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GIRLS OF THE MORNING-GLORY CAMP FIRE
BY
ISABEL HORNIBROOK
AUTHOR OF “CAMP AND TRAIL,” “FROM KEEL TO KITE,” ETC.
_ILLUSTRATED BY JOHN GOSS_
BOSTON
LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Published April, 1916
Copyright, 1916,
BY LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO.
_All Rights Reserved_
Girls of the Morning-Glory Camp Fire
NORWOOD PRESS
BERWICK & SMITH CO.
NORWOOD, MASS.
U. S. A.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Dedicated to Ruth, Eleanor, and Margaret_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: The great burnished top was set to spinning madly upon a
flat stone.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The author expresses her indebtedness to Dr. Frank G. Speck of
the University of Pennsylvania and to Dr. Jacob D. Sapir for
permission to reprint the nonsense-syllables and music of the
Leaf Dance, from their records made among the Indians, published
in “Ceremonial Songs of the Creek and Yuchi Indians.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
I A STROLLING PIANO
II PLAYGROUND PEACEMAKERS
III CAPTAIN ANDY TAKES OFF HIS HAT
IV THE LAKESIDE COUNCIL FIRE
V A MINIATURE
VI THE GREEN CROSS
VII MARY-JANE PEG
VIII THE SUGARLOAF
IX WOOD GATHERERS AMONG THE DUNES
X THE ASTRONOMER
XI KULLÍBIGAN
XII FLOURED GLASS
XIII WIND AGAINST TIDE
XIV THE CASTAWAY
XV IN THE QUICKSANDS’ GRIP
XVI THE SUN-DOLLAR
XVII A MONOGRAM ON A COIN
XVIII THE TORCH BEARER
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ILLUSTRATIONS
The great burnished top was set to spinning madly upon a flat
stone.
Her left hand had snatched at the dragging reins
“She won’t fail. She can’t! I see the _red_!”
“An’ you’ll laugh back at the fears, once you join the
Morning-Glory Camp Fire”
On, ploughing on, through the wet, oozing sands
A large, antique silver coin of a size and stamp such as neither
Boy Scout nor Camp Fire Girl had ever seen before
------------------------------------------------------------------------
GIRLS OF THE MORNING-GLORY CAMP FIRE
CHAPTER I
A STROLLING PIANO
“Why did she choose ‘Morning-Glory’ as her tribe name?” asked Mŭnkwŏn
the Rainbow of Sesooā the Flame, as Rainbow and Flame, with girlish arms
entwining, stood beneath the shelter of the Silver Twins, two kingly
birch-trees, so identical in stature even to their topmost jeweled
crowns of leaves flashing in the July sun, so alike in the silver
symmetry of each fair limb as to be named the Twins.
These silver kings were one-hearted, too, in their benevolent purpose in
life, which was to unite in casting a brotherly shade over a certain
corner of the broad city playground, dotted with children from every
clime, and incidentally to fan the flushed cheeks of the two girls
directly beneath them, bound together by a girdling rainbow that played
about their waists, woven by the sun’s shuttle amid the quivering
birch-leaves, fit symbol of their binding Camp Fire sisterhood.
Sesooā’s eyes danced, lit by a tiny golden flame that uncurled itself in
their demure hazel like a firefly alighting on a brown leaf. She caught
her lower lip between the pretty incisors that decorated the front of
her mouth as she scrutinized the semi-distant figure of a
sixteen-year-old girl—perhaps nearer to seventeen—clad in a loose
lavender smock to her knees, whence to her ankles there was a gleam of
white skirt, with the most bewitching, frilled summer “Tam” of lavender,
matching her smock, shielding her brown head, sheltering her face, like
the hood of a flower. This floral figure leaned against the open door of
a handsome automobile which was standing upon the playground avenue.
