Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl Part 13

Now he was laughing at the wrong side of his mouth, as he peeped over the brink.

"Oh-h! the rock _isn't_ perpendicular; it slants down, though, pretty sharply--down into an inner cave--by gracious! And Ruddy, the way he's hanging his nose, is within an inch or two o' the floor of that other cave!... And, yet, he's helpless! Helpless as if he had a halter round his neck! Oh-h! if some of the other fellows were here."

But Stud did not seem to be quite alone; he was one and a half; for the hearts of two girls were pendent from _his_ neck; outside he knew they were backing him,--praying for him.

Also, that frenzied gurgle from the victim's throat, his choking cry as the light struck him, the squirming body and up-rolling eyes told the boy scout that he was just in time; although the foam was pink upon Ruddy's lips and his congested head was a fire-ball, indeed,--that brash head with all his chances in it.

"Ha!

"No Loyal Scout gives place to doubt, But action quick he shows!"

The song, his own, the original march-song of his troop, sang itself through Stud's brain, seethed in the low whistle upon his lips, as, guided by his ruby breast-eye, he slid down into that strange and secret dungeon in which the black pa.s.sage ended and, thrusting his st.u.r.dy shoulders under the pendent body of the victim whose convulsed hands clutched vainly at the bare slab, raised it so that the choking boy could breathe freely again--and in due time shake off the dizziness of his awful plight, hung up by the heels by the rock itself.

But not until the Scoutmaster came to his patrol leader's a.s.sistance could those pinioned feet be really freed and their owner brought to daylight again, not by a return via the fissure route, but hoisted in a rope-noose, as Pem had been from the Devil's Chair, through a gra.s.s-covered opening discoverable in the roof of that inner cave.

"Goodness! after all, he wasn't so much more foolish--headstrong--than I was. But Una! Una! If you ever-r tell them!" Thus did the maiden of the chowchow name spill her spice into her friend's ear,--burning spice, for, privately, she was shocked at seeing her own folly, parodied, vulgarized, as it were.

"Well! I should say! He was hanging between hawk and buzzard--if ever a fellow was," happened to be Stud's moved comment as, clinging to that lowered rope, he was hoisted, too, through that covert opening, the loyal little lamp upon his breast paling now into a penny candle held towards the sun.

But the rescuer's halo did not pale.

It burnished the picnic luncheon which followed, encircling, rainbow-like, little Jessie who basked in it more than did the rebellious hero, pelted with wild flowers by the girls--as symbolic of other bouquets.

"Oh! let up--let up--will you? Those big fellows will take me for the 'goat'--somebody's 'goat'!" protested Stud helplessly, striving to direct attention from himself by training it upon a straggling group of distant youths, really too far off to take stock of what was going on among the merry picnic party.

But Pemrose was taking stock of them. Her widening eyes, her reddening cheeks, the little piqued s.h.i.+ver that electrified her chin, told that one figure--one figure--called for recognition; called for it, indeed, so loudly that it couldn't be denied him.

Every member of that group--a canoeing party, a wading party, it was, just landed from the near-by river, the blue Housatonic--was a blaze of color.

But the st.u.r.diest among them was simply barbaric. The warm sunlight of May dripped golden from his nick.u.m shoulders, bronzed to the hue of a statue, bathed his bare knees and feet, his khaki shorts, the flame of an apricot jersey, the black and yellow cap,--the sheaf of mayflowers within his arm.

"Oh! how boys--big boys--do revel in color. A girl--any girl I ever knew--is demure in her taste beside them," murmured the Camp Fire Guardian, with amused, motherly tolerance.

"Pshaw! I think it's hor-rid. So flashy!" snapped Pemrose; Jack at a Pinch had made gorgeous his incivility and was parading it before her eyes.

"Oh, boy! Look at that middle fellow. He'd have a grosbeak 'skun a mile'!" gasped Stud, following the direction of her glance, with a virtuous consciousness of his own cave-soiled khaki, moderately lit by merit badge and service stripe.

"'Grosbeak!' Oh, but I love grosbeaks! And all that color--why! it paints the landscape," came flutteringly from Aponi, the White Birch b.u.t.terfly, least Priscilla-like in her tastes of the Group, when she was not in Camp Fire green, or soft-toned ceremonial dress.

"Maybe 'twill paint the blues in old Tory Cave, if we run across them there," put in Tomoke, maiden of the flambeau and the fire-talk. "They certainly are a perfect 'scream', those big boys," her eyes merrily following that clamor of color now wending back towards the canoes.

"Humph! they'd have to 'go some' to leaven the blues of Tory Cave,"

remarked the Scoutmaster, laughingly addressing himself to a roll. "The biggest bonfire on earth wouldn't half dry the cave-tears there."

"Yes, that's the den of the Doleful Dumps--their diggings!" laughed a younger scout, flouris.h.i.+ng aloft a mess-mug, the gray of his rolling eyes. "Bats--bats as big as saucers--no, soup-plates! And, far in--far in--the sound of running water, like a weak wind!"

