GIRLS OF THE MORNING-GLORY CAMP FIRE

BY

ISABEL HORNIBROOK

AUTHOR OF “CAMP AND TRAIL,” “FROM KEEL TO KITE,” ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY JOHN GOSS

BOSTON

LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO.

Published April, 1916

Copyright, 1916,

By Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.

All Rights Reserved

Girls of the Morning-Glory Camp Fire

NORWOOD PRESS

BERWICK & SMITH CO.

Norwood, Mass.

U. S. A.

Dedicated to Ruth, Eleanor, and Margaret

The great burnished top was set to spinning madly upon a flat stone.

The author expresses her indebtedness to Dr. Frank G. Speck of the University of Pennsylvania and to Dr. Jacob D. Sapir for permission to reprint the nonsense-syllables and music of the Leaf Dance, from their records made among the Indians, published in “Ceremonial Songs of the Creek and Yuchi Indians.”

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

[The great burnished top was set to spinning madly upon a flat stone.]

[Her left hand had snatched at the dragging reins]

[“She won’t fail. She can’t! I see the red!”]

[“An’ you’ll laugh back at the fears, once you join the Morning-Glory Camp Fire”]

[On, ploughing on, through the wet, oozing sands]

[A large, antique silver coin of a size and stamp such as neither Boy Scout nor Camp Fire Girl had ever seen before]

GIRLS OF THE MORNING-GLORY CAMP FIRE

CHAPTER I

A STROLLING PIANO

“Why did she choose ‘Morning-Glory’ as her tribe name?” asked Mŭnkwŏn the Rainbow of Sesooā the Flame, as Rainbow and Flame, with girlish arms entwining, stood beneath the shelter of the Silver Twins, two kingly birch-trees, so identical in stature even to their topmost jeweled crowns of leaves flashing in the July sun, so alike in the silver symmetry of each fair limb as to be named the Twins.

These silver kings were one-hearted, too, in their benevolent purpose in life, which was to unite in casting a brotherly shade over a certain corner of the broad city playground, dotted with children from every clime, and incidentally to fan the flushed cheeks of the two girls directly beneath them, bound together by a girdling rainbow that played about their waists, woven by the sun’s shuttle amid the quivering birch-leaves, fit symbol of their binding Camp Fire sisterhood.

Sesooā’s eyes danced, lit by a tiny golden flame that uncurled itself in their demure hazel like a firefly alighting on a brown leaf. She caught her lower lip between the pretty incisors that decorated the front of her mouth as she scrutinized the semi-distant figure of a sixteen-year-old girl—perhaps nearer to seventeen—clad in a loose lavender smock to her knees, whence to her ankles there was a gleam of white skirt, with the most bewitching, frilled summer “Tam” of lavender, matching her smock, shielding her brown head, sheltering her face, like the hood of a flower. This floral figure leaned against the open door of a handsome automobile which was standing upon the playground avenue.

“I’m sure it’s beyond me to tell why Jessica Holley (Jessica Dee Holley; she always likes to bring the unusual little middle name in, because it was her mother’s, I suppose), why she chose Welatáwesit, which is the only Indian equivalent she could find for Morning-Glory—literally meaning ‘Climbing Plant’ or ‘Pretty Flower’ for her Camp Fire name. But I believe there’s a story attached to the choice, some ‘cunning’ little anecdote of her childhood. Wish I could ferret it out! She seems, always, to have been called ‘Glory,’ nearly as much as Jessica,” answered Sesooā racily, she who in every-day life bore no flaming cognomen, but was plain little, gay little, Sally Davenport, as full of quips and quirks, of lightning impulses and sudden turns as the wheeling firefly in her eyes.

“Goody! I’d like to hear the anecdote, too. The Morning-Glory name suits her so well that I thought she must have dreamed it—that it came to her in sleep—as I dreamed mine,” laughed the Rainbow, whose rightful name when she was not clad in a leather-fringed robe of khaki, in moccasins and head-band, and seated by a Council Fire, was Arline Champion. “But I call it absurd, meanly absurd, that if there’s any story about her and her name, we should not hear it, we who have named our Camp Fire (and it’s the best in the city, too, though I say it myself!), our whole group or tribe of fourteen girls, after her,” she went on with a stamp of her foot on the playground sod and with rainbowed emphasis; she was the shell-tinted, demurely shining kind of fifteen-year-old girl who unconsciously aims at carrying a rainbow in her pocket, to brighten the dull or tear-wet day.

“Oh! we didn’t exactly ‘name it after her,’” demurred Sally. “She happened to come here last winter to visit those rich girls, the Deerings, who are all fluff an’ stuff; that exactly describes them, Olive and Sybil——” There was the least little green tinge of the spitfire about Sesooā’s flame now as she shot a glance toward two girls seated in the waiting automobile together with an older woman, evidently chaperon to the band of girls. “Oh! I say, pinch me; I shouldn’t have said that, should I, seeing that they brought us here in their car? But ’twas the first time they ever did it, though my father is head-bookkeeper in their father’s office at the Works; and I’ll engage ’twas Morning-Glory—Jessica—who suggested it, as we all wanted to visit this playground where there are so many foreign children, to see them dance their folk dances,” she ran on, speech flitting away from its starting-point in the wake of her firefly dance, which vivaciously hovered from one object or group of objects to another.

Arline waited for it to alight again on Jessica, as it presently did.

“Well! as I was saying,” reverted Sally, “you remember how she came here last February just when we were beginning to organize our Camp Fire group, when we had secured Miss Darina Dewey as Guardian (I think she’s a love of a Guardian and I like her unusual first name, too, though some of the girls don’t!) but before we had applied for our Charter, when we were searching for a name for our new Camp Fire circle, raking over Indian names like leaves until—goodness! we seemed half-smothered in them.” Sally paused for breath, breathlessly smothered, indeed, by the sunlit torrent of her own words, which had a trick of inundating a listener.

“It was at our second meeting, I think, at Miss Dewey’s house,” she went on, “that Jessica came in, all snow an’ sparkle from her eyes to her toes, and introduced herself by showing a transfer card signed by the Guardian of a Camp Fire circle in a small town in Pennsylvania to which she had belonged, the Akiyuhapi Camp Fire.”

“The Are-you-happy Camp Fire! Sounds just like that!” put in Arline, rainbowed with mirthful memory. “Jessica told us that she had already been initiated as a Wood Gatherer and showed her silver fagot ring. But we were a little flabbergasted, weren’t we, when she sprang her Indian name on us, by which she had chosen to be known among Camp Fire circles: Welatáwesit; it sounded musical as she pronounced it, but it seemed a mouthful! She partly explained it (d’you remember?) by saying that when she was choosing her symbolic name—as all Camp Fire Girls do—she wanted, for a special reason which she kept to herself, to take that of a flower, Morning-Glory. And that Penobscot Indian word was the nearest she could get to it, the morning-glory not being originally a native plant.”

“Yes, and it was at that very meeting, after we had welcomed Jessica with open arms as a Camp Fire Sister”—thus Sally again took up the fascinating thread of reminiscence—“that when each girl had told her symbolic name, Indian or otherwise, and how she came to choose it to express some special wish or aim, that we fell back upon digging for one for the new Camp Fire itself, the new circle or tribe. And then, don’t you remember”—Sesooā’s voice rose to a pitch of excitement—“how Betty Ayres, little fair-haired Betty, who’s so enthusiastic and about as big as a minute—she’s just four feet, five inches and a half——”

“My! but your minutes do stretch—like elastic,” put in Arline, with a rallying elbow poke.

“Humph! Piffle! Betty jumped up suddenly as if she saw a vision, with an idea swelling up so big in her that she seemed to grow two inches on the strength of it. ‘Girls!’ she cried, ‘I’m just tired of browsing among Indian dictionaries, searching for a novel name for our new Camp Fire circle. Why don’t we call it, right away, the Morning-Glory Camp Fire? There’s a name that will reflect glory on us!’ said little Betty, half sobbing and half shining. ‘It suggests so much—so much that I can’t just put into words of——’”

“‘Of the Morning of Life, the Glory of Girlhood—and vice versa—isn’t that what you mean, Betty dear?’ said our Guardian, helping her out!” This reminiscent contribution came from Arline. “And then Miss Dewey went on to say how she thought herself that it would be a glorious name for us who are Daughters of the Sun, so to speak, having the Sun as our general symbol. So the Morning-Glory Camp Fire we are! And when we camp out this summer upon the Sugarloaf Peninsula where the sand-dunes are white as snow, we’re going to call our great, ramshackle wooden shanty, with one side quite open to the airs of heaven, Camp Morning-Glory. So much glory that we shan’t know ourselves, eh? But all this”—slowly—“doesn’t bring us one little bit nearer to answering the question which I asked you at first, why our Glory-girl, Jessica, chose her symbolic name at the beginning. Since it put so much into our heads we’ve got a right to know all about it!” with another laughing stamp upon the playground grass. “I can’t bear mystery; if there’s a secret as big as my thumb, even if it’s about nothing or next to nothing, I want to know it.”

“Oh, mystery—I love mystery! Bubbling mystery!” Sesooā rose on tiptoe under the Silver Twins, looking rather like a Baltimore oriole, that vivid flame-bird, for she, too, wore the latest thing in girlish smock frocks of a dainty peach-color very closely related to orange, shirred or smocked with black by her own clever little fingers that had fashioned the garment, too, the which had won her a green honor-bead to string upon the Camp Fire Girl’s necklace that she wore on ceremonial occasions.

Those fingers had draped the little orange Tam O’Shanter, as well, which covered her crisp, dark hair, a masterpiece of head-gear more jaunty, less hood-like than that of the flower-like figure leaning against the auto’s side to which the wheeling firefly of her glance now turned.

“Oh, bubbles! I’m going right over now to ask her why she chose her Morning-Glory name and symbol,” she went on, each word a tinted bubble of laughing curiosity painting itself upon the sunshine. “Absurd, but I am! If there’s any foolish little child-story woven in with the choice, this is the very time and place to hear it, here on the public playground, with all those children—such funny, foreign-looking tots most of them!—dancing ‘Pop Goes the Weasel!’ Pouf! I feel like dancing with them.”

And the human oriole flitting forth from the friendly shade of the Twins fluttered her shirred plumage in a gleeful pas seul upon the playground grass, where the sun-glare transformed her into an orange flame, while her ears, attuned to all merry sounds, drank in the shrill music of five-and-thirty children’s voices (the number ought to have been even, but in that gleeful chorus there was one silent throat), six dancing sets, shouting with a strange babel of foreign accents, to the accompaniment of their stamping feet, the old nonsense-rhyme of the sixteenth century:

“Half a pound of twopenny rice,

Half a pound of treacle,

Stir it up and make it nice

Pop goes the weasel!”

hummed Sally, in flaming echo, and stood still.

All the while, that versatile quirk in her nature, corresponding to the flitting firefly in her eyes, which rendered her attention easily diverted when she wasn’t gravely in earnest, changed her all at once from an eager bubble of curiosity, that must burst if it did not penetrate a trifling secret, into an absorbed spectator. She hung upon the fringe of the playground dances, intent upon every rhythmic movement as the leading couple in each juvenile set (it happened to be a little earringed, lustrous-eyed Syrian girl footing it with a small Turk for a partner in that nearest) formed an arch with their uplifted arms for a gay little dancer to pass beneath.

“Oh-h! don’t they catch on well and dance prettily, these playground children?” murmured Sesooā softly to the quivering interest in her own heart. “I’m awfully glad that Jessica proposed our visiting this playground to-day where there are so many little foreigners not born in this country or whose parents haven’t been long here. She”—dreamily soliloquizing, with a glance at that lavender-smocked figure—“said that, last year, she and the other members of the Akiyuhapi Camp Fire in that Pennsylvanian milling town, where she became a Camp Fire Girl, did so much voluntary work upon the public playground, largely among the little immigrants, teaching them American songs, American games, telling them stories, settling their squabbles. Well! I guess I’m not going to bother her with questions about her ‘Morning-Glory’ name just now. Over there where she’s standing”—flashing another glance at the gray auto, with two girls in it and one leaning against its silver door-knob—“I’d have to bray like a jackass to be heard above the music of that absurd piano, perched upon a low cart. Goody!” with a sudden, excited movement of her vivid shoulders. “I shouldn’t like to be that perched-up pianist. Just suppose the playground horse should take it into his head to pop—to dance—to chase the weasel, too?”

Was it any suddenly restless movement on the part of that four-footed servant of the city which drew the strolling piano upon a low cart from playground to playground to thresh out music for the children’s dances—was it that which flashed the thought backward over his flicking tail, over the head of the pounding pianist seated upon a light cane chair before the lashed piano, flashed it into Sally’s brain? That, or the elfin dance of sunbeams upon his stamping hoofs which, together with the popping dance-cries of the children and the louder popping of the musical instrument behind him—deliriously out of tune, too—must surely infect the staidest horse?

Sally did not know which launched the apprehension, the tickling sunbeams or the restless hoofs and head. But she was used to horses. She found herself mechanically straightening up, controlling the giddy dance-spirit in her own soles, moving nearer—nearer—to the low cart as if she could not help it.

A brilliant orange streak in the sunlight she, flecked oriole-like with black, from the velvet ribbon that lent tone to that saucy little Tam, to the black needlework stars upon the heaving girlish breast.

Then all at once this human flame-bird weaving its way in and out between sets of dancing children was halted by a musical crash, brought up short on tiptoe by a screaming commotion through which rang a nightmare of treble chords wildly sustained by the pianist’s right hand blundering among the shrieking keys of the elevated piano, while her left arm waved on high, imploring help, the whole seeming a premature, mad finale to the popping music, to which every voice upon the playground, animate and inanimate, lent a cry—discordantly at that!

The effect was so feverishly funny that Sally, who had the oriole’s gay spirit within her orange-smocked breast, vented a shriek as loud as any, to swell the confusion, automatically clapping her fingers to her ears.

The voices of some fourscore children had popped explosively from song and shout to scare-note and shriek, a conglomerate shriek, strengthened by every foreign accent under the sun (any cry ever hurled from the crumbling Tower of Babel was nothing to it!), a shriek that hung, sustained, in air together with the rasping, squelching notes of that unfinished musical measure which seemed to tatter the air itself.

“Ouch! My s-soul!” murmured Sally under her breath. “The horse! It’s the—horse. He is bolting, with the piano lashed to the cart behind him. And the—poor—pianist!”

It needed no more. She saw the girl-musician’s left arm waving, imploring, saw her rock upon the light cane chair before the instrument that was not lashed to the rocking cart; she heard the horse’s mutinous snort, heard it strangely echoed in dumb fashion by a pair of parted childish lips near her; crowning all, she caught the terrified shriek of a small boy who clutched at his raven-black hair and what English he could muster as he started toward a sand-pile ahead, yelling, “Mine babee—mine babee! Horse he go kill her; she—she go all—deaded!”

And like the flame from the cloud leaped the answering fire in Sesooā—little Camp Fire Girl!

“The driver—the boy driver—he ought to be shot; he’s umpiring a baseball game,” was the first distinct thought that leaped to her mind as, like an oriole on the wing, she sped across the sunlit grass in the wake of the still rocking cart, the fiendishly howling piano, the screaming, swaying pianist. The second lightning conviction was: “It’s up-hill and the horse can’t really run very fast with that absurd piano behind him! He’s dancing all over the place, rather than wildly running, now!... Rolie showed me—has told me so often—how to stop a runaway!”

Rolie was her Boy Scout brother and that gallant fourteen-year-old Scout seemed to run neck and neck with her in this crisis, whispering heart into her, advising her movements.

The firefly in her eyes, soaring, golden, above consternation, has lit now upon the horse’s quivering haunch—on his black mane.

“After all, he’s only a horse; I’ve not alone ridden one, but, as a Camp Fire Girl, have saddled and bridled and fed an’ currycombed it, too, every day for the past month!” whizzed thought, darting ahead of her as with another springy step or two her right hand has seized the cart’s shaft to hold on and prevent herself from falling in the supreme effort she is about to make.

Her left hand, attached to a strong little wrist for a girl not yet sixteen, has snatched at the dragging reins, holding them short, is trying to pull the horse’s head down, turn it toward her!

Only a horse! And a brother-horse was such a friend of hers! The firefly bore that thought upon its wings as it wheeled above doubt, resistance, wrenching strain that was tugging her soft young arms from their sockets—her feet from the solid earth.

Only a horse! But a maddened horse, distracted by the shrieking ivories behind him!

Her girl’s strength against his!

Yet his rebel-crest was lowering. His lifted forelegs were uncurling, the waving hoofs that cared not what they smashed returning sanely to the sod.

And over the tumult of his heated horse-play, the inflaming echo of the music playing upon his generally patient nerves, rose the voice of the Camp Fire Girl as one who understands, gentling, soothing:

“Whoa! Whoa-a! old horse. There! there! good boy. Qui-quiet—now! The-ere!”

Her left hand has snatched at the dragging reins.

A snort that shook the earth under her feet, a jolt and rattle of the low cart and lashed piano, straining at its moorings to the cart, an hysterical sob from the pianist, and a girl life-saver stood outlined for one flaming minute at the horse’s head, queen of the equine dance, mistress of him and the situation, her hand to her side, her breath coming in great, ragged gasps that claimed to be sobs, too, sobs of wonder at how she ever did it!

“Well done, little girl! Good work! Well done, little Oriole in the orange smock!” came from spectators known and unknown. “How on earth did you have the presence of mind to do it—to stop him so quickly?”

“I’m a Camp Fire Girl. I ought to have my wits about me!”

Sesooā threw back her head and let them see the flame in her eyes, the flame kindled at that new-born Fire whose divine essence is to “Give Service!”

Suddenly that flame cowered and ran to hide in the tremble that swept over her from head to foot, a sick shudder that carried with it, also, the heroine’s grateful ecstasy as she looked ahead, only six short feet, at a raven-haired small boy flinging himself with a jumble of foreign cries and broken English at a playground sand-box, where, amid other tiny tots, a black-haired baby of eighteen months crawled safely like an insect, at the heart of the silvery pile.

CHAPTER II

PLAYGROUND PEACEMAKERS

The pianist had been helped from her cane perch by a grown-up girl, a young school-teacher who led the playground dances and who had run a close race with Sesooā to the rescue; although, as she frankly blurted out now, it was doubtful whether she would have had the courage and skill to stop the runaway in good form, as cleverly as the Camp Fire Girl had done.

It all hinged upon this, as Sally knew, that a black-maned, fifteen or sixteen hands high equine dancer, with a howling piano behind him, presents an infinitely more paralyzing spectacle to the maid, young or old, who has never come to close quarters with a horse in his stable than it would to one who had bridled and unbridled, harnessed and unharnessed him, fed, cared for and petted him intimately—even though the incentive to such laborious care might be partly a decorative one, the reward of another red honor-bead to string upon her Camp Fire Girl’s necklace.

There was one thing to which the orange-smocked maid had not become accustomed, however; that was to sterilizing the flame of her little tongue, lest it should materially hurt anybody, when hot fire was kindled within her from good cause.

“You ought to be shot,” she told the schoolboy driver who had deserted temporarily from the horse’s head; “you ought—ought to be shut up in jail for a month! What sort of stuff have you got in you”—breathlessly—“skedaddling off to a ball game, instead of looking after the cart and piano? Suppose he had killed her?” pointing to the shaken pianist who had sunk upon a bench beneath a beautiful, circular catalpa tree just bursting into flower.

“Oh, Kafoozalem! I didn’t think that old fire-horse would run even if there was a charging battery behind him; he’s as old as Methusaleh,” muttered the boy rather sulkily.

“What! did he once belong to the fire department?” Sesooā was stroking the black mane very gently just now.

“Yes, the city sold him to a livery stable when he got too old to hit the pace with the other horses when a fire alarm was turned in an’ when he was too worn-out to look spry in a hack, the liveryman bargained him back on to the city; now he’s playing the fool carting round a piano for ‘Pop Goes the Weasel!’” The youthful driver snorted between laughter and commiseration.

“Oh! the poor old fellow; perhaps he mistook the singing of the children—it was shrill enough to beat the band—and the popping music behind him for some new-fangled kind of alarm invented since his day; so he just bolted—and danced when he found he couldn’t make it—couldn’t climb the hill dragging the cart and piano, with the pianist playing still! There now! you old hero of a worn-out fire-horse, aren’t you glad you didn’t end your days in disgrace by killing somebody?” cooed the Camp Fire Girl to the aged rebel whose black nose was now nuzzling her waist in friendly fashion.

“Yes, I ought to have stopped playing directly he began to dance,” confessed the girl-musician, “but I simply lost presence of mind. It got on my nerves this morning driving round these poor parts of the city, perched up in front of the cart beside the driver, like an organ-grinder’s wife.”

“Well, you won’t have to do it after this week probably,” comforted the other schoolteacher who led the dances; “the supervisor of playgrounds says that he’s going to station a graphophone on every playground where there isn’t a piano in a schoolhouse close by. You see the playground system is only newly established here in Clevedon and they haven’t got it running very well yet. Hello! Jacob, so your ‘babee’ didn’t get hurt, eh; you’ll have to thank this lady for stopping the horse before he trampled the sand-pile where the tiny children were.” So she addressed the raven-haired small boy in a dingy little hanging blouse of red velvet, whose foreign cries had topped the tumult.

“How old are you, Jacob?” questioned the heroine of the moment, sparing the child and his broken English an attempt at compliance.

Jacob Kominski, Polish Jew, struck a dramatic attitude and blinked at her solemnly.

“‘Old’!” he echoed. “Yes’day I be s-six; next day to-mow-wow I be seven,” speculatively leaning his head to one side; “som’day to-day I’s five—I is all de olds in de world!” passionately.

“Somehow he looks it, doesn’t he?” broke in another girlish voice with a laugh in it and a tender note, too, tender as the dawn, a very morning-glory note, that came well from under the lavender Tam O’Shanter, as the girl in the silken smock frock, the subject of conversation earlier, linked her arm through Sally’s. “Come here, Jacob! Aren’t they ‘cunning,’ these playground children? We used to have such lots of fun with them last year—not here, of course! Oh, Sally, you’re the—bravest—thing!”

“Am I?” breathed Sally, nestling close to the lavender smock; the Glory-girl, as her Camp Fire Sisters had a trick of calling Jessica, was not only the oldest member of their organized circle, not only wore upon the little finger of her left hand the silver fagot ring, symbol of membership—as Sally did upon hers which had caught the horse’s reins—but she was on the verge of attaining higher rank in her society, of becoming a “Fire Maker”; in a word, she was regarded as the flower, not in name alone, of the Morning-Glory Camp Fire, the tribe that was her namesake, in a way.

“Oh! yes, indeed, you were very brave. However did you screw up courage to do it, to run beside the cart and catch the horse’s head? I’d have been afraid of being knocked down—trampled!”

“So would I! And I! Or of having the cart go over me!” Such was the duet of applause which followed on the heels of Jessica’s praise from still two other pairs of girlish lips; namely from the two girls in white who had been seated in the automobile against whom the little spitfire flame of Sally’s tongue had been launched, a little while ago, when she scathingly pronounced them “all fluff and stuff!”

The nobler flame which had burned in her during her late heroic act had altogether consumed petty jealousies and criticisms for the time being; she took their congratulations well and gratefully, while Arline, her dearest chum and Camp Fire Sister with whom she had exchanged memories under the Twins, fondled her upon the side that was not in possession of Jessica.

“The pianist is braver than I was, for, see there! she’s going to mount the cart and play again,” suggested Sesooā presently, growing a little tired of being “fussed over.” “She is gritty, if you like it!”

“So she is!” acquiesced the older of the two Deering girls who owned the luxurious motorcar in waiting upon the playground avenue; her name was Olive; to the unprejudiced eye she did not seem to be composed of super-light and “fluffy” stuff; at sixteen and a half, nearly the same age as Jessica, she was already a beauty, from the glossy, ringlet curl—as black as Jacob Kominski’s locks, but so silkily fine that it did not seem to belong to the same category of human hair—tucked behind her small ear, to the toe of her seven-dollar shoe. “And it must be so perfectly horrid driving round in front of that piano and cart!” added Olive of the blue-black curl, throwing a glance at the mounting pianist from her dark, girlishly dreamy, Southern eyes.

“You may be sure she doesn’t play organ-grinder for fun!” laughed Arline. “She’s a young school-teacher who has to support her mother, so the playground teacher who leads the dances says, and she adds to her salary by playing for the children’s singing games and folk-dances during the playground season. Now! if only one girl who’s a member of our Camp Fire were here—Ruth Marley, who aims at a musical career and plays for our Camp Fire songs and dances, how nicely she could help her out by mounting the cart and pounding away at ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ (I wonder if they’re going to begin that again?) instead of her.”

“Tooraloo! Somebody seems to be beginning something—stirring up a new fuss—over there!” suddenly suggested Sally, who was preening her orange and black plumage, anxiously smoothing it to make sure there was no mark where the penitent old fire-horse had caressed her. “Goody! what’s up now: a battle, an earthquake—or merely somebody drowning in that two-foot-and-a-half-deep bathing pool—or some other playground trifle?”

“It’s a—a fight, I think” quavered a new voice whose staid quality dripped sedately upon the laughing girlish sarcasm.

“A fight! A fight between two boys—two small boys! Where is it? Over there—d’you see—at the foot of the giant stride—beyond those seesawing teeter-ladders!” All the five maidens in summer Tams and Panamas were breathlessly exclaiming together, now, directing their gaze across half-an-acre of playground at a piece of athletic apparatus glittering rather like a tall steel gibbet against the blue and white sky, up whose skeleton ladders juvenile athletes were one by one climbing to try their prowess at sliding or jumping down; at the foot of this “giant stride” a ring of boys, with even one or two men among them, had sprung up as mysteriously as the growth of corn on a hot night.

“Yes, I’m sure it’s a fight between some of the playground children,” said the sedate voice again, coming from the middle-aged woman who had sat in the automobile with the two Deering girls before the escapade of the horse, whom Olive and Sybil—yes, and Jessica Holley, too—called Cousin Anne.

“A quarrel between two little boys who are pommeling each other black and blue, I suppose,” she went on with tremulous anxiety. “Where—where’s the playground teacher?”

