“Anything missing?” gasped Mrs. Bonnell, as she came up the slope from the lake, whither Natalie had sped in advance.

“Don’t you dare tell us there is!” cried Marie.

“There doesn’t seem to be,” went on the Guardian, whose rather short breath bore to her the unwelcome intelligence that she was getting stout. “I really must exercise more,” she told herself. “I am positively getting indolent, and in camp—of all things!”

“Everything seems to be as we left it,” declared Natalie after a hurried glance around, while Mrs. Bonnell sat down on a board nailed between two trees making a rustic seat.

“They could easily have opened our tent, gone in and tied the flaps back again,” suggested Alice. “Do hurry and look in, Nat!” for breath-of-the-pine-tree was fumbling with the knots of the cords.

“We must learn to tie some of the queer knots the boy scouts have in their manual book,” suggested Mabel.

By this time Natalie had succeeded in loosening the tent-flaps. With the boys gathered in a circle back of them the girls peered into their sleeping and living quarters.

“Everything seems all right,” murmured Natalie.

“Unlock the trunks and make sure,” suggested Alice. “If they have taken my best dress I——”

“You won’t go over to the dance at the Point to-morrow night; will you?” asked Jack.

“Indeed, I’ll not. But don’t suggest such a thing!”

The girls crowded into the tent, and a hurried search disclosed that, so far as they could tell, nothing was missing.

“Though they may have taken all our things to eat,” said Marie. “If they have, we’ll have to depend on you boys.”

“Huh! We’re cleaned out,” exclaimed Phil. “We came to get enough of your stuff for supper.”

“You poor boys!” murmured Mabel.

“This is the first they’ve thought of us,” declared Blake. “They’re so anxious about their own stuff that they didn’t care what had happened to ours.”

“Oh, we did so!” declared Alice. “Only you frightened us, meeting us the way you did.”

“Tell us all about it,” urged Natalie.

“There isn’t anything to tell,” replied Jack. “We had been off fishing, and when we came back we found our pantry pretty well cleaned out. Lucky we didn’t have an awful lot. We had to stock up again to-morrow, anyhow.”

“Let’s go over and take a look, girls,” proposed Marie. “We won’t need to get much for supper. There are some cold beans and——”

“What about us?” came from Jack. “Don’t you s’pose we want to eat?”

“Well, you can come to supper with us,” suggested Mrs. Bonnell. “After that we’ll all go over to the Point in the motor-boat—that is if it runs—and we’ll stock up.”

“Good!” cried Blake. “And we’ll have a dance after it.”

“Then come on!” proposed Alice. “We’ll look for clues, and decide who it is took their things.”

“Ha! Ha! That’s a good one!” jeered Jack. “Look for clues! Why you couldn’t even find your way home from Bear Pond!”

“But we did to-day,” said his sister quietly.

“You did? Were you over there again?”

“We were,” replied Marie.

“You must be fond of the place,” suggested Jack. “What did you find this time—a snake?”

“We located the Gypsy Camp,” said Natalie gently.

“You did?” chorused the boys, all excitement.

“We did,” went on Natalie. “And we’re going to tell the constable about it, and see if he can get back Mabel’s mother’s ring—it was the same band of Gypsies we think.”

“The same band!” cried Jack.

“Yes,” continued Mabel. “There was a Hadee in it, only she was missing. And we had our fortunes told, and there seemed to be some excitement in the camp, and——”

“Don’t tell it all!” exclaimed Mabel. “Leave some for the rest of us. Old Hanson is moving, boys because——”

“He saw a ghost!” broke in Alice.

“He heard it, you mean,” corrected Marie. “Nat was the only one who saw it.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Natalie, doubtfully.

“Say, kindly translate,” begged Blake in a weak voice as he pretended to support himself against Jack. “What does all this mean, anyhow?”

“It’s got me going,” admitted Phil.

“Let me sit down—then please tell it all over again,” pleaded Jack. “Now proceed,” and he took a seat beside Mrs. Bonnell.

Gradually the girls gave a connected story of their trip that afternoon, including their meeting with the man of the old mill.

“And to cap the climax,” finished Natalie, “you boys meet us and say your camp has been looted—is that the proper word?”

“We’ll permit you to use it semi-occasionally,” said Blake, “though I think it is taboo in Camp Fire Girls’ rules.”

“Well, anyhow, let’s go over and see what we can find in the boys’ camp,” suggested Marie.

“After what you have gone through with to-day you can accomplish anything,” declared Blake. “To think of you finding the Gypsy camp at Bear Pond, when, all the while, we had a notion that it was at Mt. Harry.”

“And we’ve b............