“C. F. G.! C. F. G.!
We are the Camp Fire C. F. G.!
Oh! none with us can compare,
For we looked over
And picked the clover,
And the World’s lit up
With our Camp Fires everywhere!”
“And, fegs! wi’ an aging, sober body like mysel’, if he isn’t a-picking o’ the clover blossoms, he’s a-smelling o’ them the night,” softly soliloquized Andrew, the chauffeur, as he listened to that halcyon song around the Pinnacle blaze–feeling barred out of Clover Land himself, as he lay among the ferns, because of the “one sair memory”, the whiff of heather ever and anon wafted to his nostrils, asit seemed, from the grave of a fifteen-year-old lassie away back in Scotland.
“Hum-m! if ’tweren’t for that, I could maist fling out an’ dance the ‘Rigs o’ Barley’ a-watching o’ those happy lasses,” he whimsically confessed in the ear of a king fern. “I could, for sure, same’s we used to dance it in the glen around a bonfire!”
But if the heather in his heart, reinforcing chauffeur primness, checked even the first lashing kick of a Highland Fling, it did not restrain him, that grave Church Elder, from taking part later in something fully as giddy; a wild and storming torchlight procession.
“Now! what we need, girls, is a good r-rich pine-knot, with a juicy, resinous knot in it, that will burn ten minutes, anyway, for signaling purposes,” said Tomoke, the personified Lightning, as the “C. F. G.” proclamation over, the magic moment came for the flashing of the light of this particular camp fire in speaking fire from mountain to mountain–acrossthe mile and a half of intervening valley. That inflammable knot was not hard to find. Split with the toy axe which the girl who had won an honor bead for signaling carried at her belt–a modern Maid Marion, at home in all woodcraft–it blazed, transplendent, a foot-long flambeau, searching the Pinnacle’s darkest nooks, winning sleepy birds from their slumbers, calling upon them to follow too, as Tomoke, nimble of foot as her aërial namesake, presently dashed up the hill, with it held high!
Brilliant as a starshell–where near-by objects were concerned–it counted the needles upon the little, awed pine trees. It painted the wild excitement upon leaping girls’ faces, lit dancing Jack-o’-lanterns in their eyes as, scrambling, they followed the light-shod leader–gold-slippered by the torch–in a breathless tumble-up over rock and needled carpet, amid scandalized bough and shamefaced crag and little, blinking torrent.
It turned to nocturnal dewdrops the bright eyes of the birds,–scandalized, too, yet resolved, at all costs, to come in on the fun!
Robins, flame-breasted in the glow, a black-throated green warbler–blossom of the night–a purple grackle, its boat-tail stiff as a fan-shaped rudder, and, “leggeddy-last,” a cawing crow, they circled on low wing after the brilliant torch,–all pecking at the wonder in the air!
It caught the whooping amazement on Andrew’s smooth-shaven upper lip, shimmering through a veil of anxiety lest, somewhere, there might be another “Deev’s Chair” around, or a madcap lassie to sit in it, as, with an irresistible “Hoot mon!” he brought up the rear of the fantastic revel; the rush of green-clad maidens, the elfin tassels of their Tam-o’-shanters waving, and of demented birds for the Pinnacle’s tallest crag.
Poised upon that gray rock-shelf, highabove the ground, her slight face with the shining eyes, framed in the radiant torch-light as in a golden miniature, the signaler’s right arm held the blazing knot with its ragged, foot-long flame at arm’s length above her head, then described a brief quarter circle to the left with it, quick, snappy–once, twice–the arm being extended on a level with the young shoulder so slim, so stiffened!
“See!–See! That stands for I: two dots! I, three times repeated, gives the call,” breathed the Guardian at Pem’s elbow, her mature face a gold-set miniature of excitement, too.
“Oh–oh! I wonder if they’ll ‘get us’, those boys–those joking Henkyl Hunters?” The throbbing question was on every girlish lip. Eyes burned, like the torch, across the valley.
The mountains were falling asleep in their night-caps of mist.
But suddenly one of them, far away, grim and dim, lifted an eyelid–and responded.
The drowsy valley caught its breath–as old Round-top winked back.
Caught its breath with many a waking scintilla of light in the pointed flash of pool and stream!
A momentary, broken arc, a shattered rainbow dividing the flood of dusk above from the gulf of darkness below; and then–and then the triumphant cry in each gasping throat:
“They’ve got us! They see us! Now–now for the message: ‘Two strange girls with us. You....’”
But there the Lightning’s lore suddenly gave out, her signaling memory, as the news was vivaciously transmitted by staccato dot and lengthier dash, the latter being the same quarter-circle once described in a single movement to the right.
Over the valley the message was hung up. It was hung up in Pem’s heart, too,–and the honor, the fair grace, of boyhood with it.
If old Round-top unhesitatingly playedup, “came across” with an invitation–an invitation to that alluring Get Together at the winter palace of the Snowbirds, then she would feel that a nickum’s rudeness was atoned for–and Jack at a Pinch might go his graceless road, never to prove a friend in need to her again–not if she knew it!
“Invite them to the picnic ... and don’t forget the cocoa!”
The valley fairly bristled with the promptness of it–the skilled directness of the message, so rapidly, so spontaneously given that the poised Lightning on the crag was hard-pressed to keep up with the meaning–to read the handwriting of fire and give the interpretation thereof.
Old Round-top had seized the shining hour. The Henkyl Hunters were no “chuffs”, no conundrums, with the strange riddle of incivility up a sleeve.
“‘Invite them to the picnic–and don’t forget the cocoa!’” Tanpa laughed.“Just like them! We did promise to lay in a fresh supply of sundries, as we pass through the town to-night–if there’s still a store left open. And that reminds me, girlies, that it’s getting late. We have no right to keep the birds out of bed any longer, demoralizing the feathered world.”
But the Lightning had recovered its morale, its memory, prompted by a Morse code-card excitedly snatched from a green breast pocket and explored by the light of the dwindling torch.
“Invite–your–friends–to–our–d-a-n-c-e,” slowly spelled out Tomoke, giving back diamond for diamond.
She was beginning upon the word “A-ll”, but the pine-knot winked itself out in a dazzlement on “dance,”–in an effulgence of sparks that fell like golden rain upon the hearts of the visitors.