“The one who leads the dances is comforting the shaken pianist before she begins to play again—telling the driver to move the cart and piano to a shady spot. Her back’s turned,” gasped Arline.

“Never mind! If it’s a fight between two little boys, I guess I can stop it—these foreign children, some of them, are dreadful for quarreling—I’ve settled playground fights before,” broke in a sudden, quivering cry from Morning-Glory, whose Indian name was Welatáwesit.

“Now, maybe, she’ll be pommeled herself; they may rain blows on her if she gets between them!” wailed Olive in a tone which showed her fondness for Jessica.

“Yes, and it seems so—so low-down to mix all up in a squealing fight between two dirty little foreigners!” Sybil Deering, two years younger than her sister, and rather fluffy in appearance from her present, superficial pout to her loose, light hair and diaphanous frills, wrinkled up a pert little nose that was inclined to point toward Heaven.

“Well! what would you have her do?” challenged Sesooā rather savagely; “let them fight on, until their eyes are all ‘bunged up’ and you could hardly tell their faces from a rubber ball, smeared with red paint, eh? There’s no fear of her!” Sally nodded toward the back of the lavender, flower-like figure making toward that mushroom ring of human applaudists which a fight, or the rumor of a fight, can collect quicker than anything else on this mortal earth. “You needn’t worry about her; she has received an honor for patriotism—a red, white, and blue honor-bead—for work she did on a public playground last year. I’m off to back her up!”

And Sesooā, again the orange-smocked flame, started in the wake of the lavender patriot, Arline, too, asking questions as they sped over the grass of a seven-year-old American boy who was not quite so keen about the pugilistic display as his companions.

“It’s Polie an’ Lithuish,” he not very lucidly explained. “Lithuish he was trying to climb the steel ladder of the ‘stride,’” pointing toward that giant piece of the apparatus of play. “Polie he pulled him down, an’ trod on his toe an’ Lithuish went for him. I guess the Polander boy, he’s the strongest; he’s got ‘Lithie’ down once a’ready!”

He had thrown him again as the girlish patriot in the lavender smock saw, when she darted through the loose ring of older boys, swelled by a bored loafer or two, arrived at so-called man’s estate, who were enjoying the fight and telling them to “Go to it!”

Pole and Lithuanian, sprigs of neighboring foreign races, dwelling next to each other in Europe, they were fighting like small wild things, tooth and claw! Polie of the flashing dark eyes, red lips and round seal-brown head had the better of it; he had flung the taller, fair Lithuanian boy into a bed of flowering canna, where his bleeding nose sowed an extra crop of ruddy blossoms.

“Oh! stop it!” cried the Morning-Glory chokingly, laying hold on Polie’s uplifted arm—although the spectacle was much more savage than she had dreamt of—and hanging on bravely, even, while he launched a sturdy nine-year-old kick at her white skirt and lavender ankle. “Oh! you older boys ought to be ashamed of yourselves—egging them on! Can’t—can’t somebody—stop—it?” for the blue-eyed Lithuanian boy was on his feet again, gory but unconquered.

“Well! I guess somebody will, little lady,” boomed a great voice behind her. “I’d have bore down upon this ‘scrap’ sooner, but for a busted spar!”

The Morning-Glory turned and looked up into a massive face which—thought being very nimble in moments like these—she silently likened all in one gasping instant to two words from a Camp Fire song: “Sheltering Flame!” It was tanned, weathered, and reddened to the florid hue of a red sunset, showing a narrow sky-line of blue, radiating protection, that corresponded to an eye-line.

From that sea-blue eye the girl’s glance involuntarily darted downward to the “busted spar,” a lame pillar of a right leg whose limp was painfully visible even as the newcomer took three hasty strides forward and dropped a powerful hand upon a shoulder of each of the small boys, holding them wide apart in a grip that they might as well try to lift a lighthouse as to break.

The stranger caught her glance and smiled. “Oh! it’s mended now, that damaged spar,” he said, answering her look; “and ’tisn’t a recent injury, anyway. Here, now! You two hop-o’-my-thumb rascals”—shaking the belligerents—“you ease off there an’ don’t get fiery again or, by my word, you’ll both march off this playground to the taste o’ the stick—sore and strong—see?”

There was nothing for them to do but to “see”—see reason—held in that mighty grip. Under a few scathing words from this peacemaker, who was physically, at any rate, a man of weight, for he must have tipped the scale at over two hundred pounds and was ruggedly tall, the ring of applauders melted away into the sunshine like an untimely frost.

“I wish I could ha’ got my hands on them at the same time and given ’em a shaking,” blurted out the flaming peacemaker. “Egging little chaps like these two on!” his gaze traveling back and forth between Polie’s swelling black eye and the nose of Lithuish. “Gosh! they did go at it hard, for young uns. But ’twas only a little sketch of a fight.”

“‘Sketch’? I should call it a—a sanguinary picture,” gasped the girl with a half-hysterical little laugh, pointing to the pug-nose of Lithuish.

“Good for you!” The stranger dropped a smiling look on her from under his bushy, gray eyebrows, pleased at her ready wit. “Well! I guess you can go back to your own folks now with an easy mind,” he suggested. “I’ll keep these butting kids in order,” with a roving glance at the waiting automobile and the group under the fragrant catalpa tree.

“Here’s a playground teacher coming, too,” said Morning-Glory, as a brawny young man, in a dripping khaki shirt and trousers that rained diamonds, approached, hugging a great, wet, white ball. “He’s been away over there evidently teaching some of the children to play water-polo in that shallow bathing-pool.”

She pointed to a broad, artificial sheet of water fed by city hydrants, with a rainbowed fountain in the center.

“Gee whiz! they’d need a score o’ teachers here to direct all these children’s play—it’s a large an’ crowded playground,” remarked the captor of Polie and Lithuish, now interposing his massive body between them. “An’ great kingdom!”—looking around him with a gust of laughter—“there’s more foreign spice on this playground than ever old King Solomon collected in his ships from the four quarters of the earth.”

“You mean that these little foreigners have lots of hot ‘pep’ in them, eh?” flashed Sally, who had just come up, liking to air a little slang.

“Sure, that’s what I do mean!” The lame peacemaker lifted a nautical-looking cap from his grizzled hair in fatherly farewell to the girls as they moved off. “So long!” he said kindly. “Maybe we’ll run across each other again.”

“Maybe we will!” Morning-Glory, otherwise Jessica, threw him a backward smile over her lavender shoulder. “I’m sure he’s a sea-captain—or was,” she said, retracing her way toward the catalpa tree between Sally and Arline. “I’m interested in sea-captains because my great-grandfather was one; I have a little old miniature of him painted on ivory which belonged to Mother; she—she left it to me,” with a catch of the breath. “He has brown hair an’ bluish eyes the color of mine; somewhere about seventy or eighty years ago he commanded a big ship and sailed out of Newburyport—the only Newburyport in the United States.... Oh, if only he could be alive now, then I’d really belong to somebody, not just be thrust on to people who aren’t any relatives at all, no matter how kind they are!” she added under her breath—so low that neither Sally nor Arline heard—with a passionate quiver of the lip and a glance at the Deering automobile flashing in gray and silver, with a faultless chauffeur on the front seat.

“Well! I’m a Camp Fire Girl, anyway.” So she silently caught herself up with a return of the morning-glory look, slightly bedewed. “And ‘Whoso standeth by that Fire, flame-fanned, shall never stand alone!’ What! that plucky pianist is really beginning on ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ again,” she exclaimed, as renewed strains from the elevated piano floated over the playground.

“Let us hope the weasel will pop to a finish this time!” laughed Arline, as they reached the catalpa tree and stood once more, grouped with Olive, Sybil, and their chaperoning cousin, under its fanning, heart-shaped leaves. “Now! I wonder to what nationality that little girl in the coarse gray frock belongs?” went on the Rainbow, sweeping with her glance the sets of skipping children again being marshaled for the folk-dance.

“Do you mean the one with the big, patient, purple eyes—eyes like a wood anemone?” asked Jessica; she who had taken for her Camp Fire name a climbing flower loved flowers of all kinds, especially wild ones.

“Yes, and with a toe sticking out through her old shoe! And she can’t keep her mouth shut, although, apparently, no words come from it. I do believe it was her queer croaking gasps that I heard with the foreign babel and the shrill ‘Oh’s’ and ‘Ah’s’ of all the other children, when I ran to stop the horse!” bleated Sally.

“I wonder if there’s anything wrong with her; whether she’s—what-d’you-call-it—defective in any way?” came in languid speculation from Olive.

“Girls!” Cousin Anne sadly settled the question. “I believe she’s deaf and dumb.”

“Deaf and dumb! That explains her. Oh, poor tot!” The Morning-Glory, whose dance-loving feet had been keeping time to the popping music, unrhythmically swung one of them off at a sharp angle, as if a rude pebble had struck her ankle in its silken stocking, hurting it more than Polie’s kick. “Deaf and dumb! Then she can’t hear the music. And she’s so awkward, moves so slowly and clumsily, that the other children don’t want to dance with her!.... Oh! she almost makes one cry.” Jessica brushed the blue-gray eyes that, according to her, resembled her ancestor’s in the old miniature. “See her standing still in the middle of the fun, plucking at the gathers of her gray frock, looking up at the other children, trying to find out what they’re going to do next!”

“Yes, and one of those other children will take her hand as a partner when the teacher insists, then drop it directly she looks the other way! They don’t want to dance with her silent tongue and old, broken shoes,” said Olive Deering.

“Then I’m going to dance with her, if the teacher will let me. We’ll form a set of our own, we two, if we can’t fit in anywhere! You don’t mind keeping the auto waiting a little longer, do you, Cousin Anne?”

The last words were flashed back over Jessica’s smocked shoulder, with a tremulous tilt of her upper lip that hung between a laugh and a sob. Already she was mingling with the juvenile dancers, a tall purple and white Morning-Glory amid that garden of racial buds, of little children from every clime.

The dumb child’s hand was in hers, after a few low words to the playground teacher, who abstracted one odd child from the nearest set and installed the new couple in her place. Jessica’s foot in its patent-leather pump and lilac stocking was thrust forth side by side with the rusty, out-at-toe footwear, the Morning-Glory swaying upon its inner tendril, the yearning tendril of Love, teaching the grey, cramped bud beside her to sway and step—to glide and pirouette—too.

The glide was only a clumsy shuffle. But there grew a light in the dumb child’s eyes, those eyes of purple patience, so that those who watched its dawning flicker from under the catalpa tree felt their throats tickle.

It did not go out with the final popping of the long-suffering weasel. For, now, the pianist, quite herself again, had struck up the gay, frolicking music of a Vineyard Dance. And side by side those mismatched partners, the seventeen-year-old Camp Fire Girl, the eight-year-old deaf-mute, were scampering through it, enacting all the vineyard drama of growth,—Jessica by dumb show instructing, after a fashion, the child at her side.

Hand in hand they knelt on one knee on the playground grass, making gay pretense of planting grape-seeds in the warm ground. Step by step—stamp, stamp, stamp!—they circled round, with arms uplifted, with groping fingers plucking counterfeit grapes of sunshine from imaginary vines, that violet light growing in the dumb child’s eyes, while she strove to ape each gesture and movement of her companion, as if—transfigured—she peeped through the gates ajar of fairy-land, had her first real glimpse of the joy of childhood.

Suddenly, her feet lagged; she dragged upon Jessica’s hand. She stood still. Her big eyes were uplifted to the white cloud-foam drifting across the blue sea of the July sky. Then they dropped wonderingly to her partner’s face.

“Look! Look! Look!” cried Arline with a frank, glad sob. “I verily believe she thinks Heaven is short an angel to-day, one having dropped down from the clouds, especially to dance with her!”

CHAPTER III

CAPTAIN ANDY TAKES OFF HIS HAT

“Great Neptune! I do declare, she dances as lightly as a Mother Carey chicken balancing upon a wave.”

“You should say, rather, that she dances like a morning-glory in the breeze!” Sesooā looked laughingly up into the face of the massive peacemaker who had separated the two little fighting foreigners; he had delivered them over to the tender mercies of the playground teacher who carried the dripping white water-ball in his arms, while he, the lame stranger whom Jessica opined was a sea-captain, withdrew to a better position for watching the dancing which brought him near to the group under the circular catalpa tree.

“An’ why should I say she dances like a ‘morning-glory,’ may I ask? I don’t know much about flowers, but I know a whole lot about foam-chickens, Carey chickens—stormy petrels you’d call ’em, most likely: and they’re the lightest, most buoyant things on God’s earth! You should see them,” went on the stranger expressively, “with their small wings spread, balancing on a wave-crest, little feet digging down into the foam, never sinking, disappearing into a watery hollow one minute, up again the next, crowing on the top of another foam-hill! I say she dances like that, the girl who’s footing it with the little creature in the broken old shoes and grey frock—as if the wave could never catch her!” There was a little genial mist, like light spray from the stormwater of which he spoke, in the stranger’s eye now, as it followed Jessica and her dumb partner through the last gay stampede of the vineyard dance. “And here’s hoping that the storm-wave never will swallow her!” he added with an eye of such merry fatherly kindness that Sally, part of whose bringing-up it had been not to hold familiar converse with strangers, absolutely forgot to place him in that category and immediately gave her racy little tongue all the freedom it desired.

“That sounds awful-ly nice what you say about her,” she remarked. “And I’ll tell her you said it; she’ll be pleased to hear it because she has made up her mind that you’re a sea-captain and her great-grandfather was one, owned a big ship and sailed out of Newburyport.”

“Ha! The only Newburyport in the United States, with its plaguy sand-bar at the mouth of the Merrimac River, so that ships can sail out of that port, when they’re in ballast, but never put in there, when they’re loaded, after a long voyage!”

“Ye-es,” murmured Sally, not interested. “But fancy thinking so much about one’s great-grandfather! However, I’m going to set to work and look up mine now, my grandparents and great-grandparents an’ what they did—so’s to win a patriotic honor-bead for my Camp Fire Girl’s necklace! But it’s different with her”—volubly indicating the deaf-and-dumb child’s partner, who was now guiding her, with expressive pantomime, through the mazy windings of a ribbon dance—“she thinks so much of that old sea-captain ancestor because she’s got his miniature and because I don’t believe she has any living relatives to think about. Her father and mother are both dead. She’s staying with the Deerings who own that beautiful automobile but I don’t think she’s related to them, except through their elderly cousin”—nodding toward the bench under the catalpa tree—“who’s her cousin, too.”

“What is the girl’s name?” asked the grey-haired peacemaker.

“Jessica Dee Holley.”

“Ha! ‘Dee’ sounds like an old Newburyport name; leastways I’ve seen it in old entries.”

“That was her mother’s name. But she isn’t alone, although she has no near relatives, because she’s a Camp Fire Girl, and we ‘cleave to our Camp Fire Sisters whenever, wherever we find them!’” Sesooā threw back her head with the same loyal gesture as that wherewith she had faced the world after stopping the horse; the golden firefly in her eyes hovering directly over the Camp Fire flame in her heart.

From the ranks of the juvenile dancers came, now, the joyful lilt of another song.

“Two by two,

Two by two,

Here we go!

With merry hearts,

And a cheerful song,

As we march in the double row.”

Two by two, yes, Jessica and her little silent partner leading with a vim, she singing for both!

Again Sally’s throat tickled and the firefly bore a little mist upon its wings as she noted the new spirit which had crept into the deaf-and-dumb child’s movements, into the clumsy, ill-shod feet, into the grey, stocky little figure, into the small, stubby fingers which no longer plucked wistfully at the gathers of her coarse frock, but brightly spread themselves in an inspired attempt to copy the waving gestures of the wonderful partner in shining lavender and white who had dropped from the clouds for her.

The sight was moving. The firefly in Sally’s eyes went in out of the rain.

“She’s going to be initiated as a Fire Maker at our next Council Fire gathering,” she murmured, nodding toward Jessica and hardly caring whether her impromptu companion understood her meaning or not. “But, oh”—blinking bright drops from her eyelids—“she ought to be a Torch Bearer! She’s a Torch Bearer already! Look at the light which she has brought into that little dumb girl’s eyes—she has lit a torch in her heart.”

“Well! I guess she has,” returned the big stranger in a moved voice, too.

“I don’t know whether you know much about Camp Fire Girls.”—Sesooā dashed the bright drops away and the firefly reappeared, hovering over a dimple—“but when a girl joins the society she takes a symbolic name, generally an Indian one, that signifies something she aims particularly to do or be. Jessica chose that of a climbing flower, the morning-glory—or its nearest Indian equivalent—for some little secret reason of her own; that’s what made it seem funny—incongruous—you know, when you said she danced like a stormy petrel, a Mother Carey chicken,” poutingly.

“Ah-h!” The stranger drew his massive brows together ruminating for a minute, his eyes on the wavy ribbon dance. “Ah! but, maybe, the two aren’t so wide apart as you think.” He turned and nodded at her. “Take a stormy morning at sea, now. I’ve seen the dawn, the morning-glory to be, come up, just a little grey flutter in the sky—like a dove-grey chicken that the foam had hatched—the foam that was piled like a great, pale egg against the horizon! It’s a funny world, little girl,” with an all-comprehensive wink of the sea-blue eye. “Things an’ meanings of things are never such miles apart but that you can link ’em, somehow; an’ that’s true of more than foam and flower!”

“Why—Captain Andy!”

“Why-y! Miss Winter!”

Cousin Anne had risen suddenly from the bench under the catalpa tree, shocked at seeing one of the girls whom she was chaperoning holding free converse with a stranger. Now she was advancing with warmly outstretched hand.

“Why! Miss Winter, I never expected to meet you here.” The massive stranger, standing bareheaded in the sunshine, was as cordially shaking that proffered hand.

“It’s Captain Andy, my dears!” Miss Anne Winter beckoned to the two Deering girls, her relatives and special charges. “Olive! this is Captain Andrew Davis who saved your Cousin Marvin’s life, with that of several other young men—college chums—when they were wrecked, while yachting a couple of years ago, off the Newfoundland Coast. You remember?” flutteringly.

“Oh! yes, indeed.” Olive extended a gracious, girlish hand; she was conscious of a little creepy thrill at meeting a real live hero, especially one who carried the heroism done up in such massive bulk, but she had heard her Cousin Marvin—before the rescue—speak of this Captain Andy Davis as being a sea-captain in no grand, mercantile way, as commanding no big barque, but only what Marvin—likewise before the rescue—dubbed a smelly fish-kettle, otherwise a New England fishing-schooner, little over a hundred feet in length from stem to taffrail.

Heroism had its noble uses, of course, especially when one had been stranded for hours as Marvin and those other college boys were upon sharp, naked rocks, seeing their yacht broken to pieces by the mountainous swell of an old sea after a storm, death staring them in the face, with no hope of rescue, until Captain Andy and his gallant “fish-kettle” hove in sight and bore down upon them—until Captain Andy, with a volunteer from his crew, launched a dory and succeeded in saving their lives at the extreme risk of his own.

Olive remembered hearing Marvin say that he did not believe there was another mariner upon the Massachusetts coast who could have “pulled off that rescue” with the sea as it was then. She thrilled again, looking up into the keen blue eye under the heavy lid, into the face which had made Jessica think of sheltering flame. At the same time, she could not help seeing a gulf—a broad gulf with floating shapes of fishy decks, horny hands, scaly oilskins—intervene between her and her sister, daughters of the bi-millionaire owner of big machine works for the manufacture of textile machinery, and this limping weather-beaten master mariner.

Sybil did not even take the trouble to be as friendly as she was.

Meanwhile Cousin Anne, Miss Anne Winter, was introducing Captain Andy Davis in proper form to Arline and Sally, mentioning the fact that the grateful Marvin had taken her to visit him when last she was in Gloucester.

“Oh, I must have felt it in my fingers—or in my tongue—that I knew you, or ought to know you, or that somebody here knew you, or I never would have talked to you so freely!” declared Sally in an orange flutter.

“And how do you come to be in Clevedon just now?” questioned Miss Anne, interrogating the weather-beaten face.

“My artist sent for me.” That florid visage bloomed all over with a boyish smile that gleamed somewhat shamefacedly through the thick, fair eyelashes, not yet turned grey. “She said she hadn’t got my ground colors right—gee! I didn’t know I had any, except when my vessel was grounded in the mud. ‘Carnation colors’ she called ’em—jiminy!”

His breezy bubble of laughter was caught and tossed further by Sally and Arline who eagerly hung upon the novelty of his speech.

“The artist is Miss Loretta Dewey, isn’t she?” So Miss Anne took him up. “She has taken you for the subject of her sea picture: ‘The Breaker King.’”

“Yes. I’m highly flattered. I had other business in this city, too, besides fixing my carnation colors,” with again that boyish laugh stirring the thick eyelashes. “I’ve been in correspondence with a lady here, a cousin of the artist’s, about renting one of my new camps at the mouth of the Exmouth River—tidal river, you know—for the summer.” (Sally caught her breath as if she were fishing for it, rose on tiptoe, stared at him breathlessly.) “The fact is, Miss Winter, I’m tired of being a hayseed,” the ex-mariner went on—“tried it for two years an’ couldn’t take to it.”

“What have you done with your little farm among the Essex woods?”

“Turned it over to my hired man. Oh! he’s a reformed character, he’ll run it all right; he’s got two anchors out now to leeward an’ win’ard, which means he was married a year ago an’ had a son born last month. Guess he had the baby baptized a Scout,” with a twinkle; “he said that ’twas watching the Boy Scouts an’ their manly doin’s that first started him to wanting to hit a man’s trail, at last—make a man of himself.”

But Miss Anne knew that it was Captain Andy who had followed up the unconscious work of the Scouts by taking that hired man, hopeless graduate of a reform school, and setting him on his feet again.

“You’re not thinking of going to sea any more?” she asked.

“No, my damaged spar kind o’ interferes with that.” The mariner looked down at his lame right leg where the sea left its mark on him in his last terrible fight with it. “But I’m gettin’ as near to the ocean as I can while staying ashore,” he volunteered. “I put in this past spring building three big, rambling wooden shanties—they ain’t much more—which I call camps, on the edge of some white sand-dunes, wildest spot on the coast of Massachusetts, where the tidal river meets the bay, or sea.”

“Oh! it’s not the Sugarloaf sand-dunes?” squeaked Sesooā, her voice thin and wiry with excitement.

“Very place! The white Sugarloaf Peninsula! Just a hundred acres, or so, of tall, snowy sand-hills in that part o’ the dunes, and wild life a-plenty on dune an’ river—bird, fish, an’ mammal, or seal! I’ve rented two of the camps already”—went on the speaker, in the teeth of a now prevalent gust of excitement which, blowing toward him, threatened to sweep him off his feet—“one to a family, t’other to a flock; to a lady, right here in this city of Clevedon, who’s going to bring ten or twelve young girls with her, to camp out, some of ’em lately started upon a cruise of their ’teens, others about midway of the voyage,” with a deep gurgle of laughter like the briny bubble of the sea.

“Did she—did she say they were a Camp Fire Group?” Sesooā’s hands were clasped upon a flame of suspense so eager that it almost scorched them.

“Come to think of it, now, I guess she did! I’ve heard a lot about that tribe, in general, lately. Boy Scouts an’ Camp Fire Girls, they’re in the spot light just now.”

“They deserve to be. And was the Guardian’s—the lady’s—name Miss Dewey?”

“You’ve hit it. I’m to be watch-dog and life-guard to the flock—I’ll have a tent o’ my own near.”

“Then, it’s us! It’s us, Captain Andy!” cried the Rainbow and the Flame together. “It’s our Morning-Glory Camp Fire that has rented your camp for the remainder of this month of July and all the month of August—the Green Corn Moon. Oh, we’re so glad to have met you—that you’re going to be our camp guard and protector!”

“Land o’ Goshen! you ain’t got no corner on the gladness; that I tell you.” The old lifesaver beamed. “Is she coming, too?” pointing to the girlish figure in the flower-like Tam among the shifting playground sets. “Is she going to camp on the dunes, too, the one that dances like a foam-chicken or a foam-clot—the Morning-Glory one?”

“Of course she is.”

“I suppose, now, you’d call her a—what-d’ye-call-it—anæsthetic dancer, eh?” with an inquisitive twinkle.

“Æsthetic,” corrected Olive, smiling a superior little smile. “Anæsthetic is a thing that puts people to sleep when they’re in pain—a medicine.”

“Oh! aye, I put my foot in the medicine, did I?” gasped the squelched captain, his “carnation colors” deepening.

From the playground came the cooing words of yet another song, dramatic, disconnected, marking the close of the afternoon’s singing games and folk-dances:

“Bluebird, bluebird, through my window!”

“Oh, Jennie, I’m tired!”

At the two random lines, children’s heads were dropped each upon the other’s shoulder in mock fatigue, resting there a moment in drowsy confidence.

“Turk, Armenian, Teuton, Slav, an’ almost every other race thrown in—Lord! if that ain’t a Peace Conference to beat the Hague,” muttered Captain Andy, his eyes watering as they scanned the faces of those foreign buds.

“I think he’s great—and I don’t mean it slangily either! He is Great,” said impulsive Sally in an aside to Olive. “Oh! why don’t Sybil and you join our Camp Fire tribe and camp with us, too, upon his Sugarloaf dunes. I feel like shouting when I think of the fun we’ll have, rowing and swimming, singing and dancing our Indian dances, the Leaf Dance and Duck Dance that Morning-Glory is going to teach us—she learned them from a professor who learned them from the Indians—among those crystal, sugary, sandy dunes.”

“Yes, and cooking your own meals, by turns, laundering your own blouses, washing camp dishes—glorifying work, as you call it! That wouldn’t suit me.” Olive shook her satin curl. “Sybil and I—with Cousin Anne, of course—are going to spend August at an hotel on the North Shore. We’ll have plenty of dancing, too; it’s a very fashionable, exclusive hotel and the most expensive teacher of up-to-date dances is coming from New York to give lessons to the guests, including Sybil and me; I teased Father until he said we might learn from him—otherwise, we shan’t have a study or a thing to do but to amuse ourselves all day long.”

