Mondamin
“Hurrah! Isn’t it fun to see our bonfire put the stars out?”
It was Dorothy who gave vent to this extinguisher, piling on more dry
brush and resinous pine logs until not a spark in the firmament, planet
or fixed star, dared to vie with the blaze below—upon the wild mountain
top.
“And when it dies down a little and the flames blow aside, you can see
old Orion, up there, stretched lazily, on watch,” said the Guardian.
“Well! whose ear is the most nearly roasted? I don’t mean an auricular
cavity,” laughingly. “I mean ‘Mondamin.’”
Mondamin, great Corn Spirit, they were toasting him, in style, upon the
summit of Mount Pocohosette, while the two lesser peaks, Little Brother
and Little Sister Mountain, as the girls called them, retired into the
shadows of right and left.
Carrying, each, half-a-dozen ears of the sweet, early corn, in its coat
of bishop’s purple, procured from the outskirts of the horse-farm, the
girls had climbed the mountain in the golden September afternoon, by a
trail which sidetracking Balcony and precipice, led almost to the very
top.
Twenty-six hundred steep feet above sea level, fifteen hundred above
their cosy camp upon the sidehill, with its exciting proximity to the
Long Pasture, they had cut down wood with their Camp Fire axes, piled
high the brush—for it takes much fuel to toast Mondamin—and brought
water wherewith to wash him down, from a little lake of the clouds which
could almost compete with the famous one of that name upon Mount
Mansfield.
Mount Mansfield, giant of the Green Mountains, they had waved him
goodnight before their bonfire put out the stars, so that lazy Orion’s
nose was, for the most part, out of joint.
A teakettle sang its song upon a little red nest of its own, to the
right of the main blaze, around which eighteen girls, each with a
browning corn-ear upon the end of a stick, were preparing the jolly corn
roast.
The first corn roast of the season—above the clouds!
The wind, now sibilant, soft, now swelling to a summit roar, sang
through dark spruce and mountain ash of the heights—bringing out the red
cheeks of the latter, the ripening berry clusters.
The mystery of night, young night, the girls had never before so felt
it—so reveled in it.
Sparks played, firefly-like, among the trees. Potatoes hissed softly
among red embers. Flames flickered upon great piles of husks, rosetting
Mondamin’s bishop’s purple, his silken undercoats of pale green and
cream, stripped off before roasting him.
Ever and anon, a toasting chorus to him rang out, led by Dorothy—the
mountain top guild of glee, laughing girls, airing their own
improvisations:
“Snap and crackle, blazing bonfire,
Pile the brush and pine logs high,
Till the flames wax bolder—bolder,
Scaring stars out of the sky!
_Strip_ Mondamin’s rustling coats,
_Strip_ his silky hair,
In the glowing embers
Roast him, sputtering, there!”
Roasted he was royally and absorbed—devoured—too, with various
accompaniments, while the flames sank to a flicker—and Orion came into
his own again, with a belt of dark clouds around him.
The wind muttered strangely now; muttered a “fore-go”, if girlish ears
had been attuned to its meaning.
Faces, black and buttery—not beautiful, but very happy—gathered round a
core of red, soon to be extinguished, when the descent of the mountain
should begin.
“It’s too bad that we didn’t bring ponchos and sleeping bags—spend the
night up here on the mountain top,” said Dorothy. “We’d have been comfy
enough in that open camp, over there—although it has no front wall, only
two gray wings, with a gap in the middle.”
“How many of those camps you do run across among the Green Mountains,”
said Pemrose, “nearly all left generously open for the ‘next fellow,’”
laughingly; “some quite snug, with gray bunks and doors—others with no
face, like that!”
“And haven’t we sampled the hard knocks,—hard bunks—too, by sleeping in
them?” murmured Madeline. “Well—hard or soft—it has been a great old
time. A wonderful summer! And now it’s—nearly—over.”
“Some queer things have happened, too,” half-whispered Naomi.
“Nothing very exciting since the night somebody played Pied Piper upon
the mountain—and coaxed Una almost over the precipice-edge! I wonder
who....” Lura leaned forward to stir the fire—her murmur breathlessly
low.
“It was the same sound—the very same—I heard before in the
garden—at—home.” Una shivered a little, caught in a rose-lined pocket of
darkness—as the night became more overcast.
