Alas! for vindication. Alas! for the invisible practical joker which seems sometimes to dog our steps in life and steal our trick when we least expect it.
A maiden knelt upon the white sands out at the wild heart of the sand-dunes, here purple with the shading blossoms of pea-vines, lace-trimmed with everlastings, or raggedly plumed with rank beach-grass and prickly barb-weed.
Near the great pyramid of clam-shells, where the Indians had held an historic feast and got their fire with primitive rubbing of sticks, she knelt upon her right knee, her left foot pressed down hard upon the flat fire-board whose scooped pit, or hollow, had a notch resting upon a wooden tray placed beneath it.
Her left hand--its arm escaping from the white middy-blouse, bared to the shoulder to allow free scope--grasped the handle or socket of her upright drill.
The right pink arm, each muscle strenuously “on the job” under the rounded flesh, worked steadily to and fro the fire-maker’s bow, hand-painted with flame, drawn taut by its leather thong, resting upon the socket at the top of the drill, thus grinding the lower point of that drill into the soft, punky wood of the fire-board, which presently, as the powdered wood-dust fell into the tray beneath, turned black--smoked.
Her hand-painted bag of tinder lay on the sands beside her--that inflammable tinder to foster the spark when it came!
Steadily she drove the bow at first! Anxiously, now, with a horrid little fear beginning to get a hand-hold on her heart, that, after all, the ordeal by fire might not work out as she had expected--the vindication come off--and prove her triumphant mistress of this situation, at least, a perfect fire-witch, even if she had behaved like a simpleton in the shipyard!
Faster, faster--with more and more force--desperately, at last, slipped backward and forward the bow! Harder--harder--ground the drill; the fire-witch, her drooping face aflame, her pretty eyelashes twinkling in a paroxysm, working for dear life now--for vindication--honor--as it seemed to her whose moods were generally highly colored, touched with the extravagance of flame.
Smoke and more smoke in little dun-gray billows! And never a spark of red!
“Rest a while, dear,” said the Guardian. “Then try again--and perhaps you’ll get it.”
She did rest, Sesooā, the fire-witch, in the shadow of the historic shell-heap over which the last flame of sunset most tantalizingly rioted. She curled down upon her left side on the sands, easing her aching right arm.
Then a second fierce trial! A breathing spell! And another wild paroxysm of effort, the decorated bow almost demented now!
Flat failure!
Smoke--and no fire!
She looked up--and caught a smile upon the face of Atlas!
Atlas who had rowed down the river when his day’s work in the shipyard was over, to meet his hostesses, the Camp Fire Group, midway of the dunes for this picnic-supper--and to excitedly discuss the fact that the new ship’s hull which they had so lately seen launched, had been fired upon by a submarine on her towed trip round to Gloucester--would have been sunk had not a Destroyer appeared!
Atlas whose halo the dune-breezes bared--the prismatic bump upon his temple, fast diminishing! Atlas who had laid himself out to make friends with the little fire-witch, deciding that she would make a perfect “pal,” the sort of girl he had always desired for a chum, with plenty of pep in her--if only she wasn’t such a little fire-balloon!
Atlas who had been met with flame turned to ice--or next door to it--with as much frigidity as politeness would allow, tempered by a perfunctory little speech of thanks, rehearsed a dozen times beforehand and eked out by the Guardian, for his heroic presence of mind in that swift leap which prevented the extinguishing in herself of the vital spark by a heavy ship’s rib!
And now it was Atlas’ turn! His smile at her failure was fleeting, involuntary--gone in a moment. But for that one moment it was a smile; a perfectly uncivilized--highly barbaric--grin.
Down went Sesooā’s hand-painted bow beside her tinder-bag!
Neck aflame, so that it could scarcely be distinguished from the red tie of her Minute-Girl Costume, cheeks burning, if the wood-dust wouldn’t, eyes, eyelashes, red-gold hair, all, emitting sparks, a fire-ball herself, she uncurled--sprang to her feet!
Her hand went to her throat. Breathlessly, desperately, she was fighting to get the better of the stray powder-puff of anger--as Iver had done--before it exploded openly.
One glance she flung at Atlas--and he was consumed!
“Let me--let me go!... Oh! we haven’t--haven’t--got wood enough for a fi-ire. You’d better light it with matches. I’ll go--let me--and get some more--driftwood, wreck-wood--to make a rainbow fire! Back--back near--the--bungalow....”
In explosive incoherency her eyes met the Guardian’s. And Gheezies never failed to read a girl’s soul.
“All right!” she said. “If one of the other girls goes with you! It would be nice to have such a wonderful fire, giving off every hue in the rainbow, out here in the middle of the dunes--as we had the night we entertained aviators--and sit around it after our cooking is through. But it’s coming on dark! Don’t be long! Take--Betty!”
Betty had to take herself--little evergreen Holly! The Flame had already flown--a tearing, scintillating flame, as it raced over sand-mound and graying sand-hill.
“I’ve just got to be alone! If not--I’d explode! Oh, he’s simply--simply hateful, that Atlas boy--if he did save my life!... Oh-h! I knew how important he felt--as if the shipyard sun shone on him alone when he was crouching with his back under that horrid ship’s rib. Ridiculous, when he wasn’t really supporting it at all!... And--and to think I should have failed--failed, before him, to get the fire, when I have broken the record before, for a girl, and got the spark in thirty seconds; that--that I should have--again--made a fool of myself!”
“Oh! Sally--Sara--have mercy! Don’t run--quite--so hard: I can’t keep up with you!” It was Betty’s panting cry, tugging at the steps of the racing Flame.
It had never been such a reckless flyaway--that Flame--that it had not a heart for a Camp Fire Sister.
Within a few hundred yards of the bungalow-beach, quarter of a mile from the group, back there, upon the dunes--amid the skirts of twilight, light and filmy yet, which the dune-breeze was shaking out--Sara Davenport, out of breath herself, paused and caught Betty by the hand.
“If--if we can just get over that big sand-hill in front of us, and the low mounds beyond, we’ll reach the spot where we saw all that wreck-wood, such a lot of it, when bathing to-day, Bettykins!” she breathed. “It--’twill save my being a wreck--myself! Oh! why couldn’t I get the spark to-night--of all nights? And--and to be grinned at by that Atlas boy! If--if that wouldn’t make a dogfish drop his herring, as Captain Andy would say!... If I can only look out over the bay--over the sea--in--in the direction of where Iver is--over there--I’ll feel better!”
“I know-ow!” soothed Betty. “It was too bad you couldn’t get it!”
