“Well, grace and growing to ye!”

Andrew, bareheaded, stood beside his car and waved his cap to the hikers, the brave band of hiking girls.

“Grace and growing! There, you’ve given us a ‘motto’,” said the Guardian, smiling at him.

“We’re ‘gracie’ without, as well as within.” Pemrose danced up to the gray-haired chauffeur, with the humorous eye—her own blue as the wild chicory, that wayside friend, by the mountain highroad. “How do you like our hiking rig—Minute Girl costume?” Thus she challenged him, thrusting out a bloomered knee.

“No flick-ma-feathers about it, but it’s ‘snod.’” Andrew stroked his shaven chin. “The mountains an’ ye will be fit-for-fit, I reckon.”

“Oh! if that isn’t a lovely compliment,” the response came with laughter—a perfect heart-shot, as the girl’s eyes danced off to timbered hills, the Green Haystack, Moose Horn Mountain, summits of the lesser Taconic Range, upon the threshold of the Green Mountains—to one dim giant, Mount Anthony, in the hazy distance.

“Fit-for-fit—chums, yes!” she caroled:

She threw out her arms towards them.

“That’s our marching song, part of it. She made it up for us—wrote it.” Pemrose glanced with fostering pride at Una, as she swung the dark poncho-roll carried over her right shoulder, with a rope crossing the left hip.

“What ‘Missie’ did! Miss Una!” To the elderly chauffeur his employer’s sixteen-year-old daughter was “Missie” still, as when she was six and he built her “dillycastles” on the seashore. “Hasn’t she the gift, now?” he murmured paternally. “But when it comes to the long tail o’ the day, will she be a home-body still upon the rough trail? I guess ye’ll all be drooping, ‘neb an’ feather.’ And she—she’ll be trailing that pack ahind her—I’m thinking!”

“Don’t—don’t be an ‘ill-dashed’ prophet, Andrew! If she does, we’ll help her out,” pledged Pemrose.

“An’—an’ when it comes to sleepin’ out, the night—in the dark o’ the wee ’oor, when—when restly ghosts walk that have to be shot through with a silver sixpence?” The old chauffeur winked. “An’, if a’ tales be true, that’s no lie!”

“They aren’t loyal to Uncle Sam if they wouldn’t compromise on a dime,” declared Pemrose. “Eh! Copper-nob?”

Gayly she flung one arm around a fifteen-year-old girl, in Minute Girl hiking costume, whose hair, bronze as the cat-whisker in the radio ring, held warm lights, now, as if the flame from her heart nested there.

“This is our Camp Fire sister, Lura Lovell, whose name by the Council Fire is O-te-go, meaning ‘Fire There’!” Pem ruffled the wavy “copper-nob.” “And here’s Tan-pa—‘White Bird’—Dorothy Bush. And our ‘Beam of Light’, La-tow—in everyday life Frances Goddard. Oh! yes, and more than a dozen others of the Victory Group of Camp Fire Girls.”

Pemrose pointed towards the red, white and blue Minute Girls, a score in all, including Guardian and Assistant Guardian, now on their toes, for departure.

“Fegs! ‘sonsie’ it sounds an’ bonnie ye all are, red-cheekit an’ red-lippit, ‘like the smith o’ Dunkelly’s wife’,” chuckled Andrew half to himself—though his lingering glance made an exception of Una. “And—maybe—ye won’t flinch before the fiery stick?”

“Eh! What’s that—fiery stick? What does it mean, anyhow?” The fire in Lura challenged the “stick.” “Hard luck! Hardship! Reality—eh?” She twinkled.

“Summat like it,” murmured the chauffeur.

“Oh! you can’t scare us with that.” Pemrose flung her arms round two of her “sisters”, rubbing a cheek, on either side, against theirs. “True ‘comerading’ can face any kind of camp luck; can’t it, my ‘hearties’?”

“Aye! she’s ilka body’s body, with her bonny, blue-lit face,” thought the chauffeur catching the beam from those blue eyes and throwing it back. “But the other—our lassie.” He caught his breath. “She’s ‘eye-sweet’! An’ she’s the black o’ her parents’ eye—meanin’ the apple. If hurt—should—come to her.”

One might say that Una was the apple of his grim eye, too—judging by the anxiety with which it rested upon her—the parting anxiety.

Una was looking, in somewhat homesick fashion at him, too, now, as if she was burning all her bridges behind her, as she tossed him the smart little fur coat, with its rose-satin lining torn by the red fox’s tooth and claw.

“Ask ‘Mither Jeanie’ to mend it for me,” she said, playfully alluding to Andrew’s wife, “and send it along to me, to the horse-farm. If we don’t get back until September and it’s cold among the mountains, I may need it. Good-bye Andrew—my ‘fuffle-daddy’.... I call him that since he tossed me, like a doll, into the back of the car and took all the battering—all the glass of the windshield in himself,” she murmured in Pemrose’s ear, turning away with a tear in her dark eye from the parting hand-shake with the chauffeur.

One and all of the band of twenty now shook hands with Andrew—all with the momentary forlorness of burning bridges, as they looked at the great purple-cushioned, radio-equipped touring car, symbol of civilization—at his long-coated form towering beside it.

Andrew’s eye was correspondingly misty: “Fegs! I’m sorry I threated ye with the fiery stick—as I couldn’t stick by ye to meet it,” he muttered dryly. “Well! fair good luck to ye, ma’am,” to the Guardian. “An’ may ye find yerselves happy an’ home-at, among the old mountains!”

