Her left hand—its wide-sleeved arm braced against the knee of that firmly planted left leg—grasped the handle or socket of her upright drill, about a dozen inches in length, her right steadily worked back and forth the bow, drawn taut by its leather thong, which rested upon that socket at the top of the drill, whose sharpened lower point, thus worked, turned boringly in the scooped hollow of the fireboard—grinding its soft punky wood into a brown sawdust which in a few seconds turned black as it fell upon the tray beneath.
It was a wonderful picture—so the artist thought—this linking of the far past with the present, primitive woman with civilization, while old Wigwam Hill looked darkly on.
Captain Andy was, indeed, sitting up and taking notice, his massive figure leaning slightly forward, hands outspread upon his knees, in breathless interest: was “the sprat,” actually, going to “eat up the shark,” a girl achieve the feat—perform the igniting wonder—which bearded men in the grip of deadly cold and desolation had attempted in vain?
True, in these strange days, he had seen a Boy Scout work that fire trick and get a spark in about thirty seconds. But a girl!
“Seems to me I know that little fire-witch, too,” he murmured to the artist. “Ain’t she the one that was fluttering round like an oriole in orange and black on the playground t’other day an’ that made friends?... My living sakes! she’s got it. See—see her smoke!” meaning the black powdered wood running out of the notch in the edge of the fireboard onto the tray, under the steady grinding of the drill—not the fire-witch, Sesooā.
Yes, grey and hopeful, it rose, that tiny cloud of smoke upon the golden air. Sally’s Camp Fire Sisters held their breath, poised on tiptoe. Wood Gatherers they, according to rank and in deed, who had been gathering inflammable birch-bark and fat pine-splinters, piling them together, in hope and faith, as the nucleus of their coming Council Fire.
“Oh! I shall die if she doesn’t get the flame, now she’s got the smoke!” quavered little fair-haired Betty Ayres, whose Camp Fire name was Psuti, the Holly, fluttering, with arms outspread, like a brown moth with a touch of gold upon its wings. “Sesooā will be so mortified if she fails, with visitors present.”
“She won’t fail. She can’t! I see the red! Don’t you—don’t you see it, the red spark?” The quivering cry came from Mŭnkwŏn, Arline.
Yes, the airy smoke was increasing, wheeling upward in a tiny spiral and at its heart appeared the miracle—a dull red spark, like a fire-seed sown by the vanished sun.
“Hurrah! she’s got it. Hush, don’t speak! Don’t startle her. She has yet to make it burn.”