"You forget the shower bath," suggested Helen. "Turn it on full force
and it would still be a thousand times dryer than any place here."
"I tell you what let's do!" spoke Dum Tucker with an inspiration that
all regretted had not come sooner. "Let's climb up and sit on the
rafters!"
Suiting the action to the word, she lightly ascended the trunk of the
huge tulip poplar tree that had been left in the center of the pavilion
as a support to the roof. The branches had been sawed off, leaving
enough projecting to serve as hat racks for the camp. These made an
admirable winding stair which an athletic girl like Dum Tucker made
nothing of climbing.
"Splendid!" and Dee Tucker followed her twin. In short order many of the
more venturesome members of the party were perched on the rafters where
they defied the rain to reach them. Even poor Mrs. Carter, her pretty
lace dress, if not absolutely ruined, at least with all of its first
freshness gone, was persuaded to come up, too, and there she sat
trembling and miserable.
"Come on up, Page!" shouted Dee to her chum.
"I'll be there soon," but Page had an idea that she meant first to
propose to Douglas.
Poor Douglas, this was a fitting ending to a day of worry and concern.
She felt like one
"Whom unmerciful disaster
Followed fast and followed faster."
Of course country folk are always made to feel in some intangible way
that they are responsible for the weather when the weather happens to be
bad and city folk are visiting them. Douglas thought she had enough not
to bear the weight of the storm, but somehow she felt that that, too,
was added to her burden.
"I know exactly what you are thinking," said Page, coming up and putting
her wet arm around Douglas' wet waist. "I have lived in the country all
my life and whenever we have a big storm at Bracken or unseasonable
weather of any sort, we are always held personally responsible for it by
a certain type of visitors. You think this is going to harm your camp
and keep people from coming, don't you?"
"Why, how did you know?"
"A little bird told me--a stormy petrel. Now I tell you what we must do:
we must whoop things up until all of these week-enders will think that
the storm was about the most interesting thing that ever happened at
Camp Carter and they will come again hoping for a repetition of the
experience."
"Oh, Page! How can we?" and Douglas smiled in spite of herself.
"Well, let's call a council and appoint a committee on ways and means."
Mr. Tucker was first on the list, then Helen and Dr. Wright, Bill
Tinsley and Lewis Somerville. Nan was so busy looking at the beauties of
Nature that she had to be called three times before she answered.
"Come on, Miss Nan!" begged Mr. Tucker. "Your wise little head is wanted
on this committee."
"Only look at that bank of clouds as the lightning strikes on the edge
of it! It looks like the portals of heaven."
"Yes, and it came mighty near being that same thing," muttered Mr.
Tucker.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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