with many things, and then rolled up like a mummy and tied with strings. We shall roast it over hot embers on a spit Ben has rigged up, with a thing he calls a ‘gutter’ to catch the juices. Good-by, dearest Papa. Don’t forget the strong, fearless girl.

Your devoted daughter,    
Billie.”

In due time a telegram was telephoned from the railroad station to the nearest hotel and from thence to the postoffice in the village at the foot of Sunrise Mountain. Here it was written down on a scrap of paper and in the course of events reached Billie Campbell. It said:

“Meet Alberdina, fearless Swiss-German. 4.30 train Saturday. Father.”

Ben brought the message with the evening mail Friday afternoon while Nancy and Billie, much heated and excited, were in the act of cooking the mock duck.

“What are you roasting? An Indian papoose?” he demanded, after they had laughed over the name of the new, fearless maid.

The spurious fowl made of a large flat piece of meat stuffed out to plump proportions and tied at each end did resemble a fat little Indian baby.

“Don’t worry us,” exclaimed Nancy. “We have enough to bother us now. The potatoes are taking forever to cook and the beans are almost done.”

“The onions are just as bad,” put in Billie.

“Why don’t you put the onions and potatoes in the same pot with the beans? Maybe it will bring them luck,” suggested Ben.

“Do you think it would affect the flavor?” Billie asked eagerly.

But Nancy, of a more adventurous spirit in cooking, recklessly dumped all the vegetables together into one pot and set it on the kerosene stove, which had been carried out by the ever-useful Ben and placed at no great distance from the open fire.

Percy came up just then.

“How are the Gypsy cooks? Is the pot boiling? What’s that thing that looks like a pig in a blanket? Or is this a cannibal feast?”

“Run away, Algernon Percival, and don’t ask so many questions,” replied Billie, stirring the pot.

“I’ve brought the dinner horn along,” said Percy in an insinuating tone of voice.

Even the Gypsy cooks laughed at this. Percy was the last person to rise in the morning. He usually appeared with the coffee and eggs, but the moment he waked up, he seized the trumpet from a nail in the wall at the side of his bed and blew a long triumphant aria with variations. Then from the camp fire at a safe distance from the log hut would come shouts of derision from the others who had been up quite an hour. The table had been carried out under the trees, and here in the early morning they had their breakfast. Here also, they had their supper if it was ready before dark and there were no lights to attract the myriads of night-flying insects. But it did look this evening as if they would be obliged to transfer all dishes and stools, table and eatables into the house, unless the potatoes and onions could be impressed with the importance of submitting to the inevitable.

Dr. Hume, just in from a long walk, tired and mortally hungry, now made his appearance, and Miss Helen Campbell in dainty white, and without any traces whatever of her recent experience with Mrs. Lupo, came trailing across the clearing. There was an expectant expression on her face, as of one who is thinking with inward pleasure of dinner. Elinor came with a bowl of Michaelmas daisies and Mary brought up the procession, carrying a platter of bread sliced so as not to destroy the shape of the loaf, an accomplishment she was proud of.

Percy, seeing the gathering of the company, promptly lifted the trumpet to his lips and blew a blast so startling and unexpected that Mary gave a nervous shriek and dropped the bread to the ground.

“Oh, you wretch,” she cried, “see what you have done! And what was the use anyway, since dinner isn’t ready and we are all here?”

“Don’t be so hasty in your judgments, Lady Mary,” answered Percy, composedly gathering up the slices of bread. “That was a song of joy because a beautiful damozel approached with bread for the hungry.”

“Hungry?” repeated Miss Campbell, watching, unmoved, the process of shaking the pine needles from the bread. “Starving, rather. If I don’t have my dinner in a minute, I shall be light enough to float away like a thistledown.”

“Who said starving?” cried Dr. Hume, joining the circle. “If there were a stronger word, I’d use it.”

“Famished?” suggested Ben.

“Perishing for want of food,” added Elinor.

Nancy and Billie exchanged glances of dismay and Billie impotently poked the pot of vegetables with a long peeled wand.

“What’s that thing that looks like an emigrant’s roll?” demanded the doctor.

“It won’t explode, I hope,” remarked Miss Campbell, noticing that the roll of meat seemed to be bursting its bonds in the process of roasting.

“Poor thing, it does seem to be suffering,” said Dr. Hume gravely. “There is some enlargement taking place in its internal organs, due to heat expansion, I judge.”

“I guess that animal, whatever it is, feels something like an early Christian martyr,” put in Percy.

“What is the creature?” inquired Miss Campbell, raising her tortoise shell lorgnette in order the better to see the writhing form over the flames.

“It’s a duck,” answered Billie, desperately stirring the kettle of vegetables.

“Duck?” they shouted in a loud chorus.

“There never was a duck on land or sea that looked like that.”

“Where are its legs?”

“Was it a winged duck?”

“Perhaps it’s a species of wingless, legless mountain duck, unknown to low countries?”

“Well, if you must know,” cried Billie, now very hot and red over the fire, and wishing devoutly that that brutally truthful speech about watched pots had never been made, “if you demand the truth, it’s mock duck——”

“It sounds like the name of a Chinese laundry-man,” put in Percy.

“Made by a famous Southern recipe. We didn’t know it would take so long to cook.” She was ashamed to mention the potatoes and onions. “If you are all so famished, you might start on the bread and butter.”

Instantly they gathered around the table and Percy passed around the bread tray. From bread they turned to the salad of tomatoes and cucumbers. Lettuce did not seem to flourish in that country. They drank the ginger ale and ate all the olives, and still the spurious fowl remained a mockery to cooks. It sent forth rivulets of juices and made a great to do over the fire, like people who are all promises and talk and no action, but it would not get done. Then the doctor slipped away and presently returned with his contribution to the supper. He had made it in the morning and it had been standing in the ice chest all day.

“I thought we might help this so as there would be no delays after we had dispatched that talkative fat person in the blanket,” he said. “I hope you will like it. My mother used to call it ‘piddling.’ It was a wash-day dessert and we always had it Mondays, made from Sunday’s cake.”

Elinor busied herself serving the wash-day dessert into china saucers. It was made of slices of cake soaked in fruit juice and spread with jam.

“When there is cream in the house, it adds of course,” observed the doctor with some pride over his success as a cook.

“The flavor’s delicious,” observed Miss Campbell, testing a small piece daintily on the edge of her spoon.

“It’s bully,” exclaimed Ben.

The doctor was really vain over his efforts.

“And I made it from memory,” he informed them, “without any recipe. I call that pretty good for a first attempt.”

They wondered if he had ever done anything in his profession that gave him as much childish delight as making this simple dessert of his boyhood.

After a brief silence, broken only by the tinkle of spoons against saucers, the campers around the table glanced at each other guiltily. Except for the portions reserved for the two cooks, there was not a crumb of piddling left.

“Better hide the plates and cover the dish,” said the doctor in a conspirator’s whisper. “It’s enough to provoke them into a mutiny. Time enough to break the news after they have eaten their mock turtle.”

“Duck,” choked Percy.

But the Gypsy cooks had noticed nothing. They were too absorbed with straining the beans and the onions now cooked to shreds, from the adamantine potatoes. The cooked vegetables they arranged in the bottom of a large meat platter as a becoming bed for the mock duck which Billie, with mingled feelings of fear and triumph, now prepared to loose from his fastenings with a long fork and the historic carving knife. But Mock Duck to the end was a rogue and a trickster. The poor little cook had just loosened him from the spit and was holding him precariously on the prong of a fork, when he gave a malicious leap into the air and plunged into the very centre of the hot embers. Instantly a circle of flames rose high about him and the air was charged with the fumes of burning flesh.

“Oh, oh!” shrieked Billie. “Help! Help!”

They did what they could to save the remnants of Mock Duck. Ben singed his eyebrows in an effort to spear him on a fork and raise him from his fiery bed. They were all very quick but the flames were quicker, and when at last Mock Duck was lifted from the embers his form was no longer recognizable and the surface of his outer covering was burned to a cinder.

The two little Gypsy cooks wept with disappointment. They had worked so hard and were so hot and tired and hungry.

Their friends were consumed with pity.

“There, there,” cried Dr. Hume, too tender hearted to look upon tears without being moved. “Don’t cry, little cooks. Look at all this nice gravy and these delicious vegetables.”

“Why, my dearest children, you mustn’t mind,” exclaimed Miss Campbell. “See what a beautiful mixture we can have. Pour the gravy right into the platter with the beans and onions. We’ll eat it on bread.”

How callous do the most fastidious become after a few weeks in camp!

“Come, come, there’s no time to be lost,” exclaimed the starving Percy.

But the two disappointed cooks had nothing to say. They choked back their tears and fell to with an appetite on beans and onions ingloriously mixed with bread and gravy. And as a final delicacy, the campers, who had commenced with dessert and salad, finished off with two very delicious mealy potatoes apiece.

“If we stayed in this wilderness long, we’d revert to savages,” Miss Campbell remarked, stirring a large cup of black coffee. “But on the whole, I think I am enjoying the reversion and my appetite is getting better every day.”

“If I were starving in the wilderness and somebody offered me Mock Duck, I’d refuse it,” ejaculated Billie irrelevantly, for nobody had mentioned mock duck for a long time.

THE BALLAD OF MOCK DUCK.
(Poem by Percy.)

There was a haughty animal,
Lived in a meadow fine;
A domesticated lady
Of the genus called bovine.

Like many other females,
Beast or human or divine,
This domesticated lady
Of the family of kine

Gazed with rapture at her features,
As reflected in a brook,
When with unblushing ecstasy
Each morn she took a look.

As she smiled at her reflection
In the mirror of the stream,
She indulged in gentle rev’ries
Of complacency supreme.

“Besides my gift of beauty
And my cultivated mind,
I have other choice attractions
Of a very varied kind.

”My roasts and steaks are luscious,
On my hash all have relied,
My youthful veal’s delicious,
And my milk is certified.“

On these pleasing meditations
Broke a mother with her brood,
Sailing o’er that calm reflection
In a most ungracious mood.

”You may be steaks and roast beef
And hash of quality,
But you stoop to imitations
Of poor humble little me.

“You may be a benefactor,
But I’ll just remind you, ma’am,
That in one small particular
You are a blooming sham.

”Don’t let your sweet milk curdle
And don’t let it sour your luck,
If I make so bold to mention
That imposture called ‘Mock Duck’!“

So this web-footed lady,
With a malice quite feline,
Disturbed the calm reflections
Of that innocent bovine.

CHAPTER IX.

A LESSON BY THE WAYSIDE.

Promptly at nine o’clock Saturday morning the “Comet” might have been seen crawling down the side of the mountain with Billie at the wheel. Dr. Hume sat beside her and Elinor and Ben were in the back seat. It was with something of a holiday feeling that they went forth to meet Alberdina, the new maid, whose presence was becoming a pressing necessity.

“I don’t mind the cooking a bit, Doctor,” Billie was saying. “Especially with Nancy, although I suppose I am really her assistant. She makes things exciting enough. I think she’s a kind of culinary speculator and takes a lot of chances, but she’s awfully lucky. She takes all sorts of rag-tag ends of things, chops them into bits and turns out what she calls ragouts.”

“They’re mighty good,” said the doctor. “Experimenting cooks generally have a sub-conscious instinct that carries them along when they seem to be going blindly. But it’s difficult to work with them. They are always dictatorial and inclined to treat the assistant as a scullery maid.”

Billie groaned.

“I hope Alberdina, strong and fearless, will relieve us of that awful scullery work. I have a feeling it would be a reflection on my character and on the Campbell family if I didn’t leave every pan bright and shining, but oh, dear, it’s work! I think if I had to keep it up I should cook everything together, vegetables and meat, in one big kettle full of boiling water.”

“That wouldn’t be such a bad mess,” laughed the doctor. “The vegetable and meat juices would make a rich broth and you could serve soup, meat and vegetables all in one plate. Think of the saving of that.”

“As Cousin Helen said, it wouldn’t take campers long to revert to savagery,” ejaculated Billie. “We are already as brown as Indians. We keep our sleeves rolled up and our collars turned in and wear creepers instead of shoes, and always khaki skirts, and never dress for supper. Even Cousin Helen has slipped back a peg—”

“It’s the only possible way to enjoy camping,” broke in the doctor. “But you would never get to be an all the way savage. Look at that remarkable young woman, Miss Phoebe, who has never had anything else in all her life,—she is far from being a savage.”

“Indeed she is,” said Billie. “She has never been to school in her life, but she knows a great deal more about some things than I do—astronomy, for instance, and English history.”

“There is more than that,” put in Elinor, leaning over to join in the conversation. “Phoebe has learned something else that keeps her from ever being ill or tired or unhappy. I asked her what it was and she said it was a secret.”

“Speaking of angels,” remarked Ben, “there is Phoebe in front of us now, carrying a basket. I suppose she is going to the Antler’s Inn to sell some of her father’s work.”

Far ahead of them, swinging along the dusty road, was Phoebe. Her tall, slender figure swayed gracefully with the movement of the walk, but her shoulders did not bend under the burden of the large basket. A hot, dry wind blew her skirts about her and flapped the brim of her jimmie hat. Since the night at Sunrise Camp, Phoebe had never gone barefooted again, and she now wore a pair of canvas creepers that gave a spring to her step as she hurried along.

Keeping time to the rhythm of her steps, Phoebe chanted softly in a rich, clear voice:

“‘The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want.
“‘He maketh me to lie down in the green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.’”

The whir of the motor car interrupted the chanting, and, with an absent-minded glance over her shoulder, she stepped to the side of the road to wait for it to pass.

But the “Comet” stopped short and all the occupants called out, “Good morning,” with an especial cordiality.

Phoebe bowed her head gravely. Her eyes had a remote expression as if she had been awakened from a dream. Ben opened the door of the car and jumped out, while Billie exclaimed:

“I am so glad we met you, Phoebe, because now you will let us give you a lift.”

Phoebe looked into Billie’s kind gray eyes for a moment and then smiled as if she had found something there that pleased her.

“I will come,” she said, as Ben took the basket from her arm and helped her into the car.

“Have you walked across the mountain this morning?” he asked, when they had started on their way again.

“I started early,” she said, “when it was cool.”

“And you are not tired?” asked the doctor.

Her eyes had a remote expression as if she had been awakened from a dream.
Her eyes had a remote expression as if she had
been awakened from a dream.—Page 136.

“No, no, I am not tired. Why should I be? This was my work for to-day. If I had been tired, I could not have done it.”

The doctor looked at her curiously.

“You believe, then, you are given strength for each day’s task?”

Phoebe did not reply. She was not accustomed to conversation and it was impossible to find words in which to express herself.

She turned her dark beautiful eyes on him with a gaze that was almost disconcerting while searching her mind for an answer.

The doctor put his question in a different way.

“When it’s your day’s work to take a long walk across the mountain in the hot sun, what keeps you from getting tired?”

“I sing,” answered Phoebe, and settled back in the seat between Elinor and Ben, her brown hands folded loosely in her lap.

The ride over to meet the new maid was intended to be something in the nature of a picnic, and they had made an early start in order to eat lunch in the woods after the first stage of the journey. And now, as the sun crept up toward the meridian, their appetites began to clamor for food. About that time, too, they came near to the road which led to the Antlers, where Phoebe hoped to sell some of her baskets. She lifted the big basket into her lap and touched Billie on the shoulder as a dumb signal to stop.

“But we are not going to let you go, Phoebe,” exclaimed Billie. “You must lunch with us in the woods. Then we’ll have time I think to drop you at the Antlers and stop for you again on the way back.”

“I do not see why Miss Phoebe needs to visit the inn at all,” put in Dr. Hume. “I wanted to get presents for my nieces and nephews. I will buy the basketful and that will save me no end of trouble searching for things in the village.”

Phoebe thoughtfully considered these generous and hospitable propositions before she replied with great seriousness of tone and manner:

“Thank you, but it is too much; I cannot accept. It is too much.”

“But it is not, Phoebe,” protested Billie. “We want you. We like to have you with us.”

“And I want the baskets, too,” went on the doctor. “It will save me a hot, stupid journey to the village.”

Phoebe looked from one to the other. Her pride was struggling with her yearning to be with these new and wonderful friends.

“We won’t take ‘No’,” cried Billie. “We are depending on you to show us a good place for our picnic and you can guide us over the last of the road to the station. You see, we have a reason for asking you. We want your help.”

The mountain-girl was therefore persuaded to remain with them for the rest of the trip, and presently they drew up near a pine forest where there was a little stream. Ben lifted out the luncheon hamper and the tea basket, and while the girls unpacked the food, Phoebe stood shyly by and watched the proceedings. With a heightened color she glanced from Billie’s and Elinor’s neat skirts and pongee blouses to her own faded calico dress. She spread out her brown fingers stained with berry juice, and looked at them sadly. Then her face brightened.

“I was almost forgetting,” she said out loud, but to no one. “I am always in too great a hurry. I have waited a long time and now it is beginning to come. It was too soon last summer, but now at last it is time.”

Dr. Hume noticed Phoebe talking to herself and shook his head.

“Too much alone,” he thought.

Meanwhile, Billie, piling sandwiches on the lunch cloth, was busy thinking of something far different. Her glance shifted from Dr. Hume to Phoebe and back again. She closed her eyes and the thought which at first she saw dimly in the dark recesses of her mind advanced to the open, took form and shape and presently boldly showed itself as a full-grown plan. Billie, sitting abstractedly on the ground, piling and re-piling the sandwiches, was startled by Ben’s rather impatient voice.

“I’ll have to fall-to unless you give the word, Billie; I’m famished.”

“Excuse my absent-mindedness, Ben,” laughed Billie. “I had just thought up a wild, though perfectly feasible scheme, and I couldn’t turn my mind to mere food for a moment.”

