When one of the camp scouts asked how Belle came to do the baking, it was learned that not only Belle had added various pursuits to her chosen line of work that summer, but that Frances also, had decided to win a badge in several studies mentioned in the handbook.
After the visit was ended, the camp scouts invited the house patrol to visit them, soon, and try a contest that they would plan. The house scouts then accompanied their visitors down the road that ran to the woodland, but stopped at the pathway that crossed it, to go to the gardens.
Mrs. James and her house scouts watched the camp girls pass out of sight in the woods, then they walked over to see how Natalie’s new potato plants which had been given her by Si Tompkins, were growing.
CHAPTER XIV
SORROWS OF A STOCK SCOUT
“I declare, Jimmy, if those pigs keep on eating like this I shall have to cut down my own rations to enable me to pay for theirs,” sighed Janet, one morning, as she came from the barn yard.
The girls who overheard this complaint laughed, and Natalie cheered her by saying: “But wait until Fall, then you’ll sell your stock and realize a fortune all at once.”
“Nat, the dreadful part of this stock raising is, that one becomes so attached to the dears that one can’t bear to part from them. Yet I cannot take them home with me, so there you are!”
Belle laughed: “Picture Janet forcing an entrance to the Wendell’s exclusive apartment house followed by a line of grunting pigs, moulting hens, butting cows and cooing doves, to say nothing of a possible ram, and the swarm of bees.”
Such a homecoming created a roar of laughter in which Janet joined heartily, and felt better therefor. Before the mirth died out, Janet had reconsidered her refusal to drive with her chums in search of a sheep or lamb that she had been longing to add to the stock list.
“I’ll go if Frances will wait until September for payment of my jitney bill,” declared Janet, having made up her mind.