on the corner!’ Come-on-out!”
Jessie appeared from the breakfast room, and Momsy, as Jessie always called her mother, looked out, too.
“What have you girls on your minds for this morning?” she asked.
“Our new canoe, Mrs. Norwood. You know, we gave the old one to those Dogtown youngsters, and our new one has never been christened yet.”
“Shall I bring a hat?” asked Jessie, hesitatingly.
“What for? To bail out the canoe? Bill says it is perfectly sound and safe,” laughed Amy.
“You are getting wee freckles on your nose, Jessie,” said Mrs. Norwood.
“Why worry?” demanded Amy. “You can never get as many as Hen wears – and her nose isn’t as big as yours.”
“It is by good luck, not good management, that you do not freckle, Amy Drew,” declared her chum. “I’ll take the shade hat.”
“Why not a sunbonnet?” scoffed Amy.
But Jessie laughed and ran out with her hat. It floated behind her, held by the two strings, as she raced her chum down to the boat landing. The Norwood boathouse sheltered several different craft, among others a motor-boat that Amy’s brother, Darrington Drew, owned. But Darry and his chum, Burd Alling, had lost their interest in the Water Thrush since they had been allowed to put into commission, and navigate themselves, the steam-yacht Marigold, which was a legacy to Darry from an uncle now deceased.
The girls got the new canoe out without assistance from the gardener or his helper. They were thoroughly capable out-of-door girls. They had erected the antenna for Jessie’s radio set without any help. Both were good boatmen – “if a girl can be a man,” to quote Amy – and they could handle the Water Thrush as well as the canoe.
They launched and paddled out from the shore in perfect form. The sun was scorching, but there was a tempering breeze. It was therefore cooler out toward the middle of the lake than inshore. The glare of the sun on the water troubled even the thoughtless Amy.
“Oh, aren’t you the wise little owl, Jess Norwood!” she cried. “To think of wearing a sun-hat! And here am I with nothing to shelter me from the torrid rays. I am going to burn and peel and look horrid – I know I shall! I’ll not be fit to go to Hackle Island – if we go.”
“Oh, we’re going, all right!”
“You’re mighty certain, from the way you talk. Has it been really settled? ‘There’s many a slip’ and all that, you know.”
“Father asked Momsy about it at breakfast before he went to town, and she said she had quite made up her mind,” Jessie said. “He will make the arrangements with the owner of the house.”
“Oh, goody! A bungalow?” cried Amy.
“Yes.”
“How big, dear? Can the boys come?”
“Of course. There are fourteen rooms. It is a big place. We will shut up the house here and send down most of the serving people ahead. We shall have at least one good month of salt air.”
“Hooray!” cried Amy, swinging her paddle recklessly. “And I’ve got just the most scrumptious idea, Jess. I’ll tell you – ”
But something unexpected happened just then that quite drove out of Amy Drew’s mind the idea she had to impart to her chum. She brought the paddle she had waved down with an awful smack on the water. The spray spattered all about. Jessie flung herself back to escape some of the inwash, and by so doing her gaze struck upon something on the surface of the lake, far ahead.
“Oh! Oh!” she shrieked. “What is that, Amy? Somebody is drowning!”
CHAPTER V – INTO TROUBLE AND OUT
Amy Drew sat up in the canoe as high as she could and stared ahead. Jessie’s observation suggested trouble; but Amy almost immediately burst out laughing.
“‘Drowning!’” she repeated. “Why, Jess Norwood, you know that you couldn’t drown those Dogtown kids. And if that isn’t some of them – Monty Shannon, and the Costello twins, and the rest of them – I’m much mistaken.”
“But see those barrels and tubs and what-all!” gasped her more serious friend. “Look there! It’s Henrietta!”
The fleet of strange barges that Jessie had first spied included, it seemed, almost every sort of craft that could be improvised. A rainwater barrel led the procession of “boats,” and Montmorency Shannon was in that, paddling with some kind of paddle that he wielded with no little skill.
There were two wooden washtubs in which the Costello twins voyaged. One was much lower in the water than the other, giving evidence of having shipped more water than its mate. In a water-trough that had been filched from somebody’s barnyard was little Henrietta and Charlie Foley.
“They will be overboard!” exclaimed Jessie, anxiously. “Drive ahead, Amy – do!”
The wind was blowing directly in their faces and from the direction of the Dogtown landing, where the flotilla had evidently embarked. The tubs spun around and around, the half-barrel in which Monty Shannon sat tried to perform the same gyrations, but Henrietta and the Foley boy blundered ahead. It was plain to Jessie’s mind that the reckless children could not have sailed in the other direction had they wished to do so.
“What do you come out here for?” she shrieked when the canoe drew near.
“Oh, Miss Jessie, we are going to the Carter place,” sang out Henrietta.
“But the Carter place is down the lake, not up!” exclaimed the exasperated Jessie.
“Yes. But the wind shifted,” said Henrietta.
“Where is your big canoe?” demanded Amy, who could scarcely paddle from laughter, in spite of the evident danger the children were in.
“That is what we started after,” said Montmorency Shannon, his red head sticking out of the barrel like a full-blown hollyhock. “It got away in the night, or somebody let it go, and we saw it away down by the Carter place. So – so we thought we’d go after it.”
“And I warrant your mothers don’t know what you are doing,” Jessie said sternly.
“Oh, they will!” cried Henrietta, virtuously.
“When they miss the washtubs,” put in Amy, with laughter.
“When we tell ’em,” corrected little Henrietta. “And we always tell ’em everything we do.”
“I see. After it is all over,” Jessie commented.
“We-ell,” said Henrietta, pouting, “we can’t tell ’em what we have done before we do it, can we? For we never know ourselves.”
“You certainly cannot beat that for logic,” declared Amy. She drove the head of the canoe to the tub of the nearest Costello twin. “Get in here carefully, Micky. You are going down.”
“That’s ’cause Aloysius always gets the best tub. He ain’t sinking none,” said Michael Costello, scowling
