“It’s sand,” explained Ruth. “I thought it was spray from the river. But a good deal of it is sand—just like a sand-storm in the desert.”
“Well!” grumbled Agnes, “I hope it’s killing a lot of those sandfleas that bother us so. I don’t see how they can live and be blown about this way.”
Ruth tackled the first post at the corner and beat it down as hard as she could, Agnes holding the lantern so that the older girl could see where to strike.
They went from one peg to the next, taking each in rotation. And when they reached the one that had pulled out entirely, Ruth drove that into the ground just as far as it would go.
Strangely enough, throughout all this business, Tess and Dot did not awake. Ruth went clear around the tent, driving the stakes. The wind howled; the sand and spray blew; and the voices of the Night and of the Storm seemed fairly to yell at them. Still the smaller Corner House girls slept through it all. Ruth and Agnes crept back into the tent and laced the flaps down in safety.
A little later, before either of them fell asleep again, they heard shouting and confusion at a distance. In the morning they learned that two of the tents in the Enterprise Camp had blown down.
The shore was strewn with wreckage, too, when daybreak came; but the wind seemed to have blown itself out. Many small craft had come ashore, and some were damaged. It was not often that the summer visitors at Pleasant Cove saw any such gale as this had been.
Everything was all right with the Corner House girls, and Ruth decided they would stick to the tent, in spite of the fact that some of the camping families were frightened away from the tent colonies by this disgraceful exhibition of Mr. Wind!
The smaller Kenways, as well as the bigger girls, were enjoying the out-of-door life immensely. They were already as brown as berries. They ran all day, bare-headed and bare-legged, on the sands. It was plain to be seen that the change from Milton to Pleasant Cove was doing all the Corner House girls a world of good.
And during the extremely pleasant days that immediately followed the night of the big wind, many new colonists came to the tents. Two big tents were erected in the Willowbend Camp, for Joe Eldred and his friends—and that included, of course, Neale O’Neil. But the Milton boys would not arrive until the next week.