“I’m sure it’s beyond me to tell why Jessica Holley (Jessica _Dee_
Holley; she always likes to bring the unusual little middle name
in, because it was her mother’s, I suppose), why she chose
_Welatáwesit_, which is the only Indian equivalent she could find
for Morning-Glory—literally meaning ‘Climbing Plant’ or ‘Pretty
Flower’ for her Camp Fire name. But I believe there’s a story
attached to the choice, some ‘cunning’ little anecdote of her
childhood. Wish I could ferret it out! She seems, always, to have
been called ‘Glory,’ nearly as much as Jessica,” answered Sesooā
racily, she who in every-day life bore no flaming cognomen, but
was plain little, gay little, Sally Davenport, as full of quips
and quirks, of lightning impulses and sudden turns as the wheeling
firefly in her eyes.
“Goody! I’d like to hear the anecdote, too. The Morning-Glory name suits
her so well that I thought she must have dreamed it—that it came to her
in sleep—as I dreamed mine,” laughed the Rainbow, whose rightful name
when she was not clad in a leather-fringed robe of khaki, in moccasins
and head-band, and seated by a Council Fire, was Arline Champion. “But I
call it absurd, meanly absurd, that if there’s any story about her and
her name, we should not hear it, we who have named our Camp Fire (and
it’s the best in the city, too, though I say it myself!), our whole
group or tribe of fourteen girls, after her,” she went on with a stamp
of her foot on the playground sod and with rainbowed emphasis; she was
the shell-tinted, demurely shining kind of fifteen-year-old girl who
unconsciously aims at carrying a rainbow in her pocket, to brighten the
dull or tear-wet day.
“Oh! we didn’t exactly ‘name it after her,’” demurred Sally. “She
happened to come here last winter to visit those rich girls, the
Deerings, who are all fluff an’ stuff; that exactly describes them,
Olive and Sybil——” There was the least little green tinge of the
spitfire about Sesooā’s flame now as she shot a glance toward two girls
seated in the waiting automobile together with an older woman, evidently
chaperon to the band of girls. “Oh! I say, pinch me; I shouldn’t have
said that, should I, seeing that they brought us here in their car? But
’twas the first time they ever did it, though my father is
head-bookkeeper in their father’s office at the Works; and I’ll engage
’twas Morning-Glory—Jessica—who suggested it, as we all wanted to visit
this playground where there are so many foreign children, to see them
dance their folk dances,” she ran on, speech flitting away from its
starting-point in the wake of her firefly dance, which vivaciously
hovered from one object or group of objects to another.
Arline waited for it to alight again on Jessica, as it presently did.
“Well! as I was saying,” reverted Sally, “you remember how she came here
last February just when we were beginning to organize our Camp Fire
group, when we had secured Miss Darina Dewey as Guardian (I think she’s
a love of a Guardian and I like her unusual first name, too, though some
of the girls don’t!) but before we had applied for our Charter, when we
were searching for a name for our new Camp Fire circle, raking over
Indian names like leaves until—goodness! we seemed half-smothered in
them.” Sally paused for breath, breathlessly smothered, indeed, by the
sunlit torrent of her own words, which had a trick of inundating a
listener.
“It was at our second meeting, I think, at Miss Dewey’s house,” she went
on, “that Jessica came in, all snow an’ sparkle from her eyes to her
toes, and introduced herself by showing a transfer card signed by the
Guardian of a Camp Fire circle in a small town in Pennsylvania to which
she had belonged, the Akiyuhapi Camp Fire.”
“The Are-you-happy Camp Fire! Sounds just like that!” put in Arline,
rainbowed with mirthful memory. “Jessica told us that she had already
been initiated as a Wood Gatherer and showed her silver fagot ring. But
we were a little flabbergasted, weren’t we, when she sprang her Indian
name on us, by which she had chosen to be known among Camp Fire circles:
Welatáwesit; it sounded musical as she pronounced it, but it seemed a
mouthful! She partly explained it (d’you remember?) by saying that when
she was choosing her symbolic name—as all Camp Fire Girls do—she wanted,
for a special reason which she kept to herself, to take that of a
flower, Morning-Glory. And that Penobscot Indian word was the nearest
she could get to it, the morning-glory not being originally a native
plant.”
