The Wee Hour
“Oh! it’s not the dusty highway,
That—Camp Fire Girls don’t mind!
And it’s not the thirsty hiking,
There are always springs—to find.
Oh! it’s not the mountain climbing,
Our jol-ly packs are light!
It’s not even snakes nor ’squitoes,
It’s the—sleeping out—at—night.
“Sleeping out in the quiet night,
With the stars for bedroom candle-light,
Boo! Woo! Woo-oo!”
Around the waning camp fire the wail of a parody rang, voicing or
burlesquing the sentiments of a dozen Camp Fire Girls.
The other half dozen were loftily silent. They were seasoned campers—or
supposed they were. They had dwelt much upon the hike on the bliss of
the poncho-bed, with a mattress of pine or spruce boughs—the bliss that
never clung to wall or bedstead of a paper-hung room.
“The stars for bedroom candle-lights,”
rang the murmur, echoing, dreamy.
“It’s not the stars for big candle tonight; it’s the moon, a full,
bright moon; there she’s rising now,” said a seventeen-year-old girl,
Madeline Fitch. “How about a ring concert?”
“We’re too far from any strong sending station here, I think, to pick up
anything by radio—even a murmur, with such a tiny set,” said Pemrose
Lorry. “But I’ll try it if you like. Here, Unie,” to her girl chum, “you
put the ring on; I’ll play ‘ground’—sink my heel into the edge of the
spring—there. But, heavens! you mustn’t pickle the crystal,” she was
gasping deliriously, a moment later, interposing a quick palm to catch
the little tear of homesickness and novelty—swollen, perhaps by the
remembrance of strange sensations experienced when last she had
“listened in” on the ring—which came trickling down Una’s pretty nose.
“Father says a drop of water, a horrid little teardrop, would spoil even
a galena crystal—and much more this new one. I have to be as careful of
it,” the inventor’s daughter caught her breath, “as he is with some of
his priceless laboratory treasures, his rare quartz tuning forks, for
instance, that give the purest pitch of any sound.... Oh! I wish we were
at camp now—so that I really, might talk with him, by radio—fancy
holding a wireless ‘hamfest’,—that’s the word, not a ‘gabfest’—with
him—a hundred miles off!”
The longing tear was in Pemrose’s eye now, a flashing droplet, but there
was no fear of its pickling the sensitive “radio soul”, the new crystal;
instantly dashed away it was as she hurried to loop her aërial round a
distant tree—with a word to one and another of the girls to watch the
tip of Una’s nose.
But nothing could be picked up from the air with the ring to-night, save
occasionally a “dying tick”, as its owner put it, the swooning ghost of
dot and dash, so faint, so very faint—remotely random—that it seemed to
come from the other side of the world—or from the moon, itself,
untranslatable signaling—and the experiment was abandoned in favor of
turning in early.
“Oh! isn’t this—heavenly?” breezed “Copper-nob”, the torch in her heart,
blown by the night-gusts, inspiring her lips as, presently, she felt the
cool air, light as a kiss, upon her cheek, which nestled beside
Dorothy’s in the poncho-bed, formed of two ponchos, upper and lower,
upon the pine-bough mattress, on the ground.
“Hea-ven-ly—oh-h!” The general, blissful sigh went round.
“What a light blue the sky is—quite light blue! I nev-er thought a
night-sky could be so bright ... and the tree shadows so black,
ink-black, against it! If, only, I could paint it,” murmured an artistic
girl, Naomi Larned, who was seldom or never divorced mentally from
sketch book or palette.
“But what—what’s that?” Una was sitting up with a scream, dragging
Pemrose, poncho-mate, with her—they had been lying down about fifteen
minutes.
“Only a bat—barn bat flying round—or maybe—maybe he’s a cave-dweller,”
murmured the other sleepily. “Isn’t he funny—just like an aviator, doing
stunts? An aviator doing stunts!” she repeated it, nodding.
“Listen—listen to the funny noise he—his wings—make:
‘Eb-eb-eb-eb-ob-ob!’ Oh! I think he’s—weird—horrible.” Una shuddered,
her face in the moonlight, white—shining—as the night-blooming cereus,
lifted over the dark poncho-edge to the peopled sky.