“Will it–will it be an outdoor affair–a piazza dance?” gasped Una. “Oh-h! I do love.... Now! Andrew!” She broke off suddenly at thechauffeur’s declaration that it was “magerful” show, “yon fire-talk”, that he never expected to see the like carried on by “tids o’ lassies”, but that it really wasn’t in him to stand there any longer rolling his eyes over it, like a duck in thunder. “Now, Andrew!” reasoned his employer’s young daughter. “You know that you’ve driven my father and mother, and Professor Lorry, too, to a dinner-party, where the professor is to give a talk about the Thunder Bird–and oh! may its fiery tale be a long one to-night–you won’t have to fetch them home for another two hours yet.”
“Hoot! It’s saft as peppermint. I am wi’ ye, Miss Una, but it’s time for all lassies to gang home,” returned the other with paternal insistence, lifting his cap in questioning appeal to the Guardian.
“He’s right, dear.Wemust be starting for the home camp, too–just as soon as we’ve seen that our fire is thoroughly extinguished,” said Tanpa.“Our paths don’t lie in the same direction, but we hope they often will in future. As to the dance, it will be a piazza affair, if the evening is fine–the festive wind-up of an exciting day, our White Birch anniversary which we celebrate with rites and symbolic dancing, in honor of our patron, our woodland lady, the leafing birch tree.”
“How lovely; per-fect-ly love-ly!” flowed from the visitors, both, in a silvery ripple.
“Well! how about your spending a few days in camp with us then–at our camp on the Bowl–if your elders are willing?” went on the gracious grown-up woman, with warmth as golden as the sunburst on her breast. “We’ll let Pemrose Lorry plant the tallest birch sapling in honor of the Thunder Bird. Long–long before it’s a full-grown tree, let us hope, the Bird will have made its great migration, crossing, not a continent, but space! And now, dears,au revoir! to meet again at Snowbird Cave.”
“Well!you certainly are the laziest bunch; you’d carry a whole bakery in your knapsacks rather than do any cooking–especially if there are girls around. Lazy as Ludlam’s dog you are! Next time–next time, I’ll set you to peeling potatoes.”
It was the chaffing voice of the Scoutmaster, Malcolm Seaver, which spoke, addressing some twenty scouts who were scattered about the vine-draped entrance to Snowbird Cave, where, yearly, the little gray-white junco birds–otherwise snow-birds–fluffy balls, with no heads to speak of, wintered among the low hemlocks near the cavern’s mouth and fed upon the spicy hemlock bark.
“I–I wonder if you could tell me of what breed Ludlam’s dog was, sir? If he could burn up daylight chasing his tail any better than this crowd can, lolling around on a picnic, he must be the limit.”
The answer came with the low, drawling laugh of Stud Bennett, otherwise Studart, brother to Jessie, the “merle’s” calling mate, who was himself playing fiddle-faddle in the sunshine, after a four-mile hike.
“Humph! Well,I’moff to locate a spring–where’s the blue bucket? When I get back you’llhaveto turn to, you dummies, build a fire and unpack the commissariat–otherwise rolls by the dozen. The ‘duff’ and Frankforts are in the ‘Baby’, I guess.” The Scoutmaster shot a glance at a big, brown duffle bag reposing on a mound, capable of containing ten bags of rations, each pertaining to individual scouts on a long hike, yet hardly sufficient to transport the “cates”, the luncheon for eighteen Camp FireGirls and twenty scouts, plus a couple of invited guests, on a Together picnic.
“Are there any boys and girls who are dying to come with me, to prospect for water?” he put forth alluringly, to the rhythmic swing of the big water bucket in his right hand, painted bright blue.
There was an instant volunteering flutter among certain green-clad girls and lads in khaki, breezing up from the grass where they had languished; others held back.
“I’d rather explore the cave–I love creepy caves–and we haven’t been half through it yet,” said Pemrose Lorry.
Forthwith Stud, the Henkyl Hunter, decided that cave-exploiting was the pastime for him; there was rarely a younger boy–Studart was barely fifteen–who did not become the captive knight of this older girl with the sky in her eyes under jet-black lashes!
Jessie, sister of Stoutheart, she of the thrush-song in her heart, wanted to be near to the girl who was mate to aThunder Bird, too; and others were drawn by the same abstract birdlime–or else the bat-stirred cave had lures.
“There–there’s a secret lobby in it,” said Stud, “a dark, rocky passage leading off from that queer black, three-cornered fissure in the right wall, ten feet from the ground–I guess nobody has ever explored it; nobody has cracked the nut of what’s behind that triangular crevice, so high up!”
“Come–come; that sounds exciting, very exciting!” remarked Tanpa, the Guardian, remaining behind too, as chaperon.
But her husband wheeled upon his jog-trot off after water, swinging his galvanized iron bucket after a manner to give the air the blues.
“Well! I wouldn’t try to crack the nut, solve the riddle, of what’s behind that queer-shaped crevice, Stud,” he said. “It’s black–black as a tinker’s pot in there. You wouldn’t know what you were heading into!”
“Aw, gammon! I wouldn’t be afraid to tackle that fissure–find out what’s back of it–although I’m not a Tin Scout–ha! ha!–out with the whole toyshop to-day; all my monkey trappings,” exploded a rough voice suddenly from among a trio of clownish-looking boys who hovered, vulture-like, on the edge of the picnic ground, transfixing with a sanguinary eye the Baby, whose soft heart was of blueberry “duff.”
“An’ I tell you what’s more, if I were to climb up an’ in there, I’d trust to my own ‘bean’ and a few matches, ’thout any gimcracks,” craked the boastful voice further, the special gewgaw on which the braggart fixed his eye, at the moment, being the little Baldwin safety lamp, four inches high, which Stud was just lighting, attached to the front of his olive-green scout hat.
“Tr-rust to your own ‘bean’–your own head–an’ what’s inside it! Well! I’ll admit it’s fiery enough,” flouted theHenkyl Hunter, piqued even in the presence of girls into giving back tit for tat. “But you’re carrying too many eggs in one basket, let me tell you, and you’re likely enough to take a leap in the dark an’ smash ’em all.”
“Ha! Am I now,” snarled the other, resenting the implication that his brick-red head was a brash basket into which to pack all his chances of safety, such as were not anchored to the poor stay of a few fickle matches.
“Am I now-ow?” he chortled, very red in the face–and tongue-tied–as he shadowed the picnic party through the cave.
At his wits’ end for a verbal retort, he presently proceeded, after the manner of his kind, to throw a stone in his own garden.
