CAMP FIRE GIRLS IN WAR AND PEACE

BOOKS BY ISABEL HORNIBROOK

Cloth. Illustrated. $1.50 each

CAMP AND TRAIL

FROM KEEL TO KITE

GIRLS OF THE MORNING-GLORY CAMP FIRE

CAMP FIRE GIRLS AND MT. GREYLOCK

CAMP FIRE GIRLS IN WAR AND PEACE

LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO.

BOSTON, MASS.

“My name is Fenn,” he volunteered, bowing over the Guardian’s hand.

CAMP FIRE GIRLS

IN

WAR AND PEACE

By

ISABEL HORNIBROOK

Author of “Girls of the Morning-Glory Camp Fire,”

“Camp Fire Girls and Mt. Greylock,” etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY JOHN GOSS

BOSTON

LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO.

Published, August, 1919

Copyright, 1919,

By Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.

All Rights Reserved

Camp Fire Girls in War and Peace

Norwood Press

BERWICK & SMITH CO.

Norwood, Mass.

U. S. A.

CONTENTS

I. | Gas Valley
II. | The Minute-Girl
III. | The Camp at Twilight
IV. | A Wandering Powder-Puff
V. | Camouflage
VI. | Playing Submarine
VII. | Menokijábo
VIII. | The Leader
IX. | The “Creature Far Above”
X. | Aviators Unawares
XI. | Knights of the Wing
XII. | A Good Line
XIII. | The Main Bitt
XIV. | The Launching
XV. | Seeking the Spark
XVI. | Wigwag
XVII. | A Radio Freak
XVIII. | The Peace Babe
XIX. | The Gold Star
XX. | Christmas of 1918

ILLUSTRATIONS

“My name is Fenn,” he volunteered, bowing over the Guardian’s hand

Supported on either side by his comrades

“W’at for you painta her like dat--de leetla boat--eh?”

“I don’t care what anybody says; I’m going to rest a while”

He sprang from under the wildly swaying timber

“I do believe it is the--mysterious--seal-hunter”

CAMP FIRE GIRLS IN WAR AND PEACE

CHAPTER I

GAS VALLEY

“Gas!”

Briefest and biggest of all words thrust by the Great War into the fore-ranks of speech, the word rang aloud upon the summer air.

A kernel of compressed menace, it burst explosively, spread elastically, until the very sky--the peaceful, lamb’s-wool New England sky--seemed darkened by its threat, until the brown buds, withered in their tender youth, and the rags of yellow grasses blighted before by its poisoned breath, trembled and wilted, as it were, anew!

It even withered the morning-glory bloom upon the faces of a quartette of young girls, who stood a few yards to windward of a little red-and-white post labeled “Danger Zone,” on the other side of which the warning was given.

Breathlessly, nervously, they shrank together until their shoulders touched, like fledgling birds struck by the terrors of the first storm that assails them in the nest, seeking for contact and comfort.

“Now the party is beginning--the ball opening, as our boys say over in France, when a gas attack is being launched against them. That smoke-candle off there on the edge of the trench, which is doing more than’s required of it--bursting into flame as well as smoke--that’s the illumination for ‘Fritzie’s’ party! And the rattle--you hear the policeman’s rattle, don’t you, shaking its teeth down in the trenches--that’s the opening stunt of the orchestra. See?”

It was a young lieutenant, a boy-officer of twenty-three, who spoke, with a silver dart in his gray eye matching the gleaming bars upon his shoulders, as he bent towards the tallest of the four girls whose face was paling under her velvet hat, uniquely embroidered by her own hand with certain silken emblems, typifying her name and symbol, together with the rank she held as a Camp Fire Girl.

“Smoke-candle! D’you mean that foot-high metal thing flaring away there behind the sand-bags, one of a dozen or so, stationed along the trench-brim? They don’t look much like ordinary candles, but they certainly can smoke! Such horrid, blinding sulphur smoke, too! Bah!”

She caught her breath a little, that oldest girl, her wide dark eyes watering, as a tiny yellow feather of the sulphur fumes, stealing stealthily to windward, wafted from the wing of the main cloud drifting off to leeward, tickled her throat in teasing fashion.

“Yes, it is blinding thick, isn’t it? We must move farther to windward, away from it.” The lieutenant smiled down at her, thinking the hat with its wide brim, and its delicate, emblematic frontispiece against the rich velvet--representing crossed logs, a tongue of flame rising from them and shading into a pearly pinion purporting to be smoke--was the prettiest headgear he had ever seen.

“Thick! So thick that you could drink it, if--if it wasn’t so horridly pea-soupy and pungent, eh?” laughed another girl, who stood next to the tallest one, their shoulders touching. “It’s as dense as the fog our Captain Andy used to tell us about; the fog out on the fishing banks--Grand Banks--which he declared was so thick at times that the poor fish didn’t know when they were atop of the water; they went on swimming up in the fog. Don’t you remember, Olive?” she asked as she merrily nudged the older, dark-eyed girl who wore the Torch Bearer’s insignia of logs, flame, and smoke--an insignia that stood for a high-beating heart, as ready and eager to do its share in this moment of world conflict, as that typified by the silver bars on the lieutenant’s shoulders and the cross-gun on his khaki collar.

It was he, Lieutenant Iver Davenport, or, to come down to detail, Lieutenant Iver O. P. Davenport, who, thanks to his middle initials and that keen silver of scrutiny between his narrowed eyelids, was christened in his infantry company “O Pips,” the camp nickname for an observation post, he who answered, with brotherly freedom, glancing over the Torch Bearer’s shoulder at the brown-eyed girl beyond her.

“Yes, sis, it’s as thick as the fogged-fish yarn, or as the fabled fog that the half-breed pathfinder who was attached to our Boy Scout troop used to tell of when he’d begin quite modestly that he ‘hadn’t seen fog ver’ tick--non--only one time he see fog so tick dat one mans try for drink eet an’ mos’ choke hisself; and wen dey take out dat fog wat dat mans try for drink, dey take dat for make broomstick--yaas!’ Oh! you couldn’t get ahead of Toiney; he who--was it three summers ago?--pulled one of your Camp Fire Group out of dangerous quicksands, eh?”

“Yes, that will be three years ago next August and we’re going to camp in that same region of white sand-dunes this coming summer, too, under the spell of the Green Com Moon,” returned the boy-officer’s sister, Sara Davenport, named by the Council Fire Sesooā, the Flame.

“Well! we won’t see Toiney again.” The eyes of the taller girl, Olive Deering, watered, but in their dark, liquid depths shone Toiney’s gold star, never to be eclipsed. “He sleeps under the daisies of France. You should have heard him march off to enlist, singing:

“‘C’est un longue chemin à Tip-per-airee,

Eet’s a long way forre go-o--

C’est un longue chemin à Tip-per-airee,

To dat chèrie girl--I--know!

Adieu, Peekadil-lee!

Adieu Leicestaire Square,

C’est un longue chemin à Tip-per-airee,

But my heart--she’s dere!’”

“Bravo! Ah, well, he’s gone on the longue chemin now--the long trail--a trail of light it must be,” murmured Lieutenant O Pips half under his breath, his eyes, keen and misty, searching that dense yellow cloud to leeward, billowing down into a ziggagging maze of trenches--the cloud thrown off by the smoking sulphur candles, of which here and there one did more than was required of it, yielded complete combustion and burst into a ragged, rose-red banner of flame, that added weirdness to the daylight scene.

Speaking of Toiney--light-hearted, raggedly romantic half-breed--who had made the supreme sacrifice, presently drew the girls’ thoughts to those living comrades-in-arms of Toiney, the American soldiers now lined up under that baleful yellow cloud, down in the invisible trenches, undergoing the training of being “put through gas,” in order to render them expert in adjusting their gas-masks directly the warning was given--the rattle sprung.

“‘Fritzie’s party,’ as you call it, seems rather halting; they haven’t brought on all the fireworks yet, have they?” suggested a third girl, known by the Council Fire as Munkwon, the Rainbow, in every-day life, as now, Arline Champion, the shell-like tint of her cheeks deepening to a hectic flush from the same expectant emotion which had paled her sisters.

“No, sometimes the chemists of the Gas Defense Department who have charge of these sham attacks, turn loose the smoke-cloud several minutes before they thicken it with the poison waves--gas waves,” the officer answered. “They send it over every old way so that no man down there may be caught napping,” with a brief excited puff of laughter.

“And I suppose this sham ‘party’ is just as dangerous for the men in the trenches here, being trained to meet gas, as the real one over there?” Arline persisted.

“Sure! With them, too, it’s the Quick or the Dead, as we say in the army!... If any one is slow about getting into his mask--otherwise his chlorine-fooler----”

It was at that moment that the whole round earth began, as it seemed, to “fool” and make believe that an earthquake heavingly rocked it. Up from the trenches came a loud, rolling report that echoed like thunder through the yellow cloud. Tearing its veil asunder, a broad sheet of flame leaped towards the sky. The ground shook under the girls’ feet. Wildly they clutched each other upon the sere skirts of Gas Valley, as this portion of the great military training-camp, where soldiers were initiated into the horrors of poison gas, was nicknamed.

“Ha! Now the fun’s really on! That turns loose the bitter tear-gas--worse than a corner on onions for making one weep!” blithely exclaimed the officer. “Don’t be nervous! It’s only the explosion of six sticks of dynamite down in the middle of the trenches, which bursts the shells on the surface, each containing a little paraffin cup--rice-paper cup--holding a small quantity of oil, and under that the lachrymatory liquid--the oniony ‘tear-stuff’ that would wring tears from a stone image. There go the chlorine-cylinders, gasping, too!”

He pointed--that young officer, charged like a live bomb himself, the heated tension of the scene and the excitement of having visitors reacting upon a naturally fiery disposition--pointed across the twenty-five yards of blighted vegetation which separated his group from the trenches, at two tall iron cylinders near which stood a couple of masked sentries, looming like brown goblins amid the yellow fringes of the smoke-cloud.

“What! Can they get as near to the horrid, deadly chlorine as all that?” breathlessly gasped the youngest girl, Ko-ko-ko, Little Owl--amid scenes like this, remote from the Council Fire, Lilia Kemp.

“Yes, if their masks are perfect, and properly adjusted. Those are two of the young chemists from the Gas Defense, who are putting over the ‘show,’ and----”

“Oh, goody! I know now why we’re urged to save and collect peach-stones next summer--ever so many other kinds of pits, too--to make carbon for soldiers’ masks! ‘Save the peach-stones; waste not one!’ A few may save a soldier’s life! When I’m drying them in the oven--incidentally burning my fingers, as I’m sure to do, I’ll feel really like--like----”

“Like the real girl behind the lines,” put in Lieutenant O Pips, his eyebrows lifting, in turn interrupting Little Owl as she had blinkingly interrupted him. “See, now, the ‘ball’ is on in good shape! There go the big firecrackers simulating shells, so that the men’s nerves may be prepared for bursting shrapnel; and the electric bombs exploding everywhere, in and out along the surface of the trenches, loosing more tear-gas!--Oh! this--this is spectacular now. But you should just see it at night. Then it’s Inferno, sure enough!”

“It--it’s that, in daylight, when one thinks of the men down there!” Olive Deering bit her lip, gazing steadfastly in the direction of the veiled trenches, above which the yellow smoke-screen was torn by the popping of monster firecrackers, pricked by the laughter of roseate flashes, so bright, so elfin, that who could dream their fairy splendor was but the glitter of a key to unlock tears?

“The men undergoing initiation in the trench-bays? Oh, bless you! they’re all right, unless--unless it should be a case of:

“‘The gas came down and caught the blighter slow.’

“But there won’t be any ‘blighter’ to-day--there couldn’t be!” He bent, that very tall young officer, nearer to Olive’s ear, the nineteen-year-old girlish ear under the Torch Bearer’s hat. “Nobody knows how I have been looking forward to this day, Olive, this spring day, when you girls would visit me in camp before I went over! I’m sorry that your father, Colonel Deering, and your aunt chose to pay a visit to Headquarters, Brigade Headquarters, instead--instead of coming on here to inspect the fireworks in Gas Valley.”

“Fireworks never to be forgotten!” murmured Olive, coloring a little as the luck of this longed-for holiday coined itself into a silver bar in the eager eyes bent upon her, matching the luck of those other silver shoulder-bars for which the young Plattsburg graduate had “plugged” so hard.

“Father has an old friend who is Captain of Headquarters Troop, but we’ll find him again later,” she said, suddenly rather breathless from the moving conviction that when the youth--for he was little more--beside her faced the poisoned horror-waves of the real Gas Valley “over there,” when he crouched, sleepless, in a cold and muddy trench-bay or led his men over the top, she, for him, would be beyond all others--even more than the brown-eyed sister to whom his glance roved now--the girl behind the lines, beyond the ocean, typifying America the Beautiful, standing for all he would die, smiling, to defend.

It may be that the prospect unrolled itself vaguely before the young soldier’s mind, for, as he straightened himself again, training his keen gaze once more upon the smoke-cloud, thickened with poison-waves, he was humming unconsciously, involuntarily, lines of a crude camp-song:

“Only one more kit-inspection,

Only one more dress-parade,

Only one more stifling stand-to--bleeding stand-to,

And the U. S. will be saved!”

“Stifling stand-to! Well, I guess the men down there in the trenches are having that now, ‘gooing’ up their masks--their chlorine-foolers--in that popping, heated cloud,” gasped his sister, racy little Sesooā, turning from a certain “kit-inspection” which she was holding upon the toilet and general get-up of another visitor to Camp Evens, not attached to her girlish party.

“Um-m! Isn’t that muff of hers pretty, the--the ‘spiffiest’ thing!” appraised Sara in silent soliloquy, the springy elasticity in herself causing her to rebound more readily than did her companions from the shock of seeing a gas attack launched; at her core there was a gay flame--a buoyant “pep”--which refused to succumb even to Inferno, with its yellow acres of sulphur smoke, its deadly waves of chlorine gas, its tormenting “tear stuff.”

“Humph! Rather late for a muff, though, seeing it’s April. We’ve discarded ours,” reflected further the self-constituted inspector of “kit,” otherwise clothing and equipment, upon the skirts of the military training-camp, as she shot a firefly glance towards the sky, more like July than April--flecked with lamb-like fleeces nestling in an arch of blue. “But then one may be forgiven for holding on to a thing like that! Adds the last touch of style to her costume! I wonder how many birds gave up their lives to make that muff: all dove-gray breast-feathers--tiny feathers--and the fashionable turban which goes with it.

“Her tailored suit is perfect, too; almost puts Olive’s new jersey one in the shade,” was the next random comment after a few seconds of absorption in the noise and novelty of the near-by attack, the monster fire-crackers, snapping, bursting, momentarily flowering in the yellow field of smoke. “And her gray cloth blouse with that soft, swathing collar around the throat, high under her ears!... Some officer’s wife most likely! Wonder what age she might be--thirty--thirty-two? For all her style she isn’t quite thoroughbred-looking like Olive--our Blue Heron,” shooting a sidelong glance at the pale, emotional face under the velvet hat adorned with the delicately embroidered logs and flame. “And she’s not in the same class at all for beauty; judging by the profile, that young woman could dispense with a little of her cheek-bone and chin. But--but what a wonderfully smooth pink skin; looks as if it had just been massaged--was massaged every day! Her skirt’s a trifle long; I suppose her feet aren’t pretty; that would be in keeping with her shoulders, for they’re rather broad--looks as if she played basket-ball and hockey. Athletic type, I guess. Her hair’s much the color of mine, but those silver threads in the mat over the ears--they--they add distinction; almost wish I were turning gray! What!”

The critic caught her breath, for the lone visitor, perhaps feeling the scrutiny, turned and boldly looked at her--looked through her, felt the Camp Fire Girl--with a glance as cool as an Arctic snow-blink. Bluish eyes--this stranger had, the gray-blue of salt ice, that.... Were they trying to infuse a little warmth into the ice-blink? Sesooā’s confused thoughts--rather abashed--never knew. For she hastily turned from this kit-inspection in which she had been furtively indulging, to seek refuge in the smoke-cloud.

And it was at that very moment that she heard a strange, hoarse exclamation from her soldier brother. At that very moment, too, she, together with her Camp Fire Sisters, felt as if the ground, now steady, rocked once more violently, sickeningly, under their feet.

What was happening upon the near edge of that dense sulphur-cloud, to leeward?

Its yellow muzzle was lifting.

Silently, stealthily, it was opening its poisoned mouth--and giving forth!

CHAPTER II

THE MINUTE-GIRL

Up the brown sod-steps, from the yellow-veiled trenches, out over the lumpy, skirting sand-bags, out into the withered vegetation of Gas Valley, stumbled three figures! Masked figures they were, goggle-eyed, grotesque, with white beaks of tubing which, curving downward from those brown face-masks, pecked in the satchels upon their own breasts!

Forth from the cloud they came, goblin figures, with horrid green spots upon their khaki blouses where the deadly chlorine had preyed on their metal buttons.

And before the petrified girlish gaze one--the middle one--rocked and pitched, like a corroded ship at sea, pitching to windward!

“Oh, somebody is injured--poisoned--g-gassed!”

Sesooā heard Olive’s cry, which pitched like the advancing figure, and forgot completely the informal “kit-inspection” to which she had been subjecting the buxom young woman of the skin and shoulders, who carried a feather muff under the April sky.

“Yes! Some one has got it--was muddle-headed--did not get his mask on quickly enough. Or else something was wrong with his ‘chlorine-fooler.’”

Now it was her brother’s voice, that of the boy-officer, and she realized--hot-hearted little sister--what it would mean to him that, on this day of all days, it should be that:

“The gas came down and caught the blighter slow.”

Poor Blighter! Supported on either side by his comrades, who dragged him along by the arms, he, the stumbling middle man, wildly clutched his khaki breast, as if holding it together--as if keeping it from bursting!

“Lay him on his side, men--feet higher than his head! Remove his mask, and give him air!”

Again it was the young lieutenant who spoke, and, glancing up at him, the girls saw that the silver luck of this long-anticipated day was tarnished in his eyes, as if the villainous chlorine had preyed upon that, too.

Concern was in those eyes, strong concern. Behind it lurked bitter chagrin, only needing a spark to the fire and tow of a hasty temper to ignite it to leaping anger--with a headlong haste to fix the responsibility for the most untimely accident.

But, through it all, he was aware of another responsibility--that of his four girl-guests.

“Stand off!” he ordered them, almost violently. “Get farther to windward. Some of the gas is clinging to his clothing!” This while the two uninjured soldiers were removing the victim’s mask and their own, tossing his aside upon the grass, together with the respirator-satchel to which it was attached (the type of satchel which would by and by hold the purifying carbon made from Camp Fire Girls’ peach-stones and pits), so that the gas, which had somehow penetrated the mask, might leak out.

Supported on either side by his comrades.

“Keep off! Get away--off--to windward! Don’t you--don’t you get it--the whiff of chlorine from his uniform--r-rich smell----”

Her brother was almost beside himself by this time--Sara knew--in his concern over the whole untimely mishap, and his anxiety for his visitors’ safety.

Obediently--loyally--she moved in the direction from which the fresh breeze blew, herself, dragging two of her companions with her.

But one girl, sneezing, choking, with the flame of the Torch Bearer’s emblem upon her hat, striking downward, lighting her cheeks with a counter-fire--one dared to disobey.

“Gas clinging to his clothing! What--do--I care?” she gasped, feeling her own smooth lungs scorched, her sweet breath seared, not only by the unlaid ghost of chlorine gliding by her, but also by a reflection of the torture going on in that poisoned breast upon the grass, where the victim’s blue, pinched nostrils fought desperately for the wavering breath of life.

Blue Heron, Torch Bearer, looked down at him and, on the instant, she went over the top, as brave men do, in the first wave of knowledge--the seasoned wave of training.

“I--I know what to do for him,” she panted on the wings of a gassed sneeze. “I’ve taken an elementary Red Cross course--have talked with nurses who’ve been across. Some--some idea of going over as a nurse’s aid, if father would let me!... Aromatic spirits of ammonia--that would help! Carry it always when I’m off with dad, because--because of his--faint----”

Even as the unfinished sentence tickled her throat like a tainted feather, she was kneeling beside the gassed soldier, plucking wisps from a tiny fleece of cotton-wool in her pin-seal bag, moistening them from a little phial, holding them, one by one, to the laboring nostrils, or chaffing the victim’s right hand, stiffening like a poisoned claw, between her own girlish palms--trying to rub the life back into it.

Her younger Camp Fire Sisters watched her from the position which they had been ordered to take up, a few yards to windward, where the young April breeze, keeping guard over them like a skipping brother, warded off the ghost of gas.

They clasped their hands tensely as they saw her forced to a position behind the sufferer’s head, to windward of his tainted clothing, by the pale, strained officer who forebore to interfere further because the vanishing gas-ghost was too weak for danger--as they beheld her kneeling there, dauntlessly ministering, quailing not before the staggering horrors of the gas sickness--the spewed blood upon the ground.

“Olive! Olive! Look at her! Isn’t she wonderful--wonderful! And she--she was ‘reared in cotton-wool’ herself, as the saying is!” Tears sprang to Sesooā’s eyes. “Nothing but ease and luxury!... ‘Elementary Course!’ Oh, she never jumped to this by fifteen lessons--and talking with nurses!” The voice was the low moaning of a Flame. “Never! She came to it by the long trail, the Camp Fire trail--hiking, climbing, sleeping out on mountain-tops, or by the seashore, having our little accidents, until--until we just forgot that we were we!”

“You forgot that you were you!” echoed the guardian breeze.

“Not one of us--one of us--was a flower-pot plant!”

“True! You weren’t!” corroborated Brother Gust.

“But Iver--Iver! Oh, this is terribly hard for him!” was the Flame’s next moaning outburst. “Besides his sympathy for the poor soldier, he’s feeling bitterly now that there--there goes his reputation for a smart and seasoned company! He--he’s all ready to be splitting mad with somebody. And he has a temper, my brother Iver. Mine’s like it only I don’t--can’t--explode with quite so much force.”

Lieutenant Iver was exploding now, with all the luck of the holiday tarnished in his eyes, his nostrils smoking like a sulphur-candle in his eagerness to nail the blighter who was responsible for the ghastly accident that had, incidentally, withered the flowers of this day of days for him.

“How--how did it happen?” he asked tensely, addressing one of the infantrymen who had dragged the gassed victim up out of the trenches, a tall sergeant--a young sergeant--to whom it had fallen to inspect the gas-masks, to make sure that they were in perfect order, before the men entered the smoky trench-bays.

“Was he muddle-headed--slow about getting his mask on--when the alarm was given--the rattle sprung?”

“No, it didn’t ‘rattle’ him a bit,” the sergeant answered, meeting the question with level eyes. “He had his mask on quicker than I had, sir--properly adjusted, too--was jollying us through it----”

“Then--then the fault must have been yours. Something was wrong with the mask itself! As Gas N. C. O. for to-day, you were detailed to inspect all respirator-masks before the men entered the trenches. I’ll report you for neglect of duty. You’ll be put in the guardhouse for disobedience.... I don’t know how you came by your stripes!”

The lightning-flash of the officer’s eye withered the drab chevron upon the sergeant’s arm.

“Oh, mercy! that Gas N. C. O. (non-commissioned officer) is in for it now. He--he’ll get a ‘skinning.’ Iver’s temper is up. He’s going to ‘bawl him out,’ or, as they say in camp, give him a fearful rating.”

The hands of Iver’s brown-eyed sister clasped and unclasped feverishly as she spoke, hanging on tiptoe upon the skirts of the main group around the convulsed victim.

Her ears were deliriously strained to catch the next words of that figurative “bawling out” in which scorching satire would take the place of shrill sound. They were low, but fiery enough to sear even her, at a distance.

But before the sergeant had been thoroughly “skinned” an interruption occurred. An older man who happened to be passing, hurriedly--anxiously--joined the group.

He wore two silver bars upon each level shoulder.

“Look! Look! He’s Captain Darling--captain of my brother’s company,” panted Sara to her companions.

Captain Darling did a strange thing--a thing which brought the girls’ hearts skipping into their throats--almost with an hysterical impulse to titter--like the light spray on the deep, deep wave when it bursts overwhelmingly.

He strode over to where the sufferer’s gas-mask lay upon the yellow grass--the chlorine-fooler which had failed to fool--put his hand into the breast-satchel attached to it, pulled out and held up--a few burnt matches.

“Ha! I thought so. This--this exonerates the sergeant. No doubt he did make a thorough inspection! Contrary to orders, the man carried matches in his satchel with his mask. The heat down there, on the threshold of the smoke-cloud, ignited them after he entered the trench--they’re warm still. They injured the mask--burned a tiny hole in the face-piece; see!”

The captain held up the goggle-eyed mask, with its brown face-piece, its white celluloid nose-clip and flutter-valve, through which a soldier’s breath and saliva escaped together. Surely enough, there was a tiny, blackened hole, no bigger than a pin’s head, piercing the rubber of that khaki-colored face-piece!

“Oh! Oh! In spite of all this, I’m glad we came to-day. I hardly realized before how much a man’s life in this terrible war depends upon his gas-mask--upon the disinfectants in his satchel through which he breathes! ‘A few peach-stones may save a soldier’s life!’ Didn’t seem possible! But ’twill make the work we girls are asked to do in war-time seem so--so--different!”

The outburst--low and tearful--came from Arline, a rain-streak, not a rainbow, now!

But Sara Davenport was beyond speech. A fiery hand clasped the back of her neck as she glanced from her officer-brother, fiercely biting his lip while he contemplated the charred match-ends, to the “skinned” sergeant--completely vindicated.

“O dear! Iver will feel now that he’s made a fool of himself, that he’s the blighter, for--for going on the storm-path and fiercely scolding that sergeant before he knew that he was to blame,” thought the fiery little sister. “Just--like--me! How often I feel that way after bursting like a hot pepper!... Iver says himself that he has a ‘whiz-bang’ temper, but it’s too bad that he should be caught discharging ‘whiz-bangs’ before Olive. He worships Olive. I guess when he goes over--as he will, oh-h! so soon--when he’s lonely or homesick, lying out in some horrid shell-hole, or rooted in trench-mud until he feels himself sprouting, he’ll be thinking of her, probably as she is now, kneeling by a gassed soldier--true Minute-Girl--no more the Olive Deering that she was when I first knew her, two years ago, than--than.... Oh, for pity’s sake! There--there’s that ‘Old Perfect’ with the muff and skin and shoulders again. I wonder if she heard him pitching into the sergeant, too. Couldn’t! She was too far off. But she’s smiling at those miserable match-ends. What--what an iceberg! If we had her in camp this summer, we wouldn’t need any underground refrigerator.... Ugh! I’d like--to--bite--her!” From which it may be inferred that the little sister was right in her self-arraignment; that there was more than one temper of the whiz-bang order, a flame at this moment upon the sear skirts of Gas Valley.

But there was no flame under the snow-light smile which shed a peculiar whiteness over the face of the detached visitor to camp. Perhaps she was conscious of its frigidity herself, for, curiously enough, she plucked at the corner of her mouth with her right hand, momentarily withdrawn from the feather muff.

The gray-gloved fingers of that hand--forefinger in evidence--described an airy semicircle, a vaguely twirling motion at her smooth, smooth, lip-corner, with the thumb as pivot! But abruptly the whole hand spread itself out to the sunshine, in bland elegance, as “Old Perfect” caught the girlish glance darted, sidelong, towards her, and then dropped to her side.

Really, it was a glance as preoccupied as the gesture itself, for two-thirds of Sara Davenport’s mind was at the moment a storm-zone, swept by concern for her brother and anxiety for the gassed victim who was himself to blame for his misery--and that clouded the other third.

Any point that the movement might have had was blunted against the broad thrill of an arrival from the base hospital of a stretcher for him, seeing that he must not be tucked away in an ambulance as yet, his only hope of recovery being fresh air and the gas-allaying power of Brother Gust.

But, although the troubled eye of the conscious self may be dim and clouded, there is in each of us, young or old, another self forever on the alert--even when he seems to be dreaming. Men name him the Subconscious.

A shy fellow and retiring, he is, nevertheless, an expert photographer, forever snap-shotting things which concern us, although he has a trick of hiding away the films--sometimes for long--until some shock compels him to produce them.

