REPRISALS
"Her tunic is of silver,
Her veil of green tree-hair,
The woodland Princess donning
Her pomp of summer wear.
White arms to heaven reaching,
Shy buds that, tiptoe, meet
The kiss of June's awaking,
The season's hast'ning feet!
Oh, sure, a laugh is lisping
In each uncurling leaf;
The joy of June is thrilling
Some sense to transport brief!
Sister of mine, White Birch Tree!
That sense my own sets free,
For in thy dim soul-stirrings
My Father speaks to me."
It was Tanpa, with the sunburst upon her right breast, general symbol of
the Camp Fire, and the birch tree in grace of green and silver
embroidered above it upon emerald khaki, who read the verses which she
had scribbled in the skiff's stern under cover of the general interest
in water-snails, eggboats and "fresh-water sheep."
"Most beautiful of forest trees--the Lady of the Woods!" came the
responsive hail from eighteen green-clad maidens, tiptoeing around the
Silver Lady, the emerald tassels of their Tam-o'-shanters skipping in
the June breeze that peeped under her fluttering veil, still tucked with
buds, to kiss those white limbs lifted to the skies, with surely, some
bud of conscious joy.
It was June! Upon the cliff-brow, above the lake, wild roses were
budding, too; and the girls' cheeks painted themselves with their
reflection--even as did the blushing minnows in the lake.
But the lady of the woods had the best of it so far as decoration went.
Never new-crowned head wore in its coronet Life as hers did,--fledgling
life.
For amid the heart-shaped leaves, so brightly green, was the cap-sheaf
of summer wear:
"A nest of robins in her hair."
The poet who penned that line would have gloried in the sight of her,
that bungalow birch tree, a tall, straight specimen, radiant as a silver
taper from the black, frescoed ring about the foot to the topmost ivory
twig, and here and there amid the fluttering, pea-green tresses a little
tuft of conscious life--a nestling with open beak and craving, coralline
throat.
He would have joyed in the sight of the tree-loving Group, too, as the
earth was turned and the first silver sapling rooted deep to the music
of Tomoke's voice, softly proclaiming:
"He who plants a tree,
He plants love.
Tents of coolness spreading out above
Wayfarers he may not live to see.
Gifts that grow are best,
Hands that bless are blest,
Plant! Life does the rest."
And Life would do the rest--oh! surely--in the case of her father and
herself, was the dewy thought of Pemrose Lorry as she planted her baby
tree in honor of that novel Wayfarer, that would first traverse space
and conquer it--bridge the gulf which made Earth a hermit amid the
heavenly bodies--of the great invention, whereof poets in future ages
would sing, that daringly took the first step towards linking planet
with planet.
And the tender sapling was rooted in the hope that long before it was a
mature tree that comet-like Wayfarer would start,--the Thunder Bird
would fly.
Well! star-dust never blinded the eyes. But it certainly dazzled
those of Pemrose, that young visionary, as she pressed earth around
her sapling's root: would there ever come a time when the Camp
Fires of Earth would hail the Camp Fires of some other planet
across that illimitable No Man's Land of Space, first--oh! thought
transcendent--first bridged by her father's genius?
But with the high seasoning of that thought came the salty smack of
another! All unseen in the planting excitement a tear dropped upon the
spading trowel as she thought of that whimsical "Get thee behind me,
Satan, but don't push!" plea of the inventor sorely tempted to
commercialize his genius, thwart its inspired range, because of the
difficulties about bringing his project to fruition--and of that money
hung up, idle, for the next twelve years.
"Daddy-man thinks he'll be--well! not an old man, but that his best
energies will be spent by that time, even if--"
But here the trowel dug vigorously, burying head over ears the thought
of the possible return within that time of the "zany" who had been such
a mad fellow in youth that, according to her father and others, it was
like sitting on a barrel of gunpowder to have anything to do with him,
so sure were you to come to grief through his explosive pranks. And yet,
and yet--perhaps it was the dash of spice in her name--Pem could not
help feeling an interest for his own sake in that "hot tamale", the
Thunder Bird's rival in the will!
