[Illustration: Frances and Jane use their Camp Fire Girl training.]
The Camp Fire Girls On A Yacht
BY
MARGARET LOVE SANDERSON
Frontispiece by
MAUDE MARTIN EVERS
The Reilly & Lee Co.
Chicago
Copyright, 1920
by
The Reilly & Lee Co.
Made in U. S. A.
_The Camp Fire Girls on a Yacht_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I AN INVITATION FOR A CRUISE 7
II SERGEANT MURPHY ASSISTS 14
III THE BOOJUM 27
IV ANCHOR WEIGHED 40
V AT THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS 51
VI BETTY WYNDHAM, ACTRESS 63
VII EXPLORING GLOUCESTER 73
VIII WHAT FRANCES FOUND 84
IX THE AFFAIRS OF BRECK 97
X HURRICANE ISLAND 110
XI DEBATE AND JUST TALK 122
XII BROTHER AND SISTER 132
XIII JACK’S AFTER-SUPPER SPEECH 141
XIV TIM’S FATHER 152
XV TIM’S MOTHER AND DETAILS 163
XVI A MOUTH FOR PIE 174
XVII “BOILED” AT ’SCONSET 181
XVIII THE BEGINNING OF TRAGEDY 188
XIX THE GOOD OF THE ILL-WIND 198
The Camp Fire Girls On a Yacht
CHAPTER I
AN INVITATION FOR A CRUISE
“Oh! Jack, Ellen, come here this instant!” cried Jane Pellew in so
excited a manner that the mail rider almost fell out of his jumper in
his effort to see what it was that made Miss Jane “take on so.” She
was dancing around the broad old veranda waving one of the letters he
had just handed her.
“Too hot, Sis, and we are too comfortable,” came Jack’s lazy voice
from under the big ash tree that shaded one side of the porch.
“You have enough energy for all of us, so s’pose you come to us,”
Ellen called.
“You won’t be hot for long, but you are going to be very uncomfortable
in a minute.” With the warning, Jane jumped off the porch and landed
in Ellen’s lap, then pulled herself up quickly by means of one hand
entwined in Jack’s thick chestnut hair.
“Shut up and listen!” commanded Jane.
“Nobody has a chance to do anything else with you around,” Jack
reminded his sister.
“Who could do anything else but listen after having a hundred and
thirty pounds of buoyant young Kentucky girl hurled on top of you from
a distance of some ten feet? I don’t believe I shall ever get my
breath again,” groaned Ellen.
“I’ll say you manage pretty well without it,” Jane laughed. “But, as I
was saying, listen and you will hear the most wonderful piece of news
that has happened in the history of mankind,” and she started reading
from the letter she had still managed to keep in her hand:
“Dearest Jane:”
“Bet it is from one of the Camp Fire Girls,” interrupted her brother.
“Keep quiet, I have a good mind not to tell you after all. But I am
such a nice girl I suppose I’ll have to. It’s from Mabel Wing. Now,
let me finish,” pleaded Jane.
“Dearest Jane:
“As long as Ellen Birch is staying with you, read this to her,
as I am so busy I’ll never have time to write two letters
saying exactly the same thing. I am sending one to Ruth Garnier
with the request that she read hers to Frances Bliss, who is
staying at her home.
“And telegraph me whether you will or won’t, but please do. I
always do things backwards even in letters. What I mean is
Daddy is going to give me a cruise on his yacht and I want you
and Ellen and Jack to come. We will leave City Island, N. Y.,
July the first, and go till we get bored, up to the Maine coast
and poke around all those little islands that Daddy says grow
in the New England waters.
“Don’t bring any clothes, as there never is any place to stow
more than the bare essentials. And make Jack bring his banjo
and, of course, your bathing suits and Camp Fire clothes.
“I’ll be so disappointed I’ll die if you don’t.
Hastily,
“Mabel.”
“As if you couldn’t tell it was ‘hastily, Mabel,’” Jack laughed. “But
I have no idea of bringing your bathing suits and Camp Fire regalia.”
“Goose! That is just the Mabel of it. She writes just as she talks,”
explained his sister.
“What fun for all of us! But we must telegraph right away,” said the
practical Ellen.
“Here comes Father now,” and Jane pointed to a red-wheeled buggy and a
briskly trotting bay horse driven up the shady approach to the
Pellews’ home by the master of the house.
The three of them ran across to meet Mr. Pellew, a man beloved by his
children’s friends as much as he was respected and loved by his own.
“Daddy dear, Mabel wants--” began Jane.
“It will be wonderful!” put in Ellen.
“Is it all right with you if I go too, Dad?” Jack interrupted both
girls.