“And the scheme is?” demanded Elinor, seating herself at the lunch table while she waited for the water to boil.

“I shall have to wait to tell you until it’s ready to serve up,” answered Billie, “nice and brown and done through.”

“Why, Billie, what kind of kitchen talk is that?” exclaimed Elinor, laughing. “You’ll be seeing with the eyes of a cook next. Sunsets will remind you of tomato soup and clouds will make you think of meringues and—”

Elinor broke off, her eyes wide with astonishment, and the others following the direction of her gaze saw that she was looking at a man who had crept into their midst so silently that no one had noticed him. In that haggard and unshaved face they recognized Mr. Lupo.

“Something to eat,” he demanded fiercely. “I’m almost starved.”

Without a word Billie handed him several sandwiches and some fruit.

“Eat it over there,” she ordered, pointing to a distant tree, “and afterwards you can tell us what is the matter.”

The others admired her calm assurance with the half-breed, but Billie was tired of the Lupos. The wife had come near being the death of her beloved cousin, and the husband was a lazy, loafing fellow. Such was her judgment of them.

“Come, Phoebe. Come, Dr. Hume,” she said, and the others gathered around the lunch cloth. Mr. Lupo lifted his sodden, bloodshot eyes at the word “Phoebe,” and saw with astonishment the young girl, whom Billie knew the couple hated, now drinking tea and mingling on equal terms with the people of Sunrise Camp.

His eyes narrowed into little slits. After choking down the sandwiches greedily, he stalked over into their midst.

“What have you done with my wife?” he demanded.

“We know nothing of your wife, Lupo,” answered Dr. Hume, who knew all about the couple by this time. “You had better go on now, if you have had enough food.”

“I don’t want any more of your cursed food,” answered Lupo, looking very much like his namesake, the wolf, at that moment. “But I tell you if you’ve given my wife money to leave me, you will have to pay for it in another coin.”

“Nobody has ever given your wife any money. She has never been back since the day she threatened Miss Campbell with a carving knife. If anybody has driven her away, it’s you, with your drunken, low habits.”

Lupo moved a step nearer and pointed his thumb at Phoebe.

“So you’re trying to make a lady of her, are you?”

Phoebe took not the slightest notice. She was watching the antics of a squirrel leaping in the branches of a giant oak tree, but she turned her eyes gratefully toward Billie, when that young woman burst out with:

“She is a lady and my friend. I think you’d better go now, Mr. Lupo.”

“Whoever meddles with those two shall pay for it,” cried the man fiercely, just as Ben seized him by the collar and flung him into a thicket of bushes, from where he presently crawled away out of sight, occasionally pausing to shake his fist in their direction.

“A nice return for hospitality,” exclaimed Billie.

“He’s a dangerous fellow,” said the doctor. “But I imagine he’s mostly talk. What do you know of him, Miss Phoebe?”

“I only know that years ago they tried to drive us away from our house. But an old man who lived with us, protected us. He owned the cabin and he left it to father and me. There was a will that made it ours. It became a home.” They smiled at her quaint expression. “And the Lupos have been turned against us always, but God has protected us from our enemies.”

They looked at her silently. It was impossible not to feel deeply impressed with the earnestness of her tone. Billie felt ashamed. With all her advantages and the opportunities money and travel had brought her, Phoebe, raised in a cabin on the mountain side, had learned something she had not.

Presently she went over and sat beside the mysterious girl.

“I wish you would teach me a few things, Phoebe. I feel that I am very ignorant.”

“But I have never been to school,” replied Phoebe in astonishment.

“There are some things one doesn’t learn at school,” answered Billie.

CHAPTER X.

ALBERDINA SCHOENBACHLER

“You no lig I shall dos clothes coog?” asked Alberdina, the Monday after her arrival.

“Boil, you mean?” corrected Miss Campbell. “Certainly. There is a clothes boiler, and goodness knows the things need it, and a good bleaching afterwards in the sun. They are as yellow as gold.”

When Alberdina, the new German-Swiss maid, had alighted from the train with her absurd little iron-bound trunk, about as big as a bread basket, Billie had felt no misgivings. Here, indeed, was a creature too healthy to know the name of fear, and too good-natured to object to hard work. The brilliant red cheeks and broad engaging smile immediately decided Billie to put all her accumulated linen in wash at once.

On top of Alberdina’s large peasant head was perched a small round hat, positively the most ludicrous thing ever seen in the shape of millinery. With its band of red satin ribbon and tiny bunch of field flowers, it seemed to defy the world to find anything funnier.

“It’s a real comedy hat,” Dr. Hume observed. “The kind they wear when they sing:

“‘Hi-lee-hi-lo-hi-lee-hi-lo,
I joost come over; I joost come over.’”

“But she’s really a ministering angel, you know,” said Billie, “sent to do the washing and ironing and scullery work. Except for cooking meals, we expect to take life easy from now on.”

And so, right gladly, they had carried Alberdina Schoenbachler over the twenty-five miles of mountain road and established her in Sunrise Camp.

“I think she is the very person we needed, Cousin Helen,” Billie said. “Not accomplished, you know, or trained in any way, but good enough for camping. And there is no reason now why we shouldn’t take the trip to the lower lake if you feel well enough. The weather is perfect.”

“Do you think we ought to leave her on the first day?” Miss Campbell replied somewhat doubtfully.

“Why not? She has enough to occupy her, goodness knows, with all that washing.”

“But suppose she should get lonely or frightened—?”

Just then a melodious Swiss yodel broke the stillness of the early morning and Billie laughed.

“She isn’t going to be lonesome. She is accustomed to the mountains. Do let’s take a holiday, Cousin Helen, please,” and with Miss Helen’s assent, Billie rushed off to find the others and tell the good news.

Perhaps some people would regard it as a fault in Billie’s character that, having formed a plan, she was always filled with wild impatience to carry it out. But when we consider that Billie’s plans concerned the pleasure and entertainment of other people and that her impatience was only another form of earnest enthusiasm, it would be difficult to criticise her.

While three of the Motor Maids busied themselves preparing the luncheon, Billie and Ben worked over the motor car, putting it in condition for a long trip, and Percy, in blue overalls, washed the body of the car.

“I am so glad to save you this drudgery,” he observed, with an ingratiating smile.

“You’re not half as glad as we are, Percival Algernon,” answered Ben. “It’s a double blessing, because it’s good discipline for you and it gives us a chance to show how much we know about machinery.”

“Don’t boast, my son. You may have a sure enough chance before the sun sets,” remarked Percy in the tone of a prophet.

“After you have washed him off well, rub him down with those cloths,” ordered Billie from under the car. “Then stow the rubber curtains inside and see to the lights. It may be late before we get back.”

“All right, Captain,” answered Percy respectfully.

It was still not nine o’clock when the “Comet,” polished and oiled and looking as neat in his dark blue and buff uniform as a soldier on parade, stood ready for departure. The hamper of luncheon was strapped on behind, and underneath the middle seats in a pan of ice were bottles of root beer and ginger ale. Presently he started down the steep road with his load. The rustic camp, perched on the ledge in the side of the mountain, with its guard of pine trees crowding almost to its doors, never looked more alluring.

“I declare I hate to leave the place,” said Miss Campbell, peeping through the glass window in the back curtain of the car.

“It’s in good hands,” laughed the doctor, as the voice of Alberdina floated to them, singing in fulsome tones:

“Ach, mein lieber Augustine, Augustine, Augustine!”

But the motor car with its load of campers had not been long gone when Alberdina withdrew her arms, elbow deep in soapsuds, from the wash tub, and looked around her.

“Ach, mein lieber Gott,” she said turning her large cow-like eyes on the pile of linen, “I dis worg nod much lige. It is too many. I mag to coog dos clothes and rest. Dis life it all hard worg ees.”

She lifted an armful of linen garments from the tub and stuffed them into the clothes boiler which she filled with water and set on the coal oil stove. Then drawing up a steamer chair, she settled herself comfortably and closed her eyes, not noticing that in the boilerful of white things she had plunged a red silk handkerchief of Percy’s. Nearly an hour had passed when Alberdina awoke from her healthy, conscienceless slumber with a start. Turning her head lazily, she noticed that the clothes were boiling and the water was running over the sides of the boiler.

“Mein Gott!” she said in German. “That little mistress will make of me the Hamburger. I must do some work.”

But to her horror and astonishment, when Alberdina made an effort to rise from the low, easy chair, she could not move. She had been bound to the chair with a stout rope, the clothes line in fact. Each fat red hand was secured to an arm of the chair, her feet tied together and her body strapped to the seat and back.

Alberdina groaned and her stupid eyes became humid with terror.

“Helb! Helb!” she called. “Helb bring. Mein Gott in himmel, helb!”

No answer came from the silent camp.

“Ees it for dis, den, I haf to you come?” she cried, addressing the circle of mountains shimmering in opalescent light. Far down from the valley below came the long clear note of a bugle, probably of some coaching party. An impudent woodpecker seated on a limb above her commenced an insistent, aggravating tapping.

Alberdina made another struggle to loose her bonds and then settled back weeping. At last merciful sleep brought her oblivion. The mountains shimmered in the heat waves. The sunlight slanting through the trees cast flickering golden shadows on the carpet of pine needles. The tinkle of a cowbell broke the stillness. In her dreams the Swiss girl was reminded of her own cherished uplands, where in the festive cheese-making time she had gathered with other maids and youths and danced to the music of the zither. Zither, did she say? But, had she been dreaming then, all the while? Was not that a zither now mingling its fairy music with the notes of the cow bell? Alberdina opened her eyes.

“Helb! Helb! I asg you helb!” she called.

The music stopped instantly and a man, tall, slender, with an indescribably distinguished air, approached, carrying the zither under his arm.

“You called?” he asked courteously.

Alberdina burst into a torrent of excited German. She rolled her prominent eyes to indicate her bonds. Streams of tears flowed down her cheeks, or taking a short cut, ran over the bridge of her nose and dropped down a precipice to her heaving bosom. Phoebe’s father watched her with an expression of gentle bewilderment. He seemed to be trying to recall something an infinite distance away, like one of those inexplicable reminiscences that flash through our minds and are gone before we can grasp their significance.

“It’s useless,” he said, shaking his head. “But something has happened to you? Oh, yes, you have been tied up.”

Taking a bone-handled clasp knife from his pocket, he carefully cut the ropes wound about her. Alberdina bounded out of the chair like a big, fleshy catapult.

“Ach, himmel, I thangs mag to you, sir,” she cried respectfully, for there was something in this wanderer which commanded deference, although he did wear a threadbare suit and mountain brogans.

“You know who did this, my girl?” he asked.

She shook her head and ran into the camp beyond. The locker rooms on the two sleeping porches were in confusion. The contents of drawers and trunks had been dumped to the floor and writing portfolios overhauled. But, apparently, nothing had been taken, because there was nothing valuable enough to tempt the most eager burglar. What little ready money they had the campers had carried with them, and there was no jewelry to steal. Only Alberdina had been robbed. With many deep guttural exclamations she found that her own little emigrant trunk had not been overlooked in the pillage and her purse, containing ten dollars, was gone.

The gentleman with the zither turned to go.

“I came to find a physician,” he said. “Is there none here?”

“I know nod,” answered the girl, shaken with sobs.

He lifted his old slouch hat.

“I bid you good day,” he said, and started away, then turning back, he exclaimed: “Perhaps I ought not to leave you here alone. But I must not stay away so long. Phoebe will be frightened. Will you come with me to my home?”

Alberdina shook her head. She was half afraid of the strange man. Who knows but it might have been this stranger, himself, who had robbed her of her savings?

“No, no; I vill stay here. The vorst is over yet already. Dey haf me robbed of my moneys. I no more haf. Dey vill not come bag.”

Having so spoken, she returned to her labors and was presently hanging on the line a long row of deep pink clothing, headed by the red silk handkerchief, the iniquitous author of the wicked deed.

In the meantime the motorists had proceeded joyfully on their way. They sang and joked and made so merry that Dr. Hume felt that he had gone back fifteen years in his busy life and was a boy himself. The road as indicated on the map in the road book was cut through forests of primeval growth. Sometimes it descended into the valley past villages and farm houses. Once it took them through a splendid tract of land dedicated with its club house to St. Hubert, patron saint of the hunt. At last it began by degrees to climb upward, and with a sudden turn around the mountain side, they came into view of an exquisite little lake, reflecting in its mirrored depths the peaks of the high mountains encircling it. Hundreds of silver birches, slender and elegant, fringed its edges, gleaming white against a background of impenetrable green.

At one corner of the lake were a small boathouse and restaurant, where customers are perpetually served with tea and maple cake. Long ago they had eaten lunch and were quite ready for more refreshments. Then everybody but Miss Campbell took a dip in the lake. The hours sped past and the sun was well on its downward grade before they realized it was time to return.

In the meantime, Billie, always eager to find out about new roads and new trails, had been questioning one of the guides at the boathouse.

“He says there’s a walk called the ‘river trail’ only two miles long that we could take, and meet the ‘Comet’ at a bridge at the end. Don’t you think some of us could take it, Dr. Hume? It’s right through the most wonderful pine forests,—one of the most beautiful walks in the Adirondacks, he says.”

“But who will run the motor car?” asked the doctor, beetling his shaggy eyebrows.

“I will,” Ben volunteered, and it was accordingly arranged that Dr. Hume and Percy should conduct the girls along the river trail while Miss Campbell and Ben proceeded by the road in the car.

It was all very simple. Miss Campbell was to take a nap while Ben looked after the “Comet’s” needs and in the course of half an hour, or at their leisure, they were to take the road. In the meantime, the others, with good walking, would have ample time to make the two miles through the forest. They bade each other a casual farewell since they were to meet again so soon, and led by the doctor, plunged into the forest.

The ground had been cleared of undergrowth, so that looking up the side of the mountain, at the foot of which gurgled a little river, one could see a vast multitude of tall straight pine trees and occasionally the flash of a silver birch. Rank on rank they stood in infinite perspective; and sometimes an aged beech tree generalled their march and sometimes a magnificent oak spread out his venerable arms with a gesture of command. But the rank and file were pines; gray grenadiers, still upright with the years; young stripling pines, eager to be on the march. And always they seemed to be going the same way over the mountains to the frontiers of the world, and always through their branches came the murmur of their martial song.

Nowhere had Billie seen so impressive, so magnificent a forest. She thought of the cryptomerias in Japan, but they were more like the gigantic pillars of a cathedral, while these hurrying hordes of pines and birches were like human beings. They suggested romances: lovers in the forests; knights in armor; wicked enchantresses.

Once Dr. Hume paused and pointed to a cleared space beyond. There, standing under a great pine tree looking at them with startled eyes were a doe and her young. In another instant they were gone, leaving the campers holding their breath.

In a little more than an hour they reached the end of the trail, where a foot bridge made of two logs took them over the turbulent little river. But no “Comet” stood waiting for them at the rendezvous with Ben at the wheel and Miss Campbell on the back seat. To be sure the road was twice as long, as the trail had wound around the side of the mountain for some five miles, but that was nothing to a motor car.

“Might as well sit down and wait,” suggested the doctor.

They seated themselves in a row on a log expecting every minute to see the familiar blue car loom into sight.

But the lagging moments dragged themselves into half an hour and still the “Comet” lingered.

“I think we’d better walk back,” said Billie, beginning to feel just a tinge of uneasiness.

“Perhaps it would be as well,” echoed the doctor. “They have had a breakdown, no doubt.”

The band of wayfarers feeling very weary after the rough walk along the river trail began their march back toward the lake.

CHAPTER XI.

A COMEDY OF ERRORS.

The original lake party might have served as an excellent illustration of the history of many principalities and nations. Having suffered a division and then a subdivision and finally a breaking up into fractional groups, it became as a weakened and shattered government, powerless to help itself.

It soon became evident that Mary Price was too weary to take the long walk back to the lake.

She was left therefore by the roadside with Percy and Elinor, while Dr. Hume, Nancy and Billie went on.

“It will probably be no time at all before we pick them up,” said the doctor cheerfully, but they made the entire walk to the lake house and there was no “Comet” to be seen.

“It left here two hours ago,” the boatman informed them. “Maybe they went on to the second bridge. That’s half a mile beyond the first one. They’ll tell a person anything, these people here will.”

“I suppose that’s exactly what happened,” Billie exclaimed, much relieved. “They have been waiting at the second bridge and will be on their way back by this time. But I think they will have to come all the way. Nancy has a blister on her heel.”

“Now, don’t blame it all on me, Billie,” said Nancy. “You know you are dead tired yourself.”

Billie smiled guiltily.

“I am played out,” she said.

“I wouldn’t think of allowing either of you young ladies to start on another tramp,” put in Dr. Hume. “I am too good a doctor for that. You must stay right here and rest and I’ll start back. I may meet the whole party any time, now.”

Billie and Nancy, therefore, settled themselves to rest on two benches near the lake while the good doctor trudged off along the dusty road.

In the meantime, Mary, who had more than overtaxed her strength that day, gave Percy and Elinor a bad fright by toppling over in a faint. They brought her to with water which Percy carried from a brook in his hat, and then carried her into the wood a bit where she could lie on the pine needles and rest her head in Elinor’s lap. But Percy hurried back to the road to keep watch, and seeing a motor car broken down in the distance hastened to catch up with it. It was a strange car, however, and the chauffeur had not seen the “Comet.”

And all this while, Ben and Miss Campbell, having waited an incalculable time at the second bridge, had gone on for half a mile. Few people can stand the test of being kept waiting. Their patience may be inexhaustible but their judgments are apt to take a bad twist and bring them right about face in the wrong direction.