“See here! you kids, if you’ll let me stand on your shoulders, you two, I’ll give those Tin Scouts an eye-opener,” he said, retaliating after a manner to hurtonly himself, as he addressed the two younger boys with him, his eyes cast up to that mysterious fissure, outlined, a rocky tripod, above his head, of which the Scoutmaster had remarked that all behind it was black as a tinker’s pot.
Into that ebony pot, forthwith, climbing by the willing step-ladder of his companions’ bodies, Ruddy, the rashling, presently thrust his head–that flaming head with all his chances in it!
His body followed, finding entrance through the crevice amidships, so to speak, where it broadened out to some three feet across from the tapering point of the lowest corner.
“Oh-h! look at him. Do look at him!” panted the girls, held up in their search for pale-faced cave flowers and strange fungi by the “derring-do” act.
“Gracious! some of you scouts ought to stop him–re-al-ly ought to stop him,” shrilled Jessie, catching her breath at the shock of darkness visible in the yawningfissure’s mouth, where the brief flicker of a match now chased bogies.
“Humph! We can’t head him off, Jess.” Her brother disclaimed responsibility with a shrug–while the little lamp winked sarcastically from his hatbrim–but in the heedful tone of the boy who had been trained to feel–as Toandoah did with his little petticoated pal–that Life was a game in which two could hunt together, even upon the trail of a Thunder Bird, and make good headway. “We can’t turn him back!” Stud shrugged his khaki shoulders. “But he’ll strike a blind bargain in there. Ha! There goes another ‘niggling’ match!”
A frippery flame, indeed, its reflection flickered a moment, a gold tooth in the fissure’s grinning mouth–darkness followed!
Two or three of the boy scouts–those who did not, like Stud, show incredulity, sarcasm gleaming, hawk-eyed, from a ruby lamp hooked to a hatband, andfrom a level eye beneath it–held their breath, dazzled; for the moment beaten at their own brave game of exploring.
So did the girl who had been piqued and dared into sitting in the Devil’s Chair–with a sheer abyss beneath her!
Again did her wide-open, staring eyes, under their black lashes, sport a Blue Peter, the flag of adventure.
“Oh! he’s plucky, anyhow. I wonder what he’ll find in there?” her palms were laid together upon a spicy filling of excitement. “He really is daring–awfully daring, you know!”
“Ha! Courage cobweb-weed!” muttered Stud laconically. “Well–well, he’ll have tears in his eyes before I go after him!”
And–with that–there was the rasp of a third “niggling” match, faintly-heard, far in, a momentary reflection, a tiny glance-coal, in the fissure’s leering mouth! And–and, following that, a shriek!
A shriek, headlong, sinking andpitching–dying like a falling star, as if some clutch were stifling it.
“Hea-vens!” The girls, blanching, shrank against the opposite cave-wall, which shuddered behind them.
A bat, flying low, a winged Fear, brushed Tanpa’s cheek, as she stood, transfixed,–and her cry was almost as hysterical as theirs.
In the blackness of that Tinker’s Pot behind the looming fissure, were there other things–other things besides a boy, a broken braggart of a boy?
Was Death in the pot with him? Had he sipped of its mystery–only to perish? Death–it seemed a raving possibility–in the shape of some wild animal, perhaps–a live, a clutching claw!
Tales were always current among the mountains, trappers’ tales–and most of them airy “traveler’s yarns”, too–of strange tracks seen in lonely spots, of lynx and bobcat; and even of the young and roving panther.
To be sure, a three-cornered tunnel, the second floor back of a lofty cave, would be the last place to look for such an ambush, unless there was some fly-trap opening to it from above. But there might be!
Boys and girls, both, their blood flamed upon the fear, then froze–until the silence, the bat-churned cave silence, was hung with icicles above them.
Then, once more, it was ripped from on top by that perishing shriek–passing strange, remote–but now it was as if the fissure’s three-cornered mouth filled with it, faintly gibbered the one word: “C-caught!”
“’Caught!’ Oh! Stud, you warned him; it’s his own doing. Let those other two boys–his friends–climb up to him! Well–if you feel–you–must?”
Jessie’s cry gibbered in agony in her throat, too, liquid as the thrush-tone in terror for its mate. But it struck a high note at the end.
For Stud’s hand was gropingmechanically for the bright little lamp above his forehead, as if for inspiration, his left for the lariat at his waist, in defiance of his threat that the desperado in the “pot” might have tears in his eyes before he would help him.
But there was something worse than cave-tears in question now–of that Studart felt sure.
And Pem, watching,–Jessie, too–caught from an entering shaft of day-light which shivered as if aghast, the reflection of the tightening glow upon his young face–the waggish features of the Henkyl Hunter!
And she recognized it, by the feeling of her stiff, cold cheeks, as she clapped her hands to them–did Toandoah’s little chum–for the glow which had electrified her own when she fought her way out of a swamped Pullman, saving her friend, driving it into the teeth of the flood, and of the World, too, that neither her father’s honor, nor his invention–noranything he ever turned out–was a Quaker gun; letting fly with it faintly at a rescuing youth, too, when she bade him “take Una first.”
For by that glow as by an altar-lamp, in whose gleam she had worshiped before she saw as the strong boy’s hand went automatically to his equipment that lamp and lariat were nothing–nothing–“without the heart of a Scout!”
“W-wedged!... Wedged!”
Now–now it was another word which jabbered faintly in the dark fissure’s mouth! A girl caught it–or thought she did.
“Wedged!” she echoed wildly. “Caught! Oh, maybe–maybe–there’s nothing in there but Ruddy himself!”
“Maybe–so!” Stud panted heavily while, across an inner, gaping hollow, the next words took a giant stride to his lips: “Anyhow–I’m going up!”
“Oh–Studley!” But beyond this one faint cry, Jessie, stanch little partner,–the girl behind the lines,–said no more to hinder him now, as she watched the scout detach his little lamp from his hatbrim and hook it on to his khaki breast.
With it glowing there, a headlight forhis gallant heart, Stud set himself to climb. Standing upon the shoulders of two brother scouts, in his belt a club snatched from one of them, he reached the lowest point of the tapering fissure.
“Ha! There he goes, in spite of his teeth,” tremored a younger boy.
“His teeth aren’t chattering!” Pem’s eyes–lightning-blue–hurled back the charge.
The denial rang in Stud’s ears as he thrust his head into the black opening, entering, amidships, as the former muddle-headed explorer had done.
“That girl’s a trump–the girl with eyes the color of the little ‘heal-all’, that blue flower we pick up here in May! A trump! But so’s little Jess, too!”
Thus did Stoutheart, a knight of to-day, pay tribute to the world he left behind him, when he felt in his exploring knees, now creeping along the bottom of the Tinker’s Pot, that there was a chance of his leaving it behind forever.
“I don’t see what else hecouldhave done,” said Tanpa, the Guardian, her fingers hysterically interlocking. “Somebody had to go up; and he’s the oldest boy–a Patrol Leader. But, oh! I wish my husband were here. Run and meet him, a couple of you!” She glanced appealingly at the scouts. “Oh! do–and hurry him back–back from the spring.”
Meanwhile Stud had forgotten even his backers in the feminine hearts below and was banking all on just one trusty ally–the headlight on his breast.
“Without the light, the little safety lamp, I couldn’t do-o it,” he told himself. “Gee! but it is as black in here as Erebus, a Tinker’s Pot, indeed–the blindest passage–blindest bargain–I ever struck! So–so sharp underneath, too!”
Yes, difficulty masked was in the “bargain”, yet he crept on over tapering ridges of rock that now and again buckled like teeth. But he knew by the parched sound of his own voice, as he shouted aquestion, that his courage might have ended in smoke, there and then, if it weren’t for the little lamp at his breast.
So rosily it burned now, in here, that its feeding oil seemed the red blood of his heart!
“Anyhow–anyhow, with it, I’ll be able to see which way the cat jumps!”
Here, Stoutheart more tightly gripped the club; the last words might prove more than mere figure of speech.
From ahead came strange, gurgling, choking sounds, rising from somewhere–growing weaker.
“Where–where are you, Ruddy? Answer! R-rap–rap out something, if you can!” he adjured.
And it was–truly–a rapping reply that reached him; a queer, hollow knocking at the door of some throat that semed shutting.
“My word! What on earth ... what in thunder’s got him?” Stud felt his own breath blow hot and cold together, but–thiscrucial moment it came back to him–the eyes of a girl out there had driven it home, with blue lightnings, that he did nothaveto defy his teeth.
“Humph! I’m no quitter,” he told the piloting breast-ray, blazing its ruby trail ahead. “Well-ll! for the love of Mike! Well! what do you know about that?... What have we h-here?”
In answer to his gasping snort, as he gaped and gasped there in the darkness, the little safety lamp told him what it made of it–of the staggering sight–it made a pair of big feet in rough cowhide boots tightly wedged by the ankles in a buckling switch of rock where two sharp, narrow ridges that formed the bottom of the Tinker’s Pot dovetailed into each other,–after the manner of rails at a switch.
Ruddy, the slipslop explorer, had gone in heels over head, so to speak. He was hanging by the heels now. Nothing visible of him but those pinioned feet!
“Hea-vens!he did strike a blind bargain. S-such a snag! The passage ends here. A drop! A–blank–fall of rock! Gee-ee!”
Dank–dank as cave-tears now was the moisture upon Stud’s forehead. For the first time his teeth almost chattered. What would he see when he held the lamp over the edge of the Tinker’s Pot into the horror of that empty space beyond where the passage broadened into blankness and the rock shelved sharply down? A dead boy? Or one so far gone from hanging that he could not be rescued?
At the first sight of those wedged feet he had felt inclined to laugh. Now he was laughing at the wrong side of his mouth, as he peeped over the brink.
“Oh-h! the rockisn’tperpendicular; it slants down, though, pretty sharply–down into an inner cave–by gracious! And Ruddy, the way he’s hanging his nose, is within an inch or two o’ the floor of that other cave!... And, yet, he’s helpless! Helpless as if he had a halterround his neck! Oh-h! if some of the other fellows were here.”
But Stud did not seem to be quite alone; he was one and a half; for the hearts of two girls were pendent fromhisneck; outside he knew they were backing him,–praying for him.
Also, that frenzied gurgle from the victim’s throat, his choking cry as the light struck him, the squirming body and up-rolling eyes told the boy scout that he was just in time; although the foam was pink upon Ruddy’s lips and his congested head was a fire-ball, indeed,–that brash head with all his chances in it.
“Ha!
“No Loyal Scout gives place to doubt,
But action quick he shows!”
The song, his own, the original march-song of his troop, sang itself through Stud’s brain, seethed in the low whistle upon his lips, as, guided by his ruby breast-eye, he slid down into that strange and secretdungeon in which the black passage ended and, thrusting his sturdy shoulders under the pendent body of the victim whose convulsed hands clutched vainly at the bare slab, raised it so that the choking boy could breathe freely again–and in due time shake off the dizziness of his awful plight, hung up by the heels by the rock itself.
But not until the Scoutmaster came to his patrol leader’s assistance could those pinioned feet be really freed and their owner brought to daylight again, not by a return via the fissure route, but hoisted in a rope-noose, as Pem had been from the Devil’s Chair, through a grass-covered opening discoverable in the roof of that inner cave.
“Goodness! after all, he wasn’t so much more foolish–headstrong–than I was. But Una! Una! If you ever-r tell them!” Thus did the maiden of the chowchow name spill her spice into her friend’s ear,–burning spice, for, privately, she was shockedat seeing her own folly, parodied, vulgarized, as it were.
“Well! I should say! He was hanging between hawk and buzzard–if ever a fellow was,” happened to be Stud’s moved comment as, clinging to that lowered rope, he was hoisted, too, through that covert opening, the loyal little lamp upon his breast paling now into a penny candle held towards the sun.
But the rescuer’s halo did not pale.
It burnished the picnic luncheon which followed, encircling, rainbow-like, little Jessie who basked in it more than did the rebellious hero, pelted with wild flowers by the girls–as symbolic of other bouquets.
“Oh! let up–let up–will you? Those big fellows will take me for the ‘goat’–somebody’s ‘goat’!” protested Stud helplessly, striving to direct attention from himself by training it upon a straggling group of distant youths, really too far off to take stock of what was going on among the merry picnic party.
But Pemrose was taking stock of them. Her widening eyes, her reddening cheeks, the little piqued shiver that electrified her chin, told that one figure–one figure–called for recognition; called for it, indeed, so loudly that it couldn’t be denied him.
Every member of that group–a canoeing party, a wading party, it was, just landed from the near-by river, the blue Housatonic–was a blaze of color.
But the sturdiest among them was simply barbaric. The warm sunlight of May dripped golden from his nickum shoulders, bronzed to the hue of a statue, bathed his bare knees and feet, his khaki shorts, the flame of an apricot jersey, the black and yellow cap,–the sheaf of mayflowers within his arm.
