CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Louise went back to camp next day, and Winona went on with her work at home. Louise had left all sorts of presents and messages from the girls, and taken a great many from Winona away with her. Louise’s visit cheered Winona up very much. There was only one hard thing about it—the news Louise had brought that the girls had extended the time of their stay again. The plan now was to stay in Camp Karonya till the fourteenth of September. School opened on the fifteenth. It seemed a long time to wait to see her friends again—for the doctor was certain that her mother would not be able to bear her weight on the injured ankle for a month to come.
Meanwhile Winona wrote to the girls, and her mother and Florence kept track, in what Winona considered a very wild way, of the things she did that should entitle her to honors. The honor-list and a sheet of blanks lived under her mother’s pillow, Winona was sure. If it gave her mother pleasure she was glad to have her do it; but it occurred to Winona the day after Louise left that it mightn’t be a bad scheme to collect a few honors herself, things that she was sure would count. Also she wanted some fun, and she had found that the acquiring of honors usually led to it. So Winona proceeded to “start something.”
To begin with, next door lived Nataly Lee. Winona went over there the very afternoon of the day Louise left, and spent the most persuasive three hours of her life, explaining to Nataly that they, as the only two Camp Fire Girls in town, ought to start some good times for other people, who, not being Camp Fire Girls, probably didn’t know how. And before she went back to get supper she had persuaded Nataly she was right.
Next day she and Nataly, cheerful and enthusiastic, made a canvass of the girls in their classes who were staying home. Winona had rather gone on the principle that nearly everyone was off somewhere else, but she found it wasn’t so at all. There were six girls beside herself and Nataly who were ready and willing to join a Porch Club that was to meet once a week, and have a picnic one week and a party the next.
Winona and Tom and Billy, with Nataly, even, helping once in a while, spent some time in furnishing the Merriam porch with chairs and hammocks and screens and lanterns. Then the boys went forth and invited their own friends with a lavish hand. The first porch party was a grand success, although there were about three boys to one girl. But that righted itself next time, which was three days later, for the Porch Club made an unanimous and prompt decision that it wanted to meet twice a week. And more girls wanted to join. So, although they were not like her own old comrades, Winona found that she was making friends whom she would never have had at all, if it had not been that she was cut off from her own set of girls, still having good times at Camp Karonya. As for Nataly, she was a marvellously different person. The work of management, of social entertaining, proved to be exactly what she could do best. And having to teach things to others (for the Porch Club added an afternoon session, devoted to hand-craft work and reading aloud), made her find that she could do things very well here that she hadn’t liked doing in camp at all! As for Winona, she let Nataly run things as much as she wanted to. She herself was just what she had always been, Ray of Light, holding the girls and boys together by her brightness and her fondness for them. She was the centre of things, after all. Not that she realized it, particularly; she only thought how queer it was that there were so many nice, friendly people in the world, willing to do nice things and have nice times if you only suggested it. And there are, too.
“And, Helen and Louise dear,” Winona wrote to her own two best friends back at Camp Karonya. “Some of the girls in our classes that we scarcely knew, and thought were quiet and stupid, are as nice and bright and funny as ever they can be, and ever so Camp Firey! I believe we can organize another Camp Fire this fall. And I have my housework arranged so that I have two hours in the morning, and most of my afternoon and evening, to do what I please with. So I have a gorgeous time working for honors. It’s a scheme I shan’t tell you about till it’s all worked out and over with, but I think it’s going to work all right. Florence suggested it, bless her heart. Love to the whole Camp Fire, and ask them to take a hike for me!”
Winona’s supplementary plan for honor-winning had been suggested to her this way:
One day she was on the back porch, mending, and Florence had four bosom friends out in the back garden, making a most fearful racket. Mrs. Merriam had a headache, and Winona knew that in a little while the headache would be worse, or that she would have to go and send Florence’s friends home, which meant hurting that independent young person’s feelings.
“Florence,” called Winona, “wouldn’t you and the other girls like me to come down to the end of the garden and tell you fairy-stories?”