stance declared would make a good drill
sergeant, set busily to work again. Nuts were not plentiful, but they
filled half a sack, and then, a large pile of flaming branches having
been gathered, they decided to drag their spoils back to the tree and to
have lunch.

"Girls, girls, girls!" shrieked Libbie, who was in the lead, "our lunch
is gone--every crumb of it!"

Sure enough, the sweaters were all tossed about in confusion and the
boxes had disappeared.

"Who took it?" demanded Bobby wrathfully. "You needn't tell me that
lunch walked off!"

High and clear and shrill, a familiar whistle sounded back of them.

"That's Bob!" Betty's face brightened. "Listen!"

She gave an answering whistle, and Bob's sounded again.

There was a scrambling among the bushes, and a group of cadets burst
through. Bob and the Tucker twins were first, and after them came Gilbert
Lane and Timothy Derby and Winifred Marion Brown.

"Hello, anything the matter?" was Bob's greeting. "You look rather glum."

"So would you," Betty informed him, "if you were starving after a
morning's work and your lunch was stolen."

"Gee, that is tough!" exclaimed Bob sympathetically. "Who stole it?"

"We don't know," volunteered Bobby. "But all those boxes couldn't take
wings and fly away."

"You go back and get the fellows," Bob commanded Tommy Tucker. "We were
having a potato roast down by the lake, and while the potatoes were
baking some of us came up for more wood," he explained to the girls. "We
thought we heard voices, and so I whistled."

Tommy Tucker was flying down to the lake before half of this explanation
was given.

"Have you a holiday, too?" Betty asked. "We're out to get decorations for
the play."

"It's the colonel's birthday," explained Bob, "and the old boy gave us
the day off. Here come the fellows."

Half a dozen more cadets joined them, all boys the girls had met at the
games. They were loud in their expressions of sympathy for the
disappointed picnickers and promptly offered their potatoes as
refreshments when they should be done.

"Oh, we're going to get that lunch back," announced Bob Henderson
confidently. "Look here!"

He pointed to some footprints in a bit of muddy ground.

"Cadet shoes!" cried Tommy Tucker. "Jimminy Crickets, I'll bet it's that
Marshall Morgan and his crowd!"

"But this is a girl's shoe," protested Betty, pointing to another print.
"See the narrow toe?"

"Ada Nansen or Ruth Royal!" guessed Bob