“Oh! Jessica, why didn’t you tell me that?” whispered Olive Deering.
“I couldn’t—Olive lovey!”
The heiress in a modest way looked very white and trembling. “I always felt—I always felt that my great-grandfather lived in some way!” she breathed. Tears oozed out between her eyelids.
It was a crucial moment. Then Tenderfoot Tommy Orr grew splendid. With the rolling gait of a very fat boy, chin thrust out, he ploughed through the circle and seized Morning-Glory’s hand in both of his.
“I say! you just come an’ have some fruit punch,” he commanded, waving his Scout’s hat toward a far-away table. “Waiter has just brought it in! Legacies an’ stuff are all right, but I’m—parched!” in the same tone that he had proclaimed how he was poisoned.... “I’m too short for you to take my arm, but you can hang on tight to my hand!” he added in Jessica’s ear, as he steered her for the distant table.
“You’re a good Scout, Tommy,” applauded Miles huskily. “Goodness! to think that one of us, in a way, did dig up a fortune from the sands after all—or something like it!”
“Miles!” The Guardian of the Morning-Glory Camp Fire seized young Stackpole’s arm as if he were her son or as if she had known him all her life. “Miles—that’s your name, isn’t it—for pity’s sake! get hold of the hotel pianist who has been playing for the dances; ask her—ask her”—breathlessly—“to strike up Portland Fancy or the Virginia Reel, something, anything lively, and set the girls to dancing.”
“Yes, let them work it off through their feet; if not we’ll have a scene!... Jiminy twisters! I want to make a scene myself!” added Miles Stackpole, Eagle Scout, stopping to whoop in the act of obediently crossing the room. “I want to wrestle somebody: I want to get out-of-doors and yell and yell—and yell—and kick over the Man in the Moon!”
CHAPTER XVIII
THE TORCH BEARER