AIRDRAWN AEROPLANES
Running water! Invisible running water! The voice behind the scenes
prompting the play,--the grim play of bat and rat and reptile in old
Tory Cave, where the rocks wept, the little strolling sunbeams clapped
their hands, and the great fungi, primrose-skirted, drooped over a drama
never finished!
It was even more romantic than the girls had hoped for,--such romance as
clings, cobweb-like, to melancholy.
Like a weak wind, truly, a sad wind blowing from nowhere, was the purl
of that hidden streamlet whose mystery no man had penetrated--nor ever
seen its flow--mournfully as cave tears it dripped upon the ears and
hearts of the girls.
"Pshaw! Who cares for weeping rocks, though they look as if they were
bursting with grief and ready to tear their pale hair--that queer growth
clinging to them. Humph! Only crocodile tears, anyhow, like 'Alice in
Wonderland!'" cried Ista, the laughing Eye of the White Birch Group,
whose everyday name was Polly Leavitt.
"It's _not_ the tears and it's not that horribly sad lake with the
little, blind, colorless fish in it, that I mind--it's the Bats!"
screamed Una Grosvenor. "Oh-h!" as the mouse-like head of the cave
mammal and its skinny wing almost brushed her face.
"Well! They're not brick-bats," came reassuringly from one of the boys,
as the Togetherers ranged through the outer part of that vast Tory
Cave--once the hiding-place of a political refugee, whose spirit seemed
flitting among them in the filmy cave-fog which, dank and mournful,
clung about the margin of that strange lake of fresh water where blind
fish played.
Presumably fed by that cloistered brooklet, whose cell, far in, in an
impenetrable recess, no human foot had ever trod, the lakelet had the
floor to itself, so to speak, so that in places scouts with their lamps,
and girls pairing off with their exploring brothers, one piloting eye
between them, had difficulty in skirting it--without a ducking.
"Whew! a ducking in the dark--a cave-bath--horrible!" cried Pemrose.
"Oh, mer-rcy! what--what is it?"
"Bah! Only a garter snake--a pretty fellow," laughed Studley, picking
the slim, striped thing up from a corner of the blind lake where it was
amphibiously basking, and letting it curl around his khaki arm,
investigating the merit badges of the patrol leader.
The green and red of the life-saver's embroidered badge, the crossed
flags of the expert signaler, the white plow of the husbandman, they
enlivened the gloom a wee bit, winking up at the safety lamp hooked to
his hat-band, as he bent over the illumined reptile.
But they did not challenge it as did the flash of an apricot sweater,
blood-red in the ruby lamplight, of a black and yellow cap, several
yellow and black caps, suddenly--eagerly--thrust near.
"He's big--big for a garter, isn't he, Buddy?" remarked a voice that did
not come from the ranks of Togetherers, of Boy Scouts and Camp Fire
Girls, excitedly scrutinizing Stud's novel armlet.
Neither--neither was it the voice of the nickum, so much Pemrose knew,
as she edged coldly a little away,--a little nearer to the dim and
sighing lake-edge.
Yet he was among them, those gaudy big boys, whose flare of color merely
striped the cave-dusk, like the dingy markings upon the snake's
squirming back.
He actually had his armful of mayflowers, too, the nickum, not the
snake; _passe_ mayflowers, with the tan of decay on them, was
nursing them carefully, as if they were part of a long lost heritage
into which he had lately come--as if he were afraid to lay them down
lest some alien should snatch them from him.
"He doesn't look like a 'chuff'--a boor. He looks like a really nice
college boy, one with a hazing imp in his eye though, lur-rking in that
little star--almost a squint; so--so like Una's," thought the inventor's
daughter, familiar with the student brand of boy. "Yet how could he be
so uncivil to us, really--actually--snub us, after all he did, too?
