“Oh, you’re hunting a lot!” exclaimed Cologne in something like impatience.  “Now, Claud, this it no joke!  We are out to find our lively-loving, luckless little friend, Tavia.”

“I’m afraid it’s useless,” sighed Dorothy.  “We may just as well wait—­perhaps she will return at lunch time.”

But lunch time came, and lunch time went by, without any trace or track of Tavia being discovered.

Finally Dorothy broke down, and went to her own room.  Cologne followed her, and there, in the secret nook in the big camp farm, the two girls discussed every possible clause of the case, and tried with heroic effort to shed some light on the mystery.

“Was it the Lamberts?  Or could it be——­”

“Oh, she would never go off with a stranger,” declared Dorothy over and over again.  “Surely our Tavia has more common sense than that.”

“But it is so lonely up here—­no,” Cologne corrected herself, “you are right, of course, Dorothy.  She will be back—­just as soon as she feels like coming.  That’s Tavia!”

But they little knew the danger to which the younger girl had unwittingly exposed herself.

No wonder Tavia could not be found within or without the precincts of the camp.

CHAPTER XI

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, “whatever she might do during the day.”

“Now, Doro, dear,” consoled Cologne, “you must not look at it that way.  It is perfectly surprising what may happen, in a perfectly safe way, after one has found out, while before that time such things seem utterly impossible.  Haven’t we had lots of that at Glenwood?”