Roasted he was royally and absorbed—devoured—too, with various accompaniments, while the flames sank to a flicker—and Orion came into his own again, with a belt of dark clouds around him.

The wind muttered strangely now; muttered a “fore-go”, if girlish ears had been attuned to its meaning.

Faces, black and buttery—not beautiful, but very happy—gathered round a core of red, soon to be extinguished, when the descent of the mountain should begin.

“It’s too bad that we didn’t bring ponchos and sleeping bags—spend the night up here on the mountain top,” said Dorothy. “We’d have been comfy enough in that open camp, over there—although it has no front wall, only two gray wings, with a gap in the middle.”

“How many of those camps you do run across among the Green Mountains,” said Pemrose, “nearly all left generously open for the ‘next fellow,’” laughingly; “some quite snug, with gray bunks and doors—others with no face, like that!”

“And haven’t we sampled the hard knocks,—hard bunks—too, by sleeping in them?” murmured Madeline. “Well—hard or soft—it has been a great old time. A wonderful summer! And now it’s—nearly—over.”

“Some queer things have happened, too,” half-whispered Naomi.

“Nothing very exciting since the night somebody played Pied Piper upon the mountain—and coaxed Una almost over the precipice-edge! I wonder who....” Lura leaned forward to stir the fire—her murmur breathlessly low.

“It was the same sound—the very same—I heard before in the garden—at—home.” Una shivered a little, caught in a rose-lined pocket of darkness—as the night became more overcast.

“But now, pshaw! it’s so easily explained.” Pemrose shrugged her shoulders impatiently, poking at the fire, too. “The Guardian was right—just some crack-brained musician, off on a holiday, seized with a fancy for sorting sounds out-of-doors,” laughingly, “testing old Nature with a tuning fork—or a variety of them—to see what key she sang in—what pitch she liked best. If father and I hadn’t done it before—”

“But early—early morning.” Una’s whisper was still restless.

“Trying to get the exact key of a bird’s song—waking song!”

“Seems to me the bird didn’t get much of a chance!” The dark-eyed girl’s whisper was whimsical now; that slight, near-sighted peculiarity in her right eye, which the girls pronounced “fetching”, was fixed half fearfully, as she stared into the fire, but she was trying—Una—to get the better of what Pem called her little “crinkams”, her cousin Treff her cowardly curves.

“Well—well, we haven’t heard it again,” said Madeline.

“I—I thought I did—one night, near camp—one starry night—”

Perhaps only the fire caught Una’s broken whisper, now, for the wind suddenly shrieked into its ear, so that the flames leaped up again noisily.

“Goodness! I hope we’re not going to have a storm,” said the Guardian. “That would be too bad after all the fun.”

“Huh! The thunder-plump comes on so quickly here,” hooted Madeline. “Seems as if the mountains just heaved a long, sullen breath—and comes the storm!”

“Ouch! angry teeth, already!” quivered another, as the night wind took her by the hair—and lightning grinned below her.

“It is coming, sure enough—and we never would have time to get home before it!” Girlish forms cowered towards the fire now, trembling—trembling before the night’s angry teeth.

“If I don’t mistake, ’twill make every storm we’ve witnessed before seem mild as a Sunday School picnic—even the one the night the flash light fainted,” said Pemrose, creeping round the fire on hands and knees, to sit near Una.

Presently, when the storm broke upon them—or below them, rather—they were locked in each other’s arms, cheek to cheek.

“They’re always ‘twosing’, those two,” Dorothy threw a little grimace into the fire’s heart, as she shrank into her heavy sweater. “Pemrose would stand up for Una against everything in the world—a good thing, too, for Una could never stand up for herself!”

But, as a matter of fact, every girl would have stood up for Una—would have shielded her with a warm breast from mountain rain and storm—and Dorothy knew it.

“I suppose that’s what it means to be ‘born in the purple’,” she murmured impishly to herself now; “it’s all gratitude to her ‘high-powered’ father,” with a low gasp, “for this wonderful, wonderful summer: radio concerts, horseback riding—everything! Una isn’t spoiled, though, I’ll admit; she loves us all, but she just swings like a pendulum between Pemrose and the Guardian.”

She had been privileged to go out alone with the Guardian—Dorothy remembered that now—on sundry occasions when the other older girls had undertaken climbing feats that were a little beyond her endurance—or her energy—as when they had stormed Little Poco, Little Brother Mountain, a precipitous peak, with a face rough as Esau’s hands—to interview the spell-woman.

They had not found her at home. And, contrary to custom, her camp on Little Brother’s shoulder was not wide open for the “next fellow.” It was securely locked.

