"Bail it! Bail it!" shouted Nell.
"Oh! is that what the tin dipper is for?" gasped Amy. "I--I thought it was to drink out of."
Afterward "Amy's drinking cup" made a joke, but just then nobody laughed at the girl's mistake. She set to work with vigor to bail out the boat, and kept it up "for hours and hours" she declared, though the others insisted it was "minutes and minutes."
At last they reached the strand.
One of the bathing house men ran out to help pull the bow of the boat up on the sands.
"Run along up to the hotel!" he cried. "There is no good shelter down here for you."
The moment they could do so the three girls leaped ashore. Thus relieved of their weight, the boat was the more easily dragged out of the reach of the waves, which now began to roll in madly. The lightning increased in its intensity, the thunder reverberated from the bluff. The tempest was at its height when they hastened to mount the winding wooden stair.
"Oh, my blister! Oh, my blister!" moaned Nell, as she climbed upward.
"Everything I've got on sticks to me like a twin sister," declared Amy Drew. "Oh, dear! How shall we ever get home in these soaked rags?"
"We must go to the hotel," cried Jessie. "Come on."
She was the first to reach the top of the stairs. There was a garden and lawn to cross to reach the veranda. As the rain was beating in from this direction none of the hotel guests was on this side of the house. The three wet girls ran as hard as they could for shelter.
Just as Jessie, leading the trio, came up the veranda steps, she heard a loud and harsh voice exclaim:
"Well, of all things! I'd like to know what you girls think you are doing here? You have no business at this hotel. Go away!"
Jessie almost stopped, and Amy and Nell ran into her.
"Oh, do go on!" cried Amy. "Let us get inside somewhere----"
"Well, I should say _not_!" broke out the harsh voice again, and the three Roselawn girls beheld Belle Ringold and Sally Moon confronting them on the piazza. "Just look at what wants to get into the hotel, Sally! Did you ever?"
"They look like beggars," laughed Sally. "The manager would give them marching orders in a hurry, I guess."
"Do let us in out of the rain," Jessie said faintly. She did not know but perhaps the hotel people would object to strangers coming inside.
But Amy demanded:
"What do you think you have to say about it, Belle Ringold? Is this something more that you or your folks own? Do go along, Belle, and let us pass."
"Not much; you won't come in here!" declared Belle, setting herself squarely in their way. "No, you don't! That door's locked, anyway. It belongs to Mrs. Olliver's private suite--Mrs. Purdy Olliver, of New York.
I am sure she won't want you bedrabbled objects hanging around her windows."
"Go around to the kitchen door," said Sally Moon, laughing. "That is where you look as though you belonged."
"Oh, that's good, Sally!" cried Belle. "Ex-act-ly! The kitchen door!"
At that moment another flash of lightning and burst of thunder made the two unpleasant girls from New Melford cringe and shriek aloud. They backed against the closed door Belle had mentioned as being the wealthy Mrs. Olliver's private entrance.
Amy and Nell screamed, too, and the three wet girls clung together for a moment. The rain came with a rush into the open porch, and if they could be more saturated than they were, this blast of rain would have done it.
"We have got to get under shelter!" shouted Jessie, and dragged her two friends farther into the veranda. Belle and Sally might have been mean enough to try to drive them back, but at this point somebody interfered.
A long window, like a door, opened and a lady looked out, shielding herself from the wind by holding the glass door.
"Girls! Girls!" she cried. "You will be drowned out there. Come right in."
"Fine!" gasped Amy, not at all under her breath. "Belle doesn't own the hotel, after all!"
"It's Mrs. Olliver!" exclaimed Sally Moon in a shrill voice, as she and Belle came out of retirement and likewise approached the open window.
"Come right in here," said the lady, cheerfully, as Jessie and her friends approached. "You are three very plucky girls. I saw you out in your boat when the storm struck you. Come in and I'll have my maid find you something dry to put on."
"Oh, fine!" sighed Amy again.
The trio of storm-beaten girls hastened in out of the wind and rain; but when Belle and Sally would have followed, Mrs. Olliver stopped them firmly.
"Don't you belong in the hotel?" she asked. "Then go around to the main entrance if you wish to come in. You are at home."
She actually closed the French window--but gently--in the faces of the bold duo. Amy, at least, was vastly amused. She winked wickedly at Jessie and Nell Stanley.
"This will break Belle's heart," she whispered.
CHAPTER XIX--BOUND OUT
Jessie thought that the very wealthy Mrs. Purdy Olliver was no different from Momsy or Mrs. Drew or Nell's Aunt Freda. She was just polite and kind. Secretly the girls from Roselawn thought the lady was very different from Belle's mother and Mrs. Moon. Perhaps that fact was one reason why the unpleasant Belle Ringold had spoken in some awe of the New York woman.
She had a really wonderful suite at the Hackle Island Hotel, for she had furnished it herself and came here every year, she told her young visitors. There was a lovely big bath room with both a tub and a Roman shower.
"Though, you can believe me," said Amy, "I don't have any idea that many of the old Romans had baths like this. It was 'the great unwashed' that supported Caesar. 'Roman bath' is only a name."
"Wrong! Not about Caesar's crowd, but about the Romans in general as bathers," answered Jessie. "Read your Roman history, girl. Or if not that--and you won't--some historical novels."
"Humph!" sniffed Amy, but made no further reply.
The girls laughingly disrobed and tried the shower, while the maid dried their outer clothing, furnishing each of the guests with kimono or negligee. Then they came out into Mrs. Olliver's living room and took tea with her.
They did not get their own clothes back until nearly six o'clock, and saw nothing of Belle and Sally when they came out of the hotel. Perhaps that was because they left by Mrs. Olliver's private door and ran right down the steps to the beach where they had left the boat.
The kind woman had asked them to come and see her again, and was especially cordial when she knew that Jessie was the daughter of the Mrs. Norwood who had been chairman of the foundation fund committee of the Women's and Children's Hospital of New Melford.
"I think that idea of having a radio concert by which to raise funds for the hospital was unusually good," the New York woman said. "It was the first thing that interested me in radio-telephony. I mean to have a set put in here soon. There is a big one in the hotel foyer, but it does not work perfectly at all times."
"Dear me," said Nell, as the girls descended to the beach, "you run into radio fans everywhere, don't you? How interesting!"
The boat was all right, only half filled with water. The bathhouse man came and turned the craft over for them and emptied it. Jessie thanked and tipped him and he pushed them off. Jessie and Amy each took an oar and made Nell sit in the stern and nurse her blister.