Flamina, little foreign-born Camp Fire Sister, only two years in America--adopted some months before by the Morning-Glory Group, who, working for patriotic honors along lines of Americanization, were teaching her the Camp Fire ritual, with the meaning of her Indian name and symbol--Flamina dimpled shyly, like the ebbing tide.
“Ah, bella! Bella! But w’y you make her looka like dat--so fine--so fine?” she cried again, lost in primitive admiration of the boat’s elemental dazzle.
“So fine! Glad I’ve found one appreciative spirit, anyway! I’m painting her in big blue smears and wavy lines as they paint the great ships--American ships--going from here across the ocean now, little Green Leaf Sister, so that they may melt into the colors of the sea and sky and no horrid submarine--you know what a submarine is--coming to the surface may fire a tin fish at them--sink them. See?”
W’at for you painta her like dat--de leetla boat--eh?
“Ha! Tin--feesh?” Flamina, wrinkling her childish brows--she was barely fourteen--looked out at the broad bay, as if she expected to see the brilliant gleam of a metallic fin swimming around there.
“Pshaw! That’s a nickname the sailors have for a torpedo, childie; you know what that is--a big dark bomb that’s fired from a submarine, which skims along just under the surface of the water like a fish, leaving a white streak behind it--swish-h, like that!” Sara drew her level white brush through a sea of sunbeams, to illustrate. “When it strikes a fine ship, then it bursts--blows the ship up. D’you understand?”
“Si--yes! Catcha wise!... I catcha wise!” murmured Flamina, entranced, her curly lashes twinkling above the night-like flash beneath them. “But, bah! your greata Uncle Sam, he not goin’ to let badda submarine stay in sea much longa--eugh?”
“No! No, you bet he isn’t!” The artist slapped the slang with her brush-tip vehemently against the boat’s side. “But he’s your ‘greata Uncle Sam,’ too, now, little Green Leaf. You run over and see the dress--the pretty ceremonial dress with leather fringes--that those two girls are finishing off for you to wear at our next Council Fire meeting here on the white sands. They’re embroidering it with a green leaf, too--your symbol.”
Excitedly Flamina ran off, singing with airy gaiety, a merry dialect song of her childhood, of girlish love for the green country: