“Yes! No-o! I do–an’ I don’t!” stammered the boyish Henkyl Hunter. “I–we–” indicating his scout brothers–“have met him a couple of times in the woods; I guess his father an’ he have a camp on the opposite side of the lake from ours. We’ve talked with him–tried to be friendly. And he–he’s always jolly, you know–like now! But–but when it comes to finding out anything about either of them, gee, you might as well whistle jigs to a milestone–so-o you might!”
CHAPTER XVI
The Council Fire
| “Across the lake in golden glory, The fairy gleams of sunlight glow. Another day of joy is ending, The clouds of twilight gather low.” |
Another day of joy, indeed! Without peril of rattlesnake–or marplot nickum to spoil it!
“‘Varnish right–and aëroplane wrong!’ That’s what he said when they laid that trap to get us out of the cave, without any fuss. But I say it’s: ‘Varnish right–and puzzle wrong!’ All wrong!” snapped Pemrose to herself again and again, repeating an old saying during the week following that first Get Together. “Nobody–nobody has a right to drift around as a puzzle, these days! If ever I get a chance, see me snub him har-rd–though he did rescue me twice! Well, thank goodness! it was the Scoutmaster, not he, who played Jack at a Pinch in Tory Cave.”
And it was the Scoutmaster, in days gone by, with the help of his boys, who had built the great stone fireplace in the girls’ bungalow in which a brilliant Council Fire was now blazing. Across the lake the golden glory stole, and girls came tip-toeing to the hearth-flame in soft, ceremonial dress, fringed and beaded, the firelight, like dawn, flushing the pearl of their headbands,–and Pem forgot the enigma of that eighteen-year-old youth who seemed to have a trick of bobbing up, now and again, under the lee of a summer holiday, like some menacing spar to leeward of a vessel in fair sail.
Well! to recall Stud’s figure of speech, nobody was “whistling jigs” to his milestone heart now–or trying to. The fire was the fiddler; and wax was not softer or more responsive than the pliant breasts on which its music fell.
“I watched a log in the fireplace burning.”
They whispered it one to another and under the spell of its transfiguring lay, bent forward, they witnessed the last act in a pine-tree pantomime.