MENOKIJÁBO
"Oh! you needn't 'throw the Babel switch,' meaning you needn't all talk
together. Now! what I'd like to know is _what_ I've been doing while
you've been growing away up there?"
Thus he faced the brine-dripping, eager girls, ruddy from immersion, who
clustered round him upon the white oasis of the sand-bar.
"What you've been doing! Sleeping--probably!"
"Sleeping! Well! Well! If that isn't enough to make a flat fish sit up
and take notice! No, I've been doing my wartime bit, 'skippering' a
coaster carrying lumber to the shipyards, dodging submarines that have
been sinking so many good little vessels of the Gloucester fishing
fleet. After the rheumatism hung on to this lame leg o' mine, like a
puppy-dog to a root, why, I had to stay ashore. Since then, at times,
I've been helping out at the Coast Guard Station, over there on Prawn
Island; I still can mend a breeches buoy or pull an oar, and some of
their men have been drafted into other war-time service. Have you
visited the station yet?"
Captain Andy pointed to a white building standing sentry over the
extreme point of the island into which the long sand-bar merged.
"Yes, we have! We've seen all the wonderful life-saving apparatus: the
light steel life-boat, the big self-bailing Coast Guard boat, too, with
a water-tight tank under her planking, and six little holes--wells--down
through her, with valves that act like the damper in a stove, through
which the water empties itself out, if she ships any. The men said she'd
live in any kind of weather." It was a simultaneous answer from two or
three of the excited girls--wet as feathered sea-mice, dripping brine
and information together.
"So she will; she'd ride a deluge! A regular Noah's Ark she is--that old
self-bailer! But she ain't a hummer for speed; they can't get more than
eight or nine miles an hour out of her, even at a pinch."
"Ha! She wouldn't be much good for chasing spy-boats then, if there are
any around here, giving out information to enemy 'subs.'" Sesooā's
eyelashes, brilliantly brine-gemmed, like the dog-seal's mustache, shot
a sidelong, scintillating glance at the massive old master mariner whose
six feet two of broad stature leaned awry, like a crooked pillar, he
having been lamed for life in a battle with the seas when the main-boom
of his vessel fell on him and crushed his right leg.
"Well, now, I don't suppose she would! No doubt there are busy spies
among us. Bonfires have been seen blazing on some lonely spot of this
very shore before transports passed, far out to sea! But it doesn't seem
as if they could do much signaling from boats and get away with it. The
Coast Guard patrols keep a pretty sharp lookout."
"Yes, we've seen them, starting out at sunset from the watch-tower--that
old crow's-nest over there on the rock." Olive nodded her small,
flower-like head, around which the red silk handkerchief was wound like
an Arab's turban, towards a human aërie perched upon a cliff of the
neighboring island. "They patrol the shore in different directions till
midnight, when other 'surf-men' go 'on beat.' They showed us their long,
portable electric torches with which they signal the tower--and the
tower signals the station--if they sight anything unusual."
"Unusual! Good life! There ain't anything atop o' the ocean now, seems
to me, that isn't as unusual as wings on a whale or--or an iceberg at
the equator!" Captain Andy's big laugh exploded like a fog-gun. "Fancy
seeing a gray-and-black submarine roll itself out o' the water an' go
for you like a fork-tailed fish with a pulpit on its back, as I did last
March, when I was taking that old coaster, the _Susie Jane_, back to
Kennebunkport. Luckily, she was goin' home light--meanin' empty--an' she
could run like a ghost, that old girl, so she showed the sub her heels.
We mightn't have got off, though, for all that, only that a big
destroyer, camouflaged till you couldn't tell her from a flock of
mermaids taking a sunbath on the surface, hove in sight, an' the U-boat
dove--crash dive, I reckon, if ever there was one!
"Gee! I couldn't help speculatin' as to what the finny creatures thought
of her--she had some shiny fins, too, herself--as she lay on the bottom;
whether it was a case of:
"'The fishes all came around she,
And seemed to think as they scanned her log,
That she made uncom-mon-ly free!'"
The girls' laughter echoed the old sea-dog's briny chuckle.
In Sara's there was an abstracted tinkle.
