“You certainly are taking it easy, considering there’s going to be a dance!” declared Tom. “Usually when anything like that is going to happen you run around like a hen with its head cut off!”

“No reason why I should, this time,” said Winona, laughing. “You Scouts are giving the dance, not we. Though perhaps it’s because my dress is off my mind. You always have to press a frock out and clean your white shoes, and be sure your sash is all right, when you’re wearing anything festive. But thanks to your suggestion about wearing the ceremonial dress, you’ll see ‘ten little Injuns’ walking in to-night, headbands, moccasins and all—and I have nothing to worry about.”

Winona stretched herself out in the Morris-chair and looked provokingly comfortable and unoccupied.

“I heard about it,” said Tom.

Winona flushed.

“What did you hear?”

“About you and your ceremonial dresses. But I guessed, too.”

“Who told you—and what did they tell?” demanded Winona, sitting up and looking ruffled.

“Marie—that all the girls mightn’t have party clothes,” Tom placidly replied.

“Marie hadn’t any business to!” said Winona.

“Well, I guessed the rest. You see, Lonny Hughes is in the Scouts, too, and he—well, he tells me things sometimes. And I know Adelaide felt pretty badly for awhile because she couldn’t keep up with some of you—Edith mostly, I guess. He said he had to fairly bully his sister into joining you girls, even after Nannie’d coaxed her. You certainly were a good sport, Win! You know, there’s just Lonny and Adelaide and a younger sister, and the father. They have one of those little flats over James’s drug-store, in the Williamson Block, and Mr. Hughes doesn’t get an awful lot of salary. Anyway, the kids keep house, and Adelaide has to look after herself all the way round. So she takes this hard, the money end, I mean.”

“I think she’s silly!” said downright Winona.

“Maybe!” said Tom wisely, and went on bestowing loving care on his repeating rifle, the joy of his life.

Winona retired into a book, and Tom, looking up a second later, caught sight of its cover.

“Great Scott!” he ejaculated, eying it. “Where did you get that?”

“Where did she get what?” asked Louise, walking unceremoniously in. “Hello, Tom. Oh, Winnie, I want you to show me about this headband. I can’t get the colors matched right—you know you have to be rather kind to beautiful golden hair like mine. It won’t stand every color there is.”

“No rest for the wicked!” said Winona cheerfully, sitting up and abandoning her book. “You don’t mean you’re going to try to get this done for to-night?”

“I certainly am,” said Louise doggedly.

“All right.” And Winona, pulled up a little table between them. “Here—this is the way.”

The two girls bent over the little loom, their heads close together. Tom, meanwhile, finished cleaning his gun, wrapped it carefully in oiled red flannel, and looked around for more worlds to conquer.

The first thing his eyes lighted on was the paper novel Winona had reluctantly laid down—the one Nataly had loaned her.

“For the love of Mike, where did you get this?”

“Your friend’s sister, next door,” said Winona mischievously. “Don’t you like her taste in books?”

“Crazy about it!” said Tom. “‘Beautiful Coralie’s Doom; or, Answered in Jest,’” he read from the vivid cover. “Say Louise, this hero was a dream. You ought to hear the amount of things he’s called the heroine, and this is only the first chapter!”

“Go ahead,” urged Louise, while Winona tried vainly to get the book away from her brother, “I guess I can bear it!”

“Let’s see. Child, sweetheart, angel, cara-mia, little one—I’ll have to start on the other hand, I’ve used up all my fingers on this one—loved one, petite, schatzchen—wonder what that is? The only thing he’s left out so far is ‘kiddo.’ I suppose we’ll come to that further on. ‘Lancelot looked down at her through his long, superfluous eyelashes,’” Tom went on, reading at the top of his strong young voice. “Those were well-trained eyelashes all right. I’ll bet he hung by ’em every day to get ’em in shape to use so much. I’ve found six sentences about those lashes on one page, and every one the same.”

“You wouldn’t expect him to have a new set every time, would you?” inquired Louise sarcastically.

“It’s a wonder he didn’t have to. One set must have been pretty well worn out by the end of a chapter. ‘Ah, you wicked fellow,’ Coralie said archly,” he went on, sitting down on the floor with the book. Winona made a dive for it, but she wasn’t quick enough. “This wicked part’s what gets me. There’s an average of twenty-five ‘wickeds’ to every chapter, and the poor fellow’s never even forgotten to return an umbrella!”

“Or a book his sister was reading,” suggested Louise.

