Running water! Invisible running water! The voice behind the scenes prompting the play,–the grim play of bat and rat and reptile in old Tory Cave, where the rocks wept, the little strolling sunbeams clapped their hands, and the great fungi, primrose-skirted, drooped over a drama never finished!

It was even more romantic than the girls had hoped for,–such romance as clings, cobweb-like, to melancholy.

Like a weak wind, truly, a sad wind blowing from nowhere, was the purl of that hidden streamlet whose mystery no man had penetrated–nor ever seen its flow–mournfully as cave tears it dripped upon the ears and hearts of the girls.“Pshaw! Who cares for weeping rocks, though they look as if they were bursting with grief and ready to tear their pale hair–that queer growth clinging to them. Humph! Only crocodile tears, anyhow, like ‘Alice in Wonderland!’” cried Ista, the laughing Eye of the White Birch Group, whose everyday name was Polly Leavitt.

“It’s not the tears and it’s not that horribly sad lake with the little, blind, colorless fish in it, that I mind–it’s the Bats!” screamed Una Grosvenor. “Oh-h!” as the mouse-like head of the cave mammal and its skinny wing almost brushed her face.

“Well! They’re not brick-bats,” came reassuringly from one of the boys, as the Togetherers ranged through the outer part of that vast Tory Cave–once the hiding-place of a political refugee, whose spirit seemed flitting among them in the filmy cave-fog which, dank and mournful, clung about the margin of that strange lake of fresh water where blind fish played.Presumably fed by that cloistered brooklet, whose cell, far in, in an impenetrable recess, no human foot had ever trod, the lakelet had the floor to itself, so to speak, so that in places scouts with their lamps, and girls pairing off with their exploring brothers, one piloting eye between them, had difficulty in skirting it–without a ducking.

“Whew! a ducking in the dark–a cave-bath–horrible!” cried Pemrose. “Oh, mer-rcy! what–what is it?”

“Bah! Only a garter snake–a pretty fellow,” laughed Studley, picking the slim, striped thing up from a corner of the blind lake where it was amphibiously basking, and letting it curl around his khaki arm, investigating the merit badges of the patrol leader.

The green and red of the life-saver’s embroidered badge, the crossed flags of the expert signaler, the white plow of the husbandman, they enlivened the gloom a wee bit, winking up at the safety lamp hooked to his hat-band, as he bent over the illumined reptile.

But they did not challenge it as did the flash of an apricot sweater, blood-red in the ruby lamplight, of a black and yellow cap, several yellow and black caps, suddenly–eagerly–thrust near.

“He’s big–big for a garter, isn’t he, Buddy?” remarked a voice that did not come from the ranks of Togetherers, of Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls, excitedly scrutinizing Stud’s novel armlet.

Neither–neither was it the voice of the nickum, so much Pemrose knew, as she edged coldly a little away,–a little nearer to the dim and sighing lake-edge.

Yet he was among them, those gaudy big boys, whose flare of color merely striped the cave-dusk, like the dingy markings upon the snake’s squirming back.

He actually had his armful of mayflowers, too, the nickum, not the snake; passË mayflowers, with the tan of decay on them, was nursing them carefully, as if they were part of a long lost heritage into which he had lately come–as if he were afraid to lay them down lest some alien should snatch them from him.

“He doesn’t look like a ‘chuff’–a boor. He looks like a really nice college boy, one with a hazing imp in his eye though, lur-rking in that little star–almost a squint; so–so like Una’s,” thought the inventor’s daughter, familiar with the student brand of boy. “Yet how could he be so uncivil to us, really–actually–snub us, after all he did, too? Goodness! wouldn’t I like to get a chance to snub him?” It was the Vain Elf which slept in the shadow of the Wise Woman in the breast of Pemrose Lorry, that stored this wish, laid it up, a vengeful arrow in the blue quiver of her eyes, now shooting piqued, sidelong glances at those flaunting big boys. “Why-y should we run up against them here? Well! he’ll never get a chance to play Jack at a Pinch–friend in need–to me again. Watch me–watch me pick my steps!” She picked them so at random, at the moment, moving off, that she came near slipping in for that eerie ducking, with the blind fish–pale as phantoms, swimming round–and Stud, flinging the striped garter away, hurried after her–Jessie, too!

“Gee! this is a peach of a cave; isn’t it?” effervesced the scout sarcastically. “Melancholy so blooming thick that you could almost sup its sorrow with a spoon, eh?”

“It’s a regular cave of despair.” The lonely trill of the feathered hermit was in Jessie’s answering note. “That sad voice of water, a cascade–a stream–far in, which nobody ever saw!”

“I’d give worlds to see it!” said Pemrose.

“So would I!” Stud’s voice was pitched high. “If it weren’t for the Scoutmaster.... Tradition says that whoever drinks of that hidden water will have luck.”

“Well! I’d let somebody else have the piping times if I were you, Buddy–if they depend on a draught from that mysterious spring.”

Now, it was the nickum who answered; the same scintillating tones they were–how bully they sounded then–which had quoted Shakespeare on “Something rotten in the State of Denmark”, amid other depressing waters, half hidden, half liberated by their ice-cloak.

“I can look out for my own ‘piping times’–thank you! And I’m not going to buy any pig in a poke–take any leap in the dark.”

The scout’s reply was bristling. To a fifteen-year-old patrol leader, a Henkyl Hunter, who went up and down upon the trail of a joke, there was a smack of condescension about that “Buddy”, used twice by those big boys; perhaps he, too, at that moment, laid up something against the youth of the flaming tone and rig.

“Humph! hasn’t he the nerve, butting in?” he muttered.“He has–has all sorts of nerve,” agreed Pemrose readily, glancing sideways after the boy whose courage she knew to be as high as his colors.