Perhaps he took such a snap-shot now of the elegant young woman whose smile was a snow-blink--like an Arctic reflection--upon the skirts of the yellow sulphur-cloud.

Perhaps, some day, he might, under unusual spur, produce the negative--the indelible negative for a vivid picture of this whole harrowing scene, when, on the brown outskirts of camp:

“The gas came down and bowled the Blighter out.”

CHAPTER III

THE CAMP AT TWILIGHT

“‘When you come to the end of a perfect day,

And you sit alone....’

“Well! we’re not sitting alone, so that’s more sentimental than suitable.” Sara Davenport broke off short in the low song which she had started, looking away over the yellow cantonments of broad Camp Evens, turned to fine gold by the sun’s last flaming ray.

“And I’m sure it’s been anything but a perfect day! What about the poor blighter, and his matches?” struck in her officer-brother, who, seated edgeways upon the railing of the lofty balcony surrounding the camp Hostess House, half-faced the four girls who had been his guests at the illuminated “smoke party” in Gas Valley.

At a little distance, absorbed in the sunset effects upon the burnished rows of elevated barracks brooding like gilded dove-cots, were Olive’s father, Colonel Deering, and a much-loved spinster-cousin, who, during the morning, had been calling upon an old friend, an officer attached to Headquarters Troop.

“The Blighter! Oh! he’s not outmatched yet,” laughed Olive. “Didn’t--didn’t the last word from the base hospital proclaim that he was getting better?”

“Anyhow, we could forgive him,” murmured Arline half under her breath, in quivering rainbowed speech, “because here we’ve been, for the past year or two, trying to live up to the hardy Minute-Girl program, hiking so many hours a week, sleeping out, though at first we ‘caved’ before a cow-bell,”--a double rainbow, this, shedding a reflection of laughter--“and now--now this morning proves that one of our number, at least, could be truly an Emergency Girl!”

She cast a moved look at Olive.

“Ah, yes!” Sesooā shot an amused glance through her half-closed lashes--pretty eyelashes they were, which began by being dark and, shading to amber, now stole gold tips from the sunset--a peculiarity rather typical of Sara herself, and of her speech at the moment, which showed that she was determined that any allusion to the morning should be tipped off with lightness. “Ah, yes! battling with gas is one thing, but--for Olive--battling with grass and grubs in a war-garden may be quite another! Wait till it comes to fighting weeds an’ witch-grass. How much--how much of the dauntless Emergency Girl will be on deck then, I wonder, in our oasis by the seashore?”

“Oh! she’ll be there--a hundred per cent of her!” protested the Torch Bearer, her courage rising to a treble trill.

“Humph! Your voice sounds as if you had just eaten a canary-bird, my dear--and it was only squab that we had for dinner!” merrily mocked the Flame. “But will--will the note be as sweet when, on some broiling hot morning in July or August, the bugle sounds Fatigue on the edge of those white sand-dunes, where we’re going to camp? And it’s ‘Fall in for work in the field!’ amid the potato-rows on the one semi-green hill that would grow a ‘tater’ within a mile of us! A case of ‘Joan of Arc, they are calling you! Lead your comrades to the field!’ ... Oh! you should have seen Olive in silver-scaled armor, as the Maid of France, with her holy lance uplifted, in some tableaux that we gave for the benefit of the Red Cross. She did make a hit!”

Sara’s eyelashes twinkled in the direction of her brother. He shifted his edgy position a little on the railing. His color rose slightly as he glanced towards the modern Joan, a girl like a white orchid, whose dark eyes and hair, with the capacity for spiritual fervor in her face, offered rare material for such an impersonation. But he did not answer.

Perhaps, when he did go over, this keen-eyed young officer of the fiery mettle, nicknamed in camp O Pips, or Observation Post, from the unerring alertness in him which made him come down hard upon a blunder--he whose temper exploded like a whiz-bang--the picture on which he would dwell oftenest, of the oldest girl in this group, would, he felt, outshine every other.

It would show her kneeling by a gassed soldier, with the flame and smoke of the Torch Bearer’s emblem upon her hat seeming especially designed to fight that other hateful yellow smoke and flame rolling away from her to leeward--the one the type of ideality that would finally win out over the baleful reality of the other, and leave none but the flame of brotherhood, with its sacred smoke of service, burning in the soul of man.

It was the ideal for which the soldier himself was going over to fight--going “shod with the preparation of the Gospel of Peace”--though humanly rough-shod!

He pulled himself together.

“And so you’re going to sport a war-garden on this jumping-off spot that you’re bound for next summer, to camp out during July and August on the edge of those white sand-dunes. I thought nothing could flourish there but sand-snails an’ seals, with--with, perhaps, this summer, an occasional submarine thrown in,” he laughingly remarked. “Aren’t you afraid that if you’re out on the water at all, a sub may come to the surface and fire a tin fish at you?”

“Oh! catch her wasting a torpedo on us when she’d have nothing to hit but my little blunt-nosed dory that you gave me, Iver; or Little Owl’s Indian canoe, which she mends with rosin when it sucks in water like a thirsty cow!” Sara, the lieutenant’s sister, burst into a laugh, looking sidewise at Ko-ko-ko--the Camp Fire Owlet--otherwise Lilia Kemp.

“Well, if it does leak a little, it’s a ‘slick bit of birch-bark,’ for all that, as Captain Andy says.” Lilia chuckled. “You’re all just envious of my genuine Indian canoe, brought by my father from Oldtown, Maine, and built by an Indian named Nodolinât--canoe-maker. I’m thinking of changing my Camp Fire name to Dolina, which has something to do with a canoe, either making or mending it, see?”

“Marring it, you mean! It’s a funny-looking craft when you have the bottom all plastered over with sticky rosin,” challenged Sara. “Oh, besides dory and birch-shell, I suppose we’ll have our old reliable, the broad, flat-bottomed camp skiff, which Captain Andy calls a ‘tender old wagon,’” laughingly.

“Captain Andy! Are you going to have that old king-pin with you again, shouldering the safety of a dozen girls or more? I don’t envy him.” The soldier smiled.

“Now, you do! You know you do! We can’t have him all the time. War got him back into active service. He’s been ‘skippering’ a coaster carrying lumber from some part of Maine round to the Essex shipyards,” said Arline. “Wasn’t that it, Olive? You had a letter from him.”

“Yes, but lately he had to give it up because of his lameness, and is doing his ‘bit’ in other directions,” replied Blue Heron, her dark eyes gazing off into the last rays of the sunset. “You know those country shipbuilding yards aren’t so very far from where we’re going to camp on the white Ipswich beach. By the bye,”--laughter trickling through her speech like sunlit water through a sieve--“by the bye, do you all know who’s going to work in those shipyards, this coming summer, if they draft him for labor? Why, my cousin, Atty Middleton Atwell!”

“Atwood Atwell, of Atwood and Atwell, city bankers! What! What! That young sprig from Nobility Hill? I beg your pardon!” The soldier, slipping off his perch, smiled apologetically at Olive, whose girlhood had blossomed in the same luxuriant soil of ancestral wealth. “Why! that kid is worth a million or two in his own right. And his great-grandfather--plus a couple more ‘greats’--signed the Declaration, eh?”

“Is--isn’t that the very reason why he should do his part where it’s most needed, as he’s too young to go across?” The oldest girl’s eyes twinkled challengingly. “Take my other cousin, Clayton Forrest; he’s not twenty-one yet! War was no sooner declared than off he went, hotfoot, and enlisted in the local infantry company being raised in his little town--about fifty young men from his father’s big loom-works signing up with him. And Clay--up to this, Clay was never a ‘grind,’” laughingly, “any more than--than Atwood was!”

“Good enough! And you have two more cousins in the navy, haven’t you?”

“Yes, indeed, she has! Why, it was with one of them, Admiral Haven Warde’s son, that Olive went down in a submarine; actually--actually submerged! Think of it!” put in the Rainbow--Arline--again, rosy now with vicarious excitement, as if the wonderful experience for one of their number touched her with an after-glow. “That--that’s what it means to be daughter of a steel king who’s connected with government shipbuilding yards! Ensign Warde is Junior Aide to the Commandant of the Miles River Navy Yard.”

“And--and it was off there that you--dove! Jove! that was an experience. What did it feel like?” The soldier’s eyes flashed curiously.

“Awfully still an’ tense while we were going down--just about half a minute, you know--with the big engines all stopped and only the electric motors going! And the swish of the water against the sub’s side! I closed my eyes and felt like a shell-fish. But when I opened them again on the bottom, oh! it was a fairy palace down there, under the sea--such bright electric lights glittering on wheels and pipes and I don’t know what not; a--a regular miracle-world of machinery,” in awed girlish tones.

“I suppose so, every inch--about--crammed full of mechanical power, except the forward quarters, where the officers slept!” suggested the lieutenant.

“Yes, and made toast and tea on a little electric contrivance attached to the shining switchboard that controlled the dynamos,” supplemented the favored one who had dived to sea-nymph’s regions in a steel shell, internally so radiant, so charged with magical power that it might make Neptune himself feel outclassed. “I--I was a fish again when we came to the surface once more, broke water, and climbed up into the conning-tower, to look through the periscope’s eye! It seemed such a strange dream-world that I saw outside, not one bit familiar; either very clear and shining and remote, or with waves and boats--and trees along the shore--looming unnaturally large and frowning, according as the telescope was adjusted. Oh-h! I’m sure I was a nice little flounder or haddock then,” merrily, “taking a peep at the upper world.”

“You came near ‘floundering’ out--being shot out, rather--through the mouth of the conning-tower into the gray pulpit, or superstructure, where you might have preached a sermon to the fishes on power, if you hadn’t been killed; that was through--gracious!--through one tiny misstep on an automatic lever, like a sleeping tiger. The Junior Aide, who could control the beast, saved you just in time, eh?” prompted Sara, but abruptly swallowed her chaff as she caught her soldier-brother’s eye.

She knew he was envying that Junior Aide, the young naval ensign, with the gold cord drooping from his left shoulder, thinking that no girl as attractive as Olive--as game in an emergency, too--should have quite so many heroic cousins.

What chance, in her memory, could an ordinary peppery lieutenant in an infantry company have against them--a lieutenant who had let his rash temper betray him into prematurely “skinning” a sergeant?

“I guess I was the blighter myself to-day--or as much of a ‘blight’ as that poor ‘doughboy’ with the matches--for letting temper, headlong anger, gas me. That little flame of a sister of mine, Sara, and I, we have the same sort of ‘pull-the-pin-and-see-me-explode’ temper,” he murmured heavily later, this thought rankling, in the ear of the oldest girl, who had looked into dreamland through the rounded eye of a periscope, when her companions had withdrawn to another corner of the lofty balcony for a better view of the sunset.

“Oh! don’t talk of ‘blights!’” she gasped laughingly. “I’m afraid that ‘bothering bugs’ and plant mildew won’t be in it with me for--for a ‘hoodoo’ when it comes to our working steadily three hours a day, weather permitting, in that green oasis of a war-garden amid the sandy desert of the white dunes, when we’re camping out, the coming summer! And yet I--I was the first to volunteer when the president of the Clevedon County Farm Bureau addressed all the Camp Fires of our city a week ago, and called for recruits for just that very thing. If I don’t stick to my pledge the other girls won’t. And we know America has got to be the ‘world’s pantry.’ But, O dear! give me knitting, sewing, painting war-posters, posing, anything else, from morning till night, except weeding an’ hoeing when the sun’s hot and--and one’s back feels as crooked as--as one of those old French streets that the boys write home about!”

Blue Heron straightened her long, girlish spine with humorous apprehension. She was a tall girl, the white parting on the right side of her dark little head being on a level with the soldier’s cheek-bone, if they were both standing.

“Oh! you’ll carry on.” He smiled at her. “It’s a good line; hold it!”

“As you will when you repel an attack, or--or go over the top!... When d’you suppose you’ll be--starting--across?”

“No knowing! At any minute, perhaps! But--but, if you should be around here a week from to-day, you may see me, still on this side, undergoing gas initiation--getting my medicine down in the trenches at the hands of the Gas Defense Division, Chemical Warfare Service. Certainly those young chemists have a witch’s imagination in the horrors they put over on us!” The soldier laughed.

“And they hold their classes every Thursday. I expect to be in the neighborhood, anyway, because father will. And Sara, you know, is staying with me. The other girls go back to the city to-morrow, to be in time for a ceremonial meeting of our Camp Fire Group, at which we’re going to have a novel initiation of our own--initiate, as a novice, that is, a foreign-born Camp Fire Sister, whom we’ve adopted for nine months, little Flamina Miola, born in Italy! I’m teaching her one or two patriotic poems--along with our special ritual--and you should hear her begin on:

“’Merica’s de lan’ we lova.

Oh, granda lan’ so free,

An’ school-a-mate, wherto I go,

Dis is de Flag fora me!”

“Good!”

“I chose her name for her, too: Nébis, A Green Leaf. Isn’t that pretty? She’s going to camp out with us this summer.”

“Green Leaf for Little Italy! It is poetic. I hope you’ll make it a laurel leaf. Well! I guess that sometimes, over there, when a fellow misses some of the things that--that make life hum, you know; when I’m ‘gooing’ up my gas-mask or, maybe, drawing pictures with my ‘toothpick’ (bayonet) in the mud, I’ll think of you Camp Fire Girls. You certainly have a corner on the poetic--fringes, beads, ceremonies--and it only seems to hearten you to meet what’s rough--ugly.”

“That’s our outdoor life,” half whispered Olive. “We get so many new sensations, come so near to--to the heart of things that we----Why! sometimes I,”--she caught her breath in a little low gush of confidence--“I feel as if it were only the fag-end of me that was shut up in--in the five feet eight or nine of flesh and blood--bloomers and blouse--called Olive.” The low girlish voice soared softly upon the last word as to a height from which the girlish soul looked out upon a great Adventure.

“You mean that you get a real glimpse into unseen things--spiritual things!” The soldier’s voice was low too--low and thrilled. “Well, since we are wading into the deep things, I may say to as much of Olive as is left in the fetching jersey suit beside me now, that ours is a rough game, but somehow, as it were, I have come nearer--nearer to God since I volunteered.... I wish it could help me to get the better of a--whiz-bang temper.”

The Torch Bearer’s eyes were wet. So were the soldier’s. The last word had been said. All she could do was to put out a tremulous little hand and touch his understandingly. He wanted very much to stoop and kiss it. But he didn’t. For he remembered that, though he wore his Plattsburg shoulder-bars, yet they were hardly more than Boy and Girl. And up to the threshold of this unifying war-time their lives had not run in parallel channels, as did that of the Junior Aide, who was an admiral’s son, for instance.

So he only covered the girlish hand warmly with his own--held it nested for a moment as that of a comrade with whom one has shared the secret trail, the rainbow trail, that leads into the unseen.

And he hid another, and very special, picture away in his soldier’s heart to brighten those moments when, riding endless miles on a troop train, “hitting the hay” at midnight or vegetating in mud until he felt himself sprouting, he might miss those things which make life hum.

CHAPTER IV

A WANDERING POWDER-PUFF

“That’s Iver! Oh! no distance, nor trench, could prevent my recognizing him.”

The cry of rapt identification came from Iver Davenport’s seventeen-year-old sister, Sara.

“Yes, one can single out his shoulders at a glance--an inch higher than those of any other man in his company--Lieutenant O. Pips!”

It was Colonel Deering who amusedly spoke, president of the Board of Directors of the Craig Steel Works, retired colonel of a national guard regiment, and father of two very attractive daughters, Olive and Sybil, Camp Fire Girls, of whom only one was present here, on the sear skirts of Gas Valley, the outskirts of the great military training-camp, where the army chemists of the Gas Defense Division were again holding their so-called “classes” initiating soldiers into an experience with poison gas.

“Oh! I’m so glad that we’ll have a chance to see him again--Iver--before he goes over. I didn’t let him know that we were coming to-day; ’twill be quite a surprise when he stalks up out of the trenches--and unmasks.” Again the eager exclamation burst from Sara, a kindling flame of excitement, as standing on the edge of the camp trenches, behind the skirting sand-bags, she craned her young neck over, to gaze along a narrow earth-cut, six feet deep, to a curving trench-bay in which her brother was stationed with a few other officers--all still without their masks--to undergo an initiation on his own account.

“He said, last week, that if we happened to be visiting camp to-day, we might see him getting his medicine at the hands of the young chemists of the Gas Defense Division, who have a witch’s imagination when it comes to horrors.” Olive smiled. “I don’t suppose that this is his first initiation, though, by any manner of means.”

“No, they keep ‘putting them through gas’--or some substitute for poison gas--right along here, so that they may be able to get their masks adjusted inside of six seconds,” remarked her father. “I believe it isn’t really going to be gas and sulphur smoke to-day--simply powder-puffs.”

“Powder-puffs! Pelt--pelt them with powder-puffs!” Sesooā nipped off a comic little shriek.

“Oh! not of the vanity-box order.” Colonel Deering’s smooth-shaven lip twitched. “These puffs are just tiny brown-paper sacks, containing, each, a tablespoonful of black powder with three or four inches of red-capped fuse sticking up out of it. They explode when they strike in the trenches, near a man’s feet, throwing up, each, its own little spitting, venomous spurt of flame, so that if he should be slow about getting into his mask his eyesight might suffer.”

“O dear! To-day I hope it won’t be a case of:

“‘The gas came down and caught the blighter slow!’”

murmured Olive, shuddering with a recollection of last week’s smoky Inferno, with its shaking roar of dynamite, its bright flash of bursting “tear-shells,” its popping of monster fire-crackers in the yellow cloud--and of what that cloud gave forth.

“Oh, no, it won’t! This seems quite tame compared with the real ‘Fritzie’s show’ last week!” Sara’s voice was an echo of her soldier-brother’s. “But who wants to see another smoky spectacle? Not me! To-day, by craning our necks over and looking along the traverse, we can see things--see the boys scrambling into their masks in a blessed hurry! Oh! here come the chemists now, with their bundles of powder-puffs. Funny-looking things those puffs are--like pert snails with their long red necks thrust up, peering around them.”

She laughed, that little Camp Fire Flame, of the shading hair and eyelashes, as the members of the Gas Defense Division, four young privates and a corporal, took up their stations at intervals along the edge of the trenches, near.

Suddenly a gong gave out its loud-tongued signal.

“There! that gives the warning this time,” proclaimed the colonel, almost as eager in his interest as the two girls. “Six seconds and over go the puffs! See the officers and men are all at Gas Alert! See their hands go diving into their breast-satchels, snatching out their masks--adjusting them!”

“Iver had his on the soonest of any,” gloated Iver’s sister. “He--he’s just as quick’s a flash about everything--from temper to task!” the last words half under her breath, in a low chuckle of intense excitement, as she leaned forth over the pale, lumpy sand-bags, on which soldiers rested their weapons in rifle-practice, gazing along the narrow brown traverse beneath.

Over floated breezily the red-necked puffs--a few into one rounded trench-bay, a few into another.

Pop, pop, pop! went their snappy explosions, within a foot or two of an officer’s feet--the men not being stationed very close together--throwing up the prettiest little spitting foam of rose-red flame, lively to look upon against the brown earth of the trench-bay.

But what! All in one petrified instant the pale sand-bag became an ice-bag under the girls’ feet--to which their trembling, curdling soles froze!

Two low, pinched cries of startled fright rang out over that brown trench traverse.

Even Colonel Deering gave way to a hectic exclamation and hung, horrified, over the trench-brim! For--was it only a wild freak of the April gust, intent on the sham-battle, too, or a young chemist’s blundering aim?--one of those pelting powder-puffs drifted astray.

Wildly--wildly astray!

It lit not on the ground at an officer’s feet, but close and warm against his khaki breast--as if it would fire his heart--between his braided blouse and the respirator-satchel upon that heaving breast.

With his bare left hand he grasped it--nestling like a red-necked snail--to toss it to earth. But in the very act it exploded and wrapped those bare wrists of his in golden bracelets of flame;--a fierce, fledgling flamelet, just hatched out, which, winging upward, pecked greedily at the mask over his face, trying to peck through to his eyes! A stinging, searing flame that twined itself brilliantly about his stretched neck, his ears, the sides of his face, the roots of his hair--wherever it could find a sentient inch that the mask did not cover--with the pitting, piercing burn that only black powder can inflict.

“Oh-h--Iver!” Sara Davenport felt as if the earth were seamed with one great brown trench, all flame-lined, swallowing her.

But before her piteous exclamation died away, her brother--that young lieutenant--had plucked the fiery scorpion from his breast, shaken himself free of the hissing, spitting powder, was stamping fiercely up the beaten sod-steps of the trench, removing his mask with fingers that shook--some of them--like charred twigs, in a withering tempest of pain.

“Thank God! I was into my mask pretty quickly. Otherwise--otherwise I’d have been blinded for life!”

He shuddered, that Boy-Officer, who had prematurely “bawled out” a sergeant, as the words broke from him, seeming to make their way out through a great smoking hole upon his breast, where the tight khaki blouse was burned away.

“Iver! Oh--Iver!” From a distance his young sister started towards him.

Blistered within by pain and rising anger--as without by powder--he did not see her. Nor yet the other visitors back of her--one of them the girl with whom he had exchanged twilight confidences a week before!

His eye, a lurid lightning-flash above the bitten, twisted lips, had instantly singled out the face of a young chemist--a penitent private--nearer, as the latter, in an agony of apology, started towards him.

“I--I didn’t mean it, sir,” stammered the youth, feeble in his confusion. “It--’twas an accident----”

For just one-half minute Lieutenant Davenport’s tall figure loomed, rigid, in the sunlight, that powder-hole smoking upon his breast.

His breath smoked, too--the smoke of his agonizing burns.

The lightning of his eye withered the blunderer before him.

Then, suddenly, with masterful grip, the soldier seized the red-eyed powder-puff of temper exploding within him, tossed it deep into the trenches of his soul, and set his foot upon it.

“What! Are you the young rascal who potted me?”

Above his bitten, pain-wrung lips, above the storm of blue powder blisters puffing out around his wrists, his neck, the edges of his face, the explosive lightnings of the eye melted--wavered--towards the mellow sunlight of a smile--a humorous smile.

“Well! take a better aim next time. Pshaw! it might not have been your fault at all--boy.... A puff--a puff may have caught the puff--and landed it on me!”

Moved by a sudden impulse, the lieutenant held out the fingers of his less injured right hand to the blanching private--who touched but did not grasp them!

Silence almost confounded reigned among the three guests, now drawn near!

A voice--a voice broke it, that of Colonel Deering:

“Onward, Christian Soldiers!”

he chanted in a low, exultant sing-song. “That Boy--that officer--will go over the top smiling, master of himself, gassed by no blinding smoke-cloud of anger or hate! And his father was always telling me that he had a brute of a temper.”

“So he has! Had! Mine’s like it--somewhat! Oh-h, quite often my flame’s a powder-puff!” Sara Davenport was quivering from neck to heel now, with the purest, proudest flame that can crown a young heart, that of a seventeen-year-old girl’s pride in her hero-brother.

“But, oh! there’ll be no excuse for its--ever--being a spitfire in future; if Iver could--master.... Hif-f! He must be suffering--ter-ri-bly!”

The other, older, dark-eyed girl was silent. But perhaps, at that moment, as she drew her breath sharply through closed teeth, even the romance of looking through a periscope’s eye, with a Junior Aide, having a fascinating gold epaulet cord drooping from his left shoulder, paled beside the romance of that victor’s eye, humorously smiling, triumphant alike over pain and passion.

CHAPTER V

CAMOUFLAGE

“A camouflaged dory! Well, if that isn’t a joke! If that isn’t original!”

The cry came, in laughing accents, from three or four Camp Fire Girls lounging upon a milk-white beach, absorbed in the occupation of another of their number, whose wet paint-brush dripped sky-beams upon the sands--blue sky-beams that winked dazzlingly in the August sun, as if filched from heaven’s own arch above.

“Original! About as original as Sara herself! Nobody else would think of it! A humble little dory that doesn’t go more than a mile from shore, and couldn’t come in on a sea-chase of any kind!

“How--how do you know what she’ll come in on?” The artist swung her azure-dripping brush, contemplating her dory’s dazzling side, as she lazily replied to her companions’ further comments. “How do I know what I’ll come in on myself? Queer times these--war-times! I shouldn’t be surprised, some fine morning, to find myself scouring cloud-land as a sky-skimmer, or--or----Now! where did I see that face before?

“Not on this beach, anyway. He’s the first man I’ve noticed around here. Goody! I welcome the sight of him.”

It was Arline Champion, Sara Davenport’s oldest friend, and closest chum, who spoke, digging in the sands with the toe of her tan boot, as she darted a demure glance along a rainbow bridge of sunbeams in pursuit of a prepossessing pedestrian who had passed at the moment upon the extreme edge of the beach where the white sands gleamed through sunlit tide-ripples, like milk in a golden vase.

“Well! wherever I’ve seen him, I’ve seen him. And, what’s more, he has run across me before, too! I felt the thrill (now, which of the colors shall I daub her with next, sky-blue, white, or dark slate?) the thrill that shot from one to the other of us when he passed. ’Twas more than the mere shock of surprise--admiration--of me and my three paint-pots.”

The impressionist artist, Sara, laughed--she who was reproducing, or trying to, with many a glance at the horizon, the dazzling light and shade of this August day in great bold smears upon her small boat’s side--the magical, baffling tints of sky-blue sea, dark, shadowy wave-hollows, white noonday light--to reproduce them as she saw them.

“Why, he was almost on the point of twirling his little mustache, when he first shot a sidelong glance at me--and such a start as he gave!”--the paintress went on. “He caught himself up just in time. If one’s to judge by his dress--sportsman’s suit--he’s not of the class to be rude, exactly.”

“Pshaw! What man living mightn’t be betrayed into twirling his mustache over a camouflaged dory: a little boat all smeared--like a Merry Andrew--with sky-blue, white, and splashing dark spots? Perfect clown! He couldn’t be mortal and not be amused. I wonder he didn’t smile outright as he passed.”

It was an older girl who spoke, a girl whose clear white skin was now slightly tanned, whose dark eyes held a golden spark in their depths, lit by the thrill of her response to the blue-and-white beauty of the August day about her--a response even more elastic than that of her companions.

“Smile! Pshaw! I’d have liked it better if he had smiled. I’d have liked it better if he had--even--spoken! Now--now you needn’t get off ‘tut, tut!’ Olive, in your character of Assistant Guardian; I’ll say it for you.” Sara’s dancing flame was saucy as she rinsed her camouflaging brush in the tide, then dipped it into a dazzling pot of white paint standing beside the blue. “What I mean is that if he had spoken, or--or merely smiled a little, I might”--musingly smearing on the paint--“might have remembered, all of a sudden, where I’ve seen him before.... Now--’twill haunt----”

“Whe-ew! Fancy Sally Davenport, shadow-haunted, ghost-haunted!” Olive burst into a low laugh.

“Oh-h! We know that no ghost fazes you, not even the ghost of chlorine gas. You don’t knuckle under to it!”

The kneeling artist slapped her brush suddenly against her dory’s side, drew it vehemently across the bow in a great white, dazzling smear, then turned impulsively and gazed along the still more dazzling beach upon which the stranger had passed, her gold-tipped eyelashes twinkling, her brown eyebrows drawn together hard, as if thought were dipping a paint-brush into some camouflaging pot of memory and trying to produce a picture--trying with all its might.

But the only result was a vague smear. Sesooā, to give her her Camp Fire name, turned again to her boat-painting, with a baffled sigh--and to her occasional studious glances at the horizon.

“I think I’ll take the camp skiff and row over to the Bar,” she remarked presently. “I might get a few new impressions of how sea and sky and wavy horizon look from there--a broader view of the ocean.”

“You’ll have a hollow impression if you go before dinner,” Olive Deering laughed. “What on earth put this whim into your brain, Sara, of painting your little dory up as a harlequin--a freak?”

“Freak! Harlequin! Well, maybe so. But I’m only putting her into the motley uniform of the high seas, at present, because--because Iver gave her to me. I wouldn’t let anybody else--another soul--touch a paint-brush to her, though.”

