Next morning by eight Camp Karonya was up and eating a large breakfast. The girls sang a cheer to Mrs. Norris when they were done, and formed for their march again. Most of them had brought enough food for two lunches, but Mrs. Norris could not be brought to think so, and insisted on piling up provisions enough for a regiment. They compromised, on several slices of roast lamb apiece, and enough bread and butter to go around and leave some over.

Winona slipped into the little general store near the farmhouse, and bargained for some more cans of evaporated milk for her under-mascot, the kitten. It was travelling in Florence’s knapsack to-day, and Florence’s things were distributed between Winona and two of the other girls. It proved to be a very frisky kitten by nature, now that its fears of being hungry and homeless were gone. Winona had to sew its bandage on again at noon.

“I don’t know how it is,” she said perplexedly. “It’s certainly a fatter kitten, and yet its bandage is too big!”

“Poor thing! Take it off altogether!” advised Helen. “Pussy will get well just as soon without it.”

So they ripped off the bandage, and the kitten seemed very grateful. Its hurt looked like scarcely more than a scratch now.

“If she’s going to be a camp mascot she ought to have a name,” suggested Florence.

Winona laughed. “I’m going to call her Hike,” she said. “She was hiking when we met her, poor pussy, and so were we.”

So Hike the Camp Cat she became. And—to anticipate—when she had been living on evaporated cream and other luxuries a few days, she turned into a plump and handsome Maltese kitten with charming manners.

The girls arrived at their camping-place at about five that day. The big limousine that belonged to Helen’s father, and the big electric delivery wagon which Louise’s father had contributed, stood waiting for them on the road nearest the clearing in the woods, where they were to make their camp.

“Do you mean to say we’re going to eat all that?” asked Edith Hillis helplessly, as she caught sight of the piled provisions in the delivery wagon.

“Well, we shan’t have to eat the tents and cots in the limousine,” said Winona. “At least, I hope not. But I think we will manage the rest. I was on the committee that figured out how much we would want for three weeks of camping, and I’m sure there’s no more here than we ordered.”

“I have the list,” said Helen.

“Then check the things off, dear, as the men lift them out,” said Mrs. Bryan.

So Helen read from her list as the barrels and boxes were carried away, and the girls listened in awe, for this is what she read:

Oneandahalfbarrelsofflour.
Fifteenpoundsshortening.

(“It’s a special kind,” explained Helen. “You can use it for cakes, as well as frying and other things.”)

Fifteenpoundsrice.
Fifteenpoundsbeans.
Fivepoundsbaking-powder.
Threesidesofbacon.
Sixty-fivepoundsofsugar.
Tenpoundsofcocoa.
Caseandahalfofevaporatedmilk.

(“And the extra cans Winnie bought to support the cat on,” interrupted Louise. “We can steal those if the worst comes to the worst.”)

Twobarrelsofpotatoes.
Sixjugsofmolasses.
Onedozencanseachpeasandcorn.
Eightpoundsofsaltpork.

“All present and accounted for,” said Mrs. Bryan, as the men who had been loaned with the wagon rolled the barrels and carried the boxes off to a little tarred shack near the spring. “We’ll have to buy butter and eggs and fresh fruit and vegetables as we go along. They’ll keep in the spring, for it seems to be ice-cold.”

“And did just things to eat for us cost all that beautiful eighty dollars we made at all the cake-sales?” asked Florence indignantly. She had helped make fudge for those sales, and she felt as if they had been her personal venture.

“It came to about fifty-five dollars, wholesale,” said Helen, looking down at the itemized list she held. “We figured out that the other thirty dollars would just about keep us in the green things and dairy things we had to have. The corn and peas are in case we’re weatherbound and can’t get fresh vegetables.”

“And how long did you say we could live on that perfect mountain of food?” inquired Nataly Lee’s mournful voice from where she was lying on the grass with her knapsack under her head.

“Three weeks, no more,” said Helen briskly. “If we want to stay we shall have to earn more money.”

“I think we could,” mused Winona thoughtfully.

“But what about the tents?” asked Elizabeth curiously. She was a quiet, competent little thing. “I don’t see where the money for them comes in.”

