“Then you sold the milk, I suppose?”
“Yes, ma’am, and we didn’t get no more for it from the creamery than the farmers who had just the ornery cows.”
“Well, I’ve got an idea already. I’m going back to Cranford as soon as we’ve had dinner to see if it will work out. I suppose that’s your son?”
She looked with a smile at the awkward, embarrassed boy who had so little to say for himself.
“Well, while the girls fix you up some shelters where you can sleep to-night, if you stay here, I’m going to ask you to let him drive me into Cranford. I want to do some telephoning—and I think I’ll have good news for you when I come back.”
Strangely enough, Mrs. Pratt made no objection to this plan. Once she had begun to yield to the charm of Eleanor’s manner, and to believe that the Camp Fire Girls meant really to help and were not merely stopping out of idle curiosity, she recovered her natural manner, which turned out to be sweet and cheerful enough, and she also began to look on things with brighter eyes.
“Makes no difference whether you have good news or not, my dear,” she said to Eleanor. “You’ve done us a sight of good already. Waked me up an’ made me see that it’s wrong to sit down and cry when it’s a time to be up an’ doin’.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t have stayed in the dumps very long,” said Eleanor, cheerfully. “Perhaps we got you started a little bit sooner, but I can see that you’re not the sort to stay discouraged very long.”
Then, while a few of the girls, with the aid of the Pratt children, washed dishes and cleared up after the meal, Eleanor took aside Margery and some of the stronger girls, like Bessie and Dolly, to show them what she wanted done while she was away.
“There’s plenty of wood around here,” she said. “A whole lot of the boards are only a little bit scorched, and some of them really aren’t burned at all. Now, if you take those and lay them against the side of that steep bank there, near where the big barn stood, you’ll have one side of a shelter. Then take saplings, and put them up about seven feet away from your boards.”