wanted nothing better than a perfectly harmless
flirtation.

"They're welcome to boys like those," she said airily. "I'll wait until
I get home, Miss Eleanor."

Then she turned away, and Eleanor, her face serious for a moment, turned
to Bessie.

"She'll wait until she's grown up, too, if I've got anything to say
about it," she said. "Bessie, when Zara comes back, of course you'll be
with her mostly. But I wish you'd make a friend of Dolly Ransom,--a real
friend. Her mother's dead, and she has no sisters."

"I hope I can," said Bessie, simply. "I like her ever so much."

CHAPTER VIII

A NEW CHUM

The farm was nearly five miles from the station, and the two big wagons
made slow time with the heavy loads, especially as the roads were still
muddy from a recent downpour. But none of the Camp Fire Girls seemed to
mind the length of the trip.

Now that she was actually out in the heart of it, Bessie found that the
country was not as much like that around Hedgeville as it had seemed to
be from the train windows. The fields were better kept; there were no
unpainted, dilapidated looking houses, such as those of Farmer Weeks and
some of the other neighbors of the Hoovers in Hedgeville whom she
remembered so well.

Neat fences, well kept up, marked off the fields, and, even to Bessie's
eyes, although she was far from being an agricultural expert, the crops
themselves looked better. She spoke of this to Eleanor.

"These aren't just ordinary farms," Eleanor explained. "My father and
some other men who have plenty of money have bought up a lot of land
around here, and they are working the farms, and making them pay just as
much as possible. My father thinks it's a shame for so many boys and
young men, whose fathers own farms, to go rushing off to the city and
work in stores and factories. And they started out to find out why it
was that way. They're business men, you see and as soon as they really
began to think about it they found out what was wrong."

"Why the boys went to the city?" asked Bessie. "I should think that
would be easy to see! It was around Hedgeville. Why, on a farm, the work
never is done. It's work all day, and then get up before daylight to
start again. And even Paw Hoover, who had a good farm, was always saying
how poor he was, and how he wished he could make more money."

"I'll bet he was always buying new land, though," said Eleanor, looking
wise.

"Yes, he was," admitted Bessie. "He alwa