“Oh dear!” cried Mrs. Brown.  “I should have told you!  But the egg woman came just then.  I should have told you the left side of the jar of peaches.  On the right side was a jar of pickled chow-chow.  It looks a lot like mince-meat, I know, but it is quite different.  The real mince-meat was on the left of the peach jar.  Oh, Sue!  You’ve made your pie of chow-chow.”

“I was thinking Sue had found out a new kind of pie,” said Daddy Brown.  “Never mind, there are some cakes and cookies.”

“Oh, dear!” cried Sue, and there were tears in her eyes.  “I did so want my mince pie to be nice!”

“It was good,” said Tom.  “The crust is the best I ever ate, and the pickled insides will go good on the fish.”

Everybody laughed at that, and even Sue smiled.

“Next time smell your mince-meat before you put it in a pie,” said Mrs. Brown.  “Otherwise your pie would have been perfect, Sue.”

“I will,” promised the little girl.

Tom became a regular member of Camp Rest-a-While, sleeping in a tent by himself.  And he proved so useful, cutting wood, going on errands and even helping with the cooking, that Mrs. Brown said she wondered how she had ever got along without him.

He was given some of Uncle Tad’s old clothes, that seemed to fit him very well, so he could no longer be called the “ragged boy,” and he went in swimming so often, often taking Bunny and Sue along, that all three were as “clean as whistles,” Mrs. Brown said.

No word had been heard from Mr. Bixby about his missing helper, but Mr. Brown had not given up making inquiries about the “needles.”

Bunny and Sue missed their electric playthings, but their father brought them other toys from the city with which they had great fun.  But still Bunny wished for his electric train, and Sue for her wonderful Teddy bear.

One night, just after supper, Mrs. Brown discovered that she needed milk to set some bread for baking in the morning.

“I’ll go and get it to the farmhouse,” said Tom.

“And may I go, too?” asked Bunny.  It was decided that he could, as it was not late, only dark.  So down the dusky road trudged Bunny and Tom, with Splash running along beside them.  As it happened, the farmhouse where they usually got the milk had none left, so they had to go on to the next one, which was quite near the edge of the Indian village.

“But they won’t any of ’em be out now, will they?” asked Bunny.

“Oh, the Indians may be sitting outside their cabins, smoking their pipes,” said Tom.

“Oh, that’ll be all right,” observed Bunny.  “They’ll be peace-pipes and they won’t hurt us.”

“Of course not,” laughed Tom.

From the road in front of the house where they finally got the milk they could look right down into the valley of the Indian encampment.  And as Bunny looked he saw a bright fire blazing, and Indians walking or hopping slowly around it.