“But now, pshaw! it’s so easily explained.” Pemrose shrugged her
shoulders impatiently, poking at the fire, too. “The Guardian was
right—just some crack-brained musician, off on a holiday, seized with a
fancy for sorting sounds out-of-doors,” laughingly, “testing old Nature
with a tuning fork—or a variety of them—to see what key she sang in—what
pitch she liked best. If father and I hadn’t done it before—”
“But early—early morning.” Una’s whisper was still restless.
“Trying to get the exact key of a bird’s song—waking song!”
“Seems to me the bird didn’t get much of a chance!” The dark-eyed girl’s
whisper was whimsical now; that slight, near-sighted peculiarity in her
right eye, which the girls pronounced “fetching”, was fixed half
fearfully, as she stared into the fire, but she was trying—Una—to get
the better of what Pem called her little “crinkams”, her cousin Treff
her cowardly curves.
“Well—well, we haven’t heard it again,” said Madeline.
“I—I thought _I_ did—one night, near camp—one starry night—”
Perhaps only the fire caught Una’s broken whisper, now, for the wind
suddenly shrieked into its ear, so that the flames leaped up again
noisily.
“_Goodness!_ I hope we’re not going to have a storm,” said the Guardian.
“That would be too bad after all the fun.”
“Huh! The thunder-plump comes on so quickly here,” hooted Madeline.
“Seems as if the mountains just heaved a long, sullen breath—and comes
the storm!”
“Ouch! angry teeth, already!” quivered another, as the night wind took
her by the hair—and lightning grinned below her.
“It is coming, sure enough—and we never would have time to get home
before it!” Girlish forms cowered towards the fire now,
trembling—trembling before the night’s angry teeth.
“If I don’t mistake, ’twill make every storm we’ve witnessed before seem
mild as a Sunday School picnic—even the one the night the flash light
fainted,” said Pemrose, creeping round the fire on hands and knees, to
sit near Una.
Presently, when the storm broke upon them—or below them, rather—they
were locked in each other’s arms, cheek to cheek.
“They’re always ‘twosing’, those two,” Dorothy threw a little grimace
into the fire’s heart, as she shrank into her heavy sweater. “Pemrose
would stand up for Una against everything in the world—a good thing,
too, for Una could never stand up for herself!”
But, as a matter of fact, every girl would have stood up for Una—would
have shielded her with a warm breast from mountain rain and storm—and
Dorothy knew it.
“I suppose that’s what it means to be ‘born in the purple’,” she
murmured impishly to herself now; “it’s all gratitude to her
‘high-powered’ father,” with a low gasp, “for this wonderful, wonderful
summer: radio concerts, horseback riding—everything! Una isn’t spoiled,
though, I’ll admit; she loves us all, but she just swings like a
pendulum between Pemrose and the Guardian.”
She had been privileged to go out alone with the Guardian—Dorothy
remembered that now—on sundry occasions when the other older girls had
undertaken climbing feats that were a little beyond her endurance—or her
energy—as when they had stormed Little Poco, Little Brother Mountain, a
precipitous peak, with a face rough as Esau’s hands—to interview the
spell-woman.
They had not found her at home. And, contrary to custom, her camp on
Little Brother’s shoulder was not wide open for the “next fellow.” It
was securely locked.
The girls, led by their Assistant Guardian, had come back almost
hysterical with fatigue, anathematizing the inhospitable “heather cat”,
whose roaming propensities were familiar to them, for occasionally they
saw her again—the Little Lone Lady—with Nature’s heavy cross, the lump
between her shoulders, climbing some lonely bridle path, always on
horseback—the camper’s pack across her saddle, the bloated umbrella in
her stirrup strap.
But the interests, the growing pastimes, of their camp life were too
many and varied—chase and capture in the Long Pasture, riding the air
with a whisper by telephony and telegraphy, as most of them could now
do—for them to waste much thought upon that lonely—eccentric—little
figure.
Yet, somehow, it rode before Pemrose to-night upon the lightning’s vivid
broomstick; she caught herself wondering what its background had
been—what sort of life had left it imposing upon the superstitions of
mountain people—living upon their crumbs, in return.
At a certain point in her speculations the girl, staring into the fire
with eyes of blue patchwork, started—snorted. She always did snort and
shy, like Revelation at trail tumbleweed, when she thought long upon
that figure of a waif-woman who dabbled in radio like herself.
“I’d like to see the inside of her umbrella,” thought Pemrose.
And with that the world fell in beneath her. The clouds, for the most
part below them, were ripped by a terrible light.
Like a thief in the night the mountain storm was on—and it was such a
thunderplump, sudden, banging electric storm, as these girls had never
beheld before.
A blue-black darkness herded them together around their cowering
fire—feeling as if the Day of Judgment were upon them—and every minute
that bruised darkness spit flame; a flame so dazzling that the eyeballs
caught it and saw by it after it had passed.
“We must seek shelter in that wooden camp,” said the Guardian, putting
her arm around Una. “The rain—I suppose it will ‘rain pitchforks’
presently—may drift in upon us, but at least we shall have a roof.”
And from there they watched the world pitchforked beneath them—torn,
racked, groaning, blazing.
“_Goodness!_ It’s like fifty days of judgment rolled into one,” moaned
Dorothy—and hid her eyes against the Guardian. “Hide me! Hide me!”
But the trees in the dark forest beneath them found no hiding place, no
rocks to fall on them and cover them from the wrath of the sky.
A blazing fireball fell among them and one tree, sometimes two, jumped
into the air—clearly in the glare the girls saw them—then fell, riven.
“Oh! those fireballs they seem to open my head ... every time one
strikes,” said Pemrose—a weak, bird-mouthed twitter.
Una sat still as the planks beneath her, cheeks as white as the sudden
white light which, at the heart of the storm, weirdly cleft the
clouds—and reigned for minutes upon the mountainside, upon the torn,
staggering forest, and in the sky.
“Oh-h! this is aw-ful. I wish I had been a better girl,” whined Dorothy.
“The black tops of those pines! There—there goes another fireball.... I
can’t bear to see them strike.”
“‘When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee ... and
through the rivers they shall not overflow thee,’” said the Guardian
finding nothing more applicable to her steadfast faith. “We may be
thankful to be, so far, above the storm—only the lightning climbing—”
The lightning, forked, blue, zigzagging up and down the shuddering
mountain, as the white light faded, counted every coral berry-bunch on
the mountain ash, every needle on the grinning spruces; but, although it
was so vivid—so lingering its dazzle—it was but the tail end of a flash
which climbed to this summit camp on old Pocohosette, two thousand feet
above the valley—almost three thousand above sea level.
“Oh, my! The horses! The horses in the Long Pasture! I wonder how
they’re taking it? If one of them should be struck! Rev-el-a-tion!”
Pemrose felt as if the fireball, now striking, was in her heart.
Far away, on a hilltop, a barn blazed.
“_Revel!_” whimpered Una. “Revel!” It was the first sound she had made.
“If—anything—should happen to her-r!”
“Oh! come,” said the Guardian; “don’t think of such things.” She,
forthwith, pinned a smile upon her lips, which the lightning, as
promptly, unpinned.
“I—I can fancy them all crowding together against the fence,” droned
Pemrose again, “and nickering nervously—even Cartoon. And the little,
trembling foals hiding under their mothers! I wonder whether a
mother-horse would desert its baby?”
“In danger, I hardly think so—although I don’t know that it has ever
been tested,” said the Guardian. “Ha! Now for the rain! The deluge! I
doubt whether our Ark will ride that, as it did the lightning.”
The black rain clouds drifting through the lightning-ripped dusk, like
soot through smoke, floated higher than the thundershutters.
Presently, girls were shrinking into themselves, trying to dwindle to
the sheltering capacity of their sweaters, cowering in corners, the
Guardian attempting to shield her brood, as fingers of rain came seeking
them out, curdling courage.
They had escaped peril of fire bolt and fork-lightning which, to-night,
had killed many a noble tree. The thunder storm was now abating.
But to spend the night here, unprovided—on the sodden floor of an open
camp! Or to attempt the descent of a washed-out trail through those
blindly dripping forests!
Well! it was the first time that the Guardian wished herself back at her
teacher’s desk—in the stuffiest schoolroom imaginable—wished that she
had not undertaken the charge of eighteen girls through these summer
months.
It was the first time that the girls, themselves, felt
flinching—breaking—before the “fiery stick” of reality with which Andrew
had threatened them—of deadly hardship.
“And there may be a washout below us on the mountain, between here and
camp,” said the Guardian feebly, “an impassable washout. We’d better
wait for a while, anyway, before attempting the trail.”
