Читать книгу Wyn's Camping Days: or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club - Marlowe Amy Bell - Страница 1

“Oh, girls! such news!” cried Wynifred Mallory, banging open the door of Canoe Lodge, and bringing into the living room a big breath of the cool May air, which drew out of the open fireplace a sudden balloon of smoke, setting the other members of the Go-Ahead Club there assembled coughing.

Grace Hedges, who was acting as fireman that week, turned an exasperated face, with a bar of smut across it, exclaiming:

“If another soul comes in that door and creates a back-draught until this fire gets to burning properly, I certainly shall have hysterics! I never did see such a mean old thing to burn.”

“Never mind, Gracie. We’re all here now–all six of us. There are no more Go-Aheads to come,” observed Bessie Lavine, yawning over her book in the only sunny corner of the room.

“There! it’s burning–finally,” exclaimed Grace, with blended disgust and thankfulness. “I never was cut out for a fireman, girls.”

“Poor Gracie,” purred Wyn, who had approached the blaze that was now beginning to curl through the hickory sticks piled more or less scientifically against the backlog. “Don’t you know it needed just that back-draught to break the deadlock in the chimney and start your fire crackling this way?”

“Bah! it was just hateful,” grumbled Grace. “I hate fire making. And it does seem as though my week for playing fireman comes around twice as often as it should.” Wyn had moved rather too near to the darting flames, and Grace suddenly pulled the captain of the club aside. “Don’t stand so near, Silly!” she cried.

“Fireman! save my che-ild!” wailed “Frank” Cameron, coming forward and winding her long arms around Wynifred. “What’s the news, Wyn, dear? Nobody had the politeness to ask you. Wherefore all the excitement?”

“There must be a strike at the blacksmith shop,” said Percy Havel, a curly-headed blonde girl.

“No!” cried Frank, with a droll twist of her rather homely features. “I’ll wager they’ve laid off one of the hands of the town clock. Business is dreadfully dull. I heard my father say so.”

She was a tall, lanky girl, was Frances Cameron, with a great mass of blue-black hair and flashing black eyes. She was thin, strong, and lacking in those soft curves of budding womanhood which girls of her age usually display. “Straight up and down, my dears,” she often said. “Built upon the most approved clothespin plan, with every bone perfectly–not to say generously–developed.”

“Well,” said Wyn, laughing, “if you girls will give me a chance I will divulge my news.”

“Be still!” commanded Frank. “The oracle speaks.”

“Oh, hurry up, Wyn!” exclaimed Percy, coming nearer the group before the now roaring fire. “I’ve been dying to tell them.”

“Well, girls,” said Wyn, smiling, so that her brown eyes fairly danced. “Mrs. Havel–Percy’s aunt–says she will go.”

“Fine!” exclaimed Frankie.

“You don’t mean it, Wyn?” gasped Mina Everett. “Then we really can go camping?”

“And to Lake Honotonka?” put in Bessie.

“That’s what we aimed to do; wasn’t it?” demanded Wyn, laughing. “And when the Go-Ahead Club starts to do a thing, it usually arrives; doesn’t it?”

“At least, the captain arrives for them,” said Frank, giving Wyn’s arm a little squeeze. “We wouldn’t get far in our ‘go-ahead’ plans if it wasn’t for you, Wynnie.”

“Such flattery!” protested the captain.

“You didn’t have an easy time convincing my mother–I know that,” said Mina, shaking her head. “You know, she’s so afraid of water.”

“And my mother is afraid of high winds,” confessed Bessie. “Wyn had to coax to bring her around.”

“And of course, Gracie’s mother is afraid of fire,” chuckled Frank; “and there you have the three elements. You can plainly see that Gracie knows very little about fire. She never built one in her life until we formed our camping club.”

“Oh, well,” observed Grace, trying to rub the smut off her face with a handkerchief and the aid of a pocket-mirror, “this is about the end of the fire season, thank goodness! If we go into camp after school closes, on Lake Honotonka, there won’t be any fires to build.”

“Oh, won’t there?” cried Bessie. “You just wait. Instead of taking turns at being fireman for the week, as we do through the winter, we’ll draw lots to see who shall build all the fires. And you know very well, Gracie, that you always are unlucky.”

“Sure she is,” agreed Frank. “She always draws the very boobiest of all booby prizes out of the grab-bag.”

“Oh, dear me!” wailed Grace, who was big, and handsome, and not a little lazy, “I do so hate to work, too. If there had been another set of girls I liked at Denton Academy, I’d never have joined the Go-Ahead Club.”

“Right. Gracie is better fitted for a Fall-Behind Club,” observed Wyn.

“But tell us, Wynnie,” begged Mina. “Is it really all arranged? Has everybody agreed that we can go in our canoes to Lake Honotonka?”

“And stay all vacation if we like?” cried Percy.

“That is the understanding,” Wyn assured them. “Percy’s aunt is the very kindest lady who ever was – ”

“Vote we buy her something nice,” interposed Frank.

“That will come in due season,” Wyn continued. “But Mrs. Havel went with me to all our people. She knows all about the place, of course – ”

“So does my father,” interposed Bessie.

“And he wasn’t hard to convince,” Wyn responded. “Of course, there are wild nooks along Honotonka’s shores; but at the upper end is Braisely Park, where all those rich folks live; and there’s the village of Meade’s Forge at this end of the lake. We can get supplies, or a doctor, or send a telephone message, easily enough. And what more does one want–camping out?”

“We’ll have just a lovely time!” sighed Bessie. “I can hardly wait for school to close.”