The girls, led by their Assistant Guardian, had come back almost hysterical with fatigue, anathematizing the inhospitable “heather cat”, whose roaming propensities were familiar to them, for occasionally they saw her again—the Little Lone Lady—with Nature’s heavy cross, the lump between her shoulders, climbing some lonely bridle path, always on horseback—the camper’s pack across her saddle, the bloated umbrella in her stirrup strap.

But the interests, the growing pastimes, of their camp life were too many and varied—chase and capture in the Long Pasture, riding the air with a whisper by telephony and telegraphy, as most of them could now do—for them to waste much thought upon that lonely—eccentric—little figure.

Yet, somehow, it rode before Pemrose to-night upon the lightning’s vivid broomstick; she caught herself wondering what its background had been—what sort of life had left it imposing upon the superstitions of mountain people—living upon their crumbs, in return.

At a certain point in her speculations the girl, staring into the fire with eyes of blue patchwork, started—snorted. She always did snort and shy, like Revelation at trail tumbleweed, when she thought long upon that figure of a waif-woman who dabbled in radio like herself.

“I’d like to see the inside of her umbrella,” thought Pemrose.

And with that the world fell in beneath her. The clouds, for the most part below them, were ripped by a terrible light.

Like a thief in the night the mountain storm was on—and it was such a thunderplump, sudden, banging electric storm, as these girls had never beheld before.

A blue-black darkness herded them together around their cowering fire—feeling as if the Day of Judgment were upon them—and every minute that bruised darkness spit flame; a flame so dazzling that the eyeballs caught it and saw by it after it had passed.

“We must seek shelter in that wooden camp,” said the Guardian, putting her arm around Una. “The rain—I suppose it will ‘rain pitchforks’ presently—may drift in upon us, but at least we shall have a roof.”

And from there they watched the world pitchforked beneath them—torn, racked, groaning, blazing.

“Goodness! It’s like fifty days of judgment rolled into one,” moaned Dorothy—and hid her eyes against the Guardian. “Hide me! Hide me!”

But the trees in the dark forest beneath them found no hiding place, no rocks to fall on them and cover them from the wrath of the sky.

A blazing fireball fell among them and one tree, sometimes two, jumped into the air—clearly in the glare the girls saw them—then fell, riven.

“Oh! those fireballs they seem to open my head ... every time one strikes,” said Pemrose—a weak, bird-mouthed twitter.

Una sat still as the planks beneath her, cheeks as white as the sudden white light which, at the heart of the storm, weirdly cleft the clouds—and reigned for minutes upon the mountainside, upon the torn, staggering forest, and in the sky.

“Oh-h! this is aw-ful. I wish I had been a better girl,” whined Dorothy. “The black tops of those pines! There—there goes another fireball.... I can’t bear to see them strike.”

“‘When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee ... and through the rivers they shall not overflow thee,’” said the Guardian finding nothing more applicable to her steadfast faith. “We may be thankful to be, so far, above the storm—only the lightning climbing—”

The lightning, forked, blue, zigzagging up and down the shuddering mountain, as the white light faded, counted every coral berry-bunch on the mountain ash, every needle on the grinning spruces; but, although it was so vivid—so lingering its dazzle—it was but the tail end of a flash which climbed to this summit camp on old Pocohosette, two thousand feet above the valley—almost three thousand above sea level.

“Oh, my! The horses! The horses in the Long Pasture! I wonder how they’re taking it? If one of them should be struck! Rev-el-a-tion!” Pemrose felt as if the fireball, now striking, was in her heart.

Far away, on a hilltop, a barn blazed.

“Revel!” whimpered Una. “Revel!” It was the first sound she had made. “If—anything—should happen to her-r!”

“Oh! come,” said the Guardian; “don’t think of such things.” She, forthwith, pinned a smile upon her lips, which the lightning, as promptly, unpinned.

“I—I can fancy them all crowding together against the fence,” droned Pemrose again, “and nickering nervously—even Cartoon. And the little, trembling foals hiding under their mothers! I wonder whether a mother-horse would desert its baby?”

“In danger, I hardly think so—although I don’t know that it has ever been tested,” said the Guardian. “Ha! Now for the rain! The deluge! I doubt whether our Ark will ride that, as it did the lightning.”

The black rain clouds drifting through the lightning-ripped dusk, like soot through smoke, floated higher than the thundershutters.

Presently, girls were shrinking into themselves, trying to dwindle to the sheltering capacity of their sweaters, cowering in corners, the Guardian attempting to shield her brood, as fingers of rain came seeking them out, curdling courage.

