CHAPTER XVIII THE WOODCHOPPERS

Under the willows, almost hidden in the vine-like foliage, they found the small motor boat that Orilla was in the habit of using. It was not her own, but belonged to a summer place that had not been opened for a few years past, and the owners were allowing Orilla to use the boat in return for some small care she gave to special plants upon the grounds and surroundings.

“That’s the boat, all right,” Gar announced, as he shoved alongside. “And just look at the—timber!”

The timber consisted of small trees, newly cut into pole lengths and placed into the launch, evidently ready to be carried off.

“That’s queer,” remarked Dell. “What can she want those for?”

“Not for wood,” Nancy replied. “That201 would stay green all winter. But let’s hurry and hunt. Shall we call now?”

“Here’s their path,” replied Gar, instead of answering. “See how fresh the broken weeds are. Let’s follow this a—ways.”

Nancy’s heart was fairly jumping with excitement. She did not want to guess at how they might find Rosa; whether she would be lying sick in that dark, damp woods, or—

“Hello there!” came a sharp call. “Meet Miss Robinson Crusoe—”

“Rosa!” exclaimed Nancy. “Oh, Rosa!” She couldn’t seem to say anything else just then, the sight of Rosa was such a relief.

“Rosalind Fernell!” was Dell’s emphatic greeting.

“Runaway Rosie,” chuckled Gar, his stout stick beating viciously at the greenery that choked the little pathway.

By this time Rosa was in full view, and the searchers beheld her lugging great bundles of young saplings, her arms scratched and torn from her efforts to carry more of the poles than she could properly manage.

202 “Why the woodyard?” asked Gar, laconically.

“They’re for Orilla—”

“Any objections?” demanded the girl just spoken of. She also was now visible, having come through a mass of clotted hazel nut trees, and she too looked like a picture from some foreign land, where women do all the chores.

“Yes, we have objections, Orilla Rigney,” spoke up Dell, sharply, “and you ought to know well enough what they are.”

“Let’s help them load their boat,” interposed Nancy, fearful that the unpleasant discussion would develop into something more serious. “Here, Rosa, I’ll take some of those—”

“Do—please,” murmured Rosa, her voice now betraying what Nancy feared—exhaustion. “I’m almost dead,” she whispered, as the defiant Orilla made her way down to the boat. “I was never so frightened in—my life!”

“Neither was I,” returned Nancy. “I’m shaking yet. What ever got into her—”

203 “Hush! She’s excited and ugly—”

“What ever—”

“Let me lug those logs if you must have them,” called out Gar, in his roughly frank, boyish way. “Goin’ to start a new cure, Orilla? Is this tree bark good for snake bites or something?”

“What I’m going to start is my own business,” snapped back Orilla, throwing her vivid head up high and bracing her thin body to carry the heavy load of wood. She was wearing a khaki suit, like a uniform, but even this, strong as the material must have been, showed more than one jagged tear from violent contact with the young trees, which must have struggled bravely against her cruel little ax.

“Have it your own way,” drawled Gar, good-naturedly. “Here, Nancy and Rosa, let’s help you. Maybe you’re not quite so fussy.”

Willingly enough Nancy and Rosa relinquished the rough sticks, their hands smarting and red from trying to tote them down to the water’s edge.

204 No one said much, everyone seemed to realize that that was the only way to avoid trouble, for Orilla seemed ready to snap at every word, and the thing to do, obviously, was to get in their boats and sail away from Mushroom Islands, promptly.

“But it’s all too silly,” grumbled Dell aside to her own friends. “Why should we humor that girl?”

“We are almost ready to go now,” Rosa coaxed. “And it is so killing hard to chop down those trees. Just look at my poor hands!”

The poor hands represented a pitiable sight indeed, for being pudgy and fat, they were easily bruised and torn, so that their surface now looked like nothing other than bruises and scratches.

Unwillingly they went back once more to the little woodland, where the devastation had been perpetrated, and there they gathered up what remained of the felled trees.

“You must have worked hard, Rosa,” Gar commented. “Why don’t you go in the business?205 Put a sign out, ‘Woodlands Cleared While You Wait.’ I tell you, I tried once on our back woods and didn’t do anything like as well as this—”

To which Rosa did not risk a reply, for the quarrelsome Orilla was at her elbow directing the gleaning in no uncertain tones.

But it was not so easy to suppress Gar. He wasn’t afraid of Orilla Rigney, and he was willing to let folks know it.

“Now, that’s enough,” he decided sharply. “We’re not going to take another stick. If you want to chop down trees, Orilla, why don’t you hire help? Or why don’t you choose a woods nearer civilization?”

“What are you grumbling about?” retorted Orilla, letting drop more than one of the sticks she had just picked up. “I didn’t ask your help, and I don’t want it—”

“But there’s a storm coming, Orilla,” said Nancy very kindly, as kindly as she might have spoken to some troublesome child, “and we had better all hurry back. There now, it’s206 all cleared up. Here, give me that long one. I haven’t an armful this time.”