“A month and a half yet,” said Frank Cameron. “And every day will seem longer than the one that preceded it. But then! when it does come – ”

“Just think of living under canvas–and for weeks and weeks! It almost makes me feel spooky,” declared Grace, beginning to grow enthusiastic.

These girls, all attending Denton Academy and living within the limits of that town, being the daughters of fairly well-to-do parents, had been able to enjoy many advantages as well as pleasures that poorer girls could not have; but none of them had chanced to experience the joys of a vacation in the woods.

During the preceding autumn they had become immensely interested in canoeing. Denton was situated upon the beautiful, winding Wintinooski, and the six members of the Go-Ahead Club had taken several Saturday cruises on the river. But never had they gone as far up the stream as Lake Honotonka.

That was a wide and beautiful sheet of water, thirty-five miles to the west of the town of Denton. Their boy friends had sometimes been allowed to go camping upon the shores of the lake; and their enthusiastic praise of the fun to be had under canvas had set Wynifred Mallory and her chums “just wild,” as Frank Cameron expressed it, to try it too.

Wyn was a girl of determination and physical as well as moral courage. If she made up her mind that a thing was right, and she wanted it, she usually got it.

When the girls first broached their desire to spend the summer at the big lake, and actually live under canvas, not one of their parents encouraged the idea. Because the “Busters,” a certain boys’ club of the girls’ friends, were going to the lake again for the long vacation, made no difference to the mothers and fathers–especially the mothers of Wyn and her chums of the Go-Ahead Club.

“It’s no use,” Bessie Lavine had reported, at their first meeting after the idea was born in Canoe Lodge, as the girls called their novel boathouse overhanging the bank of a quiet pool of the Wintinooski. “Even father won’t hear of it. Six girls going alone into the wilds – ”

“But the Busters and Professor Skillings will be near our camp,” Frank had cried. “That’s what I told mother. But she couldn’t see it.”

Wyn had listened at that meeting to the opinions of all the other girls–and to their hopeless and disappointed complaints as well–and then she had taken the whole burden on her own shoulders.

“Don’t you say another word at home about it, girls–any of you,” she said. “Leave it to me. Our idea of living for the summer in the open is a good one. We’ll come back to school in the fall with ginger and health enough to keep us going like dynamos during the next school year.”

“But you can’t make my mother see that,” wailed Percy. “She only sees the snakes, and mosquitoes, and tramps, and big winds, and drowning, and I don’t know but she visualizes earthquake shocks and volcanoes!”

“Give me a chance,” said Wyn.

“Voted!” Frankie declared. “When Wyn sets out to do a thing we might as well give her her head. She’s like Davy Crockett; and I hope all our folks will come down without being shot, like the historic ’coon.”

And this present declaration of their captain, which had so aroused the Go-Ahead Club, was the result of Wyn Mallory’s exertions.

She had first obtained the interest and cooperation of Percy’s Aunt Evelyn, who was a widowed lady fond of outdoor life herself. Mrs. Havel was to act as chaperone. With this addition to their forces, the girls stood a much better chance to win over their parents to their plan.

And finally Wyn had gained the permission of the most obdurate parent. The cruise of the Go-Ahead Club in their canoes to Lake Honotonka, and their camping for the summer at some available spot along the lake shore, was decided upon.

“And are the Busters going?” asked Frank. “That’s the next important matter.”

“Oh, we can get along without those boys, I guess,” scoffed Bessie.

“Yes, I know. We don’t need ’em. And they are a great nuisance sometimes,” admitted Frank, laughing. “But just the same, we’ll have lots more fun with them around–especially Dave Shepard–eh, Wynnie?”

“I don’t see that you need me to witness the truth of your statement, Frank,” returned Wyn, flushing very prettily, for the girls sometimes teased her about Dave, who was her next-door neighbor. “Of course we want the boys, even if Bess is a man-hater.”

“I guess they’ll go,” Frank said. “They liked it so much last year. And the professor is interested in the geological specimens to be found up that way.”

“Goodness!” exclaimed Mina. “Is Professor Skillings going with them again? He is so odd.”

“He’s very absent-minded,” said Bessie.

Frank began to laugh again. “Say!” she began, “did you hear about what happened to him last week? Father met him coming down Lane Street–you know, it’s narrow and the sidewalk in places is scarcely wide enough for two people to pass comfortably.

“There was poor Professor Skillings hobbling along with one foot continually in the gutter, his eyes fixed on a book he was reading as he walked. Father said to him:

“‘Good morning, Professor! How are you feeling to-day?’

“‘Why–why–why!’ exclaimed the professor–you know his funny way of speaking. ‘Why–why–why–I was very well when I started out, I thought. But I don’t know what’s come over me. Do you know, I’ve developed a pronounced limp since leaving the house!’”

“Well, the boys like him,” Wyn said, when the girls’ laughter had subsided.

“I thought I saw Dave Shepard and that ‘Tubby’ Blaisdell around here when I hurried down from school to light the fire,” remarked Grace.

At that moment a strange, scraping sound was heard right above the girls’ heads. Bess and Mina jumped up.

“What’s that?” cried Grace.

“It’s something on the roof,” declared Wyn.

Now, Canoe Lodge was built on a high bank over the river. One stepped from the level sward into the living room. The roof on one side was a short, sharp pitch; but over the river it ran out in a long, easy slope to shelter the canoe landing.

Suddenly there was a crash, and the very house shook. There was a wheezy shout of alarm, the sound of another voice in wild laughter, and some heavy body slid down the long side of the roof with the noise of an avalanche.

“The Busters!” shrieked Percy, and ran to a window overlooking the river.