“Five? What’s the matter, ’Mealy, can’t you count before breakfast? There are six of us.”
“I said five nice girls,” Amelia insisted. “He might have had one of several reasons for bringing you along.”
“Such as—” Nan had come into the room just in time to hear this last.
“Oh, he might have wanted to make the world a better place for the rest of us to live in by losing Laura, making her a target for the revolutionists, feeding her to the bulls, or just leaving her here as food for the fleas,” Amelia responded airily, and then she put her arm around Laura’s shoulder as though to show her that she didn’t mean a word of what she was saying.
“They do say,” Grace added as she joined the group, “that the fleas here are man-sized. That reporter told me last night that the reason they give us mosquito netting to put over us at night is that the fleas and the mosquitos wage a nightly battle as to who is going to carry off the Americans.”
“And you believed him?” Laura laughed.
“Well, not exactly,” Grace answered, “but I did carefully tuck my netting all round me last night.”
“He told me lots of things about Mexico, too,” Nan added, “and I don’t know which of them to believe. This is a queer country we are going into, full of so many strange legends, so many different kinds of people that any wild tale at all might be true.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Amelia agreed, “when Laura came into the room this morning. This guidebook here is full of all sorts of queer tales.”
“Such as—?” Nan queried.