es me feel spooky," declared Grace, beginning to grow enthusiastic.

These girls, all attending Denton Academy and living within the limits
of that town, being the daughters of fairly well-to-do parents, had been
able to enjoy many advantages as well as pleasures that poorer girls
could not have; but none of them had chanced to experience the joys of a
vacation in the woods.

During the preceding autumn they had become immensely interested in
canoeing. Denton was situated upon the beautiful, winding Wintinooski,
and the six members of the Go-Ahead Club had taken several Saturday
cruises on the river. But never had they gone as far up the stream as
Lake Honotonka.

That was a wide and beautiful sheet of water, thirty-five miles to the
west of the town of Denton. Their boy friends had sometimes been allowed
to go camping upon the shores of the lake; and their enthusiastic praise
of the fun to be had under canvas had set Wynifred Mallory and her chums
"just wild," as Frank Cameron expressed it, to try it too.

Wyn was a girl of determination and physical as well as moral courage.
If she made up her mind that a thing was right, and she wanted it, she
usually got it.

When the girls first broached their desire to spend the summer at the
big lake, and actually live under canvas, not one of their parents
encouraged the idea. Because the "Busters," a certain boys' club of the
girls' friends, were going to the lake again for the long vacation, made
no difference to the mothers and fathers--especially the mothers of Wyn
and her chums of the Go-Ahead Club.

"It's no use," Bessie Lavine had reported, at their first meeting after
the idea was born in Canoe Lodge, as the girls called their novel
boathouse overhanging the bank of a quiet pool of the Wintinooski. "Even
father won't hear of it. Six girls going alone into the wilds----"

"But the Busters and Professor Skillings will be near our camp," Frank
had cried. "That's what I told mother. But she couldn't see it."

Wyn had listened at that meeting to the opinions of all the other
girls--and to their hopeless and disappointed complaints as well--and
then she had taken the whole burden on her own shoulders.

"Don't you say another word at home about it, girls--any of you," she
said. "Leave it to me. Our idea of living for the summer in the open is
a good one. We'll come back to school in the fall with ginger and health
enough to keep us going like dynamos during the next sc