“Yes, and it was at that very meeting, after we had welcomed Jessica
with open arms as a Camp Fire Sister”—thus Sally again took up the
fascinating thread of reminiscence—“that when each girl had told her
symbolic name, Indian or otherwise, and how she came to choose it to
express some special wish or aim, that we fell back upon digging for one
for the new Camp Fire itself, the new circle or tribe. And then, don’t
you remember”—Sesooā’s voice rose to a pitch of excitement—“how Betty
Ayres, little fair-haired Betty, who’s _so_ enthusiastic and about as
big as a minute—she’s just four feet, five inches and a half——”
“My! but your minutes do stretch—like elastic,” put in Arline, with a
rallying elbow poke.
“Humph! Piffle! Betty jumped up suddenly as if she saw a vision, with an
idea swelling up so big in her that she seemed to grow two inches on the
strength of it. ‘_Girls!_’ she cried, ‘I’m just tired of browsing among
Indian dictionaries, searching for a novel name for our new Camp Fire
circle. Why don’t we call it, right away, the Morning-Glory Camp Fire?
There’s a name that will reflect glory on us!’ said little Betty, half
sobbing and half shining. ‘It suggests so much—so much that I can’t just
put into words of——’”
“‘Of the Morning of Life, the Glory of Girlhood—and _vice versa_—isn’t
that what you mean, Betty dear?’ said our Guardian, helping her out!”
This reminiscent contribution came from Arline. “And then Miss Dewey
went on to say how she thought herself that it would be a glorious
name for us who are Daughters of the Sun, so to speak, having the Sun
as our general symbol. So the Morning-Glory Camp Fire we are! And when
we camp out this summer upon the Sugarloaf Peninsula where the
sand-dunes are white as snow, we’re going to call our great,
ramshackle wooden shanty, with one side quite open to the airs of
heaven, Camp Morning-Glory. So much glory that we shan’t know
ourselves, eh? But all this”—slowly—“doesn’t bring us one little bit
nearer to answering the question which I asked you at first, why our
Glory-girl, Jessica, chose her symbolic name at the beginning. Since
it put so much into our heads we’ve got a right to know all about it!”
with another laughing stamp upon the playground grass. “I can’t bear
mystery; if there’s a secret as big as my thumb, even if it’s about
nothing or next to nothing, I want to know it.”
“Oh, mystery—I love mystery! Bubbling mystery!” Sesooā rose on tiptoe
under the Silver Twins, looking rather like a Baltimore oriole, that
vivid flame-bird, for she, too, wore the latest thing in girlish smock
frocks of a dainty peach-color very closely related to orange, shirred
or smocked with black by her own clever little fingers that had
fashioned the garment, too, the which had won her a green honor-bead to
string upon the Camp Fire Girl’s necklace that she wore on ceremonial
occasions.
Those fingers had draped the little orange Tam O’Shanter, as well, which
covered her crisp, dark hair, a masterpiece of head-gear more jaunty,
less hood-like than that of the flower-like figure leaning against the
auto’s side to which the wheeling firefly of her glance now turned.
“Oh, bubbles! I’m going right over now to ask her why she chose her
Morning-Glory name and symbol,” she went on, each word a tinted bubble
of laughing curiosity painting itself upon the sunshine. “Absurd, but I
am! If there’s any foolish little child-story woven in with the choice,
this is the very time and place to hear it, here on the public
playground, with all those children—such funny, foreign-looking tots
most of them!—dancing ‘Pop Goes the Weasel!’ Pouf! I feel like dancing
with them.”
And the human oriole flitting forth from the friendly shade of the Twins
fluttered her shirred plumage in a gleeful _pas seul_ upon the
playground grass, where the sun-glare transformed her into an orange
flame, while her ears, attuned to all merry sounds, drank in the shrill
music of five-and-thirty children’s voices (the number ought to have
been even, but in that gleeful chorus there was one silent throat), six
dancing sets, shouting with a strange babel of foreign accents, to the
accompaniment of their stamping feet, the old nonsense-rhyme of the
sixteenth century:
“Half a pound of twopenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle,
Stir it up and make it nice
_Pop_ goes the weasel!”
