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 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
 “’Becca she canno’ speak—no’ cry, like me—jus’ ketch her ‘tummy’
an’ fall—no’ come up!” The raving child vivaciously illustrated her
meaning by pounding with a wet left fist upon her own little rounded
stomach, rather full of unripe apples, too.
“Where? Where?” was all the girl could say. “Drowning! She must
be drowning in two or three feet of water—lying on the bottom of
the bathing-pool!” raged her thought, storming like a thunderclap in
her ears.
The sheet-like pool was wide and wan, covering half an acre, no
depth of color anywhere, except where the brilliant afternoon sun
created an island sunburst in the water around the fountain and
where near the pool’s edge it showed topsy-turvy, moving pictures,
pink and yellow, of children standing or promenading on their heads,
as if in fear.
Jessica’s agonized promenade was short and splashing. Now the
water rose above her knees as she dragged herself and her clothing
through it! “Where? Where?” was still all her seemingly water-logged
tongue could say.
“I’ll t’ink some dere—dere she’ll go down,—’Becca!” answered, at
last, the pluckily wading, little French child, who clung to her right
hand, pointing to a rainbow-shaft from the fountain leveled
downward, too, like an exploring finger.
And there the rainbow and Jessica found her—at the burnished
point to which she in her dumb play had waded forth through two
feet and a half of water to catch that rainbow—lying all dressed in
the old grey frock and broken footwear beneath the island sunburst
of the fountain.
Here the girl, looking down, saw a dark spot, a hair-fringed mound
upon the pool’s bottom, barely covered by a glassy inch or two of
ripples—head submerged!
With a choking cry she stooped and dragged it up, lifted it. She
was strong and athletic for her seventeen years, but her whole
girlish framework rocked and shuddered, almost collapsed, as she
did so, bowed by an unexpected gust of weight.
 The dumb child was eight years old, stout and chunky; now,
unconscious, clogged by the leaden weight of water in her little
clothing, swamped by green fruit, she would have made a taxing
burden for a man.
“Father—Father in Heaven, give me strength—help me—strength
to carry her out of the pool! Strength, Father—strength!”
Half-aloud, irrepressibly, the cry that ever comes first in dire need
rocked between the young girl’s parted, gasping lips—she rocking
with it, to the roots, like a sapling in flood.
The childish mound of weight and water sank again until it
touched the glassy ripples, seeming as if it dragged her very flesh
with it, while the French child, submerged to her wallowing armpits,
moaned beside her.
Then the round, strained arm that flashed with the silver of the
Fire Maker’s bracelet, aided by its fellow, managed, somehow, to
gather up that leaden weight again, to hold it above the thin sheet
of water, to start with it, staggering toward the earthen bank.
“Is she drowned—dead? How long did she lie there? How far can I
carry her?” The questions spun like a water-worked wheel in
Jessica’s brain, grinding out each staggering step. “Oh! isn’t it
horrible? And we were going to dress her up! The frock I made her!
Green apples! Cramp!... Oh, I’m letting her down! It’s too much. I—
c-can’t!”
The girl’s dizzy gaze swam before her to the bank. She saw the
catalpa tree—a hundred miles off! She saw strange, steely shapes of
playground apparatus on another continent, as it were. Dimly she
beheld the forms of other girls, her companions, who had come with
her, wading through the light, crisp feathers of water to her help.
Then she saw something else. She heard a shout. Down the
playground slope to the innocent looking pool’s edge, like an arrow
launched from nowhere, tore a brown figure, coming at the rate of a
hundred yards to a dozen seconds.
It was a knightly figure, tall, slimly erect, with green and red
stripes, together with many rich, quivering points of color flashing in
an embroidered jumble upon its right sleeve, the highest color-point
green that gleamed like an emerald eye against a blood-red
background as the flying water hit it.
And where she wore the silver of rank upon her braceleted arm,
tortured in a half-fainting effort to struggle onward with her dripping
burden, it showed a kindred gleam of silver in the eagle drooping
from a red, white, and blue ribbon on its left breast.
“Hang on, just a second! Hold up—I’ll take her!” It seemed to be
the American Eagle, dangling from the tricolored ribbon, that
screamed the encouragement.
