“Let me take Gentilla,” said she, when she had heard the story. “I’ll leave her at the camp. She is too little to understand, but Susan has had quite a fright. They weren’t gone from home an hour, though,” she added, “but I suppose it seemed long to them.”
Of course it did. Susan could never be made to believe that she and Gentilla had not been imprisoned in the schoolhouse for hours and hours, perhaps half a day.
When she reached home, she enjoyed telling the story over and over. Grandmother was sympathetic, and gave Susan a lecture upon going into strange places and shutting the door behind her. Grandfather was concerned with the fact that the door was open at all, and wanted to know who had been tampering with town property.
Phil was the most satisfactory audience of all, for he bitterly regretted having missed the adventure, and listened again and again to Susan’s account of it with undiminished interest. She was able to brag and boast to him as she could to no one else, and before they separated for the night neither one was quite sure whether or not real bears and Indians had come out of the woods and been driven away by Susan single-handed.
“We’ll play about it,” said Phil, rising slowly from the steps as he heard his mother for the third time call him to come home. “We’ll take turns being bears and Indians. We can play in my woodshed and we’ll play it the first thing—”
“Phil!” came his father’s voice.
Phil skipped down the path toward home with the speed of a grasshopper.
“To-morrow!” he called back as he hopped over the stone wall.
Something so exciting was to happen “to-morrow” that, for the time being, this adventure was to be cast in the shade. But Susan went to bed that night feeling quite a heroine, and knowing there was no one in the world Phil envied so much as herself.