There was a low, jealous catch in the girlish voice--almost a sob--which swept the light puzzle of the passing stranger entirely out of mind. For it was August now, not April--early April--and Lieutenant Iver Davenport had had his real baptism of fire, over the top in the bleak No Man’s Land of France--liquid fire and bursting shrapnel, to which a wandering powder-puff was but a waspish prelude.

He had had his “bleeding stand-to--stifling stand-to”--facing the worst horrors in the shape of poison gas that the enemy could put over, had been wounded and citied for gallantry; and his blue-pointed service-star was enshrined forever against the red background of his sister’s heart. She would have given a good deal to know whether another girl did homage in her heart of hearts to that star, too--the tall girl, Olive Deering, Torch-Bearer, whose dark eyes could kindle with the golden spark of a Joan of Arc fire.

Sesooā shot a little measuring flame of inquiry, in the shape of a glance, up at her now and again, as she went on with her blue-and-white daubing, dressing her little boat in the party-colored uniform of the seas, with many a wavy figure and crude hieroglyphic thrown in, to make the disguising dazzle more complete.

“Ah! Madonna! Scusa me! But--but w’at for you painta her like dat--de leetla boat--eh?”

It was a new voice, suddenly drawn near, a voice with a sunny sparkle--a liquid softness--in it which hinted at its having first flowered into speech under skies as radiantly azure, as fleecily flecked, as the dory’s side.

“Why, hullo, Flamina!... Hullo! Little Nébis, our Green Leaf, is that you?” Sara, lowering her paint-brush, which dripped silver tribute now upon the sands, looked up into the new eyes, brown as the velvety barnacles clinging to some sea-rocks near, shyly daring, merrily challenging, through their black upcurling lashes.

Flamina, little foreign-born Camp Fire Sister, only two years in America--adopted some months before by the Morning-Glory Group, who, working for patriotic honors along lines of Americanization, were teaching her the Camp Fire ritual, with the meaning of her Indian name and symbol--Flamina dimpled shyly, like the ebbing tide.

“Ah, bella! Bella! But w’y you make her looka like dat--so fine--so fine?” she cried again, lost in primitive admiration of the boat’s elemental dazzle.

“So fine! Glad I’ve found one appreciative spirit, anyway! I’m painting her in big blue smears and wavy lines as they paint the great ships--American ships--going from here across the ocean now, little Green Leaf Sister, so that they may melt into the colors of the sea and sky and no horrid submarine--you know what a submarine is--coming to the surface may fire a tin fish at them--sink them. See?”

W’at for you painta her like dat--de leetla boat--eh?

“Ha! Tin--feesh?” Flamina, wrinkling her childish brows--she was barely fourteen--looked out at the broad bay, as if she expected to see the brilliant gleam of a metallic fin swimming around there.

“Pshaw! That’s a nickname the sailors have for a torpedo, childie; you know what that is--a big dark bomb that’s fired from a submarine, which skims along just under the surface of the water like a fish, leaving a white streak behind it--swish-h, like that!” Sara drew her level white brush through a sea of sunbeams, to illustrate. “When it strikes a fine ship, then it bursts--blows the ship up. D’you understand?”

“Si--yes! Catcha wise!... I catcha wise!” murmured Flamina, entranced, her curly lashes twinkling above the night-like flash beneath them. “But, bah! your greata Uncle Sam, he not goin’ to let badda submarine stay in sea much longa--eugh?”

“No! No, you bet he isn’t!” The artist slapped the slang with her brush-tip vehemently against the boat’s side. “But he’s your ‘greata Uncle Sam,’ too, now, little Green Leaf. You run over and see the dress--the pretty ceremonial dress with leather fringes--that those two girls are finishing off for you to wear at our next Council Fire meeting here on the white sands. They’re embroidering it with a green leaf, too--your symbol.”

Excitedly Flamina ran off, singing with airy gaiety, a merry dialect song of her childhood, of girlish love for the green country:

“Pascarella vieni in campagna,

Al sole chè monterà,

Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah-h!

Quando il sole chè monterà.

“Marianna vieni in campagna,

Quando chè il sole monterà,

Ah! Ah! Ah! ... Ah!

Quando il sole monterà.”

“Did you ever hear such gladness as there is in that soaring ‘Ah’? She’s just as full of song as a skylark, isn’t she?” commented Olive, who still lingered near the boat-painter. “In ceremonial dress she’ll be a fairy! I can hardly get over the fact that it’s Sybil--Sybil who’s embroidering it for her with a green leaf, who has shown her how to weave her headband, too; Sybil who, a little while ago, hated to be tied down even to fancy-work for half an hour!”

“Um-m!” Sara cast a musing, half-whimsical glance over her shoulder at a point, about a dozen yards distant, where two girls sat, engaged in fine needlework, upon the sands, with a loose garment of golden-brown khaki between them.

One, the elder, was garnishing it artistically with soft leathern fringes, weaving into them the smiling rainbows of her own thought--she being Arline, the Camp Fire Rainbow--which craved a very happy future for this little foreign-born Camp Fire Sister, adopted temporarily by the Morning-Glory Group.

The other, whose needle was threaded with sunbeams and the green of spring, bent her golden head over her embroidery with equal assiduity and sisterhood of interest; a sight which sent Sesooā’s thoughts leaping back to a city playground, crowded with foreign-born children, the cradle of her contact with these two girls from the wealthier avenues of life--Olive and Sybil--whom she, with the racy flame in her for the moment a spitting powder-puff, had scathingly pronounced “all fluff and stuff!”

Well! the early loss of a mother, the spoiling of a bereaved father had, perhaps, rendered their youthful ideals rather fluffy in a downy nest of self.

Three years of Camp Fire life at the most impressionable period, of feelings quickened by a romantic ritual, of heart knit to other girl-heart by the entwining flame of the outdoor Council Fire--of coming, as Olive had said, very near to the Father Heart in which lay their unity--this, and more, had brought one to kneeling, undaunted, by a gassed soldier, the other to embroidering an elm leaf--symbolic American elm--upon the dress of a little immigrant of not two years’ standing.

“Your brother Iver said that it ought to be a laurel leaf for Little Italy,” remarked Olive now, with just the slightest reminiscent quiver of the lip and deepening of color, as she seated herself upon the sands at a safe distance from the camouflaging artist, with her three flashing paint-pots, and drew forth a half-knit stocking from a home-woven bag that was like Joseph’s coat of many colors.

“Laurel leaf! It ought to be that for all our allies!” panted Sesooā, halting in her choice between blue and dark slate-color for her next broad harlequin smear.

“Of course!... The brave Belgians! The women of England! The French--oh! aren’t they wonderful! I had a letter from my cousin, Clayton Forrest, this morning. I wanted to tell you about it. He says the little French women are such--such out-an’-out bricks! He never saw anything like their spirit!” Olive’s dark eyes glowed as she turned the “silver” heel of her stocking for the Red Cross.

“Humph!” grunted Sesooā and daubed passionately, in a blue mood, the discounting energy of her exclamation not being at all leveled at the heroines of sunny France, but at Olive’s male cousins, about whom she quite agreed with her brother Iver, that they were altogether too many and too spectacular for such an attractive girl.

She even pooh-poohed the patriotism of the eighteen-year-old lad, worth a million or two in his own right, who was swinging a mallet now in the country shipbuilding yards not far from here.

“Well! Well, Clay was marching through a deserted French village with his company--they were just straggling along in loose order--when he saw something coming towards him that looked like a great round wicker basket--with the bright handle of a copper saucepan and a turkey-red pillow sticking out over the brim--plodding along of itself on two little clattering wooden shoes.

“As it came nearer, he made out a little gray head in a blue foulard--or handkerchief--nodding above it.... O dear! there I’ve dropped two stitches in my heel.”

Olive drew breath, to pick them up.

“It--it was a refugee, not an animated basket; a little old Frenchwoman returning to her home--or what had been her home,” she went on, winking bright drops from her eyes. “And Clay--Clay, who before the War was never a ‘grind,’ must have asked permission to carry the basket for her, and got it, although one could only read between the lines in his letter, for he spoke of finding the ruin which had been her home, and of setting down all her household belongings with a jerk that made the bright saucepans rattle like chattering teeth when--when he saw that there were only four blackened walls standing, over which the Germans had set up a tin roof, with a horrid, winking old tin door.

“They had stabled horses there.

“Clay says he was just afraid to look at the thin, withered little face under the blue foulard.... But he heard a cluck and a stamp. There she was, the little old peasant-woman, tearing down the ugly sign which the enemy had set up, stamping on it with her wooden shoes, and muttering away to herself, so--so pluckily: ‘Tchu! Tchu! Tchu! C’a ne fait rien! C’est la guerre!’ And then she began singing aloud in a voice like a Victory siren:

“‘Mais ils ne l’aurout plus,

Jamais! Jamais!’

“‘But they’ll never have it again!

Never! Never!’”

Sara, pealing the translated echo, that seemed to come ringing across the ocean, sniffed now to her dory’s side, instinctively exchanging her blue-dripping brush, and its corresponding mood, for a dazzling white one, with which she painted in broad smears radiant dreams of Peace--restoration--reconstruction!

“And our boys have gone over to fight, so that ‘they may never have it again!’” murmured Olive in a voice that must have been like the old Frenchwoman’s, between a sob and a song. “They’ll pay our debt to France, and carry on! Carry on, until the cry of some poor, pale little children, who crept up out of cellars in another village they entered, comes true.”

“What--was their--cry?” Sara sniffed as wetly as the outgoing tide; she had forgotten that Corporal Clayton Forrest was one of the superfluous cousins, whose feet, turning aside from paths of luxury, had enlisted in the plodding infantry with fifty companions from his father’s big loom-works.

She had seen him leading a cotillion or escorting fair maidens--debonair cavalier-in-chief of his little New England town.

She pictured him laden with the pots and kettles, the turkey-red pillows, all the household belongings of a little old peasant woman, compressed into a great wicker basket--with the handle of a copper saucepan sticking out over the rim, like the tail of a sitting bird; and she sniffed again because knighthood had not ceased to flower.

“Oh! what was their cry? The children’s cry!” Olive moistly caught her breath. “Ah!... Why! they simply burst open, like poor little pinched buds that had been kept in a cellar--the enemy had held that village four years--when they saw the American soldiers! Clay says they caught at their hands and kissed them--danced wildly round them, crying: ‘Fini, la Guerre! C’fini--c’fini--la--Guerre!’”

“But it isn’t--isn’t ‘Fini, la Guerre!’ yet. And we’ve got to carry on, too; not--not at camouflaging nonsense like this,”--Sara painted a dazzling hieroglyphic, a riddle of the future, upon her boat’s side--“but at real, steady war work, that’s no joke, in that big garden of ours, a young farm, I call it, over there on the hill--Squawk Hill--was there ever such a name!--called after a relative of yours, Olive, the noisy night-heron.... And just between you an’ me”--painting furiously--“I’m getting awf’ly--awf’ly tired of weeding, spraying, hoeing, raking right along, day in and day out, for an hour an’ a half in the morning--hour an’ a half at night!”

“Evening, you mean! Three whole hours--nothing to speak of! But they do string out, when you’re ‘carrying on’!” Blue Heron--Olive--straightened her long, graceful young back; this morning’s stunt of carrying on upon the hill of discordant name had made it feel almost as crooked as an ancient village street, tiled and twisted, in the France which they had been discussing.

“Ah, well, if we show any signs of weakening--we older girls--it’s all up with our pledges as a Group to help feed our boys and the hungry women and children on the other side of the water, for the younger girls don’t take much interest in war-gardening; they’d rather spend all their time, especially at low tide, over there on the long sand-bar, pow-wowing with the seals and birds. And I don’t blame them!” Sara waved a pensive brush towards a distant snow-white, humpy line, just rising like wavy limbs of sea-nymphs from green breakers, the merriest mob of breakers that combed and foamed and shrank as the tide ebbed. “Everything--everything is so wild an’ happy-go-lucky all around us--that----”

“That it makes one feel irresponsible,” sighed Olive; “puts the war a long way off, except--except when one turns the silver heel of a stocking--bah! another stitch down--or gets a letter from over there.”

“Oh! I know how you hate grubbing in the muck, raising vegetables. You were never cut out for a farmerette; that’s your Southern ancestry, on your mother’s side, I suppose--proud planters who left all that sort of thing to slaves!” Sara’s eyebrows went up. “And I must confess”--with a comical shrug--“that there are times when I see very little fun in planting potatoes--and all sorts of other things--with--with about forty-eleven million horrid little bugs just sitting on the fence, as old farmers say, and watching you do it, waiting to pounce on the young shoots directly they come above ground--and not one of them will light on a thistle!... But, bah! C’est la Guerre. And conservation would be nowhere--a lame duck--without cultivation! Besides the hours aren’t--very--long.”

“Yes! if it wasn’t day in and day out, for months at a stretch,” murmured the older girl, arching delicate, dark eyebrows somewhat ruefully over her stocking. “Well, our beets and carrots--all the other vegetable things, too--are coming along. We’ll have quite a cargo soon for Captain Andy to take over in his boat to some of the summer colonies and dispose of. Think of giving a big bunch of profits to the Red Cross!”

“And of having all the little infant carrots that are thinned out--to give others a chance to grow--for our own eating, meantime!” Sara laughed. “Terra-cotta babies, so tender an’ pink! Makes one feel like an ogre to devour them before they ever get a chance to mature.”

“Survival of the fittest, Sally!” Olive sprang lightly to her feet. “I don’t feel as if I could survive another minute without something to eat! Thank goodness! There goes the dear bugle, sounding mess-call--dinner--as if we were military maids. Nothing militant about us, is there, except--except our skirmishes with the big seals, to drive them off the bar. ’Twill be low tide in another hour or so. How about rowing over there?”

“Good!” Sesooā looked out towards that long milk-white, level line, a mile in length, the Ipswich Bar, rising steadily inch by inch from the billowy green of the receding tide. Colonies of birds were settling upon it and brown amphibious forms wallowing up out of the water. “Humph!” she gasped suddenly. “Maybe that sportsman--that man who passed a while ago, whose face I have seen somewhere before, is a seal-hunter, down here shooting seals, those spotted hair-seals. He had a gun over his shoulder. Bah! it just makes me cross to see a pair of eyes that I recognize as I recognized his at once, and not--not be able to place them in any head that I remember.”

“Put them out of your own head, honey, and think of the baby carrots,” counseled Olive, slipping an arm through her companion’s. “Lilia and Betty Ayres have a trick of creaming them to perfection; they’re cooks for to-day.”

“Ah, well, perhaps if we should--should--run across him again----” was the low, still haunted rejoinder, absently completed by a backward glance at a camouflaged dory.

CHAPTER VI

PLAYING SUBMARINE

“Ils ne l’aurout plus,

Jamais! Jamais!”

Sesooā drove her boat’s nose on to the bar to the tune of the old Frenchwoman’s triumphant chant of defiance to the invaders, who had wrecked her dwelling, but would never have it again! Never, never!

The Camp Fire Girl was flinging it now as a merry challenge to the seals, the big, spotted harbor-seals, treating them as invaders--where they were more at home than she was--and disputing with them the right of possession of the milky sand-bar at low tide.

It was a teeming settlement, at low water, that Ipswich Bar--a long, white street fringed by wavy greenery of billows, which had risen miraculously out of the bay, thronged by a motley multitude of gulls, herons, wee sandpipers, petrels, strutting to and fro, exchanging now and again a squawky greeting, hobnobbing with brother or cousin, or coolly ignoring one of another tribe, occasionally parting with a fish to a young one--a dazzling, bewildering Great White Way of birds.

And the flippered, bulky harbor-seals--the marbled seals--in their spotted hair-coats, lay around upon the sands, a whole herd of them, like lazy merchants who, tired of displaying their wares, had reclined, to bask in the sun.

Ploughing the waves to this White Way came another settler, which a certain old sea-dog, Captain Andy Davis, friend of the Morning-Glory Group of Camp Fire Girls, called alternately, with briny disrespect, “a loose old wagon” or an “old red settler,”--in plain English, a broad, flat-bottomed, ruddy-painted camp-boat, impossible to capsize.

This “settler,” bobbing over the green tide, gave the strange effect, somewhat, of a portly, waddling, ruddy old duck which had ambitiously adopted a cygnet. For towed in her wake came a silvery something, graceful as a young swan--a light birch-bark shell, a fifteen-foot canoe whose bark skin shone like satin--with a delicate decoration of ferns, where the outer layer of bark had been scraped away into a pattern, at each tapering end.

The red mother-settler had aboard a cargo--a precious cargo of girlhood--of which one shifting item done up in a bathing-suit, crowned by a red silk handkerchief wound around a curly head, leaned over the stern of the mother-skiff, in rapt admiration of that feather-weight canoe.

“I believe--really believe--that I could have paddled over here to the bar from our beach in her!” burst sanguinely from the lips of that flesh-and-blood item, Lilia Kemp, otherwise Ko-ko-ko, Little Owl. “Even if a green comber had capsized her, I could have righted her again and scrambled in. I could do it, fully dressed, let alone to say in a bathing-suit.”

“Which means you could undress in the water, right her, and get aboard!” corrected an older girl, of shading, twinkling eyelashes between which hovered a firefly glance like a glow-worm playing through an amber fringe of grasses. “Well!--well, I shouldn’t mind a premature ducking myself,” she ran on, her lithe body rhythmically swaying to one of the red oars which she was wielding. “Perhaps--who knows--we may get it, too, if the seals regard us as invaders! Ginger! will you look at them--a whole herd, thirty at least, out of water, sunning themselves on the sands!”

“Oh! we see them, Sara.” It was a general responsive chorus in half a dozen gay young voices. “Goody! I never, never, came so near to a seal--a mustached man-fish--before! We’re going to have the frolic of our lives!” from one in piping solo. “And the birds--birds--birds! Ever see anything like them? Fishing, strutting, squabbling, holding a Peace Conference!”

“No! I never saw anything like them before. Nor you, either! There’s nothing to equal the wild life on the Ipswich Bar, at low tide, nearer than the bird reservation on Three Arch Rocks, off the Oregon Coast; that’s what I heard a great naturalist say!... And, oh! see--see! there are some of my cousins, the great herons, just gobbling up everything in sight,” trilled Olive Deering--Blue Heron--in a shrill treble of excitement which, winging right out of her, fluttered on to the bar, to greet those feathered fisher-folk, her cousins.

“Of course, the Arch Rocks, being a reservation, go a long way beyond anything we could see here, for the teeming multitudes of their bird-life--the grandeur of their nested arches,” she added softly, her dark eyes alight, her breast rising and falling, light as a cork, upon a pure, primitive flame of being, typified by the red tongue of flame of the Torch Bearer’s emblem, with crossed logs and pearly smoke, embroidered upon the bosom of her glossy bathing-suit.

It was one of those outdoor moments when, as she had told Lieutenant Davenport, there seemed to be but an illumined fag-end of her real self left in the five feet nine of red-crowned girlish form perched airily, now, upon the side of the red-skinned settler.

The rest, the main part, had become one with the joyful feather-folk, the spotted mammals sunning themselves, with the blue of the sky above, the dazzling flower of foam on the bonnet of the green old whistling tide, off on a holiday from the shore--and with a Father Presence in all, scarce veiled, so radiantly apprehended at the moment that faith was almost sight.

She came to herself with a backward glance at a twilight balcony, at a young soldier who had, in feeling, come nearer to God since he volunteered--came to her transfigured self in time to hear that officer’s little flame of a sister gaily protesting: “Bah! Three Arch Rocks! Who craves for Oregon? This is good enough for us. Now--now--now comes the shock, as the soldiers say; now, for finding out how near those seals will let us get to them, before they take to the water! Hitherto they’ve had the bar all to themselves, except for the birds. But:

“‘Ils ne l’aurout plus,

Jamais! Jamais!’

“We’re out for possession, too, this summer!... Oh, mercy! Here they come, stampeding--flopping. Oh, sit tight, girls; if they strike the boat, they may----”

“They can’t capsize us!” burst explosively from sister lips. “The old settler----”

She was a settler, a sturdy one, that camp skiff. She rocked and wallowed, but settled down, as in a nest, in the green hubbub of tide and foam stirred up by the wildly startled plunging-off of thirty sportive young seals, which, striking the water with the heavy splashes of men bathers, swam deliriously around in all directions, whipping the eddies with their active flippers, amid a low tornado of broken exclamations from the girls.

“Oh, mercy! Look! Aren’t their dark heads just like those of a lot of boys, swimming round? And did you--did you see them when they made a dash for the water?”

“They were so quick that you couldn’t see them!”

“Yes, I did! They--they floundered off the bar with the funniest kangaroo roll, half-upright, their little fore-flippers in the air--like puppies’ paws--swinging the hind parts of their bodies first to one side, then--then to the other--the queerest teeter! Oh! I’ll never forget it!... Never!”

Olive’s own voice “teetered” upon the protests that softly lashed the sunshine around the boat, breaking in upon the general medley of her companions’ excitement.

As she perched upon the ruddy rim of the old red settler, her arm was about the shoulders of the adopted Camp Fire Sister, little Flamina, whose Green Leaf was a perfect quiver leaf now, the night-black pupils of her eyes--big dilated--shining through their jetty lashes, like radium in the dark.

“Ah, Madonna! How I am excita’! Vitello marina! De bigga seal! I no see such bigga sealla on shore of Napoli--me!” she cried, her childish mind traveling back by aërial route--the sisterly arm about her made it a rainbowed route--from the lonely wildness of the Ipswich Sand-bar to the sunny beauty of her native shores on the blue bay of Naples as she had occasionally beheld them.

“Ha! Justa looka!” panted Flamina again, liquidly musical as a little spring brook, hugging her excitement passionately, within locked arms, to the breast of her small pea-green sweater. “De bigges’ seal ees no mova--heem stay on sand--rolla ova! Ah! Brava! Brava!”

“Brava, indeed! Did you ever see such bravado?” It was Sesooā’s low, laughing outburst. “Three of them--four--aren’t stirring--not making a break for the water at all! Ginger! we must be within thirty yards of them now. The Big Four lying up there, high an’ dry, on the ridge of the sloping bar! And--and one of them a monster! Perfect ‘whale,’ as the boys would say! Oh-h! will you look at his fangs--long yellow fangs--and his mustache twinkling with brine!

“And the round, brown spots all over him! See him roll over on his side and grin, as if he dared--dared us to come nearer! Mercy! Hasn’t he a half-human kind of face! I’m afraid; he looks like a man-fish, a--monster!”

Little Owl--Lilla--was crouching, hands clasped, in the red stern of the old settler, as the words tumbled forth through her parted lips. Behind her, rocking upon the eddies, was the fern-decked, birch canoe.

“Sara! Sara Davenport! you’re too daring! He--they--might attack us. Let’s row off and land at a little distance, upon another part of the bar! Upon my word! he does look ugly--wicked. I--I’m ‘creepy’ all over--positively. He seems bent on holding the fort--the sand-bar!” Arline’s voice shook upon a moist rainbow of excitement.

“Yes, they’ve had it all to themselves too long, but:

“‘Ils ne l’aurout plus...!’”

Was it that a New England seal disliked to hear himself challenged in the defiant chant which an old Frenchwoman had flung after retreating Germans--to have his reign upon the milk-white bar--the heaven of the low-water sands--disputed? Or was it that, after all, his grinning pep was only surface spice--that whatever savage courage still remained in him for battles with his own tribe, had been reduced by persecution to arrant cowardice in man’s direction, was not proof against the slow, complacent advance, inch by inch, onto the bar, of an old red, wooden settler, vibrant from stem to stern with the quivers and gasps of a dozen wildly excited girls?

Whatever the reason--perhaps the sands on which his blubbery brain had rested alone knew--whatever the reason, swiftly, suddenly, he threw the switch, as it were, the lightning-switch, when the nosing old camp-boat was only twenty yards from him, signaling to the three other big seals, the ladies of his family, his marbled wives.

Lightning-like, they responded, making a kangaroo dash for the water--led by their grinning lord--so quick that in the sunlight their briny, oily hair-coats seemed phosphorescent.

But it was a day when strange, covert methods of warfare were in vogue.

Perhaps, even lying out at low tide upon the dry sands of the Ipswich Bar, the big, brooding old dog-seal had seen strange fish-like structures--gray and black--rising afar off from ocean’s depths, and from them had taken a hint.

At all events, no U-boat, yet, ever equalled the surprising swiftness with which he played submarine--took it upon himself to play submarine.

Whether it was blind fear or baffled fury, creaming to blunder, in that old blubber-head of his, he dove right under the boat, instead of dodging by it!

Giving way before the red settler, he bumped against her flat bottom, and hoisted her right out of the water--her delicate cygnet chick, the birch canoe, too!

An easy matter for him, for he weighed a full three hundred pounds or so, and made nothing of the leviathan feat of hoisting a cargo of girls tumultuously out of one element into another--the spray-shot, spray-curdled air!

The old wooden settler clucked and rocked dizzily, fiery red in the face and mad as an old wet hen. But she could not hold on to her chicks--or at least she could hold to but very few of them!

Out of her they shot on all sides! The green tide around her suddenly bloomed with flower-like girlish heads done up in red silk handkerchiefs.

The air was streaked with a curdled foam of sputtering cries: “The seal! That big seal! Where--is--he? Dove r-right un-der--us! Played submarine, he did!... Tchu! tchu! tchu! C’est la Guerre! Guerre, with a vengeance--yes!... Oh! Where do we go from here, girls--where do we go-o from here?”

“You deserve to go to ‘Davy Jones’ from here, for letting a big seal bounce you out! Great Neptune! haven’t you a grain more sense than that, after all the forty-one tricks I’ve taught you? Eh-h?”

It was a loud voice, whooping like a klaxon, that came suddenly ringing over the swirling tide, seconded by a sound of oars. “D’you ask where the seal is? Well! there he goes, swimming off--beating it to win’ard, vowing by his ancestors, back to the tadpoles, that he’ll never have anything to do with girls again--after landing you all in the surf off the old bar. An’ each an’ every one o’ you as wet as a sea-mouse--a feathered sea-mouse! Dear, dear! ’Bout time you had a convoy, I reckon!”

“‘Convoy’! Captain Andy! Captain Andy Davis! Well! it’s no wonder a big seal b-bounced us all out--got the better of us; you’ve been neglecting us s-shamefully.” It was Blue Heron’s voice babbling through brine as Olive’s geranium-like head rose from the greenery of a water-hill.

“Panky doodle! Have I, indeed? Want me to tow your old red settler of a boat on to the sands? She’s drifting off. The rest of you can swim, I reckon. Good! In the water, anyhow, you behave as well as you look--an’ that’s saying a lot!”

“Hurrah! Is it now? So--so you’re thinking better of sending us to--Davy Jones--right off, eh?” Sesooā’s little flame of laughter shot back over her shoulder, as, striking out boldly, she swam for the dry sands of the long bar--the dazzling Great White Way of birds--her companions following, Olive towing the foreign-born little sister, who was hampered by having drawn the rough pea-green sweater, for warmth, over her bathing-suit.

A dozen laughing nymphs they were, landing in madcap mood at the heart of the frolic of the wild life on the bar.

Behind them, in charge of their ruddy old skiff and the tossed canoe, came their friend and body-guard of former camping seasons, Captain Andrew Davis, master mariner of Gloucester, whose massive figure was still a tower of strength, and the light of his eye undimmed, at seventy-two!

CHAPTER VII

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.

CHAPTER VIII

THE LEADER

“Let your spirit guide us through,

Joan of Arc, they are calling you!”

Over the white sands of the Ipswich Beach, looking towards the long sand-bar, with about three-quarters of a mile of sapphire water sparkling between, the sportive cry rang, with a gay note of challenge under its playfulness:

“Come with the flame in your glance!”

And she came with the flame in her glance--no spirit Maid of Orleans returning to lead the gallant sons of the fleur-de-lys on bleeding fields--as who knows but she may have come to her France in its hardest hour! Not her, but a modern maid with the fire of the morning in her dark eye, a spiritual sense of the wild beauty around her in the quiver of her sensitive lips, with a brine-wet braid of black hair hanging down her back--needing, indeed, only armor and helmet, instead of blue overalls, to make her, as she had been once before in tableaux for the Red Cross, a very fair representation of that Maid of France who, of old, left her sunny orchards to drive the invader from her soil!