Another second, and the arm that wore the Fire Maker’s bracelet,
typical of the fire at the heart that waters could not quench, had
yielded its unconscious burden—swamping cargo of green apples
and all—to that stronger right arm with the dancing specks of color
upon the sleeve.
“Do you know how long she’s been under water? One of the
children just told me what was going on here!” panted the
newcomer with the silver eagle on his breast as he laid poor little
Rebecca, silent forever, as it seemed, face downward, upon the
nearest patch of playground grass where the sunbeams mocked her
wet, weed-like hair and the broken old shoes, as full of water, now,
as she was herself.
“I don’t know how long she lay there—on the bottom of the pool.”
Involuntarily Jessica pressed her left hand to her heart which was
doing strange “stunts,” while with her right she helped the tired
French child to the bank.
“And I don’t know whether there’s life in her still or not!” The lad
in khaki had breathlessly flung his broad, olive-green hat upon the
grass and was stretching Rebecca’s limp arms out on either side of
her head, not a quiver of which gave token that the torch of her
dumb existence was still alight in some covert corner of her dripping
body. He looked up at the other four girls, Jessica’s companions,
who, wet about the ankles, were hovering, pale-faced, near. “One or
two of you had better run to the nearest pay-station and telephone
for a doctor,” he gasped, “if there isn’t a doctor’s office near. We may
not be able to bring her to! It may take the pulmotor—I could use
that if we had it. Turn her face a little to one side, so that she can
get the air!” This to his fellow-worker, Jessica, who obeyed, her
breath hissing between her teeth in long, shivering, yearning gasps.
“Who’d ever have thought of any child drowning in that toy pool—
two feet an’ a half of water at deepest?” groaned the lad as he knelt
astride of the prostrate little figure, now looking haggard and
horrified.
“Two feet and a half of water—and green apples!” Jessica
corrected him.
His hands were quickly finding the spaces between the rigid little
limbs. Alternately he pressed with all the weight of his strong young
shoulders upon them, then relaxed, setting up a bellows-like motion
to expel the playground pool—as much of it as ’Becca had swallowed
—from her air-passages and draw in fresh air.
“Could you get at my watch in my vest pocket and time this?”
Jessica obeyed.
“Two of the girls have gone to find a doctor,” she said, glancing at
the disappearing forms of Sally and Betty. “Keep away; we mustn’t
get too near”—this to the other two—“we mustn’t take the air from
her.”
“You know something about first aid then; are you timing this
work? It ought to be about a dozen strokes to a minute.” The
bestriding lad directed his question to the first rescuer—the girl-
rescuer—by the motion of an eyelid, the while his strong hands,
tanned to the color of his khaki uniform, rose and fell rhythmically
upon the framework of ’Becca’s dumb little heart, he trying so hard
to breathe for her through those brown hands, to force artificial
respiration.
The silver swooping eagle above his heaving heart shook and
palpitated with his efforts.
A redness grew under his eyes, as under Jessica’s, where horror
and anxiety laid their congesting fingers.
 But the many rich points of color upon his khaki sleeve, yellow,
green, red, white, each of them a little embroidered design in silk,
mingled their merits with the sunbeams which wove of them a rich
arabesque that flashed and played beneath the most noticeable of
the badges, the emerald eye against a blood-red background which
shone, green as hope, when he took the little victim of the bathing-
pool from Jessica’s arms.
No peering eye, indeed, this merit badge, but the green cross of
the first aid, awarded for proficiency in succor, hopeful still upon its
red ground, enclosed in a green circle.
Suddenly that verdant hope of which it spoke blossomed! It
thrilled and rioted through Jessica.
“Oh! perhaps we sha’n’t need a doctor—or the pulmotor. I saw her
eyelids quiver. She may not have been three minutes under water.”
The timing watch in the girl’s hand shook. “Keep off the other
children, Olive—Arline—don’t let them get near, to draw the oxygen
from her!”
Yes, slowly the breath of life was wavering back into its dumb
tabernacle: through ’Becca’s blue, swollen lips came a slow,
uncertain shiver, drawn from the hands working upon her, a
quivering gasp.
“Oh! can’t I rub her a little now, toward the heart—to start it up—I
know just how; I have a Red Cross diploma for first aid—I’m a Camp
Fire Girl!” The sobbing, gurgling exclamation burst from Jessica; on
the heels of the sob came a little whistling, thrush-like note like the
beginning of a song, a song of succor.
