CAMP FIRE SISTERS
Never was a diversion more welcome!
"We're on the map,
R-ready to prove it with snap!"
Snap was in the very sunset as the evening breeze learned the song.
As for the inventor's daughter, her joyous relief was now a hop and now
a dance, anon a pine-caught hullabaloo, as she gleefully turned her back
upon the Devil's Chair and nickum memories--her face to the glowing sun
of sisterhood.
"Camp Fire sisters! Camp Fire sisters! Was ever such luck?" she cried.
"Oh! come, let's find them--let's join them."
"Oh--let us!" assented Una, her excitement, too, running like wildfire
through the wood.
And, presently, the two city girls, wafting themselves airily over
bowlders, threading their way in and out among pigmy pines, with here
and there a needled patriarch among them, came upon a forest scene that
might well have wakened Queen Mab from her sleep in a cobweb net and
made her think that some, at least, of the fairy dreams with which she
inspired mortals had come true.
A dozen, and more, of sylvan figures, the green tassels of their
Tam-o'-shanters waving like the tasseled green of the cinnamon fern
flitted busily in and out among their passive brothers, the trees, not
pines here, but a few beautiful stripling birches planted in a sunny
spot.
To these white-stemmed saplings, tall and taper-like, some of the
nymphs, maidens from thirteen to seventeen, were playing fairy
godmother, affixing to their slender trunks placards proclaiming the
exaction of dire forfeits from any wanton human churl found guilty of
mutilating a silver birch tree, stripping it even of an inch of tender
skin, thus entailing upon it decay and death.
Other of the maidens were gathering fagots for an outdoor fire to the
tune of a version of Andrew's song, not without humor in the present
crisis:
"Singing whack fol de ri do,
'Twill comfort their souls,
To get such fine fagots,
When they've got no coals!"
One, brisk spoon in hand, was busily stirring some fairy brew, batter
rather--an older figure superintending, Queen Mab herself maybe, having
a golden sunburst embroidered upon the heaving emerald of her breast.
Now! to these came forth two other maidens, emerging, breathless, from
the Pinnacle pines, and made the hand-sign of fire.
Up went gracefully a dozen green arms, in charming tableau, as the
woodland nymphs paused in their work, their curving fingers typifying
the warmth of the curling flame behind the finger--the Camp Fire welcome
to heart and hearth.
A genial flame which the Guardian--she of the golden maturity--put into
winsome words, as she approached.
"Welcome--thrice welcome,--Sisters!" she cried. "We are the White Birch
Group of Lenox, at present engaged in protecting our younger brothers,
the little trees which we planted ourselves. I am Tanpa--signifying
Birch--Guardian of the Group; in everyday life just Myra Seaver."
"And my name is Lorry--Pemrose Lorry--my ceremonial name Wantaam, a Wise
Woman." Here the spokeswoman for the two strangers had the grace to
blush, remembering the Devil's Chair. "And this--this is my friend, Una
Grosvenor, who has just been initiated into 'Camp Fire.' We belong to
the Woo-hi-ye--Victory--Group of Clevedon which, you know, is only a
hundred miles, or so, from here; and we--"
But Tanpa's face had become suddenly fascinated--illumined--to rival the
sunburst upon her breast.
"'Pemrose!'" She echoed the words softly, with transient glow. "How
novel--and pretty! But--Lorry! Oh-h! you don't mean to say--you don't
tell me--that you're anything to the great inventor, of whom the whole
world is talking: the professor who has invented an apparatus to--to
travel anywhere through the air, through space--even to reach the
moon?... Ah-h, there she is now! I wonder if she's listening to us!"
It was, indeed, at that moment that Yachune herself, the Silver Queen,
showed her placid face above the Pinnacle pines, pale on the rim of the
waning sunset. Did she dream of the Earth-valentine in store for her,
mild old Mammy Moon?
No knowing! The Pinnacle, the green Pinnacle, towered until it seemed
very near to her with the mounting pride in one girl's breast.
"Toandoah, the inventor, is my father--oh! Professor Lorry, I mean. The
Thunder Bird--the record-breaking Thunder Bird--is his invention. I call
it that; an ordinary rocket he says it is."
Well! the sky was in Pem's eyes, of a truth, now, enough blue to make a
Blue Peter, the flag of embarking, the flag of adventure; no rudeness of
"nickum", earthbound, boastful, could ever humiliate her again, with
Toandoah's emblem in her heart.
Yet, as she felt the Guardian's saluting kiss upon her young forehead,
so starred by fate, as she was introduced, one by one, to her sisters of
the White Birch Group and was invited, she the center of a flattering
fuss, to sit with them by a Pinnacle blaze, instead of being at the
pleasant pains to build her own fire, her thoughts would turn back--turn
back every now and again, to Jack at a Pinch!
To the quick-witted, surefooted youth, so daring, if so unmannerly--such
a chuff--who had not even waited to make the rope fast around his own
body before sliding down the rock to the Devil's Chair a second
time--and who had, a second time too, climbed, unaided.
But she said nothing of him--or of her recent escapade.
And she was glad that Una didn't!
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,
space-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 moonshine
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 spaces--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 breasts, 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 passion.
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.