At eight precisely the audience, accommodated on long planks which reached from box to box, saw a curtain pulled away from between two trees. Nothing was to be seen in its place but a plump red album standing out against a background which represented every sheet in the camp. They had used Marie’s red cheese-cloth after all, instead of Winona’s black paper muslin. As for the framework, that was a work of art for which several of the girls were responsible. It had taken all the manual training they knew, and a little bit more—they had had to call Tom Merriam, whose hobby was carpentry, before they got it all right—but the general effect was gorgeous. The audience was given a fair amount of time to appreciate the beauty of the album, which was about eight feet high. Then Marie stepped out. She had been elected to the very responsible part of Samantha because her memory was good, rather than because she looked it. But she had done excellently with what means she had. Two small pillows for a foundation, a pink wrapper with large black spots, sent on from home, an elderly bonnet borrowed from a friendly farmer’s wife, a substantial gingham apron, spectacles, a Paisley shawl, and a large palm-leaf fan, completed a get-up that would have disguised Marie Hunter effectually from her own best friend.
When she thought she had waited long enough to give the audience a chance to appreciate her she curtsied, and reaching over, pulled at the album cover with the crock of a green-handled umbrella. The inside page of the album was imitated by a frame with white muslin tightly stretched over it, and an oval hole in the middle for the picture. In the hole just now was a meek, chin-whiskered face surrounded by a high collar—Mr. Gedney, normally. Samantha pointed to this proudly.
“Brethren and sisteren,” began Samantha, after she had introduced herself, “this here is my lawful, though sometimes wayward, pardner Josiah Allen. I was married to him in a brand-new green silk gown, made pollynay, and Mother Jones’s parlor, come twenty year ago. Our mutual affection has been a beakin ever since, though I can’t deny it has sputtered some once in awhile, and burned purty low, tryin’ times like house-cleanin’ an’ wash-days.”
She went on with the famous tale of “How the Bamberses borrowed Josiah,” cutting it short when she heard the tiny bell behind the scene tinkle, as a signal that another picture was ready. Then she jerked the cover to with her umbrella-handle, and operated it again. This time the inside leaf had been fastened back with the lid, for this was a full-sized picture. The audience, by this time, was laughing at nearly everything she said, for Marie was a capital mimic, and she had picked out and strung together all the funniest things she could find in the Samantha Allen books.
“This here,” announced Samantha, “is my step-children, Thomas Jefferson and Tirzah Ann. They ain’t bad children, if I do say it as shouldn’t, and I have brung ’em up like they wuz my own.”
Winona was Tirzah. She sat stiffly in a high-backed chair (the back was pasteboard, covered with black muslin, cut in a Chippendale sort of way) and she wore a full, flowered gown, with her hair looped over her ears and fastened in the back to a “chignon” with two fat curls hanging from it. They had put Tom with her, with a view to mutual support. He, too, had a preposterous collar (collars may be made by the dozen if you have scissors and patience, and the Camp Fire Girls had both) and a flowered vest. His baggy clothes and a tall hat at his feet completed a picture that was so much like the ones you do see in old albums that the audience began to clap before Marie was through her introduction.
“Woof!” said Tom when he got out of the frame. “Never again for me!” He turned to grin at Billy, who had still to go on. Billy was supposed to be ‘Submit Tewksbury’s beau, a dashin’ city feller,’ and he was trying to get an appropriate amount of dash into his mustaches.
“Every time I go up against Camp Karonya,” responded Billy sadly, “I have to do something that needs a lot of stiffening. I had to work two hours over that fiend tail of mine, and these whiskers are just as bad.”
“It’ll be worse when you have real ones,” remarked Louise consolingly. She was acting as putter-on-of-finishing-touches. There was a dressing-tent apiece for the girls and boys, and Billy was on the outside of his, trying to arrange the mustache to his liking by means of a small mirror pinned to the canvas.
“At least I won’t have to worry about their sticking on,” was his reply.