“Oh! how boys–big boys–do revel in color. A girl–any girl I ever knew–is demure in her taste beside them,” murmured the Camp Fire Guardian, with amused, motherly tolerance.
“Pshaw! I think it’s hor-rid. So flashy!” snapped Pemrose; Jack at a Pinch had made gorgeous his incivility and was parading it before her eyes.
“Oh, boy! Look at that middle fellow. He’d have a grosbeak ‘skun a mile’!” gasped Stud, following the direction of her glance, with a virtuous consciousness of his own cave-soiled khaki, moderately lit by merit badge and service stripe.
“‘Grosbeak!’ Oh, but I love grosbeaks! And all that color–why! it paints the landscape,” came flutteringly from Aponi, the White Birch Butterfly, least Priscilla-like in her tastes of the Group, when she was not in Camp Fire green, or soft-toned ceremonial dress.
“Maybe ’twill paint the blues in old Tory Cave, if we run across them there,” put in Tomoke, maiden of the flambeau and the fire-talk. “They certainly are a perfect ‘scream’, those big boys,” her eyes merrily following that clamor of color now wending back towards the canoes.
“Humph! they’d have to ‘go some’ to leaven the blues of Tory Cave,” remarked the Scoutmaster, laughingly addressing himself to a roll. “The biggest bonfire on earth wouldn’t half dry the cave-tears there.”
“Yes, that’s the den of the Doleful Dumps–their diggings!” laughed a younger scout, flourishing aloft a mess-mug, the gray of his rolling eyes. “Bats–bats as big as saucers–no, soup-plates! And, far in–far in–the sound of running water, like a weak wind!”
“Running water! Invisible running water! A–weak–wind! Oh-h! do let us hurry and go on there. We have to cross the river; haven’t we?” The gurgle of that cloistered brooklet was already in Pem’s heart as her dilating gaze spanned the Housatonic, broad and open, “warbling” amid its soft meadow slopes, as she had looked upon it from the Devil’s Chair. “But, goody! I hope wewon’trun across him there–Jack at a Pinch! Flauntinground like a grosbeak!” She bit the thought into an olive. “Stud’s no grumpy riddle–if he is a Stoutheart, like the other!”
Runningwater! Invisible running water! The voice behind the scenes prompting the play,–the grim play of bat and rat and reptile in old Tory Cave, where the rocks wept, the little strolling sunbeams clapped their hands, and the great fungi, primrose-skirted, drooped over a drama never finished!
It was even more romantic than the girls had hoped for,–such romance as clings, cobweb-like, to melancholy.
Like a weak wind, truly, a sad wind blowing from nowhere, was the purl of that hidden streamlet whose mystery no man had penetrated–nor ever seen its flow–mournfully as cave tears it dripped upon the ears and hearts of the girls.
“Pshaw! Who cares for weeping rocks, though they look as if they were bursting with grief and ready to tear their pale hair–that queer growth clinging to them. Humph! Only crocodile tears, anyhow, like ‘Alice in Wonderland!’” cried Ista, the laughing Eye of the White Birch Group, whose everyday name was Polly Leavitt.
“It’snotthe tears and it’s not that horribly sad lake with the little, blind, colorless fish in it, that I mind–it’s the Bats!” screamed Una Grosvenor. “Oh-h!” as the mouse-like head of the cave mammal and its skinny wing almost brushed her face.
“Well! They’re not brick-bats,” came reassuringly from one of the boys, as the Togetherers ranged through the outer part of that vast Tory Cave–once the hiding-place of a political refugee, whose spirit seemed flitting among them in the filmy cave-fog which, dank and mournful, clung about the margin of that strange lake of fresh water where blind fish played.
Presumably fed by that cloistered brooklet, whose cell, far in, in an impenetrable recess, no human foot had ever trod, the lakelet had the floor to itself, so to speak, so that in places scouts with their lamps, and girls pairing off with their exploring brothers, one piloting eye between them, had difficulty in skirting it–without a ducking.
“Whew! a ducking in the dark–a cave-bath–horrible!” cried Pemrose. “Oh, mer-rcy! what–what is it?”
“Bah! Only a garter snake–a pretty fellow,” laughed Studley, picking the slim, striped thing up from a corner of the blind lake where it was amphibiously basking, and letting it curl around his khaki arm, investigating the merit badges of the patrol leader.
The green and red of the life-saver’s embroidered badge, the crossed flags of the expert signaler, the white plow of the husbandman, they enlivened the gloom a wee bit, winking up at the safety lamphooked to his hat-band, as he bent over the illumined reptile.
But they did not challenge it as did the flash of an apricot sweater, blood-red in the ruby lamplight, of a black and yellow cap, several yellow and black caps, suddenly–eagerly–thrust near.
“He’s big–big for a garter, isn’t he, Buddy?” remarked a voice that did not come from the ranks of Togetherers, of Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls, excitedly scrutinizing Stud’s novel armlet.
Neither–neither was it the voice of the nickum, so much Pemrose knew, as she edged coldly a little away,–a little nearer to the dim and sighing lake-edge.
Yet he was among them, those gaudy big boys, whose flare of color merely striped the cave-dusk, like the dingy markings upon the snake’s squirming back.
He actually had his armful of mayflowers, too, the nickum, not the snake;passëmayflowers, with the tan of decay on them, was nursing them carefully, as if they werepart of a long lost heritage into which he had lately come–as if he were afraid to lay them down lest some alien should snatch them from him.
“He doesn’t look like a ‘chuff’–a boor. He looks like a really nice college boy, one with a hazing imp in his eye though, lur-rking in that little star–almost a squint; so–so like Una’s,” thought the inventor’s daughter, familiar with the student brand of boy. “Yet how could he be so uncivil to us, really–actually–snub us, after all he did, too? Goodness! wouldn’t I like to get a chance to snub him?” It was the Vain Elf which slept in the shadow of the Wise Woman in the breast of Pemrose Lorry, that stored this wish, laid it up, a vengeful arrow in the blue quiver of her eyes, now shooting piqued, sidelong glances at those flaunting big boys. “Why-yshouldwe run up against them here? Well! he’ll never get a chance to play Jack at a Pinch–friend in need–to me again.Watch me–watch me pick my steps!” She picked them so at random, at the moment, moving off, that she came near slipping in for that eerie ducking, with the blind fish–pale as phantoms, swimming round–and Stud, flinging the striped garter away, hurried after her–Jessie, too!
“Gee! this is a peach of a cave; isn’t it?” effervesced the scout sarcastically. “Melancholy so blooming thick that you could almost sup its sorrow with a spoon, eh?”
