chanted Sara again, feeling that camouflage was not her only inspiration.
“Can’t you hear the bugle sounding?
Can’t you feel our pulses bounding?
Lead your comrades to the field!”
she caroled further, falling into step with the maid of the rake, and looking challengingly up into the dark eyes with the golden spark of fire--of fervor--in them.
“I confess I wish ’twas any other kind of field, for once; that we had any other hill to take this morning but that same old heart-breaker of a converted sand-peak--from which the enemies, the weeds--witch-grass, rank beach-grass, wild pea, wild vetch--have to be driven back again and again, with barb-weed, instead of barbed wire, for the worst of all!” craved she, her chant sinking to a dirge-like sing-song, to which she matched her march to the war-garden on Squawk Hill, that discordant paradise of night-herons, so lately reclaimed from the barren dunes.
“What!... What! Sara, you’re not weakening?” The Maid brandished her rake. “I wish I had a little more ‘pep’ in me, myself, this morning,” she acknowledged, a moment later, sinking her voice to a silky whisper, with a backward glance over her blue-overalled shoulder at the younger girls, fifteen of them--a bright-eyed, laughing brigade--who were following her to take the hill for the fiftieth time from an invading horde of weeds, ranker, stronger at the seashore than anywhere else--with a giant’s grip upon the sandy soil, from control of which they had been so lately ousted.
“Well! you didn’t expect to be captain of the forces again this morning, did you, as you have been for three days past?” Sara looked up at her friend, the oldest girl of the Morning-Glory Group, now encamped upon the white beach behind them, who had kept incognito a secret that shone in the dark; who was determined, upon her return to the city, to go to work, at anything, to release a man--a man for the front. “You thought our Guardian--Gheezies--would be able to lead us out to capture the hill, herself, to-day.”
“I hoped she would,” said Olive Deering. “But I could see that she still isn’t feeling very well after that little sick attack of the past week. So I persuaded her to save her strength for the Council Fire to-night--the ceremonial meeting on the sands--at which our little Green Leaf, Flamina, is really to be initiated as a Wood-Gatherer, and receive her fagot-ring; hitherto she has been only a novice.”
“Won’t her voice enrich our Wohelo chant?” murmured Sara. “Sometimes when she’s by herself, skipping along by the sea, it seems to me as if I never, really, heard a girl sing before; it just fondles the air--sweetens everything about her. Listen to her now; that’s what she calls a ‘funny one!’”