"That hit close to us!" exclaimed someone.
"Where are Susan and Oscar?" cried Douglas. "They will be scared to death."
"When I went down in the kitchen after the tub for the Victrola, Oscar was under the table and Susan was trying to get in the fireless cooker, head first," volunteered Bill. "The kitchen is really the dryest place on the mountain, I fancy."
"You forget the shower bath," suggested Helen. "Turn it on full force and it would still be a thousand times dryer than any place here."
"I tell you what let's do!" spoke Dum Tucker with an inspiration that all regretted had not come sooner. "Let's climb up and sit on the rafters!"
Suiting the action to the word, she lightly ascended the trunk of the huge tulip poplar tree that had been left in the center of the pavilion as a support to the roof. The branches had been sawed off, leaving enough projecting to serve as hat racks for the camp. These made an admirable winding stair which an athletic girl like Dum Tucker made nothing of climbing.
"Splendid!" and Dee Tucker followed her twin. In short order many of the more venturesome members of the party were perched on the rafters where they defied the rain to reach them. Even poor Mrs. Carter, her pretty lace dress, if not absolutely ruined, at least with all of its first freshness gone, was persuaded to come up, too, and there she sat trembling and miserable.
"Come on up, Page!" shouted Dee to her chum.
"I'll be there soon," but Page had an idea that she meant first to propose to Douglas.
Poor Douglas, this was a fitting ending to a day of worry and concern. She felt like one
"Whom unmerciful disaster Followed fast and followed faster."
Of course country folk are always made to feel in some intangible way that they are responsible for the weather when the weather happens to be bad and city folk are visiting them. Douglas thought she had enough not to bear the weight of the storm, but somehow she felt that that, too, was added to her burden.
"I know exactly what you are thinking," said Page, coming up and putting her wet arm around Douglas' wet waist. "I have lived in the country all my life and whenever we have a big storm at Bracken or unseasonable weather of any sort, we are always held personally responsible for it by a certain type of visitors. You think this is going to harm your camp and keep people from coming, don't you?"