Within the next week Mrs. Bryan had sent for and filled out and returned the application blanks, and now the girls were merely waiting for the return of the blanks and their charter. Meanwhile, out of school hours, Winnie helped her mother about the house.

“I mayn’t have time for much housework when I belong to the Camp Fire,” she thought, “and I’d better do all I can now.”

So she learned a good deal about cooking, and helped regularly with the dishes—and with the supper-getting and tidying. Finally—it was almost the end of May by then—the charter came, and material for the ceremonial dresses, and various other things; and the girls held their first Camp Fire. It was at Winnie’s house, with its big fireplace, that they had it. Mrs. Bryan invited two other girls to join, to make up the number; Dorothy Gray and Adelaide Hughes. Dorothy the girls all knew and liked—she was everybody’s choice for one of the vacant places—but nobody knew much about Adelaide, who was a newcomer in town, except that she had no mother, and lived with her father and her younger brother and little sister in one of the few apartment-houses that were beginning to be put up in the little town where the girls all lived. She was a quiet, rather sullen girl, and she dressed badly—almost untidily. The girls were surprised at her joining, for she seemed to keep away from people almost as if she did it on purpose. But Mrs. Bryan wanted her in, and the girls would any of them have done anything for Mrs. Bryan. Only they confided to each other that they hoped Adelaide wouldn’t spoil the fun.

As each girl came, the night of the first meeting, she was taken, not into the living-room, but to a little room beside it, and asked to wait there for the rest. Edith Hillis was the last to come, and then they were summoned into the other room. It was lighted only by the blaze of the fire.

Helen explained things to the girls, as her step-mother had explained to her.

“When the drum begins to beat we are to come in, Indian file,” she reminded them, as a soft, measured beat began to be heard in the next room.

Putting herself at the head of the line, she led the seven girls into the room to the rhythmic beating. They circled around it once, then sat down in a ring about the fireplace, and looked at Mrs. Bryan with admiration.

She had on a straight brownish gown, with deep fringes at its bottom. She sat on the floor by a curious drum, of a sort most of them had never even seen pictures of. She was beating it softly, Indian fashion, with her closed fist.

“Welcome,” she spoke clearly, rising as the girls came to a halt around her. “Have you come desiring to make a Camp Fire and tend it?”

“Yes,” answered all the girls. It was then that they dropped into their places, in a semi-circle around the fire and their Guardian.

Then each of the girls, in turn, rose and repeated her wish to become a Camp Fire Girl, and follow the Law of the Fire. When they had all finished Mrs. Bryan leaned back in her corner, and talked to them about the Law—what each of the seven parts of it meant.

“Why—it covers everything!” said Winnie.

“It certainly does!” seconded Louise. “All I have to do, it seems to me, is to go on living, and I’ll acquire unnumbered honor beads.”

“You may think so,” Helen warned her, “but you’ll find there’s plenty to learn about it. I’ve been studying it out.”

“Oh, that’s all right!” said Louise airily. She caught up the manual as she spoke, and ran her eye down the list of honors by the firelight. “Wash and iron a shirtwaist—I love to wash things. Make a bed for two months—I’d be hung with beads if I had one for every two months I’ve made my bed. Abstain from gum, candy, ice-cream—oh, good gracious!”

“That counts as much as the rest,” said Winnie mischievously, “and think how good it will be for you!”

“I’ll get thin,” Louise remarked thoughtfully. “What are you going to start with, Winnie?”

“Health-craft, I think.” Winona had taken the book in her turn, and was looking through the pages. “I’ve always wanted to learn horseback riding, and I think perhaps father’ll let me, now it’s in a book as something you ought to do.” Then she remembered what her brother had said about the flapjacks, and she shook her head as she passed on the book. “No,” she corrected herself, “I don’t believe that will be the first thing I’ll do. I think I need home-craft quite as much as I do learning to ride.”

“What about you, Helen?” asked Louise.

“Why, clay-modelling and brass-work, or things like that,” was the prompt answer. “I want to take up art-craft when I get older, and I might as well begin.”

“Can you clay-model in camp?” asked Louise.

“Just as well as you can make a shirtwaist,” replied Helen, unruffled.

“I like the hand-crafts, too,” said Edith Hillis. “I think I shall specialize on fancy-work.”

“Always a perfect lady!” teased Louise, who was something of a tomboy, and frankly thought it was silly of Edith to refuse to get her hair wet in the swimming-pool, and wear veils for her complexion.

The other three girls, Marie Hunter and Dorothy Gray and Adelaide Hughes, did not say what honors they were going to work for. Everybody was pretty sure that Marie was going to write a play, and Dorothy did beautiful needle-work. But as for Adelaide, silent in her place, nobody could guess.

“You mustn’t any of you forget that there’s sewing to do, right now,” warned Mrs. Bryan. “And I want all of you to look at my dress, because each of you will have to make one like it.”

She stood up again, and they all examined the straight khaki dress with its leather fringes.

“That won’t be especially hard to make,” concluded Marie, who did most of her own sewing. “There’s a pattern, isn’t there, Mrs. Bryan?”

“Oh, yes, and I have it. And there’s one more thing, girls—two, rather. We must each choose a name, and a symbol to go with the name. Then we have to name the Camp Fire.”

“A name—how do you mean?” asked Winnie.

“I mean that, of course, our Camp Fire has to be called something. Beside that, so does each Camp Fire Girl. I like birds and bird-study, so I am going to call myself ‘Opeechee,’ the Robin, and take a pair of spread wings for my symbol. It’s to put on one’s personal belongings like a crest—see? as I have it on this pillow-top.”

The girls clustered around her to see the symbol, stencilled on the pillow-cover on her lap. She told them she was going to burn it on her shirtwaist box as well, and showed them where she had woven it into her headband, a gorgeous thing of brown and orange-red beads.

“It would go on a paddle-blade, too,” said Helen thoughtfully.

“It shall on mine to-morrow,” declared Marie. “That is, if I’ve thought of a symbol by then,” she added prudently.

“I think this new name idea is perfectly gorgeous!” cried Louise enthusiastically. “I’ve always hated my name—you’d expect a Louise to be tall and severe and haughty—and look at me!”

She jumped up in the firelight and spread out her plump arms tragically.

“We see you!” nodded Helen calmly, and Louise sat down again.

“You’ll be glad you have red hair when you’re grown up,” consoled Edith. “It’s supposed to be very beautiful.”

“Well, it isn’t,” said Louise energetically, “with people always asking after the white horse. I wonder why red-haired girls and white horses are supposed to go together?”

But nobody could tell her. They were all clustered about Mrs. Bryan and the manual, choosing names, and planning symbols, and you couldn’t hear yourself think. Winnie and Helen and Mrs. Bryan had planned to finish the evening by playing games, but all the girls were so busy talking that it was impossible to get a game in edgewise.

Presently Mrs. Merriam and little Florence came in with cocoa and sandwiches. And then, at about ten-thirty, the meeting broke up, after planning a bacon-bat for the next Saturday.

Winnie Merriam sat, as she loved to sit, by the dying fire. Her mother began to clear away the dishes, but Winnie stopped her with:

“Please wait a little while, and talk to me, mother. I haven’t had half enough sandwiches, and besides, the nicest part of a party is talking it over afterwards.”

“Very well,” said Mrs. Merriam, sitting down across from her daughter and helping herself to something to eat. “I didn’t get much chance at the refreshments either, I was so busy helping you serve them. What was it you wanted to say particularly, dear?”

“I wanted to ask you about my name, mother. I wasn’t christened ‘Winnie,’ was I?”

“Why, no, dear—you know that. You were christened ‘Winona,’ after your grandmother—only somehow, we never called you that.”

“It’s a real Indian name, isn’t it?” asked Winnie.

“It certainly is,” her mother assured her. “Why, dear, I’ve told you the story of it many a time.”

“Not for a long time now,” persuaded her daughter. “I think I’ve forgotten some of it. Didn’t a real Indian give it to grandmother?”

“The Indian didn’t exactly give it to her, it belonged to the Indian’s baby.”

“Oh, tell me the story!” urged Florence sleepily. “I want to hear, too!”

Mrs. Merriam made room for Florence in her lap, and went on above her with the sandwich and the story.

