Dandering Kate
“Well! _What_ a funny footprint! It’s a woman’s track, too, with spikes
on the heel. Now, gracious! it couldn’t be that somebody else—somebody
else has been trying my radio game, out here, listening in, in this wet
spot, with a little portable receiving set?... That’s what it looks
like! My-y!”
A breathless image of astonishment, Pemrose Lorry knelt in the
underbrush near the trail, the scrubby tangled trail, broad enough to
pass muster for a grass-grown road, with ruts in either side and a cart
track in the center, which led from the girls’ camping-place of the
night before—through an arm of woods—to the farmhouse on whose land they
had slept.
Right on the trail, submerging it in one spot, was stagnant pond-water.
Beside the pond was the curious footprint. Her face aflame, red as the
Turk’s cap—flame lily, near—the girl knelt, examining it.
“I—I’ll wager that’s what it is,” she cried half-wildly. “Another radio
amateur, radio fan, has—judging by appearances—been here, this morning,
with her heel in the wet mud and her wire out to a tree—or smuggled away
in an umbrella, possibly, listening in with a toy set, like mine—or
probably with something larger—better—so far as results go. Oh, goody!
‘When Greek meets Greek!’ Don’t I wish we might run on to her.” She
craned her neck, also red with amazement, as the painted wood-lily,
searching the early sunlight, the woodland aisles.
“I don’t see why that mightn’t very well be,” said Una. “If our
automobile is rigged up with radio, so that we can pick up messages
within twenty miles, as we speed along, why mightn’t somebody have a
little Kodak-like set, out here—and play with it out-of-doors, in the
early morning. You—you aren’t the only lion,” laughingly. “In one of the
out-of-the-way farmhouses there may be a red-hot amateur, like you; so
many of them.... Heavens! What’s—that?” She jumped three feet.
Right in front of her was a bulky pincushion, a huddled pincushion,
bristling all over with black and brown spikes, menacingly white-tipped.
And the pincushion inopportunely grunted.
She screamed. So did bronze-haired Lura—and Naomi, a brown-haired girl,
who nursed a sketchbook.
“Gracious! A porcupine! Dandering Kate—as woodsmen call it!” shrieked
Pemrose, startled from her contemplation of the mysterious footprint.
“Oh! don’t go near him—her,” panted Una. “It’ll shoot its quills into
you.”
“Not—unless it’s attacked!”
“But—but it does into a dog.”
“Because the dog shoots his face into the porcupine’s overcoat,” laughed
the inventor’s blue-eyed daughter, going nearer to the bristling ball,
which startled the pincushion into a grunting shuffle for the long grass
at the roadside, where it lay, curled up into a spiky hump-back, the
barbed quills erect on a three-inch tail.
“I thought we’d see one somewhere in the woods this morning,” said Lura.
“They’re generally abroad early, before the dew goes.”
“And in the evening,” added Pemrose. “They ‘hole up’ during the heat of
the day, so father—”
She caught her breath, with a sudden stifled feeling of being “holed
up”, herself.
Was it another Dandering Kate—the figure which, suddenly appeared by the
roadside—the porcupine was not the only round-shouldered thing. Looking
ahead under the shadow of maples and birches, overarching, Pemrose
caught sight of another.
It flashed out of the woods almost simultaneously with a prolonged
shriek from Una—who had almost stumbled on to a second grunting
pincushion.
It wore a woman’s riding habit, leather-faced breeches, leggings, gray
coat, with a red handkerchief knotted round the neck and felt hat jammed
down upon the head.
But that—that which the coat covered; Pemrose—Lura—felt their eyes
water.
It was Nature’s “grueling” pack, a lamb on the back, as mountaineers
pityingly call a lump between the shoulders, not obtrusive—but obvious
in the tight riding coat.
But what did obtrude itself, what plowed deep into their young breasts,
was the flash of the eyes, very dark, very keen, against the green
radiance of the wood.
It just crashed across Pemrose’s gaze, as it were, because for a moment,
the tiniest moment, she seemed to see something known, the ghost of
something familiar, in it, which, yet, was so wild, so _adrift_, so
unknown, as to seem a misfit for the morning—a misfit for the woods,
with their happy-hearted girlhood.
It was almost as if the horsewoman felt that, herself, for she vanished
immediately, to reappear, a minute later, leading a bay horse forth from
a bridle path.
With the bright, obtrusive flash of a heel now, a steel-shod heel, she
was in the saddle—which had a camper’s pack slung across it—and riding
off, with just one backward glance which lit like a brilliant moth on
Una.
“Well—for goodness sake!” Pemrose stared vacantly—hands clasped. “Did
you see the shining creeper on her heel, the bulky umbrella in her
stirrup strap? So—so she’s the radio ‘bug’—amateur!” as if she could
hardly find breath for the discovery. “I’ll engage she has a nice little
receiving set tucked away in that umbrella, the antennæ running round
the steel ribs. Oh! it’s true—no longer am I the only lion,” with a
tragic chuckle.
“Only witch—rather,” corrected Lura. “She! She just came and went, like
an apparition.”