So she spaded away, watering her sapling for the first time, herself,
with that little tributary tear; and then, propitiating it, after the
manner of the Indians, in the graceful Leaf Dance, capering around it,
around the Queen Birch, too, with her companions, upon the lightest
fantastic toe, their green arms outstretched and waving, to imitate the
leaves above them, blown by the wind.
Went the phonograph upon the bungalow piazza, as it threw off the music,
the quaint Indian accompaniment to those stamping, shuffling, skipping
feet, to the queer little half-savage syllables, borrowed from the Creek
Indians, upon the lips of the chanting, dancing girls, to the coconut
hand-rattle wielded by Aponi, the Butterfly, most fairy-like of the
green dancers, as she led and led, in honor of the new _idlwissi_,
or tree-hair, the listening leaves--ethereal partners overhead.
[Illustration]
Containing little pebbles picked from the lake-side, with a stick
running through the painted coconut-shell for a handle, its gleeful
rattle fairly turned girls' heads with the joy of June.
"I think we'll have to ask you to repeat that dance to-night for the
benefit of the boys, your guests," said the Scoutmaster, who was
manipulating the phonograph. "Fairyland wouldn't be 'in it' with the
human leaves tripping in pink and gold and green and--no ordinary man
knows what!"
Fairyland, indeed, seemed beaten hollow as "across the lake in golden
glory" the waning sunbeams of early June bathed the little floating
pier, wreathed in laurel and daisy chains, then climbed with flagging
feet, like a tired angel, the sod-steps cut into the side of the steep
cliff, and, gaining the top, joined their rose-colored brothers skipping
among girlish forms in every fair hue imaginable, claiming partners in a
dance as of Northern Lights before ever their human brothers, the scouts
in gilded khaki, got a chance at a reel.
"Oh! I feel it in my toes that this is going to be a won-der-ful party,"
said Toandoah's little pal, kicking lightly, impatiently with those
satin toes of her party slippers at the tufted grass, as she sat
enthroned upon the sod of the cliff's brow, with two knights beside her,
Stud of the stout heart, and a bright-eyed luckless tenderfoot, whose
parents, in a fit of dementia surely, had named him Louis Philip Green,
which, as he used only the initial letter of his second name, had of
course entailed a nickname.
"You promised you'd dance the Lancers with me, although I'm only a
tenderfoot," said Peagreen, nibbling a blade of grass as he lay prone
upon the sod and shooting a glance, bright and eager as a robin's, in
the direction of the black-haired girl with those skybeams in her eyes
under inky lashes.
"Humph! The cheek of some kids who ought to be tucked up in their
Beehive when--when that dance comes off!" grumbled the fifteen-year-old
Stud, with the arrogance of a Patrol Leader, directing his glance at a
brown, conical bungalow flanking a large one, where the younger boys
turned in at what seemed to them unseemly hours, while scout veterans
sat up overhauling the day's doings for an occasion of a laugh against
somebody, practical joke, of course, preferred, to be published in the
Henkyl Hunter's typewritten Bulletin and hung up in the porch next
morning.
"Well! I'm safe for the Grand March, anyhow--and the Virginia reel, too,
eh!" Stud dug congratulatory fists into his brown sides, wriggling
aggressively upon the cliff-brow, like Peagreen figuratively hugging the
ground with an impatient nose.
Privately he was inclined to the opinion that the blue-eyed girl's
friend who had that little nearsighted stand in one of her dark eyes,
and two dimples to Pemrose's one, was the daintier "peach" of the
two--and that his own sister, Jess, was as pretty as either; but think
of the distinction of leading off with a girl whose father would lead
off amid the dance of planets, in sending a messenger to the moon, Mars,
too, maybe!
"Whoopee!" He kicked the sod as if spurning it as common or garden
earth--although there were moments when, like others--elders--in a
skeptical world, he told himself that the Thunder Bird would prove,
after all, a Flying Dutchman,--just an extravagant dream.
"So--so you were out on the lake this morning, studying pond life with
the professor," he said, alluding to the Scoutmaster. "He's instructor
in a college and each year he gets us started on something; last summer
it was astronomy--he brought a small telescope along."
