“What?” Nancy stood up and looked around. “Tod and Mike? Firecrackers?”
“Those two clowns love practical jokes,” the girl explained, coming over to them with a smile. “Firecrackers under a trash can. They’ve been at it all morning.” The girl was short, thin, and dark-haired, and she had a nervous intensity that reminded Nancy of Paula.
Nancy let out the breath she’d been holding. She felt her pulse slow down to its normal rate.
“Hah! We sure scored one on you, didn’t we?” The boy who came running to Nancy and George looked very pleased with himself. He was short and stocky and wore a pair of faded cutoffs and a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “I’m Tod. And this is Mike.” He pointed to the boy who had followed him over. The accomplice was tall and thin, his legs looking like pipestems in his frayed cutoffs.
“Listen, you guys, I don’t think it was funny at all,” George protested, coming out from behind the tree. “You scared us to death!”
But Nancy just said mildly, “Yeah, you sure scored one. We were pretty scared.” Were Tod and Mike really immature enough to think it was funny to frighten people like that?
“Well, I’ve got to say this,” Mike observed, looking at Nancy appraisingly. “You sure think fast and act fast—for a girl.” He grinned and shuffled his feet. Maybe, thought Nancy, he was shy.
The dark-haired girl spoke up. “I’m Mercedes.” She pointed to two others who had come up behind her. “This is Linda and this is Ralph. I guess you’ve already met Sammy,” she added, looking toward the raft, where Sammy was standing close to Ned, talking animatedly with him.
Nancy followed her glance. “Yes,” she said wryly, wondering if Sammy was going to be another Sondra—or worse. “We’ve already met Sammy. She seems very . . . friendly. And helpful.”
“Yeah, that’s Sammy, all right.” Tod nudged Mike. “Very friendly. And very helpful.”
Linda was a delicate, fragile-looking girl with a narrow, pointed face that reminded Nancy of a princess in a fairy-tale book. Ralph, slender with intense black eyes, was probably the scholarly type. He seemed a little out of place next to Tod and Mike, both of whom looked as if they’d grown up in the woods. Nancy listened carefully to them as Mercedes introduced them, trying to detect any trace of the voice that had made the phone call. But the week-old memory of a muffled voice wasn’t much to go on.
However, after a few minutes of conversation, Nancy had found out some essential details about their companions. Except for Nancy, Ned, Bess, and George, everyone seemed to be from the area, which struck Nancy as a little odd. Hadn’t George said that the contest was national? If that was true, why weren’t there any winners from other parts of the country? Mercedes turned out to be Paula’s cousin, a fact which didn’t surprise Nancy, given the nervous energy they seemed to share. Linda and Ralph were both from Great Falls and appeared to be close friends—also not surprising, Nancy thought, since they, too, seemed alike, both quiet and shy. Tod and Mike came from a nearby small town and, according to them, were experienced rafters.
“There’s not much about Lost River that we don’t know,” Tod bragged. “We’ve made half a dozen trips down it in the past couple of years. We could handle these rafts ourselves, without any trouble—and all the gear, too. Like the radio, for instance. Isn’t it a beauty?” He jerked his thumb toward Mike. “Mike here is the expert on this baby. Right, Mike?”
Mike nodded. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “Radios are my hobby.”
“Is rafting dangerous?” George asked excitedly. She sounded as if she wished it were, but she wasn’t sure she should. She cocked an ear. “It sounds dangerous,” she said, listening to the thundering of the falls.
Mike shrugged. “Not if you know what you’re doing.” He cast a meaningful glance at Max, who had just joined the group and was busily talking to Bess. “Of course, if you’re careless or just plain dumb, somebody’s going to get hurt—or worse.” Nancy thought that Mike sounded as if he were challenging Max’s raft-handling ability. She wondered if he knew something about Max that the others didn’t.