“Yes, I think you might—now—while I ‘piece in’ her breathing.”
“Here, Olive, you hold the watch; it isn’t so important to time the
pressures any more; she’s coming round—coming round all right!”
With the timepiece upon her palm ticking little Rebecca’s life back,
measuring the intervals between her reviving gasps, Olive stood and
watched.
Golden lad! Dripping girl, a year his junior! Camp Fire Girl! Eagle
Scout! Together they worked and rubbed. And life, kindly life, so
reluctant to quit even a dumb tabernacle, answered their call,
stealing upon slow wings of returning circulation through the silent
child’s body.
Suddenly the timepiece trembled in the hand that held it. That of
which Olive had spoken in the library as swelling up so big in her at
times; the nameless tide of a young girl’s ideals, of her rapture at
beauty, her adoration of the Father’s Presence she saw in it, her dim
drawings toward service and hero-worship; that impulsive tide rose
so high in her now that it had to find a temporary outlet in the tears
of agitation and relief stealing down her cheeks.
Only a temporary one! Olive had groped girlishly to find a channel
of self-expression for that tide; she had tried to let it ooze out of her
in rhyming, to work it off in painting—or attempts thereat.
But here she was quivering from head to foot with the sudden
discovery that in the living picture before her, the prostrate child and
those two kneeling figures upon the playground grass, there was
something nobler than pen or paint-brush could depict, the highest
form of self-expression.
And her heart surging up within her vaguely named that picture,
“Succor.”
Succor was in the healing warmth of the sunlight that, now again,
made its brightness felt.
Succor seemed waving its wings among the branches of the near-
by willow-tree that brooded over the scene—not one helpless wing,
but two: the Will to help and the trained Ability to do it.

Three hours later two girls sat one on each side of a cot in the
children’s ward of a city hospital. Things had happened in the
meantime. A doctor had arrived in an automobile and after some
gentle soundings and poundings of ’Becca’s anatomy to locate the
undigested fruit that swamped her, had carried her off to the
hospital, declaring that her after treatment was important.
The after treatment she was receiving now was in the shape of a
big waxen queen doll from Olive, a creature that could mechanically
call upon its royal parents by the titles of “Papa” and “Mamma,” as
its little human owner couldn’t.
“It seemed too bad that she shouldn’t have some present, seeing
that we couldn’t dress her up to-day—or for many days to come,”
remarked Olive Deering, looking across at Jessica who was holding
the dumb child’s stubby little fingers. “I wish we knew the name of
the Boy Scout who helped you to save her!”
“’Twas I who helped him; he worked over her until he brought her
to. He was an Eagle Scout, too, the highest rank among the Scouts.”
“Think of it!”
“All those little colored designs embroidered on his sleeve were his
twenty-one merit badges.”
Silence for a few minutes while ’Becca’s right hand fondled the
doll.
“Glory!” In a low and thrilling voice Olive broke the stillness of the
ward where most of the children slept, calling the other girl by the
pet name of her childhood. “Glory! the ladder has dipped once for all
toward the Sugarloaf; no, I don’t mean that; I mean that the
Sugarloaf and Camp Morning-Glory and camping out with the girls of
the Morning-Glory Camp Fire are all on top for me—and for Sybil,
too, if I can make her; the hotel is nowhere!”
“Do you really mean it, that you want to become a Camp Fire Girl
at last?”
“I want to do something worth while!” Olive’s lip quivered; she
spoke passionately. “I want to do something with—with spice in it! I
felt that, to-day, when I saw you working to bring ’Becca round—you
and that boy.... I want to dance the Leaf Dance and, maybe, to
inflict my rhymes on other girls without their laughing at me,”
emotion dwindling down to laughter.
“But perhaps your father will wish you to go to that hotel, Sybil
and you, with Cousin Anne.”
“Father, no! He approves of the Camp Fire movement; I’ve heard
him say so. He thinks with Captain Andy”—laughingly—“that it’s a
pretty good incubator for the growth of new wing-feathers—unusual
power to do things.”
“Or power to do unusual things, eh?”