“Your great-grandfather was an Indian missionary, and when he and your Great-grandmother Martin went out to live among the Indians, they took with them their little baby daughter, so young they had not named her yet. Well, one day, while your grandmother was sitting on the steps of the log house where they lived with her baby on her lap, a squaw came along with her baby. She had it strapped to her back, the way they carry them, you know. She was a stranger, not one of the mission Indians, and oh, so tired and ragged and dusty!

“Great-grandmother Martin couldn’t understand her language, but she beckoned her into the house and gave her food for herself and milk for the baby. And then, by signs, she asked the baby’s name. And the Indian woman said ‘Winona—papoose Winona—yes.’ It seemed she could speak a very little English. So then Great-grandmother Martin asked the woman what the name meant—for all Indian names have meanings, you know. But the woman hadn’t enough English words to answer her. So she got up from the floor where she had been sitting and took the bright steel bread-knife that lay where great-grandmother had been cutting bread for her. She held it in a ray of sunlight that crossed the room, and shook it so the light flashed and was reflected, bright and quivering, in the room.

“‘That Winona!’ she explained.

“After she was rested she wouldn’t stay. She went on her travels, wherever she was going,—great-grandmother never saw her again. But she didn’t forget the name, and as soon as she could she asked the Indian interpreter what ‘Winona’ really meant. He told her that it was the name of another tribe for ‘ray of light that sparkles,’ or ‘flashing ray of light.’

“So Great-grandmother Martin named her own little girl Winona. The name was pretty, and the meaning was prettier still. And she grew up and married Grandfather Merriam—and when you came we named you for her.”

“Then it really is a sure-enough Indian name,” said its owner. “And the meaning is lovely. ‘A ray of flashing light’—you couldn’t ask to be anything better than that, could you, mother? I believe if I can I shall keep my own name for the Camp Fire. It is prettier than anything I could make up or find.”

“It certainly is,” said her mother.

“Why didn’t I have a Nindian name, too?” clamored Florence aggrievedly, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

“Because your other grandmother didn’t,” said her mother, kissing her. “One Indian maiden in a family is enough. What names have the other girls chosen, Winnie?”

Winona began to laugh.

“Louise says she is going to call herself ‘Ishkoodah’—don’t you remember, in Hiawatha, ‘Ishkoodah, the Comet—Ishkoodah, with fiery tresses?’ she says she thinks she can make a lovely symbol out of it. It’s funny, but Louise is always doing funny things. I think she’s really in earnest about this. And Helen says she’s going to call herself ‘Night-Star.’ We don’t know the Indian for that yet, but we’re going to hunt it up at the library. She thinks she will specialize on astronomy—learn what the constellations are, you know. I’d like to do that, too. All I know is the Big Dipper, and that the slanty W set up sidewise is Cassiopea’s Chair. I learned that from the little Storyland of Stars you gave me when I was seven.”

“I want to know chairs, too,” said Florence drowsily.

“All right, dear, you shall,” soothed Winona. Then she went on talking to her mother.

“So all the girls said they’d take sky names, and we decided to call our camp by the Indian name for the sky, because we want to camp out as much as we can.”

“I think that is a good idea,” said Mrs. Merriam.

“It was mine,” said Winona. “But Mrs. Bryan remembered an Indian name for it—Karonya. We’re Camp Karonya—isn’t that pretty? And then Marie remembered the Indian name for South-Wind, one of them, Shawondassee, and took it. But the rest couldn’t think of Indian names, so we waited to hunt some.”

“Do the names have to be Indian?”

“Oh, no,” Winnie answered sleepily, “but it’s better.”

“Come!” said her mother, setting Florence, who was fast asleep, on her feet. “We’d all better go to bed, or we’ll be too sleepy to go to church to-morrow.”

“And the sooner I go to sleep the sooner next Saturday will come, as you used to say when I was a little girl,” added Winona. “Oh, I can scarcely wait to find out what a bacon-bat really is on its native heath—or anywhere, for that matter.”

“Didn’t they tell you what it was?”

“No—Marie is planning it, and she wouldn’t say, except that it would be heaps of fun, and I was to bring a dozen rolls and some salt and a jack-knife. I’ll have to borrow Tom’s. Good-night, mother dear.”