It was Tanpa, with the sunburst upon her right breast, general symbol of the Camp Fire, and the birch tree in grace of green and silver embroidered above it upon emerald khaki, who read the verses which she had scribbled in the skiff’s stern under cover of the general interest in water-snails, eggboats and “fresh-water sheep.”

“Most beautiful of forest trees–the Lady of the Woods!” came the responsive hail from eighteen green-clad maidens, tiptoeing around the Silver Lady, the emerald tassels of their Tam-o’-shanters skipping in the June breeze that peeped under her fluttering veil, still tucked with buds, to kiss those white limbs lifted to the skies, with surely, some bud of conscious joy.

It was June! Upon the cliff-brow, above the lake, wild roses were budding, too; and the girls’ cheeks painted themselves with their reflection–even as did the blushing minnows in the lake.But the lady of the woods had the best of it so far as decoration went. Never new-crowned head wore in its coronet Life as hers did,–fledgling life.

For amid the heart-shaped leaves, so brightly green, was the cap-sheaf of summer wear:

The poet who penned that line would have gloried in the sight of her, that bungalow birch tree, a tall, straight specimen, radiant as a silver taper from the black, frescoed ring about the foot to the topmost ivory twig, and here and there amid the fluttering, pea-green tresses a little tuft of conscious life–a nestling with open beak and craving, coralline throat.

He would have joyed in the sight of the tree-loving Group, too, as the earth was turned and the first silver sapling rooted deep to the music of Tomoke’s voice, softly proclaiming:

And Life would do the rest–oh! surely–in the case of her father and herself, was the dewy thought of Pemrose Lorry as she planted her baby tree in honor of that novel Wayfarer, that would first traverse space and conquer it–bridge the gulf which made Earth a hermit amid the heavenly bodies–of the great invention, whereof poets in future ages would sing, that daringly took the first step towards linking planet with planet.

And the tender sapling was rooted in the hope that long before it was a mature tree that comet-like Wayfarer would start,–the Thunder Bird would fly.

Well! star-dust never blinded the eyes. But it certainly dazzled those of Pemrose, that young visionary, as she pressed earth around her sapling’s root: would there ever come a time when the Camp Fires of Earth would hail the Camp Fires of some other planet across that illimitable No Man’s Land of Space, first–oh! thought transcendent–first bridged by her father’s genius?

But with the high seasoning of that thought came the salty smack of another! All unseen in the planting excitement a tear dropped upon the spading trowel as she thought of that whimsical “Get thee behind me, Satan, but don’t push!” plea of the inventor sorely tempted to commercialize his genius, thwart its inspired range, because of the difficulties about bringing his project to fruition–and of that money hung up, idle, for the next twelve years.

“Daddy-man thinks he’ll be–well! not an old man, but that his best energies will be spent by that time, even if–”

But here the trowel dug vigorously, burying head over ears the thought of the possible return within that time of the “zany” who had been such a mad fellow in youth that, according to her father and others, it was like sitting on a barrel of gunpowder to have anything to do with him, so sure were you to come to grief through his explosive pranks. And yet, and yet–perhaps it was the dash of spice in her name–Pem could not help feeling an interest for his own sake in that “hot tamale”, the Thunder Bird’s rival in the will!

So she spaded away, watering her sapling for the first time, herself, with that little tributary tear; and then, propitiating it, after the manner of the Indians, in the graceful Leaf Dance, capering around it, around the Queen Birch, too, with her companions, upon the lightest fantastic toe, their green arms outstretched and waving, to imitate the leaves above them, blown by the wind.

Went the phonograph upon the bungalow piazza, as it threw off the music, the quaint Indian accompaniment to those stamping, shuffling, skipping feet, to the queer little half-savage syllables, borrowed from the Creek Indians, upon the lips of the chanting, dancing girls, to the coconut hand-rattle wielded by Aponi, the Butterfly, most fairy-like of the green dancers, as she led and led, in honor of the new idlwissi, or tree-hair, the listening leaves–ethereal partners overhead.

Containing little pebbles picked from the lake-side, with a stick running through the painted coconut-shell for a handle, its gleeful rattle fairly turned girls’ heads with the joy of June.

“I think we’ll have to ask you to repeat that dance to-night for the benefit of the boys, your guests,” said the Scoutmaster, who was manipulating the phonograph. “Fairyland wouldn’t be ‘in it’ with the human leaves tripping in pink and gold and green and–no ordinary man knows what!”

Fairyland, indeed, seemed beaten hollow as “across the lake in golden glory” the waning sunbeams of early June bathed the little floating pier, wreathed in laurel and daisy chains, then climbed with flagging feet, like a tired angel, the sod-steps cut into the side of the steep cliff, and, gaining the top, joined their rose-colored brothers skipping among girlish forms in every fair hue imaginable, claiming partners in a dance as of Northern Lights before ever their human brothers, the scouts in gilded khaki, got a chance at a reel.“Oh! I feel it in my toes that this is going to be a won-der-ful party,” said Toandoah’s little pal, kicking lightly, impatiently with those satin toes of her party slippers at the tufted grass, as she sat enthroned upon the sod of the cliff’s brow, with two knights beside her, Stud of the stout heart, and a bright-eyed luckless tenderfoot, whose parents, in a fit of dementia surely, had named him Louis Philip Green, which, as he used only the initial letter of his second name, had of course entailed a nickname.

