“Where is Gerry? Is she all right?” she demanded. “She was just in front of me before the storm broke. Here she comes, now.”
In fact, Gerry was at the moment only a few steps away, leaning on Vera’s arm and looking fragile and shaken.
“I am abominably afraid of storms; have been always,” she exclaimed petulantly. “So I suppose you were right not to let me run. Perhaps I might have been knocked down. Still, I think you were frightfully rough, Vera. Perhaps you can’t help it, having been brought up in the country.” And Gerry ended her speech with the fine scorn which one remembers the city mouse felt for the country mouse in the old fable.
“Yes, I am sorry if I hurt you,” Vera returned, quietly disengaging her arm from the other girl’s, now that she saw there was nothing the matter and knowing that she preferred being with Sally. She herself wished to learn how Peggy and Bettina and their Camp Fire guardian had passed through the storm.
It was now nearly daylight on the top of the mesa. The sun had not risen, but there was a kind of general grayness that preceded the approach of dawn. At least, it was possible for the girls to grope their way about and to recognize each other as they approached close by.
Vera now saw that Bettina had gone over toward Mrs. Burton and that Peggy, in her usual practical fashion, was wandering about trying to discover how much damage had been done. The Indian girl was with her.
It was a piece of good fortune, or perhaps what is usually the cause of good fortune—a piece of good sense—that the camp fire had been put out before the girls had retired for the night. In these dry months in Arizona, when there is ordinarily so little rainfall and living so near the great ranch fields of corn and alfalfa, Mr. Gardener had suggested that it was wiser to take every precaution. Now the ashes had blown in every direction and the three sticks, which usually stood like a tripod above the camp fire, had tumbled abjectly down. More important, the kitchen tent had collapsed.
When Vera reached Peggy she discovered that she was pulling at the tent ropes and trying to find out the extent of the damage.
“Do try to dig out a saucepan or a kettle or anything you can find, please, Vera,” Peggy suggested. “I am going to start a fire and make some coffee, if one of us can find the stuff. Nothing happened of any consequence and yet my knees are as shaky as if I had been through the war. And I’m afraid Tante will be ill. Mother wrote me not to forget—even if she never spoke of the fact—that she really is out here for her health. I don’t know whether being a Camp Fire guardian can be much of a health cure, but at least it is stimulating.” And Peggy laughed and set to working vigorously with Vera’s aid to search out what was needed. In the meantime, Dawapa kept fairly close beside her. For, apparently, she was less shy with her and liked her best.
Bettina had knelt down beside Polly.