She felt herself stiffen slightly inside as she confronted a face she had noticed earlier, when all the camp counselors had met the summer group at the local train station. Pat had suspected from her first glance at the girl that she was going to prove to be trouble. Staring into her deep blue eyes once again, she was almost certain of it. She'd been a girls camp counselor long enough to recognize that look at once. "Oh, you," she muttered. Her eyebrows tightened in another frown, but the girl's eyes stared right back at her in challenge. "Aren't you the one who was making all the fuss at the train station?" she snapped.

"I was questioning why we had to ride all the way up here in that cattle car you called a bus, yes," she answered. "At the camp I went to last summer, they sent private limousines into town to pick us up."

"Then why didn't you go back to that camp this summer?" Pat asked as sweetly as she could manage her voice to sound, but the hard line around her mouth betrayed the truth of her feelings.

For a moment, the girl seemed completely flustered. Her stare darted away from Pat's face and she shifted her stance nervously. "I-I – didn't go back there because I was bored with the place," she declared after a hesitant start.

"Well, I'm afraid you're going to be bored with this camp, too," Pat hinted, "unless you learn to follow orders like the rest of the girls. What's your name?"

"Roxanne," she said. "Roxanne Thomas."

"And how old are you, Roxanne?"

"I'm seventeen," she answered quickly.

"Little liar!" Pat thought to herself. "If you're a day over sixteen I'm Grandma Moses!"

Aloud, however, she asked, "Don't you think that's a little young to be making decisions for yourself?"

"Not at all," the girl said, with a haughty toss of the mane of long brown hair tumbling over her shoulders. "I've been doing it all my life."

"I doubt that, Roxanne," Pat muttered, aware that she and the girl were now heavily in the midst of a confrontation for leadership of the others in the group. The results of this first showdown might well determine who held the ultimate authority for the rest of the summer.