Mrs. Stanlock called up his office, but learned that he had left an hour and a half before, supposedly for home.

"How did he leave?" Mrs. Stanlock inquired nervously.

"In his automobile," was the answer.

That being the case, he ought to have been home more than an hour ago. His office was in the city and he could easily make the run in fifteen minutes.

Thoroughly alarmed, Mrs. Stanlock called up the police, stated the circumstances and asked that a search be made for her husband.

Two hours more elapsed and the whole neighborhood was alarmed. The news spread rapidly and was communicated by phone to most of Mr. Stanlock's friends and acquaintances throughout the city. The search was growing in scope and sensation. Treachery was suspected, a tragedy was feared.

Then suddenly and calmly, Mr. Stanlock reappeared at home, driving the machine himself. He had a thrilling story to tell of his experiences.

CHAPTER VI.

THE PUNSTER MAKES A FIND.

When Marion Stanlock selected the term High Peak as her Camp Fire name, her deliberations carried her back from Hiawatha Institute to the scene of most of the years of her child life in Hollyhill. Confronted with the task of choosing a name, she first consulted her ideals to determine what associations she wished to have in mind when in after years she recalled the motive and circumstances of her selection.

Home surroundings had always had much of beauty for Marion. From the beginning of his business career, Mr. Stanlock had had a large income and was able to supply his family with many of the expensive luxuries, as well as all the so-called necessities of life. But for Marion the artificial luxuries had little special attraction. She accepted them as a matter of course, but that is about all the claim they had upon her. She enjoyed the use of her father's automobiles, but she wondered sometimes at the scheme of things which entitled her to an electric runabout or a limousine and a chauffeur, while thousands of other quite as deserving girls were not nearly as well favored.

The ability and the disposition to look at things occasionally from this point of view contributed much to the generosity of Marion's nature. She was a favorite among rich and poor alike, except among those rich who could "understand" why the wealthy ought to be specially favored, and those poor too narrow and circumscribed to credit any wealthy person with genuine generosity.

Being of this artless and unartificial trend of mind, Marion must naturally turn to either nature or human merit for the selection of her Camp Fire name. She was not sufficiently mature to pick a poetic idea from the achievements of men, and so it fell to nature to supply a quaint notion as a foundation for her "nom-de-fire."

Seated in her room at Hiawatha Institute one evening, Marion cast about her mental horizon for some scene or association in her life that would suggest the desired name. The first that came to her was the picture of a towering mountain, conspicuous not so much for its actual loftiness as for its deceptive appearance of great height. In all her experiences at home, it had never occurred to Marion to think of this individual portion of prehistoric geologic upheaval as a mass of earth and stones. She thought of it only as the most beautiful expression of nature she had ever seen, graceful of form, rich in the seasons' decorations.

This mountain was probably about as slender as it is possible for a mountain to be. Compared, or contrasted, with a nearby and characteristic mountain of the range, it was as a lady's finger to a telescoped giant's thumb. High Peak, as the tapering sugar-loaf of earth was called, was located west of Hollyhill, close to the town. In fact the portion of the city inhabited by the main colony of miners' families was built on the sloping ground that formed a foothill of the mountain.

And so when Marion named herself as a Camp Fire Girl after this mountain she had in mind an ideal expressed in the first injunction of the Law of the Camp Fire, which is to