[Illustration: They gathered for the second time around the camp-fire,
and smelled the delicious odors arising from bacon and hot coffee.]
THE GIRL SCOUTS’
MOTOR TRIP
By EDITH LAVELL
Author of
The Girl Scouts at Miss Allen’s School, The Girl
Scouts at Camp, The Girl Scouts’ Good Turn,
The Girl Scouts’ Canoe Trip, The Girl
Scouts’ Rivals, The Girl Scouts’ Vacation
Adventures, The Girl Scouts on the
Ranch
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
THE GIRL SCOUTS SERIES
A SERIES OF STORIES FOR GIRL SCOUTS
By EDITH LAVELL
The Girl Scouts at Miss Allen’s School
The Girl Scouts at Camp
The Girl Scouts’ Good Turn
The Girl Scouts’ Canoe Trip
The Girl Scouts’ Rivals
The Girl Scouts on the Ranch
The Girl Scouts’ Vacation Adventures
The Girl Scouts’ Motor Trip
Copyright, 1924
By A. L. BURT COMPANY
THE GIRL SCOUTS’ MOTOR TRIP
Made in U. S. A.
CHAPTER I
A CHALLENGE.
Marjorie Wilkinson and Lily Andrews sauntered down the hall of the
dormitory towards their rooms, humming tunes and dragging their hockey
sticks along the floor behind them. They were enjoying a particularly
jubilant mood, for their team had just been victorious; the sophomores
of Turner College had succeeded in defeating the juniors in a closely
contested game of hockey. And Marjorie and Lily both played on the team.
As they paused at the door of their sitting-room, Florence Evans, a
member of the old senior patrol of Pansy Troop of Girls Scouts, and now
a freshman at college, came out to meet them. She had run in for news of
the game, and finding the girls away, had decided to await their return.
“Who won?” she demanded, without any ceremony.
“We did!” announced Lily, triumphantly. “Naturally—with such a captain!”
She nodded proudly towards Marjorie.
“Congratulations!” cried Florence, seizing both girls by the hands and
leading them back to the room. “Now—tell me all about it!”
Marjorie had scarcely begun her account of the thrilling match when she
was interrupted by the abrupt entrance of Alice Endicott, another
freshman who had been a Girl Scout of the same troop, looking as if she
carried the most startling news in the world. Naturally vivacious, her
cheeks glowed and her eyes shone with even greater brilliancy than
usual. The girls stopped talking instantly, aware that her excitement
was not due to any event so ordinary as a hockey game.
“Girls!” she flung out. “Guess what?”
“What?” they all demanded at once.
Alice waved an open letter before their eyes.
“The most magnificent thing has happened—”
“To you?” interrupted Florence, who always wanted to be explicit.
“To _us_—all of us—of the senior patrol. A plan for this summer!”
“The scouts aren’t to get together again, are they?” cried Marjorie,
jumping up and going over towards Alice, as if she wanted at a single
glance to learn the contents of that mysterious letter.
“Have you found a baby, or only a boot-legger?” asked Lily, laughingly.
“Because it’s too late to get our tea-house back again, after the
money’s all spent!”
“Neither of those things,” replied Alice. “Only a rich relation.”
“Why the ‘only’?” inquired Florence. “I think that’s almost enough. But
tell us about it. How does it concern us?”
“Just wait till you hear!” laughed Alice, turning to her letter again.
“Well, do let us hear!” begged Lily, impatiently. “We’re waiting.”
Alice seated herself upon the couch and paused a moment before she
started upon her explanation, as if to make the situation more dramatic.
At last she began.
“Of course you know our family are all in modest circumstances, but it
seems that there is this one wealthy relative—an elderly, maiden aunt on
my father’s side. I have never seen her, because she has lived in
California during all of my life, but naturally I had heard of her
before. She never took any interest in us, however, and always said she
was going to leave all of her money to her two nephews whom she is
raising.
“Well, I hardly thought she knew of my existence, when suddenly, out of
a clear sky, I got this letter from her with its thrilling proposition.
She must have learned somewhere of the work we did last summer, and of
our reason for doing it, and she was impressed. She evidently never knew
any Girl Scouts before, or in fact any girls who were interested in
anything so worth while as a sick mother or a tea-house. So, lo and
behold, she writes to me and tells me she wants to make my
acquaintance—and not only mine, but that of the whole patrol!”
“But we can’t go out west, Alice!” interrupted Marjorie, jumping at her
meaning. “We couldn’t possibly afford it.”
