But Bessie only smiled in answer. She could swim already, but she said nothing about it, since no one asked her, seeming to take it for granted that, like Zara, she was unused to the water. Moreover, while she could swim well enough, she was afraid that she would look clumsy and awkward in comparison to the Camp Fire Girls. Most of them had changed their clothes now, before dinner.
Some wore short skirts and white blouses; one or two were in a costume that Bessie recognized at once as that of Indian maidens, from the pictures she had seen in the books she had managed to get at the Hoover farmhouse. She noticed, too, that many of them now wore strings of beads, and that all wore rings. Two or three of the girls, too, wore bracelets, strangely marked, and all had curious badges on their right sleeves.
"We've got to wash the dishes, now," said Minnehaha, who bore out her name by laughing and smiling most of the time. She had already told Zara that her real name was Margery Burton. "You sit down and rest, and when we've done, we'll talk to you and tell you more about the Camp Fire Girls and all the things we do."
"No, indeed," said Bessie, laughing back. "That won't do at all. You cooked our meal; now we'll certainly help to clean up. That's something I can do, and I'm going to help."
Zara, too, insisted on doing her share, and the time passed quickly as the girls worked. Then, when the things were cleaned and put away, and some preparations had been made for the evening meal, Zara begged to have her first swimming lesson at once.
"No, we'll have to wait a little while for that," said Minnehaha. "We must wait until Wanaka comes back. She's our Guardian, you see, and it's a rule that we mustn't go into the water unless she's here, no matter how well we swim, unless, of course, we have to, to help someone who is drowning. And it's too soon after dinner, too. It's bad for you to go into the water less than two hours after a meal. We're always careful about that, because we have to be healthy. That's one of the chief reasons we have the Camp Fire."
"Tell us about it," begged Zara, sitting down.
"You see this ring?" said Minnehaha, proudly.
She pointed to her ring, a silver band with an emblem,—seven fagots.
"We get a ring like that when we join," she explained. "That's the Wood-Gatherer's ring, and the National Council gives it to us. Those seven fagots each stand for one of the seven points of the law of the fire."