“Either will answer! I’m sure Cousin Anne would be delighted to
get off on her own hook this summer, without any of us girls. And
’twill be lots better for Sybil than going to an hotel and lording it
over half-a-dozen boys, whose parents are staying there, and who
wait on her all the time—fight over her, maybe, as two of them did,
last year—because they think she’s fairy-like and pretty.” There was
a look of her beautiful mother in Olive’s eyes now.
“As for me, I’ve quite made up my mind; I’m not going to lose my
hoot through not using it, like that poor old straw-eyed owl,” wound
up the Camp Fire recruit. “I don’t care”—rising to a dramatic
outburst—“if there should be a dozen tingling Penelopes and half-a-
dozen witchetty nieces of Captain Andy’s, each with a pig for a pupil,
in the camp, I’ll—what is it you say—I’ll ‘cleave to my Camp Fire
Sisters whenever, wherever I find them!’”
Half laughing, half crying, she stretched her hand across the cot.
Jessica grasped it. The pledge of sisterhood was made and ratified
upon the heart of a dumb child.
 CHAPTER VII

MARY-JANE PEG

Mary-Jane Peg was munching a green apple. Green apples had

never swamped her. To her they were the prize and the poetry of
existence.
Other things were well enough in their way, such as a daily mess
that had as many flavors in it as there were airs in a musical medley
or scents in a pot-pourri. A succulent cabbage or young turnip
weren’t bad. Indeed, so far as satisfying hunger went, all was grist
that came to the mill of her astounding digestion, roots, leaves,
land-turtle’s eggs found among potato rows, anything, everything
went, from a lately hatched chicken killed by herself to an old shoe
of her owner’s.
But the real greens of life, that which lent to it a bitter-sweet
rapture, were the hard windfall apples of July, shaken by the orchard
breeze from a tree whose fruit would not ripen until fall; she
preferred them even to a red astrachan, with the early bloom of
maturity upon its cheek.
“Ungh! Ung-gh!” muttered Mary-Jane, closing her white eyelashes
until her little grey-green eye almost vanished into her head over
which two quivering upright ears stood sentinel. “Ungh! Ungh!” That
apple tasted uncommonly good. She nodded over it like a hungry
child over his bread and milk when it exactly hits his taste. As its tart
juices slid down her capacious throat she said a grunting grace to
the universe and started upon a rooting search for another.
 “Oh! Mary-Jane Peg, how—how everlastingly happy you are! You
haven’t a thing to worry you!”
As the envious human voice fell upon Mary-Jane’s now slanting
ears, coming from the edge of a shabby, swaying hammock slung
between two orchard trees, the muncher of green apples raised her
head and, happening at that moment to be in the vicinity of that
hammock, rubbed her white-haired side against a pair of small
muslin knees drooping over its edge. “Ungh! Ungh!” she vouchsafed
in a snort of semi-intelligent sympathy. “Ungh! Un-ngh!” her
conversation, except in some squealing emergency, being
monotonously limited to this monosyllable.
“Oh, Mary-Jane! Oh, Mary-Jane Peg, I don’t want to die—to die
before you do—I don’t want to die young!”
It was a frankly doomed cry now; had there been an executioner
in waiting behind an orchard tree, had Mary-Jane Peg been the
sheriff whose business it was to hurry a victim off to an untimely
end, the voice could not have carried more pathetic conviction.
“Die! Lord ha’ mercy! who’s talking about dying?—not you, Kitty?
You talking about ‘stepping out’ at the advanced age of fourteen!”
came a blusterous voice, suddenly breezing-up among the apple and
cherry trees.
The doomed one, the occupant of the hammock and owner of the
muslin knees, dropped, startled, to her feet and whisked around like
a shaken leaf, the orchard zephyr fluttering the hem of her green
muslin frock, lengthened to suit her years, but falling shrunkenly
short in that respect.
“You don’t want to die, eh?” challenged the breezy voice again in
an orchard gust. “You don’t want to die before that pampered pig
that’s hazaracking round here, surfeiting herself with windfall apples.
Well! she’s sure to lie down an’ grunt her last, some time, if she
don’t make tasty bacon first, but where’s the fun of sitting in a
hammock, talking to her about it? That’s what I’d like to know!”
