ping up and down in a perfect agony of fear, wringing her
hands one moment and tearing at her skirts the next.

"It's a hornet's nest," exclaimed Ben. "Keep still, Nancy. Don't run.
They won't sting you if you are perfectly still."

But it was needless to tell Nancy not to run. What with her narrow skirt
and the spongy ground she could scarcely walk.

"There are dozens of them crawling inside my skirt," she sobbed, "and
you tell me to keep still."

"Don't be frightened, Nancy-Bell. I'll stand with you," announced Percy,
boldly offering himself as a sacrifice to hornets, as he drew Nancy's
arm through his.

"Come on, hornets," he cried. "Sting a man. Don't attack a helpless
girl."

The others could not keep from laughing at the picture of Nancy and
Percy standing arm in arm in the wilderness.

"You remind me of a bridal couple walking up the aisle," exclaimed
Billie. But Nancy was too frightened to withdraw her arm from Percy's
even at this witticism. She leaned on him in an attitude of relief and
extreme confidence.

"Didn't I tell you I would be her staff before the day was over?" he
remarked with a grin.

"I've been stung in a dozen different places," sobbed Nancy.

"Stand still," ordered Ben. "They will leave you and go back to their
nest if you are quiet."

And as he had predicted, the hornets did leave off their attack and
return to their home, but not until Percy had been stung several times
without a murmur. For the sake of Nancy Brown, he would voluntarily have
stepped into any number of hornets' nests.

At last the procession started on. In the misty twilight, they were a
company of gray shadows moving silently along. When people are lost,
really and unquestionably lost, their true natures rise to the surface:
if there is any selfishness hidden away, it develops into complainings
and reproaches; the faint-hearted make unhappy predictions; the lazy
ones get tired before they have any right to. Ben had always admired the
Motor Maids, but never more than now when he saw them quiet and
courageous in the face of a night in the swamp. Nancy might shriek over
hornets and snakes, but she would never confess to being tired or
frightened. Not once had they complained or reproached him, and now when
the will-o'-the-wisps began their ghostly dance through the mists, and
the great wall of mountain loomed up in front of them black and
threatening, it seemed to poor Ben that it would make it easier for him
to