“Maybe it’s friend cow bringing back my shoe,” chuckled Cleo.
Came the uncertain notes of the bugle again:
“We can’t get ’em up—up—up!” it stuttered frantically, unable to return to the first notes to repeat the strain.
The girls shuffled into slippers and bathrobes, the regular drill costumes, and Grace ventured to poke her head outside the tent.
“The boys!” she exclaimed. “There they go scamping off. Just gave us our first call, to tease, of course. Well, I’m glad something got Benny up. I wouldn’t wonder if the bugler blew him out first.”
“They’re gone,” repeated Miss Mackin good-naturedly, “and I suppose they think it was a great joke. Grace, couldn’t we borrow that bugle?”
“I’ll see; I think Clee could blow it; she does so well with a bicycle pump.”
Presently the Bobbies were outside; having reverently raised their colors, they raced off to the “drill field,” a little place cleared of brush and safe from the eyes even of Benny’s bugle squad. There, in bathing suits, they went through the setting up exercises, warranted to do everything in the way of providing health and beauty for Girl Scouts.
From that they raced off to the little cove in the lake, took a dip, which they would loved to have prolonged into a swim had Mackey not blown that police whistle; then back to camp, then washed and dressed and jumped out to their benches set around the new boarded table.
Washing between the trees, where twin cedars or other saplings were used to hold the basin bench, proved novel to those little girls, used to the white enamelled bathrooms at home; but it was fun, even if Julia did spill “every drop of the pitcher full of fresh water” and have to borrow from Margaret; and although Grace found her soap so slippery, it would roll off into the pine needles and when rescued look like a new sort of fuzzy-wuzzy chestnut. Altogether it was fun and frolic, and “good for what ails you,” as Cleo commented, when Madaline took to preaching about the wrongs of civilization.