“Now, ‘Jack’,” Pemrose used the rallying nickname, “you promised you
wouldn’t be a ‘weer’, as Treff would call it, a fanciful
‘peerie-weerie’,” with a low, “dropping-off” laugh, “frightened of
nothing—and getting every one worked up. Lie down-and go to sleep,”
mumblingly. “I’m so—”
“_Two_ of them!” shivered Una—and shook her. “Oh-h, mercy! they’re
flying down close—close-near us. One almost touched me.” She stifled a
low scream by biting at the poncho-edge.
The “weeriness”, like hay fever, spread.
Girls were sitting up all along the line, now, upon the moonlight
bedding-ground, on the edge of a grove, where the taper-like stems of
slim white birches, their spreading crowns, were the black and silver
candlesticks that held the stars for bedroom candlelight.
Across that strange light blue of the sky, so remote from the azure of
daytime, and embroidered with inky shadows, black patches were darting
and zigzagging in wavy lines, now side-slipping downward, on a wing-tip,
like a tilted aëroplane, turning a fantastic somersault, soaring
again—to take, with lightning rapidity, a nose-dive after prey.
A nose-dive that brought them, each in turn, down very near to the row
of dark ponchos.
“Goody—ginger! Just like aviators—stunt-flying! After insects, I
suppose—and any little bird, nestling, foolish enough to be out—late!”
To Pemrose, rousing to watch them, that skinny-winged sky-cavalry,
darkly maneuvering, was part of the wonderful fascination of the
night—of the night-side of Nature just being turned outward.
So it was to most of the girls—camping girls.
To just one or two tenderfoots—Una in especial—the bats were vampires,
when they flew too close—with the low, eerie “eb-eb-eb-ob!” of swooping
wings.
“They—they make the sky look ‘ghoulie’,” she whispered.
And as night wore on and the ghouls sought their barns or caves, she did
not easily settle down again.
“That black—black something s-stealing towards—us!” She was pinching
Pemrose’s arm, once more. “Oh! it looks like a bull—a bear.”
“Elephant, perhaps! Can’t you see its tusks waving?” jeered her
poncho-mate. “I’ll tell you what it is; it’s great black,
stalking—worry-cow. Go to sleep.”
“All—the funny little noises!” rippled on the nervous tenderfoot, who
now felt a Meg-many-foot, or half-a-dozen of them—clammy
centipedes—crawling down her back, not silver-footed, either. “And the
low boughs, swinging, they look like people! The birds—listen—they’re so
restless, aren’t they—sleep restlessly! Oh-h, de-ar! what’s—that? What,
ever, is that?”
It was the sharp, slicing “Whit-whit-whir-r!” of a night hawk’s wings.
It was a frenzied, torn little “Cheep! Cheep!” with the momentary
flutter of a tiny body—two dark bodies—in mid-air; a fidgetty bird
scared out of the nest by the hawk’s proximity and caught in the night
hawk’s talons.
Una bewailed the nocturnal tragedy, sobbing softly.
But this was the fiery stick of reality waving luridly across the
cinematograph of worked-up sensations—she ceased creating worry-cows.
Girls really steadied down now, settling to sleep, only arousing, once
in a while, to chase a stone from under an inquisitive elbow or hip,
where they had flattered themselves the bedding-ground was perfectly
clear.
And so it drew on towards the plaintive stillness of the wee hour, one
o’clock, when, midnight past, the lusty Night seems to shake its dark
tresses and settle down for a breathing spell, too, before morn-blink.
Pemrose was awake. She had been dreaming of the radio ring; that with
her heel in the fostering wet, it had added to its magic the gift of
transporting her—and she was back in the laboratory with her inventive
father. She had let one of his rare quartz tuning forks fall and had
broken it.
She awoke to the wee ’oor ... and the rattle of a chain.
“I—I m-mustn’t wake Una—at any cost. What is it—where is it?... It must
be after midnight—now.”