“You promised you’d dance the Lancers with me, although I’m only a tenderfoot,” said Peagreen, nibbling a blade of grass as he lay prone upon the sod and shooting a glance, bright and eager as a robin’s, in the direction of the black-haired girl with those skybeams in her eyes under inky lashes.

“Humph! The cheek of some kids who ought to be tucked up in their Beehive when–when that dance comes off!” grumbled the fifteen-year-old Stud, with the arrogance of a Patrol Leader, directing his glance at a brown, conical bungalow flanking a large one, where the younger boys turned in at what seemed to them unseemly hours, while scout veterans sat up overhauling the day’s doings for an occasion of a laugh against somebody, practical joke, of course, preferred, to be published in the Henkyl Hunter’s typewritten Bulletin and hung up in the porch next morning.

“Well! I’m safe for the Grand March, anyhow–and the Virginia reel, too, eh!” Stud dug congratulatory fists into his brown sides, wriggling aggressively upon the cliff-brow, like Peagreen figuratively hugging the ground with an impatient nose.

Privately he was inclined to the opinion that the blue-eyed girl’s friend who had that little nearsighted stand in one of her dark eyes, and two dimples to Pemrose’s one, was the daintier “peach” of the two–and that his own sister, Jess, was as pretty as either; but think of the distinction of leading off with a girl whose father would lead off amid the dance of planets, in sending a messenger to the moon, Mars, too, maybe!

“Whoopee!” He kicked the sod as if spurning it as common or garden earth–although there were moments when, like others–elders–in a skeptical world, he told himself that the Thunder Bird would prove, after all, a Flying Dutchman,–just an extravagant dream.

“So–so you were out on the lake this morning, studying pond life with the professor,” he said, alluding to the Scoutmaster. “He’s instructor in a college and each year he gets us started on something; last summer it was astronomy–he brought a small telescope along.”

Pem’s heels drummed more excitedly on the sod–the starry heavens were her scope.

“But we have a good deal of fun with the big compound microscope, too–and more without it,” acknowledged Studley. “Fancy last week we caught a huge pike which had jumped clear out of the water, on to the bank, after a water-hen!”

“Where was that? How–how big was it?” The girlish questions mounted helter-skelter.

“The pike? Oh! he weighed about fifteen pounds. It was right over there, on the other side of the lake,” pointing to the spot where the party interested in egg-boats had landed that morning. “He–he gobbled the hen, too.”

“Did he?” But he might have been threatening to gobble her, judging by the start which the girl gave at the moment.

Her heart jumped down to the water’s edge as abruptly as did the cliff beneath her.

Her eyes were on a boat rowing out of the sunset’s eye directly across the lake from that very spot.

There was but one individual in it and he–he was rowing by instinct, as the birds fly, for his gaze was glued to a newspaper sheet, the sun’s own evening edition, gorgeously printed by the painted rays in every hue of the spectrum.

He was heading straight–straight for the floating wharf with its plank-bridge running out ashore.

Jack at a Pinch again!

“Do–do you know who he is?” Pem flashed the question upon the older of her two boy-knights.

“Well-ll! I guess so.” Stud’s joy in the recognition floundered a little. “He–he’s the fellow–one of the fellows–who boomed the aËroplane, the other day, to get you girls quietly out of the cave, when there was a ‘rattler–’”

“As if we’d have made a fuss, anyhow!” The girl’s eyes blazed, again a patchwork, drawing their red center from the sun. “You said–you said that it was so hard to make friends with him, like whistling jigs to a milestone–ah!” Her own voice was suddenly stony. “Have you–oh! have you made any headway since?”

“Humph! Yes. I’ve found out something about him.”

The patrol leader’s preoccupied eyes were on the boat edging vaguely nearer to the wharf, with its one “nickum” figure, so nonchalantly rowing, so absorbed in the rainbowed sheet upon its knees that at this moment it awkwardly “caught a crab” and almost suggestively lost an oar.

Simultaneously, however, the phonograph on the piazza struck up, as a prelude to festivities, the Virginia reel, the notes tripping gaily out across the painted lake; and the rower shot one glance upward, as if to say: “I’ll be there in time!” then bent his hungry nose to the paper again.

“What–what did you find out about him?” Pem’s interest was equally hungry–positively famishing. “His name–eh?”“Ha–that’s the question! Over on Greylock the farmers’ sons call him Shooting Star’, alias ‘Starry’,” with a boyish laugh, “because when they were awf’ly hard up for a player in the last ball game of the series against Willard College, having lost their second baseman and substitute too, by gracious! he breezed along, an’ the captain, hearing he had played on a college team, roped him in ... an’–an’, what do you know, but he won the game for that mountain team with a home run! A home run over the left field fence! Bully!”

“But, surely, they know his–real–name!” Pem’s aloof absorption in that fell like fog-drip even upon the glow from that left field fence.