“That’s the most splendid thing of all,” smiled Mrs. Bryan, as the men began to slide ten dusty-looking tents out of the wagon. “Mr. Gedney, the Scoutmaster, called up Mr. Bryan just before I was going shopping for tents, and told me about these in case we wanted them. They belonged to the National Guard, and the State had condemned them, because they were shabbier than some politician or other liked them to be. So the Scouts were offered them at a ridiculously low price, if they would only take enough. Rather than let such a bargain go by the Scouts took them all, though there were more than they needed. And Mr. Gedney says we may use these, and needn’t pay for them till next winter.”

The girls agreed that it certainly was luck, and followed on down to see the tents put up—ten little brown tents in a row, with two cots and a box-dressing-table in each.

“You’ll have to stow your clothes underneath the cots,” explained Mrs. Bryan. “And I expect each of you to learn how to put up and take down her own tent.”

“Beads!” exploded Louise.

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Bryan.

“We only have extra under-things,” said Marie, “and one dress-up frock apiece, besides our camp clothes and ceremonial dresses. We don’t need much room.”

By the time the tents had been assigned and the cots made up, supper was ready, and Mrs. Bryan summoned them to it by blowing a clear little whistle she wore. The girls had expected to turn to and get their own supper. So they were very much surprised to find Mrs. Bryan’s black maid Grace, and Mrs. Hunter’s Jenny smiling behind the long trestles in the mess-tent, setting steaming dishes up and down the table.

“This is a special treat,” explained Mrs. Bryan. “We’re all tired to-night, and we hadn’t time to do any cooking ourselves anyway, so I let Grace and Jenny do it. But to-morrow morning camp life begins. We’ll draw lots for assignment to duties, after supper.”

The girls stood up behind their seats for a moment and said grace, then sat down, and ate as if they had never seen food before. It was a very civilized meal, soup, roasts and dessert, all sent over by the mothers in the tonneau of the Bryan car, as the cooks and the provisions had been. It tasted good, but everyone looked forward with joy to real camp cooking.

“Wait till you see how I can broil venison steak,” threatened Louise, as she ate a very large helping of despised roast beef from a mere unromantic cow.

“Where’ll you get the venison? Pick it?” called back Winona from the other side of the table.

“No, she’s going to grow it!” said Elizabeth.

“Nothing of the kind!” said Louise cheerfully. “All you do is to go out with a gun, and stalk till you find a magnificent moose feeding peacefully among the underbrush.”

“Suppose there isn’t any underbrush?” inquired Edith’s languid voice from the table’s other end.

“Then you carry some out with you and scatter it around for the deer to eat out of,” said Louise undisturbed. “Don’t interrupt the lesson on natural history, please. You stand, moved by the beauty of the sight, for a long time. Then, recalled to yourself by the thought of the seven starving little Blue Birds at home, you draw your revolver to your shoulder and are about to fire.”

“Sure it’s a revolver?” asked Winona skeptically.

“Well, your pistol, then—they’re all the same thing. Just then the moose lifts his head and looks at you mournfully out of his large, deer-like eyes. You almost relent. But you nerve yourself and fire—one crashing shot between the eyes. Then you throw the moose across your shoulders and carry it home—and there’s your venison steak.”

“It sounds more like a venison mis-steak to me,” said Winona. “I suppose you’re going hunting to-morrow morning, Louise?”

But Louise had just arrived at her dessert.

“I scorn to reply,” was all she said as she retired into her ice-cream.

After supper the girls lay about on the grass, while Winona and Marie and Mrs. Bryan put slips of paper in a double boiler. The girls drew lots to decide which should be camp cooks and camp orderlies for the first week: four for the cooking, four for buying provisions and policing the camp, and four for the dish-washing and preparing vegetables.

“That leaves one girl over,” spoke up Adelaide, sitting up under a tree.

Mrs. Bryan shook her head. “No,” she said, “it doesn’t, because somebody has to look after the Blue Birds every week. I’m going to appoint Marie Hunter, because she hasn’t any small sisters, and it won’t be such an old story to her to look after little girls. So there are just enough people to go around. Rise up and draw lots out of the boiler, girls!”