“It’s a regular cave of despair.” The lonely trill of the feathered hermit was in Jessie’s answering note. “That sad voice of water, a cascade–a stream–far in, which nobody ever saw!”
“I’d give worlds to see it!” said Pemrose.
“So would I!” Stud’s voice was pitched high. “If it weren’t for the Scoutmaster.... Tradition says that whoever drinks of that hidden water will have luck.”
“Well! I’d let somebody else have thepiping times if I were you, Buddy–if they depend on a draught from that mysterious spring.”
Now, it was the nickum who answered; the same scintillating tones they were–how bully they sounded then–which had quoted Shakespeare on “Something rotten in the State of Denmark”, amid other depressing waters, half hidden, half liberated by their ice-cloak.
“I can look out for my own ‘piping times’–thank you! And I’m not going to buy any pig in a poke–take any leap in the dark.”
The scout’s reply was bristling. To a fifteen-year-old patrol leader, a Henkyl Hunter, who went up and down upon the trail of a joke, there was a smack of condescension about that “Buddy”, used twice by those big boys; perhaps he, too, at that moment, laid up something against the youth of the flaming tone and rig.
“Humph! hasn’t he the nerve, butting in?” he muttered.
“He has–has all sorts of nerve,” agreed Pemrose readily, glancing sideways after the boy whose courage she knew to be as high as his colors.
“The Scoutmaster wouldn’t hear of our venturing in so far as to investigate that running water, anyhow,” said Studley. “My eye! What’s the rumpus now–the kettle o’ fish?”
It was a shriek from one girl–half-a-dozen girls. It was a loud hiss, almost a whistle, from some pallid vegetation near the lake-edge. It was a black snake rearing a blue-black head and glittering eye within three feet of Una Grosvenor, novice among Camp Fire Girls, whose scream tore at the very stones of Tory Cave until they cried out in echo.
It was a dozen green-clad girls scattering wildly this way and that, olive-green aspen leaves tossing in a whirlwind, shuffling from pillar to post–from rock to darkling rock.
It was–it was a powerful reptile form, in armor of jetty scales, trailing its six-footlength away, the noise of its mighty tail-blows against the earth and flying pebbles calling all the Dumps–the Doleful Dumps–out of the dens where they hid here, making them take strange and shadowy shapes, gigantic shapes, of threat.
“Let me get out! Oh-h! I want to get out, away–anywhere!” shuddered Una. “This is no-o fun.”
“Yes! it is–once you get used to it,” laughed Pemrose, who–together with the Jack at a Pinch still hovering near–liked her excitement warm. “Look–lookat him crimp himself along! Ever–ever see anything so crooked?” as the great muscle in the reptile’s body contracted and relaxed upon its hasty retreat. “When we girls had our War Garden, a year ago, an old farmer said we planted our potato rows so straight that he ‘vummed ’twould make a black snake seasick to cross from one to the other.’”
“Ha! Because he just naturally has to go ajee!” laughed her scout knight,estimating the length of that scaly corkscrew, if uncoiled, with his eye. “Pshaw! I’ve tamed ’em–and killed ’em, too,” he added.
“Yes! a black snake wouldn’t harm you, even if he did bite.” Pem was still reassuring her friend. “Did you hear him whistle?... But–but what’s that?” It was just half a minute later that she put the question. “He isn’t making that noise with his tail still; is he?”
She looked at Stud. Under the ruby eye of the lamp his face–the face of a Stoutheart–had turned suddenly pea-green.
His eyes were fixed upon a gleam of bloated yellow dimly seen, under the lee of a rock, not very many yards away–the venomous, pale yellow of the dropsical cave fungi.
“Why–why! it’s only one of those horrid, blowzy, mushroom things. Butwhat’sthe noise–like–like somebody rattling little marbles, dry peas?”
The girl felt her own breath go ratatat as she put the question.
“Oh-h! only some fellow rattling–rattling–beans in his pocket. Let’s get away–quick!”
And then Pemrose knew what it was to look upon a Stoutheart “rattled.”
But, with that, a voice, a cry, not loud, but strong, exploded like a spring gun in the cave,–suddenly halting advance.
“What’s that outside? What’s that outside?” it whooped. “Is it an aëroplane?Twoaëroplanes? Oh! hurry out–and see.”
“A dozen aëroplanes! A corps of aëroplanes!” boomed back those flaunting big boys, of whom the nickum was leader, playing up to the cue of the Scoutmaster who had started the concentrated cry. “Oh, hurry–hurry!”
She saw him fling his mayflowers on the ground, that strange youth, and snatch at Una’s hand, to drag her along towards the low cave entrance. He made awide, circling movement to catch at hers, too. But she dodged it. Never more should he play Jack at a Pinch to her! Never!
Through old Tory Cave there surged the noise of a rising wind, silencing that weak gust afar off, now baleful, the sound of the hidden water; reverberating among the rocks, it might be taken for anything, for the hum of aircraft–for a perfect onslaught of sky cavalry!
And the Scoutmaster’s cry was convincing.
Yet–yet, when boys and girls tumbled tumultuously through the cave entrance–the girls by some mysterious understanding, first–not a remote sign of a biplane, even a meagerone, decorated the sky overhead.
No flying wires sent down their challenge. And the hum resolved itself into what it was: the rising, random mockery of Ta-te, the tempest, laughing at their searching looks, going north, south, eastand west, aloft, skirmishing in bewilderment to all points of the horizon.
“Hum-m. There isn’t asignof a buzz-wagon! Who pulled off that stunt–on–us?” bleated a few of the mystified younger boys, while Stud silently brushed moisture like cave-tears from his forehead.
So did the tall Scoutmaster, heavily breathing relief.
“Not an aëroplane in sight! Not a single one!” breezed the girls, all ready to be angry. “Who–who put that hoax over?”
“Varnish right–and aëroplane wrong!” It was the freakish voice of a nickum which answered. “No! No buzzer, as the boys say, but there was a rattler, in there, beside that rock. If some of you girls had gone ahead, you’d have stepped right on him!”
“A ‘rattler!’ A big rattlesnake! And–and you started the cry, to get us out quietly–quickly!”
“Not we! The Scoutmaster had the presence of mind to launch an aëroplane.We boomed it,” came the laughing reply, as Jack at a Pinch, second fiddle now, marched off with his companions.
