“Every girl is supposed to be a puzzle,” Ernestine Johanson reminded. “I don’t like to snatch any honors away from anyone, but, you know, we should always have the truth.”
“Yes, let us have the truth about this interesting, Teddy-teeth-baring, dee-light-ing announcement that Katherine has to make to us,” Estelle Adler implored.
“The delay wasn’t my fault,” Katherine said, with an attitude of “perfect willingness if all this nonsense will stop.” “But here comes Miss Ladd. Let’s wait for her to join us, for I know you will all want her opinion of the proposition I am going to put to you.”
Miss Harriet Ladd, Guardian of the Fire, bearing a large bouquet of wild flowers that she had just gathered in timber and along the bank of the stream, joined the group of girls seated on the grass a minute later, and then all waited expectantly for Katherine to begin.
CHAPTER II.
A SPECIAL MEETING CALLED.
Fern hollow—begging the indulgence of those who have read the earlier volume of this series—is a deep, richly vegetated ravine or gully forming one of a series of scenic convolutions of the surface of the earth which gave the neighboring town of Fairberry a wide reputation as a place of beauty.
The thirteen Camp Fire Girls, who had pitched their tents on the lower hillside, a few hundred feet from a boisterous, gravel-and-boulder bedded stream known as Butter creek, were students at Hiawatha Institute, a girls’ school in a neighboring state. The students of that school were all Camp Fire Girls, and it was not an uncommon thing for individual Fires to spend parts of their vacations together at favorite camping places. On the present occasion the members of Flamingo Fire were guests of one of their own number, Hazel Edwards, on the farm of the latter’s aunt, Mrs. Hannah Hutchins, which included a considerable section of the scenic Ravine known as Fern hollow.