Pem's heels drummed more excitedly on the sod--the starry heavens were
_her_ scope.
"But we have a good deal of fun with the big compound microscope,
too--and more without it," acknowledged Studley. "Fancy last week we
caught a huge pike which had jumped clear out of the water, on to the
bank, after a water-hen!"
"Where was that? How--how big was it?" The girlish questions mounted
helter-skelter.
"The pike? Oh! he weighed about fifteen pounds. It was right over there,
on the other side of the lake," pointing to the spot where the party
interested in egg-boats had landed that morning. "He--he gobbled the
hen, too."
"_Did_ he?" But he might have been threatening to gobble her,
judging by the start which the girl gave at the moment.
Her heart jumped down to the water's edge as abruptly as did the cliff
beneath her.
Her eyes were on a boat rowing out of the sunset's eye directly across
the lake from that very spot.
There was but one individual in it and he--he was rowing by instinct, as
the birds fly, for his gaze was glued to a newspaper sheet, the sun's
own evening edition, gorgeously printed by the painted rays in every hue
of the spectrum.
He was heading straight--straight for the floating wharf with its
plank-bridge running out ashore.
Jack at a Pinch again!
"Do--do you know who he is?" Pem flashed the question upon the older of
her two boy-knights.
"Well-ll! I guess so." Stud's joy in the recognition floundered a
little. "He--he's the fellow--one of the fellows--who boomed the
aeroplane, the other day, to get you girls quietly out of the cave, when
there was a 'rattler--'"
"As if we'd have made a fuss, anyhow!" The girl's eyes blazed, again a
patchwork, drawing their red center from the sun. "You said--you said
that it was so hard to make friends with him, like whistling jigs to a
milestone--ah!" Her own voice was suddenly stony. "Have you--oh! have
you made any headway since?"
"Humph! Yes. I've found out something about him."
The patrol leader's preoccupied eyes were on the boat edging vaguely
nearer to the wharf, with its one "nickum" figure, so nonchalantly
rowing, so absorbed in the rainbowed sheet upon its knees that at this
moment it awkwardly "caught a crab" and almost suggestively lost an oar.
Simultaneously, however, the phonograph on the piazza struck up, as a
prelude to festivities, the Virginia reel, the notes tripping gaily out
across the painted lake; and the rower shot one glance upward, as if to
say: "I'll be there in time!" then bent his hungry nose to the paper
again.
"What--what did you find out about him?" Pem's interest was equally
hungry--positively famishing. "His name--eh?"
"Ha--that's the question! Over on Greylock the farmers' sons call him
Shooting Star', alias 'Starry'," with a boyish laugh, "because when they
were awf'ly hard up for a player in the last ball game of the series
against Willard College, having lost their second baseman and substitute
too, by gracious! he breezed along, an' the captain, hearing he had
played on a college team, roped him in ... an'--an', what do you know,
but he won the game for that mountain team with a home run! A home run
over the left field fence! Bully!"
"But, surely, _they_ know his--real--name!" Pem's aloof absorption
in that fell like fog-drip even upon the glow from that left field
fence.
"Maybe they do--and maybe they don't! He refused it to the fans. And
when the Greylock coach cornered him he palmed it off as Selkirk. But my
cousin who's pitcher on the team says in his opinion that was just
'throwing a tub to a whale'--something fishy about it, see?" Stud
winked. "For 'Starry' an' his father--who's a queer fish, if ever there
was one--had a camp then up on Greylock peak, and the postmaster in
charge o' the Greylock mail owned that he received letters for them
addressed to another name--only he couldn't--wouldn't--give it away."
"_Wha-at!_"
Pem's hand suddenly smote her lips.
Her wide eyes were no patchwork now. Stud had not thought that a girl's
eyes could be so blue. It almost gave him the "Willies", their remote,
peculiar sky-glow, as if afar--afar--they were seeing things.
"What!" she gasped again, while that vivid glow faded, became bluish,
blank, the tint of "Moonshine"--of a strange, wild, nondescript dream.
Moonshine that seemed flooding her whole being!
