Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl Part 18

Went the phonograph upon the bungalow piazza, as it threw off the music, the quaint Indian accompaniment to those stamping, shuffling, skipping feet, to the queer little half-savage syllables, borrowed from the Creek Indians, upon the lips of the chanting, dancing girls, to the coconut hand-rattle wielded by Aponi, the b.u.t.terfly, most fairy-like of the green dancers, as she led and led, in honor of the new _idlwissi_, or tree-hair, the listening leaves--ethereal partners overhead.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Containing little pebbles picked from the lake-side, with a stick running through the painted coconut-sh.e.l.l for a handle, its gleeful rattle fairly turned girls' heads with the joy of June.

"I think we'll have to ask you to repeat that dance to-night for the benefit of the boys, your guests," said the Scoutmaster, who was manipulating the phonograph. "Fairyland wouldn't be 'in it' with the human leaves tripping in pink and gold and green and--no ordinary man knows what!"

Fairyland, indeed, seemed beaten hollow as "across the lake in golden glory" the waning sunbeams of early June bathed the little floating pier, wreathed in laurel and daisy chains, then climbed with flagging feet, like a tired angel, the sod-steps cut into the side of the steep cliff, and, gaining the top, joined their rose-colored brothers skipping among girlish forms in every fair hue imaginable, claiming partners in a dance as of Northern Lights before ever their human brothers, the scouts in gilded khaki, got a chance at a reel.

"Oh! I feel it in my toes that this is going to be a won-der-ful party,"

said Toandoah's little pal, kicking lightly, impatiently with those satin toes of her party slippers at the tufted gra.s.s, as she sat enthroned upon the sod of the cliff's brow, with two knights beside her, Stud of the stout heart, and a bright-eyed luckless tenderfoot, whose parents, in a fit of dementia surely, had named him Louis Philip Green, which, as he used only the initial letter of his second name, had of course entailed a nickname.

"You promised you'd dance the Lancers with me, although I'm only a tenderfoot," said Peagreen, nibbling a blade of gra.s.s as he lay p.r.o.ne upon the sod and shooting a glance, bright and eager as a robin's, in the direction of the black-haired girl with those skybeams in her eyes under inky lashes.

"Humph! The cheek of some kids who ought to be tucked up in their Beehive when--when that dance comes off!" grumbled the fifteen-year-old Stud, with the arrogance of a Patrol Leader, directing his glance at a brown, conical bungalow flanking a large one, where the younger boys turned in at what seemed to them unseemly hours, while scout veterans sat up overhauling the day's doings for an occasion of a laugh against somebody, practical joke, of course, preferred, to be published in the Henkyl Hunter's typewritten Bulletin and hung up in the porch next morning.

"Well! I'm safe for the Grand March, anyhow--and the Virginia reel, too, eh!" Stud dug congratulatory fists into his brown sides, wriggling aggressively upon the cliff-brow, like Peagreen figuratively hugging the ground with an impatient nose.

Privately he was inclined to the opinion that the blue-eyed girl's friend who had that little nearsighted stand in one of her dark eyes, and two dimples to Pemrose's one, was the daintier "peach" of the two--and that his own sister, Jess, was as pretty as either; but think of the distinction of leading off with a girl whose father would lead off amid the dance of planets, in sending a messenger to the moon, Mars, too, maybe!

"Whoopee!" He kicked the sod as if spurning it as common or garden earth--although there were moments when, like others--elders--in a skeptical world, he told himself that the Thunder Bird would prove, after all, a Flying Dutchman,--just an extravagant dream.

"So--so you were out on the lake this morning, studying pond life with the professor," he said, alluding to the Scoutmaster. "He's instructor in a college and each year he gets us started on something; last summer it was astronomy--he brought a small telescope along."

Pem's heels drummed more excitedly on the sod--the starry heavens were _her_ scope.

"But we have a good deal of fun with the big compound microscope, too--and more without it," acknowledged Studley. "Fancy last week we caught a huge pike which had jumped clear out of the water, on to the bank, after a water-hen!"

"Where was that? How--how big was it?" The girlish questions mounted helter-skelter.

"The pike? Oh! he weighed about fifteen pounds. It was right over there, on the other side of the lake," pointing to the spot where the party interested in egg-boats had landed that morning. "He--he gobbled the hen, too."

"_Did_ he?" But he might have been threatening to gobble her, judging by the start which the girl gave at the moment.

Her heart jumped down to the water's edge as abruptly as did the cliff beneath her.

Her eyes were on a boat rowing out of the sunset's eye directly across the lake from that very spot.

There was but one individual in it and he--he was rowing by instinct, as the birds fly, for his gaze was glued to a newspaper sheet, the sun's own evening edition, gorgeously printed by the painted rays in every hue of the spectrum.