“Come with the flame in your glance,

With a garden-rake for a holy lance!”

chanted Sara again, feeling that camouflage was not her only inspiration.

“Can’t you hear the bugle sounding?

Can’t you feel our pulses bounding?

Lead your comrades to the field!”

she caroled further, falling into step with the maid of the rake, and looking challengingly up into the dark eyes with the golden spark of fire--of fervor--in them.

“I confess I wish ’twas any other kind of field, for once; that we had any other hill to take this morning but that same old heart-breaker of a converted sand-peak--from which the enemies, the weeds--witch-grass, rank beach-grass, wild pea, wild vetch--have to be driven back again and again, with barb-weed, instead of barbed wire, for the worst of all!” craved she, her chant sinking to a dirge-like sing-song, to which she matched her march to the war-garden on Squawk Hill, that discordant paradise of night-herons, so lately reclaimed from the barren dunes.

“What!... What! Sara, you’re not weakening?” The Maid brandished her rake. “I wish I had a little more ‘pep’ in me, myself, this morning,” she acknowledged, a moment later, sinking her voice to a silky whisper, with a backward glance over her blue-overalled shoulder at the younger girls, fifteen of them--a bright-eyed, laughing brigade--who were following her to take the hill for the fiftieth time from an invading horde of weeds, ranker, stronger at the seashore than anywhere else--with a giant’s grip upon the sandy soil, from control of which they had been so lately ousted.

“Well! you didn’t expect to be captain of the forces again this morning, did you, as you have been for three days past?” Sara looked up at her friend, the oldest girl of the Morning-Glory Group, now encamped upon the white beach behind them, who had kept incognito a secret that shone in the dark; who was determined, upon her return to the city, to go to work, at anything, to release a man--a man for the front. “You thought our Guardian--Gheezies--would be able to lead us out to capture the hill, herself, to-day.”

“I hoped she would,” said Olive Deering. “But I could see that she still isn’t feeling very well after that little sick attack of the past week. So I persuaded her to save her strength for the Council Fire to-night--the ceremonial meeting on the sands--at which our little Green Leaf, Flamina, is really to be initiated as a Wood-Gatherer, and receive her fagot-ring; hitherto she has been only a novice.”

“Won’t her voice enrich our Wohelo chant?” murmured Sara. “Sometimes when she’s by herself, skipping along by the sea, it seems to me as if I never, really, heard a girl sing before; it just fondles the air--sweetens everything about her. Listen to her now; that’s what she calls a ‘funny one!’”

The Green Leaf was dancing forward to the field now, her hands on her hips, setting the other younger girls saucily swaying with her, to a dialect lilt of:

“In capo del monte,

In capo del monte,

Si fà l’amore

Fiorentina! Fiorentina!

E cip i tè ciop!

E cip i tè ciop!”

“E chippety chop! Chippety chop!” Olive laughingly echoed the last two lines as the little singer pronounced them. “I know what that song means,” she cried; “it’s about a lover going up a mountain to see his lady-love whose name is ‘Fiorentina’--Florence--and the ‘Chippety chop!’ is their airy chatter. Oh! I’m so glad”--she waved her garden rake--“that the suggestion came from Headquarters that each Camp Fire Group should adopt a foreign-born sister. Listening to Flamina, nobody can think that the benefit will be all on her side; we’re getting some magic from her that breathes in that wonderful voice of hers, which, as you say, would soften a----”

“A corky carrot, eh?” sniffed Sesooā, her spirits dropping with a squawk from airy realms of love and song, to the skirts of the war-garden on Night-Heron Hill. “Well! Here’s such a passé vegetable row, a left-over from the crop which the farmer--Captain Andy’s enterprising nephew--planted himself early in the spring. Our late carrot-crop that we put in towards the end of June doesn’t need any sorcery of Flamina’s--or anybody else’s”--laughingly; “it’s a winner,” looking along green, feathery rows stirred by the sea-breeze, with here and there a terra-cotta rim just peeping above ground.

“And nobody appreciates its being a ‘corker’--not corky--any more than I do, except when one has to go to work to thin it out, as some of us will have to do this morning.... And to tell the truth,” Sara’s gold-tipped eyelashes twinkled, “I never felt less like work than I do to-day.”

“I don’t feel very much in the mood for it myself!” Olive, captain of the farming-forces, bit her lip, surveying the hill which she had to take, routing out invading weeds and the supernumeraries in the young ranks of the vegetables.

“My legs are trying to persuade me that it’s time for that evening ceremonial meeting now--wanting to wheel me back in the direction of camp,” whispered Sara whimsically, as the firefly glance of her brown eyes flitted over the too prolific rows, not of feathery carrots alone, but of flouncing beets, tomatoes, beans, triumphant but tardy here at the seashore, likewise calling to be thinned out. “There’s no need for you to say how your cold feet are behaving, Olive; they’d be warm enough if you were off there, pow-wowing with the birds on the bar, or lying out on the home-sands, polishing off--poetically--the words of the candle-lighting ceremony which you have prepared for the Council Fire to-night. You know that you’re no enthusiastic farmerette; you’d a thousand times rather paint radio-dials for aëroplanes; ’fess up now!”

“Well! when I came here I hardly knew a potato-stalk from a flouncing beet, but--but I’m pushing my green head above the soil,” confessed the Maid of the rake--the modern Joan--upon this humble field, the reclaimed desert looking down upon the fawning ocean, which had to be won from the enemy over and over again.

“The time’s past, however, honey”--Olive drew in her beautifully chiseled lower lip, which had rather a deep indentation under it, a rose-leaf nest resting upon the rounded ledge of the chin, which the girls called her shelf--the ivory shelf where she kept her inspirations--“the time’s past when any girl who is a girl wants to do only the things which she likes, in the way of war-work, leaving those that pinch slightly for others!... And now for the pinch! It’s time to begin. We’re out to make a showing for the U. S. A.--as our soldiers say--to stand back of them and help win the war. Let’s ‘tie to that’ with--with a hundred per cent of the best that’s in us, eh?”

But, ah! there are times for all when a hundred per cent on the best of our soul-stock seems exorbitant interest to pay for success in a struggle.

At the end of an hour’s work weeding and thinning out, fighting the enemy, grappling with prickly barb-weed, that nettled the ungloved fingers which boldly grasped it, routing out stubborn beach-grass, wild vetch, wild pea, on this sea-girt hill which seemed to have unregenerate leanings towards being a squawky desert still, even the Maid herself--Olive--began to feel resolution wavering.

“O dear! There never was an ancient village-street in France--or anywhere else--as crooked as my back feels at the present moment,” she murmured twistedly to herself. “There--there seems to be a ‘squawk’ in my courage, too! I want to knock off! I feel irresponsible--idle. Perhaps it was that mad frolic yesterday on the bar--getting to the heart of the wild life--the upset--ducking--when the big seal played submarine! It did something to me. Oh-h! to be, really, a heron, gull, flippered seal, anything--anything that knows nothing about horrible--‘civilized’--war;... about carrying on in the teeth of not--wanting--to!”

She straightened her long, graceful back, the Maid, and stood for a minute gazing off across a mile or more of sparkling bay, to that green bar on which the high tide now held glassy revel, beckoning to jollity with long, white fingers of foam, after a manner to make her feel more irresponsible still.

At the end of that minute she became aware that, mystically, her mood had spread, or perhaps, in that harum-scarum frolic off the dazzling bar, the great marbled dog-seal had done more than heave the old settler into the air; he had capsized the morale of this little army of girls.

“Oh-h, goody! My grit’s gone glimmering!” deplored Sara suddenly. “I hate this witch-grass; there’s a ‘squawky’ old witch in every tuft of it, I’m sure; it’s so rank an’ stubborn--so hard to rout out.”

“Gone glimmering! I haven’t even a glimmer left,” sighed fair-haired Sybil, the Maid’s sister, gazing down at her round arm, bare from the elbow, which had twinkled as a galaxy--radio-painted--the night before. “Too much fun yesterday; it’s taken the ‘pep’ out of me--burnt it all away. I--I’d rather do anything than thin out these saucy beets, anyway; they’re so red-faced and flouncing, they--they just seem to giggle at you in the sun, when you’re tired and your back aches, and you don’t want to keep on.”

“Yes, like horrid--bold--florid-faced girls; to-day I just want to smack every one that I pull up!” finished Lilia crossly. “I don’t mind grubbing in this sandy war-garden, when it’s an hour and a half in the morning and an hour and a half in the afternoon, but to put in the whole time, or most of it--two hours and a half, anyway--at a stretch, because we want to take it easy, later, and make ready for the Council Fire--why, that’s too much. I don’t care what anybody says; I’m going to rest a while!”

It was the same all over the broad semi-cultivated acres of lonely hillside. Everywhere courage had gone glimmering, or flickered out altogether.

Of the seventeen girls at work--two of the campers having been left at home to prepare dinner: Arline, whose symbolic rainbow was never more needed, and Betty, the evergreen Holly--not one was now carrying on, or, if at all, very lamely.

A distant trio who had been raking over the earth around the vegetables, in order to renew the mulch--surface muck--and draw the moisture to that sandy surface--had, together with other unpaid volunteers whose tedious task was to fight insect pests with noxious tobacco-water, thrown down their arms ignominiously, and sat down under a crooked tree, to chat.

“An infant carrot is, sure, a funny-looking thing; this one has a tail like a wood-mouse, only pink,” lazily moralized Sul-sul-sul-i, meaning Redstart--Little Fire--here, in this work-a-day field, Victoria Glenn. “I wonder how such a terra-cotta baby tastes--raw? Bah! Horrid!”

“I don’t care what anybody says; I’m going to rest a while.”

She bit into the vegetable baby and threw it from her, repeating the experiment, in “loafing” fashion, with another, and yet another.

“Why! you mustn’t waste them. We can cook those for our own use--save the winners to sell for the Red Cross--and to feed others. Oh! Oh! you’re not giving out, too, are you--Victory?”

The Maid’s voice broke upon the appealing cry. This change rung upon Victoria had served as a rally-word before, but evidently there was “little fire” left in the Victory girl now.

And, worst of all, Olive, the captaining Maid, the Torch-Bearer, felt as if, at the moment, she could give forth no fuel from her own spirit to feed the waning spark.

“If--if I don’t ‘pucker’ up--if I’m not true to my service-pin--the day is lost.” She glanced down at the red, white, and blue button upon her overalls. “Mercy! it is hot--getting hotter. We’re none of us in the mood for work; our legs are telling us that it’s time to fall in for a march back to camp, when it isn’t. If I can’t rally ‘the light that’s in me,’ pass it on to others, what good am I as a leader?... Hitherto I have not been a slacker!”

The feathery luxuriance of the carrot-plants, bending like green foam before the sea-wind, the far-off rows of sweet-corn, tall beans, taller than herself--Kentucky wonders--potatoes, and even the “giggling” beets, did a rural dance around her, to support that claim of the young soul.

And, yet--and yet--Olive knew that the “Joan” fire, with which she started out, had gone from her eyes, the Joan fervor from her heart.

For, after all, she was no hero-souled peasant Maid of middle ages, but a fun-loving, by nature ease-loving, girl, reared, as Sara had once said, “in cotton-wool,”--in padded luxury--who, occasionally, rebelliously felt, as now, that the shadow cast by the Great War and its burden of responsibility had fallen unnaturally upon her youth, as upon the otherwise care-free girlhood around her, making her old before her time.

While her feet trod the struggling soil of the war-garden she was aware of a secret garden within her, beckoning them; a garden of indolence--of ephemeral do-as-you-please delights--in which, indeed, she had rarely lingered since she became a Camp Fire Girl.

How was she to avoid its tempting gate now--how carry on at the task that “pinched”?

And the answer was, as it was to the Maid, Joan, of old, in her sunny orchard, the whispering voices, bidding her look beyond herself--above!

“Our Father!” breathed Olive Deering softly, with a rush of tears to her wide dark eyes, which gazed away from her followers, out over land and sea. “Great Spirit in Whom I live and move and have my being--invisible--Whom, yet, as it were, I have seen--strengthen me now; don’t let me shamefully weaken; help me to--carry--on!

“Girls!” She turned again to the field, the humble, oft-won field. “Girls--Minute-Girls--Victory Girls--what on earth are we about, weakening, thinking of knocking off before the time for which we pledged ourselves is over, simply because we’re not in the humor for work? Bah! Nice volunteers we are! What would our Soldier Boys think of us? Oh! I’ve got a letter here that would shame us--right here in the breast-pocket of my overalls”--plucking it forth, waving thin checked sheets, pennon-like. “It--it’s to my father from the captain of that infantry company in which my Cousin Clay is--Clay, who carried the big basket of household goods for the little old Frenchwoman--helped her to get settled again----”

“Humph!” interjected Sara; she still disliked to listen to any eloquence bearing upon the war score of Olive’s cousins--even on the ordinary “innings” of that rich boy who, seen leading a blind horse under a blazing sun through a country shipyard, not a dozen miles away, was apparently not reveling in his task any more than they had been in theirs--the only score on which she would have liked to hear her friend dilate was Iver’s.

“The captain’s letter tells of an experience which the Boys had, away back in January, before they had been on the front lines at all--while they were still in training--in barracks, somewhere in France.” Thus Olive took up the story. “It was their first day in the practice-trenches, (nine long miles from those barracks--about the worst day, for weather, the captain says, that he ever remembers) the men said ‘Sonny France’ had gone up front and got killed--sleet, snow, rain, mud--just a too-horrid sample of everything, girls!

“And after their nine-mile march to the trenches, the company put in long hours of hard work, training--practicing how to repel an attack, how to go over the top, ploughing round, knee-deep, in mud, with their gas-masks on--which the captain says is about as comfortable as walking about town on a day hot as this, with your head in a canvas bag.”

“Oh! we--we know a little about those chlorine-foolers--some of us--about the popping gas-cloud, too!” wetly exploded Sara.

“And then--then came the dreary march back to barracks in that freezing January weather, with the men tired almost to death.... But were they weakening, our gallant Boys of the Yankee Division?... our deary, cheery American Boys? No! No! They were singing. And one--one--the captain says, a mere lad, sang loudest of all--then dropped in his tracks as he reached the barracks! And shall we----”

“No-o, we--shan’t! We’re not ‘squawking’--crying quit! Not giving up! We’re out to make a showing, and we’re going to do it--no matter how hot the sun is, or how ‘witchety’ the weeds! Carry on’s the word; carry on!”

The failing squawk had, indeed, become a shout; it was a general cry, from one and all of the war-workers, for all had drawn near to listen--a sprayed cry, too, as if the gust sweeping up from the sea, over which that letter had traveled, brought a little brine on its wings.

“Just one thing morel” cried Olive, again the Torch-Bearer--the Maid. “I’ve read somewhere, though not in this letter, that when soldiers are marching a long distance, shoulder to shoulder, they can stand it much better than if one is hiking alone. There’s our lesson in team-work, girls; let’s take hold together--pull together, as we never did before--on the weeds, the superfluous vegetable chicks, the muck, or whatever it is! And--sing!”

“We don’t know how we’ll do it, but we’re on the way,”

started a voice, moved--half-laughing.

“We’re out to make a showing for the U. S. A.

There’s going to be a hot time before us this day,

But still we’ll make our showing ...”

The protest was triumphantly completed by the fresh breeze booming up the vegetables.

Two hours later a tired girl, with slight lines of weariness under her dark eyes, stole into the tent upon the white beach, flanking the mother-bungalow, which was, at present, hers and Sara’s.

She did not turn to her own corner, but to her friend’s, where was pinned to the translucent canvas a framed photograph, with a Service Star above it.

“Iver!” whispered Olive Deering, tremulously--and again the Maid’s look was on her face--“I’m trying to be worthy of you--of all our Boys--of our talk on that twilight balcony! I’m ‘holding the line!’ I’m carrying on!”

CHAPTER IX

THE “CREATURE FAR ABOVE”

“I light the red candle of Health: strength that I draw from the ocean, buoyancy from the breeze, elasticity from the air, the sands, and ‘dash’ from the wild life about me--dashing health that makes it irksome for me to walk if I can run or dance, that sets my heart soaring along sky-ways of thankfulness, makes me strong for all work which my country asks of me: I light the red candle of Health.”

“I light the white candle of Peace: as, in the Christmas story, Atawessu, the Star, the Creature Far Above, guided wise men to the manger where the Prince of Peace was born, so may the star of loving kindness guide all men soon to that ‘fair city of peace’ where children’s cry--like the song of angels, of old--shall come true and it may be ‘Fini,’ forever, la Guerre: good will on earth! I light the white candle of Peace.”

“I light the blue candle of Loyalty--Truth: as the tides of the ocean are stable, returning rhythmically to the shore, governed by some force which men call Solar Attraction, so may I be drawn to the Sun of Ideals, ‘true to the truth that is in me,’ loyal to each pledge I make: I light the blue candle of Truth!”

“Peerless red, white, and blue,

Vitality, love, and truth,

Bright be my hold on you,

In these halcyon days of youth!

“Staunch as the ocean’s tide,

Nor man, nor might may turn,

Steady as beacon-light,

In its patient, steadfast burn!

“True as the fixed star’s beam.

The Creature Far Above,

Unerring as wild bird’s dive

For hidden treasure trove!

“True as the ...”

But the chanting voices--enriched by Flamina’s caressing note--faltered. What “Creature Far Above” was gliding forth from a bank of blood-red cloud, its radiant wings aflame, as if dipped in the fires of another world?

“It’s an aëroplane! A big--aëroplane! A biplane!”

“Nev-er!”

“Yes, it is! I--I thought at first it was a sea-gull; I’ve been watching it--saw it before it entered that red cloud-gate!” Sara Davenport’s leather-fringed sleeves fell back from her bare fore-arms, leaving them free to describe a broken arc of excitement--like chain-lightning ripping the dusk--under the spell of the tricolored candles.

“Mercy! Whoopee-doo!... Zoom, zoom, zoom!... May--may I be feathers, as Captain Andy would say, if ’tisn’t an aëroplane! A big army air-plane! Oh, girls alive, d’you suppose--suppose it’s going to land--come to earth--drop down right here by our Council Fire?”

“Oh! it never will. Where is it? I can’t see it! The dusk’s so thick, anyway!” It was a half-cheated wail from two-thirds of the girls, turning to Sara’s flame, now a perfect pillar of fire, for guidance--direction.

“There! There! See! Just over that tallest sand-peak now--high sand-hill!... And, oh! for goodness sake! there’s the moon coming over the top--coming over the top to stare at it.”

Yes! round-orbed, magnificent, shadow-mapped, the silvery Green Corn Moon was sailing up over the dunes of antique silver--over the dark-tressed crown of a lesser hill, to gaze at the winged wonder--one moment burning up in the last dying flame of day, the next a mammoth gray moth circling and circling in the vast crimson-hung halls of twilight, as if drawn to the home-fires of earth.

To the far-beckoning blaze of the Council Fire upon the pale beach, within thirty yards of the tide’s rippling edge--the fairy, rainbowed blaze, fed by bone-dry driftwood, copper-marked wreck-wood, flinging aloft every hue in the spectrum--before which nineteen Camp Fire Girls and their Guardian had entered upon the candle-lighting ceremony arranged by Olive Deering, Torch-Bearer, the Maid who had “carried on” that morning upon the humble field of that depressing hill.

Now the candles, red, white, and blue, symbolic torches, embedded in their silver candlesticks of sand, flickered, guttered, unheeded--went out, two of them--negligible as glow-worms beside some transcendent display of Northern Lights, streaming merry dancers, radiating from the excitement in the girls’ own breasts, which seemed to surround that aërial visitor from the North, flying lower--lower--directly over the high-floating, pink-shot smoke-reek of the Council Fire.

But....

Was it going to be a visitor?

Forgotten was the charming purpose of the evening, the main feature of the ceremonial meeting, the initiation of Nébis, little Flamina, now fondling the air with vocal thrills that sobbed joyously, like the softer strings of a violin--as that transporting question sailed, moon-faced, over the top!

“But--but where did you see it first, Sara? Oh! how could you see it, far off--when everything’s getting so dark? I never knew you had--cat’s--eyes!”

Little Owl was blinking like a snake-charmed owlet which could not move its head upon the neck usually so flexible--that slender girlish neck rising from the round setting of the ceremonial dress being bent fixedly backward--the face, white as a moon-flower, shining upward in ultimate expectancy, such as never had been before, never could, felt she, be again, though she live till crack of doom!

“See it! Oh, I don’t know! While--while we were singing--chanting--about the Creature Far Above (oh! wasn’t that funny?) I happened to look off, and saw a speck--dark--against the red! I thought, at first, it was a bird! Then--then it entered that red ripple-cloud ... then.... Oh-h! I believe it is going to land--land on our map--right here on the sands.

“Yes; I can hear the engine buzz--now! Gracious! it looks like a big, dark fish--swimming round in a fog, with a whirligig in its mouth--the revolving propeller, I suppose.”

Olive was stuttering with excitement, too--her hands clasped--staccato excitement that ticked each word off like a dot against the bare, steely possibility that the big biplane, now within a couple of hundred yards of the home-fires, might pass over and on, without descending.

“It may be a naval aëroplane patrolling for submarines, in which case it will probably fly on over the water--on top of the water, maybe!”

Even Gheezies, the Guardian, as she put forth the unwelcome suggestion, was oppressed by a tickling in her throat, a cooing almost babyish, of held-up excitement that did not yet dare to be exultation over the landing of an army battle-plane by their Council Fire--so that maturity dropped from her like a nun’s cloak and her forty years became as the fourteen of the youngest tiptoeing maidens present.

“My! But, mercy! suppose it should be--should be an enemy air-plane? Hostile! Goodness!”

Sybil, pirouetting on her toes upon the sands, subsided to the soles of her moccasins, in momentary apprehension--flat fright--her lips falling apart, a cleft flower, as her gaze fluttered downward, like a shot bird, to the dim dunes, searching them for two other lonely camps about an eighth of a mile distant, one just vacated, the other occupied by the Guardian’s artist-brother, who, at the moment, was far out on the bay, deep-sea fishing.

Other youthful glances strayed this way and that way, too. All tales of coast invasion which the girls had heard, of air-raid and wreck--invasion which, owing to the fleet of their British cousins and to the immortal valor of their own noble army, fighting for them, they were to be spared in the Great War--loomed up in a dark fog-ring encircling them.

“Bah! Enemy! Hostile!... Gammon and spinach!” cried Sara, flapping, fluttering like a brown leaf in a fish-tail breeze. “No such thing! It’s too far off for us to see the insignia--rings on the under side of the wings, but.... Oh, say! it is going to land; it’s doing a nose-dive now--heading straight down. Glory, d’you hear it whistle?”

“Whee-ee-oo-oo!” Blithely, indeed, whistled the splendid air-ship, nosing towards earth, as if it knew the feminine welcome awaiting it, settling into a natural glide, while the fine wires of the “struts” connecting the two planes cut the air with that homing sound.

“Hostile!... Piffle! Why! Why! the rudder is striped--can just make it out--red, white, and blue, the same--the same as our service-buttons.”

Ah! dear insignia. Perhaps, at that culminating moment, as the recognition bubbled forth, under all the merry dance of excitement in girlish breasts, there was a stable under-current of complaisance sweeping them upward bodily, as it were, to meet the aërial visitor; satisfaction that, nine hours before, on the hill of discordant name, they had not weakened--been untrue to the claim of those ringed colors linking them now in service to the Adventurers of the skies.

“Yes, here they come! Glory hallelujah! Three cheers for the Red, White, and Blue! Oh-h!”

A moment of tense silence, of flyaway breath fluttering, winged, through parted lips--of girlish faces transfigured, luminous in the dusk as the head-bands about girlish brows--flashing recognition signals into the gloom! And down it came, that army bi-plane--bump, bump, bump--in the briefest of jolting canters along the dim, dim beach!

“Well!... Well, we didn’t make a pancake landing, anyhow! No!”

Forth leaped, on the word, from his tiny cock-pit, his deep pilot’s seat, a young, boyish aviator, helmeted, gauntleted, leather-jacketed!

Forth he leaped, and pushed his goggles back--then stood for a moment, a-blink, a knight of the skies, fresh from his parade ground, the clouds, landing among fairy princesses, filleted and headed, upon a fairy shore, with a rainbowed Council Fire in the background and three tall candles, of the charmed colors which ringed his wings--one still alight, flickering a welcome--in their antique silver candlesticks of sand!

Could romance go further? The Guardian Fairy felt that it could not. She stepped forward and held out her hand.

“It was a very pretty landing, indeed,” she said.

The knight unbuttoned his leather helmet and pulled it off; his long back gauntlet, reaching to the elbow, too!

“Well! she did drag her tail a little,” he answered, glancing deprecatingly at his “ship” with its red, white, and blue rudder; the great crimson fish--fabled fish--with wings in its head and a propeller in its gaping mouth, which the high tide seemed to have thrown up upon the sands.

“My name is Fenn,” he volunteered, bowing over the Guardian’s hand.

“Lieutenant Fenn, I suppose?”

The aëronaut bowed again, unbuttoning his leather coat, so that there was a gleam of silver bars--those army bars which Iver wore, thought Sara quickly--upon the broad shoulders beneath; of silver wings, too, wrought on black velvet upon the tired breast, heaving boyishly.

“And--and this is my observer, Lieutenant Hayward,” he introduced further, turning to the second air-man, who, also, had vacated the airy nest of his little cock-pit and stood upon the darkening tide-shore.

“Well! Mother Earth is always ready to welcome aviators--or her children are!” The Guardian shook hands with both.

“That is, when they land of their own free will,” put in the boyish pilot, his strong, white teeth flashing from a pale face as he looked breezily beyond her at nineteen maidens whose hovering brown draperies, fluttering fringes, embroideries and long braids “Mammy Moon” now touched with primitive charm, as if they were her favored offspring.

“I admit the correction,” the Guardian Fairy smiled. “At all events, we are glad--su-premely glad”--her voice shook a little with the thrill of the thing--“to welcome you to our Council Fire. We--we have never before entertained Angels unawares--Aviators unexpectedly!” She laughed. “We are the Morning-Glory Group of Camp Fire Girls, encamped in that bungalow by the seashore. I am the Guardian, Darina Dewey, spinster,” still laughingly. “It would take a long time to introduce you all round, and it’s getting too dark to see. At least, let me present you to the elder girls--to our Assistant Guardian, Miss Deering.... Olive--Lieutenant Fenn.”

Sara Davenport, introduced next, was not too thrilled to note the young air-pilot’s start of admiration over the first presentation--note it jealously, for Iver’s sake.

“Bah! I don’t wonder he wilts!” she murmured to herself, half-savagely. “Olive is a dream in ceremonial dress, with those long braids, her dark eyes, and her skin like a moonlit cosmos flower. If--if I were an aviator, I’d want to fly away with her--ten thousand feet high! Then--then, what would Iver do? Oh, yes! Have you made a long flight?” she added aloud.

“Not very, but I had hard work flying my course.” The knight of the clouds, really not much “wilted,” was giving full twilight attention to her now, as to the other older girls to whom he was introduced. “I was heading into the wind, you see, and the very little there is, up there, was against us. We were flying low, ‘winging the midway air,’” smilingly, “when we sighted the smoke from your big fire there, and my Observer ordered me to fly over.”

“Oh, did you think--imagine--it was a spy bonfire, signaling out to sea? I don’t believe we have a single spy round here, with--with the possible exception of the long-legged sand-snipe always spying upon the fish--greedy things!” Sara excitedly caught her breath.

“Well! I wouldn’t be too sure--of anything.” The young air-scout plucked his goggles from his forehead.

“And do you mean to say you were flying over the coast--over the shore--looking out for--for suspicious things--huts in the woods, lonely signal-stations, wireless ... oh-h?” Arline and Betty drew breath simultaneously, tumultuously, speaking together.

“Well, we saw nothing suspicious here,” was the evasive answer, “only suggestive....”

“Suggestive--of what?”

“Oh, that:

“‘Ground-school dinners bring the tears,

We haven’t had a feed--in--years!’”

came the answer with a long--beclouded--sigh.

