COALS OF FIRE
There wasn't a single dissenting voice. Once they knew what was required, the girls rushed at once to their rooms to dress, and within ten minutes they were all assembled on the porch. Mingled with them were most of the girls from Miss Halsted's camp, thoroughly frightened and much distressed, and evidently entirely forgetful of the trouble that had existed as late as that evening between the two camps.
"Now, I'll tell you very quickly what the situation is," said Eleanor. "Don't mind asking questions, but make them short. It seems that some of the other girls over there were angry at Gladys when they got back there after Miss Brown came here to see me. And they told her she had been wrong in setting them against us."
"I knew she was the one who had done it!" Dolly whispered to Bessie.
"She and one other girl, Marcia Bates, were great chums, and they got angry. They said they wouldn't stay to be abused—isn't that right, Miss Brown?—and they decided to go for a walk in the woods back of the lake here."
"They've often done it before," said Miss Brown. "I thought it was all right and they would have gone, anyhow, even if I'd told them not to do it."
"When they started," Eleanor went on, "the moon was up, and there were plenty of stars, so that they should have been able to find their way back easily, guided by the moon or by the Big Bear—the Dipper. But it's clouded up since then and it's begun to rain. The wind has changed, too, and they might easily have lost themselves."
"Wouldn't they be on a regular trail?" asked Margery Burton.
"There aren't any regular trails back here," spoke up one of the girls from the Halsted camp. "There are just a lot of little paths that criss-cross back and forth, and keep on getting mixed up. It's hard enough to find your way in daylight."
"They have sent for guides from the big hotel at the head of the lake," said Eleanor. "They will get here as soon as they can, and a few men are out searching already. But I think the best thing for us to do is to organize a regular patrol. We'll beat up the mountain quickly, and pretty well together, in a long line, so that there won't be more than a hundred feet between any two of us. Then when we get to the ridge about half way up we'll start back, and cover the ground more carefully, if we haven't found them."