"The patrol men use the blinker system to signal the tower or Coast
Guard Station--International Code--I don't know but that I could do
a little signaling with that myself, _at a pinch_," she remarked,
her eyebrows lifting tentatively. "Iver taught me; he's my
brother--lieutenant-brother--at the front," sinking to a sitting
posture on the sands and looking up explanatorily at Captain Andy.
"Proud of him, ain't you?"
"Well, maybe so!" The gold-tipped eyelashes twinkled over a tear that
was diamond pride of the first water. "I like to practice anything I
learned from him; and it has won me a new honor-bead, a local honor for
signaling--the color chosen by our Guardian herself.... Iver thought
Camp Fire was just 'great'!" went on the seventeen-year-old sister,
"that it taught us to love and _live_ the outdoors life, to be hardy,
plucky, resourceful, and yet--yet remain girly!... Not too girly,
though! Another couple of years and I want to go out into the world--be
free--make my mark!"
"As you're doing now, leaving footprints on the sands of time," chaffed
Olive, as the Flame who had just spoken fitted a black-stockinged foot
into the moist edge of the sand-bar. "Well! to steal a metaphor, it's in
moccasins that we Camp Fire Girls will make footprints on the sands of
time, linking the past with the present, eh?"
Blue Heron, also, sank dreamily to a sitting posture, her arms
encircling her knees, which did homage to the flame of the Torch
Bearer's emblem upon the breast of her bathing-suit; her wide, dark
eyes gazing mistily across the ocean, perhaps toward a front-line
trench in France, at a young officer whose homing thoughts would turn
to the poetry of the Council Fire, to all that it typified of
America--progress, beauty, sisterhood--when he missed the things that
make life hum.
"Humph! Talking o' footprints, I suppose, that, from now on, it's bound
to be 'Skirts go ahead!' along some trails, anyway," murmured Captain
Andy. "Well! I'm not kicking, so long's they remain skirts."
"With bloomers upon occasion, and overalls when we're working in that
green oasis of a war-garden over there on Squawk Hill, where nothing but
wild vetch and barb-weed grew until last summer, when some farmer found
out that there was enough clay mingled with the sand for it to be
cultivated, so he started in to--to make the squawky desert bloom. We've
rented it from him now, and quite often it blooms with backaches." Sara
kicked at the turning tide.
"He's my nephew--that desert-coaxing fellow." The mariner, on whom,
three years before, this same group of girls had bestowed the Indian
name of Menokijábo, or "Tall Standing Man," straightened his great back.
"I made my headquarters with that 'ere nephew an' his family part o' the
time last winter," he went on, "in that bleak little settlement over
yonder, on the island."
"What! Do people live there all the year round?" It was Little
Owl--Lilia--who put the staggered question, turning from the spot where
she, with other of the younger girls--Sybil Deering, Betty Ayres,
Victoria Glenn, called by the Council Fire Sul-sul-sul-i, or Little
Fire--had been frolicking with the Indian canoe and its short paddle.
"How can they?" Lilia blinked at the lonely sea-girt colony whose
suburban boulevard, at low water, was the teeming sand-bar.
"How--ever--can they make a living?"
"Hum-m! This time o' year we live off the 'summer boarders;' in winter
we live off each other!"
"Mercy! I hope nobody is going to live off me--on me!" Sybil bounded
into the fern-decked canoe--all agog for comic flight.
"Ye gods an' little fishes! You'd be a delicate morsel--a choice
goldfish--wouldn't you?" Captain Andy beamed down on her yellow head,
his massive brows working up and down like a cloud-bank above the
blazing sun-dog--mock-sun--in his eyes. "Well! I'd advise you not to get
so near to that big old submarine seal again; he mightn't be able to
resist a nibble."
"Oh! seals won't attack you, nowadays, will they, no matter how large
they are?" It was Arline who thus thrust her symbolic rainbow into the
conversation; she had been paddling in the surf with Flamina--little
Green Leaf--whose foreign glances in the direction of the Tall Standing
Man were flutteringly shy as spring leaves.
"No, I guess not! They have some awful battles between themselves, but
they've been persecuted enough to let human beings alone. I saw a
seal-hunter--strange to these parts--hanging round this bar day before
yesterday. He had come down the Exmouth River--tidal river--in a launch,
with a guide, from that little shipbuilding town up at the head of the
river to which I was freighting lumber last spring. It's just humming
now, building wooden vessels, all sizes!"
