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PEMROSE LORRY
CAMP FIRE GIRL
* * * * *
By
ISABEL HORNIBROOK
DRAKE OF TROOP ONE
SCOUT DRAKE IN WAR TIME
COXSWAIN DRAKE OF THE SEASCOUTS
PEMROSE LORRY: CAMP FIRE GIRL
* * * * *
[Illustration: Not a remote sign of a biplane decorated the sky overhead.
Frontispiece. See page 171.]
PEMROSE LORRY
CAMP FIRE GIRL
by
ISABEL HORNIBROOK
With Illustrations by Nana French Bickford
[Illustration]
Boston
Little, Brown, and Company
1921
Copyright, 1921,
By Little, Brown, and Company.
All rights reserved
Published October, 1921
Norwood Press
Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co.
Norwood, Mass., U. S. A.
TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER, VETERAN AUTHOR,
WHO FIRST HAD AN ADMIRATION FOR THE WISE WOMAN
WHO SAVED THE CITY, THIS STORY IS DEDICATED.
PREFACE
This, the first story written upon the latest and unique conquest of the
age, the conquest of empty Space, with the subsequent reaching out to
the Heavenly Bodies, has the permission of the conquering inventor,
Professor Robert H. Goddard.
May it bring to every Camp Fire in America, and to boys as well, the
romance of the transcendent achievement, beside which all dressing of
fiction pales!
The Author also acknowledges her indebtedness to Professor Frank G.
Speck for permission to reprint the music of the Leaf Dance.
CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. A QUAKER GUN 1
II. GIMCRACK ICE 20
III. THE WRONG SIDE OF HER DREAM 31
IV. THE SECOND WRECK 40
V. SHE SAVED A CITY 49
VI. A HOTSPUR 60
VII. THE PINNACLE 69
VIII. A USURPER 78
IX. JACK AT A PINCH 86
X. CAMP FIRE SISTERS 98
XI. MOTHER EARTH'S ROMANCE 109
XII. OLD ROUND-TOP 124
XIII. COBWEB WEED 134
XIV. STOUTHEART 147
XV. AIRDRAWN AEROPLANES 160
XVI. THE COUNCIL FIRE 174
XVII. A NOVEL SANTA CLAUS 190
XVIII. REPRISALS 207
XIX. A RECORD FLIGHT 229
XX. THE SEARCH 244
XXI. THE MAN KILLER 262
XXII. A JUNE WOMAN 280
XXIII. THE CELESTIAL CLIMAX 296
ILLUSTRATIONS
Not a remote sign of a biplane decorated the sky overhead Frontispiece
"Oh! de-ar Mammy Moon--what a shock she'll get" PAGE 2
"Keep cool! Don't stir! I'll reach you in a moment!" 86
The man looked up at her, some dash of whimsical fire
mastering weakness 268
PEMROSE LORRY
CAMP FIRE GIRL
CHAPTER I
A QUAKER GUN
"And will the Thunder Bird really lay its egg upon the moon? Such a hard
egg, too! Will it--really--drop a pound weight of steel upon the head of
the Man in the Moon?... Oh! de-ar Mammy Moon--what a shock she'll get."
The girl, the fifteen-year-old Camp Fire Girl--all but sixteen now--to
whom Mammy Moon had been the fairy foster-mother of her childhood, ever
since she lay, wakeful, in her little cot, looking up at that silvery
face of a burnt-out satellite, picturing it the gate of Heaven and her
mother's spirit as bathed in the soft, lunar radiance behind it, caught
her breath with a wild little gasp whose triumph was a sob upon the
still laboratory air.
"Lay its egg in a nest of the moon! A dead nest! It will do more than
that, little Pem!" Toandoah, the inventor, turned from fitting a number
of tiny sky-rockets into the supply chamber of a larger one,--turned
with that living coal of fire in his eye which only the inventor can
know, and looked upon his daughter. "Yes, it will do more than that! The
Thunder Bird will lay its golden egg for us--if it drops its expiring
one upon the moon. It will send us back the first record from space, the
very first information as to what it may be that lies up--away up--a
couple of hundred miles, or so, above us, in the outer edges of the
earth's atmosphere of which less is known at present than of the deepest
soundings of the ocean. Our Thunder Bird will be the--first--explorer."
[Illustration: "Oh! de-ar Mammy Moon--what a shock she'll get." Page 2.]
