Swimming about, near the surface, as the minnows usually do, the clear waters of the June Bowl became for the girls, looking, one by one through the large microscope over the boat's side, a "vasty deep" in which leviathans played--fairy fish--seeing everything rose-color, painting themselves to ecstasy with the joys of mating, the joy of June.

"See--see they're not all red--or partly so--s-such a lovely pinky-red, especially around the fins and head--that's where they keep their pigment," said Tanpa. "Some have colored themselves like goldfish; others are greenish--or lighter yellow."

"Ha! While others, again, are gotten up as if for a minstrel show for their marriage--painted black, for the time being!" laughed her husband, the tall Scout Officer.

"Yes. That's why we like, girls and boys, to come down to our camp early in the season--if only at intervals--because we watch the summer coming and can study the wonderful lake life as at no other time," remarked the Guardian again, and then subsided into private life in the stern of the broad, red camp-skiff, scribbling something in verse form to be read at the White Birch celebration in the afternoon when land as well as lake was a-riot with young color, strewn with wild flowers for gay June to tread on.

"Oh! isn't it the most wonderful--wonderful season? In the city we go camping too late. The freshness isn't there." Pem's eyes were dim as she applied one to the lens of the microscope, to gaze once more at the painted Tritons; she was glad that in the freshness of the year it was--oh! so soon now--that the little Thunder Bird would momentarily color the skies and paint the World rose-colored in excitement over its demonstration--over the heights that could be reached--paving the way for the Triton of Tritons to come.

"Well! if we spend any more time with the minnows, we'll have to 'cut out' the 'fresh-water sheep', the little roaches, and the insects'

egg-boats," said the Scoutmaster. "Speaking of the latter, I saw a curious one yesterday upon a stagnant pool over on the other side of the lake; perhaps the visitors would be interested in it."

The visitors were interested in the bare mention. Warming equally to comfort and excitement again, they clamored--Pemrose and Una--for a sight of that raft of gnats' eggs, so cunningly formed and glued together, minute egg to egg, hundreds of them, that it was a regular lifeboat--no storm could sink it, and pressure only temporarily.

Yet, after all, Pemrose only half heard the Scoutmaster's explanation of how the insect chose a floating stick or straw as a nucleus, placed her forelegs on it and laid the egg upon her hind ones, holding it there until she had brought forth another to join it, gluing the two together by their sticky coating,--and so on till the broad and buoyant boat was constructed!

Pemrose hardly heard, for as the party made its way to that stagnant pool, an overflow at some time of the sparkling Bowl, and hidden in a dense little wood, she had a sudden demonstration of how, under certain circ.u.mstances, a girl's heart is much more capsizable than a gnat's egg-boat.

Hers positively turned turtle--yes! really, turned turtle--at sight of a long, gray figure lying, breast down, amid undergrowth upon the margin of a little stream that was hurrying away from it to the lake.

She felt momentarily topsy-turvy, every bit of her, for anywhere on earth--aye, even if she were scouring s.p.a.ce with the Thunder Bird--she would recognize that angular figure.

It had once pulled her up a snow-bank to the distant rumble of an engine's explosion.

Yes, and surely she had seen it again, once again, since then--although, sandwiched as it now was between egg-boats and painted Tritons she could not--for the moment--remember where.

"Fine day! Having luck? Catching anything?" hailed the Scoutmaster, with genial interest, as one woodsman to another, for the figure was angling with a fly-rod.

The latter shot a side long glance at the party from under a broad Panama hat,--then jammed that, rather uncivilly, further down upon his head.

"Bah! The fish aren't ex-act-ly jumping out of the water, saying 'Hullo!' to you!" it returned in the freakish drawl of a masked battery, shrinking deeper into cover amid the ferns.

Yet, when the Nature students had pa.s.sed on, one quivering girl, with ears intently on the alert, heard it fire off something in the same fern-cloaked rumble about a certain fly being a "perfect peach" to fish with.

And the answer came in clear, ringing, boyish tones--from another angler presumably--momentarily rainbowing the wood.

"Yes--sure--that Parmachene belle is _the girl_, Dad! If--if there's a trout in the stream, she'll put the 'come hither!' on it."

"Bah! Likening a trout-fly to a girl! So like his 'nick.u.m' impudence!"

Pem's teeth--in her present mood--came together with a snap. And, of course, she couldn't see the gnat's raft when she arrived at the stagnant puddle, for she had borrowed the gnat's sting with which to barb the snub which she meant to inflict, some time, upon that angling youth who had sat, unabashed, in the Devil's Chair,--if ever luck held out a chance.

"Yes--yes! and if he had played Jack at a Pinch forty-eleven million times, I'd do it." Her eyes were flashing now like the sky-dots in the pool, forked by iridescent shadows. "So--so _here's_ where they have their camp," craning her neck for a glimpse of a log-cabin amid the spruces. "Stud said it was just across the lake from the girls'!"

After that--well! who could be interested in gnat-boats when they had just lit upon the ambush of a Puzzle; a puzzle that would only open in a pinch and shut up, like a Chinese ring-box, afterwards?

And, moreover, that woodland lurking-place was just a bare mile and a half across the Bowl from the floating barrel pier, decked, as it was built, by girls' hands, and from the great heart's-ease bungalow, now, too, in process of decoration for the gala time in the afternoon around the White Birch totem; and for the blissful, far-off event, drawing nearer with every shining moment, the brilliant piazza, dance in the evening!

CHAPTER XVIII

REPRISALS

"Her tunic is of silver, Her veil of green tree-hair, The woodland Princess donning Her pomp of summer wear.

White arms to heaven reaching, Shy buds that, tiptoe, meet The kiss of June's awaking, The season's hast'ning feet!

Oh, sure, a laugh is lisping In each uncurling leaf; The joy of June is thrilling Some sense to transport brief!

Sister of mine, White Birch Tree!

That sense my own sets free, For in thy dim soul-stirrings My Father speaks to me."

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 ta.s.sels 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:

"A nest of robins in her hair."

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:

"He who plants a tree, He plants love.

Tents of coolness spreading out above Wayfarers he may not live to see.

Gifts that grow are best, Hands that bless are blest, Plant! Life does the rest."

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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce, 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.