“All those little colored designs embroidered on his sleeve were his twenty-one merit badges.”
Silence for a few minutes while ’Becca’s right hand fondled the doll.
“Glory!” In a low and thrilling voice Olive broke the stillness of the ward where most of the children slept, calling the other girl by the pet name of her childhood. “Glory! the ladder has dipped once for all toward the Sugarloaf; no, I don’t mean that; I mean that the Sugarloaf and Camp Morning-Glory and camping out with the girls of the Morning-Glory Camp Fire are all on top for me—and for Sybil, too, if I can make her; the hotel is nowhere!”
“Do you really mean it, that you want to become a Camp Fire Girl at last?”
“I want to do something worth while!” Olive’s lip quivered; she spoke passionately. “I want to do something with—with spice in it! I felt that, to-day, when I saw you working to bring ’Becca round—you and that boy.... I want to dance the Leaf Dance and, maybe, to inflict my rhymes on other girls without their laughing at me,” emotion dwindling down to laughter.
“But perhaps your father will wish you to go to that hotel, Sybil and you, with Cousin Anne.”
“Father, no! He approves of the Camp Fire movement; I’ve heard him say so. He thinks with Captain Andy”—laughingly—“that it’s a pretty good incubator for the growth of new wing-feathers—unusual power to do things.”
“Or power to do unusual things, eh?”
“Either will answer! I’m sure Cousin Anne would be delighted to get off on her own hook this summer, without any of us girls. And ’twill be lots better for Sybil than going to an hotel and lording it over half-a-dozen boys, whose parents are staying there, and who wait on her all the time—fight over her, maybe, as two of them did, last year—because they think she’s fairy-like and pretty.” There was a look of her beautiful mother in Olive’s eyes now.
“As for me, I’ve quite made up my mind; I’m not going to lose my hoot through not using it, like that poor old straw-eyed owl,” wound up the Camp Fire recruit. “I don’t care”—rising to a dramatic outburst—“if there should be a dozen tingling Penelopes and half-a-dozen witchetty nieces of Captain Andy’s, each with a pig for a pupil, in the camp, I’ll—what is it you say—I’ll ‘cleave to my Camp Fire Sisters whenever, wherever I find them!’”