No one tried to stop Phrosy in her threatened flight. In fact, the impulse of them all was toward flight, and they followed that impulse.

“Something fell on the roof!” cried Amy, starting to open the door and shrinking back against it as another clap of thunder reverberated through the forest.

“Open the door!” cried Jessie, impatiently, as she pushed Amy aside.

“Yes, we had better get outside,” put in Miss Alling, trying to keep calm. “For all we know, the roof may come down on top of us.”

The door flew open with a bang and a tremendous gust of wind fairly blew them against the opposite wall.

“What a gale!” gasped Nell. “We’ll never be able to get out there!”

“I am going!” declared Jessie, and with lowered head dashed into the open. The other girls, gathering courage from her example, followed, and brought up short at the sight that met their eyes.

A giant tree, half dead at the top, had been struck by the lightning and uprooted. In its fall the outermost branches had brushed the roof of the lodge.

“Lucky it did not fall across the roof,” said Amy, shivering. “That would have meant good-bye lodge for fair.”

“Struck pretty close to us, at that,” said Nell. “Lucky you cut that in-wire, Jess.”

“Better get inside again,” said Miss Alling. “We shall be soaked in a moment.”

For the rain had begun in earnest, coming down in a swishing torrent that drove them on a run for the shelter of the lodge. And there they stayed until the storm blew itself out.

So quickly did the time pass after the departure of the boys for Gibbonsville that it was the second day before the girls began to feel anxious about them.

They were just beginning to imagine all kinds of dreadful things that might have happened to them when Burd and Fol returned, in Darry’s roadster, but not with Darry.

Upon relentless questioning Burd admitted that Darry had lingered in Gibbonsville.

“You see, it was this way,” Burd tried to explain, as the girls showered him with questions. “We were not able to find out anything satisfactory about this girl of mystery who saddled you with an unpassable five-dollar bill, Amy, and so, when we got discouraged and said we were coming back before we had missed all the fun, Darry said we would have to go back without him.”

“But you shouldn’t have let him do anything so perfectly ridiculous!” said Amy, vexed. “There were two of you to one. Couldn’t you have made him come back with you?”

Burd chuckled.

“If you have ever tried to make your brother do anything he didn’t want to do, you know how easy it is,” he remarked. “I would just about as soon try to teach a wild elephant to dance. Nothing doing! When Darry acts like that the one thing to do is to give him his head.”

“But he must have been terribly interested in—that girl—to do a thing like this,” said Jessie, slowly, and Burd looked at her queerly. He seemed about to speak, but changed his mind.

“If you ask me,” said Fol, “I think he was just plain off his head.”

“And you didn’t catch sight of that awful girl?” asked Amy.

“We didn’t,” replied Burd, with just the faintest possible emphasis on the we.

“Then my five dollars is gone forever unless Darry succeeds in getting it back for me!”

“I haven’t the least idea it is the five-dollar bill Darry is worrying about,” said Burd, significantly, and thereafter not all Amy’s bribes or threats could bring from him an explanation of the cryptic sentence.

It was some hours later that Burd took Jessie by the arm and drew her aside from the others.

“See here, Jess,” he said. “I don’t like the way Darry is acting, at all.”

“What do you mean?” queried Jessie, all her fears of the morning once more active.

“He hasn’t been like himself——”

“I have noticed that,” broke in the girl, impatiently. “You have something special you want to tell me about Darry, Burd. Please don’t keep me waiting.”

Burd hesitated.

“I am telling you this,” he said, at last, “because you are level-headed and not apt to go off the handle like Amy. Jessie, I have reason to believe that Darry saw that girl when we were in Gibbonsville.”

“What makes you think that?” asked Jessie, faintly. Suddenly the world seemed all upside down.

“He managed to dodge away from Fol and me when we weren’t looking,” Burd answered, stirring up some loose stones with his foot and looking extremely uncomfortable. “And later on when we were looking for him we came suddenly around a corner and saw him talking with some one. His companion dodged out of sight when she saw us, but Fol and I saw that it was a girl, and, from the description you gave of her, it seemed pretty sure that she was the same one you and Amy are after.”

