“’Course I do. I’m just teasing you, Mumsey. I wouldn’t really want to get mixed up with your party. They might sweep me away and put goggles on me, to match me up with the library high-brow folks. When a girl’s mother is made a librarian delegate, I suppose,” sighed Nancy affectedly, “she ought to wear goggles anyway.”
“Don’t go making fun of my--peers,” cautioned Mrs. Brandon in the same bantering manner. “I tell you, my dear, if it were not for the library we wouldn’t any of us be taking a vacation. There’s the postman now. And I can see Ted’s postcard coming!”
“Four of them!” shouted Nancy, who had already made hold the bright pictured messages. “Why four, all at once?”
“Laid over,” laconically answered the postman. “Those camps let their mail pile up, I’ll tell you.”
But Nancy was deciphering the boy’s scrawl which, when classed as handwriting, was never model, but now, classed as his first message home from his first week at camp, amounted to perfectly ideal “broad-casting.”
They read and re-read, Nancy finding little secret words sticking on the canoe sails and peeping out of, what might have been a cloudburst, if the postcard had not carried with it the other explanation. This read “Beautiful Lake Tuketo by Moonlight” and it was the moonlight effect that was so apt to be misleading.
“He’s all right, at any rate,” remarked the mother, thus betraying her anxieties. “And he seems to be having a good time,” she sighed relievedly.
“Trust Ted for that,” Nancy reminded her. “But what an awful looking lot of boys! Just see my card! They look like a comedy parade.”
“Why Nancy! They’re fine looking little chaps, I’m sure,” defended Mrs. Brandon. “But I suppose that picture was taken to show the raising of Old Glory, not as a beauty contest illustration.”
“’S’cuse me,” murmured Nancy. “Of course, they’re--darlings, every one of them, but I wouldn’t swap our Ted for--the whole bunch!”
“Yes-sum!” confessed Nancy, glorifying in her pretended ungrammatic freedom.
Even the most difficult tasks are finally accomplished, and now Nancy was actually riding towards Boston. The details of closing up their little home had been rather confusing, especially as each member of the small family was starting out in a different direction, but it was all done at last, and soon Nancy would cross Boston and take the Maine line out toward New Hampshire.