“I’d rather wash every dish in camp than chaperon the infants!” said Louise aside; and drew a slip marked “Dish-Washing” on the spot. “If I got all my wishes as quickly as that, how nice it would be!” she sighed, and lay down with her arm around little Bessie. Louise had not a passion for washing dishes.

Then Adelaide drew a cooking slip. So did Winona and Elizabeth and Lilian Brown, one of the girls who had joined later. Anna Morris, Dorothy Gray and Edith Hillis drew the other dish-washing slips and Helen Bryan, Nataly Lee, Gladys Williams and the other Brown sister, Gertrude, were assigned the police and provision duty. At the end of the week everybody was to shift to something else.

“It seems to me the camp orderlies have the best of it,” said Helen, yawning. “What do we do, Nannie?”

“You see that everyone remembers to make up her bed in the morning, you sweep out the camp, carry water from the spring. You have to see, too, that the camp is kept in fruit and vegetables—in other words, walk to a farmhouse about a mile away every other day to buy provisions. We mustn’t break into our canned goods except in an emergency. You are really the people who are responsible for the camp’s running smoothly.”

“Carry water!” said Nataly with a gasp. “Won’t we get our clothes wet?”

“Wear a waterproof, love,” said Louise. “I’m going to ask to have Nataly assigned to bring me all my water for dishes,” she whispered to Winona, beside her. “I’m sure it will have an elevating effect on her character.”

“Oh, don’t, Louise!” whispered Winona back. “Suppose you’d spent your young life on a sofa, reading ‘Beautiful Coralie’s Doom,’ you wouldn’t feel able to carry water either!”

“Then I wouldn’t go Camp Firing,” said Louise conclusively.

Next morning the camp cooks were up at six. Breakfast was to be at seven-thirty, but the girls were so afraid of being too late that they devised an elaborate system of strings, whereby the earliest awake was to jerk her strings, and wake all the others. Winona, Lilian Brown and Elizabeth were on the ground by a quarter past six, but, although they had all jerked their strings faithfully, no Adelaide appeared. Finally they descended in a body on the tent which held Adelaide and her little sister Frances.

“Well, would you look at that!” said Winona in an indignant whisper.

The other girls cautiously lifted the tent-flap and stuck in their heads.

Frances slept placidly on one cot, her little freckled face half buried in the pillow. On the other, quite as fast asleep, lay Adelaide—and there was not a string tied to her anywhere!

“Well, if that isn’t the limit!” said Elizabeth and Lilian in one breath, and Elizabeth reached down to the pail of water which the orderlies had faithfully set outside each tent door before they went to bed. She tilted the cold water on her handkerchief, and dropped it wetly on Adelaide’s face. It wasn’t a wet sponge, but it did nearly as well, as an awakener.

“What—where—nonsense, Lonny, don’t!” said Adelaide, waving her arms, and finally sitting up.

“It isn’t Lonny; it’s us,” said Winona coldly, “and why on earth did you untie the strings, when all the rest of us had them to get up by?”

Adelaide looked ashamed.

“I couldn’t sleep all tied up that way,” she confessed. “I felt like a spider or a fly or something. So I tied them on the cot. But I thought when you pulled them the cot would jar, and wake me!”

“It might have,” said Winona, “if you’d tied them on your own cot!”

Adelaide, looking in the direction of Winona’s pointing finger, found out why she had not wakened. In her sleepiness the night before, she had fastened her strings to a large twig that grew out of the ground beside her bed!

“I ought to be drowned!” said Adelaide ashamedly. “But if you girls will wait till I get bathed and dressed, I’ll wash all the dishes to pay for this!”

“You won’t do any such thing,” said the others.

So they sat sociably outside Adelaide’s tent till she was dressed and joined them. Then they started out valiantly for the cooking-place.

When they reached it a very cheering surprise awaited them, for there was Mrs. Bryan seated on a pile of kindling, with a box of matches on her lap and a pleasant smile on her face.

