“Good goods!  Stampeded ’em!  They’ll vote for you for any office —­your pick!  If that guy Ephraim plans buttering the slide we’ll set him on it—­watch!”

“You bet,” she answered sentimentally.  “I wasn’t cheer leader for nothing.  Besides, I delivered the valedictory—­say, what are we waiting here for?”

“Come on, then!” I urged her.  “We’ll leave our mule-load behind in case they’ve eaten your horse.  Come with us to the stables and—­”

But she interrupted me.

“You men go down and get the horses.  Do what you can with the crowd.  I’ll get the women into something like order if that’s possible, and we’ll all meet wherever there’s open ground and moonlight at the foot of the hill.”

“I’ll come with you,” Will proposed.  “You’ll need—­”

“No you won’t!  The women are easy.  They’ve been taught to obey orders!  It’ll take all the wit you three men own between you to get the men in line!  Let’s get busy!”

The men had treated the hanging blankets with the respect the ancient Jews accorded to the veil of the Holy of Holies. (We learned afterward that there was an Armenian man of the party who had followed a circus one summer all across the States, and had brought that sensible precaution home with him as rule number one for successful management of mixed assemblies.) Gloria Vanderman made a run for the curtain and dived behind it.  We heard the women welcome her.

“Let’s go!” said Will.

Will had ever been our ladies’ man in all our wanderings, because women could never resist his unaffected comradeship.  Even among Americans he was rare in his gift of according to women equality not only of liberty, but of understanding and good sense, and it went like wine to the heads of some we had met, so that Will was seldom without a sex-problem on his hands and ours.  But Will was too good a comrade to be surrendered to any woman lightly.

“Damn that chicken!” murmured Fred by way of praying fervently, pausing in the breach in the wall to rub his shin.  “Feel that bruise, will you!  No young woman ever brought me luck yet!”

“What are you waiting for?” complained a voice from outer darkness.  “Come on, you rummies!”

Fred sat down on the protruding stone that had injured his shin, and detained me with his arm across the opening.

“Mark my words!  In order that that young woman may be educated to consider Will Yerkes a paragon of unimaginable virtues, we—­you and I—­are going to have to do what he calls ‘hustle.’  We’re going to see speed, and we’re going to sweat, trying to catch up.  There isn’t a scatterbrained adventure conceivable that we’re not going to be forced into, nor an imaginable peril that we’re not going to have to pull him out of.  We’re going to be cursed for our trouble, and ridiculed to make amusement for her majesty.  And at the end of it all we’re going to be patronized for a couple of ignorant damned fools who don’t know better than be bachelors.  What’s worse, we’re going to submit tamely.  What is infinitely worse, we’re going to like it!  There are times when I doubt the sanity of my whole sex!”