“What did Darry say when he knew you had seen him? Did he—explain?” asked Jessie, slowly.

“There is the most peculiar part of it,” Burd answered reluctantly. “He not only refused to explain but acted as though angry and was unpleasant about the whole thing. Accused us of trying to spy on him and of several other crimes that were farthest from our minds. He even went so far as to say that we had ‘spoiled it all.’”

“What did he mean by that?” asked Jessie, puzzled and speaking more to herself than to Burd.

“That is what I would give a good deal to find out,” returned Burd, ruefully, then adding, with a chuckle: “You should have heard him when, in an evil moment, Fol asked him for an explanation. Near chewed Fol’s head off.”

Jessie shook her head slowly. The situation was even more mysterious than she had thought it, and with each of Burd’s startling revelations she became more hopelessly bewildered.

“Did he say when he was coming back?” she asked, after a long reflective pause. Again Burd shook his head.

“He wouldn’t tell us anything,” he said, adding with a frown: “I don’t mind admitting to you he got me pretty sore.”

Jessie smiled slightly and murmured that she “didn’t wonder.”

“I don’t know what we can do about it,” she added, after a moment, as they turned and started back toward the others. “I am sure Darry has good reasons for acting as he does, and when he comes to explain everything to us we shall see that he could not have acted differently.”

But in spite of her brave words she was troubled, and, partly to get Darry and his strange behavior out of her mind and partly to give herself something absorbing to do, she suggested that they “listen in” on a concert.

All the rest of that afternoon and evening the girls and boys and Miss Alling spent at the radio. Toward evening they had the luck to tune in on the airway of the forest ranger station.

Some one at the station was giving a talk on the prevention of forest fires by radio, and they listened with interest.

“I suppose they wouldn’t stage a little forest fire for us,” said Amy at the end of the talk, removing the phones and rubbing her head where they had pressed. “It would be great fun to see one.”

“It would be more fun not to!” said Burd, decidedly. “That station isn’t far from here. What do you girls say to taking a run over there, soon?”

“We say ‘yes,’” was the enthusiastic response from all.

“The sooner the better,” added Jessie.

Darry came back the next day, but he positively refused to give any reason for his prolonged stay in Gibbonsville. After two or three attempts even his sister gave up questioning him, and Amy was persistent.

“Might just as well try to get information from a wooden idol,” Amy said disgustedly to Jessie. “I think that girl must have thrown a spell over him.”

“Then I should certainly like to remove it,” returned Jessie, moodily. “He isn’t one bit like the old Darry.”

“Who isn’t?”

They turned, startled, to see Darry himself looking down at them and laughing. He had climbed into the branches of a huge old gnarled oak that threw its shade before the lodge and now sat dangling his legs in solid comfort. He had even taken a book up with him for company.

“Well, of all things! Reading on a day like this!” cried Amy. “Can’t you think of anything better to do with your time, Darry Drew?”

“If you could suggest something sufficiently enticing,” said Darry, with a grin, “I might be lured down from this leafy bower. You don’t know how comfortable it is up here, really,” he said, with a sigh, as he realized that his peaceful solitude must come to an end.

“Hear the man!” laughed Nell, who had come up just in time to hear his last words. “His eagerness to be with us is flattering!”

“Far be it from me to be ungallant to the ladies,” said Darry, dropping to the ground and bowing low before them. “I am at your service, fair ones. Command me!”

“Hey, don’t be too reckless, Darry,” warned Burd, as he and Fol joined the group. “They may ask you to repair their radio or start a forest fire or something. I know them!”

“As if we couldn’t take care of our radio by ourselves,” said Jessie, scornfully.

“A little forest fire might furnish some excitement,” added Amy brightly. “We would need only a very little one, you know.”

“And what fun to see the forest rangers at work!” exclaimed Nell.

“Now, what did I tell you?” demanded Burd.

“I have an idea worth two of that,&rd............