“Humph! Doesn’t it seem queer–queer–outlandish?” she snapped, bolstering the piqued head higher with each passionate adjective. “Here for three months, ever since February–since I recovered consciousness after that freezing wreck–I’ve been longing, oh! longing to meet again the boy whose chaff, whose very chaff, warmed one amid the horrors.... You didn’t hear it; you were too far gone. And, now!” The little fists lashed out. “Bah! Who could ev-er dream that he’d turn out such a ‘chuff’, as the boys say–an un-civ-il chuff?... Una! it’s never–it isn’t, it can’t be Camp Fire Girls?”
“It is! It is! I told you I heard singing.”
The answer was shrill with delight as the wiry note of the little black-poll warbler, nesting near.
“Why! Why! Goodness! That’s what I hurled at him; at his crowing, cock-a-hoop back!”
The older girl’s face softened, melted into whimsicality now,–into a freakish surprise that encircled, like a golden ring, her wide-open mouth.
Up–up from the Pinnacle’s softer side, its tender, heavenly side, the chant came ringing, the merry chant and challenge:
| “Then–then don’t take a nap, For we’re on the map!” |
“Camp Fire Girls! Camp Fire Girls! Here on the Pinnacle ‘map’!”
Pem caught her breath wildly. Never–oh! never was a turn of the tide more welcome.