The wild mountains were “home-at” with them—very much at home to Camp Fire Girls—so the echoes presently testified, catching up the blithe chorus written by Pemrose to Una’s marching song:

“All Wo-he-lo singing! Wo-he-lo for aye!” With the soft cheer on her lips, the arm of the blue-eyed girl stole round her “play-marrow,” Una, heart of her heart, chum of chums—play-marrow was Andrew’s word for that girlish affection which, begun in youth, is a star that never sets until the Camp Fire trail is done. “You’re not down-hearted: No-o!” she insisted, catching the lingering little cloud on the “eye-sweet” face. “You can’t be—honey. Look at the wild flowers.”

“Ha:

laughed Una, beguiled by the bait immediately, as she stooped to pick a purplish blue spike of the wayside vervain—cousin to the garden verbena—to which a bee had clung, asleep.

“In one way she’ll be more at home in the wilderness than any of us—being near kin to the wild flowers,” smiled the Guardian, following, with her eyes on the tenderfoot among her Group—its exotic—Una—as the latter darted off after boneset and yellow sow thistle now.

“See the sow thistle is one of the flowers that close, go to sleep at night—and open in the morning, quite early,” laughed its captor, holding it up; “so I’ve admitted it to my flower clock—garden flower clock; bindweed, chickweed and pimpernel are some of the others—pimpernel, lazy little weather prophet!”

laughed Lura. “Come along, ducky, your brain is a regular flower basket.”

“With a ‘fancy’ legend wrapped round the stem of each flower in the basket!” murmured Pemrose, her finger to her laughing lip. “No wonder she thinks she hears sounds in the woods at daybreak—fairy singing.... Oh! what’s—that? Kittens—are they? No-o!”

“Coons! Three—three baby racoons trotting across the road!” The Guardian clasped her hands. “Oh! girls, we are being admitted to the fellowship of the wild.”

“Oh! weren’t they the funniest little gray things—no, buff—bushy tails—trotting from wood, oh! from wood to wood, to find their mother.” Every lip was gasping now, every eye penetrating, trying to penetrate the thicket of roadside scrub into which the wild things had vanished.

“Gracious! The mountains are being at home to us, indeed—welcoming us, as fit-for-fit,” cooed Pemrose exultantly.

“Making us pay toll, too, aren’t they—as fit-for-fit?” The Guardian eased the pack upon her back, the neat camper’s roll which carried much more than the poncho, warm sleeping-bag and personal equipment—the limit for her girls, most of them. “Just look at that mountain road before us, there, standing upon its hind-legs—and feeling for the sky!” she added merrily.

“And when we have wrestled with that one, then there’ll be another at the same rearing stunt,” laughed Dorothy. “Oh, dear! I have a hag-a-back already—a pain between my shoulders.”

broke forth the marching chorus again, tiding them over that snaky, brown hill and the next—landing them in the lap of luncheon—luncheon by a mountain brook—with a deer crashing in the bushes near by—and a black-throated warbler singing from a bush: “Oh! ’tis sweet here—’tis sweet here,” as a naturalist has translated his song.

“We’ll postpone lighting a fire and cooking a real meal until this evening,” said the Guardian, “when our first day’s ten-mile hike triumphantly accomplished, we hope to strike the Long Trail running from end to end of the Green Mountains.”

“But we only follow that for a short distance,” said Frances, “for five miles or so.”

“Just the listening radius of my ring!” Miser-like, Pemrose glanced at her pack, shrined in whose heart lay the jewel more wonderful than any boon fairy had ever bestowed, jealously sheathed, lest one homesick tear or the tiniest raindrop falling upon the new crystal should mar its magic.

“Perhaps we may come in on a concert with it to-night,” said Terry Ross, Assistant Guardian, baptized Theresa, ardently. “I’m just—dying—to ‘listen in’ on that ring!”

“No radio concerts until we reach Mount Pocohosette—our camp on the sidehill—at the end of our four days’ hike,” was Pemrose’s answer. “Una and I did pick up a little faint, faint singing with it once, but ... where is Una now?”

“Off searching for an evening primrose near that fence corner,” said Robin Drew, a bright-eyed girl. “She wants to find one all ‘tuggled’ up, to sleep, as she says. She can tell you the exact hour at which every wild flower opens and closes—those that do. Oh-h! I never knew a girl whose brain was such a flower basket.”

“I fancy her father hopes to find a little ‘sand’ among the flowers when he gets back.” Pemrose dimpled slyly. “There, I didn’t mean to be slangy,” with a sidelong, blue glance at the Guardian.

“Her father! Oh! think of what he’s doing for us, that camp on the sidehill, radio—horses—Revel and Revelation ... in more than horseflesh, too!” It was a general ecstatic outburst that creamed the cake and seasoned sandwiches—made the brook water effervescent. “Oh-h—to reach Mount Pocohosette—that horse farm in the bottom-lands!”

“Three more days’ hiking—and four nights, sleeping out, as a Rubicon,” laughed Terry Ross, a tall, twenty-year-old maiden, long-legged, slender-backed.

“Oh! we’ll cross it—head up to the last step,” protested valiant voices. “Don’t be too sure. Wait until the tail of the day—and the last long mile,” suggested others. “It’s only one o’clock now.”

Six o’clock—and a sun setting! Setting royally behind hills that rose, detached, pell-mell, like huge, green bubbles, on either side of a mountain trail! Hills clad upon their lower slopes by acres of feathery podgum—hairy as Esau’s hands—with dark spruce woods above!

Six o’clock—and packs weighing heavily! Una next door to trailing hers by its cross ropes in the dust—almost like the can at the old dog’s tail—but the hand of Pemrose or warm “Copper-nob” steadied it upon her back!

Six o’clock! And it was not their fit-for-fit song of the Mountains At Home that steadied pluck now, kept girlish feet from slipping backward on the trail but the song made sacred in mud and mettle by their brothers over there: