And mountains of white up above,
And mountains of blue in the distance,
I follow the trail that I love.”
When the verse ceased and Peggy had turned around, there was a little burst of applause.
The little poem she had just recited was so perfectly descriptive of the scene surrounding the Camp Fire party at this moment that it was almost as if it had been created for the place and the occasion.
They had come part of the way down one of the easier trails leading to the Grand Canyon and had reached a broad, flat rock like a table-land. On it there was a growth of scrub pine; way below the deep, subdued roar of the Colorado River and beyond the blue, snow-topped hills.
Peggy was standing at the edge of the plateau of rock looking down the trail which descended lower into the canyon, when the lines of the song had occurred to her and she had spoken them aloud.
She was one of a group of half a dozen or more persons near enough to hear what she was saying while the others were not far away in the background.
“That is charming, Peggy,” Gerry declared when the applause ended. “I do envy your being able to remember a thing so delightfully appropriate. I never can at the right moment. But it isn’t like you, Peggy, to be reciting poetry; one might have expected it of Bettina. I believe you are in love.”
She spoke good-naturedly but with a little teasing inflection that only Gerry had at her command among the Camp Fire girls.