One glance she flung at Atlas--and he was consumed!
“Let me--let me go!... Oh! we haven’t--haven’t--got wood enough for a fi-ire. You’d better light it with matches. I’ll go--let me--and get some more--driftwood, wreck-wood--to make a rainbow fire! Back--back near--the--bungalow....”
In explosive incoherency her eyes met the Guardian’s. And Gheezies never failed to read a girl’s soul.
“All right!” she said. “If one of the other girls goes with you! It would be nice to have such a wonderful fire, giving off every hue in the rainbow, out here in the middle of the dunes--as we had the night we entertained aviators--and sit around it after our cooking is through. But it’s coming on dark! Don’t be long! Take--Betty!”
Betty had to take herself--little evergreen Holly! The Flame had already flown--a tearing, scintillating flame, as it raced over sand-mound and graying sand-hill.
“I’ve just got to be alone! If not--I’d explode! Oh, he’s simply--simply hateful, that Atlas boy--if he did save my life!... Oh-h! I knew how important he felt--as if the shipyard sun shone on him alone when he was crouching with his back under that horrid ship’s rib. Ridiculous, when he wasn’t really supporting it at all!... And--and to think I should have failed--failed, before him, to get the fire, when I have broken the record before, for a girl, and got the spark in thirty seconds; that--that I should have--again--made a fool of myself!”
“Oh! Sally--Sara--have mercy! Don’t run--quite--so hard: I can’t keep up with you!” It was Betty’s panting cry, tugging at the steps of the racing Flame.
It had never been such a reckless flyaway--that Flame--that it had not a heart for a Camp Fire Sister.
Within a few hundred yards of the bungalow-beach, quarter of a mile from the group, back there, upon the dunes--amid the skirts of twilight, light and filmy yet, which the dune-breeze was shaking out--Sara Davenport, out of breath herself, paused and caught Betty by the hand.
“If--if we can just get over that big sand-hill in front of us, and the low mounds beyond, we’ll reach the spot where we saw all that wreck-wood, such a lot of it, when bathing to-day, Bettykins!” she breathed. “It--’twill save my being a wreck--myself! Oh! why couldn’t I get the spark to-night--of all nights? And--and to be grinned at by that Atlas boy! If--if that wouldn’t make a dogfish drop his herring, as Captain Andy would say!... If I can only look out over the bay--over the sea--in--in the direction of where Iver is--over there--I’ll feel better!”