Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl Part 9

Instead, she bathed every sore spot left by the experience in the glory of telling her new friends all that she might tell of the romantic, s.p.a.ce-conquering Thunder Bird, while, above, the Man in the Moon, eavesdropping, learned of the surprise in store for him.

Perhaps he cribbed some hint, too, from the excited girlish tongue of the demonstration so soon to take place upon Mount Greylock, when the invention would be tried out; and lastly of the thrilling invitation to the White Birch Group to be present--not then--but on that Great Day, far ahead, when the real Thunder Bird, full-fledged with magic, red-eyed, fiery-tailed, would embark on its hundred-hour flight moonward, as Pem was sure it would start, no matter where the gold-mine to equip it came from.

"Well! we seem, truly--truly--to be treading the 'margin of moons.h.i.+ne land', don't we?" said the Guardian dreamily, enchantment in her voice.

"I--almost--feel as if, some day, we might be inviting the Man in the Moon to supper with us here on the Pinnacle, to shoot himself back in the small hours. Joking apart, it does draw the Universe very near together, doesn't it--open the road to such wonderful possibilities!"

Her hands came together as she gazed, that graceful, green-clad woman, speechless, transfigured, along the aerial high-road on which the Thunder Bird would first pay toll by dropping its golden egg, its record, off--off beyond the low night-clouds to the mysterious sky-ways where daylight now mated with dusk and the lunar lamps were being softly lighted, even to the gateway of Mammy Moon herself. Throbbing, she flushed from head to heel, as she thought of the two hundred and thirty thousand miles to be traversed before the first barrier between the heavenly bodies had been let down--and the Thunder Bird had won home.

"It's--too--gr-reat for words," she said, a break in her voice now.

"Well-ll! if we are not playing hostess to the Man in the Moon--quite yet--at least, we seem to be entertaining angels unawares, with the latest rumors from the sky," laughingly. "How about supper now? Later on maybe we can show you two dear girls that we--as a Group--can do something with red fire, too, a very earth-bound something, mere child's play compared to the future of your celestial Bird. Ha!

But--what's--that?"

And then, for the first time in its yet unwritten story, the Thunder Bird had its nose put out of joint by a modest little earth-bird--a hermit, too, as it would be among the starry s.p.a.ces--by a little, brown-backed evening thrush singing its good-night song in a thicket of scrub near by.

"O wheel-y-will-y-will-y-_il-l_!"

it caroled, as a naturalist has translated the wonderful, silver-sweet prelude of the master-singer of the woods, the nightingale of America, rising, trilling until--now--with the voice-throwing magic of the ventriloquist, its song seemed to come from quite another corner of the thicket, while girls' hearts melted in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, as, climbing a maypole of ecstasy, the notes trembled--fluted--upon a gossamer pinnacle of gladness at the close of a perfect day.

"Oh-h!"

There was no breath in girlish bodies for more than the one answering note of pa.s.sion.

No wonder the Thunder Bird's nose was out of joint.

Earth has a magic all her own.

But was it ventriloquism at large? Had the hermit power to throw his melody right into the center of the ring of girls--so to answer himself?

It was the visitors' turn now for a stupendous sensation.

Almost as airy and flute-like, though not as liquidly sweet and soaring, were bird-notes which answered back from within the very halo of Pemrose herself; and she turned, with her heart in her throat, to see who--who had the thrush in her pocket.

CHAPTER XI

MOTHER EARTH'S ROMANCE

Surely, it was the sweetest grace ever said.

A duet between a hermit thrush and a Camp Fire Girl! Pinnacle vespers!

If gladness did not flow freely now, then human hearts were a desert!

Instead, they were enchanted ground, those girlish hearts, carried away by a sense that Mother Earth did not, after all, have to go outside her own atmosphere for her fairy-land,--her golden crown of romance.

"Wheel-y-will-y-will-y-il!"

preluded again the little brown hermit-lover, with the rufous tail and ruffled, speckled breast, from an evergreen twig of the low pine-scrub.

And, once more, the aping response, the counterfeit thrush-note, came from some little branch of that goodly green tree known as the White Birch Group.

"Who's doing it? Oh-h! who's doing it--answering?" breathed Pemrose Lorry, feeling thrown into the shade with her Thunder Bird; which wasn't altogether bad for her, either. "Oh! it's _you_, is it? Where's the whistle--the bird-caller's whistle?"

"Here. Look!" A maiden shy as a hermit-thrush herself, with rufous lights in her sleek brown hair, and tiny, red-brown specks flecking the iris of her eyes--corresponding to the many freckles upon her small face, with a luminous quality added--opened a volunteering palm.

In its concave hollow, also marbled with sun-spots, lay the magic whistle, the two gleaming tin disks about the size of a fifty-cent piece, joined one upon another with an eighth of an inch distance between them, through whose simple medium the music in the heart of a fourteen-year-old girl had so attuned itself to a little of the melody in the breast of the thrush as to draw--actually draw--the hermit himself forth on to a rock on the edge of the thicket, looking eagerly, a trifle doubtfully, for the raw singer--the mate, who had answered him.

