“It’s an aëroplane! A big--aëroplane! A biplane!”
“Nev-er!”
“Yes, it is! I--I thought at first it was a sea-gull; I’ve been watching it--saw it before it entered that red cloud-gate!” Sara Davenport’s leather-fringed sleeves fell back from her bare fore-arms, leaving them free to describe a broken arc of excitement--like chain-lightning ripping the dusk--under the spell of the tricolored candles.
“Mercy! Whoopee-doo!... Zoom, zoom, zoom!... May--may I be feathers, as Captain Andy would say, if ’tisn’t an aëroplane! A big army air-plane! Oh, girls alive, d’you suppose--suppose it’s going to land--come to earth--drop down right here by our Council Fire?”
“Oh! it never will. Where is it? I can’t see it! The dusk’s so thick, anyway!” It was a half-cheated wail from two-thirds of the girls, turning to Sara’s flame, now a perfect pillar of fire, for guidance--direction.
“There! There! See! Just over that tallest sand-peak now--high sand-hill!... And, oh! for goodness sake! there’s the moon coming over the top--coming over the top to stare at it.”
Yes! round-orbed, magnificent, shadow-mapped, the silvery Green Corn Moon was sailing up over the dunes of antique silver--over the dark-tressed crown of a lesser hill, to gaze at the winged wonder--one moment burning up in the last dying flame of day, the next a mammoth gray moth circling and circling in the vast crimson-hung halls of twilight, as if drawn to the home-fires of earth.
To the far-beckoning blaze of the Council Fire upon the pale beach, within thirty yards of the tide’s rippling edge--the fairy, rainbowed blaze, fed by bone-dry driftwood, copper-marked wreck-wood, flinging aloft every hue in the spectrum--before which nineteen Camp Fire Girls and their Guardian had entered upon the candle-lighting ceremony arranged by Olive Deering, Torch-Bearer, the Maid who had “carried on” that morning upon the humble field of that depressing hill.
Now the candles, red, white, and blue, symbolic torches, embedded in their silver candlesticks of sand, flickered, guttered, unheeded--went out, two of them--negligible as glow-worms beside some transcendent display of Northern Lights, streaming merry dancers, radiating from the excitement in the girls’ own breasts, which seemed to surround that aërial visitor from the North, flying lower--lower--directly over the high-floating, pink-shot smoke-reek of the Council Fire.
But....