“There ithn’t much danger of falling over the furniture in the dark, ith there?” she asked.

“Not when we have a Torch Bearer with us,” answered Buster, from the shadow just outside the door.

“Thave me!” murmured Tommy.

“Oh, my stars!  We’ll laugh to-morrow, darlin’.  It’s too dark to laugh now.  Come in and sit down, Buster.  It isn’t safe to leave you out there.  No telling what you might not do after having given out such a flimsy ‘joke.’”

“Where shall I sit?” asked Margery, stepping in and glancing about the room.

“Take the easy chair over there in the corner,” suggested Harriet smilingly.

“But there isn’t any chair there.”

“That ith all right.  You jutht thit where the chair would be if there were one,” suggested Tommy.

“No sitting this evening,” declared the guardian.  “You will all prepare for bed.  At least two of you need rest—­I mean Harriet and Tommy.”

“Yeth, we alwayth need that.  I never thhall get enough of it until after I have been dead ever and ever tho long.”

“I am not sleepy, but, of course, being a leader now, I have to set a good example,” said Harriet lightly.

Tommy squinted at her inquiringly, as if trying to decide whether or not it were prudent to take advantage of her now that Harriet was a leader officially.  She decided to test the matter out at the first opportunity, but just now there was a matter of several hours’ sleep ahead, so Tommy quickly prepared for sleep, after which, straightening out her blanket, she twisted herself up in it in a mummy roll with only the top of her tow-head and a pair of very bright little eyes observable over the top of the blanket.

Harriet waited until her companions had rolled up in their blankets; then she opened the door wide so that the ocean breeze blew in and swirled about the interior of the cabin in a miniature gale.  The girls did not mind it at all.  They thought it delicious.  This was getting the real benefit of being at the sea shore.  Harriet rolled in her blanket directly in front of the door with her head pillowed on the sill.  To enter the cabin one would have to step over her.  She went to sleep after lying gazing out over the sea for some time.

“What’s that?” Harriet started up with a half-smothered exclamation.  A report that sounded like the discharge of a gun had aroused her, or else she had been dreaming.  She was not certain which it had been.  The other girls were asleep, as was indicated by their regular breathing.  Harriet listened intently.  She had not changed her position, but her eyes were wide open, looking straight out to sea.  Nothing unusual was found there.  She was about to close her eyes again when a peculiar creaking sound greeted her ears.  Harriet knew instantly the meaning of the sound.  It came from the straining of ropes on a sailboat.

Unrolling from the blanket and hastily dressing, the Meadow-Brook Girl crawled out to the bar, wishing to make her observations unseen by any one else.  Now she saw it again, that same filmy cloud in the darkness, towering up in the air, moving almost phantom-like into the bay to the south of the cabin on Lonesome Bar.