“Be sure you do,” said Mollie, wickedly. “Betty is simply pining away.”
Then the girls turned back to camp once more, feeling rather lonesome. They did wish the boys could have stayed.
“I guess we might as well pull down this thing,” said Betty, eyeing the tent which they had erected on the first night of their stay in the woods. “We have a real tent now and when the boys come up for the week-end, they’ll have that big one of Roy’s with them.”
So down came the tarpaulin, although the girls had almost as much difficulty in the dismantling of the improvised tent as they had had in the erecting of it.
At last it was down, however, and they set about making the camp as neat as possible. This done, they wandered through the woods, trying to find if there were any camp in the neighborhood which might harbor tramps.
They found none, and they finally returned to camp more mystified than before.
That night around the campfire—the prettiest one they had yet made—Betty cautioned them that the best thing they could do would be to put “this scare about tramps” out of their minds.
“There’s no use ruining our whole summer,” she said. “The chances are, even if there are tramps about, they don’t mean to annoy us. We haven’t any jewelry or valuables that they might hope to steal, and they will probably be only too glad to give us a wide berth.”
“That’s what I say,” agreed Mollie, heartily. “It’s up to us to say whether we’re going to let such a foolish thing ruin our fun. I, for one, don’t intend to.”
“Nor I,” said Amy, stoutly. “Now that I’m here I’m going to have the time of my life.”