Mr. Pellew put his hands up to his ears and screamed above the hubbub:
“How can I tell whether it will be wonderful for Ellen and all right
for you or even what Mabel wants if the bunch of you try to rival the
builders of the tower of Babel?”
“Ellen,” suggested Jack, “you tell him; Jane gets too excited.”
Ellen put one hand over Jane’s mouth and told Mr. Pellew of the
interesting trip Mabel and her father had planned for them.
Squirming away from Ellen, Jane flung her arms around her father’s
neck and said, “But we don’t like leaving you when we have been home
from school for only such a short while.”
“It never seems to enter your scatter-brained heads that I might
oppose you in anything,” Mr. Pellew smiled at his daughter.
“You always are keen for us to have a good time,” Jack explained.
“And you went and had such clever good children that they know just
exactly what to do and what is good for them and what is bad for
them,” added Jane.
“Of course you can go and I’ll be mighty glad for my children to have
such a wonderful summer. When do you expect to leave and from what
point?” inquired Mr. Pellew.
“First of July, City Island!” came in chorus from the three.
“Henceforth all my conversation will be nautical. Yo-ho-ho and a
bottle of two per cent substitute. Jack, do you have to have a horn or
a pipe for stage property when you want to execute a briny jig?” and
Jane began to cavort around in what she considered a truly seafaring
manner.
“‘Shiver my timbers!’ and ‘Scuttle her amidships!’ is my contribution
to this, but I am the only person to be allowed to use these choice
phrases until some one can think up better ones. Then, of course, I’ll
be glad to cash in my old ones for the new ones,” was Ellen’s generous
offer.
“Son, you had better order some horses saddled directly after dinner
so you kids can ride over and send the necessary telegrams,” said Mr.
Pellew to Jack.
With an “Aye, aye, sir,” Jack raced toward the stable.
“Home is so beautiful in the summer that I can hardly bear to leave
it,” sighed Jane.
She and her father and Ellen were walking over the close-cut grass and
she cast a rather wistful eye around the lovely lawn that stretched
before the Pellew house. There were great trees whose spreading
branches had shaded her grandparents, her own father and the mother
she couldn’t remember, but loved because of the sweet pictures her
father had of her. Where the lawn stopped the rolling fields of blue
grass began and Jane could see the old mare, on which she and Jack had
learned to ride, grazing contentedly. It was a hobby of her father’s
never to sell the old horses on the place but to treat them as worthy
old pensioners and turn them out on the rich bluegrass pasture lands
that bordered his place. Mr. Pellew had a string of race horses famous
throughout Kentucky, and as Jane put it, she and Jack had “fallen from
the cradle into a saddle.” Their father kept a model stable and Aunt
Min, who took charge of the Pellew home, often complained that the
expense of upkeep for the stable was far greater than that of their
exceedingly well run home.
“Well, of course, I won’t force you to go,” teased her father.
“Why, Jane, I thought you were perfectly wild to go,” Ellen said.
“Oh, that is the way I always behave about leaving home. I am terribly
sentimental over it and always indulge in dramatics when I go away.
You see, I am bats about all the horses and dogs on the place and I
can’t help thinking about Atta Boy, the Denmark colt Dad was letting
me break for my own,” Jane explained. “All the work I have put in on
him will come to nothing if he isn’t ridden regularly this summer, and
Daddy doesn’t have time to do it for me and I wouldn’t trust anybody
else with such a peach of a colt.”
“You honor me, daughter.” Mr. Pellew made a low mocking bow. “To show
my deep appreciation of the fact that you put my horsemanship on the
level with your own, I suppose I will have to promise to ride Atta Boy
every other day for you.”
“I love Kentucky too, Jane, and you can’t know how much it has meant
to me to stay with you. Last summer it was too wonderful with the
other girls here but this summer it has been just splendid with you
and Jack.” Ellen blushed after mentioning Jack, because he had just
been telling her what a wonderful summer it was for him with her
visiting Jane.
“Ellen, did you ever hear this little tribute to our state?” Mr.
Pellew asked and began:
“Ever see Kentucky grass
Or hear about its blueness?
Looks as if the whole derned earth
Was bursting out in newness.
Skies and folks alike all smiles.
Gracious! you are lucky
If you spend a day in June
Down in old Kentucky.”
“And the more days you spend in Kentucky the luckier you are,” stated
Jane. “But goodness, I sound like that girl from Virginia who was at
Hillside last year.”
Aunt Min came out on the porch and interrupted the eulogy on the
charms of Kentucky by telling them that dinner was ready. But anyone
seeing the great platter of fried chicken on the table before Aunt Min
would have said that the eulogy might well have been continued in the
spacious old dining room.