“Let your spirit guide us through,
Joan of Arc, they are calling you!”
Over the white sands of the Ipswich Beach, looking towards the long sand-bar, with about three-quarters of a mile of sapphire water sparkling between, the sportive cry rang, with a gay note of challenge under its playfulness:
“Come with the flame in your glance!”
And she came with the flame in her glance--no spirit Maid of Orleans returning to lead the gallant sons of the fleur-de-lys on bleeding fields--as who knows but she may have come to her France in its hardest hour! Not her, but a modern maid with the fire of the morning in her dark eye, a spiritual sense of the wild beauty around her in the quiver of her sensitive lips, with a brine-wet braid of black hair hanging down her back--needing, indeed, only armor and helmet, instead of blue overalls, to make her, as she had been once before in tableaux for the Red Cross, a very fair representation of that Maid of France who, of old, left her sunny orchards to drive the invader from her soil!
“Come with the flame in your glance,
With a garden-rake for a holy lance!”
chanted Sara again, feeling that camouflage was not her only inspiration.
“Can’t you hear the bugle sounding?
Can’t you feel our pulses bounding?
Lead your comrades to the field!”
she caroled further, falling into step with the maid of the rake, and looking challengingly up into the dark eyes with the golden spark of fire--of fervor--in them.
“I confess I wish ’twas any other kind of field, for once; that we had any other hill to take this morning but that same old heart-breaker of a converted sand-peak--from which the enemies, the weeds--witch-grass, rank beach-grass, wild pea, wild vetch--have to be driven back again and again, with barb-weed, instead of barbed wire, for the worst of all!” craved she, her chant sinking to a dirge-like sing-song, to which she matched her march to the war-garden on Squawk Hill, that discordant paradise of night-herons, so lately reclaimed from the barren dunes.
“What!... What! Sara, you’re not weakening?” The Maid brandished her rake. “I wish I had a little more ‘pep’ in me, myself, this morning,” she acknowledged, a moment later, sinking her voice to a silky whisper, with a backward glance over her blue-overalled shoulder at the younger girls, fifteen of them--a bright-eyed, laughing brigade--who were following her to take the hill for the fiftieth time from an invading horde of weeds, ranker, stronger at the seashore than anywhere else--with a giant’s grip upon the sandy soil, from control of which they had been so lately ousted.
“Well! you didn’t expect to be captain of the forces again this morning, did you, as you have been for three days past?” Sara looked up at her friend, the oldest girl of the Morning-Glory Group, now encamped upon the white beach behind them, who had kept incognito a secret that shone in the dark; who was determined, upon her return to the city, to go to work, at anything, to release a man--a man for the front. “You thought our Guardian--Gheezies--would be able to lead us out to capture the hill, herself, to-day.”
“I hoped she would,” said Olive Deering. “But I could see that she still isn’t feeling very well after that little sick attack of the past week. So I persuaded her to save her strength for the Council Fire to-night--the ceremonial meeting on the sands--at which our little Green Leaf, Flamina, is really to be initiated as a Wood-Gatherer, and receive her fagot-ring; hitherto she has been only a novice.”
“Won’t her voice enrich our Wohelo chant?” murmured Sara. “Sometimes when she’s by herself, skipping along by the sea, it seems to me as if I never, really, heard a girl sing before; it just fondles the air--sweetens everything about her. Listen to her now; that’s what she calls a ‘funny one!’”
The Green Leaf was dancing forward to the field now, her hands on her hips, setting the other younger girls saucily swaying with her, to a dialect lilt of:
“In capo del monte,
In capo del monte,
Si fà l’amore
Fiorentina! Fiorentina!
E cip i tè ciop!
E cip i tè ciop!”
“E chippety chop! Chippety chop!” Olive laughingly echoed the last two lines as the little singer pronounced them. “I know what that song means,” she cried; “it’s about a lover going up a mountain to see his lady-love whose name is ‘Fiorentina’--Florence--and the ‘Chippety chop!’ is their airy chatter. Oh! I’m so glad”--she waved her garden rake--“that the suggestion came from Headquarters that each Camp Fire Group should adopt a foreign-born sister. Listening to Flamina, nobody can think that the benefit will be all on her side; we’re getting some magic from her that breathes in that wonderful voice of hers, which, as you say, would soften a----”
“A corky carrot, eh?” sniffed Sesooā, her spirits dropping with a squawk from airy realms of love and song, to the skirts of the war-garden on Night-Heron Hill. “Well! Here’s such a passé vegetable row, a left-over from the crop which the farmer--Captain Andy’s enterprising nephew--planted himself early in the spring. Our late carrot-crop that we put in towards the end of June doesn’t need any sorcery of Flamina’s--or anybody else’s”--laughingly; “it’s a winner,” looking along green, feathery rows stirred by the sea-breeze, with here and there a terra-cotta rim just peeping above ground.
“And nobody appreciates its being a ‘corker’--not corky--any more than I do, except when one has to go to work to thin it out, as some of us will have to do this morning.... And to tell the truth,” Sara’s gold-tipped eyelashes twinkled, “I never felt less like work than I do to-day.”
“I don’t feel very much in the mood for it myself!” Olive, captain of the farming-forces, bit her lip, surveying the hill which she had to take, routing out invading weeds and the supernumeraries in the young ranks of the vegetables.
“My legs are trying to persuade me that it’s time for that evening ceremonial meeting now--wanting to wheel me back in the direction of camp,” whispered Sara whimsically, as the firefly glance of her brown eyes flitted over the too prolific rows, not of feathery carrots alone, but of flouncing beets, tomatoes, beans, triumphant but tardy here at the seashore, likewise calling to be thinned out. “There’s no need for you to say how your cold feet are behaving, Olive; they’d be warm enough if you were off there, pow-wowing with the birds on the bar, or lying out on the home-sands, polishing off--poetically--the words of the candle-lighting ceremony which you have prepared for the Council Fire to-night. You know that you’re no enthusiastic farmerette; you’d a thousand times rather paint radio-dials for a?roplanes; ’fess up now!”
“Well! when I came here I hardly knew a potato-stalk from a flouncing beet, but--but I’m pushing my green head above the soil,” confessed the Maid of the rake--the modern Joan--upon this humble field, the reclaimed desert looking down upon the fawning ocean, which had to be won from the enemy over and over again.
“The time’s past, however, honey”--Olive drew in her beautifully chiseled lower lip, which had rather a deep indentation under it, a rose-leaf nest resting upon the rounded ledge of the chin, which the girls called her shelf--the ivory shelf where she kept her inspirations--“the time’s past when any girl who is a girl wants to do only the things which she likes, in the way of war-work, leaving those that pinch slightly for others!... And now for the pinch! It’s time to begin. We’re out to make a showing for the U. S. A.--as our soldiers say--to stand back of them and help win the war. Let’s ‘tie to that’ with--with a hundred per cent of the best that’s in us, eh?”
But, ah! there are times for all when a hundred per cent on the best of our soul-stock seems exorbitant interest to pay for success in a struggle.
At the end of an hour’s work weeding and thinning out, fighting the enemy, grappling with prickly barb-weed, that nettled the ungloved fingers which boldly grasped it, routing out stubborn beach-grass, wild vetch, wild pea, on this sea-girt hill which seemed to have unregenerate leanings towards being a squawky desert still, even the Maid herself--Olive--began to feel resolution wavering.
“O dear! There never was an ancient village-street in France--or anywhere else--as crooked as my back feels at the present moment,” she murmured twistedly to herself. “There--there seems to be a ‘squawk’ in my courage, too! I want to knock off! I feel irresponsible--idle. Perhaps it was that mad frolic yesterday on the bar--getting to the heart of the wild life--the upset--ducking--when the big seal played submarine! It did something to me. Oh-h! to be, really, a heron, gull, flippered seal, anything--anything that knows nothing about horrible--‘civilized’--war;... about carrying on in the teeth of not--wanting--to!”
She straightened her long, graceful back, the Maid, and stood for a minute gazing off across a mile or more of sparkling bay, to that green bar on which the high tide now held glassy revel, beckoning to jollity with long, white fingers of foam, after a manner to make her feel more irresponsible still.
At the end of that minute she became aware that, mystically, her mood had spread, or perhaps, in that harum-scarum frolic off the dazzling bar, the great marbled dog-seal had done more than heave the old settler into the air; he had capsized the morale of this little army of girls.
“Oh-h, goody! My grit’s gone glimmering!” deplored Sara suddenly. “I hate this witch-grass; there’s a ‘squawky’ old witch in every tuft of it, I’m sure; it’s so rank an’ stubborn--so hard to rout out.”
“Gone glimmering! I haven’t even a glimmer left,” sighed fair-haired Sybil, the Maid’s sister, gazing down at her round arm, bare from the elbow, which had twinkled as a galaxy--radio-painted--the night before. “Too much fun yesterday; it’s taken the ‘pep’ out of me--burnt it all away. I--I’d rather do anything than thin out these saucy beets, anyway; they’re so red-faced and flouncing, they--they just seem to giggle at you in the sun, when you’re tired and your back aches, and you don’t want to keep on.”
“Yes, like horrid--bold--florid-faced girls; to-day I just want to smack every one that I pull up!” finished Lilia crossly. “I don’t mind grubbing in this sandy war-garden, when it’s an hour and a half in the morning and an hour and a half in the afternoon, but to put in the whole time, or most of it--two hours and a half, anyway--at a stretch, because we want to take it easy, later, and make ready for the Council Fire--why, that’s too much. I don’t care what anybody says; I’m going to rest a while!”
It was the same all over the broad semi-cultivated acres of lonely hillside. Everywhere courage had gone glimmering, or flickered out altogether.
Of the seventeen girls at work--two of the campers having been left at home to prepare dinner: Arline, whose symbolic rainbow was never more needed, and Betty, the evergreen Holly--not one was now carrying on, or, if at all, very lamely.
A distant trio who had been raking over the earth around the vegetables, in order to renew the mulch--surface muck--and draw the moisture to that sandy surface--had, together with other unpaid volunteers whose tedious task was to fight insect pests with noxious tobacco-water, thrown down their arms ignominiously, and sat down under a crooked tree, to chat.
“An infant carrot is, sure, a funny-looking thing; this one has a tail like a wood-mouse, only pink,” lazily moralized Sul-sul-sul-i, meaning Redstart--Little Fire--here, in this work-a-day field, Victoria Glenn. “I wonder how such a terra-cotta baby tastes--raw? Bah! Horrid!”
“I don’t care what anybody says; I’m going to rest a while.”
She bit into the vegetable baby and threw it from her, repeating the experiment, in “loafing” fashion, with another, and yet another.
“Why! you mustn’t waste them. We can cook those for our own use--save the winners to sell for the Red Cross--and to feed others. Oh! Oh! you’re not giving out, too, are you--Victory?”