It is true that Ben had yielded to Miss Campbell in going beyond the supposed meeting place, and now to make matters worse, the “Comet” came to an inexplicable standstill. Poor Ben, with small knowledge of what to do, began a long and wearisome investigation of unfamiliar machinery.

There was something of the dumb driven animal in Ben when he entered unfamiliar territory, and his slow plodding methods had been known to irritate Miss Campbell profoundly.

And now, one more separation remained to complete the disbandment of this innocent party of pleasure. Ben, shamefaced and very humble, was obliged to confess to Miss Campbell that he could not locate the trouble with the “Comet.” Deeply he regretted his inefficiency, but there was nothing to do but give up.

“I’m thinking,” he said, “that maybe I had better walk back a little ways and see if the others aren’t coming up behind us.”

“Very well,” answered Miss Campbell with dignity. “You may go. I suppose nobody would wish to harm an old woman.”

Presently, therefore, she found herself alone in the wilderness. There was something almost human and comforting about the “Comet,” however, that faithful mechanism that had borne them on so many pilgrimages, and Miss Campbell addressed herself to him as to a human companion.

“I just believe you had more sense than that stupid Ben Austen,” she said. “You wouldn’t go on because you knew perfectly well that your mistress was behind you. You’re a nice, good old thing.”

She paused and peered out of the car. Darkness was falling and the road was filled with somber shadows cast by the far-reaching branches of the trees on either side. As far as she could see along the white strip of road there was no human soul behind her. Her eyes swept the road in front. It was criss-crossed with light and shadow and it was difficult to make out anything moving, but Miss Campbell thought she saw an object approaching. Yes, it was unquestionably an object. Something large and white—a van. Great heavens, it was a Gypsy van!

“Ben!” she called, but Ben was quite a quarter of a mile away by now.

The only thing to do was to get out and hide behind a tree in the woods. She could not bring herself to face a band of Gypsies. Hurriedly climbing down from the car, Miss Campbell concealed herself in a thicket of trees near the road.

Presently the van drew up alongside the empty car.

“By Jove, here’s an abandoned motor. Where do you suppose the people are?” said a man walking at one side of the van and driving the horse.

Two women were comfortably seated in rocking chairs in the little front compartment of the vehicle.

“How strange!” said one of them. “It’s like finding a derelict at sea. Where are the Captain and the crew? Where are the passengers?”

“Where indeed?” thought the lady behind the tree.

“It’s like the mystery of the ‘Maria Theresa,’” pursued the man. “A perfectly good ship abandoned in mid-ocean without the slightest explanation and all on board lost forever.”

This gruesome comparison made Miss Campbell decidedly uncomfortable.

“Shall we leave her to drift, ladies?” he asked affably.

“I will protect the ‘Comet’ with my life,” she thought. “I don’t believe they are Gypsies anyhow. Their accent is too good, and a Gypsy would never address the women of his family as ‘ladies.’”

“I am afraid I am at present the sole survivor of the crew,” she said politely to the young man. “If you would be kind enough to advise me, sir, I should be greatly indebted.”

Immediately the man lifted his broad-brimmed hat and the women in the rocking chairs leaned forward in order the better to see this dainty, mysterious little lady in gray who had emerged apparently from a primeval forest.

“With the greatest pleasure, ma’am,” answered the young man, filled with curiosity, and they all listened with courteous attention while she related the history of the afternoon’s mishaps.

“And now that stupid Ben, who is really a very nice boy under ordinary circumstances, has gone off and left me and almost anything could have happened,—wolves, Indians, half-breeds—” she added, thinking of the treacherous Lupos.

After she had finished, the young man stood for a moment thinking.

“My name is Richard Hook, ma’am, at your service,” he said. “The only thing I could suggest is for me to unhitch Dobbin here and ride him down the road to look for your party and leave you with my sister, Maggie, and her friend. This is as good a place as any other for us to put up for the night. You might as well start supper, girls. Perhaps this lady is hungry.”

“I am,” interjected Miss Campbell fervently.

So it happened that Richard Hook went ambling off into the twilight on old Dobbin while Maggie Hook and her friend, Amy Swinnerton, made Miss Campbell comfortable in the van and prepared to cook supper.

“And you are not Gypsies after all?” asked the little lady, watching one of the girls light a bracket lamp on the wall of the van.

“No, indeed,” laughed Maggie Hook. “Not by birth at least, but I think we have something of the Gypsy spirit because we love to spend our summers in this way. Have you never seen a van?”

Miss Campbell could not say that she had and looked about her with much interest.

“These are our beds, you see,” Amy explained. “The top one folds up and we use the lower one for a divan. Richard sleeps in a tent. This is the dressing room,” she continued with as much pride as a custodian showing a sightseer over an ancient castle.

A little space had been curtained off in the back and behind this hung a mirror over a small dressing table, and a row of hooks for clothes.

“And this is your kitchen?” asked Miss Campbell, indicating a row of plates and cups on a plate rack and a small kerosene stove, at one side opposite the beds.

“That and a chafing dish and a camp fire,” answered Maggie Hook. “But we mostly prefer the fire. I’ll get things started here to-night and when Richard comes he can make us a fire if he dares. I believe the laws around here are pretty strict about fires.”

“Well, my dears, it is assuredly the most complete and delightful little traveling home I ever saw,” exclaimed Miss Campbell, after she had looked over the entire van and then seated herself in a rocking chair to watch preparations for supper. It did not take long for her to make friends with these nice young girls who were indeed about the age of her own charges.

“How many are in your party, Miss Campbell?” asked Maggie, in the act of breaking eggs into a bowl.

“There are eight of us, but I hope you aren’t thinking——”

“Oh, but I am,” insisted Maggie. “I am sure they will be very tired and hungry, and, besides, we have plenty in the larder for everyone,—a whole ham!” she added archly.

“Dear me, I wish Billie were here,” said Miss Campbell. “I believe she always keeps things stored away in the ‘Comet’ for an emergency.”

“I’ll beat up some Johnnie cakes,” announced Amy. “We can cook those on the wood fire later.”

In the meantime, the waiters who had waited in vain and the wanderers who had wandered fruitlessly, began to realize that the situation was serious. Billie grew desperately impatient. At last she succeeded in engaging a carry-all and two horses from a man at the moat house and soon she and Nancy, seated face to face, were hurrying along the road. Dr. Hume had met Percy. Ben had discovered Elinor and Mary standing fearfully on the edge of the forest. By the time that Richard Hook had got anywhere at all with his old nag, the lake-party, with the exception of Miss Campbell, was re-united in Billie’s carry-all and driving comfortably in the direction of the “Comet.”

They were very tired and hungry but a graven image would have melted to laughter over this comedy of errors, and Richard Hook, hearing the gay chorus of voices approaching, was quite sure it was another picnic party. But he was not a young man to take chances, and having taken his position across the middle of the road, he waved his arms and yelled, “Stop!”

“Do you know anything about a little lady in gray and an abandoned automobile?” he asked.

“Cousin Helen and the ‘Comet,’” cried Billie, consumed with anxiety. “Oh, Ben, how could you have left them?”

“But——” began Ben.

“I assure you the lady is in good hands,” interrupted Richard. “My sister is looking after her.”

There were more explanations and presently they started on their way again, and in a little while drew up beside the Gypsy van and the abandoned motor car. And the upshot of the whole adventure was that the two parties joined forces and provisions.

The boys built a fire against a great boulder on the river bank and there was a wonderful supper. All the very best of everything was brought out for the occasion. They ate Johnnie cakes from wooden platters and drank black coffee from glasses, Russian fashion. Later they sang songs and told stories around the camp fire. Never did people commingle so agreeably as the caravanners and the motorists. Somehow Sunrise Camp and Alberdina Schoenbachler faded into the dim recesses of their memories.

“Of course you can’t go home,” Richard Hook remarked to Billie. “We’ll camp out to-night. You’ll never be able to mend that car in all this blackness, and it would be a pretty hard road to follow at night anyhow. We’ve just come over it. Dobbin can pull the car over to one side of the road, and Miss Campbell and Miss Price can sleep in the van.”

“And we’ll show you what a bed really is,” Ben went on eagerly. “Not a motor car cushion affair either.”

To their surprise, Miss Campbell was agreeable to the plan.

“There’s nobody at home to worry but Alberdina,” she said, “and it won’t hurt her to lose a little flesh, anyhow.”

The boys worked hard over the beds. Springy couches they made of spruce branches, covered with blankets, and, at last as care-free as a lot of Gypsies, they all slept as soundly as they had ever slept in their own beds at home.

CHAPTER XII.

THE RETURN.

With the exception of her three best friends, Billie Campbell had never met people who pleased her so much on short acquaintance as the Hooks and their guest. It had not taken them half an hour to bridge over the gap of unfamiliarity.

“What is it?” she asked of Maggie Hook, Richard’s small, whimsical sister, black haired, black eyed, with quick alert movements like a bird’s.

“I can tell you exactly the reason,” replied Maggie. “It’s because we all belong to the road. There is a bond between us. We go Gypsying in our van and you go Gypsying in your car. We be all of one blood like Kipling’s Mowgli and the animals in the jungle.”

“Only we aren’t the real thing as much as you,” said Billie modestly. “The ‘Comet’ is a dear old thing, but he’s not a house.”

“You wouldn’t enjoy it if he were,” said Maggie. “A motor traveling van would never do. You see the point of this kind of life is that it’s lazy and contemplative. We just amble along and it doesn’t matter whether we make ten miles or five. We are not attempting long distance records. We are just getting intimate with the ups and downs of the country; the streams and rivers; the little valleys and bits of green by the roadside. Sometimes, if we find a place that’s secluded enough, a little glen or a grove that screens off the road, we stay there for several days.”

“But what do you do?”

“We all do the things we like best. Richard reads and takes long walks or fishes, if there is a stream. I clean the van from top to bottom and polish everything up and bake a cake in the little oven. Then I darn all the stockings and mend the clothes.”

Billie laughed.

“You’re not a Gypsy,” she said, “if you are a black-eyed wanderer. They never mend or clean anything. But what does Miss Swinnerton like to do? Is she fond of housework, too?”

“Amy? No, not specially. She sketches and paints in water colors, and botanizes, and looks for bits of stones and rocks which she examines through a glass, and translates French and generally potters around. She’s always busy. She can do anything from making an omelette to painting a picture.”

Billie turned her eyes half wistfully toward the plump brown-haired Amy Swinnerton. She felt suddenly very inefficient and worthless.

“I can’t do anything,” she said, frowning. “I’m ashamed of myself.”

“You can run a motor car and keep it in order,” answered the new friend. “I never knew another girl who could.”

“That’s ground into me by experience. But I hate sewing. I’m not a good cook and I can’t draw or paint or play the piano. We met a girl this summer who has been brought up in a cabin on the mountain and has never been to school in her life, who knows a lot more than I do.”

Billie told what little she knew of the strange history of Phoebe.

“It would make a wonderful story,” observed Maggie. “I should like to put it into a book.”

“Do you write, too?” asked Billie eagerly.

Maggie blinked her dark, bright eyes.

“When you see my name appear in book reviews and magazines and things, then you’ll know I write,” she replied.

This conversation occurred the next morning at breakfast. Billie had risen at dawn and repaired the “Comet” and the motor party was soon now to start on its homeward journey.

Richard Hook presently joined his sister and Billie. Sitting cross-legged on the ground at their feet, he munched a bacon sandwich and sipped black coffee from a tin cup. He reminded Billie of one of Shakespeare’s wise fools. All he lacked were the cap and bells. His whimsical, humorous eyes were rather far apart; his dark hair, cropped close, stood up straight over his forehead. His nose was distinguished in shape and his flexible mouth turned up at the corners. He talked slowly with a sort of twang like a farmer from the east coast and there was a kind of hidden humor under whatever he said. He had charming old-world manners, and an old-fashioned way of saying “I thank you,” or “Permit me, ma’am,” or “At your service, ma’am.” He was really quite a delightful person, they unanimously decided; and so was his sister and so was her friend.

Billie wondered what Richard Hook’s work was; or whether perhaps he was still in college. She wondered a great many things about him, and she felt quite sure that he was not well off. Presently she said:

“It’s too bad when we are all just beginning to be friends that we must part so soon. Why can’t you turn old Dobbin right about face and come back and see us at Camp Sunrise?”

“Why not, indeed?” answered Richard.

“Do come,” urged Billie, never dreaming that in giving this invitation she had been moved by something stronger than her own friendly wish to know more of these nice people, and that destiny itself had a hand in the business.

Richard Hook took a little calendar from his pocket and contemplated it gravely.

“Another month has perished with her moon,” he remarked. “We’re in August, little sister. Did you realize that? I see no reason why we shouldn’t travel toward Sunrise Camp before——”

“Before——” repeated Maggie, and the brother and sister exchanged a swift glance.

“Then you do accept,” exclaimed Billie joyfully.

“With the greatest pleasure,” answered Richard, “if you think old Dobbin can climb the hill.”

“Of course he can,” replied Billie.

“But, Richard, do you think we dare?” asked Maggie in a low voice.

Richard’s mouth turned up at the corners and his eyes gave a humorous blink.

“We dare anything,” he said. “Pray excuse this little aside, Miss Billie. It’s only that we are obliged to consider certain complications that arise to vex us at times. I think we can easily arrange to go to Camp Sunrise.”

Billie was more certain than ever that money was the complication. But surely that was an inexpensive way of spending one’s vacation, provided one owned the van and the horse.

“How much longer does your vacation last, Mr. Hook?” she asked.

“It depends. My boss is a very notionate old party. He might let me go wandering on like this for several weeks longer or he might suddenly decide to send for me, and I should have to go hiking back in the midst of my holiday.”

Maggie laughed, and Billie wondered what kind of work this unusual young man did that sent out sudden calls in the very middle of hard-earned vacations.

However, it was arranged that the caravanners should meander back toward Sunrise Camp and in the course of time stop there for a visit.

“They are delightful young people,” Miss Campbell said. “I don’t know who they are, I’m sure, nor what the young man does, but I find them quite the most charming young people with the exception of my own that I ever met.”

“It’s rather strange about his work,” remarked Dr. Hume. “I don’t know what he does now, but he wishes above all things to be a farmer, he informed me. He’s always looking for farms as he journeys along the road. That’s one of the reasons why he got the van, in order to see the country and decide where he’d like best to locate.”

They were not so merry on the journey back as they had been on the trip of the morning before. For one reason those who had slept in open camp had not had off their clothes for twenty-four hours, and all of them felt the crying need of baths after the two dusty journeys. But there was another reason besides these physical ones. They were beginning to feel conscience-stricken about Alberdina. How had she taken their long, unexplained absence? Would she still be singing “Ach, mein lieber Augustine!” when they returned, and would there be a long clothes line bowed under the weight of clean white linen bleaching in the sun ready to be ironed? So restless did they grow under these speculations, that they did not pause for lunch and, urging the “Comet” to the limit of his speed, they reached home a little before noon. Alberdina was there. Thank heavens for that. They could see her plainly as they turned the curve in the road. But her appearance was not promising. Perched on her head was that absurd comedy hat. She was sitting down, quite low, on the iron-bound trunk, in fact, leaning on her large cotton umbrella, as one prepared to depart on a journey.

If you have ever lived in a remote spot with an uncertain maid, you will recall how apologetic you were to her for your own shortcomings.

“Oh, dear, what shall I say to her?” exclaimed Miss Campbell. “She looks as if she were ready to go this minute.”

“Why can’t we tell her the truth? We simply couldn’t help it,” said Billie. “She ought not to be angry over something we couldn’t control.”

“You don’t know them, but I’ll just brazen it out. I know we’re entirely dependent on the creature for the comforts of life, but I won’t let her bully me. Well, Alberdina,” she called, as the car drew up at the camp door, “have you been lonesome?”

“Lonesome?” repeated Alberdina, not moving from her ridiculous trunk. “I no time haf had for lonesomes. Many peoples to dis house come—crazy peoples—men and vimmen, hein? They haf my moneys took already yesterday! Ach, Gott! They haf me tied wid ropes. They have nogged and nogged in the night times. Dos vimmens, I hear the boice already yet. I no lig dees place. I to my home go bag to-day. Dey have robbed dis house. Dey haf made to turn red dos vite clothes.”

In dead silence they descended from the motor car and filed into the house to investigate Alberdina’s wild, incoherent story.

There were certainly signs of an invasion in the locker rooms, everything tipsy turvy on the floor. Alberdina showed them the ropes that had bound her. With rivers of tears she mentioned her loss of ten dollars.

“And the red clothes?” asked Billie doubtfully.

This had been reserved to the last by the wily-innocent Swiss girl. With cries of sorrow they beheld their underclothing and blouses all tinged a deep pink.

Suddenly Miss Campbell marched up and stood in front of the girl with a very cold steely look in her cerulean eyes.

“Answer me this instant,” she said, “and speak the truth. You boiled those clothes with a red silk handkerchief?”

Alberdina broke down and wept copiously.

“I knew not about dos red,” she exclaimed.

“But when you saw the clothes were turning red, why didn’t you take them off the fire?” asked Billie.

“I did nod see.”

“Not see? And why not, pray?” demanded Miss Campbell.

“I was asleeb and when I wog, I was wit rope tied.”

“Who cut the rope?” asked Dr. Hume, beginning to doubt the whole story.

“A gentlemans who mag to play music on the zither.”

“Phoebe’s father!” exclaimed the girls.

They glanced at each other with a wild surmise.

“It couldn’t have been——”

“No, no, I’m sure he never would——”

“Hush,” said Ben, “here comes Phoebe.”

The mountain girl, looking pale and distraught, her hair flying, her face and hands scratched from contact with brambles, rushed into their midst.

“My father,” she cried. “He has been lost all night. I have looked and looked and I cannot find him. Oh, if he should be in the marshes——”

She fell on her knees at Billie’s feet and broke into sobbing.

