Ten miles is quite a drive with a heavy load, but it was still early when we pulled up alongside the porch of the big hotel. It made me sort of gasp when I looked at it. It was so big, and we were going to live in it all alone. Mr. Ames said there were thirty-nine bedrooms, and I expect there were about that many more rooms of other kinds. It was a funny-looking place, all bulges and bay-windows. It looked as if it had been built in a dozen pieces by folks whose ideas were a heap different. There were three stories to it, and almost every bedroom opened out on to a gallery or a porch or a balcony.
The whole of it stood on a point going out into the lake. Just off the end of the point was a tiny island with a little bridge across to it, and on that was another big building, where, Mr. Ames told us, there used to be a room for dancing, with bedrooms for the help up-stairs.
And that was all there was to it. As far as you could see there wasn’t another building. Mr. Ames said there wasn’t a cottage on the lake and that the nearest farm-house was four miles away. The woods came almost down to the shore of the lake, and all around it the hills bulged up a dozen times as high as any hill I ever saw in Michigan.
“Well,” says Mr. Ames, “how does she look to you?”
“F-fine,” says Mark; and we all agreed with him.
“Boats in the boat-house yonder,” says Mr. Ames. “Need paintin’ and calkin’, I expect. I put the fixin’s in the wagon, so if you want a boat you’ll have to tinker one up.”
“It’ll give us somethin’ to do,” says I, for I like to carpenter or meddle with machinery or mend up things. “That’ll be my job.”
“I’ll see you settled,” says Mr. Ames, “and then git back to town.”
He helped us carry our things inside. Some of the stuff we piled in the big, dusty, cobwebby office to be taken care of later. The bedding we took up-stairs after we had selected our rooms. We took two bedrooms. Plunk Smalley and I were in one and Mark was in the other with Binney, because Binney was smallest and would leave enough room in bed for all of Mark. The rooms were right over the office and were connected by a door. There was a door out of Mark’s room on to a big round porch right on top of the main porch of the hotel. They were dandy, pleasant rooms.
We put in most of the day cleaning up the rooms we wanted to use and fixing up the big range in the kitchen. We expected to cook most of our meals outdoors, but there would be some days when we couldn’t and that range would come in handy. It was quite a job, but when we were through our bedrooms and the office and the dining-room and the halls and kitchen were as clean as they ever had been. By eight o’clock we were plenty tired and ready for bed. Then we made a discovery that was going to be important before we got out of that country—mighty important. We didn’t have a candle or a lamp or a lantern!