“No,” added Florence, “I was thinking of looking for a job for the
summer.”
“Wait till you hear the rest of it!” said Alice. “We won’t need any
money. Aunt Emeline is offering to pay all our expenses, _if we motor
to California_!”
“Motor!” repeated Marjorie. “We girls? By ourselves—?”
“No; we may, in fact, we _must_ have a chaperone.”
“It would be a wonderful thing to do!” exclaimed Florence, contrasting
the pleasures of such a delightful excursion with the routine duties of
an office position, such as she had planned for herself. “But is it
possible?”
“Why not?” demanded Alice. “Lots of girls have done it before—I’ve even
read accounts of their trips in the magazines, telling all about what to
take, and how much it costs.”
“But they are always older girls than we are!” objected Lily.
“Girl Scouts can do anything any other girls can do!” asserted Marjorie
with pride. “I’m sure we could make the trip. Now, tell me again,
please, Alice: just which of us are invited?”
“All the girls who took part in last summer’s work at the tea-house,”
replied Alice. “That means us four, Daisy Gravers, Ethel Todd, Marie
Louise Harris—and—Doris and Mae if they want to.”
““If they want to” is good!” laughed Marjorie. “Imagine those two brides
leaving their husbands for a two months’ trip!”
“Of course you could hardly expect Mae to,” admitted Alice; “she’s quite
too recent a bride. But Doris will have been married a year.”
“But she and Roger are just as spoony as ever!” interrupted Lily. “No,
I’m afraid we can’t count on them. But the other three girls probably
will.”
“To continue,” said Alice: “you know that I told you my aunt is queer—a
little “off” we always considered her. Well, she goes on to add that we
must make the trip inside of six weeks, follow the Lincoln Highway, not
spend more than a certain sum of money she is depositing in my name,
and—the last is worst of all—”
“What?” demanded two or three of the scouts at once.
“We are not to accept help of any men along the way!”
The girls all burst out laughing immediately at the absurdity of such a
suggestion. Yet there was not one among them who doubted that she could
fulfill the conditions.
“And what happens if we do take assistance?” asked Florence, when the
merriment had subsided. “Do we have to pay for our own trip?”
“No, but the guilty girls have to go home,” replied Alice.
“Can’t you just see us dropping one by one ‘by the wayside’” remarked
Lily, “because we accept masculine chivalry. Really, it will be hard—”
“Oh, we can do it!” said Marjorie, with her usual assurance. She put
down her hockey stick and went over to the tea-table to make tea. The
subject was too interesting to allow her guests to depart.
“Tell us more,” urged Florence.
“The best is yet to come,” said Alice, her eyes sparkling with pleasure,
because of the further revelation she was about to make. “There is a
reward at the end!”
“A reward!” repeated Marjorie. “As if the trip itself weren’t enough—”
“Yes, this is the marvellous part. If we fulfill all the conditions, and
reach Aunt Emeline’s house by midnight of August first, each girl is to
receive a brand-new runabout, for her very own!”
“What? What?” demanded all the girls at the same time, unable to believe
their ears.
“Shall we accept the offer?” continued Alice.
“Shall we?” cried Florence. “As if there were any doubt!” She jumped up
and gave Alice an ecstatic little squeeze.
The other girls were just as enthusiastic, and they discussed the affair
from every angle, while they drank Marjorie’s tea and nibbled at some
nabiscoes which Lily produced from her cake box. When they came to the
selection of a chaperone, they were all unanimous in their desire to
have Mrs. Remington.
“But would she leave her husband for such a long time?” asked Lily,
doubtfully.
“It wouldn’t be a question of leaving him,” answered Marjorie. “Because
he has to go to some sort of Boy Scout camp this summer for the months
of July and August—she told me about it in her last letter. So she might
be very glad of the invitation.”
“Then that settles that,” said Alice. “Marj, will you write
immediately?”
“I certainly will, and I’ll write home for permission for myself at the
same time.”
“Marj!” exclaimed Lily, suddenly. “What about the Hadleys? Didn’t you
promise that you’d go to the seashore—?”
Marjorie blushed, remembering the time she had told John Hadley that she
would spend her vacation with him and his mother, and had disappointed
him to go on the ranch. Luckily, however, no definite plans had been
agreed upon as yet for this summer.
“No, thank goodness I didn’t promise,” she replied. “But,” she added
teasingly, “how can you ever exist all that time without seeing Dick
Roberts?”
Her room-mate only laughed good-naturedly at the thrust; she was used to
being taunted about the frequency of this young man’s visits.
“I can get along very well without any young man,” she replied,
boastfully. “I’m not Doris—or Mae Van Horn!”
“Mae Melville, you mean,” corrected Alice, for they all had difficulty
in calling the girl by her new name, of which she had been in possession
only a month. “Wasn’t it funny,” she added, “that Mae caught Doris’s
bouquet at the wedding, and sure enough was the first to get married!
Just as if there were something to the old superstition after all!”
“It was, and it wasn’t, odd,” reasoned Marjorie; “because after all it
was very natural for Doris and Mae to be the first girls married from
our patrol. They didn’t have so much to keep them occupied as we college
girls have—and they had more time to think about such things.”
“Implying,” remarked Florence, “that if you weren’t busy here, you’d be
marrying John Hadley, and Lily, Dick Roberts, and—”
“That will do, Flos!” remonstrated Marjorie. “You don’t have to apply
every generalization personally. But, seriously, it is a fact that
college girls usually marry later in life than those who just stay at
home like Doris.”
“But Mae didn’t stay home! She had a job.”
“Now don’t let’s have an argument on a college girl’s chances versus
those of a business woman!” protested Lily. “And by the way, wasn’t it
too bad that we couldn’t any of us be at Mae’s wedding to see who would
catch the bride’s bouquet! We won’t know who will be the next victim!”
“Maybe we’ll all be old maids,” laughed Marjorie. “At any rate, I don’t
think any of us will be running off soon, since we’re all six in
college. And that reminds me, haven’t we four been mean to go on talking
about this marvellous proposition, and not make any attempt to go get
Daisy—”
“I’ll go for her this instant!” volunteered Alice, jumping immediately
to her feet. “It is a shame—”
She was off in a moment, skipping down the hall like a happy child.
It was not long before she returned with Daisy Gravers, another Girl
Scout of the patrol, and the subject was discussed all over again with a
thoroughness that omitted no details. The girls’ only regret was that
Ethel Todd, a junior at Bryn Mawr, could not be present to hear all
about it.
“I’ll write to her,” said Alice. “Then, if we can all six go—and Mrs.
Remington—”
“And maybe Marie Louise,” put in Daisy.
“We’ll need several cars,” concluded Lily, who always did things
sumptuously.
“Two ought to be enough,” said Florence. “But say, girls, why couldn’t
we leave our planning until Doris’s house-party? Then we’ll all be
together, and will know definitely whether or not we can go.”
“But the boys will be such an interruption!” sighed Lily. “You can’t get
a thing done with them around.”
“Oh, we’ll shut them out of our conferences,” announced Marjorie,
coolly. “We must accustom ourselves to getting along without the
opposite sex if we are to make a success of our trip.”
“And yet it is a pity,” remarked Alice, “after all they did for us last
summer at the tea-house!”
“Yes, maybe if it weren’t for them we wouldn’t have become famous and
received this scrumptious invitation,” surmised Daisy.
“What I can’t understand,” mused Florence, who had been carefully
considering every aspect of the offer, “is why your aunt should want us
to make the trip independent of all masculine assistance. Especially
when, as you say, Alice, she shows such preference for her two nephews.”
“Oh, it’s just an idea of hers—a notion that she’s taken, I suppose,”
replied Alice. “When you’re awfully rich and awfully old, you sometimes
do crazy things just for the novelty of it.”
“My, what a philosopher you are!” joked Florence. “You sound as if you
had been both old and rich!”
“My theory,” put in Marjorie, “is that it has something to do with the
nephews. She has probably boasted of our work last summer, and perhaps
the boys belittled it. So I think this might be a kind of wager.”
“That sounds plausible!” exclaimed Lily. “Well, let’s do all in our
power to make the old lady win.”
“And yet,” interposed Florence, “she may be on the other side, hoping we
don’t live up to the conditions. It would certainly be cheaper for her
if we fell down—”
“Girls, I think you’re all wrong,” said Daisy. “I think she is just a
lovely old lady, who has read about our work, and wants to reward us.
But she thinks we’ll appreciate our cars more if we earn them, and
that’s the reason she put on all these conditions.”
“Come, we’re not getting anywhere!” interrupted Florence, “and the
time’s passing.” A glance at her watch assured her that the supper hour
was imminent.
“Meet here day after tomorrow,” suggested Marjorie, as the girls rose to
take their leave; “and try to have your parents’ permission by then.”
“We’ll have it!” cried two or three of the girls. “We wouldn’t miss this
chance for the world!”