Goodness! wouldn't I like to get a chance to snub him?" It was the Vain
Elf which slept in the shadow of the Wise Woman in the breast of Pemrose
Lorry, that stored this wish, laid it up, a vengeful arrow in the blue
quiver of her eyes, now shooting piqued, sidelong glances at those
flaunting big boys. "Why-y _should_ we run up against them here?
Well! he'll never get a chance to play Jack at a Pinch--friend in
need--to me again. Watch me--watch me pick my steps!" She picked them so
at random, at the moment, moving off, that she came near slipping in for
that eerie ducking, with the blind fish--pale as phantoms, swimming
round--and Stud, flinging the striped garter away, hurried after
her--Jessie, too!
"Gee! this is a peach of a cave; isn't it?" effervesced the scout
sarcastically. "Melancholy so blooming thick that you could almost sup
its sorrow with a spoon, eh?"
"It's a regular cave of despair." The lonely trill of the feathered
hermit was in Jessie's answering note. "That sad voice of water, a
cascade--a stream--far in, which nobody ever saw!"
"I'd give worlds to see it!" said Pemrose.
"So would I!" Stud's voice was pitched high. "If it weren't for the
Scoutmaster.... Tradition says that whoever drinks of that hidden water
will have luck."
"Well! I'd let somebody else have the piping times if I were you,
Buddy--if they depend on a draught from that mysterious spring."
Now, it was the nickum who answered; the same scintillating tones they
were--how bully they sounded then--which had quoted Shakespeare on
"Something rotten in the State of Denmark", amid other depressing
waters, half hidden, half liberated by their ice-cloak.
"I can look out for my own 'piping times'--thank you! And I'm not going
to buy any pig in a poke--take any leap in the dark."
The scout's reply was bristling. To a fifteen-year-old patrol leader, a
Henkyl Hunter, who went up and down upon the trail of a joke, there was
a smack of condescension about that "Buddy", used twice by those big
boys; perhaps he, too, at that moment, laid up something against the
youth of the flaming tone and rig.
"Humph! hasn't he the nerve, butting in?" he muttered.
"He has--has all sorts of nerve," agreed Pemrose readily, glancing
sideways after the boy whose courage she knew to be as high as his
colors.
"The Scoutmaster wouldn't hear of our venturing in so far as to
investigate that running water, anyhow," said Studley. "My eye! What's
the rumpus now--the kettle o' fish?"
It was a shriek from one girl--half-a-dozen girls. It was a loud hiss,
almost a whistle, from some pallid vegetation near the lake-edge. It was
a black snake rearing a blue-black head and glittering eye within three
feet of Una Grosvenor, novice among Camp Fire Girls, whose scream tore
at the very stones of Tory Cave until they cried out in echo.
It was a dozen green-clad girls scattering wildly this way and that,
olive-green aspen leaves tossing in a whirlwind, shuffling from pillar
to post--from rock to darkling rock.
It was--it was a powerful reptile form, in armor of jetty scales,
trailing its six-foot length away, the noise of its mighty tail-blows
against the earth and flying pebbles calling all the Dumps--the Doleful
Dumps--out of the dens where they hid here, making them take strange and
shadowy shapes, gigantic shapes, of threat.
"Let me get out! Oh-h! I want to get out, away--anywhere!" shuddered
Una. "This is no-o fun."
"Yes! it is--once you get used to it," laughed Pemrose, who--together
with the Jack at a Pinch still hovering near--liked her excitement warm.
"Look--_look_ at him crimp himself along! Ever--ever see anything
so crooked?" as the great muscle in the reptile's body contracted and
relaxed upon its hasty retreat. "When we girls had our War Garden, a
year ago, an old farmer said we planted our potato rows so straight that
he 'vummed 'twould make a black snake seasick to cross from one to the
other.'"
"Ha! Because he just naturally has to go ajee!" laughed her scout
knight, estimating the length of that scaly corkscrew, if uncoiled, with
his eye. "Pshaw! I've tamed 'em--and killed 'em, too," he added.
