The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods Part 8

Two hours later they reached camp, and Hinpoha began calling around for Migwan, but there was no sign of her. "Are you sure she isn't hiding about the camp to surprise us?" asked Hinpoha hopefully. Sahwah seized the bugle and blew the call which meant, "Come at once, no matter what you are doing," but there was no answer. Thoroughly frightened, they started back on the trail, meeting Nyoda and Medmangi just coming in. At the story of Migwan's disappearance Nyoda immediately planned a search.

But first of all she insisted on the girls eating their supper.

Then she reminded them that they had walked fifteen miles that day and most of them needed rest. Hinpoha stoutly maintained that she was as fresh as a May morning and declared she would walk all night to find Migwan. "What if she never comes back!"

she wailed. Her knees gave way under her at the thought and she sank down at Nyoda's feet, her head on her arms.

"Of course she'll come back," said Nyoda confidently, but her heart was like water within her. These girls were all in her charge for the summer and she was responsible for their welfare.

What had become of Migwan? The party that finally started out were Nyoda, Hinpoha, Sahwah and the man who had watched the camp while the girls were away, who drove his wagon along the roadway and let the girls ride in turn. They explored the woods back to where the two paths emerged from the thicket, calling and searching with lanterns. All to no purpose. They went over every inch of the path down which Migwan had disappeared. Now Migwan, in coming through, had strayed off the path, which was very hard to follow, and the place where she had gone over the edge was at least twenty feet from the true path. The searchers therefore did not find the evidence of her fall, and as the time when they stood there and called to her corresponded with the time when Migwan lay in a dead faint, she made no response, and they pa.s.sed on.

The night wore on and the searchers grew more and more alarmed.

Hinpoha dissolved in tears and declared she just couldn't live without Migwan. Nyoda tried to comfort her with all sorts of cheering possibilities, but her own heart was troubled and anxious. They retraced their route back to the place where they had camped the night before, but found nothing. Then, discouraged and panic-stricken, they began to retrace their steps to camp.

Morning light brought a new disclosure. Not only had they lost Migwan somewhere in the great woods, but they themselves were completely off the trail of the day before. At one of the dim cross-roads they had made a misturn, and were now wandering around without the slightest notion of where they were going.

"Well, I'll be jiggered," said the man with the wagon. "I thought I knew these here woods pretty well, but I'm blamed if I know where we are now. Everything looks turned around; I'd swear now, that that was the west over there, yet there is the sun a-risin'

as big as life. I'm plumb addled!"

They advanced uncertainly, looking closely for the red-marked trees of the hike. "This road looks as if it went somewhere,"

said Hinpoha. They stuck to the road for a while but soon saw a sign board reading, "Cambridge, 7 miles." Cambridge was a town lying exactly in the opposite direction from Loon Lake.

Bewildered, they turned back and Hinpoha left the main road and followed a narrow path that led into the woods. Wearily Nyoda walked after her. She was at her wits' end.

"It's no use, Hinpoha," she said sadly. "This path isn't any better than the road. We never went through this gully on the hike."

"Still, it might lead to one we know," answered Hinpoha, and they kept on. The path seemed endless, and was hard to walk in, for it was on the side of a hill.

"Let's turn back," pleaded Nyoda. "We're only wasting our strength without getting anywhere."

"Maybe we had better," answered Hinpoha in a discouraged tone.

Just then the path turned sharply, and as they rounded the corner they came upon a figure sitting in the long gra.s.s. "Migwan!"

cried Nyoda, and stood as if petrified. Hinpoha pointed her finger and tried to sing "O'ertaken," but burst into tears instead and fell on Migwan's neck. Explanations were soon made and Migwan was carried to the wagon to be petted and fussed over as if she had been lost for a year.

So, wearied but triumphant, the hunting party returned to camp with the trophy of the chase.

CHAPTER V.

IN WHICH A FILM TELLS A TALE.

It was the end of the swimming period and Nyoda was thoroughly exhausted. She had been giving Gladys her first swimming lesson.

It had taken a week to coax the girl into the water at all and nearly another one to get her in over her knees. She showed a perfectly unreasoning terror of the water. In vain did Sahwah dive off the tower and come up safe and sound; in vain did Hinpoha demonstrate how impossible it was to sink if you relaxed.

Gladys doubled up in a tense knot and grew sick with fear, regardless of Nyoda's supporting hand. Finally Nyoda took her farther up the beach, away from the other girls. "Now, Gladys,"

she said rea.s.suringly, "do you believe, down deep in your heart, that I would let go of you and let you drown?"

"No," said Gladys.

"Then," said Nyoda, "you come along and let me hold you up while you float." Gladys swallowed hard and stiffened out like a crowbar; then as a wavelet washed over her face she clutched wildly at Nyoda and put her feet on solid bottom. And so she went on. With inexhaustible patience Nyoda tried again and again to get her to lie out flat on the water, but was compelled to admit at the end of the hour that she had made no progress whatever, for Gladys had not made the slightest effort to control either her muscles or her fears. Nyoda sympathized with her great fear of the water, for she realized that it was a very real thing; but she was disappointed that she had not tried to conquer it.