CHAPTER XIII.

BILLIE AND THE DOCTOR.

Several things had to be done before any steps could be taken to find Phoebe’s father. First Alberdina must be roundly scolded for her carelessness about the clothes and then placated with a ten dollar bill to compensate her for her loss. There must be lunch prepared for hungry travelers, and Phoebe, herself, must be given food and made to rest. In the meantime they questioned her concerning her father’s movements. He had left the cabin with his zither the morning of the day before and had not been seen since, except when he had appeared at the camp and cut Alberdina’s bonds.

“Has he ever stayed away before at night?” asked Dr. Hume.

“No, never. When he is not weaving baskets or carving, he is very restless and often is away for hours, but he always comes back before bed time. He never forgets me. That is why I am so uneasy now,” she went on, clasping and unclasping her hands in the agony of her uncertainty.

“Phoebe,” said the doctor, “what is it that gives you strength to do your day’s work, even if it means walking across a mountain in the hot sun carrying a heavy basket?”

Phoebe lowered her eyes and a flush spread over her sunburned face.

“I forgot,” she said. “I was so unhappy that I forgot. It has helped me, oh, so many times when we have had no money. Many times we have been snowed in on the mountain without food and it has always come. It saved us from the Lupos. I was lonesome and it brought me friends.” She glanced at the girls busily preparing lunch and at Ben and Percy talking in low voices on the porch.

“Don’t you think it will help you now?”

“It has left me. I can’t find it,” replied poor Phoebe. “It is because I am so frightened. It never comes if you are frightened.”

“My child,” said the good doctor, “you are worn out. You must have lunch and take a good rest. In the meantime we will do everything we can to find your father. Perhaps he has lost his way and is wandering in the woods somewhere.”

“No,” said Phoebe, shaking her head miserably, “he never loses his way. He knows the trails better than I do myself.”

The doctor himself brought Phoebe a tray of lunch. She was ravenously hungry.

“The poor little thing hasn’t eaten for hours,” he thought, glancing at her covertly, as he returned with a basin of water, a soft towel and Miss Campbell’s private bottle of eau de cologne. When she had finished eating, he made her stretch out on the divan while he gave her face and hands and wrists an aromatic bath. Never before had Phoebe been ministered to and waited on. She smiled at the doctor with dumb gratitude.

“When people are hungry and tired and discouraged, they have a pretty hard time holding on to their faith, Phoebe,” he said. “Even when they haven’t anything to worry about, it’s hard enough. You go to sleep now and I promise you we will start on the search for your father at once.”

Phoebe raised her eyes gratefully to his. In those clear brown depths she read strength, gentleness and sympathy. She felt she was looking into the face of an angel with a shiny bald head and shaggy red-gray eyebrows.

“I believe God sent you,” she said, and in a few moments dropped off into a deep exhausted sleep.

After luncheon or dinner, whatever that meal might be called in camp, Percy got out his motor cycle and proceeded to the Antler’s Inn to ask for news of Phoebe’s father. Ben took the trail to Indian Head and Billie and Dr. Hume went down to the village in the motor car to drum up a search party or find guides to help them scour the mountains. In neither attempt were they in the least successful.

On the way down the mountain, Billie decided to unburden herself of something that had been on her mind for a long time.

“You have never seen Phoebe’s father, have you, Dr. Hume?”

The doctor shook his head.

“Have you ever heard of a case like his? I mean forgetting one’s past.”

“Oh, yes. I have seen a number of cases. The patient usually loses his memory altogether in time and goes insane.”

“But he’s not insane, doctor. He’s not even going insane. Really and truly, except about always trying to find a physician, his brain is as clear as anybody’s.”

The doctor smiled. He liked this earnest, enthusiastic girl who was always doing things for other people and modestly disclaiming credit. There was something masculine in her disregard for small things and the largeness of her views.

“A very nice man has instilled her with extremely big ideas about life,” he reflected. “She is furthermore a wholesome, healthy young creature with a high order of intelligence and a very warm, tender heart.”

So much engaged was he in his diagnosis of Billie’s character that he had almost forgotten the subject of the conversation when she spoke up again rather timidly.

“What I’m driving at is this, doctor, and I’ve been thinking about it for days. Don’t you think you could operate on Phoebe’s father, put a silver plate on his skull or lift whatever’s pressing on his memory bump? Don’t you think you could undertake it, doctor? I know you are a famous surgeon. Papa wrote that to me long ago, but I knew it before he told me. I could tell just from seeing and being with you that you were a great man.”

The doctor laughed over these artless compliments.

“Are you a mind reader, Miss Billie?”

“But you will undertake it, doctor?” she urged.

“We must first catch our man, my child, and then have a look at him. A good many things would have to be considered: whether he would consent himself; whether he would be able to stand the shock of a serious operation, and whether he may not have some disease an operation wouldn’t help; paralysis or softening of the brain.”

“At any rate, you will undertake it?” cried Billie joyfully.

“Do you wish it so much?” he asked, watching her face as she guided the car down the steep road.

“I do, I do! Think what it would mean to Phoebe to have this mystery cleared; think what it would mean to him, too!”

“I was thinking of it,” answered the doctor gravely. “That’s just the point. Suppose Phoebe’s father would not thank me for bringing his past back? Suppose, after all, he would be happier in this state than with his memory restored. Do you realize that a man like that, a man of education and refinement, I mean, must have had some very good reason for hiding himself away in these mountains? That he may have been flying from something?”

The enthusiasm died out of Billie’s face.

“Oh, Dr. Hume,” she began, “I hadn’t thought of that. Indeed, I couldn’t connect anything of the sort with Phoebe and her father. They are not a bit like that.”

“You never can tell. The people who have given way to some wild impulse that will cause them everlasting regret are not always bad people by any means. His reasons for hiding himself and his wife in a cabin in these mountains of course may have been entirely innocent; or he may have hoped to find oblivion and forgetfulness up here out of the world. If I give him back his memory, providing of course I can do it, I may give him the very thing he is running away from.”

“Don’t you think he has been punished enough and that Phoebe ought to have a chance?” argued Billie.

“Is there anything to prevent Phoebe’s having a chance without knowing her father’s past?” asked the doctor.

“Nothing, except there would always be that mystery hanging over her. Don’t you think it would be very unpleasant not to know who you were or even your father’s name?”

“I am a living example to the contrary,” said the doctor with a laugh. “My father and mother were really my adopted parents. They took me out of an orphan asylum when I was a little lad about five years old. I remember it vividly. Afterwards they had other children, but they always treated me like a beloved eldest son. I never knew any difference and I never bothered my head about my real parents. Whoever they were, they had died or shuffled me off on an institution. My adopted mother was the finest woman I have ever known and if Hume isn’t my real name, it doesn’t matter. I shall do everything I can to make it an honored one.”

“You are a wonderful man, doctor,” exclaimed Billie, quite overcome by this bit of confidence about his past. “It was because you were so fine that they were good to you. Perhaps God picked you out from all the other orphans to have a good home because he saw what fine material there was in you.”

“No indeed, my dear young lady,” laughed the doctor. “It was just a matter of chance. The little orphans were like the two women sitting in the market place. The one was taken and the other left. If they chose me for anything, it was solely and entirely because I had brown eyes.”

“You may say what you please,” protested Billie. “They looked deeper than that, I am certain.”

“Simply luck, Miss Billie. I have always been lucky. The fellows at college called me ‘Lucky Bill.’ But to return to the original subject of the discussion: I don’t want to disappoint an unselfish, fine young woman like you,—you see I can pay compliments, too,——” he added, watching the flush of pleasure mount to Billie’s face; “I don’t want to make any promises about this man I can’t carry out, but I promise this much: I will do what I can.”

“Thank you a thousand times, Dr. Hume,” said Billie gratefully. “I would just like to shake hands with you if I could, but you see I have to guide the ‘Comet.’ It will be a wonderful thing to give a man back his senses after eighteen years.”

“Maybe so; maybe not,” answered the doctor as the car turned into the village street.

They stopped in front of the only hostelry in the place, a cheap two-story wooden house with a horse trough in front of it. Here usually could be found several guides for camping trips and driving parties, and here Dr. Hume looked for help in rescuing Phoebe’s father.

The owner of the house, a thin sallow-faced man with pale shifting eyes came out to speak to them.

“You ain’t meanin’ it’s old crazy Frenchy you’re after?” he asked. “I don’t wonder he’s lost if it’s him.”

“That’s the man,” answered Dr. Hume, “but I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I guess he’s got wind he’s suspected of settin’ Razor Back Mountain on fire and he’s vamoosed. He ought to be shut up anyhow. He’s a dangerous character runnin’ around the country.”

Billie was shocked and angry.

“He is not,” she burst out. “I know Mr.—Mr. French quite well——”

The man broke into a loud rasping laugh.

“Mr. French!” he repeated.

“He’s incapable of setting a mountain on fire and he is as gentle and courteous as possible.”

There was another laugh. This time it came from within the house and Billie and the doctor recognized the voice of Mr. Lupo.

“You’re a friend of Lupo, I see,” remarked the doctor looking very hard at the man.

“I guess that’s none of your affair,” answered the other angrily. “And nothin’ agin’ him nor me either, for the matter o’ that.”

The doctor lifted his eyebrows.

“I’d like to hire two or three guides. Are there any about?”

“There ain’t no guides connected with this here establishment goin’ to go huntin’ for crazy Frenchy,” announced the man roughly, “if that’s what you’re wantin’ with them. Most of ’em is fightin’ the flames anyhow.”

The doctor sat silently for a moment looking at the mountaineer, whose eyes shifted uneasily under his steady gaze.

“I would advise you and your friend, Lupo, not to meddle too much in this affair,” he said, as the inn keeper with a snarling laugh shuffled back into the house.

Billy turned the automobile and they went slowly down the street.

“If we were in the Kentucky or the Virginia mountains, I should call this a feud,” remarked the doctor, “but up here there is something more than a revenge for a quarrel two generations old that creates a situation of this kind. That man has got some ugly reason for withholding his guides. He’s a sinister looking wretch, and no man with a shifting pair of eyes can be trusted around the corner.”

“But what are we to do?” asked Billie.

“If we can’t get guides,—we’ll just go alone,” answered Dr. Hume. “I think we’ll have to find your Mr. French, Miss Billie, seeing that a lot of cut-throats are trying to keep us from doing it.”

CHAPTER XIV.

CHANCE NEWS.

Billie and the doctor were indeed in something of a quandary as to what to do about Phoebe’s father. It was evident from further inquiry that the tide of general opinion had been turned against Crazy Frenchy; not one soul could be interested in the search for him, not even after an offer of liberal pay.

“He ain’t no good anyhow,” one man said. “He and his daughter holds themselves above common people even when they don’t have enough to keep body and soul together. They lives on property that ain’t theirs by rights, and they don’t belong in this section of the country. The father’s crazy and the neighborhood will be glad to git rid of him.”

“An’ I’d jes’ like to mention,” added another man, “the people as takes up for ’em ain’t goin’ to find it no ways a easy proposition.”

Certainly Lupo had enlisted the sympathies of the entire village in his own behalf.

“I told your friend at the hotel a moment ago,” said the doctor, “that he and Lupo had better be careful how they meddled in this business. If you don’t want to engage yourself to me to find this unfortunate man, you have a perfect right to refuse. It’s only a common act of kindness at any rate. But I would warn you that if you and your friends intend to make trouble, you will get into trouble. That’s all.”

The mountaineer scowled.

“We can prove he set Razor Back on fire,” he said. “He was seen in the neighborhood prowling about with a can of oil yesterday morning.”

“At what time?” demanded Billie quickly.

“I don’t know the exact hour, lady, but it was some time in the forenoon.”

“Well,” ejaculated Billie angrily, “that shows how much evidence you have to go upon. There’s not a word of truth in it and you have no right to spread that wicked report founded on a falsehood. Mr. French was at Sunrise Camp just about that time and he couldn’t have got anywhere near Razor Back Mountain in hours. We have a witness to prove what we say.”

“It may not have been forenoon, come to think of it,” said the man doggedly.

“Nonsense,” exclaimed the exasperated Billie, as the “Comet” dashed away with a contemptuous honk-honk, leaving the defeated mountaineer standing in the middle of the road.

Only one person was awake in all the camp when the doctor and Billie returned: Alberdina, busy ironing pink-tinted clothes in the lean-to. Miss Campbell and the girls were napping on the upper porch and Phoebe still slept on a couch in the living room, while Ben and Percy had not returned from their search for news of her father.

“Miss Billie,” remarked the doctor, “if you will be kind enough to fix me up a lunch, I think I’ll pack my knapsack and start on the road again. I can’t say how long I shall be gone, but you mustn’t be uneasy if I don’t get back for a day or two. The boys will look after you and if you have any real trouble, you had better telegraph your father. If possible, try and keep Phoebe right here. Those men will go no further than threats in regard to us. They know we are too powerful for them, but I couldn’t say the same for that poor girl and her father. I suppose jealousy and Lupo’s treachery are the motives behind it. The father does better work than any of them can do and the mountaineers resent the difference between them, whatever it is, birth, breeding, education. But we can’t judge them by the usual standards, of course. They have never had any chances, these people, shut in by this wall of mountains. There is not much inspiration to be charitable and kind, living in one of these little shanties during the long cold winters. It’s a pretty fine nature that doesn’t get warped and narrowed by the life.”

“Phoebe’s didn’t,” thought Billie, while she sliced bread for the doctor’s lunch.

After he had departed with his staff and his telescope and his knapsack, Billie sat down in a steamer chair under the trees and began to think. She lifted her eyes to the wall of mountains now mystical and unreal under their mantle of blue shadow. How could treachery and hatred and jealousy exist where there was so much beauty? It seemed to her that she had only to look about her to be inspired and uplifted; but Billie was too young to realize that it takes more than scenery to furnish that kind of inspiration.

“I am not tired and I am not sleepy,” she thought. “Must I sit here all the afternoon waiting for the others to wake?” She glanced at her watch. “Only a quarter to three. Why can’t I take a walk? It’s against the rules as laid down by papa for women members, but that was only a joke anyhow and I shan’t go far.”

Billie chose a trail they often took after supper for the reason that it was brought to an early finish by the bed of a creek dry in summer, though probably a brave stream in the spring after the thaws. But it was a pretty walk, tunneled through the forest, carpeted with dried pine needles and bordered on either side by ferns.

Strolling along, Billie thought of many things; of the mountain on the other side of Indian Head on which fires had started and where bands of men were now fighting the flames. That was a dreadful thing to do, to set a forest on fire; a crime against nature as well as against man. She thought of Phoebe’s father, perhaps injured, or worse, who could tell? Then with a mental leap she thought of Richard Hook and his sister Maggie; the charm of their personalities; their simplicity; their joy in living. Billie wondered if she could be happy if she were poor, really quite poor. It was rather fun cooking, with Alberdina to clean up after them. It was only for a little while and it was just a sort of game.

“It would be a dog’s life to keep up forever,” thought Billie, “but Richard and Maggie Hook would never admit it. They make the best of being poor and pretend that living like Gypsies is the most delightful way of spending one’s vacation. I think they are just fine. There is Phoebe, too. How well she has got on without anything, education, money, friends. She is wonderful.”

Who was Phoebe? Who was her father? Were they not mysterious people? When the veil was lifted at last, Billie felt convinced that it would disclose no ordinary identity. They had the marks of distinguished people in exile. There was a look of family about them both that no ragged attire could disguise.

Toward the end of the trail, Billie saw an old woman hobbling toward her, leaning on a stout stick. She looked remarkably like one of the aged forest trees unexpectedly come to life. A gnarled, brown, weather-beaten old creature she was, who reminded Billie of a dwarfed apple tree she had seen in Japan, a little old bent thing said to have been over two hundred years old. Attached to the woman’s waist was a pocket apron bulging with herbs, camomile and catnip, wood sorrel and sassafras root.

“Now, if Mary were here,” thought Billie, “she would at once make a story of this: ‘The Princess and the Old Witch.’ I am sure Mary would call me a princess,” she added modestly.

When the young girl and the old witch met, they paused without exactly knowing why. The herb gatherer had a strange, small, yellow face, crossed and re-crossed with wrinkles.

“Good afternoon,” said Billie politely, not knowing what else to say.

The old woman waved aside this greeting with her stick.

“You come from Sunrise Camp?” she asked in a voice as cracked as her face was wrinkled.

Billie nodded.

“I bring message. You look for somebody?”

“Yes,” replied Billie eagerly.

“You not find him now. Too much enemies.”

“Where is he?” she demanded.

No answer came to this question.

“You will not tell me?”

“No tell,” answered the old creature.

“Is he ill or hurt?”

The herb gatherer touched her forehead.

“He safe,” she answered. “But people not safe who look for him. Too much enemies.”

After that not another word could Billie get out of the obstinate old creature.

Who had sent her? Who was looking after Phoebe’s father, if he were hurt or a prisoner? Could not Phoebe see him? Nothing would she reply to all these questions.

The old woman waved aside this greeting with her stick.
The old woman waved aside this greeting
with her stick.—Page 212.

“I’m much obliged for that much anyhow,” said Billie at last. “You must be tired and hungry. Won’t you come back to the camp and let me give you——” she paused to consider. What could an old stunted apple tree like? Somehow it didn’t seem as if she could live on real food. “Will you drink a cup of tea?” she added hastily.

The wrinkled face remained inscrutable.

“Or coffee?”

“Coffee?” repeated the old soul, and suddenly without the faintest warning, smiled and Billie smiled back.

“I can make delicious strong coffee,” announced the girl proudly. “You will come, won’t you?”

“I come,” answered the herb-gatherer. “Coffee? I come!”

