“Girls,” whispered Margery, excitedly, “don’t stand there mooning—or sunning—for ever! I thought there was a gopher in this tent last night. I heard something scratching, and I thought it was the dog outside; but just look at these two holes almost under Laura’s pillow!”
“Let’s fill them up, cover them over—anything!” gasped Bell. “Laura will never sleep here another night if she sees them.”
“Nobody insured Laura against gophers,” said Polly. “She must take the fortunes of war.”
“I wouldn’t wake her,” said Margery. “She didn’t sleep well, and her face is flushed. Come, or we shall be late for breakfast.”
When they returned, fresh and rosy, from their bath, there was a stir of life in all the tents. Pancho had come from the stage-station with mail; an odour of breakfast issued from the kitchen, where Hop Yet was humming a fragment of Chinese song, that ran something like this,—not loud, but unearthly enough, as Bell used to say, to spoil almost any cooking:—
Dicky was abroad, radiant in a new suit of clothes, and Elsie pushed her golden head out between the curtains, and proclaimed herself strong enough for a wrestling-match with any boy or man about the camp.
But they found Laura sitting on the edge of her straw bed, directly over the concealed gopher-holes, a mirror in her hand and an expression of abject misery on her countenance.
“What’s the matter?” cried the girls in one breath. But they needed no answer, as she turned her face towards the light, for it was plainly a case of poison-oak—one eye almost closed, and the cheek scarlet and swollen.
“Where do you suppose you got it?” asked Bell.