But Peggy's enthusiasm was contagious! Hilltop--Pat had never been there--was a very old farmhouse ten miles from the city, back in the hills near Camp Wichita, where Captain Ricky took her girls in the summer-time. It belonged to an old man and his wife who had been friends of Mrs. Lee's father. During the winter months they preferred to move into a more sheltered cottage nearer the barns. The house--a short walk from the lake on which the young people skated in the winter and canoed in the summer--had great square rooms and many of them, warmed by fire-places like caverns that consumed whole logs at a time. Often Mrs. Lee, who found real recreation in such little excursions with her young people--had taken the girls and boys there for week-end picnics!
"Mother says we may stay three whole days this time! We can skate and coast and have all kinds of fun! Garrett has a new bob that he made and he says he'll bet anything it can beat all the others."
"Do the boys go, too?" broke in Pat.
"Oh, yes, mother likes to have them go! They help a lot, you see, and she says it wouldn't be nearly as much fun if they weren't along. Jim Archer and Bob Slocum and Ted Scott and maybe Wynne Meade will go--and Garrett! They're sort of fun!" for Peggy read disappointment in Pat's face.
"I think boys are a nuisance!"
Sheila came promptly to the defense. "Perhaps--sometimes! But brothers are nice!"
Pat's experience had been limited to the bashful young brothers, miserable with too much scrubbing and stiff collars, who had occasionally visited the other girls at school.
Peggy thought it a decided waste of time to be bothering over such a point when there was so much to plan and do! So, with a conviction intended to end the discussion, she said: "Well, they carry the logs and the water and go out and open the house and I guess we'll find them mighty useful!"
And, indeed, Pat was to find one of the boys more than useful before the picnic was over!
A few hours' well-organized activity put everything in readiness for the house-party. Garrett Lee appointed himself chief of the commissary and flew tirelessly between his home and the grocery store until he had assembled enough cans of soup, bacon, weiners and other eatables peculiar to scouts' appetites to feed a regiment! Sheila and Mrs. Lee, after a brief consultation, added to the equipment many little necessities that Garrett in his masculine ignorance had overlooked. Two of the other girls collected the necessary kitchen utensils and a simple first-aid kit. Loaded down with all these and with extra blankets and the bobs, the boys and Mrs. Lee went on out to Hill-top a day in advance to open the house and prepare it for the others.