Her first impression of Gladys bad been borne out by later events. She was vain and silly and shallow; she lacked the good sportsmans.h.i.+p which made the rest of the Winnebagos such successful campers. Of team work she had no idea at all. She wanted to order her day to suit herself, and put on an injured air if one of the girls declined to help her make a stencil when it was time to clean up the tent for inspection. Her corner of the tent was never in order, and as a result the Omegas were getting low marks in inspection, much to their disgust, for the rivalry between the two tents was very keen. Gladys had officially joined the Winnebagos, having come into the group at the last Council Fire as Kamama the b.u.t.terfly. The very name she chose was an ill.u.s.tration of her character. She had no higher ambition than to be a society b.u.t.terfly. Nyoda sighed, but she knew Gladys was not to blame, for she had been brought up in an artificial atmosphere of fas.h.i.+on and sn.o.bbery.

Nyoda saw at once that in order to get the most good out of camp Gladys must be on the same basis as the other girls, so she defined their relative positions clearly at the beginning.

Gladys's father owned the camp, so they were in a measure her guests; therefore, Nyoda would not let her pay a share of the provisions, thus evening things up. Gladys had now been in camp nearly two weeks, but she had not entered heart and soul into the life as the others had. And it was not because they had left her out of things--every girl had gone out of her way to make her feel at home. The fault was clearly Gladys's own.

Nyoda was thinking about all these things when her reverie was interrupted by the sound of an automobile horn, and in a few moments a man came down the path from the road. He approached her and introduced himself as Mr. Bailey. He was a private detective, he said, and was trying to locate a child that had strayed or been kidnapped from a family on the other end of the lake. He was visiting all the camps to see if any one had seen the child. Nyoda shook her head. "We haven't seen any child around here," she said. "Was it a girl or a boy?"

"A boy," answered Mr. Bailey, "three years old; at the time of his disappearance he wore a white sailor suit and hat."

"When did he disappear?" asked Nyoda.

"Last Thursday night."

"We were just coming home from a hiking trip then and had lost one of our own girls and weren't paying much attention to anything else," said Nyoda, "but I'll ask the girls who were in camp while we were looking for Migwan." She blew the bugle and called the girls together and when they had come she introduced Mr. Bailey and asked if they had seen anything of the little boy.

At the mention of a boy in a white sailor suit Migwan p.r.i.c.ked up her ears. "Why, I saw him when I was lying in the woods waiting for the girls to come for me. There were two men with him, one carrying him. I spoke to them and asked them to send somebody after me. They said they were hurrying to catch the boat."

"What boat?" asked the detective.

"It must have been the _Bluebird_,--the Loon Lake boat--for they were going in the direction of Loon Lake."

"Can you describe the men?" asked Mr. Bailey. Migwan tilted back her head and squinted her eyes in an effort to bring back the picture. "One was tall and had a black mustache. He was the one who carried the boy. The other was shorter and smooth-faced,"

she said.

"Could you swear to that description?" asked the detective.

Migwan suddenly clapped her hands. "I can do better than that,"

she said. "I can show a picture of them. The little boy looked so cute I snapped them."

"You have this picture?" said the detective eagerly.

"The film isn't developed yet," answered Migwan.

"How soon can you have it developed?" asked Mr. Bailey.

"We'll do it right away," said Nyoda. "We have a dark room rigged up." Nyoda took every precaution to guard against spoiling the film, and Hinpoha, who was in the dark room with her, hardly dared breathe for fear of working some harm. What an exciting moment it was when the figures finally stood out plainly on the film! The girls crowded around the detective as he held the picture to the light. There were the two men and the little boy just as Migwan had described them.

"What will you take for this film?" asked the detective.

"Take for it!" said Migwan. "You're perfectly welcome to it.

I'm only too glad to help if the picture will be of any benefit."

"Migwan's a heroine!" sighed Sahwah after the detective had departed. "I wish I had a chance to do something big and n.o.ble!

The only time I can be heroic is in my sleep, and then I make myself ridiculous."

"Cheer up, Sahwah," said Hinpoha, "I can't even be heroic in my sleep. Come on, I'll beat you a game of tennis." And off went the two cronies, arm in arm.

Gladys came and sat beside Migwan, who was spending her convalescent days in a steamer chair on the porch of the shack, where she could watch the girls in the lake and be with them during Craft hour. Nyoda had summoned a doctor from the village who proclaimed Migwan's dislocation a slight one and her prompt setting of it a good thing, and promised that in a few weeks it would be as good as ever. Meanwhile, however, she had to keep off her feet, and the enforced rest bothered her more than the pain did at first. She read a good deal, however, and did much Craft work, and the days went by somehow.

"What are you doing?" asked Gladys.

"Making a woodblock," said Migwan.

"What's it for?"