Being eager for the obtaining of new honor-beads to string upon the leather thongs about their girlish necks, they had arranged to give a large party at which the girls and boys would be equal in number, where all the youthful guests should take part in at least two old-fashioned dances—the boys being instructed on the spur of the moment by the girls if they could not skilfully foot it already in the old-time figures of “Pop Goes the Weasel,” “Chorus Jig,” or any two more stately American dances popular long ago.
For this achievement every participating member of the Twin-Light Tribe was to receive a red, white, and blue honor for patriotism, a distinction which might have been extended to the father of one of them who put the ballroom of the seaside hotel of which he was manager at the service of the Camp Fire Girls for a certain evening and who lent generous aid, too, along the lines of refreshments.
The large room was radiant with electric bulbs disguised as Chinese and Japanese lanterns which pointed many a rainbowed finger of light at the silver sun-dollar gleaming upon Jessica’s breast when she entered the hall. But nobody, neither the benevolent manager nor the guests, all—with the exception of Scoutmasters and Camp Fire Guardians—under twenty, was ignorant by this time of the details of its strange discovery.
Two of the Boy Scouts, going for milk to a farmhouse beyond the dunes where their camp was situated, upon the evening of the most terrible and exciting day in the life of one Camp Fire Girl, Jessica Dee Holley, had told about the finding of the old coin in the wet side of a sand-hill.
The farmer from whom they procured their milk reported the news at the nearest post-office when he drove round with his full cans next morning. The postmaster telephoned it to a newspaper reporter. Inside of thirty-six hours practically the whole of Wessex County, Massachusetts, knew that another of the old sun-stamped Peruvian pesos, lost from the South American brig wrecked off the coast nearly three-quarters of a century before, had been found by two Boy Scouts and by a girl who had been swept down the tidal river in a squall in an opposite direction to that taken by the drifting brig which the furious gale of long ago had driven in from the bay, over the bar, to break to pieces in the river.
Even the few resident guests still staying on at the hotel, now that September had set in, had heard or read the story, too, touched up by a reporter’s imagination, and were anxious to meet the heroine of the drifting dory accident who to-night wore the beautiful old peso, or dollar, on a silver chain around her neck.
“There’s a man out there in the hotel corridor who says he’s interested in old coins. I was talking to him just now; he’s like all the rest; he wants to see the sun-dollar,” remarked Miles Stackpole, Eagle Scout, to the coin’s possessor, looking down at the silver sunburst dangling upon the breast of her white dress.
At this patriotic party the Scouts, by request, wore their uniform. Miles was resplendent with all his merit badges below the service stripes upon his right sleeve; the American Eagle in silver swooped from the red, white and blue ribbon hanging from the silver bar upon his left breast. On his collar was embroidered in dull gold B. S. A.: Boy Scouts of America; together with the number of the troop to which he belonged.
Other lads from his camp numbering over twenty, including Kenjo and the fat Astronomer, looked debonair and smart in their khaki uniforms, too.
But the Camp Fire Girls had, for to-night, abandoned their leather-fringed khaki; they were not in ceremonial dress; each wore a conventional party-frock or the fairest apology for one which she happened to have brought with her to camp, the girlish costumes ranging widely from Olive Deering’s frilled yellow silk in which she looked like a chrysanthemum, the first of the season, to Sally’s white skirt and orange smock, minus the saucy Tam—wherein she was again the little Baltimore oriole of the city playground—and to Penelope’s white duck skirt and “fancy” waist which the girls had between them fashioned for her, having ruled out her old “black and white warbler” attire with the faded girdle.