"I guess Miss Clark can marry whom she pleases. She's very pretty."
"And her dad is rich too, so I don't believe we can solve our mystery that way," finished Cleo, and none of the three had quite decided just how she would like to end it when the five o'clock bell from the "Home" out Clinton way chimed a warning hour.
"So late!" exclaimed Grace, "and I have to practice before tea."
"And I have to help mother, for Martha's out," added Madaline.
"Let's run," suggested Cleo, and those who happened to see the trio scampering along never could have guessed they guarded so carefully the mystery of the woodsman's letter.
CHAPTER XV
VENTURE TROOP
The girls of Franklin Mills were finally organized and began work just as Molly Cosgrove had planned. Venture Troop immediately became a band of active, enthusiastic and withal capable girls, bringing to the scout movement a new vigor and promise, the result of individual self-discipline and the indispensible power of personal responsibility.
It must be understood here that girls employed in factories may lack social education, but they are always more self-reliant, more capable of handling emergencies and difficulties, and more surely skilled in precision and mechanical accuracy than are the girls of same age situated in the more fortunate walks of life, the difference in comparison being always in favor of normal conditions, and general education, because of the balance and mental ability acquired through our modern schools and progressive methods.
But the mill girl is never an inferior, and in the exact science of skill, she can easily and at any time outdistance the most brilliant high-school graduate, for skill is her education, and she handles, and fingers, and computes sometimes many thousands of delicate threads, or intricate bits of metal, the slightest fumble of which might throw out of gear a powerful machine. This is applied mathematics, is it not? She uses no pencil nor paper, but counts by allowing one line to overlap another at every five hundred cards, done in some fine print work, and when ten five hundred cards show that almost invisible margin, she knows she has pasted five thousand!