GETTING USED TO IT
The boys were in haste to get to their own camping site, which was across from the island on the southern shore of Lake Dunkirk. So they hurried the baggage belonging to Mrs. Morse and the girls to the cabin, and then prepared to embark again with their own boats.
Chet saw to it that everything appeared to be in good shape about the camp on the island knoll, and he drew up the three canoes belonging to the girls, himself.
“Now, if you girls get into trouble to-night, toot this thing,” and Chet produced an automobile horn which he had brought along for the purpose. “If you need us by day, Laura knows how to wig-wag with those flags. I taught her.”
“For pity’s sake, Chet!” exclaimed Jess, with some asperity. “Do you suppose we are going to need you boys every hour, or so?”
“I hope not!” added Lil Pendleton. “Surely we ought to be able to get along in camp just as well as you boys.” 93
“Hear! hear!” cried Bobby. “How are you going to summon us if you need help, my dear little boys? Sha’n’t we give you each a penny whistle so you can call us?”
Chet only laughed. Lance said: “We’ve been camping before; most of you girls haven’t. Of course you will get into trouble forty times to our once.”
“Well! I like that,” sniffed Jess, who did not like it at all. “If girls aren’t just as well able to take care of themselves, as boys, I’d like to know why.”
“Jess is getting to be a regular suffragette,” chuckled Dora Lockwood.
“Reminds me of the little girl whose mother was chasing the hens out of the garden,” said Laura, with her low laugh. “The hen-chaser declared that ‘You can’t teach a hen anything, to save your life,’ when the little girl spoke up for her sex, and said: ‘Well! I think they know quite as much as the roosters!’”
“And that’s all right,” teased Lance, as the boys got under way. “I bet this bunch of hens on Acorn Island will holler for us roosters before we set the distress signal for them.”
“Get out, you horrid thing!” cried Bobby. “Calling us hens. We’re only pullets, at best.”
A lantern had been lit in each tent, for the shadows 94 were thickening under the oak trees on the knoll. Lizzie Bean at once began to overhaul the cooking utensils and supplies in the cook-tent.
This tent was divided into two parts. Lizzie’s own cot was in the rear apartment. There was a long table, roughly built but serviceable, in the front with the stove and chest of drawers. There were folding campstools in plenty.
In the cabin was a comfortable straw mattress for Mrs. Morse in the wide bunk, a small table on which her typewriter case already stood, a rocker made in rustic fashion, a painted dressing case with mirror of good size, and shelves for books.
A small fire was burning on the hearth, for the cabin was apt to be damp after its many months of abandonment. It had been swept and garnished with boughs of sweet-smelling spruce and pine.
The girls’ sleeping tent housed seven cots, all supplied with unbleached cotton sheets and heavy double blankets. Lil Pendleton looked about it when she brought in her bag, and shivered.
“Goodness!” she said. “I’m glad we’re ’way out here in the wilderness if we’re going to dress and undress in this thing. Why! I shall feel just as much exposed as though the sides were made of window-glass.”
“What nonsense!” sniffed Bobby, who had 95 been camping with her father and had spent many a night in a tent. “You’re too particular, Lil.”
“Who asked you to put in your oar?” demanded Miss Pendleton, crossly. “I have a right to my opinion, I hope.”
“I should hope it was nobody else’s opinion,” returned Miss Bobby, quick to pick up the gauntlet.
“Hush, girls!” advised Mother Wit. “Let us not be quarrelsome. We don’t want Mrs. Morse to think we are female savages right at the start.”
Lil sniffed; but good-tempered Bobby said, quickly: “You’re right, Laura. I beg the company’s pardon—and Lil’s particularly. We must be ‘little birds who in their nest agree.’”
“You’re a fine bird, Bobby,” laughed Dora. “Come on! I hear the dishes rattling. Let’s see what Lizzie has tossed up for supper.”
“I wonder if she managed to boil the water without burning it?” giggled Jess. “She’s the funniest girl!”
“I should think you and Laura could have found a maid who wasn’t quite such a gawk,” muttered Lil, unpleasantly.
“Hush!” admonished Mother Wit. “Don’t let her hear you.”
“Why not?” snapped Lil.
“You will hurt her feelings.” 96
“Pooh! she’s paid for it––”
“Not for having her feelings hurt,” declared Laura, sternly. “And I won’t have it. She’s odd; but she is quite as quick of hearing as the next person.”
“Aw, you’re too particular, Laura,” drawled Lil. But she stood a little in awe of Mother Wit.
They joined Mrs. Morse and filed into the cook-tent. Lizzie’s flushed face appeared behind the steaming biscuits and a big platter of ham and eggs. They did not really know how hungry they were until they sat down to these viands.
Lizzie stood with arms akimbo and waited for the verdict upon the cooking.
“Most excellent, Lizzie,” Mrs. Morse said, kindly.
“Suits ye, does it?” asked the strange girl. “I flatter myself them biscuits air light enough to sleep on.”
