The Camp Fire Girls on the Open Road Part 18

Being part of the surprise for the guests she couldn't very well go out and risk being seen; she just had to stay in the room and wait for someone from our floor to come along. For a long while n.o.body came, and then, when she was about ready to give up, she did hear footsteps coming down the corridor. It was dark by that time and she couldn't see who it was, but she pounced out like a cat on a mouse and dragged the girl into her room.

"Paint a blue band on my neck, quick!" she commanded, thrusting out the paint box and switching on the light.

Then she saw who it was. It was Sally Prindle. Hinpoha was a little taken aback, but she had about exhausted her patience waiting for someone to come by and help her.

"Will you, please?" she pleaded, holding out the paints enticingly.

"What is it?" asked Sally dully, looking at Hinpoha in that crazy costume as if she thought she was not in her right mind.

Hinpoha explained the urgent and immediate need of a blue band of a certain shade on her neck.

"But I never painted anything before," objected Sally.

"You'll never learn any younger," said Hinpoha, jubilant that Sally hadn't walked out with her nose in the air. "Here, take the brush, I'll show you what to mix; see, this and this and this."

Under Hinpoha's direction Sally painted the blue band and then regarded her handiwork with critical eyes.

"Thanks, that's fine," said Hinpoha, holding out her hand for the paints.

"It needs something more," said Sally slowly, squinting at Hinpoha's neck. "Do you mind if I use any more paint?"

"Go as far as you like," said Hinpoha, surprised into flippancy, "let your conscience be your guide!"

Sally made swift dabs at the little color squares, her face all puckered up in a deep frown of concentration.

"Now, how do you like it?" she asked anxiously, after a few minutes, leading Hinpoha to the mirror.

Hinpoha says she screamed right out when she looked, she was so surprised and delighted. For on the front of the band Sally had painted the most wonderful ornament. It was an enormous ruby, set in a gold frame, the design of which simply took your breath away. How she ever did it with the colors in Hinpoha's box is beyond us.

"Oh, wonderful!" raved Hinpoha, hugging Sally in her extravagant way. "I can't wait until the girls see it. Won't I make a sensation, though! Come to the party, won't you please, Sally? We'd love to have you."

Sally shook her head and prepared to depart. "I have to go," she said with a return to her old brusque manner. "I have another engagement."

But Hinpoha saw the wistful look that came into her face and she knew that Sally's "other engagement" was waiting on table in the boarding house where she lived.

Hinpoha's painted jewelry created a sensation all right. Cries of admiration rose on every side, and the fact that the stony-faced Sally Prindle had done it only added to the sensation. Who would ever have suspected that the most inartistic-looking girl in the whole college had such a talent up her sleeve?

Two days later there was another excited meeting of the LAST OF THE WINNEBAGOS.

"Our fortune's made!" shrieked Agony joyfully, dancing around the room and waving a j.a.panese umbrella over her head.

"Why? How?" we all cried.

"The fad! The fad!" shouted Agony.

"What fad?" I asked. "Do stop capering, Agony, and put down that umbrella before you break the lamp shade. We've smashed three already this year."

"Don't you see," continued Agony, breathless, dropping down on the bed and fanning herself with the handle of the umbrella. "Hinpoha's started a fad with that painted jewelry--blessings on that fool notion of hers of painting a band on her neck, anyway! Half a dozen girls came to cla.s.ses this morning with bands painted on their necks and ornaments in front that they'd gotten Sally to paint for them. In another day the whole college will be after her to paint ornaments on their necks. Don't you see what I mean? We've got to join forces with Sally, set up in business for the Benefit of the Red Cross--and the cup is ours. Whoop-la! Oh, girls, don't you _see_!"

We saw, all right. Inside of two minutes Sally was voted a member of the LAST OF THE WINNEBAGOS and in a few hours business was in full swing.

Sally, of course, was the star of the cast, but the rest of us worked just as hard as press agents. We placarded the whole college with posters announcing that Mme. Sallie Prindle, the distinguished painter of jewelry, would create, for the benefit of the Red Cross, any combination of precious stones desired by the paintee--charges twenty-five cents and up. Students were urged to show their patriotism by appearing in cla.s.sroom adorned with one of the masterpieces of the above-mentioned Prindle.

It was a success from the word go. The fad spread like wildfire, and Sally spent all her waking hours that were not actually taken up with recitations painting jewelry on fair necks and arms. Lessons were almost forgotten in the fascinating business of admiring designs and comparing effects, and many were the wails because the wonderful things had to be washed off all too soon. We had offered our room as studio because Sally's was too far away from the center of things, and most of the time it was so crowded with eager customers that we couldn't get in ourselves.

Prices rose as business increased, and the candy box we were using for a bank showed signs of collapsing.

The next week the juniors gave a dance and they all ordered dog collars for the occasion. Everybody else had to stand aside. Prices for these were to be one dollar and up, according to how elaborate they were. How Sally ever got them all on without fainting in her tracks will always be a mystery. She did a lot of them the night before and then the girls wound their necks with gauze bandages to keep them clean. Miss Allison, who dropped in during the performance, folded up on the bed and laughed until she was weak.