“And what’s a ‘saucy meow,’ Winona? Coralie did ’em all the time. Can you?”

But here Winona threw herself bodily on him, and this time she managed to recover her book, which she sat on.

“Well, this literature class is very interesting, but my happy home wants me,” said Louise, rising and taking up her loom and the headband, which was in a fair way to be properly finished now. “Thanks, ever so much, Ray of Light. You’re the best girl as ever-ever-was. See you to-night, Tommy.”

“Now, that’s some girl,” said Tom admiringly. “No nonsense about her. Do you want me to take you over, Winnie?”

“That would be awfully nice of you, but we thought we’d ‘attend in a body,’ as the papers say,” answered Winona. “Aren’t you boys going to?”

“Well, you see, there are extra girls,” explained Tom. “There aren’t enough of you Scoutragettes to go round, so we’ve asked some other girls, and we have to go after them. But we’ll get them early, and be there to meet you when you get there.”

“Well, I don’t want to croak.” And Winona arose to go into the kitchen, for that way lay an honor bead, and it was nearly supper-getting time. “But I think the boy who goes after Nataly Lee won’t be drawn up to meet us, unless we kindly hold back the order of march for him.”

“Shouldn’t wonder,” called Tom after her. “Get something good for supper, there’s a useful sister!”

But though there was a slight delay in the order of march, it was Louise Lane, of all unexpected people, who was responsible for it: her headband went wrong after all, she explained when, flushed and panting, she appeared in her other one at the meeting-place.

The girls fell into step and marched, two and two, out into the street up the short block to the school-house, where most of the public affairs in the town were held.

“Oh, isn’t it gorgeous?” whispered Winona irrepressibly as they came steadily and lightly up the centre of the hall, till they faced the Scouts.

These last were drawn up in a military formation, in the order of their seniority, with the Scoutmaster at their head. He was a plump, cheerful, middle-aged man, the father of three of the Scouts, and vice-principal of the High School. But you would never have thought he had seen a class-room, he looked so military and colonel-fied, there at the head of his line of erect, soldierly-looking boys.

“It’s like real receptions!” whispered Helen to Winona, as the orchestra blared out “Hail to the Chief!” which was as near to “Welcome to the Camp Fire Girls” as the orchestra’s resources could come. Then Mrs. Bryan and Mr. Gedney gave the order to break ranks, and the orchestra slid with surprising ease into a Paul Jones. So did the boys and girls.

“We got here first, you see,” whispered Tom to Winona as he crossed her. The round went on for quite a little while before the whistle blew for the breaking up into twos, so Winona was able to question and answer bit by bit as she and her brother met and parted.

“What about the extra girls?” she whispered, for no extra girls were to be seen.

“The fellows are going after them now,” explained Tom. “This was a dance——” Tom had to leave, and finished on the next round, “for the Camp Fire. The others didn’t come first, naturally.”

And sure enough, by the time the first dance was over, the extra boys were back, bringing partners with them—girls Camp Karonya knew, and who were presently going to form a second Camp Fire—for Camp Karonya’s membership list was almost full now. The newcomers had evidently been asked to wear fancy costume, and the effect of the Indian dresses that the Camp Fire Girls wore, and the boys’ military clothes, was lighted up and made more beautiful by the dash of color made by an occasional gypsy or Oriental lady.

The hall had been decorated in a half-military, half-woodland fashion, with tents draped against the walls, crossed rifles, green boughs and lighted lanterns. It was a warm night, so they had filled the big fireplace at the side of the room with boughs. The entrance to the kitchen, where the cooking-classes were held in the school every Friday, was covered by a tent. Behind that tent, the exciting rumor spread, was a real colored caterer who was going to serve refreshments of unparalleled splendor at the proper time.

But at about ten o’clock a frenzied rapping was heard from the place which was supposed to hold the mysterious caterer. It rose above the music. Mr. Gedney hurried to the door to see what had happened. An irate negro appeared—the city caterer who had been imported to lend grandeur to the scene.

“Mr. Gedney,” he said in what he may have thought was a tragic whisper, but which echoed through half the hall, “I’se been a-caperin’ fo’ nineteen yeahs, an’ ah nevah had anything as shockin’ happen to me as dis heah befo’.”

“Why, what’s the matter, Thomas?” Mr. Gedney asked, while the more curious of the dancers marked time gently within earshot.