They walked briskly back to camp, this ill-assorted couple, and it was not long before Billie had established her companion in a chair under the trees and the coffee pot on the kerosene stove, where it was soon sending out a fragrant aroma.

“Don’t you get very tired gathering herbs on the mountains?” asked Billie, by way of making conversation.

“When I tired, I rest,” answered the other briefly.

Presently Billie brought out a tray with a cup and saucer, sugar and cream and some thin slices of buttered bread. From the upper gallery there came to her the low hum of conversation. The sleepers had awakened and were getting bathed and dressed.

“Do you know Phoebe?” she asked, while she poured the coffee.

The herb-gatherer smacked her lips and sniffed the air expectantly. “I’ve seen her.”

“Don’t you feel sorry for her to lose her father? She is very unhappy.”

“No sugar,” exclaimed the old woman, ignoring the question. “Good!” she exclaimed. “Fine coffee!”

Presently Billie poured out another cup and finally another.

“You like coffee, don’t you?” she said.

“This fine coffee.”

“We send away for it. The village coffee is not good.”

“I never tasted the like before.”

“If you will answer me a question,” said Billie suddenly, “I will get my father to send you enough of this coffee to last all winter.”

The old woman picked up the coffee pot and drained it to the last drop.

“If I tell,” she said, warmed and stimulated by the hot drink, “it make lot trouble.”

“Trouble for whom?”

“Much trouble for all.”

“All I am to say to Phoebe then is that her father is in good hands and she is not to look for him?”

The herb-gatherer nodded.

“How soon will he be coming back?”

She shook her head and seizing her staff, rose to go.

“Are you a friend of the Lupos?”

There was no answer. Billie tried again.

“Did Mrs. Lupo ever go back to her husband?”

“Lupo very angry. She not go back.”

“She needn’t stay away on our account. My cousin forgave her long ago.”

“I go now,” announced the old woman, not taking the slightest notice of Billie’s remarks.

“I am very much obliged to you for the news of Phoebe’s father. Every time you bring us any news, you may have coffee, and if you show us where he is,—quite secretly, you know,—you shall have a great deal of coffee and money, too.”

“I go now,” repeated the strange old creature, pretending not to understand Billie’s offer, and she promptly took her leave without another word.

Billie gathered up the tray and the coffee things and carried them into the kitchen.

“It looks like rain, Alberdina. I think we had better eat indoors to-night,” she said.

Something, perhaps the east wind charged with wet, had made her feel dispirited and uneasy. She was homesick for her father and she wished that Dr. Hume had not gone away. She almost wished they had never set eyes on Phoebe and her father at all. How complicated life had suddenly become! They were just a party of well-meaning campers taking a summer holiday on the mountainside, meaning no harm to anybody on earth; and having done a little kindness to a poor girl and her half-crazed father, they had obtained the enmity of an entire village. How cruel and ignorant these people were! How warped and uncharitable!

“Have Percy and Ben got back yet?” asked Nancy, appearing at the door of the lean-to in a fresh blue linen dress, her hair all dewy from her bath, her eyes bright and clear from the long rest.

“Heavens, Nancy, you make me feel like a dusty old shoe,” exclaimed Billie, realizing for the first time that she was tired and hot and crushed. “No, no one has come and Dr. Hume has gone to look for Phoebe’s father.” Then she told Nancy of the experiences of the afternoon.

“If the old woman spoke the truth all we have to do is to lie low and say nothing, like Br’er Rabbit,” said Nancy.

“Do you know what I intend to do, Nancy,” announced Billie, glancing through the open door at Phoebe in the distance on the divan. “Phoebe’s awake. You see she’s sitting up. I am going to set her fears at rest about her father first. Then I’m going to take her upstairs and after she’s bathed, I’ll dress her in some of my things. She shall swallow her pride. Cousin Helen shall ask her to visit us until her father is able to come back, and to-morrow I mean to take her down to the village in the ‘Comet.’ She shall wear my best and only pink linen. Won’t she be stunning? I’m glad I took your advice and brought it along now, and we’ll just show these people that Phoebe is not a poor ragged mountain girl.”

“Take anything of mine you want,” said Nancy generously. “Phoebe’s taller than I am, but she can wear my ‘undies,’ I suppose.”

“I think I have plenty,” replied Billie, “that is, if Alberdina Schoenbachler ever gets through ironing the pink wash.”

Phoebe was a good deal cheered by the message of the old herb gatherer.

“Oh, yes, I know her quite well. She likes me. Once when I had a fever she came and nursed me for several days and gave me herb tea.”

Phoebe also submitted to being dressed up, after a good deal of persuasion.

“You know we are under a great obligation to you and you must give us a chance to get rid of a little of it,” Billie said. “Besides, Dr. Hume said that on no account were you to leave the camp. You wouldn’t like to disobey him, would you?”

“No, no,” Phoebe answered, and finally permitted herself to be led to the women’s quarter of the camp, where for the first time in her life she bathed in a porcelain bath tub, with scented soap and toilet water and sweet smelling talcum powder and violet ammonia and all kinds of women’s luxuries at her service on a hand shelf by the tub.

When Billie proudly led Phoebe downstairs that evening, the others, already gathered around the supper table, were filled with amazement. Instead of the ragged, disheveled mountain girl, they saw a beautiful young woman in a white duck skirt and a muslin blouse. Her throat rose like a slender column from the lace yoke of the blouse and her soft hair was rolled into a loose knot on her neck.

“I know now she is a princess,” said Mary.

Ben and Percy, returned from their search, had brought no news.

CHAPTER XV.

A WARNING.

The next day Billie had much difficulty in persuading Phoebe to put on the beautiful pink linen.

“It is not right,” Phoebe kept saying, although her eyes shone with a new luster when she gazed at the pretty frock. “I am very grateful for what you have done but you must not do too much. I am sure my father would not approve of my accepting so many favors.”

“Nonsense,” exclaimed Billie. “Can’t one girl lend another a few clothes without its being called ‘favors’? I shouldn’t hesitate to borrow from you, Phoebe, if I were—well—in your situation. And it seems to me that this dress would be very becoming to you. It suits your complexion better than mine because it matches your cheeks. I usually wear blue but I was over-persuaded by Nancy-Bell to get pink.”

In the end, Phoebe was induced to put on the pink dress. It had been wonderful enough to wear a neatly fitted duck skirt and a lace-trimmed blouse, but in this embroidered linen frock the color of wild roses Phoebe was in a dream.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, glancing at her flushed image in the mirror, “I never understood that clothes would make so much difference. I feel like someone else.” She looked down at her white canvas pumps, which were, as a matter of fact, a shade too long for her, although she had run barefoot over the mountains. “And my feet look really small.”

When Billy placed on her head a white Panama hat trimmed with a broad band of black velvet, Phoebe’s eyes filled with tears.

“Am I Phoebe?” she ejaculated. “Phoebe without a name, who lives in a log house? Oh, Miss Campbell——”

“Not Miss Campbell,” interrupted Billie. “You must call me Billie. Aren’t you my guest and almost the same age? Besides, I never recognize myself with ‘Miss’ tucked on before my name.”

“Billie, then,” went on Phoebe, blushing because she had never known a girl before to call by the first name. “Do you think it is right that I should dress up so beautifully when—when my father is hidden away somewhere?”

“But I feel perfectly sure he is safe,” said Billie. “Perhaps someone has told him it would be safer to keep away for a while.”

“But why? He has never injured anyone in his life.”

“It is all Lupo’s doings and that is one reason why we want you to go with us down to the village and show yourself, so that they can see you have a number of very good friends to look after your interests.”

The girls all left off their khaki camping clothes and attired themselves in light summer frocks that morning. There was a reason for this unusual “hike” as Percy called it, and it pleased Nancy extremely, who took that opportunity to wear her best blue batiste and her prettiest hat. Billie wore no hat. It annoyed her when she drove the car, she said; but as a matter of fact she had lent her only hat to Phoebe.

From time to time, as the car went down the mountain road, Miss Campbell glanced admiringly at the mountain girl beside Billie in front.

“Dear, dear,” she exclaimed in a low voice, “what clothes will do for one. And how well the child wears them. She might have been accustomed to pretty things all her life.”

“She puts us all in the shade,” whispered Nancy.

If Billie had intended to create a sensation in the village, she succeeded beyond her wildest hopes. At first Phoebe was not recognized, but at the village store where everything was sold from groceries to Indian moccasins, a man loafing at the door exclaimed:

“By golly, that there’s Phoebe from up on the mountains!”

Phoebe blushed scarlet and then smiled.

“I suppose it will be a surprise to them,” she said.

They waited some time at the general store for purchases and letters, and by the time the “Comet” had borne them slowly onward to the small hotel, the news had spread down the street. At the water trough, they came to a full stop. They had no errands at the hotel, but Billie pretended to examine the “Comet’s” interior mechanism with careful interest. Pretty soon, nearly two dozen people had gathered at the trough. The innkeeper himself appeared, pale-eyed and sly; and Lupo made bold to show his face.

“Look at Crazy Frenchy’s gal diked out in all them duds,” one of the company exclaimed.

“She do look good, crazy or no crazy,” remarked a swarthy-faced guide eying Phoebe with admiration.

The young girl seemed entirely unconscious of all the attention she was attracting. She looked straight ahead down the village street and never even glanced at the group of rough men gathered near the car.

“How do we know but she didn’t aid and abet Frenchy?” burst out the innkeeper. “How do we know but she didn’t help him start them fires on Razor Back? The two is always together, ’ceptin’ now when he’s a-hidin’ and she’s put on fine clothes to drive around with her rich friends.”

Phoebe turned her startled gaze on the man. Her lips parted.

“Don’t answer them,” whispered Billie, and with a grand flourish she swept the “Comet” around in a circle and turned his nose up the street.

“Do they accuse my father of setting Razor Back on fire?” asked Phoebe, tremulously.

“They tried to, but they couldn’t prove it,” answered Billie.

“My father loves the mountains,” protested poor Phoebe. “He loves the forests. He wouldn’t harm even one tree. How cruel these people are! Always they have hated us and we have never injured any of them. Oh, Billie, I feel that I must go to my father. I know he needs me.”

“You remember the doctor’s message,” answered Billie; “that it would be dangerous for you to leave camp. I am certain he knew what he was saying. Besides, didn’t you say the old herb woman was a friend? She would not have deceived you, would she?”

“No,” answered Phoebe, half smiling. “Once I pulled a thorn out of old Granny’s foot and washed and bound it, and she has been good to me ever since. The time she nursed me, she never left me day or night until I was well.”

“So you see,” said Billie, “it would be foolish for you to start out to hunt your father when you know old Granny can be depended upon and Dr. Hume, too.”

Phoebe was not the only one who felt restless in camp that afternoon. All of them had the sensation of waiting for something. Only Alberdina seemed placidly content. Having been forgiven the pink clothes and having had her stolen money refunded, she went about her work, singing and yodelling in a melodious voice, and for lunch surprised them with a German cinnamon cake she had made during their absence in the village.

“Why, you can cook, Alberdina?” exclaimed Billie, on whom cooking was beginning to pall.

“I can a leedle coog.”

“Then you shall cook the dinner,” announced Billie firmly, and Alberdina, who had not mentioned cooking in the bond, quailed before her stern gray eye and consented.

The afternoon dragged slowly along. It was very hot and the women members of the camp lay on their cots in kimonos reading and napping. Percy, underneath, snored lustily, and Ben chopped wood and piled up the logs scientifically for a fire that evening.

Alberdina’s supper was distinctly German in flavor, but it was good and Billie and Nancy enjoyed freedom from the bondage of cooking the evening meal. After supper the wind freshened and it grew much cooler.

“It’s going to be a dark night. There’s no moon,” remarked Ben, wistfully. “Shall I light the camp fire? And then we can sit around and tell stories and sing songs,” and because no one either assented or objected, owing to the peculiar restlessness that possessed them, he put a match to the pile of logs and presently the clearing was illuminated. The camp house stood out in bold relief against the background of the mountains. Little clouds were scurrying across the sky like schools of fish, and an occasional flash of heat lightning lit up the mountains and valley with strange distinctness. Elinor had brought out her guitar and they had just begun one of the old familiar songs, when a ragged boy appeared in their midst so suddenly that he might have sprung up full grown from the earth.

He faced Ben without looking at the others.

“The doctor wants both gem’man to come. I show the way. Quick.”

Phoebe sat up very straight and looked at the boy.

“I don’t know you,” she said. “Who are you?”

“I come from that away,” answered the boy, pointing with his thumb toward Indian Head. “The doctor said you would know it was all right by this here,” he added, unbuttoning his coat and taking out the doctor’s well remembered cane. “An’ he don’t want none of the ladies to come. Jes’ the men.”

“But I will go,” exclaimed Phoebe. “My father——”

“Is your father Frenchy?”

“Yes,” answered the girl, lowering her eyes.

“The doctor says Frenchy’s gal was not to be skeered. Frenchy is safe and well.”

“Are you sure?” demanded Phoebe.

“So help me,” answered the boy, raising his hand to heaven.

“But what does it mean?” broke in Miss Campbell. “I don’t like the sound of it at all. Why has the doctor sent for both of you boys? Why should we be left alone? It’s not like the doctor at all.”

“They ain’t got to go no distance much, lady,” the boy assured her. “They’ll be back inside of fifteen minutes,” and being the prince of liars and an actor of precocious ability, he succeeded in persuading them that Ben and Percy must follow him without delay.

The girls were still gathering up the rugs and cushions preparatory to going into the house, when there came another interruption that frightened Miss Campbell so much that she gave a little cry and seized Billie’s arm.

“It’s only old Granny, the herb-woman,” Billie assured her. “What is it, Granny?”

“Phoebe! They gona’ tar and feather Phoebe an’ her father if they can find him. Go, quick. Lupo an’ his men comin’ up mountain. Hurry and shut house.”

“But I don’t want to bring this danger on my friends,” exclaimed Phoebe. “I will go with you, Granny.”

“No, no, too dangerous,” answered the old woman. “Lupo, he see in dark.”

“Indeed, you shall not go,” broke in Miss Campbell indignantly. “You’ll stay right here and they shall not tar and feather you or anybody else. The low wretches!”

“Shut up house, quick,” was Granny’s last piece of advice as she melted away in the darkness.

Nobody paused to beat down the camp fire or gather up the rugs and cushions. Into the house they scurried and lost no time in drawing the great iron-bound winter doors across the openings into the living room, and bolting them. The doors to the sleeping porches were all carefully closed and locked from the inside. Then they sat down in the immense vaulted room and waited.

Phoebe, sitting apart from the others, seemed very quiet and calm in the face of the danger which threatened her, and Billie knew she was calling on the faith which had never failed her.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE ATTACK.

They were filled with hot indignation over the situation. They felt sure now that Ben and Percy had been lured away, but they were not uneasy for their safety. Billie had told them what Dr. Hume had said: that the mountaineers would not dare injure any of the campers. But all of them realized that Phoebe might be treated with cruel indignities. Only a few weeks before, Billie had read an account in a newspaper of how a pretty young school teacher had been tarred and feathered by a mob of people who were jealous of her beauty and refinement. If Lupo could persuade the villagers that Phoebe and her father were responsible for the forest fires, Billie felt certain they would have a very unreasonable lot of visitors to deal with that night. She wished with all her heart that someone with an eloquent tongue would appear and address these narrow, stupid men, someone who understood their natures and knew how to deal with them. She believed that violence would only aggravate their rage. Someone would have to talk to them.

The other Motor Maids sat on a divan whispering together, and Miss Campbell, calm as was her wont in the presence of danger, paced up and down the room, examining the bolts of the heavy shutters. Alberdina, with her little iron bound trunk beside her, sat grumbling in a corner.

“Is it for thees I haf gome?” she murmured. “I to New Yorg return to-morrow. They will keel me already yet.”

“You are perfectly safe, Alberdina,” said Miss Campbell, “and you are not to go back to New York to-morrow. You are to stay with us and see this thing through. I shall telegraph Mr. Campbell in the morning and have the law on these people. I am sick and tired of their savagery and injustice. The cruel wretches! I——”

A long shrill whistle interrupted her outburst. It penetrated the stout walls of their fortress so unexpectedly that it brought them all to their feet with low exclamations.

“There they are,” whispered Mary.

Alberdina groaned, “Mein lieber Gott,” and sank upon a couch with the expression of a condemned man about to be executed.

It was some moments after the whistle before the enemy made its next advance. That also was unexpected and terrifying,—loud knocks on the wooden shutters of the large entrance.

Nobody moved or spoke. Again the knocks came and a voice called:

“We want that gal and her father. You ain’t got no right to shelter criminals. Open in the name of the law. I reckon a sheriff will make you listen to reason.”

“Break the door down, Lupo,” said another voice. “The law’s in its right to git what it wants. They ain’t nobody that kin refuse the law without payin’ for it.”

Although they were so confident of the law, the girls felt sure the mention of a sheriff was a blind, and that the mountaineers were not going to do anything so incriminating as to break in the doors. Then there followed a period of consultation outside. Footsteps could be heard along the galleries; the stout shutters on all the openings were shaken and pounded upon; but Sunrise Camp was indeed as strong as a fortress when it was closed. Storms had beaten against it in vain, and unless the mob outside resorted to hatchets and saws, it would not be easy to break in.

At last the voice of Lupo spoke from the front gallery.

