to carry her out to it."

"They pretended to be helping us with the fire, and they really did
help, Bessie. I guess we wouldn't have saved any of the tents at all if
it hadn't been for them."

"Oh, I saw what they were doing! When I saw the man pick Zara up,
though, I knew right away what their plan was. And I was just going to
scream when another man got hold of me, and he kept me from shouting,
and carried me off to the yacht in the boat. Zara had fainted, and they
kept us down below in a cabin and said they were going to take us along
the coast until we came to the coast of the state Zara and I were in
when we met you girls first."

"We guessed that, Bessie. That was one of the things we were all
worrying about when we came here--that they might try to carry you two
off that way. I don't see how it can be that you're all right as long as
you're in this state, and in danger as soon as you go back to the one
you came from."

"Well, you see, Zara and I really did run away, I suppose. Zara's father
is in prison, so they said she had to have a guardian, and I left the
Hoovers. So that old Farmer Weeks--you know about him, don't you?--is
our guardian in that state, and he's got an order from the judge near
Hedgeville putting us in his care until we are twenty-one."

"But that order's no good in this state?"

"No, because here Miss Mercer is our guardian. But if they can get us
into that other state, no matter how, they can hold us."

"Oh, I see! And, of course, Miss Eleanor understood right away. When we
told the men who had helped us with the fire that you were missing, they
said they were afraid you must have been caught in the fire, but Miss
Eleanor said she was sure you were on the yacht. And they just laughed."

"I heard that big man, Jeff, talking to her when she went aboard the
yacht."

"Yes. They wouldn't let her look for you, and he threatened to put her
off if she didn't come ashore. You heard that, didn't you?"

"Oh, yes! Zara and I could hear everything she said when she was in the
cabin on the yacht. But we couldn't let her know where we were."

"Well, just as soon as she could get to a telephone, Miss Eleanor called
up Bay City, and asked them to send policemen or some sort of officers
who could search the yacht. But we were terribly afraid that they would
sail away before those men could get here, and then, you see, we
couldn't have done a thing. There wouldn't have been any way of catching
them