“He doesn’t look like a ‘chuff’–a boor. He looks like a really nice college boy, one with a hazing imp in his eye though, lur-rking in that little star–almost a squint; so–so like Una’s,” thought the inventor’s daughter, familiar with the student brand of boy. “Yet how could he be so uncivil to us, really–actually–snub us, after all he did, too? Goodness! wouldn’t I like to get a chance to snub him?” It was the Vain Elf which slept in the shadow of the Wise Woman in the breast of Pemrose Lorry, that stored this wish, laid it up, a vengeful arrow in the blue quiver of her eyes, now shooting piqued, sidelong glances at those flaunting big boys. “Why-y should we run up against them here? Well! he’ll never get a chance to play Jack at a Pinch–friend in need–to me again. Watch me–watch me pick my steps!” She picked them so at random, at the moment, moving off, that she came near slipping in for that eerie ducking, with the blind fish–pale as phantoms, swimming round–and Stud, flinging the striped garter away, hurried after her–Jessie, too!
“Gee! this is a peach of a cave; isn’t it?” effervesced the scout sarcastically. “Melancholy so blooming thick that you could almost sup its sorrow with a spoon, eh?”
“It’s a regular cave of despair.” The lonely trill of the feathered hermit was in Jessie’s answering note. “That sad voice of water, a cascade–a stream–far in, which nobody ever saw!”
“I’d give worlds to see it!” said Pemrose.
“So would I!” Stud’s voice was pitched high. “If it weren’t for the Scoutmaster.... Tradition says that whoever drinks of that hidden water will have luck.”
“Well! I’d let somebody else have the piping times if I were you, Buddy–if they depend on a draught from that mysterious spring.”
Now, it was the nickum who answered; the same scintillating tones they were–how bully they sounded then–which had quoted Shakespeare on “Something rotten in the State of Denmark”, amid other depressing waters, half hidden, half liberated by their ice-cloak.
“I can look out for my own ‘piping times’–thank you! And I’m not going to buy any pig in a poke–take any leap in the dark.”
The scout’s reply was bristling. To a fifteen-year-old patrol leader, a Henkyl Hunter, who went up and down upon the trail of a joke, there was a smack of condescension about that “Buddy”, used twice by those big boys; perhaps he, too, at that moment, laid up something against the youth of the flaming tone and rig.
“Humph! hasn’t he the nerve, butting in?” he muttered.