“Ladies, I’m only askin’ justice. You got two dangerous people in this here house. The law wants ’em. We don’t mean no harm to you an’ we’ll leave peaceable if you’ll hand over the prisoners. I’m goin’ to give you five minutes to decide in an’ if you don’t open the door, we’re goin’ to break it open with this here axe.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort, Lupo,” cried Miss Campbell, her voice ringing with indignation. “And I warn you that unless you wish to serve a long term in the penitentiary, you’d better leave this place at once with your friends. Mr. Campbell would never stop until he saw all of you well punished for this night’s work. You’ve already broken into the house and robbed our maid——”

“Who said I did?” shouted Lupo. “It was Frenchy done that, too. He’s a dangerous man to live in a peaceable place. We’ve been puttin’ up with him and his daughter for too long, and we citizens ain’t goin’ to put up with ’em no longer. They gona’ be punished first, and then they gona’ give up that there home that ain’t theirs by rights and leave this here part of the country forever.”

Miss Campbell decided not to reply to Lupo’s outburst. It only excited him and it was evident her arguments had no effect.

And now, after what seemed an interminable time, the door resounded with the blows of a woodman’s axe.

“Go up into the gallery, Phoebe,” ordered Miss Campbell, trembling in spite of her determination not to be frightened.

Phoebe rose and walked to the middle of the room. Her face was transfigured and she looked almost unearthly.

“I am not afraid,” she said. “I believe that I will be saved from my enemies. God is sending someone to save me.”

But the Motor Maids and Miss Campbell had no such faith to bolster up their faltering courage. During the long, lonely evenings on the mountainside when Phoebe had read aloud to her father from the New Testament, which he seemed to like best, there had grown in her mind a belief as strong as it was simple. There had never been any people to shake her convictions with arguments, nor books to suggest doubts. And now in her soul she had called for help and she believed it would come even at the eleventh hour.

Billie, whose faith in prayer was not unmixed with a desire for action of a very vigorous and immediate variety, seized an old rifle hung from a nail on the wall. She had no idea whether there were any loads in it, but she had made up her mind to use the butt-end on the first man who entered the room. In the meantime, the axe had crashed through one of the thick, hardwood panels, making a slit broad enough to see through.

“I’ll shoot any man who comes into this room,” called Billie. “Keep out.”

An eye was placed at the hole in the door. Billie felt instinctively it was Lupo’s.

“That there old rusty gun ain’t got no loads in it, Miss. You kin shoot all you like.”

There was another pause, and the blows began again. Alberdina gave evidence of wishing to speak, but Miss Campbell interrupted her.

“Never mind, Alberdina,” she said impatiently. “You may go up into the gallery if you like. You are quite safe. They only want Miss Phoebe.”

But Alberdina would not be silenced. Perhaps somewhere in the remote history of her ancestors there had been a warrior who had ranged the German forests dressed in the skins of wild beasts, his helmet decorated with a pair of fierce upstanding horns. Who knows but a drop of his fighting blood had come down through the generations to stir this sluggish descendant into action just at this particular moment when something had to be done?

“Come,” she called, with unexpected energy. “I asg you, come. We will a high wall mag already. You will see. Hein?”

Again the axe crashed through the door and without a word they followed her into the gallery, Billie carrying the rifle and Elinor the breakfast horn. Alberdina hurried into the locker room and presently returned with a trunk hoisted on her shoulders. This she placed at the top of the stairs.

“Good,” exclaimed Billie. “Why didn’t we think of that before? It will keep them off for a little longer, at any rate.”

Alberdina did not listen to these honeyed words of praise, however. She never paused until she had piled three trunks, one on top of the other in a very effective barricade. At the far end of the gallery, Elinor and Mary appeared to be very much occupied at a little window placed in the roof for ventilation, but now closed. Finding the bolt rusty, Elinor took off her slipper and broke a pane of glass. Mary, her lieutenant, then handed her the breakfast horn. It was like Elinor to wipe off the mouth piece carefully with her handkerchief before she placed it to her lips. But the blast she blew must have startled the mountaineers outside, for the blows on the door ceased for a moment. Again and again she signaled, always the same long agitated note.

“I think anybody would recognize that as a call for help,” she said, pausing for breath; and while the axe crashed through the door, she continued to blow the bugle with all her strength.

Billie, however, felt fairly certain that a trunk barricade and a bugle blast for help would not keep off the savages long.

“We need some kind of ammunition, Nancy,” she said. “If only this rifle was loaded.”

“Did you look through the barrel?” asked Nancy, slightly more experienced with firearms than Billie. She seized the rifle and held it up before a lamp that Alberdina had set in a corner of the gallery, cocked it and looked through with one eye professionally squinted.

“Why, it is loaded,” she announced. “It only has two empty what do you call them—chambers?”

“Must I shoot at somebody?” asked Billie.

“You could try and I could try,” answered Nancy, “but I don’t think either one of us would hit an elephant.”

Just then Miss Campbell put out the light. At the same moment the axe made a breach in the door and a man crawled through. Billie lifted the rifle and, taking a long breath, aimed at his foot. The man was looking about him in a bewildered way. It was the innkeeper, second leader of the gang. Billie pulled and pulled, but nothing happened, and in another moment a dozen mountaineers had crawled through the opening. The one lamp cast a small circle of light near the fire-place. The rest of the room was in darkness. In the gallery the anxious watchers were invisible to the band of men, but the watchers themselves could see the outlaws plainly now gathered in a group in the center of the room, rather uneasy after breaking down the door of Sunrise Camp.

“Ladies, I’d advise you to give up the prisoners,” called Lupo, addressing the darkness. “We ain’t goner touch none of you, but we wants them two furriners right away.”

“Git some torches,” ordered the innkeeper, who seemed really to be the boldest man in the lot.

Several men disappeared and in a moment returned with pitch torches which cast a lurid, flickering light through the room. It was a weird scene, looking down from the gallery. All of the men wore masks except Lupo and the innkeeper, who were boldly undisguised. They peered about the room. Suddenly Lupo’s eye caught a corner of the staircase at the far end.

“They’re upstairs. Come on, men,” he called.

Billie raised the shotgun to her shoulder.

“I’ll shoot the old thing off this time if it flies to pieces,” she said, and pulled the trigger with all her might.

“Bang!” went the gun, and down she sat very hard, not knowing where she had aimed. There was a great confusion of voices below and she thought she heard someone cry out with pain.

“Could I have shot anyone?” she asked herself tremulously as she picked herself up from the floor. Her shoulder ached and her finger was bruised, but she put the gun into position again.

“I’ll shoot any man who comes up those steps,” she called.

The outlaws had gathered under the gallery now, holding their torches high and gazing with some curiosity at the women grouped above them. Miss Campbell stood with her arm around Phoebe’s waist. Elinor and Mary were still at the window. Nancy was with Billie, and Alberdina crouched behind the barricade.

Lupo fell back angrily.

“I guess you ain’t got but one load in your old shotgun,” he called. “Come on, men. We’ll make a run for it.”

Billie turned the gun straight on him. She felt almost more afraid of the unwieldy thing than she did of the man himself.

“If it jumps again,” she thought, “it’ll break my shoulder. And it’s so undignified to have to sit down every time I shoot it off.”

The innkeeper made a leap for the steps and Lupo followed him. Billie ran to the other end of the gallery so as to get a better aim, and pulled at the trigger. The trunks were swaying and Alberdina had rushed from behind them.

“Oh, Nancy, I can’t make it go off,” Billie sobbed under her breath.

“Give it to me,” whispered Nancy, seizing the gun and leveling it with trembling hands at Lupo.

“Look out, Lupo,” called a man below, as the barricade went down with a crash.

But Lupo was in no mood to listen to warnings. Bounding over a fallen trunk, he wrenched the gun from Nancy’s hand.

At this moment, a man walked into the room and marched straight up to the group of mountaineers.

“I beg your pardon, gentlemen,” he said in a voice loud enough to be heard by everybody, “is this Sunrise Camp?”

CHAPTER XVII.

THE FORCE OF ELOQUENCE.

Phoebe gazed at the newcomer as if she were seeing a visitor from heaven. All the women in the gallery experienced enormous sensations of relief and Alberdina smiled down at him broadly.

“Mein lieber Gott, helb has gome already yet,” she exclaimed.

They hardly seemed to comprehend in their relief that one man had to deal with a dozen or more.

“Who are you?” demanded Lupo, roughly, coming to the top of the stairs.

“My name is Hook, at your service. May I ask if you are giving a performance of private theatricals? The scene is a good deal like a band of highwaymen attacking a number of helpless women.”

“We’re in the rights of the law,” put in the innkeeper.

“Why wear masks then?” asked Richard Hook.

There was no answer to this pointed question and three of the maskers slunk toward the door.

“We’ve come here to git two criminals hiding illegally in this here camp,” burst out Lupo.

“Have you a warrant for their arrest?”

“We don’t need no warrants in these here mountains.”

“Oh, yes you do,” insisted Richard politely. “Law and order must be respected just as much on the mountains as in the valleys. People who don’t respect them soon find out what happens.”

Two more men slunk toward the door.

“I think,” went on Richard, “that you had better follow your friends out quietly and go to your homes. I am certain most of you have wives who would be glad to see you again after this dangerous little adventure. Jail isn’t a pleasant place, you know, especially to people who are in the habit of breathing mountain air.”

Only six men remained now of the original number. Even Lupo had been silenced, but at the mention of wives he flared up again.

“They have taken my wife away from me,” he cried, shaking his fist at the women in the gallery. “They have given her money to leave me. I ain’t so forgivin’.”

“Do you want to know the real reason why your wife left you?” said Richard in a tone of such conviction that Lupo was deceived into thinking this perfect stranger knew all about him. “She was afraid of you and your lawless ways. When you have been drinking, as you have to-night, you’re a dangerous man. You begin by breaking into private houses. You’re disorderly and violent. Men like you end in the penitentiary. You hide yourselves perhaps for a while, but these mountains are difficult to hide in nowadays. You would be caught sooner or later, and do you think you’ll get much sympathy with the court after one of these ladies, perhaps, has told the history of to-night’s work? Fifteen years would be a short sentence. Your wife is right, I think. You’re not a very safe companion.”

Lupo looked about him bewildered. Only one of the band remained: the watery-eyed innkeeper.

“I was in the rights of the law,” exclaimed Lupo, half-crying as he crept down the gallery steps.

“I am afraid not,” said Richard gently. “But you take a little trip to another county and get some good honest work, and you will soon find out how much happier and safer it is to be within the limits of the law. Decidedly more agreeable than being hunted through the mountains by a sheriff with his bloodhounds, sleeping out in the cold, going hungry, slinking around the edges of villages when everybody is asleep for a chance piece of bread. Earning honest money with your wife happy beside you is heaven in comparison, I assure you.”

Lupo hung his head until his eyes were hidden by the brim of his felt hat.

“I’m goin’,” he said sullenly. “I guess your argyments is too good for the likes of me to try an’ answer. I wants my wife back more’n I wants to git even with Frenchy and his gal. They done me a injury once, but I’m willin’ to call it square if you are.”

“Call it square,” said Richard, and the two mountaineers slunk out of the room and disappeared in the night.

And now the ladies of Sunrise Camp and Richard Hook found themselves quite alone in the vast living room. The danger was over and the last and most impious of the outlaws departed. Miss Campbell and her girls standing in a row in the gallery looked down into the whimsical face of their deliverer. Billie recalled that only a little while before she had wished for someone with a persuasive tongue to appear and address the outlaws. Phoebe, too, had believed that God would send a deliverer. Whose prayer had brought the young man to Sunrise Camp in the nick of time? Hers or Phoebe’s, Billie wondered. Perhaps it was their combined wishes. She understood little about the psychology of wishes. At any rate, here they all stood, safe and sound, and presently they found themselves laughing at the ludicrous thing that might have turned into a tragedy but for Richard Hook’s persuasive tongue.

Already Alberdina was removing the barriers.

“Whose idea was that? Yours, Miss Billie?” asked Richard.

“No, no. We really owe our temporary safety to Alberdina, there. She thought of it herself.”

The German girl was well pleased over the fame the one intelligent act of her life had brought her. She smiled broadly at Richard as she cleared the way for the ladies to descend.

“Before we settle down to talk,” remarked the young man, “suppose we open the doors and windows and light the lights. This room is fairly close and it would be a good idea to illuminate for the sake of your friends who might happen to be returning. By the way, where are the criminals?”

“Here is one of them,” answered Miss Campbell, smiling. “This is our friend, Miss Phoebe—” she hesitated, “Miss Phoebe French. Does she look like a criminal?”

Phoebe, who all this time had been watching Richard with a sort of rapt expression, was startled out of her dream. She blushed and looked down at the floor. The girls had never seen her so shy.

“This is Mr. Hook, Phoebe,” continued Miss Campbell. “I think we ought all to offer him our united thanks for his courage.”

“I do thank you, sir, with all my heart,” said Phoebe fervently, timidly offering her hand.

Richard stretched out his left hand.

“I—I ask your pardon for giving you my left hand,” he said, and for the first time they noticed that his right arm was hanging limply at his side.

“Oh, Rich—Oh, Mr. Hook,” cried Billie, as red as a beet. “What have I done—I shot you—Oh, dear, I am so sorry!”

“Don’t you worry, Miss Billie. It’s just a coat sleeve wound. The bullet cut through the cloth and scratched my arm. It’s lodged there in the wall now, I suppose, as a memento of your nerve.”

“Why, boy, your sleeve is soaked in blood,” exclaimed Miss Campbell. “And you’re as white as a ghost. Sit down here quick. Alberdina, a basin of water. Billie, some bandages. Hurry, all of you. Why are you standing around like a lot of wooden images?”

Phoebe was too inexperienced to join in the general rush for bandages, peroxide of hydrogen, absorbent cotton and witch hazel: all the first-aid-to-the-injured the camp afforded. She stood at the foot of the couch and watched Richard Hook with large innocent eyes. His own eyes, very dark gray, wide apart and extremely intelligent, returned her gaze with a kind of amused admiration.

In the meanwhile, Miss Helen Campbell snipped up his shirt sleeve with a pair of small scissors and Billie, overwhelmed with contrition, stood ready to bathe the wound, which was more bloody than serious.

“I call this pretty nice,” remarked Richard, glancing at the circle of anxious faces leaning over him. “It’s worth being shot to have so many ministering angels about one; and a Seraph with a flaming sword at the foot of my couch to guard me,” he added, glancing again at Phoebe, now holding a lamp high with a perfectly steady arm, so that the others could see to work.

Having washed and bound the wound, they propped his head on two pillows and drew their chairs about the couch. Never was a young man so coddled before.

“You haven’t explained to us yet, Mr. Hook, how you happened to drop down from the skies,” said Miss Campbell.

“I dropped up and not down, on the contrary, Miss Campbell. The van isn’t so very far away. The girls wanted to put up for the night at the foot of the mountain, but I was stubborn for once and we worked old Dobbin until his limbs refused to go any farther. After they had got settled for the night, I thought I’d take a stroll. I supposed you would all have gone to bed but I had a feeling I’d like to see Sunrise Camp by starlight. I wouldn’t have found it, however, if I had not heard the calls for help on the bugle. There wasn’t a light to be seen from the road.”

Elinor felt a secret pride at this statement. It was she, then, who had brought the rescuer! Billie felt sure it was her own strong wish that had drawn Richard to them in their great need, while Phoebe, filled with the conviction of her faith, believed he had been sent in answer to her fervent prayers.

If Richard had been consulted about this and had spoken the truth from his heart, could he have explained the irresistible impulse that had urged him to climb the steep road up the mountain on that dark night?

At this juncture, Ben and Percy, more dead than alive from running, almost fell into the room.

“Great Caesar’s ghost,” Percy ejaculated in a weak voice, “but we have had a fright about you, and here you are giving an evening reception!”

“Nothing has happened, then?” Ben managed to gasp.

“That little arch fiend led us into a jungle and lost us,” went on Percy. “We heard the bugle calls for help. Gee! But we have had a run.”

“And you’re all right? You’re safe?” cried Ben, counting them over. “And Mr. Hook has been protecting you? Thank heavens for that.”

“My dear young man,” observed Miss Campbell with some irritation, “will you please to turn around and look at that front door or slide or whatever you call the thing? I wish you to know that we have had one of the most exciting evenings of our lives. This house was attacked and broken into by a dozen ruffians and if it hadn’t been for Alberdina, there, who has the mind of a general and knew exactly how to build a barricade with trunks, Phoebe would certainly have been tarred and feathered, even before Mr. Hook came to our rescue——”

“He heard my bugle,” announced Elinor.

“I wished for him,” thought Billie.

“I prayed for him,” said Phoebe in a low voice.

“If Richard Hook had not appeared and permitted himself to be shot by Billie without uttering a sound——”

“Oh, I let out a yell,” broke in Richard.

“We would have all been murdered, like enough.”

“But where are your sister and Miss Swinnerton?” asked Ben.

“I suppose I had better be getting back to them,” said Richard, who had quite forgotten that he had left two unprotected maidens asleep in a traveling van on a ledge half a mile below.

Percy and Ben offered to go back for him, but he would not consent, and Billie, solicitous and full of contrition for her reckless shooting, had the “Comet” out in a jiffy although Richard had asked to be allowed to walk. They found the van dark and quiet. Evidently the girls had heard nothing of the rumpus on the mountain and had felt no uneasiness about Richard, who was accustomed to taking strolls at untimely hours.

It did not take long to bring the motor car back to camp and before midnight a peaceful calm had settled over the log hut.

Phoebe, stretched on her cot in the living room, lay staring up into the darkness of the unceiled roof. She tried to think of her father somewhere out on the mountain, but always her thoughts reverted to the new young man with the kind, smiling eyes. Once she chanted in a low voice:

“‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings!’”

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE MORNING AFTER.

Miss Campbell felt no ill effects from the visit of the mountaineers. She had not even thought of ill effects, in fact. Somehow, the presence of Phoebe, unruffled and calm through all the danger, had had its influence on all of them. Even Alberdina’s emotions had been hushed by contact with that peaceful nature.

It was well past six o’clock before the exhausted household awakened next morning at Percy’s trumpet call. Hurrying down before the others, Billie was amazed to see the traveling van drawn up in a clearing at the edge of the grove. Old Dobbin, tethered to a rope, stood nearby peaceably munching his breakfast from a wooden pail. Amy Swinnerton was seated in front of an easel sketching the log cabin and from inside of the van came the crisp voice of Maggie Hook, singing:

“‘I loved a lass, a fair one,
As fair as e’er was seen;
She was indeed a rare one,
Another Sheba Queen:
But, fool as then I was,
I thought she loved me, too:
But, now alas! she’s left me,
Falero, lero, loo!’”

“Good morning!” cried Billie, running over to the van. “You must have muffled old Dobbin’s feet to have crept in so quietly. How is Ri—Mr. Hook?” she added, all in one breath.

Maggie popped her head out of the front of the van. She reminded Billie of a little bird peeping from a bird house.

“Not ‘Mister,’” she called, smiling brightly. “Remember, Billie, that we brothers and sisters of the road never use titles.”

“Oh, yes, I mustn’t forget that I’m one of the fraternity,” answered Billie, smiling.

“‘—Gypsy blood to the Gypsy blood
Ever the wide world over,’”

called Maggie, with much animation, from the top step of the van.

“You’ll have to know her better to understand her dual nature, Billie,” observed Amy Swinnerton, glancing up from her easel. “After she’s been a good housewife and got things shipshape and free from the dust of the road she loves so much, she’s ready to turn Gypsy and muss them all up again.”

“I never mussed anything up in my life,” broke in Maggie. “I only clean up other people’s musses.”

“But how is your brother Richard?” persisted Billie. “You see I feel some natural anxiety because I was the one who shot him last night. Has the wound been dressed?”

“Shot him?” repeated the other girls.

“That was why he made me drive old Dobbin this morning,” said Amy.

“And to think he never told,” broke in Maggie, “and he’s gone off now, goodness only knows where.”

“And he didn’t tell you about the attack and how he saved us?” demanded Billie.

“Not a word.”

Billie gave them an account of what had happened the evening before. It was exciting enough to tell about and the girls listened breathlessly. Richard’s courage and tact with the outlaws when all the time his sleeve was soaked with blood from the wound in his arm, fired her with unusual eloquence.

“I don’t think they intended to harm any of us,” she finished. “It was Phoebe they wanted, and her father, who is hiding somewhere on the mountain. But we shall be thankful to him all our lives for what he did. Why didn’t he tell you?”

“It’s too like him,” said Maggie. “I don’t know whether it’s modesty or indifference, but he never, never tells stories where he figures as a hero.”

“Do you wish us to stop here now after so much excitement?” Amy asked. “I don’t think it’s any time for outsiders to intrude in spite of Maggie’s rhymes about Gypsy blood and brothers of the road.”

“Indeed, we wouldn’t think of letting you go,” cried Billie hospitably. “You are not strangers to us, I assure you, after all your kindness. But I do wish I could find your brother. The place on his arm bled a lot last night. I am certain a wound like that should be washed and dressed every few hours. Do you think he could have gone very far away?”

“Oh, dear,” exclaimed Maggie. “Richard is incorrigible. He does make me so uneasy sometimes.”

“There is nothing to do but wait patiently until the spirit moves him to come back,” put in Amy calmly. “He is so strong and well that perhaps his wounds don’t have to be dressed as often as other people’s. There seems to be a special Providence that looks after him anyhow. It would be foolish to worry.”

Nevertheless, Billie did worry considerably in her heart, and even Phoebe, who presently joined them and was introduced to the girls, looked startled and uneasy when she heard that Richard Hook, her deliverer, had gone away without having his wound dressed.

The caravanners were greatly interested in seeing Phoebe, whose history they had heard.

“She is very beautiful,” Amy observed, “but she doesn’t look human, somehow. She has the expression of a person who sees visions, air pictures invisible to other people.”

“She is very religious,” Billie replied. “Not like the religious people we know, but—well like people in the time of Christ might have been. You see she got it all herself without any outside teaching. She just learned it out of the New Testament mostly, and she practices it all the time. It’s part of her life. Sometimes, I think it would be a pity to interfere with it.”

“How can you interfere with it, Billie?” asked Nancy.

“By taking her back to wicked West Haven with all its temptations,” laughed Billie.

“But shall you?” they asked in a chorus.

“We can’t leave her in this wild place.”

“And her father?” put in Mary.

“You’ll have to ask Dr. Hume about that,” answered Billie, and not another word would she say on the subject.

That morning the “Comet” conveyed a load of young people down to the village. Miss Campbell ordered a telegram to be sent to her cousin, demanding his immediate presence at the camp. Also a carpenter was secured to build a new door for the living room. This time the village street was singularly empty. No faces peeped from the half opened doors and no crowd gathered at the town pump. The rickety old wooden hotel was closed and the blinds drawn at every window. Evidently Richard Hook had frightened Lupo and the innkeeper very effectually.

“I don’t think they will ever trouble us again, Phoebe,” Billie remarked as they circled the pump and started home.

“They are sorry,” said Phoebe compassionately. “They are like children, and Mr. Hook understood that when he spoke to them as children. He is very wonderful and very good.”

“He is indeed,” agreed Billie. “He is a very remarkable young man.”

Phoebe seemed about to speak again, but kept silent. It was difficult for her to carry on a conversation.

“I love him,” she said at last, so simply and innocently that Billie smiled in spite of the earnestness of Phoebe’s expression.

“You love everyone, do you not, Phoebe? It is what you have learned by yourself up here in the mountain.”

“I cannot do that,” answered Phoebe. “I have tried but I cannot. But I love Mr. Hook. May God protect him always and reward him for his kindness.”

Billie looked away abashed. She had never heard anyone speak like that before outside of a church. She, too, hoped that God would protect Richard, but she would not have said it for worlds. She hoped also that Richard would be waiting for them at Sunrise Camp when they returned. He was not there, however. Miss Campbell, with Nancy and Percy, had looked for him in vain.

“No, he has not come back,” said the little lady. “And neither has Dr. Hume. Where is that foolish man? He shouldn’t have left us without news all this time.”

“Richard should remember that he is a guest and not an independent traveler,” exclaimed Maggie Hook. “I don’t think he has any right to go off and stay like this.”

“Now, Maggie, you are worrying and it’s very foolish,” put in practical Amy Swinnerton. “You know perfectly well he’ll be back by nightfall.”

Nobody felt quite in the humor to do anything. The day was exceedingly hot and the sun on its downward course in the heavens was like a red ball. Most of the party scattered for naps and letter writing and did not meet again until sunset.

That afternoon as they gathered around the supper table, Alberdina brought a note to Miss Campbell, written in a strange, old-fashioned handwriting on a scrap of paper. It read:

“Do not be uneasy. I have gone in search of Mr. Hook.

Phoebe.”

Miss Campbell groaned as she read the message aloud.

“Really, Billie,” she exclaimed reproachfully, “you and your father between you induced me to come to this place for peace and rest——”

Billie’s eyes filled with tears.

“Never mind, child,” added the distracted lady. “It’s not your fault.”

“It all came about,” remarked Mary, who was fond of tracing things to their beginnings, “because Billie bought a pail of blackberries from Phoebe one morning and Mrs. Lupo was angry.”

This might be considered an interesting and perfectly true statement, but nobody heard it, because they were busy organizing a search party. A few moments later Billie and Ben went down to the village in the motor car for guides, and this time guides were forthcoming.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE MILLS OF GOD.

It was not often that Billie lost a night’s rest from anxiety, but that night her eyes refused to close and she lay staring into the darkness, straining her ears for sounds in the forest. Even Richard’s sister, Maggie, was not so abjectly miserable as Billie. She tried to explain to herself that it was all because she had been the one to shoot the young man in the arm.

“I’d much rather have shot that horrid Lupo,” she sobbed under her breath. “Suppose I’ve killed Richard? The wound may be much worse than we thought it was.” She wiped her eyes on the sheet and lay very still listening. Away off on the mountain somewhere a dog began to howl. The weird sound made her shiver and hide her face in the pillow.

“Oh, God protect him,” she whispered, and then blushed furiously. “I suppose I have a perfect right to pray for a friend?” she thought in reply to some unspoken thought.

Besides the anxiety she felt, all sorts of new and unusual sensations were disturbing her peace of mind that wakeful night. She experienced a kind of irritation against Phoebe, which she could not explain to herself.

“He’ll think she’s lots braver than I am,” she thought, naming no names, “because I wouldn’t dare go out in the woods alone at night to hunt for him. She is braver and better than I am. She is wonderful and—and so beautiful. I—I wish my hair wasn’t so straight,” she added to the pillow into which she had poured these girlish secrets.

At last when the first gray streaks of dawn appeared, Billie rose and, quietly dressing, crept downstairs.

“How silly I have been,” she was admonishing herself, irritably, when she saw Phoebe run around the side of the house and stand looking up at the sleeping porch.

Billie dashed across the clearing.

“Phoebe, have you found him? Is he all right?” she demanded, grasping the girl’s shoulders and shaking her in her impatience.

“Yes. I found him and took him to my home,” answered Phoebe proudly. “He was lost in the marsh just as you were. His arm was bleeding and he was very weak.”

“He is very ill?”

“No, no. It was from losing so much blood, they said.”

“They?”

“Old Granny and Dr. Hume. My father is there, too.” Phoebe clasped her hands. “Oh, God is good to me,” she cried. “That I should find my father and Mr. Hook on the same day.”

Billie felt strangely irritated, and then reproachful of herself.

“And your father, Phoebe,” she asked kindly. “What happened to him?”

“On the day he came to the camp, he said, the language of the German girl stirred up something in his mind. After he went away he must have been very confused and he only remembers walking for a long time and then falling. You would not guess who found and has cared for him all this time? Old Granny and Mrs. Lupo. They brought him to Granny’s cabin, where Mrs. Lupo has been hiding. Then the doctor came, and they got a wagon and moved him down the mountain to our home. That was yesterday.”

“I am so glad,” said Billie, endeavoring to be sympathetic, but feeling really much more relieved over the safety of Richard Hook.

“The doctor has sent you some written messages,” went on Phoebe, giving Billie a little note book. “They are inside.”

“My dear Miss Billie,” the note read, “not long ago you asked me to restore the sleeping memory of our friend and I told you it was sometimes best to let sleeping memories lie. Since that time I have become deeply interested in the personality of Phoebe’s father. He is a gentleman, undoubtedly, in birth and breeding. He is perfectly aware that he has lost his memory and has discussed the mystery of his identity with me so intelligently that I may say I feel it my duty to do what I can. Even his illusion regarding the physician is more in the nature of a deep and lasting impression evidently made just before he took the plunge into forgetfulness. I have mentioned that to him, too. He has never talked to people before on these subjects because there has never been anyone to talk to, but I have suggested the operation and he is keen to have it done. I must confess I am filled with curiosity about him. Who knows what distinguished niche he may have occupied once somewhere? I may be restoring—well, never mind. There is no use making guesses now. In spite of his broken leg, he is in good physical condition and I am going to have the thing over with. I am therefore asking you to send the telegrams you will find further over, to two young surgeons I know who will be interested enough in the case to put up with the inconvenience of the place. I would not risk exciting this mysterious person by moving him to a hospital. Mrs. Lupo appears anxious to make amends and will remain to cook and help generally. I think you had better bring over the ‘Comet’ to take back your friend, Mr. R. Hook, who seems strangely eager to return, although I have done my best to entertain him. I wonder if it could be a princess disguised as a beggar girl or a princess undisguised, who has so stirred young Richard’s soul. I need not say which princess has stirred mine.

“Faithfully, William Hume.”

Now, what did the doctor mean by all this nonsense, Billie asked herself. It was true that Phoebe, when she had gone in search of Richard had put on her old faded gingham, and certainly Richard owed a great deal to the beggar maid in disguise, but she—Billie—did wish the doctor wouldn’t tease.

Billie blessed the “Comet” that morning from the bottom of her heart. It was a busy time and the swift, faithful machine enabled them to accomplish in a few hours what with a horse and wagon might have taken them at least a day to do. After breakfast he carried them down to the village, where Dr. Hume’s telegrams were sent, and where something happened that set Billie wondering about the identity of Phoebe and her father.

While Ben sent the telegrams and Maggie Hook and Mary looked over the souvenir post cards in the general store, Billie sat on the steps outside reading a letter from her father. Only Phoebe, once more attired in the white blouse and duck skirt, remained in the car. A big touring car containing two men and a chauffeur drew up alongside the “Comet,” and while one of the men went into the store, the other paced up and down outside. He was a man about Mr. Campbell’s age, tall and foreign looking with a soldierly bearing. Billie glanced at him only once and went on reading her letter. Presently she noticed that he was standing in front of her, his hat in his hand.

“Will you pardon me if I interrupt you?” he asked in good English with an accent. “May I take the liberty of asking you a question?”

“Oh, certainly,” answered Billie politely.

“May I inquire the name of the young lady in the motor car, if it is not too great an impertinence? I ask not from curiosity, but because I perceive a strong likeness.”

“Her name is ‘Phoebe,’” Billie answered.

“And her surname?”

Billie hesitated. After all it was absurd to assert that Phoebe’s last name was “French.”

“You do not know her last name?”

“Well,—you see—she hasn’t any,” Billie stammered. “She—her father has forgotten who he was.”

“So?” ejaculated the stranger. “And they live?”

“They live on Indian Head Mountain in a little cabin.”

“Will you pardon me if again I seem inquisitive? The young lady—you say she lives in what you call a cabeen and yet she seems not to be poor—that is, in appearance, I mean.”

Billie flushed again. It did seem very much like gossiping to answer all these questions, but this stranger was commanding,—rather elegant in his manner.

“The young lady has friends, perhaps? People who have helped her?”

“Yes, that is it,” said Billie.

“Another question and I shall not trouble you further. Where is this—er—cabeen?”

“It is on a ledge over ‘Table Top’ on ‘Indian Head Mountain,’” answered Billie promptly, having good reason to remember that location. “Take the road to the right at the end of this street and it takes you straight there. It’s called ‘Indian Head Road.’”

The stranger took a notebook and pencil from his pocket and wrote down the names. When he closed the book, Billie saw that it was of Russian leather with a coat of arms in dull gilt embossed on the back. The pencil fitted into a flat gold case on which also was the coat of arms. She glanced quickly at Phoebe and her heart gave a leap. It was not difficult to connect coats of arms and grand things with Phoebe. Billie could easily picture her in the midst of fine surroundings.

“She is a princess,” she thought wistfully. “And beautiful and good.”

The stranger also was watching Phoebe. His face worked with emotion and he said something in German in a low voice.

“And her father?” he asked suddenly. “Where is he?”

“At the cabin,” answered Billie.

“You are indeed very kind,” and the stranger, making a low foreign bow, joined his companion in the touring car and in two minutes the great machine was lost in the distance.

Billie’s mind was filled with conjectures on the journey to Phoebe’s home a little later. When they left the car to climb the path to the cabin, she lingered behind the others, thinking deeply, although she had seen Richard from below standing on the very edge of a rocky shelf scanning the road with the doctor’s telescope.

With a shy obstinacy new to her candid nature she pretended not to notice him or to mind that Phoebe with ingenuous joy had run ahead to speak to him first.

“I’ve been waiting for you a long time, Miss Billie,” he exclaimed, having left the others and run down the path to meet her.

“We had to go to the village first,” answered Billie.

“No, no. I mean it has seemed an infernal long time since the ‘Comet’ pulled up down there in the road and you lagged behind.”

“Not ten minutes.”

“I guess it would have seemed long to you if you had been sitting here since eight a. m. watching every vehicle that passed. Not long ago a big black car stopped down there and I was pretty sure it had come to fetch me.”

He gave her one of his ingratiating smiles.

“Who was it?” asked Billie.

“I don’t know. They saw the doctor for a minute and then went on. But I don’t want to talk about them. Why didn’t you hurry?”

“I always heard that sick men were children,” laughed Billie, “and I can see that you are quite ill because you are such a child. We shall take you home now and feed you up on cream and eggs, providing we can get any.”

Billie was glad to see Dr. Hume again. They clasped hands like old comrades. There was a peculiar radiance in his brown eyes as he looked at her.

“You’ve had a great honor paid you, Miss Billie,” he said.

“What in the world?”

“The gods have chosen you to turn their mills a while and you are turning them pretty fast, I can tell you.”

CHAPTER XX.

A LONG SLEEP.

The song of the “Comet’s” motor broke the stillness of the afternoon some ten days later as he cheerfully pushed upward on the Indian Head road. Mr. Campbell was at the wheel and beside him sat Billie, glancing up at him from time to time with eyes full of loving devotion. On the back seat was Phoebe, silently contented beside Richard Hook, and the other occupant was Alberdina Schoenbachler, that absurd little hat perched atop her big smiling face.

There had been many days of anxiety and suspense for the people at Sunrise Camp. It was impossible not to feel deeply interested in the strange things that were transpiring in the little cabin on Indian Head. The two young surgeons had arrived; a tent had been pitched alongside the cabin, and one morning early the operation was performed. Since that time the patient had lain in a stupor. And now Dr. Hume had sent Mrs. Lupo, tamed and domestic, to take Alberdina’s place at the camp, and Alberdina was to come at once to the cabin. Mrs. Lupo could give no reason; that was all the message stated, except that the patient was doing well.

The doctor went down the path to meet them, when the car stopped under the brow of the hill. He shook hands with Richard Hook, patted Phoebe on the cheek, and said:

“Hang on to your faith, little girl. It’s a wonderful reservoir to draw on.”