[Illustration: musical score]
hummed Sally, in flaming echo, and stood still.
All the while, that versatile quirk in her nature, corresponding to the
flitting firefly in her eyes, which rendered her attention easily
diverted when she wasn’t gravely in earnest, changed her all at once
from an eager bubble of curiosity, that must burst if it did not
penetrate a trifling secret, into an absorbed spectator. She hung upon
the fringe of the playground dances, intent upon every rhythmic movement
as the leading couple in each juvenile set (it happened to be a little
earringed, lustrous-eyed Syrian girl footing it with a small Turk for a
partner in that nearest) formed an arch with their uplifted arms for a
gay little dancer to pass beneath.
“Oh-h! don’t they catch on well and dance prettily, these playground
children?” murmured Sesooā softly to the quivering interest in her own
heart. “I’m awfully glad that Jessica proposed our visiting this
playground to-day where there are so many little foreigners not born in
this country or whose parents haven’t been long here. She”—dreamily
soliloquizing, with a glance at that lavender-smocked figure—“said that,
last year, she and the other members of the Akiyuhapi Camp Fire in that
Pennsylvanian milling town, where she became a Camp Fire Girl, did so
much voluntary work upon the public playground, largely among the little
immigrants, teaching them American songs, American games, telling them
stories, settling their squabbles. Well! I guess I’m not going to bother
her with questions about her ‘Morning-Glory’ name just now. Over there
where _she’s_ standing”—flashing another glance at the gray auto, with
two girls in it and one leaning against its silver door-knob—“I’d have
to bray like a jackass to be heard above the music of that absurd piano,
perched upon a low cart. Goody!” with a sudden, excited movement of her
vivid shoulders. “I shouldn’t like to be that _perched-up_ pianist. Just
suppose the playground horse should take it into his head to pop—to
dance—to _chase the weasel, too_?”
Was it any suddenly restless movement on the part of that four-footed
servant of the city which drew the strolling piano upon a low cart from
playground to playground to thresh out music for the children’s
dances—was it that which flashed the thought backward over his flicking
tail, over the head of the pounding pianist seated upon a light cane
chair before the lashed piano, flashed it into Sally’s brain? That, or
the elfin dance of sunbeams upon his stamping hoofs which, together with
the popping dance-cries of the children and the louder popping of the
musical instrument behind him—deliriously out of tune, too—must surely
infect the staidest horse?
Sally did not know which launched the apprehension, the tickling
sunbeams or the restless hoofs and head. But she was used to horses. She
found herself mechanically straightening up, controlling the giddy
dance-spirit in her own soles, moving nearer—nearer—to the low cart as
if she could not help it.
A brilliant orange streak in the sunlight she, flecked oriole-like with
black, from the velvet ribbon that lent tone to that saucy little Tam,
to the black needlework stars upon the heaving girlish breast.
Then all at once this human flame-bird weaving its way in and out
between sets of dancing children was halted by a musical crash, brought
up short on tiptoe by a screaming commotion through which rang a
nightmare of treble chords wildly sustained by the pianist’s right hand
blundering among the shrieking keys of the elevated piano, while her
left arm waved on high, imploring help, the whole seeming a premature,
mad finale to the popping music, to which every voice upon the
playground, animate and inanimate, lent a cry—discordantly at that!
The effect was so feverishly funny that Sally, who had the oriole’s gay
spirit within her orange-smocked breast, vented a shriek as loud as any,
to swell the confusion, automatically clapping her fingers to her ears.
The voices of some fourscore children had popped explosively from song
and shout to scare-note and shriek, a conglomerate shriek, strengthened
by every foreign accent under the sun (any cry ever hurled from the
crumbling Tower of Babel was nothing to it!), a shriek that hung,
sustained, in air together with the rasping, squelching notes of that
unfinished musical measure which seemed to tatter the air itself.
“Ouch! My s-soul!” murmured Sally under her breath. “The horse! It’s
the—_horse_. He is bolting, with the piano lashed to the cart behind
him. And the—poor—pianist!”
