“I am a Stranger in This Locality,” He Explained _Frontispiece_ PAGE For a Moment the Man Stared in Silence 59 Sally’s Hands Beat Against the Closed Door 160 “I Wish You Would Help Me About Something,” She Said 189 The Camp Fire Girls At Half Moon Lake CHAPTER I Indian Summer Two girls were following a narrow trail. About them the woods were scarlet and flame, golden and bronze, and in contrast the blue-green depth of tall pine and cedar trees. Down a steep hill the trail led; on either side a thick underbrush of wild grapevines and blackberries that twisted and sprawled, showing shriveled clumps of seed pods where formerly the fruit had ripened. One of the girls, wearing a corduroy costume of hunter’s green and a tam-o-shanter of the same shade, was carrying a rifle, while over her shoulder hung a brace of rabbits and half a dozen quail. Following close behind her the second girl’s costume was of the same character, a short skirt and coat with leather leggings and high boots, but of dark blue. “Do you think we are lost, Gill?” she inquired cheerfully. Her companion shook her head. “Well, as David Murray says, we are where we shouldn’t be and don’t know where we are, but I should never call that being lost, would you, Bettina?” Grasping a small birch tree firmly so as not to be obliged to continue her descent, and forcing Bettina to imitate her example, Gill turned halfway around. “To get down this hill and find our camp before dusk I suggest that we follow the fashion set by ‘The Waters at Lodore’. I am not sufficiently literary to recall the exact lines of the poem, I leave that to you, Princess, but there was something about their dashing, splashing and tumbling, something quick and active, and in contrast to our methods for this past hour. Farewell, valor at present is the better part of discretion, to transpose the axiom.” As she ceased speaking, releasing the slender young tree and bracing her feet together, Mary Gilchrist began to slide down the steep incline. In the heart of the Adirondack forest it was now early in the month of November and about four o’clock in the afternoon. Overhead the sun was still shining and the sky a warm blue, yet from the ground arose a light mist, playing in and out amid the underbrush and the bases of the trees, ethereal and evanescent, the floating draperies of unseen fairies holding an autumn carnival. Bettina Graham continued her downward progress more slowly and cautiously. Over the trail beech leaves and birch leaves and the long fingers of the pine had blown in little drifts of amber and green which, mixing with the decaying wood and wet earth, formed a slippery aisle.