Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl Part 15

A dazzling transformation scene it was: in the glow they could see, summed up, each transition of light and heat that went before: dawn's tender flame, the fierce blaze of high noon, ruby rays of evening streaming now across the Bowl--hill-girt lake without--gathered, all gathered, in a golden age behind them to feed the sap of a n.o.ble tree, here poured forth, amid a radiant ballet of flame and spark, to furnish life, light--inspiration--to a Council Fire.

"I watched a log in the fireplace burning, Oh! if I, too, could only be Sure to give back the love and laughter, That Life so freely gave to me!"

Tanpa, the Guardian, softly breathed it. And in the eye of more than one girl the wish was trans.m.u.ted into a tear,--into something more tender, more transported, than a laugh, as the log, in a final spurt, gave all, and fell, like a tired dancer, upon the broad hearth, its rosy chiffons crumpled and fading into the pale gray of wood-ashes.

"There it goes!" The eyes of Pemrose were a patchwork now, flame embroidered upon their shining blue; oh! if she were to give forth what Life gave to her, which of her Camp Fire Sisters would have such riches to reflect?

It had been hers--hers--to share the dream of a great inventor, to look forward with him to the pioneering moment--the beginning of that which would surely, in time, draw the Universe visibly together--the moment when the Thunder Bird should fly.

She never qualified that dream by an _if_, wherever the funds to equip it might come from--or even if it had to wait a dozen years, Toandoah's triumph, like that fortune "hung up--" for the great Bird to make its new migration to the moon, in proof that s.p.a.ce was no barrier--when the Thunder Bird, giving all, as the log had done, would drop its skeleton upon the desert of that silent satellite.

But there were steps to be taken in the meantime--exciting steps in the ladder of success. Those patchwork eyes, looking into the flame now, counted them, one by one, and hung in breathless antic.i.p.ation upon the first: upon the moment, so soon to come off, when old Greylock would really send back a shout of gladness, for on his darkling summit the hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America would press the b.u.t.ton and loose the lesser Thunder Bird to fly up the modest distance of a couple of hundred miles, or so, with its diary in its head, and send back the novel record of its flight.

"I--do--believe that my father sleeps with one eye open, thinking of that golden egg, as he calls it--the little recording apparatus," she said, when the White Birch Group, as one, asked that the special program for this ceremonial meeting should be a talk from an inventor's daughter upon this most daring enterprise of the age. "He says that if _that_ does not drift back to earth safely with the crow-like parachute--if anything should happen to it, to the two little wheels, with the paper winding from one on to the other, all dashed with pencil marks--the world would call him a fool's mate.... If it did!" Pem's teeth were clinched. "But, of course, without the record, there would be nothing to show how high the little rocket had really flown--showing the bigger one the road," with an excited gasp.

"Yes, I can understand how anxious he must be about the safe return of the egg--or the log--whichever you choose to call it--the first record from s.p.a.ce, anyway." Tanpa's tone was almost equally excited. "And of course the wind may play pranks with the parachute--drift it away down the mountainside!"

"So that we'd lose it in the darkness--oh-h!" Pem shivered upon the thought. "But we'll all be on the lookout to prevent that, as many of us as are there--and that won't be more than a picked few, Dad says, to witness this first experiment.... When--when the real Thunder Bird flies, though--" she turned those patchwork eyes now, sky-blue, flame-red, upon her companions--"you'll all--all-ll be there. And, oh!

won't it--won't it be a sight to watch--it--tear?"

Drooping towards the fire-glow, lips parted in entranced a.s.surance, the slight figure became lost in the same dream which had held it months before in a February Pullman, while a daring flame, like a red-capped pearl diver, plunging into the mystery of that fairy thing, that gleaming stole about her neck brought out milky flashes of l.u.s.ter--together with those New Jerusalem tints, jade and gold and ruby.

Finished now it was, the pearl-woven prophecy--fair record to go down to posterity!

In faith--such faith as had inspired Penelope, faithful wife, of old, to weave and unravel her endless web, steadfast in the belief of her husband's return, so the girlish fingers upon the loom had wrought the transcendent story to a finish.

To a finish even to the sprinkling of gold pieces, the yellow bonanza, coming from somewhere, to gorge the Thunder Bird, for its record flight; to a finish even to the celestial climax, the little blue powder-flash lighting up the dear, fair face of Mammy Moon!

But of one climax, more celestial still, Pemrose Lorry could not speak, not even to these her Camp Fire Sisters: of the evening of the second wreck--the wreck of hope after that third installment of a disappointing will had been read--when she had taken the four feet and a half of pearl poem to her father's workshop, the grim hardware laboratory, and out of the home of light, which she herself hardly understood, in her young, young heart, had told him, doubtful of the future, that she knew the invention would win out--the Thunder Bird go where nothing earthly had ever gone before.

And he had whispered something--something surpa.s.sing--about a Wise Woman who saved a city.

It made sacred every thought now, and humbled it, too, in the breast of this little sixteen-year-old girl, with the mingled yarn in her nature--the mingling spice in her name.

Others had these fair stoles, too, the history of their girlish lives woven in pearls of typical purity, crossed by vivid representations of events. Drooping to their knees, in symbolic beauty, finishing with the soft leather fringes on which a breeze sweeping down the wide chimney played, they flashed here and there in the high colors of adventure--the quaintly symbolized adventure tale.