It needed no more. She saw the girl-musician’s left arm waving,
imploring, saw her rock upon the light cane chair before the instrument
that was _not_ lashed to the rocking cart; she heard the horse’s
mutinous snort, heard it strangely echoed in dumb fashion by a pair of
parted childish lips near her; crowning all, she caught the terrified
shriek of a small boy who clutched at his raven-black hair and what
English he could muster as he started toward a sand-pile ahead, yelling,
“Mine babee—mine babee! Horse he go kill her; she—she go _all—deaded_!”
And like the flame from the cloud leaped the answering fire in
Sesooā—little Camp Fire Girl!
“The driver—the boy driver—he ought to be _shot_; he’s umpiring a
baseball game,” was the first distinct thought that leaped to her mind
as, like an oriole on the wing, she sped across the sunlit grass in the
wake of the still rocking cart, the fiendishly howling piano, the
screaming, swaying pianist. The second lightning conviction was: “It’s
_up-hill_ and the horse can’t really run very fast with that absurd
piano behind him! He’s dancing all over the place, rather than wildly
running, now!... Rolie showed me—has told me so often—how to stop a
runaway!”
Rolie was her Boy Scout brother and that gallant fourteen-year-old Scout
seemed to run neck and neck with her in this crisis, whispering heart
into her, advising her movements.
The firefly in her eyes, soaring, golden, above consternation, has lit
now upon the horse’s quivering haunch—on his black mane.
“After all, he’s only a horse; I’ve not alone ridden one, but, as a Camp
Fire Girl, have saddled and bridled and fed an’ currycombed it, too,
every day for the past month!” whizzed thought, darting ahead of her as
with another springy step or two her right hand has seized the cart’s
shaft to hold on and prevent herself from falling in the supreme effort
she is about to make.
Her left hand, attached to a strong little wrist for a girl not yet
sixteen, has snatched at the dragging reins, holding them short, is
trying to pull the horse’s head down, turn it toward her!
Only a horse! And a brother-horse was such a friend of hers! The firefly
bore that thought upon its wings as it wheeled above doubt, resistance,
wrenching strain that was tugging her soft young arms from their
sockets—her feet from the solid earth.
Only a horse! But a maddened horse, distracted by the shrieking ivories
behind him!
Her girl’s strength against his!
Yet his rebel-crest was lowering. His lifted forelegs were uncurling,
the waving hoofs that cared not what they smashed returning sanely to
the sod.
And over the tumult of his heated horse-play, the inflaming echo of the
music playing upon his generally patient nerves, rose the voice of the
Camp Fire Girl as one who understands, gentling, soothing:
“Whoa! Whoa-a! old horse. There! there! good boy. Qui-quiet—now!
_The-ere!_”
[Illustration: Her left hand has snatched at the dragging reins.]
A snort that shook the earth under her feet, a jolt and rattle of the
low cart and lashed piano, straining at its moorings to the cart, an
hysterical sob from the pianist, and a girl life-saver stood outlined
for one flaming minute at the horse’s head, queen of the equine dance,
mistress of him and the situation, her hand to her side, her breath
coming in great, ragged gasps that claimed to be sobs, too, sobs of
wonder at how she ever did it!
“Well done, little girl! Good work! Well done, little Oriole in the
orange smock!” came from spectators known and unknown. “How on earth did
you have the presence of mind to do it—to stop him so quickly?”
“I’m a Camp Fire Girl. I ought to have my wits about me!”
Sesooā threw back her head and let them see the flame in her eyes, the
flame kindled at that new-born Fire whose divine essence is to “Give
Service!”
Suddenly that flame cowered and ran to hide in the tremble that swept
over her from head to foot, a sick shudder that carried with it, also,
the heroine’s grateful ecstasy as she looked ahead, only six short feet,
at a raven-haired small boy flinging himself with a jumble of foreign
cries and broken English at a playground sand-box, where, amid other
tiny tots, a black-haired baby of eighteen months crawled safely like an
insect, at the heart of the silvery pile.