“The robber must have been a chauffeur, Elinor,” said Mary, “and a very good one, too, because he not only knew how to run the Comet but to repair it.”
“What are we going to do?” asked Elinor irrelevantly.
The two girls stood thinking. The robber had not taken their suitcases which they had been obliged to unstrap and open the night before; nor had he touched their camping outfit. Only the motor had been filched from them while they slept.
“I think the first thing to do is to make ourselves comfortable,” Mary remarked as her eyes fell on the alcohol stove. “Then we’ll get breakfast and Billie will be more cheerful. Perhaps someone will come along by then.”
As soon as Billie noticed her friends arranging their tumbled hair and washing their faces from the bottle of drinking water they always carried with them, she stopped crying at once.
“I’m awfully ashamed,” she exclaimed, as embarrassed as a boy caught in the act of shedding tears. “I’m afraid I’ve been a fearful cry-baby, as if weeping could do any good. Here, let’s wash them off and get busy,” she added, trying to smile while she poured some of the water over her pocket handkerchief and bathed her red eyes.
“Don’t you care, Billie,” cried Nancy. “I was glad to see you a little human like the rest of us. And it was a dreadful blow.”
Mary, with her unfailing desire to make everybody comfortable under the most trying circumstances, began presently to prepare coffee over the alcohol stove, and the fragrance of the bean did seem to comfort them somewhat in their trying position. When the most optimistic person in a party becomes the prey of wretchedness, the others usually pretend a cheerfulness they by no means feel. But now that Billie had regained her composure, Miss Campbell’s spirits began to sink.
She made a pitiful little toilet with a teacupful of drinking water and her eau de cologne. She arranged her snow white hair in its usual three-finger puffs, pinned on her lace jabot with great care and then surveyed the far-stretching country with an uneasy glance.
“If one robber is around another is sure to be,” she began. “Oh, dear, oh, dear! if we had only never started on this madman’s journey. Your father was a foolish fellow ever to have consented, Billie. What are we but five weak helpless women lost in the wilderness?”