“Well, would you look at that!” said Winona in an indignant whisper.
The other girls cautiously lifted the tent-flap and stuck in their heads.
Frances slept placidly on one cot, her little freckled face half buried in the pillow. On the other, quite as fast asleep, lay Adelaide—and there was not a string tied to her anywhere!
“Well, if that isn’t the limit!” said Elizabeth and Lilian in one breath, and Elizabeth reached down to the pail of water which the orderlies had faithfully set outside each tent door before they went to bed. She tilted the cold water on her handkerchief, and dropped it wetly on Adelaide’s face. It wasn’t a wet sponge, but it did nearly as well, as an awakener.
“What—where—nonsense, Lonny, don’t!” said Adelaide, waving her arms, and finally sitting up.
“It isn’t Lonny; it’s us,” said Winona coldly, “and why on earth did you untie the strings, when all the rest of us had them to get up by?”
Adelaide looked ashamed.
“I couldn’t sleep all tied up that way,” she confessed. “I felt like a spider or a fly or something. So I tied them on the cot. But I thought when you pulled them the cot would jar, and wake me!”
“It might have,” said Winona, “if you’d tied them on your own cot!”
Adelaide, looking in the direction of Winona’s pointing finger, found out why she had not wakened. In her sleepiness the night before, she had fastened her strings to a large twig that grew out of the ground beside her bed!