“Yes, Tommy. You wish excitement. Suppose you run down and jump into the creek at the bottom of the hill,” called Harriet Burrell, raising a flushed face from the fire over which she was cooking their supper. “Run down and jump in. If the water is deep, you might pretend you are drowning; then Margery will rush to your rescue and save you. Drowning is exciting enough. I know, for I was nearly drowned once.”
“I fear a little trout stream at the foot of a hill would not prove very exciting to a girl who has been lost at sea for hours on a dark night,” observed the guardian. “You will have to think of something else, Harriet. Are you, too, suffering from inactivity?”
“Not at all. Miss Elting,” answered Harriet brightly. “I came out here with you for the sake of the outing, for the fresh air and the birds and the odors of——”
“Burned stumps,” finished Margery. “The whole place smells like a country smoke-house, where the farmer smokes his hams for the winter. Ugh!”
“As far as I am concerned,” resumed Harriet Burrell, “I am not looking for excitement. I am enjoying myself thoroughly. What is more, were I looking for the unusual, I do not think it would be necessary to look far for it.”
Tommy regarded her companion with narrowed eyes and wrinkled forehead.
“Do you know thomething that we don’t know, Harriet?”
“Perhaps I do and perhaps not,” was the evasive reply. “Why don’t you use your eyes and your ears and your nose, you and Margery?”
“My nose?” sniffed Buster. “That’s the trouble. This horrible, smoky, burned smell makes me ill. When I shut my eyes I think the side of the hill is on fire right this minute, instead of a year or so ago, or whenever it was.”
She gazed first down the slope to the valley below, where a slender stream was to be seen threading its way through the blackened landscape, then up the hill to where the trees had begun to grow again after the forest fire had seared their leaves and blackened their young trunks. The trees were making a noble fight for life, the green at their tops showing that some success had attended their unequal fight. Here and there blackened slabs of granite protruded from the uninviting landscape between the camp of the young women and the denser forest beyond, which the fire had failed to reach. Still farther on the campers saw the road that led back to their homes at Meadow-Brook.