They had escaped peril of fire bolt and fork-lightning which, to-night, had killed many a noble tree. The thunder storm was now abating.

But to spend the night here, unprovided—on the sodden floor of an open camp! Or to attempt the descent of a washed-out trail through those blindly dripping forests!

Well! it was the first time that the Guardian wished herself back at her teacher’s desk—in the stuffiest schoolroom imaginable—wished that she had not undertaken the charge of eighteen girls through these summer months.

It was the first time that the girls, themselves, felt flinching—breaking—before the “fiery stick” of reality with which Andrew had threatened them—of deadly hardship.

“And there may be a washout below us on the mountain, between here and camp,” said the Guardian feebly, “an impassable washout. We’d better wait for a while, anyway, before attempting the trail.”

Slowly the sodden minutes dragged along, to the jeer of the rain sweeping past the camp, occasionally into it, pecking, a merciless rain-crow, in every corner.

It took all the grit of the boldest hearts to say to themselves: “What of it? The rain isn’t going to ‘come it all over me.’ I am a Camp Fire Girl; I will not flinch nor falter!”

The Guardian felt that she had one thought that cowed her, Una: Una whom she had hoped to return proudly to her parents, a few days later, rosier, healthier in body, if not hardier of soul—Una, possibly, laid up ill, as a result of to-night’s exposure.

By-and-by—an hour had passed—she was heavily, miserably, debating within herself as to whether it were better to tackle the washout with draggled girls on foot, or to try to light a fire again—stick it out on the mountain top until morning.

“We’ll have to wait a little longer, anyhow, before we could possibly find anything ‘spunky’ enough to burn,” she murmured almost deciding upon the latter course.

Again the wet blanket of watching fell upon the camp. Suddenly—it was well on into the second hour—a corner of it was lifted ... lifted by a sound.

Light—light so dazzling as to be unbelievable was stealing under that blanket of misery.

“Klopsh! Klopsh! Klopsh!... Klopsh!” There were distant heavy sounds upon the mountainside. Something—something was struggling upward, in heavy travail.

“We saw bear signs upon the mountain, coming up,” moaned Una, “stumps—torn—apart; bushes—”

“Hush! Hush—listen!” The Guardian was sitting bolt upright—with a look upon her face such as young Moses, of old, might have worn, when he saw deliverance for his people.

“Klopsh! Klopsh! Klopsh! Klopsh!” And now—now, with that nearing, splashing crescendo mingled other sounds: whistling and complaining of branches, upper branches, the sullen swish of lower boughs, through which a passage was being forced; a rattling of little twigs against.... What?

And not one—not one of the wet and weary girls dared yet even to name it to herself: “Wagon!”?

Then, suddenly, one of them was on her feet and out of the cabin, flash light in hand, in time to see a great, reeking farm horse, eyes rolling, jaws foaming, lip rolled back from the dauntless teeth, plunge forth from the mountain top spruces.

Game leader, he was followed by a sweating, snorting wheel horse!

“Tandem,” gasped Pemrose Lorry—and reeled against a tree, which splashed her all Over.

“Well! I reckon this storm would make the Day o’ Judgment seem a Sunday School picnic, eh?” roared Donald Menzies, who managed the horse-farm for Mr. Grosvenor.

A giant figure, six-feet-four, in oilskins and sou’wester, he wavered before the girls’ eyes—a beatific vision.

“Pile in! Pile in!” he shouted. “Miss Una!... Where’s Miss Una?”

“I guess the rest of us might have dr-rowned before he’d have come all the way up the mountain—after—us,” pouted Dorothy. “Well! if we aren’t the princess, we’re lucky to come in on her innings. Girls! A great hay wagon—dry hay—a rubber covering to spread over us.... Talk of the seventh heaven!”

“I’d rather have this than—heaven.” Lura was creeping under that dark rubber blanket in among the fresh, sweet hay, so dry and warm.

“Gosh! I started in the thick of it,” Menzies was proclaiming. “An’ hard work I had to make the top, with this mud-crunching outfit.” He pointed to the dripping leader, whose whinnying snorts told the story of that upward, raving struggle, amid peril of fireball and falling tree.

“Did you walk beside them—climb beside them, all the way?” asked the Guardian.

“Yes’m. And I could hardly hold ’em to the trail, even then, lightning searing their eyeballs—trees going up around ’em! But Mr. Grosvenor’s daughter! To think o’ her being exposed up here!” The farmer’s voice rocked to the swish of the “shoe-bree”, the water that filled his waist-high boots.

