CHAPTER I
TIME TO GO WAYFARING AGAIN

“Oh, dear!” loudly sighed Patsy Carroll.

The regretful exclamation was accompanied by the energetic banging of Patsy’s French grammar upon the table.

“Stay there, tiresome old thing!” she emphasized. “I’ve had enough of you for one evening.”

“What’s the matter, Patsy?”

Beatrice Forbes raised mildly inquiring eyes from the theme she was industriously engaged in writing.

“Lots of things. I hate French verbs. The crazy old irregular ones most of all. They start out one thing and by the time you get to the future tense they’re something entirely different.”

“Is that all?” smiled Beatrice. “You ought to be used to them by this time.”

“That’s only one of my troubles,” frowned Patsy. “There are others a great deal worse. One of them is this Easter vacation business. I thought we’d surely have three weeks. It’s always been so at Yardley until this year. Two weeks is no vacation worth mentioning.”

“Well, that’s plenty of time to go home in and stay at home and see the folks for a while, isn’t it?” asked Beatrice.

“But we didn’t intend going home,” protested Patsy.

“Didn’t intend going home?” repeated Beatrice wonderingly. “What are you talking about, Patsy Carroll? I certainly expect to go home for Easter.”

“You only think you do,” Patsy assured, her troubled face relaxing into a mischievous grin. “Maybe you will, though. I don’t know. It depends upon what kind of scheme my gigantic brain can think up.

“It’s like this, Bee,” she continued, noting her friend’s expression of mystification. “Father and I made a peach of a plan. Excuse my slang, but ‘peach of a plan’ just expresses it. Well, when I was at home over Christmas, Father promised me that the Wayfarers should join him and Aunt Martha at Palm Beach for the Easter vacation. He bought some land down in Florida last fall. Orange groves and all that, you know. This land isn’t so very far from Palm Beach. He was going down there right after Christmas, but a lot of business prevented him from going. He’s down there now, though, and – ”

“You’ve been keeping all this a dead secret from your little chums,” finished Beatrice with pretended reproach.

“Of course I have,” calmly asserted Patsy. “That was to be part of the fun. I meant to spring a fine surprise on you girls. Your mother knows all about it. So does Mrs. Perry. I went around and asked them if you and Mab and Nellie could go while I was at home during the Christmas holidays. Aunt Martha liked my plan, too. Now we’ll have to give it up and go somewhere nearer home. We’d hardly get settled at Palm Beach when we’d have to come right home again. One more week’s vacation would make a lot of difference. And we can’t have it! It’s simply too mean for anything!”

“It would be wonderful to go to Palm Beach,” mused Beatrice. “It would be to me, anyway. You know I’ve never traveled as you have, Patsy. Going to the Adirondacks last summer was my first real trip away from home. Going to Florida would seem like going to fairy land.”

Readers of “Patsy Carroll at Wilderness Lodge,” are already well acquainted, not only with Patsy Carroll and Beatrice Forbes, but also with their chums, Mabel and Eleanor Perry. In this story was narrated the adventures of the four young girls, who, chaperoned by Patsy’s stately aunt, Miss Martha Carroll, spent a summer together in the Adirondacks.

Wilderness Lodge, the luxurious “camp” leased by Mr. Carroll for the summer, had formerly belonged to an eccentric old man, Ebeneezer Wellington. Having died intestate the previous spring, his property and money had passed into the hands of Rupert Grandin, his worthless nephew, leaving his foster-daughter, Cecil Vane, penniless.

Hardly were the Wayfarers, as the four girls had named themselves, established at the Lodge when its owner decided, for reasons of his own, to oust them from his property. A chance meeting between Beatrice and Cecil Vane revealed the knowledge that the latter had been defrauded of her rights and was firm in the belief that her late uncle had made a will in her favor, which was tucked away in some corner of the Lodge.

The long-continued hunt for the missing will and the strange circumstances which attended the finding of it furnished the Wayfarers with a new kind of excitement, quite apart from other memorable incidents and adventures which crowded the summer.

In the end, Cecil came into her own, and the Wayfarers returned to Morton, their home town, to make ready to enter Yardley, a preparatory school, in which Mabel, Eleanor and Patsy were to put in another year of study before entering college.

When Beatrice Forbes had joined the chums on the eventful vacation in the mountains, she had fully expected on her return to Morton to become a teacher in one of the grade schools. Fortune, however, had smiled kindly on her. Her great-aunt, whom her mother had visited that summer for the first time, had exhibited a lively interest in the great-niece whom she had never seen.