She drew on her last pinch of pep, of breath--the Holly--as they raced on, over the tall, white sand-peak, shadowy in the gloaming, tripping over wild pea-vines, empurpling, faintly now, the lower dunes.
The scampering sea-breeze racing from their own beach, where cranberries slept with their coral cheeks on dimming pillows, clasped them like a brother.
“We’ll just have time to gather a few chunks of the coppery wreck-wood. Then--then we’ll have to hurry back,” said Betty. “I really didn’t think it was so far to this spot, and I guess the Guardian didn’t either! You swept her----”
“Hush! Listen! The chug, chug, of a launch--motor-boat--passing quite close in to shore, too! Tide’s high!” Sara halted on tiptoe now, a poised, breathless figure, and held up her hand.
“I’m afraid!” whispered Betty. “I wish we hadn’t come!”
“Nonsense! Nobody runs close in to shore--close to our beach--except Captain Andy--funny if ’twas him!--the artist’s brother, or--or, now an’ again, that seal-hunter, who passed when I was camouflaging the dory--toothless bead-eye”--with a recovering chuckle--“whose face, the hunter’s I mean, I can’t.... Goodness! I rather hope it isn’t--him!”
“If we crouched down behind those two low sand-mounds in front, we could peep over--between them--and see who it was without being seen,” pleaded Betty timorously.
“Right you are--little Chicken-heart,” came the older girl’s response.
“I feel as if I were in the trenches now, looking over the top.” Betty gathered a handful of purple pea-blossoms from the sand-rampart before her.
“Standing on the firing-step, peering out over the sand-bags, as the soldiers do! But there’s nothing to fire at here! Pretty sure to be a friend, whoever it is!... My s-soul! I do believe it is the--mysterious--seal-hunter!”
“He’s--alone!” whispered Betty.
“Yes--for the first time, except when he passed us on the beach!”
Chug, chug! hiss, hiss! the motor-boat, a trim little launch, was abreast of them now, passing within twenty-five yards, so close to shore that its occupant seemed to have made a bet with the crowing high tide that he could thus skirt the beach without grounding.
He was standing up, amidships, his left hand on the pilot-wheel, narrowly scrutinizing the shore.
Either he saw or did not see two pairs of eyes peering at him, ferret-like, through clumps of beach-grass. With a complacent gesture, satisfied on some score, the fingers of his right hand went up to the comer of his mouth, describing a crescent, a twirling motion, as they thoughtfully fondled the tip of a small, bristling mustache.
It was with a low moan--a strange searching moan--that Sara Davenport fell back, and lifted a long-drawn face to the sky--all madcap flame, petty flame, wilted in her now.
“Bet-ty!” She clutched the other girl’s arm, and pinched it so tight that the Holly, little thorny evergreen, quivered like her namesake of the dunes in a wintry blizzard.
“I do believe it is the--mysterious--seal-hunter.”
“Bet-ty! I have seen him before--seen him do that--with his fingers! But where--where? I must remember! I feel--now--that I ought to remember! Oh! God, help me to--remember!” Sara Davenport bowed her paling girlish face against a purple cushion of wild pea, raised it again in half a moment, and crept cautiously around the screening mounds.
“He’ll bear watching!... I’m going to watch him,” she gasped. “I’m going to see what he’s up to! Oh!” winking fiery tears back, “oh! if I could--only--get the spark now--the spark from my memory, instead of just smoke--I wouldn’t care if I never--never--got it, the fire, from wood again, in all my born life!”
“He has something in his hand--something that shimmers in his hand! See! See, Betty! It--it’s like the radio-powder in that little bottle--Olive’s secret that shines in the dark--only you can see it farther off--much farther off--where we are!”
“Like--like the radio-dials facing the aviator in his tiny cock-pit!” corroborated Betty, in low response to the flaming whisper which scorched her ear, as Sara’s lips hissed into it amid the rustling beach-grass.
“Mer-cy! He’s whirling it--doing something with it--spinning it round in a circle. It is--it is a radio-dial! A big one! Bet-ty----”
“Don’t pinch so har-rd!” sobbed Betty, groveling amid the purple pea-blossoms.
“He’s signaling with it! Oh! my living soul! he is--is--signaling now, with his right arm! Wigwagging! See-ee! Putting his hand d-down, with the dial in it, snapping it back up to his shoulder; that answers to a dot! More slowly now--that’s for a dash, by code! Standing up there in the launch--in that little creek--showing the dial out to sea! Short! Long! Short! Oh-h! I understand Wigwag. But I can’t read that--get the words--message!... I can just barely make out his arm going--catch the shimmer sideways. Heaven and earth! It’s cipher, I suppose.... He’s sending a message out to--sea--by cipher! Betty, he’s a--spy-y!”
The murmuring beach-grass whispered about the two girls. The crushed pea-blossoms lining their sand-nook with velvet cushions--dark velvet--sent the ghost of a wild fragrance up into their nostrils--wild as the situation in which they found themselves on the ragged coast-line of their normal life--wild, abnormal, as War itself.
The launch, with the man standing in it, his left hand on the pilot-wheel, had drawn round into a little tidal creek, a foaming inlet, not forty yards from the girls! Crawling along in the purple hollows, screened by luxuriant vegetation, their whispers drowned by its rank murmurs and by the sea-breeze, sweeping the red lamps of their burning cheeks, which, it seemed, must give them away in the darkness, they had followed his movements, lying low, waiting through endless minutes, until night more fully fell! Sara had! And Betty--trembling little fair-haired Betty--whose loyalty, at least, was ever-green, had not hung back.
“A spy--a spy signaling with radio out to sea, giving out word to submarines! Oh! it may have been he who told the date of the launching of that new vessel we saw, so that she was fired upon--a hole torn in the tugboat’s smoke-stack--so that they were lying in wait for her.... Mercy!”
Had it been a signaling contest, a prize offered for rapidity, the fiery wigwag of Sara’s tongue and thoughts at the moment might have carried off the palm even against that strange--strange--arm curling and uncurling from the black, silhouetted shoulder, outlined with random shimmer, like a phosphorescent twig against the night.
“Must--must be a strong radio-dial! With a telescope--through periscope--it could be seen a long way off--five miles, perhaps! Not otherwise!... Oh!--Oh-h! he’s through now. Cranking the launch--starting off again! People thought him a harmless seal-hunter!... Out into the bay!... But where did I see him before: his--his eyes that puzzled me--arm--hand--the movement he made, twirling his mustache, as he passed our beach a while ago? Oh! Betty, I think, maybe--maybe--I’m mad, but--Bet-ty--it’s coming to me.”
