“But those queer little Indian words that they’re chanting have no meaning; they’re just nonsense syllables such as ‘Tara-ra boom de ay!’ or something like that,” laughed Sybil.
“Goodness! how I wish a little niece o’ mine, named Kitty Sill, who spends half her time mooning under orchard leaves, could watch that dance,” suddenly interjected the captain in tones that seemed to come up from his boots they were so deep and yearning. “She’s a queer little thing, fourteen last month an’ as shy—just as shy as a sickle-bill curlew!” searching for a simile.
“What makes her like that?” asked Olive; she was beginning to feel an unaccountable interest in everything connected with Captain Andy; his nautical humor set against the harrowing experiences of his life, combined with his rescue of her Cousin Marvin, had, by this time, set every pulse of hero-worship in her throbbing.
“Search me! I don’t know what makes Kitty like that,” came the answer in a sort of deep, protesting shout. “Maybe, now, the well-bred pig that she confides in more’n she does in her family knows, but if she does, confound it! she ain’t telling.”
“A pet pig-g! Ugh!” Sybil shuddered.
“Her mother thinks that little Kitty has taken a troublesome notion o’ some sort into her head that makes her so faint-hearted an’ foolish. Who knows but that if she were to join these new-fangled—or old-fangled—Camp Fire Girls an’ grow a few extry wing-feathers—high-colored ones, so to speak, such as learning how to start a fire without matches, an’ dance like a leaf on a tree—she’d forget all about it?” speculatively.
“Oh! I’m sure she would,” came from Olive with a fervor that surprised herself. “That old owl is a horrible example against clipping one’s wings, not using any little powers one has!” laughingly. “You listen to that, Sybil, and don’t laugh at my flights any more!”
Yet that night when in the sanctum of her own room Olive seated herself upon a corner of her bed—a rare breach of orderliness for her—and thence, as from a white throne, reviewed the evening’s proceedings which she marshaled before her, her thoughts did not long dwell upon poetic flights or matchless fires—or even upon the dramatic Leaf Dance.
They rested chiefly upon the initiation of the new Fire Maker, of a girl standing before the Council Fire, promising to tend, as her fathers had tended, those twin-fires which are the very heart-flame of humanity, without which, as Captain Andy said, the world would be cold as an ice-jammed hull.
Feeling is life. And there is nothing like a romantic ritual for stirring emotion. Olive felt it tingle all over her.