“Humph! they’d have to ‘go some’ to leaven the blues of Tory Cave,” remarked the Scoutmaster, laughingly addressing himself to a roll. “The biggest bonfire on earth wouldn’t half dry the cave-tears there.”
“Yes, that’s the den of the Doleful Dumps–their diggings!” laughed a younger scout, flourishing aloft a mess-mug, the gray of his rolling eyes. “Bats–bats as big as saucers–no, soup-plates! And, far in–far in–the sound of running water, like a weak wind!”
“Running water! Invisible running water! A–weak–wind! Oh-h! do let us hurry and go on there. We have to cross the river; haven’t we?” The gurgle of that cloistered brooklet was already in Pem’s heart as her dilating gaze spanned the Housatonic, broad and open, “warbling” amid its soft meadow slopes, as she had looked upon it from the Devil’s Chair. “But, goody! I hope we won’t run across him there–Jack at a Pinch! Flaunting round like a grosbeak!” She bit the thought into an olive. “Stud’s no grumpy riddle–if he is a Stoutheart, like the other!”
CHAPTER XV
Airdrawn Aëroplanes
Running water! Invisible running water! The voice behind the scenes prompting the play,–the grim play of bat and rat and reptile in old Tory Cave, where the rocks wept, the little strolling sunbeams clapped their hands, and the great fungi, primrose-skirted, drooped over a drama never finished!
It was even more romantic than the girls had hoped for,–such romance as clings, cobweb-like, to melancholy.
Like a weak wind, truly, a sad wind blowing from nowhere, was the purl of that hidden streamlet whose mystery no man had penetrated–nor ever seen its flow–mournfully as cave tears it dripped upon the ears and hearts of the girls.
“Pshaw! Who cares for weeping rocks, though they look as if they were bursting with grief and ready to tear their pale hair–that queer growth clinging to them. Humph! Only crocodile tears, anyhow, like ‘Alice in Wonderland!’” cried Ista, the laughing Eye of the White Birch Group, whose everyday name was Polly Leavitt.
“It’s not the tears and it’s not that horribly sad lake with the little, blind, colorless fish in it, that I mind–it’s the Bats!” screamed Una Grosvenor. “Oh-h!” as the mouse-like head of the cave mammal and its skinny wing almost brushed her face.