So for the moment peace was restored, and the queer proceedings continued, until at last even Orilla seemed satisfied that the task had been properly finished.

Only to Nancy did she deign a pleasant look, and that look, Nancy thought, was rather secretive. For as the girl did half smile, she also winked one of her green, gimlet eyes, as if trying to convey to Nancy a message not meant for the others. This recalled the party cape episode, when Nancy compromised by agreeing, at least partly, not to mention Orilla’s secret visit.

“But we found you, Rosa, at any rate,” Nancy repeated, as again they paired off. “I’ll never be able to tell you how I felt,” she continued, giving the truant cousin a reassuring pinch.

Rosa rolled her eyes meaningly. “If you hadn’t—” She left that contingency to Nancy’s over-worked imagination, and again turned to help Orilla.

207 “Don’t bother; just go along,” ordered Orilla rudely.

“But aren’t you going too?” Rosa questioned in surprise.

“Seems to me folks are awfully worried about what I’m going to do,” snapped Orilla. “But if you’ll all go along and take your pet with you—”

“Orilla Rigney!” called out Dell authoritatively. “What is the matter with you? Are you determined to make enemies of even those who are trying to help you?”

Nancy turned quickly to interpose, and as she caught a queer expression on Orilla’s face she hurried to answer Dell before the other could do so.

“Now, Dell, please don’t be cross,” begged Nancy with a sly glance intended for Dell alone. “We had all best be going if we hope to escape that storm. Just see those clouds!”

“All aboard!” called out Gar. “Orilla, can’t I push your boat out for you?”

“No, thank you. I’m not ready yet.”

“But the storm,” pleaded Nancy.

208 “I’m not afraid of storms. I love them.”

“Out here, all alone?”

“I have birds and all the wild life of the woods. They are the friends I can depend upon,” replied Orilla. And as she said this her voice was soft, pleasant, actually musical. It was plain where her affections lay.

“All right. Sorry. Hop in, girls. I’m heading straight for the other shore,” Gar made known, starting up the engine as he talked.

Reluctantly they turned away from the solitary figure on the shore. She looked like a creature of the woods, indeed, the brown outline of her form merging so completely into the shadows, that it was scarcely distinguishable as the watchers swung around the end of the island.

“Why won’t she come?” queried Nancy anxiously.

“Because she won’t let us see where she goes,” replied Rosa.

“And don’t you know?” pressed Nancy further.

209 “No. She had promised to take me this afternoon—but—oh, well—” sighed Rosa. “I’m glad you came and I don’t care much about her promises now. I guess I’ve been pretty—foolish.”

“Only guess so?” put in Dell, in a way naturally expected from her, as the oldest member of the party. “We’ve been sure of that all summer. Just imagine, cutting down trees and doing that silly stuff!”

“Now, Dell,” objected Rosa, a little huffed, “you must know I did have some reason. I’m not altogether a simpleton, I hope.”

“So do we—hope,” flung back Gar over his shoulder. “But there’s a boat I’ve got to tow in. See them waving? Hold tight; I’ve got to turn sharp and these waves are pretty frisky.”

All hands now turned their attention to the fisherman’s boat, a little rowboat, quite helpless against the fury into which the lake was working its surface. It took but a very short time to reach the craft, then a man flung Gar a line which the boy pulled up until he could210 tie it securely into the stern lock of the Whitecap.

“Why, there’s Pixley!” shouted Rosa. “See her trying to hold on to the fish. She’s sitting in the bottom of the boat.”

And those who looked saw the little woman just as Rosa said, trying desperately to keep her cargo from being washed overboard.

As she recognized the party in the Whitecap, however, she managed to shout her delight, for it appears she and her pilot had been battling the waves for some time before the launch came along.

“Ought to call you girls life-savers,” she called out. “This is the second time you have saved mine.”

“Maybe the third,” joked Nancy to Rosa, “for if I hadn’t saved her from the mob in the train when that grape juice bottle exploded—”

But Nancy just then saw a speck of light, like a spark, over in one of the group of islands from which they had lately embarked.

And it couldn’t have been lightning, for the storm, though imminent, had not yet broken211 and there was no rumble of thunder even in the distance.

She looked again, made sure of the spot, but said nothing to her companions. The appeal Orilla had silently given her, with that glance from her deep-set eyes, seemed to Nancy too pathetic to be made light of. And perhaps the spark of light in the woodland, away out there where nothing but low, scrubby pine trees grew, had something to do with Orilla’s secret. At any rate this was no time to discuss it. Confusion forbade.

“We’ll be in before it hits us,” called Gar gayly, surveying the racing storm clouds.

“And a good thing for us,” added his sister, “for even this launch is not altogether safe in a real lake hurricane.”