CHAPTER X

AVIATORS UNAWARES

“Ground-school dinners! What! That means you’re hungry!... Dreadfully hungry?”

“Oh, not so bad as all that; only rather tired of feasting on air-puffs,” came the laughing answer. “Joy-sticks and air-puffs! My companion had some of the former in his pocket--meaning chocolate bars!”

“Joy--fiddlesticks! We’ll get you something more substantial right away. Supper--supper will be ready in a winged hurry!”

Wing-footed, indeed, one-half the army of girls started for a united drive upon the bungalow and its seashore resources.

“Oh, not so many! ‘Too many cooks,’ you know!” The Guardian’s voice arrested them. “Four will be plenty--those who are housekeepers for to-day, with Olive and Sara. Well! you’re on your mettle, girls; it’s something to entertain aviators unawares.”

“Lucky loopers of the clouds, who certainly have tumbled into a bed of roses!” chuckled the youthful pilot, throwing off his leather “togs,” examining his aërial ship all over by the light of an electric torch, whose luminous ring belted his own adventurous figure in its greenish-brown trick-suit fashioned like the farming overalls which his girl-hostesses had worn that day in their battle with weeds and pests upon Squawk Hill.

“Well! aren’t you glad now, ‘Goggle Eyes,’ now that we’ve landed in clover--hit it lucky--that I decided to nose her down and make a landing here--bunk out on our wings to-night?”

Thus he challenged the observer, with his dangling binoculars.

“Well! I do admit it’s ‘low tide’ inside me, Ned; every little creek bare as a sand-pocket; I shan’t object to being filled up,” acknowledged the older air-man. “Only I feel rather”--he smiled through the flash-light’s luminous ring upon the picturesque maidens in ceremonial dress--“rather as if we had been sailing by the star-chart and landed upon some more romantic planet than old Mother Earth, which hits some of us such hard knocks at times. I--I’ll have to rub my eyes to make sure I’m awake--not having an air-dream,” blinkingly.

“Oh-h, what a pretty compliment to the Council Fire!” Sybil purred happily. “Now! won’t you--can’t you--tell us something about the aëroplane--the big, strong battle-plane--about its different parts, and what it is made of?”

“Humph! Let the pilot explain his own ship. Go ahead, ‘Tailspin Ned’!” laughed the observer, challenging the younger aviator, Lieutenant Edwin Mortimer Fenn, R. M. A.

“Well! Well, as you see, ours is the tractor type of aëroplane, having the propeller in front, drawing it through the air,” explained the latter, flashing his electric light upon that mahogany propeller which shone like a silver paddle--if not a silver piece--in a gasping fish’s mouth.

“These are the aërofoils--wings--which support it in flight, having a spread of thirty-six feet from tip to tip, on each plane. And----”

“You have--oh! excuse my interrupting!--you have some wings on your breast, too.” Little Owl pointed shyly to those four-inch mirror-wings, the army insignia, reflecting the young air-man’s flying achievements, gleaming against their velvet setting upon his rough gabardine overalls.

“Yes! I wouldn’t swap them for a General’s stars.” His white teeth flashed boyishly. “They represent my commission as an R. M. A.--Reserve Military Aviator. When I was a humble cadet my breast-wings were stiffer,” laughingly.

“How--how do you mean?” came from a dozen enthralled girls.

“Why! they were of metal--silver--three inches across; not limply wrought upon black velvet; that was when I was in training on the flying-fields, where I went, from Aviation Ground School, where--where the dinners--were--so good,” naïvely.

“Mercy! I’m just dying to fly,” came breathlessly from one fluttering feminine throat--Little Owl’s. “According to my symbolic name, I’m a bird, anyway!”

“Well, don’t die--flying. Probably after the war is over--no doubt before very many years have flown ahead of you--your Camp Fire Group will have a Bird Corps of its own,” encouragingly.

“And win honor-beads for parading in the air--sky-blue and cloud-barred, I suppose!” burst ecstatically from one or two of the other girls whose symbolic names were also derived from the feathered tribe, with which, in a dazzling skyscape vision, they saw themselves competing.

“Now, perhaps, you’d like to know a little more about the wings that will support you.” The R. M. A., otherwise Tailspin Ned--a nickname he had acquired upon the training-fields--flashed his torch again over the aëroplane--the mammoth gaping red fish. “Well, the wing-ribs--spars--are of light wood, covered with fine linen, doped with a preparation to make it durable; so is the fuselage, body of the machine. The props connecting the two planes are the struts whose flying wires sang their jolly little earth-song--whistled, you know--as we came down. When we land for the night on a lonely spot, we have to guard the aëroplane, so we bunk out on our wings; if it rains, we bunk under them.”

“Tuck your little head under your wing, like a real bird-man,” laughed Sybil.

“While the Witch watches over your slumbers,” supplemented Sul-sul-sul-i--Victoria Glenn, the Victory girl. “Mercy! What a bloodthirsty red-eyed old witch!... Girls, do look! She’s stenciled on cloth, broomstick and all, just as we have our Camp Fire emblem stenciled upon our dresses.” Victoria, a Fire Maker, glanced down at the dusky crossed logs and tongue of flame upon the skirt of her own ceremonial gown.

“She’s the emblem of our flying squadron; we chose her as soldiers choose a mascot,” answered the R. M. A. “The cloth on which she rides rampant is glued to the side of the fuselage, just beneath my cock-pit. This is the stabilizer which preserves our equilibrium in the air; all this rear part is the tail mechanism.”

“What--what are the dials--radio-dials? Oh, see how they light up when the flash-light moves off!” cried one or two voices.

“Those that face me in my little cock-pit! Why, clock, compass, altimeter, inclinator--and a few more to guide us on the sky-trail.”

“If--if you just stroll down to the water’s edge, you’ll see a radio freak!” laughed Sybil. “A shining figurehead on a dory! She’s camouflaged too, that wooden bead-eye! I had the prettiest little Milky Way on my own arm last night,”--holding up that round member--“six tiny stars; I washed them off this morning.”

“So you’re no longer a Camp Fire galaxy!” Now, it was the aviator’s turn to chuckle, as compliantly he strode towards the murmuring tide, extinguishing his torch.

“But--but why the camouflage?” he demanded. “Rather a rub-in joke, eh, on a humble little rowboat that’s as innocent as a lamb; she’ll never chase anything--dodge anything....”

“Hold on--hold on there, you Cavalry Man of the Skies, as my soldier-brother would say! How do you know?” suddenly challenged the piquant voice of the dory’s owner, bristling with “pep” behind him.

“When--when aviators drop from a height of ten thousand feet.... Oh! don’t say you weren’t as high as that----” Sara bit her lip comically.

“Higher, part of the time,” was the amused reply. “I saw a double sunset this evening. Just after witnessing the first we ‘zoomed’ up, soared for the fun of the thing, outside the earth’s shadow, saw Old Sol rise again, blood-red, in the West--like a tricked rooster with a flaming comb--and set for the second time. Jove! Some sight that!”

“There! I told you anything--anything is possible these times. Well! What I’d like to know is, where the cavalry of the sky would like to sup--indoors or out?” questioned Sara, waving her fringed arms towards that violet night-sky, no longer locked to man.

“Outdoors, by all means, I should say, by that corking bonfire!” The aviator glanced backward over his shoulder at the blazing pile of driftwood whose shading smoke-reek, floating high over the dunes, had guided him to earth.

“And what would the air-scouts choose to drink?”

“Oh-h, I know!” flashed forth Sybil. “They’re just crazy about milk--mild milk. Don’t they--don’t they always drop down on a farmer if they get a chance? My cousin, Atwood, who’s working in the shipbuilding yards, not a dozen miles from here--leading a blind horse hitched to a great yellow ship’s timber and not enjoying it--he told me that when he visited a friend in training at the flying-fields, the chum said that after a long fly he was just like a baby, crying for milk.”

“Zooms! We’ve got gallons of that--nearly one gallon, anyway. We brought it home from the nearest farmhouse this evening--a mile away, across the dunes.”

Sara, much concerned over this novel entertainment of angels--winged beings--unprepared, swung round on her moccasined sole for an inspired rush back to camp.

“Hurrah for the home fires!” The aviator gleefully shrugged his shoulders. “Oh! I felt it in my bones, all afternoon, that before night we’d land--somewhere--in clover:

“‘Oh, a wonderful thing is a flying cadet,

He lives on a promise--and--hope!’”

he chanted boyishly.

Then, from the darkling tide’s edge, his “zooming” glance soared upward to his parade-ground, the night sky; to Atawessu, the evening star, the Creature Far Above, as softly--half-wistfully--he finished the quotation, reminiscent of his training days above the flying-fields:

“But--but the twinkling stars are as far as his bars,

And he never--quite--figures the dope!”

CHAPTER XI

KNIGHTS OF THE WING

“Well! we have tumbled into a camp of milk and honey.”

Lieutenant Hayward, the observer, with the binoculars, from whom the young air-scout had taken orders as he flew over the shore, was almost guilty of smacking his lips in relish of the fare set before him in the light of the rainbowing Council Fire and of two camp-lanterns which turned the antique silver of the sands to gold.

“Keep the home-fires burning!”

he chanted. “Ye zephyrs! I don’t think I ever appreciated them so much before. Certainly that’s a corking Council Fire; all those wonderful colors; fairy lilac shading into blue flame, rose, green, and yellow, which the copper-corroded wreck-wood throws off!”

“Corroded! The green is just about the hue of the soldiers’ buttons up--up at Camp Evens, after the chlorine-gas changed them, eh, Olive?” murmured Sara reminiscently under her breath--forbearing to vent upon the banquetting sky-lords the story of a gruesome episode on the day when four of the girls present visited her brother in camp. “Oh! won’t you tell us why you flew over--flew low over our fire, this evening?” she burst forth suddenly, eagerly. “Did you really take it for a spy-bonfire, on this lonely beach, signaling out to sea? Are you--are you air-scouts, patrolling, on the lookout for--for huts in the woods--secret wireless----”

But the observer held up a pleading hand.

“How can you ask me, fair Earth Daughter, to discuss anything at present but--but these wings and camouflage? Aviators’ slang!” he murmured divertingly, beaming upon his forthcoming mouthful of creamed chicken, greenly disguised with the juiciest of young peas.

“Canned as well as camouflaged--the wings!” Arline’s shoulders were hunched in a deprecatory rainbow. “The peas are home-grown, though, from our own war-garden on that prickly wretch of a hill off there.” She laughed. “There--there was a great shelling off this coast this morning,” glancing towards the night-sea whence a hostile attack might come.

“Ha! And were the shells ‘incomers’ or ‘outgoers,’ as the soldiers say? Apparently none of them lodged in the camouflage--or in these dandy hot-air rolls.” The aërial observer laughed, falling in with the girlish jest.

“Warmed over air!” The Rainbow touched a tepid finger-roll. “We got the receipt from our Wohelo magazine.”

“‘Zooms’ for Wohelo!”

“Fish-tails for breakfast,

Cloud-puffs for tea,

But Camp Fire rolls

Are the feast for me!”

chanted “Goggle Eyes,” loftily improvising with an inspired glance at the violet night-sky.

“We can picture the air-puffs, but whence--whence the fish-tail ménu? Flying fish?” queried Olive, breaking into the airy chit-chat.

“No, fish-tail breezes--flapping gusts--that blow you about up there--a lively relish for your rations!”

Here the older aviator glanced sidewise at Sara, as one who has neatly weathered a downthrow current of curiosity.

“Humph! Silent as a fish! Questions taboo! They’ll tell you nothing, these air-scouts--nothing that you’d really like to find out about,” murmured the inquisitive one, teasing the fire-logs with a birch-stick until they matched her own tantalized flame.

“Well!... Well! I’m glad you’re not missing Ground-School dinners now,” she vouchsafed aloud. “When you’ve finished rhyming over the rolls, oh! won’t you--please--tell us something about flying, about your parade-ground, up there?”

“You--you tell ’em, Big Boy!” The observer nudged the younger aviator.

“Well! what shall it be? We sky-skimmers can do about everything with our wings that the birds do with theirs, you know, except flap them. Along some lines we could teach our feathered friends a few tricks!” The younger man laughed over his loyalty cake, less most of the usual ingredients, plus spices and skill. “How about emulating the somersault of a tumble-pigeon--looping the loop--or racing an express train across endless prairies, and, when you caught up with it, flying low, bumping your wheels on the cab of the locomotive, to let the engineer know he wasn’t ‘in it,’ eh?”

“Bravo! What fun! And the engineer, how would he take it?”

“Why, he’d come out and wave his arms, to ‘shoo’ us off, while the passengers flourished hats and handkerchiefs from the train-windows. Ye bats and flying cats! but this honey is good. Did you hive it yourselves as well as grow the peas?”

“No, one of the girls had it sent to her by an uncle who has a bee-farm in Vermont. Well!... Well! We’re waiting to hear more from the latest flying cat--flying man, rather.”

“Great cats! you are, eh?” Tailspin Ned laughed through the firelight. “Ha! What about the thrills we gave civilians--those ‘gawkers of the clouds’--on one public holiday, when our field was thrown open to the public? Thrill after thrill, joke after joke, put over on them!... But, oh, I say, this is awfully one-sided. Those quite too fetching ‘togs,’--pardon me, those very picturesque dresses, head-bands, moccasins, and so forth--they signify something--some ceremony. Now! won’t you let us come in on it?”

“What! On our monthly council meeting!” The Guardian smiled, as smiled her symbol, the yellow sunburst embroidered upon her breast. “As for this rainbowed Council Fire, whose smoke guided you to earth, we were only using it as a background this evening--an accessory. Being such a still night, the program--its opening part--centred around a candle lighting ceremony arranged by one of our number.”

Along a red lane of firelight she glanced at Olive, beautiful in the ruby glow which brought out the wings of a heron woven into her shimmering head-band and the Torch Bearer’s emblem, stenciled on cloth--as the clawing Witch was stenciled upon the fuselage of the aëroplane--crossed logs, flame-tongue, pearl-white smoke, upon the front of her khaki dress, which, with its manifold, meaningful embroideries, was fast becoming a rare, fair tapestry of achievement.

“We--we were just considering Atawessu--the Star--as a symbol, when down you dropped from airdom!” Gheezies--Guardian--smiled again.

“With fresh rumors from the sky, eh? Well! to show that you don’t resent the intrusion--now it’s our turn to plead--won’t you please go on with the ceremony, and let us light the clouds with a memory of your candles?”

“Hardly--that! We’re too interested in--in the thrills you gave the ‘gawkers.’” Even a Guardian may stumble into slang under the spell of aërial enthusiasm. “Our awarding of honors”--she touched the triple necklace of many-colored beads falling to her knees--“and of rank,” with a glance at little star-eyed Flamina, “may well be postponed. But, perhaps, we will let you ‘come in on our ceremony’ to--to the extent of singing you a song or two in return for your soaring thrills.”

And presently, with all the soft magic of welcoming motion of which a score of Earth Daughters were capable, there floated forth upon the fire-warmed dusk, beside the prismatic Council Fire:

“Whose hand above this flame is lifted,

Shall be with magic touch engifted,

To warm the hearts of lonely mortals,

Who stand within its open portals.

Whose house is dark and bare and cold,

Whose house is cold,

This is his own!”

“Ha! Our castles in the clouds are always bare--and often cold. We’re so glad you’ve made us free of yours!”

The younger aviator--Big Boy--drew a long breath; perhaps sometimes, in the vast empty spaces of those air-castles, occasionally dreary--he might, like Lieutenant Iver over-seas--recall the warm imagery of the Council Fire, its magic of sisterhood, when he missed the things that make life hum.

“Now! it’s your turn. You sing us a song!” pleaded Lilla, a fluttering Owlet, as the brown-clad maidens, light as wafted leaves, settled again into a sitting circle upon the sands.

“Well, I like that! I’ll tell the world!” laughingly. “To ask me to croak, like a flying frog, after such a smooth performance--as--that!... However, how does this go?

“‘Oh, Major! Oh, Major! Oh, Major!’ he said,

‘What shall we do with this flying cadet?

His ambitions are many,

His achievements are small,

He came through the Game with no wings at all!’”

“Good! Good! Bravo!” An enthusiastic clapping of maidens’ hands around the Council Fire. “But how did he get through without any wings?” hazarded one small voice.

“Because he failed to win them, his breast-wings, his insignia.” The R. M. A., Lieutenant Ned, touched the winged emblem upon his own breast. “Or perhaps he was grounded--dropped--while learning to fly, for some act of stupidity or dare-deviltry, say, making a pancake landing, as I might have done on the sands here, coming down flat, kerplunk, without easing her off at all--wrecking his machine.”

“Humph! I’m glad that we didn’t make a pancake landing over on Squawk Hill this morning--fall down flat upon our war-work. Then we’d have come through the Game with no wings at all, eh?” Sara bent whimsically towards the shading flames of wreck-wood. “And now--now for the thrills!” she demanded hungrily.

“Such as we gave the long-suffering public on that memorable field-day? What do you say to an aërial bomb going off, to fifty-four air-ships parading in the sky, doing loops, spins, spirals, Immelmann turns, when you change your direction quickly, and so forth; to two aviators--one in reality--making pretense of changing places while looping, and--and the feminine shrieks when a life-size dummy, in leather togs, fell headlong out?”

“I’ll wager that, among the spectators, the men were as nervous as the women--so there, you Cavalryman of the Clouds!” pouted Sara, almost leaning her cheek against the silver and rose of a flaming dead arm of juniper, found on the beach.

“I wonder that you weren’t afraid to burlesque tragedy?” The Guardian caught her breath.

“Well, we came near getting the real thing: one lieutenant fell in a tailspin, in mid-air. We were pretty sure he was done for,” gravely. “Eventually, he recovered. The same accident once happened to me, but so high up that I managed to right the machine--get control of it--before I reached the ground; hence my nickname.”

The younger aviator, the intrepid pilot, leaned also, half-wistfully, towards the Council Fire:

“Oh!... Oh! a won-der-ful thing is a flying cadet,

He lives on a promise and hope,”

he chanted softly once more, ere pursuing the backward thrills of field-day.

“Well! I suppose it’s high time that we were tucking our heads under our wings--or bunking out on those wings, on the beach,” he remarked half an hour later, after excited hostesses, by this eventful Council Fire, had listened, with cheeks aflame, to more aërial jokes “put over” upon civilians; to tales of clown flying and aërial battles; to the crowning narrative of an “enemy” air-ship--of counterfeit hostility, like the gas-attack at Camp Evens--appearing to bomb the field; of an oil-puddle afire, to represent a burning city; of sirens sounding, bombs exploding, cloud-high, and a U. S. aëroplane “jumping on his tail” to bring him down.

“Gracious! I’ll hear those whistles--that aërial bombardment--in my sleep,” murmured Arline, the Rainbow. “If you’re very tired after flying your long course to-day, you can both turn in to sleep in one of the tents, and we’ll guard the big war-plane in a body--we girls--during part of the night, anyway,” proffered she, the most timid of the group.

The Guardian laughed; so did the aëronauts.

“Sing us a lullaby, instead--another smooth song,” pleaded Big Boy.

And drowsily the strains of “Mammy Moon” stole from tired voices upon the dark, while the full-faced Green-Corn Moon looked down, perhaps pondering upon how many generations of moons had come and gone without seeing such a miracle as the great winged fish upon the dusky beach--the competing voyager of the clouds.

“I suppose you won’t be abroad at dawn to see us take off from the sands--see us ‘zoom’!” remarked the younger aviator as he bade his beaded hostesses good-night.

“Don’t be too sure of that!” came the answer of drowsy challenge, melting into the magic--deep soul-magic--of

“Lay me to sleep in sheltering flame,

O Master of the Hidden Fire.

Wash pure my heart and cleanse for me

My soul’s desire!”

“Aye! that’s the Fire to warm our bare castles in the air--with it the endless spaces cannot be dreary,” commented the observer to the tide as he stretched himself out to bunk in vigil, upon one of the aëroplane’s linen wings, while the tired young pilot, for the earlier part of the night, enjoyed the luxury of a tent.

Yes, the same fire it was which burned in the breast of Iver Davenport, now, perhaps, lying out in a shell-hole in No Man’s Land--he who “had come nearer to God” since he volunteered; the same which had inspired Olive, child of luxury, the modern Maid, upon a humble field, to “carry on” in the teeth of distaste and weariness; the same, in degree, which upheld her boy cousin, leading a blind horse hitched to a heavy timber through a shipyard, and not reveling in his novel “job”!

“In flame of sunrise bathe my mind,

O Master of the Hidden Fire,

That when I wake, clear-eyed may be

My soul’s desire.”

It was in the earliest flames of sunrise that a dozen, at least, of wakeful girls thronged the white beach--where cranberry vines trailed exquisitely over the sands, laying young cheeks of faintly flushed berries upon snowy pillows--to watch the great battle-plane take off--take the air, in its upward flight.

“Now, I’ll ‘give her the gun’--open the throttle! And see me ‘zoom’!” laughed the pilot--Big Boy--waving renewed farewells from his tiny cock-pit.

“Yes! Watch him ‘zoom’!... Fly upward into the clouds! Oh, see the Bird!” was the responsive challenge of one girl to another.

“We’ll tell the story of this visit by the Council Fire, as long as ever we’re a Group,” said Olive, an envious Blue Heron, her wide, dark eyes catching a pink spark from dawn, as they followed the big war-plane on its zooming--cloud-climbing--flight, straight upward.

“We’ll stencil it on a sheepskin and pass it down to--to our children’s children,” chuckled Sara, “as an incident of the ‘off ’ side of the Great War, when flying was in its youth! But”--she caught her breath, while a speculative dawn flame, a red flush, crept up her neck--“but I don’t believe there was anything ‘off’--vague, I mean--about the purpose of those two aviators; they were air-scouts on patrol-duty--spy-hunters--mark my words--flying low, most of the time, over the shore, while the observer, Goggle Eyes, with his binoculars, leaning out, I suppose--oh! I wonder how he could do it?--searched the woods and all lonely places, like ours, for suspicious huts--secret wireless-stations----”

She broke off, dreamily following the mounting cavalry of the sky.

“Well! As yet, we’ve only seen one strange man around here--that seal-hunter,” began Arline.

“Whose face I have seen somewhere before!... Goody! See them ‘zoom’! Higher--higher!”

Sara’s own face was a puckered flame, lit by a brand from day’s first burning, but by no coveted memory-flash, as she watched the aëroplane, now a rosy speck--a radiant, exploring dragon-fly--upon the far-away edge of dawn.

“Bah! The seal-hunter! Nothing wrong ’bout him!” Lilla blinked drowsily upward, the sleepiest Little Owl ever caught abroad in daylight. “He has a contract, Captain Andy says, to deliver a lot of those spotted skins of hair-seals to some firm, for making babies’ shoes--awf’ly soft an’ nice for that! I wonder if he’ll get that big ‘buster’ which played submarine with us? And whenever he comes down the river, from that little shipbuilding town which he makes his headquarters, or near there, his guide, old America Burnham, who’s as loyal as his name, comes with him--that’s what they told us at the farmhouse where we went for milk.”

“He was--alone--when he passed us on the beach, while I was painting the dory.... Ugh! I’m cold; d’you know it?” shivered Sara, her flame dying down, like an early morning fire lit too soon, before there is fuel to feed it, refusing even to kindle the spark of memory which she craved, for her comfort.

“Well, if there was a busy spy up in the neighborhood of those shipyards, he might--think of it!--might manage to give out information about the launching of some of the medium-sized vessels which the men are building just’s fast as ever they can, working overtime at it--I wonder if my cousin who leads the blind horse gets as far as that?--to fill the gaps made by horrid submarines in the spunky Gloucester fishing-fleet.”

Sybil’s eyes of monkey-flower blue were now throwing aërial forget-me-nots--pensive glances--after the vanishing cavalry of the air, even as she thus spoke, with one-half of her thoughts on those less spectacular heroes of the deep, the toiling fishermen, whose schooners and savings were being, daily, sunk before their eyes.

“Humph! Captain Andy says he wonders why the subs have not ventured in near shore already, and made an attempt to sink some of those vessels just after they were launched--when they first smelled water, meaning when they were being towed round to the seaport--Gloucester--to have their masts and rigging set up.... O dear! may it not be long before he takes us up the river to see a launching, and visit my Cousin Atwood at his work. I just want to see for myself what sort of a bold front that boy is putting up now!”

Olive, laughing and yearning together, waved a farewell to the aëroplane, now a vanishing speck.

“‘Oh, Major! Oh, Major! Oh, Major!’ he said ...”

Sara’s shoulders were comically shrugged.

“His ambitions are many,

His achievements are small,

He came through the Game with no wings at all!”

“How do you know? He may be growing some--that spoiled cousin of mine--faster than you are. All war service wings are not of the same feather exactly!”

And now the morning-song of Olive’s laughter held a challenging note of rebuke.

CHAPTER XII

A GOOD LINE

Many a true word is spoken in jest--or figure! All war service wings are not the same.

Atlas was upholding shipping. Atlas was bearing up the country. Atlas was upholding the world and its blue arch of freedom, just as the fabled Atlas of old--stalwart sea-god--was supposed to bear heaven and earth upon his broad shoulders.

That is how the modern Atlas--eighteen-year-old shipyard worker--felt.

It had not been an easy day for Atlas, otherwise, young Atwood Atwell, Olive’s cousin, heir to millions, future prop of a wealthy banking-house, at present steadying--holding up, rather in imagination than reality--a raw and ponderous yellow ship’s rib, and, according to his excited feeling, the whole free world with it.

It had been a harder, and in some ways more stirring, day than if he had been aërially breakfasting on “fish-tails,” supping on cloud-puffs, doing Immelmann turns in the sky, “zooming” upward, or nosing down, to scan the home-shores through powerful binoculars for tell-tale signs of spy-work which might frustrate the labors of Atlas and his fellow-toilers by sooner or later bringing about the sinking of the vessels they built.

Atlas had seen the scouting air-plane pass over the shipyards, five days previous, just before sunset, but he had not paid much attention to it. He was just starting off in his neat little racing-car for a welcome rush back to the open arms of luxury in and about the paternal summer residence at Manchester-by-the-Sea.

“By George! I’m beginning to feel sick of the sight of these dead-an’-alive shipyards,” he muttered to himself, throwing a backward glance, as he drove off, at the yards full of skeleton shapes, like a scarecrow Armada. “Working on moulding timbers--laying the thin moulds on the timbers out there in the field beyond the yard, marking those timbers down to the proper size and beveled shape, using my mathematics until my head aches--nice pastime when the sun’s hot! And, for variety, steering Blind Tim, that old draft-horse--hitched to one o’ those half-ton timbers when at last it’s polished down to a rib--from end to end o’ the yard, between green stock and seasoned stock, an’ every other kind of lumber!” He tooted his horn fiercely, to warn some homing workman, swerved to avoid another automobile, and so snapped the thread of meditation.

As he did so, he caught the critical glance of a trio of blue-shirted ship-carpenters hailing from his own sphere of labor, wending their way homeward, too; and almost he caught the carping comment of one of them, Libby Taber--professional shipyard pessimist.

“There! Aw, there goes the ‘Candy Kid’!” grunted Libby, and his voice was flatter than a marsh-fog. “Well, he ain’t putting up much of a front, is he? He’s ‘soured’ on shipyard work already. He’ll be knocking off, some fine day, pretty soon, an’ tucking himself away, as a Mamma’s boy, in some soft little ‘bunk-fatigue’ job--lazy man’s job for war-time.... See if he don’t!”

“Well, now, I’m not so sure about that,” tempered the foreman. “He side-tracked the ‘bunk-fatigue’ jobs when he was drafted for work. An’ if he ain’t stuck on the shipyard stunt, he’s sticking to it, with muscle an’ nerve--and risks don’t faze him; he’s as ready to take a chance as another!”

But despite these sterling qualifications, before the boy reached home that evening, Libby’s marsh-fog mood had, somehow, mysteriously communicated itself to the young draftee of labor, the wealthy banker’s son, who, until the war summons sounded, had never before done anything he wasn’t particularly interested in doing.

