“Notice,” said one mother, “that there are keys and also bolts on all the doors. We feel much safer to have you in a house like this. With Grace here and the boys only a mile away, you ought to be safe. Jimmy said something about rigging up a telephone, and I hope they do it.”
“To think that our fathers, as well as the boys, drove some of the nails in this!” rather sentimentally said Leigh. “I’d like to stay right out here to-night!”
“You would find it rather inconvenient, Leigh,” laughed her mother. “We did not like to buy blankets and things and leave them here. There is time enough.”
So there was. After lingering looks all around, the girls were willing to leave in the boats for the other camp, where they were shown all over the little peninsula which the boys had chosen as a site. The boys’ “Shack,” as they called it was not as smooth as the girls’ and as yet unpainted, but it was well built, for they had had the assistance of carpenters on this as on the other. The main room was more open and the boys would sleep in bunks. “Got lots of windows, you see, and if it rains in, it can’t hurt our floor.”
“Lookout for what you call your port holes, Billy,” said Nan, to Billy, who had made this remark. “You want to keep the rain from your bunks at least.”
The picnic was held outdoors, on a slope which overlooked the lake. There were not so many Black Wizard parents as the girls had at first supposed, but most of the sisters had come, and the S. P.’s decided to invite some of them to visit their camp during the weeks there, if Grace were willing. It would be such a shame to keep all that fun to themselves. “We could have them all, in relays, couldn’t we, Jean?” asked Nan.
“We certainly could, and several are the right age to join the S. P.’s. Daddy just told me that he and Mr. Standish and Mr. Dudley and Mr. Baxter have bought up a lot of the land around this end of the lake, to make it safe and keep it wild for us, and to put up a few more little shacks if we want any more campers. I’m so stunned over it that I don’t know who I am!”
The girls, in spite of their dazed condition which they claimed, threw themselves into the boys’ celebration heartily and raved as girls are supposed to do over the location and plans. Nor did they forget to be sincere in their thanks for the Wizards’ part in the great surprise. “It was perfectly grand!” cried Jean, with a sandwich in one hand and a chicken wing in the other.