Pemrose Lorry raised her cheek stealthily from the poncho-pillow. Talk
of “wuzziness” now! Her skin began to ooze at every pore, chilly as the
dew around.
It was the mournful clank of a chain again. She saw that “Copper-nob”,
near her, was half sitting up, too, swaying like a feather backwards and
forwards. She could almost hear the other girl’s teeth chatter.
Her own gave a frozen click, click—and set suddenly, as if in lockjaw.
It was no figment of the imagination now, nor yet a mist-fawn of the
night—a pale, gliding mist-shape—there was a something white before her.
It bobbed and bowed towards her, about fifty yards away. It accomplished
a weird levitation, ascending automatically into the moonlight—dropping
again. And there appeared another white form, poised above it—to the
faint, far rattle of a chain.
Lightminded ghosts, they teetered up and down, blanching the moonbeams,
now checkered by a thin cloud.
And at the sight “Copper-nob’s” nerves gave way; she “loosed” a shriek
that startled everybody.
But it did not exorcise the apparitions.
There they were, undeniable as ever, sketching their chalk-white
outlines against the night—so that the heart of the stoutest melted
within her bones—in the solemn stillness of the wee’oor—and her flesh
crept.
“This is Ghost Craft ... and we’ve none of us—none of us taken honors in
that.” Pemrose’s faint mischief was curdled by an eerie note.
“Ghosts that have to be shot through with a silver sixpence!” Andrew’s
nonsense came back to her.
And the qualifying: “An’ if a’ tales be true, that’s no lie!” could not
resolve into thin air the spectres before her.
Twenty pairs of eyes could testify to them, seesawing up and down in
silvery balances of moonbeams—now one, now another tipping the scale.
And the small hour was very, very still. Not a sound troubled it, but
the hollow clanking of that distant chain—picked up by ears near the
ground, and ... rising sounds of hysteria among the girls.
Even the Guardian felt as if some insulation were stripped from her
nerves. Each one sent a separate, tingling shock through her body.
But she got to her knees and then to her feet—the dark poncho clinging
to her.
“Girls! this can be explained. This must be explained. If we don’t
explain it.... Who’ll come—with—me?”
There was a groveling and grubbing among the ponchos.
“Let’s—go!” said a small voice then—the very small voice of Pemrose
Lorry, “I’d like to tell Daddy how a ghost tips the scale; I suppose
they weigh about as much as two pin-heads—or the dust off a feather,”
speculated the laboratory sprite.
“No-o, you stay here, Theresa,” returned the Guardian to another
volunteer. “You stay with the younger girls. We three will investigate
this.”
For now it was “Copper-nob” who, loosing the inner fire with a timid:
“Let’s go!” was tiptoeing in the Guardian’s wake along a plaided path of
moonbeams.
And in the demeanor of the three, as the girls fell in on either side of
the older woman, there was something freakishly suggestive of the noble
Roman and his two companions: of “how well Horatius kept the bridge in
the brave days of old.”
On across a strip of rank pasture they went, halting amid black,
confusing shadows to see whether the ghosts would falter before the
advance, or not.
But the spectres never wavered, alternately poised, shimmering sentries,
against the sky, where the pasture ended in a grassy bank, which some
crowning had topped off into a tall sod-fence.
Imponderable ghosts, weighing as much as two pin-heads, louder, more
blood-curdling, grew the hapless rattle of the chain they dragged!
But somebody was feeling dizzily another freakish element in the
situation.
Suddenly “Copper-nob”, whose training had been rather different to that
of her two companions—more rural—went mad as a March hare.
She flung herself down in the heavy dew, arms limply outflung—feet
kicking wildly.
“Goats!” she gasped. “Goats!” she shrieked. “Goats! Not Ghosts! Two
long-haired, milk-white goats, chained together! One—one has got to this
side of the fence, is trying to drag the other over. And the other won’t
stand for it! Oh-h!”
“Nannie! Billy! Tug-of-war!” The failing knees of the two supporting
heroines gave way under them too; they sank down—down—into the moonlit
dew—and laughed until the wee ’oor shook.