“What I’m going to start is my own business,” snapped back Orilla, throwing her vivid head up high and bracing her thin body to carry the heavy load of wood. She was wearing a khaki suit, like a uniform, but even this, strong as the material must have been, showed more than one jagged tear from violent contact with the young trees, which must have struggled bravely against her cruel little ax.
“Have it your own way,” drawled Gar, good-naturedly. “Here, Nancy and Rosa, let’s help you. Maybe you’re not quite so fussy.”
Willingly enough Nancy and Rosa relinquished the rough sticks, their hands smarting and red from trying to tote them down to the water’s edge.
No one said much, everyone seemed to realize that that was the only way to avoid trouble, for Orilla seemed ready to snap at every word, and the thing to do, obviously, was to get in their boats and sail away from Mushroom Islands, promptly.
“But it’s all too silly,” grumbled Dell aside to her own friends. “Why should we humor that girl?”
“We are almost ready to go now,” Rosa coaxed. “And it is so killing hard to chop down those trees. Just look at my poor hands!”
The poor hands represented a pitiable sight indeed, for being pudgy and fat, they were easily bruised and torn, so that their surface now looked like nothing other than bruises and scratches.
Unwillingly they went back once more to the little woodland, where the devastation had been perpetrated, and there they gathered up what remained of the felled trees.
“You must have worked hard, Rosa,” Gar commented. “Why don’t you go in the business? Put a sign out, ‘Woodlands Cleared While You Wait.’ I tell you, I tried once on our back woods and didn’t do anything like as well as this—”
To which Rosa did not risk a reply, for the quarrelsome Orilla was at her elbow directing the gleaning in no uncertain tones.