WHEN THE BOYS CAME


Dorothy had always loved her cousins, Ned and Nat, but when they
arrived at the camp, the day after Tavia's disappearance, she fancied
she had never before fully appreciated them. They came in the
_Firebird_, their automobile, and declared that they would camp out in
the open Maine woods, cook in the open, make soups of lily bulbs,
stirred with the aromatic boughs of the spruce, and otherwise conform
to all the glorious hardships peculiar to the pioneers--according to
the stories told by said pioneers.

But the absence of Tavia put a damper on everything.

"We have got to start out and trace her," Jack Markin told Ned and
Nat. "It is inconceivable where she could have gone to."

"We certainly shall start out at once," declared Nat, who was always
Tavia's champion, to say nothing of his being her special friend and
admirer. "I have known her to do risky things before, but this is the
utmost."

"I never saw such a girl," growled Ned. "Just when a fellow expects to
have a first-rate time, she puts up something that knocks it out."

Dorothy was disconsolate. Her eyes showed the result of a sleepless
night, and her usually pink cheeks were quite pale.

"She would never stay away of her own accord over night," she sighed,