One of the saluting figures, third in the procession, which even in ceremonial beads and fringes had something familiar about it to Captain Andy, had a small bow of polished wood slung upon her right arm upraised in the hand-sign.
“Well! I wondered, bein’ Indian maidens, that they had no bows an’ arrows among ’em; that redeems it,” muttered the highly diverted captain.
“Oh, but she isn’t going to shoot an arrow from that bow, else you and I might look out for punctures!” laughed the artist. “She’s going to coax the arrow of fire out of dull wood with it—see the notched fireboard and drill in her left hand—going to kindle the Council Fire without matches!”
“Well, if she does that, she’ll make me sit up an’ take notice! My word! how often I’ve tried that trick, raked over heaven an’ earth, as you might say, for the means o’ making a fire—an’ that more’n once, too—when I’ve been shipwrecked and freezing all night on a lonesome shore.”
“Hadn’t you any matches?” questioned Olive Deering who sat upon a fallen pine-log near the captain’s boulder, also a guest at this open-air Council Fire, not yet kindled.
“The sea took ’em when it ripped off my sou’wester, the matches being in a flannel pocket of its lining. I tell you, little lady, I had hard work to hold on to my scalp, an’ so had every member o’ my crew, too, swimming forty or fifty yards to fight for a foothold on naked rocks, in an icy sea that pounded a man as if bent on breaking every bone in his body—that was the worst time when we were wrecked off the island o’ Grand Manan in a November breeze, when some of us spent the night clinging to icy ledges, t’others crawled up, bleeding an’ frost-bitten, to where there was wood—Lord! what we wouldn’t ha’ given to know the secret o’ getting fire without matches then. You don’t tell me a girl can do it? I guess she may, perhaps—when sprats swallow sharks, as we sailors say!” he added, with a sceptical chuckle.
“Well! wait and see the shark eaten up—the impossible done!” laughed the artist trustfully.
In the gathering dusk Olive’s dark eyebrows were drawn together; from her windfall log, where she sat side by side with Sybil, she looked sidewise scrutinizingly at the grey-haired master mariner; she was beginning to see the gulf which yawned between him and her filled not with shapes of slimy decks, gurry-pens and fish-scaled oilskins, but with the towering masts of human courage and heroism that reached unto the sky, piercing Death’s very shadow, outsailing and outwitting that pale spectre a hundred times to save human life.
“I wonder—I wonder whether ‘the sprat will swallow the shark’: whether Sally will really succeed in getting fire without matches?” she quivered, leaning forward with a new interest in the performance which had, before, seemed merely spectacular, what the boys would call a “showing-off stunt.”
And, now, the fringed and beaded Camp Fire Girl was kneeling on her right knee upon the burnished sod of the lake shore, her left foot pressing down hard upon the flat fireboard in which there was a little scooped pit or hollow merging into a notch in the edge of the board, resting upon a thin little wooden tray placed beneath it.