"Running water! Invisible running water! A--weak--wind! Oh-h! do let us hurry and go on there. We have to cross the river; haven't we?" The gurgle of that cloistered brooklet was already in Pem's heart as her dilating gaze spanned the Housatonic, broad and open, "warbling" amid its soft meadow slopes, as she had looked upon it from the Devil's Chair. "But, goody! I hope we _won't_ run across him there--Jack at a Pinch! Flaunting round like a grosbeak!" She bit the thought into an olive. "Stud's no grumpy riddle--if he is a Stoutheart, like the other!"

CHAPTER XV

AIRDRAWN AeROPLANES

Running water! Invisible running water! The voice behind the scenes prompting the play,--the grim play of bat and rat and reptile in old Tory Cave, where the rocks wept, the little strolling sunbeams clapped their hands, and the great fungi, primrose-skirted, drooped over a drama never finished!

It was even more romantic than the girls had hoped for,--such romance as clings, cobweb-like, to melancholy.

Like a weak wind, truly, a sad wind blowing from nowhere, was the purl of that hidden streamlet whose mystery no man had penetrated--nor ever seen its flow--mournfully as cave tears it dripped upon the ears and hearts of the girls.

"Pshaw! Who cares for weeping rocks, though they look as if they were bursting with grief and ready to tear their pale hair--that queer growth clinging to them. Humph! Only crocodile tears, anyhow, like 'Alice in Wonderland!'" cried Ista, the laughing Eye of the White Birch Group, whose everyday name was Polly Leavitt.

"It's _not_ the tears and it's not that horribly sad lake with the little, blind, colorless fish in it, that I mind--it's the Bats!"

screamed Una Grosvenor. "Oh-h!" as the mouse-like head of the cave mammal and its skinny wing almost brushed her face.

"Well! They're not brick-bats," came rea.s.suringly from one of the boys, as the Togetherers ranged through the outer part of that vast Tory Cave--once the hiding-place of a political refugee, whose spirit seemed flitting among them in the filmy cave-fog which, dank and mournful, clung about the margin of that strange lake of fresh water where blind fish played.

Presumably fed by that cloistered brooklet, whose cell, far in, in an impenetrable recess, no human foot had ever trod, the lakelet had the floor to itself, so to speak, so that in places scouts with their lamps, and girls pairing off with their exploring brothers, one piloting eye between them, had difficulty in skirting it--without a ducking.

"Whew! a ducking in the dark--a cave-bath--horrible!" cried Pemrose.

"Oh, mer-rcy! what--what is it?"

"Bah! Only a garter snake--a pretty fellow," laughed Studley, picking the slim, striped thing up from a corner of the blind lake where it was amphibiously basking, and letting it curl around his khaki arm, investigating the merit badges of the patrol leader.

The green and red of the life-saver's embroidered badge, the crossed flags of the expert signaler, the white plow of the husbandman, they enlivened the gloom a wee bit, winking up at the safety lamp hooked to his hat-band, as he bent over the illumined reptile.

But they did not challenge it as did the flash of an apricot sweater, blood-red in the ruby lamplight, of a black and yellow cap, several yellow and black caps, suddenly--eagerly--thrust near.

"He's big--big for a garter, isn't he, Buddy?" remarked a voice that did not come from the ranks of Togetherers, of Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls, excitedly scrutinizing Stud's novel armlet.

Neither--neither was it the voice of the nick.u.m, so much Pemrose knew, as she edged coldly a little away,--a little nearer to the dim and sighing lake-edge.

Yet he was among them, those gaudy big boys, whose flare of color merely striped the cave-dusk, like the dingy markings upon the snake's squirming back.

He actually had his armful of mayflowers, too, the nick.u.m, not the snake; _pa.s.se_ mayflowers, with the tan of decay on them, was nursing them carefully, as if they were part of a long lost heritage into which he had lately come--as if he were afraid to lay them down lest some alien should s.n.a.t.c.h them from him.

"He doesn't look like a 'chuff'--a boor. He looks like a really nice college boy, one with a hazing imp in his eye though, lur-rking in that little star--almost a squint; so--so like Una's," thought the inventor's daughter, familiar with the student brand of boy. "Yet how could he be so uncivil to us, really--actually--snub us, after all he did, too?

Goodness! wouldn't I like to get a chance to snub him?" It was the Vain Elf which slept in the shadow of the Wise Woman in the breast of Pemrose Lorry, that stored this wish, laid it up, a vengeful arrow in the blue quiver of her eyes, now shooting piqued, sidelong glances at those flaunting big boys. "Why-y _should_ we run up against them here?

Well! he'll never get a chance to play Jack at a Pinch--friend in need--to me again. Watch me--watch me pick my steps!" She picked them so at random, at the moment, moving off, that she came near slipping in for that eerie ducking, with the blind fish--pale as phantoms, swimming round--and Stud, flinging the striped garter away, hurried after her--Jessie, too!

"Gee! this is a peach of a cave; isn't it?" effervesced the scout sarcastically. "Melancholy so blooming thick that you could almost sup its sorrow with a spoon, eh?"

"It's a regular cave of despair." The lonely trill of the feathered hermit was in Jessie's answering note. "That sad voice of water, a cascade--a stream--far in, which n.o.body ever saw!"

"I'd give worlds to see it!" said Pemrose.

"So would I!" Stud's voice was pitched high. "If it weren't for the Scoutmaster.... Tradition says that whoever drinks of that hidden water will have luck."