“Oh, Puppums—you naughty dog!” she said, trying to take the teeth away from him as unostentatiously as possible.
But Puppums, realizing from her voice that something was wrong, looked up at her depreciatingly, wagged his tail again, suddenly put his tail between his legs and started for the camp!
It was no use to try to ignore things any longer.
“Oh, Mr. Sloane,” Winona cried. “I’m so sorry! He’s a bad dog. I’ll go straight after him and get them.”
“Now, never mind,” said Mr. Sloane, kindly if rather indistinctly. He began to laugh. “That dog o’ yours certainly is a rip-snorter!” he said. “Knock a man down an’ carry off his teeth!”
By this time the boys had stopped trying not to laugh, and were howling in unison in the background. And little Frances, Adelaide’s sister, came up with a nice birch-bark box. She handed it to Mr. Sloane, dropped a pretty courtesy, and ran. And so did the others. The only unembarrassed members of the party were Puppums, who wasn’t there, to be Irish, and Mr. Sloane himself.
“Talk about banner days!” sighed Louise. “I was the only one of us that didn’t get into trouble——”
“Louise!” called somebody, from outside the tent where Louise was washing and getting ready for supper. “Did you know that you left the store-shed door open this morning when you came in for supplies, and somebody’s carried off every bit of bacon!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
And in the opulent days which followed the winning of the carnival prizes, and the selling of lovely amounts of Camp Fire goods, Camp Karonya decided that it ought to own a phonograph. The treasury, which was a suitcase under Helen’s bed, had money in it, and the girls badly needed something to dance by. To be sure, the camp boasted a mandolin, two guitars, a mouth-organ and a banjo, to say nothing of Mrs. Bryan’s Iroquois drum. But all these had to be worked by hand, and the orchestra, after performing for several long evenings while their friends practised folk-dances with abandon, struck.