Slowly the sodden minutes dragged along, to the jeer of the rain
sweeping past the camp, occasionally into it, pecking, a merciless
rain-crow, in every corner.
It took all the grit of the boldest hearts to say to themselves: “What
of it? The rain isn’t going to ‘come it all over me.’ I am a Camp Fire
Girl; I will not flinch nor falter!”
The Guardian felt that she had one thought that cowed her, Una: Una whom
she had hoped to return proudly to her parents, a few days later,
rosier, healthier in body, if not hardier of soul—Una, possibly, laid up
ill, as a result of to-night’s exposure.
By-and-by—an hour had passed—she was heavily, miserably, debating within
herself as to whether it were better to tackle the washout with draggled
girls on foot, or to try to light a fire again—stick it out on the
mountain top until morning.
“We’ll have to wait a little longer, anyhow, before we could possibly
find anything ‘spunky’ enough to burn,” she murmured almost deciding
upon the latter course.
Again the wet blanket of watching fell upon the camp. Suddenly—it was
well on into the second hour—a corner of it was lifted ... lifted by a
sound.
Light—light so dazzling as to be unbelievable was stealing under that
blanket of misery.
“Klopsh! Klopsh! Klopsh!... Klopsh!” There were distant heavy sounds
upon the mountainside. Something—something was struggling upward, in
heavy travail.
“We saw bear signs upon the mountain, coming up,” moaned Una,
“stumps—torn—apart; bushes—”
“Hush! Hush—listen!” The Guardian was sitting bolt upright—with a look
upon her face such as young Moses, of old, might have worn, when he saw
deliverance for his people.
“Klopsh! Klopsh! Klopsh! _Klopsh!_” And now—now, with that nearing,
splashing crescendo mingled other sounds: whistling and complaining of
branches, upper branches, the sullen swish of lower boughs, through
which a passage was being forced; a rattling of little twigs against....
What?
And not one—not one of the wet and weary girls dared yet even to name it
to herself: “Wagon!”?
Then, suddenly, one of them was on her feet and out of the cabin, flash
light in hand, in time to see a great, reeking farm horse, eyes rolling,
jaws foaming, lip rolled back from the dauntless teeth, plunge forth
from the mountain top spruces.
Game leader, he was followed by a sweating, snorting wheel horse!
“Tandem,” gasped Pemrose Lorry—and reeled against a tree, which splashed
her all Over.
“Well! I reckon this storm would make the Day o’ Judgment seem a Sunday
School picnic, eh?” roared Donald Menzies, who managed the horse-farm
for Mr. Grosvenor.
A giant figure, six-feet-four, in oilskins and sou’wester, he wavered
before the girls’ eyes—a beatific vision.
“Pile in! _Pile in!_” he shouted. “Miss Una!... Where’s Miss Una?”
“I guess the rest of us might have dr-rowned before he’d have come all
the way up the mountain—after—us,” pouted Dorothy. “Well! if we aren’t
the princess, we’re lucky to come in on her innings. Girls! A great hay
wagon—dry hay—a rubber covering to spread over us.... Talk of the
seventh heaven!”
“I’d rather have this than—heaven.” Lura was creeping under that dark
rubber blanket in among the fresh, sweet hay, so dry and warm.
“Gosh! I started in the thick of it,” Menzies was proclaiming. “An’ hard
work I had to make the top, with this mud-crunching outfit.” He pointed
to the dripping leader, whose whinnying snorts told the story of that
upward, raving struggle, amid peril of fireball and falling tree.
“Did you walk beside them—climb beside them, all the way?” asked the
Guardian.
“Yes’m. And I could hardly hold ’em to the trail, even then, lightning
searing their eyeballs—trees going up around ’em! But Mr. Grosvenor’s
daughter! To think o’ her being exposed up here!” The farmer’s voice
rocked to the swish of the “shoe-bree”, the water that filled his
waist-high boots.
“Pshaw! ’twouldn’t hurt her—didn’t hurt her. We were above the storm—for
the most part,” declared Pemrose stoutly. “This is the cushioned chair
in which Treff said she was wheeled through life—always would be,” she
murmured to herself, with a cogitative wink, settling down beside Una in
what stood just now for the lap of the “chair”—luxury’s lap—this year’s
perfumed hay. “To-night, aren’t we in luck to occupy it with her?”
