The room they called the Den in Winnie Merriam’s house was dark, except for the leaping wood-fire in the big stone fireplace. Around the fire sat and lay five girls. They had been toasting marshmallows, but they were past the point where you eat the toasted ones with pleasure, or even steal the raw ones—which don’t taste burnt—to eat surreptitiously.

“Helen Bryan, you’ve been feeding Puppums all your marshmallows for the last ten minutes,” accused Winnie, sitting up. She had been draping herself along a pile of cushions for the last fifteen minutes—thinking, evidently, for she had been quiet—a very unusual thing for chattering Winnie.

Winnie Merriam was fourteen, but people usually took her for a year older, because of her slim height. She had big blue eyes in a face that was not regularly pretty, perhaps, but so gay and pink-cheeked and quick-smiling that people always said she was pretty—which does quite as well.

Her chum, Helen, defiantly fed a last marshmallow to the fat near-fox-terrier in the centre of the circle, who didn’t particularly seem to want it.

“I’ve got to be polite to my hostess’s dog, haven’t I?” she retorted. “And he asked for them so pathetically!”

“I expect the poor old pup will look more pathetic this time to-morrow,” said Winnie. “He’ll probably look like Buster Brown’s Tige in the last pictures—both paws up over his aching head. Then you’ll have to come back here and hold ice on his fevered brow, won’t she, Puppums?”

“Or yours, maybe,” suggested Marie Hunter, the quiet brown girl in the corner. “What’s the matter, Win? You haven’t said a word for ages. I’ve been watching you.”

“I’ve been thinking!” explained Winnie, nodding her curly brown head with dignity.

“For the first time?” suggested Helen. “Don’t do it if it hurts, honey.”

“No,” said Winnie placidly, “I’ve often been known to do it.”

“Well, what were you thinking?” asked Edith Hillis, lifting her yellow curls from Marie’s lap. Edith was the fluffy member of the crowd, small for her age, yellow-haired and blue-eyed and rather too much dressed. She was supposed to care more for her complexion than for anything else on earth except Marie Hunter, but she was as sweet-tempered as she could be, and everybody liked her. “You looked as if you were thinking about something awfully interesting.”

“Well,” said Winnie slowly, “I was thinking about us. We know each other very, very well, and go together, and have gorgeous times—I was thinking that it would be nice if we made ourselves into a club, or some sort of a society.”

“Oh, say! That’s a perfectly gorgeous idea!” exclaimed chubby, red-haired Louise Lane, from behind Helen. “I vote we be a club, right away!”

“But is five enough?” asked Marie doubtfully. Marie was always the one who thought of things. She was a good deal of a bookworm, and did a great deal of beautiful embroidery, and never said much. But she was the one the girls were apt to ask advice of if they needed it badly. She was nearly a year older than Winnie and Edith. Louise wasn’t quite fourteen, and Helen would be fifteen in two months.

“I think five’s plenty,” said Louise.

“I don’t, exactly,” demurred Winnie. “Seems to me there ought to be seven or eight anyway, or we’d be like an army all major-generals.”

“All right,” came from Helen sleepily. “But that can wait. I think the thing to make up our minds about first is—what would it do if it was a club? I mean clubs have to have some object.”

“Why!” exclaimed Winnie blankly, “I never thought of that!”

“Well,” still opposed Louise, “I don’t see why we have to have an object. Just meet, and have a president and secretary and things, and enjoy ourselves.”

“What about an embroidery club?” suggested Edith. “Marie and I like to embroider.”

“I don’t,” said Louise flatly.

“Nannie was telling me about a walking-club she belonged to,” Helen suggested pacifically.

Nannie was Helen’s step-mother—not at all like the step-mothers in the fairy-tales, but a pretty, gay woman of about twenty-eight, who was great friends with her step-daughter and the step-daughter’s chums.

“A hiking-club?” asked Winnie. “That would be fun. Why couldn’t we combine both those things in one?”

“Lovely!” jeered Louise. “I can see myself trotting along up a mountain, embroidering as I go!”

“Listen to Louise being sarcastic!” said Helen. “I think the idea of combining two or three things is a splendid one.”

“What’s splendid?” asked a bright voice from the darkness at the other end of the room.

“Oh, are you there, Nannie?” called Helen. “We’re planning a club—a very fine combination club where you do everything.”

“It sounds like a Camp Fire,” said Nannie. “Your father’s downstairs, Helen. I ran up to tell you that we’re ready to go whenever you are.”

“Oh, not yet, please!” begged Winnie. “What is a Camp Fire, Mrs. Bryan? Do come sit down by us, and have some marshmallows.”

“It corresponds to the Boy Scouts,” Mrs. Bryan explained, dropping down among the girls, “and it includes doing about everything there is to do. It’s national, though, and you’re affiliated with headquarters.”