"Yes! a black snake wouldn't harm you, even if he did bite." Pem was
still reassuring her friend. "Did you hear him whistle?... But--but
what's that?" It was just half a minute later that she put the question.
"He isn't making that noise with his tail still; is he?"
She looked at Stud. Under the ruby eye of the lamp his face--the face of
a Stoutheart--had turned suddenly pea-green.
His eyes were fixed upon a gleam of bloated yellow dimly seen, under the
lee of a rock, not very many yards away--the venomous, pale yellow of
the dropsical cave fungi.
"Why--why! it's only one of those horrid, blowzy, mushroom things. But
_what's_ the noise--like--like somebody rattling little marbles,
dry peas?"
The girl felt her own breath go ratatat as she put the question.
"Oh-h! only some fellow rattling--rattling--beans in his pocket. Let's
get away--quick!"
And then Pemrose knew what it was to look upon a Stoutheart "rattled."
But, with that, a voice, a cry, not loud, but strong, exploded like a
spring gun in the cave,--suddenly halting advance.
"What's that outside? What's that outside?" it whooped. "Is it an
aeroplane? _Two_ aeroplanes? Oh! hurry out--and see."
"A dozen aeroplanes! A corps of aeroplanes!" boomed back those flaunting
big boys, of whom the nickum was leader, playing up to the cue of the
Scoutmaster who had started the concentrated cry. "Oh, hurry--hurry!"
She saw him fling his mayflowers on the ground, that strange youth, and
snatch at Una's hand, to drag her along towards the low cave entrance.
He made a wide, circling movement to catch at hers, too. But she dodged
it. Never more should he play Jack at a Pinch to her! Never!
Through old Tory Cave there surged the noise of a rising wind, silencing
that weak gust afar off, now baleful, the sound of the hidden water;
reverberating among the rocks, it might be taken for anything, for the
hum of aircraft--for a perfect onslaught of sky cavalry!
And the Scoutmaster's cry was convincing.
Yet--yet, when boys and girls tumbled tumultuously through the cave
entrance--the girls by some mysterious understanding, first--not a
remote sign of a biplane, even a meager _one_, decorated the sky
overhead.
No flying wires sent down their challenge. And the hum resolved itself
into what it was: the rising, random mockery of Ta-te, the tempest,
laughing at their searching looks, going north, south, east and west,
aloft, skirmishing in bewilderment to all points of the horizon.
"Hum-m. There isn't a _sign_ of a buzz-wagon! Who pulled off that
stunt--on--us?" bleated a few of the mystified younger boys, while Stud
silently brushed moisture like cave-tears from his forehead.
So did the tall Scoutmaster, heavily breathing relief.
"Not an aeroplane in sight! Not a single one!" breezed the girls, all
ready to be angry. "Who--who put that hoax over?"
"Varnish right--and aeroplane wrong!" It was the freakish voice of a
nickum which answered. "No! No buzzer, as the boys say, but there was a
rattler, in there, beside that rock. If some of you girls had gone
ahead, you'd have stepped right on him!"
"A 'rattler!' A big rattlesnake! And--and you started the cry, to get us
out quietly--quickly!"
"Not we! The Scoutmaster had the presence of mind to launch an
aeroplane. We boomed it," came the laughing reply, as Jack at a Pinch,
second fiddle now, marched off with his companions.
"Who--is he?" Pemrose caught wildly at the arm of Stud, who was wishing
that he and not those patronizing big boys had caught the Scoutmaster's
cue and created airdrawn aeroplanes by the corps. "Do you--do you know
who he is; that biggest--that gaudiest--one among them?"
"Yes! No-o! I do--an' I don't!" stammered the boyish Henkyl Hunter.
"I--we--" indicating his scout brothers--"have met him a couple of times
in the woods; I guess his father an' he have a camp on the opposite side
of the lake from ours. We've talked with him--tried to be friendly. And
he--he's always jolly, you know--like now! But--but when it comes to
finding out anything about either of them, gee, you might as well
whistle jigs to a milestone--so-o you might!"