above his shoulder. "Don't
that beat the Dutch! I don't wonder you skeered 'em! You'd have had me
goin', I guess, an' I ain't no chicken, nor easy to skeer, neither. You
two certainly done a smart job gettin' away from them."

And so, when they reached Long Lake, the girls and the guides, who had
scattered all over the woods searching for them, agreed, when they
straggled in, one party after another. Eleanor Mercer was one of the
first to return, and when she had finished proving her gratitude for
their safe return, she turned a laughing face toward the chief guide.

"Do you know the thing that pleases me best about this, Andrew?" she
asked him.

"I can guess, ma'am," he said, with a grin. "You told us when you come
up here that you was goin' to prove that a party of girls could get
along without help from men. And I reckon it looked to you this morning
as if you was goin' to need us pretty bad, didn't it?"

"It certainly did, Andrew," she answered, gravely. "And I don't want you
to think for a moment that we're not grateful to you for the way you
turned out and scoured the woods."

"Don't talk of gratitude, Miss Eleanor. We've known you for years, but
even if we'd never seen you before, and didn't know nothin' about the
girls that thief had stolen, we'd ha' turned out jest the same way to
rescue them. An' I guess any white men anywhere would ha' done the same
thing.

"But if it was only us you'd had to depend on, I'm afraid the young
lady'd still be out there. It was her friend that saved her. Too bad she
trusted that Lolla witch. If she'd gone to Jim Skelly when she was near
the gypsy camp that time, an' told him where her chum was, he'd have had
her free in two shakes of a lamb's tail."

"I think Dolly and Bessie must be awfully hungry," said Zara, who had
listened with shining eyes to the tale of her friends' adventures.

"Oh, they must, indeed!" said Eleanor, remorsefully. "And here we've
been listening to them, and letting them talk while they were starving."

She turned toward the fire, but already two of the guides had leaped
forward, and in a moment the smell of crisp bacon filled the air, and
coffee was being made.

"Oh, how good that smells!" said Dolly. "I _am_ hungry, but it was so
exciting, remembering everything that happened, that I forgot all about
it! Isn't it funny? I was dreadfully scared when I was alone there, and
again afterward, when we thought we were safe, and that horrid man
caught