The Camp Fire Girls in After Years

by Margaret Vandercook

For this was not the first token of affection that Bobbin had presented. Indeed, many queer, small gifts had been brought to the strange lady since their first meeting, so that Polly had been curiously touched. For of course Bobbin's offerings came straight from her heart. In her pathetic, shut-in world she had no way of knowing anything of the history of the woman whom she so plainly admired.

Yet inside Polly O'Neill's sitting room at this moment there were four or five tokens of affection that must have come from her. They were too extraordinary for any one else to have sent them and had been laid at her shrine in too unusual a way. For most of them had been literally flung on her veranda. A few of them, when she happened to be sitting outdoors as she was doing at the present moment, and the others when no one had seen or known of their appearance.

One of the gifts was a beautiful blue feather that must have fallen from some unusual bird flying over the western lands, another a stone that shone like the finest crystal, in the sun, and a third a horseshoe some small broncho must have shed in trotting across the plains.

However, never once had Polly been able to thank her new friend for her gifts. For always at the slightest movement on her part Bobbin had turned and run away more fleetly than any one else could. For since Miss O'Neill's report that she had found the girl living with such rough people Bobbin had been recaptured and brought back to the village to school. Notwithstanding, she had once more escaped and now either no one knew just where she had gone or else no one had taken the trouble to capture her a second time.

It occurred to Polly at this moment that she would like to try and influence the girl, or at any rate show her gratitude. Besides, anything would be better than spending the rest of the day bewailing her own loneliness. Moreover, it would do her good for a moment to compare her own loneliness with Bobbin's!

Without a movement or a sign to the girl to betray that she had even caught sight of her, Polly at once slipped into her bedroom and put on her coat and hat. And she was down in her yard and had stretched out her hand to touch her visitor before the girl became aware of her.

Yet the very next instant Bobbin started and began running as swiftly as she had at their first meeting. And this time, even more impetuously and with less reason, Miss O'Neill pursued her.

It was ridiculous of Polly and utterly undignified and unbecoming. No other person in the world in her position would have done such a thing. Yet she had no more thought of its oddity and the attention that she might create than if she had been a Camp Fire girl in the New Hampshire woods nearly fifteen years before.

Of course the woman could not run half so fast as Bobbin in these days, but it was only because she was not well, Polly said to herself angrily. She had been the swiftest runner of all the girls for short distances in their old Sunrise Hill Club. Of course Sylvia had used to get the better of her in long distance tests. Still, even now she was managing to keep Bobbin in sight, although she had a horrid stitch in her side and was already out of breath.

Fortunately, however, for Miss Polly O'Neill's reputation she was not at the present time within the fashionable precincts of Colorado Springs, else she might possibly have been thought to have gone suddenly mad. Her hotel was some distance out in the country and there were but few houses in its neighborhood. Moreover, Bobbin was running away from the town and not toward it.