Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl Part 10

"Here--here, let me explain that we have a sort of Community camp for boys and girls about three miles from here, on the wooded sh.o.r.es of The Bowl, that lovely, egg-shaped lake among the hills," put in Tanpa, an air-drawn picture in her glowing tones. "There are two big bungalows, a couple of hundred yards apart, one for the Troop, one for the Group! Of course, we can't occupy them all the time, at present, not until school is closed, but we constantly go out there over night--to watch the summer coming--and for week-ends."

"Oh! the lake and the woods around it are more wonderful now than at any other season of the year," put in one of the older girls, an a.s.sistant-Guardian. "And we can always keep warm, you know, even if there is a cold spell in May, because the boys chop wood for us."

"Yes, and we do their mending; oh! and quite often the shoe pinches--the stocking, I mean--when the holes are just haggles!" The eyebrows of a fair-haired, pretty girl of fifteen were ruefully arched, over eyes of merriment. "But we do--do have such fun at our Get Togethers--our picnics and parties," went on she, whose ceremonial name was Aponi the b.u.t.terfly of the mountain group.

"Hur-ra-ah! There are two such Get Togethers coming off quite soon now--one the day after to-morrow--Sat.u.r.day--a picnic at s...o...b..rd Cave, to explore some other caves afterwards upon the further side of the river, the blue Housatonic."

This contribution came, piecemeal, from several feasting mouths together.

"Oh! the Housatonic--blue--Hous-a-tonic!" Pemrose bent demurely over her flapjack and cocoa, curling her toes under her as she recalled her view of it from the Devil's Chair. "And what about the second Get Together--when is that to be?" she asked.

"A week from Sat.u.r.day: _Jubilate!_ It's our anniversary day as a White Birch Group when we hold a sort of carnival in he afternoon in honor--in honor of the de-ar birch trees just bursting into leaf." Aponi fluttered like green tree-hair, herself. "And that's to be followed--whoopee!--by a party: a real, full-blown June dance in the evening--to which all the boys are invited. And--and, maybe, some girls not of our Groups will find an invitation tucked into their stockings, too," slily. "But for the picnic this week the Boy Scouts are hosts."

"I guess, if they knew there were two strange girls in camp--such girls--they'd scuttle to 'come across' with an invitation, too!" laughed the one slangy member inseparable from every group, whose talk is the long st.i.tch in the thread of conversation.

"Do you think they would? Oh! I don't know about that. Boys are such--such griffins, sometimes."

Wormwood was in the eye of Pemrose, pointing the accusation, a new and gloomy pessimism born of the Devil's Chair and Jack at a Pinch.

"_Ours_ aren't!" It was the voice of the little girl-thrush lifted in blue-jay belligerence now. "Our boys aren't queer fish--not a bit!"

rising to hot defense of Stud, the Stoutheart, who even in callow youth, was of opinion that Life in every phase was a game for two--in which two, of differing s.e.xes, could hunt together and make good headway.

"To be sure, they do love to get off jokes on each other--and occasionally on us," went on Jessie, the brown-haired merle in maiden form. "They have a society of older boys in their camp called the Henkyl Hunters' Brigade. My brother Stud--he's a patrol leader--belongs to it.

And they go on the war-path occasionally--and publish a bulletin about their doings."

"What's a henkyl?" Una's mouth was wide open; upon its gusty breath rode horned toads and plated lizards, in imaginary solution.

"A henkyl! Oh! if you ask _them_, they say it's a freak of an animal that they hunt up and down in the woods, trying to get its scalp, or--or catch it alive. Which they seldom or never do!" Jessie's eyes sparkled. "Stud says a whole 'henkyl' is hard to capture; it's so sure to shed its horns or its teeth just as you pounce upon it."

Pem was staring intently at the speaker, her black brows drawn together over eyes as speculatively blue as ever they had been in Toandoah's laboratory when grasping, or trying to, grave problems of the air.

"Oh! I know. I know!" she cried suddenly, the blue breaking up in the firelight into a harlequin patchwork of merry gleams. "A henkyl! Why-y!

it's a joke. A joke that they're forever chasing up and down, trying to get a laugh against somebody,--that absurd brigade!"

"Companions.h.i.+p with a Thunder Bird has sharpened your wits," smiled the Guardian. "A practical joke it is, that most elusive thing to pull off whole, point and all, with the laugh entirely on one side! Well! we mustn't give them any occasion to turn the chase against us, air their wit in our direction, by failing in our demonstration presently--the signaling practice to which we challenged them; eh, Tomoke?"

"No, indeed!" A sixteen-year-old girl, gray-eyed, vibrant with energy, mobile as the Lightning, the mettlesome Lightning, from which she took her Camp Fire name, spoke up spiritedly. "We're going to flash a message right across the valley, over to old Round-top, that sleepy, dark mountain, a couple of miles away, just as soon as the daylight is all faded out," she explained.

"Oh, ho! That's what the Guardian meant when she spoke of showing us something--a display--with red fire, eh?" gasped Pemrose. "How are you going to signal--with what code?"

"Morse code--and a good, fat two-foot pine-knot, oozing with resin!"

smiled the Lightning, vivid with inspiration. "How--how about sending over this message: 'Two strange girls in camp; you ought to meet them'?"

"Lovely! That will hit the mark!" came the appreciative chorus, to the song of logs. "Then--then you'll see old Round-top wake up, quick's a wink and 'come across' with an invitation--an invitation to that banner picnic the day after to-morrow!"

CHAPTER XII

OLD ROUND-TOP

"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, as it seemed, from the grave of a fifteen-year-old la.s.sie 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 la.s.ses," 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 las.h.i.+ng 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 flas.h.i.+ng of the light of this particular camp fire in speaking fire from mountain to mountain--across the 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 aerial namesake, presently dashed up the hill, with it held high!

Brilliant as a starsh.e.l.l--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, s.h.i.+mmering through a veil of anxiety lest, somewhere, there might be another "Deev's Chair" around, or a madcap la.s.sie 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 ta.s.sels of their Tam-o'-shanters waving, and of demented birds for the Pinnacle's tallest crag.

Poised upon that gray rock-shelf, high above the ground, her slight face with the s.h.i.+ning 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 played up, "came across" with an invitation--an invitation to that alluring Get Together at the winter palace of the s...o...b..rds, then she would feel that a nick.u.m'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!"