“Just back from doing their justly-famous diving stunt!” added Winnie. “Better come near the fire, girls, and try to get your shoes dry.”
The fire, which the rest had made during the “diving-stunt,” was burning beautifully. The girls laid down waterproofs and blankets, and disposed themselves comfortably around it, for the fire-makers were tired, and the rescuers and rescued were particularly glad to lie down and be warm and dry and limp.
“Two long hours to dinner-time!” from Winnie presently in a very sad voice. “I don’t feel as if I could stand it.”
“Nor I!” several voices chimed in.
“Then why do you?” suggested Mrs. Bryan sensibly. “If everybody’s hungry we might as well have dinner now!”
CHAPTER FOUR
At the mention of dinner everybody became energetic as by magic. Winnie split her two dozen rolls neatly down the middle, and set them in rows on a newspaper, ready for the broiled bacon. Marie, with her red wrapper pinned up out of harm’s way, banked the fire, while Edith mixed cocoa and condensed milk industriously in the bottom of a gigantic kettle which was discovered, too late, to have been intended to boil the water in. It occurred to Winnie that Edith in overalls was much more fun than Edith in fluffy ruffles that she had to remember to take care of, as she watched her flying around with her curls waving in the wind, looking like a stage newsboy. Helen, on her knees by the heap of provisions, was unwrapping her bacon, and somebody else was peeling all the hard-boiled eggs.
“Didn’t anybody bring cake?” asked Louise plaintively. “Have we nothing but rolls, bacon and eggs?”
“Why, what else do you want?” asked Marie with a dignity rather interfered with by the way her scarlet draperies flapped in the breeze. “All the bacon-bats I ever heard about they just had rolls and bacon—we have a lot of things extra.”
“Glad I never attended one of the just-rolls-and-bacon kind,” Louise rebelliously declared.