The Maid’s voice broke upon the appealing cry. This change rung upon Victoria had served as a rally-word before, but evidently there was “little fire” left in the Victory girl now.
And, worst of all, Olive, the captaining Maid, the Torch-Bearer, felt as if, at the moment, she could give forth no fuel from her own spirit to feed the waning spark.
“If--if I don’t ‘pucker’ up--if I’m not true to my service-pin--the day is lost.” She glanced down at the red, white, and blue button upon her overalls. “Mercy! it is hot--getting hotter. We’re none of us in the mood for work; our legs are telling us that it’s time to fall in for a march back to camp, when it isn’t. If I can’t rally ‘the light that’s in me,’ pass it on to others, what good am I as a leader?... Hitherto I have not been a slacker!”
The feathery luxuriance of the carrot-plants, bending like green foam before the sea-wind, the far-off rows of sweet-corn, tall beans, taller than herself--Kentucky wonders--potatoes, and even the “giggling” beets, did a rural dance around her, to support that claim of the young soul.
And, yet--and yet--Olive knew that the “Joan” fire, with which she started out, had gone from her eyes, the Joan fervor from her heart.
For, after all, she was no hero-souled peasant Maid of middle ages, but a fun-loving, by nature ease-loving, girl, reared, as Sara had once said, “in cotton-wool,”--in padded luxury--who, occasionally, rebelliously felt, as now, that the shadow cast by the Great War and its burden of responsibility had fallen unnaturally upon her youth, as upon the otherwise care-free girlhood around her, making her old before her time.
While her feet trod the struggling soil of the war-garden she was aware of a secret garden within her, beckoning them; a garden of indolence--of ephemeral do-as-you-please delights--in which, indeed, she had rarely lingered since she became a Camp Fire Girl.
How was she to avoid its tempting gate now--how carry on at the task that “pinched”?
And the answer was, as it was to the Maid, Joan, of old, in her sunny orchard, the whispering voices, bidding her look beyond herself--above!
“Our Father!” breathed Olive Deering softly, with a rush of tears to her wide dark eyes, which gazed away from her followers, out over land and sea. “Great Spirit in Whom I live and move and have my being--invisible--Whom, yet, as it were, I have seen--strengthen me now; don’t let me shamefully weaken; help me to--carry--on!
“Girls!” She turned again to the field, the humble, oft-won field. “Girls--Minute-Girls--Victory Girls--what on earth are we about, weakening, thinking of knocking off before the time for which we pledged ourselves is over, simply because we’re not in the humor for work? Bah! Nice volunteers we are! What would our Soldier Boys think of us? Oh! I’ve got a letter here that would shame us--right here in the breast-pocket of my overalls”--plucking it forth, waving thin checked sheets, pennon-like. “It--it’s to my father from the captain of that infantry company in which my Cousin Clay is--Clay, who carried the big basket of household goods for the little old Frenchwoman--helped her to get settled again----”
“Humph!” interjected Sara; she still disliked to listen to any eloquence bearing upon the war score of Olive’s cousins--even on the ordinary “innings” of that rich boy who, seen leading a blind horse under a blazing sun through a country shipyard, not a dozen miles away, was apparently not reveling in his task any more than they had been in theirs--the only score on which she would have liked to hear her friend dilate was Iver’s.
“The captain’s letter tells of an experience which the Boys had, away back in January, before they had been on the front lines at all--while they were still in training--in barracks, somewhere in France.” Thus Olive took up the story. “It was their first day in the practice-trenches, (nine long miles from those barracks--about the worst day, for weather, the captain says, that he ever remembers) the men said ‘Sonny France’ had gone up front and got killed--sleet, snow, rain, mud--just a too-horrid sample of everything, girls!
“And after their nine-mile march to the trenches, the company put in long hours of hard work, training--practicing how to repel an attack, how to go over the top, ploughing round, knee-deep, in mud, with their gas-masks on--which the captain says is about as comfortable as walking about town on a day hot as this, with your head in a canvas bag.”
“Oh! we--we know a little about those chlorine-foolers--some of us--about the popping gas-cloud, too!” wetly exploded Sara.
“And then--then came the dreary march back to barracks in that freezing January weather, with the men tired almost to death.... But were they weakening, our gallant Boys of the Yankee Division?... our deary, cheery American Boys? No! No! They were singing. And one--one--the captain says, a mere lad, sang loudest of all--then dropped in his tracks as he reached the barracks! And shall we----”
“No-o, we--shan’t! We’re not ‘squawking’--crying quit! Not giving up! We’re out to make a showing, and we’re going to do it--no matter how hot the sun is, or how ‘witchety’ the weeds! Carry on’s the word; carry on!”
The failing squawk had, indeed, become a shout; it was a general cry, from one and all of the war-workers, for all had drawn near to listen--a sprayed cry, too, as if the gust sweeping up from the sea, over which that letter had traveled, brought a little brine on its wings.
“Just one thing morel” cried Olive, again the Torch-Bearer--the Maid. “I’ve read somewhere, though not in this letter, that when soldiers are marching a long distance, shoulder to shoulder, they can stand it much better than if one is hiking alone. There’s our lesson in team-work, girls; let’s take hold together--pull together, as we never did before--on the weeds, the superfluous vegetable chicks, the muck, or whatever it is! And--sing!”
“We don’t know how we’ll do it, but we’re on the way,”
started a voice, moved--half-laughing.
“We’re out to make a showing for the U. S. A.
There’s going to be a hot time before us this day,
But still we’ll make our showing ...”
The protest was triumphantly completed by the fresh breeze booming up the vegetables.
Two hours later a tired girl, with slight lines of weariness under her dark eyes, stole into the tent upon the white beach, flanking the mother-bungalow, which was, at present, hers and Sara’s.
She did not turn to her own corner, but to her friend’s, where was pinned to the translucent canvas a framed photograph, with a Service Star above it.
“Iver!” whispered Olive Deering, tremulously--and again the Maid’s look was on her face--“I’m trying to be worthy of you--of all our Boys--of our talk on that twilight balcony! I’m ‘holding the line!’ I’m carrying on!”
“I light the red candle of Health: strength that I draw from the ocean, buoyancy from the breeze, elasticity from the air, the sands, and ‘dash’ from the wild life about me--dashing health that makes it irksome for me to walk if I can run or dance, that sets my heart soaring along sky-ways of thankfulness, makes me strong for all work which my country asks of me: I light the red candle of Health.”
“I light the white candle of Peace: as, in the Christmas story, Atawessu, the Star, the Creature Far Above, guided wise men to the manger where the Prince of Peace was born, so may the star of loving kindness guide all men soon to that ‘fair city of peace’ where children’s cry--like the song of angels, of old--shall come true and it may be ‘Fini,’ forever, la Guerre: good will on earth! I light the white candle of Peace.”
“I light the blue candle of Loyalty--Truth: as the tides of the ocean are stable, returning rhythmically to the shore, governed by some force which men call Solar Attraction, so may I be drawn to the Sun of Ideals, ‘true to the truth that is in me,’ loyal to each pledge I make: I light the blue candle of Truth!”
“Peerless red, white, and blue,
Vitality, love, and truth,
Bright be my hold on you,
In these halcyon days of youth!
“Staunch as the ocean’s tide,
Nor man, nor might may turn,
Steady as beacon-light,
In its patient, steadfast burn!
“True as the fixed star’s beam.
The Creature Far Above,
Unerring as wild bird’s dive
For hidden treasure trove!
“True as the ...”
But the chanting voices--enriched by Flamina’s caressing note--faltered. What “Creature Far Above” was gliding forth from a bank of blood-red cloud, its radiant wings aflame, as if dipped in the fires of another world?
“It’s an a?roplane! A big--a?roplane! A biplane!”
“Nev-er!”
“Yes, it is! I--I thought at first it was a sea-gull; I’ve been watching it--saw it before it entered that red cloud-gate!” Sara Davenport’s leather-fringed sleeves fell back from her bare fore-arms, leaving them free to describe a broken arc of excitement--like chain-lightning ripping the dusk--under the spell of the tricolored candles.
“Mercy! Whoopee-doo!... Zoom, zoom, zoom!... May--may I be feathers, as Captain Andy would say, if ’tisn’t an a?roplane! A big army air-plane! Oh, girls alive, d’you suppose--suppose it’s going to land--come to earth--drop down right here by our Council Fire?”
“Oh! it never will. Where is it? I can’t see it! The dusk’s so thick, anyway!” It was a half-cheated wail from two-thirds of the girls, turning to Sara’s flame, now a perfect pillar of fire, for guidance--direction.
“There! There! See! Just over that tallest sand-peak now--high sand-hill!... And, oh! for goodness sake! there’s the moon coming over the top--coming over the top to stare at it.”
Yes! round-orbed, magnificent, shadow-mapped, the silvery Green Corn Moon was sailing up over the dunes of antique silver--over the dark-tressed crown of a lesser hill, to gaze at the winged wonder--one moment burning up in the last dying flame of day, the next a mammoth gray moth circling and circling in the vast crimson-hung halls of twilight, as if drawn to the home-fires of earth.
To the far-beckoning blaze of the Council Fire upon the pale beach, within thirty yards of the tide’s rippling edge--the fairy, rainbowed blaze, fed by bone-dry driftwood, copper-marked wreck-wood, flinging aloft every hue in the spectrum--before which nineteen Camp Fire Girls and their Guardian had entered upon the candle-lighting ceremony arranged by Olive Deering, Torch-Bearer, the Maid who had “carried on” that morning upon the humble field of that depressing hill.
Now the candles, red, white, and blue, symbolic torches, embedded in their silver candlesticks of sand, flickered, guttered, unheeded--went out, two of them--negligible as glow-worms beside some transcendent display of Northern Lights, streaming merry dancers, radiating from the excitement in the girls’ own breasts, which seemed to surround that a?rial visitor from the North, flying lower--lower--directly over the high-floating, pink-shot smoke-reek of the Council Fire.
But....
Was it going to be a visitor?
Forgotten was the charming purpose of the evening, the main feature of the ceremonial meeting, the initiation of Nébis, little Flamina, now fondling the air with vocal thrills that sobbed joyously, like the softer strings of a violin--as that transporting question sailed, moon-faced, over the top!
“But--but where did you see it first, Sara? Oh! how could you see it, far off--when everything’s getting so dark? I never knew you had--cat’s--eyes!”
Little Owl was blinking like a snake-charmed owlet which could not move its head upon the neck usually so flexible--that slender girlish neck rising from the round setting of the ceremonial dress being bent fixedly backward--the face, white as a moon-flower, shining upward in ultimate expectancy, such as never had been before, never could, felt she, be again, though she live till crack of doom!