“What’s--coming?”
“The spark! Not just a smoke-cloud any longer! I’m getting it--getting--at--it! Oh-h!”
It was at that moment, straining her burning eyes to follow the dark outline of the launch, gliding away from shore, heading boldly out across the bay, with its Innocent chug, chug, in her ears--America Burnham’s loyal launch, hired or stolen--that Sara Davenport felt as if through the darkness within--the raging tumult--a radio-tipped arrow cleft her from throat to toe--then pointed one way.
Pointed to a picture shimmering against blackness, like an illumined dial, like the beady figurehead on the dragonized dory, its meaning--strong meaning--beginning to be read: the outskirts of a military training-camp, a gassed soldier, a pale girl ministering to him with soaked wisps of cotton-wool, a raging young officer “bawling out” a sergeant and a detached young woman looking on with snow-blink glance, complacently raising thumb and forefinger, pivot and crescent, to her smooth--smooth--lip-corner.
“Betty! Betty! I’m not mad! I’ve got it--got it, the spark. Remember now----Oh! I’m sure I remember where I’ve seen him.... Goody! What a chump”--Sara’s hand madly twisted itself into the pea-vines--“what a simpleton--ninny--I was, not to do so sooner!... Gracious! wor-worse now,”--frenziedly--“letting him get away--off--to find another creek, to do--do some more radio-signaling to submarines!”
“What--what can you do to stop him? The Coast Guard men--patrol men--they ought to see him! Oh-h, let’s run back--back to the others--tell the others!”
“Yes--and let him get clear away! Patrol couldn’t see him; he was hidden from them by that jutting sand-spit behind us. No search-lights playing over the bay either to-night! But they could see me--see me--if I signaled! I can! Iver taught me--Iver, over there!... I’ve got an honor-bead!”
“Oh-h! Where are you going?” Betty clutched wildly at the other’s short blue skirt; a flame--a soul--was in its narrow hem.
“The Bungalow! I can find something--Olive’s electric flash-light--signaling flash-light--she left it behind her; other girls took theirs, to light----”
“Door’s locked!” sobbed Betty. This was War--for the first time she realized it.
“Sure--sure to find a window--somewhere--open! If not--break a pane! He’s not going to get away--get away with it--his radio Wigwag! Was--was it his sister, maybe, up at Camp Evens--or him--himself, in woman’s dress? Oh-h, why on earth didn’t I catch on sooner?... Atlas held up shipping!”
Dim prints fluttered out from the varnished wall--the living-room wall--in the strong breeze blowing through an open window: Pershing, American Commander-in-chief; Foch, Marshal of France; Haig, who held the line; Cadorna, of Flamina’s Italy; Albert of Belgium, kingly of courage!
The Camp Fire Group had held an indoor guessing contest the night before, identifying these and lesser leaders of the Great War, without seeing the names. The pastime over, they had pinned the leaders up on the bare wall of that bungalow living-room.
Now the sea-breeze took its turn at identification as it crept through the window--in the wake of an excited girl whose wildly throbbing heart, like a lamp turned high within her, guided her straight to an adjoining dormitory, a glass-paneled sleeping-porch, closed at present, where was a long row of dim cots.
“I don’t need to grope around for matches. Olive keeps her flash-light by the head of her bed--since she and I haven’t been sleeping in a tent any longer.... What’s this? Oh! her secret that shines in the dark--the powder for radio-paint in that tiny bottle. Perhaps if I wetted a little of it--smeared some more on the dory’s bow--and rowed out a little way, to signal, I’d attract attention better; ’twould act as a foot-light--if they saw it through the glasses--between flashes! Well--here goes!”
Yet as she fluttered forth again through the wind-gap of that window, the Flame turned briefly and waved her hand to those World Heroes upon the wall. Not much tribute to them! At the moment one and all were summed up in the highly colored mental print of her brother Iver, fighting over there.
“He taught me to signal with Morse and Semaphore--to read Wigwag, too! He was wounded in both legs, the very first time he went over the top--crawled on, leading his men--that was at Chateau-Thierry. He’d want me to use the knowledge I got from him.... I’d do it even if that spy were to see me, turn back and kill me, maybe, before the Coast Guards get here.... Priceless stuff, Olive says, this radio-powder. Bah! who cares, if it helps? Now--now, she’s a regular lightning-bug, my camouflaged dory!”
Lost to all sense of economic values, she was wetting a full big pinch of the costly powder on her burning palm, with a drop or two of sea-water, smearing it over the dory’s camouflaged bow--then shoving her off, forgetful even of Betty, a trembling Holly--though of loyalty still evergreen--cowering upon the beach-edge.
“Now! what’s the attention-signal--Morse? Let’s see!” The girl’s left hand pushed her hair back from her brow, she crouching in the lightning-bug dory, a few yards from shore. “Yes! ‘A,’ sent over and over; ‘dit-dar-dit-dar-dit-dar--dit,’ if signaled with a buzzer; short, long, short, long, so on, with the light!”
She was standing now--as the spy had done in the motor-boat, the launch which had melted off into far shadows of the bay--holding her signaling flash-light aloft, pressing her thumb lightly, with rhythmic unevenness, upon a little lever at the side.
And, lo! the shore which she was facing--the wild island-shore merging into the long sand-bar--awoke, opened its eyes, answered with bright blinker flashes of understanding from lonely watch-tower and patrolling surf-man on his tiresome beat.
“Short, short, long! That would be dit-dit-dar--meaning U. N.--they got me! Now--now what message shall I send?... Oh, I wonder if he’ll get me, the spy, turn back an’ get me, before they come? Never mind; Iver----”
One sidelong glance out into the curtaining shadows of the bay! Then, “Catch spy in launch. Out--bay!” slowly spelled out the winking flash-light, pressed by a girl’s unfaltering little thumb.
And fast as the shore had blinked, it responded! There was something unusual about the direct, correct message; about a strange, faint unearthly shimmer, seen through binoculars, bathing the spot--the boat--whence it came, when the flash-light wasn’t speaking.
Tower and patrol, both, flashed their message to the white Coast Guard Station upon the island-shore. A strong search-light scanned the bay.
In its radiance forth leaped the light steel life-boat, rowed by strong arms; the Coast Guard power-boat, the old self-bailer, too, hustling as she could do, in an emergency.
“O dear! I hope she can show a little more speed--that self-bailing ark--than Captain Andy gave her credit for. Otherwise, she won’t overhaul the launch! He--may--get away, after all!... Oh-h, there’s Betty calling! Poor little Betty!”
With signal-flashes in her finger-tips that seemed to light the water round her, the sands ahead, the Flame shoved her dory’s nose up on to the beach again.
A wild-eyed Betty met her! Some one else!
“Is it true--true--that they’re after a spy, the Coast Guards--that you signaled them? You?” cried Atlas.
Sara turned a flash-light beam upon him and nodded.
“We--we’ve been searching for you! Just got here!... Oh! isn’t there a boat--a boat of any kind--anywhere--on this old graveyard of a beach? I--I want to take after him, too!... I--must!”
The boyish tones wildly bristled as Atlas’ search-light glance implored the sands, resting for a fatuous moment upon the dim shape of a canoe--Little Owl’s birch-bark canoe.
“Pshaw! you couldn’t go in her; she’s light’s a feather. Here, you may take my--dory!”
“Heavens! Her! She looks as if she had escaped from some--boat--bedlam!” Atlas drew a raving breath.
“Yes--she’s camouflaged--a perfect lightning-bug, too! But you can have her!” With an hysterical laugh the dory’s owner stepped out, laid down her hand-painted oars, deaf to the rude voice maligning her boat--the dim, beauteous home-sands, too. “And I--I won’t ask to go in her, either!” she magnanimously added.
“Gee! but you’re a brick.”
“No more than you are! You held up shipping--that heavy old ship’s rib--or seemed to!”
But Atlas was deaf to the tardy tribute, as the dory, no longer even a bead-eye, but a radio nightmare--all ghostly a-shimmer--dashed out upon the tide.
“Well! Well! we got him--nabbed him. The Coast Guard men said they never saw a dory stretch herself like that one; that I just drove her--sent her for all she was worth!... They--they nearly cracked their sides laughing at her, too, when ’twas all over--wanted to know what ‘nut palace’ she’d escaped from--said the spy must have thought he had an evil spirit on his track!”
It was an hour later. Atlas was holding forth to nineteen girls and their breathless Guardian upon the dark sands--on the very spot where the air-scouts, spy-hunting aviators, had made a landing.
“I--I went ashore with them at the Station--after they searched the launch,” he added.
“Oh! what did they find in her? a--a woman’s wig?” cried Sara, who had been remembering, furiously remembering--minutely recalling--during the past hour. “A--a--the most charming brown wig, with little wavy threads of gray in the mat over the ears; that--that’s what ‘Old Perfect,’ with the feather turban, the muff in April, the rather high cheek-bones, the very smooth skin, wore up at Camp ... Goody! I was envying her the--gray--hairs.” The voice of the fire-witch broke upon a mettlesome little canter of laughter.
“Yes, they did find a dress-suit case with a false bottom; a feminine wig--some further disguise--was stowed away in it.”
“But who--captured--him?” It was a low, thrilled uproar of question. “Not--not the camouflaged dory?”
“No, the Coast Guard captain. The launch was showing her heels to the old self-bailer. The spy shifted his course--put about--was trying to dodge back towards the river--tidal river--down which he came. The steel boat headed him off, and--and the dory, too! Then he jumped overboard, tried to swim. But the captain yelled at him to halt--surrender--or he’d fire. Ex-ci-ting! Well! I should say so.... Good of you to let me take your boat--if she is the most ‘witchetty’ thing that ever floated!”
“You--you upheld shipping.”
Within the radiant ring of the powerful flash-light belting the sands, a boy and girl--Atlas and the Flame who had defied him--looked into each other’s feverish eyes with comradeship, not challenge now--comradeship that might well grow to something more charming, as the years went on--when the white flag of Peace should float once more over a progressive world.
Misunderstanding was of the past--mockery, too! They had come through the Game “with their wings,”--the patient, toiling service-game for freedom and Country; they were one with their brothers of the skies--with the heroes of trench and top, over there.
Or, to change the figure, all had done their bit, and, in two instances, by might and magic of service, automatically swelling, it had become the main bitt to which the main-sheet of safety, the mainsail of progress, were belayed.
And yet--yet--in another minute even that failed to satisfy the girl in the case--left her with a hollow feeling of dissatisfaction--for she was a creature of moods shading like her eyelashes, and suffering from reaction, too!
The flash-light winked itself out in her hand--and all her exultation with it.
She hid her now pale face in the curve of an arm in a green-stained middy-blouse.
“Oh! yes, it’s ex-ci-ting.... Ter-ri-bly exciting!” she moaned to the sands. “But how I wish it was over! I don’t want to distrust those about me. And maybe he thought he had a grain of right--though he was a spy!” The tired concession was breathed into the curve of a trembling elbow. “Cool--cool he was, anyhow--here and there! Oh-h! if only the cry of the children--the little children over in France--could come true, and it was: ‘Fini la Guerre!... Fini--forever--la Guerre!’ If Peace could come again!”
Peace had come again.
And in her shining bassinet Peace Europa breathed softly through a mouth like a damp red rose, waved a tiny arm feebly, uncurled the new-born hand, with its pearly nails, as if she would catch and hold to her baby breast--forever and a day--the new-born happiness that had come to earth with her.
Beside her in the wee hospital crib, sharing the soft blanket in which the welcoming nurse had wrapped her, slumbered another, her Heavenly Twin--the Babe of Peace.
So it seemed to nurses and doctors who stole near to look at her, lying all oiled and shiny!
“If ever a baby was born at the hour of fate, she was!” breathed the intern, the house-doctor, beaming through his glasses upon her. “And, by George! the mite seems to know it, too. Did you ever before see such a placid smile upon a new-born thing?”
“I never did,” replied the feminine superintendent of the Hospital. “I’m afraid I’ll have to keep out of the ‘baby-room,’--else I’ll break every rule--take her up now and again, to cuddle her, just for the sake of this won-der-ful hour in which she first saw--the--light.”
“Yes! and spoil her for her mother to take care of, afterwards--make her as nervous as a witch. I guess even my young sister--fifteen-year-old sister who’s a Camp Fire Girl and has taken a course in Baby Craft--would have more self-control than that,” rebuked the intern, but leniently, joy oozing through his glasses; for his dearest chum was at the front, that devastated front, in far-away France--and now there was a chance of seeing him again.
“I feel that way, too, doctor,” said the superintendent, interpreting the look, not the rebuke. “My twin brother is over there. He’s been wounded over and over again. Oh! how I dreaded his taking part in the next big drive. No need for it now! Will you listen to the whistles and horns--that hooting klaxon. Why! the world’s gone mad. And to think that this baby--a soldier’s child, too--should be born just at the moment, or a few minutes before it, that the word went out to cease firing!” The superintendent wiped her eyes.
“Was ever such a heavenly herald?” breathed the doctor.
“Her mother feels so. She says the child is born for greatness. She has named her already, Peace Europa--Peace Europa Bush.”
“Gosh! Some name! A big contract to fasten upon six pounds and three-quarters of soft pink flesh and gristly bone,” mocked Dr. Lemuel Kemp. “Well! I suppose the heavenly infant will hold an unconscious reception, all day long, of those who are privileged to be admitted--in this Hades of a room.” He sniffed at the hothouse atmosphere of the baby-room--extremely hothouse--in which humanity’s latest buds--seventeen of them, with Europa as the center--were unfolding. “I’ll have to tip that young sister of mine the word to come round and see her. I suppose she’s somewhere out at the heart of the clamor now--in the crowded streets, with the rest of the family--the rest of the world--gone mad over the Armistice being signed. But, oh! she’ll have a fringe of enthusiasm left for the Peace baby,” smilingly. “She has been taking care of a neighbor’s child, two months old, for an hour a day lately; she showed me a pretty flame-colored honor-bead she had received for it.”
“A neat way of gilding the pill of service!” smiled the superintendent.
“Say, rather, of transforming it into a sugar pellet,” was the man’s reply, as the two left the tropical atmosphere of the hospital nursery.
Yes, War was over. Simultaneously with the birth of little Peace the word had gone forth to a hacked and harrowed and weary world to cease firing!
No wonder that the young Day, born with her, had gone mad--outside the hospital--a brimming-over child that could not contain its own happiness; that from shore to shore bells rang, sirens sang, klaxons hooted themselves hoarse--men and women, too--while underneath the wild riot--vociferous glee--tears baptized the dawn in many a home; radiant joy-tears on behalf of those who would come back, through which, like a reflection of the morning-star in ocean, shone the gold star of memory for those who would not!
But the star of service had not set. The wings which had come through the game, undrooping, must be spread anew for tried, if tamer, lights.
And so, as Europa still lay, oiled and shining, teasing the air with her first pin-prick cries--ere yet she was four hours old--there arrived two visitors to see her!
One was blinking like the sleepiest Owlet ever caught abroad at daylight; she had been awake since three, abroad since thirty minutes past; she was the doctor’s sister, Lilla Kemp, Little Owl, of the Morning-Glory Group of Camp Fire Girls--a Glory Unit now, as it paraded the streets in a body, radiating ecstasy and anticipatory reunion--longed-for reunion with the brothers over there.
The other, being by name and nature of the order of the flame, looked as if she could never “drowse” again, as if she had caught the very heart of the sunlight joy upon the tips of her shading eyelashes and held it there in twinkling points of gold.
“I’ve made the duckiest--dearest--dandiest--little set of baby-clothes for her--for Peace Europa--her mother told me, long ago, that if she happened to be born on Peace Day, she would name her that,” said Sesooā, the Flame. “You should see them, Lil, the sweetest little dress--I put every teeny, tiny, microscopic stitch in it myself,”--there was a drop of water on the gold lashes now--“the daintiest fine linen gertrude and tiny shirtie. You see, I knew she was a soldier’s child--and due to arrive about this time.”
“And you’ll exhibit them, won’t you, at our next ceremonial meeting--a Peace Ceremonial, the Guardian said it would be, if the Armistice went through; she’s planning for it already. They’ll mean a new honor for hand craft, a pretty green honor-bead--those dear little baby-clothes.”
“Oh! I can hardly think about that now, or of anything, except--except that they’re a thanksgiving set--offering,”--the tears brimmed over at this golden point, two of them dropped upon Peace Europa’s blanket, saluting the invisible peace twin, new-born Peace Angel, sleeping beside her--“a thanksgiving offering because Iver’s coming back.... Oh! I can’t be s-sure yet, of course! He’s been wounded so often, burned with mustard gas, lost--lost all his beautiful wig, as he jokingly said--his hair, you know, burned off.
“But when you come back,
As you will come back!”
The sister’s tear-breathed chant--each word a whirling joy-center--was crooned into Europa’s hooding blanket. “Isn’t she the darlingest baby you ever saw--little Peace Angel?” added Sara Davenport very softly. “I’m going to adopt her in a way; take care of her for an hour a day later on, if her mother will allow me, as you have been doing with that neighbor’s baby--Lilla.”
“Why don’t we adopt her forthwith, as a Group, directly she’s out of the hospital, make her clothes for her, bring her toys, and when she’s a year old, or so, take her to camp with us in the summer? Fancy her building sand-castles--little Peace Europa--among the cranberries on that white beach from which you put off in your radio-smeared dory, to signal the Coast Guards! Fancy that--our Peace Europa!”
Lilla’s eyes spilled over with humid light upon the blanketed mite.
“Too lovely for anything--if her mother will allow it!”
“Bless you! She’ll make no objection. They live in rather a stuffy little street; when she was well she took a boarder or two to help out while her husband was fighting over there--and she has three more children, the oldest twins, a boy and girl, between four and five, and a tot of two.”
“How--how about leaving Europa to sleep with her heavenly twin, the Peace Babe, and our taking those other twins out to see the big parade this afternoon--they’re soldier’s children,” suggested Sesooā, with sudden inspiration.
“Good idea! Only, of course, representatives from our group, from every Camp Fire in the city, are supposed to march with the Red Cross for which we have been knitting, sewing, making surgical dressings, working in a war-canteen, and so forth, right along--to parade on this won-der-ful Peace Day!” Little Owl’s lip quivered; she, too, wore a blue-starred service-pin for a young uncle, who had been to her childhood a pal and a protector--prisoner now on enemy soil--would the Armistice bring him back?
“Oh! we’ll let Blue Heron--Olive--hold our Morning-Glory end up in the parade, with the Rainbow, Arline, to support her. They’ll attract attention enough. Olive is doing that now, I believe, since she made her début in society two months ago, at her stepmother’s wish, but very quietly, the War not being over then and every one of us ready to stand on our heads, as now, for joy.... For you will come back!... Ah, well!” the Flame’s lip quivered. “Ah--well!”
The latter sigh introduced the least dark shade of panic into the day’s rainbowed panegyrics, lest he who was to return--Iver--Lieutenant O Pips of the alert eye, the observation post astuteness--might fall short of gaining his heart’s desire when he did return, might not get all he longed to ask from the Torch-Bearer whom he had seen in ceremonial dress, or kneeling by a gassed soldier, many and many a time, over there, when he missed the things that make life hum.
“Ah, well! no use in anticipating. At all events, I’ve got over being raspy on the score--the war-time score--of Olive’s cousins!” A little flaming shrug of shoulders now, as the two, with a last yearning look at Peace Europa--beneficent babe--a last almost reverent touch upon the tiny, pearly hand which had come to earth, as it seemed, bearing the boon mankind desired--turned to leave the tropical baby-room, the quiet hospital.
“Well! it’s to be the twins now, is it, Europa’s brother and sister?” said Lilla, as they emerged into the open, where, on all sides, the day, young yet, had gone mad, was running over with tomfoolery and innocent riot--a madcap child that could not contain its own gladness.
But the twins were no “peace handful,” as the two girls found. In the absence of their mother they were martyring a grandmother. They had baptized the joy of the day in mud-puddles and hung it out to dry from spikey fences--the boy of four and a half, especially--until not a clean, whole shred of clothing remained to him.
“Never mind! I’ll find something for him to wear,” proclaimed the grandmama hopefully. “Will I allow them to go an’ see the big parade with you!” eyeing the visitors with almost tearful gratitude. “Oh! you’d better believe I will. Now! to see how I can rig him up. There are these rompers of Elsie’s, fresh from the tub--I’ve just ironed them!”
“But I can’t wear them. Oh! I c-can’t wear--them!” The boy eyed the tiny gingham garment as if Peace Day had, in aviator’s slang, become a pancake wreck, its joy all flattened. “They’re girl’s!”
He leveled a mud-caked forefinger at an utterly ignominious half-inch of embroidery decorating those romper-leglets of his twin sister.
“Daddy-man w-wouldn’t want me to wear them! Daddy-man’s a soldier--my Bob-daddy is! He’s over in France--now!”
Bob-sonny of four and a half looked sidelong out of a rolling eye-corner at the two spick and span Camp Fire Girls, in costume of red, white, and blue.
In this contest, however, those victorious colors, so triumphant over there, were coolly neutral.
He attacked the grandmother with pleadings--the two freshly laundered rings of embroidery weaving chains about the manikin soul within him, as he rebelliously eyed them.
“Come! Come! No more nonsense now!” Grandmama suddenly set her foot down. “I wonder you aren’t ashamed! You’ll have to wear ’em--or stay at home!”
She departed, on an errand, to the near-by kitchen.
Once more Bobbie’s insulted eye implored the Minute-Girls, still neutral.
Then he retreated into an adjoining bedroom, whose door was wide open, and knelt upon a low chair--desperately, as soldiers kneel in the trenches.
“O God,” he pleaded, with full bursting heart of faith. “O God, please don’t let Her make me wear dem--dis day--dey’re--girl’s!”
Neutrality was at an end.
It was America’s hour and her spirit flamed in her Minute-Girl daughters, siding, all in an illumined flash, a tearful flash, with Bob-sonny against any camouflaging of his sex on this day when Columbia’s sons, his father among them, decorated and re-decorated, over there, were being hailed--and kissed (oft to their disgust) with delirious cries that “America--America had saved France!”
“You shan’t! You shan’t!” cried Sesooā, seizing upon the manikin who, not so many months ago, had seen them march away, his baby soul on fire. “You shan’t, Bobby! I’ll save you! See--see if I don’t!”
She was in the strange kitchen in an instant.
“Oh! Gran’ma,” she wheedled, “I’m just so used to the wash-tub. I’ve done the whole family washing before now and won a flame-colored honor-bead for that little performance,” laughingly--tenderly. “As we’re going to take these heavenly twins off your hands for the rest of the day--I promise not to bring them home until they’re so tired an’ sleepy that they wouldn’t see a puddle if ’twas spattering them--won’t you--won’t you let me have one pair of Bob-sonny’s little knickerbockers, that cunning little blouse, too. Dear me! I’ll launder them for him in no time! When he sees the big parade go by he can hold up his head as ‘all boy,’--what there is of him--a fiery little son of big, fiery Bob-daddy, over in France, who has helped to bring the War to an end, ... and who doesn’t know yet that his little Peace Europa is waiting--waiting--for him on this side of the water, when he gets back--as he will get back!”
But in the hearts of Camp Fire Girls, for all time, there would burn the gold star of memory for those who would not return!
In the home of another member of the Morning-Glory Group smiles had untowardly turned to shrieks that day.
It was the small boys’ hour when they dominated, because of the embryo manhood in them, in the name of their fathers or brothers over there.
They were not slow to avail themselves of the temporary license. Ten-year-olds, in squads of eight, linked tandem-fashion, one behind the other, butted those of middle-age, fat or fussy business men, without rebuke, meeting naught but the indulgent smile of an eye that looked humidly across the water.
And little Kendal Ayres, aged seven, climbing ambitiously to wave Old Glory from a tin roof, fell to a graveled walk and broke his arm.
“Mother!” he said, striving heroically to endure the pain of a compound fracture until the doctor came. “Mother! let me have ‘Shepherd’s’ picture by me; that will help me to--bear--it--better.”
It was his sister Betty who brought it--who reverently brought it--the picture of an Army Chaplain in uniform, with the Croix de Guerre upon his breast.
“I have a gold star for a Godfather now, haven’t I?” murmured little Kendal, through clenched teeth, as he had often whispered before since “Shepherd” had given his life, while succoring the wounded, in France.
“You have, Kennie,” said white-lipped Betty, whose loyalty was evergreen, but her courage easily frost-nipped. “And--and you’ll have to live up to it! So will I!”
She did. Putting her delicate, half-fainting mother out of the room, she waited upon the doctor while he was administering the ether, even lay on the bed beside Kennie, holding his hands--getting some of the fumes herself--until oblivion set in and Kendal lay passive beneath his gold star--in the hallowed presence of “Shepherd.”
It was the sacred memory of “Shepherd” and many others which consecrated the Peace Ceremonial which the Group held in its own club-room, two weeks after the Armistice was declared--a room so furnished and decorated by the hand-craft of its occupants that, like their dresses, stenciled and embroidered, it was a history in itself of talent, achievement, individual and collective.
And the memory of that Ceremonial would go down in history, not alone in the Camp Fire “count,” but wondrously wrought into the tapestried life-stories--into thought, word and deed--of the members present.
It matters not who recited, in a voice that rocked unsteadily once or twice upon the raft of a sob, “Flanders Fields.”
Her personality was lost in the:
“If ye break faith with us who die!”
Ah! no. There must be no breaking of faith. The life of every American boy and girl alive on that fair November, the eleventh, when the sun shone as if knowing that it marked a New Epoch, mocking the brown leaves upon the ground--while Peace Europa cooed in her blanket--must be nobler for all time--a fair and loving monument to those who would not come back.
But--but the note of pathos melted into melody when it came to considering the new: to standing upon the threshold of that better World, bought with a price, brushed by the feet of youth and of hopeful young nations--weary old ones--to-day.
Not three candles alone, as on that white beach, where aviators landed by the Council Fire, were lit to-night, but one for each country of the Allies, to typify joy rekindled well-nigh all over the war-scarred earth.
And when little Flamina, Nébis, the Green Leaf upon a later branch of America’s great tree--whose leaves must be truly now for the healing of the nations--stepped forward, with flashing eye, to light the green candle of Italy, there was a long-drawn breath between a song and a sob in the breast of each maiden present.
“Va fuora d’ltalia, ta fuora ch’e l’orro,
Va fuora d’ltalia, va fuora o stranier!”
caroled Flamina--the big, dilating pupils of her eyes as black stars in a sepia-brown sky--while she chanted Italy’s hymn of liberty--the national hymn.
“Doesn’t she make just the dearest little Camp Fire Sister, with--with the grace of her, the green leaf in her head-band and embroidered upon the front of her ceremonial dress!” murmured one and another of the Group who had adopted her, working for patriotic honors along lines of Americanization--building up the new American womanhood, to the broader ideals and understanding won by the Great War.
Flamina was a full-fledged Wood Gatherer now. The brightest silver spark in the night of her eye, beneath those curly lashes, was a reflection of the fagot-ring upon her finger.
The ceremony of her initiation, interrupted by the witch-stenciled war-plane, by the knights of the sky, with their clipped anecdotes of airdom adventures--their wingèd slang--had been gone through later upon the white beach, while:
“Drowsy wavelets come and go,
To weave a dream-spell ’round Wohelo!”
She was getting into her heart of hearts the Wohelo magic now; the triple ideals of Work, Health, Love--the cord that bound her to her Camp Fire Sisters, those daughters of the Sun, who, as she increasingly understood, wedded old and new, the poetry of the past--of races that went before them upon American soil--with the reaching-out progress of the present.
And “there is that giveth and yet increaseth,” so the Bible says: every hour spent in truly naturalizing the little foreign-born sister, cultivating the freshly grafted shoot, with its transplanted green leaf, had been one of richness for the instructors, too; from Olive, who had improved her English, to Sara and Betty, who had helped to fashion her ceremonial dress, and Sybil who had wrought a leaf upon its bosom.
The music of her caressing song, whether it dwelt in childish passion, wild and tender, upon the country and sea she loved, recalling her own blue bay of Naples, or matched the mischief of her dancing footsteps, gay as the most elusive little leaf, in a
“Cip i tè ciop!
(Chippety chop!)”
warmed their blood to a more sparkling fire.
But, sweetest of all at this Peace Celebration--never to be forgotten--it added a new and soaring note to the song, fairest in Columbia’s ears: “America the beautiful!”
“And crown they good with brotherhood,
From sea to shining sea.”
Ah! well might the hearts of Columbia’s daughters swell--those of the Morning-Glory Group rejoice--for by the glow of the Council Fire on lonely beaches, by the encircling ring around symbolic candles, by welding ritual, poetry and song, in this the morning-glory hour of the World’s rebirth, after a night of pain, God had crowned America’s good with sisterhood:
“From Sea to shining Sea.”
The moving note which merged into melody at the first Peace Celebration, when War was, forever, as men hoped, a thing of the past, turned to mirth in the second one--the Christmas Ceremonial.
It was more than mirth in one girlish heart--one, at least. It was mounting thanksgiving which often sang itself into a sobbing prayer of joy, like the sun-curl upon the swelling wave when tumultuously it breaks.
For He had come back.
Lieutenant Iver Davenport--without as much hair as Peace Europa, because of the burning effects of mustard gas--slowly recovering from shrapnel-wounds, was back at Camp Evens, where once, in premature passion, he had rashly “bawled out” a sergeant, now, by the fortunes of war, a lieutenant like himself.
His mother and sister had been up to see him. They had sat by his cot in the base hospital, and Sara, knowing the sort of news for which he was thirsting, had told him all the story of their camping summer, making it center chiefly around one leading figure--that of the Torch Bearer, Olive Deering.
She described the waning fires of resolution upon the hill of the night-heron, when grit had gone glimmering, and how Olive had gloriously rekindled the flame from the glow in her own breast--and by the thought of what Soldier Brothers were enduring over there.
“It was from a letter about her cousin Clay--Clayton Forrest--that she read. He apparently did ‘his all’ over there, but came through, as--as did that other cousin of Olive’s, the rich banker’s son, who put in his time working in a shipyard on this side. Atlas, we nicknamed him because when we first saw him he was apparently holding up--supporting--with his back and shoulders a horribly heavy, raw, yellow ship’s rib--and the World with it.... That’s just how he felt; I know he did.... Never mind; I like him awfully well now--ever since I let him take my freak of a dory! Ha! that’s another story.”
So Sara’s tongue ran on, a moved, at times a merry, flame, into the returned soldier’s ear.
“But,”--her voice retreated into the softest twilight of conjecturing speech--“but I don’t believe Atlas--or any one of her cousins--holds up Olive’s world. Perhaps I ought not to say it....”
She broke off, mistily, as her eyes met her brother’s, with the homing hunger in them; her brother who had temporarily lost his hair--but not his smile!
“Do you mean--mean to say”--he began, in the old headstrong way. “Ah, well! nothing matters, girlie, except that I’m at home--at home, alive, and can soon see--everybody--for myself. Although I don’t know whether they’ll let me out of here before Christmas, or not. If they do--if I should be discharged from the hospital, and sent to the Casualty Detachment--why, I might get back to you sooner--sooner than I hope for, now.”
“Quite--unexpectedly--perhaps?”
The sister’s heart gave a flying leap.
“Possibly. But don’t look for it! As I say, what does--anything--matter, except that I will be back with you--sooner or later?”
The Flame suddenly bowed her wet cheek on the narrow cot next his; the ring in the last words, the whole world of relief, gave her for the first time an inkling into the soldier’s lot over there; no letter of his had done so.
“While the fight was on, all was Advance--and a heart full of cheers!”