"I never saw anything to equal it, never," she declared. "There's never been such a fad in the history of the college." Then she sat up and demanded a dog collar herself.

"Why on earth didn't you tell us you could paint jewelry, Sally Prindle?"

she asked, as she watched those swift fingers doing their wonderful work.

"Of all things, wasting your time specializing in mathematical figures, when all the time you had designs like these in your head!"

"I never knew I could do it," said Sally in a funny, bewildered fashion that set the girls all a-laughing. "I never had a paint brush in my hand before. _She_,"--pointing to Hinpoha--"put the things into my hands and ordered me to paint, and I painted. It came to me all of a sudden."

Did we get the loving cup? I should say we did! By the end of the month we had raised five hundred and some odd dollars, more than half of the total, and by far the largest amount raised by any group. We were all wrecks by the time it was over, because we had to take turns waiting on table down at Sally's boarding house to hold her job for her while she worked up in our room; besides getting the paint off the girls' necks again. That wasn't always an easy job because sometimes she had to use things beside water colors to get certain effects.

But it was well worth our while, for the LAST OF THE WINNEBAGOS have achieved undying fame. Migwan started it with her fake Indian legend and the rest of us surely carried it to a grand finish. The best of the whole business, though, was getting Sally.

Do you know why she was so queer and stand-offish to people all this while? She told us in a burst of confidence that night after we had been given the loving cup. O Katherine, it would almost break your heart. It seems she has a brother who forged a note last year and was sent to prison. She considered that money a debt of honor which she must pay back, and so she came away to college, planning to work her way through and become a teacher of mathematics, which was her strong subject. But she had taken her brother's disgrace so to heart that she thought the people in college would consider her an outcast if they found it out, and, rather than go through the misery of having people drop her after they had been friendly with her she made up her mind to make no friends at all, and then she didn't need to worry about their finding it out and cutting her. It broke her all up to turn down our offers of friendship last fall and she left Purgatory because she couldn't bear to see us after that.

Think of it, Katherine, what she must have suffered, and n.o.body to tell it to! And everybody calling her a prune! We all cried over her and a.s.sured her a million times we didn't care a rap what her brother had done; we loved her and were proud to have her for a friend. She was a different girl after that. All the stiffness came out of her like magic and she looked like a person who has been let out of prison after being shut up for years. Her great dread all the time had been that somebody would find out about her brother; now that we actually knew it and it didn't make a bit of difference, the big load was off her spirits. From being the most unpopular girl in the cla.s.s she suddenly became one of the most popular.

All her money troubles faded too, because she got work making designs for a big Art Craft jewelry shop that paid her enough so she didn't have to borrow any more money.

The nicest part of it all, though, was what Agony did. The night that Sally Prindle told us about her brother Agony wrote to her father, who, I imagine, must be a very influential man, and asked if he could get Sally's brother pardoned. Just how Agony's father went about it we will never know, but not long afterward Sally got a letter from her brother saying that he had been pardoned on the condition that he would enlist in the army, which he had done.

Think what that meant to Sally! Instead of being afraid anyone would find out she had a brother she could now speak of him as proudly as the other girls did who had brothers in the army; could take her place with the proudest of them.

Oh, Katherine, if we could only see right through people and know just why they do things the way they do, what a wonderful world this would be!

Lovingly yours, Gladys.

KATHERINE TO THE WINNEBAGOS

April 25, 19--.

Dearest Winnies:

I thought it had all happened, that is, everything that was going to happen for the next ten years, but it seemed that the excitement of the last few weeks was but a beginning, and a very humble beginning at that!

We had just gotten over the sensation of the fire and the arrest of the negro, and school was in running order again and life in general had resumed the even tenor of its ways, when, without warning, the sky fell on the house of Adams. They say that coming events cast their shadows before, and that everything works out according to a fixed rule, but this could only have been the exception that proved the rule. Having battered around this wicked world for twenty years I thought I was prepared for all the shocks that human flesh is heir to, and that no matter what happened there was a special rule of etiquette to fit it, but there was nothing in all my experience, nor in the Ten Commandments, nor Hoyle, nor Avogadro's Hypothesis, nor Grimm's Law, that prepared me for what happened next.

Sat.u.r.day was the fateful day. Sat.u.r.day is the day on which everything happens to me. I was born on Sat.u.r.day; it was on Sat.u.r.day I met you and landed headfirst into the Winnebago circus; it was on Sat.u.r.day I heard the news that I was not to go to college, and, I suppose, in the order of human events, I shall die on Sat.u.r.day.

On this Sat.u.r.day morning--can it be only yesterday?--I sat in the doorway peacefully knitting and occasionally gazing off into s.p.a.ce as my thoughts wandered, flitting from subject to subject like the yellow b.u.t.terflies that flashed from flower to flower. The sunshine sprayed over the roof and glinted on my amber needles, until it seemed that I was knitting sunshine right into the socks. I was filled with a vast contentment that throbbed in my temples and quivered in my toes; from head to foot I was "in tune with the infinite." That morning father and I had gone over our accounts and our balance was so satisfactory that we figured in another year we could finish paying off the mortgage.