The bright flame of Sally’s enthusiasm wavered and paled like a candle-flame in garish sunshine. Her face fell. To her versatile, girlish fancy the picture which Olive painted of the coming August was richer in coloring, more dazzlingly gilded in frame—with the modern dancing thrown in—than any that the crystal Sugarloaf could offer, even when peopled with fringed and beaded Camp Fire Girls.

Crestfallen, she looked at Captain Andy, partly to hide her chagrin.

He was staring fixedly at the playground before him, where a dumb child unable to reach up and drop her head upon a seventeen-year-old girl’s lavender shoulder—as the other children were doing with their partners—laid it upon her breast.

“Bless her heart of gold, that girl!” he breathed, his strong face working. “Whether you call her ‘Morning-Glory’ or foam-chicken, I say bless her heart for calling the bluebird through a dumb child’s window when she can’t call it for herself.... I had a little sister, long ago, born deaf an’ dumb; she only lived to be four. I played with her until she died.... I take off my hat to that Camp Fire Girl.”

“Oh-h!” exploded Sesooā between a sob and a song which together cleared the horizon and righted her toppling enthusiasm; that in girlhood to which Captain Andy, hero of a hundred sea-fights, bared his head, as he reverently did, was best worth while; unwittingly he, a connoisseur in Life, had put his finger on that which was lacking in Olive’s picture, present in this: the seeking Beauty not for oneself alone, not in one’s own life only, but to see it blossom in dull, sad, silent corners of the human garden, the Camp Fire ideal.

Swept upon a tide of reaction Sally turned passionately to Cousin Anne. “Oh, Jessica is the dandiest girl,” she exclaimed, slangy with emotion. “Oh! Miss Anne, I do want to ask you a question; do you know, won’t you tell me, why she was bent on choosing Morning-Glory as her Camp Fire name and emblem, why she was called ‘Glory’ as a pet name before?”

“It was because of a little incident in her childhood.”

“Yes, I know! And this playground, teeming with children, is the very place to hear it,” seconded Arline, chiming in.

“Well, I don’t think she would mind my telling you girls, it’s such a trifling little story, but because it’s so tenderly connected with her mother, who died a little more than two years ago, she doesn’t care to speak of it herself; her mother was my cousin.”

“Yes?” breathed the expectant girls.

“I used to visit them when Jessica was a little child; she loved flowers from the time she was a baby girl, and her mother invented a ‘flower game’ which she used to play with her at night after the child was in bed, so that she might fall asleep with a happy impression on her mind; the mother would begin, ‘I am your rose,’ to which the drowsy little voice would answer, ‘I am your violet,’ or something like that and so on through all the flowers they could name, until Jessica was asleep.

“Well! one night the game went on as usual: ‘I am your rose,’ ‘I am your vi’let;’ ‘I am your pansy,’ ‘I am your lily;’ ‘I am your dandelion,’ ‘I am your nasturt’um;’ ‘I am your lily of the valley,’ but to this there was no answer—the mother had the last word—Jessica was fast asleep.

“Early next morning, however, her mother was awakened by two little arms stealing round her neck, by a moist little mouth pressed to her cheek and a child’s voice saying softly into her ear: ‘Mamma! Mamma! I am your morning-glory!’

“Somehow, under cover of sleep, the seed of the flower game had lingered in her mind all night, to blossom in the morning.” Miss Anne gently blinked at such mysteries, looking before her at the dissolving playground sets.

“Oh-h, if that isn’t the sweetest child-story!” burst from Sally in subdued applause. “I’m so glad that you told it to us, satisfied our curiosity.”

“Yes, and we’ll have such a pretty little anecdote to relate, in turn, at our next Council Fire gathering—when we’re supposed to tell of some kind deed which we’ve seen done—about how the Morning-Glory danced with the dumb child, gave her such a good time this morning. I wish I could write it up in verse—even blank verse,” yearned Arline aspiringly. “You’ll be there, won’t you, Miss Anne?”

“Of course she will; it’s to be held outdoors, if the weather is fine, upon the lake shore at the foot of Wigwam Hill, where you can almost see the ghosts of Indians—who camped there in numbers, nearly two hundred years ago—moving about. Of course she’ll be there and Captain Andy, too, to see me light a fire without matches and watch us dance the Leaf Dance!” Sesooā whirled like an orange leaf in a gust of reinstated enthusiasm. “Hurrah for our Morning-Glory Camp Fire! Hurrah and hurrah again for Camp Morning-Glory—our camp that is to be—on the far-away Sugarloaf!” her mind’s eye exploring those white Sugarloaf dunes, amid which she would revel, Puck-like, fairy-like, by the light of the Green Corn Moon.

CHAPTER IV

A LAKESIDE COUNCIL FIRE

“Wo-he-lo for aye,

Wo-he-lo for aye, Wo-he-lo,

Wo-he-lo, Wo-he-lo for aye!

Wo-he-lo for work,

Wo-he-lo for health,

Wo-he-lo, Wo-he-lo,

Wo-he-lo for Love!”

On Wigwam Hill the pine-tree—the noble standing pine, emblem of “simplicity and strength,” symbol of membership in the Camp Fire Sisterhood—bent its head, listening with every needle, as if it knew itself the special patron of this winding chant. Maple and elm-tree, amid whose rich foliage reposed like flaming birds of paradise the last rays of the setting sun, fluttered their approval as the chanting procession wound beneath them. The white-birch-tree rocked with applause. The evening breeze curled the ears of the lake and bade it listen to “Wohelo!”

Only the great-horned, straw-eyed owl, a life prisoner on the lake shore—imprisoned years ago by some naturalist who led a hermit’s existence within a stone’s throw of the water—ruffled his dappled plumage until he looked as big as an eagle upon the dim perch of his cage-house, and pessimistically hissed the chant.

He might have hooted, but in captivity he had lost his voice, was as dumb, so far as natural expression went, as the little deaf-mute of the city playground, reduced to declaring his feelings,—highly embittered ones,—by a goose-like hiss.

“Poor old owl, I do feel so sorry for you—you poor, soured old prisoner!” murmured the fringed and beaded leader of the chanting Wohelo procession, winding out from the leafy foot of Wigwam Hill past the captive’s cage, as she met the painted eye, golden as a wheaten straw and as lifeless, with a little black dot of a pupil within the yellow ring.

Whereupon the captive opened his beak until she could almost see past the roots of the pink, kitten-like tongue down into his stomach, and hissed her, turning his head upon its swivel neck, without moving another muscle or feather of his body, until he faced, now, sideways, now, directly backward, taking stock of the girl-leader’s brown-robed followers. At intervals he lowered over the painted-looking straw-eye the tiny, mysterious curtain, grey as asbestos, which he kept tucked up under his eyelid, as if the stately procession of fourteen brown figures gliding, single file, in and out among the outstanding tree-trunks, with pearly glitter of head-band and flash of many-colored honor-beads upon girlish necks, dazzled him.

“Good land! is it old Wigwam Hill—or the maidens who sleep in that Indian graveyard on the top of it—come to life?” gasped Captain Andy to his “artist” who had kept him in the city in order to paint his ground colors, the hardy flame of the skin, the indomitable blue of the eye, for her picture of “The Breaker King.” “Only I’ll wager those dead-an’-gone maidens couldn’t touch these in looks or in the bravery of their beads an’ fixings; I’ve seen all sorts of fashions an’ rigs, but this is a style of its own—eh?” He gave a breezy puff of admiration as his mariner’s eye followed the procession of maidens in leather-fringed khaki, lit by embroidery and bead, the filleted figures whose hair fell in long braids to their waists, Morning-Glory (to-night to be initiated into higher rank) leading, as they crossed an open space upon the lake shore and glided past a stationary figure of mature grace, with a yellow sun embroidered upon the left breast of her ceremonial dress, which matched theirs.

“It is Gheezies, our Guardian—Guardian of the Morning-Glory Camp Fire,” was the joyous recognition in each girlish breast, as the members of the procession, in turn, saluted her with a hand-sign, their right arms gracefully upraised, following the curves of an imaginary flame, the hand-sign of fire; fire of the heart and fire of the hearth, fire of the sun and fire beneath the shingled or slated roof-tree that shelters a home, being the glowing symbol of the Camp Fire Girl.

One of the saluting figures, third in the procession, which even in ceremonial beads and fringes had something familiar about it to Captain Andy, had a small bow of polished wood slung upon her right arm upraised in the hand-sign.

“Well! I wondered, bein’ Indian maidens, that they had no bows an’ arrows among ’em; that redeems it,” muttered the highly diverted captain.

“Oh, but she isn’t going to shoot an arrow from that bow, else you and I might look out for punctures!” laughed the artist. “She’s going to coax the arrow of fire out of dull wood with it—see the notched fireboard and drill in her left hand—going to kindle the Council Fire without matches!”

“Well, if she does that, she’ll make me sit up an’ take notice! My word! how often I’ve tried that trick, raked over heaven an’ earth, as you might say, for the means o’ making a fire—an’ that more’n once, too—when I’ve been shipwrecked and freezing all night on a lonesome shore.”

“Hadn’t you any matches?” questioned Olive Deering who sat upon a fallen pine-log near the captain’s boulder, also a guest at this open-air Council Fire, not yet kindled.

“The sea took ’em when it ripped off my sou’wester, the matches being in a flannel pocket of its lining. I tell you, little lady, I had hard work to hold on to my scalp, an’ so had every member o’ my crew, too, swimming forty or fifty yards to fight for a foothold on naked rocks, in an icy sea that pounded a man as if bent on breaking every bone in his body—that was the worst time when we were wrecked off the island o’ Grand Manan in a November breeze, when some of us spent the night clinging to icy ledges, t’others crawled up, bleeding an’ frost-bitten, to where there was wood—Lord! what we wouldn’t ha’ given to know the secret o’ getting fire without matches then. You don’t tell me a girl can do it? I guess she may, perhaps—when sprats swallow sharks, as we sailors say!” he added, with a sceptical chuckle.

“Well! wait and see the shark eaten up—the impossible done!” laughed the artist trustfully.

In the gathering dusk Olive’s dark eyebrows were drawn together; from her windfall log, where she sat side by side with Sybil, she looked sidewise scrutinizingly at the grey-haired master mariner; she was beginning to see the gulf which yawned between him and her filled not with shapes of slimy decks, gurry-pens and fish-scaled oilskins, but with the towering masts of human courage and heroism that reached unto the sky, piercing Death’s very shadow, outsailing and outwitting that pale spectre a hundred times to save human life.

“I wonder—I wonder whether ‘the sprat will swallow the shark’: whether Sally will really succeed in getting fire without matches?” she quivered, leaning forward with a new interest in the performance which had, before, seemed merely spectacular, what the boys would call a “showing-off stunt.”

And, now, the fringed and beaded Camp Fire Girl was kneeling on her right knee upon the burnished sod of the lake shore, her left foot pressing down hard upon the flat fireboard in which there was a little scooped pit or hollow merging into a notch in the edge of the board, resting upon a thin little wooden tray placed beneath it.

Her left hand—its wide-sleeved arm braced against the knee of that firmly planted left leg—grasped the handle or socket of her upright drill, about a dozen inches in length, her right steadily worked back and forth the bow, drawn taut by its leather thong, which rested upon that socket at the top of the drill, whose sharpened lower point, thus worked, turned boringly in the scooped hollow of the fireboard—grinding its soft punky wood into a brown sawdust which in a few seconds turned black as it fell upon the tray beneath.

It was a wonderful picture—so the artist thought—this linking of the far past with the present, primitive woman with civilization, while old Wigwam Hill looked darkly on.

Captain Andy was, indeed, sitting up and taking notice, his massive figure leaning slightly forward, hands outspread upon his knees, in breathless interest: was “the sprat,” actually, going to “eat up the shark,” a girl achieve the feat—perform the igniting wonder—which bearded men in the grip of deadly cold and desolation had attempted in vain?

True, in these strange days, he had seen a Boy Scout work that fire trick and get a spark in about thirty seconds. But a girl!

“Seems to me I know that little fire-witch, too,” he murmured to the artist. “Ain’t she the one that was fluttering round like an oriole in orange and black on the playground t’other day an’ that made friends?... My living sakes! she’s got it. See—see her smoke!” meaning the black powdered wood running out of the notch in the edge of the fireboard onto the tray, under the steady grinding of the drill—not the fire-witch, Sesooā.

Yes, grey and hopeful, it rose, that tiny cloud of smoke upon the golden air. Sally’s Camp Fire Sisters held their breath, poised on tiptoe. Wood Gatherers they, according to rank and in deed, who had been gathering inflammable birch-bark and fat pine-splinters, piling them together, in hope and faith, as the nucleus of their coming Council Fire.

“Oh! I shall die if she doesn’t get the flame, now she’s got the smoke!” quavered little fair-haired Betty Ayres, whose Camp Fire name was Psuti, the Holly, fluttering, with arms outspread, like a brown moth with a touch of gold upon its wings. “Sesooā will be so mortified if she fails, with visitors present.”

“She won’t fail. She can’t! I see the red! Don’t you—don’t you see it, the red spark?” The quivering cry came from Mŭnkwŏn, Arline.

Yes, the airy smoke was increasing, wheeling upward in a tiny spiral and at its heart appeared the miracle—a dull red spark, like a fire-seed sown by the vanished sun.

“Hurrah! she’s got it. Hush, don’t speak! Don’t startle her. She has yet to make it burn.”

But, now, Sesooā—one breathing, quivering foster-flame herself, with cheeks on fire—was holding some tinder, shredded cedar-wood, down upon the spark, shielded by a fragment of birch-bark. It was the crucial moment of all. Rising upon one knee, gently she blew upon it, the fire-witch, fanning it with the quivering breath of her own life.

“She won’t fail. She can’t! I see the RED!”

It blazed. The day was won.

“Good life alive! that stumps me; I never thought of a girl doing that.” The cry came in a tempestuous gust from Captain Andy.

“She got the fire in exactly fifty-one seconds from the time she started drilling; I timed her.” The artist was peering through the dusk at the watch upon her knee.

“Well, they’ll light their Council Fire now; it ought to be a booming one. Here’s for gathering some good chunks from the edge of the woods to swell it!” The captain, who had already found his feet in excitement, limped toward the tree-clad foot of Wigwam Hill—whistling and chanting boisterously, boyishly, in amazed elation over the feat which he had witnessed:

“Singing whack fol de ri-do!

’Twill comfort their souls,

To get such fine fagots,

When they’ve got no coals!

“Young Maidee, young Maidee,

If I tell you true,

I’m keeping some fagots

And sticks, too, for you!”

“We’ll accept the fagots, although we generally don’t take any help in the building of our Council Fire!” cried one of the girlish Wood Gatherers running toward him in the gloaming, holding up her left hand on which the silver fagot ring gleamed. “But don’t you dare—dare sing the rest of that song on peril of your life! I can sing it, too:

“A woman, a dog,

And an old walnut-tree,

The more that you whacks ’em

The better they’ll be!

We’re Camp Fire Girls; we grow by working, not by whacking.”

“Whoo! Whoo! Hulla-baloo! Peppercorns and fire-sticks! Have I put my foot in it again, as I did on the playground, mixing up medicine and dancing?” roared the rueful mariner. “There! even that old caged bird is hissing me, as if he had a goose-head, not an owl’s, upon his swivel shoulders.”

So, fanned by laughter, fostered with song, the Council Fire grew until it threw a far reflection on the lake waters and lit up many a nook known to Indian maidens of yore, at the foot of the historic hill.

“Now comes the most important part of the Council Fire program, the initiation of one girl into the rank of Fire Maker, higher than that of Wood Gatherer, which she has borne since her first initiation!”

So spoke the artist after certain preliminary ceremonies had taken place, such as the awarding of new honor-beads, two red honors to Sesooā for feats of horseback riding and for feeding, petting, and combing a horse from mane to tail during a period of thirty days—a prancing routine dignified as Health Craft!

Other honors, flame-colored mostly, were chiefly for homely duties such as girls had always performed, often with a shrug that labeled them humdrum, seeing no glamor about them until they were painted rose-color forever by an honor-bead strung upon a leather thong, by the light of the magically kindled Council Fire.

“Who’s the lucky girl that gains higher rank?” yawned Captain Andy whose masculine interest flagged a little. “If you don’t stop hissing, I’ll wring your swivel neck!” this to the owl. “I tried freeing that bird this evening when the old naturalist’s back was turned—couldn’t warm to the idea of his enduring a prison life-sentence—and, will you believe it, he couldn’t fly two yards, had lost his wing-power, as well as his hoot, through not using it. I had to hustle him back into his cage, with a bitten finger, to prevent the camp dogs from getting him. Ha! so that’s the candidate for rank, eh”—looking toward the Council Fire again—“the Morning-Glory girl that dances like a leaf in a gust, or a foam-chicken—or anything else that’s lighter’n a puff?”

Welatáwesit was giving a demonstration of another kind now, vaunting her skill at first aid by bandaging Betty. Then something white, larger than a bandage, fluttered in the flame-stabled twilight; it might have been a child’s frock.

Softly through the dusk came the voice of the deaf-and-dumb child’s partner, consecrating her girlish powers to the fire of humankind:

“For I will tend,

As my fathers have tended,

And my fathers’ fathers,

Since time began,

The fire that is called,

The love of man for man,

The love of man for God.”

“An’ without those two fires this old world would be about as warm an’ cheerful as an ice-jammed hull, eh?” commented Captain Andy, intent upon the mature figure of the Guardian who, ruddily outlined in the flame-light, was placing upon the arm of the new Fire Maker the silver insignia of her rank, the Fire Maker’s bracelet.

“I think Jessica is the sort of girl who naturally tends that heart-fire without which the world would be out in the cold!” remarked Cousin Anne at this point, leaning forward from her seat upon a fallen tree-trunk. “One of her Camp Fire Sisters, Mŭnkwŏn—who is at the head of her high school class in composition—has blossomed forth into blank verse to celebrate the little incident of her dancing with the deaf-mute on the playground—and some other things which she has been trying to do for the child.”

“Yes, there’s Arline fluttering her poetic wing-feathers now!” smiled the artist.

“She does well to flutter ’em.” Captain Andy looked from under his heavy eyelids, massive like all else about him, at the girlish figure sitting nearest to the Council Fire, holding a paper near to the blaze which picked out the sportive rainbows of embroidery on her dress and in her pearly head-band. “Thunder! if she didn’t preen ’em at all, even if they’re only pin-feathers, she might lose the use of some valu’ble ones, like the poor old owl, there, that gave me a sore finger for trying to coax him to fly,” breezily.

“Hush! listen; she’s beginning,” adjured Olive, as a rainbowed voice, arching a little cloud of girlish embarrassment, fell upon the firelight:

“When the Moon of Thunder causeth

School to cease and fields to blossom,

Sendeth forth its quivering light-bolt,

Heats the earth with dazzling sun-ray,

Come the children to the Playground,

Come the merry-hearted children,

Group round swing and teeter-ladder,

Dance their strange and quaint folk-dances

Underneath the flowering shade-tree,

Frolic in the sparkling water,

Shallow pool of rainbowed water,

But there cometh one among them,

Maiden of eight summers only,

Heareth not a note of music,

Hath no voice for song or laughter,

Slow of foot and dull of eye she,

And the pitying children shun her.

Then the flower of the Camp Fire,

‘Pretty Flower,’ Morning-Glory,

With a foot as light as foam-clot

And a tender heart within her,

Takes that sad-eyed maiden gently

By the hand and gaily leads her,

Wins her to pick grapes in fancy,

Grapes of sunshine from the greensward,

Calls the Bluebird through her window

To sing its song within that dumb heart,

Fashions her a robe of linen,

Brings her moccasin of leather....”

(“’Twas I who bought the ‘moccasins,’—such a pretty little pair of shoes with buckles!” put in Olive sotto voce.)

“And where’er her Camp Fire Sisters

Pitch their tents by lake or river,

This the deed shall be remembered

Of Welatáwesit—Morning-Glory!”

wound up Arline triumphantly, much to the embarrassment of the subject of the poem who sat midway of the circle round the Council Fire, shielding her scorched cheeks from the flame-light.

“Good! I call that pretty good!” Captain Andy clapped heartily. “’Tain’t poetry, but it goes—like a vessel under a ‘jury rig,’” with a discounting wink.

“Pshaw! I could write rafts of that stuff,” came softly from Olive Deering. “I do try my hand at it sometimes, but Sybil laughs at me.”

“Yes, no sooner did she get here this evening than she fell to composing a poem about that old caged owl:

“An owl he longed for his greenwood tree,

Was pining to be free,

And never a goose in the farmyard wide

Hissed half so sore as he!

That’s how it went!” laughed airy Sybil.

“Come now! to my mind that goes better than the other,” chuckled the mariner, whose one idea of verse was a lyric or a limerick. “Poetry that has no rhyme to it is a lame makeshift, like a ‘jury rig’ replacing real spars. So your little sister laughs at your—um-m—poetic wing-feathers, does she?” looking directly at Olive. “Well, I wouldn’t stunt ’em for all that! Seems to me, now, that Council Fire is a pretty good incubator for the hatching out of new wing-feathers—or pin-feathers, eh?” chuckling again.

“Jolly Neptune! which wing are they waving now, the right or the left—or have they grown a third, a new-fangled one, all in a hurry?” he inquired of his invisible sea-god, after an interval, as strange, crooning syllables, weirdly repeated, fell upon his ear:

“Gā’ hyo nē’ he

Hé ga’ hyo nē he ya

Gā hyo nē’ hé

Hé ga hyo nē he ya

Hó dji ge hyá!”

The fringed and beaded maidens were on their feet now, circling, shuffling, Indian fashion, round the fire, the leader shaking a child’s hand-rattle aloft between the fingers of her right hand whose arm waved mystically toward the fire.

“I do believe she’s the one that dared me to sing the last verse of that old fagot-song about a woman, a dog and an old walnut-tree bein’ improved by whacking!” rumbled the captain, rubbing his hands. “Gee whiz! it’s a good entertainment. And it ought to be, to keep a man o’ my age sitting for an hour an’ a half on a cold stone!” ruefully feeling his boulder-bench.

“Yes, she’s the very one: her Camp Fire name is Wĕltaak, meaning music, and she has the G clef, together with a bar of music, woven as a symbol into her head-band,” said Sybil.

“She’s ‘some singer,’ too. I wonder if the ghosts on old Wigwam Hill are waking up to listen to this?”

Captain Andy glanced behind him, swaying with a half-superstitious shudder as the sweet, eerie notes of the dance-music fell upon his ear:

Old Wigwam Hill did, indeed, seem, in an interlude of the dance, to ruffle every leaf upon its sides as if, Rip-Van-Winkle-like, it had fallen asleep a couple of hundred years ago, was now rubbing its eyes and waking up to be saluted by sounds much like those which had set it dozing, when braves in bonnets of feathers danced with their painted squaws upon the lake shore.

“That’s an Indian dance, the Leaf Dance, in honor of the leaves—idiwissi, or ‘tree hair’—thanking them for their grateful shade,” explained Olive, watching the winding, gesturing figures of the Camp Fire Girls, whose ceremonial dresses the Council Fire lit up with wonderfully dramatic effect as they circled round and round it.

“Morning-Glory taught it to them; she learned it from a friend who picked it up in the camps of the Creek Indians,” supplemented the artist.

“But those queer little Indian words that they’re chanting have no meaning; they’re just nonsense syllables such as ‘Tara-ra boom de ay!’ or something like that,” laughed Sybil.

“Goodness! how I wish a little niece o’ mine, named Kitty Sill, who spends half her time mooning under orchard leaves, could watch that dance,” suddenly interjected the captain in tones that seemed to come up from his boots they were so deep and yearning. “She’s a queer little thing, fourteen last month an’ as shy—just as shy as a sickle-bill curlew!” searching for a simile.

“What makes her like that?” asked Olive; she was beginning to feel an unaccountable interest in everything connected with Captain Andy; his nautical humor set against the harrowing experiences of his life, combined with his rescue of her Cousin Marvin, had, by this time, set every pulse of hero-worship in her throbbing.

“Search me! I don’t know what makes Kitty like that,” came the answer in a sort of deep, protesting shout. “Maybe, now, the well-bred pig that she confides in more’n she does in her family knows, but if she does, confound it! she ain’t telling.”

“A pet pig-g! Ugh!” Sybil shuddered.

“Her mother thinks that little Kitty has taken a troublesome notion o’ some sort into her head that makes her so faint-hearted an’ foolish. Who knows but that if she were to join these new-fangled—or old-fangled—Camp Fire Girls an’ grow a few extry wing-feathers—high-colored ones, so to speak, such as learning how to start a fire without matches, an’ dance like a leaf on a tree—she’d forget all about it?” speculatively.

“Oh! I’m sure she would,” came from Olive with a fervor that surprised herself. “That old owl is a horrible example against clipping one’s wings, not using any little powers one has!” laughingly. “You listen to that, Sybil, and don’t laugh at my flights any more!”

Yet that night when in the sanctum of her own room Olive seated herself upon a corner of her bed—a rare breach of orderliness for her—and thence, as from a white throne, reviewed the evening’s proceedings which she marshaled before her, her thoughts did not long dwell upon poetic flights or matchless fires—or even upon the dramatic Leaf Dance.

They rested chiefly upon the initiation of the new Fire Maker, of a girl standing before the Council Fire, promising to tend, as her fathers had tended, those twin-fires which are the very heart-flame of humanity, without which, as Captain Andy said, the world would be cold as an ice-jammed hull.

Feeling is life. And there is nothing like a romantic ritual for stirring emotion. Olive felt it tingle all over her.

Her chin quivered as she looked up at the picture of a beautiful woman upon the delicately tinted wall of the pretty bedroom—that of the mother who had died when she was twelve.

The dark Southern eyes, which her own reflected, called to her.

She rose and stood before the picture.

“Mother!” she whispered, palpitating. “Mother!” above a breath. “I am scarce sixteen and a half now: I—might—begin to take your place more with Father—and with Sybil, too!”

When, in that holy of holies, a girl’s prayer-nook, Olive knelt a little later, the growing wing-feather for which she prayed was not a rhyming-power—nor power to match any one of the feats which she had to-night seen performed—but that she might soar to be like her mother.

