Harriet shook her head.  “I’m going to help carry the stuff to our camp.  Then I shall be sure of keeping warm.  Come on, girls.  Where are the bedding packs?”

“Down there by the tree, Miss,” replied Jim.

Harriet ran to the tree.  “I don’t find them,” she called a moment later.

Jim harried to her.  He was mystified to discover that the packs were not where he had left them.

“You didn’t throw them in the river, did you, Jim?” questioned Harriet.

He declared vehemently that he had not; that he had placed them well back from the water, and that they could not possibly have rolled into the river.  Jim announced that he was going down the shore to look for them, just the same.  This he did, starting away at a trot.  Wonderingly, and somewhat disturbed, for the bedding and the clothing packs contained articles that could not be done without, the girls instituted a search of their own, but found nothing.  The loss of the packs meant their return to town to purchase more supplies.  No one wished to do that, in the first place; and, in the second place, they needed warm, dry bedding and dry clothing for use that night.

While Jim was in search of the missing equipment the girls went to work and collected the scattered contents of some of the packs.  Suddenly there came a long-drawn shout from down shore.

“I’ve got ’em!”

“I thought so,” nodded Miss Elting.

Jim came back lugging a pack soon thereafter.  The water was running from the pack, under whose weight the driver was staggering.

“Found them in the river,” he explained.  “Had drifted into a cove.  So heavy I couldn’t carry more than one at a time.  The other packs are open and the stuff spread all over the cove.  I gathered it up as well as I could.  You’ll have to give me a rope to tie the things up, or else bring them back in wads.”

“In the river?” cried the girls in chorus.

“Well, I swum!” muttered Janus, pausing from his labors long enough to consult his whiskers.  “Things are moving kind of fast.”

“Oh, this is nothing, nothing at all,” laughed Crazy Jane.  “You will think things are moving after you have been out with the Meadow-Brook Girls for a time.  Things always do move when we are around.  Look out that they don’t move so fast as to sweep you with them.  My! but this is a heavy pack.”

The girls had taken the wet pack from Jim and were dragging it up the bluff.  Janus tied this and two other packs on the back of one horse, then began making ready for doing the game with the other animal.  By the time he was ready, Jim had returned with still another wet bundle of equipment.

“Our clotheth are in that pack!” wailed Tommy, as she surveyed the bedraggled outfit.  “What thhall we do?”

“Keep quiet and go on up to camp,” said Margery severely.

“Come, come, girls!” urged Miss Elting, a little irritated.  She had not yet quite recovered from the shock of Harriet’s disaster.  How great a shock this had been her charges had not fully realized.