After supper was cleared away the girls set about collecting wood in the open space on the top of the little hill, for their ceremonial-fire. It was the most happy and successful meeting they had had, and also, as Louise expressed it, the most beadful. It ended in a ghost-dance around the fire. After it was through the girls lay still and told stories, which gradually became more ghostly than the dance. It was very pleasant till bedtime came. Then even the bravest of them made dashes for their tents; and Mrs. Bryan, making her rounds after the camp was asleep, found five lighted candles keeping ghosts out of five tents in a row!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
There were bathing and boating and tree-climbing in the days that followed and there were hikes and folk-dances and various entertainments, by themselves, and occasionally with the Scouts for audience. The girls canoed all up and down the river, and borrowed the Scout swimming-pool with rapture, and learned all sorts of swimming and diving stunts. And everybody got brown and husky and cheerful. But in between the good times the girls worked on steadily, each at her appointed task, and in about ten days there was a promising collection of material to be sold, for the virtuous purpose of giving Camp Karonya some more weeks of life in the Wampoag woods.
Helen gave up modelling her beloved statuettes, and went soberly to work at bowls and vases, and other such things that people would be likely to find useful. She decorated them with motives she drew herself, and took them up to Wampoag, the summer-resort, where there was a kiln, and had them fired. Louise made burnt-leather pillows, which filled her hair with such a fearful smell that for awhile she washed it every day, till it occurred to her to wear a bathing-cap to work in. She also burned mats and table-covers and napkin-rings to the limit of her purchasing power; and when that failed she took to carving things out of wood she picked up. The Blue Birds wove raffia baskets and table-mats, and Marie and Edith crocheted bags and collars. Adelaide devoted herself to canning. The rest helped her sometimes, but more of the time she took pride in putting up the fruit all by herself.
There were embroidered tea-cloths and runners, and there was hammered brass-work. The honor-counts rolled up like snowballs, for the girls made nearly everything a girl is capable of making or decorating. There was almost enough made to stop.
But still Camp Karonya held nightly discussions, having made these various things, as to how to sell them. The plan most of them wanted to adopt was that of going from house to house with them. Having a fair meant hiring a room or store, or running the risk of having nobody come to buy—for the camp was two miles from the nearest point of civilization. The only alternative seemed putting them into some of the resort shops to be sold on commission, and there was a large risk there that the shops might not do properly by them. There was another alternative, sending them home to be sold, but that seemed inglorious, somehow.
One night, after everything had been argued over until everybody had finished from sheer inability to think of anything more to say, and begun to discuss constellations instead, Winona, lying on her back, felt a pull at her sleeve. She rolled over, to see Louise stealthily working herself down the hill, out of the moonlight. Winona rolled as stealthily after her.
“What is it?” she asked, when they were at the bottom of the hill, where they couldn’t be seen.
“Come hither, Little One, and I will tell you!” responded Louise, like Kipling’s Crocodile. She led the way to the dock, where they sat down in the moored rowboat, and Louise began to hold forth.