At the mention of dinner everybody became energetic as by magic. Winnie
split her two dozen rolls neatly down the middle, and set them in rows
on a newspaper, ready for the broiled bacon. Marie, with her red wrapper
pinned up out of harm's way, banked the fire, while Edith mixed cocoa
and condensed milk industriously in the bottom of a gigantic kettle
which was discovered, too late, to have been intended to boil the water
in. It occurred to Winnie that Edith in overalls was much more fun than
Edith in fluffy ruffles that she had to remember to take care of, as she
watched her flying around with her curls waving in the wind, looking
like a stage newsboy. Helen, on her knees by the heap of provisions, was
unwrapping her bacon, and somebody else was peeling all the hard-boiled
eggs.
"Didn't anybody bring cake?" asked Louise plaintively. "Have we nothing
but rolls, bacon and eggs?"
"Why, what else do you want?" asked Marie with a dignity rather
interfered with by the way her scarlet draperies flapped in the breeze.
"All the bacon-bats I ever heard about they just had rolls and bacon--we
have a lot of things extra."
"Glad I never attended one of the just-rolls-and-bacon kind," Louise
rebelliously declared.
Winnie, who liked cake herself, and thought she had seen some, went back
to the heap of provisions and began to dig at it like a small dog at a
mole-hill.
"Marie!" she called triumphantly in a minute, "There _is_ cake! And a
lot of bananas!"
"That's good," Marie serenely remarked. "Bring them along."
Winnie reappeared in a minute, very flushed and triumphant, with a hand
of bananas under her arm, and a huge chocolate cake, with almost
undamaged icing, poised carefully before her.
"Oh, I remember!" said absent-minded Dorothy, "I brought that cake. It
was in the satchel with the knives and forks."
"You certainly saved all our lives," said Louise feelingly, and went on
whittling toasting-sticks for the bacon. "Here, Winnie, take a stick and
start in to be useful."
"How do you do it?" Winnie wondered--"cook bacon, I mean? I never did it
this way before."
"Just string it on the stick any way at all," Marie advised, and speared
a slice scientifically as she spoke.
"Easy when you know how!" laughed Winnie, sharpening her own stick a
little more and threading some bacon on it.
In a few minutes everybody had slices of bacon frizzling gayly, and
getting more or less charred. When they were done enough they were
popped between the opened rolls, and--eaten, cinders and all. The water,
though it was boiled in something else than its own proper
kettle--something remarkably like a dish-pan cunningly slung over the
fire by a wonderful system of forked sticks--came to a boil without
accident, and was poured on the cocoa. Each girl had brought her own
drinking-cup, so there was no difficulty about crockery. It seemed to
Winnie, balanced on one elbow on her rug, that nothing had ever tasted
so good as the bacon sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, washed down by all
the hot cocoa you could drink.
By the time the cake and bananas came the girls felt as if they couldn't
eat another thing. But they did. It was delightful lying around the fire
talking and eating and laughing. It was one of those mild days which
come in May sometimes, bright, with a little breeze. After awhile
somebody started a Camp Fire song, and one by one they all joined in.
After that they lay quiet for awhile, talking and being lazy.
When they began to clear away Edith declared that she didn't dare go
near the spring again. So it was Winona and Louise who took the few
things there were to wash, the cocoa-kettle and dish-pan and
drinking-cups and the silver, over to the spring. It was pleasant, lazy
work, not a bit like home dish-washing. Louise splashed the things up
and down in the running water, and Winona dried them.
"Isn't it nice?" sighed Winnie. "Oh, I do wish we could camp outdoors
all this summer, instead of living in hot houses! Don't you always hate
to sleep indoors when it's hot?"
Louise rolled over on her back and looked at the sky.
"Yes, I think I do," she spoke thoughtfully. "You have to, though. Out
in California they say everybody has sleeping-porches, and never thinks
of going inside at night. I wish people had them here."
A brilliant idea came to Winona--which, by the way, she afterward
carried out. "Our side-porch is almost all screened. I wonder if mother
wouldn't let me sleep there? I'm going to ask her, anyway."
"I wish I could, too," breathed Louise, "but our side-porch is where
everybody goes by--that's the worst of living on a corner. I know I
never could break the milkman and the baker of contributing rolls and
milk on top of me in the early morning!"
"What a splendid idea! Then you could have 'breakfast in your bed,' like
Harry Lauder," said Winnie, and both girls stopped to giggle. "But
honestly," began Winnie again, as she reached out for some long grass
near her and began to plait it, "don't you think we can all camp out
this summer?"
"Here?"
"N-no, not here--at least, I don't believe they'd let us, the people who
own it, I mean. But there must be somewhere that we could go, somewhere
not too far off to cost a lot to get there."
"I wonder!" said Louise, pulling a thick red pig-tail around in order to
nibble its end thoughtfully. She had a habit of gnawing at her hair when
she thought hard. "What about Cribb's Creek?"
"That's too near," Winnie opposed.
"Well, where did the Boy Scouts go last year?"
"Up on Wampoag River, a little way below Wampoag," said Winona. "They
said it was a cinch, because they could sell all the fish they caught to
the Wampoag hotel-keepers, and get things they needed, and yet it was
just as wild as it could be if you went a little way along the river."
Wampoag was a summer resort not far from them.
"Well, how far's that?" asked Louise.
"About ten miles to the boys' camp," answered Winona. "But there would
be plenty of good camping-ground nearer home, and quite close to that
little village--what's its name?"
"Green's Corners," supplied Louise.
"I wonder who Green was, and if he really _did_ have corners," Winona
thoughtfully remarked.
Louise giggled. "He was a square man, I suppose," she said, and Winnie
gave her a shove. "Oh, don't!" she said. "That's an awful pun."
