an absolute good-for-nothing. Oh, I know I was opposed to your Camp Fire club last summer, but I have watched you more carefully than you dream and have entirely changed my mind. I am not asking you to let me come into your club to help you. I am afraid I am selfish, I can’t explain it to you now, but I want to help myself. Of course I am not wise enough to be your guardian, but I have been talking to Miss McMurtry and she has promised to help me and it is only because you don’t seem able to find anyone else that I dare offer myself.”
At this moment Nan Graham, whom Rose had not seen before, tumbled unexpectedly off her sofa. It was because of her eagerness to reach the other girls. They, at a quick signal from one to the other, had arisen, and now, forming a circle, danced slowly about their new guardian chanting the sacred law of the Camp Fire.
CHAPTER IV
“The Reason o’ It”
“Rose,” Betty Ashton called at about ten o’clock the next morning. Betty was sitting alone before the living room fire, the other girls having gone into town to school several hours before. Books and papers and writing materials were piled on a table before her and evidently she had been working on some abstruse problem in mathematics, for several sheets of legal cap paper were covered with figures.
“Rose,” she called again, and so plaintively this second time that the new guardian of the Sunrise Camp Fire girls hurried in from the kitchen. A gingham apron covered her from head to foot, a large mixing spoon was in one hand and a becoming splash of flour on one cheek.
“What is it, dear?” she inquired anxiously. “Does your foot hurt worse than it did? I ought to have come in to you right away, but Mammy and I have been making enough loaves of bread to feed a regiment and I have been turning some odds and ends of the dough into Camp Fire emblems to have for tea – rings and bracelets and crossed logs. I am afraid I am still dreadfully frivolous!” And Rose flushed, for in spite of Betty’s own problem she was smiling at her. This the Rose who had come to her first Camp Fire Council only a month before in a Paris frock, probably never having cooked a meal for any one in her life!
However, Betty answered loyally. “You are quite wonderful, Rose, and only the other day Donna said you were giving to our Camp Fire life what with all her knowledge she had somehow failed to give it – the real intimate family feeling. I suppose I oughtn’t to have interrupted you. No, it isn’t my foot, it is only that I have gotten myself into a new difficulty and I want to ask you what you think I had best do?”
And with a worried frown Betty again studied the closely written figures which must have represented some still unsolved problem, for she continued staring at them, turning the sheets over and over. Finally, before speaking, she drew an open letter from her pocket, carefully re-reading several lines.
“I suppose it isn’t worth while my mentioning, Rose, that none of us do anything at present but think, dream and plan for our Camp Fire Christmas entertainment,” she said with a half sigh and smile, “and you know packages have been coming to me until the attic is most full of them. I have just been charging things as I bought them and until to-day I haven’t paid much attention to what they cost. But yesterday I received such a strange letter from mother. She writes that father is a little better and I am not to worry and she hopes we may have a happy Christmas. However, she can’t send me any more money for the holidays beyond my usual allowance. Father has had some business losses lately, and not being able to look after things himself, they are not going quite right. Isn’t it odd, for you see I have already explained to her that we were going to have unusually heavy expenses this Christmas and please to let me have money instead of a present? Yet she says she can’t send me anything. Poor mother, she apologizes humbly instead of telling me that I am an extravagant wretch, but just the same it is the first time in my life I haven’t had all the money I needed to spend at Christmas and now I don’t see how I am ever going to pay for all the things I have bought. I don’t think I have any right to be a Camp Fire girl if I am in debt, and I am – miles!”
Instead of answering immediately Rose turned away her face to conceal a look of concern at Betty’s news which she did not wish the young girl to see. Other persons in Woodford were beginning to speculate upon a possible change in the Ashton fortune. Certain enterprises in which Mr. Ashton had been concerned had been known to fail, but then no one understood to what extent he had been interested.
“Can’t you give up some of the things, dear,” Rose suggested gently, knowing that Betty had never been called upon to do any such thing before in her life, but to her surprise she now saw that her companion’s expression had entirely changed.
“What a goose I am!” Betty laughed cheerfully. “Of course I can write to old Dick for the money. I don’t usually like to ask him, for he is such a conscientious person, so unlike reckless me, and will probably scold, but then he will give me the money just the same. I wonder if anything ever happened to make Dick more serious than other young men? He isn’t a bit like Frank Wharton or other wealthy fellows who do nothing but spend money and have a good time. He seems just devoted to studying medicine, and sometimes he has said such strange things to mother as though there might be some special reason why he wanted so much to help people.” And feeling that her own dilemma was now comfortably settled, Betty fell to puzzling over the older problem which she had always kept more or less at the back of her mind.
But, curiously enough, Rose Dyer shook her head discouragingly. “I wouldn’t try that method of getting the money, Betty, if I were you,” she replied thoughtfully. “I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you that if your mother and father are not able to give you extra money, and you know Dick always makes them put you first, why he is probably not having any extra money either. And since his whole heart is set on going to Germany next year to continue his work why he is probably saving all that he can now so as not to be an additional expense.”
Rose was several years older than Dick, but they had known one another ever since she came as a young girl to New Hampshire from her home in Georgia, bringing her colored mammy with her. For Rose’s parents had died and she had lived with an old uncle until a few years before when he had gone, leaving her his heiress. Now Rose’s pretty home in Woodford was closed for the winter and her chaperon living in Florida while she spent her time trying to learn to be a worthy guardian for the Camp Fire girls. Perhaps she really had heard more of Dick Ashton’s early life than his sister Betty and had a special reason for her interest in him, however she said nothing of it.
“I wonder if I couldn’t lend you the money. I am not rich as you are, but perhaps I have – ”
And here Betty shook her head decisively. “I couldn’t borrow the money of anybody, one way of owing it would be as bad as another. I simply have got to find a way.” She stopped suddenly because the sound of some one driving up to the cabin surprised her, and then, to her greater surprise, her guardian, after a hurried glance out of the window, dropped her mixing-spoon with a clatter and positively ran out of the room.
Betty stared. She could only see rather a shabby, old-fashioned buggy standing near the Totem pole in front of their cabin, and a young man hitching his horse to it.
Almost forgetting her bandaged ankle, the girl hobbled over to the door, but when she had opened it gave an involuntary cry of pain and the next instant found herself being lifted and carried back to her chair.
“You must not try to walk until you are sure things are all right with you,” a strange voice said severely. Then, in answer to Betty’s look of amazement, he took off his hat and bowed gravely. She found herself staring at a tall, slender man of about thirty, in carefully brushed clothes, which nevertheless had an old-fashioned, country appearance, and with a face at once so handsome and so stern that he looked as if he might have stepped out of an old frame which had held the portrait of one of the early Puritan fathers.
“I
