The two girls stopped for a moment, and then, with joyful shouts, rushed forward.

As for our friends, they seemed paralyzed with astonishment.  It was so different from what they had expected.  Then Alice found her voice, and cried: 

“The two lost girls—­we have found them!”

CHAPTER XXV

OUT OF THE WILDS

For perhaps several seconds the two parties strangely met in that Florida wild stood staring at one another.  Then the two girls hurried forward, and one of them exclaimed: 

“Oh, have you come for us?”

“Not exactly, Miss Madison.”

“Oh—­you—­you know us?” gasped the other.

“Certainly, Mabel,” laughed Alice.  “Don’t you remember us—­the moving picture girls?”

“Ruth—­Alice DeVere!” came the simultaneous cry from the lost girls—­now the found girls.  “Oh, how did you ever get here?” asked Helen Madison, for it was really she and her sister.  Alice had recognized them first, and Ruth knew them a moment later.

“We are lost, like yourselves,” said Ruth.  “Oh, but can you tell us where our steamer is?”

“Your steamer—­no!” half-sobbed Mabel.  “Oh, it is awful!  We have been lost a long time—­it seems a month, but of course it isn’t.  We can’t find our way out of this wilderness.  It is a labyrinth, and we dare not go far from this hut for fear we shall never find it again.  It has been terrible.  But if you are lost you cannot help us.  What shall we do?”

“Let us eat first,” suggested Russ, practically.  “You have some birds there.  I fancy you are as hungry as we are.  We have some crackers and coffee.  We’ll get up a meal and then decide what to do.  Come, Paul, we’re the commissary department.”

“Oh, but we must hear your story!” cried Ruth to the lost girls, after she had presented Mrs. Maguire and the boys.  “We read about you in the paper, and we heard of you from the hotel clerk in Sycamore.”

“There isn’t much to tell,” said Mabel.  “We started off after wild orchids.  Well, we became lost, and in trying to find our way back we wandered farther and farther into the swamp.  We had our motor boat, as you see, and quite a quantity of provisions, which was lucky for us.  We tried our best to get out, but could not.

“Finally we found this spot—­the hut was already here, built by alligator hunters, very likely.  We appropriated it, and the small quantity of food it contained.  Since then we have lived on that and what we could shoot.  Fortunately game was plentiful, but we have so longed for some bread and coffee.  I am dying for a cup.”

“Dinner will soon be served,” laughed Russ, who, with Paul, was preparing a rude meal, broiling the birds over a camp fire.

“And now tell us about yourselves,” suggested Mabel to Alice.  “Oh! to think of meeting you again this way,” and she recalled the first meeting in the train going to the New England backwoods.