They took Liz to the cabin, and left her there after the storm was over and the six Central High girls went to their own tent. But although Laura did not say much about it, she was as dissatisfied as the dog seemed to be.
In the morning she was up earlier than anybody else in the camp. The grass and brush was 147 drenched with the rain. There were puddles here and there. The sun was not yet up and it would take several hours of his best work to dry up the wet places.
Laura had not won her nickname of “Mother Wit” for nothing. She had inventiveness; likewise she had a sane and sensible way of looking at almost any mysterious happening. She did not get scared as Nellie did, or ignore a surprising thing, as Jess did.
Now she was dissatisfied with the outcome of Liz Bean’s “conniption,” as Bobby had termed it the evening before. The maid-of-all-work had shown no fear of thunder and lightning when the tempest began and the other girls were frightened.
Then, why should she wait until the storm was nearly over before showing all the marks of extreme terror? And, in addition, Liz seemed to be fairly speechless about the matter, whereas she was naturally an extremely garrulous person.
“Why did the Barnacle bark so?” demanded Laura, when she stood, shivering, in the gray light of dawn before the cook-tent. “Not just for the fun of hearing his own voice, I am sure.”
The ground before the cook-tent was soft, and trampled by the girls’ own feet. Laura went carefully around to the rear, stepping on firm ground so as to leave no marks. 148
There was a rear opening to the cook-tent—out of the part Liz had been sleeping in. But these flaps were laced down.
However, there were marks in the soft ground right here—footmarks that could not be mistaken. They were prints of a man’s boot—no girl in the crowd wore such footgear as those that made these marks!
The boot-prints led right from the laced flaps of the tent toward the woods. Laura could see fully a dozen of the marks, all headed that way. The man had come from the inside of the tent, for there were no footprints showing an approach to the tent from this end.