But none could match the theme of the two little primitive figures upon the mounttain-top, the inventor looking through a tube, the comet-like streak of fire above them: the opening of a highroad through s.p.a.ce,--the first step towards a federation of the heavenly bodies.

The record to go down to posterity!

Yet old Earth had still her individual romance of seedtime and harvest, sun and storm, peril and deliverance.

Emblematically depicted these were in the pearl strip of a girl, with a winsome reflection of Andrew's thistle-burr in her speech. Born "far awa' in bonnie Scotland", the thistle and America's goldenrod blent their purple and gold upon her young shoulders; there was an idealized plow, representing the peaceful agricultural calling of her father,--and a jump from peace to peril in the primitively symbolized scene of a shipwreck through which she had been with him when crossing the Atlantic in a sailing vessel.

"We had all to take to the boats, you see," said Jennie McIvor, "for the ship was leaking so badly that she couldn't keep afloat but a wee bit longer; and we had a verra rough time until we were picked up."

A rough time, indeed, typified by the wildly driven little canoes--the most primitive form of the boat--tossed upon stiff water-hills, brooding above them the quaint, corkscrew figure, with the eye in its head, of Ta-te, the tempest.

Somehow, this eye--the spying wind's eye--haunted Pemrose that night, curled up in a previous suggestion of the Guardian's which, momentarily, had twisted itself, snake-like, around her heart.

Suppose Ta-te should prove cruel to her, as to Jennie whom she had eventually spared! Suppose, on the great night of the first experiment with Toandoah's little rocket, Ta-te, jealous of a rival in the small Thunder Bird which could out-soar all the winds of Earth--out-soar even the air, their cradle--should meanly seize upon the black, silk parachute, light as soot, anch.o.r.ed to the golden egg, the little recording apparatus! Suppose it should whirl both off, away from the eager hands stretched out to claim them, hide them in a dark recess of the mountain side, maybe, where they could not be found for days,--possibly never!

Ta-te _could_ play fast and loose with her father's reputation, she knew; at least, with the witness to his success as an inventor.

"If the wind should do that," she thought, "then the World, some part of it--the horrid World--will say that Mr. Hartley Graham's last thoughts about that mile-long will were wise ones: that it was better--better to leave all that money 'hung up' awaiting the possible return of that madcap younger brother--who'll make ducks and drakes of it, most likely--than--than to turn it over to a Thunder Bird," with a faint flash of a smile, "in spite, oh! in spite of the fact that daring volunteers--skilled aviators--are wild to take pa.s.sage in the far-flying Bird."

Yes! even that youthful hotspur who used the cream of rough-edged paper, and was willing to try anything once, though it should be once for all.

The girl's thought reverted to him now as she gazed into the bungalow fire, seeing in the gusty flicker of every log that menacing spiral,--the brooding wind's eye.

It claimed her, that wild, red eye, even while her companions of the White Birch Group were excitedly discussing their picturesque plans for the morrow; for the celebration of their annual festival in honor of the birch trees bursting into leaf, for the odes, the songs, the dances, the planting, each, of a silvery sapling.

It mesmerized her, did Ta-te's eye, with its setting of flame, even to the exclusion of enthusiasm about the big dance--the joyous Together--in the evening, of which Una raved in antic.i.p.ation now and again, and for which these two friends and rivals in the matter of eyelashes had brought their prettiest party dresses.

The elders presiding over the destinies of both had given a happy consent to Tanpa's invitation, and the two were now the guests for a few days of the mountain Group at their camp on the egg-shaped Bowl.

The sigh of the mountain breeze came soothingly across the lake to lull their slumbers as they lay down to rest, side by side, in the little bungalow cots of which a dozen ranged the length of the great water-side dormitory half-open, half-screened.

Yet Pem fell asleep imploring Ta-Te--and lost the little record altogether in her dreams!

Up and down old Greylock she plodded, looking for it, hand in hand with Toandoah,--but ever it eluded them!

Muttering, bereft, she tossed; then for a moment awoke, blinkingly sat up, to see the moonlight flickering--Mammy Moon's own smile--upon the pearl-woven prophecy beside her, from which she could hardly be parted by night or day.

Sleep again! And now it was not only the diary but the Thunder Bird, itself, that was lost,--astray in s.p.a.ce, and she with it!

She was trying to catch it by the fiery tail-feathers when, all of a sudden--all of a sober sudden--those feathers became soft, flopping, buffeting,--real.

They brushed her parted lips. They flopped against her cheek. They even mopped the dews of slumber from her eyes.

"Hea-vens! W-what is it-t?"

Wildly she sat up--a second time--to see the dawn poking at her with a pink finger and the lake shimmering without, a great pearl found by the morning in an iridescent oyster-sh.e.l.l of mist.

And, within, a b.u.mping, buffeting something, soft as moss, dun-gray as terror--blundering into every sleeper's face, as if testing its warmth, bowling its way along the line of cots.

"Cluck! Cluck! Flutter! Flutter! Awake! Awake! I'm lost! I'm lost!" it said.

"What is it? _What is it?_"

Never was such an exciting reveille as girl by girl bounded up--elastic--fingering a brushed, a tickled cheek.

The answer was a screech that made the morning blush, as if a ghost had invaded the Tom Tiddler's ground of open day light.

Una shrieked in echo.

Morale was undermined. Cots were vacated. Maiden jostled maiden, all colliding upon a gaping question that fanned sensation sky-high--until the bungalow fairly rocked upon a hullabaloo.