"Oh--that hive! That's where my Cousin Atwood is working, since he was
drafted for labor, putting in his six hours--and more--a day, so his
mother wrote me. I believe she's actually worrying about him.... Between
you an' me, Atty's an only son--rather a spoiled boy! Never did a
blessed thing in his life that he didn't want to before; that's my
private opinion! Oh! we'll just have to get you to take us up the river
in a launch, some day soon, to visit him, won't you, Captain Andy?"
Olive, starting up from the sloping sand-ridge, laid a pleading hand
upon the massive old "king-pin's" arm.
"Oh--go to it!" He sighed like a hurricane under the blue mock-sun in
his eyes. "I suppose, from now on, I may's well make up my mind to be
shoved about, like a vessel in a rip, for the rest of the summer, while
you girls are camping here.... What's your cousin's full name?"
"Atwood Atwell."
"Hum-m. A. A., if not A 1, ain't he? And he's one o' those rich
boys--'candy kids'--who are helping to man the short-handed country
shipyards now? Well, I declare! What's he look like? 'Bout five feet
seven or eight in height, heavy build, light-haired, pink-skinned?"
"That sounds as if it might be a description," Olive laughed. "What was
he doing when you saw him?"
"Leading a big blind horse, hitched to a heavy ship's timber, across the
yard, under a blazing sun."
"Did he look as if he enjoyed it--took hold well?"
"Wal, now, I'm frank to say that his smile wasn't ex-act-ly that of a
man with a likely bale of goods to sell--or who wouldn't swap his job
for a kingdom." The sun-dog in the eye sported a tail of sarcasm now.
"'Twas when I sheered off from him an' his blind draft-horse, was
prowling round the shipyard that I first saw the seal-hunter I spoke of,
who was hanging round the bar here day before yesterday watching for a
shot. He was just starting down the river then, with his guide, an old
river-man, 'Merica Burnham, whose launch he hires."
"Oh-h! did he have on a Norfolk suit--belted tweeds and knickerbockers?
Gracious! Olive, I wonder if it _could_ be the same man who passed while
I was painting my dory--camouflaging her?"
Sara's paddling toes suddenly tickled the tide into questioning spray
that camouflaged her cry.
"Now--now, by the ginger joker! Was it _you_ who turned a sensible dory
into a smeared freak? Oh! I saw her as I rowed by your camp. Land! the
sight of her would make a dogfish drop his herring."
Thus the old mariner laughingly diverted that speculative spray.
"Bah! Captain Andy, you're horrid. I think it was quite a cunning idea
to camouflage her, put her into the disguise of the high-seas
uniform--so to speak--as Iver gave her to me.... But if anybody else
made a joke of her!"
"You'd be ready to tar 'em, eh? And so that sportsman
chap--seal-hunter--passed while you were fathoms deep in camouflage! Bet
my life he was amused! I guess it was the same man, girlie, for the
fellow I saw did have on a top-shelfer's rig such as you mention; he was
a walking arsenal, too, rifle an' shotgun both; perhaps he hopes to make
some profit out o' the seal-skins, if he gets any; most everything is
profitable these times! But he missed the one shot I saw him try;
probably at the big old bull-seal that played submarine with you."
"Humph! Glad he did!" came from Sara, mouthpiece for the unavenging
girls. "He must be a tenderfoot sportsman, though."
"Not necessarily. A blubbery seal is about the quickest thing on earth;
it can dive between the flash of the gun and the time the shot strikes
the water--where it has been. Well:
"'What is missed is mysteries,
What is hits is histories!'"
The old sea-dog chuckled again.
"It certainly is a mystery to me _where_ I've seen him before--before
to-day!" Sara's brows were puckered. "His face, as a whole, isn't
exactly, so to speak, familiar. But the eyes are! He blinked as he
passed--a cool sort o' blink--and one of them closed just a shade faster
than the other. Oh, bother! 'twill haunt me now."
It did haunt her, that uneven blink--dogged her back to camp from the
sand-bar.
