“Yes, getting down to bed-rock, as the boys say, it means ‘A creature far above!’” Suddenly the younger girl’s mood changed. Her moccasined foot kicked the fine sand into the air as if she were starting it off on a rainbowed quest to find the Star, her namesake, along a climbing trail where she knew she would find it hard to follow. “A—Creature—Far—Above!” she repeated slowly. “I guess that’s what I need to be! Since—since I’ve taken that name”—scarcely above a whisper—“I feel, somehow, low-down, because I’m always ‘putting my foot in it’; I did this morning, laughing at that little orchard Kitty directly she got here. An’ I’m too slangy. Mother doesn’t hear me, you know, or she’d correct me.... And there’s so much to be done for the boys, where a girl has three brothers younger than herself, that it didn’t seem to matter how I spoke—or much what I wore—so long’s I could get things—done.”
A silvery star peeping out as the sun declined, peering down at the sand-hills, saw her namesake’s eyes full of sore tears.
Olive stared a minute. Then her arms went round Penelope.
“Oh! you dear,” she gasped. “Oh! you dear!” wetly, too.
They had come out to gather dead juniper; they found the living fire-wood, the magic fuel of deep sympathy, mutual girlish comprehension.
It doubled their joy in a minute or two. For Penelope’s pangs were evanescent. They danced in the snowy sand-valleys, gathering up the khaki skirts of their ceremonial dresses into puckered bags for their driftwood fagots—brine-whitened chunks, some of them easily splintered and rendered portable, which had been swept in by the garnering tide from many a distant shore—together with withered limbs of basswood and juniper, native to the dunes.
They tried vainly to drag along in their train a very ancient captive, a bleached, branching cedar-stump, driftwood, too, which gleamed like a white marble monument amid the sands that had alternately covered and uncovered it for many hundreds of years.
Olive scraped its surface with her Camp Fire Girl’s pocket-knife and was delighted that she could tell by the flesh-pink of the wood underneath that it was cedar; one of the first flights which Blue Heron had made about the camp into the fairy-land of unacquired knowledge was the learning from Captain Andy to tell one kind of wood from another, whether it was alive and growing or merely dead driftage.
“It makes one love trees all the more when you can tell how they differ in their wood as well as in their branches and leaves,” she murmured, now, as the girls wandered on, picking here a wild rose, there a lacy blossom of thoroughwort or of the everlasting white—blossoming spirit of these white dunes—which Olive stuck into her black braid of hair.
“Well, we’ve got about all the wood we want, now; don’t you think so?” suggested Penelope, at last. “And it’s time we got back to the beach and our camp fire; Sesooā and Mŭnkwŏn, Sally and Arline, will be cooking supper; they’re cooks to-day, you know; they’re going to toast bacon on twigs and Arline has made a blackberry shortcake with those blackberries that we found yesterday in the woods up the river.”