After supper the hostess showed them her long parlor and invited them to make themselves at home. But they were all too sleepy to frolic. Louise, who was untirable, did indeed unsling her banjo from across her shoulder and try to sing, but she interrupted herself in the middle of “Nellie Gray” with a gigantic yawn. The Blue Birds were all asleep in their chairs, and had to be marched off to bed half conscious. It was only eight, but the elder sisters and cousins who took them up liked the looks of the white cots very much, and—well, it seemed so useless to go downstairs again, some way. So Winona and Adelaide and Louise and Elizabeth, and Marie, who was looking after such Blue Birds as had not sisters along, simply went to bed, too, when they had attended to their charges. The other girls sat sleepily downstairs for awhile, waiting for their friends to come back. And then they, too, came upstairs and went to bed—and by eight-thirty there was nothing to be heard of seven Blue Birds, thirteen Camp Fire Girls, a dog and a cat, but twenty even breathings from as many cots, an occasional snore from the back porch where Puppums was tied, and a loud, ecstatic purr from the corner of Winona’s cot, where the Medary’s late kitten was privately spending the night.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Next morning by eight Camp Karonya was up and eating a large breakfast. The girls sang a cheer to Mrs. Norris when they were done, and formed for their march again. Most of them had brought enough food for two lunches, but Mrs. Norris could not be brought to think so, and insisted on piling up provisions enough for a regiment. They compromised, on several slices of roast lamb apiece, and enough bread and butter to go around and leave some over.
Winona slipped into the little general store near the farmhouse, and bargained for some more cans of evaporated milk for her under-mascot, the kitten. It was travelling in Florence’s knapsack to-day, and Florence’s things were distributed between Winona and two of the other girls. It proved to be a very frisky kitten by nature, now that its fears of being hungry and homeless were gone. Winona had to sew its bandage on again at noon.
“I don’t know how it is,” she said perplexedly. “It’s certainly a fatter kitten, and yet its bandage is too big!”
“Poor thing! Take it off altogether!” advised Helen. “Pussy will get well just as soon without it.”
So they ripped off the bandage, and the kitten seemed very grateful. Its hurt looked like scarcely more than a scratch now.
“If she’s going to be a camp mascot she ought to have a name,” suggested Florence.
Winona laughed. “I’m going to call her Hike,” she said. “She was hiking when we met her, poor pussy, and so were we.”
So Hike the Camp Cat she became. And—to anticipate—when she had been living on evaporated cream and other luxuries a few days, she turned into a plump and handsome Maltese kitten with charming manners.