“Billy! Billy!” Erminie whispered as she started up. “You don’t know what an awful thing I’ve done!”
“You’ve done what I wished you would do long ago, and I’ll stand for whatever happens.” A proud light shone in his eye that she saw others besides herself could read.
“I’m going to speak to Bess Carter,—tell her that I’ll work with her. Anyway it will be better if I’m not seen with you till the Kid’s mad cools off.”
She started across the deck but he detained her. “Erminie! Did you promise Jim you’d come—come here with—”
“No, Billy, he took it for granted. I laughed and let it go so, for that was my game then. But—oh, Billy! I’ve fumbled everything! And it’s going to be hard for you when I was trying to make it—”
“Never mind me. I can fight my own battles.”
The steamer bumped the wharf, lurching the standing ones against one another; and the merry confusion of disembarking drove all serious matters to cover of silence. The few teachers, making as little as possible of their duties as chaperones, let the young people manage things for themselves.
Dinner was the first consideration; and as no one there knew quite so much about coffee as Reginald Steele and Billy, that was their job, which occupied them wholly, together with Bess Carter, skilled in cookery through use of the tiny rock fireplace on the bank of Runa Creek in “good old California.”
Erminie, who had no more idea of how to make coffee for three hundred than she had concerning heavenly ambrosia, hovered close to the three, anxious to tell Bess of her change of heart, yet more anxious to keep away from Jim Barney, and most of all to be near Billy, who meant strength and deliverance to her.
It was early June and the sun still high at seven o’clock, when they began dinner. In groups of several, with perhaps fifty sitting in comfort at the long table in the bark-roofed pavilion, but oftenest in couples seated apart in the many nooks of the small clearing, they chattered and feasted, punctuating the meal with many noisy pranks and repeated yells.