laughed Lura. “Come along, ducky, your brain is a regular flower basket.”
“With a ‘fancy’ legend wrapped round the stem of each flower in the basket!” murmured Pemrose, her finger to her laughing lip. “No wonder she thinks she hears sounds in the woods at daybreak—fairy singing.... Oh! what’s—that? Kittens—are they? No-o!”
“Coons! Three—three baby racoons trotting across the road!” The Guardian clasped her hands. “Oh! girls, we are being admitted to the fellowship of the wild.”
“Oh! weren’t they the funniest little gray things—no, buff—bushy tails—trotting from wood, oh! from wood to wood, to find their mother.” Every lip was gasping now, every eye penetrating, trying to penetrate the thicket of roadside scrub into which the wild things had vanished.
“Gracious! The mountains are being at home to us, indeed—welcoming us, as fit-for-fit,” cooed Pemrose exultantly.
“Making us pay toll, too, aren’t they—as fit-for-fit?” The Guardian eased the pack upon her back, the neat camper’s roll which carried much more than the poncho, warm sleeping-bag and personal equipment—the limit for her girls, most of them. “Just look at that mountain road before us, there, standing upon its hind-legs—and feeling for the sky!” she added merrily.
“And when we have wrestled with that one, then there’ll be another at the same rearing stunt,” laughed Dorothy. “Oh, dear! I have a hag-a-back already—a pain between my shoulders.”
“But ‘chivy’ aches and march along,
And set the echoes sing-ing,
Till woods and hills and laughing glens,