She was still puzzling over it when, late that evening, after darkness
fell, she stole down from the big brooding bungalow to the tide's edge,
to say good-night to her harlequin dory, hauled up into the black pocket
of a little sandy cove.
Sands and superstition go together. Suddenly Sara found herself shaking
from head to foot in the dim, weird light of a clouded moon, with the
full tide wailing like a bad ghost below her.
Somebody--somebody besides herself--had been at work upon her dory, that
precious legacy!
Was it man or mocking sprite?
The dim little boat, its smears hidden, shone sprite-like now, as if a
water-fairy had taken possession of it and infused into the wooden shell
an elfin soul which defied the petrified girl-owner through two tiny
luminous eyes, the whiteness of whose enchanted glare, at close
quarters, made up for the pin-head nature of their size.
Lo and behold! The dory's blunt, unromantic nose was bewitched into
radiating light in the darkness, too. Down it shone a narrow streak,
bright as a Milky Way!
"What is it? Who--who could have done it? Could--could it be the
phosphorescent trail of some creature thrown up by the tide?"
But the high tide sobbed, "Not guilty!" as the girl--her flesh beginning
to creep upon her bones--turned towards it with the question on her
lips.
"No! It doesn't look like any ordinary phosphorescent trail of a slimy
thing!" So her chilling lips answered half aloud the question put by her
quailing heart.
She retreated a long step--two--three! The luminous eyes, so whitely
shining, faded out--were hidden--lost in a veil of darkness.
"Bah! What a goose--an utter goose--I am to feel creepy, even for an
instant! If a spirit has got into my dory, it's a mighty short-sighted
one.... 'Twould be easy to dodge it!"
She broke into a low chuckle, sharpened by rising anger.
"It--it's the work of somebody! That--that seal-hunter! Could he be
the--Blighter?"
Strange how, out of the stirred waves of her subconscious self, the
epithet used by her soldier-brother, when the gas, catching a
disobedient "doughboy," had temporarily withered a fiery officer's
holiday, sprang--a kindred flame now--to her parted, stiffening lips, as
she turned to the night-breeze for an answer!
But the sea-wind replied, "Not guilty!" pleading an alibi for the
seal-hunter of the uneven blink, one of whose eyes was just an iota
quicker on the cool wink than the other--who had missed his shot at the
big dog-seal, although he had made a traveling arsenal of himself to
invade the bar.
For, as the temperate gust argued, what possible object could a grown-up
man have in giving a harmless little merry-andrew of a dory a luminous
figurehead, visible, with the naked eye, only for a few yards--even if
his present place of sojourn had not, according to Captain Andy, been
miles away, at a little town far up a tidal river, which rang with the
noise of shipbuilders' mallets--or launching axes--where Olive Deering's
rich boy-cousin was working as a draftee of labor, to replace the gaps
made in shipping by raiding submarines, and apparently not in love with
his chosen job.
"No! That hunter's face haunts me, not--not with a 'comfy' sort of
feeling either, though, for the life of me, I can't tell why. But I
don't think he's the blighter--in this case. And it was a good joke my
camouflaging that little dory, if somebody hadn't gone an' spoiled
it--turned her into--into a toothless bead-eye,"--with a raving
chuckle--"into a miserable little guy of a dragon-dory!"
A gurgle faintly tickled the air, like water bubbling out of an
over-full bottle.
Sara Davenport wheeled about, her flame suspended.
Forth from between two low sand-mounds near by shot an arm, a bare,
round arm, scintillating with six tiny twinkling white stars--a mundane
Milky Way!
The dory's owner caught her breath. For a brief second the "creeps"--the
goose-flesh--almost came back. Then she leaped and grasped it.
The air gurgled like a cataract--a foamy cataract--suddenly shot by a
wail!
"Oh, _don't_--don't! You're h-hurting me!" screamed Sybil Deering. "O
dear! how mad you are! Ha! ha! ha! R-rough you are--uh-huh-huh!...
Don't! You're--hurting!"
"Hurting! I mean to hurt you! What right--what business--had you to go
meddling with my dory, at all? Just because you're a rich girl you think
you're privileged! The little boat Iver gave me--t-turning her into a
guy!"
"You made a freak of her yourself!"
