"It's perfect!" Eric whispered to me, "Those girls look just like us! And there must be more than Thrirty of them out there. All we've got to do is swim out there underwater, pick up the next load of clothes that someone brings out, wash 'em up, then, when we carry them in to dry, we can pick up some of those duds that are already out there and get dressed in them!"'

It sounded reasonable, but my heart was still racing with fear and embarassment.

"You really think it will work?" I asked timidly.

"It's got to," Eric insisted, "Look at how they just come and go at random down there. No one will notice us, and those girls out in the water are just as naked as we are."

"Let's try it!"

Minutes later, we were out in the breast-deep icey water, taking pieces of cloth from a tan-skinned woman who gave us a rather puzzled look for an instant, but shrugged 'it off and went back to swimming.

As we worked, I expressed my misgivings to Eric.

"I just noticed something,

I whispered, "Only about a third

of these girls are swimming and playing around out here. The rest just wash the clothes and carry them out to

dry."

"So?"

"I don't know,

I answered softly,

"I just hope we haven't joined the wrong team or something out here. Let's hurry and get this stuff up on shore and get some clothes on!" Quickly, we went through the motions of washing the soft, handwoven garments, then carried them up to the flat rocks. Bad luck! Everything out there right now was sopping wet! There wasn't a thing we poor frightened girls could wear! So there was nothing to do but carry some more stuff back out into the stream and go through the motions of washing

it.

It went like that all afternoon. Somehow, whenever we got onto shore, there was never anything lying out that we could wear! I begam to wonder if this whole set-up was really as casually organized as it had first seemed.

There is little twilight in the tropics, so it was late afternoon when someone called a halt. By this time, the only ones still out in the water were those of us washing clothes, and so Eric and I mingled with the rest as best we could as we waded up onto shore, wondering what would happen next. There was

a woman passing through the crowd... no, more than one... two... three?