“Oh, confound it all! I do want to knock off. May as well own up to it,” he acknowledged to himself then, and during the days immediately following. “How about jumping my job at the end of next week, after I’ve given the foreman--he’s a fine old fellow--due warning, and--and slipping into some niche in the bank, or in Uncle Peter’s patent attorney’s office, as the Mater wanted me to do? Maybe, after all, I strained a point, leaving the softer snaps for older men, and starting in to help build ships, as I’m too young to go across--too young to enter the Army or Navy, or Aviation either; at least, the family is against it--Uncle Sam, too, it seems--until I’ve had another year or two of college. Well! there’s not much sugar in the deal I’ve chosen.... Pretty raw deal all round! Bah!”

He forged this latter comment, in a moody play upon words, five days after the scouting war-plane had flown over the shipyards and landed by a Council Fire, as he pursued the monotonous task of leading the big blind horse hauling a half-ton of that raw “deal”--unpainted timber--through the shipyard, amid yellow reefs of the same “ships’ stuff” all about him.

Then, suddenly, under the forenoon sun, Atlas--he had not yet become Atlas, though, upholding shipping and the world--jumped, caught his breath, and yanked at Tim’s rein--sightless Tim!

A limousine had stopped by the country shipyard--the open, unguarded shipyard--where vessels were built by the roadside.

A lady stepped out, his mother.

“Don’t hurt my boy!” she said to the yard foreman. “Don’t work him too hard. He’s beginning to look tired of an evening.”

“Well! I guess that won’t hurt him any,” returned the foreman, smiling, not unfeelingly. “He’s doing his bit, and who--who knows when it may become the main bitt?” perpetrating a whimsical joke as he looked towards a finished vessel, wedged up on the launching-ways of an adjoining shipyard, all ready to be launched to-day. “See--see that sawed-off, drab post rising from her deck, ma’am?” he challenged, being a man of words, with a voice that habitually hovered about the sky-line, if Libby’s clung to the marshes. “That’s one o’ the two bitt-heads--weather main bitt, we call it--to which by’n-by the main-sheet controlling the mains’l will be belayed--made fast--safety an’ progress both, y’ understand!”

The mother stared at him smilingly--began to set him down as a “character.”

“I’d let the boy alone if I were you, lady,” went on the yard-boss earnestly. “If his present ‘tough’ bit never shows up on deck as the main bitt on which everything hangs, yet it’s that for him now, if the best in him is anchored to it. Get--me?”

The mother did. She refrained from condoling with her son upon the sameness of the work in which Blind Tim and he were a team, patted the sightless horse, which had “pulled himself blind” in the service of a city fire department, upon the nose, and drove off.

But the boy felt that he had been made an object of solicitude; he “gloomed” outright and made up his mind, once for all, to “jump his job” before another ten days were over, in favor of one softer, or swifter, as the case might be.

“Bah! I could stick it out better in the trenches,” he said to himself.

But----

“It’s a good line. Hold it--Mike!” challenged the foreman, reading, perhaps, what was passing in his mind.

Young Crœsus started. It was novel to hear himself addressed as “Mike.” A red glow rose to his neck. He did not resent it. Instead it warmed him a very little, as if he had stretched just one toe towards a fire--but not enough to redden the blues.

“‘A good line,’” he repeated to himself. “Pshaw! I wonder if that flock of girls will think so--those who are coming up the river this afternoon, from that distant beach, to see the launching? At least, Olive said so in her note. Will leading a blind horse which ‘tugged himself blind’ carrying the hook and ladder to city fires--straining harder than he was driven, as if he knew there were lives in danger--will that seem a good line to them? Oh, they’ll gush over him, of course!... Ha! Here comes another visitor! ‘Never rains but it pours!’” truculently.

Carefully--indeed, tenderly--guiding Tim, duty’s blind hero, he had reached that part of the lumber-littered shipyard where the ponderous beveled “frame,” or yellow ship’s rib which the horse was hauling, would be set up, hoisted by a rude derrick worked by man-power, until it was in line with sixty-odd of those square frames already branching outward and upward from the keel of a skeleton vessel propped high upon the building-stocks.

“Hum-m! ‘Some’ visitor he seems to be! They’re dropping auger, mallet, and saw to shake hands with him--the ship-carpenters!”

Curiously enough, young Atwood, leaning against his equine hero--a sturdy, boyish figure, light-haired, ruddy-skinned, as Captain Andy had described him, in smeared khaki trousers, a white duck shirt, a duck hat on the back of his head--wanted to do the same, while he waited for the rib to be set up.

But the visitor did not look at him. He exchanged a few greetings, hearty, but rather heavy-hearted. In his eye there was a brooding sense of loss, but a very slight birth-mark beneath it burned like fire--a flaming star that could not be extinguished.

It magnetized Atwood’s gaze, that star; he kept glancing curiously up at it--it looked so indomitable, burning upon the tall cheek-bone of a bronzed man who must have measured six feet one even from the red horizon-line across his tanned forehead to the highly polished toe of his tan shoe which burrowed speculatively into the matted shavings of the shipyard.

“I’ve come to see what vessels you’ve got on the stocks, that’ll be ready for launching pretty soon,” he said, addressing the foreman, within hearing of Atwood, Blind Tim--who pricked his ears at the lusty voice--and an interested circle of workmen.

“What! You’re not thinking of going out again--so soon, Captain Bob? Why! It’s only two weeks since--since that dandy schooner we built for you a year ago was sunk by a submarine.” The master shipwright gasped. “Named after your two little boys she was, wasn’t she? Sufferin’ catfish! that did make me feel bad; I’m the boy who--built--her.”

Captain Bob’s tall lip-line quivered, then tightened--flamed like the birth-star.

“Yes, they sank my savings with her,” he admitted. “All I had was in that vessel! An eight-thousand-dollar fare o’ fish, too, that we had faced dirty weather to get! ’Twill come heavier on the crew, though, mostly married men with families who’ll lose their share, four hundred dollars each, from the trip. Gosh!”

“You had a hard time trying to make shore, too, when the ‘Jerries’ let you get off with your lives--after you saw them whipsaw a bomb under your schooner, and--and----”

The big captain put out a big hand as if warding off something.

“She crumpled up like a paper bag,” he said sorrowfully, “and went down.... Yes! we had a row of fifty-eight hours in the dories--rough sea, too, part o’ the time--before we sighted land.”

“Anything to eat, had you?”

“One bag o’ biscuits that the cook grabbed up when we were ordered to leave her, a gallon of water between sixteen of us, and three parts of a rhubarb pie that we gave to the--kid.”

“Yes, I heard that you had a thirteen-year-old boy--a Boy Scout--with you.”

“So! Son of one of the fishermen--dead game, too!” Captain Bob nodded. “He was standing at the vessel’s rail. I told him to get into the first dory. Not a bit of it! Not until he was sure his father was safe! When at last we reached shore a woman asked him if he had ‘steered’ the dory at all. He misunderstood her, being weak--having gone fifty hours on that three-quarters of a rhubarb pie--mean sour it was, too; we hadn’t much sugar aboard! But, Statue o’ Liberty! you should have seen him fire up: ‘No!’ he yells at her weakly; ‘I wasn’t skeered!’

“True--he wasn’t! Kept a scout’s mouth on, as they call it, all the time, corners turning up--an’ whistled, curled up in the bow, as long’s a drop of the rhubarb juice held out, to--well, to wet his whistle!”

Eyes were wet now among the ship-carpenters--Atwood’s, too! He tickled Blind Tim’s ear and wished that he could muster up enough horse sense to understand the story.

“Well, the game young one spoke for the rest of you; you’re none of you ’skeered o’ the subs if you’re ready to go out again--looking for another vessel!”

It was the moved foreman who spoke. Instantly Captain Bob came back to business, sent his critical gaze roving over the wooden hulls most nearly finished upon the building-stocks.

“Oh! we’re all ready to go to-morrow,” he remarked unconcernedly, chewing his lip, like a cud of courage. “There’s a man I know who wants to buy a fishing-vessel--and he’s after me to take her out. He sent me up here to look ’em over. The ‘Jerries’ ain’t going to keep me ashore.”

“I reckon not! You’re like the rest o’ the skippers, Capt’n Bob--heart of a bullock, with no back-down to it! The subs couldn’t----”

But it was at that very moment--that full and flattering moment--that the inevitable pessimist spoke up, breaking in upon the foreman’s tribute.

“Aw-w! What’s the use?” groaned Libby Taber, in swampy tones--he who had predicted that the rich boy among them would soon be taking ease in a “bunk-fatigue job.” “Where’s the use?... Gloucester’s gone up. It’s good-bye--Gloucester! Day, day, Gloucester! We can’t build ships faster than the submarines can sink ’em!”

There was an explosive sound in the yard. Blind Tim--duty’s hero--heard it. The foreman heard it, too, and knew it for what it was--the sob of a young soul coming into its own!

“‘Gloucester gone up!... Good-bye, Gloucester!’” gritted a voice between clenched teeth. “Well--I guess not! ‘We can’t build ships fast as the subs can sink them!’ ... Well! maybe we can now.”

It was the voice of the “Candy Kid”; the voice of a young David crying aloud in the shipyards against the Philistine menace of his people.

Ship-carpenters stared. Another minute and they might have scoffed at the stripling--a discouraged stripling, at that--turning spokesman.

But the foreman didn’t. He promptly gave a diverting order:

“Frame up!”

Then while workmen proceeded to loop the “falls,” hempen ropes, of the hoisting derrick about the ponderous yellow rib which Tim had hauled from the shaping sawmill, he muttered to the visitor:

“Go round with you in a minute, Cap’n Bob! Just let’s get this half of a square frame in place first, so’s they can bolt her down! Whoops-ma-daisy! Up she goes!”

Up she went, indeed, the rich boy leaving Tim nosing blindly into the dry shavings and helping to steady her--the great rib--in the hoisting-tackle.

“I knew the lad had it in him,” was the foreman’s silent comment. “There’ll be no more thought of quitting; he’ll work overtime now, to stand back of Cap’n Bob--and his kind--to the last punch in him!... Steady her there--now!” he cried aloud, as the beveled frame hovered over the backbone-keel to which it would be bolted, and then settled down upon it, another rib added to the ship’s skeleton. “A mite more to the right! Hold her now!”

Ship-carpenters did. Two, leaping upon the stocks--the platform of protruding blocks, arranged cross and criss-cross, on which the skeleton rested--steadied the rib with their horny hands.

The boy did more--the boy who had cried out against Gloucester “going up.”

Aflame from neck to heel--bareheaded now--he sprang upon the protruding stocks, too, and, facing the yard, bent his back, his broad, muscular, young back, under that ponderous frame, so contributing his mite towards steadying it in place until it could be shored up--propped in its own place.

And it was then--then--to his own excited feeling, not to his conscious thought--that he became Atlas upholding Gloucester, supporting shipping--bearing up the World!

A cramped position! Well, presently every bone in him ached, and swelled, as it seemed, under the heavy pressure, although the half-ton rib, balanced upon the narrow keel, was still suspended in--supported by--the derrick’s falls.

Water dripped from his disheveled hair--his face--and ran down in rivulets over his bare, red chest, from which the open shirt-collar--the limp, soiled shirt-collar--fell back.

But still he crouched--bearing up the World!

Ho! All of a sudden, his bent frame stiffened, reacted to a lightning-like, cleaving thrill which made him conscious that it was growing numb.

Two bright eyes were looking audaciously--challengingly--into his. They were pretty eyes--brown eyes--each harboring a mocking firefly. And the lashes, half-veiling them, were unusual--dark brown, shading into amber at the tips, now borrowing the sunshine’s gold--mocking gold!

Atlas scowled now as he bore up shipping; his subconscious feeling of importance--his “it” feeling--was being derided, laughed at, by a girl.

Vaguely, for the blood was congesting in his head, he saw that there were, at least, a dozen other girlish forms behind her. Girlish faces, fresh as May-flowers, with a little tan on them, flocked before his swimming vision.

One swam into sight which he knew. It was lit by dark eyes, with stars in them.

But, somehow, at the moment, he did not welcome them--their starry sympathy. He felt, too, hotly provoked with the firefly ones which challenged him.

“Hul-hullo--Olive!... How d’you do?” he managed to get out, in response to his cousin’s quivering glance.

“Hullo! Atlas.... Atlas holding up the World!” came in laughing admiration, with swift intuition, from Blue Heron. Her hands were clasped--her whole slim girlish form a tribute. “My! but his wings have grown--war-service wings!” The silent homage tickled her throat.

“When--when is the launching to be?” she asked. “When is that new vessel to be launched over there, in that other yard?”

“About--an hour from now--I--think!” answered Atlas, with difficulty, from under the yellow ship’s rib.

CHAPTER XIII

THE MAIN BITT

“Better stand off a little! Move back! You’re too close. No--no one knows what may happen. The frame isn’t shored up--propped in place--yet.... Get back--back--I say!”

Thus Atlas delivered his commands, looking up, a frowning young god, of lowering brows, from under the weight which he was steadying--helping to steady. And if his tones were cramped, they were the more imperious.

The May-flower flock of faces, swimming before his bent gaze, receded--retreated to the confines of the shipyard; all--all save one!

One defied him. One still derided him with that firefly challenge which silently said, “Dear me! how important we are!”

“Back!” waved Atlas again, flourishing a half-numbed arm. But the Flame was still defiant. He knew it for a Flame now: a flame of mischief, sunlit mockery, obstinacy, perhaps--temper, upon occasion--and all manner of deeper fires.

He did not know that it was named by the Council Fire for what it was--and what it aspired to be of kindling warmth--Sesooā, the Flame; otherwise, Sara Davenport, embodiment of “pep” in a Camp Fire Group.

Once more he waved his right hand imperiously. Even the fingers began to feel wooden and look yellow in the sunlight, like the great branching timber, measuring thirty feet in its curve, weighing half a ton, which to an onlooker he seemed to be supporting upon his back and shoulders, although the ponderous weight was still really suspended in the hempen falls of the derrick.

Relying upon these straining ropes, one of the two ship-carpenters who had been steadying the ponderous rib with their hands, leaped down to lend some aid in “shoring it,” propping it in place upon the skeleton vessel’s narrow keel-timbers.

It might have been ten seconds later that Atlas felt the peculiar thrill and quiver all through his bent back, his numbing legs--with their feet braced upon the stocks, or building-blocks--that he felt when trout-fishing or “drailing” in the ocean, if a big fish nibbled at his line.

He had got a nibble now! A danger nibble! There was a tremble, a shudder, in the great rib pressing upon him.

Er-er-err-r! It was the gurgle of an aged rope, a worn-out rope, parting, strand by strand, in mid-air.

“My s-soul! The--the falls--derrick’s falls--are--giving--way!”

The nibble had become a bite now, with the hook in his brain.

And he came of a race--a ready-witted race--which was accustomed to act upon any strong nibble of conviction--to take lightning-hold upon a situation.

It was a lightning vision which swam before Atlas now, against a black background of shipyard. He saw the great rib, the ponderous timber, released by the derrick’s failing ropes, unable to maintain, even with his aid, its balance, tottering--tumbling--sidewise, off from him--crashing down into the yard.

He saw, too, that the near-by girl defying him with that merry, wilful glance pointed to mockery on the golden tips of her eyelashes, was within reach of being struck by it--by the wide curve it would describe in falling.

His hunched back became a razor-back--chin touching his knees. And, like a wild-cat, he leaped upon her, pushing her aside--away.

Er-er-r-r! Pop! Snap went the parting ropes--one giving way after the other--their report as thunder in his ears, while, elastically doubling, he sprang from under the wildly swaying timber.

But it did not spare him. Like the kick of a thunder-cloud something grazed him, dealt him a glancing blow upon the shoulder, staggering enough to send his feet from under him--even as he hurled the girl aside.

He was beyond seeing that it was the massive tip of the ungrateful rib which--in feeling--he had been supporting.

Down he went, and the earth, in the shape of another grinning yellow timber--one of those lumber-reefs amid which he was wont to steer Blind Tim--rose up to meet him with such a warm welcome that he saw stars--a whole firmament of them, blood-red, and brighter than the twinkling galaxy which had adorned Sybil’s arm.

Then he lay very still and saw nothing--nothing--just outside the yellow curve of the monster rib, which lay still and prostrate, too, while the girl, her equilibrium likewise upset, rolled over upon the shavings, feeling that, according to a nursery rhyme of her childhood, “heaven and earth had fallen together” and crushed the upholding Atlas between them.

The first to reach him was a ship-carpenter. And according to the pell-mell disorder that broods over most accidents, it happened to be the pessimist, Libby Taber--Libby, who had seen him from the first in the light of a quitter!

He sprang from under the wildly swaying timber.

Now, there is nothing more pell-mell than the moods of a pessimist, not being strung upon the consistent thread of hope!

Libby was no exception. He fogged the air with his stricken cry.

“Oh-h! he’s done for,” he wailed. “Knocked out--done for; the--the best lad that ever set foot in the yard--an’ the quickest to take hold--no ‘sass’ about him, at all, if he is a--rich--man’s--son!”

“Shut up--before I choke you!” growled a steadier voice, the foreman’s. “Done for! Not much! His head came against that lumber-pile. He was doing his bit and it sure was the main bitt that time”--in low, shaken tones--“with a girl’s life depending on it!”

But the girl--why! she felt herself shrinking into such a little “bit” that it seemed as if, presently, she must fade out altogether into the foggy consternation of the ship-yard.

Piteously she looked around for her Camp Fire Sisters. In the deepest pit of blunder and humiliation they would stand by her--even even though Libby was calling the heavens to witness that the fallen rib, grinning in the sunlight, had more sense than the rib that was taken out of Adam’s side and made into a girl--“so it had, by gosh!”

CHAPTER XIV

THE LAUNCHING

“Hurrah! She kicks! She crawls!... She goes!”

It was an hour later. The girls, nineteen of them, with their Guardian, were standing upon the skirts of the adjoining shipyard, watching, with a thrill only a shade less keen than that which had heralded the landing of a war-plane by their Council Fire, the shooting-off of a new vessel on to the water--the curling, laughing high tide which rose crowing to meet her, its bride.

Atlas was with them. Until the end of the War--or as long as he was a shipyard worker--he would be Atlas now, for the foreman had caught the merry deification from Olive’s lips.

He was covering his halo with his hair; it was a rainbowed halo, too, a bump the size of a hen’s egg, of all colors, upon his right temple, sending a red streak down to his cheek-bone.

In feeling, he was more Atlas than ever, for now it seemed as if he had a lightning-shot globe upon his head, in the shape of that heroic bump, which at times spun so hard through space that it threatened to spin him round with it. But he managed to keep his feet, and the delirious throbs of pain only added to his excitement--and to the thrill of the foreman’s words in his swelling ear: “It was a good line. And you held it--Mike. You saved the life of that contrary little craft--that girl!”

And now he was witnessing the launching of another craft upon her career, with a stifling heart-throb of anxiety which said that it might--might be an unnaturally short one. For the beautiful ship’s hull just darting off the greased launching-ways on to the river, sleek and glossy in her fresh garment of paint--the embryo fishing schooner--would not alone have to face the perils which were the daily bread of Captain Bob and his kind, when big seas would pound her like an earthquake, but even on her maiden trip a submarine might sink her.

There was no knowing what might be in store for her even while, as now, she was a mere sparless hull, before she matured into a maiden vessel; whether, if word had got out as to the date of her launching, a raiding sea-wolf might not be in waiting to seize upon her--a perfectly helpless, wobbly lamb, under the convoy of a tugboat--and blow her up, as she was being towed round to the seaport, to have her masts set up.

This lent a pathos to the cheers--from girls and others--which greeted the first stir of life in her, as her rocking glide began.

“She cr-rawls! She goes! Hi! Hi! Oh-h, see her go!... Oh, isn’t she a bird!”

And, indeed, for the brief few seconds of that swallow-like dart--her white deck flashing--she did seem radiantly winged, like the aëroplane.

“Hour-rah! Houp-ela! She go--de petit ship!” Now it was the voice of a French workman, hanging upon the tail of the launching cheers. “Houp-ela! Ah! Vive le vaisseau!”

“Vive le vaisseau! Here’s hoping no submarine will get her!” cried Atlas, forgetting that he bore a spinning globe upon his head, as he saw the new hull kick up her heels in the water for the first time--brought up short by her snubbing-line--while the crowing tide shot an aigrette of spray aloft, to baptize the ensign--the Stars and Stripes--proudly waving at her stern.

“Vive le vaisseau! Long life to the vessel! O dear! Why can’t we go round to Gloucester on her, all of us, as the tugboat is here now, waiting to tow her down the river?” It was a joint, eager cry from a dozen girls. “Oh-h! do say we can. Captain Andy--our Menokijábo!”

But the old sea-giant--the Tall Standing Man--was proof even against the wheedling use of the Indian name which his Camp Fire Group had bestowed upon him and which could generally, according to his own weakening lament, beguile him into a compliance with being shoved around like a schooner in a tide-rip, at the will of a score of headstrong girls.

“No! No--siree!” He shook his massive shoulders determinedly. “If I was only sure of the tide--and the tug-captain who’s to tow the new hull round was sure of it--I’d haul down my colors an’ ye could.”

“I know a girl who was launched on a new vessel like this--from this very ship-yard, too--and she an’ her father went round to Gloucester on it--the new hull--and she said it was a sort of ‘royal progress’ all the way; everybody from every house and camp along the shore tooting horns, blowing whistles, waving the biggest flags they had, cheering the new vessel on her course--hoping she’d escape the submarines,” said Lilia--Little Owl--looking longingly at that newly launched ship’s hull rocking gracefully upon the river, with her deck white as a hound’s tooth.

“Well! the tide answered for them to go through the canal, I reckon,” was Captain Andy’s reply, still accompanied by negative shrugs. “That’s the new canal that they built since war began, to avoid the danger of taking freshly launched ships outside the harbor, into open sea, at all. Happen it might answer to-day. Happen it mightn’t! Ye never can tell about the tide in this river. An’ if ye had to go outside, how would you like to see a sub pop up to leeward an’ fire a tin fish at you, as I did when I was running that slick old coaster, the Susie Jane, last spring?”

“How could the said sub know that a new vessel had just been launched up here and was being towed round?” questioned Sara Davenport. Her tones were small; it was the first time she had spoken since her challenge to Atlas upbearing the rib--and what came of it.

“I can’t tell how. But information leaks out somehow. Spies, I guess,” was the mariner’s answer.

“Fresh rumors from the sky, as the aviators say,” burst forth Olive excitedly. “According to report those two who landed by our Council Fire and entertained us so well, did discover a lonely hut, with a wireless outfit attached, in some part of the woods along the shore here.”

“They’ll have to do some more tall scouting, I reckon--comb the shores from end to end--before they nab every one who’s playing into the hands of the ‘Jerries.’” Menokijábo shook his great head. “A spy on any side has a quick eye an’ his nerve with him. Anyhow, I’m not taking chances on the safety of this new hull--against the odds of somebody, who has a ‘nifty’ scheme up his sleeve, signaling out to sea about her--by letting you girls make the towed trip on her new deck.”

“And you won’t take chances on our going through the canal, either, on--on the tide being obliging?” Sybil eyed him wistfully.

“Great Neptune! Not much! With a river-channel that’s all ‘studdled’ with quicksands an’ changing gullies, as this one is,” glancing down the brackish river, “the old tide just naturally has to chase itself out a little faster at one time than another. Just high tide now--four o’clock--five by my watch! They didn’t change the tide-table when, on Easter morning, they shoved the clocks an hour ahead. They couldn’t work any daylight-saving racket on the hoary old tide,” laughingly; “’twould upset calculations all over the globe.”

“Well, I think I’ll follow the tide’s example and ‘beat it’ for the sea--Manchester-by-the-Sea--rather earlier than usual to-day, now that I’ve seen the launching,” said Atlas, in whose ear the foreman had been whispering.

“Good! And don’t ye show up to-morrow,” softly enjoined the latter. “An’ you don’t drive your own car this evening, either. Marty Williams will be starting your way pretty soon; you’ve driven him home many an evening; now he can drive you!”

“But you’ll come down to see us at our camp just as soon as you feel able”--began Olive, and stopped, for Atlas’ bump, bared by breezes, flamed like a thunder-bolt in her direction--“I mean--I mean any day now,” she amended lamely. “If you row down the river from here, we’ll come across the sand-dunes from our side of them and meet you half-way, so that you need not go all the way down to the mouth of the river, over the bar and, so, around up to our white beach.”

“We might bring our supper with us, light a fire and picnic out on the middle of the dunes--that would be dandy--right near that great, huge pile of clam-shells where the Indians once held an historic clam-bake,” came breathlessly from Betty--fair-haired Betty Ayres--whose symbol was the Holly, green when all other shrubs were bare.

“Thanks! Awf’ly--awf’ly good you are!” murmured Atlas. “You may look for me on deck--meaning on the dunes by the shell-heap--some time soon. I’ll let you know first. Well, good-bye. So long!”

Yet he lingered a little, ostensibly absorbed in the river and its bride, the new hull, really inclining his swollen right ear for some added word of invitation from the girl with the amber-tipped eyelashes, whose life he had saved.

But those lashes, except for the grace of one flickering farewell nod, were persistently lowered.

“Pshaw! Pshaw! she’s the very original female clam herself--not a word out of her,” thought Atlas, and departed, in high dudgeon.

“Sara Davenport! You behaved like an idiot, not moving off when he told you, before--before that horrid old, jaundiced rib of a ship came near falling on you--and killing you. I suppose it really might have killed you but for him!” was the Flame’s scorching thought. “But he did feel so self-important--crouching there, under the great rib, feeling that he was upholding shipping--I know he did! Just because he’s such a rich boy, who never did anything like that before!... And Olive’s cousin! One of the set into which her father--her family--would think she ought to--ought to marry--when by and by it comes to that--never thinking of Iver, at all!... Iver who held out his burnt hand to a private! Iver who’s been over the top--wounded three times--burned with mustard gas! Oh-h-h!”

Mustard tears were in Sesooā’s eyes now. But, for all their stinging, she would not have parted with them for a kingdom--those diamond drops of the first water, tribute to her pride in the soldier-brother “over there,” to a quite extravagant jealousy on his behalf, too, lest he should fail of getting his heart’s desire when he came back--as she knew he would come!

“Oh! I suppose I shouldn’t vent it on Olive’s kith and kin,” she told herself, looking out through a blur at the lately launched vessel which the tugboat was now taking in tow for her perilous trip round to the seaport, when, if the hoary old tide was not obliging, a “tin fish” might be fired at her, or a bomb whip-sawed up under her new keel, to blow up some thirty thousand dollars’ worth of vessel--and the labor of months.

“What a contrary little cat--an utter simpleton--that Atlas boy must think me! A nice impression I’ve given him of our Camp Fire Group! Well! I can--can--undo some of it, later on. Watch him--watch him open his eyes when he sees me light a fire with rubbing sticks, out there on the middle of the dunes, as the Indians did long ago, I suppose, when they had that huge clam-bake. I wish I could show him that very last honor-bead, too, red with a white square on it, like the Scouts’ signal-flags--a local honor for signaling, for understanding wigwag--sending a message with Morse code or semaphore. I’ll wager he couldn’t do it, for all he held up shipping! No, sir!”

The Flame’s lip was hotly quivering to match the storm water in her eyes, as she sent these thoughts after the new hull, now being towed down the river.

One and all, the girls waved a parting salute, made the hand-sign of fire to win her luck--that baby vessel.

The hand-sign was in Sesooā’s heart. Not by any stereotyped thanks for the vital spark still in her, paid for by the spinning globe which Atlas was carrying home on his head--although, of course, these must be offered, verbal or written--but by the magic of thunder-bird or “hand-hold,” bow, drill, fire-board and tinder, winning the boon of fire from dead wood, would she retrieve the honor of her Camp Fire, uphold the other side of her not scarred by wilfulness and petty mockery through a fantastic jealousy on Iver’s behalf.

Never--never before had Firemaking Outfit such a contract to fill--or the dunes such a vindication to witness!

CHAPTER XV

SEEKING THE SPARK

Alas! for vindication. Alas! for the invisible practical joker which seems sometimes to dog our steps in life and steal our trick when we least expect it.

A maiden knelt upon the white sands out at the wild heart of the sand-dunes, here purple with the shading blossoms of pea-vines, lace-trimmed with everlastings, or raggedly plumed with rank beach-grass and prickly barb-weed.