The man's eyes were dim now. For a moment he saw as in a prism the work
of his fingers, those little explosive rockets--the charges of smokeless
powder--which being discharged automatically in flight, would send the
Thunder Bird upon its magic way, roaring its challenge to the world to
listen, switching its rose-red tail of light.
Then--then as the mist cleared those deep, glowing eyes of his became to
his daughter a magic lantern by which she saw a series of pictures
thrown upon the sheeting whitewash of the laboratory wall, culminating
in one which was almost too dazzling for mortal girl of fifteen--though
born of a great inventor--to bear.
"And to think," she cried, rising upon tiptoe, swaying there in the
February sunlight, "just to think that it's a Camp Fire Girl--a Camp
Fire Girl of America--with the eyes of the world upon her, who will push
the button, throw the switch upon a mountain-top, launch the Thunder
Bird upon its glor-i-ous way, send off--send off the first
earth-valentine to Mammy Moon!... Oh! Toandoah--oh! Daddy-man--it's too
much."
Pemrose Lorry clasped her hands. Her blue-star eyes, blue at the moment
as the tiny blossoms of the meadow star-grass for which some fairy has
captured a sky-beam, were suddenly wet.
A slim, girlish figure in forest green--last sylvan word in Camp Fire
uniforms which she was trying on--she hung there, poised upon an inner
pinnacle, while sunbeams racing down the whitewash did obeisance before
her, while spectroscope, lathe and delicate balances, brilliant
reflectors, offered her a brazen crown.
"Well--well, it's coming to you, Pem--you sprite." Her father shot a
sidelong glance at the nixie green as he fitted another little rocket
into its groove in the larger one's interior, where the touch of a
mechanical appliance, like the trigger of a gun, in the Thunder Bird's
tail, would ignite it in flight. "You alone, girl as you are, know the
full secret of the Thunder Bird, as you romantically call it, the
principle on which I am working, child--in so far as you can understand
it--in creating this model rocket for experiments and the master
sky-rocket, the full-fledged Thunder Bird, later, to soar even to the
moon itself--Mars, too, maybe--you alone know and you have kept it dark.
You've plugged like a boy at your elementary physics in high school,
so's to be _able_ to understand and sympathize--you've lived up to
the name I gave you--"
"My chowchow name!" interjected the girl, winking slily.
"Well! it is a mixture." Her father echoed her chuckle. "But I guess
you've been son and daughter both, you good little pal--you sprite of
the lab."
"Oh! Toandoah--oh! Daddy-man--I'm so glad."
Here there was a little laboratory explosion, a rocket of feeling fired
off, as the owner of that hybrid name, Pemrose, came down from her
pinnacle and, perching upon a low tool-chest at the inventor's side,
took the humbler place she loved,--fellow of her father's heart.
"I--I used to wish I was all boy until I became a Camp Fire Girl; that
bettered the betty element a little," she confided, the spice of her
mixed cognomen floating in her eye.
It was a joke with her, that chowchow name--original mixture--and how
she came by it.
Her father, Professor Guy Noel Lorry, Fellow of Nevil
University,--Toandoah, the inventor, she called him,--wearing his
symbol, a saw-toothed triangle, embroidered with her own upon her
ceremonial dress--had at one time almost prayed for a son, a boy who
might help him to realize the dream, even then taking hold upon his
heart, of conquering not the air alone but space--zero space, in which
it was thought nothing could travel--so that old Earth might reach out
to her sister planets.
He planned to call the boy Pemberton after his own father.
Likewise the mother of the maiden in green now seated upon the tool-box
had longed for a daughter and aspired to name her Rose, in tender memory
of a dear college chum, a flower no longer blooming upon earth.
And when the little black-haired mite in due time came, when she opened
upon her father eyes blue as the empyrean he hoped to conquer, he had
cried out of a core of transport lurking in the very heart of
disappointment: "Oh! by Jove, I can't quite give up my dream: let's name
her Pemrose. If she had been a boy, I'd have called her Pem."
The young mother blissfully agreed--and did not live long to call her
anything.
Grown to girlhood, the sprite of the laboratory, who had looked through
a spectroscope at seven, clapping her small hands over the fairy
colors--pure red, orange, green, blue, violet, separated by little dark,
thread-like lines, each representing some element in that far-away upper
air which her father hoped to master--preferred for herself the boyish
Pem to the oft-worn Rose.
But in order to square accounts with what she called the "betty" element
in her, she evened things up on becoming a Camp Fire Girl by choosing a
name all feminine wherewith to be known by the Council Fire.