Then he grasped hands with Mr. Campbell, whom he had met several times now and liked immensely, nodded to Alberdina, and drawing Billie’s arm through his, marched on ahead.

“Anybody might think my little girl was a consulting physician,” remarked Mr. Campbell, amused at the earnest conversation the young girl and the great surgeon had plunged into,—and proud, too, that it should be so.

“Oh, they have lots of secrets from us, Mr. Campbell,” replied Richard Hook. “Miss Billie is confidential adviser to the doctor. I don’t believe he takes a step without consulting her first.”

“Wise man,” answered Billie’s father. “He’ll get some good sound advice, if not entirely professional.”

In the meantime, Billie was saying:

“Oh, doctor, what has happened? Is he conscious? Has he spoken? Does he recognize anyone?”

“How could he, child, when there is no one for him to recognize? Recollect that in coming to, the man has taken up the thread of his life of eighteen or twenty years ago. I would not trust him to see Phoebe at this point. Only the faces of strangers are safe for him for the time being.”

“And the stranger never came back who inquired about him that day?”

“No. I told him two weeks would be safer. There is no doubt the man was a personage of some sort. His companion said, ‘Yes, Excellency,’ as they went down the path. I suppose he’s got some kind of a title.”

“Did he seem excited?” asked Billie.

“I could hardly say excited. He appeared a good deal moved by the story of Phoebe and her father. He asked me if any money was needed.”

“Of course you said ‘no’?” observed Billie.

“I did. It’s my turn now. His turn may come later. I explained to him that any excitement or sudden recognition immediately after the operation might prove fatal or disastrous, and he took himself off. But I consider that Phoebe’s father is practically identified.”

“Is he conscious?” asked Billie with subdued excitement.

“Not only conscious, but, my dear child, what do you think? Speaking German; not English.”

Billie gasped.

“That’s why you wanted Alberdina.”

“Yes, I needed someone who could speak with him, and a servant would be excellent; better, really, than an educated German. Just now the man’s mind is in terrible confusion. He is back in another country somewhere, but he is holding his own, and if he can get over the shock which must come when he links his past with his present, I believe we need have no fear for his reason; but it will be a pretty ticklish moment.”

The doctor looked down into Billie’s eager, earnest face, and his eyes were filled with admiration.

“Oh, doctor,” she exclaimed, “you are so wonderful. Next to Papa, the most wonderful man I have ever met. Richard and I——”

“What!” interrupted the doctor, smiling, “do you mean to say that that young whipper snapper, with his Gypsy notions and his clever tongue, has already photographed himself on your mind? I should never have bathed and bound his wounds if I had guessed it.”

“You know you would,” laughed Billie, blushing a little. “But he’s only a comrade.”

The doctor looked into her eyes again.

“That’s what they all should be, Miss Billie,” he said. “Comrades. And if I were only fifteen years younger, I should be looking for just such a comrade as you.”

“But I am your comrade,” protested the young girl. “Just as much as Richard’s. I’m proud to be. It’s the greatest honor that’s ever been paid to me.”

“Oh, to be young again,” sighed the doctor with a humorous lift to his eyebrows. “Oh, to be young, like young Richard, there. But I must remember that I am a very busy middle-aged person with an extremely interesting patient to pull through. I trust he’ll thank me for the job.”

“Don’t you honestly believe he is some distinguished person?”

“I couldn’t say, little comrade, but I could guess that he’s no ordinary one.”

They had reached the cabin now. The others had come up, and they all stood outside talking in low voices. After a brief word with Alberdina, Dr. Hume conducted her into the little room where the Motor Maids and their friends had once found refuge. From the doorway, Billie could see the silver candlesticks on the mantel shelf. Mrs. Lupo had kept them brightly polished and they lent a strange charm and refinement to the bare apartment. Phoebe crept in and knelt outside her father’s door.

“Now, Alberdina,” said the doctor as a last caution, “you understand that you are not to speak unless the gentleman inside asks you a question in German. Answer him in three words if you can. Then come out quietly. If he calls, you may go back.”

Alberdina laid aside her comedy hat and followed the doctor into the sick room. The others gathered noiselessly outside the window and listened. There was a long silence. Then the man on the bed spoke in a low, weak voice. It was only a mumble of sounds to Billie and Richard, but Mr. Campbell understood German and listened intently.

Alberdina replied not in three words but in a long voluble speech.

They held their breath.

“Come out,” called the doctor softly.

The sick man had begun to speak again. He seemed to be giving orders.

At the door Phoebe was weeping softly. Her father, restored to himself, was a stranger who spoke in a foreign tongue. Billie was fairly shaking with excitement.

“Do you suppose he’s forgotten English?” she whispered to Richard, who made the most absurd reply that had nothing whatever to do with Phoebe’s father and lost memories.

“I think the doctor had better take you in hand,” said Billie.

“I have an incurable disease,” answered the young man, not in the least ashamed.

Mr. Campbell had joined the doctor and Alberdina at the other end of the house where their voices could not be heard in the sick room. The young surgeons were also in the group. When Billie and Richard came up, the German girl was saying:

“I cannot from the German English mag. He is a German already yet?”

“Of course,” answered the doctor impatiently, “but what did he ask you?”

Alberdina broke into German.

“No, no. In English.”

“He very sig yet ees——”

The doctor gave poor Alberdina a withering glance.

“I think I can tell you most of the conversation, Doctor,” put in Mr. Campbell. “The patient asked Alberdina if she were one of the maids at the palace. She answered at great length that she was laundress at Sunrise Camp. ‘This was not a palace,’ she explained, ‘but a hut.’

“‘I have been in an accident?’” the sick man asked, as Mr. Campbell translated it.

“When Alberdina acquiesced, he told her to call Franz or Karl.

“Seeing her shake her head, he said:

“‘The Baron von Metz is here?’

“‘No,’ answered Alberdina.

“‘None of the household?’”

Then he gave her orders to telegraph the Baron von Metz at an address in Dresden and sign it A. J. Mr. Campbell had failed to catch the telegram, although he distinctly heard the second telegram to a “Miss Phoebe Jones,” at an address in England. It said she was not to worry. He had been detained by illness. Twice he made the blundering maid repeat the telegram, and finally exhausted with the mental effort, dropped into unconsciousness.

Was it not strange and terrible to take up the thread of one’s life where it had been so ruthlessly snapped off some two decades ago?

Richard and Billie, seated on a rock out of hearing distance of the cabin, discussed the anomaly together.

“It’s like Rip Van Winkle,” Billie observed, “only worse because there have been so many inventions.”

“Yes, there are motor cars, for instance. They were only on trial then; and flying machines.”

“And hobble skirts,” added Billie with an inward laugh, remembering Nancy’s.

“It’s very interesting,” said Richard, “a good deal like missing the middle act of a drama.”

“Don’t you imagine that Phoebe’s father belonged to a noble family? Perhaps he was a younger son, and fell in love with a pretty English girl named Phoebe Jones. They eloped to America and hid themselves in the mountains, and the old Archduke or Prince or Baron who was the father perhaps gave it out that his son was insane. They always do that, you know.”

“Very romantic,” said Richard, “but why has he been speaking only English all these years?”

“Don’t ask me anything so scientific, please.”

“It would go hard with me,” pursued Richard, “if I got a blow on the head over my English-language bump, because I wouldn’t have any other to take its place.”

Having arranged the history of the sick man to their own satisfaction, and as a matter of fact, to the doctor’s and Mr. Campbell’s also, they returned to Sunrise Camp, leaving Alberdina and Phoebe behind them.

Poor Phoebe had watched Billie and Richard together from the doorstep of the cabin. Then she had folded her hands with a gesture of resignation and closed her eyes. Something had hurt her. She still felt the pain and not all her faith nor prayers could ease it.

That night the campers gathered around the fire and discussed the mystery of the “Prince in Exile,” as they had named Phoebe’s father. They told stories of similar cases, of men with double identities who had been lost for years, of men who had made new lives for themselves and even earned fortunes.

“I knew he was a prince the first time I saw him,” Mary exclaimed.

“And now Phoebe will be a princess and perhaps very rich,” observed Elinor.

“Think of stepping from a cabin to a palace,” went on Amy Swinnerton. “From being a barefooted girl selling blackberries on the mountain to being a noble lady with a retinue of servants.”

And so they all talked and discussed and enjoyed themselves immensely until a motor horn interrupted them. A car had evidently stopped in front and someone now hurried over to the group around the fire.

“Well, children,” called Dr. Hume, “I daresay you’ll be interested in the news I am bringing you.”

“Wasn’t I right?” cried Billie.

“He was a prince?”

“Or a duke, perhaps?”

“Even a baron is pretty good.”

There was a long pause.

“You are wonderful guessers,” said the doctor. “He lived in a palace.”

“I knew it,” cried Mary.

“Would it disappoint you very much if I were to tell you that the gentleman without a memory who lived in a palace was not a prince, nor a duke, nor a baron, but at one time a clergyman?”

“Oh!” they exclaimed in varying tones of surprise and disappointment.

“Then how the palace?” asked Maggie Hook.

“The Rev. Archibald Jones, a highly educated English gentleman of no means to speak of, was tutor in a noble family in Germany.”

“But his wife? She was a princess?” cried Mary, almost weeping.

“Every woman is a princess, my dear young lady,” replied the gallant doctor.

“But a real one, Doctor? One who lived in a palace?”

“She lived in the palace, yes. She was attached to the household as English governess. The tutor and the governess met, as well they might even in a grand castle, and being in the same boat as regards teaching and birth, they fell in love. The lady was very beautiful, I understand.”

“And then?” demanded the chorus.

“Then they came to America where the field was larger even than in a palace with the noblesse. The young wife fell sick and the young husband, having saved a bit of money, brought her up into the mountains. The night Phoebe was born he tried to take a short cut down the mountainside to get a doctor who was stopping at a hotel now in ruins——”

Percy bowed his head.

“I recognize the spot,” he said.

“And the young tutor husband not of the nobility fell and hit his head against a rock. He was brought back insensible by an old Indian grandfather of Mrs. Lupo. The beautiful young wife only lived a few days, and when the father was better and the baby stronger the Indian took them and their belongings across the valley to Indian Head, where they have lived ever since.”

“Poor things,” exclaimed Miss Campbell. “What a pitiful, sad story!”

“And the wife’s name was Phoebe Jones?” asked Billie.

“Wrong again,” replied the doctor. “Would you have a Jones marry a Jones?”

“Then who, pray, was Miss Phoebe Jones?”

“Aunt of the Rev. Archibald. For some reason he remembered the name and I suppose gave it to the child.”

“Then who was the German gentleman who recognized Phoebe?”

“Now you are getting down to real romance,” replied the doctor.

“He was the young noble for whom the Rev. Archibald acted as tutor.” Here the doctor spoke slowly and impressively. “He loved the English governess and when she married the poor tutor, his noble heart was broken and never has been mended.”

“And he never married another?” piped up Mary’s small voice.

“Oh yes, my dear. The nobility always marries. Singleness is against the rules. He married and has a family of six.”

“And is that the end of the story?” asked Billie.

“No, there is a sequel. It seems that when the Rev. and Mrs. Archibald Jones disappeared from the stage of life without explanation only one person, after a decade or more, still clung to the belief that they were not dead. None other than Miss Phoebe Jones herself, spinster, living in Surrey, England. She recently died leaving her property to her nephew, his wife or possible heirs. It seems that the gentlemen who just now dropped me at your door——”

“The disappointed lover?”

“Yes. The broken-hearted noble with a wife and six children, knew about this will because the lawyers in trying to trace Mr. Jones and his wife had got into communication with him.”

“And so they won’t be poor,” said Nancy. “I’m glad of that. Phoebe looked beautiful in good clothes.”

Everybody laughed, and then the doctor remarked:

“And so the story has a plain ending, after all. Phoebe is not a princess and you are all disappointed.”

“No, no, no,” they protested, but the doctor knew better.

CHAPTER XXI.

COMRADES OF THE ROAD.

Already the scarlet sumac lit the road with its flaming torch, and here and there on the mountainside a flash of scarlet like a redbird’s wing appeared among the masses of foliage. Autumn was at hand, the autumn of the Adirondacks, when the evening air is nipped with the hint of frosts to come and the sky is a deeper blue than ever it is at mid-summer.

Summer comrades of the road may not linger in the hills at this enchanting season. There is work to be done in the valleys where the busy people live. In a few days now the shutters of log cabin camps will be closed and traveling vans will be sent to winter quarters.

The boys and girls who have lingered around the campfire, singing songs and telling stories under the great harvest moon, all comrades of the road, must turn their thoughts to soberer things than roasting apples and school day reminiscences. The grown people, too, stretched out in their steamer chairs, have been idling away the hours. Vaguely, as in a mist, a great surgeon recalls that there is a hospital somewhere he has been neglecting for weeks. An engineer is thinking of his tunnel only just started through the heart of a mountain. A little old spinster, fair and fresh as a rose, recalls with a start that for many weeks she has been sleeping under the stars and eating strange food on a bare deal table; and down in the valley her beautiful old home, filled with memories of her girlhood, is waiting to shelter her.

Near the spinster sits a tall man with a delicate, nervous face. He sits with folded arms, his eyes fixed on the back wall of mountains across the valley. He is thinking not of the future of the little home in Surrey that awaits him, but of the twenty black years behind him, as blank and empty as the years of a prisoner spent in solitary confinement. Sometimes, with a curious, startled gaze, he turns his eyes toward his daughter, seated in the circle with the young people.

While we have been taking this leisurely view of our friends, Alberdina has approached, smiling broadly over a great tray of cakes and ginger ale. Mrs. Lupo is hovering in the background.

“It was that skirt of the young lady’s that brought me really back to my senses,” Mrs. Lupo had confessed to Miss Campbell. “I thought the young lady had sunk in the mire. The misery that come to me then made me see things different; that and the prayer you taught me. Lupo, he’s workin’ now in the valley and when the camp is broke up, I guess we’ll forgive and forgit.”

Miss Campbell, glancing at Mrs. Lupo now in the background, wondered if that awful memory of the carving knife was not a dream.

“Papa,” Billie called from her place near the campfire, “you mustn’t forget to send pounds and pounds of really good coffee to old Granny, the herb gatherer, enough to last her all winter.”

“I’ll make a note of it, daughter. Are there any other old parties you wish to pension off with coffee or tea this winter?”

“No, papa. But I’d like to keep old Granny in coffee for the rest of her life because she loves it so.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” called Percy, rising and flourishing an apple on the end of a long stick, “I made a discovery this morning through a letter from a friend, and I’ve been saving it until this moment to spring it on the Motor Maids and company.”

“About whom is this discovery?” asked Richard uneasily, raising his eyebrows and blinking his humorous eyes.

“It’s about two impostors who travel around in a little wooden house on wheels and live like Gypsies——”

“Oh, dear,” cried Maggie, “now what have you been finding out about us, pray?”

“I know,” said Richard. “You’ve found that we are really Gypsies and only pretending to be amateurs.”

“Nothing of the sort. I’ve discovered that you have been traveling under a disguise——”

“My name is certainly ‘Hook,’” put in Richard.

“And mine is Maggie,” piped his sister.

“Maybe so,” went on Percy. “That’s not the disguise. You’ve been wearing the cloak of poverty, when you are really as rich as cream, the pair of you, with an old grandfather in England who has a title and castles and much pleasing property; and every now and then the old grandpapa sends for you and you have to give up Gypsying and fly.”

“And he’s your boss who’s always interfering with your vacations?” interrupted Billie.

“And you just pretend to be poor for the novelty of the experience?” asked Nancy. “I wish I could pretend to be rich in the same way.”

“But we are Gypsies at heart,” put in Maggie, “and I do love to scrub and cook. Grandpapa’s is so dull.”

“And where does Grandpapa think you are now? Not in a traveling van, I’ll wager,” said Miss Campbell.

Maggie laughed.

“We are supposed to be visiting Aunt Lucretia. She’s our American aunt, Papa’s sister, who brought us up, before Grandpapa decided to recognize us. You see Mamma would marry Papa, who was poor then, and came from Maine. He looked just like Richard and I don’t blame her. Grandpapa lets us come every summer to visit Aunt Lucretia now.”

“And where does Aunt Lucretia think you are?”

“Why, visiting Amy Swinnerton.”

Who could keep from laughing over this brother and sister who loved the life on the road and the campfire?

“Thank fortune, I’m not in line for the title,” Richard whispered to Billie under cover of the conversation of the others, “and Grandpapa or no Grandpapa, I shall buy that farm,—do you guess where?”

“I can’t imagine,” answered Billie.

“In West Haven. I’ve never seen it, but that is the place you like best, isn’t it?”

“I think I like the traveling van best,” answered Billie irrelevantly,—“that is, next to the ‘Comet,’” she added with a sudden feeling of loyalty toward the faithful motor car.

“The traveling van would be a part of it and the ‘Comet,’ too, for that matter.”

Then he calmly slipped his hand over hers under the folds of her scarlet cape.

“Shall we be comrades of the road?” he whispered.

“Some day, perhaps,” Billie answered, not taking her hand away, but glancing shyly at her father, who was watching her face in the fire light.

Then she smiled at Richard. After all, she was past eighteen and Richard,—well, Richard was the most delightful person she had ever met in all her life.

Let us take leave of our young people before they go back to the valleys where work is waiting for them. Brown and strong and happy, they sit in a circle talking and laughing, as boys and girls will, under the light of the harvest moon.

While they are still comrades of the road, we will bid them good-night.

Good-night, little Mary, calm and sweet, watching the stars twinkling through the tree tops. Good-night to you, Nancy, dimpling and smiling, while Percy whispers in your ear; and Elinor, too, talking quietly and happily to Ben. And now a last good-night to Billie, best of comrades, kindest and truest of friends.

THE END

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