The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods; Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping

by Hildegard G. Frey

It was the end of the swimming period and Nyoda was thoroughly exhausted. She had been giving Gladys her first swimming lesson. It had taken a week to coax the girl into the water at all and nearly another one to get her in over her knees. She showed a perfectly unreasoning terror of the water. In vain did Sahwah dive off the tower and come up safe and sound; in vain did Hinpoha demonstrate how impossible it was to sink if you relaxed. Gladys doubled up in a tense knot and grew sick with fear, regardless of Nyoda's supporting hand. Finally Nyoda took her farther up the beach, away from the other girls. "Now, Gladys," she said reassuringly, "do you believe, down deep in your heart, that I would let go of you and let you drown?"

"No," said Gladys.

"Then," said Nyoda, "you come along and let me hold you up while you float." Gladys swallowed hard and stiffened out like a crowbar; then as a wavelet washed over her face she clutched wildly at Nyoda and put her feet on solid bottom. And so she went on. With inexhaustible patience Nyoda tried again and again to get her to lie out flat on the water, but was compelled to admit at the end of the hour that she had made no progress whatever, for Gladys had not made the slightest effort to control either her muscles or her fears. Nyoda sympathized with her great fear of the water, for she realized that it was a very real thing; but she was disappointed that she had not tried to conquer it.

Her first impression of Gladys bad been borne out by later events. She was vain and silly and shallow; she lacked the good sportsmanship which made the rest of the Winnebagos such successful campers. Of team work she had no idea at all. She wanted to order her day to suit herself, and put on an injured air if one of the girls declined to help her make a stencil when it was time to clean up the tent for inspection. Her corner of the tent was never in order, and as a result the Omegas were getting low marks in inspection, much to their disgust, for the rivalry between the two tents was very keen. Gladys had officially joined the Winnebagos, having come into the group at the last Council Fire as Kamama the Butterfly. The very name she chose was an illustration of her character. She had no higher ambition than to be a society butterfly. Nyoda sighed, but she knew Gladys was not to blame, for she had been brought up in an artificial atmosphere of fashion and snobbery.

Nyoda saw at once that in order to get the most good out of camp Gladys must be on the same basis as the other girls, so she defined their relative positions clearly at the beginning. Gladys's father owned the camp, so they were in a measure her guests; therefore, Nyoda would not let her pay a share of the provisions, thus evening things up. Gladys had now been in camp nearly two weeks, but she had not entered heart and soul into the life as the others had. And it was not because they had left her out of things—every girl had gone out of her way to make her feel at home. The fault was clearly Gladys's own.

Nyoda was thinking about all these things when her reverie was interrupted by the sound of an automobile horn, and in a few moments a man came down the path from the road. He approached her and introduced himself as Mr. Bailey. He was a private detective, he said, and was trying to locate a child that had strayed or been kidnapped from a family on the other end of the lake. He was visiting all the camps to see if any one had seen the child. Nyoda shook her head. "We haven't seen any child around here," she said. "Was it a girl or a boy?"

"A boy," answered Mr. Bailey, "three years old; at the time of his disappearance he wore a white sailor suit and hat."

"When did he disappear?" asked Nyoda.

"Last Thursday night."

"We were just coming home from a hiking trip then and had lost one of our own girls and weren't paying much attention to anything else," said Nyoda, "but I'll ask the girls who were in camp while we were looking for Migwan." She blew the bugle and called the girls together and when they had come she introduced Mr. Bailey and asked if they had seen anything of the little boy.