CHAPTER V

A MINIATURE

“Jessica! Ho! Jessica-a. Olive is looking for you-u, Jessica. She’s gone into the library now.” Sybil Deering’s high, laughing voice, rilling and trilling on terminal vowels like the spring note of a meadow-lark, rang up the broad staircase of the Deering mansion.

“Oh! is she? I’m coming. I’ll be down in just a minute,” sang back the girlish tones which had called the Bluebird on the playground; in the smallest of the guest-rooms upstairs—a pretty nest, like Olive’s bedroom—Jessica Holley laid down a paint-brush, closed a box of water-colors which looked as if it had seen service in other hands than hers, thrust aside a smeared palette, daubed with burnt sienna, yellow and black, on which she had been experimenting with colors in order to get something like the right shade for a Camp Fire Girl’s ceremonial dress of khaki and, forthwith, proceeded to the library.

“Jessica, when are we going to take those things to the little deaf-and-dumb girl, the frock you made for her—which you exhibited at the Council Fire last night—and the shoes I bought? I’m just longing to see her in them,” said Olive directly she showed her nose within the realm of books.

“Immediately after luncheon; I’ve got a plan. I’m going to call up Arline and Sally—Betty Ayres wants to come with us, too—and tell them about it; we’ll time our start so’s to arrive on the playground a little after two o’clock, before the playground teachers get back from dinner, and if little ’Becca is there (did I tell you I had found out that her name is Rebecca?) we’ll just inveigle her into a shed and dress her up in the new finery, throw away the old shoes, perhaps, the grey frock, too—then, when the teachers turn up and the dancing begins, the other children won’t know her.”

“She won’t know herself. Did you find out whether she was born deaf and dumb?”

“No. She became stone-deaf at four years old after scarlet fever; then she gradually lost the power of speech, too, so her mother told one of the playground teachers. Her parents are Russian Jews who have only been a couple of years in this country. The teacher thinks that some of the croaking sounds she makes are fragments of words in her own tongue that she remembers. And once when some boys were shouting ‘Swing! Swing!’ upon the playground, ’Becca said ‘Swing!’ quite clearly, as if she caught some vibration of the sound.”

“I should think she could be taught to speak again by and by.” Olive looked hopeful. “Come out of your dreamland, Jessica,” she added laughingly; “stick to Rebecca and the playground plan! Whenever you’re in the library, morning, noon or night, you’re staring at that stained-glass window. I believe you’ve fallen in love with the young scribe who’s bending over a parchment book in it.”

“No, but I’m in love with his brown robe.” Jessica’s eyes went up to the rich gold-brown of the young monk’s habit. “I’ve just been trying to get something like that tint on my palette up-stairs, so as to paint the ceremonial dress on the figure of a Camp Fire Girl. Besides”—the blue-grey eyes of Morning-Glory rested reverently upon the soft radiance of the painted window through which the daylight flickered, glorified—“besides, as you know, Olive, my father was a stained-glass artist; he designed beautiful windows like that, worked out his designs in water-colors on paper and afterward—when the great sheet of glass had been properly prepared—painted the window itself—oil-painting, using metallic paints.”

“Is that how it’s done?” queried Olive. “I love this library window. And I like to study the stained-glass windows in church, too—sometimes I forget to say my prayers when I’m looking at them!” in merry penitence.

“I, too! My father used to paint the saints’ and cherubs’ heads so beautifully, painting both sides of the glass, the figure in some dull tint, brown or grey, on the right side, to face the people and the brilliant, the illuminating colors, as he called them, upon the back, the other side of the sheet of glass, so’s to shine through,” looking up at the translucent rays streaming through the brown monkish figure.

“Did you use to watch him while he was painting?”

“Occasionally I did, perched on a chair beside his tall, oblong easel that had the glass upon it.... He let me when he could, because he had it all planned out that I—too——”

The last words were very thin and low and broke off, their snapped thread being lost in the rich tangle of colors, ruby and gold, with other glories wonderfully interwoven, which bathed that corner of the room where the pictured medieval scribe sat poring over his written book.

Olive moved a little uneasily. She felt uncomfortable when Jessica spoke of her father, because, having lost a mother herself, she understood what bereavement meant, but to lose both parents, as the other girl had done, to have absolutely no nearer living relative than Cousin Anne, related to Jessica through her mother’s mother as she was to Olive through her father’s father; that was terrible, indeed!

Therefore out of her fidgetings Olive evolved a remark which led away from the glorious window and stained glass in general.

“Do you know, I think that it was just too awfully good of you to spend all day yesterday sewing upon that white frock for little ’Becca, the dumb child,” she said with girlish gush.

“Oh! that was nothing; I enjoyed doing it. Cousin Anne deserves more than half the praise; ’twas she who bought the material; I—I didn’t have the money!”

Jessica spoke rather absent-mindedly, her gaze still wavering between the ruby window-nook and Olive.

“What!” breathed the latter. “Oh, you poor dear! Jessica, Father never thought of it, I’m sure, but I’m going to drop a hint to him, this very day, that he might make you a monthly allowance for pocket-money, now that you’ve come to live with us for a year or two, just as he does with Sybil and me. Oh-h! you wouldn’t like it, eh?” in crestfallen echo.

“Olive!” The Morning-Glory’s arms fell limply to her sides. Her skin, naturally clear and colorless as a pure white specimen of her name-flower, looked wan in the gold and crimson shafts of light streaming from the stained window. “Oh-h! Olive, I wouldn’t have you do that, hint anything—not for the world. Oh, don’t you think I feel it enough—that I——”

The gusty words splashed through the first drops of a tear-fall so sudden that it seemed as if the rainbowed colors had begun to drip.

A wet and crumpled-up Morning-Glory, all draggled upon its vine of girlish courage, dropped into a library chair, turning a streaming face to hide against the leather chair-back.

“Oh, honey, I never—meant——” came brokenly from Olive.

“I know—I know you never meant to be anything but lovely to me!” sobbed the figure in the chair. “But, oh”—wildly weeping—“if my father or my mother could have lived! I know that your father, Olive—that Mr. Deering—invited me to come here for this last year or so that I’ll be in high school, when he had never even seen me, simply because Cousin Anne was so worried about my having nowhere—nowhere to go after Auntie (of course, she wasn’t really my auntie, only a friend of Mother’s who took me in after Mother died) sailed for China with her husband who’s a missionary. They didn’t think that China, the part that she’s going to, would be good for me!” pathetically.

“I’m sure it wouldn’t—pig-tails and Boxers and stuff!” wailed Olive helplessly, her face wet too, as if the window’s melting shafts of color dripped upon it. “There, Jessica! There, Jess darling; you know we all just love to have you with us!” perching upon the arm of the library chair, laying her beautiful dark head with the ringlet curl against the stricken brown one.

The curl tickled Jessica’s neck; impulsively she caught and kissed it, fondled it like a flower against her wet cheek.

“Yes, ev-er-ybody has been so good to me,” she gasped, reviving enough for heartfelt emphasis. “You’ve shared things with me, Sybil and you; and Cousin Anne insists on giving me a little pocket-money from time to time, just as she gives me clothes—she’s so dear!—and just as she’s insisting on paying my camp-board in that seashore camp, so that I may have the fun of going with the other girls to those beautiful Sugarloaf sand-dunes.”

Sugarloaf! Never did sugar-lump drop into a tart cup with more ameliorating sweetness than dropped that word, now, into the troubled waters pulsing to and fro between the girls’ hearts, although it breathed of brine, not sugar.

Olive started, sat up straight upon the chair-arm. She had thought of more words to conjure with, to win back joy or, at any rate, distract from sorrow.

“Jessica!” she said solemnly, “I’ve got a teeter-ladder in my brain. Ever since we visited the playground that day I’ve had a teeter-ladder in my head.”

Jessica choked upon the next sob which mixed itself up with her startled breath. Her nose ceased burrowing in the leather nest of a chair-button. She sat up and turned her face round.

“Oh! you needn’t stare at me; I’m not going out of my mind; I haven’t got a giant stride there, too,” laughingly. “But the ladder keeps seesawing all the time; it’s like a game of ‘Jenkins: Hands up! Hands down!’ One minute the ladder teeters down toward the Sugarloaf, and the hotel, that Father proposed our going to this summer, Sybil and I, is away up in the air, with the teacher of modern dancing from whom we’re to take lessons, crowing on top: Cock-a-doodle-doo! Tooraloo! Like that!

“Next minute down with the hotel—up with the Sugarloaf and the Camp Fire Girls dancing the Leaf Dance among the white dunes!”

Olive had stars in the dreamy black of her eyes, now; they were gazing far away.

“What on earth do you mean: not that you’re thinking of becoming a Camp Fire Girl—joining our Morning-Glory Camp Fire? Oh, you know how I’ve wanted you to do that, Olive!” A little lightning-spurt of excitement flashed through Jessica’s tears. “Oh, Sugarloaf and sugarloons!” she gasped, shaky laughter beginning to patter like crystal hail through the rain-drops, the end of the shower. “Why, ’twould just be sugar through and through that camping trip if Sybil and you should come with us.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” Olive shook her head sagely. “If I were to try my hand at the camp cooking, I’m afraid the effects would be bitter, not sweet,” with a grimace. “You know Father says that my cookery ought to be tried first on the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals before any member of the animal kingdom should be allowed to partake of it!” Here, even the satiny ringlet curling down Olive’s white neck on to the shoulder of her white dress laughed—she clung to that black curl since she put her hair up, for good, six months before.

“I suppose that if Mother had lived I’d have learned to do a great many things that I don’t know much about now,” she went on softly. “Cook never wanted us in the kitchen; so we stayed out of it. Cousin Anne says that I’m not a bit ‘domestic.’ But sometimes”—the dark eyes shone wistfully—“something just swells up so big in me that I feel as if I shall simply burst if I don’t get it out of my system!” becoming, in turn, tragically confidential. “I’ve tried working it off in the rhymes that Sybil laughs at; I persuaded Father to let me take painting lessons outside of school-hours, but I don’t believe I’ll ever paint anything that a cow would care to look at,” laughing ruefully, “whatever you may do! Cook (you know she cooked for Father and Mother before I was born and she’s Irish) saw one of my pictures and I heard her say to herself: ‘Tear an’ ages! looks as if that old guinea-hen had got some paint on her claws and scratched on the paper.’ Truth and honor! that’s what she did say!”

Jessica was now laughing spasmodically, the bright drops upon her eyelashes winking at the other girl’s gropings after self-expression.

“All I can do, it seems to me, is, as I heard Captain Andy singing to himself last night during part of the Council Fire program, to:

“‘Laugh a little and sing a little,

And work a little and play a little,

And fiddle a little and foot it a little,

As bravely as I can!’”

Olive laughingly footed it round the library, burlesquing her own limitations. “And I don’t know whether I could even ‘foot it’ very far if it came to a tramp,” she said over her shoulder. “Goodness! since Sybil and I have used the automobile so much, as Father drives himself in the smaller car, I don’t even ‘sing the song of feet’ except when I play tennis or go round the golf course with Dad.... Perhaps, if I joined the Camp Fire Girls, I might grow a few new wing-feathers, as Captain Andy wants his little niece to do—the niece that moons in an orchard and goes round with a pet pig and a duck for followers—she must be awfully ‘witchetty,’ eh?”

“I should think so!” came from a now smiling Morning-Glory in the leather chair.

“Gracious! there’s the luncheon bell and we must get through with the meal as quickly as we can if we’re to carry out your plan, Jess, of getting to the playground and dressing up little ’Becca before the teachers get back and the folk-dancing begins.”

“Oh! I must run and bathe my face.” Jessica made for the library-door in a flurry. “First—first, I want to hug you, Olive. And you won’t think, will you, that I’m not just too awfully grateful to you all for making me so—so happy here?

“It was meddling with Papa’s old paint-box this morning that broke me all up,” added the seventeen-year-old girl to herself, dashing up the broad staircase which she had descended a little while ago, to her own room. “That, and thinking of how I used sometimes to sit by him when he was painting a saint’s head on glass for some beautiful window!” (A vigorous splash with a cold sponge.) “Mother said he ran to Saints’ Heads!” (Splash and choke!) “And he used to say that I inherited his talent and love of color and that girls were taking up stained-glass work—window-painting—now, making a success of it, too. I only wish I could!” (Splash, splash, splash, and a girl forcing a dripping sponge into her mouth, to drown a returning sob, because she felt that it would not be “game” to depress with tears or the semblance of them the midday meal of those who had generously given her a home!) “And, whatever comes, I’ve got to be as brave as my great-gran’daddy!” she gasped the next minute, through her set teeth, glancing at a small table, on which, beside the disturbing paint-box, lay an old-fashioned, oval leather case, with a tarnished gold stripe round its edge.

Towel in hand, Jessica impulsively sprang toward the table, touched a spring and disclosed a small miniature, older still than the case, painted on ivory, set in gold, showing a face which, if the artist of ninety-odd years ago painted truly, was very like the Morning-Glory one now hanging over it: the same crest of light brown hair over the forehead, the same naturally laughing grey-blue eyes. “My mother’s grandfather, Captain Josiah Dee, you were a very handsome young man when that miniature was painted, let me tell you!” she gurgled, biting upon a corner of the damask towel in a fighting attempt to regain composure by forcing her thoughts to dwell lightly for a minute upon the manly shoulders in the blue coat with brass buttons and the high stock-collar under a dimpled chin—her own had a dimple like it! “You have such a living smile; you always seem to be alive and laughing at me when I feel blue! Well! You saved lots of lives when you commanded a big ship, but were drowned, yourself, at last. I must be as brave as you were! And, great-gran’daddy dear, let me tell you, too, I’m not altogether alone, because I’ve got Cousin Anne and I’m a Camp Fire Girl—and Olive’s a dear; wouldn’t she be a dream—just a Camp Fire Girl’s dream—in a ceremonial dress and beaded head-band, with her black hair in two long plaits and her dark eyes?”

The oval case shut with a click.

Olive’s hair and eyes looked as dreamily beautiful in a simple white dress as they would have done in gold-brown khaki when, three-quarters of an hour later, she wended her way, together with four other girls, toward that poor and crowded quarter of the city of Clevedon whose tall factory chimneys enshrined the public playground—largely a garden of foreign buds—whither their steps were bent.

Yet not one of her companions envied that hair its raven lustre or the grace of the small head it crowned, for if they were not all four beauties, at least they were true daughters of Columbia who, fair herself, seldom or never hatches an ugly duckling.

There was one point of envy among them, so far as Sally, Betty, and Arline were concerned—the glass buttons on Jessica’s blouse!

“Oh! those ‘Wohelo’ heart-shaped buttons!” Sally’s eyes and the July sky-beams together picked out the decorative W—she was sure it meant to be a W—within the blue heart of glass. “And that white blouse with the blue facings—it just brings out the color of your eyes, ‘Glory,’” calling Jessica, the oldest of the quintette, by the name which, growing out of an incident, had clung to her in childhood, to blossom later into her Camp Fire title.

“Cousin Anne gave it to me on my birthday and my lavender smock frock, too; I made the lavender Tam myself.” The Morning-Glory was utterly smiling again, forgetting even the brass buttons on the coat of her great-grandfather, the only relative besides Cousin Anne who seemed to her, in a way, to live and preside over her girlhood, forgetting them and him in that jolliest of youth’s experiences, to be abroad with a small band of admiring individuals of its own age and sex.

Looking back, mentally, she saw that seventeenth birthday, separated from her only by a hand-span of fourteen days, standing in the way and smiling at her, not yet hidden by any curve in the highroad of life nor blotted out by any startling event.

Looking forward, literally, she saw a different vision in ugly contrast to delicate smock and Wohelo blouse: a vision that at a distance suggested nothing so strongly as a bedizened magpie.

“Who’s that swinging on the garden gate?” burst forth Betty.

“Oh! it’s that girl with the funny surname—‘Tingle,’ isn’t it—who entered high school last January.” The pretty shell-pink tints of Arline’s complexion—her strong point—deepened with disfavor as she looked ahead at the restless gate, one of a scattered row decorating one side of a raw new street whose lately erected dwellings faced depressingly upon vacant lots, piles of sand and earth, a wheelbarrow or two, and the gaping bones of skeleton houses.

“Yes, and if ever there was a surname invented that rang true to life, it’s that one—so far as she’s concerned!” Sally, throwing up her eyes, rose to a dramatic outburst. “Penelope Tingle! Just think of it! And she gives you the ‘tingles’ all over when you come within a yard of her. The ‘Black and White Warbler’ some of the high school boys who are interested in bird-study call her, because her voice is so high an’ thin an’ wiry and her laugh like a hiss.”

“Her clothes would set me tingling worse than her voice; they talk to you before ever you get near her!” Olive’s nostrils quivered.

“Hush! we’re almost upon her—and the white gate,” came from Jessica.

“Hul-lo-a! Hullo! Sal-ly.” The voice which rang out from that swinging gate as the quintette of girls ranged abreast of it had at this moment more of the stinging quality of a blue jay’s when it wakes one at sunrise than of any species of warbler; the Tingle girl’s clothing must partly have inspired the boys’ nickname: black and white of the loudest upright stripes upon the swinging skirt, black and white in brindled circles on the too visible expanse of stockings, enlivened by a wisp of a rose-colored girdle and an old-rose felt hat with a tarnished quill.

These latter touches of color being a trifle faded had the dejected air of not being able to vie with the thick ruddiness of Penelope’s wrists which clung to the gate-bars and the florid hue of her plump cheeks.

“Hullo-o, Sally! Is—is it ‘nobody home’ this morning? Don’t you want to speak to me?” challenged the jay-like voice, as Penelope’s face hung out over the gate.

At this the golden firefly in Sally’s eyes wheeled doubtfully, now toward that raw, new white gate, now toward Olive: Olive, whose father was a very important personage, indeed, and her father’s employer at the Works; Olive, who had plainly inherited the flower of good breeding, nourished in the soil of wealth. And reading a contempt for Tingles and tingling voices in Olive’s face, little horse-loving Sally, who generally could be the best kind of a small sportswoman, figuratively gathered her garments (neat and trim as when she was mounted, from her simple whip-cord skirt to her Camp Fire Girl’s knockabout hat) about her and, like the priest and Levite of old, passed by on the other side, leaving Penelope to her wounding manners and with a bruise in her heart.

All of which means that she returned Penelope’s vociferous greeting with a stiff nod only suited to the inside of an ice-house!

The Tingle girl ceased swinging as if petrified and stared after her; then she burst into a high shriek of exasperated laughter and hailed a boy upon a vacant lot across the street.

“Hullo! Rolie,” she cried, “do you know that there’s a frost this morning; it froze hard here just now,” pointing her slangy sarcasm by a red forefinger leveled at Sally’s receding back.

“Ss-sh! you’re crazy,” expostulated the lad who wore a Boy Scout suit.

“If I’m ‘crazy,’ you’re hazy—hazy in the brain! He! He! He! Hi! Ha!” The retort and the shrill laughter followed the quintette of girls down the street.

“Isn’t she dreadful?” gasped fair little Betty who had named the Morning-Glory Camp Fire. “I should think she is one big tingle; henceforth I’ll feel her a mile off!”

“Perfectly horrid!” acquiesced Olive.

Sally’s under-lip suddenly quivered; one of her lightning changes of mood breezed up in her, almost wafting her back toward the gate; she felt the same twinge of penitence that occasionally nipped her for having once lightly denounced Olive and her sister Sybil as “all fluff and stuff,” chiefly because, hitherto, they had taken little notice of her, when, now, she was forced to admit that Olive’s inner fabric was anything but unduly “fluffy.”

“Perhaps it’s not Penelope’s fault that she’s like that,” she put forward slowly. “The Tingles haven’t been long in the city and they come to our church, so my mother went to call on Mrs. Tingle—she’s not the tingling sort at all; she’s a very nice, refined woman—but isn’t it strange she has the very same affliction, in a way, as that deaf-and-dumb child whom we’re going to see now?” glancing at a white parcel under Jessica’s arm. “She’s absolutely deaf, too, having lost her hearing after an illness, and is losing her speech, also, so that she has to write things down for callers. Mother said that she lacked the very sense that would enable her to correct Penelope’s manners. But the funny part of it is,” ran on Sally volubly, “that she said Pen—Penny, as she calls her—was her right hand about the house, working so hard—since her father lost money lately—and managing her young brothers so well.”

“Imagine it! There must be two Pennies, then, one of brass, the other of gold,” laughed Jessica.

“Yes, when Mother told all that to the Guardian of our Camp Fire, Miss Dewey, she said it was too bad that Penelope shouldn’t have her hard duties touched up and made interesting by winning honor-beads for them and that she was going to invite her to join our Morning-Glory Camp Fire—there’s no Camp Fire circle at the church that Pen and I attend. Miss Dewey thinks that it would tone her down a lot to wear a ceremonial dress and sing stately songs, with mystic motions.”

“Goodness! you might as well try to make a parrot pray,” interjected Betty.

“I don’t know—now!” This from the Rainbow, Arline. “Don’t you remember, Sally, how you and I felt about a year ago when we were just fifteen”—with a great air of maturity—“we felt awkward and as if nobody loved us,” plaintively; “we didn’t know whether to put our hair up or not; we felt too old to run and play with the boys as we used to do——”

“You won’t feel that way when you’re eighteen; I’ll soon be young enough for it again,” put in Morning-Glory sagely.

“And yet we weren’t old enough to do as our older sisters and friends did, receive formal calls from boys and have them invite us very prettily to go to places!” Thus the Rainbow again took up the chant of a fifteen-year-old girl’s problems, ending with this Jubilate: “’Twas then that ‘Camp Fire’ came in so well, wasn’t it? Since it took hold of us, six months ago, we’ve been just so busy doing new things, dressing up and winning honors, that we haven’t had time to think of ourselves at all. Maybe Penelope is at the awkward age, too, without any home help such as we had.”

“Maybe so! Let’s drop the tingling penny now, anyway!” suggested Betty with a chuckle. “Arline says she feels too old to race with boys as she used to do, but whether we run with them or not, we’ll run into them, I expect, when we go camping this summer, for Captain Andy says that there’s a Boy Scout Camp on some other sand-dunes, just across the river from the Sugarloaf, with harbor seals and breakers an’ quicksands and all sorts of queer obstacles between them and us!”

“Too bad! Boys come in handy, sometimes, when you fish off the rocks with a pole and don’t want to handle the bait,” suggested Sally reflectively.

“I hear that there will be two Boy Scout troops in that camp,” discoursed Betty again, “one from the neighborhood of this city and one from that wild tidal river an’ bay region where we’re going; the Scoutmasters are cousins. Well! here we are at the playground now.”

“Tired, Olive?” Jessica linked her arm tenderly through Olive Deering’s; that library scene had drawn them very close together.

“No-o,” answered Olive absent-mindedly, hardly hearing her own monosyllable because of the swish of that teeter-ladder of indecision in her brain, now seesawing at a gallop: “If that tingling Penelope should join the Morning-Glory Camp Fire and go with these other girls to the camp on the Sugarloaf dunes, I sha’n’t; Sybil and I will go to that big, beautiful hotel and simply amuse ourselves!” So thought said. And so she left it, with the hotel swinging on high, a dizzy castle in the air.

“Oh! here’s that funny little Jacob, who’s ‘all de olds in de world,’ running to meet us,” cried Morning-Glory meanwhile. “I hope we’ll find poor little silent ’Becca as easily; ’twill be such fun to dress her up and ‘make her over’ before the teachers get back to the playground, after dinner, and the afternoon dancing begins!” hugging her tissue-paper parcel, containing the white frock in which every stitch had been set by her own patient fingers, together with the buckled shoes, Olive’s gift.

Jacob of the raven locks seemed almost as much excited as when the horse bolted with the playground piano: his small brown fingers clutched the hem of his hanging blouse.

“Ha! we haf de big fire las’ night to our house,” he proclaimed. “My babee”—pointing to the insect-like infant whom Sally had saved from being trampled by stopping the playground horse—“my babee she get a match an’ de pape’ an’ she wipe dem on de wall an’ de fire come. An’ w’en de big mans w’at make de fire out shay: ‘Who make dis fire?’ my babee she shay: ‘Me! Me! Me!’”

“What a depraved little ‘firebug’—isn’t that the police word? Sorry I saved her!” exclaimed Sally.

Jessica did not linger for Jacob’s dramatic recital; she was walking on over the broad public playground, past the Silver Twins and the flowering catalpa tree on the edge of whose island of shade she had called the Bluebird through a dumb child’s window, on toward the great, gleaming bathing-pool—that artificial sheet of shallow water—in an eager search for little ’Becca.

By her side ran a self-constituted escort, a strange, foreign child whom she had not seen before, catching with elfin fingers at the silver bracelet, the Fire Maker’s bracelet, last night received, on Jessica’s wrist.

“Ach! you haf de prit-ty br-racelet,” murmured the little foreigner’s guttural accents. “I haf de br-racelet-te, too, to my home. I haf de gol’ necklace to my home. I haf de pink silk stocking; I haf de blue silk stocking”—thrusting forward, first, one thin leg, then the other, in coarse and faded cotton. “I haf de lots of ice-cr-ream to my home!”

“Poor little thing; she probably hasn’t got a single one of them!” The Morning-Glory’s eyes were misty as she looked down upon the small braggart.

“Where are you going?” shrieked Jacob after her.

“To the moon!” she answered absently, looking steadily ahead, searching the feathery edges of the wide bathing-pool in which some barelegged children were paddling for little ’Becca in the out-at-toe shoes and coarse grey frock, in order to transform her into something like a stout fairy, before the folk-dancing should begin.

“To de—moon? Take me!” screamed Jacob, all agog for any excursion in such good company.

Was it from the moon—the now invisible Thunder Moon of July—or from the edge of some far planet of gloom that the sudden cry came, a cry with a note of menace in it, of sobbing horror, of fear, wiping out Jacob’s childish plea from the face of the sunshine?

A cry in the guttural accents, the broken English that attacked the girls’ ears everywhere on this playground!

A cry that mocked the fragrance of the pyramidal catalpa blossoms and blanched the rainbowed fountain at the heart of the bathing-pool until it frowned like a specter!

“’Becca!” gasped Jessica, flattening her soft parcel against her heaving breast. “’Becca!” She knew not why she said it.

