“Know what bird that is?” asked her granduncle.
“Some sort of crane.” So the fluttering ribbon again made answer, playing with her reply.
“‘Crane!’ Balderdash! It’s a great Blue Heron. See ’em pretty often round here! There were three of ’em standing in a row upon this beach at the very time that I landed my first boat-load of Camp Fire Girls here—looked just as if the birds were lined up on deck for a welcome.”
“How funny!” cried Kitty, showing her dimples.
“Say! but it tickled the girls. The birds flew off, but slowly; they seem to know the law protects ’em now. One of the girls, the very one we were talking about, got so excited that she came near upsetting the rowboat I was landing them in. She cried out that, when she was initiated, she was going to take the Blue Heron for her Camp Fire name because it had such a splendid spread o’ wings. I shouldn’t wonder if she first thought of becoming a Camp Fire Girl through seeing an old owl, with a goose’s head on his shoulders, that could neither fly nor hoot, had lost his natural powers through not using them.”
“Do the other girls call her the Blue Heron?”
“They call her by the Indian word for it. You come along over now and we’ll ask her what that is!” Captain Andy began a strategic move forward in the direction of Camp Morning-Glory.
Kitty began a crab-like backward one.
“No-o! I don’t know any girls like her and her sister (isn’t that the sister sitting near her on the sands?)—they’re too grand for me, eh?” Her dimples fluctuated tentatively.
“Grand! Fiddlestick! Is it of the money or the Mayflower emblem you’re thinking, child? Pshaw, Kittykins”—the captain let out his deep, droll laugh—“I guess you can come near matching that last any day, with your old chimney built for five smokes! I’ve read the builder’s contract myself, dated 1718, for that big T-shaped chimney, to be ‘built of brick, for five smokes!’ And by the red, brick breast of that old chimney your fathers an’ your fathers’ fathers, ever since, have tended the fire o’ love to God and man, that the Camp Fire Girls aim to tend. They’re patriotic, those girls; they get honor-beads, so they tell me, for looking up their gran’parents an’ great-gran’parents—and their occupations; all that went to the building up of this great country; they’ll welcome you and your five smokes with open arms.”