Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl Part 14

"Well! I'd let somebody else have the piping times if I were you, Buddy--if they depend on a draught from that mysterious spring."

Now, it was the nick.u.m who answered; the same scintillating tones they were--how bully they sounded then--which had quoted Shakespeare on "Something rotten in the State of Denmark", amid other depressing waters, half hidden, half liberated by their ice-cloak.

"I can look out for my own 'piping times'--thank you! And I'm not going to buy any pig in a poke--take any leap in the dark."

The scout's reply was bristling. To a fifteen-year-old patrol leader, a Henkyl Hunter, who went up and down upon the trail of a joke, there was a smack of condescension about that "Buddy", used twice by those big boys; perhaps he, too, at that moment, laid up something against the youth of the flaming tone and rig.

"Humph! hasn't he the nerve, b.u.t.ting in?" he muttered.

"He has--has all sorts of nerve," agreed Pemrose readily, glancing sideways after the boy whose courage she knew to be as high as his colors.

"The Scoutmaster wouldn't hear of our venturing in so far as to investigate that running water, anyhow," said Studley. "My eye! What's the rumpus now--the kettle o' fish?"

It was a shriek from one girl--half-a-dozen girls. It was a loud hiss, almost a whistle, from some pallid vegetation near the lake-edge. It was a black snake rearing a blue-black head and glittering eye within three feet of Una Grosvenor, novice among Camp Fire Girls, whose scream tore at the very stones of Tory Cave until they cried out in echo.

It was a dozen green-clad girls scattering wildly this way and that, olive-green aspen leaves tossing in a whirlwind, shuffling from pillar to post--from rock to darkling rock.

It was--it was a powerful reptile form, in armor of jetty scales, trailing its six-foot length away, the noise of its mighty tail-blows against the earth and flying pebbles calling all the Dumps--the Doleful Dumps--out of the dens where they hid here, making them take strange and shadowy shapes, gigantic shapes, of threat.

"Let me get out! Oh-h! I want to get out, away--anywhere!" shuddered Una. "This is no-o fun."

"Yes! it is--once you get used to it," laughed Pemrose, who--together with the Jack at a Pinch still hovering near--liked her excitement warm.

"Look--_look_ at him crimp himself along! Ever--ever see anything so crooked?" as the great muscle in the reptile's body contracted and relaxed upon its hasty retreat. "When we girls had our War Garden, a year ago, an old farmer said we planted our potato rows so straight that he 'vummed 'twould make a black snake seasick to cross from one to the other.'"

"Ha! Because he just naturally has to go ajee!" laughed her scout knight, estimating the length of that scaly corkscrew, if uncoiled, with his eye. "Pshaw! I've tamed 'em--and killed 'em, too," he added.

"Yes! a black snake wouldn't harm you, even if he did bite." Pem was still rea.s.suring her friend. "Did you hear him whistle?... But--but what's that?" It was just half a minute later that she put the question.

"He isn't making that noise with his tail still; is he?"

She looked at Stud. Under the ruby eye of the lamp his face--the face of a Stoutheart--had turned suddenly pea-green.

His eyes were fixed upon a gleam of bloated yellow dimly seen, under the lee of a rock, not very many yards away--the venomous, pale yellow of the dropsical cave fungi.

"Why--why! it's only one of those horrid, blowzy, mushroom things. But _what's_ the noise--like--like somebody rattling little marbles, dry peas?"

The girl felt her own breath go ratatat as she put the question.

"Oh-h! only some fellow rattling--rattling--beans in his pocket. Let's get away--quick!"

And then Pemrose knew what it was to look upon a Stoutheart "rattled."

But, with that, a voice, a cry, not loud, but strong, exploded like a spring gun in the cave,--suddenly halting advance.

"What's that outside? What's that outside?" it whooped. "Is it an aeroplane? _Two_ aeroplanes? Oh! hurry out--and see."

"A dozen aeroplanes! A corps of aeroplanes!" boomed back those flaunting big boys, of whom the nick.u.m was leader, playing up to the cue of the Scoutmaster who had started the concentrated cry. "Oh, hurry--hurry!"

She saw him fling his mayflowers on the ground, that strange youth, and s.n.a.t.c.h at Una's hand, to drag her along towards the low cave entrance.