“She’ll never make bacon—although she may after I’m gone!” This
last was a plaintive after-clap of thought; the wearer of the muslin
dress of shrunken green looked up with melting defiance into the
face which upon a far-away city playground had reminded a Camp
Fire Girl of “sheltering flame.”
It flamed protectively now all over the massive features as its
narrowed blue eyes from under their heavy, weather-beaten eyelids
dropped a glance half of amusement, half of deep concern, that
floated downward quite a distance like the petal of a flower to alight
on the brown head of the little four-feet-seven figure in green.
Yes, it was scarcely half an inch taller, that figure, than the
buoyant little form of Betty Ayres, whose Camp Fire name was Psuti,
the Holly, chosen from a book of symbols because the holly is
“gayest when other trees are bare.”
There was a sort of grimness rather than gaiety about this other
small girlish figure palpitating under the orchard trees as if at its
core there was a spike rather than an elastic spring, that steely spike
being fairly well covered up by the rounded, childish form, whose
curves were not quite as well-filled out as they ought to be, the curly
brown hair and dimpling face—quite a shade paler than nature
intended—and the mischievous brown eyes, more liquid than Sally’s,
now amber pools of sunlight in which a tiny brown trout seemed
perversely to leap, refusing to be caught.
Captain Andy, looking down upon the brown head, made up his
mind that, now or never, he would catch that little perverse troutlet
which had been dodging him and everybody else for some months
and extract the spiky hook about which it played in Kitty’s being; in
other words, that he would get at the grim core of secret fear, or
whatever it might be, which, as he put it to himself, seemed to be
eating the very heart out of the child.
“Come! let’s sit down an’ talk a while; I’m just full to the hatches
with things I want to tell you, Kitty,” he said. “That hammock looks
too skittish to bear my weight; let’s put for the seat under the
cherry-tree there, the tree that you an’ I did some grafting on last
spring,” indicating a bandaged trunk on which a surgical operation
had been performed. “Neat piece of vegetable surgery it was, too,
grafting a slip from a tree bearing fine ox-heart cherries on to one
bearing mighty poor bleeding-hearts, eh?” muttered the captain as
he caught the hand of his little grandniece, Kitty Sill. “Sounds some
like a parable that!” under his breath. “Maybe there’s the same
ticklish job ahead o’ me, now, to graft something on to this little
bleeding heart,” glancing askance at Kitty’s face with its set lips in
contrast to the fluctuating dimples. “But, first, to find out why it
bleeds—and there I’ve got my work before me!... Let’s see, what
d’ye call that crunching pig that you swap secrets with, here, secrets
you won’t tell your mother?” he asked aloud.
“Mary-Jane Peg.” Kitty linked the two first names, emphasizing the
last like a surname. “She won a prize at a fair; she’s a pedigreed
pig.”
“Ungh! Ungh!” corroborated Mary-Jane, boastfully, rubbing herself
against the captain’s legs as he seated himself with his grandniece.
“Avast there!” boomed Captain Andy. “I haven’t got any prizes, nor
yarns to swap with you, either,” applying the toe of his boot to the
pink-shot side of the pedigreed pig. “Don’t you—don’t you come
hazaracking around me!”
Mary-Jane understood that raging word beginning with “h” as little
as Kitty Sill did, and Kitty had never found it in a school dictionary
yet, but, somehow, it always cowed her as it did the corkscrew-tailed
pig; Mary-Jane made off and Kitty felt constrained to answer
something when her great-uncle baldly put the question to her:
“Now then, chicken, out with it; what did you mean by talking ’bout
dying—dying young, too, as if you meant it?”
But the trout was not caught yet, nor the spiky hook extracted:
Kitty opened her mouth, indeed, but this is what she coolly said,
with a little, sly smile of mischief, kicking at a leg of the orchard
bench with the heel of her swinging slipper:
“Well, I don’t know but what it would be better to die young than
have the things that preacher said come true!” with nonchalant
indifference.
“What did he say? Where did you hear him?”
 “Two years ago at Ma’am Barrows’s house; he had a meeting
Sunday afternoon; she said he was a revival preacher,”—the foot
swinging vehemently—“but most o’ the folks let on that they
considered him a ‘survival,’ or something like that.”
“What did he preach about?”
