“Easily. The girls will be delighted to have my cot for a visitor. I really don’t have a whole cot, but I managed to get room to sleep in it,” she smilingly admitted. “Yet, I hope I have not influenced you to take pity on me,” she hurried to protest.
“You are a real blessing,” said Cleo. She was going to say “angel,” but a look from Grace forbade that extreme.
“We are going exploring this afternoon,” announced Julia, as the visitor prepared to leave.
“Oh, yes! Don’t mind the danger-signs you find stuck around,” said Miss Mackin. “We have seen many of them, but not yet scented any real danger. Good-bye for a while!” she finished. “I’ll be here in time to take charge of the banner-raising.” She hesitated in front of the new flagpole, her eyes alight with admiration for the girls’ spirit of loyalty to their Scout principles. Then Miss Mackin hurried off toward Camp Norm.
[CHAPTER V—A STOLEN LOOK AROUND]
It was dawn on Lake Hocomo, and the sun that disappeared behind the hills last night after spilling his colorful paint-pots into the surprised waters, tried to make amends now by softening the deadened mixture into a haze of amethyst mists.
Gray, purple, rosy, and all so velvety, like the essence of color-life itself, the day dawned; welcomed by glad birds from every bush, tree or meadow spot for miles around.
Were the Bobbies up now they might have learned something from their namesake. On a soft patch of velvet grass, jeweled with dew-blessed buttercups, and that tiniest of flowers, the pale blue forget-me-not, the bobolinks fluttered, their song as reckless as the riot of early day, as they paddled along on wingtips to the gay rhythm of rippling, reckless aria; for a happy little songster is the bobolink, shooting up and diving down into the wet grasses for his bath of sweetness, then swaying on the slenderest of stems, not unlike the little girl who stands perched on her springboard in the first joys of water-diving.
It was because this rollicking bird sings as he flies that the vote of the Scouts resulted in his name being chosen, and on the dawn recorded the brown-gray streaked little songster left his meadow for a glimpse of that new camp in the woods. Soon he must go South for his rice feast, for early in summer the birds of his clan descend upon the rice fields and lo——!
The bobolink perched himself on the top of that new flagpole, and perhaps his trilled notes were a co-mingling of praise and good wishes. But the Bobbies were sleeping in their mothers’ cottages and dreaming of the first night in camp.