“You mean friends of all the world?” said Betty shyly. “Yes, I think so too.”
“Well, I must say!” Mona flared up at once. “All I can tell you is, then—and Rene thinks the same—that we two would do anything for the sake of the patrol and for Sybil and everything. We’d do anything to get the Cup back. And if Betty, of all people——”
“You know perfectly well that Betty’s as keen to get it back as you are,” flared up Gerry in return.
A grim silence fell on the cubicles. Brushes could be heard in vigorous use from the four corners of the room.
Matters were still rather strained and the subject was a chilly one between the couples next day. Sybil, however, who with Eve—her second—and Doris, Jean and Lilian, the older Guides of the patrol, was to head the expedition, was certainly in no mood to notice petty trifles such as Tenderfoot feuds. The patrol was marched out in business-like fashion on to the moor, and the practice began.
Vigorous, practical, and to the point, was the scheme of the afternoon’s work. The Tenderfoots were taken in hand first by the captain herself, and received a preliminary lesson in stalking and sign-reading.
“Red Indians are wonders,” said Sybil; “there are no tracking secrets hidden from them. They will lie in wait for hours; and the crumpling of a leaf or the shade of difference in a sound means everything to them sometimes. Their food depends on their scouting, you see, and their family’s food. They learn ‘stalking’ because they would die if they did not understand how to stalk. In our country, too, keepers and others look for ‘sign’ from morning till night. In the war, you’ll remember, scouting played a tremendous part.”
“I say, Sybil, gipsies leave ‘sign’ behind,” put in Mona, as they all squatted on the grass.
“Yes, they do. Patrin, they call it. And the gipsies can follow each other just because of it. It helps them more than we’d understand, I expect, since they are roaming all the time. I’ve seen broom-making gipsies sitting on the backs of their caravans and throwing down sometimes a bundle of twigs, and marking their road along from one town to another in that way. A regular trail is left behind; but only just plainly enough trailed, of course, for a watchful person to see.”
“The ones that camp on the moor here make baskets, you know,” put in Mona.