“I thought you mightn’t know just where to begin,” she said, “so I thought I’d come help, this first morning. The first thing is the fire. Do any of you know how to make a cooking-fire in the open?”

Adelaide didn’t, neither did Elizabeth. Winona thought she knew, but wasn’t sure, and Lilian had once seen it done, but had forgotten how.

“I’d better show you all, then,” said their Guardian briskly. “The first thing you do is to get together two big green logs that won’t burn. Roll them together so they form a big V.”

“Logs that won’t burn! What a queer beginning!” said Winona, whose idea of building a fire was heaping a bonfire up with sticks till it flamed high.

But they tugged and pushed till they had a couple of newly-felled trees at angles to each other, in a hollow place protected from the wind.

“Now, you build your fire inside that V,” explained Mrs. Bryan, “and, you see, you can put the cocoa-pan up at the beginning of the crotch, and the portable oven and the frying-pan down where the division is wider.”

“Simple as anything,” said Winona, “once you know how.”

And they scattered to find wood. The sticks lay about in plenty—later they were hard to find without going into the woods which encircled the camping-place—and Mrs. Bryan showed them how to commence a fire by laying small pieces of brushwood criss-cross at the bottom, and piling on heavier wood till all was aflame. Presently they had a solid, roaring fire. They sat back and let it burn down to coals. By then they had the flour-barrel opened, the bacon sliced, and the water ready to put on the cocoa. Winona made biscuits, it seemed to her, in mountains, while Elizabeth got out the butter and knives and forks, and set the table.

“You can’t cut out biscuits enough for twenty people with a cutter, child!” advised Mrs. Bryan.

“Just take the butcher-knife, and cut the whole mass of dough into squares, after you’ve laid it on the floured floors of the oven!”

But the bacon had to be sliced, and this took longer; and Adelaide’s job, looking after the cocoa, proved nerve-racking, because cocoa will burn at the slightest chance. But everything came right, and by the time the other girls were astir their breakfast was awaiting them, piping hot; crispy bacon, hot biscuits and butter, with jam they had made themselves, and cocoa.

“Jam’s an extra,” Mrs. Bryan warned them. “It happened to be left over from the sales, so I brought it. You’ll have to go to work and make some more out of berries you pick.”

After breakfast, Marie, the keeper of the Blue Birds’ Nest, said that she was going to put two Blue Birds to work at each of the camp shifts, and leave the odd one to be Mrs. Bryan’s personal Bird and attendant. Mrs. Bryan was to choose her attendant, who was to run her errands for her and help her generally. But she refused to do it.

“I like them all so much,” she said, “that I can’t pick out a special one.”

So they counted out for the honor, and the choice for the first week fell on little Lucy Hillis. The others, as far as it could be done, worked with their own sisters.

After breakfast, while the dish-washing brigade wrestled with the cups, plates and spoons that twenty people leave behind them, the cooks held a council. They decided that it would be easier if two girls got each meal in turn: Winona and Adelaide the dinner, Elizabeth and Lilian the supper, and so on. The camp police divided off the same way, and so, eventually, did the dish-washers. Helen, who had the Camp funds in her charge, talked with the girls who were going to market that day. There was twenty-five dollars for three weeks of camp, she explained, and she thought that the safest way would be to allow so much a day, which gave them about a dollar twenty a day to spend. They thought so, too, and presently Nataly and Helen went off in search of the farmhouse which had promised to keep them supplied with perishable provisions.

Winona and Adelaide, freed of any further duties till supper-time, went off exploring. It was a perfect day, bright and breezy and not too hot. Winona half-danced along, singing under her breath. The sun glinted on her pretty hair and lighted up her blue eyes. Adelaide looked at her wistfully.

“I do wish I were you!” she said abruptly.

Winona looked at her in surprise. “Wish you were me? Why, on earth?” she asked. “Isn’t it just as nice to be you?”

Adelaide shook her head. “I don’t like it much!” she said rebelliously.

“Why not?” asked Winona.

Adelaide shrugged her shoulders.

Winona slipped her arm about her, and pulled her down on a comfortable looking log.

“Let’s sit down and talk about it,” said she cheerfully.