“Who–is he?” Pemrose caught wildly at the arm of Stud, who was wishing that he and not those patronizing big boys had caught the Scoutmaster’s cue and created airdrawn aëroplanes by the corps. “Do you–do you know who he is; that biggest–that gaudiest–one among them?”
“Yes! No-o! I do–an’ I don’t!” stammered the boyish Henkyl Hunter. “I–we–” indicating his scout brothers–“have met him a couple of times in the woods; I guess his father an’ he have a camp on the opposite side of the lake from ours. We’ve talked with him–tried to be friendly. And he–he’s always jolly, you know–like now! But–but when it comes to finding out anything about either of them, gee, you might as well whistle jigs to a milestone–so-o you might!”
“Across the lake in golden glory,
The fairy gleams of sunlight glow.
Another day of joy is ending,
The clouds of twilight gather low.”
Anotherday of joy, indeed! Without peril of rattlesnake–or marplot nickum to spoil it!
“‘Varnish right–and aëroplane wrong!’ That’s whathesaid when they laid that trap to get us out of the cave, without any fuss. But I say it’s: ‘Varnish right–and puzzle wrong!’ All wrong!” snapped Pemrose to herself again and again, repeating an old saying during the week following that first Get Together. “Nobody–nobody has a right to drift around as a puzzle, these days! If ever I get a chance, see me snub him har-rd–though he did rescueme twice! Well, thank goodness! it was the Scoutmaster, not he, who played Jack at a Pinch in Tory Cave.”
And it was the Scoutmaster, in days gone by, with the help of his boys, who had built the great stone fireplace in the girls’ bungalow in which a brilliant Council Fire was now blazing. Across the lake the golden glory stole, and girls came tip-toeing to the hearth-flame in soft, ceremonial dress, fringed and beaded, the firelight, like dawn, flushing the pearl of their headbands,–and Pem forgot the enigma of that eighteen-year-old youth who seemed to have a trick of bobbing up, now and again, under the lee of a summer holiday, like some menacing spar to leeward of a vessel in fair sail.
Well! to recall Stud’s figure of speech, nobody was “whistling jigs” to his milestone heart now–or trying to. The fire was the fiddler; and wax was not softer or more responsive than the pliant breasts on which its music fell.
“I watched a log in the fireplace burning.”
They whispered it one to another and under the spell of its transfiguring lay, bent forward, they witnessed the last act in a pine-tree pantomime.
A dazzling transformation scene it was: in the glow they could see, summed up, each transition of light and heat that went before: dawn’s tender flame, the fierce blaze of high noon, ruby rays of evening streaming now across the Bowl–hill-girt lake without–gathered, all gathered, in a golden age behind them to feed the sap of a noble tree, here poured forth, amid a radiant ballet of flame and spark, to furnish life, light–inspiration–to a Council Fire.
“I watched a log in the fireplace burning,
Oh! if I, too, could only be
Sure to give back the love and laughter,
That Life so freely gave to me!”
Tanpa, the Guardian, softly breathed it. And in the eye of more than one girl the wish was transmuted into a tear,–intosomething more tender, more transported, than a laugh, as the log, in a final spurt, gave all, and fell, like a tired dancer, upon the broad hearth, its rosy chiffons crumpled and fading into the pale gray of wood-ashes.
“There it goes!” The eyes of Pemrose were a patchwork now, flame embroidered upon their shining blue; oh! if she were to give forth what Life gave to her, which of her Camp Fire Sisters would have such riches to reflect?
It had been hers–hers–to share the dream of a great inventor, to look forward with him to the pioneering moment–the beginning of that which would surely, in time, draw the Universe visibly together–the moment when the Thunder Bird should fly.
She never qualified that dream by anif, wherever the funds to equip it might come from–or even if it had to wait a dozen years, Toandoah’s triumph, like that fortune “hung up–” for the great Bird tomake its new migration to the moon, in proof that space was no barrier–when the Thunder Bird, giving all, as the log had done, would drop its skeleton upon the desert of that silent satellite.
But there were steps to be taken in the meantime–exciting steps in the ladder of success. Those patchwork eyes, looking into the flame now, counted them, one by one, and hung in breathless anticipation upon the first: upon the moment, so soon to come off, when old Greylock would really send back a shout of gladness, for on his darkling summit the hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America would press the button and loose the lesser Thunder Bird to fly up the modest distance of a couple of hundred miles, or so, with its diary in its head, and send back the novel record of its flight.
“I–do–believe that my father sleeps with one eye open, thinking of that golden egg, as he calls it–the little recording apparatus,” she said, when the White Birch Group, as one, asked that the specialprogram for this ceremonial meeting should be a talk from an inventor’s daughter upon this most daring enterprise of the age. “He says that ifthatdoes not drift back to earth safely with the crow-like parachute–if anything should happen to it, to the two little wheels, with the paper winding from one on to the other, all dashed with pencil marks–the world would call him a fool’s mate.... If it did!” Pem’s teeth were clinched. “But, of course, without the record, there would be nothing to show how high the little rocket had really flown–showing the bigger one the road,” with an excited gasp.
“Yes, I can understand how anxious he must be about the safe return of the egg–or the log–whichever you choose to call it–the first record from space, anyway.” Tanpa’s tone was almost equally excited. “And of course the wind may play pranks with the parachute–drift it away down the mountainside!”
“So that we’d lose it in thedarkness–oh-h!” Pem shivered upon the thought. “But we’ll all be on the lookout to prevent that, as many of us as are there–and that won’t be more than a picked few, Dad says, to witness this first experiment.... When–when the real Thunder Bird flies, though–” she turned those patchwork eyes now, sky-blue, flame-red, upon her companions–“you’ll all–all-ll be there. And, oh! won’t it–won’t it be a sight to watch–it–tear?”
Drooping towards the fire-glow, lips parted in entranced assurance, the slight figure became lost in the same dream which had held it months before in a February Pullman, while a daring flame, like a red-capped pearl diver, plunging into the mystery of that fairy thing, that gleaming stole about her neck brought out milky flashes of luster–together with those New Jerusalem tints, jade and gold and ruby.
Finished now it was, the pearl-woven prophecy–fair record to go down to posterity!
In faith–such faith as had inspired Penelope, faithful wife, of old, to weave and unravel her endless web, steadfast in the belief of her husband’s return, so the girlish fingers upon the loom had wrought the transcendent story to a finish.
To a finish even to the sprinkling of gold pieces, the yellow bonanza, coming from somewhere, to gorge the Thunder Bird, for its record flight; to a finish even to the celestial climax, the little blue powder-flash lighting up the dear, fair face of Mammy Moon!
