Pemrose Lorry, Camp Fire Girl

by Isabel Hornibrook

  CHAPTER XVII

  A NOVEL SANTA CLAUS

  "It's an Owl!"

  "Only an owl--a little screech owl! Not--not so little, either! Wheredid it come from?"

  "Yes! How on earth did it get in? Doors--windows--all are screened."

  "Glory halleluiah! It came down the chimney. Look--look at the black onits feathers, the wood-smuts clinging to it! Down the big chimney of theliving room!"

  "Like Santa Claus down the chimney! Mercy! d'you suppose it played Santaitself? or did the boys push it down?"

  "The boys! Those miserable Henkyl Hunters--always on the trail of ajoke! If they did, they'll never own up! Never!"

  Such was the substance of the uproar as the downy ball of moppingfeathers took on a beak, claws and big brown eyes, blank and round,perching upon the foot-rail of a cot!

  "Oh! it's as bad as the bats in Tory Cave. And they were so-o hor-rid!"wailed Una. "It--it just tickled my lips with its wing. Bah!"

  "Bad! It's not bad, at all; it's dear," cooed Jessie, the merle, feelinginstant kinship with the bewildered bird. "Girls! Girls! I believe it'sblind--blind as a bat, or as the pale fish in the cave. There itgoes--look--knocking its head, this way and that, against the wall!"

  Yes, the fluttering thing, of a sudden taking to flight again, was nowplaying shuttlecock, feathered shuttlecock, to the battledore of a broadsunbeam which batted it wildly hither and yon.

  "Oh! keep back--quiet--maybe, 'twill settle down again," pleaded themerle.

  "Hasn't it the face of a cunning little kitten? Such a wise, blinking,round-eyed kitten! Its head is reddish, not gray--and the rufousmarkings on its breast, too! Oh-h! I wonder if the boys did catch it inthe woods and thought it was a good 'henkyl' to put down our chimney?"

  But that, as the girls knew, would remain as blind a puzzle as the long,screened dormitory was to the dazzled owl, unable to see clearly indaylight, out visiting when he should have been in bed in the cool, darkhollow of a tree.

  "Oo-oo-oo-ooo ... cluck!" it cooed and grumbled, pressing a dappledbreast and wide-spread wings against a screen, the mottled back-feathersruffling into a huge breeze-swept pompon.

  "See! He's playing he's a big owl."

  "Oh! I wonder if he'd let me--let me catch him." Jessie sighedyearningly.

  "Do-o, and we'll tame him--keep him for a mascot!" It was a generalacclamation.

  And the feathered Santa, apparently having no objection to thisrele--finding himself no longer a waif in Babel--finally settled downagain on the glittering head-rail of Una's cot, his fluffy breast to theoutdoor sunlight, his solemn, kittenish face--the head turning round ona pivot without the movement of a muscle in the body--confronting sagelythe delighted girls.

  "Isn't he the dearest thing? Oh! I'm glad the boys played the trick--ifit was the boys. I'd rather think he played Santa himself."

  There was no inkling in Jessie's mind, as, so murmuring and softlybarefoot, she stole up to the visitor, now motionless as a painted bird,of a much worse trick that those freakish Henkyl Hunters might play, agirl abetting them, too--shocking fact--before night fell again upon thepearly Bowl.

  "Oo-oo-ooo! Boo! See me reverse!" It seemed to be what the owl wassaying to the maidens as he turned the tables on them again and againwith that teetotum trick of his swivel neck.

  But he did not scream any more or offer the least objection when themerle took him to her tender breast, cooing reassurance.

  "There! you've got a new singing teacher, Jess--a little screech owl.Little! My! he's big for a small-eared owl, isn't he?--nearly a footlong. Brush the camouflage off him--the smuts of the chimney!"

  "Well--well, whether he enacted Santa Claus of his own accord, orwhether he didn't--" thus Tanpa broke in on the last flow of speechwhich was a medley--"he's brought us one gift, anyway, the gift of aglorious day for our annual White Birch celebration."

  It did prove a banner day, from the breakfast out of doors on the widepiazza in that matchless warmth of early summer when buds are bursting,trees singing themselves into leaf--for "all deep things are song--"when the inquisitive breeze peeps longingly into the yellow heart of thefirst wild rose and May is bourgeoning, flowering, into the joy of June.

  Below the bungalow the three-mile lake, a mile and a half across--thetransfigured Bowl--was still a softly glowing pearl, treasured incotton-wool mists which entirely hid its real framing of lofty hills.

  "When the mountains cease playing blindman's buff with each other,then--then it will be time for our morning swim, won't it? The firstreal swim of the season, too," murmured Tomoke, the signaling maiden,nestling coaxingly near to the presiding Guardian.

  "Yes, if you think the water will be warm enough."

  "Oh! it was quite warm yesterday when we paddled out around thefloat--the floating pier." Jessie, who was tempting the feathered SantaClaus, pampered captive under her arm, with every tidbit she could thinkof, from cereal to lake-cod caught by the girls themselves, looked downat that buoyant pier--a golden raft, at the moment--tossing a dozenyards from the base of a fifteen-foot cliff where the shore jumpedsharply down to the water. Yesterday it had been wreathed with boughsfor the coming festival: the swimming structure, naevely composed of twogreat barrels, boarded over, with a broad plank, as a bridge, runningout ashore.

  To it a couple of shining canoes and two broad camp boats were moored;it also served as a springboard for diving.

  Built by girl-carpenters themselves--with a little masculinehelp--presently to be garlanded with daisy-chains and buttercups, forthe June carnival, and to hide its crudity, it stood, so the Guardianthought, exquisitely for the practical and the poetic in Camp Fire life,which ever in "glorifying Work" seeks Beauty!

  The sun was seeking that too, just now, gloating over his own noblereflection in the green-lipped Bowl,--benevolently promising, indeed, aday hot for the season, as well as radiant.

  "Yes! the temperature has taken a leap ahead," said Tanpa musingly. "Ithink you can go in--for a short swim, any way."

  "Notify me--notify me if you see me drowning--for I can't hear the voiceof doom through my bathing cap!" laughed Una Grosvenor, two hours later,in consequence of this permission, wading coyly out beyond the float, towhere the lake-water rose over the crossed logs of the Camp Fire emblemon the breast of her blue bathing suit.

  "Oh! she's in no danger of drowning; she swims better than I--I do-onow," shivered Pemrose, rather wishing that June were July and the Bowlhad undergone the gradual glow of a heating process. "Aren't you coming,Thrush?" she cried. "Aren't you coming in, Jessie?"

  "I can't leave the owl! I believe the boys meant him as an anniversarypresent--though they went about presenting him in a queer way," was thefostering answer.

  The other girls, however, were in the water, as those grigs of boys hadbeen before them; the Bowl seemed to froth with their laughter, spraycreaming around the bare, sunflushed arms flung above it, as if the lakeitself, in festive mood, were a sentient sharer in the joy of thesedaring June bathers.

  "Now--now who wants to dress and come out in the boats for a study ofpond-life under the microscope?" cried the Guardian.

  "Whoo! Whoo! That--that's a bait to which the fish always rise," criedone and another, eagerly splashing ashore blue of brow and covered withgooseflesh, yet loath to admit that on this the feathered Santa Claus'gift of a prematurely perfect June day the creamy Bowl was still tooemphatically a cooler.

  Up the rude sod steps of the cliff they trooped--a bevy ofshivers--fleeing for warmth and the shelter of the bungalow.

  "Oo-oo-oo! I've never been in bathing so early in the year before,"shook out Pemrose, to whom the experience--the lingering chill of thismountain Bowl many hundred feet above sea-level--was rather too much ofa weak parody upon her last freshwater ducking.

  "Oh! you'll soon warm up. Come, hurry and dress! It's no end of funstudying water-snails and egg-boats--gnats' funny egg-boats--under amicroscope, with the Scoutmaster," encouraged Tomoke, in everyday lifeIna Atwood, blue as her l
ightning namesake, and rather hankering afterthe warmth of her pine-knot torch.

  "Ye-es; and--and minnows--where every one of them is--is a chief Tritonamong the minnows!" laughed another girl, scrambling into her clothes."Meaning no minnows, at all--all-ll Tritons!"

  All Tritons, sure enough, rosy Tritons, brilliant now in the earlysummer, the breeding season, with wonderful colors, the males,especially.

  Swimming about, near the surface, as the minnows usually do, the clearwaters of the June Bowl became for the girls, looking, one by onethrough the large microscope over the boat's side, a "vasty deep" inwhich leviathans played--fairy fish--seeing everything rose-color,painting themselves to ecstasy with the joys of mating, the joy of June.

  "See--see they're not all red--or partly so--s-such a lovely pinky-red,especially around the fins and head--that's where they keep theirpigment," said Tanpa. "Some have colored themselves like goldfish;others are greenish--or lighter yellow."

  "Ha! While others, again, are gotten up as if for a minstrel show fortheir marriage--painted black, for the time being!" laughed her husband,the tall Scout Officer.

  "Yes. That's why we like, girls and boys, to come down to our camp earlyin the season--if only at intervals--because we watch the summer comingand can study the wonderful lake life as at no other time," remarked theGuardian again, and then subsided into private life in the stern of thebroad, red camp-skiff, scribbling something in verse form to be read atthe White Birch celebration in the afternoon when land as well as lakewas a-riot with young color, strewn with wild flowers for gay June totread on.