“I--I was always Iver’s best chum--he said so--but I suppose I’ll have to resign myself now to the fact that when he went over the top at Chateau-Thierry and St. Mihiel--four times he led his men over the top, once into that Belleau wheat-field, yellow in the morning, red at night, and again into the meadow where he remembers thinking, before he was shot down, that the clover was sweet, even if he couldn’t smell it for the gas--his real thoughts, when he had any, were more of another girl than of me. Well! I can’t be jealous about that, as I was over the things he left with me! Oh! if he only could be discharged before Christmas--and spend it with us!”
Such was the tenor of the sisterly thoughts as the train bore her back to the home city of Clevedon, now daily witnessing the return of officers and men who wore upon their right sleeve the gold stripes telling of service in France--supplemented often and nobly by the added gold which spoke of wounds.
“Dear me! I wish they--the doctors up there at Camp Evens--would pronounce him better, turn him over to the Casualty Department; then he’d probably get his discharge right away, and arrive home unexpectedly--perhaps! Oh-h!”
The bliss of the latter possibility was the spirit in Sara Davenport’s feet which kept them moving elastically from room to room of her father’s suburban bungalow on the day before Christmas Eve. It was a red-hearted wreath here, a garland there, typifying the matchless thanksgiving of this Christmas in many a heart, to be green while life should last--and the heart have a reminiscent throb!
It was creaming, frothing, whipping, mixing, and cutting into diamond shapes which borrowed luster from the diamond mine of contingent expectancy within such as had never transfigured cookies before.
For if Iver should possibly arrive, not even the type of fare set before aviators on a moonlit beach and jollified by the airy slang of space, was meet for the returning You!
“Those air-scouts would call these coated chocolate bars creamed joy-sticks,” thought Sara, as she reverted to candy-making and Camp Fire recipes. “Well! if Iver should be with us, again, on Christmas Day, every mouthful I eat will be a joy-stick--tasteless except for the joy. Oh-h! just suppose he should come to-night while I’m out--attending that Christmas Ceremonial at the Deerings’ home.”
“Maybe I could send him to fetch you,” returned her mother, to whom the latter remark was made aloud. “But, to my mind, there’s hardly a chance of it!... Here’s a box which has just come for you, daughter!”
“Oh, good gracious! it couldn’t be--from--him?”
No! It was a bunch of pearl-white Christmas roses grown in the conservatories of Manchester-by-the-Sea.
With it was no accompanying card, but a sheet of creamy, rough-edged, masculine note-paper, on which were a series of rather clever pen-sketches: overalled girls wielding rake, hoe, and sprayer upon a sea-girt hill; on the next page, a youth steering a blind horse between reefs of lumber, then with his back bent under a ponderous ship’s rib--a girl defying him--lastly, that girl upright in a dory that might have escaped from some boat-bedlam, signaling to Coast Guards.
“Atlas knew what would appeal to a Camp Fire Girl, with a taste for primitive picture-writing,” murmured the Flame to herself, nursing the starry roses, the stars in the eyes above them shining through those gold-tipped lashes, like a rayed nebula. “Well, well! I suppose this is a sort of silent tribute to the fact that we all--all--came through the Game with our wings, as an aviator would say; that we weren’t grounded in what we set out to do!”
A thought which made the awarding of honors at that Christmas Ceremonial, in the dying days of 1918, a rite at once more triumphant and touching than the bestowal of any honor-beads before!
For each khaki-colored bead strung upon a leather thong testified to the contributing of an individual bit in the hour of Freedom’s main bitt, when it was the anchoring prop to which the mainsail of progress, the mainsheet of safety, were made fast.
Yes! and, in a way, the lives over there, too. For many a soldier owed his rations and his recovery to the tireless zeal of voluntary workers on this side of the water.
Who knows but Lieutenant Iver did, as, an hour later, when the spirit of the Ceremonial meeting had turned to Christmas merrymaking, his fingers, long and thin, wielded the colonial knocker and rang the bell of the Deering mansion on Nobility Hill--as certain annals of the city were proud to call it.
“Oh-h! I nev-er could come in, sis.... Such a scarecrow I am--without as much hair as--as that Peace Babe you were telling me about!”
“She! Why! she has a perfect shock now--little Peace Europa! She--she’s growing, at all points, like her name!” It was his sister’s voice, merry, tender--tearfully moved--as she ran down-stairs to meet him. “So--so you were discharged sooner than you expected, Iver.”
“Yes. Got my marching orders from the Casualty Detachment only a few hours ago. Didn’t even wait to telephone! Come to fetch you home--sis!... Why-y! Olive.”
Somehow, as she watched that meeting between the Torch Bearer and the gaunt soldier from over-seas, Sara Davenport, regardless of an onlooking butler, turned aside in the great lighted hall, and hid her wet eyes in the crook of her arm from which the soft leather fringes fell back--just as she had done by the bungalow on the wild sea-beach, after the exciting capture of a spy, when she yearned that Peace might come again.
She was a forked Flame now, as then, cleft by dividing emotions.
For it was evident by the wonderful color on Olive’s cheek, by the joy-brand in her eyes, who--who was the prop that held up her world--her maidenly castles in the air. And it was not Atlas, nor any one of her cousins, fine as might be their war-score!
But not even Sister Sara, only the December breeze fluttering about the brownstone mansion on the hill, heard what passed, yet a little while later, between a very tall, very thin officer, assiduously cultivating a baby crop of new hair, and a dark-eyed girl, upon a balcony of the Deering home, whither maidens in ceremonial dress had flocked to hear far, sweet echoes of Community singing--after the said soldier had been beguiled up-stairs on the plea that he might keep his trench-cap on.
And the said breeze actually halted, cornered by the new mischief--the shy, glad mischief--in Olive’s tones which had hitherto been more on the meditative order.
“I wonder”--murmured the Torch Bearer--“I wonder, now, if I’m the very first Camp Fire Girl to--to be proposed to--that’s what it means, doesn’t it--in head-band and moccasins--ceremonial dress,” shyly.
“But, oh--oh, good gracious! Olive, I oughtn’t; not--not until after I had s-spoken to your father! What will he say?”
The youthful lieutenant’s courage was more flustered than when he led his men over the top into that French clover-meadow where a glance told him that the blossoms were sweet even if he couldn’t smell them through his gas-mask--and for noxious cloud.
“My father! I don’t know what he will say. But--but I rather imagine it will be the same thing he said--when--he saw you hold out your blistered hand--to a private--after you had been so badly burned by that--stray--powder-puff.”
“And what was that?”
“Onward--Christian--Soldier!”
whispered Olive very softly.
The End