“See it! Oh, I don’t know! While--while we were singing--chanting--about the Creature Far Above (oh! wasn’t that funny?) I happened to look off, and saw a speck--dark--against the red! I thought, at first, it was a bird! Then--then it entered that red ripple-cloud ... then.... Oh-h! I believe it is going to land--land on our map--right here on the sands.
“Yes; I can hear the engine buzz--now! Gracious! it looks like a big, dark fish--swimming round in a fog, with a whirligig in its mouth--the revolving propeller, I suppose.”
Olive was stuttering with excitement, too--her hands clasped--staccato excitement that ticked each word off like a dot against the bare, steely possibility that the big biplane, now within a couple of hundred yards of the home-fires, might pass over and on, without descending.
“It may be a naval a?roplane patrolling for submarines, in which case it will probably fly on over the water--on top of the water, maybe!”
Even Gheezies, the Guardian, as she put forth the unwelcome suggestion, was oppressed by a tickling in her throat, a cooing almost babyish, of held-up excitement that did not yet dare to be exultation over the landing of an army battle-plane by their Council Fire--so that maturity dropped from her like a nun’s cloak and her forty years became as the fourteen of the youngest tiptoeing maidens present.
“My! But, mercy! suppose it should be--should be an enemy air-plane? Hostile! Goodness!”
Sybil, pirouetting on her toes upon the sands, subsided to the soles of her moccasins, in momentary apprehension--flat fright--her lips falling apart, a cleft flower, as her gaze fluttered downward, like a shot bird, to the dim dunes, searching them for two other lonely camps about an eighth of a mile distant, one just vacated, the other occupied by the Guardian’s artist-brother, who, at the moment, was far out on the bay, deep-sea fishing.
Other youthful glances strayed this way and that way, too. All tales of coast invasion which the girls had heard, of air-raid and wreck--invasion which, owing to the fleet of their British cousins and to the immortal valor of their own noble army, fighting for them, they were to be spared in the Great War--loomed up in a dark fog-ring encircling them.
“Bah! Enemy! Hostile!... Gammon and spinach!” cried Sara, flapping, fluttering like a brown leaf in a fish-tail breeze. “No such thing! It’s too far off for us to see the insignia--rings on the under side of the wings, but.... Oh, say! it is going to land; it’s doing a nose-dive now--heading straight down. Glory, d’you hear it whistle?”
“Whee-ee-oo-oo!” Blithely, indeed, whistled the splendid air-ship, nosing towards earth, as if it knew the feminine welcome awaiting it, settling into a natural glide, while the fine wires of the “struts” connecting the two planes cut the air with that homing sound.
“Hostile!... Piffle! Why! Why! the rudder is striped--can just make it out--red, white, and blue, the same--the same as our service-buttons.”
Ah! dear insignia. Perhaps, at that culminating moment, as the recognition bubbled forth, under all the merry dance of excitement in girlish breasts, there was a stable under-current of complaisance sweeping them upward bodily, as it were, to meet the a?rial visitor; satisfaction that, nine hours before, on the hill of discordant name, they had not weakened--been untrue to the claim of those ringed colors linking them now in service to the Adventurers of the skies.
“Yes, here they come! Glory hallelujah! Three cheers for the Red, White, and Blue! Oh-h!”
A moment of tense silence, of flyaway breath fluttering, winged, through parted lips--of girlish faces transfigured, luminous in the dusk as the head-bands about girlish brows--flashing recognition signals into the gloom! And down it came, that army bi-plane--bump, bump, bump--in the briefest of jolting canters along the dim, dim beach!
“Well!... Well, we didn’t make a pancake landing, anyhow! No!”
Forth leaped, on the word, from his tiny cock-pit, his deep pilot’s seat, a young, boyish aviator, helmeted, gauntleted, leather-jacketed!
Forth he leaped, and pushed his goggles back--then stood for a moment, a-blink, a knight of the skies, fresh from his parade ground, the clouds, landing among fairy princesses, filleted and headed, upon a fairy shore, with a rainbowed Council Fire in the background and three tall candles, of the charmed colors which ringed his wings--one still alight, flickering a welcome--in their antique silver candlesticks of sand!
Could romance go further? The Guardian Fairy felt that it could not. She stepped forward and held out her hand.
“It was a very pretty landing, indeed,” she said.
The knight unbuttoned his leather helmet and pulled it off; his long back gauntlet, reaching to the elbow, too!
“Well! she did drag her tail a little,” he answered, glancing deprecatingly at his “ship” with its red, white, and blue rudder; the great crimson fish--fabled fish--with wings in its head and a propeller in its gaping mouth, which the high tide seemed to have thrown up upon the sands.
“My name is Fenn,” he volunteered, bowing over the Guardian’s hand.
“Lieutenant Fenn, I suppose?”
The a?ronaut bowed again, unbuttoning his leather coat, so that there was a gleam of silver bars--those army bars which Iver wore, thought Sara quickly--upon the broad shoulders beneath; of silver wings, too, wrought on black velvet upon the tired breast, heaving boyishly.
“And--and this is my observer, Lieutenant Hayward,” he introduced further, turning to the second air-man, who, also, had vacated the airy nest of his little cock-pit and stood upon the darkening tide-shore.
“Well! Mother Earth is always ready to welcome aviators--or her children are!” The Guardian shook hands with both.
“That is, when they land of their own free will,” put in the boyish pilot, his strong, white teeth flashing from a pale face as he looked breezily beyond her at nineteen maidens whose hovering brown draperies, fluttering fringes, embroideries and long braids “Mammy Moon” now touched with primitive charm, as if they were her favored offspring.
“I admit the correction,” the Guardian Fairy smiled. “At all events, we are glad--su-premely glad”--her voice shook a little with the thrill of the thing--“to welcome you to our Council Fire. We--we have never before entertained Angels unawares--Aviators unexpectedly!” She laughed. “We are the Morning-Glory Group of Camp Fire Girls, encamped in that bungalow by the seashore. I am the Guardian, Darina Dewey, spinster,” still laughingly. “It would take a long time to introduce you all round, and it’s getting too dark to see. At least, let me present you to the elder girls--to our Assistant Guardian, Miss Deering.... Olive--Lieutenant Fenn.”
Sara Davenport, introduced next, was not too thrilled to note the young air-pilot’s start of admiration over the first presentation--note it jealously, for Iver’s sake.
“Bah! I don’t wonder he wilts!” she murmured to herself, half-savagely. “Olive is a dream in ceremonial dress, with those long braids, her dark eyes, and her skin like a moonlit cosmos flower. If--if I were an aviator, I’d want to fly away with her--ten thousand feet high! Then--then, what would Iver do? Oh, yes! Have you made a long flight?” she added aloud.
“Not very, but I had hard work flying my course.” The knight of the clouds, really not much “wilted,” was giving full twilight attention to her now, as to the other older girls to whom he was introduced. “I was heading into the wind, you see, and the very little there is, up there, was against us. We were flying low, ‘winging the midway air,’” smilingly, “when we sighted the smoke from your big fire there, and my Observer ordered me to fly over.”
“Oh, did you think--imagine--it was a spy bonfire, signaling out to sea? I don’t believe we have a single spy round here, with--with the possible exception of the long-legged sand-snipe always spying upon the fish--greedy things!” Sara excitedly caught her breath.
“Well! I wouldn’t be too sure--of anything.” The young air-scout plucked his goggles from his forehead.
“And do you mean to say you were flying over the coast--over the shore--looking out for--for suspicious things--huts in the woods, lonely signal-stations, wireless ... oh-h?” Arline and Betty drew breath simultaneously, tumultuously, speaking together.
“Well, we saw nothing suspicious here,” was the evasive answer, “only suggestive....”
“Suggestive--of what?”
“Oh, that:
“‘Ground-school dinners bring the tears,
We haven’t had a feed--in--years!’”
came the answer with a long--beclouded--sigh.
“Ground-school dinners! What! That means you’re hungry!... Dreadfully hungry?”
“Oh, not so bad as all that; only rather tired of feasting on air-puffs,” came the laughing answer. “Joy-sticks and air-puffs! My companion had some of the former in his pocket--meaning chocolate bars!”
“Joy--fiddlesticks! We’ll get you something more substantial right away. Supper--supper will be ready in a winged hurry!”
Wing-footed, indeed, one-half the army of girls started for a united drive upon the bungalow and its seashore resources.
“Oh, not so many! ‘Too many cooks,’ you know!” The Guardian’s voice arrested them. “Four will be plenty--those who are housekeepers for to-day, with Olive and Sara. Well! you’re on your mettle, girls; it’s something to entertain aviators unawares.”
“Lucky loopers of the clouds, who certainly have tumbled into a bed of roses!” chuckled the youthful pilot, throwing off his leather “togs,” examining his a?rial ship all over by the light of an electric torch, whose luminous ring belted his own adventurous figure in its greenish-brown trick-suit fashioned like the farming overalls which his girl-hostesses had worn that day in their battle with weeds and pests upon Squawk Hill.
“Well! aren’t you glad now, ‘Goggle Eyes,’ now that we’ve landed in clover--hit it lucky--that I decided to nose her down and make a landing here--bunk out on our wings to-night?”
Thus he challenged the observer, with his dangling binoculars.
“Well! I do admit it’s ‘low tide’ inside me, Ned; every little creek bare as a sand-pocket; I shan’t object to being filled up,” acknowledged the older air-man. “Only I feel rather”--he smiled through the flash-light’s luminous ring upon the picturesque maidens in ceremonial dress--“rather as if we had been sailing by the star-chart and landed upon some more romantic planet than old Mother Earth, which hits some of us such hard knocks at times. I--I’ll have to rub my eyes to make sure I’m awake--not having an air-dream,” blinkingly.
“Oh-h, what a pretty compliment to the Council Fire!” Sybil purred happily. “Now! won’t you--can’t you--tell us something about the a?roplane--the big, strong battle-plane--about its different parts, and what it is made of?”
“Humph! Let the pilot explain his own ship. Go ahead, ‘Tailspin Ned’!” laughed the observer, challenging the younger aviator, Lieutenant Edwin Mortimer Fenn, R. M. A.
“Well! Well, as you see, ours is the tractor type of a?roplane, having the propeller in front, drawing it through the air,” explained the latter, flashing his electric light upon that mahogany propeller which shone like a silver paddle--if not a silver piece--in a gasping fish’s mouth.
“These are the a?rofoils--wings--which support it in flight, having a spread of thirty-six feet from tip to tip, on each plane. And----”
“You have--oh! excuse my interrupting!--you have some wings on your breast, too.” Little Owl pointed shyly to those four-inch mirror-wings, the army insignia, reflecting the young air-man’s flying achievements, gleaming against their velvet setting upon his rough gabardine overalls.
