“I told Mother we girls would take every other day at the housekeeping,” said Mary Louise as she backed the car out of the garage and onto the road behind the cottages. “That will give her a chance to get some rest from cooking—some vacation. You don’t mind, do you, Jane?”
“Course I don’t mind!” replied her chum. “Maybe the family will, though!”
“Don’t you believe it! We’re swell cooks, if I do say it myself.”
She drove the car along past the backs of the cottages, turning at the road beyond Ditmars in the direction of the little village of Four Corners—a place not much bigger than its name implied. It was a still, hot day; all the vegetation looked parched and dried, and the road was thick with dust.
“I wish it would rain,” remarked Mary Louise. “If we should have another fire, it might spread so that it would wipe out all of Shady Nook.”
“Oh, let’s forget fires for a while,” urged Jane. “You’re getting positively morbid on the subject!... Is this the grocery?” she asked as her companion stopped in front of a big wooden house. “It looks more like a dry-goods store to me. All those aprons and overalls hanging around.”
“It’s a country store,” explained the other girl. “Wait till you see the inside! They have everything—even shoes. And the storekeeper looks over his glasses just the way they always do in plays.”
The girls jumped out of the car and ran inside. Jane found the place just as Mary Louise had described it: a typical country store of the old-fashioned variety.
“Hello, Mr. Eberhardt! How are you this summer?” asked Mary Louise.
“Fine, Miss Gay—fine. You’re lookin’ well, too. But I hear you had some excitement over to Shady Nook. A bad fire, they tell me. Can you figure out how it happened?”