CHAPTER VI

THE GREEN CROSS

The next minute she knew.

The splashing cries which came from the feathered edges of the bathing-pool rushed toward her like a great water-wave tipped with foreign foam, about which there was nothing articulate until, presently, the spray of one clear shriek was tossed up: “’Becca! Rebecca!”

The Morning-Glory’s face was a very white flower now, all crumpled by fear, as was the flattened parcel she hugged, the parcel that was to have worked a metamorphosis.

“’Becca she—she go down, stay down, under de water. She haf eat de green apple—she sick—she down under de water—she not come up—eugh!” So the spray-like shriek spread itself out into a cloud of words as a little French girl of six or seven in a bathing-suit came flying, wild-eyed, toward the one tall figure she saw, the girl with shiny blue glass buttons on her blouse, who frantically hugged a small parcel.

“Where? Where? Show me where!” The figure dropped the parcel with a scream and seized the hand of the newsbearer. “Show me where!”

Down into the feathery ripples—the tiny ripples that broke so gently upon their earthy rim as if protesting that their shallow innocence couldn’t do any harm—they went together, barelegged child and skirted girl who didn’t even wait to toss off a shoe.

“’Becca she canno’ speak—no’ cry, like me—jus’ ketch her ‘tummy’ an’ fall—no’ come up!” The raving child vivaciously illustrated her meaning by pounding with a wet left fist upon her own little rounded stomach, rather full of unripe apples, too.

“Where? Where?” was all the girl could say. “Drowning! She must be drowning in two or three feet of water—lying on the bottom of the bathing-pool!” raged her thought, storming like a thunderclap in her ears.

The sheet-like pool was wide and wan, covering half an acre, no depth of color anywhere, except where the brilliant afternoon sun created an island sunburst in the water around the fountain and where near the pool’s edge it showed topsy-turvy, moving pictures, pink and yellow, of children standing or promenading on their heads, as if in fear.

Jessica’s agonized promenade was short and splashing. Now the water rose above her knees as she dragged herself and her clothing through it! “Where? Where?” was still all her seemingly water-logged tongue could say.

“I’ll t’ink some dere—dere she’ll go down,—’Becca!” answered, at last, the pluckily wading, little French child, who clung to her right hand, pointing to a rainbow-shaft from the fountain leveled downward, too, like an exploring finger.

And there the rainbow and Jessica found her—at the burnished point to which she in her dumb play had waded forth through two feet and a half of water to catch that rainbow—lying all dressed in the old grey frock and broken footwear beneath the island sunburst of the fountain.

Here the girl, looking down, saw a dark spot, a hair-fringed mound upon the pool’s bottom, barely covered by a glassy inch or two of ripples—head submerged!

With a choking cry she stooped and dragged it up, lifted it. She was strong and athletic for her seventeen years, but her whole girlish framework rocked and shuddered, almost collapsed, as she did so, bowed by an unexpected gust of weight.

The dumb child was eight years old, stout and chunky; now, unconscious, clogged by the leaden weight of water in her little clothing, swamped by green fruit, she would have made a taxing burden for a man.

“Father—Father in Heaven, give me strength—help me—strength to carry her out of the pool! Strength, Father—strength!”

Half-aloud, irrepressibly, the cry that ever comes first in dire need rocked between the young girl’s parted, gasping lips—she rocking with it, to the roots, like a sapling in flood.

The childish mound of weight and water sank again until it touched the glassy ripples, seeming as if it dragged her very flesh with it, while the French child, submerged to her wallowing armpits, moaned beside her.

Then the round, strained arm that flashed with the silver of the Fire Maker’s bracelet, aided by its fellow, managed, somehow, to gather up that leaden weight again, to hold it above the thin sheet of water, to start with it, staggering toward the earthen bank.

“Is she drowned—dead? How long did she lie there? How far can I carry her?” The questions spun like a water-worked wheel in Jessica’s brain, grinding out each staggering step. “Oh! isn’t it horrible? And we were going to dress her up! The frock I made her! Green apples! Cramp!... Oh, I’m letting her down! It’s too much. I—c-can’t!”

The girl’s dizzy gaze swam before her to the bank. She saw the catalpa tree—a hundred miles off! She saw strange, steely shapes of playground apparatus on another continent, as it were. Dimly she beheld the forms of other girls, her companions, who had come with her, wading through the light, crisp feathers of water to her help.

Then she saw something else. She heard a shout. Down the playground slope to the innocent looking pool’s edge, like an arrow launched from nowhere, tore a brown figure, coming at the rate of a hundred yards to a dozen seconds.

It was a knightly figure, tall, slimly erect, with green and red stripes, together with many rich, quivering points of color flashing in an embroidered jumble upon its right sleeve, the highest color-point green that gleamed like an emerald eye against a blood-red background as the flying water hit it.

And where she wore the silver of rank upon her braceleted arm, tortured in a half-fainting effort to struggle onward with her dripping burden, it showed a kindred gleam of silver in the eagle drooping from a red, white, and blue ribbon on its left breast.

“Hang on, just a second! Hold up—I’ll take her!” It seemed to be the American Eagle, dangling from the tricolored ribbon, that screamed the encouragement.

Another second, and the arm that wore the Fire Maker’s bracelet, typical of the fire at the heart that waters could not quench, had yielded its unconscious burden—swamping cargo of green apples and all—to that stronger right arm with the dancing specks of color upon the sleeve.

“Do you know how long she’s been under water? One of the children just told me what was going on here!” panted the newcomer with the silver eagle on his breast as he laid poor little Rebecca, silent forever, as it seemed, face downward, upon the nearest patch of playground grass where the sunbeams mocked her wet, weed-like hair and the broken old shoes, as full of water, now, as she was herself.

“I don’t know how long she lay there—on the bottom of the pool.” Involuntarily Jessica pressed her left hand to her heart which was doing strange “stunts,” while with her right she helped the tired French child to the bank.

“And I don’t know whether there’s life in her still or not!” The lad in khaki had breathlessly flung his broad, olive-green hat upon the grass and was stretching Rebecca’s limp arms out on either side of her head, not a quiver of which gave token that the torch of her dumb existence was still alight in some covert corner of her dripping body. He looked up at the other four girls, Jessica’s companions, who, wet about the ankles, were hovering, pale-faced, near. “One or two of you had better run to the nearest pay-station and telephone for a doctor,” he gasped, “if there isn’t a doctor’s office near. We may not be able to bring her to! It may take the pulmotor—I could use that if we had it. Turn her face a little to one side, so that she can get the air!” This to his fellow-worker, Jessica, who obeyed, her breath hissing between her teeth in long, shivering, yearning gasps.

“Who’d ever have thought of any child drowning in that toy pool—two feet an’ a half of water at deepest?” groaned the lad as he knelt astride of the prostrate little figure, now looking haggard and horrified.

“Two feet and a half of water—and green apples!” Jessica corrected him.

His hands were quickly finding the spaces between the rigid little limbs. Alternately he pressed with all the weight of his strong young shoulders upon them, then relaxed, setting up a bellows-like motion to expel the playground pool—as much of it as ’Becca had swallowed—from her air-passages and draw in fresh air.

“Could you get at my watch in my vest pocket and time this?”

Jessica obeyed.

“Two of the girls have gone to find a doctor,” she said, glancing at the disappearing forms of Sally and Betty. “Keep away; we mustn’t get too near”—this to the other two—“we mustn’t take the air from her.”

“You know something about first aid then; are you timing this work? It ought to be about a dozen strokes to a minute.” The bestriding lad directed his question to the first rescuer—the girl-rescuer—by the motion of an eyelid, the while his strong hands, tanned to the color of his khaki uniform, rose and fell rhythmically upon the framework of ’Becca’s dumb little heart, he trying so hard to breathe for her through those brown hands, to force artificial respiration.

The silver swooping eagle above his heaving heart shook and palpitated with his efforts.

A redness grew under his eyes, as under Jessica’s, where horror and anxiety laid their congesting fingers.

But the many rich points of color upon his khaki sleeve, yellow, green, red, white, each of them a little embroidered design in silk, mingled their merits with the sunbeams which wove of them a rich arabesque that flashed and played beneath the most noticeable of the badges, the emerald eye against a blood-red background which shone, green as hope, when he took the little victim of the bathing-pool from Jessica’s arms.

No peering eye, indeed, this merit badge, but the green cross of the first aid, awarded for proficiency in succor, hopeful still upon its red ground, enclosed in a green circle.

Suddenly that verdant hope of which it spoke blossomed! It thrilled and rioted through Jessica.

“Oh! perhaps we sha’n’t need a doctor—or the pulmotor. I saw her eyelids quiver. She may not have been three minutes under water.” The timing watch in the girl’s hand shook. “Keep off the other children, Olive—Arline—don’t let them get near, to draw the oxygen from her!”

Yes, slowly the breath of life was wavering back into its dumb tabernacle: through ’Becca’s blue, swollen lips came a slow, uncertain shiver, drawn from the hands working upon her, a quivering gasp.

“Oh! can’t I rub her a little now, toward the heart—to start it up—I know just how; I have a Red Cross diploma for first aid—I’m a Camp Fire Girl!” The sobbing, gurgling exclamation burst from Jessica; on the heels of the sob came a little whistling, thrush-like note like the beginning of a song, a song of succor.

“Yes, I think you might—now—while I ‘piece in’ her breathing.”

“Here, Olive, you hold the watch; it isn’t so important to time the pressures any more; she’s coming round—coming round all right!”

With the timepiece upon her palm ticking little Rebecca’s life back, measuring the intervals between her reviving gasps, Olive stood and watched.

Golden lad! Dripping girl, a year his junior! Camp Fire Girl! Eagle Scout! Together they worked and rubbed. And life, kindly life, so reluctant to quit even a dumb tabernacle, answered their call, stealing upon slow wings of returning circulation through the silent child’s body.

Suddenly the timepiece trembled in the hand that held it. That of which Olive had spoken in the library as swelling up so big in her at times; the nameless tide of a young girl’s ideals, of her rapture at beauty, her adoration of the Father’s Presence she saw in it, her dim drawings toward service and hero-worship; that impulsive tide rose so high in her now that it had to find a temporary outlet in the tears of agitation and relief stealing down her cheeks.

Only a temporary one! Olive had groped girlishly to find a channel of self-expression for that tide; she had tried to let it ooze out of her in rhyming, to work it off in painting—or attempts thereat.

But here she was quivering from head to foot with the sudden discovery that in the living picture before her, the prostrate child and those two kneeling figures upon the playground grass, there was something nobler than pen or paint-brush could depict, the highest form of self-expression.

And her heart surging up within her vaguely named that picture, “Succor.”

Succor was in the healing warmth of the sunlight that, now again, made its brightness felt.

Succor seemed waving its wings among the branches of the near-by willow-tree that brooded over the scene—not one helpless wing, but two: the Will to help and the trained Ability to do it.

Three hours later two girls sat one on each side of a cot in the children’s ward of a city hospital. Things had happened in the meantime. A doctor had arrived in an automobile and after some gentle soundings and poundings of ’Becca’s anatomy to locate the undigested fruit that swamped her, had carried her off to the hospital, declaring that her after treatment was important.

The after treatment she was receiving now was in the shape of a big waxen queen doll from Olive, a creature that could mechanically call upon its royal parents by the titles of “Papa” and “Mamma,” as its little human owner couldn’t.

“It seemed too bad that she shouldn’t have some present, seeing that we couldn’t dress her up to-day—or for many days to come,” remarked Olive Deering, looking across at Jessica who was holding the dumb child’s stubby little fingers. “I wish we knew the name of the Boy Scout who helped you to save her!”

“’Twas I who helped him; he worked over her until he brought her to. He was an Eagle Scout, too, the highest rank among the Scouts.”

“Think of it!”

“All those little colored designs embroidered on his sleeve were his twenty-one merit badges.”

Silence for a few minutes while ’Becca’s right hand fondled the doll.

“Glory!” In a low and thrilling voice Olive broke the stillness of the ward where most of the children slept, calling the other girl by the pet name of her childhood. “Glory! the ladder has dipped once for all toward the Sugarloaf; no, I don’t mean that; I mean that the Sugarloaf and Camp Morning-Glory and camping out with the girls of the Morning-Glory Camp Fire are all on top for me—and for Sybil, too, if I can make her; the hotel is nowhere!”

“Do you really mean it, that you want to become a Camp Fire Girl at last?”

“I want to do something worth while!” Olive’s lip quivered; she spoke passionately. “I want to do something with—with spice in it! I felt that, to-day, when I saw you working to bring ’Becca round—you and that boy.... I want to dance the Leaf Dance and, maybe, to inflict my rhymes on other girls without their laughing at me,” emotion dwindling down to laughter.

“But perhaps your father will wish you to go to that hotel, Sybil and you, with Cousin Anne.”

“Father, no! He approves of the Camp Fire movement; I’ve heard him say so. He thinks with Captain Andy”—laughingly—“that it’s a pretty good incubator for the growth of new wing-feathers—unusual power to do things.”

“Or power to do unusual things, eh?”

“Either will answer! I’m sure Cousin Anne would be delighted to get off on her own hook this summer, without any of us girls. And ’twill be lots better for Sybil than going to an hotel and lording it over half-a-dozen boys, whose parents are staying there, and who wait on her all the time—fight over her, maybe, as two of them did, last year—because they think she’s fairy-like and pretty.” There was a look of her beautiful mother in Olive’s eyes now.

“As for me, I’ve quite made up my mind; I’m not going to lose my hoot through not using it, like that poor old straw-eyed owl,” wound up the Camp Fire recruit. “I don’t care”—rising to a dramatic outburst—“if there should be a dozen tingling Penelopes and half-a-dozen witchetty nieces of Captain Andy’s, each with a pig for a pupil, in the camp, I’ll—what is it you say—I’ll ‘cleave to my Camp Fire Sisters whenever, wherever I find them!’”

Half laughing, half crying, she stretched her hand across the cot. Jessica grasped it. The pledge of sisterhood was made and ratified upon the heart of a dumb child.

CHAPTER VII

MARY-JANE PEG

Mary-Jane Peg was munching a green apple. Green apples had never swamped her. To her they were the prize and the poetry of existence.

Other things were well enough in their way, such as a daily mess that had as many flavors in it as there were airs in a musical medley or scents in a pot-pourri. A succulent cabbage or young turnip weren’t bad. Indeed, so far as satisfying hunger went, all was grist that came to the mill of her astounding digestion, roots, leaves, land-turtle’s eggs found among potato rows, anything, everything went, from a lately hatched chicken killed by herself to an old shoe of her owner’s.

But the real greens of life, that which lent to it a bitter-sweet rapture, were the hard windfall apples of July, shaken by the orchard breeze from a tree whose fruit would not ripen until fall; she preferred them even to a red astrachan, with the early bloom of maturity upon its cheek.

“Ungh! Ung-gh!” muttered Mary-Jane, closing her white eyelashes until her little grey-green eye almost vanished into her head over which two quivering upright ears stood sentinel. “Ungh! Ungh!” That apple tasted uncommonly good. She nodded over it like a hungry child over his bread and milk when it exactly hits his taste. As its tart juices slid down her capacious throat she said a grunting grace to the universe and started upon a rooting search for another.

“Oh! Mary-Jane Peg, how—how everlastingly happy you are! You haven’t a thing to worry you!”

As the envious human voice fell upon Mary-Jane’s now slanting ears, coming from the edge of a shabby, swaying hammock slung between two orchard trees, the muncher of green apples raised her head and, happening at that moment to be in the vicinity of that hammock, rubbed her white-haired side against a pair of small muslin knees drooping over its edge. “Ungh! Ungh!” she vouchsafed in a snort of semi-intelligent sympathy. “Ungh! Un-ngh!” her conversation, except in some squealing emergency, being monotonously limited to this monosyllable.

“Oh, Mary-Jane! Oh, Mary-Jane Peg, I don’t want to die—to die before you do—I don’t want to die young!”

It was a frankly doomed cry now; had there been an executioner in waiting behind an orchard tree, had Mary-Jane Peg been the sheriff whose business it was to hurry a victim off to an untimely end, the voice could not have carried more pathetic conviction.

“Die! Lord ha’ mercy! who’s talking about dying?—not you, Kitty? You talking about ‘stepping out’ at the advanced age of fourteen!” came a blusterous voice, suddenly breezing-up among the apple and cherry trees.

The doomed one, the occupant of the hammock and owner of the muslin knees, dropped, startled, to her feet and whisked around like a shaken leaf, the orchard zephyr fluttering the hem of her green muslin frock, lengthened to suit her years, but falling shrunkenly short in that respect.

“You don’t want to die, eh?” challenged the breezy voice again in an orchard gust. “You don’t want to die before that pampered pig that’s hazaracking round here, surfeiting herself with windfall apples. Well! she’s sure to lie down an’ grunt her last, some time, if she don’t make tasty bacon first, but where’s the fun of sitting in a hammock, talking to her about it? That’s what I’d like to know!”

“She’ll never make bacon—although she may after I’m gone!” This last was a plaintive after-clap of thought; the wearer of the muslin dress of shrunken green looked up with melting defiance into the face which upon a far-away city playground had reminded a Camp Fire Girl of “sheltering flame.”

It flamed protectively now all over the massive features as its narrowed blue eyes from under their heavy, weather-beaten eyelids dropped a glance half of amusement, half of deep concern, that floated downward quite a distance like the petal of a flower to alight on the brown head of the little four-feet-seven figure in green.

Yes, it was scarcely half an inch taller, that figure, than the buoyant little form of Betty Ayres, whose Camp Fire name was Psuti, the Holly, chosen from a book of symbols because the holly is “gayest when other trees are bare.”

There was a sort of grimness rather than gaiety about this other small girlish figure palpitating under the orchard trees as if at its core there was a spike rather than an elastic spring, that steely spike being fairly well covered up by the rounded, childish form, whose curves were not quite as well-filled out as they ought to be, the curly brown hair and dimpling face—quite a shade paler than nature intended—and the mischievous brown eyes, more liquid than Sally’s, now amber pools of sunlight in which a tiny brown trout seemed perversely to leap, refusing to be caught.

Captain Andy, looking down upon the brown head, made up his mind that, now or never, he would catch that little perverse troutlet which had been dodging him and everybody else for some months and extract the spiky hook about which it played in Kitty’s being; in other words, that he would get at the grim core of secret fear, or whatever it might be, which, as he put it to himself, seemed to be eating the very heart out of the child.

“Come! let’s sit down an’ talk a while; I’m just full to the hatches with things I want to tell you, Kitty,” he said. “That hammock looks too skittish to bear my weight; let’s put for the seat under the cherry-tree there, the tree that you an’ I did some grafting on last spring,” indicating a bandaged trunk on which a surgical operation had been performed. “Neat piece of vegetable surgery it was, too, grafting a slip from a tree bearing fine ox-heart cherries on to one bearing mighty poor bleeding-hearts, eh?” muttered the captain as he caught the hand of his little grandniece, Kitty Sill. “Sounds some like a parable that!” under his breath. “Maybe there’s the same ticklish job ahead o’ me, now, to graft something on to this little bleeding heart,” glancing askance at Kitty’s face with its set lips in contrast to the fluctuating dimples. “But, first, to find out why it bleeds—and there I’ve got my work before me!... Let’s see, what d’ye call that crunching pig that you swap secrets with, here, secrets you won’t tell your mother?” he asked aloud.

“Mary-Jane Peg.” Kitty linked the two first names, emphasizing the last like a surname. “She won a prize at a fair; she’s a pedigreed pig.”

“Ungh! Ungh!” corroborated Mary-Jane, boastfully, rubbing herself against the captain’s legs as he seated himself with his grandniece.

“Avast there!” boomed Captain Andy. “I haven’t got any prizes, nor yarns to swap with you, either,” applying the toe of his boot to the pink-shot side of the pedigreed pig. “Don’t you—don’t you come hazaracking around me!”

Mary-Jane understood that raging word beginning with “h” as little as Kitty Sill did, and Kitty had never found it in a school dictionary yet, but, somehow, it always cowed her as it did the corkscrew-tailed pig; Mary-Jane made off and Kitty felt constrained to answer something when her great-uncle baldly put the question to her: “Now then, chicken, out with it; what did you mean by talking ’bout dying—dying young, too, as if you meant it?”

But the trout was not caught yet, nor the spiky hook extracted: Kitty opened her mouth, indeed, but this is what she coolly said, with a little, sly smile of mischief, kicking at a leg of the orchard bench with the heel of her swinging slipper:

“Well, I don’t know but what it would be better to die young than have the things that preacher said come true!” with nonchalant indifference.

“What did he say? Where did you hear him?”

“Two years ago at Ma’am Barrows’s house; he had a meeting Sunday afternoon; she said he was a revival preacher,”—the foot swinging vehemently—“but most o’ the folks let on that they considered him a ‘survival,’ or something like that.”

“What did he preach about?”

“Oh! I don’t take any stock in it now; I did then; he talked a whole lot about wrath an’ anger comin’ in pailfuls on the earth—that’s what I understood him to say—and ’bout folks calling on the rocks to fall on them an’ hide ’em, so’s the hot wrath couldn’t strike.”

“And what did you do, little Kitty?” Captain Andy was much interested, although he knew he had not got at the spiky secret yet.

“Me!” Kitty raised her level brown eyebrows; the dimples flashed. “Me! Why, I just came home, all tuckered out, and went down to the bottom of the orchard there and picked out that big, tall rock near the stream that has a bed of soft earth under it, an’ I thought that, if worst came to worst, I’d lie down and call on that rock to fall, for ’twas the earth that would, really, tumble on to me—an’ that wouldn’t hurt very much!”

If only the preacher could have seen Kitty’s outwitting expression, her swinging shoe!

Her granduncle stared at her a minute. Then the orchard rang with his gusty laugh.

“Great Kingdom! if you ain’t the sly-boots,” he blankly ejaculated. “If you haven’t an eye to business, picking out a rock that’s bedded in good soft earth so’s the earth might smother, but not mangle you, cheating the anger of the Almighty!”

But Captain Andy’s laughter was a brief puff. It died summarily. He rose and paced the orchard, thrusting Mary-Jane out of the way with his meditative foot, his figure looming massively against the background of fruit-trees.

Just as suddenly he sat down again and touched Kitty’s hand with a horny forefinger, his face at this moment a sheltering flame, indeed, fed by an inner fire.

“Kitty child! listen to me,” he said. “You ain’t so ready to tell me things, but I’m going to tell you something that I never told yet to a soul outside my wife—your gran’aunt, Kitty—who died more’n five years ago. Kitty, I’ve led a rough an’ racking life, take it all together, with maybe more storm than shine in it—I’ve gone winter-fishing for years to the far-away ocean fishing-grounds an’ that’s about the hardest life a man can lead—an’ he’s sure to ask at times what’s the meaning of it all. Kitty, I don’t set up to know the meaning. But two or three times in my life, once when I was a boy of your age, again when I was a tossed seaman standing to the wheel o’ my vessel at twilight, something has come to me like a flash an’ I’ve seemed to see surer than sunlight the Power behind everything an’—and it was the ‘Big Good Thing,’ as somebody calls it, Fatherhood an’ Truth an’ Understanding—and it isn’t dropping rocks on anybody. Pretty often we roll ’em on to ourselves, though, or get on the rocks, whichever way you like to put it, by taking false bearings, by our mistakes and the like. Now, little girl, don’t you go and make the big mistake of shutting up tighter’n a clam on any secret that’s troubling you—sharing it only with a pig!

“Bless your heart!” went on the moved captain after an interval during which tears had begun to steal down his grandniece’s cheeks. “Why, bless your heart, dearie, Death and I ain’t strangers. I’ve seen him and his shadow often enough to know him pretty well, an’ two-thirds of the time I’ve ousted him, too, when he was just setting up a claim.” Something superb stirred in the speaker’s tones at memory of the lives he had saved. “An’, maybe, if he was casting an eye on you at all—else why should you talk about ‘dying young’—I might be able to drive him off again.”

“It—’twas what Aunt Hannah said,” began Kitty weakly, no longer perverse. “She said it to Aunt Kate, sitting on this very seat under the cherry-tree, only last spring. I”—with a stifled sob—“was playing ’round with Mary-Jane and my little topknot duck; she thought I didn’t hear.”

“Great Neptune, I’d as lief be with Davy Jones as to live with that woman’s scarecrow tongue; she’s always ridden by a nightmare or a daymare or something.” Captain Andy sprang to his feet again with nautical restlessness, but he did not pace the orchard; he stood glaring down in a half-savage, half-tender way on Kitty.

“What did she say—what scare was she passing on to somebody then? Now, out with it—no bushwhacking—no beatin’ about the bush—you can’t get by me, you know!”

Kitty rubbed the back of a freckled little hand against her right eye and her right dimple blossomed forth; already she was feeling better, deriving a comfort which neither Mary-Jane nor the topknot duck nor any other member of her animal kingdom could impart; if this heroic granduncle of hers would rather depart this life with Davy Jones (the fabulous gentleman who summons sailors when death claims them at last) than to live with the tongue and the scares of Mrs. Hannah Beals, her aunt by marriage, then, perhaps, there wasn’t much in the spiky scare which the said Aunt Hannah had planted in her heart three months earlier.

“She said I was the livin’ image of my Aunt Lottie, father’s sister, who died when she was less than seventeen,” returned Kitty sedately. “Then Aunt Kate said she thought I looked a little peaked and thin—that I ought to go round more with girls of my own age.”

“So you ought! An’ that’s what I’m going to talk to you about presently,” put in the listener. “Well! an’ did Aunt Hannah drive the nightmare then?” laughingly.

“She said that she didn’t see as ’twould do much good for me to go round more with girls an’ boys, go to their parties an’ such-like, because I was so like my Aunt Lottie in looks and ways that it seemed borne in on her—that’s what she said—that I’d start a cough one o’ these fine days, not far off, and go as Aunt Lottie did; an’ that I was looking more like it every day, getting thinner”—sniff—Kitty wiped away a tear.

