“I can’t wait until the other boys arrive to get started,” he answered. “I’m going to start preparing the logs and lay the floor. Won’t this be ideal?”
In the meantime, Marjorie began her secretarial duties by sorting mail and answering as many of the letters as she could, while Penny went into the village to shop in order to stock up on staples and to make arrangements for her weekly orders.
One afternoon Jimmy, Phil and Mal decided to have a look at the long old shed in the back yard which they thought might be fixed up to house the cars of their summer guests. The old shed had been there all the time, of course, but somehow they had kept putting off the time when they would examine it. There had been so many things to do when they first came, they had not even opened all the rooms in the house until they had decided to turn it into a summer hotel.
Now the guest rooms must be cleaned and aired. Penny and Marjorie were busy from morning to night helping Theresa and Ann Mary dust and make beds.
“This is so boring,” Marjorie complained. “The only room I’m interested in is the old storage room, Penny. When are we ever going to go through those old trunks?”
“We’ve had a look at the contents of one of them,” Penny pointed out patiently. “And we found that it contained nothing but some very old-fashioned clothes and a few worthless, though pretty trinkets. Wait till we have more time, honey. Then you may rummage around in there to your heart’s content.”
“I can’t understand your lack of curiosity,” Marjorie moaned. “I can’t sleep nights thinking about what might be in the trunk we didn’t open.”
Penny laughed. “I guess we’ve had too much indoor work for one day. Let’s join the boys down at the shed.”
“Goody, goody,” Marjorie cried, flinging down her dust cloth. “There’s bound to be something more exciting than cobwebs out there.”
At last they were hurrying down the concrete walk, past the Donahues’ small cabin behind the Lodge. They caught up with Mal and the boys on the old graveled drive, overgrown with weeds. This drive led among bushes and trees and looked like an old horse trail, but it was wide enough for a car to travel over it with care.