He made a wide, circling movement to catch at hers, too. But she dodged it. Never more should he play Jack at a Pinch to her! Never!

Through old Tory Cave there surged the noise of a rising wind, silencing that weak gust afar off, now baleful, the sound of the hidden water; reverberating among the rocks, it might be taken for anything, for the hum of aircraft--for a perfect onslaught of sky cavalry!

And the Scoutmaster's cry was convincing.

Yet--yet, when boys and girls tumbled tumultuously through the cave entrance--the girls by some mysterious understanding, first--not a remote sign of a biplane, even a meager _one_, decorated the sky overhead.

No flying wires sent down their challenge. And the hum resolved itself into what it was: the rising, random mockery of Ta-te, the tempest, laughing at their searching looks, going north, south, east and west, aloft, skirmis.h.i.+ng in bewilderment to all points of the horizon.

"Hum-m. There isn't a _sign_ of a buzz-wagon! Who pulled off that stunt--on--us?" bleated a few of the mystified younger boys, while Stud silently brushed moisture like cave-tears from his forehead.

So did the tall Scoutmaster, heavily breathing relief.

"Not an aeroplane in sight! Not a single one!" breezed the girls, all ready to be angry. "Who--who put that hoax over?"

"Varnish right--and aeroplane wrong!" It was the freakish voice of a nick.u.m which answered. "No! No buzzer, as the boys say, but there was a rattler, in there, beside that rock. If some of you girls had gone ahead, you'd have stepped right on him!"

"A 'rattler!' A big rattlesnake! And--and you started the cry, to get us out quietly--quickly!"

"Not we! The Scoutmaster had the presence of mind to launch an aeroplane. We boomed it," came the laughing reply, as Jack at a Pinch, second fiddle now, marched off with his companions.

"Who--is he?" Pemrose caught wildly at the arm of Stud, who was wis.h.i.+ng that he and not those patronizing big boys had caught the Scoutmaster's cue and created airdrawn aeroplanes by the corps. "Do you--do you know who he is; that biggest--that gaudiest--one among them?"

"Yes! No-o! I do--an' I don't!" stammered the boyish Henkyl Hunter.

"I--we--" indicating his scout brothers--"have met him a couple of times in the woods; I guess his father an' he have a camp on the opposite side of the lake from ours. We've talked with him--tried to be friendly. And he--he's always jolly, you know--like now! But--but when it comes to finding out anything about either of them, gee, you might as well whistle jigs to a milestone--so-o you might!"

CHAPTER XVI

THE COUNCIL FIRE

"Across the lake in golden glory, The fairy gleams of sunlight glow.

Another day of joy is ending, The clouds of twilight gather low."

Another day of joy, indeed! Without peril of rattlesnake--or marplot nick.u.m to spoil it!

"'Varnish right--and aeroplane wrong!' That's what _he_ said when they laid that trap to get us out of the cave, without any fuss. But I say it's: 'Varnish right--and puzzle wrong!' All wrong!" snapped Pemrose to herself again and again, repeating an old saying during the week following that first Get Together. "n.o.body--n.o.body has a right to drift around as a puzzle, these days! If ever I get a chance, see me snub him har-rd--though he did rescue me twice! Well, thank goodness! it was the Scoutmaster, not he, who played Jack at a Pinch in Tory Cave."

And it was the Scoutmaster, in days gone by, with the help of his boys, who had built the great stone fireplace in the girls' bungalow in which a brilliant Council Fire was now blazing. Across the lake the golden glory stole, and girls came tip-toeing to the hearth-flame in soft, ceremonial dress, fringed and beaded, the firelight, like dawn, flus.h.i.+ng the pearl of their headbands,--and Pem forgot the enigma of that eighteen-year-old youth who seemed to have a trick of bobbing up, now and again, under the lee of a summer holiday, like some menacing spar to leeward of a vessel in fair sail.

Well! to recall Stud's figure of speech, n.o.body was "whistling jigs" to his milestone heart now--or trying to. The fire was the fiddler; and wax was not softer or more responsive than the pliant b.r.e.a.s.t.s on which its music fell.

"I watched a log in the fireplace burning."

They whispered it one to another and under the spell of its transfiguring lay, bent forward, they witnessed the last act in a pine-tree pantomime.