Learning from Mrs. Forbes, Beatrice’s longing ambition to obtain a college education, she had privately decided to accompany Beatrice’s mother to the latter’s home when her visit was ended, and thus view her ambitious young relative at close range.

This she had done. She had found Beatrice quite up to her expectations. She had also met Patsy Carroll and promptly fallen into the toils of that most fascinating young person. Patsy had privately advanced Beatrice’s cause to so great an extent that it was not long until Beatrice was making joyful preparations to accompany Mabel, Eleanor and Patsy to Yardley, as a result of her aunt’s generosity.

So it was that the congenial quartette of Wayfarers had settled down together at Yardley for a year of conscientious study. It now lacked but ten days until the beginning of the Easter vacation and, as usual, energetic Patsy was deeply concerned in the problem of how to make the best of only two weeks’ recreation when she had fondly looked forward to three.

“It wouldn’t do us a bit of good to ask for an extra week,” mourned Patsy. “Three girls I know have tried it and been snubbed for their pains. What we must do is to get together and plan some sort of outing that won’t take us so far away from here. Of course we can’t be sure of anything unless Aunt Martha approves. She’ll be disappointed about not going to Palm Beach. She just loves to travel around with the Wayfarers, only she won’t say so right out. Come on, Bee. Let’s go and see the girls. Now that the great secret has all flattened out, like a punctured tire on my good old car, I might as well tell Mab and Nellie the sad tale.”

“You go, Patsy. I must finish this theme.” Beatrice cast a guilty glance at the half-finished work on the table. “I must hand it in at first recitation to-morrow and it’s a long way from being finished.”

“Oh, bother your theme! You can finish it later. It’s only eight o’clock. We’ll stay just a few minutes.”

“Hello, Perry children!” greeted Patsy, when five minutes afterward she and Beatrice broke in upon their chums, who roomed on the floor above Patsy and Beatrice.

“Hello, yourself,” amiably responded Mabel, as she ushered them into the room. “Of course you can’t read or you would have seen the ‘Busy’ sign on the door.”

“Pleasure before business,” retorted Patsy. “Kindly ask us to sit down, but not on your bed. I want a chair with a back to it. It’s strictly necessary to my comfort.”

“Help yourself.”

This from Eleanor who had laid aside her book and come forward.

“What’s on your mind, Patsy?” asked Mabel curiously. “Something’s happened. I can tell that by the way you look.”

“I have a heavy load on my mind,” declared Patsy with deep impressiveness.

Dramatically striking her forehead, she cried, “Ouch! That hurt!” giggled and dropped down into a nearby chair.

“You almost knocked it off,” chuckled Beatrice, seating herself on the edge of Mabel’s bed. “The load, I mean.”

“I did not. I almost knocked my forehead off. The load is still there. Now to get rid of it.”

Whereupon Patsy plunged into the subject of the great secret.

“And Mother said we could go?” asked Eleanor eagerly when Patsy had finished speaking.

“Certainly, but the powers that be, here at Yardley, say you can’t,” reminded Patsy. “Palm Beach is not for us this Easter. I’m so disgusted over this vacation business!”

“It’s a shame!” exclaimed Mabel. “I don’t want to go any place else. Why can’t we go there, anyway? It would take us two or three days to go and the same length of time to come back. We’d have a week there. That would be better than nothing.”

“I suppose it would,” concurred Patsy rather reluctantly. “It’s only that I hate being torn up by the roots and hustled back here just the very minute I’m getting used to things at the Beach. There is so much to see there. Besides, I’m simply crazy to go to the Everglades. Father promised that he’d hire a real Indian guide, to take us there on an expedition.”

“Let’s write to our people and tell them to write to the registrar, asking if we can’t have that extra week,” proposed Eleanor eagerly. “If your Aunt Martha, our mother and Bee’s mother would all write to her, it might do some good.”

“We can try it. I doubt whether it will help much,” Patsy said gloomily. “Miss Osgood is so awfully strict, you know. It’s our only chance and a slim one. I’m going straight to my room and write to Aunt Martha. Bee can write to her mother as soon as she finishes a theme she’s toiling over. You’d better write to-night, too. The sooner we find out the best or the worst, the sooner we’ll knew what to do about Easter. If we can only have two weeks, Aunt Martha may want to do the Beach anyway. If she doesn’t – well, we’ll have to think up some place nearer Yardley to go to. I’m determined to have some kind of trip, if it’s only to Old Point Comfort. The Wayfarers have been cooped up all winter. It’s time they went wayfaring again.”