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!