“Gosh! I wish I had the keelhauling of that woman; she’d go down under a vessel’s keel an’ she’d never come up again! Now, Kitty child, listen to me!” Captain Andy touched the child’s shoulder. “And take it from me as straight that you’re like your Aunt Lottie”—Kitty sniffed forlornly again—“and you’re not like her; she was a grain taller an’ a bit narrower in the chest than you are,” critically eyeing the small green figure in the shrunken muslin dress. “But, even with that handicap, she wouldn’t have faded away before she was seventeen—not a bit of it—if she’d got it fast in her head, like those Camp Fire Girls who are in one of my camps over on the Sugarloaf sand-dunes, that to ‘Hold on to Health’ comes pretty near being the strongest point in the law of life.

“She was ambitious about her studies; she had her heart set on going to college; it was, with her, come home from high school, peck at her dinner, then out into this orchard, not to swap gossip with a pig an’ a crested duck, but to sit in a hammock with a study-book, or if ’twas winter, she’d be half the afternoon poring over that book or another, in her own little bedroom, maybe, and come down, weazened an’ blue-nosed”—sadly—“to peck like a bird at her supper. I told her mother that Lottie was going ahead on that tack under more sail than she could carry. ‘Take her out o’ school,’ I said; ‘turn her loose in the woods. I’ll teach her to swim an’ dive until she’s as much at home in the water as a young harbor-seal and has the appetite of a shark!’ ... Land! there’s a fine bathing-beach half-a-mile from this orchard, but she couldn’t swim any farther than that pedigreed pig there, ’bout the only animal that can’t hold its own in the water. Can you? Can you swim farther than Mary-Jane Peg?” He frowned fiercely on Kitty.

“Ye-es—with water-wings,” she faltered, “I can swim ten yards.”

“‘Ten yards! Water-wings!’ Gumph! An’ you of my breed! That’s the way with about half the boys an’ girls on this cape, of sea-faring stock, too! Can’t swim a stroke until some summer visitor who spends nine-tenths o’ the year away from the ocean takes pity on ’em and teaches ’em—then they’ll hand his name down to their children as a water-god who had Neptune ‘skun a mile.’” Honk! Captain Andy’s angry laughter scaled the bandaged tree.

“But to come back to Lottie!” He reseated himself mournfully. “Well, p’raps her mother would have hearkened to my advice, but the child herself was set against it, an’ nobody said her nay. She graduated from high school at sixteen with tall honors—an’ a face the color of sea-foam. The following winter she overworked at college, studied about every minute when she wasn’t waiting on table to win her way through, broke down, came home with a cough that turned to a galloping consumption or something o’ the sort—they buried her in the spring.”

Kitty drew a long sob-like breath.

“Well now, you ha’n’t got the over-study fever, but you’ve anchored in this orchard too long, with a pig an’ a duck for crew, fishing up scares. It’s ‘Up anchor!’ now; you’re going to be ready for me to-morrow when I come for you in my power-boat—I’ve been talking to your mother about it already—an’ you’ll spend a couple o’ weeks, at any rate, in one or other of those camps on the white Sugarloaf Peninsula, either among the Camp Fire Girls or sleeping in my big tent if you prefer it. You’ll do things ’long with other girls (that Mary-Jane she’s a mighty intelligent pig, but a silent partner), you’ll slide down sand-hills, watch the seals, learn to swim, breast-stroke, crawl-stroke——”

“I won’t do it!” That little brown trout, a minnow of perversity, leaped again in the amber pool of Kitty’s eyes.

But the flying-dolphin-like gleam in Captain Andy’s swallowed it up at a gulp.

“Oh, tut, tut! Avast there! What I say goes, this trip!” The granduncle stamped his foot on the orchard buttercups just as he had many a time stamped it at Death upon a reeking deck which the seas were pounding like an earthquake, bidding that grim spectre begone; so he was bent on driving off his shadow now.

“They—they’d only laugh at me, those Camp Fire Girls; they wear short skirts or bloomers an’ middy blouses—I’ve seen a tribe of them before—an’ they dress up grandly at ceremonial meetings; I have only frocks like these; an’ they’d laugh at me for chumming with a pig an’ a duck an’ some hens.”

“I’ll warrant they wouldn’t. They’d give you a colored honor-bead, instead, to string on a leather thong round your neck—that is if you joined them—for knowing so much about a farmyard. As for the Camp Fire duds, I’ll see that you have ’em when you need ’em. Bless your heart, little Kitty, you won’t know yourself in green bloomers—any more’n a vessel seems to know herself when she gets her first suit o’ sails on and feels herself moving; all your fears’ll run to hide an’ laugh at you out o’ the knees of those bloomers. An’ you’ll laugh back at the fears once you join the Morning-Glory Camp Fire.”

“Is that what they call it?” A dawn-pink stole into Kitty’s cheeks.

“Sure. And they call the biggest o’ my camps that they roost in at night, twelve of ’em—not all the tribe could come—Camp Morning-Glory. Sounds slick, doesn’t it? Sounds as if they had hit the sun’s trail, doesn’t it? And, by gracious! they have. They’re a lighthearted tribe, always ‘on deck,’ always alert an’ doing something, swimming or rowing, dressing up in Indian toggery, singing, sliding, cooking—middling good cookery, too—I’ve tasted it—laundering their own blouses, even one or two rich girls among ’em, whose father could charter a laundry for the whole outfit an’ not miss it—‘glorifying work,’ they call it!”

“But—I don’t want to go.” Perversity’s last stand!

“Ah, but hearken a minute; do you know what I’m going to do when I get back to the Sugarloaf this afternoon? I’m going to prowl about the white sand-dunes until I find a nice hard chunk o’ birch-wood—there’s all sorts o’ driftage among those dunes, even to planks and great big logs washed down from Maine lumber camps an’ trundled ashore there—what d’you suppose I want that birch-chunk for?”

Kitty’s eyes widened.

“I’m going to make a top of it—a guessing-top, to spin on a flat stone—about a foot long that top’s to be, nine inches in circumference near the point, thirty at the head-end; ’twill be painted with symbols an’ it’s called by an Indian name ‘Kullibígan.’ It’s a magic top; it tells fortunes.”

“Non-sense!”

“You wait and see! ’Twas the Morning-Glory who thought of that game; she’s the prettiest little dancer and her name is Jessica, the sort of girl”—Captain Andy looked at some old-farm buildings beyond the orchard and drew his comparison, now, from the farm, not the foam—“the sort of girl who if she was run through a milk separator would come out all cream! From what I gather she’s pretty much alone in the world, too, has her own way to make; that don’t down her; she’s a Morning-Glory in spite of it—that’s her Camp Fire name.”

“An’ you’ll laugh back at the fears, once you join the Morning-Glory Camp Fire.”

“How did she learn about the Indian top?”

“Why! she learned of it from a professor who watched the Indian maidens play the Kullibígan spinner game in their own camps or on their reservations. They ask it a question about who’s going to marry first or that sort of thing, sitting round in a scattered ring, and the one toward whom the big painted top falls after it has spun itself dizzy, why, it has pitched on her for the answer to the question.”

“Something like playing ‘This year, next year, some time, never,’ with a holly leaf!”

“Hum-m! You see you might ask that Kullibígan guessing-top which of you were going to die young—you sitting round among the Camp Fire Girls—an’ it mightn’t topple your way at all.”

The Doomed One crowed triumphantly; Kullibígan had sent the orchard spectre that stalked her scampering, when Mary-Jane Peg had failed to root him out.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SUGARLOAF

“It’s a long way to shore now,

It’s a long way to go!”

So sang a laughing voice to the blossoming wave that was barely two inches below the singer’s lips!

So full of frolic was that voice chanting amid the foam, as the white-flowering waves broke about a girl-swimmer, that it would be hard for an onlooker to believe that those tidal waves, themselves, were not sentient sharers of her joy.

“It’s a long way to shore now,

It’s a long way to go,

It’s a long way to shore now,

To the dearest girls I know!

Good-by, Morning-Glory!

Farewell, Betty, fair!

It’s a long—long—way to yonder shore now,

But my heart’s right there!”

improvised Sally again, breasting a foam-hill through the watery transparency of which her bare arms laughed—no other word could so well express their exuberant motions—while her shoulders in the blue bathing-suit, with a flame-colored emblem on the breast, held a mimic boxing-match with the waves and her head in its red silk turban nodded saucily to her “heart”—or its reflection—upon “yonder shore,” some sixty yards away.

“She swims like a fish, that Sesooā one—that’s her Camp Fire name,” commented Captain Andy as he wended his way along a white beach, bordered on one side by the incoming surge of a tidal river, on the other by a snowy rampart of sand-hills plumed with vegetation.

His remark was directed to a shrinking little figure by his side in a “lengthened” muslin dress, brown-dotted, now, and a wide leghorn hat, too childish for her years, with broad streamers of laundered white ribbon hanging down her back.

“They’re strong on names, those Camp Fire Girls,” remarked the florid seaman, encouragingly making conversation, as the small footsteps beside him flagged. “I’m blessed if they didn’t go to work an’ hunt up one—an Indian name with a meaning—for me. It had only twenty-two letters to it.”

“What did it mean?” questioned Kitty, shyly, as her granduncle paused to watch the frolicking figure amid the foam-hills with the flaming symbol of crossed logs upon her breast—signifying that among the Camp Fire Girls she held the rank of Wood Gatherer—and other girlish figures bathing, diving or swimming near her.

“Mean! It was taken from the Ojibway language and it meant something like ‘Wind-in-the-trees-Man!’ They said my voice, or my roar, was like that. But I up an’ said that the name was too long—a comber—knocked me over like a big wave—d’ye understand? And that I objected to being called a ‘Big Wind,’ anyhow! Then they handed me out another just for fun, to keep up the atmosphere of the camp, as they said.”

“And what’s that one?” asked Kitty Sill, her brown eyes feasting themselves upon the water-pommeled figures of girls about her own age.

“Let’s see now! Can I remember it? Something like Men-o-ki-gá-bo; yes, I guess that’s it!”

“An’ what on earth does that mean?”

“‘Standing Tall!’ Ain’t that a bully name?” The mariner reared his massive bulk with a highly amused twinkle in his eye which surveyed the bathers, too. “Fancy me play-acting with Indian names at my age, when I’m cruising toward seventy! But it pleases them an’ don’t hurt me. The Morning-Glory chose the latter name, the girl I was speaking to you about yesterday. There she goes, diving nigh on fifteen feet off that high rock; she dives as well as dances like a foam-chicken! You stick to her like a limpet, little Kitty, if you’re shy-like among the strange girls, and I’ll warrant you’ll soon feel at home! But I guess you will with any of them; they’re a kind-hearted tribe.”

“Tell me some more of their dressing-up names!” Kitty shook her laundered ribbons. The little brown troutlet leaped in the sunlight in her blinking eyes, but it was an eager, not a perverse, minnow now; greedy for the bait of a new interest.

“Oh, tooraloo! Ask me an easy one. Well, I guess I can make a hit at the name of that tall girl that’s toeing the water there on the edge of the beach, making up her mind to go in; I wrote her Camp Fire name down because I considered it the best of the bunch.” Captain Andy took a penciled slip from his vest pocket. “U-l-i-d-a-h-á-s-u!” he spelled out slowly. “That’s a Penobscot Indian word cut down from one of fifteen letters and it means ‘Peace’; she wants to be a peacemaker, that girl, to do her bit now an’ when she grows up toward bringing peace everywhere. She has a dove in her head-band.”

“Who’s the girl with the red cheeks—an’——?”

“And the scream like a curlew! Can’t tell you her dressing-up name, Kitty. But her ordinary one is Penelope, with a kind of extraordinary surname: Tingle, an’ gee! she is one big tingle, was about as mild-mannered as a hurricane when she came here first, but she’s simmering down a little, by degrees. See that dark-haired girl who’s sitting on the steps of the biggest camp building—Camp Morning-Glory they call it?” The captain wheeled shoreward and looked toward a scattered trio of new camps, lightly built frame houses, in a curve of the white crescent beach.

“The one who has just come out of the water and taken the handkerchief off her head?” Kitty inquired.

“Yes, she’s one of the rich girls I spoke of. The first time I saw her she talked some frilly stuff about going to an hotel, she and her sister, an’ dancing all summer—something like that—now she foots it an’ sings with the rest of the girls and cooks an’ launders, and learns how to run a motor-boat and pull a good oar, too, an’ thinks it all a lark. Her father has millions, I guess, and wears a mite o’ pink ribbon on his coat that makes him look like a foreign di-plo-mat—I heard him speechify after a public dinner when I was in the city of Clevedon about three weeks ago.”

“What’s that for?” inquired Kitty’s laundered ribbons waving in the sea-breeze and taking the words from her lips.

“The scrap o’ ribbon! Why! to show that his ancestors did truly come over here on the Mayflower—as yours an’ mine did, Kitty, for the matter o’ that, on a bunchy old hooker called the Angel Gabriel. That girl’s name is Olive Deering; her mother was a beautiful Southerner, so I understand, an’ the girl herself is, as a seaman would say, A. I. in p’int of looks from her keel to her truck-head!” Captain Andy chuckled.

A slow swish of wings in the air! A great bird rising majestically from the water’s edge where it had been feeding on fish at a point where the tidal ripples broke gently upon the white sands that gleamed through them like milk in a crystal vase.

Kitty turned eagerly to watch its flight toward the dunes, the white expanse of sand-hills, some of which were sand-snows right to the top that rose to two hundred feet, or thereabouts, above sea level; others shone with the faint pink of delicate flesh owing to the shadow cast by the vegetation, the sparse grass that stood up like the scanty hair on a baby’s head.

The deep hollows between the peaks were pink and purple with the riotous, blossoming beach-pea or emerald with low trees and shrubs, basswood, bitter-sweet, bayberry and barberry.

One sand-valley held a crystal basin left by the tide where a score of sandpipers were bathing.

Over all sailed the magnificent bird—great wings heavily flapping—like a grey slate against the sky, in length measuring about four feet from the tip of its six-inch beak to the end-feather of its insignificant tail, its little yellow eye slanting down sidelong on Kitty, which, of course, she could not see, its long neck gracefully stretched.

“Know what bird that is?” asked her granduncle.

“Some sort of crane.” So the fluttering ribbon again made answer, playing with her reply.

“‘Crane!’ Balderdash! It’s a great Blue Heron. See ’em pretty often round here! There were three of ’em standing in a row upon this beach at the very time that I landed my first boat-load of Camp Fire Girls here—looked just as if the birds were lined up on deck for a welcome.”

“How funny!” cried Kitty, showing her dimples.

“Say! but it tickled the girls. The birds flew off, but slowly; they seem to know the law protects ’em now. One of the girls, the very one we were talking about, got so excited that she came near upsetting the rowboat I was landing them in. She cried out that, when she was initiated, she was going to take the Blue Heron for her Camp Fire name because it had such a splendid spread o’ wings. I shouldn’t wonder if she first thought of becoming a Camp Fire Girl through seeing an old owl, with a goose’s head on his shoulders, that could neither fly nor hoot, had lost his natural powers through not using them.”

“Do the other girls call her the Blue Heron?”

“They call her by the Indian word for it. You come along over now and we’ll ask her what that is!” Captain Andy began a strategic move forward in the direction of Camp Morning-Glory.

Kitty began a crab-like backward one.

“No-o! I don’t know any girls like her and her sister (isn’t that the sister sitting near her on the sands?)—they’re too grand for me, eh?” Her dimples fluctuated tentatively.

“Grand! Fiddlestick! Is it of the money or the Mayflower emblem you’re thinking, child? Pshaw, Kittykins”—the captain let out his deep, droll laugh—“I guess you can come near matching that last any day, with your old chimney built for five smokes! I’ve read the builder’s contract myself, dated 1718, for that big T-shaped chimney, to be ‘built of brick, for five smokes!’ And by the red, brick breast of that old chimney your fathers an’ your fathers’ fathers, ever since, have tended the fire o’ love to God and man, that the Camp Fire Girls aim to tend. They’re patriotic, those girls; they get honor-beads, so they tell me, for looking up their gran’parents an’ great-gran’parents—and their occupations; all that went to the building up of this great country; they’ll welcome you and your five smokes with open arms.”

It was a very smoky background for a pathetically shy little figure as Kitty advanced over the white sands toward the triple steps of the largest of the wooden camps, open at one side to the airs of heaven. But it needed no backing of ancestral smokes, that shrinking figure in the childish, flapping hat and dotted muslin.

For Olive, still in her wet bathing-suit, with her dark hair hanging, loose and long, about her, saw the little stranger coming.

The childish dress, rustic and old-fashioned, but dainty and demure, the pretty dimples, each nesting a freckle, the liquid, amber-brown eyes in which that tiny flashing minnow seemed to come and go with shy feeling—not sure of its owner’s reception—all these simply reached out and took Olive by the heart, bringing her to her feet in a jump, the water swishing in her bathing shoes.

“Why! it’s Kitty,” she cried. “Captain Andy’s Kitty! Oh, Kitty, we’re just so glad to see you! We were dying for you to come!”

No distant or smoky welcome this! Kitty flirted her wide, starched skirts as might a pleased bird its tail. The happy water rose to her eyes. She cast one far-away mental glance to Mary-Jane Peg and the orchard with its bandaged trees as she felt Olive’s wet arm about her shoulders.

“Oh! I must kiss you,” said Olive Deering, “although it’s too bad to wet you all up, Kitty. We’ve been watching for you all day, ever since Captain Andy told us he was going to fetch you here in his motor-boat. Captain Andy’s so good to us,” breathing briny gratitude; “he’s always on watch to see that we don’t go too far out when bathing, those of us who can’t swim very well yet.”

“Oh! you’re coming on—you’re coming on!” encouraged the mariner, whose camp name was Menokigábo.

“And he has taught us a lot about rowing and steering, a little about sailing, too!”

“Can’t do much with a sailboat here; it’s too near the mouth of the river. Tide’s too tricky,” remarked the captain. “That’s the bar where those curly breakers are, Kitty,” dropping his hand on his niece’s arm and whirling her round to face a white line of breakers about a mile down-river; beyond which flared the blue breadth of the comparatively open sea. “That’s the sand-bar where river an’ bay meet. Pretty rough water there, breaking on the Neck—the sandy neck of those other sand-dunes on the opposite side of the river! Mustn’t get carried down there in a boat, any of you girls! Quicksands, too! The Neck is studdled with ’em.”

“What does ‘studdled’ mean?” Olive’s briny lips blew the words like a pickled kiss into Kitty’s ear.

“I don’t know. Search—me!” quiveringly.

“I wonder the Boy Scouts don’t get caught among the wicked quicksands, seeing that they’re camping somewhere among those other dunes.” It was Sybil Deering who spoke. Sybil was not yet a Camp Fire Girl, although her elder sister who was to spend two months in camp had already been initiated as a Wood Gatherer; Sybil felt that the occasional presence of boys would add sauce to this crystalline Sugarloaf on which she found herself.

She had not been in bathing and she yawned in the hot sun as she sent her gaze sweeping over as much of that white Sugarloaf Peninsula as she could see, a hundred acres of sand-dunes taking their name from the highest peak, a pillar-like loaf of sand that sparkled like sugar-frosting in the hot sun.

“Oh, they know how to steer clear o’ the quicksands, I guess,” answered Captain Andy, answering on behalf of the Boy Scouts whose invisible camp was somewhere among the lesser sand-hills on the other side of the tidal river, here, nearly two miles across. “But quicksands’ll fool you,” he went on meditatively. “That’s why they’re so turrible dangerous; they look just like the firm sand, seem like it, too, when you plant one foot on them, but bring up the other, bend your weight on it an’ immediately you’ll hear the water rushing in under you and you’ll begin to sink—an’ it’s the one thing next to impossible under Heaven to drag you out!”

“How long does it take to—to sink out of sight?” asked Arline Champion—who had just come up out of the water rainbowed with brine—feeling awfully creepy.

“’Bout five minutes. Get caught in one o’ those sand-traps, nobody ever knows what becomes of you!”

There was a pervading, unanimous shudder, gathering up into it all the little minor shivers of the wet bathers.

“You’d better tell Jessica that,” volunteered little Betty Ayres from the edge of the dripping group. “She goes out in the rowboat, alone, the most; she might get swept down there—an’ stranded.”

“That reminds me, I saw the Morning-Glory, early to-day, doing a strange stunt; she was sitting under a rock with a sheet o’ something—dull glass it seemed like—on her knee, bending over it. I thought she was looking at herself in it an’ called to her, chaffing-like! She jumped up and ran away. She seemed kind o’ vexed at being caught.”

There was a general, wondering laugh, ousting the shudder, as one and another pair of girlish eyes sought the turbaned head of Morning-Glory, the foam-chicken, amid the waves.

Olive spoke first when the puzzled mirth subsided.

“Come up here, little Kitty,” she said. “Sit on the steps—I’m going to dress in a minute; I’m just sunning myself—and tell us what you used to do on the farm where you live and in the orchard. How did you amuse yourself?”

“Mostly I played with the ducks an’ hens—an’ with Mary-Jane Peg,” replied Kitty’s lips and fluttering ribbons gravely.

“Who is Mary-Jane Peg?”

“She’s a pig—a very nice pig.”

“He! He! He! Hi!... Ha! Isn’t she too green for anything—the greenest little hayseed, greenest little guy—naming a pig like that?”

No need to ask whence came the tingling titter! Penelope had come up out of the water, too, Penelope of the swinging gate who, in view of her home handicaps and her sisterly service to younger brothers, had been invited by the Guardian of the Morning-Glory Camp Fire to join its circle and camp out, here, with its members.

“He! He! Ha-a-a!” rattled on Penny and, suddenly, in the midst of her stampeding laughter became conscious of a chill, that her mirth and her remark, both, shot wild, skated like pebbles over a frozen surface, grated upon an icy silence.

The chill suddenly started a fever. Desperately she ran down the white beach to hide her burning cheeks in the water.

“I said she had the mild manners of a hurricane—a Caribbean Sea hurricane!” mumbled Captain Andy between puffs of laughter. “Her core is gusty, but it’s good. Well! I must be off to hunt up a chunk o’ birch wood or some other hard wood to whittle it into a big top—otherwise you can’t play that Kullibígan guessing-game to-night. An’ Kitty wants to ask a question of that fortune-telling top, eh, Kitty?” He dropped a wink upon the Doomed One, whose conviction of early death was melting away, like snow in May, into the filmy, sunlight haze that hung over the sand-peaks of the Sugarloaf. “No! you stay here along with the other girls an’ get acquainted. I’ll be back soon.”

But he was not thinking of his grandniece as he walked off to prowl among the dunes; he was philosophizing about girlhood in general. “Girls, even the best of ’em, are freakish. You can’t understand ’em,” he told his masculine old heart. “They cut queer capers, sometimes, just like a vessel! Now, what was the Morning-Glory one doing to-day, sitting an’ looking at herself in that pane o’ glass on her lap—an’ running off without a word as if I caught her, or came near catching her, in a crime? Her eyes looked red, too, when next I met her. And there’s nothing to cry over in her looks; she’s pretty as her name-flower. But”—soliloquizing further to a silvery birch-log, part of the driftwood scattered everywhere among the dunes, as he notched it with his pocket-knife, to test its suitability for a spinner or guessing-top—“but it’s hard for a girl like her to lose both parents before she’s seventeen, to have no regular home an’ no money, be dependent for a while on those who are no kin, as I believe’s the case!”

Meditating thus upon the invisible storm and stress that might beset even a girl’s life set Captain Andy crooning about the actual storms amid which his life had been spent as he bore the birch-log to his watchman’s tent upon the beach, to saw off a foot of it for a revolving top.

“If howling winds and roaring seas

Give proof of coming danger ...”

he sang, broke off and took up the song again on the farther side of a mumbled gap as he commenced his whittling:

“When perils gather round

All sense of danger’s drowned,

We despise it to a man!

We sing a little and laugh a little

And work a little an’ play a little

And fiddle a little an’ foot it a little

As bravely as we can!

As bravely as we can! Yaho-o!”

CHAPTER IX

WOOD GATHERERS AMONG THE DUNES

“Hullo! Maidens, have all the braves gone hunting?” Thus boomed Menokigábo, known before he entered upon this Sugarloaf life of glamor at the beck of a dozen Camp Fire Girls as Captain Andy and at the rooms of the Master Mariners’ Association as Captain Andrew Davis. “All the braves gone a-hunting, eh?”

“No braves around this camp except you, Capt’n Andy!” One or two of the answering voices sounded the least trifle disconsolate—or wistful.

So far as supplying the male element went, Captain Andy was massive, but not a mass!

His admiration, however, of the sunset picture upon the beach before him could hardly have been outdone by any male mass, juvenile or adult.

“My! but you Camp Fire Girls do make the world look ‘gallus,’” he burst forth in seaman’s phraseology.

“What does that mean?” Ten voices rose together in asking this question.

“Royal-looking.”

“Oh! goody! he says we look royal; we’re princesses, Indian princesses, for this evening.” Morning-Glory strutted along the flushed sands in all her fringed and beaded bravery of ceremonial attire, beaming like the purple and white morning-glory in her head-band as if she had never known a lonely moment.

“But where are the bows an’ arrows, maidens? Why! you haven’t even got a harpoon among you, in case a school of blackfish should come in,” bantered Menokigábo, named for his stature “Standing Tall,” named by the maidens, in jest, as they told him, so that he might fit in with the general atmosphere of their camp.

“We’ll bring the bows and arrows next time we come,” answered Gheezies, the Guardian of the Camp Fire tribe, with the yellow sun embroidered on her bosom, this being the meaning of her name and her own particular symbol as it was the general emblem of all Camp Fire tribes.

She was standing by a budding camp fire which had just begun to blossom in a nest of rocks upon the beach, eclipsed by the sun’s fading splendors.

Scattered around her were her maidens, all in ceremonial dress, with their long braids hanging, head-bands gleaming, moccasined feet spurning the sands in an evening ecstasy of dressing up. Daughters of the Sun! Children of Camp Morning-Glory! What wonder that the old sea-dog said they made the world look “royal.”

“Hullo! see, I’ve got the Kullibígan all ready.” He pointed to a foot-long top of spinning dimensions and silvery lustre in his hand. “’Tain’t painted yet, but I guess that won’t lessen the magic—’twill answer all your questions by an’ by just as well.”

