In Sara’s there was an abstracted tinkle.
“The patrol men use the blinker system to signal the tower or Coast Guard Station--International Code--I don’t know but that I could do a little signaling with that myself, at a pinch,” she remarked, her eyebrows lifting tentatively. “Iver taught me; he’s my brother--lieutenant-brother--at the front,” sinking to a sitting posture on the sands and looking up explanatorily at Captain Andy.
“Proud of him, ain’t you?”
“Well, maybe so!” The gold-tipped eyelashes twinkled over a tear that was diamond pride of the first water. “I like to practice anything I learned from him; and it has won me a new honor-bead, a local honor for signaling--the color chosen by our Guardian herself.... Iver thought Camp Fire was just ‘great’!” went on the seventeen-year-old sister, “that it taught us to love and live the outdoors life, to be hardy, plucky, resourceful, and yet--yet remain girly!... Not too girly, though! Another couple of years and I want to go out into the world--be free--make my mark!”
“As you’re doing now, leaving footprints on the sands of time,” chaffed Olive, as the Flame who had just spoken fitted a black-stockinged foot into the moist edge of the sand-bar. “Well! to steal a metaphor, it’s in moccasins that we Camp Fire Girls will make footprints on the sands of time, linking the past with the present, eh?”
Blue Heron, also, sank dreamily to a sitting posture, her arms encircling her knees, which did homage to the flame of the Torch Bearer’s emblem upon the breast of her bathing-suit; her wide, dark eyes gazing mistily across the ocean, perhaps toward a front-line trench in France, at a young officer whose homing thoughts would turn to the poetry of the Council Fire, to all that it typified of America--progress, beauty, sisterhood--when he missed the things that make life hum.
“Humph! Talking o’ footprints, I suppose, that, from now on, it’s bound to be ‘Skirts go ahead!’ along some trails, anyway,” murmured Captain Andy. “Well! I’m not kicking, so long’s they remain skirts.”
“With bloomers upon occasion, and overalls when we’re working in that green oasis of a war-garden over there on Squawk Hill, where nothing but wild vetch and barb-weed grew until last summer, when some farmer found out that there was enough clay mingled with the sand for it to be cultivated, so he started in to--to make the squawky desert bloom. We’ve rented it from him now, and quite often it blooms with backaches.” Sara kicked at the turning tide.
“He’s my nephew--that desert-coaxing fellow.” The mariner, on whom, three years before, this same group of girls had bestowed the Indian name of Menokijábo, or “Tall Standing Man,” straightened his great back. “I made my headquarters with that ’ere nephew an’ his family part o’ the time last winter,” he went on, “in that bleak little settlement over yonder, on the island.”
“What! Do people live there all the year round?” It was Little Owl--Lilia--who put the staggered question, turning from the spot where she, with other of the younger girls--Sybil Deering, Betty Ayres, Victoria Glenn, called by the Council Fire Sul-sul-sul-i, or Little Fire--had been frolicking with the Indian canoe and its short paddle. “How can they?” Lilia blinked at the lonely sea-girt colony whose suburban boulevard, at low water, was the teeming sand-bar. “How--ever--can they make a living?”