“Yes! I wouldn’t swap them for a General’s stars.” His white teeth flashed boyishly. “They represent my commission as an R. M. A.--Reserve Military Aviator. When I was a humble cadet my breast-wings were stiffer,” laughingly.
“How--how do you mean?” came from a dozen enthralled girls.
“Why! they were of metal--silver--three inches across; not limply wrought upon black velvet; that was when I was in training on the flying-fields, where I went, from Aviation Ground School, where--where the dinners--were--so good,” na?vely.
“Mercy! I’m just dying to fly,” came breathlessly from one fluttering feminine throat--Little Owl’s. “According to my symbolic name, I’m a bird, anyway!”
“Well, don’t die--flying. Probably after the war is over--no doubt before very many years have flown ahead of you--your Camp Fire Group will have a Bird Corps of its own,” encouragingly.
“And win honor-beads for parading in the air--sky-blue and cloud-barred, I suppose!” burst ecstatically from one or two of the other girls whose symbolic names were also derived from the feathered tribe, with which, in a dazzling skyscape vision, they saw themselves competing.
“Now, perhaps, you’d like to know a little more about the wings that will support you.” The R. M. A., otherwise Tailspin Ned--a nickname he had acquired upon the training-fields--flashed his torch again over the a?roplane--the mammoth gaping red fish. “Well, the wing-ribs--spars--are of light wood, covered with fine linen, doped with a preparation to make it durable; so is the fuselage, body of the machine. The props connecting the two planes are the struts whose flying wires sang their jolly little earth-song--whistled, you know--as we came down. When we land for the night on a lonely spot, we have to guard the a?roplane, so we bunk out on our wings; if it rains, we bunk under them.”
“Tuck your little head under your wing, like a real bird-man,” laughed Sybil.
“While the Witch watches over your slumbers,” supplemented Sul-sul-sul-i--Victoria Glenn, the Victory girl. “Mercy! What a bloodthirsty red-eyed old witch!... Girls, do look! She’s stenciled on cloth, broomstick and all, just as we have our Camp Fire emblem stenciled upon our dresses.” Victoria, a Fire Maker, glanced down at the dusky crossed logs and tongue of flame upon the skirt of her own ceremonial gown.
“She’s the emblem of our flying squadron; we chose her as soldiers choose a mascot,” answered the R. M. A. “The cloth on which she rides rampant is glued to the side of the fuselage, just beneath my cock-pit. This is the stabilizer which preserves our equilibrium in the air; all this rear part is the tail mechanism.”
“What--what are the dials--radio-dials? Oh, see how they light up when the flash-light moves off!” cried one or two voices.
“Those that face me in my little cock-pit! Why, clock, compass, altimeter, inclinator--and a few more to guide us on the sky-trail.”
“If--if you just stroll down to the water’s edge, you’ll see a radio freak!” laughed Sybil. “A shining figurehead on a dory! She’s camouflaged too, that wooden bead-eye! I had the prettiest little Milky Way on my own arm last night,”--holding up that round member--“six tiny stars; I washed them off this morning.”
“So you’re no longer a Camp Fire galaxy!” Now, it was the aviator’s turn to chuckle, as compliantly he strode towards the murmuring tide, extinguishing his torch.
“But--but why the camouflage?” he demanded. “Rather a rub-in joke, eh, on a humble little rowboat that’s as innocent as a lamb; she’ll never chase anything--dodge anything....”
“Hold on--hold on there, you Cavalry Man of the Skies, as my soldier-brother would say! How do you know?” suddenly challenged the piquant voice of the dory’s owner, bristling with “pep” behind him.
“When--when aviators drop from a height of ten thousand feet.... Oh! don’t say you weren’t as high as that----” Sara bit her lip comically.
“Higher, part of the time,” was the amused reply. “I saw a double sunset this evening. Just after witnessing the first we ‘zoomed’ up, soared for the fun of the thing, outside the earth’s shadow, saw Old Sol rise again, blood-red, in the West--like a tricked rooster with a flaming comb--and set for the second time. Jove! Some sight that!”
“There! I told you anything--anything is possible these times. Well! What I’d like to know is, where the cavalry of the sky would like to sup--indoors or out?” questioned Sara, waving her fringed arms towards that violet night-sky, no longer locked to man.
“Outdoors, by all means, I should say, by that corking bonfire!” The aviator glanced backward over his shoulder at the blazing pile of driftwood whose shading smoke-reek, floating high over the dunes, had guided him to earth.
“And what would the air-scouts choose to drink?”
“Oh-h, I know!” flashed forth Sybil. “They’re just crazy about milk--mild milk. Don’t they--don’t they always drop down on a farmer if they get a chance? My cousin, Atwood, who’s working in the shipbuilding yards, not a dozen miles from here--leading a blind horse hitched to a great yellow ship’s timber and not enjoying it--he told me that when he visited a friend in training at the flying-fields, the chum said that after a long fly he was just like a baby, crying for milk.”
“Zooms! We’ve got gallons of that--nearly one gallon, anyway. We brought it home from the nearest farmhouse this evening--a mile away, across the dunes.”
Sara, much concerned over this novel entertainment of angels--winged beings--unprepared, swung round on her moccasined sole for an inspired rush back to camp.
“Hurrah for the home fires!” The aviator gleefully shrugged his shoulders. “Oh! I felt it in my bones, all afternoon, that before night we’d land--somewhere--in clover:
“‘Oh, a wonderful thing is a flying cadet,
He lives on a promise--and--hope!’”
he chanted boyishly.
Then, from the darkling tide’s edge, his “zooming” glance soared upward to his parade-ground, the night sky; to Atawessu, the evening star, the Creature Far Above, as softly--half-wistfully--he finished the quotation, reminiscent of his training days above the flying-fields:
“But--but the twinkling stars are as far as his bars,
And he never--quite--figures the dope!”
“Well! we have tumbled into a camp of milk and honey.”
Lieutenant Hayward, the observer, with the binoculars, from whom the young air-scout had taken orders as he flew over the shore, was almost guilty of smacking his lips in relish of the fare set before him in the light of the rainbowing Council Fire and of two camp-lanterns which turned the antique silver of the sands to gold.
“Keep the home-fires burning!”
he chanted. “Ye zephyrs! I don’t think I ever appreciated them so much before. Certainly that’s a corking Council Fire; all those wonderful colors; fairy lilac shading into blue flame, rose, green, and yellow, which the copper-corroded wreck-wood throws off!”
“Corroded! The green is just about the hue of the soldiers’ buttons up--up at Camp Evens, after the chlorine-gas changed them, eh, Olive?” murmured Sara reminiscently under her breath--forbearing to vent upon the banquetting sky-lords the story of a gruesome episode on the day when four of the girls present visited her brother in camp. “Oh! won’t you tell us why you flew over--flew low over our fire, this evening?” she burst forth suddenly, eagerly. “Did you really take it for a spy-bonfire, on this lonely beach, signaling out to sea? Are you--are you air-scouts, patrolling, on the lookout for--for huts in the woods--secret wireless----”
But the observer held up a pleading hand.
“How can you ask me, fair Earth Daughter, to discuss anything at present but--but these wings and camouflage? Aviators’ slang!” he murmured divertingly, beaming upon his forthcoming mouthful of creamed chicken, greenly disguised with the juiciest of young peas.
“Canned as well as camouflaged--the wings!” Arline’s shoulders were hunched in a deprecatory rainbow. “The peas are home-grown, though, from our own war-garden on that prickly wretch of a hill off there.” She laughed. “There--there was a great shelling off this coast this morning,” glancing towards the night-sea whence a hostile attack might come.
“Ha! And were the shells ‘incomers’ or ‘outgoers,’ as the soldiers say? Apparently none of them lodged in the camouflage--or in these dandy hot-air rolls.” The a?rial observer laughed, falling in with the girlish jest.
“Warmed over air!” The Rainbow touched a tepid finger-roll. “We got the receipt from our Wohelo magazine.”
“‘Zooms’ for Wohelo!”
“Fish-tails for breakfast,
Cloud-puffs for tea,
But Camp Fire rolls
Are the feast for me!”
chanted “Goggle Eyes,” loftily improvising with an inspired glance at the violet night-sky.
“We can picture the air-puffs, but whence--whence the fish-tail ménu? Flying fish?” queried Olive, breaking into the airy chit-chat.
“No, fish-tail breezes--flapping gusts--that blow you about up there--a lively relish for your rations!”
Here the older aviator glanced sidewise at Sara, as one who has neatly weathered a downthrow current of curiosity.
“Humph! Silent as a fish! Questions taboo! They’ll tell you nothing, these air-scouts--nothing that you’d really like to find out about,” murmured the inquisitive one, teasing the fire-logs with a birch-stick until they matched her own tantalized flame.
“Well!... Well! I’m glad you’re not missing Ground-School dinners now,” she vouchsafed aloud. “When you’ve finished rhyming over the rolls, oh! won’t you--please--tell us something about flying, about your parade-ground, up there?”
“You--you tell ’em, Big Boy!” The observer nudged the younger aviator.
“Well! what shall it be? We sky-skimmers can do about everything with our wings that the birds do with theirs, you know, except flap them. Along some lines we could teach our feathered friends a few tricks!” The younger man laughed over his loyalty cake, less most of the usual ingredients, plus spices and skill. “How about emulating the somersault of a tumble-pigeon--looping the loop--or racing an express train across endless prairies, and, when you caught up with it, flying low, bumping your wheels on the cab of the locomotive, to let the engineer know he wasn’t ‘in it,’ eh?”
“Bravo! What fun! And the engineer, how would he take it?”
“Why, he’d come out and wave his arms, to ‘shoo’ us off, while the passengers flourished hats and handkerchiefs from the train-windows. Ye bats and flying cats! but this honey is good. Did you hive it yourselves as well as grow the peas?”
“No, one of the girls had it sent to her by an uncle who has a bee-farm in Vermont. Well!... Well! We’re waiting to hear more from the latest flying cat--flying man, rather.”
“Great cats! you are, eh?” Tailspin Ned laughed through the firelight. “Ha! What about the thrills we gave civilians--those ‘gawkers of the clouds’--on one public holiday, when our field was thrown open to the public? Thrill after thrill, joke after joke, put over on them!... But, oh, I say, this is awfully one-sided. Those quite too fetching ‘togs,’--pardon me, those very picturesque dresses, head-bands, moccasins, and so forth--they signify something--some ceremony. Now! won’t you let us come in on it?”
“What! On our monthly council meeting!” The Guardian smiled, as smiled her symbol, the yellow sunburst embroidered upon her breast. “As for this rainbowed Council Fire, whose smoke guided you to earth, we were only using it as a background this evening--an accessory. Being such a still night, the program--its opening part--centred around a candle lighting ceremony arranged by one of our number.”
