"Oh, aren't you the wise little owl, Jess Norwood!" she cried. "To think of wearing a sun-hat! And here am I with nothing to shelter me from the torrid rays. I am going to burn and peel and look horrid--I know I shall!
I'll not be fit to go to Hackle Island--if we go."
"Oh, we're going, all right!"
"You're mighty certain, from the way you talk. Has it been really settled? 'There's many a slip' and all that, you know."
"Father asked Momsy about it at breakfast before he went to town, and she said she had quite made up her mind," Jessie said. "He will make the arrangements with the owner of the house."
"Oh, goody! A bungalow?" cried Amy.
"Yes."
"How big, dear? Can the boys come?"
"Of course. There are fourteen rooms. It is a big place. We will shut up the house here and send down most of the serving people ahead. We shall have at least one good month of salt air."
"Hooray!" cried Amy, swinging her paddle recklessly. "And I've got just the most scrumptious idea, Jess. I'll tell you----"
But something unexpected happened just then that quite drove out of Amy Drew's mind the idea she had to impart to her chum. She brought the paddle she had waved down with an awful smack on the water. The spray spattered all about. Jessie flung herself back to escape some of the inwash, and by so doing her gaze struck upon something on the surface of the lake, far ahead.
"Oh! Oh!" she shrieked. "What is that, Amy? Somebody is drowning!"
CHAPTER V--INTO TROUBLE AND OUT
Amy Drew sat up in the canoe as high as she could and stared ahead.
Jessie's observation suggested trouble; but Amy almost immediately burst out laughing.
"'Drowning!'" she repeated. "Why, Jess Norwood, you know that you couldn't drown those Dogtown kids. And if that isn't some of them--Monty Shannon, and the Costello twins, and the rest of them--I'm much mistaken."
"But see those barrels and tubs and what-all!" gasped her more serious friend. "Look there! It's Henrietta!"
The fleet of strange barges that Jessie had first spied included, it seemed, almost every sort of craft that could be improvised. A rainwater barrel led the procession of "boats," and Montmorency Shannon was in that, paddling with some kind of paddle that he wielded with no little skill.
There were two wooden washtubs in which the Costello twins voyaged. One was much lower in the water than the other, giving evidence of having shipped more water than its mate. In a water-trough that had been filched from somebody's barnyard was little Henrietta and Charlie Foley.
"They will be overboard!" exclaimed Jessie, anxiously. "Drive ahead, Amy--do!"
The wind was blowing directly in their faces and from the direction of the Dogtown landing, where the flotilla had evidently embarked. The tubs spun around and around, the half-barrel in which Monty Shannon sat tried to perform the same gyrations, but Henrietta and the Foley boy blundered ahead. It was plain to Jessie's mind that the reckless children could not have sailed in the other direction had they wished to do so.
"What do you come out here for?" she shrieked when the canoe drew near.
"Oh, Miss Jessie, we are going to the Carter place," sang out Henrietta.
"But the Carter place is down the lake, not up!" exclaimed the exasperated Jessie.
"Yes. But the wind shifted," said Henrietta.
"Where is your big canoe?" demanded Amy, who could scarcely paddle from laughter, in spite of the evident danger the children were in.
"That is what we started after," said Montmorency Shannon, his red head sticking out of the barrel like a full-blown hollyhock. "It got away in the night, or somebody let it go, and we saw it away down by the Carter place. So--so we thought we'd go after it."
"And I warrant your mothers don't know what you are doing," Jessie said sternly.
"Oh, they will!" cried Henrietta, virtuously.
"When they miss the washtubs," put in Amy, with laughter.
"When we tell 'em," corrected little Henrietta. "And we always tell 'em everything we do."
"I see. After it is all over," Jessie commented.
"We-ell," said Henrietta, pouting, "we can't tell 'em what we have done before we do it, can we? For we never know ourselves."
"You certainly cannot beat that for logic," declared Amy. She drove the head of the canoe to the tub of the nearest Costello twin. "Get in here carefully, Micky. You are going down."
"That's 'cause Aloysius always gets the best tub. _He_ ain't sinking none," said Michael Costello, scowling at his twin.
"Quick!" commanded Amy, and the disgruntled Costello swarmed over the side of the canoe. "We can take in one more. Who is the nearest drowned?"
"I'm sitting in half a foot of water," confessed the red-haired Shannon, grinning.
"A little soaking will do _you_ good. I can guess who suggested this crazy venture," Jessie said. "Come, Henrietta."
"I need her to trim ship!" cried Charlie Foley.
"What do you want to trim your ship with--red, white and blue?" demanded Amy. "If that trough sinks I know you can swim, Charlie."
The crowd would have had some difficulty in getting back to shore with the wind blowing as freshly as it did if the girls had not come along and, in relays, helped them all back.
"What Mrs. Shannon will say when she sees her two washtubs floating off like that, I don't know," sighed Henrietta, after they were all ashore.
"One of 'em's sunk, so she can't see it," Micky Costello said calmly.
"Maybe the other will go down. Don't you big girls say anything and maybe she won't find it out."
Jessie and Amy had headed for Dogtown in the first place without any expectation of playing a life-saving part. Jessie thought they ought to see Mrs. Foley, who was fleshy and easy of disposition, and ask her about Henrietta's visit. So they accompanied the freckle-faced little girl to the Foley house.
"I ain't telling 'em all they can come to visit my island, Miss Jessie,"
said the little girl. "But of course, the Foleys could come. Mrs. Blair and Bertha wouldn't mind just them, of course. There's only Mrs. Foley and Charlie and Billy and the baby and three more boys and--and--well, that's all, only Mr. Foley. He wouldn't want to come."
"You would better be sure of your island, and just how much you own of it, Hen," advised Amy Drew. "It may not be big enough to hold everybody you want to invite."
"Why, Miss Amy, it's a awful big island," declared little Henrietta.
"It's got a whole golf link on it. I heard Mr. Blair say so."
The "bulgy" Mrs. Foley welcomed the Roselawn girls with her usual copiousness. Of course, she had the youngest Foley in her lap, and the housework was "at sixes and sevens," since little Henrietta had been at Stratfordtown for a week.