“Now! what we need, girls, is a good r-rich pine-knot, with a juicy, resinous knot in it, that will burn ten minutes, anyway, for signaling purposes,” said Tomoke, the personified Lightning, as the “C. F. G.” proclamation over, the magic moment came for the flashing of the light of this particular camp fire in speaking fire from mountain to mountain–across the mile and a half of intervening valley. That inflammable knot was not hard to find. Split with the toy axe which the girl who had won an honor bead for signaling carried at her belt–a modern Maid Marion, at home in all woodcraft–it blazed, transplendent, a foot-long flambeau, searching the Pinnacle’s darkest nooks, winning sleepy birds from their slumbers, calling upon them to follow too, as Tomoke, nimble of foot as her aërial namesake, presently dashed up the hill, with it held high!
Brilliant as a starshell–where near-by objects were concerned–it counted the needles upon the little, awed pine trees. It painted the wild excitement upon leaping girls’ faces, lit dancing Jack-o’-lanterns in their eyes as, scrambling, they followed the light-shod leader–gold-slippered by the torch–in a breathless tumble-up over rock and needled carpet, amid scandalized bough and shamefaced crag and little, blinking torrent.
It turned to nocturnal dewdrops the bright eyes of the birds,–scandalized, too, yet resolved, at all costs, to come in on the fun!
Robins, flame-breasted in the glow, a black-throated green warbler–blossom of the night–a purple grackle, its boat-tail stiff as a fan-shaped rudder, and, “leggeddy-last,” a cawing crow, they circled on low wing after the brilliant torch,–all pecking at the wonder in the air!
It caught the whooping amazement on Andrew’s smooth-shaven upper lip, shimmering through a veil of anxiety lest, somewhere, there might be another “Deev’s Chair” around, or a madcap lassie to sit in it, as, with an irresistible “Hoot mon!” he brought up the rear of the fantastic revel; the rush of green-clad maidens, the elfin tassels of their Tam-o’-shanters waving, and of demented birds for the Pinnacle’s tallest crag.
Poised upon that gray rock-shelf, high above the ground, her slight face with the shining eyes, framed in the radiant torch-light as in a golden miniature, the signaler’s right arm held the blazing knot with its ragged, foot-long flame at arm’s length above her head, then described a brief quarter circle to the left with it, quick, snappy–once, twice–the arm being extended on a level with the young shoulder so slim, so stiffened!
“See!–See! That stands for I: two dots! I, three times repeated, gives the call,” breathed the Guardian at Pem’s elbow, her mature face a gold-set miniature of excitement, too.
“Oh–oh! I wonder if they’ll ‘get us’, those boys–those joking Henkyl Hunters?” The throbbing question was on every girlish lip. Eyes burned, like the torch, across the valley.
The mountains were falling asleep in their night-caps of mist.
But suddenly one of them, far away, grim and dim, lifted an eyelid–and responded.