“Maybe they do–and maybe they don’t! He refused it to the fans. And when the Greylock coach cornered him he palmed it off as Selkirk. But my cousin who’s pitcher on the team says in his opinion that was just ‘throwing a tub to a whale’–something fishy about it, see?” Stud winked. “For ‘Starry’ an’ his father–who’s a queer fish, if ever there was one–had a camp then up on Greylock peak, and the postmaster in charge o’ the Greylock mail owned that he received letters for them addressed to another name–only he couldn’t–wouldn’t–give it away.”

“Wha-at!”

Pem’s hand suddenly smote her lips.

Her wide eyes were no patchwork now. Stud had not thought that a girl’s eyes could be so blue. It almost gave him the “Willies”, their remote, peculiar sky-glow, as if afar–afar–they were seeing things.

“What!” she gasped again, while that vivid glow faded, became bluish, blank, the tint of “Moonshine”–of a strange, wild, nondescript dream.

Moonshine that seemed flooding her whole being!

And yet–although she was a quick-witted girl–it was too vague for her to draw from it one clear thought–only an uneasy, unreal, absolutely breathless feeling!

And then the queer, air-drawn sensation as suddenly passed–and with it the blue moon which had momentarily turned her world to nothing–“shooed” off by a very real, very tangible, quite pressing apprehension:

“He–he’s not coming to the da-nce?”

She sprang up hurriedly, pointing to the boat below; to its one preoccupied figure, clad neither in rough sweater nor May-fly gaudiness, now, but, if the sunset didn’t exaggerate, in a very becoming dark suit.

“Humph! I don’t know! I guess he is! Didn’t think he could pull it off for some reason or other–” Stud’s shoulders were shrugged. “But, maybe, he’s found where there’s a will there’s a way.”

“Why-y?” The girl’s lips were parted breathlessly, her foot involuntarily stamping.“Oh! you know you told us to invite our friends to the party; not you, but the other girls did, when they signaled across that night from the green Pinnacle–gee! and it was some signaling, too.” The scout’s glance was teasing now as it shot up from the grass. “So–so one of the older boys he ran across that bunch o’ fellows who were blooming round in the cave the other day–they’re all from camps on the lake–and invited the whole five. This one thought he couldn’t accept, but I guess he’s making a dash at it–at coming just the same!”

“Oh!... Oh, dear! I wish he wasn’t!”

“Why?” Now it was the scout’s turn to hang, breathless, upon the interrogation as he too jumped to his feet.

“Because–oh! because I’d be–be ever so much more comfortable without him–enjoy myself more.” Pem caught her breath wildly.

“Then ’twill be A. W. O. L. for him! ... A. W. O. L. for him–if I perish for it!”

“What–what does that mean?”

“Absent With-Out Leave, as they set it down in the Army!”

Mischief leaped to the Henkyl Hunter’s eye.

He beckoned Peagreen from the grass to follow him. A whisper in the tender-foot’s ear and down the winding sod-steps of the cliff they scrambled!

Pem knew that she ought to call them back; knew it from the white parting at the side of her throbbing little head to the toe of her satin slipper tumultuously beating the ground, as she sank down, an orchid amid her chiffons, to watch.

But it was a moment when the spice of her chowchow name had all spilled over; when the Vain Elf which, according to her father, slept in the shadow of the Wise Woman, was broadly–mutinously–awake.

The boat had drawn in alongside the decked float now.It was gently rocking there, on and off, the rower having shipped his oars and laid them beside him, his strong fingers now and again hooking the wharf when there was danger of his drifting away, while his obsessed nose was bent closer still to the newspaper sheet, catching the last rays of daylight on it.

He did not look up when the scouts, running out over the plank bridge, spoke to him.

Suddenly one of them–Stud it was–leaned down and snatched the oars, lifted them high in the air, the nickum’s evil genius having prompted him to lay them in the boat’s side nearest the wharf; perhaps it was the demon which he had dared by sitting in the Devil’s Chair.

At the same time Peagreen gave the boat a strong shove outward to where a current caught it and swept it further–mockingly further, towards the darkening center of the Bowl.

“Oh! I say–I say, you fellows, that’s no stunt to pull off!” roared the nickum wrathfully. “I’m due at the dance now!”

“You’re not coming to the dance. There’s a girl here who doesn’t want you!” rang back the voice of callow chivalry in the barbarous pipe of the tenderfoot.

And Pem, slipping up from the grass, her hands to her burning cheeks–for she had not meant it to go as far as this–stole back to the piazza, to dance away from the shamefaced ecstasy of reprisal in her heart.

Perhaps she would have felt that this was too sore a snub to inflict for any rudeness on Jack at a Pinch; perhaps she would have compelled her boy-knights to put out in the camp skiff and return those oars–under pain of not dancing with them, at all–had she seen the illuminated column over which the victim’s nose had been so disastrously bent.

It was in every sense a highly colored description of her father’s record-breaking invention, dwelling particularly, though vaguely, upon the experiments so soon to take place with a lesser Thunder Bird, a smaller rocket, from the remote and misty top of old Mount Greylock.