  "Oh! isn't it the most wonderful--wonderful season? In the city we gocamping too late. The freshness isn't there." Pem's eyes were dim as sheapplied one to the lens of the microscope, to gaze once more at thepainted Tritons; she was glad that in the freshness of the year itwas--oh! so soon now--that the little Thunder Bird would momentarilycolor the skies and paint the World rose-colored in excitement over itsdemonstration--over the heights that could be reached--paving the wayfor the Triton of Tritons to come.

  "Well! if we spend any more time with the minnows, we'll have to 'cutout' the 'fresh-water sheep', the little roaches, and the insects'egg-boats," said the Scoutmaster. "Speaking of the latter, I saw acurious one yesterday upon a stagnant pool over on the other side of thelake; perhaps the visitors would be interested in it."

  The visitors were interested in the bare mention. Warming equally tocomfort and excitement again, they clamored--Pemrose and Una--for asight of that raft of gnats' eggs, so cunningly formed and gluedtogether, minute egg to egg, hundreds of them, that it was a regularlifeboat--no storm could sink it, and pressure only temporarily.

  Yet, after all, Pemrose only half heard the Scoutmaster's explanation ofhow the insect chose a floating stick or straw as a nucleus, placed herforelegs on it and laid the egg upon her hind ones, holding it thereuntil she had brought forth another to join it, gluing the two togetherby their sticky coating,--and so on till the broad and buoyant boat wasconstructed!

  Pemrose hardly heard, for as the party made its way to that stagnantpool, an overflow at some time of the sparkling Bowl, and hidden in adense little wood, she had a sudden demonstration of how, under certaincircumstances, a girl's heart is much more capsizable than a gnat'segg-boat.

  Hers positively turned turtle--yes! really, turned turtle--at sight of along, gray figure lying, breast down, amid undergrowth upon the marginof a little stream that was hurrying away from it to the lake.

  She felt momentarily topsy-turvy, every bit of her, for anywhere onearth--aye, even if she were scouring space with the Thunder Bird--shewould recognize that angular figure.

  It had once pulled her up a snow-bank to the distant rumble of anengine's explosion.

  Yes, and surely she had seen it again, once again, since then--although,sandwiched as it now was between egg-boats and painted Tritons she couldnot--for the moment--remember where.

  "Fine day! Having luck? Catching anything?" hailed the Scoutmaster, withgenial interest, as one woodsman to another, for the figure was anglingwith a fly-rod.

  The latter shot a side long glance at the party from under a broadPanama hat,--then jammed that, rather uncivilly, further down upon hishead.

  "Bah! The fish aren't ex-act-ly jumping out of the water, saying'Hullo!' to you!" it returned in the freakish drawl of a masked battery,shrinking deeper into cover amid the ferns.

  Yet, when the Nature students had passed on, one quivering girl, withears intently on the alert, heard it fire off something in the samefern-cloaked rumble about a certain fly being a "perfect peach" to fishwith.

  And the answer came in clear, ringing, boyish tones--from another anglerpresumably--momentarily rainbowing the wood.

  "Yes--sure--that Parmachene belle is _the girl_, Dad! If--ifthere's a trout in the stream, she'll put the 'come hither!' on it."

  "Bah! Likening a trout-fly to a girl! So like his 'nickum' impudence!"Pem's teeth--in her present mood--came together with a snap. And, ofcourse, she couldn't see the gnat's raft when she arrived at thestagnant puddle, for she had borrowed the gnat's sting with which tobarb the snub which she meant to inflict, some time, upon that anglingyouth who had sat, unabashed, in the Devil's Chair,--if ever luck heldout a chance.

  "Yes--yes! and if he had played Jack at a Pinch forty-eleven milliontimes, I'd do it." Her eyes were flashing now like the sky-dots in thepool, forked by iridescent shadows. "So--so _here's_ where theyhave their camp," craning her neck for a glimpse of a log-cabin amid thespruces. "Stud said it was just across the lake from the girls'!"

  After that--well! who could be interested in gnat-boats when they hadjust lit upon the ambush of a Puzzle; a puzzle that would only open in apinch and shut up, like a Chinese ring-box, afterwards?

  And, moreover, that woodland lurking-place was just a bare mile and ahalf across the Bowl from the floating barrel pier, decked, as it wasbuilt, by girls' hands, and from the great heart's-ease bungalow, now,too, in process of decoration for the gala time in the afternoon aroundthe White Birch totem; and for the blissful, far-off event, drawingnearer with every shining moment, the brilliant piazza, dance in theevening!