Along a red lane of firelight she glanced at Olive, beautiful in the ruby glow which brought out the wings of a heron woven into her shimmering head-band and the Torch Bearer’s emblem, stenciled on cloth--as the clawing Witch was stenciled upon the fuselage of the a?roplane--crossed logs, flame-tongue, pearl-white smoke, upon the front of her khaki dress, which, with its manifold, meaningful embroideries, was fast becoming a rare, fair tapestry of achievement.
“We--we were just considering Atawessu--the Star--as a symbol, when down you dropped from airdom!” Gheezies--Guardian--smiled again.
“With fresh rumors from the sky, eh? Well! to show that you don’t resent the intrusion--now it’s our turn to plead--won’t you please go on with the ceremony, and let us light the clouds with a memory of your candles?”
“Hardly--that! We’re too interested in--in the thrills you gave the ‘gawkers.’” Even a Guardian may stumble into slang under the spell of a?rial enthusiasm. “Our awarding of honors”--she touched the triple necklace of many-colored beads falling to her knees--“and of rank,” with a glance at little star-eyed Flamina, “may well be postponed. But, perhaps, we will let you ‘come in on our ceremony’ to--to the extent of singing you a song or two in return for your soaring thrills.”
And presently, with all the soft magic of welcoming motion of which a score of Earth Daughters were capable, there floated forth upon the fire-warmed dusk, beside the prismatic Council Fire:
“Whose hand above this flame is lifted,
Shall be with magic touch engifted,
To warm the hearts of lonely mortals,
Who stand within its open portals.
Whose house is dark and bare and cold,
Whose house is cold,
This is his own!”
“Ha! Our castles in the clouds are always bare--and often cold. We’re so glad you’ve made us free of yours!”
The younger aviator--Big Boy--drew a long breath; perhaps sometimes, in the vast empty spaces of those air-castles, occasionally dreary--he might, like Lieutenant Iver over-seas--recall the warm imagery of the Council Fire, its magic of sisterhood, when he missed the things that make life hum.
“Now! it’s your turn. You sing us a song!” pleaded Lilla, a fluttering Owlet, as the brown-clad maidens, light as wafted leaves, settled again into a sitting circle upon the sands.
“Well, I like that! I’ll tell the world!” laughingly. “To ask me to croak, like a flying frog, after such a smooth performance--as--that!... However, how does this go?
“‘Oh, Major! Oh, Major! Oh, Major!’ he said,
‘What shall we do with this flying cadet?
His ambitions are many,
His achievements are small,
He came through the Game with no wings at all!’”
“Good! Good! Bravo!” An enthusiastic clapping of maidens’ hands around the Council Fire. “But how did he get through without any wings?” hazarded one small voice.
“Because he failed to win them, his breast-wings, his insignia.” The R. M. A., Lieutenant Ned, touched the winged emblem upon his own breast. “Or perhaps he was grounded--dropped--while learning to fly, for some act of stupidity or dare-deviltry, say, making a pancake landing, as I might have done on the sands here, coming down flat, kerplunk, without easing her off at all--wrecking his machine.”
“Humph! I’m glad that we didn’t make a pancake landing over on Squawk Hill this morning--fall down flat upon our war-work. Then we’d have come through the Game with no wings at all, eh?” Sara bent whimsically towards the shading flames of wreck-wood. “And now--now for the thrills!” she demanded hungrily.
“Such as we gave the long-suffering public on that memorable field-day? What do you say to an a?rial bomb going off, to fifty-four air-ships parading in the sky, doing loops, spins, spirals, Immelmann turns, when you change your direction quickly, and so forth; to two aviators--one in reality--making pretense of changing places while looping, and--and the feminine shrieks when a life-size dummy, in leather togs, fell headlong out?”
“I’ll wager that, among the spectators, the men were as nervous as the women--so there, you Cavalryman of the Clouds!” pouted Sara, almost leaning her cheek against the silver and rose of a flaming dead arm of juniper, found on the beach.
“I wonder that you weren’t afraid to burlesque tragedy?” The Guardian caught her breath.
“Well, we came near getting the real thing: one lieutenant fell in a tailspin, in mid-air. We were pretty sure he was done for,” gravely. “Eventually, he recovered. The same accident once happened to me, but so high up that I managed to right the machine--get control of it--before I reached the ground; hence my nickname.”
The younger aviator, the intrepid pilot, leaned also, half-wistfully, towards the Council Fire:
“Oh!... Oh! a won-der-ful thing is a flying cadet,
He lives on a promise and hope,”
he chanted softly once more, ere pursuing the backward thrills of field-day.
“Well! I suppose it’s high time that we were tucking our heads under our wings--or bunking out on those wings, on the beach,” he remarked half an hour later, after excited hostesses, by this eventful Council Fire, had listened, with cheeks aflame, to more a?rial jokes “put over” upon civilians; to tales of clown flying and a?rial battles; to the crowning narrative of an “enemy” air-ship--of counterfeit hostility, like the gas-attack at Camp Evens--appearing to bomb the field; of an oil-puddle afire, to represent a burning city; of sirens sounding, bombs exploding, cloud-high, and a U. S. a?roplane “jumping on his tail” to bring him down.
“Gracious! I’ll hear those whistles--that a?rial bombardment--in my sleep,” murmured Arline, the Rainbow. “If you’re very tired after flying your long course to-day, you can both turn in to sleep in one of the tents, and we’ll guard the big war-plane in a body--we girls--during part of the night, anyway,” proffered she, the most timid of the group.
The Guardian laughed; so did the a?ronauts.
“Sing us a lullaby, instead--another smooth song,” pleaded Big Boy.
And drowsily the strains of “Mammy Moon” stole from tired voices upon the dark, while the full-faced Green-Corn Moon looked down, perhaps pondering upon how many generations of moons had come and gone without seeing such a miracle as the great winged fish upon the dusky beach--the competing voyager of the clouds.
“I suppose you won’t be abroad at dawn to see us take off from the sands--see us ‘zoom’!” remarked the younger aviator as he bade his beaded hostesses good-night.
“Don’t be too sure of that!” came the answer of drowsy challenge, melting into the magic--deep soul-magic--of
“Lay me to sleep in sheltering flame,
O Master of the Hidden Fire.
Wash pure my heart and cleanse for me
My soul’s desire!”
“Aye! that’s the Fire to warm our bare castles in the air--with it the endless spaces cannot be dreary,” commented the observer to the tide as he stretched himself out to bunk in vigil, upon one of the a?roplane’s linen wings, while the tired young pilot, for the earlier part of the night, enjoyed the luxury of a tent.
Yes, the same fire it was which burned in the breast of Iver Davenport, now, perhaps, lying out in a shell-hole in No Man’s Land--he who “had come nearer to God” since he volunteered; the same which had inspired Olive, child of luxury, the modern Maid, upon a humble field, to “carry on” in the teeth of distaste and weariness; the same, in degree, which upheld her boy cousin, leading a blind horse hitched to a heavy timber through a shipyard, and not reveling in his novel “job”!
“In flame of sunrise bathe my mind,
O Master of the Hidden Fire,
That when I wake, clear-eyed may be
My soul’s desire.”
It was in the earliest flames of sunrise that a dozen, at least, of wakeful girls thronged the white beach--where cranberry vines trailed exquisitely over the sands, laying young cheeks of faintly flushed berries upon snowy pillows--to watch the great battle-plane take off--take the air, in its upward flight.
“Now, I’ll ‘give her the gun’--open the throttle! And see me ‘zoom’!” laughed the pilot--Big Boy--waving renewed farewells from his tiny cock-pit.
“Yes! Watch him ‘zoom’!... Fly upward into the clouds! Oh, see the Bird!” was the responsive challenge of one girl to another.
“We’ll tell the story of this visit by the Council Fire, as long as ever we’re a Group,” said Olive, an envious Blue Heron, her wide, dark eyes catching a pink spark from dawn, as they followed the big war-plane on its zooming--cloud-climbing--flight, straight upward.
“We’ll stencil it on a sheepskin and pass it down to--to our children’s children,” chuckled Sara, “as an incident of the ‘off ’ side of the Great War, when flying was in its youth! But”--she caught her breath, while a speculative dawn flame, a red flush, crept up her neck--“but I don’t believe there was anything ‘off’--vague, I mean--about the purpose of those two aviators; they were air-scouts on patrol-duty--spy-hunters--mark my words--flying low, most of the time, over the shore, while the observer, Goggle Eyes, with his binoculars, leaning out, I suppose--oh! I wonder how he could do it?--searched the woods and all lonely places, like ours, for suspicious huts--secret wireless-stations----”
She broke off, dreamily following the mounting cavalry of the sky.
“Well! As yet, we’ve only seen one strange man around here--that seal-hunter,” began Arline.
“Whose face I have seen somewhere before!... Goody! See them ‘zoom’! Higher--higher!”
Sara’s own face was a puckered flame, lit by a brand from day’s first burning, but by no coveted memory-flash, as she watched the a?roplane, now a rosy speck--a radiant, exploring dragon-fly--upon the far-away edge of dawn.
“Bah! The seal-hunter! Nothing wrong ’bout him!” Lilla blinked drowsily upward, the sleepiest Little Owl ever caught abroad in daylight. “He has a contract, Captain Andy says, to deliver a lot of those spotted skins of hair-seals to some firm, for making babies’ shoes--awf’ly soft an’ nice for that! I wonder if he’ll get that big ‘buster’ which played submarine with us? And whenever he comes down the river, from that little shipbuilding town which he makes his headquarters, or near there, his guide, old America Burnham, who’s as loyal as his name, comes with him--that’s what they told us at the farmhouse where we went for milk.”
“He was--alone--when he passed us on the beach, while I was painting the dory.... Ugh! I’m cold; d’you know it?” shivered Sara, her flame dying down, like an early morning fire lit too soon, before there is fuel to feed it, refusing even to kindle the spark of memory which she craved, for her comfort.
“Well, if there was a busy spy up in the neighborhood of those shipyards, he might--think of it!--might manage to give out information about the launching of some of the medium-sized vessels which the men are building just’s fast as ever they can, working overtime at it--I wonder if my cousin who leads the blind horse gets as far as that?--to fill the gaps made by horrid submarines in the spunky Gloucester fishing-fleet.”
Sybil’s eyes of monkey-flower blue were now throwing a?rial forget-me-nots--pensive glances--after the vanishing cavalry of the air, even as she thus spoke, with one-half of her thoughts on those less spectacular heroes of the deep, the toiling fishermen, whose schooners and savings were being, daily, sunk before their eyes.
“Humph! Captain Andy says he wonders why the subs have not ventured in near shore already, and made an attempt to sink some of those vessels just after they were launched--when they first smelled water, meaning when they were being towed round to the seaport--Gloucester--to have their masts and rigging set up.... O dear! may it not be long before he takes us up the river to see a launching, and visit my Cousin Atwood at his work. I just want to see for myself what sort of a bold front that boy is putting up now!”