“The Scoutmaster wouldn’t hear of our venturing in so far as to investigate that running water, anyhow,” said Studley. “My eye! What’s the rumpus now–the kettle o’ fish?”

It was a shriek from one girl–half-a-dozen girls. It was a loud hiss, almost a whistle, from some pallid vegetation near the lake-edge. It was a black snake rearing a blue-black head and glittering eye within three feet of Una Grosvenor, novice among Camp Fire Girls, whose scream tore at the very stones of Tory Cave until they cried out in echo.

It was a dozen green-clad girls scattering wildly this way and that, olive-green aspen leaves tossing in a whirlwind, shuffling from pillar to post–from rock to darkling rock.

It was–it was a powerful reptile form, in armor of jetty scales, trailing its six-foot length away, the noise of its mighty tail-blows against the earth and flying pebbles calling all the Dumps–the Doleful Dumps–out of the dens where they hid here, making them take strange and shadowy shapes, gigantic shapes, of threat.

“Let me get out! Oh-h! I want to get out, away–anywhere!” shuddered Una. “This is no-o fun.”

“Yes! it is–once you get used to it,” laughed Pemrose, who–together with the Jack at a Pinch still hovering near–liked her excitement warm. “Look–look at him crimp himself along! Ever–ever see anything so crooked?” as the great muscle in the reptile’s body contracted and relaxed upon its hasty retreat. “When we girls had our War Garden, a year ago, an old farmer said we planted our potato rows so straight that he ‘vummed ’twould make a black snake seasick to cross from one to the other.’”

“Ha! Because he just naturally has to go ajee!” laughed her scout knight, estimating the length of that scaly corkscrew, if uncoiled, with his eye. “Pshaw! I’ve tamed ’em–and killed ’em, too,” he added.

“Yes! a black snake wouldn’t harm you, even if he did bite.” Pem was still reassuring her friend. “Did you hear him whistle?... But–but what’s that?” It was just half a minute later that she put the question. “He isn’t making that noise with his tail still; is he?”

She looked at Stud. Under the ruby eye of the lamp his face–the face of a Stoutheart–had turned suddenly pea-green.

His eyes were fixed upon a gleam of bloated yellow dimly seen, under the lee of a rock, not very many yards away–the venomous, pale yellow of the dropsical cave fungi.

“Why–why! it’s only one of those horrid, blowzy, mushroom things. But what’s the noise–like–like somebody rattling little marbles, dry peas?”The girl felt her own breath go ratatat as she put the question.

“Oh-h! only some fellow rattling–rattling–beans in his pocket. Let’s get away–quick!”

And then Pemrose knew what it was to look upon a Stoutheart “rattled.”

But, with that, a voice, a cry, not loud, but strong, exploded like a spring gun in the cave,–suddenly halting advance.

“What’s that outside? What’s that outside?” it whooped. “Is it an aËroplane? Two aËroplanes? Oh! hurry out–and see.”

“A dozen aËroplanes! A corps of aËroplanes!” boomed back those flaunting big boys, of whom the nickum was leader, playing up to the cue of the Scoutmaster who had started the concentrated cry. “Oh, hurry–hurry!”

She saw him fling his mayflowers on the ground, that strange youth, and snatch at Una’s hand, to drag her along towards the low cave entrance. He made a wide, circling movement to catch at hers, too. But she dodged it. Never more should he play Jack at a Pinch to her! Never!

Through old Tory Cave there surged the noise of a rising wind, silencing that weak gust afar off, now baleful, the sound of the hidden water; reverberating among the rocks, it might be taken for anything, for the hum of aircraft–for a perfect onslaught of sky cavalry!

And the Scoutmaster’s cry was convincing.

Yet–yet, when boys and girls tumbled tumultuously through the cave entrance–the girls by some mysterious understanding, first–not a remote sign of a biplane, even a meager one, decorated the sky overhead.

No flying wires sent down their challenge. And the hum resolved itself into what it was: the rising, random mockery of Ta-te, the tempest, laughing at their searching looks, going north, south, east and west, aloft, skirmishing in bewilderment to all points of the horizon.

“Hum-m. There isn’t a sign of a buzz-wagon! Who pulled off that stunt–on–us?” bleated a few of the mystified younger boys, while Stud silently brushed moisture like cave-tears from his forehead.

So did the tall Scoutmaster, heavily breathing relief.

“Not an aËroplane in sight! Not a single one!” breezed the girls, all ready to be angry. “Who–who put that hoax over?”

“Varnish right–and aËroplane wrong!” It was the freakish voice of a nickum which answered. “No! No buzzer, as the boys say, but there was a rattler, in there, beside that rock. If some of you girls had gone ahead, you’d have stepped right on him!”

“A ‘rattler!’ A big rattlesnake! And–and you started the cry, to get us out quietly–quickly!”

“Not we! The Scoutmaster had the presence of mind to launch an aËroplane. We boomed it,” came the laughing reply, as Jack at a Pinch, second fiddle now, marched off with his companions.

“Who–is he?” Pemrose caught wildly at the arm of Stud, who was wishing that he and not those patronizing big boys had caught the Scoutmaster’s cue and created airdrawn aËroplanes by the corps. “Do you–do you know who he is; that biggest–that gaudiest–one among them?”

“Yes! No-o! I do–an’ I don’t!” stammered the boyish Henkyl Hunter. “I–we–” indicating his scout brothers–“have met him a couple of times in the woods; I guess his father an’ he have a camp on the opposite side of the lake from ours. We’ve talked with him–tried to be friendly. And he–he’s always jolly, you know–like now! But–but when it comes to finding out anything about either of them, gee, you might as well whistle jigs to a milestone–so-o you might!”