“Oh! I don’t take any stock in it now; I did then; he talked a whole
lot about wrath an’ anger comin’ in pailfuls on the earth—that’s what
I understood him to say—and ’bout folks calling on the rocks to fall
on them an’ hide ’em, so’s the hot wrath couldn’t strike.”
“And what did you do, little Kitty?” Captain Andy was much
interested, although he knew he had not got at the spiky secret yet.
“Me!” Kitty raised her level brown eyebrows; the dimples flashed.
“Me! Why, I just came home, all tuckered out, and went down to the
bottom of the orchard there and picked out that big, tall rock near
the stream that has a bed of soft earth under it, an’ I thought that, if
worst came to worst, I’d lie down and call on that rock to fall, for
’twas the earth that would, really, tumble on to me—an’ that
wouldn’t hurt very much!”
If only the preacher could have seen Kitty’s outwitting expression,
her swinging shoe!
Her granduncle stared at her a minute. Then the orchard rang
with his gusty laugh.
“Great Kingdom! if you ain’t the sly-boots,” he blankly ejaculated.
“If you haven’t an eye to business, picking out a rock that’s bedded
in good soft earth so’s the earth might smother, but not mangle you,
cheating the anger of the Almighty!”
But Captain Andy’s laughter was a brief puff. It died summarily. He
rose and paced the orchard, thrusting Mary-Jane out of the way with
his meditative foot, his figure looming massively against the
background of fruit-trees.
Just as suddenly he sat down again and touched Kitty’s hand with
a horny forefinger, his face at this moment a sheltering flame,
indeed, fed by an inner fire.
 “Kitty child! listen to me,” he said. “You ain’t so ready to tell me
things, but I’m going to tell you something that I never told yet to a
soul outside my wife—your gran’aunt, Kitty—who died more’n five
years ago. Kitty, I’ve led a rough an’ racking life, take it all together,
with maybe more storm than shine in it—I’ve gone winter-fishing for
years to the far-away ocean fishing-grounds an’ that’s about the
hardest life a man can lead—an’ he’s sure to ask at times what’s the
meaning of it all. Kitty, I don’t set up to know the meaning. But two
or three times in my life, once when I was a boy of your age, again
when I was a tossed seaman standing to the wheel o’ my vessel at
twilight, something has come to me like a flash an’ I’ve seemed to
see surer than sunlight the Power behind everything an’—and it was
the ‘Big Good Thing,’ as somebody calls it, Fatherhood an’ Truth an’
Understanding—and it isn’t dropping rocks on anybody. Pretty often
we roll ’em on to ourselves, though, or get on the rocks, whichever
way you like to put it, by taking false bearings, by our mistakes and
the like. Now, little girl, don’t you go and make the big mistake of
shutting up tighter’n a clam on any secret that’s troubling you—
sharing it only with a pig!
“Bless your heart!” went on the moved captain after an interval
during which tears had begun to steal down his grandniece’s cheeks.
“Why, bless your heart, dearie, Death and I ain’t strangers. I’ve seen
him and his shadow often enough to know him pretty well, an’ two-
thirds of the time I’ve ousted him, too, when he was just setting up
a claim.” Something superb stirred in the speaker’s tones at memory
of the lives he had saved. “An’, maybe, if he was casting an eye on
you at all—else why should you talk about ‘dying young’—I might be
able to drive him off again.”
“It—’twas what Aunt Hannah said,” began Kitty weakly, no longer
perverse. “She said it to Aunt Kate, sitting on this very seat under
the cherry-tree, only last spring. I”—with a stifled sob—“was playing
’round with Mary-Jane and my little topknot duck; she thought I
didn’t hear.”
“Great Neptune, I’d as lief be with Davy Jones as to live with that
woman’s scarecrow tongue; she’s always ridden by a nightmare or a
daymare or something.” Captain Andy sprang to his feet again with
nautical restlessness, but he did not pace the orchard; he stood
glaring down in a half-savage, half-tender way on Kitty.
“What did she say—what scare was she passing on to somebody
then? Now, out with it—no bushwhacking—no beatin’ about the
bush—you can’t get by me, you know!”
