to us?" asked Katherine, hurriedly pulling her
middy on over her head and throwing back the tent flap. No one was in
sight outside.

"Must have been for someone else," she reported, looking right and left
along the pathway. "There's nobody out here."

She came back into the tent and began arranging her small possessions on
the shelf which swung overhead.

"How I'm ever going to keep all my things on one-third of this shelf is
more--" she began, but her speech ended in a startled gasp, for the
floor of the tent suddenly heaved up in the center, sending bottles,
brushes and boxes tumbling in all directions. The board which had thus
heaved up so miraculously continued to rise at one end, and underneath
it a pair of long, lean, powerful-looking arms came into view, followed
by a head and a pair of shoulders. Katherine and Oh-Pshaw sat petrified
at the apparition.

"Did I scare you, girls?" asked a deep, strong voice, and the apparition
looked gravely from one to the other. It was a dark-skinned face,
bronzed by wind and weather to a coppery, Indian-like tinge, and the
hair which framed it was coarse and black. Only the head and shoulders
of the apparition were visible beside the arms, the rest being concealed
in the depths underneath the tent, but the breadth of those shoulders
indicated clearly what might be expected in the way of a body. After a
moment of roving back and forth between the two girls, the dark eyes
under the heavy eyebrows fastened themselves upon Katherine with a
mournful intensity of gaze that held her spellbound, speechless. After a
full moment's scrutiny the dark eyes dropped, and the apparition, using
her arms as levers, raised herself to the level of the floor and stood
up. She was taller even than they had expected from the breadth of her
shoulders; in fact, she seemed taller than the tent itself. Katherine,
who up until that moment had considered herself tall, felt like a pigmy
beside her, or, as she expressed it, "like Carver Hill suddenly set down
beside one of the Alps." Never had she seen such a monumental young
woman; such suggestion of strength and vigor contained in a feminine
frame.

Oh-Pshaw looked timidly at the human Colossus standing in the middle of
the tent, and inquired meekly, "Are you Miss Armstrong? Are you our
Councilor?"

"I am," replied the newcomer gravely, replacing the board in the floor
with a nonchalance which conveyed the impression that coming up through
floors wa