He was heading straight--straight for the floating wharf with its plank-bridge running out ash.o.r.e.

Jack at a Pinch again!

"Do--do you know who he is?" Pem flashed the question upon the older of her two boy-knights.

"Well-ll! I guess so." Stud's joy in the recognition floundered a little. "He--he's the fellow--one of the fellows--who boomed the aeroplane, the other day, to get you girls quietly out of the cave, when there was a 'rattler--'"

"As if we'd have made a fuss, anyhow!" The girl's eyes blazed, again a patchwork, drawing their red center from the sun. "You said--you said that it was so hard to make friends with him, like whistling jigs to a milestone--ah!" Her own voice was suddenly stony. "Have you--oh! have you made any headway since?"

"Humph! Yes. I've found out something about him."

The patrol leader's preoccupied eyes were on the boat edging vaguely nearer to the wharf, with its one "nick.u.m" figure, so nonchalantly rowing, so absorbed in the rainbowed sheet upon its knees that at this moment it awkwardly "caught a crab" and almost suggestively lost an oar.

Simultaneously, however, the phonograph on the piazza struck up, as a prelude to festivities, the Virginia reel, the notes tripping gaily out across the painted lake; and the rower shot one glance upward, as if to say: "I'll be there in time!" then bent his hungry nose to the paper again.

"What--what did you find out about him?" Pem's interest was equally hungry--positively famis.h.i.+ng. "His name--eh?"

"Ha--that's the question! Over on Greylock the farmers' sons call him Shooting Star', alias 'Starry'," with a boyish laugh, "because when they were awf'ly hard up for a player in the last ball game of the series against Willard College, having lost their second baseman and subst.i.tute too, by gracious! he breezed along, an' the captain, hearing he had played on a college team, roped him in ... an'--an', what do you know, but he won the game for that mountain team with a home run! A home run over the left field fence! Bully!"

"But, surely, _they_ know his--real--name!" Pem's aloof absorption in that fell like fog-drip even upon the glow from that left field fence.

"Maybe they do--and maybe they don't! He refused it to the fans. And when the Greylock coach cornered him he palmed it off as Selkirk. But my cousin who's pitcher on the team says in his opinion that was just 'throwing a tub to a whale'--something fishy about it, see?" Stud winked. "For 'Starry' an' his father--who's a queer fish, if ever there was one--had a camp then up on Greylock peak, and the postmaster in charge o' the Greylock mail owned that he received letters for them addressed to another name--only he couldn't--wouldn't--give it away."

"_Wha-at!_"

Pem's hand suddenly smote her lips.

Her wide eyes were no patchwork now. Stud had not thought that a girl's eyes could be so blue. It almost gave him the "w.i.l.l.i.e.s", their remote, peculiar sky-glow, as if afar--afar--they were seeing things.

"What!" she gasped again, while that vivid glow faded, became bluish, blank, the tint of "Moons.h.i.+ne"--of a strange, wild, nondescript dream.

Moons.h.i.+ne that seemed flooding her whole being!

And yet--although she was a quick-witted girl--it was too vague for her to draw from it one clear thought--only an uneasy, unreal, absolutely breathless feeling!

And then the queer, air-drawn sensation as suddenly pa.s.sed--and with it the blue moon which had momentarily turned her world to nothing--"shooed" off by a very real, very tangible, quite pressing apprehension:

"He--he's not coming to the da-nce?"

She sprang up hurriedly, pointing to the boat below; to its one preoccupied figure, clad neither in rough sweater nor May-fly gaudiness, now, but, if the sunset didn't exaggerate, in a very becoming dark suit.

"Humph! I don't know! I guess he is! Didn't think he could pull it off for some reason or other--" Stud's shoulders were shrugged. "But, maybe, he's found where there's a will there's a way."

"Why-y?" The girl's lips were parted breathlessly, her foot involuntarily stamping.

"Oh! you know you told us to invite our friends to the party; not you, but the other girls did, when they signaled across that night from the green Pinnacle--gee! and it was some signaling, too." The scout's glance was teasing now as it shot up from the gra.s.s. "So--so one of the older boys he ran across that bunch o' fellows who were blooming round in the cave the other day--they're all from camps on the lake--and invited the whole five. This one thought he couldn't accept, but I guess he's making a dash at it--at coming just the same!"

"Oh!... Oh, _dear_! I wish he wasn't!"

"Why?" Now it was the scout's turn to hang, breathless, upon the interrogation as he too jumped to his feet.

"Because--oh! because I'd be--be ever so much more comfortable without him--enjoy myself more." Pem caught her breath wildly.

"Then 'twill be A. W. O. L. for him! ... A. W. O. L. for him--if I perish for it!"

"What--what does that mean?"