“Oh, Miss!  I guess that’s gone for good.  Near as I could make out o’ Uncle Pete, the landslide at the west end of the island buried his treasure box a mile deep!  It was in one o’ the little caves, I s’pose.”

“Caves?  Are there caves on the island?”

“Lots of ’em.  Big ones as well as small.  If Uncle Pete wasn’t plumb crazy, he had his money and papers in a hide-out that I’d never found.”

“I see Miss Picolet coming this way.  She won’t approve of my talking with ‘a strange young man’ so long,” laughed Ruth.  “You let me know every few days where you are, Jerry?”

“Yes, ma’am, I will.  And thank you kindly.”

“You aren’t out of funds?  You have money?”

“I’ve got quite a little store,” said Jerry, smiling.  “Thanks to that nice black-eyed girl that I helped out of the car window.”

“Oh!  Ann Hicks.  And she’s being made much of, now, by the girls, because she knew how to fling a rope,” cried Ruth, looking across the picnic ground to where her schoolmates were grouped.

“She’s all right,” said Jerry, enthusiastically.  “They ought to be proud of her—­them that was in that boat.”

“It will break the ice for Ann,” declared Ruth.  “I am so glad.  Now, I must run.  Don’t forget to write, Jerry.  Good bye.”

She gave him her hand and ran back to join her school friends.  Ann had gone about putting up the children’s swing and at first had paid little attention to the enthusiasm of the girls who had been saved from going over the dam.  But she could not ignore them altogether.

“You’re just the smartest girl I ever saw,” Heavy declaimed.  “We’d all be in the water, sure enough, if you hadn’t got that rope to us.  Come on, Ann!  Be a sport. Do wear your laurels kindly.”

“I’m just as ‘dumb’ about books as ever.  Flinging that rope didn’t make any difference,” growled the western girl.

“I don’t care if you don’t know your ‘A.B., abs,’” cried one of the girls who had taken a prominent part in the dunce cap trick.  “You make me awfully ashamed of myself for being so mean to you.  Please forgive us all, Ann—­that’s a good girl.”

Ann was awkward about accepting their apologies; and yet she was not naturally a bad-tempered girl.  She was just different from them all—­and felt the difference so keenly!

This sudden reversal of feeling, and their evident offer of friendliness, made her feel more awkward than ever.  She remained very glum while at the picnic grounds.

But, as Ruth had said, the incident served to break the ice.  Ann had gotten her start.  Somebody beside the “primes” gave her “the glad hand and the smiling eye.”  Briarwood began to be a different sort of place for the ranch girl.

There were plenty of the juniors who looked down on her still; but she had “shown them” once that she could do something the ordinary eastern girl could not do and Ann was on the qui vive for another chance to “make good” along her own particular line.