Wantaam, signifying Wisdom--a Wise Woman--was the title she bore as one
who wore the Fire Maker's bracelet upon her wrist and had pledged
herself to tend as her fathers had tended and her fathers' fathers since
time began, that inner, mystic flame which has lit man's way to progress
from the moment when he forged a bludgeon to conquer his own world,
until, to-day, when he was inventing a Bird to invade others.
And it was that Wise Woman who spoke now; she, of all others, who knew
the secret of the magic Thunder Bird; and who, trustworthy to the core,
had "kept it dark."
"Oh! if I've 'plugged' hard in the past over those fierce first
principles of mechanics, electricity, optics, heat and the rest--and
those 'grueling' laws of gravitation--that's just nothing, a scantling
compared to the way I'm going to study and make a hit when I get on into
college," she cried; "so--so that, some day, I can, really, work with
you, Toandoah--you record-breaking inventor--oh! dearest father ever
was."
Laughingly, passionately she flung an arm around the neck of the man in
the long, drab laboratory coat, half strangling him as he bent over the
two-foot model rocket, testing it with his soul in his finger-tips, from
its cone-shaped steel head to its steering compartment, thence to the
supply chamber with all the little propelling rockets in it, down to its
complicated nozzle, or tail.
"Why--why! there's no knowing what you and I may be doing yet, when we
strain our wits to cracking, is there, Daddy-man?" she exulted further.
"You say, yourself, that once space is conquered, that horribly cold old
zero space outside the earth's atmosphere, anything devised that will
move through it, as our Thunder Bird can do, then--then there's no
limit! We might be shooting a passenger off to the moon now, provided
the Man in the Moon would shoot him back," gayly, "if only the master
sky-rocket, twelve times as large as this little model you're working on
for experiments, were ready. The re-al moon-going Thunder Bird! Oh,
dear!" Her little fingers restlessly intertwined. "How--how I can
har-rdly wait to throw the switch upon a mountaintop and--watch it
_tear_, as the college boys say!"
"Sometimes--sometimes I'm inclined to think it will never 'tear'; that
another than I will be the first to reach the heavenly bodies." Toandoah
sighed. "For where are the funds coming from, Pem, the little
bonanza--fairy gold-mine--necessary to gorge our Thunder Bird for its
record flight--fit it out for its novel migration to the moon, eh?" The
inventor clasped his hands behind his head, whistling ruefully. "Funds,
child! Already, it has pecked through the biggest slice of mine!"
"Ah! but--ah! but--" the girl suddenly flashed upon him a sky-blue
wink--"ah! but the third _nut_ hasn't been cracked yet, remember,
for the Bird to peck at that. Isn't it in four weeks from now--oh! in
five--" the slight figure swaying like the blue-eyed grass upon its tall
green stem, blown by a wild breeze--"in five weeks from now that the
third drawer will be opened, containing the third and last installment
of Mr. Hartley Graham's queer, queer drawn-out will. When it is--oh!
when it is--maybe, then, at last, there will be something coming to the
University, our University, to benefit your inventions, Daddy."
"My child! when that third nut is cracked, 'twill only benefit a 'nut'."
The man chuckled drily now. "In other words, the remainder of Friend
Hartley's fortune, all that his sister, Mrs. Grosvenor, hasn't already
got, will still be held in trust by me, as executor of the will,
for--for that griffin of a younger brother of his who cleared out over
twenty years ago and hasn't sent a line to his family since."
"Was Mr. Treffrey Graham--really--such a--zany?" Pem asked the question
for the nineteenth time, her black eyebrows arching.
"My word! 'Was he?' A--a regular hippogriff he was, child! A hot tamale,
like that Mexican fruit which burns you if you bite into it! At college
one could hardly come near him without getting scorched by his tricks.
Remember my telling you about my putting in an appearance in class one
day--Physics 3--boasting of the latest thing in student's bags, setting
it down beside me--and not seeing it again for three weeks? The terrible
Treff, of course! The climax came, as you know, when he locked a
gray-haired professor into the padded cell for opposing baseball too
early in the season, while the campus was still soft."
"Mer-rcy! And kept him there for ages--in that stuffy little room, all
wadded and lined with brown burlap, used for analyzing sound--the prof
not able to make himself heard!"
The listener, girl-like, drew fresh excitement from a faded tale.
"Yes--that meant expulsion, of course, and his family, one and all,
turning a cold shoulder on Treff, before he went away for good--nobody
knew where. His engagement was broken off. His brother Hartley saw to
that--married the girl himself."
"I wonder--I wonder if the Terrible Treff ever married?" Pem musingly
nursed her chin,--and with it a wildfire interest in the "hot tamale."
"I heard he did. Somebody said so--somebody who met him out West, years
ago--that he was a widower, with a little son. But--apparently--he has
no more use for his family."
"No more--no more than his sister, Mrs. Grosvenor, has for us since you
were made executor of that outlandish will, left, piecemeal in three
drawers, to be opened on the first three anniversaries of Mr. Graham's
death--and not her husband!" Now it was an entirely new breeze of
excitement, a stiffening, pinching draught, which swept the forest-green
figure upon the tool-chest until its voice grew thin and sharp and edged
as the blades in the box beneath it. "Oh-h, yes! she's at daggers
dr-rawn with us now--on her high ropes all the time, as you'd say.
And--and she sneers at your inventions, father! She calls the rocket,
the rocket," half-hysterically, "the moon-reaching rocket,--a Quaker
gun--a Quaker gun that'll never be fired, never go off--never hit
anything!... _Oh-h!_"
With her hand to her green breast at the insult, the girl bounded,
blindly as a ball, from her box, across the laboratory--and on to a low
platform.
Through her raging young body there shot like a physical cramp the
knowledge that Quakers, noble-hearted Friends, did not use any guns;
that the mocking term was but a by-word, a jesting synonym for all that
was impotent--non-existent in reason and power--a dummy.
Savagely she applied her eye to the tall, ten-foot spectroscope rearing
its brazen height from this low pedestal.
Without, beyond the glaring white-washed laboratory, was a February
world, equally white, of zero ice and snow.
Through the spectroscope she saw a world in flames--blood-red.
It was not more flaming than her thoughts.
Her father's transcendent invention just a faddist's dream! The Thunder
Bird a joke--a _Quaker Gun_!
"Bah!" Convulsively her little teeth bit into her lower lip as she
adjusted the telescope portion of the instrument for analyzing
light--reducing it to prismatic hues--a little.
And now, lo! a world brilliantly jaundiced--her orange--the snow being a
wonderful reflector of the sun's divided rays.
"Father! Father-r! I used to love Una Grosvenor. Now I h-hate her! If
her mother made that hor-rid speech about a Quaker gun, she repeated it,
before all the boys and girls in our Drama Class, too! If I see her this
afternoon at the Ski Club, the skiing party out at Poplar Hill, I shan't
speak to her. And we used to be so chummy! Why--" the girl fluttered
now, a green weathercock, upon the two-foot platform--"why, we used to
stand side by side and measure eyelashes, to see which pair was going to
be the longer. I'll wager mine are now!"
With a veering laugh the weathercock was here bent forward, striving to
catch some brazen glimpse of a winking profile in the polished brass of
the spectroscope.
Her father laughed: this was the Rose side of her--of his maiden of the
patchwork name--the Rose side of her, and he loved it!
"But--but Poplar Hill! Poplar Hill! Why! that's away outside the city
line--out at Merryville," he exclaimed, a minute later, in
consternation. "Goodness! child, you're not going off there to ski
to-day--in a zero world, everything snowbound, no trolley cars running?"
"Oh! the trains--the trains aren't held up, father." The coaxing
weathercock now had a green arm around the neck of the man in the long,
drab coat. "And I just couldn't give up going! I'm becoming such a
daring ski-runner, Daddy-man; you'll be proud of me when you see! Why! I
can almost herring-bone uphill; and I'm getting the kick-turn 'down
fine.' Darting, gliding, stemming, jumping downhill--oh! it's such
perfect fun, such creamy fun; I'm not a girl any longer, I'm just a
swallow."
"One swallow doesn't make a summer; all this doesn't change the
weather." The inventor glanced anxiously through a window.
"No, but it's such a very short train-run. Pouf! only six miles on the
two o'clock express bound north, why--why! the very train that you and I
will be taking, later, Daddy-man, along in May, when you try out
experiments with that little model rocket you're working on now, upon
old Mount Greylock--highest mountain of the State. Oh-h! if ever a
girl's thumb itched, mine does to press the little electric button and
start it off, to fly up a couple of hundred miles, or so, to send you
back your golden egg, siree--the first record from space. Oh! through
all the fun of slope and snow I'll be thinking of that the entire time
to-day--the whole, enduring, livelong time. Yes!"