Olive, laughing and yearning together, waved a farewell to the a?roplane, now a vanishing speck.
“‘Oh, Major! Oh, Major! Oh, Major!’ he said ...”
Sara’s shoulders were comically shrugged.
“His ambitions are many,
His achievements are small,
He came through the Game with no wings at all!”
“How do you know? He may be growing some--that spoiled cousin of mine--faster than you are. All war service wings are not of the same feather exactly!”
And now the morning-song of Olive’s laughter held a challenging note of rebuke.
Many a true word is spoken in jest--or figure! All war service wings are not the same.
Atlas was upholding shipping. Atlas was bearing up the country. Atlas was upholding the world and its blue arch of freedom, just as the fabled Atlas of old--stalwart sea-god--was supposed to bear heaven and earth upon his broad shoulders.
That is how the modern Atlas--eighteen-year-old shipyard worker--felt.
It had not been an easy day for Atlas, otherwise, young Atwood Atwell, Olive’s cousin, heir to millions, future prop of a wealthy banking-house, at present steadying--holding up, rather in imagination than reality--a raw and ponderous yellow ship’s rib, and, according to his excited feeling, the whole free world with it.
It had been a harder, and in some ways more stirring, day than if he had been a?rially breakfasting on “fish-tails,” supping on cloud-puffs, doing Immelmann turns in the sky, “zooming” upward, or nosing down, to scan the home-shores through powerful binoculars for tell-tale signs of spy-work which might frustrate the labors of Atlas and his fellow-toilers by sooner or later bringing about the sinking of the vessels they built.
Atlas had seen the scouting air-plane pass over the shipyards, five days previous, just before sunset, but he had not paid much attention to it. He was just starting off in his neat little racing-car for a welcome rush back to the open arms of luxury in and about the paternal summer residence at Manchester-by-the-Sea.
“By George! I’m beginning to feel sick of the sight of these dead-an’-alive shipyards,” he muttered to himself, throwing a backward glance, as he drove off, at the yards full of skeleton shapes, like a scarecrow Armada. “Working on moulding timbers--laying the thin moulds on the timbers out there in the field beyond the yard, marking those timbers down to the proper size and beveled shape, using my mathematics until my head aches--nice pastime when the sun’s hot! And, for variety, steering Blind Tim, that old draft-horse--hitched to one o’ those half-ton timbers when at last it’s polished down to a rib--from end to end o’ the yard, between green stock and seasoned stock, an’ every other kind of lumber!” He tooted his horn fiercely, to warn some homing workman, swerved to avoid another automobile, and so snapped the thread of meditation.
As he did so, he caught the critical glance of a trio of blue-shirted ship-carpenters hailing from his own sphere of labor, wending their way homeward, too; and almost he caught the carping comment of one of them, Libby Taber--professional shipyard pessimist.
“There! Aw, there goes the ‘Candy Kid’!” grunted Libby, and his voice was flatter than a marsh-fog. “Well, he ain’t putting up much of a front, is he? He’s ‘soured’ on shipyard work already. He’ll be knocking off, some fine day, pretty soon, an’ tucking himself away, as a Mamma’s boy, in some soft little ‘bunk-fatigue’ job--lazy man’s job for war-time.... See if he don’t!”
“Well, now, I’m not so sure about that,” tempered the foreman. “He side-tracked the ‘bunk-fatigue’ jobs when he was drafted for work. An’ if he ain’t stuck on the shipyard stunt, he’s sticking to it, with muscle an’ nerve--and risks don’t faze him; he’s as ready to take a chance as another!”
But despite these sterling qualifications, before the boy reached home that evening, Libby’s marsh-fog mood had, somehow, mysteriously communicated itself to the young draftee of labor, the wealthy banker’s son, who, until the war summons sounded, had never before done anything he wasn’t particularly interested in doing.
“Oh, confound it all! I do want to knock off. May as well own up to it,” he acknowledged to himself then, and during the days immediately following. “How about jumping my job at the end of next week, after I’ve given the foreman--he’s a fine old fellow--due warning, and--and slipping into some niche in the bank, or in Uncle Peter’s patent attorney’s office, as the Mater wanted me to do? Maybe, after all, I strained a point, leaving the softer snaps for older men, and starting in to help build ships, as I’m too young to go across--too young to enter the Army or Navy, or Aviation either; at least, the family is against it--Uncle Sam, too, it seems--until I’ve had another year or two of college. Well! there’s not much sugar in the deal I’ve chosen.... Pretty raw deal all round! Bah!”
He forged this latter comment, in a moody play upon words, five days after the scouting war-plane had flown over the shipyards and landed by a Council Fire, as he pursued the monotonous task of leading the big blind horse hauling a half-ton of that raw “deal”--unpainted timber--through the shipyard, amid yellow reefs of the same “ships’ stuff” all about him.
Then, suddenly, under the forenoon sun, Atlas--he had not yet become Atlas, though, upholding shipping and the world--jumped, caught his breath, and yanked at Tim’s rein--sightless Tim!
A limousine had stopped by the country shipyard--the open, unguarded shipyard--where vessels were built by the roadside.
A lady stepped out, his mother.
“Don’t hurt my boy!” she said to the yard foreman. “Don’t work him too hard. He’s beginning to look tired of an evening.”
“Well! I guess that won’t hurt him any,” returned the foreman, smiling, not unfeelingly. “He’s doing his bit, and who--who knows when it may become the main bitt?” perpetrating a whimsical joke as he looked towards a finished vessel, wedged up on the launching-ways of an adjoining shipyard, all ready to be launched to-day. “See--see that sawed-off, drab post rising from her deck, ma’am?” he challenged, being a man of words, with a voice that habitually hovered about the sky-line, if Libby’s clung to the marshes. “That’s one o’ the two bitt-heads--weather main bitt, we call it--to which by’n-by the main-sheet controlling the mains’l will be belayed--made fast--safety an’ progress both, y’ understand!”
The mother stared at him smilingly--began to set him down as a “character.”
“I’d let the boy alone if I were you, lady,” went on the yard-boss earnestly. “If his present ‘tough’ bit never shows up on deck as the main bitt on which everything hangs, yet it’s that for him now, if the best in him is anchored to it. Get--me?”
The mother did. She refrained from condoling with her son upon the sameness of the work in which Blind Tim and he were a team, patted the sightless horse, which had “pulled himself blind” in the service of a city fire department, upon the nose, and drove off.
But the boy felt that he had been made an object of solicitude; he “gloomed” outright and made up his mind, once for all, to “jump his job” before another ten days were over, in favor of one softer, or swifter, as the case might be.
“Bah! I could stick it out better in the trenches,” he said to himself.
But----
“It’s a good line. Hold it--Mike!” challenged the foreman, reading, perhaps, what was passing in his mind.
Young Cr?sus started. It was novel to hear himself addressed as “Mike.” A red glow rose to his neck. He did not resent it. Instead it warmed him a very little, as if he had stretched just one toe towards a fire--but not enough to redden the blues.
“‘A good line,’” he repeated to himself. “Pshaw! I wonder if that flock of girls will think so--those who are coming up the river this afternoon, from that distant beach, to see the launching? At least, Olive said so in her note. Will leading a blind horse which ‘tugged himself blind’ carrying the hook and ladder to city fires--straining harder than he was driven, as if he knew there were lives in danger--will that seem a good line to them? Oh, they’ll gush over him, of course!... Ha! Here comes another visitor! ‘Never rains but it pours!’” truculently.
Carefully--indeed, tenderly--guiding Tim, duty’s blind hero, he had reached that part of the lumber-littered shipyard where the ponderous beveled “frame,” or yellow ship’s rib which the horse was hauling, would be set up, hoisted by a rude derrick worked by man-power, until it was in line with sixty-odd of those square frames already branching outward and upward from the keel of a skeleton vessel propped high upon the building-stocks.
“Hum-m! ‘Some’ visitor he seems to be! They’re dropping auger, mallet, and saw to shake hands with him--the ship-carpenters!”
Curiously enough, young Atwood, leaning against his equine hero--a sturdy, boyish figure, light-haired, ruddy-skinned, as Captain Andy had described him, in smeared khaki trousers, a white duck shirt, a duck hat on the back of his head--wanted to do the same, while he waited for the rib to be set up.
But the visitor did not look at him. He exchanged a few greetings, hearty, but rather heavy-hearted. In his eye there was a brooding sense of loss, but a very slight birth-mark beneath it burned like fire--a flaming star that could not be extinguished.
It magnetized Atwood’s gaze, that star; he kept glancing curiously up at it--it looked so indomitable, burning upon the tall cheek-bone of a bronzed man who must have measured six feet one even from the red horizon-line across his tanned forehead to the highly polished toe of his tan shoe which burrowed speculatively into the matted shavings of the shipyard.
“I’ve come to see what vessels you’ve got on the stocks, that’ll be ready for launching pretty soon,” he said, addressing the foreman, within hearing of Atwood, Blind Tim--who pricked his ears at the lusty voice--and an interested circle of workmen.
“What! You’re not thinking of going out again--so soon, Captain Bob? Why! It’s only two weeks since--since that dandy schooner we built for you a year ago was sunk by a submarine.” The master shipwright gasped. “Named after your two little boys she was, wasn’t she? Sufferin’ catfish! that did make me feel bad; I’m the boy who--built--her.”
Captain Bob’s tall lip-line quivered, then tightened--flamed like the birth-star.
“Yes, they sank my savings with her,” he admitted. “All I had was in that vessel! An eight-thousand-dollar fare o’ fish, too, that we had faced dirty weather to get! ’Twill come heavier on the crew, though, mostly married men with families who’ll lose their share, four hundred dollars each, from the trip. Gosh!”
“You had a hard time trying to make shore, too, when the ‘Jerries’ let you get off with your lives--after you saw them whipsaw a bomb under your schooner, and--and----”
The big captain put out a big hand as if warding off something.
“She crumpled up like a paper bag,” he said sorrowfully, “and went down.... Yes! we had a row of fifty-eight hours in the dories--rough sea, too, part o’ the time--before we sighted land.”
“Anything to eat, had you?”
“One bag o’ biscuits that the cook grabbed up when we were ordered to leave her, a gallon of water between sixteen of us, and three parts of a rhubarb pie that we gave to the--kid.”
“Yes, I heard that you had a thirteen-year-old boy--a Boy Scout--with you.”
