After the good man's curiosity has been satisfied, and Starrett has summoned the girls to appear, the worthy farmer strolls off after his lost cow, first inviting the club to the farm to another supper. One by one, the girls emerge from their camp, but when they hear how near to a house they have been during the rain, great is the laughter.
"I don't care, though," cries Cornelia Hadwin; "we've really had a sort of a camping-out time, and I'm glad of it."
After hearing Joe's report, the club determines to push on at once to Curtin Harbor in the early evening, without accepting the hospitable invitation to supper at the farmhouse.
The two miles to the main road are quickly traversed, and before long the club wheels around a long curve in the road, and the blue expanse of Curtin Harbor lies beneath them. The clouds are gone by this time; the rising moon shoots slantwise through a few thin, dissolving folds, and brings out ripples of gold and silver on the long seas. There seems to be a breeze that stirs the water to darker ruffles beyond the head-land, but where the young folk sit on their tricycles, enjoying the beauty of the scene and the salty damp of the evening air, not a blade of the coarse, silvery beach-grass stirs; every spire and blade stands in sheeny silver in the mellow light.
Below the beach-road branches off a long winding descent to the quiet cottages which lie in the evening glow, seemingly fast asleep.
"Now, girls, for a good coast!" cries Starrett. "Here goes!"
And away indeed he goes, over the brow of the hill, rolling swiftly, and removing his feet from the pedals as his machine gathers way. Away also they all fly after him, merry as larks, waking all the echoes of the shore with their light-hearted shouts and laughter. The tricycle lamps flash out upon the seaward road, and soon it comes to pass, that as Charley's wheels whiz flashing into the wide, grassy dooryard of a certain pleasant little summer abode, a hand lifts the window curtain, and a voice, with a ring of irrepressible gladness but a great pretense of gruffness, calls out:
"Is this my noisy daughter, who has been running wild for a week over all the roads on Cape Cod?"
"Oh, Papa!" cries Charley, gleefully, "we've had a perfectly charming trip!"
And so says the entire club. And they pass a vote of thanks to Joe for taking faithful care of them, and to Starrett for his excellent escort duty. And now when the story of their eighty-mile ride is told, everybody votes tricycling a wonderfully health-giving and delightful exercise, and the first long trip of the Girls' Tricycling Club a grand success.