“I can’t get ye back to yer camp ’fore morning. A washout on the old
mountain ’tween here and there!” The farmer was wheeling his sputtering
tandem, drawing the fifteen-foot hay wagon, now full, girls blissfully
cuddling close to each other, putting the rubber covering between them
and the last peckings of the angry rain-crow. “But, luck with us, we can
reach the valley—the horse-farm—by a roundabout trail ... though it may
be a ‘wild-bear’ game, going down,” with a grin.
“Some tear-in-two jolts I expect,” prophesied Lura. “Ouch!
Beginning—already,” as she fell over on Naomi. “I always wanted to ride
behind a tandem—never thought ’twould be like this!”
“That tall leader is a hero. I’m in love with him.” Dorothy lifted a
corner of the rubber coverlet, to peep out at the black form of the
plunging horse, tackling the miry, downward trail, lightning tickling
his ears, spent thunder hooting at him. “Oh-h! the wild-bear game is
beginning, indeed,” she screamed, a minute later, as the whole
mud-crunching outfit stuck fast in a quagmire.
“Don’t mind if ye overhear some swearing in the teeth o’ judgment!”
growled Menzies whimsically, hauling upon his groaning tandem, in to its
knees. “Hi! there, you Yank,” to the game leader, “You’re all right;
you’ll come through.”
“The Yanks are pulling through—pulling out!” gasped Pemrose. “But,
goodness! what an Adventure this is!” as the wagon resumed its way
through the torn, dark woods.
“Lucky for ye all that this happened to-night—if ’twas bound to happen,”
murmured Menzies, ages later, as the mountain trail plunged downward
into a gutted road. “To-morrow, I’d ha’ been away.”
“Oh! do you expect to be gone long?” asked the Guardian, leaning out,
with grateful interest.
“No, ma’am. Not with two o’ my help missing,” came the grim answer; “one
off on a vacation, t’ other on his back with a ‘busted’ leg, broken by a
kick from a bad horse down in one of those concrete boxes—outdoor
boxes.”
The girls, listening eagerly, knew well those great concrete-lined
“horse-boxes”, where outlaws moped and half-civilized horses, not good
enough to be trusted up on the range.
“I guess, for one night, my son, Sanbie, and old ‘Burn-the-wind’, the
blacksmith, can hold the fort,” laughed Menzies. “I’m just making a
flying trip to Bennington, to buy grain,” came back the floating
accents; “double header—thinking of selling Revelation.”
Double header! Kill two birds with one stone! But that stone hit
something in its way—the heart of Pemrose Lorry.
Sell Revelation! The horse she had ridden all the summer. The horse who
had come to know her so well that, while he still coquetted with oats
and halter, once she had him caught, and saddled, he would look round at
her out of his almost human eyes, curiously saying: “Well! are we going
now? I’m—ready.”
Now was when she got her tear-in-two jolt. Her heart jumped like a riven
tree—sank blighted.
And here was where Una scored again; she owned her horse. Revel would be
sent up to the city, for her to ride.
“But it wouldn’t be ‘sporty’ to show it—show anything,” murmured Pemrose
to her riven heart. “I’m too lucky to have ridden him—all—summer!”
“Best—best horse in the Long Pasture,” went on Menzies’ musing croak.
“Expect to get five hundred for him. Only waiting till Mr. Grosvenor
gets back to clinch the bargain. And he’s expected home to-morrow; isn’t
he, Miss Una?”
“Ye-es,” nodded Una sleepily, from the hay. “Ha! Farm lights, at last!”
She roused a little. “Horses stamping!”
One horse stamped upon Pemrose’s heart all that night. She felt sorry
she had given it to him, to trample, thus.
“But I believe he’ll miss me, too—Revelation,” she said to herself.
“Sometimes, when we were out riding, if we lay down under the pines,
he’d come and feel me over with his nose, to make sure that I was there;
I believe he’d have driven off anybody who attacked me.... Ah! lucky
Una.... But it wouldn’t be ‘sporty’ to show it.”
It came almost as a relief, affording an excuse for pent-up feeling,
that when the campers got back to their own log cabin, at noon the next
day, a second loss confronted her, over which she might puzzle and rave
without breach of code.
“Look! Look! Look!” she cried—and became, in a moment, the center of a
sensation, whirlwind sensation. “Somebody has been in here. In here
to-day! There’s a window open in our sleeping room—marks on the floor;
and my picture of Una, the one I had by my cot, is—gone.”