“I’m going to paint it all over with symbols to-morrow,” burst forth Jessica, touching the carefully polished wood. “I’m going to paint the emblem of our Morning-Glory Camp Fire which is an ocean sunrise—the dawn coming up like a foam-chicken, as Captain Andy—I mean Menokigábo—says, and my own symbol, a morning-glory flower and all the symbols of my Camp Fire Sisters that I can crowd on to it.”

“Great guns! ’twill surely be ‘some top’ then,” ejaculated old “Standing Tall,” looming massive against the waning sunlight. “Why! Kitty.”

Some one had come sliding pell-mell down the nearest sand-peak and reaching him in a rush, flung her arms around him, or tried to. Well might he exclaim!

Kitty, not in Indian dress, although her hair hung in two chestnut braids down her back! But a Kitty in olive-green bloomers silvered with sand! Kitty in a middy blouse too large for her—her sleeves rolled up—with the brightest dancing eyes and a delicate pink flush burnishing the gold of the freckles on her cheeks!

“Don’t tell Mary-Jane Peg,” implored Kitty, quaintly, looking down at her bloomers; “she’d be shocked.”

“Oh, land!” The captain simply roared.

“Sybil lent me these—wasn’t it good of her?” The Doomed One thrust forward one bloomered leg, into whose bagginess her orchard scares had evidently run to hide and had lost themselves. “Sally lent me the blouse,” glancing at her companion, in ceremonial dress, who had slid down the sand-hill with her, and whose arms were full of fuel gathered among the dunes, dead, silvery limbs of juniper, with driftwood and wreckwood. “Oh, Uncle Andy, I’m having such a good time! I’ve made up my mind that I want to be a Camp Fire Girl; you can order the dress an’—an’ fixin’s for me any time you want to!” saucily.

“Good life! can I? You jumped to it pretty quickly, didn’t you?” as if he were addressing the dancing minnow in Kitty’s eyes.

“It’s not surprising that she should swallow the new bait so quickly,” he muttered in an aside to the Guardian of the Camp Fire whose tender eyes rested upon this new recruit’s transformed face. “There are no children in the two families living nearest to her father’s old-fashioned farmhouse with the gambrel roof and T-shaped chimney. And those that she went to school with she didn’t take to—though she ought to have been forced to do so—these girls have made her take to them; they’ve burned up her shyness, somehow.”

“Kitty is learning that ‘it is the discovery of ourselves outside ourselves which makes us glad,’” quoted Gheezies the gracious Guardian, with the little feathery rings of grey hair, light as thistle-fluff among her dark locks, playing about her pearly head-band. “She sees herself reflected in each one of these girls with whom she has come in contact under circumstances novel enough to open her eyes to the reflection and already she’s a new Kitty. Already she’s sharing the team spirit, the joy of doing things together!” looking down on the slender, withered arms of juniper which Kitty had been gathering, too, among the sand-hills and had flung down in her rush upon her great-uncle.

Not one frowning face left a mote on that shining mirror of girlhood in which Kitty saw her own heart, its natural aims and desires, not Penelope’s even; Penelope had been rather quiet ever since she hid her laugh, her graceless tongue and flaming cheeks in the water.

“I’m going up among the dunes to gather some more wood,” she announced now. “We haven’t nearly enough to make a good fire to cook our supper and have it burn on and on in a jolly Council Fire afterward,” looking at the wigwam-like heap of fuel already piled upon the sands.

“Lovely!” responded Olive, meaning the idea, not the setter-forth thereof, although Penelope looked a very different Pen from the gaudy tomboy of the gate; no human hurricane could be a hurricane in ceremonial dress; there was a poetry about the leather fringes, the soft hue of the brown khaki, the shimmering head-band and embroidered moccasins which chastened the commonness of Penny’s speech.

To-night her clothes did not “talk” to you afar off; they thrilled you with a sense of some romance recovered which the world had lost a while.

And no setting for them could have been more perfect than the white beach and sand-hills, gleaming like lesser Alps, of the Sugarloaf Peninsula, flushed pink by the sunset.

“Oh! isn’t it all too beautiful?” breathed Olive who had a chord in her heart that vibrated with a joy as of heaven to Nature’s beauty, as she linked her fringed arm through Penelope’s, feeling a twinge of regret for the silent rebuff which the latter’s rude tongue had brought upon her earlier in the day; this feeling it was which prompted Olive to be her wood-gathering companion now, in collecting juniper and driftage from among the burnished dunes.

She might have had a worse companion than Penelope, for the tingling Penny, though her junior, was much the better climber of the two, and it was toilsome work, ploughing up well-nigh perpendicular sand-peaks, sometimes, through a jungle of vegetation that snared one’s every step.

“Don’t get into that thatch-grass, Cask!” warned Penelope; “I did the other day and was bitten by a thatch-spider; it poisoned me something aw-ful!”

“Spiders! Thatch-spiders! Ugh-h.” Olive shuddered at the rank dull-green thatch of one sand-hill, whose ungainliness seemed to have something in common with Penelope’s speech. “You don’t pronounce my Camp Fire name properly,” she said after a minute during which she had given the spider-breeding thatch-grass a wide berth. “You call me ‘Cask’: the a ought to be longer and softer in Kask; that’s the Indian for Blue Heron, the Penobscot Indian.”

“I think it’s a star name, Cask,” murmured Penelope, giving the title exactly the same intonation as before. “And you’ve got your symbolic name nailed onto you all right, Olive, because you’ve already been initiated as a Wood Gatherer and taken rank among the Camp Fire Girls,” glancing at the fagot ring on Olive’s little finger. “I haven’t; I’m only on probation, although they don’t ‘stump’ from wearing the ceremonial dress and being called by the Indian name that I’ve chosen: Awatawéssu; that’s Penobscot, too.”

The poetry of the name which even Pen’s pronunciation could not mar was so at variance with Penelope’s slangy speech that the Blue Heron, poised on a white sand-peak, her fringed arms outspread in their loose sleeves, as if she were about to take wing through the joy-filled universe, had to laugh.

“Oh! Penny, you’re too funny,” she said. “Yours is really a star name,” dreamily, “for it means ‘a star,’ doesn’t it?”

“Yes, getting down to bed-rock, as the boys say, it means ‘A creature far above!’” Suddenly the younger girl’s mood changed. Her moccasined foot kicked the fine sand into the air as if she were starting it off on a rainbowed quest to find the Star, her namesake, along a climbing trail where she knew she would find it hard to follow. “A—Creature—Far—Above!” she repeated slowly. “I guess that’s what I need to be! Since—since I’ve taken that name”—scarcely above a whisper—“I feel, somehow, low-down, because I’m always ‘putting my foot in it’; I did this morning, laughing at that little orchard Kitty directly she got here. An’ I’m too slangy. Mother doesn’t hear me, you know, or she’d correct me.... And there’s so much to be done for the boys, where a girl has three brothers younger than herself, that it didn’t seem to matter how I spoke—or much what I wore—so long’s I could get things—done.”

A silvery star peeping out as the sun declined, peering down at the sand-hills, saw her namesake’s eyes full of sore tears.

Olive stared a minute. Then her arms went round Penelope.

“Oh! you dear,” she gasped. “Oh! you dear!” wetly, too.

They had come out to gather dead juniper; they found the living fire-wood, the magic fuel of deep sympathy, mutual girlish comprehension.

It doubled their joy in a minute or two. For Penelope’s pangs were evanescent. They danced in the snowy sand-valleys, gathering up the khaki skirts of their ceremonial dresses into puckered bags for their driftwood fagots—brine-whitened chunks, some of them easily splintered and rendered portable, which had been swept in by the garnering tide from many a distant shore—together with withered limbs of basswood and juniper, native to the dunes.

They tried vainly to drag along in their train a very ancient captive, a bleached, branching cedar-stump, driftwood, too, which gleamed like a white marble monument amid the sands that had alternately covered and uncovered it for many hundreds of years.

Olive scraped its surface with her Camp Fire Girl’s pocket-knife and was delighted that she could tell by the flesh-pink of the wood underneath that it was cedar; one of the first flights which Blue Heron had made about the camp into the fairy-land of unacquired knowledge was the learning from Captain Andy to tell one kind of wood from another, whether it was alive and growing or merely dead driftage.

“It makes one love trees all the more when you can tell how they differ in their wood as well as in their branches and leaves,” she murmured, now, as the girls wandered on, picking here a wild rose, there a lacy blossom of thoroughwort or of the everlasting white—blossoming spirit of these white dunes—which Olive stuck into her black braid of hair.

“Well, we’ve got about all the wood we want, now; don’t you think so?” suggested Penelope, at last. “And it’s time we got back to the beach and our camp fire; Sesooā and Mŭnkwŏn, Sally and Arline, will be cooking supper; they’re cooks to-day, you know; they’re going to toast bacon on twigs and Arline has made a blackberry shortcake with those blackberries that we found yesterday in the woods up the river.”

“Here’s hoping that ’twill taste better than my apple-shortcake, which Captain Andy said was ‘chunky’ when I took a piece over to his tent! But I’ll do better next time. See if I don’t!” laughed Blue Heron, dropping her fuel and flapping her winged sleeves as if for a new flight. “Oh! Pen, I simply can’t go back—yet,” she quavered; “not if they begin supper without us. I don’t believe we’ll ever have another evening—another sunset—quite so lovely as this. I want to climb that tall peak and see the view; I will, too, if I never taste another mouthful!”

They capered up the lower, easy slope of the hill, fringes waving, just in that mood when feet would wither if they didn’t dance and the heart must burst if it couldn’t worship.

“Oh! how near it brings one to—to Things—like the altar rails at Confirmation,” whispered Olive, half to herself, her gasping breath a shrine for panting feeling when, with slower steps, she had mastered the summit of this hundred-feet snow-peak and looked down upon lesser dunes, creamily piled, sown with sunset roses, upon a crystalline hollow like a mimic glacier where fairies skated and away at the sundown glories crowning the snow-drift dunes of the opposite shore beyond the tidal river’s blue.

There all heaven seemed let loose, the heaven that lives in color; the elder girl’s soul was steeped in it; with cords woven of every hue in the spectrum it linked each holy moment of her life and wove it into the present minute: again, across the gulf of a year, she felt the touch of consecrating hands upon her head, heard the prayer: “Defend, oh, Lord, this Thy child with Thy Heavenly grace...!”

It was no far-away Lord of grace and glory now; the sunset made a highway to His Presence.

“That she may daily increase in Thy Holy Spirit more and more...!”

What better translation of that than the Camp Fire spirit: the quest of beauty, truth, service, health, happiness, love?

Olive’s lips quivered as, with a loving, expanding desire for human contact, she again put an arm around Penelope. Penelope nestled close to her. They clung together upon the white apex of that peak, the apex of girlish feeling, in such a moment as should ever prevent outward differences from separating them again.

Penelope stirred uneasily. “I’ve got the dune-fever,” she said. “You set me going, Olive! I just can’t go back to camp with our fagots until I climb that other peak, just beyond this one, to see how the sunset looks from there!”

“All right! Let’s!” responded Olive recklessly. “Our Guardian or Captain Andy will be coming out to look for us, though! Well! it won’t take very long. We really will go back then. Oh! wait for me, Pen!” as Penelope, scarlet of cheek, sturdy of foot, panting in breath, ploughed up that still farther peak, like a brown goat, her braids and fringes waving.

“Stay, Sweetheart, stay!

Stay, till I ketch thee!”

panted Olive, as she neared the top, making the sand-dunes ring with the merry hail of an old song.

“Hey ding a ding a ding!

This ketching is a pretty thing!”

“Is it, though?” sarcastically inquired a voice. “I don’t think it’s a ‘very pretty thing!’” in the sourest of masculine voices that ever planted a sting in a girlish paradise. “Oh, jiggaroo! I don’t think ‘ketching’s’ pretty: I’m caught—an’ I don’t like it!”

Both girls jumped. The grumbling shout came from a sandy shoulder of the peak on which they were standing, a peak whose shoulder-blade stood out, clad in dark, olive-green basswood. Was it a goblin voice?

Beneath one glossy shrub showed a yellow-brown mound—a huddled, abject mound—a shade lighter in hue than their own ceremonial dresses.

Under the waning gold of the sunset it looked jaundiced. Jaundiced, truly, yellow-green with despair, if tones suggest color, and surly—the surliest ever—was the renewed shout that came from it, flung up from the olive-green clump of basswood into the teeth of the girls, the lips that launched the grumble being hidden.

“Oh, guree!” so it sullenly ran. “If that isn’t like girls! If they must sing on a trail, why can’t they sing something sensible! ‘Ketching!’ ‘Sweetheart!’ Stuff to make a fellow sick—sicker’n he is already! Oh-h-h! Ouch!”

The despondent groan in which the complaint ended seemed to rock the very sand-hill to its shifty foundations.

CHAPTER X

THE ASTRONOMER

“It’s a Boy!” Both girls burst forth simultaneously, explosively, with the discovery. The explosion was followed by an inarticulate rumble made up of mirth, that was one part trepidation at this boy’s very singular behavior, and of the gratification which variety always brings in its train, for in three weeks and three days of camping they had not seen a boy, saving at long range.

One of Captain Andy’s wooden camps upon the Sugarloaf beach, flanking their own Camp Morning-Glory, was unoccupied. The other sheltered an elderly naturalist and his wife—young people there were none, outside of their own group.

“But what a fat boy!” Penelope’s gaze was measuring the padded breadth of the yellow-brown shoulders, hunched and bowed. “Ever see such a fat thing in your life?” The hills rang with her giggle, half-hysterical now, for the sun was departing, shadows creeping among the dunes; she was not absolutely sure that this bloated yellowish back, persistently toward her, was human.

Was it a swollen spectre of the Sugarloaf?

And while the girls stood clinging to each other in nervous indecision they became definitely conscious of a distant, organ-like volume of sound coming from no point in sight; they had heard it right along, but, knowing whence it boomed, paid no attention to it. It was the roar of the breakers at high tide, breaking upon the sand-bar, half a mile off, where the tidal river met the open bay, or sea.

It sounded louder here than on the beach near their camp and the incessant, invisible sobbing added to the mystery enveloping that surly back.

All of a sudden the Mystery turned plump around and addressed them.

“For the love o’ Mike!” it burst forth irritably, “why do you stand there staring; why don’t you offer to do something for a fellow who’s a ‘goner,’ eh?”

“Are you a ‘goner’?” Penelope plucked up heart to ask; the yellow-brown Mystery was presenting not a back, but a shoulder to her now, together with a short, thick neck, a double chin and the fat profile of a head, covered with clammy hair, which, inclining to one side like a bird’s, looked up at her sidelong.

That slanting gaze became an amazed one presently; the owner of the flesh-cushioned back, whether human or goblin, was evidently struck for a moment by the unique spectacle of two fringed and moccasined maidens, with their hair in long braids, head-bands on their foreheads, colored beads upon their necks, looking down at him from under the waving wing of dusk, their pedestal a white sand-hill.

But his interest in anything outside himself and his clump of basswood was evidently momentary.

“Of course I’m a goner,” he reaffirmed glumly. “Can’t you see it to look at me?” in the tone of one whose plight exempts him from the civilities of life. “I’m just making my will.”

He pointed with the dignity of a dying sage to a little grey book upon his knee and waved a stub of pencil.

“Gee! he’s crazy,” ejaculated Penelope—and Olive was deaf to her slang now.

“No, I’m not ‘crazy,’” came up from the basswood. “I’m poisoned.”

“Poisoned! With—what?” It was Olive’s startled lips which put the question.

“Arsenate of lead.”

Here was a thunderclap, indeed, which shook the sands under the girls’ feet; neither of them knew much about poisons, but this sounded deadly.

“Yes, I guess I’m done for. If you can’t do anything for me, don’t stand staring down at me! I want to make my will in peace.” The fat fingers which held the stubby pencil waved it solemnly and then began to write again in the little grey book which had a vivid colored picture on the cover.

“If I’m to go”—the youthful testator looked up with something like a sob of self-admiration—“if I have to go, I want to die like a plucky—Scout.”

“Ho! He’s a Boy Scout.” Penelope caught her breath. She squeezed Olive’s hand in a convulsive grip. She rose to tiptoe on the sand-peak. Something was rising up in Penelope, stretching itself like a body of fire within her own frame so that she felt it in every extremity of her actual body, something was queening it within her, the motherly impulse, the mothering impulse fed and fostered by the care of three younger brothers.

This fat Scout called himself a “goner.” His puffy cheeks looked pale, too, in the waning golden light; so did the double chin bent over the pencil.

But just so, a year ago, had her thirteen-year-old brother Jim moaned that he was a “goner” when he fell fifteen feet from a tin roof that he was painting and broke his arm in three places.

Jim’s father was away, his deaf mother could not hear the doctor’s requests—the doctor whom Pen hastily summoned; it was Penelope, herself, not then fifteen, who had waited upon the surgeon, furnished safety-pins, etc., while he manipulated his ether bottle and bandages.

It was Penelope who had shrunk into a corner and sobbed and prayed while Jim was taking the ether, but it was Penelope, too, who, when that surgeon needed further help, had stumbled forth from her corner, had bravely stretched herself on the bed beside Jim and held the ether pad to his nostrils and mouth, sticking to the task even when she felt her own senses reeling off into dizzy sickness.

And it was Penelope, now, who tossed Olive’s arm which was around her away, as if it were a lifeless limb of juniper, who in another moment was crouching by the clump of basswood, beside the boy who had made up his mind that he had to “go” and was scribbling his boyish bequests.

Fiercely she grasped his arm in its khaki uniform and shook it!

“Listen to me! Look at me!” she gasped. “Where did you get the arsenic or lead or whatever it was?”

“Arsenate of lead!” corrected the testator, mildly now. “Dead-deadly poison—poisons you some if it only trickles over your body!”

Penny’s cheeks lost a good deal of their color which ebbed away into a hard little island of red under each cheek-bone.

“Where did you get it?” she repeated.

“In the woods over there, beyond the creek, where the trees and the berries and the ground an’ all were sprayed with it.”

“Were you alone? Was anybody with you?”

“Kenjo was. He’s another Scout. He’s gone off over the dunes to try an’ find a house, or camp, to get something to give me. But I guess it’s no use!” with a deep gulp that in a girl would have been a collapsing sob.

“Mercy!” The fingers of Penelope’s left hand distractedly clawed her cheek; her eyes, sharpened to a glittering point, pierced the victim’s face as she thrust her own near to it.

Suddenly she wheeled and changed her tactics.

“Here! let me see the will you’re making: ‘To my brother Basil I leave my push-mobile, stern wheel is off, he can fix it, to my chum Snuffy I leave my mandolin, it has two strings busted, b-but——’” read Penelope aloud in high, strained tones which exploded in a quavering shriek.

She flung the book—it was a Boy Scout diary, with the will scrawled and misspelt upon a blank page headed Memoranda—she flung it from her into the heart of the basswood.

“Look here!” Like a hurricane she turned on the victim. “I don’t say you’re making all this up, but I do believe that, down deep, you’re not sure you’re poisoned an’ are going to die right away. You only think you think you are!”

How on earth Penelope’s girlish intuition leaped to the fact that there was more of melodrama than of hopeless tragedy in this strange scene among the pale dunes Olive did not know, but at heart she felt herself going down on her shaking knees to Penelope for the way in which the younger girl handled the situation, even though Penny’s next words were delivered with her crudest gust.

“Where do you feel bad, anyhow?” She leveled her forefinger at the victim who, deprived of the melancholy satisfaction of making his will and bequeathing his lame treasures, slanted his gaze up at her, his short neck with its double chin thrust forward; there was a fat quiver of that chin now as if he were uncertain whether to follow her hopeful lead, or not.

“‘Ba-ad!’” he echoed waveringly. “Why! I’ve got a circus in my head or a merry-go-round—something that’s wheeling an’ spinning.”

“You’re just dizzy. Have you been wandering round in the woods?”

“Yes, quite a bit.”

“Where else do you feel poisoned? Have you got cramps?”

The victim rubbed his waist-line: “No, but I feel kind o’ sick an’—an’ ’s if ’twas low tide inside me.”

“Pshaw, ten to one you’re hungry! An’ they’re cooking supper over at our camp on the beach. Goodness! I can just smell the bacon toasting here; can’t you, Olive?”

“Ye-es,” fibbed Blue Heron, spreading her dainty nostrils toward the broad sandy acres of up-hill and down-hill which separated the trio from the camp fire—that was later to be a Council Fire—on the beach.

“Bacon!” The victim stirred; a hungry shudder shook him that gave way to a renewed shiver of despair; he stretched out an arm to recover his book.

“No, you sha’n’t have it! You’re not going to die and leave your ‘busted mandolin.’... He! He! He! Hi!” Penelope’s giggle rang out shrilly. “How long is it since you swallowed the poison? You haven’t told yet how you came to take it!”

“I’ll tell you,” struck in another voice. A manly-looking Boy Scout appeared suddenly from behind the basswood, his broad hat pushed back from a haggard face. “I went off to get help for him,” he explained. “I saw some camps, but they were a good way off. I thought I’d come back and haul him over there, where I could give him an antidote, you know, whites of eggs or salt an’ water—or something somebody would let me have.”

“We have got all those things at our camp,” suggested Olive eagerly.

“You see, I don’t know how much he really is poisoned.” This older Scout looked down upon the fat victim. “It all happened this way: We’re camping with a whole lot of other Scouts in that Boy Scout camp among the dunes on the opposite side of the river. Well! to-day our Scoutmaster said that Fatty an’ I might take the rowboat—we call him that—his name is Tommy Orr——”

“Most times they call me the Astronomer, because they say I’m always looking up,” mildly interjected the poisoned one.

“So you are; fat boys who have short necks mostly do; they can’t look at you straight!” threw in Penelope.

“Ha! Indeed! Is that so?” The victim straightened himself more than he had done yet, to glare at her sarcastically, then collapsed into a huddle again. “Well, go on, Kenjo, tell them about the dead chewink with the blackberry in its beak,” he sighed. “We call him Kenjo Red,” with a fat wave of the hand toward his brother Scout, “because we don’t need a fire in camp while we have his head.”

The newcomer, whose scalp-locks escaping from under his broad hat were indeed of the firiest hue, only smiled in a tired way and hastily took up the tale of woe where he dropped it.

“Well, we two took the boat, rowed across to this side of the river and up Loaf Creek, the little creek that runs in round the Sugarloaf——”

“Yes, I know; we’re going to explore it some day,” put in Olive excitedly. “Was it in the woods at the head of the creek that he got the poison?”

“Yes, the ground was all sprayed white with it in one place, but Tommy didn’t notice it at first; he’s only been three months a Scout. We had been wandering about the woods—they were pretty thick—after we landed from the boat and didn’t quite know where we were! Tommy walked on ahead o’ me while I was trying to take our bearings; he had been eating blackberries an’ went on eating ’em——”

“Sour they were, too—mean sour!” interjected Tenderfoot Tommy Orr.

“When I started after him I saw that the ground was all sprayed white here and there with the lead poison that the State uses for getting rid of caterpillar pests and I yelled to him to stop. Just a little farther on we came upon two dead rabbits and three dead birds; one o’ the birds, a chewink—little grey ground-robbin, you know—had a half-pecked blackberry in its beak; another, a wild canary, was stiffening out, with a berry ’longside it.”

This looked horribly serious. Tenderfoot Orr groaned aloud and rubbed his cushioned waist-line.

“Well! Tommy made up his mind then that he was a ‘goner’ as well as the chewink. I saw no house or camp near, so I hustled him back to the boat, rowed down the creek, landed here on the Sugarloaf, where I left him a few minutes ago, to look around and see in which direction there was a camp.”

“Ours is the nearest: we’ll give you all the antidotes you want—salt and water enough to float the boat—or the boy! Goody, how that bacon smells!” Penelope sniffed vigorously to the dune breeze. “We must be getting back anyway, mustn’t we, Olive? They won’t know what on earth’s become of us. Oh, come along!” She seized the tenderfoot’s fat arm as she might have seized that of her brother Jim. “Never mind the little diarybook; exercise your will, now, instead of making it!”

And with a heavy groan, led by the mythical odors of bacon sizzling over an outdoor fire, the hungry tenderfoot picked up his broad hat that rested like an olive-green mushroom in a near-by patch of sage-brush, so alike in hue that it would be hard to tell one from the other, arose and followed her.

Near where the dunes sloped down into the beach, the anxious party came upon Captain Andy. He eyed the girls aslant, reprovingly.

“Well! you two would be a good pair to send after trouble,” he remarked caustically, “you take so long in getting back. I was just starting off on a cruise to look for you.”

“Hullo, Capt’n Andy!” boomed Kenjo, intercepting a reply by his joyous greeting to an old friend: “Yes”—reproachfully—“you’re all taken up with the Camp Fire Girls now—Scouts don’t get a look-in!”

“Petticoats first—bloomers, rather!” chuckled the jolly mariner. “Skirts go ahead—meaning skirts have the preference, especially when they’re new-fangled skirts like these!” pointing to the khaki ceremonial dresses of the two excited girls who had forgotten all about the fuel they gathered.

“Hey! what’s the matter with this Scout? He don’t look very chipper.”

The captain laid a hand on Tommy’s shoulder.

“He’s poisoned—poisoned dead—or thinks he is; from eating blackberries an’ arsenic an’ lead!” explained Penny with great lucidity.

In a few words Kenjo cleared up the situation.

“How long is it since he ate those blackberries?” asked Captain Andy, gravely. “An hour yet?”

“Oh, I guess it is—pretty nearly an hour, anyway.”

“Well! let me tell you that if he had got enough of that arsenate of lead into him to finish him as it did the birds an’ rabbits, he’d hear more from it by this time. You’d have horrible cramps by now an’ you’d look a heap worse than you do!” The captain gazed down reassuringly on Tenderfoot Tommy, alias “the Astronomer,” who, with fat neck thrust forward, was slanting a very anxious look up at him.

“So she said. She said I only b’lieved I b’lieved I was poisoned. She’s a brick.” The Astronomer blinked at Penelope now.

