Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp | Page 9

Libbie will want to put a laurel wreath on my brow if I climb up there. See! There is a bunch of laurels right over there--those glossy-leaved, runty sort of trees. Not for me! I am going to lead Jim out ahead, and you climb up, if you want to, and come along with the rest of the bunch. Ride my horse, if you will, Betty."
"So you'd run away from a girl!" scoffed Betty, but laughing. "You are no hero, Bob Henderson."
"Sure I'm not," he agreed cheerfully. "And I'd run away from a girl like Libbie any day. I wonder how Timothy Derby stands for her. But he's almost as mushy as a soft pumpkin!"
With this disrespectful observation Bob started off with the gray horse and Betty scrambled up the bank down which she had plunged so heedlessly.
Bobby was one of those who had dismounted at the brink of the ravine, and she held out a brown hand to Betty as the latter scrambled up the last yard or two of the steep bank and helped her to a secure footing.
"Are you all right, Betty dear?" she cried.
"No. One side of me is left," laughed Betty. "Wasn't that some slide?"
"Now, don't try to make out that you did it on purpose!" exclaimed Esther, the youngest Littell sister.
"It was too lovely for anything," sighed Libbie.
"I'm glad you think so," said Betty. "Oh! you mean what Bob did. I see. Of course he is lovely--always has been. But don't tell him so, for it utterly spoils boys if you praise them--doesn't it Bobby?"
"Of course it does," agreed Betty's particular chum, whose real name, Roberta, was seldom used even by her parents.
"I like that!" chorused the Tucker twins. "Wait till we tell Bob, Betty," added Tommy Tucker, shaking his head.
"If you try to slide downhill on horseback again, we'll all just let you slide to the very bottom," said Teddy.
"Don't fret," returned Betty gaily. "I don't intend to take another such slide----"
"Not even if your Uncle Dick takes you up to Mountain Camp?" asked Bobby. "There's fine tobogganing up there, he says. Mmmm!"
"Don't talk about it!" wailed Betty. "You know we can't go, for school begins next week and Uncle Dick won't hear to anything breaking in on my schooling."
"Not even measles?" suggested Tommy Tucker solemnly. "Two of the fellows were quarantined with it when we left Salsette," he added.
"Oh! don't speak of such a horrid thing," gasped Libbie, who did not consider measles in the least romantic. "You get all speckled like--like a zebra if you have 'em."
The twins uttered a concerted shout and almost rolled out of their saddles into which they had again mounted after assisting the girls, Betty being astride Bob's horse.
"Speckled like a zebra is good!" Bobby Littell said laughingly to her plump cousin. "I suppose you think a barber's pole is speckled, Libbie?"
These observations attracted the deluded Libbie sufficiently from her hero-worship, so that when Bob Henderson came up out of the ravine to join them a mile beyond the scene of the accident, he was perfectly safe from Libbie's romantic consideration.
The boy and girl friends were then in a deep discussion of the chances, pro and con, of Betty's Uncle Dick taking her with him to Mountain Camp despite the imminent opening of the term at Shadyside.
"Of course there is scarcely a possibility of his doing so," Betty said finally with hopeless mien. "Mr. Canary--Uncle Dick's friend is named Jonathan Canary, isn't that a funny name?" she interrupted herself to ask.
"He's a bird," declared Teddy Tucker solemnly.
"Nothing romantic sounding about that name," his brother said, with a look at Libbie. "'Jonathan Canary'--no poetry in that."
"He, he!" chuckled Ted wickedly. "Talking about poetry----"
"But we weren't!" said Bobby Littell. "We were talking about going to Mountain Camp in the Adirondacks. Think of it--in the dead of winter!"
"Talking about poetry," steadily pursued Teddy Tucker. "You know Timothy Derby is always gushing."
"A 'gusher,'" interposed Betty primly, "is an oil well that comes in with a bang."
"Don't you mean it comes out with a bang?" teased Louise.
"In or out, Betty and I have seen 'em gush all right," cried Bob, as they cantered on together along a well-defined bridle-path.
"Say! I'm telling you something," exploded Teddy Tucker, who did not purpose to have his tale lost sight of. "Something about Timothy Derby."
"Oh, dear me, yes!" exclaimed Bobby. "Do tell it and get it over, Ted."
The twins both began to chuckle and Teddy had some difficulty in going on with his story. But it seemed they had been at the Derby place the evening before and Timothy had been "boring everybody to distraction," Ted said, reading "Excelsior" to the family.
"And believe me!" interjected Tommy Tucker, "that kid can elocute."
"And he's always been at it," hurried on his twin, giggling. "Here's what Mr. Derby