Kitty rubbed the back of a freckled little hand against her right eye
and her right dimple blossomed forth; already she was feeling better,
deriving a comfort which neither Mary-Jane nor the topknot duck nor
any other member of her animal kingdom could impart; if this heroic
granduncle of hers would rather depart this life with Davy Jones (the
fabulous gentleman who summons sailors when death claims them
at last) than to live with the tongue and the scares of Mrs. Hannah
Beals, her aunt by marriage, then, perhaps, there wasn’t much in
the spiky scare which the said Aunt Hannah had planted in her heart
three months earlier.
“She said I was the livin’ image of my Aunt Lottie, father’s sister,
who died when she was less than seventeen,” returned Kitty
sedately. “Then Aunt Kate said she thought I looked a little peaked
and thin—that I ought to go round more with girls of my own age.”
“So you ought! An’ that’s what I’m going to talk to you about
presently,” put in the listener. “Well! an’ did Aunt Hannah drive the
nightmare then?” laughingly.
“She said that she didn’t see as ’twould do much good for me to
go round more with girls an’ boys, go to their parties an’ such-like,
because I was so like my Aunt Lottie in looks and ways that it
seemed borne in on her—that’s what she said—that I’d start a cough
one o’ these fine days, not far off, and go as Aunt Lottie did; an’ that
I was looking more like it every day, getting thinner”—sniff—Kitty
wiped away a tear.
“Gosh! I wish I had the keelhauling of that woman; she’d go down
under a vessel’s keel an’ she’d never come up again! Now, Kitty
child, listen to me!” Captain Andy touched the child’s shoulder. “And
take it from me as straight that you’re like your Aunt Lottie”—Kitty
sniffed forlornly again—“and you’re not like her; she was a grain
taller an’ a bit narrower in the chest than you are,” critically eyeing
the small green figure in the shrunken muslin dress. “But, even with
that handicap, she wouldn’t have faded away before she was
seventeen—not a bit of it—if she’d got it fast in her head, like those
Camp Fire Girls who are in one of my camps over on the Sugarloaf
sand-dunes, that to ‘Hold on to Health’ comes pretty near being the
strongest point in the law of life.
“She was ambitious about her studies; she had her heart set on
going to college; it was, with her, come home from high school, peck
at her dinner, then out into this orchard, not to swap gossip with a
pig an’ a crested duck, but to sit in a hammock with a study-book, or
if ’twas winter, she’d be half the afternoon poring over that book or
another, in her own little bedroom, maybe, and come down,
weazened an’ blue-nosed”—sadly—“to peck like a bird at her supper.
I told her mother that Lottie was going ahead on that tack under
more sail than she could carry. ‘Take her out o’ school,’ I said; ‘turn
her loose in the woods. I’ll teach her to swim an’ dive until she’s as
much at home in the water as a young harbor-seal and has the
appetite of a shark!’ ... Land! there’s a fine bathing-beach half-a-mile
from this orchard, but she couldn’t swim any farther than that
pedigreed pig there, ’bout the only animal that can’t hold its own in
the water. Can you? Can you swim farther than Mary-Jane Peg?” He
frowned fiercely on Kitty.
“Ye-es—with water-wings,” she faltered, “I can swim ten yards.”
“‘Ten yards! Water-wings!’ Gumph! An’ you of my breed! That’s
the way with about half the boys an’ girls on this cape, of sea-faring
stock, too! Can’t swim a stroke until some summer visitor who
spends nine-tenths o’ the year away from the ocean takes pity on
’em and teaches ’em—then they’ll hand his name down to their
children as a water-god who had Neptune ‘skun a mile.’” Honk!
Captain Andy’s angry laughter scaled the bandaged tree.
“But to come back to Lottie!” He reseated himself mournfully.
“Well, p’raps her mother would have hearkened to my advice, but
the child herself was set against it, an’ nobody said her nay. She
graduated from high school at sixteen with tall honors—an’ a face
the color of sea-foam. The following winter she overworked at
college, studied about every minute when she wasn’t waiting on
table to win her way through, broke down, came home with a cough
that turned to a galloping consumption or something o’ the sort—
they buried her in the spring.”
Kitty drew a long sob-like breath.