Near the great pyramid of clam-shells, where the Indians had held an historic feast and got their fire with primitive rubbing of sticks, she knelt upon her right knee, her left foot pressed down hard upon the flat fire-board whose scooped pit, or hollow, had a notch resting upon a wooden tray placed beneath it.

Her left hand--its arm escaping from the white middy-blouse, bared to the shoulder to allow free scope--grasped the handle or socket of her upright drill.

The right pink arm, each muscle strenuously “on the job” under the rounded flesh, worked steadily to and fro the fire-maker’s bow, hand-painted with flame, drawn taut by its leather thong, resting upon the socket at the top of the drill, thus grinding the lower point of that drill into the soft, punky wood of the fire-board, which presently, as the powdered wood-dust fell into the tray beneath, turned black--smoked.

Her hand-painted bag of tinder lay on the sands beside her--that inflammable tinder to foster the spark when it came!

Steadily she drove the bow at first! Anxiously, now, with a horrid little fear beginning to get a hand-hold on her heart, that, after all, the ordeal by fire might not work out as she had expected--the vindication come off--and prove her triumphant mistress of this situation, at least, a perfect fire-witch, even if she had behaved like a simpleton in the shipyard!

Faster, faster--with more and more force--desperately, at last, slipped backward and forward the bow! Harder--harder--ground the drill; the fire-witch, her drooping face aflame, her pretty eyelashes twinkling in a paroxysm, working for dear life now--for vindication--honor--as it seemed to her whose moods were generally highly colored, touched with the extravagance of flame.

Smoke and more smoke in little dun-gray billows! And never a spark of red!

“Rest a while, dear,” said the Guardian. “Then try again--and perhaps you’ll get it.”

She did rest, Sesooā, the fire-witch, in the shadow of the historic shell-heap over which the last flame of sunset most tantalizingly rioted. She curled down upon her left side on the sands, easing her aching right arm.

Then a second fierce trial! A breathing spell! And another wild paroxysm of effort, the decorated bow almost demented now!

Flat failure!

Smoke--and no fire!

She looked up--and caught a smile upon the face of Atlas!

Atlas who had rowed down the river when his day’s work in the shipyard was over, to meet his hostesses, the Camp Fire Group, midway of the dunes for this picnic-supper--and to excitedly discuss the fact that the new ship’s hull which they had so lately seen launched, had been fired upon by a submarine on her towed trip round to Gloucester--would have been sunk had not a Destroyer appeared!

Atlas whose halo the dune-breezes bared--the prismatic bump upon his temple, fast diminishing! Atlas who had laid himself out to make friends with the little fire-witch, deciding that she would make a perfect “pal,” the sort of girl he had always desired for a chum, with plenty of pep in her--if only she wasn’t such a little fire-balloon!

Atlas who had been met with flame turned to ice--or next door to it--with as much frigidity as politeness would allow, tempered by a perfunctory little speech of thanks, rehearsed a dozen times beforehand and eked out by the Guardian, for his heroic presence of mind in that swift leap which prevented the extinguishing in herself of the vital spark by a heavy ship’s rib!

And now it was Atlas’ turn! His smile at her failure was fleeting, involuntary--gone in a moment. But for that one moment it was a smile; a perfectly uncivilized--highly barbaric--grin.

Down went Sesooā’s hand-painted bow beside her tinder-bag!

Neck aflame, so that it could scarcely be distinguished from the red tie of her Minute-Girl Costume, cheeks burning, if the wood-dust wouldn’t, eyes, eyelashes, red-gold hair, all, emitting sparks, a fire-ball herself, she uncurled--sprang to her feet!

Her hand went to her throat. Breathlessly, desperately, she was fighting to get the better of the stray powder-puff of anger--as Iver had done--before it exploded openly.

One glance she flung at Atlas--and he was consumed!

“Let me--let me go!... Oh! we haven’t--haven’t--got wood enough for a fi-ire. You’d better light it with matches. I’ll go--let me--and get some more--driftwood, wreck-wood--to make a rainbow fire! Back--back near--the--bungalow....”

In explosive incoherency her eyes met the Guardian’s. And Gheezies never failed to read a girl’s soul.

“All right!” she said. “If one of the other girls goes with you! It would be nice to have such a wonderful fire, giving off every hue in the rainbow, out here in the middle of the dunes--as we had the night we entertained aviators--and sit around it after our cooking is through. But it’s coming on dark! Don’t be long! Take--Betty!”

Betty had to take herself--little evergreen Holly! The Flame had already flown--a tearing, scintillating flame, as it raced over sand-mound and graying sand-hill.

“I’ve just got to be alone! If not--I’d explode! Oh, he’s simply--simply hateful, that Atlas boy--if he did save my life!... Oh-h! I knew how important he felt--as if the shipyard sun shone on him alone when he was crouching with his back under that horrid ship’s rib. Ridiculous, when he wasn’t really supporting it at all!... And--and to think I should have failed--failed, before him, to get the fire, when I have broken the record before, for a girl, and got the spark in thirty seconds; that--that I should have--again--made a fool of myself!”

“Oh! Sally--Sara--have mercy! Don’t run--quite--so hard: I can’t keep up with you!” It was Betty’s panting cry, tugging at the steps of the racing Flame.

It had never been such a reckless flyaway--that Flame--that it had not a heart for a Camp Fire Sister.

Within a few hundred yards of the bungalow-beach, quarter of a mile from the group, back there, upon the dunes--amid the skirts of twilight, light and filmy yet, which the dune-breeze was shaking out--Sara Davenport, out of breath herself, paused and caught Betty by the hand.

“If--if we can just get over that big sand-hill in front of us, and the low mounds beyond, we’ll reach the spot where we saw all that wreck-wood, such a lot of it, when bathing to-day, Bettykins!” she breathed. “It--’twill save my being a wreck--myself! Oh! why couldn’t I get the spark to-night--of all nights? And--and to be grinned at by that Atlas boy! If--if that wouldn’t make a dogfish drop his herring, as Captain Andy would say!... If I can only look out over the bay--over the sea--in--in the direction of where Iver is--over there--I’ll feel better!”

“I know-ow!” soothed Betty. “It was too bad you couldn’t get it!”

She drew on her last pinch of pep, of breath--the Holly--as they raced on, over the tall, white sand-peak, shadowy in the gloaming, tripping over wild pea-vines, empurpling, faintly now, the lower dunes.

The scampering sea-breeze racing from their own beach, where cranberries slept with their coral cheeks on dimming pillows, clasped them like a brother.

“We’ll just have time to gather a few chunks of the coppery wreck-wood. Then--then we’ll have to hurry back,” said Betty. “I really didn’t think it was so far to this spot, and I guess the Guardian didn’t either! You swept her----”

“Hush! Listen! The chug, chug, of a launch--motor-boat--passing quite close in to shore, too! Tide’s high!” Sara halted on tiptoe now, a poised, breathless figure, and held up her hand.

“I’m afraid!” whispered Betty. “I wish we hadn’t come!”

“Nonsense! Nobody runs close in to shore--close to our beach--except Captain Andy--funny if ’twas him!--the artist’s brother, or--or, now an’ again, that seal-hunter, who passed when I was camouflaging the dory--toothless bead-eye”--with a recovering chuckle--“whose face, the hunter’s I mean, I can’t.... Goodness! I rather hope it isn’t--him!”

“If we crouched down behind those two low sand-mounds in front, we could peep over--between them--and see who it was without being seen,” pleaded Betty timorously.

“Right you are--little Chicken-heart,” came the older girl’s response.

“I feel as if I were in the trenches now, looking over the top.” Betty gathered a handful of purple pea-blossoms from the sand-rampart before her.

“Standing on the firing-step, peering out over the sand-bags, as the soldiers do! But there’s nothing to fire at here! Pretty sure to be a friend, whoever it is!... My s-soul! I do believe it is the--mysterious--seal-hunter!”

“He’s--alone!” whispered Betty.

“Yes--for the first time, except when he passed us on the beach!”

Chug, chug! hiss, hiss! the motor-boat, a trim little launch, was abreast of them now, passing within twenty-five yards, so close to shore that its occupant seemed to have made a bet with the crowing high tide that he could thus skirt the beach without grounding.

He was standing up, amidships, his left hand on the pilot-wheel, narrowly scrutinizing the shore.

Either he saw or did not see two pairs of eyes peering at him, ferret-like, through clumps of beach-grass. With a complacent gesture, satisfied on some score, the fingers of his right hand went up to the comer of his mouth, describing a crescent, a twirling motion, as they thoughtfully fondled the tip of a small, bristling mustache.

It was with a low moan--a strange searching moan--that Sara Davenport fell back, and lifted a long-drawn face to the sky--all madcap flame, petty flame, wilted in her now.

“Bet-ty!” She clutched the other girl’s arm, and pinched it so tight that the Holly, little thorny evergreen, quivered like her namesake of the dunes in a wintry blizzard.

“I do believe it is the--mysterious--seal-hunter.”

“Bet-ty! I have seen him before--seen him do that--with his fingers! But where--where? I must remember! I feel--now--that I ought to remember! Oh! God, help me to--remember!” Sara Davenport bowed her paling girlish face against a purple cushion of wild pea, raised it again in half a moment, and crept cautiously around the screening mounds.

“He’ll bear watching!... I’m going to watch him,” she gasped. “I’m going to see what he’s up to! Oh!” winking fiery tears back, “oh! if I could--only--get the spark now--the spark from my memory, instead of just smoke--I wouldn’t care if I never--never--got it, the fire, from wood again, in all my born life!”

CHAPTER XVI

WIGWAG

“He has something in his hand--something that shimmers in his hand! See! See, Betty! It--it’s like the radio-powder in that little bottle--Olive’s secret that shines in the dark--only you can see it farther off--much farther off--where we are!”

“Like--like the radio-dials facing the aviator in his tiny cock-pit!” corroborated Betty, in low response to the flaming whisper which scorched her ear, as Sara’s lips hissed into it amid the rustling beach-grass.

“Mer-cy! He’s whirling it--doing something with it--spinning it round in a circle. It is--it is a radio-dial! A big one! Bet-ty----”

“Don’t pinch so har-rd!” sobbed Betty, groveling amid the purple pea-blossoms.

“He’s signaling with it! Oh! my living soul! he is--is--signaling now, with his right arm! Wigwagging! See-ee! Putting his hand d-down, with the dial in it, snapping it back up to his shoulder; that answers to a dot! More slowly now--that’s for a dash, by code! Standing up there in the launch--in that little creek--showing the dial out to sea! Short! Long! Short! Oh-h! I understand Wigwag. But I can’t read that--get the words--message!... I can just barely make out his arm going--catch the shimmer sideways. Heaven and earth! It’s cipher, I suppose.... He’s sending a message out to--sea--by cipher! Betty, he’s a--spy-y!”

The murmuring beach-grass whispered about the two girls. The crushed pea-blossoms lining their sand-nook with velvet cushions--dark velvet--sent the ghost of a wild fragrance up into their nostrils--wild as the situation in which they found themselves on the ragged coast-line of their normal life--wild, abnormal, as War itself.

The launch, with the man standing in it, his left hand on the pilot-wheel, had drawn round into a little tidal creek, a foaming inlet, not forty yards from the girls! Crawling along in the purple hollows, screened by luxuriant vegetation, their whispers drowned by its rank murmurs and by the sea-breeze, sweeping the red lamps of their burning cheeks, which, it seemed, must give them away in the darkness, they had followed his movements, lying low, waiting through endless minutes, until night more fully fell! Sara had! And Betty--trembling little fair-haired Betty--whose loyalty, at least, was ever-green, had not hung back.

“A spy--a spy signaling with radio out to sea, giving out word to submarines! Oh! it may have been he who told the date of the launching of that new vessel we saw, so that she was fired upon--a hole torn in the tugboat’s smoke-stack--so that they were lying in wait for her.... Mercy!”

Had it been a signaling contest, a prize offered for rapidity, the fiery wigwag of Sara’s tongue and thoughts at the moment might have carried off the palm even against that strange--strange--arm curling and uncurling from the black, silhouetted shoulder, outlined with random shimmer, like a phosphorescent twig against the night.

“Must--must be a strong radio-dial! With a telescope--through periscope--it could be seen a long way off--five miles, perhaps! Not otherwise!... Oh!--Oh-h! he’s through now. Cranking the launch--starting off again! People thought him a harmless seal-hunter!... Out into the bay!... But where did I see him before: his--his eyes that puzzled me--arm--hand--the movement he made, twirling his mustache, as he passed our beach a while ago? Oh! Betty, I think, maybe--maybe--I’m mad, but--Bet-ty--it’s coming to me.”

“What’s--coming?”

“The spark! Not just a smoke-cloud any longer! I’m getting it--getting--at--it! Oh-h!”

It was at that moment, straining her burning eyes to follow the dark outline of the launch, gliding away from shore, heading boldly out across the bay, with its Innocent chug, chug, in her ears--America Burnham’s loyal launch, hired or stolen--that Sara Davenport felt as if through the darkness within--the raging tumult--a radio-tipped arrow cleft her from throat to toe--then pointed one way.

Pointed to a picture shimmering against blackness, like an illumined dial, like the beady figurehead on the dragonized dory, its meaning--strong meaning--beginning to be read: the outskirts of a military training-camp, a gassed soldier, a pale girl ministering to him with soaked wisps of cotton-wool, a raging young officer “bawling out” a sergeant and a detached young woman looking on with snow-blink glance, complacently raising thumb and forefinger, pivot and crescent, to her smooth--smooth--lip-corner.

“Betty! Betty! I’m not mad! I’ve got it--got it, the spark. Remember now----Oh! I’m sure I remember where I’ve seen him.... Goody! What a chump”--Sara’s hand madly twisted itself into the pea-vines--“what a simpleton--ninny--I was, not to do so sooner!... Gracious! wor-worse now,”--frenziedly--“letting him get away--off--to find another creek, to do--do some more radio-signaling to submarines!”

“What--what can you do to stop him? The Coast Guard men--patrol men--they ought to see him! Oh-h, let’s run back--back to the others--tell the others!”

“Yes--and let him get clear away! Patrol couldn’t see him; he was hidden from them by that jutting sand-spit behind us. No search-lights playing over the bay either to-night! But they could see me--see me--if I signaled! I can! Iver taught me--Iver, over there!... I’ve got an honor-bead!”

“Oh-h! Where are you going?” Betty clutched wildly at the other’s short blue skirt; a flame--a soul--was in its narrow hem.

“The Bungalow! I can find something--Olive’s electric flash-light--signaling flash-light--she left it behind her; other girls took theirs, to light----”

“Door’s locked!” sobbed Betty. This was War--for the first time she realized it.

“Sure--sure to find a window--somewhere--open! If not--break a pane! He’s not going to get away--get away with it--his radio Wigwag! Was--was it his sister, maybe, up at Camp Evens--or him--himself, in woman’s dress? Oh-h, why on earth didn’t I catch on sooner?... Atlas held up shipping!”

CHAPTER XVII

A RADIO FREAK

Dim prints fluttered out from the varnished wall--the living-room wall--in the strong breeze blowing through an open window: Pershing, American Commander-in-chief; Foch, Marshal of France; Haig, who held the line; Cadorna, of Flamina’s Italy; Albert of Belgium, kingly of courage!

The Camp Fire Group had held an indoor guessing contest the night before, identifying these and lesser leaders of the Great War, without seeing the names. The pastime over, they had pinned the leaders up on the bare wall of that bungalow living-room.

Now the sea-breeze took its turn at identification as it crept through the window--in the wake of an excited girl whose wildly throbbing heart, like a lamp turned high within her, guided her straight to an adjoining dormitory, a glass-paneled sleeping-porch, closed at present, where was a long row of dim cots.

“I don’t need to grope around for matches. Olive keeps her flash-light by the head of her bed--since she and I haven’t been sleeping in a tent any longer.... What’s this? Oh! her secret that shines in the dark--the powder for radio-paint in that tiny bottle. Perhaps if I wetted a little of it--smeared some more on the dory’s bow--and rowed out a little way, to signal, I’d attract attention better; ’twould act as a foot-light--if they saw it through the glasses--between flashes! Well--here goes!”

Yet as she fluttered forth again through the wind-gap of that window, the Flame turned briefly and waved her hand to those World Heroes upon the wall. Not much tribute to them! At the moment one and all were summed up in the highly colored mental print of her brother Iver, fighting over there.

“He taught me to signal with Morse and Semaphore--to read Wigwag, too! He was wounded in both legs, the very first time he went over the top--crawled on, leading his men--that was at Château-Thierry. He’d want me to use the knowledge I got from him.... I’d do it even if that spy were to see me, turn back and kill me, maybe, before the Coast Guards get here.... Priceless stuff, Olive says, this radio-powder. Bah! who cares, if it helps? Now--now, she’s a regular lightning-bug, my camouflaged dory!”

Lost to all sense of economic values, she was wetting a full big pinch of the costly powder on her burning palm, with a drop or two of sea-water, smearing it over the dory’s camouflaged bow--then shoving her off, forgetful even of Betty, a trembling Holly--though of loyalty still evergreen--cowering upon the beach-edge.

“Now! what’s the attention-signal--Morse? Let’s see!” The girl’s left hand pushed her hair back from her brow, she crouching in the lightning-bug dory, a few yards from shore. “Yes! ‘A,’ sent over and over; ‘dit-dar-dit-dar-dit-dar--dit,’ if signaled with a buzzer; short, long, short, long, so on, with the light!”

She was standing now--as the spy had done in the motor-boat, the launch which had melted off into far shadows of the bay--holding her signaling flash-light aloft, pressing her thumb lightly, with rhythmic unevenness, upon a little lever at the side.

And, lo! the shore which she was facing--the wild island-shore merging into the long sand-bar--awoke, opened its eyes, answered with bright blinker flashes of understanding from lonely watch-tower and patrolling surf-man on his tiresome beat.

“Short, short, long! That would be dit-dit-dar--meaning U. N.--they got me! Now--now what message shall I send?... Oh, I wonder if he’ll get me, the spy, turn back an’ get me, before they come? Never mind; Iver----”

One sidelong glance out into the curtaining shadows of the bay! Then, “Catch spy in launch. Out--bay!” slowly spelled out the winking flash-light, pressed by a girl’s unfaltering little thumb.

And fast as the shore had blinked, it responded! There was something unusual about the direct, correct message; about a strange, faint unearthly shimmer, seen through binoculars, bathing the spot--the boat--whence it came, when the flash-light wasn’t speaking.

Tower and patrol, both, flashed their message to the white Coast Guard Station upon the island-shore. A strong search-light scanned the bay.

In its radiance forth leaped the light steel life-boat, rowed by strong arms; the Coast Guard power-boat, the old self-bailer, too, hustling as she could do, in an emergency.

“O dear! I hope she can show a little more speed--that self-bailing ark--than Captain Andy gave her credit for. Otherwise, she won’t overhaul the launch! He--may--get away, after all!... Oh-h, there’s Betty calling! Poor little Betty!”

With signal-flashes in her finger-tips that seemed to light the water round her, the sands ahead, the Flame shoved her dory’s nose up on to the beach again.

A wild-eyed Betty met her! Some one else!

“Is it true--true--that they’re after a spy, the Coast Guards--that you signaled them? You?” cried Atlas.

Sara turned a flash-light beam upon him and nodded.

“We--we’ve been searching for you! Just got here!... Oh! isn’t there a boat--a boat of any kind--anywhere--on this old graveyard of a beach? I--I want to take after him, too!... I--must!”

The boyish tones wildly bristled as Atlas’ search-light glance implored the sands, resting for a fatuous moment upon the dim shape of a canoe--Little Owl’s birch-bark canoe.

“Pshaw! you couldn’t go in her; she’s light’s a feather. Here, you may take my--dory!”

“Heavens! Her! She looks as if she had escaped from some--boat--bedlam!” Atlas drew a raving breath.

“Yes--she’s camouflaged--a perfect lightning-bug, too! But you can have her!” With an hysterical laugh the dory’s owner stepped out, laid down her hand-painted oars, deaf to the rude voice maligning her boat--the dim, beauteous home-sands, too. “And I--I won’t ask to go in her, either!” she magnanimously added.

“Gee! but you’re a brick.”

“No more than you are! You held up shipping--that heavy old ship’s rib--or seemed to!”

But Atlas was deaf to the tardy tribute, as the dory, no longer even a bead-eye, but a radio nightmare--all ghostly a-shimmer--dashed out upon the tide.

“Well! Well! we got him--nabbed him. The Coast Guard men said they never saw a dory stretch herself like that one; that I just drove her--sent her for all she was worth!... They--they nearly cracked their sides laughing at her, too, when ’twas all over--wanted to know what ‘nut palace’ she’d escaped from--said the spy must have thought he had an evil spirit on his track!”

It was an hour later. Atlas was holding forth to nineteen girls and their breathless Guardian upon the dark sands--on the very spot where the air-scouts, spy-hunting aviators, had made a landing.

“I--I went ashore with them at the Station--after they searched the launch,” he added.

“Oh! what did they find in her? a--a woman’s wig?” cried Sara, who had been remembering, furiously remembering--minutely recalling--during the past hour. “A--a--the most charming brown wig, with little wavy threads of gray in the mat over the ears; that--that’s what ‘Old Perfect,’ with the feather turban, the muff in April, the rather high cheek-bones, the very smooth skin, wore up at Camp ... Goody! I was envying her the--gray--hairs.” The voice of the fire-witch broke upon a mettlesome little canter of laughter.

“Yes, they did find a dress-suit case with a false bottom; a feminine wig--some further disguise--was stowed away in it.”

“But who--captured--him?” It was a low, thrilled uproar of question. “Not--not the camouflaged dory?”

“No, the Coast Guard captain. The launch was showing her heels to the old self-bailer. The spy shifted his course--put about--was trying to dodge back towards the river--tidal river--down which he came. The steel boat headed him off, and--and the dory, too! Then he jumped overboard, tried to swim. But the captain yelled at him to halt--surrender--or he’d fire. Ex-ci-ting! Well! I should say so.... Good of you to let me take your boat--if she is the most ‘witchetty’ thing that ever floated!”

“You--you upheld shipping.”

Within the radiant ring of the powerful flash-light belting the sands, a boy and girl--Atlas and the Flame who had defied him--looked into each other’s feverish eyes with comradeship, not challenge now--comradeship that might well grow to something more charming, as the years went on--when the white flag of Peace should float once more over a progressive world.

Misunderstanding was of the past--mockery, too! They had come through the Game “with their wings,”--the patient, toiling service-game for freedom and Country; they were one with their brothers of the skies--with the heroes of trench and top, over there.

Or, to change the figure, all had done their bit, and, in two instances, by might and magic of service, automatically swelling, it had become the main bitt to which the main-sheet of safety, the mainsail of progress, were belayed.

And yet--yet--in another minute even that failed to satisfy the girl in the case--left her with a hollow feeling of dissatisfaction--for she was a creature of moods shading like her eyelashes, and suffering from reaction, too!

The flash-light winked itself out in her hand--and all her exultation with it.

She hid her now pale face in the curve of an arm in a green-stained middy-blouse.

“Oh! yes, it’s ex-ci-ting.... Ter-ri-bly exciting!” she moaned to the sands. “But how I wish it was over! I don’t want to distrust those about me. And maybe he thought he had a grain of right--though he was a spy!” The tired concession was breathed into the curve of a trembling elbow. “Cool--cool he was, anyhow--here and there! Oh-h! if only the cry of the children--the little children over in France--could come true, and it was: ‘Fini la Guerre!... Fini--forever--la Guerre!’ If Peace could come again!”

CHAPTER XVIII

THE PEACE BABE

Peace had come again.

And in her shining bassinet Peace Europa breathed softly through a mouth like a damp red rose, waved a tiny arm feebly, uncurled the new-born hand, with its pearly nails, as if she would catch and hold to her baby breast--forever and a day--the new-born happiness that had come to earth with her.

Beside her in the wee hospital crib, sharing the soft blanket in which the welcoming nurse had wrapped her, slumbered another, her Heavenly Twin--the Babe of Peace.

So it seemed to nurses and doctors who stole near to look at her, lying all oiled and shiny!

“If ever a baby was born at the hour of fate, she was!” breathed the intern, the house-doctor, beaming through his glasses upon her. “And, by George! the mite seems to know it, too. Did you ever before see such a placid smile upon a new-born thing?”

“I never did,” replied the feminine superintendent of the Hospital. “I’m afraid I’ll have to keep out of the ‘baby-room,’--else I’ll break every rule--take her up now and again, to cuddle her, just for the sake of this won-der-ful hour in which she first saw--the--light.”

“Yes! and spoil her for her mother to take care of, afterwards--make her as nervous as a witch. I guess even my young sister--fifteen-year-old sister who’s a Camp Fire Girl and has taken a course in Baby Craft--would have more self-control than that,” rebuked the intern, but leniently, joy oozing through his glasses; for his dearest chum was at the front, that devastated front, in far-away France--and now there was a chance of seeing him again.

“I feel that way, too, doctor,” said the superintendent, interpreting the look, not the rebuke. “My twin brother is over there. He’s been wounded over and over again. Oh! how I dreaded his taking part in the next big drive. No need for it now! Will you listen to the whistles and horns--that hooting klaxon. Why! the world’s gone mad. And to think that this baby--a soldier’s child, too--should be born just at the moment, or a few minutes before it, that the word went out to cease firing!” The superintendent wiped her eyes.

“Was ever such a heavenly herald?” breathed the doctor.

“Her mother feels so. She says the child is born for greatness. She has named her already, Peace Europa--Peace Europa Bush.”

“Gosh! Some name! A big contract to fasten upon six pounds and three-quarters of soft pink flesh and gristly bone,” mocked Dr. Lemuel Kemp. “Well! I suppose the heavenly infant will hold an unconscious reception, all day long, of those who are privileged to be admitted--in this Hades of a room.” He sniffed at the hothouse atmosphere of the baby-room--extremely hothouse--in which humanity’s latest buds--seventeen of them, with Europa as the center--were unfolding. “I’ll have to tip that young sister of mine the word to come round and see her. I suppose she’s somewhere out at the heart of the clamor now--in the crowded streets, with the rest of the family--the rest of the world--gone mad over the Armistice being signed. But, oh! she’ll have a fringe of enthusiasm left for the Peace baby,” smilingly. “She has been taking care of a neighbor’s child, two months old, for an hour a day lately; she showed me a pretty flame-colored honor-bead she had received for it.”

“A neat way of gilding the pill of service!” smiled the superintendent.

“Say, rather, of transforming it into a sugar pellet,” was the man’s reply, as the two left the tropical atmosphere of the hospital nursery.

Yes, War was over. Simultaneously with the birth of little Peace the word had gone forth to a hacked and harrowed and weary world to cease firing!

No wonder that the young Day, born with her, had gone mad--outside the hospital--a brimming-over child that could not contain its own happiness; that from shore to shore bells rang, sirens sang, klaxons hooted themselves hoarse--men and women, too--while underneath the wild riot--vociferous glee--tears baptized the dawn in many a home; radiant joy-tears on behalf of those who would come back, through which, like a reflection of the morning-star in ocean, shone the gold star of memory for those who would not!

But the star of service had not set. The wings which had come through the game, undrooping, must be spread anew for tried, if tamer, lights.

And so, as Europa still lay, oiled and shining, teasing the air with her first pin-prick cries--ere yet she was four hours old--there arrived two visitors to see her!

One was blinking like the sleepiest Owlet ever caught abroad at daylight; she had been awake since three, abroad since thirty minutes past; she was the doctor’s sister, Lilla Kemp, Little Owl, of the Morning-Glory Group of Camp Fire Girls--a Glory Unit now, as it paraded the streets in a body, radiating ecstasy and anticipatory reunion--longed-for reunion with the brothers over there.

The other, being by name and nature of the order of the flame, looked as if she could never “drowse” again, as if she had caught the very heart of the sunlight joy upon the tips of her shading eyelashes and held it there in twinkling points of gold.