“Dey done stole mah ’freshments!” wailed the darky, forgetting, in his emotion, to lower his voice. “Ah had de ice-cream an’ de san-wiches an’ de fruit-punch an’ de fancy-cake”—a soft moan went up unconsciously over the room as the hungry dancers heard of these vanished glories—“an’ Ah put dem out on de side poach till Ah wanted dem. Ah didn’t know Ah was comin’ to no thief-town. An dey’s gone!”

Mr. Gedney rose to the occasion nobly.

“We’ll find some of them, Thomas,” he said.

By this time nearly everyone in the room had paused about the door. Mr. Gedney raised his voice. “Ladies,” he said, “if you will excuse your partners for half an hour they will go out on the trail of our—ah—vanished refection. Scouts, attention! By twos, forward—hike!”

In an instant every Scout, with a hasty excuse to his partner, had vanished from the building.

“It’s that Bent Street gang,” hissed Tom to his sister in passing. “We know where they hang out, and where they’re likely to have cached the eats.”

“I only hope there’ll be something left by the time the Scouts find the food,” wailed Louise. “Don’t look so happy, Winnie—it’s insulting!”

“She’s swelling as if she had an idea,” suggested Helen, who had come over. “What is it, Win?”

“So I have!” said Winona, her eyes sparkling as they always did when Great Ideas came her way. She was rather given to them. She ran across to Mrs. Bryan and began to talk to her in an excited whisper.

When she had done Mrs. Bryan nodded.

“Splendid!” she said. “Tell the girls yourself, my dear.”

So Winona stood swiftly out in the middle of the floor, a slim, gallant little figure in her Indian frock and the long strings of scarlet beads she had added to it.

“Girls!” she said. “Those refreshments mayn’t ever come back. The boys won’t be back with them right away, anyhow. Let’s get together and make some more!”

“Good!” called out all the girls at once, and came flocking around Mrs. Bryan and Winona for orders. But Mrs. Bryan wouldn’t give any.

“You manage it, Ray of Light!” said she as Winona turned to her.

“We want sandwiches and fruit punch and cakes, and—we can’t get ice-cream this late at night,” she remembered.

“We can get oysters,” said Helen’s competent voice from behind a group of girls. “That oyster house down on Front Street is always open till twelve.”

“Then we can make creamed oysters—good!” said Winona. “Let’s see—sixteen couples—about fifty sandwiches, if you count three to a person. Six loaves of bread, about. Marie, you belong to a big family—do you think you have any bread in the house your family could part with?”

“Three loaves, anyway,” said Marie.

“I’ll bring the other three,” spoke up Elizabeth Greene, one of the new members.

They both threw on their wraps and hurried out. Fortunately, most of the girls lived close by.

“We’ll send Thomas for the oysters,” suggested Mrs. Bryan next. “None of you want to go to Front Street this time of night.”

She produced her purse from the pocket of her ceremonial dress, and went to send Thomas for the oysters.

“Has anybody got anything in their house to fill sandwiches with?” Winona went on.

“We have two pounds of dates,” offered Edith Hillis, “and some rolls of cream cheese.”

“And I have the other half of both sketches, peanut butter and lettuces,” called out Louise, “three heads, and two big glasses.”

“All right, go get ’em,” said Winona unceremoniously, and two more sisters of the Camp Fire hurried on their wraps and fled out into the night.

“I have milk and butter, myself,” went on Winona.

“Nannie,” hinted Helen to Mrs. Bryan, who had returned, “do you remember those three big layer cakes you made for the Presbyterian fair? I’ll make them over again if I can have them now.”

“No you won’t, my child, because they’re my contribution,” returned her step-mother briskly. “Thank you for reminding me. I’ll get them, and pineapples and lemons for your contribution to the lemonade.”

Dorothy remembered that she had some oranges and bananas, and Adelaide finally recalled to the rest that creamed oysters need thickening, and went after flour and salt and pepper.

A couple of the other girls had candy at home, beautifully fresh and home-made. In fifteen minutes every girl was back laden down, and all of them invaded the little school kitchen. Fortunately most of the sixteen had taken cooking lessons there, and knew just where to find everything, even to their own aprons. So there was no time lost searching for matches and knives and bowls, and other such necessaries.

One group of four cut and squeezed and sliced fruit for the fruit-punch—or fruit-lemonade, to give it the only name it was really entitled to. Another set prepared the sandwiches, which, what with pitting and chopping the dates for the date-and-peanut-butter ones, and cutting and spreading six big loaves of bread, was quite an undertaking. Another group handled the creamed oysters. This last wasn’t exactly a group, though, because, try as you may, it is impossible for more than two people to make one cream gravy, or white sauce. The rest cut cake and arranged plates and looked after the serving generally.