“They are a good deal more feathery than our ‘downy couches’ here in camp, I warrant, Lizzie,” laughed Laura.
“Glad ye like ’em. There’s plenty of biscuits—don’t be bashful.”
Jess giggled when she saw Lil’s face. “How rude!” muttered Miss Pendleton. “I don’t see what you and Mother Wit were thinking about when you hired that girl.” 97
“Thinking of you, Lily—thinking of you,” declared Jess. “She will willingly do your share of the dish-washing.”
“Dish-washing? Fancy!” exclaimed Lil. “I’d like to see myself!”
“Well I wouldn’t,” put in the omnipresent Bobby. “Not if I had to eat after your manipulation of the dish-mop.”
“But we didn’t come to do anything like that,” wailed Lil.
“Just the same we have got to do a part of the camp work,” declared Mother Wit. “It all can’t be shoved off onto Lizzie.”
“Let us arrange about that right here and now,” suggested Mrs. Morse.
“Oh, Mrs. Morse!” cried Nell, eagerly. “First of all I vote that Mrs. Morse is not called upon to do a thing! She’s company as well as chaperon.”
“I will make my own bed,” said the lady, smiling. “You girls can take turns sweeping and dusting the cabin, if you like.”
“And making the beds and cleaning up our tent,” added Laura. “Two at a time—it won’t seem so hard if two work together.”
“A good idea,” agreed Mrs. Morse.
“But that leaves an odd girl,” suggested Jess.
“We’ll change about. The odd girl shall help 98 the cook. And one meal a day—either breakfast, dinner, or supper—we girls must cook, and Lizzie is going to have nothing to do with that meal.”
“Why! I can’t cook,” wailed Lil again.
“Good time for you to begin to learn, then,” Laura said, laughingly.
Some of the other girls looked disturbed at the prospect. “I can make fudge,” observed Nell, honestly, “but I never really tried anything else, except to make toast and tea for mother when she was ill and the maid was out.”
“Listen to that!” exclaimed the voice of Lizzie Bean, who had been listening frankly to the dialogue. “An’ I been doin’ plain cookin’ an’ heavy sweepin’ and hard scrubbin’ ever since I was knee-high to a toadstool!”
Bobby burst out laughing. “So have I, Lizzie!” she cried. “Only I have done it for Father Tom and my kid brothers and sisters when Mrs. Betsey was sick.”
Lily Pendleton turned up her nose—literally. “We’re going to have trouble with that girl,” she announced to Nellie. “She doesn’t know her place.”
But whatever Lizzie knew, or did not know, she did not shirk her share of the work. She stayed up after everybody else had retired and washed 99 every pot and pan and plate, and set her bread to rise for morning, and stirred up a big pitcher of flapjack flour to rise over night, peeled potatoes to fry, leaving them in cold water so they would not turn black, and set the long table fresh for breakfast.
When the earliest riser among the girls (who was Laura herself) peeped into the cooking tent at daybreak, the fire in the stove was already roaring, and Lizzie had gone down to the shore to wash her face and hands in the cold water. Laura ran down in her bathing suit.
“What do you think of this place, Lizzie?” she asked the solemn-faced girl.
“For the land’s sake, Miss!” drawled Lizzie Bean, “I never had no idea the woods was so lonesome—for a fac’.”
“No?”
“I sh’d say not! I went to bed and lay there an’ listened. The trees creaked, and the crickets twittered, and some bird had the nightmare an’ kep’ cryin’ like a baby––”
“I expect that was a screech-owl, Lizzie,” interrupted Laura. “They come out only at night.”
“Goodness to gracious! Do they come out every night?” demanded the girl.
“And them frogs?”
“They are tree-toads. Yes, they are here all summer, I guess.”
“Goodness to gracious! And folks like to live in the woods? Well!”
“Do you think you can stand it?” queried Laura, much amused, yet somewhat anxious, too.
“As long as I’m goin’ to get all that money every week it’ll take more than birds with the nightmare an’ a passel of frogs to drive me away. Now! when do you want breakfast, Miss?”
“Not until Mrs. Morse gets up. And none of the other girls are out yet,” said Laura.
But very soon the other girls began to appear. They had agreed to have a dip the first thing, and the girls who first got into the water squealed so because of the cold, that it routed out the lie-abeds.
Lily would not venture in. She sat on a stump, with a blanket wrapped around her, and shivered, and yawned, and refused to plunge in with the others.
“And it’s so early,” she complained. “I had no idea you’d all get up so early and make such a racket. Why, when there isn’t school, I never get up before nine o’clock.”
“Ah! how different your life is going to be on 101 Acorn Island,” said Bobby, frankly. “You’ll be a new girl by the time we go back home.”
“I don’t want to be a new girl,” grumbled Lily.
“Now, isn’t that just like her?” said Bobby, sotto voce. “She is perfectly satisfied with herself as she is. Humph! Lucky she is satisfied, I s’pose, for nobody else could be!”