“Regular dues and meetings?” asked Helen, pricking up her ears. “Oh, stay here, Nannie, and tell us all about it!”

They surrounded Mrs. Bryan, and made her tell them all she knew about Camp Fires, which was a good deal.

“I like it!” announced Louise when Mrs. Bryan was done. “Me be heap big chiefess—wahoo-oo!”

She jumped up as she spoke and waved Helen’s best hat above her head for a hatchet.

“Oh, my hat!” cried Helen, making a wild dive for it. Puppums thought it was all a game for his special benefit, and dived after them—and the meeting broke up in disorder. But not before the girls had decided to be a Camp Fire, and made Mrs. Bryan promise to act as their Guardian.

Winnie, after the girls had gone, returned alone to the fire, and sat down by it, thinking over the things she had been hearing.

“It’s going to be heaps of fun,” was the first thing she thought, and then, “It’s going to take lots of time!”

Then she got up and shook herself. “Anyway, I love it!” she decided. Then she put the lights out and went to bed.

Helen Bryan was over early next morning.

“Oh, Winnie!” she called up to her friend’s window.

“Come on up!” called Winnie back. “I’ve just had my bath, but I haven’t finished dressing.”

Helen came in by the open back door, spoke to Mrs. Merriam, who was getting breakfast, and tore up the stairs to Winnie’s room.

“Oh, there’s such heaps to tell!” she announced before she was well inside the room. “Rings and bands and dresses and ceremonies and—everything! Only we will have to take more girls in. You have to have at least seven to start with.”

Helen stopped for lack of breath, and dropped on the bed. Winnie, who was doing her hair before the mirror, turned around.

“It’s like the Boy Scouts, only it’s girls,” she decided thoughtfully. “Helen, I don’t see why we can’t have just as good times as they do. Tom’s always telling about the glorious times his patrol had last summer, camping up near Wampoag. I don’t see why we shouldn’t go camping, too, and have heaps of fun!”

“Why, of course we can!” agreed Helen. “None of your mothers will mind if Nannie goes along, and she’ll have to if she’s Guardian.”

“Come on down and have breakfast with us,” invited Winnie, straightening up from her last shoe-lace. “You haven’t told me half the things there are to tell.”

“Well, I’ve had breakfast,” said Helen, “but——”

“Oh, you can eat some more,” insisted Winnie. “We’re going to have flapjacks and maple syrup.”

“Well, all right,” said Helen, weakening. Flapjacks and maple syrup did sound good. So they went down together to the breakfast table.

Winnie’s family, her father and mother and her brother Tom, and eight-year-old Florence, had to be told all about it.

“Can’t I be a Fire Camp Girl, too?” demanded Florence on the spot.

“I don’t know yet,” said Helen. “We’ll have to find out.”

“I will be, whether you find out or not,” said Florence, who was a determined young person, and something of a tagger.

“Well, thank goodness, to-day’s Saturday,” and Winnie changed the subject cheerfully. “We have all day to find out in, and there’s scarcely any home-work to do. Have you any, Helen?”

“Only a little history,” said Helen, “and I can do that to-night.”

“Such heaps of good times coming!” sang Winnie rapturously as she sprang up from the table, to get a fresh supply of flapjacks.

“If you have as good a time as the Scouts do you’ll have fun, all right,” said Tom. “But I don’t see how you can—just girls!”

Helen laughed, but his sister flew up.

“We can, and better, too,” she flashed. “Just you wait and see!”

“Seeing’s believing,” said Tom mischievously, passing his plate for the flapjacks as Winnie brought in the heaping plate that had been keeping hot in the oven.

“That’s true,” said his father gravely, putting a pile of buttered quarter-sections on his son’s plate. “At least, nobody who hadn’t seen it would believe you could eat so many flapjacks and not explode!”

Everyone laughed; but Tom calmly went on eating.

“They’re awfully good, mother,” he said. “I’ll tell you, Winnie, if you could learn to make as good flapjacks as mother with your Fire Camping, as Florence calls it, you’d be doing something worth while.”

“Oh, I don’t suppose there’s anything about flapjacks in it—do you think there could be, Helen?” asked Winnie.

Mrs. Merriam laughed a little.

“Well, do you know, my dears,” she said, “I have a strange feeling that there is!”

“I don’t see how,” doubted Winona. “But maybe, if I get time, Tom, I’ll learn how to make them. Come on, Helen, let’s go back to Nannie and ask her all the questions we can think of.”

The two girls ran out hand-in-hand.

“Are there flapjacks in it, mother?” asked little Florence.

Mrs. Merriam laughed again as she began to clear the table.

“There are, and a great deal besides, or I’m much mistaken, dear!”