“I only hope ours looks half as well.”
“Well, this morning at sunrise there were just two tents standing. Everything else had been burnt. And I was doing my best to get the police or someone from Bay City to rescue two of my girls who were prisoners on a yacht out there in the cove!”
Mary Turner appealed whimsically to Charlie Jamieson.
“Does she mean it, Charlie?” she begged. “Or is she just trying to string me?”
“I’m afraid she means it, and I happen to know it’s all true, Mary,” said Charlie, enjoying her bewilderment. “But it’s a long story. Perhaps you’d better let it keep until you have put things to rights.”
“We’ll help in doing that,” said Eleanor. “Dolly, run over and get the other girls, won’t you? Then we’ll all turn in and lend a hand, and it will all be done in no time at all.”
“Indeed you won’t!” said Marcia. “We’re going to do everything ourselves, just to show that we can.”
“There isn’t much to do,” said Mary Turner, with a laugh. “So you needn’t act as if that were something to be proud of, Marcia. You see, I thought it was better to take things easily at the start, Eleanor. They wanted to come here with all the tents and things and set up the camp by themselves, but I decided it was better to have the harder work done by men who knew their business.”
“You were quite right, too,” agreed Eleanor. “That’s the way I arranged things for our own camp the day we came. To-day we did do the work ourselves, but there was a reason for the girls were so excited and nervous about the fire that I thought it was better to give them a chance to work off their excitement that way.”
“I’m dying to hear all about the fire and what has happened here,” said Mary. “But I suppose we’d better get everything put to rights first.”