Camp Fire Girls!”
“Oh-h!” It was a prolonged ejaculation; the girls’ eyes were wet and winking above the wreathing smiles upon their lips as the notes boomed off over the night-tide, setting the river a-roar.
“Oh, this has been a won-der-ful evening altogether,” said the Guardian, her face an illumination that beamed softly upon the final echo which seemed to strike those distant dunes upon the opposite side of the tidal-river.
“Aye! Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls!” chuckled Captain Andy meditatively. “Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls, theirs—theirs is the coming tide!”
CHAPTER XII
FLOURED GLASS
Sesooā heard a sob. A frank sob that published the trouble of some girl’s heart to the dunes and to the sea! And Sally did not know what to do about it.
It was the first sob she had heard during the six weeks that the girls of the Morning-Glory Camp Fire had been camping on the white Sugarloaf.
“Somebody is thinking that it’s nearly the end of August and that we’ll be going back to the city pretty soon!” she surmised. “Oh-h, to be a seal!” The golden spark in her eyes, the dancing firefly, lit out over the waves and hovered above a sleek dog-like head, but larger than a dog’s, appearing above the water some fifty yards from the white beach on which she stood. “Oh, to be a harbor seal and stay here always to sun oneself on a sands-pit in summer and in winter ride an ice-cake, as the seals do! I was made to be a wild thing!” Her laughter rippled, clear and low, like the ebbing tide, but she dammed it up lest it should intrude upon the feeling betrayed by that other unaccountable sound which she had just heard, coming from the farther side of a barrier of rock that intersected the beach.
“I wonder, now, which of the girls it is?” she silently speculated. “Is Kitty yearning for her orchard and the grunting society of Mary-Jane Peg? But she seems so happy here among us! Yet, perhaps, the scare we got three days ago upset her, when that big seal dived under our rowboat and upset it, half-way up ’Loaf Creek! Oh, bubbles! that was a bad spill.” Here another low splash of laughter dropped its liquid notes to mingle with the distant mirth of the tide, breaking far out, as Sesooā, in thought, glanced past the rock-barrier, past some acres of intervening dunes freshly swept by a southwesterly wind, at the winding blue creek, Sugarloaf Creek, that crept in round the back of the Sugarloaf Peninsula until it lost itself in the woods where the fat Astronomer came to grief.