“No, indeed!” A sixteen-year-old girl, gray-eyed, vibrant with energy, mobile as the Lightning, the mettlesome Lightning, from which she took her Camp Fire name, spoke up spiritedly. “We’re going to flash a message right across the valley, over to old Round-top, that sleepy, dark mountain, a couple of miles away, just as soon as the daylight is all faded out,” she explained.
“Oh, ho! That’s what the Guardian meant when she spoke of showing us something–a display–with red fire, eh?” gasped Pemrose. “How are you going to signal–with what code?”
“Morse code–and a good, fat two-foot pine-knot, oozing with resin!” smiled the Lightning, vivid with inspiration. “How–how about sending over this message: ‘Two strange girls in camp; you ought to meet them’?”
“Lovely! That will hit the mark!” came the appreciative chorus, to the song of logs. “Then–then you’ll see old Round-top wake up, quick’s a wink and ‘come across’ with an invitation–an invitation to that banner picnic the day after to-morrow!”
CHAPTER XII
Old Round-top
| “C. F. G.! C. F. G.! We are the Camp Fire C. F. G.! Oh! none with us can compare, For we looked over And picked the clover, And the World’s lit up With our Camp Fires everywhere!” |
“And, fegs! wi’ an aging, sober body like mysel’, if he isn’t a-picking o’ the clover blossoms, he’s a-smelling o’ them the night,” softly soliloquized Andrew, the chauffeur, as he listened to that halcyon song around the Pinnacle blaze–feeling barred out of Clover Land himself, as he lay among the ferns, because of the “one sair memory”, the whiff of heather ever and anon wafted to his nostrils, as it seemed, from the grave of a fifteen-year-old lassie away back in Scotland.
“Hum-m! if ’tweren’t for that, I could maist fling out an’ dance the ‘Rigs o’ Barley’ a-watching o’ those happy lasses,” he whimsically confessed in the ear of a king fern. “I could, for sure, same’s we used to dance it in the glen around a bonfire!”
But if the heather in his heart, reinforcing chauffeur primness, checked even the first lashing kick of a Highland Fling, it did not restrain him, that grave Church Elder, from taking part later in something fully as giddy; a wild and storming torchlight procession.