“I’m a star,” she informed him. “That’s my Camp Fire name; as you’re an Astronomer you can look up to me all you want to!” Nobody blamed Pen for her giggle then. “You see, that dead chewink and the wild canary might have pecked at some more poisoned stuff besides the blackberries,” she sagely suggested. “Maybe the sprayed poison wasn’t on the berries at all.”

“That’s so!” assented Captain Andy. “You come over to my tent at the foot o’ the dunes”—he pushed Tommy along by the shoulder. “I know the signs of that poison, for I’ve used it myself; I’ll examine you an’ dose you, if necessary; if not, you can have some supper. It’s all ready down there on the beach. Great guns! I was feelin’ scared about you and so was the Guardian, Miss Dewey.” He looked at the two tired girls. “I thought, maybe, you were never coming back to play that Kullibígan game to-night, after my whittling out the witchtop for you!”

CHAPTER XI

KULLIBÍGAN

The Indian game of Kullibígan was in full swing.

Supper was over, a wonderful outdoor banquet, for which the high tide furnished the orchestra, the white sands the table linen, with the last rays of the dying sun showering bouquets upon its damask.

As if in answer to Captain Andy’s question earlier in the evening when he beheld the bevy of maidens in Indian dress upon the beach, there were two unexpected “braves” at the feast and hungry guests they were; Kenjo, who was entered upon the school-roll of his native town as Kenneth Jordan, bearing in mind that “A Scout is courteous,” the fifth point of the Scout Law, insisted on toasting fresh relays of bacon for the hungry girls and for the Astronomer, who ate enormously.

Captain Andy, in the absence of any severe symptoms of lead poisoning, had come to the conclusion that the tenderfoot was not going to share the fate of the chewink, that he, apparently, did not stand in need, even, of an antidote; still, as a precautionary measure, he flooded him inwardly with strong tea, beneficial in any case of poisoning, until the fat Astronomer declared that he could hear his final mouthfuls of cake splash as they went down.

The after-banquet songs were furnished by the hostesses who chanted their “Wohelo!” cheer, greatly to the edification of the Scouts, followed by their song, “Mystic Fire,” gracefully dramatized by the waving of fringed arms, the swaying of girlish forms around the camp fire upon the twilight sands, lending the final touch of romance to the white wildness of the Sugarloaf, moving the flame of admiration in Kenjo to flicker up into:

“Gee! I thought we Boy Scouts were the ‘whole show’ when it came to new stunts, but I guess it’s as Captain Andy says, ‘Skirts go ahead!’” with a boyish laugh.

“Well! you’ll show them something by ’n’ by, when it gets dark, when you signal with lanterns or an old broom dipped in kerosene to our camp on the dunes across the river to say we’re safe here, for Captain Andy says he won’t let us row back there to-night,” spoke up the now drowsy Astronomer. “He says we can sleep in his tent—a bully tent, divided up into rooms—at the foot of a sand-hill; he was going to have his niece there, but he says she can bunk with the girls.” Tommy waved a fat hand in the direction of Kitty.

“I don’t care; that’s what I want to do,” spoke up little Kitty, erstwhile of “the bleeding heart,” rejoicing in the freedom of her green bloomers. “Morning-Glory—I can’t pronounce her Indian name—says I can sleep with her,” shyly. “And we’ll wake up early and watch the dawn across the river and I may help her cook the breakfast—she’s to be one of the cooks to-morrow.”

“Indeed, you may, but don’t mistake me for Mary-Jane Peg in your sleep; I don’t want to be taken for a pig in a poke!” laughed Jessica, otherwise Welatáwesit. “And now for Kullibígan! What question shall we ask it first?”

“Who’ll be married first?” suggested the Astronomer. “That’s what girls always want to know, isn’t it?”

And then the excitement of the night began in earnest.

The great burnished top, painted by firelight, was set to spinning madly upon a flat stone set in the sand, surrounded by a ring of sitting girls; it revolved dizzily for many seconds, then fell over upon its broad head, as if bowing to Kitty.

The laughter that followed this exploit of the guessing-top made dunes and sea ring; Kitty was to be wedded first, instead of prematurely departing this life.

“Let us ask it something sensible, something that might have an answer in the near future,” suggested Betty Ayres—gay little Betty, whose Camp Fire name was Psuti, the Holly—after sundry other riddles had been propounded to the Kullibígan top for divination—questions as distant in speculation and wild in their answer as the lot which had fallen upon Kitty. “Let’s ask who’ll be the first to attain the highest rank among the Camp Fire Girls, and become a Torch Bearer!”

“Good!” approved Gheezies, the presiding Guardian of the Fire.

Psuti, with two little hands upon the broadest point of the tall top’s circumference, skilfully set it revolving upon the stone; as before, it seemed to have no sense of the fitness of things; it toppled toward her, as nearly as its falling direction—a wide point of debate—could be determined, she having swiftly resumed her seat in the circle.

“Pshaw! it doesn’t know much: Morning-Glory will be the first Torch Bearer; she’s a Fire Maker already,” burst impetuously from one or two of the girls. “And she’s going to do some work among little girls when we go back to the city, form a Nest of Blue Birds, as it’s called, among the poor children of that big playground which we visited, show them how to dress their dolls and so forth,” suggested Sesooā, “make them happy once a week for three months; that’s part of the test for becoming a Torch Bearer.”

“I suppose you’ll draw that little deaf-and-dumb girl whose life you saved into the nest—eh?” Mŭnkwŏn turned inquiringly toward Morning-Glory. “Whew! I’ll never forget that day—the shock we all got!” The breast of Arline’s ceremonial dress, embroidered with her rainbow symbol, heaved; the many-colored honor-beads upon her neck shook. “Fancy! the poor child drowning, or next door to it, in two feet and a half of water!”

“Two feet and a half of water! Drowning! A deaf-and-dumb child!” Nobody had noticed the “shock” which Kenjo experienced as the Rainbow’s words fell upon his ear, reaching him where he squatted on the sands, just outside the circle of girls gathered round the fortune-telling top, now lying idle upon the flat stone.

“Is—is a Torch Bearer the highest rank among the Camp Fire Girls?” Kenjo went on to ask eagerly, thrusting the flame of his red head dangerously near to the Council Fire. “To be an Eagle Scout is the highest a fellow can go among the Boy Scouts—and mighty few ever get there! A Scout must have twenty-one merit badges for that! But we have an Eagle Scout in our camp,” proudly. “He’s a sort of Assistant Scoutmaster, directing the athletics. He saved a deaf-and-dumb child from drowning in shallow water this summer—dragged her out and brought her to, resuscitated her; a Camp Fire Girl helped him.”

“Helped him! He helped her, you mea-ean!” The excited challenge delivered in three girlish voices rose to a screaming trio. “Where did it happen? What’s his name?” followed in a minor key.

“Yes, where did it happen?” gasped the Blue Heron, Olive, bending excitedly forward from her place near the fire.

“In the city of Clevedon, I think. Stack comes from there or from some town near it; he was dressed for a big Boy Scout Rally at the Clevedon Armory and was taking a short cut across a public playground when he heard a lot of children yelling—girls shrieking——”

“We weren’t shrieking at all! There!” flung out Sesooā between her teeth. “If ‘Stack’ is the only name he’s got, I don’t think much of it.” The firefly in Sally’s eyes danced upon the twilight.

“That’s what we call him in camp; his name is Miles Stackpole.”

“That’s better,” came from Morning-Glory, Miles’s partner in that playground rescue.

“Stack said the girl who helped was a pippin.” Here the Astronomer who had been dozing upon the firelit sands suddenly awoke from a dream in which Penelope’s red cheek was a poisoned cherry and he a chewink pecking at it to his destruction. “He said she was a peach and could do something,” went on Tenderfoot Tommy; “that she wasn’t all fluff an’ stuff or frills an’ stuff, like most girls, afraid of a little wetting!”

“Oh! indeed? A lot he must know about girls!” Every voice in the feminine circle went to swell this sarcasm or something like it.

Each feminine soul there felt that life could not be all mystic motions and ceremonial dresses, their rich cream at present, nor yet bloomers and middy blouses; all looked forward to the pleasing variety of frilly hours again, with hearts, if only for the space of a short party-hour, correspondingly frivolous.

Meanwhile the Astronomer, with his gaze slanting upward from the sands and trained upon the feminine circle, was suffering at the hands of Kenjo who had tried to stifle his confidences.

“Oh! Won’t Stack just lick you when we get back to camp and he hears how you gave him away?” scolded the older Scout. “You go to sleep again; that’s the only time you’re safe, Fatty. We’re going to ask the Kullibígan top another question, something exciting, with real ‘pep’ in it, this time: ‘Who’s going to dig up a fortune from the sands?’ May I come in on the answer to this?” Ken appealed eagerly to the Guardian of the Camp Fire.

“Certainly. And may you come in on the fortune, too, if there is one!” Thus Gheezies gave her smiling consent, tagging it with a good wish.

“Oh! that’s too far-fetched to be exciting; nobody really believes in finding Captain Kidd’s treasure nowadays, although Captain Andy says that some of it was certainly hidden along the coast here, but that the tidal current must have sucked it out into the river long ago,” protested Betty, in a fringed flutter.

“And Stack says that he met a professor of something who was round here studying tides, and the prof said he didn’t believe that the current could do any such thing!” threw back Ken hotly.

“Oh! it’s such a hackneyed old question, anyway.” Thus Morning-Glory backed up Betty.

“A regular ‘chestnut,’” yawned Penelope, who was getting sleepy.

“Well! isn’t a ‘chestnut yarn’ the best kind to anchor to with a hope of its coming true?” Kenjo appealed to the Guardian with a fire that matched his ruddy hair. “At least”—muttering low—“I think I learned in high school that some old fellow said that.”

“He said a ‘platitude’ was; I’m not sure but that they’re one and the same thing,” replied Gheezies, with a smile.

“Ah, but we’ve something to anchor to besides a ‘chestnut’—Stack and I!” Kenneth Jordan, second-class Scout, thrust his fiery head close to Jessica’s and spoke in a hollow voice of mystery scarcely to be heard in the firelit twilight beyond her ear, although Sesooā, on the other side of him, caught crumbs of the confidence. “We said we wouldn’t tell anybody lest they’d laugh at us for digging.” The Scout became a husky shell for his secret. “But I guess, maybe, Stack won’t mind my telling you as you helped him save that dumb child. He an’ I”—the secret began to crack the shell—“he an’ I were down on the Neck yesterday,” jerking an elbow in the direction of the sand-bar at the river’s mouth, “and there was an old man there, hunting big hen-clams, at low tide; he told us he was over ninety; we asked him how long he expected to live an’ he said: ‘Down here, you live as long as you want to!’”

“Is that the secret?”

There was a shout from the girls. Ken’s voice had risen like the tide upon the old clam-hunter’s words. It sank mysteriously again.

“We asked him, too”—the secret was popping out now in Jessica’s favored ear—“whether he believed there was treasure hidden along that beach or among the dunes. He said, ‘Sure as a hen-clam hops there is!’ Then he put his face close to Stack’s—he hadn’t a tooth—and pointed to a certain spot among the dunes and said that a few years ago (we dug out of him that ’twas about thirty) a handful of old gold and silver coins had been picked up there. We pumped him further, but his mind wandered, he didn’t seem able to pin it long to anything, he only mumbled and shuffled off after a big hen-clam—surf-clam, you know—that tried to get away from him by hopping off on its one funny little leg that it thrust out of the shell. ’Twas the queerest thing you ever saw to watch him trying to rake it up with his iron fork.”

“Must ha’ been! A hopping clam!” This set Penny giggling, for the Scout’s voice had risen again upon the irrelevant matter of the aged clam-hunter’s raking among the treasures left by the last high tide.

Her paroxysm brought Kenjo to himself and to his manners, set him diffidently apologizing to the Guardian for daring to drop a secret within her magic ring, at the other end of her firelit circle.

“Stack’d go for me for doing such a thing,” he gasped. “I guess I put my foot in it, too, like Fatty! Well! here goes for pumping the guessing-top about that treasure!”

With a strong twist of his tanned hands he set the Kullibígan revolving; it spun itself dizzy and fell between Sally and Arline.

“Never mind; we’ll try again; best two out of three!” cried the Scout. “Now, then, old top, spin your durndest. Tell us who digs up a fortune from the sands!”

The Kullibígan answered his appeal, thrilled him with a half-superstitious tingle from neck to heel by sprawling over toward him.

“Again! Again! Once more!”

It fell precipitately toward Morning-Glory, turned a somersault and stood upon its head.

“Well! it has given me one chance to come in on the treasure, anyhow.” Thus Kenjo, crestfallen over its last dizzy feat, consoled himself. “Stack an’ I’ll dig; you bet we’ll dig; we’ll take Toiney into the secret. I believe he’d scent a coin as he scents a spring a mile off!”

“Who’s Toiney!” For the last minute the girls had sat very still, not a leather fringe stirring; now they spoke again.

“Toiney! Oh! he’s an Assistant Scoutmaster who gives us lessons in wood-lore and in tracking an’ trailing; he’s a French Canadian, with a strain of Indian in him. Well!” Kenjo heaved a long breath. “He’ll be organizing a search party to look for us—if he hasn’t done so already. He’s the stuff, although I guess you girls would call him queer stuff!”

“Are you going to try to signal to the opposite dunes to let them know you’re safe?” asked the Camp Fire Girl whose name meant Peace.

“I’m not going to ‘try.’ I’m going to do it, signal by semaphore code the word ‘Safe,’ if Captain Andy can let me have a couple of camp lanterns—that is, if I can make ’em see me at our camp, get their attention!”

“I guess I have only one lantern that’s strong enough to be seen at a distance,” responded the mariner.

“Well! if you have some kerosene oil and an old broom that you don’t mind being burned up?”

“Hurrah! we’ll furnish you with that,” cried the girls, all eager for the exhibition.

And, now, the Boy Scouts had their innings so far as a “showing-off stunt” was concerned.

Scaling a very high rock whose base was laved by the tide, pushing the corn broom for a burnt offering before him, Ken drew up the lantern and oil-can shoved aloft by the captain.

A ring of excited girls, with their Guardian, scattered to a little distance whence they could have a good view of the signaling Scout and his performance.

One minute, and the oil-soaked broom flamed, its blaze streaming forth, a mighty flare-up, to be seen miles off!

The Scout waved the burning besom to and fro, making strange, mysterious passes with it, before attempting to signal a message. “If I can only get their attention at our camp!” he muttered yearningly.

There were a few very anxious moments.

Then Captain Andy roared up to the signalman:

“It’s all right! You’ve got ’em! They see you. There’s a light showing upon a peak of those other dunes that wasn’t there before. Most likely they were out searching an’ watching for a signal from you. Go ahead with the message!”

Then Ken lowered the lantern with its strong reflector almost to his feet, his left arm held the blazing broom at arm’s length—sowing a hissing fire-crop in the sea—to form the letter S.

“Safe. Kenjo.” He spelled it out by the code, fiery letter by letter.

“Isn’t it wonderful—that fire-talk?” breathed little Kitty; Mary-Jane Peg and the orchard seemed very far away; she had not begun to live until now.

“Broom’s not burned out yet, Cap!” shouted down the Scout to Captain Andy. “Here’s for signaling a message that’ll keep ’em guessing all night!”

“What’s that?”

“‘Safe at Camp Morning-Glory’! Sounds as if we were camping on the sun’s trail. Here goes! Watch—me!”

The broom-handle, sprayed with oil, was sacrificed to Glory, the lingering flame of the besom, of the compressed corn fibre, having given out.

But if ever a camp broom perished gloriously, that one did.

Its waterside illumination set the sea aflame, lit up the brown, beaded figures of the girls, caused far distant lighthouses, with other nocturnal eyes gleaming from headland and hill up and down the opposite shore of the river, to pale and wink themselves out for the moment.

Ken tossed the handle into the river, a proud Scout having demonstrated that along every line it was not “Skirts go ahead—skirts take the lead!” even if they were ceremonial skirts.

“Well! I guess our Scoutmaster and Toiney will feel easy about us now; they surely got some of that message I flashed ’em,” he proclaimed sliding down the rock, feeling like a king-boy. “’Twas good of you girls to let me make a fire-stick an’ fiddlestick out o’ your camp broom,” laughing triumphantly. “We owe you a supper, too, Tommy an’ I—I hope you’ll let us pay it back some time!”

“Oh! yes, when we visit your camp—if we ever do. Boys can’t cook like girls, though!”

“Can’t they? Haw! Haw!” came in accents of cotton-wool irony from the Astronomer’s padded throat. “We’ll give you red-flannel hash, with frills to it. I say, Ken, let’s give ’em something now—let’s give a rousing Scout yell for them! She”—leveling a fat finger at Penelope—“first got me to thinking that I only thought I thought, she thought I was poisoned. Hey! that was the way of it, wasn’t it?” appealing to the convulsed Penny. “Now, then, rise to it, Kenjo!”

The youthful signalman fought shy of this ebullition at first, but on Captain Andy’s saying approvingly: “That’s the very caper! Good idea, Ken; go ahead an’ drive it!” he did drive the patriotic yell in honor of their girl-hostesses with all the might that was in him.

With his arm across the Astronomer’s fat back as the latter stood with cushioned legs wide apart upon the sands, Tommy’s arm, likewise, embracing his backbone, swaying together like double bellows, they pantingly drove that yell while the dune-breeze joined in and the sonorous gush of the high tide, too, seemed to proclaim that it was the “very caper,” a proper tribute, indeed.

“A-M-E-R-I-C-A

Boy Scouts! Boy Scouts!

U. S. A.

Camp Fire Girls! Camp Fire Girls!

Camp Fire Girls!”

“Oh-h!” It was a prolonged ejaculation; the girls’ eyes were wet and winking above the wreathing smiles upon their lips as the notes boomed off over the night-tide, setting the river a-roar.

“Oh, this has been a won-der-ful evening altogether,” said the Guardian, her face an illumination that beamed softly upon the final echo which seemed to strike those distant dunes upon the opposite side of the tidal-river.

“Aye! Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls!” chuckled Captain Andy meditatively. “Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls, theirs—theirs is the coming tide!”

CHAPTER XII

FLOURED GLASS

Sesooā heard a sob. A frank sob that published the trouble of some girl’s heart to the dunes and to the sea! And Sally did not know what to do about it.

It was the first sob she had heard during the six weeks that the girls of the Morning-Glory Camp Fire had been camping on the white Sugarloaf.

“Somebody is thinking that it’s nearly the end of August and that we’ll be going back to the city pretty soon!” she surmised. “Oh-h, to be a seal!” The golden spark in her eyes, the dancing firefly, lit out over the waves and hovered above a sleek dog-like head, but larger than a dog’s, appearing above the water some fifty yards from the white beach on which she stood. “Oh, to be a harbor seal and stay here always to sun oneself on a sands-pit in summer and in winter ride an ice-cake, as the seals do! I was made to be a wild thing!” Her laughter rippled, clear and low, like the ebbing tide, but she dammed it up lest it should intrude upon the feeling betrayed by that other unaccountable sound which she had just heard, coming from the farther side of a barrier of rock that intersected the beach.

“I wonder, now, which of the girls it is?” she silently speculated. “Is Kitty yearning for her orchard and the grunting society of Mary-Jane Peg? But she seems so happy here among us! Yet, perhaps, the scare we got three days ago upset her, when that big seal dived under our rowboat and upset it, half-way up ’Loaf Creek! Oh, bubbles! that was a bad spill.” Here another low splash of laughter dropped its liquid notes to mingle with the distant mirth of the tide, breaking far out, as Sesooā, in thought, glanced past the rock-barrier, past some acres of intervening dunes freshly swept by a southwesterly wind, at the winding blue creek, Sugarloaf Creek, that crept in round the back of the Sugarloaf Peninsula until it lost itself in the woods where the fat Astronomer came to grief.

“Captain Andy says we were lucky to see a seal out of the water even at the cost of a ducking,” she ruminated further, “and that we, probably, wouldn’t have done so at all if that great big fellow, weighing a couple of hundred pounds or so, hadn’t gone far up the creek after the ‘feed,’ meaning the huge eel that he was devouring, half out of water, when we rowed round a marshy bend right on to him.... Goodness! of all the ‘mix-ups’ then! I’ll never forget it!” The last words formed themselves aloud in her laughter-filled throat. “Six of us girls struggling in the water! Sybil and Kitty an’ Betty up to their necks although ’Loaf Creek is shallow! And that big, spotted harbor seal which bumped into us and capsized us, just making for the creek’s mouth as hard as he could swim! I guess he knew where the deep water was, all right!”

She stood gazing out at the receding tide, seeing again the sleek head of the capsizing mammal as he put for the open water, the tidal channel, doubtless, vowing by the shades of his ancestors, the tidal tadpoles, that he would never be caught up a narrow creek again by a boat-load of shrieking girls.

“I hardly think it’s Kitty who is sorrowful or ‘peeved’ over something.” Sally was conscious of the thought which crowded out the seal as another low, gulping noise, mysteriously like a sob, came from the other side of the crusted barrier of rock. “That doesn’t sound like Kitty, either!” She put her ear to the crusty rock-heart. “Kitty Sill behaved as well as any of us all through the ducking in the creek—our wildest adventure as yet—all she said when it was over and we were safe in the boat again was: ‘Will you tell Mary-Jane Peg that I was brave?’ She’s simply killing with her talk about that pedigreed pig! She’s the funniest little thing! And Jessica vowed she’d make a special call on Mary-Jane.... Oh, gracious!” Sally’s hands came softly together upon a flame of dismay that scorched their palms. “Good gracious, I do believe it’s Jessica, herself—Morning-Glory, if you please—who’s having a quiet cry ‘all by her lonely’! And she’s the most popular girl in camp.”

The camp favorite, the most popular girl, had, nevertheless, if sounds could be trusted, a pent-up trouble of some kind which she wasn’t withholding from the sea; there was a restless movement on the other side of the rock as if somebody rolled over on the sands, followed by a lonely, grieved sobbing that appealed to the ebbing tide for comfort.

Now, all at once, impulsive Sally was filled with a jealousy of that low-ebb tide for being chosen as a confidant; she would have liked to thrust it farther out still. Before she knew what she was doing this feeling and another, overwhelming curiosity, spread wide their wings and wafted her lightly over the rock-barrier.

She descended with a pounce upon the other side and immediately began to flutter and cackle inarticulately, like a hen in a flowerbed.

The patch of white beach beyond the rock-fence was fairly abloom with colored articles which attracted the scanty sunshine that, to-day, was having a tilt with the ruffling southwesterly wind as to which should rule the weather.

One sunbeam poked his finger inquisitively among the small blocks of paint in a box of water-colors lying open upon the sands. Another slanted his eye like an amused connoisseur at a sheet of cardboard pinned down by a chunk of pale driftwood and bearing a crude, very highly colored painting of blue water between dauby green marsh-banks and of a boat being upset by some fabulous sea-monster that was apparently trying to climb into it.

Sally jumped to the conclusion that this was meant for a kind of “colored supplement” comic illustration of the accident which had happened in ’Loaf Creek, on which her thoughts had lately been dwelling, for the seal had the ears of a jackass and claws an inch long upon his fore-flippers which grappled the side of the boat.

She cackled exceedingly at sight of it and shuffled in the sand, like the hen who has found not colors only, but something fruitful, also, in the bed of bloom.

Then she caught her breath with an amazed start, like Captain Andy’s when he saw the same sort of thing; a third sunbeam was surveying himself under difficulties in a sheet of glass about the size of a small window-pane, which looked as if it had been floured over, dulled and whitened by a very watery paste of some kind.

“Gee whiz!” exclaimed Sally who thought that she had eschewed slang with Penelope before her eyes as a horrible example. “What are you doing with the pane of glass, Jessica dearie, mixing biscuits on it?” with a low explosion of laughter.

“No-o,” mumbled the owner of the flowerbed who, with face averted from the intruder, looked rather like a glossy, green shrub trained and clipped into fantastic shape, of the style which, once upon a time, presided over old-fashioned gardens; for her sweater of dark green wool and her Camp Fire Girl’s Tam O’Shanter finished with an emerald pompon matched in hue her olive-green khaki skirt—all of which apparently failed to create a verdant atmosphere of spring in her young heart at present.

“Are you trying cookery experiments on the glass?” laughed Sesooā, much mystified and excitingly tickled by curiosity, for her roving gaze now took in among the litter of articles on the sands a little earthenware crock with a paste that looked like very thin, dyspeptic dough in it. “Olive—Blue Heron—says that her father used to declare that her cookery ought to be tried upon the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals before human beings were allowed to partake of it—that was before she became a Camp Fire Girl—but you’re testing it on the pane of glass. Why! Jess—Jessica—Morning-Glory—I didn’t mean to tease you, honey; you’re not peeved with me for finding you here all alone and feeling blue, are you?” Sesooā flung herself upon her knees on the wind-ruffled sand and slipped an arm around the green shoulders of her Camp Fire Sister whose breast was again ploughed by random sobs.

Sally—the little oriole of the city playground—was gay in throat and inquisitive as that orange-and-black songster, but she was wonderfully soft of heart, too; she bit her lip and puckered up her eye-corners, determined that, if she could help it, a Camp Fire Sister should not weep alone any more than she should stand alone.

Then in the space of one long breath her working face was smoothed out as if an electric iron passed over it. Her glance had fallen again upon the dauby comic picture of the blue creek and the boat with half-formed human figures, some of which were being wildly shot into the air by a dragon-like seal.

“Ha! you were painting that—our ducking in ’Loaf Creek—for little Rebecca, weren’t you?” Caressingly she dropped her chin upon the green heave of Morning-Glory’s shoulders. “You’re going to send it to her, eh? But surely you’re not crying about her? She probably doesn’t realize that she’s deaf-and-dumb, different from other children. And you’ve done so much for her, dearie, saving her life and all—the Eagle Scout only came in on the tail-end of the rescue. And you can do more when we go back to the city.”

“Oh! what d’you take me for? F-Fudge! I’m not crying about her—I’m not so—so soft—what earthly g-good would it do her?”

The Morning-Glory’s broken accents were snappish, scraping against a rasp within.

“Well! you needn’t eat me up for suggesting it.” Sally withdrew her chin and made a face at the green shoulders whose back was still toward her. “I’m going away if you’re as cross as a thorn!”