“There will be no need this time,” asserted Mrs. Bonnell. “I have the little axe with which to blaze the trees.”
“It sounds like a French lesson, doesn’t it?” asked Alice, with a laugh.
“The hairpins did very well,” said Natalie with another laugh, at the remembrance of their pretty Guardian-chaperone diligently scratching the bark of the white birch trees with her wire coiffeur retainers.
The day after the boys had “played tag with the hornets,” as Alice put it, there had been rain, but the Camp Fire Girls had put in the enforced idle time to good advantage by getting ready for the trip to Bear Pond.
Marie had artfully interviewed Reuben when he came with some eggs, and had carefully jotted down the directions to be followed. He told them of a shorter route to the place, necessitating a little longer row, but less of a walk.
Then they had carefully packed some baskets of provisions, and had even arranged to take along some coffee, and an old pot in which to boil it over an open fire.
“Well, I guess we’re ready to start,” announced Mrs. Bonnell, after an early breakfast.
“How many bottles of olives did you put in?”
The above are only samples. Three or more pages of similar import might be set down, but to no purpose. They were about to leave their camp, and, against the visits of an intruder they had locked most of their valuables such as they did not take with them—in their trunks. Then the tent-flaps had been carefully tied shut, a weird array of knots being used, having been copied from a boy-scout book that the Guardian had with her.
“If a burglar can untie those,” said Mrs. Bonnell as she finished the last one, “he’ll be so short tempered that he won’t bother to take the few little things we have left here.”
“But how can we untie them?” asked Marie.
“Oh, I can easily pick them out with a hairpin,” answered the resourceful Mrs. Bonnell. “Hairpins to a woman are what a screw-driver is to a man. I never could get along without them. From buttoning shoes to opening bottles of olives, they run the gamut of utility.”
The day was fair, with no promise of rain, but, even if it should come, the serviceable suits, of which each girl had two, would neither be damaged, nor would they readily permit of the wearers being drenched.