But of one climax, more celestial still, Pemrose Lorry could not speak, not even to these her Camp Fire Sisters: of the evening of the second wreck–the wreck of hope after that third installment of a disappointing will had been read–when she had taken the four feet and a half of pearl poem to her father’s workshop, the grim hardware laboratory, and out of the home of light, which she herself hardly understood, in her young, young heart,had told him, doubtful of the future, that she knew the invention would win out–the Thunder Bird go where nothing earthly had ever gone before.
And he had whispered something–something surpassing–about a Wise Woman who saved a city.
It made sacred every thought now, and humbled it, too, in the breast of this little sixteen-year-old girl, with the mingled yarn in her nature–the mingling spice in her name.
Others had these fair stoles, too, the history of their girlish lives woven in pearls of typical purity, crossed by vivid representations of events. Drooping to their knees, in symbolic beauty, finishing with the soft leather fringes on which a breeze sweeping down the wide chimney played, they flashed here and there in the high colors of adventure–the quaintly symbolized adventure tale.
But none could match the theme of the two little primitive figures upon themounttain-top, the inventor looking through a tube, the comet-like streak of fire above them: the opening of a highroad through Space,–the first step towards a federation of the heavenly bodies.
The record to go down to posterity!
Yet old Earth had still her individual romance of seedtime and harvest, sun and storm, peril and deliverance.
Emblematically depicted these were in the pearl strip of a girl, with a winsome reflection of Andrew’s thistle-burr in her speech. Born “far awa’ in bonnie Scotland”, the thistle and America’s goldenrod blent their purple and gold upon her young shoulders; there was an idealized plow, representing the peaceful agricultural calling of her father,–and a jump from peace to peril in the primitively symbolized scene of a shipwreck through which she had been with him when crossing the Atlantic in a sailing vessel.
“We had all to take to the boats, you see,” said Jennie McIvor, “for the shipwas leaking so badly that she couldn’t keep afloat but a wee bit longer; and we had a verra rough time until we were picked up.”
A rough time, indeed, typified by the wildly driven little canoes–the most primitive form of the boat–tossed upon stiff water-hills, brooding above them the quaint, corkscrew figure, with the eye in its head, of Ta-te, the tempest.
Somehow, this eye–the spying wind’s eye–haunted Pemrose that night, curled up in a previous suggestion of the Guardian’s which, momentarily, had twisted itself, snake-like, around her heart.
Suppose Ta-te should prove cruel to her, as to Jennie whom she had eventually spared! Suppose, on the great night of the first experiment with Toandoah’s little rocket, Ta-te, jealous of a rival in the small Thunder Bird which could out-soar all the winds of Earth–out-soar even the air, their cradle–should meanly seize upon the black, silk parachute, light as soot,anchored to the golden egg, the little recording apparatus! Suppose it should whirl both off, away from the eager hands stretched out to claim them, hide them in a dark recess of the mountain side, maybe, where they could not be found for days,–possibly never!
Ta-tecouldplay fast and loose with her father’s reputation, she knew; at least, with the witness to his success as an inventor.
“If the wind should do that,” she thought, “then the World, some part of it–the horrid World–will say that Mr. Hartley Graham’s last thoughts about that mile-long will were wise ones: that it was better–better to leave all that money ‘hung up’ awaiting the possible return of that madcap younger brother–who’ll make ducks and drakes of it, most likely–than–than to turn it over to a Thunder Bird,” with a faint flash of a smile, “in spite, oh! in spite of the fact that daring volunteers–skilled aviators–are wild to take passage in the far-flying Bird.”
Yes! even that youthful hotspur who used the cream of rough-edged paper, and was willing to try anything once, though it should be once for all.
The girl’s thought reverted to him now as she gazed into the bungalow fire, seeing in the gusty flicker of every log that menacing spiral,–the brooding wind’s eye.
It claimed her, that wild, red eye, even while her companions of the White Birch Group were excitedly discussing their picturesque plans for the morrow; for the celebration of their annual festival in honor of the birch trees bursting into leaf, for the odes, the songs, the dances, the planting, each, of a silvery sapling.
It mesmerized her, did Ta-te’s eye, with its setting of flame, even to the exclusion of enthusiasm about the big dance–the joyous Together–in the evening, of which Una raved in anticipation now and again, and for which these two friends and rivals in the matter of eyelashes had brought their prettiest party dresses.
The elders presiding over the destinies of both had given a happy consent to Tanpa’s invitation, and the two were now the guests for a few days of the mountain Group at their camp on the egg-shaped Bowl.
The sigh of the mountain breeze came soothingly across the lake to lull their slumbers as they lay down to rest, side by side, in the little bungalow cots of which a dozen ranged the length of the great water-side dormitory half-open, half-screened.
Yet Pem fell asleep imploring Ta-Te–and lost the little record altogether in her dreams!
Up and down old Greylock she plodded, looking for it, hand in hand with Toandoah,–but ever it eluded them!
Muttering, bereft, she tossed; then for a moment awoke, blinkingly sat up, to see the moonlight flickering–Mammy Moon’s own smile–upon the pearl-woven prophecy beside her, from which she could hardly be parted by night or day.
Sleep again! And now it was not only the diary but the Thunder Bird, itself, that was lost,–astray in space, and she with it!
She was trying to catch it by the fiery tail-feathers when, all of a sudden–all of a sober sudden–those feathers became soft, flopping, buffeting,–real.
They brushed her parted lips. They flopped against her cheek. They even mopped the dews of slumber from her eyes.
“Hea-vens! W-what is it-t?”
Wildly she sat up–a second time–to see the dawn poking at her with a pink finger and the lake shimmering without, a great pearl found by the morning in an iridescent oyster-shell of mist.
And, within, a bumping, buffeting something, soft as moss, dun-gray as terror–blundering into every sleeper’s face, as if testing its warmth, bowling its way along the line of cots.
“Cluck! Cluck! Flutter! Flutter! Awake!Awake! I’m lost! I’m lost!” it said.
“What is it?What is it?”
Never was such an exciting reveille as girl by girl bounded up–elastic–fingering a brushed, a tickled cheek.
The answer was a screech that made the morning blush, as if a ghost had invaded the Tom Tiddler’s ground of open day light.
Una shrieked in echo.
Morale was undermined. Cots were vacated. Maiden jostled maiden, all colliding upon a gaping question that fanned sensation sky-high–until the bungalow fairly rocked upon a hullabaloo.