“Well now, you ha’n’t got the over-study fever, but you’ve
anchored in this orchard too long, with a pig an’ a duck for crew,
fishing up scares. It’s ‘Up anchor!’ now; you’re going to be ready for
me to-morrow when I come for you in my power-boat—I’ve been
talking to your mother about it already—an’ you’ll spend a couple o’
weeks, at any rate, in one or other of those camps on the white
Sugarloaf Peninsula, either among the Camp Fire Girls or sleeping in
my big tent if you prefer it. You’ll do things ’long with other girls
(that Mary-Jane she’s a mighty intelligent pig, but a silent partner),
you’ll slide down sand-hills, watch the seals, learn to swim, breast-
stroke, crawl-stroke——”
“I won’t do it!” That little brown trout, a minnow of perversity,
leaped again in the amber pool of Kitty’s eyes.
But the flying-dolphin-like gleam in Captain Andy’s swallowed it up
at a gulp.
“Oh, tut, tut! Avast there! What I say goes, this trip!” The
granduncle stamped his foot on the orchard buttercups just as he
had many a time stamped it at Death upon a reeking deck which the
seas were pounding like an earthquake, bidding that grim spectre
begone; so he was bent on driving off his shadow now.
“They—they’d only laugh at me, those Camp Fire Girls; they wear
short skirts or bloomers an’ middy blouses—I’ve seen a tribe of them
before—an’ they dress up grandly at ceremonial meetings; I have
only frocks like these; an’ they’d laugh at me for chumming with a
pig an’ a duck an’ some hens.”
“I’ll warrant they wouldn’t. They’d give you a colored honor-bead,
instead, to string on a leather thong round your neck—that is if you
joined them—for knowing so much about a farmyard. As for the
Camp Fire duds, I’ll see that you have ’em when you need ’em. Bless
your heart, little Kitty, you won’t know yourself in green bloomers—
any more’n a vessel seems to know herself when she gets her first
suit o’ sails on and feels herself moving; all your fears’ll run to hide
an’ laugh at you out o’ the knees of those bloomers. An’ you’ll laugh
back at the fears once you join the Morning-Glory Camp Fire.”
“Is that what they call it?” A dawn-pink stole into Kitty’s cheeks.
“Sure. And they call the biggest o’ my camps that they roost in at
night, twelve of ’em—not all the tribe could come—Camp Morning-
Glory. Sounds slick, doesn’t it? Sounds as if they had hit the sun’s
trail, doesn’t it? And, by gracious! they have. They’re a lighthearted
tribe, always ‘on deck,’ always alert an’ doing something, swimming
or rowing, dressing up in Indian toggery, singing, sliding, cooking—
middling good cookery, too—I’ve tasted it—laundering their own
blouses, even one or two rich girls among ’em, whose father could
charter a laundry for the whole outfit an’ not miss it—‘glorifying
work,’ they call it!”
“But—I don’t want to go.” Perversity’s last stand!
“Ah, but hearken a minute; do you know what I’m going to do
when I get back to the Sugarloaf this afternoon? I’m going to prowl
about the white sand-dunes until I find a nice hard chunk o’ birch-
wood—there’s all sorts o’ driftage among those dunes, even to
planks and great big logs washed down from Maine lumber camps
an’ trundled ashore there—what d’you suppose I want that birch-
chunk for?”
Kitty’s eyes widened.
“I’m going to make a top of it—a guessing-top, to spin on a flat
stone—about a foot long that top’s to be, nine inches in
circumference near the point, thirty at the head-end; ’twill be
painted with symbols an’ it’s called by an Indian name ‘Kullibígan.’
It’s a magic top; it tells fortunes.”
“Non-sense!”
 “You wait and see! ’Twas the Morning-Glory who thought of that
game; she’s the prettiest little dancer and her name is Jessica, the
sort of girl”—Captain Andy looked at some old-farm buildings beyond
the orchard and drew his comparison, now, from the farm, not the
foam—“the sort of girl who if she was run through a milk separator
would come out all cream! From what I gather she’s pretty much
alone in the world, too, has her own way to make; that don’t down
her; she’s a Morning-Glory in spite of it—that’s her Camp Fire name.”
 “An’ you’ll laugh back at the fears, once you join
the Morning-Glory Camp Fire.”

“How did she learn about the Indian top?”

“Why! she learned of it from a professor who watched the Indian
maidens play the Kullibígan spinner game in their own camps or on
their reservations. They ask it a question about who’s going to marry
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