“But to come back to Lottie!” He reseated himself mournfully. “Well, p’raps her mother would have hearkened to my advice, but the child herself was set against it, an’ nobody said her nay. She graduated from high school at sixteen with tall honors—an’ a face the color of sea-foam. The following winter she overworked at college, studied about every minute when she wasn’t waiting on table to win her way through, broke down, came home with a cough that turned to a galloping consumption or something o’ the sort—they buried her in the spring.”
Kitty drew a long sob-like breath.
“Well now, you ha’n’t got the over-study fever, but you’ve anchored in this orchard too long, with a pig an’ a duck for crew, fishing up scares. It’s ‘Up anchor!’ now; you’re going to be ready for me to-morrow when I come for you in my power-boat—I’ve been talking to your mother about it already—an’ you’ll spend a couple o’ weeks, at any rate, in one or other of those camps on the white Sugarloaf Peninsula, either among the Camp Fire Girls or sleeping in my big tent if you prefer it. You’ll do things ’long with other girls (that Mary-Jane she’s a mighty intelligent pig, but a silent partner), you’ll slide down sand-hills, watch the seals, learn to swim, breast-stroke, crawl-stroke——”
“I won’t do it!” That little brown trout, a minnow of perversity, leaped again in the amber pool of Kitty’s eyes.
But the flying-dolphin-like gleam in Captain Andy’s swallowed it up at a gulp.
“Oh, tut, tut! Avast there! What I say goes, this trip!” The granduncle stamped his foot on the orchard buttercups just as he had many a time stamped it at Death upon a reeking deck which the seas were pounding like an earthquake, bidding that grim spectre begone; so he was bent on driving off his shadow now.
“They—they’d only laugh at me, those Camp Fire Girls; they wear short skirts or bloomers an’ middy blouses—I’ve seen a tribe of them before—an’ they dress up grandly at ceremonial meetings; I have only frocks like these; an’ they’d laugh at me for chumming with a pig an’ a duck an’ some hens.”
“I’ll warrant they wouldn’t. They’d give you a colored honor-bead, instead, to string on a leather thong round your neck—that is if you joined them—for knowing so much about a farmyard. As for the Camp Fire duds, I’ll see that you have ’em when you need ’em. Bless your heart, little Kitty, you won’t know yourself in green bloomers—any more’n a vessel seems to know herself when she gets her first suit o’ sails on and feels herself moving; all your fears’ll run to hide an’ laugh at you out o’ the knees of those bloomers. An’ you’ll laugh back at the fears once you join the Morning-Glory Camp Fire.”
“Is that what they call it?” A dawn-pink stole into Kitty’s cheeks.
“Sure. And they call the biggest o’ my camps that they roost in at night, twelve of ’em—not all the tribe could come—Camp Morning-Glory. Sounds slick, doesn’t it? Sounds as if they had hit the sun’s trail, doesn’t it? And, by gracious! they have. They’re a lighthearted tribe, always ‘on deck,’ always alert an’ doing something, swimming or rowing, dressing up in Indian toggery, singing, sliding, cooking—middling good cookery, too—I’ve tasted it—laundering their own blouses, even one or two rich girls among ’em, whose father could charter a laundry for the whole outfit an’ not miss it—‘glorifying work,’ they call it!”