“Don’t talk of apparitions:
“Give me the moonlight, give me the goat,
And—leave the rest to me!”
caroled Pemrose, laughing all over, in quivering excitement, at the
memory of how illusory moonlight, long-haired goats, half-bred Angora,
with the novelty of the wee ’oor had—a few hours before—put phantoms
over upon the imagination.
“Well—well! do you know that it isn’t goats we ought to think of now,
but cows, if we re going after milk for breakfast.” Naomi waved her
sketchbook—a rallying pennon. “They’ll say, the other girls, hungry
girls, that we—we’d be good ones to send out after trouble, because
we’re so slow in getting back,” with a fluttering dimple.
“But—but I say,” began the budding artist again, as girlish feet pursued
the trail, “where’s the use of our all plodding on to the farmhouse?
Can’t ‘Jack’—Una—and I wait here—and you pick us up on the way back?”
“Yes! Oh! this wood.” Una the ultra-feminine “Jack”, sniffed greedily.
“This wood! It smells just like glorified strawberry jam; the wild
strawberries are late here.”
“And there’s the most delectable little brook that ever you saw over
there,” pleaded Naomi. “The shadows, reflections, in it: blue-greens of
pines, greeny-greens of rocks, gray-green of the water, itself. And—and
the light that never was on land or sea, this hour of the morning!” The
cooing whisper was the very voice of the green-gold radiance, itself.
“Una could hunt—wild—flowers—”
Was it—was it the light that didn’t seem to belong on land or sea, the
light that seemed adrift as it flashed from under a riders hat, just a
minute or two before, that stiffened Pemrose’s tart answer then.
“No-o, you don’t!” She decided quickly. “I’m leader of this
expedition—and we stick together. Forward march—and no straggling!
Good-bye, Dandering Kate!”
As girlish hands waved farewell to the spiky pincushions, the wood-road
abruptly gave out in a field, which, in turn, yielded to a potato patch
that led up to the farmhouse door.
Milk cans clashing together like cymbals, brought the farmer’s wife,
sunbonneted, from a meadow where she had been helping with the first
crop of hay.
“Yes, my sakes! you can get all the milk you want,” she cried, “but my
son ain’t through milking yet, though it’s on for eight o’clock. He’s as
awk’ard as a one-armed paper hanger this morning,” in a lowered tone,
“you see his right arm has been pretty bad ever since the war. It was
broken by a machine-gun bullet; sometimes he can use it—sometimes it
worries him, ain’t no good, at all. You can go round to the barn
yerselves.”
They did, with hearts beating slowly, like muffled drums, as they
pictured that one-armed milker.
But suddenly feet moved to a quick step again, a merry quick step—though
stealthy—as they caught the whistle and then the chant—“swanky”
challenge—that came through the barn-door.
“How’ll you keep’em down on the farm,
After they’ve seen Paree,
They’ll never want to see a rake or hoe,
Who the deuce can _parlez-vous_ a cow?”
“It always was a good job; wasn’t it?” Suddenly a girl’s head was thrust
mischievously near to his—a head that burned like a lamp in the dim
stall.
“_Always_ a good job!” White teeth flashed within a foot of his ear.
“Oh! I can parlez-vous a cow. I’ve taken full care of one for a month.”
He started—the one-handed soldier. White jets flew, between his fingers,
giving each girl a milk-eye.
“Here—just let me try. Let me ‘spell’ you for a while!”
“Copper-nob” pushed him off the stool. “I’m a Camp Fire Girl—with honors
for milking. Watch me ‘parlez-vous’ her! Hove—lady?” This to the cow.
“Well! by George, I’ve ‘no kick coming.’” The ex-service man rose, with
a glance at his Y. D. button. “I’m as awkward as a one-handed fiddler,
this morning,” he confessed ruefully.
“And—and surely the others won’t mind, the other campers—if we keep
breakfast waiting.” Lura from the milking stool looked up at Pemrose,
“not when we tell them how—whom—we’ve been helping! ’Tisn’t as if we had
‘mooned’ round in the woods—” the milk was coursing richly
now—“watching—apparitions—in red handkerchiefs.”
She broke off, cooing to the placid Jersey, for Pemrose seemed seeing
apparitions at the moment, staring bewitched, at a mountainside
opposite, where a figure on a small bay horse was slowly climbing a
rough bridle path.
Her blue eyes, those of the inventor’s favored daughter, shone
half-petulantly with the feeling that she was not the only lion in the
desert, with fabulous hearing, if not roaring, powers, as she caught the
far, bright flash of metal—of more than the stirrup from the rider’s
right foot.
“But who—is—she?” The girl’s black eyebrows drew together. “If Andrew
was here, he’d say she looked ‘fey’, unbalanced—rather unbalanced. Her
eyes, they were the strangest—wild and bright. But she looks like a sort
of ‘needle nose’, too,” with a sudden snap, “cunning in her face—and she
rivals me with radio—plays with it out-of-doors ... who ...”
“Who the deuce can _parlez-vous_ a cow?”
broke in “Copper-nob” triumphantly. “Look Pem, I’m down to ‘skimmings’
now,” as the milk thinned to a frothy trickle, “but the pail is
three-parts full. Hove—lady! You’re a winner,” in grateful compliment to
the Jersey cow.