shot down to them, and the freckled-faced
coxswain, Gilbert Lane, one of the boys the girls had met at Bob and
Tommy's "party," grinned cheerfully.

"Where you going?" he asked, resting a friendly hand on the
rowboat's rim.

Bobby described an arc with her oar that incidentally showered the
questioner with shining water drops.

"We're out for adventure," she answered airily.

"Just got our swimming certificates to-day," volunteered Betty.

Bob flashed her a congratulatory smile.

"Race you to the end of the lake?" suggested Tommy Tucker.

Bobby regarded him with magnificent scorn.

"As if eight of you couldn't beat two!" she said significantly. "I never
heard such talk! Why you'd have a walk!" she added.

The boys shouted with laughter.

"You're a poet, Bobby," declared Tommy. "Tennyson had nothing on
you--had he, Libbie?"

Libbie turned her dark eyes on him and frowned a little.

"I wasn't listening," she said indifferently.

"Well, anyway, row up to the end of the lake, will you?" suggested
Gilbert. "With drill night ahead of us, we want a little brightness to
remember the day by."

Canoes, rowboat and shell swept on up the lake, and when the scrubby
pines that bordered the narrow peak of the north shore were in sight,
Bobby glanced back over her shoulder at Betty.

"You're spattering me," she complained.

"I thinks it's beginning to rain," said Betty mildly, and even as she
spoke, Louise called to them:

"Girls, it's beginning to pour!"

A sudden blast of wind struck them, blowing the rain against their backs.

"Keep on rowing!" shouted Bob's voice. "We'll have to land and walk back.
You girls can never beat back against this storm. We're almost to the
shore now."

A few minutes more and the boats touched shore. The boys were out in an
instant and helped the girls to land.

"We'll carry up the boats--don't you think that is best, Tommy?" shouted
Bob. "If we carry them up high enough and leave them, they will be
perfectly safe."

The wind and the rain made shouting necessary if one's voice were to
carry above the storm. The boys lifted the light boats and carried them
into the woods, turning them over so that the keels were up.

"Now the question is," said Bob, who seemed by common consent to have
been elected leader, "shall we walk along the shore and get drenched, or
take a chance of finding our way through the woods?"

To their astonishment, Libbie burst into a fit of hysterical weep