“Oh! isn’t this—heavenly?” breezed “Copper-nob”, the torch in her heart, blown by the night-gusts, inspiring her lips as, presently, she felt the cool air, light as a kiss, upon her cheek, which nestled beside Dorothy’s in the poncho-bed, formed of two ponchos, upper and lower, upon the pine-bough mattress, on the ground.
“Hea-ven-ly—oh-h!” The general, blissful sigh went round.
“What a light blue the sky is—quite light blue! I nev-er thought a night-sky could be so bright ... and the tree shadows so black, ink-black, against it! If, only, I could paint it,” murmured an artistic girl, Naomi Larned, who was seldom or never divorced mentally from sketch book or palette.
“But what—what’s that?” Una was sitting up with a scream, dragging Pemrose, poncho-mate, with her—they had been lying down about fifteen minutes.
“Only a bat—barn bat flying round—or maybe—maybe he’s a cave-dweller,” murmured the other sleepily. “Isn’t he funny—just like an aviator, doing stunts? An aviator doing stunts!” she repeated it, nodding.
“Listen—listen to the funny noise he—his wings—make: ‘Eb-eb-eb-eb-ob-ob!’ Oh! I think he’s—weird—horrible.” Una shuddered, her face in the moonlight, white—shining—as the night-blooming cereus, lifted over the dark poncho-edge to the peopled sky.
“Now, ‘Jack’,” Pemrose used the rallying nickname, “you promised you wouldn’t be a ‘weer’, as Treff would call it, a fanciful ‘peerie-weerie’,” with a low, “dropping-off” laugh, “frightened of nothing—and getting every one worked up. Lie down-and go to sleep,” mumblingly. “I’m so—”
“Two of them!” shivered Una—and shook her. “Oh-h, mercy! they’re flying down close—close-near us. One almost touched me.” She stifled a low scream by biting at the poncho-edge.
The “weeriness”, like hay fever, spread.
Girls were sitting up all along the line, now, upon the moonlight bedding-ground, on the edge of a grove, where the taper-like stems of slim white birches, their spreading crowns, were the black and silver candlesticks that held the stars for bedroom candlelight.