These girls, all attending Denton Academy and living within the limits of that town, being the daughters of fairly well-to-do parents, had been able to enjoy many advantages as well as pleasures that poorer girls could not have; but none of them had chanced to experience the joys of a vacation in the woods.
During the preceding autumn they had become immensely interested in canoeing. Denton was situated upon the beautiful, winding Wintinooski, and the six members of the Go-Ahead Club had taken several Saturday cruises on the river. But never had they gone as far up the stream as Lake Honotonka.
That was a wide and beautiful sheet of water, thirty-five miles to the west of the town of Denton. Their boy friends had sometimes been allowed to go camping upon the shores of the lake; and their enthusiastic praise of the fun to be had under canvas had set Wynifred Mallory and her chums “just wild,” as Frank Cameron expressed it, to try it too.
Wyn was a girl of determination and physical as well as moral courage. If she made up her mind that a thing was right, and she wanted it, she usually got it.
When the girls first broached their desire to spend the summer at the big lake, and actually live under canvas, not one of their parents encouraged the idea. Because the “Busters,” a certain boys’ club of the girls’ friends, were going to the lake again for the long vacation, made no difference to the mothers and fathers–especially the mothers of Wyn and her chums of the Go-Ahead Club.
“It’s no use,” Bessie Lavine had reported, at their first meeting after the idea was born in Canoe Lodge, as the girls called their novel boathouse overhanging the bank of a quiet pool of the Wintinooski. “Even father won’t hear of it. Six girls going alone into the wilds—”
“But the Busters and Professor Skillings will be near our camp,” Frank had cried. “That’s what I told mother. But she couldn’t see it.”
Wyn had listened at that meeting to the opinions of all the other girls–and to their hopeless and disappointed complaints as well–and then she had taken the whole burden on her own shoulders.
“Don’t you say another word at home about it, girls–any of you,” she said. “Leave it to me. Our idea of living for the summer in the open is a good one. We’ll come back to school in the fall with ginger and health enough to keep us going like dynamos during the next school year.”
“But you can’t make my mother see that,” wailed Percy. “She only sees the snakes, and mosquitoes, and tramps, and big winds, and drowning, and I don’t know but she visualizes earthquake shocks and volcanoes!”