What was to be done? The camp was in an uproar. Never had Patsy been out at night. It could not be allowed! The Twins went off in one direction, the boys in others. The girls scattered through woods and along the shore. Nancy knew his favorite haunts. But Patsy was not under the great beech tree where the squirrels chattered. He was not cushioned in the fragrant cedar-bushes over the wall in the country of the field-mice. The dell under the great pine told no news of him. Dick found no print of little feet in the mud of the brook, or in the sand of the bathing beach.
“Patsy! Patsy!” the woods rang with the anxious cry; the evening bird-chorus seemed to take it up with a mocking cadenza. For they had no cause to love Patsy the prowler.
Finally the Camp gave him up for the night. Nancy could hardly eat her supper she was so worried. “I shall never see my kitten again!” she wailed. “The foxes will get him. Or he will tumble into the sea and be drowned. Or he may stray off into the deep woods and become a wild cat!”
“You needn’t worry,” soothed her mother. “Patsy can take care of himself, like any native. I’m sure of that.”
“But he never was out alone all night,” lamented Nancy. “And this is Midsummer Eve, of all times! Who knows what may happen to him?”
“If Patsy is a fairy cat he will surely be safe,” Cicely comforted her cousin. This thought alone seemed to give Nancy a little hope. She forgot all about fern-seed and the charms she had intended to try on this magic night. After supper she and Cicely retired early to their tent in the Fairy Ring.
“What a fuss about a cat!” thought some of the campers. But most of them were as sorry as could be. For they loved the beautiful Patsy.
“I sha’n’t sleep all night,” Nancy declared.
“Nonsense!” Cicely retorted, being a practical common-sense person. “What good will that do Patsy?”
“He might come home in the night,” said Nancy dubiously.