“There are, and a great deal besides, or I’m much mistaken, dear!”
CHAPTER TWO
Within the next week Mrs. Bryan had sent for and filled out and returned the application blanks, and now the girls were merely waiting for the return of the blanks and their charter. Meanwhile, out of school hours, Winnie helped her mother about the house.
“I mayn’t have time for much housework when I belong to the Camp Fire,” she thought, “and I’d better do all I can now.”
So she learned a good deal about cooking, and helped regularly with the dishes—and with the supper-getting and tidying. Finally—it was almost the end of May by then—the charter came, and material for the ceremonial dresses, and various other things; and the girls held their first Camp Fire. It was at Winnie’s house, with its big fireplace, that they had it. Mrs. Bryan invited two other girls to join, to make up the number; Dorothy Gray and Adelaide Hughes. Dorothy the girls all knew and liked—she was everybody’s choice for one of the vacant places—but nobody knew much about Adelaide, who was a newcomer in town, except that she had no mother, and lived with her father and her younger brother and little sister in one of the few apartment-houses that were beginning to be put up in the little town where the girls all lived. She was a quiet, rather sullen girl, and she dressed badly—almost untidily. The girls were surprised at her joining, for she seemed to keep away from people almost as if she did it on purpose. But Mrs. Bryan wanted her in, and the girls would any of them have done anything for Mrs. Bryan. Only they confided to each other that they hoped Adelaide wouldn’t spoil the fun.
As each girl came, the night of the first meeting, she was taken, not into the living-room, but to a little room beside it, and asked to wait there for the rest. Edith Hillis was the last to come, and then they were summoned into the other room. It was lighted only by the blaze of the fire.
Helen explained things to the girls, as her step-mother had explained to her.
“When the drum begins to beat we are to come in, Indian file,” she reminded them, as a soft, measured beat began to be heard in the next room.
Putting herself at the head of the line, she led the seven girls into the room to the rhythmic beating. They circled around it once, then sat down in a ring about the fireplace, and looked at Mrs. Bryan with admiration.
She had on a straight brownish gown, with deep fringes at its bottom. She sat on the floor by a curious drum, of a sort most of them had never even seen pictures of. She was beating it softly, Indian fashion, with her closed fist.