"Romeo and Juliet!" laughed the Guardian. "Such a dear little feathered Romeo, with a beak lined with pure gold--and a fairy oboe in his breast!

Juliet--" she lightly touched the brown-plumaged maiden--"Juliet answering from her balcony, this mound!"

"Only a parrot Juliet who can coin such shabby notes to answer him with!" breathed the girl, shyly nursing her whistle. "No doubt he's saying to himself: 'Shucks! Where's that hermit--or hermitess--'"

merrily, "'with the frog in her throat, or the great, big worm?'"

"Oh! do-o try it again, anyway?" pleaded the visitors together. "It's won-der-ful! We'll be as still--as still as a nun's chapel!"

And obligingly, once more, the human thrush lifted up her notes of speckled sweetness compared to the silver purity of the strength which answered, the hermit fluting pa.s.sionately upon his rock:

"the song complete, With such a wealth of melody sweet, As never the organ pipe could blow And never musician think or know!"

Carried beyond himself--perhaps after all, he was a lonely hermit--he actually hopped from his rock, unalarmed, towards the firelight, when--when the concert was suddenly interrupted by a woodland gorgon!

By Andrew who, rearing his six feet two of gaunt, hurlothrumbo length from a fern-bed, hooking stick in hand, suddenly lifted from the embers a boiling kettle.

"Fegs! 'twas like to scald somebody wi' its daffy simmer," he explained apologetically to the Guardian, being, in his capacity of chauffeur, used to camping emergencies among these picturesque hills--so like, in many respects, the wilds of his Scottish Highlands where the Lady of the Lake, an original Camp Fire Girl, shot her skiff across the blue-eyed loch.

"My certy! but 'twas pretty to see yon _merle_, though!" he murmured, having restored the kettle to sanity. "Fine it minded me, ma'am, o' the time when I was a boy, huntin' like a nick.u.m for the nests o' mavis an' merle--blackbird an' thrush--when I'd rise 'wi' lark an'

light!' Fegs!" Scotch humor ripping chauffeur silence, "yon was a thing to make a sober body young again; a while agone I don't know but I was feelin' like the last o' pea-time; an'--an', noo, I'm a green pea again,... or I would be but for the one sair memory," added Andrew, the true-penny, under his breath.

"Yes--yes, and you had to go jumping around like a parched pea, and frightening the beautiful merle, the thrush, away!" complained Una, aggrieved. "Oh! how did you ever learn to mimic its call, at all?" she cried, catching at the wrist of the human merle, now very practically engaged in toasting bacon-strips on the end of a stick.

"My brother taught me; my only brother, Stud--Studley--Studart they nickname him in camp--I don't know why," was the fluttering response.

"A corruption of Stoutheart, I should say!" supplied the Guardian, now busily frying flapjacks. "Of all the Boy Scouts in my husband's troop, he's the lion-heart," laughingly. "So I understand!"

"Yes, oh! yes, but he's so-o nice, with it," cooed the merle's brown-eyed "mate." "He has never--oh! never--squeezed me out of anything, just because I was a girl; always said that two--two--could hunt together and make good headway!" softly.

"And so they can: and so they will, when it comes to the grandest quest of all, the hunt for truth and justice at the polls, voting side by side! Girls! Dear--girls!" The eyes of Tanpa, the Guardian, were ablaze now with more than the firelight's glow, as she tossed her browned cakes on to a platter. "_Dear_ girls! In the new, the wider future before us--soon to confront all of you--let us bring to it our Camp Fire hall-mark: the hall-mark of the woods: purity of the Pinnacle's breath, the 'pep' of the outdoor dawn--tenderness of the twilight, when we feel that G.o.d is near!... And now--and now! let us sing our grace, not for this food alone, but for the new manna which has fallen for us--the glorious manna of opportunity."

"If we have earned the right to eat this bread, happy are we, but if unmerited Thy blessings come, may we more faithful be!"

On wings of faith the moved chant floated forth, led by the girl-thrush in a sweet soprano, supported by the sonorous roll of the Pinnacle organ, the murmuring pine trees; and the voices of the slender tree choir, the slim, white-tunicked boy-birches, bore it aloft--aloft to Heaven.

"So you're not only gifted as a 'merle', you sing as a girl, too!" said Pemrose presently, nestling nearer to the maiden with the whistle in her green breast-pocket. "You must love birds very much in order to imitate a thrush-song like that."

"Well! my ceremonial name, as a Camp Fire Girl, signifies a little brown bird of the woods; so I thought it was 'up to me' to learn to converse with my kind!" was the half-shy, half-spicy answer. "My brother Stud and I have no end of fun, now in the early summer when the birds have just arrived, and are mating, calling them around our camp."