“I’ve made the duckiest--dearest--dandiest--little set of baby-clothes for her--for Peace Europa--her mother told me, long ago, that if she happened to be born on Peace Day, she would name her that,” said Sesooā, the Flame. “You should see them, Lil, the sweetest little dress--I put every teeny, tiny, microscopic stitch in it myself,”--there was a drop of water on the gold lashes now--“the daintiest fine linen gertrude and tiny shirtie. You see, I knew she was a soldier’s child--and due to arrive about this time.”

“And you’ll exhibit them, won’t you, at our next ceremonial meeting--a Peace Ceremonial, the Guardian said it would be, if the Armistice went through; she’s planning for it already. They’ll mean a new honor for hand craft, a pretty green honor-bead--those dear little baby-clothes.”

“Oh! I can hardly think about that now, or of anything, except--except that they’re a thanksgiving set--offering,”--the tears brimmed over at this golden point, two of them dropped upon Peace Europa’s blanket, saluting the invisible peace twin, new-born Peace Angel, sleeping beside her--“a thanksgiving offering because Iver’s coming back.... Oh! I can’t be s-sure yet, of course! He’s been wounded so often, burned with mustard gas, lost--lost all his beautiful wig, as he jokingly said--his hair, you know, burned off.

“But when you come back,

As you will come back!”

The sister’s tear-breathed chant--each word a whirling joy-center--was crooned into Europa’s hooding blanket. “Isn’t she the darlingest baby you ever saw--little Peace Angel?” added Sara Davenport very softly. “I’m going to adopt her in a way; take care of her for an hour a day later on, if her mother will allow me, as you have been doing with that neighbor’s baby--Lilla.”

“Why don’t we adopt her forthwith, as a Group, directly she’s out of the hospital, make her clothes for her, bring her toys, and when she’s a year old, or so, take her to camp with us in the summer? Fancy her building sand-castles--little Peace Europa--among the cranberries on that white beach from which you put off in your radio-smeared dory, to signal the Coast Guards! Fancy that--our Peace Europa!”

Lilla’s eyes spilled over with humid light upon the blanketed mite.

“Too lovely for anything--if her mother will allow it!”

“Bless you! She’ll make no objection. They live in rather a stuffy little street; when she was well she took a boarder or two to help out while her husband was fighting over there--and she has three more children, the oldest twins, a boy and girl, between four and five, and a tot of two.”

“How--how about leaving Europa to sleep with her heavenly twin, the Peace Babe, and our taking those other twins out to see the big parade this afternoon--they’re soldier’s children,” suggested Sesooā, with sudden inspiration.

“Good idea! Only, of course, representatives from our group, from every Camp Fire in the city, are supposed to march with the Red Cross for which we have been knitting, sewing, making surgical dressings, working in a war-canteen, and so forth, right along--to parade on this won-der-ful Peace Day!” Little Owl’s lip quivered; she, too, wore a blue-starred service-pin for a young uncle, who had been to her childhood a pal and a protector--prisoner now on enemy soil--would the Armistice bring him back?

“Oh! we’ll let Blue Heron--Olive--hold our Morning-Glory end up in the parade, with the Rainbow, Arline, to support her. They’ll attract attention enough. Olive is doing that now, I believe, since she made her début in society two months ago, at her stepmother’s wish, but very quietly, the War not being over then and every one of us ready to stand on our heads, as now, for joy.... For you will come back!... Ah, well!” the Flame’s lip quivered. “Ah--well!”

The latter sigh introduced the least dark shade of panic into the day’s rainbowed panegyrics, lest he who was to return--Iver--Lieutenant O Pips of the alert eye, the observation post astuteness--might fall short of gaining his heart’s desire when he did return, might not get all he longed to ask from the Torch-Bearer whom he had seen in ceremonial dress, or kneeling by a gassed soldier, many and many a time, over there, when he missed the things that make life hum.

“Ah, well! no use in anticipating. At all events, I’ve got over being raspy on the score--the war-time score--of Olive’s cousins!” A little flaming shrug of shoulders now, as the two, with a last yearning look at Peace Europa--beneficent babe--a last almost reverent touch upon the tiny, pearly hand which had come to earth, as it seemed, bearing the boon mankind desired--turned to leave the tropical baby-room, the quiet hospital.

“Well! it’s to be the twins now, is it, Europa’s brother and sister?” said Lilla, as they emerged into the open, where, on all sides, the day, young yet, had gone mad, was running over with tomfoolery and innocent riot--a madcap child that could not contain its own gladness.

But the twins were no “peace handful,” as the two girls found. In the absence of their mother they were martyring a grandmother. They had baptized the joy of the day in mud-puddles and hung it out to dry from spikey fences--the boy of four and a half, especially--until not a clean, whole shred of clothing remained to him.

“Never mind! I’ll find something for him to wear,” proclaimed the grandmama hopefully. “Will I allow them to go an’ see the big parade with you!” eyeing the visitors with almost tearful gratitude. “Oh! you’d better believe I will. Now! to see how I can rig him up. There are these rompers of Elsie’s, fresh from the tub--I’ve just ironed them!”

“But I can’t wear them. Oh! I c-can’t wear--them!” The boy eyed the tiny gingham garment as if Peace Day had, in aviator’s slang, become a pancake wreck, its joy all flattened. “They’re girl’s!”

He leveled a mud-caked forefinger at an utterly ignominious half-inch of embroidery decorating those romper-leglets of his twin sister.

“Daddy-man w-wouldn’t want me to wear them! Daddy-man’s a soldier--my Bob-daddy is! He’s over in France--now!”

Bob-sonny of four and a half looked sidelong out of a rolling eye-corner at the two spick and span Camp Fire Girls, in costume of red, white, and blue.

In this contest, however, those victorious colors, so triumphant over there, were coolly neutral.

He attacked the grandmother with pleadings--the two freshly laundered rings of embroidery weaving chains about the manikin soul within him, as he rebelliously eyed them.

“Come! Come! No more nonsense now!” Grandmama suddenly set her foot down. “I wonder you aren’t ashamed! You’ll have to wear ’em--or stay at home!”

She departed, on an errand, to the near-by kitchen.

Once more Bobbie’s insulted eye implored the Minute-Girls, still neutral.

Then he retreated into an adjoining bedroom, whose door was wide open, and knelt upon a low chair--desperately, as soldiers kneel in the trenches.

“O God,” he pleaded, with full bursting heart of faith. “O God, please don’t let Her make me wear dem--dis day--dey’re--girl’s!”

Neutrality was at an end.

It was America’s hour and her spirit flamed in her Minute-Girl daughters, siding, all in an illumined flash, a tearful flash, with Bob-sonny against any camouflaging of his sex on this day when Columbia’s sons, his father among them, decorated and re-decorated, over there, were being hailed--and kissed (oft to their disgust) with delirious cries that “America--America had saved France!”

“You shan’t! You shan’t!” cried Sesooā, seizing upon the manikin who, not so many months ago, had seen them march away, his baby soul on fire. “You shan’t, Bobby! I’ll save you! See--see if I don’t!”

She was in the strange kitchen in an instant.

“Oh! Gran’ma,” she wheedled, “I’m just so used to the wash-tub. I’ve done the whole family washing before now and won a flame-colored honor-bead for that little performance,” laughingly--tenderly. “As we’re going to take these heavenly twins off your hands for the rest of the day--I promise not to bring them home until they’re so tired an’ sleepy that they wouldn’t see a puddle if ’twas spattering them--won’t you--won’t you let me have one pair of Bob-sonny’s little knickerbockers, that cunning little blouse, too. Dear me! I’ll launder them for him in no time! When he sees the big parade go by he can hold up his head as ‘all boy,’--what there is of him--a fiery little son of big, fiery Bob-daddy, over in France, who has helped to bring the War to an end, ... and who doesn’t know yet that his little Peace Europa is waiting--waiting--for him on this side of the water, when he gets back--as he will get back!”

CHAPTER XIX

THE GOLD STAR

But in the hearts of Camp Fire Girls, for all time, there would burn the gold star of memory for those who would not return!

In the home of another member of the Morning-Glory Group smiles had untowardly turned to shrieks that day.

It was the small boys’ hour when they dominated, because of the embryo manhood in them, in the name of their fathers or brothers over there.

They were not slow to avail themselves of the temporary license. Ten-year-olds, in squads of eight, linked tandem-fashion, one behind the other, butted those of middle-age, fat or fussy business men, without rebuke, meeting naught but the indulgent smile of an eye that looked humidly across the water.

And little Kendal Ayres, aged seven, climbing ambitiously to wave Old Glory from a tin roof, fell to a graveled walk and broke his arm.

“Mother!” he said, striving heroically to endure the pain of a compound fracture until the doctor came. “Mother! let me have ‘Shepherd’s’ picture by me; that will help me to--bear--it--better.”

It was his sister Betty who brought it--who reverently brought it--the picture of an Army Chaplain in uniform, with the Croix de Guerre upon his breast.

“I have a gold star for a Godfather now, haven’t I?” murmured little Kendal, through clenched teeth, as he had often whispered before since “Shepherd” had given his life, while succoring the wounded, in France.

“You have, Kennie,” said white-lipped Betty, whose loyalty was evergreen, but her courage easily frost-nipped. “And--and you’ll have to live up to it! So will I!”

She did. Putting her delicate, half-fainting mother out of the room, she waited upon the doctor while he was administering the ether, even lay on the bed beside Kennie, holding his hands--getting some of the fumes herself--until oblivion set in and Kendal lay passive beneath his gold star--in the hallowed presence of “Shepherd.”

It was the sacred memory of “Shepherd” and many others which consecrated the Peace Ceremonial which the Group held in its own club-room, two weeks after the Armistice was declared--a room so furnished and decorated by the hand-craft of its occupants that, like their dresses, stenciled and embroidered, it was a history in itself of talent, achievement, individual and collective.

And the memory of that Ceremonial would go down in history, not alone in the Camp Fire “count,” but wondrously wrought into the tapestried life-stories--into thought, word and deed--of the members present.

It matters not who recited, in a voice that rocked unsteadily once or twice upon the raft of a sob, “Flanders Fields.”

Her personality was lost in the:

“If ye break faith with us who die!”

Ah! no. There must be no breaking of faith. The life of every American boy and girl alive on that fair November, the eleventh, when the sun shone as if knowing that it marked a New Epoch, mocking the brown leaves upon the ground--while Peace Europa cooed in her blanket--must be nobler for all time--a fair and loving monument to those who would not come back.

But--but the note of pathos melted into melody when it came to considering the new: to standing upon the threshold of that better World, bought with a price, brushed by the feet of youth and of hopeful young nations--weary old ones--to-day.

Not three candles alone, as on that white beach, where aviators landed by the Council Fire, were lit to-night, but one for each country of the Allies, to typify joy rekindled well-nigh all over the war-scarred earth.

And when little Flamina, Nébis, the Green Leaf upon a later branch of America’s great tree--whose leaves must be truly now for the healing of the nations--stepped forward, with flashing eye, to light the green candle of Italy, there was a long-drawn breath between a song and a sob in the breast of each maiden present.

“Va fuora d’ltalia, ta fuora ch’e l’orro,

Va fuora d’ltalia, va fuora o stranier!”

caroled Flamina--the big, dilating pupils of her eyes as black stars in a sepia-brown sky--while she chanted Italy’s hymn of liberty--the national hymn.

“Doesn’t she make just the dearest little Camp Fire Sister, with--with the grace of her, the green leaf in her head-band and embroidered upon the front of her ceremonial dress!” murmured one and another of the Group who had adopted her, working for patriotic honors along lines of Americanization--building up the new American womanhood, to the broader ideals and understanding won by the Great War.

Flamina was a full-fledged Wood Gatherer now. The brightest silver spark in the night of her eye, beneath those curly lashes, was a reflection of the fagot-ring upon her finger.

The ceremony of her initiation, interrupted by the witch-stenciled war-plane, by the knights of the sky, with their clipped anecdotes of airdom adventures--their wingèd slang--had been gone through later upon the white beach, while:

“Drowsy wavelets come and go,

To weave a dream-spell ’round Wohelo!”

She was getting into her heart of hearts the Wohelo magic now; the triple ideals of Work, Health, Love--the cord that bound her to her Camp Fire Sisters, those daughters of the Sun, who, as she increasingly understood, wedded old and new, the poetry of the past--of races that went before them upon American soil--with the reaching-out progress of the present.

And “there is that giveth and yet increaseth,” so the Bible says: every hour spent in truly naturalizing the little foreign-born sister, cultivating the freshly grafted shoot, with its transplanted green leaf, had been one of richness for the instructors, too; from Olive, who had improved her English, to Sara and Betty, who had helped to fashion her ceremonial dress, and Sybil who had wrought a leaf upon its bosom.

The music of her caressing song, whether it dwelt in childish passion, wild and tender, upon the country and sea she loved, recalling her own blue bay of Naples, or matched the mischief of her dancing footsteps, gay as the most elusive little leaf, in a

“Cip i tè ciop!

(Chippety chop!)”

warmed their blood to a more sparkling fire.

But, sweetest of all at this Peace Celebration--never to be forgotten--it added a new and soaring note to the song, fairest in Columbia’s ears: “America the beautiful!”

“And crown they good with brotherhood,

From sea to shining sea.”

Ah! well might the hearts of Columbia’s daughters swell--those of the Morning-Glory Group rejoice--for by the glow of the Council Fire on lonely beaches, by the encircling ring around symbolic candles, by welding ritual, poetry and song, in this the morning-glory hour of the World’s rebirth, after a night of pain, God had crowned America’s good with sisterhood:

“From Sea to shining Sea.”

CHAPTER XX

CHRISTMAS OF 1918

The moving note which merged into melody at the first Peace Celebration, when War was, forever, as men hoped, a thing of the past, turned to mirth in the second one--the Christmas Ceremonial.

It was more than mirth in one girlish heart--one, at least. It was mounting thanksgiving which often sang itself into a sobbing prayer of joy, like the sun-curl upon the swelling wave when tumultuously it breaks.

For He had come back.

Lieutenant Iver Davenport--without as much hair as Peace Europa, because of the burning effects of mustard gas--slowly recovering from shrapnel-wounds, was back at Camp Evens, where once, in premature passion, he had rashly “bawled out” a sergeant, now, by the fortunes of war, a lieutenant like himself.

His mother and sister had been up to see him. They had sat by his cot in the base hospital, and Sara, knowing the sort of news for which he was thirsting, had told him all the story of their camping summer, making it center chiefly around one leading figure--that of the Torch Bearer, Olive Deering.

She described the waning fires of resolution upon the hill of the night-heron, when grit had gone glimmering, and how Olive had gloriously rekindled the flame from the glow in her own breast--and by the thought of what Soldier Brothers were enduring over there.

“It was from a letter about her cousin Clay--Clayton Forrest--that she read. He apparently did ‘his all’ over there, but came through, as--as did that other cousin of Olive’s, the rich banker’s son, who put in his time working in a shipyard on this side. Atlas, we nicknamed him because when we first saw him he was apparently holding up--supporting--with his back and shoulders a horribly heavy, raw, yellow ship’s rib--and the World with it.... That’s just how he felt; I know he did.... Never mind; I like him awfully well now--ever since I let him take my freak of a dory! Ha! that’s another story.”

So Sara’s tongue ran on, a moved, at times a merry, flame, into the returned soldier’s ear.

“But,”--her voice retreated into the softest twilight of conjecturing speech--“but I don’t believe Atlas--or any one of her cousins--holds up Olive’s world. Perhaps I ought not to say it....”

She broke off, mistily, as her eyes met her brother’s, with the homing hunger in them; her brother who had temporarily lost his hair--but not his smile!

“Do you mean--mean to say”--he began, in the old headstrong way. “Ah, well! nothing matters, girlie, except that I’m at home--at home, alive, and can soon see--everybody--for myself. Although I don’t know whether they’ll let me out of here before Christmas, or not. If they do--if I should be discharged from the hospital, and sent to the Casualty Detachment--why, I might get back to you sooner--sooner than I hope for, now.”

“Quite--unexpectedly--perhaps?”

The sister’s heart gave a flying leap.

“Possibly. But don’t look for it! As I say, what does--anything--matter, except that I will be back with you--sooner or later?”

The Flame suddenly bowed her wet cheek on the narrow cot next his; the ring in the last words, the whole world of relief, gave her for the first time an inkling into the soldier’s lot over there; no letter of his had done so.

“While the fight was on, all was Advance--and a heart full of cheers!”

“I--I was always Iver’s best chum--he said so--but I suppose I’ll have to resign myself now to the fact that when he went over the top at Château-Thierry and St. Mihiel--four times he led his men over the top, once into that Belleau wheat-field, yellow in the morning, red at night, and again into the meadow where he remembers thinking, before he was shot down, that the clover was sweet, even if he couldn’t smell it for the gas--his real thoughts, when he had any, were more of another girl than of me. Well! I can’t be jealous about that, as I was over the things he left with me! Oh! if he only could be discharged before Christmas--and spend it with us!”

Such was the tenor of the sisterly thoughts as the train bore her back to the home city of Clevedon, now daily witnessing the return of officers and men who wore upon their right sleeve the gold stripes telling of service in France--supplemented often and nobly by the added gold which spoke of wounds.

“Dear me! I wish they--the doctors up there at Camp Evens--would pronounce him better, turn him over to the Casualty Department; then he’d probably get his discharge right away, and arrive home unexpectedly--perhaps! Oh-h!”

The bliss of the latter possibility was the spirit in Sara Davenport’s feet which kept them moving elastically from room to room of her father’s suburban bungalow on the day before Christmas Eve. It was a red-hearted wreath here, a garland there, typifying the matchless thanksgiving of this Christmas in many a heart, to be green while life should last--and the heart have a reminiscent throb!

It was creaming, frothing, whipping, mixing, and cutting into diamond shapes which borrowed luster from the diamond mine of contingent expectancy within such as had never transfigured cookies before.

For if Iver should possibly arrive, not even the type of fare set before aviators on a moonlit beach and jollified by the airy slang of space, was meet for the returning You!

“Those air-scouts would call these coated chocolate bars creamed joy-sticks,” thought Sara, as she reverted to candy-making and Camp Fire recipes. “Well! if Iver should be with us, again, on Christmas Day, every mouthful I eat will be a joy-stick--tasteless except for the joy. Oh-h! just suppose he should come to-night while I’m out--attending that Christmas Ceremonial at the Deerings’ home.”

“Maybe I could send him to fetch you,” returned her mother, to whom the latter remark was made aloud. “But, to my mind, there’s hardly a chance of it!... Here’s a box which has just come for you, daughter!”

“Oh, good gracious! it couldn’t be--from--him?”

No! It was a bunch of pearl-white Christmas roses grown in the conservatories of Manchester-by-the-Sea.

With it was no accompanying card, but a sheet of creamy, rough-edged, masculine note-paper, on which were a series of rather clever pen-sketches: overalled girls wielding rake, hoe, and sprayer upon a sea-girt hill; on the next page, a youth steering a blind horse between reefs of lumber, then with his back bent under a ponderous ship’s rib--a girl defying him--lastly, that girl upright in a dory that might have escaped from some boat-bedlam, signaling to Coast Guards.

“Atlas knew what would appeal to a Camp Fire Girl, with a taste for primitive picture-writing,” murmured the Flame to herself, nursing the starry roses, the stars in the eyes above them shining through those gold-tipped lashes, like a rayed nebula. “Well, well! I suppose this is a sort of silent tribute to the fact that we all--all--came through the Game with our wings, as an aviator would say; that we weren’t grounded in what we set out to do!”

A thought which made the awarding of honors at that Christmas Ceremonial, in the dying days of 1918, a rite at once more triumphant and touching than the bestowal of any honor-beads before!

For each khaki-colored bead strung upon a leather thong testified to the contributing of an individual bit in the hour of Freedom’s main bitt, when it was the anchoring prop to which the mainsail of progress, the mainsheet of safety, were made fast.

Yes! and, in a way, the lives over there, too. For many a soldier owed his rations and his recovery to the tireless zeal of voluntary workers on this side of the water.

Who knows but Lieutenant Iver did, as, an hour later, when the spirit of the Ceremonial meeting had turned to Christmas merrymaking, his fingers, long and thin, wielded the colonial knocker and rang the bell of the Deering mansion on Nobility Hill--as certain annals of the city were proud to call it.

“Oh-h! I nev-er could come in, sis.... Such a scarecrow I am--without as much hair as--as that Peace Babe you were telling me about!”

“She! Why! she has a perfect shock now--little Peace Europa! She--she’s growing, at all points, like her name!” It was his sister’s voice, merry, tender--tearfully moved--as she ran down-stairs to meet him. “So--so you were discharged sooner than you expected, Iver.”

“Yes. Got my marching orders from the Casualty Detachment only a few hours ago. Didn’t even wait to telephone! Come to fetch you home--sis!... Why-y! Olive.”

Somehow, as she watched that meeting between the Torch Bearer and the gaunt soldier from over-seas, Sara Davenport, regardless of an onlooking butler, turned aside in the great lighted hall, and hid her wet eyes in the crook of her arm from which the soft leather fringes fell back--just as she had done by the bungalow on the wild sea-beach, after the exciting capture of a spy, when she yearned that Peace might come again.

She was a forked Flame now, as then, cleft by dividing emotions.

For it was evident by the wonderful color on Olive’s cheek, by the joy-brand in her eyes, who--who was the prop that held up her world--her maidenly castles in the air. And it was not Atlas, nor any one of her cousins, fine as might be their war-score!

But not even Sister Sara, only the December breeze fluttering about the brownstone mansion on the hill, heard what passed, yet a little while later, between a very tall, very thin officer, assiduously cultivating a baby crop of new hair, and a dark-eyed girl, upon a balcony of the Deering home, whither maidens in ceremonial dress had flocked to hear far, sweet echoes of Community singing--after the said soldier had been beguiled up-stairs on the plea that he might keep his trench-cap on.

And the said breeze actually halted, cornered by the new mischief--the shy, glad mischief--in Olive’s tones which had hitherto been more on the meditative order.

“I wonder”--murmured the Torch Bearer--“I wonder, now, if I’m the very first Camp Fire Girl to--to be proposed to--that’s what it means, doesn’t it--in head-band and moccasins--ceremonial dress,” shyly.

“But, oh--oh, good gracious! Olive, I oughtn’t; not--not until after I had s-spoken to your father! What will he say?”

The youthful lieutenant’s courage was more flustered than when he led his men over the top into that French clover-meadow where a glance told him that the blossoms were sweet even if he couldn’t smell them through his gas-mask--and for noxious cloud.

“My father! I don’t know what he will say. But--but I rather imagine it will be the same thing he said--when--he saw you hold out your blistered hand--to a private--after you had been so badly burned by that--stray--powder-puff.”

“And what was that?”

“Onward--Christian--Soldier!”

whispered Olive very softly.

The End

From Keel to Kite

How Oakley Rose Became a Naval Architect

By ISABEL HORNIBROOK

12mo Cloth    Illustrated

The story of an up-to-date boy who achieves his ambition against a headwind of difficulty. Son of a Gloucester “skipper” lost on Georges, he is brought up by his grandfather, and inheriting a keen love of vessels, desires to become a naval architect. Obliged to leave high school, he goes to work in an Essex shipyard, hoping to obtain a practical knowledge of vessels. He studies naval architecture there in rainy intervals when shipbuilding is impossible; takes a fishing trip to Georges, and another, full of exciting adventure, to the halibut fletching grounds off the coast of Labrador.

“Boys who delight in adventure, briskly told, will surely find entertainment and profit in reading this wholesome and lively story.”--New York Examiner.

Camp and Trail

By ISABEL HORNIBROOK

12mo Cloth    Illustrated

A story for boys and girls who delight in adventure. Two English boys with their friend, an American collegian, go into the woods of Maine to hunt deer and moose. But they never kill wantonly or for mere sport--only for food or in self-defence. They study the ways of the great game of the woods, and breathe in health, inspiration and noble thoughts with the odor of the pines and the air of lake and mountain.

For sale by all booksellers or sent postpaid on receipt of price by the publishers

LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO., BOSTON

HANDICRAFT FOR HANDY GIRLS

By A. NEELY HALL

Author of “The Boy Craftsman,” “Handicraft for Handy Boys,” “The Handy Boy”

AND DOROTHY PERKINS

Illustrated with photographs and more than 700 diagrams and working drawings

8vo Cloth    Price, Net, $2.00 Postpaid, $2.25

With the aid of an experienced craftswoman, A. Neely Hall, who is in a class by himself as a thoroughly reliable teacher of handicraft, every operation that he describes being first practically worked out by himself, and every working drawing presented being original, new, and actual, has opened the door for the great and constantly increasing number of girls who like to “make things.” Such girls see no reason why the joy of mechanical work should be restricted to their brothers, and with this book it need no longer be. The first part of the book is devoted to a great variety of indoor craft that can be followed in autumn and winter, while the second part, “Spring and Summer Handicraft,” deals with many attractive forms of outdoor life, including an entire chapter on the activities of “Camp Fire Girls.”

“This book will be hailed with delight by all girls who have a Mechanical turn.”--Watchman-Examiner.

“Girls will love just such a book and will find interest for every day of the year in it.”--St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

“Triumphs of ingenuity never dreamed of are to be found in this volume of handicraft that girls can make, but its chief charm is to be found in the practical value of most of the things to be made.”--Lexington Herald.

For sale by all booksellers or sent postpaid on receipt of price by the publishers

Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., Boston

THE LAKEPORT SERIES

By EDWARD STRATEMEYER

VOLUME ONE

THE GUN CLUB BOYS OF LAKEPORT

Or The Island Camp

321 pages    Illustrated    Price $1.25

A bright, breezy, outdoor story, telling how several lads organized a gun club and went camping in the winter time. They had with them a trusty old hunter who revealed to them many of the secrets of Nature as found in the woods. A volume any boy who loves a gun will appreciate.

This story of camping and hunting will appeal to every American boy.--Register, New Haven, Conn.

VOLUME TWO

THE BASEBALL BOYS OF LAKEPORT

Or The Winning Run

315 pages    Illustrated    Price $1.25

With the coming of summer the boys turned their attention to baseball and organized a club, and played many thrilling games. The rivalry was of the keenest, and the particulars are given of a plot to injure the Lakeport nine and make them lose the most important game of all.

Will appeal to every healthy American boy.--American, Baltimore, Md.

VOLUME THREE

THE BOAT CLUB BOYS OF LAKEPORT

Or The Water Champions

300 pages    Illustrated    Price $1.25

This time the scene is shifted to the lake. The boys all know how to row and sail a boat, and they organize a club and have fun galore. During a squall on the lake something of great value is lost overboard. The abduction of a little girl adds to the interest of the volume. Every lad who loves the water will read this volume with pleasure.

This author knows how to please red-blooded lads.--Times-Union, Albany, N. Y.

DOROTHY BROWN

By NINA RHOADES

Illustrated by Elizabeth Withington

Large 12mo Cloth    $1.50 net

This is considerably longer than the other books by this favorite writer, and with a more elaborate plot, but it has the same winsome quality throughout. It introduces the heroine in New York as a little girl of eight, but soon passes over six years and finds her at a select family boarding school in Connecticut. An important part of the story also takes place at the Profile House in the White Mountains. The charm of school-girl friendship is finely brought out, and the kindness of heart, good sense and good taste which find constant expression in the books by Miss Rhoades do not lack for characters to show these best of qualities by their lives. Other less admirable persons of course appear to furnish the alluring mystery, which is not all cleared up until the very last.

“There will be no better book than this to put Into the hands of a girl in her teens and none that will be better appreciated by her.”--Kennebec Journal

MARION’S VACATION

By NINA RHOADES

Illustrated by Bertha G. Davidson

12mo    $1.25 net

This book is for the older girls, Marion being thirteen. She has for ten years enjoyed a luxurious home in New York with the kind lady who feels that the time has now come for this aristocratic though lovable little miss to know her own nearest kindred, who are humble but most excellent farming people in a pretty Vermont village. Thither Marion is sent for a summer, which proves to be a most important one to her in all its lessons.

“More wholesome reading for half grown girls it would be hard to find; some of the same lessons that proved so helpful in that classic of the last generation ‘An Old Fashioned Girl’ are brought home to the youthful readers of this sweet and sensible story.”--Milwaukee Free Press.

For sale by all booksellers, or sent postpaid on receipt of price by the publishers

LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO., Boston