Thomas the “caperer” sat in a corner and “shucked oysters,” as he called it, with his two attendant waiters standing statue-like behind him. It made a very impressive, if rather useless group.

Mrs. Bryan lent a helping hand here and there as it was needed, but in the main she left the guidance of the affair to Winona’s generalship.

“Why, I didn’t know how easy it was to have people do things!” Winona whispered to the Guardian, when that lady came over to her once to advise a little more butter in the gravy.

“You happen to have executive ability, that’s all,” explained Mrs. Bryan.

Winona laughed. “Oh, it doesn’t take executive ability when people want to help!” she returned gayly.

The boys got back in just forty-five minutes, with rather dirtier uniforms than they had taken away. They were panting, also, and had a general cheerful air of having had something happen. But with them they bore, triumphantly, the untouched freezer, full of beautiful molds of ice-cream; also a large pasteboard box full of untouched, but rather crumpled-looking, fancy cakes.

The sandwiches, they explained regretfully, were beyond recall, and so was the salad. The Bent Street gang had been just about to begin their last course when the Scouts descended.

“We had a bully time!” said Billy Lee to Winona, who emerged from the kitchen, trying hard to look unoccupied, as did all the rest of the girls. “We didn’t expect a lark like that in the middle of this. But it’s hard on you girls to miss half the refreshments!”

“Don’t worry,” said Winona cheerfully. “We aren’t going to miss any of the refreshments, and neither are you! What do you think Camp Fire Girls are good for?”

“Lots!” said Billy honestly, “but I don’t see——”

“That’s because you aren’t looking,” laughed Winona.

She pointed towards the little tent that draped the kitchen door. From out that tent issued haughtily Thomas’s two negro waiters, each bearing a steaming, creamed-oyster-laden tray.

“You’d better sit down,” suggested Winona, “Everybody else has.”

“Well, this is great!” cried Billy enthusiastically, between bites of creamed oysters and sandwiches, and sips of fruit lemonade that was really better than that the Bent Street gang had stolen. “You don’t mean to say you girls did all this right off the bat, while we were hunting the hoodlums, do you?”

“Why, of course we did,” and Winona dimpled with pleasure. “There were such a lot of us that it wasn’t hard at all.”

“Anyhow, whoever managed it was a mighty clever person,” said Billy, meditatively eating his last oyster. “Don’t you think so?”

This happened to be a rather embarrassing question.

“Why, no!” she said thoughtlessly.

“Then it was you!” said Billy, jumping cleverly to his conclusion.

“We all helped,” said Winona, blushing. “Everybody brought something. I only thought of it first—that was easy.”

“Easy if you know how!” said Billy skeptically.

“Winona knew how,” asserted Helen’s voice behind them. She began to talk to Winona and Billy very earnestly about several things that didn’t seem to have much to do with life in general. They had to turn half round to face her, which was what she wanted, for it prevented Winona from seeing that all the members of the Camp Fire were clustered near her place. The first she knew of it was Mrs. Bryan’s voice saying:

“All together, girls—a cheer for Ray of Light, who saved the refreshments!”

The girls’ voices rang out in the triple cheer for Winona, who blushed harder than ever.

“I didn’t do anything but suggest it!” she explained uselessly. Then she remembered her manners and sprang up.

“Thank you, Sisters of the Camp Fire—even if I don’t deserve it!” she said gayly.

Then the band started up and dancing went on.

The evening ended with a riotous Virginia reel (which, by the way, meant an honor bead for every girl, because the boys none of them knew much about reeling, and had to be shown) and a final ringing cheer for the Camp Fire Girls by the Scouts. Then the party broke up. Though broke up is hardly the word, for the girls marched out, as they had come, in a body, with a military file of Scouts on either side of them. Altogether it certainly was the most festive of parties, and everybody thought so even next morning, when the mournful things about a party are apt to occur to you.

The Scouts insisted, by the way, on replacing the various things that had been taken out of various pantries. The girls had intended to pay their families scrupulously back, but the Scouts extracted an exact account of the commandeered supplies from their sisters and cousins. Then they saw to it that everything, from the last loaf of bread to the last peanut, was redelivered by four next day. And so ended “the very best party,” as everybody agreed, “that we ever had.”