“So! Son of one of the fishermen--dead game, too!” Captain Bob nodded. “He was standing at the vessel’s rail. I told him to get into the first dory. Not a bit of it! Not until he was sure his father was safe! When at last we reached shore a woman asked him if he had ‘steered’ the dory at all. He misunderstood her, being weak--having gone fifty hours on that three-quarters of a rhubarb pie--mean sour it was, too; we hadn’t much sugar aboard! But, Statue o’ Liberty! you should have seen him fire up: ‘No!’ he yells at her weakly; ‘I wasn’t skeered!’
“True--he wasn’t! Kept a scout’s mouth on, as they call it, all the time, corners turning up--an’ whistled, curled up in the bow, as long’s a drop of the rhubarb juice held out, to--well, to wet his whistle!”
Eyes were wet now among the ship-carpenters--Atwood’s, too! He tickled Blind Tim’s ear and wished that he could muster up enough horse sense to understand the story.
“Well, the game young one spoke for the rest of you; you’re none of you ’skeered o’ the subs if you’re ready to go out again--looking for another vessel!”
It was the moved foreman who spoke. Instantly Captain Bob came back to business, sent his critical gaze roving over the wooden hulls most nearly finished upon the building-stocks.
“Oh! we’re all ready to go to-morrow,” he remarked unconcernedly, chewing his lip, like a cud of courage. “There’s a man I know who wants to buy a fishing-vessel--and he’s after me to take her out. He sent me up here to look ’em over. The ‘Jerries’ ain’t going to keep me ashore.”
“I reckon not! You’re like the rest o’ the skippers, Capt’n Bob--heart of a bullock, with no back-down to it! The subs couldn’t----”
But it was at that very moment--that full and flattering moment--that the inevitable pessimist spoke up, breaking in upon the foreman’s tribute.
“Aw-w! What’s the use?” groaned Libby Taber, in swampy tones--he who had predicted that the rich boy among them would soon be taking ease in a “bunk-fatigue job.” “Where’s the use?... Gloucester’s gone up. It’s good-bye--Gloucester! Day, day, Gloucester! We can’t build ships faster than the submarines can sink ’em!”
There was an explosive sound in the yard. Blind Tim--duty’s hero--heard it. The foreman heard it, too, and knew it for what it was--the sob of a young soul coming into its own!
“‘Gloucester gone up!... Good-bye, Gloucester!’” gritted a voice between clenched teeth. “Well--I guess not! ‘We can’t build ships fast as the subs can sink them!’ ... Well! maybe we can now.”
It was the voice of the “Candy Kid”; the voice of a young David crying aloud in the shipyards against the Philistine menace of his people.
Ship-carpenters stared. Another minute and they might have scoffed at the stripling--a discouraged stripling, at that--turning spokesman.
But the foreman didn’t. He promptly gave a diverting order:
“Frame up!”
Then while workmen proceeded to loop the “falls,” hempen ropes, of the hoisting derrick about the ponderous yellow rib which Tim had hauled from the shaping sawmill, he muttered to the visitor:
“Go round with you in a minute, Cap’n Bob! Just let’s get this half of a square frame in place first, so’s they can bolt her down! Whoops-ma-daisy! Up she goes!”
Up she went, indeed, the rich boy leaving Tim nosing blindly into the dry shavings and helping to steady her--the great rib--in the hoisting-tackle.
“I knew the lad had it in him,” was the foreman’s silent comment. “There’ll be no more thought of quitting; he’ll work overtime now, to stand back of Cap’n Bob--and his kind--to the last punch in him!... Steady her there--now!” he cried aloud, as the beveled frame hovered over the backbone-keel to which it would be bolted, and then settled down upon it, another rib added to the ship’s skeleton. “A mite more to the right! Hold her now!”
Ship-carpenters did. Two, leaping upon the stocks--the platform of protruding blocks, arranged cross and criss-cross, on which the skeleton rested--steadied the rib with their horny hands.
The boy did more--the boy who had cried out against Gloucester “going up.”
Aflame from neck to heel--bareheaded now--he sprang upon the protruding stocks, too, and, facing the yard, bent his back, his broad, muscular, young back, under that ponderous frame, so contributing his mite towards steadying it in place until it could be shored up--propped in its own place.
And it was then--then--to his own excited feeling, not to his conscious thought--that he became Atlas upholding Gloucester, supporting shipping--bearing up the World!
A cramped position! Well, presently every bone in him ached, and swelled, as it seemed, under the heavy pressure, although the half-ton rib, balanced upon the narrow keel, was still suspended in--supported by--the derrick’s falls.
Water dripped from his disheveled hair--his face--and ran down in rivulets over his bare, red chest, from which the open shirt-collar--the limp, soiled shirt-collar--fell back.
But still he crouched--bearing up the World!
Ho! All of a sudden, his bent frame stiffened, reacted to a lightning-like, cleaving thrill which made him conscious that it was growing numb.
Two bright eyes were looking audaciously--challengingly--into his. They were pretty eyes--brown eyes--each harboring a mocking firefly. And the lashes, half-veiling them, were unusual--dark brown, shading into amber at the tips, now borrowing the sunshine’s gold--mocking gold!
Atlas scowled now as he bore up shipping; his subconscious feeling of importance--his “it” feeling--was being derided, laughed at, by a girl.
Vaguely, for the blood was congesting in his head, he saw that there were, at least, a dozen other girlish forms behind her. Girlish faces, fresh as May-flowers, with a little tan on them, flocked before his swimming vision.
One swam into sight which he knew. It was lit by dark eyes, with stars in them.
But, somehow, at the moment, he did not welcome them--their starry sympathy. He felt, too, hotly provoked with the firefly ones which challenged him.
“Hul-hullo--Olive!... How d’you do?” he managed to get out, in response to his cousin’s quivering glance.
“Hullo! Atlas.... Atlas holding up the World!” came in laughing admiration, with swift intuition, from Blue Heron. Her hands were clasped--her whole slim girlish form a tribute. “My! but his wings have grown--war-service wings!” The silent homage tickled her throat.
“When--when is the launching to be?” she asked. “When is that new vessel to be launched over there, in that other yard?”
“About--an hour from now--I--think!” answered Atlas, with difficulty, from under the yellow ship’s rib.
“Better stand off a little! Move back! You’re too close. No--no one knows what may happen. The frame isn’t shored up--propped in place--yet.... Get back--back--I say!”
Thus Atlas delivered his commands, looking up, a frowning young god, of lowering brows, from under the weight which he was steadying--helping to steady. And if his tones were cramped, they were the more imperious.
The May-flower flock of faces, swimming before his bent gaze, receded--retreated to the confines of the shipyard; all--all save one!
One defied him. One still derided him with that firefly challenge which silently said, “Dear me! how important we are!”
“Back!” waved Atlas again, flourishing a half-numbed arm. But the Flame was still defiant. He knew it for a Flame now: a flame of mischief, sunlit mockery, obstinacy, perhaps--temper, upon occasion--and all manner of deeper fires.
He did not know that it was named by the Council Fire for what it was--and what it aspired to be of kindling warmth--Sesooā, the Flame; otherwise, Sara Davenport, embodiment of “pep” in a Camp Fire Group.
Once more he waved his right hand imperiously. Even the fingers began to feel wooden and look yellow in the sunlight, like the great branching timber, measuring thirty feet in its curve, weighing half a ton, which to an onlooker he seemed to be supporting upon his back and shoulders, although the ponderous weight was still really suspended in the hempen falls of the derrick.
Relying upon these straining ropes, one of the two ship-carpenters who had been steadying the ponderous rib with their hands, leaped down to lend some aid in “shoring it,” propping it in place upon the skeleton vessel’s narrow keel-timbers.
It might have been ten seconds later that Atlas felt the peculiar thrill and quiver all through his bent back, his numbing legs--with their feet braced upon the stocks, or building-blocks--that he felt when trout-fishing or “drailing” in the ocean, if a big fish nibbled at his line.
He had got a nibble now! A danger nibble! There was a tremble, a shudder, in the great rib pressing upon him.
Er-er-err-r! It was the gurgle of an aged rope, a worn-out rope, parting, strand by strand, in mid-air.
“My s-soul! The--the falls--derrick’s falls--are--giving--way!”
The nibble had become a bite now, with the hook in his brain.
And he came of a race--a ready-witted race--which was accustomed to act upon any strong nibble of conviction--to take lightning-hold upon a situation.
It was a lightning vision which swam before Atlas now, against a black background of shipyard. He saw the great rib, the ponderous timber, released by the derrick’s failing ropes, unable to maintain, even with his aid, its balance, tottering--tumbling--sidewise, off from him--crashing down into the yard.
He saw, too, that the near-by girl defying him with that merry, wilful glance pointed to mockery on the golden tips of her eyelashes, was within reach of being struck by it--by the wide curve it would describe in falling.
His hunched back became a razor-back--chin touching his knees. And, like a wild-cat, he leaped upon her, pushing her aside--away.
Er-er-r-r! Pop! Snap went the parting ropes--one giving way after the other--their report as thunder in his ears, while, elastically doubling, he sprang from under the wildly swaying timber.
But it did not spare him. Like the kick of a thunder-cloud something grazed him, dealt him a glancing blow upon the shoulder, staggering enough to send his feet from under him--even as he hurled the girl aside.
He was beyond seeing that it was the massive tip of the ungrateful rib which--in feeling--he had been supporting.
Down he went, and the earth, in the shape of another grinning yellow timber--one of those lumber-reefs amid which he was wont to steer Blind Tim--rose up to meet him with such a warm welcome that he saw stars--a whole firmament of them, blood-red, and brighter than the twinkling galaxy which had adorned Sybil’s arm.
Then he lay very still and saw nothing--nothing--just outside the yellow curve of the monster rib, which lay still and prostrate, too, while the girl, her equilibrium likewise upset, rolled over upon the shavings, feeling that, according to a nursery rhyme of her childhood, “heaven and earth had fallen together” and crushed the upholding Atlas between them.
The first to reach him was a ship-carpenter. And according to the pell-mell disorder that broods over most accidents, it happened to be the pessimist, Libby Taber--Libby, who had seen him from the first in the light of a quitter!
He sprang from under the wildly swaying timber.
Now, there is nothing more pell-mell than the moods of a pessimist, not being strung upon the consistent thread of hope!
Libby was no exception. He fogged the air with his stricken cry.
“Oh-h! he’s done for,” he wailed. “Knocked out--done for; the--the best lad that ever set foot in the yard--an’ the quickest to take hold--no ‘sass’ about him, at all, if he is a--rich--man’s--son!”
“Shut up--before I choke you!” growled a steadier voice, the foreman’s. “Done for! Not much! His head came against that lumber-pile. He was doing his bit and it sure was the main bitt that time”--in low, shaken tones--“with a girl’s life depending on it!”
But the girl--why! she felt herself shrinking into such a little “bit” that it seemed as if, presently, she must fade out altogether into the foggy consternation of the ship-yard.