And yet--although she was a quick-witted girl--it was too vague for her
to draw from it one clear thought--only an uneasy, unreal, absolutely
breathless feeling!
And then the queer, air-drawn sensation as suddenly passed--and with it
the blue moon which had momentarily turned her world to
nothing--"shooed" off by a very real, very tangible, quite pressing
apprehension:
"He--he's not coming to the da-nce?"
She sprang up hurriedly, pointing to the boat below; to its one
preoccupied figure, clad neither in rough sweater nor May-fly gaudiness,
now, but, if the sunset didn't exaggerate, in a very becoming dark suit.
"Humph! I don't know! I guess he is! Didn't think he could pull it off
for some reason or other--" Stud's shoulders were shrugged. "But, maybe,
he's found where there's a will there's a way."
"Why-y?" The girl's lips were parted breathlessly, her foot
involuntarily stamping.
"Oh! you know you told us to invite our friends to the party; not you,
but the other girls did, when they signaled across that night from the
green Pinnacle--gee! and it was some signaling, too." The scout's glance
was teasing now as it shot up from the grass. "So--so one of the older
boys he ran across that bunch o' fellows who were blooming round in the
cave the other day--they're all from camps on the lake--and invited the
whole five. This one thought he couldn't accept, but I guess he's making
a dash at it--at coming just the same!"
"Oh!... Oh, _dear_! I wish he wasn't!"
"Why?" Now it was the scout's turn to hang, breathless, upon the
interrogation as he too jumped to his feet.
"Because--oh! because I'd be--be ever so much more comfortable without
him--enjoy myself more." Pem caught her breath wildly.
"Then 'twill be A. W. O. L. for him! ... A. W. O. L. for him--if I
perish for it!"
"What--what does that mean?"
"Absent With-Out Leave, as they set it down in the Army!"
Mischief leaped to the Henkyl Hunter's eye.
He beckoned Peagreen from the grass to follow him. A whisper in the
tender-foot's ear and down the winding sod-steps of the cliff they
scrambled!
Pem knew that she ought to call them back; knew it from the white
parting at the side of her throbbing little head to the toe of her satin
slipper tumultuously beating the ground, as she sank down, an orchid
amid her chiffons, to watch.
But it was a moment when the spice of her chowchow name had all spilled
over; when the Vain Elf which, according to her father, slept in the
shadow of the Wise Woman, was broadly--mutinously--awake.
The boat had drawn in alongside the decked float now.
It was gently rocking there, on and off, the rower having shipped his
oars and laid them beside him, his strong fingers now and again hooking
the wharf when there was danger of his drifting away, while his obsessed
nose was bent closer still to the newspaper sheet, catching the last
rays of daylight on it.
He did not look up when the scouts, running out over the plank bridge,
spoke to him.
Suddenly one of them--Stud it was--leaned down and snatched the oars,
lifted them high in the air, the nickum's evil genius having prompted
him to lay them in the boat's side nearest the wharf; perhaps it was the
demon which he had dared by sitting in the Devil's Chair.
At the same time Peagreen gave the boat a strong shove outward to where
a current caught it and swept it further--mockingly further, towards the
darkening center of the Bowl.
"Oh! I say--I say, you fellows, that's no stunt to pull off!" roared the
nickum wrathfully. "I'm due at the dance now!"
"You're not coming to the dance. There's a girl here who doesn't want
you!" rang back the voice of callow chivalry in the barbarous pipe of
the tenderfoot.
And Pem, slipping up from the grass, her hands to her burning
cheeks--for she had not meant it to go as far as this--stole back to the
piazza, to dance away from the shamefaced ecstasy of reprisal in her
heart.
Perhaps she would have felt that this was too sore a snub to inflict for
any rudeness on Jack at a Pinch; perhaps she would have compelled her
boy-knights to put out in the camp skiff and return those oars--under
pain of not dancing with them, at all--had she seen the illuminated
column over which the victim's nose had been so disastrously bent.
It was in every sense a highly colored description of her father's
record-breaking invention, dwelling particularly, though vaguely, upon
the experiments so soon to take place with a lesser Thunder Bird, a
smaller rocket, from the remote and misty top of old Mount Greylock.