“Pshaw! ’twouldn’t hurt her—didn’t hurt her. We were above the storm—for the most part,” declared Pemrose stoutly. “This is the cushioned chair in which Treff said she was wheeled through life—always would be,” she murmured to herself, with a cogitative wink, settling down beside Una in what stood just now for the lap of the “chair”—luxury’s lap—this year’s perfumed hay. “To-night, aren’t we in luck to occupy it with her?”

“I can’t get ye back to yer camp ’fore morning. A washout on the old mountain ’tween here and there!” The farmer was wheeling his sputtering tandem, drawing the fifteen-foot hay wagon, now full, girls blissfully cuddling close to each other, putting the rubber covering between them and the last peckings of the angry rain-crow. “But, luck with us, we can reach the valley—the horse-farm—by a roundabout trail ... though it may be a ‘wild-bear’ game, going down,” with a grin.

“Some tear-in-two jolts I expect,” prophesied Lura. “Ouch! Beginning—already,” as she fell over on Naomi. “I always wanted to ride behind a tandem—never thought ’twould be like this!”

“That tall leader is a hero. I’m in love with him.” Dorothy lifted a corner of the rubber coverlet, to peep out at the black form of the plunging horse, tackling the miry, downward trail, lightning tickling his ears, spent thunder hooting at him. “Oh-h! the wild-bear game is beginning, indeed,” she screamed, a minute later, as the whole mud-crunching outfit stuck fast in a quagmire.

“Don’t mind if ye overhear some swearing in the teeth o’ judgment!” growled Menzies whimsically, hauling upon his groaning tandem, in to its knees. “Hi! there, you Yank,” to the game leader, “You’re all right; you’ll come through.”

“The Yanks are pulling through—pulling out!” gasped Pemrose. “But, goodness! what an Adventure this is!” as the wagon resumed its way through the torn, dark woods.

“Lucky for ye all that this happened to-night—if ’twas bound to happen,” murmured Menzies, ages later, as the mountain trail plunged downward into a gutted road. “To-morrow, I’d ha’ been away.”

“Oh! do you expect to be gone long?” asked the Guardian, leaning out, with grateful interest.

“No, ma’am. Not with two o’ my help missing,” came the grim answer; “one off on a vacation, t’ other on his back with a ‘busted’ leg, broken by a kick from a bad horse down in one of those concrete boxes—outdoor boxes.”

The girls, listening eagerly, knew well those great concrete-lined “horse-boxes”, where outlaws moped and half-civilized horses, not good enough to be trusted up on the range.

“I guess, for one night, my son, Sanbie, and old ‘Burn-the-wind’, the blacksmith, can hold the fort,” laughed Menzies. “I’m just making a flying trip to Bennington, to buy grain,” came back the floating accents; “double header—thinking of selling Revelation.”

Double header! Kill two birds with one stone! But that stone hit something in its way—the heart of Pemrose Lorry.

Sell Revelation! The horse she had ridden all the summer. The horse who had come to know her so well that, while he still coquetted with oats and halter, once she had him caught, and saddled, he would look round at her out of his almost human eyes, curiously saying: “Well! are we going now? I’m—ready.”

Now was when she got her tear-in-two jolt. Her heart jumped like a riven tree—sank blighted.

And here was where Una scored again; she owned her horse. Revel would be sent up to the city, for her to ride.

“But it wouldn’t be ‘sporty’ to show it—show anything,” murmured Pemrose to her riven heart. “I’m too lucky to have ridden him—all—summer!”

“Best—best horse in the Long Pasture,” went on Menzies’ musing croak. “Expect to get five hundred for him. Only waiting till Mr. Grosvenor gets back to clinch the bargain. And he’s expected home to-morrow; isn’t he, Miss Una?”

“Ye-es,” nodded Una sleepily, from the hay. “Ha! Farm lights, at last!” She roused a little. “Horses stamping!”

One horse stamped upon Pemrose’s heart all that night. She felt sorry she had given it to him, to trample, thus.

“But I believe he’ll miss me, too—Revelation,” she said to herself. “Sometimes, when we were out riding, if we lay down under the pines, he’d come and feel me over with his nose, to make sure that I was there; I believe he’d have driven off anybody who attacked me.... Ah! lucky Una.... But it wouldn’t be ‘sporty’ to show it.”

It came almost as a relief, affording an excuse for pent-up feeling, that when the campers got back to their own log cabin, at noon the next day, a second loss confronted her, over which she might puzzle and rave without breach of code.

“Look! Look! Look!” she cried—and became, in a moment, the center of a sensation, whirlwind sensation. “Somebody has been in here. In here to-day! There’s a window open in our sleeping room—marks on the floor; and my picture of Una, the one I had by my cot, is—gone.”