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 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--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 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, high above 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 played up, "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 the
chauffeur'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. _We_ must 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."