"I thought it was a very good one. Well, to come back to business, the
boys didn't go by train. Indeed, I don't think you can, unless you go
away round. They hiked."
"Well, why shouldn't we, too?" asked Louise.
"Or part of the way, anyway!" added Winnie,
"People would take us for a band of 'I won't works!' We'd look it, too,
by the time we got to the end of the journey."
"But we needn't do it all at once," said Winnie. "We could break the
journey overnight. Don't you know, people in England have walking-tours
that last for days and days? I've read about it. They stop in inns
overnight and have adventures."
"Well, I'd like the adventures, if they didn't mean falling into ponds
and getting your clothes wet," said Louise.
Winnie yawned.
"I suppose they think we've tied the cups round our necks and jumped
in," and she lazily started to get up. "Come on, Louise, let's find Mrs.
Bryan and ask her about camping. She's sure to know about hikes and
everything."
Finding Mrs. Bryan proved to be hard, because she was not in the kind of
a place where you would expect to find a grown-up step-mother. They
finally discovered her by a flutter of blue skirt that hung down below
the branches of an old apple-tree. She was sitting comfortably in one of
its crotches, trying to carve herself a willow whistle.
"Come on up, girls!" she hailed them cheerfully. "There's always room at
the top!"
"Where are the rest of them?" asked Winnie, beginning to climb. Louise
followed more slowly, for Winnie was more slender and quicker in her
movements.
"Scattered all over, I suppose," said Mrs. Bryan. "Edith went back to
old Mary's to see if her clothes were dry. Did you want them for
anything special?"
"No indeed," Winnie assured her. "It was you we wanted for something
special."
"Well, I'm here," and Mrs. Bryan dropped an affectionate hand on the
pretty brown head beneath her. "What is it, dear?"
"It's about camping out," spoke Winnie and Louise in a breath. "Do you
think we can do it?"
Mrs. Bryan laughed.
"'Can we do it?' Why, my dears, that's just what we're for! What would
be the fun of belonging to a Camp Fire if we couldn't go camping
outdoors?"
"Oh, lovely!" cried Winnie. "Then you'll go, too?"
"I certainly will!" said Mrs. Bryan promptly. "It would have to be when
Mr. Bryan was having his vacation, though, because it would never do to
leave, not only my own hearth-fire, but my own poor helpless husband,
untended. And, of course, it will not be till school is through."
"Oh, oh, it begins to sound almost real!" Winnie cried with a joyous
little jounce that shook several pink blossoms from the tree.
"Just wait!" warned Louise from her lower limb. "When we start that
twenty-five-mile hike, it will seem quite too real for comfort, take my
word for it!"
"Don't you think we could hike to camp?" appealed Winnie.
"You'll have to practise shorter hikes first," was the answer. "If you
do that there's no reason why we couldn't all walk the distance. I
suppose we'll camp somewhere on the Wampoag River."
"Yes, that's what we thought," said the girls.
"Of course, we'd have to break the journey," Winnie went on.
"Well, yes, I think so," Mrs. Bryan answered. "Oh, here are Helen and
Marie now. Oh, Helen! We're up in this tree! No, don't come up--all the
seats are full!"
"Then come down!" called Helen. "We have something to show you."
The something proved to be a small and very scared garter-snake, that
Helen was carrying in a forked stick.
"Poor little snakelet!" said Louise. "Do let him go home, Helen--I'm
sure he's not grown-up yet."
So Helen put down the snake and off he went.
"Did you find your clothes?" Louise asked Marie rather superfluously,
for she had on her sailor-suit, rather fresher-looking than it had been
before.
"It was all done when we got there," said Marie, "but Edith's dress was
harder to do--all those ruffles, you know--so Mary's still ironing it."
"Then we'd better sit here and wait for her," suggested Louise. "And oh,
girls, we have a plan."
"A real plan, all hand-made?" mocked Helen. "Do tell us about it."
So then the camping-trip was discussed and votes taken about it. Helen,
of course, could go. Marie was sure she would be allowed to.
"Mother says I stay in the house and read too much anyway," she said.
The other girls, drifting up one by one, were all wild over the idea.
Edith, in her freshly-laundered frock, was a little doubtful about the
hike, but as she said, if she fainted from exhaustion she could take a
train or a carriage or something the rest of the way.
They talked camping till it was time to go back and pack up things for
the return trip. So the girls rose up from around the apple-tree, and
stowed everything away in the baskets and satchels they had brought, and
walked back to the trolley. First, though, they gave old Mary all the
provisions they had left; cocoa, six rolls, and a generous half of the
chocolate cake.
"That certainly was a life-sized cake!" breathed Winnie as she set it on
Mary's kitchen table. "But it won't be as hard to eat as it was to
carry, will it?"
"Sure ye needn't worry but what it'll get et," laughed Mary. "Many
thanks, an' good luck to yez all."
They piled into the trolley, rather sleepy with the long day in the
wind, and, except for Marie and Edith, rather crumpled. Winnie's blouse
had a grass-stain, and Louise's was marked neatly across the back, like
a Japanese stencil, with a wet brown bough-mark. There were also burrs,
more or less, on everybody. But what were burrs?
Everybody heaved a sight of contentment as they settled down in their
seats.
"It certainly was a lovely picnic!" they said.
"How beautifully fresh and clean Edith Hillis keeps her dresses!" said
Mrs. Merriam to Winnie, as Edith turned to wave good-bye at the Merriam
gate, and went down the street with Marie and Helen. "You'd think that
pink dress had just been washed and ironed, and yet she's been out in
the woods with the rest of you tousled-looking children all day!"
And Winona laughed so that it was at least two minutes before she could
explain.