"She was mine. _I_ could do what I liked with her. You know how I hate
people to--to fool with anything belonging to me!... And this----"
The jealous speech snapped explosively.
"There--there's somebody in that sand-pocket with you! Who is it?"
"Only--me!" clucked Little Owl very deprecatingly, thrusting a touzled
head over the mound. "We--we didn't think that you'd get mad, like this,
fly up in the air--clap your wings an' crow--hiss--positively hiss!" in
a half-cowed whimper.
"Yes, and _peck_, too!" savagely. "I'll get even with you both! I'll
punish--find some way of punishing you! I'll leave camp to-morrow--if
you don't!"
The anger in the injured one's breast--fed by the raveled fluff of
weariness strewing the day's end--now leaped to wild exaggeration, like
the little boat's disguise, which had passed from camouflage to
caricature.
"If I could have my way----" Sara fairly ground her teeth, confronting
the wooden bead-eye. "If I could only have my way, I'd----"
But what figure was rising from the dim, dark sands beyond the dory?
What figure bestrode it, like Hercules mastering the many-headed
water-monster?
Ah! that of a young officer coolly smiling from out a puffy storm of
blue powder-blisters which rimmed his face, and covered his neck and
wrists--with a powder-hole smoking upon his breast--holding out a right
hand, humorously, to a paling private.
"Oh! if Iver--if Iver could squelch his powder-puff--the one exploding
_in_ him, I can.... There! There! Girls! I didn't mean to take a joke so
badly. I am a jealous cross-cat, especially where----"
The faltering tongue refused to speak the brother's name.
"And we didn't _mean_ to hurt you! We were--thoughtless." Sybil's
penitent speech, still shooting a cataract of frothy gurgles, tumbled
towards sobs. "But we--we found some of the luminous powder that Olive
has in a tiny bottle--very little, it's so fearfully expensive--powder
that shines in the dark, which she mixes with a few drops of oil to make
radio-paint. Of course it isn't ra-radium--really, but----"
Shooting rapids of laughter, between boulders of sobs, the explanations
of Olive's sister wavered towards collapse.
"You know, or I guess you don't know, for she has kept it secret--a
secret that shines in the dark--that Olive is determined, when we get
back to the city, to go to work at something--anything--to release a
man--a man for the front! Any kind of work for Olive, so long's it isn't
farming or gardening! So she has been learning how to paint dials for
aëroplanes and submarines--radio-dials on which the arrows and figures
shine like cat's eyes at night; the darker it is, the more they shine!
She means to practise the work down here, but hasn't begun yet. She's
kept the paint and the secret hidden away. But I knew, and I----"
"You thought of painting a luminous figurehead on my dory! The powder is
composed of radio-active substances, I suppose." Sara was laughing
herself, now. "Well! it certainly does shine. No submarine officer could
fail to see his depth-gauge, if he was diving by it, with lights out; or
aviator----"
"Shine! Glory hallelujah! It costs enough to outshine
diamonds--everything else on earth, except radium itself!" wailed
Sybil--called, by the Council Fire, Light of the Home--glancing down at
the pin-head galaxy upon her arm. "I suppose if--when--Olive discovers
that I stole some, I'll have to pay for it,"--rocking with stifled
laughter as she looked at the bead-eyed dory--"with--with a month's
allowance of pocket-money!"
"Serve you right, too! I'm glad of it! Wasting anything so precious in
war-time! But what a brick Olive is--bent on going to work to release a
man! I wonder she didn't tell me, at any rate! I suppose she thought I'd
write of it to Iver--over there--and she'd hate to be advertised as a
heroine--in a mild sort of way!" This last a softened little
windy-weep-sighing as Sara, without another glance at the dragonized
dory, started back towards camp.
"So--so it's anything but gardening--or farm-work--for her! I wonder how
she'll keep up at fighting barb-weed and witch-grass to-morrow. I'll be
a barbed weed again myself if I don't turn in now. Well! come along,
Galaxy! I forgive you! You certainly are a radiant--blighter!"
She, the oldest girl, seized Sybil's twinkling arm and the trio started
at a race for tent and bungalow, leaving that toothless bead-eye, the
luminous dory, staring unwinkingly at the tide.