Piteously she looked around for her Camp Fire Sisters. In the deepest pit of blunder and humiliation they would stand by her--even even though Libby was calling the heavens to witness that the fallen rib, grinning in the sunlight, had more sense than the rib that was taken out of Adam’s side and made into a girl--“so it had, by gosh!”
“Hurrah! She kicks! She crawls!... She goes!”
It was an hour later. The girls, nineteen of them, with their Guardian, were standing upon the skirts of the adjoining shipyard, watching, with a thrill only a shade less keen than that which had heralded the landing of a war-plane by their Council Fire, the shooting-off of a new vessel on to the water--the curling, laughing high tide which rose crowing to meet her, its bride.
Atlas was with them. Until the end of the War--or as long as he was a shipyard worker--he would be Atlas now, for the foreman had caught the merry deification from Olive’s lips.
He was covering his halo with his hair; it was a rainbowed halo, too, a bump the size of a hen’s egg, of all colors, upon his right temple, sending a red streak down to his cheek-bone.
In feeling, he was more Atlas than ever, for now it seemed as if he had a lightning-shot globe upon his head, in the shape of that heroic bump, which at times spun so hard through space that it threatened to spin him round with it. But he managed to keep his feet, and the delirious throbs of pain only added to his excitement--and to the thrill of the foreman’s words in his swelling ear: “It was a good line. And you held it--Mike. You saved the life of that contrary little craft--that girl!”
And now he was witnessing the launching of another craft upon her career, with a stifling heart-throb of anxiety which said that it might--might be an unnaturally short one. For the beautiful ship’s hull just darting off the greased launching-ways on to the river, sleek and glossy in her fresh garment of paint--the embryo fishing schooner--would not alone have to face the perils which were the daily bread of Captain Bob and his kind, when big seas would pound her like an earthquake, but even on her maiden trip a submarine might sink her.
There was no knowing what might be in store for her even while, as now, she was a mere sparless hull, before she matured into a maiden vessel; whether, if word had got out as to the date of her launching, a raiding sea-wolf might not be in waiting to seize upon her--a perfectly helpless, wobbly lamb, under the convoy of a tugboat--and blow her up, as she was being towed round to the seaport, to have her masts set up.
This lent a pathos to the cheers--from girls and others--which greeted the first stir of life in her, as her rocking glide began.
“She cr-rawls! She goes! Hi! Hi! Oh-h, see her go!... Oh, isn’t she a bird!”
And, indeed, for the brief few seconds of that swallow-like dart--her white deck flashing--she did seem radiantly winged, like the a?roplane.
“Hour-rah! Houp-ela! She go--de petit ship!” Now it was the voice of a French workman, hanging upon the tail of the launching cheers. “Houp-ela! Ah! Vive le vaisseau!”
“Vive le vaisseau! Here’s hoping no submarine will get her!” cried Atlas, forgetting that he bore a spinning globe upon his head, as he saw the new hull kick up her heels in the water for the first time--brought up short by her snubbing-line--while the crowing tide shot an aigrette of spray aloft, to baptize the ensign--the Stars and Stripes--proudly waving at her stern.
“Vive le vaisseau! Long life to the vessel! O dear! Why can’t we go round to Gloucester on her, all of us, as the tugboat is here now, waiting to tow her down the river?” It was a joint, eager cry from a dozen girls. “Oh-h! do say we can. Captain Andy--our Menokijábo!”
But the old sea-giant--the Tall Standing Man--was proof even against the wheedling use of the Indian name which his Camp Fire Group had bestowed upon him and which could generally, according to his own weakening lament, beguile him into a compliance with being shoved around like a schooner in a tide-rip, at the will of a score of headstrong girls.
“No! No--siree!” He shook his massive shoulders determinedly. “If I was only sure of the tide--and the tug-captain who’s to tow the new hull round was sure of it--I’d haul down my colors an’ ye could.”
“I know a girl who was launched on a new vessel like this--from this very ship-yard, too--and she an’ her father went round to Gloucester on it--the new hull--and she said it was a sort of ‘royal progress’ all the way; everybody from every house and camp along the shore tooting horns, blowing whistles, waving the biggest flags they had, cheering the new vessel on her course--hoping she’d escape the submarines,” said Lilia--Little Owl--looking longingly at that newly launched ship’s hull rocking gracefully upon the river, with her deck white as a hound’s tooth.
“Well! the tide answered for them to go through the canal, I reckon,” was Captain Andy’s reply, still accompanied by negative shrugs. “That’s the new canal that they built since war began, to avoid the danger of taking freshly launched ships outside the harbor, into open sea, at all. Happen it might answer to-day. Happen it mightn’t! Ye never can tell about the tide in this river. An’ if ye had to go outside, how would you like to see a sub pop up to leeward an’ fire a tin fish at you, as I did when I was running that slick old coaster, the Susie Jane, last spring?”
“How could the said sub know that a new vessel had just been launched up here and was being towed round?” questioned Sara Davenport. Her tones were small; it was the first time she had spoken since her challenge to Atlas upbearing the rib--and what came of it.
“I can’t tell how. But information leaks out somehow. Spies, I guess,” was the mariner’s answer.
“Fresh rumors from the sky, as the aviators say,” burst forth Olive excitedly. “According to report those two who landed by our Council Fire and entertained us so well, did discover a lonely hut, with a wireless outfit attached, in some part of the woods along the shore here.”
“They’ll have to do some more tall scouting, I reckon--comb the shores from end to end--before they nab every one who’s playing into the hands of the ‘Jerries.’” Menokijábo shook his great head. “A spy on any side has a quick eye an’ his nerve with him. Anyhow, I’m not taking chances on the safety of this new hull--against the odds of somebody, who has a ‘nifty’ scheme up his sleeve, signaling out to sea about her--by letting you girls make the towed trip on her new deck.”
“And you won’t take chances on our going through the canal, either, on--on the tide being obliging?” Sybil eyed him wistfully.
“Great Neptune! Not much! With a river-channel that’s all ‘studdled’ with quicksands an’ changing gullies, as this one is,” glancing down the brackish river, “the old tide just naturally has to chase itself out a little faster at one time than another. Just high tide now--four o’clock--five by my watch! They didn’t change the tide-table when, on Easter morning, they shoved the clocks an hour ahead. They couldn’t work any daylight-saving racket on the hoary old tide,” laughingly; “’twould upset calculations all over the globe.”
“Well, I think I’ll follow the tide’s example and ‘beat it’ for the sea--Manchester-by-the-Sea--rather earlier than usual to-day, now that I’ve seen the launching,” said Atlas, in whose ear the foreman had been whispering.
“Good! And don’t ye show up to-morrow,” softly enjoined the latter. “An’ you don’t drive your own car this evening, either. Marty Williams will be starting your way pretty soon; you’ve driven him home many an evening; now he can drive you!”
“But you’ll come down to see us at our camp just as soon as you feel able”--began Olive, and stopped, for Atlas’ bump, bared by breezes, flamed like a thunder-bolt in her direction--“I mean--I mean any day now,” she amended lamely. “If you row down the river from here, we’ll come across the sand-dunes from our side of them and meet you half-way, so that you need not go all the way down to the mouth of the river, over the bar and, so, around up to our white beach.”
“We might bring our supper with us, light a fire and picnic out on the middle of the dunes--that would be dandy--right near that great, huge pile of clam-shells where the Indians once held an historic clam-bake,” came breathlessly from Betty--fair-haired Betty Ayres--whose symbol was the Holly, green when all other shrubs were bare.
“Thanks! Awf’ly--awf’ly good you are!” murmured Atlas. “You may look for me on deck--meaning on the dunes by the shell-heap--some time soon. I’ll let you know first. Well, good-bye. So long!”
Yet he lingered a little, ostensibly absorbed in the river and its bride, the new hull, really inclining his swollen right ear for some added word of invitation from the girl with the amber-tipped eyelashes, whose life he had saved.
But those lashes, except for the grace of one flickering farewell nod, were persistently lowered.
“Pshaw! Pshaw! she’s the very original female clam herself--not a word out of her,” thought Atlas, and departed, in high dudgeon.
“Sara Davenport! You behaved like an idiot, not moving off when he told you, before--before that horrid old, jaundiced rib of a ship came near falling on you--and killing you. I suppose it really might have killed you but for him!” was the Flame’s scorching thought. “But he did feel so self-important--crouching there, under the great rib, feeling that he was upholding shipping--I know he did! Just because he’s such a rich boy, who never did anything like that before!... And Olive’s cousin! One of the set into which her father--her family--would think she ought to--ought to marry--when by and by it comes to that--never thinking of Iver, at all!... Iver who held out his burnt hand to a private! Iver who’s been over the top--wounded three times--burned with mustard gas! Oh-h-h!”
Mustard tears were in Sesooā’s eyes now. But, for all their stinging, she would not have parted with them for a kingdom--those diamond drops of the first water, tribute to her pride in the soldier-brother “over there,” to a quite extravagant jealousy on his behalf, too, lest he should fail of getting his heart’s desire when he came back--as she knew he would come!
“Oh! I suppose I shouldn’t vent it on Olive’s kith and kin,” she told herself, looking out through a blur at the lately launched vessel which the tugboat was now taking in tow for her perilous trip round to the seaport, when, if the hoary old tide was not obliging, a “tin fish” might be fired at her, or a bomb whip-sawed up under her new keel, to blow up some thirty thousand dollars’ worth of vessel--and the labor of months.
“What a contrary little cat--an utter simpleton--that Atlas boy must think me! A nice impression I’ve given him of our Camp Fire Group! Well! I can--can--undo some of it, later on. Watch him--watch him open his eyes when he sees me light a fire with rubbing sticks, out there on the middle of the dunes, as the Indians did long ago, I suppose, when they had that huge clam-bake. I wish I could show him that very last honor-bead, too, red with a white square on it, like the Scouts’ signal-flags--a local honor for signaling, for understanding wigwag--sending a message with Morse code or semaphore. I’ll wager he couldn’t do it, for all he held up shipping! No, sir!”
The Flame’s lip was hotly quivering to match the storm water in her eyes, as she sent these thoughts after the new hull, now being towed down the river.
One and all, the girls waved a parting salute, made the hand-sign of fire to win her luck--that baby vessel.
The hand-sign was in Sesooā’s heart. Not by any stereotyped thanks for the vital spark still in her, paid for by the spinning globe which Atlas was carrying home on his head--although, of course, these must be offered, verbal or written--but by the magic of thunder-bird or “hand-hold,” bow, drill, fire-board and tinder, winning the boon of fire from dead wood, would she retrieve the honor of her Camp Fire, uphold the other side of her not scarred by wilfulness and petty mockery through a fantastic jealousy on Iver’s behalf.
Never--never before had Firemaking Outfit such a contract to fill--or the dunes such a vindication to witness!