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. Th............